PRNewsfoto/Kaya FestLauryn Hill will join members of the Marley family at the Kaya Fest in April. "As we prepare to bring Kaya Fest to the west coast, we're proud to have the continued support of powerful artist Ms. Lauryn Hill," says Stephen Marley, son of the late Bob Marley and producer of the festival. "This year, in celebration of the 40th anniversary of my father's album Kaya, we wanted to go even bigger - more artists, more love and more people celebrating with us from all over the world," Marley adds. The Kaya Fest will be held April 28-29 in San Bernardino, California. Marley will perform along with his brothers Ziggy, Damian, Julian, and Ky-Mani. Hill is connected with the family as she has five children with another brother, Rohan Marley. Kay Fest will also feature Cypress Hill, Action Bronson, Toots & the Maytals, Third World and Inner Circle. The event seeks to educate and celebrate the thoughtful uses for cannabis." Copyright 2018, ABC Radio. All rights reserved. ABCNews.com(WASHINGTON) -- A Texas same-sex couple has sued the federal government, alleging they were denied the chance to be foster parents to a refugee child because they do not mirror the holy family. According to a complaint filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on Tuesday, married couple Fatma Marouf and Bryn Esplin expressed their interest in February 2017 in fostering a refugee child to an official with the Catholic Charities of Fort Worth (CCFW). The group is an affiliate of the United States Conference of Bishops, which the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) contracts for some of its federal child welfare duties. The lawsuit alleges that during a phone conversation with Donna Springer, chair of the executive committee of CCFWs board of directors, they were told that foster parents must mirror the holy family, and they would not qualify to foster a child. We were both completely shocked, Marouf told ABC affiliate WFAA-TV. It was hurtful in realizing there was no overcoming that barrier, Esplin added. The lawsuit says the couple also asked if any of the refugee children in the program might be lesbian or gay and were told that none of the 700 children served by the program are members of the LGBT community. Marouf immediately reported to the Office of Refugee Resettlement via email that CCFW had discriminated against her and her wife, the complaint says, but she did not receive a response for nearly two months. The couple claims they haven't received any further communication from them since, leading to this weeks lawsuit. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and HHS are named in the lawsuit. HHS told ABC News, We do not comment on pending litigation. The USCCB has not immediately responded to ABC News request for comment. Catholic Charities Fort Worth denies to the Dallas Morning News that the couple ever spoke with Springer saying she "never had any contact with the couple" but acknowledged the then-director of child welfare services talked to them over the phone. The organization also denied allegations in the lawsuit that the couple was told the agency did not have any LGBT kids among the refugee children in its care at the time. "We do not screen or otherwise ask the children we serve to self-identify if they are LGBT," said Katelin Cortney, Catholic Charities Fort Worth's communications director told the local news outlet. "We train our foster families to accept children from all cultures and walks of life so they can be as prepared as possible to welcome someone new into their home." The couple hopes the lawsuit will allow them to apply to be foster parents to a refugee child, as well as prevent sexual orientation-based discrimination against other prospective parents, according to the lawsuit. Copyright 2018, ABC Radio. All rights reserved. Article Not Found Sometimes, authors delete their articles after publishing them. To see if the article was renamed or re-published, please click here. Would you like to know how many people have read this article? Or how reputable the author is? Simply sign up for a Advocate premium membership and you'll automatically see this data on every article. Plus a lot more, too. President Trump's first year in office proved to be just as racially divisive as his campaign -- but even more consequential, says the Southern Poverty Law Center report released on Wednesday (February 21). "President Trump in 2017 reflected what white supremacist groups want to see: a country where racism is sanctioned by the highest office, immigrants are given the boot and Muslims banned," said Heidi Beirich, director of the SPLC's Intelligence Project. "When you consider that only days into 2018, Trump called African countries 'shitholes,' it's clear he's not changing his tune. And that's music to the ears of white supremacists." 2017 was a year that saw the latest incarnation of white supremacy break through the firewall that for decades kept overt racists largely out of the political and media mainstream, the SPLC report Year in Hate and Extremism said. According to the SPLC report, for the first time since 2009, hate groups were found in all 50 states. Neo-Nazi groups were up 22 percent, from 99 to 121. Black-nationalist groups expanded from 193 to 233 chapters in reaction to Trump and the rising white-supremacist movement. Anti-Muslim groups rose for a third straight year. After tripling in 2016, they added 13 more chapters last year and now have 114. Typified by their anti-Semitic, anti-LGBT, anti-white rhetoric and conspiracy theories, these black-nationalist groups should not be confused with activist groups such as Black Lives Matter and others that work for civil rights and to eliminate systemic racism, the report pointed out. Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan blamed Trump for encouraging a "growing sentiment" to "put the Black, the Brown, the Red back in a place they have cut out for us." His newspaper, The Final Call, wrote that "separation from White America" is the "divine solution" to the rise of white supremacy. Not surprisingly, the ranks of black-nationalist hate groups -- groups that have always been a reaction to white racism -- expanded to 233 chapters in 2017, from 193 the previous year. Even with the growth, black-nationalist groups lagged far behind the more than 600 hate groups that adhere to some form of white-supremacist ideology -- and they have virtually no supporters or influence in mainstream politics, much less in the White House. Within the white-supremacist movement, neo-Nazi groups saw the greatest growth -- from 99 groups to 121. Anti-Muslim groups rose for a third straight year. They increased from 101 chapters to 114 in 2017 -- growth that comes after the groups tripled in number a year earlier. Ku Klux Klan groups, meanwhile, fell from 130 groups to 72. The decline is a clear indication that the new generation of white supremacists is rejecting the Klan's hoods and robes for the hipper image of the more loosely organized alt-right movement, SPLC said. The overall number of hate groups likely understates the real level of hate in America, because a growing number of extremists, particularly those who identify with the alt-right, operate mainly online and may not be formally affiliated with a hate group. Aside from hate groups, the SPLC identified 689 active antigovernment groups that comprised the "patriot" movement in 2017, up from 623. Of these, 273 were armed militias. Historically, these groups rise during Democratic presidencies out of fear of gun-control measures and federal law-enforcement action against them. They typically decline under GOP presidencies. This has not been the case under Trump, whose radical views and bigotry may be energizing them in the same way he has invigorated hate groups. The Year in Hate and Extremism report also pointed out: - Trump appointed key administration advisers with ties to the radical right, including Stephen Bannon, the head of Breitbart News who boasted of turning the website into "the platform for the alt-right." The president thrilled white supremacists with his policy initiatives, such as revving up the country's deportation machinery and curtailing civil-rights enforcement. - Reinvigorated white supremacists staged their largest rally in a decade -- the demonstration in Charlottesville, Virginia, that left an anti-racist counter protester dead and Trump equivocating over condemning racism. Former Klan boss David Duke called the rally a "turning point" and vowed that white supremacists would "fulfill the promises of Donald Trump" to "take our country back." Next Page 1 | 2 (Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher). Would you like to know how many people have read this article? Or how reputable the author is? Simply sign up for a Advocate premium membership and you'll automatically see this data on every article. Plus a lot more, too. From Smirking Chimp Destruction and rubble in Syria. (Image by FreedomHouse) Details DMCA Pressure is mounting as the Trump administration continues to refuse to reveal its legal justification for bombing Syria in April 2017, despite increased scrutiny from Democratic senators and a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Minnesota) wrote a letter to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson on February 8, 2018, requesting a copy of the State Department memo containing the Trump administration's legal justification for the US attack against Syria on April 6, 2017, when it bombed the Shayrat military airbase with 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles. At the time of the bombing, Trump suggested that he ordered the launching of the missiles in retaliation for a sarin gas attack at Khan Sheikhoun, allegedly ordered by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The Syrian government, however, denied responsibility for the chemical attack. Meanwhile, Defense Secretary James Mattis admitted earlier this month he has "no evidence" Assad ordered the use of sarin gas against his own people. In his letter, Kaine expressed concern that the administration persists in refusing to reveal its legal rationale for the bombing. "The fact that there is a lengthy memo with a more detailed legal justification that has not been shared with Congress, or the American public, is unacceptable," Kaine wrote. Yet, in spite of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by Protect Democracy on May 22, 2017, Trump refuses to release the memo. The administration claims it is classified. But, as Protect Democracy discovered during the litigation, the classified portion can be easily redacted. Trump's Attack on Syria Violated US and International Law In response to an April 2017 inquiry by Kaine and Rep. Adam Schiff (D-California), the administration said the 2017 missile strike in Syria was not based on the 2001 or 2002 authorizations for use of military force (AUMF), which related to Afghanistan and Iraq, respectively. Rather, the administration has cited the president's authority as Commander in Chief and Chief Executive under Article II of the Constitution "to defend important U.S. national interests." But Article II does not give the president the power to mount a military attack in this instance. Article II states, "The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States." Article I, however, says only Congress has the power to declare war. Taken together, Articles I and II mean that the president commands the armed forces once Congress has authorized war. In fact, Trump's attack on Syria violated both US and international law. Under the War Powers Resolution (WPR), the president can introduce US troops into hostilities or imminent hostilities only (1) after Congress has declared war, or (2) with "specific statutory authorization," or (3) in "a national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces." None of these three requirements was met to justify the use of military force in Syria. First, Congress had not declared war. Second, the administration stated it was not relying on the 2001 or 2002 AUMFs (which would not apply anyway) and there was no other congressional authorization. Third, there had been no attack on the United States or US armed forces before Trump's missile strike. It thus violated the WPR. Moreover, even if the military attack on Syria did not run afoul of the WPR, it violated the United Nations Charter, a treaty the United States has ratified, making it part of US law under the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution, which says treaties shall be the supreme law of the land. Article 2(4) of the Charter says that states "shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state." Next Page 1 | 2 (Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher). Would you like to know how many people have read this article? Or how reputable the author is? Simply sign up for a Advocate premium membership and you'll automatically see this data on every article. Plus a lot more, too. Vietnam War Era - Photo by Bruno Barbey (Image by manhhai) Details DMCA I have been silent much too long, and now I want to say what needs to be said. I may offend some. If so I am sorry, but it is time for you to buck up and face the scourge that is infecting our society. America is no longer a government for and by the people. We have our own oligarchs and are not much better than governments that we look upon as our geophysical enemy. To see what an AR-15 (AR means automatic rifle) can do, in Vietnam I carried an M-14 (M = machine gun). It was designed to kill in combat en mass. It was designed for the Korean human wave. That rifle killed when aiming a rifle was too slow to devastate the enemy. It was effective, leaving a small hole in the entry point and a much larger hole at the exit point. When we had to turn in our M-14 for an M-16 (semi-automatic is an AR-15) we complained like crazy. They jammed so often it was frightful during a fire fight. That problem was resolved quickly. What was very different was the devastating effect of a hit. We would joke, "Hit an enemy in the little finger and it would kill him" (enemy was not the word we used). It was a very small entry point and a massive exit point, and it turned the wound into an indescribable vision of death. Now imagine 20 little six-year-old children butchered in this way laying around Sandy Hook elementary school. Yes it is hard to imagine and quite shocking to some, but it is the pure unadulterated truth. If you could only see what I have seen you could not, with any semblance of decency, approve of such a weapon of devastation to be sold not only to 18-year-olds, but to anyone in a country where in our very declaration, it gives us the promise of the ability to enjoy "Life, Liberty, and Happiness." You should worry about a person who finds these promises in a weapon of war. Imagine the grief of parents that could not look upon the faces of the children that they loved so dearly. Now 17 teenagers and adult teachers lay dead, and forever gone from their loved ones at the latest shooting in Florida. Imagine the Pulse in Orlando and Las Vegas killings. Columbine was 19 years ago, and the NRA continues to rule our nation. Our representatives and senators are terrified of the NRA. A word; you cannot be more terrorized than the victims of one of these mass shootings. I never intended to bring my nightmares home from Vietnam. They called us baby killers. Think long and hard about this. Maybe the NRA are the baby killers. I wish every person who proudly displays their NRA sticker or hat, or whatever, would be called out as baby killers. As Jackie Kennedy said, "let them see what they have done." When will we ever learn? 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(U.S.), EZ facility Inc, (U.S.), Yardi System Inc,(U.S.), Active Network LLC, (U.S.), Civicplus (U.S.), Legend Recreation Software Incorporation(U.S.),Jarvis Corporation (U.S.), EMS software LLC( U.S.), RECDESK LLC (U.K), MyREC.Com(U.S.) Dash PlatformFor Sample Copy of this report:A birds eye view of the Recreation Management Software industry made available in the report helps readers to understand the key drivers, restraints, challenges, and opportunities that are shaping the global Recreation Management Software market. Furthermore, the report evaluates challenges experienced from buyers and sellers side. The report offers advice from key industry experts on how these challenges can be overcome.The future potentials of this market are analyzed and the prevalent trends are been looked upon with utmost detailing. The growth in all the major geographic regions are been studied in detail in this particular report. 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We are as a firm expertise in making extensive reports that cover all the necessary details about the market assessments such as major technological improvement in the industry.Contact Us5001 Spring Valley Road,Suite 400 East,Dallas, TX 75244, USAWeb:Email: sales@qyresearchstore.com Feb 23, 2018: Solar Power Banks Market Growth 2018-2025 Anker, Aukey, RavPower, Xiaomi Technology Solar Power Banks Market Forecast 2018 https://goo.gl/CSDgFz http://qyresearchstore.com/global-solar-power-banks-market-manufacturers-2018-review-size-and-forecast-2023/ A market study "Global Solar Power Banks Market" examines the performance of the Solar Power Banks market 2018. It encloses an in-depth Research of the Solar Power Banks market state and the competitive landscape globally. 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It encloses an in-depth Research of the Satellite Ground Station Equipments market state and the competitive landscape globally. This report analyzes the potential of Satellite Ground Station Equipments market in the present and the future prospects from various angles in detail.The Global Satellite Ground Station Equipments Market 2018 report includes Satellite Ground Station Equipments market Revenue, market Share, Satellite Ground Station Equipments industry volume, market Trends, Satellite Ground Station Equipments Growth aspects. A wide range of applications, Utilization ratio, Supply and demand analysis are also consist in the report.It shows manufacturing capacity, Satellite Ground Station Equipments Price during the Forecast period from 2018 to 2022.To Get Sample Report Click Here:Manufacturers Analysis and Top Sellers of Global Satellite Ground Station Equipments Market 2018 :1. Gilat Satellite Networks2. Harris CapRock3. Hughes Network Systems4. ViaSat5. VT iDirect6. Clyde Space7. Comtech Telecommunications8. Gigasat9. GomSpace10. InmarsatSatellite Ground Station Equipments Market : By ApplicationMilitaryCivilianSatellite Ground Station Equipments Market : By TypePower UnitsNetwork EquipmentTest & Monitoring EquipmentFirstly, the report covers the top Satellite Ground Station Equipments manufacturing industry players from regions like United States, EU, Japan, and China. It also characterizes the market based on geological regions.Further, the Satellite Ground Station Equipments report gives information on the company profile, market share and contact details along with value chain analysis of Satellite Ground Station Equipments industry, Satellite Ground Station Equipments industry rules and policies, circumstances driving the growth of the market and compulsion blocking the growth. Satellite Ground Station Equipments Market development scope and various business strategies are also mentioned in this report.Browse Full Report Here:The Satellite Ground Station Equipments research report includes the products that are currently in demand and available in the market along with their cost breakup, manufacturing volume, import/export scheme and contribution to the Satellite Ground Station Equipments market revenue worldwide.Finally, Satellite Ground Station Equipments market report gives you details about the market research findings and conclusion which helps you to develop profitable market strategies to gain competitive advantage.About Usqyresearchstore.com is a leading market intelligence team which making extensive reports that cover all the necessary details about the market assessments such as major technological improvement in the industry.Contact US:5001 Spring Valley Rd #400,Dallas,TX 75244, USAContact No. +1-214-661-1669Email: sales@qyresearchstore.com Feb 23, 2018: PTZ Security Cameras Market Growth 2018-2025 Hikvision, Panasonic, Dahua, Sony PTZ Security Cameras Market http://bit.ly/2GC1Lxh http://www.qyresearchstore.com/global-ptz-security-cameras-market-manufactures-2018-review-size-and-forecast-2023 http://qyresearchstore.com/ PTZ Security Cameras Market Research 2018A market study "Global PTZ Security Cameras Market" examines the performance of the PTZ Security Cameras market 2018. It encloses an in-depth Research of the PTZ Security Cameras market state and the competitive landscape globally. This report analyzes the potential of PTZ Security Cameras market in the present and the future prospects from various angles in detail.The Global PTZ Security Cameras Market 2018 report includes PTZ Security Cameras market Revenue, market Share, PTZ Security Cameras industry volume, market Trends, PTZ Security Cameras Growth aspects. A wide range of applications, Utilization ratio, Supply and demand analysis are also consist in the report.It shows manufacturing capacity, PTZ Security Cameras Price during the Forecast period from 2018 to 2025.To Get Sample Report Click Here:Manufacturers Analysis and Top Sellers of Global PTZ Security Cameras Market 2018 :1. Hikvision2. Axis Communications3. Panasonic4. Dahua5. Bosch Security Systems6. Sony7. Samsung8. Avigilon9. Pelco by Schneider Electric10. Honeywell11. Mobotix12. GeoVision13. Belkin14. NetGear15. Vivotek16. D-Link17. Arecont Vision18. Wanscam19. Toshiba20. GOSCAM21. Juanvision22. ApexisPTZ Security Cameras Market : By Application Residential Use Commercial Use Public & Government InfrastructurePTZ Security Cameras Market : By Type Centralized DecentralizedFirstly, the report covers the top PTZ Security Cameras manufacturing industry players from regions like United States, EU, Japan, and China. It also characterizes the market based on geological regions.Further, the PTZ Security Cameras report gives information on the company profile, market share and contact details along with value chain analysis of PTZ Security Cameras industry, PTZ Security Cameras industry rules and policies, circumstances driving the growth of the market and compulsion blocking the growth. PTZ Security Cameras Market development scope and various business strategies are also mentioned in this report.Browse Full Report Here:The PTZ Security Cameras research report includes the products that are currently in demand and available in the market along with their cost breakup, manufacturing volume, import/export scheme and contribution to the PTZ Security Cameras market revenue worldwide.Finally, PTZ Security Cameras market report gives you details about the market research findings and conclusion which helps you to develop profitable market strategies to gain competitive advantage.About US:"QY Research Store" is a leading market intelligence team which accredits and provides the reports of some of the top publishers in the field of technology industry. We are as a firm expertise in making extensive reports that cover all the necessary details about the market assessments such as major technological improvement in the industry.Contact Us5001 Spring Valley Road,Suite 400 East,Dallas, TX 75244, USAWeb:Email: sales@qyresearchstore.com Wax Melts Market trends estimates high demand by 2025 https://www.tmrresearch.com/sample/sample?flag=B&rep_id=764 https://www.tmrresearch.com/sample/sample?flag=T&rep_id=764 https://www.tmrresearch.com/wax-melts-market Global Wax Melts Market: SnapshotThe home fragrance sector is increasingly becoming one of the strongest sectors of the global fragrances industry. The luxury sector in the home fragrance market is, especially, exhibiting a significant rise in demand across emerging economies as well. Segments such as wax melts are gaining prominence owing to their organic origins and absolutely no harm to the environment. The market for wax melts is expected to swell in the next few years, thanks to a vast set of factors, including the rising expenditure on luxury products from the increasingly affluent higher middle class in developing economies, the rising number of product varieties, and the ease of procuring international products through e-commerce websites.The impact of the Internet is, especially, highly prevalent in the luxury wax melts segment. In the next few years, e-commerce is projected to become one of the most lucrative sales channel and account for a massive share in the overall sales of wax melts across the globe. With international companies gaining easy exposure with the help of the mammoth e-commerce industry across major developing as well as developed economies, companies are advised to focus more on utilizing the e-commerce industry for promising returns.Request Sample Copy of the Report @Competition is expected to intensify in the market as a number of regional and domestic companies foray into emerging economies. Nevertheless, the brand value of international brands will help bring revenue from young consumers and the swelling elite class. Innovation in products, packaging, and development of products in economic cost range could also help companies gain a larger share of the market in emerging economies.Global Wax Melts Market: OverviewWax melts, also known as wax tarts, unlike candles that burn with a wick, are put in a tart warmer or an oil burner and gradually warmed from a tea light or electric heating source. Available in numerous fragrances and designs, they are being increasingly used to improve indoor atmosphere. A report by TMR Research studies the global market for wax melts by factoring in the current competitive dynamics, growth drivers and restraints, and market size. Currently, the market is fragmented in nature with a copious number of players both large and small in the U.S. and the U.K. competing with each other on the basis of price, product differentiation, and astute marketing strategies.Request TOC of the Report @To maintain a foothold in the market, the leading players are resorting to strategic collaborations. The report studies all such prevalent trends in details and goes on to segment the market based on different parameters. It also leverages popular analytical tools to find out opportunities and threats awaiting players in the global market for wax melts. It identifies prominent players contributing toward the growth of the market. The report furnishes an overview of their financial position, recent developments, product portfolio, and geographical reach.Wax Melts Market: Drivers and TrendsAt the forefront of driving growth in the global market for wax melts is the rising concern towards air care and hygiene in commercial and residential buildings. Besides, wax melts do not emit harmful flames and are eco-friendly and safe. This is another factor fuelling an upward trend in the market. Going forward, wax melts are predicted to see explosive sales on the back of solid demand for air fresheners and aromatherapy. The increasing awareness among the rising ranks of discerning consumers about environmental and health hazards, which is posed mainly by aerosol sprays, will further stoke demand for wax melts.Read Comprehensive Overview of Report@Also driving growth in the global market for wax melts is the increasing need for longer lasting fragrances and the relatively cheaper cost of wax melts as compared to alternative products such as aerosol fragrance and reed diffusers. In addition, the availability of a wide array products having different sizes, scents, and patterns will also drive the market. A recent noticeable trend in the market is the marketing of products through the proliferating ecommerce channels, apart from supermarkets and hypermarkets. Another prominent trend is the continued thrust on product innovation.Wax Melts Market: Regional OutlookGeographically, Asia Pacific is slated to clock maximum growth on account of the solid demand for air care products in the countries of Australia, Japan, and China. End-user sectors of home decor and aromatherapy have been primarily pushing demand in the region. In terms of market share, however, North America dominates followed by Europe. The market is also predicted to witness good growth in the U.S., the U.K., Canada, and Germany due the substantial growth in aromatherapy and concerns about air care. Other factors augmenting the market in the aforementioned regions are the hectic schedule and rising disposable incomes of people.Companies Mentioned in ReportTo present a detailed assessment of the competition prevailing in the global market for wax melts, the report profiles companies such as Scentsy, Yankee Candle, SC Johnson, Reckitt Benckiser, and Rimports Limited. The analysts have evaluated the top-tier companies based on their key adoptions, strategies, mergers and acquisitions, and recent developments.About UsTMR Research is a premier provider of customized market research and consulting services to business entities keen on succeeding in todays supercharged economic climate. Armed with an experienced, dedicated, and dynamic team of analysts, we are redefining the way our clients conduct business by providing them with authoritative and trusted research studies in tune with the latest methodologies and market trends.Our savvy custom-built reports span a gamut of industries such as pharmaceuticals, chemicals and metals, food and beverages, and technology and media, among others. With actionable insights uncovered through in-depth research of the market, we try to bring about game-changing success for our clients.Contact:TMR Research,3739 Balboa St # 1097,San Francisco, CA 94121United StatesTel: +1-415-520-1050Email: sales@tmrresearch.com Global Medical Radiation Shielding Market Analysis, Growth Drivers & Trends to 2022 Market Research Reports Search Engine https://www.mrrse.com/sample/4016 https://www.mrrse.com/medical-radiation-shielding-market https://www.mrrse.com/enquiry/4016 www.mrrse.com www.industrynewsanalysis.com/ A latest research report titled as Medical Radiation shielding Market - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends and Forecast 2017 - 2022 has been recently added to the vast portfolio of Market Research Reports Search Engine (MRRSE) online research offerings. This report is a professional and in-depth analysis on the present state and future prospect for the global market. It provides valuable information to the industry insiders, potential entrants or investors. It includes an exhaustive enquiry with the reliability of logic and the comprehensiveness of contents.Request For Free Sample Report @Growing use of radiation therapy and nuclear medicine for treatment and diagnosis purposes is expected to support the global sales of medical radiation shielding in the forthcoming years. As per the latest report published by Market Research Reports Search Engine (MRRSE), the global medical radiation shielding market is expected to surpass a valuation of US$ 1,100 Mn by the end of 2022.The number of diagnostic imaging centers has swelled significantly in recent years due to increasing prevalence of chronic diseases including cancer. This is partly driving the demand for medical radiation shielding. With rapid installation of radiology equipment, requirements of supporting accessories such as radiation shielding tools and other related setups have also escalated. Prolonged exposure to large amount of ionizing radiation can lead to devastating health impacts such as tumor development, cancer or other severe side-effects. Therefore, the need for protecting oneself from hazardous radiations while working under such conditions is extremely vital. Moreover, growing awareness regarding safety while handling radio-active equipment is expected to reflect favourably on the market. Professionals who work in diagnostics centers having equipment that emit radiation are often at risk of being exposed to high amount of radiation. For diagnostics centers having proper radiation shielding is important in order to ensure safety of its medical staff.Block and Rooms will remain a Leading Product Type Segment Over 2022Block and rooms will remain highly preferred medical radiation shielding products over the forecast period (2017-2022). Blocks and rooms are among the most important aspects of medical radiation shielding, hence their demand is expected to remain strong in the near future. Global sales of blocks and rooms medical radiation shielding products currently command for around 30% share of the global market in terms of revenue.Hospitals will Remain the largest End Users of Medical Radiation Shielding Over 2022Use of medical radiation shielding in hospitals is expected to remain high throughout the forecast period. Over US$ 400 Mn worth medical radiation shielding products are expected to be deployed in hospitals towards the end of 2022. Hospitals are making a significant contribution to the growth of the market. Increasing awareness about ill-effects of medical radiation is expected to boost the deployments of medical radiation shielding in hospitals.Browse Full Report with TOC @Sales of Medical Radiation Shielding for Diagnostic Solution will remain StrongDemand for medical radiation shielding for diagnostic solution is expected to remain significantly high in 2017 and beyond. Currently, more than two-third of medical radiation shielding product sold globally are deployed for diagnostics solution.North America will continue to be the Most Attractive Market for Medical Radiation ShieldingIn terms of revenue, North America is expected to dominate the global medical radiation shielding during the forecast period. The market in the region is projected to surges at a sound CAGR between 2017 and 2022. The region is likely to present lucrative opportunities owing to existence of an advanced healthcare infrastructure. By 2022-end the market in North America is expected to surpass a valuation of US$ 400 Mn. Meanwhile, Europes market is also expected to exhibit considerable growth on account of the growing healthcare expenditure and technological advancements in the regions healthcare infrastructure.Global Medical Radiation Shielding: Competitive LandscapeLeading market players profiled in TMRs report include A&L Shielding, ESCO Technologies Inc., Gaven Industries, Inc., Global Partners in Shielding, Inc., Radiation Protection Products, Inc., Ray-Bar Engineering Corp., and Veritas Medical Solutions LLC. A majority of these companies have been actively focusing on improving the efficiency of their products and ensure complete safety from radiation.Enquire about this Report @About UsMarket Research Reports Search Engine (MRRSE) is an industry-leading database of market intelligence reports. MRRSE is driven by a stellar team of research experts and advisors trained to offer objective advice. Our sophisticated search algorithm returns results based on the report title, geographical region, publisher, or other keywords.MRRSE partners exclusively with leading global publishers to provide clients single-point access to top-of-the-line market research. MRRSEs repository is updated every day to keep its clients ahead of the next new trend in market research, be it competitive intelligence, product or service trends or strategic consulting.ContactState Tower90, State StreetSuite 700Albany, NY - 12207United StatesTelephone: +1-518-730-0559Email: sales@mrrse.comWebsite :Read More Industry News At: Feb 23, 2018: Nitrogen Cryogenic Pumps Market Growth 2018-2025 Sumitomo Heavy, Ebara, Flowserve Nitrogen Cryogenic Pumps Market Forecast 2018 https://goo.gl/K2JjfQ http://qyresearchstore.com/global-nitrogen-cryogenic-pumps-market-manufacturers-2018-review-size-and-forecast-2023/ A market study "Global Nitrogen Cryogenic Pumps Market" examines the performance of the Nitrogen Cryogenic Pumps market 2018. It encloses an in-depth Research of the Nitrogen Cryogenic Pumps market state and the competitive landscape globally. This report analyzes the potential of Nitrogen Cryogenic Pumps market in the present and the future prospects from various angles in detail.The Global Nitrogen Cryogenic Pumps Market 2018 report includes Nitrogen Cryogenic Pumps market Revenue, market Share, Nitrogen Cryogenic Pumps industry volume, market Trends, Nitrogen Cryogenic Pumps Growth aspects. A wide range of applications, Utilization ratio, Supply and demand analysis are also consist in the report.It shows manufacturing capacity, Nitrogen Cryogenic Pumps Price during the Forecast period from 2018 to 2022.To Get Sample Report Click Here:Manufacturers Analysis and Top Sellers of Global Nitrogen Cryogenic Pumps Market 2018 : Sumitomo Heavy Industries Ebara Corporation Flowserve Corporation Fives S.A Brooks AutomationNitrogen Cryogenic Pumps Market : By ApplicationEnergy & PowerMetallurgyChemicalsElectronicsNitrogen Cryogenic Pumps Market : By TypeCentrifugalPositive DisplacementFirstly, the report covers the top Nitrogen Cryogenic Pumps manufacturing industry players from regions like United States, EU, Japan, and China. It also characterizes the market based on geological regions.Further, the Nitrogen Cryogenic Pumps report gives information on the company profile, market share and contact details along with value chain analysis of Nitrogen Cryogenic Pumps industry, Nitrogen Cryogenic Pumps industry rules and policies, circumstances driving the growth of the market and compulsion blocking the growth. Nitrogen Cryogenic Pumps Market development scope and various business strategies are also mentioned in this report.Browse Full Report Here:The Nitrogen Cryogenic Pumps research report includes the products that are currently in demand and available in the market along with their cost breakup, manufacturing volume, import/export scheme and contribution to the Nitrogen Cryogenic Pumps market revenue worldwide.Finally, Nitrogen Cryogenic Pumps market report gives you details about the market research findings and conclusion which helps you to develop profitable market strategies to gain competitive advantage.About Usqyresearchstore.com is a leading market intelligence team which making extensive reports that cover all the necessary details about the market assessments such as major technological improvement in the industry.Contact US:5001 Spring Valley Rd #400,Dallas,TX 75244, USAContact No. +1-214-661-1669Email: sales@qyresearchstore.com Telecom Power System Market in North America to grow at a CAGR of 8.45% during 2016-2020 | Delta Electronics, Eaton, Emerson Network Power, GE Industrial Solutions https://www.researchmoz.us/enquiry.php?type=S&repid=892983 https://www.researchmoz.us/telecom-power-system-market-in-north-america-2016-2020-report.html/toc http://bit.ly/1TBmnVG Power systems are used in all telecommunication installations for controlling, monitoring, and measuring the flow of power across telecom networks. These systems are made of a combination of smaller systems such as converters, distributors, controllers, and backup systems that bear different technical specifications. The primary application of telecom power systems is in wireless and fixed-line environments. They are used in several other related applications, including network equipment, xDSL terminals, mobile broadband, cellular sites, and transmission applications. The telecom power system market in North America to grow at a CAGR of 8.45% during the period 2016-2020.Covered in this report:The report covers the present scenario and the growth prospects of the telecom power system market in North America for 2016-2020. To calculate the market size, the report considers the revenue generated from the following:- Telecom power system products such as DC power systems (which include rectifiers, converters, inverters, system controllers, switches, cabinets, batteries, solar modules, and distribution and circuit breakers) and AC power systems (which include surge protective devices, generators, and UPS).- Telecom power system software and service functions such as design and integration, installation, on-site service monitoring and maintenance, sales of power monitoring software such as network power monitoring software, AC power monitoring software, battery monitoring software, and overall site monitoring software.Click to get Sample PDF:Technavio's report, Telecom Power System Market in North America 2016-2020, has been prepared based on an in-depth market analysis with inputs from industry experts. The report covers the market landscape and its growth prospects over the coming years. The report also includes a discussion of the key vendors operating in this market.Key vendors- Delta Electronics- Eaton- Emerson Network Power- GE Industrial SolutionsOther prominent vendors- AEG Power Solutions- Alpha- Alstom- Bel Fuse- Benning Power Solutions- C&D Technologies- Cummins Power- Myers Power Products- Pioneer Magnetics- SAFT- Schneider Electric- Shindengen- ZTEView Complete TOC with Tables and Figures at:Key questions answered in this report- What will the market size be in 2021 and what will the growth rate be?- What are the key market trends?- What is driving this market?- What are the challenges to market growth?- Who are the key vendors in this market space?- What are the market opportunities and threats faced by the key vendors?- What are the strengths and weaknesses of the key vendors?ResearchMoz is the worlds fastest growing collection of market research reports worldwide. Our database is composed of current market studies from over 100 featured publishers worldwide. Our market research databases integrate statistics with analysis from global, regional, country and company perspectives. ResearchMozs service portfolio also includes value-added services such as market research customization, competitive landscaping, and in-depth surveys, delivered by a team of experienced Research Coordinators.Albany NY - 12207United StatesTel: +1-518-621-2074Tel: 866-997-4948 (Us-Canada Toll Free)Email: sales@researchmoz.usFollow us on LinkedIn at: Global Aesthetic Devices Market Development Status and Outlook 2018 https://www.qyresearchreports.com/sample/sample.php?rep_id=1516197&type=S https://www.qyresearchreports.com/report/global-aesthetic-devices-market-research-report-2018.htm/toc https://www.qyresearchreports.com/sample/sample.php?rep_id=1516197&type=D http://www.qyresearchreports.com https://studyanalyst.blogspot.in Qyresearchreports include new market research report "Global Aesthetic Devices Market Research Report 2018" to its huge collection of research reports.Aesthetic Devices Market Research Report is a comprehensive market study, which has been created with a sole goal to armor existing and new players to gain advantage over their competitors. For the development of the report, proven research methodology and reliable analytical tools are applied to gain accurate understanding and insightful foresight into its potential development. The report presents figurative scenario of the market in current situation as well as forecasts the future based on all the important factors that that primed to influence the global Aesthetic Devices market. The report covers all prevalent trends and products playing a significant role in the growth of the market for Aesthetic Devices over the forecast period.Global Aesthetic Devices market competition by top manufacturers, with production, price, revenue (value) and market share for each manufacturer; the top players includingDEKA Laser TechnologiesSyneron MedicalSigmacon MedicalSanuwave HealthSalient MedicalLumenisEnter your information below to receive a free sample copy of this report @Prepared after extensive primary and secondary research, the report contains findings that are both reliable and verifiable. With the use of research techniques such as Porters five forces analysis and SWOT analysis, the important facets of each player and key segment are highlighted.One of the key feature of the report is the player profile section, in which it offers valuable information on the major players in the global Aesthetic Devices market, such as their manufacturing base, product specification, production capacity, revenue and gross margin, and competitors. The report also includes the major business strategies adopted by the players, their market positioning, and various recent developments.The report also divides the global market for Aesthetic Devices into important segments to present a clear picture of the opportunities available for the players. The segmentations have been done on the basis of product type, application, and technology. The geographical segmentation of the global Aesthetic Devices market is also examined in detail, with the development of the market in each region charted through accurate historical statistics.Table of ContentsGlobal Aesthetic Devices Market Research Report 20181 Aesthetic Devices Market Overview1.1 Product Overview and Scope of Aesthetic Devices1.2 Aesthetic Devices Segment by Type (Product Category)1.2.1 Global Aesthetic Devices Production and CAGR (%) Comparison by Type (Product Category)(2013-2025)1.2.2 Global Aesthetic Devices Production Market Share by Type (Product Category) in 20171.2.3 Laser Hair Removal1.2.4 Laser Skin Resurfacing DevicesRead Complete Table of Content @2 Global Aesthetic Devices Market Competition by Manufacturers2.1 Global Aesthetic Devices Capacity, Production and Share by Manufacturers (2013-2018)2.1.1 Global Aesthetic Devices Capacity and Share by Manufacturers (2013-2018)2.1.2 Global Aesthetic Devices Production and Share by Manufacturers (2013-2018)2.2 Global Aesthetic Devices Revenue and Share by Manufacturers (2013-2018)2.3 Global Aesthetic Devices Average Price by Manufacturers (2013-2018)3 Global Aesthetic Devices Capacity, Production, Revenue (Value) by Region (2013-2018)3.1 Global Aesthetic Devices Capacity and Market Share by Region (2013-2018)3.2 Global Aesthetic Devices Production and Market Share by Region (2013-2018)3.3 Global Aesthetic Devices Revenue (Value) and Market Share by Region (2013-2018)3.4 Global Aesthetic Devices Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)3.5 North America Aesthetic Devices Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)3.6 Europe Aesthetic Devices Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)3.7 China Aesthetic Devices Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)Enquiry For Discount Visit @List of Tables and FiguresFigure Picture of Aesthetic DevicesFigure Global Aesthetic Devices Production (K Units) and CAGR (%) Comparison by Types (Product Category) (2013-2025)Figure Global Aesthetic Devices Production Market Share by Types (Product Category) in 2017Figure Product Picture of Laser Hair RemovalTable Major Manufacturers of Laser Hair RemovalFigure Product Picture of Laser Skin Resurfacing DevicesTable Major Manufacturers of Laser Skin Resurfacing DevicesFigure Product Picture of Microdermabrasion DevicesAbout Us:QYResearchReports.com delivers the latest strategic market intelligence to build a successful business footprint in China. Our syndicated and customized research reports provide companies with vital background information of the market and in-depth analysis on the Chinese trade and investment framework, which directly affects their business operations. Reports from QYResearchReports.com feature valuable recommendations on how to navigate in the extremely unpredictable yet highly attractive Chinese market.Contact Us:1820 AvenueM Suite #1047Brooklyn, NY 11230United StatesToll Free: 866-997-4948 (USA-CANADA)Tel: +1-518-621-2074Web:Email: sales@qyresearchreports.comBlog: Doxorubicin Market:Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends and Forecast By 2024 https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/market-research/doxorubicin-market.asp https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/toc/12637 https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/samples/12637 https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/methodology/12637 www.persistencemarketresearch.com Cancer is the leading cause of death worldwide with 8.2 million cancer related deaths in 2012 estimated by World Health Organization (WHO). Anthracycline especially doxorubicin has been the mainstay of cancer treatment since many years. Doxorubicin also known as doxorubicin hydrochloride is an antibiotic belonging to class of medication known as anthracycline antibiotics, and is the first liposomal encapsulated anticancer drug to receive clinical approval and is used in the treatment of several types of carcinomas. Doxorubicin is produced by the soil fungus belonging to genus Streptomyces. The drug is used in combination with other drugs to treat cancers such as, breast, lung, bladder, stomach, ovarian, neuroblastoma,Hodgkin and non-Hodgkin lymphomas, and certain types of leukemias. It is less commonly used in treatment of squamous cell carcinomas of head and neck, cervix and vagina, carcinomas of testes and prostate. The drug kills the cancerous cells in several ways including intercalation between DNA pairs thereby preventing replication of cancer cells, DNA strand breakage and inhibition with enzyme topoisomerase II. Doxorubicin is marketed either in the powdered or in solution form and is administered intravenously every 21 to 28 days. However, the treatment depends upon the type of cancer being treated, the types of other drugs that are taken during the treatment and how well the body response to the medicine. The drug is sometimes given as a continuous infusion wherein the drug is infused slowly into the patients body.Report Overview @Global doxorubicin market is expected to witness upsurge in its revenue over the forecast period attributed to growing prevalence of cancer worldwide. WHO estimates that cancer prevalence is expected to increase at an estimated rate of 50% by 2050. Furthermore, increasing use of drug in the treatment of ovary cancer is further expected to increase the sales of the doxorubicin over the forecast period. The drug is also known to have high treatment efficacy in patients with AIDS-related Kaposis sarcoma after failure of prior systemic chemotherapy.However, conventional doxorubicin treatment imposes several side effects such as nausea and vomiting that may last 2448 hours after treatment, hair loss, myelosuppression, loss of appetite, diarrhea, localized swelling etc. Therefore, the need for development of doxorubicin with liposomal formulation arose improving therapeutic index of conventional doxorubicin. This strategy resulted in preferential accumulation of doxorubicin within the cancerous cell in order to maximize the drug efficacy and minimize toxicity, thus fueling the doxorubicin market growth in the near future.Request for Table of Contents @One of the most common and prevailing side effect of doxorubicin is cardiomyopathy with an estimated incidence of 4% at a dose of 500550 mg/m, subsequently leading to congestive heart failure. The rate of cardiomyopathy reaches to 36% when the dose exceeds 600 mg/m. This may lead to introduction of drugs with lesser side effects replacing the doxorubicin in the future. However, ongoing shortages of the drug has also affected the revenues of the doxorubicin market contently.The global market for Doxorubicin is segmented on basis of formulation, cancer type, distribution channel and geography:Segmentation by Formulation - Lyophilized Doxorubicin Powder,Doxorubicin Solution.Segmentation by Cancer Type- Breast Cancer,Prostate Cancer,Ovary Cancer,Lung Cancer,Bladder Cancer,Stomach Cancer,Leukemia,Others.Segmentation by Distribution Channel- Hospitals Pharmacies,Retail Pharmacies,E-Commerce.Increasing prevalence of several cancer types have resulted in increasing usage of doxorubicin in clinical practice thus driving the revenues for the same. By formulation, the global market for doxorubicin has been classified into, lyophilized doxorubicin powder and doxorubicin solutionGet Sample Copy of this Report @By cancer type, the global doxorubicin market is segmented into, breast cancer, prostate cancer, ovary cancer, lung cancer, bladder cancer, stomach cancer, leukemia and others. Breast cancer and prostate cancer segments are expected to account for maximum revenue share in global doxorubicin market over the forecasted period.On the basis of distribution channel, the global doxorubicin market is segmented into, hospital pharmacies, retail pharmacies and e-commerce.On the basis of regional presence, global doxorubicin market is segmented into five key regions viz. North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and Middle East & Africa. North America will continue to dominate the global doxorubicin market attributed to growing number of cancer epidemiology in the region. Furthermore, doxorubicin shortages in the past few years due to manufacturing issues have resulted in entry of increasing number of players in the market. This has substantially improved the revenue of global doxorubicin market in the near future. Asia Pacific is expected to be the fastest growing region in global doxorubicin market attributed to increasing prevalence of breast and lung cancer.Need more information about Report methodology @Some of the major players operating in global doxorubicin market are Pfizer Inc., Johnson & Johnson Services, Inc., Sun Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd., Meiji Seika Pharma Co., Ltd., Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd., MicroBiopharm Japan Co., Ltd., and Synbias Pharma. Companies are involved in collaboration agreements for R&D in order to exploit maximum potential.About UsPersistence Market Research (PMR) is a U.S.-based full-service market intelligence firm specializing in syndicated research, custom research, and consulting services. PMR boasts market research expertise across the Healthcare, Chemicals and Materials, Technology and Media, Energy and Mining, Food and Beverages, Semiconductor and Electronics, Consumer Goods, and Shipping and Transportation industries. The company draws from its multi-disciplinary capabilities and high-pedigree team of analysts to share data that precisely corresponds to clients business needs.PMR stands committed to bringing more accuracy and speed to clients business decisions. From ready-to-purchase market research reports to customized research solutions, PMRs engagement models are highly flexible without compromising on its deep-seated research values.ContactPersistence Market Research Pvt. Ltd305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,USA Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.commedia@persistencemarketresearch.comWeb: Feb 23, 2018: Wrist Coil Market Growth 2018-2025 Siemens Healthineers, Philips, GE, Hitachi Wrist Coil Market http://bit.ly/2ofYg8Y http://www.qyresearchstore.com/global-wrist-coil-market-manufactures-2018-review-size-and-forecast-2023 http://qyresearchstore.com/ Wrist Coil Market Research 2018A market study "Global Wrist Coil Market" examines the performance of the Wrist Coil market 2018. It encloses an in-depth Research of the Wrist Coil market state and the competitive landscape globally. This report analyzes the potential of Wrist Coil market in the present and the future prospects from various angles in detail.The Global Wrist Coil Market 2018 report includes Wrist Coil market Revenue, market Share, Wrist Coil industry volume, market Trends, Wrist Coil Growth aspects. A wide range of applications, Utilization ratio, Supply and demand analysis are also consist in the report.It shows manufacturing capacity, Wrist Coil Price during the Forecast period from 2018 to 2025.To Get Sample Report Click Here:Manufacturers Analysis and Top Sellers of Global Wrist Coil Market 2018 :1. Siemens Healthineers2. GE3. Philips4. Hitachi5. Toshiba MedicalWrist Coil Market : By Application Clinical Research Laboratories OthersWrist Coil Market : By Type Less Than 8 Channels 8-16 Channels More Than 16 ChannelsFirstly, the report covers the top Wrist Coil manufacturing industry players from regions like United States, EU, Japan, and China. It also characterizes the market based on geological regions.Further, the Wrist Coil report gives information on the company profile, market share and contact details along with value chain analysis of Wrist Coil industry, Wrist Coil industry rules and policies, circumstances driving the growth of the market and compulsion blocking the growth. Wrist Coil Market development scope and various business strategies are also mentioned in this report.Browse Full Report Here:The Wrist Coil research report includes the products that are currently in demand and available in the market along with their cost breakup, manufacturing volume, import/export scheme and contribution to the Wrist Coil market revenue worldwide.Finally, Wrist Coil market report gives you details about the market research findings and conclusion which helps you to develop profitable market strategies to gain competitive advantage.About US:"QY Research Store" is a leading market intelligence team which accredits and provides the reports of some of the top publishers in the field of technology industry. We are as a firm expertise in making extensive reports that cover all the necessary details about the market assessments such as major technological improvement in the industry.Contact Us5001 Spring Valley Road,Suite 400 East,Dallas, TX 75244, USAWeb:Email: sales@qyresearchstore.com Global Industrial Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) Market 2017-2021 | ABB, AMETEK Solidstate Controls, Eaton, Emerson Network Power, Schneider Electric https://www.researchmoz.us/enquiry.php?type=S&repid=892987 https://www.researchmoz.us/global-industrial-uninterruptible-power-supply-market-2017-2021-report.html/toc http://bit.ly/1TBmnVG UPS systems provide emergency power when the main power supply fails. These systems are used to protect equipment and machinery from unexpected power disruptions that could result in loss of productivity. UPS systems are of two types online and offline.The global industrial UPS market to grow at a CAGR of 6.35% during the period 2017-2021. The report covers the present scenario and the growth prospects of the global industrial UPS market for 2017-2021. To calculate the market size, the report considers the revenue generated from the sales of industrial UPS systems in the market.The market is divided into the following segments based on geography:- Americas- APAC- EMEAClick to get Sample PDF:Technavio's report, Global Industrial UPS 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.Key vendors- ABB- AMETEK Solidstate Controls- Eaton- Emerson Network Power- Schneider ElectricOther prominent vendors- AEG Power Solutions- Benning Power Electronics- Borri- Fuji Electric- GE Industrial- Mitsubishi Electric- Active Power- Caterpillar- Riello Power India- Piller Group- NUMERIC- Cyber Power Systems- Falcon Electric- Gamatronic- Uninterruptible Power SuppliesView Complete TOC with Tables and Figures at:Key questions answered in this report- What will the market size be in 2020 and what will the growth rate be?- What are the key market trends?- What is driving this market?- What are the challenges to market growth?- Who are the key vendors in this market space?- What are the market opportunities and threats faced by the key vendors?- What are the strengths and weaknesses of the key vendors?ResearchMoz is the worlds fastest growing collection of market research reports worldwide. Our database is composed of current market studies from over 100 featured publishers worldwide. Our market research databases integrate statistics with analysis from global, regional, country and company perspectives. ResearchMozs service portfolio also includes value-added services such as market research customization, competitive landscaping, and in-depth surveys, delivered by a team of experienced Research Coordinators.Albany NY - 12207United StatesTel: +1-518-621-2074Tel: 866-997-4948 (Us-Canada Toll Free)Email: sales@researchmoz.usFollow us on LinkedIn at: Remote Infrastructure Management Market to reach a market size of $44.6 billion by 2023 According to a new report Global Remote Infrastructure Management Market, published by KBV research, the Global Remote Infrastructure Management Market size is expected to reach $44.6 billion by 2023, rising at a market growth of 11.4% CAGR during the forecast period. The North America market holds the largest market share in Global Server Management Solution Market by Region in 2016, and would continue to be a dominant market till 2023; growing at a CAGR of 8.5 % during the forecast period. The Europe market is expected to witness a CAGR of 8.7% during (2017 2023) in Global Database Management Market. Additionally, The Asia Pacific market is expected to witness a CAGR of 14.1% during (2017 2023) in Global Storage Management Market. The Large Enterprises market holds the largest market share in Global Remote Infrastructure Management Market by Organization Size in 2016, and would continue to be a dominant market till 2023. The Small & Medium Enterprises market is expected to witness a CAGR of 15.6% during (2017 2023). The BFSI market holds the largest market share in Global Remote Infrastructure Management Market by Vertical in 2016, and would continue to be a dominant market till 2023; growing at a CAGR of 9.3 % during the forecast period. The Healthcare market is expected to witness a CAGR of 11% during (2017 2023). Additionally, The Retail market would attain market value of $5,912.1 million by 2023. Full Report: https://kbvresearch.com/remote-infrastructure-management-market/ The market research report has exhaustive quantitative insights providing a clear picture of the market potential in various segments across the globe with country wise analysis in each discussed region. The key impacting factors of the Global Remote Infrastructure Management Market have been discussed in the report with the elaborated company profiles of Fujitsu Limited, Capgemini, Accenture Plc., Genpact, Nityo Infotech, Sensiple, Rigel Networks, Cognizant, UST Global, Inc., and AT&T, Inc. Global Remote Infrastructure Management Market Size Segmentation By Core Services Server Management Database Management Storage Management Network & Communication Management Application Management Others By Organization Size Small & Medium Enterprises Large Enterprises By Vertical BFSI Government Energy & Utilities Healthcare Manufacturing Retail Telecom & IT Transportation Others By Geography North America Remote Infrastructure Management Market Size US Remote Infrastructure Management Market Size Canada Remote Infrastructure Management Market Size Mexico Remote Infrastructure Management Market Size Rest of North America Remote Infrastructure Management Market Size Europe Remote Infrastructure Management Market Germany Remote Infrastructure Management Market UK Remote Infrastructure Management Market France Remote Infrastructure Management Market Russia Remote Infrastructure Management Market Spain Remote Infrastructure Management Market Italy Remote Infrastructure Management Market Rest of Europe Remote Infrastructure Management Market Asia Pacific Remote Infrastructure Management Market China Remote Infrastructure Management Market Japan Remote Infrastructure Management Market India Remote Infrastructure Management Market South Korea Remote Infrastructure Management Market Singapore Remote Infrastructure Management Market Malaysia Remote Infrastructure Management Market Rest of Asia Pacific Remote Infrastructure Management Market LAMEA Remote Infrastructure Management Market Brazil Remote Infrastructure Management Market Argentina Remote Infrastructure Management Market UAE Remote Infrastructure Management Market Saudi Arabia Remote Infrastructure Management Market South Africa Remote Infrastructure Management Market Nigeria Remote Infrastructure Management Market Rest of LAMEA Remote Infrastructure Management Market Companies Profiled Fujitsu Limited Capgemini Accenture Plc. Genpact Nityo Infotech Sensiple Rigel Networks Cognizant UST Global, Inc. AT&T, Inc. Unique Offerings from KBV Research Exhaustive coverage of Global Remote Infrastructure Management Market Size Highest number of market tables and figures Subscription based model available Guaranteed best price Assured post sales research support with 10% customization free Related Reports: North America Remote Infrastructure Management Market (2017-2023) Europe Remote Infrastructure Management Market (2017-2023) Asia Pacific Remote Infrastructure Management Market (2017-2023) LAMEA Remote Infrastructure Management Market (2017-2023) Knowledge Based Value Research is a global brand and consulting firm serving all kinds of business verticals, government and non-governmental organizations, and not-for-profit organizations. Our motto is to extend our services that will have a lasting impact on our clients who trust us with their business goals. 4F CS 27, Ansal Plaza Sector 1, Vaishali 201010 Delhi NCR, Ghaziabad, India Tel: 0120-4968631 / +91-9990696033 Email: info@kbvresearch.com This release was published on openPR. Permanent link to this press release: Copy Please set a link in the press area of your homepage to this press release on openPR. openPR disclaims liability for any content contained in this release. Marcus Evans Leading the Future Leaders of Tomorrow to thrive in the C-suite through Strategic Transformation Marcus Evans proudly presents the CFO Africa conference which will take place on 12th 14th March 2018 at the Cape Town Marriott Hotel Crystal Towers, Cape Town, South Africa.Presenting immense line up of speakers; Till Streichert Group Chief Financial Officer, VODACOM; Warren Hero Chief Technology Officer, MICROSOFT; Vernon Fryer Chief Information Security Officer, NEC AFRICA; Oliva Muwanga-Zake Head of Group IT, ESKOM; Anthony Julies Deputy Director-General Assets and Liability Management, National Treasury of South Africa; Nondumiso Zibi Chief Information Officer, ESKOM; Wayne Koonin Group Finance Director, Omnia Group; Andre Wentzel Group Head-Anti Money Laundering, Standard Bank; Thagraj Moodley Group Chief Information Security Officer, Discovery; Deon Fredericks Chief Financial Officer, Telkom; Zafar Mahomed Chief Financial Officer, McDonalds South Africa; Gerrit Van Der Merwe Chief Executive Officer, Candor Governance.One of the speakers, Ravi Singh Chief Financial Officer at Liberty Africa Insurance said the CFO has to be cost conscious in any business at all times. It is easy to get drawn into spending a bit more when profits are growing at significant levels but competitive changes in your market coupled with negative economic conditions can have a devastating impact on the profits of any business.Ravi will be speaking on Taking a Macro View of the Future: Actions to be Taken to Mitigate Major Risks on day one of the conference happening in Cape Town.Happening for the first time this year, the conference will be providing strategic inputs on how CFOs must look beyond their traditional roles to become an enterprise wide strategist. The large scale conference will be also featuring exclusive post conference workshop for finance leaders in the C-suite to shape their thinking towards digital disruption and how it is now changing the DNA of CFOs this year.Zafar Mahomed who is also speaking at conference shared that he is looking forward to the other presentations presented by his fellow peers. It is an opportunity to learn from others and immerse myself in the latest thinking.One of the top highlights of this large scale conference will be the CFO Chatrooms on equipping CFOs for the CEO journey and Success Story session on a real life CFO transition and successful journey to the top.The conference is proudly partnered with Risk Africa magazine. Robert Walters and Association of International Certified Professional Accountants (AICPA-CIMA).marcus evans GroupA global, multifaceted media, corporate marketing and information company, employing 3000 professionals in 59 worldwide locations. While our activities are wide ranging our core focus is providing businesses with the insights and contacts they need to grow. Our B2B Events portfolio includes over 500 summits and conferences annually across all industry sectors whilst our professional training division provides customers with access to the worlds leading technical experts on a truly global basis as well as supporting business language and cultural training needs.Suite A-20-1, Level 20, Hampshire Place Office, 157 Hampshire, 1 Jalan Mayang Sari, 50450, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia Upcoming Study Offers Key Insights on How On-The-Go Yoghurt Market will Evolve During 2017-2027 https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-gb-3253 https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/toc/rep-gb-3253 Increasing busy and hectic lifestyle is major factor driving demand for healthy on-the-go products including on-the-go yogurt which offers nutrients, vitamins and calcium for healthy lifestyle. On-the-go yogurt is available in various packaging such as pouch, bottle, cups etc. which makes it popular amongst children as well as working professionals. Growing demand for on-the-go yogurt is also responsible for growing packaging industry which manufactures novel packaging for yogurts and makes it easy for consumers to take it on-the-go. Increasing number of working women is also becoming a major market driver for increasing demand of on-the-go yogurt for fulfilling the requirement of vitamins and other nutrients.Market Segmentation:On-the-go yoghurt market is segmented on the basis of packaging type such as pouch, bottle, cups, etc. According to the convenience of consumers on-the-go yogurt is packed in variety of packaging which makes it easy for consumption. On-the-go yogurt is available for kids mainly in pouch in number of retail shops and supermarket/ hypermarkets. Bottle and cup packaging for on-the-go yogurt is mainly used by working professionals or in the house for daily consumption.Request For Report Sample@On-the-go yogurt market is further segmented on the basis of its type as flavored and non-flavored. Consumption trend for on-the-go yogurt in flavored form is more as compared to non-flavored on-the-go yogurt as a result of improved taste and flavor. Thus market demand for flavored on-the go yogurt segment is higher. Manufacturers are increasing production of flavored on-the-go yogurt to cater with growing demand in global market.On-the-go yogurt market is segmented on the basis of distribution channel as supermarket/ hypermarket, retail shops, online shops and others. Due to increasing busy and hectic lifestyles consumers are preferring online shopping to save time and hence mans are making product available through various online channels. Supermarkets/ hypermarkets and retail shops are distribution segments growing rapidly as compared to online stores for on-the-go yogurt market as a result of easy availability and convenient buying options.Market Regional Outlook:On the basis of regions, the On-the-go yoghurt market has been segmented into North America, Latin America, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Asia-Pacific Excluding Japan, Japan, Middle East and Africa. As a result of increasing number of health conscious consumers in the regions North America and Europe on-the-go yogurt market is gaining traction. Europe is leading consumer of on-the-go yogurt followed by North America. Increasing number of milk-based product factories and investments by global players in growing their production base in Asia Pacific region, is factor expected to drive significant growth of on-the-go yogurt market over the forecast period. China and India are leading countries in Asia Pacific for the consumption of on-the-go yogurt.Market Drivers and Trends:Increasing awareness of health benefits associated with it on-the-go yoghurt is trending in global market. On-the-go yogurt contains calcium, vitamins and other beneficial nutrients which makes it popular in health conscious consumers. Easy availability of on-the-go yogurt in retail shops, supermarket/ hypermarkets is also one of the factor driving market demand. Increasing number of consumers with busy and hectic lifestyles is factor driving market demand for on-the-go yogurt in working professionals. On-the-go yogurt is available in different flavours which makes it popular in children for healthy consumption in turn fueling growth of global market. Increasing number of working women and various health benefits associated with yogurt products are other factors expected to contribute to significant growth of the market over the forecast period.Visit For TOC@On-the-go yoghurt Market Key Players:Some of the key players in the on-the-go yoghurt market include Origin Food Group, LLC, The Nemours Foundation, Materne North America Corp., B&G Foods, Inc., Chobani, LLC, Alpro UK (Ltd.), Go Greek Yogurt, Sprout Organic Foods etc.ABOUT US:Future Market Insights (FMI) is a leading market intelligence and consulting firm. We deliver syndicated research reports, custom research reports and consulting services, which are personalized in nature. FMI delivers a complete packaged solution, which combines current market intelligence, statistical anecdotes, technology inputs, valuable growth insights, an aerial view of the competitive framework, and future market trends.CONTACTFuture Market Insights616 Corporate Way, Suite 2-9018,Valley Cottage, NY 10989,United StatesT: +1-347-918-3531F: +1-845-579-5705Email: sales@futuremarketinsights.comWebsite: http.futuremarketinsights.com Data Integration Software Market 2018 by Size, Share, Trends, Key Vendors (Microsoft, Cisco Systems, Denodo Technologies, Attunity, Adeptia, Actian Corporation) , Drivers and Forecast ReportsWeb http://www.reportsweb.com/inquiry&RW00011588739/sample http://www.reportsweb.com/global-data-integration-software-market-size-status-and-forecast-2025 http://www.reportsweb.com/buy&RW00011588739/buy/3300 This report studies the global Data Integration Software market, analyzes and researches the Data Integration Software development status and forecast in United States, EU, Japan, China, India and Southeast Asia. This report focuses on the top players in global market, likeInformaticaIBMSAP SEOracleTalendMicrosoftCisco SystemsDenodo TechnologiesAttunity, AdeptiaActian CorporationSyncsortSymantec CorporationTeradataIntelRequest a Sample atMarket segment by Regions/Countries, this report coversUnited StatesEUJapanChinaIndiaSoutheast AsiaMarket segment by Type, the product can be split intoOn-premiseHostedMarket segment by Application, Data Integration Software can be split intoBSFIGovernmentE-commerceHealthcareOthersBrowse Complete Report atKey Point from Table of Contents:1 Industry Overview of Data Integration Software2 Global Data Integration Software Competition Analysis by Players3 Company-Top Players) Profiles4 Global Data Integration Software Market Size by Application-2013-2018)5 United States Data Integration Software Development Status and Outlook6 EU Data Integration Software Development Status and Outlook7 Japan Data Integration Software Development Status and Outlook8 China Data Integration Software Development Status and Outlook9 India Data Integration Software Development Status and Outlook10 Southeast Asia Data Integration Software Development Status and Outlook11 Market Forecast by Regions and Application-2018-2025)12 Data Integration Software Market Dynamics13 Market Effect Factors Analysis14 Research Finding/ConclusionPurchase Complete Report atContact Information:Call: +1-646-491-9876Email: sales@reportsweb.comReportsWeb.com is a one stop shop of market research reports and solutions to various companies across the globe. We help our clients in their decision support system by helping them choose most relevant and cost effective research reports and solutions from various publishers. We provide best in class customer service and our customer support team is always available to help you on your research queries.505, 6th floor, Amanora Township, Amanora Chambers, East Block, Kharadi Road, Hadapsar, Pune-411028 Global Bicomponent Fiber Market 2018-Dupont, Eastman, JNC corp, Teijin, Toho Tenax Global Bicomponent Fiber Market https://goo.gl/aWftKE https://goo.gl/uhfLr7 www.apexmarketreports.com Apex Market Reports, recently published a detailed market research study focused on the "Global Bicomponent Fiber Market" across the global, regional and country level. The report provides 360 analysis of "Global Bicomponent Fiber Market" from view of manufacturers, regions, product types and end industries. The research report analyses and provides the historical data along with current performance of the Global Bicomponent Fiber industry, and estimates the future trend of Global Bicomponent Fiber market on the basis of this detailed study. The study shares "Global Bicomponent Fiber Market" performance both in terms of volume and revenue.Get Free Sample Copy of Report Here:Top Manufacturers Analysis of This ReportToray IndustriesOwens CorningTeijinToho TenaxDupontEastmanJNC corp.CHA Technologies GroupES FiberVisionsFar Eastern New CenturyThe market research report explores the Global Bicomponent Fiber market across the globe along with major regions and countries. The research report provides a detailed study on each and every aspect of "Global Bicomponent Fiber Market". The research report studies the entire value chain from raw material to end user industries. The report also shares import/export statistics along with production and consumption for all major regions and countries. Moreover, the research study classifies the Global Bicomponent Fiber market based on major product types, application and end users industries of Global Bicomponent Fiber. Besides, the report also covers geographical segmentation for Global Bicomponent Fiber market. The report further provides production, capacity, price per region, gross margin, production cost, for all major regions and countries listed in report.The competitive landscape of the global market for Global Bicomponent Fiber is determined by assessing the major industry participants, production capacity, production capacity utilization rate, Global Bicomponent Fiber market's production chain, pricing by each manufacturer and the revenue generated by each manufacturer in the Global Bicomponent Fiber market globally.Enquire Before Buying @The Global Bicomponent Fiber market 2018 is further analyzed on the basis of product pricing, Global Bicomponent Fiber production volume, data pertaining to demand and Global Bicomponent Fiber supply, and the revenue garnered by the product. The report provides upstream and downstream analysis covering major raw material used in manufacturing of Global Bicomponent Fiber along with detailed manufacturing sources. The report also shares list of major raw material manufacturers along with their manufacturing locations. Detailed raw material price trend analysis along with manufacturing cost analysis is also incorporated into the report. Various methodical tools such as investment returns, feasibility, SWOT analysis and market attractiveness analysis has been implemented in the research study to present a comprehensive, detailed study of the industry for Global Bicomponent Fiber across the world.About UsApex Market Reports offers elevating market research globally. We have collection of various syndicated reports of different categories. Apex Market Reports provides you to best services, weather youre searching for new trends in market or competitive scenario in emerging market.Customers can buys different reports across various categories such as Chemical and Material, Biotechnology, Healthcare, Food and beverages, Automobile and various sectors. Our Website offers safe and secure online ordering experience, convenient payment options.Contact UsFrank ValadezCorporate Sales Specialist155 North Wacker Drive, Suite 4250Chicago, IL 60606Phone: +17739042683Email id - sales@apexmarketreports.comWebsite - Global Biostimulants Market Key Players Analysis: BASF SE, Sapec Group (Trade Corporation International), Arysta Life Science Limited, Isagro S.P.A, Valagro S.P.A, Koppert B.V and Italpollina (Italy) https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/sample_request/2770 https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/biostimulants-market-2770 Major Key Players:This report includes a study of strategies used in the market, mergers and acquisitions in native starches, multiple product launch by Biostimulants market players. It further includes product portfolios and developments of leading major players which includes Arysta Life Science Limited (Japan) Isagro S.P.A (Italy) Valagro S.P.A (Italy) Koppert B.V (The Netherlands) Italpollina (Italy) BASF SE (Germany) Sapec Group (Trade Corporation International) (Spain)The Global Biostimulants Market is highly competitive due to the presence of some well-established regional and global players. The competitive environment of this market is projected to intensify with an increase in product portfolio and also increasing number of key players. The Global biostimulants market is segmented on the basis of by type, crop type, active ingredients, application and country.Get a Sample Report @Market Analysis:Global Biostimulant market will be entering unexplored territory and holds huge potential and ample scope of growth. The global biostimulants market is majorly driven by the need for an increase in yield per hectare owing to rising global population and their demand for food. Various Government initiatives, amplified funding and grants for sustainable agriculture are supporting growth of biostimulants market. Biostimulants are increasingly finding applications in agriculture and horticulture sector owing to the benefits such as improved metabolism, water holding capacity, chlorophyll and antioxidants production. Increasing demand for clean label food & beverages owing to rising awareness about healthy lifestyle is leading to the expansion of organic farming across the globe.Furthermore, factors such as diminishing farmland and requirement of sustainable solutions for agriculture production will also propel the growth of biostimulants market in the near future. Europe dominates the global biostimulants market due to rising demand for sustainable agricultural products and rising demand for clean label food products. However, APAC region will witness the fastest market growth due technological advancements and growing awareness regarding benefits of organic food products in the region.These factors will support the growth of global biostimulants market during the forecast period 2017-2023.Key Findings: Foliar treatment will dominate the market and grow at a CAGR of 10.4% Europe will continue to dominate the Global biostimulant market followed by Asia Pacific during forecast period Acid based dominated the active ingredient market and humic acid dominated acid active ingredient market. Fruits and vegetables will grow at a higher CAGR of 11.14% Natural Biostimulants is projected to dominate the market and will grow at a CAGR of 11.1%Access Report Details @Regional Analysis:The global biostimulants market is segmented into North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and rest of the world (ROW). Among these Europe region has the major market share. The Europe dominates the biostimulants market. Emerging markets like India and China have been considered as potential markets for biostimulants due to growing demand for organic food and beverages. Global biostimulants market is highly concentrated in Europe. Biostimulants manufacturers are focusing on expanding their product line by providing larger product line with huge application in farming. Asia-Pacific is projected to grow at the highest CAGR 11.23% from 2017 to 2023.Target Audience: Retailers & wholesalers E-commerce companies Traders, importers and exporters Biostimulants manufacturers Raw material suppliers End usersThe Reports also Cover Regional and Country Level Analysis,North America U.S. CanadaEurope Germany France Italy Spain UK Rest of EuropeAsia-Pacific China India Australia Singapore Rest of Asia PacificRest of the world Brazil Mexico Argentina OthersAbout Market Research Future:At Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.ContactMarket Research FutureOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, Hadapsar,Pune - 411028Maharashtra, India+1 646 845 9312Email: sales@marketresearchfuture.com Probiotic Fermented Milk Market Poised to Incur Steadfast Growth During 2017-2027 https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-gb-3257 https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/toc/rep-gb-3257 Fermented dairy-based products consists of active bacterial cultures which are one of the common sources of probiotics present in the products. Probiotic fermented milk-based products contains specific strains of live bacteria that has potential health effects. Health benefits associated with probiotic fermented milk is gaining popularity in health conscious consumers. Probiotic fermented milk products helps in maintaining overall health of the individual along with improving gut function and immunity of the body. Probiotic fermented milk products consists of typical probiotics including lactic acid bacteria such as Bifidobacterium, Lactobacillus acidophilus, and Lactobacillus casei. These probiotic strains are widely used in fermented milk-based products such as kefir, yogurt, and cheese. These type of probiotic fermented milk-based products are beneficial for many digestive and gastrointestinal conditions.Market Segmentation:The global probiotic fermented milk market is segmented on the basis of product type, application, and region. The global probiotic fermented milk market is segmented on the basis of product type such as yogurt, kefir, cheese, and others. Probiotic fermented milk market is growing due to its yogurt product which covers maximum market for probiotic fermented milk as compared to other milk products. Kefir milk is fermented milk product made with kefir grains has many health benefits which is becoming popular in many health conscious consumers which is in turn increasing global demand for probiotic fermented milk-based products. The global probiotic fermented milk market is segmented on the basis of application in industries such as dairy, cosmetics, and beverages industries. In cosmetic industry probiotic fermented milk is used in anti-aging creams and lotions.Request For Report Sample@Market Regional Outlook:On the basis of regions, the Probiotic fermented milk market has been segmented into North America, Latin America, Western and Eastern Europe, Asia-Pacific region, Japan, Middle East and Africa. Probiotic fermented milk market have significant share in North America and Europe as a result of increasing number of health conscious consumers. Asia Pacific is expected to grow in forecast period as a result of increasing awareness of healthy, nutritious probiotic fermented milk products. Demand for probiotic fermented milk products in global market is increasing as a result of its application in multiple industries.Market Drivers and Trends:The driving factors for probiotic fermented milk market are increasing demand for probiotic fermented milk in cosmetic products, dairy products and beverages. Rising consumer awareness regarding usage of probiotic fermented milk-based products in day-today life helps in enhancing the nutritional content of the food is one of the major driving factor for the market globally. Increasing demand probiotic fermented milk in cosmetic industry is also one of the key driving factor for global probiotic fermented milk market. Varieties of flavorings and taste enhancers are added to these probiotic fermented milk products which is making it popular in children in turn driving the global probiotic fermented milk market. Hence, the global probiotic fermented milk market is expected to observe robust growth over the forecast period.Visit For TOC@Probiotic fermented milk Market Key Players:Some of the key players in the Probiotic fermented milk market include Danone, Nestle S.A., Valio Ltd., FrieslandCampina, Danisco A/S, Lifeway Foods, Inc., Bio-K Plus International Inc., General Mills, Inc., Morinaga Milk Industry Co., Ltd., Mother Dairy Fruit & Vegetable Pvt Ltd. etc. are among these. The companies are projected to frame certain strategies in future in order to gain the competitive advantage in global fermented ingredients market till 2027.ABOUT US:Future Market Insights (FMI) is a leading market intelligence and consulting firm. We deliver syndicated research reports, custom research reports and consulting services, which are personalized in nature. FMI delivers a complete packaged solution, which combines current market intelligence, statistical anecdotes, technology inputs, valuable growth insights, an aerial view of the competitive framework, and future market trends.CONTACTFuture Market Insights616 Corporate Way, Suite 2-9018,Valley Cottage, NY 10989,United StatesT: +1-347-918-3531F: +1-845-579-5705Email: sales@futuremarketinsights.comWebsite: http.futuremarketinsights.com Smart Glass in Automotive Market 2018 Analyzed by Business Growth, Development Factors, Application (Side/ Rear View Mirror, Sunroofs, Sidelites/ Backlites, Windshield) and Future Prospects ReportsWeb http://www.reportsweb.com/inquiry&RW00011588400/sample http://www.reportsweb.com/global-smart-glass-in-automotive-market-professional-survey-report-2018 http://www.reportsweb.com/buy&RW00011588400/buy/3500 Smart Glass in Automotive Market by Global Brands, Countries, Type and Applications 2018 updated report provides a comprehensive analysis of the Smart Glass in Automotive market focusing on the market size and trends with industry structure reviewThis report focuses on top manufacturers in global market, with production, price, revenue and market share for each manufacturer, coveringAGCPPG IndustriesSmartGlass InternationalSAGE ElectrochromicsGentexHitachi ChemicalsView, IncGlass AppsResearch FrontiersScienstry, Inc.RavenBrickPleotintRequest a Sample on Smart Glass in Automotive Market atOn the basis of product, this report displays the production, revenue, price, market share and growth rate of each type, primarily split intoElectro Chromic GlassSuspended Particle Device (SPD) GlassThermo Chromic GlassPolymer Dispersed Liquid Crystals GlassPhoto Chromatics GlassBy Application, the market can be split intoSide/ Rear View MirrorSunroofsSidelites/ BacklitesWindshieldBy Regions, this report covers (we can add the regions/countries as you want)North AmericaChinaEuropeSoutheast AsiaJapanIndiaBrowse Complete Report on Smart Glass in Automotive Market atKey Point from Table of Contents:1 Industry Overview of Smart Glass in Automotive2 Manufacturing Cost Structure Analysis of Smart Glass in Automotive3 Technical Data and Manufacturing Plants Analysis of Smart Glass in Automotive4 Global Smart Glass in Automotive Overall Market Overview5 Smart Glass in Automotive Regional Market Analysis6 Global 2013-2018E Smart Glass in Automotive Segment Market Analysis-by Type)7 Global 2013-2018E Smart Glass in Automotive Segment Market Analysis-by Application)8 Major Manufacturers Analysis of Smart Glass in Automotive9 Development Trend of Analysis of Smart Glass in Automotive Market10 Smart Glass in Automotive Marketing Type Analysis11 Consumers Analysis of Smart Glass in Automotive12 Conclusion of the Global Smart Glass in Automotive Market Professional Survey Report 2018Purchase Complete Report atReportsWeb.com is a one stop shop of market research reports and solutions to various companies across the globe. We help our clients in their decision support system by helping them choose most relevant and cost effective research reports and solutions from various publishers. We provide best in class customer service and our customer support team is always available to help you on your research queries.505, 6th floor, Amanora Township, Amanora Chambers, East Block, Kharadi Road, Hadapsar, Pune-411028 IoT in Manufacturing 2018 Global Industry Key Players - Microsoft Corp., PTC Inc., Siemens AG, IBM Corp., Zebra Technologies Market Analysis And Forecast To 2025 Global IoT in Manufacturing Market https://www.wiseguyreports.com/sample-request/2832711-global-iot-in-manufacturing-market-size-study-by-solution-network https://www.wiseguyreports.com/reports/2832711-global-iot-in-manufacturing-market-size-study-by-solution-network Global IoT in Manufacturing MarketGlobal IoT in Manufacturing Market industry valued approximately USD 10.11 billion in 2016 is anticipated to grow with a healthy growth rate of more than 30.26% over the forecast period 2017-2025. The major factors driving the growth are rising need for predictive maintenance, the introduction of intelligent machine applications, and escalating regulatory compliances.Request a Sample Report @The objective of the study is to define market sizes of different segments & countries in previous years and to forecast the values to the next eight years. The report is designed to incorporate both qualitative and quantitative aspects of the industry with respect to each of the regions and countries involved in the study. Furthermore, the report also caters the detailed information about the crucial aspects such as drivers & restraining factors which will define the future growth of the market. Additionally, it will also incorporate the opportunities available in micro markets for stakeholders to invest, detailed analysis of competitive landscape and product offerings of key players. The detailed segments and sub-segment of the market are explained below:Solution: Network Management Data Management Device Management Application Management Smart SurveillanceService: Professional Services Managed ServicesApplication: Business Process Optimization (BPO) Predictive Maintenance Workforce Management Supply Chain Management OthersVertical: Automotive Aerospace & Defense Chemicals & Material Energy & Utilities Healthcare Food & BeveragesRegions: North Americao U.S.o Canada Europeo UKo Germany Asia Pacifico Chinao Indiao Japan Latin Americao Brazilo Mexico Rest of the WorldFurthermore, the years considered for the study are as follows:Historical year 2015Base year 2016Forecast period 2017 to 2025Some of the key manufacturers involved in the market are Microsoft Corp., PTC Inc., Siemens AG, IBM Corp., Zebra Technologies, Bosch Software Innovations GmbH, Cisco Systems Inc., and Huawei. Acquisitions and effective mergers are some of the strategies adopted by the key manufacturers. Investment in research and development, new product launches and focuses on continuous technology innovations are also strategies adopted by the major players.Target Audience of the IoT in Manufacturing Market StudyKey Consulting Companies & Advisors Large, medium-sized, and small enterprises Venture capitalists Value-Added Resellers (VARs) Third-party knowledge providers Investment bankers InvestorsChapter 1. Research Methodology1.1. Research Process1.1.1. Data Mining1.1.2. Analysis1.1.3. Market Estimation1.1.4. Validation1.1.5. Publishing1.2. Research AssumptionChapter 2. Global IoT in Manufacturing Market Definition & Scope2.1. Objective of The Study2.2. Market Definition2.3. Scope of The Study2.4. Years Considered for The Study2.5. Currency Conversion Rates2.6. Report LimitationChapter 3. Executive Summary3.1. Key Trends3.2. Global & Segmental Market Estimates & Forecasts, 2015-2025 (USD Billion/Million)Chapter 4. Global IoT in Manufacturing Industry Dynamics4.1. Growth Prospects4.1.1. Drivers4.1.2. Restraints4.1.3. Opportunities4.2. Industry Analysis4.2.1. Porters 5 Force Model4.2.2. PEST Analysis4.2.3. Value Chain Analysis4.3. Analyst Recommendation & ConclusionContinued.Complete Report Details @Wise Guy Reports Is Part Of The Wise Guy Consultants Pvt. Ltd. And Offers Premium Progressive Statistical Surveying, Market Research Reports, Analysis & Forecast Data For Industries And Governments Around The Globe. Wise Guy Reports Features An Exhaustive List Of Market Research Reports From Hundreds Of Publishers Worldwide. We Boast A Database Spanning Virtually Every Market Category And An Even More Comprehensive Collection Of Market Research Reports Under These Categories And Sub-Categories.Wise Guy Research Consultants Pvt LtdOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, HadapsarPune - 411028Maharashtra, India Indoor Lighting Management Market 2018 Sales Revenue and Key Players: Crompton Greaves, General Electric, Gstar Technology, Havells Sylvania, Osram Licht, Osram Sylvania, Thorn Lighting https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/sample_request/3852 https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/indoor-lighting-management-market-3852 Market Research Future published a research report on Indoor Lighting Management Market Research Report- Global Forecast 2023 Market Analysis, Scope, Stake, Progress, Trends and Forecast to 2023.Market ScenarioIndoor lighting management can be defined as an essential part of home or any indoor space that enhance the total ambience of the room. In indoor lighting, light fixtures is the important part of interior design.The major drivers fueling the market of Indoor Lighting Management Market includes, high disposable income of people, changing lifestyle and availability of low cost light emitting diode for indoor space is driving the market. The study indicates, dynamic benefits of LED luminaries that includes high intensity of brightness, high energy efficiency, low radiated heat, high reliability, negligible UV rays and long life span is one of the significant factors driving market growth. According to the study, the decreasing price of LED components is boosting the indoor lighting management market growth.The indoor lighting management market can be segmented on the basis of product, type and application. By types the indoor lighting management consists of ambient lighting, task lighting and accent lighting. Accent lighting enable users by automatically adjusting to the day and night light source. It enhance users interior space by can extending the useable space of their property during the darker hours and help set the mood of the property they want, and offers users with certain choice features.Get Sample of Report @The indoor lighting management market is expected to grow at approximately USD 17 Billion by 2023, at 19% of CAGR between 2017 and 2023.Regional Analysis:The regional analysis of indoor lighting management market is being studied for region such as Asia Pacific, North America, Europe and Rest of the World. North America is one of the leading player in the indoor lighting management market owing to high disposable income of people and demand for ambient lighting is boosting the market in the region. Rapid infrastructure activities across different industries has driven the market of indoor lighting management market in Asia-Pacific region. This growth is mainly attributed to the rising demand for ambient lighting paired with stringent energy efficiency regulation.Key Players:The prominent players in the indoor lighting management market are Crompton Greaves (India), General Electric (U.S.), Gstar Technology Co. Ltd. (China), Havells Sylvania (U.K.), Osram Licht AG (Germany), Osram Sylvania (U.S.), Koninklijke Philips N.V. (Netherlands), Shenzhen MR LED (China), Thorn Lighting (U.K.), Ushio Lighting Technologies (Japan), among others.Segments:Indoor lighting management market is segmented on the basis of product, range and application.Indoor Lighting Management Market by Product: Recessed Suspended Surface Mounted Wall Mounted Free Standing Downlights Projectors Multiple Lighting Systems OthersIndoor Lighting Management Market by Type: Ambient Lighting Task Lighting Accent LightingIndoor Lighting Management Market by Space Type: Residential Industrial Commercial OfficeIndoor Lighting Management Market by Application: Ceiling lights Wall lights Picture lights Table lamps Floor lamps Bathroom lights Kitchen lights Commercial lights OthersStudy Objectives of Indoor Lighting Management Market: To provide detailed analysis of the market structure along with forecast of the various segments and sub-segments of the Global Indoor Lighting Management Market To provide insights about factors affecting the market growth To analyze the Indoor Lighting Management market based on various factors- supply chain analysis, porters five force analysis To provide historical and forecast revenue of the market segments and sub-segments with respect to four main geographies and their countries- North America, Europe, Asia, and Rest of the World (ROW) To provide country level analysis of the Market with respect to the current market size and future prospective To provide country level analysis of the Market for segment by Capacity, Battery Type, Power bank Type, No. of USB ports and sub-segments. To provide strategic profiling of key players in the Market, comprehensively analyzing their core competencies, and drawing a competitive landscape for the market To Track and Analyze competitive developments such as Joint Ventures, Strategic Alliances, Mergers and acquisitions, new product developments, and research and developments in the Global Indoor Lighting Management Market.Get Complete Report @Intended Audience Investors and consultants System Integrators Government Organizations Research/Consultancy firms Technology solution providers IT Solution Providers Original Equipment ManufacturersAbout Us:At Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.Media Contact:Akash Anand,Market Research FutureOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, Hadapsar,Pune - 411028Maharashtra, India+1 646 845 9312Email: akash.anand@marketresearchfuture.com Posted Thursday, February 22, 2018 9:30 am The U.S. Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee last week approved President Trumps nominees to lead the Office of Personnel Management. McCaskill who serves as the top-ranking Democrat on the Committee voted to support both nominees, Dr. Jeff Tien Han Pon and Michael Rigas. The Office of Personnel Management plays a key role in managing day-to-day government operations, processing security clearances, and ensuring that Missourians taxpayer dollars are used as efficiently as possible, McCaskill said. Its critical that the agency has permanent leadership, and I look forward to working with Dr. Pon and Mr. Rigas once theyre confirmed by the full Senate. The Office of Personnel Management serves as the chief human resources agency and personnel policy manager for the federal government. Now that the committee has approved Pon and Rigas, their nominations await a vote in the full Senate. In her role leading the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, McCaskill has conducted extensive oversight over the Office of Personnel Management. Last year, McCaskill joined Republican Committee Chairman Ron Johnson of Wisconsin to call for answers from the agency on the security clearance process for National Security Agency contractor Reality Winner, who is accused of leaking classified information about attempted Russian hacking of U.S. voting software. In 2016, McCaskill called on the Obama Administration to put in place stronger oversight to protect more than $1 billion in government contracts following a report from the Office of Personnel Managements Inspector General that found serious weaknesses in internal controls that made the contracts susceptible to waste, fraud and abuse. Following the Office of Personnel Management data breach in 2015, which compromised the personal information of at least 21.5 million individuals, McCaskill and a group of bipartisan Senators introduced language that was signed into law to help protect federal civilian networks from cyberattacks. Global Hydraulic Cylinder Market to grow at a CAGR of 4.39% during 2016-2020 | Bosch Rexroth, Eaton, HYDAC, Parker Hannifin https://www.researchmoz.us/enquiry.php?type=S&repid=892994 https://www.researchmoz.us/global-hydraulic-cylinder-market-2016-2020-report.html/toc http://bit.ly/1TBmnVG The hydraulic cylinder industry will see a steady growth during the forecast period due to a continuous demand from the agriculture, construction equipment, mining equipment, material handling equipment, industrial equipment, aerospace, and defense sectors.The global hydraulic cylinder market to grow at a CAGR of 4.39% during the period 2016-2020. The report covers the present scenario and the growth prospects of the global hydraulic cylinder market for 2016-2020. To calculate the market size, the report discusses major drivers that are influencing market growth and challenges faced by vendors and the market as a whole.The market is divided into the following segments based on geography:- Americas- APAC- EMEAClick to get Sample PDF:Technavio's report, Global Hydraulic Cylinder Market 2016-2020, has been prepared based on an in-depth market analysis with inputs from industry experts. The report covers the market landscape and its growth prospects over the coming years. The report also includes a discussion of the key vendors operating in this market.Key vendors- Bosch Rexroth- Eaton- HYDAC- Parker Hannifin- WEBER-HYDRAULIKOther prominent vendors- Bengbu Yeli Machinery- Caterpillar- Dongyang Mechatronics- Energy Manufacturing- Enerpac- Hunger Hydraulik- Hydratech Industries- Hyva- KCC- Komatsu- KYB- Ligon Industries- Pacoma- Precision Hydraulic- SMC- Texas Hydraulics- Wren- Wipro Infrastructure Engineering- YukenView Complete TOC with Tables and Figures at:Key questions answered in this report- What will the market size be in 2020 and what will the growth rate be?- What are the key market trends?- What is driving this market?- What are the challenges to market growth?- Who are the key vendors in this market space?- What are the market opportunities and threats faced by the key vendors?- What are the strengths and weaknesses of the key vendors?ResearchMoz is the worlds fastest growing collection of market research reports worldwide. Our database is composed of current market studies from over 100 featured publishers worldwide. Our market research databases integrate statistics with analysis from global, regional, country and company perspectives. ResearchMozs service portfolio also includes value-added services such as market research customization, competitive landscaping, and in-depth surveys, delivered by a team of experienced Research Coordinators.Albany NY - 12207United StatesTel: +1-518-621-2074Tel: 866-997-4948 (Us-Canada Toll Free)Email: sales@researchmoz.usFollow us on LinkedIn at: Warehouse Management System Market 2018 Global Key Players: HighJump Software, Oracle Corporation, Manhattan Associates Inc., Tecsys Inc., SAP SE, JDA Software Group, Softeon Inc. Warehouse Management System Market https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/sample_request/2028 https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/warehouse-management-system-market-2028 Global Warehouse Management System Market - OverviewWarehouse Management System is a software application aimed at supporting warehouse or distribution center. High demand from end use sectors is the primary driving factor for the growth of warehouse management system market. Add-on module sales, supply chain platform integration and cost of ownership benefits also fueling the growth of the market.On the basis of services, warehouse management system market is segmented as software, consulting, system integration, and operations & maintenance. Software segment accounts the largest share because of the software as a service (SaaS). Large companies with small warehouses need WMS because they have same operational challenges as their counterparts. Hence several WMS suppliers have decided to go after the low-end of the warehouse market by providing their software as a service. It helps the smaller companies with less capital investments and greater flexibility. Software segment is expected to increase at a good pace during the forecast period.On the basis of application, warehouse management system market is segmented as electronics, pharmaceutical, transportation & logistics, retail, and others. Transportation & logistics sector is expected to show the significant growth during the forecast period because numerous providers offer transportation management system (TMS) for their WMS solutions. Also in Retail sector, WMS reduces the delivery time and errors while processing the orders which strengthens the suppliercustomer relationships, and is a remarkable driver for the WMS market. The Warehouse Management System market is expected to cross USD 2.65 billion at the end of the forecasted period and is expected to grow at CAGR of approximately 14% from 2016 to 2022Get Sample of Report @Prominent PlayersHighJump Software (U.S.), Oracle Corporation (U.S.), Manhattan Associates Inc. (U.S.), Tecsys Inc. (Canada), SAP SE (Germany), JDA Software Group Inc. (U.S.), LogFire Inc. (U.S.), Made4net LLC (U.S.), Softeon Inc.(U.S.), and Synergy Logistics Ltd (U.K.) are some of the prominent players profiled in MRFR Analysis and are at the forefront of competition in the Global Warehouse Management System Market.Industry NewsIn April 2017, Oracle announced a new supply chain cloud functionality that helps businesses master challenging warehouse fulfillment issues in order to help outpace their competition. Version 8 of Oracle Warehouse Management Cloud has the latest functional user experience and integration enhancements that provide a comprehensive view of inventory from supplier to the distribution center (DC) to store shelves.In September, 2016, Oracle Corp. Business software giant would buy LogFire Inc., a provider of cloud-based warehouse management systems (WMS), to help Oracle complete its portfolio of supply chain management applications in an effort to compete with logistics technology specialists like Manhattan Associates Inc. and JDA Software Group Inc.Get Complete Report @Global Warehouse Management System Market - Competitive AnalysisGlobal Warehouse Management System Market appears to be highly fragmented and competitive owning to the presence of numerous large and small players active in regional market. The key strategies traced from the analysis of recent developments of the key players include Product Launch, Agreement & Partnership, Acquisition and expansion. Strategic partnerships between Key players support the growth and expansion plans of the key players during the forecast period. On the product and sales side, companies are investing in innovation/R&D, brand building, and fostering strong relationships with customers to support their competitive position.About Market Research Future:At Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.MRFR team have supreme objective to provide the optimum quality market research and intelligence services to our clients. Our market research studies by products, services, technologies, applications, end users, and market players for global, regional, and country level market segments, enable our clients to see more, know more, and do more, which help to answer all their most important questions.Market Research FutureOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, Hadapsar,Pune - 411028Maharashtra, India+1 646 845 9312Email: sales@marketresearchfuture.com New Research Report Provides Credible Insights on How Psyllium Seed Market will Evolve During 2017-2027 https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-gb-3282 https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/toc/rep-gb-3282 Psyllium is a form of fiber and comes under Plantaginaceae plant family. Psyllium is available in various forms such as psyllium seeds, psyllium husk, psyllium husk powder, psyllium industrial powder etc. Psyllium seeds can be consumed directly or in powdered form for medical purposes as it has various health benefits. Psyllium seed is a source of fiber, protein, and triglycerides. Psyllium seed also contains ascorbic acid, aucubin, beta-carotene, beta-sitosterol, potassium, riboflavin, selenium, sodium, chromium, cobalt, fiber, linoleic acid, magnesium etc. Psyllium seed can be marketed as whole seed or the husk or husk powder according to convenience of consumers. Psyllium seed is an intestinal cleanser and stool softener for both animals as well as humans therefore it is used as traditional medicinal herb in Asian countries.Market Segmentation:Psyllium seed market is segmented on the basis of application as therapeutics application, industrial application, animal feed etc. In therapeutics, Psyllium seed is used for constipation, diarrhea, high cholesterol, heart disease, blood pressure, obesity, irritable bowel syndrome and inflammatory bowel disease. In industry, Psyllium seed is used to prevent soil erosion, prevent landscaping, preventing crumbling of solid ingredients as a result of moisture retention. In animal feed, psyllium seed husk is used to move sand from animals digestive system without any harmful effect.Request For Report Sample@Psyllium seed market is segmented on the basis of industrial applications as food industry, pharmaceutical industry, and cosmetic industry. In food industry, psyllium seed can be powdered and used in health drinks, ice creams, breads, biscuits and other bakery products. Psyllium seed is also used in cereal breakfasts by many athletes. In pharmaceutical industry psyllium is used as thickening agent for capsule formation. In cosmetics industry, psyllium seeds can be used in forms like paste or power in anti-aging herbal products for skin care.Psyllium seed market is further segmented on the basis of regions as North America, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Latin America, Asia Pacific Excluding Japan, Japan, and Middle East and Africa.Market Regional Outlook:On the basis of regions, the Psyllium seed market has been segmented into North America, Latin America, Western and Eastern Europe, Asia-Pacific region, Japan, Middle East and Africa. Psyllium seed is originated from Iran and increased its travel from Asia to Europe. Production of psyllium seeds mainly comes from Arab world, Afghanistan, Egypt, North India, Sindh, Baluchistan etc. for medicinal purposes. Europe is emerging in psyllium seed market for consumption as well as production. Currently, India is the largest producer of psyllium seeds.Market Drivers and Trends:Psyllium seed have number of health benefits such as constipation, diarrhea, high cholesterol, heart disease, blood pressure, obesity, irritable bowel syndrome and inflammatory bowel disease which is increasing demand for psyllium seeds in global market. Other applications of psyllium seed in various industries such as food industry, pharmaceutical industry, cosmetic industry is increasing which drives the market for psyllium seeds globally. Psyllium seed is used as an animal feed which is helping animals without any side effects, therefore the demand for psyllium seed as animal feed is gaining interest in global market which states that the psyllium seed market is expected to in forecast period.Visit For TOC@Psyllium seed Market Key Players:Some of the key players in the psyllium seed market include Keyur Industries, Atlas Industries, JYOT Overseas Pvt. Ltd., Abhyuday Indutries, Satnam Psyllium Industries, Rajganga Agro Product Pvt.Ltd., Shree Mahalaxmi psyllium Pvt. Ltd., Ispasen Remedies, Jyotindra International, Shubh Psyllium Industries are among these.ABOUT US:Future Market Insights (FMI) is a leading market intelligence and consulting firm. We deliver syndicated research reports, custom research reports and consulting services, which are personalized in nature. FMI delivers a complete packaged solution, which combines current market intelligence, statistical anecdotes, technology inputs, valuable growth insights, an aerial view of the competitive framework, and future market trends.CONTACTFuture Market Insights616 Corporate Way, Suite 2-9018,Valley Cottage, NY 10989,United StatesT: +1-347-918-3531F: +1-845-579-5705Email: sales@futuremarketinsights.comWebsite: http.futuremarketinsights.com Ongoing Study Traces the Expansion of Babassu Oil Market During 2017-2027 https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-gb-3285 https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/toc/rep-gb-3285 Babassu oil is extracted from babassu palm which is primarily found in Amazon region of South America. It is light yellow in color when liquid and creamy white when it is in solid form. It is commercially manufactured by crushing hard shell of babassu palm nut and extracting oil from the kernel. The health dominating properties has led this product to hold a promising future. It contains vitamin E which protects against toxins such as eye disorders, neurological diseases such as Alzheimer's disease, and diabetes and others. It also contains phyto sterols or plant sterols which enables to lower the cholesterol absorption in the body.Babassu Oil Market SegmentationBabassu oil is segmented on the basis of type which includes organic & conventional. Conventional babassu oil is expected to account for major value share during the forecast period. Organic babassu oil is expected to represent favorable growth in the near future. Babassu oil is very much suitable in terms of getting rid of from various hair and skin care problems. Thus increasing application of organic babassu oil in the manufacturing of organic cosmetics products is expected to drive the segment growth in the near future.Request For Report Sample@Babassu oil is further segmented on the basis of form which includes solid and liquid. Liquid form of babassu oil is expected to account for relatively higher value share during the forecast period. Wide availability of liquid form of babssu oil with various application such as in cooking or using as a cosmetic product is expected to drive the segment growth during the forecast period.Babassu oil is further segmented on the basis of distribution channel which includes beauty salon, pharmacy/drugstores, specialty outlet and through online retailing. Among all these segment pharmacy/drugstore is expected to represent major value share during the forecast period. Consumers perceives babassu oil as a hair and skin treatment product which is expected to support the segment growth during the forecast period. Online retailing expected to account for favorable growth during the forecast period. Increasing penetration of internet coupled with rising consumer inclination towards convenient shopping is expected to drive the segment growth in the near future.Babassu Oil Market Regional AnalysisBabassu oil market is segmented on the basis of region which includes North America, Latin America, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Asia Pacific excluding Japan, Middle East & Africa and Japan. Geographically North America is expected to represent the favorable market for babassu oil in terms of value share. In the region the U.S. is expected to represent major value share during the forecast period. Among consumer in U.S. it is becoming a favorable ingredient for its ability to smooth and soften skin and hair which is expected to drive the market growth in the country. Latin America is expected to represent substantial growth in terms of value over the forecast period. Easy availability of raw material at low cost is expected to drive the market growth across the region.Increasing demand for organic cosmetics products containing babassu oil is expected to support the market during the forecast period. Moreover consumers are looking forward to replace coconut oil with babassu oil due to its favorable properties for both skin and hair, which is further expected to fuel the market growth in the near future. However, there are some restraining factors which are effecting the global babasu oil market. Such as commercially babbassu oil is not manufactured across the globe except in Brazil. Due this it incurs high cost and sold at high price in globally.Visit For TOC@Key PlayersSome of the key players operating in babassu oil market includes Mielle Organics, ANITA GRANT, Dr. Adorable Inc. LABORATOIRE CENTIFLOR (Huiles & Sens) , and Sheabutter Cottage among others.ABOUT US:Future Market Insights (FMI) is a leading market intelligence and consulting firm. We deliver syndicated research reports, custom research reports and consulting services, which are personalized in nature. FMI delivers a complete packaged solution, which combines current market intelligence, statistical anecdotes, technology inputs, valuable growth insights, an aerial view of the competitive framework, and future market trends.CONTACTFuture Market Insights616 Corporate Way, Suite 2-9018,Valley Cottage, NY 10989,United StatesT: +1-347-918-3531F: +1-845-579-5705Email: sales@futuremarketinsights.comWebsite: http.futuremarketinsights.com Global Canisters Market; Key DriverZibo Uni-Shine Industry Co., swastika international co, Electrolux Group, Ashirwad chemicals among others; Forecasts Till 2023 Market Research Future - MRFR https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/sample_request/759 https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/canisters-market-759 https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/check-discount/759 Executive Summary:The, Canisters Market inquire about report is developing with the quick pace; chiefly due the prospering Healthcare Sector. As per a current report distributed by the Market Research Future, The , Canisters Industry Research report is blasting and anticipated that would pick up unmistakable quality over the conjecture time frame. The Market is anticipated to exhibit a colossal development by 2027, outperforming its past development records as far as esteem and volume.TRY SAMPLE REPORT @Global Canisters Market Report: Regional Analysis:The regional analysis includes North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Middle East and rest of the world.Plastic is the most preferred packaging material as it is available in a variety of grades, has significant barrier properties, is chemically inert, and can be used to create attractive packages with esthetic appeal, which helps in the marketing and promotional activities for the drug. The grades of plastic used for packaging include PE, PP, polyolefin, PET, and PVC. Canisters are also developed from Polyethylene material.North America:North- America is dominating the Canisters Market followed by Europe and Asia-pacific regions. Factors such as advancement in manufacturing processes and technological innovation, growing demand for drug delivery devices & blister packaging, contribution of nanotechnology to the pharmaceutical packaging market, and implementation of new health law in the U.S. are driving the growth of the market. US is the leader market amongst other countries such as Canada, Mexico among others.Asia-Pacific:Asia-Pacific is the emerging market in the Global canisters Market. The increasing small and large pharmaceutical packaging industries, rising awareness among consumers and government initiatives such as Make-In-India campaign started by Indian government is driving the growth of Canisters market in India. Australia, China are also showing good opportunities in the forecasted period.Global Canisters Market Report: Key Players:Some of the major market players of Global Canisters Market are as follows: Zibo Uni-Shine Industry Co., Ltd. , swastika international co, Electrolux Group, Stanley Black & Decker, Dyson Ltd., Oreck Corporation, TTI Floor Care, Miele, Eureka Forbes Ltd, and Haier Group, Clariant, Sanner GmbH, Ashirwad chemicals among others.Global Canisters Market Report: Regional Analysis:The regional analysis includes North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Middle East and rest of the world.Plastic is the most preferred packaging material as it is available in a variety of grades, has significant barrier properties, is chemically inert, and can be used to create attractive packages with esthetic appeal, which helps in the marketing and promotional activities for the drug. The grades of plastic used for packaging include PE, PP, polyolefin, PET, and PVC. Canisters are also developed from Polyethylene material.North America:North- America is dominating the Canisters Market followed by Europe and Asia-pacific regions. Factors such as advancement in manufacturing processes and technological innovation, growing demand for drug delivery devices & blister packaging, contribution of nanotechnology to the pharmaceutical packaging market, and implementation of new health law in the U.S. are driving the growth of the market. US is the leader market amongst other countries such as Canada, Mexico among others.Asia-Pacific:Asia-Pacific is the emerging market in the Global canisters Market. The increasing small and large pharmaceutical packaging industries, rising awareness among consumers and government initiatives such as Make-In-India campaign started by Indian government is driving the growth of Canisters market in India. Australia, China are also showing good opportunities in the forecasted period.Global Canisters Market Report: Key Players:Some of the major market players of Global Canisters Market are as follows: Zibo Uni-Shine Industry Co., Ltd. , swastika international co, Electrolux Group, Stanley Black & Decker, Dyson Ltd., Oreck Corporation, TTI Floor Care, Miele, Eureka Forbes Ltd, and Haier Group, Clariant, Sanner GmbH, Ashirwad chemicals among others.Global Canisters Market Report: Latest Trends:Clariant, a world leader in specialty chemicals, today announced in year 2015 its plans to invest CHF 10 million in a new Healthcare Packaging manufacturing plant in Cuddalore in Tamil Nadu State, located about 25 km from the city of Pondicherry. The plant will manufacture Clariant's market-leading moisture control products to support the growing pharmaceutical packaging market in India.Global Canisters Market Report: Overview:The global pharmaceutical packaging market is expected to grow with a CAGR of more than 7% during the forecasted period. Among various pharmaceuticals packaging types such as pillow pak, unit pak, vials among others, canisters are growing on a growing demand. The major reason of such a wide acceptance of Canisters in pharmaceutical packaging is its rigid structure and also it is easy to keep and maintain which is becoming the major reason of its acceptance in household sectors.Desiccant canisters are small, rigid, cylindrical containers filled with desiccant materials such as clay, silica gel, activated carbon, aimed at absorbing moisture and controlling odors. It is a plastic container made up of Polyethylene material. Due to their rigid design, desiccant canisters are ideal for automatic, high-speed insertion in pharmaceutical and Nutraceutical bottles and packaging. While desiccant packets are fed from a reel and require constant line stoppages, these are fed through a hopper system, allowing for seamless, constant insertion.These desiccant canisters are considered non-toxic. In addition, these canisters are FDA CFR 21 approved and considered safe to use in direct contact with food or pharmaceuticals.Global Canisters Market Report: Application:Canisters are being used in various applications such as Pharmaceuticals, Nutraceuticals, chemicals, retail industries. Various industries use canisters on the basis of its configuration. For instance, pharmaceuticals use canisters of configuration 0.5-1 gm. on major basis whereas chemicals are using 1 gm. - 2gm. canisters mostly. Other packaging types such as syringes and vials are being used by diagnostic market.Global Canisters Market Report: Market Influencer:The major growth factors of Global Canisters Market include rise in contract manufacturing, the flourishing pharmaceutical industry, and the rising awareness about the benefits of canisters among global consumers. The global pharmaceutical packaging market is also expected to benefit from technological advancements such as the introduction of Nano-enabled packaging, the packaging type that currently provides the most enhanced barrier properties against moisture, light, and mechanical forces.However, Availability of raw materials and price volatility coupled with changing health regulations are the major deterrents which is curbing the growth of this market.ACCESS COMPLETE REPORT @Global Canisters Market Report: Market Segmentation:The Global Canisters Market can be segmented into its configuration, applications and end-users.Global Canisters Market by Configuration:5 gm. 1 gm.1 gm. 2 gm.2 gm. - 3gm.3 gm. and aboveOthersGlobal Canisters Market by Applications:Pharmaceuticals packagingNutraceuticals packagingDiagnostic packagingOthersGlobal Canisters Market by End-users:AutomotiveHealthcarePharmaceuticalsDomesticChemicalsRetail industriesOthersThe reports also covers brief analysis of Geographical Region includes:Americas-North America-US-CanadaEurope-Western Europe-Germany-France-Italy-Spain-U.K-Rest of Western Europe-Eastern Europe-Poland-RussiaAsia Pacific-Asia-China-India-Japan-Rest of Asia-Pacific Countries-Australia-New Zealand-The Middle East& AfricaThe report on Canisters Market comprises of extensive primary research along with the detailed analysis of qualitative as well as quantitative aspects by various industry experts, key opinion leaders to gain the deeper insight of the market and industry performance.This report will provide the clear picture of current market scenario of Canisters Market globally as well as the country level markets. The report also provides the information about Canisters packets available in different configuration, and it also deliver details information about its various applications. It will also depict detailed information about companies with their market dynamics involved in manufacturing of Canisters.CONTINUEDAVAIL DISCOUNT REPPRT @About Market Research Future:At Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.In order to stay updated with technology and work process of the industry, MRFR often plans & conducts meet with the industry experts and industrial visits for its research analyst members.Contact:Market Research FutureOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, Hadapsar,Pune 411028Maharashtra, India+1 646 845 9312Email: salesteam@marketresearchfuture.com Hydrolyzed Oat Protein Market to Reflect Steady Growth During 2017-2027 https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-gb-3306 https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/toc/rep-gb-3306 Proteins are the molecular compound made up of chains of amino acids. Hydrolyzed proteins are the breakdown of protein bind into free amino acid. Hydrolyzed oat protein is a naturally derived soluble form of protein. Hydrolyzed oat protein is a water soluble natural humectant primarily used in cosmetics products. It also act acts as a natural co-emulsifier and enables in reducing the greasiness of oil/water emulsions. In cosmetics products it acts as a conditioning, softening and moisturizing agent. Rising awareness and increasing demand for cosmetics products containing plant based natural ingredient is expected to support the market growth over the forecast period.Market SegmentationHydrolyzed oat protein market is segmented on the basis of application which includes cosmetics, toiletries and detergents. Among all these segments cosmetics segment is expected to account for relatively higher value share in terms of value. Wide application of hydrolyzed oat protein in cosmetics products such as skin care or hair care products is expected to support the segmented growth over the forecast period. Cosmetics segment is further sub-segmented as skin care products and hair care products. Among both of these sub-segment skin care sub-segment is expected to have a major market share during the forecast period. Increasing usage of hydrolyzed oat protein in skin care moisturizing cream and sun care products is expected to fuel the growth of skin care sub-segment growth during the forecast period. Moreover, rising demand for ant-wrinkle cream and anti-aging cream with natural food ingredient across the globe is further expected to support the skin care segment growth over the forecast period. In addition, hair care sub-segment is expected to show a favorable growth in the near future. Hydrolyzed oat protein is gaining importance in terms of usage in hair treatment products and conditioning shampoo which is expected to support hair care sub-segment growth in the near future. Toiletries segment is expected to account for favorable growth in hydrolyzed oat protein market during the forecast period.Request For Report Sample@Regional Analysis -:Geographically in hydrolyzed oat protein market Europe is expected to account for the major market share followed by North America during the forecast period. However these region is expected to account for moderate growth due to mature market. Among North American region U.S. is expected to be the major contributor in terms of revenue followed by Canada. Moreover Asia pacific is expected to show the favorable growth during the forecast period followed by Latin America. In Asia pacific region China and India is expected to account for the substantial growth due to increased demand for cosmetics products containing natural ingredient. Moreover in Latin America Brazil is expected to be the major contributor in terms of revenue followed by Mexico.Consumers across the globe are perceiving food derived or plant based ingredients in personal care products as a healthy and value added products. They giving high preference to the products which contains a composition of natural ingredient which is expected to support the market growth over the forecast period. Traditionally oats have been viewed as healthy food, however their popularity has expanded in recent years they are also increasingly recognized as an ingredient with very low allergenic potential, but very high, proven, therapeutic value which is expected to fuel its market growth during the forecast period. Oats are increasingly used for maintaining skin such as it enables to soothe and heal the skin, reducing inflammation and redness. In addition, hydrolyzed oat protein is increasingly used for manufacturing ant-aging and anti-wrinkle cream which is further expected to fuel the market growth over the forecast period.Visit For TOC@Key Players -:Some of the major key players operating in flavonoid market includes Croda International Plc, Lotioncrafter LLC, Provital Group, BioOrganic Concepts, Induchem companies, Lonza Group, and Sinerga S.p.A. among others.ABOUT US:Future Market Insights (FMI) is a leading market intelligence and consulting firm. We deliver syndicated research reports, custom research reports and consulting services, which are personalized in nature. FMI delivers a complete packaged solution, which combines current market intelligence, statistical anecdotes, technology inputs, valuable growth insights, an aerial view of the competitive framework, and future market trends.CONTACTFuture Market Insights616 Corporate Way, Suite 2-9018,Valley Cottage, NY 10989,United StatesT: +1-347-918-3531F: +1-845-579-5705Email: sales@futuremarketinsights.comWebsite: http.futuremarketinsights.com Changing Demand-Supply Scenario to Influence Expansion of Acetic Acid Market During 2017-2027 https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-gb-3802 https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/toc/rep-gb-3802 Acetic acid, also known as ethanoic acid is a colourless liquid, which has a sour smell and distinct and strong pungent. Acetic acid is mainly produced by methanol carbonylation technique. Acetic acid is also used for producing chemical contents including Vinyl acetate monomer (VAM), Purified Terephthalic Acid (PTA), etc. Acetic acid is used in various industries such as rubber, plastics, pharmaceutical, construction, paint and other industries. It is also used for water treatment and in vinegar as a key ingredient.Global Acetic Acid Market: Drivers and RestraintsGrowing demand for acetic acid in rubber, plastics, pharmaceutical, construction, paint and other industries is driving the growth of global acetic acid market. In addition, increasing demand for Purified Terephthalic Acid (PTA) and Vinyl acetate monomer (VAM) in packaging and textile industry (polyester manufacturing), is also resulting into increasing demand for acetic acid. Increasing demand for acetic acid as vinegar due to various health benefits associated with it is also expected to accelerate the growth of global acetic acid market during the forecast period. Moreover, the expansion of new separation technologies to improve the production efficiency is also can be an opportunity for the global acetic acid market. Furthermore, being an industrial chemical and chemical reagent, acetic acid is also used in making cellulose acetate for the photographic film.Request For Report Sample@Growth of acetic acid market is comparatively low in some regions however the market is already in its maturity stage in those regions. High concentration of acetic acid can be harmful for aquatic life, animals, and plants, which can be a restraint for the global acetic acid market in forecast period. Furthermore, the volatile prices of raw material such as methanol also can be a limiting factor for the acetic acid market.Global Acetic Acid Market: SegmentationOn the basis of application, the global acetic acid market is segmented into:-Acetic anhydrideVinyl acetate monomer (VAM)Acetate estersPurified Terephthalic Acid (PTA)On the basis of end-use, the global acetic acid market is segmented into:-Paints and CoatingPharmaceuticalsFood and BeveragesGlobal Acetic Acid Market: Region wise OutlookThe global acetic acid market is divided into seven regions, namely North America, Latin America, Asia Pacific excluding Japan (APEJ), Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Japan and Middle East and Africa (MEA). Asia pacific is one of the largest market of acetic acid. Taiwan and china are the key markets of acetic acid in Asia pacific region. Owing to increasing demand for paints & coatings, demand for acetic acid is witnessing surge in Asia Pacific region. India will also register a remarkable growth in the global acetic acid market in forecast period due to rising investments, increasing population, favourable government initiatives, constantly enhancing demand from end-use sectors, and expanding industries in the region. China is the largest market of acetic acid. North America and Europe are also the major markets for the acetic acid.Visit For TOC@Global Acetic Acid Market: Key PlayersSome of the key players in the global acetic acid market are-E & C chemicals Inc.Seidler Chemical CompanyParchem fine & specialty chemicalsGujarat Narmada valley fertilizers & chemicals limited (GNFC)GFS chemicals Inc.Scientific solutions LLCKAP Techno Chem. USA Inc.U.S. Chemicals Inc.Tedia Company Inc.Hydrite chemical companyJiangsu Sopo (Group) Co.Eastman ChemicalsWacker ChemieWEGO CHEMICAL GROUPThe global woodworking machines market is highly fragmented due to the presence of large number of regional and global players. Regional players choose quality service and competitive pricing as their winning strategy over global players. In response to this, global players are largely involved in merger & acquisition and partnership activities in order to enhance their profitability margin and market share.ABOUT US:Future Market Insights (FMI) is a leading market intelligence and consulting firm. We deliver syndicated research reports, custom research reports and consulting services, which are personalized in nature. FMI delivers a complete packaged solution, which combines current market intelligence, statistical anecdotes, technology inputs, valuable growth insights, an aerial view of the competitive framework, and future market trends.CONTACTFuture Market Insights616 Corporate Way, Suite 2-9018,Valley Cottage, NY 10989,United StatesT: +1-347-918-3531F: +1-845-579-5705Email: sales@futuremarketinsights.comWebsite: http.futuremarketinsights.com Kings in Food Flavours Market Are From India, Nepal, Sri Lanka And Bangladesh | Synergy Flavors, Inc., Mane SA, Wild Flavors, Symrise AG Are Top Leading Key Players In Flavor Industry Flavour Market Cooked Report https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/sample_request/4162 https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/enquiry/4162 Repot portfolioFlavour is considered as food additives or ingredients which are used commercially in food and beverages and other various applications. Flavor indicates the sensory impression of food or any other substance that is determined by chemical senses of taste and smell. It is the sensual impression of food or other applications such as beverages, cosmetic & personal care, nutraceutical and other end-use applications. There are various types of food additives which are commercially available that are added to food and beverages to make it tastier and more appealing. Flavors are prepared by the mixture of volatile chemicals.With the rising health concerns among the mass consumers the demand for clean label products have been experiencing a surge. Clean label refers to the proper declaration of ingredients present in the food product. In some countries, clean label also refers to food additives which are added in their natural form and contain no harmful chemicals. Rising demand for natural and organic food has supported the increased demand for clean label products as consumers want to eliminate the risk of being affected by any food borne disease. Clean label also helps in educating the consumers about food traceability throughout the production and distribution involved in the supply chain. In European Union, clean label indicates the flavourings added in the food. Increase in product innovations is majorly propelled by technological strides. Introducing new and unique technologies have resulted in increased manufacture of innovative products. Various factors such as taste, quality and source of flavours are critical for this market. Manufacturers of flavours have adopted suitable technologies to achieve desirable product with fine organoleptic properties according to consumers preferences.Avail Sample copy here @Country AnalysisThe flavour market is segmented into India, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. Among these, India is projected to retain its dominance throughout the forecast period. Robust economic growth, rising urbanization, explosion of in the middle class population are the significant factors of the growth of flavour in India. India is estimated to reach USD 513.74 million by the end of 2022. However, Bangladesh is projected to expand at a moderate CAGR of 9.13% during the forecast period of 2017-2022.SegmentsThe flavour market has been segmented on the basis of product type, such as synthetic and natural. Natural is estimated to grow fast as compare to synthetic during the forecast period of 2017-2022. On the basis of application, flavour market has been segmented into food, beverages, tobacco, cosmetic & personal care and pharmaceutical.Key PlayersThe leading market players in the flavour market primarily are Givaudan SA (Switzerland), Firmenich SA (Switzerland), International Flavors & Fragrances Inc. (U.S.), Symrise AG (Germany), Takasago International Corporation (Japan), Wild Flavors, Inc. (U.S.), Mane SA (U.S.), Sensient Technologies Corporation (U.S.), T.Hasegawa Co., Ltd (Japan), Kerry Group (India), Synergy Flavors, Inc. (U.S.), Huabao International (Japan), S H Kelkar and Company Limited (India).Target AudienceFlavour manufacturersRaw material suppliersEnd usersRetailers and wholesalersE-commerce companiesTraders, importers and exportersAny enquiries are highly welcome @Key FindingsIndia is estimated to retain its dominance throughout the forecast period and to grow at a substantial CAGR of 10.04%.The growing consumer awareness, increasing demand of organic products, increasing incidence of diseases will surge the sales of natural flavour over synthetic flavour. Many convenience food manufacturing companies have started using natural flavour in food manufacturing to provide value addition and to make product differentiation from their competitors.Country Analysis of Flavour Market Development and Demand Forecast to 2022 MarketThe reports also cover country level analysis:IndiaBangladeshSri LankaNepalNote: For Full Report analysis or PDF copy Kindly hit above links of your choice.About Market Research Future:At Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.MRFR team have a supreme objective to provide the optimum quality market research and intelligence services to our clients. Our market research studies by products, services, technologies, applications, end users, and market players for global, regional, and country level market segments, enable our clients to see more, know more, and do more, which help to answer all their most important questions.In order to stay updated with technology and work process of the industry, MRFR often plans & conducts meet with the industry experts and industrial visits for its research analyst members.Contact:Market Research FutureOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, Hadapsar,Pune - 411028Maharashtra, India+1 646 845 9312Email: sales@marketresearchfuture.com Global Blood Pressure Monitoring Devices Market Research and Forecast 2018-2023 https://www.omrglobal.com/industry-reports/blood-pressure-monitoring-devices/ Global Blood Pressure Monitoring Devices Market, Size, Share, Market Intelligence, Company Profiles, Market Trends, Strategy, Analysis, Forecast 2018-2023GLOBAL BLOOD PRESSURE MONITORING DEVICES MARKET INSIGHTS:The blood pressure monitoring devices market is anticipated to witness an impressive growth rate with a CAGR of 10.5% during the forecast period. Major factors that fuel the growth of the global blood pressure monitoring devices include increase in the number of cases of the hypertension and cardiovascular diseases in people.For More info:Increase in geriatric & obese population, rising awareness toward health in developing economies are likely to act as high impact rendering drivers for the global blood pressure monitoring devices market. In the recent years, it has been observed that the number of patients getting diagnosis across the globe is increasing for cardiovascular diseases and checking, & maintaining the blood pressure is the basic need to cure these diseases. However, fluctuation of readings in digital devices will be a challenge for the market during the forecast period. The reason for impacting the growth of the market will be declining price of blood pressure monitoring devices. An expertise is needed in checking blood pressure through mercury sphygmomanometer. However, government regulations and investments are expected to drive the growth of monitoring devices market in a positive direction.The global blood pressure monitoring devices market is geographically segregated into Europe, North America, Asia Pacific and Rest of the World (RoW). In the current scenario, North America dominates the global blood pressure monitoring devices market. The main factor of dominance is well established healthcare infrastructure, high diagnosis rate of the patients and growth in the chronic diseases due to the changing lifestyle of the people in the region. Europe is also estimated to show a positive growth rate in the blood pressure monitoring devices during the forecast period.APAC is anticipated to be fastest growing region mainly due to countries such as Japan, China, and India. China and India are the most populous countries in the world and high rate prevalence of the CVD can be observed in both the countries in the recent years and is expected to be same during the forecast period. Increasing investment by manufacturers, increasing awareness, rising purchasing power, rapidly improving healthcare facilities, and rising number of undiagnosed & untreated cases of high BP are key factors attributing to this regional market growth.Key players of blood pressure monitoring devices market are A&D Medical, American Diagnostic Corp., Bosch + Sohn GmbH U. CO. KG, Briggs Healthcare, Inc., Contec Medical Systems Co., Ltd., Covidien PLC, and GE Healthcare Ltd. The market players are adopting the strategy of tie-ups with universities and research institutes for increasing their market share across the globe. The report covers overview about the companies, their recent product launches, merger with another firms, acquisition by the company, and disinvestment of the company. The report includes detailed market overview, market determinants, company profiling, sector analysis, market segmentation, geographical analysis, patent analysis, strategic recommendations, key company analysis, key findings, market estimations, market insights, analyst insights and predictive analysis of the market.MARKET SEGMENTATION:Global Blood Pressure Monitoring Devices Market is segmented on the basis of technology, application, component and regional outlook.Global Blood Pressure Monitoring Devices Market Research and Analysis, By Device TypeGlobal Blood Pressure Monitoring Devices Market Research and Analysis, By End User ApplicationGlobal Blood Pressure Monitoring Devices Market Research and Analysis, By End User ApplicationGlobal Blood Pressure Monitoring Devices Market Research and Analysis, By RegionTHE REPORT COVERS:Comprehensive research methodology of Global Blood Pressure Monitoring Devices Market.This report also includes detailed and extensive market overview with key analyst insights.Exhaustive analysis of macro and micro factors influencing the market guided by key recommendations.Analysis of regional regulations and other government policies impacting the Blood Pressure Monitoring Devices Market.Insights about market determinants, which are stimulating the Blood Pressure Monitoring Devices Market.Detailed and extensive market segments with regional distribution of forecasted revenues.Extensive profiles and recent developments of market players.Orion Market Research (OMR) is an Indian research company known for its crisp and concise reports.The company is equipped with an experienced team and young brigade of analysts. The company provides quality syndicated research reports, customized research reports, company profiling, consulting and other research-based services. OMR provide global and regional market reports of various domains such as healthcare, energy, IT, chemicals, and automobiles. The company provides a 360-degree view of the market with parametric analysis, key market insights, key findings, statistical forecasts, competitive landscape, extensive segmentation, key trends, strategic recommendations and detailed company profiles.CORPORATE OFFICE:Orion Market Research Pvt Ltd116, Shagun ArcadeVijay Nagar SquareIndore, Madhya Pradesh India- 452010Email: info@omrglobal.com, support@omrglobal.comIndia: +91-780-304-0404Global: +1-646-755-7667 Snom UK adds new recruits to meet 2018 growth expectations www.snom.com Two new hires at Snom UK as the IP phone manufacturer gears up for successSnom Technology GmbH, IP telephony specialists and manufacturers of innovative, attractive and cost-efficient IP end-point solutions today announced that they have strengthened their UK team with the addition of two new experienced hires. The expansion of the UK team is a strategic response to the expanding Snom product portfolio and expected growth in the UK market.Alison Tetlow, Snoms UK Distribution Director, is joined by Presales Consultant Neal Laxman, and Channel Sales Director Brett Kershaw. This is at a time when Snom is aiming to meet ambitious targets in the UK powered by a drive to expand not only the product portfolio, but also to provide Snom partners with an increased range of sales tools and incentives to widen market reach.Following the launch of several new products and with more in the pipeline, we proved that we are serious about achieving our aims, explained Tetlow. Now we have two great new additions to the UK Snom team to handle the increase in demand we are expecting, so I am delighted to have Brett and Neal onboard. Their experience and industry as well as technical knowledge will be invaluable in achieving everything we have planned for 2018 and beyond.Brett Kershaw has 22 years of direct sales and account management experience as an integral part of fast-paced sales teams at IT and telecom vendors such as Yealink, and Toshiba. Bretts thorough knowledge of the telecoms industry gives him an in-depth understanding of UK market requirements.Neal Laxman is an experienced IT and telecoms solutions consultant having worked at IT resellers in various support and consulting positions, most recently at Avaya. Neal is already familiar with the Snom product range and will be providing technical support for UK resellers, ITSPs and distributors as well as running a series of training webinars for UK partners.About SnomA leading global premium brand for innovative professional and enterprise VoIP phones, Snom is headquartered in Berlin, Germany. Founded in 1997, Snom is a pioneer in the VoIP industry, launching the worlds first IP phone in 2001. Today, Snoms product portfolio meets the full spectrum of business communications requirements of call centers, conference rooms and executive management through to safety-conscious industrial environments.A subsidiary of VTech Holdings Limited since 2016, Snom has offices in Italy, the UK, France and Taiwan and enjoys an excellent global reputation in the Voice-over-IP market. Snoms products are renowned for their technical innovation, aesthetic design, user-friendliness and outstanding audio quality. The current product portfolio is universally compatible with all leading PBX platforms and Snom products have won numerous awards around the world from independent experts.Engineered in Germany, Snoms IP solutions also make an excellent choice for vertical markets, such as healthcare and education, when searching for specialized solutions in business communications, IoT and smart technologies.Visitto find out more about Snom Technology GmbHPress contacts for further information:united communications GmbHJason Green/Peter LinkRotherstr. 1910245 BerlinTel.: +49 30 78 90 76 0snom@united.deSnom Technology GmbHHeike CantzlerWittestr. 30G13509 BerlinHead of Marketingmarketing@snom.com Posted Friday, February 23, 2018 4:30 am In the United States, military veterans diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) often are prescribed therapeutic horseback riding (THR) as a complementary therapy, but little is known about how these programs affect PTSD in military veterans. Now, a University of Missouri study has determined that veterans had a significant decrease in PTSD scores just weeks after THR. Results show that therapeutic horseback riding may be a clinically effective intervention for alleviating PTSD symptoms in military veterans. PTSD is an anxiety disorder that occurs after exposure to life-threatening events or injuries and is marked by flashbacks, avoidance, and changes in beliefs and feelings, said Rebecca Johnson, a professor in the MU College of Veterinary Medicine and the Millsap Professor of Gerontological Nursing in the Sinclair School of Nursing. Estimates are that more than 23 million military veterans experience PTSD symptoms each year. While counseling and behavior therapies often are prescribed, sometimes clinicians will encourage complementary therapies, such as therapeutic horseback riding. We wanted to test whether THR could be a useful complementary therapy in the treatment of PTSD. The interaction between horses and riders has been demonstrated to increase riders confidence, self-esteem, sensory sensitivity and social motivation while decreasing stress. For the study, 29 military veterans were assessed for eligibility from a nearby Veterans Administration (VA) hospital. Those diagnosed with PTSD or PTSD with traumatic brain injury were invited to participate in a therapeutic horseback riding program once a week for six weeks. PTSD symptoms then were measured both at three weeks and six weeks into the program using the PTSD Checklist-Military Version (PCL-M) assessment, a 20-item self-reporting survey that is used by clinicians to gauge PTSD symptoms. Additionally, other measurement instruments were used to assess improvements made in the treatment of the anxiety disorders. Results showed that participants in the program experienced a significant decrease in PTSD scores, almost 67 percent, after just three weeks of THR, Johnson said. After six weeks, participants experienced an 87 percent drop in PTSD scores. Interestingly, the veterans who self-identified for the study all were from the Vietnam War era meaning that some of these military veterans had been experiencing PTSD symptoms for 40 or 50 years. It may be important for health care systems to support THR as a viable complimentary therapy. The article, Effects of therapeutic horseback riding on post-traumatic stress disorder in military veterans, was published in Military Medical Research. Support was provided by the Harry S Truman Memorial Veterans Hospital. Calcium Citrate Malate Market to Significant Growth Foreseen by 2027 https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-gb-3865 https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/toc/rep-gb-3865 http://www.futuremarketinsights.com/ Calcium plays a significant component of the body. Calcium helps to maintain and promote the proper functioning of various body parts such as bones, joints, nerves and muscles among others. Deficiency of calcium content in the body directly affects the bone and joint health. Calcium citrate malate is an important component which helps to replenish the calcium content in the body. Calcium citrate malate consists calcium and organic acids such as malic acid and citric acid, which help to increase the absorption of calcium in the body. Calcium citrate malate along with vitamin D helps to prevent bone and joint diseases, as it helps to retain calcium and maintain the bone mass density along with other health benefits. Moreover, calcium citrate malate can suffice requirement of calcium with or without adequate food intake. Calcium citrate malate is most commonly used as calcium supplements. It also forms major component in fortification of food and beverages.Request For Sample @Global Calcium Citrate Malate Market: Drivers and RestraintsWith increasing health conscious behaviour, consumers are drifting towards healthier food products. Hence, driving the calcium citrate malate market with growing application in health supplements. Calcium citrate malate has potential to reduce the risk of fractures. Hence, with increasing incidence of bone related diseases among women such as osteoporosis, demand for products to overcome osteoporosis is expected to gain traction, which is expected to bolster the overall calcium citrate malate market growth. Moreover, calcium citrate malate also possess various other significant properties such as high aqueous solubility, enhanced bioavailability along with increased absorption, thus finding profound application in the manufacturing of health supplements and fortified food and beverages products.Furthermore, with increasing demand for bone & joint supplements among geriatric population, the demand for calcium citrate malate is expect to accelerate during the forecast. Calcium citrate malate market caters to broad range of age groups to various optimal health benefits. Moreover, calcium citrate malate is also reported to cater potential to help in preventing kidney stones. Although still this benefit is at introductory stage. Hence gaining traction in the health supplements market due to its versatile nature.However, there are various other compound apart from calcium citrate malate by which calcium can be incorporated into food and beverages product in fortified form, which are cost efficient. Hence, may restrain the growth of calcium citrate malate market particularly in fortified food and beverages products. It is also reported to have certain side effects if consumed in excessive amount such as constipation, nausea, weight loss and loss of appetite.Global Calcium Citrate Malate Market: SegmentationOn the basis of form, calcium citrate malate is segmented into:-TabletsCapsulesPowderOn the basis of industry, organic hair care s market is segmented into:-PharmaceuticalFood & BeverageGlobal Calcium Citrate Malate Market: Region wise OutlookThe global calcium malate market is categorised into seven regions, namely, Western Europe, Eastern Europe Middle East and Africa (MEA), Asia Pacific excluding Japan (APEJ), Japan, Latin America and North America. Asia Pacific region accounts for major share of the market. With increasing incidences of bone related disease among women, demand for calcium citrate malate supplements is expect to record significant growth. North America accounts for significant share of the market. As majority of the population in North America comprises baby boomer generation, attaining the age of 55yrs in the recent years. Thereby, fuelling the demand for bone & joint supplements to prevent the age related diseases. This is further leading to a bright prospect for growth of calcium citrate malate market. Owing to rising preventive health awareness among consumers, demand for calcium citrate malate products is expected to propel in Europe.Request For TOC @Global Calcium Citrate Malate Market: Key PlayersSome of the prominent players identified in the global calcium malate market across the value chain includes:Panvo Organics Pvt Ltd.GlaxoSmithKline PlcRevital LimitedAlbion Laboratories, Inc.Posy Pharmachem Pvt. Ltd.BioveaNutraBio Labs, Inc.Dr. Paul Lohmann GmbH KGABOUT US:Future Market Insights (FMI) is a leading market intelligence and consulting firm. We deliver syndicated research reports, custom research reports and consulting services, which are personalized in nature.FMI delivers a complete packaged solution, which combines current market intelligence, statistical anecdotes, technology inputs, valuable growth insights, an aerial view of the competitive framework, and future market trends.CONTACT:Future Market Insights616 Corporate Way, Suite 2-9018,Valley Cottage, NY 10989,United StatesT: +1-347-918-3531F: +1-845-579-5705Email: sales@futuremarketinsights.comWebsite: RF Power Amplifier Market 2018 Sales Revenue and Global Leaders: Qualcomm, Analog Devices, Skyworks Solutions, Broadcom Limited, ANADIGICS, Infineon Technologies, NXP Semiconductors, Toshiba, Mitsubishi Electric https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/sample_request/4181 https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/rf-power-amplifier-market-4181 Market Research Future published a research report on RF Power Amplifier Market Research Report-Global Forecast 2023 Market Analysis, Scope, Stake, Progress, Trends and Forecast to 2023.Market ScenarioMajor giants like Qualcomm and Broadcom, Ltd. are investing into RF power amplifier market due to increasing demand from various industry verticals. Qualcomm, with Japans TDK has launched a new venture RF360 Holdings to produce power amplifiers, filters and other chips to manage radio frequency at front end. The company is based in Singapore and Qualcomm will own 51% of the company and TDK will own 49%. Broadcom Ltd. is known for supplying RF power amplifier modules, bluetooth and Wi-Fi chips for iPhones. With the growth in number of frequency bands supported by phones, RF subsystems are becoming more complex.Asia Pacific region holds the largest market share of global RF Power Amplifier Market followed by North America and Europe. The growth is Asia Pacific region is mainly dominated by China and Japan and is attributed to the increasing demand for innovative technologies and strong presence of manufacturing industries in the region. China is considered to be the manufacturing hub of electronics. Asia Pacific region is also expected to be the fastest growing region owing to the developing economies in the region.RF power amplifier market has been segmented on the basis of product and application. The application segment is further bifurcated into consumer electronics, aerospace & defense, automotive, medical and others. Out of which, the consumer electronics segment is expected to grow at a significant rate during the forecast period owing to the increasing adoption of smartphones and tablets. The RF power amplifiers basically drive the antennas of a transmitter in order to convert a low power radio frequency signal into a high power radio frequency signal. Owing to this, RF power amplifiers are majorly used for amplifying voice and data communication signals. RF power amplifiers are compatible with both 4G and 5G services. They can also be used for weather sensing.Get Sample of Report @The RF Power Amplifier Market is expected to grow at approx. USD 11 Billion by 2023, at 16% of CAGR between 2017 and 2023.Regional Analysis:The regional analysis of RF power amplifier market is being studied for regions such as Asia Pacific, North America, Europe and Rest of the World. It has been observed that Asia Pacific is estimated to account for the largest share of the market and is projected to grow at the fastest rate during the forecast period. The major growth in RF power amplifier market in Asia Pacific is attributed to growing economy in the Asian countries like China, Japan and India and strong presence of manufacturing industries in that region.Segments:RF power amplifier market can be segmented on the basis of following:By Product 10 GHz 10-20 GHz 20-30 GHz 30-60 GHz 60+ GHzBy Application Consumer Electronics Aerospace & Defense Automotive Medical OthersKey Players:The prominent players in RF power amplifier market are Qualcomm (U.S.), Analog Devices (U.S.), Skyworks Solutions, Inc. (U.S.), Broadcom Limited (Singapore), ANADIGICS, Inc. (U.S.), Murata Manufacturing Co., Ltd. (Japan), Infineon Technologies AG (Germany), NXP Semiconductors N.V. (Netherlands), Toshiba Corporation (Japan) and Mitsubishi Electric Corporation (Japan) among others.Get Complete Report @Intended Audience Technology Investors Research/Consultancy Firms Original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) OEM technology solution providers Amplifiers Manufacturers Amplifiers Suppliers Manufacturing Companies ConsumersAbout Us:At Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.Media Contact:Akash Anand,Market Research FutureOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, Hadapsar,Pune - 411028Maharashtra, India+1 646 845 9312Email: akash.anand@marketresearchfuture.com Coronary Artery Bypass Graft Market 2016-2022: Key Findings, Key Players Profiles, Regional Analysis and Future Prospects Coronary Artery Bypass Graft Market https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/sample_request/2285 https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/check-discount/2285 Namely Coronary Artery Bypass Graft Market Report has Been Published by Market Research Future Which Covers All the Geographical Locations with Demand, Trend Analysis with near about Forecasted results and Also Covers the Market Expectations.The Global Coronary Artery Bypass Graft Market is expected to reach around USD 116 million by the end of the forecast period and is expected to grow at the CAGR of ~6.0%.Coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) is a type of bypass surgery that is used to create a new path for blood to flow to the heart. This is used for patients who have severe coronary heart disease. CABG is the most common type of open heart surgery in the United States. Deskbound lifestyle, anxiety, stress and high consumption of junk food are key reasons that causes cardiovascular diseases in individuals around the globe. The market for coronary artery bypass graft is growing rapidly. The credit of this high growth can be given to increasing number of cases of cardiovascular disease which is the result of changing lifestyle along with it increase in patients awareness about this disease, related surgeries and therapies.Key Players for Global Coronary Artery Bypass Graft Market:Hancock Jaffe Laboratories, Inc., Terumo Cardiovascular Systems Corporation, VasoPrep Surgical, Dextera Surgical Inc., Neograft Inc., NOVADAQ Technologies Inc., MAQUET Holding B.V. & Co. KG., Genesee BioMedical, Sorin Group, Edwards Lifesciences Corporation and others.Access Sample Copy atSegments:Global Coronary Artery Bypass Graft Market has been segmented on the basis of type which comprises of off-pump, on-pump, minimally invasive direct CABG, endoscopic vein harvesting and others. On the basis of procedure; the market is segmented intosingle CABG surgery, double CABG surgery, triple CABG surgery, quadruple CABG surgery and others. On the basis of end users the market is segmented into hospitals, cardiology clinics, research institutes and others.Regional Analysis of Global Coronary Artery Bypass Graft Market:Globally North America is the largest market for Coronary Artery Bypass Graft. The North American market for coronary artery bypass graft is growing with the CAGR of ~6.4% during the forecast period of 2016-2022. Europe is the second-largest market for coronary artery bypass graft. Asia pacific region is expected to be fastest growing region in Coronary Artery Bypass Graft Market.Table Of Contents:1 Introduction1.1 Definition1.2 Scope Of Study1.3 Research Objective1.4 Assumptions & Limitations1.5 Market Structure:2 Research Methodology2.1 Research Process2.2 Primary Research2.3 Secondary Research3 Market Dynamics3.1 Drivers3.2 Restraints3.3 Opportunities3.4 Challenges3.5 Macroeconomic Indicators4 Market Factor Analysis4.1 Porters Five Forces Model4.1.1 Bargaining Power Of Suppliers4.1.2 Bargaining Power Of Customer4.1.3 Intensity Of Competitors4.1.4 Threat Of New EntrantsContinuedApply for Discount atTop Reasons to Buy the Reports: Company profiling with detailed strategies, financials, and recent development activities Market Strategic Business Influence Data Market Research Future recommendations in key business segments based on the market estimations Market share analysis of the top industry players Market forecasts for a minimum of 5 years of all the mentioned segments, Trends and the regional markets With SWOT AnalysisAbout Market Research Future:At Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.Contact:Market Research Future+1 646 845 9312Email: sales@marketresearchfuture.comMRFR has the distinguished objective of providing the optimal quality research and granular research to clients. Our market research studies by products, services, technologies, applications, end users, and market players for global, regional, and country level market segments, enable our clients to see more, know more, and do more, which help answer your most important questions.Our Research Analysts are eager to share their knowledge and assist you in refining market research parameters, choosing right market studies, and evaluating both the market scope and the research methodologies of varied segments.We bridge the gap between our clients and their clients by identifying and decoding just the target group, while generating leads with the highest accuracy.Years of research into diverse fields of work has ingrained within us, a proficiency so distinguished that our industry-specific specialists identify with your business ideas and feel the pulse of your challenges and opportunities. This enables us for providing assistance, through our consulting and strategic consulting services, in informed managerial decision making. In order to stay updated with technology and work process of the industries, WantStats Research and Media often conducts industrial visits for its research analysts. Relevant inputs from various established market participants, help our clients make significant contribution in respective markets are a huge motivation for all of us to endlessly furnish quality. We depend greatly on profound insights into complex realms of our study.Pune, India Ventilator Associated Pneumonia Global Key Players Adenium Biotech ApS, Destiny Pharma Ltd, Theravance Biopharma Inc and Wockhardt Ltd Market Analysis & Forecast 2018 to 2022 Ventilator Associated Pneumonia https://www.wiseguyreports.com/sample-request/2841815-ventilator-associated-pneumonia-vap-pipeline-review-h1-2018 https://www.wiseguyreports.com/reports/2841815-ventilator-associated-pneumonia-vap-pipeline-review-h1-2018 Ventilator Associated PneumoniaOverviewVentilator-associated pneumonia (VAP) is pneumonia that develops 48 hours or longer after mechanical ventilation is given by means of an endotracheal tube or tracheostomy. Ventilator-associated pneumonia (VAP) results from the invasion of the lower respiratory tract and lung parenchyma by microorganisms.The most important signs are fever, low body temperature, new purulent sputum, and hypoxemia (decreasing amounts of oxygen in the blood).Click here for sample report @Top Companies mentionedAdenium Biotech ApSCytaCoat ABDestiny Pharma LtdTheravance Biopharma IncWockhardt LtdZavante Therapeutics IncVentilator Associated Pneumonia Industry Major OutlookPharmaceutical and Healthcare latest pipeline guide Ventilator Associated Pneumonia - Pipeline Review, H1 2018, provides comprehensive information on the therapeutics under development for Ventilator Associated Pneumonia , complete with analysis by stage of development, drug target, mechanism of action (MoA), route of administration (RoA) and molecule type. The guide covers the descriptive pharmacological action of the therapeutics, its complete research and development history and latest news and press releases.The Ventilator Associated Pneumonia (VAP) (Infectious Disease) pipeline guide also reviews of key players involved in therapeutic development for Ventilator Associated Pneumonia (VAP) and features dormant and discontinued projects. The guide covers therapeutics under Development by Companies /Universities /Institutes, the molecules developed by Companies in Pre-Registration, Phase III, Phase II, Phase I, Preclinical, Discovery and Unknown stages are 1, 5, 7, 5, 11, 2 and 1 respectively.Ventilator Associated Pneumonia pipeline guide helps in identifying and tracking emerging players in the market and their portfolios, enhances decision making capabilities and helps to create effective counter strategies to gain competitive advantage.Ventilator Associated Pneumonia - Competitive AnalysisKey players are making innovative developments in Ventilator Associated Pneumonia industry. The same will help in improving the market performance. Heavy investments are made by major players in the R&D sectorScopeThe pipeline guide provides a snapshot of the global therapeutic landscape of Ventilator Associated Pneumonia.The pipeline guide reviews pipeline therapeutics for Ventilator Associated Pneumonia by companies and universities/research institutes based on information derived from company and industry-specific sources.The pipeline guide covers pipeline products based on several stages of development ranging from pre-registration till discovery and undisclosed stages.The pipeline guide features descriptive drug profiles for the pipeline products which comprise, product description, descriptive licensing and collaboration details, R&D brief, MoA & other developmental activities.The pipeline guide reviews key companies involved in Ventilator Associated Pneumonia therapeutics and enlists all their major and minor projects.The pipeline guide evaluates Ventilator Associated Pneumonia therapeutics based on mechanism of action (MoA), drug target, route of administration (RoA) and molecule type.The pipeline guide encapsulates all the dormant and discontinued pipeline projects.The pipeline guide reviews latest news related to pipeline therapeutics for Ventilator Associated Pneumonia..ContinuedFor Detailed Reading Please visit @Wise Guy Reports understand how essential statistical surveying information is for your organization or association. Therefore, we have associated with the top publishers and research firms all specialized in specific domains, ensuring you will receive the most reliable and up to date research data available. We also provide COTS (Commercial off the Shelf) business sector reports as custom exploration agreeing your particular needs.WISEGUY RESEARCH CONSULTANTS PVT LTDOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersPune - 411028Maharashtra, India Antifibrinolytic Drugs Market Will Generate New Growth Opportunities By 2025 https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=B&rep_id=34133 https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=T&rep_id=34133 https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/antifibrinolytic-drugs-market.html http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com Tissue damage leads to rupture of vessels which triggers hemostatic mechanism. Hemostasis is a physiological mechanism of the body, wherein vessels contract, platelet plugs are formed, and coagulation starts, resulting in a stable fibrin network. Fibrinolysis is activated during this mechanism. Fibrinolysis is a physiological process in which blood clots are dissolved and tissue damage is remolded. Antifibrinolytic drugs are used to induce clot formation and to prevent blood loss in traumatic injuries. These drugs inhibit the activation of plasminogen to plasmin, thus preventing fibrinolysis and maintaining clot stability.Antifibrinolytic drugs are commonly known as fibrinolytic inhibitors. Reduction of fibrinolytic activity with antifibrinolytic drugs is important in trauma and surgery to control blood loss. People suffering from bleeding disorders such as hemophilia A and B, Von Willebrand disease, and platelet dysfunctions are often treated with fibrinolytic inhibitors or antifibrinolytic drugs. Currently, epsilon-aminocaproic acid (EACA) and tranexamic acid (TA or AMCA) are the synthetic antifibrinolytic drugs available in the market. EACA is a synthetic derivative of lysine and has a strong inhibiting effect on plasminogen. TA is found to be 10 times more effective than epsilon-aminocaproic acid.The global Antifibrinolytic Drugs Market is anticipated to expand during the forecast period due to rise in severe road accidents, complicated medical surgeries and procedures, prevalence of angioedema, and rise in the high-risk geriatric population globally. Trauma is the second largest cause of death in people aged between five and 45 years. Each year, about three million people die due to trauma. Injuries to the central nervous system and multi-organ failure cause severe bleeding problems. In such cases, antifibrinolytic drugs play a key role in preventing lysis of clot and loss of blood. Antifibrinolytic drugs are given to patients, undergoing cardiovascular surgeries, to prevent excessive bleeding. High prevalence of bleeding disorders and rise in major surgical procedures drive the global antifibrinolytic drugs market.Request to View Brochure of Report -The global antifibrinolytic drugs market can be segmented based on drug type, application, end-user, and region. In terms of drug type, the global market can be divided into Trasylol, Aminocaproic acid, RiaSTAP, Aprotinin, Tranexamic acid injection, Tranexamic acid oral, Lysteda, and Fibrinogen, human.Based on application, the global antifibrinolytic drugs market can be categorized into gynecology, gastrointestinal bleeding, hereditary angioedema, hemorrhage, bleeding in nose and mouth, fibrinolytic response testing, and surgeries. The gynecology segment can be further divided into medical conditions such as menorrhagia, pregnancy, parturition, and gynecological surgeries. The surgeries segment includes dental surgeries, cardiovascular surgeries, and neurosurgeries. In terms of end-user, the global antifibrinolytic drugs market can be segmented into hospitals, ambulatory surgical centers, clinics, and health care specialty processes.Request to View ToC of Report -In terms of region, the global antifibrinolytic drugs market can be segmented into Europe, Latin America, Asia Pacific, North America, and Middle East & Africa. North America dominates the market in terms of revenue and is anticipated to continue its dominance during the forecast period from 2017 to 2025. Rise in awareness about antifibrinolytic drugs is likely to augment the market in North America. Growth of the market in North America can also be attributed to substantial investments in R&D and health care expenditure by the government and private players. Europe holds the second largest share of the global antifibrinolytic drugs market owing to mandatory medical insurance in countries such as Germany and France, high disposable income, and high research & development in the health care sector. The market in Asia Pacific and Middle East & Africa is attributed to expand at a significant pace during the forecast period.Key players operating in the global antifibrinolytic drugs market are Acic Fine Chems, Xanodyne Pharmaceuticals, and Aurobindo Pharma Ltd.View Report -About UsTransparency Market Research (TMR) is a market intelligence company, providing global business information reports and services. Our exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trends analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. TMRs experienced team of analysts, researchers, and consultants, use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather, and analyze information. Our business offerings represent the latest and the most reliable information indispensable for businesses to sustain a competitive edge.US Office Contact90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite: Anticholinergic Drugs Market by Application, Trends and Growth Rate to 2025 https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=B&rep_id=34136 https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=T&rep_id=34136 https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/anticholinergic-drugs-market.html http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com Nephrology and urology disorders are common complications of cardiovascular diseases and diabetes. Certain drugs and unhealthy food habits are also known to cause nephrological and urological diseases. According to the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive & Kidney Diseases approximately 26 million individuals in the U.S. suffer from chronic kidney diseases. Statistics also shows that about 87,000 patients die of kidney failure every year. Some of the commonly used drug classes for treating nephrological and urological disorders include diuretics, anti-hypertensive drugs, phosphate binders, and anti-cholinergic drugs, and 5-alpha-reductase inhibitors. Anticholinergic drugs block the action of acetylcholine, a chemical messenger that sends signals to brain and eventually triggers abnormal bladder contractions associated with overactive bladder. Acetylcholine controls several functions of the body that are not under voluntary control such as sweating, pupil dilation, contraction of bladder muscles, digestion, and salivation. With regard to nephrological and urological disorders, anticholinergic drugs are mostly used for treating overactive bladder.Anticholinergic drugs are recommended for a wide range of conditions including overactive bladder, Parkinsons disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, vomiting, nausea, psychosis, and depression. Certain drugs such as oxybutynin and hyoscine are prescribed for their anticholinergic effect. Others exhibit anticholinergic activity not related to their primary mode of action, for example, ranitidine and carbamazepine. Increasing prevalence of neurological disorders drives the global Anticholinergic Drugs Market. However, there has been keen interest in the harm caused by drugs with anticholinergic effect. Certain side-effects of these drugs such as dry mouth, constipation, blurry vision, sedation, decreased sweating, difficulty urinating, decreased saliva, and memory impairment restrain the global anticholinergic drugs market.Request to View Brochure of Report -The global market for anticholinergic drugs, especially those used in nephrology and urology, is expected to expand at a moderate pace from 2017 to 2025. Some of the commonly prescribed anticholinergic drugs are Detrol (tolterodine) by Pfizer, Enablex (darifenacin) by Actavis, Vesicare (solifenacin) by Astellas Pharma US, Inc., Sanctura (trospium) by Allergan, Toviaz (fesoterodine) by Pfizer, and Ditropan XL (oxybutynin) by Janssen Pharmaceuticals. Recently, in July 2014, a research study conducted by the University of East Anglia revealed that long-term use of anticholinergic drugs could impact common physical functions of the patient.The global anticholinergic drugs market can be segmented based on drugs into natural and synthetic or semisynthetic drugs. Natural anticholinergic drugs include Atropine and Hyoscine (Scopolamine). Based on mechanism of action, the global anticholinergic drugs market can be segmented into mydriatic, anti-spasmodic, anti-parkinson, anti-ulcer, anti-asthmatic, pre-anesthetic, drugs for motion sickness, and drugs for urinary incontinence. Based on distribution channel, the global anticholinergic drugs market can be segmented into hospital pharmacies, clinics, hospitals, retail pharmacies, and online pharmacies.Request to View ToC of Report -Geographically, the global anticholinergic drugs market can be segmented into five major regions: North America, Europe, Asia Pacific (APAC), Latin America, and Middle East & Africa. Asia Pacific held the leading market share, followed by North America, in 2016. These two regions are expected to retain their positions from 2017 to 2025. Rising prevalence of neurological complications and increasing government initiatives that appear to be moving toward shorter periods of patent exclusivity for new drug applications are some of the factors driving the market in these regions. Moreover, large population, increasing disposable income, and growing awareness among patients are a few factors driving the market in Asia Pacific. Europe and Middle East & Africa are likely to present significant growth opportunities to the anticholinergic drugs market during the forecast period. This is attributable to increasing geriatric population in these regions.Key players operating in the global anticholinergic drugs market are Pfizer, Inc., Astellas Pharma US, Inc., Allergan plc, and Janssen Pharmaceuticals (a Johnson & Johnson company).View Report -About UsTransparency Market Research (TMR) is a market intelligence company, providing global business information reports and services. Our exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trends analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. TMRs experienced team of analysts, researchers, and consultants, use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather, and analyze information. Our business offerings represent the latest and the most reliable information indispensable for businesses to sustain a competitive edge.US Office Contact90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite: In-Flight Catering Service Market 2018 Key Players: SATS, Servair, Emirates Flight Catering, Dnata, Air Culinaire, Compass Group, Do & Co., https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/sample_request/1303 https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/in-flight-catering-service-market-1303 MarketResearchFuture Publish a New Market Research Report On In-Flight Catering Service 2018 : Discovers the Opportunities, Trends, Risk, Simulation, Management to 2023.Description:In-Flight Catering Service -Global Market Status and Trend Report 2013-2023 offers a comprehensive analysis on In-Flight Catering Service industry, standing on the readers perspective, delivering detailed market data and penetrating insights. No matter the client is industry insider, potential entrant or investor, the report will provides useful data and information.Other factors that predominantly contribute propelling the market growth include the innovative services offered by airline companies, increased emphasis on quality food services and passenger preferences to pay for premium quality of food. Food safety is a major focus area for companies operating in the global in-flight catering services market. With quality and hygiene becoming a deciding factor for passengers in choosing a flight, catering companies are adopting stringent safety and sanitation measures to maintain quality of food. Also Airline companies are increasingly offering a broader food menu and food customization options to customers. In order to meet customer expectations; these Airline companies partner with the Inflight Catering Services that can help them in the task. These factors define the future landscape of the global In-Flight Catering Service market.Private Jet Catering and On-board Retail are the current trends observed during the analysis. For the most part, jet card programs include basic catering, although some such as VistaJet or Air Partner include gourmet offerings.Request a Sample Report @The Global In-Flight Catering Service Market is driven by some of the leading players operating in the market includingSATS,Servair,Emirates Flight Catering,Dnata,Air Culinaire,Compass Group, Do & Co.,Egypt Air in Flight Services,Gate Gourmet,Goddard Catering.Global In-Flight Catering Service Market is forecasted to demonstrate a spectacular growth by 2021, surpassing its previous growth records in terms of value with a striking 5% of CAGR during the projected period (2016 -2021).Competitive AnalysisThe market appears to be highly competitive owing to the presence of numerous well-established players having international and global presence. These players are heavily investing to enhance the food quality and global expansion. Marketers identify the need for world-class in-flight catering and invest accordingly in state-of-the-art facilities to provide catering. These key players strive to exceed their customers' expectations with innovative in-flight catering services with Quality assurance, safety & security.Get a Complete Report @About Market Research Future:At Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.MRFR team have supreme objective to provide the optimum quality market research and intelligence services to our clients. Our market research studies by products, services, technologies, applications, end users, and market players for global, regional, and country level market segments, enable our clients to see more, know more, and do more, which help to answer all their most important questions.Contact:Market Research Future+1 646 845 9312Email: sales@marketresearchfuture.com Mitotic Inhibitors Market Top Industry Players, Revenue By 2025 https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=B&rep_id=34148 https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=T&rep_id=34148 https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/mitotic-inhibitors-market.html http://www.transparencymarketresearch.com Mitosis is a process of cell division, wherein a cell divides into an identical cell through multiplication and separation of its chromosomes. The separation of chromosomes is carried out by microtubules in the cell. Mitotic inhibitors are substances that inhibit the separation of chromosomes by binding to tubulin, which are the building blocks of microtubules. Mitotic inhibitors are naturally derived products from various plant extracts. Mitotic inhibitors are widely used in the life sciences and medical industries. Mitotic inhibitor drugs are used to treat various types of cancer using chemotherapy. These drugs are targeted at cancer cells to stop multiplication and help eradicate cancer.Mitotic inhibitors are widely used in life sciences for various studies such as study of chromosomes (cytogenetic). Several industry players are investing in the development and commercialization of mitotic inhibitor drugs to treat cancer and other medical conditions. Natural occurrence and efficiency in treating cancer are likely to increase the uptake of these drugs during the forecast period. Besides treating cancer, mitotic inhibitors have applications in antibiotics to control fungal infection and some are found to be useful in treating gout. Investments are being made to expand applications of mitotic inhibitors in the health care industry. However, several side effects are associated with the use of mitotic inhibitor drugs in cancer treatment, including nerve damage, muscle and joint pain, and nausea & vomiting. This in turn is anticipated to limit their use, thereby hampering market growth.Request to View Brochure of Report -The Global Mitotic Inhibitors Market can be segmented based on product type, application, end-user, and region. In terms of product type, the market can be divided into taxanes, vinca alkaloids, colchicine, podophyllotoxins, and others. The taxanes and vinca alkaloids segments are anticipated to account for significant shares of the global mitotic inhibitors market and are likely to experience strong growth during the forecast period from 2017 to 2025. Availability of large number of cancer drugs is expected to augment these segments. Based on application, the global mitotic inhibitors market can be segmented into therapeutics and life sciences. High consumption and high cost of therapeutic mitotic inhibitors are anticipated to drive the therapeutics segment during the forecast period. Based on end-user, the market can be classified into hospitals, ambulatory surgical centers, academic research institutes, and others.Request to View ToC of Report -Geographically, the global mitotic inhibitors market can be segmented into North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America, and Middle East & Africa. North America is expected to constitute a large share of the global market during the forecast period, owing to high consumption of these drugs for cancer treatment. Moreover, high usage of mitotic inhibitors in life sciences in this region is projected to fuel the growth of the mitotic inhibitors market in North America during the forecast period from 2017 to 2025. Europe is anticipated to account for a significant share of the global market during the forecast period.According to the World Health Organization, around 3.7 million new cancer cases are registered in Europe each year. Increase in health care expenditure in Asia Pacific is likely to propel the market during the forecast period. Furthermore, increasing investment in life sciences is projected to boost the growth of the mitotic inhibitors market in Asia Pacific.Major players operating in the global mitotic inhibitors market are Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd., Pfizer, Inc., Eisai Co., Ltd., Bristol-Myers Squibb Company, Celgene Corporation, Novartis AG, Pharm US LLC, Merck KGaA, AdooQ BioScience, and Enzo Life Sciences, Inc., among others.View Report -About UsTransparency Market Research (TMR) is a market intelligence company, providing global business information reports and services. Our exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trends analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. TMRs experienced team of analysts, researchers, and consultants, use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather, and analyze information. Our business offerings represent the latest and the most reliable information indispensable for businesses to sustain a competitive edge.US Office Contact90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite: Lactic Acid Market to Expand with Significant CAGR During 2017 2027 https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-gb-3895 https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/askus/rep-gb-3895 http://www.futuremarketinsights.com/ Lactic acid forms an important industrial product, which is used in the formation of various small or large compounds. Lactic acid is formed through the breakdown of glucose and its oxidation. Lactic acid can be processed both naturally and synthetically. The naturally obtained lactic acid is formed by the fermentation process through bacterial reaction, the prominent bacteria involved in the process are lactobacillus, bifidobacterium, pediococcus among others. Moreover, lactic acid is also naturally present in human body obtained from glycogen through muscles cells to support energy production when oxygen supply is inadequate in the body. However, chemically lactic acid is derived through the hydrolysis of lacto nitrile. Lactic acid finds extensive application in food industry as it helps to regulate micro flora in the food and act as food preservatives. It is formed by the natural fermentation process in food products such as cheese, soy sauce, pickled vegetables among others. Apart from food industry, it is widely used in pharmaceutical and chemical industry. The polymers of lactic acid are widely used as labelling and packaging material as they are biodegradable and being biocompatible in nature, they are being used in manufacturing of sutures, drugs and prosthetic devices.Request For Sample @Global Lactic Acid Market: Drivers and RestraintsThe widespread applicability of lactic acid across various sectors is driving the demand for lactic acid market. Lactic acid possess various peculiar characteristics, which has different roles to be played in various food segments. . In meat poultry and fish products lactic acid helps to prolong their shelf life along with preventing the growth of pathogenic bacteria. In pickled vegetables and salad dressings, lactic acid helps to prevent their spoilage and enhances the product safety, whereas in dairy products certain bacteria breakdown the sugar of milk into lactic acid which provides a creamy texture and savoury flavour to the products such as yogurt whose flavour and texture is dependent upon the presence of lactic acid. Hence broad spectrum of applicability in food industry is spurring the growth of lactic acid market. Owing to antimicrobial, moisturizing property of lactic acid, it has a revitalising effect on the skin. Hence, is gaining popularity among cosmetics manufacturers. In other non-food application lactic acid is available as myriad which is extensively used in various industrial applications such as pharmaceuticals, chemical and textile industry Thereby, propelling the growth of lactic acid market.The major challenge faced by the lactic acid market is to fermentation process of the lactic acid which requires technological optimization and product purification. Moreover, this biotechnological production requires optimization of nutrients thus, leading to high manufacturing cost. Thereby, restraining the growth of lactic acid market.Global Lactic Acid Market: SegmentationOn the basis of application, lactic acid market is segmented into:-Dairy ProductsMeat poultry and fishPickled vegetablesBaked productsSavoury flavoursSalad dressingOn the basis of end user industries, lactic acid market is segmented into:-Food & BeveragesChemicalPharmaceuticalCosmeticsTextilesOn the basis of functionality, lactic acid market is segmented into:-Flavouring AgentEmulsifierph RegulatorAnti-forming agentAnti-microbial agentGlobal Lactic Acid Market: Region wise OutlookThe global lactic acid market is categorised into seven regions, namely, Western Europe, Eastern Europe Middle East and Africa (MEA), Asia Pacific excluding Japan (APEJ), Japan Latin America and, North America. North America accounts for largest share of the lactic acid market. The food industry accounts for the majority of the lactic acid market and rest is contributed by non-food application in North America region. Asia Pacific accounts for potential region which is expected to record significant growth during the forecast period. Increasing demand for versatility in the food products among consumers, is contributing to the growth of lactic acid market as it prolongs the shelf life of the food products and make them perishable. Europe also holds significant share in the market. Increasing demand for processed and functional food among consumers, is propelling the demand for lactic acid in the food products.Request For TOC @Global Lactic Acid Market: Key PlayersSome of the prominent players identified in the global lactic acid market includes:NatureWorks LLCCorbionGalactic s.a.Archer Daniels Midland CompanyMusashino Chemical (China) Co.,Ltd.Palsgaard A/SHenan Jindan Lactic Acid Technology Co., LtdSigma-Aldrich Co. LLC.ABOUT US:Future Market Insights (FMI) is a leading market intelligence and consulting firm. We deliver syndicated research reports, custom research reports and consulting services, which are personalized in nature.FMI delivers a complete packaged solution, which combines current market intelligence, statistical anecdotes, technology inputs, valuable growth insights, an aerial view of the competitive framework, and future market trends.CONTACT:Future Market Insights616 Corporate Way, Suite 2-9018,Valley Cottage, NY 10989,United StatesT: +1-347-918-3531F: +1-845-579-5705Email: sales@futuremarketinsights.comWebsite: Global Warehouse Management Systems Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends and Forecast 2017 - 2025 MRRSE https://www.mrrse.com/sample/2127 https://www.mrrse.com/warehouse-management-systems https://www.mrrse.com/enquiry/2127 https://www.mrrse.com/ https://www.industrynewsanalysis.com/ A new report added to the repository of Market Research Reports Search Engine Warehouse Management Systems Market - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends and Forecast 2017 - 2024 is a comprehensive repository of information, providing market share, size, and forecast.Request to View Sample Report @The emergence of digital technology and expanding application of WMS has led to increased adoption of warehouse management systems. The market for warehouse management systems (WMS) is anticipated to expand at a revenue CAGR of 14.1% during the forecast period from 2017 to 2025. The global warehouse management systems market was valued at US$ 1,447.1 Mn in 2016. Warehouse management system (WMS) provides optimization, monitoring and control of complex warehouse and distribution activities such as yard management, dock scheduling, order management, labor management, inventory management, and others in an efficient manner. Hence, growing e-commerce industry and the subsequent adoption of WMS in this sector is expected to drive the warehouse management systems market. Another significant factor supporting the growth of warehouse management systems market is the increasing adoption of BYOD in various industries such as retail, 3PL, health care, and manufacturing among others. This has led to an increasing demand for cloud based warehouse management systems, subsequently driving the warehouse management systems market.Holding Major Share, On-premise Warehouse Management Systems Emerged Dominant in 2016The global warehouse management systems market has been segmented on the basis of component and application. On the basis of the component, the market is segmented into software and services. The software segment in the deployment type segmentation is further divided into on-premise and cloud based warehouse management systems. On-premise and cloud based warehouse management system segments are each further categorized into labor management system, analytics and optimization, and others which includes yard management and 3PL billing. In 2016, on-premise warehouse management systems accounted for maximum share of the warehouse management software market at around 76.3% of the revenue of the overall warehouse management software market. However, cloud based warehouse management software is expected to show sustainable growth during the forecast period due to technological advancements and cost effectiveness as compared to on-premise warehouse management software. Based on the services, the market is segmented into consulting, system integration, and operations and maintenance. In 2016, the maintenance segment held the largest revenue share and is also expected to expand at a highest CAGR during the forecast periodFor More Info about This Report Visit @In terms of various applications, the market is segmented into retail, electronics, food and beverage, pharmaceutical, third party logistics, and others which includes book and publishing, and home improvement. In 2016, the third party logistics (3PL) segment held the largest revenue share of around 27% in the overall warehouse management systems market.Asia Pacific to Offer Lucrative Growth Prospects in Forthcoming YearsGeographically, Europe is the largest market for warehouse management systems. Asia Pacific is expected to witness fastest growth during the forecast period. China, India, Japan, Australia and Indonesia are among the major markets for warehouse management systems in the Asia Pacific region. Through the course of the reports forecast period, Asia Pacific is expected to showcase robust opportunities for growth to the market. The rising demand for extended WMS solutions to support in-store inventory, order management, and cloud integration is the chief driver of the warehouse management systems market in Asia Pacific. Besides this, the Middle East and Africa and Latin America are likely to offer substantial growth opportunities to the market in the coming years. The rising retail application in nations such as the UAE, Saudi Arabia among others on account of the expanding ecommerce market will augment the markets growth in the Middle East and Africa.Some of the major players in the global warehouse management systems market with the significant developments are HighJump Software, Tecsys, Inc., Infor Inc., JDA Software Group, Inc., LogFire Inc., Made4net LLC, Manhattan Associates Inc., Oracle Corporation, Reply, SAP SE, Softeon, Inc., and Synergy Logistics Ltd.Have any Query? Ask Our Expert @About MRRSEMarket Research Reports Search Engine (MRRSE) is an industry-leading database of Market Research Reports. MRRSE is driven by a stellar team of research experts and advisors trained to offer objective advice. Our sophisticated search algorithm returns results based on the report title, geographical region, publisher, or other keywords.MRRSE partners exclusively with leading global publishers to provide clients single-point access to top-of-the-line market research. MRRSEs repository is updated every day to keep its clients ahead of the next new trend in market research, be it competitive intelligence, product or service trends or strategic consulting.Contact UsState Tower90, State StreetSuite 700Albany, NY - 12207United States Telephone: +1-518-730-0559Email: sales@mrrse.comWebsite:Read More Industry News At: Posted Friday, February 23, 2018 6:15 am Haley Ragsdale, Rogersville, and Grace Nickols, Strafford, were both named to the fall 2017 deans list at Harding University in Searcy, Arkansas. To be eligible, a student must be carrying 12 or more hours with a 3.65 or higher grade-point average and no incompletes. Polyglycerol Polyricinoleate Market Progresses for Huge Profits During 2017 2027 https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/toc/rep-gb-3896 https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-gb-3896 http://www.futuremarketinsights.com/ Food additives enhances the flavour and shelf life of the food. With increasing inclination of consumers towards processed food is contributing to the growth of food additives market. Polyglycerol polyricinoleate is naturally and chemically obtained food additive with excellent emulsifying properties. Polyglycerol polyricinoleate is chemically obtained from polymerized ricinoleic acid and polymerized glycerol, whereas naturally it is derived from castor bean oil. Polyglycerol polyricinoleate has hydrophilic and hydrophobic properties, thus making it a water-in-oil emulsifier. Hence predominantly used in food & beverage industry. Polygylcerol polycricinoleate is chemically prepared through four stages starting from preparation of castor oil fatty acid up to the partial esterification process of castor oil fatty acid with polyglycerol. It can either be used in blended or individual form depending upon the quality to be obtained.Request For TOC @Global Polygylcerol PolycricinoleateMarket: Drivers and RestraintsWith shifting food trends among consumers, demand for versatile food ingredient is increasing among manufacturer,s so as to enhance the functionality of food products. Thus, fuelling the demand for Polygylcerol polycricinoleate market. Polygylcerol polycricinoleate is predominantly used as stable emulsifying agent with low viscosity. Hence, preferred in baking industry and in manufacturing of low-fat spread products. However, its major application is chocolate industry. The adequate flow and water-in-oil emulsion properties of polygylcerol polycricinoleate contributes in improving the texture and tolerance to thickening effect of the chocolate during manufacturing process. Moreover, it is cost effective ingredient as compared to cocca butter, thereby, drawing interest among manufacturers. Hence, propelling the growth of polygylcerol polycricinoleate market. Apart from food & beverage industry, polygylcerol polycricinoleate is also used as emsulfying and skin conditioning agent in cosmetics products. Another prominent characteristics of polygylcerol polycricinoleate is the ability to limit the fat bloom thereby, leading to abundant use in the production of low fat spreads. Hence, its widespread application and versatile characteristics, is expected to fuel the growth of polygylcerol polycricinoleate market.However, the chemical manufacturing process of polygylcerol polycricinoleate involves high operating temperatures along with long reaction times. Thus adversely affecting the final product quality leading to decoloration and odour problems. Thus, hampering the adoption of polygylcerol polycricinoleate among manufacturers and inhibiting its market growth. Moreover, the permissible limit of the polygylcerol polycricinoleate intake recommended by FDA is to 7.5 milligrams per kilogram of body weight, if consumed beyond the limit may cause liver enlargement. Hence, usage beyond permissible limit by manufacturers and limited knowledge among consumers may hamper the growth of polygylcerol polycricinoleate market.Global Polygylcerol PolycricinoleateMarket: SegmentationOn the basis of industry, polygylcerol polycricinoleate market is segmented into:-Food & BeverageChocolateConfectionery fillingsLow fat spreadsFats & OilsPersonal CareOn the basis of source, polygylcerol polycricinoleate market is segmented into:-HalalVeganOrganicSyntheticOn the basis of application, polygylcerol polycricinoleate market is segmented into:-Emulsifying agentFilling agentThickening agentGlobal Polygylcerol PolycricinoleateMarket: Region wise OutlookThe global polygylcerol polycricinoleatemarket is categorised into seven regions, namely, Western Europe, Eastern Europe Middle East and Africa (MEA), Asia Pacific excluding Japan (APEJ), Japan, Latin America and, North America. North America accounts for largest share of polygylcerol polycricinoleate market. As consumers are drifting towards processed food, demand for food additives have been increased in the food industry. Thereby propelling the polygylcerol polycricinoleate market. Europe is expected to hold a significant share of the market. Asia Pacific represents an opportunistic region for polygylcerol polycricinoleate market. As, it offers cost effective manufacturing facilities and increased inclination of manufacturers towards cost-effective substitute for expensive ingredients, thereby spurring the polygylcerol polycricinoleate market growth.Request For Sample @Global Polygylcerol PolycricinoleateMarket: Key PlayersSome of the prominent players identified in the global polygylcerol polycricinoleate market includes:Ter Hell & Co. GmbhDuPont Nutrition & HealthPalsgaard A/SThe Hershey CompanyEstelle Chemicals Pvt. Ltd.Croda International PlcSigma-Aldrich Co. LLC.DPO International Sdn. Bhd.Univar Inc.ABOUT US:Future Market Insights (FMI) is a leading market intelligence and consulting firm. We deliver syndicated research reports, custom research reports and consulting services, which are personalized in nature.FMI delivers a complete packaged solution, which combines current market intelligence, statistical anecdotes, technology inputs, valuable growth insights, an aerial view of the competitive framework, and future market trends.CONTACT:Future Market Insights616 Corporate Way, Suite 2-9018,Valley Cottage, NY 10989,United StatesT: +1-347-918-3531F: +1-845-579-5705Email: sales@futuremarketinsights.comWebsite: Automotive Lightweighting Market Size and Forecast 2025 - Current Trends, Opportunities, Challenges https://www.marketresearchreports.biz/sample/sample/1581088 https://www.marketresearchreports.biz/reports/1581088/automotive-lightweighting-global-industry-market-research-reports https://www.marketresearchreports.biz/sample/enquiry/1581088 http://www.marketresearchreports.biz/ "The Latest Research Report Automotive Lightweighting Market - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends, and Forecast 2017 - 2025 provides information on pricing, market analysis, shares, forecast, and company profiles for key industry participants. - MarketResearchReports.biz"This exclusive report will provide you with the market size and forecast (US$ Mn) for the global market and its segments for the period from 2015 to 2025 along with the growth rate (CAGR) from 2017 to 2025, considering 2016 as base year. In addition, drivers, restraints and opportunities, competitive landscape have also been covered under the current proposed table of contents, which will in due course help you to take strategic decisions with respect to the market.Automotive lightweighting is a technology that is utilized to reduce the weight of the vehicle by incorporating lightweight materials in body frames, structures and components. The evolution of the industry has witnessed the usage of lightweight materials such as titanium and carbon fiber against conventional steel and aluminum.Get Sample Copy of this report @The Chassis utilizing the maximum metal is the key component of the lightweight market. The automotive industry has witnessed the usage of high strength steel chassis, as they are 20% lighter than their steel counterparts. Aluminum is widely used in structural parts and frame of the vehicle. The automotive lightweighting market is likely to expand in the near future as regulatory bodies have called for higher emission standards. Usage of lightweight materials reduces emissions by approximately 0.08g CO2/Kg, which in turn is boosting the implementation of lightweighting technology in powertrains and suspensions systems. The trend of using plastic and fiber materials for the interiors, fenders, and bumpers has increased. Europe has set targets to reduce the current emission per vehicle of 140 gCO2/KM to decline to 95 gCO2/KM by 2020. The adoption of electric vehicles has led to the development of lightweight solutions, as the battery considerably adds to the body weight of the vehicle. Carbon fiber holds the key to future lightweighting solutions, as it offers a greater degree of freedom and weighs 50% less than steel. The legislation in Europe targets of 85% vehicle recyclability; carbon fiber recyclability success is projected to boosts the lightweighting market in Europe.Plastic is the predominant material that is utilized in vehicle interiors, as it offers a good cost-to-weight ratio. The development of reinforced and high strength plastic for its usage as windshield and window glass is estimated to increase the lightweighting market of plastics. The hybrid and electric vehicles is set to hold a major share of the automotive lightweighting market. The demand of lightweighting material such as high strength steel is estimated to rise due to its use in premium cars such as Mercedes for the body and power train systemsMaintenance and repair of carbon fiber material is difficult, as any damage cannot often be visually inspected; however, it requires acoustic, ultrasonic, or x-ray imaging. Carbon fiber is five to six times more expensive than steel; however; the price of carbon fire is estimated to be significantly comparable to aluminum in the near future, due to the current efforts being taken to develop fast cutting resins and reduce the production cycle time. This, in turn, is expected to boost the application of carbon fiber in vehicles.View Report @The global automotive lightweighting market can be segmented based on type of material, application, and region. Based on material, the market can be segmented into high strength steel, aluminum, plastics, carbon fibers and titanium. High strength steel and aluminum segments, presently, hold a major share of the market. Increase in usage of plastic in dashboards, bumpers, and interiors has raised the market for light weight plastics and it is projected to expand further. The development of lightweight titanium chassis by car manufacturer Areil has led to the usage of titanium as a lightweight material and the use of titanium is expected to grow in motor sport industry. In terms of application, the automotive lightweighting market can be classified into powertrain, chassis, suspension, steering, and interiors. The lightweighting of chassis and powertrain is responsible for controlling emissions and thus, their demand is anticipated to increase due to the further introduction of emission regulations. Based on region, the lightweighting market can be segmented into North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and Middle East & Africa. North America is a prominent manufacturer of light trucks, and the regulation Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) passed by NHTSA sets emissions standards for cars and light trucks. This, in turn, is projected to boost the automotive lightweighting market in North America. The lightweighting market in Europe has expanded at a significant growth rate, as the current vehicle generation is 12% lighter than the previous one. Europe being home to major luxury auto manufacturers enacting stringent emission norms is the leading market for automotive lightweighting. The increase in production of electric vehicles in China and Japan is projected to boost the lightweighting market in the region.Key players operating in the automotive lightweighting market include ArcelorMittal that manufactures lightweight steels., BASF SE produces lightweight plastics and composites for automobiles. Toray Industries, Inc. manufactures carbon fiber materials for monocoque body structures. Arconic and U.S. Magnesium LLC are also the key players operating in the lightweighting market.The report offers a comprehensive evaluation of the market. It does so via in-depth qualitative insights, historical data, and verifiable projections about market size. The projections featured in the report have been derived using proven research methodologies and assumptions. By doing so, the research report serves as a repository of analysis and information for every facet of the market, including but not limited to: Regional markets, technology, types, and applications.Send An Enquiry Request @The study is a source of reliable data on:Market segments and sub-segmentsMarket trends and dynamicsSupply and demandMarket sizeCurrent trends/opportunities/challengesCompetitive landscapeTechnological breakthroughsValue chain and stakeholder analysisThe regional analysis covers:North America (U.S. and Canada)Latin America (Mexico, Brazil, Peru, Chile, and others)Western Europe (Germany, U.K., France, Spain, Italy, Nordic countries, Belgium, Netherlands, and Luxembourg)Eastern Europe (Poland and Russia)Asia Pacific (China, India, Japan, ASEAN, Australia, and New Zealand)Middle East and Africa (GCC, Southern Africa, and North Africa)The report has been compiled through extensive primary research (through interviews, surveys, and observations of seasoned analysts) and secondary research (which entails reputable paid sources, trade journals, and industry body databases). The report also features a complete qualitative and quantitative assessment by analyzing data gathered from industry analysts and market participants across key points in the industrys value chain.A separate analysis of prevailing trends in the parent market, macro- and micro-economic indicators, and regulations and mandates is included under the purview of the study. By doing so, the report projects the attractiveness of each major segment over the forecast period.Highlights of the report:A complete backdrop analysis, which includes an assessment of the parent marketImportant changes in market dynamicsMarket segmentation up to the second or third levelHistorical, current, and projected size of the market from the standpoint of both value and volumeReporting and evaluation of recent industry developmentsMarket shares and strategies of key playersEmerging niche segments and regional marketsAn objective assessment of the trajectory of the marketRecommendations to companies for strengthening their foothold in the marketAbout usMarketResearchReports.biz is the most comprehensive collection of market research reports. MarketResearchReports.Biz services are specially designed to save time and money for our clients. We are a one stop solution for all your research needs, our main offerings are syndicated research reports, custom research, subscription access and consulting services. We serve all sizes and types of companies spanning across various industries.ContactMr. NachiketState Tower90 Sate Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-621-2074Website:E: sales@marketresearchreports.biz Aerospace Additive Manufacturing Market 2018 Key Players : 3D Systems, Arcam, EOS, ExOne, Stratasys, ATI, Carpenter Technology https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/sample_request/1551 https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/aerospace-additive-manufacturing-market MarketResearchFuture Publish a New Market Research Report On Aerospace Additive Manufacturing 2018 : Discovers the Opportunities, Trends, Risk, Simulation, Management to 2021.Description:Aerospace Additive Manufacturing -Global Market Status and Trend Report 2018-2021 offers a comprehensive analysis on Aerospace Additive Manufacturing industry, standing on the readers perspective, delivering detailed market data and penetrating insights. No matter the client is industry insider, potential entrant or investor, the report will provides useful data and information.Additive manufacturing is a process that can build a three-dimensional object based on a CAD digital model. AM uses an 'additive' process, where an object is built by applying materials in successive layers as per the CAD design. Unlike the conventional manufacturing, which involves 'subtractive' process (e.g., cutting, drilling, milling) and forming (bending, shaping), the AM process requires minimum or no tooling to build the finished productHowever, there are various hurdles hampering the rapid commercialization and wide-scale utilization of AM, for aerospace parts and products. The current AM technology is not yet capable enough to compete with conventional manufacturing techniques in terms of speed of production and reliability. There are also issues associated with limited choices for materials (only a fraction of materials used for conventional manufacturing are currently suitable for AM process).Request a Sample Report @Key PlayersSome of the key players in the Global Aerospace Additive Manufacturing Market are 3D Systems, Arcam, EOS, ExOne, Stratasys, ATI, Carpenter Technology, Concept laser, CRP Technology, Optomec, Proto Labs, Renishaw, SLM Solutions, and Voxeljet.Global Aerospace Additive Manufacturing Market is expected to grow at a CAGR of around 21% during 2016-2021.Industry/ Innovation/ Related News:November 7, 2017 - 3D Systems announced award of a new 3-year contract with BMW. The contract for the companys On Demand Manufacturing (ODM) Services includes production of 3D printed parts that BMW will use for design and functional prototypes.July 10, 2017:- GE Additive made significant strides within the aerospace industry at the recent Paris Air Show by forging strategic supplier agreements, announcing a unique new additive machine, and meeting hundreds of potential customers. While GE Additive has been engaged in the revolutionary additive manufacturing technology for decades. Through acquisitions and billions of dollars in internal technology investments, GE Additive is aggressively industrializing the technology across several industries.Get a Complete Report @Target Audience Aerospace Additive OEMs 3D Manufacturing OEMs Component Suppliers Aftermarket suppliers Research Institute / Education Institute Potential Investors Key executive (CEO and COO) and strategy growth managerAbout Market Research Future:At Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.MRFR team have supreme objective to provide the optimum quality market research and intelligence services to our clients. Our market research studies by products, services, technologies, applications, end users, and market players for global, regional, and country level market segments, enable our clients to see more, know more, and do more, which help to answer all their most important questions.ContactMarket Research Future+1 646 845 9312Email: sales@marketresearchfuture.com Polyoxyethylene Sorbitan Monostearate Market to Witness Exponential Growth by 2027 https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-gb-3965 https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/toc/rep-gb-3965 http://www.futuremarketinsights.com/ Emulsifiers are hydrophilic and hydrophobic in nature. Emulsifiers are used across various industrial applications. Polyoxyethylene sorbitan monostearate is yellowish-brown emulsifier, which is obtained through the reaction between ethylene oxide, sorbitol along with anhydrides and commercially edible stearic acid, obtained from vegetable fats and oils. Polyoxyethylene sorbitan monostearate is commonly known as polysorbate 60 which is characterised as synthetic compound. Polyoxyethylene sorbitan monostearate is extensively used as emulsions as they help to reduce the surface tension of the constituents that needs to be emulsified. Polyoxyethylene sorbitan monostearate being a non-ionic emulsifier, it is used to disperse oil in water and acts as a surfactant and thus finding extensive use in pharmaceutical and cosmetics industry.Request For Sample @Global Polyoxyethylene Sorbitan MonostearateMarket: Drivers and RestraintsIncreasing demand for compounds with versatile properties among manufacturers represents opportunitisc platform for the growth of polyoxyethylene sorbitan monostearate market. In food and beverage industry it offers broad spectrum of applications such as it prevents staling of the baked products, being emulsifier it helps prevent oil separation from artificial whipped cream and helps to stabilise the colour additives along with other ingredients throughout the mixture. Thereby enhancing the texture and quality of food products, contributing to the growth of polyoxyethylene sorbitan monostearate market. Characteristics properties of polyoxyethylene sorbitan monostearate such as thickening agents and ability to reduce surface tension is widely used in skin care formulas and other personal care products such as lotions, shampoos, creams and fragrance powders among others. With increasing inclination of consumers towards better and enhanced personal care products, demand for polyoxyethylene sorbitan monostearate as thickening agent is expected to grow significantly in the forthcoming years.Moreover, due to other peculiar properties of polyoxyethylene sorbitan monostearate such as lubricating agents and gelling agents, it is predominantly used in the manufacturing of pills and capsules and also helps to prolong the shelf life of certain medicines. Hence, spurring the demand for polyoxyethylene sorbitan monostearate market across industrial applications.However, excessive consumption of products containing polyoxyethylene sorbitan monostearate may cause diarrhoea, abdominal discomfort among others. Hence, may affect the growth of polyoxyethylene sorbitan monostearate market. Moreover, polyoxyethylene sorbitan monostearate may have animal derived source, hence vegan population may abstain from consumption of such products. Thereby, hampering the growth of polyoxyethylene sorbitan monostearate market.Global Polyoxyethylene Sorbitan MonostearateMarket: SegmentationOn the basis of end-use, polyoxyethylene sorbitan monostearatemarket is segmented into:-Food & BeveragePersonal CarePharmaceuticalTextileOthersOn the basis of applications, polyoxyethylene sorbitan monostearateis segmented into:-EmulsifierStabilizing agentThickening agentsGelling agentsLubricantsOn the basis of form, polyoxyethylene sorbitan monostearateis segmented into:-LiquidPasteGlobal Polyoxyethylene sorbitan monostearateMarket: Region wise OutlookThe global polyoxyethylene sorbitan monostearatemarket is categorised into seven regions, namely, Western Europe, Eastern Europe Middle East and Africa (MEA), Asia Pacific excluding Japan (APEJ), Japan, Latin America and North America. North America accounts for major share of the polyoxyethylene sorbitan monostearate market. With increasing inclination of consumers towards personal care products and processed food, demand for emulsifying agents and gelling agents is expected to increase significantly, thereby, propelling the growth of polyoxyethylene sorbitan monostearate market. Asia Pacific represents opportunistic platform for the growth of polyoxyethylene sorbitan monostearate market. Growth of Polyoxyethylene sorbitan monostearate market in Asia Pacifc is due to flourishing trade options along with increasing demand for compounds with versatile characteristics among end user industries.Request For TOC @Global Polyoxyethylene sorbitan monostearateMarket: Key PlayersSome of the prominent players identified in the global polyoxyethylene sorbitan monostearatemarket includesKao GroupSigma-Aldrich Co. LLC.Sisco Research Laboratories Pvt. Ltd.Merck KGaASpectrum Chemical Manufacturing Corp.Amresco LLCCroda International PlcEvonik Industries AGCISME ITALY S.R.L.ABOUT US:Future Market Insights (FMI) is a leading market intelligence and consulting firm. We deliver syndicated research reports, custom research reports and consulting services, which are personalized in nature.FMI delivers a complete packaged solution, which combines current market intelligence, statistical anecdotes, technology inputs, valuable growth insights, an aerial view of the competitive framework, and future market trends.CONTACT:Future Market Insights616 Corporate Way, Suite 2-9018,Valley Cottage, NY 10989,United StatesT: +1-347-918-3531F: +1-845-579-5705Email: sales@futuremarketinsights.comWebsite: Global Baking Mixes Market is Estimated to Reach US$ 5,893.3 Mn Revenue Towards 2022 End https://www.factmr.com/connectus/sample?flag=S&rep_id=300 https://www.factmr.com/report/300/baking-mixes-market https://www.factmr.com/connectus/sample?flag=D&rep_id=300 https://www.factmr.com/treet Baking mixes are the ingredients used for making baked food products. Baking mixes are being used to save the time. However, with increasing health consciousness among consumers, manufacturers are producing baking mixes that are gluten-free and are made using wheat or rice flour, they are also using natural sweeteners in baking mixes. New flavors are also being introduced. Quality assurance is also becoming an important part of the baking mixes market. Hence manufacturers are conducting quality test to check if ingredient are added in correct proportion. This report, published by Fact.MR, provides in-depth analysis of the global baking mixes market for the forecast period 2017-2022, and offers key insights about future market direction.Rising number of consumers moving away from the artificial ingredients, sweeteners, and preservatives is resulting in the manufacturers focusing on developing or producing baking mixes using organic or natural sweeteners and ingredients. Hence, baking mixes including organic and gluten-free ingredients are more gaining traction. Meanwhile, major market players are also investing in the research to offer new flavors and enhance the taste. With nutrition-focused and ingredient-focused ready to pay more for the quality product, baking mixes manufacturers are conducting quality-assurance testing of the product.Request For Sample Report-According to the latest report by Fact.MR, the global market for baking mixes is likely to experience moderate CAGR. The market is estimated to reach US$ 5,893.3 million revenue towards 2022 end. Offering convenience, due to the reduced preparation time and all-in-one ingredient formulation are some of the factors resulting in the popularity of baking mixes among consumers. However, rising concern towards the health and preference for natural and organic food products is one of the major factor hampering the growth of the global baking mixes market.Bread Baking Mix- Top-Selling ProductCompared to the various baking mix products available in the market such as pizza dough baking mix, biscuits, and cookies baking mix, etc., bread baking mix is likely to emerge as one of the top-selling baking mix product. Bread baking mix is estimated to exceed US$ 1,700 million revenue by 2022 end. Although cakes and pastries are also likely to gain nearly one-fourth of the share in terms of the revenue by 2017 end.Highest Distribution of Baking Mix through Modern TradeModern trade is likely to emerge as the biggest distribution channel for baking mix. By 2022 end, modern trade is estimated to exceed US$ 1,600 million value. Meanwhile, online distribution channels are also likely to experience moderate growth between 2017 and 2022.North America to Dominate the Global Baking Mixes MarketNorth America is likely to remain dominant in the global baking mixes market throughout the forecast period 2017-2022. Meanwhile, Europe and Asia Pacific Excluding Japan (APEJ) are also anticipated to witness growth in the baking mixes market. Growth in disposable income and rising population are a few factors contributing to the growth of the market in APEJ region.Competition TrackingThe report also profiles companies that are expected to remain active in the expansion of global baking mixes market through 2022, which include Cargill Inc., General Mills, Inc., Pinnacle Foods Inc., Chelsea Milling Company, Ingredion Incorporated, Associated British Foods plc, Archer-Daniels-Midland Company, Bob's Red Mill Natural Foods, Inc., Hain Celestial Group, Inc., and Dawn Food Products Inc.Browse Full Report With TOC-Table of ContentGlobal Baking Mixes Market - Executive SummaryGlobal Baking Mixes Market Overview2.1. Introduction2.1.1. Global Baking Mixes Market Taxonomy2.1.2. Global Baking Mixes Market Definition2.2. Global Baking Mixes Market Size (US$ Mn) and Forecast, 2012-20222.2.1. Global Baking Mixes Market Y-o-Y Growth2.3. Global Baking Mixes Market Dynamics2.4. Supply Chain2.5. Product Innovations2.6. Value Chain2.7. Pricing Analysis2.8. List of Distributors2.9. Key Participants in the MarketGlobal Baking Mixes Market Analysis and Forecast By Product Type3.1. Global Baking Mixes Market Size and Forecast By Product Type, 2012-20223.1.1. Bread Market Size and Forecast, 2012-20223.1.1.1. Revenue (US$ Mn) Comparison, By Region3.1.1.2. Market Share Comparison, By Region3.1.1.3. Y-o-Y growth Comparison, By Region3.1.2. Cakes and Pastries Market Size and Forecast, 2012-20223.1.2.1. Revenue (US$ Mn) Comparison, By Region3.1.2.2. Market Share Comparison, By Region3.1.2.3. Y-o-Y growth Comparison, By Region3.1.3. Biscuits and Cookies Market Size and Forecast, 2012-20223.1.3.1. Revenue (US$ Mn) Comparison, By Region3.1.3.2. Market Share Comparison, By Region3.1.3.3. Y-o-Y growth Comparison, By Region3.1.4. Pizza Dough Market Size and Forecast, 2012-20223.1.4.1. Revenue (US$ Mn) Comparison, By Region3.1.4.2. Market Share Comparison, By Region3.1.4.3. Y-o-Y growth Comparison, By Region3.1.5. Waffles Market Size and Forecast, 2012-20223.1.5.1. Revenue (US$ Mn) Comparison, By Region3.1.5.2. Market Share Comparison, By Region3.1.5.3. Y-o-Y growth Comparison, By Region3.1.6. Muffins and Brownies Market Size and Forecast, 2012-20223.1.6.1. Revenue (US$ Mn) Comparison, By Region3.1.6.2. Market Share Comparison, By Region3.1.6.3. Y-o-Y growth Comparison, By Region3.1.7. Pancakes Market Size and Forecast, 2012-20223.1.7.1. Revenue (US$ Mn) Comparison, By Region3.1.7.2. Market Share Comparison, By Region3.1.7.3. Y-o-Y growth Comparison, By RegionContinue..Request For Discount On This Report-About Fact.MRFact.MR is a fast-growing market research firm that offers the most comprehensive suite of syndicated and customized market research reports. We believe transformative intelligence can educate and inspire businesses to make smarter decisions. We know the limitations of the one-size-fits-all approach; thats why we publish multi-industry global, regional, and country-specific research reports.7 Upper Pembroke SContact UsFact.MRSuite 988427 Upper Pembroke Street,Dublin 2, IrelandTelephone: +353-1-6111-593Email: sales@factmr.com/Web: Insightful Forecast on Expansion of Kraft Envelopes Market During 2017-2027 https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-gb-5731 https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/toc/rep-gb-5731 www.futuremarketinsights.com Global courier, express and parcel market is expanding at higher annual growth rates in last few years, due to increased population migration & globalization. The market at present is valued at approximately US$ 320 to 350 billion. This rapidly growing market is increasingly demanding environmental friendly packaging products for its shipping & transportation services. Kraft envelopes are the best product solution to ship small & medium sized valuable items by courier or postal services, which is accepted industry wide. Kraft envelopes are made of kraft papers, which are cheap and lightweight. Kraft envelopes are also known as brown envelopes or paper envelopes. Government agencies, corporates, banks and educational institutes use this for mailing the documents. Increasing people migration across globe is pushing courier & parcel industry to new heights, which in turn drives the demand for kraft envelopes. Although growing digitization is restraining the growth of courier & postal industry, the rising cyber insecurity, & movement of physical goods is enabling the kraft envelopes market to sustain the growth. Gifts, confidential documents (bank cheques, demand drafts, and medical reports, court declarations, academic records and other documents). Kraft paper is made from 70 100% recycled material, from newsprints and other paper & paperboard products.Kraft Envelopes: Market DynamicsGrowing awareness about packaging carbon footprint and its adverse effect on environment is pushing consumers to opt for environmental friendly products like paper envelopes and biodegradable reusable plastic envelopes. The advantage of kraft papers over other envelopes is easy writing & printability. Lightweight property of kraft envelopes makes it first preference for parcel, courier & express services. Kraft envelopes market in Asian region is highly dominated by small and medium scale players. The increasing number of print media has generating thousands of tonnes of paper wastage, which can be recycled to produce kraft envelopes. This trend is highly visible in countries like India, China, and Japan. Growing digital media is moderately affected print media in last decade, but in longer terms the intensity may get larger. Kraft envelopes are also used in pharmaceutical sector to pack medicines at medical stores. In financial & academic sectors to keep records. The penetration of internet and smartphone in emerging and underdeveloped economies is expected to hamper the kraft envelopes market. But, people affection and attachment to print media and physical document records is creating some inertia for consumers choice for digital solutions. Overall, the kraft envelopes market is expected to expand at a healthy compound annual growth rates (CAGR) during the forecast period.Request Report Sample@Kraft Envelopes: Market SegmentationThe kraft envelopes market is segmented on the basis of product type, application and end-use. On the basis of product type, the global kraft envelopes market is segmented into coated & uncoated kraft envelopes. Based on the application global kraft envelopes, the market is segmented into gift envelopes, confidential envelopes, official envelopes, and invitations. Based on the end use global kraft envelopes, the market is segmented into parcel services, courier services and postal services. The coated kraft envelopes market is expected to dominate the global market by product type, due to increasing consumer preference.Kraft Envelopes Market: Regional outlookKraft envelopes market has been segmented on the basis of region into North America, Latin America Eastern Europe, Western Europe, Asia Pacific Excluding Japan (APEJ), Middle East & Africa (MEA), and Japan. APEJ is expected to dominate the overall global kraft envelopes market, with India and China together as a major contributors. Western Europe and Eastern Europe together are expected to stand at second position by market share followed by North America.Visit For TOC@Kraft Envelopes Market: Key playersSome of the players in the global Kraft Envelopes market are Royal Envelope, Cenveo Corporation, Sangal Papers Ltd., BETA (ShenZhen) Package Products Co.Ltd., Mehta Envelope Manufacturing Company, French Paper Co., International Paper., Quality Park Products, Heinrich Envelope, Sheppard Envelope MFG CO., Northeastern Envelope Company and others.About Us Future Market Insights (FMI) is a leading market intelligence and consulting firm. We deliver syndicated research reports, custom research reports and consulting services, which are personalized in nature. FMI delivers a complete packaged solution, which combines current market intelligence, statistical anecdotes, technology inputs, valuable growth insights, an aerial view of the competitive framework, and future market trends.CONTACT:616 Corporate Way, Suite 2-9018,Valley Cottage, NY 10989,United StatesT: +1-347-918-3531F: +1-845-579-5705Email: sales@futuremarketinsights.comWebsite: Global Chatbot Market Will Become Worth US$994.5 Mn In 2024: Key Companies Strive to Enhance Customer Experience to Expand User Base Market Research Report https://www.researchmoz.us/enquiry.php?type=S&repid=905693 https://www.researchmoz.us/chatbot-market-global-industry-analysis-size-share-growth-trends-and-forecast-2016-2024-report.html/toc http://www.researchmoz.us/ http://bit.ly/1TBmnVG http://summaryofmarketresearchreports.blogspot.in/ Researchmoz added Most up-to-date research on "Global Chatbot Market Will Become Worth US$994.5 Mn In 2024: Key Companies Strive to Enhance Customer Experience to Expand User Base" to its huge collection of research reports.Chatbot refers to a computer program, which stimulates the conversation between human and the machine. Generally, a chatbot acts like a real person with the support of artificial intelligence. The major applications of the chatbot include ecommerce websites, social media platforms, call centers, gaming and mobile applications.The Chatbot Market report provides an in-depth analysis of the global chatbot market for the period 2015 2024, wherein 2015 is the base year and the years from 2016 to 2024 is the forecast period. The report also contains the compound annual growth rate (CAGR %) from 2016 to 2024 for all the segments. The report covers key trends prevailing in the global chatbot market over the forecast period. The report also provides impact analysis for those key trends across all the geographical regions. It also highlights various drivers, restraints, and opportunities expected to influence the markets growth during the forecast period.Global Chatbot Market: Key SegmentationsThe study provides a holistic perspective on market growth in terms of revenue estimates (in US$ Mn), across different geographies, which include North America, Europe, Asia Pacific (APAC), Middle East & Africa (MEA), and South America. The market estimates have been analyzed by taking into account the impact of various economic, political, technological, social, and legal and the existing market dynamics influencing market growth. The report would also include executive summary, providing the overview of the global chatbot market. The report also provides industry development and key market indicators for the global chatbot market.This research study on the global Chatbot market provides a detailed analysis based on the different segments including platform type and enterprise type. Based on the platform, the market is divided into the web-based, mobile and stand-alone. Based on enterprise size, the market is segmented into small & medium enterprises and large enterprises. The report also covers profiles of major players, their growth strategies and also focuses on various recent developments, and includes market positioning analysis of key players operating in the chatbot market. The report also encompasses cross segment market attractiveness analysis, for different geographies based on their growth rate and market size. The report also analyses the global chatbot ecosystem and recognizes key stakeholders of the industry.To Get Sample Copy of Report visit @Global Chatbot Market: Competitive LandscapeThe study includes competition matrix for key players in the global chatbot market based on their capabilities and growth potential. The competition matrix also benchmarks the key companies in the global chatbot market on the basis of top line growth, market share, segment growth, infrastructure capabilities, market position, product offerings, R&D focus and future outlook. The completion matrix also contains the major developments made by the company in the recent years.Under the company profiles section, the report provides an overview of the players operating in the market, the strategies deployed by them to gain competitive advantage, the annual revenue generated by them in the past two or three years, SWOT analysis, regional breakdown and their relevant business segment revenue. The report also contains market share analysis of the key players in the global chatbot market for the year 2015 based on their revenues generated for the same year.The report aims to provide an inclusive analysis of the global chatbot market across geographical regions, which are further sub-segmented into countries located in the region to cover in-depth analysis of the global chatbot market. Key countries included in the scope of the study are - The U.S., Canada, the U.K., Germany, France, China, India, Japan, Australia UAE, Saudi Arabia, Brazil and Argentina.The key players profiled in this report include Astute Solutions, Facebook, Inc. ,Google, Inc., Haptik, Inc., Helpshift, Imperson Ltd., Kasisto Inc., Kiwi, Inc., Microsoft Corporation, Pandorabots, Inc., Slack Technologies, Inc. ToyTalk (PullString Inc.) and Yahoo Inc.Browse TOC @The global Chatbot market has been segmented as follows:Chatbot Market, by PlatformWeb-basedMobileStand-aloneChatbot Market, by Enterprise SizeSmall and Medium EnterprisesLarge EnterprisesChatbot Market, by GeographyNorth AmericaThe U.S.CanadaRest of North AmericaEuropeThe U.K.RussiaFranceRest of EuropeAsia Pacific (APAC)ChinaAbout ResearchMozResearchMoz is the one stop online destination to find and buy market research reports & Industry Analysis. We fulfill all your research needs spanning across industry verticals with our huge collection of market research reports. We provide our services to all sizes of organizations and across all industry verticals and markets. Our Research Coordinators have in-depth knowledge of reports as well as publishers and will assist you in making an informed decision by giving you unbiased and deep insights on which reports will satisfy your needs at the best price.Mr. NachiketState Tower,90 State Street,Suite 700,Albany NY - 12207United StatesEmail: sales@researchmoz.usWebsite @Tel: 866-997-4948 (Us-Canada Toll Free)Tel: +1-518-621-2074Follow us on LinkedIn @Follow us on Blogger @ Latest Trend and Development of Process Water Treatment Chemicals Market in Global Industry 2018 https://www.researchmoz.us/enquiry.php?type=S&repid=1504829 https://www.researchmoz.us/global-process-water-treatment-chemicals-sales-market-report-2018-report.html/toc https://www.researchmoz.us/global-process-water-treatment-chemicals-sales-market-report-2018-report.html http://bit.ly/1TBmnVG https://marketinfo247.wordpress.com/ Albany, NY, 23rd February : Recent research and the current scenario as well as future market potential of "Global Process Water Treatment Chemicals Sales Market Report 2018" globally.In this report, the global Process Water Treatment Chemicals market is valued at USD XX million in 2017 and is expected to reach USD XX million by the end of 2025, growing at a CAGR of XX% between 2017 and 2025.Get PDF for more Professional and Technical insights @Geographically, this report split global into several key Regions, with sales (K MT), revenue (Million USD), market share and growth rate of Process Water Treatment Chemicals for these regions, from 2013 to 2025 (forecast), coveringUnited StatesChinaEuropeJapanSoutheast AsiaIndiaGlobal Process Water Treatment Chemicals market competition by top manufacturers/players, with Process Water Treatment Chemicals sales volume, Price (USD/MT), revenue (Million USD) and market share for each manufacturer/player; the top players includingAkzoNobelAshlandBaker HughesBASFBK GiuliniGE Infrastructure Water and Process TechnologiesClariantKemiraKurita Water IndustriesOn the basis of product, this report displays the production, revenue, price, market share and growth rate of each type, primarily split intoCorrosion InhibitorScale InhibitorCoagulantFlocculantsOthersView Complete TOC with tables & Figures @On the basis on the end users/applications, this report focuses on the status and outlook for major applications/end users, sales volume, market share and growth rate for each application, includingFood & BeveragesPetrochemical IndustrySteel IndustryOthersTable of Contents1 Process Water Treatment Chemicals Market Overview1.1 Product Overview and Scope of Process Water Treatment Chemicals1.2 Classification of Process Water Treatment Chemicals by Product Category1.2.1 Global Process Water Treatment Chemicals Market Size (Sales) Comparison by Type (2013-2025)1.2.2 Global Process Water Treatment Chemicals Market Size (Sales) Market Share by Type (Product Category) in 20171.2.3 Corrosion Inhibitor1.2.4 Scale Inhibitor1.2.5 Coagulant1.2.6 Flocculants1.2.7 Others1.3 Global Process Water Treatment Chemicals Market by Application/End Users1.3.1 Global Process Water Treatment Chemicals Sales (Volume) and Market Share Comparison by Application (2013-2025)1.3.2 Food & Beverages1.3.3 Petrochemical Industry1.3.4 Steel Industry1.3.5 Others1.4 Global Process Water Treatment Chemicals Market by Region1.4.1 Global Process Water Treatment Chemicals Market Size (Value) Comparison by Region (2013-2025)1.4.2 United States Process Water Treatment Chemicals Status and Prospect (2013-2025)1.4.3 China Process Water Treatment Chemicals Status and Prospect (2013-2025)1.4.4 Europe Process Water Treatment Chemicals Status and Prospect (2013-2025)1.4.5 Japan Process Water Treatment Chemicals Status and Prospect (2013-2025)1.4.6 Southeast Asia Process Water Treatment Chemicals Status and Prospect (2013-2025)1.4.7 India Process Water Treatment Chemicals Status and Prospect (2013-2025)1.5 Global Market Size (Value and Volume) of Process Water Treatment Chemicals (2013-2025)1.5.1 Global Process Water Treatment Chemicals Sales and Growth Rate (2013-2025)1.5.2 Global Process Water Treatment Chemicals Revenue and Growth Rate (2013-2025)Browse Report @2 Global Process Water Treatment Chemicals Competition by Players/Suppliers, Type and Application2.1 Global Process Water Treatment Chemicals Market Competition by Players/Suppliers2.1.1 Global Process Water Treatment Chemicals Sales and Market Share of Key Players/Suppliers (2013-2018)2.1.2 Global Process Water Treatment Chemicals Revenue and Share by Players/Suppliers (2013-2018)2.2 Global Process Water Treatment Chemicals (Volume and Value) by Type2.2.1 Global Process Water Treatment Chemicals Sales and Market Share by Type (2013-2018)2.2.2 Global Process Water Treatment Chemicals Revenue and Market Share by Type (2013-2018)2.3 Global Process Water Treatment Chemicals (Volume and Value) by Region2.3.1 Global Process Water Treatment Chemicals Sales and Market Share by Region (2013-2018)2.3.2 Global Process Water Treatment Chemicals Revenue and Market Share by Region (2013-2018)2.4 Global Process Water Treatment Chemicals (Volume) by ApplicationResearchMoz is the one stop online destination to find and buy market research reports & Industry Analysis. We fulfill all your research needs spanning across industry verticals with our huge collection of market research reports. We provide our services to all sizes of organizations and across all industry verticals and markets. Our Research Coordinators have in-depth knowledge of reports as well as publishers and will assist you in making an informed decision by giving you unbiased and deep insights on which reports will satisfy your needs at the best price.ResearchMozMr. Nachiket Ghumare,90 State Street, Albany NY, United States - 12207Tel: +1-518-621-2074USA-Canada Toll Free: 866-997-4948Email: sales@researchmoz.usFollow us on LinkedIn @Follow me on : Aircraft Line Maintenance Market 2018 Key Players: Lufthansa Technik, Monarch Aircraft Engineering, SIA Engineering Company https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/sample_request/1420 https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/aircraft-line-maintenance-market Market Overview:Line maintenance MRO entails full technical handling such as transit, pre-flight checks, daily checks, and weekly checks. Through line maintenance, the firms provide assistance in fuel checks, headset maintenance and repair, and on call handling. Growing international trade between countries have increased the frequencies of cargo planes. Thus, it is essential to conduct timely checks or repairs of airplane to ensure efficient performance and safe air travel.As of 2016, there were more than 22,000 active commercial wide body and narrow body aircraft across the globe. These existing commercial fleets are expected to be replaced by more than 40,000 new aircraft, over the next 20 years, and the global fleet is likely to reach 45,000 aircraft by 2036. Moreover, the high demand for air travel in the emerging regions, such as Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East, leads to an increase in the number of aircraft in these regions. As a result, approximately 22,000 commercial aircraft are expected to be delivered to these regions in the next 20 years. On the other hand, it is expected that over 15,000 commercial aircraft would be delivered in developed regions such as North America and Europe, by 2036.Moreover, the global military aircraft fleet, as of 2016, was over 53,000, with the US having the largest share (26%) of the military planes, followed by Russia (7%), China (6%), and India (4%). With the increase in defence budgets in a number of countries, there have been high development and procurement of military aircraft, in the recent years.Concurrently, outsourcing of Aircraft Line Maintenance MRO Market to third-party companies, is one of the trending opportunities for the airline companies so as to reduce their aircraft MRO expenses, with more than 10-20% of saving. For example, in 2013, 65% of aircraft MRO was outsourced by airlines, across the globe. As a result, there has been an increased adoption of MRO outsourcing, of late, due to the growing awareness of its benefits, such as low labour rates and the availability of adequate spare parts.Request a Sample Report @Key PlayersSome of the key players in the Global Aircraft Line Maintenance Market are Delta TechOps, Lufthansa Technik, Monarch Aircraft Engineering, SIA Engineering Company, SR Technics, British Airways Engineering, Hong Long Aircraft Engineering, TAP Maintenance & Engineering, and Turkish Technic.The global Aircraft Line Maintenance Market is expected to grow at a CAGR of around 5.5% during 2016-2021. The key factors driving the growth are growing initiatives towards aircraft safety, increase in flights hours, increased demand for aircraft, and usage of best in class technologies in aircraft.Industry/ Innovation/ Related News:October, 2017:- Monarch Aircraft Engineering Limited (MAEL) signed a contract with the China Airlines to carry out line maintenance on its aircraft.August, 2017:- FEAM Maintenance announced its agreement with the Emirates airline to provide the full handling line maintenance services for the Boeing 777 passenger and freighter aircraft, at the Chicago O'Hare International Airport.October, 2016 - SR Technics signed several maintenance agreements with easyJet, a British airline, thereby extending its partnership. Under the contract, the company would provide line maintenance services to the aircraft fleet of easyJet, at its line and light base maintenance stations in the UK and Switzerland.Get a Complete Report @Regional AnalysisAsia had the largest share of the global aircraft line maintenance MRO market in 2016. It is an emerging region in the long-haul international market and it relies heavily on the small and medium wide-body aircraft. As a result, a number of such airlines have been entering into service, recently such as Indigo, Tigerair Singapore, Tigerair Australia, and Air Asia. Asia Pacific is home to major MRO service providers such as HAECO and SIA Engineering Company, and is projected to witness the highest growth rate, during the forecast period. Over the years, with the increasing incomes, there has been a high demand for air travel in the region, which stimulated larger developments of airplanes. It is expected that by 2035, more than 16,000 aircraft would be delivered in the region. Moreover, due to the low labour rates, North American airlines outsource 60% of their heavy maintenance and airframe MRO, to Asia, where it is a major source of income. In the recent years, there have been some major developments in the market.About Market Research Future:At Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.MRFR team have supreme objective to provide the optimum quality market research and intelligence services to our clients. Our market research studies by products, services, technologies, applications, end users, and market players for global, regional, and country level market segments, enable our clients to see more, know more, and do more, which help to answer all their most important questions.Contact:Market Research Future+1 646 845 9312Email: sales@marketresearchfuture.com Hybrid Electric Marine Propulsion Engine Market Globally Expand At A CAGR Of 7.25% Between The Period 2017 - 2021 Market Research Report https://www.researchmoz.us/enquiry.php?type=S&repid=1208718 https://www.researchmoz.us/global-hybrid-electric-marine-propulsion-engine-market-2017-2021-report.html/toc http://www.researchmoz.us/ http://bit.ly/1TBmnVG http://summaryofmarketresearchreports.blogspot.in/ Researchmoz added Most up-to-date research on "Hybrid Electric Marine Propulsion Engine Market Globally Expand At A CAGR Of 7.25% Between The Period 2017 - 2021" to its huge collection of research reports.A diesel-electric propulsion system with the provision for additional storage of electrical devices and enhanced controls is known as a hybrid electric propulsion system. The key components of a hybrid electric system include: Electric motor, Generator, Electrical storage devices, Charging system for these electrical devices, and Control system. Other components include an engine that is either fueled by diesel or gasoline. At present, a more environment-friendly and cleaner fuel, liquefied natural gas (LNG), is being increasingly used by commercial vessels.Technavios analysts forecast the global hybrid electric marine propulsion engine market to grow at a CAGR of 7.25% during the period 2017-2021.Covered in this reportThe report covers the present scenario and the growth prospects of the global hybrid electric marine propulsion engine market for 2017-2021. To calculate the market size, the report presents a detailed picture of the market by way of study, synthesis, and summation of data from multiple sources.The market is divided into the following segments based on geography:AmericasAPACEMEATechnavio's report, Global Hybrid Electric Marine Propulsion Engine 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 Get Sample Copy of Report visit @Key vendorsCaterpillarMAN Diesel & TurboMitsubishi Heavy IndustriesRolls-RoyceWrtsilOther prominent vendorsCumminsHybrid MarineSTEYR MOTORSElco Motor YachtsOceanvoltBeta MarineLeonardo DRSGEMarket driverSurge in commercial shippingFor a full, detailed list, view our reportMarket challengeCollapsing Greek shipbuilding industryFor a full, detailed list, view our reportBrowse TOC @Market trendEmergence of dual-fuel enginesFor a full, detailed list, view our reportKey questions answered in this reportWhat will the market size be in 2021 and what will the growth rate be?What are the key market trends?What is driving this market?What are the challenges to market growth?Who are the key vendors in this market space?What are the market opportunities and threats faced by the key vendors?What are the strengths and weaknesses of the key vendors?About ResearchMozResearchMoz is the one stop online destination to find and buy market research reports & Industry Analysis. We fulfill all your research needs spanning across industry verticals with our huge collection of market research reports. We provide our services to all sizes of organizations and across all industry verticals and markets. Our Research Coordinators have in-depth knowledge of reports as well as publishers and will assist you in making an informed decision by giving you unbiased and deep insights on which reports will satisfy your needs at the best price.Mr. NachiketState Tower,90 State Street,Suite 700,Albany NY - 12207United StatesEmail: sales@researchmoz.usWebsite @Tel: 866-997-4948 (Us-Canada Toll Free)Tel: +1-518-621-2074Follow us on LinkedIn @Follow us on Blogger @ Russia has deployed at least two of its last generation stealth fighter jets, Su-57, in the Syrian skies as Moscow continues to offer air cover to pro-Syrian regime fighters to crash rebel pockets, including in Eastern Ghouta. The jets were filmed landing at Russias Khmeimim airbase along the Mediterranean coast. Experts deem the deployment by Moscow as an attempt to showcase and test its advanced aircraft in Syrian mayhem. The military had previously announced it would begin testing the fighters in combat. They have been touted as a future rival to the Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor, which the US uses in patrols over Syria. US officials have repeatedly accused Russia of using Syria literally as a showroom for its military and defense industries. Loose Fill Packaging Systems Market to Witness Soaring Growth During 2017-2027 https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-gb-6219 https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/toc/rep-gb-6219 www.futuremarketinsights.com Global Loose Fill Packaging Systems Market: IntroductionSafety of products is a basic priority in todays market. Safe and robust packaging is necessary to attract customers. Various protective packaging are already available in the market which offers great safety to the products. Loose fill packaging peanuts are one such protective packaging solutions which provides light weight, dust free and offers shock and impact protective packaging solution. This are used during shipment of packaged products in various industries. Loose fill packaging systems are used for proper filling of loose fill packaging peanuts. Loose fill packaging systems are employed for proper and safe packaging of packaged goods for transit. Various loose fill packaging systems are available in the market, from simple dispensers to fully automated pneumatic systems. Through these systems, loose fill is moved gently along air, and maintains the integrity of dust free packaging. The outlook for the global loose fill packaging systems is expected to be positive due to growing packaging across the globe.Global Loose Fill Packaging Systems Market: DynamicsWhen goods are transported, the empty spaces must be filled with some material to prevent product from shock and damage. This is done by putting loose fill packaging peanuts inside the boxes. The loose fill packaging systems are employed for proper filling of peanuts around the product to keep it stable and safe during transit. This factor is expected to rise the global loose fill packaging peanuts market over the forecast period. Loose fill packaging systems are employed by various industries including medical & pharmaceutical, automobile, electrical & electronics, construction, art & kraft and other such industries to fill packing peanuts while packaging of products. This factor is expected to drive the global loose fill packaging systems market over the forecast period. This are dispensing systems with automated overhead for dispensing, are installed in manufacturing facilities. These loose fill packaging systems are easy to operate. These factors are expected to fuels the global loose fill packaging systems market over the forecast period. These systems can work at different speeds as per the requirement. The factor which might hamper the global loose fill packaging systems market is its installation cost. It is quite costly to install in the industry.Request Report Sample@Global Loose Fill Packaging Systems Market: SegmentationThe global loose fill packaging systems market has been segmented as:On the basis of machine types, the global loose fill packaging systems market has been segmented as:Handheld SystemsFully Automated Pneumatic SystemsOn the basis of end use industry, the global loose fill packaging systems market has been segmented as:AutomobileArt & KraftMedicalShippingElectrical & ElectronicOthersGlobal Loose Fill Packaging Systems Market: Geographical OutlookBased on regions, the global loose fill packaging systems market is divided into seven regions namely:North AmericaWestern EuropeAsia-pacific except JapanEastern EuropeLatin AmericaMiddle-east and AfricaJapanVisit For TOC@North America and Western Europe regions are expected to witness average growth in the global loose fill packaging systems market due to adoption of automation from the very beginning. Latin America and Eastern Europe are expected to witness low growth during the forecast period due to economic downturn in the regions. APAC is expected to drive the global loose fill packaging systems market over the forecast period. It is due to the growing manufacturing industries in the regions, especially China which is a manufacturing hub of the world. This is expected to drive the global loose fill packaging systems market over the forecast period. MEA is anticipated to witness positive growth over the forecast period. Japan is expected to witness sluggish growth in the global loose fill packaging systems market. Overall the outlook for the global loose fill packaging systems is expected to be positive over the forecast period.Global Loose Fill Packaging Systems Market: Key PlayersFew of the key players operating in the global loose fill packaging systems market are - Storopack Hans Reichenecker GmbH, Hanchett Paper Company, Neff Packaging Systems among others.About Us Future Market Insights (FMI) is a leading market intelligence and consulting firm. We deliver syndicated research reports, custom research reports and consulting services, which are personalized in nature. FMI delivers a complete packaged solution, which combines current market intelligence, statistical anecdotes, technology inputs, valuable growth insights, an aerial view of the competitive framework, and future market trends.CONTACT:616 Corporate Way, Suite 2-9018,Valley Cottage, NY 10989,United StatesT: +1-347-918-3531F: +1-845-579-5705Email: sales@futuremarketinsights.comWebsite: Blood Collection Monitors Market: Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends and Forecast 2017 2025 https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/market-research/blood-collection-monitors-market.asp https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/toc/20935 https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/samples/20935 https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/methodology/20935 www.persistencemarketresearch.com Blood collection monitor is a compact medical devices utilized to monitor homogenous mixing of blood and anticoagulant during collection of blood from a donor. This device is primarily utilized to prevent clot formation of blood. Blood collection monitors are used in hospitals, clinics and biotechnology industries worldwide. The device also ensures prevention of blood cells being damaged during collection procedure. A typical blood collection monitor contains an audio visual alarm that notifies an abnormal condition of the donor.Rise in blood transfusion reaction and blood disorders demand the need of blood collection monitors worldwide. Increase in aging population has led to the growth in the rate of critical life-saving surgical procedures which demand blood transfusion. These factors have led to an increase in the inventory levels of blood banks and blood centers. According, to the World Health Organization (WHO) it has been estimated that the global elderly population is expected to reach around 2 billion by 2050; this was around 524 million in 2010.Report Overview @Moreover, the global geriatric population is expected to grow at the fastest rate in developed countries such as Italy, Germany, the U.K., the U.S. and Japan. Thus, increasing geriatric population globally augments the demand for blood collection monitors. Furthermore, advances in healthcare, technology and medical services demands the need of blood collection monitors to fulfill patient needs. Hence, the healthcare providers are rapidly adopting blood collection monitors with the aim of providing better healthcare services to the patient. Therefore, the global demand of blood collection monitors is experiencing a rapid pace worldwide.However, cost of installation and deployment of blood collection monitors is a prime constraint for the adoption of this technology in hospitals and blood centers. This situation further intensifies in developing countries due to ongoing economic downturn, particularly in low GDP nations and some European countries. In addition, large hospitals and blood banks that have sufficient funds to invest may not actually adopt this technology because of lack of awareness about its financial benefits in the long run. Moreover, hospitals and blood banks in developing countries may not be able to afford such high costs and hence may hold back the growth of this market.Request for Table of Contents @North America represents the largest regional market for blood collection monitors primarily due to strong demand of the devices and increasing awareness among people about blood transfusion reaction. Europe accounts for the second largest market for blood collection monitors after North America. Rise in aging population and longer life expectancy has been majorly driving the blood collection monitors market in Europe. Asia-Pacific comprises countries such as India, China, Australia, Japan and Malaysia.Get Sample Copy of this Report @Japan and China accounted for the largest share of the blood collection monitors market among the Asia-Pacific countries due to strong demand and increase in awareness about the device. Technological advancement would further expect to accentuate the market growth in these regions. Rest of the World (RoW) comprises the markets in Latin America, the Middle East and Africa. The market for blood collection monitors in RoW is primarily fuelled by extensive increase of healthcare infrastructure in Brazil and Mexico.Need more information about Report methodology @Major market players operating in the global blood collection monitors market include DSK International, Terumo Penpol, REMI ELEKTROTECHNIK LIMITED, Bioelettronica Srl, Accurate Scientific Instruments, Delcon SRL, Labtop Instruments Private Limited, Haemonetics Corporation among others.About UsPersistence Market Research (PMR) is a U.S.-based full-service market intelligence firm specializing in syndicated research, custom research, and consulting services. PMR boasts market research expertise across the Healthcare, Chemicals and Materials, Technology and Media, Energy and Mining, Food and Beverages, Semiconductor and Electronics, Consumer Goods, and Shipping and Transportation industries. The company draws from its multi-disciplinary capabilities and high-pedigree team of analysts to share data that precisely corresponds to clients business needs.PMR stands committed to bringing more accuracy and speed to clients business decisions. From ready-to-purchase market research reports to customized research solutions, PMRs engagement models are highly flexible without compromising on its deep-seated research values.ContactPersistence Market Research Pvt. Ltd305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,USA Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.commedia@persistencemarketresearch.comWeb: Cystoid Macular Edema Market: Global Industry Analysis, Growth, Trends and Forecast 2017 2025 https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/market-research/cystoid-macular-edema-market.asp https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/toc/20938 https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/samples/20938 https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/methodology/20938 www.persistencemarketresearch.com Cystoid macular edema (CME) also known as Irvine Gass Syndrome is a painless disorder affecting the central retina or macula. This condition is characterized by multiple cysts like areas of fluid in the macula causing retinal swelling or edema. CME is the retinal thickening of macula due to disruption of the normal blood-retinal barrier which leads to leakage from the perifoveal retinal capillaries causing accumulation of fluid within the intracellular spaces of the retina, mainly in the outer plexiform layer. CME is of two types: pseudophakic and nonpseudophakic cystoid macular edema. Pseudophakic cystoids macular edema is when the cause of occurrence is known while nonpseudophakic is the condition where no specific clinical findings have been observed. Symptoms of cystoids macular edema are blurred or decreased central vision.The cause of CME is not completely known though it may be accompanied by various diseases such as uveitis, vein occlusion or diabetes. It is also known to occur commonly after cataract surgery. Various risk factors associated with cystoids macular edema are penetrating keratoplasty (corneal transplant), retinal surgery, chronic renal failure, retinal vein occlusion, retinitis pigmentosa, systemic medication and topical prostaglandin analogs for glaucoma..No significant racial or sex related predilection exists for this condition. However, cystoids macular edema can occur at any age based on the etiology, though advanced age is at higher risk.Report Overview @The global cystoids macular edema market can be segmented based on diagnosis, therapy, and geography. Drug class segment comprises non steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, anti- vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) agents, carbonic anhydrase inhibitors and steroids. Generally anti inflammatory agents such as corticosteroids and diuretics including acetazolamide are used to treat retinal inflammation. These drugs may be given in the form of eye drops, injection or by oral administration. In certain cases anti- vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) is administered or a laser procedure is carried out to eliminate macular edema. Anti-VEGF therapies with ranibizumab or bevacizumab have demonstrated positive outcomes.Request for Table of Contents @Surgical options to treat cystoids macular edema include laser photocoagulation, and vitrectomy. Laser photocoagulation is a therapeutic technique that uses light soured to coagulate tissue. Diagnostic tests include color fundus photography, fluorescein angiography, optical coherence tomography, and auto fluorescence. Out of all these techniques, optical coherence tomography which is a type of visual biopsy provides examination with highest sensitivity and allows early detection though fluorescein angiography is considered as a gold standard. Optical CT helps to confirm diagnosis as well as monitor progress of cystoid macular edema. Tests such as fasting blood sugar, lipid profile and blood pressure, are recommended if conditions such as diabetes or retinal vein occlusion are suspected.Get Sample Copy of this Report @Geographically, the cystoids macular edema market can be categorized into four major regions namely North America, Europe, Asia Pacific and Rest of the World. In the U.S., nearly 7,700 cataract surgeries are performed per day Some of the key players contributing to the global cystoids macular edema market are The EMMES Corporation, Fovea Pharmaceuticals SA, Icon Bioscience, Inc., Merck & Co., Inc., Sanwa Kagaku Kenkyusho Co., Ltd., and Novartis AG.Need more information about Report methodology @Various clinical trials are being conducted to study the treatment options for cystoids macular edema. Several institutions contributing to these clinical trials across the globe are Johns Hopkins University, Wake Forest University, Iladevi Cataract and IOL Research Center, Rabin Medical Center, Hong Kong Eye Hospital, Kyushu University, Wills Eye Institute, Retina Institute of Hawaii, University of Bern, Queen's University and Tabriz University.About UsPersistence Market Research (PMR) is a U.S.-based full-service market intelligence firm specializing in syndicated research, custom research, and consulting services. PMR boasts market research expertise across the Healthcare, Chemicals and Materials, Technology and Media, Energy and Mining, Food and Beverages, Semiconductor and Electronics, Consumer Goods, and Shipping and Transportation industries. The company draws from its multi-disciplinary capabilities and high-pedigree team of analysts to share data that precisely corresponds to clients business needs.PMR stands committed to bringing more accuracy and speed to clients business decisions. From ready-to-purchase market research reports to customized research solutions, PMRs engagement models are highly flexible without compromising on its deep-seated research values.ContactPersistence Market Research Pvt. Ltd305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,USA Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.commedia@persistencemarketresearch.comWeb: Advanced Drug Delivery Systems Market:Global Industry Size, Share, Growth, Trends and Forecast 2017 2025 https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/market-research/advanced-drug-delivery-systems-market.asp https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/toc/20941 https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/samples/20941 https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/methodology/20941 www.persistencemarketresearch.com Advanced drug delivery systems are the improved methods for delivering the drug molecule to the targeted site in a more controlled manner. These methods are developed in order to improve the efficacy ratio of the currently available drugs. Delivering drug at the controlled rate, slow and targeted delivery for onsite drug release and absorption are the basis for the development of advanced drug delivery systems. Furthermore, the development of improved methods of drug delivery is preferred these days over the search for novel molecules.There are various dosage forms available by which a drug substance can be incorporated for efficacious delivery. Advancements in biotechnology and nanotechnology have significantly boosted the development of novel drug delivery approaches. Various interdisciplinary studies in the field of polymer science, pharmaceuticals, organic chemistry and molecular biology are required for the development of advanced drug delivery systems. The drug delivery system comprise of drug formulation, dosage form and mechanism of release.Report Overview @These advanced delivery systems have the potential of overcoming one of the major problem faced by the pharmaceutical industry for the onsite drug efficacy. Development of advanced drug delivery systems needs into consideration several factors such as pharmacodynamics, drug toxicity, immunogenicity, bio compatibility, pharmacokinetics as well as drug efficacy.Most of the advanced drug delivery systems are developed keeping in mind the cancer treatment as the chemotherapy drugs needs to have deeper penetration into the cancer site as well avoiding various associated side effects.Request for Table of Contents @Various advantages of advanced drug delivery systems over the conventional delivery systems such as on site action, reduce dosing amount, increased drug efficacy, therapeutic success rate etc. support its market growth. In addition, increasing clinical research activities in the development of more advanced drug delivery systems would also be fuelling the market growth. Certain technical limitations in the development of methods, stringent regulations, high pricing for the advanced products, non-availability in the low income countries are some of the factors limiting the market growth of global advanced drug delivery systems.Development of novel drug delivery systems is dependent on the number of funding projects for its research and development. The price of the delivery system depends on the complexity of disease, drug molecule and the delivery mode preferred. Market growth is also dependent on the adoption rate of these advanced delivery systems by healthcare practitioners. Various advanced drug delivery and drug targeting systems are currently under development which may fuel the market in future. Emergence of new bioactive materials and gene therapy are also getting attention for the development of advanced drug delivery systems. The collaborations and mergers by the industry players also have a significant impact on the market for advanced drug delivery systems.Get Sample Copy of this Report @Geographically, the market for advanced drug delivery systems can be segmented into five regions, North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia Pacific and Middle East & Africa. North America dominates the global advanced drug delivery systems market owing to the better adoption of improved drug delivery solutions as well as follow up of advanced treatment approaches in healthcare. This is followed by the European market owing to better healthcare infrastructure facilities and growing number of research activities in the healthcare domain over the region.Asia Pacific region represents significant market opportunities in the advanced drug delivery systems due to the improvement in healthcare infrastructure as well as increasing healthcare spending and rising disease prevalence. Latin America followed by MEA represents the lowest market share as well as growth rate in the advanced drug delivery solution with the lower adoption rate over the region.Need more information about Report methodology @Some major key players of advanced drug delivery systems market include NeXstar Pharmaceuticals, Inc., West Pharmaceutical Services, Inc., AstraZeneca, Sequus Pharmaceuticals Inc., 3M, Novartis International AG and others.About UsPersistence Market Research (PMR) is a U.S.-based full-service market intelligence firm specializing in syndicated research, custom research, and consulting services. PMR boasts market research expertise across the Healthcare, Chemicals and Materials, Technology and Media, Energy and Mining, Food and Beverages, Semiconductor and Electronics, Consumer Goods, and Shipping and Transportation industries. The company draws from its multi-disciplinary capabilities and high-pedigree team of analysts to share data that precisely corresponds to clients business needs.PMR stands committed to bringing more accuracy and speed to clients business decisions. From ready-to-purchase market research reports to customized research solutions, PMRs engagement models are highly flexible without compromising on its deep-seated research values.ContactPersistence Market Research Pvt. Ltd305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,USA Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.commedia@persistencemarketresearch.comWeb: Global Preimplantation Genetic Testing Market: Growing Public-Private Investments in the Field of Preimplantation Genetic Testing to Contribute to the Growth in World Preimplantation Genetic Testing Market Infinium Global Research https://www.infiniumglobalresearch.com/Reports/MakeSampleRequest/716 https://www.infiniumglobalresearch.com/Reports/requestdiscount/716 https://www.infiniumglobalresearch.com/healthcare_medical_devices/global_preimplantation_genetic_testing_market https://www.infiniumglobalresearch.com The report "Preimplantation Genetic Testing Market by Products & Services (Reagents and Consumables, Software and Services and Instruments), Technology (Single-Nucleotide Polymorphism, Next-Generation Sequencing, Fluorescence in Situ Hybridization, Comparative Genomic Hybridization and Polymerase Chain Reaction), Procedure Type (Preimplantation Genetic Screening, and Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis), Application (Single Gene Disorders, HLA Typing, Structural Chromosomal Abnormalities, X-Linked Disorders, Aneuploidy and Gender Identification), End User (Hospitals, Diagnostic Labs, and Service Providers, Research Laboratories & Academic Institutes, Maternity Centers & Fertility Clinics) - Global Industry Analysis, Trends analysis and Forecast up to 2024 studies the world as well as regional markets including North America, Europe, Asia Pacific and RoW (Including Latin America, Middle East and Africa)", Global preimplantation genetic testing market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 10.0% over the forecast period of 2017 - 2023. Factors driving the growth of this market include growing public-private investments in the field of preimplantation genetic testing, number of fertility clinics are increasing worldwide, decreasing fertility rates, technological advancements, and high risk of chromosomal abnormalities with advancing maternal age.Get Free Sample Pages of this Report:Preimplantation Genetic Screening is estimated to Account for the Largest Share of the Market in 2017By procedure type, the preimplantation genetic testing market is classified into Preimplantation Genetic Screening, and Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis. The preimplantation genetic screening segment is expected to lead the global preimplantation genetic testing in 2017. Factors driving the growth of this segment include rising demand for preimplantation genetic screening owing to increasing genetic disorders and decrease in female fertility as well as advancements in the screening of preimplantation genetic testing.Aneuploidy is estimated to Command the Largest Share of the Market during the Forecast PeriodBased on application, the preimplantation genetic testing market is categorized into single gene disorders, HLA typing, structural chromosomal abnormalities, X-Linked disorders, aneuploidy and gender identification. The aneuploidy segment is estimated to account for the largest share of the global preimplantation genetic testing market during the forecast period. Rising initiatives taken by the prominent players regarding aneuploidy screening to reduce the risk of miscarriage, increasing prevalence of abnormal number of chromosome leading to aneuploidy and growing maternal age are the key factors driving the growth of this end-user segment.Get 15% Discount on this Report:North America is estimated to Command the Largest Share of the MarketBased on region, the preimplantation genetic testing market is segmented into North America, Europe, Asia, and the Rest of the World (RoW). North America is expected to dominate the preimplantation genetic testing market in 2017. This is attributed to factors such as growing public-private investments in the developed PGI owing to high demand among the people seeking for IVF treatments, rising number of people suffering from genetic disorders and increasing use of innovative genetic techniques over the conventional genomic techniques.Companies Profiled Covered in this Report:The report profiles some of the key companies in the preimplantation genetic testing market including Perkinelmer, Inc., Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc., ABBott Laboratories, Agilent Technologies, Inc., Oxford Gene Technology, Invicta Genetics, Genea Limited, Beijing Genomics Institute, Progenesis, Combimatrix Corporation.Browse Complete TOC of this Premium Report:Report Highlights:The report provides deep insights on demand forecasts, market trends and micro and macro indicators. In addition, this report provides insights on the factors that are driving and restraining the global preimplantation genetic testing market. Moreover, IGR-Growth Matrix analysis given in the report brings an insight on the investment areas that existing or new market players can consider. The report provides insights into the market using analytical tools such as Porters five forces analysis and DRO analysis of preimplantation genetic testing market.Moreover, the study highlights current market trends and provides forecast from 2017 to 2023. We also have highlighted future trends in the preimplantation genetic testing market that will impact the demand during the forecast period. Moreover, the competitive analysis given in each regional market brings an insight on the market share of the leading players. Additionally, the analysis highlights rise and fall in the market shares of the key players in the market. This report will help manufacturers, suppliers and distributors of the preimplantation genetic testing market to understand the present and future trends in this market and formulate their strategies accordingly.About Us:Infinium Global Research and Consulting Solutions is started with a single motto of being business partner of first choice. We at Infinium work on the strengths of our clients to ensure we help them consolidate their market position. We firmly believe in the fact that if you are able to develop newer opportunities then you find there is no dearth of opportunities for you.Contact Us:Infinium Global ResearchGoyal Shinde Park, Bhau Patil Road,Bopodi, Pune-411 020.U.S. + Canada Toll Free: 1-800-638-0796Email: sales@infiniumglobalresearch.comWebsite: Power over Ethernet (POE) Market 2018 Global Industry Demand, Technical Growth and Profit by Forecast to 2022 https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/sample_request/2091 https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/power-over-ethernet-market-2091 Power over Ethernet Market Overview:Power over Ethernet (POE) is a technology which enables the transfer of the electric signals with data over paired ethernet cables and allows the transfer of electric power with data over the same power cable to the POE enabled devices. Factors such as low maintenance, low cost, less downtime, easy installation among others are some of the technological factors which makes it more advanced than traditional network power cables. The rising energy cost and adoption of POE in the commercial sectors are expected to surge the market over period of time.The market of Power over Ethernet has been segmented on the basis of types, power to port, applications and end users. By types, powered device controller & ICs is expected to dominate market and to grow at the highest rate over the time. The main factors supporting this growth is increasing demand for PD controller products such as IP cameras, wireless access point and POE enabled devices. POE controller provides equipment safety by enabling safe delivery of power without any damage to cable as well as device.The factors such as control over device, cost efficiency, efficient monitoring and flexible network architectures in various application segments has contributed to enhanced growth of the market. High adoption of the VoIP technology and rising demand for network security cameras are anticipated to drive the demand of power over Ethernet market as these devices are placed at the higher place on the wall where power is provided with the POE power cables.The Global Power over Ethernet Market is expected to grow at CAGR of 13% and estimated to reach at market size of USD 1 billion by the end of forecast period.Major Key Players:Key companies of the market are Axis Communications AB (Sweden), Maxim Integrated Products, Inc. (U.S.), Texas Instruments, Inc. (U.S.), and STMicroelectronics N.V. (Switzerland). Some other well-known players comprise Linear Technology Corp. (U.S.), Broadcom Ltd. (U.S.), and Microsemi Corp. (U.S.).Request a Sample Report @Latest Industry NewsJan 2018 - Elo, a leading global supplier of touchscreen computing solutions, released Androids I-Series 2.0, a wholly upgraded product with consistency and versatility. The product is ideal for commercial 10 to 22 inch touchscreen applications. It includes a new power over ethernet module as an optional accessory. The module is a solid choice for conference scheduler displays, AV control applications, and power-drop locations.Dec 2017 - Patton Electronics is a U.S. based manufacturer of UC, cloud, & IoT solutions for carrier, enterprise, and industrial networks. It shortly announced that its CopperLink 1101 power-over-ethernet extender has won two awards, adding accolades to the firm.Dec 2017 - CoolGear and PoE Texas have joined hands to combine USB-C with PD and power over ethernet. During early 2018, PoE Texas will launch the POE-USBC-Kit and the AT-USBC-Kit which would allow USB-C PD over ethernet. PoE lowers the adoption costs of USB-C, eliminating the need for advanced electrical infrastructure. Unlike USB-C, which has a transmission power of 10 feet (three meters) and is uncommon in buildings & homes, ethernet has a power of 328 feet (100 meters). The latter is also almost ubiquitous in modern construction.Sep 2017 - Redpark's gigabit + PoE adapter seamlessly connects an iPad or iPhone to gigabit ethernet and uses power over ethernet (PoE) to charge the device through a single ethernet cable (when connected to a compatible network switch or power injector). The gigabit + power adapter also connects an iPhone or iPad to a wired ehernet network and employs an external AC power adapter to provide power to the device, eliminating the need for a PoE network switch.Global Competitive Analysis:With the entry of new industry players, massive volume-driven growth has been observed. Companies are looking forward to gain shares by participating in various strategies. The best opportunity for this sector lies in tapping product innovations and investing wisely.Industry SegmentsThe power over ethernet market is segmented into the following categories:Types - Power Sourcing Equipment Controllers & ICs and Powered Device Controllers & ICsPowers to Port Up to 15.4W, Up to 30W, Up to 60W, and Up to 100WApplications - Security & Access Control, Connectivity, LED Lighting & Control, Infotainment, and OthersEnd Users - Residential, Commercial, and IndustrialDetailed Regional StudyThe global Power over Ethernet Market is split into North America, Europe, APAC, and Rest of the World (RoW). North America dominates the market. Regional presence of numerous players gives North America a competitive edge over other regions. The rich IT & telecom sector and higher demand for POE controllers and ICs help North America.Access Report Details @Europe is also showing steady growth. Countries; like U.K. and Germany are major contributors to the region al market. Asia-Pacific stands as the third biggest market due to its expanding IT hubs in India, China, and Japan. China, as a manufacturing hub is adopting PoE in different industries.About Market Research Future:At Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.MRFR team have supreme objective to provide the optimum quality market research and intelligence services to our clients. Our market research studies by products, services, technologies, applications, end users, and market players for global, regional, and country level market segments, enable our clients to see more, know more, and do more, which help to answer all their most important questions.ContactMarket Research FutureOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, Hadapsar,Pune - 411028Maharashtra, India+1 646 845 9312Email: sales@marketresearchfuture.com Aerospace Composites Market 2018 Key Players: Mitsubishi Rayon, Owens Corning, Hyosung, Kaman, SGL Group and Teijin Aramid https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/sample_request/1242 https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/aerospace-composites-market MarketResearchFuture Publish a New Market Research Report On Aerospace Composites 2018 : Discovers the Opportunities, Trends, Risk, Simulation, Management to 2021.Description:Aerospace Composites -Global Market Status and Trend Report 2018-2021 offers a comprehensive analysis on Aerospace Composites industry, standing on the readers perspective, delivering detailed market data and penetrating insights. No matter the client is industry insider, potential entrant or investor, the report will provides useful data and information.Composites are made from the combination of two or more different materials resulting in different physical or chemical properties than of the individual components. The fiber reinforced polymers are mainly used in the aerospace industry. These are mainly composed of carbon fibers, glass fibers, and aramid fibers. Composites are mainly used for the aerospace structure and components that need to be lightweight while also possessing the superior strength. Composites have found a wide range of applications in commercial aircraft, rotorcraft, UAVs and military aircraft. These have been largely used for aircraft fuselage, tail, wings, aircraft cabin interiors, aircraft seats, and jet engine components.Aerospace Composites enjoy increasing popularity and does the Aerospace Composites Market enjoy an extensive traction. The market has been growing rapidly along with the growing demand for new and optimized aircrafts and jet engines, so has the production processes.Request a Sample Report @Major key PlayersThe leading market players in the global Aerospace Composites market primarily include Cytec Industries, Hexcel, Koninklijke Ten Cate (TenCate), Mitsubishi Rayon, Owens Corning. The other prominent players include Hartzell Aerospace, Hyosung, Kaman, SGL Group and Teijin Aramid.Global Aerospace Composites Market is expected to grow at a CAGR of around 8% during 2016-2021. This growth is driven due to significant demand for aircraft weight reduction and fuel efficiency and high corrosion resistance.Industry/ Innovation/ Related News:DECEMBER 8, 2017 - Hexcel Corporation announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire the Aerospace & Defense (A&D) business of Oxford Performance Materials (OPM). OPM A&D produces qualified, high-performance thermoplastic, carbon fiber reinforced 3D printed parts for Commercial Aerospace and Space and Defense applications. With this qualify additive manufacturing technology Hexcel Corporation can apply the high performance polymer PEKK for aerospace, industrial and biomedical applications.January 12, 2016 - Cytec Solvay Group has signed an exclusive distribution agreement between its Composite Materials Global Business Unit and Bang & Bonsomer Group. The agreement covers Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia and Finland for all Process Materials products. The Process Materials product portfolio supports the end-to-end manufacturing of composite parts and includes an extensive portfolio of vacuum bagging consumables, pre-manufactured kitting solutions and tooling products. It provides advanced composites process materials for aerospace, automotive, wind energy, motorsport, marine, mass transportation and other demanding applications.November 24, 2014 GKN partners with Alexander Dennis to accelerate the introduction of a low-carbon bus fleetBrowse Full Report @About Market Research Future:At Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.MRFR team have supreme objective to provide the optimum quality market research and intelligence services to our clients. Our market research studies by products, services, technologies, applications, end users, and market players for global, regional, and country level market segments, enable our clients to see more, know more, and do more, which help to answer all their most important questions.Contact:Market Research Future+1 646 845 9312Email: sales@marketresearchfuture.com Global In Vitro Toxicology Testing Market Value to Increase to US$ 7,750 Mn in the Year 2022 https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/samples/18658 https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/market-research/in-vitro-toxicology-testing-market/toc In vitro toxicology testing is carried out to identify the potential toxicity of new compounds when they are at an early stages of development during the discovery and development of new drugs. This type of testing is carried out to identity the presence or absence of certain toxins in drugs, agricultural chemicals and food additives.There is a sharp increase in R&D procedures which require in vitro toxicology testing and this is boosting the growth of this market along with latest technological developments. Moreover, the ban on animal testing has led to the increasing adoption of in vitro toxicology testing and the governments all across the world are providing increased funding for such type of testing.The global in vitro toxicology testing market is slated to touch a value of about US$ 7,750 Mn in the year 2022 and grow at a robust CAGR during the assessment period.Request to sample report @4 Forecast Highlights on Global In Vitro Toxicology Testing MarketAs per the forecast of Persistence Market Research, the services segment is slated to touch a value of nearly US$ 2,400 Mn in the year 2022. This represents a robust CAGR growth during the assessment period of 2017-2022. The services segment is estimated to account for nearly one-third of the revenue share of the product & services type segment by the year 2017 and is forecasted to gain market share by 2022 over 2017.As per the forecast of Persistence Market Research, the biochemical assays segment will reach a value of about US$ 1,800 Mn in the year 2017. This represents a robust CAGR growth during the forecast period.The biochemical assays segment is forecasted to account for nearly one-third of the total revenue share of the method segment by the end of the year 2017 and is expected to lose in market share by 2022 as compared with the year 2017.As per the forecast of Persistence Market Research, the pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical industry segment is slated to reach a value of nearly US$ 3,500 Mn in 2022. The pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical segment is expected to gain market share by the end of the year 2022. The largest share is contributed by the North America region in the pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical segment.Persistence Market Research forecasts the cell culture technologies segment to exhibit a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 5% from 2017 to 2022.Request Report for TOC @The report has also included the profiles of some of the leading companies in the in vitro toxicology testing market like Promega Corporation, Charles River Laboratories International, Inc., SGS S.A., Qiagen N.V., Cyprotex PLC, Bio-Rad Laboratories, Inc., Merck KGaA, GE Healthcare Inc., Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc. and Eurofins Scientific Se.About UsPersistence Market Research (PMR) is a U.S.-based full-service market intelligence firm specializing in syndicated re-search, custom research, and consulting services. PMR boasts market research expertise across the Healthcare, Chemicals and Materials, Technology and Media, Energy and Mining, Food and Beverages, Semiconductor and Electronics, Con-sumer Goods, and Shipping and Transportation industries. The company draws from its multi-disciplinary capabilities and high-pedigree team of analysts to share data that precisely corresponds to clients business needs.ContactPersistence Market Research Pvt. Ltd305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,USA Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.com General Mills Enters Into Sauces Market | Latest Report Analysis by Type, Specialty Food-Type, Packaging, Application and Region | Addressing Continues Growth in Sauces Industry Segments Sauces Market https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/sample_request/2791 https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/enquiry/2791 Study Objectives of Sauces MarketDetail analysis of the markets segments and sub-segmentsTo estimate and forecast market size by Type, Specialty Food-Type, Packaging, Application and regionTo analyze key driving forces which are influencing the marketRegion level market analysis and market estimation of North America, Europe, Asia, and rest of the world (ROW) and their countriesValue chain analysis & supply chain analysis of SaucesCompany profiling of major players in the marketCompetitive strategy analysis and mapping key stakeholders in the marketAnalysis of historical market trends and technologies along with current government regulatory requirementsMove to Report @Market Synopsis of Sauces:Market Definition:Sauces are defined as the fluid or semi-solid paste used as a condiment across the food industries. Sauces are mainly used as a food additive as it enhances the flavor. Sauces are also used as dips and toppings and is popular amongst all the regions for its rich taste. Sauces are low in sodium and saturated fat which adds to the nutritional value of the product. The increasing consumption of flavor enhancers have increased the popularity of sauces during the forecast period.Market Scenario:Increasing demands for innovative food products with high nutritional value has a major impact on the Sauces market. The high demand for flavor enhancers is influencing the growth of Sauces market as a key ingredient. The developing technologies in the food sector has helped in fueling up the market share of the product by bringing innovations in the flavors of sauces. Shift in the consumption pattern backed up by rising health consciousness amongst the consumers has led to the growing share of Sauces globally.The tomato sauce segment is evaluated to increase at higher rate based on rising consumers preference towards prominent sour and sweet flavors. Based on the specialty food-type amongst the sauces, the share held by low-carb sauces is found to escalate due to the less calorie imparted by the product into the body. Based on the packaging, squeeze bottles is found to be dominating the segment. The application of Sauces in ready-to-eat meals holds a major and prominent share followed by application in pasta and noodles.Key Findings:Application of the product as dips is evaluated to grow at a steady rateTop five exporters of Sauces include Germany, Italy, China, Netherlands and U.S.SegmentsSauces has been segmented on the basis of type which comprises Mustard, Tomato, Chili Pepper, Soy, Others. The Tomato sauce segment is found to hold a major share due to high consumers preference.Sauces has been segmented on the basis of specialty food-type which comprises Kosher, Gluten-Free, Vegan, Low-Carb, Low-Fat, Others. Low-Carb Sauces holds a lions share based on increasing health consciousness amongst the consumers.Sauces has been segmented on the basis of packaging which comprises Glass Bottles, Squeeze Bottles, Sachets, Jars, Others. Squeeze Bottles are found to hold a major share amongst the given packaging type.Sauces has been segmented on the basis of applications which comprises Dips, Dressings, Soups and Gravies, Pasta and Noodles, Ready-To-Eat Meals, Others. The Ready-To-Eat Meals segment is growing at a higher growth rate.Regional AnalysisThe Global Sauces Market is segmented into North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and rest of the world (ROW). Europe region has the major market share followed by North America. Developing economy has led to increase in disposable income and changing consumers food preferences due to which Europe is projected to generate a high revenue during the given forecast period. The Major importers of Sauces include U.K., Canada, France, Germany and U.S. Based on the increasing consumption of food preparations with accompaniments, the import and export in the developed countries is found to rise at a steady growth rate.Key PlayersThe key players profiled in the Global Sauces Market are Nestle SA (Switzerland), Kraft Foods Inc. (U.S.), Mars, Incorporated (U.S.), General Mills, Inc. (U.S.), ConAgra Food (U.S.), Unilever Plc. (U.K.), Hormel Foods Corporation (U.S.), The Kroger Company (U.S.)Enquiries are welcome @Intended AudienceSauces manufacturersReady-To-Eat Food manufacturersRetailers and wholesalersTraders, importers and exportersThe Global Sauces Market is segmented under the following regions mentioned below:North AmericaU.S.CanadaMexicoEuropeGermanyFranceItalySpainU.K.Rest of EuropeAsia-PacificChinaIndiaAustraliaJapanRest of Asia PacificRest of the worldBrazilArgentinaSaudi ArabiaSouth AfricaOthersThe report for Global Sauces Market of Market Research Future comprises of extensive primary research along with the detailed analysis of qualitative as well as quantitative aspects by various industry experts, key opinion leaders to gain the deeper insight of the market and industry performance. The report gives the clear picture of current market scenario which includes historical and projected market size in terms of value and volume, technological advancement, macro economical and governing factors in the market. The report provides details information and strategies of the top key players in the industry. The report also gives a broad study of the different markets segments and regions.Note: To Access Full Report Do follow the above mentioned links, and allow us to contribute in your business marketAbout Market Research Future:At Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.MRFR team have a supreme objective to provide the optimum quality market research and intelligence services to our clients. Our market research studies by products, services, technologies, applications, end users, and market players for global, regional, and country level market segments, enable our clients to see more, know more, and do more, which help to answer all their most important questions.In order to stay updated with technology and work process of the industry, MRFR often plans & conducts meet with the industry experts and industrial visits for its research analyst members.Contact:Market Research FutureOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, Hadapsar,Pune - 411028Maharashtra, India+1 646 845 9312Email: sales@marketresearchfuture.com 2018 - 2022 Global Radiation Therapy Market: Increasing Incidence and Prevalence of Cancer & Technological Advancements Market Research Report https://www.researchmoz.us/enquiry.php?type=S&repid=1576782 https://www.researchmoz.us/global-radiation-therapy-market-industry-analysis-outlook-20182022-report.html/toc http://www.researchmoz.us/ http://bit.ly/1TBmnVG http://summaryofmarketresearchreports.blogspot.in/ Researchmoz added Most up-to-date research on "2018 - 2022 Global Radiation Therapy Market: Increasing Incidence and Prevalence of Cancer & Technological Advancements" to its huge collection of research reports.Radiation therapy or radiotherapy is a therapy using ionizing radiation, generally as part of cancer treatment to control or kill malignant cells and normally delivered by a linear accelerator. Radiation therapy may be curative in a number of types of cancer if they are localized to one area of the body. It may also be used as part of adjuvant therapy, to prevent tumor recurrence after surgery to remove a primary malignant tumor (for example, early stages of breast cancer). Radiation therapy is synergistic with chemotherapy, and has been used before, during, and after chemotherapy in susceptible cancers. The sub-specialty of oncology concerned with radiotherapy is called radiation oncology.The global radiotherapy market is segmented into three main categories; external beam therapy, internal beam therapy and others. Further, the external beam is classified into three different segments, namely; LINAC, proton beam therapy and compact advanced radiation therapy.The key factors driving the growth of radiation therapy market are increasing incidences of cancer cases, rising health care expenditure, escalating aging population, accelerating economic growth and adoption of unhealthy lifestyle. The major trends that can be observed are increased preference towards noninvasive procedures, increasing public awareness and technological advancements. However, the expansion of radiation therapy market is hindered by stringent regulations, barriers to implementation and harsh side effects of radiation therapy.To Get Sample Copy of Report visit @The report Global Radiation Therapy Market: Industry Analysis & Outlook (2018-2022) analyzes the development of this market, with focus on the North American, European, Asia-Pacific and Latin American regions. The major trends, growth drivers as well as issues being faced by the market are discussed in detail in this report. The four major players: Ion Beam Applications, Varian Medical Systems, Inc., Elekta AB and Accuray Inc, are being profiled along with their key financials and strategies for growth. The report contains a comprehensive analysis of the global radiation therapy market along with the study of the regional markets.Table of Content1. Market Overview1.1 Radiation Therapy1.2 Types of Radiation Therapy2. Global Radiation Therapy Market2.1 Global Radiation Therapy Market by Value2.2 Global Radiation Therapy Market Forecast by Value2.3 Global Radiation Therapy Market by Region2.4 Global Radiation Therapy Market by SegmentsBrowse TOC @3. Global External & Internal Beam Therapy Market3.1 Global External Beam Therapy Market3.1.1 Global External Beam Therapy Market Forecast by Value3.1.2 Global External Beam Therapy Market by Devices3.1.3 Global LINAC Market Forecast by Value3.1.4 Global LINAC Market Growth Potential3.1.5 Global LINAC Installed Base by Country3.1.6 Global LINAC Treated Patients Volume Forecast3.1.7 Global Proton Beam Therapy Market Forecast by Value3.1.8 Global Proton Beam Therapy CentersAbout ResearchMozResearchMoz is the one stop online destination to find and buy market research reports & Industry Analysis. We fulfill all your research needs spanning across industry verticals with our huge collection of market research reports. We provide our services to all sizes of organizations and across all industry verticals and markets. Our Research Coordinators have in-depth knowledge of reports as well as publishers and will assist you in making an informed decision by giving you unbiased and deep insights on which reports will satisfy your needs at the best price.Mr. NachiketState Tower,90 State Street,Suite 700,Albany NY - 12207United StatesEmail: sales@researchmoz.usWebsite @Tel: 866-997-4948 (Us-Canada Toll Free)Tel: +1-518-621-2074Follow us on LinkedIn @Follow us on Blogger @ Ni John Fru Ndi, the emblematic leader of the Social Democratic Front, the main opposition party in Cameroon, announced he is not running in the 2018 presidential elections. Speaking at the special congress of the party held in Bamenda on Thursday, the veteran leader reportedly said he was leaving the stage for the younger generation and will not be presenting his candidature for the 2018 presidential elections in the central African nation. Since its creation in 1990, the SDF has participated in three presidential elections respectively in 1992, 2004 and 2011 with the same candidate, Ni John Fru Ndi, 77. Cameroon will hold senatorial elections on March 25, ahead of the presidential vote later this year. The SDF said it will participate in the process. The SDF draws much of its backing from two predominantly English-speaking regions in the North West and south West of Cameroon, formerly ruled by both England and France. The two restive regions are currently riled by secessionists, who entered an armed phase of their struggle for independence. President Paul Biya, 85, is expected to seek another term in office after over three decades in charge of the Central African nation. Global E-Book Reader Market - E-Commerce sub segment is estimated to be valued at US$ 275.1 Mn by the end of 2020 https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/samples/9107 https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/market-research/ebook-reader-market/toc According to a recent market report published by Persistence Market Research titled E-Book Reader Market: Global Industry Analysis (2012 2016) and Forecast (2017 2020) the global e-book reader market was valued at US$ 1401.4 Mn in 2016.Demand for e-book readers is expected to be supported by an increasing adoption of online content in the educational curriculum, an increasing adoption of e-books, a growing e-learning market and increasing availability of free e-books on the internet.Persistence Market Research RecommendationsE-book reader manufacturers can focus on expanding their businesses across countries in APAC and MEA where the regional governments are taking initiatives pertaining to digital education systems and are also investing heavily on the e-education system.North America and Europe could be potential growth regions for e-book reader vendors, owing to the growing adoption of e-books across countries in these regions. E-book reader manufacturers can focus on advanced and new technologies such as Text-to-Speech, Audiobooks, and Music to increase their market share in various regions.Request to sample report @Global E-Book Reader Market: Segmentation & ForecastThe global e-book reader market is segmented on the basis of screen type, connectivity type, distribution channel, price range and region. On the basis of screen type, the market is segmented as E Ink screen and LCD screen. The E Ink screen sub-segment was valued at US$ 1009.1 Mn in 2016. On the basis of connectivity type, the market is segmented as Only Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi and 3G. The Wi-Fi and 3G sub-segment is projected to be valued at US$ 303.0 Mn by the end of 2020. On the basis of distribution channel, the market is segmented as Organized Retail store, Unorganized Retail store and e-Commerce.The E-Commerce sub segment is estimated to be valued at US$ 275.1 Mn by the end of 2020. On the basis of price range, the market is segmented into Below US$ 100, US$ 101 US$ 200, and Above US$ 200. In terms of value, the US$ 101 US$ 200 segment was valued at US$ 619.3 Mn in 2016.Global E-Book Reader Market: Regional ForecastPersistence Market Research tracks the performance of the global e-book reader market across the five key geographies of North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and the Middle East & Africa. According to Persistence Market Research analysis, the Asia Pacific regional market is expected to witness relatively good demand for e-book readers over the forecast period. Revenue from the e-book reader market in Asia Pacific and North America is estimated to collectively account for over 50% of the global e-book reader market revenue in 2017.Request Report for TOC @Global E-Book Reader Market: Key PlayersThe report profiles some of the companies operating in the global e-book reader market such as Amazon.com, Inc. Rakuten Kobo, Inc., Barnes & Noble, Hanvon Technology Co. Ltd., Onyx International Inc., PocketBook International SA, Aluratek Inc., Bookeen, ECTACO Inc., Ematic, Arta Tech and Wexler Flex.About UsPersistence Market Research (PMR) is a U.S.-based full-service market intelligence firm specializing in syndicated re-search, custom research, and consulting services. PMR boasts market research expertise across the Healthcare, Chemicals and Materials, Technology and Media, Energy and Mining, Food and Beverages, Semiconductor and Electronics, Con-sumer Goods, and Shipping and Transportation industries. The company draws from its multi-disciplinary capabilities and high-pedigree team of analysts to share data that precisely corresponds to clients business needs.ContactPersistence Market Research Pvt. Ltd305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,USA Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.com Global Titanium Dioxide Market By Key Players - Tronox Limited, The Chemours Company, Ishihara Sangyo Kaisha, Ltd. and Kronos Worldwide, Inc. Market Research Report https://www.researchmoz.us/enquiry.php?type=S&repid=1576780 https://www.researchmoz.us/global-titanium-dioxide-market-industry-analysis-outlook-20182022-report.html/toc http://www.researchmoz.us/ http://bit.ly/1TBmnVG http://summaryofmarketresearchreports.blogspot.in/ Researchmoz added Most up-to-date research on "Global Titanium Dioxide Market By Key Players - Tronox Limited, The Chemours Company, Ishihara Sangyo Kaisha, Ltd. and Kronos Worldwide, Inc." to its huge collection of research reports.Titanium dioxide is a pigment form of titanium produced as a white powder sourced from natural minerals such as ilmenite, rutile and slag. Other sources of titanium dioxide include beach sand deposits, which occurs along the coastlines of the United States, India, South Africa and Australia. It is mainly used to scatter light, as it absorbs none of the incident light in the visible region of the spectrum. Apart from these properties, titanium dioxide possesses good thermal stability, resistance to ultraviolet degradation & chemical attacks and provides whiteness, opacity, durability, stability, hiding power and brightness to appliances. It is used in various industries such as coatings, paints, plastics, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, printing inks, paper, textiles, dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSC) and food industry.Titanium dioxide pigment is generally manufactured to convert impure feedstock ore into the pure white pigment. It can be manufactured by either of the two processes: Sulfate Process and Chloride Process.The Asia Pacific region is a major contributor in the supply and demand of titanium dioxide market supported by low cost of production and increased use of titanium dioxide in various end markets and in major emerging economies such as Japan, China and India.The global titanium dioxide market is expected to grow with increasing construction spending, increasing plastic production, growing urban population, accelerating economic growth and paints and coatings industry. Key trends of this market includes growing demand in flexible packaging market, industry consolidation and increasing shift towards hydrometallurgical production process. However, there are some factors which can hinder growth of the market including rising titanium dioxide prices, stringent regulations and dominance of calcium carbonate.To Get Sample Copy of Report visit @The report Global Titanium Dioxide Market: Industry Analysis & Outlook (2018-2022) by Koncept Analytics provides an extensive research and detailed analysis of the present market along with future outlook. The report discusses the major growth drivers, key tends & developments and challenges of the market, covering Asia Pacific, the Americas, Europe and Middle East Africa region along with the global market. The report profiles the key players of the market including Tronox Limited, The Chemours Company, Ishihara Sangyo Kaisha, Ltd. and Kronos Worldwide, Inc.Table of Content1. Market Overview1.1 Introduction1.2 Manufacturing Process1.3 End Markets and Applications2. Global Titanium Dioxide Market Analysis2.1 Titanium Dioxide Market Forecast by Value2.2 Titanium Dioxide Supply and Demand Volume2.3 Titanium Dioxide Supply and Demand Volume Forecast2.4 Titanium Dioxide Supply Volume by Region2.5 Titanium Dioxide Demand Volume by Region2.6 Titanium Dioxide Consumption by End Market2.7 Titanium Dioxide Supply Volume by Production Type2.8 Titanium Dioxide Feedstock Ores DemandBrowse TOC @3. Regional Titanium Dioxide Market Analysis3.1 Asia Pacific3.1.1 Asia Pacific Titanium Dioxide Supply and Demand Volume3.1.2 Asia Pacific Titanium Dioxide Supply and Demand Volume Forecast3.1.3 China Titanium Dioxide Exports and Imports Volume3.1.4 China Titanium Dioxide Exports and Imports Volume Forecast3.1.5 China Titanium Dioxide Exports by Region3.2 The Americas3.2.1 The Americas Titanium Dioxide Supply and Demand Volume3.2.2 The Americas Titanium Dioxide Supply and Demand Volume ForecastAbout ResearchMozResearchMoz is the one stop online destination to find and buy market research reports & Industry Analysis. We fulfill all your research needs spanning across industry verticals with our huge collection of market research reports. We provide our services to all sizes of organizations and across all industry verticals and markets. Our Research Coordinators have in-depth knowledge of reports as well as publishers and will assist you in making an informed decision by giving you unbiased and deep insights on which reports will satisfy your needs at the best price.Mr. NachiketState Tower,90 State Street,Suite 700,Albany NY - 12207United StatesEmail: sales@researchmoz.usWebsite @Tel: 866-997-4948 (Us-Canada Toll Free)Tel: +1-518-621-2074Follow us on LinkedIn @Follow us on Blogger @ MOOCs Market to Grow at a CAGR of 30.12% during the Period 2018-2022 ReportsWeb http://www.reportsweb.com/inquiry&RW00011619828/sample http://www.reportsweb.com/buy&RW00011619828/buy/3500 http://www.reportsweb.com/global-moocs-market-2018-2022 MOOCs provide free online courses to the learners by offering a flexible and an affordable way of learning new skills. Many vendors providing MOOCs also have started giving out certifications for a minimal fee.Publisher's analysts forecast the global MOOCs market to grow at a CAGR of 30.12% during the period 2018-2022.FREE | Request Sample Copy is Available atCovered in this reportThe report covers the present scenario and the growth prospects of the global MOOCs market for 2018-2022. To calculate the market size, the report presents a detailed picture of the market by way of study, synthesis, and summation of data from multiple sources.The market is divided into the following segments based on geography:- Americas- APAC- EMEAPublisher's report, Global MOOCs Market 2018-2022, has been prepared based on an in-depth market analysis with inputs from industry experts. The report covers the market landscape and its growth prospects over the coming years. The report also includes a discussion of the key vendors operating in this market.Key vendors- Coursera- edX- FutureLearn- Iversity- MiriadaX- Udemy- UdacityBuy nowMarket driver- Rise in regional MOOCs- For a full, detailed list, view our reportMarket challenge- Completion rates- For a full, detailed list, view our reportMarket trend- Developing economies- For a full, detailed list, view our reportKey questions answered in this report- What will the market size be in 2022 and what will the growth rate be-- What are the key market trends-- What is driving this market-- What are the challenges to market growth-- Who are the key vendors in this market space-Complete Report is Available atContact Us:Call: +1-646-491-9876Email: sales@reportsweb.comReportsWeb.com is a one stop shop of market research reports and solutions to various companies across the globe. We help our clients in their decision support system by helping them choose most relevant and cost effective research reports and solutions from various publishers. We provide best in class customer service and our customer support team is always available to help you on your research queries.505, 6th floor, Amanora Township,Amanora Chambers, East Block,Kharadi Road, Hadapsar, Pune-411028 Latest News About Global Home Healthcare Equipment Industry to Witness Growth Through 2021 Market Research Report https://www.researchmoz.us/enquiry.php?type=S&repid=1390469 https://www.researchmoz.us/global-home-healthcare-equipment-industry-2017-trends-and-forecast-report-report.html/toc http://www.researchmoz.us/ http://bit.ly/1TBmnVG http://summaryofmarketresearchreports.blogspot.in/ Researchmoz added Most up-to-date research on "Latest News About Global Home Healthcare Equipment Industry to Witness Growth Through 2021" to its huge collection of research reports.Home Healthcare Equipment Market Report by Material, Application, and Geography Global Forecast to 2021 is a professional and in-depth research report on the world's major regional market conditions, focusing on the main regions (North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific) and the main countries (United States, Germany, United Kingdom, Japan, South Korea and China).The report firstly introduced the Home Healthcare Equipment basics: definitions, classifications, applications and market overview; product specifications; manufacturing processes; cost structures, raw materials and so on. Then it analyzed the world's main region market conditions, including the product price, profit, capacity, production, supply, demand and market growth rate and forecast etc. In the end, the report introduced new project SWOT analysis, investment feasibility analysis, and investment return analysis.The report includes six parts, dealing with:1.) basic information;2.) the Asia Home Healthcare Equipment Market;3.) the North American Home Healthcare Equipment Market;4.) the European Home Healthcare Equipment Market;5.) market entry and investment feasibility;6.) the report conclusion.To Get Sample Copy of Report visit @Table of ContentsPart I Home Healthcare Equipment Industry OverviewChapter One Home Healthcare Equipment Industry Overview1.1 Home Healthcare Equipment Definition1.2 Home Healthcare Equipment Classification Analysis1.2.1 Home Healthcare Equipment Main Classification Analysis1.2.2 Home Healthcare Equipment Main Classification Share Analysis1.3 Home Healthcare Equipment Application Analysis1.3.1 Home Healthcare Equipment Main Application Analysis1.3.2 Home Healthcare Equipment Main Application Share Analysis1.4 Home Healthcare Equipment Industry Chain Structure Analysis1.5 Home Healthcare Equipment Industry Development Overview1.5.1 Home Healthcare Equipment Product History Development Overview1.5.1 Home Healthcare Equipment Product Market Development Overview1.6 Home Healthcare Equipment Global Market Analysis1.6.1 Home Healthcare Equipment Global Import Market Analysis1.6.2 Home Healthcare Equipment Global Export Market Analysis1.6.3 Home Healthcare Equipment Global Main Region Market Analysis1.6.4 Home Healthcare Equipment Global Market Analysis1.6.5 Home Healthcare Equipment Global Market Development Trend AnalysisBrowse TOC @Chapter Two Home Healthcare Equipment Up and Down Stream Industry Analysis2.1 Upstream Raw Materials Analysis2.1.1 Upstream Raw Materials Price Analysis2.1.2 Upstream Raw Materials Market Analysis2.1.3 Upstream Raw Materials Market Trend2.2 Down Stream Market AnalysisAbout ResearchMozResearchMoz is the one stop online destination to find and buy market research reports & Industry Analysis. We fulfill all your research needs spanning across industry verticals with our huge collection of market research reports. We provide our services to all sizes of organizations and across all industry verticals and markets. Our Research Coordinators have in-depth knowledge of reports as well as publishers and will assist you in making an informed decision by giving you unbiased and deep insights on which reports will satisfy your needs at the best price.Mr. NachiketState Tower,90 State Street,Suite 700,Albany NY - 12207United StatesEmail: sales@researchmoz.usWebsite @Tel: 866-997-4948 (Us-Canada Toll Free)Tel: +1-518-621-2074Follow us on LinkedIn @Follow us on Blogger @ Latest Industrial Robotics Market Trends, Development and Key Manufacturers Forecast Report 2018-2025 ReportsWeb http://www.reportsweb.com/inquiry&RW00011062336/sample http://www.reportsweb.com/industrial-robotics-market The market for industrial robotics is at its growing phase in certain countries and at infant stage in some developing countries. The market is further expected to flourish with increasing government support for automation in industries including, industrial robotics across the globe. Global industrial robotics market is expected to grow from US$ 16,847.6 million in 2017 to US$ 48,166.9 million by 2025 at a CAGR of 14.2% between 2018 and 2025. One of the key factor propelling the market growth for industrial robotics is constantly aging population of several countries worldwide resulting in increasing labor costs. As per WHO, approximately 2 Bn people globally are anticipated to be more than 60 years old by 2050, which is over triple of what it was in 2000. Diminishing fertility rates and longer lifespans are the major factors contributing to this growth. Further, increasing support from governments is also bolstering the growth of the market. For instance, Chinese government announced a five-year 'Robotics Industry Development Plan' for the expansion of China's industrial robotics sector. The government is offering considerable subsidies and tax breaks for industrial automation.Request Sample Copy is Available atGlobal Industrial Robotics Market Players:ABB Ltd.Kawasaki Heavy Industries, Ltd.Yaskawa Electric CorporationFanuc CorporationKuka AGMitsubishi Electric CorporationDenso CorporationNachi-Fujikoshi Corp.Comau S.P.A.Universal Robots A/SThe report focuses on an in-depth segmentation of this market based by types, function and industry. The geographic segmentation of the report covers five major regions including; North Americas, Europe, Asia-Pacific (APAC), Middle East and Africa (MEA) and South America (SA). The regional market has been further bifurcated by respective countries. By industry segment, automotive sector accounted for the largest share of the industrial robotics market in 2017; whereas APAC region is expected to grow at the highest CAGR during the forecast period.The report aims to provide an overview of global industrial robotics market with detailed market segmentation. Also, it analyzes the current industrial robotics market scenario and forecasts the market till 2025. The report covers market dynamics effecting the market during the forecast period. Furthermore, the report analyzes the competitive scenario, geographic trends, and opportunities in the markets with respect to all geographic regions. The report also includes the detailed company profiles of the key players in the market along with their market strategies and SWOT analysis. The report also provides detailed PEST analysis for the major geographic regions such as North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, Middle East & Africa and South America.Complete Report is Available atAPAC is one of the prominent regions in industrial robotics market which is contributing highest revenue globally due to rapidly growing manufacturing sector of the region and increasing competition demanding for better productivity and efficiency. Rapidly growing economies in Asia-Pacific (APAC) with significant growth manufacturing will pave the path for increasing adoption and propel the market for industrial robotics. Also, the APAC region is expected to grow with highest CAGR during the forecast period, with China contributing the major share. Furthermore, Europe region is also experiencing a significant growth attributed to the presence of significant automotive manufacturing industry. Also, the U.S. and Mexico are witnessing significant growth in adoption of industrial robotics. Some of the major players operating in the global industrial robotics market includes ABB Ltd., Kawasaki Heavy Industries, Ltd., Yaskawa Electric Corporation, Fanuc Corporation, Kuka AG, Mitsubishi Electric Corporation, Denso Corporation, Comau SpA, Nachi-Fujikoshi Corp. and Universal Robots A/S among others.About ReportsWeb:ReportsWeb is a one stop shop of market research reports and solutions to various companies across the globe. We help our clients in their decision support system by helping them choose most relevant and cost effective research reports and solutions from various publishers.Contact Us:Phone: +1-646-491-9876Email Id: sales@reportsweb.com Commodity risk management course Hedging Strategies to Protect Price Risk and GAFTA contracts http://www.ukragroconsult.com/bsg/2018/en/conference www.ukragroconsult.com, www.blackseagrain.net Hedging Strategies to Protect Price Risk and GAFTA contractsBeginner-IntermediateWithin XV international conference BLACK SEA GRAIN-2018Date: April 17, 2018Place: InterContinental hotelWhy attend?Commodity risk management is a topic well discussed in the Black Sea Region. Some companies are proactive with this, while others continue to learn the process. The purpose of this course is to dig deeper into the strategies commercial firms can use to protect their price risk.This course is more for beginner to intermediate level understanding and will go into futures, options, and OTC strategies that can be utilized for Black Sea participants. We will also fully discuss the new CME PLATTS contracts available for use to manage Black Sea Price risk.GAFTA contracts are the main instruments of trade in grains in Black Sea region.The course is aimed to increase the level of expertise in crucial issues related to the execution of GAFTA contracts starting from the date of signing until payment is received. The workshop provides a detailed analysis of the most common mistakes of the parties, the consequences of non-fulfillment of the contract, as well as dispute resolution, considering peculiarities of trade in Black Sea region market. During this course, participants will receive answers to numerous practical issues, which they face in their everyday work with contracts.AGENDA:8:30-9:00 Registration&Coffee9:00 Futures/Hedge Basics-Concepts10:00 GAFTA contracts formation and fulfilment11:30 Options: Terminology and Concepts/ Pricing and Delta/ Love to lose Application/Common strategies13:00-14:00 Lunch14-00 Over-the-counter (OTC derivative markets)15:00 GAFTA default and damages16:00 Coffee16:30 Black Sea Contracts- PLATTS- further introduction and trading applications16:30 GAFTA Case Study17:30-18:00 Market Outlook - closing thoughtsSPEAKERS:Matt AmmermannVice President, Eastern Europe/Black Sea Region, INTLFCStone Financial Inc- FCM DivisionRichard JelinekVice President Global Education, INTLFCStone Financial IncIvan KasynyukPartner, Head of international arbitration & trade practice in, AGA Partners law firmParticipation fee: 90 REGISTRATION Hedging Strategies to Protect Price Risk and GAFTA contracts -For additional information please contact: conference@ukragroconsult.orgmatt.ammermann@intlfcstone.comUkrAgroConsultConsulting agency "UkrAgroConsult" - an independent company, founded in 1994, which provides accurate timely information on agricultural market of Ukraine and Black Sea region countries. UkrAgroConsult offers a wide range of services, including market studies, business analysis and investment consulting of the following agri markets: grains and derived products, oilseeds and derived products, meat, milk, sugar, and inputs market (seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, agricultural technology and machines), elevator equipment, logistics."UkrAgroConsult" is the organizer of the following annual international conferences: "Black Sea Grain", "Black Sea Oil Trade", as well as other events that contribute to the development of the agrarian sector of Ukraine.Company internet resources:Timoshenko 29v of.5 Kyiv Ukraine Airport IT Systems Market 2018 Key Players: RESA AIRPORT DATA SYSTEMS, Amadeus IT Group SA , Ultra Electronics Holdings, Northrop Grumman Corporation https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/sample_request/3858 https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/airport-it-systems-market-3858 MarketResearchFuture Publish a New Market Research Report On Airport IT Systems 2018 : Discovers the Opportunities, Trends, Risk, Simulation, Management to 2021.Description:Airport IT Systems-Global Market Status and Trend Report 2018-2021 offers a comprehensive analysis on Airport IT Systems industry, standing on the readers perspective, delivering detailed market data and penetrating insights. No matter the client is industry insider, potential entrant or investor, the report will provides useful data and information.In a nutshell, the Airport IT System plays a vital role in flawless airport operations management, which makes it an ideal and essential component for the airports worldwide. This acting as the key factor along with the increasing number of airports globally propels its market growth further escorting it to ascended heights on the global platform.Request a Sample Report @Key PlayersThe key players of global airport IT systems market are RESA AIRPORT DATA SYSTEMS (France), Amadeus IT Group SA (Spain), Rockwell Collins (US), INFORM GmbH (Germany), and Siemens AG (Germany). Other companies that are operating in this market are IBM (US), Ultra Electronics Holdings (UK), Northrop Grumman Corporation (US), SITA (Geneva), Thales Group (France) and IKUSI (Spain).The Market of Airport IT Systems Market appears to be highly competitive owing to the presence of numerous well-established players having international and global presence. Innovation, mergers & acquisitions, and brand reinforcement remain the key trends for the leading players. These key players compete based upon pricing, reputation and services. Vendors strive to develop the Airport Operations Management Systems solution that delivers a suite of application offerings to help address the information system needs of airports. Using time-tested methodologies and best practices, key players try to bring together disparate point systems from multiple providers into a security-rich, integrated environment that addresses resource planning, passenger experience and asset management.Industry/Innovation/Related News:January 29, 2018 The new Muscat International Airport (Oman) announced that it is all set to undergo readiness tests focusing on the remarks on the passenger traffic and systems used for passenger check-in or boarding, security systems, and luggage handling as these systems are very important in taking corrective measures to ensure smooth operations at the airport.July 24, 2017 SEA, ((Societa Esercizi Aeroportuali) is the Group that manages the Italian airports and IBM announced a seven-year service agreement to consolidate and manage SEAs IT infrastructure on a hybrid IT environment that integrates the IBM Cloud.Get a Complete Report @Airport IT Systems Global Market SegmentsFor the Better understanding of this report the Global Airport IT Systems Market has been segmented in to 3 key dynamics.Segmentation By Function : Comprises Airport Operation Control Centre, Departure Control SystemSegmentation By Software : Comprises Non Passenger System, Passenger SystemSegmentation By Regions : Comprises Geographical regions - North America, Europe, APAC and Rest of the World.About Market Research Future:At Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.MRFR team have supreme objective to provide the optimum quality market research and intelligence services to our clients. Our market research studies by products, services, technologies, applications, end users, and market players for global, regional, and country level market segments, enable our clients to see more, know more, and do more, which help to answer all their most important questions.Contact:Market Research Future+1 646 845 9312Email: sales@marketresearchfuture.com US & Global Pediatric Medical Device Market - Major Venders: are Abbott Nutrition, GE Healthcare, Phillips Healthcare, Novamed USA,, etc. - 2027 Market Research Future - MRFR https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/sample_request/769 https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/global-pediatric-medical-device-market-769 https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/check-discount/769 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:The, Pediatric Medical Device Market inquire about report is developing with the quick pace; chiefly due the prospering Healthcare Sector. As per a current report distributed by the Market Research Future, The , Pediatric Medical Device Industry Research report is blasting and anticipated that would pick up unmistakable quality over the conjecture time frame. The Market is anticipated to exhibit a colossal development by 2027, outperforming its past development records as far as esteem and volume.TRY FREE SAMPLE REPORT @The US & Global Pediatric Medical Device Market: OverviewPediatrics is one of the popular branches of medicine which deals with the health, treatment and medical care of infants, children and adolescents. A doctor who deals with the treatment of pediatrics is known as pediatrician. The Pediatrics can be classified into:Neonates: from birth till the first 28 days of lifeInfants: 29 days to 2 yearsChildren: 2 years to 12 yearsAdolescents: 12 years to 18 yearsThe Pediatric Medical Devices are such devices which are used in the treatment and care for the infants and children below 18 years having some healthcare issues. Many of the pediatric medical devices are especially designed and developed for children, but in some of the cases the adult devices are used. The designing of the pediatric medical devices can be a challenging tasks for the manufacturers because the new born and infants are much more active than adults along with their body structure. Considering this factor, there are several pediatric medical devices available for the proper care for the sick babies for various diseases.The US & Global Pediatric Medical Device Market: ApplicationsThe pediatric medical devices are mostly used in the hospitals, specialized baby clinics and others. The several pediatric medical devices which are used in the treatment for infants and children are infant caps, infant incubators, bililights, newborn hearing screener, cranial orthosis, infant warmer and others. This all pediatrics are used by the pediatrician in some of the condition among infants such as infections, injuries, genetic and congenital conditions, organ diseases and dysfunctions, cancer and other several diseases.The US & Global Pediatric Medical Device Market: Market Growth InfluencerThe global pediatric medical device market will be driven the market because of increase in the incidences of premature birth and new and innovative technological development in the pediatric medical equipment and devices. Due to this scenario, the US & global pediatric medical devices market is possibly expected to gain a healthy and a strong growth rate in the forecasted year 2016-2027. The other major factors which are influencing the market growth for the US & global pediatric medical devices market are the increasing in the awareness devices related to the diagnoses of baby care, increasing in the healthcare expenditure along with the growing disposable income and the new and updated technological advancements in the pediatric medical devices are pushing The US & Global Pediatric Medical Device Market. On the other hand, the high competitions among the existing key players are acting as an inhibitor in the US & global pediatric medical device market. In the US and other developed and developing economies, the existing government has proposed and initiated to reduce the birth rate to control the population which has radically pulling down the pediatric medical devices market and particularly in the US, because of the incidence of the Zika Virus, the central government and federal health officials has advised and recommended women not to become pregnant. This is one of the major key challenge can be faced by the manufactures of Pediatric Medical Devices.The US & Global Pediatric Medical Device Market: Market SegmentationFor the purpose of this study, MRFR has segmented the US & global pediatric medical device market into devices types, applications and end users. The devices types are segmented into infant caps, infant incubators, bililights, newborn hearing screener, cranial orthosis, infant warmer and others. The application segment is divided into hospitals, clinics and others. The end users segmented in divided into doctors, pediatrician and others.The US & Global Pediatric Medical Device Market: Regional AnalysisThe US: Technological advancements, rising life styles, growing population, growing disposable income, increasing healthcare expenditure and rising awareness of pediatric medical devices has propelled the pediatric medical market helped the US market to be on the top on the list. Apart from this, the large number of baby hospitals, huge infrastructure, professional and skilled doctors has also pushed and driving the pediatric medical market. But the manufacturers may have to face restraints due to the spreading of Zika Virus. Due to this, the government has recommended women not to become pregnant to avoid the infection of Zika Virus to new born babies.India: In Asia-Pacific, India is one of the biggest markets for pediatric medical devices due to the increasing incidences of premature birth and mature birth. And a large pool of infants and children are still undiagnosed with the proper treatment. Along with this, increasing awareness, growing disposable income and governments initiative in investing in the healthcare sector.Middle East & Africa: Capturing the MEA market will become a huge opportunity for the pediatric device manufacturers due to the large number of malnutrition birth rate, increasing infections, government initiative and other several factors.The US & Global Pediatric Medical Device Market: Key PlayersThe existing and prominent key players present in the The US & Global Pediatric Medical Device Market are Abbott Nutrition, GE Healthcare, Phillips Healthcare, Novamed USA, Narang Medical Limited, Phoenix Medical Systems, Pega Medical, Johnson & Johnson, Medtronic and among others.Market Research Future introduces about The US & Global Paediatric Medical Device Market during the forecast period 2017-2027 which mainly includes the growth drivers, trends and restraints and how the market will grow in the future across the globe. In this report, Market Research Future has focused on the current market scenario which includes market segmentation, market dynamics, and competitive landscape along with company profiles.The reports also covers brief analysis of Geographical Region includes:Americas- North America (US, Canada)- Latin America (Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Rest of LATAM)Europe- Western Europe (Germany, France, Italy, Spain, U.K, Rest of Western Europe)- Eastern Europe (Poland, Russia)Asia Pacific- Asia (China, India, Japan, South Korea, Rest of Asia)- Pacific Countries (Australia, New Zealand)ACCESS FULL REPORT @Middle East & Africa- Middle East (Saudi, Qatar, UAE)- Rest of Middle East (Africa, South Africa, Rest of Africa)Every report of Market Research Future comprises of extensive primary research along with the detailed analysis of qualitative as well as quantitative aspects by various industry experts, key opinion leaders to gain the deeper insight of the market and industry performance. The report gives the clear picture of current market scenario which includes historical and projected market size in terms of value and volume, technological advancement, macro economical and governing factors in the market. The report also gives a broad study of the different market segments and regions.Table Of Contents:CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION1.1 DEFINITION1.2 SCOPE OF STUDY1.2.1 RESEARCH OBJECTIVE1.2.2 ASSUMPTIONS & LIMITATIONS1.2.2.1 ASSUMPTIONS1.2.2.2 LIMITATIONS1.3 MARKET STRUCTURE:CHAPTER 2. RESEARCH METHODOLOGY2.1 RESEARCH PROCESS:2.2 PRIMARY RESEARCH2.3 SECONDARY RESEARCH:CHAPTER 3. MARKET DYNAMICS3.1 DRIVERS3.2 RESTRAINTS3.3 OPPORTUNITIES3.4 MACROECONOMIC INDICATORSCHAPTER 4. MARKET FACTOR ANALYSIS4.1 PORTERS FIVE FORCES MODEL4.2 BARGAINING POWER OF SUPPLIERS4.3 BARGAINING POWER OF BUYERS4.4 THREAT OF NEW ENTRANTS4.5 THREAT OF SUBSTITUTES4.6 INTENSITY OF RIVALRYCHAPTER 5. US & GLOBAL PEDIATRIC MEDICAL DEVICE MARKET, BY TYPE5.1 INFANT CAPS5.2 NEWBORN HEARING SCREENER5.3 CRANIAL ORTHOSIS5.4 INFANT WARMER5.5 INCUBATORS BILIGHTSCONTINUEDAVAIL AMAZING DISCOUNT ON REPPRT @About Market Research Future:At Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.In order to stay updated with technology and work process of the industry, MRFR often plans & conducts meet with the industry experts and industrial visits for its research analyst members.Contact:Market Research FutureOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, Hadapsar,Pune 411028Maharashtra, India+1 646 845 9312Email: salesteam@marketresearchfuture.com Neutropenia - Companies Involved in Therapeutics Development are Arven Ilac, Lupin Ltd, amd Merck & Co Inc Neutropenia https://www.wiseguyreports.com/sample-request/2319063-neutropenia-pipeline-review-h2-2017 https://www.wiseguyreports.com/reports/2319063-neutropenia-pipeline-review-h2-2017 WiseGuyReports.com with their unique quality of simplifying the market research study, presents a deep diving study report Neutropenia - Pipeline Review, H2 2017NeutropeniaOverviewNeutropenia is an abnormally low count of neutrophils, a type of white blood cell that helps fight off infections, particularly those caused by bacteria and fungi. Signs and symptoms include fevers, frequent infections, mouth ulcers, gum infections and dysuria.Click here for sample report @Top Companies mentionedArven IlacLupin LtdMerck & Co IncMycenax Biotech IncProlong Pharmaceuticals LLCRichter Gedeon NyrtNeutropenia Industry Major OutlookPharmaceutical and Healthcare latest pipeline guide Neutropenia - Pipeline Review, H1 2018, provides comprehensive information on the therapeutics under development for Neutropenia , complete with analysis by stage of development, drug target, mechanism of action (MoA), route of administration (RoA) and molecule type. The guide covers the descriptive pharmacological action of the therapeutics, its complete research and development history and latest news and press releases.The Neutropenia (Hematological Disorders) pipeline guide also reviews of key players involved in therapeutic development for Neutropenia and features dormant and discontinued projects. The guide covers therapeutics under Development by Companies /Universities /Institutes, the molecules developed by Companies in Pre-Registration, Filing rejected/Withdrawn, Phase III, Phase II, Phase I, Preclinical and Unknown stages are 4, 2, 2, 4, 6, 9 and 3 respectively.Neutropenia pipeline guide helps in identifying and tracking emerging players in the market and their portfolios, enhances decision making capabilities and helps to create effective counter strategies to gain competitive advantage.Neutropenia - Competitive AnalysisKey players are making innovative developments in Neutropenia industry. The same will help in improving the market performance. Heavy investments are made by major players in the R&D sectorScopeThe pipeline guide provides a snapshot of the global therapeutic landscape of Neutropenia.The pipeline guide reviews pipeline therapeutics for Neutropenia by companies and universities/research institutes based on information derived from company and industry-specific sources.The pipeline guide covers pipeline products based on several stages of development ranging from pre-registration till discovery and undisclosed stages.The pipeline guide features descriptive drug profiles for the pipeline products which comprise, product description, descriptive licensing and collaboration details, R&D brief, MoA & other developmental activities.The pipeline guide reviews key companies involved in Neutropenia therapeutics and enlists all their major and minor projects.The pipeline guide evaluates Neutropenia therapeutics based on mechanism of action (MoA), drug target, route of administration (RoA) and molecule type.The pipeline guide encapsulates all the dormant and discontinued pipeline projects.The pipeline guide reviews latest news related to pipeline therapeutics for Neutropenia..ContinuedFor Detailed Reading Please visit @Wise Guy Reports understand how essential statistical surveying information is for your organization or association. Therefore, we have associated with the top publishers and research firms all specialized in specific domains, ensuring you will receive the most reliable and up to date research data available. We also provide COTS (Commercial off the Shelf) business sector reports as custom exploration agreeing your particular needs.WISEGUY RESEARCH CONSULTANTS PVT LTDOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersPune - 411028Maharashtra, India Small UAV Market 2018 Key Players: Israel Aerospace Industries Ltd., SAAB, Thales, Lockheed Marti and Aeronautics LTD https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/sample_request/1136 https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/small-uav-market MarketResearchFuture Publish a New Market Research Report On Small UAV 2018 : Discovers the Opportunities, Trends, Risk, Simulation, Management to 2021.Description:Small UAV -Global Market Status and Trend Report 2018-2021 offers a comprehensive analysis on Small UAV industry, standing on the readers perspective, delivering detailed market data and penetrating insights. No matter the client is industry insider, potential entrant or investor, the report will provides useful data and information.The global small UAV market is expected to reach billion by 2021, to grow at a CAGR of around 7%. Small UAVs can mainly be classified as mini-UAV and micro-UAV. They are small enough to be carried and operated by a single person. During military operations, they can be launched as a portable air-defense system by infantrymen. The development of small UAVs mainly began in 1997, with Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA's) multi-year USD 35 million project to develop micro air vehicles (MAVs).As a part of the effort, and in collaboration with companies such as Lockheed Martin and Aerovironment, multiple micro UAVs were designed and developed. The relevance and cost-effective operation of these micro UAVs (mainly for military applications) led to its increased utilization and demand.Request a Sample Report @The cost effectiveness and ease to acquire and operate these small UAVs in comparison to manned aircraft (and other larger UAVs) have led to the increase in demand from multiple segments such as military, industries, agriculture, and real estate. As of 2015, small UAVs are still largely being used by military in conflict regions throughout the world. However, the market growth rate for civil-commercial segment is much higher.Major Key PlayersThe leading market players in the global small UAV market primarily include AeroVironment, Elbit Systems, Israel Aerospace Industries Ltd., SAAB, Thales, Lockheed Martin, Aeronautics Limited, and Northrop GrummanThe global Small UAV Market is expected to reach billion by 2021, to grow at a CAGR of around 7%.Industry/ Innovation/ Related News:September 19, 2017:- AeroVironment, announced that it has delivered M1/M2/M5-compatible Raven and Puma AE unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) to two DoD customers, with more orders and deliveries scheduled. In addition, the company will begin taking orders in December 2017 for M1/M2/M5-configured Wasp AE micro air vehicles (MAV) for delivery in spring 2018.June 1, 2017 - Aero Vironment announced the selection of the Wasp AE small unmanned aircraft system by the Australian Defence Force (ADF). The ADF Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity (ID/IQ) contract calls for the delivery of Wasp AE systems over a three-year period, as well as training and logistics support for up to ten years, for a total AeroVironment contract value of up to USD 36.5 million.January 13, 2016:- Saab will deliver three UAV systems to the Swedish Police. Each system comprises air vehicles equipped with day/night sensors and a ground station, plus spare parts, consumables, documentation, training and technical support. The contract will be in effect from 2016 to 2018.September 16, 2015:- Thaless new modular Watchkeeper X system reflects a growing need for high-end military-standard Intelligence, Surveillance, Target Acquisition and Reconnaissance (ISTAR) capability to wider markets. This modular Unmanned Aircraft System offers a range of options that can be adapted to specific operational resquirements. The versatile system is ideal for providing high-performance ISTAR over a wide range of air, land and maritime scenarios but can now also provide covert, rapid reaction to threats if required. Thales aims to deliver Watchkeeper X through collaboration with local industries and partnerships. This unique approach to unmanned aircrafts systems means that Thales can help to build a truly sovereign capability for our customersBrowse Full report @About Market Research Future:At Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.Contact:Market Research Future+1 646 845 9312Email: sales@marketresearchfuture.com The United Kingdom has warned of a threat of attacks by Islamists on foreigners in South Africa following the kidnapping of two British nationals. According to a statement posted on its website, Britains Foreign Office said the main threat was from Islamic State. The British couple, who live in Cape Town and have dual British and South African citizenship, was kidnapped on Feb. 12 near the Bivane dam in the small town of Vryheid. The Foreign Offices advisory posted on Thursday cautions travelers about ongoing terror threats from the Islamic State group in South Africa. It said terrorists were likely to try to carry out attacks in shopping areas in major cities and recalled that news reports suggest that a number of South African nationals had travelled to Syria, Iraq and Libya and were likely to pose a security threat. South African police said a ransom has not been demanded, and investigations have not revealed so far any links to terrorists. No attack followed a similar warning by Britain and the United States in June 2016. The southern African nation has so far been safe from jihadist attacks. Advanced Composites Market Key Developments Factors, Revenue Generation Model & Business Segment Overview to 2023 Advanced Composites https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/sample_request/4678 https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/advanced-composites-market-4678 Global Advanced Composites Market 2018 to 2023 focus on business Intelligence for revenue-generating processes, market research future illustrated some of the typical ways that is used to improve key revenue generation processes. Fundamentally, Advanced Composites market analysis, new technology, scope, stake, progress, trends and opportunities are about using detailed and specific business information about client.Advanced Composites Market- Top 10 Global key Players & Their StrategySome of the prominent players functioning in the Global Advanced Composites Market: The 3M company (U.S.A.),Axalta Coating Systems, LLC (U.S.A.), PPG industries (U.S.A.), TEIJIN LIMITED (Japan), Koninklijke Ten Cate bv (the Netherlands), Hexcel Corporation( U.S.A.), Toyota Motor Corporation( Japan), Cytec Solvay Group( U.S.A.), Hexcel Corporation( U.S.A.),among others.Get your sample copy of Advanced Composites Market atGlobal Advanced Composites Market research report spread across 135 Pages consist 45 Tables and 11 Figures also include Top 10 Global key players that sharing latest types, technology, application by 2023.Advanced Composites Market Market Overview / Study Objective / SynopsisAdvanced composites are a combination of polymer materials inserted in a resin matrix. They are also called polymer matrix composites. They are known for their extraordinary strength, mechanical resistance, stiffness and modulus of elasticity. Excellent dimensional ability, thermal conductivity, lightweight and electrical properties are the important trends and factors promoting the market confidently. It is projected that the Advanced Composites Market is set to grow at a higher CAGR owing to its growing demand observed in end use industries such as oil & gas, buildings and construction, automotive, aerospace, electronics, marine, and others.Advanced Composites Market Competitive AnalysisAs per our Market Analysis, the Advanced Composites Market is segregated into type and application. The market by type is further categorized into thermoset and thermoplastic resins. Of these, thermoset resins are further sub-divided into epoxy, polyurethanes, phenolic and amino resins. Thermoset resins are formed by curing reaction that occurs at 200 degrees celsius. Once thermoset resins are formed, they cant be remolded or reshaped.For Technical and Professional Details Book Complete Advanced Composites Market Report atAdvanced Composites Market Segmentation AnalysisThe Global Advanced Composites Market is segmented into resin type and application. On the basis of resin type, the market is classified into thermoset and thermoplastic. Among these, thermoset segment is estimated to hold the major share in the market owing to its excellent stiffness, light weight and durability features. Thermoset segment is further sub-divided into epoxy resins, polyurethanes, phenolic and amino resins. It is predicted that epoxy resin segment is set to grow at a higher CAGR due to its growing consumption in end use industries. Applications segment further differentiated into aerospace, transport, electronics, sports, energy, construction and others. Among these, aerospace is projected to be the major segment in this market.Advanced Composites Market Regional AnalysisThe Advanced Composites Market is segregated into five key regions namely Asia Pacific, North America, Europe, Latin America and the Middle East & Africa. Among these, Asia Pacific is projected to hold the major share in the market due to growing production of thermoset resins in major end industries such as buildings and construction, automobile, sports, and others. Countries such as China, Japan and India have become apparent as the leading players in this region. The growing demand from the major industries has propelled Advanced Composites Market to witness a higher CAGR during the forecast period, 2017-2023.About Market Research Future:At Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our (CRR), (HCRR), (3R), (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services. MRFR team have supreme objective to provide the optimum quality market research and intelligence services to our clients. Our market research studies by products, services, technologies, applications, end users, and market players for global, regional, and country level market segments, enable our clients to see more, know more, and do more, which help to answer all their most important questions.Contact Us:Market Research Future+1 646 845 9312Email: sales@marketresearchfuture.com Ticagrelor Market 2018 - Major Participants: are Eli Lilly, Boehringer, Ingelheim, Pfizer, Amgen, Merck, Roche, GSK etc. Market Research Future - MRFR https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/sample_request/820 https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/ticagrelor-market-820 https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/check-discount/820 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:The, Ticagrelor Market inquire about report is developing with the quick pace; chiefly due the prospering Healthcare Sector. As per a current report distributed by the Market Research Future, The , Ticagrelor Industry Research report is blasting and anticipated that would pick up unmistakable quality over the conjecture time frame. The Market is anticipated to exhibit a colossal development by 2027, outperforming its past development records as far as esteem and volumeTRY FREE SAMPLE REPORT @Global Ticagrelor Market - Key Players:Eli Lilly, Boehringer, Ingelheim, Pfizer, Amgen, Merck, Roche, GSK, Alexion, Boehringer, Ingelheim Pfizer, AmgenGlobal Ticagrelor Market - Regional Analysis:The global market is segmented into the various regions including Americas, Europe, Asia Pacific, and the Middle East & Africa. The Americas accounts for the largest market share of about more than ~40% of the market share due to extensive use product by the patients discharged from hospitals in the regions, major manufacturers developing the product in the region.Europe is the second largest market of Ticagrelor followed by Asia Pacific. However Asia Pacific market is expected to grow at the fastest growth rate due to awareness of ticagrelor, Asia Pacific accounting for more than 60% of the global population and increasing cardiovascular patients. Particularly, India and China are anticipated to be a growing and the fastest growing market. Many major players seeking opportunity and expand their presence in this region influencing the growth of the market.The Middle East & Africa holds the least share in the ticagrelor market due to lack of awareness, less market access scenarios activities, and poor medical facilities.Global Ticagrelor Market - Overview:Ticagrelor is an antiplatelet drug which is a member of a section of pharmaceuticals which tackle the problem of platelet aggression. The global ticagrelor market is expected to grow at a healthy growth rate during the forecast period 2017-2027. The major factors influencing the growth of the market include high patient pool suffering from heart problems, increasing development in the product by the companies, commercialization and improving market access scenarios and funding for research and development by the market players and many others. Moreover there is a huge opportunity in developing countries that is grabbed by various market players for expanding their presence in the region. The market is forecasted to demonstrate a double digit growth by 2027, surpassing its previous growth records in terms of value with a striking CAGR during the anticipated period 2017 2027.ACCESS FULL REPORT @Global Ticagrelor Market - Competitive Analysis:AstraZeneca, Eli Lilly, Boehringer, Ingelheim, Pfizer, Amgen, Merck, Roche, GSK, Alexion, Boehringer, Ingelheim Pfizer, Amgen are some of the prominent players at the forefront of competition in the Global Ticagrelor Market and are profiled in MRFR Analysis.Characterized by the presence of several well-established and small players, the global market of Ticagrelor appears to be highly competitive and fragmented. With well-established market in the North America region major companies like AstraZeneca Eli Lilly, Pfizer, GSK, Pfizer, Amgen and various others have their home in the region and generate maximum market share. These companies have expanded their operating unit in various other emerging regions as well. Moreover the other small and medium scale players are generating revenue from local market.There has been increasing development in the product and commercialization of the product. AstraZenecas a Swedish multinational pharma and biotech involved in the production since the beginning. Brilinta the companys product in 2016 generated a sales of about $ 839 million. The product perceived 45% year on year (YoY) revenue growth in the United States and about 15% year on year increase in sales in the European market. The increase in the product revenue is majorly due to changes in the brand name of the competitor product as well as growing use of Brilinta by patients discharged from hospitals in European region. More over the development in Brilinta with the launch of 60-mg version of Brilinta, which in 2016 accounted for 10% of the total prescriptions of the drug in the United States. This development and improving market access for the product is expected to increase the growth of the revenue in 2017 as well. It is expected that the product Brilinta by AstraZeneca to exceed the $ 1.0 billion sales in 2017 and turn out to be a blockbuster therapy.AstraZeneca furthermore concentrating on commercialization of the product in order to increase product availability across the globe. AstraZeneca announced the collaboration of Sun Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd., according to the agreement the company Sun Phrma agreed to distribute AstraZenecas new brand of ticagrelor Axcer in India. Sun Pharma is and India's top pharmaceutical company and the world's 5th largest specialty generic pharmaceutical company. This collaboration will authorize AstraZeneca to enhance usage of this molecule through wide reach to doctors and thereby helping a greater number of ACS patients.Global Ticagrelor Market - Segments:The global tricagrelor market can be segmented on the bases of End users- Clinics, Hospitals, Medical institutionsCONTINUEDAVAIL AMAZING DISCOUNT ON REPPRT @About Market Research Future:At Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.In order to stay updated with technology and work process of the industry, MRFR often plans & conducts meet with the industry experts and industrial visits for its research analyst members.Contact:Market Research FutureOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, Hadapsar,Pune 411028Maharashtra, India+1 646 845 9312Email: salesteam@marketresearchfuture.com Aerostat Systems Market 2018 Key Players: https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/sample_request/1302 https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/aerostat-systems-market MarketResearchFuture Publish a New Market Research Report On Aerostat Systems 2018 : Discovers the Opportunities, Trends, Risk, Simulation, Management to 2021.Description:Aerostat Systems -Global Market Status and Trend Report 2018-2021 offers a comprehensive analysis on Aerostat Systems industry, standing on the readers perspective, delivering detailed market data and penetrating insights. No matter the client is industry insider, potential entrant or investor, the report will provides useful data and information.An aerostat is a platform which utilizes lighter than air gases such as hydrogen, helium and hot air gases. These gases help the aerostat to produce lift with the same overall as air. Aerostats include powered airships and unpowered balloons. These balloons are tethered to the ground. The components of aerostat include light weight skin which comprises of helium gas to provide payload, buoyancy and ground station. Aerostat are used for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance by military forces and also in civilian observation.Aerostat has wide range of applications in the commercial and military forces. The operating cost associated with aerostat is low when compared with unmanned aerial systems which are expensive and have limited endurance. Aerostat requires less crew for its operation and also the maintenance is low because it has less mechanical parts. The versatility of applications provided by aerostat is producing the demand for persistent ISR and also for the homeland security which is driving the market.Request a Sample Report @Major Key PlayersSome of the key players in the Aerostat Systems Market are AUGUR-RosAeroSystems, Raven Industries Inc., Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Exelis Inc., Allsopp Helikites Ltd., ILC Dover, L.P., Israel Aerospace Industries, Lindstrand Technologies Limited, and Drone AviationGlobal Aerostat Systems Market is expected to grow at a CAGR of around 13% during 2016-2021. The factors behind such significant growth are growing demand of surveillance and intelligence from military and homeland security agencies.Industry/ Innovation/ Related News:July 23, 2015: Reliance Unmanned Systems has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Augur Overseas Operation of Singapore to manufacture Aerostats and Airships in India.June 1, 2015 Raven Industries has been awarded a firm-fixed price (FFP) contract through the Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division Lakehurst, N.J. for the procurement of Exportable Persistent Ground Surveillance Systems (EPGSS), spare equipment and technical support. The tethered aerostat contract was awarded for approximately $6 million and is expected to be delivered over the next 12 months.June 2015: AUGUR-RosAeroSystems announces to build lighter-than-air military airships capable of carrying 200 personnel and travelling up to 105 mph without the need for a runawayBrowse Full Report @About Market Research Future:At Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting ServicesContact:Market Research Future+1 646 845 9312Email: sales@marketresearchfuture.com Global White Spirits Market Expected to Grow to US$ 8,103.2 Mn by the end of 2025 https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/samples/4544 https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/market-research/white-spirit-market/toc https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/market-research/white-spirit-market.asp White Spirits Market: Global Industry Analysis (2012-2016) and Forecast (2017-2025), a new report published by Persistence Market Research, tracks the performance of the global white spirits market for a projected period of eight years, i.e. between 2017 and 2025. According to this report, in terms of value, the global white spirits market is expected to expand at a CAGR of 4.2% during the assessed period.This market is estimated to be valued at US$ 5,832.3 Mn by 2017 end and reach US$ 8,103.2 Mn by the end of 2025. The steady growth is anticipated in terms of demand from various applications, such as paints thinner and cleaning & degreasing solvents which is expected to drive the growth of the white spirits market during forecast period.Global White Spirits Market: Key RegulationsNeed: In the recent past, regulatory bodies have begun implementing regulations mandating the reduction of VOC emissions due to rising environmental concerns and deteriorating air quality across the globeRegulations: Directive 2004/42/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 21 April 2004 on the limitation of emissions of VOCs due to the use of organic solvents in certain paints and varnishes and vehicle refinishing products and amending Directive 1999/13/EC Paints based on white spirits, intended to be used by the general public, are restricted in Denmark for indoor use on ceilings and walls. In 2007, the Scientific Committee on Occupational Exposure Limits proposed the following value as recommended occupational limit value for white spirits: 20 ppm (116 mg/m) as 8 h average level, 50 ppm (290 mg/m) as 15 min short-term exposure limit level.The Occupational Safety and Health Administration has set the legal limit (permissible exposure limit) for white spirits exposure in the workplace as 500 ppm (2,900 mg/m3) over an 8-hour workday. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health has set a recommended exposure limit of 350 mg/m3 over an 8-hour workday and 1,800 mg/m3 over 15 minutes.Request to sample report @Description: The VOC directive that aims to reduce ozone formation potential of VOCs in connection with photochemical reactions in ambient air, defines 12 sub-categories for coating products applied to buildings and five subcategories for vehicle refinishing products for which limits are set with regard to VOC content. The maximum permissible VOC content range is 30840 g/l, depending on the product.Effect on the White Spirits Market: Owing to regulations related to VOC emissions, there is increasing demand for low aromatic white spirits globally, which hinders demand for conventional white spirits. Major manufacturers are shifting focus towards marketing of white spirits with low aromatic content so as to comply with regulations.Global White Spirits Market: Forecast by ApplicationOn the basis of application, this market is segmented into paint thinner, cleaning solvent, degreasing solvent, fuel, disinfectant and others. In terms of application, the paint thinner segment is expected to witness healthy growth owing to increase in demand from industrial and architectural/decorative coatings during the forecast period.Building & Construction segment is expected to register nearly 1.3X growth between 2017 and 2025. The Paint Thinner segment is anticipated to witness sound growth. It is expected to grow with a CAGR of 4.9% over the forecast period.Global White Spirits Market: Forecast by Grade TypeGrade type segment consists of low flash grade, regular flash grade and high flash grade. Regular flash grade segment is projected to expand at a relatively higher CAGR over the forecast period. The regular flash grade segment is estimated to account for a 60.9% revenue share in the global white spirits market in 2025, followed by high flash grade and low flash grade segments respectively.Global White Spirits Market: Forecast by Product TypeProduct type segment includes type 1, type 2 and type 3 segments. In terms of value, the type 1 segment has been estimated to account for a 46.1% share by 2025 end. This is projected to grow 1.4X during the forecast period to be valued at US$ 3,778.4 Mn in 2025, expanding at a CAGR of 4.3%Request Report for TOC @Global White Spirits Market: Forecast by RegionAPAC is the key market that accounts for a major share in the global white spirits market. The market in APAC is expected to register high CAGR over the forecast period and provide significant opportunities in the global white spirits market owing to the growing paints & coatings, automotive, packaging and building & construction industry in this region as well as shifting of manufacturing industries to China, India and ASEAN Countries. APAC is estimated to account for around 41.4% share in terms of value in the global white spirits market in 2017.Global White Spirits Market: Key PlayersExxonMobil Corporation, Royal Dutch Shell Plc, Total S.A., Idemitsu Kosan Co., Ltd., Neste Oyj, Haltermann Carless Deutschland GmbH, DHC Solvent Chemie GmbH, GSB Chemical Co. Pty. Ltd., and Al Sanea Chemical Products are some of the key companies operating in the global white spirits market.Report overview @About UsPersistence Market Research (PMR) is a U.S.-based full-service market intelligence firm specializing in syndicated re-search, custom research, and consulting services. PMR boasts market research expertise across the Healthcare, Chemicals and Materials, Technology and Media, Energy and Mining, Food and Beverages, Semiconductor and Electronics, Con-sumer Goods, and Shipping and Transportation industries. The company draws from its multi-disciplinary capabilities and high-pedigree team of analysts to share data that precisely corresponds to clients business needs.ContactPersistence Market Research Pvt. Ltd305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,USA Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.com Finnish Defense Market sizes and predictions for growth https://www.marketresearchreports.biz/sample/sample/1581151 https://www.marketresearchreports.biz/reports/1581151/future-of-the-finnish-defense-market-research-reports https://www.marketresearchreports.biz/reports/1581151/future-of-the-finnish-defense-market-research-reports/toc http://www.marketresearchreports.biz/ MarketResearchReports.Biz presents this most up-to-date research on "Future of the Finnish Defense Industry - Market Attractiveness, Competitive Landscape and Forecasts to 2023".Finland is a geo-strategically vital base due to its vicinity to Russia. The political and military development in Russia significantly influences the countrys security. The Baltic Sea is a predominant logistic transport corridor for Finland, and Russias rising interests in this area is likely to impact the security of the country. The Finnish annual defense budget stands at US$3.5 Billion in 2018, and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 11.25% over the forecast period.Request For Sample Report @Defense expenditure as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) recorded an average of 1.3% during 20142018. As a result of the governments effort to reduce debt and focus on enhancing employment within the country, it is expected to increase to 1.7% in the forecast period.Finland capital expenditure is expected to increase significantly registering a CAGR of 10.80% during the forecast period. The Finnish Defence Ministry is expected to procure fighters and multi-role aircraft, corvettes and land based C4ISR. Furthermore, during the forecast period, Finland is expected to allocate as much as 67.6% of its defense budget towards revenue expenditure, which will be used to pay pension allowances to retired military personnel, salaries, training and other administrative activities.Complete Report Details @During 20142018, Finlands Homeland Security (HLS) expenditure was driven by the continuing problems of illicit drug trading and human trafficking across its eastern border with Russia, along with cyber-crimes. However, with much of the illegal migration from the Middle Eastern countries now subsiding, the countrys homeland security expenditure is anticipated to marginally decline over the forecast period. The expenditure is anticipated to increase at a CAGR of 3.82% during the forecast period. Finland is anticipated to spend significantly on border security, cyber security, and surveillance systems.The report ""Future of the Finnish Defense Industry - Market Attractiveness, Competitive Landscape and Forecasts to 2023"" offers detailed analysis of the Finnish defense industry with market size forecasts covering the next five years. This report will also analyze factors that influence demand for the industry, key market trends, and challenges faced by industry participants.Request For TOC Report @In particular, it provides an in-depth analysis of the following -The Finnish defense industry market size and drivers: Detailed analysis of the Finnish defense industry during 20192023, including highlights of the demand drivers and growth stimulators for the industry. It also provides a snapshot of the countrys expenditure and modernization patterns.Budget allocation and key challenges: Insights into procurement schedules formulated within the country and a breakdown of the defense budget. It also details the key challenges faced by defense market participants within the country.Porters Five Force analysis of the Finnish defense industry: analysis of the market characteristics by determining the bargaining power of suppliers, bargaining power of buyers, threat of substitution, intensity of rivalry, and barriers to entry.Import and Export Dynamics: Analysis of prevalent trends in the countrys imports and exports over the last five years.Market opportunities: Details of the top five defense investment opportunities over the next 10 years.Competitive landscape and strategic insights: Analysis of the competitive landscape of the Finnish defense industry. It provides an overview of key players, together with insights such as key alliances, strategic initiatives, and a brief financial analysis.Companies mentioned in this report: Elektrobit Corporation, Kiitokori Oy , Millog Oy, Nammo Lapua Oy, Patria, Patricomp Oy, and Temet OyScopeFinlands total defense expenditure stands at US$3.5 billion in 2018, and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 11.25% over the forecast period, to reach US$5.6 billion in 2023. Finnish defense expenditure is primarily driven by participation in peacekeeping initiatives, the soldier modernization program, naval fleet modernization initiatives and the procurement of advanced technology equipment. Finland is an active participant in the crisis management programs mandated by the United Nations (UN). The Finnish defense industry is expected to focus its expenditure on Leopard 2A6 main battle tanks, multi-role aircraft, modernizing corvettes and acquiring land based C4ISR systems.Finnish defense capital expenditure is expected to increase from US$2.5 billion in 2019 to US$3.4 billion in 2023, growing at a CAGR of 7.63%. The Finnish Defense Ministry is expected to procure multirole fighter aircraft, search and rescue helicopters, armored vehicles, main battle tanks, cyber security, a joint strike missile (JSM) system, and submarines. Revenue expenditure is expected to increase from US$4.6 billion in 2019 to US$5.5 billion in 2023, attributed to additional training and development programs that are to be undertaken over the forecast period.The country is anticipated to spend significantly on fighters and multirole aircraft, land-based C4ISR, corvettes, in addition to cyber security, surveillance systems, airport security, biometric systems, video-surveillance systems, training, and cyber security software during the forecast period.Reasons to buyThis report will give the user confidence to make the correct business decisions based on a detailed analysis of the Finnish defense industry market trends for the coming five yearsThe market opportunity section will inform the user about the various military requirements that are expected to generate revenues during the forecast period. The description includes technical specifications, recent orders, and the expected investment pattern by the country during the forecast periodDetailed profiles of the top domestic and foreign defense manufacturers with information about their products, alliances, recent contract wins, and financial analysis wherever available. This will provide the user with a total competitive landscape of the sectorA deep qualitative analysis of the Finnish defense industry covering sections including demand drivers, Porters Five Forces Analysis, Key Trends and Growth Stimulators, and latest industry contractsAbout usMarketResearchReports.biz is the most comprehensive collection of market research reports. MarketResearchReports.Biz services are specially designed to save time and money for our clients. We are a one stop solution for all your research needs, our main offerings are syndicated research reports, custom research, subscription access and consulting services. We serve all sizes and types of companies spanning across various industries.Contact UsState Tower90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207United StatesTel: +1-518-621-2074Website:Email: sales@marketresearchreports.biz Smart Parking Systems Market to grow at a CAGR of 12.9% and accounts for US$ 1099.4 Mn in the year 2025 The Insight Partners http://www.theinsightpartners.com/sample/TIPTE100000102 http://www.theinsightpartners.com/reports/smart-parking-systems-market http://www.theinsightpartners.com/reports/smart-parking-systems-market Worldwide Smart Parking Systems Market Analysis to 2025 is a specialized and in-depth study of the Smart Parking Systems industry with a focus on the global market trend. The report aims to provide an overview of global Smart Parking Systems Market with detailed market segmentation by product/application and geography. The global Smart Parking Systems Market is expected to witness high growth during the forecast period. The report provides key statistics on the market status of the Smart Parking Systems players and offers key trends and opportunities in the market.In the present scenario, world is facing critical issues of traffic cramming with a significant rise in the vehicle population and congestion in cities, and this has become an ongoing challenge for municipal councils and the traffic authorities to track and manage vehicular traffic. Numerous efforts have been made to improve countrys parking and traffic management systems. A number of private-public joint initiatives such as ParkIndy, SFpark and LA Express Park have adopted and implemented smart parking in order to effectively utilize unused parking spaces. These make use of real-time, smart, sensor-based parking information. Smart parking solutions such as online parking reservations, and mobile parking payment are expected to boost the smart parking systems market worldwide during the forecast period. In the coming years, P2P parking might generate new opportunities globally for myriad commercial parking lots, garages and residents to rent out their parking spaces with the aid of online marketplaces like ParkingPanda, JustPark, ParkMe and the social media.Request a Sample Report atThe global Smart Parking Systems Market is anticipated to grow at a CAGR of 12.9% during the forecast period 2015 2025 and accounts for US$ 1099.4 Mn in the year 2025. Furthermore, the market is categorized into parking site, components, end-user industry and regions. The parking site segment comprises of off-site parking and on-site parking, where the off-street parking sites are predicted to capture the majority of market, due to increasing adoption of smart parking systems in commercial and corporate infrastructure. Smart parking systems comprises of three main components which are; Hardware, software and services the hardware components are anticipated to lead the components market during the forecast period. The end-user industry is fragmented into transport facilities, government and municipalities, commercial institutions and corporate institutions. The government and municipalities sectors is predicted to generate massive opportunities for the smart parking systems market.On the basis of geographies the regional market is distributed into Europe, North America, South America, Middle East & Africa and Asia Pacific. Here, North America dominates the Smart Parking systems regional market share but in coming years APAC is expected witness fastest YoY growth rate of 16.4% during the forecast period. Rising demand rate in the Asian countries, specifically India and China are impelling the growth of this market.Smart Parking Systems Market Players:- Cisco Systems, Inc.- Amano McGann, Inc.- Smart Parking Ltd.- Urbiotica- Skidata AG- Swarco AG- Parkmobile, LLC- Nedap N.V- Kapsch- Xerox Corp.- Parkmobile, LLC- SWARCO AGInquire Before Buying atThe report segments the global smart parking systems market as follows:Global Smart Parking Systems Market - By Parking SitesOn - Street ParkingOff - Street ParkingGlobal Smart Parking Systems Market - By ComponentsHardwareSoftwareServicesGlobal Smart Parking Systems Market - By End-user IndustryTransportation FacilitiesGovernment & MunicipalitiesCorporate InstitutionsCommercial InstitutionsGlobal Smart Parking Systems Market - By GeographyNorth AmericaU.S.CanadaMexicoEuropeFranceGermanyItalySpainU.K.Rest of EuropeAsia Pacific (APAC)JapanChinaIndiaAustraliaRest of APACMiddle East & Africa (MEA)Saudi ArabiaU.A.E.South AfricaRest of MEASouth America (SA)BrazilRest of SAThe report provides a detailed overview of the industry including both qualitative and quantitative information. It provides overview and forecast of the global Smart Parking Systems Market based on product and application. It also provides market size and forecast till 2025 for overall Smart Parking Systems Market with respect to five major regions, namely; North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific (APAC), Middle East and Africa (MEA) and South America (SAM), which is later sub-segmented by respective countries and segments. The report evaluates market dynamics effecting the market during the forecast period i.e., drivers, restraints, opportunities, and future trend and provides exhaustive PEST analysis for all five regions.Also, key Smart Parking Systems Market players influencing the market are profiled in the study along with their SWOT analysis and market strategies. The report also focuses on leading industry players with information such as company profiles, products and services offered, financial information of last 3 years, key development in past five years.View Complete ReportContact Us:Call: +1-646-491-9876Email: sales@theinsightpartners.comAbout Us:The Insight Partners is a one stop industry research provider of actionable intelligence. We help our clients in getting solutions to their research requirements through our syndicated and consulting research services. We are a specialist in Technology, Media, and Telecommunication industries.533, 5th Floor,Amanora Chambers, East Block, Amanora Township,Kharadi Road, Hadapsar, Pune-411028 Global Embedded Display Market to Surpass US$ 18,700 Mn by 2022-end https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/samples/18778 https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/market-research/embedded-display-market/toc https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/market-research/embedded-display-market.asp The embedded displays are utilized to execute color display interface that offers different features such as an embedded functionality, touch screen and smart graphic user interface, which is affordable for mass manufacturing. These displays have the capacity of saving power with higher efficiency and deliver flexibility. It is observed that a dramatic growth in the number of automated equipment and systems in different types of industries, which has contributed to the expansion of the embedded display market.On the other hand, the technological improvements in the embedded display area has helped to the newest products with high end displays taking part in market and subsidizing largely to the expansion of these products. Additionally, greater efficiency and minimum costs are key factors that are accountable for the expansion of the market. Increased utilization of embedded display in the 3D systems has been observed as well as this is generating a lot of opportunities to grow in this market.Drivers of MarketThe embedded displays needs less power compared to other type of displays and this is the key advantage of these type of systems. Additionally, compatibility of these systems with submicron chips is another driving factor that is fueling growth of the market.Moreover, these type of displays are flexible and have decreased interface with the specified wireless services, which is another factor that are propelling demand for embedded displays. Technological developments related to these systems is also boosting growth of the market.The recent report developed by Persistence Market Research (PMR) stated that the global embedded display market is anticipated to reach valuation of nearly US$ 18,800 Mn by 2022 and is anticipated to reflect high CAGR during the assessment period (2017-2022).Request to sample report @Regional Segmentation of Embedded Display MarketIn terms of value, the market for embedded displays in the North America is anticipated to retain its dominance throughout the assessment period and this trend is going to sustain over the forecast period. The report reveals that the market in North America is projected to remain the most attractive market, growing at highest CAGR during the assessment period.LED Displays to Secure One-Fourth Revenue Share of MarketThe LED display type segment is anticipated to reach market valuation of nearly US$ 4,755 Mn by the end of 2022, according to the forecast recorder by Persistence Market Research. This reflects high CAGR throughout the assessment period. The LED display type segment is anticipated to procure over one-fourth revenue share of the market by 2017-end and is anticipated to lose the share of the market by the end of 2022.Request Report for TOC @The wearable device segment is anticipated to reach nearly US$ 1,350 Mn by the end of 2022, according to the forecast done by Persistence Market Research. The segment is estimated to reflect staggering CAGR throughout the assessment period. The report reveals, the wearable device segment is anticipated to procure nearly 10% share of the total application segment, in terms of revenues, by the end of 2017. The segment is projected to gain share of the market by the end of 2022.Competitive LandscapeThe players operating in the market are profiled in the report such as Data Modul AG, Avnet, Inc., Enea AB., Intel Corp., Altia Inc., Green Hills Software Inc., Planar Systems Inc., Anders Electronics Plc, Esterel Technologies SA, and Microsoft Corp. These are several companies that are projected to remain active in the market throughout the assessment period. These players will have large contribution in the growth of the market. Key strategies of these players are also included in the report as well as their long-term vision to remain at the pole position has been included in the report.Report overview @About UsPersistence Market Research (PMR) is a U.S.-based full-service market intelligence firm specializing in syndicated re-search, custom research, and consulting services. PMR boasts market research expertise across the Healthcare, Chemicals and Materials, Technology and Media, Energy and Mining, Food and Beverages, Semiconductor and Electronics, Con-sumer Goods, and Shipping and Transportation industries. The company draws from its multi-disciplinary capabilities and high-pedigree team of analysts to share data that precisely corresponds to clients business needs.ContactPersistence Market Research Pvt. Ltd305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,USA Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.com Global Software Defined Security Market Revenue is Expected to Reach US$ 3,800 Mn in the Year 2022 https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/samples/13201 https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/market-research/software-defined-security-market/toc https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/market-research/software-defined-security-market.asp One of the major growth factor for the adoption of software defined security is the growing concern amongst the organizations using the virtual infrastructure and services of a cloud based system.The software defined security system is used by the enterprises to automate their network security management. Due to the growing usage of the cloud technology, many enterprises are demanding security solutions that are easy to manage, can be highly customized and provide security without the presence of any hardware.Software defined security provides all these facilities and in addition, it is also used to prevent data loss and identify and access management solutions. With the growing adoption of cloud based services and infrastructure, the adoption of software defined security solutions is also on the rise.The global software defined security market is slated to touch a value of about US$ 3,800 Mn in the year 2022 and grow at a robust CAGR during the assessment period.Request to sample report @4 Forecast Highlights on Global Software defined security MarketAs per the forecast of Persistence Market Research, the services component type segment is slated to touch a value of about US$ 1050 Mn in the year 2022. This represents a robust CAGR growth during the assessment period of 2017-2022. The services component type segment is estimated to account for nearly one-fourth of the revenue share of the component type segment by the year 2017 and is forecasted to gain market share by 2022 over 2017.As per the forecast of Persistence Market Research, the small and medium enterprise segment will reach a value of about US$ 640 Mn in the year 2017.This represents a robust CAGR growth during the forecast period. The small and medium enterprise segment is forecasted to account for more than one-fourth of the total revenue share of the end user segment by the end of the year 2017 and is expected to lose in market share by 2022 as compared with the year 2017.As per the forecast of Persistence Market Research, the network monitoring segment is slated to reach a value of nearly US$ 1,300 Mn in 2022. The network monitoring segment is expected to lose market share by the end of the year 2022. The largest share is contributed by the North America region in the network monitoring segment.Persistence Market Research forecasts the U.S. software defined security market to exhibit a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 7% from 2017 to 2022.Request Report for TOC @The report has also included the profiles of some of the leading companies in the software defined security market like Catbird, VMware, Inc., SAS Institute Inc., Fortinet, Cisco Systems, Inc., Symantec Corporation, Intel Corp., EMC Corp., Palo Alto Networks and Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company.Report overview @About UsPersistence Market Research (PMR) is a U.S.-based full-service market intelligence firm specializing in syndicated re-search, custom research, and consulting services. PMR boasts market research expertise across the Healthcare, Chemicals and Materials, Technology and Media, Energy and Mining, Food and Beverages, Semiconductor and Electronics, Con-sumer Goods, and Shipping and Transportation industries. The company draws from its multi-disciplinary capabilities and high-pedigree team of analysts to share data that precisely corresponds to clients business needs.ContactPersistence Market Research Pvt. Ltd305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,USA Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.com Heavy Oil Market 2018 Analysis and Forecast to 2023 Schlumberger, Schlumberger, Total, Shell, Saudi Aramco Heavy Oil Market https://www.wiseguyreports.com/sample-request/3010250-global-heavy-oil-market-research-report-2018 https://www.wiseguyreports.com/reports/3010250-global-heavy-oil-market-research-report-2018 Heavy Oil Market 2018Wiseguyreports.Com adds Heavy Oil Market Market Demand, Growth, Opportunities, Analysis of Top Key Players and Forecast to 2022 To Its Research Database.Report Details:This report provides in depth study of Heavy Oil Market using SWOT analysis i.e. Strength, Weakness, Opportunities and Threat to the organization. The Heavy Oil Market report also provides an in-depth survey of key players in the market which is based on the various objectives of an organization such as profiling, the product outline, the quantity of production, required raw material, and the financial health of the organization.Global Heavy Oil market competition by top manufacturers, with production, price, revenue (value) and market share for each manufacturer;The top key players including;SchlumbergerHalliburtonTotalCOSSaudi AramcoAlbemarleShellFractalsysHuskyDevonRequest a Sample Report @Geographically, this report is segmented into several key Regions, with production, consumption, revenue (million USD), market share and growth rate of Heavy Oil in these regions, from 2013 to 2025 (forecast), coveringNorth AmericaEuropeChinaJapanSoutheast AsiaIndiaOn the basis of product, this report displays the production, revenue, price, market share and growth rate of each type, primarily split intoHeavy Crude OilViscous Crude OilCoal Tar CreosoteOn the basis of the end users/applications, this report focuses on the status and outlook for major applications/end users, consumption (sales), market share and growth rate for each application, includingMetallurgyFuelMachine ManufacturingIf you have any special requirements, please let us know and we will offer you the report as you want.Complete Report Details@Major Key Points in Table of Content:Global Heavy Oil Market Research Report 20181 Heavy Oil Market Overview1.1 Product Overview and Scope of Heavy Oil1.2 Heavy Oil Segment by Type (Product Category)1.2.1 Global Heavy Oil Production and CAGR (%) Comparison by Type (Product Category)(2013-2025)1.2.2 Global Heavy Oil Production Market Share by Type (Product Category) in 20171.2.3 Heavy Crude Oil1.2.4 Viscous Crude Oil1.2.5 Coal Tar Creosote1.3 Global Heavy Oil Segment by Application1.3.1 Heavy Oil Consumption (Sales) Comparison by Application (2013-2025)1.3.2 Metallurgy1.3.3 Fuel1.3.4 Machine Manufacturing1.4 Global Heavy Oil Market by Region (2013-2025)1.4.1 Global Heavy Oil Market Size (Value) and CAGR (%) Comparison by Region (2013-2025)1.4.2 North America Status and Prospect (2013-2025)1.4.3 Europe Status and Prospect (2013-2025)1.4.4 China Status and Prospect (2013-2025)1.4.5 Japan Status and Prospect (2013-2025)1.4.6 Southeast Asia Status and Prospect (2013-2025)1.4.7 India Status and Prospect (2013-2025)1.5 Global Market Size (Value) of Heavy Oil (2013-2025)1.5.1 Global Heavy Oil Revenue Status and Outlook (2013-2025)1.5.2 Global Heavy Oil Capacity, Production Status and Outlook (2013-2025)7 Global Heavy Oil Manufacturers Profiles/Analysis7.1 Schlumberger7.1.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.1.2 Heavy Oil Product Category, Application and Specification7.1.2.1 Product A7.1.2.2 Product B7.1.3 Schlumberger Heavy Oil Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.1.4 Main Business/Business Overview7.2 Halliburton7.2.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.2.2 Heavy Oil Product Category, Application and Specification7.2.2.1 Product A7.2.2.2 Product B7.2.3 Halliburton Heavy Oil Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.2.4 Main Business/Business Overview7.3 Total7.3.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.3.2 Heavy Oil Product Category, Application and Specification7.3.2.1 Product A7.3.2.2 Product B7.3.3 Total Heavy Oil Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.3.4 Main Business/Business Overview7.4 COS7.4.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.4.2 Heavy Oil Product Category, Application and Specification7.4.2.1 Product A7.4.2.2 Product B7.4.3 COS Heavy Oil Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.4.4 Main Business/Business Overview7.5 Saudi Aramco7.5.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.5.2 Heavy Oil Product Category, Application and Specification7.5.2.1 Product A7.5.2.2 Product B7.5.3 Saudi Aramco Heavy Oil Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.5.4 Main Business/Business Overview7.6 Albemarle7.6.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.6.2 Heavy Oil Product Category, Application and Specification7.6.2.1 Product A7.6.2.2 Product B7.6.3 Albemarle Heavy Oil Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.6.4 Main Business/Business Overview7.7 Shell7.7.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.7.2 Heavy Oil Product Category, Application and Specification7.7.2.1 Product A7.7.2.2 Product B7.7.3 Shell Heavy Oil Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.7.4 Main Business/Business Overview7.8 Fractalsys7.8.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.8.2 Heavy Oil Product Category, Application and Specification7.8.2.1 Product A7.8.2.2 Product B7.8.3 Fractalsys Heavy Oil Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.8.4 Main Business/Business Overview7.9 Husky7.10 DevonContinued.Contact Us:NORAH TRENTPh: +1-646-845-9349 (US)Sales@Wiseguyreports.ComPh: +44 208 133 9349 (UK)ABOUT US:Wise Guy Reports is part of the Wise Guy Consultants Pvt. Ltd. and offers premium progressive statistical surveying, market research reports, analysis & forecast data for industries and governments around the globe. Wise Guy Reports features an exhaustive list of market research reports from hundreds of publishers worldwide. We boast a database spanning virtually every market category and an even more comprehensive collection of market research reports under these categories and sub-categories.ADDRES:WISE GUY RESEARCH CONSULTANTS PVT LTDOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, HadapsarPune - 411028Maharashtra, India Payments Landscape in Slovakia: Opportunities and Risks to 2021 https://www.marketresearchreports.biz/sample/sample/1580999 https://www.marketresearchreports.biz/reports/1580999/payments-landscape-in-slovakia-opportunities-and-risks-to-2021-market-research-reports https://www.marketresearchreports.biz/reports/1580999/payments-landscape-in-slovakia-opportunities-and-risks-to-2021-market-research-reports/toc http://www.marketresearchreports.biz/ MarketResearchReports.Biz presents this most up-to-date research on "Payments Landscape in Slovakia: Opportunities and Risks to 2021".GlobalDatas "Payments Landscape in Slovakia: Opportunities and Risks to 2021", report provides detailed analysis of market trends in the Slovakian cards and payments industry. It provides values and volumes for a number of key performance indicators in the industry, including cash, payment cards, credit transfers, direct debit, and cheques during the review-period (2013-17e).Request For Sample Report @The report also analyzes various payment card markets operating in the industry, and provides detailed information on the number of cards in circulation, transaction values and volumes during the review-period and over the forecast-period (2017-21f). It also offers information on the country's competitive landscape, including the market shares of issuers and schemes.The report brings together GlobalDatas research, modeling, and analysis expertise to allow banks and card issuers to identify segment dynamics and competitive advantages. The report also covers details of regulatory policy and recent changes in the regulatory structure.Complete Report Details @This report provides top-level market analysis, information and insights into the Slovakian cards and payments industry, including -- Current and forecast values for each market in the Slovakian cards and payments industry, including debit, credit, and charge cards.- Detailed insights into payment instruments including credit transfers, direct debit, cheques, cash, and payment cards. It also, includes an overview of the country's key alternative payment instruments.- E-commerce market analysis.- Analysis of various market drivers and regulations governing the Slovakian cards and payments industry.- Detailed analysis of strategies adopted by banks and other institutions to market debit, credit, and charge cards.Scope- Contactless technology is gaining traction in Slovakia, with all leading banks in the country now offering cards with contactless functionality. To benefit from the growing adoption of contactless, banks in Slovakia are also launching contactless mobile payment services. The latest of these is the November 2016 expansion of Tatra bankas MobilePay app in collaboration with Visa. The solution allows users to store their debit and credit cards within the app and make contactless payments at partnered merchants using their mobile phone.- Payment service providers are launching innovative solutions to offer convenient payments. To promote electronic fund transfers, in August 2017 PayPal partnered with Skype to allow its users to send and receive money through the Skype app. The service was launched in over 20 countries, including Slovakia. In December 2015, Mastercard collaborated with CSOB to launch Masterpass in Slovakia. The payment solution allows users to pay from a list of pre-stored card and shipping information. The service offers merchants a faster and easier way to process payments and helps decrease checkout abandonment rates.- The advent of mobile-only banks is likely to accelerate a shift towards electronic payments in Slovakia. Germany-based bank N26 launched a mobile-only bank in Slovakia in December 2015, allowing consumers to conduct banking transactions via their mobile phones. Account holders are offered a prepaid Mastercard that can be used to make payments in stores and online. In June 2017, 365 Bank - a Slovakia-based mobile-only bank - announced plans to launch its banking operations in early 2018.Request For TOC Report @Reasons to buy- Make strategic business decisions, using top-level historic and forecast market data, related to the Slovakian cards and payments industry and each market within it.- Understand the key market trends and growth opportunities in the Slovakian cards and payments industry.- Assess the competitive dynamics in the Slovakian cards and payments industry.- Gain insights into marketing strategies used for various card types in Slovakia.- Gain insights into key regulations governing the Slovakian cards and payments industry.About usMarketResearchReports.biz is the most comprehensive collection of market research reports. MarketResearchReports.Biz services are specially designed to save time and money for our clients. We are a one stop solution for all your research needs, our main offerings are syndicated research reports, custom research, subscription access and consulting services. We serve all sizes and types of companies spanning across various industries.Contact UsState Tower90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207United StatesTel: +1-518-621-2074Website:Email: sales@marketresearchreports.biz Super League In-Depth Analysis: Citi Private Bank 2017 - Tracking the worlds major competitors in wealth management https://www.marketresearchreports.biz/sample/sample/1581018 https://www.marketresearchreports.biz/reports/1581018/super-league-in-depth-analysis-citi-private-bank-2017-tracking-the-worlds-major-competitors-in-wealth-management-market-research-reports https://www.marketresearchreports.biz/reports/1581018/super-league-in-depth-analysis-citi-private-bank-2017-tracking-the-worlds-major-competitors-in-wealth-management-market-research-reports/toc http://www.marketresearchreports.biz/ MarketResearchReports.Biz presents this most up-to-date research on "Super League In-Depth Analysis: Citi Private Bank 2017 - Tracking the worlds major competitors in wealth management"."Super League In-Depth Analysis: Citi Private Bank 2017", is a comprehensive analysis of Citigroups private banking operations. It offers insight into the companys strategy, financial results, and marketing activities. It also covers recent merger and acquisition (M&A) activity, customer targeting, and product innovation.Request For Sample Report @Citi Private Bank is part of Citigroups Institutional Clients Group, reflecting the banks strategy of leveraging institutional banking capabilities to serve UHNW clients. The lower segments of the market are served by brands that sit within Citibanks retail banking business.It provides in-depth analysis of the following -- Insight into Citi Private Banks growth strategy.- Overview of the firms organizational structure.- Clear presentation of its geographical coverage and expansion strategy, including M&A activity.- Analysis of the firms financial performance, including comparison with other global wealth managers.- Examination of key target client groups.- Analysis of Citi Private Banks product and service proposition and how it is unique compared to those of its competitors.- Review of Citi Private Banks marketing and social media activities.Complete Report Details @Scope- Citigroup is boosting its presence in European cities such as Paris, Amsterdam, Dublin, Madrid, and Luxembourg, as well as expanding its capabilities in these offices to counter the impact of Brexit.- Citi Private Banks revenues have been growing steadily in recent years, partly due to better deposit spreads and growth in loan volumes in North America.- In 2016, Citigroup launched Citi Priority in 13 markets with a new digital experience and preferred benefits to cater to the growing emerging affluent client base.- Through its philanthropic efforts, Citigroup is focusing on boosting financial inclusion, improving job opportunities for youth, and supporting the establishment of economically vibrant cities.- Citi Private Bank offers tailored services to specific customer groups, such as non-resident Indians and Asian and Latin American individuals resident in the US.Request For TOC Report @Reasons to buy- Examine the financial performance and key ratios for Citi Private Bank and benchmark this competitor against other global wealth managers.- Explore Citi Private Banks recent M&A and growth strategies and their impacts on its AUM growth and financial performance.- Understand Citi Private Banks client targeting strategies and examine whether these have been successful.- Learn more about Citi Private Banks marketing strategy, social media presence, and digital innovations.About usMarketResearchReports.biz is the most comprehensive collection of market research reports. MarketResearchReports.Biz services are specially designed to save time and money for our clients. We are a one stop solution for all your research needs, our main offerings are syndicated research reports, custom research, subscription access and consulting services. We serve all sizes and types of companies spanning across various industries.Contact UsState Tower90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207United StatesTel: +1-518-621-2074Website:Email: sales@marketresearchreports.biz SaaS based SCM Market Analysis, Size, Share, Overview, Revenue, Gross Margin and Forecast 2018-2025 The Insight Partners http://www.theinsightpartners.com/sample/TIPTE100000370 http://www.theinsightpartners.com/inquiry/TIPTE100000370 http://www.theinsightpartners.com/reports/saas-based-scm-market In the era of automation, programmed machineries play a vital role in reducing cost and time taken to produce goods or to cater services. The users of applications are enabled to have more control over the sensitive data with features like 24/7 monitoring and security. Rapid digitization has added pressures on the organizations today to rely on cloud based applications. A cloud based application can be used to easily scale up or scale down the operations as per the demand being currently witnessed in the market. It handles flexibility to the application users. Flexibility offered by the SaaS model for SCM applications gives competitive advantage to users by letting them to quickly adjust to the demands of their respective customers and incorporate the necessary changes in the operations efficiently. Users derive high efficiency through this with reduced cost pressures that makes them highly competitive in the market. SaaS has been integrated by major upcoming and leading SCM software companies with major adoptions witnessed by the SMEs. The advantage offered is the faster responsiveness to the rapidly changing customer demands.The global SaaS based SCM market is segmented based on deployment model as: private cloud, public cloud, and hybrid cloud. The SaaS based SCM market can be further divided by solutions into manufacturing Planning, Sourcing and Procurement, Supply Chain Planning, Warehouse Management, Transportation Management and Others (S&OP, Import/ Export Planning, EDI, Demand Planning). Various industry verticals are into adoptions of the SaaS based SCM solutions and they can be classified as Transportation & Logistics services, Manufacturing industry, Retail industry, public sector, and distribution industry. On the basis of end-user SaaS based SCM market can be further divided into small & medium enterprises (SMEs), and large enterprises.Request a Sample Report atThe global SaaS based SCM market is estimated to grow at a CAGR of 22.6% during the forecast period 2016 2025 and accounts for US$ 36.72 Bn in the year 2025. In case of a centralized on-premise supply chain management solution for a large organization, if there is some problem at the central server, there can be a catastrophic loss to the entire data, while in case of cloud based service, the data is processed from servers to servers at a very fast speed. Even if one server collapses, there are other servers that ensure the continuity of the operations and thus reducing the downtime of services. Realizing the cost efficiencies, redundant services and the need to cater to ever increasing demands, customers are steadily making a shift to cloud based supply chain services.Each customer has become a separate segment today. Demands of any customer rapidly change today and companies offering services to them have to respond quickly. Survival in a highly dynamic environment requires quick response and that is provided by SCM software. These factors have led to increased adoptions of SaaS based SCM software.Inquire before Buying atSaaS based SCM Market Key Players-Descartes Systems-Infor-JDA Software-SAP-Epicor-Oracle-Manhattan Associates-IBM-Kewill-HighJump SoftwareView Complete Report atContact Us:Call: +1-646-491-9876Email: sales@theinsightpartners.comAbout Us:The Insight Partners is a one stop industry research provider of actionable intelligence. We help our clients in getting solutions to their research requirements through our syndicated and consulting research services. We are a specialist in Technology, Media, and Telecommunication industries.533, 5th Floor,Amanora Chambers, East Block, Amanora Township,Kharadi Road, Hadapsar, Pune-411028 EHR and EMR Market Trends in U.S and Global by Key Vendors Till 2023 US EHR-EMR Market https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/sample_request/775 https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/enquiry/775 https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/enquiry/775 The Global & US EHR-EMR Market Report: OverviewEHR/EMR has been evaluated more than US $15 billion in the global market and the reasons behind it is the growth of the life science and healthcare industry. EHR (Electronic Health Records)/ EMR (Electronic Medical Record) shares a very thin line for differentiation. EHR where the information related to health issues of a person are being gathered, managed and created by the licensed clinics, consultants and individual staff of an organization but in the EMR the information is being gathered, managed and created aggregately by more than one organization. EHR-EMR market is totally dependent on the growth of the healthcare and life-science industry and as per the past trends, these industries are growing with double digit CAGR, resulting the more demand for the EHR-EMR products. EHR-EMR market plays very vital role in the database management for any healthcare organization as the arrival rate of the individuals are increasing day by day and manually it becomes very difficult to monitor the activity and condition of an individual who has visited the organization long time back.Get Sample Copy @Global & US EHR-EMR Market Report: ApplicationsEHR-EMR has various applications in the healthcare industry. EHR-EMR products sole purpose is to keep and manage the database of individuals. The various applications in the industry includes- identification and maintenance of personal record, managing the demographics of patients, managing the problem list, managing the medical prescription lists, managing the history of the patients, managing the clinical documents and notes, capturing and managing the external documents of the hospital/clinic, prescribing the care plans, protocols and guidelines, managing the prescribed plans, protocols and guidelines for the specific clients, generating the records patients specific instruction among others.Global & US EHR-EMR Market Report: Market InfluencerThe main market driver for the EHR-EMR market is the benefits associated with the products. EHR-EMR products have been very revolutionary in the segment of managing the data of the patients. Earlier, the whole system was manually operated with the lots of effort of people, time and money and managing the records on the paper was quite hectic job for the hospitals. EHR-EMR replaced the manual process and due to the efficiency and effectiveness every organization working in the healthcare and life science are adapting these technologies. The other factor which is helping the market of EHR-EMR is the developments in this market. By connecting this system on the web, accessibility of the information becomes very easy for the institutions and can be accessed from anywhere around the globe.Global & US EHR-EMR Market Report: Market SegmentationFor the better understanding of the report, Global EHR-EMR Market has been segmented on the basis of installation type, end user and geography.On the basis of installation type:- Server bases- Web based- Software (As Services)On the basis of end user:- Hospitals- Clinic Centers- OthersGet Discount @Global & US EHR-EMR Market Report: Regional AnalysisThe Americas are the leading in the market of EHR-EMR with the market share of more than 45% followed by the Europe and Asia-Pacific countries that are accounted for the market share of XX%. Americas including North America and Latin America who is having one of the best medical facilities around the globe has high rate arrival of patients. Countries like the US and Canada who falls under the umbrella of developed countries are well technologically advanced therefore having the largest market share in the EHR-EMR market. Countries like Germany, Italy among others, whose government in promoting the healthcare industry by introducing the various healthcare plans and new equipments in this industry. Asia Pacific together accounts for more than 41% of global population and also most of the countries falls under the Asia Pacific are in the developing phase. Developing countries have immense opportunities for the EHR-EMR market. Countries in this region like China, India who together holds more than 30% of the global population are said to be the biggest market for the EHR-EMR products by the end of the forecasted period.Global & US EHR-EMR Market Report: Key PlayersThe key players in the market of EHR-EMR are:- eClinicalWorks- Praxis EMR- Allscripts Healthcare Solutions, Inc.- Cerner Corporation- NextGen Healthcare- Medical Information Technology, Inc.- Epic Systems- 4medica- Athenahealth, Inc.- GE Healthcare- OthersMarket Research Future introduces about 2016 Global EHR/EMR Market during the forecast period 2016-2027 which mainly includes the growth drivers, trends and restraints and how the market will grow in the future across the globe. In this report, Market Research Future has focused on the current market scenario which includes market segmentation, market dynamics, and competitive landscape along with company profiles.The reports also covers brief analysis of Geographical Region includes:Americas- North America (US, Canada)- Latin America (Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Rest of LATAM)Europe- Western Europe (Germany, France, Italy, Spain, U.K, Rest of Western Europe)- Eastern Europe (Poland, Russia)Asia Pacific- Asia (China, India, Japan, South Korea, Rest of Asia)- Pacific Countries (Australia, New Zealand)Middle East & Africa- Middle East (Saudi, Qatar, UAE)- Rest of Middle East (Africa, South Africa, Rest of Africa)Ask to Expertise @About US:Market Research Future (MRFR), enable customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half and Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous and Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.Contact Us:Market Research FutureOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, Hadapsar,Puneand411028Maharashtra, IndiaPhone: +1 646 845 9312Email: sales@marketresearchfuture.com . Digital Isolator Market 2018 Key Players: Advantech, Murata Manufacturing Company, NXP Semiconductors N.V., Broadcom Ltd, Texas Instruments,, ST Microelectronic https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/sample_request/4988 https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/digital-isolator-market-4988 MarketResearchFuture Publish a New Market Research Report On Digital Isolator 2018 : Discovers the Opportunities, Trends, Risk, Simulation, Management to 2023.Description:Digital Isolator -Global Market Status and Trend Report 2018-2023 offers a comprehensive analysis on Digital Isolator industry, standing on the readers perspective, delivering detailed market data and penetrating insights. No matter the client is industry insider, potential entrant or investor, the report will provides useful data and information.The digital isolator market is expected to grow at a significant rate. The market is majorly driven by the ability of digital isolators to be used at higher altitudes. Many enterprises like Texas Instruments offer high efficiency and low emission reinforced digital isolators. This reinforced digital isolator helps support reliable operation of the industrial system. The device by Texas instruments features integrated isolated power and data upto 100 Mbps, minimizing board space and cost of simplified system design. The market of the digital isolator is following certain trends like growth in noise-free electronics, increased usage of renewable energy sources, growing demand to replace octocouplers, and usage of the digital isolator at higher altitude.Request a Sample Report @Major key PlayersSome of the prominent key players in the market include Advantech Co Ltd (Taiwan), Murata Manufacturing Company Ltd (Japan), NXP Semiconductors N.V. (the Netherlands), Broadcom Ltd (U.S.), Texas Instruments, Inc (U.S.), ST Microelectronics N.V. (Switzerland), Infineon Technologies AG (Germany), ON Semiconductor (U.S.), Digi Key Corporation among others.The Digital Isolator Market Is Estimated to Grow at a CAGR Of 6 % during the forecasted period of 2017 to 2023Regional AnalysisBy geography, the market is segmented into North America, Europe, Asia Pacific and rest of the world. Asia Pacific accounted for the largest market share in 2016. Asia Pacific is expected to grow at a high rate during the forecast period owing to the presence of a large number of major electrical device and equipment manufacturers in this region. Additionally, many of the electronic & electrical component manufacturers are shifting from North America and Europe to Asia Pacific to capitalize on the low direct costs and lower cost of labor incurred in countries like China, India and South East Asia. The market growth can also be attributed to the increasing demand for isolated gate drivers, generated with the proliferation of electric and hybrid electric vehicles worldwide.North America and Europe are predicted to inspire players with some powerful business prospects through their success in the market. The digital isolators are gaining huge demand due to its high reliability and efficiency which is best suited in healthcare sectors. Europe is to be estimated to be the second largest market for digital isolator during the forecast period.Browse Full Report @About Market Research Future:At Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.Contact:Market Research Future+1 646 845 9312Email: sales@marketresearchfuture.com Drug Discovery Technologies Market 2018 - 2024 Latest Technology Innovations, Size, Growth and Forecasted Report https://www.infiniumglobalresearch.com/Reports/MakeSampleRequest/1128 https://www.infiniumglobalresearch.com/Reports/MakeEnquiryRequest/1128 https://www.infiniumglobalresearch.com To launch new drugs they undergo number of test and process. The Drug discovery technologies are used for the launch of new drugs and for research of drugs. The report on global drug discovery technologies market is an in depth analysis of the segments and sub-segments in the drug discovery technologies market. The report provides analysis for the global as well as regional markets over the period of 2016 to 2024. According to report the global drug discovery technologies market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 18.4% over the forecast period of 2018 - 2024.The growing incidences of diseases, pathogen resistance to old drugs, patent expiries, and competition among drug manufacturers are the key factors that drive the growth of this market. Moreover, increasing investment in the field of nanotechnology, biotechnology, genomics, and, molecular biology are some other factor that has driven this market. Furthermore, long duration of drug discovery process, high initial setup cost and presence of strict regulatory surroundings.Get Sample Copy of this Report:The report on global drug discovery technologies market covers segments such as technology type, and end users. The technology type segments include biochips, high throughput screening, pharmacogenomics, genomics, bioanalytical instruments, bioinformatics, nanotechnology and others (RNAI, combinatorial chemistry). On the basis of end users the global drug discovery technologies market is categorized into biopharmaceutical companies, pharmaceutical companies, research institutes and biotech companies.Geographic CoverageThe report provides regional analysis covering geographies such as North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and Rest of the World. In this section the key trends and market size for each geography is provided over the period of 2016 2024. The countries covered in the North America region include the U.S., Canada, and Mexico; while Asia-Pacific includes China, Japan, India, South Korea and Malaysia among others. The U.S. drives the growth in the North America region as it is the largest market in the region. The Asia-pacific region offers a substantial potential for the market growth owing to rapid growth in markets such as India and China. The APAC region is projected to experience a growth at a CAGR of x.x% over the period of 2018 - 2024.Companies Profiled:The report provides profiles of the companies in the global drug discovery technologies market such as, Agilent Technologies, Inc, Abbott Laboratories, Inc., GE Healthcare Ltd., Albany Molecular Research Inc., Affymetrix Inc., Arqule Inc., Luminex Corporation, Bayer Healthcare AG, Novartis AG, and Astrazeneca plc.For More Enquiry on This Report:Report Highlights:The report provides deep insights on demand forecasts, market trends and micro and macro indicators. In addition, this report provides insights on the factors that are driving and restraining the global drug discovery technologies market. Moreover, IGR-Growth Matrix analysis given in the report brings an insight on the investment areas that existing or new market players can consider. The report provides insights into the market using analytical tools such as Porters five forces analysis and DRO analysis of drug discovery technologies market.Moreover, the study highlights current market trends and provides forecast from 2018 to 2024. We also have highlighted future trends in the drug discovery technologies market that will impact the demand during the forecast period. Moreover, the competitive analysis given in each regional market brings an insight on the market share of the leading players. Additionally, the analysis highlights rise and fall in the market shares of the key players in the market. This report will help manufacturers, suppliers and distributors of the drug discovery technologies market to understand the present and future trends in this market and formulate their strategies accordingly.About UsInfinium Global Research and Consulting Solutions is started with a single motto of being business partner of first choice. We at Infinium work on the strengths of our clients to ensure we help them consolidate their market position. We firmly believe in the fact that if you are able to develop newer opportunities then you find there is no dearth of opportunities for you. With our strategic research approaches and deep dive in the market segments, we try to find out new opportunities that our clients can encash with their existing resources. Our experts with over 100 years of cumulative experience in research offer the best in the industry services to our clients to ensure that they achieve their business goals.Contact UsInfinium Global Research,Toll Free:U.S. + Canada: 1-800-638-0796,Website :Email: sales@infiniumglobalresearch.com Worldwide Hydrocephalus Market to Be Influenced By Advanced Detection Techniques By 2022 Hydrocephalus Market https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/sample_request/1719 https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/hydrocephalus-market-1719 https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/enquiry/1719 www.marketresearchfuture.com With hydrocephalus being an especially rare condition, there has been very few developments in this sector, especially in terms of research and treatment in terms of both treatment methods and medications. Increase in the development of medical sciences have created renewed interest for this sector. Market Research Future, a firm which specializes in market reports related to the healthcare sector among others, published in its recent report on Hydrocephalus Market Research Report Global Forecast to 2022 that the sector will ensue with a positive CAGR % and will also establish a good rate of revenue growth in the forecast period.The market for hydrocephalus is not very well developed due to lack of attention paid to treatment of the disease. Following the development of shunts for draining the accumulated cerebrospinal fluid and scans to diagnose this condition, there have been improvements in terms of treatments to provide short term relief to patients. However, there are efforts to develop treatments to address the disease in the initial stages and this has ensured a positive growth trend for the market.Get a sample report atIncrease in the functionality level of diagnostic equipments and upgradation of medical knowledge has led to increase in the demand that is generated for this particular sector. Increase in the numbers of malnutrition cases and genetic defects contributing to the rise of the hydrocephalus market. The sectors growth can be restricted due to lack of awareness and government initiatives.Latest Industry Updates:Oct 2017 Integra Lifesciences has acquired Codman Neuro from Johnson & Johnson for $1.1 billion. Integra is divesting its assets in order to get the FTC's permission on its proposed acquisition of Johnson & Johnson's Codman Neurosurgery business. The Codman Neurosurgery business offers a portfolio of devices focused on hydrocephalus management, neuro intensive care and cranial surgery, and generated net revenues of approximately $371.5 million in 2016.Sep 2017 Researchers from the Loma Linda University School of Medicine were awarded $1.7 million from the National Institutes of Health to continue their search for a treatment for hydrocephalus, the buildup of excessive cerebrospinal fluid in the brain. The team aims to develop a better treatment for hydrocephalus, by using fetal rat brains, they will study whether the mechanism that produces cerebrospinal fluid can be manipulated. If the amount of cerebrospinal fluid can be controlled, patients with hydrocephalus would have a more effective treatment and a better quality of life.Nov 2017 Alcyone Lifesciences have designed a non-invasive ventricular catheter and flusher system restores or increases cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) flow in a non-flowing shunt, thereby advancing the treatment for hydrocephalus. They also announced that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have cleared the Alivio Ventricular Catheter & Flusher System (Alivio System) for the treatment of hydrocephalus. This comes on the heels of Alcyone receiving the EU CE Mark last month.Dec 2017 A multidisciplinary team of researchers on the IUPUI campus has received a $1.8 million grant from the U.S. Department of Defense to gain a better understanding of hydrocephalus and commence developing potential treatments. The researchers, from the School of Science at IUPUI and the Indiana University School of Medicine, are conducting a preclinical evaluation of drug compounds, including one they have identified as a strong prospective candidate to treat hydrocephalus.April 2017 Medtronic plc recently launched its new StealthStation technology. The StealthStation technology has been a mainstay in neurosurgery suites for the past 25 years, being used in more than 2.25 million procedures. The StealthStation S8 technology includes a new and improved software interface, a two-cart platform design, and electromagnetic technology to complement the surgical workflows.Browse Complete Report atHydrocephalus Market - Competitive AnalysisWith the entry of new industry players in the hydrocephalus market segment, a trend of solid, volume-driven growth has been observed in the market with the addition of new and advanced products. Companies are aiming to capture & solidify their share of the market segment, by competing and experimenting with various advantage points. The best long-term growth opportunities for this sector can be captured by ensuring ongoing process improvements and financial flexibility to invest in the optimal strategies.The key players in this market are HLL Life care Limited, ChristophMiethke GmbH & Co. KG, Codman &Shurtleff, Inc., DePuySynthes Companies, HP BioprotesesLtda. Few of the other important market players are Integra LifeSciences Corp, Medtronic, SOPHYSA Inc., RAUMEDIC, Spiegelberg GmbH & Co. KG, Tokibno Co. Ltd., and Vittamed.Hydrocephalus Market SegmentsThe hydrocephalus market is segmented on the basis of category, diagnosis type, treatment type and region.On The Basis Of Category: Congenital, Compensated, Acquired and Others.On The Basis Of Diagnosis Type: Head Ultrasound, CT Scan Head And Others.On The Basis Of Treatment Type: Surgery Shunt Insertion, Medication and Others.On The Basis Of Region: North America, Europe, Asia Pacific and ROW.More inquire atHydrocephalus Market - Regional AnalysisGeographically, the global hydrocephalus market is segmented into North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Middle East & Africa and Rest of the World. North America is the largest market for Hydrocephalus. The North American market for is expected to grow at an exceptional CAGR and is expected to achieve a million dollar growth by the end of the forecasted period. Europe is the second-largest market for Hydrocephalus which is expected to grow at an outstanding CAGR%. Asia pacific region is expected to be fastest growing region in Hydrocephalus Market.About usAt Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.Market Research FutureP: +1 646 845 9312W:sales@marketresearchfuture.com Blood Flow Measurement Devices 2018 Global Market by Types, Countries and Manufacturers to 2025 Medtronic, GE Healthcare, Siemens Healthineers, Koninklijke Philips Blood Flow Measurement Devices Market https://www.wiseguyreports.com/sample-request/3010319-global-blood-flow-measurement-devices-market-size-status-and-forecast-2025 https://www.wiseguyreports.com/reports/3010319-global-blood-flow-measurement-devices-market-size-status-and-forecast-2025 Blood Flow Measurement Devices Market 2018Wiseguyreports.Com adds Blood Flow Measurement Devices Market Market Demand, Growth, Opportunities, Analysis of Top Key Players and Forecast to 2023 To Its Research Database.Report Details:This report provides in depth study of Blood Flow Measurement Devices Market using SWOT analysis i.e. Strength, Weakness, Opportunities and Threat to the organization. The Blood Flow Measurement Devices Market report also provides an in-depth survey of key players in the market which is based on the various objectives of an organization such as profiling, the product outline, the quantity of production, required raw material, and the financial health of the organization.This report studies the global Blood Flow Measurement Devices market, analyzes and researches the Blood Flow Measurement Devices development status and forecast in United States, EU, Japan, China, India and Southeast Asia.This report focuses on the top players in global market, likeMedtronicGE HealthcareSiemens HealthineersKoninklijke PhilipsACE MedicalADInstrumentsBIOPAC SystemsCarolina Medical ElectronicsRequest a Sample Report @Market segment by Regions/Countries, this report coversUnited StatesEUJapanChinaIndiaSoutheast AsiaMarket segment by Type, the product can be split intoSystemsAccessoriesMarket segment by Application, Blood Flow Measurement Devices can be split intoHospitals and physicians' officesASCsHome care settingsIf you have any special requirements, please let us know and we will offer you the report as you want.Complete Report Details@Major Key Points in Table of Content:Global Blood Flow Measurement Devices Market Size, Status and Forecast 20251 Industry Overview of Blood Flow Measurement Devices1.1 Blood Flow Measurement Devices Market Overview1.1.1 Blood Flow Measurement Devices Product Scope1.1.2 Market Status and Outlook1.2 Global Blood Flow Measurement Devices Market Size and Analysis by Regions (2013-2018)1.2.1 United States1.2.2 EU1.2.3 Japan1.2.4 China1.2.5 India1.2.6 Southeast Asia1.3 Blood Flow Measurement Devices Market by Type1.3.1 Systems1.3.2 Accessories1.4 Blood Flow Measurement Devices Market by End Users/Application1.4.1 Hospitals and physicians' offices1.4.2 ASCs1.4.3 Home care settings2 Global Blood Flow Measurement Devices Competition Analysis by Players2.1 Blood Flow Measurement Devices Market Size (Value) by Players (2013-2018)2.2 Competitive Status and Trend2.2.1 Market Concentration Rate2.2.2 Product/Service Differences2.2.3 New Entrants2.2.4 The Technology Trends in Future3 Company (Top Players) Profiles3.1 Medtronic3.1.1 Company Profile3.1.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.1.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.1.4 Blood Flow Measurement Devices Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.1.5 Recent Developments3.2 GE Healthcare3.2.1 Company Profile3.2.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.2.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.2.4 Blood Flow Measurement Devices Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.2.5 Recent Developments3.3 Siemens Healthineers3.3.1 Company Profile3.3.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.3.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.3.4 Blood Flow Measurement Devices Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.3.5 Recent Developments3.4 Koninklijke Philips3.4.1 Company Profile3.4.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.4.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.4.4 Blood Flow Measurement Devices Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.4.5 Recent Developments3.5 ACE Medical3.5.1 Company Profile3.5.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.5.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.5.4 Blood Flow Measurement Devices Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.5.5 Recent Developments3.6 ADInstruments3.6.1 Company Profile3.6.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.6.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.6.4 Blood Flow Measurement Devices Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.6.5 Recent Developments3.7 BIOPAC Systems3.7.1 Company Profile3.7.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.7.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.7.4 Blood Flow Measurement Devices Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.7.5 Recent Developments3.8 Carolina Medical Electronics3.8.1 Company Profile3.8.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.8.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.8.4 Blood Flow Measurement Devices Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.8.5 Recent DevelopmentsContinued.Contact Us:NORAH TRENTPh: +1-646-845-9349 (US)Sales@Wiseguyreports.ComPh: +44 208 133 9349 (UK)ABOUT US:Wise Guy Reports is part of the Wise Guy Consultants Pvt. Ltd. and offers premium progressive statistical surveying, market research reports, analysis & forecast data for industries and governments around the globe. Wise Guy Reports features an exhaustive list of market research reports from hundreds of publishers worldwide. We boast a database spanning virtually every market category and an even more comprehensive collection of market research reports under these categories and sub-categories.ADDRES:WISE GUY RESEARCH CONSULTANTS PVT LTDOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, HadapsarPune - 411028Maharashtra, India Magnetic Field Sensor Market 2018 Key Players: MEMSIC Inc., Honeywell International Inc, Allegro MicroSystems, Analog Devices, Inc. https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/sample_request/4986 https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/magnetic-field-sensor-market-4986 MarketResearchFuture Publish a New Market Research Report On Magnetic Field Sensor 2018 : Discovers the Opportunities, Trends, Risk, Simulation, Management to 2023.Description:Magnetic Field Sensor -Global Market Status and Trend Report 2018-2023 offers a comprehensive analysis on Magnetic Field Sensor industry, standing on the readers perspective, delivering detailed market data and penetrating insights. No matter the client is industry insider, potential entrant or investor, the report will provides useful data and information.The global magnetic field sensor market is spanned across Americas, Europe, Asia Pacific, and Rest of world. North America dominates the magnetic field sensor market. The growing demand of magnets and electromagnets which is widely used in automotive and telecom sectors are boosting growth of magnetic field sensor market in this region. The increasing demand of sensors is extensively used in various applications including speed sensing, flow rate sensing, detection, position sensing, and others. In April 2017, Asahi Kasei MicroDevices had announced its product release of 3-axis magnetic sensor for internet of things to captures magnetic fields with vector components.Request a Sample Report @Major key PlayersAsahi Kasei MicroDevices (Japan),MEMSIC Inc. (U.S.),Honeywell International Inc. (U.S.),Allegro MicroSystems, LLC (U.S.),Analog Devices, Inc. (U.S.),TDK Corporation (Japan),ams AG (Austria),Robert Bosch GmbH (Germany),Infineon Technologies (Germany),Tower Semiconductor Ltd. (Israel),Crocus Technology (U.S), TE Connectivity Ltd. (Switzerland), MELEXIX N.V (Belgium), Sanken Electric Co., Ltd. (Japan), NXP Semiconductors N.V (Netherlands), Kohshin Electric (Japan), NVE Corporation (U.S), PASCO Corporations (Japan), among others.The global Magnetic Field Sensor Market is expected to grow at USD ~6 billion by 2023 at a CAGR of ~8% during the forecast period 2017-2023.Segmentation Of Magnetic Field Sensor Market:The global magnetic field sensor market is segmented into type, range, applications, end-users, and region. The type is further segmented into Hall Effect sensors, magneto resistive sensors, SQUID sensors, fluxgate sensors, and others. Further, the Hall Effect sensors is sub-segmented anisotropic magneto resistive sensors, giant magneto resistive sensors, tunnel magneto resistive sensors and others. The magneto resistive sensors is sub-segmented into hall elements, hall ICs and others. And, the SQUID sensors is sub-segmented low-temperature SQUID, high-temperature SQUID and others. The range are segmented into 10 Gauss (BIAS Magnetic Field Sensors) consoles. The application segment is sub-segmented into speed sensing, flow rate sensing, detection, position sensing, navigation and electronic compass and others. Whereas, the end users segment is sub-segmented transportation, consumer electronics, BFSI, healthcare, aerospace & defense, industrial and others sectors. The market is spanned across regions including North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and rest of the world.Browse Full Report @About Market Research Future:At Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.Contact:Market Research Future+1 646 845 9312Email: sales@marketresearchfuture.com Global Womens Wear Market 2018 Analysis By Key Players: GAP Inc,, H & M Hennes & Mauritz AB, Inditex,Ralph Lauren Corporation, Nike. Women?s Wear Market https://www.wiseguyreports.com/sample-request/2975364-women-s-wear-global-market-report-2018-including https://www.wiseguyreports.com/reports/2975364-women-s-wear-global-market-report-2018-including Womens Wear Market:WiseGuyReports.com adds Womens Wear Market 2018 Global Analysis, Growth, Trends and Opportunities Research Report Forecasting to 2023reports to its database.Executive SummaryWomen's Wear Market Global Report 2018 from The Business Research Company provides the strategists, marketers and senior management with the critical information they need to assess the global women's wear market.Where is the largest and fastest growing market for the women's wear? How does the market relate to the overall economy, demography and other similar markets? What forces will shape the market going forward? The women's wear market global report from the Business Research Company answers all these questions and many more.The report covers market characteristics, size and growth, segmentation, regional and country breakdowns, competitive landscape, market shares, trends and strategies for this market. It traces the markets historic and forecast market growth by geography. It places the market within the context of the wider paper, plastics, rubber, wood and textile manufacturing market, and compares it with other markets. The market characteristics section of the report defines and explains the market. The market size section gives the market size ($b) covering both the historic growth of the market and forecasting the future. Drivers and restraints looks at the external factors supporting and controlling the growth of the market. Market segmentations break down market into sub markets. The regional and country breakdowns section gives an analysis of the market in each geography and the size of the market by geography and compares their historic and forecast growth. It covers all the regions, key developed countries and major emerging markets. It draws comparisons with country populations and economies to understand the importance of the market by country and how this is changing. Competitive landscape gives a description of the competitive nature of the market, market shares, and a description of the leading companies. Key financial deals which have shaped the market in recent years are identified. The trends and strategies section highlights the likely future developments in the market and suggests approaches companies can take to exploit this. The women's wear market section of the report gives context. It compares the women's wear market with other segments of the women's wear market by size and growth, historic and forecast. It analyses Expenditure Per Capita, The Women's Wear Market Indicators Comparison.Request Sample Report @ScopeMarkets Covered: Tops; Bottoms; Dresses; Outerwear; Innerwear; Sportswear; Other Women's WearCompanies Mentioned: GAP Inc,, H & M Hennes & Mauritz AB, Inditex,Ralph Lauren Corporation, Nike.Countries: Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Spain, Russia, UK, USA and Australia.Regions: Asia-Pacific, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, North America, South America, Middle East And AfricaTime series: Five years historic and forecast.Data: Ratios of market size and growth to related markets, GDP, Expenditure Per Capita, The Women's Wear Market Indicators Comparison.Data segmentations: country and regional historic and forecast data, market share of competitors, market segments.Sourcing and Referencing: Data and analysis throughout the report is sourced using end notes.Table of Content1. Womens Wear Market Characteristics2. Womens Wear Market Size And Growth3. Womens Wear Trends And Strategies;4. Pestle Analysis5. Womens Wear Market Customer Information;6. Womens Wear Market Regional And Country Analysis7. Womens Wear Market Segmentation8. Womens Wear Market Segments9. Global Womens Wear Market Comparison With Macro Economic Factors10. Womens Wear Market Comparison With Macro Economic Factors Across Countries11. Asia-Pacific Womens Wear Market12. Western Europe Womens Wear Market13. Eastern Europe Womens Wear Market14. North America Womens Wear Market15. South America Womens Wear Market16. Middle East Womens Wear Market17. Africa Womens Wear Market18. Womens Wear Market Competitive Landscape18.1. Company Profiles18.2. GAP Inc.18.2.1. Overview18.2.2. Products And Services18.2.3. Strategy18.2.4. Financial Performance18.3. H & M Hennes & Mauritz AB18.3.1. Overview18.3.2. Products And Services18.3.3. Strategy18.3.4. Financial Performance18.4. Inditex18.4.1. Overview18.4.2. Products And Services18.4.3. Strategy18.4.4. Financial Performance18.5. Ralph Lauren Corporation18.5.1. Overview18.5.2. Products And Services18.5.3. Strategy18.5.4. Financial Performance18.6. Nike18.6.1. Overview18.6.2. Products And Services18.6.3. Strategy18.6.4. Financial Performance19. Key Mergers And Acquisitions In The Womens Wear Market20. Market Background: Apparel Manufacturing Market21. AppendixReasons to Purchase Outperform competitors using accurate up to date demand-side dynamics information. Identify growth segments for investment. Facilitate decision making on the basis of historic and forecast data and the drivers and restraints on the market. Create regional and country strategies on the basis of local data and analysis. Stay abreast of the latest customer and market research findings Benchmark performance against key competitors. Develop strategies based on likely future developments. Utilize the relationships between key data sets for superior strategizing. Suitable for supporting your internal and external presentations with reliable high quality data and analysis Gain a global perspective on the development of the market. Report will be updated with the latest data and delivered to you within 3-5 working days of order.ContinuousFor further information on this report, visit Contact Us:Norah Trentsales@wiseguyreports.comPh: +1-646-845-9349 (US); +44 208 133 9349 (UK)Wise Guy Reports Is Part Of The Wise Guy Consultants Pvt. Ltd. And Offers Premium Progressive Statistical Surveying, Market Research Reports, Analysis & Forecast Data For Industries And Governments Around The Globe. Wise Guy Reports Features An Exhaustive List Of Market Research Reports From Hundreds Of Publishers Worldwide. We Boast A Database Spanning Virtually Every Market Category And An Even More Comprehensive Collection Of Market Research Reports Under These Categories And Sub-Categories.Addres:WISEGUY RESEARCH CONSULTANTS PVT LTDOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersPune - 411028Maharashtra, IndiaPhone :+91 841 198 5042 Military Robotics Market Emerging Technologies, Latest Trends, Challenges, Key Vendor and Analysis 2018-2025 The Insight Partners http://www.theinsightpartners.com/sample/TIPTE100000688 http://www.theinsightpartners.com/reports/military-robotics-market World Military Robotics Market Report 2018-2025 is a professional and in-depth study on the current state of the Military Robotics Market. This report studies Military Robotics in Global market, especially North America, Europe, Asia Pacific (APAC), Middle East and Africa (MEA), and South America (SAM).Military Robotics are the being majorly used for military and homeland security purpose, it has been designed for armed tasks like gunfire, airborne, and for underwater surveillance. These robots help military capable of image capturing, bomb disposal, gunfire, carry wounded military personnel, and detect mines among others. The major driving factors for the military robotics market is the advancement of automation in the defense industry. Moreover, these robots can traverse through rough and hazardous environment, which is increasing the interest among the defense forces across the globe to incorporate robots in to their battalions.The factor acting as an inhabitant to the growth of market for military robotics is the initial investments to procure rugged robots and moreover, these robots indulge in high maintenance cost due to multi-function programmability, which in turn incurs huge costs. However, the increasing development in artificial intelligence acts as an opportunities for the market of military robotics during the forecast period.Request Sample is Available atThe Global Military Robotics Market Analysis to 2025 is a specialized and in-depth study of the military robotics industry with a focus on the global market trend. The report aims to provide an overview of global military robotics market with detailed market segmentation by platform, application, end users, and geography. The global military robotics market is expected to witness high growth during the forecast period. The report provides key statistics on the market status of the leading market players and offers key trends and opportunities in the market.The report provides a detailed overview of the industry including both qualitative and quantitative information. It provides overview and forecast of the global military robotics market based on platform, components, and end users. It also provides market size and forecast till 2025 for overall military robotics market with respect to five major regions, namely; North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific (APAC), Middle East and Africa (MEA) and South America (SAM). The market by each region is later sub-segmented by respective countries and segments. The report covers analysis and forecast of 16 counties globally along with current trend and opportunities prevailing in the region.Besides this, the report analyzes factors affecting market from both demand and supply side and further evaluates market dynamics effecting the market during the forecast period i.e., drivers, restraints, opportunities, and future trend. The report also provides exhaustive Porters Five Forces analysis, projecting the bargaining power of buyers and suppliers, threats to substitute products and new entrants and rivalry among competitors in the industry.Also, key military robotics market players influencing the market are profiled in the study along with their SWOT analysis and market strategies. The report also focuses on leading industry players with information such as company profiles, products and services offered, financial information of last 3 years, key development in past five years.Military Robotics Market Key Players1. Boston Dynamics2. Elbit Systems Ltd.3. Lockheed Martin Corporation4. Israel Aerospace Industries5. Rheinmetall AG6. Turkish Aerospace Industries7. SAAB AB8. Endeavor Robotics9. Aerovironment, Inc.10. Qinetiq North AmericaComplete Report is Available atContact Us:Call: +1-646-491-9876Email: sales@theinsightpartners.comAbout Us:The Insight Partners is a one stop industry research provider of actionable intelligence. We help our clients in getting solutions to their research requirements through our syndicated and consulting research services. We are a specialist in Technology, Media, and Telecommunication industries.533, 5th Floor,Amanora Chambers, East Block, Amanora Township,Kharadi Road, Hadapsar, Pune-411028 Non-Life Insurance Thailand Market 2018 Analysis, Opportunities and Forecast to 2020 https://www.wiseguyreports.com/reports/3005536-non-life-insurance-in-thailand-key-trends-and-opportunities-to-2020 https://www.wiseguyreports.com/reports/3005536-non-life-insurance-in-thailand-key-trends-and-opportunities-to-2020 www.linkedin.com/company/4828928 https://twitter.com/WiseGuyReports https://www.facebook.com/Wiseguyreports-1009007869213183/?fref=ts Synopsis'Non-Life Insurance in Thailand, Key Trends and Opportunities to 2020' report provides a detailed outlook by product category for the Thailand non-life insurance segment, and a comparison of the Thailand insurance industry with its regional counterparts.It provides values for key performance indicators such as written premium, incurred loss, loss ratio, commissions and expenses, combined ratio, total assets, total investment income and net earned premium during the review period (20112015) and forecast period (20152020).GET SAMPLE REPORT @The report also analyzes distribution channels operating in the segment, gives a comprehensive overview of the Thailand economy and demographics, explains the various types of natural hazard and their impact on the Thailand insurance industry, and provides detailed information on the competitive landscape in the country.The report brings together research, modeling and analysis expertise, giving insurers access to information on segment dynamics and competitive advantages, and profiles of insurers operating in the country. The report also includes details of insurance regulations, and recent changes in the regulatory structure.Summary'Non-Life Insurance in Thailand, Key Trends and Opportunities to 2020' report provides in-depth market analysis, information and insights into the Thailand non-life insurance segment, including: The Thailand non-life segments detailed outlook by product category A comprehensive overview of the Thailand economy and demographics A comparison of the Thailand non-life insurance segment with its regional counterparts The various distribution channels in the Thailand non-life insurance segment Detailed analysis of natural hazards and their impact on the Thailand insurance industry Details of the competitive landscape in the non-life insurance segment in Thailand Details of regulatory policy applicable to the Thailand insurance industryScopeThis report provides a comprehensive analysis of the non-life insurance segment in Thailand: It provides historical values for the Thailand non-life insurance segment for the reports 20112015 review period, and projected figures for the 20152020 forecast period. It offers a detailed analysis of the key categories in the Thailand non-life insurance segment, and market forecasts to 2020. It provides a comparison of the Thailand non-life insurance segment with its regional counterparts It analyzes the various distribution channels for non-life insurance products in Thailand. It analyzes various natural hazards and their impact on the Thailand insurance industry It profiles the top non-life insurance companies in Thailand, and outlines the key regulations affecting them.Reasons to Buy Make strategic business decisions using in-depth historic and forecast market data related to the Thailand non-life insurance segment, and each category within it. Understand the demand-side dynamics, key market trends and growth opportunities in the Thailand non-life insurance segment. Assess the competitive dynamics in the non-life insurance segment. Identify growth opportunities and market dynamics in key product categories. Gain insights into key regulations governing the Thailand insurance industry, and their impact on companies and the industry's future.Key Highlights The Office of Insurance Commission (OIC), the insurance regulator, issued the Insurance Development Plan (20162020) on January 21, 2016, to develop the insurance industry and protect the rights of policyholders. The OIC has proposed to increase the minimum capital requirements for insurers under the new risk-based capital (RBC) 2 framework. The Ministry of Finance made amendments to regulations on foreign shareholding on January 18, 2017, allowing foreign insurers to acquire a 100% stake in domestic insurance companies. Rice crop insurance scheme became effective on July 3, 2017. The Bank for Agriculture and Agricultural Cooperatives (BAAC) is responsible for the implementation of the scheme.Table of Content: Key Points1 KEY FACTS AND HIGHLIGHTS2 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY3 ECONOMY AND DEMOGRAPHICS4 SEGMENT OUTLOOK5 OUTLOOK BY CATEGORY6 DISTRIBUTION CHANNEL OUTLOOK7 NATURAL AND MAN-MADE HAZARDS8 COMPETITIVE LANDSCAPE9 GOVERNANCE, RISK AND COMPLIANCEContinuedACCESS REPORT @Get in touch:LinkedIn:Twitter:Facebook:Wise Guy Reports understand how essential statistical surveying information is for your organization or association. Therefore, we have associated with the top publishers and research firms all specialized in specific domains, ensuring you will receive the most reliable and up to date research data available. We also provide COTS (Commercial off the Shelf) business sector reports as custom exploration agreeing your particular needs.WISE GUY RESEARCH CONSULTANTS PVT LTDOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersPune - 411028Maharashtra, India Radio Frequency Component Market Major Key Players: Qorvo Inc. (U.S.), Murata Manufacturing Co., Ltd. (Japan), Tsinghua Unigroup (China), Skyworks Solutions, Inc. (U.S.) Radio Frequency Component Market https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/sample_request/2041 https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/radio-frequency-component-market-2041 Market Scenario:Radio frequencies are radio signals that range between 3 KHz to 300 KHz. Components of radio frequency are the building blocks that enable connectivity in various electronic devices that are currently used. The radio frequency components enable the transmission and identification of frequencies. There exist various kinds of radio frequencies such as voice frequencies, medium frequencies, ultra high frequencies and super high frequencies among others.The various equipment used in radio frequency are couplers, power dividers, terminators, attenuators, detectors, adapters and phase shifters among others. The radio frequency components are utilized to obtain high switching rate, reciprocity, reliability, miniaturization and weight reduction. RF Components in correct combinations are the basic components desired by any communication devices for their functioning.The factor that affects this market is its capability to fit in very small sizes in the applications. With increasing network of universal mobile telecommunications system (3G), the market has witnessed high demand for switches and tuners due to their supporting feature to provide precise functionality to the other main RF devices such as power amplifiers, and demodulators. The major driving factors for growth of radio frequency component market are the rapid technological advancements in wireless communication and the increasing adoption of consumer electronics such as smartphones, set top box and smart television among others.The global Radio Frequency Component Market is expected to grow from USD ~6 Billion in 2016 to USD~ 16 Billion by 2022, at an estimated CAGR of ~16%. The growth of this market can be constrained by factors such as the growing installed base of the barcode system in several industries and low awareness of radio frequency components. The growth is also restrained because of comparatively higher expenditures as compared to the barcode systems.Major Key Players: Qorvo Inc. (U.S.) Murata Manufacturing Co., Ltd. (Japan) Tsinghua Unigroup (China) Skyworks Solutions, Inc. (U.S.) Broadcom Limited (U.S.) Vectron International, Inc. (U.S.) Danaher Corp. (U.S.) WIN Semiconductors Corp. (Taiwan) Mitsubishi Electric Corporation (Japan)Request a Sample Copy @Study Objectives of Global Radio Frequency Component Market: To provide detailed analysis of the market structure along with forecast of the various segments and sub-segments of the global IOT- Identity Access Management market. To provide insights about factors affecting the market growth. To analyze the global Radio frequency component market based porters five force analysis etc. To provide historical and forecast revenue of the market segments and sub-segments with respect to four main geographies and their countries- North America, Europe, Asia, and Rest of the World (ROW). To provide country level analysis of the market with respect to the current market size and future prospective. To provide country level analysis of the market for segment by components, material and applications. To provide strategic profiling of key players in the market, comprehensively analyzing their core competencies, and drawing a competitive landscape for the market. To track and analyze competitive developments such as joint ventures, strategic alliances, mergers and acquisitions, new product developments, and research and developments in the Global IOT- Identity Access Management Market.Segments:The global radio frequency component market has been segmented on the basis of components, material and end-users. Components comprises of filters, amplifiers, duplexer, antenna switches and modulators & demodulators. Materials consist of silicon, gallium arsenide, indium phosphide, nitride and others. The end-users are consumer electronics, automotive, telecommunication and military among others.Intended Audience: Radio Manufacturers Integrators Radio frequency testers Research firms Military and navy Raw material manufacturersBrowse Full Report Details @Regional Analysis:The regional analysis of Radio frequency component market is being studied for areas such as Asia Pacific, North America, Europe and rest of the world. North America is expected to dominate the radio frequency component market owing to huge number of early technology adopters and the highly established telecom sector in the North American region.Asia-Pacific is expected to experience a growth owing to the rise in consumer disposable income which is projected to lead to increase in adoption of consumer electronic products with connectivity features. Europe is expected to experience huge demand of radio frequency component market with increasing use of electronic devices for industrial, commercial and residential purposes.Table of Content1. Report prologue2. Introduction2.1 Definition2.2 Scope of the study2.2.1 Research objective2.2.2 Assumptions2.2.3 Limitations2.3 Market structureContinuedAbout Market Research Future:At Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.MRFR team have supreme objective to provide the optimum quality market research and intelligence services to our clients. Our market research studies by products, services, technologies, applications, end users, and market players for global, regional, and country level market segments, enable our clients to see more, know more, and do more, which help to answer all their most important questions.Contact:Market Research FutureOffice No. 524/528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, HadapsarPune 411028Maharashtra, India+1 646 845 9312Email: sales@marketresearchfuture.com Vibration Monitoring Market 2018 by Global Key Players: Honeywell International, Emerson Electric, General Electric, SKF AB, Rockwell Automation, Meggitt PLC https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/sample_request/3932 https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/vibration-monitoring-market-3932 Market Research Future published a research report on Vibration Monitoring Market Research Report- Global Forecast 2023 Market Analysis, Scope, Stake, Progress, Trends and Forecast to 2023.Market Scenario:The Vibration Monitoring provides early warning which enables to detect the fault and failure in the system. The vibration monitoring has prompt the market due to its response for fast failure source localization and process optimization at machines in operation. It also offers high diagnostic authoritativeness and greater diagnostic accuracy. The vibration monitoring system is integrated with the sensors with low noise system and is functionally tested for circuit continuity and output response, which is highly recognized by the organizations. The introduction of online vibration monitoring systems, used for protection of critical machinery, reduced maintenance costs and suggest the possibility of faultlessness in the system.The study indicates that the vibrational monitoring is rapidly becoming standard practice in most industrial predictive maintenance programs. The vibration monitoring is driven by various factor such as advance indication of developing problems, protect health, safety, and environment, monitor inaccessible equipment, complement portable monitoring programs which increase the demand of vibration monitoring market growth, globally.Get Sample of Report @The global Vibration Monitoring market is expected to grow at USD$ ~2.03 Billion by 2023, at ~6.6% of CAGR between 2017 and 2023.Segments:The global Vibration Monitoring market has been segmented on the basis of component, system type, end-users, and region.Vibration Monitoring Market by Component:Hardware Transmitters Accelerometers Proximity probes Velocity sensors OthersSoftware Services OthersVibration Monitoring Market by System Type: Vibration analyzers Embedded systems Vibration meters OthersVibration Monitoring Market by End-Users: Automotive Metal and Mining Food & Beverages Chemicals Oil & Gas OthersVibration Monitoring Market by Regions: North America Europe APAC Rest of the WorldKey Players:The prominent players in the Vibration Monitoring Market are Honeywell International Inc. (US), Emerson Electric Co. (US), General Electric (US), Analog Devices Inc.(US), SKF AB (Sweden), National Instruments Corp. (US), Rockwell Automation, Inc. (US), Schaeffler Technologies AG & Co. KG (Germany), Bruel & Kiaer Sound & Vibration Measurement A/S (Denmark), and Meggitt PLC (UK), among others.Regional Analysis:The regional analysis of Vibration Monitoring Market is being studied for region such as Asia pacific, North America, Europe and Rest of the World. North America region is dominating the global vibration monitoring market and accounted for a largest market share. The Key Vendors such as Honeywell International Inc. (US), Emerson Electric Co. (US), General Electric (US), and many more are the major player in this market. In Europe region, the vibration market is gaining momentum due to the vibration monitoring equipment which is providing the computerized information that will interlink with the investigations of machine manufacturer, the operator in industrial production, as well as to the related insurance companies. This region is expected to grow further in the coming years of the Vibration Monitoring market. Asia Pacific will emerge to the highest CAGR in the vibration monitoring market.Study Objectives of Vibration Monitoring Market: To provide detailed analysis of the market structure along with forecast of the various segments and sub-segments of the Vibration Monitoring market. To provide insights about factors affecting the market growth. To analyze the Vibration Monitoring market based porters five force analysis etc. To provide historical and forecast revenue of the market segments and sub-segments with respect to four main geographies and their countries- North America, Europe, Vibration Monitoring a, and Rest of the World (ROW). To provide country level analysis of the market with respect to the current market size and future prospective. To provide country level analysis of the market for segment on the basis component, system type, end-users, and region. To provide strategic profiling of key players in the market, comprehensively analyzing their core competencies, and drawing a competitive landscape for the market. To track and analyze competitive developments such as joint ventures, strategic alliances, mergers and acquisitions, new product developments, and research and developments in the Vibration Monitoring systemGet Complete Report @Intended Audience Raw material providers Vibration monitoring manufacturers Original equipment manufacturers Research organizations and consulting companies Vibration monitoring-related associations Distributors and traders Government bodies Semiconductor product designers and fabricators Research institutes and organizations Technology standards organizations Technology investors Research institutes, System Integrators Research/Consultancy firmsAbout Us:At Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.MRFR team have supreme objective to provide the optimum quality market research and intelligence services to our clients. Our market research studies by products, services, technologies, applications, end users, and market players for global, regional, and country level market segments, enable our clients to see more, know more, and do more, which help to answer all their most important questions.In order to stay updated with technology and work process of the industry, MRFR often plans & conducts meet with the industry experts and industrial visits for its research analyst members.Media Contact:Akash Anand,Market Research FutureOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, Hadapsar,Pune - 411028Maharashtra, India+1 646 845 9312Email: akash.anand@marketresearchfuture.com USD 225 Million by 2023 Expected growth for Neuromorphic Computing Market Including Key Players: IBM Corp, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Samsung Group, Intel Corp. HRL Laboratories https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/sample_request/5110 MarketResearchFuture Publish a New Market Research Report On Neuromorphic Computing 2018 : Discovers the Opportunities, Trends, Risk, Simulation, Management to 2023.Description:Neuromorphic Computing -Global Market Status and Trend Report 2018-2023 offers a comprehensive analysis on Neuromorphic Computing industry, standing on the readers perspective, delivering detailed market data and penetrating insights. No matter the client is industry insider, potential entrant or investor, the report will provides useful data and information.Neuromorphic engineering is an emerging interdisciplinary field that involves designing sophisticated devices based on complex neural circuits of the brain. It uses principles of the nervous system for engineering applications to achieve a better understanding of computations occurring in actual biological circuits and utilize their unique properties of to design and implement efficient engineering products.The main factors, which has driven research and development of neuromorphic chips, are tremendous demand for data and data analytics, miniaturization of sensors, ingress of Artificial Intelligence into software of almost all intelligent machines and high cost of further miniaturization of integrated circuits.Request a Sample Report @Key PlayersSome of the key players in the market are IBM Corp. (U.S.), Hewlett Packard Enterprise (U.S.), Samsung Group (South Korea), Intel Corp. (U.S.), HRL Laboratories, LLC (U.S.), General Vision Inc. (U.S.), Applied Brain Research Inc. (U.S.), and BrainChip Holdings Ltd. (U.S.) among others.The Global Neuromorphic Computing Market is expected to reach USD 225 Million by 2023SegmentationThe market for neuromorphic computing market is segmented on the basis of application, offering, end-user and region. On the basis of offering, the segment is further classified into hardware and software. Neuromorphic computing has a wide range of applications such as image recognition, signal recognition, data mining, object detection and many more. By end-user, the market can be segregated into five segments: automotive, consumer electronics, automotive, defense, and healthcare. The consumer electronics is expected to hold the largest share in terms of end-use application of neuromorphic computing. The usage of neuromorphic computing in self-driven and smart vehicles is expected to bring a transition in transportation and furthermore propel the growth of automotive sector. The usage of neuromorphic chips in satellites for surveillance and aerial imagery is highly in demand in the defense sector.Software is expected to hold the largest share of neuromorphic computing market, based on offering. Software has applications in video monitoring, machine vision, and voice identification. Increasing adoption of software in industries such as aerospace & defense, IT & telecom, and medical is driving the growth of the neuromorphic computing software market.Get Full Report @ https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/neuromorphic-computing-market-5110About Market Research Future:At Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.Contact:Market Research Future+1 646 845 9312Email: sales@marketresearchfuture.com Acoustic Wave Sensor Market 2018 Global Key Players: Sensortechnik, Vectron International, Qualtre, SENSeOR SAS, Transense Technologies, Sensor Technology, Hawk Measurement Systems https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/sample_request/4220 https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/acoustic-wave-sensor-market-4220 Market Research Future published a research report on Acoustic Wave Sensor Market Research Report- Global Forecast 2023 Market Analysis, Scope, Stake, Progress, Trends and Forecast to 2023.Market Scenario:The global acoustic wave sensor market can be bifurcated as type, device, end-users and region. On the basis of type, the market can be segmented as bulk acoustic wave sensor and surface acoustic wave sensor. Out of these, surface acoustic wave sensor accounted for the largest market share majorly due to wireless and passive nature of sensors, penetration of micro electro mechanical system (MEMS) technology and low manufacturing cost. However, bulk acoustic wave sensor segment is expected to grow over the forecast period, 2017-2023.The factors contributing to the growth of the Acoustic Wave Sensor Market are high demand for saw-based temperature sensors from end-user verticals and growing concern toward security and surveillance and high implementation in the automotive industry. However, factors such as computational cost and technical issues associated with energy consumption, and sensitivity are hindering the growth of the acoustic wave sensor market. Furthermore, increasing investments in the wave sensor market and increasing opportunities across various industries are expected to boost the growth of the acoustic wave sensor market over the forecast period, 2017-2023.Get Sample of Report @Acoustic wave sensors can be explained as micro electro mechanical systems which rely on the modulation of surface acoustic waves for sensing a physical phenomenon. The sensor helps to pass an electrical signal into a mechanical wave which can be easily influenced by physical phenomena. The device helps to transduce the wave back into an electrical signal.The global acoustic wave sensor market is highly competitive. Various established international brands, domestic brands and as well as new entrants form a competitive landscape. The key players are nonstop increasingly seeking market expansion through various strategic mergers and acquisitions, innovation, increasing investments in research and development and cost-effective product portfolio. The acoustic wave sensor market is highly competitive due to the presence of several large vendors.The global acoustic wave sensor market is expected to reach approximately USD 895 million by the end of 2023 with 11% CAGR during forecast period 2017-2023.Key PlayersThe key players in the global acoustic wave sensor market include- Althen GmbH Mess- und Sensortechnik (Germany), Vectron International Inc. (US), Qualtre Inc. (US), SENSeOR SAS (France), NanoTemper Technologies GmbH (Germany), Transense Technologies plc (UK), Sensor Technology Ltd. (US), Pro-micron GmbH & Co. KG (Germany), Hawk Measurement Systems (Australia) and H. Heinz Mewiderstande GmbH (Germany) among others.Regional AnalysisThe global acoustic wave sensor market is expected to grow significantly over the forecast period, 2017-2023. Automotive segment of acoustic wave sensor market globally drives the market majorly due to their extensive range of uses in the automobile industry. The market is expected to have higher growth rate as compared to the previous years. The global acoustic wave sensor market segmented into four main regions such as North America, Asia-Pacific, Europe and Rest of the World. Automotive segments hold a largest share in the North American region. The reason is attributed to implementation of sensor devices in various industries and the growing concern about security.Also, organizations are looking for better technologically advanced solutions in this region. Therefore, automotive sector of the North American market accounted for the largest market share.Asia-Pacific region is expected to grow over the forecast period. Countries such as Japan, China and India contributes largely to the overall market share. The reason is attributed to the increasing number of businesses in this region and the growing adoption of sensors by the automotive industry.North-America accounted for the largest market share. Countries such as U.S. and Canada contributes largely to the overall market share. The reason is attributed to increasing number of vendor present across this region and the growing use of technologically advanced solutions and presence of technical expertise.Get complete Report @Intended Audience Raw material providers Original equipment manufacturers Semiconductor component suppliers Acoustic Wave Sensor distributors Software solution providers Connectivity Service providers for hazardous equipment Research institutes and organizations Technology standards organizations Technology investors Research institutes, System Integrators Research/Consultancy firmsAbout Us:At Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.MRFR team have supreme objective to provide the optimum quality market research and intelligence services to our clients. Our market research studies by products, services, technologies, applications, end users, and market players for global, regional, and country level market segments, enable our clients to see more, know more, and do more, which help to answer all their most important questions.In order to stay updated with technology and work process of the industry, MRFR often plans & conducts meet with the industry experts and industrial visits for its research analyst members.Media Contact:Akash Anand,Market Research FutureOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, Hadapsar,Pune - 411028Maharashtra, India+1 646 845 9312Email: akash.anand@marketresearchfuture.com Future of Hadoop and Big Data Analytics Market, By Solution, Service, End User - Global Industry Insights, Trends, Outlook, 2017-2025 https://www.coherentmarketinsights.com/ongoing-insight/toc/1118 https://www.coherentmarketinsights.com/ongoing-insight/hadoop-and-big-data-analytics-market-1118 http://www.coherentchronicle.com Hadoop is a Java-based programming structure that is used for processing and storage of large data sets in a distributed computing environment. It is a distributed processing technology that provides expansive data storage facility and handles thousands of terabytes of data and rapid data transfer among nodes. Hadoop is extensively used in big data analytics, including scientific analytics, business and sales development, and enormous volumes of data processing.Among end users, the banking, finance and insurance segment is expected to lead the hadoop and big data analytics market during the forecast period (2017 2025). The banking and finance sector has witnessed rapid growth, primarily due to increasing adoption of information technology solutions for improved banking services. The proliferation of online transactions, is increasing adoption towards technologies such as National Electronic Fund Transfer (NEFT), Real-time Gross Settlement Systems (RTGS), Electronic Clearing Service (ECS) as well as mobile transactions. Transactions through such technology, however, are hacking targets for cybercriminals. Furthermore, websites and mobile applications that accept online purchases and transactions, which store details regarding credit cards, debit cards, and bank account are also prominent hacking targets. According to the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), during 2015-2016, 16,468 cyber terrorism associated with ATM, debit card, credit card, and net banking frauds were reported. Whereas, 13,083 frauds were reported in 2014-2015 and 9,500 in 2013-14. This indicates the increasing number of cyber frauds over the years, which in turn is expected to augment the demand for Hadoop and Big Data Analytics solutions in the banking and finance industry.Request Table of Content of this Report :However, non-uniformity of data sets is expected to restraint the growth opportunity of global digital marketing software market. Additionally lack of proper Hadoop platform due to shortage of skilled workforces that can transform machine language to operational solutions for data warehousing, is another major restraining factor that is expected to reduce growth rate of the market.North America holds a dominant position in the market and is expected to maintain its dominance over the forecast period. Dominance of this region is attributed to the rampant development of IT infrastructure and high presence of major IT companies such as Google, Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle in the region.Asia Pacific is projected to observe rapid growth over the forecast period, owing to rapid industrialization and urbanization. For instance, Government of India has launched the smart city mission for city renovation and retrofitting program to develop 100 cities across the country to make them more resident friendly and highly maintainable. Such initiatives are expected to create opportunities for growth of the market over the forecast period.Key market players operating in the hadoop and big data analytics market include Microsoft Corporation, Amazon Web Services (AWS), IBM Corporation, Teradata Corporation, Tableau Software, Inc., Cloudera, Inc., Pentaho Corporation, Marklogic Corporation, SAP SE, and Pivotal Software, Inc.For More Information :About Coherent Market Insights:Coherent Market Insights is a prominent market research and consulting firm offering action-ready syndicated research reports, custom market analysis, consulting services, and competitive analysis through various recommendations related to emerging market trends, technologies, and potential absolute dollar opportunity.Contact Us:Mr. ShahCoherent Market Insights1001 4th Ave,#3200Seattle, WA 98154Tel: +1-206-701-6702Email: sales@coherentmarketinsights.comVisit our news Website: Under Vehicle Surveillance Market 2018 Sales Revenue and Key Players: Delphi Automotive, Robert Bosch, Continental, DENSO, Honeywell Security Group, SecuScan, Law Enforcement Associates https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/sample_request/4301 https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/under-vehicle-surveillance-market-4301 Market Research Future published a research report on Under Vehicle Surveillance Market Research Report- Global Forecast 2023 Market Analysis, Scope, Stake, Progress, Trends and Forecast to 2023.Market ScenarioRegionally, North America accounted for the largest market share from countries such U.S. and Canada among others. The reason is attributed to growing demand for high-end technology solutions, increasing R&D happening in this region, changing in buying pattern, positive trends in the economy growth and growing awareness towards vehicle safety. However, Asia Pacific is expected to grow over the forecast period, 2017-2023. The reason is attributed to presence of large number of manufacturers and the increasing concerns regarding safety and security.The global Under Vehicle Surveillance Market can be bifurcated as type, end-users and region. On the basis of type, the market can be segmented as fixed and portable. Out of these, portable segment accounted for the largest market share majorly due to growing demand for inspection of the undersides of road vehicles. However, fixed segment is expected to grow at a steady rate over the forecast period, 2017-2023.The factors contributing to the growth of the under vehicle surveillance market are growing due to favorable government regulations in several countries, increasing demand for premium cars equipped with vehicle surveillance systems and wide range of benefits of under vehicle surveillance systems. Furthermore, factors such as high penetration of vehicle surveillance in developing countries and various solutions offered by vehicle surveillance as a software are expected to boost the growth of the under vehicle surveillance market over the forecast period, 2017-2023.However, complexity, high cost of systems regulations and technological advancements in autonomous car are the factors hampering the growth of the overall market.Get Sample of Report @The global under vehicle surveillance market is highly competitive. Various established international brands, domestic brands and as well as new entrants form a competitive landscape. The key players are nonstop increasingly seeking market expansion through various strategic mergers and acquisitions, innovation, increasing investments in research and development and cost-effective product portfolio. The under vehicle surveillance market is highly competitive due to the presence of several large vendors.The global under vehicle surveillance market is expected to reach approximately USD 10 billion by the end of 2023 with 13% CAGR during forecast period 2017-2023.Key Players:The key players in the global under vehicle surveillance market include- Delphi Automotive PLC (U.K.), Robert Bosch GmbH (Germany), Continental AG (Germany), DENSO Corporation (Japan), Honeywell Security Group (U.S.), COMM-PORT Technologies (U.S.), Law Enforcement Associates (U.S.), SecuScan (Germany) and Hangzhou Hikvision Digital Technology Co. Ltd. (China) among others.SegmentsFor the purpose of this study, Market Research Future has segmented the market of under vehicle surveillance into type, end-users and region.Type Fixed PortableEnd-users Government Commercial Energy plant entrances Military & Defense OthersRegion North America Europe Asia Pacific Rest of the WorldGet Complete Report @Intended Audience Device manufacturers Network Operators Distributors Suppliers Research firms Software Developers Commercial Banks Vendors Government Agencies Vendors End-user sectors Technology InvestorsAbout Us:At Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.Media Contact:Akash Anand,Market Research FutureOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, Hadapsar,Pune - 411028Maharashtra, India+1 646 845 9312Email: akash.anand@marketresearchfuture.com Iron Oxide Market to Showcase Healthy Expansion at 4.3% CAGR During 2015-2025 https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-gb-1254 https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/askus/rep-gb-1254 www.futuremarketinsights.com Future Market Insights (FMI) delivers key insights on the global iron oxide market in its latest report titled, Iron Oxide Market: Global Industry Analysis and Opportunity Assessment, 2015-2025. In terms of value, the global iron oxide market is projected to increase at a CAGR of 4.3% during the forecast period, owing to various factors, regarding which FMI offers vital insights in detail in this report.Iron oxides are chemical compounds that, apart from iron ores, find wide application as pigments, catalysts, etc. Construction and paints & coatings are the major end-use industries for iron oxides.Growth in construction industry, supported by rising urbanization, is expected to be among the major drivers for global iron oxide market. Major application of iron oxides in the construction industry is to colour concrete blocks and pavement bricks. Iron oxide pigments are being widely used in paints and coatings industry for their use as primers for automobiles and steel structures.Request For Report Sample@Stringent government regulations are expected to adversely impact global iron oxide market significantly. This is especially the case in China, where, over the last two years, various small- and medium-scale companies have exited the iron oxide market due to high costs involved in ensuring regulatory compliance. The same trend is expected to continue over the near future.The iron oxide market is segmented on the basis of product type, application and region. On the basis of product type, the global iron oxide market is segmented into red iron oxide, yellow iron oxide, black iron oxide, orange iron oxide, brown iron oxide, green iron oxide and other blends. On the basis of application, the global iron oxide market is segmented into construction, paints & coatings, plastics, chemicals, paper & pulp manufacturing, textile, ceramics, leather and others (fertilizers, cosmetics and rubber). Regionally, the global iron oxide market is segmented into Asia Pacific Excluding Japan (APEJ), North America, Latin America, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Middle East & Africa and Japan.Among product types, red iron oxide was the largest revenue contributor to the global iron oxide market in 2014. Wide application of red iron oxide across various industries is expected to support growth of the segment over the forecast period.In 2014, the construction industry segment dominated the global market, accounting for around 50% revenue share. Growth of the construction industry is in turn expected to drive growth of the iron oxide market over forecast period. In order to enhance their market share, iron oxide producers are focusing on development of new applications for iron oxides.In 2014, Asia pacific excluding Japan (APEJ) was the largest market for iron oxide, both in terms of production and consumption. In terms of consumption, APEJ was followed by Western Europe and North America, respectively.Request For Report Table of Content (TOC):Key players profiled in this study of the global iron oxide market include LANXESS AG, Huntsman International Inc. Cathay Industries, Alabama Pigments Company LLC, Shenghua Group Deqing Huayuan Pigment Co LTD, TODA KOGYO CORPORATION, Jiangsu Yuxing Industry and Trade Co., Ltd., Hunan Three-ring Pigments Co., Ltd., Yaroslavsky Pigment Company and Tata Pigments Company. LANXESS AG has been estimated to account for the largest share in the global iron oxide market in 2015.ABOUT US:Future Market Insights (FMI) is a leading market intelligence and consulting firm. We deliver syndicated research reports, custom research reports and consulting services, which are personalized in nature. FMI delivers a complete packaged solution, which combines current market intelligence, statistical anecdotes, technology inputs, valuable growth insights, an aerial view of the competitive framework, and future market trends.CONTACT:Future Market Insights616 Corporate Way, Suite 2-9018,Valley Cottage, NY 10989,United StatesT: +1-347-918-3531F: +1-845-579-5705Email: sales@futuremarketinsights.comWebsite: Maritime Safety Market Industry, Market Segments, Market Share, Market Size, Market Analysis, Geographical Trends and Demand Forecast to 2024 Maritime Safety Market http://bit.ly/2HFNqRq http://bit.ly/2sKbYWk http://bit.ly/2BJ0k0F http://databridgemarketresearch.com/blog/ https://www.linkedin.com/company/data-bridge-market-research Data Bridge Market Research provides New Report titled Global maritime safety market accounted for USD 17.3 billion in 2016 growing at a CAGR of 7.7% during the forecast period of 2017 to 2024. The upcoming market report contains data for historic year 2014, 2015, the base year of calculation is 2016 and the forecast period is 2017 to 2024., also the Global Maritime Safety Market, By Geography; Technologies & Systems(Screening & Scanning, Access Control, Detectors, Geographic Information System, Surveillance & Tracking, Weather Monitoring, SCADA, Communication); Services; Categories- Industry Trends and Forecast to 2024.Market Definition: Global Maritime Safety MarketMaritime safety is referred to be the mission of United States coast guard. Coast guard investigates maritime incidents, merchant vessels, offshore drilling units and maritime facilities. Apart from these coast guards are also responsible for licensing mariners, documenting U.S. flagged vessels, and implementing a variety of safety programs. Maritime safety awareness, and regulatory compliances and standards may act as the major driver in the growth of marine safety. On the other side, absence of uniform standards of technologies and solutions may hamper the market.Major market drivers & restraints: Maritime safety awareness Regulatory compliances and standards Rising trade and freight transport activities by sea Ungoverned marine regions Absence of uniform standards of technologies and solutions Transnational organized crime (TOC)Order Free Sample Report@Market Segmentation: Global Maritime Safety MarketThe global maritime safety market is segmented on the basis of technologies and systems into screening and scanning, access control, detectors, geographic information system, surveillance and tracking, weather monitoring, SCADA, communication, and others. The access control segment is further sub segmented into biometrics, and identification card. The detectors segment is further sub segmented into RFID tags, CARNE/HAZMAT detection, and laser range finder. The surveillance and tracking segment is further sub segmented into underwater surveillance, video surveillance, automatic identification system, long-range identification and tracking (LRIT), radar, optronics, and thermal imaging. The communication segment is further sub segmented into satellite-based, and radio-based. The others segment is further sub segmented into long range acoustic device, e-navigation, charts, network security, cyber security, and intruder alarms.On the basis of services, the global maritime safety market is segmented into training, risk assessment and investigation, maintenance and support, consulting, and others.The others segment is further sub segmented into loss prevention, security management, counter piracy, kidnap, and response consultancy.On the basis of categories, the global maritime safety market is segmented into port and critical infrastructure security, vessel security, and coastal surveillance.On the basis of geography, the global maritime safety market report covers data points for 28 countries across multiple geographies such as North America, South America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, Middle East & Africa.Some of the major countries covered in this report are U.S., Canada, Germany, France, U.K., Netherlands, Switzerland, Turkey, Russia, China, India, South Korea, Japan, Australia, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, and Brazil among others. In 2017, North America is expected to dominate the market.Have Any Query? Ask Ours Expert @Company Share Analysis: Global Maritime Safety MarketThe report for maritime safety market include detailed vendor level analysis for market shares in 2016 for Global, North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa and South America specifically. Also impact and development analysis of key vendors is registered in the market and factored on the basis of Vendor Positioning Grid Analysis which measures the vendors strengths and opportunities against present market challenges, measure providers ability to identify or satisfy present market needs, map providers market vision to current and upcoming market dynamics among others. The report also measures technology life line curve and market time line to analyze and do more affective investments.Major Market Competitors: Global Maritime Safety MarketSome of the major players of the global maritime safety market are BAE Systems, Elbit Systems Ltd., Harris Corporation, Honeywell International Inc., Kongsberg Gruppen ASA, Northrop Grumman Corporation, Raytheon Anschutz, Saab AB, Leonardo Societa per azioni, SIGNALIS, GRUPO EULEN, ABS Group, Consilium AB Publ., Vane Brothers, SOLAS MARINE SERVICES GROUP, Safety Management Systems LLC, Siam Global Marine Safety Co., Ltd., and others.Read more about the Maritime Safety Market Visit@About Data Bridge Market Research:Data Bridge Market Research set forth itself as an unconventional and neoteric Market research and consulting firm with unparalleled level of resilience and integrated approaches. We are determined to unearth the best market opportunities and foster efficient information for your business to thrive in the market. Data Bridge endeavors to provide appropriate solutions to the complex business challenges and initiates an effortless decision-making process.Contact:Vishal DixitData Bridge Market ResearchTel: +1-888-387-2818Email: Sales@databridgemarketresearch.comInvestor: investors@databridgemarketresearch.comVisit Blog:Follow us on LinkedIn: Economy Minister Meets World Bank Staff to Discuss Blockchain Prospects By Tea Mariamidze Georgias First Vice-Premier and the Minister of Economy, Dimitry Kumsishvili, has met the representatives of the World Bank (WB) and discussed the prospects of blockchain technologies development.Blockchain is a digitized, decentralized, public ledger of all cryptocurrency transactions.Constantly growing as completed blocks [the most recent transactions] are recorded and added to it in chronological order, it allows market participants to keep track of digital currency transactions without central recordkeeping.The meeting was held at the headquarters of the Ministry of Economy on February 19. The World Bank delegation was headed by Hans Timmer, the Chief Economist of the World Bank for Europe and Central Asia region.In parallel with the discussions about blockchain technologies, the sides also spoke about the opportunities of the development of the cryptocurrencies in Georgia.The World Banks representatives highlighted that the production of bitcoins and the blockchain technologies in general are very well developed in Georgia. They added the country is among the leaders in this field.Moreover, as mentioned at the meeting, the World Bank found it necessary to study the experience that public and private sectors of Georgia have accumulated in this regard, particularly in the use of the blockchain technologies.The WB delegation expressed interest in the current situation in the field and the visions and prospects of the further development of those technologies in Georgia.As reported by the Ministry of Economy, the representatives of the World Bank will also meet other governmental agencies as well as the private sector, where the blockchain technology is introduced as well. Future of Distributed Ledger Technology Market - Global Industry Insights, Trends, Outlook, 2017-2025 https://www.coherentmarketinsights.com/ongoing-insight/toc/1131 https://www.coherentmarketinsights.com/ongoing-insight/distributed-ledger-technology-market-1131 http://www.coherentchronicle.com A distributed ledger is a synchronized and decentralized digital database software system. It maintains all transaction information in a decentralized manner across different locations, by reducing the requirement of a central authority for checking against manipulation. It permits any online transactions or data storage to be safe by preventing the probability of cybercrime as all the consumers are able to see all transactions, and the data is stored in a register. A digital ledger can securely and accurately store all this information with the help of cryptography, which can be accessible only by using cryptographic signatures.Distributed Ledger Technology applicationsBlockchain is a type of distributed ledger technology. Blockchain technology is a decentralized software program that establishes a digital register, which enables in protected online payment transactions. These transactions are recorded in the register from a number of computers. The register maintains a continuous set of data containing information about the transaction records without changing the transaction information. The data in the register is maintained in the form of lists, which are organized in Blocks for each time period. These Blocks consists of information about the transactions, and provides a reference to the previous Block, thus, the present Block links to the prior Block to form a Blockchain. Generally, one Block contains the information about a set of transactional records for a particular period of time or fixed memory size.Request Table of Content of this Report :Importance of Distributed Ledger TechnologyDistributed ledger technology based transactions enable faster, safer, and economical transactions as compared to conventional transaction systems. This is due to the fact that conventional transaction systems refer to central administrator or centralized data storage system. Moreover, distributed ledger technology can be used to build a permanent and transparent ledger system for gathering data on exchanges, real-time tracking of digital transaction and payments, and to prevent frauds and errors. All the information stored in distributed ledger becomes unchangeable, and can be accessible from each node of a network as it becomes identical replica. Hence, if any changes are made in the register, it will be reflected and copied to every users database within a span of seconds. Therefore, digital ledgers are more secure and to make a successful cyber-attack, a hacker needs to attack all the distributed copies, simultaneously.However, lack of awareness about distributed ledger technology and limited scalability are two major factors expected to restraint growth opportunity of the global distributed ledger technology market.Regional InsightsThe distributed ledger technology market is segmented on the basis of geography including North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America, Middle East, and Africa regions. The market in North America is expected to be dominant in the global market. This is owing to rising awareness and increasing applications of this technology in various segments. For instance, according to IoT Newsletter Organization in 2017, U.S. Department of Energy is exploring the application of blockchain technology for the management of next-generation power grids. This in turn boosting growth of the distributed ledger technology market.Rising demand for e-Commerce in emerging economies such as China and India is another factor for growth of the markets. According to Coherent Market Insights analysis, in 2016, China accounted for over 63% of digital buyers in Asia Pacific followed by India and Japan. Hence, Asia Pacific accounted for over 10% of global retail e-Commerce sales in 2016. This is owing to increasing implementation and improving blockchain services in this region. Blockchain is used in e-Commerce for gathering data on exchanges, real-time tracking of digital transaction, and payments. Increased adoption and development of Bitcoin in China is expected to fuel growth rate of blockchain market, which is expected to in turn boost growth of the distributed ledger technology market in Asia Pacific.Competitive InsightsThe key market players in the distributed ledger technology industry include IBM Corporation, Microsoft Corporation, Amazon.com, Inc., SAP SE, Intel Corporation, Samsung Group, NVIDIA Corporation, Xilinx, Inc., AMD, Inc., Siemens AG, Accenture Plc, and Infosys Ltd.For More Information :About Coherent Market Insights:Coherent Market Insights is a prominent market research and consulting firm offering action-ready syndicated research reports, custom market analysis, consulting services, and competitive analysis through various recommendations related to emerging market trends, technologies, and potential absolute dollar opportunity.Contact Us:Mr. ShahCoherent Market Insights1001 4th Ave,#3200Seattle, WA 98154Tel: +1-206-701-6702Email: sales@coherentmarketinsights.comVisit our news Website: IoT in Europe Market 2017: Key Players Vodafone, Orange, Telefonica, O2 and More IoT in Europe: Market https://www.wiseguyreports.com/sample-request/1685827-iot-in-europe-market-opportunities-and-main-applications https://www.wiseguyreports.com/conferences https://www.wiseguyreports.com/seminars SUMMARYWiseGuyReports published new report, titled IoT in Europe: Market opportunities and main applications"IoT in Europe: Market opportunities and main applications", a new Telecom Insider Report by offers a thorough study of the size of the IoT market and different strategies of telecom operators in the European region. The report analyses the strategies pertaining to IoT verticals.The high penetration of smartphones has favored the mass usage of IoT-related applications and has appeared as an essential IoT device for the IoT ecosystem. The storage capacity provided by cloud computing and the analytics stemming from big data have also foster growth of IoT. Europe will boast the most IoT connections worldwide in 2017, followed by the Americas, Asia-Pacific and Africa and Middle East, and will remain leader through 2020. expects total IoT connections to reach 3.1 million in 2020 supported by businesses needs to optimize resources, enhance customer experience and generate new revenue streams. Cellular M2M connections are gaining traction among total SIM cards in Europe, representing 7% of the market in 2017. In terms of IoT applications in Europe, forecasts the share of smart metering in total connections to decline to 28% in 2020, from 52% in 2017, as industrial and finance applications boom. European telcos have invested different IoT applications with telematics, fleet management, smart cities and smart home being four specific example illustrated in this report.The report consists of the following sections - Introduction: This section briefly examines the definition of IoT and M2M and offers a snapshot of the different IoT standards.- Key Drivers: This section highlights the three main drivers behind the proliferation of IoT connections, namely the high take-up of smartphones, cloud computing and bidg data analytics (BDA).- Market sizing: This section provides an estimate and forecast through 2020 of total IoT connections worldwide and in Europe. It also take a dive into the size of IoT in Europe by connectivity, vertical and applications- Case studies: We continue with a review of the IoT applications that leading telecom companies - Vodafone Germany, Orange France, Telefonica Spain and O2 UK - have been following to increase presence in the IoT environment.- Key findings and recommendations: We conclude the report with a summary of key findings and a set of recommendations for telecom operators and network vendors to grasp full opportunities on the IoT market.GET SAMPLE REPORT @Companies mentionedVodafoneOrangeTelefonicaO2Scope- IoT connections have been growing at a fast pace triggered by smartphone growth, cloud computing and big data analytics. Europe makes up over a third of all IoT connections compared to other regions- Total IoT connections to increase 1.4x between 2017 and 2020 to 4.8bn connections, at a CAGR of 34%.- Cellular M2M, though growing in number, to decrease in total IoT connections through 2020 and the market share of telcos deploying other kinds of connectivity (e.g., fixed, satellite, LoRa, Sigfox, NB-IoT, etc.) will increase- European operators have majorly invested in fleet management and telematics with smart homes gaining momentum and Spain paving the way for smart cities.Key points to buy- The insider report examines the IoT strategies of European telecom operators to generate new revenue streams. The report also provides analysis of main IoT applications European telcos have invested in.- The insights in the report will help executives build proactive and profitable growth strategies through analysis of the strategies adopted by telcos, competitive environment and best practices.- The case studies focus on current strategies pertaining to IoT technology used and application targeted for four telcos in the region. The analysis can be beneficial to local competitors or prospective market entrants.- By understanding of the opportunities stemming from IoT, telcos can strengthen their market positioning and competitiveness.- With a total of 24 Exhibits, the report is designed for an executive-level audience, boasting presentation quality.Table of ContentsTable of contents 3List of exhibits 4Executive Summary 5Introduction: Definitions and standards 6Defining the IoT and M2MIoT standardsMain challengesSection 1: Main opportunities and challenges 10Smartphones growthCloud computingBig data analyticsSection 2: Market sizing 14IoT Connections - International BenchmarkIoT by connectivity - EuropeM2M in total SIM cards - EuropeIoT by applications - EuropeIoT by vertical - EuropeSection 3: Case Studies 20Vodafone Germany - Telematics..CONTINUEDFor accessing accurate and deep understanding and to gain latest insights and key developments in the area of your interest, we also have a list of conferences in which you will be interested in, for more information, cordially checkFor updating knowledge or for thoroughly understanding various terminologies, we also have vast list of seminars for your reference, for more information cordially checkWise Guy Reports understand how essential statistical surveying information is for your organization or association. Therefore, we have associated with the top publishers and research firms all specialized in specific domains, ensuring you will receive the most reliable and up to date research data available. We also provide COTS (Commercial off the Shelf) business sector reports as custom exploration agreeing your particular needs.WISEGUY RESEARCH CONSULTANTS PVT LTDOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersPune - 411028Maharashtra, India Expansion of Laser Safety Glasses Market Poised to Reflect a CAGR of 8.2% for 2015-2025 Period https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-gb-885 https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/askus/rep-gb-885 www.futuremarketinsights.com Future Market Insights (FMI) recently announced the release of its report titled Laser Safety Glasses Market: Global Industry Analysis and Opportunity Assessment 2015-2025. As per the report, the global laser safety glasses market was valued at US$ 262.5 Mn in 2014 and is anticipated to reach US$ 613.3 Mn by 2025 end, increasing at a CAGR of 8.2% over the forecast period (2015-2025).Market Drivers and RestraintsIncreasing application areas for laser technology coupled with stringent regulations for worker safety are factors anticipated to further drive demand for laser safety glasses during the forecast period. Technological advancements in laser technology has created wider scope for application of laser safety glasses in the medical field, wherein lasers are used in oncology, cosmetic surgery, dentistry, dermatology and other procedures. Intense laser beams used in these surgical procedures demands usage of high-quality laser safety glasses. Increasing awareness and rising stringent regulations regarding hazards of exposure to lasers, as well as growing selections with regard to comfort and design of laser safety glasses being offered by manufacturers are further driving growth of the global laser safety glasses market. Moreover, Federal Aviation Administration (U.S.) reported a strong rise in laser accidents in the aviation industry during the last few years, which is expected to increase usage of laser safety glasses in military, aerospace and defence sectors.Request For Report Sample@Complex certification requirements for commercialization of laser safety glasses in EU countries can be a potential threat for growth of the laser safety glasses market. Also, rising application of laser safety glasses, especially in medical industry has attracted regional well as international market players in the field. This has resulted in stiff competition in the laser safety glasses industry due to constant product innovation by major players.Increasing popularity of laser surgery across various medical branches is expected to offer lucrative opportunities in the laser safety glasses market. Laser surgeries are bladeless, painless and leave no visible marks on patients. Thus, laser treatment is rapidly becoming popular in various fields such as dermatology and eye surgery. This has created major potential opportunity for laser protection glasses manufacturers, and this trend is expected to continue over the forecast period.Market SegmentsGeography-wise, North America dominated the global laser safety glasses market in 2014, accounting for approximately one-third value share of the global laser safety glasses market. The North America laser safety glasses market is expected to witness healthy growth over the next few years. Manufacturers in the region are actively launching new laser safety glass products with different styles and shapes, to capitalise on this growing trend.Revenue contribution of Asia Pacific excluding Japan (APEJ) to the global laser safety glasses market is projected to increase at a relatively high CAGR of 10.3% over the forecast period. The laser safety glasses market continues to be fragmented in this region, mainly due to low entry barriers for manufacturers. Furthermore, various domestic products are easily accessible in the region, offering value-added laser safety glasses products at low prices. Western Europe is a mature market for laser safety glasses and is projected to witness stable growth through 2025, attributed to rise in demand for laser safety glasses in Germany, the U.K. and France. Japan laser safety glasses market is expected to witness sluggish growth over the forecast period and is expected to lose market share to emerging markets in Asia Pacific such as China and India.On the basis of technology type, the glass laser safety eyewear segment dominated the global laser safety glasses market in 2014 in terms of revenue. Revenue contribution of the segment is expected to increase at a CAGR of 7.6% during the forecast period. In terms of revenue, the laser protective face shields and thin-film glasses segment is expected to register significant CAGR during 20152025, due to their increasing applications in medical and automotive manufacturing segments.On the basis of application type, the medical segment dominated the global laser safety glasses market in 2014 in terms of revenue, accounting for over 40.0% share of the global laser safety glasses market. This segment is expected to lose market share to the military & defence and automotive manufacturing segments, which are projected to expand at significant CAGRs of 8.8% and 8.6%, respectively during the forecast period.Request For Report Table of Content (TOC):Competitive LandscapeKey market players covered in the report include Honeywell International Inc., uvex Group, Phillips Safety Products, Inc., Thorlabs, Inc., Univent Optical Technologies, Kentek Corporation, Laser Safety Industries, NoIR Laser Company LLC, Global Laser Ltd. And VS Eyewear. Most players in the market are engaged in various activities, such as mergers and acquisitions, increasing investments in technological and product developments, geographical expansion and brand building via strong marketing strategies, in order to sustain their position in the competitive market.ABOUT US:Future Market Insights (FMI) is a leading market intelligence and consulting firm. We deliver syndicated research reports, custom research reports and consulting services, which are personalized in nature. FMI delivers a complete packaged solution, which combines current market intelligence, statistical anecdotes, technology inputs, valuable growth insights, an aerial view of the competitive framework, and future market trends.CONTACT:Future Market Insights616 Corporate Way, Suite 2-9018,Valley Cottage, NY 10989,United StatesT: +1-347-918-3531F: +1-845-579-5705Email: sales@futuremarketinsights.comWebsite: Scleritis Market 2022 : Pfizer Inc. (U. S.), Johnson & Johnson Consumer Inc. (U. S.), Sun Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. (Mumbai), Bayer AG (Germany) and Shasun Scleritis Market https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/sample_request/1756 https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/check-discount/1756 Namely Scleritis Market Report has Been Published by Market Research Future Which Covers All the Geographical Locations with Demand, Trend Analysis with near about Forecasted results and Also Covers the Market Expectations.The Global Scleritis Market is showing the significant growth; mainly due to increase in the patient population and also companies are showing much interest toward the Scleritis Market, as they feel there are huge opportunities and gaps between the market demand and supply of effective treatments. Thus, companies are showing more interest in research and development activities for introducing best treatment that meets the requirement of market. These inventions help companies to meet the requirement of the market and maximize the profit share across the globe. Moreover, they have focused on developing countries such as India, China, Malaysia, and Brazil. Government of these regions is more focus to adopt better treatment for their citizen. There has been a growing awareness within the region that improving population health will lead the development of a society. Most of the countries are reforming the health care system with a special focus on the poor or disadvantaged groups, who face financial barriers to have access to health care services and are exposed to financial risk due to illness. Thus, government trying to introduce cheapest treatment or a way out to reimburse the cost of treatment. Most of the reforms appeal to social health insurance as the main approach to improve health care systems so as to protect the poor. In both scenarios it is the profitable situation for the Market players. Many companies such as Pfizer Inc. (U. S.), Johnson & Johnson Consumer Inc. (U. S.), Sun Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. (Mumbai), Bayer AG (Germany) and Shasun working together to minimize the gap between demand and supply of the market.Pfizer Inc. (U. S.), Johnson & Johnson Consumer Inc. (U. S.), Sun Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. (Mumbai), Bayer AG (Germany) and Shasun are some of the leading players at the cutting edge of the competition in the market of scleritis, globally.Sclera is the white outer coating of the eye, which help eye to move. Scleritis is the inflammatory disease in which the sclera becomes severely inflamed and red and it may occur in single or both eyes. There are various types of scleritis depends upon the location of the inflammation such as diffuse sclerosis, nodular sclerosis, and necrotizing scleritis. The symptom associated with scleritis is pain in eye movement, excessive tearing, decreased vision, blurry vision, sensitivity to light, deep-seated headaches, eye irritation, and double vision. It is more common in women as it is associated with autoimmune diseases, whereas men are more likely to have infectious scleritis than women. It can be diagnosed ultrasonography, complete blood count, and biopsy and many more.Access Free Sample Copy atGlobal Scleritis Market - Regional AnalysisThe market of scleritis is much higher in the Americas region. There are several factors for tremendous growth of the Scleritis Market in this region such as growing patient population, presence of major market players, and increasing awareness about scleritis. The government has more focus towards research and development for introducing the best treatment for their population.Europe is also considering the huge market for scleritis players, owing to present of huge population affected by the disease. Government is more focused to educate their public in order to minimize the patient population about scleritis.The market of scleritis is growing rapidly in Asia Pacific region, owing to unhealthy life balance, disturb immune system. These are the factor which leads the scleritis affected patient population in this region. Most of the countries of this region have common lifestyle and economic conditions. Government of developing countries within this region are more focusing towards new technology and advance treatment option, thus more research and development programs are initiated for the development of better treatment. Countries such as India and China are more focused market for major market players owing to the huge patient population suffering with disease, and growing purchasing power as compare to other countries in this region. Japan is a well-developed country and have well established healthcare system and technology, whereas developing countries are still focusing on better technology for the treatment, this gap between the developed and developing countries will present significant growth opportunities for the Scleritis Market players in the next few years.There are huge opportunities and challenges for improving health systems in the Middle East and Africa region. Countries of Africa region are seeking to address simultaneously a range of infectious diseases. However, the health systems that are trying to cope with these challenges are underdeveloped relative to those in other regions.Major TOC:1. Report Prologue2. Introduction2.1 Definition2.2 Scope Of The Study2.2.1 Research Objective2.2.2 Assumptions2.2.3 Limitations2.3 Market Structure2.4 Market Segmentation3. Research Methodology3.1 Research Process3.2 Primary Research3.3 Secondary Research3.4 Market Size Estimation3.5 Forecast Model4. Market Dynamics4.1 Drivers4.2 Restraints4.3 Opportunities4.4 Mega Trends4.5 Macroeconomic IndicatorsAbout Discount atTop 5 Reasons to Buy the Reports: Company profiling with detailed strategies, financials, and recent development activities Market Strategic Business Influence Data Market Research Future recommendations in key business segments based on the market estimations Market share analysis of the top industry players Market forecasts for a minimum of 5 years of all the mentioned segments, Trends and the regional markets With SWOT AnalysisAbout Market Research Future:At Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.Contact:Market Research Future+1 646 845 9312Email: sales@marketresearchfuture.comMRFR has the distinguished objective of providing the optimal quality research and granular research to clients. Our market research studies by products, services, technologies, applications, end users, and market players for global, regional, and country level market segments, enable our clients to see more, know more, and do more, which help answer your most important questions.Our Research Analysts are eager to share their knowledge and assist you in refining market research parameters, choosing right market studies, and evaluating both the market scope and the research methodologies of varied segments.We bridge the gap between our clients and their clients by identifying and decoding just the target group, while generating leads with the highest accuracy.Years of research into diverse fields of work has ingrained within us, a proficiency so distinguished that our industry-specific specialists identify with your business ideas and feel the pulse of your challenges and opportunities. This enables us for providing assistance, through our consulting and strategic consulting services, in informed managerial decision making. In order to stay updated with technology and work process of the industries, WantStats Research and Media often conducts industrial visits for its research analysts. Relevant inputs from various established market participants, help our clients make significant contribution in respective markets are a huge motivation for all of us to endlessly furnish quality. We depend greatly on profound insights into complex realms of our study.Pune, India Blood Transfusion Diagnostics Market Trends in United States, Zambia and Uganda Expected to Boost by 2027 Blood Transfusion Diagnostics Market https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/sample_request/1126 https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/check-discount/1126 https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/enquiry/1126 The Blood Transfusion Diagnostics Market Segments:The market for Blood Transfusion Diagnostics is segmented into mainly three; by type, by application and by End users and its various sub-segments. By type include Instruments, Reagents, Others. Furthermore by end users include Hospital, laboratories, Blood Banks, Plasma Fractionation Facilities, Military Blood Banks and others.Global Blood Transfusion Diagnostics Market - Competitive Analysis:There is a significant increase in the number of the company offering blood transfusion diagnostics. Some major companies are trying to focus on new and advanced tests & products to gain the market. Whereas, some are has used the technique of acquisition and collaboration to gain the market.However, the growth of the market is restrained by various factors such as risk involved in transmission of infectious disease from one person to another without carrying out screening procedure.Get Exclusive Sample Copy @Blood Transfusion is an essential part of providing healthcare services to the patients. Blood and blood products like RBCs, WBCs, platelets and others are transfused from one person to another. This requires screening tests which are vital before conducting blood transfusion. Strict regulation governing the use and transfer of blood, increasing awareness regarding blood transfusion and automation of blood banks drive the growth of this market. Furthermore, increasing demand for diagnostic and treatment devices in developed and developing countries further influence the growth of the market.Blood Transfusion Diagnostics Market Key Players:The key players that are involved in global blood transfusion diagnostics market are Immucor (U.S), Ortho Clinical Diagnostics (U.S), Beckman Coulter (U.S), Quotient Limited (U.S), Diagast (France), Abbott Diagnostics (U.S), Novartis AG (Switzerland), Becton Dickinson (U.S), BAG healthcare (Germany) DiaSorin (Italy), Fujirebio (Belgium), Grifols (Spain), Siemens (Germany), Quidel (U.S), Hologic/Gen-Probe (U.S), Biokit (Spain), Bio-Rad (U.S).Global Blood Transfusion Diagnostics Market - Regional Analysis:Globally, Americas account for the largest market share in blood transfusion diagnostics market consists of two regions namely North America and South America. Increasing in number of blood banks, adoption of automation in blood banks, awareness programs in school & medical institutes and demand of safe and reliable technology for blood transfusion drive this market in North America. Increasing adoption of Nucleic Acid Amplification for diagnosis of blood and blood products also contribute to the growth of this market in North America. United States is the biggest market place worldwide contributing 46% of total blood transfusion diagnostics market. Ortho-Clinical Diagnostic is the largest transfusion diagnostic equipment and solution provider with estimated market share of 7 to 8%. Medical institutes conduct lecture and conference on safe blood transfusion for medical students and also for patients. Europe blood transfusion diagnostics market has observed stable growth owing to increasing demand for advanced diagnostic products. Asia-Pacific is fastest growing market region for this market due to presence of huge patient pool, and huge opportunity for the market growth. The Middle East and Africa holds the least share in the market due to lack of awareness among the people and limited development of medical sector.Get Discount @Major TOC for Blood Transfusion Diagnostics Market:1 Report Prologue2 Market Introduction2.1 Introduction2.2 Scope of Study2.3 Research Objective2.4 Assumptions & Limitations2.4.1 Assumptions2.4.2 Limitations3 Research Methodology3.1 Researches Process3.2 Primary Researches3.3 Secondary ResearchesContinued..!Ask Questions to Experts @About US:Market Research Future (MRFR), enable customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.Contact Us:Market Research FutureOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, Hadapsar,Pune - 411028Maharashtra, IndiaPhone: +1 646 845 9312Email: sales@marketresearchfuture.com Ontogenetic Market 2018 - Major Participants: are ANT Neuro, EMS Handels Gesellschaft mbH, Natus Medical Incorporated, and others Market Research Future - MRFR https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/sample_request/860 https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/ontogenetic-market-860 https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/check-discount/860 Report Summary:The, Ontogenetic Market inquire about report is developing with the quick pace; chiefly due the prospering Healthcare Sector. As per a current report distributed by the Market Research Future, The , Ontogenetic Industry Research report is blasting and anticipated that would pick up unmistakable quality over the conjecture time frame. The Market is anticipated to exhibit a colossal development by 2023, outperforming its past development records as far as esteem and volume.TRY FREE SAMPLE REPORT @The global Ontogenetic market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 4.2% during the forecast period 2017-2023.Key Players:Some of key the players in the market are ANT Neuro (the Netherlands), EMS Handels Gesellschaft mbH (Austria), Natus Medical Incorporated (U.S.), Ontogeny, Inc (U.S.), Symbiotic Devices (Australia), and others.Regional Analysis:The Americas dominate the global ontogenetic market owing to a large amount of money invested in the research and development and clinical trials. The Americas mainly includes North America and South America. North America is the leading regional market, whereas South America ontogenetic market is also growing at a significant rate. The U.S. is the highest revenue generating country within the region.The European market is the second largest and is expected to grow exponentially during the forecast period. Major European countries like Germany, France, and the U.K are driving this market. On the other hand, Eastern European countries are also contributing a major share to this regional market growth. The U.K is expected to grow at a healthy CAGR in the European ontogenetic market.The Asia Pacific is the fastest growing ontogenetic market owing to increasing funding for research and development and government initiatives to encourage such research. China and Japan are the major players in this region, while India is emerging as the fastest growing country in this market.However, lack of developed infrastructure, low investment in research and development are likely to slow the Middle East & African market growth.Market Scenario:Ontogenetic is a developmental history of an organism, which includes the study of cognitive, physical, social, and emotional development, which can be attributed to experience with the individuals and the environment within the environment. Ontogenetic is a vast subject and continuous research in the field is expanding its applications. Increasing human and animal population is one of the major factors affecting the market growth, positively. Furthermore, increasing funding for research is one of the major driving factors of the market. Epilepsy is the disorder of a nervous system. According to the last updated report on February 2017 by World Health Organization (WHO), around 50 million people are affected with epilepsy globally, and it affects people of all ages. The report suggests that around 2.4 million people are diagnosed with epilepsy every year globally.Companies are focusing on merger and also collaborating with universities or academic institutes for further study on ontogenetic. In this regards, in March 2016, Natus Medical Incorporated announced its expansion of neurodiagnostic services into seven new states with the acquisition of the assets of NeuroQuest, LLC. This acquisition helped Natus Medical Incorporated in expanding their network globally and helped to increase the market share. Rapidly changing technology plays an important role in the growth of this market. Technological advancement is opening new doors to the ontogenetic research and use.Governments of different nations have done various developments to encourage research, which is driving the market growth. Increasing adoption of various oncologic practices owing to rising patient population having a nervous disorder. According to the last updated report on February 2017 by the World Health Organization (WHO), annually 30-50 cases are diagnosed per 100 000 people, whereas, in low and middle-income countries, this figure is up to two times higher.The developed countries are holding major market share owing to the availability of advanced infrastructure, skilled professionals, and high expenditure, but the market is rapidly expanding in emerging countries such as India, China, and Brazil. The research activities in Pacific region, especially, in Australia is increasing and is expected to grow significantly during the forecast period.ACCESS FULL REPORT @Segmentations:The global ontogenetic market is segmented on the basis of devices, application, and end user.On the basis of the devices, it is segmented into electroencephalography, magnetoencephalography, and others.On the basis of the application, it is segmented into developmental biology, developmental psychology, developmental cognitive neuroscience, developmental psychobiology, and others.On the basis of the end user, it is segmented into research laboratories, academic institutes, and others. Furthermore, the research laboratories are segmented into government research laboratories, independent or private research laboratories, and others.Table Of Content:Chapter 1. Report PrologueChapter 2. Market Introduction2.1 Definition2.2 Scope Of The Study2.2.1 Research Objective2.2.2 Assumptions2.2.3 LimitationsChapter 3. Research Methodology3.1 Introduction3.2 Primary Research3.3 Secondary Research3.4 Market Size EstimationChapter 4. Market Dynamics4.1 Drivers4.2 Restrains4.3 Opportunities4.4 Challenges4.5 Macroeconomic Indicators4.6 Technology Trends & AssessmentChapter 5. Market Factor Analysis5.1 Porters Five Forces Analysis5.1.1 Bargaining Power Of Suppliers5.1.2 Bargaining Power Of Buyers5.1.3 Threat Of New Entrants5.1.4 Threat Of Substitutes5.1.5 Intensity Of Rivalry5.2 Value Chain Analysis5.3 Investment Feasibility Analysis5.4 Pricing AnalysisCONTINUEDAVAIL AMAZING DISCOUNT ON REPPRT @About Market Research Future:At Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.In order to stay updated with technology and work process of the industry, MRFR often plans & conducts meet with the industry experts and industrial visits for its research analyst members.Contact:Market Research FutureOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, Hadapsar,Pune 411028Maharashtra, India+1 646 845 9312Email: salesteam@marketresearchfuture.com Sauces, Condiments and Dressing Market Accounting for a Value of over US$ 14,500 Mn by the End of 2026 https://www.factmr.com/connectus/sample?flag=S&rep_id=347 https://www.factmr.com/report/347/sauces-condiments-dressing-market https://www.factmr.com/connectus/sample?flag=D&rep_id=347 https://www.factmr.com/ Changing taste patterns of the customers has led them to experiment with new delicacies and flavors. Demand for the spicy food products is expected to rev up with the increasing preference for organic and natural food flavors. Consumption of food products such as pasta and rice with various sauces, condiments and dressing continues to remain in vogue globally. Increasing shift towards consumption of spicy food products is further expected to boost demand for various condiments, sauces, and dressing significantly. Growing need to control the pH in sauces continues to remain a major challenge among the sauce manufacturers. In order to control the pH in sauces and offer enhanced flavor has led to surge in acidification process of the sauces.According to Fact.MR, the global sauces, condiments and dressing market is expected to represent a value of over US$ 110,300 Mn by the end of 2026.Convenience Products to Impact Global Market GrowthAs customers are becoming more conscious about their health, manufacturers are increasingly opting for organic and natural ingredients for food products. Demand for food products that have minimum or no additives or preservatives continue to remain high among the modern consumers. In addition, surge in demand for on-the-go and convenience food products has led the manufacturers to increasingly offer ready-to-use pouches of sauces and mixed herbs that customers can conveniently use to garnish on the food products while travelling or working. Surge in demand for on-the-go food products will continue to boost sales of the sauces, condiments, and dressing globally.Request For Sample Report-Prevalence of Acid Reflux to Inhibit DemandOverconsumption of salt has continued to impact health of the customers adversely. According to CDC, excessive consumption of sodium increases the probability of hypertension, stroke or cerebrovascular accidents and heart disease. Moreover, World Health Organization recommends that consumption of salt by an individual should not be less than 5 grams daily.As sodium continues to remain a major ingredient in range of hot sauces, overconsumption of the hot sauces can adversely affect the health of customers. Excessive consumption of hot sauces can lead to gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD) or acid reflux. Due to growing apprehensions of acid reflux, customers with sensitive stomachs avoid consumption of various hot and spicy sauces. In addition, excessive consumption of tomato sauce can cause headache, vomiting and dizziness. Bound to these factors, demand for the sauces, condiments, and dressings is expected to drop during the forecast period.Cooking Sauce to Represent a Leading SegmentGrowing need to enhance flavor of various delicacies has led to surge in demand for cooking sauces in the food industry globally. On the basis of product type, the cooking sauce segment is expected to represent the highest revenue growth, accounting for a value of over US$ 14,500 Mn by the end of 2026. In contrary, the pickled product type segment is expected to register a robust CAGR during the forecast period.Based on distribution channel, the foodchain services segment is expected to generate significant revenues, recording a value of over US$ 9,700 Mn by the end of 2017. On the other hand, the online store distribution channel segment is expected to register significant CAGR throughout the forecast period.Competition TrackingLeading market players operating in the global sauces, condiments, and dressing market include General Mills Inc, Hormel Foods Corp, Nestle SA, ConAgra Foods Inc, McCormick & Co Inc, The Kraft and Heinz Company, Unilever Group, PepsiCo Inc., Kikkoman Corp and Clorox Co.Browse Full Report With TOC-Table of ContentGlobal Economic OutlookGlobal Sauces, Condiments, and Dressing Market - Executive SummaryGlobal Sauces, Condiments, and Dressing Market Overview3.1. Introduction3.1.1. Global Sauces, Condiments, and Dressing Market Taxonomy3.1.2. Global Sauces, Condiments, and Dressing Market Definition3.2. Global Sauces, Condiments, and Dressing Market Size (US$ Mn) and Forecast, 2012-20263.2.1. Global Sauces, Condiments, and Dressing Market Y-o-Y Growth3.3. Global Sauces, Condiments, and Dressing Market Dynamics3.4. Supply Chain3.5. Cost Structure3.6. PEST Analysis3.7. Product Life Cycle Analysis3.8. Forecast Factors3.9. List of Distributors3.10. Consumer Sentiments Analysis3.11. Key Participants Market Presence (Intensity Map) By RegionGlobal Sauces, Condiments, and Dressing Market Analysis and Forecast 2012-20264.1. Global Sauces, Condiments, and Dressing Market Size and Forecast By Product Type, 2012-20264.1.1. Cooking Sauces Market Size and Forecast, 2012-20264.1.1.1. Revenue (US$ Mn) Comparison, By Region4.1.1.2. Market Share Comparison, By Region4.1.1.3. Y-o-Y growth Comparison, By Region4.1.2. Table Sauces Market Size and Forecast, 2012-20264.1.2.1. Revenue (US$ Mn) Comparison, By Region4.1.2.2. Market Share Comparison, By Region4.1.2.3. Y-o-Y growth Comparison, By Region4.1.3. Pickled Products Market Size and Forecast, 2012-20264.1.3.1. Revenue (US$ Mn) Comparison, By Region4.1.3.2. Market Share Comparison, By Region4.1.3.3. Y-o-Y growth Comparison, By Region4.1.4. Dips Market Size and Forecast, 2012-20264.1.4.1. Revenue (US$ Mn) Comparison, By Region4.1.4.2. Market Share Comparison, By Region4.1.4.3. Y-o-Y growth Comparison, By RegionContinue..Request For Discount On This Report-About Fact.MRFact.MR is a fast-growing market research firm that offers the most comprehensive suite of syndicated and customized market research reports. We believe transformative intelligence can educate and inspire businesses to make smarter decisions. We know the limitations of the one-size-fits-all approach; thats why we publish multi-industry global, regional, and country-specific research reports.Contact UsFact.MRSuite 988427 Upper Pembroke Street,Dublin 2, IrelandTelephone: +353-1-6111-593Email: sales@factmr.com/Web: Medical Electrodes Market Value to Rise to US$ 857 Million by 2022 https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=S&rep_id=30887 https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=D&rep_id=30887 https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/medical-electrodes-market.html https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com In a fragmented and competitive global medical electrodes market, the entry of new players in regional markets will further intensify the degree of competition, states a new report by Transparency Market Research (TMR). Investments for the development of novel medical electronics and advancement of existing products is a key growth strategy among players in this market.Request for Sample Copy of Report @Abbott Laboratories, Oscor Inc., Biotronik SE & Co. KG, OSYPKA AG, Pacetronix Limited, Medtronic Plc., Boston Scientific Corporation, Lepu Medical Technology, and Zoll Medical Corporation are some prominent names in the global medical electrodes market.According to TMR, the demand in the global medical electrodes market will rise at a healthy 6% CAGR during the forecast period between 2017 and 2022. At this pace, the revenue in the market is projected to reach US$857 mn by 2022 end from an estimated revenue of US$641.3 mn in 2017.The key application segments of the global medical electrodes market include cardiology, neurophysiology, sleep disorders, and intraoperative monitoring. Geography-wise, North America is a key market for medical electrodes owing to presence of a modern healthcare infrastructure; going forward, the region is likely to rise at a healthy 6.3% CAGR between 2017 and 2022.Enquiry for discount on this report @The increasing incidence of lifestyle diseases in several parts of the world is a key growth driver of the medical electrodes market. The prevalence of cardiac diseases has particularly been on the rise in developed economies of North America and Western Europe, which is leading to the uptake of medical electrodes for diagnosis purpose. Medical electrodes are increasingly being used for the diagnosis of several diseases such as cardiac diseases and neurophysical disorders, as well as for the treatment of neurological diseases such as Alzheimers and Parkinsons. Medical electrodes function by transferring current energy into electrical energy, which can be used to identify biomarkers left by a number of medical conditions. This is because the accuracy obtained by medical electrodes has made them an integral component of healthcare facilities.The increasing adoption of electronics devices to render healthcare and modernization of healthcare facilities in several parts of the world are some other key growth drivers of the global medical electrodes market. Government initiatives as well efforts undertaken by private organizations have led to solid growth of the healthcare sector in several economies of Europe and North America. Further, substantial efforts in a number of countries to include strong diagnostic services within the healthcare sector are likely to augment growth of this market.Apart from this, the increasing use of nanotechnology in the medical devices arena could further boost the growth of medical electrodes market. Medical electrodes function via a metal detector a conducting gel/paste, which is applied on the patients body. With the use of nanotechnology, the efficacy of this process can be improved significantly and thus make medical electrodes even more relevant for diagnosis purposes. Further research in nanotechnology with the objective to augment nanotechnology-based products in medical devices is likely to boost growth of the medical electrodes market in the upcoming years.Report Overview @Last but not the least, rising support of governments in emerging economies to improve healthcare facilities could act as a crucial factor to the growth of global medical electrodes market in the future.About UsTransparency Market Research (TMR) is a market intelligence company, providing global business information reports and services. Our exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trends analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. TMRs experienced team of analysts, researchers, and consultants, use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather, and analyze information. Our business offerings represent the latest and the most reliable information indispensable for businesses to sustain a competitive edge.Each TMR syndicated research report covers a different sector - such as pharmaceuticals, chemicals, energy, food & beverages, semiconductors, med-devices, consumer goods and technology. These reports provide in-depth analysis and deep segmentation to possible micro levels. With wider scope and stratified research methodology, TMRs syndicated reports strive to provide clients to serve their overall research requirement.US Office Contact90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite: Cyber Insurance Market 2018 Global Analysis, Opportunities and Forecast to 2022 https://www.wiseguyreports.com/sample-request/2398497-2017-global-cyber-insurance-industry-research-report https://www.wiseguyreports.com/reports/2398497-2017-global-cyber-insurance-industry-research-report The report provides a comprehensive analysis of the Cyber Insurance industry market by types, applications, players and regions. This report also displays the production, Consumption, revenue, Gross margin, Cost, Gross, market share, CAGR, and Market influencing factors of the Cyber Insurance industry in USA, EU, China,India, Japan and other regions, and forecast to 2022, from 2017.Request a Sample Report @Market Analysis by Players:American International GroupThe Chubb CorporationZurich Insurance CoXL Group LtdBerkshire HathawayAllianz Global Corporate & SpecialtyMunich Re GroupLloyd'sLockton CompaniesAON PLCMarket Analysis by Regions:North AmericaEuropeChinaJapanOthersMarket Analysis by Types:Small Medium EnterpriseLarge Medium EnterpriseMarket Analysis by Applications:HealthcareRetailFinancial ServicesInformation Technology and ServicesOthersTable of Content1 Cyber Insurance Market Overview1.1 Product Overview of Cyber Insurance1.2 Classification and Application of Cyber Insurance1.3 Global Cyber Insurance Market Regional Analysis1.3.1 USA Market Present Situation Analysis1.3.2 Europe Market Present Situation Analysis1.3.3 Japan Market Present Situation Analysis1.3.4 China Market Present Situation Analysis1.3.5 India Market Present Situation Analysis1.3.6 Southeast Asia Market Present Situation Analysis1.3.7 South America Market Present Situation Analysis1.3.8 South Africa Market Present Situation Analysis1.4 Cyber Insurance Industry Development Factors Analysis1.4.1 Cyber Insurance Industry Development Opportunities Analysis1.4.2 Cyber Insurance Industry Development Challenges Analysis1.5 Cyber Insurance Consumer Behavior Analysis2 Global Cyber Insurance Competitions by Players2.1 Global Cyber Insurance Sales (Unit) and Market Share (%) by Players2.2 Global Cyber Insurance Revenue (Million USD) and Share by Players (2016-2017)2.3 Global Cyber Insurance Price (USD/Unit) by Players (2016-2017)2.4 Global Cyber Insurance Gross Margin by Players (2016-2017)3 Global Cyber Insurance Competitions by Types3.1 Global Cyber Insurance Sales (Unit) and Market Share (%) by Types3.2 Global Cyber Insurance Revenue (Million USD) and Share by Type (2012-2017)3.3 Global Cyber Insurance Price (USD/Unit) by Type (2012-2017)3.4 Global Cyber Insurance Gross Margin by Type (2012-2017)3.5 USA Cyber Insurance Sales (Unit) and Market Share (%) by Type3.6 China Cyber Insurance Sales (Unit) and Market Share (%) by Type3.7 Europe Cyber Insurance Sales (Unit) and Market Share (%) by Type3.8 Japan Cyber Insurance Sales (Unit) and Market Share (%) by Type3.9 India Cyber Insurance Sales (Unit) and Market Share (%) by Type3.10 Southeast Asia Cyber Insurance Sales (Unit) and Market Share (%) by Type3.11 South America Cyber Insurance Sales (Unit) and Market Share (%) by Type3.12 South Africa Cyber Insurance Sales (Unit) and Market Share (%) by Type4 Global Cyber Insurance Competitions by Application4.1 Global Cyber Insurance Sales (Unit) and Market Share (%) by Application4.2 Global Cyber Insurance Revenue (Million USD) and Share by Application (2012-2017)4.3 Global Cyber Insurance Price (USD/Unit) by Application (2012-2017)4.4 Global Cyber Insurance Gross Margin by Application (2012-2017)4.5 USA Cyber Insurance Sales (Unit) and Market Share (%) by Application4.6 China Cyber Insurance Sales (Unit) and Market Share (%) by Application4.7 Europe Cyber Insurance Sales (Unit) and Market Share (%) by Application4.8 Japan Cyber Insurance Sales (Unit) and Market Share (%) by Application4.9 India Cyber Insurance Sales (Unit) and Market Share (%) by Application4.10 Southeast Asia Cyber Insurance Sales (Unit) and Market Share (%) by Application4.11 South America Cyber Insurance Sales (Unit) and Market Share (%) by Application4.12 South Africa Cyber Insurance Sales (Unit) and Market Share (%) by Application5 Global Cyber Insurance Production Market Analysis by Region5.1 Global Cyber Insurance Production (Unit) and Market Share (%) by Region5.1.1USA Cyber Insurance Market Production Present Situation Analysis5.1.2 Europe Cyber Insurance Market Production Present Situation Analysis5.1.3 China Cyber Insurance Market Production Present Situation Analysis5.1.4 Japan Cyber Insurance Market Production Present Situation Analysis5.1.5 India Cyber Insurance Market Production Present Situation Analysis5.1.6 Southeast Asia Cyber Insurance Market Production Present Situation Analysis5.1.7 South America Cyber Insurance Market Production Present Situation Analysis5.1.8 South Africa Cyber Insurance Market Production Present Situation Analysis5.2 Global Cyber Insurance Production Value (Million USD) and Share by Region (2012-2017)5.3 Global Cyber Insurance Price (USD/Unit) by Region (2012-2017)5.4 Global Cyber Insurance Gross Margin by Region (2012-2017)6 Global Cyber Insurance Sales Market Analysis by Region6.1 USA Cyber Insurance Market Consumption Present Situation Analysis6.2 Europe Cyber Insurance Market Consumption Present Situation Analysis6.3 China Cyber Insurance Market Consumption Present Situation Analysis6.4 Japan Cyber Insurance Market Consumption Present Situation Analysis6.5 India Cyber Insurance Market Consumption Present Situation Analysis6.6 Southeast Asia Cyber Insurance Market Consumption Present Situation Analysis6.7 South America Cyber Insurance Market Consumption Present Situation Analysis6.8 South Africa Cyber Insurance Market Consumption Present Situation Analysis7 Imports and Exports Market Analysis7.1 USA Cyber Insurance Imports and Exports Analysis (2012-2017)7.2 Europe Cyber Insurance Imports and Exports Analysis (2012-2017)7.3 China Cyber Insurance Imports and Exports Analysis (2012-2017)7.4 Japan Cyber Insurance Imports and Exports Analysis (2012-2017)7.5 India Cyber Insurance Imports and Exports Analysis (2012-2017)7.6 Southeast Asia Cyber Insurance Imports and Exports Analysis (2012-2017)7.7 South America Cyber Insurance Imports and Exports Analysis (2012-2017)7.8 South Africa Cyber Insurance Imports and Exports Analysis (2012-2017)ContinuedAccess Complete Report @Contact Us:Norah TrentPartner Relations & Marketing ManagerSales@Wiseguyreports.ComPh: +1-646-845-9349 (US)Ph: +44 208 133 9349 (UK)ABOUT US:Wise Guy Reports is part of the Wise Guy Consultants Pvt. Ltd. and offers premium progressive statistical surveying, market research reports, analysis & forecast data for industries and governments around the globe. Wise Guy Reports features an exhaustive list of market research reports from hundreds of publishers worldwide. We boast a database spanning virtually every market category and an even more comprehensive collection of market research reports under these categories and sub-categories.ADDRES:WISE GUY RESEARCH CONSULTANTS PVT LTDOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, HadapsarPune - 411028Maharashtra, India Dental Chair Market is Projected to Rise at a CAGR of 3.90% over the Period from 2017 to 2022 https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=S&rep_id=20573 https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=D&rep_id=20573 https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/dental-chairs-market.html https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com The worldwide dental chairs market is portrayed by mechanical developments. The key partnerships among global and household organizations is another rising pattern in this market. The main providers of dental chairs over the world, for example, A dec Inc., Danaher, Dexta Corp., DentalEZ Inc., Dome Inc., are progressively including into mergers, acquisitions, and strategic organizations with an end goal to fortify their solid footing in the worldwide market. Throughout the following couple of years, the market is expected to witness extraordinary contention between the sellers, competing based on advancement in items and value differentiation. Leading organizations working in the market were painstakingly profiled by the examination experts, contemplating different viewpoints, for example, upcoming advancements, item portfolio, critical business systems, SWOT investigation, and friends and monetary review.Request for Sample Copy of Report @According to a research report by Transparency Market Research (TMR), before the finish of 2017, the overall market for dental chairs is relied upon to achieve US$455.5 mn. Further, the open door in this market is anticipated to ascend at a CAGR of 3.90% over the period from 2017 to 2022 and increment to US$551.8 mn before the finish of the figure time frame. The expanding mindfulness among individuals about general oral wellbeing and cleanliness is likewise anticipated that would drive the development of this market throughout the following couple of years. Europe has surfaced as the main local market for dental chairs. Making a flat out chance of US$27.9 mn amid the period from 2017 to 2022, this provincial market is expected to stay on the best finished the following couple of years. The interest for oral surgery dental chairs is moderately higher, at present, and is foreseen to remain so finished the following couple of years. In any case, the interest for different kinds of dental chairs is likewise expanding consistently, around the world.Enquiry for discount on this report @With the colossal ascent in the predominance of oral (gum and teeth) ailments over the world, the worldwide dental chair is encountering a wonderful surge in its valuation and size. The headways in the therapeutic and medicinal services infrastructural, around the world, is likewise impelling the development of this market generously. In any case, the lack of ergonomic highlights may confine the selection of these chairs, considering contrarily their deals and, in this way, on the market in the years to come. In any case, the advanced innovation and the rising awareness level of individuals relating to the general oral wellbeing and cleanliness is anticipated to help this market throughout the following couple of years. One of the impediments of the dental calling has been its reliance on settled hardware, for example, the dental units or chairs.Report Overview @The dental units for the most part require interfacing with electrical, and additionally seepage and pipes systems. Transportation to the dental office is referred to by a significant number of the elderly as a boundary to dental treatment. The elderly populace is quickly developing on the planet. It is evaluated that 3.5 million US elderly individuals will live in long haul mind offices by year 2030. In a few circumstances, transport framework may likewise limit access to mind. Versatile (transport dental join together) or convenient administrations take out the transportation hindrance by conveying the support of the customer. The convenient dental chair will give more noteworthy help to crippled customers living in those distant spots. They make it workable for the elderly to get the care they merit. The versatile and convenient dental administrations will likewise empower look after the elderly in their homes or care offices. The interest for dental care will keep on increasing.About UsTransparency Market Research (TMR) is a market intelligence company, providing global business information reports and services. Our exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trends analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. TMRs experienced team of analysts, researchers, and consultants, use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather, and analyze information. Our business offerings represent the latest and the most reliable information indispensable for businesses to sustain a competitive edge.Each TMR syndicated research report covers a different sector - such as pharmaceuticals, chemicals, energy, food & beverages, semiconductors, med-devices, consumer goods and technology. These reports provide in-depth analysis and deep segmentation to possible micro levels. With wider scope and stratified research methodology, TMRs syndicated reports strive to provide clients to serve their overall research requirement.US Office Contact90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite: Georgia-US Ties for National Defence Strengthen By Khatia Kardava On February 13, Georgian Defense Minister Levan Izoria presented a report at the Georgian Parliaments Defense and Security Committee meeting, focusing on the countrys main defense priorities.According to him, with the support of American partners, "the most ambitious Georgia Defense Readiness Program's launch is planned for May, which implies creation of a new combat training center in Vaziani, near Tbilisi.According to the Defense Minister, the program aims at strengthening Georgias defensive capabilities through training nine Georgian army battalions by American military instructors. Georgian soldiers will be trained and equipped according to NATO standards.Within two years (1017-2018), Georgia will receive financial aid worth more than $100 million from the United States to support the military reforms.The Defense Minister particularly stressed the fact that, unlike the previous training programs, facilitated by Georgias foreign partners that aimed at preparing Georgian troops for international missions, the purpose of the training would be to prepare the battalions for territorial defense of their own country. Izoria called this change a historic fact.Izoria also said that in 2018, the armed forces will face serious reforms. In particular, the Ministry of Defense will allocate 23 million GEL from the budget to modernize and upgrade the military aviation. One of the plans is to bring the marine component to the defense program.According to Levan Izoria, the U.S.- Georgian relations stand at a qualitatively new level of cooperation.We are working on long-term planning instruments which will be designed for 3-5 years, and this is unique in our relations, stated Izoria.It is noteworthy that after 9 years of Georgias attempts to purchase anti-tank missile complexes (Javelin), in November 2017, the US government for the first time made a political decision and sold Javelin to Georgia.The Government of Georgia has requested to purchase four 410 Javelin Missiles, and 72 Javelin Command Launch Units (CLUs) includes 2 Javelin Block 1 CLUs to be used as spares), 10 Basic Skills Trainers (BST); up to 70 simulated rounds; U.S. Government and contractor technical assistance; transportation; and other related elements of logistics and program support. The total estimated cost is $75 million.The proposed sale will contribute to the foreign policy and national security of the United States by improving the security of Georgia. The Javelin system will provide Georgia with increased capacity to meet its national defense requirements.The United States is ally and supporter of Georgia. Since the establishment of diplomatic relations, the United States has a number of times provided Georgia with political, military, financial and humanitarian aid. Especially is appreciated the strategic partner's support for Georgia's territorial integrity and sovereignty.Strategic relations between the two countries in defense and security were founded nine years ago on 9 January 2009. when in Washington Georgia and the US signed a Charter on Strategic Partnership. The Charter represents a framework for deepening security and defense relations. In the frames of the Charter, working groups also focus on cooperation in the field of economy, energy and education.A Memorandum on Deepening the Defense and Security Partnership, between the US and Georgian Governments, signed on July 6, 2016, bears special importance and has accordingly elevated the cooperation level. The document entails mobilization of all necessary efforts aimed at enhancing combat readiness of the Armed Forces.Based on the Memorandum on Deepening the Defense and Security Partnership, a detailed cooperation project for the years 2016-2019 has been adopted. The major element of the multi-year (3 years) bilateral military planning framework is the Georgia Defense Readiness Program which is executed in collaboration with the United States to further develop Georgias institutional capacity to generate and sustain military force readiness.The US assistance in the educational field is also of high importance. In the frames of the International Military Education and Training Program, civilian and military personnel of the Georgian Armed Forces are being trained in the US military institutions.Georgian Armed Forces has been receiving significant assistance from the US Marine forces in support of Georgias participation in the NATO-led missions in Afghanistan.The US and Georgia regularly conduct joint multinational exercises such as Agile Spirit (since 2011) and Noble Partner (since 2015). Automotive Aftermarket to Register High Revenue Growth at 9.6% CAGR During 2016-2026 https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-as-661 https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/askus/rep-as-661 www.futuremarketinsights.com In Future Market Insights market report titled, Automotive Aftermarket: ASEAN Industry Analysis and Opportunity Assessment, 2016-2026, poor road infrastructure and extended vehicle life have been identified as profitable factors for the growth of the automotive aftermarket in ASEAN. On account of growing out-of-warranty car parc, the US$ 19.3 Bn ASEAN automotive aftermarket is predicted to surpass US$ 48 Bn in revenues by 2026 end, increasing at a healthy CAGR of 9.6% through 2026.Key Trends Impacting the ASEAN Automotive AftermarketGrowing popularity of new, lightweight vehicle modelsAdvances in OEM technology and OEM globalisationAdoption of remote vehicle diagnostic systems, growing awareness about self-inflating tyres, and widespread acceptance of electric vehicle technologyOnline sales of automotive parts and accessoriesEstablishment of franchises in emerging countries, especially those where vehicle parc is steadily gaining tractionSegmentation Highlights: Tyres Will Remain Highest Selling Parts; Indonesia to Remain the Largest MarketRequest For Report Sample@By type, tyres will continue to account for the largest revenue share. In the accessories segment, the interior accessories segment which includes steering wheels, seat covers, seat belts, liners, floor mats, liners, gauges, dash boards, and shift knobs will reportedly hold a major share of over 66%, crossing a value of US$ 9.0 Bn by 2026 end.By service, general automotive repair is estimated at over 86% value share during the forecast period, maintaining dominance over automotive transmission repairs. By vehicle type, passenger cars will continue to attract higher revenues compared to commercial vehicles. Indonesia will remain the largest market accounting for 35% revenue share of the market in 2026. Thailand and Malaysia, the other key markets will collectively account for over 50% revenue share of the market.Fundamental Shift in Consumer Preference and Drivers Choice Will Impact the MarketWith driverless car technology and dashboard pyro techniques steadily gaining traction, consumers are likely to have more aftermarket channels to shop. Consumer behaviour is expected to shift from a conventional way of buying vehicle parts, accessing repair services, and selecting accessories. Moreover, evolving driver preferences also reflect a new set of revenue generation opportunities for automakers, auto part suppliers, repair shops, and accessory retailers. Consumers are increasingly becoming aware of the latest launched products and thus, will access a plethora of aftermarket product offerings to cater to their comfort, aesthetics, and infotainment-related requirements.Request For Report Table of Content (TOC):Key Players Focussing on Boosting Expansion CapacityThe key players highlighted in the ASEAN automotive aftermarket include Denso Corporation, Hella KGaA Hueck & Co., Continental AG, Delphi Automotive PLC, ACDelco, Faurecia SA, Magneti Marelli SpA, Robert Bosch GmbH, Aisin Seiki Co., Ltd., and Bridgestone Corporation. Bridgestone, one of the top companies, announced expansion of its international manufacturing capabilities in Germany this year. Post-acquisition of Speedy France, the company also launched a new manufacturing plant based in Indonesia. Continental AG also opened its new production plants in India and China this year.ABOUT US:Future Market Insights (FMI) is a leading market intelligence and consulting firm. We deliver syndicated research reports, custom research reports and consulting services, which are personalized in nature. FMI delivers a complete packaged solution, which combines current market intelligence, statistical anecdotes, technology inputs, valuable growth insights, an aerial view of the competitive framework, and future market trends.CONTACT:Future Market Insights616 Corporate Way, Suite 2-9018,Valley Cottage, NY 10989,United StatesT: +1-347-918-3531F: +1-845-579-5705Email: sales@futuremarketinsights.comWebsite: Future of Supercapacitor Market - Global Industry Insights, Trends, Outlook, and Opportunity Analysis, 2017-2025 https://www.coherentmarketinsights.com/ongoing-insight/toc/1145 https://www.coherentmarketinsights.com/ongoing-insight/supercapacitor-market-1145 http://www.coherentchronicle.com A super-capacitor, also named as ultra-capacitor, has a high capacity and higher capacitance compared to conventional capacitors. It is capable of storing 10 to 100 times more energy per unit volume than electrolytic capacitor. This supercapacitor acts as a bridge between capacitors and rechargeable batteries, to fill the gap between them. Super-capacitors can be used for power regulation in batteries. Super-capacitors are able to receive and discharge charge much faster as compared to a battery. It has low impedance, due to which it has high and low temperature charge and discharge capacity. Owing to this property, super-capacitor are suitable for application where faster charging and discharging is required, rather than energy storage for long period of time. These applications includes cars, trains, buses, and elevators, where it can be utilized for regenerative braking and storage of energy for short period of time.Other major applications include wind turbines. In wind turbine application, supercapacitors responsible for smoothing out the discontinuous power supplied by the wind.Request Table of Content of this Report :Growth in consumer electronics sector is expected to be a major factor for growth in the global super-capacitor market. This is owing to increasing adoption of smart, sustainable, and convenient devices. For example, in smartphones and laptops, there is a requirement for longer electric power backup, and super-capacitor fulfills this requirement. For instance, according to Coherent Market Insights analysis, as of 2016, around 350 units of mobile devices were sold globally, which accounted for an increase of over 3.7% from 2015. Revenue generated by smartphone devices alone, accounted for over 70% sales of the global mobile devices in 2016.However, high cost of materials is expected to restrain growth of the global super-capacitor market. For instance, graphene is most commonly used in supercapacitors as electrolytes, which is more expensive than activated carbon. Its initial high cost exceeds the cost of lithium ion batteries.Asia Pacific market is expected to exhibit the highest CAGR over the forecast period (20172025). This is due to presence of major key players in this region such as Panasonic Corporation (Japan), Murata Manufacturing Co., Ltd. (Japan), and Nesscap Co., Ltd. (China). Additionally, high growth in automotive sector is expected to boost the market growth. According to the International Energy Agencys Global EV Outlook, China was largest market for electric vehicles in 2016, accounting for over 40% of the electric cars sold globally, which includes over 200 million electric two-wheelers and over 300,000 electric buses. Super-capacitors are significantly used in electric and hybrid vehicles for short-term energy storage and brake reforming. Hence, growth in electric and hybrid market is expected to lead to regional supercapacitor market growth.Major players operating in the global supercapacitor market include Cap-XX Limited, Panasonic Corporation, Nesscap Energy Inc., Murata Manufacturing Co., Ltd., Maxwell Technologies, Inc., Skeleton Technologies, Axion Power International, Inc., Graphene Laboratories, Inc., Nippon Chemi-Con Corporation, Mouser Electronics, Inc., AVX Corporation, Evans Capacitor Company, and SPEL Technologies Private Limited.For More Information :About Coherent Market Insights:Coherent Market Insights is a prominent market research and consulting firm offering action-ready syndicated research reports, custom market analysis, consulting services, and competitive analysis through various recommendations related to emerging market trends, technologies, and potential absolute dollar opportunity.Contact Us:Mr. ShahCoherent Market Insights1001 4th Ave,#3200Seattle, WA 98154Tel: +1-206-701-6702Email: sales@coherentmarketinsights.comVisit our news Website: Myanmar telecom service Market 2017: Key Players Myanmar Posts and Telecommunications (MPT), Ooredoo Myanmar, Telenor Myanmar and More Myanmar telecom service Market https://www.wiseguyreports.com/sample-request/2627736-myanmar-country-intelligence-report https://www.wiseguyreports.com/conferences https://www.wiseguyreports.com/seminars SUMMARYWiseGuyReports published new report, titled Myanmar: Country Intelligence Report"Myanmar: Country Intelligence Report", a new Country Intelligence Report by provides an executive-level overview of the telecommunications market in Myanmar today, with detailed forecasts of key indicators up to 2022. Published annually, the report provides detailed analysis of the near-term opportunities, competitive dynamics and evolution of demand by service type and technology/platform across the fixed telephony, broadband and mobile markets, as well as a review of key regulatory trends.In 2017, Myanmar will generate total telecom service revenue of $2.7bn, which is expected to decline to $2.6bn by 2022 at a CAGR of -0.1%. However, when valued in local currency, the total service revenue indicates an increase from an estimated K3,615bn in 2017 to K4,267bn by 2022, reflecting a CAGR of 3.4%. Mobile voice will be the largest revenue-contributing segment in 2017. Mobile data will be the fastest growing segment during 2017-2022, driven by rapid proliferation of smartphones, expanding 3G coverage and growing adoption of high-value 4G LTE/LTE-A services. Going forward, operators will focus on FTTH and LTE coverage expansion to boost broadband penetration in the country.The Country Intelligence Report provides in-depth analysis of the following - Demographic and macroeconomic context in Myanmar.- The regulatory environment and trends: a review of the regulatory setting and agenda for the next 18-24 months as well as relevant developments pertaining to spectrum licensing, national broadband plans, tariff regulation and more.- Telecom services market outlook: analysis as well as historical figures and forecasts of service revenue from the fixed telephony, broadband, mobile voice and mobile data markets.- The competitive landscape: an examination of the positioning of leading players in terms of revenue market shares across segments in the telecom services market.- Company snapshots: analysis of the financial position of leading service providers in the telecommunications markets.- Underlying assumptions behind our published base-case forecasts, as well as potential market developments that would alter, either positively or negatively, our base-case outlook.GET SAMPLE REPORT @Companies mentionedMyanmar Posts and Telecommunications (MPT)Ooredoo MyanmarTelenor MyanmarMecTelYTPScope- The overall telecom service revenue in Myanmar in terms of US$ will reflect a CAGR of -0.1% (3.4% in K) during 2017-2022.- Mobile revenue will account for 94% of total telecom revenue in 2022, driven by increasing adoption of mobile broadband and 4G services.- 3G will be the most adopted mobile technology in 2017. However, by 2022, 4G will account for the majority of the market due to rising demand for high-speed data services and LTE network expansion over the forecast period.- The top two mobile operators, MPT and Telenor Myanmar, will account for 81.2% share of overall mobile subscriptions in 2017. Operators will continue to focus on network coverage expansion and fiber deployment to acquire customers and drive the telecom market.- Fixed voice and fixed broadband access lines will be dominated by MPT, accounting for 92.5% and 47.5% of market share, respectively, in 2017.Key points to buy- This Country Intelligence Report offers a thorough, forward-looking analysis of Myanmars telecommunications markets, service providers and key opportunities in a concise format to help executives build proactive and profitable growth strategies.- Accompanying Forecast products, the report examines the assumptions and drivers behind ongoing and upcoming trends in Myanmars mobile communications, fixed telephony, broadband markets, including the evolution of service provider market shares.- With more than 20 charts and tables, the report is designed for an executive-level audience, boasting presentation quality.- The report provides an easily digestible market assessment for decision-makers built around in-depth information gathered from local market players, which enables executives to quickly get up to speed with the current and emerging trends in Myanmars telecommunications markets.- The broad perspective of the report coupled with comprehensive, actionable detail will help operators, equipment vendors and other telecom industry players succeed in the challenging telecommunications market in Myanmar...CONTINUEDFor accessing accurate and deep understanding and to gain latest insights and key developments in the area of your interest, we also have a list of conferences in which you will be interested in, for more information, cordially checkFor updating knowledge or for thoroughly understanding various terminologies, we also have vast list of seminars for your reference, for more information cordially checkWise Guy Reports understand how essential statistical surveying information is for your organization or association. Therefore, we have associated with the top publishers and research firms all specialized in specific domains, ensuring you will receive the most reliable and up to date research data available. We also provide COTS (Commercial off the Shelf) business sector reports as custom exploration agreeing your particular needs.WISEGUY RESEARCH CONSULTANTS PVT LTDOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersPune - 411028Maharashtra, India Atherectomy Devices Market to Expand at a CAGR of 5.60% During the Period from 2017 to 2022 https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=S&rep_id=30962 https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/sample/sample.php?flag=D&rep_id=30962 https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com/atherectomy-devices-market.html https://www.transparencymarketresearch.com A fresh commerce and business intelligence study by Transparency Market Research (TMR) detects the global atherectomy devices market to be intensely competitive with the presence of several big shot players. The dominance of the leading players, namely Boston Scientific Corp., Medtronic Plc, Terumo Corp., Royal Philips NV, Cardiovascular Systems Inc., Spectranetics Corp., and Avinger Inc. is mainly because of their vast geographical presence and financial might. The leading players also have an extensive product portfolio that helps them sustain the competition.Request for Sample Copy of Report @In the years ahead, competition in the atherectomy devices market is likely to further intensify. Leading players in the market are engaged in R&D to introduce newer products in order to steal a march over their competitors. Mergers and acquisitions is another noticeable trend observed in this market. For example, in August 2014, Boston Scientific Corporation acquired the interventional unit of Bayer AG leading to the expanded portfolio of the former to serve to treat vascular conditions.According to the TMR report, the demand is likely to increment at a CAGR of 5.60% vis-a-vis value during the forecast period from 2017 to 2022. At this pace, the demand in the global atherectomy devices market will translate into a revenue of US$735 mn by the end of 2022 from US$558.9 mn in 2017. Based on device type, directional atherectomy devices account for the leading demand due to several advantages such as ability of plaque debulking and availability in several sizes. Among the various end users, hospitals have been reporting a relatively higher demand for atherectomy devices. North America holds supremacy among other key regions for atherectomy devices due to a high number of devices to have received approval of U.S. FDA and favorable reimbursement policies.Enquiry for discount on this report @The rising prevalence of peripheral artery diseases (PAD) is having a significant impact on the global atherectomy devices market. Across the world, more than 250 million individuals suffer from PAD. Between the period 2000 and 2010, the prevalence of PAD increased by 24% and continues to rise at a significantly high rate, leading to a surging demand for atherectomy devices. The prevalence of target diseases is witnessed in both developed and developing countries. The growing geriatric population globally has significantly added to the number of individuals suffering from PAD, which in turn, has stoked the demand for atherectomy devices.Apart from this, increasing preference for minimally invasive procedure is also projected to favor the atherectomy devices market. Atherectomy being a minimally invasive procedure is increasingly being preferred over angioplasty to widen narrowed arteries. Minimally invasive procedures result in fewer traumas and faster recovery for patients.Substantial research and development pursuits by market players leading to the introduction and commercialization of novel products is also favoring this market. The expanding distribution channels as well as strengthening of existing distribution channels is also fuelling the atherectomy devices market.Report Overview @On the other hand, however, limited patient awareness for diagnosis of peripheral coronary diseases, stringent regulations, and lack of skilled and well-trained medical experts is holding back the markets growth. Proving to serve the atherectomy devices market is increasing research activities and rising healthcare expenditure generally in emerging economies.About UsTransparency Market Research (TMR) is a market intelligence company, providing global business information reports and services. Our exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trends analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. TMRs experienced team of analysts, researchers, and consultants, use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather, and analyze information. Our business offerings represent the latest and the most reliable information indispensable for businesses to sustain a competitive edge.Each TMR syndicated research report covers a different sector - such as pharmaceuticals, chemicals, energy, food & beverages, semiconductors, med-devices, consumer goods and technology. These reports provide in-depth analysis and deep segmentation to possible micro levels. With wider scope and stratified research methodology, TMRs syndicated reports strive to provide clients to serve their overall research requirement.US Office Contact90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite: Dicamba Market to Witness Steady Growth at 15.4% CAGR During 2016-2020 https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/reports/sample/rep-gb-2556 https://www.futuremarketinsights.com/askus/rep-gb-2556 www.futuremarketinsights.com Growing need for broadleaf weed regulation will continue to be the key driver to the demand for dicamba globally. The global dicamba market is foreseen to witness healthy growth, reaching a value worth US$ 313.3 Mn in 2016. North America may outpace the largest dicamba market i.e. Europe, in terms of Y-o-Y growth.Use of dicamba as an herbicide for controlling broadleaf weed in domestic, commercial, and non-commercial applications, will remain the primary factor fuelling the demand. Farmland maintenance is the most prominent driver to dicamba market growth. In addition to easy usage and widespread availability, rising need for food safety and security, and growing awareness about efficient crop protection, are likely to favour the growth of the dicamba market, especially in developing countries. Surging need for maximum crop yield without losing facing significant loss is also identified to be one of the important market drivers. Steadily increasing exports from China are foreseen to push the market growth further.Request For Report Sample@A number of modern agricultural practices involve replacement or combination of glyphosate with dicamba, which may create lucrative opportunities. Moreover, wide acceptance of integrated pest management is also expected to spur the consumption of dicamba. The U.S. EPAs recent approval for the usage of a non-volatile dicamba-based herbicide by Monsanto is now considered to be a major booster to dicamba market growth. Emergence of innovative applications of dicamba in addressing multiple weed destruction will be another critical factor pushing the market.Drift damage caused due to the volatility of dicamba can remain a longstanding challenge to the market growth. Similarly, reported cases of illnesses and allergies in humans post-exposure to dicamba, will remain a major barrier to mass adoption. Strict regulations regarding approval is another key factor expected to restrain the market growth.With revenues beyond US$ 265.0 Mn in 2016, agriculture will continue to lead the market in terms of application, with over 84% market value share. Lawn and turf segment is also expected to register a remarkable market share of over 12% in 2016. While the Y-o-Y growth of agriculture segment is projected to be of around 8.7% in 2017 over 2016, that of the lawn and turf segment is estimated at 7.3%.Regionally, Europe is currently the largest market for dicamba. However, it may witness a slight decline post-2016. This region is likely to account for over 26% market share in 2016, whereas the revenues can reach beyond US$ 83 Mn. A higher growth rate is expected to be registered by North America, possibly accounting for almost 24% share of the market value in 2016. In 2017, Europe will exhibit a strong Y-o-Y growth of 7.7% over 2016, whereas that of North America is projected to be of 9.2%.Request For Report Table of Content (TOC):BASF SE, E I du Pont de Nemours & Company, Monsanto Co., The Dow Chemical Company, Bayer AG, Nufarm Limited, and Syngenta AG are some of the leading companies competing in the global dicamba market. Recently, DuPont and Monsanto Co. announced a multi-year dicamba supply agreement, confined to North America.Long-term Outlook: The global dicamba market is expected to expand at a robust CAGR of 15.4%.ABOUT US:Future Market Insights (FMI) is a leading market intelligence and consulting firm. We deliver syndicated research reports, custom research reports and consulting services, which are personalized in nature. FMI delivers a complete packaged solution, which combines current market intelligence, statistical anecdotes, technology inputs, valuable growth insights, an aerial view of the competitive framework, and future market trends.CONTACT:Future Market Insights616 Corporate Way, Suite 2-9018,Valley Cottage, NY 10989,United StatesT: +1-347-918-3531F: +1-845-579-5705Email: sales@futuremarketinsights.comWebsite: Payments Landscape in Sweden Market 2017: Key Players Swedbank, SEB, Nordea, ICA Banken, Visa and More Payments Landscape in Sweden https://www.wiseguyreports.com/sample-request/2595725-payments-landscape-in-sweden-opportunities-and-risks-to-2021 https://www.wiseguyreports.com/conferences https://www.wiseguyreports.com/seminars SUMMARYWiseGuyReports published new report, titled Payments Landscape in Sweden"Payments Landscape in Sweden: Opportunities and Risks to 2021", report provides detailed analysis of market trends in the Swedish cards and payments industry. It provides values and volumes for a number of key performance indicators in the industry, including credit transfers, cash, direct debit, payment cards, and cheques during the review-period (2013-17e).The report also analyzes various payment card markets operating in the industry, and provides detailed information on the number of cards in circulation, transaction values and volumes during the review-period and over the forecast-period (2017-21f). It also offers information on the country's competitive landscape, including the market shares of issuers and schemes.The report brings together research, modeling, and analysis expertise to allow banks and card issuers to identify segment dynamics and competitive advantages. The report also covers details of regulatory policy and recent changes in the regulatory structure.The report provides top-level market analysis, information and insights intothe Swedish cards and payments industry, including - Current and forecast values for each market in the Swedish cards and payments industry, including debit, credit, and charge cards.- Detailed insights into payment instruments including credit transfers, cheques, cash, direct debit, and payment cards. It also, includes an overview of the country's key alternative payment instruments.- E-commerce market analysis and payment methods.- Analysis of various market drivers and regulations governing the Swedish cards and payments industry.- Detailed analysis of strategies adopted by banks and other institutions to market debit, credit, and charge cards.GET SAMPLE REPORT @Companies mentionedSwedbankSEBNordeaHandelsbankenICA BankenIkano BankVisaMastercardAmerican Expressand Diners ClubScope- Alternative payments are gaining traction in Sweden, with wide acceptance of domestic and international payment solutions such as Swish, Samsung Pay, Masterpass, and Alipay. In October 2017 Apple Pay was launched in Sweden, allowing customers to add their debit and credit cards to the wallet and make payments using their smart device. Currently the solution is supported by Nordea, ST1 bank, and Ticket Rikskuponger-Edenred.Merchants accepting Apple Pay in Sweden include Starbucks, 7 Eleven, Elgiganten, and digital inn. Further, in September 2017 Alipay signed an agreement with Svensk Handel - the Swedish Trade Federation - to allow Chinese tourists to make payments at merchants across Sweden using Alipay. The popular domestic payment solution, Swish, introduced QR code-based payments in May 2017. Using the Swish app, users can also make in-store payments at partnered merchant stores by scanning QR codes.- To enable faster fund transfers, the European Payments Council launched a pan-European instant credit transfer scheme in selected Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) markets in November 2017. SEPA Instant Credit Transfer (SCT Inst) will enable individuals to transfer a maximum of 15,000 ($15,783.80) within 10 seconds. Funds can be transferred instantly 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. Sweden is anticipated to introduce SCT Inst in 2018.- Competition in Swedens payment cards market is expected to rise, with non-banking companies starting to offer basic banking and financial services. Alternative payment solution provider Klarna received its full banking license in June 2017 from the Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority. Klarna plans to offer various banking services including accounts and bank cards.Key points to buy- Make strategic business decisions, using top-level historic and forecast market data, related to the Swedish cards and payments industry and each market within it.- Understand the key market trends and growth opportunities in the Swedish cards and payments industry.- Assess the competitive dynamics in the Swedish cards and payments industry.- Gain insights into marketing strategies used for various card types in Sweden.- Gain insights into key regulations governing the Swedish cards and payments industry...CONTINUEDFor accessing accurate and deep understanding and to gain latest insights and key developments in the area of your interest, we also have a list of conferences in which you will be interested in, for more information, cordially checkFor updating knowledge or for thoroughly understanding various terminologies, we also have vast list of seminars for your reference, for more information cordially checkWise Guy Reports understand how essential statistical surveying information is for your organization or association. Therefore, we have associated with the top publishers and research firms all specialized in specific domains, ensuring you will receive the most reliable and up to date research data available. We also provide COTS (Commercial off the Shelf) business sector reports as custom exploration agreeing your particular needs.WISEGUY RESEARCH CONSULTANTS PVT LTDOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersPune - 411028Maharashtra, India PSivida Corp Global Market 2017: Key Players: GlaxoSmithKline Plc, Daiichi Sankyo Co Ltd, F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd and More pSivida Corp (PSDV) https://www.wiseguyreports.com/sample-request/2704921-psivida-corp-psdv-product-pipeline-analysis-2017-update https://www.wiseguyreports.com/conferences https://www.wiseguyreports.com/seminars WiseGuyReports published new report, titled pSivida Corp (PSDV)SummarypSivida Corp (pSivida) is a specialty pharmaceutical company that offers development of miniaturized, sustained-release drug delivery products and technologies. The companys products include iluvien, retisert and durasert. Its durasert is an injectable, miniaturized, sustained-release drug delivery system, used for the treatment of chronic diseases of the back of the eye. pSividas iluvien is an injectable, non-erodible, intravitreal implant for the treatment of DME. The company offers drug delivery products and technologies to treat serious, debilitating diseases of the eye that can lead to blindness. It operates in the US and the UK. pSivida is headquartered in Watertown, Massachusetts, the US.This report is a source for data, analysis, and actionable intelligence on the companys portfolio of pipeline products. The report provides key information about the company, its major products and brands.The report enhances decision making capabilities and help to create effective counter strategies to gain competitive advantage.GET SAMPLE REPORT @Scope- The report reviews detailed company profile with information on business description, key company facts, major products and services, key competitors, key employees, locations and subsidiaries and recent developments- The report analyzes all pipeline products in development for the company pSivida Corp- The report provides pipeline analysis on all pipeline products of the company (by equipment type, by indication, by development stage, and by trial status)- The report covers detailed information on each pipeline product with information on pipeline territory, stage of development, device class, regulatory path, indication(s), application(s) and estimated launch date- The report provides detailed description of products in development, technical specification and functions- The report also covers ongoing clinical trials (wherever applicable) with information on trial name, trial objective, sponsor, trial design , trial status and phase, estimated start and end date.Key points- Develop business strategies by understanding the trends and developments driving the medical devices pipeline and technology landscape- Design and develop your product development, marketing and sales strategies by understanding the competitor portfolio- To formulate effective Research & Development strategies- Develop market-entry and market expansion strategies- Exploit in-licensing and out-licensing opportunities by identifying products, most likely to ensure a robust return- Plan mergers and acquisitions effectively by identifying key players of the most promising pipeline- Identify emerging players with potentially strong product portfolio and create effective counter-strategies to gain competitive advantage- Develop competition strategies by identifying the status and likely launch of the competitors pipeline products through review of the clinical trials, stage and of development, etc- Identify, understand and capitalize the next high-value products that your competitor would add in its portfolioTable of ContentsTable of ContentsList of TablesList of FigurespSivida Corp Company OverviewpSivida Corp Company SnapshotpSivida Corp Pipeline Products and Ongoing Clinical Trials OverviewpSivida Corp Pipeline Analysis OverviewpSivida Corp - Key FactspSivida Corp - Major Products and ServicespSivida Corp Pipeline Products by Development Stage..CONTINUEDFor accessing accurate and deep understanding and to gain latest insights and key developments in the area of your interest, we also have a list of conferences in which you will be interested in, for more information, cordially checkFor updating knowledge or for thoroughly understanding various terminologies, we also have vast list of seminars for your reference, for more information cordially checkWise Guy Reports understand how essential statistical surveying information is for your organization or association. Therefore, we have associated with the top publishers and research firms all specialized in specific domains, ensuring you will receive the most reliable and up to date research data available. We also provide COTS (Commercial off the Shelf) business sector reports as custom exploration agreeing your particular needs.WISEGUY RESEARCH CONSULTANTS PVT LTDOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersPune - 411028Maharashtra, India Cosmetic Chemicals Market Demand, Growth Analysis & Opportunity and Forecast to 2022 https://www.wiseguyreports.com/sample-request/2098809-cosmetic-chemicals-market-forecasts-from-2017-to-2022 https://www.wiseguyreports.com/reports/2098809-cosmetic-chemicals-market-forecasts-from-2017-to-2022 Cosmetic Chemicals Market is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 4.83% over the forecast period to grow to US$27.554 billion by 2022, increasing from US$21.765 billion in 2017.Cosmetic chemicals are integral part of different cosmetic products such as conditioners, shampoos, lotions, and creams among others. These chemicals help in increasing shelf-life of the products due to presence of various preservatives while enhancing the appearance of the user. Rising disposable income and living standards, changing consumer preferences, and advanced packaging solutions is augmenting the demand for cosmetic products. Increasing demand for personal care products is providing necessary impetus for the growth of global cosmetic chemicals market.Growing global ageing populations is one of the major drivers of global cosmetic chemicals market. Desire to look young and beautiful is attracting consumers worldwide towards various anti-ageing and personal care products. Increasing purchasing power and living standards along with the increased demand for grooming products to look aesthetically appealing, both by women and men, is also propelling the growth of global cosmetic chemicals market. Growing global e-commerce industry will bolster the growth of global cosmetic chemicals market in the coming years since consumers around the world have an easy access to various cosmetic products from international brands. Furthermore, global market players are investing heavily on R&D to develop advanced and diverse product portfolio in order to address different consumers requirements, thereby positively impacting the growth of cosmetic chemicals market in the next five years. However, factors such as rising demand for natural & organic cosmetic products, growing concerns over ingredient toxicity, and stringent regulations regarding cosmetic ingredients will restrain the growth of global cosmetic chemicals industry during the forecast period.By ProductBy product, surfactants accounted for the largest market share in 2016 and will continue to dominate the product segment till the end of the forecast period owing to their diverse use in several applications such as skin care and hair care. Increasing demand for skin-repair and anti-ageing creams and lotions will exponentially augment the market share of emollients during the forecast period.Request a Sample Report @By GeographyGeographically, North America held the maximum market share in 2016. The demand for various cosmetic chemicals in North America is majorly driven by the presence of large number of global cosmetic chemicals manufacturers in the region coupled with high consumer awareness regarding the benefits of different cosmetics and personal care products. APAC region will witness the highest CAGR during the forecast period due to increasing focus on physical appearance and personal hygiene by consumers. Growing commercialization of various international cosmetic brands in emerging economies such as China and India is also attracting customers towards different cosmaceuticals which will significantly bolster the growth of APAC Cosmetic Chemicals market in the near future.Competitive InsightsProminent key market players in Cosmetic Chemicals market include Akzo Nobel, The Dow Chemical Company, BASF, Evonik, and Huntsman among others. The global cosmetic chemicals company is highly fragmented due to the presence of large number of global and regional vendors. Owing to the intense competition in the industry, market players need to follow strategic partnerships and M&A while expanding their product portfolio by launching new products as per the changing needs of customers around the globe. Recently in May 2017, Huntsman Corporation and Clariant have announced their merger to create a leading global specialty chemical company named HuntsmanClariant to improve growth profile in highly attractive end markets and geographies.SegmentationIn this report, Cosmetic Chemicals market is segmented by product, by application, and by geography:By ProductSurfactantsEmollientsPreservativesThickening AgentsAdditivesPolymersPowders, Colorants, and PigmentsOthersBy ApplicationSkin CareHair CareMake UpPerfumes and FragrancesOral CareOthersBy GeographyNorth AmericaSouth AmericaEuropeMiddle East and AfricaAsia PacificKey questions answered by the reportWhat will be the Cosmetic Chemicals market size from 2017 to 2022?How are the major drivers and restraints affecting the Cosmetic Chemicals market growth and the opportunities which exist for key vendors?Which segment and region will drive or lead the market growth and why?A comprehensive analysis of competitive landscape and key market participants behaviorKey strategies being adopted by vendors, with in-depth analysis along with their impact on competition and market growthTable of Content1. Introduction1.1. Market Definition1.2. Scope of the Study1.3. Currency1.4. Assumptions1.5. Base, and Forecast Years Timeline2. Research Methodology2.1. Research Design2.2. Secondary Sources2.3. Validation3. Key Findings of the Study4. Market Dynamics4.1. Drivers4.2. Restraints4.3. Opportunities and Market Trends4.4. Market Segmentation4.5. Porters Five Forces Analysis4.5.1. Bargaining Power of Suppliers4.5.2. Bargaining Power of Buyers4.5.3. Threat of New Entrants4.5.4. Threat of Substitutes4.5.5. Competitive Rivalry in the Industry4.6. Supplier Outlook4.7. Industry Outlook4.8. Industry Value Chain Analysis4.9. Industry Regulations4.10. Scenario Analysis5. Cosmetic Chemicals Market Forecast by Product5.1. Introduction5.2. Surfactants5.3. Emollients5.4. Preservatives5.5. Thickening Agents5.6. Additives5.7. Polymers5.8. Powders, Colorants, and Pigments5.9. Others6. Cosmetic Chemicals Market Forecast by Application6.1. Introduction6.2. Skin Care6.3. Hair Care6.4. Make Up6.5. Perfumes and Fragrances6.6. Oral Care6.7. Others7. Cosmetic Chemicals Market Forecast by Geography7.1. Introduction7.2. North America7.3. South America7.4. Europe7.5. Middle East and Africa (MEA)7.6. Asia Pacific (APAC)8. Competitive Intelligence8.1. Market Share Analysis8.2. Strategies of Key Players8.3. Recent Investments and Deals9. Company Profiles9.1. BASF SE9.1.1. Overview9.1.2. Financials9.1.3. Products and Services9.1.4. Key Developments9.2. Akzo Nobel N.V.9.2.1. Overview9.2.2. Financials9.2.3. Products and Services9.2.4. Key Developments9.3. Ashland9.3.1. Overview9.3.2. Financials9.3.3. Products and Services9.3.4. Key Developments9.4. Huntsman International LLC9.4.1. Overview9.4.2. Financials9.4.3. Products and Services9.4.4. Key Developments9.5. Solvay9.5.1. Overview9.5.2. Financials9.5.3. Products and Services9.5.4. Key Developments9.6. Procter and Gamble9.6.1. Overview9.6.2. Financials9.6.3. Products and Services9.6.4. Key Developments9.7. Evonik Industries AG9.7.1. Overview9.7.2. Financials9.7.3. Products and Services9.7.4. Key Developments9.8. The Dow Chemical Company9.8.1. Overview9.8.2. Financials9.8.3. Products and Services9.8.4. Key Developments9.9. Bayer AG9.9.1. Overview9.9.2. Financials9.9.3. Products and Services9.9.4. Key Developments9.10. United-Guardian, Inc.9.10.1. Overview9.10.2. Financials9.10.3. Products and Services9.10.4. Key Developments9.11. LOreal9.11.1. Overview9.11.2. Financials9.11.3. Products and Services9.11.4. Key DevelopmentsContinuedAccess Complete Report @ABOUT US:Wise Guy Reports is part of the Wise Guy Consultants Pvt. Ltd. and offers premium progressive statistical surveying, market research reports, analysis & forecast data for industries and governments around the globe. Wise Guy Reports features an exhaustive list of market research reports from hundreds of publishers worldwide. We boast a database spanning virtually every market category and an even more comprehensive collection of market research reports under these categories and sub-categories.ADDRES:WISE GUY RESEARCH CONSULTANTS PVT LTDOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, HadapsarPune - 411028Maharashtra, India Light Emitting Diode (LED) Global Market Research Sources Growth by Top Global Leader- Cree, Epistar Corp, Nichia Corporation, OSRAM Light AG, Siemens AG. and Others The Insight Partners http://www.theinsightpartners.com/sample/TIPTE100000106 http://www.theinsightpartners.com/buy/TIPTE100000106 http://www.theinsightpartners.com/reports/light-emitting-diode-led-market LED lights are based on semiconductor modules and release less discharged heat as compared to fluorescent and incandescent products. LED lights are utilized across numerous end-user industries such as commercial, industrial, outdoor, and architectural. Profile ration of LED in applications such as traditional lightings has given a solid thrust to the lightings market. LED is anticipated to surpass the conventional compact fluorescent lamp (CFL) and cold cathode fluorescent lamp (CCFL) lighting market as it delivers high level of illumination, long life, high reliability, and high efficiency. In addition, LED lighting is a cost effective solution over conventional lighting applications such as CFL and CCFL.The global LED market is segmented by technology, namely: traditional LED, high brightness LED, organic LED, polymer LED, and ultra violet LED. The global LED market is further segmented by applications, into automotive, general lighting, display screen, backlight sources, forensic &research, and government. Furthermore, the global LED market is also segmented on the basis of product types into low power product and high power product. Lastly, the global LED market is also segmented by installation type as new installation and retrofit.Request a Sample Report atLight Emitting Diode (LED) Market Players:Cree, Inc.Epistar Corp.Nichia CorporationOSRAM Light AGSiemens AG.Koninklijke Philips N.V.Lumileds LightingGeneral ElectricSamsung Electronics Co., Ltd.Bridgelux, Inc.SemiLEDS CorporationSeoul Semiconductors Co., Ltd.Toyoda Gosei Co., Ltd.The report provides a detailed overview of the industry including both qualitative and quantitative information. It provides overview and forecast of the global Light Emitting Diode (LED) market based on product and application. It also provides market size and forecast till 2025 for overall Light Emitting Diode (LED) market with respect to five major regions, namely; North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific (APAC), Middle East and Africa (MEA) and South America (SAM), which is later sub-segmented by respective countries and segments. The report evaluates market dynamics effecting the market during the forecast period i.e., drivers, restraints, opportunities, and future trend and provides exhaustive PEST analysis for all five regions.Buying atThe initial capex required for LED lighting is huge and this is restricting its initial acceptance. However, considering the longer lifetime of LEDs, the overall cost of the same is low when matched to CFLs. Incandescent lamps utilize extra energy than LED lamps; therefore, numerous governments have introduced laws to restrict their use. Moreover, non-commercial LED market drivers include actions implemented to back usage of LED lighting systems at the legislative level, and improvement of standards and regulations for running energy-saving lighting systems at the individual organization stages. LED lighting is environment friendly, as it does not produce toxic gases. For instance, fluorescent lights emit toxic bi-products like carcinogenic, which cause cancer, whereas incandescent lamps emit huge volumes of carbon dioxide. However, LED lighting overcomes these shortcomings with better reliability and better illumination.It is expected that the consumers will gain awareness regarding the aids of longer life of LED and ultimately would lead to a widespread adoption of LED lighting during the forecast period. Declining prices of LED lamps, growing display backlighting applications, longer life span and high efficacy of LED lamps are key factors propelling the global LED market. LED lighting offers enormous prospects to save energy intake across residential, outdoor and architectural applications. Additionally, outdoor LED lighting is further gaining popularity for usage in tunnels, traffic lights, roadways, parking lots and garages. Residential applications for LED lighting consists of lighting in kitchens, dining rooms, hallways, and bathrooms.Cree, Inc., Epistar Corp., Nichia Corporation, OSRAM Light AG, Siemens AG, Koninklijke Philips N.V., and Lumileds Lighting are the chief LEDmarket players globally. Other prominent vendors of this market include General Electric, Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., Bridgelux, Inc., SemiLEDS Corporation, Seoul Semiconductors Co., Ltd., and Toyoda Gosei Co., Ltd. Both, Siemens and Phillips, have bifurcated their lighting work from their core business to enable faster response to market dynamics and to achieve greater revenues. In addition, General Electric has taken steps to initiate manufacturing its own LED circuit panels, which could prove to be an effective strategy for their lighting business in the future.Reason to Buy- Highlights key business priorities in order to assist companies to realign their business strategies.- The key findings and recommendations highlight crucial progressive industry trends in the Light Emitting Diode (LED) market, thereby allowing players to develop effective long term strategies.- Develop/modify business expansion plans by using substantial growth offering developed and emerging markets.- Scrutinize in-depth global market trends and outlook coupled with the factors driving the market, as well as those hindering it.- Enhance the decision-making process by understanding the strategies that underpin commercial interest with respect to products, segmentation and industry verticals.View Complete Report atContact Us:Call: +1-646-491-9876Email: sales@theinsightpartners.comThe Insight Partners is a one stop industry research provider of actionable intelligence. We help our clients in getting solutions to their research requirements through our syndicated and consulting research services. We are a specialist in Technology, Media, and Telecommunication industries.533, 5th floor, Amanora Township,Amanora Chambers, East Block,Kharadi Road, Hadapsar, Pune-411028 Direct Drive Wind Turbine Market Analysis, Top Key Players - GE Renewable Energy, Siemens AG, Goldwind Science & Tech. Leitwind AG, ENERCON GmbH, Emergya Wind Tech Direct Drive Wind Turbine Market https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/sample_request/2465 https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/direct-drive-wind-turbine-market-2465 Market HighlightsThe depletion of fossil fuel reserves has an alarming effect on the environment due to which the alternative renewable sources has gained immense importance. The wind energy is one of the cheapest renewable energy sources. So power generation from wind energy is done by harnessing the energy from the wind and is used to generate electricity from the harnessed power.The rising demand for energy and increasing greenhouse gas emission has raised the significance of renewable energy sources such as wind energy, which will boost the growth of direct drive wind turbine market globally. Factors such as favorable government policies, growing concern for energy conservation and depleting fossil fuel reserves are expected to drive the global direct drive wind turbine market during the forecast period. The Global Direct Drive Wind Turbine Market is projected to grow at approximately 11.5% CAGR and is estimated to touch USD XX billion by the end of 2022.Market Research AnalysisBased on capacities, the market is segmented as less than 1MW, 1MW to 3MW and more than 3MW. In which, the 1MW to 3MW segment is projected to drive the market.Based on technologies, the market is segmented as electrically excited synchronous generator and permanent magnet synchronous generator, with the latter being projected to account for the largest market share due to its light weight feature and offshore application.Among regions, Europe is expected to dominate the global direct drive wind turbine market with the highest CAGR owing to increased investments in wind energy sector.Get Sample of Report @Key PlayersGE Renewable Energy (U.S.), Siemens AG (Germany), Goldwind Science & Technology Co. Ltd. (China), Leitwind AG (Italy), ENERCON GmbH (Germany), Xiangtan Electric Manufacturing Group (China), Emergya Wind Technologies B.V. (The Netherlands), VENSYS Energy AG (Germany), Windtronics LLC (U.S.) and American Superconductor Corporation (U.S.) are some of the leading players operating in this market.Regional Analysis of Global Direct Drive Wind Turbine MarketEurope is the leading market and is expected to grow at approximately XX% CAGR during the forecast period. It is due to countries such as Spain, U.K., France and Ireland, in the region that the investment is high in wind energy sector with favorable government regulations.It is followed by Asia-Pacific due to the adoption of gearless wind turbines in the emerging nations such as China and India with growing energy needs in the region.LIST OF TABLESTABLE 1 GLOBAL DIRECT DRIVE WIND TURBINE MARKET, BY CAPACITYTABLE 2 GLOBAL DIRECT DRIVE WIND TURBINE MARKET, BY TECHNOLOGYTABLE 4 GLOBAL DIRECT DRIVE WIND TURBINE MARKET, BY REGIONTABLE 5 ASIA-PACIFIC DIRECT DRIVE WIND TURBINE MARKET, BY CAPACITYTABLE 6 ASIA-PACIFIC DIRECT DRIVE WIND TURBINE MARKET, BY TECHNOLOGYTABLE 8 ASIA-PACIFIC DIRECT DRIVE WIND TURBINE MARKET, BY COUNTRYTABLE 9 CHINA DIRECT DRIVE WIND TURBINE MARKET, BY CAPACITYTABLE 10 CHINA DIRECT DRIVE WIND TURBINE MARKET, BY TECHNOLOGYContinueLIST OF FIGURESFIGURE 1 RESEARCH TYPEFIGURE 2 GLOBAL DIRECT DRIVE WIND TURBINE MARKET: BY CAPACITY (%)FIGURE 3 GLOBAL DIRECT DRIVE WIND TURBINE MARKET: BY TECHNOLOGY (%)FIGURE 4 GLOBAL DIRECT DRIVE WIND TURBINE MARKET: BY REGION (%)FIGURE 5 ASIA-PACIFIC DIRECT DRIVE WIND TURBINE MARKET, BY CAPACITY (%)FIGURE 6 ASIA-PACIFIC DIRECT DRIVE WIND TURBINE MARKET, BY TECHNOLOGY (%)FIGURE 7 ASIA-PACIFIC DIRECT DRIVE WIND TURBINE MARKET, BY COUNTRY (%)FIGURE 8 NORTH AMERICA DIRECT DRIVE WIND TURBINE MARKET, BY CAPACITY (%)FIGURE 9 NORTH AMERICA DIRECT DRIVE WIND TURBINE MARKET, BY TECHNOLOGY (%)FIGURE 10 NORTH AMERICA DIRECT DRIVE WIND TURBINE MARKET, BY COUNTRY (%)Continue.Get Complete Report @About Market Research Future:At Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.MRFR team have supreme objective to provide the optimum quality market research and intelligence services to our clients. Our market research studies by products, services, technologies, applications, end users, and market players for global, regional, and country level market segments, enable our clients to see more, know more, and do more, which help to answer all their most important questions.Market Research FutureOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, HadapsarPune - 411028Maharashtra, India+1 646 845 9312Email: sales@marketresearchfuture.com Photonic ICs (PIC) Industry Analysis Research with Future Scope Growth by Top Global Leader-Alcatel-Lucent S.A., Infinera Corporation, JDS Uniphase Corporation, Huawei Technologies Co, Avago Technologies and Others The Insight Partners http://www.theinsightpartners.com/sample/TIPTE100000109 http://www.theinsightpartners.com/buy/TIPTE100000109 http://www.theinsightpartners.com/reports/photonic-ics-pic-market Photonic Integrated Circuits (PIC), functions analogous to electronic ICs, utilizes photons instead of electrons to carry data. Photons, unit of light, travels comparably much faster than other data carriers, hence data transfer speed has increased dramatically. Global photonic ICs market is expected to rise at a remarkable rate as it offers substantial enhancements in system size, power intake, cost, and dependability.On the basis of uses, the global photonic IC market is segmented into biophotonics, optical communication, sensors, optical signal processing and nanophotonics. The global photonic IC market is further segmented on the basis of integration methods deployed into monolithic integration, hybrid integration, and module integration. In addition, the global photonic IC market is segmented on the basis of components, namely: modulators, lasers, multiplexers/demultiplexers, detectors, optical amplifiers and others (such as attenuators, wavelength converters, etc.). The market is segmented on the basis of materials, namely: lithium niobate (LiNbO3), indium phosphide (InP), silicon (Si), gallium arsenide (GaAs), and silicaonsilicon.Request a Sample Report atPhotonic ICs (PIC) Market Players:- Alcatel-Lucent S.A.- Infinera Corporation- JDS Uniphase Corporation- Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd.- Avago Technologies Ltd.- Intel Corporation- NeoPhotonics Corporation.- Agilent Technologies- Ciena Corporation- Emcore CorporationOngoing limitation of electronic ICs in search of adding more transistors over a single silicon substrate has pressured the industry to invent a substitute. Furthermore, existing principal players have developed monolithically combined InP-based photonic ICs that assimilates more than 600 components/utilities in a single chip. As a result, there is an enormous competition in the marketplace as every single player is aiming at inventing photonic IC-based products which would be capable of integrating large quantities of functions/utilities at low cost. Budget and magnitude saving accomplished by integrating diverse optical modules, including modulators, detectors, and lasers, into a single package is the key focus area for the players within the photonic ICs market. Rising demands for high speed communication combined with developing application zones, specifically in the arena of sensing, optical communications, and biophotonics have powered the progress of the global photonic ICs market. In addition, high power efficiency, inexpensive fabrication, improved reliability, and high data transfer rates offered by photonic ICs are factors which are expected to propel this market. The use of photons for the drive of offering high-speed information processing, computation, and data transmission offers a sound prospect intended for the development of photonic ICs market.Optical sensors application is an emerging application in this marketplace, which is utilized in fields like aerospace, defense, transportation, energy, and medicine. Quantum computing, a technology soon to be commercialized, is another segment that promises significant utilization of photonic ICs. Photonic ICs are similarly used in biomedical arena, wherein InP-established use of definite photonic ICs are being utilized for the diagnostic examination of opaque skin tissues.Optical communications is a leading application sector in the photonic IC market, whereas biophotonics and sensing are the other key application segments. Even though the present-day input from optical signal processing segment is the minimum, it is anticipated to witness strong progress post the commercialization of quantum computing.Buying atNorth America leads the global photonic IC market, trailed by Europe and Asia Pacific. While North America is the chief photonic IC market, Asia Pacific is anticipated to witness strong growth, overtaking Europe and eventually North America. The development in Asia Pacific can be majorly credited to growing demand from optical communications and biophotonics applications. The worldwide photonic IC market is extremely disjointed and is branded by the presence of large number of players. Some of the top players in the marketplace comprise Alcatel-Lucent S.A., Infinera Corporation, JDS Uniphase Corporation, Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd., Avago Technologies Ltd., Intel Corporation, Agilent Technologies, Ciena Corporation, Emcore Corporation and NeoPhotonics Corporation.Reason to Buy- Highlights key business priorities in order to assist companies to realign their business strategies.- The key findings and recommendations highlight crucial progressive industry trends in the Photonic ICs (PIC) market, thereby allowing players to develop effective long term strategies.- Develop/modify business expansion plans by using substantial growth offering developed and emerging markets.- Scrutinize in-depth global market trends and outlook coupled with the factors driving the market, as well as those hindering it.- Enhance the decision-making process by understanding the strategies that underpin commercial interest with respect to products, segmentation and industry verticals.View Complete Report atContact Us:Call: +1-646-491-9876Email: sales@theinsightpartners.comThe Insight Partners is a one stop industry research provider of actionable intelligence. We help our clients in getting solutions to their research requirements through our syndicated and consulting research services. We are a specialist in Technology, Media, and Telecommunication industries.533, 5th floor, Amanora Township,Amanora Chambers, East Block,Kharadi Road, Hadapsar, Pune-411028 Trans-Cinnamic Acid Market Overview, Demand, Size, Growth and Forecast 2022 - Worldwide Analysis ReportsWeb http://www.reportsweb.com/inquiry&RW00011477878/sample http://www.reportsweb.com/global-trans-cinnamic-acid-market-2018-2022 Trans-cinnamic acid is the most commonly used derivative of cinnamic acid. It is used as a flavoring agent in cosmetics, dyes, and pharmaceuticals.Publisher's analysts forecast the global trans-cinnamic acid market to grow at a CAGR of 6.38% during the period 2018-2022.Covered in this ReportThe report covers the present scenario and the growth prospects of the global trans-cinnamic acid market for 2018-2022. To calculate the market size, the report considers the revenue generated from the sales of trans-cinnamic acid.FREE | Request Sample Copy is Available atThe Market is Divided into the Following Segments Based on Geography-Americas-APAC-EMEAPublisher's report, Global Trans-Cinnamic Acid Market 2018-2022, has been prepared based on an in-depth market analysis with inputs from industry experts. The report covers the market landscape and its growth prospects over the coming years. The report also includes a discussion of the key vendors operating in this market.Key Vendors-BOC Sciences-Capot Chemical-Ivy Fine Chemicals-Merck-Tokyo Chemical IndustryMarket Driver-Rapid expansion of flavors and fragrance industry-For a full, detailed list, view our reportMarket Challenge-Volatility in crude oil prices-For a full, detailed list, view our reportComplete Report is Available atMarket Trend-Continuous R&D to prepare indigo dye which is less hazardous to health-For a full, detailed list, view our reportKey Questions Answered in this Report-What will the market size be in 2022 and what will the growth rate be?-What are the key market trends?-What is driving this market?-What are the challenges to market growth?-Who are the key vendors in this market space?Contact Us:Call: +1-646-491-9876Email: sales@reportsweb.comAbout ReportsWeb:ReportsWeb.com is a one stop shop of market research reports and solutions to various companies across the globe. We help our clients in their decision support system by helping them choose most relevant and cost effective research reports and solutions from various publishers. We provide best in class customer service and our customer support team is always available to help you on your research queries.505, 6th floor, Amanora Township,Amanora Chambers, East Block,Kharadi Road, Hadapsar, Pune-411028 Smart Fleet Management Market Review From 2018 To 2023: Global Industry Size, Share, Growth, Trends https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/sample_request/5226 https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/smart-fleet-management-market-5226 Smart Fleet Management Market Research Report - Global Forecast To 2023Smart Fleet Management Market Report 2018 is a professional and in-depth study on the current state of the Global Smart Fleet Management Market size, share, growth, trends, and opportunities with forecast to 2023.Get Sample Copy of Global Smart Fleet Management Market Report atKey Companies analyzed in report are: Harman International Industries, Inc., Robert Bosch GmbH., Siemens AG, Denso Corporation, IBM Corporation, Continental AG, Cisco Systems, Inc., Sierra Wireless, Inc., Calamp Corp., OTTO Marine Ltd., Precious Shipping Co. Ltd., and Globecomm Systems,Smart fleet management, essentially, a system through which operators keep track of variable factors such as fuel consumption, maintenance and route management. Smart fleet management systems provide a dedicated server for fleet data and security in a single system, which enables operators to analyze and make informed and cost effective decisions or enhance safety. Such availability of integrated data through smart fleet management systems attract customers, toward these solutions, across the globe.With the entire automotive industry pushing for higher fuel efficiency in vehicles combined with high speed networks, the market for smart fleet management is expected to witness significant growth during the forecast period.High costs associated with the smart fleet management systems is expected act as a major hindrance for the market. Additionally, continuous increase in fleet sizes and travel routes, successively, result in higher complexity of the system, which is expected to act as another major restraint for the smart fleet management market.Regional Analysis:The Asia Pacific region is expected to provide lucrative opportunities to layers in the smart fleet management market. Stringent government regulations, combined with improving transportation facilities and infrastructure are expected to aid the growth of the smart fleet management market in this region. Government authorities in countries such as India and China encourage original equipment manufacturers to implement such systems in vehicles, mainly to enhance driver safety. The market for smart fleet management is expected to thrive in this region. Additionally, improving socio-economic conditions in countries such as India, Thailand, and Indonesia have resulted in the growth of demand for premium segment fleets, which positively impacts the market growth during the forecast period.Browse Full Report at:Other regions such as North America and Europe are also poised for rapid growth. Existence of sophisticated technology and major manufacturers, provides solid groundwork for the smart fleet management firms in this region. Established automotive industry also aids the growth of the market in these regions. Rising number of commercial fleets in Europe and United States, widen the customer base to accommodate major smart fleet management system manufacturers. Significant technological development and research and development activities in the North America and Europe are expected to provide high opportunities for the smart fleet management market to rapidly growth during the forecast period.The report for Global Smart Fleet Management Market of Market Research Future comprises of extensive primary research along with the detailed analysis of qualitative as well as quantitative aspects by various industry experts, key opinion leaders to gain the deeper insight of the market and industry performance. The report gives the clear picture of current market scenario which includes historical and projected market size in terms of value, technological advancement, macro economical and governing factors in the market. The report provides details information and strategies of the top key players in the industry. The report also gives a broad study of the different market segments and regions.About Market Research Future:At Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.Contact:Market Research Future+1 646 845 9312Email: sales@marketresearchfuture.com Thailand Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET) Industry Market 2017: Key Players: Indorama Ventures PCL, Thai Shinkong Industry Corp.,Ltd and More Thailand Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET) Industry Market https://www.wiseguyreports.com/sample-request/2739918-polyethylene-terephthalate-pet-industry-outlook-in-thailand-to-2021-market https://www.wiseguyreports.com/conferences https://www.wiseguyreports.com/seminars WiseGuyReports published new report, titled Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET) Industry Outlook in ThailandSummaryPolyethylene Terephthalate (PET) Industry Outlook in Thailand to 2021 - Market Size, Company Share, Price Trends, Capacity Forecasts of All Active and Planned Plants, provides up to date in-depth information on Thailands Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET) industry. The report presents major market trends. The report covers Thailands Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET) plants and presents installed capacity by process and technology. The report offers historical and forecast market size, demand and production forecasts, end-use demand details, price trends, trade balance data, and company shares of the countrys leading Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET) producers.GET SAMPLE REPORT @Companies mentionedIndorama Ventures PCL, Thai Shinkong Industry Corp.,Ltd, Polyplex Corporation Ltd, Mitsui Chemicals, Inc., Toray Industries Inc.Scope- Comprehensive information of all active Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET) plants in Thailand- Comprehensive information of all planned Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET) projects in Thailand- Capacity forecasts to 2021 with details like process, technology, operator and equity- Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET) industry supply scenario in Thailand from 2007 to 2021- Plant capacity growth and installed plant capacity by production process and technology- Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET) industry market dynamics in Thailand from 2007 to 2021- Market size, demand and production outlook, demand by end-use sector, and average prices- Trade balance data from 2007 to 2021- Import and export data and net exports and imports as a percentage of demand- Company details, including company overview, business description and information on current and upcoming Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET) plants- Company capacity shares for key Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET) producers in Thailand.Key points- Latest information on Thailands Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET) industry- Macro and microeconomic trends affecting Thailands Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET) industry- Market positioning of the countrys Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET) producers- Opportunities in the Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET) industry- Market-entry and market-expansion strategies- Enables you to benchmark your operations and strategies against those of major companies..CONTINUEDFor accessing accurate and deep understanding and to gain latest insights and key developments in the area of your interest, we also have a list of conferences in which you will be interested in, for more information, cordially checkFor updating knowledge or for thoroughly understanding various terminologies, we also have vast list of seminars for your reference, for more information cordially checkWise Guy Reports understand how essential statistical surveying information is for your organization or association. Therefore, we have associated with the top publishers and research firms all specialized in specific domains, ensuring you will receive the most reliable and up to date research data available. We also provide COTS (Commercial off the Shelf) business sector reports as custom exploration agreeing your particular needs.WISEGUY RESEARCH CONSULTANTS PVT LTDOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersPune - 411028Maharashtra, India Vulpith E-Services Pvt Ltd is Offering Freelancers and Clients Special Incentives to Register Before Feb. 28 Vulpith is a new freelancing platform with multiple advantages for both clients and freelancersBENGALURU, India, February 6, 2018 (Newswire.com) - Vulpith E-Services Pvt Ltd has just launched their new hybrid cloud freelancing platform for e-sourcing professional services. Vulpith.com is offering special incentives for both freelancers and clients who sign on by Feb. 28. For freelancers who register and complete their profile by the deadline, the company will waive their commission. For clients who register and post a project, they will have a free account manager.Vulpiths freelancing platform enables clients to e-source, screen and select service providers such as freelancers, agencies, consultants and remote employees. The service also caters to multiple industries including automotive, banking, communications, education, energy, government, healthcare, hospitality and tourism, life sciences, retail and many more.Vulpith does not take any commission on freelancers projects up to $25. Projects earning more than this amount, there is a 6% (six percent) commission. Payments are guaranteed on Vulpith even if the client does not pay. Freelancers' work is also secure and cannot be copied while the client reviews and is only made available once the client releases payment.Clients who are seeking services have advanced data protection, assured project delivery and zero fees for project awarding, cancellation and opt-out. Both the client and the freelancer are protected with dual-layer security, escrow payments and cloud workspace data protection. Vulpith makes connecting with freelancers easier and more secure than ever before.Clients already using Vulpith have really great things to say about the service. Anil Kumar P., the vice president of global marketing at Etradex, has said, Ive given out a few projects on Vulpith and found very rewarding freelancers who were matched perfectly to the job at hand. I also used the payment and data protection options, which I think are essential to the future of freelancing. Im going to stay with Vulpith.To learn more and take advantage of the early benefits available to freelancers and clients before Feb. 28, visit Vulpith.com.Vulpith is a hybrid cloud freelancing platform for e-sourcing professional services. Vulpith enables clients to e-source, screen and select service providers. To learn more, visit Vulpith.com.Embassy Tech Square, 1st Floor, Tower Delta,Block-B,Varthur HobliMedia Contact: Vara Prasad, +91-73960 12015(M), info@vulpith.com Global Aseptic Packaging Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends, and Forecast to 2024 MRRSE https://www.mrrse.com/sample/2094 https://www.mrrse.com/aseptic-packaging-market https://www.mrrse.com/enquiry/2094 https://www.mrrse.com/checkdiscount/2094 https://www.mrrse.com/ https://www.industrynewsanalysis.com/ Market Research Reports Search Engine (MRRSE) has been serving as an active source to cater intelligent research report to enlighten both readers and investors. This research study titled Aseptic Packaging MarketRequest to View Sample Report @Aseptic packaging was introduced in the 1940s. The process was subsequently improvised to suit the needs of end-user industries. Aseptic packaging primarily includes paperboard, aluminum, polypropylene, calcium carbonate (by few manufacturers), borosilicate glass (for pharmaceutical packaging), and ethylene vinyl alcohol. The packages primarily consist of six to seven layers of the materials mentioned above. They are arranged in orderly fashion. Currently, food, beverages, and dairy are the key industries that employ aseptic packaging; however, the pharmaceutical industry leads the end-user segment. The aseptic packaging market is primarily dominated by Asia Pacific; it is followed by Europe and North America, due to the high growth of downstream industries in these regions.This report analyzes and forecasts the market for aseptic packaging at the global and regional level. The market has been forecast based on revenue (US$ Mn) from 2016 to 2024, considering 2015 as the base year. The study includes drivers and restraints of the global aseptic packaging market. It also covers impact of these drivers and restraints on demand for aseptic packaging during the forecast period. The report also highlights opportunities in the aseptic packaging market at the global and regional level.The report includes detailed value chain analysis, which provides a comprehensive view of the global aseptic packaging market. Porters Five Forces model for the aseptic packaging market has also been included to help understand the competitive landscape in the market. The study encompasses market attractiveness analysis, wherein end-user industries are benchmarked based on their market revenue, growth rate, and general attractiveness.The study provides a decisive view of the global aseptic packaging market by segmenting it in terms of products such as carton; bags & pouches; bottles; vials; prefilled syringes & ampoules, and others. These segments have been analyzed based on present and future trends. Regional segmentation includes current and forecast demand for aseptic packaging in North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America, and Middle East & Africa. The report also covers demand for individual products and end-user industries in all regions.For More Info about This Report Visit @The report provides the estimated market size of aseptic packaging for 2016 and forecast for the next eight years. The global market size of aseptic packaging has been provided in terms of revenue. Market revenue has been defined in US$ Mn. Market numbers have been estimated based on key products and end-user industries of aseptic packaging. Market size and forecast for products and end-user industries have been provided in terms of global, regional, and country level markets.In order to compile the research report, we conducted in-depth interviews and discussions with a number of key industry participants and opinion leaders. Primary research represents the bulk of research efforts, supplemented by extensive secondary research. We reviewed key players product literature, annual reports, press releases, and relevant documents for competitive analysis and market understanding. Secondary research includes a search of recent trade, technical writing, Internet sources, and statistical data from government websites, trade associations, and agencies. This has proven to be the most reliable, effective, and successful approach for obtaining precise market data, capturing industry participants insights, and recognizing business opportunities.Secondary research sources that are typically referred to include, but are not limited to company websites, annual reports, financial reports, broker reports, investor presentations, SEC filings, Plastemart magazine, TPE magazine, internal and external proprietary databases, and relevant patent and regulatory databases such as ICIS, Hoovers, oneSOURCE, Factiva and Bloomberg, national government documents, statistical databases, trade journals, market reports, news articles, press releases, and webcasts specific to companies operating in the market.We conduct primary interviews on an ongoing basis with industry participants and commentators to validate data and analysis. These help validate and strengthen secondary research findings. These also help develop the analysis teams expertise and market understanding.The report comprises profiles of major companies operating in the global aseptic packaging market. Key players in the aseptic packaging market include Tetra Pak, Sealed Air Corporation, Greatview Aseptic Packaging Co., Ltd., ELOPAK Group, Ecolean AB, Molopak, Schott AG, IPI, SIG Combibloc Group AG, and Dizaynpak Baski Ve Ambalaj Teknolojileri A.S. Market players have been profiled in terms of attributes such as company overview, financial overview, business strategies, and recent developments.Have any Query? Ask Our Expert @The report segments the global aseptic packaging market as follows:Aseptic Packaging Market - Product AnalysisBottles (Glass, Plastic)CartonsVials, Prefilled Syringes & AmpoulesBags & PouchesOthers (Cups)Aseptic Packaging Market - End-user AnalysisFoodDairyBeveragesPharmaceuticalOthers (Personal Care, etc.)Aseptic Packaging Market - Regional AnalysisNorth AmericaU.S.MexicoCanadaEuropeFranceU.K.SpainGermanyItalyRussiaRest of EuropeAsia PacificChinaJapanASEANIndiaRest of Asia PacificLatin AmericaBrazilArgentinaRest of Latin AmericaMiddle East & Africa (MEA)GCCSouth AfricaRest of MEACheck Discount on This Report @About MRRSEMarket Research Reports Search Engine (MRRSE) is an industry-leading database of Market Research Reports. MRRSE is driven by a stellar team of research experts and advisors trained to offer objective advice. Our sophisticated search algorithm returns results based on the report title, geographical region, publisher, or other keywords.MRRSE partners exclusively with leading global publishers to provide clients single-point access to top-of-the-line market research. MRRSEs repository is updated every day to keep its clients ahead of the next new trend in market research, be it competitive intelligence, product or service trends or strategic consulting.Contact UsState Tower90, State StreetSuite 700Albany, NY - 12207United States Telephone: +1-518-730-0559Email: sales@mrrse.comWebsite:Read More Industry News At: Latest Report on Oil Accumulator Market Size & Share, Growth, Trends and Forecast 2017 - 2025 https://www.marketresearchreports.biz/sample/sample/1581220 https://www.marketresearchreports.biz/reports/1581220/oil-accumulator-global-industry-market-research-reports https://www.marketresearchreports.biz/sample/enquiry/1581220 https://www.marketresearchreports.biz/sample/checkdiscount/1581220 http://www.marketresearchreports.biz/ The report " Oil Accumulator Market - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends and Forecast 2017 - 2025", has been prepared based on an in-depth market analysis with inputs from industry experts.The main objective of this report is to define, describe, and forecast the global Oil Accumulator market on the basis of types of applications, major sectors, deployment models, organization size, and regions. The report contains an analysis of the major factors influencing the growth of the market (drivers, restraints, opportunities, and challenges). It aims to strategically analyze the micromarkets with respect to individual growth trends, prospects, and their contribution to the market. The report attempts to forecast the market size for 5 major regions, namely, North America, Europe, Asia Pacific (APAC), Middle East and Africa (MEA), and Latin America. It contains key vendor profiles and comprehensively analyzes their core competencies. The report also tracks and analyzes competitive developments, including partnerships, collaborations, acquisitions, new product developments, and R&D activities in the market.Get Sample Copy of this report @Demand for energy is rapidly growing in recent years. Accumulation of oil is an important aspect to eliminate hazards during oil extraction processes. Oil accumulators are considered to be hydro pneumatic devices that store non compressible fluid through an external source such as a fluid, gas, spring, and piston under high pressure. Oil accumulators have gained importance all over the world due to initiatives in reducing harmful environmental pollution during oil & gas drilling activities. Oil accumulators are employed for various purposes such as noise reduction, leakage compensation, and pulsation dampening.The oil accumulator market can be segmented based on its types, applications, and region. Based on its types, oil accumulators can be bifurcated as hydraulic or piston, bladder, and diaphragm accumulators. Hydraulic accumulators are generally considered to be piston type accumulators. A free moving piston separates the compressible gas cushion from the hydraulic fluid. The bladder type accumulator consists of an elastic barrier between the oil and gas. The diaphragm type accumulator is designed into two sections that are bolted or screwed together. A synthetic rubber diaphragm is installed for bifurcation of oil & gas. Accumulators are used in drilling rigs in offshore and onshore regions. It is utilized in blowout preventers to restrict the sudden influx of oil & gas during drilling operations. It is used in mud pumps in oil & gas exploration activities and also by drilling tools and equipment manufacturers for developing instruments. Oil accumulators are also used by environmental research institutes and government organizations.Opportunities in the oil accumulator market arise from rising demand for oil & gas exploration and production activities. The attempts to minimize environmental hazards due to exploration have positively impacted the growth of the oil accumulator market. Restraints of the market include high cost of production. However, efforts are being made to reduce costs and develop advance technology oil accumulators. Thus, oil accumulator are an important component when environmental factors are taken into consideration.In terms of geography, North America leads the oil accumulator market in terms of demand. This can be ascribed to the increase in oil & gas activities in offshore regions of the U.S. New discovery of shale oil in the North Dakota region in North America has increased the demand for oil accumulators. The oil accumulator market has been expanding in countries in Asia Pacific such as India, China, and Japan due to the rise in maritime security activities, growth in offshore oil & gas production activities, and improvement in underwater communications. The oil accumulator market in European countries such as the U.K., Germany, France, and Norway is likely to expand due to increased oil & gas drilling activities in the North Sea and improvement in maritime security. Countries in Latin America such as Brazil and Mexico are anticipated to witness an increase in demand for marine instrumentation activities due to rapid urbanization and rise in offshore oil & gas activities in the Gulf of Mexico. Demand for marine instrumentation in countries in Middle East & Africa is also likely to rise due to the increase in number of offshore oil & gas exploration and production activities.View Full Report @Key global market players operating in the oil accumulator market include companies such as Nippon Accumulator Co. Ltd., Eaton Corporation, Parker-Hannifin Corporation, Bosch Rexroth AG, and Tobul Accumulator Inc.The report offers a comprehensive evaluation of the market. It does so via in-depth qualitative insights, historical data, and verifiable projections about market size. The projections featured in the report have been derived using proven research methodologies and assumptions. By doing so, the research report serves as a repository of analysis and information for every facet of the market, including but not limited to: Regional markets, technology, types, and applications.The study is a source of reliable data on:Market segments and sub-segmentsMarket trends and dynamicsSupply and demandMarket sizeCurrent trends/opportunities/challengesCompetitive landscapeTechnological breakthroughsValue chain and stakeholder analysisRequest For Enquiry @The regional analysis covers:North America (U.S. and Canada)Latin America (Mexico, Brazil, Peru, Chile, and others)Western Europe (Germany, U.K., France, Spain, Italy, Nordic countries, Belgium, Netherlands, and Luxembourg)Eastern Europe (Poland and Russia)Asia Pacific (China, India, Japan, ASEAN, Australia, and New Zealand)Middle East and Africa (GCC, Southern Africa, and North Africa)The report has been compiled through extensive primary research (through interviews, surveys, and observations of seasoned analysts) and secondary research (which entails reputable paid sources, trade journals, and industry body databases). The report also features a complete qualitative and quantitative assessment by analyzing data gathered from industry analysts and market participants across key points in the industrys value chain.A separate analysis of prevailing trends in the parent market, macro- and micro-economic indicators, and regulations and mandates is included under the purview of the study. By doing so, the report projects the attractiveness of each major segment over the forecast period.Highlights of the report:A complete backdrop analysis, which includes an assessment of the parent marketImportant changes in market dynamicsMarket segmentation up to the second or third levelHistorical, current, and projected size of the market from the standpoint of both value and volumeReporting and evaluation of recent industry developmentsMarket shares and strategies of key playersEmerging niche segments and regional marketsAn objective assessment of the trajectory of the marketRecommendations to companies for strengthening their foothold in the marketCheck Discount @About usMarketResearchReports.biz is the most comprehensive collection of market research reports. MarketResearchReports.Biz services are specially designed to save time and money for our clients. We are a one stop solution for all your research needs, our main offerings are syndicated research reports, custom research, subscription access and consulting services. We serve all sizes and types of companies spanning across various industries.Contact usMr. NachiketState Tower90 Sate Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-621-2074Website:E: sales@marketresearchreports.biz Research Focused On the Petroleum & Diesel Retail Market Size & Share, Growth, Trends and Forecast 2017 - 2025 https://www.marketresearchreports.biz/sample/sample/1581191 https://www.marketresearchreports.biz/reports/1581191/petroleum-diesel-retail-global-market-research-reports https://www.marketresearchreports.biz/sample/enquiry/1581191 https://www.marketresearchreports.biz/sample/checkdiscount/1581191 http://www.marketresearchreports.biz/ The report " Petroleum & Diesel Retail Market - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends and Forecast 2017 - 2025", has been prepared based on an in-depth market analysis with inputs from industry experts.The main objective of this report is to define, describe, and forecast the global Petroleum & Diesel Retail market on the basis of types of applications, major sectors, deployment models, organization size, and regions. The report contains an analysis of the major factors influencing the growth of the market (drivers, restraints, opportunities, and challenges). It aims to strategically analyze the micromarkets with respect to individual growth trends, prospects, and their contribution to the market. The report attempts to forecast the market size for 5 major regions, namely, North America, Europe, Asia Pacific (APAC), Middle East and Africa (MEA), and Latin America. It contains key vendor profiles and comprehensively analyzes their core competencies. The report also tracks and analyzes competitive developments, including partnerships, collaborations, acquisitions, new product developments, and R&D activities in the market.Get Sample Copy of this report @Petroleum & Diesel Retail Market: SnapshotRetailing of petroleum products entails NOCs/merchants offering petroleum based items specifically to clients. The filling stations offering fuel fall under the retail market. Petroleum and diesel retail has a place in the downstream part of the oil and gas business. A petroleum retail outlet is a setup that offers an extensive variety of items from raw petroleum, for example, diesel and petroleum to end-users under a single roof. In a petroleum retail outlet, purchasers can get petroleum and diesel at one place using multi-product dispensers (MPDs).The petroleum & diesel retail market can be divided on the basis of license, operator, and product. On the basis of operator, the market is bifurcated into public and private. Based on license type, the market is segmented into company owned dealer operated (CODO), company owned company operated (COCO), and dealer owned dealer operated (DODO). On the basis of product, the global market is classified into diesel and petroleum.The report offers a complete assessment of the market. It does so through top to bottom subjective experiences and accurate and reliable information to arrive at projections about market estimate. The projections included in the report have been determined utilizing proven research methodologies. Thus, the exploration report fills in as a storehouse of information and data for each aspect of the market, including yet not constrained to: Regional markets, innovation, sorts, and applications.Petroleum & Diesel Retail Market: Drivers and RestraintsThe market for petroleum and diesel retailing is driven by the flourishing automobile industry all over the globe which is driving the demand for energy fuels particularly, diesel and petroleum. In any case, instability in costs of raw petroleum is the major factor which based on which, the final retailing cost of diesel and petroleum is decided in any nation. The business of a retailer is influenced by government measures and activities, costs of raw petroleum w.r.t finished product, and the geographical factors. Most retail outlets over the globe are monitored by national oil organizations of their nations. The drivers with respect to public sector units can be characterized into standards of security, fiscal drivers, regulations, and environmental policies. Fiscal drivers include taxes, for example, company taxes and fuel duty and rates in business that influence the business of PFS. The evaluation by the Voice of America depends on the execution of the retail outlet. The final expenses of retail incorporate roughly around 60% of VAT and fuel duty.View Full Report @Petroleum & Diesel Retail Market: Geographical AnalysisAs of now, nations in Asia Pacific account for a significant share in the petroleum and diesel retail market. Rise in population combined with growing popularity of automobiles in nations in Asia Pacific, for example, India and China are expected to propel the investments in the growth of new and existing retail shops. In Europe, the petroleum retail market in the U.K. has over 200 organizations that are working with production, refining, distribution, and marketing activities of several products. India has plans to build new petroleum retail outlets in Karnataka state which is expected to drive the demand for petroleum and diesel retail shops in Asia Pacific region.Petroleum & Diesel Retail Market: Companies MentionRoyal Dutch Shell plc, Reliance Industries Limited, Exxon Mobil Corporation, and Indian Oil Corporation Ltd are some of the major firms leading the global petroleum and diesel retail market. These firms are investing and working on mergers and acquisitions to sustain and improve their position in the global market.The report offers a comprehensive evaluation of the market. It does so via in-depth qualitative insights, historical data, and verifiable projections about market size. The projections featured in the report have been derived using proven research methodologies and assumptions. By doing so, the research report serves as a repository of analysis and information for every facet of the market, including but not limited to: Regional markets, technology, types, and applications.The study is a source of reliable data on:Market segments and sub-segmentsMarket trends and dynamicsSupply and demandMarket sizeCurrent trends/opportunities/challengesCompetitive landscapeTechnological breakthroughsValue chain and stakeholder analysisRequest For Enquiry @The regional analysis covers:North America (U.S. and Canada)Latin America (Mexico, Brazil, Peru, Chile, and others)Western Europe (Germany, U.K., France, Spain, Italy, Nordic countries, Belgium, Netherlands, and Luxembourg)Eastern Europe (Poland and Russia)Asia Pacific (China, India, Japan, ASEAN, Australia, and New Zealand)Middle East and Africa (GCC, Southern Africa, and North Africa)The report has been compiled through extensive primary research (through interviews, surveys, and observations of seasoned analysts) and secondary research (which entails reputable paid sources, trade journals, and industry body databases). The report also features a complete qualitative and quantitative assessment by analyzing data gathered from industry analysts and market participants across key points in the industrys value chain.A separate analysis of prevailing trends in the parent market, macro- and micro-economic indicators, and regulations and mandates is included under the purview of the study. By doing so, the report projects the attractiveness of each major segment over the forecast period.Highlights of the report:A complete backdrop analysis, which includes an assessment of the parent marketImportant changes in market dynamicsMarket segmentation up to the second or third levelHistorical, current, and projected size of the market from the standpoint of both value and volumeReporting and evaluation of recent industry developmentsMarket shares and strategies of key playersEmerging niche segments and regional marketsAn objective assessment of the trajectory of the marketRecommendations to companies for strengthening their foothold in the marketCheck Discount @About usMarketResearchReports.biz is the most comprehensive collection of market research reports. MarketResearchReports.Biz services are specially designed to save time and money for our clients. We are a one stop solution for all your research needs, our main offerings are syndicated research reports, custom research, subscription access and consulting services. We serve all sizes and types of companies spanning across various industries.Contact usMr. NachiketState Tower90 Sate Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-621-2074Website:E: sales@marketresearchreports.biz Air Quality Monitoring Equipment Market : Key Trends, Research, Key Players, Economic Impact and Forecast to 2024 Market Research Report https://www.researchmoz.us/enquiry.php?type=S&repid=903192 https://www.researchmoz.us/air-quality-monitoring-equipment-market-global-industry-analysis-size-share-growth-trends-and-forecast-2016-2024-report.html/toc http://bit.ly/1TBmnVG https://marketreserch1.blogspot.com Researchmoz added Most up-to-date research on "Air Quality Monitoring Equipment Market - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends and Forecast 2016 - 2024" to its huge collection of research reports.Air Quality Monitoring Equipment Market: OverviewThis report provides strategic and in-depth analysis of the global air quality monitoring equipment market, and the growth forecast for the period 2016 to 2024. The scope of this report includes analysis of different segments within market that are differentiated as per type, end user and geography of the global air quality monitoring equipment market.It also provides assessment of different factors that is impacting the global market, classified as market drivers, restraints, as well as opportunities in the report. All these factors determine the different trends impacting the overall market growth. Moreover, after taking into consideration all this factors, a comprehensive analysis of the global air quality monitoring equipment market along with the growth estimation for the forecast period is also provided within the report. Different market trends analysis and market opportunity map analyzed in this report discusses the upcoming trends. In addition to this, the scope of this report also focuses on the future growth of various air quality monitoring equipment.To Get Sample Copy of Report visit @Air Quality Monitoring Equipment Market: SegmentationAir quality monitoring equipment devices are segmented into different types such as air pollution sampler, anemometers, gas analyzers and detectors, and particle counter among others. These different types of air quality monitoring equipment devices include both simple and complex types depending on the applications. Demand for air quality monitoring equipment devices is increasing as a result of rise in air pollution and subsequent activities to monitor level of air pollution.Globally the alarming growth of air pollution has led to an increase in the usage of air quality monitoring equipment to curb different diseases. With the rise in illness as a result of air pollution, different government agencies worldwide have come up with stringent policies and regulations to curb various ill effects. This has been another major factor contributing to the growing demand of air quality monitoring equipment market globally. The global air quality monitoring equipment market has been further segmented into end users. Different end users that are segmented under this report includes power generation, oil & gas, medical, construction, chemical and othersAll these segments are provided with market size along with the forecast from 2016-2024, highlighting the different trends that may act as influencing factors covered under the scope of this report. The region wise market analysis also provides the in-depth analysis of various trends occurring in different regions that is also covered under the scope of report. The different regions included in the scope of this report includes North America, Europe, Asia Pacific and Rest of the World.Make an Enquiry about TOC @Air Quality Monitoring Equipment Market: Competitive AnalysisFor better decision making purpose, the competitive analysis as well as profiling of top players that are present in this market is included within the scope of our report. Other than this, the respective market share, recent developments as well as different business strategies that are adopted by the leading players are also included within this report. Additionally, the Porters five forces analysis gives a better understanding of competition level in this market. Top companies present in the global air quality monitoring equipment market has been included in the report.Some of the leading players in the global air quality monitoring equipment market are Kusam - Meco (India), Siemens AG (Germany), Fortive Corporation (U.S.), CEM Corporation (U.S.), Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc. (U.S.), Teledyne Technologies Inc. (U.S.), Servomex (UK), Horiba Ltd. (Japan), Vaisala (Finland), and Aeroqual (New Zealand) among others.The global air quality monitoring equipment market has been segmented as follows:By TypeAir Pollution SamplerAnemometersGas Analyzers and DetectorsParticle CounterOthersBy End UserPower GenerationOil & GasMedicalConstructionChemicalAbout ResearchMozResearchMoz is the one stop online destination to find and buy market research reports & Industry Analysis. We fulfill all your research needs spanning across industry verticals with our huge collection of market research reports. We provide our services to all sizes of organizations and across all industry verticals and markets. Our Research Coordinators have in-depth knowledge of reports as well as publishers and will assist you in making an informed decision by giving you unbiased and deep insights on which reports will satisfy your needs at the best price.For More Information Kindly Contact :ResearchMozMr. Nachiket Ghumare,Tel: +1-518-621-2074USA-Canada Toll Free: 866-997-4948Email: sales@researchmoz.usFollow us on LinkedIn @ Global Mergers & Acquisitions Advisory Market 2018 Key Players: Goldman Sachs & Co, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan, Citi, Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Mergers & Acquisitions Advisory Market https://www.wiseguyreports.com/sample-request/2975263-mergers-acquisitions-advisory-global-market-report-2018-including https://www.wiseguyreports.com/reports/2975263-mergers-acquisitions-advisory-global-market-report-2018-including Mergers & Acquisitions Advisory Market:WiseGuyReports.com adds Mergers & Acquisitions Advisory Market 2018 Global Analysis, Growth, Trends and Opportunities Research Report Forecasting to 2023reports to its database.Executive SummaryMergers & Acquisitions Advisory Market Global Report 2018 from The Business Research Company provides the strategists, marketers and senior management with the critical information they need to assess the global mergers & acquisitions advisory market.Where is the largest and fastest growing market for the mergers & acquisitions advisory? How does the market relate to the overall economy, demography and other similar markets? What forces will shape the market going forward? The mergers & acquisitions advisory market global report from the Business Research Company answers all these questions and many more.The report covers market characteristics, size and growth, segmentation, regional and country breakdowns, competitive landscape, market shares, trends and strategies for this market. It traces the markets historic and forecast market growth by geography. It places the market within the context of the wider financial services market, and compares it with other markets. The market characteristics section of the report defines and explains the market. The market size section gives the market size ($b) covering both the historic growth of the market and forecasting the future. Drivers and restraints looks at the external factors supporting and controlling the growth of the market. Market segmentations break down market into sub markets. The regional and country breakdowns section gives an analysis of the market in each geography and the size of the market by geography and compares their historic and forecast growth. It covers all the regions, key developed countries and major emerging markets. It draws comparisons with country populations and economies to understand the importance of the market by country and how this is changing. Competitive landscape gives a description of the competitive nature of the market, market shares, and a description of the leading companies. Key financial deals which have shaped the market in recent years are identified. The trends and strategies section highlights the likely future developments in the market and suggests approaches companies can take to exploit this. The mergers & acquisitions advisory market section of the report gives context. It compares the mergers & acquisitions advisory market with other segments of the mergers & acquisitions advisory market by size and growth, historic and forecast. It analyses Expenditure Per Capita, The Mergers & Acquisitions Advisory Market Indicators Comparison.Request Sample Report @ScopeMarkets Covered: Mergers Advisory; Acquisitions AdvisoryCompanies Mentioned: Goldman Sachs & Co,Morgan Stanley,JP Morgan,Citi,Bank of America Merrill LynchCountries: Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Spain, Russia, UK, USA and Australia.Regions: Asia-Pacific, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, North America, South America, Middle East And AfricaTime series: Five years historic and forecast.Data: Ratios of market size and growth to related markets, GDP, Expenditure Per Capita, The Mergers & Acquisitions Advisory Market Indicators Comparison.Data segmentations: country and regional historic and forecast data, market share of competitors, market segments.Sourcing and Referencing: Data and analysis throughout the report is sourced using end notes.Table of Content1. Mergers & Acquisitions Advisory Market Characteristics2. Mergers & Acquisitions Advisory Market Size And Growth3. Mergers & Acquisitions Advisory Trends And Strategies;4. Pestle Analysis5. Mergers & Acquisitions Advisory Market Customer Information;6. Mergers & Acquisitions Advisory Market Regional And Country Analysis7. Mergers & Acquisitions Advisory Market Segmentation8. Mergers & Acquisitions Advisory Market Segments9. Global Mergers & Acquisitions Advisory Market Comparison With Macro Economic Factors10. Mergers & Acquisitions Advisory Market Comparison With Macro Economic Factors Across Countries11. Asia-Pacific Mergers & Acquisitions Advisory Market12. Western Europe Mergers & Acquisitions Advisory Market13. Eastern Europe Mergers & Acquisitions Advisory Market14. North America Mergers & Acquisitions Advisory Market15. South America Mergers & Acquisitions Advisory Market16. Middle East Mergers & Acquisitions Advisory Market17. Africa Mergers & Acquisitions Advisory Market18. Mergers & Acquisitions Advisory Market Competitive Landscape18.1. Company Profiles18.2. Goldman Sachs & Co18.2.1. Overview18.2.2. Products And Services18.2.3. Strategy18.2.4. Financial Performance18.3. Morgan Stanley18.3.1. Overview18.3.2. Products And Services18.3.3. Strategy18.3.4. Financial Performance18.4. JP Morgan18.4.1. Overview18.4.2. Products And Services18.4.3. Strategy18.4.4. Financial Performance18.5. Citi18.5.1. Overview18.5.2. Products And Services18.5.3. Strategy18.5.4. Financial Performance18.6. Bank of America Merrill Lynch18.6.1. Overview18.6.2. Products And Services18.6.3. Strategy18.6.4. Financial Performance19. Key Mergers And Acquisitions In The Mergers & Acquisitions Advisory Market20. Market Background: Investment Banking Market21. AppendixReasons to Purchase Outperform competitors using accurate up to date demand-side dynamics information. Identify growth segments for investment. Facilitate decision making on the basis of historic and forecast data and the drivers and restraints on the market. Create regional and country strategies on the basis of local data and analysis. Stay abreast of the latest customer and market research findings Benchmark performance against key competitors. Develop strategies based on likely future developments. Utilize the relationships between key data sets for superior strategizing. Suitable for supporting your internal and external presentations with reliable high quality data and analysis Gain a global perspective on the development of the market. Report will be updated with the latest data and delivered to you within 3-5 working days of order.ContinuousFor further information on this report, visit Contact Us:Norah Trentsales@wiseguyreports.comPh: +1-646-845-9349 (US); +44 208 133 9349 (UK)Wise Guy Reports Is Part Of The Wise Guy Consultants Pvt. Ltd. And Offers Premium Progressive Statistical Surveying, Market Research Reports, Analysis & Forecast Data For Industries And Governments Around The Globe. Wise Guy Reports Features An Exhaustive List Of Market Research Reports From Hundreds Of Publishers Worldwide. We Boast A Database Spanning Virtually Every Market Category And An Even More Comprehensive Collection Of Market Research Reports Under These Categories And Sub-Categories.Addres:WISEGUY RESEARCH CONSULTANTS PVT LTDOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersPune - 411028Maharashtra, IndiaPhone :+91 841 198 5042 IoT Managed Services Market: Global Industry Trend Analysis 2012 to 2017 and Forecast 2017 - 2025 https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/market-research/iot-managed-services-market.asp https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/toc/19531 https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/samples/19531 https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/methodology/19531 https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/ IoT Managed Services market: IntroductionTo help manage energy costs and improve comfort and convenience, the customers are seen investing in IoT solutions. IoT provides the opportunity for managed services to improve their service interactions, gain more information about the users and their behaviors related to specific devices and services, and ultimately provide better support, maximize operational efficiency and reduce operational overhead. Some of the IoT Managed Services are fleet tracking, operational efficiency and business model transformation in different industries, cloud based video surveillance, home control and automation, power monitoring and loss identification, healthcare and wellness services and city wide Government IoT capabilities.For more information about this Report visit @IoT Managed Services market: Drivers and ChallengesCost containment, demand for customer choice and improved interactions with existing DSM programs point toward the potential of IoT to help transform the relationship between utilities and their customers. IoT enables customers to manage their energy independent from their utility and will require a rethinking of current utility business models to capture market share in this broader demand management landscape.MSPs will be required to make substantial investments to support IoT devices as in many cases, to support a device, part of the code may need to be rewritten or modified which could include an IoT device's embedded operating system (OS), the drivers that enable it to communicate with a network, or the device's remote management software or in some cases, it could be a basic modification in terms of a change to values in a configuration file such as auto-starting a service on the OS which means that they may want to modify the firmware itself and recompile it to add support for additional protocols. It totally depends and is on a case-by-case basis. This would lead the company to invest more on these problems solutions and the greatest challenge will be recruiting staff with the appropriate data analytics skills for the companies which are looking forward to advance in IoT Managed Services market.IoT Managed Services Market: SegmentationSegmentation of IoT Managed Services market on the basis of End-User shows the direct sector in which it is used. On the basis of End-User the IoT Managed Services market can be segmented into Commercial and Residential.Segmentation of IoT Managed Services market on the basis of Verticals shows the use of these services in different segments. On the basis of Verticals the IoT Managed Services market can be segmented into Oil and Gas, Mining, Discrete Manufacturing, Transportation and Defense, Machine to Machine, Healthcare and Retail.Request Report for TOC @IoT Managed Services Market: Key PlayersSome of the key players of IoT Managed Services Market include Cisco Systems, Inc., Google, Cognizant Technology Solutions Corporation, Prodea, Scalable Systems, HCL Technologies Limited, Harman International Industries, Inc., Infosys Limited, Virtusa Corporation, Tieto Corporation, Tata Consultancy Services Limited, Tech Mahindra Limited, and Wipro Limited.IoT Managed Services Market: Key DevelopmentIn October 2017, Google Cloud launched a public beta of their Cloud IoT Core services, which is a fully managed offering for IoT messaging and device management. This comes in place as the service open in private preview with a few customers previously, but the launch opens the service to all users and provides a competing solution to the IoT offerings.IoT Managed Services Market: Regional OverviewOn the basis of geography, IoT Managed Services Market can be segmented into five key regions namely North America, Latin America, Europe, APAC and Middle East & Africa. Among various regions, the IoT Managed Services Market in North America is expected to dominate during the forecast period owing to a more adaption of IoT devices. APAC is expected to increase fast as due to the presence of creditable organizations that are gradually moving to a digital marketing trend related IoT managed service market.Request to Sample of Report-The report covers exhaustive analysis on:IoT Managed Services market Segments, IoT Managed Services market Dynamics, Historical Actual market Size, 2012 - 2016, IoT Managed Services market Size & Forecast 2017 To 2027, Supply & Demand Value Chain, IoT Managed Services market Current Trends/Issues/Challenges, Competition & Companies involved, IoT Managed Services market Value Chain, IoT Managed Services market Drivers and RestraintsNeed more information about Report methodology ?About UsPersistence Market Research (PMR) is a third-platform research firm. Our research model is a unique collaboration of data analytics and market research methodology to help businesses achieve optimal performance.Contact UsPersistence Market Research305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,USA Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.comWeb: Human Resource Outsourcing Market: Global Industry Trend Analysis 2012 to 2017 and Forecast 2017 - 2025 https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/samples/21931 https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/toc/21931 https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/market-research/human-resource-outsourcing-market.asp https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/methodology/21931 http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com In todays world, the rapid growth of industrialization has led to increasing the demand for trained and qualified employees to manage personal functions and administrative tasks of an enterprise. In order to improve operational efficiency, companies opt for services like human resource outsourcing in which the company that requires trained professionals, hire employees from firms providing such resources by having a service level agreement where both the groups mutually agree to the services that the resource will provide. Particular companies provide outsourcing resources. These resources join the company for a specified project and stay in the firm until the project ends. Once the project is over, the resource gets outsourced to some other business for another project.The companies that are small to medium-sized outsource human resources in order to manage their administrative tasks in order to have economic and operational benefits. The key trend in the market is recruiting employees for outsourcing from social media in order to identify the appropriate resource for each project.Human Resource Outsourcing: Drivers and RestraintsThe process of human resource outsourcing is beneficial to many companies since this concept makes business processes very economical and efficient. Such factors drive the growth of human resource outsourcing market. Also, a lot of tedious training is required to have a separate operational HR department. Thus, business organizations prefer outsourcing as a solution. Such factors boost the market for human resource outsourcing.Request Sample Report @Factors like loss of control over the staff, lack of flexibility restrains the organizations to adopt this outsourcing process. Also, this method prohibits the enterprise to maintain relationships with their employee, and it is also possible that the outsourced resource is not much benefit to the organization. Such factors hamper the growth of human resource outsourcing market.Human Resource Outsourcing: SegmentationSegmentation based on types of services provided by Human Resource Outsourcing in Market: PEO,ASO,Payroll,Time tracking,Staffing,Recruiting,Insurance Services,HR Consulting,Performance Management,OthersSegmentation based on type of outsourcing of Human Resource Outsourcing in Market:Business process HR outsourcing: In this process, there is an external supplier that manages all the activities of the resourceShared service HR outsourcing: In this process, only transaction or administrative elements of the human resources are subcontracted to an external supplierApplication (and facilities) service HR outsourcing: In this, the external supplier looks after technological infrastructure in order to support the activities of HRHuman Resource Outsourcing: Competitive LandscapeThe key players of the Accenture PLC, Capita plc., Northgate Capital, LLC, Xansa Plc., Vertex Inc., Ceridian HCM, Inc., ADP, LLC.,, IBM, Aon Hewitt and Adecco S.A.Request to Browse Full Table of Content, figure and Tables @Regional OverviewEurope is expected to be the largest market for Human Resource Outsourcing market. The majority of Human Resource Outsourcing vendors such as Capita plc, Northgate Capital, LLC and Xansa PLC are based in Europe region. This is attributed to increasing number SMBs in the region. The market is anticipated to grow in North America region due to presence of other vendors like Ceridian HCM, Inc., ADP, LLC, in the region.The report covers exhaustive analysis on:Global Human Resource Outsourcing Market SegmentsGlobal Human Resource Outsourcing Market Dynamics,Historical Actual Market Size, 2012 - 2016,Global Human Resource Outsourcing Market Size & Forecast 2017 to 2027,Supply & Demand Value Chain for Human Resource Outsourcing Market,Global Human Resource Outsourcing Market Current Trends/Issues/Challenges,Competition & Companies involved in Human Resource Outsourcing Market,Human Resource Outsourcing Technology,Value Chain of Sales Performance Management solutionsRead Report Overview @Global Human Resource Outsourcing Market Drivers and RestraintsRegional analysis for Global Human Resource Outsourcing Market includes North America Human Resource Outsourcing Market,US,Canada,Latin America Human Resource Outsourcing Market,Argentina,Mexico,Brazil,Rest of Latin America,Western Europe Human Resource Outsourcing Market,Germany,France,U.K.,Spain,Italy,Nordic,Benelux,Rest of Western Europe,Eastern Europe Human Resource Outsourcing Market,Poland,Russia,Asia Pacific Human Resource Outsourcing Market,Australia and New Zealand (A&NZ),China,India,ASEAN,Rest of Asia Pacific,Japan Human Resource Outsourcing Market,The Middle East and Africa Human Resource Outsourcing Market,GCC Countries,North Africa,South Africa,Rest of MEAThe report is a compilation of first-hand information, qualitative and quantitative assessment by industry analysts, inputs from industry experts and industry participants across the value chain. The report provides in-depth analysis of parent market trends, macro-economic indicators and governing factors along with market attractiveness as per segments. The report also maps the qualitative impact of various market factors on market segments and geographies.Need more information about Report methodology ?ABOUT US:Persistence Market Research (PMR) is a third-platform research firm. Our research model is a unique collaboration of data analytics and market research methodology to help businesses achieve optimal performance. To support companies in overcoming complex business challenges, we follow a multi-disciplinary approach. At PMR, we unite various data streams from multi-dimensional sources. By deploying real-time data collection, big data, and customer experience analytics, we deliver business intelligence for organizations of all sizes.CONTACT:Persistence Market Research305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,USA Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.comWeb: Fortified Beverages Market Key Players Analysis | Danone SA, Nestle SA, The Coco Cola Company, The Boots Company PLC, Tropicana Products Inc., General Mills, Inc. and Abbott Laboratories https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/sample_request/2960 https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/fortified-beverages-market-2960 Market Overview:Fortified Beverages Market holds a bright spot in the beverage space. .Fortified Beverages demand will grow at a progressive rate in the developing nations. The notion of good-for-you nutrients on the go is primarily driving the growth of the market and future growth in fortified beverage market is expected with the integration of ingredient suppliers, beverage manufacturers and consumers. Manufacturers are focusing on sourcing high-quality ingredients to meet consumer demand. With an increasing demand for new flavors, market players are constantly innovating to meet the changing tastes and demand of the consumers. With the rapidly changing tastes and preferences of consumers, the demand for new and exotic flavors is growing.Owing to growing consumer needs and their awareness about the fundamental needs for nutrition and proactive measures to prevent chronic ailments and attain well-being, demand for fortified beverages has grown in recent years. The growth has been driven by the increased acceptance of health & wellness products amongst the consumers and their motivation on improving immunity. With growing health concerns and rising per capita health care cost, there has been surge in demand of fortified beverages consumption and consumers indulging in the pursuit of healthy buying goes for fortified beverages as fortification of beverages involves the process of adding micronutrients to beverages which are generally consumed by the different age group consumers.Mainstream consumers are inclined to consume fortified beverages as it helps them curb their appetite, burn fat and help reduce their body weight. Fortified Beverages has attracted the attention of consumers owing to the power of social media influencers and celebrity endorsements which primarily trigger the demand of perfumes and fragrance end-products. The growth has been driven by the increased demand by health cognizant consumers and their motivation on improving immunity. Furthermore, hectic lifestyles coupled with rising disposable incomes are the key growth factors. With changing lifestyle and altering consumer preferences, and strong performance of retail sector have significantly resulted in growing demand of Fortified Beverages. With strong economic growth, emergence of a large and prosperous middle class population, increasing consumers cautiousness to spend along with high rates of migration from rural to urban areas has led to the influx of international retailers to the developing regions and has encouraged the construction of large volume of new retail real estate. Rising urbanization coupled with cheap labor force, high ranking in ease of doing business index, government incentives & policy support and rising disposable income has attracted international retailers to enter and expand in Asia Pacific and Latin American region and gain strong foothold in the market.Latest Industry Updates:March, 2017: Vega US LLC introduced Vega Protein+ Shake,s a ready-to-drink plant-based protein productNovember, 2016: Brengman Bros. Winery introduced Piccolo Dito, a line of fortified wines, in select marketsGet a Sample Report @Major Key Players:Fortified Beverages industry is highly competitive and marked by the presence of various large and small vendors competing based on price, quality, innovation, reputation, and distribution. Most of the companies operating in the market are focusing on new product development as well as expanding its their product line, augmenting its capabilities and investing in research and development to offer products with better functionality. With strategic investments, market players can focus on penetrating into the developing economies to expand their business portfolio. Consumers in developing countries are keen on exploring new product range offered to them and form a large consumer base. Establishing market in these emerging economies is profitable based on relatively low set-up costs, ease of doing business, and further lower variable cost to be incurred.Industrial players are keen to leverage on the recent trends in the market including altering consumer spending patterns, consumer tastes, regional, national, and local economic conditions, and demographic shifts. Industrial players are also involved in the acquisition of smaller players which will further support the company to expand and reach out to consumers across the regions, the end-user industries are inclined towards product promotions through social media, magazines and other mediums in order to reach out to customers. The promotional strategy aids in retaining the existing the customers and also to regenerate new customer base. Major industrial players are innovating and introducing new and unique flavors to attract and cater to the fluctuating demand of the consumers. The key market players profiled in Global Fortified Beverages Market report include Danone SA (France), Nestle SA (Switzerland), The Coco Cola Company (U.S.), The Boots Company PLC (U.K.), Tropicana Products Inc. (U.S.), General Mills, Inc. (U.S.), Abbott Laboratories (U.S.).Market Segments:The global Fortified Beverages market has been divided into type, source, functional groups, application, and region.On The Basis Of Nutrients Type: Minerals, Vitamins and othersOn The Basis Of Product Type: Non-Alcoholic, AlcoholicOn The Basis Of Distribution Channel: Store Based and Non-Store BasedOn The Basis Of Region: North America, Europe, Asia Pacific and ROWAccess Report Details @Regional Analysis:The global Fortified Beverages market is segmented into North America, Europe, APAC, and Rest of the World (RoW). Global Fortified Beverages market is highly dominated by North America region is expected to retain its dominance throughout the forecast period. Europe is also estimated to contribute to high revenue in the fortified beverages market. However, Asia pacific is projected to register maximum CAGR during the forecast period owing to increasing per capita disposable income coupled with the changing lifestyles of the consumer in the region. Countries such as China and India offer a lucrative opportunity in the Asia Pacific region for the fortified beverages manufacturers. Latin American region is also projected to show a high potential in the fortified beverages market.About Market Research Future:At Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.MRFR team have supreme objective to provide the optimum quality market research and intelligence services to our clients. Our market research studies by products, services, technologies, applications, end users, and market players for global, regional, and country level market segments, enable our clients to see more, know more, and do more, which help to answer all their most important questions.Contact:Market Research FutureOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, Hadapsar,Pune - 411028Maharashtra, India+1 646 845 9312Email: sales@marketresearchfuture.com A Deep Analysis of Current and Future Investments in Surface Treatment Chemicals Market https://www.xpodenceresearch.com/Request-Sample/105674 https://www.xpodenceresearch.com/Reports/Surface-Treatment-Chemicals-Market Surface finish also known as surface texture is an important property for materials, machines, and component structures that are wide-open to severe operation conditions as well as environment. Surface finish helps in limiting friction as well as transferring layer formation during sliding process. The material surface can get severely damaged owing to the exposure to abrasive conditions extreme temperatures, and corrosive environment. The application of surface treatment chemical helps to increase hardness, develop resistance and develops adhesion of other chemical treatments.The surface treatment chemicals are primarily used for the metals and alloys treatment. These surface treatment chemicals can also be used for the printed circuit boards treatment and these circuit boards are made up of plastic and metal. The metal profiles favor surface treatments such as electroplating that involves in the metallic coating formation on surfaces and anodic oxidation for light metals like titanium and aluminium. In order to enable effective application of other chemicals, various additives and sealants are also used.Request For Free Sample Of The Report @The global surface treatment chemicals market can be classified based on type, application, and region. On the basis of type, the global surface treatment chemicals market is classified into additives and sealants, paint strippers, corrosion protection, cleaners, anodising chemicals, passivation and others. Depending upon application, the global market is segmented into automotive & aerospace, electronics & electrical, construction, industrial, and others.The global surface treatment chemicals market is expected to garner maximum revenue in the forecast period. Factors such extensive application of surface treatment chemicals in automotive coating, expanding industrialization and high demand of heavy machinery in the emerging markets are expected to fuel the growth of surface treatment chemicals market. Also, the mounting residential and commercial infrastructure is fuelling the demand for anodised aluminium leading to the generation of demand for anodising chemicals. However, rigid environmental regulations pertaining to emissions restrain the sales of certain surface treatment chemicals in some regional markets.Based on regions, the global surface treatment chemicals market is divided into North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific (APAC), Middle East & Africa (MEA), and Latin America. The North American and Asia-Pacific region is anticipated to command the maximum market share and would lead the surface treatment chemicals market during the forecast period. Factors such as rise in demands for surface treatment chemicals in automotive, industrial manufacturing and electronics application are expected to fuel this market in the Asia-Pacific region during the forecast period. The developing industrial machinery and construction sector growth is also anticipated to create high demand for these chemicals in this region.Obtain Report Details @The surface treatment chemicals market is of highly fragmented nature with large number of domestic and regional manufacturers presence in each region. The major companies that provide surface treatment chemicals include Platform Specialty Products Corp., Henkel AG & Co. KGaA, JCU Corporation, , Politeknik Metal A.?, Chemetall (BASF SE), and Yuken Industry Co., Ltd. among others.About Us-Xpodence Research is a U.S. based Market Research Company and offers the most extensive collection of progressive surveying syndicated and customized research reports of various categories for private and public industries across the globe.We offer the comprehensive market research solution for all the industries by performing the in-depth study of industry trends, verticals globally. We believe in building an eternal bond with our customers through providing them inclusive research study both customized and syndicated based on their specific requirements.The organizations in every industry such as Technology, Pharmaceuticals, Consumable Goods, Food & Beverage and others demands a market-based solutions for various significant decisions based on productivity and output globally. Our services are tailored specifically to our clients by proposing them the potential outcome, based on our in-depth analysis and insights for exploring the growth strategies through providing the best possible decision for quality production.Contact Us-Xpodence ResearchUSA Office244 , Madison AvenueNew York City, NY - 10016United StatesUK Office109 ,Straford Street,LeedsWest Yorkshrie LS11 6JGUnited KingdomToll Free +1- 844-445-2861Email-sales@xpodenceresearch.com Medicated Personal Care Products Market 2018 Major Participants: Personal Care, TWASA, KPH Cosmos, Edana, Johnson & Johnson, LOreal, DCC Health and Beauty Solutions https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/sample_request/1008 https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/medicated-personal-care-products-market-1008 https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/check-discount/1008 Report Summary:The, Medicated Personal Care Products Market inquire about report is developing with the quick pace; chiefly due the prospering Healthcare Sector. As per a current report distributed by the Market Research Future, The , Medicated Personal Care Products Industry Research report is blasting and anticipated that would pick up unmistakable quality over the conjecture time frame. The Market is anticipated to exhibit a colossal development by 2027, outperforming its past development records as far as esteem and volume.TRY FREE SAMPLE REPORT @Key Players for Medicated personal care products Market:Some of the key players in this market are: Personal Care (US) , TWASA (India), KPH Cosmos Pvt. Ltd (India), Edana, Johnson & Johnson (US), LOreal (Paris), DCC Health and Beauty Solutions LTD (UK).Global Medicated personal care products Market - Regional Analysis:Global Medicated personal care products market is segmented on the basis of geographies or regions which mainly includes Americas, Europe, Asia Pacific, and Middle East & Africa. Americas is dominating the global market for Medicated personal care products with more than 40% share of the total market in 2016. The major factors influencing the growth of the market include due to increasing use of medical personal care products, increasing spending over cosmetic products, growing aging population, and various others.Asia-Pacific is expected to be the fastest growing market in coming future. The nations in the Asia represent to a portion of the biggest and high potential markets for export growth for the U.S. Individual Care and Cosmetics businesses. Containing more than 20% of U.S. worldwide exports in the sector, the Asian nations offer the business more than 3 billion potential consumers in the fastest growing global markets. This base incorporates customers in developed markets for U.S. products, for example, Japan, Australia and South Korea, which together represented more than $1 billion in U.S. individual care and cosmetics export trades in 2015 to China, which at an estimated USD 500 to USD 600 million in U.S. exports that same year, is anticipated to become the largest global market for cosmetics in the next two to three years agents.What's more, the nations incorporated into the Asia Personal Care and Cosmetics Guide give access to some of the most highest potential future marketsincluding the developing white collar class in nations crossing from Indonesia to Vietnam to Malaysia. These purchasers seek to the quality and refinement for which U.S. products are known. As of now these business sectors source the vast majority of their fundamental individual care products from mass market U.S. organizations including Procter and Bet, Johnson and Johnson and Colgate-Palmolive. Progressively these consumers are moving past the basics to premium skin and hair care and also color cosmetics opening opening the way to a wide variety of U.S. based beauty care products exporters.The Middle East & Africa holds the least share of the global market due to limited availability of biotechnology facilities. The UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait are expected to drive the Middle East & African market. Whereas, the African region is expected to witness a moderate growth.Global Medicated personal care products Market - Overview:Various medical companies are working hard to mollify the rising demand for ingredients and medicines that go into personal care products for the skin, hair, oral care, and various other applications. As a large, rapidly growing and increasingly diversified market, product components denote special challenges for medical manufacturing companies. Growing consumer incomes and changing lifestyles influence the global Medicated personal care products industry. Furthermore, the market is driven by an increasing middle class in the East, and growing elderly population in the West, and new opportunities such as halal beauty, mens grooming, and bio-based skin care.The market is forecasted to demonstrate a double growth by 2017. The Global Medicated personal care products market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 20.30% during assessment period of 2017-2027.Moreover, adding to the growth of the market, better standard of living along with growing disposable income of the working middle-class population in developing countries of Asia-Pacific including China, India, and Malaysia is expected to influence the growth of this market. Rising on-going R&D with technological breakthroughs in the area of processing and cost-effective products were major factors responsible for expanding industry growth over the past decade and the upcoming trend will continue further in the coming years.ACCESS FULL REPORT @Global Medicated personal care products Market - Competitive Analysis:Characterized by the presence of several well-established and small players, the global market of Medicated personal care products appears to be highly competitive and fragmented. With well-established market in the Americas region major companies have their home in the region and generate maximum market share. These companies have expanded their operating unit in various other emerging regions as well. Moreover the other small and medium scale players are generating revenue from local market.Table Of Contents:Chapter 1. Report PrologueChapter 2. Market Introduction2.1 Introduction2.2 Scope Of Study2.3 Research Objective2.4 Assumptions & Limitations2.4.1 Assumptions2.4.2 LimitationsChapter 3. Research Methodology3.1 Research Process3.2 Primary Research3.3 Secondary ResearchChapter 4. Market Dynamics4.1 Drivers4.2 RestraintsChapter 5. Market Factor Analysis5.1 Porters Five Forces Model5.1.1 Bargaining Power Of Suppliers5.1.2 Bargaining Power Of Buyers5.1.3 Threat Of New Entrants5.1.4 Threat Of Substitutes5.1.5 Intensity Of Rivalry5.2 Supply Chain AnalysisCONTINUEDAVAIL AMAZING DISCOUNT ON REPPRT @About Market Research Future:At Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.In order to stay updated with technology and work process of the industry, MRFR often plans & conducts meet with the industry experts and industrial visits for its research analyst members.Contact:Market Research FutureOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, Hadapsar,Pune 411028Maharashtra, India+1 646 845 9312Email: salesteam@marketresearchfuture.com Polyanionic Cellulose Market: Global Industry Trend Analysis 2012 to 2017 and Forecast 2017 - 2025 https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/market-research/polyanionic-cellulose-market.asp https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/toc/21994 https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/samples/21994 https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/methodology/21994 https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com Market Definition and IntroductionPolyanionic cellulose (PAC) is a type of water-soluble cellulose ether derivative manufactured by the chemical modification of natural cellulose. It is a vital type of water-soluble cellulose ether. Polyanionic cellulose finds important applications in offshore exploration & production, drilling & salt well operations in the upstream oil & gas industry. It is a white or yellowish, odorless powder, which is hygroscopic, tasteless, & non-toxic. It is water-soluble at both low as well as high temperatures, and forms a thick liquid when dissolved in water. PAC displays high stability in high temperature applications and exhibits high resistance to salty environments as well. It has also been found to possess anti-bacterial properties.Report Overview @Polyanionic cellulose slurry displays superior fluid loss reducing capability, rejection capability and higher temperature tolerance in various applications. Furthermore, polyanionic cellulose finds applications across a diverse range of industries for a wide range of uses apart from the oil & gas industry. For instance, food & beverage, pharmaceutical, chemical, plastic and polymer are some of the end use industries worth noting.Considering these important aspects of the applications of polyanionic cellulose, the study of the polyanionic cellulose market becomes an important read.Market SegmentationOn the basis of product type, the polyanionic cellulose market can be segmented as follows: Low viscosity polyanionic cellulose,Regular viscosity polyanionic cellulose,High viscosity polyanionic cellulose,Extra high viscosity polyanionic celluloseOn the basis of end use, the polyanionic cellulose market can be segmented as follows: Oil & gas,Food & beverage,Pharmaceutical,Agrochemical,Electronics,Leather processing,Chemical,Printing,Plastic & polymer,Ceramic,OthersRequest for Table of Contents @Key Trends, DriversIn the search for hydrocarbons to ensure smooth, long term supply of crude oil & natural gas and energy sufficiency, petroleum exploration & production companies have been strategizing to procure & develop offshore oil & gas fields in deeper waters, as well in harsh environment offshore conditions. This has been translating into an increase in the demand for polyanionic cellulose, as it has significant applications in context to altering drilling fluid properties in favor of ensuring smooth oilfield service operations. Polyanionic cellulose provides superior filtration control and supplementary viscosity in most water-based drilling fluids, vis-a-vis other oilfield chemicals. This has been an important factor driving the growth of the polyanionic cellulose market.In recent times, there has been a rise in the demand for polyanionic cellulose from the fast growing food & beverage industry. This is so because polyanionic cellulose has demonstrated to be more safe vis-a-vis other chemicals, as a food additive, thereby gaining preferential use. Polyanionic cellulose has also been finding increased usage in water purification processes in the food & beverage industry. It is also being widely used as a stabilizer & thickener in food production.For instance, jelly products & ice creams are stabilized & thickened to a large extent with the use of polyanionic cellulose (PAC). PAC is also advantageous due to its compatibility to be canned & stored for extended periods of time, thereby becoming a popular choice as a food stabilizer. It is also being increasingly used to stabilize gravies and fruit & vegetable juices. The rapid growth of the food & beverages industry has also been contributing to the market growth of polyanionic cellulose at a global level. In the pharmaceutical industry, polyanionic cellulose has been gaining importance as an emulsifier & a stabilizer in the manufacture of injectable medicines & tablets due to its effective bonding properties.Get Sample Copy of this Report @Market ParticipantsExamples of some of the market participants identified across the value chain of the polyanionic cellulose market are as follows: The Dow Chemical Company,Ashland,Sidley Chemical Co., Ltd.,IRO Group Inc.,Global Drilling Fluids & Chemicals Ltd.,Shanghai Bichain Industrial Chemical Co., Ltd.,Deva Drill Tech India Limited,Albattal Chemical industries,Silver Fern Chemical, Inc.,Zhengzhou Sino Chemical Co., Ltd.,Chemstar Products CompanyThe research report presents a comprehensive assessment of the market and contains thoughtful insights, facts, historical data, and statistically supported and industry-validated market data. It also contains projections using a suitable set of assumptions and methodologies. The research report provides analysis and information according to market segments such as geographies, application, and industry.The report covers exhaust analysis on: Market Segments,Market Dynamics,Market Size,Supply & Demand,Current Trends/Issues/Challenges,Competition & Companies involved,Technology,Value ChainRegional analysis includes: North America (U.S., Canada),Latin America (Mexico. Brazil),Western Europe (Germany, Italy, France, U.K, Spain),Eastern Europe (Poland, Russia),Asia Pacific (China, India, ASEAN, Australia & New Zealand),Japan,Middle East and Africa (GCC Countries, S. Africa, Northern Africa)The report is a compilation of first-hand information, qualitative and quantitative assessment by industry analysts, inputs from industry experts and industry participants across the value chain. The report provides in-depth analysis of parent market trends, macro-economic indicators and governing factors along with market attractiveness as per segments. The report also maps the qualitative impact of various market factors on market segments and geographies.Report Highlights:Detailed overview of parent market,Changing market dynamics in the industry,In-depth market segmentation,Historical, current, and projected market size in terms of volume and value,Recent industry trends and developments,Competitive landscape,Strategies of key players and products offered,Potential and niche segments, geographical regions exhibiting promising growth,A neutral perspective on market performance,Must-have information for market players to sustain and enhance their market footprintNeed more information about Report methodology ? @About UsPersistence Market Research (PMR) is a third-platform research firm. Our research model is a unique collaboration of data analytics and market research methodology to help businesses achieve optimal performance.To support companies in overcoming complex business challenges, we follow a multi-disciplinary approach. At PMR, we unite various data streams from multi-dimensional sources. By deploying real-time data collection, big data, and customer experience analytics, we deliver business intelligence for organizations of all sizes.Contact UsPersistence Market Research305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,USA Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.comWeb: Allulose Market: Global Industry Trend Analysis 2012 to 2017 and Forecast 2017 - 2025 https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/methodology/16909 https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/samples/16909 https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/toc/16909 https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/methodology/16909 https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/ Allulose is a kind of low energy monosaccharide sugar which is present in very small quantities in the products. The level of sweetness of allulose is 70% sweet as compared with sucrose. Allulose contains many health benefits such as improving insulin resistance in the body, hypoglycemic controls (mineral-chromium), and antioxidant enhancement and formation in the body of an individual.Need more information about Report methodology ?Allulose contains the taste, texture and the performance like sugar, but it does not has calories and hence many health concisions individuals are shifting their preference towards consuming healthy food products which has low calorie present in the foods. Manufacturers are widely using allulose in their food products as it adds bulk and texture to the food products along with working in combination with other sweeteners. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved the use of allulose in various food products and is generally recognized as safe (GRAS) product. Allulose does not raise the blood sugar levels in the diabetic patients and hence is mostly used by health concisions people globally.Global Allulose: Market SegmentationThe global allulose market is segmented on the basis of form, application and region. The allulose market is segmented on the basis of forms such as powder, liquid, and others. The global allulose market is segmented on the basis of application in which allulose is used in application such as pharmaceuticals as a gelling agent in medicines and drugs, in savory dishes such as soups, sauerkraut, sauces, toppings, pickles and salads and in beverages such as health drinks, soft drinks and others. Allulose is also widely used in various products such as yogurt, ice cream, bakery products, and other low calorie foods. Allulose is widely used as a stabilizing and thickening agent for various bakery products such as biscuits, cakes, rye breads, meat dishes. Hence, the global allulose market is expected to significantly increase the revenue contribution over the forecast period.Request to Sample of Report-Global Allulose Market: Regional OutlookGeographically, the global allulose industry can be divided by major regions which include North America, Latin America, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Asia Pacific, Japan and Middle East and Africa. Globally, among all regions, North America has developed as the dominant region in global Allulose market followed by Europe and Asia Pacific. Increasing demand for allulose as a thickening agent in various end use applications, has strengthened the growth of global allulose market and hence is projected to significantly expand the revenue contribution of the market over the forecast period.Global Allulose Market: Growth DriversThe global Allulose market driving factors are increasing demand for ready-to-eat snack foods coupled with the convenience of foods. Increasing opportunities in bakery industry is also another factor in driving the Allulose market along with rising in production of Allulose as a result of stabilizing agents used in various food applications. Manufacturers are focusing on providing healthier product offerings. Allulose helps in improving various savory products thickening and is used by various manufacturers worldwide. Allulose is also used as a stabilizing agent in various pharmaceutical drugs and medicines. Allulose contains the taste, texture and the performance like sugar, but it does not has calories and hence many health concisions individuals are shifting their preference towards consuming healthy food products which has low calorie present in the foods. Hence, the global Allulose market is expected to observe robust growth over the forecast period.Request Report for TOC @Global Allulose Market: Key PlayersSome of the key players identified across the value chain of the global Allulose market include Anderson Global Group, Tate & Lyle, Matsutani Chemical Industry Co. Ltd., CJ CheilJedang, Quest Labs, and others. The companies are expected to expand their business by enhancing their product portfolio in global allulose market. The companies are projected to frame certain strategies in future in order to gain the competitive advantage in global allulose market till 2025.Need more information about Report methodology ?The report covers exhaustive analysis on:Allulose Market SegmentsAllulose Market DynamicsHistorical Actual Market Size, 2015 2016 for Global Allulose MarketAllulose Market Size & Forecast 2017 to 2025Supply & Demand Value ChainAllulose Market Current Trends/Issues/ChallengesCompetition & Companies involved in Global Allulose MarketTechnologyValue ChainGlobal Allulose Market Drivers and RestraintsRegional analysis for Allulose Market includes:North AmericaLatin AmericaEuropeAsia Pacific & JapanThe Middle East and AfricaAbout UsPersistence Market Research (PMR) is a third-platform research firm. Our research model is a unique collaboration of data analytics and market research methodology to help businesses achieve optimal performance.Contact UsPersistence Market Research305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,USA Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.comWeb: African Trypanosomiasis - Pipeline Review, H1 2018 by MarketResearchReports.biz https://www.marketresearchreports.biz/sample/sample/1581037 https://www.marketresearchreports.biz/reports/1581037/african-trypanosomiasis-pipeline-review-h1-2018-market-research-reports/toc https://www.marketresearchreports.biz/reports/1581037/african-trypanosomiasis-pipeline-review-h1-2018-market-research-reports https://www.researchmoz.com/checkout?rep_id=1581037&licType=S http://www.marketresearchreports.biz/ "The Report African Trypanosomiasis - Pipeline Review, H1 2018 provides information on pricing, market analysis, shares, forecast, and company profiles for key industry participants. - MarketResearchReports.biz"About Trypanosomiasis MarketGlobal Markets Direct's latest Pharmaceutical and Healthcare disease pipeline guide African Trypanosomiasis - Pipeline Review, H1 2018, provides an overview of the African Trypanosomiasis (Infectious Disease) pipeline landscape.Get Sample copy of this Report @African trypanosomiasis (also known as African sleeping sickness) is a parasitic infection caused by a species of parasite, Trypanosoma brucei, which is transmitted to humans through the bite of the tsetse fly. Symptoms include anxiety, drowsiness during the day, fever, headache, insomnia at night, mood changes, sleepiness (may be uncontrollable), sweating, swollen lymph nodes all over the body, swollen, red, painful nodule at site of fly bite and weakness. Treatment includes anti-protozoal agents.Report HighlightsGlobal Markets Direct's Pharmaceutical and Healthcare latest pipeline guide African Trypanosomiasis - Pipeline Review, H1 2018, provides comprehensive information on the therapeutics under development for African Trypanosomiasis (Infectious Disease), complete with analysis by stage of development, drug target, mechanism of action (MoA), route of administration (RoA) and molecule type. The guide covers the descriptive pharmacological action of the therapeutics, its complete research and development history and latest news and press releases.The African Trypanosomiasis (Infectious Disease) pipeline guide also reviews of key players involved in therapeutic development for African Trypanosomiasis and features dormant and discontinued projects. The guide covers therapeutics under Development by Companies /Universities /Institutes, the molecules developed by Companies in Phase III, Preclinical and Discovery stages are 1, 4 and 1 respectively. Similarly, the Universities portfolio in Phase III, Preclinical and Discovery stages comprises 1, 5 and 3 molecules, respectively.African Trypanosomiasis (Infectious Disease) pipeline guide helps in identifying and tracking emerging players in the market and their portfolios, enhances decision making capabilities and helps to create effective counter strategies to gain competitive advantage. The guide is built using data and information sourced from Global Markets Directs proprietary databases, company/university websites, clinical trial registries, conferences, SEC filings, investor presentations and featured press releases from company/university sites and industry-specific third party sources. Additionally, various dynamic tracking processes ensure that the most recent developments are captured on a real time basis.Request for TOC @Note: Certain content / sections in the pipeline guide may be removed or altered based on the availability and relevance of data.Scope- The pipeline guide provides a snapshot of the global therapeutic landscape of African Trypanosomiasis (Infectious Disease).- The pipeline guide reviews pipeline therapeutics for African Trypanosomiasis (Infectious Disease) by companies and universities/research institutes based on information derived from company and industry-specific sources.- The pipeline guide covers pipeline products based on several stages of development ranging from pre-registration till discovery and undisclosed stages.- The pipeline guide features descriptive drug profiles for the pipeline products which comprise, product description, descriptive licensing and collaboration details, R&D brief, MoA & other developmental activities.- The pipeline guide reviews key companies involved in African Trypanosomiasis (Infectious Disease) therapeutics and enlists all their major and minor projects.- The pipeline guide evaluates African Trypanosomiasis (Infectious Disease) therapeutics based on mechanism of action (MoA), drug target, route of administration (RoA) and molecule type.- The pipeline guide encapsulates all the dormant and discontinued pipeline projects.- The pipeline guide reviews latest news related to pipeline therapeutics for African Trypanosomiasis (Infectious Disease)Reasons to buy- Procure strategically important competitor information, analysis, and insights to formulate effective R&D strategies.- Recognize emerging players with potentially strong product portfolio and create effective counter-strategies to gain competitive advantage.- Find and recognize significant and varied types of therapeutics under development for African Trypanosomiasis (Infectious Disease).- Classify potential new clients or partners in the target demographic.- Develop tactical initiatives by understanding the focus areas of leading companies.- Plan mergers and acquisitions meritoriously by identifying key players and its most promising pipeline therapeutics.- Formulate corrective measures for pipeline projects by understanding African Trypanosomiasis (Infectious Disease) pipeline depth and focus of Indication therapeutics.- Develop and design in-licensing and out-licensing strategies by identifying prospective partners with the most attractive projects to enhance and expand business potential and scope.- Adjust the therapeutic portfolio by recognizing discontinued projects and understand from the know-how what drove them from pipeline.View Report @Table of ContentsList of TablesList of FiguresIntroductionGlobal Markets Direct Report CoverageAfrican Trypanosomiasis - OverviewAfrican Trypanosomiasis - Therapeutics DevelopmentPipeline OverviewPipeline by CompaniesPipeline by Universities/InstitutesProducts under Development by CompaniesProducts under Development by Universities/InstitutesAfrican Trypanosomiasis - Therapeutics AssessmentAssessment by TargetAssessment by Mechanism of ActionAssessment by Route of AdministrationAssessment by Molecule TypeAfrican Trypanosomiasis - Companies Involved in Therapeutics DevelopmentNovartis AGSanofiScynexis IncAfrican Trypanosomiasis - Drug Profilesacoziborole - Drug ProfileProduct DescriptionMechanism Of ActionR&D ProgressCBL-0137 - Drug ProfileProduct DescriptionMechanism Of ActionR&D ProgressDDD-100097 - Drug ProfileProduct DescriptionMechanism Of ActionR&D Progressfexinidazole - Drug ProfileProduct DescriptionMechanism Of ActionR&D ProgressGNF-6702 - Drug ProfileProduct DescriptionMechanism Of ActionR&D ProgressMDL-73811 - Drug ProfileProduct DescriptionMechanism Of ActionR&D Progressmelarsoprol hydroxypropylbetadex - Drug ProfileProduct DescriptionMechanism Of ActionR&D ProgressMS-08 - Drug ProfileProduct DescriptionMechanism Of ActionR&D ProgressPeptides for Sleeping Sickness - Drug ProfileProduct DescriptionMechanism Of ActionR&D ProgressSmall Molecules for Infectious Diseases - Drug ProfileProduct DescriptionMechanism Of ActionR&D ProgressSmall Molecules for Sleeping Sickness - Drug ProfileProduct DescriptionMechanism Of ActionR&D ProgressSmall Molecules to Inhibit Lanosterol 14 alpha-Demethylase for Chagas Disease, Leishmaniasis and African Trypanosomiasis - Drug ProfileProduct DescriptionMechanism Of ActionR&D ProgressSmall Molecules to Inhibit Leucyl-tRNA Synthetase (LeuRS) for Human African Trypanosomiasis - Drug ProfileProduct DescriptionMechanism Of ActionR&D ProgressSmall Molecules to Inhibit N-Myristoyltransferase for African Trypanosomiasis - Drug ProfileProduct DescriptionMechanism Of ActionR&D ProgressSmall Molecules to Inhibit Variant Surface Glycoprotein for African Trypanosomiasis - Drug ProfileProduct DescriptionMechanism Of ActionR&D ProgressAfrican Trypanosomiasis - Dormant ProjectsAfrican Trypanosomiasis - Discontinued ProductsAfrican Trypanosomiasis - Product Development MilestonesFeatured News & Press ReleasesJan 31, 2018: Sanofi, DNDi seek European Medicines Agency review for sleeping sickness treatmentNov 04, 2017: Phase II/III Studies Show High Efficacy and Safety of Fexinidazole, the First Oral Treatment for Sleeping SicknessAug 30, 2016: UGA researchers discover a drug for a tropical diseaseAppendixMethodologyCoverageSecondary ResearchPrimary ResearchExpert Panel ValidationContact UsDisclaimerBuy Now @About usMarketResearchReports.biz is the most comprehensive collection of market research reports. MarketResearchReports.Biz services are specially designed to save time and money for our clients. We are a one stop solution for all your research needs, our main offerings are syndicated research reports, custom research, subscription access and consulting services. We serve all sizes and types of companies spanning across various industries.ContactMr. NachiketState Tower90 Sate Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-621-2074Website:E: sales@marketresearchreports.biz A majority of Floridians support a ban on the sale of assault weapons, including a majority of Florida gun owners, according to a poll conducted by this week by the Florida Senate Republican leaders. The measure is the latest sign that the bills drafted by the House and Senate and expected to be unveiled on Friday may fall short of what most Floridians want lawmakers to do after the deadly shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on Feb. 14 that killed 17 students and teachers. The shooter, Nikolas Cruz, used an AR-15 in the Parkland attack and bought the gun legally from a Broward gun shop. All 15 Senate Democrats want an assault weapons ban. They will propose it Monday at a Senate Rules Committee meeting when three gun bills are debated for the first time: SB 7022, SB 7024 and SB 7026. There is support for going farther, acknowledged Sen. Bill Galvano, R-Bradenton, the incoming Senate leader, in an interview with the Herald/Times. Story here. Rugged Devices Market: Global Industry Trend Analysis 2012 to 2017 and Forecast 2017 - 2025 https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/samples/22111 https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/toc/22111 https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/market-research/rugged-devices-market.asp https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/methodology/22111 http://www.persistencemarketresearch.com Rugged Devices Market: IntroductionIncreasing connectivity and network coverage in extreme environments is the latest trend which has brought rugged devices market into limelight. Rugged electronic devices are a kind of smart devices which have a high processing power and extended features. The usability of these devices can only be increased with and better and long line connectivity to the Internet coupled with network coverage and higher bandwidth speeds.Rugged devices are a specific class of devices designed to work in harsh environments so they can withstand dust, drops, vibrations, and extreme temperatures. As these devices rely on connectivity, so for military and other government operations, they rely on dedicated satellites and network towers. For the other end-users, they solely rely on commercial satellites.Rugged Devices Market: Drivers and ChallengesGrowth in the usage of rugged electronic devices in the defense sector and their widened application areas are some of the reasons that are expected to drive the global rugged electronics market in the coming years. The additional value they provide in the form of their durability and low downtime is expected to enhance the markets growth prospects.Request Sample Report @The market is anticipated to be hindered by the low order quantity from individual end users. Moreover, the high cost of rugged electronics in comparison to the benefits of client customization is also expected to be a major restraint to the growth of the global rugged electronics market.Rugged Devices Market: SegmentationThe Rugged Devices Market can be segmented on the basis of Product Type, End User, and regions.On the basis of Product Type, the Rugged Devices Market is segmented into:Industrial Computing,Handheld Devices,Tracking Devices,Other; On the basis of End User, the Rugged Devices Market is segmented into: Mining and Metal,Power,Chemical,Transportation,Healthcare,Defense,Aerospace,Adventure Sports,OtherRequest to Browse Full Table of Content, figure and Tables @Rugged Devices Market: Key PlayersSome key players in the Universal Flash Storage industry are AdLink Technology Inc., Artesyn Embedded Technologies, Chassis Plans LLC, Comark Corporation, Core Systems, Crystal Group Inc., Curtiss Wright Controls Electronic Systems, Inc. , General Dynamics Corporation, General Micro Systems, Germane Systems, Kontron AG, Leonardo DRS, Mountain Secure Systems , NCS Technologies, Inc., Rave Computer , Rugged Science, Schneider Electric SE, Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories (SEL), Siemens AG, Systel, Inc., Themis Computer, Inc., Trenton Systems Inc., Westek Technology Ltd., XES (Extreme Engineering Solutions), Inc., ZMicro, Inc.Rugged Devices Market: Regional OverviewOn the basis of geography, Rugged Devices Market can be segmented across North America, Latin America, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, Asia Pacific Excluding Japan, Japan, and Middle East & Africa. Among various regions, the Rugged Devices Market in North America is expected to dominate during the forecast period due to the presence of major industry players, along with the adoption of rugged electronics solutions by various industry verticals in the region. North America region is expected to be followed by Western Europe and Asia Pacific.The report covers exhaustive analysis on:Rugged Devices Market Segments,Rugged Devices Market Dynamics,Historical Actual Market Size, 2012 - 2016,Rugged Devices Market Size & Forecast 2017 To 2027,Supply & Demand Value Chain,Rugged Devices Market Current Trends/Issues/Challenges,Competition & Companies involved,Rugged Devices Market Value Chain,Rugged Devices Market Drivers and RestraintsRead Report Overview @Regional analysis for Rugged Devices Market includes North America Market,U.S.,Canada,Latin America Market,Argentina,Mexico,Brazil,Rest of Latin America,Western Europe Market,Germany,France,U.K.,Spain,Italy,Nordic,Benelux,Rest of Western Europe,Eastern Europe Market,Poland,Russia,Rest of Eastern Europe,Asia Pacific Excluding Japan Market,Australia and New Zealand (A&NZ),China,India,ASEAN,Rest of Asia Pacific,Japan Market,Middle East and Africa Market,GCC Countries,North Africa,South Africa,Rest of MEAThe report is a compilation of first-hand information, qualitative, and quantitative assessment by industry analysts, inputs from industry experts and industry participants across the value chain. The report provides in-depth analysis of parent market trends, macro-economic indicators and governing factors along with market attractiveness as per segments. The report also maps the qualitative impact of various market factors on market segments and geographies.Need more information about Report methodology ?Report Highlights:Detailed overview of parent market,Changing market dynamics of the industry,In-depth market segmentation,Historical, current and projected market size in terms of value,Recent industry trends and developments,Competitive landscape,Strategies of key players and product offerings,Potential and niche segments/regions exhibiting promising growth,A neutral perspective towards market performance,Must-have information for market players to sustain and enhance their market footprintABOUT US:Persistence Market Research (PMR) is a third-platform research firm. Our research model is a unique collaboration of data analytics and market research methodology to help businesses achieve optimal performance. To support companies in overcoming complex business challenges, we follow a multi-disciplinary approach. At PMR, we unite various data streams from multi-dimensional sources. By deploying real-time data collection, big data, and customer experience analytics, we deliver business intelligence for organizations of all sizes.CONTACT:Persistence Market Research305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,USA Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.comWeb: Floating Solar Panels Market Trend to 2024 Profiling SPI Energy, Solaris Synergy, Novaton AG, Ciel & Terre International, Pristine Sun https://www.marketstudyreport.com/request-a-sample/289512//?utm_source=OPR-SP https://www.marketstudyreport.com/check-for-discount/289512//?utm_source=THFN-SP https://www.marketstudyreport.com/reports/floating-solar-panels-market-size-by-product-tracking-stationary-by-capacity-0-1-1-mw-1-5-mw-5-mw-by-connectivity-on-grid-off-grid-industry-analysis-report-regional-outlook-u-s-uk-italy-netherlands-japan-south-korea-china-india-taiwan-malaysia-singapore-australia-brazil-israel-growth-potential-price-trends-competitive-market-share-forecast-2016-2024/?utm_source=OPR-SP https://www.marketstudyreport.com/securecheckout/paymenta/289512?msfpaycode=sumsf/?utm_source=THFN-SP https://www.marketstudyreport.com/reports/global-floating-solar-panels-market-2018-2022/?utm_source=RR-SP https://www.marketstudyreport.com https://www.marketstudyreport.com/category/news-releases/ Floating Solar Panels Market Size, Industry Analysis Report, Regional Outlook (U.S., UK, Italy, Netherlands, Japan, South Korea, China, India, Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore, Australia, Brazil, Israel), Application Development status, Price Trend, Competitive Market Share & Forecast, 2016 2024.On grid floating solar panels market volume could witness a significant growth of over 45% from 2016 to 2024. Development of large utility scale projects coupled with numerous financial incentives and tax benefits offered by the regulators will influence the global business size.Floating Solar Panels Market size is set to exceed 2.5 GW by 2024; according to a new research report.Request a Sample Copy of Global Floating Solar Panels Market Research Report @Measurers to reduce greenhouse gas emissions have seen a sincere effort from policy makers towards the adoption of sustainable energy. Government of China under its 13th five-year plan has set up a target to reduce the existing GHG emission level to 18% by 2020. Regulators of UK has also established numerous frameworks under the countrys climate change act 2008. The country is targeting to curb the GHG emission level to 80% by 2050 from 1990 level.Availability of limited land space for the deployment of new PV systems will significantly drive the floating solar panels market share across the globe. Numerous countries have allowed the reservoir owner to collect rent and business tax from the plant operators. Feed in tariff schemes by several other countries will further enhance the industry landscape.Tracking floating solar panels market size is predicted to exceed USD 250 million by 2024. Technological advancement coupled with declining solar component cost will positively influence the business growth.Key industry player includes SPI Energy, Solaris Synergy, KYOCERA CORPORATION, Novaton AG, Ciel & Terre International, Pristine Sun, Yingli Solar, Vikram Solar and Sunengy.Enquire Discount on Global Floating Solar Panels Market Research Report @U.S. floating solar panels market volume share is predicted to grow over 67 % by 2024. Federal government initiatives to encourage the deployment of clean energy technologies will further complement the industry outlook.For Europe, UK floating solar panels market share was valued over 1.12 MW in 2015. Synchronization of Queen Elizabeth II project over Walton-on-Thames has significantly driven the industry growth across the region.For more information on this report, Please visit at:China is predicted to reach over USD 140 million by 2024. Increasing investments towards the deployment of large scale PV projects will enhance the countrys business landscape. Japan floating solar panels market is anticipated to exceed over 400 MW by 2024. Accessibility with limited resources will significant drive the demand across the country. In 2016 Kyocera Corp of Japan had successfully synchronized the worlds largest floatovoltaics power plant having capacity of 14.5 MW.Growth driversIncreasing adoption of clean energy sourcesHigh land acquisition costHigh capacity utilization factorOrder a copy of this premium research report @Related Reports: -Global Floating Solar Panels Market 2018-2022Floating solar panels are also referred as floating solar farms or floating solar arrays, referring to an array of photovoltaic (PV) panels on a structure that floats on a water body typically a lake or a reservoir. A floating solar panel system built on water conserves land space increases the overall efficiency of the solar panel, and provides several environmental benefits, including reduced evaporation of water.Marketstudyreport.com allows you to manage and control all corporate research purchases to consolidate billing and vendor management. You can eliminate duplicate purchases and customize your content and license management.Market Study ReportThe Green Suite #4594,Dover, DE 19901United StatesPhone: 1-201-355-0868US Toll Free: 1-866-764-2150Email: sales@marketstudyreport.comWebsite:News: EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) Blood Glucose Monitors Market Report 2018 https://www.worldwidemarketreports.com/sample/103862 https://www.worldwidemarketreports.com/discount/103862 https://www.worldwidemarketreports.com/ In this report, the EMEA Blood Glucose Monitors market is valued at USD XX million in 2016 and is expected to reach USD XX million by the end of 2022, growing at a CAGR of XX% between 2016 and 2022.The Values marked with XX is confidential data. To know more about CAGR figures fill in your information so that our business development executive can get in touch with you.Request Sample Copy of the Business Report @Geographically, this report split EMEA into Europe, the Middle East and Africa, With sales (K Units), revenue (Million USD), market share and growth rate of Blood Glucose Monitors for these regions, from 2012 to 2022 (forecast)Europe: Germany, France, UK, Russia, Italy and Benelux;Middle East: Saudi Arabia, Israel, UAE and Iran;Africa: South Africa, Nigeria, Egypt and Algeria.EMEA Blood Glucose Monitors market competition by top manufacturers/players, with Blood Glucose Monitors sales volume (K Units), price (USD/Unit), revenue (Million USD) and market share for each manufacturer/player; the top players includingLifescanBayer AGAbbott LaboratoriesJohnson and JohnsonI-SENSOmronARKRAYNipro DagnosticsInfopiaYuwellEdanSANNUOKONSUNGCARENOVOMICROTECHAgaMatrixALL MedicusTerumo CorporationHainice Medical Inc.Mendor OyCare DiagnosticaISOtechHealth & LifeOK BiotechGet discount on this report :On the basis of product, this report displays the sales volume, revenue, product price, market share and growth rate of each type, primarily split intoLancing Device MonitorsSiphon MonitorsOtherOn the basis on the end users/applications, this report focuses on the status and outlook for major applications/end users, sales volume, market share and growth rate for each application, includingFamilyHospitalClinicIf you have any special requirements, please let us know and we will offer you the report as you want.About WMR :Worldwide Market Reports is your one-stop repository of detailed and in-depth market research reports compiled by an extensive list of publishers from across the globe. We offer reports across virtually all domains and an exhaustive list of sub-domains under the sun. The in-depth market analysis by some of the most vastly experienced analysts provide our diverse range of clients from across all industries with vital decision making insights to plan and align their market strategies in line with current market trends. Worldwide Market Researchs well-researched inputs that encompass domains ranging from IT to healthcare enable our prized clients to capitalize upon key growth opportunities and shield against credible threats prevalent in the market in the current scenario and those expected in the near future.Contact Us:Mr. ShahWorldwide Market Reports1001 4th Ave,U.STel: +1 415 871 0703Email: sales@worldwidemarketreports.comWEBSITE : Ammunition Market has operated By Remington Arms, Orbital ATK, BAE Systems, Olin Corporation, CCI, Ruag Ammotech Ammunition Market, Ammunition Market Study, Ammunition Market Size, Ammunition Market Segmentation, Ammunition Market Growth https://www.marketstudyreport.com/request-a-sample/467650//?utm_source=OPEN-DC https://www.marketstudyreport.com/check-for-discount/467650//?utm_source=OPEN-DC https://www.marketstudyreport.com/reports/ammunition-market/?utm_source=OPEN-DC https://www.marketstudyreport.com/reports/global-fuel-cell-market-research-report-2018-2023-by-players-regions-product-types-applications/?utm_source=ss-DC https://www.marketstudyreport.com https://www.marketstudyreport.com/category/news-releases/ Ammunition Market size is estimated to exceed USD 11.5 billion by 2025; as per a new research reportThe research report of global Ammunition market is a comprehensive study of the latest trends and opportunities afloat this business space. Broadly segmented in terms of key products, respective applications, pivotal regions, and the fundamental companies, this report forecasts Ammunition market to traverse alongside a highly profitable growth path by 2024.Global Top Manufactures Analysis:Dynamics Corporation, Remington Arms, Orbital ATK, BAE Systems, Olin Corporation, CCI, Ruag Ammotech, Nammo AS, Federal Premium Ammunition, Maxam, Poongsan, Denel, Global Ordnance, Hornady Manufacturing and Nexter Munitions.Global mortar demand is expected to grow at 3.3% CAGR, owing to growing applications in lower firing pressure arms. Defense applications account for major industry share owing to conventional utilization and demands for new innovations. Need for non-lethal bullets will offer viable growth landscape owing to their application in riot control.U.S. ammunition market share will account for over 90% of the North American revenue by 2025. Rising concerns regarding criminal activity and utilization of small &medium caliber ammunition for recreational activities will propel consumption.Get Sample Copy of this Report:The Ministry of Defense (MoD), India under its Make in India initiative encouraging private sector to manufacture ammunition for defense will drive the regional ammunition market size over the forecast timeframe. Several exhibitions such as Fishing and Hunting in Moscow are held regularly to promote fishing, tourism, and hunting activities which in turn drive demand. Ease of availability and usability of next generation equipment will provide solid growth platform over the coming years.Scope of Report:Global Ammunition market report classifies this industry extensively in terms of the regional landscape. Market Segment by Regions, regional analysis covers:Competition among nations for advanced weaponry and related equipment is likely to propel the ammunition market size from 2016 to 2025. China, Pakistan, India, Syria, and Israel will present potential growth opportunities owing to recurring border disputes. Moreover, rising gun ownership in countries such as the U.S., Russia, India and Germany will support the industry growth over the forecast timeline.Ammunition Market by caliberSmall CaliberMedium CaliberLarge CaliberArtilleryMortarAmmunition Market by applicationDefenseCivilGet Discount Copy of this Report:We presents a detailed picture of the market by way of study, synthesis, and summation of data from multiple sources. The analysts have presented the various facets of the market with a particular focus on identifying the key industry influencers. The data thus presented is comprehensive, reliable, and the result of extensive research, both primary and secondary.Table of Content:Chapter 7 Company Profiles7.1 Ruag Ammotech7.1.1. Business Overview7.1.2. Financial Data7.1.3. Product Landscape7.1.4. Strategic Outlook7.2. BAE Systems7.2.1. Business Overview7.2.2. Financial Data7.2.3. Product Landscape7.2.4. Strategic Outlook7.3. CCI7.3.1. Business Overview7.3.2. Financial Data7.3.3. Product Landscape7.3.4. Strategic Outlook7.4. Denel7.4.1. Business Overview7.4.2. Financial Data7.4.3. Product Landscape7.4.4. Strategic Outlook7.5. Federal Premium Ammunition7.5.1. Business Overview7.5.2. Financial Data7.5.3. Product Landscape7.5.4. Strategic Outlook7.6. General Dynamics Corporation7.6.1. Business Overview7.6.2. Financial Data7.6.3. Product Landscape7.6.4. Strategic Outlook7.7. Global Ordnance7.7.1. Business Overview7.7.2. Financial Data7.7.3. Product Landscape7.7.4. Strategic OutlookFor More Tactical Information:Related ReportGlobal Fuel Cell Market Research Report 2018-2023 by Players, Regions, Product Types & ApplicationsThe global Fuel Cell market is valued at XX million USD in 2017 and is expected to reach XX million USD by the end of 2023, growing at a CAGR of XX% between 2017 and 2023. This report offers an overview of the market trends, drivers, and barriersMarketstudyreport.com allows you to manage and control all corporate research purchases to consolidate billing and vendor management. You can eliminate duplicate purchases and customize your content and license management.Market Study ReportThe Green Suite #4594,Dover, DE 19901United StatesPhone: 1-201-355-0868US Toll Free: 1-866-764-2150Email: sales@marketstudyreport.comWebsite:News: Fast rectifier Market: Global Industry Trend Analysis 2012 to 2017 and Forecast 2017 - 2025 https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/market-research/fast-rectifier-market.asp https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/toc/21943 https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/samples/21943 https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/methodology/21943 https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com Global Fast rectifier Market: OverviewMany applications require the conversion of alternative current to direct current, in that case Fast rectifiers are utilized. They form components of high voltage DC power supplies. These components have very low reverse recovery time and very low switching losses and low noise turn-off switching.Report Overview @They have an added advantage of electrical performance compared to a device in an SMA package, but with lower thermal resistance and a much smaller size, which occupying about 57% less PCB space than an SMA. Additionally, the exceptional thermal performance provides a more efficient, cooler running solution and improves the safe operating area of the device, even in harsh automotive environments.Global Fast rectifier Market: Market DriversAs combustion is the source of power in automobiles it creates an environment which is hard to sustain for the delicate electronic components this creates a need for robust electronics. Fast rectifierss are used in industrial, and automotive environments which require High reverse breakdown voltage, Fast reverse recovery time and low total capacitance, low-leakage current and high forward surge current capability, Excellent thermal transfer properties and lower profile.Global Fast rectifier Market: SegmentationThe global market for the Fast rectifier is segmented by the types of application and product type.Segmentation by product applicationBy application the fast recovery rectifiers are divided as in strobe applications that require high surge resistance as well as in the industrial, commercial and automotive sectors.Segmentation by product typeThe Fast rectifier are offered in different types dependent upon maximum average rectified current, maximum reverse recovery time, maximum reverse current, maximum reverse voltage, packaging type and forward voltage.Request for Table of Contents @Global Fast rectifier Market: Industry Key PlayersThe global vendors for Fast rectifier Market include:ROHM Semiconductor, Future Electronics Japan, Microsemi Corporation, ABB, HINDENGEN ELECTRIC MANUFACTURING CO., LTD., ANKEN ELECTRIC CO.,LTD.,Global Fast rectifier Market: Region-wise outlookRegions divide the global market for Fast rectifier Market into North America, Latin America, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, the Asia Pacific Excluding Japan, Japan, and Middle East & Africa. Among these regions, the North America and Western Europe region dominates the market regarding revenue generation because of the constantly increasing consumptions of the bakery products followed by Latin America and Eastern European countries. APEJ region expected to grow at the highest CAGR due to the rise in population, per capita income, and this factors are positively contributing to the increasing buying power of the population. MEA region is expected to grow at moderate CAGR over the forecast period.Get Sample Copy of this Report @The report covers exhaustive analysis on: Global Fast rectifier Market Segments,Global Fast rectifier Market Dynamics,Historical Actual Market Size, 2012 - 2016,Global Fast rectifier Market Size & Forecast 2017 to 2027,Supply & Demand Value Chain for Fast rectifier Market,Global Fast rectifier Market Current Trends/Issues/Challenges,Competition & Companies involved in Fast rectifier Market,Fast rectifier Market Technology,Value Chain of Video Conferencing Endpoints and Infrastructure,Global Fast rectifier Market Drivers and RestraintsReport Highlights:Detailed overview of parent market,Changing market dynamics of the industry,In-depth market segmentation,Historical, current and projected market size in terms of volume and value,Recent industry trends and developments,Competitive landscape,Strategies of key players and product offerings,Potential and niche segments/regions exhibiting promising growth,A neutral perspective towards market performance,Must-have information for market players to sustain and enhance their marketNeed more information about Report methodology ? @About UsPersistence Market Research (PMR) is a third-platform research firm. Our research model is a unique collaboration of data analytics and market research methodology to help businesses achieve optimal performance.To support companies in overcoming complex business challenges, we follow a multi-disciplinary approach. At PMR, we unite various data streams from multi-dimensional sources. By deploying real-time data collection, big data, and customer experience analytics, we deliver business intelligence for organizations of all sizes.Contact UsPersistence Market Research305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,USA Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.comWeb: Hop Extracts Market: Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends and Forecast 2017 2025 https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/methodology/13060 https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/toc/13060 https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/samples/13060 https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/market-research/hop-extracts-market.asp https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/ Hop Extracts is a brewing component used commonly in making beer for commercial and personal purposes. In the year 2000, a journal of Agricultural & Food Chemistry listed hops as anti-oxidant. Later in 2005, Journal of Molecular Nutrition listed Hops as Anti-Infective. Due to its properties, Hops became a critical ingredient in beer production and achieved a significant role in the same. In 1405, Hops was first legalized in Flanders (currently Belgium) which witnessed high growth in production since then. In 1516, REINHEITSGEBOT (German Beer Purity Law) passed a bill in Bavaria State of Germany which requires only water, barley malt, hops, and yeast may be used for crafting beer. This is one of the oldest law still applied globally.Need more information about Report methodology ?Almost all the countries have a market for Hop and Hop Extracts. During the time, many unique Hop Extracts are developed in order to satisfy the taste buds of people and their preferences. Hops are used to give flavor, aroma, color and taste to a beer when mixed in appropriate proportions during the brewing process. While many factors create overall beer flavors, hops will have the biggest impact on how beer is perceived. Hop Extracts market is strong in Americas and Europe because a large portion of the population consumes beer which is driving the Hop Extracts market.While a large population of APEJ and MEA still don't drink alcoholic beverages which have restricted the Hop Extracts market in these regions. However, countries like India, have shown significant growth in beer consumption; India is the most growing beer market in the world is likely to become next home of many international Hop Extracts producers in next 5 to 10 years. Although, India doesnt produce Hops which create a great opportunity for companies to start producing hops in the country. Apart from India, China and Hong Kong are also one of the most growing markets of Hop Extracts in APEJ region due to their historical relation with beer. Hop Extracts market is expected to witness an escalating demand among the consumers because of its significant use and increasing presence of beer, ale and other beverages throughout the globe.Request Report for TOC @Hop Extracts: Market DynamicsGrowing demand for beer and ale is driving the Hop Extracts market globally. Consumers all around the world are getting attracted towards Hop Extracts because of its ease and low production costs which is driving the market. Hop extracts save time and energy while producing beer. Hops are generally added in Wort in order to give bittering, aroma and flavour to beer. Countries like China, India, and Hong Kong, are the future markets for alcoholic beverage and thus a promising market for Hop Extracts. Perception towards alcoholic beverage in the Middle East and APEJ is changing, and with the rise of per capita income, people changed their way of living and shifted towards beer from fruit juices. Hop Extracts serves best for the purpose of brewing when one needs to save time which won't be possible without Hop Extracts. Hence, Hop Extracts market is expected to grow during the forecast period due to its versatile benefits.However, Hop Extracts comes along with some restraints. Hop Extracts cannot be easily found in developing markets. Most of the people have no knowledge of Hop Extracts in most of the countries which is a big restraint for this market because of limited advertisement. People also fears of dangers such as change in alcoholic content, conversion of liquid to poison or acid and others that they perceive in using Hop extracts instead of pellets or hop fruit.Hop Extracts market has an opportunity to expand in APEJ and MEA region. In the past decade, hundreds of Hop Extracts players entered China because of decent Hop production in the country and all of them are doing great. There is a need to increase the presence throughout the region.Request to Sample of Report-Hop Extracts: Market SegmentationHop Extracts market can be segmented on the basis of types, which include:OilPelletsAromaHop Extracts market can be segmented on the basis of Hop variety, which include:CascadeNuggetWillametteCitraCrystalClusterCentennialOthers (Chinook, Columbus, Mosaic, etc.)Hop Extracts market can be segmented on the basis of Applications, which include:BrewingHerbal TreatmentPharmaceuticalHop Extracts: Segment OutlookHop Extracts market can be segmented on the basis of type which includes oil, pellets and aroma. Hop Oil is the most commonly used ingredient in beer. Hop Extracts market can be segmented on the basis of Hop variety which includes Cascade, Nugget, Willamette, Citra, Crystal, Cluster, Centennial and Others (Chinook, Columbus, Mosaic, etc.). Hop Extracts market can also be segmented on the basis of types of applications which includes brewing, herbal treatment and pharmaceutical.Hop Extracts: Regional OutlookRegional coverage for Hop Extracts market includes North America, Latin America, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, Asia Pacific Excluding Japan (APEJ) and the Middle East and Africa (MEA). Hop Extracts market witnesses a high demand in North America and Europe because of the high consumption of beers in the region. However, the Hop Extracts market is expected to grow significantly in APEJ region as consumers have widely adopting beer and ale.For more information about this Report visit @Hop Extracts: Market PlayersThe market players in Hop Extracts market are Hopsteiner, BSG, Northern Brewers, The Malt Miller, MoreBeer, Charles faram and many more.About UsPersistence Market Research (PMR) is a third-platform research firm. Our research model is a unique collaboration of data analytics and market research methodology to help businesses achieve optimal performance.Contact UsPersistence Market Research305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,USA Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.comWeb: D-limonene Market: Global Industry Trend Analysis 2012 to 2017 and Forecast 2017 - 2025 https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/market-research/dlimonene-market.asp https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/toc/17428 https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/samples/17428 https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/methodology/17428 https://www.persistencemarketresearch.com/ Global D-limonene Market: OverviewD-limonene is a chief constituent in numerous citrus oils such as grapefruit, mandarin, orange, and lemon. It is a pleasant lemon like aroma commonly used as terpene. It is an isomer of limonene used as a chemical. D-limonene has a wide application in air care and furnishing products, cleaning products for electric and electronic items, personal care products, etc. due to its pleasant aroma. It is also used as a food additive as a flavouring agent.For more information about this Report visit @Therefore the compound is experiencing wide demand in the food and beverages segment across the globe. The demand for D-limonene is growing at a rapid rate over the forecast period attributed to relatively high demand for the compound in products used on a daily basis such as creams, lotions, perfumes, soaps, etc. The global D-limonene market is expected to grow at a significant growth rate, attributed to increasing application of the compound in food and personal care industry. The market in North America is expected to register a relatively high growth rate over the forecast period followed by Asia Pacific.Global D-limonene Market: DynamicsThe major factors driving the growth of the global D-limonene market include growing industries such as food and beverages, pharmaceuticals, personal care, electronics and electrical, etc. Other applications such as furnishing products, air care products, and cleaning products are anticipated to enhance the growth of the global d-limonene market. High use of D-limonene for reducing the risk of potential pollutants as an alternative to chlorofluorocarbons (CFC) and ozone-depleting chemicals is also an important factor fuelling the growth of the compound across the globe. Companies manufacturing D-limonene products can leverage potential opportunities in regions such as North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific, attributed to rapidly growing demand for personal care and food products, and the trend is expected to continue over the forecast period.Request Report for TOC @Global D-limonene Market: SegmentationThe global D-limonene market is segmented on the basis of end-use, source, and region. Among the end-use segments, personal care products segment contribute for significant value share over the forecast period in global D-limonene market owing to high demand for the compound in daily used products such as creams, lotions, perfumes, soaps, etc. Food products segment is followed by personal care products segment, owing to the significant growth of food additives across the globe over the forecast period. On the basis of source type segmentation, orange segment accounts for a relatively high share in the global D-limonene market over the forecast period, attributed to the comparatively high content of D-limonene in the orange.Based on the end-use, the global D-limonene market is segmented into:Personal Care ProductsFood ProductsFurnishing Care ProductsElectrical and Electronic Devices Cleaning ProductsAir Care ProductsOthers (Dishwashing, Laundry, etc.)Based on the source, the global D-limonene market is segmented into:OrangeLemonGrapefruitMandarinGlobal D-limonene Market: Regional OverviewOn the basis of geography, the global D-limonene market is fragmented into seven regions namely, North America, Western Europe, Asia Pacific except Japan (APEJ), Eastern Europe, Latin America, the Middle East & Africa and Japan. Among the regions, North America dominates the global D-limonene market in terms of revenue contribution owing to the relatively high demand for D-limonene from the personal care industry. North America is followed by Asia-Pacific, attributed to growing personal care and food and beverages industry particularly in the countries such as China and India. Eastern Europe and Japan account for a relatively low-value share in the global D-limonene market. Latin America and Middle East & Africa are expected to represent a moderate opportunity in the global D-limonene market, owing to the moderate economic as well as industrial growth in the region. Overall, the outlook for the global D-limonene market is positive over the forecast period.Request to Sample of Report-Global D-limonene Market: Key PlayersSome of the players in the global D-limonene market include Florida Chemical Company, Bramha Scientific, Aredale Chemical Company Limited, Norkem Group, Shamrock Chemicals, A. B. Enterprises, Aroma Aromatics & Flavours, Mentha & Allied Products Pvt. Ltd., Banner Chemicals Limited, Parchem fine & specialty chemicals, Seidler Chemical Co, Inc., Scandinavian Formulas, Inc., Univar Inc., and FBC Chemical Corporation.Need more information about Report methodology ?About UsPersistence Market Research (PMR) is a third-platform research firm. Our research model is a unique collaboration of data analytics and market research methodology to help businesses achieve optimal performance.Contact UsPersistence Market Research305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,USA Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.comWeb: Slovakian Cards & Payments Landscape in Slovakia: Competitive Dynamics, Opportunities and Risks to 2021 Market Research HUB https://www.marketresearchhub.com/enquiry.php?type=S&repid=1580999 https://www.marketresearchhub.com/report/payments-landscape-in-slovakia-opportunities-and-risks-to-2021-report.html https://www.marketresearchhub.com/enquiry.php?type=enquiry&repid=1580999 http://www.marketresearchhub.com/ https://www.industrynewsanalysis.com/ An up-to-date research report has been disclosed by Market Research Hub highlighting the title Payments Landscape in Slovakia: Opportunities and Risks to 2021 report provides detailed analysis of market trends in the Slovakian cards and payments industry. It provides values and volumes for a number of key performance indicators in the industry, including cash, payment cards, credit transfers, direct debit, and cheques during the review-period (2013-17e). The report also analyzes various payment card markets operating in the industry, and provides detailed information on the number of cards in circulation, transaction values and volumes during the review-period and over the forecast-period (2017-21f). It also offers information on the country's competitive landscape, including the market shares of issuers and schemes.Request For Free Sample Report:The report brings together Market Research Hubs research, modeling, and analysis expertise to allow banks and card issuers to identify segment dynamics and competitive advantages. The report also covers details of regulatory policy and recent changes in the regulatory structure.This report provides top-level market analysis, information and insights into the Slovakian cards and payments industry, including -- Current and forecast values for each market in the Slovakian cards and payments industry, including debit, credit, and charge cards.- Detailed insights into payment instruments including credit transfers, direct debit, cheques, cash, and payment cards. It also, includes an overview of the country's key alternative payment instruments.- E-commerce market analysis.- Analysis of various market drivers and regulations governing the Slovakian cards and payments industry.- Detailed analysis of strategies adopted by banks and other institutions to market debit, credit, and charge cards.Scope- Contactless technology is gaining traction in Slovakia, with all leading banks in the country now offering cards with contactless functionality. To benefit from the growing adoption of contactless, banks in Slovakia are also launching contactless mobile payment services. The latest of these is the November 2016 expansion of Tatra bankas MobilePay app in collaboration with Visa. The solution allows users to store their debit and credit cards within the app and make contactless payments at partnered merchants using their mobile phone.- Payment service providers are launching innovative solutions to offer convenient payments. To promote electronic fund transfers, in August 2017 PayPal partnered with Skype to allow its users to send and receive money through the Skype app. The service was launched in over 20 countries, including Slovakia. In December 2015, Mastercard collaborated with CSOB to launch Masterpass in Slovakia. The payment solution allows users to pay from a list of pre-stored card and shipping information. The service offers merchants a faster and easier way to process payments and helps decrease checkout abandonment rates.- The advent of mobile-only banks is likely to accelerate a shift towards electronic payments in Slovakia. Germany-based bank N26 launched a mobile-only bank in Slovakia in December 2015, allowing consumers to conduct banking transactions via their mobile phones. Account holders are offered a prepaid Mastercard that can be used to make payments in stores and online. In June 2017, 365 Bank - a Slovakia-based mobile-only bank - announced plans to launch its banking operations in early 2018.Browse Full Report with TOC:Reasons to buy- Make strategic business decisions, using top-level historic and forecast market data, related to the Slovakian cards and payments industry and each market within it.- Understand the key market trends and growth opportunities in the Slovakian cards and payments industry.- Assess the competitive dynamics in the Slovakian cards and payments industry.- Gain insights into marketing strategies used for various card types in Slovakia.- Gain insights into key regulations governing the Slovakian cards and payments industry.Enquire About This Report:About Market Research Hub:Market Research Hub (MRH) is a next-generation reseller of research reports and analysis. MRHs expansive collection of banking market research reports has been carefully curated to help key personnel and decision makers across industry verticals to clearly visualize their operating environment and take strategic steps.MRH functions as an integrated platform for the following products and services: Objective and sound market forecasts, qualitative and quantitative analysis, incisive insight into defining industry trends, and market share estimates. Our reputation lies in delivering value and world-class capabilities to our clients.Contact Us90 State Street,Albany, NY 12207,United StatesToll Free: 800-998-4852 (US-Canada)Email: press@marketresearchhub.comWebsite:Read Industry News at - Global and Chinese Virtual Machines Industry, 2017 Market Research Report https://www.worldwidemarketreports.com/sample/18851 https://www.worldwidemarketreports.com/sample/18851 https://www.worldwidemarketreports.com/discount/18851 https://www.worldwidemarketreports.com/ The 'Global and Chinese Virtual Machines Industry, 2012-2022 Market Research Report' is a professional and in-depth study on the current state of the global Virtual Machines industry with a focus on the Chinese market. The report provides key statistics on the market status of the Virtual Machines manufacturers and is a valuable source of guidance and direction for companies and individuals interested in the industry.Firstly, the report provides a basic overview of the industry including its definition, applications and manufacturing technology. Then, the report explores the international and Chinese major industry players in detail. In this part, the report presents the company profile, product specifications, capacity, production value, and 2012-2017 market shares for each company. Through the statistical analysis, the report depicts the global and Chinese total market of Virtual Machines industry including capacity, production, production value, cost/profit, supply/demand and Chinese import/export. The total market is further divided by company, by country, and by application/type for the competitive landscape analysis. The report then estimates 2017-2022 market development trends of Virtual Machines industry. Analysis of upstream raw materials, downstream demand, and current market dynamics is also carried out. In the end, the report makes some important proposals for a new project of Virtual Machines Industry before evaluating its feasibility. Overall, the report provides an in-depth insight of 2012-2022 global and Chinese Virtual Machines industry covering all important parameters.Request Sample Copy of the Business Report @1.1 Brief Introduction of Virtual Machines1.2 Development of Virtual Machines Industry1.3 Status of Virtual Machines IndustryChapter Two Manufacturing Technology of Virtual Machines2.1 Development of Virtual Machines Manufacturing Technology2.2 Analysis of Virtual Machines Manufacturing Technology2.3 Trends of Virtual Machines Manufacturing TechnologyGet discount on this report :Chapter Three Analysis of Global Key Manufacturers3.1 Company A3.1.1 Company Profile3.1.2 Product Information3.1.3 2012-2017 Production Information3.1.4 Contact Information3.2 Company B3.2.1 Company Profile3.2.2 Product Information3.2.3 2012-2017 Production Information3.2.4 Contact Information3.3 Company CIf you have any special requirements, please let us know and we will offer you the report as you want.About WMR :Worldwide Market Reports is your one-stop repository of detailed and in-depth market research reports compiled by an extensive list of publishers from across the globe. We offer reports across virtually all domains and an exhaustive list of sub-domains under the sun. The in-depth market analysis by some of the most vastly experienced analysts provide our diverse range of clients from across all industries with vital decision making insights to plan and align their market strategies in line with current market trends. Worldwide Market Researchs well-researched inputs that encompass domains ranging from IT to healthcare enable our prized clients to capitalize upon key growth opportunities and shield against credible threats prevalent in the market in the current scenario and those expected in the near future.Contact Us:Mr. ShahWorldwide Market Reports1001 4th Ave,U.STel: +1 415 871 0703Email: sales@worldwidemarketreports.comWEBSITE : Alpha Olefin Sulfonate (AOS) Market by Technology, Application & Geography Analysis & Forecast to 2023 https://www.marketstudyreport.com/request-a-sample/831695/?utm_source=OPR-SL https://www.marketstudyreport.com/check-for-discount/831695/?utm_source=PAID-SL https://www.marketstudyreport.com/reports/global-alpha-olefin-sulfonate-aos-market-by-manufacturers-countries-type-and-application-forecast-to-2023/?utm_source=SL https://www.marketstudyreport.com/reports/north-america-and-europe-anhydrous-hydrogen-fluoride-ahf-market-by-manufacturers-regions-type-and-application-forecast-to-2023/?utm_source=RR-SL https://www.marketstudyreport.com https://www.marketstudyreport.com/category/news-releases/ MarketStudyReport.com Add New Global Alpha Olefin Sulfonate (AOS) Market by Manufacturers, Countries, Type and Application, Forecast to 2023 to its research database. The report presents a deep study of the market growth factors and drivers. The report spread across 102 pages with table and figures in it.Alpha Olefin Sulfonate (AOS) is a kind of surfactant, normal alpha olefins are excellent intermediates for producing alpha olefin sulfonate (AOS) surfactants. These surfactants provide outstanding detergency, high compatibility with hard water, and good wetting and foaming properties. AOS is free of skin irritants and sensitizers, and it biodegrades rapidly. It is used in high-quality shampoos, light-duty liquid detergents, bubble baths, and heavy-duty liquid and powder detergents. It is also used in emulsion polymerization. C14-C16 AOS blends are frequently used in liquid hand soaps.Scope of the Report:This report focuses on the Alpha Olefin Sulfonate (AOS) market, especially in North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, South America, Middle East and Africa. This report categorizes the market based on manufacturers, regions, types and applications.Request a sample copy of Alpha Olefin Sulfonate (AOS) Market Research Report @Market Segment by Manufacturers, this report covers Stepan, AK ChemTech, Godrej, Pilot Chem, Lion Specialty Chem, Solvay, Taiwan NJC, Huntsman, Akzo Nobel N.V, Kao Chem, Clariant, Enaspol A.S, Bendale Chem, Fogla Corp, Colonial Chem, Zanyu Tech, Resun Auway Ind, Sinolight Chem, Nanfine (Anhui), Xingya Group, Jujin Chem, Tianzhi Fine Chem, Jintung Petrochem.An inherent sub-vertical of the Chemicals and Advanced Materials industry space, Alpha Olefin Sulfonate (AOS) market stands to gain remarkable proceeds over 2018-2023, as per a recently compiled report Market Segment by Regions, regional analysis covers:North America (United States, Canada and Mexico)Europe (Germany, France, UK, Russia and Italy)Asia-Pacific (China, Japan, Korea, India and Southeast Asia)South America (Brazil, Argentina, Colombia)Middle East and Africa (Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, Nigeria and South Africa)Market Segment by Table of Contents:Global Alpha Olefin Sulfonate (AOS) Market OverviewGlobal Alpha Olefin Sulfonate (AOS) Market Manufacturers ProfilesGlobal Alpha Olefin Sulfonate (AOS) Market Competition, by ManufacturerGlobal Alpha Olefin Sulfonate (AOS) Market Analysis by RegionsGlobal Alpha Olefin Sulfonate (AOS) by CountriesGlobal Alpha Olefin Sulfonate (AOS) Market Segment by TypeGlobal Alpha Olefin Sulfonate (AOS) Market Segment by ApplicationAlpha Olefin Sulfonate (AOS) Market Forecast (2018-2023)Sales Channel, Distributors, Traders and DealersResearch Findings and ConclusionAppendixMarket Segment by Type, covers Liquid Type (35%-42%)Paste Type (About 70%)Powder Type (90%)Needles Type (90%)Market Segment by Applications, can be divided into Personal CareHome CareIndustrial ApplicationsOthersEnquire For Discount on Alpha Olefin Sulfonate (AOS) Market Research Report @There are 15 Chapters to deeply display the global Alpha Olefin Sulfonate (AOS) market.Chapter 1, to describe Alpha Olefin Sulfonate (AOS) Introduction, product scope, market overview, market opportunities, market risk, market driving force;Chapter 2, to analyze the top manufacturers of Alpha Olefin Sulfonate (AOS), with sales, revenue, and price of Alpha Olefin Sulfonate (AOS), in 2016 and 2017;Chapter 3, to display the competitive situation among the top manufacturers, with sales, revenue and market share in 2016 and 2017;Chapter 4, to show the global market by regions, with sales, revenue and market share of Alpha Olefin Sulfonate (AOS), for each region, from 2013 to 2018;Chapter 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9, to analyze the key regions, with sales, revenue and market share by key countries in these regions;Chapter 10 and 11, to show the market by type and application, with sales market share and growth rate by type, application, from 2013 to 2018;Chapter 12, Alpha Olefin Sulfonate (AOS) market forecast, by regions, type and application, with sales and revenue, from 2018 to 2023;Chapter 13, 14 and 15, to describe Alpha Olefin Sulfonate (AOS) sales channel, distributors, traders, dealers, Research Findings and Conclusion, appendix and data sourceFor More Info on Market Research @Related Reports: -North America and Europe Anhydrous Hydrogen Fluoride (AHF) Market by Manufacturers, Regions, Type and Application, Forecast to 2023Anhydrous Hydrogen Fluoride (AHF) is ... Scope of the Report: This report focuses on the Anhydrous Hydrogen Fluoride (AHF) in North America and Europe market, especially in United States, United K..Centralize market research purchases across your entire organization in one place.Marketstudyreport.com allows you to manage and control all corporate research purchases to consolidate billing and vendor management. You can eliminate duplicate purchases and customize your content and license management.Market Study ReportThe Green Suite #4594,Dover, DE 19901United StatesPhone: 1-201-355-0868US Toll Free: 1-866-764-2150Email: sales@marketstudyreport.comWebsite:News:Connect with us: Google+ | LinkedIn | Twitter Latin America Data Center Construction Market Size to Worth $316 Million by 2023 | Arizton https://www.arizton.com/market-reports/data-center-construction-market-latin-america https://www.arizton.com/market-reports/data-center-construction-market-latin-america https://www.arizton.com/market-reports/data-center-construction-market-latin-america The need to reduce operating and cooling cost in data centers will boost the demand for DCIM solutions in the Latin America data center construction market during 2017-2023Ariztons recent market research report on the data center construction market in Latin America provides comprehensive industry analysis, trend forecasts, and competitive analysis. The research study segments the market by type (building development, installation and commissioning services, building design, physical security, and DCIM), by geography (Brazil, Colombia, Chile, and Rest of Latin America), and offers detailed competitive analysis.The Latin America data center construction market size is projected to reach values of around $316 million by 2023 and is expected to grow at a CAGR of approximately 11% during the forecast period.The improving the broadband and network connectivity is driving demand in the Latin American market. The leading operators are focusing on deploying colocation and modular infrastructure projects to attract new consumers and gain a larger market share.Request for your free sample today!The top 3 drivers and trends augmenting the growth of the data center construction market in Latin America are discussed below:Increased Interest for Modular Data Center DeploymentThe leading infrastructure vendors are offering modular solutions which in turn, is boosting the demand in the Latin America data center construction market. The key players are providing the modular infrastructure that includes pre-fabricated data center facilities, racks, and containment systems. The deployment of modular data center takes up to 8 weeks time and the OPEX of these facilities around 30% less than the traditional centers. The growing need for additional infrastructure to improve availability is propelling the growth of modular infrastructure solution in the Latin American market. Telecommunications operators are the largest adopters of these solutions across Latin America. The leading vendors are focusing offering modular infrastructure that is energy efficient and is designing facilities that support high rack density. Such developments will help to reduce operating costs and help companies gain a larger share in the Latin America data center construction market.Increase in Adoption of DCIM SolutionsThe growing focus on adopting DCIM solutions is augmenting the growth of the Latin America data center construction market. The incorporation of DCIM solutions will help vendors offer end-to-end monitoring and automation services across facilities in the Latin American market. These monitoring and management solutions identify the maintenance of infrastructure to avoid operational failure and help to maintain backup cooling during outages. The development of modern cooling infrastructure that offers controls for direct and remote monitoring of facilities will revolutionize the market in Latin America. Various leading operators are identifying the potential benefit of using DCIM systems to monitor and automate in data centers to attract new consumers and gain a larger market share in Latin America.Request for your free sample today!Growing Rack Power Density in Data CentersThe increasing demand for solutions such as cloud computing, Internet of things (IoT), and big data analytics across industries will attribute to the growth of the Latin America data center construction market. The BFSI, healthcare, government, and heavy industries are adopting cloud-based services that increase the utilization of IT infrastructure and driving the growth of the market in Latin America. The increase in rack power density and the growing requirement of high-performance computing (HPC) and virtualization will drive the demand for new facilities in the Latin American market. The rapid deployment of the modular data center that involves racks that can support up to 10kW or beyond expected to continue to trend in the Latin America data center construction market during the forecast period.The leading vendors in the data center construction market in Latin America are KKR Investment Group (Aceco TI S.A.), AECOM, Flex Enclosure, ZFB Group, ABB, Assa Abloy, Bosch Security Systems (Robert Bosch), Honeywell International, Schneider Electric, Siemens, and Vertiv.The complete overview of the latest market research report on data center construction market in Latin America by Arizton is now available.The report also offers a detailed study of major trends, drivers, challenges, and also provides the market size and forecast for major geographical regions and key countries.Order a report now:About Arizton Advisory & IntelligenceArizton Advisory and Intelligence is an innovation and quality-driven firm, which offers cutting-edge research solutions to clients across the world. We excel in providing comprehensive market intelligence reports and advisory and consulting services.We offer comprehensive market research reports on industries such as consumer goods & retail technology, automotive and mobility, smart tech, healthcare and life sciences, industrial machinery, chemicals and materials, IT and media, logistics and packaging. These reports contain detailed industry analysis, market size, share, growth drivers, and trend forecasts.Arizton comprises a team of exuberant and well-experienced analysts who have mastered in generating incisive reports. Our specialist analysts possess exemplary skills in market research. We train our team in advanced research practices, techniques, and ethics to outperform in fabricating impregnable research reports.Arizton Advisory & IntelligenceChicago, Illinois, 60605Mail: enquiry@arizton.comCall: +1-312-465-7864 Flavored Milk Market Is Segmented Into Flavor, Packaging Material,& Distribution Channel: Dairy-Based Beverage Products https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/sample_request/5458 https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/enquiry/5458 Market DefinitionFlavored milk is a dairy beverage where, additional flavors such as chocolate, vanilla, butterscotch, and strawberry among others are added to white milk to make it different from the conventional white milk. The key ingredients of flavored milk are milk, sugar, colorings, additional flavor, and sweetener.Synopsis of Flavored Milk MarketMarket ScenarioDue to the changing lifestyles of the consumers, the demand for ready to drink products is increasing at a fast pace. Also, various new beverage products are launched in different flavors in order to suit the specific requirement of the customers. Beverage industries are experiencing a substantial growth over the last few years. Dairy-based beverage products are gaining traction both in developed and developing economies. The increasing population coupled with the per capita disposable income is anticipated to fuel the sales of the dairy-based beverages in the upcoming decade.Growing confectionery industry and increasing demand for dairy products is supporting the growth of flavored milk market. Long shelf-life of the product is having a positive impact on the growth of the Flavored Milk Market. The key players are constantly making efforts to come up with new flavors in the market which is adding fuel to the growth of the market.Intended Audience Flavored milk manufacturers Dairy industry Raw material suppliers Retailers and wholesalers E-commerce industry Traders, importers, and exportersSample copy available @Key Findings Flavored milk has a massive opportunity in the global beverages market Asia Pacific is the fastest growing region in the flavored milk market. India and China has shown huge potentials for the flavored milk market share during the review period, 2017-2023 Feb 2016 Coca-Cola India, one of the countrys leading beverage companies, has launched its flavored milk offering VIO. The new offering further expands Coca-Colas existing portfolio of beverages, providing consumers more choiceSegmentsThe global flavored milk market is segmented into the flavor, packaging material, and distribution channel.On the basis of the flavor, it is segmented into chocolate, vanilla, butterscotch, strawberry, and others. Among all the flavors, the chocolate segment holds the major market share followed by the vanilla segment. The primary reason for the growth of the chocolate flavor segment is their extensive use owing to high consumer demand.On the basis of the packaging material, it is segmented into plastic, glass, paper, metal, and others. Among all the packaging types, the plastic segment is dominating the market followed by the metal owing to the ease of handling and logistics.On the basis of the distribution channel, it is segmented in store-based and non-store based. Among both, the store-based distribution channel is dominating the market owing to the availability of wide range of products followed by the convenience of finding all products under one roof is driving the growth of this segment.Regional AnalysisThe global flavored milk market is segmented into North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and rest of the world (RoW). Among all, Asia Pacific region is expected to retain its dominance throughout the forecast period. This is attributed to the high consumption of milk products, increasing per capita disposable income coupled with the rising awareness of health benefits among the consumers in developing economies like India, China, and Indonesia. Additionally, in the Asia Pacific region, China and India offer a lucrative opportunity for the flavored milk manufacturers.Moreover, North America is projected to witness a steady growth during the review period. However, Latin American region is projected to show a high potential in the flavored milk market owing to the rising disposable income and increasing consumption of flavored milk as a beverage in this region.Key PlayersSome of the key players profiled in the global flavored milk market: Nestle S.A. (Switzerland), Danone (France), Arla Foods Amba (Denmark), Associated Milk Producers, Inc. (U.S.), Bright Food (Group) Co., Ltd.(China), Dairy Farmers of America, Inc. (U.S.), Dean Foods Company (U.S.), Koninklijke FrieslandCampina NV (the Netherlands), Grupo Lala, S.A.B. de C.V. (Mexico), and Amul Industries Pvt Ltd. (India)The report for global flavored milk market of Market Research Future comprises of extensive primary research along with the detailed analysis of qualitative as well as quantitative aspects by various industry experts, key opinion leaders to gain the deeper insight of the market and industry performance. The report gives the clear picture of current market scenario which includes historical and projected market size in terms of value and volume, technological advancement, macroeconomic and governing factors in the market. The report provides details information and strategies of the top key players in the industry. The report also gives a broad study of the various segments and regions of the market.Enquiry before buy @Table Of ContentChapter 1. Methodology And Scope1.1. Research Methodology1.1.1 Initial Data Exploration1.1.2 Statistical Modelling And Forecast1.1.3 Industry Insights And Validation1.2. Data SourcesChapter 2. Executive Summary2.1. Flavored Milk Industry Market Synopsis, 2017-20232.1.1 Business Trends2.1.2 Product Flavour Trends2.1.3 Product Packaging Material Trends2.1.4 Product Distribution Channel TrendsChapter 3 Flavored Milk Market Insights3.1 Industry Segmentation3.2 Industry Size And Forecast3.3 Industry Ecosystem Analysis3.4 Industry Impact Forces3.4.1 Growth Drivers3.4.1.1 Increasing Consumer Demand For Milk Products3.4.1.2 Shifting Consumer Eating Preferences3.4.2 Industry Pitfalls & Challenges3.4.2.1 Health Concerns Regarding Milk And Milk Products3.4.2.2 Availability Of Economical Alternatives3.5 Growth Potential Analysis3.6 Company Market Share Analysis, 20163.7 Porters Analysis3.8 PESTEL AnalysisChapter 4 Flavored Milk Market By Flavour Insights4.1 Global Flavored Milk Market Volume Share By Flavour, 2017-20234.1.1 Chocolate4.1.1.1 Market Estimates & Forecast, 2017-20234.1.2 Vanilla4.1.2.1 Market Estimates & Forecast, 2017-20234.1.3 Butterscotch4.1.3.1 Market Estimates & Forecast, 2017-20234.1.4 Strawberry4.1.4.1 Market Estimates & Forecast, 2017-20234.1.5 Others4.1.5.1 Market Estimates & Forecast, 2017-2023Chapter 5 Flavored Milk Market By Packaging Material Insights5.1 Global Flavored Milk Market Volume Share By Packaging Material, 2017 & 20235.1.1 Glass5.1.1.1 Market Estimates & Forecast, 2017-20235.1.2 Plastic5.1.2.1 Market Estimates & Forecast, 2017-20235.1.3 Paper5.1.3.1 Market Estimates & Forecast, 2017-20235.1.4 Metal5.1.4.1 Market Estimates & Forecast, 2017-2023Chapter 6 Flavored Milk Market By Distribution Channel Insights6.1 Global Flavored Milk Market Volume Share By Distribution Channel, 2017 & 20236.1.1 Store Based6.1.1.1 Market Estimates & Forecast, 2017 2023Continue..........Note: To Access Full Report Do follow the above mentioned links, and allow us to contribute in your business marketAbout Market Research Future:At Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.MRFR team have a supreme objective to provide the optimum quality market research and intelligence services to our clients. Our market research studies by products, services, technologies, applications, end users, and market players for global, regional, and country level market segments, enable our clients to see more, know more, and do more, which help to answer all their most important questions.In order to stay updated with technology and work process of the industry, MRFR often plans & conducts meet with the industry experts and industrial visits for its research analyst members.Contact:Market Research FutureOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, Hadapsar,Pune - 411028Maharashtra, India+1 646 845 9312Email: sales@marketresearchfuture.com Global Parkinsons Disease : Discover Major Growth Factors To Drive Market strategy Report: 2018 Edition Parkinsons Disease https://www.researchmoz.us/enquiry.php?type=S&repid=715352 https://www.researchmoz.us/global-parkinsons-disease-market-report-2016-edition-report.html www.researchmoz.us 23 Feb 2018"Global Parkinsons Disease Market Report: 2016 Edition" with coming years Industries Trends, projections of Global Growth, Major key player and Case study, Review, Share, Size, Effect.. .Report Description-' 'Parkinsons Disease (PD) is a chronic and progressive neurodegenerative or movement disorder which involves the malfunction and death of vital nerve cells in the brain, called neurons. Parkinsons primarily affects neurons in an area of the brain called the substantia nigra. The early signs and symptoms may be mild and may go unnoticed initially. The cause of this disease is mainly unknown with no cure till date but there exist several treatment options such as medications and surgery.. . Get Sample Report' 'The current treatment market for Parkinsons disease has several unmet needs as no treatment has yet been successful in fully restoring the function that produces dopamine. However, the treatment currently only aims at controlling and relieving symptoms. The Parkinsons disease treatment market remains flooded by both branded and generic drugs. The market is expected to experience fluctuations in branded sales due to patent expiries and subsequent entry of generics in the market. Several biologics are under development for the treatment of Parkinsons along with possibility of developing Stem Cell as a treatment therapy.The Parkinsons disease market is expected to acquire modest growth driven by launch of new therapies and increasing rate of drug treatment due to increasing healthcare expenditure and ageing population. The major growth drivers of the Parkinsons disease market includes rising level of toxin exposure, increasing life expectancy, rising male population worldwide, ageing population, healthcare expenditure and pesticide consumption. However, the growth of the market will also remain challenged by generic erosion, current treatment limitations and increasing risk of developing Melanoma.The report, Global Parkinsons disease Market analyzes the currently prevailing condition of the market along with its future scope of development. The specific markets of the U.S., the European Union and Japan are being discussed in the report. The major trends, growth drivers as well as issues being faced by the industry are being presented in this report. The major players in the industry are being profiled, along with their key financials and strategies for growth.Table of Content1. Market Overview1.1 Introduction1.2 Fundamental Features1.3 Types of Parkinsons Disease1.4 Risk Factors1.5 Treatment Options2. Global Market2.1 Global Parkinsons Disease Drug Market by Value2.1.1 Global Parkinsons Disease Drug Market by Region2.1.2 Global Parkinsons Disease Market by Drug Class2.1.3 Global Parkinsons Disease Patient Population by Severity2.1.4 Global Parkinsons Disease Patient Population by Region3. Regional Markets3.1 The U.S.3.1.1 The U.S. Parkinsons Disease Market by Value & Volume3.1.2 The U.S. Parkinsons Disease Market Value by Category3.1.3 The U.S. Parkinsons Disease Market Volume by Category3.1.4 The U.S. Parkinsons Disease Market by Drug Class3.1.5 The U.S. Parkinsons Disease Branded Drugs Market3.1.6 The U.S. Parkinsons Disease Generic Drugs Market3.2 The European Union3.2.1 The E.U. Parkinsons Patient Prevalence & Diagnosis3.2.2 The European Parkinsons Disease Drug Market by Value3.3 Japan3.3.1 Japans Parkinsons Disease Drug Market by Value4. Market Dynamics4.1 Growth Drivers4.1.1 Rising Level of Toxin Exposure4.1.2 Rising Life Expectancy4.1.3 Rising Male Population4.1.4 Increasing Ageing Population4.1.5 Global Healthcare Expenditure4.1.6 Pesticides Consumption4.2 Trends4.2.1 Late-Stage Drug Development for Parkinsons Disease4.2.2 Stem-Cell Therapy as Potential Treatment4.2.3 Biologics under Development for Parkinsons Disease4.3 Challenges4.3.1 Generic Erosion4.3.2 Parkinsons Treatment associated with Higher Risk of Melanoma4.3.3 Current Treatment Limitation5. Competitive Landscape5.1 The U.S. Parkinsons Disease Branded Drug Market by Company5.2 The U.S. Parkinsons Disease Generic Drug Market by Company6. Company Profiles6.1 Biotie Therapies Corp.6.1.1 Business Overview6.1.2 Financial Overview6.1.3 Business Strategies6.2 Adamas Pharmaceuticals Inc.6.2.1 Business Overview6.2.2 Financial Overview6.2.3 Business Strategies6.3 Lundbeck6.3.1 Business Overview6.3.2 Financial Overview6.3.3 Business Strategies6.4 Novartis6.4.1 Business Overview6.4.2 Financial Overview6.4.3 Business Strategies7. Market Outlook7.1 Global Market Forecast7.2 Forecast Methodology7.2.1 Dependent and Independent Variables7.2.2 Correlation Analysis7.2.3 Regression AnalysisList of TableCurrently Leading Treatment Drugs for Parkinsons DiseaseSelected Late-Stage Drugs for ParkinsonsSelected Late-Stage Drugs for Parkinsons DiseaseBiologics under Development for Parkinsons DiseaseAdamas Pharmaceuticals Therapeutic PortfolioLundbecks Product PipelineDependent and Independent VariableCorrelation MatrixModel Summary Coefficient of DeterminationRegression Coefficients OutputList of ChartGlobal Parkinsons Disease Drug Market by Value (2010-2015E)Global Parkinsons Disease Drug Market by Region (2014)Global Parkinsons Disease Market by Drug Class (2015E)Global Parkinsons Disease Patient Population by Severity (2015E)Global Parkinsons Disease Patient Population by Region (2015E)The U.S. Parkinsons Disease Market by Value & Volume (2013-2020E)The U.S. Parkinsons Disease Market Value by Category (2013-2017E)The U.S. Parkinsons Disease Market Volume by Category (2015)The U.S. Parkinsons Disease Market by Drug Class (2015)The U.S. Parkinsons Branded Drugs Market by Value & Volume (2013-2020E)The U.S. Parkinsons Generic Drugs Market by Value & Volume (2013-2020E). . Detail Repot with Table of ContentsResearchMoz is the worlds fastest growing collection of market research reports worldwide. Our database is composed of current market studies from over 100 featured publishers worldwide. Our market research databases integrate statistics with analysis from global, regional, country and company perspectives. ResearchMozs service portfolio also includes value-added services such as market research customization, competitive landscaping, and in-depth surveys, delivered by a team of experienced Research Coordinators.Researchmoz Global Pvt. Ltd.90 State Street,Albany, NY 12207,United States,Tel: 866-997-4948 (Us-Canada Toll Free),Tel: +1-518-621-2074 Global Oilfield Biocides Sales Market Key Trends, Size, Growth, Shares And Forecast Research Report 2018 Oilfield Biocides Sales Market https://www.researchmoz.us/enquiry.php?type=S&repid=1501551 https://www.researchmoz.us/global-oilfield-biocides-sales-market-report-2018-report.html/toc https://www.researchmoz.us/ http://bit.ly/1TBmnVG Researchmoz added Most up-to-date research on "Global Oilfield Biocides Sales Market Report 2018" to its huge collection of research reports.In this report,the global Oilfield Biocides market is valued at USD XX million in 2017 and is expected to reach USD XX million by the end of 2025,growing at a CAGR of XX% between 2017 and 2025.Geographically,this report split global into several key Regions,with sales (K MT),revenue (Million USD),market share and growth rate of Oilfield Biocides for these regions,from 2013 to 2025 (forecast),coveringUnited StatesChinaEuropeJapanSoutheast AsiaIndiaTo Get Sample Copy of Report visit @Global Oilfield Biocides market competition by top manufacturers/players,with Oilfield Biocides sales volume,Price (USD/MT),revenue (Million USD) and market share for each manufacturer/player; the top players includingDow Chemical CompanyBASF SESolvay SAAkzoNobel N.V.Nalco Holding CompanyICL Industrial ProductsLonzaTroy CorporationThorGmbhLnxessClariantAlbemarleDuPontKemira OyjBaker HughesBio ChemicalXingyuan ChemistryOn the basis of product,this report displays the production,revenue,price,market share and growth rate of each type,primarily split intoGlutaraldehydeDBNPATHPSChlorineQuaternary AmmoniumOn the basis on the end users/applications,this report focuses on the status and outlook for major applications/end users,sales volume,market share and growth rate for each application,includingDrillingProductionFracturingCompletionOthersTable of ContentsGlobal Oilfield Biocides Sales Market Report 20181 Oilfield Biocides Market Overview1.1 Product Overview and Scope of Oilfield Biocides1.2 Classification of Oilfield Biocides by Product Category1.2.1 Global Oilfield Biocides Market Size (Sales) Comparison by Type (2013-2025)1.2.2 Global Oilfield Biocides Market Size (Sales) Market Share by Type (Product Category) in 20171.2.3 Glutaraldehyde1.2.4 DBNPA1.2.5 THPS1.2.6 Chlorine1.2.7 Quaternary Ammonium1.3 Global Oilfield Biocides Market by Application/End Users1.3.1 Global Oilfield Biocides Sales (Volume) and Market Share Comparison by Application (2013-2025)1.3.2 Drilling1.3.3 Production1.3.4 Fracturing1.3.5 Completion1.3.6 Others1.4 Global Oilfield Biocides Market by Region1.4.1 Global Oilfield Biocides Market Size (Value) Comparison by Region (2013-2025)1.4.2 United States Oilfield Biocides Status and Prospect (2013-2025)1.4.3 China Oilfield Biocides Status and Prospect (2013-2025)1.4.4 Europe Oilfield Biocides Status and Prospect (2013-2025)1.4.5 Japan Oilfield Biocides Status and Prospect (2013-2025)1.4.6 Southeast Asia Oilfield Biocides Status and Prospect (2013-2025)1.4.7 India Oilfield Biocides Status and Prospect (2013-2025)1.5 Global Market Size (Value and Volume) of Oilfield Biocides (2013-2025)1.5.1 Global Oilfield Biocides Sales and Growth Rate (2013-2025)1.5.2 Global Oilfield Biocides Revenue and Growth Rate (2013-2025)2 Global Oilfield Biocides Competition by Players/Suppliers, Type and Application2.1 Global Oilfield Biocides Market Competition by Players/Suppliers2.1.1 Global Oilfield Biocides Sales and Market Share of Key Players/Suppliers (2013-2018)2.1.2 Global Oilfield Biocides Revenue and Share by Players/Suppliers (2013-2018)2.2 Global Oilfield Biocides (Volume and Value) by Type2.2.1 Global Oilfield Biocides Sales and Market Share by Type (2013-2018)2.2.2 Global Oilfield Biocides Revenue and Market Share by Type (2013-2018)2.3 Global Oilfield Biocides (Volume and Value) by Region2.3.1 Global Oilfield Biocides Sales and Market Share by Region (2013-2018)2.3.2 Global Oilfield Biocides Revenue and Market Share by Region (2013-2018)2.4 Global Oilfield Biocides (Volume) by ApplicationGet Complete TOC With Tables and Figures @3 United States Oilfield Biocides (Volume, Value and Sales Price)3.1 United States Oilfield Biocides Sales and Value (2013-2018)3.1.1 United States Oilfield Biocides Sales and Growth Rate (2013-2018)3.1.2 United States Oilfield Biocides Revenue and Growth Rate (2013-2018)3.1.3 United States Oilfield Biocides Sales Price Trend (2013-2018)3.2 United States Oilfield Biocides Sales Volume and Market Share by Players (2013-2018)3.3 United States Oilfield Biocides Sales Volume and Market Share by Type (2013-2018)3.4 United States Oilfield Biocides Sales Volume and Market Share by Application (2013-2018)4 China Oilfield Biocides (Volume, Value and Sales Price)4.1 China Oilfield Biocides Sales and Value (2013-2018)4.1.1 China Oilfield Biocides Sales and Growth Rate (2013-2018)4.1.2 China Oilfield Biocides Revenue and Growth Rate (2013-2018)4.1.3 China Oilfield Biocides Sales Price Trend (2013-2018)4.2 China Oilfield Biocides Sales Volume and Market Share by Players (2013-2018)4.3 China Oilfield Biocides Sales Volume and Market Share by Type (2013-2018)4.4 China Oilfield Biocides Sales Volume and Market Share by Application (2013-2018)5 Europe Oilfield Biocides (Volume, Value and Sales Price)5.1 Europe Oilfield Biocides Sales and Value (2013-2018)5.1.1 Europe Oilfield Biocides Sales and Growth Rate (2013-2018)5.1.2 Europe Oilfield Biocides Revenue and Growth Rate (2013-2018)5.1.3 Europe Oilfield Biocides Sales Price Trend (2013-2018)5.2 Europe Oilfield Biocides Sales Volume and Market Share by Players (2013-2018)5.3 Europe Oilfield Biocides Sales Volume and Market Share by Type (2013-2018)5.4 Europe Oilfield Biocides Sales Volume and Market Share by Application (2013-2018)6 Japan Oilfield Biocides (Volume, Value and Sales Price)6.1 Japan Oilfield Biocides Sales and Value (2013-2018)6.1.1 Japan Oilfield Biocides Sales and Growth Rate (2013-2018)6.1.2 Japan Oilfield Biocides Revenue and Growth Rate (2013-2018)6.1.3 Japan Oilfield Biocides Sales Price Trend (2013-2018)6.2 Japan Oilfield Biocides Sales Volume and Market Share by Players (2013-2018)6.3 Japan Oilfield Biocides Sales Volume and Market Share by Type (2013-2018)6.4 Japan Oilfield Biocides Sales Volume and Market Share by Application (2013-2018)Continue...About ResearchMozResearchMoz is the one stop online destination to find and buy market research reports & Industry Analysis. We fulfill all your research needs spanning across industry verticals with our huge collection of market research reports. We provide our services to all sizes of organizations and across all industry verticals and markets. Our Research Coordinators have in-depth knowledge of reports as well as publishers and will assist you in making an informed decision by giving you unbiased and deep insights on which reports will satisfy your needs at the best price.ResearchMozState Tower,90 State Street,Suite 700,Albany NY - 12207United StatesEmail: sales@researchmoz.usWebsite @Tel: 866-997-4948 (Us-Canada Toll Free)Tel: +1-518-621-2074Follow us on LinkedIn @ Global Surgical Waste Management Market Size, Status and Forecast 2025 : Stericycle, Clean Harbors QYResearchReports https://www.qyresearchreports.com/sample/sample.php?rep_id=1576920&type=S https://www.qyresearchreports.com/sample/sample.php?rep_id=1576920&type=D Qyresearchreports include new market research report "Global Surgical Waste Management Market Size, Status and Forecast 2025" to its huge collection of research reports.The global Surgical Waste Management market is witnessing a frequent alteration in its dynamics. Emphasizing on these changes, this research report offers an in-depth assessment of the performance of this market during the period from 2018 to 2025. In this research report, experts have determined the attractiveness of this market with the help of various significant analytical tools, such as investment return analysis and market feasibility assessment. The future status of the worldwide market for Surgical Waste Management has also been predicted by them on the basis of results attained from these evaluations.These assessments also help in the expansion of the worldwide market for Surgical Waste Management and provide a clear picture of the impacts of various crucial strategies implemented by leading market participants for the expansion of their businesses over the past few years.KNOW MORE WITH FREE SAMPLE STUDY @This report studies the global Surgical Waste Management market, analyzes and researches the Surgical Waste Management development status and forecast in United States, EU, Japan, China, India and Southeast Asia. This report focuses on the top players in global market, likeStericycleSharps ComplianceDaniels SharpsmartClean HarborsRepublic ServicesAli Traders Waste ManagementAMB EcosterylThe research report further examines the competitive landscape of the global market for Surgical Waste Management by studying the company profiles of the major market participants thoroughly. It also categorizes the market into various segments on the basis of a number of major market factors. The industry chain and the government policies and regulations that influence the demand for Surgical Waste Management have also been studied at length in this report.In conclusion, the report examines the worldwide market for Surgical Waste Management on the basis of the availability of products. The volume of production, products pricing, and the revenue generated in the overall market are the key factors, based on which analysts determine the performance of this market. The sales dynamics and the production chain have also been assessed in this research report. The report is aimed at providing a clear picture of the global market for Surgical Waste Management to participants and help them in preparing apt strategies to attain a competitive edge over their rivals.Table of Contents1 Industry Overview of Surgical Waste Management1.1 Surgical Waste Management Market Overview1.1.1 Surgical Waste Management Product Scope1.1.2 Market Status and Outlook1.2 Global Surgical Waste Management Market Size and Analysis by Regions (2013-2018)1.3 Surgical Waste Management Market by Type1.4 Surgical Waste Management Market by End Users/Application2 Global Surgical Waste Management Competition Analysis by Players2.1 Surgical Waste Management Market Size (Value) by Players (2013-2018)2.2 Competitive Status and Trend2.2.1 Market Concentration Rate2.2.2 Product/Service Differences2.2.3 New Entrants2.2.4 The Technology Trends in FutureClick here to avail discount on this reports @3 Company (Top Players) Profiles3.1 Stericycle3.1.1 Company Profile3.1.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.1.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.1.4 Surgical Waste Management Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.1.5 Recent Developments3.2 Sharps Compliance3.2.1 Company Profile3.2.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.2.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.2.4 Surgical Waste Management Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.2.5 Recent Developments4 Global Surgical Waste Management Market Size by Type and Application (2013-2018)4.1 Global Surgical Waste Management Market Size by Type (2013-2018)4.2 Global Surgical Waste Management Market Size by Application (2013-2018)4.3 Potential Application of Surgical Waste Management in Future4.4 Top Consumer/End Users of Surgical Waste Management5 United States Surgical Waste Management Development Status and Outlook5.1 United States Surgical Waste Management Market Size (2013-2018)5.2 United States Surgical Waste Management Market Size and Market Share by Players (2013-2018)5.3 United States Surgical Waste Management Market Size by Application (2013-2018)List of Tables and FiguresFigure Global Surgical Waste Management Market Size (Million USD) Status and Outlook (2013-2018)Table Global Surgical Waste Management Revenue (Million USD) Comparison by Regions (2013-2018)Figure Global Surgical Waste Management Market Share by Regions (2013-2018)Figure United States Surgical Waste Management Market Size (Million USD) and Growth Rate by Regions (2013-2018)Figure EU Surgical Waste Management Market Size (Million USD) and Growth Rate by Regions (2013-2018)Figure Japan Surgical Waste Management Market Size (Million USD) and Growth Rate by Regions (2013-2018)Figure China Surgical Waste Management Market Size (Million USD) and Growth Rate by Regions (2013-2018)Figure India Surgical Waste Management Market Size (Million USD) and Growth Rate by Regions (2013-2018)Figure Southeast Asia Surgical Waste Management Market Size (Million USD) and Growth Rate by Regions (2013-2018)Table Global Surgical Waste Management Revenue (Million USD) and Growth Rate (%) Comparison by Product (2013-2018)About Us:QYResearchReports.com delivers the latest strategic market intelligence to build a successful business footprint in China. Our syndicated and customized research reports provide companies with vital background information of the market and in-depth analysis on the Chinese trade and investment framework, which directly affects their business operations. Reports from QYResearchReports.com feature valuable recommendations on how to navigate in the extremely unpredictable yet highly attractive Chinese market.Contact Us:1820 AvenueM Suite #1047Brooklyn, NY 11230United StatesToll Free: 866-997-4948 (USA-CANADA)Tel: +1-518-621-2074Email: sales@qyresearchreports.com Global Bentonite Market 2017 Top Manufacturers : Clariant, Cimbar, Taiko Group, Wyo-Ben Inc QYResearchReports https://www.qyresearchreports.com/sample/sample.php?rep_id=1095975&type=S https://www.qyresearchreports.com/sample/sample.php?rep_id=1095975&type=D Qyresearchreports include new market research report "Global Bentonite Market Professional Survey Report 2017" to its huge collection of research reports.The global Bentonite market is driven by a variety of regional and global factors, a critical assessment of which forms the crux of the report. The key dynamics of the market is constantly influenced by changing business models and several paradigmatic shifts in recent years, holistic insights of which is offered in the report. The study on the global Bentonite market tracks the vendor landscape, changes in regulatory framework, and the prevailing governmental policies in major countries. The analysis zeroes in on the prevalent risks, strategic as well as tactical, impacting the dynamics of the global Bentonite market. The report takes into account recent offerings of major players and key strategies adopted by them to gain a better foothold in the global Bentonite market. An analysis of the key strategic dynamics also includes recent investments made by them to expand their presence across new geographic regions. In addition, the analysis takes a closer look at research and development (R&D) activities being undertaken by them. Furthermore, the study evaluates the impact on emerging avenues and lucrative prospects in various regions.Enter your information below to receive a free sample copy of this report @This report studies Bentonite in Global market, especially in North America, China, Europe, Southeast Asia, Japan and India, with production, revenue, consumption, import and export in these regions, from 2012 to 2016, and forecast to 2022.This report focuses on top manufacturers in global market, with production, price, revenue and market share for each manufacturer, coveringMTI (AMCOL)Imerys (S&B)ClariantTaiko GroupAshapuraHuawei BentoniteFenghong New MaterialLKAB MineralsBentonite Performance MineralsChang an RenhengThe findings and insights offered in the study is a useful guide for investors, new entrants, emerging and established players, and any stakeholder interested to track the growth trajectory of the market. Prepared with the help of invaluable inputs from a large number of secondary and primary sources, the study offers evidence-based insights which will guide companies in effective strategy formulations. The research employs a number of prominently recognized industry methods to ascertain the attractiveness of key segments. Combing these methods with SWOT analysis and Porters five forces analysis, the report intends to present a comprehensive insight into the competitive dynamics of the global Bentonite market. In addition, key trends likely to bring disruptive changes in various regional markets are also analyzed at length in the study.Table of Contents1 Industry Overview of Bentonite1.1 Definition and Specifications of Bentonite1.1.1 Definition of Bentonite1.1.2 Specifications of Bentonite1.2 Classification of Bentonite1.2.1 Sodium Bentonite1.2.2 Calcium Bentonite1.2.3 Potassium Bentonite1.3 Applications of Bentonite1.4 Market Segment by Regions2 Manufacturing Cost Structure Analysis of Bentonite2.1 Raw Material and Suppliers2.2 Manufacturing Cost Structure Analysis of Bentonite2.3 Manufacturing Process Analysis of Bentonite2.4 Industry Chain Structure of BentoniteEnquiry For Discount Visit @3 Technical Data and Manufacturing Plants Analysis of Bentonite3.1 Capacity and Commercial Production Date of Global Bentonite Major Manufacturers in 20163.2 Manufacturing Plants Distribution of Global Bentonite Major Manufacturers in 20163.3 R&D Status and Technology Source of Global Bentonite Major Manufacturers in 20163.4 Raw Materials Sources Analysis of Global Bentonite Major Manufacturers in 20164 Global Bentonite Overall Market Overview4.1 2012-2017E Overall Market Analysis4.2 Capacity Analysis4.2.1 2012-2017E Global Bentonite Capacity and Growth Rate Analysis4.2.2 2016 Bentonite Capacity Analysis (Company Segment)4.3 Sales Analysis4.3.1 2012-2017E Global Bentonite Sales and Growth Rate Analysis4.3.2 2016 Bentonite Sales Analysis (Company Segment)4.4 Sales Price Analysis4.4.1 2012-2017E Global Bentonite Sales Price4.4.2 2016 Bentonite Sales Price Analysis (Company Segment)6 Global 2012-2017E Bentonite Segment Market Analysis (by Type)6.1 Global 2012-2017E Bentonite Sales by Type6.2 Different Types of Bentonite Product Interview Price Analysis6.3 Different Types of Bentonite Product Driving Factors Analysis6.3.1 Sodium Bentonite of Bentonite Growth Driving Factor Analysis6.3.2 Calcium Bentonite of Bentonite Growth Driving Factor Analysis6.3.3 Potassium Bentonite of Bentonite Growth Driving Factor Analysis7 Global 2012-2017E Bentonite Segment Market Analysis (by Application)7.1 Global 2012-2017E Bentonite Consumption by Application7.2 Different Application of Bentonite Product Interview Price Analysis7.3 Different Application of Bentonite Product Driving Factors Analysis7.3.1 Molding Sands of Bentonite Growth Driving Factor Analysis7.3.2 Iron Ore Pelletizing of Bentonite Growth Driving Factor Analysis7.3.3 Pet Litter of Bentonite Growth Driving Factor Analysis7.3.4 Drilling Mud of Bentonite Growth Driving Factor Analysis7.3.5 Civil Engineering of Bentonite Growth Driving Factor Analysis7.3.6 Agriculture of Bentonite Growth Driving Factor AnalysisAbout Us:QYResearchReports.com delivers the latest strategic market intelligence to build a successful business footprint in China. Our syndicated and customized research reports provide companies with vital background information of the market and in-depth analysis on the Chinese trade and investment framework, which directly affects their business operations. Reports from QYResearchReports.com feature valuable recommendations on how to navigate in the extremely unpredictable yet highly attractive Chinese market.Contact Us:1820 AvenueM Suite #1047Brooklyn, NY 11230United StatesToll Free: 866-997-4948 (USA-CANADA)Tel: +1-518-621-2074Email: sales@qyresearchreports.com 2017-2022 Global and U.S. Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Field-Effect Transistor (MOSFET) Market Status and Forecast by Players, Types and Applications QYResearchReports https://www.qyresearchreports.com/sample/sample.php?rep_id=1254674&type=S https://www.qyresearchreports.com/sample/sample.php?rep_id=1254674&type=D Qyresearchreports include new market research report "2017-2022 Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Field-Effect Transistor (MOSFET) Report on Global and United States Market, Status and Forecast, by Players, Types and Applications" to its huge collection of research reports.The report on the Global and United States Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Field-Effect Transistor (MOSFET) has been created with the sole objective to armor existing and new players to gain a ground over their competitors. The report has been prepared using proven research methodologies and industry-best analytical tools to serve as a reliable guide for its audiences. The report provides figurative scenario of the market currently and how it is projected to evolve over the forecast period. The report covers key trends and indices playing a significant role in the growth of the Global and United States Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Field-Effect Transistor (MOSFET) market over the forecast timeframe.Compiled after an extensive research phase, the report presents findings that are reliable as well as verifiable. Using standard analytical tools such as Porters Five Forces and SWOT analysis, profitability of new ventures and investments in the market as well as positioning of key players is presented herein.Request a Free Sample Report of this research to evaluate more:This report studies the Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Field-Effect Transistor (MOSFET) market status and outlook of global and United States, from angles of players, regions, product types and end industries; this report analyzes the top players in global and United States market, and splits the Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Field-Effect Transistor (MOSFET) market by product type and applications/end industries.The major players in global and United States Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Field-Effect Transistor (MOSFET) market, including ROHM Semiconductor, International Rectifier, Toshiba, NXP Semiconductor, Vishay, STMicroelectronics, Mitsubishi Electric Corp, Fuji Electric.One of the highlight of the report is player profile section, which includes valuable information pertaining to key players in the Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Field-Effect Transistor (MOSFET) market, including their manufacturing capacity, product specification, gross margin, revenue, and competitors. Included in the report is key business strategies adopted by players, their market standing, and recent developments.The report divides the Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Field-Effect Transistor (MOSFET) market into key segments that market stockholders can invest in for business gains. The report also provides absolute market share of key segments and growth rate of individual segments over the reports forecast period. Both dominant and emerging growth trends have been mentioned.Included in the report is an exhaustive collection of tables, charts, and graphs for a pictorial representation of growth trends and behavior of key segments in the Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Field-Effect Transistor (MOSFET) market over the forecast period. The report concludes with a birds eye view of emerging trends in the Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Field-Effect Transistor (MOSFET) market that can give heads up to players, before their competitors.Table of Contents1 Methodology and Data Source1.1 Methodology/Research Approach1.1.1 Research Programs/Design1.1.2 Market Size Estimation1.1.3 Market Breakdown and Data Triangulation1.2 Data Source1.3 Disclaimer2 Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Field-Effect Transistor (MOSFET) Market Overview2.1 Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Field-Effect Transistor (MOSFET) Product Overview2.2 Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Field-Effect Transistor (MOSFET) Market Segment by Type2.3 Global Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Field-Effect Transistor (MOSFET) Product Segment by Type2.3.1 Global Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Field-Effect Transistor (MOSFET) Sales (K Units) and Growth (%) by Types (2012, 2016 and 2022)2.3.2 Global Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Field-Effect Transistor (MOSFET) Sales (K Units) and Market Share (%) by Types (2012-2017)2.3.3 Global Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Field-Effect Transistor (MOSFET) Revenue (Million USD) and Market Share (%) by Types (2012-2017)2.3.4 Global Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Field-Effect Transistor (MOSFET) Price (USD/Unit) by Type (2012-2017)2.4 United States Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Field-Effect Transistor (MOSFET) Product Segment by TypePlease click the link to avail discount on this report @3 Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Field-Effect Transistor (MOSFET) Application/End Users3.1 Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Field-Effect Transistor (MOSFET) Segment by Application/End Users3.2 Global Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Field-Effect Transistor (MOSFET) Product Segment by Application3.2.1 Global Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Field-Effect Transistor (MOSFET) Sales (K Units) and CGAR (%) by Applications (2012, 2016 and 2022)3.2.2 Global Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Field-Effect Transistor (MOSFET) Sales (K Units) and Market Share (%) by Applications (2012-2017)3.3 United States Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Field-Effect Transistor (MOSFET) Product Segment by Application3.3.1 United States Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Field-Effect Transistor (MOSFET) Sales (K Units) and CGAR (%) by Applications (2012, 2016 and 2022)3.3.2 United States Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Field-Effect Transistor (MOSFET) Sales (K Units) and Market Share (%) by Applications (2012-2017)4 Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Field-Effect Transistor (MOSFET) Market Status and Outlook by Regions4.1 Global Market Status and Outlook by Regions4.1.1 Global Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Field-Effect Transistor (MOSFET) Market Size and CAGR by Regions (2012, 2016 and 2022)4.2 Global Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Field-Effect Transistor (MOSFET) Sales and Revenue by Regions4.2.1 Global Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Field-Effect Transistor (MOSFET) Sales (K Units) and Market Share (%) by Regions (2012-2017)4.2.2 Global Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Field-Effect Transistor (MOSFET) Revenue (Million USD) and Market Share (%) by Regions (2012-2017)4.2.3 Global Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Field-Effect Transistor (MOSFET) Sales (K Units), Revenue (Million USD), Price (USD/Unit) and Gross Margin (%) (2012-2017)4.2.4 North America Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Field-Effect Transistor (MOSFET) Sales (K Units), Revenue (Million USD), Price (USD/Unit) and Gross Margin (%) (2012-2017)4.2.5 Europe Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Field-Effect Transistor (MOSFET) Sales (K Units), Revenue (Million USD), Price (USD/Unit) and Gross Margin (%) (2012-2017)4.2.6 Asia-Pacific Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Field-Effect Transistor (MOSFET) Sales (K Units), Revenue (Million USD), Price (USD/Unit) and Gross Margin (%) (2012-2017)4.2.7 South America Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Field-Effect Transistor (MOSFET) Sales (K Units), Revenue (Million USD), Price (USD/Unit) and Gross Margin (2012-2017)5 Global Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Field-Effect Transistor (MOSFET) Market Competition by Players/Manufacturers5.1 Global Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Field-Effect Transistor (MOSFET) Sales (K Units) and Market Share by Players (2012-2017)5.2 Global Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Field-Effect Transistor (MOSFET) Revenue (Million USD) and Share by Players (2012-2017)5.3 Global Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Field-Effect Transistor (MOSFET) Average Price (USD/Unit) by Players (2012-2017)5.4 Players Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Field-Effect Transistor (MOSFET) Manufacturing Base Distribution, Sales Area, Product Types5.5 Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Field-Effect Transistor (MOSFET) Market Competitive Situation and Trends5.5.1 Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Field-Effect Transistor (MOSFET) Market Concentration Rate5.5.2 Global Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Field-Effect Transistor (MOSFET) Market Share (%) of Top 3 and Top 5 PlayersAbout Us:QYResearchReports.com delivers the latest strategic market intelligence to build a successful business footprint in China. Our syndicated and customized research reports provide companies with vital background information of the market and in-depth analysis on the Chinese trade and investment framework, which directly affects their business operations. Reports from QYResearchReports.com feature valuable recommendations on how to navigate in the extremely unpredictable yet highly attractive Chinese market.Contact Us:1820 AvenueM Suite #1047Brooklyn, NY 11230United StatesToll Free: 866-997-4948 (USA-CANADA)Tel: +1-518-621-2074Email: sales@qyresearchreports.com 2017-2022 Global and United States Lignin Market Status and Forecast by Players, Types and Applications QYResearchReports https://www.qyresearchreports.com/sample/sample.php?rep_id=1257053&type=S https://www.qyresearchreports.com/sample/sample.php?rep_id=1257053&type=D Qyresearchreports include new market research report "2017-2022 Lignin Report on Global and United States Market, Status and Forecast, by Players, Types and Applications" to its huge collection of research reports.The development of the Global and United States Lignin market is formed by a varying extent of common and Global and United States factors and patterns, and the clear record of which shapes the focal point of the report. The examination presents all the learning into various upgrades, perceives completely open entryways, and offers a detailed investigation of the components affecting the development of market. The sweeping record on the Global and United States Lignin market fuses an assessment of the prevalent working and macroeconomic condition in various regions. It includes the present changes in regulatory ways and surveys their impact on rising theory patterns. The examination explores genuine creative work practices in various regions and their wide impact on developing and developed nations of organization in the Global and United States Lignin market. The wage offer and size of various regional and Global and United States players help in understanding the key movement of the market. Genuine strategies got by them to get a prevalent strong balance in the market are similarly highlighted in the report.Interpret a Competitive Outlook Analysis Report with Free Sample Report:This report studies the Lignin market status and outlook of global and United States, from angles of players, regions, product types and end industries; this report analyzes the top players in global and United States market, and splits the Lignin market by product type and applications/end industries.The Asia-Pacific will occupy for more market share in following years, especially in China, also fast growing India and Southeast Asia regions.The major players in global and United States Lignin market, including Borregaard LignoTech, KMT Polymers Ltd, MWV Specialty Chemicals, Tembec, Domsjo Fabriker, Nippon Paper Industries, Flambeau River Papers, 3 S Chemicals, Dallas Group of America, 7.10 Pacific Dust Control, Inc, Abelin Polymers, Cardinal Chemicals, Enaspol, UPM, Domtar, Weili Group, Wuhan East China Chemical, Shenyang Xingzhenghe Chemical.The examination is prepared using a monstrous and different database of discretionary research and the revelations are affirmed through an extensive variety of fundamental research, including gatherings, talks, and social events. The patterns offered in the report mirrors the points of view of supposition pioneers, CEOs, CXOs, and strategists in the Global and United States Lignin showcase and are maintained by quantitative data and examinations. To make the examination in the revelations trustworthy, the examination uses diverse sweeping mechanical assemblies, for instance, Porter's five forces investigation and the general SWOT examination. The degree of creative advancements ascending in the Global and United States Lignin advertise causing intrusions in the market is in like manner separated in the examination.Table of Contents1 Methodology and Data Source1.1 Methodology/Research Approach1.1.1 Research Programs/Design1.1.2 Market Size Estimation1.1.3 Market Breakdown and Data Triangulation1.2 Data Source1.3 Disclaimer2 Lignin Market Overview2.1 Lignin Product Overview2.2 Lignin Market Segment by Type2.3 Global Lignin Product Segment by Type2.3.1 Global Lignin Sales (K Units) and Growth (%) by Types (2012, 2016 and 2022)2.3.2 Global Lignin Sales (K Units) and Market Share (%) by Types (2012-2017)2.3.3 Global Lignin Revenue (Million USD) and Market Share (%) by Types (2012-2017)2.3.4 Global Lignin Price (USD/Unit) by Type (2012-2017)2.4 United States Lignin Product Segment by TypeGet discount on this report at3 Lignin Application/End Users3.1 Lignin Segment by Application/End Users3.2 Global Lignin Product Segment by Application3.2.1 Global Lignin Sales (K Units) and CGAR (%) by Applications (2012, 2016 and 2022)3.2.2 Global Lignin Sales (K Units) and Market Share (%) by Applications (2012-2017)3.3 United States Lignin Product Segment by Application3.3.1 United States Lignin Sales (K Units) and CGAR (%) by Applications (2012, 2016 and 2022)3.3.2 United States Lignin Sales (K Units) and Market Share (%) by Applications (2012-2017)4 Lignin Market Status and Outlook by Regions4.1 Global Market Status and Outlook by Regions4.1.1 Global Lignin Market Size and CAGR by Regions (2012, 2016 and 2022)4.2 Global Lignin Sales and Revenue by Regions4.2.1 Global Lignin Sales (K Units) and Market Share (%) by Regions (2012-2017)4.2.2 Global Lignin Revenue (Million USD) and Market Share (%) by Regions (2012-2017)4.2.3 Global Lignin Sales (K Units), Revenue (Million USD), Price (USD/Unit) and Gross Margin (%) (2012-2017)4.2.4 North America Lignin Sales (K Units), Revenue (Million USD), Price (USD/Unit) and Gross Margin (%) (2012-2017)4.2.5 Europe Lignin Sales (K Units), Revenue (Million USD), Price (USD/Unit) and Gross Margin (%) (2012-2017)4.2.6 Asia-Pacific Lignin Sales (K Units), Revenue (Million USD), Price (USD/Unit) and Gross Margin (%) (2012-2017)4.2.7 South America Lignin Sales (K Units), Revenue (Million USD), Price (USD/Unit) and Gross Margin (2012-2017)5 Global Lignin Market Competition by Players/Manufacturers5.1 Global Lignin Sales (K Units) and Market Share by Players (2012-2017)5.2 Global Lignin Revenue (Million USD) and Share by Players (2012-2017)5.3 Global Lignin Average Price (USD/Unit) by Players (2012-2017)5.4 Players Lignin Manufacturing Base Distribution, Sales Area, Product Types5.5 Lignin Market Competitive Situation and Trends5.5.1 Lignin Market Concentration Rate5.5.2 Global Lignin Market Share (%) of Top 3 and Top 5 PlayersAbout Us:QYResearchReports.com delivers the latest strategic market intelligence to build a successful business footprint in China. Our syndicated and customized research reports provide companies with vital background information of the market and in-depth analysis on the Chinese trade and investment framework, which directly affects their business operations. Reports from QYResearchReports.com feature valuable recommendations on how to navigate in the extremely unpredictable yet highly attractive Chinese market.Contact Us:1820 AvenueM Suite #1047Brooklyn, NY 11230United StatesToll Free: 866-997-4948 (USA-CANADA)Tel: +1-518-621-2074Email: sales@qyresearchreports.com Global 3D Printing Medical Device Market Is Anticipated To Expand At A CAGR Of 17.7% From 2017 To 2025, Rising To US$3513.0 Mn 3D Printing Medical Device Market https://www.researchmoz.us/enquiry.php?type=S&repid=1581079 https://www.researchmoz.us/3d-printing-medical-device-market-global-industry-analysis-size-share-growth-trends-and-forecast-2017-2025-report.html/toc https://www.researchmoz.us/enquiry.php?type=E&repid=1581079 https://www.researchmoz.us/ http://bit.ly/1TBmnVG Researchmoz added Most up-to-date research on "3D Printing Medical Device Market - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends, and Forecast 2017 - 2025" to its huge collection of research reports.This report provides an analysis of the global 3D printing medical device market for the period of 2015 to 2025, wherein the period from 2017 to 2025 comprises the forecast period and 2016 is the base year. Data for 2015 is provided as historical information. The report covers all the major trends and technologies playing a major role in the growth of the 3D printing medical device market over the forecast period. It also highlights various drivers, restraints and opportunities expected to influence the markets growth during the said period. The study provides a holistic perspective on the markets growth in terms of revenue in US$ Mn, across different geographical regions namely North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Middle East & Africa and Latin America.To Get Sample Copy of Report visit @3D printing or an additive manufacturing is a process that creates a real or physical object from a digital design. 3D printing uses a layer by layer method approach to print the 3D objects. It can make physical structure of objects designed with a CAD program or scanned with a 3D Scanner. It has wide applications in aerospace, automotive, dental and medical healthcare, jewelry, architecture and so on.Global 3D Printing Medical Device Market: Scope of the ReportThe market overview section of the report showcases the market dynamics and trends such as the drivers, restraints and opportunities that influence the current nature and future status of this market. The report also provides value chain analysis and key market indicators for the 3D printing medical device market. The 3D printing medical device market estimates are the result of our in-depth secondary research, primary interviews and in-house expert panel reviews. These market estimates have been analyzed by taking into account the impact of different political, social, economic, technological and legal factors along with the current market dynamics affecting the market growth.Global 3D Printing Medical Device Market: SegmentationThe global 3D printing medical device market is segmented on the basis of component, technology and application. By component, the global 3D printing medical device market is bifurcated into printer, material, software & services. Further, the technology segmentation includes electron beam melting, selective laser melting, selective laser sintering, photopolymerization, direct metal laser sintering and others On the basis of application the 3D printing medical device market is segmented into orthopedic & cranial implant, dental restorations, surgical instruments and others (tissue fabrication & external prosthesis). 3D printing medical device market is also segmented on the basis of regions into North America, South America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and Middle East & Africa. The report covers the analysis of these segments across all geographies, along with qualitative analysis for key market indicators supplementing the growth of 3D printing medical device market during the forecast period.Get Complete TOC With Tables and Figures @Global 3D Printing Medical Device Market: Competitive DynamicsThe report also includes competitive profiling of the key players associated with the 3D printing medical device market around the globe. The important business strategies adopted by them, their market positioning, financials, SWOT analysis and recent developments have also been identified in the research report. The competitive landscape section of the report also gives an overview about the major contributing regions/countries by these key players in order to strengthen their market position in the future.Technology advancement and rising medical application in 3D printing across emerging economies, are forcing companies to develop 3D printing medical device to continue the profitability of the market. Some of the major players in global 3D printing medical device market are Arcam AB, 3D Systems Inc., Organovo Holdings, SLM Solutions Group AG, Cyfuse Biomedical K.K., EOS GmbH Electro Optical Systems, EnvisonTec, FabRx Ltd., Materialise NV, and Concept Laser. Details such as financials, business strategies, SWOT analysis, recent developments, and other such strategic information pertaining to these players has been duly provided as part of company profiling.Market Segmentation:3D Printing Medical Device Market, by Component- Printers- Materials- Software & Services3D Printing Medical Device Market, by Technology- Electron Beam Melting- Selective Laser Melting- Selective Laser Sintering- Photopolymerization- Direct Metal Laser Sintering- Others3D Printing Medical Device Market, by Application- Orthopedics & Cranial Implants- Dental Restorations- Surgical Instruments- Others (Tissue Fabrication, External Prosthesis)In addition, the report provides analysis of the 3D Printing Medical Device Market with respect to the following geographic segments:North America- The U.S.- Canada- Rest of North AmericaEurope- The U.K.- Germany- France- Rest of EuropeMake an Enquiry of this report @Asia Pacific (APAC)- India- China- Japan- Australia- Rest of APACMiddle East and Africa (MEA)- GCC Countries- South Africa- Rest of MEASouth America- Brazil- Rest of South AmericaAbout ResearchMozResearchMoz is the one stop online destination to find and buy market research reports & Industry Analysis. We fulfill all your research needs spanning across industry verticals with our huge collection of market research reports. We provide our services to all sizes of organizations and across all industry verticals and markets. Our Research Coordinators have in-depth knowledge of reports as well as publishers and will assist you in making an informed decision by giving you unbiased and deep insights on which reports will satisfy your needs at the best price.ResearchMozState Tower,90 State Street,Suite 700,Albany NY - 12207United StatesEmail: sales@researchmoz.usWebsite @Tel: 866-997-4948 (Us-Canada Toll Free)Tel: +1-518-621-2074Follow us on LinkedIn @ 2017-2022 Global and United States UTV Tires Market Status and Forecast by Players, Types and Applications QYResearchReports https://www.qyresearchreports.com/sample/sample.php?rep_id=1293688&type=S https://www.qyresearchreports.com/sample/sample.php?rep_id=1293688&type=D Qyresearchreports include new market research report "2017-2022 UTV Tires Report on Global and United States Market, Status and Forecast, by Players, Types and Applications" to its huge collection of research reports.The market study on the Global and United States UTV Tires market provides a comprehensive analysis taking a critical look at vital market indicators and growth trends shaping the markets growth trajectory over the forecast period from 2018 to 2025. The growth of the market is steered by several Global and United States and regional developments, influenced by evolving governmental regulations and policies. The study strives to provide in-depth insights into these factors and assesses their impact on the business landscape of the Global and United States UTV Tires market. Further, the study provides valuable insights into region-specific business risks that industry players face, and prevalent strategies to alleviate them. Making a granular analysis of demand drivers, the study closely looks into paradigmatic and mild shifts made by various players in the Global and United States UTV Tires market to consolidate their position. Going ahead, the report studies the impact of these shifts on growth prospects and lucrative avenues in the forthcoming years. The study strives to provide valuable insights into imminent growth spaces and new revenue streams in the Global and United States UTV Tires market.For free sample on this report, fill the form @This report studies the UTV Tires market status and outlook of global and United States, from angles of players, regions, product types and end industries; this report analyzes the top players in global and United States market, and splits the UTV Tires market by product type and applications/end industries.The Asia-Pacific will occupy for more market share in following years, especially in China, also fast growing India and Southeast Asia regions.North America, especially The United States, will still play an important role which cannot be ignored. Any changes from United States might affect the development trend of UTV Tires. United States plays an important role in global market.The major players in global and United States UTV Tires market, including Bridgestone, Michelin, Goodyear, Continental, Pirelli, Hankook, Sumitomo, Yokohama, Maxxis, Zhongce, GITI Tire, Toyo Tire, Cooper Tire, Kumho Tire, Apollo Tires Ltd, Triangle Group, Nexen Tire, Hengfeng Rubber, Nokian Tyres.The market study is prepared after examining vast volumes of historic data collected during an extensive research phase. Using Porters Five Force analysis and SWOT analysis, the study tries to assess the level of competition. This is complemented with a host of industry-best quantitative tools and supported by qualitative methods, the report provides projection and estimations in the Global and United States UTV Tires market. These values can be used by market participants to obtain a lucid picture of the markets growth. The views of industry leaders and opinion leaders in various countries presented herein is a highlight of the report.Table of Contents1 Methodology and Data Source1.1 Methodology/Research Approach1.1.1 Research Programs/Design1.1.2 Market Size Estimation1.1.3 Market Breakdown and Data Triangulation1.2 Data Source1.3 Disclaimer2 UTV Tires Market Overview2.1 UTV Tires Product Overview2.2 UTV Tires Market Segment by Type2.3 Global UTV Tires Product Segment by Type2.3.1 Global UTV Tires Sales (K Units) and Growth (%) by Types (2012, 2016 and 2022)2.3.2 Global UTV Tires Sales (K Units) and Market Share (%) by Types (2012-2017)2.3.3 Global UTV Tires Revenue (Million USD) and Market Share (%) by Types (2012-2017)2.3.4 Global UTV Tires Price (USD/Unit) by Type (2012-2017)2.4 United States UTV Tires Product Segment by TypeAvail Discount @3 UTV Tires Application/End Users3.1 UTV Tires Segment by Application/End Users3.2 Global UTV Tires Product Segment by Application3.2.1 Global UTV Tires Sales (K Units) and CGAR (%) by Applications (2012, 2016 and 2022)3.2.2 Global UTV Tires Sales (K Units) and Market Share (%) by Applications (2012-2017)3.3 United States UTV Tires Product Segment by Application3.3.1 United States UTV Tires Sales (K Units) and CGAR (%) by Applications (2012, 2016 and 2022)3.3.2 United States UTV Tires Sales (K Units) and Market Share (%) by Applications (2012-2017)4 UTV Tires Market Status and Outlook by Regions4.1 Global Market Status and Outlook by Regions4.1.1 Global UTV Tires Market Size and CAGR by Regions (2012, 2016 and 2022)4.2 Global UTV Tires Sales and Revenue by Regions4.2.1 Global UTV Tires Sales (K Units) and Market Share (%) by Regions (2012-2017)4.2.2 Global UTV Tires Revenue (Million USD) and Market Share (%) by Regions (2012-2017)4.2.3 Global UTV Tires Sales (K Units), Revenue (Million USD), Price (USD/Unit) and Gross Margin (%) (2012-2017)4.2.4 North America UTV Tires Sales (K Units), Revenue (Million USD), Price (USD/Unit) and Gross Margin (%) (2012-2017)4.2.5 Europe UTV Tires Sales (K Units), Revenue (Million USD), Price (USD/Unit) and Gross Margin (%) (2012-2017)4.2.6 Asia-Pacific UTV Tires Sales (K Units), Revenue (Million USD), Price (USD/Unit) and Gross Margin (%) (2012-2017)4.2.7 South America UTV Tires Sales (K Units), Revenue (Million USD), Price (USD/Unit) and Gross Margin (2012-2017)List of Tables and FiguresTable Research Programs/Design for This ReportFigure Bottom-up and Top-down Approaches for This ReportFigure Global UTV Tires Revenue (Million USD) Status and Outlook (2012-2022)Figure United States UTV Tires Revenue (Million USD) Status and Outlook (2012-2022)Table Global UTV Tires Sales (K Units) and Growth Rate (%) Comparison by Types (2012, 2016 and 2022)Table United States UTV Tires Sales (K Units) and Growth Rate (%) Comparison by Types (2012, 2016 and 2022)Table United States UTV Tires Sales (K Units) Comparison by Applications (2012-2022)Table Global UTV Tires Sales (K Units), Revenue (Million USD), Price (USD/Unit) and Gross Margin (%) (2012-2017)Table North America UTV Tires Sales (K Units), Revenue (Million USD), Price (USD/Unit) and Gross Margin (%) (2012-2017)Table Europe UTV Tires Sales (K Units), Revenue (Million USD), Price (USD/Unit) and Gross Margin (%) (2012-2017)Table Asia-Pacific UTV Tires Sales (K Units), Revenue (Million USD), Price (USD/Unit) and Gross Margin (%) (2012-2017)About Us:QYResearchReports.com delivers the latest strategic market intelligence to build a successful business footprint in China. Our syndicated and customized research reports provide companies with vital background information of the market and in-depth analysis on the Chinese trade and investment framework, which directly affects their business operations. Reports from QYResearchReports.com feature valuable recommendations on how to navigate in the extremely unpredictable yet highly attractive Chinese market.Contact Us:1820 AvenueM Suite #1047Brooklyn, NY 11230United StatesToll Free: 866-997-4948 (USA-CANADA)Tel: +1-518-621-2074Email: sales@qyresearchreports.com 2018-2025 Global and United States Central Air-conditioning Market Status and Forecast by Players, Types and Applications QYResearchReports https://www.qyresearchreports.com/sample/sample.php?rep_id=1510657&type=S https://www.qyresearchreports.com/sample/sample.php?rep_id=1510657&type=D Qyresearchreports include new market research report "2018-2025 Central Air-conditioning Report on Global and United States Market,Status and Forecast,by Players,Types and Applications" to its huge collection of research reports.The Global and United States market for Central Air-conditioning has been researched on with every detail in the publication with increased emphasis on various significant factors such as growth drivers, restraints and market opportunities. Each of the elements that pertain to the shaping of the market dynamics that has been analyzed and studied in detail by the research analysts, so as to offer the best and most evaluative and exhaustive study to the report buyers. The snapshot or the executive summary that has been provided in the market intelligence study has been designed in such a way so as to give a quick overview of the market for receiving information on the go. This could help readers with hands-on data needed to make quick decisions anytime during their growth journey in the market.To Download Free Sample Report with TOC:This report studies the Central Air-conditioning market status and outlook of global and United States, from angles of players, regions, product types and end industries; this report analyzes the top players in global and United States market, and splits the Central Air-conditioning market by product type and application/end industries.The Asia-Pacific will occupy for more market share in following years, especially in China, also fast growing India and Southeast Asia regions.North America, especially the United States, will still play an important role which cannot be ignored. Any changes from United States might affect the development trend of Central Air-conditioning.The major players in global and United States market, includingDaikinYork International CorporationCarrierTraneMitsubishiHitachiGreeAirwell GroupLennoxThe study of market segmentations that has been offered with the publication that explores some of the most significant categories of the Global and United States Central Air-conditioning market is deemed significant for the growth of industry participants. All of the segments that have been studied elaborately in the said publication have been deeply evaluated with assistance from best of the research techniques. The analysts have dissected each of the segments and have shed light on vital factors that influence the growth of the various segments. Using this crucial information, market players could rightly shape their business plans in favor of the betterment of their growth in the world market. Segments that have been analyzed in the publication could be related to product, end use, application, and geography.A group of experienced analysts who have prepared the said report delves deep into the various factors that hinder or fuel the Global and United States market for Central Air-conditioning. It also discovers and mentions the important trends that are emerging in the said market. Banking upon all these information that has been gathered so far, it has come up with the best course of action for all the stake holders of the market.Table of Contents1 Methodology and Data Source1.1 Methodology/Research Approach1.1.1 Research Programs/Design1.1.2 Market Size Estimation1.1.3 Market Breakdown and Data Triangulation1.2 Data Source1.3 Disclaimer2 Central Air-conditioning Market Overview2.1 Central Air-conditioning Product Overview2.2 Central Air-conditioning Market Segment by Type2.3 Global Central Air-conditioning Product Segment by Type2.3.1 Global Central Air-conditioning Sales (K Units) and Growth (%) by Type (2013, 2017 and 2025)2.3.2 Global Central Air-conditioning Sales (K Units) and Market Share (%) by Type (2013-2018)2.3.3 Global Central Air-conditioning Revenue (Million USD) and Market Share (%) by Type (2013-2018)2.3.4 Global Central Air-conditioning Price (USD/Unit) by Type (2013-2018)2.4 United States Central Air-conditioning Product Segment by TypeCheck Discount For This Report @3 Central Air-conditioning Application/End Users3.1 Central Air-conditioning Segment by Application/End Users3.2 Global Central Air-conditioning Product Segment by Application3.2.1 Global Central Air-conditioning Sales (K Units) and CGAR (%) by Application (2013, 2017 and 2025)3.2.2 Global Central Air-conditioning Sales (K Units) and Market Share (%) by Application (2013-2018)3.3 United States Central Air-conditioning Product Segment by Application3.3.1 United States Central Air-conditioning Sales (K Units) and CGAR (%) by Application (2013, 2017 and 2025)3.3.2 United States Central Air-conditioning Sales (K Units) and Market Share (%) by Application (2013-2018)4 Central Air-conditioning Market Status and Outlook by Regions4.1 Global Market Status and Outlook by Regions4.1.1 Global Central Air-conditioning Market Size and CAGR by Regions (2013, 2017 and 2025)4.2 Global Central Air-conditioning Sales and Revenue by Regions4.2.1 Global Central Air-conditioning Sales (K Units) and Market Share (%) by Regions (2013-2018)4.2.2 Global Central Air-conditioning Revenue (Million USD) and Market Share (%) by Regions (2013-2018)4.2.3 Global Central Air-conditioning Sales (K Units), Revenue (Million USD), Price (USD/Unit) and Gross Margin (%)(2013-2018)4.2.4 North America Central Air-conditioning Sales (K Units), Revenue (Million USD), Price (USD/Unit) and Gross Margin (%)(2013-2018)4.2.5 Europe Central Air-conditioning Sales (K Units), Revenue (Million USD), Price (USD/Unit) and Gross Margin (%)(2013-2018)4.2.6 Asia-Pacific Central Air-conditioning Sales (K Units), Revenue (Million USD), Price (USD/Unit) and Gross Margin (%)(2013-2018)4.2.7 South America Central Air-conditioning Sales (K Units), Revenue (Million USD), Price (USD/Unit) and Gross Margin (2013-2018)5 Global Central Air-conditioning Market Competition by Players/Manufacturers5.1 Global Central Air-conditioning Sales (K Units) and Market Share by Players (2013-2018)5.2 Global Central Air-conditioning Revenue (Million USD) and Share by Players (2013-2018)5.3 Global Central Air-conditioning Average Price (USD/Unit) by Players (2013-2018)5.4 Global Top Players Central Air-conditioning Manufacturing Base Distribution, Sales Area, Product Types5.5 Central Air-conditioning Market Competitive Situation and Trends5.5.1 Central Air-conditioning Market Concentration Rate5.5.2 Global Central Air-conditioning Market Share (%) of Top 3 and Top 5 PlayersAbout Us:QYResearchReports.com delivers the latest strategic market intelligence to build a successful business footprint in China. Our syndicated and customized research reports provide companies with vital background information of the market and in-depth analysis on the Chinese trade and investment framework, which directly affects their business operations. Reports from QYResearchReports.com feature valuable recommendations on how to navigate in the extremely unpredictable yet highly attractive Chinese market.Contact Us:1820 AvenueM Suite #1047Brooklyn, NY 11230United StatesToll Free: 866-997-4948 (USA-CANADA)Tel: +1-518-621-2074Email: sales@qyresearchreports.com Global Organic Honey Market Report 2018 with Key Manufacturers : Glorybee Inc., Madhava Honey QYResearchReports https://www.qyresearchreports.com/sample/sample.php?rep_id=1568955&type=S https://www.qyresearchreports.com/sample/sample.php?rep_id=1568955&type=D Qyresearchreports include new market research report "Global Organic Honey Market Professional Survey Report 2018" to its huge collection of research reports.The global Organic Honey market has been detailed in an elaborative manner in this report so that readers could gain complete knowledge of some of the important aspects vital for growth. The analysts who have prepared the report have implemented latest research methodologies to leave no stone unturned when studying the market. They have made an attempt to cover most of the significant growth factors that could help players to ensure a strong rise in the market. With that being said, it is also critical to gain an understanding about factors that could hamper the demand for Organic Honey in the coming years. In this regard, the report has done a great job of studying growth restraints and how players could effectively face the challenges when functioning in the market.Get Free Research Summary of the Report:This report studies Organic Honey in Global market, especially in North America, China, Europe, Southeast Asia, Japan and India, with production, revenue, consumption, import and export in these regions, from 2013 to 2018, and forecast to 2025.This report focuses on top manufacturers in global market, with production, price, revenue and market share for each manufacturer, coveringGlorybee Inc.Little Bee ImpexMadhava HoneyWholesome SweetenersY.S. Eco Bee FarmsNorth Dallas Honey CompanyHeavenly OrganicsWedderspoon Organic Holdings,Market opportunities for Organic Honey have been shed light upon by the analysts with a view to help players to make a comeback or resist the effects of restraining factors that may be prevailing in the industry. When it comes to market segmentation, the analysts have closely segregated the market into different segments and evaluated each segment for growth opportunities. All of the segments studied in the report have been assessed based on their market shares and other important aspects. There may be segments based on product, application, and of course, region.Regional segmentation of any market could be quite crucial for players to read potential prospects and how they could make use of the available prospects in different parts of the world. The competitive landscape of the global Organic Honey market has also been examined to understand its nature and trends expected to take shape in the foreseeable future. On the whole, the report could come out as a brilliant guideline to devise powerful strategies and gain a strong foothold in the market.Table of Contents1 Industry Overview of Organic Honey1.1 Definition and Specifications of Organic Honey1.1.1 Definition of Organic Honey1.1.2 Specifications of Organic Honey1.2 Classification of Organic Honey1.3 Applications of Organic Honey1.4 Market Segment by Regions2 Manufacturing Cost Structure Analysis of Organic Honey2.1 Raw Material and Suppliers2.2 Manufacturing Cost Structure Analysis of Organic Honey2.3 Manufacturing Process Analysis of Organic Honey2.4 Industry Chain Structure of Organic HoneyPlease click the link to avail discount on this report @3 Technical Data and Manufacturing Plants Analysis of Organic Honey3.1 Capacity and Commercial Production Date of Global Organic Honey Major Manufacturers in 20173.2 Manufacturing Plants Distribution of Global Organic Honey Major Manufacturers in 20173.3 R&D Status and Technology Source of Global Organic Honey Major Manufacturers in 20173.4 Raw Materials Sources Analysis of Global Organic Honey Major Manufacturers in 20174 Global Organic Honey Overall Market Overview4.1 2013-2018E Overall Market Analysis4.2 Capacity Analysis4.2.1 2013-2018E Global Organic Honey Capacity and Growth Rate Analysis4.2.2 2017 Organic Honey Capacity Analysis (Company Segment)4.3 Sales Analysis4.3.1 2013-2018E Global Organic Honey Sales and Growth Rate Analysis4.3.2 2017 Organic Honey Sales Analysis (Company Segment)4.4 Sales Price Analysis4.4.1 2013-2018E Global Organic Honey Sales Price4.4.2 2017 Organic Honey Sales Price Analysis (Company Segment)6 Global 2013-2018E Organic Honey Segment Market Analysis (by Type)6.1 Global 2013-2018E Organic Honey Sales by Type6.2 Different Types of Organic Honey Product Interview Price Analysis6.3 Different Types of Organic Honey Product Driving Factors Analysis6.3.1 by Types of Organic Honey Growth Driving Factor Analysis6.3.2 by Packaging Type of Organic Honey Growth Driving Factor Analysis7 Global 2013-2018E Organic Honey Segment Market Analysis (by Application)7.1 Global 2013-2018E Organic Honey Consumption by Application7.2 Different Application of Organic Honey Product Interview Price Analysis7.3 Different Application of Organic Honey Product Driving Factors Analysis7.3.1 Cosmetic & Personal Care of Organic Honey Growth Driving Factor Analysis7.3.2 Food & Beverage of Organic Honey Growth Driving Factor Analysis7.3.3 Pharmaceuticals & Nutraceuticals of Organic Honey Growth Driving Factor AnalysisAbout Us:QYResearchReports.com delivers the latest strategic market intelligence to build a successful business footprint in China. Our syndicated and customized research reports provide companies with vital background information of the market and in-depth analysis on the Chinese trade and investment framework, which directly affects their business operations. Reports from QYResearchReports.com feature valuable recommendations on how to navigate in the extremely unpredictable yet highly attractive Chinese market.Contact Us:1820 AvenueM Suite #1047Brooklyn, NY 11230United StatesToll Free: 866-997-4948 (USA-CANADA)Tel: +1-518-621-2074Email: sales@qyresearchreports.com Global Aerospace Coatings Market Steadily Expanding At A CAGR Of 5.8% Between 2017 And 2025, Poised To Value US$2,532.9 Mn Aerospace Coatings Market https://www.researchmoz.us/enquiry.php?type=S&repid=1581074 https://www.researchmoz.us/aerospace-coatings-market-global-industry-analysis-size-share-growth-trends-and-forecast-2017-2025-report.html/toc https://www.researchmoz.us/enquiry.php?type=E&repid=1581074 https://www.researchmoz.us/ http://bit.ly/1TBmnVG Researchmoz added Most up-to-date research on "Aerospace Coatings Market - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends, and Forecast 2017 - 2025" to its huge collection of research reports.Aerospace Coatings are used to coat the interior and external structural components of aircraft. Innovative technologies and industry friendly regulations implemented by various governments fuel the expansion of aerospace coatings market. Expansion of the aerospace coatings market can be ascribed to the advancements made in the defense and space sector. However, commercial and business aircraft is the key factor driving the global aerospace coatings market.Increasing air passenger traffic, emerging economies and growing number of low cost carriers are expected to boost the aerospace coatings market in the future. Recent trend of spending heavily on military and space programs are expected to fuel the growth of the aerospace market in near future.To Get Sample Copy of Report visit @Aerospace coatings are primarily used in aircraft parts such as horizontal stabilizers, vertical fins, wings fairings, and engine cowlings. In the military application segment, coatings are employed in radar panels, avionic racking and rotor blade boxes. Fleet expansion activities, increased competition among global aircraft leaders such as Boeing, expansion of low cost carriers and clause relaxation are the key drivers of the aerospace coatings market. The commonly used resins in the aerospace coating applications include polyurethane, epoxy, acrylics and other resins such as fluoropolymers and polyesters. Among the various technologies, water-based technologies are anticipated to surpass the solvent-based technology in the upcoming years. Aerospace coatings market is heavily dependent on both OEM and MRO segments. With the introduction of new aircraft, OEM is gaining popularity across the globe. The lions share of the aerospace coatings market is consumed by the commercial & business aircraft. However, increased spending on the military sector is anticipated to propel the expansion of aerospace coatings market in the near future.The study provides comprehensive view of the Aerospace Coatings market by dividing it into resin type, technology, user, end-user and geography.Global Aerospace Coatings Market: Scope of the StudyThe report estimates and forecasts the Aerospace Coatings market on the global, regional, and country levels. The study provides forecast between 2017 and 2025 based on volume (tons) and revenue (US$ Mn) with 2016 as the base year. The report comprises an exhaustive value chain analysis for each of the product segments. It provides a comprehensive view of the market. Value chain analysis also offers detailed information about value addition at each stage. The study includes drivers and restraints for the Aerospace Coatings market along with their impact on demand during the forecast period. The study also provides key market indicators affecting the growth of the market. The report analyzes opportunities in the Aerospace Coatings market on the global and regional level. Drivers, restraints, and opportunities mentioned in the report are justified through quantitative and qualitative data. These have been verified through primary and secondary resources. Furthermore, the report analyzes substitute analysis of Aerospace Coatings market and global average price trend analysis.The report includes Porters Five Forces Model to determine the degree of competition in the Aerospace Coatings market. It comprises qualitative write-up on market attractiveness analysis, wherein products, processes, applications and countries have been analyzed based on attractiveness for each region. Growth rate, market size, raw Process availability, profit margin, impact strength, Application, competition, and other factors (such as environmental and legal) have been evaluated in order to derive the general attractiveness of the market. The report comprises price trend analysis for Aerospace Coatings between 2017 and 2025.Get Complete TOC With Tables and Figures @Global Aerospace Coatings Market: Research MethodologySecondary research sources that were typically referred to include, but were not limited to company websites, financial reports, annual reports, investor presentations, broker reports, and SEC filings. Other sources such as internal and external proprietary databases, statistical databases and market reports, news articles, national government documents, and webcasts specific to companies operating in the market have also been referred for the report.In-depth interviews and discussions with wide range of key opinion leaders and industry participants were conducted to compile this research report. Primary research represents the bulk of research efforts, supplemented by extensive secondary research. Key players product literature, annual reports, press releases, and relevant documents were reviewed for competitive analysis and market understanding. This helped in validating and strengthening secondary research findings. Primary research further helped in developing the analysis teams expertise and market understanding.Global Aerospace Coatings Market: Regional OutlookRegional segmentation includes the current and forecast of Aerospace Coatings in North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America, and Middle East & Africa (MEA). Key countries such as the U.S., France, Germany, the U.K., China, India, ASEAN, South Africa, Mexico, and Brazil have been included in the study. Market segmentation includes amount of Aerospace Coatings consumed by product, process, and application in all the regions and countries.Global Aerospace Coatings Market: Competitive OutlookThe report covers detailed competitive outlook that includes market share and profiles of key players operating in the global market. Key players in the aerospace coatings market include PPG Industries, Inc, The Sherwin-Williams Company, Akzo Nobel N.V, Hentzen Coatings Inc, Mankiewicz Gebr. & Co etc. Company profiles include attributes such as company overview, number of employees, brand overview, key competitors, business overview, business strategies, recent/key developments, acquisitions, and financial overview (wherever applicable).The Aerospace Coatings Market has been divided into the following segments.Aerospace Coatings Market Resin Analysis- Polyurethane- Epoxy- Acrylics- OthersAerospace Coatings Market Technology Analysis- Water-based- Solvent-based- OthersAerospace Coatings Market User Analysis- OEM- MROAerospace Coatings Market End User Analysis- Commercial & Business Aircraft- Military & Space- HelicoptersAerospace Coatings Market Regional AnalysisNorth America- U.S.- CanadaLatin America- Brazil- Mexico- Rest of Latin AmericaMake an Enquiry of this report @Europe- Germany- France- U.K.- Spain- Italy- Rest of EuropeAsia Pacific- China- Japan- India- ASEAN- Rest of Asia PacificMiddle East & Africa- GCC- South Africa- Rest of Middle East & AfricaAbout ResearchMozResearchMoz is the one stop online destination to find and buy market research reports & Industry Analysis. We fulfill all your research needs spanning across industry verticals with our huge collection of market research reports. We provide our services to all sizes of organizations and across all industry verticals and markets. Our Research Coordinators have in-depth knowledge of reports as well as publishers and will assist you in making an informed decision by giving you unbiased and deep insights on which reports will satisfy your needs at the best price.ResearchMozState Tower,90 State Street,Suite 700,Albany NY - 12207United StatesEmail: sales@researchmoz.usWebsite @Tel: 866-997-4948 (Us-Canada Toll Free)Tel: +1-518-621-2074Follow us on LinkedIn @ Nanobots Market 2018 Major Participants: Xidex Corp., Zymergen Inc., Synthace Limited, Ginkgo Bioworks. Other players are: Advanced Diamond Technologies https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/sample_request/1301 https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/reports/nanobots-market-1301 https://www.marketresearchfuture.com/check-discount/1301 Report Summary:The, Nanobots Market inquire about report is developing with the quick pace; chiefly due the prospering Healthcare Sector. As per a current report distributed by the Market Research Future, The , Nanobots Industry Research report is blasting and anticipated that would pick up unmistakable quality over the conjecture time frame. The Market is anticipated to exhibit a colossal development by 2023, outperforming its past development records as far as esteem and volume.TRY FREE SAMPLE REPORT @Global Nanobots Market - Regional Analysis:The Americas dominate the global nanobots market owing to the presence of large number of companies in countries like United States. Increasing prevalence of various types of acute and chronic diseases also propel the need of the development of the novel and effective diagnostic methodologies and treatment methods. Continuous development in the advanced robotics research has also impacted on the growth of the nanobots market. Europe accounts for the second largest market for the nanobots, which is followed by Asia Pacific. European region has captured a significant share in the global nanobots market owing to the large patient pool and developing healthcare infrastructure, and increased government support for the research and development in the heathcare sector. Asia Pacific is the fastest growing market owing to the huge population base, increasing prevalence of cardiovascular diseases, increased carncer cases, rapidly developing economies and presence of huge opportunity for the growth of the market. The Middle East & Africa has the least market share due to the presence of the poor economies in Africa region.Global Nanobots Market - Overview:According to a recent study published by the Market Research Future analysts, the global nanobots market is growing at a rapid rate; mainly due to the continuous developments in the robotics, emergence of the advanced robotics as a tool in the healthcare.Nanobots are used in various fields for different tasks to be performed thus reducing human errors. The implementation of this of this technology in healthcare is increasing from last few years. Technological advancement in healthcare has boundless opportunities helping patients to get treated with less harmful and reliable technology and advanced healthcare equipments. Applications of these nano and micro-machines are nearly endless. Some of the most exciting opportunities for the nanobots market are its use in the cancer treatment with the purpose of identifying and destroying cancer cells more accurately and effectively. Use of nanobots as targeted drug delivery mechanisms for disease control and prevention. Creating nanoparticles that gather in certain tissues and then scanning the body with a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) could help highlight problems such as diabetes. Nanobots can be used to develop new sensing devices to monitor and measure the world around us. According to experts, nanobots are believed to have such tremendous potential, that nanobots will allow us to connect our biological nervous system to the cloud by the end of next decade.On the other hand, there are some obstacles in this market such as high costGlobal Nanobots Market - Competitive Analysis:The global market consist of players such as Xidex Corp. (Texas), Zymergen Inc. (U.S), Synthace Limited (U.K), Ginkgo Bioworks (U.S). Other players are: Advanced Diamond Technologies (U.S), and Advanced Nano Products Co Limited (South Korea). These are some of the prominent players at the forefront of competition in the global nanobots market.The market for nanobots is emerging market with rapid growth owing to the number of companies operating in this market. There are number of companies involved in the development of the products, including the devices, sensors, and accessories for the various types of nanobots.Nanobots Market is rapidly growing market with various companies that are involved in the manufacturing of different types of nanorobots such as These companies have adapted the strategies of the acquisitions, and launching of the new products in order to strive in this very big and competitive market.Xidex Corp. is a Texas based company manufacturing nanodevices. Nanobot is a nano manipulator by Xidex mainly applied in scanning electron microscope. Xidex products nanomanipulator solutions to nonscientists. Naonobot is used for sample preparation.Zymergen Inc. is a U.S based company providing solutions in biology, automation and computation. Zymergen involves integration of biology with machine learning. Automation involves manufacturing of robots to test thousands of strains of bacteria. Computation involves the use of integrated data collection system in which the instruments and sensors feed data into the software management system directly from the labs.Synthace Limited has a product named Antha which is an operating system for computing in labs. The technology is used to run biological experimentation and manufacturing processes reprogram as well as reprogram robots in very less span of time. Synthace was awarded as Technology Pioneer by World Economic Forum in June 2016.of the development, regulatory measures for the use of the nanobots in integration with the medical devices. All these factors may hinder the growth of the nanobots market to an extent.ACCESS FULL REPORT @Segments:Global Nanobots market has been segmented on the basis of type of nanorobots which includes Microbivore nanorobots, Respirocyte nanorobots, Clottocyte nanorobots and Cellular repair nanorobots. Other types of Nanobots include nanoswimmers and bacteria powered robots. On the basis of application the market is segmented into Nano Medicine, Biomedical, Mechanical and other applications.Table Of Contents:Chapter 1. Report PrologueChapter 2. Market Introduction2.1 Introduction2.2 Scope Of Study2.3 Research Objective2.4 Assumptions & Limitations2.4.1 Assumptions2.4.2 LimitationsChapter 3. Research Methodology3.1 Research Process3.2 Primary Research3.3 Secondary ResearchChapter 4. Market Dynamics4.1 Drivers4.1.1 Increasing Use Of Nanobots In Nano Medicine4.1.2 Increasing Awareness Of Healthcare Professional About Use Of Nanobots In Healthcare4.2 Restraints4.2.1 Training For Healthcare Users Of Nanobots May Take A Long TimeChapter 5. Market Factor Analysis5.1 Porters Five Forces Model5.1.1 Bargaining Power Of Suppliers5.1.2 Bargaining Power Of Buyers5.1.3 Threat Of New Entrants5.1.4 Threat Of Substitutes5.1.5 Intensity Of Rivalry5.2 Supply Chain AnalysisCONTINUEDAVAIL AMAZING DISCOUNT ON REPPRT @About Market Research Future:At Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.In order to stay updated with technology and work process of the industry, MRFR often plans & conducts meet with the industry experts and industrial visits for its research analyst members.Contact:Market Research FutureOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, Hadapsar,Pune 411028Maharashtra, India+1 646 845 9312Email: salesteam@marketresearchfuture.com Opportunity In The North America Yogurt Market Is Expected To Be Worth US$14.59 Bn By 2024 To Surge At A CAGR Of 3.0% Yogurts Market https://www.researchmoz.us/enquiry.php?type=S&repid=197473 https://www.researchmoz.us/yogurt-market-north-america-scenario-industry-analysis-size-share-growth-trends-and-forecast-2013-2019-report.html/toc https://www.researchmoz.us/enquiry.php?type=E&repid=197473 https://www.researchmoz.us/ http://bit.ly/1TBmnVG Researchmoz added Most up-to-date research on "Yogurts Market - North America Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends, and Forecast 2016 - 2024" to its huge collection of research reports.Yogurt is a diary product. Yogurt is produced by fermentation of milk by bacterial treatment. The bacteria in the presence of lactose in milk, produces lactic acid. The lactic acid produced by the bacterial treatment reacts with milk protein to impart the texture and taste of yogurts. Yogurt is generally produced from cows milk as it is readily available all across the world. Non-dairy yogurts are also gaining popularity among consumers. Non-dairy yogurts are prepared from non-dairy sources such as plant oils. Soy oil and coconut oil are the major sources of non-dairy yogurts. However, dairy based yogurts are by far the largest category of yogurts. Yogurts have steady demand amongst consumers from the advent of the dairy industry. In the last couple of decades the yogurt market has experienced multifold growth owing to product diversification and improved packaging leading to increased shelf life.To Get Sample Copy of Report visit @North America Yogurt Market: SegmentationTraditional yogurt and Greek yogurts are by far the major product types in the North American yogurt market. Traditional and Greek yogurt together accounted for almost 75% of the total yogurt market demand, by revenue, in 2015. Since the last decade, the rising demand of Greek yogurt has been a driving force for the growth of the demand for yogurt in North America. Greek yogurt accounted for only 1-2% of the market share in the U.S. yogurt market in 2004. Owing to the high degree of penetration in the U.S. market, Greek yogurts accounted for almost 40% of the yogurts market in the U.S. in 2015.Yogurt products are sold in several major packaging containers, namely: cups, pouch, tubs and jars. Out of all these packaged containers, cups hold the largest market share in 2015 accounting for almost 70% of the North American yogurt market. Cups and pouch are the easy to use and easy to dispose packaged containers. Packaging plays a crucial role in the success of a desert items such as yogurt. Hence companies are investing considerable amount on the development and diversification of packaging materials to reduce cost, increase product attractiveness among consumer and also to increase the shelf life of the packaged products.North America Yogurt Market: Regional OutlookBy geography, the North America yogurt market is segmented into U.S. and Rest of North America. Per person per year yogurt consumption in Canada is substantially higher with respect to the U.S. However, the higher population and presence of major players in the U.S. is driving the U.S. yogurts market. Per person per year yogurt consumption in U.S. was 7.7 in 2015. Whereas, per person per year yogurt consumption of yogurt was recorded at 11 kg in 2015. Low per person per year consumption of yogurt is expected to be a major restrain for the growth of the North America yogurt market demand.Get Complete TOC With Tables and Figures @North America Yogurt Market: ScopeFor better understanding of the market dynamics, the report also highlights on the company market share of major players in 2015 versus the market share in 2016. In addition, the report also provides detailed analysis on per person per year in major countries across the world. Market attractiveness analysis of yogurts market by the product types has also been incorporated in the study, in addition to the drivers, restraints and opportunity in the North America yogurts market.Key Players Mentioned in the Report are:The report provides company market share analysis of the various industry participants. Key players have also been profiled on the basis of company overview, financial overview, business strategies and recent developments. Major market participants profiled in this report are Dannon Inc. (U.S.), Fage International S.A (Luxembourg), Chobani, LLC (U.S.), Yoplait USA, INC (U.S.), Noosa Yogurt LLC (U.S.), The Icelandic Milk and Skyr Corporation (U.S.), Stonyfield Farm (U.S.), Annie's Homegrown (U.S.), AtlantaFresh (U.S.) and Berkeley Farms (U.S.) among others.North America yogurt market can be segmented as follows;-North America Yogurt Market, by Product Type- Traditional Yogurt- Australian Yogurt- Icelandic Yogurt- Greek Yogurt- Non-Dairy Yogurt- Kids Yogurt- Other YogurtsNorth America Yogurt Market, by Packaged Containers- Cups- Pouch- Tubs- BottlesMake an Enquiry of this report @North America Yogurt Market, by Geography- North America- U.S.- Rest of North AmericaAbout ResearchMozResearchMoz is the one stop online destination to find and buy market research reports & Industry Analysis. We fulfill all your research needs spanning across industry verticals with our huge collection of market research reports. We provide our services to all sizes of organizations and across all industry verticals and markets. Our Research Coordinators have in-depth knowledge of reports as well as publishers and will assist you in making an informed decision by giving you unbiased and deep insights on which reports will satisfy your needs at the best price.ResearchMozState Tower,90 State Street,Suite 700,Albany NY - 12207United StatesEmail: sales@researchmoz.usWebsite @Tel: 866-997-4948 (Us-Canada Toll Free)Tel: +1-518-621-2074Follow us on LinkedIn @ PARP (Poly ADP-Ribose Polymerase) Inhibitor Market 2018 - Global Industry size, Shares, Trends, Growth, Analysis and Forecast 2025 PARP (Poly ADP-Ribose Polymerase) Inhibitor Market https://www.researchmoz.us/enquiry.php?type=S&repid=1576779 https://www.researchmoz.us/global-parp-poly-adpribose-polymerase-inhibitor-market-industry-analysis-outlook-20182025-report.html/toc https://www.researchmoz.us/ http://bit.ly/1TBmnVG Researchmoz added Most up-to-date research on "Global PARP (Poly ADP-Ribose Polymerase) Inhibitor Market: Industry Analysis & Outlook (2018-2025)" to its huge collection of research reports.PARP means poly (adenosine diphosphate [ADP] -ribose) polymerase. It is a family of 17 enzymes that combine several (poly) units of ADP-ribose in a chain (the PAR chain) and transfers them to the target proteins. This helps to restore DNA when it is damaged. DNA can be damaged by many factors, including exposure to UV rays, radiation, some anti-cancer drugs or other substances in the environment. PARP inhibitors block an enzyme critical to the repair of single stranded breaks in DNA. Inhibition of this DNA repair enzyme can lead to cell death, particularly in cancer cells that carry deficiency in other DNA repair pathways.To Get Sample Copy of Report visit @PARP inhibitors play an effective maintenance role in current cancer-combating strategies with its superior effect to that of existing ovarian cancer treatment. Currently, Talazoparib and Veliparib are in Phase III clinical trials and Rucaparib, Olaparib and Niraparib are approved PARP drugs which are currently present in the market for ovarian cancer. PARP inhibitors improve progression-free survival in women with recurrent ovarian cancer, sensitive to platinum.The U.S. is the major market of PARP inhibitor supported by PARPi for ovarian cancer in the market. The U.S. region is likely to experience further growth of PARP inhibitor market with upcoming PARP inhibitors and growing cases of cancer.The global PARP inhibitor market is expected to grow in future due to increasing ageing population, rising cancer incidences, rise in health expenditure and improving economic conditions and vast unmet medical need. Key trends in this market include a combination of PARP and immuno therapy, increasing awareness, development of biomarkers and strong research and development efforts. However, there are some factors which can hinder the market growth including side effects, resistance to PARP inhibitors and regulatory challenges.The report Global PARP Inhibitor Market: Industry Analysis & Outlook (2018-2025) by Koncept Analytics provides an extensive research and detailed analysis of the present market along with future outlook. The report discusses the major growth drivers and challenges of the market, covering the U.S. and Europe region along with the global market. The four major players: Tesaro Inc., Clovis Oncology, AstraZeneca and Abbvie Inc. are being profiled along with their key financials and strategies for growth.Get Complete TOC With Tables and Figures @About ResearchMozResearchMoz is the one stop online destination to find and buy market research reports & Industry Analysis. We fulfill all your research needs spanning across industry verticals with our huge collection of market research reports. We provide our services to all sizes of organizations and across all industry verticals and markets. Our Research Coordinators have in-depth knowledge of reports as well as publishers and will assist you in making an informed decision by giving you unbiased and deep insights on which reports will satisfy your needs at the best price.ResearchMozState Tower,90 State Street,Suite 700,Albany NY - 12207United StatesEmail: sales@researchmoz.usWebsite @Tel: 866-997-4948 (Us-Canada Toll Free)Tel: +1-518-621-2074Follow us on LinkedIn @ Blood Glucose Device Market, Users Global Forecast, SMBG (Test Strips, Lancet, Meter), Countries (USA, Europe, etc) & Companies : Researchmoz Blood Glucose Device Market https://www.researchmoz.us/enquiry.php?type=S&repid=1572622 https://www.researchmoz.us/blood-glucose-device-market-users-global-forecast-smbg-test-strips-lancet-meter-countries-usa-europe-etc-companies-report.html/toc https://www.researchmoz.us/enquiry.php?type=E&repid=1572622 https://www.researchmoz.us/ http://bit.ly/1TBmnVG Researchmoz added Most up-to-date research on "Blood Glucose Device Market, Users Global Forecast, SMBG (Test Strips, Lancet, Meter), Countries (USA, Europe, etc) & Companies" to its huge collection of research reports.Blood Glucose Device Market will reach to USD 19 Billion by the year 2024, due to rising income level, growing diabetes population and innovative marketing campaign of companies. United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Spain, Italy, Russia & China are the dominating countries in the global blood glucose device market. It is anticipated that global SMBG users will grow to 19 percent by 2024, from the 2017 SMBG users.China is the Leading Country in the Diabetes Mellitus PopulationChina is the leading countries in the world diabetes mellitus population. Diabetes prevalence in china is growing dramatically from 1 percent in 1980 to over 10 percent in 2017. Growing income and Changing lifestyle is the major reasons for the growth of diabetic mellitus population in China. It is projected that China Diabetic Population is likely to cross over 125 Million by 2024.To Get Sample Copy of Report visit @Reimbursement is driving force for European & North America Blood Glucose Device MarketAlmost all countries in the European & North American regions have some form of diabetes reimbursement policy in their diabetes prevention and control programs. Diabetes patients can get this reimbursement on purchase of medicine, glucose meter, test strips or lancets, depending on the countries reimbursement policy. It helps to drive Blood Glucose Device market as more people can get access to Self Monitoring Blood Glucose (SMBG) devices through this program and take the preventive measurements.Local Players are giving tough competition to Multi-national CompaniesCompanies market share studied in the report are as follows LifeScan Inc., Roche Diagnostic, Abbott Laboratories & Bayer HealthCare.Blood Glucose Device Market, Users Global Forecast, SMBG Components (Test Strips, Lancet, Meter) of 15 Countries (USA, Europe, BRIC, Australia, Kuwait) & Companies (Roche Diagnostic, LifeScan Inc. Bayer HealthCare, Abbott Laboratories) analyzes the worldwide market for, blood glucose test strips market, blood glucose lancet market and blood glucose meter market. This is the 3rd publication on Blood Glucose Device Market by Renub Research. This report studies the separate comprehensive analytics for the 15 countries: United States, European Countries (United Kingdom, Germany, Spain, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland), BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China), Australia and Kuwait. Annual estimates and forecast are provided for the period of 2018 through 2024. An eight year historic analysis is also provided for these markets. This 287 page report with 256 Figures and 12 Tables provides a complete analysis of top 15 countries of global self-monitoring blood glucose (SMBG) market.Test Strip, Lancet, Glucose Meter Market, Diabetes Population of 15 Countries covered as follows- Diabetes Population Scenario and Forecast in all 15 countries- Type 1 and Type 2 Diabetes Scenario and Forecast in all 15 countries- Blood Glucose (SMBG) Devices Users and Forecast in all 15 countries- Blood Glucose Devices (SMBG) Market and Forecast in all 15 countries- Test Strips Market and Forecast in all 15 countries- Lancet Market and Forecast in all 15 countries- Meter Market and Forecast in all 15 countriesCountries Covered in this Report:- United States- United Kingdom- Germany- Spain- Italy- Netherlands- Norway- Sweden- Switzerland- Brazil- Russia- India- China- Australia- KuwaitGet Complete TOC With Tables and Figures @Companies Revenue (Sales) from Self-Monitoring Blood Glucose (SMBG) devices have been analyzed in this report.- Roche Diagnostic- LifeScan Inc.,- Bayer HealthCare- Abbott LaboratoriesThis Report is useful for those who want to know- Worldwide as well as country specific SMBG device market, SMBG device segments (Blood Glucose Meter, Test Strips and Lancet) market- Countries Diabetes Scenario (Total Number of Diabetic Mellitus Population, Type 1 & Type 2 Diabetic Population)- Countries Reimbursement Policy on Diabetic Care and SMBG Devices- Key Players SMBG business performance and their market share in world SMBG marketBlood Glucose Device Market & Forecast (SMBG) (Test Strips, Lancet, Meter) Worldwide Analysis analyzes the worldwide market for, blood glucose test strips market, blood glucose lancet market and blood glucose meter market. This is the 3rd publication on Glucose Device Market by Renub Research. This report studies separate comprehensive analytics for the 15 countries: United States, European Countries (United Kingdom, Germany, Spain, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland), BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China), Australia and Kuwait. Annual estimates and forecast are provided for the period of 2016 through 2020. A nine year historic analysis is also provided for these markets. This 269 page report with 257 Figures and 12 Tables provides a complete analysis of top 15 countries of worldwide self-monitoring blood glucose (SMBG) market.Self-Monitoring Blood Glucose (SMBG) Device Market is expected to cross over US$ 16 Billion by 2020 as incidence of diabetes is increasing dramatically. It is estimated that 642 Million people will develop the disease by 2040. This is putting pressure on governments and social institutions to take necessary steps to keep the disease in check and avoid complications in order to ensure that diabetic impact is kept to a minimum. United States is the single largest market for SMBG devices market followed by Russia and United Kingdom. However, China has the highest self-monitoring of blood glucose users compared to other countries.United States, Russia and United Kingdom together hold more than 63 percent of the total test strips market share whereas in blood glucose meter market China is the dominating country. All big players such as Roche, Bayer and Abbott Laboratories are continuously losing their market share.- Test Strip, Lancet, Glucose Meter Market, Diabetes Population of 15 Countries- Diabetes Population Scenario and Forecast in all 15 countries- Type 1 and Type 2 Diabetes Scenario and Forecast in all 15 countries- Self-Monitoring Blood Glucose (SMBG) Devices Users and Forecast in all 15 countries- Self-Monitoring Blood Glucose Devices (SMBG) Market and Forecast in all 15 countries- Blood Glucose Test Strips Market and Forecast in all 15 countries- Blood Glucose Lancet Market and Forecast in all 15 countries- Blood Glucose Meter Market and Forecast in all 15 countriesCountries Covered in this Report:- United States- United Kingdom- Germany- Spain- Italy- Netherlands- Norway- Sweden- Switzerland- Brazil- Russia- India- China- Australia- KuwaitMake an Enquiry of this report @Companies Revenue (Sales) from Self-Monitoring Blood Glucose (SMBG) devices have been analyzed in this report.- Roche Diagnostic- LifeScan Inc.,- Bayer HealthCare- Abbott LaboratoriesAbout ResearchMozResearchMoz is the one stop online destination to find and buy market research reports & Industry Analysis. We fulfill all your research needs spanning across industry verticals with our huge collection of market research reports. We provide our services to all sizes of organizations and across all industry verticals and markets. Our Research Coordinators have in-depth knowledge of reports as well as publishers and will assist you in making an informed decision by giving you unbiased and deep insights on which reports will satisfy your needs at the best price.ResearchMozState Tower,90 State Street,Suite 700,Albany NY - 12207United StatesEmail: sales@researchmoz.usWebsite @Tel: 866-997-4948 (Us-Canada Toll Free)Tel: +1-518-621-2074Follow us on LinkedIn @ Global Personal Floatation Devices (PFDs) Market Key Trends, Size, Growth, Shares And Forecast Research Report 2018 Personal Floatation Devices (PFDs) Market https://www.researchmoz.us/enquiry.php?type=S&repid=1503719 https://www.researchmoz.us/global-personal-floatation-devices-pfds-market-research-report-2018-report.html/toc https://www.researchmoz.us/ http://bit.ly/1TBmnVG Researchmoz added Most up-to-date research on "Global Personal Floatation Devices (PFDs) Market Research Report 2018" to its huge collection of research reports.In this report, the global Personal Floatation Devices (PFDs) market is valued at USD XX million in 2017 and is expected to reach USD XX million by the end of 2025, growing at a CAGR of XX% between 2017 and 2025.Geographically, this report is segmented into several key Regions, with production, consumption, revenue (million USD), market share and growth rate of Personal Floatation Devices (PFDs) in these regions, from 2013 to 2025 (forecast), coveringNorth AmericaEuropeChinaJapanSoutheast AsiaIndiaTo Get Sample Copy of Report visit @Global Personal Floatation Devices (PFDs) market competition by top manufacturers, with production, price, revenue (value) and market share for each manufacturer; the top players includingMustang SurvivalAstralSurvitec Group LimitedThe Coleman CompanyKokatatNRS (Northwest River Supplies)MTI Marine TechnologyVIKING Life-Saving EquipmentAqua Lung InternationalHarmonyJimBuoyABSOLUTE OUTDOOROBrienHansen ProtectionJohnson OutdoorsStormy LifejacketsSpinlockSeaSafe SystemsStearnsOnyxStohlquistKent Sporting GoodsPhantom AquaticsGrundensPromateOn the basis of product, this report displays the production, revenue, price, market share and growth rate of each type, primarily split intoBuoyancy Aid (Foam Core)Life jacketSurvival SuitBuoyancy CompensatorOthersOn the basis of the end users/applications, this report focuses on the status and outlook for major applications/end users, consumption (sales), market share and growth rate for each application, includingPassenger & Aircraft CrewCommercial VesselGovernment & MilitaryWater SportingOthersTable of ContentsGlobal Personal Floatation Devices (PFDs) Market Research Report 20181 Personal Floatation Devices (PFDs) Market Overview1.1 Product Overview and Scope of Personal Floatation Devices (PFDs)1.2 Personal Floatation Devices (PFDs) Segment by Type (Product Category)1.2.1 Global Personal Floatation Devices (PFDs) Production and CAGR (%) Comparison by Type (Product Category)(2013-2025)1.2.2 Global Personal Floatation Devices (PFDs) Production Market Share by Type (Product Category) in 20171.2.3 Buoyancy Aid (Foam Core)1.2.4 Life jacket1.2.5 Survival Suit1.2.6 Buoyancy Compensator1.2.7 Others1.3 Global Personal Floatation Devices (PFDs) Segment by Application1.3.1 Personal Floatation Devices (PFDs) Consumption (Sales) Comparison by Application (2013-2025)1.3.2 Passenger & Aircraft Crew1.3.3 Commercial Vessel1.3.4 Government & Military1.3.5 Water Sporting1.3.6 Others1.4 Global Personal Floatation Devices (PFDs) Market by Region (2013-2025)1.4.1 Global Personal Floatation Devices (PFDs) Market Size (Value) and CAGR (%) Comparison by Region (2013-2025)1.4.2 North America Status and Prospect (2013-2025)1.4.3 Europe Status and Prospect (2013-2025)1.4.4 China Status and Prospect (2013-2025)1.4.5 Japan Status and Prospect (2013-2025)1.4.6 Southeast Asia Status and Prospect (2013-2025)1.4.7 India Status and Prospect (2013-2025)1.5 Global Market Size (Value) of Personal Floatation Devices (PFDs) (2013-2025)1.5.1 Global Personal Floatation Devices (PFDs) Revenue Status and Outlook (2013-2025)1.5.2 Global Personal Floatation Devices (PFDs) Capacity, Production Status and Outlook (2013-2025)Get Complete TOC With Tables and Figures @2 Global Personal Floatation Devices (PFDs) Market Competition by Manufacturers2.1 Global Personal Floatation Devices (PFDs) Capacity, Production and Share by Manufacturers (2013-2018)2.1.1 Global Personal Floatation Devices (PFDs) Capacity and Share by Manufacturers (2013-2018)2.1.2 Global Personal Floatation Devices (PFDs) Production and Share by Manufacturers (2013-2018)2.2 Global Personal Floatation Devices (PFDs) Revenue and Share by Manufacturers (2013-2018)2.3 Global Personal Floatation Devices (PFDs) Average Price by Manufacturers (2013-2018)2.4 Manufacturers Personal Floatation Devices (PFDs) Manufacturing Base Distribution, Sales Area and Product Type2.5 Personal Floatation Devices (PFDs) Market Competitive Situation and Trends2.5.1 Personal Floatation Devices (PFDs) Market Concentration Rate2.5.2 Personal Floatation Devices (PFDs) Market Share of Top 3 and Top 5 Manufacturers2.5.3 Mergers & Acquisitions, Expansion3 Global Personal Floatation Devices (PFDs) Capacity, Production, Revenue (Value) by Region (2013-2018)3.1 Global Personal Floatation Devices (PFDs) Capacity and Market Share by Region (2013-2018)3.2 Global Personal Floatation Devices (PFDs) Production and Market Share by Region (2013-2018)3.3 Global Personal Floatation Devices (PFDs) Revenue (Value) and Market Share by Region (2013-2018)3.4 Global Personal Floatation Devices (PFDs) Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)3.5 North America Personal Floatation Devices (PFDs) Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)3.6 Europe Personal Floatation Devices (PFDs) Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)3.7 China Personal Floatation Devices (PFDs) Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)3.8 Japan Personal Floatation Devices (PFDs) Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)3.9 Southeast Asia Personal Floatation Devices (PFDs) Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)3.10 India Personal Floatation Devices (PFDs) Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)4 Global Personal Floatation Devices (PFDs) Supply (Production), Consumption, Export, Import by Region (2013-2018)4.1 Global Personal Floatation Devices (PFDs) Consumption by Region (2013-2018)4.2 North America Personal Floatation Devices (PFDs) Production, Consumption, Export, Import (2013-2018)4.3 Europe Personal Floatation Devices (PFDs) Production, Consumption, Export, Import (2013-2018)4.4 China Personal Floatation Devices (PFDs) Production, Consumption, Export, Import (2013-2018)4.5 Japan Personal Floatation Devices (PFDs) Production, Consumption, Export, Import (2013-2018)4.6 Southeast Asia Personal Floatation Devices (PFDs) Production, Consumption, Export, Import (2013-2018)4.7 India Personal Floatation Devices (PFDs) Production, Consumption, Export, Import (2013-2018)5 Global Personal Floatation Devices (PFDs) Production, Revenue (Value), Price Trend by Type5.1 Global Personal Floatation Devices (PFDs) Production and Market Share by Type (2013-2018)5.2 Global Personal Floatation Devices (PFDs) Revenue and Market Share by Type (2013-2018)5.3 Global Personal Floatation Devices (PFDs) Price by Type (2013-2018)5.4 Global Personal Floatation Devices (PFDs) Production Growth by Type (2013-2018)6 Global Personal Floatation Devices (PFDs) Market Analysis by Application6.1 Global Personal Floatation Devices (PFDs) Consumption and Market Share by Application (2013-2018)6.2 Global Personal Floatation Devices (PFDs) Consumption Growth Rate by Application (2013-2018)6.3 Market Drivers and Opportunities6.3.1 Potential Applications6.3.2 Emerging Markets/CountriesContinue...About ResearchMozResearchMoz is the one stop online destination to find and buy market research reports & Industry Analysis. We fulfill all your research needs spanning across industry verticals with our huge collection of market research reports. We provide our services to all sizes of organizations and across all industry verticals and markets. Our Research Coordinators have in-depth knowledge of reports as well as publishers and will assist you in making an informed decision by giving you unbiased and deep insights on which reports will satisfy your needs at the best price.ResearchMozState Tower,90 State Street,Suite 700,Albany NY - 12207United StatesEmail: sales@researchmoz.usWebsite @Tel: 866-997-4948 (Us-Canada Toll Free)Tel: +1-518-621-2074Follow us on LinkedIn @ MHealth App 2018 Global Market Key Players Mindbody, Fitbit, Zombies Run, Runtastic -Analysis And Forecast To 2021 MHealth App Market https://www.wiseguyreports.com/sample-request/2873240-global-mhealth-app-market-size-and-forecast-to-2021 https://www.wiseguyreports.com/reports/2873240-global-mhealth-app-market-size-and-forecast-to-2021 MHealth App Market 2018Wiseguyreports.Com Adds MHealth App Global Market Demand, Growth, Opportunities, Manufacturers, Analysis of Top Key Players and Forecast to 2021 To Its Research Database.Description:MHealth App Report by Material, Application, and Geography Global Forecast to 2021 is a professional and comprehensive research report on the world's major regional market conditions, focusing on the main regions (North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific) and the main countries (United States, Germany, United Kingdom,Japan, South Korea and China).In this report, the global MHealth App market is valued at USD XX million in 2017 and is projected to reach USD XX million by the end of 2021, growing at a CAGR of XX% during the period 2017 to 2021.The report firstly introduced the MHealth App basics: definitions, classifications, applications and market overview; product specifications; manufacturing processes; cost structures, raw materials and so on. Then it analyzed the world's main region market conditions, including the product price, profit, capacity, production, supply, demand and market growth rate and forecast etc. In the end, the report introduced new project SWOT analysis, investment feasibility analysis, and investment return analysis.The major players profiled in this report include:MindbodyCompany BFitbitZombies RunRuntasticCompany GRequest for Sample Report@The end users/applications and product categories analysis:On the basis of product, this report displays the sales volume, revenue (Million USD), product price, market share and growth rate of each type, primarily split into-Mobile Phones MHealth AppSmartphones MHealth AppOn the basis on the end users/applications, this report focuses on the status and outlook for major applications/end users, sales volume, market share and growth rate of MHealth App for each application, including-Ordinary PeopleProfessionalComplete report details @If you have any special requirements, please let us know and we will offer you the report as you want.Table of Contents:Part I MHealth App Industry OverviewChapter One MHealth App Industry Overview1.1 MHealth App Definition1.2 MHealth App Classification and Prodcut Type AnalysisMobile Phones MHealth AppSmartphones MHealth App1.3 MHealth App Application and Down Stream Market AnalysisOrdinary PeopleProfessional1.4 MHealth App Industry Chain Structure Analysis1.5 MHealth App Industry Development Overview1.6 MHealth App Global Market Comparison Analysis1.6.1 MHealth App Global Import Market Analysis1.6.2 MHealth App Global Export Market Analysis1.6.3 MHealth App Global Main Region Market Analysis1.6.4 MHealth App Global Market Comparison Analysis1.6.5 MHealth App Global Market Development Trend AnalysisPart II Asia MHealth App Industry (The Report Company Including the Below Listed But Not All)Chapter Two 2012-2017 Asia MHealth App Productions Supply Sales Demand Market Status and Forecast2.1 2012-2017 MHealth App Capacity Production Overview2.2 2012-2017 MHealth App Production Market Share Analysis2.3 2012-2017 MHealth App Demand Overview2.4 2012-2017 MHealth App Supply Demand and Shortage Analysis2.5 2012-2017 MHealth App Import Export Consumption Analysis2.6 2012-2017 MHealth App Cost Price Production Value Profit AnalysisChapter Three Asia MHealth App Key Manufacturers Analysis3.1 Mindbody3.1.1 Product Picture and Specification3.1.2 Capacity Production Price Cost Production Value Analysis3.1.3 Contact Information3.2 Company B3.2.1 Product Picture and Specification3.2.2 Capacity Production Price Cost Production Value Analysis3.2.3 Contact Information3.3 Company C3.3.1 Product Picture and Specification3.3.2 Capacity Production Price Cost Production Value Analysis3.3.3 Contact Information......Chapter Four Asia MHealth App Industry Development Trend4.1 2017-2021 MHealth App Capacity Production Trend4.2 2017-2021 MHealth App Production Market Share Analysis4.3 2017-2021 MHealth App Demand Trend4.4 2017-2021 MHealth App Supply Demand and Shortage Analysis4.5 2017-2021 MHealth App Import Export Consumption Analysis4.6 2017-2021 MHealth App Cost Price Production Value Profit AnalysisPart III North American MHealth App Industry (The Report Company Including the Below Listed But Not All)Chapter Five 2012-2017 North American MHealth App Productions Supply Sales Demand Market Status and Forecast5.1 2012-2017 MHealth App Capacity Production Overview5.2 2012-2017 MHealth App Production Market Share Analysis5.3 2012-2017 MHealth App Demand Overview5.4 2012-2017 MHealth App Supply Demand and Shortage Analysis5.5 2012-2017 MHealth App Import Export Consumption Analysis5.6 2012-2017 MHealth App Cost Price Production Value Profit AnalysisChapter Six North American MHealth App Key Manufacturers Analysis6.1 Fitbit6.1.1 Product Picture and Specification6.1.2 Capacity Production Price Cost Production Value Analysis6.1.3 Contact Information6.2 Zombies Run6.2.1 Product Picture and Specification6.2.2 Capacity Production Price Cost Production Value Analysis6.2.3 Contact InformationContinued..Contact US:NORAH TRENTPartner Relations & Marketing Managersales@wiseguyreports.comPh: +1-646-845-9349 (US)Ph: +44 208 133 9349 (UK)About Us:Wise Guy Reports Is Part Of The Wise Guy Consultants Pvt. Ltd. And Offers Premium Progressive Statistical Surveying, Market Research Reports, Analysis & Forecast Data For Industries And Governments Around The Globe. Wise Guy Reports Features An Exhaustive List Of Market Research Reports From Hundreds Of Publishers Worldwide. We Boast A Database Spanning Virtually Every Market Category And An Even More Comprehensive Collection Of Market Research Reports Under These Categories And Sub-Categories.Addres:: Wise Guy Research Consultants Pvt Ltd: Pune 411028: Maharashtra,: Ph: +91 841 198 5042 Power Monitoring and Control Devices Market by Manufacturers,Types,Regions and Applications Research Report Forecast to 2025 Power Monitoring and Control Devices 2018 https://www.wiseguyreports.com/sample-request/3013109-global-power-monitoring-and-control-devices-market-research-report-2018 https://www.wiseguyreports.com/reports/3013109-global-power-monitoring-and-control-devices-market-research-report-2018 WiseGuyReports.Com Publish a New Market Research Report On Power Monitoring and Control Devices Market by Manufacturers,Types,Regions and Applications Research Report Forecast to 2025.Description:In this report, the global Power Monitoring and Control Devices market is valued at USD XX million in 2017 and is expected to reach USD XX million by the end of 2025, growing at a CAGR of XX% between 2017 and 2025.Geographically, this report is segmented into several key Regions, with production, consumption, revenue (million USD), market share and growth rate of Power Monitoring and Control Devices in these regions, from 2013 to 2025 (forecast), coveringNorth AmericaEuropeChinaJapanSoutheast AsiaIndiaGet a Sample Report @For more information or any query mail at sales@wiseguyreports.comGlobal Power Monitoring and Control Devices market competition by top manufacturers, with production, price, revenue (value) and market share for each manufacturer; the top players includingABBSiemensSchneider ElectricGEEmersonRockwellYokogawa ElectricMitsubishi ElectricDanaherHoneywellHitachiEatonOn the basis of product, this report displays the production, revenue, price, market share and growth rate of each type, primarily split intoPower Monitoring DevicesPower Control DevicesOn the basis of the end users/applications, this report focuses on the status and outlook for major applications/end users, consumption (sales), market share and growth rate for each application, includingOil & GasMiningManufacturing IndustryEnergyUtilitieConstructionReport Details @Table Of Contents Major Key PointsGlobal Power Monitoring and Control Devices Market Research Report 20181 Power Monitoring and Control Devices Market Overview1.1 Product Overview and Scope of Power Monitoring and Control Devices1.2 Power Monitoring and Control Devices Segment by Type (Product Category)1.2.1 Global Power Monitoring and Control Devices Production and CAGR (%) Comparison by Type (Product Category)(2013-2025)1.2.2 Global Power Monitoring and Control Devices Production Market Share by Type (Product Category) in 20171.2.3 Power Monitoring Devices1.2.4 Power Control Devices1.3 Global Power Monitoring and Control Devices Segment by Application1.3.1 Power Monitoring and Control Devices Consumption (Sales) Comparison by Application (2013-2025)1.3.2 Oil & Gas1.3.3 Mining1.3.4 Manufacturing Industry1.3.5 Energy1.3.6 Utilitie1.3.7 Construction1.4 Global Power Monitoring and Control Devices Market by Region (2013-2025)1.4.1 Global Power Monitoring and Control Devices Market Size (Value) and CAGR (%) Comparison by Region (2013-2025)1.4.2 North America Status and Prospect (2013-2025)1.4.3 Europe Status and Prospect (2013-2025)1.4.4 China Status and Prospect (2013-2025)1.4.5 Japan Status and Prospect (2013-2025)1.4.6 Southeast Asia Status and Prospect (2013-2025)1.4.7 India Status and Prospect (2013-2025)1.5 Global Market Size (Value) of Power Monitoring and Control Devices (2013-2025)1.5.1 Global Power Monitoring and Control Devices Revenue Status and Outlook (2013-2025)1.5.2 Global Power Monitoring and Control Devices Capacity, Production Status and Outlook (2013-2025).7 Global Power Monitoring and Control Devices Manufacturers Profiles/Analysis7.1 ABB7.1.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.1.2 Power Monitoring and Control Devices Product Category, Application and Specification7.1.2.1 Product A7.1.2.2 Product B7.1.3 ABB Power Monitoring and Control Devices Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.1.4 Main Business/Business Overview7.2 Siemens7.2.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.2.2 Power Monitoring and Control Devices Product Category, Application and Specification7.2.2.1 Product A7.2.2.2 Product B7.2.3 Siemens Power Monitoring and Control Devices Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.2.4 Main Business/Business Overview7.3 Schneider Electric7.3.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.3.2 Power Monitoring and Control Devices Product Category, Application and Specification7.3.2.1 Product A7.3.2.2 Product B7.3.3 Schneider Electric Power Monitoring and Control Devices Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.3.4 Main Business/Business Overview7.4 GE7.4.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.4.2 Power Monitoring and Control Devices Product Category, Application and Specification7.4.2.1 Product A7.4.2.2 Product B7.4.3 GE Power Monitoring and Control Devices Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.4.4 Main Business/Business Overview7.5 Emerson7.5.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.5.2 Power Monitoring and Control Devices Product Category, Application and Specification7.5.2.1 Product A7.5.2.2 Product B7.5.3 Emerson Power Monitoring and Control Devices Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.5.4 Main Business/Business Overview7.6 Rockwell7.6.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.6.2 Power Monitoring and Control Devices Product Category, Application and Specification7.6.2.1 Product A7.6.2.2 Product B7.6.3 Rockwell Power Monitoring and Control Devices Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.6.4 Main Business/Business Overview7.7 Yokogawa Electric7.7.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.7.2 Power Monitoring and Control Devices Product Category, Application and Specification7.7.2.1 Product A7.7.2.2 Product B7.7.3 Yokogawa Electric Power Monitoring and Control Devices Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.7.4 Main Business/Business Overview7.8 Mitsubishi Electric7.8.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base, Sales Area and Its Competitors7.8.2 Power Monitoring and Control Devices Product Category, Application and Specification7.8.2.1 Product A7.8.2.2 Product B7.8.3 Mitsubishi Electric Power Monitoring and Control Devices Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)7.8.4 Main Business/Business OverviewContinueFor more information or any query mail at sales@wiseguyreports.comABOUT US:Wise Guy Reports is part of the Wise Guy Consultants Pvt. Ltd. and offers premium progressive statistical surveying, market research reports, analysis & forecast data for industries and governments around the globe. Wise Guy Reports features an exhaustive list of market research reports from hundreds of publishers worldwide. We boast a database spanning virtually every market category and an even more comprehensive collection of market research reports under these categories and sub-categories.Office No.528,Amanora Chambers,Magarpatta Road,Hadapsar,Pune-411028. Construction Equipment Rental Services Market Analysis, Market Size, Regional Outlook, Competitive Strategies and Forecasts, 2018 To 2023 https://www.researchnreports.com/request_sample.php?id=53910 https://www.researchnreports.com/ask_for_discount.php?id=53910 www.qyreports.com This statistical surveying research report on the Global Construction Equipment Rental Services Market is an all-encompassing study of the industry sectors, up-to-date outlines, industry development, drivers, and restraints. It provides market projections for the coming years. It contains an analysis of late augmentations in innovation, Porters five forces analysis and progressive profiles of hand-picked industry competitors. The report furthermore articulates an analysis of trivial and full-scale factors indicated for the new and tenured candidates in the market along with a methodical value chain exploration.Top Key Vendors in Market: United Rentals, Ring Power, Gmmco Ltd, Finning, Boels Verhuur, Blueline Rental, Sunbelt RentalsGet Sample Copy Of this Report @The initial section presents the industry overview of the Construction Equipment Rental Services Market. This part of the study encompasses the specifications and definition of the market. In addition, the types of the machines have been detailed. The application areas of the market come next in the study. The dynamics impacting the development of the Global Market such as the drivers, challenges, opportunities, and trends are also described in detail in this research surveying report.The competitive landscape of the Global Construction Equipment Rental Services Market is discussed in the report, which also includes the players market share. The report profiles some of the leading players in the global market for the purpose of an in-depth study of the challenges faced as well as growth opportunities in the market. The report also considers the approaches implemented by the main corporations to sustain their hold on the industry. The business synopsis and financial synopsis of each of the companies have been examined.Get Reasonable Discount on This Premium Report @The report provides both, qualitative and quantitative research of the Global Construction Equipment Rental Services Market, as well as incorporates worthy insights into the balanced scenario and favored development methods adopted by key competitors. Distinctive distribution channels and slants inclined to bear fruit in the 2018-2023 forecast period have been bestowed in the report to permit readers to plan captivating strategies.On the basis of geographical regions, the Global Construction Equipment Rental Services Market is segmented broadly into Latin America, Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and Asia Pacific. The global market is still in its exploratory stage in most of the regions but it holds the promising potential to flourish steadily in coming years. The major companies investing in this market are situated in Canada, U.K., and the US, India, China and some more countries of Asia Pacific region. Consequently, Asia Pacific, North America, and Western Europe are estimated to hold more than half of the market shares, collectively in coming years.In the last sections of the report, the manufacturers responsible for increasing the sales in the Construction Equipment Rental Services Market have been presented. These manufacturers have been analyzed in terms of their manufacturing base, basic information, and competitors. In addition, the technology and product type introduced by each of these manufacturers also form a key part of this section of the report.Table of Content:Global Construction Equipment Rental Services Market Research Report 2018-2023Chapter 1 Construction Equipment Rental Services Market OverviewChapter 2 Global Economic ImpactChapter 3 Competition by ManufacturerChapter 4 Production, Revenue (Value) by Region (2018-2023)Chapter 5 Supply (Production), Consumption, Export, Import by Regions (2018-2023)Chapter 6 Production, Revenue (Value), Price Trend by TypeChapter 7 Analysis by ApplicationChapter 8 Manufacturing Cost AnalysisChapter 9 Industrial Chain, Sourcing Strategy and Downstream BuyersChapter 10 Marketing Strategy Analysis, Distributors/TradersChapter 11 Market Effect Factors AnalysisChapter 12 Market Forecast (2018-2023)Chapter 13 AppendixAbout QYReports:We at, QYReports , a leading market research report publisher accommodate more than 4,000 celebrated clients worldwide putting them at advantage in todays competitive world with our understanding of research. Our list of customers include prestigious Chinese companies, multinational companies, SME's and private equity firms whom we have helped grow and sustain with our fact-based research. Our business study covers a market size of over 30 industries offering unfailing insights into analysis to reimagine your business. We specialize in forecasts needed for investing in a new project, to revolutionize your business, to become more customer centric and improve the quality of output.Contact:QYReportsJones John(Sales Manager)+91-9764607607sales@qyreports.com Chocolate Syrup Market In-depth Analysis to 2022 with major factors Driving the Beverage, Dairy & Frozen Dessert, Confectionery, Bakery http://www.qyreports.com/request-sample/?report-id=62216 http://qyreports.com/ask-for-discount?report-id=62216 http://qyreports.com/enquiry-before-buying?report-id=62216 www.qyreports.com Chocolate has traditionally been used as a flavoring ingredient in a variety of foods such as cakes, ice cream, milk shakes, and others. Chocolate syrup, also known as chocolate flavored seasoning, Chocolate Syrup is a concentrated solution of chocolate used primarily as a topping or dessert source for a variety of desserts. Cocoa powder, sweeteners such as sugar, corn syrup and others are some of the key ingredients for chocolate syrup. Increased use of chocolate syrup as coffee, tea, milkshakes, cakes and other flavor enhancers is expected to support market growth during the forecast period.Chocolate syrups are categorized by type, including organic and traditional. Between these two segments traditional chocolate syrup has been estimated to be an important share in terms of value and expected to be dominant over the expected period. Organic chocolate syrup is expected to generate a relatively high CAGR over the forecast period. With consumer awareness of healthy lifestyles, they are constantly shifting to organic products that are expected to drive segment growth during the forecast period.For sample Copy of this report:The chocolate syrup market is further subdivided based on distribution channels, including hypermarkets / supermarkets, convenience stores, specialty stores, grocery stores and online retailers. Of all of these segments, hypermarkets / supermarkets are expected to dominate market share during the forecast period. Growth in retail penetration, particularly in developing countries such as Asia Pacific, the Middle East and elsewhere, is expected to support the growth of the large mart / supermarket sector in the chocolate syrup market during the forecast period. The online retail sector of the chocolate syrup market is expected to grow favorably in the near future. As internet penetration increases and consumer influence on online shopping grows, it is expected to support segment growth during the forecast period.Geographically Chocolate Syrup Market Western Europe is expected to occupy a major market share next to North America during the forecast period. Western Europe is one of the largest consumers of chocolate, which is expected to support market growth in the region. However, the region is expected to show moderate growth due to mature markets. Of the North American regions, the United States is expected to be a major contributor to Canada's profitability. The Asia-Pacific region is also expected to show favorable growth during the forecast period followed by Latin America. In the Asia-Pacific region, China and India are expected to see significant growth due to increased demand for chocolate or chocolate-flavored products. Also, in Latin America, Brazil is expected to be a major contributor to Mexico's subsequent sales.Avail discount on this report :This research report provides an in-depth analysis of the global Chocolate Syrup Market Market based on enterprise size, services, solution, end-use industry, and geography. The report also provides an analysis of the factors that drive and restrain the growth of the Chocolate Syrup Market market. It discusses the prevailing market trends, prospective growth opportunities, and major strategies increasing the popularity of the global market. It provides market estimates and forecasts for all the segments in terms of revenue.The report covers all the major trends and technologies playing a major role in the market growth over the forecast period. The competition in the global market for Chocolate Syrup Market will likely heat up in the next couple of years on the back of entry of a substantial number of solution providers. This statistical surveying report presents an all-inclusive assessment of the worldwide market for Chocolate Syrup Market, taking several market verticals, such as the production capacity, product pricing, the dynamics of demand and supply, sales volume, revenue, and the growth rate of this market into consideration.For more information:Company Profiled: The Key Players operating in the Chocolate Syrup Market Market includes Hersheys: Nesquik (Nestle), Santa Cruz Organic, Torani, Smuckers, AHLASKA, Heb, Fox Syrups, Bosco and Walden FarmsThe report provides competitive landscape of the Chocolate Syrup Market market, thereby listing out all the major players according to their geographic presence, market attractiveness and recent key developments. The competitive landscape section of the report gives an overview about the market share of several key players for the year 2017. Moreover, key takeaways section provided at the end of competitive landscape section would help the operating companies to make the best move in the market.These market estimates have been analyzed by taking into account the impact of different political, social, economic, technological, and legal factors along with the current market dynamics affecting the market growth. Factors including market position, offerings and R&D focus are attributed to companys capabilities. This section also identifies and includes various recent developments carried out by the leading players.We at, QYReports , a leading market research report publisher accommodate more than 4,000 celebrated clients worldwide putting them at advantage in todays competitive world with our understanding of research. Our list of customers include prestigious Chinese companies, multinational companies, SME's and private equity firms whom we have helped grow and sustain with our fact-based research. Our business study covers a market size of over 30 industries offering unfailing insights into analysis to reimagine your business. We specialize in forecasts needed for investing in a new project, to revolutionize your business, to become more customer centric and improve the quality of output.QYReportsJones John(Sales Manager)+91-9764607607sales@qyreports.com Hospital Workforce Management Software Market Analysis, Market Size, Regional Outlook, Competitive Strategies and Forecasts, 2018 To 2023 https://www.itintelligencemarkets.com/request_sample.php?id=266 https://www.itintelligencemarkets.com/ask_for_discount.php?id=266 This statistical surveying research report on the Global Hospital Workforce Management Software Market is an all-encompassing study of the industry sectors, up-to-date outlines, industry development, drivers, and restraints. It provides market projections for the coming years. It contains an analysis of late augmentations in innovation, Porters five forces analysis and progressive profiles of hand-picked industry competitors. The report furthermore articulates an analysis of trivial and full-scale factors indicated for the new and tenured candidates in the market along with a methodical value chain exploration.Top Key Vendors in Market: Infor, ADP, LLC, Oracle, IBM, GE Healthcare, ATOSS Software AG, Ultimate Software, McKesson Medical-Surgical Inc., Kronos Incorporated, Cornerstone Ondemand, Inc., WorkForce Software, LLC.Get Sample Copy Of this Report @The initial section presents the industry overview of the Hospital Workforce Management Software Market. This part of the study encompasses the specifications and definition of the market. In addition, the types of the machines have been detailed. The application areas of the market come next in the study. The dynamics impacting the development of the Global Market such as the drivers, challenges, opportunities, and trends are also described in detail in this research surveying report.The competitive landscape of the Global Hospital Workforce Management Software Market is discussed in the report, which also includes the players market share. The report profiles some of the leading players in the global market for the purpose of an in-depth study of the challenges faced as well as growth opportunities in the market. The report also considers the approaches implemented by the main corporations to sustain their hold on the industry. The business synopsis and financial synopsis of each of the companies have been examined.Get Reasonable Discount on This Premium Report @The report provides both, qualitative and quantitative research of the Global Hospital Workforce Management Software Market, as well as incorporates worthy insights into the balanced scenario and favored development methods adopted by key competitors. Distinctive distribution channels and slants inclined to bear fruit in the 2018-2023 forecast period have been bestowed in the report to permit readers to plan captivating strategies.On the basis of geographical regions, the Global Hospital Workforce Management Software Market is segmented broadly into Latin America, Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and Asia Pacific. The global market is still in its exploratory stage in most of the regions but it holds the promising potential to flourish steadily in coming years. The major companies investing in this market are situated in Canada, U.K., and the US, India, China and some more countries of Asia Pacific region. Consequently, Asia Pacific, North America, and Western Europe are estimated to hold more than half of the market shares, collectively in coming years.In the last sections of the report, the manufacturers responsible for increasing the sales in the Hospital Workforce Management Software Market have been presented. These manufacturers have been analyzed in terms of their manufacturing base, basic information, and competitors. In addition, the technology and product type introduced by each of these manufacturers also form a key part of this section of the report.Table of Content:Global Hospital Workforce Management Software Market Research Report 2018-2023Chapter 1 Hospital Workforce Management Software Market OverviewChapter 2 Global Economic ImpactChapter 3 Competition by ManufacturerChapter 4 Production, Revenue (Value) by Region (2018-2023)Chapter 5 Supply (Production), Consumption, Export, Import by Regions (2018-2023)Chapter 6 Production, Revenue (Value), Price Trend by TypeChapter 7 Analysis by ApplicationChapter 8 Manufacturing Cost AnalysisChapter 9 Industrial Chain, Sourcing Strategy and Downstream BuyersChapter 10 Marketing Strategy Analysis, Distributors/TradersChapter 11 Market Effect Factors AnalysisChapter 12 Market Forecast (2018-2023)Chapter 13 AppendixAbout Us:We at IT Intelligence Markets conduct intensive market research and generate detailed reports about the products and services offered in the IT domain. Our team is devoted to providing custom reports that are taylor-made to suit the customers requirements. We make sure to keep our customers updated with the latest market dynamics as IT industry is undergoing sea change intrinsically & extrinsically by forces such as regulatory fluctuations, rapidly evolving consumer preferences, and newer technologies. Not only do our market research analysts scrutinize market requirements but also track competitors relentlessly for obtaining the most updated scenario of the market.Contact Us:Name: Vijay TannaCompany: It Intelligence MarketsAddress: Survey No-9/4, Flat# 6, Panchshil Park, Ganpati Marg, Nigidi, Pune 411044Mail Id: sales@itintelligencemarkets.comContact No: +91 705-760-0700 Global Cancer Vaccines Market to grow at a CAGR of +15% during forecast period 2017-2021 https://www.researchnreports.com/request_sample.php?id=72023 https://www.researchnreports.com/ask_for_discount.php?id=72023 https://www.researchnreports.com/pharma-healthcare/Global-Cancer-Vaccines-Market-Research-Report-2017-72023 www.qyreports.com Cancer vaccines are being developed as a method of preventing certain types of cancer, and as therapeutic treatments to treat existing cancers across a range of indications in oncology, either as stand-alone therapies or in combination with traditional cancer therapeutics such as chemotherapy and surgery. The high mortality rate associated with cancer and its resistance to conventional treatments such as radiation and chemotherapy has led to the investigation of a variety of anti-cancer immunotherapies, which have a lower toxicity associated with their use than traditional chemotherapies.This report presents a 360-degree overview of the competitive scenario of the Global Cancer Vaccines market. The report includes massive data relating to the recent product and technological developments observed in the market, complete with an analysis of the impact of these advancements on the markets future development. The research report analyzes the global Cancer Vaccines market in a detailed manner by explaining the key aspects of the market that are expected to have a quantifiable influence on its developmental prospects over the forecast period.Get Sample Copy of this Report:Key Players:AstraZeneca plc, Aduro BioTech, Cytos, Galena Biopharma, Juvaris Biotherapeutics, MedImmune, Oxford BioMedica, Prima BioMed, GlaxoSmithKline, Sanofi, Merk&co, Ubivac, VaccinogenThe study also examines the numerous policies that regulate processes in the global Cancer Vaccines industry, precisely, the ones that are currently active, along with an analysis of the top news stories about the global Cancer Vaccines industry. This report also offers an important analytical guidance on the trends and developments in this industry. The report also provides a professional and comprehensive analysis on the global Cancer Vaccines market while articulating industry insights into its current state of affairs.It provides a refined view of the classifications, applications, segmentations, specifications and much more for Cancer Vaccines market. Recent developments and policies with respect to this market are clarified with maximum data. The report also examines the cost structures and pricing regarding the suppliers, raw materials, labors, equipments needed, and many other. This study is a compilation of primary and secondary research, which allows the readers and players to have a strong understanding of the overall market.Avail Discount up to 30% on this report now at:A birds eye view of the Cancer Vaccines industry made available in the report helps readers to understand the key drivers, restraints, challenges, and opportunities that are shaping the global Cancer Vaccines market. Furthermore, the report evaluates challenges experienced from buyers and sellers side. The report offers advice from key industry experts on how these challenges can be overcome.The analytical tools such as investment return and feasibility analyses have also been employed in this research to determine the market attractiveness. The report evaluates the products available in the market on the basis of the production volume, their pricing structure, and the revenue generated by them. Production chain and the dynamics of demand and supply has also been assessed in this report. The research report also analyzes the market hierarchy carrying out a SWOT analysis of the key players operating on the global Cancer Vaccines market in order to provide an overall picture of the competitive landscape in the industry and assist the participants to come up with market winning strategies to gain an edge over their peers.Get Complete Report@:About QYReports:We at, QYReports , a leading market research report publisher accommodate more than 4,000 celebrated clients worldwide putting them at advantage in todays competitive world with our understanding of research. Our list of customers include prestigious Chinese companies, multinational companies, SME's and private equity firms whom we have helped grow and sustain with our fact-based research. Our business study covers a market size of over 30 industries offering unfailing insights into analysis to reimagine your business. We specialize in forecasts needed for investing in a new project, to revolutionize your business, to become more customer centric and improve the quality of output.Contact:QYReportsJones John(Sales Manager)+91-9764607607sales@qyreports.com Global Risk Analytics Market 2017-2021: Key Findings, Regional Analysis, Top Key Players Profiles and Future Prospects Risk analytics assist organizations in knowing the certain risk existing in their businesses. Risk analytics tools help companies to derive risk-aware decisions and thus improving their business performance. Alongside this, risk analytics tools improve return on capital and reduces cost involved in regulatory compliance. With enterprises thriving to reduce the catastrophic losses, adoption of risk analytics tools have seen an uprising trend in recent years. Moreover, risk analytics tools help in central clearing of over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives. This report presents a 360-degree overview of the competitive scenario of the Global Risk Analytics market. The report includes massive data relating to the recent product and technological developments observed in the market, complete with an analysis of the impact of these advancements on the markets future development. The research report analyzes the global Risk Analytics market in a detailed manner by explaining the key aspects of the market that are expected to have a quantifiable influence on its developmental prospects over the forecast period. Get Sample Copy of this Report: https://www.researchnreports.com/request_sample.php?id=77032 Key Players: IBM Corporation, SAP SE, Tata Consultancy Services Ltd., SAS Institute, Inc., Oracle Corporation, SunGard Data Systems Inc., Genpact, Accenture PLC, Intellect Design Arena Limited, OpenGamma Limited, Numerix LLC, ACL Services, Riskdata S. A. The study also examines the numerous policies that regulate processes in the global Risk Analytics industry, precisely, the ones that are currently active, along with an analysis of the top news stories about the global Risk Analytics industry. This report also offers an important analytical guidance on the trends and developments in this industry. The report also provides a professional and comprehensive analysis on the global Risk Analytics market while articulating industry insights into its current state of affairs. It provides a refined view of the classifications, applications, segmentations, specifications and much more for Risk Analytics market. Recent developments and policies with respect to this market are clarified with maximum data. The report also examines the cost structures and pricing regarding the suppliers, raw materials, labors, equipments needed, and many other. This study is a compilation of primary and secondary research, which allows the readers and players to have a strong understanding of the overall market. Avail Discount up to 30% on this report now at: https://www.researchnreports.com/ask_for_discount.php?id=77032 A birds eye view of the Risk Analytics industry made available in the report helps readers to understand the key drivers, restraints, challenges, and opportunities that are shaping the global Risk Analytics market. Furthermore, the report evaluates challenges experienced from buyers and sellers side. The report offers advice from key industry experts on how these challenges can be overcome. The analytical tools such as investment return and feasibility analyses have also been employed in this research to determine the market attractiveness. The report evaluates the products available in the market on the basis of the production volume, their pricing structure, and the revenue generated by them. Production chain and the dynamics of demand and supply has also been assessed in this report. The research report also analyzes the market hierarchy carrying out a SWOT analysis of the key players operating on the global Risk Analytics market in order to provide an overall picture of the competitive landscape in the industry and assist the participants to come up with market winning strategies to gain an edge over their peers. Get Complete Report@: https://www.researchnreports.com/healthcare-it/Global-Risk-Analytics-Market-Research-Report-2017-2021-77032 About Research N Reports: Research N Reports is a new age market research firm where we focus on providing information that can be effectively applied. Today being a consumer driven market, companies require information to deal with the complex and dynamic world of choices. Where relying on a sound board firm for your decisions becomes crucial. Research N Reports specializes in industry analysis, market forecasts and as a result getting quality reports covering all verticals, whether be it gaining perspective on current market conditions or being ahead in the cut throat Global competition. Since we excel at business research to help businesses grow, we also offer consulting as an extended arm to our services which only helps us gain more insight into current trends and problems. Consequently we keep evolving as an all-rounder provider of viable information under one roof. Contact us: Mr. Sunny Denis Contact No. +1-888-631-6977 sales@researchnreports.com (ResearchnReports) This release was published on openPR. Permanent link to this press release: Copy Please set a link in the press area of your homepage to this press release on openPR. openPR disclaims liability for any content contained in this release. Conductive Yarn Market 2022: Chain Structure, Competitive Landscape, New Projects, Investment Analysis, Region, Applicatio, Price Trends, Competitive Market Share by Top Vendors http://www.qyreports.com/request-sample/?report-id=62527 http://www.qyreports.com/ask-for-discount/?report-id=62527 http://www.qyreports.com/payment-form/?report-id=62527 www.qyreports.com Conductive Yarns can be used in a wide range of end uses including, static dissipation, electromagnetic shielding, resistive heating, and electro-conductive transmission. Through the development of unique, innovative manufacturing processes.The report on Conductive Yarn market is a source of expansive ideas, statistical data, and detailed information, which has the potency to ensure profit of an enterprises. It gives a basic overview of the industry which includes definition, applications, classifications, and industry chain structure. Extensive development plans and policies are discussed meticulously. There also exists a cost study and manufacturing structures with perfect explanation.Get Sample copy of this Report @:Companies Profiled in this report includes, KB Seiren Beltron, Textronics, Novonic, Formosa Taffeta, Hebei Swiit Metallic Fiber, Jiangsu Textile Research Institute, Gui Lian, Shanghai Yishi Industrial, HONGKONG WEI XING TECHNOLOGY, Changzhou Polyace Textile Yarn, KOOLON, Baoding Sanyuan, Shanghai Bosung Metallic Yarn, Longzhi, Tongxiang Baoding Textile, Cocou, CHANG YIANG HSIN, Jinan BaiteThis report defines the specifications, applications, classifications of Conductive Yarn market and explains the industrial chain structure in detail. Recent policies and developments are researched in depth to help enhance this report. A detailed cost structure is examined and prices are coated by labors, raw material supplier and others. An insight about demand supply chain is also mentioned in detail.Get 20% Discount on this Report @:The examination of the manufacturing cost structure of the global Conductive Yarn market has been performed based on key aspects such as industry chain structure, manufacturing process, raw materials, and their suppliers. The manufacturing plants analysis and technical data of the global market have been explained in the lights of raw material sources, technology sources, research and development status, manufacturing plants distribution, and commercial production date and capacity.Initially, the Conductive Yarn producing an analysis of the most important trade players based on their company profiles, annual revenue, sales margin, growth aspects is additionally lined during this report, which is able to facilitate alternative Conductive Yarn market players in driving business insights.Access Complete Report @:The report gives a SWOT analysis of the new projects in the international and Conductive Yarn market, investment feasibility, development trends, and investment return analysis of these projects. Study of the Conductive Yarn markets competitive landscape includes data facts and figures about leading countries and suppliers capacity, cost-structures, production values, profits, and gross margins of key businesses operating in the market over the reports review period. The report also provides details such as product picture and specification, and contact information of the companies profiled in the Conductive Yarn markets manufacturer analysis segment.Table of ContentsGlobal Conductive Yarn Market Research ReportChapter 1 Conductive Yarn Market OverviewChapter 2 Global Economic Impact on IndustryChapter 3 Global Market Competition by ManufacturersChapter 4 Global Production, Revenue (Value) by RegionChapter 5 Global Supply (Production), Consumption, Export, Import by RegionsChapter 6 Global Production, Revenue (Value), Price Trend by TypeChapter 7 Global Market Analysis by ApplicationChapter 8 Manufacturing Cost AnalysisChapter 9 Industrial Chain, Sourcing Strategy and Downstream BuyersChapter 10 Marketing Strategy Analysis, Distributors/TradersChapter 11 Market Effect Factors AnalysisChapter 12 Global Conductive Yarn Market ForecastAbout QYReports:We at, QYReports , a leading market research report publisher accommodate more than 4,000 celebrated clients worldwide putting them at advantage in todays competitive world with our understanding of research. Our list of customers include prestigious Chinese companies, multinational companies, SME's and private equity firms whom we have helped grow and sustain with our fact-based research. Our business study covers a market size of over 30 industries offering unfailing insights into analysis to reimagine your business. We specialize in forecasts needed for investing in a new project, to revolutionize your business, to become more customer centric and improve the quality of output.Contact:QYReportsJones John(Sales Manager)+91-9764607607sales@qyreports.com In the race for the Michigan U.S Senate seat, incumbent Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., holds a sizable funding margin. As of Dec. 31, 2017, the three-term senator had just over $8 million on hand. Her Republican opponents are led by Sandy Pensler with just over $5 million. But, Pensler has also loaned his campaign $5 million. John James reported $647,270 on hand, and Bob Carr reported $3. The three Republican candidates will face off in the Aug. 7 primary, with the winner facing Stabenow on Nov. 6. The other U.S. Senate seat from Michigan is not up for re-election this year. Incumbent Sen. Gary Peters, elected in 2016, would face re-election in 2022, should he choose to run for a second term. For 2017, Stabenow reported $7,187,954 in total receipts with $6,679,140 of total contributions. Total individual contributions broke down into $3,850,347 of itemized contributions and $1,297,928 of unitemized. She also reported $1.5 million in contributions from other committees and almost $500,000 of transfers from other authorized committees. Pensler, who is self-funding his campaign with a $5 million loan, reported $5,015,888 of total receipts from Dec. 4, 2017, through Dec. 31, 2017. The Pensler for Senate campaign showed cash on hand of $5,008,537. From July 1, 2017, through Dec. 31, 2017, James reported total receipts of $1,000,951. Of that amount, $950,932 is in total contributions. James recorded $815,598 of itemized individual contributions and $127,083 in unitemized individual contributions. His campaign has also received a loan of $50,000 from the candidate. At the end of 2017, James reported cash on hand of $647,270. Carr, who is running a one-man campaign, reported total receipts of $4,042 from Oct. 1, 2017, through Dec. 31, 2017, but that includes $2,407 in loans made by the candidate. On Friday, President Trump plans to announce the approval of the largest ever set of sanctions against his constant political sparring partner, North Korea, during a speech to attendees of the Conservative Political Action Conference. The White House hopes that the decision will force North Korean leader Kim Jong Un to again reconsider his nations nuclear program. According to excerpts made available to the media, the new round of sanctions will target 56 shipping companies, vessels and other entities that the White House believe have continued to conduct prohibited trade as outlined by previous U.S. sanctions against North Korea meant to cut off economic streams. The Treasury Department will soon be taking new action to further cut off sources of revenue and fuel that the regime uses to fund its nuclear program and sustain its military by targeting 56 vessels, shipping companies, and trade businesses that are assisting North Korea in evading sanctions, read excerpts from the presidents speech. Under Kims leadership, North Korea has further developed its nuclear arsenal and has become more antagonistic and threatening toward the U.S. and its Asian allies. The presidents daughter, Ivanka, is currently in South Korea with leading a delegation of American officials at the final weekend of the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang. A West Virginia judge has dismissed a lawsuit filed by Murray Energy against HBO and Last Week Tonight host John Oliver, according to Lawful Masses, a legal website and livestream series hosted by copyright attorney Leonard French. Coal magnate Bob Murray, along with his company, Murray Energy, and other associated coal companies, filed the suit alleging defamation stemming from an episode that aired on June 18, 2017, that examined and exposed the coal companies misdeeds. Murray and his company were revealed in the episode to have harassed the families of mine cave-in victims, creating unsafe working environments and ignoring the environmental impact of the coal industry with some clever funnies thrown in. A personal favorite of ours is Olivers squirrel friend, Mr. Nutterbutter (pictured above). Oliver revealed in the episode that when the show attempted to contact Murray Energy, it received a cease and desist from the companys legal team. Murray Energy has a history of threatening litigation against media outlets and journalists who are critical of their practices or employees. The original filing was littered with hyperbolic speech and attempts to garner sympathy that hardly amounted to legal claims. The defendants attorneys filed a First Amendment-based motion to dismiss, which a West Virginia judge upheld, ruling that the case should be dismissed with prejudice, which keeps the plaintiffs from filing the charges against Oliver and HBO again. The arguments set forth in the Defendants Motion to Dismiss well-founded, appropriate in this matter and will grant the same, reads the ruling. The ruling does give Murray and the other plaintiffs the opportunity to file an appeal within 30 days, but it also allows the defendants the ability to draft their own victory. Yes, Oliver, HBO and their attorneys will be writing the judges statement based on findings and facts that support the courts rulings. This doesnt happen often as the task is normally left up to the judges clerk. Heres hoping those classic Mr. Nutterbutter catchphrases, Eat shit, Bob and Memo Line: Kiss my ass, make it in there somewhere. Check out your favorite copyright attorney break down the cases dismissal here and revisit Olivers expose on Murray and the coal industry below. The new phones are coming! Mobile World Congress is nearly upon us, and soon we'll be feasting our eyes on the latest and greatest Android has to offer. So whether you're attending the big show or just checking out the keynote streams online, here's everything we expect (and hope) to see: MWC 2018: Samsung Venture Beat Renders of the Galaxy S9 and S9+ have leaked in all their glory. You might have missed Samsung's presence at last year's MWC, but by golly you won't this year. After using the 2017 show to launch the Tab S3 and Windows 10-powered Galaxy Book, this year's keynote will be all about the new Galaxy S9, and it's undoubtedly going to command much of the MWC spotlight. While it's likely to look a whole lot like the S8, with the same 5.8-inch and 6.2-inch screens, Samsung's newest flagship will reportedly bring a host of improvements, including a faster chip, more RAM, and a way-better camera. Samsung is expected to bring the dual-camera setup that was in the Note 8 to the Galaxy S9 this year, but there might be a catch: Only the larger model will have it. Based on leaked renders and specs, Samsung will reportedly create further separation between its two phones by putting a single camera in the S9 and a dual camera in the S9+. Apple does the same thing with the iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus, but thus far, Samsung has offered the same camera experience on both models of Galaxy S phones. Elsewhere, the phones are expected to gain Animoji-style 3D emoji characters and super slow-motion recording. And don't worry, it isn't expected to lose the headphone jack just yet. MWC 2018: Sony Martyn Williams The successor to the Xperia XZ Premium will reportedly launch at MWC. Sony always brings a new flagship phone to MWC, but this year's release might get a little more attention on the other side of the pond. The reason? The new phones are expected to have a fresh modern design and a working fingerprint reader in the United States, following the mid-range models released at CES in January. The successor to the XZ1, which landed last summer, will reportedly bring a 5.8-inch, 18:9 screen with a slim-bezel design and a Snapdragon 845 chip. A smaller model will pack a 5-inch screen and a similar aesthetic. A short teaser video released by Sony suggests the phones could have a curved, more aerodynamic design than the previous boxy models. Both models will reportedly feature rear-facing fingerprint readers, a first for a flagship Xperia phone. (Previous models have had the sensor built into the power button, an clumsy implementation that was turned off in the United States for unexplained reasons.) However, we expect the real show-stopper in the new Xperia phones will be the camera. Last year's XZ Premium introduced a killer slo-mo camera, and we can't wait to see what Sony has dreamed up for the new phones. MWC 2018: LG Doug Duvall/IDG A souped-up LG V30 is reportedly on tap for MWC 2018. While it's all but assured that we won't be seeing a follow-up to the lauded G6, which was launched at last year's MWC, LG won't be arriving in Barcelona empty-handed. The company has already announced that it will be unveiling new version of its mid-range K series phones next week, but we're most interested in the revamped V30. Unlike the Sprint-exclusive V30+, which merely bumped the storage and added a pair of high-fidelity earbuds, the new V30 will focus on AI. While it doesn't appear as though LG will be announcing yet another digital assistant, it will be building "a suite of AI technologies" into the new V30 to enhance the overall experience. In a press release, LG outlined the AI enhancements it will be bringing to V30's eyes and ears. Vision AI will be built into the camera, so it "automatically analyzes objects and recommends the best shooting mode from among eight modes: portrait, food, pet, landscape, city, flower, sunrise, and sunset," much like the Huawei Mate 10 Pro. LG says the AI tech will enable better low-light shots as well as smart image recognition, including automatic detection for QR codes and shopping options. Also new will be voice control for Google Assistant that will let you initiate a variety of commands, from taking wide-angle photos to taking cine videos. MWC 2018: Huawei Huawei Huawei may be gearing up to release a new line of MediaPad tablets at MWC 2018. Huawei is expected to have a mellow presence at this year's MWC, having just launched the Mate 10 Pro in the United States to some controversy. It's possible that we'll get a look at the successor to the P10, but most rumors regarding that phone point to a March release. Huawei used last year's MWC to show off a new version of its Android Wear watch, but a reprise seems unlikely because Google hasn't released a new version of Android Wear in nearly two years. So, smart money is on the likelihood of new Android-based MediaPad tablets. MWC 2018: Asus WinFuture The Zenfone 5 will reportedly look a lot like the iPhone X. While the Samsung Galaxy S9's design won't be turning any heads, Asus is expected to launch a phone that will. According to leaked images, the Zenfone 5 will sport a design heavily inspired by Apple's iPhone X. Featuring a Snapdragon 845, a slim-bezel design, and an 18:9 display, the newest flagship Zenfone is expected to feature a notch for the camera at the top of the display, a design element that's sure to generate some buzz. Also rumored is the Zenfone 5 Lite, which, as its name suggests, is reportedly a cheaper, lesser-featured version of the flagship Zenfone 5. It's expected to sport four, count 'em, four cameras (two each front and back), as well as an 18:9 Full HD+ display. MWC 2018: Nokia Stephen Lawson We probably won't see anything as cool as the 3310 from Nokia this year. HMD-owned Nokia made a big splash at Mobile Word Congress last year with the restyled retro release of the 3310 candy bar phone, but its presence at this year's event shouldn't make any waves. Reportedly on the docket are several updates to existing handsets (the Nokia 6, 7 Plus, and 9 have all been rumored) as well as one intriguing new model, the Nokia 1. Why 1, you ask? Well, the budget phone will reportedly by one of the first Android Go phones, showcasing Google's stripped-down, storage-friendly OS. Built on Android Oreo, the OS features a suite of apps and services designed specifically for phones with limited storage and battery capacities, speed, and memory. After a Google blog post teased the first batch of Android Go phones coming at MWC, we're excited to see what's in store. MWC 2018: The rest Google Project Tango may be dead, but AR is very much alive on Android phones. As usual, MWC will be chock full of concepts, prototypes, and sneak peeks at what's coming down the road in the Android universe. 5G connectivity will be the buzz word as Intel and others show off the first products with the faster modems built in. AI will surely be big as well, as we get a look at a new crop of speakers, phones, and devices powered by Google Assistant. We'll also be on the lookout for a new crop of AI wearables, whether in the form of watches, earbuds, or glasses. Augmented reality will have a bigger presence as well. This time last year, Google's AR Tango project was limited to just a couple phones, but thanks to ARCore, many more phones are now able to take advantage of the platform. Google Assistant had its coming out party at Mobile World Congress 2017 with the announcement that it was expanding beyond Googles own Pixel phones, and now its ready to take on the world. Literally. Google has announced it will be expanding Assistant to nearly two dozen more languages this year as it expands its influence to some 95 percent of all eligible Android phones worldwide. Google Assistant already speaks English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, and Portuguese (Brazil), but its linguist capabilities will be greatly expanded over the next 10 months as Google plans to add support for more than 30 languages. First up will be Danish, Dutch, Hindi, Indonesian, Norwegian, Swedish and Thai, all of which should arrive by summer. Mentioned in this article Pixel XL $769.00 MSRP $769.00 See it on Google Along with the new languages comes support for multilingual speakers. Starting with English, French, and German, Assistant will be able to understand your voice in each language without needing to change the main language in the Home app settings. Perhaps more importantly, Google will also be working with its partners to expand the capabilities of Assistant on handsets. Much like we saw with Edge Sense on the HTC U11 and the Active Edge on the Pixel 2, Google will allow OEMs to build new unique interactions with Google Assistant on their phones, including OK Google support when the screen is off. Google says Sony, LG, and Xiaomi will be announcing the first round of custom integrations, with more to follow. Also new will be the ability for Assistant to integrate with your carrier so customers can "learn more about their plan, add new services (like international data roaming), get customer support and more." Initially, the new action will be limited to Sprint, Koodo, Telus, and Vodafone. And finally, support for routines and location-based reminders is making its way to Google Homes this week. Originally announced alongside the Pixel 2 phones last year, routines will let users combine multiple actions into a single command, like turning off the lights and lowering the thermostat when you say, OK Google, good night. And location-based reminders will ping your phone at the appropriate time when you tell your Google Home to do something like remind you to buy milk after work. The impact on you and your Homes: With the launch of HomePod and expansion of Alexa, the home assistant race is in full swing, and its only going to get more contentious. Its hard to tell exactly whos in the lead, but its very close between Amazon and Google, and Google is smart to leverage its advantage with Android to expand Assistants reach. Whats more, Alexa is only available in English, German, and Japanese, so the new languages could help Google put some distance between it and Amazon. Petoskey volleyball finally gets in home match, drops Gaylord in three The skies finally opened up yesterday morning while volunteers and staff checked out some of the goods in Craigieburn on a sunrise shoot. Follow cam Friday will be back for the second year in a row. Stay tuned for daily updates on Trans NZ's Facebook page. Well have a couple days of nice weather right before the race, but we are expecting another system to push through on Sunday, the first day of racing. This might be the first full 5-day wet Trans NZ on record. Every time I arrive back at Craigieburn and capture the first glimpse of the mountain range in front of me, it is always a magical place. I love being able to bring riders from all around the world to share this same joy and the incredible riding there. As for Queenstown those guys just know how to GSD (Get Shit Done). Thats their motto. Each year I return, another trail has gone in and another project is in the works. Megan Rose, founder and Event Director Julie Marshall may be volunteering, but don't be fooled. She will undoubtedly throw down competitive times throughout the week on select stages. Local Mark Nicholls has filled many roles at the Trans NZ. From racer to marshall to medic to party instigator - he's a man of many trades. Even in the midst of summer, the snowline reminds us that weather can change on a dime on the South Island. Turn down for what! The 2018 Yeti Trans NZ will save the best views for last on Day 5 in Queenstown. I heard about the event from a number of my mates from the Red Hill Riders Mountain Bike Club in Australia who said it was rad. I'm always keen to ride new trails and have never done a 5-day event like this before, so I jumped at the chance to challenge myself and my bike thanks to Mondraker Australia and DHaRCO clothing. Mike Doria, competitor Some people come to race, but most come for the adventure, the camaraderie, and being able to let go of responsibilities for the week. American rider Tom Sampson tries to blend in with his surroundings. I have always enjoyed multi-day enduros and had a great experience last year at the Trans BC. The organization, the vibes, and trails were great and motivated me to visit New Zealand. Besides escaping European winter, racing in New Zealand is a great way to launch my season. Im looking forward to more blind stage races, where you have the opportunity to share memories with a mix of riders and discover new trails in a new place. Jerome Clementz Yeti Trans NZ presented by Shimano Day 5, Queenstown - a Remarkable Finale Day 2 from the Yeti Trans NZ 2017 Presented by Shimano The extended forecast predicts every condition over the next week. Will this be the first full-on wet Trans NZ? Weve got a few new trails for the racers to try out. Its been raining the last few days, so by the time the Trans visits Alexandra, it should be grippy. The last two stages on day four will be pretty wild. Young Bradley Harris will return hungry to beat the entire Open Mens field once again hes flying pretty well. Phil Oliver, owner Altitude Bikes and trail boss in Alexandra Rock rolls in the land of thyme paint unique perspectives in Central Otago. This year, the skies may not be so bright. See you at the races! Writer Sarah Rawley will be taking on her third Yeti Tranz NZ to race and report. Stay tuned for recaps after Days 1 and 2, 3 and 4, and the Final Day. As Cyclone Gita storms the South Island, the 2018 Yeti Tranz NZ presented by Shimano preps for its fourth year of enduro, racing New Zealands most epic and tantalizing trails.The race will commence in Craigieburn Forest Park, where racers are thrown straight into the gauntlet on steep, exposed, rocky and rooty trails. Talk to any local and they will grin with delight when you mention Craigieburn the tracks are that good. After two days of exploring the contrast of high-alpine and dense beech forests, racers will be transported across the South Island to Queenstown, the 'Adventure Capital of the World', for three days of exploring the areas best trails from a locals perspective.With 85% of the racers taking on the Yeti Trans NZ for the first time, there will be many new perspectives to be shared throughout the week. Every other day of reporting will be viewed through a different lens amateurs, foreigners, locals, volunteers, media, medics, pros and of course the wizard, herself, behind the curtain.Eleven countries will be represented in the field of 130 racers with 32 percent calling New Zealand home. The field is split half and half between Masters and Open racers. Despite the low-key race aspect surrounding the Yeti Trans NZ, the event attracts a high calibre of racers who are keen to go as fast as they can, while having a fun time doing it.France's Jerome Clementz is a consistent contender for the top of the box. Paul Van der Ploeg from Australia returns to best his third place at the 2017 Yeti Trans NZ. American Yeti rider Tom Sampson is new to the enduro scene but has the legs and skills to push his way up. New Zealnader, Kashi Leuchs, ex-Olympian and NZ Yeti distributor, has a target on his back in the Master 40+ Mens category. You can never rule out the underdogs who will emerge throughout the week.Coming out of British Columbia, Emily Slaco knows a thing or two about riding in wet, slippery conditions. New Zealander Melissa Newell a.k.a. Mops, will be racing too.With the forecast looming over us, the field will inevitably be shuffled around by the conditions, skills, local knowledge, and a little luck with mechanicals and keeping it rubber side down.Follow the action on Pinkbike for updates. The Yeti Trans NZ will be posting regular updates on Facebook and Instagram throughout the week, and video recaps on Vimeo. For more information email megan@ridingbc.com or visit www.transnz.com About Megan Rose Megan has been riding and racing bikes all over the world for 13 years and organizing bike events for the past nine years. She splits her time between British Columbia, Canada and New Zealand, running Trans BC 6 Day Enduro, and running the Trans NZ 5 Day Enduro race. Over the past five years, Megan has personally raced in over 40 enduro races, timed over 60 days worth of enduro races, and organized 30+ enduro races. Megan and her team look forward to bringing you the best of the best from all of these perspectives.About Yeti Cycles Founded in 1985, Yeti Cycles make race-bred, obsessively engineered, masterfully crafted mountain bike proven by the fastest riders in the most demanding conditions. Based in Golden, Colorado, Yeti is owned and staffed by riders who are more likely to be out riding the companys latest creation that sitting in a conference room. Visit www.yeticycles.com for more details. Off The Felt: Chinese New Year and Visiting Thailand February 23, 2018 Alexandra Cacovean This week, we welcomed the Chinese New Year, and Tom and Durrrr's Wife celebrated by sharing another cute photo. I mean, we're seeing a lot of Dwan now lately considering he's been a ghost the last few years. Meanwhile, others traveled to Thailand. I mean, Matthew Waxman was there, Felix Schulze too, and Greg and Julie Merson were spending their honeymoon there. Lily Kiletto was also there! Oh, what a small world... Anyway, some others were finding other ways to enjoy their free time. Phil Laak, for instance, was catching hail (yes, I know it sounds crazy), and Matt Salsberg enjoyed his portable sauna... What a week! Take a look. Why do these too look so good in photos? Durrrr's wife posted throwback pics of the Australian Open and Tom Dawn is doing prom poses now. And took a photo with the Queen in Hong Kong. Girls night out? Loving this photo, Dehlia! Matthew shared some amazing videos of Thailand. Felix Schulze was basking in the sun. Yes, more Thailand but this looks gorgeous. Lily even rode an elephant. Phil decided to catch hail. Because, why not? And Matt bought himself a portable sauna. Seriously, what? Tony was with the ladies! This looks like so much fun. Felix, this is your best look. Boys night out but who is that guy? It's been a minute since we've seen Doc. Johnnie is enjoying Mexico lindo. Both presidents in one pic. The caption, OMG. Whoa! He's not even wearing shoes anymore. By Zachary Fagenson and Roberta Rampton TALLAHASSEE, Fla./WASHINGTON (Reuters) Dozens of teenaged survivors of the second-deadliest public school shooting in U.S. history marched on Floridas capital on Wednesday to ask lawmakers to ban sales of assault rifles of the sort used to kill 17 students and educators last week. Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, became the latest school targeted by a gunman using a semi-automatic AR-15 assault rifle, stirring the nations long-running debate about gun rights and public safety. Dressed in jeans and T-shirts and carrying signs with the slogan #Neveragain, survivors of the Feb. 14 mass shooting met with lawmakers in Tallahassee, to ask for stricter controls on gun sales. Investigators said the assault was carried out by 19-year-old former student Nikolas Cruz, who purchased an AR-15 nearly a year ago. Police have charged Cruz, who had been kicked out of Douglas for disciplinary problems, with 17 counts of premeditated murder. We want to see some common sense gun laws so this will never happen again, said Rachel Padnis, a 16-year-old sophomore from the school near Fort Lauderdale. President Donald Trump, a strong supporter of gun rights, was due to meet later Wednesday with parents, students and teachers who have been victims of gun violence, including those affected by the Valentines Day shooting in Florida. The White House meeting comes a day after Trump said his administration would take steps to ban bump stocks, an accessory that enables a rifle to shoot hundreds of rounds a minute. A spokeswoman said the administration was open to the idea of setting national age limits on sales of assault rifles. The state Senate on Wednesday postponed discussion on a proposed gun control bill, with Senate President Joe Negron, a Republican, saying the chamber will take up other measures. The legislative session wraps up on March 9, leaving lawmakers little time to act. Before that move, dozens of students packed into a meeting room and peppered Negron with questions about why civilians should have continued access to assault rifles. Negron declined to say whether he would support any specific gun control measures, saying, Thats an issue were going to look at as we work to develop legislation. TRUMP TALKS Trump, a strong supporter of gun rights, was scheduled to host a listening session with high school students and teachers at the White House on Wednesday. Trumps support for any tightening of gun laws would mark a change for a Republican who was endorsed by the National Rifle Association gun lobby during the 2016 presidential campaign. The NRA opposes an outright ban on bump stocks but has said it would be open to restrictions on the devices. Under pressure after Parkland, the deadliest-ever shooting at a U.S. high school, Trump on Tuesday directed the Justice Department to quickly complete a proposed rule that would treat bump stocks as machine guns, which could effectively outlaw them in the United States. Last October, a retired real estate investor and high-stakes gambler used multiple assault rifles equipped with bump stocks to kill 58 people at a Las Vegas outdoor concert, the deadliest attack by a single gunman in U.S. history. Bump stocks have not played a prominent role in other recent U.S. mass shootings. Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer on Wednesday urged Trump to back legislation, instead of a regulation, on bump stocks, noting that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has questioned whether it has the authority to ban bump stocks. The only way to close this loophole permanently is legislation, Schumer said. Later this week, Trump will meet with local and state officials, and plans to talk with governors about the issue. Trump generally favors a Senate bill on background checks, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said Tuesday. Calls for national student walkouts and marches in the coming months have gained steam on social media, including the March for Our Lives on March 24 in Washington, spearheaded by Douglas students. Hundreds of students walked out of their high school in Davie, Florida, about 16 miles (26 km)south of Parkland, in a move to show support for the student activists, local TV images showed. The NRA has agreed to participate in a televised town hall on guns to be broadcast by CNN later Wednesday, the news network said. NRA officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Gun violence on public school and college campuses has become so commonplace in the United States in the last several years that administrators regularly stage drills to train students and staff in the event of a mass shooting. (Additional reporting by Katanga Johnson in Parkland, Florida, and Rick Cowan and Doina Chiacu in Washington; Writing by Scott Malone; Editing by Jonathan Oatis and Jeffrey Benkoe) 2.2k SHARES Facebook Twitter Whatsapp Pinterest Reddit Print Mail Flipboard Rachel Maddow put it all together and showed how Paul Manaforts money problems vanished after he joined the Trump campaign. Video: This is really incredible from Maddow on how Paul Manafort, the Trump campaign, and financial crimes tie together. #Maddow. pic.twitter.com/zuq6lwU9Sx Sarah Reese Jones (@PoliticusSarah) February 23, 2018 Maddow said: For some reason times were tough and this stuff all happens in very close succession, all at once, late 2015 early 2016. These guys are doing backflips allegedly flagrantly illegal backflips to try to get cash for Manafort and increasingly it was not working. But then it all turned around. For some reason manafort himself to the trump campaign as a full-time volunteer I dont need to get paid, I dont have money problems. Then his money problems turn around. And, again, look at the timing here, look at the timing. Between approximately 2016 and January 2017 manafort with the assistance of Gates sought and secured approximately $16 million. $16 million in two loans from lender D. Finally, great relief. Money coming in. Lets put late 2015 and early 2016 behind them. Thank god for lender D. I mean, they were still apparently ripping off lender D. There was another doctored profit-and-loss statement where Gates took the real profit-and-loss statement and converted it from a PDF file to a word file, edited it, added $3.5 million. Then turned it back into a PDF. They learned not to use the bookkeeper anymore. They even concocted a note that the over $300,000 that was overdue on Manaforts American Express card, that was a big misunderstanding. They concocted a story that Gates borrowed the card, he was good for it, pay no attention to how the quote delinquency on that American Express card significantly affected Paul Manaforts credit score. So they still hand to scam lender D but it worked. Look at the timeline. That scrambling in late 2015 and early 2016 and its not working out. But starting July, 2016, Gates and Manafort, jackpot. Rachel Maddow put it together This is why Paul Manaforts financial crimes are important to the Russia scandal. Manafort wasnt some rich guy with Russia connections. He was a broke scammer who needed cash with Russia connections. This was the guy that Trump put in charge of his campaign. After Manafort joined the campaign, Russias efforts to help Trump hit another gear. Paul Manafort has a lot of information that he could give to Mueller. Manafort could fill in some gaps. Trumps campaign needed help. Paul Manafort needed cash. Manafort also had the Russia connections. It isnt difficult to see the intersection of needs, and Rachel Maddow revealed a key motive that connects Manaforts financial crimes to the Trump campaign. For more discussion about Rachel Maddow join our Rachel Maddow and MSNBC group. 703 SHARES Facebook Twitter Whatsapp Pinterest Reddit Print Mail Flipboard President Trump is doing that thing he does so well- talking with great confidence about concepts he clearly doesnt grasp in vague terms that mean nothing. For example, Trump hasnt endorsed any specific proposal to address gun violence, other than arming teachers. Arming everyone used to be a joke concept. It was a concept that TV racist Archie Bunker pushed to great laughter. Ronald Klain pointed out today, Trumps plan to arm teachers to stop school shootings appears to be based on this Archie Bunker plan to stop airplane hijacking by arming all passengers. On All in the Family, racist-know-nothing Archie Bunker is shown going on TV to demand his God-given right to have a gun in the house. To much laughter, Archie explains his simpleton thought process, All you gotta do is arm all your passengers. They just pass out the pistols at the beginning of the trip, and then pick them up again at the end. Case closed. The clip of Trump on arming teachers: Heres the clip of Archie Bunker sounding exactly like our now president: Three plus decades later, the Archie know-nothing racist Trump told CPAC, A teacher wouldve shot the hell out of him before he knew what happened. Its time to make our schools a much harder target for attackers, Trump said. We dont want them in our schools. We dont want them. When we declare our schools to be gun-free zones it just puts our students in far more danger. Earlier Friday Trump called for offensive firepower, which sounds a lot like a shoot-first policy. No way that could go wrong. Trump calls for "offensive firepower" in schools after Stoneman Douglas school shooting. #Parkland pic.twitter.com/gRsdBDys8R Sarah Reese Jones (@PoliticusSarah) February 23, 2018 Trump and his fellow NRA lawmakers keep repeating convenient talking points about gun-free zones being so dangerous, thus the need to arm everyone. Their talking points echo disgraced John Lotts, whom Think Progress dubbed the most prolific academic in the gun debate. Think Progress wrote that a decade ago Lotts claims that more guns equal more safety were repudiated and he was also caught pushing studies with severe statistical errors on numerous occasions. Also, An investigation uncovered that he had almost certainly fabricated an entire survey on defensive gun use. After his public disgrace, Lott was brought back again after Sandy Hook as an expert and cited on platforms like the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, LA Times, Politifact and more, they observed. So of course, the President who has revived a TV character making fun of the worst of America is pushing the exact same argument as a discredited, disgraced academic. There is no other side to this story. There are dollars and greed on the other side of this story, and that is why Donald Trump is aligning with the NRA. The same NRA also being investigated currently for possible money laundering for the Russians to Donald Trumps campaign. This is the same NRA that Trump called patriotic today. When NRA lawmakers and this President talk about how we need more guns, the entire nation should laugh at them as we knew to do decades ago. The concept is a farce. It is nothing but a money heist by the gun manufacturers, sold by discredited fools. Donald Trump is the racist, know-nothing Archie Bunker brought to real life and elevated to the highest office in the world, courtesy of the Republican Party. Alvi Karimov, press secretary to Chechen Republic head Ramzan Kadyrov, responded to Amnesty International's annual report, which accused Chechen authorities of abusing the rights of local gay people. The report detailed state-sponsored discrimination against gays in Russia generally, and also gross abuses targeting gays in Chechnya. Amnesty cited victim and eyewitness accounts of persecution, including the torture and murder of gay men in the Chechen capital Grozny and other parts of the republic, that were first published by the independent Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta in April 2017. The newspaper detailed the plight of more than 100 who were detained and the deaths of at least three Chechen men accused of being homosexual. According to the newspaper, the detentions followed a formal request made in March 2017 to hold a gay-parade, which sparked public protests in the republic, where the newspaper reports even an accusation of being gay can lead to execution. Facing media coverage of the roundup of gays, Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov reported on the situation in the region to Vladimir Putin in late April 2017. He told the Russian president that the information about multiple arrests, torture and killings was a provocation. Kadyrov claimed the only person reportedly murdered by Chechen law enforcement was, in fact, safe and in his own home, and the coming outs were paid for as a money-making campaign. Kadyrov denied any evidence of any detentions in the locations indicated in the Novaya Gazeta publications. Putins press secretary Dmitry Peskov said he has "no reliable information" of detentions of gay men in Chechnya. While Grozny continues to deny not only persecution and torture of gay men, other evidence has emerged. In October, a gay man, Maxim Lapunov, said in Moscow that he had escaped torture in Chechnya. At a news conference organized by Novaya Gazeta, Leptunov said he was forced to name other gay men and was beaten for being a Russian who came to Chechnya to corrupt Chechens. Amnesty International responded to a request for comment on the statement by Alvi Karimov, the spokesman for the head of Chechnya, denying the very existence of gay men in Chechnya. This is not the first time the Chechen government officials accuse human rights activists in conspiring with the West and label them as enemies of the people, the human rights group told Polygraph.info. It added that some Chechen leaders like Magomed Daudov, speaker of the Chechen parliament, have even gone so far as to call for the death penalty for human rights activists. Amnesty also said, in response to Karimov's suggestion it cooperated with the "Western intelligence agencies," it never works or coordinates its work with any of the intelligence services and conducted its own independent research into the situation of gay men in Chechnya and used proven information from other human rights NGOs (non-governmental organizations). Meanwhile, the daughter of slain Chechen human rights activist Natalia Estemirova, who would have turned 60 today but was murdered in July 2009 while working on working on "extremely sensitive" cases of human rights abuses in Chechnya, has also commented on the plight of gays in the republic. It is unsurprising that Chechen authorities continue to deny any allegations of the gay purge, Lana Estemirova wrote in a letter to Polygraph.info. The reasoning behind persecution was harrowing -- it seems that upon discovering the existence of gay community in Chechnya, the officials and police aimed to break those men physically and emotionally, purely out of deeply rooted prejudices and hatred. Chechnya is a very conservative, patriarchal republic and Kadyrovs regime controls every aspect of its social and political life without any distinction between the private and the public. Gay men insult Kadyrov and his henchmen on an existential level and threaten his vision of masculinity hence he cannot even bring himself to say the word gay. Estemirova urges a full examination of the episode. We must do everything in our power and urge the Russian government to conduct a proper investigation and grant the victims appropriate protection if they want to testify. We have to continue making Kadyrov uncomfortable, she wrote. The Russian non-governmental organization Russian LGBT Network said it opened a hot line for gay victims in Chechnya, and reported evacuating over 106 people out of Chechnya and helping provide asylum at European embassies. Charleston, SC (29403) Today Mostly cloudy in the morning then periods of showers later in the day. High 86F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 40%.. Tonight Partly cloudy skies. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low 72F. Winds light and variable. The Charleston Wine + Food Festival removed prominent hospitality executive Randall Goldman from its board Thursday amid allegations of sexually suggestive behavior. The board voted unanimously to oust Patrick Properties Hospitality Group CEO Randall Goldman and ban him from festival events, citing a code of conduct that supports the highest standard of ethics and moral integrity. Festival spokeswoman Alyssa Maute-Smith said the organization has never before removed a board member. The decision came hours after The Post and Courier published an article detailing allegations made by eight of Goldmans former employees. They accused him of doling out backrubs, planting kisses and sending unseemly late-night text messages against recipients wishes. Following the boards action, the Greater Charleston Restaurant Association confirmed Goldman will remain president of its organization. Representatives of the James Beard Foundation did not return messages asking if Goldman will retain his seat on the groups national advisory board. The Wine + Food board disciplined and released Goldman just days before the Feb. 28 start of the five-day festival, which annually draws upward of 20,000 attendees and has an estimated economic impact of $9.6 million. For some of Goldmans accusers, the decision reached by the board after two hours of closed-door discussion amounted to vindication. I'm glad people can see what we see," said longtime Fish chef Nico Romo, who had tears in his eyes after the vote was taken. "It's a relief." Fish closed about a year after Romo left the restaurant. Patrick Properties is introducing its replacement, Parcel 32, at the festival. All festival programs scheduled for Patrick Properties venues will proceed as planned, Smith said. Patrick Properties owns Lowndes Grove, the American Theater and the William Aiken House, in addition to its Upper King Street restaurant. Before the vote, an attorney for Charles and Celeste Patrick of Patrick Properties Hospitality Group reiterated his clients commitment to standing by their highest-ranking employee. A statement authored by Allan Holmes concluded, Neither we nor the law of the workplace require managers who are mind readers. Rather, it is anticipated that our employees all of whom are adults will express themselves if they feel their space has been invaded, or if they prefer a handshake to a more gregarious hug. Hours after the meeting adjourned, Holmes e-mailed members of the media, saying, Let us firmly state that Patrick Properties Hospitality Group is committed to a safe workplace, will investigate any complaint, and will take appropriate action whenever warranted." In his original statement on behalf of the Patricks, Holmes followed up a pledge to provide a safe workplace with a clause saying, We are equally committed to not taking any action based upon reports of anonymous sources.' Romo was baffled by the phrase, since he was one of four former employees named in The Post and Couriers story detailing allegations against Goldman. Former Patrick Properties publicist Angel Powell, another named source, also attended the board meeting, which was closely watched by members of Charlestons hospitality community. Prior to the board taking its vote, Powell accepted board chair David Marconis invitation for members of the public to comment. Nobody is relishing being in this position," Powell said. Theres nothing to gain, except knowing we stood up and said our truth. Powell continued, I want to be here for those of us who are still too afraid. Im a face of a story I didnt want to be a part of. But if your life at work is different than a mans life at work, thats not OK." In the wake of sexual harassment revelations that have roiled the U.S. restaurant industry, the James Beard Foundation has revised its award criteria, requiring nominees to demonstrate the values of respect, transparency, diversity, sustainability and equality. As The New York Times recently reported, the foundation also has revoked voting privileges from past winners who have been publicly accused of sexual harassment or abuse. Mitchell Davis, executive vice president of the James Beard Foundation, did not return a message seeking comment on Goldmans continued affiliation with the group. A foundation publicist also did not respond to messages. Although the Greater Charleston Restaurant Association is an auxiliary of the Charleston Area Convention and Visitors Bureau, it is not required to seek the larger groups approval of its decisions. Still, Helen Hill, CEO of the bureau, said she agrees with the GCRAs statement, which reads, Our team's experience with Randall Goldman has always been professional. We have not experienced any inappropriate behavior by Mr. Goldman, and consequently have no plans to take action at this time." When I first heard the allegations against Randall Goldman I talked to my CACVB and GCRA staff, Hill wrote in an e-mail to The Post and Courier. No one had anything negative to say about Randall, and no one had had an experience with him that was similar to the events in your story. A spokesperson for the GCRA did not return a message asking how the group, which describes itself as an advocate for the largest private sector employer in the tri-county area, reached its decision. Board member Jessica Slaughter of FIG said she was not aware of a vote or boardwide discussion. Slaughter missed the last two meetings because of family health issues, but continued to receive all announcements e-mailed to board members. Although she wasn't consulted prior to the statement's release, she said she did not witness any behavior by Goldman at the three GCRA meetings she attended that made her uncomfortable. "He's definitely a schmoozy, kiss-on-the-cheek kind of guy," she said. Goldman will not be immediately replaced on the Wine + Food board. The open position will be discussed after the festival, according to festival spokesperson Smith. Multiple unregistered firearms and drugs were seized by police following a raid Thursday at a home on Tun Kiko Feja Street in Mangilao. Guam Police Department Criminal Investigation Division agents and the SWAT team executed a search warrant looking for stolen jewelry and Rolex watches, methamphetamine, drug paraphernalia and firearms. GPD spokesman Sgt. Paul Tapao said the raid was part of an ongoing burglary investigation. A witness told police she was aware of a stolen Rolex watch that had allegedly been given to Jesus San Agustin Ignacio, 65, court documents state. The witness indicated she had been to Ignacio's home and smoked crystal methamphetamine with him, and saw him wearing a Rolex watch that was believed to be stolen in a burglary last year. On Thursday morning detectives searched Ignacio's Mangilao residence, an inoperable bus and vehicles on the property. Ignacio was found in the bus with a loaded .22 caliber rifle by his bed, court documents state. Drugs and guns Police seized 10 unregistered firearms, multiple caliber ammunition, multiple magazines, drug paraphernalia, several glass pipes with residue testing positive for methamphetamine, plastic baggies and five marijuana plants. Jesus Ignacio was arrested and charged with possession of firearms without a firearms identification card,and possession of an unregistered firearm. Tapao said Jessiree Dolores Meno Ignacio, 27, also was arrested on a charge of theft by receiving stolen property. She was booked and released. Asia Pacific Gynecological Examination Chairs Market: Market Estimation, Dynamics, Regional Share, Trends, Competitor Analysis 2012-2016 and Forecast 2017-2023 Asia Pacific Gynecological Examination Chairs Market PR-Inside.com: 2018-02-23 14:28:34 Press Information Precision Business Insights Precision Business Insights, Kemp House, 152 160 City Road, London EC1V 2NX Satya Lead-Digital Marketing +1-866-598-1553 email https://www.precisionbusinessinsights.com # 569 Words Precision Business Insights,Kemp House,152 160 City Road,London EC1V 2NXLead-Digital Marketing+1-866-598-1553 Asia Pacific Gynecological Examination Chairs Market: By Product Type (Hydraulic, Electric, Non-electric), By End Users (Hospitals, Clinics, Diagnostic Centers), and Geography -Market Estimation, Dynamics, Regional Share, Trends, Competitor Analysis2012-2016 and Forecast 2017-2023Market Outline: Asia Pacific Gynecological Examination Chairs MarketGynecological examination chairs are used in the diagnosis and treatment procedures of gynecology. These chairs are used in the majority of gynecological procedures such as diagnosis of ovarian cancer, endometrial cancer, cervical cancers, and pregnancy complications among others. Gynecological examination chairs have various features such as seamless, foamy, adjustable backrest, and adjustable seating. These chairs provide easy access to the diagnosis and treatment of reproductive system of women.A sample of this report is available upon request @Market Dynamics: Asia Pacific Gynecological Examination Chairs MarketDrivers Increase in the prevalence of vaginal cancer and other gynecological indications Adoption of newer technologies in gynecological diagnostics Increase in the female population leads to rise in prevalence of gynecological problemsRestraints High cost of gynecological examination chairs Stringent regulatory guidelines for product approvalMarket Scope: Asia Pacific Gynecological Examination Chairs MarketAsia Pacific gynecological examination chairs market is segmented on the basis of product type, end-user, and regionBased on the product type, Asia Pacific gynecological examination chairs market is segmented into the following: Hydraulic Electric Non-electricBased on the end-user, Asia Pacific gynecological examination chairs market is segmented into the following: Hospitals Clinics Diagnostic centers OthersBased on the Country, Asia Pacific Gynecological examination chairs market is segmented into the following: Japan China India Australia & New Zealand ASEAN (Includes Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Philippines, Malaysia, and Others) South Korea Rest of Asia-PacificTo view TOC of this report is available upon request @Competition Assessment: Asia Pacific Gynecological Examination Chairs MarketSome of the players in the Asia Pacific Gynecological examination chairs market include: Malvestio Spa (Italy) Medifa-hesse GmbH & Co. KG (Germany) Inmoclinc S A (Spain) Hidemar (Spain) Favero Heath Projects Spa (Italy) Harbin Howell medical apparatus and instruments co., Ltd (China) Wanrooe Medical (China)Need more information about this report @Key Features of the Report: The report provides granular level information about the market size, regional market share, historic market (2012-2016) and forecast (2017-2023) The report covers in-detail insights about the competitors overview, company share analysis, key marketdevelopments, and their key strategies The report outlines drivers, restraints, unmet needs, and trends that are currently affecting the market The report tracks recent innovations, key developments and startups details that are actively working in the market The report provides plethora of information about market entry strategies, regulatory framework and reimbursement scenario The report analyses the impact of socio-political environment through PESTLE Analysis and competition through Porters Five Force Analysis in addition to recent technology advancements and innovations in the marketGet access to full summary @About Precision Business InsightsPrecision Business Insights is one of the leading market research and business consulting firm, which follow a holistic approach to solve needs of the clients. We adopt and implement proven research methodologies to achieve better results. We help our clients by providing actionable insights and strategies to make better decisions. We provide consulting, syndicated and customised market research services based on our client needs.Email: sales@ precisionbusinessinsights.com PR-Inside.com: 2018-02-23 19:03:14 FSCwire / Press ReleaseThe following press release was disseminated by FSCwire for Emerald Bay Energy Inc.--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---Calgary, Alberta (FSCWire) - Emerald Bay Energy Inc. (TSX Venture:EBY). has issued a press release with the following headline:Emerald Bay Provides Update on Kuhn 5To view this press release on the FSCwire website, please either click on the link below, or copy and paste the link into your browser:If you would prefer, you can also view this press release as a PDF file, please either click on the link below, or copy and paste the link into your browser:For more information on Emerald Bay Energy Inc., or to see additional press releases issued by this company, please either click on the link below, or copy and paste the link into your browser: http://www.fscwire.com/public-company/Emerald Bay Energy Inc.Source: Emerald Bay Energy Inc. (TSX Venture: EBY, OTC Bulletin Board: EMBYF)Date: February 23, 2018Time: 1:03 PM EST--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---The story mentioned above was issued on behalf of Emerald Bay Energy Inc. and disseminated through FSCwire.About FSCwireFSCwire (a division of Filing Services Canada Inc.), is a global newswire dissemination, SEDAR, SEDI, and EDGAR / XBRL service provider.FSCwire is a full service global newswire dissemination company and is fully approved by all exchanges in Canada and the U.S. Press releases can be distributed for all sizes of public, private or not for profit companies and any other organization requiring news distribution. In addition to individual companies; public relations, communications and investor relations firms trust FSCwire to distribute press releases for their respective clients.In addition to newswire dissemination FSCwire also offers EDGAR, XBRL, SEDAR, SEDI, and additional services for publicly traded companies. For more information, please go to our website: http://www.fscwire.com Maximum News Dissemination by FSCwire. http://www.fscwire.com Copyright 2018 - FSCwire (a division of Filing Services Canada Inc.) Other than writing and marketing books, a Nigerian author is into some other thing that could be considered intriguing. Collins Oscar, author of five books, loves hawking a Nigerian beverage popularly called zobo. Zobo is produced from dried roselle leaves (Hibiscus Sabdariffa). It is said to contain anti-hypertensive properties, and therefore helpful in the management of hypertension. Its a refreshing drink for families not only in Nigeria, but in West Africa. Where he lives in Uyo, Akwa Ibom State, Mr. Oscar, 30, is often seen knocking on peoples door, delivering zobo drinks in plastic bottles in well-arranged cellophane packs. He also distributes the product to stores and supermarkets and hawks it around traffic light in the city. Mr. Oscar, obviously proud of what he is doing, would take photos of himself handing over the drinks to his customers or soliciting for buyers at the traffic light and then post them on Facebook. And that would stir debates on his brand of entrepreneurship. And then more people would contact him with more delivery request. Business is booming, Mr. Oscar told PREMIUM TIMES, saying he wasnt bothered about what people think of his action. Being an author isnt supposed to be a profession; it shouldnt be because youve written a book, you now limit your life, he said. I also did that to challenge people who think that youth in the state are lazy. I did it hoping that it could inspire some guys here to wake up and solve their problems instead of depending on the government, he added. The young author still markets and sells his books as much as he does the zobo drinks. He said the zobo business was a partnership with a senior friend. He markets and sells the product, while his friend does the production. I told myself that I will make my first N10 million before I become 31, he said. I am close to that target. Mr. Collins Oscar (2nd from left) selling zobo on the street Mr. Oscar said he writes books from his life experience such as hawking zobo. His latest book, 19 Business Lessons I Learnt From A Thief, was inspired when thieves broke into his house and stole his power generating set. He is also the author of the bestselling book, Idiots With B.Sc., which tries to explain why university education in Nigeria wasnt bringing out the potentials from the students. The author enjoys a lot of support from the youth in the state. He is quite different from many youths who are only interested in politics, says UbongAbasi Okon, a young computer science graduate who is into full-time farming in Uyo. Mr. Okon said he buys Mr. Oscars zobo drink anytime he sees it in a shop. I have never met him, but I follow him on the social media. Its someone the youth should look up to. But a lot of youth may not really look up to him, considering the erosion of values in our society, said Mr. Okon. ADVERTISEMENT He added, With time, people will come to respect him; you know, people attached a lot of respect to success. I know a lot of people, for now, might be looking down on him. Imaobong Akpan, a public affairs analyst in Uyo, said she has been a close friend to the author and sees him as an unusual fellow. Ms. Akpan tried to justify the authors action, even though she said she wouldnt personally like to hawk things on the streets. It doesnt blend, but that is Oscar for you. That wasnt necessary, but he would always want to prove a point. That was a way of sending a message. He doesnt do things the normal way. Even his books have very unusual titles. He is not just an author, he is an entrepreneur, dont forget that. I think the youth could be inspired by what he is doing, she said. The author, a graduate of sociology from the University of Uyo, sees himself as a rebel with a mission to change things in Nigeria. His parents initially disagreed with his attitude towards life, but today they are proud of him, he said. Rebellion is obedience to God; there are so many things going wrong in Nigeria and Akwa Ibom State, and it will only take a rebel to correct them. Our system here has been soiled and when you try to say the truth people will tell you to keep quiet. Or they would advise you not to say it loud, so that people wont come after you. I see a lot of excellence in other countries, but here we are surrounded by mediocrity. So, I feel challenged every day that I should be able to represent excellence in my own community and in the country, said Mr. Oscar. ADVERTISEMENT The Abuja chapter of the Actors Guild of Nigeria has inaugurated new executive members to steer the affairs of the guild for the next two years. The News Agency of Nigeria reports that the nine-member executive took their oath of office on Thursday night at the Inauguration and Fund Raising Night of the Guild held in Abuja. The new executives led by Alvin Ahmed as Chairman were elected on December 2, 2017. Other members of the leadership team include Anithan Audu Vice Chairman; Josep Nwanze Secretary General; and Patience Eze as the new Public Relations Officer for the Guild. Others are Etukudoh Godwin, Treasurer; Ifeoama Nwakozo, Financial Secretary and Jackson Oluwafemi, Chief Whip. In his inaugural speech, the new chairman, Ahmed, on behalf of the executive pledged their commitment to the guild adding that they would consolidate on the successes recorded by their predecessors. He noted that members welfare was to be given uttermost priority to ensure that actors in the Federal Capital Territory strive and remain outstanding. We are set to hit the ground running as we reposition our noble guild towards ensuring that actors in Abuja take their pride of place. Nollywood has other guild as well, we hope to build a better working relationship with them and other relevant stakeholders for the growth of the film industry in the Territory, he said. In his remark, the National President of the AGN, Emeka Rollas, who handed certificate of office to the new executives, urged them to maintain the good legacies of the immediate past leaders of the guild. He noted that while many other state chapters of the AGN were being factionalsed, the FCT chapter remains united and strong, and thus was a reference point. Abuja chapter, under the leadership of Agility Onwurah, has really shown that it is the centre of unity indeed, as it grows stronger, I therefore urge this new executive to maintain the good name. In the same vein, Agility Onwurah, the outgoing president of the guild in the FCT, urged the new executives to remain steadfast, adding that he was ready to give necessary advice to the new leaders whenever that was required. NAN reports that Nollywood actors, leaders of the Association of Movie Producers (AMP) and the Directors Guild of Nigeria (DGN),and other bodies were present at the event. (NAN) ADVERTISEMENT A veteran Hollywood star, Lucien Morgan, is one of the lead cast in a new Nollywood film, In a Strange Land, which opens in Nigerian cinemas from March 2. Lucien, who is best known for his roles in Hollywood hits like, American Werewolf in London and Futures, starred alongside several Nollywood stars in the movie. They include UK-based Nollywood actors like Ngozi Thompson- Igwebike, Roseline Sanni-Ajose, Toyin Moore and Sam Obiago. Others are Larry King, William Kemeh, Judith Chukwu, MA Benson and Kevwe Ogunje. The film was produced by Roseline Sanni-Ajose popularly called RSA, directed Teri Ekuerahare and co-produced by William Kemeh. Having successful premiered the movie in London and Lagos, RSA told PREMIUM TIMES that the movie which revolves around modern day slavery and human trafficking, deserves to be screened in Nigeria for obvious reasons. She noted, Modern slavery is an appalling crime that has no place in todays society. All hands must be on deck to fight this monster. In A Strange Land serves to create/strengthen awareness of this problem, the consequences of perpetuating such acts and how to end the crime in our countries. The director added, It is an emotionally gripping tale told with delicate sophistication blended with suspense, intrigue, as it unravels the turbulent path people in the quest for a better life outside the shores of their countries forcefully walk upon. In a strange land is based on a true story and tells of a young lady trafficked from Nigeria to England for domestic servitude to a working class family. She is elated at the prospects of having a better life in the UK but things dont go as planned. Dictatorial laws are set forbidding her from having contact with the outside world followed swiftly by the oppression, molestation, emotional torture and cruel beatings. She fears for her life and the post man whom she secretly communicates with through the letter box slot suspects foul play a case of human trafficking and urges her to run away and report to the police. Things are however complicated. She is there illegally, and there is the fear of deportation/ imprisonment. Also, her employers would get into trouble with the law and there is her poor family back in Nigeria depending on her earnings and rooting for her to deliver them from the poverty stricken state. She finally makes a decision that sets her on course for the unexpected! . The movie seeks to enlighten Africans at home and in the diaspora on how and what to look out for when the appalling crime is being perpetuated. In A Strange Land was sponsored by Portsmouth University (Film Department), powered by Roseline Sanni Ajoses Inspiration Production and is being distributed by Metro Classic Pictures. ADVERTISEMENT Turkey on Friday summoned the top Dutch diplomat in Ankara, a day after the Dutch parliament voted to recognise the mass killing of Armenians during World War I as genocide, state-run news agency Anadolu reported. Turkey fiercely condemned the resolution which received overwhelming support, with only three lawmakers voting against saying it has no legal binding character or validity. The Dutch government said it would continue to discuss the question of the Armenian genocide but was not planning official recognition. Turkey vehemently rejects any assertion that the killing of up to 1.5 million Armenians at the hands of the Ottoman Empire constitutes genocide. However, Turkey, the Ottoman Empires successor state, accepts that many Armenians were killed during the war. This is the second time in a week that the top Dutch envoy to Ankara has been summoned. He was called into the ministry on February 17 too, as it became clear Dutch lawmakers planned to move ahead with the recognition. Relations between the Netherlands and Turkey are rocky. The two NATO allies and key trading partners do not have ambassadors posted to each others capitals. The Dutch government banned Turkish politicians from entering the country to conduct election rallies aimed at Turkish expatriates in the Netherlands in March 2017, ahead of a controversial referendum on expanding President Recep Erdogans powers. (dpa/NAN) A former Lagos State Governor, Bola Tinubu, has expressed concerns that his presidential assignment of reconciling the warring interests within the All Progressives Congress, APC, is being sabotaged by the party chairman, John Odigie-Oyegun. Mr Tinubu, named at the beginning of the month by President Muhammadu Buhari to lead the APC consultation, reconciliation and confidence-building efforts ahead of 2019 elections, had in a letter on Wednesday expressed disappointment at the alleged damaging actions of Mr. Oyegun, contrary to the assurances when both of them met last week. The party told PREMIUM TIMES it had no comment on Mr. Tinubus letter to its chairman when contacted late Thursday. Mr. Tinubu, a national leader of the party, directed the February 21 letter, first reported by The Cable newspaper on Thursday, to Mr. Oyegun and copied Mr. Buhari, Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, Senate President Bukola Saraki and Speaker Yakubu Dogara. Disappointment greeted me when I discovered that you had swiftly acted in contravention of the spirit of our discussions, wrote Mr. Tinubu. Instead of being a bulwark of support as promised, you positioned yourself in active opposition to the goal of resuscitating the progressive and democratic nature of APC. He recalled Mr. Oyegun mentioned Kogi, Kano, Adamawa and Kaduna States as the worst crisis-hit chapters, but regretted: You have taken it as your own personal ambition to thwart my presidential assignment in these key states. Using the Kogi example, he said the chairman had made a unilateral move of inaugurating party officers parallel to those already heading the chapter in that state. While this may place you in (a) significant affinity with those parallel officials you handpicked, this machination suggests no improvement in the welfare of the party in Kogi or at the national level, said Mr Tinubu. Pointedly, he then put it that Mr. Oyegun wanted to undermine my mandate by engaging in dilatory tactics for the most part. When forced to act, you do so in an arbitrary and capricious manner. Messrs. Tinubu and Oyegun started as political associates in the third republic when both, as members of the Social Democratic Party, served as senator and governor (of Edo State), respectively. Then, the third republic senator backed the former Edo governor to become the APC chairman in 2014. But soon after their party came to power in 2015, the relationship between the two politicians broke down as Mr. Oyegun disregarded the interests of Mr. Tinubu in two significant cases. Firstly, the Oyegun-led APC national working committee did not back Mr. Tinubus protege, James Faleke, to continue as the partys candidate in the Kogi State governorship election, after Abubakar Audus death. Then, the relationship further deteriorated after the NWC upheld the primary election of Rotimi Akeredolu as the partys flagbearer in the Ondo governorship election in 2016, brushing aside protest by Segun Abraham, supported by Mr. Tinubu. Following that development, Mr. Tinubu demanded Mr. Oyegun resign. But Mr. Tinubu, in his letter, said Mr. Oyegun has no right as the chairman of the party to sabotage his assignment with detrimental unilateral decisions, regardless of their disagreement. He warned the chairman of improper unilateral decisions with regard to the national and state chapters of the party the party belongs to all of its members. I request that you make available to me the status reports and all the pertinent information regarding the state chapters without further delay. The spokesperson for the APC, Bolaji Abdullahi, confirmed the letter to PREMIUM TIMES Thursday evening. He, however, declined comment, saying it was directed to the chairman. ADVERTISEMENT In direct response to further probe that it has implications for the party, he replied: if the party decides to respond, we will have to meet, sit and look at it and decide. I cannot make a unilateral response. It does not appear the NWC is trusting Mr Tinubu to reconcile the aggrieved camps within the party. The party on Thursday announced a committee to be led its deputy national chairman, south, to work on the deepening crisis rocking its Kaduna State chapter. Commentators have suggested the task given to Mr. Tinubu is difficult one as he is aggrieved also. This week, his wife, Remi, said her husband was trashed after helping President Muhammadu Buhari to power in 2015. However, another theory is that the assignment is essentially targeted at appeasing Mr. Tinubu by the presidency. ADVERTISEMENT The National Chairman of the All Progressives Congress (APC) John Odigie-Oyegun, has said he supports Bola Tinubu, contrary to claims that he was frustrating the latters reconciliation assignment. Mr. Tinubu had in a letter to Mr. Oyegun expressed concerns that his presidential assignment of reconciling members of the party was being sabotaged by Mr. Odigie-Oyegun. Instead of being a bulwark of support as promised, you positioned yourself in active opposition to the goal of resuscitating the progressive and democratic nature of APC, Mr. Tinubu said in the letter copied President Muhammadu Buhari and other leaders of the party. Mr. Odigie-Oyegun has, however, rejected that assertion, in his response obtained by PREMIUM TIMES. However, rather than address the specific allegations by Mr. Tinubu, the party chairman simply pledged his support for the ex-Lagos governors reconciliation efforts. I thank you for your letter dated February 21, 2018, for your prayers and good wishes for my health. I wish you the same and pray that our good God keeps you strong and grants you His peace, Mr. Odigie-Oyegun wrote in the letter dated February 23. Let me once again formally congratulate you on the peacemaking assignment Mr. President has entrusted you with. It is most challenging but I believe you will ultimately justify the confidence reposed in you by Mr President. In this, you have my fullest support. Copies of Mr. Odigie-Oyeguns letter were sent to Mr. Buhari, Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, Senate President Bukola Saraki and Speaker Yakubu Dogara, all of whom Mr. Tinubu also copied in his letter. APC Chairman, John Odigie-Oyeguns letter ADVERTISEMENT Facebook has offered to assist the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, in exploring ways to expand voter education and engage citizens meaningfully to achieve peaceful general elections in 2019. According to INEC, this was made known when a team from Facebook, led by its Public Policy Director for Africa, Ebele Okobi, paid a courtesy visit to the INEC Chairman, Mahmood Yakubu, at the agencys headquarters in Abuja on Wednesday. Facebook, created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg, is a social networking site for connecting with family and friends online and sharing information. It is presently the worlds largest social network, with more than 1 billion users worldwide. Ms. Okobi noted that with a membership base of 2.1 billion worldwide and 80 million from Nigeria, Facebookhad recognized that the topics people mostly shared were about elections and politics. People care very deeply about how they are governed, about who governs them and other political issues. Knowing that people come to the platform to talk about what they care about, we have developed a politics and government programme essentially to understand how our platform is being used, not just during elections, but also to help governments engage with their citizens and also to see what the risks related to our platform in elections are and what opportunities and programmes can be put in place to address the risks. She said the company was open to ideas on how best it could improve its services and the electoral processes in Africa, especially in Nigeria. Mr. Yakubu told the team that organising and conducting elections was a huge responsibility for the commission and comes with enormous risks. A good election, I have always said, is a recipe for peace and a poorly conducted election could lead to violence and civil war. And part of it is the perception some people create on the social media. He acknowledged the large following the commission enjoys on Facebook, which he said is the largest among election management bodies in Africa, and underscored its potentials for engaging citizens, disseminating information and dispelling fake news for peaceful elections. He noted that the Facebook has become one of the veritable means of interacting with the public. I think more people now get their news from the social media than the traditional media, he said. The Chairman thanked Facebook for pulling down fake pages of the commission from its platform just as it commended the social media giant for also putting mechanisms for checking hate speech and fake news in place. He said the commission looked forward to working with Facebook in ensuring that the voting population gets the best to help them make informed choices. ADVERTISEMENT The Imo State Police Command has arrested a member of the four-man robbery gang that attacked a customer at Zenith Bank in Owerri, killing two policemen. The suspect, Chinomso Onwuegbuchulam, popularly known as Ogolo, was arrested at his hideout at Close 7 Mgbuakara, Eleparanwan in Rivers. The Commissioner of Police in Imo, Chris Ezike, who paraded the suspect on Friday in Owerri, described Mr. Onwuegbuchulam as the last man standing in the robbery gang. He said that Mr. Onwuegbuchulam had a bachelors degree in public administration from the Imo State University. The News Agency of Nigeria recalls that the four-man robbery gang attacked a customer at Zenith Bank, Owerri in February last year, killing two on-duty police officers. The police had, however, arrested two out of the four gang members, days after the incident, recovering three AK47 riffles and 175 rounds of ammunition, while one member of the gang was killed during the robbery. Mr. Ezike said that operatives of the command had been trailing the Mr. Onwuegbuchulam, who had been on the run since the incident. Speaking to NAN on the sidelines at his parade, Mr. Onwuegbuchulam said that he had been into robbery since 2012. He said that he was the one who snatched N2.8 million from the customer at Zenith Bank. Mr. Onwuegbuchulam disclosed further that he got N400,000 as his share in the robbery, while the remaining money was shared among other gang members and the informant. (NAN) ADVERTISEMENT An Ebute Meta Magistrates Court on Friday remanded a 36-year-old policeman, Ismaila Aladuge, in custody for the alleged murder of Daniel Dukur, a Naval officer. Mr. Aladuge, who appeared on a charge for murder, is to remain behind bars pending the outcome of legal advice from the State Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP). Chinalu Uwadione, the prosecutor, told the court that the offence was committed on July 17, at No. 11, Idowu Martins St., Victoria Island, Lagos. He said that the accused had accidentally shot dead Dukur, 34, on his abdomen with his service riffle while trying to disperse a mob. The offences, the News Agency of Nigeria reports, contravened Section 223 of the Criminal Law of Lagos State, 2015. The Magistrate, A.S. Okubule, adjourned proceedings until March 30, pending the legal advice. (NAN) ADVERTISEMENT The Catholic Bishops Conference of Nigeria, CBCN, has criticised the Gender and Equal Opportunities Bill saying some of its content could provide an avenue for the legalisation of many anti-human life and anti-family activities. The clerics, in a communique at the end of their conference, also condemned the distribution of condoms and other contraceptive pills in schools. Whereas we acknowledge some legitimate rights due to women and the need to promote them, we, nevertheless, condemn the provisions of the Gender and Equal Opportunities Bill, which could provide an avenue for the legalisation of many anti-human life and anti-family activities. We therefore demand that such provisions be expunged from the Bill. Similarly, we condemn in unmistakable terms the indiscrete distribution of condoms and contraceptive pills in our schools, youth service orientation camps and private/government health institutions. No person, authority or institution has the right to terminate human life. They also demanded the immediate action of government to ensure adequate and even distribution of voter registration materials across the country. The communique was issued at the end of the CBCNs first plenary session for 2018 in Abuja. The clerics also lamented what they described as reports of inadequate voter registration materials experienced in specific parts of the country. Although the Catholic bishops did not state the region where the said report about poor voter registration materials allegedly emanated from, the conference regarded the situation as unfortunate. It also condemned recent reports of underage voting allegedly experienced in Kano State. Elections are around the corner. This process begins with the registration of voters, an exercise that has already started nationwide. Reports reaching us from all over the nation indicate that in many places facilities for registration are not available, thus depriving many people of the right to register for voting. It is equally reported that such difficulty in registration often target certain segments of the community. Furthermore, we hear of the registration of underaged persons. It is quite unfortunate that our young people allow themselves to be used as canon fodders in electoral malpractices. Government and especially Independent Electoral Commission (INEC), should address these serious lapses with utmost urgency and without discrimination and bias, the statement signed by the former CBCN President, Ignatius Kaigama, and his team of officers said. The CBCN also called on government to promote entrepreneurship and other forms of employment, as a means of alleviating the hardship in the country. In our recent visit to President Muhammadu Buhari, we expressed our concerns on the state of the nation. While we thank him for giving us a listening ear, we expect him to urgently address the issues raised, as he promised he would. We re-affirm that government has an indispensable role to play in supporting genuine initiatives to improve our peoples standard of living. In the words of Pope St John Paul II, the state has the duty to sustain business activities by creating conditions which will ensure job opportunities, by stimulating those activities where they are lacking or by supporting them in moments of crisis. We therefore call on government to provide adequate social amenities, infrastructure, functional education, right policies, and good governance, that will bring about the enabling environment required for entrepreneurship to thrive. The CBCN announced its list of newly elected officers, praying for Gods guardians upon them. To the glory of God we announce to you the newly elected principal officers of our Conference. They are: President, Most Rev. Augustine Obiora Akubeze, Archbishop of Benin City; Vice President, Most Rev. Lucius Iwejuru Ugorji, Bishop of Umahia; Secretary, Most Rev Camillus Raymond Umoh, Bishop of Ikot-Ekpene, Assistant Secretary, Most Rev. Charles Michael Hammawa, Bishop of Jalingo. We pray for Gods wisdom and guidance in the discharge of their responsibilities. ADVERTISEMENT Tijjani Tumsah, the Vice Chairman, Presidential Committee on North East Initiative (PCNI), says the intervention of medical outreach in the North-East is smooth following successes recorded by the military in the region. Mr. Tumsha said this on Friday after monitoring the medical outreach conducted at Bayara General Hospital, Bauchi. He said: Nigerian military has been making success in recovering areas in the North-East as such more areas are becoming smooth and available for intervention and outreach programmes. So, the challenge we see is in delivering the resources as and when it is required. Like you can see, we are here for four days and it seems there is no end to the number of patients. We wish we can have a longer plan and reach more people. That will be our target and that is the target of the federal government through the Presidential Committee on North East Initiative. Mr. Tumsah expressed satisfaction with the medical assistance being given to the people. As one of our medical interventions that is in Buhari plan we want to offer this medical assistance to all range of people who have no access to medical care. This medical outreach is free. It is part of the PCNI initiative to bolster medical care in all the six states of the North East. The exercise has achieved quite a bit of success. Unfortunately, it ends after seven days. But we intend to continue with this exercise rotationally within the states of the North-East. We will definitely come back to Bauchi again and do the exercise and make a lot more people happy, he said. The vice chairman said the medical intervention which was supported by ProHealth International and other health NGOs had a team of qualified doctors in various fields attending to the people. (NAN) ADVERTISEMENT The Joint Union of Tertiary Institutions in Nasarawa State has suspended the indefinite strike action it began on February 16. Ariks Samuel-Bashayi, the chairman of the union, announced the suspension of the strike while briefing journalists on Friday at the College of Education, Akwanga, after the unions emergency meeting. He stated that the suspension of the strike was due to the commitment made by the state government through the respective management of the three state-owned tertiary institutions. He said, Though all our demands are not met, but because of appeals and interventions by the stakeholders, the union shifted ground to give room for further discussion. The state government and other stakeholders appealed to the union to call off the strike in order to pave way for further negotiation. The chairman, therefore, called on all members of the union to resume work immediately pending further directives. The News Agency of Nigeria reports that the union had embarked on an indefinite strike since February 16, citing governments refusal to address welfare- related issues. The institutions involved are: the College of Education, Akwanga, College of Agriculture, Lafia; and the Nasarawa State Polytechnic, Lafia. (NAN) ADVERTISEMENT Governor Yahaya Bello of Kogi on Friday triggered a fresh controversy about his status as a registered voter when he obtained a Temporary Voter Card, TVC, at his Okene Ward. Kingsley Fanwo, the Director-General, Media and Publicity to the Governor, confirmed this in a statement he issued and circulated among media houses in Lokoja. Mr. Fanwo said that the issuance of the TVC to Mr. Bello was sequel to a form he filled, seeking the transfer of his Permanent Voter Card (PVC) to Okene. The governor had been on the issue of the transfer for long. He is excited it has finally been done by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC). Yes, his card has been transferred to his polling unit at Okene. The governor is a law-abiding leader who will continue to follow due process, Mr. Fanwo said in the statement. The issue of Mr. Bello as a registered voter before the 2015 general elections has been a subject of public interest and currently in court for decision. Mr. Bello had registered afresh in Lokoja, Kogi State, on May 23, 2017; but INEC swiftly described the governors action as illegal and unconstitutional. INEC alleged that Mr. Bello was involved in double registration, claiming that the governor had earlier registered at Wuse, Zone II, on January 30, 2011. For their involvement in the governors alleged illegal registration in 2017, a senior official of INEC was retired compulsorily from service while two other personnel were summarily dismissed. Attempts to get the State INEC office to comment on the governors latest action were unsuccessful as many calls to the mobile phone of the state Resident Electoral Commissioner, James Akpa, did not connect. However, the Director of Publicity and Voter Education, Ahmed Biambo, when contacted, promised to call back but failed to do so. Meanwhile, the Peoples Democratic Party has urged INEC to explain the mystery surrounding the collection of a TVC by Mr. Bello. Dickson Achadu, the PDP Director of Research and Documentation in the state, in a statement, insisted that the governor was culpable having registered twice: in Abuja in 2011 and in Lokoja in 2017. INEC must come clear with what is happening and the circumstances surrounding the governors double registration, most especially that the governor has been dragged to court, having allegedly registered twice as being alleged by INEC. INEC must reassure citizens of its readiness to conduct a free, fair and credible poll in 2019 as the governors action is making it lose public confidence. It is unimaginable that having confessed to not being able to transfer his permanent voter card before 2015 and the governors second registration held in Kogi Government House, Lokoja, INEC can still participate in the drama that took place at INEC office in Okene today, the statement said. (NAN) ADVERTISEMENT The Kano State Governor, Abdullahi Ganduje, has accepted the resignation of the state Accountant-General, Aisha Bello, in the midst of an ongoing probe into the states finances. The erstwhile official tendered her resignation Thursday. It is not clear if the move is connected with the ongoing financial probe. Mr. Ganduje thanked Mrs. Bello for the service she rendered to the state as commissioner of planning and budget and later accountant-general. He wished her Gods guidance in her future endeavours. The Director, Treasury in the Ministry of Finance, Shehu Muazu, will now serve as the acting accountant-general. Meanwhile, an ongoing investigation of the management of the states finances including contracts payment, salary payments and alleged salary deductions among others by the states public complaints and-graft units will continue. Muhammad Garba, the State Commissioner for Information said, the state government will take appropriate, necessary measures on the management of the offices of the Accountant-General and Sub-Treasurer pending the final conclusion of the investigations. ADVERTISEMENT President Muhammadu Buhari on Wednesday humorously called the Kaduna State Governor, Nasir El-Rufai, a bulldozer driver The unusual greeting occurred two days after the states controversial demolition of a building used by a faction of the governing All Progressives Congress in Kaduna State. The building, located at 11b Sambo Road, was demolished on Tuesday morning. While greeting Mr. El-Rufai shortly before the National Executive Council, NEC, meeting on Thursday, President Buhari referred to him as Mai tuka bulldozer, the Hausa term for Bulldozer driver. The video of the greeting was shot by an online TV, Oak TV. The mention of the new name was followed by a round of laughter by other governors present at the scene. It is not clear if the remark depicts Mr. Buharis tacit approval of the action which has generated public debate. The Kaduna State Urban Planning and Development Agency (KAPSUDA) in a statement signed by its Director-General, Ibrahim Husseini, said the demolition was part of operations the agency was undertaking across Kaduna metropolis in compliance with its mandate. KASUPDA said the land will be turned into a public park. ADVERTISEMENT The Governor of Kaduna State, Nasir El-Rufai, has sued Shehu Sani, the senator representing Kaduna Central, for defamation. Mr. El-Rufai is seeking a N2 billion sanction from the lawmaker for four charges, one of which is defamation of character. He filed the suit at the state high court on Friday, a report by Punch newspaper indicates. The governor is seeking compensation for injury allegedly suffered as a result of the malicious statements allegedly made by the senator through the mass media to humiliate him and defame his integrity by calling him a drunk, loose cannon and an embarrassment to President Muhammadu Buhari. The governor is seeking, among other reliefs, a declaration that the derogatory remarks made against him by Mr. Sani was totally false and injurious to his person in the eyes of the public. The counsel to the governor, AbdulHakeem Mustapha, while speaking with journalists, said each of the four actions attracts the sum of N500 million. Mr. Mustapha also dismissed insinuations that Mr. El-Rufai, by virtue of his position, did not have the constitutional right to sue anyone. The two politicians have over the years been involved in series of altercations based on their political differences. Reacting to the demolition of a building belonging to a faction of the All Progressives Congress (APC) in the Kaduna State on Tuesday, Mr. Sani had called on President Muhammadu Buhari to caution the governor. It is of concern to us that these actions by the governor have been done in the name of Mr. President who he believed that he is his son that he so much loves. Governor Nasir El-Rufai is an affliction to the people of Kaduna State and a curse to us. We will use this opportunity to call on Mr. President to caution his beloved son who has unleashed a reign of terror and has behaved in the most despicable and irresponsible way, he said. ADVERTISEMENT The senator representing Kaduna Central, Shehu Sani, has reacted to legal action taken against him by the Kaduna State Governor, Nasir El-Rufai. The lawmaker said he cannot be intimated by such move as he has endured and overcame several of such actions by the governor. Mr. El-Rufai on Friday filed a suit at the Kaduna State High Court demanding N2 billion from the lawmaker for four charges, one of which is defamation of character. The governor is seeking compensation for injury allegedly suffered as a result of the malicious statements made by the senator to humiliate him and defame his integrity by calling him a drunk, loose cannon and an embarrassment to President Muhammadu Buhari. In a statement by his Special Adviser (Political) on Friday, Mr. Sani said nothing can stop him from expressing his opinion. The statement reads, The attention of the distinguished Senator Shehu Sani has been drawn to a report that the Governor of Kaduna State, Nasiru El-Rufai, has filed a civil defamation suit in the Kaduna State High court demanding N2 billion. The distinguished senator is yet to be served but our team of lawyers are ready and well prepared. The distinguished senator wishes to assure all his supporters and well-wishers that nothing and absolutely nothing can stop him from expressing his opinion on either Kaduna State or national issues. Mr. Sani also vowed to forge ahead in the fight against the governor, saying he had gone through worse battles. The distinguished senator is a dogged fighter who has been through many courts and even prisons in his life of struggle and can never be stopped or intimidated to silence by any means. Those who are allergic to heat should not be in the kitchen. The distinguished senator will never falter or waiver in speaking truth to power whether at local or national level. The senator will continue to beam the light in the dark and grey areas of our democracy. Those who are irritated by the truth simply need to get a cotton bud. Those who voluntarily offer themselves for public service have also chosen to offer themselves for public scrutiny. The distinguished senator has in the last two years endured and overcame sponsored violence and campaign of calumny by the aides of the state governor and will overcome this. The Olu of Warri, Ogiame Ikenwole, has called on the federal government to help mop up youth from the streets by activating and utilising the two main ports in the city. The monarch said this during a visit to President Muhammadu Buhari on Friday. Speaking briefly with State House correspondents after the meeting, he said he was at the villa because our ports are not working. He said Warri Port and Coco Port are very good and solid ports but are not working. While other ports in other areas are working, ours are just left unutilised and so we want the ports to be activated so that they can start working, and that will mop up a lot of youths from the streets, he said. According to him, when the two ports were working there was no restiveness in the area. Apart from the ports situation, the monarcgh also asked Mr. Buhari to look at the Gas city which was initiated by the administration of former President Goodluck Jonathan, but abandoned. He said the gas city is a fantastic project. The last president did the ground breaking before he left but since then nothing has been happening. We want the federal government to hasten action on it because that will mop up over 300,000 youth from the streets. So when all of our youths are engaged, the restiveness will be minimised, he added. Mr. Ogiame said he also requested Mr. Buhari to look at the possibility of constructing Coco road in the area. He said the road, when constructed, will open up the area and allow economic activities to expand. We have the escravos road, the railway that is going on now, we want it to come to the area. By that, the economic activities will thrive better and Nigerians will be happy for it, he said. The traditional ruler said Mr. Buhari assured the delegation he will do his best. His hands are tied because everybody demands his attention, that he will follow to ensure things are done, he said. The immediate past governor of Delta State, Emmanuel Uduaghan, who was part of the delegation also spoke briefly and said he was encouraged with the presidents response on the challenges presented by the Olu of Warri. We presented the challenges of security, you know we are in an area in the Niger Delta where there has been a lot of insecurity challenges. We also have challenges of ecological problems, we also have the problem of infrastructure development, problem of access to ports which is very critical. Delta has six ports and to be able to get to the ports there is a place called escravos bar which has been very shallow. Even the water channel is highly stilted and so he was appealing to the federal government to dredge the escravos channels so that the bigger ships will be able to come into the ports of Delta, especially the Warri ports, Mr. Uduaghan said. ADVERTISEMENT See pictures below: R-L; President Muhammadu Buhari, The Olu of Warri, His Majesty Ogiame Ikenwoli and delegation during an audience at the State House in Abuja. PHOTO; SUNDAY AGHAEZE. FEB 23RD 2018. President Muhammadu Buhari receives The Olu of Warri, His Majesty Ogiame Ikenwoli and delegation during an audience at the State House in Abuja. PHOTO; SUNDAY AGHAEZE. FEB 23RD 2018. President Muhammadu Buhari receives The Olu of Warri, His Majesty Ogiame Ikenwoli and delegation during an audience at the State House in Abuja. PHOTO; SUNDAY AGHAEZE. FEB 23RD 2018. R-L; President Muhammadu Buhari, The Olu of Warri, His Majesty Ogiame Ikenwoli, Chief Ayiri Emami aka the Ajuwaoyiboyami of Warri Kingdom, Chief Brown Mene and delegation during an audience at the State House in Abuja. PHOTO; SUNDAY AGHAEZE. FEB 23RD 2018. PHILADELPHIA, Feb. 23, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Aberdeen Chile Fund, Inc. (the "Fund") (NYSE American: CH), a closed-end equity fund, announced today its performance data and portfolio composition as of January 31, 2018. The Fund's total returns for various periods through January 31, 2018 are provided below. (All figures are based on distributions reinvested at the dividend reinvestment price and are stated net-of-fees): Cumulative as of 01/31/18 Annualized as of 01/31/18 1 Month 3 Month YTD 1 Year 3 Years 5 Years 10 Years Since Inception NAV 4.9 8.6 4.9 42.0 16.5 -0.5 3.9 12.0 Market Price 5.7 8.6 5.7 54.8 16.8 -1.9 2.0 11.3 MSCI Chile Index 7.3 9.7 7.3 47.2 15.9 -0.8 4.8 n/a On January 31, 2018, the Fund's net assets amounted to US$96.5 million and the Fund's NAV per share was US$10.31. As of January 31, 2018, the portfolio was invested as follows: Portfolio Composition Percent of Net Assets Consumer Staples 23.2 Financials 18.0 Consumer Discretionary 13.5 Utilities 11.8 Industrials 8.6 Real Estate 7.7 Materials 5.5 Energy 4.6 Information Technology 2.4 Telecommunications 2.2 Cash 2.5 The Fund's ten largest equity holdings as of January 31, 2018, representing 64.0% of net assets, were: Stock Percent of Net Assets S.A.C.I. Falabella 11.1 Banco Santander Chile 9.9 Parque Arauco 7.7 Enel Americas 5.8 Sociedad Quimica y Minera de Chile 5.5 Embotelladora Andina 5.2 Cencosud SA 4.8 Banco de Chile 4.8 Vina Concha y Toro 4.7 Empresas Copec 4.6 Important Information Aberdeen Asset Management Inc. (the "Administrator") has prepared this report based on information sources believed to be accurate and reliable. However, the figures are unaudited and neither the Fund, the Administrator, Aberdeen Asset Managers Limited (the "Investment Adviser"), nor any other person guarantees their accuracy. Investors should seek their own professional advice and should consider the investment objectives, risks, charges and expenses before acting on this information. The Investment Adviser and the Administrator are each a subsidiary of Aberdeen Asset Management PLC ("Aberdeen PLC"). The merger of Standard Life plc and Aberdeen PLC, announced on March 6, 2017 ("Merger"), closed on August 14, 2017. Aberdeen PLC became a direct subsidiary of Standard Life plc as a result of the Merger and the combined company changed its name to Standard Life Aberdeen plc. Shareholders of the Fund are not required to take any action as a result of the Merger. Following the Merger, the Fund's Investment Adviser and Administrator are each an indirect subsidiary of Standard Life Aberdeen plc, but otherwise did not change. The investment advisory and administration agreements for the Fund, the services provided under the agreements, and the fees charged for services did not change as a result of the Merger. The portfolio management team for the Fund did not change as a result of the Merger. Closed-end funds are traded on the secondary market through one of the stock exchanges. The Fund's investment return and principal value will fluctuate so that an investor's shares may be worth more or less than the original cost. Shares of closed-end funds may trade above (a premium) or below (a discount) the net asset value (NAV) of the fund's portfolio. There is no assurance that the Fund will achieve its investment objective. Total return figures with distributions reinvested at the dividend reinvestment price are stated net-of-fees and represents past performance. Past performance is not indicative of future results, current performance may be higher or lower. Holdings are subject to change and are provided for informational purposes only and should not be deemed as a recommendation to buy or sell the securities shown. Inception date September 27, 1989. There is no since inception figure for the MSCI Chile Index because the inception date of the Index is January 1, 2001. The inception date of the Fund is September 27, 1989. If you wish to receive this information electronically, please contact: [email protected] SOURCE Aberdeen Chile Fund, Inc. MINNEAPOLIS, Feb. 23, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- AmTrav Corporate Travel, the only all-in-one alternative in business travel, announced today that TJ Salo has joined the Business Development team. An expert in corporate travel sales, TJ brings years of experience from companies such as Acendas and Sun Country Airlines. TJ will be focused on promoting AmTrav's all-in-one, easy-to-use travel management solution throughout Minnesota. Craig Fichtelberg, President of AmTrav, said, "We're excited that TJ will be exposing Minnesota businesses to the idea that there is a better, easier way to manage travel than the status quo." "I'm really fortunate to join the AmTrav team," said TJ. "Too many businesses have no idea there's an easier travel management solution out there. They've been stuck using what they've been using forever 'just because.' I'm excited to shed light on a better way!" For more details about AmTrav Corporate Travel, visit: https://www.amtrav.com. About AmTrav Corporate Travel AmTrav is a global business travel agency committed to eliminating the hassle of corporate travel. With a proprietary web-based booking tool and 24/7 in-house support team, AmTrav simplifies the booking process, reduces costs and solves travel problems. Stuck at the airport? Need to tweak hotel arrangements at the last minute? Whether it's 3 a.m. or 3 p.m., online or offline, AmTrav is there. All AmTrav agents are company employees and based in the US. Over the past 25 years, AmTrav and its sister company CheapAir have helped over three million people travel with ease. For more information, visit: https://www.amtrav.com. Contact: Cassie Sclafani (312) 525-9729 [email protected] SOURCE AmTrav Corporate Travel Related Links http://www.amtrav.com SAN DIEGO, Feb. 23, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, most estimates suggest that the unemployment rate in the blind community is as high as 70%. To address this gap and assist job seekers who are blind or low vision currently seeking employment, Aira, the world's fastest-growing assistive technology service, is announcing a new initiative to provide free service through the Aira Employment Program. Aira, called a "godsend" by the New York Times, uses smart glasses equipped with a camera that streams live video to a remote, human agent. Using the video stream, GPS, and web data, agents offer live, on-demand assistance to people who are blind or visually impaired. Today, people use Aira to a huge variety of tasks, including reading, shopping, social interactions, navigation, home management, experiencing art, travel, taking in sporting events as well as employment assistance. Starting on Tuesday, February 20, Aira is offering free service for job-seekers as they navigate employment sites, fill out applications, build resumes, and travel to and from meetings with prospective employers. Through the Aira Employment Program, the first 100 Aira Explorers to secure job interviews will have their ride covered via our partnership with Lyft. "There is a great workforce available for hire right now," says Suman Kanuganti, Aira's Co-Founder and CEO. "Equal access to information at workplace is a human right. By expanding access to Aira during the job search, and working with innovative companies like Lyft to ensure that people have safe, reliable transportation, we can help people through this process more independently. It truly has the potential to transform livespushing the 70 percent unemployment rate down to less than seven percent." The leaders of the National Federation of the Blind, the oldest nationwide organization of blind Americans, the American Council of the Blind, which is at the forefront of the creation of policies, and the American Foundation for the Blind, which advances understanding of blindness using research and data, have all voiced support for the Aira Employment Program. "The National Federation of the Blind dedicates significant effort to reducing or eliminating barriers to the employment of blind Americans, since employment is essential for the blind to live the lives we want," said Mark Riccobono, President of the National Federation of the Blind. "We believe that Aira's service can enhance the ability of blind people to prepare, search, and apply for employment. We are therefore pleased that Aira is making this service available and delighted to continue our partnership by connecting blind job seekers to this resource." "The American Council of the Blind applauds Aira's efforts to advance employment by addressing the critical barriers of access to visual information and transportation. As a champion of policies and programs designed to foster employment, we welcome Aira's contribution to level the playing field for job seekers who are blind or visually impaired," said Eric Bridges, Executive Director of the American Council of the Blind. Kirk Adams, CEO and President of the American Foundation for the Blind said: "Expanding employment opportunities for people who are blind or low vision is one of AFB's central goals. through our series of employment summits we convene stakeholders, employers, vocational rehabilitation, nonprofits, and the blind this community to create pathways to competitive, integrated, mainstream employment. We are so excited to see technology companies like Aira enhancing the job search experience, and work to drastically reduce the unemployment rate among people who are blind and low vision." About Aira Aira is AI + AR for the blind. Aira combines the power of Artificial Intelligence and Augmented Reality with wearable technologies, plus the interaction of its network of trained remote human assistants, to provide the 300 million blind and low vision people around the globe immediate access to information and assistance. Aira's technology not only greatly enhances independence and mobility for those with vision loss, but also forms the basis of its endeavor to create smart cities that are accessible for all. Learn more at www.aira.io. To learn more about the Aira Employment Program visit: http://go.aira.io/employment SOURCE Aira Related Links http://www.aira.io WARREN, Mich., Feb. 23, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Art Van Furniture ("Art Van" or "the company") President and CEO Kim Yost today announced plans to retire after nine years with the company. In order to ensure a seamless leadership transition, Mr. Yost will maintain his current role until a successor has been appointed. Art Van has commenced a process to identify and evaluate candidates for the President and CEO position. "I am very proud of what the company and its associates have achieved during our time together over the past nine years growing from $350 million to over $1.3 billion in sales, from 35 stores to over 180 across 9 states, and from 1,500 associates to over 5,700," said Yost. "The future is very bright for Art Van, and a multi-year strategic plan that will ensure the continued growth and success of the Art Van, Levin and Wolf Furniture brands has been laid out. I am confident that the company's next chapter will be a great one and I look forward to supporting a smooth leadership transition." "Additionally, I would like to express my sincere appreciation to the late Mr. Art Van Elslander, the Van Elslander family and my many associates for the opportunity to have led the company and be part of the Art Van story for the past nine years," said Yost. "We thank Kim for the leadership and guidance he has provided to the company," said Jeff Swenson, Managing Director of Thomas H. Lee Partners. "He has been an incredible partner to us through this year of transition, and we believe that Art Van continues to be uniquely positioned to capitalize on future growth opportunities." About Art Van Furniture, LLC. Art Van Furniture, LLC is the Midwest's No. 1 furniture and mattress retailer with 184 stores in 9 states operating under the following brands; Art Van Furniture, Art Van PureSleep, Art Van Flooring, Scott Shuptrine Interiors, Levin Furniture, Wolf Furniture and Gardiner Wolf Furniture. Founded in 1959, the company is headquartered in Warren, Mich. Visit artvan.com for more information. About Levin Furniture Founded in 1902, Levin Furniture has 35 furniture and mattress showrooms and clearance centers in Northeastern Ohio and Southwestern Pennsylvania. For more information, visit levinfurniture.com. About Wolf Furniture Wolf Furniture was founded in Altoona, Pennsylvania in 1902, and purchased Maryland-based Gardiners Furniture in 2015. The company has 18 furniture showrooms in Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia. For more information, visit wolffurniture.com. About Thomas H. Lee Partners, L.P. Thomas H. Lee Partners, L.P. ("THL") is a premier private equity firm investing in middle market growth companies, headquartered in North America, exclusively in four industry sectors: Business & Financial Services, Consumer & Retail, Healthcare, and Media, Information Services & Technology. Using the firm's deep domain expertise and the internal operating capabilities of its Strategic Resource Group, THL seeks to create deal sourcing advantages, and to accelerate growth and improve operations in its portfolio companies in partnership with management teams. Since its founding in 1974, THL has raised over $22 billion of equity capital, acquired over 140 portfolio companies and completed over 360 add-on acquisitions which collectively represent a combined enterprise value at the time of acquisition of over $200 billion. SOURCE Art Van Furniture Related Links http://www.artvan.com RICHMOND, Va., Feb. 23, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Markel Corporation (NYSE: MKL) announced today that Beth Hungate-Noland will join the company as a Managing Director. Hungate-Noland, who has been a Partner at Williams Mullen for the past 15 years, will join the team at Markel that is responsible for the oversight of the company's Markel Ventures operations. "Beth has been a valued partner of the Markel Ventures family for many years and played an integral role with many of our companies. When working together in the past, Beth always made us better as a team. She provides sound advice, and more importantly, she reinforces the values and business judgment that are consistent with the Markel Style," said Tom Gayner, Co-Chief Executive Officer. "Beth's new role will be very different in nature, providing the opportunity to broaden her experience and extend her positive influence within our group." Hungate-Noland was most recently a partner in Williams Mullen's corporate practice where she spent 15 years serving clients with mergers and acquisitions, debt and equity financings, and corporate governance counseling. Hungate-Noland will be based out of Markel Corporation's headquarters in Richmond, Virginia. About Markel Corporation Markel Corporation is a diverse financial holding company serving a variety of niche markets. The Company's principal business markets and underwrites specialty insurance products. In each of the Company's businesses, it seeks to provide quality products and excellent customer service so that it can be a market leader. The financial goals of the Company are to earn consistent underwriting and operating profits and superior investment returns to build shareholder value. Through its subsidiary Markel Ventures, Markel makes investments in businesses that operate outside of the insurance marketplace. The Markel Ventures businesses operate with a high degree of autonomy and have the shared goal of positively contributing to the long-term financial performance of Markel Corporation. Visit Markel Corporation on the web at markelcorp.com. SOURCE Markel Corporation Related Links http://www.markelcorp.com LONDON, February 23, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Following the success of bitcoin last year in the Payments Race from Toronto to Las Vegas, organised by Money20/20 and Fintech Finance, Adastra's Marketing Director Amelie Arras looks to defend her crown, and become the first woman to cross Asia solely using cryptocurrency. She will be up against four other intrepid racers each using their own much more traditional payment methods. With the recent crash in bitcoin price and rise in transaction fees, however, the story might be quite different this time around. "My experience from the previous Payments Race showed me first hand that acceptance at a merchant level is not what I can rely on to win. Instead I will be using bitcoin for what it was originally designed for, a peer to peer currency. Using the power and enthusiasm of the crypto community, I am determined to win the race again," says Amelie Arras. In a quest to best demonstrate the real-world challenges of everyday transactions, using nothing but bitcoin, Amelie's challenge is to purchase everything from food to travel to accommodation during the five-day race, beginning in Hong Kong on 10th March 2018. "The Money20/20 Asia Payments Race is definitely the most challenging one yet, it will really test the racers to the limit. We'll get to really understand the real life benefits and issues of each payment method across multiple markets in Asia. Oh, and it will be insanely entertaining in the process, stay tuned for insight and fun in equal measures," says Pat Patel, Content Director of Money20/20 Europe & Asia Amelie must complete a series of daring challenges on route to win points along the way; the person with the most number of points when they cross the finish line at Money20/20 Asia in Singapore is the winner. With her bitcoin wallet and trusty video camera, her sponsor Coinfloor has ultimate faith that the bitcoin racer will win, or at least pass the finish line in time! "Coinfloor is delighted to be sponsoring Amelie's bid to retain her Payments Race champion title. We're excited to watch her engage with crypto enthusiasts across Asia as a Bitcoin Ambassador. Good luck Amelie," says Obi Nwosu, CEO of Coinfloor. Amelie will be mentored by some great minds in payments including Teo Vincent, VP of OCBC Bank , Anson Zeall, CEO of Coinpip, and Leda Glyptis, CIO at QNB Group. Follow the race and track Amelie's progress as she embarks on her second Bitcoin Challenge across Asia. Follow her daily journey and preparation via: Twitter: @ameliearras Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/fintechie/ Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWiaP3A1ErwY982IsSlnSkQ LinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/ameliearras Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ameliearras/ Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/user/ameliearras Telegram: @AmelieArras WeChat ID: ameliearras To follow the full payments race, visit the http://asia.money2020.com/payments-race and check out the various social media and YouTube channels. About Amelie: Amelie is a Director of Marketing at Adastra Marketing, a UK based specialist FinTech marketing agency, with a dedicated team passionate about the future of payments and financial services. To find out more about what Adastra Marketing can do for your FinTech business visit www.adastra-marketing.com . About Fintech Finance Fintech Finance are a young, dynamic group of filmographers, writers and Fintech Enthusiasts. We combine our knowledge of the Financial Industry with our media expertise to provide in-depth and exciting coverage of everything Financial Technology. From 3-D, Virtual Reality and Music Videos Fintech Finance are the maverik reporters of one of the most progressive industries in the world. Our episodes speak with key decision- makers around the world who share their thoughts on emerging trends, breakthrough technologies and stimulating developments. Our crew will travel the globe, from Mongolia, Mexico to Manchester we will get the scoop on the next big app that could change the world of finance. www.Fintech.Finance About Money20/20: Founded in 2011 and acquired by Ascential plc in 2014, Money20/20 creates destination events where the most innovative people in payments, FinTech and the broader financial services industry connect. Famed for their high-impact networking, the Las Vegas (October) and Copenhagen (June) editions are widely considered unmissable by the industry they serve. The new Asian edition will debut in Singapore in March 2018. Money20/20 is the space where the industry's smartest visionaries and innovators come together to create the future of money. Money20/20 is an Ascential event. www.money2020.com Coinfloor: Coinfloor is the UK's leading cryptocurrency exchange, providing a secure and accessible platform for clients to trade and invest. We work with institutional and sophisticated investors, providing access to our robust technology and excellent Sterling to bitcoin liquidity. Our team of highly experienced Financial Institutional experts and Crypto technologists and traders underpin our unique expertise. As the most established and liquid UK exchange, we can also execute large trades through our OTC Market, servicing clients who wish to purchase cryptocurrency safely and quickly without personally trading on an exchange. For more information, please visit www.Coinfloor.com For more information or interviews please contact: Amelie Arras, [email protected] or phone +44-(0)-1243-535063 SOURCE Adastra Marketing BROOKLYN, N.Y., Feb. 23, 2018 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Brooklyn Law School congratulates Professor Alex Stein on his appointment to the Israeli Supreme Court by the country's Judicial Appointments Committee. Stein, a foremost expert on torts, medical malpractice, evidence, and general legal theory, was appointed along with Israeli District Court Judge Ofer Grosskopf to fill two open Supreme Court positions that were vacated by retiring justices. Stein's nomination was supported by Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked, who chairs the Committee, and he was voted in unanimously. There are 15 justices on the Israeli Supreme Court. "Professor Stein is one of the world's brilliant legal minds," said Nick Allard, President and Dean of Brooklyn Law School. "In the short time he has been with us, he has made an enormous positive impact on the Brooklyn Law School communityas a teacher, a scholar, and a wonderfully energetic and engaged colleague and friend. We could not be prouder of his well-deserved appointment to the Israeli Supreme Court, where we know he will make important and lasting contributions as a juristas he has as a law professor and practicing lawyer." "I am thrilled and humbled," said Stein of the appointment. "Leaving legal academiaand, in particular, Brooklyn Law School, where I found a great home and intellectual powerhouse with prolific world-class faculty and highly motivated studentsisn't easy. But I very much look forward to serving the people of Israel and its legal system." "This is a day of celebration for the world of Israeli law," Shaked told Israeli news site Ynetnews. "Outstanding nominees were selected, carrying unique and varied cultural background and life experiences. I have little doubt their contribution to the court will leave its mark on the annals of Israeli law." Born and raised in the former Soviet Union, Stein immigrated with his parents to Israel, where he finished high school, served in the military, and studied law. Following his marriage, he has lived in the United States for the last 14 years and joined the Law School faculty in 2016. While in the United States, he continued his involvement in the Israeli legal academy and practice. Stein has been recognized as one of the most highly cited scholars in the field of Evidence. His writings combine law with economic theories and philosophy. His books include Foundations of Evidence Law; Tort Liability Under Uncertainty; An Analytical Approach to Evidence: Text, Cases and Problems; and Evidence & Proof. He received his law degree from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and his Ph.D. from the University of London. Israeli Supreme Court Chief Justice Esther Hayut praised the appointees, telling Ynetnews they would be "two excellent Supreme Court justices with top-notch and impressive reputations. I have no doubt both will make a significant contribution to the Supreme Court and enrich its rulings with their knowledge." About Brooklyn Law School Founded in 1901, Brooklyn Law School offers a vibrant intellectual community emphasizing teaching excellence, leading-edge scholarship, and an innovative academic program designed to prepare students for public service, business, and private practice, nationwide and across the globe. It is an independent institution, unaffiliated with any university or college, and the only law school in Brooklyn. The Law School offers students the J.D. 2-3-4 Program, with degree options that include an accelerated 2-year J.D. program, traditional 3-year program, and extended part-time 4-year program. Visit Brooklyn Law School at www.brooklaw.edu. SOURCE Brooklyn Law School Related Links http://www.brooklaw.edu Allen, an experienced lawyer and new face in Chicago politics, is a former Cook County prosecutor. The fourth-generation Chicagoan is running for judge to bring fairness and justice to the Court for all people. Just Nesh, the stage moniker for Chicago-based comedian Taneshia Rice, has made appearances on Comedy Central with Kevin Hart, HBO and BET. Standup comic Leon Rodgers, also a Chicago native, has appeared at comedy festivals across the country. "This event demonstrates the support our campaign has received from a broad spectrum of voters," said Allen. "We're excited and grateful to be supported by two of the city's finest, and funniest, comedians." To learn more about 5th Sub-Circuit judicial candidate Shay Tyrone Allen, visit www.VoteforShay.com. Media Contact: Micki Steele 248.587.7922 mobile [email protected] SOURCE Citizens to Elect Shay Tyrone Allen Related Links http://www.voteforshay.com IRVINE, Calif., Feb. 22, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- CommerceWest Bank (OTCBB: CWBK) supported the Blind Children's Learning Center and stepped into the world of children who are blind or visually impaired to understand the challenges that they face. The Vision Beyond Sight event raised funds to help provide early intervention, education and family support to children with visual impairments. Ivo Tjan, Chairman and CEO of CommerceWest Bank commented, "The children at the Blind Children's Learning Center are truly inspirational." He continued, "It is a privilege to help the children realize that they can accomplish their dreams and create a world where they can find success." CommerceWest Bank is a California based full service commercial bank with a unique vision and culture of focusing exclusively on the business community. Founded in 2001 and headquartered in Irvine, California. The Bank serves businesses throughout the state with an emphasis on clients in Orange County, San Diego, Los Angeles, and Riverside Counties. We are a full service business bank and offer a wide range of commercial banking services, including concierge services, remote deposit solution, online banking, mobile banking, lines of credit, working capital loans, commercial real estate loans, SBA loans, and cash management services. Mission Statement: CommerceWest Bank will create a complete banking experience for each client, catering to businesses and their specific banking needs, while accommodating our clients and providing them high-quality, low stress and personally tailored banking and financial services. Please visit www.cwbk.com to learn more about the bank. "BANK ON THE DIFFERENCE" SOURCE CommerceWest Bank Related Links http://www.cwbk.com AMERICAN FORK, Utah, Feb. 23, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Cornerstone Technologies, a leading event production provider, today announced the appointment of marketing veteran Stuart Gold as executive advisor to implement growth strategies and identify new markets and opportunities. Cornerstone has been an active presence in the Utah tech industry for more than 25 years, with a proven track record of creating successful events for a range of companies, including Wendy's, Adobe, Cloudera, Monster Energy, LinkedIn, eBay and others. As the exclusive production provider for Utah's acclaimed Silicon Slopes Tech Summit, Cornerstone earned praise for its inspirational concepts and precise technology. "Working with Cornerstone has made all the difference in achieving our goals with the annual tech summit," said Clint Betts, executive director of Silicon Slopes. "Cornerstone has always been able to catch the vision of the event and take it to the next level through incredible technology and displays to make the entire experience unforgettable." Gold brings more than 30 years of experience in integrated marketing and events to his role at Cornerstone, through leadership roles at Domo, DocuSign and Omniture (now Adobe), among others. Gold recently worked together with Cornerstone in his role as executive producer for the Silicon Slopes Tech Summit. He will bring his international marketing experience to bear as he works with the Cornerstone team to help establish the company as a major provider of event production and management. "Cornerstone is a dragon that just woke up, with tremendous potential of becoming a leading live event production company on a national and global scale," said Gold. "Silicon Slopes was an exceptionally successful event, and just a taste of what we are capable of producing. Show organizers and attendees alike are consistently amazed at the results; these aren't your grandma's events." Gold will combine his knowledge and experience with the creativity, artistry and capability of Cornerstone's experienced team. Cornerstone is appointing Gold to help expand operations into new markets, bringing the company's strategy, execution and value to opportunities with tech companies in California's Bay Area, and beyond. "We are thrilled to work together with Stuart in changing industry expectations as to what an event can provide," said Chad Fraughton, co-owner of Cornerstone. "A truly disruptive show requires the perfect blend of creativity and technology. Cornerstone specializes in bringing that magic to events, taking them to the next level for guests and organizers alike." Visit Cornerstone's website for more information about its full range of creative services. Connect with Cornerstone on Facebook. Media Contact Jacob Moon Method Communications 801.461.9797 [email protected] SOURCE Cornerstone Technologies Related Links http://www.cornerstoneav.com "When African Americans thrive, all of America thrives," Secretary Ross said. "Here at the Commerce Department, we are here to support you, and to help you prosper." Following Secretary Ross' address, MBDA Acting National Director Chris Garcia led a fireside chat featuring Ja'Ron Smith, Special Assistant to the President of the United States for Domestic Policy, and Johnathan Holifield, the Executive Director of the White House Initiative on HBCUs. The panel discussion "African American Leaders in the White House: Education, Business and Policy" addressed issues facing minority business enterprises and acknowledged the crucial role African American businesses play in keeping the U.S. competitive. Smith has two Howard University degrees, and previously served as a Congressional staff member before taking over as Director of External Affairs for Generation Opportunity, an advocacy group aimed at engaging young Americans on economic policy issues. Holifield, who holds a master's degree in education and a law degree from the University of Cincinnati, was a consultant, author and speaker before his appointment to the Trump Administration. A former West Virginia and Cincinnati Bengals running back, Holifield was a co-founder in a consulting firm, ScaleUp Partners, that worked with businesses, colleges and universities. MBDA is the only federal agency solely dedicated to the growth and sustainability of minority-owned firms, helping to secure an annual average of $5.4 billion worth of contracts and financial investments. About the Minority Business Development Agency (MBDA) MBDA, www.mbda.gov, is the only Federal agency dedicated to the growth and global competitiveness of U.S. minority-owned businesses. Our programs and services better equip minority-owned firms to create jobs, build scale and capacity, increase revenues and expand regionally, nationally and internationally. Services are provided through a network of MBDA Business Centers. After 45 years of service, MBDA continues to be a dedicated strategic partner to all U.S. minority-owned businesses, committed to providing programs and services that build size, scale and capacity through access to capital, contracts and markets. Follow us on Twitter @usmbda. Contact: Velicia D. Woods Phone: (202) 482-0491 Email: [email protected] SOURCE Minority Business Development Agency (MBDA) Related Links http://www.mbda.gov HANGZHOU, China, Feb. 23, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Dragon Victory International Limited ("LYL" or the "Company"), a company offering reward-based crowdfunding opportunities and quality incubation services to entrepreneurs in China, announced today that the revenue of their upgraded crowdfunding platform has been growing at a rate of 30% per month. The updated platform includes over 2,000 cooperation repair agency partnerships, which generate over RMB 4 million in revenue on a monthly basis since January 2018. The Company intends to rapidly replicate the upgraded platform's existing model in more cities with mature markets, in the near future. Further, the Company plans to integrate the upstream and downstream links of the auto parts supply chain, with blockchain and smart contract technology in order to explore the tremendous after-sales auto services market in China. As previously disclosed in the press release on November 6, 2017, the Company and Mr. Jiawei Cao formed a joint venture in China, namely, Hangzhou Dacheng Automotive Technology Service Co., Ltd ("HDATS"). This strategic relationship was intended to strengthen the objectives and growth of the Company as an innovative business service provider; as well as compliment the current platform with an additional transaction model that generates rewards for users and customers. The Company and Mr. Cao each own 60% and 40% of the equity interest of HDATS, respectively. The Company's platform has been upgraded to set-up a business ecosystem, which enables customers of internet auto-insurance to take full advantage of the full range of offline services provided by auto service providers. This new component of the LYL platform allows car owners to buy auto insurance on LYL's platform and, in return, to receive rewards vouchers, eligible for auto services to be provided by partner auto service providers. Mr. Jianjun Sun, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Dragon Victory International Limited, commented, "We are pleased at the progress of our next generation platform. As we continue to integrate the newest and most useful burgeoning technologies in our platform, we expect our platform to continue to grow in popularity as Dragon Victory maintains its position as the leading public crowdfunding company." Mr. Fred Gu, the Chief Financial Officer of Dragon Victory International Limited, elaborated, "We expect this joint venture to raise RMB 30 million in revenue by March 31st, 2019. We believe this is an excellent demonstration of the flexibility of our platform and our ability to integrate innovative new business models and adapt to the specific needs of specialized industries. We are optimistic that this experience will lead to future collaboration and the production of value for Dragon Victory International and our business partners." About Dragon Victory International Limited Incorporated in 2015 and headquartered in Hangzhou, Dragon Victory International Limited ("LYL" or the "Company") offers reward-based crowdfunding opportunities in China to entrepreneurs and funding sources through a fast-growing reward-based crowdfunding platform at www.5etou.cn. 5etou is designed to enable small- and medium-sized companies, start-ups and idea generators to raise funding from participants through the Internet. The Company also provides quality business incubation services and financial services to entrepreneurs and business entities with funding needs who utilize our crowdfunding platform. More information is available at www.dvintinc.com. Forward-Looking Statements This press release contains information about the Company's view of its future expectations, plans and prospects that constitute forward-looking statements. Actual results may differ materially from historical results or those indicated by these forward-looking statements as a result of a variety of factors including, but not limited to, risks and uncertainties associated with its ability to raise additional funding, its ability to maintain and grow its business, variability of operating results, its ability to maintain and enhance its brand, its development and introduction of new products and services, the successful integration of acquired companies, technologies and assets into its portfolio of products and services, marketing and other business development initiatives, competition in the industry, general government regulation, economic conditions, dependence on key personnel, the ability to attract, hire and retain personnel who possess the technical skills and experience necessary to meet the requirements of its clients, and its ability to protect its intellectual property. The Company encourages you to review other factors that may affect its future results in the Company's registration statement and in its other filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. For more information, please contact: Company Contact: Bo Lyu, the Board Secretary Dragon Victory International Limited Email: [email protected] Phone: +86-15157527297 Investor Contact: Tina Xiao, President Ascent Investor Relations LLC Email: [email protected] Phone: +1-917-609-0333 SOURCE Dragon Victory International Limited STOCKHOLM, Feb. 23, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- EQT VIII holds first and final close at EUR 10.75 billion hard cap ( USD 13.2 billion ) hard cap ( ) Strong support for EQT's responsible investment and ownership approach growth, transformation and "future-proofing" of high-quality companies Official launch of EQT VIII in September 2017 less than six months in fundraising EQT today announces that the eighth fund within the Equity investment strategy, EQT VIII (or the "fund"), held a first and final close at its hard cap of EUR 10.75 billion. The fund officially launched in September 2017. Investor demand from both existing and new investors was strong with approximately 70% of the commitments to EQT VIII made by investors in the predecessor Equity fund, EQT VII. "The successful fundraising of EQT VIII confirms the support for EQT's investment and ownership approach. We are extremely proud to have earned investors' trust and are fully committed to using EQT's experience to find solid businesses with transformational potential. EQT seeks to create superior and sustainable value by improving companies with the support of EQT's superb Industrial Network and the investment advisory teams at EQT Partners", comments Christian Sinding, Head of the EQT Equity investment advisory team and Deputy Managing Partner at EQT Partners. EQT VIII will continue the investment strategy of the previous EQT Equity funds. The Equity funds have a strong track record of "future-proofing" companies, on average their portfolio companies increased sales by 10% and earnings by 13% annually during such funds' ownership. The fund will be deployed into high-quality companies with strong development potential using the EQT value creation toolbox, global platform, digitalization experience and proven governance model to drive performance. Through a thematic and sector-based approach, and by being local with locals, EQT intends to source unique investment opportunities in EQT VIII's target markets. Investment opportunities will be sought primarily in Northern Europe, focusing on three core sectors, Healthcare, TMT and Services, as well as selectively investing in Industrial Technology and Consumer Goods. When deploying the fund, EQT VIII will utilize the expertise of the Equity investment advisory team at EQT Partners, as well as the specialists from EQT's independent Industrial Network. Thomas von Koch, CEO and Managing Partner at EQT Partners, continues: "EQT VIII marks yet another milestone in our long-term strategy, manifesting EQT's position as a leading global investment firm. With EQT's vision of becoming the most reputable investor and owner, our strategy is to make EQT VIII the best possible home for companies poised for growth, as well as be a responsible corporate citizen in the societies where we operate." The fundraising was led by the in-house Investor Relations team within EQT Partners. Jussi Saarinen, Partner and Head of Investor Relations, says: "We are humbled by the confidence that the investors have in EQT and very pleased with the high quality of the fund's investor base." EQT VIII is backed by a global blue-chip investor base including, among others, AP2, AP6, Ardian, Argentum, CNP Assurances, Daido Life Insurance Company, The Dai-ichi Life Insurance Company, Danske Bank Wealth Management, Elo, Fubon Life Insurance Company, GIC, GoldPoint Partners, HarbourVest Partners, Harel Insurance, Ilmarinen, Keva, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Nan Shan Life Insurance Company, The New York City Retirement Systems, Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance, P+, Partners Group, PFA Pension, Sampension, Signal Iduna, Teacher Retirement System of Texas, Teachers' Retirement System of the State of Illinois, TryghedsGruppen, Universities Superannuation Scheme and Varma. About EQT EQT is a leading investment firm with approximately EUR 49 billion in raised capital across 26 funds. EQT funds have portfolio companies in Europe, Asia and the US with total sales of more than EUR 19 billion and approximately 110,000 employees. EQT works with portfolio companies to achieve sustainable growth, operational excellence and market leadership in short, future-proofing portfolio companies. More info: www.eqtpartners.com About the EQT VIII fund EQT VIII is a EUR 10.75 billion fund that will target primarily control equity investments as well as significant influence investments in companies with strong market positions, significant potential for revenue and earnings growth, strong cash flows and a solid platform that can retain and attract high-quality management. EQT VIII will seek to make equity investments typically ranging between EUR 150 million and EUR 1,000 million. The geographical focus will primarily be Northern Europe and the fund will mainly focus on investments in the Healthcare, TMT and Services sectors. The fundraising for EQT VIII has now closed. Accordingly, the foregoing should in no way be treated as any form of offer or solicitation to subscribe for or make any commitments for or in respect of any securities or other interests or to engage in any other transaction. This press release is translated into multiple languages for information purposes only. In case of a discrepancy, this version shall prevail. CONTACT: Christian Sinding, Head of the EQT Equity investment advisory team and Deputy Managing Partner at EQT Partners, +41-44-266-6800 EQT Press Contact, +46-8-506-55-334 This information was brought to you by Cision http://news.cision.com http://news.cision.com/eqt-ab/r/eqt-strengthens-position-as-a-leading-investor-and-owner---closes-eighth-equity-fund-at-eur-10-75-bi,c2458584 The following files are available for download: SOURCE EQT AB Related Links http://www.eqtpartners.com NEW YORK, Feb. 23, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Rosen Law Firm, a global investor rights law firm, announces it has filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of purchasers of the securities of MetLife, Inc. (NYSE: MET) between February 27, 2013 and January 29, 2018, both dates inclusive ("Class Period"). The lawsuit seeks to recover damages for MetLife investors under the federal securities laws. To join the MetLife class action, go to http://www.rosenlegal.com/cases-1279.html or call Phillip Kim, Esq. or Daniel Sadeh, Esq. toll-free at 866-767-3653 or email [email protected] or [email protected] for information on the class action. NO CLASS HAS YET BEEN CERTIFIED IN THE ABOVE ACTION. UNTIL A CLASS IS CERTIFIED, YOU ARE NOT REPRESENTED BY COUNSEL UNLESS YOU RETAIN ONE. YOU MAY ALSO REMAIN AN ABSENT CLASS MEMBER AND DO NOTHING AT THIS POINT. YOU MAY RETAIN COUNSEL OF YOUR CHOICE. According to the lawsuit, defendants throughout the Class Period made false and/or misleading statements and/or failed to disclose that: (1) MetLife's practices and procedures used to estimate its reserves set aside for annuity and pension payments were inadequate; (2) MetLife had inadequate internal controls over financial reporting; and (3) as a result, defendants' statements about MetLife's business, operations and prospects were materially false and misleading and/or lacked a reasonable basis at all relevant times. When the true details entered the market, the lawsuit claims that investors suffered damages. A class action lawsuit has already been filed. If you wish to serve as lead plaintiff, you must move the Court no later than April 6, 2018. A lead plaintiff is a representative party acting on behalf of other class members in directing the litigation. If you wish to join the litigation, go to http://www.rosenlegal.com/cases-1279.html or to discuss your rights or interests regarding this class action, please contact Phillip Kim or Daniel Sadeh of Rosen Law Firm toll free at 866-767-3653 or via email at [email protected] or [email protected]. Follow us for updates on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-rosen-law-firm or on Twitter: https://twitter.com/rosen_firm. Rosen Law Firm represents investors throughout the globe, concentrating its practice in securities class actions and shareholder derivative litigation. Since 2014, Rosen Law Firm has been ranked #2 in the nation by Institutional Shareholder Services for the number of securities class action settlements annually obtained for investors. Contact Information: Laurence Rosen, Esq. Phillip Kim, Esq. Daniel Sadeh, Esq. The Rosen Law Firm, P.A. 275 Madison Avenue, 34th Floor New York, NY 10016 Tel: (212) 686-1060 Toll Free: (866) 767-3653 Fax: (212) 202-3827 [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] www.rosenlegal.com SOURCE Rosen Law Firm, P.A. Related Links http://www.rosenlegal.com BRUSSELS, February 23, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Positive indicators mirror outbound travel growth forecasts around the celebration of the Chinese New Year, one of the key periods when Chinese take holidays. According to the latest results of the Long-Haul Travel Sentiment Survey and Index Chinese willingness to travel overseas remains positive in the first months of 2018. Nearly 3 in 5 (58%) Chinese respondents plan to travel internationally between January-April 2018 suggesting that demand from this market is likely to sustain in the near future. Europe remains the number one destination for Chinese planning to travel long-haul 93% of Chinese respondents who intend to visit overseas destinations in the first four months of 2018 are likely to choose a European destination. The strong interesto for travel to Europe reflects the increasing affluence of Chinese citizens, improved air connectivity, competitive airfares, and the opening of many new visa application centres across China. Additionally, public-private initiatives aimed at strengthening the presence of European tourism in China e.g. 2018 EU-China Tourism Year and Partnerships in European Tourism are expected to support the surge in Chinese travel flows to Europe for the foreseeable future. Chinese travellers keen on exploring multiple destinations in one single trip The majority (67%) of Chinese respondents expect their next holiday to Europe to last approximately one week and consist of visits to multiple European countries. Besides the most popular destinations, such as France, Germany and Italy; other destinations like the Netherlands and the Czech Republic are gaining popularity among Chinese. In line with the global travel trends, 60% of Chinese respondents expressed interest in heading into the great outdoors for more nature-related experiences. Simultaneously, Europe's culture, history and famous landmarks continue to attract many visitors and make a big mark on Chinese travel in Europe. The Long-Haul Travel Sentiment Survey and Index is an initiative of the European Travel Commission, the European Tourism Association (ETOA) and Eurail Group aimed at monitoring travel sentiment in some of the most important outbound travel markets for Europe - Brazil, China, Japan, Russia and the US. See more findings in the latest Long-Haul Travel Barometer #12/2018 here http://etc-corporate.org For more information, please contacts: Miguel Gallego, [email protected] , +3225489000. SOURCE European Travel Commission (ETC) CLEVELAND, Feb. 22, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Forest City Realty Trust, Inc. (NYSE: FCEA) ("Forest City" or the "Company") today issued the following statement: As the Board of Directors' previously announced process to review operating, strategic, financial and structural options to enhance stockholder value remains ongoing, the Board has extended the window by which the Company must receive proper written advance notice of the nomination of a director candidate at its 2018 Annual Meeting of Stockholders. The nomination window, which commenced on December 3, 2017, will now extend to 5:00 p.m. Eastern Time on March 21, 2018. The Board intends to conclude the strategic review process prior to expiration of the extended nomination window. The date and location of the 2018 Annual Meeting of Stockholders has yet to be announced. The Company does not intend to comment further on the progress or status of the review process unless the Company determines that further disclosure is appropriate or required by law. About Forest City Forest City Realty Trust, Inc. is an NYSE-listed national real estate company with $8.1 billion in consolidated assets. The Company is principally engaged in the ownership, development, management and acquisition of commercial, residential and mixed-use real estate in key urban markets in the United States. For more information, visit www.forestcity.net. Forward-Looking Statements This press release contains forward-looking statements. Such forward-looking statements relate to future, not past, events and often address the Company's expected future actions and performance. Forward-looking statements may be identified by the use of words such as "expect," "intend," "plan," and similar words and phrases. These forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future events and involve risks, uncertainties and assumptions that are difficult to predict. All statements regarding the Board's review of operating, strategic, financial and structural alternatives and expected associated costs and benefits, including whether operating, strategic, financial and structural alternatives could unlock value, are forward-looking. Actual developments and business decisions may differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Important factors, among others, that could cause the Company's actual results and future actions to differ materially from those described in forward-looking statements include the uncertain outcome, impact, effects and results of the Board's review of operating, strategic, financial and structural alternatives, and the risks discussed in the Company's documents filed with the SEC, including the Company's Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2016, quarterly reports on Form 10-Q and Current Reports on Form 8-K. The Company expressly disclaims any obligation to update any forward-looking statement contained in this press release to reflect events or circumstances that may arise after the date hereof, all of which are expressly qualified by the foregoing, other than as required by applicable law. SOURCE Forest City Realty Trust, Inc. Related Links http://www.forestcity.net The RestcommONE Marketplace is a CPaaS ecosystem that blends traditional telecommunications and APIs (applications programming interfaces) with new, ready-to-deploy real-time voice, video and messaging applications. RestcommONE Marketplace partners offer participating service providers new business opportunities by providing real-time applications and solutions that are certified and integrated into the RestcommONE Platform. Until now, MNOs were unable to participate in and leverage the fast growing CPaaS Market. Today, with RestcommONE Marketplace and its four new mobile focused application partners, the opportunity for MNOs stretches beyond CPaaS enablement to include the ability to deliver in-demand real-time communications business solutions that scale seamlessly and efficiently. "Traditionally, CPaaS models have been focused on VoIP Service Providers, leaving MNOs to sit on the sidelines," said Michael Brandenburg of Frost and Sullivan. "Telestax's ability to extend the CPaaS opportunity directly to MNOs creates a unique ecosystem that will broaden the adoption of real-time communications while increasing a new pathway to revenue for this unique set of service providers." RestcommONE Marketplace New Mobile Partners: floLIVE - An immediate revenue opportunity for MNOs/MVNOs looking to acquire mobile data capacity and IMSI access for supporting IoT customers and devices that require network access throughout the world. floLIVE operates a self-developed core network and offers a secure, cloud-based IoT ecosystem designed and built especially for IoT; and encompasses a wide range of services to market verticals - all provided as-a-service via their global cloud. Gintel - MNOs are increasingly looking for innovative business services they can offer to their SME customers, who are abandoning traditional landline and legacy PBX services. Gintel provides the world's leading mobile PBX capability, allowing MNOs to provide true business level features via a mobile device. Joors - Mobile advertising continues to be a fast growing but difficult opportunity for MNOs to leverage. Using RestcommONE's geolocation capabilities and Joors' expertise in data sponsoring, MNOs/MVNOs can generate significant recurring incremental revenues from mobile marketing. Joors is also the key component behind the JoorsChain consortium that proposes to integrate Block Chain based hi-tech solutions to benefit MNOs. Sompopo - Mobile e-Commerce is still an issue with many carriers and application providers alike. Sompopo's mobile commerce platform integrates different applications to meet the needs of specific markets. Its point of sale (PoS) application also supports cash payment transactions to help deliver products and services. Included is a wholesaler panel that front-ends company specific virtual warehouses and a delivery agent app that supports certified PoS. "RestcommONE Marketplace brings a global collection of best of breed partners together to create a very unique opportunity for MNOs," said Kevin Nethercott, Telestax VP worldwide business development for CPaaS Enablement. "The instant an MNO connects to our RestcommONE cloud platform, and become CPaaS enabled, they are generating revenue through our partners that are buying mobile capacity or terminating traffic onto their network." Resources About Telestax Telestax is quickly becoming the catalyst for bringing real-time communications into the mainstream. Our RestcommONE platform is scalable, highly available and is the only WebRTC platform that supports cloud, on premise and hybrid deployment configurations. RestcommONE is fast becoming the platform of choice for rapidly building enterprise class real-time messaging, voice and video applications. RestcommONE Marketplace connects these new Omnichannel applications with RestcommOne CPaaS-enabled (Communications Platform as a Service) service providers and increases the revenue opportunity for both. The RestcommONE Marketplace is generating a positive disruption in the real-time communications market by changing the way organizations acquire and utilize their business software. Telestax is a privately held global company with headquarters in Austin, TX. Media Contact: Nancy Colwell [email protected] SOURCE Telestax, Inc. Related Links http://www.telestax.com DUBLIN, Feb. 23, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- The "Aircraft Fire Protection Systems Market by Product, Application, Fit, Aircraft Type and Region - Global Forecast to 2022" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering. The aircraft fire protection systems market is projected to grow from an estimated USD 911.6 Million in 2017 to USD 1,157.7 Million by 2022, at a CAGR of 4.90% from 2017 to 2022. Increased number of orders for new aircraft across the globe and modernization of the existing aircraft are key factors expected to drive the aircraft fire protection systems market during the forecast period. The market has been segmented based on product, application, fit, aircraft type, and region. North America is estimated to lead the aircraft fire protection systems market in 2017, owing to the presence of major aircraft manufacturers, such as Boeing (US) and Bombardier (Canada). These companies have significant new aircraft orders across the globe which is expected to boost the aircraft fire protection systems market. The existing backlogs in aircraft deliveries can restrain the growth of the aircraft fire protection systems market. Delay in aircraft deliveries can also result in the cancellation of aircraft orders. For instance, in 2015, Qatar Airways canceled the A320neo aircraft orders due to a delay in aircraft delivery. Thus, existing backlogs in aircraft deliveries act as a restraint to the growth of the aircraft fire protection systems market. Products offered by various companies operating in the aircraft fire protection systems market have been listed in the report. The recent developments section of the report includes information on strategies adopted by various companies between 2014 and 2017. Meggitt (UK), Halma plc (UK), and United Technologies (US) are some of the major market players that have an extensive geographical reach and distribution channels. Market Dynamics Drivers Increased Number of Orders for New Aircraft Across the Globe Modernization of the Existing Aircraft Restraints Existing Backlogs in the Delivery of New Aircraft Lack of Proper Aviation Infrastructure and Imposition of Additional Aviation Taxes in Emerging Economies Opportunities Emergence of New Aircraft Manufacturers in the Asia Pacific Region Development of Aircraft Fire Suppression Systems Using Halon Alternatives as Suppression Agent Challenges Formulation of the Stringent Regulatory Norms Key Topics Covered: 1 Introduction 2 Research Methodology 3 Executive Summary 4 Premium Insights 5 Market Overview 6 Industry Trends 7 Aircraft Fire Protection Systems Market, By Product 8 Aircraft Fire Protection Systems Market, By Application 9 Aircraft Fire Protection Systems Market, By Fit 10 Aircraft Fire Protection Systems Market, By Aircraft Type 11 Aircraft Fire Protection Systems Market, By Region 12 Competitive Landscape 13 Company Profiles Advanced Aircraft Extinguishers (AAE) Aerocon Engineering Amerex Diehl Stiftung & Co. Kg Gielle Groups H3R Aviation Halma Meggitt Siemens United Technologies For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/2kpqpj/global_aircraft?w=5 Media Contact: Research and Markets Laura Wood, Senior Manager [email protected] For E.S.T Office Hours Call +1-917-300-0470 For U.S./CAN Toll Free Call +1-800-526-8630 For GMT Office Hours Call +353-1-416-8900 U.S. Fax: 646-607-1907 Fax (outside U.S.): +353-1-481-1716 SOURCE Research and Markets Related Links http://www.researchandmarkets.com GREENWICH, Conn., Feb. 22, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Greenwich Auction & Connecticut Antique Center will be offering a Drip painting attributed to Jackson Pollock (January 28, 1912 August 11, 1956), widely considered one of the most influential artists of the 20th-century at their auction this Sunday. Attributed Jackson Pollock Although not fully authenticated, the painting and its back have many tantalizing clues that point towards its origin. The painting reflects the unique characteristics and chosen paints corresponding directly to Pollock's drip paintings executed during the late 1940's. Discoloration of the paint would be expected from a painting that is perhaps sixty-five years old. The painting is executed on wallboard (also known as sheetrock). Research has indicated that Pollock would gather unwanted scraps of wallboard/sheetrock from contractors which he used as canvases. The painting is approximately 42 x 32 . On the reverse are several written clues that could point to its authentication. "JP" initials that could be those of Jackson Pollock . . "48" refer to perhaps 1948, the year the painting was created. "#2" as shown below, appears to be the title of the painting. "69th. St." this could be a gallery, such as Peggy Guggenheim's "J Dunlop" this could refer to a dealer or prior owner of the painting. "NYAB 544" perhaps a venue (New York Art Blog) with a number. The auction will take place Sunday, February 25th beginning at 11:00 a.m. For additional information, photos, and to place bids, please visit Greenwich Auction's online bid site HERE. David Johnson, owner of the auction house stated: "It wouldn't be the first time a Jackson Pollock was discovered in obscurity. Before he became one of the most famous artists in the world, many of his paintings were lost. I just love the idea that someone will be able to have a possible Pollock hanging in their home for a fraction of the cost. This will be a fun auction!" The owner purchased the painting in the mid-1970's at a warehouse sale in Norwalk, Connecticut. It should be noted that Jackson Pollock had family members that resided in Connecticut at that time as well. In 1948 Pollock tried to trade several of his paintings to an airplane pilot to fly him to Connecticut. However, the pilot told him, "Planes' burn gas to fly not paintings." Perhaps this is one of those paintings. Jackson Pollock was relatively an unknown artist until 1949 when Life magazine's headlines read, "Is he the greatest painter in the United States?" This is believed to be the starting point for Pollock's introduction to the American people and his controversial career. Jackson Pollock today is widely considered the most challenging and influential American artist of the twentieth century. In his revolutionary painting of the late 1940's, he dripped or poured paint into complex webs of interlacing lines, rhythmically punctuated by pools of color. With their all-over composition, seemingly total abstraction, and gestural but remarkably controlled handling of paint, these powerful works announced the emergence of Abstract Expressionism. Pollock suggested that viewers "look passively and try to receive what the painting has to offer and not bring a subject matter or preconceived idea of what they are to look for." Pollock's wife, Lee Krasner, said, "He used to give his pictures conventional titles but now he simply numbers them, Numbers are neutral they make people look at a picture for what it is, pure painting." On November 2006 Jackson Pollock's "Number 5' drip painting" sold for a shocking $140 million dollars. It is suggested that prices for his drip paintings will continue to rise because of their scarcity. Greenwich Auction is a premier auction house, strategically located in Fairfield County, Connecticut. They continually offer unique items of value and historical interest from collections throughout Fairfield County, Westchester, New York City and beyond. Greenwich Auction is always interested in quality consignments of single items or entire estates. For more information on Greenwich Auction please visit their website: www.GreenwichAuction.net or call 203-355-9335. MEDIA CONTACT: Peter Barhydt Aberdeen Associates, Inc. [email protected] 203-252-4768 Related Images attributed-jackson-pollock.jpg Attributed Jackson Pollock Attributed Jackson Pollock attributed-jackson-pollock-detail.jpg Attributed Jackson Pollock Detail Attributed Jackson Pollock Detail back-of-attributed-jackson-pollock.jpg Back of Attributed Jackson Pollock Back of Attributed Jackson Pollock SOURCE Greenwich Auction Related Links http://www.GreenwichAuction.net PHILADELPHIA, Feb. 23, 2018 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- "Mental Health Partnerships (MHP), a multi-faceted mental health advocacy and service agency, joins with all Americans in mourning the 17 lives lost at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Floridaand we demand that our legislators take immediate action to prevent such tragedies," says MHP President and CEO Michael Brody. "We are talking about gun safety. After a mass shooting in Australia in 1996, the country enacted strict gun lawsand it has not had a mass shooting since. 'In the developed world, these levels of gun violence are a uniquely American problem.' "Even within the U.S., the research is clear: According to an American Public Health Association study, 'states with higher rates of gun ownership had disproportionately large numbers of deaths from firearm-related homicides.' As economist Richard Florida wrote, 'fatal gun violence is less likely to occur in richer states with more post-industrial knowledge economies, higher levels of college graduates, and tighter gun laws . Factors like drug use, stress levels, and mental illness are much less significant than might be assumed (emphasis added).' "Many of us at Mental Health Partnerships have been diagnosed with serious mental health conditions, and we are concerned about the linking of such conditions with a propensity for violence, because it increases prejudice and discrimination. As a writer on the Behavioral Scientist website noted in October: 'Perpetuating the myth that mental illness is the cause of mass shootings only serves to stigmatize the mentally ill even further. In addition, it distracts from the more difficult conversation that must be had over gun-control in America.' "Unfortunately, many of our legislators are in thrall to the National Rifle Association. Republicans received nearly $6 million in the 2016 election cycle; Democrats received $106,000. (How much does your legislator receive? Here's the list. And President Trump? He got at least $21 million from the gun lobby.) But who are they representing? Ninety percent of Americans support background checks for all gun sales. "As to the Second Amendment (which, in fact, covers militias, not personal gun ownership), common sense begs the question 'Guns have changed. Shouldn't our gun laws?'" Contact: Michael Brody, President and CEO, MHP SOURCE Mental Health Partnerships Related Links https://www.mentalhealthpartnerships.org/ After a stem cell transplant didn't work -- leaving her seemingly out of treatment options and with a prognosis of only six months left to live -- her doctor, Dr. Joseph McGuirk, director of blood cancers and stem cell transplants at The University of Kansas Cancer Center, refused to give up and identified an innovative solution for Dumler. He located a clinical trial at another hospital in Houston and encouraged her to apply. Dumler was accepted and became only the third person in the world to undergo this revolutionary treatment, called CAR-T. Her story was featured on NBC's TODAY Show as Dumler, her husband and Dr. McGuirk recounted the journey (see the video here). The therapy involves removing a patient's T cells -- a type of white blood cell -- and genetically engineering them to recognize and attack the patient's tumors. The T cells are then put back into the patient's body. "A revolution in cancer medicine is ongoing right now," says McGuirk, who previously oversaw a CAR-T clinical trial at The University of Kansas Cancer Center that showed promising results. "When patients develop cancer, the T-cells have failed to do their job, because part of their job is surveillance for misbehaving cells or abnormally shaped cells recognize that and attack and destroy them." Unlike traditional intensive chemotherapies or radiation, CAR-T "re-arms" patients' immune systems, allowing them to do the work. The Food and Drug Administration recently approved the gene therapy, named Yescarta, to treat adults with large B-cell lymphoma, a type of non-Hodgkin lymphoma, who have failed to respond to other treatments. The University of Kansas Cancer Center is one of the few facilities to offer this CAR-T therapy. A full video of Emily's story and the treatment is available here. The University of Kansas Health System is the region's premier academic medical center, providing a full range of care. The hospital is affiliated with the University of Kansas Schools of Medicine, Nursing and Health Professions, and their various leading-edge research projects. The constantly growing facility contains 768 staffed beds (plus 24 bassinets) and serves more than 37,500 inpatients annually. Eight of its medical and surgical specialty areas are ranked nationally by the U.S. News & World Report "Best Hospital" lists, including Cancer (#25), Cardiology & Heart Surgery (#36), Gastroenterology and GI Surgery (#34), Geriatrics (#18), Nephrology (kidney) (#46), Neurology & Neurosurgery (#46), Pulmonology (#32) and Urology (#17). The cancer program is part of The University of Kansas Cancer Center, one of 69 National Cancer Institute-designated programs in the U.S. The hospital has received Magnet nursing designation three times in a row, reflecting the quality of care throughout the hospital, an honor awarded three consecutive times to only 3.7 percent of the hospitals nationwide. The hospital also houses the region's only accredited burn center, the area's only nationally accredited Level I Trauma Center and a leading quality transplant program in liver, pancreas, kidney, heart and bone marrow. For more information, visit KansasHealthSystem.com. The University of Kansas Hospital receives no state appropriations and is financed through operating revenue, bonding authority and philanthropy. SOURCE The University of Kansas Cancer Center Related Links http://www.kumed.com NEW YORK, February 23, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- CannabisNewsWire Editorial Coverage Out of 120 applicants, Manitoba recently awarded four master retail licenses, a monumental action as Canada prepares to legalize cannabis for recreational use this summer. The entities that now hold prized licenses to retail pot and its associated paraphernalia in the province are: Tokyo Smoke, a subsidiary of HIKU Brands (CSE:HIKU) ( OTC: DJACF) (DJACF Profile); a consortium of Delta 9 Cannabis Inc. and Canopy Growth Corp. (TSX: WEED) (OTC: TWMJF); National Access Cannabis (TSX-V: NAC) (OTC: NACNF); and 10552763 Canada Corporation. One key industry player that missed out on this licensing opportunity is MedReleaf (TSX: LEAF) (OTC: MEDFF). These licenses open the doors to considerable recreational retail revenue potential, and investors with foresight were quick to take action, with Aphria (TSX: APH) (OTC: APHQF) and Koicha Partners LP investing millions into the big four's newest presence, HIKU. New name, established brand Although the name HIKU is new, the brands behind it are well-known and have interesting back stories. Tokyo Smoke was named "best brand" at the inaugural Cannabis Industry Awards in December 2017, and in January 2018 the company joined forces with Doja Cannabis Company to create HIKU. HIKU is led by CEO Alan Gertner and President Trent Kitsch, who founded the best-selling men's brand, SAXX Underwear. Gertner ran a $100 million business as head of an Asia-Pacific-wide sales team during his tenure in corporate strategy at Google. When he found that what he thought was his dream job was less than fulfilling, he shifted gears and co-founded Tokyo Smoke with his father Lorne Gertner, formerly PharmaCan chairman (now Cronos Group), who was dubbed the 'Godfather of Canadian Cannabis'. Tokyo Smoke is a seasoned retailer, already running stores online and several successful brick-and -mortar shops, selling a range of experiential products that feature the creative use of cannabis. Established already in key markets like Toronto and Calgary, Tokyo Smoke's cannabis will soon be on shelves in legal recreational dispensaries in the United States. East meets West in merging of cannabis retail and production minds Partnering with Doja Cannabis, a seasoned Kelowna-based pot producer, was Gertner's first foray into production. The strategy of merging minds with industry expertise in producing and retailing pot brought Gertner, based in the east, and Kitsch, based in the west, to a new market in the Manitoban middle ground. The cannabis industry is growing at a rapid pace. While powerful players are teaming up to establish brand presence and formulate creative ways to differentiate themselves, the smaller contenders will begin to get weeded out. With Manitoba's major retail cannabis players now clear, the stage is set for companies to continue their push toward becoming Canada's first dominant cannabis retailers. HIKU, with shares trading over $2.50 and an estimated market cap topping $300 million, is definitely one to watch. Comparables: Aphria (OTCQB: APHQF) (TSX: APH) was founded in 2011 and is headquartered in Leamington, Ontario. The company calls itself one of the lowest-cost producers of marijuana, and produces dry cannabis, as well as cannabis oil of varying qualities and strength. Its cannabis is 100 percent greenhouse grown. Aphria's estimated market cap is over $2 billion. Canada's largest producer, Canopy Growth (OTC: TWMJF) (TSX: WEED), has a market cap of more than $4 billion, with shares currently trading over $22, a 61.3% increase over the last three months. Formerly known as Tweed Marijuana Inc., Canopy Growth was founded by Bruce Linton in 2014, and is based in Smiths Falls, Ontario. Canopy Growth is the first federally regulated, publicly traded cannabis producer in North America. It operates numerous production facilities across Canada and around the world with over 700,000 square feet of production licensed under Canada's medical cannabis framework. National Access Cannabis (OTC: NACNF) (TSX-V: NAC) National Access Cannabis' market cap is over $135 million; stock is trading over $1. The company operates medical cannabis care centers across Canada, National Access is adapting its established medical clinic model to meet the needs of the Manitoba retail market. National Access works alongside Health Canada and Licensed Producers to help qualifying patients gain access to their license. After receiving the Manitoba retail National Access announced it intends to deepen its relationships with CannaRoyalty Corp. and Cannabis Wheaton Income Corp. MedReleaf (TSX: LEAF) (OTC: MEDFF) was voted Top Licensed Producer at the Lift Canadian Cannabis Awards. MedReleaf is an Ontario- based, R&D-driven company dedicated to innovation, and delivering products to the global medical market, and providing brands and product assortment for the recreational consumer market. MedReleaf's market cap is currently over $2.26 billion. For a more in-depth look into HIKU Brands, visit HIKU Brands (CSE:HIKU; OTC: DJACF) or read the FULL Report: Cannabis Investors Need Three M's To Success: Money, Moxie, and Management About CannabisNewsWire CannabisNewsWire (CNW) is an information service that provides (1) access to our news aggregation and syndication servers, (2) CannabisNewsBreaks that summarize corporate news and information, (3) enhanced press release services, (4) social media distribution and optimization services, and (5) a full array of corporate communication solutions. As a multifaceted financial news and content distribution company with an extensive team of contributing journalists and writers, CNW is uniquely positioned to best serve private and public companies that desire to reach a wide audience of investors, consumers, journalists and the general public. CNW has an ever-growing distribution network of more than 5,000 key syndication outlets across the country. 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The forward-looking statements in this release are made as of the date hereof and CNW and FNM undertake no obligation to update such statements. CannabisNewsWire (CNW) & NetworkNewsWire (NNW) are proud to be affiliated partners of the Investor Brand Network (IBN) About IBN Over the past 10+ years we have consistently introduced new network brands, each specifically designed to fulfil the unique needs of our growing client base and services. Today, we continue to expand our branded network of highly influential properties, leveraging the knowledge and energy of specialized teams of experts to serve our increasingly diversified list of clients. Please feel free to visit the Investor Brand Network (IBN) http://www.InvestorBrandNetwork.com Corporate Communications Contact: CannabisNewsWire (CNW) Denver, Colorado +1-303-498-7722 Office [email protected] Media Contact: FN Media Group, LLC [email protected] +1(954)345-0611 SOURCE CannabisNewsWire Just after the finish line, the skipper Giovanni Soldini comments: ''We are super happy but also very tired. The last 48 hours have been very tough. Sailing in the Channel upwind with a lot of breeze, a lot of sea and a terrible cold. The record went very well, we are very happy with our route. The most difficult part was the last one: with more favorable weather conditions in the Atlantic we could have gained another 3 or 4 days, but that's okay. Indeed it could not have been better, technically the boat is perfect. From the last time we put Maserati Multi 70 in a yard, we have sailed more than 19,000 miles and everything is fine onboard, surely there is the work of preparation by Guido and the whole team. An excellent crew.'' As we wait for the ratification by the World Sailing Speed Record Council, the organization that validates the ocean records, here is a summary of the Tea Route day by day. Jibing in the South China Sea After the start on 18 January (10h42'24'' UTC, the official time by the WSSRC), on the first two days, the crew takes advantage of the NE wind, making a series of jibes to get closer to the southern tip of Vietnam. On the third day, a first transition with little wind off Singapore is negotiated. On the fourth and fifth day, the crew still sails with light winds to pass the Sonda Strait and enters the Indian Ocean with a two-day advantage on Gitana 13. Full throttle in the Indian Ocean despite everything On the sixth day, the first one in the Indian Ocean, a tropical depression localized in the South West of Sumatra is crossed. From the seventh to the ninth day, Maserati Multi 70 sails downwind at high speed on the direct route in the south-eastern trade winds of the southern hemisphere, recording the best sailing day with 644 miles traveled in 24 hours. On the tenth day the right hull's rudder breaks following a collision with a floating object. On the eleventh day, the broken rudder blade is replaced. The advantage of Maserati Multi 70 reaches its minimum falling below 250 miles. On the twelfth day, the route comes out of the trade winds range and passes a high-pressure neck. The three following days are characterized by the passage of three cold fronts. Maserati Multi 70 reaches the southernmost latitudes of the route, around 38S. The Cape of Good Hope is passed on the sixteenth day with a five-day lead over Gitana 13. South Atlantic along the African side The South Atlantic climbing begins downwind. On the nineteenth day the eastern option is decided to cross the Equator. From the twentieth to the twenty-third day, Maserati Multi 70 heads to West Africa following the direct route, crossing off the Gulf of Guinea. The Equator is passed on the twenty-second day. The advantage of Maserati reaches its maximum with 2,046 miles. An unusual route also in the North Atlantic An unexpected light breeze bubble slows the landing in Sierra Leone on the twenty-third day. The doldrums and a stationary tropical depression near the coastline must be passed through. The situation of the Azores high pressure remains atypical, it is quite impossible to avoid it passing to the West, the eastern option goes on. From the twenty-fifth to the thirtieth day, Maserati Multi 70 makes several tacks along the coasts of West Africa up to the Canary Islands. The advantage remains stable around 1,200 miles. On the thirty-first day, upwind sailing against NE breeze phase begins; Maserati Multi 70 is getting closer to the coast of Portugal. The boat sails very fast in the second part of the Bay of Biscay crossing. The English Channel upwind and the Thames downwind Maserati Multi 70 enters the English Channel before dawn on 22 February. The thirty-fifth day of navigation begins between the British Cornwall and Brittany and continues towards the southern coasts of England, before resuming the tacking sequence along the coastline, with a freezing cold. The following day, early in the morning, the trimaran enters the Strait of Dover and turns the southeastern end of England to go up the Thames estuary, then the river up to Queen Elizabeth II Bridge. The finish line is crossed on 23 February at 13:20 UTC. To relive the challenge, visit the cartography on maserati.soldini.it/cartography/ The challenge is supported by Maserati, the main sponsor that gives the name to the trimaran and Aon as co-sponsor, along with the official supplier for the clothing, Ermenegildo Zegna. A special thanks also to Boero Bartolomeo S.p.A. and Contship Italia Group. For news and updates follow: www.maserati.soldini.it Facebook - Giovanni Soldini official page Twitter @giovannisoldini Instagram @giovanni_soldini YouTube www.youtube.com/user/GiovanniSoldini SOURCE Maserati North America Related Links http://www.maserati.soldini.it BRISBANE, Australia, Feb. 22, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Cat fanatics everywhere rejoice! A new documentary that takes viewers on a journey into the unique, often bizarre world of Japanese cat obsession has just been released. The film, "Cat Nation: A Film About Japan's Crazy Cat Culture" is the latest documentary from filmmaker Tim Delmastro. The film explores the Japanese fascination with cats, from cat-scented hygiene products to cats with human jobs and everything in between. CatNation "While traveling through Japan, everywhere I looked cats were being used in really odd and creative ways," says Tim. The film stars British YouTube personality Chris Broad, who treks across Japan to document numerous unusual cat-centric activities such as cat themed cafes, bars, temples, and even entire cat islands. The film, which was fully funded in just 48 hours on popular crowd-funding website Kickstarter, is available to view on iTunes, Google Play, Amazon and Vimeo on Demand. For more information, please visit the film's official website at www.catnation.tv, or contact the film's producers at [email protected]. Related Images cat-nation-official-poster.jpg Cat Nation - Official Poster cats-in-a-tokyo-office.jpg Cats in a Tokyo Office nitama-the-train-station-master-cat.jpg Nitama - the train station master cat japanese-cat-statues.jpg Japanese Cat Statues Related Links Catnation Related Video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=646xOnPVFyw SOURCE Cat Nation Related Links https://www.catnation.tv/ BRISBANE, Australia, Feb. 22, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Orocobre Limited (ORE: ASX ORL: TSX) (Orocobre ), a leading global producer of lithium carbonate, today released its financial results for the half year to 31 December 2017 (1H FY18). Highlights: 1H FY18 profit 1, 2 of US$8.2 million , up from US$7.4 million on the prior comparative period (pcp) of , up from on the prior comparative period (pcp) Total production of 6,072 tonnes of lithium carbonate Strong results from the Olaroz Lithium Facility: revenue of US$63.1M , on sales of 5,532 tonnes of lithium carbonate , on sales of 5,532 tonnes of lithium carbonate EBITDAIX 2 of US$37.2M of average price received of US$11,415 /tonne, up from US$9,186 /tonne in pcp /tonne, up from /tonne in pcp gross operating margins of 62% with lithium production costs at US$4,336 /tonne, excluding royalties and corporate costs making Olaroz one of the lowest cost producers of lithium chemicals in the world /tonne, excluding royalties and corporate costs making Olaroz one of the lowest cost producers of lithium chemicals in the world Strong corporate balance sheet after recent capital raising with cash balance of approximately US$335 million with receipt of the second tranche of Toyota Tsusho funding (subject to shareholder approval) with receipt of the second tranche of Toyota Tsusho funding (subject to shareholder approval) Fully funded expansion plans with strategic partner, Toyota Tsusho Market fundamentals for lithium remain intact with strong demand growth, tight supply and increasing prices Orocobre Managing Director and CEO, Richard Seville said: "Orocobre continues to consolidate its position as a mainstream, profitable, low cost producer of lithium carbonate. "Strong global market fundamentals for lithium carbonate products persist. Prices continue to rise and we expect to see an increase of approximately 25% in 2H FY18 prices on those received in the 1H FY18. "Our plans to expand production at our Olaroz facility have been increased to total production of 42,500 tonnes per annum and we continue work on a 10,000 tonne per annum lithium hydroxide plant to be constructed with our partner Toyota Tsusho Corporation in Japan. "Both of these projects are now fully funded," he said. Outlook and guidance and data Subject to market and operating conditions Orocobre provides the following guidance: Olaroz Lithium Facility Approximately 14,000 tonnes of production of lithium carbonate for FY18 2H FY18 prices up 25% on 1H FY18 Capital expenditure of US$12 -15 million (for FY18) including CO2 recovery equipment, additional spare parts, process optimisation projects and previously noted pond management and control systems -15 million (for FY18) including CO2 recovery equipment, additional spare parts, process optimisation projects and previously noted pond management and control systems Overall pond inventory increased to approximately 45,500 tonnes. Borax Argentina Production forecast of 35,000 - 40,000 tonnes for FY18 Capital expenditure of ~US$2 -4 million for FY18 Corporate Corporate costs of ~US$6 million for FY18 Proforma financials The Orocobre Group achieved a net profit after tax of US$8.2 million1 (31 December 2016: US$7.4 million profit), which included its share of net gains/(losses) of the SDJ joint venture of US$13.1 million (31 December 2016: US$9.7 million profit) and an impairment at Borax Argentina of US$1.9 million. Sales de Jujuy PTE and hence the Olaroz Lithium Facility, recorded positive EBITDAIX2 of US$37.2 million for the six months to 31 December 2017. Borax Argentina recorded EBITDAIX of US$1.0 million which represents a reduced loss of US$1.1 million compared to the previous corresponding period, the operations and expansion studies remain under internal review. Strong cash inflows The Olaroz Lithium Facility (Sales de Jujuy, SDJ SA) continued to generate strong operating cash flows in 1H FY18 enabling it to fully fund a principal and interest payment on the Mizuho project loan. The majority of Standby Letters of Credit against overdraft facilities available to SDJ SA have been repaid and operating cashflow will be utilised by Orocobre to fund expansion plans and continue to improve its operations. For more information please contact: Richard Seville Andrew Barber Managing Director Investor Relations Manager T: +61 7 3871 3985 T: +61 7 3871 3985 M:+61 419 916 338 M: +61 418 783 701 E: [email protected] E: [email protected] Notes: On 1 May 2016 Orocobre has changed its reporting currency from Australian dollars to US dollars in the 2016 financial year. Unless otherwise stated, all financial data in this release is quoted in US dollars3. 1 Statutory profit (loss) is profit after tax attributable to owners of the Company. 2 Orocobre's results are reported under International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS). This report also includes certain non-IFRS financial information, including the following: 'Underlying profit' is a profit after tax before significant items attributable to owners of the Company. 'Proportional consolidation' is a method of including items of income, expense, assets and liabilities in proportion to the company's percentage of participation in the joint venture. "NCI" is the Non Controlling Interest which represents the portion of equity ownership in the Joint Venture not attributable to Orocobre Limited. 'EBITDAIX is 'Earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation, impairment and foreign exchange gains (losses)'. 'EBITIX is 'Earnings before interest, tax, impairment and foreign exchange gains (losses)'. 'EBTIX is 'Earnings before tax, impairment and foreign exchange gains (losses)'. 3 Financial data has been translated to US dollars using average exchange rates for the relevant period in the income statement. About Orocobre Limited Orocobre Limited is listed on the Australian Securities Exchange and Toronto Stock Exchange (ASX: ORE) (TSX: ORL), and is building a substantial Argentinian-based industrial chemicals and minerals company through the construction and operation of its portfolio of lithium, potash and boron projects and facilities in the Puna region of northern Argentina. The Company has built, in partnership with Toyota Tsusho Corporation and JEMSE, the first large-scale, greenfield brine based lithium project in approximately 20 years at the Salar de Olaroz with production capacity of 17,500 tonnes per annum of low-cost lithium carbonate. Plans are underway to expand the Olaroz operations to a total of 42,500 tonnes per annum and to build a 10,000 tonne per annum lithium hydroxide plant in Japan with Toyota Tsusho Corporation. The Olaroz Lithium Facility has a low environmental footprint because of the following aspects of the process: The process is designed to have a high processing recovery of lithium. With its low unit costs, the process will result in low cut-off grades, which will maximise resource recovery. The process route is designed with a zero liquid discharge design. All waste products are stored in permanent impoundments (the lined evaporation ponds). At the end of the project life the ponds will be capped and returned to a similar profile following soil placement and planting of original vegetation types. Brine is extracted from wells with minimum impact on freshwater resources outside the salar. Because the lithium is in sedimentary aquifers with relatively low permeability, drawdowns are limited to the salar itself. This is different from halite hosted deposits such as Salar de Atacama , Salar de Hombre Muerto and Salar de Rincon where the halite bodies have very high near surface permeability and the drawdown cones can impact on water resources around the Salar affecting the local environment. , Salar de Hombre Muerto and where the halite bodies have very high near surface permeability and the drawdown cones can impact on water resources around the Salar affecting the local environment. Energy used to concentrate the lithium in the brine is solar energy. The carbon footprint is lower than other processes. The technology developed has a very low maximum fresh water consumption of <20 l/s, which is low by industry standards. Sales de Jujuy S.A. is also committed to the ten principles of the sustainable development framework as developed by The International Council on Mining and Metals. The company has an active and well-funded "Shared Value" program aimed at the long term development of the local people. The Company continues to follow the community and shared value policy to successfully work with suppliers and the employment bureau to focus on the hiring of local people from the communities of Olaroz, Huancar, Puesto Sey, Pastos Chicos, Catua, Susques, Jama, El Toro, Coranzuli, San Juan and Abrapampa. The community and shared value policy continues to be a key success factor, training local people under the supervision of high quality experienced professionals. The Company also wholly-owns Borax Argentina, an important regional borate producer. For further information, please visit www.orocobre.com. SOURCE Orocobre Limited Related Links http://orocobre.com "It was not easy to choose our top five Engineers of the Year," said Dave Carter, senior vice president, Engineering, Pratt & Whitney. "We have a lot of talented engineers who made great contributions last year. The accomplishments of the individuals we chose were particularly notable, and we are grateful to have them as leaders in our organization." Pratt & Whitney's Engineers of the Year for 2018 are Mark Von Nieda, chief engineer for the F100/TF33/J52; Rick Carlton, chief engineer for Military Development Programs; Ron Prihar, Structures discipline chief, GSE; Esther Boyes, model chief engineer for the PW1900G and PW1700G; and Dan Gysling, aeromechanics fellow. "Mark's experience and professionalism were instrumental in simultaneously working multiple field incident investigations while being able to find the root cause for each," said Carter. "Rick's persistence and guidance in the development of a critical engine program through Preliminary and Detailed Design helped it progress in a timely manner. Ron accelerated Engine Services' ability to decrease engine overhaul time, and lent his expertise to the development of processes for the F100 Retirement for Cause (RFC) initiative. Esther spearheaded the certification of the PW1900G for Embraer E190-E2 and E195-E2, showing exceptional technical skill and leadership. And finally, Dan's expertise in dynamics helped to optimize the engine bearing compartment sealing and damping system for our GTF and advanced military products. They are each shining examples of what it means to go beyond for our customers." The American Society of Mechanical Engineers is a not-for-profit organization that represents 130,000 engineers in more than 150 countries, including college students and young engineers, to senior researchers and executives. About Pratt & Whitney Pratt & Whitney is a world leader in the design, manufacture and service of aircraft engines and auxiliary power units. United Technologies Corp., based in Farmington, Connecticut, provides high-technology systems and services to the building and aerospace industries. To learn more about UTC, visit its website at www.utc.com, or follow the company on Twitter: @UTC. Pratt & Whitney +1 (860) 565-9600 [email protected] SOURCE Pratt & Whitney Related Links http://www.pratt-whitney.com (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160303/792302 ) Browse 305 tables and 43 figures spread through 231 pages and in-depth TOC on "Protective Packaging Market" https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/protective-packaging-market-39055502.html Early buyers will receive 10% customization on this report The global protective packaging market is growing steadily owing to the rise in manufacturing activities and growth in demand for conveniently packaged products. The increase in demand from the food & beverage industry also provides an opportunity for market growth, especially in the emerging Asia Pacific and South American regions. The interior doors segment is expected to grow at the highest CAGR during the forecast period Based on product type, the interior doors segment is expected to be the fastest-growing during the forecast period. Increase in government investments in non-residential infrastructure and growth of the residential sector are expected to drive the interior doors segment during the forecast period. Get PDF Brochure @ https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/pdfdownload.asp?id=39055502 Flexible protective packaging segment, by type, to gain maximum share during the forecast period The flexible protective packaging segment is projected to account for the largest share in 2022, mainly because of the growth in consumption of food & beverage, dairy, and cosmetic products. Flexible protective packaging is appealing as well as functional as it offers convenient packaging, which can be easily wrapped according to the size and shape of the product. The growth of the healthcare industry also provides an opportunity for the growth of the protective packaging market due to the rise in consumption of over-the-counter products for which flexible protective packaging is used, especially in the emerging markets of Asia Pacific and South America. Foam plastics segment, by material, to grow at the highest rate during the forecast period Raw materials such as foam plastics, paper & paperboard, and plastics are used for protective packaging. The foam plastic segment accounted for the largest market share in terms of value, in the protective packaging market. Foam plastics are lightweight and provide thermal insulation and offer shock-dampening properties; this segment is thus projected to be the fastest-growing in the protective packaging market. Cushioning segment, by function, is projected to grow at the highest rate during the forecast period The main function of protective packaging is to protect the product from any kind of damage such as physical or environmental. It is required in order to withstand damage such as external shock, vibration, compression, and climatic conditions during shipping, handling, and storage. The cushioning segment is projected to grow at the highest rate in the protective packaging market owing to its soft or resilient material used to fill gaps, render shape, and provide protection to the product. It restrains the movement of the packed product and prevents damage from shock and vibration during transportation. Cushioning protects fragile and lightweight items from damage during transportation and warehousing. Asia Pacific to be the largest share in the protective packaging market by 2022 On the basis of key regions, the Protective Packaging Market is segmented into North America, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Nordics, Asia Pacific, South America, Middle East, and Africa. The Asia Pacific region is estimated to account for the largest share among all the regions in 2017, and is projected to grow at the highest rate from 2017 to 2022, in terms of value. This can be mainly attributed to the increase in demand for protective packaging in China and India coupled with the growth in the food & beverage industry in these countries. The urbanized population is shifting its preference to healthy and safe packaged foods owing to the rise in disposable incomes. The major players include Smurfit Kappa Group (Ireland), Sealed Air Corporation (US), Sonoco Products Company (US), WestRock US), Huhatamaki (Finland), Ranpak (US), Pregis Corporation (US), Pro-Pac Packaging (Australia), Storopack Hans Reichenecker (Germany), Dow (US), and DS Smith (UK). The companies have adopted strategies such as acquisitions, expansions, and new product launches to cope with the increase in demand in the emerging markets. Inquiry Before Buying @ https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Enquiry_Before_Buying.asp?id=39055502 Browse Related Reports Stand-up Pouches Market by Type (Aseptic, Standard, Retort, Hot-filled), Form (Round Bottom, Rollstock, K-Style, Plow/Folded Bottom, Flat Bottom), Closure Type (Top Notch, Zipper, Spout), Application, and Region - Global Forecast to 2022https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/stand-up-pouches-market-197698472.html Flexible Plastic Packaging Market by Type (Stand-Up Pouches, Flat Pouches, Gusseted Bags, Wicketed Bags, Wraps, Rollstock), Material (Plastic Films, Paper, Aluminum Foil, Bioplastics), Printing Technology, Application, and Region - Global Forecast to 2022https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/flexible-packaging-market-1271.html Know More About our Knowledge Store @ http://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Knowledgestore.asp About MarketsandMarkets MarketsandMarkets provides quantified B2B research on 30,000 high growth niche opportunities/threats which will impact 70% to 80% of worldwide companies' revenues. Currently servicing 5000 customers worldwide including 80% of global Fortune 1000 companies as clients. Almost 75,000 top officers across eight industries worldwide approach MarketsandMarkets for their painpoints around revenues decisions. Our 850 fulltime analyst and SMEs at MarketsandMarkets are tracking global high growth markets following the "Growth Engagement Model - GEM". The GEM aims at proactive collaboration with the clients to identify new opportunities, identify most important customers, write "Attack, avoid and defend" strategies, identify sources of incremental revenues for both the company and its competitors. MarketsandMarkets now coming up with 1,500 MicroQuadrants (Positioning top players across leaders, emerging companies, innovators, strategic players) annually in high growth emerging segments. MarketsandMarkets is determined to benefit more than 10,000 companies this year for their revenue planning and help them take their innovations/disruptions early to the market by providing them research ahead of the curve. MarketsandMarkets's flagship competitive intelligence and market research platform, "RT" connects over 200,000 markets and entire value chains for deeper understanding of the unmet insights along with market sizing and forecasts of niche markets. Contact: Mr. Salgarkar MarketsandMarkets INC. 630 Dundee Road Suite 430 Northbrook, IL 60062 USA: +1-888-600-6441 Email: [email protected] Visit Our Blog @ http://www.marketsandmarketsblog.com/market-reports/chemical Connect with us on LinkedIn @ http://www.linkedin.com/company/marketsandmarkets SOURCE MarketsandMarkets QUAKERTOWN, Pa., Feb. 23, 2018 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- QuantumClean and ChemTrace will exhibit at SEMICON China 2018 at the Shanghai New International Expo Centre from March 14 - 16 (booth 2707). "QuantumClean's ultra-high purity semiconductor process chamber parts cleaning, coating and analytical testing centers help our fab, OEM and OPM customers REDUCE cost-of-ownership. Analytically validated ultraclean parts result in FASTER chamber recovery and LONGER Mean Time Between Cleans. Optimized cleaning methods and proprietary recoating technologies EXTEND part life. Lean production lines deliver FAST part turnaround times resulting in REDUCED inventory costs. We are the only firm to offer ultra-high purity chamber part cleaning validated by a Certificate of Analysis from an accredited laboratory ChemTrace", explains Scott Nicholas, President and CEO. "ChemTrace operates under rigorous quality assurance standards and is independently ISO 17025:2005 certified. This year, we celebrate 25 years of semiconductor process related microcontamination analytical excellence of chamber parts, wafers, cleanroom materials, ultra-pure water, high-purity and complex chemicals", states Surjany Russell, Director of Sales. Visit our booth to learn how our service offerings can bring improvement to your operation by solving critical process chamber manufacturing and related challenges. ChemTrace and QuantumClean are divisions of Quantum Global Technologies, LLC headquartered in suburban Philadelphia, Pennsylvania USA. QuantumClean is the global leader in sub-10nm ultra-high purity outsourced process tool chamber parts cleaning and coating services, tool part life extension and process tool part optimization solutions to the semiconductor wafer fabrication, OEM and OPM industries. Founded in 2000, QuantumClean operates innovative Advanced Technology Cleaning Centers built on the premise of providing customers process improvement through consistently cleaner parts that exceed industry standards. These solutions dramatically reduce our customers' total cost-of-ownership. With 1,500 employees in 20 facilities located in 8 countries, QuantumClean provides unsurpassed cleaning capability and convenience worldwide. quantumclean.com For 25 years, ChemTrace has provided independent and analytical verification of process tool chamber part cleaning effectiveness. Recognized as the leading reference analytical testing laboratory for the semiconductor, solar and related industries, ChemTrace has the solutions for FAB, OEM and OPM's critical cleaning issues and requirements. With more than 100 employees in 5 labs located in 3 countries, ChemTrace offers unsurpassed microcontamination analysis and local convenience. chemtrace.com Media Contacts QuantumClean: Meg Cox, +1-215-892-9300, [email protected] ChemTrace: Robin Puri, +1-503-251-0979, [email protected] QuantumClean, ChemTrace, Advanced Technology Cleaning Centers, ATCC, Process Improvement through Consistently Cleaner Parts, Single Part Chemical Clean and SPCC are all registered trademarks of Quantum Global Technologies, LLC. ACS, Atomically Clean Surfaces, Alternative TWAS, Analytical & Engineering Services, C-Coat, Cleancoat, Cleaning, Coating & Testing Center of Excellence, Environmentally Clean Process, ECP, Final Surface Finish, FSF, QGT, M-Coat, PartSmart, PT3, QualClean, Selective Deposition Removal, SDR, Service Request form, SRF, Solution Based Chemistry, TechBriefs, The Perfect Order, The Perfect Qual, The Perfect Process Transfer, Tight-Coat, V-Clean, VeriClean, Waterless Acid, Y-Coat, Z-Coat, Smart, Lean, Clean and Green, Center of Excellence and Validated Ultra-High Purity. Maximum Productivity are all trademarks of Quantum Global Technologies, LLC. SOURCE QuantumClean-ChemTrace Related Links http://www.chemtrace.com/ LAS VEGAS, Feb. 23, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- A dedication ceremony and open house for the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) Absolute Dental Saturday Morning Children's Clinic will take place on Saturday, February 24th, from 9:00 to 11:00 am. All media and community members are invited to join as UNLV and Absolute Dental pediatric professionals unveil the clinic's mentorship program and share services available to the public. The UNLV Absolute Dental Saturday Morning Children's Clinic provides free dental care to disadvantaged children in the community who may be living in poverty or are without access to dental services. Spearheaded by Nevada's first female board-certified pediatric dentist, Dr. Patricia Prada, Absolute Dental has partnered with UNLV School of Dental Medicine by donating $100,000 and volunteering time to mentor and train dental students while serving underprivileged children in Las Vegas. The Ribbon Cutting will happen at the UNLV School of Dental Medicine at 1700 W. Charleston Blvd., Bldg. A. Light breakfast will be served for those in attendance with opening remarks scheduled to begin at 9:30 am. To RSVP for this event, please email [email protected] or call 702-774-2362. If interested in being considered for free dental treatment, please visit www.unlv.edu/dental/clinics or call 702-774-2400 for more information. About Absolute Dental: Absolute Dental started in the Las Vegas Valley over 14 years ago with a single office and has been providing industry-leading dental care to our community ever since. Now with more than 25 offices and growing, we remain committed to offering quality, affordable dental care and a comfortable experience for your entire family. For more information about Absolute Dental and their community initiatives, visit www.absolutedental.com. SOURCE Absolute Dental Related Links http://www.absolutedental.com RESTON, Va., Feb. 23, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Sallyport Global Holdings today filed a defamation lawsuit against two former employees who made false and misleading statements to the Associated Press about the company's operations at Balad Air Force Base in Iraq. The lawsuit claims the statements harmed Sallyport's reputation and the company has notified the employees that it would not pursue the lawsuit if they issue a retraction on the public record. "As this lawsuit makes clear, these former employees knewas can be seen from their own internal reports and communicationsthat the statements they made about Sallyport were not true," said attorney Lee H. Rubin of Mayer Brown. "The misleading narrative created by these employees needs to be corrected and this lawsuit seeks to hold them accountable for the damage they caused to Sallyport's reputation. Sallyport is a dedicated partner in the fight against terror and operates with transparency, integrity and accountability." While Sallyport strongly disputed the claims when the article was published, the company undertook a thorough investigation of the accusations and confirmed that claims made by the former employees were inaccurate and misleading. In the wake of this review, Sallyport determined it was necessary to set the record straight about its operations in Balad. The lawsuit provides a detailed and truthful account of the events falsely described by the former employees. According to the lawsuit, shortly after employees Robert Cole and Kristie King were terminated for inadequate performance, they made a number of false allegations about Sallyport, including that the company was involved in a sex trafficking ring and had concealed information about security breaches from the U.S. government. The complaint shows that internal reports by King and Cole contradicted the claims they made in the news article. For example, regarding King and Cole's accusations of prostitution and trafficking at Balad, the lawsuit notes that these employees wrote a report prior to their firing stating that the prostitution allegations were "unfounded" and "rumors." Another example of the false statements made by one of the employees is the accusation that Sallyport tried to cover up the theft of three large generators at the base. Verbal and written reports made to government representatives about the incident immediately after it occurred clearly establish that it was "openly investigated and reported to the Government." Futhermore, the equipment at issue was stolen from an area of the base that Sallyport did not control and was not assigned to protect. The lawsuit seeks damages against Cole and King for defamation and breach of contract. Sallyport is a critical component of U.S. efforts in the war on terror and the fight against ISIS. The company currently has a contract to provide comprehensive life and logistics support, security, construction, and base operation support services at the largest Iraqi Air Base, supporting more than 4,000 resident contractors involved in the Iraqi Air Force F-16 Program. About Sallyport Sallyport is a leading provider of diverse services to government and commercial clients across the globe. For over a decade, we have worked in diverse environments on over 100 security, operations and maintenance, and life support contracts, combining exceptional customer services with a broad range of capabilities to help customers operate more efficiently. We have been at the forefront of working to enable global operations focused on developing capacity, post-conflict stability, and prosperity. SOURCE Sallyport Global SARASOTA, Fla., Feb. 23, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- After 20+ years of finding strategic solutions to clients' complex problems, Shinn & Company has merged with top 20 CPA and advisory firm Carr, Riggs & Ingram, LLC (CRI). The Shinn & Company team joins more than 1,800 CRI professionals currently serving clients across the Southern U.S. Shinn & Company has offices in Bradenton and Sarasota. The firm provides accounting and auditing, tax compliance and planning, business consulting, and small business accounting services with particular industry expertise delivered to agricultural, education, governmental, nonprofit, construction, and real estate clients. "Our mission has been to provide clients with exemplary accounting and consulting services with integrity, and the efficiencies and expanded services created by this merger with a regional CPA firm will allow us to continue to deliver on this promise," said Byron Shinn, Shinn & Company's managing partner. "In addition to bringing CRI another vibrant market, the expansion of the Florida Gulf Coast CRI team creates added depth of expertise in industries such as agribusiness, manufacturing, and real estate," stated Bill Carr, CRI's chairman, and managing partner. CRI has financial tools and accounting resources available on its website at www.CRIcpa.com. About Carr, Riggs & Ingram, LLC CRI is a CPA and advisory firm located in more than 25 markets throughout Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas. CRI's industry specializations include construction, government, banking/financial institutions, healthcare, insurance, not-for-profit, manufacturing, and distribution. CRI offers traditional and specialized services including audit and assurance, business consulting and support, forensic accounting, IT auditing, retirement plan auditing, SEC compliance, business valuation, tax planning, and trusts and estates work. Additionally, CRI's portfolio companies deliver service organization control (SOC) reports, investment banking, management consulting, and wealth management. CRI is a top 20 nationally ranked accounting firm. For additional information, please visit CRIcpa.com. Media Contact Cheryl Hunt,CRI Marketing Manager 629.208.7705 [email protected] SOURCE Carr, Riggs & Ingram Related Links https://www.cricpa.com/ On March 13 th & 14 th , 2018, Solarplaza will host the 5 th annual edition of the leading conference dedicated to the operational phase of solar plants and portfolios. Covering technical and financial topics, which range from performance optimization to refinancing and secondary market. The conference agenda includes breakout sessions where attendees will learn from 90+ industry experts about the latest developments in solar asset management. First Lessons Regarding O&M and Asset Management for Storage will include: How to hierarchically integrate and manage storage to improve operations Maintenance guidelines and strategies: to what degree can storage be optimized Information on performance data and defining scope of work Avoiding the mistakes of the past "I believe that the future of solar is solar plus storage," says Anthony Conklin, President of Solar Data Systems, Inc. (Solar-Log), "It is important to stay ahead of the trends in technology and the solar industry is no exception to that. We are mindful of the shift going towards battery storage and as a performance monitoring tool, we have the ability to give users a birds-eye view to track both energy flow and battery state-of-charge." Solar-Log has been leading the industry in solar PV monitoring technology for more than 12 years and was recently named one of the global leaders in Home Energy Management Systems by Navigant Research*. Solar-Log continues to hold the position as the top Independent Software Vendor for residential and commercial monitoring, according to GTM Research**. Sources: * Navigant Research Leaderboard: Residential Solar Monitoring and HEMS: https://www.navigantresearch.com/research/navigant-research-leaderboard-residential-solar-monitoring-and-hems **Global PV Monitoring 2017-2022: Markets, Trends and Leading Players: https://www.greentechmedia.com/research/report/global-pv-monitoring-2017-2022-markets-trends-and-leading-players About Solar Data Systems, Inc. and Solare Datensysteme GmbH Solar Data Systems, Inc. is a fully owned subsidiary of Solare Datensysteme GmbH, manufacturer of Solar-Log web-enabled monitoring and metering solutions for photovoltaic plants. Solar-Log is a global market leader with over 274,000 plants monitored world-wide, with a generating power of 12.3 GWp. The Solar-Log product family monitors plant performance, integrates yield forecasting, provides real-time error detection, automatic status information, and offers revenue-grade metering for incentive reporting. This industry-leading functionality maximizes PV plant performance, optimizes self-consumption, provides intelligent grid feed-in controls, and best-in-class PV plant fleet management. Solare Datensysteme GmbH is based in Binsdorf, Germany and is a subsidiary of BKW AG (Bern, Switzerland) a global company for energy and infrastructure. SOURCE Solar Data Systems, Inc. "The interest we have received from ShowStoppers at CES was incredible. We have already met with a few parties from the middle east, Europe and Asia expressing interest in strategic partnerships", says Shane Wilder, CEO of Vibes Modular. "There is a growing global interest in our products. We think MWC will open additional doors as leaders in mobile recognize the incredible disruptive opportunity for shareable and sustainable smartphone accessories." The Mobile World Congress show runs from February 26 March 1, 2018. The Vibes Modular team will demonstrate its market available "ROXON Modular Smartphone System line of products which starts with its global patent pending BASEROX Smartphone Case. "When we show the BASEROX case to consumers and the trade we hear a consistent message 'Why didn't I think of that', says Scharles, Wilder, Co-Founder and Chief Technical Officer of Vibes Modular. The reverse side of the BASEROX case is carved out and has a patented trim ring which allows for the simple snap on, snap off usability for its accessories. And if a user changes phones, they simply need a new inexpensive BASEROX case. All of the ROXON line of accessories will still back snap in place. In addition, the company will be showing its VOLTROX thin form factor Power Bank and the VIBROX Sound Engine at MWC which provides robust sound that emanates from a Bluetooth enabled vibration powered carbon fiber surface and includes conference calling, all from a thin lightweight accessory (that also snaps on to the back of the BASEROX case.) The STICKYMOUNT adapter allows users to attach their VIBROX speaker virtually anywhere: the kitchen, a studio, a cooler, a surfboard, or shower, for example. As a bonus feature, the VIBROX Sound Engine is waterproof, and will be available to ship in Q2. Vibes Modular has several products in its roadmap, some of which will be displayed at the ShowStopper booth. Just ask for Shane or Scharles and they'll happily walk you through the company's product development roadmap. "One of the questions we get asked a lot is 'Tell us about your manufacturing capability'. We chose the best in the world that can scale to millions of products. Capacity is in place", says Scharles. This year at Mobile World Congress the organization's central theme is sustainability. According to its website they are "Bringing the Sustainable Development Goals to life at MWC 2018." Vibes Modular sustainable positioning is based upon how the products can be reused. So many products are deemed unusable once a new smartphone version is created. To hedge against obsolescence from upgrading, one only has to change its Vibes Modular case (BASEROX) and continue to snap on Vibes Modular smartphone products. To learn more about the MWC ShowStoppers event go here . To learn more about or to purchase Vibes Modular products now, go to VibesModular.com. SOURCE Vibes Modular NEW YORK, Feb. 23, 2018 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The American Turkish Society will honor Dr. Mehmet Oz at their 2018 Gala on Wednesday, May 2 at The Plaza in New York. Gala Chair, Martha Stewart will present Dr. Oz with The American Turkish Society's Outstanding Achievement Award for his significant contributions and moral commitment to improving the lives of so many in the United States. Dr. Oz has won nine Daytime Emmy Awards for The Dr. Oz Show and is a professor of Surgery at Columbia University. He directs the Complementary Medicine Program at New York-Presbyterian Hospital and performs 50 heart operations annually. His research includes heart replacement surgery, minimally invasive surgery, alternative medicine and health care policy. He has authored over 400 original publications, book chapters, and medical books, and has received numerous patents. He also hosts the internationally syndicated radio broadcast Daily Dose. He writes a newspaper column syndicated by Hearst in 175 markets internationally, and has a magazine, The Good Life, with Hearst, which was voted the hottest new publication in 2014. "We are very proud to celebrate at the world-famous Plaza Hotel (@ThePlazaHotel) in Manhattan, the remarkable multi-profession, multi-faceted talents and accomplishments of our 2018 American Turkish Society (Amerikan Turk Cemiyeti) (@FollowTurkey) Gala Honoree Dr. Mehmet Oz (@DrOz), in the fields of traditional medicine, cardiac surgery, holistic medicine, healthy living, publishing best-selling books, and producing and starring in Emmy-award winning multi-media shows. Mehmet brings out the best in all of us with his consistent excellence in so many fields of endeavor, and makes us all try harder in those that we navigate in our daily lives," said The American Turkish Society's Chairman, Murat Koprulu. Founded in 1949, The American Turkish Society is the oldest, independent organization in the world dedicated to building bridges between the United States and Turkey. The American Turkish Society's mission is to enhance business, economic, and cultural ties between Turkey and the United States. The Society fosters understanding and cooperation between the countries through education, cultural exchange, philanthropy, humanitarian efforts and networking; presents and supports programs highlighting Turkish arts and culture; and nurtures the next generation of leaders through its Young Society Leaders program. Over 350 guests from the public and private sectors, including diplomats, leading business executives, artists, scholars and thought leaders from Turkey and the United States will support this year's Gala and all proceeds will benefit the non-profit's many programs in the areas of education, arts, culture, and business. For more on the American Turkish Society or to purchase tickets to this year's Gala, please visit www.americanturkishsociety.org SOURCE The American Turkish Society Related Links http://www.americanturkishsociety.org The DREAM Project's Sixth Annual NYC Benefit, Suenos 2018 , is set to take place on March 5th at The Italian Academy at Columbia University. This exclusive event will kick off with a special VIP reading by Junot Diaz, followed by the main event, headlined by this year's awards. The evening will finish with the first US performance by the DREAM Bachata Academy Band, followed by the croonings of bachata diva Andre Veloz. Confirmed guests include DREAMer of the Year, Pulitzer Prize winner Junot Diaz who will be joined by the Principal of The American Ballet Theatre Misty Copeland, actress Dascha Polanco, Educators of the Year Actor and Head Start Ambassador Taye Diggs with artist and writer Shane Evans and many more. In addition, Beachwold Residential will be awarded Corporate DREAMer of the Year for the contribution and emphasis they have placed on education in the Dominican Republic. All proceeds from the event will go directly towards DREAM's early childhood development, at-risk youth and workforce development programs, impacting more than 8,000 Dominican youth in 27 different communities. This year's sponsors, helping DREAM create change and end the cycle of poverty in the Dominican Republic, include: UBS, JetBlue, Fast Enterprises, The RC22 Foundation, Brugal, Dominican Republic Tourism, the Latino Network Coalition, Beachwold Residential, and Univision 41 Nueva York. To be part of this stellar night, visit: http://www.dominicandream.org/suenos. About The DREAM Project: The Dominican Republic Education and Mentoring (DREAM) Project is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization that focuses on early childhood education, high quality primary education, holistic youth development, and arts, culture and community enrichment. Their groundwork was laid in 1995 when a group of Dartmouth students came down for a semester to volunteer in public schools in Cabarete, Dominican Republic. Today, DREAM helps more than 8,000 youth receive a better education in 27 different communities. For more information visit www.dominicandream.org. Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/645353/The_DREAM_Project_Red_Carpet.jpg SOURCE The DREAM Project Related Links http://www.dominicandream.org NEW YORK, Feb. 23, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- The US Navy Veterans Mesothelioma Center is now urging a US Navy Veteran who has recently been diagnosed with mesothelioma or their family to call them anytime at 800-714-0303 for very honest advice on how not to lose out on their compensation. The group says, "Buying into Internet nonsense such as, 'get medical treatment first, and then talk to a lawyer' or 'no lawsuit required' are gimmicky marketing lines we want to help a Navy Veteran with this rare cancer, or their family avoid at all costs." http://USNavyMesothelioma.Com Asbestos Warning Sign US Navy Veterans The US Navy Veterans Mesothelioma Center says, "We have made it our number one priority to provide a Navy Veteran with mesothelioma on the spot access to the nation's most capable and skilled mesothelioma lawyers who are extremely experienced in helping US Navy Veterans with a mesothelioma compensation claim. These lawyers also have extremely good references from people that they have helped for the last decade as we would like to discuss anytime at 800-714-0303. The US Navy Veterans Mesothelioma Center is urging a diagnosed US Navy Veteran, or a Navy Shipyard worker with mesothelioma, to steer clear of Internet or cable TV advertisements that suggest the following: "No lawsuits needed" Note: If a Navy Veteran with mesothelioma wants the best possible financial compensation a lawsuit might be needed. "A Federal Mesothelioma Compensation Claim Center" Note: The government does not sponsor websites related to mesothelioma compensation claims. "Get the financial claim settlement you deserve" Note: If a Navy Veteran with mesothelioma is not represented by some of the nation's top mesothelioma attorneys they may not get the compensation they deserve. "Get medical treatment first, and then when you get around to it call us" Note: If a Navy Veteran waits too long to begin the financial compensation process they may not live long enough to see a compensation settlement. The group says, "What is missing from these advertising gimmicks is any mention of getting the best compensation results nationwide, or more experienced mesothelioma lawyers get better compensation results for their US Navy Veteran clients, and/or if you do not begin the mesothelioma compensation claims process immediately you could get financially shortchanged." Before a US Navy Veteran with mesothelioma and/or their family retain the services of a law firm to advance a compensation claim for this rare cancer caused by exposure to asbestos, they are urged to contact the US Navy Veterans Mesothelioma Center at 800-714-0303 for direct access to some of the nation's leading mesothelioma attorneys who consistently obtain the best possible financial compensation settlement results on a nationwide basis. http://USNavyMesothelioma.Com According to the CDC the states indicated with the highest incidence of mesothelioma include Maine, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maryland, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, Virginia, Michigan, Illinois, Minnesota, Louisiana, Washington, and Oregon. However, based on the calls the US Navy Veterans Mesothelioma Center receives a US Navy Veteran or US Navy Shipyard worker with mesothelioma could live in any state including New York, Florida, California, Texas, Illinois, Ohio, Iowa, Indiana, North Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota, Wyoming, Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, Arizona, Idaho, or Alaska. http://USNavyMesothelioma.Com For information about current and former US Navy Ships or Submarines please review the US Navy website on this topic: http://www.navy.mil/navydata/our_ships.asp. Media contact: Michael Thomas [email protected] 800-714-0303 SOURCE US Navy Veteran Mesothelioma Center Related Links http://usnavymesothelioma.com TEL AVIV, Israel, Feb. 23, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Vascular Grafts Solutions announced today the interim results from the VEST III study, a post-marketing trial which evaluates the effectiveness of the VEST technology (Venous External SupporT) in treatment of saphenous vein graft (SVG) disease after coronary artery bypass grafting. The Interim results of the entire patients' cohort from Barmherzigen Bruder hospital, in Trier Germany, were presented at the DGTHG meeting in Leipzig, by Prof. Ivar Friedrich. The cohort included 35 patients (mean age 66.0 7.1 years, 97% males) with multi-vessel disease that underwent CABG between October 2015 and January 2017. In addition to an internal mammary artery graft, each patient received one external stent (VEST, Vascular Graft Solutions, Israel) to a single SVG randomized to either the right or left coronary territories while one or more non-stented SVG served as control. Graft patency was evaluated at 6 months using CT angiography. Prof. Friedrich reported that all SVGs were harvested in an open manner and that VEST - external stent deployment was successful in 100% of patients. In addition, transient time flow measurements and pulsatility indices in the stented and non-stented groups were 36.114.8 and 2.00.8 and 37.4215.2 and 2.31.3 respectively. Overall MACCE rate was 8.3% during the reported study period (mean follow-up 481 days, range 229-681 days). Six month CT angiography has been completed for all 35 patients (100% follow-up). Early patency of LIMA grafts was 100% (35/35). Early patency of stented SVG to the right and left territories were 100% (17/17) and 100% (18/18) respectively compared to 100% (18/18) and 94.4% (17/18) in the non-stented group. "After 50 years of using veins as bypass grafts in cardiac surgery, we finally have a promising technology to target vein graft degeneration". said Professor Ivar Friedrich. VEST received CE mark approval in 2015, and has been implanted successfully in more than 1,000 patients in leading European heart centers. To date, it is the only technology that demonstrated clinical effectiveness in mitigation of vein graft disease five years after surgery. "To the best of our knowledge, this is the first clinical group that report 100% early patency rates from a randomized controlled cohort of externally stented grafts," said Eyal Orion, founder and CEO of VGS. "We are honored and privileged to develop, together with cardiac surgeons, breakthrough technologies that will restate CABG and position it as a definitive treatment for severe coronary disease. This report, joins our previous publications from VEST I and VEST II trials that demonstrated significant beneficial effect of VEST on vein grafts disease." About VEST VEST - Venous External SupporT, is a kink resistant cobalt-chromium external support applied on the outer surface of saphenous vein grafts when used in CABG surgery. Its unique mechanical properties enable the surgeon to design its geometry during the procedure and optimize the dimensional match with the graft. VEST is designed to target the underlying factors leading to vein graft disease; disturbed flow pattern, high wall tension and in particular, progression of vein graft disease (intimal hyperplasia). VEST is CE Marked and commercially available in Europe, Mexico and South-Africa. In the U.S., VEST is an investigational device and is not available for sale. About Vascular Graft Solutions Vascular Graft Solutions Ltd, a privately held medical device company Based in Tel-Aviv, Israel, was founded in 2009. The company is devoted to the development, manufacturing and marketing of medical technologies in cardiac and vascular surgery with market leading innovations and industry-leading pipeline. Rotem Katzenellenbogen VP Business Development [email protected] +972-3-549-9054 SOURCE Vascular Grafts Solutions Related Links http://www.graftsolutions.com/ NEW YORK, Feb. 23, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- It's time for women to speak up as never before. And, perhaps, most importantly, it's time for people to LISTEN to What She Said. W Hotels today announces an exciting next step for What She Said, the brand's popular initiative that celebrates femininity in all its forms, nuances and glory. Here, femininity is defined by experience, not confined by gender. Since launching in 2016, What She Said has given a platform to icons of culture like Diane von Furstenberg, Jenna Lyons, Rachel Zoe, LeToya Luckett, Tig Notaro, Cheryl Hines, and NIIA, among others, with over 40 well-attended and stimulating What She Said events to date. Now, as conversations in our society evolve, so too will the What She Said platform, which will focus on providing safe spaces for conversation to drive progress in the gender equality movement by bringing in provocative speakers, cultivating community, and sparking conversation that inspires, educates, and enlightens. In addition to panels hosted with experts of industry around the world, W will host at least one intimate dinner each month, bringing captivating, behind-closed-doors conversations about modern issues of equality to the global stage through curated podcasts, videos and livestreamed content. "W Hotels has always been a bold advocate and active participant in global conversations around equality," said Anthony Ingham, Global Brand Leader, W Hotels Worldwide. "The next iteration of What She Said will once again offer a global platform for essential conversations to be heard, navigating the challenges and triumphs of work, love, play and everything in between. This is a defining time for gender equality, not just in the U.S., and our global presence gives us the opportunity to foster meaningful discussions in a safe space, rooted in the idea that change comes from a place of understanding and positivity." W kicks off the 2018 What She Said program on February 23 at W Hollywood as What She Said hands over the stage to powerhouse writer, producer, and director, Ava DuVernay. Spoken word poet, Olivia Gatwood, will start off the evening with a live performance followed by DuVernay who will welcome a private audience for an evening of honest discussion around work, life and femininity. DuVernay has broken many boundaries throughout her award-winning career. She is the first African-American woman to win the U.S. Directing Award: Dramatic from the Sundance Film Festival for her film "Middle of Nowhere"; the first African-American woman nominated for a Golden Globe Award for directing; and the first African-American woman director to have a film nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture (for her work on the Academy Award-winning film "Selma"). As the director of Disney's highly-anticipated "A Wrinkle in Time" DuVernay has reached another milestone as the first African-American woman to direct a live action film with a budget of more than $100 million. She is a gifted storyteller and a hugely influential voice, inspiring millions around the world with her work and wisdom. "We still have a lot of work to do. We have a long way to go before we reach a state of equality and platforms like What She Said are helping to do the work," said Ava DuVernay. "Like film, conversations like these can be a vehicle for empathy, a place to speak honestly about difficult aspects of society today and perhaps most importantly, a space to celebrate one another." What She Said will continue the conversation each month at W hotels around the world covering a range of topics with industry experts in the fields of art, design, architecture, fashion, and fitness. Below are some highlights from the 2018 schedule: March 5, 2018 : W Boston , Women in Fitness, conversation with Olympian Nastia Liukin and local celebrity chef and James Beard Award Winner, Jody Adams : , Women in Fitness, conversation with Olympian Nastia Liukin and local celebrity chef and Award Winner, March 7, 2018 : W Dubai Al Habtoor City & W London Leicester Square, International Women's Day celebration : Al Habtoor City & Leicester Square, International Women's Day celebration April 12, 2018 : W Amsterdam , Design Panel with designers Antoinette van den Berg , Spijkers & Spijkers, Alexandra Frida , Bibi van der Velden and Loes Vrij : , Design Panel with designers , Spijkers & Spijkers, , and May 12-20, 2018 : W New York Times Square, Women in Architecture, in partnership with NYC Design Pavilion and NYC Design Week For more information, visit theangle.whotels.com/topic/what-she-said/. About W Hotels Worldwide Born from the bold attitude and 24/7 culture of New York City, W Hotels, part of Marriott International, Inc., has disrupted and redefined the hospitality scene for nearly two decades. Trailblazing its way around the globe, with over 50 hotels, W defies expectations and breaks the norms of traditional luxury wherever the iconic W sign lands. With a mission to fuel guests' lust for life, W ignites an obsessive desire to soak it in, live it up and hit repeat. The brand's provocative design, iconic Whatever/Whenever service and buzzing Living Rooms create an experience that is often copied but never matched. Innovative, inspiring and infectious, the brand's super-charged energy celebrates guests' endless appetite to discover what's new/next in each destination, to see more, feel more, go longer, stay later. W Hotels Worldwide is proud to participate in the industry's award-winning loyalty program, Starwood Preferred Guest. Members can now link accounts with Marriott Rewards, which includes The Ritz-Carlton Rewards at members.marriott.com for instant elite status matching and unlimited points transfer. For more information on W Hotels, visit whotels.com/theangle or follow us on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. About Disney's "A Wrinkle in Time" From visionary director Ava DuVernay comes Disney's "A Wrinkle in Time," an epic adventure based on Madeleine L'Engle's timeless classic which takes audiences across dimensions of time and space, examining the nature of darkness versus light and, ultimately, the triumph of love. Through one girl's transformative journey led by three celestial guides, we discover that strength comes from embracing one's individuality and that the best way to triumph over fear is to travel by one's own light. Meg Murry is a typical middle school student struggling with issues of self-worth who just wants to fit in. The daughter of two world-renowned physicists, she is intelligent and uniquely gifted, as is Meg's younger brother, Charles Wallace, but she has yet to realize it for herself. Complicating matters is the mysterious disappearance of Mr. Murry, which has left Meg devastated and her mother broken-hearted. Charles Wallace introduces Meg and her fellow classmate Calvin to three celestial beings (Mrs. Which, Mrs. Whatsit and Mrs. Who) who have journeyed to Earth to help search for their father, and together they embark on their formidable quest. Travelling via a wrinkling of time and space known as tessering, they are transported to worlds beyond their imagination where they must confront a powerful evil force. To make it back home to Earth, Meg must face the darkness within herself in order to harness the strength necessary to defeat the darkness rapidly enveloping the Universe. Directed by Oscar nominee Ava DuVernay from a screenplay by Oscar winner Jennifer Lee and Jeff Stockwell based upon the beloved novel by Madeleine L'Engle, "A Wrinkle in Time" stars: two-time Academy Award nominee Oprah Winfrey as Mrs. Which, Oscar winner Reese Witherspoon as Mrs. Whatsit, Emmy nominee Mindy Kaling as Mrs. Who, Storm Reid as Meg Murry, Gugu Mbatha-Raw as Mrs. Murry, Michael Pena as Red with two-time Emmy winner Zach Galifianakis as the Happy Medium and Emmy nominee Chris Pine as Mr. Murry. Produced by Jim Whitaker and Catherine Hand with Doug Merrifield and Adam Borba serving as executive producers, the film also boasts an impressive creative team featuring some of the most talented and skilled craft persons working today, including: Tobias Schliessler, ASC as director of photography, Naomi Shohan as production designer, Oscar-nominee Spencer Averick as film editor, two-time Academy Award-nominee Paco Delgado as costume designer with music by Ramin Djawadi. "A Wrinkle in Time" opens nationwide on March 9, 2018. SOURCE Marriott International, Inc. Related Links http://www.marriott.com BARCELONA, Spain, Feb. 23, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Wibson is pleased to announce the launch of its blockchain-based, decentralized data marketplace that provides individuals a way to securely sell validated personal information in a trusted environment. The Wibson prototype mobile app will be the first step in supporting consumers' ability to monetize their data with direct offers from data buyers. Highlighted by an exclusive event for industry leaders and partners from the consumer data and blockchain worlds, the Wibson app launch will coincide with Mobile World Congress in Barcelona (Feb. 26th March 1st). Through the release of the Wibson iOS and Android apps, individuals can connect to data sources, such as Facebook and their mobile device location, monitor offers from data buyers, and sell their personal data. "In today's economy, data equals money. Unfortunately, that exchange hasn't made its way into consumer wallets until now," says Wibson.org founder and CEO Mat Travizano. "Wibson completely changes this dynamic by restoring ownership over our personal information. Now consumers can access their data, and can choose to profit from these transactions how and when they want." Wibson is built on a set of core principles designed to protect individuals. Because the marketplace is inherently transparent, users have complete insight into the intended use of their data, including if it is anonymized, who the buyer is and the price they will be paid. Investors in Wibson include Telefonica, Kenetic Capital, and DG Capital, among many other prominent angel investors and funds. "Telefonica is excited to be an early investor in Wibson, a disruptive technology based on the blockchain, which will help people take back control of their personal data," said Telefonica Chief Innovation Officer, Gonzalo Martin-Villa. Jehan Chu, Managing Partner of Kenetic Capital added, "The Wibson marketplace not only benefits consumers by providing them the ability to control and monetize their personal information, it gives corporate marketers, and advertisers access to high quality, verified data and an explicit consumer consent mechanism which will be absolutely critical as new privacy regulations, such as GDPR, come into effect in the coming months. Wibson is addressing a huge personal data opportunity with a very intelligent and thoughtful approach." David Garcia, Managing Partner of DGG Capital, said, "I've been impressed by the speed and vision of the Wibson team. The personal data landscape is evolving rapidly, and the time is right to change how personal data is used and transacted. Improved transparency and consumer control of personal information may sound scary to corporate marketers, but the marketplace's decentralized nature and inherent transparency will support a more efficient and fair marketplace that ultimately benefits everyone in the data ecosystem." How it works Individuals can connect to data sources such as Facebook and their mobile device location, monitor offers from data buyers, and sell their personal data. Once the data transaction is confirmed, consumers receive payment for sharing access to their data. The Wibson personal data marketplace takes advantage of the blockchain network so that there is always a smart contract between data buyer and sellers that governs how consumers' personal information will be used. Typical data buyers are businesses who are looking for validated personal data to better target offers and ads or non-profit organizations who are conducting social good research. Currently, Wibson is running on the Ethereum test network and will be providing points for engagement that will be redeemable for the marketplaces' token, Wibcoin, when the complete network launches later this year. The Wibson marketplace will be showcased at the launch event during Mobile World Congress on February 27th. Event attendees will engage in a discussion about the future of consumer data in a new era of decentralized blockchain networks. Speakers include Wibson CEO Mat Travizano and Santi Siri, founder of blockchain based @DemocracyEarth. To learn more about Wibson, visit the website at www.wibson.org. About Wibson Established in October of 2017, the Wibson data marketplace provides infrastructure and financial incentives for individuals to securely sell private information that is validated for accuracy, all without sacrificing personal privacy. Wibson is a project from the team behind Grandata whose mission is to create a trusted universal data platform that maximizes value for both individuals and companies. Media Contacts: Colleen Wickwire +1 858 336 1078 [email protected] Aaron Foreman [email protected] SOURCE Wibson Related Links http://www.wibson.org If you are new to iQ you can schedule a demo and learn more about this opportunity. PSFK iQ - Where Innovators Turn for Research. Our professional-grade research platform is designed specifically for Retail and CX leaders who want to know whats next. Whether youre staying current on trends or need a real-time research partner to help you get ahead, count on PSFK iQ to deliver the info you need to make your next move. Cookies What are cookies ? How do we use cookies? How to control cookies? 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You can delete all cookies that are already on your computer and you can set most browsers to prevent them from being placed.Most browsers allow you to:If you chose to delete cookies, you should be aware that any preferences will be lost. Also, if you block cookies completely many websites (including ours) will not work properly and webcasts will not work at all. For these reasons, we do not recommend turning cookies off when using our webcasting services. When Francisco Cantu started touring to promote his new book, The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border (Riverhead, Feb. 6), he was basking in the support of indie booksellers around the country, with having been named the top Indie Next List pick for this month. Cantu braced himself for the reality that the book, which focuses on the author's struggle to come to terms with his work and his own family history (as the grandchild of a Mexican immigrant), might draw ire from his former employer and conservatives. He never imagined, though, that it would draw a backlash from the group that now seems to be railing against the title: liberals. Cantu's cross-country tour for The Line Becomes a River, which began earlier this month, purred along largely without incident until the author arrived in California. At a February 19 event in San Francisco, at Green Apple Books on the Park, roughly 12 activists disrupted Cantu's reading. They entered the event, forming a circle at the front of the room and, for half an hour, peacefully took turns reading three-minute narratives about abuses committed by the Border Patrol. It was very peaceful and moving, said Green Apple Books co-owner Kevin Ryan, who witnessed the protest. I asked Francisco if he wanted to speak or address anything. And he said, No. I don't have anything to say. Everything they said was true. By his own account, Cantu entered the U.S. Border Patrol as an idealistic and naive 23-year-old. He emerged from the organization, four years later, deeply conflicted about his work and haunted by his time patrolling the desert. Speaking at an uninterrupted event at the Los Angeles Public Library on Wednesday night, Cantu said: As I was writing this book, I was, in the back of my mind, anticipating backlash from the Border Patrol or [backlash] from the right. Since the book has come out, the loudest reaction has been from the left. Cantu, through his publisher Riverhead, declined to talk to PW. Riverhead also declined to comment. But, on the author's behalf, the publisher emailed a brief statement. Calling the Green Apple protesters "purposeful and impactful," Cantu said the readers "highlighted individual and structural failings within the agency." He went on: "Their actions gave me hope that more people will be moved to directly engage with border issues, and take action to hold our institutions accountable for violence. While Ryan, the co-owner of Green Apple, felt the protest yielded something positive "because a lot of different people got heard, not all booksellers feel Cantu is being treated fairly. After canceling his Feb. 20 event at Oakland, Calif.'s East Bay Booksellers, the store's owner, Brad Johnson, sent a note to his patrons, calling the attacks being leveled at Cantu "indistinguishable from bullying." Despite being caught off guard by the protests, Cantu understands the feelings the book has stirred. Its inherently problematic that the voice of a Border Patrol agent is being lifted up in the headlines, he said in Los Angeles. If you are undocumented, you would say, Why the hell do you need this border patrol agent to come along and start talking about how bad things are at the border? Weve been telling you that the whole time! Why dont you publish a book by us? Why dont you lift up our voices?' I think thats an incredibly important conversation to have right now. Some West Coast booksellers have embraced the book even more vocally since it fell under fire. After the Green Apple incident, Skylight Books in Los Angeles selected the book as its the subject of its next "Current Events Reading Group." And, according to the author's publicity team, the East Bay Books cancellation will be the only modification in Cantu's schedule, with five more stops still planned through March. On Thursday night, Cantu appeared at Warwick's in San Diego. The store's director of events, Julie Slavinsky, confirmed that one patron had asked the store to cancel Cantu's appearance. To prepare for the visit, the bookstore hired a security guard and notified the local branch of the San Diego police department about the possibility of a protest. In my seven years as the events director, we have not had any protestors show up because of an author, Slavinsky said. By Slavinsky's account, 100 people attended the event. In the end, there were no protestors in the crowd. Zinc Media Groups TV subsidiaries, Blakeway and Tern Television, have been awarded four significant TV commissions. Following completion of its acquisition by Zinc Media in December, Tern has been commissioned to produce three series across the BBC, Channel 4 and Channel 5 networks. Terns first Channel 5 commission, Extreme Planes, will be a three-part series that uses amateur clips to examine plane crashes, take-offs and landings and near misses.Following the 2017 success of the programme, Flights from Hell Caught on Camera, Channel 4 has commissioned Tern to produce a four-part series, Holidays from Hell. The new series will comprise user-generated content footage, human testimony and expert revelation to the worlds of cruises, holidays, flights and trains.Finally, Britains Lost Masterpieces has been recommissioned by BBC Network for a third three-part series on BBC Four, which will be produced from Tern Televisions Belfast base. The programme made headlines around the world when series one revealed an undiscovered Raphael painting in Aberdeenshire, while series two uncovered a Rubens piece in Glasgow.Blakeway meanwhile has been commissioned by Channel 5 to produce a follow up to the Wonderful World of Puppies series, a 12-part prime time outing.We are delighted that we have been awarded these high-profile and significant commissions with BBC, Channel 4 and Channel 5, said Zinc Media CEO David Galan. The commissions serve to not only highlight and reinforce our strategy of securing long-running, high-quality programmes but also demonstrate the strength of our newly acquired subsidiary Tern Television, which continues to secure valuable contracts and to go from strength-to-strength. Mexico's Televisa has launched a new premium content division, which has already found a global partner in Amazon's subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) service. Through offices in Los Angeles and Mexico City, Televisa Alternative Originals (TAO) will focus on developing, producing and distributing premium content for SVOD and pay-TV players.According to the Mexican company, launching TAO increases Televisa's commitment to developing and producing original content for a global audience. " The agreement with Amazon positions the company as a key player in the region, working together with a platform that will boost Televisa's content reach," said the media giant.TAO's agreement with Amazon Prime Video is for an undisclosed number of series, and the SVOD platform will air titles worldwide, while Televisa will keep rights for Mexico's pay-TV and free-to-air as well as Univision in the US.Amazon intends to expand its Spanish-language original catalogue with quality content, aiming to draw more subscribers for Prime Video in Mexico and Latina America."As the streaming industry continues growing around the globe, TAO fills an empty niche in the market, thanks to its access to multicultural stories and Latin American talent," Televisa added. Special counsel Robert Mueller has indicted 13 Russian nationals for allegedly conspiring to sow confusion in the 2016 presidential election. The chance of extraditing any of the accused from Vladimir Putin's Russia is zero. Some of the Russians' Keystone Cops efforts to disrupt the election favored Donald Trump (as well as Bernie Sanders). Yet Mueller's team made it clear that the Russians neither colluded with any U.S. citizens nor had any material effect on the election's outcome. But from here on out, there will be ironies, paradoxes and unintended consequences with just about everything Mueller does. Is it now time to prosecute foreigners for attempting to interfere with a U.S. election? If so, then surely Christopher Steele, the author of the Fusion GPS dossier, is far more culpable and vulnerable than the 13 bumbling Russians. Steele is not a U.S. citizen. Steele colluded with Russian interests in compiling his lurid dossier about Donald Trump. Steele did not register as a foreign agent. And Steele was paid by Hillary Clinton's campaign to find dirt on political rival Trump and his campaign. In other words, Steele's position is far worse than that of the Russians for at a variety of reasons. One, he is easily extraditable while the Russians are not. Two, his efforts really did affect the race, given that the dossier was systematically leaked to major media and served as a basis for the U.S. government to spy on American citizens. Three, unlike with the Russians, no one disputes that American citizens -- Hillary Clinton, members of the Democratic National Committee, and anti-Trump partisan Glenn Simpson and his Fusion GPS team -- colluded by paying for Steele's work. Mueller's team has also leveraged a guilty plea from former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn for making false statements to FBI investigators. If the Flynn case is now the Mueller standard, then we know that a number of high-ranking officials are vulnerable to such legal exposure. Department of Justice official Bruce Ohr deliberately omitted on federal disclosure forms the fact that his wife, an expert on Russia, worked on the Fusion GPS dossier. Steele himself probably lied to the FBI went he claimed he had not leaked the dossier's contents to the media. Hillary Clinton aides Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills likely lied to FBI investigator Peter Strzok (who had also interviewed Flynn) when they claimed they had no idea that Clinton was using a private and illegal email server until the story went public. In fact, Abedin and Mills had communicated with Clinton over the same server -- as did then-President Barack Obama, who likewise denied that he knew about the improper server. Former FBI Director James Comey likely lied to Congress when he claimed that his exoneration of Clinton came after he had interviewed her. We now know from documents that he drafted a statement about the conclusion of the investigation even before he met with her. As far as obstruction charges go, Mueller has other possible targets. Former Attorney General Loretta Lynch met secretly with Bill Clinton on a jet parked on a tarmac in Phoenix shortly before the Justice Department closed the probe of Hillary Clinton and chose not to pursue charges against her. Comey said Lynch asked him not to use the word "investigation" when discussing the Clinton email probe. Text messages between Strzok and fellow FBI official Lisa Page suggest that Lynch knew in advance about the conclusions Comey would reach in the investigation. What is going on? Mueller is under enormous pressure to find collusion between the Trump team and Russia, or to find that the Trump team obstructed justice by trying to hide such collusion. But neither likely happened. Mueller was appointed at a time of national hysteria, brought on by partisan journalism based on a leaked dossier -- itself a product of a discredited British agent working with Russian sources while being paid by the Clinton campaign. Worse still, the effort to hide the origins and the use of that dossier to obtain court permission to spy on American citizens may be a classic case of obstruction of justice. Mueller's existential problem has been with him from the start. Due to the shenanigans of his discredited friend Comey and a rabid media, he was appointed to investigate crimes that did not exist. But if they did exist, collusion and obstruction were committed by those associated with the Clinton campaign and even by members of the Obama administration. Investigating any possible crimes committed by members of the Clinton campaign or the Obama administration apparently is taboo, given the exalted status of both. But every time Mueller seeks to find incidental wrongdoing by those around Trump, he only makes the case stronger that behavior by those involved in the Clinton campaign and the Obama administration should be investigated. If such matters are not treated in an unbiased manner, we are not a nation of equality under the law, but a banana republic masquerading as a democracy. (C) 2018 TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC. While Baltimore and Chicago grab headlines, St. Louis counts its dead quietly. For the fourth year in a row, St. Louis reigns supreme as the per capita murder capital of America. The 2017 murder rate was 66 per 100,000 people three times as high as that of Chicago. If St. Louis were as populous as the Windy City (the Gateway City has 311,000 residents, while Chicago has in excess of 2.7 million residents), the tally of murder victims would exceed 1,780 a year. Add to this that most victims families never get justice in St. Louis, with approximately 61 percent of the cases in 2017 still considered open that is, unsolved. Of the 205 murders in St. Louis last year, at least 193 of the victims were black. Of even more concern, 72 percent of those homicide victims were aged between 17 and 40. The American carnage to which President Trump so often refers is mostly young black men felled by other young black men in urban areas. This must end. In 1961, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King asked a church congregation to own up to some devastating facts on black crime, Do you know that Negroes are 10 percent of the population of St. Louis and are responsible for 58 percent of its crimes? Weve got to face that. And weve got to do something about our moral standards. We know that there are many things wrong in the white world, but there are many things wrong in the black world, too. We cant keep on blaming the white man. There are things we must do for ourselves. Fifty-six years later, it is well past time to have the talk again but, this time, no scapegoating, only solutions. Today, we are no longer Negroes, and 47 percent of the population of the city of St. Louis is black per the U.S. Census Bureau. But the share of black crime is much larger than its population, and victims of black crime are their neighbors, their classmates, and their families. The prevailing sentiment among many is to shirk responsibility and lay blame on others. Academics like Michelle Alexander and self-proclaimed community leaders like Al Sharpton throw charged yet meaningless rhetoric around and jump on every instance of overt racism as evidence of a new Jim Crow or institutionalized racism. For them, there seems to be a Klansman under every rock. So, naturally, when black on black crime is mentioned, its immediately countered with charges of racism. Dont get me wrong; capital-R racism exists. Just after the New Year, two white teens in a beat-up Honda called my husband and me niggers outside a mall in suburban St. Louis. In 2018! But does highlighting every instance of ignorant, boorish behavior advance the plight of those trapped in failing schools or destitution? So what can be done? More blacks in roles of power? Surely, that alone cannot be the answer black leaders have run major cities across the country for decades, without significant change. Last November, lily-white Saint Paul, Minnesota elected a black mayor for the first time, as did Charlotte, North Carolina. But St. Louis, like many urban metro regions with high murder rates, remains extremely racially segregated, fostering distrust and serving as a barrier to the spread of positive, productive behavior. According to the 2015 Where We Stand Report on racial segregation, St. Louiscontinues to be one of the most segregated of the peer regions. It ranks as 7th most segregated between black and white residents, 4th highest in terms of white isolation, and 9th highest in terms of black isolation. The report also ties segregation to negative impacts on life expectancy, mental health, educational attainment, and lifetime earnings. While the St. Louis metro region has made positive strides, a public awareness campaign and commitment from city and county leaders would serve as positive next steps. Isolated and mired in poverty and crime, many young urban blacks feel trapped by their circumstances, because opportunities seem so distant and unattainable. In many communities, black students who excel in school are physically assaulted, told they are "acting white," and made subject to merciless ridicule. Furthermore, too much of black popular culture lauds irresponsible and dangerous behaviors from making the quick buck to consequence-free sex and, even, violence. In some quarters, these values are not just the norm but considered aspirational. Its a recipe for ruin. But the time for "having conversations" is over. Senseless homicides are robbing our city of its treasure the very young men and women who would partake in the American dream, if only they could live long enough to see it through. Yet not all hope is lost. This is where community kicks in with a long-term strategic plan: pulling in all of the stakeholders to get real about the link between poverty and crime and to leave race out of it. There already exist amazing grassroots non-profits operating in St. Louis; Mission St. Louis is leading by lowering the rate of recidivism for convicted felons, changing the city one life at a time. Mission Gate Ministries is another. As wonderful as both organizations are, we need not wait until after a conviction to intercede. Theres no cure-all for poverty and inner-city homicide rates. But lets start by replacing the discussion of racial animus with concrete efforts at improving black cultural norms, reducing segregation, and addressing poverty through the promotion of intact families. Weve tried everything else with very little success; its time to get back to basics. Stacy Washington is a decorated Air Force veteran, Emmy-nominated TV personality, frequent guest on Fox News and Fox Business Channels, and host of nationally syndicated radio program Stacy on the Right, based in St. Louis. CNN recently hosted an anti-gun town hall featuring a number of grieving children and parents from Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, who aimed their ire at the National Rifle Association, politicians peripherally associated with the NRA and anyone who didn't say exactly what they wanted to hear. It was an event where a student could compare Sen. Marco Rubio to a mass murderer and question whether NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch truly cares about her children without ever being challenged. I hope CNN got the rating it was looking for, because it's almost guaranteed that NRA membership and gun sales are about to spike. Between all the demonizing, heckling, sophistry, gaslighting, platitudes and emotional appeals, members of the crowd -- people who should never be the target of conspiracy theories or ad hominem attacks but shouldn't be exempted from a real debate either -- booed a rape survivor's story and cheered at the idea of banning "every semi-automatic rifle in America." Maybe someone will ask them if they support banning every semi-automatic in America period, since the latter is responsible for the preponderance of gun homicides. One death is too many, after all. Whatever the case, these young people are about to be hit by a harsh reality, because banning semi-automatic rifles or handguns is not only impractical and likely unconstitutional but, for many millions of Americans who worry about the Second Amendment, also highly undesirable. Yet a star-studded lineup of liberals, many of whom are funding the activism of Parkland students with big checks, cheered with them. Do they all agree that every semi-automatic rifle in America should be banned? Do they agree that anyone who supports legal semi-automatic rifles has "blood on their hands"? Someone with access should ask. What we do know is that the entire liberal political class couldn't stop praising the activism and lack of "cynicism" displayed by these kids (a selective admiration reserved for those who coincidentally align with their positions). The kids were indeed earnest, even if they were generally uneducated about gun laws, legal process and the underpinning of the Second Amendment -- which is to be expected. Those who use them as political shields, on the other hand, are cynical. Those who put them on TV to participate in a national Airing of Grievances are cynical. Those who point to the bodies of victims and argue with every American who refuses to accept the left's framing of the issue are the ones who deserve contempt. What we've learned from the events of the past few days is that most liberals are uninterested in a holistic answer to school shootings -- a unique problem detached from general violent crime, rates of gun ownership, region or age. While there is no cure-all, a mix of improved background checks, a better reporting system, better law enforcement reaction to threats, more community involvement and mental health reform could lower the number of shootings. Pulling back from the massive wall-to-wall coverage, which probably helps glorify these shooters for the next madman, might also help. Yet as far as I can tell, banning or inhibiting gun ownership seems to be the only answer for the left. For instance, while we can never truly quantify how many shooters are dissuaded by new laws or restrictions, we do know some mass shooters can be stopped by armed Americans. It happens all the time. Why shouldn't teachers and others who have a constitutional right to protect their homes and families do the same for their students? The dismissive, sneering reaction to that idea by most of the media and Democrats was telling. Now, I understand some Americans don't want to send their kids to schools with armed teachers. That should be their choice. But the idea that a trained concealed-carry permit holder or guard couldn't possibly stop or mitigate the damage done by a mass shooter defies reality. So a real divide exists in America, not between those who want to "do something" and those who don't, but between those who believe there is a natural right to own and defend oneself with a weapon -- preferably a semi-automatic weapon -- and those who do not. The latter position seemed to be prevalent among the young people at the town hall, and certainly among their cheering section. While I feel great sorrow for these kids and worry about my own, I have no moral duty to be on their side politically. More immediately, events like the CNN town hall go a long way in convincing gun owners that gun control advocates do have a desire to confiscate their weapons. The advocates can't confiscate weapons right now, so they support whatever feasible incremental steps are available to inch further toward that goal. We don't know how this plays out in the long run. In the short run, though, it does nothing to stop the next school shooting. COPYRIGHT 2018 CREATORS.COM President Trump on Friday called for his biggest supporters to avoid complacency ahead of this years midterm elections, saying they need to stay engaged and rally behind congressional Republicans. In a 75-minute speech at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference held just outside Washington, Trump acknowledged the historic difficulties faced by a presidents political party in off-year campaigns following presidential elections and urged his supporters not to be complacent. What happens is you fight so hard to win the presidency, and you fight, fight, fight, Trump said. By the time you start campaigning, it's a year. And now you got to go and fight again. But you just won. So nobody has that same drive that they had. The president volunteered the fact that Democrats are highly energized against him -- theyre crazed, as he put it -- while calling on his voters to marshal similar levels of enthusiasm. You're sitting back, you're watching television. Maybe I don't have to vote today. We just won the presidency. And then we get clobbered, Trump cautioned. We can't let that happen. The speech, given in front of die-hard Trump supporters and conservative activists, was reminiscent of Trumps 2016 campaign rallies. It included calls from Trump to build a wall on the Mexican border, along with "Lock her up! chants from the audience when the president mentioned Hillary Clinton. It also touched on a variety of current issues, such as touting tax cuts signed into law late last year, criticizing Democrats over the lack of an agreement on immigration, and pushing for a response to the school shooting in Parkland, Florida last week -- with most of Trumps emphasis placed on school security, including allowing some teachers to carry guns. But Trump consistently returned to the midterm elections and his hope that his supporters will stay engaged. The Democratic Party base was energized throughout 2017, with strong turnout in off-year elections helping them secure victories in a number of statewide and local races, even in GOP territory -- a mini-wave that Democrats hope will swell into a tsunami this year. Trump remains immensely popular with his supporters and the GOP base, however, which means that preserving their congressional majorities depends on the ability of Republican incumbents and challengers to transfer enthusiasm for Trump into votes for themselves -- even when the presidents name isnt on the ballot. The effort will be particularly necessary in Senate races, with 10 Democrats running for re-election in states Trump carried in 2016, including five he won overwhelmingly. But Republicans in House races, facing an energized and organized opposition from Democrats, could be facing serious problems if Trump supporters dont turn out in force. Democrats need to win 24 seats to flip the House majority, and The Cook Political Report, a nonpartisan election analysis, currently rates 26 GOP seats as either toss-ups or favoring Democrats. After touting tax cuts, his success at confirming a Supreme Court justice and lower court judges, and his support for the Second Amendment, Trump warned his audience that all those issues would be in jeopardy if Democrats won back control of Congress. Don't be complacent, because if they get in, they will repeal your tax cuts, Trump said. They will put judges in that you wouldn't believe. They'll take away your Second Amendment, which we will never allow to happen. Id love you to get out there and work really hard for '18, he later added. We need more Republicans to keep the tax cuts and keep all of this going. As the EU-facilitated talks to normalize relations between Kosovo and Serbia enter the final stretch, the West faces a unique opportunity to help resolve two major issues in one go normalize relations between Serbs and Albanians by resolving the Kosovo issue and downsize Russias influence in the Balkans. This is a unique opportunity that should not be missed because of rigidity or indecision. Swift action and tact are needed to close the final chapter in the breakup of former Yugoslavia and to allow the region a chance at a new beginning. While the potential of this process to improve relations between Serbs and Albanians is clear, the simultaneous opportunity to downsize Russias influence is often missed due to a fundamental misunderstanding of the history and character of Serb-Russian relations. For the greater part of the 20th century, the two countries which at times used to be close allies were actually at odds with each other. The SerboRussian bond that played a critical role in the outbreak of World War I dissolved with the Russian Revolution and the victory of the Reds over the Whites in 1922. The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, which would later morph into the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, was staunchly anti-Soviet, not only because of the KaraA?orA?eviA? dynastys fear of Communism, but also because of King Aleksandars close ties with members of the Russian aristocracy. Initially an instrument of Soviet influence abroad, the Yugoslav Communists grew independent as leaders of an anti-fascist movement in World War II and were finally expelled from the Cominform, a predecessor of Comecon and the Warsaw Pact, in 1948. From that point onward, the by-then Communist Yugoslavia and the Soviet Bloc engaged in a mini-Cold War of their own, with the West backing Yugoslavia as a buffer zone between themselves and the Soviets. This mini-Cold War went through periods of confrontation and rapprochement, with party purges and border standoffs slowly giving way to Soviet attempts at Yugoslav style liberalization. It was not really until the collapse of Communist Yugoslavia in 1991 and the subsequent international isolation of Serbia that Serbias contemporary relationship with Russia started to take shape. This new relationship centered on Serbias periodic needs for support vis-a-vis the West, which got involved in the post-Yugoslav space in the 1990s, trying to put an end to all regional conflicts. Initially, Russia could offer Serbia little more than mediation and intelligence sharing, which it would simultaneously provide to the West as well, on whose assistance it then depended for its fiscal stability and deficit spending. Such Russian involvement made a meaningful impact on two occasions. In 1999, it secured Slobodan MiloseviA?s consent to the Kumanovo Agreement, which facilitated the withdrawal of Serb police and Yugoslav military from Kosovo, after 78 days of NATO airstrikes to end the excessive use of force in the province. The withdrawal allowed for the start of an international peacekeeping operation, which continues to this day under the European Union Rule of Law Mission/EULEX and NATOs Kosovo Force/KFOR. Russia also helped with a peaceful transition of power in Serbia, convincing MiloseviA? to step down in 2000, after his refusal to concede electoral defeat led to the 5 of October uprising in Belgrade. This last intervention allowed for a complete reset in Serbias relations with the West, with every government of Serbia since then making European integration its priority. Increasingly worried about NATOs eastward expansion, President Vladimir Putins administrations started considering partnership opportunities in the west to slow down this eastward momentum. Russias rapid economic recovery in the early 2000s suddenly expanded the countrys capacity to project power abroad and provide robust support to potential partners and allies. Increasingly worried about NATOs eastward expansion into the post-Soviet space, President Vladimir Putins administrations started considering partnership opportunities in the west with which to slow down this eastward momentum until it could be reversed. The Balkans and Central Europe topped the list of opportunities, but Serbia, at first, showed no interest, despite several traumatic events. These included the assassination of the countrys first freely and fairly elected prime minister, Zoran ?inA?ic, in 2003 and the peaceful dissolution of federal Yugoslavia, by then the Union of Serbia and Montenegro, in 2006. Throughout these challenges, the partner of choice was always the West. Russias opportunity did, however, come in 2006 and 2007, during the UN-facilitated talks on the future status of Kosovo. For these talks, Serbia set itself a very high goal of reabsorbing Kosovo, for which it would not gain support in the West. When the United Nations mediator Martti Ahtissari proposed supervised independence instead, Serbia decided to lean on Russia for support again and leverage its veto at the United Nations Security Council to block Kosovos international recognition. Kosovo declared independence on February 17, 2008. With Russias support, Serbia secured diplomatic leverage, but at the price of periodic concessions that steadily increased Russias influence in the Balkans, while complicating Serbias relations with the West. In the lead up to Kosovos declaration of independence, Serbia allowed Russias Gasprom Neft to purchase a 51 percent stake in Serbias integrated oil and gas company Naftna Industrija Srbije (NIS). Gasprom Neft acquired the stake for 400 million, which was below the market estimate of 600 to 800 million, and 550 million in investment, which was eventually realized as an intercompany loan due back in 2025. The acquisition gave Gasprom Neft control over Serbias largest network of filling stations, three refineries two of oil in Serbia and one of gas in Nigeria and statutory monopoly of exploration, development, and production of Serbias crude oil and gas reserves valued at 7 billion. The energy accord that facilitated this acquisition also added Serbia to the South Stream pipeline project, which was supposed to connect Russia and Central Europe via the Black Sea and Balkans. The next concession came in 2012, when another accord established a joint Russo-Serbian crisis center in the Serbian city of Nis, which sits on the nexus of highway and railway networks connecting Eastern and Southern Balkans with Central Europe. The center would eventually become a major issue in Serbias relations with the West, when Russia requested diplomatic status for its staff there in 2017. The answer is still pending, though all indications are that Serbia will reject Russias request. The last concession Serbia made took place in 2015, when the Russian international news agency Rossiya Segodnya opened a Belgrade branch of its online broadcaster Sputnik. In a fragmented media space in which payment for relay is possible and Gasprom Neft is a major advertiser, Sputnik quickly achieved market penetration, partially contributing to the fall in public support for European integration from 57 percent to 47 percent and the rise in support for closer ties with Russia from 42 percent to 63 percent over a period of two years. With the exception of the Vojislav Kostunica government of 20072008, which lost its majority when the prime minister showed readiness to abandon European integration in response to Kosovos declaration of independence, successive Serbian governments were well aware of the cost of keeping Russia close, but moved at different speeds to resolve the Kosovo issue that necessitated it. The only path forward was through the EU-facilitated talks,[i] which after addressing technical issues would offer an opportunity for compromise on status. President Boris Tadic and the Mirko Cvetkovic government of 20082012 decided to engage in these talks at an envoy level, but as issues became more complex, progress slowed and then stalled. President Tomislav Nikolic and the Ivica Dacic government of 20122014 recognized their predecessors error and agreed to elevate the talks to the prime ministerial level, after which progress picked up pace again. The Aleksandar Vucic government of 20142017 maintained high momentum until mass protests in Pristina forced the Isa Mustafa government of Kosovo away from the negotiating table in early 2016. Talks resumed later in the year, despite ongoing volatility, only to be transferred to the presidential level in 2017 and then disrupted again, this time around by the assassination of a moderate Kosovo Serb politician Oliver Ivanovic earlier this year. By then, the talks had already delivered on a whole range of issues, including border management, exchange of civil registries and cadasters, special status for Kosovo Serb municipalities, integration of Kosovo Serb police, judiciary, and prosecution, as well as a small set of issues affecting Kosovos ability to integrate into the global system, like having a unique dial-in country code. Both the protests and the assassination highlighted the growing opposition to compromise of extremist groups and organized crime. Each incident came after significant forward momentum or possibility thereof and derailed the entire process for a while. The recent willingness of Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic to explore solutions that would allow Serbia to recognize Kosovo and the subsequent launch of a dialogue in Serbia to identify acceptable options have marked a watershed moment in the talks. A compromise solution would not only allow Serbs and Albanians to start healing their relationship, but would also open up opportunities for much needed collaboration between Serbia, Kosovo, and Albania not seen since the late Middle Ages.[ii] The solution would also decrease Serbias dependency on Russia and with it, Russias leverage, as well as further consolidate Serbia on a trajectory of European integration, if not NATO integration.[iii] That said, this potential also attracts considerable risk. Extremist groups and organized crime stand to lose considerable income and societal positioning from any normalization of relations. Both have considerable resources at their disposal and are willing to deploy violence in pursuit of their objectives. Their interests are also converging with those of foreign actors who would rather see the Balkans politically fragmented. The West would not only need to move quickly, if it wants to capitalize on the opportunity that presents itself, but would also need to display maximum flexibility to allow negotiators to identify a compromise which would work for both sides involved. Fortunately, the European Unions High Representative Federica Mogherini has displayed the know-how and ability to move the dial forward. By now, she also knows all negotiators well enough to facilitate a breakthrough before the end of her mandate next year. The German Marshall Fund of the United States (GMF) stands ready to assist this effort with its policy and convening capacity, as well as its support for civil society, which through the Balkan Trust for Democracy, has been investing in regional reconciliation and collaboration for more than 15 years. U.S. National Security Adviser Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster is rumored to be on his way out. The reason appears to be McMasters endorsement of the view that the Russians engaged in a disinformation campaign designed to create instability in the United States during the 2016 presidential election. President Donald Trump is highly sensitive to this claim because of the implication that the disinformation campaign helped him get elected. Whether or not that is true is unimportant for our purposes. Trump, like any politician, is sensitive to anything that challenges his legitimacy in office, and he expects absolute loyalty from subordinates. Senior government officials come and go, and it rarely matters. One suit replaces another, and life goes on. At this moment, however, the fate of McMaster is somewhat more important. The job of the national security adviser is to coordinate all of the elements involved in national security, including the State and Defense Departments, the intelligence agencies and any other part of the federal government that touches on such matters. He is the presidents chief adviser in foreign policy, the channel through which the views of the departments and agencies are filtered, and above all, the person who enforces the presidents foreign policy throughout all relevant entities. The national security adviser has become a particularly sensitive role. It is always hard to control the agencies, but at a time when the CIA and the FBI appear to be in occasional confrontation with the president over the Russia issue, it has become even harder. The intelligence and security agencies have to continue to carry out their primary mission gathering intelligence and conducting counterintelligence while also communicating their activities to the president. Given the tension, the president lacks trust in the intelligence and its McMaster who has to keep the system functioning while a confrontation with the president is underway. The riptides of politics are enormous. Even more important, the United States is facing old and new foreign policy issues that are inherently contentious. Perhaps the most striking thing about the Trump administrations various policies is the continuity they share with the policies of previous administrations. Rhetoric aside, the U.S. relationship with NATO and Russia is not materially different than it was during Barack Obamas administration. The same is true in the Middle East, with insufficient forces pursuing an unclear goal. The U.S. and China continue to bicker over trade relations. And nothing violent has happened in North Korea, with the Trump administration pursuing the same cautious attempts to shape Pyongyangs policies that were pursued by previous administrations. Much of this continuity can be attributed to bureaucratic inertia. An argument could be made that all of these issues require more aggressive handling. But it is very difficult to move anything as vast and diffuse as U.S. foreign policy. Another reason for the continuity is that Trump appointed three people to run U.S. foreign policy who are inherently cautious. Secretary of Defense James Mattis resisted more aggressive policies when he was a top military commander during Obamas administration. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson comes from outside of the foreign policy establishment and has had to catch up to its subtleties. He heads the department that is least respected by the Trump administration, with attempts being made to slash its budget and its staff. McMaster is also a cautious and meticulous man. He is the author of a book called Dereliction of Duty, which eviscerated the Johnson administrations handling of the Vietnam War and, in particular, criticized the spread of dishonest information. It appears that, for McMaster, orderly and honest flow of information must be maintained at any cost. The paradox is that the more information you have, the more unwilling you become to make major changes. But at the moment, the flow of information is far more important than innovations in foreign policy. McMaster has been critical in creating processes that maintain stability. That isnt to say there havent been turf battles over foreign policy. Its rumored that Mattis and McMaster see some things very differently. Mattis is said to be more cautious on Korea, McMaster more aggressive. Such differences are common and healthy. In fact, they create healthy, creative tension between important foreign policy figures far better than consensus. The problem is that its difficult to imagine how the continuity of U.S. policy could be maintained if someone very different than McMaster took over his position. One of the things causing tension between the president and some of his advisers has been that the president wants them to be political, and they wont be. Thats the case here and its the ability and willingness of McMaster to resist the temptation to become political as others hadnt that has been a stabilizing force. In general, our view is that the people running the government come and go, but U.S. foreign policy is driven by geopolitical necessity, constraining decision-makers from making many changes they might otherwise want to make. I will not argue that McMaster is indispensable. But with the president confronting the Russian disinformation issue, and with a range of foreign policy issues likely to shift of their own weight, any degree of instability in U.S. foreign policy could have an impact. North Korea, Russia, China and the Middle East are all under pressure, and the U.S. has thus far been restrained. At a time when the foreign policy institutions of the U.S. are themselves in flux, increasing that flux could have consequences. This is not a world-changing event, but every event need not be world-changing. It is simply noteworthy in the sense that institutional instability can have some impact on regions that dont need any more impacts. Athens, GA (30605) Today Showers in the morning with isolated thunderstorms in the afternoon. High 82F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 30%.. Tonight Cloudy skies early followed by scattered showers and thunderstorms later during the night. Low 69F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 40%. Midtown Manhattan may have been down, but it's not out. If the office district's supremacy had been threatened by the rise of Hudson Yards on the far west side and the rebuilding of the World Trade Center to the south, JPMorgan Chase's decision to build a taller skyscraper on the site of its current Park Avenue headquarters says it's still New York's power center. The bank plans to demolish the almost-60-year-old building it owns at 270 Park Ave. and replace it with a 70-to-75-story tower that would be ready in about five years. It would be the first major project under the city's Midtown East rezoning, an effort to encourage new office construction in the area. For companies drawn to new developments like Hudson Yards, it was less a matter of geography than the appeal of glitzy new skyscrapers -- a stark contrast with Midtown's aging office stock, according to Marc Holliday, chief executive officer of landlord SL Green Realty Corp. JPMorgan's commitment to Park Avenue shows the neighborhood around Grand Central Terminal is still a magnet for New York's biggest companies, and its project will generate momentum for further development, he said. The bank's decision "will just solidify the importance of this area to the city," Holliday, whose company is building the One Vanderbilt skyscraper nearby, said in an interview. "Given the opportunity to build new construction in east Midtown, it will almost always be corporations' first choice to plant their flag." JPMorgan's announcement comes after a few years in which several high-profile financial companies have left Midtown for Hudson Yards and the Financial District. BlackRock,.the world's largest asset manager, will relocate from Midtown East to 50 Hudson Yards, and buyout firm KKR & Co. is buying offices at 30 Hudson Yards, leaving behind 9 West 57th St., one of Manhattan's most prestigious office addresses. JPMorgan itself was in negotiations in 2014 to move to Hudson Yards, talks that fell apart. It's an exaggeration to say those moves suggest that companies are abandoning Midtown, according to Holliday. It just means they like new buildings. "It's not the West Side, it's new construction," Holliday said. There is demand by major corporate tenants "for new, state-of-the-art buildings that can offer things that older buildings can't offer, even when they're redeveloped." About 77 percent of Manhattan's 400 million square feet of offices was built before 1980, according to Richard Persichetti, U.S. Northeast research director for brokerage Cushman & Wakefield. While JPMorgan wouldn't comment on the price tag for its new headquarters, SL Green's One Vanderbilt -- just west of Grand Central -- is costing about $3.31 billion to develop, and a plan to rework the tower at 666 Fifth Ave. was slated at about $4 billion. JPMorgan's project "is not expected to have a material impact" on the bank's financial results, according to the statement Wednesday. Should the plan go forward, JPMorgan's 52-story current headquarters, completed in 1961, would be the world's tallest voluntarily demolished tower ever, according to the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat. It's all in the name of modernization. Rules rezoning 78 blocks between East 39th and East 57th streets took effect in August, allowing for bigger, taller buildings. It was the culmination of a five-year effort started by then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg and is expected to pave the way for more than 6 million square feet of new office towers in the area. (Bloomberg is the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg News parent Bloomberg LP.) Under the new rules, landmarks may sell their unused development rights anywhere in the district, rather than just to the properties in their immediate vicinity. JPMorgan plans to buy such development rights so it can build a taller tower. In Midtown alone, JPMorgan leases at least 3.5 million square feet of offices spread across 12 buildings, according to data from CoStar Group Inc. Much of that space could wind up empty after the bank consolidates into its new headquarters. Included in the tally are large blocks at nearby Park Avenue towers, 277 and 245. Chinese conglomerate HNA Group Co. is seeking to sell 245 Park Ave., which it bought less than a year ago for $2.21 billion. JPMorgan also owns properties such as 383 Madison Ave., the former Bear Stearns tower, and leases offices in other locations such as lower Manhattan, Brooklyn and New Jersey's Hudson River waterfront. The bank's headquarters project will push building owners in Midtown to step up their games, as tenants demand more up-to-date offices, according to Peter Hauspurg, chief executive officer of brokerage Eastern Consolidated. Office landlords, he said in an email, "are going to have to completely redo their tenant spaces -- assuming they can't build new -- in order to compete with the new generation of product coming online." --- Bloomberg's Patrick Clark and Jenny Surane contributed. HARTFORD The Connecticut Lottery Corporation Board of Directors voted Thursday to end a contract with its outside auditor and hire another company to look into how it works with the Department of Consumer Protection. The move comes as the Lottery is faced with explaining how incorrect ticket numbers were entered into an electronic lottery machine for the New Years Day Super Draw, excluding 100,000 ticket buyers from the drawing and costing the state nearly $1 million. The lottery transfers more than $300 million a year to the states general fund. The Jan. 1 incident was regrettable, said Chelsea Turner, interim president and CEO of Connecticut Lottery Corporation. We are very sorry for this. Over the course of a two-and-a-half-hour hearing at the Capitol Thursday, members of the Public Safety and Security Committee, which oversees the Lottery, sought to understand how exactly the drawing went awry. Lottery and Consumer Protection officials said the drawing team did not follow official procedures, opting instead to use a checklist to guide their work. Five employees were present at the drawing that day: two from the Lottery, two from Consumer Protection and one from Marcum LLC, which won a $60,800 contract in 2017 with the Lottery Corporation as the outside auditor. A Marcum accountant was supposed to observe the lottery drawing and ensure official procedures were followed. Marcum has denied any responsibility for the error through their counsel. The New Years Day episode, which Lottery and DCP officials chalked up to human error Thursday, forced the Lottery to hold a do-over drawing on Jan. 16. Three employees were placed on administrative leave. DCP has also removed its two employees from the Jan. 1 drawing team from lottery oversight. I think it is important, as a committee of oversight, to have transparency with respect to what happened and what is being done to correct it, said state Representative Joe Verrengia D-West Hartford/Elmwood, co-chair of the committee. I think we accomplished that today. Turner said there was shared responsibility among the three organizations with employees at the drawing for the errors that were made. Michelle Seagull, commissioner for Consumer Protection, said her Department was clearly a part of the drawing disaster. She also apologized to legislators Thursday for the incident. She said Consumer Protection and the Lottery need to fundamentally shift their relationship for better oversight. She told lawmakers Thursday that new laws may be needed to give her Department more teeth for oversight and enforcement. Don Defranzo, chair of the Lottery Board of Directors, defended his corporation to legislators, saying over past 20 years, no other organ of state government has been a more reliable revenue generator. But over the past 18 months, the Lottery has been peppered with setbacks, both administrative and operational, he said. The lottery has work to do, he said. The NBC sitcom "Parks and Recreation" was a show about the power of community and civic engagement that was created and run by outspoken gun lobby critic Michael Schur. It's arguably not the best show for the National Rifle Association to reference on its social media accounts. Yet that's exactly what the organization did late Wednesday evening. The occasion was a thank you tweet from the NRA to Dana Loesch, the organization's spokeswoman who fielded questions from Parkland, Florida, residents in a CNN town hall following the mass shooting that killed 17 people last week at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. It read "thank you for being the voice of over 5 Million #NRA members." Attached was a GIF of comedian Amy Poehler as Leslie Knope, the show's main character, saying "thank you." Several of the primary people attached to the show - including Schur, Poehler and comedian Nick Offerman who played the beloved Ron Swanson - were not pleased. They quickly took to Twitter to demand the NRA remove the tweet. Schur, using his Twitter handle @KenTremendous, wrote to the NRA, "Hi, please take this down. I would prefer you not use a GIF from a show I worked on to promote your pro-slaughter agenda." He added that Poehler "isn't on Twitter," but that "she texted me a message: "Can you tweet the NRA for me and tell them I said" (expletive) off. Offerman was less polite. He tweeted at both the NRA and Loesch, saying "our good-hearted show and especially our Leslie Knope represent the opposite of your pro-slaughter agenda - take it down and also please eat" (expletive). He followed that with an American flag emoji. As of early Thursday morning, the NRA's tweet had not been removed. The debate over gun control has been raging anew in the week since the Parkland shooting. Several students who survived have spoken out, telling and retelling their stories of that day while calling for stricter gun control laws. They've organized rallies in Washington, D.C., Florida and throughout the country. On Wednesday, many of the survivors and their parents confronted both Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., and the NRA about their stance on gun control. Schur, who currently runs the NBC sitcom "The Good Place," has used his Twitter account to voice his support of tougher gun control laws, and he pulls no punches. For example, he retweeted this from the Toronto Star's Washington correspondent Daniel Dale: "'News: Trump now appears to be endorsing the Fox News-promoted idea of sending veterans into schools with guns. He says ex-Marine, ex-Air Force people could 'be spread evenly throughout the school,' and that could 'solve your problem.'" Schur added the message, "This is maybe 1% less dumb than arming teachers, which still makes it the second dumbest (expletive) idea in the history of America." NORFOLK Tom Hennick, Public Information Officer from the Freedom of Information Commission, will be holding an Informational Seminar on Thursday, March 15 at 7 p.m., at Norfolk Town Hall, 19 Maple Ave. to discuss FOI laws and new legislation. A Q&A session will follow. Members of area town boards, commissions and the public are invited. RSVP by emailing twnnfksec@snet.net, Subject line: FOI Seminar. In case of inclement weather, a notice will be posted on the Norfolk Town website www.norfolkct.org by noon of that day. For more information, please call 860-542-5829. Free dental event seeks volunteers, donations TORRINGTON The 12th Connecticut Mission of Mercy Free Dental Clinic (CTMOM) seeks volunteers and donations for the two-day free dental clinic, scheduled for Friday, April 20 and Saturday, April 21 at Torrington High School in Torrington. The clinic is expected to treat close to 800 patients over the course of the two days. To date, nearly 600 people have signed up to volunteer for the CTMOM Free Dental Clinic, and event organizers are encouraging additional people and businesses to register volunteers at www.ctmom.org. Volunteer registration is scheduled to close on March 27, and roughly 1,000 volunteers, ranging from general volunteers to dental and medical volunteers, are needed over the course of set-up, clinic hours and breakdown. The clinic will open its doors at Torrington High School, 50 Major Besse Drive in Torrington on Friday, April 20 and Saturday, April 21 at 8 a.m. and will run until it reaches capacity. Patients are seen on a first-come, first-served basis. CTMOM is dependent on contributions and welcomes financial and in-kind donations. Individual and corporate donations are still needed to defray the cost of the Clinic. The budget for the 2018 CTMOM Free Dental Clinic and operations totals $254,556. To contribute, visit www.ctmom.org or call 860-863-5940. In addition to dental and medical volunteers, volunteers are needed for non-medical tasks such as traffic/crowd monitors, foreign language interpreters (all languages needed, especially Spanish), sign language interpreters, patient escorts, and especially help to set-up and breakdown the clinic. Volunteer descriptions and volunteer registration can be found at www.ctmom.org. We encourage not only individuals to sign-up to volunteer for this critical outreach effort, but also area businesses to consider having employees give some of their time to help us at this years CTMOM Free Dental Clinic. It is a very rewarding endeavor that will help hundreds of people in need, said Dr. Michael Perl, CTMOM Co-Chair, in a written statement. We are immensely grateful for those who have registered to volunteer so far and donations totaling $190,345 to support this years clinic. We hope to keep that momentum going and continue to receive both monetary and in-kind donations from businesses, especially in the Torrington area. The CTMOM Free Dental Clinic provides a full range of dental services for people of all ages. Everything is done for free and on a first-come, first-served basis, including cleanings, fillings, extractions, x-rays, fluoride treatments, sealants, root canal treatment on anterior teeth, limited partial dentures and general health screenings. To date, major donors (including in-kind*) to the CTMOM Free Dental Clinic include The Robert G. & Marguerite M. Derx Foundation, Delta Dental of New Jersey Foundation, WFSB 3*, Beatrice Fox Auerbach Foundation at the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving, Integrity Systems & Solutions*, Connecticut State Dental Association, Connecticut State Dental Foundation, Henry Schein Dental*, Siracusa Moving & Storage*, Astor Dental Laboratory LLC*, Webster Bank, Fortress Insurance Company, Steven & Alexandra Cohen Foundation, Twenty Seven Foundation, Hoffman Lexus, Patterson Dental Supply*, Benco Dental Supply*, Dexis*, Gendex*, Benecare Dental Plans, Colony Hardware*, Dart Dental Supply*, Dentsply Caulk*, Coltene*, and Colgate.* For a sponsorship package and an up-to-date list of donors, visit: www.ctmom.org. Smoking cessation classes to begin TORRINGTON Charlotte Hungerford Hospital (CHH) is once again offering free admission to its next Freedom From Smoking Cessation Program beginning on Tuesday, March 20. The series includes seven interactive classes over a six week period with Quit Day planned for Tuesday, April 10. The program features discussion and skills practice sessions led by a trained, certified American Cancer Society facilitator who understands the motivations and rationalizations of smoking, and uses a positive behavior change approach that teaches people how to become a permanent non-smoker. In this step-by step program, participants will receive the personal attention they need to help them quit smoking and transition to a healthier, smoke free lifestyle through education, relaxation techniques, and methods of preventing weight gain, said Sandy Markus, CHH Program Facilitator, in a written statement. The classes are being held 4-5:30 p.m. in the conference room at the Hungerford Center, 780 Litchfield Street, Torrington, just up the hill from the main hospital building. As a special incentive, the $75 program fee will be waived for all participants. Call 860-496-6538 to register or receive more information. Space is limited. Temple Beth Israel to hold Yiddish class WINSTED Temple Beth Israel, Winsted, is holding a Yiddish class on March 3, 12-1:30 p.m. The class will be taught by service leader Max Edwards. Class runs for 90 minutes and covers a variety of topics including a brief history of the Yiddish language (with geography and dialects); basic fun language skills; and even Yiddish curses and expressions. He will also teach a Yiddish song and explain its cultural context. All are welcome; no knowledge of Hebrew or Yiddish required. Cost is $10 per person. For information, call 860 379-8923; email: coolshul.winsted@gmail.com; FaceBook https://facebook.com?TBIwinsted Casino trips resume in March TORRINGTON The Torrington Parks and Recreation Department will resume its monthly trips to the Mohegan Sun casinos. The trips are $25 per person, per trip. The bus leaves from the Torrington Plaza Staples Plaza near 99 Restaurant at 8 p.m. and returns at 6 p.m. Early registration is encourage, as seats fill quickly. The datesfor Mohegan Sun trips are Mondays, March 19, April 16, June 18, Aug. 20 and Sept. 17. Call 860-489-2274 for more information. State prosecutors in Shanghai on Friday announced the indictment of Wu Xiaohui, former CEO and general manager of the embattled state-owned conglomerate Anbang Insurance, which has now been seized by the authorities. Wu, a member of the ruling Chinese Communist Party's "2nd generation revolutionary" elite, stands accused of financial fraud and abuse of his position, the No. 1 branch of the Shanghai People's Procuratorate said in a brief statement. The case has been forwarded to the Shanghai Intermediate People's Court, paving the way for a trial, it said. Meanwhile, the China Insurance Regulatory Commission said Anbang, a Fortune 500 company, had violated laws and regulations which "may seriously endanger the solvency of the company." The indictment comes after Wu, who is married to Zhuo Ran, the granddaughter of late supreme leader Deng Xiaoping, was placed under investigation on June 9. An employee surnamed Li who works at rival insurance giant Pacific Insurance, the decision to press ahead with Wu's likely trial is a political one, because China's insurance industry is all ultimately backed and controlled by the ruling Chinese Communist Party. "All insurance companies in China have state-owned assets behind them," Li said. "They are actually party property." A veteran journalist surnamed Chen, who has been following the Anbang investigation, said the authorities now seem to be trying to distance the case from its association with Deng, whose family is close to being revolutionary royalty among China's ruling elite. "They have made it very clear that this is now outside of the Deng family," Chen said. "The charges that they have brought against him are very interesting, though, but to accuse him of financial fraud is pretty serious." "This means that government has concluded that he tried to cheat and defraud people," he said. "Whose money was invested [in his companies]? It's hard to tell exactly where the fraud is alleged to have taken place." Complex ownership patterns Wu, 52, hails from the eastern province of Zhejiang, and made his first fortune in automobile sales, setting up Anbang in 2004. Media reports emerged last year claiming that Wu and Zhuo had divorced, but Wu later denied them publicly. Anbang is Chinas third largest insurer with 1.97 trillion yuan (U.S. $290 billion) in total assets, and recent reports by financial news service Caixin and The New York Times have exposed complex ownership patterns linking much of its assets to Wu and his wife. Caixin's cover story A Maze of Capital Leads to Anbangs Aggressive Expansion prompted legal threats and counter-threats amid strenuous denials from the company. The company was propelled into the international spotlight with its purchase of New York's iconic Waldorf Astoria hotel in 2015, and has made other international deals worth U.S. $30 billion. The company was banned from issuing any new financial products for three months in May by China's insurance regulator, which cited shoddy risk-management practices. It will now be managed by officials from the China Insurance Regulatory Commission, the central bank and other financial bodies, for one year, in a bid to restructure its ownership while keeping it open for business. Reported by Wong Siu-san and Lam Kwok-lap for RFA's Cantonese Service, and by Shi Shan for the Mandarin Service. Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie. An ethnic Mongolian herder-turned-activist from China's northern region of Inner Mongolia says she recently traveled to the regional capital Hohhot to protest against the pollution of traditional grazing lands by a Chinese-invested mining company. Bao Yu, a resident of Xinhure Som, or village, in Inner Mongolia's Urad Middle Banner, a county-like division, said the land she inhabits has been destroyed by pollution from a nearby mining operation. "My Name is Bao Yu. I am a herder from Xinhure Som ... in Urad Middle Banner, and I went [to Hohhot] to complain before Chinese New Year, because the local officials always lie to me and send me away again," Bao told RFA. "They say they will resolve my grievance, but they still haven't done so," she said. "That's why I continued to petition after the New Year." "This time, I will also be filing a complaint about the gachaa [township ruling Chinese Communist Party] secretary who has taken over the grasslands and has been persecuting local herders," Bao said. According to Bao, the gold-mining company Taiping Mining has caused serious pollution of the local air and water, causing serious environmental damage to the fragile ecosystem of the local steppe, and leaving local Mongolian herders in extreme hardship. Local people have repeatedly confronted government officials over the pollution, but to no avail, she said. Polluted water, air Bao has been protesting against pollution caused by Taiping Mining since 2006, saying the company is releasing heavy metals directly into local rivers, as well as releasing pollutants into the air. She said dynamiting and diesel fumes from the heavy machinery employed at the company's gold mine have further polluted the air and the nearby grasslands where herders graze their livestock. Local herds of sheep and cattle have developed respiratory problems and died after eating poisoned grass, and the sheep's wool has turned dark, rendering it useless, Bao said. China's 5.8 million-strong ethnic Mongolian community has long complained of widespread environmental destruction, violent evictions from traditional grazing lands, and unfair development policies in the region. Ethnic Mongolian dissidents Hada and his wife Xinna have repeatedly accused the ruling Chinese Communist Party of a calculated program of ethnic cleansing in Inner Mongolia by destroying herders' traditional way of life. "There are more than 20 households affected around the Taiping Mining facility in Moren Gachaa," Xinna told RFA. "Overall, Moren Gachaa is home to more than 100 households of herders, making a total population of nearly 3,000 people." Repeated calls to the Xinhure Som government offices rang unanswered during office hours on Thursday. Lack of consultation United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights Philip Alston was highly critical of the local government's lack of consultation with ethnic minorities regarding economic development that affects them following his 2016 trip to China. The United States Congressional Executive Commission on China noted with concern the frequent detention of ethnic Mongolian herders who engaged in peaceful protests related to the use of their grasslands, including those who voiced their concerns online or talked with foreign reporters about their complaints. It called on U.S. lawmakers and officials to support Mongolian, Uyghur, and Tibetan minority groups working to improve human rights, environmental protection, economic development, and rule of law in China. They should also "call on the Chinese government to allow ... herders to exercise their fundamental rights of freedom of expression, association, and peaceful assembly, as well as the right to be free from arbitrary detention," the report said. Reported by Qiao Long for RFA's Mandarin Service. Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie. North Korean hostesses wait for customers at the entrance to a North Korean restaurant in the border city of Dandong, northeastern China's Liaoning province,in a file photo. North Korean workers in China are doing their utmost to earn extra income before they are forced to return home under tough international sanctions imposed on their nation for recent nuclear tests and missile launches, a source in China with knowledge of the situation said. The isolated country has exported workers abroad for years, and requires them to remit much of their earnings to the North Korean government, which is believed to use the cash to fund its illicit weapons programs. Most North Korean workers are stationed in Russia and China, where they regularly work more than 12 hours per day for wages they see as little as 10 percent of, after the regime of leader Kim Jong Un takes its cut. Though a large number of North Korean workers in China have already returned home, those who are still there are eagerly trying to earn additional yuan by working as many extra hours as they can before they are forced to leave, the source said. The remaining workers and their supervisors are keeping the extra foreign currency for themselves, and not turning a portion of it over to the North Korean regime as they are required to do, he said. The amount of their [regular] income is already reported to North Korean authorities, so managers, security officers, or workers cant individually keep a penny more, said the source who declined to be named. They ask their Chinese employers to let them work extra hours after their regular eight-hour shifts, and by doing so they are able to increase their personal income by receiving compensation for the overtime hours, he told RFAs Korean Service. Chinese employers are well aware of North Korean workers pitiful circumstances, so they are letting them make extra money for two to three months before they return home, he added. Most North Koreans in China work after dinner until midnight at sewing factories or food processing factories, and split the extra money they earn fifty-fifty with their supervisors, who do not report the additional income to North Korean authorities, he said. The ratio is absolutely advantageous to managers, but the workers are just thankful because they do not have power to influence Chinese employers, the source said. North Koreans in China make an average monthly salary of 700 to 800 Chinese yuan (U.S.$110-$126) during an eight-hour shift, but they receive only 400 to 500 yuan (U.S. $63-$79) for themselves after handing over the rest to their government, he said. By working extra hours, they can earn more than they do in their regular monthly salaries, he said. Chinese employers who are aware of their difficult situations fully cooperate with the workers by letting them work extra hours at night and compensate them, the source said. It wouldnt be good if North Korea found out about their [after-hours] foreign currency earning activities, the source said. However, managers and workers all desperately want personal income, and they have a mutual understanding, so it seems like it is working without any obstacles. Even more sanctions About 100,000 North Koreans working abroad send some U.S. $500 million in earnings to Pyongyang annually, according to an estimate by the United Nations. In September, the U.N. Security Council adopted resolutions prohibiting countries from accepting North Korean workers in response to a nuclear test the North conducted earlier that month. Three months later, the Council unanimously passed an additional resolution, drafted by China and the United States in response to a ballistic missile launch that Pyongyang said was capable of reaching the U.S. mainland, requiring all North Korean workers abroad to return home within two years. On Friday, the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump announced new sanctions targeting nearly 60 ships and maritime transport companies registered in North Korea and other countries including China, in an effort to stop the North from evading U.N. sanctions restricting oil imports and coal exports. [The U.S.] Treasury [Department] is aggressively targeting all illicit avenues used by North Korea to evade sanctions, including taking decisive action to block the vessels, shipping companies, and entities across the globe that work on North Koreas behalf, said Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin in a printed statement. This will significantly hinder the Kim regimes capacity to conduct evasive maritime activities that facilitate illicit coal and fuel transports, and erode its abilities to ship goods through international waters, he said. The president has made it clear to companies worldwide that if they choose to help fund North Koreas nuclear ambitions, they will not do business with the United States, he said. Reported by Joonho Kim for RFAs Korean Service. Translated by Leejin Jun. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin. Lao Prime Minister Thongloun Sisolith has ordered the governor of the countrys northeastern Xieng Khouang province moved from his job to an obscure government post amid renewed efforts to rein in profiteering from the trade in illegal timber, Lao sources say. Somkot Mangnomek was replaced by the deputy secretary-general of the ruling Partys provincial committee in a hand-over ceremony at the provinces administrative headquarters on Feb. 15, Lao media said. Official news sources did not report the reasons for Somkots dismissal, though a government official told RFAs Lao Service next day that the former governor had been connected to illegal logging in his province. Governor Somkot Mangnomek was removed because, as governor back in 2015, he had authorized a private company to transport 13,000 cubic meters of lumber, timber, and logs from Xieng Khouang province to Vietnam, RFAs source, an official in the Government Inspection Authority, said on condition of anonymity. The shipment had not been approved by the State Audit Organization and was never declared to the government, the source said. Somkot had also ordered Xieng Khouang police to bulldoze a privately owned luxury restaurant in the town of Phonsavan, in the provinces Pek district, so that a bank could be built on the property, and in addition had provoked disputes with local residents over land sold in concessions to Chinese investors, RFAs source said. Last year, Lao authorities seized more than 1,000 cubic meters of timber illegally harvested in several districts of Xieng Khouang province. On Jan. 3, the confiscated wood was put up for sale at auction. Another governor dismissed Somkots transfer followed the dismissal last November of the governor of Attapeu province, whose wife was implicated in the transport to Vietnam of timber harvested illegally in their heavily deforested region. In May 2017, Lao authorities seized a convoy of 27 trucks of logs owned by Seng Viyaketh, wife of Attapeus then-governor Nam Viyaketh, at the Phoukeua checkpoint on the border. Authorities determined that the timber was illegally obtained in Laos. The Politburo issued an order early in November reassigning Nam to work with the countrys National Social and Scientific Council as part of a reshuffle of high-ranking leaders in accordance with job requirements for the new era. While Nam and his wife denied any connection to the trucks seized in May, an official source who inspects timber in the southern provinces of Laos told RFA that the governors dismissal was directly related to the incident, as well as conflict of interest for his family and embezzlement. According to annual survey of corruption for 2017 by the watchdog group Transparency International, Laos ranks 135 out of 180 countries, down from 123 the previous year. There is more corruption because government inspects only small fish not big fish, a senior Lao official told RFA. However a Vientiane resident, speaking on condition of anonymity, said It appears that corruption is down because there are inspections going on. Most timber illegally harvested in Laos is obtained through conversion forestryclearing areas marked for the development of infrastructure projects such as hydropower dams, road building, and mining operationswhich is used as an excuse for large-scale logging that otherwise would not be permitted under Lao law. Reported by RFAs Lao Service. Translated by Max Avary. Written in English by Richard Finney. A Uyghur woman from a remote northwestern corner of the Xinjiang region of China was recently hauled off to a political re-education camp set up to punish members of her Muslim ethnic group deemed disloyal to China. Her crime: answering a phone call from a relative whose number was on a government blacklist. RFAs Uyghur Service has learned that Mihray Jume, 37, was picked up by a policeman in recent weeks and taken to the Beshtope Re-education Camp in Kunas (Shinyuan, in Chinese) county in Ili Kazakh Autonomous Prefecture. A police officer from Araltope Police Station in the same county, confirmed that Jume, whose occupation he said was housewife, is in detention at the Kunas Besh camp. She is in Kunas, said the officer, who declined to give further details. A second officer told RFA by telephone that he had arrested Mihray and handed her over to the police from Beshtope. I put her in a police car to be taken to Beshtope, said the officer. Jumes had answered a phone call from a blacklisted number, he said. The reason (for her detention) was that her brother-in-laws wife called her and she answered it. The person registered to that number was blacklisted, said the officer. Since April last year, ethnic Uyghurs accused of holding extremist and politically incorrect views have been detained in re-education camps throughout Xinjiang, where members of the ethnic group have long complained of pervasive discrimination, religious repression, and cultural suppression under Chinese rule. Chinese authorities have not publicly acknowledged the existence of re-education camps in Xinjiang, and the number of inmates kept in each facility remains a closely guarded secret, but Uyghur activists estimate that up to 1 million Uyghurs have been detained throughout the region since April 2017. Since Xinjiang party chief Chen Quanguo was appointed to his post in August 2016, he has initiated unprecedented repressive measures against the Uyghur people and ideological purges against so-called two-faced Uyghur officialsa term applied by the government to Uyghurs who do not willingly follow directives and exhibit signs of disloyalty. Uyghurs, as well as Xinjiang ethnic minority Kazakhs and Kyrgyz, who have family member living abroad have come under state pressure designed to force their relatives to return to China. Those who have heeded the demand have been sent to re-education camps. China regularly conducts strike hard campaigns in Xinjiang, including police raids on Uyghur households, restrictions on Islamic practices, and curbs on the culture and language of the Uyghur people, including videos and other material. While China blames some Uyghurs for "terrorist" attacks, experts outside China say Beijing has exaggerated the threat from the Uyghurs and that repressive domestic policies are responsible for an upsurge in violence there that has left hundreds dead since 2009. Reported by Shohret Hoshur for RFAs Uyghur Service. Translated by the Uyghur Service. Written in English by Paul Eckert. Five suspected members of a drug-trafficking ring were arrested in Argentina and Russia as part of a joint police investigation that was launched more than a year ago after 389 kilograms of cocaine were found in the Russian Embassy in Buenos Aires, Argentinian officials say. Argentinian Security Minister Patricia Bullrich said that the probe led to the arrest on February 22 of a naturalized Russian who was a member of the police force in Buenos Aires and another citizen of the South American country. The investigation started in December 2016, when Russias ambassador to Argentina reported to Argentinian authorities that they had suspicions about luggage found in an annex of the embassy. Once authorities confirmed that traffickers were trying to move 16 bags of cocaine from the embassy by way of a diplomatic flight, "a tracking device was placed in the suitcase that was to be used to make the shipment to Russia, which was its destination," Bullrich told reporters. The luggage was flown to Russia in 2017, and Bullrich said three Argentinian customs officials traveled to Russia to monitor the delivery. Two individuals were arrested when they went to pick up the cargo, while a former embassy official was arrested in his Moscow apartment. Another suspect is still at large and is wanted under an international arrest warrant. "This has been one of the most complex and extravagant drug-dealing operations that Argentina has faced," Bullrich said. She said Russian security service agents had also traveled to Argentina to assist in the probe. Based on reporting by AP, AFP, and Reuters The parliamentary factions of the ruling Republican Party and the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF), also known as Dashnaktsutyun, have nominated former Prime Minister Armen Sarkisian for president. Sarkisian met with representatives of the two factions shortly before their February 23 vote. The Republican Party and Dashnaktsutyun are coalition partners. The move comes after Armenias outgoing President Serzh Sarkisian on January 19 named Armen Sarkisian as the Republican Partys choice to succeed him. Armen Sarkisian, who is not related to the outgoing president, was Armenias prime minister from 1996 to 1997 when he resigned in the midst of a respiratory illness. He is currently Armenia's ambassador to the United Kingdom and, in accordance with recent constitutional reforms regarding the presidency, is not a member of any political party. Earlier in January, President Sarkisian said the Republican Partys candidate should be a person who is not involved in politics and is highly regarded by Armenian society. Following a referendum in December 2015, Armenia changed its form of government from a semipresidential to a parliamentary republic. As a result, presidential veto powers are being stripped from the post and the presidency is being downgraded to a figurehead position elected by parliament every seven years rather than a direct popular vote. The constitutional reforms coming into effect also limit an Armenian president to a single seven-year term. Sceptics see the constitutional reforms as a way for incumbent President Sarkisian to maintain political control in Armenia by becoming prime minister when the mandate for his second five-year presidential term expires on April 9. Armenias Republican Party controls a simple majority in Yerevans 113-seat, single-chamber legislature and is expected to approve Armen Sarkisian as the next president in an early March vote. Iranian security officers have arrested two women who protested against the compulsory hijab in Tehran by removing their head scarves in public and waving them while standing on utility boxes. Shaparak Shadizadeh, one of the two women arrested, was taken into custody on February 21. Her family said she was beaten up during the arrest. Another woman was reportedly arrested on February 22. A video shows a police officer kicking her down from a utility box where she had staged her peaceful protest. More than two dozen women in recent weeks have protested against a law requiring women to wear the Islamic veil in public. Iranian police said in early February that they arrested 29 women who removed their head scarves in public. Women's dress has been heavily scrutinized in the Islamic republic since the 1979 revolution, when adherence to an Islamic dress code became compulsory. The dress code dictates that women's hair and body must be covered in public. Morality police launch regular crackdowns on those who are not fully respecting rules relating to the hijab. PODGORICA -- Police in Montenegro have confirmed that the man who threw a hand grenade into the compound of the U.S. Embassy in Podgorica on February 22 left behind a suicide note. A police source in the Montenegrin capital, who spoke to RFE/RL on condition of anonymity, said the suicide note by Dalibor Jaukovic was six pages long. Jaukovic was a Serbian-born Kosovo war veteran who was a member of the Yugoslav armed forces in the late 1990s when the United States launched 78 days of air strikes against Serbia to bring the 1998-98 Kosovo war to an end. Early on February 22, he threw a Yugoslav-made M75 "Kashikara" grenade over the embassy compound wall before detonating a second explosive device outside the compound that killed him. Nobody else was hurt by the two explosions. The U.S. State Department confirmed late on February 22 that Jaukovic was opposed to Montengro's membership of NATO as well as pro-Western political leaders in Montenegro. Jaukovic was a member of a Serbian-language Facebook group called "Russophiles." He also joined a Serbian-language Facebook group with more than 57,000 members called "Sometimes Life Breaks You So Much That You Don't Have The Strength To Fight Anymore." Executives and regional leaders gathered for a ground-breaking ceremony for Afghanistan's section of the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) gas pipeline on February 23 in the western Afghan city of Herat. Herat, and uncertainty as the ceremony there approached, provide another reminder of the doubts and questions that have surrounded the TAPI pipeline for years now. On February 20, Jailani Farhad, the spokesman for the Herat mayor, was quoted as saying the project would be inaugurated on February 25. China's Xinhua news agency seemed hesitant to provide an exact date at all, also reporting on February 20 that the "ceremony is expected to be held within coming days." Turkmen President Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov was visiting Mary on February 21. His country, of course, is the supplier of gas for TAPI; and given Turkmenistan's current dire economic situation (more on that below), it is in Berdymukhammedov's interest to see Afghanistan start construction of TAPI. Berdymukhammedov told officials that on February 23 "many important events" would take place, first of all the launch of construction on TAPI in Afghanistan but also the start of work to build a new high-voltage transmission power line and extend a railway from Turkmenistan to Afghanistan. Berdymukhammedov indicated he would be at the ceremony in Herat but it was not mentioned in a report on the official Turkmen government website. So one question was whether the Turkmen president would make the trip to Herat (he did); another was whether he would dress in his commando fatigues, as he did in videos last year, perhaps to frighten away militants. Because security along the 744-kilometer section of the TAPI pipeline has been a huge question in recent years as fighting spread and intensified in previously relatively stable areas of northern Afghanistan. In fact, RFE/RL's Radio Free Afghanistan, known locally as Azadi, reported on February 22 that Herat officials said insurgents who were trained by Iran to disrupt the February 23 ceremony had switched sides and joined the government. For what's it's worth, a spokesman for the Taliban and a Taliban splinter group led by Rasul Akhund that operates in northwestern Afghanistan have both pledged to protect construction of TAPI through Afghan territory, since it is a "national project." Given the government in Kabul's bold claims that TAPI would help bring prosperity and stability to Afghanistan, it is difficult to imagine any militant group in Afghanistan resisting the temptation to try to sabotage the project and keep the government from boosting its popularity and support in areas along the proposed TAPI route. And the Taliban and the Taliban splinter group are not the only armed groups active in northern and western Afghanistan. There are other militant forces and warlords there as well. What Afghanistan Gets TAPI aims to carry some 33 billion cubic meters (bcm) of natural gas a year, most of which is intended for markets in Pakistan and India. Afghanistan should receive some 5 bcm of that gas, but equally if not more importantly, Afghanistan will receive transit fees from TAPI. But how much? The Afghan Voice Agency reported on February 19 that the amount would be "nearly $400 million" annually. Afghanistan's ToloNews reported on February 20 that "Afghanistan is expected to earn $500 million USD in transit duties annually from the project. Turkmen Foreign Minister Rashid Meredov promised in November that Afghanistan would receive some $1 billion annually in transit fees from TAPI. Of course, Turkmenistan is experiencing the worst economic crisis of its 26-year history as an independent country, in large part due to the inability to sell Turkmenistan's major and nearly only export: gas. So Turkmen officials could be expected to say anything that would portray TAPI in a positive light, especially since financing for the project is still uncertain. Who Will Pay For Construction? State company Turkmengaz is the operator of TAPI. That means Turkmengaz must find some $8.5 billion of the estimated $10 billion it will cost to build TAPI. The company has no experience managing a major project outside Turkmenistan and so far has found it difficult to attract investors. The Islamic Development Bank already promised a loan of some $700 million, but that's where it ends. Other countries and companies have reportedly expressed some interest in joining TAPI -- the China National Petroleum Corporation, Russia, Uzbekistan, Saudi Arabia -- but no contracts have been signed. Turkmenistan alone cannot come up with the remaining almost $8 billion that Turkmengaz still needs to cover its share of the costs. And it will not have escaped the attention of potential foreign investors that Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India, the countries that will also benefit from TAPI, have never gone beyond the 5 percent of costs ($500 million) that each is committed to spending -- showing, perhaps, that there are doubts about the viability of TAPI in Kabul, Islamabad, and New Delhi. Another question that we're still looking for an answer to is whether Turkmenistan has completed its section of TAPI. There was a big launch ceremony in Turkmenistan in December 2015 for construction of the 214-kilometer portion on Turkmen territory. Turkmen officials have maintained since then that construction was progressing. But strangely, state media in Turkmenistan, which is obsessed with showing pictures and footage of the country's major projects, has not shown much proof of TAPI's construction. Once there were some photographs in 2016 of sections of pipe-laying in a desert that were alleged to be somewhere in eastern Turkmenistan. But we're still waiting for clues from the February 23 ceremony in Herat to clear up that and other questions. The views expressed in this blog post do not necessarily reflect the views of RFE/RL A Russian lawmaker has threatened to revoke the parliamentary accreditation of journalists from a popular TV channel, following a report it aired on sexual harassment allegedly committed by a member of Vladimir Zhirinovsky's Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR). The deputy speaker of the State Duma, LDPR member Igor Lebedev, said on Twitter on February 23 that his party would raise the issue of cancelling the Dozhd TV journalists' accreditation in Russia's parliament. "I consider yesterday's accusations by the Dozhd journalists against Duma member Leonid Slutsky about sexual harassment to be a harsh violation of ethics and criminal law, and an insult," Lebedev wrote, saying the LDPR faction would "move to cancel" their accreditation. Three female journalists working in the parliament's lower house had told Dozhd TV on condition of anonymity that Slutsky had sexually harassed them inside the State Duma. Slutsky has rejected the accusations. On February 22, LDPR leader Zhirinovsky, who is also a presidential candidate, told Dozhd TV that he would talk to Slutsky about the issue. With reporting by Dozhd TV Russia has been marking its Day of the Fatherland's Defender, which also coincides with the 100th anniversary of the foundation of the Red Army. The Red Army, established by the Bolsheviks in 1918, became the Soviet Army in 1946, after the end of World War II. During Soviet times, February 23 used to be called the Day of the Soviet Army and Navy, and was renamed Day of the Fatherland's Defender in 2002, more than 10 years after the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991. In a solemn ceremony, Russian President Vladimir Putin laid flowers on the grave of the Unknown Soldier near the Kremlin. The ceremony was also attended by Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, and the speakers of both chambers of Parliament, Valentina Matviyenko and Vyacheslav Volodin. Communists and other leftist organizations marched in downtown Moscow to mark the occasion. The Red Army was officially established just several months after the Vladimir Lenin-led Bolshevik party came to power on November 7, 2017. Based on reporting by TASS and Interfax Russian tycoon Oleg Deripaska is stepping down as the head of Russia's Rusal aluminum empire, weeks after he appeared on a U.S. list of tycoons said to benefit from their ties with the Kremlin. Rusal and its parent company EN+ Group announced Deripaska's departure and other management changes early on February 23, saying they "would ensure additional synergy of the metallurgic and energy segments" of the company's business. The company did not mention an investigative report recently published by Russian opposition leader and anticorruption crusader Aleksei Navalny that said that Deripaska hosted Russian Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Prikhodko for a lavish stay on his yacht. The Navalny report on February 8, which was based on social media posts and photos provided by a woman who claimed to have had an affair with Deripaska, said the meeting was part of a growing body of evidence of corruption in Kremlin circles. Deripaska denied committing any unlawful actions and warned media outlets not to disseminate "these mendacious accusations" in the Navalny report. Russia's mass-media regulator Rozkomnadzor later moved to block publication of the report online. Deripaska was also one of 96 Russian tycoons listed by the U.S. Treasury Department on January 30 as having gained wealth and power through close association with President Vladimir Putin. The Treasury Department has said it will impose sanctions on some wealthy Russians in the near future. Before Deripaska's announced resignation, the Russian business daily Kommersant cited his appearance on the Treasury's "Kremlin list" as a reason for why he was planning to quit his Rusal post. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters earlier this week that he was doubtful Deripaska would leave because he appeared on the "Kremlin list," but Peskov did not deny Kommersant's report that the well-connected tycoon was planning to step down. With reporting by TASS Sweden's military has cited an increasingly assertive Russia in a request to parliament for a major increase in the Nordic country's defense spending. The armed forces said in a report to lawmakers on February 23 that Sweden needs to more than double its annual military spending to 115 billion Swedish crowns ($14 billion) by 2035 from about 50 billion crowns currently. Military leaders also called for doubling the number of active personnel to about 120,000. The report cited Moscow's planned increase in military spending and aggressive foreign policy as reasons to boost Sweden's defense outlays. "Russia has, through its action in Georgia in 2008, as well as in the Crimea and in east Ukraine in 2014, showed that it does not hesitate to use military force to achieve its political goals," the report said. Russia seized Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula in 2014 and has backed separatists in eastern Ukraine in a war that has killed more than 10,300 people since April 2014. Russia fought Georgia in a brief war in 2008, and Moscow has backed separatists in breakaway Georgian regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Sweden is not a NATO member but has participated in military drills with member states. Some in the country have raised the issue of Sweden joining the alliance, a move that would be certain to anger Moscow. The report by the military comes a day after the Swedish Security Service warned of potential meddling by Moscow in the September general elections and said that "Russian espionage constitutes the greatest security threat" against the country. Based on reporting by Reuters and AFP WASHINGTON -- The Pentagon says U.S. military commanders were told by their Russian counterparts that there were no Russians in a paramilitary force whose attack on a base in eastern Syria earlier this month led to a massive counterstrike by U.S. forces. The comments by Defense Department spokeswoman Dana White on February 22 add another piece to the puzzle surrounding the February 7 incident, which Moscow said this week caused dozens of casualties among fighters from Russia and other former Soviet republics but did not involve uniformed Russian troops. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and other U.S. military officials have repeatedly said that U.S. military commanders were in contact with their Russian counterparts at the time of the clash. But White's comments are the clearest to date that the U.S. military was told there were no Russians in the attacking force. "The strike in Syria -- our strikes were done out of self-defense. We were very clear about that. We saw those -- that group moving towards us. We still don't know, and I won't speculate, about the intentions or the composition of that group," White said. "What I can tell you is that we used our deconfliction phone line, and we used it before, during, and after the strike. And we were assured by the Russians that there were no Russians involved," she said. The clash in Deir al-Zor Province appears to be the first time that U.S. forces engaged directly with Russians in Syria, where Russian forces are backing President Bashar al-Assad's government in a devastating seven-year civil war. The revelation that Russian mercenaries were killed stoked fears of an outright hostile confrontation between Russians and U.S. forces. But the Russian government has distanced itself from the incident and its public comments have been subdued. The United States has said that air and artillery strikes launched after as many as 500 pro-government forces attacked a base housing U.S.-backed opposition forces and U.S. military advisers killed about 100 of the attackers. Mounting Evidence No Russian official directly acknowledged that Russian citizens were involved until February 15, when Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said that about five people who were "presumably Russian citizens" may have been killed. On February 20, the Russian Foreign Ministry said "several dozen" citizens of Russia and other former Soviet republics were wounded in the lopsided exchange. With accounts from relatives and acquaintances of Russian fighters in Syria mounting, some open-source researchers and media reports have said that dozens or hundreds of Russians were killed. Russia has given Assad's government crucial support throughout the war in Syria, which began with a government crackdown on protests. Moscow helped turn the tide of the conflict in his favor by launching a campaign of air strikes in 2015 and stepping up its military presence on the ground. In Russia, anger is growing among relatives of the dead and survivors, and supporters of private military companies like Vagner, which is believed to have sent hundreds of contract soldiers to Syria. The company is financed by a wealthy St. Petersburg businessman, Yevgeny Prigozhin, who is known for his close ties to the Kremlin. Some relatives have said their loved ones were lured by the company's relatively high wages, but were deceived into thinking they were going to work on construction projects. A senior U.S. diplomat says it has become "more challenging" for Washington to work with Moscow in Syria amid Russia's resistance to a call by Western powers for a 30-day cease-fire in the war-torn country. "We've worked hard to maintain relations and a dialogue with Russia on those issues and areas where we can work cooperatively toward a common goal. Syria is one," U.S. Deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan told reporters in Brussels on February 23. "As the campaign against [Islamic State militants] has proceeded, it has become more challenging for us to work with the Russians [there]," he added. His comments came ahead of a planned vote in the United Nations Security Council on a resolution demanding a 30-day cease-fire across Syria to allow delivery of humanitarian aid and to evacuate ill and wounded civilians. The leaders of France and Germany urged Russian President Vladimir Putin to back the truce, but Moscow has resisted, saying it wanted "guarantees" it would be respected by U.S.-backed rebel fighters. The vote had been scheduled for early on February 23 but has twice been delayed as Western diplomats negotiate to avoid a Russian veto. The developments come amid a growing outcry from Western capitals, the United Nations, and humanitarian groups over Syrian government air strikes and shelling that have pounded a rebel-held suburb of Damascus for the past six days, killing an estimated 450 people. Russia has given President Bashar al-Assad's government crucial support throughout the 7-year-old war in Syria and has generally rejected moves it feels would put its Syrian ally at a disadvantage. Based on reporting by Reuters and AFP Leaders and senior officials from Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Pakistan, and India have inaugurated the start of work on the Afghan part of a multibillion-dollar pipeline project that they hope will meet the region's energy needs. The Afghan and Turkmen presidents, Ashraf Ghani and Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov, were joined by Pakistani Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi and India's Minister of State for External Affairs M.J. Akbar in Afghanistan's western city of Herat for the groundbreaking ceremony for the Afghan section of the TAPI (Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India) natural-gas pipeline. "Galkynysh, the world's second-biggest gas field, will feed the TAPI pipeline," Berdymukhamedov told reporters gathered in a town near the Turkmen-Afghan border via a video link from Herat. Turkmenistan holds the world's fourth-largest natural gas reserves but has been heavily dependent on gas exports to China after Russia cut back on gas imports in the last few years. The planned 1,800-kilometer pipeline connecting Central Asia with South Asia is to carry 33 billion cubic meters of Turkmen natural gas annually for 30 years. The total cost of the project, which is expected to take two years to complete, is estimated at $10 billion. "A new chapter of economic growth and regional connectivity starts right here in the economic and cultural hub of #Afghanistan," Ghani wrote on Twitter after arriving in Herat on February 22. Railway Link Ghani and Berdymukhammedov were also expected to inaugurate work on the construction of a railway link between Afghanistan and Turkmenistan. Heavy security will guard the pipeline construction through Afghanistan, said Jelani Farhad, a spokesman for the Herat provincial governor's office, on February 23. Security personnel were deployed in sensitive areas across Herat for the opening ceremony, checking all vehicles entering the city. "It's a golden day for Afghanistan today. It will help our economy and create thousands of jobs," Farhad said. Backers of the TAPI pipeline say it will ease energy deficits in South Asia and help reduce tensions in the divided region. Afghan officials say Kabul should earn some $500 million annually in transit duties and that the project should help create thousands of jobs. However, security concerns over the project remain high as the Western-backed government in Kabul has been struggling to fend off the Taliban and other militant groups since the withdrawal of most NATO troops in 2014. Turkmenistan started construction of its section of the pipeline in December 2015. Taliban Support The planned underground pipeline is intended to carry 33 billion cubic meters of gas annually alongside Afghanistan's Herat-Kandahar highway, then through Quetta and Multan in Pakistan and ending up at the India-Pakistan border town of Fazilka. It would start from the Galkynysh Gas Field near the town of Yoloten in Turkmenistan's eastern province of Mary. Officials say 5 billion cubic meters would go to Afghanistan and India, and Pakistan would buy around 14 billion. Afghanistan, India, and Pakistan have all repeatedly stated their commitment to the project despite the tensions that New Delhi and Kabul have with Islamabad. Pakistan is accused of not doing enough to stop terrorist groups from using its soil for attacks against the neighboring countries, which Islamabad denies. Highlighting security concerns surrounding TAPI, officials in Herat Province on February 22 paraded a group of 10 Afghan militants claiming to have been trained by neighboring Iran to sabotage events related to the planned pipeline. Herat Governor Mohammad Asif Rahimi told RFE/RL that the insurgents changed their minds at the last minute and surrendered. Iranian officials have not commented on the claims. The pipeline would mostly run through parts of Afghanistan where the Taliban has a strong presence. However, the main Taliban organization in the country has declared its support for TAPI, calling it an "important project" for the country. With reporting by Pajhwok, Tolo News, VOA, Reuters, and AP A Turkish man has been given 53 life sentences for a 2013 bombing that killed dozens of people near the border with Syria, Turkish state-run media reported. The Anadolu news agency on February 23 said Nasir Eskiocak was sentenced to one life term for each of the 53 people killed in the twin car bombings in the town of Reyhanli in Turkey's southern Hatay Province. The media reports did not indicate if other suspects were being sought or were in custody. Prosecutors said Eskiocak was the mastermind of the May 11, 2013, attack, which Ankara blamed on groups supporting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Damascus denied any involvement in the attack, one of the deadliest incidents of Syria's nearly seven-year-old civil war spilling into Turkey. Turkey and the United States back rebel groups fighting to topple Assad, while Russia and Iran have intervened to support the Syrian president. Based on reporting by Anadolu, AFP, dpa, and YeniSafak Turkey's Foreign Ministry summoned the top Dutch envoy in the country on February 23, a day after lawmakers in the Netherlands voted to recognize the mass killing of Armenians under the Ottoman Empire during World War I as "genocide," the Turkish state-run news agency Anadolu reported. It was the second time in a week that Erik Weststrate, the Dutch charge d'affaires to Ankara, was summoned. He had also been called to the ministry last week as it became clear Dutch lawmakers planned to move ahead with the recognition. Turkey "fiercely" condemned the resolution -- which received overwhelming support from Dutch lawmakers, with only three lawmakers voting against it -- saying it has "no legal binding character or validity," Anadolu reported. Dutch lawmakers also passed a separate resolution calling for a government representative to be sent in April to Armenia's capital, Yerevan, for commemorations of the victims. The World War I-era mass slaughter and deportation of up to 1.5 million Armenians by Ottoman Turks is a highly sensitive issue in both Armenia and Turkey. Armenia says it is one of the first examples of genocide in modern history, predating the Holocaust carried out by Nazi Germany against more than 6 million Jews during World War II. Turkey objects, saying that Armenians died in much smaller numbers and because of civil strife rather than a planned, systemic effort by the Ottoman government against the Christian minority. At least 23 countries, including France and Germany, recognize the killings as "genocide." Relations between the Netherlands and Turkey are rocky. The two NATO allies do not have ambassadors posted to each other's capitals. The Dutch government banned Turkish politicians from entering the country to conduct election rallies aimed at Turkish expatriates in the Netherlands in March 2017, ahead of a referendum on expanding President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's powers. Meanwhile, the Armenian Foreign Ministry welcomed the Dutch vote, saying: "With this step, [the] parliament of the Netherlands once again reconfirmed its commitment to universal human values and the noble cause of prevention of genocides and crimes against humanity." Earlier on February 22, Dutch acting Foreign Minister Sigrid Kaag said the government would not follow the lawmakers' lead in recognizing the killings as genocide. Kaag said the cabinet will "continue to exercise restraint" in the issue and continue to discuss "the question of the Armenian genocide." Kaag also said an official representative would be sent to the commemoration ceremony in Yerevan on April 24, but insisted that it was not a sign that the Dutch government recognizes the massacre of Armenians as genocide. "This cabinet wants to be very careful about relations with Turkey, which have been better," she said in comments before the vote. With reporting by AP, dpa, AFP, and Reuters KYIV -- The commander of Ukraine's armed forces has warned of possible "wide-scale aggression" by Russia against his country. Viktor Muzhenko, the Ukrainian military's chief of staff, told RFE/RL in a February 23 interview that Kyiv's army must be prepared for any type of Russian threat amid its ongoing war against Moscow-backed separatists in the east of the country. "We must be ready to stand against [aggression] now, tomorrow, a week after, a year after, three years after, until the moment when such a threat goes away," Muzhenko said. The threats include a "possible wide-scale operation" and "wide-scale aggression" by Russia against Ukraine, he added. His comments follow Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko's signing this week of a law that supporters say will help Kyiv restore control of territory that has been held by Russia-backed separatists in Ukraine's eastern regions of Luhansk and Donetsk since April 2014. The new law puts all military and law enforcement activities in eastern Ukraine under the control of the Ukrainian Army's top command, a move that formally ends what Kyiv has until now referred to as an "antiterrorist operation" in the area. "The antiterrorist operation will be over and we will move further to the operations by the joint forces," Muzhenko said. "That means a clear structure of the management system, the subordination of certain forces and resources to the military command, creation of the joint operative headquarters as the main body to manage the operation on the territories of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions," he added. The move will help to "more effectively administer Ukraine's armed forces" in the region, Muzhenko said. Russia has denounced the legislation, saying it threatens to escalate the violence in eastern Ukraine. More than 10,300 people have been killed in eastern Ukraine since the fighting erupted there in April 2014 following Russia's seizure of Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula. Moscow denies backing the separatists despite substantial evidence of such support. September 2014 and February 2015 peace deals -- known as the Minsk accords -- have failed to end the violence in eastern Ukraine. Moscow and Kyiv frequently trade accusations of undermining the peace effort. Muzhenko told RFE/RL that Ukraine's army will be able to improve its tank defenses by the end of 2018. He said the recent U.S. decision to supply Ukraine with more sophisticated weaponry, including Javelin antitank weapons, is important for Kyiv from a military, psychological, and political perspective. "That is a strong political signal for other countries and also a very strong signal for Ukrainian society, saying that we are not alone, other countries are helping us, and first of all the United States is assisting us," Muzhenko said. The United States says it will open its new embassy in Jerusalem in May, a move scheduled to coincide with the 70th anniversary of Israel's independence. The planned opening of the embassy, which marks a reversal of decades of U.S. policy, was praised by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu after it was announced by U.S. President Donald Trump's administration on February 23. "It will turn Israel's 70th Independence Day into an even greater national celebration," Netanyahu said in a statement posted on Twitter by the Israeli Embassy in Washington. Trump's announcement last year that Washington would move its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem infuriated Palestinians and their Arab allies. Palestinians want East Jerusalem to be the capital of their future state. Israel has annexed East Jerusalem and declared the entire city as its capital, a move not recognized by the international community. "We are planning to open the new U.S. Embassy to Israel in Jerusalem in May. The embassy opening will coincide with Israel's 70th anniversary," AFP quoted a State Department spokesperson as saying on February 23. The relocation date announced on February 23 is sooner than had originally been suggested by U.S. officials. U.S. Vice President Mike Pence had said last month that the move would be completed by the end of 2019. The embassy will be in located in the building that houses U.S. consular operations in Jerusalem before moving to a separate annex by the end of 2019, the State Department said. The United States has begun the search for a permanent location, it added. Israel's intelligence minister, Israel Katz, said on Twitter on February 23 that he would like to congratulate Trump "on his decision to transfer the US Embassy to our capital on Israel's 70th Independence Day." "There is no greater gift than that!" Katz wrote. The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) denounced the decision, calling it a "provocation to all Arabs." "The American administration's decisions to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital and choose the Palestinian people's Naqba as the date for this step is a blatant violation of international law," Saeb Erekat, the secretary-general of the PLO, was quoted by AFP as saying. With reporting by AP, Reuters, AFP, and dpa The United States has hit North Korea with new sanctions, slapping punitive measures on more than 50 vessels and companies and one individual the U.S. administration says are helping Pyongyang evade existing sanctions related to its nuclear and ballistic-missile programs. The new measures were announced on February 23 by the U.S. Treasury Department ahead of President Donald Trump's unveiling of the sanctions during a speech the same day. "We just imposed today [on North Korea] the heaviest sanctions ever imposed on a country ever before," Trump told the cheering crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland, outside Washington. "Hopefully, something positive can happen. We'll see," he added. The excerpts of the Trump's speech released by the White House prior to the event included further comments about North Korea. But the president deviated from his prepared remarks and addressed the issue only at the end of his 80-minute, wide-ranging talk. In the text, Trump was quoted as saying the Treasury Department was taking the actions to further cut off sources of fuel and revenue that Pyongyang uses to support its nuclear program and military. As he spoke to the CPAC, the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control disclosed details of the new measures, which target one individual, 27 companies, and 28 vessels activities related to North Korea nuclear and ballistic-missile programs. The individual was identified as Tsang Yung Yuan, described as a Chinese national located in Taipei, Taiwan. It did not immediately disclose why the person was added to the sanctions list. The announcement came as South Korea is holding the Winter Olympics, an event that Seoul and Pyongyang have used in an effort to resume talks. Tensions have increased on the Korean Peninsula in recent months as Pyongyang continues to test its nuclear and ballistic missile programs in defiance of United Nations regulations. No Russian entities were included in the sanctions list announced February 23. Trump told Reuters last month Russia was helping Pyongyang evade international sanctions, saying Moscow "is not helping us at all with North Korea." With reporting by AP and Reuters U.S. special counsel Robert Mueller has hit President Donald Trumps former campaign manager with new conspiracy and other charges, including allegations that he set up a secret lobbying campaign involving former senior European politicians. The new indictment against Paul Manafort was filed in U.S. District Court in Washington on February 23, just hours after Manafort's deputy, Rick Gates, pleaded guilty to related charges. The flurry of filings followed an indictment a day earlier against the two men, and a related guilty plea by a London-based lawyer earlier in the week -- all indications that Mueller's investigation is quickening its pace and stepping up pressure to secure cooperation with the probe. Mueller's investigation of Manafort and Gates has largely focused on the lobbying they did for a Russian-aligned Ukrainian political party, as well as various offshore companies and bank transfers that, prosecutors allege, were hidden from U.S. authorities. 'Former European Chancellor' In the new document, Mueller charged that Manafort secretly enlisted "former senior European politicians" in 2012 and 2013 to lobby on behalf of the government of then-President Viktor Yanukovych, who was leader of Ukraine's Party of the Regions until he fled the country in February 2014. The former politicians, who are not identified in the indictment, were paid more than 2 million euros for their work. They did not disclose they were being paid for lobbying, Mueller's office charged. "The plan was for the former politicians, informally called the Hapsburg group, to appear to be providing their independent assessments of government of Ukraine actions, when in fact they were paid lobbyists for Ukraine," the indictment stated. The group operated from 2012 to 2013, and was managed by a "former European chancellor," who along with the other members lobbied U.S. legislators and White House officials, according to the indictment. Although the indictment does not name any of the European politicians, the Associated Press previously reported that Manafort had worked with Mercury LLC, a U.S.-based lobbying firm that had employed former Austrian Chancellor Alfred Gusenbauer. The members of the group were to "appear to be providing their independent assessments of government of Ukraine actions, when in fact they were paid lobbyists for Ukraine," the indictment said. Gusenbauer, who served as chancellor of Austria in 2007-2008, and two other lobbyists involved in Manafort's campaign met with members of the U.S. Congress in 2013, according to Politico, which cites Justice Department disclosures retroactively filed last year by Mercury. Manafort has repeatedly maintained his innocence. Earlier on February 23, Gates appeared in federal court in Washington, where he entered a guilty plea to charges of conspiracy and lying to a federal law enforcement agent. Previously, he too had denied the charges. Gates' change of heart indicated that he plans to cooperate with Mueller's team as they pursue the core of their mandate: investigating interactions between Trump associates and Russian officials, as well as alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election. During his court hearing, prosecutors said they would recommend up to 71 months in prison for Gates, but that could be reduced based on his cooperation. After Gates entered his plea, a Manafort spokesman issued a statement, repeating Manafort's position and criticizing Gates. "I had hoped and expected my business colleague would have had the strength to continue the battle to prove our innocence," he said. "For reasons yet to surface he chose to do otherwise." Gates is the fifth person to plead guilty in connection with Mueller's probe, including Trumps first national security adviser, Michael Flynn. Manafort served as Trump's campaign manager from March 2016 until August 2016, when he was fired after revelations about the extent of his work with the Party of the Regions. Contradictory Explanations After Manafort's firing, Gates continued working with the campaign, and assisted Trump's team in the transition after he won the election. Mueller has also brought charges against three Russian companies and 13 Russians, including a St. Petersburg businessman with close ties to the Kremlin. The question of Russian interference has shadowed Trump's administration since before he took office. He has repeatedly called for a more conciliatory approach toward Moscow, and has complained about Mueller's investigation, saying it has shown no evidence of collusion between his administration and Russia. Flynn was fired by Trump in February 2017 after it emerged he had misled top White House officials about his interactions with Russia's ambassador to the United States. Trump fired FBI director James Comey in May 2017, and has given contradictory explanations for it. He said in an interview with NBC News in May 2017 that, at the time he decided to fire Comey, he was thinking that "this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story. It's an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they shouldve won." After a congressional uproar, Mueller -- a former FBI director himself -- was appointed, overseen by the Justice Department's No. 2 official, Rod Rosenstein. The U.S. intelligence community issued a report the same month that Trump took office that accused Russia of a widespread cyberhacking-and-propaganda campaign aimed at influencing the vote. The indictment Mueller issued against more than a dozen Russian suspects this month asserted the campaign intended to support Trump's candidacy. U.S. President Donald Trump has accused Russia, Iran, and the Syrian government of being responsible for a "humanitarian disgrace" in Syria as Western leaders continued to press for a cease-fire in the war-torn Middle East country. "I will say what Russia and what Iran and what Syria have done recently is a humanitarian disgrace," Trump told a news conference at the White House on February 23. "What those three countries have done to those people is a disgrace," he added. The comments come as the United Nations Security Council was scheduled to vote on February 24 on a motion calling for a 30-day truce in Syria to allow for the delivery of humanitarian aid and to evacuate wounded civilians. The vote was originally scheduled for February 23, but it was delayed at least twice before the new date was set. Russia has previously expressed opposition to the resolution, saying it is unrealistic and that it ignores the fact that many Islamic State (IS) fighters remain in the region. French President Emmanuel Macron expressed hope that the Security Council will reach a deal on the Western-led resolution calling for a cease-fire in Syria. Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel appealed to Russian President Vladimir Putin on February 23 ahead of the planned vote, urging Russia to back the resolution and press its Syrian government ally to stop the bombardments of a rebel-held enclave outside Damascus. Witnesses reported a new wave of bombs hit the enclave in Syria's eastern Ghouta district on February 23. More than 400 civilians have reportedly been killed in the district since February 18. "The massacre in eastern Ghouta must stop now," EU foreign-policy chief Federica Mogherini said in a statement. "The European Union is running out of words to describe the horror being experienced by the people of eastern Ghouta." Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said earlier on February 23 that "Russia and Iran must stop the regime." He also said that the bombardment of eastern Gouta and a government offensive against rebel-held positions in Idlib Province was "contrary" to agreements negotiated in Astana by diplomats from Ankara, Moscow, and Tehran. Earlier, the United States criticized Russia over the bombing of eastern Ghouta, saying Moscow had a "unique responsibility" for more than 400 people being killed in the Damascus suburb this month. The U.S. State Department called on Russia to use its influence over the Syrian government to stop the killing while U.S. diplomats pushed for a resolution demanding a 30-day truce in Ghouta that was scheduled for a vote in the UN Security Council early on February 23. State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert blamed Russia for not curbing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his army, which launched an all-out offensive to defeat militants in Ghouta in February -- an operation that Russia and Syria said would mirror their bloody campaign to retake Aleppo. "What are they doing to stop the devastation, the deaths, the murders that are taking place in Syria?" Nauert asked journalists in Washington. "Without Russia backing Syria, the devastation and the deaths would certainly not be occurring." "It is a good reminder that Russia bears a unique responsibility for what is taking place there," she said. Nauert also blamed Moscow for what she called "throwing a wrench" into negotiations at the UN over a resolution to establish a temporary cease-fire that would allow aid to get to the civilian population that is trapped in Ghouta amid the fierce fighting. Russia's UN ambassador rejected the Western-drafted resolution, raising the possibility of a veto when the council votes on it on February 23. Ambassador Vasily Nebenzya said the media and Western nations were conducting a "misinformation campaign" about the fighting in Ghouta and ignoring what he called the "inconvenient truth" that several thousand fighters from a group affiliated with Al-Qaeda reside there. Nauert said the fighting in Ghouta shows the failure of Russian-sponsored peace negotiations over Syria, which had designated eastern Ghouta as a "de-escalation zone" where fighting was supposed to be on the decline. "It shows what a farce this de-escalation zone has become," Nauert said. At the United Nations, U.S. Ambassador for Economic and Social Affairs Kelley Currie said Assad was trying to "bomb or starve" his enemies into submission in Ghouta, just as he did in Aleppo, Hama, and Homs. She said Assad was counting on Russia to provide the cover he needs at the UN so his forces can "keep bombing and gassing these 400,000 people" who live in Ghouta. The Syrian Army dropped leaflets on February 22 calling on Ghouta residents to leave for their own safety and urging opposition fighters to hand themselves over. The leaflets were similar to those dropped over rebel-held neighborhoods during the government's siege of Aleppo. Syria's UN Ambassador Bashar al-Ja'afari told the UN Security Council that Ghouta would be the "second Aleppo." With reporting by AP, AFP, and Reuters WASHINGTON -- The U.S. special counsel investigating alleged Russian interference in U.S. politics has filed updated criminal charges against two former top campaign aides of President Donald Trump. The grand jury indictment, released on February 22, is the latest move in Robert Mueller's spreading investigation of interactions between Trump associates and Russian-linked officials. Paul Manafort, who was fired as Trumps campaign manager in August 2016, and his deputy, Rick Gates, had initially been hit with conspiracy, fraud, and other charges last year. Most of the charges stem from consulting and lobbying work Manafort did for a pro-Russia political party in Ukraine. Both had pleaded not guilty to the initial charges, filed in October. The new charges, which include tax evasion and financial fraud, seem to indicate a tough approach by Mueller, who has reportedly been seeking the cooperation of both Manafort and Gates in the investigation. A spokesman for Manafort said he was "innocent" and "confident" that he would be acquitted of all the new charges. Manafort and Gates are among a growing number of people indicted by Mueller's team. Mueller has secured guilty pleas on related charges from four people, including Trumps ex-national security adviser, Michael Flynn. Earlier this week, a London-based lawyer pleaded guilty to lying to federal investigators about his communications with Gates. With reporting by AP U.S. President Donald Trump will host the leaders of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania in a Baltic Summit on April 3, the White House has said. Officials on February 23 said the meeting will "focus on how best to strengthen our security, business, trade, energy, and cultural partnerships" with "important allies." Scheduled to attend are Presidents Kersti Kaljulaid of Estonia, Raimonds Vejonis of Latvia, and Dalia Grybauskaite of Lithuania. In a statement, Trump said he will use the event to help the Baltic heads of state celebrate the 100th anniversary of their countries' independence. The Baltic states were part of the Russian empire before declaring independence in 1918. They were independent until 1940, when they were occupied by the Soviet Union and annexed in an act never officially recognized by the United States. The countries regained their independence in 1991 and joined the European Union and NATO in 2004. The Baltic states have expressed concerns about Moscow's intentions in the region, especially since Russia's seizure and annexation of Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula in 2014. NAMANGAN, Uzbekistan -- A blogger in Uzbekistan's eastern city of Namangan has gone on trial for alleged libel and charges of using Facebook to publish insults about Prime Minister Abdulla Aripov and the daughters of the late President Islam Karimov. The trial of the 59-year-old Abbos Nasriddinov began on February 22 at the Namangan City Administrative Court. Nasriddinov told RFE/RL that he had simply expressed his opinions regarding issues in society, something which is guaranteed by the countrys constitution. If found guilty, Nasriddinov could face a hefty fine. Since Karimov's death in 2016, more bloggers and journalists have begun expressing criticism of public officials under his successor Shavkat Mirziyoev. President Mirziyoev has announced an agenda aimed at decreasing Uzbekistan's international isolation, establishing "a dialogue" between the authorities and ordinary people, and mending tense ties with neighboring Central Asian countries. In October, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said that Uzbek authorities had taken "some positive steps" during Mirziyoevs first year but still needs to make "sustainable" improvements on human rights. New Planet Hollywood resort announced for Cancun Cancun, Q.R. Planet Hollywood has announced it will be opening a resort in Cancun with Sunwing Travel Group. The travel agency has signed a deal with Planet Hollywood to increase Planet Hollywoods hotel operations around the world. The first two hotels on the companys busy agenda include the Planet Hollywood Resort Cancun and Planet Hollywood Beach Resort Costa Rica. Planet Hollywood Resort Cancun will open in late Spring of 2019 and mark Planet Hollywoods first foray into the in-demand luxury all-inclusive category. Robert Earl, Planet Hollywoods Founder and Chairman says,The Planet Hollywood brand has always been about delivering unique and memorable experiences that translate into lifelong memories for our guests. I am so excited to partner with Sunwing Travel Group and cannot wait to get started with the first spectacular locations in Costa Rica and Cancun. This is the perfect opportunity to bring fame a lot closer to all customers by leveraging Sunwing Travel Groups proven track record of successfully operating and rapidly expanding premier hotel brands. In addition to building and operating new resorts, Sunwing Travel Group will offer management services and franchise opportunities to prospective Planet Hollywood Hotels and Resorts worldwide. Robert Earl is a visionary that knows how to create exciting and engaging experiences, said Stephen Hunter, President & CEO of Sunwing Travel Group, adding that its all about capturing the little details that others miss. The new Planet Hollywood resorts will use technology to heighten the resort experience, from interactive touch-screen digital displays narrating the memorabilia experience to PHTV in-suite and throughout the resort, keeping guests up-to-date with live streaming of events and activities. New roadways in the works for Puerto Morelos Puerto Morelos, Q.R. Motorists in Puerto Morelos will have new roads thanks to the work carried out on Avenida Joaquin Hendricks Diaz, which for years remained closed. Municipal president Laura Fernandez Pina said the two-lane road toward the federal highway, between Timon and Zetina Gasca, is being installed. She explained that they are leveling and compacting so they can eventually seal the surface before applying asphalt. This avenue, in the section of the Timon to the Zetina Gasca, always remained closed because it was never paved. It was not even level so that even if it was a dirt road, vehicles could circulate. In response to a request from citizens, we included this road in the transformation of Puerto Morelos, she said. Laura Fernandez explained that the paving work of Joaquin Hendricks Diaz is being completed with an investment of 43 million peso from the Budget of Expenditures of the Federation. She also reported that this week will be the paving of Goleta Street in Villas Morelos I subdivision and that in the coming days, work will be done in the arteries Brujula, Catamaran, Galeon, Carabela and 23 de Enero where the old pavement has already been removed. We work in different points of the municipal seat to continue transforming our Puerto Morelos and improve the quality of life of the people. Paving works, construction of sidewalks and garrisons, introduction of drainage and placement of new public lighting, she added. Fernandez Pina said that on February 21, conversion work for new underground electric source began. These work projects will bring permanent benefits because we will say goodbye to the aerial wiring and the blackouts that are registered in the tourist area of our charming village. The Federal Electricity Commission and the city of Puerto Morelos have invested 20 million peso, she explained. Policeman shot, killed outside school while picking up children Playa del Carmen, Q.R. An off-duty police officer was shot and killed outside a school in Playa del Carmen Thursday when he arrived to pick up one of his children. An agent of the Municipal Preventive Police was executed outside a primary school in the Ejidal neighborhood after arriving on a moto with one child to pick up his other. The shooting occurred outside the Adolfo Cisneros Camara school where 911 emergency personnel responded to the call. According to preliminary information, the deceased policeman was identified as Mario N, who reports say came to the campus accompanied by one of his children to pick up his other son. As he was about to get on his motorcycle, two subjects approached him and fired four times, twice in the air and twice toward the policeman. When the agent fell, the assailants fled on 8th Street and 80th Avenue aboard a gray vehicle. Agents of the Municipal Preventive Police surrounded the area while the deceased agents children were returned to the school. There have been unverified reports that some members of the municipal police received threats after the February 20 arrest of a Los Pelones gang leader near the Municipal Palace. The municipal government of Solidarity says that in coordination with the state police, they have activated all security protocols to find those responsible for the crime. Bajaj and KTM joined hands back in 2007. At that time, sales of KTM were on the decline, whereas Bajaj was no where to be seen on the world map. Fast forward 10 years, and the duo is now an example for manufacturers the world over. Bajaj and KTM has helped each other and together, they are making waves in the motorcycle industry. Riding on these waves, the partnership is all set to launch a new range of entry level Husqvarna motorcycles. The first batch of Vitpilen 401 and Svartpilen 401 will be manufactured at KTM plant in Mattighofen, Austria, where they are to be launched next month. In India, these bikes will be launched by Q3 2018. Pronunciation and meaning guide Vitpilen pronounced as vit-pi-len, means white arrow pronounced as swort-pi-len is black arrow. Both these bikes were spied on test recently by ThrustZone. The bikes you seen in the images are most likely imported from Austria. Completely undisguised, the two new bikes, Vitpilen 401 and Svartpilen 401 have already managed to create decent enough buzz in the segment. Both bikes are built on the same platform as the KTM Duke 390. It is also powered by the same 373 cc engine which powers the Duke 390. This engine might be tuned slightly to deliver power and torque differently as compared to D390. More details will only be revealed once the bikes are launched. Based on the globally successful KTM Duke 390, Vitpilen 401 and Svartpilen 401 production will shift to India by end 2018. It will be manufactured at the Bajaj plant where the KTMs are made. It is from here that these two bikes will be exported around the world. At the time of announcing Husqvarnas India production plans, Bajaj KTM had made two important points. The first part of this announcement is increase in production of KTM branded motorcycles from India. Earlier, Bajaj KTM had aimed at producing 1 lakh motorcycles of KTM brand in India. Now, the brand has revealed that a total of 2 lakh motorcycles will be produced in 2020. Second part of the announcement The 2 lakh volume will be possible because Bajaj will also produce Husqvarna branded motorcycles at their state of the art plant in Chakan the same plant where they produce the Duke 125, 200, 250, 390, RC 125, 200, 250 and 390 models. National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) has warned that toll charges could be halved in the event of poor maintenance of tolled roads. This warning to all states comes at a time when the Madras High Court has asked the NHAI to reduce toll charges by as much as 50% at the toll plaza at Madurai-Virudhunagar due to improper maintenance. NHAI has asked all its officials to keep a close eye on conditions of tolled stretches of roads all across India and to ensure that they are properly maintained or else toll charges will be reduced. Union road transport and highways secretary, Yudhvir Singh Malik, confirms that NHAI will take note of the Madras High Court order and assess and ensure proper maintenance of road. In September 2015, NHAI had also rolled back the toll hike along the Delhi-Jaipur NH-8 highway following a report that the road was potholed and improperly maintained. This proposed hike was in violation of the Supreme Court order that toll should not be charged if roads are poorly maintained. The Madras High Court has also recently approved 100% toll charges can be charged at the Kappalur toll plaza once the poorly maintained 50 km stretch is repaired and report submitted to for verification. NHAI is also expected to launch a national toll free number for persons to report road accidents on national highways. The same number can be used to register complaints with regard to operations and maintenance of the roads. The launch of this helpline number 1033 is slated for launch later this month. With this, users of the highway will be able to lodge direct complaints against the contractor. User will also be able to lodge complaints via social media. They can post photos of the bad stretch on Facebook or Twitter and tag the NHAI or Ministry of Road Transport handle in order to lodge complaint. Investigation will be launched, and if the contractor is found to be not fixing the highway, tolls will be halved. Report: Army wages offensives on Saudi enemys gatherings in Tuesday [21/February/2018] SANAA, Feb. 21 (Saba) The army and popular forces have waged military offensive and artillery shelling on Saudi army and its mercenaries gatherings in several fronts on Tuesday, military officials told Saba News Agency on Wednesday. Saudi aggression media admitted the killing of 3 and wounding 3 of its soldiers in clashes with the army and popular forces in border fronts line. In Najran province, dozens of Saudi-paid mercenaries were killed and wounded during repelling their infiltration toward Adhiaq and Mahjuba mountains in front of Boqea desert, destroying three military vehicles under the cover of various types of warplanes. In Jizan border province, gatherings of Saudi soldiers shelled by artillery in Khashel and Faridhah sites, while a Saudi military vehicle was bombed by an explosive device in Hathira site, killing all its crew. In the border province of Asir, Saudi soldiers and mercenaries gatherings were shelled in Alab crossing, costume, Hanjer, Fill-Shaibani, Shabakah site, and the hills of Khazan and Qanasin. In Yemen province of Jawf, gatherings of mercenaries were targeted by artillery shells in Utemah front of Khub-washaaf district. Also in Khub-washaaf district of Jawf, dozens of mercenaries were killed and wounded during artillery shelling in Sabrain area and gatherings of mercenaries and military vehicles were shelled in Mahamisha area of Khub-washaaf, destroying a vehicles and killing and wounding many of them. Furthermore, two of Saudi-paid mercenaries were sniped in Mahamisha area of Khub-wasshaaf district, while katyusha rockets were fired toward militias gatherings in the same area. In Taiz province, gatherings of mercenaries and their military vehicles were targeted by artillery in the west of Khaled camp in Moazea district, killing and wounding dozens. Also in Taiz, an infiltration of mercenaries was foiled in Abar of Sarmain district, killing and wounding dozens. In the western coast, a mercenaries military vehicle was burned by a guided rocket, while four Saudi-paid mercenaries were killed in Taiz. In Bayda province, artillery shelling targeted gatherings of mercenaries and their military vehicles in Natea front. In Lahj province, the army and committees foiled a mercenaries infiltration toward Shaznanh area of Qubaida district. In Marib province, sniper unit of the army and popular forces shot dead four Saudi-paid mercenaries in Surwah district. Sameera al-Mahdi Saba Report: Army attacks against Saudi troops over 24 hours [22/February/2018] SANAA, Feb. 22 (Saba) The army and popular forces have launched military operations, including artillery, missiles and snipping attacks against US-backed Saudi-led aggression coalition soldiers and mercenaries over the past 24 hours, according to the army reports combined by Saba on Thursday. In Jizan border province, three Saudi soldiers were sniped in Kars-Jubah site, another one shot dead in Khazan hill of Qewa village and a Saudi soldier was sniped in northern Hamidha village. Also in Jizan, katyusha rockets were accurately fired toward Saudi soldiers gatherings in Maten camp and Mawsem gate, killing and wounding dozens. Furthermore, artillery shelling targeted gatherings of Saudi soldiers and vehicles in Jarah valley, Sawdah and Faridha sites, while a Saudi military vehicle, carried a weapon, was burned in Kars-Jubah by artillery shells, killing and wounding all its crew. In Marib province, five of Saudi-paid mercenaries were shot dead in several areas of Serwah front. Also in Marib, katyusha rockets were fired toward gatherings of mercenaries and their vehicles in Mas camp and beyond Salb mountain, causing direct causalities. In Suwah district of Marib, a military vehicle, loaded with mercenaries, was destroyed by an explosive device in Najed front of Surwah district. In Bayda province, gatherings of mercenaries were targeted by artillery shells in Zahir and Yafaan areas of Thi-Naem district. In Taiz province, fortifications of mercenaries were bombed by explosive devices in several sites of Salh district. In western coast front of Taiz, a mercenaries military vehicle was smashed by a guided missile, killing all its crew. Also in Taiz, artillery shelling targeted militias gatherings in Selw district, killing and wounding dozens, while an infiltration of mercenaries toward Tashrifat was foiled, capturing one of the mercenaries, killing and wounding dozens. In Nehm district, artillery force of the army and popular committees targeted Saudi-backed mercenaries gatherings in Salb mountain and in front of Buhra mountain of Harib-Nehm. Sameera Hassn/Zak Saba [CAIRO] A truck designed locally to put an end to wheat losses during transport from fields to storage silos is set for testing in Egypt this summer. During the harvesting season in Egypt, it is common to see grains scattered across routes used by transport vehicles. This is due to bumpy roads, too many bags of wheat stacked on these vehicles, or bad packaging. According to the Ministry of Supply and Internal Trading, the wheat lost during transport currently amounts to one-sixth of the local harvest, and was almost half three years ago. The country loses 15 per cent of the grain destined for its silos, costing the government about 2 billion Egyptian pounds (approximately US$1.1 million). "The truck is also equipped with a precise system to record the weight of the crop and estimate the price for the farmer in the field." Mohamed Al-Kholy Four years ago, the former Egyptian Minister of Supply decided to tackle the problem by asking the Academy of Scientific Research to dedicate a fund to find a solution. The truck was designed by an Egyptian team from the Agricultural Engineering Research Institute (AENRI), under the leadership of the institutes vice chairman for research Mohamed Al-Kholy. It was funded by a grant of one million Egyptian pounds (approximately US$56,000) from the Academy. It was evaluated last December, and will be tested [during the] next harvest season in June, Al-Kholy confirmed in an interview with SciDev.Net. He explains that the design features a pneumatic system which uses compressed air to pull the grains inside the vehicle. This ensures that the wheat can be transported without any damage, even on bumpy roads. Al-Kholy is confident the trailer will address all the problems related to the process of transporting wheat harvest. Although its primary objective is to facilitate transportation to eliminate waste, he says its potential benefits go beyond that. For example, it also addresses one of the main problems associated with the transportation process: the fact that officials cannot weigh the wheat accurately using manual tools at storage silos, where supplies may arrive either damaged or containing a high amount of impurities due to the poor packing. According to Al-Kholy, the truck separates out impurities from the grains using the difference between their weights: working on the principle of critical velocity, the air inside the vehicle retains the grains while removing the impurities. Verifying the grade of the wheat arriving at silos, which is based on the personal assessment of an official, is another problem this invention aims to solve. The truck is also equipped with a precise system to record the weight of the crop and estimate the price for the farmer in the field, says Al-Kholy. He explains that these issues do not affect just the farmer, but also the state, which ends up paying a price for high-grade wheat when in fact it receives cargo with a large amount of damaged grain. The former minister of Supply intends [has planned for] to produce 600 trucks to cover the entire country, Al-Kholy added. Mohamed Abdel-Moneim, head of the Faculty of Agriculture at Zagazig University in Egypt, says the innovation could also be used to transport imported grain, which is subject to similar problems. According to Abdel-Moneim, two wheat shipments that arrived in Egypt from France and Romania a few months ago were rejected because they contained poppy seeds. The use of a truck with these specifications will protect us from such errors completely due to its ability to separate impurities from the grains, he says. However, Al-Kholy fears for the future of the innovation in light of the upcoming presidential elections in March. The Minister of Scientific Research, Khalid Abdul Ghaffar expressed his enthusiasm for this product and promised to communicate with his colleague, the Minister of Supply, Ali Al-Meselhi, to speed up its circulation all over the country. Now, there is a fear that this effort [may be] lost with ministerial changes. This piece was produced by SciDev.Nets Middle East & North Africa desk. Five women scientists from the developing world have been awarded an international prize for research that promotes socio-economic development and a better quality of life. The awards a partnership between the Elsevier Foundation and the Organization for Women in Science for the Developing World (OWSD) were presented at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), which took place in Austin, Texas this month (15-19 February). Hasibun Naher from Bangladesh, Germaine Djuidje Kenmoe from Cameroon, Silvia Gonzalez Perez from Ecuador, Dawn Iona Fox from Guyana and Witri Wahyu Lestari from Indonesia each received a US$5,000 cash prize for their work. If they have the opportunities and support, women in the developing world can become leaders in their field Jennifer Thomson Naher was recognised for her work on computer simulation of tsunamis; Djuidje Kenmoe for the study of molecular friction-and-wear for improving energy efficiency; Gonzalez Perez for molecular modelling of new sustainable materials; Fox for work on converting waste into materials with added value; and Lestari for her research on the synthesis of metal-organic frameworks for various applications in medicine or environmental protection. OWSD president, Jennifer Thomson, says the women distinguished with the award show that, if they have the opportunities and support, women in the developing world can become leaders in their fields. Not all women have the opportunity to do so. According to 2015 data from UNESCO, women in much of the world face social, political and economic barriers to dedicating their working life to science but those who live in developing countries can face additional, different obstacles. Poverty, for instance, is strongly linked with unequal access to secondary education, and this may keep women from obtaining a university degree in almost in any field. Another obstacle is related to culture and traditions that maintain inequalities between men and women. According to a UNESCO report from 2017, parents with more traditional beliefs about gender roles tend to discourage their daughters from pursuing a scientific career. To become a scientist in a developing country, a woman must be creative and committed, Djuidje Kenmoe, the Cameroonian OWSD-Elsevier prize winner, told SciDev.Net. This, she added, is because in addition to academic work, she will often be tied to social and familiar responsibilities and duties. This highlights the importance of a prize that is specific to women scientists who live and work in developing countries, argues Hortensia Moreno, a researcher from the National Autonomous University of Mexico and a specialist in gender studies. According to Moreno, this prize highlights the need to promote women scientists presence in scientific fields they may have been prevented from entering both in formal ways, for example through restrictions on studying or entering into academic life, and in symbolic ways, through myths, stereotypes and narratives that feed the false notion that women do not have an aptitude for science. Djuidje Kenmoe believes that science and education can promote change in her community. This is why part of her work is about convincing families that they should offer a girl the same opportunities they offer to a boy. Girls ought to know that when they have a job they can be financially independent, and have an important power in family decisions. According to Moreno, prizes also represent the interests of the organisations that grant them. They can legitimize economic power, but also have value as they allow even a minimal distribution of wealth. Elsevier has faced strong criticism from the scientific communities in several European countries, who pay large sums to publish and access articles in journals owned by the company. At the end of last year, 200 German academic institutions cancelled their subscriptions to the publishing house in a push for national negotiation that offers fairer payments for their publications and open access for the institutions that produce them. This piece was amended on 27th February, 2018, to clarify that the criticism was directed at Elsevier, not the Elsevier Foundation. Women have been told for years that if they don't have children before their mid-30s, they may not be able to. But a new study from Princeton University's Coleen Murphy has identified a drug that extends egg viability in worms, even when taken midway through the fertile window, which could theoretically extend women's fertility by three to six years. Her work appears in the current issue of the journal Current Biology. "One of the most important characteristics of aging is the loss of reproductive ability in mid-adulthood," said Murphy, a professor of molecular biology and the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics. "As early as the mid-30s, women start to experience declines in fertility, increased rates of miscarriage and maternal age-related birth defects. All of these problems are thought to be caused by declining egg quality, rather than a lack of eggs." When she reviewed the literature on aging and on reproductive health about a decade ago, she discovered that this particular question -- how to maintain egg quality with age -- had been overlooked by researchers from both fields. "It's really why we started this," she said. "They were missing something that's really important to a lot of people. We just wondered whether we could do anything to contribute to that." Murphy, who is also the director of the Paul F. Glenn Laboratories for Aging Research at Princeton, specializes in using a microscopic worm, Caenorhabditis elegans, to study longevity. These worms have many of the same genes as humans, including those that drive the aging processes of their three-week-long lives. Several years ago, researchers in her lab discovered that C. elegans not only exhibits a similar mid-life decline in reproduction, but also that their unfertilized eggs (oocytes) showed similar declines in quality with age to human eggs. As they investigated why, the researchers in her lab focused on the genes and proteins that are more common in healthy, young eggs than aging ones. They recently decided to try the opposite approach -- investigate why some proteins are "downregulated," or less common, in the lower-quality oocytes. Nicole Templeman and Rachel Kaletsky, postdoctoral research fellows in Murphy's lab, investigated one downregulated group of proteins, cathepsin B proteases, that are rare in high-quality eggs and more common in eggs that have begun degrading with age. The existence of drugs that block these exact proteins provided an opportunity to test their effects. advertisement As she prepared to block the proteins, "there were at least three possibilities," Murphy said. "One, that this was just an inert marker of good oocytes, in which case, there would be no effect from blocking these proteins. Two, their expression increased as a compensatory mechanism to fight the effects of aging, in which case, blocking the proteins' activity would make things even worse. Or three, that these proteins normally increase in old, poor-quality oocytes and are part of the problem -- in which case, their loss would help slow age-related decline." When Templeman administered the drug, she found that the answer was behind door number three: The treated worms still had healthy eggs long after the control group did not. They had administered the drug at the beginning of the worms' reproductive window, the equivalent of puberty, so even though the drug worked, it wouldn't be helpful to adult women, Murphy said. "What you want is a drug [that] you could give to a woman in her mid-30s, and it would still preserve the oocytes that she has," Murphy said. So that's what Templeman tried next. She waited until halfway through the worms' reproductive period before she gave them the drug. It worked beautifully. advertisement "Nicole was very restrained," Murphy said. "She said, 'I think I might have interesting to show you,' and I'm jumping around. Because you can really see it -- see the difference between the worms that were treated and not treated." The results were better than they had hoped, showing that even a late administration of the drug could extend the worms' egg quality. Another experiment that knocked out the cathepsin B genes entirely succeeded in extending worms' fertility by about 10 percent. If applied to humans, Templeman said, "It could be a three- to six-year extension of your reproductive period." It can be hard to believe that microscopic worms could have anything in common with mammals, let alone humans, Murphy admitted. That's why she and Templeman were delighted to discover a cattle breeding study that found the cathepsin B proteins that affect the C. elegans oocytes play the same role in cows. "Any time you can do something in worms where you really feel you might be on the right track for mammals, that makes it pretty exciting," Murphy said. "There's still this idea out there that 'Worms are so different from mammals.' But we keep finding the same genes -- and now we're finding the same kind of drugs could affect this." "This study is significant on several fronts," said Sean Curran, an associate professor of biogerontology at the University of Southern California Leonard Davis School who was not involved in the research. "Reproductive decline is a hallmark of aging, but despite its prevalence, interventions to slow the loss of reproductive capacity are lacking. Dr. Murphy and colleagues have capitalized on their rich data sets to identify a pharmacological target to quell the loss of reproductive decline that comes with age." The cathepsin B inhibitor is nowhere near ready for testing in humans yet, Murphy said. "That's not our area," she said. "We wanted to say: This is something that could work. ... The idea that you could do something mid-reproduction to improve the rest of reproduction -- for me, that's a game changer." The article, "Insulin signaling regulates oocyte quality maintenance with age via Cathepsin B activity" by Nicole Templeman, Shijing Luo, Rachel Kaletsky, Cheng Shi, Jasmine Ashraf, William Keyes and Coleen Murphy appears in the journal Current Biology on March 8, and was released online today. The study was supported by the Glenn Foundation for Medical Research, and National Institute of Health New Innovator (1DP2OD004402-01) and March of Dimes awards to Murphy. Templeman was supported by a Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship. Editorial note: Worm researchers distinguish between "oocytes," unfertilized eggs, and "eggs," which have been fertilized, but this article uses the terms interchangeably. For details about the experiments done with oocytes or fertilized eggs, please see the published research. Some scientists have hypothesized that tumor-promoting changes in cells during cancer development -- particularly an epigenetic change involving DNA methylation -- arise from rogue cells escaping a natural cell deterioration process called senescence. Now, researchers at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center demonstrated that instead, tumor-associated epigenetic states evolve erratically during early stages of tumor development, eventually selecting for a subset of genes that undergo the most changes during normal aging and in early tumor development. The work, published in the Feb. 12 issue of Cancer Cell, may help refine biomarkers of cancer risk. Screening for these genes may help stratify, for every age group, individuals with the highest risk for cancer development, the authors say. "Aging is probably the leading risk factor for most common cancers," says coauthor Stephen Baylin, M.D., the Virginia and Daniel K. Ludwig Professor of Cancer Research at the Kimmel Cancer Center. As epigenetic changes are reversible in laboratory models, some scientists are considering the possibility of modifying this risk factor as a potential way to modulate aging as a cancer risk factor. "Maybe you won't find the Ponce de Leon Fountain of Youth, but if you could dampen down the risk of cancer for every decade you age, that could be huge," says Baylin. For the study, investigators studied patterns of DNA methylation, a process by which cells add tiny methyl chemical groups to a beginning region of a gene's DNA sequence, often silencing the gene's activation. They took fibroblast cells from human foreskin samples and followed an established, three-step laboratory process called Weinberg's classical transformation system to convert the cells to cancer cells. The process includes infecting cells with genes known to induce tumor development. The scientists also injected the early transformed cells into mice to monitor their progression. They took a second group of fibroblast cells and let them naturally mature into senescence. The researchers followed methylation changes observed in both groups of cells over time. "Senescence is a very well-known, normal aging process that is actually an antitumor mechanism. It occurs when cells perceive an excess of DNA damage, when cells undergo too many cell divisions or when they experience cancer development-related stress. So it was puzzling to us how the senescence process could lead to the formation of tumors," says senior study leader Hariharan Easwaran, Ph.D., assistant professor of oncology at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center. To solve the mystery, Easwaran, Baylin and collaborators began mapping the evolution of epigenetic DNA methylation alterations during senescence and transformation. They found that although the alterations appeared similar between senescent cells and transformed cells, the way they evolved and the genes that got methylated were different for the most part. The researchers found that DNA methylation that evolved during senescence was very programmed, so much so that replicates of the senescence process in different petri dishes all had the same epigenetic pattern, Easwaran says. Independent replicates of the transformation process, by contrast, appeared very stochastic, or random. In addition, the transformation process primarily involved regulator genes that are critical for cancers to maintain the characteristics of a cancer cell, Baylin says. In comparison, senescence involves a number of metabolic process genes. In additional experiments, Wenbing Xie, Ph.D., the study's lead author, could not coax senescent cells into becoming transformed cells, serving as a protection against cancer development, and identified a subset of transformation-associated methylated genes that were most prone to get methylated during early tumor formation and during aging. In future work, the researchers will explore tissue-specific patterns of DNA methylation gains for the senescence and transformation classes of genes, and hope to use that to devise strategies for determining age-associated risk-stratification of tumor development. In addition to Baylin, Easwaran and Xie, scientists who contributed to the study were Ioannis Kagiampakis, Yang W. Zhang, Lauren Murphy, Yong Tao, Xiangqian Kong, Byunghak Kang, Limin Xia, Filipe L.F. Carvalho, Ray-Whay Chiu Yen, Cynthia A. Zahnow and Nita Ahuja of Johns Hopkins; Lixia Pan of the National Cancer Institute; and Subhojit Sen of Mumbai University in India. The work was supported by the National Cancer Institute grants R01CA185357, R21CA212495 and R01CA170550, The Hodson Trust and the Evelyn Grollman Glick Scholar Award. Genetic tools can be a powerful complement to visual identification of endangered fish, indicates a study from the University of California, Davis. In the study, published in the journal Conservation Genetics, researchers conducted genetic analysis on fin clips from endangered delta smelt, threatened longfin smelt and invasive wakasagi smelt. The fin clips were among those collected as part of the Yolo Bypass Fish Monitoring program. ONE-THIRD MISIDENTIFIED The scientists were looking for signs of hybridization, which they found is not a significant threat for this population of delta smelt. But the genetic analysis detected something they had not expected: About 27 percent of the fish originally thought to be native delta smelt in the Yolo Bypass were actually nonnative wakasagi. Overall, roughly a third of the samples were misidentified. The co-authors emphasize that this was a sampling from one section of the delta smelt's habitat. The results do not suggest that there are fewer delta smelt overall than previously thought. Co-author Brian Mahardja from the California Department of Water Resources said the agency's monitoring program caught almost no delta smelt during the first 10 years of sampling in the Bypass but caught more than ever within the past five years. "The results of this study do not alter the long-term abundance trends of delta smelt in the Yolo Bypass, but it does mean we need to genetically identify our fish for higher accuracy," Mahardja said. advertisement A COMPLEMENT TO SURVEYS Delta and longfin smelt are native to the San Francisco Estuary but have experienced drastic population declines in recent years. The latest California fish survey in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta found only two delta smelt during four months of trawling from September to December. Efforts to protect delta smelt have made it the target of debate between environmentalists seeking to protect the ecosystem and interest groups seeking increased water deliveries for farming and urban uses. Surveys of native fish abundance inform management decisions and lead to policy changes that affect millions of Californians. "Genetic identification can be a great complement to traditional surveys, particularly where visual identifications are challenging," said lead author Alyssa Benjamin, a lab technician with the UC Davis Department of Animal Sciences. YOUNGER SMELT HARDER TO IDENTIFY The study demonstrates the difficulty of identifying these fish solely by appearance. Delta, longfin and wakasagi smelt have similar features and a capacity to hybridize with each other. While it is possible to distinguish the three species by sight, hybrids are nearly impossible to distinguish by looks alone. advertisement Wakasagi smelt present additional challenges. As juveniles, wakasagi can look identical to delta smelt. A key distinguishing feature is that wakasagi develop several spots under their jaw, while delta smelt do not. But these spots do not tend to emerge until the wakasagi are older, making identification among juveniles more challenging. In fact, 95 percent of misidentified fish were juveniles. NOT ALL AREAS ANALYZED Delta smelt live only in the San Francisco Bay and the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, which includes the Yolo Bypass, a 59,000-acre floodway protecting Sacramento and the southern Sacramento Valley from seasonal flooding. The researchers note that the study did not analyze all areas where delta smelt are surveyed. Misidentifications are most likely to occur in areas where both delta smelt and wakasagi are present. This includes the Yolo Bypass but is not expected to include the entire estuary. The Yolo Bypass Fish Monitoring Program also uses a unique, rotary screw trap, which is checked once a day for sampling. Some of the fish are in various stages of decay by the time biologists check the trap, which can make identification more difficult. "Many of the factors affecting the identification are specific to this area of the Yolo Bypass," Benjamin said. "I think other areas of the Delta will find better accuracy, so we'd have to explore those areas before making any assumptions about the rest of the estuary." Additional co-authors on the study include Ismail K. Sa?lam from UC Davis and Hacattepe University in Turkey, and James Hobbs, Tien-Chieh Hung and Amanda Finger of UC Davis. The study was funded by the California Department of Water Resources. To detect detect intestinal schistosome infections, the World Health Organization recommends using the Kato-Katz technique, which analyzes slides of fecal matter. But the approach often misses people who are infected with only a low burden of parasites and, as a consequence, shed only a few eggs in fecal samples. Researchers have now analyzed the efficacy of other testing approaches in a setting with low parasite burden; their results appear in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases. Schistosomiasis, or infection with the flatworm Schistosoma mansoni, affects more than 240 million people worldwide. In some countries -- including Brazil -- control programs have led to a significant reduction in the prevalence and parasite burden of endemic populations. However, in this setting it can be difficult to detect active infections since the Kato-Katz technique loses its sensitivity. Stefan Geiger, of Brazil's Federal University of Minas Gerais, and colleagues examined 254 individuals in a moderate prevalence area of Northern Minas Gerais, Brazil, using four different approaches to test for intestinal schistosomiasis. The approaches were: the standard Kato-Katz technique, which analyzes slides from up to three fecal samples; a modified Helmintex method, which isolates eggs from 30 g. of feces using magnetic beads; a saline gradient, which cleans 500 mg of feces to detect eggs; and a rapid urine test (POC-CCA) which detects a secreted protein produced mainly by adult worms of S. mansoni. When additional tests were used alongside the Kato-Katz method, the estimated prevalence of schistosomiasis in the population rose 2.3 times, from 20.4% to 45.9%. All methods lost their high sensitivity at low and very low intensity infections. The sensitivity of the POC-CCA (64.9%) was similar to the sensitivity of analyzing six Kato-Katz slides from three fecal samples. The best sensitivity was obtained with the Helmintex method (84%). "In its present form, Helmintex is not applicable for large-scale screening due to the required sample size and the time-consuming sieving and sedimentation processes, but might be an adequate reference standard or gold standard for the evaluation of newly developed, field-based diagnostic tests," the researchers say. "We believe that a combination of methods has to be implemented since the schistosomiasis control programs in different regions of the world are moving from morbidity control towards transmission control and elimination." Belgian, English and Australian scientists are calling on the Australian authorities to review their decision to introduce the carp herpes virus as a way to combat the common carp having colonised the country's rivers. In a letter published in the journal Science, they not only believe that this measure will be ineffective but that it also represents a risk to ecosystems. On a global scale, the common carp (Cyprinus carpio) is one of the most important fish species in fish farming. Its annual production ranges between 4 and 5 million tonnes. Initially introduced to Australia for production in fish farms, the species has gradually colonised the rivers to the point of dominating the indigenous species. One of the methods proposed by the Australian government to reduce the number of carp is to release a virus which is deadly to this species, the cyprinid herpesvirus 3 (CyHV-3, also called the Koi herpesvirus or KHV) in rivers. However, scientists note that data currently available on the carp's biology, the pathogeny of the virus and the ecology of Australian rivers suggests that this tactic will not be effective and could even represent a risk to ecosystems. Before the large-scale release of the CyHV-3, which will be costly (the plan proposed has a budget of 18 million Dollars) and irreversible, assessments must be carried out on the virus' actual capacity to sustainably reduce Australian carp populations living freely without harming the indigenous ecosystems. The authors advocate for the introduction of limited testing to safely assess if the virus can effectively control carp populations without harming ecosystems. The opinion of the scientists is notably based on work carried out for over a decade by Professor Alain Vanderplasschen from the Immunology and Vaccination Laboratory at the University of Liege who is behind the development of the first vaccine against CyHV-3. "The discovery in our laboratory of the beneficial role of the behavioural fever expressed by carp as well as other recent results indicate that the Australian government's biocontrol plan will not meet its objectives. This may even cause serious damage to the ecosystems," explains Professor Alain Vanderplasschen. It is one of the most astonishing results of physics: when a complex system is left alone, it will return to its initial state with almost perfect precision. Gas particles, for example, chaotically swirling around in a container, will return almost exactly to their starting positions after some time. This "Poincare Recurrence Theorem" is the foundation of modern chaos theory. For decades, scientists have investigated how this theorem can be applied to the world of quantum physics. Now, researchers at TU Wien (Vienna) have successfully demonstrated a kind of "Poincare recurrence" in a multi-particle quantum system. The results have been published in the journal Science. An Old Question, Revisited At the end of the 19th century, the French scientist Henri Poincare studied systems which cannot be fully analysed with perfect precision -- for example solar systems consisting of many planets and asteroids, or gas particles, which keep bumping into each other. His surprising result: every state which is physically possible will be occupied by the system at some point -- at least to a very good degree of approximation. If we just wait long enough, at some point all planets will form a straight line, just by coincidence. The gas particles in a box will create interesting patterns, or go back to the state in which they were when the experiment started. A similar theorem can be proved for quantum systems. There, however, completely different rules apply: "In quantum physics, we have to come up with a completely new way of addressing this problem," says Professor Jorg Schmiedmayer from the Institute for Atomic and Subatomic Physics at TU Wien. "For very fundamental reasons, the state of a large quantum system, consisting of many particles, can never be perfectly measured. Apart from that, the particles cannot be seen as independent objects, we have to take into account that they are quantum mechanically entangled." There have been attempts to demonstrate the effect of "Poincare recurrence" in quantum systems, but until now this has only been possible with a very small number of particles, whose state was measured as precisely as possible. This is extremely complicated and the time it takes the system to return to its original state increases dramatically with the number of particles. Jorg Schmiedmayers team at TU Wien, however, chose a different approach: "We are not so much interested in the complete inner state of the system, which cannot be measured anyway," says Bernhard Rauer, first author of the publication. "Instead we want to ask: which quantities can we observe, that tell us something interesting about the system as a whole? And are there times at which these collective quantities return to their initial value?" The team studied the behaviour of an ultracold gas, consisting of thousands of atoms, which is kept in place by electromagnetic fields on a chip. "There are several different quantities describing the characteristics of such a quantum gas -- for example coherence lengths in the gas and correlation functions between different points in space. These parameters tell us, how closely the particles are linked by quantum mechanical effects," says Sebastian Erne, who was responsible for the theoretical calculations necessary for the project. "Our everyday intuition is not used to dealing with these quantities, but for a quantum systems, they are crucial." Recurrence Discovered -- in Collective Quantities By measuring such quantities, which do not refer to single particles, but characterize the system as a whole, it was indeed possible to observe the long-sought quantum recurrence. And not only that: "With our atom chip, we can even influence the time it takes the system to return to one particular state," says Jorg Schmiedmayer. "By measuring this kind of recurrence, we learn a lot about the collective dynamics of the atoms -- for example about the speed of sound in the gas or about scattering phenomena of density waves." The old question, whether quantum systems show recurrences, can finally be answered: Yes, they do -- but the concept of recurrence has to be slightly redefined. Instead of trying to map out the complete inner quantum state of a system, which cannot be measured anyway, it makes more sense to concentrate on quantities which can be measured in quantum experiments. These quantities can be observed to drift away from their initial value -- and to return to their initial state eventually. Some molecular biologists who study the proteins that regulate cell operations, including Elizabeth Vierling at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, do not confine their research to understanding the molecules' current roles. They also look deep into the proteins' evolutionary past to explore what structures have allowed proteins with new functions to develop in response to new needs. An expert in how plants cope with heat, Vierling's interest for many years has been small heat shock proteins (HSPs), which accumulate in plants at high temperatures and appear to act as "molecular chaperones" to protect other proteins from damage. For work reported in the current issue of Science, Vierling, Indu Santhanagoplan and Eman Basha at UMass Amherst and Vierling's longtime collaborator, Justin Benesch and his Oxford University group, experts in protein biophysics, looked at two types of small HSPs to address what they call a "basic evolutionary puzzle." That is, how two different types of small HSPs, Class I and Class II, evolved from a single type over 400 million years ago to form two distinct types with different functions. "It's always important to consider evolution when you're looking at protein function, because it provides insight into potential functional differences, as well as features important for function," Vierling points out. She explains, "We know that mosses, some of the first plants to live on land, as well as all the other plants we see around us, can make both Class I and II small HSPs. We've also demonstrated that these two small HSPs have different functions, though exactly how they work remains unclear. However, the algae that came before land plants only have one type of these small HSPs. Therefore, sometime while plants were evolving functions needed to live on land, they basically duplicated their single small HSP to create two types of small HSPs, and this must have been advantageous." For small HSPs to duplicate themselves and go on to evolve would be easy, she adds, if each acted as a single unit. "But most proteins work in complexes," she points out, "with partners of either more of the same protein units or different ones. This makes developing a new function harder, because a new function may require changing partners. New partners not only have to fit each other, but may also have to not be promiscuous. That is, they can't act in a complex with the original unit. This is the case for the small HSPs, which assemble into dodecamers with 12 of the same units." "Millions of years ago when the small HSP duplication took place," the molecular biologist says, "the two would have been identical, like clones. At some point, they developed enough differences that they don't co-assemble anymore. They started to do different things." advertisement For this work, Vierling says her lab contributed knowledge about the two small HSPs and understanding of their functional differences. They also created a mutant protein important for demonstrating structural similiarities and differences between the two. Benesch's lab contributed expertise in advanced biophysical characterizarion of proteins, the principles of protein architecture and assembly, and the biophysics surrounding those. Vierling says that usually when researchers look at how protein structures assemble, they look at where the structures touch, because that's where they are compatible. "One of the new understandings of this work is that we found there are places away from the interacting surfaces that affect whether or not they can assemble. So you can't just look at where they contact each other, you have to look at other factors." She adds, "This paper does all the fancy biochemistry and biophysics to show why these two small HSPs cannot co-assemble. The reason has to do with the energetics of the final structure, and some of the data may be quite esoteric for evolutionary biologists. But because physical principles control protein structure and intereaction, these are important factors to consider in studies of protein evolution. This work also further solidifies the recognition that these two small HSPs have to have very distinct roles in the cell." In addition to experiments, the team used computer simulations to look at how changes in the way the two proteins might look when bumping into each other could affect their ability to assemble as dodecamers, or 12-part units. One of the first co-authors, Georg Hochberg, also did extensive bioinformatics analysis of protein databases to put the work into a broad evolutionary context. She says, "When the data are taken together, calculations of basic physical parameters could show that it was energetically favorable to make dodecamers of the same type of subunit. This was the result not only of very small changes in the parts of the proteins that stick together in the dodecamer, but also due to parts of the protein that flop around before they stick together. This information is of interest relative to designing protein complexes that can function in new ways." In addition, the data predicted that complexes with many identical units like the Class I and II small HSPs are rare in nature, suggesting their importance to plants should not be underestimated and defining their precise mode of action in plant protection is an important goal. Vierling, who is a member of the Models to Medicine (M2M) protein homeostasis group at UMass Amherst's Institute of Applied Life Sciences, was supported by the U.S. National Institutes of Health and Massachusetts Life Sciences Center in this work. A research team has discovered the process - and filmed the actual moment - that can change the body's response to a dying cell. Importantly, what they call the 'Great Escape' moment may one day prove to be the crucial trigger for autoimmune diseases like arthritis. The research team, led by Professor Benjamin Kile from Monash University's Biomedicine Discovery Institute (BDI), has discovered - and filmed - the exact moment when DNA escapes out of the mitochondria (the organelles inside cells that produce energy) during cell death. The study, published today in the journal Science, involved major collaborators from the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Research Campus in the US. Mitochondria are the ultimate double agent; they are essential to keep cells alive, but when damaged, they can trigger the body's own immune system with potentially devastating consequences. Because the DNA inside mitochondria (mtDNA) has many similarities with bacterial DNA (they share common ancestry), the body reacts to its presence outside the mitochondria, or indeed, outside the cell, as if under attack from invading pathogens. It is a similar failure to distinguish 'self' from 'non-self' that underlies inflammatory and autoimmune diseases. While the release of mtDNA is thought to contribute to autoimmune diseases such as lupus, how it escapes from the mitochondria has never been explained. Monash BDI researcher Dr Kate McArthur, while completing her PhD at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, used a revolutionary new microscope at the Janelia Research Campus in the US to capture the moment when mitochondria form a 'hernia' that balloons out of the mitochondria expelling the DNA into the rest of the cell. The live-cell lattice light-sheet microscopy (LLSM) system developed by Nobel Prize winner Eric Betzig is a new technique that allows scientists to observe living cells at groundbreaking resolution. Dr McArthur travelled to the Janelia Research Campus in Virginia multiple times between 2015-2017, and remembers the moment when she witnessed, for the first time, the mitochondria actively expelling its DNA. "As scientists, we are taught to be quite sceptical when we see something unexpected, so I think my initial reaction was 'no way...' advertisement "It was only after I had carefully repeated the experiment many times that I began to realise what we had found," Dr McArthur said. According to Professor Kile, when a cell commits suicide (a normal part of the human body's balancing act to control blood cell numbers), two proteins called BAK and BAX are triggered. "What we witnessed - in real time - was these professional killer proteins opening up huge 'macropores' in the outer membrane of the mitochondria, leading the inner contents to herniate out, bringing the mtDNA with it," Professor Kile said. "BAK and BAX deliver the 'kill shot' designed to permanently disable the cell. But in doing that, mtDNA is lost from the mitochondria. In essence, this is collateral damage, which, if it isn't controlled properly, triggers the immune system to drive pathological inflammation," he said. The discovery was cemented by images captured by Monash University's Titan Krios cryo-electron microscope, currently the most advanced microscope for biological electron microscopy, and the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute's new lattice light-sheet microscope, custom built by collaborators in the Institute's Centre for Dynamic Imaging. Professor Kile stressed that, in research, "fundamental discoveries such as this are rare, and this one has profound implications for the understanding of a wide range of autoimmune diseases and infections. "This has been a brilliant collaboration - between Monash's Biomedicine Discovery Institute, the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research here in Melbourne and the Janelia Research Campus in the US - which has brought together cutting-edge technologies and first-class expertise to address questions that before now, had never been asked, and would have been impossible to answer," he said. Astronomers have used NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to make the most precise measurements of the expansion rate of the universe since it was first calculated nearly a century ago. Intriguingly, the results are forcing astronomers to consider that they may be seeing evidence of something unexpected at work in the universe. That's because the latest Hubble finding confirms a nagging discrepancy showing the universe to be expanding faster now than was expected from its trajectory seen shortly after the big bang. Researchers suggest that there may be new physics to explain the inconsistency. "The community is really grappling with understanding the meaning of this discrepancy," said lead researcher and Nobel Laureate Adam Riess of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) and Johns Hopkins University, both in Baltimore, Maryland. Riess's team, which includes Stefano Casertano, also of STScI and Johns Hopkins, has been using Hubble over the past six years to refine the measurements of the distances to galaxies, using their stars as milepost markers. Those measurements are used to calculate how fast the universe expands with time, a value known as the Hubble constant. The team's new study extends the number of stars analyzed to distances up to 10 times farther into space than previous Hubble results. But Riess's value reinforces the disparity with the expected value derived from observations of the early universe's expansion, 378,000 years after the big bang -- the violent event that created the universe roughly 13.8 billion years ago. Those measurements were made by the European Space Agency's Planck satellite, which maps the cosmic microwave background, a relic of the big bang. The difference between the two values is about 9 percent. The new Hubble measurements help reduce the chance that the discrepancy in the values is a coincidence to 1 in 5,000. Planck's result predicted that the Hubble constant value should now be 67 kilometers per second per megaparsec (3.3 million light-years), and could be no higher than 69 kilometers per second per megaparsec. This means that for every 3.3 million light-years farther away a galaxy is from us, it is moving 67 kilometers per second faster. But Riess's team measured a value of 73 kilometers per second per megaparsec, indicating galaxies are moving at a faster rate than implied by observations of the early universe. advertisement The Hubble data are so precise that astronomers cannot dismiss the gap between the two results as errors in any single measurement or method. "Both results have been tested multiple ways, so barring a series of unrelated mistakes," Riess explained, "it is increasingly likely that this is not a bug but a feature of the universe." Explaining a Vexing Discrepancy Riess outlined a few possible explanations for the mismatch, all related to the 95 percent of the universe that is shrouded in darkness. One possibility is that dark energy, already known to be accelerating the cosmos, may be shoving galaxies away from each other with even greater -- or growing -- strength. This means that the acceleration itself might not have a constant value in the universe but changes over time in the universe. Riess shared a Nobel Prize for the 1998 discovery of the accelerating universe. Another idea is that the universe contains a new subatomic particle that travels close to the speed of light. Such speedy particles are collectively called "dark radiation" and include previously known particles like neutrinos, which are created in nuclear reactions and radioactive decays. Unlike a normal neutrino, which interacts by a subatomic force, this new particle would be affected only by gravity and is dubbed a "sterile neutrino." Yet another attractive possibility is that dark matter (an invisible form of matter not made up of protons, neutrons, and electrons) interacts more strongly with normal matter or radiation than previously assumed. advertisement Any of these scenarios would change the contents of the early universe, leading to inconsistencies in theoretical models. These inconsistencies would result in an incorrect value for the Hubble constant, inferred from observations of the young cosmos. This value would then be at odds with the number derived from the Hubble observations. Riess and his colleagues don't have any answers yet to this vexing problem, but his team will continue to work on fine-tuning the universe's expansion rate. So far, Riess's team, called the Supernova H0 for the Equation of State (SH0ES), has decreased the uncertainty to 2.3 percent. Before Hubble was launched in 1990, estimates of the Hubble constant varied by a factor of two. One of Hubble's key goals was to help astronomers reduce the value of this uncertainty to within an error of only 10 percent. Since 2005, the group has been on a quest to refine the accuracy of the Hubble constant to a precision that allows for a better understanding of the universe's behavior. Building a Strong Distance Ladder The team has been successful in refining the Hubble constant value by streamlining and strengthening the construction of the cosmic distance ladder, which the astronomers use to measure accurate distances to galaxies near to and far from Earth. The researchers have compared those distances with the expansion of space as measured by the stretching of light from receding galaxies. They then have used the apparent outward velocity of galaxies at each distance to calculate the Hubble constant. But the Hubble constant's value is only as precise as the accuracy of the measurements. Astronomers cannot use a tape measure to gauge the distances between galaxies. Instead, they have selected special classes of stars and supernovae as cosmic yardsticks or milepost markers to precisely measure galactic distances. Among the most reliable for shorter distances are Cepheid variables, pulsating stars that brighten and dim at rates that correspond to their intrinsic brightness. Their distances, therefore, can be inferred by comparing their intrinsic brightness with their apparent brightness as seen from Earth. Astronomer Henrietta Leavitt was the first to recognize the utility of Cepheid variables to gauge distances in 1913. But the first step is to measure the distances to Cepheids independent of their brightness, using a basic tool of geometry called parallax. Parallax is the apparent shift of an object's position due to a change in an observer's point of view. This technique was invented by the ancient Greeks who used it to measure the distance from Earth to the Moon. The latest Hubble result is based on measurements of the parallax of eight newly analyzed Cepheids in our Milky Way galaxy. These stars are about 10 times farther away than any studied previously, residing between 6,000 light-years and 12,000 light-years from Earth, making them more challenging to measure. They pulsate at longer intervals, just like the Cepheids observed by Hubble in distant galaxies containing another reliable yardstick, exploding stars called Type Ia supernovae. This type of supernova flares with uniform brightness and is brilliant enough to be seen from relatively farther away. Previous Hubble observations studied 10 faster-blinking Cepheids located 300 light-years to 1,600 light-years from Earth. Scanning the Stars To measure parallax with Hubble, the team had to gauge the apparent tiny wobble of the Cepheids due to Earth's motion around the Sun. These wobbles are the size of just 1/100 of a single pixel on the telescope's camera, which is roughly the apparent size of a grain of sand seen 100 miles away. Therefore, to ensure the accuracy of the measurements, the astronomers developed a clever method that was not envisioned when Hubble was launched. The researchers invented a scanning technique in which the telescope measured a star's position a thousand times a minute every six months for four years. The team calibrated the true brightness of the eight slowly pulsating stars and cross-correlated them with their more distant blinking cousins to tighten the inaccuracies in their distance ladder. The researchers then compared the brightness of the Cepheids and supernovae in those galaxies with better confidence, so they could more accurately measure the stars' true brightness, and therefore calculate distances to hundreds of supernovae in far-flung galaxies with more precision. Another advantage to this study is that the team used the same instrument, Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3, to calibrate the luminosities of both the nearby Cepheids and those in other galaxies, eliminating the systematic errors that are almost unavoidably introduced by comparing those measurements from different telescopes. "Ordinarily, if every six months you try to measure the change in position of one star relative to another at these distances, you are limited by your ability to figure out exactly where the star is," Casertano explained. Using the new technique, Hubble slowly slews across a stellar target, and captures the image as a streak of light. "This method allows for repeated opportunities to measure the extremely tiny displacements due to parallax," Riess added. "You're measuring the separation between two stars, not just in one place on the camera, but over and over thousands of times, reducing the errors in measurement." The team's goal is to further reduce the uncertainty by using data from Hubble and the European Space Agency's Gaia space observatory, which will measure the positions and distances of stars with unprecedented precision. "This precision is what it will take to diagnose the cause of this discrepancy," Casertano said. The team's results have been accepted for publication by The Astrophysical Journal. Researchers from CIC nanoGUNE (San Sebastian, Spain), in collaboration with the Donostia International Physics Center (DIPC, San Sebastian, Spain) and Kansas State University (USA), report in Science the development of a so called 'hyperbolic metasurface' on which light propagates with completely reshaped wavefronts. This scientific achievement towards a more precise control and monitoring of light is highly interesting for the long run technological challenge of miniaturizing optical devices for sensing and signal processing. Optical waves propagating away from a point source typically exhibit circular (convex) wavefronts. "Like waves on a water surface when a stone is dropped," explains Peining Li, EU Marie Sklodowska-Curie fellow at nanoGUNE and first author of the paper. The reason of this circular propagation is that the medium through which light travels is typically homogenous and isotropic i.e. uniform in all directions. Scientists had already theoretically predicted that specifically structured surfaces can turn the wavefronts of light upside down when it propagates along them. "On such surfaces, called hyberbolic metasurfaces, the waves emitted from a point source propagate only in certain directions and with open (concave) wavefronts," explains Javier Alfaro, PhD student at nanoGUNE and co-author of the paper. These unusual waves are called hyperbolic surface polaritons. Because they propagate only in certain directions, and with wavelengths that are much smaller than that of light in free space or standard waveguides, they could help to miniaturize optical devices for sensing and signal processing. Now, the researchers developed such a metasurface for infrared light. It is based on boron nitride, a graphene-like 2D material, and was selected because of its capability to manipulate infrared light on extremely small length scales, which could be applied for the development of miniaturized chemical sensors or for heat management in nanoscale optoelectronic devices. On the other hand, the researchers succeeded to directly observe the concave wavefronts with a special optical microscope, which have been elusive so far. Hyperbolic metasurfaces are challenging to fabricate because an extremely precise structuring on the nanometer scale is required. Irene Dolado, PhD student at nanoGUNE, and Saul Velez, former postdoctoral researcher at nanoGUNE (now at ETH Zurich) mastered this challenge by electron beam lithography and etching of thin flakes of high-quality boron nitride provided by Kansas State University. "After several optimization steps, we achieved the required precision and obtained grating structures with gap sizes as small as 25 nm," Dolado says. "The same fabrication methods can also be applied to other materials, which could pave the way to realize artificial metasurface structures with custom-made optical properties," adds Saul Velez. To see how the waves propagate along the metasurface, the researchers used a state-of the-art infrared nanoimaging technique that was pioneered by the nanoptics group at nanoGUNE. They first placed an infrared gold nanorod onto the metasurface. "It plays the role of a stone dropped into water," says Peining Li. The nanorod concentrates incident infrared light into a tiny spot, which launches waves that then propagate along the metasurface. With the help of a so-called scattering-type scanning near-field microscope (s-SNOM) the researchers imaged the waves. "It was amazing to see the images. They indeed showed the concave curvature of the wavefronts that were propagating away form the gold nanorod, exactly as predicted by theory," says Rainer Hillenbrand, Ikerbasque Professor at nanoGUNE, who led the work. The results promise nanostructured 2D materials to become a novel platform for hyberbolic metasurface devices and circuits, and further demonstrate how near-field microscopy can be applied to unveil exotic optical phenomena in anisotropic materials and for verifying new metasurface design principles. The research has been mainly funded by individual fellowship grants of the European Union Marie Sklodowsca-Curie Actions and the pre-doctoral research grants program of the Basque and Spanish Governments, as well as by the National Science Foundation (USA), and has been carried out in line with nanoGUNEs projects within the EU's Graphene Flagship. The global fishing fleet is so big it can be seen from space. Really. Fishing activity now covers at least 55 percent of the world's oceans -- four times the land area covered by agriculture -- and can now be monitored, in near real time, to the level of individual vessels. In fact, 70,000 vessels of the global fishing fleet traveled 460 million kilometers in 2016, equivalent to traveling to the moon and back 600 times. Using satellite tracking, machine learning and common ship-tracking technology, scientists from UC Santa Barbara teamed up with colleagues at Global Fishing Watch, National Geographic Society's Pristine Sea project, Dalhousie University, SkyTruth, Google and Stanford University to illuminate the extent of global fishing -- down to single vessel movements and hourly activity. Their findings appear in the journal Science. "I think most people will be surprised that until now we didn't really know where people were fishing in vast swaths of the ocean," said co-author Christopher Costello, a professor at UCSB's Bren School of Environmental Science & Management. "This new real-time dataset will be instrumental in designing improved management of the world's oceans that is good for the fish, ecosystems and fishermen." While the dataset is hundreds of times higher in resolution than previous global surveys, the total area of the ocean fished is likely higher than the 55 percent estimated. That's because some fishing efforts in regions of poor satellite coverage or in exclusive economic zones with a low percentage of vessels using the automatic identification system (AIS) were not included. The team used machine learning technology to analyze 22 billion messages publicly broadcasted from vessels' AIS positions from 2012 to 2016, to answer the question, "What drives commercial fishing behavior?" Based solely on vessel movement patterns, the Global Fishing Watch algorithm was able to identify more than 70,000 commercial fishing vessels, the sizes and engine powers of these vessels, what type of fishing they engaged in, and when and where they fished down to the hour and kilometer. advertisement This new global view of fishing draws on advances in satellite technology and big data processing. More than 40 million hours of fishing activity was observed in 2016, and while most nations appeared to fish predominantly within their own exclusive economic zones, China, Spain, Taiwan, Japan and South Korea accounted for 85 percent of the observed fishing on the high seas. "This dataset provides such high-level resolution on fishing activity that we can even see cultural patterns, such as when fishermen in different regions take time off," said co-author Juan Mayorga, a project scientist in the Sustainable Fisheries Group at the Bren School and with NatGeo's Pristine Seas. For example, in the Chinese fishing fleet -- the largest in the world -- during Chinese New Year fishing activity is reduced to levels comparable to those during seasonal bans enforced by the government. The investigative team also found that when and where fishing occurs are tied more to politics and culture than to natural cycles such as fish migrations and marine food production. "Our analysis demonstrated that policies, cultures and economics play a huge role in driving fishing behavior," Costello said. "In addition, we examined whether fishing diminished when fuel prices were high and found a weak response," he added. "These are the kinds of things about which we've always speculated but haven't ever been able to test -- until now." The resulting interactive map -- which is freely available to the public -- shows a near real-time view of the fishing patterns of individual vessels and fleets. This allows anyone to see what is going on in their own backyard and to observe where policy boundaries are in place and where they are not. "By making this data public, we are providing governments, management bodies and researchers with the information needed to make transparent and well-informed decisions to better regulate fishing activities and reach conservation and sustainability goals," Mayorga said. The study not only opens a gateway for improved ocean management but also confirms that fishing activity is clearly bounded according to differing management regimes, which indicates the role that well-enforced policy can play in curbing overexploitation. "This collaboration opens up myriad research opportunities," Costello explained. "We are leveraging the products developed by Global Fishing Watch to address new and important research questions that will improve fisheries sustainability around the world." Researchers at The University of Texas at Dallas have devised a new technique to isolate aggressive cells thought to form the root of many hard-to-treat metastasized cancers -- a significant step toward developing new drugs that might target these cells. "Our lab is interested in finding ways to prevent cancer recurrence," said Dr. Jiyong Lee, assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry in the School of Natural Sciences and Mathematics at UT Dallas. "The problem is, not all cancer cells are equal. "There is a small population of cancer cells that is much more aggressive than others -- cancer stem cells," Lee said. "These give rise to secondary tumors, even after the primary tumor has been successfully treated. The cells are notoriously difficult to find, let alone eradicate." Lee and his colleagues used a two-step process to sort through a library of 40,000 chemical compounds, looking for any that would selectively bind to breast cancer stem cells, isolating them from standard breast cancer cells. The screening process identified five compounds, called ligands, that bind specifically to cancer stem cells, and the researchers selected one of them for closer study. The results were published online recently in Chemistry -- A European Journal. While similar methods have been used to separate cancer cells from normal healthy cells, Lee said the results mark the first demonstration of a technique that separates cancer stem cells from other cancer cells. advertisement "We have approached this problem in a novel way, and for the first time have isolated a ligand that binds specifically to cancer stem cells," he said. How Cancer Recurs Stem cells are in various tissues in the body, and unlike regular cells, which have a limited lifespan, they can divide and renew themselves for long periods of time. They are also unspecialized, meaning that when one of them divides, the resulting cells can transform into another cell type. For example, stem cells in bone marrow can become bone, fat or blood cells. Similarly, cancer stem cells -- believed to reside at the heart of tumors, fueling their growth -- are also thought to be unspecialized and able to self-renew until they transform into new cancer cells. Most effective treatments for primary tumors leave cancer stem cells unscathed. Even if a primary tumor is successfully treated, cancer stem cells can travel unnoticed by the immune system through the bloodstream to seed new tumors elsewhere, a process called metastasis. Such secondary tumors can appear years later and are often more aggressive and harder to treat. advertisement Challenges of Targeting Cancer Stem Cells Many researchers, including Lee, believe killing cancer stem cells in a primary tumor should eliminate it by removing its renewable source of cancer cells, while also preventing the genesis of new cancers. There are currently no clinically proven drugs directed at cancer stem cells, he said. The challenge: You have to find cancer stem cells before you can kill them. "Research in this field has been difficult because specifically targeting cancer stem cells has been hard," Lee said. "There are limited methods for even detecting these cells." The Experiments Using available data on physical factors that differentiate cancer stem cells, Lee's group incubated a mixture of both breast cancer stem cells and non-stem cancer cells together with 40,000 tiny plastic beads, each coated with multiple copies of one ligand. After two screenings, Lee identified a particular ligand that he believed bound to only the cancer stem cells and used it to separate them from non-stem cancer cells. To confirm this, he injected each set of cells into mice and monitored the animals for tumor growth. "In the cancer stem cell group, we got rapid tumor growth and bigger tumor size than we saw in the regular cancer cell group," Lee said. "We also saw even more cancer stem cell activity, which helps explain why these tumors were more aggressive. "It was also exciting that we didn't see any tumor growth in the group that received the cancer cells from which the cancer stem cells had been removed. This data supports the notion that if you eliminate cancer stem cells, you get tumor degeneration." Possible Applications Lee envisions the ligands he identified being used in multiple ways, including therapeutics, diagnostics and imaging. "The simplest version of a therapeutic would be attaching a toxic agent to the ligand, which would then bind selectively to and kill cancer stem cells," Lee said. "It would also be beneficial to adapt these ligands into imaging agents, which would light up the cancer stem cells in a patient and help determine the best treatment options. "The most immediate application, though, will likely be using our technique to isolate cancer stem cells for further study in the lab, as well as a drug development tool." Other UT Dallas authors of the study are: Dr. Luxi Chen, postdoctoral research associate; Chao Long, a doctoral student in chemistry and biochemistry; and Kha Andy Minh Tran BS'16, a former Lee lab member. The research was supported by a High Impact/High Risk grant from the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas. Children with chronic kidney disease (CKD) may have lower intellectual functioning compared with the general population, with mild deficits across academic skills, executive function, and visual and verbal memory. The findings, which appear in an upcoming issue of the Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology (CJASN), come from an analysis of studies published through 2016. CKD in children clearly affects their physical health, but research also indicates that it can have impacts on neurocognitive function, academic performance, and mental health. This can lead to long-term consequences for children with CKD as they transition into adulthood. To look into this issue, Kerry Chen, MBBS (The Centre for Kidney Research, University of Sydney, in Australia) and her colleagues examined all of the published evidence on cognitive and academic outcomes in children and adolescents with CKD. Their analysis included 34 studies with more than 3000 CKD patients under the age of 21 years. The analysis suggests that children with CKD may have low-average neurocognitive and academic outcomes. The global cognition IQ of children with CKD was classified as low-average. Compared with the general population, the average differences in IQ were -10.5 for all CKD stages, -9.39 for patients with mild-to-moderate stage CKD, -11.2 for patients who underwent kidney transplantation, and -16.2 for patients on dialysis. Direct comparisons showed that children with mild-to-moderate stage CKD and those who received kidney transplants scored 11.2 and 10.1 IQ points higher than children on dialysis. Children with CKD also had lower scores than the general population in executive function and memory domains, and they scored lower in tests of academic skills related to mathematics, reading, and spelling. "In translating our findings to clinical practice, this research provides relevant information on the areas of need -- for example, working memory and mathematics -- for which children with CKD may need guidance, practice and assistance, particularly for children on dialysis," said Dr. Chen. "It also suggests hypotheses for why the overall intellectual and educational outcomes of children with CKD are reduced compared with the general population, and how best to prevent deficits." An accompanying Patient Voice editorial provides the perspective of Lori Hartwell, Founder and President of the Renal Support Network, who has had kidney disease since 2 years of age. "I recall occasions while on hemodialysis experiencing poor cognition and difficulty retaining information," she wrote. "It is not surprising that children and adolescents on dialysis are at greater risk of such effects. Studies have shown a decline in cognitive function that has been associated with fluid and solute shifts while undergoing hemodialysis." She offers up a number of questions to consider as efforts are made to address patients' needs. As we grow older, our muscular function declines. A new study by researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden shows how an unexpectedly high number of mutations in the stem cells of muscles impair cell regeneration. This discovery may result in new medication to build stronger muscles even when in old age. The study is published in Nature Communications. It has already been established that natural aging impairs the function of our skeletal muscles. We also know that the number and the activity of the muscles' stem cells decline with age. However, the reasons for this has not been fully understood. In a new study, researchers at Karolinska Institutet have investigated the number of mutations that accumulate in the muscle's stem cells (satellite cells). "What is most surprising is the high number of mutations. We have seen how a healthy 70-year-old has accumulated more than 1,000 mutations in each stem cell in the muscle, and that these mutations are not random but there are certain regions that are better protected," explains Maria Eriksson, Professor at the Department of Biosciences and Nutrition at Karolinska Institutet. The mutations occur during natural cell division, and the regions that are protected are those that are important for the function or survival of the cells. Nonetheless, the researchers were able to identify that this protection declines with age. "We can demonstrate that this protection diminishes the older you become, indicating an impairment in the cell's capacity to repair their DNA. And this is something we should be able to influence with new drugs," explains Maria Eriksson. The researchers have benefited from new methods to complete the study. The study was performed using single stem cells cultivated to provide sufficient DNA for whole genome sequencing. "We achieved this in the skeletal muscle tissue, which is absolutely unique. We have also found that there is very little overlap of mutations, despite the cells being located close to each other, representing an extremely complex mutational burden," explains the study's first author, Irene Franco, Postdoc in Maria Eriksson's research group. The researchers will now continue their work to investigate whether physical exercise can affect the number of accumulated mutations. Is it true that physical exercise from a young age clears out cells with many mutations, or does it result in the generation of a higher number of such cells? "We aim to discover whether it is possible to individually influence the burden of mutations. Our results may be beneficial for the development of exercise programmes, particularly those designed for an aging population," explains Maria Eriksson. The researchers gained access to the muscle tissue used in the study via a close collaboration with clinical researchers, including Helene Fischer at the Unit for Clinical Physiology at Karolinska University Hospital. The study has been a cooperative project between researchers at Karolinska Institutet, Science for Life Laboratory (SciLifeLab), Uppsala University, Linkoping University and Stockholm University, in addition to several affiliated institutes in Italy. The research is financed by the Swedish Research Council, CIMED (Centre for Innovative Medicine), the David and Astrid Hagelen Foundation, the Swedish Society of Medicine, the Gun and Bertil Stohnes Foundation, the Osterman Foundation, the Marianne and Marcus Wallenberg Foundation, Wallenberg Advanced Bioinformatics Infrastructure and the EU Commission funding programme, Marie Sk?odowska-Curie. Single-cell analysis holds enormous potential to study how individual cells influence disease and respond to treatment, but the lack of cost-effective and user-friendly instrumentation remains challenging. As described in a study published today in Nature Communications, researchers at the New York Genome Center (NYGC) and New York University (NYU) have taken steps to facilitate broad access to single-cell sequencing by developing a 3D-printed, portable and low-cost microfluidic controller. To demonstrate the utility of the instrument in clinical environments, the researchers deployed the device to study synovial tissue from patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) at the Hospital for Special Surgery (HSS). In the study, the researchers describe the 3D-printed custom device, which, along with its electronic and pneumatic components, can be easily obtained and assembled for a total cost of about $600, a fraction of the cost of comparable commercial systems. The device occupies a small footprint as well, not much larger than a tissue box. "Most commercial microfluidic instruments are very costly; as a result, not every lab has access to exciting technology for single-cell analysis," said William Stephenson PhD, Senior Research Engineer in the NYGC's Technology Innovation Lab, who led the development of the instrument and is a lead author on the study. "We designed the instrument to perform droplet microfluidics and in particular Drop-seq, a massively parallel technology for single cell RNA-sequencing." In collaboration with researchers and clinicians at HSS, a world leader in rheumatology research and disease treatment, the group used the instrument to profile joint synovial tissue from RA patients. RA is an autoimmune disease that affects 1% of the population and is associated with painful swelling in the joints. The precise cause of RA is undetermined and muddled by the diversity of cells found in the swollen joints of patients. The portability of the controller permitted patient samples to be processed on-site and immediately after surgery, minimizing handling and transport to optimize sample quality. The researchers collected samples from five RA patients totaling 20,387 cells and looked at the individual gene expression patterns for each cell. "This dataset gave us the opportunity to identify individual subpopulations of cells that could drive the progression of RA, even if they have not been previously characterized," said Rahul Satija PhD, a Core Faculty Member at NYGC, Assistant Professor of Biology at NYU, and senior author on the study. By analyzing the complete dataset and searching for clusters of similar cells, the researchers identified 13 groups, representing both infiltrating immune and inflamed stromal populations. Of particular interest were distinct groups of fibroblasts with strikingly different gene expression patterns. "Roughly an hour after surgical excision, individual cells from patient tissues were labeled for single-cell sequencing. From this work, we have classified unrecognized fibroblast subtypes that may prove to be important drug targets for our RA patients," said Laura Donlin, Co-Director of the HSS Precision Medicine Lab and Assistant Professor at Weill Cornell Medicine, and a lead author on the study. The researchers were able to validate the presence of these multiple groups using flow cytometry, and discovered that they exhibited distinct localization patterns with the joint tissue as well. The dataset is a step towards creating a comprehensive "cell atlas" for synovial tissue from RA patients. Moving forward, the researchers are compiling data from additional RA patients, and aim to obtain patient samples from other arthritic conditions such as psoriatic arthritis and osteoarthritis. In addition, they plan to use CITE-seq, a technique also developed in the Technology Innovation Lab at the NYGC, to more precisely classify cell types by measuring the presence of surface proteins in addition to the transcriptome. They also envision that technology will be useful for profiling samples that are difficult to study in a standard lab, such as highly infectious samples in biocontainment facilities or samples being collected in field research settings. To facilitate its widespread use in the scientific and medical community, the instrument has been fully "open-sourced." Instructions and assembly manuals for the instrument can be found online at the popular microfluidics repository Metafluidics (metafluidics.org/devices/minidrops). "We hope that this instrument lowers the hurdles associated with performing single-cell transcriptome profiling experiments in basic research and clinical settings," Dr. Stephenson said. The arrangement of a city's streets and buildings plays a crucial role in the local urban heat island effect, which causes cities to be hotter than their surroundings, researchers have found. The new finding could provide city planners and officials with new ways to influence those effects. Some cities, such as New York and Chicago, are laid out on a precise grid, like the atoms in a crystal, while others such as Boston or London are arranged more chaotically, like the disordered atoms in a liquid or glass. The researchers found that the "crystalline" cities had a far greater buildup of heat compared to their surroundings than did the "glass-like" ones. The study, published today in the journal Physical Review Letters, found these differences in city patterns, which they call "texture," was the most important determinant of a city's heat island effect. The research was carried out by MIT and National Center for Scientific Research senior research scientist Roland Pellenq, who is also director of a joint MIT/ CNRS/Aix-Marseille University laboratory called 2 (MultiScale Material Science for Energy and Environment); professor of civil and environmental engineering Franz-Josef Ulm; research assistant Jacob Sobstyl; 2 senior research scientist T. Emig; and M.J. Abdolhosseini Qomi, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California at Irvine. The heat island effect has been known for decades. It essentially results from the fact that urban building materials, such as concrete and asphalt, can absorb heat during the day and radiate it back at night, much more than areas covered with vegetation do. The effect can be quite dramatic, adding as much as 10 degrees Farenheit to night-time temperatures in places such as Phoenix, Arizona. In such places this effect can significantly increase health problems and energy use during hot weather, so a better understanding of what produces it will be important in an era when ever more people are living in cities. The team found that using mathematical models that were developed to analyze atomic structures in materials provides a useful tool, leading to a straightforward formula to describe the way a city's design would influence its heat-island effect, Pellenq says. "We use tools of classical statistical physics," he explains. The researchers adapted formulas initially devised to describe how individual atoms in a material are affected by forces from the other atoms, and they reduced these complex sets of relationships to much simpler statistical descriptions of the relative distances of nearby buildings to each other. They then applied them to patterns of buildings determined from satellite images of 47 cities in the U.S. and other countries, ultimately ending up with a single index number for each -- called the local order parameter -- ranging between 0 (total disorder) and 1 (perfect crystalline structure), to provide a statistical description of the cluster of nearest neighbors of any given building. advertisement For each city, they had to collect reliable temperature data, which came from one station within the city and another outside it but nearby, and then determine the difference. To calculate this local order parameter, physicists typically have to use methods such as bombarding materials with neutrons to locate the positions of atoms within them. But for this project, Pellenq says, "to get the building positions we don't use neutrons, just Google maps." Using algorithms they developed to determine the parameter from the city maps, they found that the cities varied from 0.5 to 0.9. The differences in the heating effect seem to result from the way buildings reradiate heat that can then be reabsorbed by other buildings that face them directly, the team determined. Especially for places such as China where new cities are rapidly being built, and other regions where existing cities are expanding rapidly, the information could be important to have, he says. In hot locations, cities could be designed to minimize the extra heating, but in colder places the effect might actually be an advantage, and cities could be designed accordingly. "If you're planning a new section of Phoenix," Pellenq says, "you don't want to build on a grid, since it's already a very hot place. But somewhere in Canada, a mayor may say no, we'll choose to use the grid, to keep the city warmer." The effects are significant, he says. The team evaluated all the states individually and found, for example, that in the state of Florida alone urban heat island effects cause an estimated $400 million in excess costs for air conditioning. "This gives a strategy for urban planners," he says. While in general it's simpler to follow a grid pattern, in terms of placing utility lines, sewer and water pipes, and transportation systems, in places where heat can be a serious issue, it can be well worth the extra complications for a less linear layout. This study also suggests that research on construction materials may offer a way forward to properly manage heat interaction between buildings in cities' historical downtown areas. The work was partly supported by the Concrete Sustainability Hub at MIT, sponsored by the Portland Cement Association and the Ready-Mixed Concrete Research and Education Foundation. The interplay between surface-water salinity and climate change in Central New York is the subject of a recent paper by researchers in Syracuse University's College of Arts and Sciences. Kristina Gutchess, a Ph.D. candidate in Earth Sciences, is the lead author of an article in the journal Environmental Science and Technology (ACS Publications). Her co-authors at Syracuse include Laura Lautz, the Jesse Page Heroy Professor and chair of Earth sciences, and Christa Kelleher, assistant professor of Earth sciences. Another co-author is Gutchess' Ph.D. supervisor, Associate Professor Zunli Lu. Rounding out the group are Li Jin G'08, associate professor of geology at SUNY Cortland; Jose L. J. Ledesma, a postdoctoral researcher of aquatic sciences and assessment at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences; and Jill Crossman, assistant professor of Earth and environmental sciences at the University of Windsor (Ontario). The paper draws on the group's study of the impact of de-icing salt from Interstate 81 and other surrounding roads and highways on the Tioughnioga River watershed. Gutchess says their findings make her "cautiously optimistic" about the watershed's future surface-water chloride concentrations. "The long-term application of road salts has led to a rise in the river's salinity level," says Gutchess, who studies processes affecting the quality of surface water and groundwater. "While various models have been used to assess potential future impacts of continued de-icing practices, they have not incorporated different climate scenarios, which are projected to impact hydrogeology in the 21st century." Gutchess' team combined various computational approaches with rigorous fieldwork and laboratory analysis to simulate surface-water chloride concentrations in the Tioughnioga -- a large, deep, 34-mile tributary of the Chenango River, flowing through Cortland and Broome counties. advertisement Central to their experiment was INCA (short for "INtegrated CAtchment"), a semi-distributed catchment-modeling platform that assesses environmental-change issues. Gutchess calibrated the model for a historical, or baseline, period (1961-90), and used the results to make projections for three 30-year intervals: 2010-39, 2040-69 and 2070-99. Based on the model's projections, the salinity of the Tioughnioga's east and west branches will start decreasing in 20-30 years. "A gradual warming trend between 2040 and 2099 will lead to reductions in snowfall and associated salt applications, causing [the river's] salinity to drop. By 2100, surface-water chloride concentrations should be below 1960s values," Gutchess says. This is potentially big news for a part of the country that has experienced rising surface-water chloride concentrations since the 1950s, when road salting began. Salt, or sodium chloride, is the most commonly used de-icing chemical in the country, spread at a rate of more than 10 million tons a year. In New York State, a typical wintertime event requires 90-450 pounds of salt per lane-mile. Vehicle traffic picks up about 10 percent of the residue; the rest enters adjacent water catchments in the form of runoff, jeopardizing terrestrial ecosystems and drinking water resources. advertisement Gutchess' hydrogeological study is one of only a few combining long-term climate variability and salinity management. The INCA model framework enabled her team to assess stream response under 16 different future scenarios, taking into account climate, land use and snow management. "INCA originally was developed to assess sources of nitrogen in catchments in a single-stem main river," Jin says. "Here, we modified the model to incorporate a new multi-branched structure, enabling us to simulate daily estimates of in-stream concentrations of chloride. We also allowed for differences in salting practices between rural and urban areas." According to INCA, road salt accounts for more than 87 percent of Tioughnioga's salinity. Current de-icing practices, combined with increased urbanization, will likely add to its salinity, but only for a while, thanks in part to the changing climate. According to Lu, the study suggests that climatic impacts are not always negative in a specific region: "It is important to understand the nuances of climate change at various time and geographic scales. Ultimately, this project will help us manage our resources more effectively, as we adapt to future changes." With a wink and a nod, he adds, "At the same time, we should not make blanket statements about climate change. No one is exempt from its effects, pro or con." Gutchess is a member of EMPOWER, a water-energy graduate-training program at Syracuse that is sponsored by the National Science Foundation and directed by Lautz. Additional support for Gutchess' research comes from the University's new Campus as a Laboratory for Sustainability program. Upon graduation in May, she will begin postdoctoral research at Yale. This item is available in full to subscribers. Attention subscribers We have recently launched a new and improved website. To continue reading, you will need to either log into your subscriber account, or purchase a new subscription. If you are a digital subscriber with an active subscription, then you already have an account here. Just reset your password if you've not yet logged in to your account on this new site. If you are a current print subscriber, you can set up a free website account by clicking here. Otherwise, click here to view your options for subscribing. More than a year after San Francisco and City College rolled out a plan to provide free tuition to all city residents, CCSF has yet to receive a single dollar to pay for the program, leaving the college short $4.1 million. Despite reporting a much-needed enrollment boost, attributed largely to the free-tuition promise, city officials have yet to receive any suitable invoices from CCSF that clearly satisfy all the conditions it agreed to when the free-tuition program was announced last year. Maria Su, director of San Franciscos Department of Children, Youth and Their Families, which is responsible for cutting reimbursement checks for the Free City program, said her office has so far sent back two invoices, one of which she characterized as an estimate. Both times, the city returned the invoices with requests for additional details about how CCSF is implementing the program. The DCYF received a third invoice on Feb. 15, and Su said her office is reviewing it. Given that its a brand-new initiative, it takes time to create and build infrastructure, Su said, but she added that, on the citys side, all we have to do is process the invoice and review the backup documentation. Its building the infrastructure on the City College side thats taken longer than expected. The central sticking point, Su said, is that CCSFs invoices and enrollment data have not adequately shown whether the school has been properly guiding students toward student aid money from federal and state sources before dipping into the limited Free City funds. The contract between the city and CCSF, also known as a memorandum of understanding, requires the college to ensure that all eligible students exhaust all available funding sources for enrollment fee payment and education-related expenses, including federal and state financial aid. Under the terms of the agreement between the city and CCSF, the city will cover the tuition and other education-related expenses for San Francisco residents through 2019. The amount the city will pay is capped at just over $11.2 million. The city also provided CCSF with a one-time grant of $500,000 to get the free-tuition program up and running, which included hiring two new CCSF financial aid counselors. The payment problem was first reported by the school newspaper, the Guardsman. Su said that, so far, weve had a hard time trying to understand or figure out how City College was using our dollars as last dollars, meaning money of last resort. CCSF spokesman Jeff Hamilton said in an email that determining the correct charges involves assessing complicated data. Disaggregating this data within the criteria set by the city while also maintaining student confidentiality and meeting our own federal and state mandates is complicated. The hiccups so far, Hamilton said, represented routine challenges for a pilot program affecting thousands of students. A CCSF informational web page about the Free City program notes that most of our students are eligible for significant state and federal financial support and that students are strongly encouraged to apply for them. Hamilton also noted that Free City has brought us many new students who are unfamiliar with (or even uninterested in) financial aid. For example, someone who wants to take a pottery class because they heard it is now free is not going to fill out a nine-page FAFSA financial aid form, referring to the federal form that helps determine a students eligibility for financial aid. Other students with precarious immigration statuses are fearful that filling out detailed financial aid information could expose them to immigration enforcement. Students sometimes dont end up in neat categories that are easy to understand from an accounting/billing standpoint, Hamilton said. Drought Map Track water shortages and restrictions across Bay Area Check the water shortage status of your area, plus see reservoir levels and a list of restrictions for the Bay Areas largest water districts. But the issue is raising concerns for some about the longevity of the Free City program. Victor Olivieri, whos running for a City College board seat, called Free City a great idea that was poorly implemented. The program, he said, was designed as a safety net for those students who need it the most, but it was instead turned into a fishing net to get as many people as possible enrolled into City College. Hes proposed greater oversight by the colleges trustees and enshrining the Free City programs funding by a (legislative) mechanism more stable than a memorandum of understanding. The effort to make City College free for San Francisco residents was spearheaded by Supervisor Jane Kim, who has turned it into a showpiece of her mayoral campaign. Through an aide, Kim said, We want to be sure students are accessing all resources available to them, and to the extent that is not happening, we will work with City College to make sure it does. A hillside housing development proposal for Lafayette must be submitted to the voters for approval, a state appeals court has ruled, reversing a judges ruling that had barred a referendum in the East Bay suburb. The development would include 44 single-family homes, parks and a bike path on 22 acres along Deer Hill Road, which runs above Highway 24 near the Lafayette BART station. The City Council approved the plan in 2015 but ran into opposition on two sides from the San Francisco Bay Area Renters Federation, which favored an earlier plan to build 315 moderate-income apartment units on the site, and from local residents calling themselves Save Lafayette, who said the city and streets near the proposed development were already too congested. Lafayette resolved a lawsuit by the renters group without changing its plan, but Save Lafayette collected nearly 2,000 signatures to qualify a referendum for the local ballot on the councils decision. The city refused to place the issue on the ballot, however, and won an early ruling from Contra Costa County Superior Court Judge George Spanos. Spanos noted that the City Council, before rezoning the 22-acre parcel, had changed Lafayettes general plan so that it allowed residential housing in that area. He said a measure submitted to voters had to be consistent with the general plan, which governs overall development in the city. The First District Court of Appeal in San Francisco disagreed Wednesday and said the referendum could go on the ballot. The referendum here would preserve the status quo, the zoning and development of the land before the City Council acted, Presiding Justice Ignazio Ruvolo said in the 3-0 ruling. The city should have either suspended the ordinance (approving the development) or submitted the issue to the voters. Lafayette could appeal the ruling to the state Supreme Court. But City Manager Steven Falk said Thursday that the city attorney was not recommending an appeal because it could delay resolution of the case, and the development, for several years. He said the City Council will consider Monday whether to appeal or put the issue on the June ballot. Drought Map Track water shortages and restrictions across Bay Area Check the water shortage status of your area, plus see reservoir levels and a list of restrictions for the Bay Areas largest water districts. Gary Garfinkle, a lawyer for Save Lafayette, said the ruling vindicates the peoples right to be heard. He said the proposed development would worsen traffic in probably the most congested intersections in the city. If voters reject the development in June, Garfinkle said, the city could legally propose a similar plan a year later, but would probably encounter another referendum. A building in San Franciscos Castro district that city officials had targeted as a drug house caught fire Friday morning. Water rushed down the road from the house at 519 Sanchez St. as firefighters standing on the blackened roof doused the two-unit building. Several of the windows had been broken. The fire was reported at 10:35 a.m. and brought under control by 11:45 a.m. with no injuries, said Nicol Juratovac, an assistant San Francisco fire chief. The cause is under investigation. In November 2015, City Attorney Dennis Herrera sued the property owner, Joel Elliott, calling the house a neighborhood nuisance known for residents dealing methamphetamine and other illicit drugs. In a statement announcing the complaint, Herrera said Elliott also had failed to comply with numerous orders to fix code violations at the property that endangered the health and safety of neighbors while draining city services. The city sued because the property was being used as a drug house, said John Cote, a spokesman for the city attorneys office. A judge granted a permanent injunction against Elliot in September 2016, ordering him to obtain permits and correct all housing code violations, as well as pay the city and county nearly $1.7 million in fines and fees. Elliott would later file for bankruptcy, and the city is pursuing a judgment for repayment. We are providing the police and fire departments with information about this property and the people associated with it, Cote said. Elliot, whose appeal of the 2016 ruling was dismissed in December 2017, said Friday that the house was vacant and had been improperly referred to as a drug den. He said no one was in the building when the fire started. I dont know who set the fire, Elliott said. I didnt set the fire. But fires dont start themselves, and this was just too coincidental. Neighbor Chick Nace said the property has long been a harbor for low-level criminal activity. It wasnt like a bar at 5:30, but I often saw odd people coming and going, he said. Drought Map Track water shortages and restrictions across Bay Area Check the water shortage status of your area, plus see reservoir levels and a list of restrictions for the Bay Areas largest water districts. Kurt Berry, who also lives in the area, said he saw people recently living in the home. I do know theres been guys coming through, squatting in the bottom part of the house, he said. Josh Bleecher Snyder, who has lived on Sanchez Street for seven years, said Elliotts home has been a consistent source of complaints. Any time there was any kind of disturbance or issue, you knew it was Joels house, he said. If you called an emergency number and you said, 519 Sanchez, they knew what you were talking about. Snyder recalled seeing people coming and going in the middle of the night, as well as sleeping on the street outside the home. He said he reached out to the city for help but got little response. As the Trump administration cracks down on high-skilled immigration and the cost of a U.S. education soars, fewer foreigners chose to study in the U.S. from 2016 to 2017. The dip is largely attributed to a drop in the number of Indian graduate students in science and engineering programs many of whom might otherwise end up working at Silicon Valley companies. After several years of a steady increase, the number of international students seeking U.S. degrees fell about 4 percent, from 840,160 to 808,640, between 2016 and 2017, according to the National Science Board, which analyzed the governments student visa data in a report last month. The number of Indian graduate students enrolled in U.S. science and engineering programs tumbled 19 percent, from 95,950 to 77,500, during that time. Concerns about staying in the U.S. after graduation have been rising as the Trump administration increases its scrutiny of H-1B visas, which are work permits that allow foreigners to live and work in the U.S. for a period of time. The majority of these visas go to Indian workers each year, and Silicon Valley companies rely on H-1B holders to fill many of their jobs. For example, H-1B holders accounted for more than 15 percent of Facebooks workforce in 2016, according to a Reuters analysis. If you dont feel like you can work after graduation, you might be less likely to come to the U.S. in the first place, said Stuart Anderson, executive director of the National Foundation for American Policy, which published an analysis of the National Science Board data Thursday. Not all categories of foreigners are seeing a decline. The number of Chinese undergraduate and graduate students enrolled in U.S. universities in 2017 increased by about 1.4 percent compared with a year earlier, and the number of Indian undergraduate students coming to the U.S. also increased slightly. In the Bay Area, where the hope of working in Silicon Valley is still a major draw around the world, some universities are still attracting plenty of international students. Susan Popko, associate provost for international programs at Santa Clara University, said the private university is not seeing a decline in international students even among Indians seeking science and engineering degrees. Were bucking all international trends, she said About 60 percent of our (international) students plan to work in the valley after graduation, so I think that is still the draw. Air Quality Tracker Check levels down to the neighborhood Ratings for the Bay Area and California, updated every 10 minutes But if the administration continues to crack down on high-skilled immigration, the decline in international students will become more pronounced, said Jill Welch, deputy executive director of public policy at NAFSA: Association of International Educators. She noted that other countries, such as Canada, offer fast-track permanent residency to foreigners with certain skills. But in the U.S., she said, the government is not being proactive enough in maintaining the inflow of highly skilled immigrants. U.S. universities and colleges are working hard to maintain their interests, Welch said. But Congress should (also) focus on welcoming common sense immigration politics, and not those that send a message that we dont want immigrants here. Turo, which arranges rentals of peoples personal cars, is suing San Francisco for trying to classify it as a traditional rental car company. Like many disruptive startups, Turo, a self-styled peer-to-peer car-sharing company headquartered in San Francisco, says its business is in a new category that doesnt fit existing regulations. It says that just as Uber and Lyft arent taxi operators, Skype is not a telecom and eBay isnt a retailer, Turo should not be burdened by an irrelevant label. We are not a rental car company; we are a tech company creating a platform to connect hosts (private car owners) to travelers, said CEO Andre Haddad. We dont own, operate or maintain cars. The cars belong to our hosts. San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera sued Turo last month for not heeding San Francisco International Airports fees and rules for rental car companies, such as ones that ban curbside deliveries of rental cars. Hes seeking a court order to stop it from operating at SFO, as well as big penalties. Turos countersuit, filed Friday in San Francisco Superior Court, says the citys stance is unconstitutional and anticompetitive. It points to a 2010 California law that recognizes personal vehicle sharing programs as a new entity as long as car owners dont make more money than their expenses, such as loan or lease payments, fuel and maintenance. John Cote, a spokesman for Herrera, dismissed that argument. You dont get a special set of rules just because your business includes a Web platform, he said in an email. You still have to play by the same rules as everybody else. Cote pointed to Turos promotional materials, also referenced in the citys lawsuit, touting its SFO rentals. Turo is trying to have its cake and eat it too, he wrote. They market themselves to customers as a superior form of rental car company and then turn around in court and say theyre not a rental car company. They advertise SFO service and then turn around and say they dont operate at the airport. Turos goal in these tactics is simply to avoid paying their share of the fees their competitors pay. But Turo says that its airport use is far more minimal than that of traditional rental car companies, which pay $18 per rental for the AirTrain people mover, plus 10 percent of receipts (as well as rental fees for airport space they occupy). Our renters dont use the AirTrain and arent at the (rental car) counters, so I dont think that price is fair, Haddad said. Turo wants to pay a per-rental fee of a few dollars, similar to the $3.80 per trip that Uber and Lyft drivers pay. Turo contends that San Franciscos lawsuit, as well as dozens of pending statehouse bills to classify it as a rental car company, stem from a conspiracy by Enterprise, the nations largest car rental company. Although Turo and similar peer-to-peer rental companies such as Getaround are still small by comparison, Turo says Enterprise wants to crush the nascent industry now before it becomes a competitive threat. Enterprise, which owns the Alamo and National car rental brands, said thats not so, and Cote, the spokesman for Herrera, dismissed Turos claim as fiction. We were an industry disrupter ourselves 60 years ago when Enterprise began renting cars in neighborhoods while our competitors remained at the airport, said Enterprise spokeswoman Laura Bryant in an email. So we intuitively understand and appreciate the challenges of being a startup in a highly competitive marketplace. ... However, we believe the playing field should be level and fair for everyone involved in ground transportation and that is especially true when it comes to safety issues like designated pickup airport locations as well as any legal restrictions concerning manufacturer vehicle recalls. Air Quality Tracker Check levels down to the neighborhood Ratings for the Bay Area and California, updated every 10 minutes If Turo were deemed equivalent to Enterprise and its ilk, it would have to add taxes on top of the rental fees that travelers pay, thus driving up the costs of its rentals, which generally are cheaper than those from traditional rental companies. But Turo says that Enterprise and the like enjoy several tax benefits that Turo and the people who rent out their vehicles do not have. When rental companies buy cars, and when they resell them, they are excused from some taxes, which add up to billions of dollars a year for the industry, according to Michelle Fang, Turo general counsel. But the private individuals whose cars comprise Turos fleet must pay these taxes when they buy or sell a car, the company said. Turo gives car owners in its network 1099 tax forms so they can pay income taxes on their rental earnings. Alameda resident David Chu, a car enthusiast, first discovered Turo as a way to rent nice cars a Maserati Ghibli, a Mercedes-Benz AMG GT S and an Alfa Romeo 4C for special occasions. In December, he bought a new 2018 Suburu WRX STI and has since rented it out via Turo for about six weekends, helping cover its expenses. Turo doesnt use the airport facilities such as the AirTrain or car rental counters like rental car companies, he said. I dont think its fair to charge them as much; eventually it would affect us, the hosts. Im receptive to lesser fees as a compromise to the solution. A new bakery is debuting in the Oakland Hills this week. The Woodminster neighborhood outpost of South of Markets LAcajou marks the second location for bakery owner Matthew Roder. In addition to assorted pastries, the Oakland storefront will feature an expanded breakfast and lunch menu, including dishes like a cheddar chipotle Benedict featuring Roders killer savory chile and cheese-spiked biscuits ($12), a tri-tip steak standwikch ($12), as well as lighter items like salads ($11-$12) and even Italian wedding soup ($6/$10). (Click here to see the soft-opening menu.) As Roder told Scoop last summer, the vibe and food at this location are inspired by the bouchon-style restaurants he visited during his travels to Lyon in the South of France. Roder also hopes the new location will prove to be a draw for folks heading to nearby Joaquin Miller Park or hikes in the Oakland Hills. The bakery will host an opening party noon-5 p.m. on Saturday, Feb. 24, featuring sample menu items and live music. (Until then, the bakery will have a limited menu of coffee drinks, pastries, juice and smoothies.) The full menu will launch on Sunday, Feb. 25. Drought Map Track water shortages and restrictions across Bay Area Check the water shortage status of your area, plus see reservoir levels and a list of restrictions for the Bay Areas largest water districts. Hours to start will be 7 a.m.-2 p.m. Tuesday-Friday; 9 a.m.-4 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. Eventually, the plan is to be open seven days a week until 8 p.m. LAcajou Bakery, 5020 Woodminster Lane, Oakland. https://www.lacajou.com Susan Coss brings the copita to her mouth. It is nearly overflowing; she raises it slowly. Inside the tiny red clay bowl is one ounce of Del Maguey Chichicapa, a mezcal from the village of San Balthazar Chichicapa, Oaxaca, made from the espadin variety of agave. It zaps with a bright, citrusy, grassy note, then turns warming, recalling roasted chestnuts. There are certain mezcals that are so complex, one or two sips is enough, says Coss, founder of Mezcalistas (www.mezcalistas.com), a blog-turned-advocacy organization. But Chichicapa you could drink this all night. And I have. Shes not the only one. More Americans are drinking mezcal these days: Volume sales of the Mexican agave spirit jumped 279 percent between 2005 and 2015, according to the IWSR, an alcohol industry analyst. Since 2016, the major spirits corporations Diageo, Bacardi and Pernod Ricard have all made significant investments in mezcal brands. These developments are all the more striking given that mezcal has been widely available in the U.S. for only about a decade. Coss Mezcalistas, and other advocates like it, deserve some credit for mezcals recent ascent. When she began blogging about mezcal in 2012, few people she encountered even knew what the spirit was. Now, with her business partner Max Garrone, Coss operates the largest mezcal tasting event in the country, called Mezcal: Mexico in a Bottle. It started five years ago as a modest trade tasting; its now a consumer-facing, five-city tour that regularly sells out. As mezcal has grown, so too has Mezcalistas. After years of blogging and throwing events, the idea now, finally, is to formalize our business, Coss says. This month, she and Garrone launch the Mezcal Collaborative, an educational platform for bartenders. On April 16 theyll host the West Coast heat of a North America-wide cocktail competition, challenging bartenders to invent, as she puts it, the mezcal cocktail. Liz Hafalia/The Chronicle No one marvels at mezcals success more than Coss. Mezcal is so entrenched in our community now, which is amazing, she says. But more so than most other spirits, mezcal makes an uneasy bedfellow for the mass market. Its an extraordinarily labor- and resource-intensive product from rural, and often very poor, communities. How can you maintain its integrity in a world that demands volume, volume, volume? Coss poses. Once it becomes just another alcohol, youve lost what makes mezcal mezcal. To see mezcal thrive, yet keep mezcal true to itself: Coss has her work cut out for her. Coss has been a voice for sustainable agriculture since moving to the Bay Area in 1989. She co-founded Oaklands Eat Real Festival with Anya Fernald (also of Slow Food Nation and Belcampo), then served as the marketing director for CUESA, which operates the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market, until 2015. Mezcal entered Coss life during a 2003 trip to Oaxaca. She and her mother had hired a local driver to visit some textile weavers in the town of Teotitlan del Valle. They asked the driver if he could take them somewhere where they could try some mezcal, which theyd been unable to find much of in Oaxaca City. He knew just the place, driving them down a long dirt road to a dilapidated old building, where they were greeted by a long-haired American man. That turned out to be Ron Cooper, founder of Del Maguey Single Village Mezcal, now the top-selling brand in the U.S. (Cooper sold a majority stake to Pernod Ricard in June.) From the beginning, Coss says, its not that I was intensely interested in Mexico. I was intensely interested in Oaxaca. Mezcal, she saw, was an ancient tradition there, predating the Spanish conquest of Mexico, that had remained largely unchanged in the face of modern technology. Tequila, a subcategory of mezcal that can be made from a single agave variety and produced in only five Mexican states, has industrialized. By contrast, mezcal, artisanal by definition, has largely remained a product of individual families in small pueblos, and remains remarkably diverse in its flavor expressions. The deeper you go with mezcal, the more fascinating it becomes, she says. Back in the Bay Area, Coss began hosting dinners at her home for local chefs and bartenders, sharing mezcals she would bring back from Oaxaca. She met Garrone, and they started the Mezcalistas blog together in 2012. They began hosting mezcal parties at art galleries and small concerts. Then came the Mexico in a Bottle Tastings, first in San Francisco, now also in New York, Washington, D.C., Chicago and San Diego. Liz Hafalia/The Chronicle Mezcalistas, the website, has that familiar homegrown-blog look, but dont let the simplistic template fool you: It has become an essential source of mezcal news and background information. In their regular posts, Coss and Garrone analyze brand acquisitions, explain the finer points of production, weigh in on controversies. They publish tasting notes, but early on they decided they would never review any spirits. Were Switzerland, Coss says. Well never endorse one brand over another. Perhaps Coss could not have imagined, when she launched the blog, the peculiar challenges that mezcal would face in 2018. The investments of Pernod Ricard, Diageo and Bacardi are, Coss has written, validation, a sign that mezcal has staying power in the global market. But mezcal is expensive to produce, no way around it, and these corporate investments likely portend a price war. I call it the race to the bottom, Coss says. When you see mezcals at very low prices, its obvious that someones getting screwed. Larger-scale production of mezcal also presents issues for sustainability. How do you maintain genetic diversity among agave plantings, which take at least four years and as many as 20, to mature? In Tequila-producing areas, agave monoculture has led to plant disease and soil depletion. Coss urges agave growers to reproduce new agave from seed, as opposed to planting clones, and supports efforts to restore the habitats of bats, which are integral to agave pollination. Mezcal also requires massive amounts of wood both in the horno, where the agave roasts before fermentation, and later in the still which puts pressure on deforestation in Oaxaca. Coss has praised Sombra Mezcal, a brand owned by master sommelier Richard Betts, for forgoing wood in its stills in favor of gas heat. Furthermore, what do you do with the byproducts of mezcal production? According to some producers, a standard bottle of mezcal could generate as many as 12 liters of vinasa (wastewater) and more than 40 pounds of bagazo (cooked agave fibers). Not to mention the other essential aspects of sustainability: How do you position mezcals new successes to enrich the impoverished communities that produced it? (One leading producer, Real Minero, just paid for a library in its pueblo.) All these are perils of success, perhaps, but Coss recognizes them as real perils nonetheless. Coss is not alone in raising these questions. And although she spends several months a year in Oaxaca, she comfortably acknowledges her outsider status. Im always aware that Im a white lady and Im involved in a product that is so culturally Mexican, she says. If you call her a mezcal expert, she scoffs: The only experts, she insists, are those who make it. That doesnt diminish Coss conviction that she has a role to play in this chapter of mezcals long life. For me, she says, it still remains a way to shed light on people whose stories might never get told. Susan Coss Mezcalistas Margarita 2 ounces mezcal 1 ounce lime juice Food Guide Top 25 Restaurants Where to eat in the Bay Area. Find spots near you, create a dining wishlist, and more. ounce Cointreau ounce agave nectar Lime wedge to rim the glass and to garnish Sal de gusano to rim the glass, optional Instructions: Pour all the ingredients into a cocktail shaker half full of ice, and shake for about 12 seconds. If using the optional sal de gusano, pour a generous amount on a plate. Take a quartered lime and rub it all around the rim of a tumbler. Invert the tumbler onto the plate covered with sal de gusano and rotate so that it is evenly covered. Strain the drink over ice into a tumbler and garnish with a wedge of lime. Where to drink mezcal in the Bay Area Lolo: Susan Coss lived in the neighborhood when this colorful Mexican restaurant opened in its original 22nd Street location. She was amazed by its mezcal selection and quickly became a regular. 974 Valencia St., S.F.; www.lolosf.com Mosto: The agave-theme bar from the Tacolicious team stocks 210 different mezcals. 741 Valencia St., S.F.; www.mostobar.com Liz Hafalia/The Chronicle 2016/The Chronicle ABV: Co-owner Ryan Fitzgerald is a mezcal fanatic. Over Proof, the upstairs bar at ABV, offers its multicourse tasting menu paired with Tequila and mezcal through Feb. 24. 3174 16th St., S.F.; www.abvsf.com Prizefighter: The top-notch Emeryville bar is one of the only Bay Area spots that offers mezcal by the half-ounce which frees you up to try more bottlings. 6702 Hollis St., Emeryville; www.prizefighterbar.com Extra: Find a recipe for Susan Coss Mezcalistas Margarita online at bit.ly/2ocK7Zo Recipe For the Mezcalistas Margarita recipe, go to TKTKTKTK The states judicial disciplinary agency has accused Steven Bailey, a former judge now running for California attorney general, of multiple acts of misconduct, including accepting improper gifts, steering court business to his son and using his judicial title to promote his candidacy. Bailey engaged in willful misconduct in office and conduct that brings the judicial office into disrepute, the Commission on Judicial Performance said Wednesday in a detailed statement of formal proceedings against the now-retired judge. Since Bailey has left the bench, the commission could no longer impose its most severe penalty, removal from office. But it could censure him if a panel of hearing officers upholds the charges. Bailey, a former criminal defense lawyer, was elected to the El Dorado County Superior Court in 2008 and served until stepping down at the end of August to run as a Republican candidate in the June primary for attorney general. He has cast himself as a law-and-order candidate, received an endorsement from Gun Owners of California and called Democratic Attorney General Xavier Becerra a soft-on-crime politician. Campaign spokesman Corey Uhden said Wednesday the commission, dominated by liberal appointees, was engaged in an unfounded attempt to disparage a respected former judge and a highly qualified candidate for attorney general. The commission includes six public members appointed by legislative leaders and Gov. Jerry Brown, two lawyers appointed by Brown, and three judges appointed by the state Supreme Court. The commission said Bailey, in his last year on the bench, spoke at numerous political events and sent notices to potential supporters identifying himself as Judge Steven Bailey, candidate for attorney general. Those actions violate ethical rules barring judges from engaging in political activity that is inconsistent with the independence, integrity or impartiality of the judiciary, the commission said. The commission also said Bailey, in numerous criminal cases, had ordered defendants to use electronic monitoring services from a company called CHI without disclosing that his son works there. In one case, the judge, in response to a letter from his son, improperly ordered a defendant to pay the company $140 for its services, the commission said. In another case, the commission said, Bailey appointed attorney Bradley Clark to monitor a court-ordered development plan at South Lake Tahoe, at $350 an hour, without disclosing that Clark was a personal friend who had been a consultant to his 2008 judicial campaign. Drought Map Track water shortages and restrictions across Bay Area Check the water shortage status of your area, plus see reservoir levels and a list of restrictions for the Bay Areas largest water districts. Bailey also accepted $827 in improper gifts from Clark, a group of court-appointed advocates and a law school between 2009 and 2012, the commission said. Under ethical standards, judges are not supposed to accept gifts, loans or favors that would reasonably be perceived as intended to influence the judge in the performance of official duties. And after a fellow judge complimented him about a shirt he was wearing at a courthouse meeting in 2015, the commission said, Bailey replied that he had gotten it from a gay man so I know it is a nice shirt, as the gays only have nice clothes, and really know how to dress. Even if he meant it as a compliment, the commission said, the comment violated an ethical ban on conduct that would reasonably be perceived as bias or prejudice. Paul Manafort was using fraudulently obtained loans and tax-cheating tricks to prop up his personal finances as he became chairman of the Trump campaign in 2016, according to a new 32-count indictment filed against him and his business partner Thursday. The indictment ratchets up pressure on Manafort and his deputy, Rick Gates, who were already preparing for a trial in the District that could come later this year on fraud and money-laundering charges. The additional charges had been expected in Special Counsel Robert Mueller's prosecution of Manafort and Gates. Manafort joined the Trump campaign in March 2016 and was campaign chairman from June to August of that year. Gates also served as a top official on Trump's campaign. Mueller accused the men of lying on their income-tax returns and conspiring to commit bank fraud to get loans. The indictment was filed in federal court in Virginia - a technical requirement because that was where the accused filed their tax returns. A court filing indicates that prosecutors initially sought to combine the new charges with the preexisting indictment in federal court in Washington, but Manafort declined to agree, leading to the possibility of separate trials in neighboring jurisdictions. The new indictment offers a more detailed portrait of what prosecutors say was a multiyear scheme by Manafort and Gates to use their income from working for a Ukrainian political party to buy properties, evade taxes and support a lavish lifestyle even after their business connections in Kiev evaporated. "Manafort and Gates generated tens of millions of dollars in income as a result of their Ukraine work. From approximately 2006 through the present, Manafort and Gates engaged in a scheme to hide income from United States authorities, while enjoying the use of the money," the indictment charges. Manafort is innocent of the new charges, his spokesman Jason Maloni said in a statement Thursday. "The new allegations against Mr. Manafort, once again, have nothing to do with Russia and 2016 election interference/collusion," the statement said. "Mr. Manafort is confident that he will be acquitted and violations of his constitutional rights will be remedied." A lawyer for Gates did not comment on the indictment. "This is pretty raw criminality,'' said Patrick Cotter, a former federal prosecutor now in private practice in Chicago. "According to the indictment, these are two fellows on a multiyear tear of lying to every bank they could find about their income. To a federal prosecutor, it's fairly crude. It's extensive and bold and greedy with a capital 'G,' but it's not all that sophisticated." Cotter said there was one hero in the special counsel's tale - a bookkeeper who refused an alleged request by Gates to falsely inflate a revenue claim. Cotter added that the indictment suggests serious risk for the defendants - if convicted at trial, given their ages and the millions of dollars in alleged fraud, they could be facing de facto life prison sentences. The indictment says that from 2006 to 2015, Manafort, with help from Gates, avoided paying taxes on income from Ukraine by disguising it as loans from offshore corporate entities, and by using foreign bank accounts to make payments to businesses in the United States on Manafort's behalf. According to the indictment, Manafort's Ukraine income dwindled in 2015, and the scheme took on a new form - getting $20 million in loans based on Manafort's real estate properties in the United States. But to do that, the grand jury charged, he and Gates made false claims to banks about their company's income and existing debts. The indictment describes one bank employee conspiring with Manafort in the fraud. In spring 2016, the indictment says, that unidentified co-conspirator wrote that a document looked doctored and asked them to "do a clean excel doc" and send that instead. When Manafort joined the Trump campaign as an adviser in early 2016, he agreed to work with no pay, pitching his ability to work free as a point of particular appeal for Trump, who was notoriously stingy and also valued people who appeared to be wealthy. In fact, prosecutors alleged Manafort was taking out multimillion-dollar loans in those same months, including $5.5 million that he sought in the same month he joined the campaign. Another detail in the indictment suggests that Manafort was under significant financial pressure even as he ascended to the top of the Trump campaign in mid-2016. One bank lender "questioned Manafort about a $300,000 delinquency on his American Express card, which was more than 90 days past due. The delinquency significantly affected Manafort's credit rating score." Drought Map Track water shortages and restrictions across Bay Area Check the water shortage status of your area, plus see reservoir levels and a list of restrictions for the Bay Areas largest water districts. In response, according to the indictment, Manafort got Gates to write a letter falsely claiming that he, not Manafort, had borrowed the card to make the purchases and would pay him back. The new charges also claim both men continued the conspiracy even as FBI agents and federal prosecutors were breathing down their necks. Manafort and Gates were hit with a 12-count indictment in October - the first criminal charges in Mueller's probe of Russian interference with the 2016 election. That indictment focused not on events in the 2016 race but financial transactions involving work by Manafort and Gates for the Ukrainian political party, and their failure to notify U.S. authorities that they were acting as lobbyists for a foreign government. On Oct. 25, 2017 - just days before the first indictment was revealed - Gates submitted a false tax document for the 2013 tax year, according to the new charges. And both men were charged with a bank fraud conspiracy involving a $9.5 million loan that investigators said continued even after that indictment was unsealed. The filing Thursday comes at a time of significant uncertainty about when a trial might happen in the first case, or even who the defense lawyers will be. Last week, U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson criticized both sides for what she called "unacceptable delays" in the case, which still does not have a trial date. Gates's legal strategy and defense team are still unclear. Three of his lawyers had asked to leave the case, a request the judge granted Thursday. The details of his issues with his lawyers have not been described publicly, beyond a court filing that said they involve "highly sensitive matters" that would "potentially be prejudicial to [Gates] as well as embarrassing." Shortly after Thursday's indictment was filed, a new lawyer, Thomas Green, filed notice with the court that he is now representing Gates. Green is an experienced white-collar attorney with a reputation for cutting plea deals on behalf of his clients. On Tuesday, an associate of Gates pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI in the course of the Russia investigation. Alex van der Zwaan, a lawyer, admitted to lying about his contacts with Gates and is awaiting sentencing. A Russian oligarch believed to control the Russian mercenaries who attacked U.S. troops and their allies in Syria this month was in close touch with Kremlin and Syrian officials in the days and weeks before and after the assault, according to U.S. intelligence reports. In intercepted communications in late January, the oligarch, Yevgeniy Prigozhin, told a senior Syrian official that he had "secured permission" from an unspecified Russian minister to move forward with a "fast and strong" initiative that would take place in early February. Prigozhin made front-page headlines last week when he was indicted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller on charges of bankrolling and guiding a long-running Russian scheme to conduct "information warfare" during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. He is known to have close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin, forged when he was a restaurateur in St. Petersburg and expanded through what became Prigozhin's wide-ranging business empire, including extensive contracts with Russia's Defense Ministry. Among his various enterprises, U.S. intelligence believes that Prigozhin also "almost certainly" controls Russian mercenaries fighting in Syria on behalf of President Bashar Assad. The mercenaries, employed by a company called Wagner, comprise ultranationalist Russians and military veterans, some of whom also fought in the Ukraine conflict, according to Russian news reports. The intelligence reports provide additional information about an incident that remains only murkily described by all concerned, with the Pentagon providing few details and the Russians offering changing accounts. U.S. intelligence agencies declined to comment on the reports. What is clear, however, is that the attack marked the biggest direct challenge to the U.S. military presence in eastern Syria since U.S. Special Operations forces began deploying there in 2015 in support of their Syrian allies in the fight against the Islamic State. The episode also raises questions about ongoing U.S. cooperation in Syria with Russia, Assad's primary backer in a civil war that increasingly has overlapped with the United States' campaign against the Islamic State. A senior administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity about the sensitive issue, described the episode as "worrisome." The official added that "it's striking how the Russians themselves have been quick to distance themselves" from what he described as an operation "under Syrian command and in response to Syrian directive." "I think [the Russians] realize just how damaging it could be to any further cooperation," the official said. U.S. and Russian-backed Assad forces are now separated by only a few miles in parts of eastern Syria, along a "deconfliction" line that restricts the former to the eastern side of the Euphrates River and the latter to the western side. In recent years, U.S. and Russian military officers have maintained near-daily telephone contact to ensure their aircraft and forces don't run into each other. The recent incident took place on the night of Feb. 7-8, when a headquarters base of U.S. troops and their Syrian allies, located near a strategic oil field several miles east of the river close to the town of Deir al-Zour, was attacked by 300 to 500 "pro-regime" forces. The Americans quickly mobilized a ferocious response, including AC-130 gunships, jet warplanes and Apache attack helicopters. After three hours, the attacking force retreated, leaving behind what the U.S. military said was about 100 dead attackers. No casualties were reported among the Americans and their allies, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). The Pentagon, in statements since the attack, has repeatedly said it is still investigating and has reached no conclusion on the identities of the attackers. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis called the incident "perplexing" and said "I cannot give any explanation" as to why a "pro-regime" force would cross the river and fire on a known SDF and U.S. headquarters. The Russian government has strenuously denied involvement. At the time, the Russian Defense Ministry said only that a "pro-government militia unit" had been conducting "surveillance and research" into the activities of a militant group, presumably the Islamic State, that had been firing mortars at government positions. The militia had no intention of attacking the SDF base, Russia said. Instead, it charged, the U.S. military had conducted an unprovoked attack against the militia. It also said the militia had not informed "the Russian operational group" about its surveillance plans, according to a statement carried by the Russian news agency Tass. A report in the Russian Kommersant newspaper quoted a military official saying that the Russian military command in Syria viewed the incident as "dangerous amateurism." But as stories began to spread in both the Russian and U.S. news media that most of the dead were Russian mercenaries, a Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman said last week that five Russian citizens might have been killed. In a new statement Tuesday, the ministry acknowledged that "several dozen" Russians were killed or wounded in the attack and that the wounded had been "provided assistance to return to Russia . . . where they are undergoing medical treatment at a number of hospitals." "Russian service members did not take part in any capacity and Russian military equipment was not used," the statement said. It referred instead to "Russian citizens" who arrived in Syria "of their own free will and for different reasons." The ministry, it said, "does not have the authority to assess the validity and legality of Their decisions." Russia has acknowledged that many of the attackers, who also included regular Syrian army troops and militias, were mercenaries. The intercepted communications show not only that was Prigozhin personally involved in planning the attack but that he had discussed it with senior Syrian officials, including Minister of Presidential Affairs Mansour Fadlallah Azzam. In a Jan. 24 exchange, Prigozhin said he had secured permission from an unspecified Russian minister the day before to move forward with a "fast and strong" initiative and was awaiting a decision by the Syrian government. On Jan. 30, Prigozhin "indicated he had a 'good surprise' " for Assad "that would come between 6 and 9 February." According to one intelligence report, he also was assured by Azzam that he would be paid for his work. The reports indicated an increased tempo of communications between Prigozhin and Kremlin officials during the same period, including Putin chief of staff Anton Vayno and deputy chief of staff Vladimir Ostrovenko, but the content of those talks is not known. The communications continued until Feb. 5 and resumed the day after the attack. U.S. Special Forces at the base and overhead reconnaissance had seen the attack force mobilizing west of the river at least a week before the attack, according to Mattis and Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Harrigian, commander of U.S. Air Forces Central Command. They notified the Russians at that time and warned that the base would defend itself. Asked in a briefing with reporters last week to characterize the conversations, Harrigian said only that they "remained professional." Drought Map Track water shortages and restrictions across Bay Area Check the water shortage status of your area, plus see reservoir levels and a list of restrictions for the Bay Areas largest water districts. On the night of the attack, Mattis said, "the Russians profess that they were not aware when we called about that force that had crossed, and it came closer. They were notified when the firing began," and the Americans were told "there were no Russians there." When the attackers, using tanks and artillery, began firing in their direction, Harrigian said, the Americans struck back. Asked Sunday as he returned from a trip to Europe whether the Russian government was responsible for its citizens fighting under contract in Syria, Mattis told reporters aboard his aircraft: "I'd prefer not to answer that right now. I need more information to understand and answer that authoritatively." The Syrian government has repeatedly threatened to use force to ensure the departure of U.S. troops from Syria. Russia, even as it has formed an uneasy partnership with the United States to avoid confrontation, also has condemned the U.S. presence as "illegal," because the United States, unlike Russia, has not secured permission from the Syrian government. According to the U.S. Treasury Department, Prigozhin owns a Russian company called Evro Polis, which, according to the Russian news site Fontanka, struck a deal in 2016 with the Syrian government to receive a 25 percent share of oil and natural gas produced on territory recaptured from the Islamic State. Most of those fields are on the eastern side of the Euphrates, where SDF fighters, accompanied by U.S. forces, have been advancing on the militants. The Prigozhin-linked mercenary company Wagner apparently provides the ground forces to help achieve that goal, working under contract with the Syrian government. The use of Wagner for operations such as the one in early February shows how integral private mercenary groups are to the Russian military effort in Syria and elsewhere, while giving the Kremlin "a thin patina of deniability," said Michael Carpenter, a former Pentagon and White House official who worked on Russia policy in the Obama administration. "More importantly," he said, "it allows Russian forces to take on the U.S.-backed SDF in a way that regular Russian forces wouldn't dare do for fear of escalation." Prigozhin has made himself indispensable to the Kremlin, said Andrew Weiss, a Eurasia expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "On the one hand, he does things that are at the pointy end of the spear, like operating a significant information operation against America," Weiss said. "On the other, he is deeply intertwined in the activities of the Ministry of Defense and provides combat capabilities and other services." --- Sly reported from Beirut. Anton Troianovski in Moscow contributed to this report. Vous etes confrontes a une infestation par la puce, la punaise de lit ? Voici plusieurs actions qui sont a mettre en uvre pour faire [] Lest any cocktail party sociologists still reduce Episcopalians to a nest of WASPs a reference to the buttoned-down, blue-blood cabal of Mayflower descendants they should have been at Grace Cathedral Feb. 13 for its eighth Carnivale party in the pews. Mother-daughter duo Jamie Bowles and Lily Leo created a swinging scene set to the theme All You Need Is Love. Some 400 black-tie guests delighted in pre-Lenten revels as magician Patrick Martin, musicians Matt Szemela and Alex Kelly, and the RAWdance troupe entertained during cocktails amid Graces gloriously Gothic nave, side chapels and even a tunnel of love transformed with heart illuminations by GotLight. Folks were also inspired by auctioneer Liam Mayclem to raise $425K for Graces education, arts and social justice programs. The pews were moved to make way for elegant tables upon which McCalls Catering set a three-course dinner crowned by a devilish chocolate-trio dessert. Songbird Paula West dazzled with her signature swoon-worthy tunes. Heidi Ho hopped barefoot onstage and honored her late aunt with a moving hula dance accompanied on ukulele by her husband, the Very Rev. Dr. Malcolm Clemens Young, who is dean of Grace Cathedral. Catherine Bigelow/Special to The Chronicle This year, Young announced, the cathedral explores a theme of truth through its prayers, preaching and featured Forum guests. In this era of fake news were celebrating truth: The truth about ourselves, coming clean about our bad behavior or the truth about how we treat people of different races and culture, Young said. Well also look about what it means to be part of a democracy. The truth about science and climate change, he continued. And what is the truth about God? He didnt teach us to go around hating or excluding people. Grace Cathedral has long held open its bronze, Ghiberti-replica doors to worshipers of all stripes, from single, senior or same-sex couples to yoga devotees. Its now added politically active to its profile. This fall, Grace plans to set the stage for the Sept. 12 opening of the Global Climate Action Summit co-chaired by California Gov. Jerry Brown. Were honored to host an interfaith service for this coalition of cities, states, businesses and faith bodies, said the Rt. Rev. Marc Andrus. In spite of what the federal government does, the #WereStillIn movement pledges to keep Americas commitment to the Paris Agreement. As Episcopal bishop of California, Andrus also noted how our current political pot-boiler has affected parishioners spiritual needs. He sees homeless people or FiDi workers seeking solace in Grace, praying and lighting candles at the Spanish crucifix or the Martin Luther King Jr. icon every day. Having a personal spiritual practice, whatever that is, is necessary. My daughter, Chloe Bringmann, dances every morning before work to jump-start her day, shared Andrus. Places like Grace are spiritual resources, beyond Sunday mornings. And we need spiritual containers that are safe and welcoming. Big-arted: Another sold-out crowd of politicos, first responders and pooh-bahs raised more than $1.85 million at the Heroes & Hearts Luncheon at AT&T Park benefiting the foundation in support of Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center. Founded by civic leaders Ellen Magnin Newman and Nancy Bechtle, this beloved event has been beating since 2004, when it debuted as Hearts in San Francisco. Created by 130 local artists, these colorful works grace places of pride around the city and have raised more than $11 million for the ZSFG Foundation. Catherine Bigelow/Special to The Chronicle Food Guide Top 25 Restaurants Where to eat in the Bay Area. Find spots near you, create a dining wishlist, and more. Among this years artists designing auction hearts: Jeremy Fish, Gina Teichert, Sirron Norris, Barbara Libby-Steinmann, Taiko Fujimura and Lillian Shanahan (a native San Franciscan who is this writers cousin). The fete honored life-saving community work of Caroline Watson, social justice and communications coordinator of Hive, a reproductive and sexual health program at ZSFG for people with HIV. And Karen Aguilar is lead patient navigator of gender health at the San Francisco Department of Public Health. Acting Mayor Mark Farrell saluted the hospital as one of the nations premier level one trauma centers and a place of sanctuary a place where people feel safe and cared for, regardless of their economic background. In a time when health care for our underserved communities is threatened by Washington, D.C., the General continues to remain a teaching ground for those that save lives and reduce disparity, said Farrell. ZSFG Foundation chairwoman Judy Guggenhime also paid tribute to three first responders and longtime lunch heroes no longer with us: the late Mayor Ed Lee; the late Intel Chairman Paul Otellini and loyal heart supporter Patrick Smith, who died two days before the event. Like our founders, Ellen and Nancy, these heroes will never be forgotten, she toasted. But today is the day they should be remembered. When the Miss Chinatown U.S.A. Pageant hits the stage Thursday night at Herbst Theatre, itll be with a new crowning glory for the three winners. This year, the pageants signature headpieces for Miss Chinatown, Miss San Francisco Chinatown and Miss Chinese Chamber of Commerce will be created by designers Renee Degner and Rosalina Lydster of Bijoux Pour La Papesse. Im a local girl and a third-generation jewelry designer, said Lydster, a longtime S.F. jeweler who is also co-producing the pageant with Mark Tran. I love getting involved with local charity events. This is Lydster and Trans first time producing the event (presented by the Chinese Chamber of Commerce) as well as Bijoux Pour La Papesses first time providing crowns and other jewelry for the pageant and winners. Lydster previously judged the Miss Universe Pageant in 2007 and 2008 and designed the first colored stone crown for the winner in 2007. She says shes excited to embrace the pageants traditions (it was founded as a Lunar New Year-related festivity in 1958) as well as to bring in the next generation. One of the most obvious updates she felt she could provide the pageant was via the crowns. Miss Chinatown has the biggest crown, Lydster says. Its a tall crown, and when we both thought about it we wanted it to stand out. Its statuesque think of the Statue of Liberty. The crown consists entirely of white, man-made (costume) stones with a platinum-colored base tone. The Miss San Francisco Chinatown crown starts with a yellow gold tone, but its also made from clear stones, Lydster says. Its more girly, and not as tall. It reminds me of a New Years crown. In the spirit of the New Year, theres also a floral cherry blossom homage in the crowns construction. The Miss Chinese Chamber of Commerce crown utilized a lot of big stones, Lydster says, including a larger pear-shaped center stone That allows her to stand out. We wanted something more like a princess. In addition to the new crowns, Lydster says theres also been some format changes to the event. The pageant is about the new generation, Lydster says. Mark works with a lot of Asian pop stars and were having the past queens performing different pop numbers. I designed very blingy costumes for it. But the costumes they wear to announce a performer will be very traditional Chinese. Food Guide Top 25 Restaurants Where to eat in the Bay Area. Find spots near you, create a dining wishlist, and more. And what about concerns that in the 2018 world of #MeToo and Times Up pageants might not be right for the times? Before I did the crown in 2007, I didnt believe in the pageant world, Lydster says. After I interviewed a few Miss Chinatown contestants, I felt it was an amazing thing for young ladies. Theyre 17 to 24 years old, theyre very educated. Its not about beauty; its about talent, and the opportunity to get out there and help others. Tony Bravo is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: tbravo@sfchronicle.com Miss Chinatown USA Pageant 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 22, Herbst Theatre, 401 Van Ness Ave. http://www.chineseparade.com/pageant.asp I think a lot of folks come to the Napa Valley for wine, says Chris Cahill. Which is lovely. But theres a natural Napa Valley, too hills and oaks and redwoods. And that really rounds out your experience. You can spend part of the day sipping wine and having great food and then stretch your legs. Cahill should know. As planner for the Napa County Regional Park and Open Space District, he helps run 8,000 acres of open space. Territory under his watch ranges from the majestic redwoods of Bothe-Napa Valley State Park to the Instagram-worthy vistas youll see on Calistogas Oat Hill Mine Trail. Now is the time to go. While certain stretches of the county are charred from last falls fires, many more are reaching the peak of early-spring beauty. Think shimmering green hillsides, newly leafed oak trees and exuberant bursts of wildflowers. Theyre as memorably enjoyable as a Napa cabernet. Peter Fish, travel@sfchronicle.com Ritchey Canyon Trail, Calistoga 8 miles out-and-back, moderate, strenuous Coastal redwoods are pretty picky about where they live. They like fog, shade and, well, coast. Which is why theyve clustered in the canyons of Bothe-Napa Valley State Park. The Ritchey Canyon Trail follows Ritchey Creek and will impress you with trilliums and orchids as well as the big trees. About a mile in, youll encounter a bit of San Francisco history: The Hitchcock site, the ghost of the country estate where the young Lillie Hitchcock Coit of Coit Tower fame spent her summers. From here the trail continues along the creek, then gains views as it climbs to the site of an 1880s homestead, your turnaround point. Start: Trail head is just inside the park entrance, 4 miles south of Calistoga on Highway 29/128; www.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=477 Dryfoot Trail, St. Helena 6.4 miles out-and-back, moderate A former cattle ranch, Moore Creek Park spreads alongside the northeastern shore of Lake Hennessey above St. Helena. Terrain here ranges from rolling hills (popular with mountain bikers and hikers) to the shady canyon along Moore Creek. A brand new section of Moore Creek Trail, called the Dryfoot Trail, ambles along the creek, crossing it on three new stone-arch bridges. In a little over 3 miles youll reach a spot labeled on some park maps as Top Secret Swimming Hole. (Shh! Dont tell anybody.) Start: Trailhead near the park entrance, 2602 Chiles and Pope Valley Road, St. Helena; www.napaoutdoors.org/parks/moore-creek-park Lower Oat Hill Mine Trail, Calistoga 9 miles out-and-back, strenuous This trail, which climbs the hills above Calistoga, balances history and scenery. In the late 1800s, Oat Hill was one of the richest cinnabar (mercury) mines in the West, and the trail follows the old road that led toward the mine. As for scenery, the hike along the rough, sometimes rocky, trail gives you sweeping views of the Napa Valley and of the dramatic, volcanic Pinnacles, plus fine displays of spring wildflowers. In about 4.5 miles youll reach the remnants (a stone wall, some fruit trees) of pioneer Karl Gustov Holms late 19th century homestead, which is a good point to turn around. Start: Small parking lot near the intersection of Lake Street and Silverado Trail, Calistoga; www.napaoutdoors.org/parks/oat-hill-mine-trail Buchli Station Road Trail, Napa 4.75-mile loop, moderate The Carneros region south of Napa may be better known for pinot noirs. But not far away, the 15,200-acre Napa-Sonoma Marshes Wildlife Area on the north shore of San Pablo Bay can offer you birds and fish and magnificent sunsets. One good access point is the Buchli Station Road Trailhead; from here hikers and cyclists can take the Buchli Station Road Trail, which runs along the levee tops in a 4.75-mile loop. Be sure to bring your binoculars: dowitchers, western Sandpipers and American avocets are all on display. Start: south end of Buchli Station Road; www.wildlife.ca.gov/lands/places-to-visit/napa-sonoma-marshes-wa Napa River Ecological Reserve, Yountville 0.5-mile loop, easy Youve planned a full food-lovers Yountville day breakfast at Bouchon, wine-tasting, lunch at Redd, more wine-tasting, and youve nabbed a 7:30 p.m. reservation at French Laundry. At some point you realize that in between all the Michellin-starred meals and world-class wine you need a quiet, beautiful place to not think about eating. This 73-acre preserve is just that place. The short, river-hugging trail leads you beneath tall oaks; birds to be seen include towhee and mockingbird. An hour spent here is the perfect palate cleanser. Start: Yountville Cross Road, Yountville; www.wildlife.ca.gov/Lands/Places-to-Visit/Napa-River-ER Researchers have uncovered a surprising trend in California migration: The populations of inland counties are growing faster than that of urban coastal counties. Phuong Nguyen, a research specialist at the California Department of Finance, began noticing the influx of Californians to inland regions, like San Joaquin and Sacramento, around 2014. "We were surprised at that," Nguyen said. California's coastal regions have historically drawn in-state migrants who leave their provincial hometowns in search of employment opportunity and urban environments. The Department of Finance continued tracking the data into 2016 and 2017 and discovered the growth of California regions located further from the Pacific Ocean persisted. Nguyen expects the trend to continue in coming years. It's a development that runs counter to the long-held narrative of small-town folks picking up and moving to their state's hubs of culture and commerce. Californians are still doing that San Francisco's population grew just under a percentage point in 2017, per new Department of Finance data but they may not like what they're finding. Culture and commerce? Check. Affordable housing? Not so much. CALIFORNIA'S POPULATION: 20 million in 1970, nearly 40 million now Cities like Sacramento are attractive to Californians on the move because of the region's thriving job market and ample supply of affordable housing, Nguyen explained. Story continues below. In 2017 the net domestic migration into Sacramento the number of people who moved there, minus the number who left was a whopping 1,466, about a 45 percent increase from the previous year. During the recession years, the net migration total hovered in the -2,000s. By comparison, the Department of Finance found San Francisco had a 2017 net domestic migration of -2,332. Five years earlier, that number was 2,635. Net domestic migration figures for San Francisco aren't completely trustworthy. Nguyen described San Francisco as a "gateway city" an entry point for foreigners immigrating to the U.S. These immigrants will register with the city, but often move away within months to other parts of California. Even then, "I would say there is a Bay Area exodus," Nguyen said. "The Bay Area is very congested and housing is not growing fast." Sacramento, however, is "booming" and "cheaper" than its coastal counterpart, she said. Last Summer SFGATE spoke to a handful of Bay Area natives who moved to Sacramento, and they confirmed many of Nguyen's hypotheses. Brianna Mullen, a Concord native and UC Berkeley graduate, made the move eastward two years ago. The 25-year-old has since bought a house with a mortgage "only a couple hundred dollars more than my [Berkeley] apartment's rent." "The financial stress of living in the Bay just wasn't worth it to me anymore," she said. According to the Department of Finance data, that sentiment seems to be growing. Michelle Robertson is an SFGATE staff writer. Email her at mrobertson@sfchronicle.com or find her on Twitter at @mrobertsonsf. Doing his rounds at Stanford Hospital on a recent afternoon, Dr. Bruce Feldstein prepared himself to see a patient suffering from a spinal infection and kidney failure. Dressed in a suit and tie, but without the physician's customary white coat and stethoscope, Feldstein, 51, did the usual things a doctor would do. He checked the woman's medical chart, and then he stepped to a sink to wash his hands. As he began to wash his hands Feldstein did something that was not part of his medical education: He started to say a prayer in Hebrew. For physicians preparing to see a patient, hand washing is a hygienic habit. For Feldstein the act has been transformed from mere routine to meaningful ritual. Because of a back injury sustained in 1997, Feldstein quit practicing medicine after 19 years as an emergency room doctor. But he has not left the field. He serves as the director of Stanford Hospital's Jewish chaplaincy, which he developed in 2000. Having traded his stethoscope for a yarmulke, Feldstein has become a man of faith intent on healing instead of curing. He uses hand washing to focus his mind and distance himself from personal distractions before visiting a patient -- so he can bring what he calls "the holiest part" of himself to the patient. Cheryl Kramer, 60, of Berkeley, welcomed Feldstein into her room when he knocked on the door. An IV tube ran from her frail right arm. She wore a neck brace because of an infection. She was waiting for her second kidney transplant. Kramer was troubled that she needed someone else's kidney; she didn't want a donor to have to suffer for her to receive one. The doctor-turned- chaplain held her hand and offered a prayer, one of several he has developed for such situations: "As it's meant to be, may you deliver the right kidney to the right person." And then he began to sing a blessing for healing. Kramer closed her eyes and smiled. When Feldstein finished with "amen," she thanked him: "I love it when you sing to me." On March 25, a day after being removed from a respirator, Kramer died. It is believed that the spinal infection had spread to other parts of her body. It couldn't be treated, and because of that she was no longer a candidate for a kidney transplant. Her husband, Jerry, was against removing his wife from life support, but she was clear about her wishes, Feldstein said. Kramer's family and friends held a service in her room at the hospital's Intensive Care Unit. Feldstein and another rabbi joined them. The experience, along with other recent deaths Feldstein attended to, left him exhausted in a way that he didn't feel as a physician, he said. "It's a very different kind of role and experience," Feldstein said, recalling the times as an ER physician that he had to tell a family of a loved one's death. When they started to cry, Feldstein stifled his own sobs before he excused himself and called someone else to console the family. Now he's the person who is called in. And he teaches medical students that it's not wrong to show some emotion when dealing with family members. "To allow one's tears is a kind of strength and allows for a deepening of the relationship or trust," Feldstein said. "In medical school we learned that crying and showing emotion was unprofessional. "Before I became a chaplain, I may have had some sense of the dynamics or emotions or questions (that are experienced when there's a death). But I wouldn't have a full sense of that or how deeply meaningful it is." Giving meaning to medicine Unlike most hospital chaplains, be they Jewish, Christian, Muslim or of another faith, Feldstein is not a graduate of a religious seminary. He is one of the few, perhaps only, doctors in the country who have left medicine to become hospital chaplains, according to the Association of Professional Chaplains. Although Feldstein's position is unique, he is part of a larger movement to incorporate spirituality and meaning in medicine. That is also the title of a required seminar he co-teaches at Stanford University School of Medicine. In his class, Feldstein strives to shift the doctor-patient relationship from one based on a person's chief complaint -- what hurts and where -- to the patient's chief concern -- what matters most to them and why. At the same time, Feldstein hopes to re-establish the human connection between doctors and patients, not only to better serve the sick, but also to help physicians avoid burnout. The motto he tries to instill in his students, borrowed from French- Canadian physician Edward Livingston Trudeau, is "To cure sometimes, to help often, to comfort always." "That's one of the differences from providing spiritual care from medical care. Medical care is oriented toward curing and fixing," he said. "When doctors are coming through and poking here and looking there, they're missing the part of connecting the person back with who they are. When I come into the room that's what I aim to do." Despite having more than 700 Jewish patients to see annually, and 10 to 20 on any given day, Feldstein vigilantly patrols the corridors of Stanford Hospital and Lucile Packard Children's Hospital to see if there is anyone -- patient, family member, doctor or staff -- in need of a friendly, calming voice, no matter the faith. He calls it "hallway chaplaincy." Sydney Mintz, an associate rabbi at Temple Emanu-El in San Francisco, met Feldstein after hearing about him from her father. Feldstein had visited Arthur Mintz, a Woodside resident in need of a double kidney and liver transplant. "I don't think I could do what he does. It's a difficult part of the life journey," Sydney Mintz said. "I need bar mitzvahs, weddings -- at the other end of life. He does amazing work." Feldstein's experience as a physician definitely enhances the communication between chaplains and physicians and helps provide more cooperation, said the Rev. George Fitzgerald, director of the hospital's pastoral care services. Joan Mersch, nurse manager of the Intensive Care Unit for Cardiac Care at Stanford Hospital, said Feldstein also helps physicians realize that sometimes their job isn't simply about saving lives. Feldstein assists physicians and patients in achieving resolution when there's nothing that can be done to save a patient. "Before Bruce is involved, or before we have anyone from the chaplaincy office involved, we might be working at cross-purposes. Doctors believe they are here to save patients, and some doctors believe they have failed when the patient dies," Mersch said. "At some point we are here to see that dying doesn't produce suffering." A calling to heal Feldstein was "at the top of his game" as a physician in 1997 when he ruptured two disks in his spine as he helped a friend move furniture. He was the attending physician at the emergency room at Kaiser-Permanente Medical Center in Santa Clara. At the same time, he was on the Stanford medical school faculty, where he taught emergency medicine. The injury brought all that to a halt. Feldstein couldn't stand for more than a couple of hours at a time, or do any lifting or twisting. Over the course of eight months, it became clear his spinal injury was inoperable. What followed was one instance of synchronicity after another, all pointing Feldstein toward becoming a chaplain. Growing up in Detroit, Feldstein was not religious. That had started to change, he said, in 1994 when he was at a conference with 450 Jewish physicians discussing medical ethics with rabbis. A side room at the conference hall was turned into a synagogue. As he watched the assembled Orthodox Jews pray, he found himself drawn in. He made the decision to become a practicing Jew. A month before the injury, Feldstein became a visiting scholar at the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics. After deciding to quit medicine, Feldstein thought he'd continue in bioethics when people began telling him they had dreams about him involving spirituality. He had some of his own. Five years after his spiritual moment, a rabbi at a Jewish medical ethics conference suggested he become a chaplain. So did others. He then applied to Stanford's clinical pastoral education program, and became a resident in 1999. The day he started the program, he visited the hospital chapel for the first time. Symbols from the world's major religions painted on the wall and a small fountain decorating the room reminded Feldstein of a dream he'd had a few years before. The dream involved people from the world's religions and a waterfall. He felt he had made the right choice. Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen, a UCSF School of Medicine professor and the director of the Institute for the Study of Heath and Illness in Bolinas, met Feldstein just after he quit practicing medicine. Remen pioneered introducing spirituality and meaning in medical curricula, having developed a course called "The Healer's Art" in 1992. Feldstein took one of her workshops, and then brought "The Healer's Art" to Stanford a couple of years later. Shortly after that, Feldstein was awarded a Templeton Award for medical school curricula on spirituality and healing and $25,000 to implement the Spirituality and Meaning in Medicine class, along with Marita Grudzen, one of his co-instructors. "He found his element," Remen said. "He has the credibility for the students and for the physicians that only a fellow physician would have. He's the perfect bridging position." Barbara Ralston, director of patient services at Stanford Hospital, said that nurses and doctors are clamoring for more spiritual-care services. She credits Feldstein, whom she called "one of the heroes of our hospital." "Everybody wants more of him," she said. "He's turned around as many physicians as he has patients." Passing it on On a chilly Thursday morning in early January, eight Stanford medical students gathered in a trailer near Stanford Hospital. As part of the required rotation in family medicine, the class of third- and fourth-year students were in the middle of a spiritual exercise led by Feldstein, Grudzen and Art Johnson. The purpose of the class, Feldstein told the students, was "to begin to identify and respond to your patients' spirituality and sources of meaning as well as your own." Over the course of the morning, they recounted some of their own spiritual experiences, in their private lives and in the clinic, and learned how to take a "spiritual history" of a patient, an assessment similar to taking a medical history. Some of the students balked, questioning whether there is such a thing as a spiritual realm and asserting that faith conflicts with science. Feldstein clarified that a spiritual assessment isn't necessary for problems like a broken ankle, but it's important to know what religion and spirituality mean to a patient. For example, if a doctor prescribes a medication to be taken three times a day with food to a Muslim fasting during Ramadan, the physician invites a conflict between medicine and the person's religious beliefs. When another third-year student, Anup Shah, 25, suggested there was no mention of medicine in their conversations of spiritual assessment, Feldstein had a different answer. "I've come to see this as medicine. It's the kind of medicine that doesn't come in IV bottles," he said. "It's a medicine called love, and it makes all the difference." Find out more Visit the George Washington Institute for Spirituality and Health at www.gwish.org. Visit the Institute for the Study of Health and Illness at www.commonweal.org. President Trump unleashed a tirade Thursday against California and its supposedly lax stance on illegal immigration, ending with a seemingly spontaneous threat to remove federal immigration authorities from the state. His remarks, made during a meeting about gun control, were in stark contrast to the public position of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials, who have dramatically increased activity in California in recent months and said repeatedly that federal authorities need to have a stronger presence in cities and states that have sanctuary policies. Trump said in the meeting, If I wanted to pull our people from California you would have a crime nest like youve never seen in California. ... Youd be inundated, you would see crime like no ones ever seen crime in this country. If we ever pulled our ICE out and said, Hey, let California alone, let them figure it out for themselves, in two months theyd be begging for us to come back. They would be begging, Trump said. And you know what? Im thinking about doing it. Democrats in the state quickly took to Twitter and other social media to defend the state and its immigration sanctuary policies, many pointing out that California has relatively low crime rates and that there is little evidence associating illegal immigration with increased violent crime. The presidents obsession with our state is growing more outrageous by the day, said Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., in a statement released less than an hour after Trumps remarks aired on TV. The presidents attacks are not only mean-spirited, theyre patently false. Immigration experts expressed some skepticism that Trump would follow through on the threat. Im not sure what to make of his comment. It doesnt seem to be the product of any sustained study of the matter. It seemed like an off-the-cuff remark, said Pratheepan Gulasekaram, a professor at Santa Clara University School of Law. Trumps comment is especially muddied given statements made by ICE officials, in particular the agencys acting director Thomas Homan, about increasing enforcement, he said. Just a few months ago Homan had the exact opposite reaction. Theyre going to redouble their efforts; were going to see massive increases in raids, Gulasekaram said. So its not clear how to read these two statements together. ICE officials in the state directed questions about Trumps comments back to the White House. The agency has ramped up its presence in California this year. In January, federal immigration agents raided 77 Northern California businesses in one week, demanding proof that employees were allowed to work in the United States. Agents have conducted widespread sweeps in Southern California, too, picking up more than 100 people this month so far. Across the state, local law enforcement agencies have refused to cooperate with ICE agents in these raids, citing city and state sanctuary policies that limit their role in immigration enforcement. California became a sanctuary state in October under a law signed by Gov. Jerry Brown that pushed back against Trump administration attempts to bolster illegal immigration policies. Trumps remarks on Thursday were the latest in a string of attacks on California over sanctuary laws that he insists are dangerous. Supporters say the laws allow undocumented immigrants to live out of the shadows, cooperating with local police and seeking education, health care and other public services without worrying they will expose themselves to possible deportation. Trump, though, has repeatedly claimed that the laws allow violent criminals to operate without fear of consequences. Early last year, the president told then-Fox News host Bill OReilly that California in many ways is out of control, as you know. He threatened to strip sanctuary cities of federal funding. In November, Trump reacted angrily to a San Francisco jurys decision to acquit a 45-year-old undocumented immigrant of murder and manslaughter charges in the 2015 killing of Kate Steinle on a bay pier. The defendant, Jose Ines Garcia Zarate, had been released from County Jail before the killing, despite a federal request that he be held for his sixth deportation, under the citys sanctuary laws. A disgraceful verdict in the Kate Steinle case! tweeted Trump, who has cited the case in his effort to build a border wall. No wonder the people of our Country are so angry with Illegal Immigration. In his latest comments, Trump said California has done a lousy management job in immigration. They have the highest taxes in the nation. And they dont know whats happening out there, Trump said. Frankly its a disgrace. The sanctuary city situation. The protection of these horrible criminals. Some of the states elected officials pushed back against Trumps assumption that sanctuary laws protect violent criminals or make communities less safe. In response to Trumps remarks, Brown opted to take a jab at the presidents disinclination to strengthen gun control policies an issue also closely associated with community safety. In California we protect all of our people from criminals and gangs, as well as dangerous assault weapons, Brown said in a statement. We do our job, Mr. President, you do yours. As to Trumps threat to remove federal authorities, reaction from some wasnt exactly to plead for mercy. Jennie Pasquarella, immigrants rights director of ACLU of California, said in a statement that communities that limit cooperation with immigration agents are safer than those that do not. Mr. President, wed welcome an ICE-free California, she said. California courts say Martins Beach, a picturesque haven near Half Moon Bay, should have its gates opened to the public, despite the objections of its billionaire owner. Sometime in the next few months, the nations highest court will decide whether to weigh in. No property right is more fundamental than the right to exclude, lawyers for Vinod Khosla said Thursday in asking the U.S. Supreme Court to grant review of the case. They said the state courts, in their rulings against Khosla, wrongly decided that owners of private beachfront property in California may not exercise that right without first obtaining the governments permission. Khosla, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, bought Martins Beach and surrounding coastal lands from their longtime owners for $32.5 million in 2008. He shut the public access gate in September 2010, citing the cost of maintenance and liability insurance. The previous owners had admitted the public for at least 70 years. After a series of back-and-forth rulings, a San Mateo County judge ruled in 2014 that Khosla should have obtained a development permit from the California Coastal Commission before shutting the gates. A state appeals court agreed in August, saying the closure was a type of property development that required the commissions approval. One of the basic goals of the state for the coastal zone is to maximize public access to and along the coast and maximize public recreational opportunities to the coastal zone, said the three-justice panel of the First District Court of Appeal in San Francisco. The state Supreme Court denied review of Khoslas appeal in October. Khosla has intermittently opened the gate in recent months. He has said he would provide beach access across a portion of his land if the state paid him $30 million for an easement. A visit to the beach on Friday found some people torn between the rights of property owners and the needs of the public. If you buy something, its your right. You own it, said Rey Vargas, an avid fisherman. But, he added, I just feel like hes being greedy. Theres so much to offer at this beach. Its beautiful. Why not let the people enjoy it. Rich Lucov of Redwood City, a longtime surfer at Martins Beach, wondered why a natural wonder was in the hands of a private entrepreneur . I dont think anybody should be able to own the beach, he said. Added Margaret Gossett of Half Moon Bay, as she strolled along the beach with friends visiting from New Jersey, I really like what California has done to preserve the coastline for everybody. Khoslas lawyers, led by Paul Clement, a former U.S. solicitor general, told the high court Thursday that the California rulings were not only a strained interpretation of the states Coastal Act but also a license for the taking of Khoslas property, in violation of his constitutional rights. The Coastal Commission and county officials decided they had the power not only to require Khosla to open his property, but also to dictate beach access hours and an absurdly low admission price of $2, the lawyers said. The government simply cannot command that parties open their private property to the public without compensation, the filing said. If the court grants review, with the votes of at least four of its nine justices, it would hear the case in the 2018-19 term that begins in October. The state courts issued their rulings in a suit by the nonprofit Surfrider Foundation. Joseph Cotchett, a lawyer for the foundation, said it would oppose Khoslas appeal. What Khosla is doing is saying to the public of California, I dont believe you have access to the beaches, Cotchett said. Its pure arrogance and money to lead him to believe he can hire the most expensive lawyers in the country and beat down the public of California. Michelle Obama returns to the Bay Area next month for an event expected to be a hot ticket. The former first lady will appear at Oracle Arena for a moderated conversation at 8 p.m. March 28, according to an announcement Thursday. On a busy morning at the St. Luke's emergency room, patients can often be found jammed into small rooms or parked on gurneys lining the hallway. A sick child without insurance may share a room with a smelly, mentally ill patient strapped to his bed who screams, spits and puts his stethoscope on you. The small, 1970s-era emergency room serves as the first line of defense when the trauma center at San Francisco General Hospital fills up. But it is woefully small and out of date, doctors and nurses who work there say - essential medical equipment is spread on various floors, rooms are cramped, and in a big earthquake the building could collapse. "Whoever designed this building had no nursing input," Patti Esquibel, a veteran nurse, said with a sigh. That's why Sutter Health, the nonprofit hospital company that oversees the California Pacific Medical Center network of hospitals in San Francisco, has proposed a $2.5 billion renovation for their hospitals and medical buildings, including the St. Luke's campus. It hopes to tear down old hospitals across the city and replace them with state-of-the-art buildings that will withstand an earthquake. But tense, drawn-out negotiations with the city have snagged on one particular issue: St. Luke's hospital. The city wants a written guarantee that the hospital will keep St. Luke's open at its current location for 20 years. Hospital administrators say they plan on keeping St. Luke's open for even longer but they don't want to give an absolute promise. "You can't give a blanket guarantee on something like that," said Kevin McCormack, spokesman for the hospital. "If, say, the economy turns down, in some awful scenario, we don't want to have our hands tied." The hospital, which serves a large number of uninsured or low-income patients, lost $25 million in 2007, the most recent year for which numbers are available, McCormack said. The medical group has not broken out income or losses from specific hospitals since then, he said. McCormack said Sutter Health has every intention of keeping the hospital open. If not, the firm wouldn't spend millions to tear it down and rebuild it, he said. "We're not opposed to keeping it open at all, but you have to be realistic," he said. But others worry Sutter Health has ulterior motives. "It is kind of the will of the communities, the will of the health department and the will of the city to keep St. Luke's open," said Barbara Garcia, health director with the Department of Public Health. "It serves so many." The city says the hospital provides essential medical services to residents of the Mission District. Without St. Luke's, residents would have to go to the busy San Francisco General, or head all the way across town to other hospitals. Put too many hurdles in the way, and the residents simply won't go to the hospital, said Dick Hodgson, vice president of policy and planning for the San Francisco Community Clinic Consortium, a nonprofit that has advocated for keeping St. Luke's open. "It is hard to keep (them) in operation," he said. "But there continues to be a need for safety-net hospitals in the Mission." Rosetta Mosby, 38, feels that way. She visits the small St. Luke's emergency room a few times a month to deal with chronic back pain. She has shared rooms with psychotic patients who have screamed constantly and fought their restraints. The situation is unnerving and makes her feel worse than she already does, Mosby said. If St. Luke's were closed, though, Mosby said she doesn't know what she would do. "I'd probably be lost without this emergency room," she said. Napa Valley wine brand Sutter Home Winery Inc. and a cooling company called Process Cooling International are facing more than $100,000 in possible workplace safety fines after a Vallejo man fell to his death at Sutter's St. Helena winery in May 2017, according to the California Department of Industrial Relations. The man, 56-year-old Daniel Mario Colombo, was making repairs to the cooling system on the roof of the St. Helena winery when he fell 16 feet through a skylight and was killed, Napa Sheriff's Capt. Steve Blower said shortly after his death. According to Cal/OSHA and the Sheriff's Office, Colombo wasn't wearing a safety harness at the time of the fatal fall. You may also be interested in this video: The workplace safety agency also found that the steel roofing covering the area where Colombo was working looked treacherously similar to the dirty fiberglass panels covering the skylight he fell through. The deadly accident could have been avoided if guardrails and other safety measures had been installed around the skylight, the agency contends. According to the agency's documents, a foreman with the cooling company said they would cover the skylight panels before beginning the project but then failed to do so. Cal/OSHA is proposing that Sutter be fined $22,500 and that Process Cooling International be fined $70,000, plus an additional $18,000 for allegedly failing to create an injury prevention program and to evacuate workers from the area until it was deemed safe. Both companies are appealing the fines, but the appeal is on hold while Cal/OSHA's Bureau of Investigations looks into the cases, according to the agency. Trinchero Family Estates, which owns Sutter Home Winery Inc., also owns the winery where a cellar worker and father of four was crushed to death by barrels in 2016, an incident that led to the company paying about $44,000 in Cal/OSHA fines. Filipa Ioannou is an SFGATE staff writer. Email her at fioannou@sfchronicle.com and follow her on Twitter The U.S. Supreme Court narrowed an anti-retaliation provision in the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial law, insulating publicly traded companies from some whistle-blower lawsuits. The court unanimously threw out a lawsuit against Digital Realty Trust by a former company official who was fired after complaining internally about alleged violations of federal securities laws. Writing for the court, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said Dodd-Frank authorized whistle-blower lawsuits only by people who had reported the alleged misconduct to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Lower courts had been divided on the issue. The core purpose of the the Dodd-Frank whistle-blower provision was to motivate people who know of securities law violations to tell the SEC, Ginsburg wrote, quoting from a Senate report. The disputed provision is one of two major federal protections for corporate whistle-blowers. The 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act lets workers press complaints with the Labor Department even if they didnt report the alleged violation to the SEC. Dodd-Frank allows whistle-blowers more time to file cases and authorizes larger awards. Ginsburg said Congress had a more far-reaching objective with Sarbanes-Oxley. It sought to disturb the corporate code of silence that discouraged employees from reporting fraudulent behavior not only to the proper authorities, such as the FBI and the SEC, but even internally. San Franciscos Digital Realty pointed to a provision in Dodd-Frank that defines whistle-blowers as people who provide information to the SEC. The suing employee, Paul Somers, said that definition doesnt apply to the anti-retaliation part of the law. Justice Clarence Thomas wrote a separate opinion, joined by Justices Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch, to say the court should have limited its analysis to the text of the statute and not consulted the Senate report. The Trump administration backed Somers, defending an SEC rule that said internal whistle-blowers are protected even if they dont lodge a complaint with the agency. The SEC received more than 4,200 reports of misconduct in 2016. Disney California Adventure Park has finally announced its plans for the shuttered Ariel's Grotto and Cove Bar near what was formerly Paradise Pier. The new installment will be a new "waterfront bar" called the Lamplight Lounge, per the OC Register. Disney had previously announced in late 2017 that the area of the park known as Paradise Pier, very close to the Grotto, would be completely reworked to showcase Pixar films like "The Incredibles," "Toy Story," and others. The lounge's changes will follow suit, but will keep a few facets of the previous restaurant namely, the popular lobster nachos dish and specialty drinks. "Lamplight Lounge will serve California casual gastro-pub cuisine that is playfully presented along with unique signature cocktails," reads a blog post from Disney. "This seaside lounge contains a full bar with picturesque waterfront views from both upstairs and downstairs. At night, outdoor seating provides views of the illuminated Pixar Pier and 'World of Color.'" And like the rest of that section of the park, the lounge will showcase nods to many Pixar movies in the form of "concept art, a quick sketch on a napkin, knick-knacks and collectable toys of beloved Pixar characters (that) will adorn the space." Both Pixar Pier and the Lamplight Lounge open on June 23, 2018. Alyssa Pereira is an SFGATE staff writer. Email her at apereira@sfchronicle.com or find her on Twitter at @alyspereira. The rumors that more people are leaving California than moving here appear to be true, according to a new report from the state of California. From 2007 to 2016, about 6 million people left the Golden State while about only 5 million moved here in the same period. What may surprise some people is that an overwhelming number of those fleeing California are heading to Texas, which accounted for close to 300,000 of the departures. Why do so many people leave for the Lone Star state? According to the study, cost of living appears to be a major factor since "families with kids and those with only a high school education predominate among those moving from California to its top destination states." At lunchtime in Germany, almost 6,000 miles away from his home in Martinez, Calif., Stephen Maris received a text alert. The motion detector attached to his family's house was alerting him to some movement. Receiving such a notification wasn't particularly odd; as he told KPIX, the camera often picks up on wildlife perching and crawling around his East Bay home. It was less than an hour into producer Madlib's Thursday night Noise Pop festival DJ set at San Francisco's 1015 Folsom when he welcomed his first surprise guest. Shortly after midnight, rapper Yasiin Bey formerly known as Mos Def walked onto the stage, more spirited than usual. The emcee just this month announced a follow-up work to his lauded "Black Star" album with Talib Kweli and, this time around, Madlib. For the occasion, he celebrated with the audience. "It's a big moment for me," he said to the crowd. "I hope it's a big moment for you. But let's get it fresh." Bey spent the next few minutes dancing onstage and picking up the mic to rap a few stray semi-freestyled verses, until a second special, unannounced guest appeared: comedian Dave Chappelle, fresh from a late set at the Punch Line, his third day at the San Francisco comedy club. "Listen," Chappelle said to a cheering audience, "this is the beginning of a new day. This is the kindest conspiracy. It don't matter what anybody says. All we gotta do is commit to being kind to one another." Bey told the crowd that he had recorded the first verse of the new "Black Star" album the previous day, and so he rapped it in real time, before adding, "I'm so excited, I don't even know how to feel. I f--- with the Bay Area." Chappelle, as is standard for him, then made an appeal for the attendees to put away their phones, asking, "I implore you to make a memory." The comedian, who is a major Prince fan, shortly thereafter told the audience that he was in San Francisco when he heard that the music icon passed. He remembered Prince's camp reaching out to him to attend the late rocker's parties, saying, "When Prince called it was like getting the call from Aquaman." From there, at Madlib's discretion, the two traded turns at the mic, with Bey rapping here and there and Chappelle offering advice and other musings. After a while, though, it got less serious. Chappelle led the audience in a clip of "Wu-Tang Clan Ain't Nuthing ta F--- Wit" and later, around 2:15 a.m., "Killing Me Softly" after a quick but respectable stage dive. As he asked, memories were definitely made. Alyssa Pereira is an SFGATE staff writer. Email her at apereira@sfchronicle.com or find her on Twitter at @alyspereira. HARTFORD, Conn. The governors of Connecticut, New York, New Jersey and Rhode Island have created a coalition of like-minded states on gun control, promising to expand existing efforts to share information on illegal guns, and ultimately make progress on gun safety measures where they contend the federal government has faltered. The four Democrats announced the formation of States for Gun Safety on Thursday. They plan to urge other governors to join the group at a National Governors Association meeting this weekend in Washington, D.C. We cant wait for the federal government to act, said Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy. We have states with good intentions, with good laws. Lets take it to the next level, lets work across our borders. Lets not just advocate for better laws in our state, but advocate for better laws in our own region. The proposed coalition comes after a 19-year-old gunmankilled 17 people with an AR-15 style assault rifle at a high school in Parkland, Fla., last week. New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy said that shooting accelerated the governors idea to form the coalition, which has been in the works for about a year. The governors said they will sign a memorandum of understanding that spells out three main areas where they plan to work together on gun issues. They want to create a cross-state task force of law enforcement officials that will trace and intercept illegal guns; form a regional gun violence research consortium; and step up intelligence and information sharing among the states. Malloy said Connecticut has a law that prevents people with protective orders against them from continuing to possess or buy guns in the state. He said sharing that information with bordering states makes sense, considering residents travel to nearby states to make purchases. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said his state created a mental health database after the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, where 26 children and adults were slain. It now contains the names of about 77,000 people who cant purchase a gun in New York. He said that information could be shared with the other states, along with state data about arrest warrants and protective orders that typically arent included in the National Instant Criminal Background Check system. Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo said its still legal in her state to buy a military-style weapon, carry concealed firearms into schools and state buildings, and purchase high-capacity magazines something she hopes to work with state lawmakers to change. ST. LOUIS Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens remains defiant, even amid calls for impeachment or resignation, after a St. Louis grand jury indicted him for felony invasion of privacy, alleging the Republican took a compromising photo of a woman during an extramarital affair the year before he was elected. St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner on Thursday announced the indictment that followed an investigation launched in January, a day after Greitens admitted to an affair with his St. Louis hairdresser that began in March 2015. Greitens released a statement saying he made a mistake but did not commit a crime. He accused Gardner, a Democrat who was also elected in November 2016, of playing politics. With todays disappointing and misguided political decision, my confidence in our prosecutorial system is shaken, but not broken, Greitens said. The people of Missouri deserve better than a reckless liberal prosecutor who uses her office to score political points. Gardners spokeswoman, Susan Ryan, responded: Despite the Governors personal attacks, the Circuit Attorney believes the courtroom is the appropriate place to argue the facts, not the media. Greitens canceled plans to go to Washington this weekend for the National Governors Association annual meeting. In a statement Friday, the Republican Governors Association said Greitens informed the group he would stay in Missouri to fight back against what his team has called a baseless charge. The group also said Greitens no longer intends to serve on its executive committee. A few lawmakers from both parties suggested that Greitens should consider resigning, just as they did after he admitted to the affair on Jan. 10. House Republican leaders announced they were forming a group of lawmakers to investigate the charges and answer the question as to whether or not the governor can lead our state while a felony case moves forward. 1 Congressional map battle: A request by Republican leaders in the Pennsylvania Legislature to stop a new congressional map from being implemented is now in the hands of the nations highest court. The filing made this week asked Justice Samuel Alito to intervene, saying the state Supreme Court overstepped its authority in imposing a new map. More litigation may follow, as Republicans are considering a separate legal challenge in federal court in Harrisburg this week. The state Supreme Court last month threw out a GOP-crafted map that was considered among the nations most gerrymandered, saying the 2011 plan violated the state constitutions guarantee of free and equal elections. 2 Medicare fraud: A prominent Florida eye doctor once accused of bribing Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey received a 17-year sentence Thursday for stealing $73 million from Medicare by persuading elderly patients to undergo excruciating tests and treatments they didnt need for diseases they didnt have. In a Fort Lauderdale court, Dr. Salomon Melgen was convicted of 67 crimes, including health care fraud, submitting false claims and falsifying records in patients files. Melgen, 63, was ordered to pay $42.6 million in restitution to Medicare. OXON HILL, Md. The head of the National Rifle Association, speaking publicly Thursday for the first time since last weeks deadly school shooting, defended gun ownership while criticizing the news media, Democrats and the FBI. Wayne LaPierre, the NRA chief, delivered remarks to the annual Conservative Political Action Conference that offered an ardent defense of his organization and the Second Amendment as a new movement led by young people makes emotional pleas for gun control. LaPierre said every member of his association mourned the loss of the 17 people who died in the shooting in Parkland, Fla. We share a goal of safe schools, LaPierre said. He argued for enforcing existing gun laws and not rushing to enact new ones. LaPierre said Democrats wanted to eliminate the Second Amendment with more restrictions. What they want are more restrictions on the law-abiding, LaPierre said. Think about that, their solution is to make you, all of you, less free. He said the solution to the problem of school shootings was to harden schools by adding more armed security officers. Evil walks among us and God help us if we dont harden our schools and protect our kids, he said. The whole idea from some ... opponents that armed security makes us less safe is completely ridiculous. It was not a new argument for the NRA in the wake of a mass shooting that has reignited the debate on gun control. But this latest push comes as a pro-gun rights Republican who campaigned with the support of the powerful lobbying group is in the White House. In a series of Twitter posts before LaPierres remarks, President Trump advocated arming teachers who have received special training, which the NRA supports. But the president also proposed other measures, such as raising the minimum age to 21 for the purchase of assault weapons, a plan the NRA has already opposed. LaPierre also criticized the unbelievable failure of the FBI. The bureau, by its own admission, did not follow protocol in pursuing a tip about the Parkland gunman. NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch also addressed the CPAC conference, accusing the news media of ignoring the N.R.A.s viewpoint and cashing in on the deaths of students. Many in legacy media love mass shootings, Ms. Loesch said. You guys love it. Im not saying that you love the tragedy, but I am saying that you love the ratings. Crying white mothers are ratings gold. WASHINGTON President Trump on Thursday endorsed a higher minimum age for buying certain rifles and tighter background checks for purchasers, saying theres nothing more important than protecting our children, amid a public outcry for action after the Florida school shooting. Trump said he spoke Wednesday night with many members of Congress and theyre into background checks. The president commented as he opened a school safety discussion at the White House with state and local officials from around the country. Early Thursday, Trump tweeted his strongest stance on gun control one day after an emotional White House session where students and parents poured out wrenching tales of lost lives and pleaded for action. Trump said on Twitter, I will be strongly pushing Comprehensive Background Checks with an emphasis on Mental Health. Raise age to 21 and end sale of Bump Stocks! The president did not immediately offer more details. The current federal minimum age for buying or possessing handguns is 21, but the limit is 18 for rifles including assault-type weapons such as the AR-15 used by a former student last week in his attack in Florida that killed 17 students and staff members. Were going to work on getting the age up to 21 instead of 18, Trump said at the White House, adding that he thinks the NRA will back it despite the groups stated opposition. The NRA will back it and so will Congress, the president predicted. He has previously expressed an interest in efforts to strengthen the federal background check system. It was not clear if he would back closing loopholes that permit loose private sales on the Internet and at gun shows. The National Rifle Associated on Wednesday quickly rejected any talk of raising the age for buying long guns to 21. Legislative proposals that prevent law-abiding adults aged 18-20 years old from acquiring rifles and shotguns effectively prohibits them for purchasing any firearm, thus depriving them of their constitutional right to self-protection, the group said in a statement. Trump, despite his new push for at least some gun-control changes, stressed his backing for the NRA on Thursday, tweeting that the folks who work so hard at the @NRA are Great People and Great American Patriots. They love our Country and will do the right thing. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! Speaking at CPAC, Vice President Mike Pence said that in a meeting with governors at the White House next Monday, Trump and the state leaders will make the safety of our nations schools and our students our top national priority. WASHINGTON President Trump said Thursday he is considering pulling U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers from California, warning that the nations most populous state would turn into a crime nest without the federal agents. Trump said heavily Democratic California, which gave Hillary Clinton a resounding victory in the 2016 presidential race, was doing a lousy management job. He pointed to a disgrace, the sanctuary city situation and lamented the protection of these horrible criminals. The presidents comments were the latest effort by the Trump administration to pressure so-called sanctuary cities to cooperate with federal immigration authorities. The Justice Department has threatened to deny millions of dollars in federal grant money to communities that refuse to comply with a statute requiring information-sharing with federal law enforcement. Its an essential part of Trumps efforts to crack down on cities and states that refuse to help enforce U.S. immigration laws. Trump issued the threat during a meeting with state and local officials on school safety and gun violence. He told Attorney General Jeff Sessions and others that his administration has targeted members of the violent MS-13 gang but has been getting no help from the state of California. Frankly, if I wanted to pull our people from California you would have a crime nest like youve never seen in California. All Id have to do is say, ICE and Border Patrol, let California alone; youd be inundated. You would see crime like nobody has ever seen crime in this country. He added: If we ever pulled our ICE out, and we ever said, Hey, let California alone, let them figure it out for themselves, in two months theyd be begging for us to come back. They would be begging. And you know what, Im thinking about doing it. The White House did not immediately comment on the presidents suggestions. Many cities have been openly defiant in the face of the threats, with lawsuits pending in Chicago, Philadelphia and California over whether the administration has overstepped its authority by seeking to withhold grant money. The Justice Department has blamed sanctuary city policies for crime and gang violence, and criticized jurisdictions that aim to thwart the federal governments immigration enforcement. Defenders contend these practices improve public safety by promoting trust among law enforcement and immigrant communities, and by setting aside scarce police resources for other, more urgent crime-fighting needs. In November, Trump called it disgraceful that a San Francisco jury acquitted a Mexican man in the killing of a woman on a pier, a case that spotlighted the local sanctuary city policy. The defendant, who said the shooting was an accident, had been deported five times and was wanted for a sixth deportation at the time of the incident. No wonder the people of our Country are so angry with Illegal Immigration, Trump tweeted after the verdict. Before the shooting, the man had finished a federal prison sentence for illegal re-entry into the United States and was transferred to San Franciscos jail to face a 20-year-old charge for selling marijuana. The Sheriffs Department released him a few days later after prosecutors dropped the marijuana charge, despite a request from federal immigration officials to detain him for deportation. WASHINGTON President Trump on Thursday intensified his calls for arming highly trained teachers as part of an effort to fortify schools against shooting massacres such as the one that occurred in Parkland, Fla., last week, even as he denounced active-shooter drills that try to prepare students to survive a rampage. I want certain highly adept people, people who understand weaponry, guns to have a permit to carry concealed firearms in schools, Trump said during his second White House meeting in two days to discuss how to respond to the shooting that killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Teachers who were qualified to handle a weapon Trump estimated between 10 and 40 percent would receive a little bit of a bonus, he said, adding, that he would devote federal money to training them. I want my schools protected just like I want my banks protected, the president said. Trump, who is under intense pressure to embrace stiffer gun restrictions in the wake of the Parkland tragedy, appears to have seized instead upon the idea of giving educators weapons, a proposal backed by the National Rifle Association, which has pressed to expand the right to carry a concealed firearm nationwide. The National Association of School Resource Officers, an advocacy group for police officers assigned to secure the nations schools, however, had a simple message for Trump Thursday about arming teachers: Dont do it. The group strongly recommends that no firearms be allowed on a school campus except those carried by carefully selected, specially trained police officers. The organization, which has about 4,500 members, provides specialized training for law enforcement officers assigned to work in the nations schools. The group warns that anyone who hasnt received the extensive training provided to police will likely be mentally unprepared to take a life, especially the life of a student assailant. The president made his comments as he convened law enforcement and state and local officials at the White House to discuss a range of proposals that could prevent future school shooting massacres. They came a day after he held an emotional session at the White House with parents, students and teachers affected by the Parkland rampage as well as other school shootings, who begged him to take action, and as a wave of student-led activism continued to spread in favor of changing gun laws. Theres a tremendous feeling that we want to get something done, Trump said in the Roosevelt Room on Thursday, adding that the NRA which has strongly backed him shares the sentiment. Were going to take action, he said. The presidents apparent confidence that Congress would be able to agree on and pass gun safety legislation flew in the face of decades of experience, in which the outrage and calls to action that follow a horrific shooting have dissipated quickly amid powerful resistance from the pro-gun lobby, and changes in the law have ultimately proven impossible. Trump said he was not in favor of one measure that schools around the nation have increasingly taken to defend themselves and their students against school shooters: holding drills to practice what to do. Active-shooter drills is a very negative thing, Trump said after Pam Stewart, the Florida Department of Education commissioner, mentioned such preparations. I dont like it. Id much rather have a hardened school. Trump added that active-shooter drills were crazy, and very hard on children. The presidents comments came after he spent the morning trying to clarify his view on arming teachers, a proposal he floated at Wednesdays session with survivors, and which has met with stiff opposition. In a series of Twitter messages, he said he would arm teachers who have military or special training experience. A gun free school is a magnet for bad people. ATTACKS WOULD END, Trump said. If a potential sicko shooter knows that a school has a large number of very weapons talented teachers (and others) who will be instantly shooting, the sicko will NEVER attack that school. Cowards wont go there problem solved, Trump said. The Associated Press contributed to this report. WASHINGTON Basking in the glow of a cheering crowd, President Trump offered a greatest-hits recap of his campaign themes during wide-ranging remarks Friday to the Conservative Political Action Conference. He urged activists to help Republicans in the fall midterm elections and heed his recent calls to address gun violence. Trumps speech at CPAC came at the end of a week that included meetings with students and teachers and state and local officials on ways to bolster school safety and address gun violence. He said the evil massacre of 17 people at the Florida high school had broken our hearts. Trump declined to reiterate his proposal to increase age restrictions for the purchase of firearms, an idea the NRA has opposed. But at separate event with the nations governors, who are attending a weekend conference, Vice President Mike Pence noted that Trump had called for raising the age to 21, part of what Pence called working with leaders in the Congress to bring this evil in our time to an end. Turning to this years elections, Trump told conservative activists at CPAC that Republicans must not be complacent in the fall midterms, warning of terrible consequences if Democrats take control of Congress. Trump predicted Democrats would take away those massive tax cuts, referencing his signature tax law signed in December, and they will take away your Second Amendment. Trump then surveyed the audience of conservatives on which issue was more important to them, and listened as the crowd cheered loudly in support of the Second Amendment right to bear arms. Near the end of a roughly 75-minute speech, Trump recited the lyrics from the 1960s song, The Snake, a campaign staple that served as an allegory to warn of what he views as the dangers of some refugees and immigrants being allowed into the United States. Trump reiterated his campaign pledge to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexican border and charged Democrats with failing to engage on a plan to provide protections for young immigrants, even though he ended the program. Trump argued that his administration has kept his campaign promises, boasting as he often does that he had the most successful first year in the history of the presidency. OAKLAND (BCN) A former Southwest Airlines baggage handler will be sentenced in federal court in Oakland on June 6 for his role in a ring that smuggled marijuana through Oakland International Airport. Keith Mayfield, 37, of Oakland, pleaded guilty before Chief U.S. District Judge Phyllis Hamilton on Wednesday to three counts: entering an airport area in violation of security requirements; conspiring to distribute marijuana; and conspiring to launder money. Mayfield is one of 13 people indicted by a federal grand jury in 2015 on charges of participating in a nationwide conspiracy to smuggle marijuana grown in Northern California to at least 10 other states. He is the 11th to plead guilty. The others pleaded guilty to distributing marijuana or entering a secured airport area or both and were sentenced to terms ranging from six months to two years and three months in prison. U.S. Attorney's Office spokesman Abraham Simmons said Mayfield admitted during his plea that on at least 40 occasions between 2013 and 2015 he smuggled luggage containing at least 551 pounds of marijuana to passengers who had already cleared the security screening. Mayfield also admitted to smuggling another 220 pounds of marijuana via Southwest Cargo to various cities for distribution, Simmons said. He additionally admitted to laundering drug proceeds by having associates deposit $51,000 in cash gained from sales in bank branches in Texas. Mayfield later withdrew most of that money in Northern California, Simmons said. The other defendants included two other baggage handlers, six couriers who allegedly carried the marijuana luggage onto planes and four people accused of aiding in packaging and selling the marijuana. Mayfield faces a mandatory minimum sentence of five years in prison for the marijuana conspiracy conviction and possible maximum sentences of 10 and 20 years for the other two convictions. The judge will consider advisory federal sentencing guidelines before determining the penalty. He is free on $200,000 bail while awaiting sentencing. 436-7364 Defense attorney Robert Waggener (415) 431-4500 SAN FRANCISCO (BCN) A man in jail on $350,000 bail for nearly a year was denied a new bail hearing again today, despite winning an appeals court ruling in January that not only ordered a new bail hearing for him, but also ordered statewide reform of the money bail system. The appeals court case involves Kenneth Humphrey, 64, a retired shipyard laborer who was arrested last May and later charged with robbery. Prosecutors said that he followed his 79-year-old neighbor into his room at the affordable senior housing complex on Turk Street where they both lived. Humphrey then allegedly threatened his neighbor, who is disabled and uses a walker, by threatening to put a pillowcase over his head. Humphrey allegedly demanded his money, threw his cellphone and eventually left with $7 and a bottle of cologne. San Francisco Superior Court Judge Joseph Quinn set Humphrey's bail at $600,000, despite objections from the San Francisco Public Defender's Office, which represents Humphrey, arguing that he had a troubled past and a history of substance abuse but had stayed out of trouble for 14 years until recently relapsing. Quinn later lowered his bail to $350,000. The public defender's office filed a writ of habeas corpus on Humphrey's behalf and eventually prevailed with the Jan. 25 ruling. In its decision, the court not only said that Humphrey was entitled to a new bail hearing that took his ability to pay into account, but that the state Constitution required all state court judges to examine ability to pay when setting bail unless there is clear and convincing evidence that the person poses a risk to public safety. State Attorney General Xavier Becerra announced Tuesday he would not appeal the decision to the state Supreme Court, saying he supported bail reform in California. The public defender's office swiftly scheduled a new bail hearing for Humphrey this morning. But when Humphrey appeared in court he was disappointed again. At today's hearing, San Francisco District Attorney's Office Managing Attorney Allison Macbeth argued that the court didn't have jurisdiction to take up the bail matter until the Jan. 25 ruling by the state appeals court officially takes effect, which will take about 40 days from the date of the ruling. San Francisco Superior Court Judge Brendan Conroy declined to revisit Humphrey's bail until the ruling was official, while acknowledging that the case was highly unusual. "The time for review has not passed," Conroy said. "Just because the attorney general is not seeking review doesn't mean that the Supreme Court won't decide to review on its own." While the Supreme Court could decide to take up the matter without the request of the state, that seems unlikely, particularly since Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye has publicly expressed support for bail reform, which was noted in the appeals court decision. San Francisco Deputy Public Defender Anita Nabha said the prosecutors were relying on a procedural technicality while continuing to deny Humphrey his rights. She said it was an "outrage." "There's really no reason for them to try and delay Mr. Humphrey's justice," Nabha said outside of court. She said that there appeared to be no plans for a review by the Supreme Court, yet Humphrey might have to spend weeks more in jail after already being unjustly detained for nearly a year. "If he were a rich man he would be out of custody on $350,000 bail," Nabha said. "Because he is a poor man he has to suffer and languish in jail." She said that the public defender's office had prepared for his release by securing him a space in an outpatient treatment facility -- which he could lose if he's not released soon -- and transportation from the jail today. "It's incredibly unfair and for someone who has limited legal knowledge, it's hard to explain," Nabha said. She said the public defender's office is considering its options. But as it stands now the soonest Humphrey could be released would be March 4. His next scheduled court date is on March 13 to set a date for his trial. BERKELEY (BCN) A recent rash of laptop thefts at Berkeley cafes is continuing despite the recent arrest of six people in an undercover operation, police said today. In the most recent case, a laptop was stolen from a cafe in the 2800 block of Telegraph Avenue at about 3:30 p.m. Wednesday, according to police. Three male suspects entered the cafe and grabbed the laptop from the hands of a woman who was sitting on a couch near the front of the business, police said. The suspects then fled to a getaway car that was waiting nearby in the 2400 block of Stuart Street, according to authorities. Berkeley police said anyone with information about the theft should call them at (510) 981-5742. In an undercover operation at about 8 p.m. last Saturday, police arrested six suspects, three adults and three juveniles, who allegedly stole laptops from patrons at Caffe Strada at 2300 College Ave. The laptops were swiftly recovered, police said. On Wednesday, the Alameda County District Attorney's Office charged Dajon Daniel, 19, of Oakland, Kingikirah Stevenson, 23, of Oakland, and Ray Moore, 19, of Antioch, with robbery, according to Berkeley police. The juveniles, two of which are 16 and the third 17, all from Oakland, remain in custody at Alameda County Juvenile Hall in San Leandro and face charges including robbery, grand theft and probation violations, police said. Laptop thefts have become a common occurrence in Berkeley and police are advising residents to keep an eye on their belongings and their surroundings. Police also said people should consider using a locking device to secure their laptops to the table, backing up their work to either an external hard drive that's not kept with the computer or to the cloud, buying tracking software so that they can be reunited with their devices if they're stolen, and making note of their device's serial number. In addition, Berkeley police said they're sharing videos from a robbery that occurred on Aug. 25 to educate the community about how quickly laptops thefts can occur. The videos are available at https://youtu.be/H0IQf_VG1XY and https://youtu.be/ydvq0nlHZOg. FAIRFIELD (BCN) Police have arrested a Fairfield man for allegedly killing a Benicia man earlier this week. Derek Dunlap, 26, was booked into Solano County Jail on suspicion of the first-degree murder of Alexander Lind, 28, of Benicia. Fairfield police found Lind's body around 6 a.m. Wednesday in the 1200 block of Empire Street. The men knew each other and the slaying is not considered a random act, police said. Police posted a photo of Dunlap online, and a citizen called police around 7:30 a.m. today after seeing someone who looked like him in the area of Broadway and Taylor streets. Police responded and detained a man who was wearing the same clothing as the man in the photo. Dunlap was then arrested and booked into jail, Lt. Greg Hurlbut said. WATSONVILLE (BCN) The Watsonville Police Department is warning the public about an ongoing virtual kidnapping scheme that a few residents have already fallen victim to. According to police, three reported "virtual kidnappings" have taken place this month alone in Watsonville. Police believe that the extortion scheme, which has been around for decades, is run out of prisons in Mexico. The virtual kidnapping scheme usually begins when criminals make a large amount of cold calls to random numbers from the same area code, officers said. Police said that suspects will play prerecorded audio of a woman's scream in hopes the caller will respond emotionally and believe it's a family member. When a specific family member is narrowed down, the suspect claims they will torture or harm the caller's loved one if they don't wire them money, police said. The criminal will insist the caller stays on the phone while they wire the money in an attempt to keep them from verifying with the loved one whether they are being held captive. Officers said that once the money transfer is complete, the suspect hangs up, never to be heard from again. This is often the time the victim finds out that their loved one was never really abducted. Some of these scams have contacts in the area where the victim is located and a physical money drop is demanded, according to police. The amount demanded is usually under $2,000 because of legal restrictions for wiring money across the border. In Watsonville, two victims were on their way to transfer money when they flagged down officers and one victim did transfer the money only to find out that her family member was not in anyone's custody, police said. Police said indicators one may be the victim of this scam are the following: callers going to great lengths to keep someone on the line, calls do not come from a loved one's telephone number, callers try to prevent someone from contacting that loved one, and callers demanding ransom money be wired to Mexico. Police suggest that if any of these indicators match up with a received call, people hang up, do not name any loved ones, ask to speak to the loved one specifically if a name does come up, ask questions only a loved one would know the answer to, listen carefully to the alleged loved one's voice, attempt to contact the loved one from another phone, and do not deliver any money. Anyone who suspects a real kidnapping is taking place or believes a ransom demand is a scheme should contact their local law enforcement, police said. President Donald Trump floated the idea of withdrawing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents out of California during remarks after a discussion of gun control at the White House this morning. "If we ever pulled our ICE out, if we ever said 'Hey, let California alone, let them figure it out for themselves,' in two months they would be begging for us to come back," Trump said. "They would be begging," he said. "And you know what, I'm thinking about doing it." Trump said the federal government had been removing members of the Mara Salvatrucha gang, more commonly known as MS-13, but they're getting "no help from the state of California" due to "lousy management." He also claimed the move would turn the Golden State into a "crime nest like you've never seen." Although Trump's threat was met with amusement from some in the general public, lawmakers and activists immediately pushed back against the notion that crime rates would increase. Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein responded within hours, pointing out that California is the world's sixth-largest economy and the largest farm state in the U.S. "We're creating jobs and driving the nation's economy," Feinstein said in a statement. "At the same time, the state's murder rates keep falling and crime is at a historic low." "The president's attacks are not only mean-spirited, they're patently false," she said. Responding to a part of the president's comments in which he mentioned Sanctuary City jurisdictions like San Francisco, Mayor Mark Farrell said Trump is sorely mistaken if he thinks such threats will coerce Californians into betraying the trust of the immigrant community. "We are a Sanctuary City because we know our city is safer when law-abiding residents, regardless of immigration status, are active members of our community," Farrell said in a statement. "The President's declaration to abdicate the federal government's obligation is more of the same from this administration, once again choosing politics over public safety," he said. The ICE Out of California Coalition -- which includes the California Immigrant Policy Center, the California Immigrant Youth Justice Alliance, the National Day Laborer Organizing Network and other organizations -- issued a statement saying that Californians know immigrants are "part of our community's heart and soul." "ICE's long track record of tearing families apart, committing abuses of power and lying to the public simply has no place in California," the coalition said. A spokesman for ICE's San Francisco office referred questions about Trump's comments to the White House. SAN FRANCISCO (BCN) Three men were found dead in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury neighborhood early this morning, and the Department of Public Health is concerned that fentanyl poisoning may be to blame. Officers responded at 4:35 a.m. to a call requesting police to check on three unresponsive people in the 1500 block of Page Street, Officer Robert Rueca said. They arrived to find the three men still unresponsive. Medics also came to the scene and pronounced the men dead, Rueca said. Police said there were no signs of foul play and the city's medical examiner's office will investigate the trio's causes of death, which has not yet been determined. Public health officials said that fentanyl, an extremely potent opioid that is sometimes used to cut street drugs, was responsible for 22 deaths in San Francisco in 2016. Most of those were associated with opiates or methamphetamine, but 27 percent involved cocaine. One person died from fentanyl poisoning after ingesting counterfeit Xanax pills in Oct. 2015 and another died after ingesting crack cocaine laced with fentanyl in May 2017. Public health officials are advising users of street drugs to carry Naloxone, more commonly known as Narcan, which can save lives if administered to opioid overdose victims if used properly. Rueca said the men were not related and did not reside at the location where officers found them. Their names have not yet been released. Officers have since cleared the scene and Urban School of San Francisco, a high school located nearby at 1563 Page St., was unaffected, Rueca said. PALO ALTO (BCN) The woman who died as a result of a head-on collision on Oregon Expressway in Palo Alto on Thursday morning has been identified as a 65-year-old Merced County resident, according to the Santa Clara County medical examiner's office. Leslie Loeser of Livingston was the passenger in a silver 2018 Kia Optima driven by her husband, according to Palo Alto police. Loeser's vehicle was exiting southbound U.S. Highway 101 to Oregon Expressway when it crossed over the median at 4:42 p.m. and struck a food delivery van, according to police. The van was in the farthest left-hand lane of eastbound Oregon Expressway. Investigators said that the driver of the van is a man in his 30s. The impact caused both vehicles to spin out and each one sustained significant damage, according to police. Loeser was found in critical condition at the scene and was transported along with her husband and the other driver to Stanford Medical Center, police said. It was there that she succumbed to her injuries. Loeser's husband, a Livingston man in his 60s, as well as the truck driver remain in the Stanford hospital. They are both expected to survive, according to officers. A Palo Alto police sergeant originally said that Loeser was driving the Kia, but the traffic investigations team revealed that she was the passenger. Police do not believe drugs or alcohol were factors in the collision. Both drivers spoke to investigators at the hospital. Loeser's husband was not cited or arrested, police said. Anyone with information on the case should call the 24-hour dispatch center at (650) 329-2413. Those who wish to remain anonymous can email paloalto@tipnow.org or text or call (650) 383-8984. The Palo Alto Police Department also has a free smartphone app where tips can be submitted anonymously available for both iPhones and Androids. 793-1900 Palo Alto police (650) 329-2413 The National Environment Management Authority (Nema) Thursday ordered the immediate closure of Nairobis Burma market. While confirming the closure, Nema Corporate Communications Manager Evans Nyabuto said the closure is as a result of a high level of violation of the plastic ban. He said the popular market will remain shut until it can demonstrate full compliance with the plastic bags ban. The Environment agency further said it had consulted with all law enforcement agencies in Nairobi, including the county police commander and his team and county askaris, all who will ensure the shutdown is enforced. The shut down comes in the wake of a crackdown on traders who are still using plastic bags. Thirty-one people were arrested in Mombasa on Monday for being in possession of plastic bags. A vehicle ferrying the bags without a permit was also impounded. Following the arrests, 29 people were on Tuesday fined Sh50,000 each or serve one year in jail after they pleaded guilty. Three others denied the charges and were released on a Sh400,000 bond and a surety of a similar amount. Plastic bags were banned in Kenya with effect from August 28, with exceptions given for garbage bin liners and those used for packaging goods in industries. 19342018 19342018 Patricia Jeanne Drucquer, Born Feb. 28, 1934 in Berkeley CA to Maurice and Myrtle Drucquer. She was married for over 20 years to Robert E Clopton, and was a devoted and caring mother to 4 children. She moved with the family to Napa, CA in 1969, and after her children were raised she founded and ran her own successful mortgage business, Vintage Mortgage, for over 20 years. After her youngest son Donald was diagnosed with ALS, she gave the business up so she could help with his care. Donald passed away from the ALS in 1998. In the early 2000s she relocated to Sonoma County, living in Cloverdale, then moving to assisted care in Santa Rosa and later Windsor. She was involved with many organizations, often rising to the top in a fairly short time. She spent many years with Sweet Adeleines, and performed in many singing competitions. She was also a many year member of Soroptimists. She was a very gentle and softhearted person, a voracious reader, and could do anything from knit a sweater to fix a bicycle. She had a curious mind, and was a lifelong learner. The project foreman with Process Cooling International told Sutter Home that they were going to take care of covering the skylight panels, according to Cal/OSHA. Colombo and two other employees were instead told to be careful while working around the skylight panels. Cal/OSHA proposed that Sutter Home Winery Inc. be fined $22,500 for the infraction and Process Cooling International be fined $70,000. Process Cooling International also failed to implement and maintain an effective injury and illness prevention program and to remove all personnel from the area until it was deemed safe, according to Cal/OSHA. For these infractions, Cal/OSHA proposed an additional $18,000 penalty. Cal/OSHAs proposed penalties are being appealed by both companies. Their payments are on hold until the appeal is complete, said Frank Polizzi, agency spokesman. Also, the cases are being reviewed by Cal/OSHAs Bureau of Investigations, he said. The Sierra Club Napa Club and the League of Women Voters in Napa are hosting a forum March 12 on the planned June vote on the Napa County Watershed and Oak Woodland Protection Initiative. The program will focus on the science and history of the initiative, featuring speakers with different backgrounds and points of view. Featured speakers are best-selling author James Conaway on the valleys battles for ag preservation and land conservation; environmental scientist Dr. Tosha Comendant on the critical role of the watershed to Napa Countys water supply; certified consulting Arborist Bill Pramuk on the importance of oaks in the Napa watershed; celebrated vintner Warren Winiarski on the need for watershed protections to preserve our agricultural community and Initiative Committee leaders Mike Hackett and Jim Wilson on what Measure C will accomplish. Chris Benz from the Sierra Club and Robyn Orsini from the Napa League will explain why both groups have endorsed the initiative. There will be time for Q&A throughout the evening. The program is free, with donations accepted. The forum will be Monday, March 12 at the Napa County Library, 580 Coombs St. Doors open at 6:15 p.m., program begins at 6:30 p.m., speakers begin at 7 p.m. Napans on bicycle or foot will benefit from the latest upgrade to a major north Napa route as will anyone simply making a left turn. An improvement to a nearly block-long stretch of Trower Avenue was approved Tuesday night by the City Council. The citys right of way west of Linda Vista Avenue will be widened by 22 feet. The extra space, which Napa will gain by purchasing parts of four residential properties, will allow the south shoulder to receive a sidewalk, curb, storm gutters, curbside parking and a bicycle lane for a short section of Trower largely untouched since its absorption into the city more than four decades ago. The upgrade, which will be covered using fees paid by developers in the Linda Vista area, will also extend a central turning lane into that part of Trower. Utility cables currently mounted on poles south of the street will be moved underground, bringing the block in line with other sections to the east and west. Negotiations with the owners of four homes south of the roadway will begin after a 30-day period when citizens can appeal the Trower Avenue projects environmental report, city engineer John Ferons said before the vote. Depending on how long Napa needs to agree on land prices with those homeowners, construction may take place either this fall or in the spring of 2019. California politicians are none too pleased after President Trump mused Thursday that he might remove Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents from the state. At a roundtable discussion about school shootings, Trump criticized California's "lousy management job" and again expressed his opposition to sanctuary cities. "If we ever pulled our ICE out, if we ever said, 'Hey, let California alone, let them figure it out for themselves,' in two months they'd be begging for us to come back," Trump said. "They would be begging. And you know what, I'm thinking about doing it." "If I wanted to pull our people from California, you would have a crime mess like you've never seen in California," he added. "All I'd have to do is to say, 'ICE and Border Patrol, let California alone.' You'd be inundated. You would see crime like no one's ever seen crime in this country. And yet we get no help from the state of California. They're doing a lousy management job, they have the highest taxes in the nation, and they don't know what's happening out there." The remarks, unsurprisingly, elicited strong reactions from California lawmakers. "In California, we protect all of our people from criminals and gangs, as well as dangerous assault weapons," Governor Jerry Brown said in a statement. "We do our job, Mr. President, you do yours." More for you California Sen. Tony Mendoza resigns under threat of expulsion... Senator Dianne Feinstein also issued a statement: "President Trump today renewed his attacks on California with more insults and threats. The president's obsession with our state is growing more outrageous by the day. "California is the 6th largest economy in the world. We're the global hub of innovation and the largest farm state in the country. We're creating jobs and driving the nation's economy. At the same time, the state's murder rate keeps falling and crime is at a historic low. "The president's attacks are not only mean-spirited, they're patently false." To see how more California lawmakers reacted to Trump's proposal, see the gallery above. Gov. Jerry Brown, a former mayor of Oakland who often griped about state governments interference with local issues, ran in 2010 on a platform of stronger local control. Hes delivered on that for the most part, with the strong exception of pet projects like high-speed rail and his putative water tunnels water project, both facing strong opposition from people and local governments in their direct paths. But now, cities and counties around the state face the strong possibility of a new law that would essentially nullify local land use and zoning plans crafted through years of public hearings and detailed analysis. This comes in the guise of fighting homelessness and Californias severe housing shortage, which has contributed to driving up rents and real estate prices to the point where many California employers have trouble retaining workers because they can live elsewhere much more cheaply. The proposed plan takes the form of a state Senate bill sponsored by San Francisco Democrat Scott Wiener that would essentially take all zoning and land use authority away from cities and counties in areas close to mass transit. An amateur astronomer became the first person to photograph a star as it began to explode. Victor Buso from Argentina photographed the moment a brief flash of light was shot out by the supernova in September 2016. That early phase can take only a matter of minutes, with Business Insider putting the chances of capturing it on camera as one-in-billions. RELATED: How close would a supernova have to be to wipe out Earth? Speaking of chance, that's how Buso chose the spiral Galaxy NGC 613, which is where the star was located while testing out a new camera. He told Newsweek, "...among those in that region of the sky, it has a beautiful form with looping cloudsbright and dark." Buso noticed a single-pixel difference between his images and ones he'd seen online. He checked back the next night, seeing what had become a supernova. Buso sent his observations to scientists at UC Berkeley, who confirmed he was the only known person to ever take a photo of the flash of light produced by an exploding star. RELATED: Amazing images from Hubble As UC Berkeley astronomer Alex Filippenko put it to Business Insider, "It's like winning the cosmic lottery." Troy Frisby writes and produces video for Buzz60 MOGADISHU, Somalia Two car bomb blasts in Somalias capital killed at least 18 people Friday and shattered a months-long period of calm in Mogadishu, which is often the target of attacks by the al-Shabaab extremist group. The explosions came a day after Somalias interior minister warned of an explosives-laden vehicle somewhere in the capital. The first blast occurred near the countrys intelligence headquarters, said police Capt. Mohamed Hussein. He said the second occurred near parliaments headquarters, where the vehicle had tried to speed through a checkpoint before security forces engaged with the gunmen suspected of trying to attack the presidential palace. The Aamin Ambulance service ferried 18 bodies and another 20 injured people after the blasts, director Abdirahman Abdulqadir said. The Somalia-based al-Shabaab claimed responsibility for the attack via its radio arm, Andalus. Al-Shabaab, which is seeking to establish an Islamist state in Somalia, regularly launches attacks on government buildings, hotels and restaurants in the volatile nation on the Horn of Africa. Al-Shabaab was blamed for a truck bombing in October that killed 512 people in the deadliest attack in the nations history. Only a few attacks since 9/11 have killed more people. Since that attack in Mogadishu, President Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed has vowed to eradicate al-Shabaab. Concerns have been high over plans to hand over the countrys security to Somalias own forces as a 21,000-strong African Union force begins a withdrawal that is expected to be complete in 2020. On Thursday the head of the AU force, Francisco Madeira, said ending the pullout before 2021 could bring about a serious risk of reversals that could derail the gains already made. Somali forces, he said, are not yet ready. In recent months, the U.S. has stepped up its operations in Somalia, accelerating drone attacks on al-Shabaab and Islamic State jihadists. Just this week, the U.S. Africa Command announced two such attacks that it said killed seven terrorists in the Lower and Middle Juba regions. The U.S. carried out more than 30 drone strikes last year in Somalia after President Trump approved expanded military efforts against al-Shabaab. Associated Press BANGKOK First, their villages were burned to the ground. Now, Myanmars government is using bulldozers to literally erase them from the earth in a vast operation rights groups say is destroying crucial evidence of mass atrocities against the nations ethnic Rohingya Muslim minority. Satellite images of Myanmars troubled Rakhine state, released Friday by the Colorado group DigitalGlobe, show that dozens of empty villages and hamlets have been completely leveled by authorities in recent weeks far more than previously reported. The villages were all set ablaze in the wake of violence last August, when a brutal clearance operation by security forces drove about 700,000 Rohingya into exile in Bangladesh. 1 Arrest in maids death: One of two suspects in the gruesome death of a Filipina maid whose body was found stuffed in a freezer in an apartment in Kuwait has been arrested, the Philippine foreign secretary said Friday. Lebanese citizen Nader Essam Assaf was arrested in Lebanon. His Syrian wife, who is also a suspect in the death of Joanna Demafelis, remains at large. The discovery of Demafeliss body on Feb. 6 in a freezer in Kuwait City, where it had reportedly been kept for more than a year, sparked outrage in the Philippines and refocused attention on the tragic plight of poor Filipinos toiling mostly as maids abroad. It prompted President Rodrigo Duterte to ban the deployment of new Filipino workers to Kuwait, where many abuses have been reported. Assaf and his wife employed Demafelis. 2 Deputy premier resigns: Australias beleaguered deputy prime minister resigned from the Cabinet on Friday over allegations that he sexually harassed a woman, but said he would not resign from Parliament. By staying in Parliament, Barnaby Joyce ensures that Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbulls single-seat majority in the House of Representatives is maintained. The allegation of sexual harassment adds to scrutiny the married Joyce has faced since news broke this month that he and his former media secretary Vikki Campion are expecting a baby in April. Questions have been raised about her employment in two government jobs after working in Joyces office and the rent-free apartment owned by a wealthy political donor where Joyce and Campion now live. WASHINGTON The Trump administration hit more than 50 vessels, shipping companies and trade businesses with sanctions Friday, escalating pressure on North Korea over its nuclear program. The administration billed it as the largest installment of North Korean economic restrictions to date. President Trump went further, declaring in a speech Friday at the Conservative Political Action Conference that it was the heaviest sanctions ever imposed on a country before. Page Content A dentist was not an employee of the practice where he worked but instead was an independent contractor, the California Court of Appeal held. The trial court was therefore correct in ruling against the dentist in his wage and hour suit, the appellate court concluded. Pedram Soleimani filed an administrative claim with the state labor commissioner against Sherbank Aziza Dental for unpaid wages, liquidated damages and waiting time penalties, as authorized by California law. The dental practice claimed that Soleimani was an independent contractor, not an employee, and so was not entitled to the remedies he sought. Soleimani prevailed on his claims at the administrative level, but the dental practice appealed and was granted a trial in state superior court. After the trial, the court issued its decision in favor of the dental practice, and Soleimani appealed that decision. [SHRM members-only HR Q&A: How do I know if an individual is considered an employee or independent contractor in California?] The appellate court first noted that, in distinguishing between employment and independent contractor relationships in California, lower courts look to the California Supreme Court's decision in S.G. Borello & Sons Inc. v. Department of Industrial Relations (1989) (48 Cal.3d 341). Under Borello, the principal test of an employment relationship is whether the person to whom service is rendered has the right to control the manner and means of accomplishing the desired result, the court said. The Borello court endorsed secondary factors that should be considered in addition to the issue of control. These include: Whether the person performing services is engaged in a distinct occupation or business. The skill required in the particular occupation. Whether the company or the worker supplies the tools and the place of work for the person doing the work. The length of time the services are performed. The method of payment, whether by time or by the job. Whether the work is a part of the regular business of the possible employer. Whether the parties believe they are in an employer-employee relationship. Additionally, the Borello court said, these "individual factors cannot be applied mechanically as separate tests; they are intertwined and their weight depends often on particular combinations." The appellate court found that the trial court properly applied the Borello factors in this case. It then found that there was substantial evidence to support the trial court's conclusion that Soleimani was an independent contractor and not an employee. This evidence included the following: Soleimani obtained his own dental license and had his own malpractice insurance. He signed an independent contractor agreement. His paychecks had no tax deductions for employee-related taxes. He was not supervised at the dental office. He received no training at the office. He decided how long to spend with a patient, what professional services needed to be performed and how the work was to be done. He received no vacation time, holiday pay or sick leave. He had earned incentive compensation based on the volume of work he performed. Thus, the court affirmed the trial court's judgment in favor of the dental practice. Soleimani v. Sherbank Azizi Dental Inc., Calif. Ct. App., No. B278844 (Feb. 15, 2018). Professional Pointer: To determine whether a worker is an employee or an independent contractor, the nature of the relationship must be closely examined. Many factors are relevant, and no one factor is controlling by itself. Joanne Deschenaux, J.D., is a freelance writer in Annapolis, Md. DEWITT, N.Y. The feeding habits of a Cooper's hawk may fascinate birdwatchers, but employees of a New York bank are fed up with the feathery remnants of slaughtered pigeons. A hawk has been killing and devouring pigeons near the entrance to M & T Bank in suburban Syracuse for several weeks. Property manager Joseph Mathlin tells the Syracuse Post-Standard that bank staff are terrified and disgusted. Mathlin says the bank tried putting up a fake owl to shoo the hawk away. Jake McGowan of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology says the hawk probably won't care about the owl but its pigeon prey might be scared off. Colorful crow-sized Cooper's hawks have become common in cities and suburbs where flocks of pigeons and birdfeeder visitors make easy pickings. To continue, please log in, or sign up for a new account. We offer one free story view per month. If you register for an account, you will get two additional story views. After those three total views, we ask that you support us with a subscription. A subscription to our digital content is so much more than just access to our valuable content. It means youre helping to support a local community institution that has, from its very start, supported the betterment of our society. Thank you very much! The United States has recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and has abandoned "strategic patience" with the vast prison camp otherwise known as North Korea. A new National Security Strategy, a new National Defense Strategy and a new Nuclear Posture Review have been completed and will combine into a coherent framework for the nation's defense that includes respect for allies and notice to Iran that the Islamic republic is out of compliance with the nuclear "framework." The president's speeches last year in Riyadh and Warsaw and this year at Davos clearly and succinctly laid out America's demands on the world and its commitments to freedom. This trio of speeches matters as much as any three given abroad since President Ronald Reagan's challenges to Europe and the Soviet Union. So the president, McConnell, House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., and their teams are smiling about their legislative achievements even as they confront the opioid epidemic and yet another school massacre. They should be. November will offer a clear choice of growth, freedom, clarity and security or a return to the Obama-Pelosi-Reid years. With some luck there might even be a path to citizenship for 1.8 million people in the country illegally and more border security if bipartisanship wins out after the failed first effort. But regardless, if one is fair, one cannot ignore the president's accomplishments. Hugh Hewitt, a Post contributing columnist, hosts a nationally syndicated radio show and is author of The Fourth Way: The Conservative Playbook for a Lasting GOP Majority. He wrote this for The Washington Post. Georgetown, SC (29440) Today Considerable cloudiness. Slight chance of a rain shower. High 86F. Winds light and variable.. Tonight Partly to mostly cloudy. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low 69F. Winds light and variable. From left: Florene Linnen, Barbara Huell and Charlesann Buttone were three of five women honored as modern heroes by author Steve Williams Feb. 20. The other women were Josephine Caldwell Howard and the Rev. Gloria Barr Ford. Doug Decker of Pawleys Island has been a licensed pilot for more than 50 years and actively involved in airport management, promotion and development for more than 35 years. Author and futurist Isaac Asimov's "Foundation" trilogy was launched aboard SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket. The text was encoded by inventor Peter Kazansky in a high-storage, ultrastable quartz disc with a lifetime of millions to billions of years. When SpaceX's record-breaking Falcon Heavy rocket made its first test launch in early February, the craft didn't just hurl Elon Musk's shiny red roadster and spacesuit-clad mannequin to space. It had another, smaller payload, which at first glance seems much less impressive: a 1-inch-wide (2.5 centimeters) quartz disc with Isaac Asimov's "Foundation" trilogy encoded in laser-etched gratings. The famous science fiction series is only the beginning of the discs' planned contents. At a time when traditional hard drives are just breaking into the terabyte range, the quartz medium can hold up to 360 terabytes per disc. It also boasts a life span of 14 billion years. That's longer than the current age of the universe. This disc was symbolic; future devices will contain much more, and more useful, information. But the technology speaks to grander issues that humanity is now pondering: becoming a multiplanetary civilization, storing information for thousands or millions of years, and contacting and communicating with other intelligences (alien and Earthling). So how should we record our knowledge and experiences for posterity? How should we ensure that this information is understandable to civilizations that may be quite different from our own? And, most importantly, what should we say? [Success! SpaceX Launches Falcon Heavy Rocket on Historic Maiden Voyage] Humans have faced challenges like these before. Ancient civilizations built monuments like the pyramids and left artifacts and writing, sometimes deliberately. Later researchers have used this material to try to piece together ancient worldviews. However, in the modern era, we've set our sights much further: from centuries to millennia, from one planet to interstellar space, and from one species to many. Set in stone Ancient civilizations, from the Maya to the Indus Valley civilization, used stone and ceramic to keep records. These materials may not be the most efficient medium, but they are certainly durable. Clay tablets from Mesopotamia have survived from the very dawn of civilization. Today, people store most of our records in delicate electronics, which degrade far more easily than the tablets of yore. "Our civilization is more ephemeral, and more at risk, than any civilization we've ever had," Nova Spivack told Space.com. Spivack co-founded the nonprofit Arch Mission Foundation (pronounced ark, as in archive), which provided the quartz discs sent skyward on the Falcon Heavy rocket. Quartz, like glass, is chemically stable and physically durable, Spivack pointed out. Just think of all the glass instruments used in chemistry labs worldwide. And because quartz is transparent, scientists can use high-powered lasers to create patterns within the disc, similar to those 3D crystal engravings you can buy at gift shops. Physically etching data into a disc creates a far more enduring record than using electronic means of encoding data. For instance, the magnetic memory on a hard drive is susceptible to electromagnetic fields, and it naturally decays over time. Transcribing the data within the material, as opposed to on its surface, also provides advantages. It protects information from surface wear, which can kill devices like CDs, where data is stored on the surface. This method also allows for a higher information density, according to the paper describing the technique. Engineers can take advantage of five variables to encode data each grating's three spatial dimensions as well as two optical properties, called the slow-axis orientation and the retardance. This lets them achieve that impressive 360-terabyte figure. Scientists encode information into a quartz disc as nanometer-scale gratings. The laser they use must produce pulses as short as a few femtoseconds, or quadrillionths of a second. This is the timescale of motions within molecules. (Image credit: Peter G. Kazansky) The discs are also a convenient way to send and receive large data packages. Spivack said he envisions humans shooting these high-capacity discs toward distant space outposts to deliver updates from, say, the Earth internet to the Martian internet. The discs would almost certainly offer more bandwidth than radio transmissions do, said Spivack, and physically sending information from place to place is already a widely accepted practice. In fact, Google used this method to transfer 120 terabytes of data from the Hubble Space Telescope between different scientists. The 5D data storage used on the quartz discs is still prohibitively expensive. The first set of discs was created and gifted to Arch by the lab that invented the technique at the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom. Spivack predicted that millions of dollars and upwards of a decade of work are necessary to make the technology commercially viable. Storage efforts like Microsoft's Project Silica show that work to improve the technique is already underway. [How Scientists Stored a Movie Inside DNA] Heading to space Durability and redundancy are crucial when preserving information over the long haul. That sentiment resounds across the field of archiving, said Laura Welcher, who oversees the Rosetta Project, a long-term archive of the world's languages at the Long Now Foundation, a partner of Arch. "[Having] lots of copies keeps stuff safe," she told Space.com. That's why Spivack's foundation plans to create Arch libraries en masse. "When you look at the Voyager disc or other attempts [to preserve culture] time capsules or sending things into space they're sending one thing to one place one time," Spivack said. "We're sending many things to many places all the time." A pair of records was included on the Voyager spacecraft containing music, sounds of Earth, images recorded in analog and greetings in many languages. The record's aluminum jacket includes symbolic instructions for playing the record using the included cartridge and needle. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech) The preserving power of redundancy also applies to humanity as a whole. Becoming a multiplanetary species is "insurance of life as we know it," Musk said in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine. Given enough time, large disasters will happen. It's wise not to have all your eggs in one basket. "We're at an elevated level of both opportunity and risk right now," Spivack said. The ability for a single person, or small group, to destroy civilization, intentionally or accidentally, is greater than it ever was. "I think it's a rite of passage that we have to get through as a civilization," he said, "and it's probably likely that most civilizations don't get through it." SpaceX has said its goal is to facilitate a spacefaring civilization. "They're doing the spacefaring part of that sentence," Spivack said. "This is the civilization part." Placing Arch libraries in every location in the solar system that humans are interested in, with media that last for millions to billions of years, could help preserve civilization, Spivack said. And space is certainly the place to go to communicate with other life-forms. [Related: The BFR: SpaceX's Mars-Colonization Architecture in Images] A tasty snack? In addition to their work on innovative technologies, the people designing these artifacts face many philosophical challenges. For instance, they need to make sure that humans, or other life-forms, that discover our messages will recognize them and can decode them. It's impossible to account for every type of intelligence that might encounter our records in the far future. Maybe they're some silica-eating life-form, Spivack said. "They might just think it's a tasty snack," he said. So, a storage device has to be intriguing enough to stir curiosity and presented in a way that suggests that the object contains a message. Spivack asked notable computer scientist Stephen Wolfram, inventor of the computation software Mathematica and online problem-solving engine Wolfram Alpha, to help the Arch team work through these quandaries. Wolfram's role is to "ask the hard questions, keep us intellectually honest," Spivack said. The two men have different perspectives on how to approach these challenges. "Nova [Spivack] told me about his project, and I was like, 'Your project is philosophically doomed,'" Wolfram chuckled. He said the cultural, and perhaps biological, differences between us and the recipients of our messages may be insurmountable. Nevertheless, he said, the mission was intriguing enough that he agreed to serve as an advisor. "The basic issue is how do you make something understandable when you don't have a shred of shared cultural context?" Wolfram said. "I think that, for better or worse, what we have here is a philosophically unsolvable problem." Wolfram came across this Persian inscription during research for his book "A New Kind of Science." Lacking cultural context, he could not tell if the writing was a mathematical representation, a cellular automaton or something else. Eventually, he learned that it was a stylized list of the 62 attributes of Allah. (Image credit: "A New Kind of Science") The problem of communication becomes even more challenging the further removed one side of the conversation is from the other culturally, temporally or biologically, Wolfram explained. And our concepts of thought and communication are overwhelmingly human-centric and 21st-century-based, he added. ['Arrival', AI and Alien Math: Q&A with Stephen Wolfram] Consider the differences between human and artificial intelligence. Google recently trained a computer program to detect heart-health risks by analyzing the blood vessels at the back of the eye. The company developed the algorithm's acumen using medical data from nearly 300,000 patients. It's likely that the distinctions important to the AI are not ones that are meaningful to us. Similarly, when studying ancient artifacts, it's difficult to pick out which aspects of an ancient geometric pattern were important to its creators and which were incidental. As these examples suggest, the real problem in preparing to communicate with alien life-forms is that we have only one species to test our assumptions on. And that species is also the one conducting the tests. Wolfram's skepticism shouldn't be mistaken for cynicism, though: The communication barrier may be philosophically unsolvable, Wolfram said, but "that doesn't mean we shouldn't try." Spivack agreed that communication will be difficult. But he also pointed out that humans have successfully communicated things through the ages, referencing the Dead Sea Scrolls and Egyptian hieroglyphics, among other examples. If any being discovers our archives in the near future, the individual will probably be a human. With this in mind, Spivack restricted the scope of the Arch Mission to humans and human-like organisms. Constraining the target audience reduces many of the philosophical problems and provides a foundation to begin designing the devices. For instance, humans are visually oriented and use symbolic writing, so crafting an artifact that's visually intriguing is a good place to start. Unfortunately, plenty of animals and natural phenomena create interesting designs that often convey no message at all. Consider male white-spotted pufferfish, which construct ornate patterns in the sand to attract mates. To what extent these patterns convey a message, and what that message may be, currently eludes scientists. Nevertheless, Spivack said it's reasonable to expect that our decedents will recognize visual cues like those on an Arch library given humanity's history of using symbols and written languages. Getting a message across Many factors will separate the minds of the future from the information we leave for them: language, culture, technical conventions and maybe even biology. Successful communication requires minimizing these barriers. When designing any archive, it's important to weigh the relative strengths of different ways of encoding information. "Every layer of encoding adds additional complexity to the decoding," said Welcher at the Rosetta Project. If we were to encode the story "Jack and the Beanstalk" into DNA, Welcher said, there would be five layers of abstraction: 1) human experience > 2) spoken language > 3) written language > 4) digital information > 5) DNA nucleotides. The Arch discs have a similar level of encoding, but Welcher said the trade-off in simplicity is worthwhile given the media's incredible durability. Rosetta Disk, a physical component of the Rosetta Project, chose a strategy that used less encoding: recording information as pages of actual text, like microfiche. Existing technology can inscribe text so small that reading it requires an electron microscope, Welcher said, but "we didn't want to erect such a huge barrier to access, so we've kept the pages to the size [where] they can be read with optical magnification." The Rosetta Disk contains over 13,000 pages of information on more than 1,500 human languages. Each page is microscopically etched onto the nickel disk. (Image credit: The Long Now Foundation) Ideally, archivists would bundle all the tools needed to extract information with the artifact itself. This is the concept behind Spivack's civilization in a box. In this project, he said, he hopes to outfit small containers with media of varying longevity and capacity. This includes devices that can be read directly, similar to the Rosetta Disk, as well as those that require more-extensive decoding, like the high-capacity quartz discs. [Eavesdropping on Aliens: Why Edward Snowden Got E.T. Wrong] The box would also contain tools to decode the messages. For instance, the package would include lenses and diagrams for a microscope to read the analog devices, which have actual images. The foundation has also designed small Raspberry Pi computers and DVD players that can read multi-thousand year durability DVDs, which are made from special materials. Those computers would go in to the box with the drives and spare parts. The foundation would also include instructions for how to read more advanced devices, like the quartz discs, in the other media, Spivack said. These delicate electronics can last a long time if they're shielded from debris and radiation, especially in an environment without oxygen, Spivack said. But even after they've degraded, the components will still provide a blueprint that the recipients could use to re-create the technology and retrieve the devices' information. Archivists can also take advantages of historical insight in their designs, Spivack said. "In cases where we were able to understand things, it's because there was a lot of data and it was distributed in many places." he said. "And in some cases, there were translations or connections to other known data sets." In this light, Spivack plans to include primers which are generally short introductory material in all of the devices. However, his idea is to include what he called "primer overkill": vast amounts of visual and encoded instructions for accessing, translating and understanding the information on each device. What will they want to know? Assuming we can get a message out for posterity, or extraterrestrial visitors, and supposing that the audience can decode the message, that leaves us with the question of what to tell them. Many scientists and futurists have suggested using mathematics in our messages. Mathematics is universal and fundamental, and it can be derived from first principals. With a little extra work, you can even encode information we've learned about the how the universe works, namely science findings. But these very attributes may make mathematics the most boring thing we could send to aliens, or preserve for our descendants, Spivack and Wolfram said. "When I first started this, I was all about passing down science," Spivack said. "But the more that I've grown and thought about this, the more I've come to understand that you can almost think of them [science and math] as commodities in a sense: that everybody in the universe who reaches a certain level has them," he said. When pondering what our decedents or other intelligent life might want to know about us, it's worth considering what we try to learn when we study cultures, individuals and other animals. We commonly seek to find out what is life like for them and why they make the decisions they do. This suggests that what's interesting and meaningful about us is the set of the values and experiences that make us unique. Wolfram echoed this sentiment. "If we want to communicate about ourselves, [we should] send things that are special to us," he wrote in a comprehensive blog post on the topic. Humanity should focus on preserving and communicating its experiences and worldview, for inquisitive extraterrestrials or archeologists 10,000 years hence. So, include artwork: images of paintings, sculptures and ornaments from the Paleolithic to the modern age. Encode music, language and prayers. Give them our stories, from sacred texts to high literature and folklore. Provide records of our history, traditions and customs. Share with them the diversity of life on Earth through pictures, recordings and DNA. In short, give them all the stuff that makes us who we are and that can never be replicated or replaced. Ultimately, whatever we choose to include in our archives will likely reflect more on what we consider important today than what future recipients will want to know, Wolfram said. And in that light, he believes projects like the Arch Mission are useful because they force society to consider what our legacy will be. Follow Harrison Tasoff @harrisontasoff. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com. I really feel the NVUSD board has abused the Napa High Indian symbol, and enough is enough. They got their just deserves in the hazing situation when it was found they did not handle it properly. So it is as if they are striking out and going to punish the community who so love the Indian symbol, they're going to show what power they have. That symbol has done no harm to anyone or anything. There is no proof, but there is proof of the harm the board of trustees and Superintendent Patrick Sweeney, and Napa High Principal Annie Petrie are doing to the Napa High School students and their families. Can't blame that on the Napa Indian, now can they? Time to be accountable for their actions. In all truth and reality, nothing SSPRIT Group and Suscol Intertribal Council said is truth. The truth is that Sweeney, Trustee Jose Hurtado, and the rest of the NVUSD Board of Trustees did not want to hear was finally said by Chairman Scott Gabaldon of the Mishewal Wappo Tribe about the Napa High Indian symbol. That truth was heard because of the Save the Indian symbol Committee, working together for him to be heard. He has not been included in the working task force and had attempted to contact the school for two years. Sweeney and other admin say no record of it. But we know better. He got heard, much to the boards dismay. City lights outshine nearly every star in the night sky over Hong Kong, which is believed to be one of the most light-polluted cities on Earth. Back in the mid-'70s during the summertime, several astronomy-minded friends and I would pile into my beat-up Chevy Impala and travel a couple hundred miles north of New York City up Interstate 87 to Warrensburg, New York. Not far from there was a campsite where we would spend time with our telescopes, observing the dark, star-spangled skies of the Adirondacks. Of course, other campers always gravitated to our campsite, where we enjoyed pointing out celestial sights and providing star-identification tips. On one of those nights, a young woman asked me what was that "long cloud" that appeared to stretch across the sky each night from horizon to horizon. That "long cloud" was, of course, the Milky Way, which, under those very dark skies, appeared so bright that it actually cast a dim shadow. I asked her how it was that she didn't know its identity. She responded that this was her very first time away from home and that she had never camped outside before. "Where is home?" I asked. "Brooklyn" was her response. Hardly a place where one can see a dark, starry sky! A sad commentary, perhaps, on one way that "progress" is stymieing our appreciation of nature. Indeed, no longer can residents in most metropolitan areas or even their nearby suburbs be treated to a view of our home galaxy, the Milky Way. And that's not the only celestial sight that is no longer available. [Gallery: 'Darkened Cities' by Thierry Cohen: Amazing Night Skies Imagined] Back in 1996 and again in 1997, skywatchers around the world were treated to the sight of two magnificent naked-eye comets: Hyakutake and Hale-Bopp. From dark skies, both were accompanied by beautifully long, gossamer tails, but from urban areas, they appeared as little more than bright fuzz balls. A side note here: I grew up in the Throgs Neck section of the Bronx, and during the 1960s, I could see quite a bit of the night sky from my backyard. But today, the city has gotten brighter. Much brighter. So bright, in fact, that now I can easily read a newspaper at night near my childhood stomping grounds without a flashlight. And the skies at my old Adirondack campsite have gotten noticeably brighter, too. What was once a sea of stars against a pitch-black background now looks more like a shade of charcoal gray. Judging by the number of visible stars, my observations show that light pollution has made the night sky over Warrensburg, New York, about four times brighter since the mid-'70s. And at various points along the horizon, there are now small domes of light indicating the presence of nearby towns, the brightest of which is Lake George, a popular tourist center several miles to the south. All of this can be traced to one thing: the curse of light pollution. Disastrous practical effects Light pollution is the excessive or misdirected outdoor lighting that is threatening to destroy virtually all casual stargazing. Throughout much of the United States, for instance, millions upon millions of precious watts are wasted because poorly designed streetlamps send a portion of their light into the sky. But it's not just stargazers who need to be concerned. While some may scoff at preserving the beauty of the night sky, there are other facets of light pollution that have a direct impact on all of us. Here are just a few examples: Energy consumption:Joshua Filmer of Futurism.com reported in 2013 that at least 30 percent of street lighting is wasted light that shines up into the sky, where it does no good. "Calculations show that 22,000 gigawatt-hours a year are wasted. At $0.10 per kilowatt-hour, the cost of that wasted energy is $2.2 billion a year," Filmer wrote. "That's 3.6 tons of coal or 12.9 million barrels of oil wasted every year to produce this lost light." Wildlife:John Metcalfe at Citylab.com reported last year that lights are disorienting birds, with deadly results. "Many species migrate by night and are perilously dazzled by artificial illumination, for reasons we don't yet completely understand," Metcalfe wrote. "Lights on skyscrapers, airports, and stadiums draw birds into urban areas, where they smack into walls and windows or each other, or flap around and eventually perish from exhaustion-related complications." Human health:According to an article published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, several studies over the past two decades have suggested that the modern practice of keeping our bodies exposed to artificial light at night increases cancer risk, especially for cancers that require hormones to grow, such as breast and prostate cancers. LEDs: Good ... and bad Regarding energy consumption, the past five or six years have seen a slow transformation from garish, peach-colored, high-pressure sodium vapor streetlights which have long been recognized to be energy-inefficient to light-emitting diode (LED) streetlights, which use solid-state technology to convert electricity into light. In contrast to old-fashioned incandescent light bulbs used in sodium vapor streetlights, LEDs do not possess filaments that burn out, nor do they get very warm. Because of their improved quality and lower cost, LEDs are now gradually replacing conventional streetlights for outdoor lighting in communities around the world. Good news, right? Well, not necessarily. Unfortunately, white LED lighting also tends to transmit high levels of blue light, which can pose potential health hazards. According to the International Dark-Sky Association (IDA), "Outdoor lighting with high blue light content is more likely to contribute to light pollution because it has a significantly larger geographic reach than lighting with less blue light. Blue-rich white light sources are also known to increase glare and compromise human vision. And in natural settings, blue light at night has been shown to adversely affect wildlife behavior and reproduction." Ways to correct this problem include the following: Properly using shields to direct the light downward, where it is needed. Converting to "warm white" LEDs, which minimize blue emissions. Using adapters that can dim lamps during the late-night and predawn hours. Avoiding the temptation to use extra lights because LEDs are more energy-efficient and thus ultimately less expensive over time. That last suggestion seems to be of especially increasing concern. As an artifact of the lower costs of LEDs, many people are now unnecessarily illuminating places that they didn't bother to light before, like the outsides of buildings and other infrastructure, according to a study in the journal Science Advances. What can you do? The IDA, founded 30 years ago, gathers and disseminates light-pollution information and solutions. It has played a pivotal role in turning the tide in the light-pollution war. The IDA is winning over key sectors of the nonastronomical public including government groups, sections of the lighting industry and electric utilities arguing that good lighting for astronomers equals energy savings and more attractive surroundings for everyone else. For more information on how to get involved, you can contact the IDA directly. (And to learn more about light pollution, you can also watch "Losing the Dark," a short planetarium show and video on light pollution produced by the IDA.) You can also join thousands of other students, families, educators and citizen scientists by participating in an international event called "Globe at Night." This event, which is free to attend, is designed to observe and record how constellations appear from different locations, as a means of measuring the brightness of the sky at a variety of urban and rural sites. Prospective observers can report their results online by comparing the number of stars seen in the night sky with a set of template images that depict the stars' visibility in varying levels of light pollution. Participation is open to anyone, anywhere in the world, who can get outside and look skyward. Not convinced that extra lighting is a problem? Check out these nighttime satellite views of Earth, courtesy of NASA's Suomi NPP satellite. Additional images from Suomi NPP taken between 2010 and 2016 clearly show how light pollution is on the rise around the globe. Lastly, you can do your part by learning more about light pollution and by taking steps to reduce extra nighttime lighting in your own town and backyard. In addition to letting you see the stars better, these steps may also save you money on electricity and help reduce the world's energy usage. Cities and towns that routinely put up ever-brighter lights for no reason other than "that's what we've always done" may think twice about spending the money if they hear just a few voices of opposition. What are your town's lighting plans? Call your city or town hall today! Remember, the night sky you save might be your own. Joe Rao serves as an instructor and guest lecturer at New York's Hayden Planetarium. He writes about astronomy for Natural History magazine, the Farmer's Almanac and other publications, and he is also an on-camera meteorologist for Fios1 News in Rye Brook, New York. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com. NASAs Apollo-Soyuz Test Project command module is seen as the final adjustments are made to its new display at the California Science Center. NASA's last Apollo command module to launch into space has shed its skin to provide a better look at the capsule, which was the first United States spacecraft to fly a joint mission with Russia. The American space vehicle that made up one half of the historic 1975 Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (ASTP) has traded its Plexiglas cover for a new glass display case at the California Science Center in Los Angeles. The six-sided enclosure not only affords the public a clearer view of the three-seat spacecraft, but also meets new conservation requirements set by the Smithsonian, which owns the artifact. "The walls of the display case are made of laminated safety glass because glass has excellent visibility and will offer our guests a clear and unobstructed view of the ASTP command module," said Devin Waller, the exhibit's project manager at the California Science Center, in an interview with collectSPACE. "Unlike the softer acrylic case that was previously used, glass is more resistant to scratching and to chemical reactions that can damage the surface over time affecting the view of the artifact inside." [Apollo-Soyuz: How the First Joint Space Mission Worked (Infographic)] The new case, created by New York-based Evidence Design and fabricated by the Germany-based company Glasbau Hahn, features interior lighting mounted to its ceiling and base frames providing illumination to see details on all sides of and inside the 43-year-old craft. "The addition of a large mirror mounted to the ceiling of the display case will allow guests to see into the ASTP command module's docking hatch and tunnel, a view that was hard to see due to the configuration of the artifact on its display mount," said Waller. "Guests will now be able to view the internal crew compartment from another angle, namely the angle in which the Russian cosmonauts enjoyed seeing when transiting from their Soyuz spacecraft to the ASTP command module during mission operations." Apollo-Soyuz Test Project command module in its original Plexiglas case at the California Science Center in Los Angeles. (Image credit: California Science Center/Perry Roth-Johnson) Originally slated to fly to the moon, command module no. 111 was reassigned to the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project when NASA's Apollo 18 lunar landing mission was cancelled. The spacecraft launched atop a Saturn IB rocket on July 15, 1975 with astronauts Thomas Stafford, Vance Brand and Donald "Deke" Slayton forming the American half of the mission. Two days later on July 17, the command module, outfitted with an adapter module, docked to the former Soviet Union's Soyuz 19 spacecraft with cosmonauts Alexei Leonov and Valery Kubasov on board. The two nations' crew members, previously competitors in a Cold War space race, exchanged handshakes and greetings in Earth orbit, setting the foundation for later cooperation on the International Space Station. The ASTP spacecraft traveled a total of 3.7 million miles (5.9 million kilometers) while completing 148 orbits of Earth. it splashed down on July 24, 1975. The spacecraft debuted on display at the California Science Center, in a Plexiglas case, in 2005 after being on exhibit at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. This is the first upgrade to its showcase since arriving in Los Angeles. In addition to improving the experience for visitors to the science center, the new glass case is also better for the spacecraft's preservation. Installation of glass panels for the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project command module's new display case at the California Science Center. (Image credit: California Science Center/Perry Roth-Johnson) "Although we cannot control or prevent any emissions from the artifact, this case was manufactured and delivered using low emission construction and packaging materials," explained Waller. "A positive pressure environment inside of the case will keep dust from entering on the rare occasion when staff needs to enter the case for maintenance purposes." The science center is planning similar glass display cases for its exhibit of NASA's Mercury-Redstone 2 (MR-2) capsule, which launched the chimpanzee Ham, and the Gemini 11 spacecraft that was flown by astronauts Charles "Pete" Conrad and Richard Gordon. All three spacecraft will eventually be moved into the California Science Center's future Samuel Oschin Air and Space Center, which will also feature the display of the space shuttle Endeavour in a vertical launch configuration. The installation of the ASTP command module's case began on Jan. 25 and was completed almost a month later on Thursday (Feb. 22). The work was done in full view of the public with updates shared online using the hashtag #apollouncovered. See more photos of the new Apollo-Soyuz command module display at collectSPACE. Follow collectSPACE.com on Facebook and on Twitter at @collectSPACE. Copyright 2018 collectSPACE.com. All rights reserved. Jupiter's south pole is seen in a series of time-lapse images taken by NASA's Juno spacecraft during its 11th close flyby of the giant planet on Feb. 7, 2018. You've never seen Jupiter's south pole quite like this. A new photo by NASA's Juno spacecraft show Jupiter's south pole as seen from above during a recent close encounter on Feb. 7. The photo is actually a series of images taken over time by Juno as the probe whipped around Jupiter during its 11th flyby of the giant planet. "At first glance, the series might appear to be the same image repeated," NASA officials wrote in an image description. "But closer inspection reveals slight changes, which are most easily noticed by comparing the far left image with the far right image." [Amazing Jupiter Photos by NASA's Juno Spacecraft] The time-lapse views of Jupiter were taken over a 40-minute period on Feb. 7, starting at 10:21 a.m. EST (1521 GMT), as Juno passed over Jupiter's south pole. Juno took the photos from distances ranging from 85,292 to 124,856 miles (137,264 to 200,937 kilometers). "Directly, the images show Jupiter. But, through slight variations in the images, they indirectly capture the motion of the Juno spacecraft itself, once again swinging around a giant planet hundreds of millions of miles from Earth," NASA officials wrote in the image description. Juno captured the photos with its JunoCam instrument. Those raw images were then processed by citizen scientist Gerald Eichstadt and assembled into the time-lapse series seen here. Juno's raw images are posted online as they are taken; the public can then review and process these images into amazing (and sometimes strange) views of Jupiter. You can access the JunoCam images here. NASA launched the $1.1 billion Juno mission in 2011, and the spacecraft arrived in orbit around Jupiter on July 4, 2016. The spacecraft takes 53 days to make one orbit of Jupiter. That extreme orbit brings the probe within 3,100 miles (5,000 km) of Jupiter's cloud tops at the closest point. Email Tariq Malik at tmalik@space.com or follow him @tariqjmalik and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com. CAPTAIN DAVE REVEALS THE SECRET LIFE OF AIRLINE WORKERS ON AN ALL-NEW "LA TO VEGAS" TUESDAY, MARCH 13, ON FOXRonnie is evicted from her apartment and kicked out of Bernard's, so Captain Dave invites her to stay with him in a community of airline workers. Colin is flustered by his bad student reviews, so Nichole and Bernard sit in on his class to give him pointers, and Artem tracks down Dave to collect a debt in the all-new "Parking Lot B" episode of LA TO VEGAS airing Tuesday, March 13 (9:00-9:30 PM ET/PT), on FOX. (LAV-106) (TV-14 D, L, V)Cast: Dylan McDermott as Captain Dave; Kim Matula as Ronnie; Ed Weeks as Colin; Nathan Lee Graham as Bernard; Olivia Macklin as Nichole and Peter Stormare as Artem Pretoria (South Africa), Feb 21, 2018 (SPS) - Minister of Science and Technology, Mrs. Naledi Pandor, renewed on Tuesday her country's solid support of the struggling Saharawi people, she minister was speaking in parliament yesterday during the debate on President Cyril Ramaphosas state of the nation address delivered last Friday. Ramaphosa is expected to respond later today. The South African official urged urged that Western Sahara the last occupied territory on the continent should not be neglected. Now that Morocco has been readmitted to the AU it must be obliged to finally free the suffering masses of Western Sahara, Naledi Pandor said. Morocco was readmitted to the African Union last year. The country left the organisation more than 30 years ago when the AU recognised the independence of the Western Sahara territory. For his part, the new president of South Africa, Mr. Cyril Ramagosa, in his speech last Friday expressed solidarity with all Africans who are still struggling to regain their legitimate rights and determine their fate. SPS 125/090/ WASHINGTON Connecticut native Paul Manaforts one-time junior business partner, Rick Gates, pleaded guilty Friday in federal court to conspiracy and making false statements involving the pairs laundering of more than $75 million through offshore accounts. The plea sets up Manaforts chief protege as a potential key witness against the New Britain-raised scion of a prominent family deeply involved in Republican politics there. Gates, 45, entered the plea in a brief appearance at U.S. District Court in Washington Friday afternoon. His plea comes on the heel of a 32-count indictment Thursday, which detailed a scheme to disguise millions paid to both men by Unkraines pro-Russia Party of Regions on behalf of that nations former president, Victor Yanukovych, who was driven from power in 2014 and replaced by a pro-Western president. Special counsel Robert Mueller has been investigating Gates and Manafort as part of the ongoing probe of possibly illegal links between the 2016 campaign of President Donald Trump and Russians, aimed at bolstering Trumps electoral prospects by denigrating Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. It is not clear what, if any, relevance the widening case against Manafort has to the broader question of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign and collusion with the election campaign and perhaps Trump himself in doing so. Also Friday, Muellers team unsealed a new indictment solely against Manafort that included an allegation that he, with Gates assistance, secretly paid former European politicians to lobby on behalf of Ukraine. The indictment accuses Manafort of paying the former politicians, informally known as the Hapsburg group, to appear to be independent analysts when in fact they were paid lobbyists. Some of the covert lobbying took place in the U.S. The indictment says the group was managed by a former European chancellor. Court papers accuse Manafort of using offshore accounts to pay the group more than 2 million euros. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., suggested the possible cooperation of Gates with the Mueller investigation might ultimately lead investigators straight to the White House. Securing a guilty plea from Rick Gates, Paul Manaforts right-hand man, is a significant step forward for the special counsels investigation, said Blumenthal, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee that is also investigating the Trump-Russia connection and possible obstruction of justice by the president. Special counsel Mueller is clearly pursuing a longstanding prosecution strategy collecting convictions as he climbs the ladder of criminal culpability and potentially paving a path to the White House. Manafort served as Trumps campaign manager between March and October of 2016. Gates was his deputy in the campaign, and went on to hold a position on Trumps inaugural committee. Manafort insists he committed no crime. Notwithstanding that Rick Gates pled today, I continue to maintain my innocence, Manafort said in a statement relayed through his spokesman, Jason Maloni. I had hoped and expected my business colleague would have had the strength to continue the battle to prove our innocence. For reasons yet to surface he chose to do otherwise. Manafort added: This does not alter my commitment to defend myself against the untrue, piled-up charges contained in the indictments against me. Trump did not respond Friday to a shouted question about the Gates plea. Muellers court filings lay out an astonishing scheme to launder money that Manafort and Gates received for their Ukraine consulting work. The document filed Friday accuses Manafort of using his hidden overseas wealth to enjoy a lavish lifestyle in the United States, without paying taxes on that income. The filing further states Manafort laundered $18 million to buy property, goods and services in the U.S. It details $12 million of direct payments, mostly from an offshore account in Cyprus, to unnamed vendors in the U.S. to cover Manaforts expenses $5.4 million to a Long Island home improvement company; $934,350 to an antique rug dealer in Alexandria, Va.; $849,215 to a mens clothing store in New York; $520,440 to a clothing store in Beverley Hills, Calif.; and $177,405 for the purchase of four Range Rovers and a Mercedes Benz. Another focus of the case against Manafort is his failure to register as an agent of a foreign government for lobbying on behalf of Yanukovych and the Party of Regions. A superseding indictment issued Thursday states that Manaforts overseas accounts paid $6.4 million for properties in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Arlington, Va. After Yanukovych was thrown out of office and Ukraine business dried up in 2015 and 2016, Manafort fraudulently secured $20 million in loans with the properties as collateral, the indictment charges. Manafort and Gates both pleaded not guilty on Muellers initial indictment of them last October. Any current discussion of artificial intelligence in the workforce centers on how it will impact -- or outright replace -- certain departments or even employees. But thats not the most pragmatic conversation for venture capitalists. considering AI's utility in identifying the most interesting startup investments. InReach Ventures co-founder Roberto Bonanzinga, for example, is investing $7 million on software that utilizes machine learning to find worthwhile European startups to pour capital into. Which raises the question: Why isnt every venture capital firm already doing this? Well-established metrics are being used to assess startup potential, and one glance at the market unveils a trove of data points being used by AI algorithms to establish correlations and patterns. These historical points are valuable in assessing how an early-stage startup will perform, while their disjointed and scattered natures provide the perfect environment for AI to thrive in. AI is a powerful tool that can filter through all the noise and present VCs with potential candidates for investment. And that will make it easier for entrepreneurs to find the best way to appeal to VCs and attain the optimal level of funding. Related: The First Thing Your Startup Can Do With AI is Become Instantly More Attractive to VCs AI as an investment aid An inherent risk comes with investing in first-time entrepreneurs, who succeed just 18 percent of the time, according to a Social Science Research Network study. Creative novice business owners are unproven, which can give VCs pause when it comes time to invest. An AI framework arms VCs with the tools and information to use reasoning, knowledge, planning, communication and perception to boil startup viability down to metrics that can complement gut instinct. AI can internalize data -- much like an automated financial adviser -- to quickly summate findings and attach a success probability to a company on the basis of previous industry experiences, churn, revenue growth and market size. By better clarifying which data best translates to successful startups, VCs can educate current and future entrepreneurs. Business owners can tweak their pitches and modify their companies' profiles to better align with what AI deems successful startup metrics, hopefully resulting in more readily available capital. Heres where they can start. 1. Mind the market. Every entrepreneur dreams of running a company thats seen as a market leader. However, raising the money to make that dream a reality is a difficult feat, especially without the right data to act upon. Attracting funds is even harder for less traditional founders who are competing with well-connected rivals for funding. Alice, an AI platform tailored toward entrepreneurial women, whittles the crowded startup scene down for founders by using data to spotlight minority-fronted businesses worth funding. With just 2 percent of U.S. women-owned businesses grossing more than $1 million in revenue, Alice measures metrics in any given industry and uses concrete data to provide personalized recommendations using concrete data, giving business owners the chance to assess their companies against a saturated field. Most founders hope to build a company that can stand out from its most successful competitors while exhibiting similar characteristics to them. Entrepreneurs should use AI platforms like Alice to look at key metrics to see how their startups stack up to competitors who have received funding or are on the cusp. From there, use this information to mold the kind of company that inspires faith -- and funding -- from VCs. Related: The Best Ways to Do Market Research for Your Business Plan 2. Track investor trends. Entrepreneurs historically educated themselves about investors by preparing their applications and pitching to investors, only to find out after meeting with them that they'd been rejected in favor of later-stage companies or ones in different verticals. Many entrepreneurs give up before they've found success because of this, but AI is changing that. Berlin-based VC firm Fly Ventures targets seed and pre-Series A startups and just closed its first fund at $41 million. The plan is for Fly Ventures to target European startups in the seed round and use machine learning to generate deal flow. The company's AI algorithm is reportedly discovering 1,000 new companies a week and can even find burgeoning tech startups before theyve begun fundraising. This type of technology directs entrepreneurs toward meeting the right investors at the right times. After surveying the market, use the AI-provided information to ensure your company's metrics line up with what investors seek in a viable startup partner. Being cognizant of what traits appeal to investors can make the search for funding more fruitful and a little less frustrating. Related: How to Approach an Investor for Your Startup 3. Never stop improving. The great thing about AI is that -- like a business -- it's never done evolving. Machine learning is constantly receiving and analyzing information, so entrepreneurs should use these nonstop updates to constantly tweak their businesses and pitches for investors. Hone Capital is already modeling this behavior. The tech-focused investment firm partnered with AngelList to create a database of more than 30,000 deals from the past decade to feed to a machine-learning model. It explored 400 characteristics and narrowed them down to 20 that are most indicative of future success. Hone provides entrepreneurs a living database of companies to consult for tips on how to improve and differentiate themselves. Founders can take this information and simplify the investment process by applying concrete success metrics to their own businesses. Use these AI capabilities to continually improve your company's profile and gain that first -- or future -- round of funding. By harnessing the power of AI, entrepreneurs at every stage will have access to better data and better insights. The technology isnt just disrupting business operations -- its changing the entire game from top to bottom. And if youre already working with it, youll know youre doing it right when a VC calls you out the blue because you fit the entrepreneurial profile that his AI was looking for. Related: Why Agritech is Set to Redefine VC Investments from 2018? Here's How AI Is Changing VC Funding Why Would Venture Capitalists, Investors Invest in Healthcare Startups in 2018? Copyright 2018 Entrepreneur.com Inc., All rights reserved This article originally appeared on entrepreneur.com It may be embarrassing to talk about, but it's an issue that more companies need to address: employees who access online porn sites. From a business standpoint, online adult content tends to be viewed as an "HR issue," rather than a security issue. But, the reality is that risque websites and apps are increasingly targeted by hackers as a way of infecting the end user. This should raise a big red flag for companies, because if an employee is infected on a work computer or from a personal device that has access to company data or networks, the entire business could be at risk. Related: 5 Things Your Employees Are Doing That Will Get You Hacked And the threat is getting worse. Not only is traditional malware proliferating online, but criminals are creating fake porn apps to lure people into installing these malicious programs on their mobile devices. Large-scale breaches of sensitive databases -- like the AshleyMadison hack of 2015 -- are also a significant opportunity for extortion. Dating websites, "cheater" services, explicit social media sites and virtual sex via webcam are all prime opportunities for blackmailers. In fact, the UK's National Crime Agency recently did a nationwide ad campaign to raise public awareness about these risks. New online tools like FakeApp, which make it easy to generate fake pornography using the images of real people, further push the boundaries for criminals, creating new opportunities for harassment and extortion. The bottom line for businesses is this: If employees are engaging in risky online activities, like pornography, "cheating" services, etc., the chances of a corporate data breach will increase. Employees are always the weakest link in any business' cybersecurity program, so adding to that risk is obviously a problem. Here is what businesses need to know. What are the primary risks? Malware, credential theft and extortion are the key concerns with adult content websites and apps. Related: Making Your Data Unreadable to Whoever Steals It Might Be the Only Way to Keep It Safe Pornography websites are a good conduit for malware since there is a lot of rich media on these sites and pop-up ads are frequent. Due to the sites' sensitive material, this also gives the hacker considerable leverage over the individual that could be used to extort information, such as account passwords and network credentials. The danger for businesses is that an employee's personal activities online could lead to a malware infection that spreads within the company, either from a work computer or by piggybacking off of a personal device used for work purposes to get inside the firewall. Targeted extortion could also be used to get direct access to company accounts. How do criminals deliver these attacks? In many cases, they infect a legitimate porn website or its third-party advertising network with malware, which then spreads to anyone who visits the site. For instance, in just the last year we've seen two large malware campaigns targeting porn sites -- "pornblackmailer" and Pornhub's click-fraud malware. However, many criminals are now also creating fake adult-themed apps that trick people into installing malicious programs to their mobile devices. According to a report this year, Kaspersky Lab found "23 malware families that use porn content to hide their real functionality." Overall it estimates 1.2 million mobile users encountered this type of malware last year. Adult-themed phishing is another method hackers use to steal credentials or infect the user's device with malware. Related: Protect Your Business! The 7 Cybersecurity Tools You Need as an Entrepreneur. What types of malware are used? Cybercriminals are nothing if not diverse and prolific, but most reports show that porn-related malware is generally focused on credential harvesting (i.e., stealing log-ins/passwords) and financial fraud. That should be a concern for businesses, because it would not be difficult to retool this malware in order to aim it at company account log-ins and banking accounts. The fake mobile apps are equally concerning, as Kaspersky Lab estimates 46 percent are used to infect a device with "rooting" malware (which can gain high-level access and permissions on the device) and banking Trojans. Extortion is a growing threat. One particularly disturbing new trend is the use of adult content to extort or blackmail individuals, using their fear of humiliation as leverage. Related: Watch Out for These Cryptocurrency Scams We've seen a variety of schemes like this recently, such as "pornblackmailer" which takes screenshots of the victim's computer to threaten them, and the "we know what you just watched" email scam, which has specifically targeted business email addresses. Last year, researchers also discovered a ransomware campaign called "Karo" that threatens to publicly share any nude photos discovered on the victim's computer. Webcam sextortion is also increasing around the world, with some victims even resorting to suicide. Many victims of the 2015 Ashley Madison data breach also became the target of online blackmailers. Here is one such blackmail letter. In most of these scenarios, the attackers were only after small payments from the victims. But, what if a hacker used these same methods to force an employee to hand over the company's network passwords, or to conduct an insider attack? How many employees would be able to stand up to this type of threat? Sexual content is an Achilles' heel. What an employee does on his or her own time is not the company's business, right? But, the problem with this long-held assumption is that in today's world of "bring your own device," remote access accounts, increased mobility and publicly accessible private lives, an employee's actions outside of the office do have an impact on the company. This problem is compounded by the rise of online sexual content and online sexual activities. Whether it is visiting a porn site, registering for an explicit online dating service, or taking nude or semi-nude "selfies" from a personal device, all of these activities are increasingly at risk of exposure from hackers. Just look at the Brazzers' hack, AdultFriendFinder breach and the many celebrity phone hacking scandals over the years. A recent report also found that many popular dating apps, like OKCupid, Tinder and Bumble, have vulnerabilities that could expose users' information to hackers, blackmailers and stalkers. Related: 10 Ways You're Being Tracked Without You Knowing It What should businesses do? For starters, every company needs to have a strict workplace policy that forbids employees from visiting pornography websites in the office or from a company-owned device. Businesses should reinforce this policy with a web filter on the network that will make accessing these sites difficult. It is also a good idea to educate employees about the risks of adult-content sites and apps, such as malware and extortion. This can be incorporated into any general security awareness program. Lastly, since a company cannot -- and should not -- control the personal lives of its employees, it needs to take a few steps to limit the risk of an insider threat. That threat could be a malware infection that spreads from the employee's device to the entire network, or it could be a rogue action forced by a blackmailer -- such as sharing a key password. To offset this risk, "access controls" are needed. No employee should have too much access to critical company accounts or information. Limit employees' remote access to only certain parts of the network. Passwords should be changed regularly, and protected by non-SMS/email two-factor authentication. Google Authenticator is a good alternative for two-factor authentication. If possible, the company's network should also be segmented to prevent infections from spreading laterally across the entire network. Strong antivirus and firewalls are important, but they won't protect against insider attacks so taking an extra defense-in-depth approach is key. Related: How Online Pornography Can Put Your Company at Risk From Hackers and Other Criminals The Biennial Cyber-Threat: How to Keep Your Company Safe During the Olympics Facebook Accused of Misusing Two-Factor Authentication to Send SMS Spam Copyright 2018 Entrepreneur.com Inc., All rights reserved This article originally appeared on entrepreneur.com NORWALK Senior Caila Degrandi felt uneasy about going back to Norwalk High School on Wednesday, after students were sheltered in place for several hours Tuesday because of a report of a possible weapon on the campus. Although she was aware that Norwalk police did not find any firearms after their school-wide search, she and other students still had questions. Why was it called a drill at first? Degrandi asked. A lot of kids were upset that we were told one thing and it was something different. But I think weve handled it well. Senior Sofia Henao said that question was raised at one of the follow-up assemblies Wednesday morning, but she was not satisfied with the answer. Students also asked if the school would consider adding metal detectors in the building for more security. They were just saying like, Oh the drill and the real thing should be conducted the same way. But either way, we would want to know if it was a drill or its not a drill, Henao said. While the assemblies were set up as an opportunity for students to ask questions and to review safety protocols, some students felt it should have been longer than 10 minutes for each grade level given the current climate surrounding school security. Both Degrandi and Henao felt students had more questions after the assembly was done. More News Investigation prompts heavy police presence at Norwalk High... Shayla Khan, a sophomore at the school, agreed, saying the assembly was a reiteration of what she and others already knew. I dont know if a 10-minute assembly would really help us, Khan said. We already knew about Anonymous Alert. While the district has no official comment about how the assemblies went, spokeswoman Brenda Wilcox-Williams said the school handled the assemblies as an in-school event and no follow-up is expected. In addition to the polices efforts, school staff conducted a secondary search of classrooms, lockers and backpacks before students returned Wednesday, according to Norwalk police Lt. Terry Blake. As of Wednesday early afternoon, Blake said the investigation was closed. To participate in the Garagiste Festival, the winery must produce fewer than 1,500 cases of wine per year. At the recent Garagiste Festival in Solvang, the majority of producers I spoke with produce 100-500 cases of wine. Some of these producers work for larger wineries for their day jobs and others are focused exclusively on growing their small brands. These are not wines made by individuals who made millions in another industry first and are looking for a fun hobby. These are wines made of passion and here are some of the people who are doing that. Seagrape Karen Steinwachs is the winemaker at Buttonwood Farm Winery and Vineyard in Santa Ynez. She and her late husband David had met in the high-tech industry but fell in love with wine and moved up to the Central Coast. In 2007, they started their own label and inspired by the idea of from the sea coast to your table, they named it Seagrape. Making Pinot Noir and Chardonnay from Sta. Rita Hills, as well as Grenache Rose and Gewurztraminer, Steinwachs only produces 500 cases under the Seagrape label. Having her own label, she is able to try different techniques, such as stem inclusion, that she might not do at Buttonwood. A rt of the deal rule one: dont underestimate Martin Gilbert. Last week, he was getting brickbats for losing Lloyds 109 billion Scottish Widows funds. Now we learn that, all along, he had a bigger play elsewhere. Its that moment in the casino where the apparently drunk hick puts down his glass, stops slurring, and lays out a royal flush. Lets rewind: Lloyds was narked when Gilberts Aberdeen merged with Standard Life. So would you be: Lloyds Scottish Widows was Aberdeens biggest customer, yet here was Gilbert jumping in the sack with a direct competitor. So Lloyds offered a deal: sell us Standard Lifes pensions book and well let you keep our business. Fine in principle, but with devils in the detail. Lloyds proposed pooling their pensions into a 60:40 venture for five years. For Gilbert, it felt messy. If were getting out of pensions, they figured, lets do it cleanly not locked into a venture where Lloyds has all the control. Thanks to his chairman Sir Gerry Grimstone, a get-out beckoned. Four years ago, Standard Life bought Phoenixs Ignis fund manager. Grimstone and Phoenixs Clive Bannister got on. Time to talk again. Today they emerge with a deal bringing Gilbert a clean exit and a guarantee that Standard will keep managing Phoenixs 200 billion funds for years to come. Some quibble at the price: Swiss Re paid 20% more for L&Gs similar business. But theres a bigger logic. From its messy mega-merger of pensions and asset management, Standard emerges as a pure, zero conflict of interest fund manager. A number of years ago I made a rare visit to my local GP seeking help; I suspect I was suffering from burnout. Two children under five, one not sleeping and a full-time job was taking its toll. I was also the breadwinner at the time, while my husband began a new business, and the pressures of that matched with the slow drip of guilt at missing so much of my sons rapid growth, meant the normal elasticity of my brain began to constrict. My horizons closed in. Natural ebullience turned to feelings of panic, while a deep pain in my chest became a physical manifestation of the negativity that had begun to blanket out everything I normally took joy from. These stories are now thankfully commonly told as they are common occurrences for many. But seven years ago it was frightening and lonely. Eventually I sought the help of my local GP, who blithely and rapidly in a 10-minute consultation prescribed antidepressants. They may work for some; they certainly didnt for me. Common side-effects, in the first days, can be akin to feeling like youve drunk a lot of coffee. For someone already suffering anxiety, this felt like an injection of cocaine and sent me on such a bad 24-hour trip, I chucked them in the bin. Twice more as my symptoms worsened I sought help from GPs, both on the NHS and privately, and each time the response was to suggest more varieties. Side-effects can be multiple and I seemed to attract every nasty writ on the instruction pamphlet. Eventually I felt forced to request a week off work. Some 12.5 million working days are lost every year to depression. Despite my muddled state, pragmatism drove me to find a therapist, but at a cost of 200 an hour, I could only afford three consecutive sessions. They were still a catalyst for change. The Drugs Do Work and Pop More Happy Pills were headlines yesterday because a six-year study published in The Lancet has proved there is some efficacy to many of these drugs. Those involved trumpeted their increased use, citing a reluctance by doctors to prescribe them or patients to take them. About 65 million prescriptions a year for antidepressants on the NHS dont seem to point to any reluctance, rather a gay abandon in handing them out. That they can work better than a placebo is welcome, but a third of those who take them will not respond at all; the study did not take into account the impact of side-effects on patients. Nor did it explore their efficacy long-term. Depression is often triggered by environmental factors. A pill cannot cure life. It can help pull some out of a mental nosedive but it will not provide the tools to prevent the same factors striking again. It cant be the only factor to help an old person tackle loneliness, a huge cause of depression. Antidepressants have their place one friend keeps a packet by her bed, a constant comfort that help is at hand if her mind ever goes astray again but should not become the fix-all, while other cures and talking therapies get further demoted (they are already scarce). Therapy has always scored as being equally, if not more constructive, cited by every psychotherapist as a vital tool in battling this debilitating illness. Despite my GPs unwillingness to help with therapy then, my council has an excellent self-referral system to access free counselling. But so enthralled were doctors with their pill packets, they hadnt thought to suggest it. Sorry, Jen, but flaunting the flesh with that dress was poorly timed Jennifer Lawrence in Versace / John Phillips/Getty Images Jennifer Lawrence can do little wrong in my eyes. And I sympathise that she felt aggrieved at the backlash when she wore that Versace dress to a photocall this week, surrounded by her male co-stars, their coats in contrast to her screen-siren flesh. But I struggle a bit in this debate because I dont think her detractors were entirely misplaced. We are in the midst of a sea-change, where we not only want to adjust mens behaviour and attitudes to women but also question how much the male gaze has fashioned womens attitudes. And in particular how female beauty and sexuality still defines us, whether we like it or not. Only this week another report stated how many young girls feel upset by their appearance. If we continue to laud buffed, bare flesh in female form look to this weeks Brits to see how women performers wore little more than a leotard while men were in cool suits how can we see ourselves clearly outside this specificity? Many designers have moved away from this flaunt it aesthetic. Take Gucci weird heads aside where you could wear any outfit without being sylph-like thin or revealing skin. Head designer Alessandro Michele asks men to be equally adventurous. Sales rocket. As women, maybe we need to keep challenging a male version of ourselves that flaunts our bodies. Even if its just until perceptions get righted. T he current situation regarding knife crime is tragic but comes as no surprise to me and every operational police officer I know. When she was Home Secretary Theresa May and the Met Commissioner made changes to stop and search because it was politically expedient to do so at the time. The only surprise is that its taken so long for the current hideous state of affairs to materialise. When young men have little fear of being caught in possession of a knife there is little to deter them from carrying one. During my 30 years of service the police have been batted between two no-win positions: accusations of racism based on the disproportionate numbers of black people they stop and search, and accusations of racism because the tragic murders of young black men are not properly dealt with. It is the police who desperately try to save these poor young men as they bleed to death in front of us and who then have to deal with the unimaginable grief of their families. In the UK the police rightly need the consent of the public to police. The public, politicians and commentators need to decide if the community tension created by stop and search outweighs the slaughter of young men. What is certain is that we cannot continue to expect the police to reduce knife crime and then accuse them of singling out people once it is under control. B Hamilton If we really want to put an end to the horrors of knife crime, the solution is quite simple. [Rudd: We need new approach to end London knife carnage, February 19]. The authorities need to bring in new laws and custodial sentences that befit the crime. In simple terms, anyone found carrying a knife or similar type of weapon should receive an automatic minimum 10-year custodial sentence this would soon put a stop to these horrific crimes. Almost everyone I speak to agrees with me on this matter. I struggle to understand why the current sentences are so lenient when this is such a serious issue. Lee Hill Isnt it ironic that people in the UK can criticise the US for its gun laws and the mass shootings that occur as a result, yet when it comes to dealing with our own epidemic of knife crime in London we seem to shy away from the task. Stop and search is often mentioned as a solution but it is nothing more than a stop-gap and has caused problems in specific neighbourhoods where people feel they are targeted. If there was some form of Government incentive for people to hand in their weapons perhaps it might encourage people to give up knives for good? James Harvey Good Friday accord is beyond the EU MATTHEW OToole has got it wrong about Brexiteers and the Good Friday Agreement [Comment, February 21]. It does have inherent faults, not least assigning de facto permanent joint rule to the two largest sectarian parties of the province. However, it was only introduced into the Brexit debate when the Irish Government, backed by the EU, claimed falsely that the British Government was risking renewed violence by refusing to remain in the customs union. Both British negotiators and Brexiteers found this baffling. They saw the Good Friday Agreement as permanent and irrelevant. It was the Irish and the EU who quite irresponsibly used it to up the ante over Brexit. If they dont like the result renewed focus on the agreement in the light of the breakdown of joint rule they only have themselves to blame. Professor Alan Sked It seems that 62 Conservative MPs from the European Research Group (ERG) are calling for a hard Brexit. Isnt this another case of the tail wagging the dog? There are 650 MPs in Parliament, of whom only a few are vocal enough to stand up to the ERG, which is acting like a party within a party. Parliament is sovereign and always has been. It is time it exerted its authority and got rid of the ERG, which is tainting our democracy. Pat Whitaker Courts must rule on social media posts I agree in part with the comments of Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales [Wikipedia boss: No regrets over bad decisions, February 21]. Certainly, some of the politicians ideas for regulating social media platforms could be a problem. Users understand that when they make posts they are not submitting drafts for editing by professionals the user, not the platform, is the publishers. It is reasonable to expect platforms to take illegal material down as soon as possible, but it must be ultimately for the courts, not any executive branch of government, to rule on what is lawful if that issue is contested. Andy Thompson Shame on those who dump their rubbish Vicky Richardsons excellent article [A rubbish revolution is required, Homes & Property, February 21] made a lot of sense . But the big problem for London is also how domestic rubbish is handled. I live on a beautiful street in South Kensington and the basement of our building has a vermin problem because of these rubbish mountains. It has taken Kensington and Chelsea council months to address it. Many people are guilty of simply throwing bags onto the street in front of their house or building and take no notice of collection dates. The result is that Londons streets are becoming smelly, unhygienic and unsightly. F or many stars, the Academy Awards represents the absolute pinnacle of achievement and acclaim in Hollywood. Taking home an Oscar is something actors dream about from their earliest days, with some stars willing to do almost anything to win (Leo, were looking at you). However, the Academy doesnt always get it right when it comes to celebrating the best work in the film industry as weve seen in 2019, with Bohemian Rhapsody proving a surprising nominee for Best Picture. There are plenty of examples of great talent being overlooked at the awards, and a look through the archives throws up plenty of baffling decisions. From Shakespeare in Love to Forrest Gump, these are the biggest Oscars upsets of all time. The 10 biggest Oscars upsets of all time 1 /10 The 10 biggest Oscars upsets of all time How Green Was My Valley (1942) Citizen Kane is synonymous with cinematic greatness, with the Orson Welles masterpiece frequently heralded as the best movie ever made. However, in 1942 it wasnt even recognised as the best film of the year, after How Green Was My Valley won the prize for Best Picture. Whats even more baffling, is that Citizen Kane was recognised with wild praise at the time of its release too Bosley Crowther of the New York Timess review was indicative of the critical response, saying: "Citizen Kane is far and away the most surprising and cinematically exciting motion picture to be seen here in many a moon ... it comes close to being the most sensational film ever made in Hollywood. How Green Was My Valley, the story of a Welsh mining community in the 19th century, remains a cult favourite, but could never match the legacy of Wells classic the movie might have missed out in 1942, but its destined to be lauded forever. Art Carney (1975) Al Pacino and Jack Nicholson gave the performances of their lives in the run up to the 1975 Oscars, starring in The Godfather and Chinatown respectively. Both era-defining films with powerful turns from Pacino and Nicholson at their heart, which have gone on to be regarded as two of the greatest films ever made. However, it was Art Carney, best known for appearing in sitcom The Honeymooners, who took the Best Actor prize for comedy Harry and Tonto. The film a cutsie drama about an old man travelling across country with his cat appears to have disappeared into the vaults of film history, while The Godfather and Chinatown remain two giants of cinema. Awarding Carney the gong certainly wasnt the academys finest hour. Beatrice Straight (1977) Beatrice Straight must go down as one of the most baffling Oscar winners of all time. She claimed the Best Supporting Actress prize with only five minutes screen time in 1977s Network, marking the shortest Oscar-winning performance ever. Straight beat Jodie Foster and Jane Alexander, who had major, critically-acclaimed roles in Taxi Driver and All The Presidents Men respectively. While Network is a classic of its kind, with a prescient outlook on rolling news culture and public discourse, awarding an Oscar based on a five minute performance is frankly ludacris. Safe to say, it made the other nominees mad as hell... Rocky (1977) The Rocky movie series got increasingly ridiculous as it went along, reaching a preposterous peak with the unbelievably epic training montage in Rocky IV. However, it all started rather more seriously, with the first film representing a hard-hitting drama. Despite excellent performances from Sly Stallone and Talia Shire as Adrian, it was still a shock to see the film knock out the likes of Taxi Driver, All the Presidents Men and Network in 1977. While it is true that the Rocky films that followed have changed fans perspectives of the original, the fact that it won against such strong opposition is still surprising. Dances With Wolves (1991) Goodfellas was unbelievably unlucky to lose out to Kevin Costners Dances with Wolves for Best Picture back in 1991, with Costner also winning Best Director. Kevin Costners epic western is a fine film in its own right, but pales in comparison to Martin Scorseses masterpiece and hasnt stood the test of time nearly as well. Theres a chance Goodfellas could have been overlooked due to its graphic violence, with the academy generally favouring the wholesome over the nasty or nihilistic. But while its a very different movie, Costners Dances With Wolves is a less impressive work. Its a travesty that Scorsese had to wait a further 16 years before claiming an Oscar for best Director on The Departed, while none of his films has ever won Best Picture. Forrest Gump (1995) Forrest Gump might be one of the most popular films of the last 25 years, but its still very surprising that it won out over Pulp Fiction and The Shawshank redemption for Best Picture in 1995. As with Goodfellas a few years later, perhaps Pulp Fiction was a little too violent, and Shawshank Redemptions poor performance at the box office may have swayed their decision the revered film was a flop upon release, making just $28m off the back of a $25m budget. However, the teams behind the films would have been aggrieved to have lost out to Robert Zemeckiss schmaltzy drama, which thanks to clunky use of CGI and an uncharacteristic performance from Hank lacking in nuance, hasnt aged well. Shakespeare in Love (1999) Harvey Weinstein embarked on an exhaustive three month press cycle to push Shakespeare In Love into contention in the late 90s, changing the way Oscars marketing was done for ever. He also hosted parties for members of the Academy, which were accused of going against the awards regulations. While Steven Spielbergs Saving Private Ryan one of the greatest war films ever made, which grossed $481m at the worldwide box office seemed a dead cert when it was nominated for the Best Picture Oscar in 1999 just a few months before. It was the schmaltzy romantic comedy Shakespeare in Love which came away with the award that year though in a shock decision. Judi Dench (1999) That Judi Dench is a fantastically talented actor has never been in doubt, but her Best Supporting Actress award for Shakespeare In Love in 1998 came as something of a shock. Dench was on-screen for a grand total of eight minutes as Queen Elizabeth, and her win certainly ruffled a few feathers. While she certainly deserves an award for her illustrious career, this wasnt the right film with which to win it. Sadly, it looks to be the effect of the Weinstein-led marketing frenzy which surrounded the film could have played a part, with Gwyneth Paltrow also winning Best Actress for her performance in the film. Getty Images Crash (2006) Crash became one of the most surprising Best Picture winners of all time back in 2006, when Sandra Bullock, Thandie Newton and Matt Dillons film proved a surprising winner and beat a list of hotly-tipped contenders. Its a perfectly fine, if pretty preposterous thriller, but when Brokeback Mountain, Capote and Munich were all nominated that year, it has to go down as one of the Academys biggest upsets. What makes it even more surprising was the films very mixed critical reception. Variety's Todd McCarthy called it a determinedly dire but neatly packaged ensembler on the state of race relations, while the Guardians Peter Bradshaw said: Its daringly supercharged fantasies of racial paranoia and humanist redemption are not to be taken too seriously. To see it beat modern classics like Brokeback Mountain is pretty unthinkable in hindsight. The King's Speech (2011) The Kings Speech might be one of the most successful British films of recent years, but it still came as something of a surprise when it beat Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan, the Coen Brothers True Grit remake, The Social Network, 127 Hours and The Fighter to the top spot. The film feels televisual at times almost like a BBC Sunday night drama and decidedly twee in the face of bolder and more daring competition. David Finchers The Social Network, in particular, was unlucky to miss out, having been nominated for eight awards and winning three. It was also awarded the Golden Globe for Drama Motion Picture that year and should have won the Best Picture award at the Oscars too. How Green Was My Valley (1942) Citizen Kane is synonymous with cinematic greatness, with the Orson Welles masterpiece frequently heralded as the best movie ever made. However, in 1942 it wasnt even recognised as the best film of the year, after How Green Was My Valley won the prize for Best Picture. Whats even more baffling, is that Citizen Kane was recognised with wild praise at the time of its release too Bosley Crowther of the New York Timess review was indicative of the critical response, saying: "Citizen Kane is far and away the most surprising and cinematically exciting motion picture to be seen here in many a moon ... it comes close to being the most sensational film ever made in Hollywood. How Green Was My Valley, the story of a Welsh mining community in the 19th century, remains a cult favourite, but could never match the legacy of Wells classic the movie might have missed out in 1942, but its destined to be lauded forever. Art Carney (1975) Harry and Tonto trailer Al Pacino and Jack Nicholson gave the performances of their lives in the run up to the 1975 Oscars, starring in The Godfather and Chinatown respectively. Both era-defining films with powerful turns from Pacino and Nicholson at their heart, which have gone on to be regarded as two of the greatest films ever made. However, it was Art Carney, best known for appearing in sitcom The Honeymooners, who took the Best Actor prize for comedy Harry and Tonto. The film a cutsie drama about an old man travelling across country with his cat appears to have disappeared into the vaults of film history, while The Godfather and Chinatown remain two giants of cinema. Audiences saw things a little differently at the time Carney was given a standing ovation during the ceremony, and his performance is certainly more impressive than the film itself. However, in hingsight, awarding him the award seems like a mistake from the Academy. Beatrice Straight (1977) TODO: define component type brightcove Beatrice Straight claimed the Best Supporting Actress prize with only five minutes screen time in 1977s Network, marking the shortest Oscar-winning performance ever. Straight beat Jodie Foster and Jane Alexander, who had major, critically-acclaimed roles in Taxi Driver and All The Presidents Men respectively. While Network is a classic of its kind, with a prescient outlook on rolling news culture and public discourse, awarding an Oscar based on a five minute performance is frankly ludacris. Safe to say, it made the other nominees mad as hell... Rocky (1977) Rocky trailer The Rocky movie series got increasingly ridiculous as it went along, reaching a preposterous peak with the unbelievably epic training montage in Rocky IV. However, it all started rather more seriously, with the first film representing a hard-hitting drama. Despite excellent performances from Sly Stallone and Talia Shire as Adrian, it was still a shock to see the film knock out the likes of Taxi Driver, All the Presidents Men and Network in 1977. The later Rocky films may have changed fans perspectives of the original - with people forgetting just how gritty and moving it is - but the fact that it won against such strong opposition is still surprising. Dances With Wolves (1991) TODO: define component type brightcove Goodfellas was unbelievably unlucky to lose out to Kevin Costners Dances with Wolves for Best Picture back in 1991, with Costner also winning Best Director. Kevin Costners epic western is a fine film in its own right, but pales in comparison to Martin Scorseses masterpiece and hasnt stood the test of time nearly as well. Theres a chance Goodfellas could have been overlooked due to its graphic violence, with the academy generally favouring the wholesome over the nasty or nihilistic. But while its a very different movie, Costners Dances With Wolves is a less impressive work. Its a travesty that Scorsese had to wait a further 16 years before claiming an Oscar for best Director on The Departed, while none of his films has ever won Best Picture. Forrest Gump (1995) TODO: define component type brightcove Forrest Gump might be one of the most popular films of the last 25 years, but its still very surprising that it won out over Pulp Fiction and The Shawshank redemption for Best Picture in 1995. As with Goodfellas a few years later, perhaps Pulp Fiction was a little too violent, and Shawshank Redemptions poor performance at the box office may have swayed their decision the revered film was a flop upon release, making just $28m (21.5m) off the back of a $25m (19m) budget. However, the teams behind the films would have been aggrieved to have lost out to Robert Zemeckiss schmaltzy drama, which thanks to clunky use of CGI and a performance from Hank lacking in nuance, hasnt aged as well. Shakespeare in Love (1999) Shakespeare in Love trailer Harvey Weinstein embarked on an exhaustive three month press cycle to push Shakespeare In Love into contention in the late 90s, changing the way Oscars marketing was done for ever. He also hosted parties for members of the Academy, which were accused of going against the awards regulations. While Steven Spielbergs Saving Private Ryan one of the greatest war films ever made, which grossed $481m at the worldwide box office seemed a dead cert when it was nominated for the Best Picture Oscar in 1999 just a few months before. It was the schmaltzy romantic comedy Shakespeare in Love which came away with the award that year though in a shock decision. Judi Dench (1999) Getty Images That Judi Dench is a fantastically talented actor has never been in doubt, but her Best Supporting Actress award for Shakespeare In Love in 1998 came as something of a shock. Dench was on-screen for a grand total of eight minutes as Queen Elizabeth, and her win certainly ruffled a few feathers. While she certainly deserves an award for her illustrious career, this wasnt the right film with which to win it. Sadly, it looks to be the effect of the Weinstein-led marketing frenzy which surrounded the film could have played a part, with Gwyneth Paltrow also winning Best Actress for her performance in the film Weinstein's influence is thought to have played a significant part in another Oscars upset, after it was suggested his campaigning helped the English Patient's Juliette Binoche win the Best Supporting Actress award over Hollywood legend Lauren Bacall who gave a critically acclaimed performance in The Mirror Has Two Faces back in 1996 previously the clear favourite. Binoche even acknowledged Bacall in her winning speech, saying "she deserves it". Crash (2006) Crash trailer Crash became one of the most surprising Best Picture winners of all time back in 2006, when Sandra Bullock, Thandie Newton and Matt Dillons film proved a surprising winner and beat a list of hotly-tipped contenders. Its a perfectly fine, if pretty preposterous thriller, but when Brokeback Mountain, Capote and Munich were all nominated that year, it has to go down as one of the Academys biggest upsets. What makes it even more surprising was the films very mixed critical reception. Variety's Todd McCarthy called it a determinedly dire but neatly packaged ensembler on the state of race relations, while the Guardians Peter Bradshaw said: Its daringly supercharged fantasies of racial paranoia and humanist redemption are not to be taken too seriously. To see it beat modern classics like Brokeback Mountain is pretty unthinkable in hindsight. The King's Speech (2011) TODO: define component type brightcove C herry Blossoms have captivated artists for centuries and continue to captivate the worlds attention through platforms like Instagram. In recent years, Japan has become synonymous with the Cherry Blossom, the tree that flowers from April through May each year. The iconic sea of pink washes through the country come spring where tourists flock to see the gorgeous hues first-hand. Known as Sakura, Japan has mastered the art of Cherry Blossom appreciation, with retailers decorating their stores in the pink florals months before the first flower emerges and they even have a dedicated Cherry Blossom forecast, where the trees are analysed to predict when they will bloom. When the blossoms finally arrive, this calls for the nation to indulge in hanami which translates to looking at flowers. This is where people will have picnics under the trees and appreciate the blooms. When is the best time of year to see the Cherry Blossom? The tricky part of seeing the Cherry Blossom is the timing. If the weather has been particularly warm that year, as it has this year, they might appear earlier than if there has been a cold winter. People. Fashion. Power. Delivered weekly. Email Sign up Sign up I would like to be emailed about offers, event and updates from Evening Standard. Read our privacy notice {{message}} {{permutiveUid}} {{message}} The best time to visit the blooms is early April as they generally last from late March through to early May. This year, as the winter has been unseasonably warm, the blossoms have already begun to appear, meaning full bloom will be earlier than usual. Shutterstock The first blossoms often appear in Okinawa, sometimes as early as January, and move north before reaching Hokkaido in early May. According to the Cherry Blossom Forecast, this year the blooms were expected to begin flowering in Tokyo on March 21 and the first full bloom day will be March 30. Where are the best places to see the Cherry Blossom? Mount Yoshino has been Japans most popular Cherry Blossom viewing spot for centuries as the mountain is covered in over 30,000 cherry trees. Crowds gather in the tree-covered slopes and you can also visit temples or hike up to the Hanayagura View Point. The blossoms here often last until May. For easy access, Tokyo is also home to a number of hanami nature spots like Ueno Park or Shinjuku Gyoen the latter which has 1,500 cherry trees. Early April is the best time to see these blooms. For a truly magical spot, you can visit Himeji Castle in Himeji, with its striking white walls contrasting with the pink hues of the blossoms. The best time to visit here is early April and its just a 60-minute train ride from Osaka. Mount Fujis Five Lakes region is the perfect spot to get a glimpse of two of Japans best-known natural wonders. Head to Chureito Pagoda in mid to late April to get the best view of the trees with Mouth Fuji in the background. Philosopher Nishida Kataro used to walk along a path on his way to Kyoto University every day, and thus is became known as the Philosophers Path. Now, each year around early April, the path is in full bloom which makes for one of the more beautiful walks you will ever take. A teenager was being questioned today in connection with two murders and a violent stabbing on a shocking night of bloodshed in Camden. Business student Sadiq Mohamed, 20, died from serious stab injuries after being discovered in Malden Road, Camden, at around 10.15pm on Tuesday. At 8.30pm, 17-year-old Abdikarim Hassan was found with knife wounds half a mile away in Bartholomew Road and died at the scene. Detectives today revealed that some 30 minutes earlier, officers on patrol discovered a 16-year-old boy suffering stab wounds in Aldenham Street, near the British Library. The 17-year-old victim was named locally as Abdikarim Hassan He and another boy had been chased down by a group of men armed with knives and remains in hospital with injuries not thought to be life threatening. Scotland Yard today said all three attacks were being treated as linked due to their proximity in time and locations, the nature of the attacks and developing lines of inquiry. Witnesses reported seeing a blue van near the scene of the two murders while in each stabbing there were reports of a group of three to four men armed with knives. Stab victim Sadiq Mohamed The Met said officers arrested an 18-year-old man last night at an address in Camden on suspicion of two counts of murder and one of grievous bodily harm. Detective Chief Inspector Paul Considine, who is leading the joint investigation, said: I need the publics help to establish the exact circumstances in which two young men were murdered and another seriously injured, and to identify the people responsible. The first teenager died at the scene on Bartholomew Road in Kentish Town / Nigel Howard Today, I am asking local residents or those people who were out in the area that night to think back - and if they saw something that may help us, please get in contact. I can understand why some people may be reluctant or nervous about coming forward but we need your help. We will treat your information in the strictest of confidence. I also believe that there are people out there who knows exactly who is responsible. I would urge you to do the right thing and tell us what you know. He added: The frequency with which young men are prepared to take each others lives is shocking. We all have a part to play in preventing this. In particular, he urged anyone who had seen a blue van in the area of the attacks on the night to come forward urgently. The appeal came after the mother of Mr Mohamed told how her son had left a voicemail message telling her Im wounded moments after he was attacked with what witnesses described as a Samurai sword. Mr Mohameds brother Mohamed Aadam, was fatally knifed last September in Camden Town while their cousin, Mohamed Abdullahi, was stabbed to death in 2013. At the family home in Mornington Crescent mum Fowsiya Abdi, 48, fought back tears as she said: He left me a message that said Im wounded, I got wounded. She added: I am now so worried for my other children, they all live in the same postcode. I cannot express how angry I am. I would like for anyone carrying a knife to be punished and taken off the streets. Camden borough commander Chief Superintendent Nicholas Davies said police have since imposed a Section 60 stop and search order across the area. She said: Tuesday was a shocking night for all of us in Camden. The violence used by young men against each other in such a short time period and small area has rightly caused concern in such a diverse and vibrant borough. We are doing all we can to address that concern. For the last three days we have had extra officers on duty highly visible and in plain clothes carrying out a range of intelligence led operations and patrols. This will continue. The stabbings shocked the capital and led to renewed calls for action against knife crime with London Assembly members calling the situation a crisis. Sixteen people have been stabbed to death in London since the start of 2018. Five of those were teenagers. A martial arts teacher who put his brother-in-law in a chokehold and left him unconscious in a deserted car park has been spared jail so he can finish his City business degree. Ali El-Fouani, 22, attacked 25-year-old Adam Gomes, grabbing him round the neck and cutting off oxygen to his brain. The row was over El-Fouanis sister splitting up from Mr Gomes and the question of who would keep gold from their marriage. El-Fouani went to confront his brother-in-law and met him at 3.30am on March 22 last year in an Asda car park near the Old Kent Road. El-Fouani, who teaches martial arts to children in Brentwood, left Mr Gomes unconscious on the ground but eventually returned to check that he had come round, Inner London crown court heard. He denied assaulting Mr Gomes but was found guilty yesterday. Recorder Silas Reid said he would ordinarily have been sent to prison for the attack, and richly deserves it. However, he gave El-Fouani a five-month suspended sentence so that he could complete his final year of a business course at the St Marys Axe campus of the BPP Business School. He runs a barber shop franchise and was said to be set for a first class degree. A masked thug was filmed carrying out a terrifying robbery of a corner shop armed with a huge hunting knife, before giving some of his spoils to a woman and child he told to wait outside. Shocking CCTV footage shows the hooded suspect, dressed all in black, burst into the shop in south east London, wielding the huge weapon. In a bizarre twist, the man handed his spoils, including sweets and fizzy pop, to a woman and child who walked in on his terrifying raid at the shop in Erith, Bexley. The man threatened a 45-year-old shop owner and demanded he hand over cash from the till. The traumatised victim gave in to the mans requests after being interrogated over where more money was kept. The man threatened a shopkeeper with a large hunting knife / Met Police During the shocking incident, a woman and a young boy entered the store and were ordered to wait outside. The suspect asked them what they wanted before barging back into the store and taking eight packs of cigarettes, two cans of fizzy pop and some sweets. He handed the goods to the woman and child before fleeing towards Northumberland Heath Park, Scotland Yard said. The suspect is described as black man around 5ft 6 ins tall. He was wearing a black Nike tracksuit, scarf, hat and gloves at the time of the robbery. Detectives investigating the case are probing links with a series of robberies in Erith since December 15 last year. DC Maxine Hudd called on the woman and child to come forward. She said: We believe that this could possibly be linked to a number of robberies that have taken place in the Erith area since 15 December 2017. Police are appealing for witnesses to this incident, specifically the woman and child, who were outside the shop, or anyone who saw the suspect enter or leave the park. Anyone with information is asked to call Bexley CID on 020 8284 9146 or the police non-emergency line on 101. As recently as the mid-1980s, wood flavoring in red wines was seen as a sign of poor wine making. The late winemaker Andre Tchelistcheff often said that aging red wines in barrels was mainly done for maturity to allow raw fermented grape juice to develop its wine-y flavors. Once you can taste the wood, Andre told me in 1986, youve lost the wine. Yet so many of the tasting notes we read on supposedly exalted red wines refer more to the wood than to the grape. Decades ago, one of the most widely acknowledged great red wines of the Napa Valley was the Cabernet Sauvignon from Heitz Cellar designated Marthas Vineyard. One expected aroma note from a Marthas Vineyard Cab back then was a eucalypt smell. Some people called it mint. It may have been a result of the fact that the vineyard was adjacent to a stand of eucalyptus trees, and that the minty notes in the wine actually came from micro-drops off the trees. The late Joe Heitz once joked that he encouraged that smell in the wine by tossing tree leaves into the gondolas after harvest. Yet some people didnt like or understand that aroma. Notably, in May 1976, a series of French tasters judged the 1970 Heitz Cabernet to be seventh best of 10 Cab-based wines in the famed Judgment of Paris tasting. A head of a human rights charity today said it is helping more and more trafficking victims in London. Professor Cornelius Katona is medical director at the Helen Bamber Foundation, which has worked with asylum-seekers, refugees and victims of trafficking and torture since 2005. The psychiatrist said: We often see people where a large component of their trafficking has taken place in the UK. They continue to be exploited for sexual purposes, or for work, or for both, in the UK. It can take years to escape from that. This week the foundation was awarded a 100,000 grant by the City Bridge Trust, the City of London Corporations charitable fund. Based in Camden, it treats 840 patients, mainly for post-traumatic stress disorder. Professor Katona said: Unless good victim care is ensured, the likelihood of successful prosecution goes down. The two go hand in hand. The police need to interview people in a way that minimises further stress and further trauma in both the police setting and in the court setting. A Metropolitan Police spokesperson said: We are committed to prosecuting those responsible for human trafficking and modern slavery offences. We put the victims at the centre of all the services we deliver to safeguard them and help them bring a case before the court. M Ps have backed a landmark bill that could save hundreds of lives every year by introducing an opt-out organ donation process. Under current rules donors, or their families, must declare whether they would be happy for their organs to be given to someone else in the event of their death. But a new proposed law, backed by the Commons on Friday, would drastically change the rules meaning that people would have to, instead, declare if they do not want to be a donor. The vote was passed with no opposition after MPs made passionate and emotional speeches in the Commons. The Organ donation (Deemed Consent) Bill was introduced by Labour MP Geoffrey Robinson. Mr Robinson told MPs that the country has some of the lowest rates of organ donation in Western Europe and said NHS figures revealed around 500 people were dying every year due to a lack of suitable donors. "This is not good enough, he said. I believe we can do better and be pioneers in making transplants more effective." He also said that he hoped it would encourage families to speak more openly about the issue, saying: "None of us likes to think about the worst happening. It is challenging to have conversations with loved ones about their wishes after death. "We know that it is at that moment when families are confronted with the awful situation that very often they back off, sometimes over-riding the wishes of the deceased who happens to be a registered donor." Labour MP Julie Elliott made an impassioned speech on the issue and spoke of her daughter who is currently receiving dialysis for a serious kidney disease. She said family had undergone turmoil when her 36-year-old daughter, who was previously health, was diagnosed with the problem in 2016. "What happened to us over the last 18 months could happen to anyone, rich or poor... and highlights the reality of the need to change the law to a position of deemed consent," she said. "From hopefully one day the family member of a recipient, I want to say (to donors) thank you very much from the bottom of my heart - you are very special people." "Let us make the change in the law to save more lives of the thousands waiting for transplants." The Bill proposes calling the new legislature Maxs Law, named after nine-year-old Max Johnson who implored politicians to back the move after his own life was saved by a heart transplant. His mum, Emma, was in Parliament on Friday to listen to the speakers. After passing its second reading, the bill will now be heavily scrutinised during the committee stage. It will then have to pass through the House of Lords before it can be brought into play. John Maingay, Director of Policy and Public Affairs at the British Heart Foundation said the strength of feeling on the issue was clear to see as politicians backed the bill. T he school forced to move after the Grenfell Tower fire is looking forward to returning home and could be back in its original building within months. Kensington Aldridge Academy lost four pupils and one former student in the blaze, and some children are still having counselling. But its head said pupils could return to the site at the foot of the tower as early as September if the burned-out building was wrapped and shielded from view. He said the secondary school is determined the future will be positive, with its first set of GCSE results due this summer and three of the first cohort of sixth formers offered Oxbridge places. Principal David Benson said: The feeling in the school community is that as difficult as it is to have to think about Grenfell, we are optimistic and proud of the successes the school has had. He added: 2018 is a big year for us. We are very focused on our first set of A-level results and the three Oxbridge offers. We are projecting that our first set of GCSE results will be among the very highest nationally in terms of progress. And we are very focused on getting back into our building. The pupils were forced to move after the fire ripped through the 24-storey Grenfell Tower in June last year / PA The school, which opened in 2014, is now in a temporary building made entirely of portable units on the edge of Wormwood Scrubs, around a mile from the original site. Built in nine weeks, all the facilities in the original building were replicated including state-of-the-art science labs and music studios. But despite the top quality new site, Mr Benson said the school is keen to return home. He added: Our admissions policy and our whole philosophy remains unchanged. We are a north Kensington academy built to serve that community. We are temporarily here in W12, but we are very much going home. We have retained links with the building and I visit it regularly. There is an attachment that the school feels to that building and that community, that we will be looking forward to at the right time getting back to. KAA1, as the original building is now known, was largely undamaged by the fire. But the school had to move to KAA2 because of its proximity to the 24-storey Grenfell Tower, and because it was within the police cordon. Mr Benson said: We anticipate being back in September. But that will only be if the tower is fully wrapped, and if the school by which I mean the parents, students, staff and governors feel that is the right thing to do. We need to be satisfied about all the questions we will have if the tower is being demolished will that be safe? Air quality? As long as we can be 100 per cent sure that its in the best interests of our students then we will go home. Mr Benson called the community 'wonderful, vibrant, creative, proud, ambitious' / Getty Images He added: As difficult as it is to think of being in a school close to the tower, we are a community school, we have a transparent admissions policy based on distance, which means all of our kids live effectively within half a mile of the school. So they are very familiar, just like everyone is in north Kensington, with living close to Grenfell Tower. Only six months after the fire, in which 71 people died, Ofsted rated KAA outstanding. Mr Benson said teachers were offered the chance to defer the inspection, but told him: You must be joking. He continued: They felt their lessons were productive and purposeful and they had the facilities they needed, so why delay it? What followed was an exceptional Ofsted report that described the schools achievements as remarkable. The schools motto intrepidus, meaning to be bold and undaunted, is at the heart of everything, it said. Mr Benson said: This is a wonderful, vibrant, creative, proud, ambitious community. Students in our school do come in many cases from deprived backgrounds but they live in one of the most affluent, exciting parts of London and they are no stranger to that success. Its all around them so they want that themselves, understandably. Victims of the Grenfell Tower fire 1 /59 Victims of the Grenfell Tower fire Final death toll: Just some of the victims who were killed in the Grenfell Tower blaze PA Final death toll: Just some of the victims who were killed in the Grenfell Tower blaze Five-year-old Isaac Paulos Family Handout Logan Gomes, who was stillborn after his family escaped from the 21st floor of the Grenfell Tower AP Victoria King, 71, and her 40-year-old daughter Alexandra Atala were among those who died in the blaze PA A photograph of Mohamed Amied Neda as his family were forced to hold a second funeral PA Mary Mendy Maria Del Pilar Burton, who was rescued from the 19th floor of Grenfell Tower, has died seven months on from the blaze Alexandra Atala, 40, the last victim to be named and pictured from the Grenfell fire Metropolitan Police Gloria Trevisan and Marco Gottardi Rania Ibrahim, Fethia Hassan and Hania Hassan PA Raymond Bernard Bassem Choucair and Nadia Choucair PA Sirria Choucair PA Mierna Choucair PA Fatima Choucair died along with five other relatives PA Mariem Elgwahry AP Hashim Kedir, wife Nura and children Yahya, 13, left, Firdaws, 11, and Yaqub, six. Mehdi El-Wahabi, 8, lived on the 21st floor of Grenfell Tower Met Police Ligaya Moore, 79, a Filipino living in the tower Met Police Artist Khadija Saye PA Victim: 12-year-old Jessica Urbano Ramirez was killed in the fire Victim: Farah Hamdan, 31, pictured with her baby daughter Mohamednur Tuccu, 44, and his three-year-old daughter Amaya Tuccu-Ahmedin PA Berkti Haftom, 29 and Biruk Haftom, 12 Metropolitan Police Victim: Sakina Afrasehabi, 65, died in the Grenfell Tower fire PA Fatima Afraseiabi 'Well respected': Grandmother-of-six Sheila Smith was killed in the Grenfell Tower blaze Met Police Hamid Kani was found on the 23rd floor PA Steve Power Mohammed Al-Haj Ali Syrian Solidarity Campaign Denis Murphy PA Young victim: Jeremiah Deen, two, died in the blaze Met Police Zainab Deen Anthony Disson Ali Yawar Jafari PA Nora Huda Kedir Hashim: His wife and their three children died Hesham Rahman PA Gary Maunders PA Ernie Vital and his mother Marjorie PA Amal Ahmedin and Amaya PA Amna Mahmud Idris PA Kamru Miah, 79, who died in the Grenfell Tower fire PA Rabeya Begum PA Mohammed Hamid, 27, died in the fire PA Mohammed Hanif PA Husna Begum PA Fathia Ali Ahmed Elsanosi PA Vincent Chiejina PA Abdulaziz El-Wahabi PA Faouzia El-Wahabi, 41 PA Yasin El-Wahabi, 20 PA Nur Huda El-Wahabi, 16, PA Mehdi El-Wahabi, 8, lived on the 21st floor of Grenfell Tower Met Police Khadija Khaloufi PA Omar Belkadi, 32, and Farah Hamdan, 31 PA Deborah Lamprell Mohammed Al-Haj Ali PA There is a specific way of organising lessons to get the most out of students. Pupils are given reading to do before lessons, so by the time they arrive in the classroom they know basic facts. Students must also correct and redraft homework after it has been marked. The school holds lectures every week, a practice more common in private schools, and speakers have included Mayor Sadiq Khan and Nobel Peace Laureate Adolfo Perez Esquivel. Sixth formers talk animatedly about how these talks have inspired them, and there is a sense of optimism. But the school will always be linked to Grenfell, and counselling is available for any students who need it. The Evening Standards Dispossessed Fund has helped to pay for an in-house clinical psychologist. Mr Benson said: Broadly speaking the school has very much carried on, with students focusing on their education. But of course in the background for students who have been particularly affected by the fire there has had to be extensive counselling and support. That therapist does really important work with a small group of targeted students, and that allows them to continue to focus on their education. The students know its there and they know if they are feeling upset in any way about what happened that they can access that support. The temporary school building has a dedicated memorial room where students can retreat to and a memory book. The space will be mirrored when the school returns home. A memorial service will also be held at a church next Saturday. Mr Benson admitted that the weeks following the tragedy last June were particularly difficult. Pupils were split between two nearby schools for the final five weeks of the year, and the atmosphere was inevitably quite subdued until they moved into their temporary building in September. But he said: There was a lot of coming together and support for each other in that time, and the school community in some ways was strengthened through that. Stormzy raps about Theresa May and money for Grenfell at Brit Awards T heresa May was facing the threat of a fresh Commons Brexit rebellion despite meeting with senior ministers in an effort to forge a united front on EU withdrawal. The Prime Minister and her senior cabinet held discussions at Chequers for eight hours to plot a way forward amid Brexit tensions within the Conservative party. However she now faces a new challenge from pro-Europe backbenchers over keeping a customs union with the EU. Leading Tory rebel Anna Soubry insisted on Thursday she had cross-party support for a new amendment to the Government's trade bill which would mandate the UK to form a customs union with Brussels after Brexit. Theresa May heads a meeting of senior ministers at her country residence of Chequers / PA The move presents an increased danger to the PM because Labour's shadow foreign secretary Emily Thornberry said the party now backs a customs union that would look "pretty much like" the current one after withdrawal. Ms Soubry said she had widespread support for her move, tweeting: "It would be in the national interest if the Government & official Opposition also backed it." The Chequers "away day" saw the inner Cabinet committee discuss the impact of Brexit on the automotive sector, agri-foods, digital trade, as well as the overall future economic partnership the UK is seeking to reach with the EU. Mrs May will set out the Brexit agenda in a major speech next week following a meeting of the full Cabinet. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is to unveil a competing vision of how Brexit should work in what is being billed as a significant address on Monday, after some backbenchers called for more clarity from the leadership. Ms Thornberry earlier made it clear Labour wanted close ties to Brussels, telling LBC: "Technically, because we are leaving the European Union we can't be in the customs union that we are in now. "So, we leave and then we have to negotiate a new agreement. That we think is likely to be a customs union that will look pretty much like the current customs union." The senior Labour figure also said the UK could join forces with Brussels to negotiate trade deals with third countries after Brexit, rather than make its own global arrangements. "If we were, during these negotiations, to say to the European Union, if you want to negotiate with third parties, with third countries, we could be connected to that agreement, and it would be to the advantage of Europe that you have a great big economy like Britain as part of your negotiations." T he UK's latest plans for Brexit, thrashed out this week by key Cabinet ministers, are "pure illusion", Donald Tusk has claimed. The European Council president said, going on media reports, that the UK was still intent on cherry picking its future relationship with the EU. Theresa May will deliver a long-awaited speech setting out her vision for Britain's ambitions on Friday. The Prime Minister cleared the way for the speech by securing agreement from senior ministers at a meeting at Chequers on Thursday on key features of the future relationship. Theresa May heads a meeting of senior ministers at her country residence of Chequers / PA The Government will pursue a policy putting Britain outside a customs union with the EU but matching Brussels rules in certain sectors in an attempt to achieve "frictionless" trade. At a press conference in Brussels, Mr Tusk said: "I am glad that the UK government seems to be moving towards a more detailed position. Brexit: Article 50 Triggered - In pictures 1 /20 Brexit: Article 50 Triggered - In pictures Britain's ambassador to the EU Tim Barrow delivers British Prime Minister Theresa May's formal notice of the UK's intention to leave the bloc under Article 50 of the EU's Lisbon Treaty to European Council President Donald Tusk in Brussels AFP/Getty Images Prime Minister Theresa May speaks during Prime Minister's Questions in the House of Common PA Britain's ambassador to the EU Tim Barrow delivers British Prime Minister Theresa May's formal notice of the UK's intention to leave the bloc under Article 50 of the EU's Lisbon Treaty to European Council President Donald Tusk in Brussels AFP/Getty Images European Council President Donald Tusk holds a news conference after receiving British Prime Minister Theresa May's Brexit letter in notice of the UK's intention to leave the bloc under Article 50 of the EU's Lisbon Treaty to EU Council President Donald Tusk in Brussels, Belgium Yves Herman/Reuters Prime Minister Theresa May takes her seat after announcing in the House of Commons PA The time 12:20pm shows on Big Ben on March 29, 2017 in London, England. The British Prime Minister Theresa May addresses the Houses of Parliament as Article 50 is triggered and the process that will take the United Kingdom out of the European Union begins Carl Court/Getty Images D-day: pro-EU protesters outside of the Houses of Parliament today as Theresa May prepares to trigger Article 50 AFP/Getty Images EU Council President Donald Tusk holds British Prime Minister Theresa May's Brexit letter which was delivered by Britain's permanent representative to the European Union Tim Barrow (not pictured) that gives notice of the UK's intention to leave the bloc under Article 50 of the EU's Lisbon Treaty in Brussels, Belgium Yves Herman/Reuters PMQ's in The House of Commons PA Jeremy Corbyn speaking at PMQ's in The House of Commons Sky News Theresa May leaving for the House of Commons Jeremy Selwyn Mayor of London Sadiq Khan at the headquarters of Vivendi in Paris where he took part in TV interviews to discuss the imminent triggering of Article 50 by the UK to leave the EU Stefan Rousseau/PA Britain's permanent representative to the European Union Tim Barrow arrives at the EU Council headquarters for as meeting before hand delivering British Prime Minister Theresa May's notice of the UK's intention to leave the bloc under Article 50 of the EU's Lisbon Treaty to EU Council President Donald Tusk in Brussels, Belgium Yves Herman/Reuters Britain's ambassador to the EU Tim Barrow arrives at the British representation of the European Union in Brussels Aurore Belot/AFP/Getty Images A giant headed Theresa May in Parliament Square, London during a protest by Avaaz after PM signed a letter to trigger Article 50 that starts the formal exit process by the UK from the European Union David Mirzoeff/PA British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson walks down Whitehall Jack Taylor/Getty Images Britain's PM Theresa May signs the official letter to European Council President Donald Tusk, invoking Article 50. AFP/Getty Images "However, if the media reports are correct I am afraid that the UK position today is based on pure illusion. "It looks like the cake philosophy is still alive. From the very start it has been a key principle of the EU 27 that there can be no cherry-picking and no single market a la carte. "This is, and will continue to be, a key principle, I have no doubt." Chuka Umunna and Tom Brake demand vote on Brexit deal Mr Tusk will travel to London for talks with Mrs May on Thursday, the day before the Prime Minister's Brexit speech. The Prime Minister's official spokesman described the eight-hour Chequers meeting as "very positive... and a step forward, agreeing the basis of the Prime Minister's speech on our future relationship". The meeting's conclusions will be discussed by the full Cabinet ahead of Mrs May's speech - probably at its regular Downing Street meeting on Tuesday. Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt, who did not attend the Chequers talks, said the Brexit sub-committee agreed that Britain must not be part of a customs union as it should have the right to strike free trade deals with other countries. He claimed "frictionless" trade was still possible without one. He told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "Customs union is one way of getting frictionless trade but it's not the only way, and what we're saying is we want to achieve frictionless trade by agreement between two sovereign bodies - the United Kingdom and European Union." T heresa Mays blueprint for Brexit was being attacked by European Union officials today just hours after it was agreed at a crunch Chequers summit. The Prime Minister shepherded ministers behind a plan that would give Britain the right to choose to diverge from European Union rules in future. It was reached after eight hours of talks among Cabinet ministers gathered at the PMs official country retreat. Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt this morning revealed that the Government believed key sectors of the economy such as car manufacturing could mirror EU rules on a voluntary basis in future in order to smooth exports and imports, while in other sectors there could be different rules over time. But in Brussels, officials said EU leaders will press ahead with their own post-Brexit trade offer in March, rejecting Mrs Mays tentative three baskets approach. We cannot make sense of all the ideas they have floated because lots of them are inconsistent, said an EU diplomat of the UK Government plans. Jeremy Hunt this morning revealed that the Government believed key sectors of the economy such as car manufacturing could mirror EU rules / REUTERS Frustrated by what they view as unclear UK positions, EU leaders plan to make a no-frills offer based loosely on an existing free trade deal with Canada. That will happen no matter whether more or less detail will come from London by that time, said one senior EU official close to the talks. We are where we are, and time is ticking. The EUs paper will reflect what we know about the UKs red lines, the official said. EU leaders will press ahead with their own post-Brexit trade offer in March / AFP/Getty Images Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker has repeatedly asserted that Mrs Mays red lines - such as rejecting free movement, the European Court of Justice and any customs union - leave no other blueprint than a basic free trade agreement. Juncker: It would be good for Britain if I was prime minister Mrs May, however, will seek what David Davis called Canada plus plus plus, giving free trade in goods and mutual recognition of standards in a range of areas going beyond the Canada deal. Government sources said a big speech spelling out her vision will probably be staged next Friday at a location in the UK. The eight-hour meeting at Chequers which ended at 10pm last night was being hailed by Brexiteers as a victory for them. Divergence has won the day, claimed one attendee. Others, however, said the emphasis was on perfect alignment in the short term. Tory MP Sarah Wollaston said it sounded like a meaningless fudge. Ambitious managed divergence pretty meaningless without further context, more an ambition to manage a divergence of views, she said in a tweet. Mr Hunt, speaking on Today, said the Cabinet committee had agreed on a policy which will put Britain outside a customs union but would match Brussels rules in certain sectors. He said: I think the central understanding - you have divergent views on a big issue like Brexit as you would expect - but the central common understanding is that there will be areas and sectors of industry where we agree to align our regulations with European regulations: the automotive industry is perhaps an obvious example because of supply chains that are integrated. M obile data coverage on the Tube has moved a step closer after transport bosses invited bids from providers. Transport for London held a behind-closed-doors event at City Hall on Thursday as it asked suppliers to bid for the contract to deliver 4G on the Underground. Mayor Sadiq Khan has set a 2019 deadline for the start of 4G coverage in Tube tunnels as part of a major drive to eliminate the capitals not-spots. The plans involve offering passengers full access to mobile networks, allowing London to catch up with other great global cities such as Seoul, Tokyo, New York or Paris. TfL said its event yesterday was attended by representatives from the major mobile phone networks, as well as mobile technology companies from around the world. In a pitch to potential providers, TfL said Londons mobile market is worth 3bn a year, and pledged to deliver full mobile coverage at stations and in tunnels so that commuters can enjoy seamless connectivity. It added: In the future, customers will be able to catch up on last nights TV, stream music or read their emails or the latest news uninterrupted. Although the aim is for 4G coverage to start before the end of 2019 it is likely to be rolled out over a longer timescale because of the complexity of the technology. The historic first subterranean calls under central London will be made by passengers on the Elizabeth Line, which will have full mobile coverage when its services launch in December 2018. The measures will bring to an end virtually the last hiding place for Londoners wishing to avoid being contacted on their phones. C harlie Gards father has hit out at WAG Rebekah Vardy after she had said there was "nothing that could be done" for him in a TV appearance on Loose Women. The former Im a Celeb contestant, who is married to footballer Jamie Vardy, spoke of the toddler during a discussion about seriously ill 21-month-old Alfie Evans on the TV programme. The panel were comparing Charlie's case to a recent High Court ruling which agreed that doctors could withdraw life-support from Alfie, who suffers from a serious neurological condition, against his parents wishes. When Alfie was likened to Charlie in the discussion, Mrs Vardy said: Although Charlie Gard was slightly different. With no disrespect to his family, there was really nothing they could do for him. Panelist: Rebekah Vardy made the comments during an interview on Loose Women / ITV Mrs Vardy later clarified in a tweet that she had meant there was nothing Charlie's parents could have done after the High Court ruling. But, after the interview aired, Chris Gard took to social media to tell Mrs Vardy she was categorically wrong in a heated and emotionally-charged rant. How dare you mention my son when you know nothing!" he wrote. I'll just include the letter from seven worldwide experts in mitochondrial disease that advocated that this actual treatment could work for Charlie. So there was something that could be done for him. They just wasted time. Charlie: The tot died last year / PA Im sick to death of hearing my sons name just thrown about and everyone thinking that we had false hope and we were fighting a lost cause and that we just couldnt let go of our child. These people are so wrong! Ive still yet to see one piece of evidence that went before the judge in April that said my son had irreversible structural brain damage. Not one. They didnt even have a neurologist as a witness at the trial. Does that not tell you something? I will not have my sons name and what we did for him tarnished by anyone. Unless you know the facts, keep your opinions to yourself. You really dont have a clue. Signing off the letter with a picture of a shrine for his baby son, he added: Love you Charlie. Miss you so much champ and I still get prouder of you by the day. Tributes flow in for Charlie Gard The pledge of Charlies parents became an international story when they appealed against Great Ormond Street doctors in a battle to keep their son alive. He was born in 2016 with mitochondrial depletion syndrome a rare condition that causes severe brain damage and erosion of the muscles. Alfie Evans: the toddler suffers with a serious neurological condition / PA In July, the High Court ruled against their wishes and allowed medics to withdraw life support for the 11-month-old. M ichael Gove today praised the Evening Standards Last Straw campaign as he said a UK-wide ban on plastic straws is set to be introduced within months. Dozens of major restaurant chains, pubs and bars across London have already ditched their straws for biodegradable alternatives after this paper encouraged them to be more environmentally friendly. Mr Gove said: Straws are not just another example of plastic waste, they can be lethal. "And the Evening Standard as part of their Last Straw Campaign has made the case compellingly for action. "I believe we need to act and am exploring now what we can do as quickly as possible within the law. Plastic straws are used on average for 20 minutes but can take up to 500 years to biodegrade. Campaigners say they are one of the most common items ingested by sea birds and can also get stuck in the mouths and nostrils of turtles. An estimated two billion straws are thrown away each year in London, making it the plastic straw capital of Europe. While there is concern current EU law means the UK cant ban straws right at this moment, Mr Gove said he is doing everything he can to eliminate this scourge and is set to make an announcement of how the ban would work legally in the next few months. D&D London whose restaurants include Bluebird, 100 Wardour St and city favourite Coq d-Argent, were among the very first businesses to issue a straw ban. Their chief executive Des Gunewardena, said: Its fantastic news that Michael Gove is doing this. Getting rid of plastic is a huge issue but getting rid of plastic straws is easy to do, which is exactly why we did it. We are thrilled that this has helped kick-start a whole movement. John Vincent, founder and CEO of food chain LEON: said: This is fantastic news. The Evening Standard, and of course David Attenborough, have done a great job to get the government to here. Lets use this momentum to get government moving on a full environmental plan that can safeguard the health of our planet. Disposable straws can be made of compostable bio-plastics derived from corn starch that biodegrade in 12 weeks. Multi-use straws can be made of paper, metal or bamboo. An edible straw made from seaweed that comes in flavours such as mango or vanilla is also being developed by a US company. P eople in Scotland mocked their local council by filling potholes with cereal, claiming that the budget for fixing roads was not big enough. A council worker filmed himself pouring an entire box of Coco Pops into a pothole along with a six pint carton of milk. The cheeky chap claimed the cereal was a temporary fix until the budget improved. Filmed in Kilmarnock, East Aryshire, the video addresses a recent move by the local council to increase the road repair budget to 6 million due to the high number of potholes in the area. But many people in the aread claimed that the budget increase was not enough. A man pours cocopops into a pothole / Facebook/East Aryshire Cooncil The video was posted on a parody page called East Ayrshire Cooncil with the caption F****** Coco Pops. This is what 6 million gets you. It begins with an alleged council worker dressed in a high vis jacket pouring coco pops into a pothole in the place of tarmac to fix the potholes. Explaining his actions, he says: Its come from the top, theres only a 6 million budget to fix the potholes so this is a cheaper alternative. The video mimics a similar clip which was posted by an amateur drama group last week. Utter Nonsense Films posted the video which featured three men dressed in high vis jackets filling potholes in the Isle of Arran with breakfast cereal. A spokesman for the East Aryshire Cooncil page told the Standard: Pot holes are a massive problem! The council were ignoring our complaints. So instead of the usual moans we approached the issue via comedy". The spokesman said that he was gobsmacked that the video went viral. He continued (We) learned today that the council convened a special cabinet meeting to discuss it (the video). Result. A spokeswoman for East Ayrshire Council said: In yesterdays Council budget, we acknowledged the problems caused by potholes and road defects, caused by the severe winter weather and we trebled the road repair budget to 6 million for the year ahead. There are 55 road resurfacing programmes in the pipeline and we have teams working seven days a week to repair road defects. B ritish shoppers have just one week left to spend their old paper 10 notes. From Thursday March 1, the notes will no longer be accepted in shops, restaurants and other retailers. The new tenner, launched in September last year, is the first Bank of England note with a tactile feature to help blind and partially-sighted users. The tactile feature is a series of raised dots in the top left-hand corner of the banknote, developed with the help of the Royal National Institute of the Blind. New 10 Note - In pictures 1 /8 New 10 Note - In pictures Bank of England's new 10 note celebrating Jane Austen in production as it enters circulation PA Bank of England's new 10 note celebrating Jane Austen in production as it enters circulation PA Dominic Seymour with a new ten pound note Jeremy Selwyn Bank of England's new 10 note celebrating Jane Austen in production as it enters circulation PA Bank of England's new 10 note celebrating Jane Austen in production as it enters circulation PA A man withdraws the new ten pound note, featuring Jane Austen, from a cash machine on Birmingham High Street PA Bank of England's new 10 note celebrating Jane Austen in production as it enters circulation PA Bank of England's new 10 note celebrating Jane Austen in production as it enters circulation PA Like the 5 note already in circulation, featuring Sir Winston Churchill, the new 10 - featuring Pride And Prejudice author Jane Austen - is made from polymer. Anyone left holding the outdated notes after the spending deadline will have to take them to a bank, building society, post office or Bank of England office to swap them. Individuals will need to be customers at a given bank in order for them to make the switch. They may also be required to present ID, such as a driving licence or a passport. The Bank of England said the new notes are more environmentally friendly and hard to counterfeit. But a backlash erupted last year when the bank revealed the new 5 and 10 notes contained small amounts of tallow, a substance derived from animal fat. The website reads: "Polymer banknotes are more resistant to dirt and moisture, so they stay cleaner for longer than paper banknotes. "The polymer material [also] allows us to include enhanced security features, which make polymer banknotes harder to counterfeit." The new note features a portrait of Jane Austen. Winchester Cathedral, where the author is buried, also features on the new note. It is shown in gold foil on the front and silver on the back. Bank of England governor Mark Carney said of the release: "The new 10 note celebrates Jane Austen's work. "Austen's novels have a universal appeal and speak as powerfully today as they did when they were first published. "The new 10 will be printed on polymer, making it safer, stronger and cleaner. "The note will also include a new tactile feature on the 10 to help the visually impaired, ensuring the nation's money is as inclusive as possible." Last year marked 200 years since Austen's death. A ustralias deputy prime minister Barnaby Joyce has said he will resign after an affair with his former staffer spiralled into a politically damaging saga. Mr Joyce said he will step down on Monday as leader of the National party, the junior partner in Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull's centre-right coalition. He said at a news conference: I will step down as the leader of the National Party and deputy leader of Australia. But he will remain MP for New England, ensuring Mr Turnbull's single-seat majority in the House of Representatives is maintained. The deputy PM said he hoped resigning would end the coverage of his private life / Getty Images He called his decision the circuit-breaker with regard to press coverage of his personal life. It comes after a new allegation of sexual harassment was made by an unidentified individual. Mr Joyce said reading about the claim was "the straw that broke the camel's back". The controversial politician previously resisted calls to resign after it was revealed he is expecting a baby with his former press secretary Vikki Campion. The scandal has seen his private life picked apart in the Australian media, with pressure on his position growing by the day. A sheriff has described his disgust after learning one of his colleagues did nothing as a rampaging gunman opened fire on children and teachers at a Florida school. The armed school resource officer, who has since been suspended, took up a tactical position at an entrance of the building that was under attack but he never went in, police said. Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel placed the officer under investigation and suspended him without pay after it emerged he was idle while shooter Nicolas Cruz, 19, carried out the horrifying massacre. When asked what officer Scot Peterson was expected to do, Sheriff Israel said he should have went in, addressed the killer, killed the killer. He said there was footage of the man outside the building making no effort to stop the gunman. Police have refused to release the video. Sheriff Israel added that he was devastated, sick to my stomach at the Valentines Day shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School that left 17 students and teachers dead. He said Mr Peterson was suspended after video footage emerged showing that the officer failed to act while the teenager killer opened fire on children and teachers. Florida high school shooting - February 2018 1 /20 Florida high school shooting - February 2018 Emergency personnel at the scene of a shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School EPA Parents wait for news after a reports of a shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School AP Students are evacuated by police from Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School AP The suspect is arrested and put in the back of a police car Reuters Students hold their hands in the air as they are evacuated by police AP People wait for loved ones Getty Images Law enforcement personel work the scene Getty Images AP The suspect is escorted into Broward Jail after being checked at hospital Reuters Students are reunited with parents and family EPA A law enforcement officer rushes toward Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School AP Fire Rescue personnel work the scene Getty Images Students released from lockdown AP People are brought out of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School after the shooting Getty Images Police and rescue workers attend the scene REUTERS A family reunites following a shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School AP Florida Gov. Rick Scott (right) walks with Sheriff Scott Israel of Broward County to a news conference near Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School AP Students released from lockdown AP Students are released from lockdown AP Students are comforted by parents and family after a shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High Schoo EPA Asked by a reporter what the officer, who has since resigned, appeared to be doing in the footage, Sheriff Israel said: nothing. He said the video footage will not be released at this time, and that it may never be made publicly available. Thousands gather for school shooting vigil in Florida As he gave updates on the police investigation at a press conference on Thursday, he added: There are no words. I mean these families lost their children. I've been to the funerals. I've been to the vigils. There are no words. Cruz has been jailed on 17 counts of murder and has admitted the attack. Defence lawyers, state records and people who knew him indicate that he displayed behavioural troubles for years and he is known to have had a collection of weapons. F riends today paid tribute to a newlywed who became the fourth victim of the Grand Canyon helicopter crash after dying from his injuries in hospital. Jonathan Udall, 32, who was on his honeymoon, had been in a critical condition since the crash during a sightseeing tour on February 10. He and his new wife, Ellie Milward, 29, had survived the impact which killed their friends Becky Dobson, 27, her boyfriend Stuart Hill, 30, and his brother Jason Hill, 32. But friends today confirmed that Mr Udall, who worked for Yorkshire Building Society with his wife, had died from his injuries. Jon Udall was celebrating his honeymoon with new wife Ellie / JustGiving Chris Tucker, who set up a fundraising page for the couple, said online: It is with a very heavy heart that I must type this. Our good friend Jon Udall has succumbed to his injuries. He was strong, brave and I will never forget him. Ellie is critical and is continuing to fight. One wellwisher replied: I had the privilege of working with Jon and Ellie at YBS and they were unanimously liked by everyone. Absolutely devastated and heartbroken. The young couple were on holiday with their four friends in the US celebrating Mr Hills 30th birthday. Grand Canyon helicopter crash - Victims named Jason Hills girlfriend Jennifer Barham, 39, and pilot Scott Booth, 42, remain in a critical condition in hospital. The Eurocopter EC130 span out of control as it came in to land before crashing and catching fire in the Quartermaster Canyon. Rescue efforts were hampered by severe weather conditions and gusts of up to 50 miles per hour, which meant the victims could not be airlifted out for nine hours. The crash is being investigated by the National Transportation Safety Board. An initial report indicates possible causes could include a mechanical problem and strong winds. Jason Hill worked as a corporate lawyer for Shoosmiths in its Milton Keynes office. Loading.... His brother was a salesman at a Mercedes-Benz dealership in Brighton, while his girlfriend Ms Dobson, worked as a veterinary receptionist for Vets 4 Pets in Worthing, East Sussex. Their father, the Reverend David Hill, told the Standard the familys only comfort was that the incredibly close brothers died together. Ms Barham is a partner at Bircham Dyson Bell law firm. Her parents David and Elaine are currently by her side in the US as she battles to recover. A woman has been taken into custody after ramming a car into a security barrier at the White House entrance. The US Secret Service tweeted that she was "immediately apprehended" after the incident on Friday afternoon. They wrote: "An individual driving a passenger vehicle struck a security barrier near the White House at 17th & E." Witnesses described seeing a commotion on the grounds of Donald Trump's residence as security officers rushed to the scene. Mr Trump was inside at the time hosting Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull. Meanwhile pictures posted on social media showed empty roads around the White House as the whole area was placed on lockdown. Other pictures have emerged of a white car with shattered windscreens being investigated by officials. The Secret Service added that the vehicle did not breach the security barrier of the White House. They said no officials were injured and no shots were fired. Noah Bierman, a reporter from the Los Angeles Times, wrote earlier: "Im locked in the White House press office. Secret Service has locked doors and appears to be looking into a security issue." He added a few minutes later: "Secret Service is getting out some bigger guns. One guy had a helmet on." W hether you are planning a staycation in the UK or heading to warmer climates, your packing list should always include a reliable SPF for the whole family. Babies and children have more sensitive and delicate skin that is highly susceptible to sun damage where over exposure can increase the risk of skin cancer later in life, according to Kate Bancroft, Founder of Face the Future, a nurse independent prescriber with three decades experience in the health industry. The NHS recommends that newborns under six months should stay out of the sun entirely, but after that, the higher the SPF, the better. Look out for gentle formulas that pack a punch with a minimum SPF 30 and broad spectrum protection for both harmful UVA and UVB rays. Reapply throughout the day and limit exposure during peak times from 11am to 3pm. Sprays may be easier but can be less effective if you miss spots - in this case, colour-changing formulas are ideal so you can see where you have applied. Apply up to 20 minutes before sun exposure and pay particular attention to those burn-prone areas like the chest and shoulders. Find the right product for your little one with our selection of the best sun cream for kids so they can play safe in the sun. Evy Sunscreen Mousse SPF 30 This sunscreen mousse by Swedish skincare brand Evy is not only easy to apply, but it turns out, a delight for children to use. Our little tester giggled with glee at all of the bubbles. But Evy formula is a serious science; a product that is extra water resistant and capable of blocking about 98 percent of UV rays while being gentle enough for infant skin, offering hypoallergenic properties as well as being free from perfume, alcohol and preservatives. Evy Anthelios Dermo-kids Aerosol SPF 50+ Designed for fragile and sensitive skin, this La Roche-Posay hypoallergenic sunscreen will not cause an irritation or reaction on any skin type. It offers high protection for both the body and the face, which is particularly crucial for delicate and pale skin. The bottle has an easy-to-use spray technology where the formula comes out white so you can ensure it has even distribution before the lightweight cream absorbs quickly into your little ones skin. Making applying sun cream quicker and easier than ever, you rub it all over your kids 30 minutes before the sun and every two hours after, especially after swimming or sweating even though the product has a high water resistance. La Roche-Posay Garnier Ambre Solaire Kids Sensitive Anti-Sand Sun Cream Spray SPF50+ Keep the creaming time to a minimum to maximise the sun-filled fun with this Garnier cream that helps you protect your kids skin in one fell swoop with an instant and continuous spray bottle. Designed specifically for fair, sensitive and sun intolerant skin, this cream protects against broad spectrum UVB, UVA and long UVA rays with a hypoallergenic formula that is also sand-repelling, water resistant, non-sticky and has no perfume or colourants. Garnier Avene Sun Care Very High Protection Lotion for Children SPF50+ For broad-spectrum defence, the Avene sun care for children to protect their delicate skin. The antioxidant-rich, water-resistant formula is specifically created for hypersensitive skin types to shield against the damaging effects of free radicals. The product has stable and effective UVB-UVA protection, while also contains the labels signature Avene Thermal Spring Water to soothe redness or irritation. The fragrance-free formula has a light, fluid and easily-spreadable consistency for fuss-free application and maximum coverage. Avene Aveeno Baby Zinc Oxide Sunscreen Prevent sunburn and skin damage with the Aveeno specially formulated sunscreen designed for your little ones with sensitive skin or eczema. The mineral cream is tear-free and skin-soothing where oats, the hero ingredient, help to lock in moisture and nourish the skin. It offers strong protection, is water resistant for 80 minutes and does not feel greasy or sticky. Aveeno Childs Farm SPF 50+ Sun Cream This high protection cream will protect young and sensitive skin from UVA and UVB rays without irritation, even for little ones suffering with eczema. The easy squeeze tube can be used by the whole family to shield against the damaging effects or sun exposure and is water resistant. It has a subtle, pleasant smell and does not contain any artificial colours, parabens, SLSs or mineral oils. Childs Farm Organic Children Scent Free Sun Lotion SPF30 Eczema, prickly heat and psoriasis wont be in any way exacerbated by this cream, which is as gentle as any organic product should be. Scent-free and soft, although we found it to be a little on the soft side, this can be rubbed in easily. For the eco-conscious, choosing this product will actually go some way to helping the environment. Green People, who make this lotion, supports the Marine Conservation Society; 30p from every sale of this product will be donated to the charity, which helps to protect UK seas. Green People Banana Boat Kids Ultramist Tear-Free Spray Lotion SPF50 The Banana Boat spray lotion appears white when first applied to the skin so it is easy to see any spots you may have missed. The high protection formula is tear-free with 80 minutes of water resistance. The bottle has a twist and lock top to excess packaging and prevent spillages, so you can easily pack it in your suitcase. Banana Boat Weleda Edelweiss Kids Sun Lotion Sensitive SPF 50 The Weleda SPF 50 contains organic virgin coconut and sunflower oils that work to retain the skins moisture. The fragrance-free, ultra-waterproof cream can be used on sensitive and eczema-prone skin and is vegan friendly. Weleda Mustela Very High Protection Sun Lotion This French brand has been taking care of mothers and babies since 1950. This sun lotion didnt disappoint. Suitable from birth onwards, this cream is fragrance free and boasts a unique, patented ingredient Avocado Perseose which helps to preserve the cellular richness of babies skin by helping to form a barrier against the suns powerful UV rays. It is rather thick, but this doesnt hinder absorption. Mustela Badger Sunscreen Broad Spectrum Baby This has the lovely gentle blended fragrances of Chamomile and Calendula and can be used on the very tiniest of babies (and grown-ups too). The ingredients are 100 percent natural, and 98 percent organic and include beeswax, sunflower oil that make the base of this mild cream mean it is naturally kind to skin. Its water resistant for a full 40 minutes. Badger Original Sprout Face & Body Sunscreen Organic and natural containing no titanium dioxide or nanoparticles the Original Sprout Face & Body Suncreen has won awards for its unique formula. Its a great choice for the mindful parent as its suitable for vegans. This is a lower SPF than many other sun creams; 27 might seem low but perhaps this is a great option for cooler climates. It feels really rich and soft, making for a really moisturising experience. Smells great, too a lovely top note of coconut that makes us think instantly of holidays. Organic Sprout Verdict T he Crown star Claire Foy has announced she has split from her husband Stephen Campbell Moore. It comes just months after he underwent major brain surgery to remove a tumour for the second time in his life. Foy, 33, best known for playing Queen Elizabeth in the hit Netflix royal drama, said she remains "great friends" with Moore. "We have separated and have been for some time," she told the Sun "We do however continue as great friends with the utmost respect for one another." The couple met on a film set in 2011 (PA Archive/PA Images) / PA The pair first worked together on the set of 2011's Season Of The Witch and they have a two-year-old daughter. It was announced in October that Foy would step down from the role of Queen Elizabeth II after two seasons in the Crown. Claire Foy plays a young Queen Elizabeth in the Crown / Netflix Moore, 38, who played teacher Tom Irwin in the The History Boys, discovered last winter that a tumour on his pituitary gland had returned. He told the Telegraph: They told me that it was a lot more dangerous this time, that there were a lot more potential problems. And then suddenly I was like: Oh God, this is really killing me. Claire Foy - In pictures 1 /45 Claire Foy - In pictures Claire Foy as Queen Elizabeth II and Matt Smith as Prince Philip Netflix Actress Claire Foy holds the award for Best Performance by an Actress In A Television Series - Drama for her role in "The Crown" during the 74th Annual Golden Globe Awards in Beverly Hills, Californi Reuters Claire Foy as Anne Boleyn in 'Wolf Hall' with Damien Lewis as King Henry VIII BBC Claire Foy in The Maze Runner Claire Foy as Lady Persie in 'Upstairs Downstairs' (2012) BBC Stephen Campbell Moore and Claire Foy arriving for the 2012 Arqiva British Academy Television Awards at the Royal Festival Hall, London PA Claire Foy, Peter Kosminsky, Colin Callender, Mark Pybus, Peter Straughan and Mark Rylance, accepting the Best Drama award for "Wolf Hall", pose in the winners room at the House Of Fraser British Academy Television Awards 2016 at the Royal Festival Hall Dave Benett Claire Foy as Princess Elizabeth in 'The Crown' Season 1 Netflix Claire Foy and Matt Smith in 'The Crown' Netflix Claire Foy as The Queen in 'The Crown' Alex Jennings as The Duke of Windsor and Claire Foy as The Queen, Series 2 of The Crown Netflix Claire Foy as Charlotte in 'White Heat' BBC Claire Foy in Wolf Hall BBC Claire Foy as Lisbeth Salander in the Girls in the Spider's Web Claire Foy and Andrew Garfield in 'Breathe' Breathe (2017) Claire Foy as Sawyer Valentini in Steve Soderburgh's Unsane (2018) First Man (2018) Claire Foy arrives for the Orange British Academy Film Awards 2011 Getty Images Claire Foy attending the Crown Premiere at Odeon Cinema, Leicester Square, London in 2016 PA Matt Smith and Claire Foy attending the Crown Premiere at Odeon Cinema, Leicester Square, London PA Claire Foy, Matt Smith and Vanessa Kirby attends the World Premiere of Netflix's "The Crown" Season 2 at Odeon Leicester Square, London Claire Foy poses for photographers on arrival at the premiere of series 'The Crown, Season 2' in 2017 AP John Lithgow, winner of the award for outstanding performance by a male actor in a drama series for "The Crown", left, and Claire Foy, winner of the award for outstanding performance by a female actor in a drama series for "The Crown", pose in the press room at the 23rd annual Screen Actors Guild Awards in 2017 Invision/AP Andrew Garfield and Claire Foy attend a photocall for "Breathe" during the 61st BFI London Film Festival 2017 Getty Images Claire Foy attending The Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute Benefit Gala 2017 PA Claire Foy attends the "Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garcons: Art Of The In-Between" Costume Institute Gala at Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2017 Getty Images Claire Foy arriving for the Opening Night Gala screening of Breathe held at Odeon Leicester Square, London in 2017 PA Claire Foy attends the 74th Annual Golden Globe Award 2017 Getty Images Claire Foy attends the 23rd Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards in 2017 Getty Images Claire Foy and Matt Smith attend The 75th Annual Golden Globe Awards Getty Images Claire Foy attends The 75th Annual Golden Globe Awards in 2018 Getty Images Claire Foy attends the Evening Standard Theatre Awards 2018 Getty Images Claire Foy walks the red carpet ahead of the opening ceremony and the 'First Man' screening during the 75th Venice Film Festival 2018 Getty Images Claire Foy onm Vogue's October 2018 Vogue Magazine Claire Foy accepts the Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series award for 'The Crown' onstage during the 70th Emmy Awards in 2018 Getty Images Claire Foy arrives for the Warner Bros. and In Style 20th annual post Golden Globes party 2019 AFP/Getty Images Claire Foy on day ten of the Wimbledon Championships 2019 Philip Toscano/PA Press photographer Eddie Keogh greets his niece Claire Foy on day ten of the Wimbledon Championships in 2019 PA Claire Foy during the Clash de Cartier event in 2019 Getty Images Claire Foy attends the EE British Academy Film Awards 2019 Getty Images Best Actress in a Supporting Role in any Motion Picture for "First Man" nominee Claire Foy arrives for the 76th annual Golden Globe Awards in 2019 AFP/Getty Images Claire Foy attends the 34th Santa Barbara International Film Festival 2019 Getty Images Claire Foy attends the UK Premiere of 'Very Ralph' at Royal Academy of Arts in 2019 Dave Benett Claire Foy accepts the #SeeHer award at the 24th annual Critics' Choice Awards in 2019 Invision/AP Eight weeks ago he underwent a high-risk operation and spent a week in hospital, but came out with a clean bill of health. You realise youre not the most important person in that process, he said. And everybody who loves you goes through far worse. My daughter didnt know what was going on, at all. But my family did, and I could see it in them. Stephen Campbell Moore spent a week in hospital for crucial brain surgery / PA Wire/PA Images There are certain things that you make sure youve done before you go into surgery. "You write a letter. But its all very much on the off chance that something did go wrong, because every part of you is saying that nothing will. J eremy McConnell is reportedly set to get the ultimate grilling on his 'abusive' relationship with ex-partner Stephanie Davies in a one-off episode of The Jeremy Kyle Show. The reality star was given a suspended sentence of 20 weeks in prison for assaulting his former partner Davies last year and slapped with a three-year restraining order banning him from contacting her. McConnells TV appearance will see him questioned on his and Davies volatile relationship and his spell in prison over Christmas after breaking the terms of conviction. A source told The Sun: Jeremy is looking forward to filming the show and having the chance to talk about his problems in full. The last two years have been chaotic and Jeremy has suffered the loss of several family members while becoming a dad for the first time. His on-off relationship with Stephanie hit rock bottom last year and he served time in prison after he breached his community service. New TV shows to look forward to in 2018 1 /17 New TV shows to look forward to in 2018 The Little Drummer Girl Florence Pugh as Charlie with Alexander Skarsgard as Becker in the John le Carre thriller BBC / The Little Drummer Girl Distribution Limited. The Cry Jenna Coleman and Ewen Leslie Synchronicity Films Ltd/Lachlan Moore Vanity Fair ITV and Amazon's remake of William. M. Thackeray's classic novel starring Olivia Cooke and Tom Bateman ITV Wanderlust Toni Collette and Steven Mackintosh star in BBC's new raunchy drama BBC/Drama Republic Press Charlotte Riley and Ben Chaplin go head-to-head as rival newspaper editors in new drama from Doctor Foster creator Mike Barlett BBC Death and Nightingales Jamie Dornan, Ann Skelly and Matthew Rhys star in a three-part drama for BBC Two BBC Maniac Emma Stone and Jonah Hill star in the limited Netflix series coming September Michele K. Short / Netflix Disenchantment Matt Groening is back and on Netflix with new adult comedy following Princess Bean and friends Netflix / Matt Groening Age Before Beauty Age Before Beauty on BBC One with Polly Walker, Sue Johnston and Lisa Riley follows a family business with plenty of secrets BBC/Mainstreet Pictures/Todd Antony Hard Sun Luther creator Neil Cross has another dabble at the cop show format in this crime/sci-fi drama inspired by the Bowie song Five Years. BBC/Euston Films A Very English Scandal Hugh Grant stars in this drama from Doctor Who/Sherlock writer Russell T Davies, which adapts John Prestons book about the scandal that surrounded Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe BBC/Blueprint Television Ltd Kiri National Treasure writer Jack Thorne pens a four-part drama about the abduction of a young black girl. The ever-reliable Sarah Lancashire is unconventional social worker Miriam, who finds herself being blamed. Channel 4 Britannia Filmed in Wales and Prague, Jez Butterworths historical drama is set in 43AD, when Roman General Aulus (David Morrissey) is attempting to conquer the Celts. Sky Collateral David Hares four-part drama (his first original TV series) explores the repercussions after a pizza delivery man is shot dead. Carey Mulligan plays Detective Inspector Kip Glaspie, who investigates. BBC/The Forge Save Me In the absence of Doctor Foster, Suranne Jones stars as the mother of a missing girl who believes that her ex- (Lennie James, who wrote the show) is guilty of the abduction, forcing him to work to clear his name. Sky Atlantic Troy: Fall of a City Swords and sandals epic in eight parts made in a collaboration with Netflix, written by David Farr (who also wrote The Night Manager). BBC/Wild Mercury Productions Patrick Melrose Benedict Cumberbatch looks right at home in this adaptation of the Edward St Aubyn novels about an outrageous aristocrat struggling to overcome the damage inflicted by an abusive father. Dave Benett There is a lot to fit into an hour-long special and Jeremy Kyle will no doubt want Jeremy to face up to his issues and apologise for his wrongdoings. Earlier this week Davies appeared on Lorraine to discuss her relationship with McConnell, who is the father of her 11-month-old baby Caben-Albi. T his weekend, Samsung will be unveiling its brand new smartphones, the Samsung Galaxy S9 and S9+ at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Its older sibling, the Samsung Galaxy S8, was a big hit when it launched last year. With infinity display and an excellent camera, expectations are running high for Samsung to deliver. Heres what were hoping to see in the new Samsung Galaxy S9 smartphone: 1. An exceptional camera On all the branding for the event on Sunday, it says: The Camera. Reimagined. This means we should expect an exceptional camera on the new device. According to rumours of the new smartphone, the Samsung Galaxy S9+ is going to feature two cameras on the back, both with 12MPs. This should bring improved quality and function to the camera. As well, the cameras are expected to have a variable aperture mode of f/1.5 or f/2.4. What this means is it will bring the new smartphone cameras in line with that of a traditional DSLR camera. Low light photography should be on point with these new features, as images will be sharper than weve seen before on a smartphone camera. The best smartphone camera accessories- in pictures 1 /6 The best smartphone camera accessories- in pictures Capture the moment with our pick of the best smartphone camera accessories Rodegrip Multipurpose Mount and Holder Suitable for: iPhone 5/5S Small enough to fit in your pocket, this mounting chassis can be used on its own or attached to a boom stand. If youre into making video content and are looking for something thatll help you achieve a stable shot, this will help- it can be propped up on the table so you can focus on filming without the risk of it falling over half way through. 13.95, Inta-Audio, Buy it now Lensta Kit Suitable for: iPhone 5 and up When professional photographers and leading industry product designers put their heads together, something beautiful can happen. Always wondered how those savvy Instagrammers get their shots? Most likely by lugging around a digital SLR, uploading the photos and then editing them on their phones. If this all sounds like a lot of effort, youre right. It is. Enter the new Lensta lenses: professional grade camera lenses you can attach to your phone, enabling you to take wide angle and close up shots. The kit includes three lenses as well as a leather case strap and bag, proving that you dont need to spend a fortune- the shots are of professional quality and high res enough to be printed. 78, Indiegogo, Buy it now Polaroid Mobile Printer Suitable for: iOS and Android Devices If youve got thousands of photos stored up in your cloud that you never print or look at, youre not alone- were all guilty of doing it. With the Polaroid mobile device you can print pictures from your phone within seconds. Shots come out at 2 x 3 inches in full colour and the paper is smudge proof so you can snap away to your hearts content. 72, Viking, Buy it now Pocket Spotlight Suitable for: all smartphones Avoid the rabbit-in-the-headlights look that the phone flash gives by using a pocket light instead. Plug into the headphone jack and itll throw out continuous light for up to an hour at a time, allowing you to adjust the focus and exposure accordingly. Itll give you more natural looking photos and video even when its dark. 23, Photojojo, Buy it now Optrix Waterproof Action Camera Case Suitable for iPhone 6/6s Never miss out on those underwater shots again with the Optrix waterproof case. Designed to maintain a total waterproof lock up to 30 feet deep as well as to survive a 20 foot drop, it includes both a wide angle and normal lens. For lovers of watersports this is the must-have holiday accessory as you can keep your phone out of harms way both on and off land. 32, Amazon,Buy it now 2. Android animoji At last years iPhone launch, there was much interest in the smartphones new facial recognition technology as well as the new animojis. Animoji was supposed to be for Apples messaging app, iMessage. With animoji, iPhone owners could then send their audio iMessages with a unicorn or a monkey for example. The new Samsung Galaxy S9 and S9+ smartphones are going to powered by Samsungs new chip, the Exynos 9810. This should give the phones improved performance as well as more sophisticated face detection for racial recognition. There are many fake animoji apps out there for Android smartphones so heres to hoping that Samsung delivers on its own version. 3. Decent speakers It's likely Samsung will retain the 3.5mm headphone jack in the Samsung Galaxy S9 and S9+ smartphones, which is great if you mourn the days of headphone jacks. What is interesting is that the smartphones will be fitting with AKG stereo speakers, according to VentureBeat. You probably dont spend much time playing music out of your smartphones speakers but if they were better maybe you would. AKG also made the Samsung Galaxy S8 headphones last time around, so its good to see this partnership still going strong. 4. Good battery life The Samsung Galaxy S9+ is rumoured to have a whopping 3,500mAh battery unit. However, thats not as big as some other smartphones out there, like the Huawei Mate 10 Pro which has a 4,000mAh battery unit. This should give the Samsung Galaxy 9+ a good day and a half battery life, without you having to worry its going to shut down anytime soon. When we spend so much time using our smartphones, the least they can do is last a full 24-hours. 5. Bixby from the start When the Samsung Galaxy S8 was launched last year, it was very obviously missing Bixby, Samsungs then-new artificial intelligence (AI) assistant. The company went all in on Bixby promotion ahead of the smartphones release, about how you could use your voice to perform tasks like writing emails, placing calls and editing photos. However, it took a while for the full Bixby features were available around the world. Countries & Areas Search for country or area A Afghanistan Albania Algeria Andorra Angola Antigua and Barbuda Argentina Armenia Australia Austria Azerbaijan B Bahamas Bahrain Bangladesh Barbados Belarus Belgium Belize Benin Bhutan Bolivia Bosnia and Herzegovina Botswana Brazil Brunei Bulgaria Burkina Faso Burma Burundi C Cabo Verde Cambodia Cameroon Canada Central African Republic Chad Chile China Colombia Comoros Costa Rica Cote dIvoire Croatia Cuba Cyprus Czechia D Democratic Republic of the Congo Denmark Djibouti Dominica Dominican Republic E Ecuador Egypt El Salvador Equatorial Guinea Eritrea Estonia Eswatini Ethiopia F Fiji Finland France G Gabon Gambia Georgia Germany Ghana Greece Grenada Guatemala Guinea Guinea-Bissau Guyana H Haiti Holy See Honduras Hungary I Iceland India Indonesia Iran Iraq Ireland Israel Italy J Jamaica Japan Jordan K Kazakhstan Kenya Kiribati Kosovo Kuwait Kyrgyzstan L Laos Latvia Lebanon Lesotho Liberia Libya Liechtenstein Lithuania Luxembourg M Madagascar Malawi Malaysia Maldives Mali Malta Marshall Islands Mauritania Mauritius Mexico Micronesia Moldova Monaco Mongolia Montenegro Morocco Mozambique N Namibia Nauru Nepal Netherlands New Zealand Nicaragua Niger Nigeria North Korea North Macedonia Norway O Oman P Pakistan Palau Palestinian Territories Panama Papua New Guinea Paraguay Peru Philippines Poland Portugal Q Qatar R Republic of the Congo Romania Russia Rwanda S Saint Kitts and Nevis Saint Lucia Saint Vincent and the Grenadines Samoa San Marino Sao Tome and Principe Saudi Arabia Senegal Serbia Seychelles Sierra Leone Singapore Slovakia Slovenia Solomon Islands Somalia South Africa South Korea South Sudan Spain Sri Lanka Sudan Suriname Sweden Switzerland Syria T Taiwan Tajikistan Tanzania Thailand Timor-Leste Togo Tonga Trinidad and Tobago Tunisia Turkey Turkmenistan Tuvalu U Uganda Ukraine United Arab Emirates United Kingdom Uruguay Uzbekistan V Vanuatu Venezuela Vietnam Y Yemen Z Zambia Zimbabwe Once upon a time in the United States there was a general perception that organizations like the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) were both apolitical and high-minded, existing only to calmly and professionally promote the safety and security of the nation. Directors of both organizations often retired quietly without fanfare to compose their memoirs, but apart from that, they did not meddle in politics and maintained low profiles. There was a widespread belief at CIA that former officers should rightly retire to a log cabin in the Blue Ridge Mountains where they could breed Labrador retrievers or cultivate orchids. But the relative respectability of Americas national security agencies largely vanished in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist incidents. It was learned that both the CIA and FBI had made fatal mistakes in their investigations of the al-Qaeda group, putting in question their effectiveness, and the leaders of both organizations began to focus on pleasing their political masters. The appearance of CIA Director George Tenet at the United Nations supporting lies promoted by Secretary of State Colin Powell was a low point, but there were many more to follow. The 2016 election brought out the worst in the CIAs leadership, with its Director John Brennan lining up behind Hillary Clinton together with former Acting Director Michael Morell and former Director Michael Hayden. Morell even claimed that Trump was a Russian agent. Indeed, there has been remarkably little speculation regarding the possible roles of some senior intelligence officials, most notably CIA Director John Brennan and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, both of whom were in office during the electoral campaign. In September 2016, the two men reportedly were involved in obtaining information on Page and it has also been suggested that Brennan sought and obtained raw intelligence from British, Polish, Dutch and Estonian intelligence services, which might have motivated FBIs James Comey to investigate the Trump associates. Brennan and Clapper, drawing on intelligence resources and connections, might have helped the FBI build a fabricated case against Trump. Currently the senior officials who were so hostile to Donald Trump have decided against going quietly into their generously rewarded retirements. Morell has long been a paid contributing expert for CBS news, Hayden has had the same role at CNN, and they are are now being joined by John Brennan at NBC. Brennan, an NBC senior national security and intelligence analyst, is an Obama-Clinton loyalist who can be relied upon to oppose policies and actions undertaken by the Trump Administration, admittedly not a bad thing, but he will be doing so from a strictly partisan perspective. And the danger is that his tag as former DCI will give him a certainly credibility, which, depending on the issue, might not be deserved or warranted. To be sure CIA interests will be protected, but they will be secondary to commentary from a partisan and revenge seeking John Brennan who is out to burnish his own sorry reputation. He looks perpetually angry when he is on television because he is. Brennan has behaved predictably in his new role. In his first appearance on Meet the Press last Sunday he said that the Steele dossier did not play any role whatsoever in the intelligence community assessment that was presented to President Obama which is a lie. He denounced the release of the so-called Nunes memo by the House Intelligence Committee because it was exceptionally partisan, which is true, and because it exposes secrets, which it does not. Brennan is also a leader of the blame Russia movement. He has claimed without providing any evidence that Russia brazenly interfered in the 2016 election and he can be counted upon to be yet one more anti-Russian voice on the mainstream media. Brennan, who was hated by much of the CIAs rank-and-file during his tenure as director, does not have much of a reputation for truth-telling. He lied about how the Agency under his leadership tried to spy on and disrupt the Senates investigation into CIA torture. He was also the driving force behind the Obama administration kill list of U.S. citizens selected for assassination. Concerns that Brennan will represent the Agencys viewpoint on NBC News are largely irrelevant as the network should have instead considered his credibility and judgment before hiring him. On Sunday, February 17th, I was surprised to see in the reliably neoconservative newspaper, New York Times, an opinion-article headlined with the distinctively non-neoconservative title, Russia Isnt the Only One Meddling in Elections. We Do It, Too. But, then, I got to the neocon core, in the article itself: But in recent decades, both Mr. Hall and Mr. Johnson argued, Russian and American interferences in elections have not been morally equivalent. American interventions have generally been aimed at helping non-authoritarian candidates challenge dictators or otherwise promoting democracy. Russia has more often intervened to disrupt democracy or promote authoritarian rule, they said. Equating the two, Mr. Hall says, is like saying cops and bad guys are the same because they both have guns the motivation matters. Thats just a typical neocon lie reality turned upside-down, black-is-white and white-is-black. When the CIA hired Iranian mercenaries to rebel against and overthrow the progressive democratically elected Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddegh in 1953 and installed there a dictatorship (which lasted till 1979); and did the same to overthrow and replace the progressive democratically elected Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz in 1954; and, more recently, in 2009, helped Hondurass aristocracy to overthrow that countrys progressive democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya, and to cement and make permanent their new and fascist regime; and, in 2014, perpetrated a brutal coup in Ukraine overthrowing that countrys democratically elected but corrupt (like all prior post-communist Ukrainian Presidents were) President Viktor Yanukovych even the Soviets (including the pre-1991 and pre-independent Russians) werent that bad; and a 1992 classic BBC documentary about the CIAs having set up in Western Europe during the Cold War numerous deadly terrorist incidents which were designed so as to be blamed on communists, makes clear, that the US CIA is a spiritual implant into the US Government, of Adolf Hitlers Nazi (but now American) Gehlen Organization a darling of the CIA Director Alan Dulles, and which is still today the CIAs spirit. But, even that hypocrisy misses the essentially fascist nature of Americas secret-police agencies, because Americas Presidents are now reliably pro-fascist, and on many occasions are even pro-racist-fascist, or pro-nazi (standing out to defend the nazi ideology itself). At the U.N., both President Obama and President Trump have stood America up publicly as being one of only three countries (in Obamas case) and then of only two countries (in Trumps case) publicly defending nazism. Furthermore, on one day (31 October 2015), twice in close succession, the U.N. Secretary-General publicly criticized Obama, though not by name, for opposing and insisting on blocking, democracy in Syria. Whereas Russia insists upon a democratic and united instead of ethnically broken-up Syria, and polls amongst Syrians consistently show that the vast majority of Syrians insist upon the same thing, the US Government not only does everything possible to block it, but has the gall to deny the blatant fact that its seeking to replace Syrias secular non-sectarian Government, by a fundamentalist-Sunni Government that will do the Sauds bidding (and the bidding of Americas oil-giants). However, that February 17th New York Times article is deceptive not merely on account of its holier-than-thou admission of the CIAs supposedly past history of badness and its presumption of todays Russia being almost as bad as was the Soviet Union. Actually, the article includes several other lies, such as are exposed in these three articles about how American billionaires systematically robbed Russia during the 1990s: Russias Fiscal Whistleblower The Summers Conundrum Soros and His CIA Friends Targeted USSR/Russia in 1987 Those articles offered at least some of the explanation as to why Americas billionaires (at least the ones who care about this matter at all) hate Vladimir Putin: they had loved Boris Yeltsin because he allowed them to rape Russia, but Putin put a stop to it. So, while millions of Americans, who subscribe to the New York Times, will learn the lie, that (and here is the regimes basic message) internationally were the good guys against the bad guys, theres no more reason to trust that, than there was when the same lies came from Joseph Goebbelss shop, at which time, the US itself was a progressive country, heading in progressive directions, under President FDR. Bill Clinton and the post-Clinton Democratic Party have repudiated that direction for their Party; and, now, in international relations, the US is solidly fascist, in both Parties. The CIA lies, as usual, indistinguishably differently when its run by a Democratic President and Congress, than when its run by a Republican President and Congress. In international relations, its the same regime, regardless: full of the same lies. And that historical fact, and ongoing but unpublished news, is not to be found to be accepted in the Timess masthead-lie, All the News That's Fit to Print or else the truth itself, just isnt Fit to Print. Its fit to print here (and without paying a subscription), but how many people even read here? This explains how the regime protects itself, against democracy by hiding whats essential. Moldova appears to be rushing to embrace NATO. According to the statement of Defense Minister Eugen Sturza, the countrys armed forces will be rearmed to meet NATO standards. In an interview with Moldova-1 TV channel, he said Moldova will buy lethal weapons and ammunition abroad for the first time in 27 years. The republic is to receive 11 million in military aid from the United States. According to the official, its just a beginning. The rearmament and modernization process will go much further as the military prepares for taking part in international missions. The mention of the need to meet NATO standards (whatever it means) was done on purpose. It was a policy statement as the Moldovan government is shifting from neutrality to ally itself with the West. Moldova is a member of the NATOs Partnership for Peace program. It has participated in the blocs mission in Kosovo. On Feb.5, Romanian Minister of Defense, Mihai Fifor visited Moldova to meet his counterpart. Joint projects to move Chisinau closer to NATO topped the agenda. The two officials reached an agreement on formation of a joint battalion trained to respond to emergencies. The move is taken to familiarize Moldova's military personnel with NATO's procedures. It was announced that 41 Moldovan servicemen will go through training in Romania this year. Some 800 Moldovan soldiers have already been trained there. The Romanian Defense Chief said Bucharest wishes for Republic of Moldova's European track to become an irreversible process. In December, 2017, the NATO Liaison Office was opened in Chisinau to confirm the fact that Moldova has become a springboard for NATO information offensive. Last May, Moldova expelled five Russian diplomats. Just a few days ago a law banning Russia broadcasting in Moldova came into force. The country has joined NATO anti-Russia propaganda effort. Not much has been said about it but the US Navy plans to construct eight training facilities for military operations in the Bulboaca training base. Probably, the facility will host American Marines. Last March, US Army Commander in Europe Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, said US seeks ways to do more exercises in the southern flank of NATO. In the summer of 2017, Bulboaca hosted the Dragoon Pioneer 2017, a joint US-Moldovan exercise. Romanian Prime Minister Viorica Danchila will visit Chisinau on February 27 after her trip to European institutions. New moves to strengthen security cooperation with NATO via Romania are expected. Moldovas ruling coalition will seek to limit Russia's influence, said Daniel Coates, the US Director of National Intelligence, at the hearings in the special committee on intelligence of the US Congress Senate held on Feb.13. On Feb.12, the Moldovas Defense Ministry announced that the military would join the US, Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine and Georgia in Platinum Eagle, a large-scale military exercise. The mission is to deploy joint forces under unfavorable battle conditions. Speaking at the Munich Security Conference, Moldovas Prime Minister Pavel Filip used the opportunity to call for withdrawal of Russian troops from Transnistria. Speaker of the Moldovan parliament, Andrian Candu, says that the presence of Russian troops stationed on the left bank of the Dniester is illegal. According to him, they should be withdrawn with compensation paid by the Russian government for the damage supposedly inflicted by the occupation forces. Last July, Moldovas parliament passed a resolution urging the withdrawal of Russian military from Transnistria. The lawmakers for Socialist Party left the parliament in protest against it, while Moldavias President Igor Dodon called the move a provocation. The vote came a day after the Moldovan government refused to allow a military aircraft with Russia's Deputy Prime Minister Rogozin on board to land in Chisinau. The official was to take part on the festivities devoted to the 25th anniversary of the Transnistrias peacekeeping mission. The authorities of the breakaway republic oppose such a move. They say the Russian military presence guarantees peace. The Russian-speaking region of Transnistria separated from Moldova in 1991. An armed conflict broke out in 1992-1993. Russian peacekeepers put an end to the fighting. The 1,000-strong task force, including Russian, Transnistrian and Moldovan military assisted by a dozen of Ukrainian military observers, has been securing peace for about 26 years. Roughly, 1,000 Russian servicemen guard the warehouses in Kolbasna (some 20,000 tons of ammunition). This presence is very limited and poses no threat to anybody but it ensures peace. Suppose Russian peacekeepers leave, is there any OSCE member willing to contribute its forces? Can anybody guarantee no armed conflict will spark again to take away human lives? It should be noted that the 5+2 format talks on Transnistrian peace held since 2005 by Moldova, Transnistria, the OSCE, Russia, Ukraine as parties and the EU and the US in external observers roles have produced no results so far. No one of those who want Russia to go has ever come up with any ideas or initiatives to give fresh impetus to the process. Should the situation in Transnistria become part of the worse for Russia, the better for us geopolitical game? What about the Transnistrian people? Who will protect their rights? So, Moldova can make one step after another to get closer to the North Atlantic Alliance, buy weapons from blocs members and host NATOs facilities on its soil. But Russian peacekeepers cannot stay in Transnistria despite the fact that it is done in strict compliance with the international obligations (the 1992 Agreement on the Principles for a Peaceful Settlement of the Armed Conflict) and the wish of Transnistrian people and government. Moldova seldom hits media headlines but the situation there is another example of creeping NATO expansion. The US is in the process of establishing its military presence there to make American soldiers and Russian peacekeepers watch each other through gun sights. Its sad, because Russia and Moldova have never seen each other as adversaries. Moldova, a neutral state, will inevitably become a target for Russias potential retaliatory strike. The situation can be changed before it is too late. Moldova holds parliamentary elections in November. A new parliament may adopt a more responsible foreign policy to put the relationship between Moscow and Chisinau back on track to benefit all. NSF again funds SIU undergrad research program by Tim Crosby CARBONDALE, Ill. A program that provides funding for a key undergraduate research program at Southern Illinois University Carbondale has received federal funding for another three years. The National Science Foundation recently approved SIUs Research Experience for Undergraduates program for $384,200 in funding for a three-year cycle. The program allows SIU annually to sponsor summer research opportunities for about 14 undergraduates in areas related to interdisciplinary materials research in chemistry, physics and engineering. SIU will mark the programs 13th year this summer. Nationwide program supports cutting-edge undergraduate research The REU program provides students the opportunity to perform cutting-edge research in materials science and engineering under the guidance of a faculty member from the departments of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Physics or Microbiology, or from the College of Engineering. Research topics generally are designed to complement the ongoing research of the faculty mentor. Students from all over the nation are eligible to compete for the SIU program, and at least two or three positions go to SIU students each year, said Boyd Goodson, professor of chemistry and biochemistry at SIU and the primary investigator on the grant. We also recruit from two-year colleges, and there have been previous SIUC REU participants from those colleges that have afterwards come to SIU to finish their undergraduate degree, Goodson said. Full-time job as a researcher Students selected for the program are paid to work full time on the research project, earning a stipend of almost $5,000. Students also receive a travel allowance of $750.00, to help defray the cost of traveling to and from SIU or to travel to a scientific conference, along with a $1,000 research allowance to support their research project. They also can reside in University Housing free of charge. During the nine-week program, students develop the skills needed to excel in both academic and industrial research environments, where interdisciplinary teams are the standard approach and researchers must communicate effectively across disciplines. The program requires students to think about the application of their research to new technologies and the manufacturing of new devices, and will give them the opportunity to present their results to a diverse audience. SIU primarily recruits from two- and four-year institutions residing in neighboring states or the Mississippi Delta region, as well as those with traditionally high enrollment of students from underrepresented groups. SIU values undergrad research Involving undergraduates in real research is hallmark of SIUs philosophy as a research institution, making the REU program a great fit for the university, Goodson said. It goes right to the core of our mission, he said. SIU has a large number of faculty who are at the top of their field in research, but these faculty are also passionate about including undergraduates in their research and creative efforts. SIU is also the right size for offering top undergraduate research and creative opportunities for students, he said. We are a major research university, so we have the resources and research-active faculty that small colleges dont have, Goodson said. Not only that, but unlike the very large research universities, our faculty-to-majors ratio is large enough to allow a large fraction if not most of our respective majors who want research experiences to actually participate in such opportunities on campus. Syrias prolonged conflict and misery going into its eighth year is no accident. It is by design. American imperialist design. First though, we note the increasing reprehensible absurdity in this conflict. Turkey, which invaded Syria nearly a month ago in violation of Syrias sovereignty, this week accused Damascus of terrorism after the Syrian government sent forces to defend the northern area near Afrin under assault from Turkey. Meanwhile, US forces, again illegally occupying Syria in violation of international law, claim to be fighting terrorist militia. Yet more often than not, the Americans are affording protection to various terrorist groups. Then when Syrian state forces advance to clear the terror groups, the US claims it is acting in self-defense by massacring whole units of the Syrian army. Further absurdity is due to France, which has been bombing Syria illegally along with the US and Britain, warning Iranian militia, who are legally present in Syria owing to Damascus approval, that they have to withdraw from the country. As if the situation couldnt get any more bizarre, Israel has carried out more than 100 air strikes on Syria, claiming that the aggression are acts of self-defense. The Syrian government of President Assad is the sovereign authority of the country, as recognized by UN resolutions. It has the right to defend its nation and to reclaim areas which have been usurped by illegally armed groups. Virtually all of these insurgents are foreign-backed proxies who have been waging a war for regime change according to the designs of their foreign sponsors. The only armed forces legally present in Syria are those of Russia, Iran and associated militia who have been requested legally by the Syrian government to assist in defending the state from a foreign-backed war. It is within the sovereign right of the Syrian government to take back all areas, including the suburb of East Ghouta near the capital Damascus. The district has been held under siege by foreign-backed extremists going by the name of Jaysh al Islam who are affiliated with internationally proscribed terror groups Al Nusra Front and Islamic State. The impetus to liberate East Ghouta has come about because the militants have been firing mortars at nearby Damascus with deadly results. Not only are Western states violating international law by militarily hampering the Syrian army and its allies in rescuing the country from foreign insurgents, the Western governments and media are mounting a propaganda campaign in an attempt to tie the Syrian state forces hands behind their backs by distorting their legal duty as barbarism. Out of the half million people who have died in the past seven years of war in Syria, it is estimated that nearly half of that total were members of the Syrian army. Added to the Western calumnies over Syria are claims that Syrian state forces have been using chemical weapons on civilian populations. The evidence points in fact to the Western-backed so-called jihadists who have been stealthily using these weapons for false-flag propaganda stunts. To understand the chaotic conflict in Syria, we must refer to the decades-old imperial designs that the US and its allies have had towards the country. The Americans and the British governments going back to Eisenhower and Churchill in the 1950s wanted to destabilize and subjugate the Arab republic a former French colony. In 1996, a new generation of imperialists in Washington led by Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, David Wurmser and other neoconservatives formulated the Clean Break strategy. The strategy in conjunction with Israel sought to destabilize and roll back Syria because of its alliance with Russia, Iran and Hezbollah. More widely, the neoconservatives in Washington openly declared their aim of balkanizing the entire region in order to, in their calculation, make Israel more secure. Syria and Iraq were top priorities for US-imposed chaos. Significantly, the Clean Break strategy designated Turkey as a key partner to the US and Israel for implementing this plan. The same American neoconservative planners went on to occupy key positions at the Pentagon and State Department during President George W Bush administrations. There is every reason to believe their stratagem of organized chaos as a way of exerting hegemony over the oil-rich Middle East continues to be the guiding, albeit tacit, policy of the US government under President Trump. Russia, Iran and Hezbollah largely helped Syria bring the war to a close at the end of last year with the widespread routing of foreign-backed insurgents. However, a subsequent peace process brokered by Russia, Iran and Turkey has lost momentum. The violence in Syria appears to be re-igniting. The increasingly overt military presence of US and Turkish forces, as well as Israeli incursions, is the clearest factor in the resurgence of conflict. More than ever, the US and its allies are operating on a brazen imperial design to dismember Syria and its territorial integrity. This is nothing short of criminal aggression by Washington following a deliberate plan for regional domination. This imperialist intrigue should be called out for what it is by the United Nations. But rather than upholding the UN Charter, the bodys senior figures are joining in the Western chorus of condemning Syria for defending its national rights. The UN is appearing like the ineffectual League of Nations in the 1930s when it pandered to Nazi and fascist aggression. What the US and its allies are doing now in Syria is a repeat fanning the flames of wider war in the Middle East. Laws and sovereignty are being smashed at will and yet the Western media and UN are blind to the aggression. Indeed, they are turning reality on its head, by blaming victim-states for the aggression. The straightforward bottom line is that the US, Turkey, Israel and other NATO powers must withdraw from Syria. Respect Syrias sovereignty and desist from criminal intrigues for regime change. This is a minimum of abiding by international law. If these protagonists persist in their criminal schemes, the region is heading for a conflagration sparing no-one. Since becoming independent in 1991 Ukraine has become one of the ten largest exporters of major conventional weapons. Rationale for this was that after 1991 the Ukrainian government cut defense spending, leaving few opportunities for domestic procurement. The newly independent Ukraine had inherited a surplus of military equipment that it didnt have the ability to maintain. Since independence defense exports became one of the few ways the country can pay for its military suffered from much smaller defense budgets in the 1990s. With the collapse of the Soviet Union Ukraine acquired an extensive collection of mostly modern combat vehicles. The T-54/55/62 main battle tanks, the conceptual heirs to the World War II T-34 tank were mainly in training units that tended to be further east, away from Ukraine which was considered a front line area of the Soviet Union. As such what Ukraine did have a lot of were more modern tanks like the T-80, T-72, and T-64. Ukraine found there is a market for updated versions older tanks and other armored vehicles. This included production of a new, modernized version of the Soviet era T-72. Many of these upgraded T-72s were produced in the massive Ukroboronproms Kyiv factory in the last few years for the Ukraine Army, especially units facing Russian forces in the east (Donbas). Production concentrated T-72AB and T-72AMT models, enhancing them with the dynamic 'contact' protection system used on the T-64BV model. New BTR-3DAs have also been delivered, and numerous armored vehicles damaged in Donbas fighting have been restored and repaired. Ukraine inherited 1,320 T-72 tanks from the Soviet Union. But because the manufacturing plant - Uralvagonzavod - was now in Russia, Ukraine decided to sell most of its T-72 tanks while maintaining the locally produced T-64s instead. Thus 863 T-72 tanks were sold to export customers between 1992 and 2015. The last delivery of 14 T-72 tanks to Nigeria took place after the fighting began in Donbas. Until 2015 all Ukrainian T-72 tanks were fully equipped but spare parts all came from factories in Russia. After the conflict in Donbass broke out improvised parts production was started in Ukraine. By the end of 2016, Ukraine had about 300 T-72s, mostly older models, in service. The remaining inventory of T-72 tanks were in storage and available for use after some factory refurbishment. Only a small number of these vehicles took part in Donbas fighting and two were captured. One, a T-72B1 (the most modern T-72 in the country's arsenal) was described as a Russian T-72B3 by Ukrainian media and presented as evidence of Russian intervention. In early 2018 Ukraine has only 72 T-72 tanks operational although some 385 more remain in storage awaiting parts. There were other problems. Ukraine had to concentrate on building a new version of the T-72 because the locally produced T-64 had performance problems and did not benefit much from upgrades. The T-72 was simply a better design. Although Ukraine has lost its former ability to produce new, modern tanks in large quantities, the armor vehicle industry does retain significant capabilities in the fields of repair and modernization. The T-72 tank was considered by the Soviet military as a 'mobilization' tank, meant for second-tier divisions. Therefore, Soviet tank units within Soviet Ukraine and Crimea were primarily equipped with T-64 tanks, which was considered a foundation tank. In the early 1990s, the newly formed Ukrainian armed forces, which inherited a total of over 4,000 main battle tanks, only adopted the T-64s into service. T-72s were sent to the reserves, or used as training units. Ukraine also inherited 487 advanced T-80 tanks but over half of these were sold off to other countries in the 1990s. In 1991 Ukraine's inventory of modern tanks included 2,340 T-64s, approximately 1,320 T-72s, and 487 T-80s. Among its inventory of T-64s, 227 are T-64R first generation tanks that required modernization and upgrades to prepare it for modern combat. Multiple T-64R tanks and 120 T-64BM Bulat tanks were updated for combat use against the Russian backed Donbas rebels. Current inventory in 2018 also includes 550 updated T-64BV tanks. There are an additional 1,000 T-64B tanks in storage that are considered tier four (bottom of the barrel) equipment and only useful as a source of spare parts. During combat operations in eastern Ukraine in 2014 and early 2015, over 50 T-64s were captured by the rebels, with another 200 destroyed or damaged beyond repair. There are currently 670 combat-ready T-64s remaining in Ukraine's inventory. Accounting for the cannibalization for spare parts of stored vehicles and in the absence of significant combat losses, it is possible for Ukraine to maintain this level of combat ready tank operations in combat-ready condition for a relatively long time. However, getting new ones is out of the question. Ukraine also operates 167 gas turbine powered T-80 tanks. In terms of components, these tanks have a lot in common with the T-64. The initial inventory that Ukraine had of these tanks was 487. But Ukraine sold 320 units to Pakistan for $650 million and these were delivered between 1997 and 1999. The remaining 167 T-80 tanks were put into long term storage in 2004 but because of the Donbas War in 2015, Ukraine decided to bring them back for frontline service after a complete overhaul. Restored T-80s are sent to Ukraines highly mobile assault forces. Each of the seven brigades of Ukraine's Airborne Troops is assigned a company of 10 T-80 tanks. To date, about 60 T-80s have been restored and delivered to the troops. Some 20- 40 more modernized T-80s will be delivered to the Ukrainian Army in 2018 and beyond. One caveat to the tank, however, is its use of a gas turbine engine, a finicky design requiring support from weapons maintenance specialists which are becoming increasingly difficult to find in the country. Ukraine is also now producing its first indigenous tank, known as the T-84 Oplot. Ten T-84U tanks were produced before 2014 and were placed in storage. Six of these tanks are currently being restored to active service. The remaining four and ten additional T-84 tanks were ordered into service or production by Ukraine in February 2018. These tanks can certainly support Ukraines punitive military operations in the Donbas for the foreseeable future but in any possible conflict with Russia, Ukraine's tank forces would be immediately and hopelessly outmatched. Ryan Schinault The military government confirmed that it is taking a soft approach to the growing number of illegal (according to strict rules imposed by the military) demonstrations against military rule and policies the military has implemented. The government warned that it would still go after those who are financing protests but the fact is (and the generals know it) that nearly all the protests are carried out by Thais doing it out of conviction, not because someone is paying them. These demonstrations are not the only problem for the unpopular government. A recent survey showed most Thais believe corruption had gotten worse since 2014 coup. One of the main reasons the military took over the government was to deal with corruption and according to most Thais they have not done so. The survey showed Thais believe corruption is getting worse despite all the claims by the military that they have reduced corruption. Worse, the economy got worse after the military coup and four years later GDP growth in Thailand is the lowest in the region and the military is blamed. To make matters worse several generals in the government are accused of corruption (because of obvious wealth that cannot be explained) and, as Thai generals usually do, the accused are acting like they are untouchable and waiting for all the media attention to go away. That has worked for many generations, but that was before cell phones and the Internet. Political power no longer guarantees control of local media. Note that all the coups since the 1930s have ended when the generals realized there were limits to their power and sense of impunity. That is happening again and the military is trying to prepare for another reversion to an elected government followed byyears of elected officials trying to curb the power and sense of impunity among the generals. Slave Trade Survives In the south the locals continue to complain, without much impact, about the continued use of slavery by fishing companies. Men from Bangladesh and Burma are recruited for jobs in Thailand but, once they arrived, were forced to first work for nothing to pay for their transportation and the recruiting fee. This form of debt slavery is a common scam in the region, especially in remote areas where it will not be noticed. This sort of thing is illegal in Thailand, but police dont do anything unless a violation is reported. The persistent poverty in Burma and Bangladesh has led to an increase in this sort of people smuggling to Thailand, which has been the economic powerhouse in the region and a magnet for millions seeking jobs. The smugglers charge a lot of money, and those smuggled (also illegal) in then become slaves for years until the fees are paid off. Sometimes the slaves are offered paying jobs once their debts are paid off but the system tends to keep the slaves in debt for life. In Thailand these debt slaves are common on rubber plantations as well as aboard fishing boats. China Requests Last November there was a jail break in the south (Songkhla province, just north of the three Moslem provinces and also bordering Malaysia). Twenty Chinese Uighurs who had been arrested for illegally entering Thailand escaped from a migrant detention center near the Malaysian border. Within a week six were recaptured, one of them across the border in Malaysia. China demanded that the six recaptured Uighurs be returned to China but the escaped Uighurs all denied they were Chinese and popular opinion in Thailand (especially the Moslem south) is against automatically sending illegal migrants in Thailand back to China. Few of these Uighurs migrants have had anything to do with Islamic terrorism and ignoring that when China demands automatic expulsion back to China of Uighurs is seen as Thailand surrendering to Chinese bullying. That sort of thing is very unpopular. Nevertheless there have been some Uighur involvement in Islamic terrorism. But now China is pressuring Malaysia (a Moslem majority country) to return eleven of these Uighurs that Malaysian police arrested. Both Malaysia and Thailand have agreements with China to extradite criminal suspects but the problem here is the eleven Uighurs are apparently not criminals in China, although they broke local laws by illegally entering Thailand and then Malaysia. In the last few years the military government in Thailand has been quick to return Uighurs who made it to Thailand (usually on their way to Malaysia). While the Thai generals are not Moslem and dependent on China the Malaysian politicians are Moslem and rather more hostile to Chinese demands. This stalemate remain unresolved as China pressures Malaysia and Malaysia insists there is no pressure. February 16, 2018: Someone posted a video on the Internet showing sixty Bangkok policemen from four different stations lining up to receive cash bribes in red envelopes from the owner of an illegal gambling operation. The red envelopes are in honor of the Lunar (Chinese) New Year celebration, which is a traditional time to give gifts to faithful servants. Several days later the police announced an investigation of corruption in the Bangkok police. Police officials also ordered an investigation into who took the video and posted it. A week earlier the national police issued a warning to police commanders to make sure there were no such New Year Red Envelope bribes, which ethnic Chinese gangsters are fond of. The Burmese army commander-in-chief visited and the Thai military arranged for the Burmese general to a high royal honor (medal); the Knight Grand Cross (First Class) of the Most Exalted Order of the White Elephant. This good will gesture was appreciated by the Burmese general, who is under criticism by the Moslem world and the UN for the way the Burmese has been handling their Moslem Royhinga minority. Thailand continues having problems with the drug trade in neighboring Burma, where the northern tribes fight to resist government efforts to suppress the drug production. Because of this the leaders of both countries try to cooperate in controlling and containing this drug trade. February 15, 2018: In the south (Yala province) Islamic terrorists used a roadside bomb to attack a school. This resulted in three students, three local defense volunteers and four civilian bystanders wounded. This is the fourth such attack on schools in the south this year. The navy received five more M21 patrol boats. This comes after four M21 patrol boats were received in September and the first three entered service in 2013. Fourteen have been received or are on order so far and these 21 meter (65 foot) boats are the backbone of the naval patrol force the navy is updating to control smuggling and poaching in coastal waters. The M21s carry a crew of nine, can stay out for 24 hours at a time and are armed with a 20mm autocannon, 12.7mm machine-gun and 81mm mortar. February 14, 2018: In the south (Pattani province) police disarmed a bike with a time bomb installed in a water bottle. Two more bike bombs went off on the 11th but caused few injuries. Two others were found and disarmed. February 13, 2018: The United States has improved joint defense cooperation with Thailand in the last year. This cooperation had diminished after the 2014 coup but this year the U.S., alarmed at the growing presence of Chinese military influence in Thailand (and unease among most Thai military leaders over the Chinese efforts) improved ties with the Thai military. A tangible example of that was the arrival of 6,800 American troops (twice as many as 2017) for the annual Cobra Gold joint military exercise. This year 29 nations will send troops to participate or observe. Since 1982 Thai and American troops have held Cobra Gold each year. Usually the event are held in Thailand and over the years has come to include troops from other countries in the region. In 2014 Cobra Gold included Chinese troops for the first time. China was invited to watch. There were only 17 Chinese troops in attendance, but it was a big deal because Chinas neighbors would rather be training with Chinese troops than confronting them. Many believe the Chinese are just there to take notes on how more experienced and better regarded troops do what they do. Two months after the 2014 Cobra Gold exercise the Thai military staged their coup. In the south (Narathiwat province) two men were shot dead for unknown reasons. February 11, 2018: The military is trying a new approach to eliminating the separatist violence in the south. In effect it is offering men identified as key leaders of the separatist groups and offer them amnesty and substantial economic rewards if they renounce the separatist violence. February 10, 2018: Prominent pro-democracy advocates led a demonstration in the capital demanding that the military government hold elections as they have been promising but regularly postponing. The pro-democracy leaders were not arrested because of the illegal demonstration (all demonstrations are now illegal without military permission) and within the week the military filed a formal complaint against seven of the protest leaders. The military charged the protest leaders of threatening public order, which the military sought to deal with in 2014 when they ousted an elected government. There was a similar demonstration in January and over thirty of those demonstrating were arrested. Some of these were protesting again today. And later announced they were organizing a schedule of regular protests until democracy returns. February 7, 2018: In Malaysia peace talks between Thailand and southern separatists resumed and made progress by agreeing to establish one safety zone in the south as a pilot test to settle disagreements over the concept. Until now lack of unity among the separatist groups made it difficult to get agreement on the details. The basic idea is that security in the south would be supervised by representatives from separatists and the government and when this worked (neither side attacked) the safety zone would be expanded until it included all three southern provinces that were majority Moslem. The government could then expand economic development and infrastructure projects. Islamic terrorism and radicalism is no longer as much of an issue as it used to be. That particular cause is generally seen as counterproductive and lacks much local support. A lot of the negotiations are an effort to create some trust. For example the BRN (Barisan Revolusi Nasional) the oldest (founded in 1960) separatist group in the south as well as one of the largest had long rejected the safety zone proposal. The main objection was the government refusal to allow foreign observers to monitor any peace agreement. BRN considers the Thai government an occupying force but the government refuses to accept that label. These attitudes are the main reason why it has been so difficult to get peace talks going at all, much less make any progress. The government openly blames disagreements among the southern separatist organizations for the difficulties in achieving a negotiated settlement. February 6, 2018: In the south (Pattani province) two separate incidents in the last two days have left two Moslem village leaders dead. It is unclear if this is local politics, gang feuds or Islamic terrorist/separatist related. All three tend to get mixed up in the south. January 25, 2018: In the central Thailand (Samut Prakan Province) a tip from locals led police to raid a warehouse where they found a Chinese lumber smuggling operation. Five Thais were arrested and later two Chinese while a third Chinese citizen is being sought. The warehouse was used to process rosewood logs and box them up to be smuggled to China where this rare lumber is highly valued. There were fifteen tons of rosewood (logs and planks) in the warehouse, all illegally cut down in Thailand and Cambodia and apparently getting past customs inspection while leaving Thailand. Police are looking into that. This sort of illegal lumber business is unpopular in Thailand because it is all about China destroying rare Thai rosewood trees and smuggling the lumber back to China. This sort of thing takes place all over Southeast Asia and is one reason why China is hated, and feared. January 22, 2018: In the northeast (Nakhon Phanom Province) Thai Navy patrol boats on the Mekong River noted some suspicious activity with a boat crossing from Laos to Thailand. Police inspected the boat and found 11 million methamphetamine tablets from Burma. This was the largest seizure of this stuff from Laos ever, and this batch was worth over $100 million when sold to users. Called "yaba" ("crazy drug") locally, most of it is smuggled out via Thailand but doing so via Laos and Thailand is something new. Since 2010 production of yaba tablets has soared in northern Burma. The meth labs are easier to conceal than poppy fields and the meth labs are believed to produce several hundred million tablets a year. But only as long as they can get the industrial chemicals required to make meth. The tribal rebels, especially ethnic Chinese tribes (like the Wa, who apparently produced the seized tablets) use the profits to buy more weapons for their fighters, and run their rebel organizations. Since 2016 India has sought to shut down the illegal chemical smuggling. China is also trying to shut down the corruption that enables drug gangs to bribe chemical shipments past border security. Burma knows it is the center of all this illicit drug activity and has been more willing to cooperate with neighbors to curb the problem. Despite efforts in Burma and China to shut down the yaba production and smuggling the drug continues to get produced and smuggled to customers in China and throughout East Asia. In the south (Yala Province) a bomb set off in a market killed three and wounded 22. January 19, 2018: In the south (Narathiwat) the widow of a village leader killed by Islamic terrorists in 2015 was herself shot dead in a similar fashion. Any allegations of a bullying culture in the Bay of Plenty District Health Board are being "taken seriously" by the boards chief executive Helen Mason. Any allegation that the Bay of Plenty District Health Board in any way condones bullying in its organisation is strongly rejected, says Helen. The DHB is firmly committed to an anti-bullying culture. We take any allegations of inappropriate behaviour very seriously. CultureSafe NZ Ltd director Allan Halse made the accusation saying the board has acted badly towards a client who raised a complaint under the Protected Disclosure Act 2000. When hospital staff were told about a meeting, which was called at extremely short notice, wasnt to proceed without a CultureSafe NZ Ltd representative present, an attempt was made to force the client to attend, says Allan. Distressed, the client left the hospital and was granted two weeks stress leave by her doctor. Its quite unusual for even the worse organisation to force attendance at meeting without allowing representation, says Allan in a Facebook post. We know that the Board has not responded to CultureSafe NZ Ltds request for an investigation into bullying/harassment by three managers and one HR personnel that was condoned by the chief executive Helen Mason, says Allan. In fact, it seems that they have taken the ostrich approach and have buried their heads in the sand. In a statement released to SunLive, Helen says the cases referred to were looked in to as soon as they were brought to their attention. However, we do not comment on individual cases for privacy reasons and would not comment on cases which are currently before the Employment Relations Authority, says Helen. The DHBs commitment to tackling inappropriate workplace behaviour has been demonstrated through the Creating our Culture programme of work over the last 18 months. Creating our Culture includes a workstream specifically focused on inappropriate behaviours and is one of the DHBs four key strategic priorities. This programme is sponsored by the Executive Management Team and is strongly endorsed by our Board. It has included over 2000 staff member interactions, through surveys, attendance at workshops, and continuing work to develop further workshops, tools and templates, says Helen. We have received a lot of very positive feedback about the programme, from staff, our employee union partners, and our patients, and are proud of what it has achieved to date. It is impossible to work at the BOPDHB without being aware of how much the values and expected behaviours highlighted by Creating our Culture matter to us all. This year, we are also adding the internationally-approved Cognitive Institute approach to tackling inappropriate behaviours. This work will be carried out in partnership with our four main employee unions. The Cognitive Institute undertakes careful vetting of any organisation wanting to work with them and have recently assessed and validated our Board and Executive Teams commitment to creating an exemplary workplace culture for everyone. Changing an organisations culture takes time and we recognise we are on a journey. It is a journey we are fully committed to. Police accounts of what happened to Katikati father of two Siegfried Newman, who went missing 10 years ago on February 25, are at variance with each other. One report says Siggy most likely died in the Kaimai Ranges on February 25, 2008, while a recent statement to SunLive from Senior Sergeant Rob Glencross, seems to indicate police believed Siggy was alive on February 26, 2008 the day after he went missing. SunLive has obtained documents relating to Order for Presumption of Death for Probate for Siegfried Newman from the High Court of New Zealand which declared him to be presumed dead in October 2009, eight months after his disappearance. These documents include the affidavit of Police Constable Steven George Campbell, who was responsible for the search and rescue operation for Siggy dated 14 September 2009 which says in summary: I believe that it is most probable that on 25 February 2008 Siegfried suddenly decided to go off into the Kaimai area on his own where he had some sort of accident which prevented him from returning and he died there. The Kaimai area is a vast area covered in dense bush which means a body could be out there and easily remain hidden and may never be found. This is what I believe happened to Siegfried. Although Siggys car was still at his Lund Road home on Tuesday February 26, police say statements from two witnesses that they saw Siggy at Pahoia School that day indicate he was still alive. Police havent been able to explain how he got to the school at least 10km away on State Highway 2 when his car was at Lund Rd, nor how he disappeared again without being seen by anyone else. I am comfortable with the witness information regarding the sighting of Mr Newman on the 26th, says Senior Sergeant Glencross. While the female witness was unsure of the day, her statement supported that of the male witness who was confident of the day. They both described activities taking place at the school when they reported seeing Mr Newman which the school were able to confirm took place on that 26th. After asking why these two police statements fail to agree on the possible date of Siggys death SunLive received the following statement: Police can confirm that the content of the statement to you from Snr Sgt Rob Glencross is accurate and still stands. That would appear to indicate police believe Siggy was alive on February 26 and went to school to see his sons Thomas and Oliver then 10 and eight years old. Friends who knew Siggy dont believe this to be true. They are adamant that if he went to the school that day, he would have made contact with his sons. They also doubt the theory that Siggy walked more than five kilometres from his Lund Road home into the Kaimai Forest. He was emotionally and physically exhausted when he visited us with his boys on the Sunday before he went missing, says a friend who doesnt wish to be named. Siggy had a cold and was coughing too. He was very unwell. I doubt he could have walked 500 metres, let alone five kilometres. Siggys disappearance is a tragic mystery for his sons and family. It happened within a few short months of the equally tragic death of his wife Vicki-Lee after a battle with cancer. Peter Rae of Katikati, his wife and children had been friends with Siggy, Vicki-Lee and children Thomas and Oliver since the children had attended day care together. We would have barbeques and the children would play together. When Vicki was diagnosed with cancer and went through what she did, we did what we could for the family, says Peter. Siggy has been out of our lives for so long, but I do think of him from time to time. If hes out there in the bush somewhere, the chances of finding him get less as less. The fact nothing has been found despite all the searching makes me wonder if he did go bush. Siggy was what I call an urban-bushman who liked to stick to formed tracks. I dont believe he would have taken his life as Siggy was afraid of pain. He would not have deliberately left his boys. When he found out Siggy was missing Peter rang police to tell them of a phone conversation with Siggy in which he said he had arranged a meeting at his home with a man on Monday February 25 to discuss a financial dispute. I offered to go into the police station to make a statement about that but was told not to bother, they had all the information they needed. Police have told SunLIve: The case remains a missing person matter. There is no evidence of foul play. Peter says there are too many unanswered questions about Siggys disappearance. I believe there needs to be an official, independent inquiry into what happened, he says. Despite the passage of time Siggy is not forgotten, says Andy Goodall of Whakamarama. Every time I go into the Kaimai Ranges in areas where Siggy might have walked, I look for him. Six months ago, I was in the area of the Eliza Mine and I searched tracks Id never been on before, but saw no trace of Siggy, says Andy who is experienced in search and rescue, including time in Antarctica. Following the official search for Siggy in 2008, Andy set aside two to three days a week for most of March and April to systematically search areas of the Kaimai Range and farms and orchards around the Newman home. He used a GPS to record everywhere he searched and even took his dog in the hope she might find something. Every so often people ask me about Siggy and following the re-screening of the Sensing Murder programme about his disappearance, I had some people contact me and I referred them to police to give statements. Siggys sons are similar age to my boys and I wonder how they are doing. Andy does not believe Siggy would have deliberately left his boys and his continued searching is motivated by a desire to find answers for them to what happened to their father. Police says: There has been no activity on any of the bank accounts identified as being linked to Mr Newman. While the case is currently classified as a missing person file, that is open to review should further information come to light. Should anyone have any new information regarding Mr Newmans disappearance they can contact the Tauranga Police on (07) 5774300 or they can do so anonymously via Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111. Tauranga born-and-bred, Carlin ONeill has been honoured by the Royal New Zealand Air Force as their Airman of the Year. The acting sergeant is the second person to receive the recently-inaugurated award, which recognises the top airman from junior ranks (corporal and below). The award recognises activities exemplifying courage, commitment, comradeship, integrity and respect. I was promoted pretty much right after I got the award, says Carlin. My commanding officer nominated me based on what Id been doing at work, where Id essentially been doing a sergeants role for over a year, as well as my community involvement with local clubs. That includes surf lifesaving at Muriwai Beach, where Carlin is continuing his patrolling after many years with the Mount Maunganui Lifeguard Service. He says its insane surf lifesaving up in Auckland, with the beaches being more dangerous. The Mount gets busy, but the problem is were just as busy up here, but with more dangerous surf conditions. Carlins been up there for six years, where he lives with his wife and three kids. Hes based at Whenuapai, where he works as an aircraft technician fixing helicopters. I used to work on the Iroquois helicopters before they were sold, and then I came up to Auckland to work on the Navys Seasprites. I travelled a lot doing that Ive been around the Pacific Islands, Australia and even to the USA. As Airman of the Year, Carlin will serve in the position for 2018, attending events and even travelling to Belgium and France for Anzac Day. And although hes been with the RNZAF for almost ten years, the 32-year-old has no plans of giving up the military life just yet. Theyre putting me through some study at the moment, he says. Im doing an aircraft maintenance engineers licence and theyre paying for the whole thing, which is pretty sweet. The Airman of the Year also receives a trophy to be held by his or her unit, a miniature keep sake trophy, CAF Commendation and a specially-designed insignia pin. Click the image above to watch the video In todays weather forecast we are expecting cloudy periods and a few showers. Also light winds and sea breezes. Its a one-clothing layer day today with a high of 24 and an overnight low of 17 degrees. High tide is at 2.10pm and low tide at 8.30pm. Theres a sea swell of 0.4m, sea temperature is 22 degrees and sunset tonight is at 8pm. If youre going fishing today, the best fish bite time is between 7 and 8pm. This day in NZ history 1902 was the end of the battle of Langverwacht Hill. Twenty-four New Zealanders were killed in this battle during the South African (Boer) War. A total of 230 New Zealanders died while serving in New Zealands first overseas war. In 1912 the SS Earnslaw was launched on Lake Wakatipu. For more than 50 years after it was launched, SS Earnslaw has carried freight and people to and from remote lakeside settlements. In world history on this day in 1821 Mexico gained independence from Spain. In 1908 Japan officially agreed to restrict emigration to the United States. Today is the birthday of Irish engineer John Phillip Holland. Born in 1841, he was the inventor of the modern submarine. It is also the birthday of Wilhelm Carl Grimm, who with his brother, compiled fairy tales. Born in 1786, he wrote "He who helped you when you were in trouble ought not afterwards be despised by you." To check out what events and activities are happening today, please go to our Whats on page. Have a great day! Bay of Plenty Rugby Union in partnership with Key Skills Recruitment hosted an open training today at Blake Park for the upcoming new initiative Little Steamers Rugby Programme. Little Steamers Rugby is a pilot programme for 3 to 4-year-olds will be run across five locations in the Western Bay of Plenty from Saturday March 3 for six weeks. The programme is structured to promote and educate parents and/or guardians to be active with their children. The content of the Little Steamers Programme will be facilitated by Bay of Plenty Rugby High Performance players including a selection of Steamers, Volcanixs and Academy players. During the one hour session, trainers will deliver a fun active session focusing on skills and fun rugby related games. The programme has been designed to assist the growth and development of a childs cognitive, physical, social and emotional wellbeing. For parents the programme will provide them the opportunity to engage with their child to develop as a positive role model, learn skills and activity, and be able to motivate their child in an active and positive environment. Bay of Plenty Rugby Union CEO Mike Rogers highlighted the important role rugby can play in encouraging healthy living. We are always looking for ways we can use rugby to support families and be proactive in assisting our community to live a healthy and active lifestyle. Key Skills Recruitment General Manager Ati Aaifou-Olive highlighted the benefits of Little Steamers Rugby. The New Zealand Ministry of Health believes parents should encourage all children to be active from birth. With this programme it is beneficial for both kids and adults. The kids will be able to learn to respect their peers, work together as a team and establish social skills while engaging with their parents/caregivers. It is the perfect family activity to be a part of. The Little Steamers Programme will start from March 3- April 7 from 8.30am-9.30am at Greerton Marist Park, Tauranga Domain, Blake Park, Gordon Spratt Reserve, and Murray Salt Stadium. Registration fees are $35 per child (Child must be guided by full parent/caregiver). Thank you for reading! Please purchase a subscription to read our premium content. If you have a subscription, please log in or sign up for an account on our website to continue. Its strange to think that a single tweet from a celebrity can wipe over one billion dollars off the market value of a company, but thats the world we live in today. Kylie Jenner, the reality TV star and socialite, gave Snapchats stock price another black eye after revealing she doesnt use the app anymore. Kim Kardashians half-sister tweeted to her 24.5 million followers: "sooo does anyone else not open Snapchat anymore? Or is it just me... ugh this is so sad." Jenner had been one of the apps most popular users. Immediately following her tweet, the companys stock started to fall and eventually declined by 6 percent, clearing around $1.3 billion off its market cap and dropping shares near to the IPO price of $17. Snapchats recent redesign, which separates content from friends and brandsincluding celebrities and influencershasnt been well-received by its near 200 million daily active users, and even led to a change.org petition signed by 1.2 million people. The fact that investors are concerned the update wont increase Snaps user numbers has also contributed to the companys troubles. Despite the overwhelmingly negative response to the update, Snapchat has no intention of reverting to the old system. The company acknowledges that the new Snapchat has felt uncomfortable for many, and said a future update would bring more personalization features, but that hasnt appeased users. Much like Facebook and its recent change, Snap says the goal is to make it easier to connect with the people you care about. Jenner did post another tweet that read, still love you tho snap ... my first love, but it didnt undo the effects of her first message. Speaking about the update at a San Francisco conference, Snapchat CEO Even Spiegel, whose pay was $637.8 million last year, said: One of the complaints we got was, wow I used to feel like this celebrity was my friend and now they dont feel like my friend anymore. And were like: Exactly. Theyre not your friend. So for us, even some of the frustrations were seeing really validate those changes. And itll take time for people to adjust. Some people will pay a lot of money for memorabilia, especially when its associated with tech luminary Steve Jobs. A job application form filled out by the Apple co-founder in 1973 is being put up for auction next month with an estimated value of over $50,000. The single-page form, which is for an unspecified position, features several spelling and punctuation errors from the former CEO of what is now the worlds ninth-largest company by revenue. Listing his name as Steven Jobs, and an address as reed college, the Oregon college he attended briefly, Jobs filled out the Special Abilities section with: "tech or design engineer. digital.-from Bay near Hewitt-Packard," instead of Hewlett-Packard. Written three years before he founded Apple with Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne, Jobs does say he has a drivers license, but adds that his access to transportation is possible, but not probable. He notes his skill with computers and calculators and wrote none in the section that asks for a phone number. RR Auction will list the item during a sale that takes place between 8 15 March. Alongside the application will be two other items from Jobs: a Mac OS X technical manual he signed 2001, which is valued at $25,000; and a signed 2008 newspaper clipping about the iPhone that is valued at $15,000. The headline of the article reads, New, faster iPhone will sell for $199. A number of Jobs personal items have gone on sale in the past. His leather jacket sold for $22,400 in 2016, while a magazine he signed went for over $50,000 last year. President Lopez Obrador highlighted the importance of respecting the sovereignty of the world's peoples during his celebration speech. | Read More Two construction union officials have been found liable of breaching workplace laws after refusing to show their right of entry permits when entering a work site and for swearing at the person who asked to see them. When the site manager for the Bendigo Theatre Project, located on the grounds of the Bendigo Senior College, asked CFMEU officials Nigel Davies and Alex Tadic to show him their right of entry permits in July 2014, they refused. A CFMEU march Credit:Amy Remeikis The Federal Court of Australia heard that the site manager, Simon Ireland, told the pair they were welcome on the site if they showed him their permits, but if they did not, they would have to leave. The court heard that Mr Tadic said words to the effect of, "I am not dealing with a f-----g pen pusher f--k off" and that he called Mr Ireland "a f-----g disgrace". Banking giant Barclays pays female employees at its investment bank division just under half as much as male colleagues on average, highlighting the gender imbalances in the industry and the concentration of men in highly paid roles. The gender pay gap widens to 79 per cent for discretionary bonuses paid to employees at its international unit, which houses the corporate and investment bank, said the London-based company, the first major bank with British operations to disclose such data. There's a long way to go: Men continue to earn more than their female colleagues at Britsh banking giant Barclays. At the British ring-fenced bank, women earn 26 per cent less than men and receive bonuses that are 60 per cent lower, according to the lender's annual report. Barclays is "confident that men and women across our organisation are paid equally for doing the same job," Chief Executive Officer Jes Staley told reporters on Thursday. Crown Resorts is pressing ahead with its two major development projects, saying apartment sales in its high-end Sydney tower are "going well", while the listed company seeks financing for its proposed 90-storey skyscraper in Melbourne. The Australian casino giant recently sold two floors of its under-construction, six-star hotel and residential complex in Sydney's Barangaroo to its largest shareholder, billionaire James Packer, for $60 million. Artist impression of Crown Sydney in Barangaroo. The $2.2 billion Barangaroo project is due for completion in 2021. "If you have a view of Barangaroo, you'll see that it's coming out of the ground, so there's some quite high level activity going on at the site," Crown Resorts chief financial officer Ken Barton said this week. Southern Cross Austereo chief executive Grant Blackley is bullish on digital radio, saying it is "coming of age" and part of its future strategy as it works to turn around its underperforming 2DayFM breakfast show. Net profit for the radio and free-to-air broadcaster dropped 21.2 per cent over the six months to December 31. Southern Cross chief executive Grant Blackley says digital radio is coming of age. After "two consecutive years of heavy lifting" to improve Southern Cross Media Group's balance sheet, Mr Blackley said net debt was down to $324.8 million after selling assets, including its Northern NSW TV licence bought last year by billionaire Bruce Gordon's WIN Network. The sale of assets hit earnings for the half, and reduced debt and leverage, "laying the foundation for a successful refinancing of our debt facilities and accompanying reduction in finance costs," Mr Blackley said. Sydney and Melbourne CBD office markets, will be primarily driven by customer focused and flexible working environments, says Colliers International. This will lead to a increased demand from investors for office assets, according to agents and landlords. In the recent reporting season, major owners including Investa Office, Dexus, Charter Hall and GPT Group all tipped lower office vacancy levels for the coming year, which will entice more sales. According to Colliers Internationals first half 2018 CBD office research & forecast report, investment activity will remain heightened with record low vacancies expected for 2018. Mission Australia, one of the countrys largest not-for-profit organisations, has a new location for the delivery of crisis and transitional accommodation in Brookvale. A local anonymous benefactor has purchased the 28-room accommodation building and an adjacent three bedroom residential dwelling for $9.4 million which will allow Mission Australia to deliver accommodation and case management services for people at risk of, or experiencing homelessness. Mission Australia, one of the countrys largest not-for-profits, has a new location in Brookvale, Sydney The new facility will open in 2018 and Mission Australia will operate the services across both properties. Colliers International agents Tom Appleby, Henry Burke and Chris Milou facilitated the sale on behalf of STARIN, a specialist fund manager and developer. Bill Gates sat down with talk show host Ellen DeGeneres for the first time this week. Gates is the founder of Microsoft and cofounder of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and is the worlds second-richest person with an estimated fortune of $US91.8 billion ($117 billion), according to Bloombergs index. Gates officially became a billionaire when he was 31 the youngest billionaire in history, at the time. But the boost to his bank account didnt send him on a spending spree, Gates said during his interview with DeGeneres. Which might help to explain why I was so readily seduced by the promise of an app that would make me fluent enough to order a meal at one of those incredible restaurants, confident that I would get the steak I had expected, rather than raw lamb's liver in a pool of delicately spiced lard. For a big talker like myself, there's nothing more disconcerting than spending time in a country where I cannot speak the language. On my last trip, I started to feel orally constipated, as if I'd landed in a silent Buddhist retreat, albeit one with incredible shopping, galleries and restaurants. A friend recommended Duolingo after I told her I would be visiting Paris. On a previous trip, the only French that really sunk into my head was the word for no, partly because it's exactly the same as the English word for no, but also because it was the word spoken to me most often, when I asked in my appalling French accent "parlay vu Onglays?". Bonjour! According to the popular language app Duolingo, I am now 21 per cent fluent in French. I gained this astonishing level of proficiency after just two weeks of intensive 10-minute daily sessions. Duolingo was very reassuring and encouraging, updating me at the end of every session as to how well I was doing, which turned out to be surprisingly well indeed. Each time I practised, my fluency levels leapt up. Yet even as the app encouraged me, doubts started to creep in about its accuracy. It wasn't just my almost non-existent vocabulary, my complete ignorance of French grammar, or my patent inability to correctly pronounce the few words that I did know. It was the phrases the app insisted I learn. Instead of teaching me to say useful thing such as "May I have a coffee that doesn't taste like boiled toilet water, please", I was being drilled on how to make inane declarations such as "Look I am eating an apple!" I expect there are times when this might be a useful thing to say, yet I was struggling to imagine them arising in the course of my brief holiday. On the plus side, the app did teach me how to apologise "je suis desole" which I was fairly certain would come in handy, as I sent my lamb's liver back to the kitchen for cooking. In fact I have an extremely fraught history with foreign languages in general. As an undergraduate I studied German at university, yet rather than gaining in confidence, I finished the course feeling like a bigger language dunce than ever. At the time, I blamed many things for this. The fact that I couldn't afford to visit Germany on semester break in order to practise my conversation, as so many of my fellow students did. Then there was my broad Australian accent, constantly leading me to mispronounce German words in a way that got laughs from my class of well-spoken former private school children. At least those were the excuses I offered myself. Now, looking back, I wonder if the real problem was simply that learning a language is hard. It takes time and practice, but it also requires humility. An acceptance that you will, most likely, sound like a dill. And I think it was the fear of sounding silly that constituted the greatest barrier to my progress. Grahame was 55 when she fetched up in England in a provincial production of The Glass Menagerie. We see her walking around the house with no make-up; we see her two years later, ravaged by illness no gauzy wilting in the style of the lady of the camellias here and we can see exactly where Annette Bening's neck creases when she turns her head. Annette Bening at this week's BAFTA Awards in London. She was nominated for Best Actress in a Leading Role but missed out on an Oscar nomination. Credit:AP "It isn't glossy and I didn't want it to be," Bening says. "I didn't want her to look phoney. I wanted her to look like a real person." There are moments when the audacity of this determination makes you catch your breath; it is easy to laugh at the vanity of actors, but a wrinkle or sag blown up to fill a cinema screen looms very large indeed. "I have vanity," Bening says. "I think we all do; I think that is pretty normal. But I'm interested in just being an actress. What matters is trying to find the authentic experience. I just worked with the magnificent Vanessa Redgrave, who's 80 and absolutely stunning. And I think that's the direction we all need to follow." Annette Bening and Lucas Jade Zumann in 20th Century Women. Credit:MERRICK MORTON Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool opens in 1979. Grahame was staying downstairs in a slightly moth-eaten rooming house in London's Primrose Hill; upstairs lived a young aspiring actor called Peter Turner, almost 30 years her junior, played in the film by Jamie Bell. She invited him to dance with her, then to sleep with her; she went to stay in Liverpool with his family. The Turners formed a classic working-class clan, mutually devoted, frequently fighting and centred around their stalwart mother, played by Julie Walters. Grahame seems to have fallen in love with them all. "It was exotic to someone from Hollywood; it is strange to think but I guess it is it's the Fab Four, the Beatles, it's Liverpool, the centre of music at the time," says the film's director, Paul McGuigan. "To go there and find Peter has this family, this close-knit family, was something that Gloria never had." Peter went to America with her; they split up; then she followed him home. She died in 1981, largely forgotten. In 1987 he wrote the book on which this film is closely based. Annette Bening and Julianne Moore in The Kids are All Right. Credit:SUZANNE TENNER Playing Grahame isn't quite the same as playing a real person everyone knows and recognises, says Bening; her current obscurity brings with her other responsibilities. "There isn't a lot of material, and what there is is salacious and not very reputable," she says. "I felt a responsibility especially because there isn't a lot we know about Gloria in truth. You can go on the internet and listen to all sorts of celebrity interviews. I do that I go down the rabbit hole every once in a while and it's really fun, but you can't find her talking about herself or what she felt about things." She already had an unusually deep knowledge of Grahame's body of work, thanks to British director Stephen Frears, who recommended she watch Grahame's back catalogue in preparation for her role as a con-man's decoy moll in The Grifters (1990). What struck Bening when she was watching that back catalogue with titles such as Sudden Fear and The Big Heat was how often Grahame was being hurt. Annette Bening and real-life husband Warren Beatty in Love Affair. Credit:Universal Pictorial Press Photo "It's really shocking now to watch," Bening told The Times. "To see not only how women are slapped around and beaten up, but how it's not even considered to be a 'dramatic device'!" Grahame won her Oscar for her performance in The Bad and the Beautiful (1952); she then played the girl who famously can't say no in Oklahoma! As a piece of casting, that has the flavour of an in-joke. On screen, she played bad dames; off screen, she was generally scandalous. Annette Bening in American Beauty. Grahame was married four times three times before she was 30 and most scandalously to Anthony Ray, her own stepson. His father, the hell-raising director Nicholas Ray, directed her in In a Lonely Place (1950) and was her husband for four years between 1948 and 1952. Rumour had it that her affair with Anthony began when the boy was only 13. As fate would have it, the launch of Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool at the Telluride and Toronto film festivals in September came just before the Weinstein revelations, the eruption of #MeToo and the beginning of repercussions for men who harassed and bullied generally much younger women. Big age gaps between sexual partners are now regarded with a distaste that has been bundled up with the revulsion felt for Weinstein's misdeeds. The case against Woody Allen, who also married a girl who was widely regarded as his de facto stepchild, has been revived. Whether this confluence of events dented Bening's chance at a fifth Oscar nomination (she is yet to win) for her sensuous performance as a seductive older woman is hard to know, but it is certainly now a difficult story to reward. In September, when the movement had yet to gather momentum, there was an Oscar buzz around her performance. The year Grahame won her Oscar was the first year the awards were televised; with no conventions to follow, she just said "thank you" and walked off. Has Bening thought about what she would say? "Well, of course," she says. "It's human nature to think about it. If you never thought about it, that would be pretty strange." She had good reason to think about it during last year's Oscars, when Beatty was handed the wrong envelope and famously announced the wrong winning film. "Oh my God. I thought my husband handled it really well," she says loyally. "What a difficult position. I thought 'well done, Warren'." Bening met Beatty on the set of his 1991 film Bugsy. She was in her early 30s hardly an ingenue but she is inevitably asked about the age gap between them in light of this film's theme and the events out in the world. "I think it's so important to distinguish between people being involved in a consensual way and the other side of the conversation," she told the website 52 Insights. "That for me is part of what is so important with what is happening, because we have to have a more nuanced conversation about coercive, unwanted sexual come-ons, harassment, and assault. These things need to be distinguished." It's the silence that is corrosive, she says, "the hiding and the keeping things under the radar". Although, she says, she and Beatty certainly kept things quiet on the Bugsy set. Of course, everyone knows exactly why you would do that. Women, as Bening says, are judged for their behaviour in a way men are not. She says she still doesn't understand why Grahame's career plummeted so dramatically after she made Oklahoma! "I don't know how much of it was because of her personal life," she ventures cautiously. "And I don't ever want to say that because I don't know that and I don't think it's fair. She had to make a living, but when she did start doing plays, she was doing tiny plays in Wisconsin. She was having a really hard time, although I have a feeling she was such a gritty character that she just got on with it." Bening started out that way, doing theatre at her local community college, getting a theatre degree at San Francisco State and then working in tiny festivals. A struggle at the beginning of a career, however, is very different from a struggle at the end of it. Bening says she can pick and choose now; her choices are generally impeccable. Future projects include a role opposite Oscar Isaac in Dan Fogelman's Life Itself, and a part in an adaptation of Anton Chekov's The Seagull. Not only is she doing more work than ever, but the roles are much richer. "All of that stuff that the women's movement in the '70s was articulating," she told Vanity Fair, "we're now beginning to feel the benefits of people in our culture being more accepting of a more complex, truthful view of women." Like many women of her generation, Bening had her feminist epiphany at university. Her parents live in Kansas, have been married for 67 years, and are staunch Republicans. Warren Beatty was famously an active Democrat who campaigned for liberal candidates; Bening is a Democratic donor but her political pronouncements are few and far between. You have to take it on faith when she says she still feels angry. There is a perceptible strength, however, in that minted graciousness. That has to be what makes women feel they should talk to her. Being Annette Bening: that's a statement in itself. Like the battered old Holdens and Fords they miraculously keep running on the remote desert roads of Central Australia, bush mechanics are a phenomenon of Australian motoring culture. These Warlpiri men have a knack for making brake pads out of mulga and reviving dead car batteries with heat from a campfire. One of the most original and popular television series produced in Australia, Bush Mechanics, co-created by David Batty and Francis Jupurrurla Kelly, first screened on the ABC in 2001. It became a bestselling DVD and is now a national touring exhibition. An outback convertible features in the show. The Victorian leg of the exhibition, hosted by the Bunjilaka Aboriginal Cultural Centre at Melbourne Museum, features two vehicles from the series as well as a variety of interactive features, among them a specially built "driving simulator" made of discarded parts that must first be assembled before it can be operated. It wasn't a promotion, salary raise or a wardrobe clash that ignited this feud between two of Australia's best-known television stars, but a bowl of brussels sprouts flung at the other you couldn't make it up. It all started when Denise Drysdale launched the leafy green vegetables at Ita Buttrose at their Studio 10 Christmas party in December. Studio 10's team, from L-R, Sarah Harris, Joe Hildebrand, Denise Drysdale, Ita Buttrose and Jessica Rowe. Credit:TEN Drysdale, a two-time Gold Logie winner, apologised for the incident, blaming it on a few too many glasses of champers (he without sin cast the first sprout), while Buttrose, AO OBE, has kept a dignified silence - until now. The founding editor of the now defunct Cleo first wanted to set the record straight that "it wasn't one sprout, it was a bowl" before explaining tensions can run high around the holidays. Police are investigating claims of corruption and fraud at Queen Victoria Market. Market chief executive Stan Liacos said allegations had been made of "improper activity by employees, developers, suppliers and the government going back more than 20 years". Police are investigating claims of criminal activity at Queen Victoria Market. Credit:Eddie Jim He said the accusations had been made this week in an anonymous email to the board which was then referred to Victoria Police. "QVM takes any allegation of impropriety extremely seriously and will fully cooperate with police as they assess this matter," he said. The number of hours of subsidised care families can access will be determined by an activity test, including paid work (including parental leave), approved study or training, unpaid work in a family business, self-employment, looking for work, volunteering, and other activities on a case-by-case basis. There's been criticism that the emphasis on how parents spend their time will impede access to early childhood education for kids in disadvantaged families. The government's response is that there'll be exemptions for parents who legitimately cannot meet the requirements. They've also funded a "safety net" for families where childcare will boost children's safety and wellbeing or grandparents are the main carers, for example. Many will welcome the abolition of the annual cap for many families currently Child Care Rebate is limited to $7613 a year for each child. That doesn't go far if your child needs more than one or two days a week or if you live in a big city where childcare rates are up to $150 a day. Under the new system, families earning $185,710 or less will have no cap on the amount of Child Care Subsidy they receive. Families earning above that threshold but below $350,000 will be capped at $10,000 a year. However, there's now an hourly cap on the subsidy: $11.55 an hour for centre-based care, $10.70 for family day care and $10.10 for out-of-school-hours care. The subsidy will be paid directly to childcare providers to pass on in the form of reduced fees, rather than directly to families. If you want to find out how much subsidy you'll get, there's a handy calculator at education.gov.au/childcare. It's pretty easy to use on both desktop and mobile, and it doesn't record your personal details so you can have a play around with it and figure out how a change in circumstances would affect your payments. I won't share my own details but I ran through a couple of fictional scenarios. Case study 1: Ash and Sarah have a daughter called Molly, age 4. Sarah is working full-time, while Ash is spending 8 hours a week in approved activity. Molly is attending a preschool program three days a week at a long daycare centre to prepare her for school in 2019. The family income is $60,000 total. This family is actually worse off under the new rules. Under the old system, the family received $460 a fortnight of which $260 was Child Care Rebate. Under the new system they'll get just $350 a fortnight. The family is no longer subject to the annual cap of $7613 for Child Care Rebate but this makes little difference to them because the current level of rebate is less than that. If Ash did double the amount approved activity i.e.16 hours a week but the household income stayed the same, the scenario would change dramatically. In that case, the family would be eligible for $530 a fortnight, compared with $470 a fortnight under the current system. If the work activity is low because Ash is the stay-at-home parent to a younger child not yet in formal care, I guess the family could try applying for an exemption. I don't know what the ruling would be on that. Case study 2: Aram and Haneen have a household income of $100,000. They own a restaurant and Haneen is working four days a week. They have two children in long daycare, where the daily rate is $130 a day for up to 10 hours of care. The couple will be eligible for subsidy of $1220 a fortnight, with no cap. Under the old system they were eligible for $1040 a fortnight $580 of that was rebate, which just squeaked under the annual cap. Case study 3: Su-Lin is a marketing executive at a bank and Michael is a registered nurse. Both work full-time and the household income is $215,000. The couple has a nine-year-old, a seven-year-old and a four-year-old. They use a nanny twice a week, but the four-year-old goes to a preschool program at long daycare three days a week and on those days the older children go to after-school care. In their area, daycare is $150 a day for up to 10 hours, while after-school care is $30 a day for 3 hours. This family sees an increase, from $470 a fortnight now to $530 a fortnight from next July. The annual cap increases to $10,000 for each child, though this doesn't make much difference now that two of the three kids are at school. "I spoke to the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) History Unit based in Russell in the ACT and they confirmed it all that it definitely wasn't a Japanese submarine that the RAAF bombed, rather an unfortunate whale swimming off the nearby coast," said Holt, who promptly prepared a comprehensive report on his findings for the Batemans Bay Historical Society. Unfortunately Holt's findings vanished when several years ago his report was unintentionally tossed out during a clean-out of the society's records. I know what you're thinking, this is starting to sound more and more like an urban legend. Stick with me. Not wanting to sift through tonnes of decaying fish and chip wrappers and other rubbish at the Batemans Bay tip in search of Holt's missing files, I promptly despatched my own request to the Directorate of History - Air Force in Canberra. Earlier this week, the return missive from RAAF Historian Martin James lobbed into my inbox. It read: "A search of the records of RAAF units known to be based and used for anti-submarine patrols along the south eastern coast of Australia has not brought up any record of a bombing of a whale." Aha, so it was a legend after all? But then I read on. "However, one of our researchers was able to locate a narrative reference to a whale attack in the Batemans Bay area on the 22nd of July 1942 in John Lever's book, No.6 OTU, Base Torpedo Unit, and R.A.A.F. Beaufort Torpedo Operations," James said. According to the book, the crew of a Beaufort A9-20 captained by a Flying Officer Schlank had seen the US ''Liberty'' ship William Dawes burning just south of Batemans Bay and starting to sink. In response, Schlank's men dropped messages to the crew of the vessel informing them that help was on the way, then remained to overwatch and report back the situation. However, during this time "a submarine was spotted and attacked with depth chargers". The crew saw oil come to the surface. However, as Lever details, "The next day two Navy Intelligence Officers interviewed the crew and "the verdict was that a whale had been mistaken for a submarine". So a whale swimming near Batemans Bay was in fact mistaken for a Japanese submarine in 1942 and bombed, but was it the same marine mammal whose bones washed up on Long Beach? Without any written record, we can only rely on anecdotal evidence to unravel this final part of the puzzle. Firstly there's Holt's recollections of his research. "Weeks after the accidental bombing, the body of a large whale washed up at the west end of Long Beach, said Holt. "Any long-time local will tell you it was one of the best years for fishing as the whale was stuck in the shallows on the beach, attracting all sorts of feeding fish." Then there's Malcolm Morgan, who along with the whale bone appears in the aforementioned circa-1951 photo with his sister Maree, mother Lorna, and their family's Humber Hawk. Morgan, who now splits his time between Sydney and the coast, said, "When my family first settled [at] that part of Long Beach in 1949, all the locals mentioned the origins of the whale."In fact, according to Morgan, other parts of the whale's skeleton were also innovatively used. "There was a lot of vertebrae still on the beach, they were excellent for sitting around the campfire for stools", Morgan said. "At one point there were ribs of the whale at Birdland and some other parts of the skeleton on display at the [now closed] Lobster Pot restaurant". Morgan believes "the seat is actually the jaw bone of a Southern Right Whale, which is so-named as they were the 'right' whale to catch because it had the 'right' amount of oil and it floated when dead." "Once bombed it would have floated to the surface and then been brought into the bay by wind and tide," Morgan said. So where is the bone bench now? "It disappeared many years ago, probably in the 1960s, someone grabbed it, I'd say," laments Morgan. "It could be anywhere now." Someone must know its whereabouts, a four-metre-long whale bone can't just disappear, can it? In the meantime, if you are among those who make regular pilgrimages to Long Beach, next time you unfold your beach chair you may wish to consider the curious connection this stretch of sand has with World War II. Just don't tell Greenpeace. Fact File Long Beach: Located about 11 kilometres north-east of Batemans Bay. William Dawes: The steel US ''Liberty'' ship William Dawes was sunk by torpedoes fired from a Japanese submarine near Tathra on July 22, 1942. Five lives were lost in the attack. Did You Know? At least 19 ships were sunk by enemy torpedoes, shells or mines off the NSW coast 1942-1944. According to the Australian Government ''Historic Shipwrecks Program'', "a further 10 were damaged but managed to limp into port for repairs and approximately 150 crew were killed in these attacks and the wreck sites today can form war graves." Another whale seat: Several years ago Sam Bright of Tanja stumbled upon this humpback whale skull (below) on a remote stretch of Mimosa National Park near Tathra. tym tim the yowie man long beach whale bone Credit:Tim the Yowie Man "The part of the skull left by the hinge of the lower jaw made for a perfect double seat," reports Bright. However unlike its Long Beach counterpart, this seat has no connection with any accidental bombings. "This poor fella probably just died of natural causes," Bright said. Where in Canberra? Happy 40th. Credit:Archives ACT Degree of difficulty: Medium Last week tym tim the yowie man Credit:Tim the Yowie Man Congratulations to Ian McKenzie of Fisher who was the first reader to correctly identify last week's photo (above), as a sign in Fairbairn Pines near the Air Disaster Memorial. McKenzie just beat perennial runner-up Rob Parnell and David Nott to the prize. Meanwhile, Steven Johnson of Jerrabomberra recognised both the location and the clue which referred to "the ghost of a nurse who is said to appear if you stop your car on the grate of a nearby road." According to Johnson, "she rushes the car and does anything she can to get in to "save" the driver and passenger." An Australian soldier in Vietnam around 1966. "By God, it took a load off my shoulders," he said. The Vietnamese were friendly with him, and when one man introduced his own father, a former enemy fighter, the two posed for a photo together. Jack Aaron (right), a Vietnam War veteran from Canberra, meets a former enemy from the conflict on a trip in 2017 to Vietnam. The two men embraced in tears before the photo was taken. "Before then, when we hugged, we were crying," Mr Aaron said. "That was a moment in my life, a turnaround too." The Social Research Centre found Baby Boomers were more likely to rank the war, along with the Apollo 11 moon landing and defining 1970s events, as the most significant in their lives. Younger generations ranked terrorism higher, as well as Australia's leaps in social reforms. Nationally, the same-sex marriage survey result ranked first, nominated by 30 per cent of people in a result possibly also influenced by the research's timing. The September 11 terrorist attack (27 per cent), the national apology to the Stolen Generations, the Port Arthur massacre (each 13 per cent) and the Sydney Olympics (12 per cent) were others in the top five. Canberrans were more likely to rank political and economic events - including the arrival of the GST, the Global Financial Crisis, and the Whitlam dismissal - higher on their list. The ACT was also the only state or territory to rank the election of Donald Trump to the US presidency in its top 10. Frank Bongiorno, a researcher for the study, said some major historic changes were notable by their absence. The arrival of the contraceptive pill, and the end of the Cold War, didn't make the top 10. Environmental controversies like the Franklin Dam dispute were also forgotten. There were clear differences across generations. Those born before 1946 - known as the Silent Generation - ranked World War II as the most significant event and often mentioned Queen Elizabeth II's coronation and visits. SRC chief executive Darren Pennay said among people born between 1946 and 1964, the Vietnam War had left a mark. "For people who lived in that time, particularly Baby Boomers, apart from the war and anti-war protests there was the fear of being conscripted." Greg Kennett was conscripted into the national service and arrived in Vietnam in 1969 aged 21, and remembers vividly both the war, and Australia's response to it afterwards. "It was a very tumultuous part in our history, it was very divided," he said. "I had friends and family members who didn't really congratulate me on my service in Vietnam, and that was very hard to take. "When we came back from Vietnam, we didn't really let people know we were Vietnam veterans." RSLs didn't recognise services personnel returning from the country as having fought in a war, and veterans of the conflict were discouraged from joining. Another Canberra-based Vietnam War veteran, Peter Dinham, said he still believed the reasons Australia entered the war were noble, although added people would differ in their opinions. He said on a recent trip to Vietnam he was told by a guide that a senior adviser in the South Vietnamese regime was in fact a North Vietnamese agent, totally unknown to the South Vietnamese. Once the American military had withdrawn, South Vietnam stood no chance in fighting off the communist north, the guide told Mr Dinham. Mr Kennett, like Mr Aaron and many other veterans, was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. He went years without seeing most of the men he served with, before the 1987 Welcome Home Parade rekindled friendships and helped the nation better understand its Vietnam veterans' contributions. A man has died after being crushed against a wall by a car in Sydney's north. Emergency services were called to Paul Close, Hornsby Heights, about 8pm, after reports a man attempted to stop an unattended car from rolling down a hill. On arrival, police found an 18-year-old man trapped between a wall and the car. He was released from between them a short time later, but despite the efforts of paramedics, he died at the scene. Officers from Kuring-Gai police area command attended and established a crime scene. Two people were killed after the vehicles they were driving collided in Sydney's south-west on Saturday morning, bringing the toll from a horror two days on NSW roads to eight. Emergency services were called to Burragorang Road in Glenmore, near Camden, about 7.45am following reports two cars were involved in a crash. Both drivers died at the scene, police said. Seven people have been killed on NSW roads in the past two days. The road has been closed and traffic is being diverted as police investigate the circumstances surrounding the crash. A report will be prepared for the Coroner. There are calls for better drug education in schools, as police continue investigations into the overdose of seven Gold Coast high school students. Six of the Saint Stephen's College year 10 students had been released from Gold Coast University Hospital by Friday afternoon, while the remaining patient was reportedly recovering well. Paramedics attended Saint Stephen's College in Upper Coomera after several students fell ill from a drug overdose. Credit:AAP All seven were rushed to hospital on Wednesday, with some in a critical condition, after ingesting an unknown drug. Police are still awaiting the results of toxicology reports to confirm which drug was involved but were investigating reports it was the Russian designer drug phenibut - an anti-depressant used to treat anxiety and insomnia - that may have been bought online. The controversial legal tactic that prevents survivors of child sexual abuse from suing the Catholic church would be invalidated by sweeping legislative changes planned by the Andrews government. The Age has obtained a confidential draft of a bill that addresses several outstanding recommendations from the states 2013 Betrayal of Trust inquiry. The bill is expected to be introduced into parliament this year. If passed, the law will expose billions of dollars in assets of the Catholic church and other religious organisations to potential legal action for the first time in more than a decade. John Ellis was abused by a priest when he was an altar boy in the 1970s. Credit:Louise Kennerley It is designed to tackle the so-called Ellis defence established when the NSW Court of Appeal ruled in 2007 that the Catholic Church does not exist in a legal sense because its property assets are held inside a special trust structure that is immune to lawsuits. The Australian National University is also understood to be attending. A spokesman for Mr Barr said the ACT delegation would focus on forging higher education and research partnerships, as well as visiting branches of the Smithsonian museums in Washington to find opportunities for cultural exchange. ACT Chief Minister Andrew Barr will join Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull in the US. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen Mr Barr and other Australian state, territory and business leaders will attend the National Governor's Association Winter Meeting. Chief Minister Andrew Barr is set to join Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull in Washington on a trip expected to cost ACT taxpayers $38,000. "Higher education is Canberra's largest export and an area of significant growth for our economy, increasing 25 per cent in 2016-17 alone," he said. "Other areas of focus will include the space industry, tourism investment, aviation, renewable energy and science." Mr Barr will return to Sydney next Friday. The Washington delegation will be Mr Barr's first public engagement with Mr Turnbull since COAG earlier this month, where the ACT resisted signing up to the federal government's new public hospital funding agreement. Mr Turnbull described the package as "generous", while Mr Barr described the $1 million sweetener the ACT would have received for signing as "a rounding error". The Canberra Greyhound Racing Club on Friday lost a bid to force the planning authority's hand and get a court order that it renew the lease over its race track. The club took the ACT Planning and Land Authority to court after the authority declined to make a decision on the club's application to renew its lease over the race course, due to expire in 2027. The greyhound club took the planning and land authority to court over the renewal of its lease of the racing track. Credit:Sitthixay Ditthavong But while Chief Justice Helen Murrell found that the authority's deliberate delay in deciding the application amounted to a refusal to perform its statutory duty to make a decision, it would be "futile" to order it make the decision now. "The authority should not be ordered to fulfil its implied statutory duty to make a decision as any such order would be futile," the chief justice said. Barnaby Joyce has bowed to the inevitable and finally resigned as Deputy Prime Minister and from Malcolm Turnbull's frontbench, leaving Veterans Affairs Minister Michael McCormack in the box seat to take over the nation's second-most-senior political post. More than two weeks after news broke that Mr Joyce and his former staffer-turned-partner Vikki Campion are expecting a baby boy, the Nationals leader announced he will formally resign at 8am on Monday. His decision to quit followed rising pressure from the public as well as from within the Nationals and their Coalition partners, the Liberal Party, as questions mounted about Mr Joyce's use of his travel entitlements and the appropriateness of Ms Campion being employed in the offices of senator Matt Canavan and MP Damian Drum, and a new allegation of sexual harassment from WA that is being investigated. The Nationals - who have prided themselves on their stability and aversion to chopping and changing leaders, unlike other major political parties - have been rocked by the scandal surrounding Mr Joyce's personal life. Controversial ex-Fairfax MP Clive Palmer has announced his eponymous political party will contest the next federal election. In a statement issued on Friday morning, Mr Palmer said the Palmer United Partys executive committee had resolved to contest the next federal election, which could be held as early as this year. Clive Palmer has announced his Palmer United Party will contest every seat at the next federal election. Credit:AAP/Jono Searle It would be an unexpected return to politics for Mr Palmer, whose party was deregistered in Queensland in 2016. He has since been embroiled in a lengthy court process over the collapse of Queensland Nickel, which resulted in nearly 800 job losses in Townsville and a debt of $300 million. Barnaby Joyce steps down as deputy prime minister and leader of the Nationals at a media conference in Armidale. Credit:Nick Fuller/ Armidale Express But to give these people in the weatherboard and iron, in those regional and small towns the best opportunity then this current cacophony of issues has to be put aside. And I think it's my responsibility to do my bit to make sure that it happens. Now, might I say, with the last allegation that was in the paper today, I have asked that that be referred to the police. I've asked for the right of the person who's made the allegation and I've asked for my right of defence that that be referred to the police. But it's quite evident that you can't go to the despatch box with issues like that surrounding you. So, I can't enter into any discussions about that. If it is going to be before the courts, it is going to be before the courts, you would understand. But I will say on Monday morning at the party room, I will step down as the leader of the National Party and deputy leader of Australia. I have informed the acting Prime Minister, Mathias Cormann, of this. I informed my colleagues of this and there are a couple of things I would like to clearly say. I want to thank the people of New England. I am so humbled that today, whilst walking around Armidale, there were people - I don't want to be so bold - but I got a sneaking suspicion some of them didn't vote for me, but they were so good at offering their support. The people of Tamworth, the same, the people in the small towns. I'm so humbled and I thank you for the overwhelming support. People literally running up, and some crying, and offering their support to me. I don't deserve the support that you've given me. Barnaby Joyce on Friday. Credit:AAP I'd like to say that it's absolutely important, it's incredibly important that there be a circuit-breaker, not just for the Parliament, but more importantly, a circuit-breaker for Vikki, for my unborn child, my daughters and for Nat. This has got to stop. It's not fair on them. It's just completely and utterly unwarranted, the sort of observation that's happened. On a humorous side, I think it's got to stop for the poor buggers who are parked outside my house every day. It's got to stop the for them as well, they have got to go home. On Monday morning, the whip, Michelle Landry, will have a meeting for in the Liberal Party and I will stand aside. Barnaby Joyce speaks to the media. Journalist: When did you come to this decision? Was it after yesterday's allegations? Obviously, it was confirmed by the allegations that I read in the paper. I just thought that has to be the straw that breaks the camel's back. Without a shadow of a doubt I'm staying as the member for New England. Do you hope to remain in the ministry or the backbench? No, the backbench. No, I won't snipe. I have a lot of things I need to do. I'm currently in the process of writing a book about precisely the people I was talking about and I want to make sure I get that concluded. I want to assist my colleagues where I can to keep their seats and also, quite naturally, in April, a baby will be born. I'll have other things on my mind. Were you aware of the Western Australia claim before you did the Fairfax interview? I have never been made directly aware of that. It was only in the last day or so I was made directly aware. But there were rumours. Have you spoken yet to the Prime Minister? I've spoken to the acting Prime Minister. What did you say? Precisely what I said, I'll be stepping down on Monday. Does this decision have anything to do with public condemnation by members of your own party? Which ones? The WA members. I made my point on that, basically, the WA party, the last time they sent across a member they didn't sit with the National Party, they didn't come to party meetings, they have their views and talk about how ferociously independent they are, but it is a bit odd when they talk about it. [Inaudible] I'm not going to be endorsing anybody. The people of New England, what's your commitment to them? It is as it always is. I don't think anybody can deny the work I've done for the people of New England, whether it is the mobile phone towers, the Scone Sale Yards, it goes on. I just noted the other day, the dementia unit opened up and we got the money for that and on and on it goes. The upgrade of the airport here. We were part of that. Decentralisation ofjobs into Armidale from APVMA in Canberra. These programs have always been at the forefront of what I do. Could you be Deputy Prime Minister again in your career? I'm not going to start talking about what is next. But you've got ambitions? It is an incredible honour. If you're a Wallaby for 10 minutes, you're a Wallaby for life. Don't we live in an incredible nation, someone who went to a public school could become Deputy Prime Minister of Australia. An incredible enforcement of the people we are. Do you take any responsibility for the events of the last two weeks, Barnaby? In which regard? For the things that happened. Yes, you take responsibility for them talking about you, but did you instigate them? No. Look, I'm not here to deride any of my colleagues. I'll let Mr Broad speak for himself. How do you think you should be regarded? Just as I started. I fought for the person in the weatherboard and iron, I fought for the person I believed was in the peripheries and the small regional towns. I used my experience of the towns, the Wolbrooks especially, and my goal in life is to try to make their life better. And I acknowledge in many areas I am rough around the edges and never tried to be anyone else. Should the media expose personal relationships like yours for the scrutiny of the Australian public? Should it happen again? No, I apologise to Vikki, the idea, walking across the road as a pregnant lady and just being, you know, put under so much pressure. I mean, I thought that's not who we are in Australia. That's not the kind of people we are. I'm the public figure, go after me. That'swhat I get paid for but don't go after private individuals. It's just wrong. And always think of it when you see something like that on paper and you think it's salacious, think,"What if that was me? My mother, my wife? How would I feel" Do you think you would still have the support of the voters at the next election that you didn't campaign for in the by-election? What do you mean? I went to a range of public events and I am humbled by the support I got at the by-election. We had the biggest swing to a government member in the history of our nation, thanks, guys. It is momentous when the second highest officeholder in a democratically elected government is forced to quit after weeks of scandal about his probity. It has been a particularly grotty week in politics. Yet again, policy debate has been usurped by scandals about the behaviour of politicians. At the national level, the fall of Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce ultimately came not only because of his private life, but mainly as a result of valid concerns about dubious behaviour including his acceptance of a rent-free accommodation from a businessman in his electorate, the shifting of his former media adviser and now-pregnant partner to roles in two other Nationals politicians offices, and the unusually long time (while receiving a taxpayer-funded allowance for being away from home) he spent in Canberra, not his electorate, when Parliament was not sitting. Barnaby Joyce resigns as Nationals leader on Friday. Credit:AAP After resisting weeks of mounting community and internal pressure to step down, Mr Joyce finally capitulated to the inevitable and resigned. The tipping point was an allegation, described by acting Prime Minister Mathias Cormann as very serious, that Mr Joyce sexually abused a woman in Western Australia. That is now under police investigation at Mr Joyces request; he vehemently denies the abuse allegation and says the investigation will exonerate him. In Victoria, another investigation was sparked after a dramatic encounter between two members of the Andrews government. The furious allegedly to the point of a (butter) knife threat clash in the members dining room of the Victorian Parliament this week between an Andrews government minister and a former minister over factional infighting will stoke already rampant community disenchantment with politicians. Australians gave Mickey Ganitch a generous welcome during World War II, when he had shore leave in Sydney while serving in the United States Navy. Mickey Ganitch met Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen Now he is ready to come back. Ganitch, 98, wants to talk to Malcolm Turnbull about a return visit to celebrate his 100th birthday. The veteran of six major battles, including Pearl Harbour, met the Prime Minister yesterday during a ceremony to honour Australian and American war dead at Arlington Cemetery near Washington DC, the resting place for more than 300,000 who served in conflict. Ganitch was one of six US soldiers and seamen who met Mr Turnbull at Arlington, where the Prime Minister laid a wreath at the tomb of the unknown soldier and another at the grave of an Australian pilot shot down over New Guinea. RSPCA Queensland is offering a reward for information about who put a dog in an Ipswich rubbish bin. Zorro, the three-year-old foxy cross, survived being crushed in a garbage truck and was rescued by tip workers at the Willowbank landfill site. Tippie, renamed Zorro, was rescued by council workers after being dumped into a garbage truck in Ipswich. Credit:Chris Campey - 7 News Queensland It's believed the dog was dumped in the truck late on February 6 or early the next day. Zorro has since undergone a hip operation and remains in the care of RSPCA, which is offering $5000 for information that leads to a conviction. A stand-off between Queensland's Liberal National Party and the state's electoral commission about which political donations should be publicly disclosed has been laid bare in the Supreme Court. Justice David Jackson has been asked to decide if the LNP must declare donations of $1000 or more, as is required under state law, or only those above the $13,500 commonwealth threshold. Scales of Justice Credit:Louie Douvis A focal point of the legal stoush stems from how political parties are able to differentiate between state and federal donations, which the LNP says it can. But lawyers for the Electoral Commission of Queensland say donations made to state-registered entities fall under state law and that drawing such a distinction between donations was "fraught". Two Labor MPs involved in an ugly Parliament House clash on Wednesday that allegedly involved a butter knife have publicly made up. But the investigation into the alleged confrontation will continue, although Parliamentary authorities have little power to punish MPs even if they are found to broken the rules. Andrews government minister John Eren and right-wing factional chieftain Adem Somyurek issued a public statement on Friday to say that the matter was over in their minds following an apology by Mr Somyurek. Tourism Minister John Eren in parliament on Thursday. Credit:Joe Armao "We have now resolved our differences. Adem has apologised for the colourful language he used which caused John offence and John has accepted," the statement read. An influential Tory MP says Australia and the UK must lead global efforts to combat Russian and Chinese interference in western democracies because the investigation into Russian meddling has neutered the Trump White House's ability to lead on the issue. Conservative MP Bob Seely raised the matter with Foreign Minister Julie Bishop in London this week. Writing exclusively for Fairfax Media, Mr Seely, who has just been elected to the British parliament's prestigious foreign affairs committee, said the Mueller investigation would only get worse for Mr Trump, diverting the US' ability to deal with threat of foreign interference. "Things will soon worsen for the US president: watch this space. The battle to save his presidency will become all-consuming. "The fallout will undermine the bipartisan approach," he said. Li Peng, then chairman of the Chinese parliament, visits John Howard in Canberra in September 2002. Credit:Andrew Taylor The 2002 gas deal was the starting gun for the "China is our future" craze that now dominates elite thinking in this country, exactly as Beijing planned it. Fifth column in Australia One of China's most effective instruments of economic statecraft is the making of dire but vague threats of economic harm to a country that displeases it. It works because governments believe the threats. As we will see, China is willing to make countries suffer. In Australia, China's threats are amplified by a corporate fifth column that has grown around the bilateral economic relationship, a business elite unwittingly beholden to a foreign master and undermining Australian sovereignty from within. This cohort of business leaders and their advisers shuttle between the two countries doing deals and making "friends" (with people whose backgrounds and motives they only think they know). They present themselves as operating in the "national interest", but it is no coincidence that our "national interest" always happens to coincide with China's. Their understanding of the options available has been narrowed by their enthrallment to Beijing. June 2010: Then vice-president and now President Xi Jinping, left, shakes hands with Fortescue Metals Group CEO Andrew Forrest as prime minister Kevin Rudd looks on in Canberra. Credit:AP Apart from the sway of China's powerful friends, there is a more diffuse reason for our sensitivity to economic pressure: the enormous influence of free-market thinking whose unspoken assumption is that the economy must come before everything else, including our freedom. China apologists repeatedly downplay or evade the importance of freedom and the threats to it. Or they insist that economic growth is the best way to guarantee freedom, as if money can buy the rule of law rather than corrupt it. In their globalist commercial worldview, national sovereignty is increasingly a relic of the past. As one senior Australian official sardonically put it to me: "Who cares about the blood?" 'China is our destiny' China is vital to Australia's future because of our economic dependence on it. Or so it is said. It's truer to say that the perception of our economic dependence gives China immense influence over Australia. It's widely believed, for example, that only our close economic relationship with China saved us from the 2008 global crash. Even though China did nothing for Australia other than continue to buy from us the iron ore and other resources it needed to fuel its growth, there is a widespread view that Australia should be grateful to China for saving us, that we owe China. Many Chinese believe this too. October 2003: Jiang's successor, Chinese president Hu Jintao, is congratulated by prime minister John Howard, opposition leader Simon Crean and MPs including future PM Julia Gillard after his address to a joint sitting of Australia's parliament. Credit:Pat Scala When a difference of view emerges, over the South China Sea, for instance, it is not uncommon for China's netizens to berate Australia for our ingratitude (often coupled with comments on how uncivilised we are). Instead of pushing back and turning the argument around - you should thank us for agreeing to fuel your boom with our resources - our commentators and politicians echo the view that we are somehow indebted to China. Perceptions of our vulnerability to China's whims weaken our resolve to resist the growing penetration of the Communist Party's influence in Australia. Sensing this, Beijing repeatedly reminds us that a continued healthy economic relationship depends on a harmonious political relationship, with harmony guaranteed when Australia conforms to Beijing's wishes. As the head of ANU's National Security College, Rory Medcalf, writes: "Essentially, Beijing wants from its commercial partners the same deal it has with its own people - economic benefits in return for acquiescence on politics and security." Malcolm Turnbull gives a speech at Australia Week 2016 in Shanghai. Credit:Andrew Meares It's worth commenting here on how the "China is our destiny" argument has played out in the public debate. Linda Jakobson of China Matters - a non-profit company founded to "stimulate a realistic and nuanced discussion of China" - bemoans the "emotional outcry" over certain Chinese investments. It's true, she admits, that "every senior business person in China is closely connected to the party", but, hey, that's how it is in China, so what are people worried about? If we could have a "grown-up debate", Jakobson asserts, we'd realise that without Chinese investment we would spend less on hospitals and schools, so let's not have any more "public spats" and just get on with it. A more sceptical commentator, Geoff Wade, shreds this kind of apologetics, showing the contradiction between party influence in Chinese corporations and the belief that those companies are only interested in profits: "Capital ... goes where the Chinese state wants it to go." So if state-directed Chinese capital is buying up Australian energy infrastructure, telecommunications and ports, having a "public spat" over it is more grown up than burying one's head in the sand. Chinese President Xi Jinping and Madame Peng Liyuan with a Tasmanian devil during their 2014 visit to Hobart. Credit:AAP In her 2017 book with Bates Gill, Jakobson argues that China and Australia-China relations are complex and subtle, so much so that it is hard for the authors to give a clear answer to any question. Fort Lauderdale: The armed sheriff's deputy assigned to the Florida high school where 17 people were shot and killed has resigned rather than face suspension after an internal investigation showed he failed to enter the school to confront the gunman during the attack, the county sheriff said on Thursday. Students hold their hands in the air as they are evacuated by police from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida after shooting. Credit:AP Deputy Scott Peterson, who was on duty and in uniform as the resource officer posted at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, was the only law enforcement officer present at the campus during the six-minute rampage last Wednesday, Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel said. Peterson's actions were caught on video during the massacre, which ranks as the second-deadliest shooting ever at a US public school, carried out by a lone gunman wielding a semiautomatic AR-15-style assault rifle. What I saw was a deputy arrive at the west side of Building 12, take up a position and he never went in, Israel said, referring to the building on campus, popularly known as the "freshman building," where authorities said the bulk of the shooting occurred. Washington: Special Counsel Robert Mueller has filed a new set of criminal charges against US President Donald Trump's former campaign aides Paul Manafort and Rick Gates that include bank and tax fraud, escalating a legal battle that started last year. Manafort and Gates are already facing criminal charges, filed by Mueller's office last October, that include conspiracy to launder money, conspiracy to defraud the United States and failure to register as foreign agents for political work they did for a pro-Russian Ukrainian political party. They were among the first to be charged as part of Mueller's investigation into whether the Trump presidential campaign colluded with Russia to influence the 2016 election. Trump has denied any collusion took place. The latest indictment, filed on Thursday, includes allegations of wrongdoing as recently as January 2017 and said Manafort and Gates were desperate for cash when their lobbying business dried up. And in Alabama, the state delayed the execution of convicted murderer Doyle Lee Hamm, who has spent more than three decades on death row, because his failing health had left him with veins that were unusable for a lethal injection. Local news reported that Branch used his final moments to make a political statement, falling into unconsciousness as he shouted "murderers" between blood-curdling screams on the execution gurney. Had all three men been put to death, it would have been the first time in more than eight years that three people had been executed on the same day in the United States. Death row inmate Thomas Whitaker was due to be executed for the murder of his mother and brother. Credit:Texas Department of Criminal Justice In Texas, it appeared to be only the third time since 1976 that a governor granted clemency to spare a death row inmate's life, according to data from the Death Penalty Information Center. Under Abbott's tenure, 30 prisoners have been put to death by legal injection. Whitaker's was the sole reprieve. In a statement, the governor said several factors played into his decision. For one, he said, the parole board's recommendation that Whitaker's life be spared - a rare move in a state that has executed more people since 1976 than any other state, by a landslide: 548, next to Virginia's 113. Secondly, Abbott said, Whitaker did not pull the trigger, yet the person who did escaped the death penalty. That gunman, Chris Brashear, is serving a life sentence after pleading guilty to a murder charge in 2007. Another accomplice, getaway driver Steven Champagne, was convicted and sentenced to 15 years in prison. In addition, the governor said, he had listened to the pleas from Whitaker's father. "Mr Whitaker's father, who survived the attempt on his life, passionately opposes the execution of his son," Abbott wrote in the statement. "Mr Whitaker's father insists that he would be victimised again if the state put to death his last remaining immediate family member." In exchange for the commutation, Abbott noted that Whitaker gave up the possibility of parole, ensuring that he will die in prison for a crime the governor described as "reprehensible" and "heinous". Two other men were scheduled to be executed on the same day - Doyle Lee Hamm from Alabama and Eric Scott Branch from Florida (right). Credit:AP Whitaker was convicted in 2007 of orchestrating the ambush on his family as they returned home from dinner celebrating his upcoming college graduation. Police would later learn he wasn't enrolled in school or about to graduate, but had misled his family. As the group arrived home, a gunman shot all four of them, purposely hitting Whitaker in the arm to draw any suspicion away from him as a suspect. At first, police suspected a burglary gone bad. After the shooting, Whitaker lived at home with his father for seven months until police identified him as a suspect. Among other things, they grew skeptical that the crime scene had not resembled a legitimate burglary. Whitaker's two accomplices would soon admit the plot to investigators. Prosecutors believed Whitaker was motivated by inheritance money. Prosecutors strongly opposed clemency in Whitaker's case. In a statement to a Houston newspaper, District Attorney John Healey said: "I have never wavered in my support of the jury's decision. They heard all the evidence after a tremendous investigation and prosecutorial effort. What they didn't hear, but what I hope the governor heard... was that Tricia Whitaker's family was fully in favour of carrying out the execution." When a New Zealand woman came face to face with a black drone in the darkness outside her bedroom window she was not alone. The late-night incident now has Marita Maass of Upper Hutt considering selling her home. The Civil Aviation Authority has had an increase of complaints about drones being flown near houses. Information released by the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) under the Official Information Act show that she was far from alone with her run-in with a drone flown by an unknown operator. It seems drones frequently breach privacy to the extent that authorities are called in. One, whose privacy was invaded from the air, fired at a drone with a shotgun and another threatened to shoot one from the sky. Earlier this year a man from Motueka on the south island said a peaceful stroll turned "really creepy" after a mysterious drone followed his family along the beach. THIS WEEK AT EIA (02/15/2018 - 02/22/2018) This index page provides a summary and links for every U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) product released this week. You can sign up for many of these separately and receive instant notification of when the product was released at: http://www.eia.gov/tools/ emailupdates/ Regularly scheduled weekly releases: Gasoline and Diesel Fuel Update (02/20/2018) Presents average weekly retail on-highway diesel fuel prices for the U.S., 8 regions, and the State of California and average weekly retail gasoline prices at the national and regional levels, and for selected cities and States. The Coal News and Markets Report for week ended 02/16/2018 (02/20/2018) Contains information for the week and spot prices: This Week in Petroleum (02/22/2018) Provides analysis, data, and charts of the latest weekly petroleum supply and price data. Weekly Petroleum Status Report, Data for Week Ending 02/16/2018 (02/22/2018) Contains timely information on supply and selected prices of crude oil and principal petroleum products in the context of historical data and forecasts. Weekly Natural Gas Storage Report (02/22/2018) Contains weekly estimates of natural gas in underground storage for the United States and three regions of the United States. Natural Gas Weekly Update (02/22/2018) Contains weekly updates of natural gas market prices, latest storage level estimates, recent lower 48 NOAA weather data, and other market activity or events. Coal Production for Week Ended 02/17/2018 (02/22/2018) Contains an overview of U.S. weekly coal production. Other releases this week: Prime Supplier Report (02/22/2018) The latest Prime Supplier Report presents data through December 2017 on Form EIA-782C, "Monthly Report of Prime Supplier Sales of Petroleum Products Sold for Local Consumption." These data measure primary petroleum product deliveries into the states where they are locally marketed and consumed. Tight oil remains the leading source of future U.S. crude oil production (02/22/2018) EIA's recently released Annual Energy Outlook 2018 (AEO2018) Reference case projects that U.S. tight oil production will generally increase through the early 2040s, when it will surpass 8.2 million barrels per day (b/d) and account for nearly 70% of total U.S. production. Tight oil production made up 54% of the U.S total in 2017 Planned Refinery Outages in the United States: December 2017 - June 2018 (02/22/2018) In this report, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) examines U.S. refinery outages planned for December 2017 through June 2018 and the implications for available refinery production capacity, petroleum product markets, and the supply of gasoline, diesel fuel, and jet fuel. EIAs dissemination of this analysis is intended to benefit market participants who may otherwise be unable to access such information. The U.S. Energy Information Administrations (EIAs) latest analysis of planned refinery outages for the period from December 2017 through June 2018 finds that such outages are not expected to cause a shortfall in the supply of petroleum products including gasoline, jet fuel, and distillate fuel relative to expected demand, either nationally or within any U.S. region. Recent legislation mandates additional sales of U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve crude oil (02/21/2018) Recent legislation has directed the sale of more than 100 million barrels of oil from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) in U.S. government fiscal years (FY) 2022 through 2027. Based on legislated sales established in multiple acts of Congress, the SPR could decline by about 40% in the coming decade while still meeting requirements for petroleum import coverage. U.S. ethane consumption, exports to increase as new petrochemical plants come online (02/20/2018) Over the next two years, EIAs Short-Term Energy Outlook (STEO) projects growth in U.S. consumption of ethane in the petrochemical industry will exceed increases in consumption of all other petroleum and liquid products such as motor gasoline, distillate, and jet fuel combined. The Manufacturing Energy Consumption Survey (MECS) final set of tables (02/20/2018) The third and final release of 2014 MECS tables is now available. The new tables include establishment counts corresponding to already-published energy consumption quantities; expanded counts of establishments participating in energy-management programs; counts of establishments with certain cogeneration and other general technologies; floorspace and number of buildings; and counts of fuel-switching including the price difference necessary to induce a switch to another energy source. U.S. coal production, exports, and prices increased in 2017 (02/16/2018) EIA expects total 2017 U.S. coal production to be 773 million short tons (MMst), 45 MMst higher than in 2016 and the largest year-over-year tonnage increase since 2001. Coal prices across the United States rose as well, especially for Central Appalachian coal. U.S. proved reserves of natural gas up in 2016, oil reserves remained unchanged (02/15/2018) The United States had 341.1 trillion cubic feet (Tcf) of natural gas proved reserves as of the end of 2016, an increase of 5% from 2015, according to EIAs recently released U.S. Crude Oil and Natural Gas Proved Reserves report. U.S. crude oil and lease condensate proved reserves remained virtually unchanged from their 2015 level, at 35.2 billion barrels. Capital investment in upstream oil and natural gas industries (02/15/2018) The International Energy Outlook 2017 anticipates a large increase in oil and natural gas production with many large, capital-intensive projects that will come online after 2025 to meet rising demand. This Issues in Focus paper discusses recent trends in the upstream oil and natural gas markets; explains how these trends are reflected in IEO2017; and covers some of the uncertainties surrounding the projections. State Energy Profiles: New monthly data for November and December 2017, new annual data, and updated Profile Analyses and Quick Facts (02/15/2018) New monthly data are available for electricity, petroleum, natural gas, and coal series. New annual data are available for average temperature, precipitation, and vehicle miles traveled. In addition, Profile Analyses and Quick Facts have been updated for Arkansas, Louisiana, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota. Wholesale Electricity and Natural Gas Market Data (02/15/2018) This site contains spreadsheets with wholesale electricity and natural gas data from eight major trading hubs that cover most regions of the United States. The data are through February 13, 2018, and are republished, with permission, from the Intercontinental Exchange (ICE). OSHKOSH, Wis. February 23, 2018; oshkosh Corporation today announced that it has been named the 2017 Wisconsin Manufacturer of the Year in the annual competition sponsored by the Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, the advisory firm of Baker Tilly Virchow Krause, LLP and the legal firm of Michael Best & Friedrich, LLP. The annual Wisconsin Manufacturer of the Year Awards Program recognizes Wisconsin companies that demonstrate a commitment to business excellence, which has a positive impact on the company and the state, making Wisconsin a better place to live, work and play. Oshkosh Corporation was part of the Mega category, based on the number of employees. 2017 was an amazing year. In addition to celebrating our 100th anniversary, we continued to grow our People First culture, and we delivered strong financial results. Being named the 2017 Wisconsin Manufacturer of the Year makes it even more special. This esteemed award is only possible because of our team members in the Oshkosh Corporation family. They continue to take our company to the next level, said Wilson R. Jones, Oshkosh Corporation President & Chief Executive Officer. Judging and scoring is based on the companys team member engagement, leadership, financial stability, manufacturing operations, safety management, continuous improvement strategies, innovation, procurement processes and community impact. This is a well-deserved award for Oshkosh Corporation," said Kurt R. Bauer, WMC President and Chief Executive Officer. "The impact of Oshkosh is not only felt in its local community, but around Wisconsin and the rest of the world. Congratulations to everyone at Oshkosh on being named Wisconsin Manufacturer of the Year." In addition to be named the Wisconsin Manufacturer of the Year, Oshkosh Corporation recently announced being named one of the ten companies in Barrons Top 100 Most Sustainable Companies and one of the 2018 Worlds Most Ethical Companies. Oshkosh Corporation was also named one of FORTUNEs Worlds Most Admired Companies, a Glassdoor Best Place to Work, a Military Friendly Employer by Victory Media and one of Americas Best Large Employers by Forbes. About Oshkosh Corporation Founded in 1917, Oshkosh Corporation is more than 100 years strong and continues to make a difference in peoples lives. Oshkosh brings together a unique set of integrated capabilities and diverse end markets that, when combined with the Companys MOVE strategy and positive long-term outlook, illustrate why Oshkosh is a different integrated global industrial. The Company is a leader in designing, manufacturing and servicing a broad range of access equipment, commercial, fire & emergency, military and specialty vehicles and vehicle bodies under the brands of Oshkosh, JLG, Pierce, McNeilus, Jerr-Dan, Frontline, CON-E-CO, London and IMT. Today, Oshkosh Corporation is a Fortune 500 Company with manufacturing operations on four continents. Its products are recognized around the world for quality, durability and innovation and can be found in more than 150 countries around the globe. As a different integrated global industrial, Oshkosh is committed to making a difference for team members, customers, shareholders, communities and the environment. For more information, please visit www.oshkoshcorporation.com. 100 Years Strong 72-year Oshkosh Corporation veteran helps company celebrate centennial Clarence Jungwirth recalls sitting in a foxhole beneath a radiant New Guinea moon, updating the daily log of killed and wounded infantrymen on his portable typewriter set atop a discarded box. The army needed that record every day, so during lulls in combat I would do the paperwork by moonlight, says Jungwirth, an Oshkosh native. It was early January 1943, the moon was full and Jungwirth was serving in combat with the 32nd Infantry Division of the United States Army in World War II. Jungwirth will turn 98 years old this year, but he still remembers the crystal clear tropic air and brilliance of that South Pacific moon like it was yesterday. You cant imagine how bright the moon is in the Southwest Pacific, he says. I mean, you could read a newspaper under the full moon. Jungwirth possesses several traits that aided him not only during his military service, but in his remarkably long civilian career that followed with Oshkosh Corporation. First is that ironclad memory. Next, is his independent spirit. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, is his ability to adapt. In 1945, after three years at war, Jungwirth returned home and began his career at a relatively young Oshkosh Corp. running the companys new blueprint machine, despite having no engineering education or experience. God blessed me with an adaptability, Jungwirth says. When I started at Oshkosh in the engineering department, there was no room for mistakes, but I adapted like a duck takes to water. I became an engineer by osmosis. Oshkosh Corp. founders William Besserdich and Bernhard Mosling knew a thing or two about adaptability. Not quite 30 years prior, the duo had founded the Wisconsin Duplex Auto Company using designs for four-wheel-drive vehicles that had been rejected by more than 50 automakers. The first four-wheel-drive truck prototype, known as Old Betsy, drove the companys early growth. By 1945, the company topped 100 employees, including Jungwirth as the fourth employee to join the engineering department. Today, the Fortune 500 Company employs more than 13,000 people worldwide and their specialty trucks, truck bodies and access equipment can be found in 150 countries across five continents. As an engineer, Jungwirth designed components for various truck models. He was on the team that designed the WT-2206 snow removal vehicle as part of the companys first major defense contract in the mid-1950s. In 1976, Jungwirth worked on the development of a Heavy Equipment Transporter (HET) which would land Oshkosh Corp.s first U.S. Army contract. This contract was a milestone in the companys history as a major supplier for the U.S. Armed Forces and some of these vehicles, the largest product in the companys defense portfolio, are still in use today. Standing at 5 feet 4 inches tall, Jungwirth jokes, The smallest guy was working on the biggest trucks. Due to the success of the HET program, Oshkosh Corp. won another major contract to supply Heavy Expanded Mobility Tactical Trucks (HEMTT) to the U.S. Army in the 1980s. Jungwirth retired in 1987, but as a self-described workaholic, he began looking for work after only six months out. Because of his vast engineering knowledge, Jungwirth was rehired in 1988 to work in Oshkosh Corp.s service department. He continues to work every weekday morning, fielding calls from drivers worldwide who need to locate parts for the companys longest-running trucks. Working at Oshkosh Corp. for 72 of its 100 years gives Jungwirth some perspective. He says the companys commitment to producing long-lasting, quality vehicles (as well as his unparalleled memory) is what affords him his job today. We have trucks that were built in the 30s, 40s and 50s that are still in the field today and I know what kind of parts to get for them, Jungwirth says. My memory has enabled me to help customers all over the world. Bryan Brandt, vice president of global branding and communications, says empowering employees like Jungwirth to be problem-solvers is vital to the companys people-focused culture, a value that has remained constant since its inception. If you look over the course of our 100 years, theres a thread of perseverance and its always our people persevering, making this company what it is today, Brandt says. As we look forward, we try to keep building that culture of perseverance. It doesnt matter what comes at us. That shared desire to persevere has kept Jungwirth coming into work every day for the last 72 years. I love a challenge, says Jungwirth, with a spark in his eye that belies his age. If I can solve a problem, I get a thrill out of it. 100 Years of Making a Difference Oshkosh Corporation will be hosting a 100 Year Anniversary parade on July 15 from 1011 a.m. The parade will begin at the corner of Knapp Street and 20th Avenue, heading east on 20th Ave. and south on Oregon Street, ending at Oshkosh Corp.s Oregon Street facility. The parade will feature more than 60 vehicles and products, be both old and new, from the Oshkosh Corporation family. An open house following the parade will take place at the companys E-Coat and South Plant Facilities from 11 a.m.3 p.m. Visit oshkoshcorp.com for more information. - Dodge has signed on as title sponsor of the NHRA Mello Yello Drag Racing Series national event at Bandimere Speedway in Denver.The 2018 Dodge Mile-High NHRA Nationals Powered by Mopar marks the 30th year that FCA US LLC brands are race sponsors, one of the longest partnerships in all of motorsports. Mopar stands with Dodge as presenting sponsor for the challenging high-altitude event, staged in the picturesque Rocky Mountains, continuing its decades-long association with Bandimere Speedway and NHRA racing.Performance and competition fuel Dodge owners and the Dodge//SRT team every day, said Steve Beahm, Head of Passenger Cars, Dodge//SRT, Chrysler and FIAT, FCA North America. The sounds, smells and thrills of drag racing bring this attitude to life for the thousands of Dodge and Mopar fans who make the Mile-High NHRA Nationals a must-see event.The 39th annual Dodge Mile-High NHRA Nationals Powered by Mopar runs July 20-22, 2018. The event kicks off the historic three-race Western Swing of the 2018 NHRA Mello Yello Drag Racing season that includes stops in California and Washington.One of the longest-running NHRA national events, the Dodge Mile-High NHRA Nationals Powered by Mopar is a highly anticipated and a fan favorite in the series.We are excited to welcome Dodge on board as the title sponsor for the Mile-High Nationals, said Brad Gerber, NHRA vice president and chief development officer. Fans travel from all over the country to experience NHRA drag racing in Denver. Its fitting that they make this race a part of the powerful Dodge brand.The 2018 season is a year of celebrations as Bandimere Speedway commemorates 60 years of speed and 30 years of partnership with FCA US, said John Bandimere III, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Bandimere Speedway. We are proud to have Dodge taking on the lead role in the sponsorship of the Mile-High NHRA Nationals, while continuing with Mopar power as the presenting sponsor. During the last three decades, we have had the privilege to see Mopar lead the way in performance, and bringing in the Dodge brand offers a new level of excitement and opportunity. The addition of night qualifying on Saturday continues to elevate the excitement and performance level making the Dodge Mile-High NHRA Nationals, one of the premier events on the tour.This year also marks the third consecutive year Dodge serves as the title sponsor of the Dodge NHRA Nationals in Reading, Pennsylvania, which runs September 13-16.The supercharged partnership of Dodge and Mopar in NHRA includes increased sponsorship of Leah Pritchetts Top Fuel dragster, continuing support as primary sponsor of Matt Hagans Dodge Charger R/T Funny Car and a new 4,800-square-foot exhibit that combines the brands rigs to form one of the largest displays on the NHRA Manufacturers Midway.Dodge fans can stay in touch with racing news and events at the Dodge Garage , a one-stop digital content hub and premier destination for drag racing and muscle car enthusiasts.Dodge Garage houses daily updates and fans get access to online racing HQ, news, events, galleries, downloads and merchandise. Dodge Garage includes exclusive content, such as a three-part video series Chasing the Title, which offers fans a unique, behind-the-scenes glimpse at Pritchett and her Don Schumacher Racing team in action.Mopar keeps racing and performance fans updated on its activities on its blog: https://blog.mopar.com Learn more about Dodge at www.dodge.com . To learn more about NHRA, visit www.nhra.com Dodge//SRT offers a complete lineup of performance vehicles that stand out in their own segments. Dodge is FCA North Americas mainstream performance brand, and SRT is positioned as the ultimate performance halo of the Dodge brand, together creating a complete and balanced performance brand with one vision and one voice.For more than 100 years, the Dodge brand has carried on the spirit of brothers John and Horace Dodge, who founded the company in 1914. Their influence continues today. New for 2018, the 840-horsepower Dodge Challenger SRT Demon, the fastest quarter-mile production car in the world and most powerful muscle car ever, is taking the world by storm, along with the new 2018 Dodge Durango SRT, Americas fastest, most powerful and most capable three-row SUV, and the 707-horsepower Dodge Challenger SRT Hellcat Widebody. These new SRT ultimate performance models join a brand lineup that includes the Durango, Grand Caravan, Journey, Charger and Challenger, including the 707-horsepower Challenger SRT Hellcat and the Charger SRT Hellcat, the quickest, fastest and most powerful sedan in the world.Headquartered in Glendora, Calif., NHRA is the primary sanctioning body for the sport of drag racing in the United States. NHRA presents 24 national events featuring the NHRA Mello Yello Drag Racing Series, NHRA Lucas Oil Drag Racing Series and NHRA J&A Service Pro Mod Drag Racing Series. NHRA provides competition opportunities for drivers of all levels in the NHRA Summit Racing Series and the NHRA Drags: Street Legal Style presented by AAA. NHRA also offers NHRA Jr. Street program for teens and the Summit Racing Jr. Drag Racing League for youth ages 5 to 17. In addition, NHRA operates four of its own racing facilities: Atlanta Dragway in Georgia; Gainesville Raceway in Florida; Lucas Oil Raceway at Indianapolis; and Auto Club Raceway at Pomona in Southern California. For more information, log on to NHRA.com , or visit the official NHRA pages on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and Twitter. SEE ALSO Modern Tulip Frenzy? - Electric Vehicles Solution Or Diversion? BURNABY, BC, Feb. 23, 2018; Electric, hybrid and alternative fuel vehicles decrease greenhouse gas emissions and in some cases can significantly reduce fuel costs. Canada continues to make strategic investments to help Canadians make greener choices and to encourage widespread adoption of electric and alternative fuel vehicles. Member of Parliament for Burnaby NorthSeymour, Terry Beech, on behalf of Canada's Minister of Natural Resources, the Honourable Jim Carr, today announced a $4.3-million investment to expand British Columbia's electric vehicle charging and refuelling infrastructure. The Government of Canada will provide funding to three recipients to help Canadians get into zero-emission vehicles and use low-carbon fuels: British Columbia Institute of Technology will demonstrate Level 2 electric vehicle (EV) charging stations in urban areas and commercial parking lots that make better use of the grid's existing electrical capacity. Additionally, it will develop a way to control and monitor electric vehicle chargers from different vendors. Hydrogen Technology & Energy Corporation (HTEC) will install a retail hydrogen fuelling station in the Vancouver area, part of a six-station network it is building in B.C.'s Lower Mainland and Victoria to encourage uptake of more hydrogen-fuelled vehicles. area, part of a six-station network it is building in B.C.'s Lower Mainland and to encourage uptake of more hydrogen-fuelled vehicles. B.C. Hydro will demonstrate an innovative Level 2 EV charger for use in multi-unit residential, commercial and municipal buildings. It will also deploy 21 Level 3 EV fast chargers across the province to further Canada's vision for a coast-to-coast network. This investment builds on the Government's $182.5-million total investment to grow Canada's electric and alternative fuel vehicle infrastructure so that using electric and alternative fuel vehicles is easier and more convenient for Canadians. In addition, the Province of British Columbia's Clean Energy Vehicle (CEV) Program is providing $1.4 million to support the HTEC and BC Hydro projects. Through Canada's national energy dialogue, Generation Energy, Canadians made it clear that the transition to electric vehicles and lower-carbon fossil fuel alternatives is not a luxury but a necessity for Canada's low-carbon future. Our government continues to support green infrastructure projects that will create jobs, advance Canada's clean future and help us realize our domestic and international climate change goals. Quotes "Building green infrastructure paves the way to a low-carbon future by reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Our government is proud to make investments that will reduce costs and address potential hurdles for the deployment of next-generation electric vehicle charging infrastructure in urban areas." Terry Beech, Member of Parliament for Burnaby NorthSeymour "We appreciate the federal government's continuing support to increase the adoption of electric and hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. Together, we are making zero-emission transportation more accessible and affordable by supporting innovation, deploying infrastructure and helping British Columbians benefit from lower maintenance and fuel costs." Michelle Mungall, B.C. Minister of Energy, Mines and Petroleum Resources "This funding is an important step in the evolution of the British Columbia Institute of Technology Energy OASIS project and an investment in our sustainable transportation future. The BCIT Smart Microgrid Applied Research Team is proud to be leading first-in-Canada applied research solutions that will reduce barriers to the adoption of electric vehicles." Kim Dotto, Dean, Applied Research, British Columbia Institute of Technology "Zero-emission, hydrogen-fuelled fuel cell electric vehicles are entering markets globally and will help Canada meets its clean air and carbon emission reduction targets. HTEC is proud to be working with partners like the Government of Canada to build out B.C.'s retail hydrogen refuelling network and support initial FCEV rollouts." Colin Armstrong, President and CEO, Hydrogen Technology & Energy Corporation Related Links MEDIA ALERT FOR MONDAY, FEB. 26, 2018 Working with Satellite-Enabled Connectivity Solutions Provider SES Networks, Bandwidth to Exceed 1.5 Gigabytes per Second onboard Regal Princess from Carnival Corporation's Princess Cruises Media Availability During Live Event via Video Conference Call and Individual Interviews with: John Padgett, chief experience and innovation officer, Carnival Corporation; Steve Collar, CEO, SES Networks WHEN: Monday, Feb. 26, 2018 12:15 12:45 PM ET | Video conference call for media with John Padgett and Steve Collar To Join Video Conference Call via WebEx Meeting, click here: bit.ly/MedallionNetRecord and enter Access Code: 733 768 771 To Join Conference Call via Phone | +1-415-655-0002 | Access Code: 733 768 771 Schedule for Facebook Live Streaming on Ocean Vacations Page: 8:30 9:15 AM ET | John Padgett and Steve Collar provide an overview of the technical aspects that power MedallionNet on board the Regal Princess, how a new standard will be set by transmitting the most bandwidth ever transmitted to a mobile platform and how it improves the guest experience. 10:30 11:00 AM ET | MedallionNet is not only accessible on board the Regal Princess, but also on Princess Cays, making it easy for guests to stay in touch with family and friends through Facetime as well as SnapChat, and stream favorite programs and games. Andrea Feczko and Tommy Davidson, hosts of "Vacation Creation," are joined by "Go" host Trek Thunder Kelly as they enjoy an array of incredible experiences at Princess Cays and share those experiences with their fans on social media. 12:00 12:45 PM ET | MedallionNet allows busy professionals to stay connected to work, including via video conferencing, as well as download and access large documents and programs. The team will also check bandwidth level. Poncho de Anda of "La Gran Sorpresa," Josh Garcia of "The Voyager" join "Local Eyes" host Anji Corley as they discuss their connected and digital experiences on board the Regal Princess. 2:00 2:30 PM ET | Mark Holmes, editorial director for the Satellite and Aviation Group of Access Intelligence, joins Padgett and verifies the final bandwidth capacity. WHERE: Event | Onboard Regal Princess, off Princess Cays, Bahamas To Join Video Conference Call via WebEx Meeting, click here: bit.ly/MedallionNetRecord and enter Access Code: 733 768 771 To Join Conference Call via Phone | +1-415-655-0002 | Access Code: 733 768 771 To Access Facebook Live Streams | facebook.com/oceanvacations/ WHAT: Carnival Corporation will establish a new standard in connectivity at sea powered by SES Networks when it attempts to make an unprecedented level of bandwidth available to guests onboard Princess Cruises Regal Princess. Working with SES Networks, the world-leading provider of satellite-enabled connectivity solutions, Carnival Corporation will attempt to achieve bandwidth of 1.5 gigabytes per second, giving guests superior access to the internet at speeds that eclipse land-based connectivity through MedallionNet, the best Wi-Fi at sea. The new standard will take place onboard the Regal Princess, off Princess Cays, an exclusive island destination for Princess Cruises guests, located on the southern tip of the island of Eleuthera in the outer Bahamas. John Padgett, Carnival Corporation's chief experience and innovation officer, and Steve Collar, CEO of SES Networks, will be available via video conference call from 12:15 12:45 PM ET on Monday, Feb. 26, 2018 to answer any questions about the bandwidth activation event as well as Carnival Corporation's long-range vision for connectivity at sea. Additionally, there will be a series of Facebook Live broadcasts streamed from the Ocean Vacations page. WHO: Video conference and individual interviews are available with: John Padgett, chief experience and innovation officer, Carnival Corporation Steve Collar, chief executive officer, SES Networks Facebook Live streaming broadcasts (facebook.com/oceanvacations/) will feature: Andrea Feczko, host, "Vacation Creation" (Carnival Corporation's ABC series now in second season) Anji Corley, host, "Local Eyes" (new direct to digital series from Carnival Corporation) Josh Garcia, host, "The Voyager" (now in its second season on NBC; recently debuted on Telemundo) Poncho de Anda, host, "La Gran Sorpresa" (Carnival Corporation's latest show now airing on Univision) Tommy Davidson, host, "Vacation Creation" (Carnival Corporation's ABC series now in second season) Trek Thunder Kelly, host, "GO" (Carnival Corporation's new direct to digital series) Mark Holmes, editorial director for the Satellite and Aviation Group of Access Intelligence BACKGROUND: The bandwidth activation event demonstrates how MedallionNet, Carnival Corporation's recently announced game-changing connectivity service enabled by SES Networks that delivers the best Wi-Fi experience in the cruise industry, will provide internet access of 1.5 gigabytes per second and how that translates into superior guest connectivity. Since mid-November 2017, MedallionNet has been keeping guests connected to friends and family, and delivering consistent streaming capabilities through unprecedented internet speeds and bandwidth, pervasive stateroom signal strength and service consistency onboard the Regal Princess from Princess Cruises, as well as on the corporation's exclusive Caribbean private island destination Princess Cays. The connectivity service leverages multi-band antennas uniquely configured in an innovative shipboard formation to minimize any potential impact to guest connectivity due to seasonal weather or ship positioning, and it fuses multi-orbit satellite bandwidth to deliver a truly immersive guest connectivity experience. MedallionNet is the latest development to emerge from Carnival Corporation's Global Experience and Innovation Center in Miami. It is the first end-to-end Wi-Fi service development formulated to exceed guest expectations through "GuestCentricity" an initiative to enhance all aspects of the vacation experience by delivering guests what they want, when, where and how they want it. MedallionNet the Best Wi-Fi at Sea Stay connected to family, friends and social media with todays most advanced cruise ship Wi-Fi. Now its easy to share all your vacation fun and photos from anywhere on board. During your preview cruise, enjoy MedallionNet for: $9.99 per device (for a 24-hour period) $29.99 for up to four devices on the same folio (for a 24-hour period) FREE for our Platinum & Elite guests (one device per guest) *All prices are quoted in USD and are subject to change without notice. Photo: Getty Images After 20 years on the run, Joseph Stroup, the man considered Americas most wanted deadbeat dad, has been taken into custody, the CBC reports, thwarted by his own bizarre drink order, and what sounds like a clumsy attempt at insurance fraud. Stroup, who owes over $560,000 in child support, was apprehended in Calgary, Canada, where he had been living under the extremely fake-sounding name of Joop Cousteau. He had become a regular at the Bears Den restaurant just outside of Calgary, and was described by the owner, Scott Winograd, as Just over the top charming. Until one day in November, when he came in with a bizarre drink order. One day out of the blue, he ordered a Cherry Coke and he wanted eight maraschino cherries in it, which is just bizarre. That just doesnt happen, Winograd said. About a minute after he had been served, Stroup called the server back over. He was clutching his jaw, and saying he had bitten into a pit and damaged some dental work. Staff were suspicious maraschino cherries dont usually have pits, and Winograd said the one Stroup held up looked like a regular cherry. The next day, Stroup came back with forms he said were from his dentist. It looked sketchy because it was all handwritten forms, Winograd explained. It didnt look official by any means, but he had his name on it, and his birthday. Concerned that Stroup might sue the restaurant, Winograd Googled him and found a Facebook page for Joop Cousteau (a.k.a. Joseph Stroup) and his profile on the Department of Health and Human Services website, which said a warrant had been issued for his arrest in 1998. Winograd contacted Canadian and U.S. authorities, and last week, Stroup was arrested by the Canada Border Services Agency, and sent back to the U.S. where he will stand trial. Maybe Joop Cousteau should have tried a better disguise. The first two days of Milan Fashion Week proved to be a chase with the proverbial white rabbit. Not only because I feared I would be late for a very important date (as I was, many times), but also because Italian houses welcomed us into various alternate realities. On Thursday night, Miuccia Prada hosted her fall 2018 show inside the nearly finished Rem Koolhaas tower of Fondazione Prada. Attendees faced a wall of windows overlooking train tracks and a cluster of neon signs, which hung atop cranes and represented motifs from past Prada collections, like bananas. The signs blended seamlessly with the twinkling Milan cityscape in the background their combined glow reflecting off the polished runway, which mirrored models as they walked. The scene felt very Italian Blade Runner. An eerie, remixed version of Blondies Heart of Glass played as the show began, followed by a similarly warped version of Flash in the Night by Secret Service. The clothes were a show of bright neons as well, with hot-pink tulle worn underneath a puffy black nylon, for contrast. The collection was yet another experiment in layering seemingly mismatched elements in sensible ways, like rubber boots with cocktail dresses, or turtlenecks under bustier tops. The woman who wears these pieces is the Milanese dweller of the future. She may have to wade through some industrial slime to get from A to B, but shell look f-ing great doing it. While the clothes themselves at Prada were not overtly futuristic save for the inclusion of some teeny-tiny Matrix sunglasses the future was on Ms. Pradas mind this year. We are living in a period which is interesting because we do not know where we are going, she reportedly told press backstage at her fall 2018 menswear show, which was inspired by virtual reality, and featured similar elements to the womens show, like revamped Prada Sport pieces. Of course scary, of course worrying, Ms. Prada added. But also interesting because of the feeling that big changes are coming. In an effort to keep up with the times, Prada tapped a viral, virtual, CGI-generated It girl named Lil Miquela to do an Instagram-story takeover for fall 2018 womens on Thursday and introduce a range of special GIFs. The brand also dressed Lil Miquela in head-to-toe Prada for the occasion, proving the brand really does have something for everyone. Believe it or not, Lil Miquela was not the first cyborg to arrive in Milan this week. On Wednesday, designer Alessandro Michele showed his own Gucci Cyborg, inspired by Donna Haraways A Cyborg Manifesto, which speaks to the blurred lines between man, machine, and animal. For Haraway, the cyborg is a metaphor for the feminist subject, who is free of societal labels and constraints. In other words, someone (or something) emancipated from our current reality. Fendi also showed a forward-thinking collection on Thursday, taking the philosophical idea of a hybrid and commercializing it. One standout piece was a sweater that reappropriated the brands logo with Filas. Millennial shoppers are sure to love the look, as it allows two completely different symbols to live on the same body an act that feels youthfully mischievous, like adding a Mento candy to a bottle of Coke and watching it explode. Combining unlikely references is not only more interesting, but also just way more fun. Fashions goal has always been to show whats new and next, but whats exciting about this season in Milan is the freedom these designers see for the future, which includes remixing the past. What Miuccia Prada, Karl Lagerfeld, and Alessandro Michele in particular seem to understand is that the next generation of buyers wants to be able to try on lots of different personas at once, as opposed to aligning with a singular vision. This is how we exist in the digital world, and our wardrobes should reflect the boundless beauty of the internet. Its fashion for a finstagram generation one where we carry around infinite selves on our phones, much like a second head. In the future, we wont have to choose between the red and the blue pill; we can have it both ways. Armed Deputy Who Never Went In at Florida School Shooting Has Resigned The armed deputy who was on duty at the Florida high school during the deadly shooting where 17 people were killed last week has resigned after being suspended without pay, the county sheriff announced. Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel said at a press conference on Thursday, Feb. 22, that Deputy Scott Peterson who on duty as the school resource officer at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland had taken position outside the building where 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz was in and stayed outside the building for four minutes without ever going in. Israel said he decided to suspend and place Peterson under an internal investigation after viewing a video that showed the deputys actions during the rampage on Feb. 14, as well as witness statements and the deputys own statement. Peterson subsequently chose to resign from the department. What I saw was a deputy arrive at the west side of Building 12, take up a position and he never went in, said Israel. The building is popularly known as the freshman building. The county sheriff told reporters Peterson should have went in, addressed the killer, killed the killer but instead he remained outside the building. Israel did not confirm whether Peterson would face criminal charges. He added that the video that shows Petersons actions at this time would not be released and may never be released depending on the prosecution and criminal case. Sheriff Scott Israel gives update in #StonemanDouglas shooting, including the resignation of the SRD for the school. pic.twitter.com/vRWYPZK1fg Broward Sheriff (@browardsheriff) February 22, 2018 He also said he was devastated and felt sick in [the] stomach about the deputys actions. There are no words. I mean these families lost their children. Ive been to the funerals. Ive been to the vigils. There are no words, Israel said during the press conference. Police said Nikolas Cruz, 19, opened fire at students and teachers at the Florida high school on Feb. 14 killing 17 people. He was taken into custody without incident and has been charged with 17 counts of premeditated murder. Additional reporting by Reuters Recommended Video: Accused Florida Shooters Neighbors Sensed Something Amiss with Cruz from a Young Age This photo taken on Nov. 29, 2017 and released on Nov. 30, 2017 by North Korea's official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) shows launching of the Hwasong-15 missile which is capable of reaching all parts of the United States. (KCNA VIA KNS/AFP/Getty Images) As Olympics Draw to a Close, US to Impose Massive New Sanctions on North Korea President Donald Trump will announce in his speech before the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) today a new set of sanctions on the North Korean communist regime. The Treasury Department, under Trumps orders, will soon take new action to cut off sources of funding and fuel that the regime uses to fund its nuclear weapons program and military. The sanctions will target 56 vessels, shipping companies, and trading businesses that are helping the regime to evade sanctions. The sanctions are the latest action by the Trump administration in response to the North Korean regimes continued development of nuclear weapons. Just last November it test-fired an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile that, according to Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, can reach any target around the world. The North Korean regime has threatened the United States as well, as its allies Japan and South Korea, multiple times with nuclear weapons over the past six months. Correction: A previous version of this article inaccurately stated December as the month in which North Korea test-fired its most recent Intercontinental Ballistic Missile Recommended Video: Trump Calls on Nation to Answer Hate with Love after Florida School Shooting Tragedy Barnaby Joyce, Australia's Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Agriculture and Water Resources, speaks during a media conference in the town of Armidale, Australia Feb. 23, 2018. (AAP/Marlon Dalton/via Reuters) Australian Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce Resigns From Cabinet, Remains in Parliament Barnaby Joyce has announced his resignation as Deputy Prime Minister and leader of the Australia National Party during a press conference on Friday, Feb. 23. Joyce told reporters gathered in Armidale the rural town in Joyces electorate of New England about 485 km (300 miles) northeast of Sydney that he will step down as the leader of the National Party on Monday. Joyce said he will move to the backbench, safeguarding the Turnbull governments one-seat majority. The decision comes following weeks of pressure over his controversial affair with former media secretary Vikki Campion. I will say on Monday morning at the party room I will step down as the leader of the National Party and deputy leader of Australia, Joyce said at the press conference. He said he decided to resign after an allegation of sexual harassment from a Western Australian woman emerged on Friday. Joyce has denied the allegations made in the complaint. Over the last month, there has been a litany of allegations, I dont believe any of them have been sustained, Joyce told reporters, reported 7News. It was after the allegations I read in the paper, I thought that had to be the straw that breaks the camels back, he added. National Party federal director Ben Hindmarsh said the party had received the sexual harassment allegation but declined to give any details. A spokesman said Joyce had been made aware of the claim indirectly and believed it was spurious and defamatory. Joyce had asked for the allegation to be referred to police, the spokesman said. Joyce also asked the public to give his current partner, Vikki Campion, who is pregnant with their child, and his estranged wife Natalie and family some privacy. Its incredibly important that there be a circuit-breaker, not just for the parliament, but more importantly, a circuit-breaker for Vikki, for my unborn child, my daughters and for Nat, he said. This has got to stop, its not fair on them, its just completely and utterly unwarranted. Joyce, a practising Catholic, has been married for 24 years with wife, Natalie, and had campaigned on family values. Joyce said at the conference that he will be keeping his seat of New England. I will continue to fight for the people in the weatherboard and iron, for the people on the peripheral and the small regional towns. I used my experience of these towns and my goal in life will always be to try to make their lives better. Barnaby Joyce (@Barnaby_Joyce) February 23, 2018 To give these people in the weatherboard and iron, in those regional and small towns the best opportunity, this current cacophony of issues has to be put aside, he added. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull who is in the United States for bilateral talks with President Trump was informed about Joyces decision 30 minutes before the announcement. He thanked Joyce for his service in a statement on Friday, reported the news station. I thank Barnaby for his service as deputy prime minister and in his various ministerial roles in which he has been a fierce advocate for rural and regional Australia, Turnbull said. Malcolm Turnbull statement on Barnaby Joyce. pic.twitter.com/UURyGFZLty Caitlyn Gribbin (@CaitlynGribbin) February 23, 2018 Turnbull last week spoke on Joyces affair with Campion and called it a shocking error of judgment. He also made changes to the Ministerial Code of Conduct as a result of the incident. The National Party will now elect a new leader, who will also become deputy prime minister under the terms of the coalition agreement with Turnbulls Liberal party. Additional reporting by Reuters From NTD.tv Recommended Video: Huge Crocodile Snags Fishermans Catch at Last Moment Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos speaks during CPAC 2018 in National Harbor, Md., on Feb. 22, 2018. The American Conservative Union hosted its annual Conservative Political Action Conference to discuss conservative agenda. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times) Betsy DeVos Defends Free Speech on College Campuses Freedom of expression is fading among students, says Secretary of Education Education Secretary Betsy DeVos said that the threat to free speech on college campuses is a very timely and serious issue that needs to be addressed. We have seen more and more examples on college campuses in recent years of shutting down free open expression and debate around ideas, DeVos said on Feb. 22 during an interview on stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). She reminded the audience that freedom of speech is a fundamental American freedom and a human right. We have got to continue to exercise a very foundational part of our nations founding in the First Amendment, she said. A college should be a place where we explore other opinions and ideas, but today that possibility is more and more controlled, she said. This administration is committed to upholding those freedoms of expression and exchange of ideas. College students should share their views without censorship and fear, she urged. As in the past, one of the main focuses of CPAC this year has been freedom of speech. In addition to Devos comments, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) defended young people who face criticisms for their beliefs. You want to know what resonates to some college thats run by a bunch of 60s hippies that are imposing some draconian speech code? he asked during an interview on stage at CPAC on Feb. 22. He called young people generation freedom and urged them to speak the truth, spread the fire of liberty. Thats a message that resonates with young people, he said. Recommended Video: Trump Calls on Nation to Answer Hate with Love after Florida School Shooting Tragedy A combination photo of David Allen Turpin (L) and Louise Ann Turpin as they appear in booking photos provided by the Riverside County Sheriff's Department in Riverside County, Calif., Jan. 15, 2018. (Riverside County Sheriff's Department/Handout via Reuters) California Horror House Children Are Watching Harry Potter, Using iPads for First Time The lawyers for the 13 siblings rescued from imprisonment said theyre getting used to the modern world while recovering at foster homes and a medical center. The Turpin brood was rescued in January from Perris, east of Los Angeles after the eldest girl escaped and called the police from an old cellphone shed squirreled away. Responding officers were shocked when they learned the ages of the children because they were all severely malnourished. Officers entering the home found that David and Louise Turpin had kept their children locked inside, forcing them to stay up all night and sleep during the day. Officers found some of the children chained to beds and other large objects with padlocks. The lawyers for the children gave the first update on them in weeks, saying the younger six are split between two foster homes while the ones who are legally adults have been recovering in a medical center. The children are coping with their newfound freedom, making decisions on their own for the first time. Thats a big deal, deciding what theyre going to read, deciding what theyre going to wear, these are all things that are decisions they make every day that are new and empowering, attorney Jack Osborn told CBS. Osborn and Caleb Mason, who are representing the older siblings, said that the staff at the Corona Medical Center converted part of the center to make it more comfortable, including an outdoor area where they can exercise. The siblings are slowly adjusting to the modern world, including watching Harry Potter movies to learning how to navigate iPads. The older group communicates with their younger siblings through Skype. Their short-term goals are to see the beach, mountains, and a movie theater while over the long-term, they want to attend college and pursue careers. Mark Uffer, the CEO of Corona Regional Medical Center, told CNN that the group there has been learning to play the guitar and sing some popular songs as a form of musical therapy, reported CNN. He said the first time he brought out his acoustic guitar to entertain them, it brought smiles to their faces. They all have good voices, beautiful voices, Uffer said. And the tears started running down the nurses faces. A number of people have offered to adopt all 13 children but its not clear when the authorities who are currently in charge of them will decide who will adopt them. The prospective parents include an uncle and one of the Duggars. The Turpin parents were scheduled for a court appearance on Feb. 23. From NTD.tv Recommended Video: Video Catches Woman Climbing Through Drive-Thru Window India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi (R) embraces Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau during a ceremonial reception at the Presidential Palace in New Delhi on Feb. 23, 2018. (Prakash Singh/AFP/Getty Images) Canadas Trudeau Finally Meets Indian Leader Modi as Visit Winds Down Canadas Prime Minister Justin Trudeau finally met with his Indian counterpart Narendra Modi on Friday during a bumpy eight-day trip to India that has been overshadowed by suggestions of a lukewarm reception by the Indian government. Trudeau said India was a natural partner and a trusted friend as his country looked for new opportunities to do business beyond its borders. Trudeau was speaking after co-chairing delegation level talks with Modi in New Delhi. India and Canada signed agreements in areas of energy, education, ICT, customs enforcements and sports, among others. Trudeau added that he and Modi were united in a renewed economic partnership that must create jobs and benefit everyone. Earlier this week, Trudeau rejected suggestions that he had been snubbed by Modi. The Indian leader tweeted a welcome to Trudeau late on Thursday, on the eve of a bilateral meeting between the two, six days after the Canadian leader arrived in the country, adding: I hope PM @JustinTrudeau and his family had a very enjoyable stay so far. The trip, partly aimed at shoring up support for Trudeaus Liberals among the politically important ethnic vote in key regions, has been criticized in Canada for being light on official government business. Support from Canadas large and concentrated South Asian community helped Trudeaus Liberals gain power in 2015, and all three of Canadas main partiesincluding the New Democratic Party, led by Jagmeet Singhare courting the Indo-Canadian vote ahead of the 2019 election. Meanwhile, in a veiled reference to the movement for an independent Sikh homeland called Khalistan, Modi said there should be no space for those who misuse communality for political motives and try to create a divide. Related Coverage Canada and India Missing Out on Greater Economic Ties The Canadian leaders tour has been overshadowed by suggestions of a lukewarm reception by the Indian government after Modi sent a junior minister from the agriculture department to receive Trudeau at the airport instead of coming himself. This was reportedly due to Indias concerns about Trudeaus perceived soft approach to Sikh extremist groups in his country, and those that sympathize with them. In comments to the media on Feb. 19 however, Trudeau strongly rejected suggestions that Canada was encouraging Sikh extremism, saying Canadas position of supporting one united India had not changed. Recommended Video: How Doctors in China Turn into Murderers A view of the headquarters of Anbang Insurance Group in Beijing on Feb. 23, 2018. (Thomas Peter/Reuters) Chairman of Chinese Conglomerate Anbang Prosecuted as Chinese Authorities Seize Company BEIJINGThe Chinese regime has officially seized control of Anbang Insurance Group Co. Ltd. and prosecuted the companys chairman, dramatically illustrating Beijings willingness to curtail big-spending private firms as it cracks down on financial risk. Insurance giant Anbang had violated laws and regulations which may seriously endanger the solvency of the company, the China Insurance Regulatory Commission (CIRC) said in a statement announcing the seizure on Feb. 23, without providing additional details. The CIRC also said Anbangs chairman and key shareholder, Wu Xiaohui, has been prosecuted for economic crimes. Wu was arrested in June 2017 as troubles mounted for one of Chinas most aggressive buyers of overseas assets. The Shanghai prosecutors office said in a statement on Feb. 23 that Wu had recently been charged with fundraising fraud and abuse of his position, and that his case had been forwarded to the citys intermediate court for prosecution. During the takeover of Anbang Group, which will last for one year starting from Feb. 23, the company will be managed by a group of Party officials from the CIRC, the central bank, and other key financial regulators and government bodies. The takeover of Anbang, which claims 1.97 trillion yuan ($310.85 billion) in assets and ranks 139 on the Global Fortune 500 list, is a defining blow to a conglomerate best known for acquiring the landmark Waldorf Astoria New York. The unprecedented seizure of a major private company also underscores how far the ruling Chinese Communist Party will go in its growing campaign to lower financial risks, sending a signal to risk-taking private enterprises. Anbang Insurance has significant stakes in a slew of major Chinese companies, such as banks and property developers. Also on Feb. 23, China Minsheng Banking Corp. Ltd., China Merchants Bank Co. Ltd., developers China Vanke Co. Ltd., and Gemdale Corp. said they received similar notices from Anbang assuring them that there would not be immediate stake sales. Currently, operations at Anbang Insurance Group and its units are operating normally with abundant cash reserves. There are no plans to sell shares in your company, the companies quoted Anbang as saying in similar filings to the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges. Too Big The Chinese regime did not elaborate on Anbangs crimes, but The Epoch Times has previously reported on the companys questionable sources of capital. Back in January, a Chinese journalist posted on Weibo a quote from an inside source, stating that Anbang was already under CIRCs control and Wu had lost his controlling rights of the company. A regulatory source with knowledge of the matter said the Chinese authorities had been effectively running the company since Wu was detained and the timing of the official takeover was linked to the investigation into Wu, which was nearly complete. But a Beijing-based lawyer who works with the CIRC and other regulators said senior officials at the insurance regulator had been watching Anbang closely since last year as its liabilities from the sale of shadow banking products grew, raising questions about the companys solvency. This appears to be an unprecedented takeovera Chinese-style hostile takeover, said Scott Kennedy, director of the Project on Chinese Business & Political Economy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. The Chinese government doesnt want to have a company default on foreign debt and it also wants to teach a lesson to other Chinese business people that the Party is in charge. After a spate of high-profile deals worth over $30 billion, Anbang began to run into roadblocks even before Wus detention, failing to close on a handful of investments and facing criticism over its opaque shareholding structure. A spokesman for Anbang Insurance Group declined to comment and referred to the CIRC announcement. Calls to Wu Xiaohuis personal phone numbers were either disconnected or unanswered. Clearly a message is being fed back into the market and to private companies that being very innovative may not be looked on favorably in the long run, said Keith Pogson, senior partner for Asia-Pacific financial services at Ernst & Young. This says to the market tread carefullyif they hadnt already got that message. In a separate statement on Feb. 23, CIRC said insurers must take steps to handle fraud risks and that it had issued new guidelines for the industry. Tightening Noose The CIRC said that Anbangs debts and obligations will not be impacted by the takeover. The takeover was implemented under a broad provision in the countrys insurance law allowing it to rectify violations of the law by insurance companies, it said. The noose had been tightening around Anbang as Chinas insurance industry came under the microscope over the past year or so for risky behavior, ranging from term-mismatches on insurance products and highly leveraged overseas acquisitions, as well as corrupt practices. Anbang distributes insurance through multiple channels, with the bulk going through banks. Under Wu, Anbang was among Chinas most active overseas investors after the regime liberalized offshore investment rules earlier this decade. In the United States, Anbang bought the Waldorf Astoria for $1.95 billion and later agreed to pay $6.5 billion for Strategic Hotels and Resorts, purchasing both properties from Blackstone Group. It acquired life insurance companies in South Korea and in Europe, as well as the largest retirement home chain in British Columbia, Canada. But it has faced increasing pushback in its offshore deal-making as Beijing has sought to curb capital outflow. Political Crimes Perhaps most important in Chinas business environment is ones political connections. Wu may have sided with the wrong Party officials. Sources close to the central authorities told The Epoch Times back in June 2017 that Wu had ties to the family of Zeng Qinghong, the former Chinese vice premier and right-hand man to former Party leader Jiang Zemin. Jiang and his associates make up an opposition faction at odds with the current leader Xi Jinping and his allies. The source said Wu had helped the Zeng family and other members of the Jiang faction to launder money overseas, while using his business dealings to spy on and influence foreign dignitaries. From Reuters. Epoch Times staff member Annie Wu contributed to this report. Convicted Murderer Mistakenly Released From Jail in Georgia A convicted murderer was released from a jail in Georgia, and the mistake wasnt realized until the family of the man he killed spotted him walking the streets. Javoris Hurston was out for two days before a fugitive squad swooped into Atlanta and sent him back to prison. WSB-TV reported that Hurstons accidental release wasnt realized by officials until they received a phone call from the family of Barry Hawkins. Hawkins, 51, was killed by Hurston in 2015. Hurston pleaded guilty to the killing last year and received a 20-year prison sentence. The DeKalb County Sheriffs Office told the broadcaster that there were no procedural errors made by any employees, so no one will be disciplined. Instead, DeKalb officials blamed the Fulton County Jail for not sending over the disposition of the murder case. So, theres a murderer on the street again? one local asked, reported WSB-TV. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that Hawkins was shot in the leg around midnight at an apartment on Ira Street in southwest Atlanta in 2015. He was rushed to the hospital but died. Police said a verbal argument preceded the shooting. From NTD.tv Recommended Video: Corvette Chase Daniel Barrett Swecker (L) who killed Nelson Marvin Canada (R) while driving under the influence in 2012. (Office of the District Attorney, 18th Judicial District) Drunk Driver Who Killed Afghanistan Veteran Gets Little Jail Time for 3rd DUI A driver charged with killing an Afghanistan veteran in 2012 while driving under the influence received his sentence this week. Daniel Barrett Swecker, 47, was driving 80 miles per hour on I-25 in Colorado when he slammed into 24-year-old Nelson Marvin Canada, an Army vet who had served in Afghanistan. This was Sweckers third DUI. Canada, who had gotten out of an SUV he was riding in to take the wheel because the driver was drunk, was thrown 124 feet, according to the Denver Post. Swecker was originally sentenced to six years in jail for the DUI and murder conviction, but he appealed his sentence multiple times, reported 9News. A jury found Swecker guilty in 2014, but a judge granted him bond while he appealed. Sweckers appeals were eventually denied, but on Jan. 18 of this year, a new judge granted a motion to reconsider his sentence. On Thursday, the new judge, Judge Shay Kara Whitaker, handed down a new sentence: 180 days in jail and four years probation. Whitaker said that Swecker had taken advantage of the time from his original sentence and stayed sober and worked to better himself and the community. Were happy with the consideration the judge gave to the unique circumstances of this case to the realities of what a great man, veteran, husband, father Mr. Swecker is, what hes given back to the community, said Sarah Schielke, Sweckers attorney. I think in a really tragic case for everybody, there was justice served. No person on their third #DUI who runs over and kills a person and flees the scene should ever avoid prison. Colorados laws on vehicular homicide are weak, and this is proof of it. Fix the law. #PublicSafety #coleg #copolitics https://t.co/1BLEFFrQJD George Brauchler (@GeorgeBrauchler) February 23, 2018 District Attorney George Bauchler said that drunk drivers involved in deadly crashes deserve mandatory prison sentences. That person can flee the scene, picking themselves over the carnage that they left behind, go to trial because they refuse to take responsibility for their conduct, be convicted by a jury of their peers and yet walk out of this courthouse, he said, reported KKTV. Our laws need to change to reflect the reality that drunk drivers that kill people must go to prison. Swecker walked away from the scene without calling 911 and walked more than a mile to a gas station where his wife picked him up, reported The Denver Post. His blood alcohol level was .118 nearly two hours after the crash. In Colorado, .08 is considered the legal level of intoxication. Every step of the way, the defendant avoided taking any responsibility for his conduct. He blamed the victims and the way the road was built and the lab that tested his blood, but a jury of Douglas County citizens didnt buy it, added Senior Deputy District Attorney Chris Wilcox, who prosecuted the case. Their verdict still speaks loud and clear: He drove drunk and killed a father and husband in our community. Canada is survived by his wife and daughter. From NTD.tv Recommended Video: Timelapse Video Captures Ocean of Clouds Over Vancouver, British Columbia Armenian woman kneeling beside dead child in field. (American Committee for Relief in the Near East [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons) Dutch Parliament Votes on Motion Regarding 1915 Armenian Massacre THE HAGUEThe Dutch parliament on Thursday passed a motion recognizing as genocide the massacre of as many as 1.5 million Armenians in 1915, although the government said it would not become official policy of the Netherlands. The motion, which was opposed by just three lawmakers out of 150, risks further straining relations between The Hague and Ankara, which have been tense since the Dutch barred a Turkish minister from campaigning in the Netherlands last year. Turkey denies that the killings, which took place at the height of World War One, constitute genocide. Its foreign ministry strongly condemned the Dutch parliaments approval of the motion and noted the Dutch governments response to it. The government will not follow the judgment of the parliament, Foreign Minister Sigrid Kaag told Dutch television before the vote. She urged utmost caution when applying the term genocide to past events. This cabinet wants to be very careful about relations with Turkey, which have been better, she said. Relations between the two countries, both members of NATO, plunged last year when the Netherlands deported a Turkish minister who had come to campaign among the Dutch Turkish minority for a constitutional referendum in Turkey. The Turkish statement made reference to the 1995 Srebrenica massacres, in which victims were killed after being turned away from a Dutch-run United Nations base where thousands had sought refuge towards the end of the Bosnian war. Baseless decisions taken by the parliament of a country that turned a blind eye to the still painful genocide at Srebrenica have no place in history or in justice, the Foreign Ministrys statement said. Turkeys attitude towards the events of 1915 is based on historical facts and legal norms. Bernard Lewis, one of the best historians on Ottoman Empire and Middle East, speaks on truth of #Armenian allegations. Why does he say "there is no genocide"? What did he benefit? Nothing but he just told truth.https://t.co/KXRdZOJlYn#ArmenianGenocide #Armenians #Armenia AFRIN OPERATION (@TafOnFire) February 22, 2018 Turkey summoned the Dutch charge daffaires to Ankara on Saturday to express unhappiness with the impending vote. Nearly a dozen other EU countries have passed similar resolutions. On Feb. 5, the Netherlands said it would not attempt to appoint an ambassador to Turkey for now. A second motion passed on Thursday calls for a high-level Dutch government official to attend Armenias formal genocide remembrance day on April 24. In the past, the Dutch ambassador has attended. Kaag said the government would consider how best to represent the Netherlands. Some scholars outside Turkey consider the killings were a genocide, or an attempt to destroy a people in part or whole. But the United States and Israel have also been cautious in naming the tragic genocide. Meanwhile yesterday #Israel #Knesset rejected #ArmenianGenocide resolution in light of its complexity & diplomatic repercussions, & because it has a clear political connection https://t.co/lRl7Wg4MpD pic.twitter.com/GETM767o7h Sedrak Mkrtchyan (@517design) February 16, 2018 It is time NOW for #ArmenianGenocide recognition and condemnation. There is no reason for further delay for other countries.#Israel?? #USA #Turkey?? (@muvaffakiyet) February 22, 2018 Turkey accepts that many Christian Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire were killed during World War One, but contests the figures and denies that the killings were orchestrated. By Stephanie van den Berg Recommended Video: First Lady Melania Trump Visits United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Man Killed After Electrical Conduit Falls on Vehicles in Lehigh Tunnel A man was killed after an electrical conduit fell from the Lehigh Tunnel in Pennsylvania before crashing through his windshield and striking him. Authorities are still searching for what caused the conduit to fall from the ceiling area on Wednesday, Feb. 21. The tunnel was at Turnpikes Northeast Extension. Howard Sexton, 70, of New Jersey, was driving a tractor-trailer at the time of the incident. The Lehigh County coroner pronounced him dead at the scene at around 10:20 p.m, according to WFMZ-TV. NBC Philadelphia reported that Sexton continued to drive through the tunnel, despite being struck in the head, before he finally pulled over in an emergency stopping lane, Pennsylvania State Police said. The truck drivers family said he had planned on retiring this summer. Multiple vehicles sustained minor damage from the debris of the wreck. Family of truck driver killed when metal tube struck his windshield while in #PATurnpike tunnel says he planned on retiring this summer: https://t.co/DvmUn3LBHQ pic.twitter.com/uRAtePTGdg NBC10 Philadelphia (@NBCPhiladelphia) February 22, 2018 The accident caused a major traffic closure that lasted from Wednesday 6:15 p.m. to Thursday morning, according to The Morning Call. There was a conduit that had come down and struck some of the vehicles, a state trooper told the newspaper. Multiple vehicles actually ran into it. They [Turnpike authorities] did a detour to replace that conduit. There were no reports of any other injuries. A spokesman for the turnpike tunnel said it was the only tunnel in the system that had electrical conduits directly exposed above the drivers, NBC10 reported. In older tunnels, the pipes are placed in a parallel maintenance tunnel. An autopsy set for this Friday will be conducted to determine Sextons exact cause of death. An investigation is being conducted by the coroners office and Pennsylvania State Police. From NTD.tv Recommended Video: Firefighter Going Over 100 mph Before Deadly Crash North Carolina Homeowner Gets Life Sentence for Killing Man in Front Yard A homeowner in North Carolina received a life sentence on Thursday, Feb. 22, for killing a man in his front yard. Chad Copley, 40, was convicted of first-degree murder for the 2016 death of Kouren-Rodney Bernard Thomas, 20. Thomas was leaving a house party down the street from Copleys home when he was shot, reported WRAL. Prosecutors said that Copley called 911 to let them know he was locked and loaded and on his way to secure his neighborhood from what he described as a bunch of hoodlums. Im going to kill em,' Copley said, Wake County prosecutor Patrick Latour told jurors. Defense attorneys said that the party was rife with unruly people and deputies found smelled marijuana on some of the partygoers. One of the people who testified for the defense, Justice Evuka, is an accused drug dealer who is in jail on felony marijuana charges, reported the Charlotte News-Observer. And a police officer said that officers found a gun in the vehicle that Evuka rode to the party. Jurors deliberated for less than two hours before unanimously reaching a guilty verdict, reported ABC11. The mother of Thomas told the broadcaster that the year-and-a-half since his death has been painful. This was so hard and it was so hard to go through today, every day, she said. He was an excellent child, sweet child, loving child, protective child, and he didnt deserve to die on the curb. Copley told the court during the trial that he felt threatened by the partygoers and acted in defense. I grabbed the shotgun and I load it with five rounds, said Copley. (They) actually lifted their shirts up, flashing the firearms. I kept telling them to leave and he reached for his gun and I shot him. Copley shot through a window from inside his garage. WRAL noted that no gun was found near Thomas or anywhere in the yard and prosecutors said there was no evidence that Thomas was any closer than the edge of the yard. From NTD.tv Recommended Video: Huge Crocodile Snags Fishermans Catch at Last Moment Officials Say Drugs Not to Blame for Murderer Screaming as Hes Executed Officials said that the drugs injected into a murderer to execute him werent responsible for a chilling scream he let out just before he died. Eric Branch, who was convicted of raping and killing a Florida college student, was put to death in Starke on Thursday. Murderers, murderers, murderers! is what he yelled at the lethal injection was administered, reported ABC3. Branch was pronounced dead at 6:05 p.m. The murder happened in 1993 after Branch was mistakenly released from a work-release facility before the completion of a sentence for forgery, theft, and sexual battery. Officials said later Thursday that the drugs were not believed to be responsible for the chilling scream. Department of Corrections spokeswoman Michelle Glady said afterward that there was no indication that Branchs scream was caused by the execution drugs, reported the Associated Press, and that the conclusion was confirmed by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. The victims family released a statement saying they are still grieving the young womans death a quarter-century later. The victims sister, Wendy Morris Hill, read a statement saying she will never be forgotten by those who love her. A Florida inmate screamed and thrashed on the gurney as he was being executed for the rape and murder of a college student. https://t.co/uWAbqFn58H WDTN (@WDTN) February 23, 2018 Branch was visited by his daughter before his execution. He had pork chops, a t-bone steak, french fries, two pints of Ben and Jerrys ice cream, and a bottle of ginger ale, Glady said, reported WEARTV. Branch was on death row for 25 years. Before the execution, Branch used his last words to make a political statement. My last statement is for you guys, he said, directing his attention to the team warden and two other officials standing beside him in the execution chamber, reported the Pensacola News-Journal. I ask you to step out of line of duty and not participate in this. The governor wishes to be senator, and Pam Bondi wishes to be governor. Let them come down here and do it. Ive learned that you are good people and this is not what you should be doing. Bondi is the Florida Attorney General. The anonymous executioner was paid $150 for administering the drugs. Relatives of Hill, the victim, were among those who watched the execution. From NTD.tv Recommended Video: How Doctors in China Turn into Murderers Parents Discover Child They Thought Was Dead Is Alive After Receiving $4,000 Bill From Orphanage Parents were notified seven years ago by officials that their hospitalized newborn baby had died. They discovered that their child was alive and living in an orphanage when they were saddled with a bill for $4000. The mother and father of the severely ill infant were told by doctors in 2011 that their baby would not survive the week, MailOnline reported. They signed papers entrusting the baby to the custody of the hospital, but about a week later had a change of heart. When they went back for their child, they were reportedly told the infant had died. #Metroweired Parents discover baby they thought was dead is alive after receiving 3,000 bill from orphanage The parents only discovered their child survived when the mothers account was frozen (Picture: Volgograd Administration of the Federal Bail https://t.co/XWw3iVhHzN Tech Support (@digitalwirral) February 22, 2018 The parents, it is reported, continued with their lives in the conviction that their baby was gone. But years later, a clerical muddle caused them to be issued a bill for orphanage costs. Because a bailiff was unable to serve them a summons to settle the outstanding balance, the womans bank assets were seized. When she inquired about the reason for the denial of access to her bank account, the shocking story became clear. Officials from the Volgograd Administration of the Federal Bailiff Service in Russia presented her with documents suggesting that her daughter was alive and living in an orphanage. As the weight of the situation hit her, it is reported the woman fainted. According to the Mirror, a representative for the bailiff service said, It became clear that the married couple had been assured for all this time that the child was dead. The parents, so unexpectedly aware of the resurrection of their baby, immediately appealed to the court for the restoration of parental rights. In November 2017, a decision was reportedly taken to allow the child to be legally reunited with her parents. Representatives of the bailiff service reportedly called the incident a truly, amazing story with a happy ending. It is not known whether the couple plans to pursue legal proceedings against the hospital. Recommended Video: 45-Year-Old Woman Unexpectedly Gives Birth After Not Realizing She Was Pregnant Police Were Called After Louisiana Students Thought This Math Symbol Looked Like a Gun A class discussion between students at a Louisiana high school about a math symbol resulted in a police investigation and a search of one students home, the Miami Herald reported citing the Allen Parish Sheriffs Office. Detectives were called to Oberlin High School in Oberlin on Feb. 20 to investigate a terroristic threat over comments made after one of the students was completing a math problem involving the square-root sign. Students in the class made comments about the symbol, saying that it looked like a gun. A square root sign represents a number which, when multiplied by itself, results in the number written under the symbol. During the discussion, one of the students said something that could sound like a terroristic threat if taken out of context. Police searched that students home but found no guns or evidence that the student intended to commit a crime. The student used extremely poor judgment in making the comment, but in light of the actual circumstances, there was clearly no evidence to support criminal charges, the Allen Parish Sheriffs Office wrote in a statement, according to Miami Herald. The police contacted the school board to determine if any disciplinary action should be taken. The incident happened one week after a gunman massacred 17 people at Marjory Stoneman High School in Parkland, Florida. The suspected shooter, Nikolas Cruz, was charged with the murders. Police were called about Cruz 39 times in the years leading up to the shooting. The FBI also admitted to mishandling a tip about him shortly before the massacre. The Parkland shooting triggered a spike in threat reports against schools across the U.S., according to the Miami Herald. From NTD.tv Recommended Video: How Doctors in China Turn into Murderers President Trumps CPAC Speech Exalts American Values Having been in office just over a year, President Donald Trump addressed the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on Feb. 23, talking about his administrations achievements as well as the values that make America great. Trump praised the tax bill passed by Congress in December, the extensive deregulation under his administration, and the record low unemployment numbers among Blacks and Hispanics. He also praised the recent revival of American energy production, which allow the United States to be more competitive with other countries. Other signs of improvement in the economy are the fact that major corporations, including Apple, are reinvesting their money in the United States, and, in some cases, moving factories back from overseas. When did you hear about car companies coming back into Michigan and into Ohio. When did you hear? You heard about them leaving, Trumps said in his remarks, many of which were unscripted and met with repeated standing ovations. The president also highlighted the significance of the increase in military spending to $700 billion. If we dont have a strong military, you might not be allowed into this room someday, Trump said. We better take care of our military. They are the greatest people. But beyond the achievements of his young administration, Trump talked about the values that make America what it is. All of us here today are united by the same timeless values, Trump said in his speech. We defend our constitution and we believe in the wisdom of our foundersour constitution is great. We support the incredible men and women of law enforcement. He also talked about the importance of these values being passed on to the next generation. We celebrate our history and our heroes and we believe young Americans should be taught to love their country and to respect its traditions. Audience members clap during a speech by president Donald Trump at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Md., on Feb. 23, 2018. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times) We salute our great American flag, we put our hands on our hearts for the pledge of allegiance, and we all proudly stand for the national anthem. He also talked about the importance of faith as the cornerstone of American society. Above else, we know that faith and family, not government and bureaucracy, are at the center of American lifewe know that, he said. Because in America we dont worship government, we worship God. Recommended Video: Year One: Thank You, Mr. President A woman wears a face mask as she walks past a poster showing how to avoid the H7N9 avian influenza virus, by a road in Beijing on April 24, 2013. (Wang Zhao/AFP/Getty Images) Regime Covering up Severity of Flu in China, According to Chinese Media This flu season has been particularly severe, considered one of the worst in a decade in the United States, and sickening many in different parts of the globe, from Hong Kong to Australia. In China, deaths caused by the flu may be underreported, which has kept the public unaware and unprepared for the brutal virus, according to a recent report by Chinese media Caixin. The viral article, published on Feb. 20, also highlighted inadequacies in the Chinese medical system. It begins with a personal story of a Caixin reporter whose father-in-law died just 27 days after showing symptoms on Dec. 28, 2017. The reporter had previously written an account of the difficulties he faced in getting adequate and timely care for his father-in-law, which he posted onto WeChat, a popular social media platform. It quickly drew many netizen reactions. The father-in-law was usually in good health. After showing signs of illness, the reporter brought him to see the doctor. It took five days for the doctor to prescribe flu medication and nine days for the doctor to make a definite diagnosis of the flu. In the meantime, the father-in-laws condition drastically worsened. The reporter had to transfer him to another hospital for treatment, but due to a shortage of beds, he had to frantically search for other available facilities. By the end of the ordeal, the father-in-law had to transfer hospitals five times, requiring a blood transfusion, treatment in the ICU, and getting hooked to an artificial lung machine (which helps deliver oxygen to the blood when the patients body cannot sufficiently do so). It cost the family more than 300,000 yuan (about $47,000). A doctor who was consulted in the article said that if the flu was diagnosed and treated early, it may have been possible to use antiviral medicine to treat the father-in-law before symptoms got worse. The Caixin article cast doubt on Chinas official death statistics. Between Jan. 1 to Jan. 9, there were 10 reported deaths from the flu in Hong Konga city under Chinas control but operating under a different political system, according to Chinas Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Though it acknowledged that there were more flu cases in mainland China than the same period in past years, the Center said there were no reported deaths between Jan. 1 and Jan. 7. Hong Kong is a city of roughly 7 million, compared to Chinas more than 1.3 billion. For the entire month of January 2018, the Chinese regime counted 273,949 flu cases and 56 deaths. Caixin also compared cases of the H3N2 flu outbreak last summer in Hong Kong, compared to nearby Guangdong Province (over 100 million population). There were 15,000 H3N2 cases and 300 related deaths in Hong Kong, compared to 74,000 H3N2 cases and 3 deaths in the latter. In mainland China, the health departments usually only put the cause of death as cardiovascular-related illness, and will not report it as a death as a result of the flu, according to Caixin. This has led to a lack of awareness of the severity of the flu outbreak, it concluded. The Chinese regime also failed to promptly alert the public to the first case of death from the H7N4 bird flu, a 68-year-old woman in Liyang City, Jiangsu Province. A notice was sent out by the National Health and Family Planning Commission on Feb. 14 to Hong Kong authorities, which was posted onto the governments official website. But the Commissions own website in China contained no news about this death. State media also did not report on the case. Beijing-based China current affairs commentator Hua Po said that the Chinese regime has a history of covering up illness outbreaks. In 2003, news of the SARS outbreak was suppressed and withheld by the Chinese regime, leading to the spread of the respiratory illness. Many innocent, unknowing people died as a result, Hua said. The Chinese Communist Partys bureaucracy results in news and information about illnesses not getting out in time. Luo Ya contributed to this report. Rich Couple Fake Their Own Assassination to Catch Son Who Hired Hitman to Kill Them In an unusual sting operation that saw a wealthy couple pretend to be dead and pose for graphic photos, police in Russia tricked a man into believing his parents had been killed by a hitman hed hired. According to MailOnline, detectives uncovered a plot in which a 22-year-old man wanted to pay a contract killer to murder his parents and sister so that he could collect a hefty inheritance payout. An undercover policeman pretending to be a hit man in the Russian resort town of Sochi met the son, who reportedly told him in detail how his parentsand sisterwere to be murdered. According to the report, the son provided all manner of helpful information to the fake hitman, including a floor plan of the intended victims home, the location of cameras, and tips on dealing with guard dogs. A price for the hit was allegedly negotiated, with the son insisting on seeing photographs of his dead parents as proof of the grisly deed. The mother and father were subsequently persuaded by the police to take part in a graphic rusethey were to be covered in fake blood and pretend to be dead. Photographs were then taken of the supposed victims. A WEALTHY couple faked their own assassination to snare their evil son who had tried to pay a hitman to bump them off. https://t.co/dQ1qTEn0L7 Edward Dawes (@DissidentDawes) February 23, 2018 The undercover officer then met with the son and provided the graphic images of proof that he had carried out his part of the bargain. The man was reported to have been delighted by what he saw and promised to pay the $53,000 bill for the homicides. Police then swooped in and arrested the man, it was reported. According to a report by the Sun, citing police sources in the Krasnodar region, the man made a full confession. He reportedly also admitted that prior to hiring a contract killer, he took steps to try and kill his parents himself. Before looking for a killer he tried to get rid of his relatives twice. He looked on the internet to find out how to carry out the murders, said the police source. On one occasion, it was reported, the man wanted to put pills in the kettle to poison his parents but his father found out something was wrong. Then the son planned to break a thermometer in his parents car so that they were poisoned with mercury vapors. But he got cold feet. According to the police, the parents were devastated at news of the scheme their boy had devised and could not believe he could do this. It was reported that the man faces 15 years in prison if convicted for trying to hire a hitman to murder his parents. Recommended Video: Driver Maxes Out Audi S4 as Police Give Chase Robber Pistol-Whips Victim, Shoots Himself: Police A robbery suspect shot himself when he was pistol-whipping his victim in New Jersey, according to the Woodbury City Police Department. The department dispatched a patrol around 8:40 p.m. to a parking garage on 27 Cooper Street after a report came in of a shooting on Tuesday, Feb. 20. Police found out four people tried to rob a 20-year-old acquaintance in the garage. A fight broke out and one of the robbers hit the victim in the head with a gun. The gun went off, however, striking the robber in the hand. The four suspects got in a car and fled, but they were stopped and apprehended by police less than 700 yards away. The suspected weapon was found in the car, the police stated in a Facebook post. Both the victim and the wounded suspect were taken to hospitals with what police deemed as non-life threatening injuries. The four suspects were arrested and identified as New Jersey residents Doug Henderson, 24, of Camden; Brianna Jiminez, 18, of Logan; Aleem Clark, 18, of Camden; and Branden Wentz, 19, of Logan. All except Wentz were charged with a conspiracy to commit robbery. Wentz was charged with robbery, aggravated assault, terroristic threats, possession of a weapon for an unlawful purpose, and unlawful possession of a handgun. Wentz and Henderson have been detained at the Salem County Jail, while Jimenez and Clark have been released pending their court appearances. Recommended Video: Surveillance Footage Shows Robber Attack Virginia Store Employee Slain Maryland Officer Saved Neighbors Life in Shooting The Maryland police officer who was shot and killed on Wednesday, Feb. 21, after he saved his neighbors life during a domestic dispute has been identified. Police said Corporal Mujahid A. Ramzziddin, 51, was off-duty at the time of the incident. Ramzziddin was a 14-year veteran of the police, a military veteran, and father of four. The officer saved his neighbors life, by giving his own after the neighbors estranged husband allegedly fired five shots outside her home located in Brandywine, ABC News reported. Police said the female neighbor was not hurt in the shooting. Prince Georges County police Chief Hank Stawinski said the officer stood his ground at a news conference Wednesday. With broken hearts, we are announcing that one of our officers was shot and killed today. The brave officer was shot while stepping in to protect a woman threatened in a domestic situation. Please keep his family and our department in your prayers. PGPDNEWS (@PGPDNews) February 21, 2018 Stawinski added that Ramzziddin was an officer who was selfless throughout his career. Today was not the first day he demonstrated his heroism. Police confirmed that the suspect who shot Ramzziddin37-year-old Glenn Tyndellwas shot and killed by police after he led them on a chase in an SUV, WJLA reported. The Prince Georges County Police Department wrote on Facebook that Ramzziddin will live in our hearts every day. On Wednesday, Ramzziddin approached his neighbor across the street after he noticed she seemed worried, Stawinksi said, citing witnesses. He asked her if she was OK and offered to go into her home after she had some concerns Stawinski added. Soon after they came back outside, Ramzziddin was shot. Sources told Fox5 that the suspect, who had a protection order against him, used a shotgun to kill the officer. The woman called police after her husband shot him. Police said the suspect had three open warrants for second-degree assault, according to WJLA. One neighbor told the network that Tyndell had a violent temper and had previously displayed violence and physical abuse in the past. From NTD.tv Recommended Video: Officer Saves Woman Who Was Pinned Small Plane Crash in Indiana Had No Survivors A plane crash in Indiana late Thursday left no survivors, police said. The Cessna 441 crashed in a field in Carroll County, reported RTV. The exact location was near 500 West and 600 South roads, just north of Rossville. Officials said at least three passengers were on board the small plane. Sources told the broadcaster that flight data indicated the plane was between 18,000 and 28,000 feet when it vanished off the radar. Shortly after, multiple people called 911, reporting a plane crash. The plane originally took off from Eagle Creek Airport in Indianapolis at 7:21 p.m. Flight records indicated it was headed to Green Bay-Austin Straubel International Airport. Officials from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the National Transportation Safety Board were scheduled to arrive on Friday to investigate the crash. The FAA placed a 3-mile radius no-fly zone on the area of the crash until Feb. 24, reported the Clinton County Daily News. On Friday, two of those killed in the crash were identified as businessman John Pagel and his son-in-law Steve Witcpalek. Pagel and his family operate Pagels Ponderosa Dairy, a dairy farm with more than 5,300 cows and 100 employees, reported the Green Bay Press-Gazette. The family also operates the Cannery Public Market in downtown Green Bay, while Pagel was on the Kewaunee County Board. Titletown Brewing Co. Chief Operating Officer Jim Kratowicz, who helped the family set up shop in Green Bay, said the death is a tragedy. Worked a tragic plane crash tonight with the Drone on a cold foggy night with light rain near Rossville IN. Prayers go out to the families of those lost. pic.twitter.com/xLQ73ZArXp Michael Pruitt, PIO (@Michael_Pruitt1) February 23, 2018 We liked the whole farm-to-table concept, but Johns reputation was highly respected. Its one of the reasons we started doing business with them, Kratowicz said. But it was also a great personal fit. Its a really, really a good family and John was a great friend to us. Personally and professionally, this is a tragedy. The plane was owned by Ponderosa Aviation, which has the same address as Pagels Ponderosa Dairy. According to Business Jet Traveler, the Cessna 441 is a solid airplane that holds its value well and is highly sought after. From NTD.tv Recommended Video: Moms Hilarious Reaction to Raptor Scare Terrifying Footage Shows Lions Charge at Car With 2 Children Inside What should have been a fun day at a British safari park turned into a terrifying nightmare after a pride of lions charged at a familys car. Abi Tudge was traveling through West Midland Safari Park with her friend and two children when rangers had to shut the gates for safety reasons. The park said it was temporarily shutting down because animals were too close to the gate, the BBC reported. The pair, both from Hereford, became trapped in the section for around 50 minutes as wardens tried to control the aggravated lions before the gates were reopened. Tudges friend, 28-year-old Jaz Reynolds, captured the heart-stopping moment as a pride of lions suddenly bolted toward their Hyundai. The beasts leaped on top of the cars roof and left behind a huge paw print-shaped dent, according to the Daily Mail. We were so [shaken] up and trying to make sure the children were OK, Tudge told the Daily Mail. The rangers were in their vehicle, but nowhere near the lions. She said if the lions had charged faster and at the window, it could have smashed open. Reynolds added, It was the last thing youd expect to happen on a casual day out. Despite some dents and scratches on the car, no one was hurt during the encounter. A parks spokesman told the BBC that the temporary closure was a precaution to prevent animals from going between gates. The spokeswoman said the incident occurred as a result of mixing males lions with females. She said the male lions were in the process of being mixed with the females for months already, but due to the wild nature of the beasts normally harmonious groups can on occasion become particularly active. The terrified visitors said they were horrified at being surrounded by the lions but didnt want to scream in case of scaring the children. One of them went up on the bonnet, and another one managed to jump on the roof, Reynolds told the Daily Mail. They really got up close and personal. The visitors said the incident has not put them off entirely, adding that the children found it hilarious. Eventually the gates opened so that we could get out, and we just carried on our day as normal, Reynolds said. This is not the first time a lion has damaged a vehicle in a drive-through safari park. South Africas Kruger National Park shared video late last year showing a male lion attacking a vehicle while a lioness, the male lions apparent intended mate, watched from nearby. From NTD.tv Recommended Video: Kayaker Rescues Iguana Swimming Miles From Shore UK singer Myles Stephenson from X Factor winning group Rak-Su, sporting the "Meet me at McDonald's" haircut on Dec. 6, 2017. (Neil P. Mockford/Getty Images) UK School Bans Meet Me at McDonalds Haircut A UK high school has made headlines after its principal banned a popular hairstyle known as the meet me at McDonalds haircut. According to the BBC, the principal of Great Yarmouth Charter Academy in Norfolk, Barry Smith, sent a letter to parents listing seven unacceptable haircuts for boys. One of the haircuts specified was any variation on the hairstyle known as Meet me at McDonalds. The letter has given students until Monday, Feb. 26, to restyle any extreme style[s]. It warned that if this was not done, the child would either be sent home, or placed in isolation. The meet me at McDonalds hairstyle was not described in the letter. However, the school did offer to provide parents with a Powerpoint presentation showing what hairstyles to avoid. The cut, which is apparently popular with schoolboys, is defined by closely shaved sides and back, topped with a voluminous curly mop. Yaye! The "Meet Me At McDonalds" hairstyle is back! Now kids can look as stupid as their parents did in the 80s! ?(The music was way cooler back then though) Check out our page on the "do": https://t.co/x82rYhZImb pic.twitter.com/WuMlIHKyMe Cyber Definitions (@Cyberdefs) February 22, 2018 Hairdresser Elliot Branford told The Metro Its a grade zero or a one on the sides, then disconnected with a perm or curly on the top and you have it sitting forwards. According to The Sun, the hairdo is reminiscent of the styles sported in the new romantic synthpop scene of the 1980s. While the origins of the name remain a mystery, The Week suggests it first appeared on Twitter in April 2015. Other styles that have been banned by the high school include the mohawk, shaven parting lines, and overgrown, heavy fringes brushed forward onto the face. According to the BBC, the new rule has been met with mixed responses from the parents. One mother said: To be quite fair [the principal is] only implementing stuff that was bog standard when we were at school, reported the BBC. While another said: It seems to us to be a bit silly. I dont understand how having a haircut affects a childs learning. Karen Leeder, a mother who posted the letter to social media, described it as absolutely ridiculous, The Sun reported. Meanwhile, many people on social media expressed puzzlement as to what the hairdo actually was. Things I learnt today: There is a hairstyle called "meet me at McDonalds". Adam Kirton (@AdamKirton) February 21, 2018 Today's discussion point in the @tes office: what is a meet me at McDonalds haircut anyway? Martin George (@geomr) February 22, 2018 This is the not the first time that the schools policies has drawn media attention. According The Sun, last September the new principal caused a stir when he introduced strict new rules, including cell phone confiscations, and enforcement of a bedtime. From NTD.tv Recommended Video: Video Catches Woman Climbing Through Drive-Thru Window Chevy Chase attends the 'Dog Years' Premiere during 2017 Tribeca Film Festival in New York City, April 22, 2017. (Noam Galai/Getty Images for Tribeca Film Festival) Wages of Road Rage: Actor Chevy Chase Starts and Loses a Roadside Fight Chevy Chase, famous for his work on Saturday Night Live starting in the 1970s and many movie and TV appearances since, met some people who were decidedly not fans of his on a New Jersey highway on Feb. 9. The 74-year-old actor told police he was driving north on Interstate 87 when a car cut him off and possibly hit him, the Daily Mail reported. Chase gave chase in his blue Mercedes, following the offending vehicle across the Mario Cuomo Bridge, while flashing his headlights. The other vehicle, a black Dodge Ram pickup, pulled over near Exit 10, and Chase got out. According to TMZ, Chase saw there was no damage but wanted to tell the other driver what Chase thought of his driving. Chase then told police that someone in the truck made an obscene gesture. Chase responded, If I were a lot younger Id bust your nose, TMZ reported. Police documents show that the pickup driver, 22-year-old Michael Landrio of East Patchogue, New Jersey, claims Chase tried to throw a punch. SomeoneChase says it was one of the passengerskicked Chase in the shoulder, knocking the elderly actor to the ground. Landrio tells a different story. We were in the right lane and as we came up to the bridge we went to the middle lane, Landrio told Fox News. It was an old guy yellingsomething we couldnt hearsuper pissed-off. We just tried to get the heck away from him. He followed us the whole length of the bridge, driving crazy. After both drivers had stopped, My friend opened his window and just said, I apologize, we were just trying to go upstate, Landrio claimed. Landrio told Fox he did not get out of the car immediately. According to Landrio, Chase then launched into a foul-mouthed tirade, screaming You know who the XXX I am? I am going to ruin your lives! Fox reported. Landrio claimed that Chase opened the door to his truck and reached in, trying to punch him, at which point Landrio kicked Chase, sending him spinning back into his own car. Landrio then closed and locked his car door and was still inside with Chase raging outside his window when a nurse and an off-duty police officer escorted him away, Fox reported. I didnt know who he wasI was just trying to defend myself. He was physically trying to harm me, Landrio told Fox. I looked him up on Google and I still didnt know who he was, he said. He didnt look like he looked when he made his movies. Landrio was given a summons for second-degree harassment. The case will come to court on March 5. From NTD.tv Recommended Video: Firefighter Going Over 100 mph Before Deadly Crash Wisconsin Businessman John Pagel Dead in Indiana Plane Crash Wisconsin businessman John Pagel and his son-in-law were identified as two of those who died in a plane crash in Indiana. The plane, a Cessna 441, took off from Eagle Creek Airport in Indianapolis on Thursday evening, Feb. 22, and was headed to Green Bay-Austin Straubel International Airport in Wisconsin, reported RTV. The plane took off around 6:20 p.m. Central Time, reported The Kewaunee County Comet. It crashed around 20 minutes after taking off. There were no survivors. Pagel and his family own and operate Pagels Ponderosa Dairy. According to its website, the dairy has 8,300 acres and 1,750 cows and employs over 100 people. Besides producing milk and other dairy products, the dairy also produces corn and alfalfa. In a picture, John Pagel is shown with his family. Pagels family also operates Rons Cheese in Luxemburg and the Cannery Public Market in downtown Green Bay, a farm-to-fork restaurant. We liked the whole farm-to-table concept, but Johns reputation was highly respected. Its one of the reasons we started doing business with them, Titletown Brewing Co. Chief Operating Officer Jim Kratowicz told Green Bay Press-Gazette. But it was also a great personal fit. Its a really, really a good family and John was a great friend to us. Personally and professionally, this is a tragedy. The Cessna was owned by Ponderosa Aviation, which has the same address as the dairy. Rep. Mike Gallagher, R-Green Bay, said in a statement posted on Facebook that the deaths of Pagel and Witcpalek were a huge loss. I was lucky enough to get to know John over the last couple yearshe was a good and honest man who worked hard, and loved both his family and community deeply. Please keep their friends and family in your prayers, he said. A family statement said that Nathan Saari, who was piloting the plane, also died in the crash, reported FOX11. We appreciate the outpouring of the (communitys) thoughts and prayers and request your respect for the privacy of the family as we wait for additional information, read a statement from the family, As we know more details we will keep you informed. From NTD.tv Recommended Video: Amazing View of Airbus Atlas Sweeping Through Valley Many drones have mountings for still or video digital cameras. (commons.wikimedia.org) Woman Finds Drone Peering Through Her Bedroom Window A New Zealand woman heard a buzzing noise outside her bedroom window late one night. When she peered out, she found herself face-to-face with a flying drone. Marita Maass of Upper Hutt, New Zealand, was reading in her bedroom when she heard the buzzing. When she realized it was coming from outside the house she got up to see what it could be. I pulled the curtains away and there was this drone about two meters (6 feet) from my face; hanging there at my window with this little red light, she told the Stuff website. She recoiled in horror, drawing the drapes, cutting off the light, and leaping into bed. I felt violated, like my privacy has been invaded, she told Stuff. It was an absolute shock to me. Maass called the police who told her that there were no laws being broken. Then she called the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) and the privacy commissioner. When she asked around the neighborhood, she learned that several people had been harassed by drones while at family gatherings or while their children were playing. The CAA reported 318 drone complaints in 2017, up from 199 in 2016, Stuff reportedand in almost two-thirds of those cases, the operator was never identified. What bothers me is theres [companies] advertising drones for under $100 so any fool and his friend can buy one, Maass told Stuff. There should be a law that says drones shouldnt be used among private homesgo to a park. New Zealand laws prohibit flying out of the line of sight or flying over private property without prior approval. However, the CAA is charged with enforcing these rules, so the police cannot get involved. Possibly New Zealand lawmakers could copy the UK Drone Bill. This law, published in draft form in November 2017, would allow law enforcement to order operators to land their drones if the police thought there was a problem or a potential problem. Officers would be able to seize drones they suspected were used in crimes. Less aggressive but perhaps more important, anyone flying a drone of more than 250 grams (just under an ounce) would need to register the craft. Owners of drones weighing more than 250 grams would also be required to pass safety tests. If such a law were passed, more of the peeping toms with flying video cameras would be identifiableor perhaps arrestable. From NTD.tv Recommended Video: Huge Crocodile Snags Fishermans Catch at Last Moment For nearly five years, fitness entrepreneur Amanda Freeman has been dying to open a studio in Greenwich, she said. At last, Freeman plans to accomplish her goal later this spring. SLT, an acronym for strengthen, lengthen and tone, is headed to 134 E. Putnam Ave., in the Mill Post Plaza that houses Asiana Cafe, Berkshire Hathaway offices and the Gilles Clement Designs showroom. Freeman hopes to launch her Greenwich workout studio featuring 12 Megaformer machines in May, she told Hearst Connecticut Media. It will be her first studio in Connecticut, adding to more than 15 around the Northeast. She launched SLT in 2011, starting with a single location in New York City. She describes SLT as combining cardio and Pilates in one intense, 50-minute session. For those new to the workout, grippy socks are a must, but knowing about a Megaformer is not. The machine cant be found in most gyms, because buyers have to obtain a specific license to get one through Lagree Fitness. SLTs entire workout takes place on the large contraption covered with a variety of handles and straps. You can expect to be a little lost at your first class, Freeman said, adding overcoming the learning curve is worth the results attendees see. This class is results-driven, she said. It helps you get the body most people are looking for: long, lean and strong without the big build. For first timers, instructors will provide detailed instructions and take things a bit slower, she said. But Freeman believes many Greenwich customers will already know what to do. Shes seen some town residents at SLT classes in Westchester County or in New York City. They already have a huge Greenwich following, said Alyssa Keleshian Bonomo, who owns the Greenwich property where SLT plans to open. Stamford-based Rhys Commercial represented her in the deal. For years, Freeman has wanted to bring her business to Greenwich, but its been tough to find the right space and location. The key was to be in central Greenwich, she said. According to Megaformer distributor Lagree Fitness website, the only nearby studios with licenses to use the machines are Catwalk Fitness in Old Greenwich, CST50 in Darien and SLTs own Rye Brook, N.Y., location. Freemans other ventures include working as a trend forecaster and later launching a daily health and wellness e-newsletter business called Vital Juice. She discovered Megaformer workouts while traveling in California and, unable to convince someone else to do it, ultimately brought them to the East Coast by opening SLT. Looking ahead, Freeman anticipates opening many more studios. We are planning to grow, grow, grow through opening new studios and through acquisitions of existing studios that use similar equipment, she said. I wont say this workout is for everyone, but the changes youll see in your body are really compelling. NORWALK After a public hearing, the Common Councils Finance/Claims Committee on Thursday evening recommended boosting the bottom line on Norwalks unfolding 2018-19 operating budget by nearly $5.5 million. It will be up to the Board of Estimate and Taxation to decide whether to allocate some or all of the additional dollars to education, if the full council backs the recommended budget cap next Tuesday evening. This is a difficult year. We have the reval(uation) this summer pending. We have changes in the tax law, the impact of which is somewhat unknown, councilman Greg Burnett Sr., finance committee chairman, said afterward. So we really need to be conscious of a tax increase to the Norwalk taxpayers. It would be great to give the Board of Ed their full request of $9.9 million (more). Last year, we gave the Board of Ed an $8 million increase. But even at a $5.5 million increase, that equates to a 3.7 percent mill rate increase to the Norwalk citizens. That will be a burden to our taxpayers. Burnett, an at-large Democrat who previously sat on the school board and once chaired the tax board, said the council will continue to work with the school board to find innovative ways to advance its strategic plan. On Tuesday evening, the council will consider the committees recommendation to cap the forthcoming operating budget at $336,168,940. The figure represents $353,595,360 in total spending less an estimated $17,426,420 in state aid and other intergovernmental revenue to the city. The school board requested $194 million, or a 5.4 percent increase, for the fiscal year starting July 1. The additional dollars are needed to implement the boards multiyear strategic initiative plan and cover salary and health insurance increases as well as increased student enrollment and state mandates, according to board chairman Michael Barbis. Norwalk Director of Finance Robert Barron, after reviewing $359.5 million in city and school board spending requests for the coming fiscal year, recommended paring the bottom line to $348.1 million. His base budget allocates the school board zero additional dollars and leaves it up to the council and tax board to decide what taxpayers can afford. The base budget would boost the citys mill rate by 1.91 percent and the annual property tax bill on the median-assessed ($340,050) single-family home in Norwalk by $164. The finance committees recommendation, as arrived at Thursday evening, would add $5.5 million to the base budget, boost the mill rate by 3.7 percent and add $318 to that same tax bill, according to Barrons department. Councilman Douglas Hempstead, a District D Republican on the finance committee, said he struggled with increasing the expenditures cap. He said the school board has made strides in education, but added, Im worried about the taxpayers this year. Id probably support this, Hempstead said of the higher cap, but Id never go higher. The committee voted unanimously to boost the expenditures cap after a well-attended public hearing at which parents and educators urged the elected officials to fully fund the school boards $194 million spending request for fiscal year 2018-19. More than a dozen people spoke, including Nate Sheldon, a parent of a Marvin Elementary School kindergartner and a member of the schools governance council. He said he has seen a lot of progress in Norwalk schools. I feel that fully funding this budget will help to put our school system on the right track to make schools a better place for our children, Sheldon said. Norwalk is a great city and thats why we all chose to live here. Barrons recommended base budget draws down $2 million from the citys rainy day fund. Bryan Meek, a Republican on the Board of Education, presented the finance committee a spreadsheet showing consistent growth of the fund over the last 17 years. He urged the committee to draw down more than $2 million to help pay for education and other priorities. If you look at these numbers, going back to the year 2001, we are in a position that we have never been, Meek said. This is a great opportunity for us. We can have it all. We can fund the schools, we can increase senior tax relief. Theres a lot we can do here. Barron disputed Meeks numbers, placing the rainy day fund at 13.6 percent rather than 15.3 percent of the citys annual revenues, and said he has been reluctant to draw down more than $2 million, given Norwalks credit standing compared to other triple-A rated communities in Connecticut. Two speakers asked the elected officials to reform how city government operates. Lisa Brinton, a 2017 mayoral candidate, renewed her call for Charter revision and professional management. Norwalk needs better management or we will become Bridgeport, sooner than you think, Brinton said. Diane Lauricella said the school board has made improvements but added she did not support fully funding its 2018-19 budget request. She asked the city officials to look for new revenue through better code enforcement, a more diversified tax base and improved property assessment before boosting spending. The full council will consider the recommended expenditures cap Tuesday evening. The Board of Estimate will use whatever cap emerges from that meeting as a target when crafting the 2018-19 operating budget. The tax board has until early May to adopt the new budget and set mill rates. NORWALK The two-year federal budget deal passed weeks ago included $6 billion for opioid addiction recovery and mental health, marking a vast increase over previous spending the total federal funding prior had been $1 billion. The funds come on the heels of a year with the highest number of Connecticut opioid overdose deaths to date. But while the money has been allocated, who will receive it has not. Over the upcoming year, members of Congress in the Senate and House will begin lobbying one another over how that sum will be divided between categories such as law enforcement, rehabilitation programs and the medical system. Thursday in Norwalk, U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy and Rep. Jim Himes sat down in with municipal officials, police officers, health professionals, advocates and recovering addicts from around Fairfield County to hear their thoughts on how the money should be used before entering the fray. What we know is that, despite our best efforts, this epidemic is getting worse, not better, said Murphy, who sits on the Appropriations Committee that allocates federal funds. I hope you will give us a bit of a sense today about what you see is working and what you see is not working when it comes to the way in which we spend dollars because youre about to get the biggest appropriation of federal dollars for this epidemic since it began, he said. Out of the $6 billion, $60 million is likely to go to Connecticut based on previous allocations of opioid crisis funding, Murphy said. Deaths from overdoses in Connecticut surpassed 1,000 people for the first time in 2017. Norwalk police Lt. James Walsh said that heroin mixed with fentanyl a drug hundreds of times more potent than heroin is still prevalent in the area, although overdose deaths from fentanyl had gone down. However, a new trend is that people have begun buying fentanyl from China on the dark web and mixing it with heroin locally. The healthcare communitys suggestions for ways to fund the fight against opioid addiction were varied. Eileen Kardos, who works with population health at Norwalk Hospital, believed that more training for prescribers to be able to intervene in cases of substance abuse could help address the problem. A model known as SBIRT (screening, brief intervention and referral to treatment) aims to put health care professionals more at ease referring patients to treatment. The SBIRT model has been very successful, Kardos said. And I think that prescribers and doctors and health care professionals really need to be comfortable having those conversations. On the treatment side, John DEramo, the president of MCCA, which provides substance abuse services in the greater Danbury area, outlined the impact recent budget cuts have had on the nonprofit. While cost of living has increased over the years, state budget cuts have forced the organization to make tough decisions. MCCA recently lost two of its 30-day rehab beds while trying to maximize the number of beds it uses for detox. And theyre both needed, he said. These are just the day-to-day challenges that a nonprofit faces in todays situation with the state. Eric Collins, physician in chief at Silver Hill Hospital in New Canaan, wasnt sure that more beds were the answer. Addiction is always a chronic, typically, and remitting illness. We can give people residential treatment, but if we dont give them something for the long-term I would analogize it to someone with diabetes, he said, where long-term management is needed. He believed that medications such as methadone maintenance and buprenorphine maintenance were an important part of treating addiction. Afterward, Michael Askew, a recovery community center manager at Connecticut Community for Addiction Recovery, voiced frustration that the funding for addiction recovery and mental health had been bundled. A recovering addict for nearly three decades himself, he believed that the bundling would end up greatly reducing how much of the $6 billion goes toward opioid addiction. More money is allocated to mental health than substance abuse, he said simply. His hope was that some of the funding would be used to replace other recent cuts to federal funds. Murphy said his biggest takeaways from the conversation were that there were not enough beds or prevention services. While he saw the $6 billion as a start, he didnt think it was enough. The problem is that the federal funding is coming at the same time that state funding is declining, he said. WILTON Wilton police made their second arrest Thursday in an October jewelry theft that saw more than $21,000 of jewelry stolen from a retailer in town. Erika Santa, 32, was transported to the Wilton Police Department on Thursday, Feb. 22 for her connection to the theft of Campus Jewelers at 5 River Road in Wilton on the afternoon of Oct. 18. She was originally picked up near her home in Jamaica, N.Y., by members of the NYPD and Nassau County Police Department. In late January, the 32-year-old suspects mother Yolanda Santa, 56, of Ridgewood, N.Y. was also arrested and charged with first-degree larceny and conspiracy to commit first-degree larceny. The latest arrest leaves only two more suspects who police identified as another Santa daughter and her boyfriend left to be charged, though police said it is only a matter of time. The other two are facing charges in New York, and were waiting for extradition on them, said police spokesman Lt. Rob Kluk. Video surveillance from Campus Jewelers showed three women distracting salespeople while the male suspect slipped multiple items into a brown paper shopping bag that he was carrying. The suspects later purchased an item with cash, and left the store with the stolen loot. Police said that none of the stolen jewelry has been located yet. In cases like these, we typically dont find the stolen goods. Thieves typically have stolen jewelry melted down very quickly, so that it cant be traced, and then they sell it off, Kluk said. Erika Santa was charged with first-degree larceny and conspiracy to commit first-degree larceny. She was held on a $100,000 surety bond, and she was given a court date of March 5. Contributed / Contributed photo WESTPORT A New York man involved in an alleged moving scam was arrested following a months-long investigation into a Brooklyn-based moving company. Westport Police first received a report of the alleged scam Aug. 16, 2017 from a former Westport woman who contacted a moving company in Brooklyn, N.Y., to move her possessions from Connecticut to California but said her belongings never arrived and she was unable to reach the moving company. Southern Illinois University Edwardsvilles Department of Historical Studies, the College of Arts and Sciences (CAS), and the SIUE Emeriti Faculty Association, are honored to welcome Edward Ayers, PhD, a renowned American historian, author, professor and president emeritus at the University of Richmond. At 5:30 p.m. on Wednesday, Feb. 28, Ayers will present Lincoln, Race and Slavery, at the Department of Historical Studies inaugural Abraham Lincoln Memorial Lecture in the Abbott Auditorium in Lovejoy Library. Parking in Lot A (behind the library) is free to the public after 5 p.m. On this weeks episode of Segue, the weekly radio program that explores the lives and work of the people at SIUE, Greg Budzban, PhD, CAS dean, and Erik Alexander, PhD, assistant professor of historical studies, have a conversation with Ayers in preparation for his upcoming trip to campus. This episode of Segue will air at 9 a.m. on Sunday, Feb. 25, on WSIE 88.7 FM The Sound. Ayers earned a bachelors from the University of Tennessee, as well as masters and doctoral degrees from Yale University. In 1980, he joined the faculty of the University of Virginia (UVA), the same institution where Alexander attended for his masters and doctoral studies. Ayers also served as dean of UVAs College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, until he was appointed president of the University of Richmond, where he served until 2015. His book, In the Presence of Mine Enemies: The Civil War in the Heart of America, 1859-1863, was awarded the Bancroft Prize and Beveridge Awards in 2004. His latest work, The Thin Line of Freedom: The Civil War and Emancipation in the Heart of America, was recently awarded the 2018 Lincoln Prize and has received critical acclaim. Among his numerous projects, Ayers is a pioneer in the field of the digital humanities. He created a digital archive, called The Valley of the Shadow, at the the dawn of the World Wide Web that revealed the history in both the North and South during the Civil War. While at the University of Richmond, he spearheaded the Digital Scholarship Lab, which helps show trends and patterns dynamically throughout American History. In 2013, he was honored with the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama at the White House. We are pleased to have you here at SIUE and hear you speak on the subject of Abraham Lincoln, slavery and race, Budzban says. Tell us about the work you have done with your two books and how they connect with your message on campus. Well, it took me 25 years to write them, mainly because we were building the large digital archive, Ayers replies. I wrote volume one when I was in your shoes, Greg, as dean of the College of Arts and Science at UVA. When I was appointed president at the University of Richmond, I found it hard to find the time to write volume two. The Thin Line of Freedom finishes the story begun by In the Presence of Mine Enemies, and when you put the two together, you have the entire story of the Civil War and the reconstruction era told from the viewpoints of the people who lived it on the ground. Through his work, Ayers has come to understand that people who lived in the North and South during the Civil War had perspectives that often go overlooked when studying American history. We all seem to have settled on past stories. One thing I try to do when lecturing around the country is to argue with everyone I am speaking with, Ayers says. We need to understand fully what Abraham Lincoln was up against during this time. I learned from Erik Alexander that the northern democrats were strong throughout the war and afterward, and Lincoln had difficulty persuading anyone who wasnt a republican to vote for him in 1864. This doesnt diminish Lincoln, but instead, this makes us appreciate him even more. The saving of the United States and the destruction of slavery didnt come along easily, and it is not just engrained in our American DNA to be free. There were close calls. Unlike some works that explore the Civil War, Ayers latest book expands long after the wars end in 1865. What do you gain in perspective and understanding by pulling the story even further forward into the 1870s? Alexander inquires. By ending research in 1865, its easy to have a triumphal vision. Everyone shakes hands, says, good game, and goes home because the North won! Ayers jokes. Those very same people who fought in the war were fighting the next day about what providing people with freedom means and what a reunified United States looked like. We cant understand the Civil War if we dont understand the consequences, and we dont understand Reconstruction if we dont understand how devastating and unanticipated this war was. Throughout the course of the trios conversation, the scholars share that the consequences of the Civil War still remain prevalent in America today. In August 2017, rallies at UVA garnered worldwide attention after a far-right group gathered to oppose the removal of a statue of confederate General Robert E. Lee. People imagine these statues rising out of the blood-soaked soil of the confederacy, but instead, they were put up for entirely different reasons, Ayers explains. If you dont reckon honestly with your history, it comes back. Why on earth would I want to focus on a time 150 years in our past and instead find something else to worry about? [I do this] because the war is still pulsing in our nation. By Madelaine Gerard, SIUE Marketing & Communications EDWARDSVILLE -Edwardsville High School students have had the opportunity to interact with and get to know several students from both China and Germany the past couple of weeks. Fifteen German students and 28 Chinese students were visiting EHS and living with EHS host families as part of a German student exchange program being coordinated by EHS Teacher Levi Antrim and a Chinese student exchange program being coordinated by EHS Teacher Kevin Paur. Antrim explained that he had just started a new German student exchange program through the German American Partnership Program (GAPP) in which he chose to partner with a school in Calw, Germany. Its a one-to-one exchange, Antrim noted. They come here and stay with our students. We take them around to the local sights, show them what American life is like and show them American school things. Then in June we will be visiting them in Calw and staying with host families. We will be there for two weeks and essentially do the same things - see things in the area, go to their school and their classes. The 15 German students arrived in Edwardsville with their two teacher chaperones on Feb. 1 and began attending classes with their host EHS students the following day. The German students followed the class schedule of their host EHS student for a few days before Antrim arranged for them to observe classes that were more of personal interest to the exchange students. The exchange students days and evenings were filled with numerous opportunities to learn about EHS, the city of Edwardsville, SIUE, the St. Louis area, and the general life of Americans. They went to Woodland Elementary one day to speak to the elementary students about how different life is in Germany compared to America. They also toured SIUE and went bowling on campus, toured Busch Stadium and explored City Museum in St. Louis. One day after school EHS English Teacher Cara Lane provided the exchange students with a tour of Main Street in Edwardsville as well as some historical Edwardsville sites. Also we had a dinner at one of the families of an exchange student, and we did a meet and greet with the mayor (of Edwardsville before a city council meeting), Antrim explained. One of the larger events was a Super Bowl party that both the German and the visiting Chinese exchange students attended in addition to all the host families. The Chinese students are a part of a very similar exchange student program that Paur has coordinated for the past three years with a host school and families in China. Antrim felt that one of the benefits for the German students visiting was that they get to experience first-hand what theyve learned about in textbooks. So its no longer just reading about Americans in a book or reading about how to use English. They actually have to use English while they are here. They have to navigate an American high school. They have to actually use the things that theyve been learning in Germany and have more of a real life application rather than just textbook things, he said. He pointed out that several of the German students had mentioned numerous times how everything is larger in America. Anywhere from buildings and cars, and rooms of houses and pretty much everything, Antrim said. The roles are reversed when the EHS students travel to Germany in June and have the opportunity to put their German skills to the test. Antrim noted that the students participating in the exchange often make lifelong friendships. I actually did this program as a high school student, and I still keep contact with my host brother from way back then. So its a good opportunity to expand their horizons a little bit, and meet some people that they otherwise wouldnt be able to meet, he said. And see cultures, Antrim added. Some of these students have never been out of the country so getting that experience to see something other than what they are used to seeing here is just phenomenal. Antrim pointed out that he chose the city of Calw, located in southwestern Germany, because the size of the city, the school theyll be visiting and the schools classes are similar to Edwardsville. Location was also important. The fact that they are in the middle of the Black Forest makes it so that we can have all kinds of beautiful things to see while we are there. They are close to a bunch of different places that are interesting to go to, Antrim said. Stuttgart is not too far away. They are the home city of Hermann Hesse, a German author. Nine EHS students will be accompanying Antrim when they visit their German exchange students from June 2 to June 17. I actually planned a little trip afterwards so we are going to Munich and Berlin for four days each as well. So we dont actually leave Germany until June 25. We were very excited to host visiting students from China and Germany. We are equally excited for the opportunities and experiences that awaits our students who will be traveling to China and Germany, EHS Principal Dennis Cramsey said. This type of exchange is a win-win for everyone involved, Cramsey added. Experiencing students from a different culture cannot be duplicated in traditional studies in a classroom. Chinese, German, and American students get to know each other on a personal level, hopefully, leading to a life-long friendship. Additionally, the experience is extremely educational for both our students and our visiting foreign students. Our faculty also has the opportunity to dialogue with educators for other countries to promote their professional growth. 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Institucion de Banca Multiple Grupo Financiero Santander Mexico, Banco Santander Peru S.A., Banco Santander Rio S.A., Banco Santander S.A., Banco Santander Totta S.A., Banco Santander de Negocios Colombia S.A., Banco de Albacete S.A., Bansa Santander S.A., CCAP Auto Lease Ltd., Canyon Multifamily Impact Fund IV LLC, Capital Street Delaware LP, Capital Street Holdings LLC, Capital Street REIT Holdings LLC, Capital Street S.A., Carfax (Guernsey) Limited (f), Carfinco Financial Group, Carfinco Financial Group Inc., Carfinco Inc., Casa de Bolsa Santander S.A. de C.V. 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Unipersonal, First National Motor Business Limited, First National Motor Contracts Limited, First National Motor Facilities Limited, First National Motor Finance Limited, First National Motor Leasing Limited, First National Motor plc, First National Tricity Finance Limited, Fondos Santander S.A. Administradora de Fondos de Inversion (en liquidacion) (b), Fortensky Trading Ltd., Fosse Funding (No.1) Limited, Fosse Master Issuer plc, Fosse Trustee (UK) Limited, GTS El Centro Equity Holdings LLC, GTS El Centro Project Holdings LLC, Gamma Sociedade Financeira de Titularizacao de Creditos S.A., Gesban Mexico Servicios Administrativos Globales S.A. de C.V., Gesban Santander Servicios Profesionales Contables Limitada, Gesban Servicios Administrativos Globales S.L., Gesban UK Limited, Gestion de Instalaciones Fotovoltaicas S.L. 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Unipersonal, Inversiones Maritimas del Mediterraneo S.A., Isla de los Buques S.A., Klare Corredora de Seguros S.A., Landcompany 2020 S.L., Langton Funding (No.1) Limited, Langton Mortgages Trustee (UK) Limited, Langton Securities (2008-1) plc, Langton Securities (2010-1) PLC, Langton Securities (2010-2) PLC, Laparanza S.A., Liquidity Limited, Luri 1 S.A. en liquidacion (b) (e), Luri 6 S.A. Unipersonal, Master Red Europa S.L., Mata Alta S.L., Merciver S.L., Mercury TFS, Mercury Trade Finance Solutions S.A. de C.V., Mercury Trade Finance Solutions S.L., Mercury Trade Finance Solutions S.p.A., Moneybit S.L., Mortgage Engine Limited, Motor 2016-1 PLC, Motor 2017-1 PLC, Mouro Capital I LP, Multiplica SpA, NW Services CO., Naviera Mirambel S.L., Naviera Trans Gas A.I.E., Naviera Trans Iron S.L., Naviera Trans Ore A.I.E., Naviera Trans Wind S.L. (b), Naviera Transcantabrica S.L., Naviera Transchem S.L. 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Grupo Financiero Santander Mexico, Santander Insurance Agency U.S. LLC, Santander Insurance Services UK Limited, Santander Intermediacion Correduria de Seguros S.A., Santander International Products Plc. (d), Santander Inversiones S.A., Santander Investment Bank Limited, Santander Investment Chile Limitada, Santander Investment I S.A., Santander Investment S.A., Santander Investment Securities Inc., Santander Investments GP 1 S.a.r.l., Santander Inwestycje Sp. z o.o., Santander Lease S.A. E.F.C., Santander Leasing LLC, Santander Leasing S.A., Santander Leasing S.A. 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Sociedad Securitizadora, Santander Secretariat Services Limited, Santander Securities LLC, Santander Seguros y Reaseguros Compania Aseguradora S.A., Santander Servicios Corporativos S.A. de C.V., Santander Servicios Especializados S.A. de C.V., Santander Technology USA LLC, Santander Tecnologia e Inovacao Ltda., Santander Tecnologia Argentina S.A., Santander Tecnologia Espana S.L.U., Santander Tecnologia Mexico S.A. de C.V., Santander Totta SGPS S.A., Santander Totta Seguros Companhia de Seguros de Vida S.A., Santander Towarzystwo Funduszy Inwestycyjnych S.A., Santander Trade Services Limited, Santander UK Group Holdings plc, Santander UK Investments, Santander UK Operations Limited, Santander UK Plc, Santander UK Technology Limited, Santander Wealth Management International SA, Santander de Titulizacion S.G.F.T. S.A., Santusa Holding S.L., Services and Promotions Delaware Corp., Services and Promotions Miami LLC, Servicio de Alarmas Controladas por Ordenador S.A., Servicios de Cobranza Recuperacion y Seguimiento S.A. De C.V., Sheppards Moneybrokers Limited, Shiloh III Wind Project LLC, Sociedad Integral de Valoraciones Automatizadas S.A., Sociedad Operadora de Tarjetas de Pago Santander Getnet Chile S.A., Socur S.A., Sol Orchard Imperial 1 LLC, Solarlaser Limited, Sovereign Community Development Company, Sovereign Delaware Investment Corporation, Sovereign Lease Holdings LLC, Sovereign REIT Holdings Inc., Sovereign Spirit Limited (f), Sterrebeeck B.V., Suleyado 2003 S.L. Unipersonal, Summer Empreendimentos Ltda., Super Pagamentos e Administracao de Meios Eletronicos S.A., Superdigital Argentina S.A.U., Superdigital Colombia S.A.S., Superdigital Holding Company S.L., Superdigital Peru S.A.C., Suzuki Servicios Financieros S.L., Swesant SA, TIMFin S.p.A., TOPSAM S.A de C.V., Taxagest Sociedade Gestora de Participacoes Sociais S.A., Teatinos Siglo XXI Inversiones S.A., The Alliance & Leicester Corporation Limited, The Best Specialty Coffee S.L. Unipersonal, Time Retail Finance Limited (b), Tonopah Solar I LLC, Toque Fale Servicos de Telemarketing Ltda., Tornquist Asesores de Seguros S.A. (b), Totta (Ireland) PLC, Totta Urbe - Empresa de Administracao e Construcoes S.A., Trabajando.com Mexico S.A. de C.V. en liquidacion (b), Trabajando.com Peru S.A.C., Trans Rotor Limited (b), Transolver Finance EFC S.A., Tresmares Growth Fund Santander SCR S.A., Tresmares Santander Direct Lending SICC S.A., Tuttle and Son Limited, Universia Brasil S.A., Universia Chile S.A., Universia Colombia S.A.S., Universia Espana Red de Universidades S.A., Universia Holding S.L., Universia Mexico S.A. de C.V., Universia Peru S.A., Universia Uruguay S.A., Uro Property Holdings SOCIMI S.A., WIM Servicios Corporativos S.A. de C.V., WTW Shipping Designated Activity Company, Wallcesa S.A., Wave Holdco S.L., Waypoint Insurance Group Inc., and Wirecard (Technological Assets). American Consumer News, LLC dba MarketBeat 2010-2021. 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MarketBeat just released five new stock ideas, but iShares MSCI India ETF wasn't one of them. MarketBeat thinks these five companies may be even better buys. View MarketBeat's top stock picks here. The following companies are subsidiares of The AES: 25 Ashdown Road Solar LLC, AES (India) Private Limited, AES (NI) Limited, AES Abigail S.a.r.l., AES Accabonac Solar LLC, AES Africa Power Company B.V., AES AgriVerde Holdings B.V., AES AgriVerde Services (Ukraine) Limited Liability Company, AES Alamitos Development Inc., AES Alamitos Energy LLC, AES Alamitos L.L.C., AES Alicura Holdings S.C.A., AES Americas International Holdings Limited, AES Andres (BVI) Ltd., AES Andres BV, AES Andres DR S.A., AES Andres Holdings I Ltd, AES Aramtermelo Holdings B.V., AES Argentina Generation S.A. (1), AES Argentina Holdings S.C.A., AES Argentina Investments Ltd., AES Argentina Operations Ltd., AES Arlington Services LLC, AES Armenia Mountain Holdings LLC, AES Armenia Mountain Wind 2 LLC, AES Aurora Holdings Inc., AES Aurora Inc., AES BES Jordan B.V., AES Bainbridge Holdings LLC, AES Bainbridge LLC, AES Ballylumford Holdings Limited, AES Baltic Holdings BV, AES Barka Services Inc., AES Barry Limited, AES Barry Operations Ltd., AES Beaver Valley L.L.C., AES Belfast West Power Limited, AES Belleville Solar LLC, AES Big Sky L.L.C., AES Botswana Holdings B.V., AES Brasil Ltda, AES Brazil Inc., AES Brazil International Holdings Limited, AES Broadalbin Solar LLC, AES Bulgaria B.V., AES Bulgaria Energy Solutions EOOD, AES Bulgaria Holdings BV, AES Bussum Holdings BV, AES CC&T International Ltd., AES CLESA Y Compania Sociedad en Comandita de Capital Variable, AES Calaca Pte. Ltd., AES Calgary Inc., AES California Management Co. Inc., AES Caracoles SRL, AES Carbon Exchange Ltd., AES Carbon Holdings LLC, AES Caribbean Finance Holdings Inc., AES Caribbean Investment Holdings Ltd., AES Cartegena Holdings BV, AES Cayman Guaiba Ltd., AES Cayman Pampas Ltd., AES Central America Electric Light LLC, AES Central American Holdings Inc., AES Central American Investment Holdings Ltd., AES Central Asia Holdings BV, AES Ceprano Energia SRL, AES Changuinola S.R.L., AES Chhattisgarh Energy Private Limited, AES Chigen Holdings Ltd., AES China Generating Co. Ltd., AES Chivor & Cia S.C.A. E.S.P., AES Chivor S.A., AES Climate Solutions Holdings I B.V., AES Climate Solutions Holdings I LLC, AES Climate Solutions Holdings II LLC, AES Climate Solutions Holdings L.P., AES Climate Solutions Holdings LLC, AES Colon Development S. de R.L., AES Columbia Power LLC, AES Communications LLC, AES Communications Latin America Inc., AES Connecticut Management L.L.C., AES Coop Holdings LLC, AES Costa Rica Energy SRL, AES Costa Rica Holdings Ltd., AES DE AssetCo VI LLC, AES DE Class B Holdings LLC, AES DE Class B I LLC, AES DE Class B II LLC, AES DE Class B III LLC, AES DE Class B IV LLC, AES DE Class B V LLC, AES DE Class B VI LLC, AES DE Class B VII LLC, AES DE Construction LLC, AES DE DevCo I LLC, AES DE DevCo NC LLC, AES DE Holdings I LLC, AES DE Holdings III LLC, AES DE Holdings IV LLC, AES DE Holdings V LLC, AES DE Holdings VI GB LLC, AES DE Holdings VI GB Owner LLC, AES DE Holdings VI LLC, AES DE Manager LLC, AES DE RS IX LLC, AES DE RS VI LLC, AES DE RS VII LLC, AES DE RS VIII LLC, AES DE RS X LLC, AES DE RS XI LLC, AES DE RS XII LLC, AES DE Residential Holdings I LLC, AES DE Solar Access Holdings I LLC, AES DE-GIE LLC, AES DPL Holdings LLC, AES DPP Holdings Ltd., AES Deepwater LLC, AES Desert Power L.L.C., AES Development de Argentina S.A., AES Disaster Relief Fund, AES Distribuidores Salvadorenos Limitada, AES Distribuidores Salvadorenos Y Compania S en C de C.V., AES Distributed Energy Inc., AES Dominicana Cooperatief UA, AES Drax Financing Inc., AES Drax Power Finance Holdings Limited, AES EDC Holding L.L.C., AES ES Alamitos LLC, AES ES Deepwater LLC, AES ES Gilbert LLC, AES ES Holdings LLC, AES ES Tait LLC, AES Ecotek Europe Holdings B.V., AES El Faro Electric Light Ltd., AES El Faro Generating Ltd., AES El Salvador Electric Light LLC, AES El Salvador LLC, AES El Salvador S.A. de C.V., AES El Salvador Trust, AES Electric Ltd., AES Electroinversora B.V., AES Elpa S.A., AES Empresa Electrica de El Salvador Limitada de Capital Variable, AES Endeavor Inc., AES Energia SRL, AES Energy B.V., AES Energy Developments S.L., AES Energy Ltd., AES Energy Services Inc., AES Energy Solutions LLC, AES Energy Storage Arizona LLC, AES Energy Storage Holdings, AES Energy Storage Holdings LLC, AES Energy Storage LLC, AES Energy Storage UK Limited, AES Energy Storage Zeeland B.V., AES Engineering LLC, AES Europe Services EOOD, AES Finance and Development Inc., AES Florestal Ltda., AES Fonseca Energia Limitada de C.V., AES Forca Ltd., AES Foreign Energy Holdings LLC, AES GEI US Finance Inc., AES GEO Energy OOD, AES GPH Holdings Inc., AES Gabreski Solar LLC, AES Gas Supply & Distribution Ltd., AES Gener S.A., AES Generation Development LLC, AES Global Insurance Company, AES Global Mobility Services LLC, AES Global Power Holdings B.V., AES Globales B.V., AES Grand Dominicana Ltd., AES Grid Stability LLC, AES Griggs Solar LLC, AES Guaiba II Empreendimentos Ltda, AES Guayama Holdings BV, AES Hawaii LLC, AES Hawaii Management Company LLC, AES Highgrove Holdings L.L.C., AES Highgrove L.L.C., AES Hispanola Holdings BV, AES Hispanola Holdings II BV, AES Holdings B.V., AES Holdings B.V. - Vietnam Rep Office, AES Holdings Brasil Ltda., AES Honduras Generation Ventures Ltd., AES Honduras Holdings Ltd., AES Horizons Holdings BV, AES Horizons Investments Limited, AES Hungary Energiaszolgaltato Kft., AES Huntington Beach Development L.L.C., AES Huntington Beach Energy LLC, AES Huntington Beach L.L.C., AES IB Valley Corporation, AES Ilumina Holdings LLC, AES Ilumina LLC, AES Ilumina Member LLC, AES India Holdings (Mauritius), AES India L.L.C., AES Indiana Holdings L.L.C., AES Integrated Energy LLC, AES Intercon II Ltd., AES Interenergy Ltd., AES International Holdings II Ltd., AES International Holdings III Ltd., AES International Holdings Ltd., AES Investment Chile SpA, AES Italia S.r.l, AES James Baird Solar LLC, AES Johnsville Solar LLC, AES Jordan Holdco Cayman Limited, AES Jordan PSC, AES Jordan Solar B.V., AES Juniper Point Holdings LLC, AES K2 Limited, AES Kalaeloa Venture L.L.C., AES Kekaha Solar LLC, AES Keystone L.L.C., AES Keystone Wind L.L.C., AES King Harbor Inc., AES Kuihelani Solar LLC, AES LA FIT Dedeaux LLC, AES LA FIT Francisco LLC, AES LA FIT Sun Valley LLC, AES LATAM Energy Development Ltd., AES Landfill Carbon LLC, AES Latin America S. de R.L., AES Latin American Development Ltd., AES Laurel Mountain LLC, AES Lawai Solar LLC, AES Levant Holdings B.V., AES Levant Holdings B.V/ Jordan PSC, AES Lion Telecom Investments B.V., AES Lumos Holdings LLC, AES Maritza East 1 Ltd., AES Maritza East 1 Services Ltd., AES Mayan Holdings S. de R.L. de C.V., AES Merida B.V., AES Merida III S. de R.L. de C.V., AES Merida Management Services S. de R.L. de C.V., AES Merida Operaciones SRL de CV, AES Mexican Holdings Ltd., AES Mexico Farms L.L.C., AES Mexico Generation Holdings S. de R.L. de C.V., AES MicroPlanet Ltd., AES Mid East Holdings 2 Ltd., AES Mong Duong Holdings B.V., AES Mong Duong Project Holdings B.V., AES Monroe Holdings B.V., AES Mount Vernon B.V., AES NA Central L.L.C., AES NEXT Ltda. de C.V., AES Nejapa Gas Ltda. de C.V., AES Nejapa Services Ltda. de C.V., AES Next LLC, AES Nile Power Holdings Ltd., AES North America Development LLC, AES OPGC Holding, AES Oahu LLC, AES Oahu Wind Holdings LLC, AES Oasis Holdco Inc., AES Oasis Ltd., AES Oasis Mauritius Inc, AES Ocean Springs Trust Deed, AES Odyssey L.L.C., AES Ohio Generation LLC, AES Operaciones Laguna del Rey S. de R.L. de C.V., AES Operadora S.A, AES Orissa Distribution Private Limited, AES Overseas Holdings (Cayman) Ltd., AES Overseas Holdings Limited, AES Pacific Inc., AES Pacific L.L.C., AES Pacific Ocean Holdings B.V., AES Pak Holdings Ltd., AES Pakistan (Pvt) Ltd., AES Pakistan Operations Ltd., AES Panama S.R.L., AES Parana Gas S.A., AES Parana Holdings Ltd., AES Parana IHC Ltd., AES Parana II Limited Partnership, AES Parana Operations S.R.L., AES Parana Propiedades S.A, AES Parana Uruguay S.R.L, AES Pardo Holdings Ltd., AES Pasadena Inc., AES Peru S.R.L., AES Phil Investment Pte. Ltd., AES Philippines Power Partners Co. Ltd., AES Platense Investments Uruguay S.C.A, AES Puerto Rico Inc., AES Puerto Rico L.P., AES Puerto Rico Services Inc., AES Redondo Beach L.L.C., AES Renewable Power Group S.R.L., AES Renewables (India) Private Limited, AES Riverside Holdings LLC, AES SACEF Investment LLC, AES SEB Holdings (Delaware) LLC, AES SEB Holdings Ltd., AES Saint Petersburg Holdings B.V., AES San Nicolas B.V., AES SellCo III LLC, AES Services Inc., AES Services Ltd., AES Services Philippines Inc., AES Servicios America S.R. L., AES Servicios Electricos S. de R.L. de C.V., AES Servicos TC Ltda., AES Shady Point LLC, AES Silk Road Energy LLC, AES Silk Road LLC, AES Solar Energy B.V., AES Solar Energy Holdings B.V., AES Solar Energy LLC, AES Solar Espana S.L., AES Solar Holdings LLC, AES Solar Power PR LLC, AES Sole Italia S.r.L., AES Soluciones Limitada de Capital Variable, AES Solutions LLC, AES Solutions Management LLC, AES South America Holdings Cooperatief U.A., AES South America Holdings I B.V., AES South America Holdings II B.V., AES South American Holdings Ltd., AES South Point Ltd., AES Southland Development LLC, AES Southland Energy Company Holdings I LLC, AES Southland Energy Holdings II LLC, AES Southland Energy Holdings LLC, AES Southland Energy Investment LLC, AES Southland Energy LLC, AES Stonehaven Holding Inc., AES Strategic Equipment Holdings Corporation, AES Sul L.L.C., AES Summit Generation Ltd., AES Swiss Lake Holdings B.V., AES TEG Holdings I LLC, AES TEG Holdings LLC, AES TEG II Mexican Holdings S. de R.L. de C.V., AES TEG II Mexican Investments S. de R.L. de C.V., AES TEG II Operations S. de R.L. de C.V., AES TEG Management Inc., AES TEG Mexican Holdings S. de R.L. de C.V., AES TEG Mexican Investments S. de R.L. de C.V., AES TEG Operations S. de R.L. de C.V., AES TEG Power Investments B.V., AES TEG Power Investments II B.V., AES TEGTEP Holdings B.V., AES TEP Holdings I LLC, AES TEP Holdings LLC, AES TEP Management Inc., AES TEP Power II Investments Limited, AES TEP Power Investments Limited, AES Tamuin Development Services S. de R.L. de C.V., AES Texas Funding III L.L.C., AES Thames L.L.C., AES Thomas Holdings BV, AES Tiete Eolica S.A., AES Tiete Inova Solucoes de Energia I Ltda., AES Tiete Inova Solucoes de Energia II Ltda., AES Tiete Inova Solucoes de Energia Ltda., AES Tiete Integra Solucoes em Energia Ltda, AES Tonawanda Solar LLC, AES Transgas I Ltd., AES Treasure Cove Ltd., AES Trinidad Services Unlimited, AES Trust III, AES Tucano Holding I S.A., AES Tucano Holdings II S.A., AES U&K Holdings B.V., AES U.S. Holdings LLC, AES U.S. Investments Inc., AES U.S. Solar LLC, AES UCH Holdings (Cayman) Ltd., AES UK Datacenter Services Limited, AES UK Holdings Limited, AES UK Power Financing II Ltd, AES UK Power Financing Limited, AES UK Power Holdings Limited, AES UK Power L.L.C., AES UK Power Limited, AES US Distributed Solar Holdings LLC, AES US Generation Holdings LLC, AES US Generation LLC, AES US Services LLC, AES US Wind Development L.L.C., AES US Wind Generation Holdings LLC, AES Union de Negocios S.A. de C.V., AES Uruguaiana Empreendimentos S.A., AES Venezuela Finance, AES Volcan Holdings B.V., AES WR Limited Partnership, AES Waikoloa Solar LLC, AES Warrior Run L.L.C., AES West Oahu Solar LLC, AES Western Power Holdings L.L.C., AES Western Power L.L.C., AES Western Wind L.L.C., AES Western Wind MV Acquisition LLC, AES Wind Bulgaria EOOD, AES Wind Generation LLC, AES Wind Generation Limited, AES Wind Investments I B.V., AES Wind Investments II B.V., AES Yucatan S. de R.L. de C.V., AES Zephyr 2 LLC, AES Zephyr 3 LLC, AES Zephyr Inc., AES- IC Ictas Enerji Uretim ve Ticaret A.S., AES-3C Maritza East 1 Ltd., AES-RS Spanish Holdings LLC, AES-RS Sunshine Cooperatief U.A., AES-RS Sunshine Holdings LLC, AES-VCM Mong Duong Power Company Limited, AESCom Sul Ltda., AESEBA Trust Deed, AGV Solar IV Geradora de Energia S.A., AGV Solar V Geradora de Energia S.A., AGV Solar VI Geradora de Energia S.A., AM Solar B.V., AM Solar B.V. - Jordan Co., APR Walden Solar 1 LLC, ARNIKA Beteiligungsverwaltungs GmbH, AZ Solar I LLC, AZ Solar II LLC, AZ Solar Phase Zero LLC, AgCert Canada Co., AgCert Canada Holding Limited, AgCert Chile Servicios Ambientales Limitada, AgCert International Limited, AgCert Servicios Ambientales S.R.L., Agilion Energy Private Limited, Allis Medina Solar LLC, Altai Power Limited Liability Partnership, Alto Maipo SpA, Amaterasu LLC, Andes Solar SpA, Arizona B&GC Solar LLC, Assonet Solar 1 LLC, Atlantic Basin Services Ltd., B.A. Services S.R.L., Bakersfield Industrial PV 1 LLC, Bakersfield PV I LLC, Beals Medina Solar LLC, Boa Hora 1 Geradora De Energia Solar S.A., Boa Hora 2 Geradora de Energia Solar S.A., Boa Hora 3 Geradora De Energia Solar S.A., Bolton Solar I LLC, Brasiliana Participacoes S.A., Bridgeport Solar LLC, Buffalo Gap Holdings 2 LLC, Buffalo Gap Holdings 3 L.L.C., Buffalo Gap Holdings LLC, Buffalo Gap Wind Farm 2 LLC, Buffalo Gap Wind Farm 3 L.L.C., Buffalo Gap Wind Farm 4 L.L.C., Buffalo Gap Wind Farm LLC, Bullock Freetown Solar 1 LLC, Bosforo de Responsabilidad Limitada de Capital Variable, CCS Telecarrier, CDEC-SING Ltda, CIA.TRANSMISORA DEL NORTE CHICO S.A., CO-CA Wholly Owned LLC, Camille Ltd., Camille Trust, Cavanal Minerals LLC, Cayman Energy Traders, Cemig II C.V., Centrais Eolicas Ametista S.A., Centrais Eolicas Borgo S.A., Centrais Eolicas Caetite S.A., Centrais Eolicas Dourados S.A., Centrais Eolicas Espigao S.A., Centrais Eolicas Maron S.A., Centrais Eolicas Morrao S.A., Centrais Eolicas Pelourinho S.A., Centrais Eolicas Piloes S.A., Centrais Eolicas Seraima S.A., Centrais Eolicas Serra do Espinhaco S.A., Centrais Eolicas Tanque S.A., Centrais Eolicas Ventos do Nordeste S.A., Centrais Eolicas da Prata S.A., Centrais Eolicas dos Aracas S.A., Central Electricity Supply Company of Orissa Limited, Central Termoelectrica Guillermo Brown S.A., Cerulean Properties LLC, Clean Wind Energy Ltd., Coastal Itabo Ltd., Colon LNG Marketing S. De R.L., Compania de Alumbrado Eletrico de San Salvador S.A. DE C.V., Compass Circle Solar LLC, Compania Transmisora Angamos SpA, Compania Transmisora La Cebada S.A., Compania Transmisora del Norte Grande SpA, Costa Norte LNG Terminal S. de R.L., Cronin Road Solar 1 LLC, DPL Capital Trust II, DPL Inc., Daggett Ridge Wind Farm LLC, Delano PV1 LLC, Diamond Development Inc., Distribuidora Electrica de Usulutan Sociedad Anonima de Capital Variable, Domi Trading S.L., Dominican Power Partners, Dublin Solar I LLC, Dunstable Solar 1 LLC, EMLP Controladora S. de R.L. de C.V., ENERAB S. de R.L. de C.V., ENERGEN S.A., Eloy ESD Solar Holdings LLC, Empresa Electrica Angamos S.A., Empresa Electrica Campiche S.A., Empresa Electrica Cochrane II SpA, Empresa Electrica Cochrane S.A., Empresa Electrica Guacolda S.A., Empresa Electrica Ventanas S.A., Empresa Electrica de Oriente S.A. de C.V., Empresa Generadora De Electricidad Itabo S.A., EnerAB Cogeneracion I Laguna del Rey S. de R.L. de C.V., EnerAB Suministro Calificado S. de R.L. de C.V., EnerAB Tenedora S. de R.L., Energetica Argentina S.A., Energia Eolica Los Olmos SpA, Energia Eolica Mesamavida SpA, Energia Verde S.A., Energy Trade and Finance Corporation, Energia Eolica Curauma SpA, Energia Eolica Paposo SpA, Energia Natural del Este Enadom, Eolica Mesa La Paz S. de R.L. de C.V., FTP Power LLC, Finchville Solar LLC, Fluence Energy LLC, Founder's Homestead Farm Solar LLC, Fundacion AES Dominicana Inc., Fundacion AES Gener, GENERGIA S.A., GNRY Holdings & Investments Limited, Gas Natural Atlantico II S. de R.L., Gas Natural Atlantico S. De R.L., Gasoducto GasAndes Argentina S.A., Gasoducto GasAndes S.A., Gener Argentina S.A., Gener Blue Water Ltd., Genergia Power Ltd., Georgia Solar Holdings LLC, Georgia Solar Parent LLC, Global Energy Holdings C.V., Goller Enerji Uretim Ltd. Sti., Gray Springs Vista Solar LLC, Greenwich Solar 1 LLC, Guacolda Energy S.A., Guaimbe I Parque Solar S.A., Guaimbe II Parque Solar S.A., Guaimbe III Parque Solar S.A., Guaimbe IV Parque Solar S.A., Guaimbe Solar Holding S.A., Guaimbe V Parque Solar S.A., Health and Welfare Benefit Plans LLC, Hipotecaria San Miguel Limitada de Capital Variable, Hipotecaria Santa Ana Limitada de Capital Variable, INVERSIONES NUEVA VENTANAS S.A., IPALCO Enterprises Inc., Indianapolis Power & Light Company, Indimento Inversiones S.L., Instituto AES Brasil, InterAndes S.A., Inversiones Cachagua SpA, Inversiones Energia Renovable Limitada, Inversiones LK SpA, Inversiones Termoenergia de Chile Ltda., Inversiones Zapallar Limitada, Inversora de San Nicolas S.A., Itabo III S.R.L., Jemeiwaa KaI S.A.S., Johnstown Solar 1 LLC, KA Energy OOD, KMR Power Company, Kazincbarcikai Iparteruletfejleszt Kft., Kings Rooftop PV LLC, La Plata I Empreendimentos Ltda., La Plata II Ltd., La Plata III C.V., Lane Ave Solar LLC, Lemoore PV 1 LLC, MFP CO Holdings II LLC, MFP CO Holdings LLC, MFP CO I LLC, MFP CO II LLC, MFP CO III LLC, MFP CO Parent LLC, MM Solar Holdings I LLC, MM Solar Parent LLC, MSP Master Tenant I LLC, MSP Master Tenant II LLC, MacGregor Park Inc., Manteca PV 1 LLC, Maple Solar LLC, Maui 17-2 LLC, Mauka FIT Twenty LLC, Mercury Cayman Co II Ltda Agencia en Chile, Mercury Chile Co. II Ltd., Mercury Chile Holdco Ltd., Mercury Chile I Limitada, Mercury Chile II Limitada, Miami Valley Insurance Company, Miami Valley Lighting LLC, Mid-America Capital Resources Inc., Middletown Solar 1 LLC, Mong Duong Finance Holdings B.V., Motor EV LLC, Mountain Minerals LLC, Mountain View Power Partners IV LLC, Mountain View Power Partners LLC, Murcia Generation Holdings B.V., NY RNM Project1 LLC, NY RNM Project1A LLC, NY RNM Project2 LLC, NY RNM Project3 LLC, NY RNM Project4 LLC, Na Pua Makani Power Partners LLC, New Caribbean Investments SRL, Norgener Inversiones SpA, Norgener Renovables SpA, Norgener S.A., Nova Energia Holding S.A., Novus Barre Town Solar LLC, Nurenergoservice LLP, Oahu SPE 101-14 LLC, Oahu SPE 101-19 LLC, Oahu SPE 101-2 LLC, Oahu SPE 101-33 LLC, Oahu SPE 101-4 LLC, Oahu SPE 101-9 LLC, Odisha Power Generation Corporation Limited, Omega SpA, PARQUE EOLICO NOLANA SpA, PARQUE EOLICO TOPOLOA SpA, Parque Eolico Beata SRL, Parque Eolico Litueche SpA, Parque Eolico Campo Lindo SpA, Parque Eolico Los Cururos SpA, Parque Eolico Victoria SpA, Punta del Sol SpA, Quebrada Seca SpA, RMR Solar LLC, RT52 Walden Solar 1 LLC, Ransomville Solar 1 LLC, Remittance Processing Services LLC, Rep Office of AES Silk Road in Almaty, Rep Office of AES Silk Road in Tajikstan Republic, Richmond Solar Power 1 LLC, River Street Solar 1 LLC, Riverside Canal Power Company, Rosamond Solar LLC, Ryan Road Solar LLC, SD Solar I LLC, SEPV Imperial LLC, San Bernardino Solar LLC, Scituate Solar I LLC, Scottsdale Solar Holdings LLC, SeaWest Asset Management Services LLC, SeaWest Energy Project Associates LLC, SeaWest Properties LLC, SeaWest Wyoming LLC, Shazia S.R.L., Simple Energy Inc., Solar Access America LLC, Solar Access CA LLC, Solar Access California LLC, Southern Electric Brazil Participacoes Ltda., Store Heat and Produce Energy Inc., Stow Solar I LLC, Sudbury Ervin GMC Solar LLC, SunE Solar XVII Project5 LLC, SunE SunHoldings4 LLC, T&T Power Holdings I SRL, T&T Power Holdings II Ltd., TEG Business Trust, TEG/TEP Management LLC, TEP Business Trust, Tau Power BV, Tecnoma Energia Solar S.L., TermoAndes S.A., Termoelectrica Penoles S. de R.L. de C.V., Termoelectrica del Golfo S. de R.L. de C.V., Terneuzen Cogen B.V., The AES Barry Foundation, The Dayton Power and Light Company, Thermo Fuels Company Inc., Tozer Road Solar LLC, USVI Solar I LLC, University Solar LLC, Vientos Neuquinos I S.A., Village of Waterbury Solar I LLC, W. Orange RD Solar LLC, West Brookfield Boston Post Road Solar LLC, West Street Solar 1 LLC, Western Solar Parent LLC, Wilbur Woods Solar LLC, Wildwood Trust, Williamsburg East Street Solar LLC, Winchendon Ash Street Solar 1 LLC, Winchendon Lincoln Avenue Solar 1 LLC, Winchendon Lincoln Avenue Solar 2 LLC, Your Energy Holdings Limited, ZPD-PT Solar Project 2017-001 LLC, ZPD-PT Solar Project 2017-003 LLC, ZPD-PT Solar Project 2017-006 LLC, ZPD-PT Solar Project 2017-007 LLC, ZPD-PT Solar Project 2017-008 LLC, ZPD-PT Solar Project 2017-011 LLC, ZPD-PT Solar Project 2017-014 LLC, ZPD-PT Solar Project 2017-017 LLC, ZPD-PT Solar Project 2017-023 LLC, ZPD-PT Solar Project 2017-024 LLC, ZPD-PT Solar Project 2017-038 LLC, ZPD-PT Solar Project 2017-044 LLC, sPower, and sPower OpCo A Blocker LLC. Bristow Group Inc. provides industrial aviation services to the offshore energy companies in Europe Caspian, Africa, the Americas, and the Asia Pacific. The company offers helicopter charter services to transport personnel between onshore bases and offshore production platforms, drilling rigs, and other installations, as well as to transport time-sensitive equipment to these offshore locations. It also provides search and rescue services for the oil and gas industry, and governmental agencies; and aircraft support services. The company was formerly known as Offshore Logistics Inc. and changed its name to Bristow Group Inc. in February 2006. Bristow Group Inc. was founded in 1955 and is headquartered in Houston, Texas. Read More 1 hour ago AP FACT CHECK: Biden's shaky claims on jobs, gasoline WASHINGTON (AP) Boasting that government policies can make a difference in improving the economy, President Joe Biden went too far Thursday in taking credit for job growth since taking office. He also made a dubious suggestion that wrongdoing is behind higher gasoline prices something that his administration will seek to fix. Read Article OTTAWAThe Competition Bureau has reached a consent agreement with Enterprise Rent-A-Car Canada over misleading advertisements that will see the car rental company pay a $1-million penalty. According to the bureaus investigation, services were not available at prices advertised because Enterprises additional mandatory fees increased advertised prices by as much as 6 per cent to 48 per cent. As part of the settlement, Enterprise which also operates under the trade names National Car Rental and Alamo Rent-A-Car in Canada will review its practices to ensure that its advertisements across various media comply with the law. This is the third time that the bureau has taken action to resolve similar pricing-practice concerns in the car rental industry. In June 2016, Avis and Budget paid a penalty of $3 million and in April 2017, Hertz and Dollar Thrifty paid a penalty of $1.25 million. In both cases, the bureau further concluded that some of the fees were described in a way that implied they were mandatory taxes or surcharges imposed by various governments when, in fact, the companies chose to impose the additional mandatory fees to recover part of their own cost of doing business. Will Wall Street ever let go of guns? That question has come up beforeafter the shootings in Newtown, in Orlando, in Las Vegas, and on and on. Now, with the nations emotions raw over the killings in Florida last week, evidence is mounting that investors may be rethinking their long, fraught relationship with the firearms industry. On Thursday, the day the head of the National Rifle Association issued a searing rebuttal to calls for stricter gun control, the nations largest privately owned bank announced it would stop issuing NRA-sponsored credit cards. Insurance giant MetLife Inc. followed Friday by saying itd stop offering NRA discounts. The investment giant BlackRock Inc. said it was exploring ways to cull gun companies from the portfolios of clients who no longer wish to invest in them. In Florida, site of the latest tragedy, teachers expressed frustration that their retirement funds own gun stocks, following revelations that holdings included the maker of the assault rifle used to kill 17 students and educators at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland. Activists have made similar appeals for years, only to see all the moments pass. Taken together, the recent developments suggest that, at least for the moment, the financial community senses the rising public pressureand is positioning itself accordingly. Now is the time for the financial services industry to step off the sidelines and take a stand, said Jonas Kron, director of shareholder advocacy at Trillium Asset Management, which focuses on sustainable investments. MetLife is dropping its program of offering discounts on home and auto insurance to NRA members. Chubb Ltd. said Friday it gave notice three months ago that it will pull out of an NRA-linked program to offer firearms liability insurance. The bigger question is whether other investors, both big and small, are willing to exit investments that have plunged in value over the past year. Gun salesand gun stockshave tumbled since Donald Trump rose to the presidency. The thinking was that his administration, unlike the previous one, would be unlikely to push for stricter gun controls given its support from the NRA. A quiet backlash has been building for years. Some major endowments, such as the $10 billion (U.S.) University of California fund, sold guns stocks after the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting in Connecticut, which prompted calls for more gun control. We continue to monitor this issue and take it very seriously, said Dianne Klein, a spokeswoman for the university system. Others are, too. On Thursday, the First National Bank of Omaha said it wouldnt renew its contract with the NRA for a branded credit card, because of customer feedback. It isnt clear how many of the NRAs nearly five million members hold the credit card. Representatives of the NRA didnt immediately return a request for comment. The Second Amendment-rights organization continues to offer a prepaid card, issued by Republic Bank & Trust Co. The bank didnt reply to request for comment on the matter. NRA chief Wayne LaPierre says the way to "stop a bad guy with a gun," in the nation's schools is to arm a "good guy with a gun." (The Associated Press) More institutions, including pension funds and municipalities, are demanding that their portfolios exclude companies that make guns and other weapons. Many of the funds, such as the giant CalSTRS, represent one of the groups most affected by school shootings: teachers. More than $845 billion of U.S. institutional assets restricted investments were in weapons as of the start of 2016, according to data from US SIF, the Forum for Sustainable and Responsible Investment. That number soared more than 1,000 per cent following the Sandy Hook school shooting in December 2012, from $74 billion at the start of 2012. Rommel Dionisio, managing director of research at Aegis Capital Corp., said that given the outcry over the latest shooting, it would certainly not surprise me to see other state funds divest their investment holdings in the industry. Still, that might not depress gun stocks given other investors will probably still be willing to buy them. For the moment, holders are not just dumping shares of gun makers. Some are trying to exert pressure from within: Shareholders have filed at least three proposals at sellers or makers of guns in the current proxy season. The proposals ask American Outdoor Brands Corp., maker of Smith & Wesson; Dicks Sporting Goods Inc.; and Sturm Ruger & Co. to report on steps theyre taking to improve gun safety and to mitigate the harm associated with gun products. The proposals were filed by religious groups affiliated with the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, whose members includes 300 institutional investors that manage $400 billion in assets. Some institutions, such as BlackRock which manages $6.3 trillion, are privately contacting gun companies to make their case. Given our inability to sell shares of a company in an index, even if we disagree with management, we focus on engaging with the company and understanding how they are responding to societys expectations of them, said BlackRock spokesman Ed Sweeney. We will be engaging with weapons manufacturers and distributors to understand their response to recent events. He added that BlackRock works with clients who want to exclude weapons makers from their portfolios. BlackRock manages more than $200 billion of assets that are screened for weapons ownership and other value-based issues. Larry Fink, BlackRocks CEO, wrote to portfolio companies last year, warning that in addition to making money, they must also be aware of the impact on society. Sweeney declined to comment on whether BlackRock would vote in favour of the shareholder proposals at proxy meetings this year. BlackRock is largest holder of the three companies where the proposals have been filed: Dicks Sporting goods, with 8.4 per cent; Sturm Ruger, with almost 17 per cent; and American Outdoor Brands, with 11.11 per cent. At each of the three, whose market capitalization is relatively small, anywhere from a quarter to nearly half of shares are owned by a handful of large institutions that, like BlackRock, generally track market indexes. Pension funds managed for public school teachers in at least a dozen U.S. states, including New York and California, own stocks issued by the makers of firearms or ammunition. The financial stakes held by teacher pension funds in gun companies, like those of other equities, each represent only a sliver of the multibillion-dollar state retirement systems investments, according to a Bloomberg analysis. But the holdings have become a hot-button issue in Florida, where last weeks massacre prompted teachers and students to pressure public officials to prevent similar attacks. The Florida Education Association, which represents educators but doesnt control the pension fund, urged the state body that does to sell its more than a half-million dollars worth of American Outdoor stock, as well as that of other gun companies. I am sure that most of Floridas public school employees are as sickened as I am to learn that the state has invested some of our pension fund holdings in the maker of the AR-15, said Joanne McCall, president of the FEA, an affiliate of the National Education Association. Surely there are better places for the state to invest its public employee retirement money than in companies that make products that harm our children. The statement followed a Bloomberg report on Tuesday detailing the Florida pension funds investments in the firearms industry. John Kuczwanski, a spokesman for the Florida State Board of Administration, which manages the fund, said that as fiduciaries, the SBA must act solely in the interest of the participants and beneficiaries. He didnt say whether the fund will follow the divestment demand by the teachers union. Michael R. Bloomberg, founder of Bloomberg LP, which operates Bloomberg News, serves as a member of Everytown for Gun Safetys advisory board and is a donor to the group. Everytown for Gun Safety advocates for universal background checks and other gun control measures. Joe, Ralph, Walter, Charles (three of those), Samuel, Alexander, Richard, Donald, Douglas, James . . . and Bill. Thats not a comprehensive list, but serves to make the historically accurate point that Canada has never had a female finance minister. So if it is gender parity we want to talk about, we could start by remembering that the powers of governance exercised through federal resource allocation have never rested with a woman. Finance Minister Bill Morneau might keep this in mind as he rises in the House Tuesday to lay down his third budget, one that has been pre-framed in the public consciousness as a document that will examine the levers of finance monies in; monies out through the lens of gender. The cynic would say that in past weeks the Liberals have laid intentionally exhaustive groundwork in gender responsive budgeting to distract from a poverty of new ideas. A more open-minded examination would attempt to assess the merits of what has been called gender mainstreaming, which has been around since the mid-1980s with varying degrees of success and has gained traction in the last decade or so. Well good luck with that. Advancing gender equality through federal legislation, policies and programs isnt new to Canada. One time-stamp is the Beijing Declaration and its 1995 pledge to advance the goals of equality for all women. Canada did adopt as a consequence the practice of gender analysis of policies and programs. But the language of the Trudeau Liberals tied budgets to gender and promised to fill gaps in measurement and results. In its 2016 fall economic statement, the government announced that to ensure not help ensure, but ensure the delivery of real and meaningful change for all Canadians, it would subject future budgets to more rigorous scrutiny by completing and publishing a gender-based analysis of budgetary measures. The 2017 budget included the governments first Gender Statement, which highlighted the obvious the wage gap, gender imbalances in innovation and public infrastructure, the under-representation of women on corporate boards, the need for more women in STEM, etc. and included modest expenditures such as the $7-billion, 11-year investment in early learning and child care as a way to lever more labour force participation from women. According to the International Monetary Fund, Canada is one of only three G7 countries to publish such a gender budget statement. As the IMF points out, statement in Canadas case is a misnomer. This wasnt a mission statement, as in, a pledge to eliminate the gender gap by 2030, or institute national daycare faster than that. Rather it filled an entire 25-page chapter on skills, market-based challenges, policies aimed at addressing poverty and violence, and much more. Its when we come to the analysis of the commitment that we run into trouble. In an IMF survey of G7 and non-G7 nations that have adopted gender budgeting, Canada rates only a limited application grade across such measures as existence of fiscal data disaggregated by gender and specific arrangements for coordinating policy decisions on gender related issues. Translation: at least as of last years budget there wasnt the tracking data to prove whether or not the outcomes matched even modest objectives. The Australians had gender-based budgeting in place for years, but the Conservative government of Tony Abbott tossed it in 2014, assessing the measure, according to the Economist, as left-leaning and anti-austerity. Austria, on the other hand, went so far as to change its constitution, declaring that the country would strive for equality of women and men in their budget management. In adopting the budgetary principle, the government demands that each ministry include a gender-responsive objective in its budget. Gender is the only indicator that applies across all ministries. A so-called court of audit is meant to assess if outcomes are met. An annual gender performance report is prepared for Parliament. Yet a presentation by Austrias Parliamentary Budget Office last spring didnt disguise the programs growing pains. Ill-defined objectives, a lack of oversight, poor inter-ministerial co-ordination and a lack of gender-related data were just some of the issues raised. What are the effects? It will bring little comfort to read that a report on OECD countries found that of 12 countries with some form of gender budgeting, only half could point to specific examples where the gender-budgeting tool had brought about significant changes in policy design and/or outcomes. Canadians will want to know how this gender-based budgeting is working for them. Like many of the current governments promises, it sounded great in theory on first and second reference. With Budget 2018, the government needs to demonstrate that its now working in practice. jenwells@thestar.ca The black SUV that pulled up to an abandoned tire factory in Hanford, California three years ago was supposed to transport the farm town into the future. A group led by former Tesla Inc. executives brought a bundle of gutsy ideas from their new employer, Chinese tycoon Jia Yueting, who vowed to revive the 1 million-square-foot building and assemble a luxurious electric car that would surpass anything from Elon Musk. The community was just thrilled to have an opportunity to have life back in the plant, said City Manager Darrel Pyle, who greeted the investors with coffee and doughnuts. Hanford is in a county where the unemployment rate is almost double the U.S. average. Today, that factory remains lifeless, hardly closer to making Faraday & Future Inc.s cars that could go for as much as $300,000 than it was three years ago, before the stunningly rapid crash of Jias debt-fueled business empire. Its an empire built off of a Netflix-style streaming service, whose high-flying shares Jia leveraged a strategy thats accelerated the decline of several Asian tycoons as he expanded into smartphones, TVs and electric cars. His Shenzhen-listed centrepiece, Leshi internet Information & Technology Corp., surged to a peak market value of about $24 billion. That was $20 billion ago. Jias fortune plummeted after regulators suspended Leshis shares for nine months and ordered him to return home and repay millions of dollars in outstanding obligations. He currently risks losing control of Leshi because of a possible margin call on his shares, which have plunged more than 60 per cent since resuming trading Jan. 24. Faraday, which is said to have received an additional $1 billion of funding in December, said theres been no impact from Leshis stock plunge. U.S. court documents from a trademark action show that while Jia helped fund Faraday, his nephew Jerry Wang now partially owns it, which may help buffer the company from Jias troubles. Wang didnt reply to a request for comment sent through Faradays press office. These misadventures provoke vitriol among those left in his wake, including the Nevada state treasurer, who called Jias empire a mirage after the tycoon pulled out of a $1 billion Faraday factory deal there before moving on to Hanford. Im willing to give Jia the credit that, at the beginning, he just believed his own fantasy, said Dan Schwartz, now a Republican candidate for Nevada governor. But it gradually metastasized. Jia declined to comment for this story through representatives at Faraday and his LeEco conglomerate, which includes a stake in Leshi. He controls Leshi, and U.S. court documents show he provided the initial capital for Faraday. Faraday attracted attention in 2016 when it unveiled a 1,000-horsepower, one-seat electric car resembling the Batmobile at the CES technology show in Las Vegas. Its employees came from Tesla, Space Exploration Technologies Corp., Ferrari and BMW and a year later the company said it had developed the worlds fastest electric car. Jia, who got his start working in IT at a local Chinese tax bureau, invested more than $300 million of his own money in Faraday. His vision involves selling the FF 91, a 1,050-horsepower electric car with a 378-mile battery range and sticker price of less than 2 million yuan ($314,000 USD). Jias internet empire, known as LeEco, began showing cash-flow problems as early as 2016, prompting him to apologize to shareholders. The company and affiliates received $2.5 billion in lifelines last year from fellow tycoon Sun Hongbin, the chairman of real estate company Sunac China Holdings Ltd., who served prison time for embezzlement before his conviction was overturned. Yet even Sun signalled last month there were limits to rescuing Leshi. Sometimes one also has to admit failure on a losing bet, he said. Leshi said most of the 9.3 billion yuan in debt it reported at the end of last year will mature in 2018. That doesnt include personal financing Jia took over the years by pledging 99.5 per cent of his stake. To top it off, Leshi said in filings that Jias related companies owe 7.5 billion yuan in accounts receivable, a number disputed by the firms. Jia has remained in the U.S. to oversee Faraday, defying a China Securities Regulatory Commission order in December to return and sort out obligations to Leshi including his unfulfilled promise to give it interest-free loans. He was included in a nationwide list of defaulters the same month. There was no healthy cash flow into the company to support such an ambitious plan, said Teng Bingsheng, a professor of strategic management at Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business in Beijing. Itll be hard to continue this game. LeEco was selling assets to help repay debt to China Merchants Bank, his wife said in a Weibo social-media post in January. In the U.S., LeEco had layoffs, sold a Silicon Valley property and scrapped a $2 billion deal with TV maker Vizio Inc. Jias empire has been called a Ponzi scheme by Schwartz, who said Faraday had to keep finding new investors to stay afloat without ever selling a car. Tencent Holdings Ltd. co-founder Zeng Liqing also echoed the allegations in comments covered by Chinese state media. Jia previously denied hes running a Ponzi scheme, saying the allegation was concocted by business rivals Tencent has a streaming business. His wife said on Weibo in January that Jia, like his rival Elon Musk, is being mocked before his product is even delivered. Is Jia Yueting a failed entrepreneur, a Ponzi scheme, just a PowerPoint? Gan Wei posted. That question needs time to solve. The 55,000 residents of Hanford, an old railroad hub in the valley immortalized in John Steinbecks Grapes of Wrath, are looking for an answer from Jia. He became Faradays chief executive officer in December after several managers left and the company backed out of another planned factory in Vallejo, California. Even so, Faraday is said to have secured $1 billion from an unnamed investor. Our funding didnt come in as expected initially, but now we are hopefully back on track, said Dag Reckhorn, the vice president of global manufacturing who helped vet the Hanford plant. The factory is a raw diamond. We need to polish it a bit, but its there and its fast and its in California. Its not the first time Faraday declined to disclose a funding source. Schwartz, a former banker, said he couldnt get answers on how Faraday would finance the Nevada plant from scratch, which came with a $355 million tax-incentive package. California made a less generous offer. The state cut a $13 million tax agreement with Faraday that hinges on meeting employment milestones. Jias China difficulties havent dinged Hanfords faith. The city is about halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco, with a main attraction being the gargantuan, seven-scoop banana split at Superior Dairy Products Co. In December, Hanford officials met with nearby colleges to discuss tailoring their classwork to meet Faradays needs. Pyle also said Jias funding challenges are typical for a startup. Pyle, who drives a decade-old Buick, was blown away when Faraday workers showed off a model EV featuring artificial intelligence and labelled as faster than any Tesla. It was about one step next to space travel, he said. Faraday promised the first production vehicle by the end of 2018. During a visit in late December, the only person at the plant was a security guard. Read more about: SAN FRANCISCOMark Zuckerberg has mandated wholesale change at Facebook after a year during which the company was rocked by Russian meddling, fake news and controversies over its role in a democracy. But theres an apparent gap between what the big boss wants and the realities of the people that implement his wishes a fact exacerbated by a culture of outspoken executives that is endemic to Silicon Valley. That struggle has been evident at the social network in recent weeks. Last weekend, its leaders scrambled to manage Facebooks message in the wake of an indictment by U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller that laid out how Russian operators used Facebook and other social media platforms to manipulate American voters. Read more: Unfriended: Users are breaking up with Facebook Trudeau to Facebook: Fix your fake news problem or face stricter regulations Facebook reports drop in North American users, record revenue after news feed changes And just days before the indictment, another Facebook executive disclosed that the company wasnt yet sure how to put in place Zuckerbergs latest major directive: shifting the companys metrics so that so-called meaningful interactions are valued over cheap likes and clicks, a response to the misinformation and reports about the harms of social media that drew attention last year. Even if (Zuckerberg) says, Resolve this right away, the problems are baked into the fundamentals of the platform, said Jonathon Morgan, chief executive of New Knowledge, a company that tracks disinformation. Its not like Mark Zuckerberg just comes to the floor, makes a command, and everything turns around. The changes are a real threat to the way that these people think about success at their jobs. Almost immediately after the indictment landed, Facebooks vice-president of global policy, Joel Kaplan, took advantage of an opportunity to appear co-operative with the regulators and critics that company has clashed with in recent months over how forthcoming Facebook was. He boasted that todays news confirms our announcement last year that foreign actors conducted a co-ordinated and sustained effort to attack our democracy, and that the company had readily handed over information on Russian interference to authorities. He said he was grateful that the U.S. government was now taking this aggressive action against those who abused our service. But hours later, another Facebook vice-president, Rob Goldman, who runs the companys massively lucrative ad business, seemed more defensive about Facebooks role. I have seen all of the Russian ads and I can say very definitively that swaying the election was NOT the main goal, he tweeted, adding that the majority of Russian ads ran after the election. We shared that fact, he wrote, but very few outlets have covered it because it doesnt align with the main media narrative of (Trump) and the election. Researchers and experts pounced on Goldman, pointing out that the bigger challenge for Facebook did not relate to ads but to the free content posted by Russians that the company has said reached nearly half the U.S. population 10 times the number of people who saw the ads. (Facebook has not said whether the majority of the free posts appeared after the election.) Others suggested that his conclusions contradicted the special counsels indictment, which found that election meddling on Facebook was indeed a priority of the Russian operatives. The comments from Goldman, who had 1,600 followers at the time, could have been a standard Twitter debate between professionals until U.S. President Donald Trump broadcast the comments to 48 million users the following day. Goldman now has more than 11,000 followers. The controversy sent Facebook executives scrambling over the weekend. They tried to recast the statements, emphasizing that Goldman was speaking for himself, without prior approval. Kaplan, trying to put an end to the matter, put out an additional company statement saying that nothing we found contradicts the Special Counsels indictments. Any suggestion otherwise is wrong. They vented internally that Goldman had damaged hard-won credibility with the public. By Monday, Goldman, posting on Facebook this time, had issued an apology to his colleagues. Goldman is part of a social media-oriented culture that is permissive of employees having a voice and become so-called thought leaders in their field. Several Facebook executives are regular Twitter users, including Andrew Bosworth, who initially shared Goldmans tweet. But that culture is increasingly pushing up against the need of big tech companies such as Facebook to defend their credibility. Marc Andreessen, a Facebook board member, shut his popular Twitter account after making offensive comments about Facebooks goals in India. After Google fired a conservative engineer for making derogatory statements about women, employees took to social media to protest both sides of the issue. Engineers across Silicon Valley pushed their chief executives to speak out against Trumps immigration ban. Recently, a Facebook executive spoke publicly about the challenges of implementing Zuckerbergs latest directive to make the product less harmful by measuring time well spent and meaningful interactions. Were trying to figure out how to best measure and understand that, Adam Mosseri, Facebook vice-president who manages the companys news feed, said at an industry conference. The metric is definitely evolving. Later, Mosseri took to Twitter to explain himself further. In response to a question from a Washington Post reporter, Mosseri said the company was considering placing more emphasis on comments and messages, particularly long ones, after surveys found that users reported those features to be meaningful to them. He said that company was trying to define how to give people news that is genuinely informative. Currently, the company shows people highly personalized content that its algorithm predicts they will find informative. But there is a real difference between feeling informed and being informed, he wrote. We have yet to work out a way to do the latter. Read more about: Brendan Fraser stepped away from the spotlight as his life was catapulted into a state of turmoil after he was allegedly groped by a prominent man in Hollywood. The actor opened up to GQ in saddening detail about his life and career particularly about the life-changing experience that occurred in 2003 after a Hollywood Foreign Press Association luncheon at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Fraser, 49, claimed that Philip Berk the former president of the HFPA, the organization that hosts the Golden Globes called him over on and proceeded to inappropriately touch him. His left hand reaches around, grabs my a-- cheek, and one of his fingers touches me in the taint. And he starts moving it around, he told GQ. I felt ill. I felt like a little kid. I felt like there was a ball in my throat. I thought I was going to cry, he continued. In my mind, at least, something had been taken away from me. The incident was previously recounted in Frasers memoir and was reported by Sharon Waxman in The New York Times, but not with the further detail provided by the Mummy star that it was more than a pinch to his behind. Fraser couldnt bring himself to tell police officers outside the hotel that day. It wasnt until he got home that he shared the information with his then-wife, Afton Smith. They later divorced in 2009 as he grappled with his feelings. I felt like someone had thrown invisible paint on me, he said. Berk, who is still an HFPA member, called Frasers account a total fabrication in an email to GQ. Frasers reps asked Berk for a written apology and Berk did confirm to GQ that he wrote a letter. My apology admitted no wrongdoing, the usual If Ive done anything that upset Mr. Fraser, it was not intended and I apologize, Berk explained. Fraser shared in the profile, titled What Ever Happened to Brendan Fraser, that what happened to his career was likely a repercussion for what occurred between Berk and himself. I dont know if this curried disfavour with the group, with the HFPA. But the silence was deafening, Fraser said, noting he was rarely invited black to Globes after 2003. His career declined through no fault of ours, Berk said. Fraser said he blamed himself for what happened and found it difficult to work after that. The alleged groping messed with his sense of who I was and what I was doing. After his friends Rose McGowan, Ashley Judd and Mira Sorvino came forward with their disturbing stories about Harvey Weinstein, Fraser commended them for showing the courage he did not have. On the eve of the 2018 Golden Globes back in January, Fraser sat in a hotel room as the actors wore Times Up pins and the actresses wore black dresses. He was uncomfortable to see that Berk was in the room. Am I still frightened? Absolutely. Do I feel like I need to say something? Absolutely, he said. Have I wanted to many, many times? Absolutely. Have I stopped myself? Absolutely. Black Panther is a mass-appeal superhero movie, breaking box-office records with its dazzling special effects, heart-pumping fight scenes and charismatic characters brought to life by a predominantly black cast. It also tells a story laden with some pretty complex and specific references that you may or may not immediately notice. Here are a few things to know after watching Black Panther. The Oakland connection While most of Black Panther takes place in Wakanda and South Korea, we get to see Oakland, Calif., in 1992 and in the present day. The Bay Area city, which serves as some Wakandans American home base, is a fitting choice for the film. While Harlem is the American city used in the comics, it was a personal choice for writer-director Ryan Coogler to use Oakland, his hometown, as the connection instead. The first scene that Coogler wrote was the opening scene that takes place there in the early 1990s, he told the website IO9. Writing it was a test of what this movie could be. The interesting part about being Black is until you open up your mouth, people dont know where youre from, Coogler told the outlet. I thought it would be cool if you start on the scene in Oakland. You have these two Black dudes, they talk and (you go) Oh, its two Black dudes from Oakland. And then at some point the guy switches and starts talking with the African accent. Oh s---, wait, this dudes from Africa? You realize, Oh yeah, I cant tell the difference. He (looks like) the same people you know. Co-writer Robert Joe Cole added that starting in Oakland was never a question. That was Ryan. Thats his heart. That was where that was going to be. Oakland is also the birthplace of the Black Panther organization, which began there in the 1960s before it became a nationwide phenomenon. One of their most popular community programs providing free breakfast to children started in the California city in 1968. In Revolutionary Suicide, Black Panther co-founder Huey Newton explained the origin of the party name: He had read about how people in a Mississippi county, who had armed themselves against establishment violence, adopted the black panther as a symbol for their political group. He then suggested to fellow founder Bobby Seale that they do the same. The panther is a fierce animal, but he will not attack until he is backed into a corner; then he will strike out, Newton wrote. Afrofuturism The design and vision of Wakanda connects clearly to Afrofuturism, which refers broadly to a fantasy genre and cultural aesthetic. It often combines elements of science fiction, magical realism and actual histories to explore the present state of the African diaspora as well as its place in the future. Cultural critic Mark Dery coined the term in the 1990s, but you can spot Afrofuturism long before such as the Parliament Funkadelic Mothership of the 1970s and through today, with Janelle Monaes more recent android alter ego. Now, Afrofuturisms biggest avatar may become the Black Panther movie and the mythical nation of Wakanda, which is technologically advanced and full of imagery that includes nods to specific African cultures. Costume designer Ruth Carter has said she looked to certain tribes, such as the Masai and the Suri, for inspiration, and combined futuristic elements. Afropunk and Afrofuturistic fashion is a good analogy for some parts of Wakanda, she told Forbes. Killmongers final wishes After the defeat of Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan), TChalla (Chadwick Boseman) tells Killmonger that Wakandans may still be able to save his life, thanks to their advanced technology. Why bother being kept alive, Killmonger responds, just so he can spend the rest of his time imprisoned? Instead he gives clear instructions: Throw his body into the sea, just like his ancestors before him who knew the bottom of the ocean was preferable to a lifetime in bondage. Killmongers wish directly references the horrors of the Middle Passage. Facing enslavement and its myriad horrors, some Africans attempted suicide aboard slave ships, including refusing to eat and jumping overboard. Suicide became a rebellion one that European captors tried to prevent with cruel tactics, including force-feeding and torture. (This history has also inspired other Afrofuturistic stories. The 90s electronic duo Drexciya developed a mythology out of imagining what happened to unborn children of enslaved pregnant African women thrown overboard; Drexciya is envisioned as an underwater civilization, a black Atlantis, created by the babies who adapted to life underwater.) In major Hollywood movies, black characters are often relegated to supporting roles, or their narratives are in relation to the white characters (or the stories are told themselves with the concept of a white audience watching, referred to as the white gaze). Black Panther flips that construct. There are a couple of white guys in the movie. Martin Freeman and Andy Serkis (who also had roles in movies based on J.R.R. Tolkien novels) play characters from the comic books and appear in the movie to serve the broader story with black people at its centre. Serkis plays the villainous black-market arms dealer Ulysses Klaue, who looks down on Wakandans as undeserving of their precious metal, and represents the plundering of African resources. Freeman is American CIA operative Everett K. Ross, who is tasked with buying a sample of vibranium. Ross has a condescending attitude toward Wakandans and then morphs into an ally after shielding Nakia (Lupita Nyongo) from a bullet. But later, especially as Wakandans fight among each other over their place in the world, Ross continued presence could make you wonder: Why is he still around, since its not really about him? Well, at the very least, hes a helpful foil. The audience gets to see him utterly baffled by Wakandas advances, which TChalla and the others arent trying to prove to him anyway. And hes the butt of some cathartic, comedic relief. In one scene, as several Wakandan leaders debate, he tries to chime in. Hes promptly shushed by Shuri and called a colonizer, and not able to get a word in edgewise. Now, how many times have we seen that in a big-budget movie? In an ordinary Victorian row house in a modest corner of Torontos west end is a place filled with profound meaning for the five teen refugees and two house-parents themselves former refugees who live there. It is the newest of four homes operated by Matthew House, Refugee Reception Services, Toronto. The non-profit agency offers safe, supportive shelter and a sense of family for teens who come on their own from far-away countries such as Eritrea, Zimbabwe, Afghanistan and Sudan. They need that desperately, says Karen Francis, executive director of Matthew House (matthewhouse.ca). Unlike sponsored refugees, there is no one waiting for these kids at the airport. Many who reside at these homes were wandering the streets unsure of where to go, who to connect with, what to do. The entire home, which had been purchased by a community partner in the fall of 2017 in the citys Little Portugal neighbourhood, required some work before it could open this past December. But no room was in as much need of renovation as the kitchen, which Francis hoped would be the heart of the home. Francis called interior designer Danielle Nicholas-Bryk, of Studio Nicholas, who had already worked on the redesign of another Matthew House location. That experience taught her how important a simple kitchen reno could be. Every day at lunchtime these incredible smells would start wafting down, Nicholas-Bryk explains. It was a home-cooked meal prepared by volunteers. All the residents, the staff everybody sat down at this massive, beautiful table and shared a meal. Thats when I realized they were creating a family for people who had left theirs behind, and really understood why the kitchen is a great place to start. From left, Matthew House executive director Karen Francis with designers Samantha Pynn and Danielle Bryk who created the revamped kitchen and forged partnerships with companies to donate the needed materials. 'Everybody got so excited, and went right to work,' says Pynn. Alarmed but undaunted by the short, weeks-only timeline, Nicholas-Bryk contacted fellow designer Samantha Pynn, whom she knew from working together on HGVTs Home to Win series. Pynn reacted by calling the schedule bonkers, then quickly brought on board Ikea, who donated much of the material. They immediately agreed to help, and said it was right up their alley, says Pynn. Everybody got so excited, and went right to work. The cosmic laws of renovation being what they are, what was supposed to be merely a cosmetic kitchen refresh hit a few bumps; upon taking down existing cabinets it became clear that a gutting would be needed in order to move mechanicals, and that fumigation was also required. Nicholas-Bryk then turned the cramped L-shaped space into a bright, storage-rich galley kitchen that could accommodate up to eight people. Cabinetry is a mix of Ikeas Ringhult which also fronts the dishwasher in a glossy, highly reflective white, and Kungsbacka, a new line made entirely from recycled plastic bottles and reclaimed industrial wood, executed in a flat anthracite. The flat slab is easy to clean, and its very urban and this is an urban home, says Nicholas-Bryk, adding that uninterrupted lines in neutral tones make the space feel larger and more open. Counters are Artisan Grey quartz from HanStone and Ceragres Senio Earth tiles were used for the backsplash. Both were donated. On the opposite wall, a colour-soaked piece donated by Toronto-based digital painter Alan McKee provides a cheerful focal point. The floor is a patterned rubber for high traffic. Instead of doing a fake wood, for example, I decided to just call it what is. Its very big in the U.K. right now. I think its chic. Its also really easy to keep clean. Storage is generous. Open shelving near the sink puts dishware within easy reach. The table is flanked by closed cabinetry on both sides and above. Theres more storage under the banquette, which has quickly become a favourite spot for eating, hanging out and doing homework. Behind it, theres a chalkboard wall for notes and reminders. Housemates participate in the cooking. Making meals together in a central place, where everyone can gather and share food, along with their culture, and their stories, and their challenges, is a good foundation for creating that feeling of community and belonging, says Francis. While their circumstances are unique, in many ways the residents are typical teens. They all have part-time jobs. They have extracurricular events. They are doing well in school, says Francis. They are all 16, 17, 18 so university and is top of mind for them. Most kids who live in the home will have already spent several months at Matthew Houses main location, on Dundas St. W., where between 50 and 70 people will stay each year while going through the refugee claimant process. As residents, they can access support for mental health, refugee claims and employment issues, as well as special services provided by such organizations as the Canadian Centre for Victims of Torture. Theres no time limit on how long kids can stay. Its opened-ended. I want to support them until they are able to come to me and say they are ready, says Francis, adding that the end of high school, when many begin university, seems to be a natural transition time. If they are feeling confident enough to go out on their own, I feel like we have done our job. NIMBY-ism has so far not raised its head around the home, which is largely funded by private donations, charitable foundations, as well as local church and community partners. The reaction has been fantastic. Thats part of what makes this a great Toronto story I have been touched by the generosity of people, and how they are so moved by the plight of refugees. Of the nearly 1,000 registered archeological sites scattered across the southeast Mexican state of Campeche, Xcalumkin is far from the most impressive. Just more than 64 kilometres northeast of the state capital (also called Campeche), it looks, at first glance, like little more than a few half-excavated hillsides. On the stifling May morning that I visited, the scrubby forest was dry and radioactively bright, baked under a sky the colour of a pilot flame. It didnt take long for this abstraction of a city to come to life. Hills revealed themselves as pyramids. Fields became plazas. A cave opening suddenly in the ground a tree, like an umbilical cord, growing from its centre became a reservoir. I had come out that morning with Rubi Peniche Lozano, who runs a restaurant called Capuchino in the historic centre of Campeche, an extravagantly pretty town on the west of the Yucatan Peninsula. Shed brought along her sister, Ada, a local teacher, and Lirio Suarez Amendola, a former delegate for the National Institute of Anthropology and History, or INAH. Suarez walked us through the site, pointing out the hidden mouths of cisterns and offering INAHs best guesses as to what each structure might have been. Xcalumkin, she told us, had likely existed since the beginning of the millennium but, like most settlements in this part of the Peninsula, would have flourished between the 8th and 10th centuries, part of a vast network of city-states and vassal towns that made up the classical Mayan world. By A.D. 950, that world had all but disappeared. To make the stucco they used to cover the buildings and pave the roads, they needed charcoal, so imagine how many trees they needed, she said as we looked down into the reservoir that was now a cave. They emptied their water sources, cut down all their trees. The temperature raised 2 degrees. They changed the climate completely. She sounded almost exasperated. Lots of people look at the Maya very romantically, that they lived with nature and all that, but its not true. They were just like us: human beings. We had reached Xcalumkin by driving north along the modern highway that connects Campeche to Merida in the neighbouring state of Yucatan, following the route of the Camino Royal, or Royal Road, built for the visit of Mexicos short-reigning Habsburg Empress Carlota in the late 19th century. We stopped at Kanki and Acanmul, a pair of ruins that, despite lying just off the highway, receive almost no visitors. In the pretty colonial backwater of Hecelchakan, we ate breakfast at an enormous rotunda-like taco stand in the central plaza, famous enough not to require a name. For four generations and 40 years, the family that runs the place has turned out Campeches best cochinita pibil, a dish of adobo-rubbed pork roasted in an underground oven, and relleno negro, an ashy stew of ground turkey and pork stained black with charred chilies. Most days, they run out of cochinita by noon and relleno negro even earlier. The afternoon would take us to artisan towns such as Dzitbalchen, known for its embroidered blouses, and Becal, where Mexicos finest Panama hats are woven from hair-thin lengths of palm in damp underground caves. The whole day, we didnt pass a single other traveller. Despite its pastel-hued jewel box of a capital, its rich archeological history, a clutch of top-notch hotels and food to compete with anything on the peninsula, Campeche remains mercifully lost to tourism. Campeches star attraction should be the ancient Mayan city of Calakmul, once the most powerful city-state in the classical Mayan world, now an immense archeological site buried deep in the wild southern jungles of the 7,252-square-kilometre Calakmul Biosphere Reserve. But while Chichen Itza and Tulum, in the neighbouring states of Yucatan and Quintana Roo, attract as many as 5,500 visitors per day, Calakmul draws barely 100. When I came down to Campeche for the first time in February 2017 (a relatively cool, dry month in Mexicos tropical south), Calakmul is what I came to see. From the early 10th century until the late 1920s, when, according to the oral tradition of the local rubber tappers, an American prospector spotted the site from a low-flying plane, Calakmul was lost to time and memory (its presence was officially registered by INAH in 1931). For the next 50 years, the rubber tappers working in the forest chipped the narrative glyphs from the citys monolithic steles, selling the citys recorded history one piece at a time. Excavations didnt begin in earnest until the 1980s. To reach Calakmul, I drove four hours down well-paved roads, booby-trapped with ill-marked speed bumps, stopping en route at El Cachimbazo, a seaside restaurant in the town of Champoton, for a lunch of ceviche and Campeches unofficial state dish, pan de cazon (layers of tortilla and shredded shark bathed in tomato puree, jauntily capped with a whole habanero). At the entrance to the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve, I dropped my things at a serene ecolodge called Puerta Calakmul, by far the best hotel in the area (high-season rates start at $175), and crossed the road to see the exquisitely preserved stucco frieze at Balamku, one of many smaller archeological sites in the area. At sundown, I drove five minutes down the road to watch millions of bats spill from the mouth of a hidden cave and spiral skyward. At dawn the next day, I woke to the call of howler monkeys and drove the last 90 minutes through the park to the site itself. On the way, I picked up my guide, Manuel Pech, who has lived most of his life in the nearby village of Conhuas. He had returned a year before from the capital, where hed studied biology, because, he told me, I wanted to save the world. Growing up next to ruins, he seemed to view civilizational collapse as imminent rather than hypothetical. Pech and I spent well over three hours at Calakmul that morning, wandering among the lost foundations of untold buildings. At the ceremonial centre, we climbed a flight of steep stone stairs to the summit of the highest pyramid. Fifteen-hundred years ago, kings and priests would have performed their ceremonies here coronations, perhaps, or sacrifices, though no one knows for sure looking out over a city of 50,000 people with stucco-paved roads, called sakbe, radiating out from its centre. My view was different. Jungle extended infinitely in every direction. To the south, Guatemala. To the north, the horizon undulated like heat. Those hills out there, Pech said, we dont know which are just hills and which are pyramids that we havent uncovered yet. The only signs of human life were the peaks of Calakmuls two other great pyramids bursting through the canopy like mountains through clouds. I left Calakmul the following day and drove east, stopping at Becan, where a series of interconnected plazas and public buildings suggest the shape of quotidian Mayan life, and at Chicana, once Becans aristocratic suburb, now another abandoned stone settlement in the forest, where heavily ornamented mansions reveal a world as stratified as our own. At Xpujil the last of the ruins along the highway, roughly 40 minutes from Puerta Calakmul by car I turned north along a recently paved two-lane road and through 64 kilometres of forest, virtually uninterrupted by human settlement. The trees along the roadside were more chartreuse than green. Swarms of butterflies ferried between them like they had places to go. The scenic route took me through languid towns such as Dzibalche and Iturbide, and to beautiful, lonely ruins at Dzibalnocac and Hochob, elaborately carved in an architectural style known today as Chenes, which Suarez would later describe as Maya baroque. About 40 kilometres before Campeche, I stopped at Edzna, whose carefully reconstructed galleries, pyramids and open plazas rival Calakmuls in grandeur. A short distance from Hacienda Uayamon Campeches most luxurious hotel, housed in the restored remains of an 18th-century plantation Edzna is Campeches most popular archeological site. Even still, on the day I visited, there were more iguanas than people. When I reached Campeche that evening, I settled in at the Hacienda Uayamons sister hotel, Hacienda Puerta Campeche, just inside the city walls (rates in high season start at $418). Like most haciendas in the Yucatan, Uayamon a 20-minute drive from the city was founded in the 18th century (although most of its buildings date to the 19th century) to cultivate and process henequen, a tough fibre made from a variety of agave. Starting in 1870, the buildings that now house Puerta Campeche served as Uayamons warehouse and a shop selling everything from imported wines to lentils to rubber from the southern forests. Both are relics of the citys 19th-century decline, a reminder of where the word decadence comes from. By the time henequen had become the Yucatans economic mainstay, most trade had shifted away from Campeche to the newly built port of Progreso or Progress on the Peninsulas northern coast. For the previous three centuries, Campeche, Mexicos second-oldest port, had thrived at the periphery of law. Though just two hours from Mexico City by plane, Campeche was, in those days, far from the centres of colonial power and virtually ungovernable. When I met Peniches husband, the local historian Alejandro MacGregor Gonzalez, he told me, Contraband was this citys glory! He had asked me to join him for breakfast at a no-frills storefront on the Parque Santa Ana, a charming plaza just outside the city walls. He ordered us ice-cold bottles of sweet black tea and two trancas de lechon, the Taqueria del Parques specialty. The tea, he explained, combined Campeches first colonial cash crop, sugar cane, with black tea that came in on British pirate ships in the 16th century. The trancas were sandwiches of lechon, a Creole roast pork dish from the Caribbean, served on crusty lengths of bread introduced by French corsairs. That food is very Yucateco, he said, pointing across the street to Taqueria Hecelchakan, which trucks in cochinita from the town of the same name each morning. This is very Campechano. Our whole culture is mixed! Elsewhere in Mexico, the word campechano is usually used in the context of food and means just that mixed as in a campechano taco, made with meat and sausage, or a campechano ceviche, made with shrimp and octopus and whatever else is on hand. For the rest of the day, MacGregor showed me around the elegantly restored old quarter centre of his hometown and its northern and southern edges, where the peaceful streets give way to mangroves and scruffy urban beaches. He told me about centuries of pirate attacks and the city walls the last of their kind in Mexico built to fend them off. He told me how his own ancestors, Scottish privateers, had arrived here in the 17th century via Charleston. We drank beers on the tranquil malecon and watched cormorants dive low over the water. The name Campeche, he explained, derives from the words kaam, meaning mirror, and pech, meaning birds in the near-extinct local dialect of Mayan. Campeche is literally a mirror for the birds! he said. Ive never known someone to speak with so many exclamation points. That evening, I walked along quiet cobbled streets past candy-coloured houses where old men and women sat out on the sidewalks to play cards and gossip. For dinner, I ate tamales and drank coconut horchata, slushy and sweet as a milkshake, at the open-air Portales de San Martin just outside the old city walls (there are several small restaurants, or antojerias, located in the Portales, all serving more or less the same food). I tried to imagine the citys bloody, lawless past, but the image wouldnt materialize. If Campeche today is one of the safest places in Mexico, its in part because, MacGregor told me, we had 200 years of piracy, fear and violence. Were not interested in all that now. Pirates and traders, an empirical fact of a knowable past, seemed more remote and fantastic than a Mayan world conjured from stone and dust. I had come back to Campeche, despite warnings about the May heat, to see an archeological site that Pech had told me about, not far from Calakmul. His grandfather, he told me, had uncovered it back in 1950 during his youth as a rubber tapper (nearly all the ruins around Calakmul were found this way, though there are no records to confirm these stories). The first archeologist officially entered the site in 1993, guided by Pechs grandfather, and although INAH spent a year restoring it in 2001, they soon abandoned it to the forest. They called the place Nadzcaan Mayan for Closer to the Sky. Nadzcaan isnt technically open to the public, but the only real restriction on getting there is stamina. Set about 14 kilometres back from the road, its accessible either on foot, a three-hour hike through the forest or by motorbike (40 minutes plus a half-hour trudge on a gradual incline). Walking in, we passed iridescent wild turkeys and the fresh tracks of feral pigs. A troop of spider monkeys high up in the trees shook branches to scare us off. Eventually, Nadzcaan emerged coyly from the forest, the 130-foot pyramid at its centre dissolving into the trees like the memory of a dream. That night we camped on top of the pyramid. I asked Pech what the Maya would have used this place for. He dragged a finger across his throat. Sacrifice probably, he said, but we never really know. The best we can do is guess what this world once looked like and how it all came crashing down. As the sun set, I looked out over the forest. Howler monkeys called from the distance. Cicadas chirred. A blood moon rose slowly into a bank of clouds and emerged, a half-hour later, washed clean. Pech smiled. Its like a mirror, he said. Read more about: OTTAWAStriking academic staff at Cambridge University say former chief justice Beverley McLachlin, who recognized a constitutional right to strike in Canada, should respect their picket line and cancel her speech Friday at Cambridge University. McLachlin is scheduled to give the Sir David Williams lecture at Cambridge Universitys prestigious law school, an annual event which regularly draws a whos who of the legal community from Cambridge, London and beyond. McLachlin led the Supreme Court of Canada from 2000 until her Dec. 15, 2017 retirement. She will continue writing judgments until June in cases she has heard. Notably she was chief justice in 2015 when Canadas top court enshrined the right to strike as an essential part of a meaningful collective bargaining process. On Friday, she is to deliver a speech entitled Where Are We Going? Reflections on the Rule of Law in a Dangerous World. However the British union representing university academic and research staff is now appealing directly to McLachlin to stand up for a principle she espoused while on the bench and not cross their picket line. Jenny Sherrard, a spokesperson for the University and College Union that represents professors on strike across the United Kingdom, said in an email to the Star the union is taking strike action for 14 days over a four-week period. And tomorrow is bang in the middle of our first strikes. Sixty-four universities are affected by the action to defend staff pensions, including Cambridge, said Sherrard. We are writing to Justice McLachlin advising her of the action and the message of solidarity we have received from our sister union in Canada, and asking her not to cross the picket line. Picket lines are organized on campuses for key business hours. On Thursday, striking law professors were walking the lines in Cambridge. It isnt clear whether McLachlin would have to cross a physical or figurative picket line Friday evening. Either way, the British union and its Canadian counterpart, the Canadian Association of University Teachers, hopes shell change her mind about her appearance. We would encourage her to respect the picket line, said David Robinson, executive director of the Canadian union. The McLachlin court ruled on several important labour cases, including one in which the SCC (Supreme Court) ruled that the right to strike was protected by the Charter. I would hope that she now demonstrates this by not crossing the UCU picket line at Cambridge. The Canadian union earlier this week sent a message backing the British unions strike action against proposed pension changes, calling it a blatant attack on your members rights. Lawyer Paul Champ, who represented one of the interveners in that seminal 2015 Canadian case that constitutionalized the right to strike in Canada, said in an interview that McLachlin should take the request seriously, that while it doesnt necessarily mean that shes picking sides, it certainly doesnt send a great message to the Cambridge faculty. Justice McLachlin is being asked to speak at an event in honour of a former eminent professor of Cambridge, yet ironically Cambridge professors are on strike and presumably wont be able to attend to attend the lecture. Theres no prohibition against anyone from crossing a picket line, but it certainly sends a message when someone does, he said. I think when there are really important reasons why you have to cross a picket line, it may be appropriate to do so. But a former chief justice of the Supreme Court of Canada who has ruled on so many landmark trade union rights cases in Canada? I think it would be sending a very questionable message to cross a picket line in these circumstances. I just dont think its an appropriate time to deliver a speech like that, and all things considered, I hope that (former) chief justice McLachlin reconsiders and asks Cambridge to reschedule their lecture. The Star began making enquiries about McLachlins planned speech Thursday. Requests for comment sent directly to McLachlin, who had already left for the U.K., and sent through the Canadian court had not yet been answered. Nor had Cambridge University administration responded to requests for comment. The event notice says it will be followed by a drinks reception. And a source speaking for background only said a lavish dinner usually follows. In January 2015, McLachlin was in the majority of judges who significantly bolstered labour rights in this country in a pair of rulings: the first upheld the right of RCMP members to form a union; and the second constitutionalized the right of Saskatchewan public sector workers to strike as part of meaningful collective bargaining. That ruling, called Saskatchewan Federation of Labour vs Saskatchewan, cited the Charters guarantee of freedom of association. It said the right to strike is an indispensable component of collective bargaining. Where good faith negotiations break down, the ability to engage in the collective withdrawal of services is a necessary component of the process through which workers can continue to participate meaningfully in the pursuit of their collective workplace goals. This crucial role in collective bargaining is why the right to strike is constitutionally protected by (the Charter) s. 2 (d). Justices Marshall Rothstein, now retired, and Richard Wagner, McLachlins successor as chief justice, wrote a stinging dissent, saying courts should stay out of it. This court should not intrude into the policy development role of elected legislators by constitutionalizing the right to strike under the freedom of association guarantee, they wrote. It is not the role of this court to transform all policy choices it deems worthy into constitutional imperatives. The exercise of judicial restraint is essential in ensuring that courts do not upset the balance by usurping the responsibilities of the legislative and executive branches. OTTAWAIndigenous communities will find themselves with a long-term funding commitment in next weeks federal budget worth hundreds of millions of dollars to address the most acute housing situation in the country, say sources familiar with the measure. The housing shortage in Indigenous communities has meant that homes are often overcrowded and in desperate need of repairs a combination that also has health consequences. The Liberals have promised unique housing strategies for Inuit, Metis and First Nations communities to go along with the 10-year, $225-million plan unveiled last year to fund groups that help house Indigenous Peoples off-reserve. The strategies would be distinct from the national housing strategy, which calls for $40 billion in promised federal and expected provincial spending on new units and a new housing supplement. Sources with knowledge of the governments plans for the budget, speaking on condition of anonymity about details not yet made public, say the government will move first on long-term funding plans for Inuit and Metis housing, where consultations are more advanced and the logistics of providing funding is simpler. The budget is also expected to signal a shorter-term plan in the range of three to five years for First Nations housing as all sides finalize consultations on a long-term plan. The funding would build upon and be similar to last years spending pledge of $300 million over 11 years for housing in the North, which went to territorial governments. This time, however, the government would provide funds directly to individual band councils, building on recent Liberal promises to advance Indigenous self-determination, including the inherent right of self-government, such as the Canada-Metis Nation Accord signed last April. The long-term funding deal would also replace annual funding agreements that have limited the efforts of communities to manage a housing crisis. There are also hopes the government boosts funding for urban Indigenous people, about one in 15 of whom will experience homelessness, compared to one in 128 for the non-Indigenous population. The majority of Indigenous Peoples live in urban settings and therefore it is crucial to allocate new funding to address the significant housing challenges facing urban Indigenous Peoples in Canada, said Jeff Morrison, executive director of the Canadian Housing and Renewal Association. Census figures released last year found 324,900 people who reported an Indigenous identity lived in a home that was in need of major repairs about one-fifth of the total Indigenous population. The Indigenous population is growing faster than the non-Indigenous population, Statistics Canada noted a pace that would only further exacerbate the overcrowding in some communities. The situation was most dire among Inuit in the North: two-fifths of the Inuit population lived in overcrowded homes in 2016, the census found. A Senate report last year described up to 15 people multiple generations of the same family in some cases crammed into small, crumbling three-bedroom units in many Inuit communities. Overcrowding has also contributed to higher levels of domestic violence and abuse, as well as health problems such as tuberculosis, the infection rate for which is 250 times higher in Indigenous communities than in the non-Indigenous population. The housing funding would work in tandem with other measures the Liberals have signalled will be in Tuesdays budget, including money to address child welfare on reserve and health issues. Indigenous Services Minister Jane Philpott has said the budget would close the funding gap for child welfare agencies on reserves to cover the actual cost of programs to keep families together. Earlier this month, the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal issued a fourth order against the government for proper funding of child and family service programs. MONTREALA 24-year-old woman who was one of three Quebecers in Australia charged with drug smuggling has pleaded guilty to importing cocaine in commercial quantities. Melina Roberge pleaded guilty in a Sydney court on Friday, according to a spokesperson for the New South Wales District Court, and is due back in court for sentencing on March 23. Under Australian law, the crime could result in a life sentence. Roberge, Isabelle Lagace, 30, and Andre Tamine, 64, were arrested on Aug. 29, 2016 after the cruise ship MS Sea Princess arrived in Sydney. Australian authorities using sniffer dogs found 95 kilograms of cocaine in their suitcases worth an estimated $30.5 million. Tamine also pleaded guilty a week ago and will be sentenced on Oct. 26. Lagace was sentenced to seven and a half years in prison last November. Authorities have said the drug seizure was the largest ever involving a cruise ship or an aircraft in Australia. Read more: Quebec woman gets 7.5 years for smuggling cocaine on cruise ship in Australia Three Quebecers charged with smuggling $30M worth of cocaine into Australia see cases put off Quebec woman to stand trial on charge of importing cocaine to Australia on cruise ship OTTAWA Cambridge University hastily cancelled a speech Friday by Canadas former top judge after the union for striking academic staff called on Justice Beverley McLachlin to respect their picket line. As pickets were set up at six sites across Cambridge faculties Friday, word came McLachlin who was part of a 2015 landmark ruling that recognized a constitutional right to strike in Canada would not deliver a prestigious law lecture on the British campus after all. The Star reported Thursday that McLachlin, who had already travelled to the United Kingdom, was scheduled to deliver the annual Sir David Williams lecture in honour of an eminent former professor of the University of Cambridges law school. Early Friday the University and College Unions Cambridge branch announced the last-minute cancellation of McLachlins speech, which was later confirmed without further comment by the universitys administration. Its not clear whether McLachlin had expressed reservations after being advised of the Stars inquiries and the unions concerns, or whether organizers decided not to put her in the awkward position of having to decide. Neither McLachlin nor the university responded to requests for clarification Friday. The University and College Union said the cancellation of the event was a huge disappointment for all involved, but that the blame for the disruption lay firmly with university leaders. Lawyer Paul Champ, who represented one of the intervenors in the seminal 2015 Canadian case that constitutionalized the right to strike in Canada, said Friday he was glad to hear the lecture was cancelled. It would have put the Chief Justice in a very awkward position to cross a picket line of law professors. Given her landmark rulings on labour rights, I am sure it was a spectacle she wanted to avoid. Read more: Opinion | Susan Delacourt: Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin knew how to make Ottawa listen Beverley McLachlin hangs up justice robes, picks up pen with courtroom thriller Beverley McLachlin leaves chief justice post cheering Supreme Courts work on Aboriginal issues Waseem Yaqoob, representative of the unions Cambridge branch, said in a press release that it could have been avoided if the universities representatives would simply commit to proper negotiations on pensions. Nobody wants to take strike action, but staff at Cambridge feel they have been left with no choice, he said. McLachlin was the invited featured guest at the annual event that regularly draws a whos who of the legal community from Cambridge, London and beyond, and had planned to deliver a speech entitled Where Are We Going? Reflections on the Rule of Law in a Dangerous World. But her presence was flagged to the Star Thursday as a concern amid the nationwide strikes. After the Star began making inquiries, the union appealed to McLachlin directly in writing, calling on her to stand up for a principle she espoused while on the bench and not cross their picket line. Picket sites were set up in Cambridge on Friday and featured mostly younger members of staff who face changes their union says will cost them dearly. The union represents academic staff including professors, researchers and librarians across Britain. It is in the second day of 14 days of strike action over proposals it says will slash the benefits of the universities pension scheme. The union says the changes would leave a typical lecturer almost 10,000 (or nearly $18,000) a year worse off in retirement than under the current setup. David Robinson, spokesman for the Canadian Association of University Teachers, said Friday the decision to cancel McLachlins lecture was the right thing to do . . . given how awkward it would have been to hold an event while faculty were outside on a picket lines. Cambridge University vice-chancellor Stephen Toope, a Canadian, called for resumption of talks later Friday, calling the nationwide strike actions deeply regrettable. The BBC reported talks were set to resume Tuesday. HALIFAXA former Somali child refugees request to temporarily halt his deportation proceedings has been rejected by the Federal Court. Abdoul Abdi, who never got Canadian citizenship while growing up in foster care in Nova Scotia, was detained by the Canada Border Services Agency after serving five years in prison for multiple offences, including aggravated assault. Abdis lawyer, Benjamin Perryman, says federal officials turned down the 24-year-olds request to press pause on deportation proceedings while he pursues a constitutional challenge. Abdi then asked the Federal Court to temporarily suspend the hearing, scheduled for March 7. In a decision released today, Justice Keith Boswell rejected his request, saying there were no exceptional circumstances warranting inference by the Federal Court. Read more: Opinion | Shree Paradkar: Canadas institutions repeatedly failed former child refugee Abdoul Abdi Opinion | Tiffany Gooch: Canada failed Abdoul Abdi but it's not too late to do the right thing Opinion | Vicky Mochama: Deportation of refugee one more hostility inflicted by Canada OTTAWACanadas top general has turned off the taps on VIP tours with deployed troops abroad but is defending the visits as a valuable morale booster and suggests a troubled December trip that saw a charge of sexual assault and complaints about excessive drinking was an isolated incident. Gen. Jonathan Vance, the chief of defence staff, announced Friday that he had temporarily suspended Team Canada trips and ordered a ban on alcohol on military aircraft when they do resume. Vance acted after getting the results of an air force investigation into a December trip that saw former Maple Leafs player Dave (Tiger) Williams charged with assault and sexual assault after alleged incidents involving a female member of the military who was a flight attendant. During that same trip, two VIPs wet themselves in their seats, there were complaints about excessive drinking and concerns whether military and aviation regulations were adhered to. For example, one passenger was allowed to bring a 40-ounce bottle of alcohol past security and onboard the flight, and several passengers were allowed to board the flight in Ottawa even though they appeared inebriated. Vance said hes concerned that the ability of military air crew to perform their jobs might have been interfered with. Thats not good, he said Friday in his first comments on the incident. Vance said commanders moved fast once they were alerted to the alleged assault. It went from there to investigation to arrest in five weeks. Lightning fast, he said. The decision to make sure the victim was cared for, job number one. The military has been running morale-boosting Team Canada tours for the last 12 years, bringing athletes, musicians and media personalities to visit with Canadian soldiers deployed abroad. But defence department sources have told the Star that the tours have been known for excessive drinking and a party atmosphere. Sources say that not all flight attendants who work on these flights have been formally trained to serve alcohol or to recognize the signs of inebriation. And they say that flight attendants feel powerless to curb excessive drinking or rowdy behaviour on flights with high-ranking military personnel and high-profile VIPs. In his own statement to air force officials this week, Lt.-Gen. Michael Hood, the commander of the Royal Canadian Air Force, acknowledged those concerns. He says he ordered the internal investigation after he was told of allegations of improper conduct by some civilian members of the Team Canada tour. It is clear to all of us that our crew members have been placed in an unacceptable situation, in particular in terms of clearer guidelines with respect to civilian VIP passengers, and the absence of policies with respect to alcohol and passengers, notwithstanding that the large majority of our flights are dry, Hood said. While following direction to provide a positive experience for VIPs, this must never again be to the detriment of our aircrews, Hood said, promising speedy decisions on the reports recommendations. Talking with reporters after an Ottawa speech, Vance dismissed concerns about the past Team Canada trips, saying hes never heard a complaint of excessive drinking or questionable behaviour until this most recent visit. I havent seen widespread or heavy drinking . . . many general officers, many senior leaders, many respected members of all sorts of different quarters in Canada have been on these trips and have not reported heavy drinking, Vance said. He said even on Decembers flight there was not widespread, heavy drinking. What I do know is that on this flight there was drinking to excess by a very small number of people, he said. Vance praised the athletes, musicians and entertainers who donate their time to visit with Canadian soldiers deployed overseas and said he hopes to be able to resume the tours as quickly as I can. Its not a VIP junket . . . its not a Mardi Gras, its not a party. Its a mission, Vance said. If weve gone off the rails a little bit there, well put it back on the rails. After Bruce McArthur pleaded guilty to hitting a man numerous times with a metal pipe on Halloween in 2001, the Crowns main concern was keeping him away from male sex workers. We believe that until he has a much better psychiatric handle on himself, and given the background of this case, that thats part of the subculture he is best kept away from, Crown attorney Michael Leshner said in court at McArthurs sentencing in April 2003. McArthur an alleged serial killer who faces six counts of first-degree murder was before the courts for the first time in 2003, having pleaded guilty to assault with a weapon and assault causing bodily harm on a man who advertised as a male hustler, the Crown said. Read more: Murder victims wife tells of love story turned wrenching tragedy Bruce McArthur charged with sixth murder Anguished family of man missing since 2010 watch news of murders from afar A court recording of the sentencing, obtained by the Star after being granted a court order this week, has shed some light on the circumstances around the attack, although the proceedings make clear that no motive was ever determined. McArthur himself said he did not know why he attacked the victim, but did apologize at his sentencing. I just wanted to apologize to the court for what happened. My lifes been kind of a mess in the last year and a half, knowing whats going to happen and whats happened to me, McArthur told now-retired Ontario Court Justice William Bassel. Id like to apologize to the victim . . . I wouldnt know what to say, other than Im sorry for all the pain and anger Ive caused him. The Crown and defence put forward a joint submission on sentencing, which included a conditional sentence of two years less a day, which would see McArthur spend the first year under house arrest, followed by a curfew for six months. The sentence would be followed by three years probation. During the conditional sentence, McArthur was barred from an area that includes Torontos Gay Village and where the Crown indicated McArthur could come into contact with male sex workers. The area he was prohibited from entering unless for some exceptions was bordered by University Ave. to the west, Bloor St. to the north, Sherbourne St. to the east, and College/Carlton St. to the south. From my perspective, its in the best interest to keep him out of the area where hes more likely than not to come into . . . (to) likely be enticed by male prostitutes, Leshner told the judge. Court heard that McArthur and the victim knew each other enough to say hello on the street, and that the victim allowed McArthur into his apartment building on Oct. 31, 2001. No sexual encounter took place that day. The victim had thought about showing his Halloween costume to McArthur, the Crown said, but instead was hit numerous times from behind by McArthur with a metal pipe he had brought with him. McArthur went to police headquarters almost immediately afterward, reporting he may have hurt someone. Leshner said the incident had traumatized the victim, who was released from hospital within a day and required stitches to his fingers. He did not provide a victim impact statement at McArthurs sentencing. Other conditions of McArthurs sentence included a prohibition on taking illicit drugs and poppers a chemical compound which can be inhaled prior to sex and is popular among some gay men. The reason for that is there was some suggestion that he may have taken poppers that day (of the assault). I believe the psychiatric report suggests that he takes them prior to sex, Leshner said, adding McArthur had also been taking the antiseizure medication Dilantin. Given that hes on Dilantin to begin with, I think its fair to say that everyone wants to keep him away from poppers since we have no idea what caused this incident. McArthur was also ordered to seek counselling for mental health issues, particularly for anger management. He was told to see his family physician within weeks of his sentencing, though his lawyer told the court McArthur was having trouble getting an appointment with his doctor due to the SARS outbreak in Toronto that year. The Crown had originally considered seeking a jail sentence, but Leshner said he reconsidered after reading the pre-sentence and psychiatric reports filed at McArthurs sentencing hearing. I am satisfied that it wouldnt be in societys interests and Mr. McArthurs interests to have him go to jail at this point in time, but there will be very strict conditions on the conditional sentence, Leshner told the judge. McArthur has so far been charged this year with six counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of Andrew Kinsman, Selim Esen, Majeed Kayhan, Soroush Mahmudi, Dean Lisowick, and Skandaraj Skanda Navaratnam, all of whom had connections to the Gay Village. On Friday, at a news conference announcing that McArthur would face a sixth murder charge for Navaratnams death, Toronto police homicide Det.-Sgt. Hank Idsinga would not comment when asked about a Star story on McArthurs guilty plea from the 2003 assault case. Im not going to discuss any of Mr. McArthurs past involvement with the police, said Idsinga, adding that McArthur technically did not have a criminal record prior to the murder charges he is now facing. The Star has confirmed that McArthur was granted a pardon for the 2003 conviction, although the record of the court proceedings remains public. Note - April 6, 2018: This material is subject to legal complaint by Azim Rizvee and Rabiya Azim. A judge has dismissed a defamation suit against a Milton woman, ruling that comments she posted online about a former federal Liberal Party candidate were a matter of public interest. The suit centred on comments she published in 2015 that took aim at a man named Azim Rizvee, who was then a candidate for Milton, a race which he lost. Stacey Newman, a freelance journalist, described various instances of intimidation, harassment and unwanted non-sexual touching that Rizvee was said to have engaged in during the summer and early fall of 2015. Rizvee and his spouse, Rabiya Azim, who managed his campaign, allege in their statement of claim that Newmans writings were malicious and they sued her in March 2016 for $16 million. In an interview with The Star Rizvee said he and his family were the victims of bullying, treatment which continued after the election was over. He called Newmans allegations all cock-and-bull. It was all framing, he said. We take it as part of politics. We definitely believe in democracy. Once it becomes a personal agenda, its going against democratic values of what we stand up for and thats what it was all about. He said he launched the lawsuit to suss out Newmans disparaging comments, calling the move personal. Asked whether he would run in the next federal election, Rizvee said absolutely. Read more: Pair of defamation lawsuits will test Ontarios new anti-SLAPP law Newmans motion used an Ontario law called Protection of Public and Participation Act, which deters frivolous litigation, also known as anti-SLAPP (Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation), attempting to chill speech considered to be a matter of public interest. In his ruling, Judge Dale Fitzpatrick said it qualified as a matter of public interest because politics is the classic example of such a topic. It is an obvious statement that free speech is one of the fundamental underpinnings to any democratic, open and tolerant society, he wrote. The right to offer commentary free from fear of litigation is especially critical to our election process. The public has a strong interest in its citizens exchanging ideas respecting the merits of a candidate for public office. This weighs in favour of protecting the comments of Ms. Newman made in the context of such a selection. Azim, Rizvees spouse, said the act, introduced in Ontario in 2015, must be rewritten. In the anti-SLAPP law, there is still a lot of grey areas, she said. It gives a party open licence to say anything about anyone without accountability. The defendant (Newman) had that edge. Because Newmans motion was successful, she recouped $85,000 in legal fees in December. In a July 2015 Facebook post, Newman refers to Rizvees supporters as henchmen who tried to stamp out dissenting opinions of him. This is not democracy, it is bullying and it is dirty politics, she wrote. Rizvee won the federal Liberal nomination in Milton. Newman was a supporter of Rizvee's rival, Zeeshan Hamid, according to the decision. Newman alleged that Rizvee, despite her protests, touched her back, arm and forced a hug on her while she was addressing the media, hovering, she alleged, to give off the appearance that she supported his campaign. According to the court decision, she said Rizvee turned violent at a later event. Newman said that Mr. Rizvee came towards her at the (Milton candidates debate), backing her into a desk and aggressively grabbing her forearm, it says. Ms. Newman says she yelled at Mr. Rizvee to let her go. In a statement posted on Newmans website in October 2015, she says that she asked Rizvee and his supporters to leave her alone many times, calling his behaviour borderline criminal and abusive. Your candidate, Azim Rizvee, in the Milton riding has, in my very strong opinion, engaged in the dirtiest political campaign I have ever witnessed, she wrote. This candidate, in my opinion, only won the candidacy by perverting the nomination process, and by using intimidation and excess to influence voters. In Rizvees affidavit, he outlines how his reputation had suffered. He said that Newmans comments likely cost him the election, as he lost by 2,438 votes and that he had personally suffered embarrassment and humiliation. Further, her communication caused fewer homes to be sold by his company. Rizvee is the co-founder of MinMaxx Realty, a real estate business, according to the June 2017 court decision. Judge Fitzpatrick stated in his decision that there was no valid evidence of harm related to Newmans communication. Rizvee was in the unique position where he (had) made the decision to present himself to be assessed and commented upon respecting his suitability for public office, he said. This assessment and public commentary is at the heart of the democratic process. The candidate must know that he will be the subject of criticism as well as support, adding that there was no evidence of malice before him. In an interview with the Star, Newman said the case, while difficult and time-consuming, has not discouraged her from airing her grievances in a public forum. Ive been asked by people if I would speak out again, and my answer to that is an emphatic yes, she said. I think its absolutely imperative that people speak up, noting that the socio-political climate has changed, referring to the #MeToo movement. When somebody is reporting something like this, when they go public, thats usually a last resort, she said. My complaints were being ignored and the harassment was continuing. This was never only about me, she said. This should never be able to happen to somebody else. I know its absolutely frightening to go up against somebody who you perceive as powerful and wealthy, but I cant stress enough how important it is to continue to do so. Newman filed a Peace Bond in November 2015, which was withdrawn, but Rizvee was advised by the Crown that Newman was fearful of him and that she didn't wish for him "to ever touch her, speak directly to her or enter within her personal space." Another claim for malicious prosecution, is still active and seeks $1.5 million in damages, said Nicholas Bader, one of Rizvees lawyers, adding that a litigation date has yet to be determined. Clarification - April 6, 2018: This article was edited from a previous version to make clear that the Crown was voicing Stacey Newman's request when it advised Azim Rizvee that she was fearful of him and didn't wish for him "to ever touch her, speak directly to her or enter within her personal space." As well, the article was edited to include that Newman was a supporter of Rizvees contender, Zeeshan Hamid, according to the decision. Update - May 3, 2018: This article was edited from a previous version to include Azim Rizvee's comments. We are not alleging a worst-case scenario where Mr. McArthur was roaming the streets as a violent predator looking for a victim. The words were spoken by Crown attorney Michael Leshner in a Toronto courtroom in January 2003, as Bruce McArthur pleaded guilty to assault with a weapon (a metal pipe) and assault causing bodily harm on a man in his own home. McArthur, now 66, would go on to be labelled an alleged serial killer, having already been charged this year with five counts of first-degree murder, with Toronto police saying there are likely more victims. But in 2003, McArthur was before the court for the first time with no criminal record. A court recording of the guilty plea, obtained by the Star after being granted a court order this week, has provided new details on the attack, including the fact that McArthur himself went to police to say he may have hurt someone. Read more: With remains of six victims found in Bruce McArthur case, police anticipate more charges Leaside couple in shock as planters with human remains found at their home Police made quick decision to arrest Bruce McArthur to protect life of young man: sources The court proceedings also make clear that a motive for the attack has never been determined. We may never know why Mr. McArthur acted in the way that he did, he doesnt know at this point. The issue on sentencing will be, bearing that in mind: What sentence is necessary to make sure it doesnt happen again? Leshner told now-retired Ontario Court Justice William Bassel. It was just after noon on Oct. 31 2001, when McArthur arrived at the victims apartment in Torontos Gay Village and was allowed into the building by the victim. He thought there was no issue with regards to security or safety, by allowing Mr. McArthur into the building, Leshner said. The complainant is also admitting he advertised in gay publications as a male hustler . . . . Hes acknowledging that Mr. McArthur certainly could have known about that reputation and by letting Mr. McArthur into the building, had allowed Mr. McArthur to believe that there was a potential opportunity for sex. No sexual encounter took place that day, Leshner said. The victim had been working on his Halloween costume, and thought about showing it to McArthur. Instead, he was hit numerous times from behind by McArthur with a metal pipe that he had brought with him. McArthur had carried the pipe with him on other days, as he apparently was concerned with issues of safety and security as a result of the subculture involving street hustlers, Leshner said. The Crown was never alleging that McArthur was carrying the pipe for the first time with the unique intent to seek out the complainant and assault the complainant in the manner that he did, Leshner said. The victim at first blacked out, and then called 911 and was taken to St. Michaels hospital. He sustained injuries to his head, bruising to his body and required several stitches on his fingers, the Crown said. Meanwhile, McArthur went to police headquarters shortly after the attack, Leshner said. The police were able to match what he was saying with the victims 911 call. Its fair to say that Mr. McArthur acknowledged the assault, and he said I dont know why I did it, Leshner said. The victim was released from hospital that same evening. Its fair to say that this incident has traumatized the victim, Leshner said. In April 2003, McArthur received a conditional sentence of two years less a day, and three years probation. Part of the conditions included being barred from an area of the city that included the gay village and from spending time with male prostitutes. The murder probe into McArthur continues, with police saying they anticipate further charges in addition to the five counts of first-degree murder he is already facing in connection with the deaths of Andrew Kinsman, Selim Esen, Majeed Kayhan, Soroush Mahmudi and Dean Lisowick. Several of the men had been reported missing over the last few years in and around Torontos Gay Village, as the community expressed concern there was a serial killer in the area. Toronto police now say remains of 6 victims found in Bruce McArthur investigation. McArthur has been charged in the deaths of five missing Toronto men Toronto police say the deaths of the five men appear to be the work of a serial killer Police warn there could be more victims Investigators have been examining homes where McArthur worked as a landscaper Police say remains have been found in several planter boxes Toronto Police Det. Sgt. Hank Idsinga. (The Canadian Press) Police have spent the last few weeks searching for remains at a number of properties that could have had a connection to McArthur, who worked as a landscaper. They have discovered the remains of six individuals in planters at a home on Mallory Crescent in Toronto, where McArthur mowed the owners lawn in exchange for storing landscaping equipment in the garage. Of the remains, only Kinsmans have so far been identified. Police are expected to provide an update on the case Friday morning. McArthurs next court appearance is set for Feb. 28. With files from Kenyon Wallace, Kelsey Wilson and Star staff A Bowmanville girl, Alexa Allison, found a creative and profitable solution when she wanted to buy a cellphone but was still too young to get a job to earn the money. Since Im too young to get a job, I decided to make my own job and write a book. Its a book about getting a job, said Alexa, 13. A girl goes out to find a job. Theyre always telling her shes too young. Youre Too Young! tells the story of Rose, who is 12 going on 13. Most of Roses friends already have phones and she really wants a new one. Rose approaches several people looking for a job and is rebuffed each time. Mixing financial literacy with youthful determination, the message of the picture book is that you can do anything no matter what age you are and to follow your dreams, explained the Grade 8 student at Duke of Cambridge Public School. It took Alexa several days to write the story and several more to edit it. The book is illustrated by her aunt, Chelsea Gauvin-Legacy. The watercolour illustrations took eight hours each and were a Christmas gift for Alexa. The book is self-published and doubled as a real-world application of math lessons for Alexa: Each book cost approximately $7 and sells for between $12 (in-person) and $18 (online). Alexa had to keep careful track of the proceeds to pay her parents back for the loan to self-publish the picture book. She wasnt allowed to spend any money until she paid back her investors, said Marsi Legacy-Allison, Alexas mom. The whole book has a theme of financial literacy for kids. Even before the book was back from the printer, the young author/businesswoman was busy pre-selling copies. The finished book came back from the printer in December. I was really excited when it came in. I was checking the mail every day, Alexa said. She had a meeting with her school principal to ask if she could send a letter home with students about the book. She was allowed to promote her book at school in exchange for giving a copy to the school library and donating a dollar from each book sold back to the school. She had a whole book to keep track of everything, said Jamie Allison, Alexas dad. She was quite impressive talking to her principal. She led the meeting, I went for moral support. Alexa also sold her book through her grandmothers toy store, her aunts office and Facebook. Youre Too Young! is also available online at Amazon, Lulu, Indigo and Barnes and Noble. Youre Too Young! has sold more than 150 copies. Alexa has been able to pay back her parents and buy herself a new iPhone 6s. Alexa isnt sure if theres more writing in her future. She said math is her favourite subject at school and she thinks someday her career might be in that field. Poppy Barley already had Finance Minister Bill Morneaus shoe size when he called for the second time about buying a pair of new shoes to wear when he tables the federal budget on Parliament Hill next Tuesday. Kendall Barber, co-founder of the Edmonton-based leather luxury shoe company, said Morneau has chosen them again, a decision the finance ministers office said was unprecedented. Were really excited about it, Barber told the Star. Its such a unique opportunity for national exposure. Morneau will officially announce the budget next Tuesday wearing a pair of Jasper Derbys in black calf and deer, according to a statement from Poppy Barley on Thursday. Read more: Ottawas go-slow approach comes at a cost Federal government wants Canadians more aware of tax benefit aimed at working poor Electric car advocates hope for signal of government support in federal budget Its an old tradition in Parliament for the finance minister to officially chair the federal budget for the following year in a pair of new shoes, although its exact origins are murky. Morneau bought the shoes the last sample pair of Jasper Derbys, according to Barber for $250 from a company sample sale. Caroline Gault, a spokesperson for the company, said the ministers pair was made to test a new batch of deer leather. Poppy Barley lists the regular versions at $398 on their website. His pick this year isnt terribly different from the black calf skin leather Oxford shoes which he donned in 2017 to table last years federal budget. According to Barber, Morneau likes black-soled shoes. Hes actually quite specific, she said. Poppy Barley was founded by Justine and Kendall Barber in 2012 as a shoe company specializing in luxury leather shoes and accessories. The sisters employ 25 people, according to the statement most of whom are women in Canada and Mexico. Poppy Barley also said it donates 1 per centof all sales to charities in both countries and maintains an ethical supply chain. The decision to choose Poppy Barley appears to fall in step with the Liberal governments priorities in the upcoming budget which, according to the statement, include promoting gender equity and the economic success of women. A sergeant with the Toronto Police Service denied accusations at a human rights tribunal Thursday that he shared a photo of a female constable in a bikini with colleagues. Sgt. Howard Payton told the hearing he did not share the photo of Heather McWilliam, explaining that he saw the photo on Facebook at work while he was perusing the social media site, but did not share the image with colleagues at 23 Division, in North Etobicoke. McWilliam, 33, is arguing at a Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario hearing that she was sexually harassed and humiliated for years by her supervising officers and that she was punished for speaking out. But she is also going a step further and alleging there is a systemic problem with the way female officers in the Toronto Police Service (TPS) are treated that needs to be addressed. She alleges the workplace was a poisoned environment for female TPS employees, and that she heard sexual or sexist comments every shift for years. The tribunal has been sitting intermittently and has heard from over 15 witnesses so far. McWilliam testified in 2016 that she had heard that Payton was showing a Facebook photo of her in a bikini to other colleagues in the division. At the time, she wanted to deal with the issue herself because she didnt want to seem weak, she said. Sgt. Kim Ledgerwood testified earlier in the tribunal that she saw the photo on Paytons work computer when they were in the same office and on the same shift. Payton told the tribunal on Thursday afternoon that it is possible that Ledgerwood may have seen the photo because he had seen the picture one or two times on his work computer. He denied, however, downloading the picture or saving it on his computer or phone. He testified that he was aware that other officers in the division may have seen the photo as well through social media, adding that he remembers an officer asking, Did you see their vacation pictures on Facebook? Payton told the tribunal he could not remember who the question was directed to. Payton was investigated by professional standards in 2015 because he used a photo of McWilliams face as his desktop background for months before she noticed and asked him to take it down. He was disciplined with an eight hour penalty. He had also shared the same picture on his phone with another officer working with McWilliam because he found the pose odd, he testified. McWilliam testified last year that these incidents were part of several incidents of harassment she experienced by her male colleagues while working at TPS. In her testimony, McWilliam stated that male officers would assess the physical appearance and attractiveness of women and discuss the sex lives of female police officers. Female porn stars were sometimes used as screen savers or desktop wall paper, she said in 2016. Various terms were used to describe female officers in addition to dykes, cts and sluts, she said. Terms such as metro mattress which she said referred to female officers who had worked in the metro division and liked to have sex. There were so many times it happened, so many words that were used, my brain sometimes blocks them out, she said in 2016. That was the norm. She said no one ever objected to the comments or referred to a workplace harassment policy. She also said that she did not see posters about workplace harassment that were supposed to be posted at every division. Her way of dealing with it was to walk away or remain silent, she said, though inwardly I was humiliated. I was degraded. I had no voice. I was being objectified sexually over and over and over again. McWilliam said she didnt speak up about what she experienced until much later because she was focusing on her job and was aware how complaints of sexual harassment would impact her career. The Toronto Police Services Board has denied McWilliams allegations on behalf of the officers and argued the hearing should not consider whether there is a systemic sexual harassment problem at the Toronto Police Service, since the allegations are being made by only one female officer. The Board is also arguing that McWilliams allegations were properly investigated and dealt with by management. The hearing will continue Friday. With files from Alyshah Hasham Local activists are gathering in silence to send their message loud and clear: Words are not enough to stop the escalating violence in Syria. Nearly 100 people have signed up on Facebook to attend a silent candlelight vigil Friday in memory of hundreds of Syrians killed this week in Eastern Ghouta. The event is one of many gatherings happening in Canadian cities. I almost dont believe in protests and vigils anymore, but at the same time its just so hard not to do anything when you see whats happening. Its absolute insanity, said Bayan Khatib, a local Syrian-Canadian activist and one of the organizers of Fridays event. Its so hard to believe that the world just sits and watches. Theres half a million people under siege, with no access to food, water or proper medicine, and now theyre being bombed. Read more: Hospitals overwhelmed with number of casualties amid bombing blitz of Damascus suburbs Syrian strikes kill more than 100 near Damascus in one of the bloodiest attacks of the war Turkey threatens to strike back if Syrian forces protect Kurdish terrorist group Human-rights organizations working inside Syria reported earlier this week that forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al Assad carried out aerial bombings over Eastern Ghouta, where more than 400,000 civilians have been under siege for years, according to The Associated Press. More than 250 people were killed, children among them. Its against international rules of war to attack such places. Following the attacks, the UN childrens fund UNICEF issued a blank statement, later saying it no longer had words to express its outrage. What we need is an immediate political solution to the conflict. We need the grave violations against children to stop, said UNICEF-Canadas president and CEO David Morley in a statement to Metro. We need the sieges to be lifted. We need unconditional humanitarian access and financial support to help those in need. And we need it all yesterday. Recent indiscriminate attacks have also targeted medical facilities. According to a press release from the Union of Medical Care and Relief Organizations, which provides free medical assistance to Syrians inside the conflict zones, a total of 13 hospitals were hit by barrel bombs and artillery strikes over the past few days. Khatib and other local activists are demanding more humanitarian assistance and for the international community to pressure Russia to stop supporting Assad. Everybody knows whats going on, everything has been said, but words fall flat, she said. Read more about: Strains of Amazing Grace broke the candle lit darkness during a vigil Thursday evening for a toddler lost to the Grand River. More than 100 people gathered in Waldemar, Ont., on the Station St. bridge that spans the surging, flood-swollen river to remember Kaden Young, the 3-year-old boy who went missing Wednesday when his mothers van was pulled into Grand River. The floodwater swept little Kaden from his mothers arms after she managed to escape the van. Search officials confirmed Thursday that a yellow T-shirt, childs booster seat, and the minivans bumper had been found during the recovery operation. However, officials dont believe the boy was wearing the shirt when he was swept away. Read more: OPP continue search for boy swept away by Grand River floodwaters Brantford residents head home after flood Searchers brace for tragedy after child swept from mothers arms into raging Grand River Kadens mother, Michelle Hanson, offered thanks to the community before leaving in an emotional state. Community members brought candles, flowers, pictures, cards and teddy bears to the bridge, and they sang Amazing Grace while neighbours comforted each other and held back tears. After a full day of searching, recovery efforts came to an end Friday around sunset, as officers geared up for another day ahead. OPP Const. Paul Nancekivell said Saturdays search will involve an underwater full dive team, in addition to their current in-water search committee. The team can get a much better look if they go under with their gear, he said. Earlier we had them checking for any disturbances above-water, but well have them in and ready for tomorrow. He added that there will also be a helicopter unit present. K9 units will also be on scene, as well as several officers who will be searching the area on foot. Communities throughout the Grand River watershed continue to experience the effects of a weather system that moved into the area Monday and brought heavy rainfall and melt runoff from warm temperatures. A flood watch continues for the Town of Grand Valley and Waldemar. The boys mother was driving when she missed a road closure barricade in dense fog at about 1 a.m. Wednesday. Her minivan was swept into the fast-moving river and deep water. She managed to free herself and Kaden from the vehicle, but the water wrenched the boy from her arms. Hanson was found at a watery alcove on the rivers bank near the bridge on Dufferin County Road 109. Dufferin County paramedics brought her to Headwaters Health Care Centre in Orangeville where she was treated for hypothermia and eventually released. Nancekivell said the OPPs emergency response team has combed kilometres of river banks since Wednesday. With files from Annie Arnone OFFENDING: A Chinese model, who ruffled feathers with a new years greeting. Liu Wens message to fans on Instagram said Happy Lunar New Year. It may seem innocuous to some, but on Chinese social media the absence of the traditional Chinese New Year drew criticism, the BBC reports. Lunar New Year is often used because the festival is celebrated in many Asian countries. DEFENDING: A Kansas bank, looking out for its assets. The Central National Bank is suing a woman accused of making more than 50 withdrawals from an ATM which happened to be churning out $100 bills in place of fives. The bank is seeking about $11,600 (U.S.) plus interest from Christina Ochoa, who claimed she kept seeking fives to add to a birthday money cake. CLIMBING: A skyscraper planned for Tokyo. And lets hope its termite-proof. Sumitomo Forestry Co is proposing to build a 350-metre, 70-floor tower made of wood to commemorate its 350th anniversary in 2041, the Guardian reports. It would be the tallest wooden tower in the world. It will be predominantly wooden, with just 10 per cent steel. RUNNING: A woman who had an affair with a married eight-term Pennsylvania congressman, for the U.S. House of Representatives. Shannon Edwards is seeking the Republican nomination. Rep. Tim Murphy, an outspoken opponent of abortion rights, resigned in October over text messages that suggested that he wanted Edwards to get an abortion when they thought she might be pregnant. PUNISHED: An American teen, for trying to smuggle a Bengal tiger cub across the U.S.-Mexico border. The 18-year-old got six months in prison for the incident which occurred when he crossed into the U.S. near San Diego, the BBC reports. Prosecutors said he was running an animal-smuggling operation, while his lawyer said he just wanted a pet. SPARED: A man whose 8-year-old son was smuggled into Spain from Morocco in a suitcase. Ali Ouattara, of Ivory Coast, avoided a jail term for facilitating the illegal entry, the BBC reports. A small fine was agreed to, over a lack of evidence that the father knew his son would be trafficked in luggage. The child, now 10, was spotted by a scanner. USHERED IN: The first female Black Rod in the 650-year history of Britains House of Lords. Sarah Clarke took up her place this week, and will formally be known as the Lady Usher of the Black Rod. The role goes back to 1348. One key modern role of Black Rod is to summon members of the House of Commons to attend the monarchs speeches in the House of Lords. SMUGGLED IN: Cocaine, to the Russian Embassy in Buenos Aires. Argentine officials say that a police officer and a Russian diplomatic official were arrested after a large coke shipment was found. Security Minister Patricia Bullrich said about 389 kilograms were hidden in diplomatic luggage seized in 2016. It required a joint, yearlong investigation but suspects were arrested this week. Never let anyone else pack your bags. We have used your information to see if you have a subscription with us, but did not find one. Please use the button below to verify an existing account or to purchase a new subscription. A junior lawyers decision to speak out with an email copied to dozens of government lawyers about an allegedly abusive boss at Ontarios Ministry of the Attorney General caused Queens Park to finally take notice of historic problems that were later called a festering sore in a government report. I write to express my profound disappointment and deep sense of shame in the organization I work for under your leadership, the young lawyer wrote in November 2016 to then-deputy attorney general Patrick Monahan. Seeking maximum impact, the junior lawyer copied her two-page letter of complaint to the executive management group and dozens of rank and file lawyers at the attorney generals ministry. She was responding to Monahans glowing description in a staff email of Malliha Wilson, his assistant deputy attorney general who had just received a lateral posting to another part of the Ontario public service. Your memo is particularly distressing given that you and other senior leadership in government . . . are fully aware of this pattern of behaviour, the junior lawyer wrote. Yet you chose to sweep all of this under the carpet. Wednesday, the Star reported on a secret government report into the behaviour of bully bosses at the ministry. In short, report author Leslie Macleod found that the workplace at the Civil Law Division is a toxic cesspool where senior bureaucrats male and female bully, harass and discriminate against hundreds of lawyers and administrative assistants. In response to the story, Wilson said she had never seen the report and was not involved in the process that led to it. I have not seen the report or the emails you refer to, Wilson wrote in a statement to the Star. Any report must have been commissioned after I left the civil service and I was not consulted in its development. I am deeply concerned about any allegations that may suggest I treated anyone unfairly. I have sought to be a champion of diversity and inclusion throughout my career, and I am proud to have been the first visible minority to hold the office of Assistant Deputy Attorney General in Ontario. Ontario Attorney General Yasir Naqvi told reporters at Queens Park he had previously been briefed about the situation, the report and how there are some challenges by the officials. Now that the report is there I know that the ministry is taking the responsibility very seriously and working hard to implement the recommendations of the report. Neither Naqvi nor senior ministry bureaucrats would answer specific questions by the Star. Naqvi said secrecy around the report (it was never released publicly) existed to protect employees, although no specific examples of complaints are in the completed document. Over 250 people were interviewed. They came forward and discussed their perspective and their opinions on the basis of confidentiality because they did not want any negative repercussions towards their careers and the work they do, Naqvi said. The Star has attempted numerous times to reach former assistant deputy attorney general Wilson, now in private practice. The Star has also sought comment from former deputy attorney general Monahan, but he was recently appointed to a judgeship and a spokesperson said he would not be commenting. It is not appropriate for Judges of the Superior Court of Justice to discuss such matters in the media, said spokesperson Norine Nathanson. Wilson, who was assistant deputy attorney general from 2008 to 2016, was transferred to the Investment Management Corporation of Ontario in November 2016, stayed for one year and recently formed her own law firm. Here is what sparked the report into her conduct and that of dozens of other senior managers at the ministry, which is generally thought of as the law firm for Ontario, according to people who work at the ministry. Sources within the ministry say that for several years government lawyers were complaining to Monahan and others about bully bosses, including Wilson. Nothing substantive was done. Among the complaints were allegations that senior management frequently ordered lawyers to change their well-researched legal opinions, sometimes for political reasons. In the summer of 2016 a group of senior lawyers who reported to Wilson and Monahan contacted Steve Orsini, the secretary of cabinet in Ontario who serves as the provinces top civil servant. Orsini stepped in and Monahan was told to look into the allegations against his assistant deputy (Wilson). A survey was done, apparently without Wilsons knowledge, and it confirmed at least some of the allegations. A decision was made to move Wilson out of the attorney generals ministry to another government posting with similar salary. On Nov. 18, 2016, Monahan wrote a glowing memo about Wilsons years of service, saying our colleague Malliha Wilson has decided to pursue an exciting new opportunity at the Investment Management Corporation of Ontario. The six-paragraph note lauded her for many accomplishments, including breaking down silos and co-ordinating the delivery of legal services. Finally, Monahan wrote, I want to personally acknowledge the extremely valuable support Malliha has provided me during my time as deputy . . . her departure will be a loss for (the ministry). That went out on a Friday. The following Monday afternoon, a junior lawyer who had worked for Wilson wrote a strongly worded note to Monahan, and copied others in the ministry. In my view, your memorandum illustrates a lack of sensitivity to, or basic understanding of, the experiences of the many people who served or have served under you. At the very least, it has raised deep cynicism about the possibility that, despite the clear evidence of (assistant deputy attorney general) Wilsons long history of abusive behaviour, senior leadership might subscribe to the views expressed in the memo. The Star has been unable to reach the junior lawyer and is not publishing her name at this time. The junior lawyer wrote in her note, sent to some of the highest-ranked civil servants in Ontario, that Monahans laudatory memo serves to minimize and silence those of us who were subject to her abusive behaviour and it re-subjects us to the humiliation and cruelty that characterized her relationships with so many of the people that worked for her. The junior lawyer said that after observing poor treatment of many others by Wilson she finally walked out of Wilsons office after suffering a particularly abusive attack. In her note she writes of numerous times when she was proud to work as a public servant at the ministry. But today I am ashamed of the institution I work for. She said it would have been better if Monahan had written a simple, neutral note announcing Wilsons departure. She called on Monahan to show strong leadership and a commitment to integrity and honesty. By January 2017, Monahan and other senior leaders in the provincial government had hired Macleod, a former public servant, to conduct an in-depth investigation into allegations of harassment, threatening and verbal abuse at the ministry. Among her conclusions after a six-month probe were that many employees work in an atmosphere of constant fear of retribution and a culture of silence prevails. Irwin Glasberg was brought in to take over from Wilson on an interim basis after she moved to another government department. Monahan became a judge, and a new deputy appointed to replace him in early 2018 (Paul Boniferro, previously a lawyer in private practice at McCarthy Tetrault) Macleods report, concluded in July 2017, has remained under wraps. It was shared with lawyers in the ministry, but they were all warned not to distribute it. She made more than 100 recommendations but the ministry will not say which are being implemented. The report is called Turning the Ship Around. Thursday, the Star was contacted by five current ministry lawyers who said they continue to have the same concerns about the ministry as they did two years ago. Clarification February 23, 2018: This article was edited from a previous version to include response from Malliha Wilson. Kevin Donovan can be reached at 416-312-3503 or kdonovan@thestar.ca The controversy roiling the Progressive Conservatives is not a source of joy for the Liberals or New Democrats even with the June 7 election fast approaching. This is bad for all of us, a high-ranking Liberal insider confided this week of the PC saga transfixing the province since former leader Patrick Brown was forced to resign Jan. 25 amid allegations of sexual impropriety. If General Motors marketing plan was Fords crash and will kill you, thats bad for the entire car industry. Well, this is bad for politics. NDP Leader Andrea Horwath agreed Friday that people are feeling pretty cynical about politics in Ontario right now. They have a deep sense of disappointment. The (Progressive) Conservative party is in no shape to govern itself, let alone our great province, said Horwath, mindful that the current climate presents an opportunity for the New Democrats. The trouble is that the Brown soap opera widening to include questions about his personal finances and suspect membership numbers is hogging so much media attention that its hard for other parties and PC leadership candidates to get their messages out. Read more: Opinion | Thomas Walkom: Patrick Brown the sole Red Tory in Ontario PC leadership melodrama PC party in crisis, says Caroline Mulroney Your 5 Ontario PC leadership candidates: A Ford, a Mulroney, an unknown, the former leader and the favourite This certainly isnt the time to be distracted by one persons problems, leadership candidate Caroline Mulroney said Friday, urging Brown to drop out of the March 10 race for his old job after being kicked out of the party caucus at Queens Park. Liberal MPP Deb Matthews, co-chair of Premier Kathleen Wynnes re-election campaign, said she finds the whole thing very troubling. I dont think anybody is enjoying this. Its not good for democracy when weve got this kind of activity going on in a party that had a proud history in this province. Thats disappointing for us all, said Matthews. PCs privately fear they could, once again, snatch defeat from the jaws of victory after four straight electoral losses to the Liberals in 2003, 2007, 2011, and 2014 under three different leaders. By the time we head to the polls in June, it will have been 19 years since weve won an election, noted Mulroney. This is the time for a new generation to take the reins, a generation of leadership that can finally do what the past generation couldnt win. During the 2015 leadership race, Brown hammered the partys old guard, vowing to avoid self-inflicted wounds like former leader John Torys promise to fund faith-based schools, and Tim Hudaks pledge to cut 100,000 public sector jobs. Yet Brown himself has triggered a leadership race at a time when the party had hoped to be gearing up to topple the Liberals, not fighting a civil war. Have your say Any leadership contest is divisive and were seeing that this time, said Tory MPP Todd Smith, a co-chair of Christine Elliotts leadership bid. This one may be more divisive than most just given the time constraints that were dealing with here and the accusations that have been hurled, he said. Asked about Browns uphill rerun for the leadership amid damaging allegations, Smith said hes incredibly competitive. Hes almost too competitive at times. The chips are going to fall March 10. And well have to pick up those chips and try and make the best of it behind our new leader and move forward into the election. Still, the danger of a pox on all their houses hovers over all three major parties. You want politicians to have a lot of integrity and you want them to have enough integrity to temper their own ambitions, said Christopher Cochrane, author and political science professor at the University of Toronto. After all the dust settles, if Brown cannot shake the allegations against him, then that does do more damage to the view of politicians being utterly untrustworthy. But at the same time, if the party was willing to get rid of him, and potentially lose the next election because he was not up to their ethical standards . . . that reflects relatively well on them. Thats the silver lining. The PCs also have a longer-term structural problem to deal with the huge divide between rank-and-file members and the party establishment. Its a bit of a mystery how to get past that, the professor said, given the further chasm with a vocal Brown constituency that backs him despite the mounting allegations. The best answer I can give is leadership where the hope is they can find somebody who is a strong enough leader to tie all the loose ends together. Even before Brown quit Jan. 25, an Ottawa-area PC activist was working on Im Out, an underground movement with a website of the same name opposing the discredited former leaders rule over the party. Its an anti-corruption faction, says Carlos Naldinho, the man behind the Im Out website. Naldinho said hes taking a pause while the leadership race plays out, but said the aim of taking back our PC party remains the same though working against candidates Brown installed may not be necessary after March 10. Were optimistic a new leader will take care of that. Id like to have something to do other than watching the dumpster fire. The other issue the PCs may also continue to struggle with is the one-member, one-vote in choosing a leader, versus the typical practice of sending delegates to a convention. Cochrane agreed the one-vote system tends to pull parties in more ideological directions during leadership races, which can pull a party apart. However, amid increasing demand for peoples voices to be heard, its hard to dial that back. Read more about: The Ontario Progressive Conservative Party is in crisis, leadership candidate Caroline Mulroney warned Friday as she called on Patrick Brown to do the right thing and leave the race amid new revelations his personal finances are being probed by the provinces integrity commissioner. Brown, the discredited former leader of the party who resigned hours after allegations of sexual misconduct against two young women surfaced was turfed from the PC caucus but nonetheless given the go-ahead last week to seek his old job. But Mulroney, speaking to reporters at her campaign headquarters in midtown Toronto, said the controversies are jeopardizing the partys chances of winning the June election. It needs to be said. Our party is in crisis, and this leadership is simply too important to Ontarians, she said. Our goal is to fire Kathleen Wynne and were losing sight of that . . . . We need someone who will stand up for our values with integrity. Over the last couple of weeks, weve seen allegations of misconduct, wrongdoing and fighting within our party. Any candidate for leader and for premier needs to provide Ontarians with a way forward. (Thursday) night, I learned Patrick Brown is under investigation by the integrity commissioner, proving once again that these distractions have no place in the leadership race. I hope that he does the right thing for the party and steps aside. Former Ontario Progressive Conservative leader Patrick Brown has joined the partys leadership race. Brown, who resigned amid sexual misconduct allegations, said Friday that the experience was like being hit by a truck. (The Associated Press) She called on the three other leadership hopefuls Christine Elliott, Doug Ford and Tanya Granic Allen to urge Brown to stand down. Integrity commissioner J. David Wake is demanding answers after a Brown staffer told the Star the former leader rented out his multimillion-dollar house on Lake Simcoe. Earlier this month, Wake wrote to Brown asking for details following the Star story that raised questions about how the MPP could afford the five-bedroom house. I note that an article in the Toronto Star on February 9, 2018, an employee in your constituency office is quoted saying that you receive rental income from your home, Wake wrote Feb. 12. The act also requires that you disclose all sources of income to my office, and as such I ask that you provide me with confirmation of same. Wakes letter, obtained by the Star, came a week prior to Conservative MPP Randy Hillier filing a complaint, asking for an investigation into Browns alleged financial irregularities to determine if they violate the Members Integrity Act. Brown, now an independent MPP, spoke briefly to the Star on Thursday, saying everything is in compliance with the integrity commissioner. Mulroney said the constant chaos is harming the partys chances on June 7. This election is just too important to jeopardize by playing politics, she said. This certainly isnt the time to be distracted by one persons problems. This is the time to unite the party. Candidates for the PC leadership will take part in a debate next Wednesday in Ottawa. About Caroline Mulroney Read more about: WASHINGTONFor years, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) has been overlooked in Washington. Overshadowed by more politically powerful law enforcement agencies such as the FBI, the ATF garnered headlines mostly for notorious episodes, including the deadly 1993 siege in Waco, Texas, and the Fast and Furious gun-walking scandal more than a decade later. Now, the ATF is on the verge of a crisis. The agency, which has not grown significantly since its founding in 1973, is about to confront a staffing shortage and is set to lose its tobacco and alcohol enforcement authorities. U.S. President Donald Trump has yet to nominate a director to oversee the agency, which has been without permanent leadership for eight of the past 12 years. Amid the dearth of leadership and resources, the White House is pushing the ATF to the forefront of its fight against violent crime. In response to the mass shooting at a Florida high school last week, Trump, who promised to fight violent criminal gangs and illegal guns two of the ATFs key missions announced that he would be relying on the bureau to regulate so-called bump stock accessories. But it is all but politically impossible for Trump, who counts the powerful gun lobby among his most ardent supporters, to strengthen the ATF. The National Rifle Association (NRA) has long sought to hobble the agency in an effort to curb its ability to regulate guns, which the gun lobby has traditionally opposed. Most people in law enforcement know why ATF cant get a director, said Michael Bouchard, a former agent and the president of the ATF Association, an independent group that supports current and former bureau officials. Its not because of the people. Its because of the politics. For decades, the NRA has used its sway in Washington to preserve the ATF in its limited capacity. It has aggressively lobbied against nominated directors and pushed Congress to enact restrictions on how the bureau spends money to curtail its ability to regulate firearms and track gun crimes. One funding provision, for example, forbids the ATF from using electronic databases to trace guns to owners. Instead, the agency relies on a warehouse full of paper records. It is beneficial to the NRA to have a smaller agency such as the ATF in charge of gun regulation, one senior bureau official acknowledged, rather than a larger, more politically powerful agency such as the FBI that can more effectively demand additional resources from Capitol Hill. The gun lobby is one of the most potent political forces in Washington, doling out tens of millions of dollars each election cycle to lawmakers and campaigns to steer the political discourse on gun regulation. The NRA reported spending the most amount of money in its history in 2016 working to support Trump and the Republican Party, and its backing has come under renewed scrutiny in the gun debate that has taken shape in the days since the shooting in Parkland, Fla. The president, in turn, has courted gun advocates, vowing to defend firearm owners and the NRA. In a tweet Thursday morning, Trump called the organization Great People and Great American Patriots. The ATF rose to prominence in the Prohibition era with its takedown of Al Capone. In the decades since, its mission has been tailored toward gun violence and trafficking. More recently, the bureau has had its share of troubling episodes. It was infamously involved in the 1993 siege at a Branch Davidian compound in Texas in which 75 peopled were killed, and during the Fast and Furious scandal two decades later, the bureau lost guns across the Mexican border, which were later recovered at crime scenes. Agents also used a multimillion-dollar slush fund meant to pay informants to instead pad their own pockets, the New York Times revealed last year. Under president Barack Obama, the White House considered eliminating the ATF. The proposal, a direct affront to the NRA, would have transferred all its law enforcement authorities to the FBI, a former senior Obama administration official said. The plan was largely abandoned, however, after the 2012 school shooting in Newtown, Conn. The NRA opposed the nomination of Andrew Travers, whom Obama selected to lead the agency in 2010. Travers was never confirmed. The NRA did not take a position on the agencys last and only Senate-confirmed director, B. Todd Jones, who led the ATF from 2011 to 2015. We support enforcement of the laws on the books and ATF efforts to apprehend and prosecute violent criminals, said Jennifer Baker, a spokesperson for the NRA. We have and will continue to oppose political appointees looking to enact an anti-gun agenda through the regulatory process, making it more difficult for law-abiding citizens to exercise their constitutional rights while criminals continue to break the law. An official at the Justice Department said the administration was interviewing potential ATF directors, but did not know when that might result in a nomination. The White House has confidence in the acting director, Thomas Brandon, the official said, who was not authorized to speak publicly about the matter. Brandon, who has served in that capacity since 2015, is thought of highly among the ATF workforce, agents said. But even his most ardent supporters acknowledge that a Senate-confirmed director, hand-picked by the president, would be better positioned to be an advocate for the agency. There is no indication that Brandon will be nominated to permanently lead the bureau. ATF works diligently with the resources that we have, said bureau spokesperson Joshua Jackson. And like any agency, we could always use additional resources. The ATFs own 52-page budget proposal for the current fiscal year describes an agency on the cusp of a resource crisis. That document is separate from the White House budget proposed last week, which lays out the administrations broader priorities for the fiscal year that begins in October. In describing its own shortages, the ATF says it remains unable to fulfill even basic regulatory responsibilities, including inspections of firearms dealers something the bureau says presents a significant risk to public safety. The ATF is also bracing for the departure of nearly a fifth of its roughly 2,500 special agents. Of them, 499 are at least 50 years old, according to the budget proposal, and face mandatory retirement at 57. Last year, 141 agents retired from the ATF, Jackson said, and only 117 were hired. An additional 24 agents left the bureau for other reasons. Still, as ranks thin, the ATF is being tasked to lead some of the Trump administrations most lauded violent crime initiatives. A team of agents was sent to Chicago over the summer to help the city combat gun violence, and the bureau is leading crackdowns on the MS-13 criminal gang, which Trump has vowed to eradicate. OXON HILL, MD.The big screen beside the stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference played a video mocking an old Connecticut regulation governing what makes a pickle a pickle, and if youd been teleported to the present from, say, 1988, this would have made perfect sense. And then youd stare wide-eyed at much of the rest of the festivities. For decades, CPAC was a gathering Republicans attended to rail against long-standing conservative villains like overreaching government. In the Donald Trump era, they have largely been superseded by other enemies. This years CPAC still offers moments of old-fashioned conservative orthodoxy. But it is being joined by a large dose of the loose philosophy that might be best called Trumpism. On Thursday, speakers griped about the FBI. They darkly warned about Muslims. They made fun of transgender people. They held a panel on fake news. And, one after the other, they hailed the wondrousness of a year-old era that Vice-President Mike Pence claimed was the most consequential year in the history of the conservative movement. At a gathering normally heavy on Republican legislators, only one, Sen. Ted Cruz, was on the speaker roster. In their place this year were Trump administration officials and Trump-friendly others: Fox News hosts, a Breitbart News editor, campus rabble-rousers fighting political correctness, far-right Europeans. Thursdays most telling indication of the new moment was the presence of Marion Marechal-Le Pen, the newest star of the Le Pen dynasty of Frances far-right National Front. Endorsing Trumps America First motto and warning of a Muslim infiltration of France, she declared, Vive le nationalisme! Trump was scheduled to speak on Friday. The NRA strikes back The biggest news on Thursday was the incendiary remarks from two officials from the National Rifle Association. The NRA, the top U.S. gun-rights lobby group, has a time-tested strategy of temporary quiet in the immediate aftermath of a mass shooting. On Thursday, eight days after the shooting that killed 17 people at a Florida school, they used the friendly confines of CPAC to lash out. First, spokesperson Dana Loesch levelled a wild and baseless charge against news reporters claiming that they secretly enjoy mass shootings. Ill say it really slowly so all the people on the platform in the back can hear me loud and clear: Many in legacy media love mass shootings, she said, emphasizing each word. You guys love it. Now, Im not saying that you love the tragedy. But I am saying that you love the ratings. NRA chief Wayne LaPierre says the way to "stop a bad guy with a gun," in the nation's schools is to arm a "good guy with a gun." (The Associated Press) She was followed by NRA executive vice-president Wayne LaPierre, who called for schools to be hardened with armed security and then painted a frightening picture of the state of American society, warning that the Democratic Party was infested with socialist saboteurs who hate American values. He advised the audience to be fearful, saying, You should be anxious, and you should be frightened. Media faces scorn Loeschs husband, Chris Loesch, appeared on a separate panel. He urged the audience to wave goodbye to the mainstream media. Dozens of people got up from their seats to wave to reporters seated in the back. Just as it was a hallmark of Trump rallies, media criticism was a prominent feature of the new CPAC. The first video of the day was a compilation of clips of television anchors admitting errors or being mocked by Trump and Fox personalities as fake news. The first panel was titled An Affair to Remember: How the Far Left and the Mainstream Media Got in Bed Together. In a sharp reversal from the usual Republican argument, which holds that cloistered media elites do not leave their northeastern bubble to speak with average Trump supporters in forgotten communities, one speaker, Candace Owens, complained that CNN too frequently interviewed Trump supporters who had no teeth. They wanted to make Trump supporters look stupid, she said. Hillary: yep, still hated Ben Shapiro, editor of the website The Daily Wire and an icon to may of the young conservatives who attend CPAC, praised Trump for preventing Hillary Clinton from becoming president. A lock her up chant, like those common during Trumps campaign, erupted from the left of the room, then another from the right. Within seconds, most of the gathering was chanting for the imprisonment of the candidate Trump defeated 15 months ago. Cruz made a Clinton joke that appeared to be about her husbands infidelity. He said a remark Bill Clinton made about Obamacare was one of the only times he had agreed with the ex-president other than about Hillary." Warnings of a Muslim menace Trump has long singled out Muslims as a danger to society. CPAC speakers did, too. Le Pen claimed Muslim immigration was creating an Islamic counter-society and changing France from the eldest daughter of the Catholic Church to the little niece of Islam. Zuhdi Jasser of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, a Muslim, called for a government commission on Islamism. Breitbart editor Raheem Kassam claimed, without providing evidence, of a dangerous sharia element establishing a presence right here in the United States." Identity politics Shapiro decried a culture in which, he claimed, members of minority groups can claim they have been victimized by an imaginary white privilege. He dismissed the existence of transgender people, saying a person born with male anatomy is a dude even if he identifies as a woman. Other young conservatives also delighted in tweaking what they said was left-wing identity politics gone mad. Grant Strobl, chairman of Young Americans for Freedom, was applauded as he explained how he exploited a University of Michigan policy that allowed students to choose their own gender pronouns to make professors call him His Majesty. Gorka! Sebastian Gorka, the combative former Trump aide pushed out of the White House by chief of staff John Kelly, had an uneventful appearance on a live-taped radio show. He managed to make headlines anyway: before he entered the room, he swore at a reporter, called him irrelevant, and lightly pushed him before huffing away. Read more about: WASHINGTONA dog injured a child onboard a Southwest Airlines flight, the latest incident in the controversy over allowing emotional-support animals on planes. It happened Wednesday night while passengers were boarding a Southwest flight from Phoenix to Portland, Ore. A spokesman for the airline said the dogs teeth scraped the girls forehead as she approached the animal, causing a minor injury. Southwest said paramedics examined the girl, who was later cleared to continue on the flight. The dog and its owner remained in Phoenix while the plane left about 20 minutes behind schedule. Neither the girl nor the dogs handler was named. Passenger Todd Rice tweeted about the incident and said the girl tried to pet the dog, ABC 15 reported. @SouthwestAir flight 1904 allows a support dog on the plane, bites kid, paramedics now on plane. Why are dogs on the plane?! Never again will I fly SWA, Rice said in his tweet, which appears to have been deleted. In another tweet, which also appears to have been deleted, Rice urged Southwest to rewrite its safety policy, according to the Arizona Republic. Responding to Rices tweet, Southwest said: We appreciate your concern and sharing this information with us, Todd. We assure you that Safety is our top priority and are addressing the situation. Southwest allows trained emotional-support animals to travel on domestic and international flights as long as their handlers provide health certificates, permits and vaccinations required by the country, state or territory from and/or to which the animal is being transported. The incident comes as two major airlines have changed their policies in response to an uptick in the number of reports involving animals on commercial flights. Delta Air Lines said in January that it is requiring advance documentation, such as proof of health or vaccinations and signed paperwork confirming that the animals can behave. The new requirements are in response to an 84 percent increase in incidents since 2016, from urinating or defecating, to barking or growling, to mauling a passenger whose face needed 28 stitches. Delta said it carries nearly 250,000 service or support animals each year. The rise in serious incidents involving animals in flight leads us to believe that the lack of regulation in both health and training screening for these animals is creating unsafe conditions across U.S. air travel, John Laughter, Deltas senior vice president, said in a statement. United Airlines announced similar changes earlier this month. The new policy also comes on the heels of dramatic increases in the number of passengers flying with comfort animals. About 76,000 flew last year, nearly double the 43,000 in 2016, United spokesman Charlie Hobart told USA Today. Federal guidelines specify that airlines must allow passengers with disabilities to board with trained service or emotional-support animals of many stripes, regardless of the animals potential to offend or annoy others on the plane, The Washington Post reported. But airlines have latitude to deny boarding to certain unusual service animals, including snakes and other reptiles, ferrets, rodents and spiders, and can prevent them from boarding if the animal poses a threat to the safety of others. A few weeks ago, United denied boarding to a peacock named Dexter because it did not meet the required weight and size. Shortly before that incident, a student who was on a Spirit Airlines flight said she flushed her dwarf hamster named Pebbles down an airport toilet after an airline representative told her to do so. A spokeswoman for the low-cost carrier confirmed that an employee had incorrectly told the passenger that she could bring her emotional-support animal on the flight but denied that an employee told her to flush the hamster, The Post reported. NEW DELHIIndian Prime Minister Narendra Modi greeted Justin Trudeau on Friday with a hug, one day after embarrassed Canadian diplomats had to revoke a party invitation for a man convicted of attempting to kill an Indian politician. The invitation was the latest blunder in Trudeaus eight-day visit, which has included everything from criticism of his colourful wardrobe to questions about whether his government is sufficiently critical of Sikh extremists. Jaspal Atwal, a Canada-based former member of a banned Sikh separatist group, had been invited by a British Columbia MP to a Thursday evening party for Trudeau at Canadas High Commission in New Delhi. Read more: Trudeaus outfits in India seen as an over-the-top fashion faux pas, internet decides Justin Trudeaus very bad trip to India may carry a steep cost Why was Trudeau snubbed on his visit to India? Atwal was convicted of trying to kill an Indian cabinet minister during a 1986 visit to Canada. The minister was shot but survived. Atwal was imprisoned and became a businessman after his release. Canada quickly withdrew the invitation once it was discovered, with Trudeau telling reporters: Obviously we take this situation extremely seriously. The individual in question never should have received an invitation. Earlier in the week, Atwal attended a Mumbai reception at which he was photographed with Trudeaus wife, Sophie Gregoire Trudeau. Modi still welcomed Trudeau on Friday with his signature bear hug, smiling at his wife and their three children, who also attended the formal outdoor ceremony. In a Thursday night tweet, Modi said he looked forward to meeting Trudeau and his family, adding I appreciate his deep commitment to ties between our two countries. But it hasnt been an easy trip for Trudeau in many ways. Trudeau has been ridiculed in India on social media for his familys seemingly endless wardrobe changes, with the photogenic group often appearing in matching and colourful Indian clothing, and has faced repeated insistence that he denounce Sikh extremism. Sikh radicalism is the main issue, the Hindustan Times, one of Indias largest newspapers, said in an editorial earlier this week. Justin Trudeau should allay Indias concerns on terrorism. Canada has a small but politically potent Sikh population, some of whom support a breakaway Sikh state, known as Khalistan, inside India. The Indian media often describe Trudeaus government as being soft on the Khalistan issue. Trudeau insisted that hed told Indian politicians that was not true. I was pleased to be able to make very, very clear that Canada supports one united India, he said after one meeting. Later Friday, the two countries signed agreements for co-operation in security, trade and higher education, including making it easier for exchanges of students and teachers. Canada is one of the most sought-after destinations by Indians for their studies. Read more about: WASHINGTONA third former member of Donald Trumps presidential campaign has admitted to a crime and agreed to co-operate with special counsel Robert Muellers investigation. Rick Gates, who was deputy chairman of Trumps campaign and then deputy chairman of Trumps inauguration committee, pleaded guilty Friday afternoon to committing a conspiracy to defraud the United States and lying to the FBI, numerous U.S. media outlets reported. He told the judge that he understood his eventual sentence would be dependent on his co-operation with Mueller. The conviction of Gates further validates Muellers probe, which has been criticized by Trump as a witch hunt. And it exposes Trump to yet more legal and political risk. Gatess decision comes a day after Mueller laid new bank fraud and tax evasion charges against him. In a letter to family and friends, obtained Friday by ABC, Gates said, Despite my initial desire to vigorously defend myself, I have had a change of heart. The reality of how long this legal process will likely take, the cost, and the circus-like atmosphere of an anticipated trial are too much. I will better serve my family moving forward by exiting this process, he said. Gates joins two campaign members, Michael Flynn and George Papadopoulos, who previously pleaded guilty to lying to the FBIpleaded guilty Tuesday for lying to the FBI about his interactions with Gates. The charges against Gates were not about his conduct on the campaign. It is not known what information Gates might have on Trump or people close to Trump. At very least, legal experts said, his plea puts more pressure on Paul Manafort, the Trump campaign chairman for whom he served as right-hand man in politics and business. The Los Angeles Times reported last weekend that its sources said Gates had agreed to testify against Manafort but did not have incriminating information on Trump. Regardless, said Peter Zeidenberg, a former federal prosecutor, Gatess plea will make Trumps situation a lot worse. It makes it more likely that Manaforts going to plea. Although he was always going to plea eventually, anyway. But it just speeds up that day where hes going to have to, said Zeidenberg. Manafort said in a statement reported by the Washington Post: I had hoped and expected my business colleague would have had the strength to continue the battle to prove our innocence. Trump was not asked about Gates at a joint press conference with Australian Prime Minster Malcolm Turnbull on Friday afternoon. He ignored shouted questions about Gates at an event earlier in the day. Nick Akerman, a former assistant prosecutor on the Watergate scandal, said Mueller would likely require information on people other than Manafort to accept a deal with Gates, since the case against Manafort is already strong. Hes in a position to know a lot, and I cant imagine they would enter into any deal with him that would not involve total co-operation. Its not just testifying against Manafort, said Akerman, now a partner at law firm Dorsey and Whitney. Theres not a lot of incentive to get him as a witness against Manafort, because you dont need a witness everything is in documents. So the key here is that he can testify as to other things. Zeidenberg disagreed. Youre always going to take the plea. You dont want to try this case, he said. Of course youre happy to plea. If the guy has information on Manafort, youll take the plea, you say thank you very much, you make it more likely that Manafort pleas. No one wants to go to trial if they dont have to. Gatess plea is the second major development in the investigation in a week. Dramatically undercutting Trumps frequent claim that the allegation of Russian election meddling is a fraud, Mueller announced last Friday that he was charging 13 alleged members of a Russian operation to assist Trump in 2016 using online trickery. Gates and Manafort had been charged the same day in October for a series of alleged offences committed outside of the campaign. Prosecutors alleged they had spent the period from 2006 to 2016 laundering millions of dollars they received from a pro-Russia Ukrainian political party, and from 2006 to 2014 lobbied the U.S. on behalf of this party, Viktor Yanukovychs once-governing Party of Regions, without registering as foreign agents as required by law. On Thursday, Mueller also alleged that Gates funnelled millions into foreign bank accounts in Cyprus, the Seychelles and elsewhere, and hid the existence and ownership of the foreign companies and bank accounts, falsely and repeatedly reporting to their tax preparers and to the United States that they had no foreign bank accounts. Gates had faced the possibility of decades in prison. The guilty plea will likely make his penalty substantially less severe. Manafort continues to fight the charges against him. Mueller, the former director of the FBI, was appointed in May to probe the relationship between Trumps campaign and the Russian government, which U.S. intelligence agencies believe interfered in the 2016 presidential election to try to help Trump get elected. Trump argues that the probe is a biased exercise that has found no collusion and no obstruction. He and his allies have dismissed the previous two guilty pleas as inconsequential, claiming they do not reflect on him personally. Part of Trumps argument about why the charges against Manafort are unimportant is that Manafort was part of his campaign for only five months, ending in August 2016. Gates, Manaforts protege in the business of international political consulting, remained after Manafort left. Though sources told the Washington Post that he was marginalized after Manaforts exit, he continued to enjoy the trust of others in Trumps orbit. The Republican National Committee paid Gates $70,000 for his strategy services between September 2016 and January 2017. After the election, Trump friend Tom Barrack made him the deputy chair of the inaugural committee, for which they raised tens of millions of dollars. And Gates joined other former top campaign aides in co-founding a pro-Trump non-profit, America First Policies, that received the presidents blessing. Gates was pushed out at America First in May 2017 after news reports about Manaforts controversial relationships with Russia. The two men had been closely tied for years. Gates, who is in his mid-40s, met Manafort as an intern at Manaforts consulting and lobbying firm, then joined Manafort at a new firm. In 2008, the New York Times reported, Gates took charge of the firms work in Eastern Europe. His work with Manafort allegedly made him millions; the Mueller indictment alleges that he transferred $3 million in unreported Ukrainian money to offshore accounts. Read more about: WASHINGTONTwo Trump administration officials on Friday said the new U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem will open in May 2018 to coincide with the 70th anniversary of Israel declaring independence. The officials said Congress is being notified of the impending move on Friday. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson signed off on the security plan for the new embassy on Thursday. The officials werent authorized to discuss the plan publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity. A ribbon-cutting is being planned for mid-May. Israel proclaimed independence on May 14, 1948. The May opening marks a significant acceleration. Since Trumps announcement, his administration has been sifting through options for fast-tracking the Israel embassys relocation. Last month, Vice-President Mike Pence announced during a visit to Israel that the embassy would move by the end of 2019 possibly earlier. Ambassador David Friedman, who lobbied for Trumps decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israels capital, has advocated moving the embassy as soon as possible. The U.S. has looked at several possible sites. The most likely plan involves a phased approach to opening the embassy in Jerusalems Arnona neighbourhood at an existing U.S. facility that handles consular affairs like passports and visas. The U.S. could initially retrofit a small suite of offices in that facility to accommodate Friedman and one or two top aides such as his chief of staff. That would allow the administration to hang an embassy sign over the door and formally open it, perhaps in the next few months. The ribbon could be cut in time for Israels Independence Day, Yom Haatzmaut, which takes place in April. The rest of the embassy staff would remain at first in Americas current facility in Tel Aviv. Over time, the Arnona facility would be expanded to accommodate more embassy personnel. The expansion could ultimately involve an adjacent property that currently houses a home for senior citizens, officials said. That property is already set to come under U.S. control in the next few years under a previous arrangement. Retrofitting just a few offices could be accomplished at minimal cost. But expanding the new embassy into a full-fledged complex that houses the bulk of Americas diplomatic staff in Israel would easily cost more than $500 million dollars, officials familiar with the process said. Particularly pricey are the strict security requirements for embassies that are written into U.S. law. Earlier Friday, four U.S. officials told The Associated Press the Trump administration is considering an offer from Republican mega-donor Sheldon Adelson to pay for at least part of the new embassy. Lawyers at the State Department are looking into the legality of accepting private donations to cover some or all of the embassy costs, the administration officials said. Its unclear how much of the cost Adelson might be willing to cover. In one possible scenario, the administration would solicit contributions not only from Adelson but potentially from other donors in the evangelical Christian and American Jewish communities, too. One official said Adelson, a Las Vegas casino magnate and staunch supporter of Israel, had offered to pay the difference between the total cost expected to run into the hundreds of millions of dollars and what the administration is able to raise. Under any circumstance, letting private citizens cover the costs of an official government building would mark a significant departure from historical U.S. practice. In the Jerusalem case, it would add yet another layer of controversy to Trumps politically charged decision to move the embassy, given Adelsons longstanding affiliation with right-wing Israeli politics. Its not clear if there is any precedent, nor whether government lawyers would give the green light to accept Adelsons or anyone elses donations for the embassy. Adelsons unconventional offer was made around the time Trump announced in December he would move the embassy to the disputed city of Jerusalem. It would address the presidents stated distaste for shelling out eye-popping sums for overseas diplomatic facilities. Although Trump has promoted the Jerusalem move as fulfilling a key campaign promise, he also was outspoken last month in blasting the $1 billion price tag for a new embassy in London. The State Department said it had nothing to announce about the Jerusalem embassy move and would not get ahead of any decisions by the secretary. We have no confirmation or details about this hypothetical proposal, the State Department said. Kathy Bethany, the former cost management director for the State Departments Bureau of Overseas Building Operations, said she couldnt recall any instances of the U.S. government accepting donations to build embassies during her tenure, which ended in 2014. I dont know how well that would work, Bethany said. Would we be beholden to putting their name on the building? Ive never heard of that. There are several ways, in theory, that it could happen. Short of donating directly to the embassy, citizens could always cut a general check to the U.S. Treasury, as politicians occasionally do to make a point about the national debt. The donors could unofficially earmark their dollars as being intended to offset the embassys cost. The State Departments Foreign Affairs Manual also lays out a formal process for accepting gifts from private citizens, including real estate. The process says gifts must be rigorously evaluated on a case-by-case basis and only allowed when the gift would not give the appearance of a conflict of interest. Adelson, who donated $5 million to Trumps inaugural committee, is one of the Republican Partys biggest donors and a major supporter of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Adelson also finances Israel Hayom, a pro-Netanyahu newspaper that is distributed free throughout Israel. If lawyers decide to allow donations for the embassy, it would come with significant political risk for Trump. The president already faces major criticism from Palestinians and others who say his decision to move the embassy to Jerusalem also claimed by the Palestinians for the capital of their future state tipped the scales unfairly in Israels favour. Mort Klein, president of the pro-Israel group Zionist Organization of America and a close associate of Adelson, said accepting donations would be ill-advised. Klein said he knew Adelson was deeply interested in seeing the embassy relocate to Jerusalem but was unaware that the casino mogul had offered to help pay for it himself. This is a government project. Its a government-run embassy, Klein said. I dont want people to be able to say it was Jewish money. Read more about: WASHINGTONU.S. President Donald Trump has said over and over that the U.S. has a trade deficit with Canada. Over and over, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and other Canadian officials have said hes incorrect. Now Trumps own economic advisers have revealed that they also think Trump has it wrong. This week, Trumps White House released the Annual Report of the Council of Economic Advisers. The council is a group of three economists appointed by Trump to give him economic advice; its annual report offers an analysis of the performance of the U.S. economy. And it simply says, in passing, that the U.S. has a surplus with Canada. The United States has free trade agreements (FTAs) with a number of countries some of which represent net trade surpluses for the United States (Canada and Singapore), and some of which represent deficits (Mexico and South Korea), the report says. Why is there a U.S. surplus with Canada? The advisers chairman Kevin Hassett, University of Chicago professor Tomas Philipson and Cornell University emeritus professor Richard Burkhauser explain that the U.S. has a surplus in the trade of services. While the U.S. has a deficit in the trade of goods, the surplus in services is more than big enough to offset it. The question of the trade balance may seem academic and irrelevant, but it has emerged as a frequent subject of public and private debate between top officials from two countries, including Trump and Trudeau themselves. The reason is Trumps vehement insistence that deficits must be eradicated. While most economists say a deficit or surplus is not the best way to measure the success of a trade relationship, the president views the figures as key evidence of which country is winning or losing. Almost every time Trump has mentioned trade with Canada, he has alleged that the U.S. has a major deficit usually citing a $17 billion figure. We have a trade deficit with Canada. We have a big imbalance of at least $17 billion, he said on Feb. 13. We lose a lot of money with Canada, he said on Feb 12. Seventeen billion with Canada Canada says we broke even. But they dont include lumber and they dont include oil. Oh, thats not . . . . My friend Justin, he says, No, no, we break even. I said, Yeah, but youre not including oil, and youre not including lumber. When you do, you lose $17 billion, he said on Dec. 28. Read more: Analysis | The complete list of all 1175 false things Donald Trump has said as U.S. president If Trump kills NAFTA, he could lock out thousands of Canadian investors and the American jobs they create Analysis | Say Donald Trump kills NAFTA. Heres what experts say will happen to Canada Taking cues from the president, his U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, said after a NAFTA negotiating session in October: For us, trade deficits do matter. And we intend to reduce them. After a negotiating session last month, he claimed that, using Canadian statistics, Canada has an over $87 billion U.S. dollar surplus with the United States. There is no indication, of course, that a president unenthusiastic about policy details and numerical accuracy will be swayed by a sentence in a lengthy official report he is unlikely to read. The top U.S. trade negotiator, Robert Lighthizer, says on Aug. 16 that the United States won't settle for cosmetic changes to the North American Free Trade Agreement as negotiations to rework terms of the pact began. (The Associated Press) Trump has paid no heed to the data that appears on the website of Lighthizers department, which says: The U.S. goods and services trade surplus with Canada was $12.5 billion in 2016. And it is not clear whether Trump allows the Council of Economic Advisers any role in making trade policy. But the report at least gives Canada additional ammunition to support its accurate argument. Using a different method of calculating the trade balance than other government departments use, it said, In 2016, the United States ran a trade surplus of $2.6 billion with Canada. The advisers also used the report to challenge some of Trumps other primary claims about trade. Scott Lincicome, an adjunct scholar at the pro-trade Cato Institute in Washington, called it a stunning rebuke of Trump and his trade officials. For example, Trump attributes trade deficits solely to trade agreements he says are unfair, and he claims that fixing the deals will eradicate the deficits. The report said, Fiscal and monetary policies may be more important than trade policies in determining the magnitude of trade balances. And Trump speaks exclusively about trade in goods. The report said, Focusing only on the trade in goods alone ignores the United States comparative advantage in services. Read more about: JUBA, SOUTH SUDANThe witness accounts remain appalling. One South Sudanese man returned home after hiding from government soldiers to find they had blinded his mother, gouging out her eyes with spears. She had tried to defend her 17-year-old daughter from being raped by more than a dozen soldiers and didnt succeed. Seventeen soldiers then raped her. The familys father was beheaded. The latest report on human rights abuses in South Sudans five-year civil war, released on Friday by a United Nations commission, for the first time identifies more than 40 senior military officials, including three state governors, who may bear individual responsibility for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Read more: Six aid workers missing in South Sudan after clash between government, opposition We have nothing, we can just pray: over 1.25 million face starvation in South Sudan, doubling war-torn countrys 2016 tally I did not expect to be confronted with so much ritual humiliation and degradation deliberately done for multiple reasons. The suffering and cruelty was worse than anyone could have imagined, Andrew Clapham, a commission member and international law professor, told The Associated Press. One South Sudanese woman told the commission that her 12-year-old son was forced to have sex with his grandmother to stay alive, the report says. The findings, with sufficient evidence against both President Salva Kiirs government forces and rebels, will be presented to the UN Human Rights Council next month. They also will be made available to judicial mechanisms such as a hybrid court for South Sudan, which long has been urged by the international community but has never appeared. The names of alleged perpetrators, kept private to help protect witnesses, are being given to the UN human rights office in Geneva. Untold tens of thousands have been killed in South Sudan since the conflict erupted in December 2013, just two years after independence from Sudan. More than two million people have fled the country, the largest refugee crisis since the Rwandan genocide 24 years ago. Millions who remain at home face hunger. The new UN report is an account of the gang-rapes, castrations, ethnic violence and other abuses that have left much of the impoverished East African nation in despair, while international frustration with the warring sides grows. An attempt at a ceasefire in late December was violated within hours. Disgusted, the United States announced a largely symbolic arms embargo and urged the UN Security Council to do the same. South Sudans government on Friday said it was asking the UN commission for the names of the accused senior military officials and will investigate. We cant condone anyone committing crimes and taking the law in their own hands, spokesperson Ateny Wek Ateny said, though he added that such reports can sometimes be cut-and-paste and based on hearsay. Opposition spokesperson Lam Paul Gabriel told the AP: The human rights body should start putting the blame directly on the regime instead of blaming both sides. The report, based on 230 witness statements and other materials, is the second since the UN commission was established in 2016 and the first since it was given a stronger mandate to preserve evidence and conduct investigations instead of simply monitoring and reporting. South Sudans conflict is splintering into chaos, the new report says. What began as a power struggle between Kiir and former Vice-President Riek Machar has fractured into an estimated 40 armed groups across the country, with many fighting each other. But consistent patterns stand out, such as government attacks on unarmed, fleeing civilians in areas where no opposition forces were present, the report says. There is a clear pattern of ethnic persecution, for the most part by government forces, Clapham said. Despite the latest accounts of abuses, South Sudan experts are skeptical that anything will change amid what the report calls a grave lack of accountability. The recommendations of these human rights reports have not been implemented in South Sudan, making them useless, Jacob Chol, senior political analyst and professor at the University of Juba, told the AP. He said human rights abusers should be barred from the South Sudan peace talks in neighbouring Ethiopia. The talks reached a stalemate last week but are expected to pick up again next month. Read more about: Unspeakable rage. Thats what I, and Indigenous youth across the country, felt when the jury delivered a not guilty verdict in the case of Gerald Stanley, who killed 22-year-old Colten Boushie. Then we felt unspeakable sadness for the verdict that allowed 15-year-old Tina Fontaine, whose body was weighted down with rocks and thrown into a river, to go without justice. Canada has shown, twice within the last month, that Indigenous youth cannot expect a reasonable level of justice. We cannot expect that justice is blind, that juries are capable of rendering it. Canadian complacency is shown in the continued colonialism that cannot be hidden. These two verdicts are just the latest iterations of it. Indigenous communities have endured these two cases, back to back, wishing for justice but knowing that raised expectations could lead to a shattering disappointment. As expected, they have left devastation. Through the verdicts in these two trials, Canada has clearly reinforced feelings of hopelessness. These decisions show young Indigenous people, the fastest-growing demographic in the country, that their lives simply arent valued as much as other Canadians. Whats worse is all that came after the verdicts. Canadians flooded comments sections, spaces on social media, and told Indigenous youth that this is justice. Colten Boushie shouldnt have been in Gerald Stanleys yard. Tina Fontaine was a teen looking for trouble, and she found it. These statements show that Canada is not the caricature of politeness, justice, and virtue that it wants so desperately to believe it is. Our justice system is anything but just. Our neighbours blame children for their own violent deaths. These verdicts have interrupted the rhetoric of reconciliation, only to reveal that we arent as far along as we might like to think. A reminder that restoring the relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous youth was going to take more than conferences, reports, and words. Indigenous youth suicide rates are staggering compared to Canadian youth, between 6 and 40 times the national average. Read that again; allow it to sink in. The vast majority of Canadians reading this now have heard the dire statistics about Indigenous youth, shrugged, and closed their eyes to it. A civilized nation would see this hopelessness in youth as a clear sign that things arent working the way they should, an emergency that must be dealt with urgently. It would see through a lens that connects dots of injustice to the systems that exist. It would ask questions about how institutions might be responsible for these devastating statistics. But what does Canada do? Reinforces the idea that young Indigenous lives are not valued. Reconciliation has to mean that Canada acknowledges that its treatment of Indigenous peoples has been unacceptable. But these verdicts, and the following public discourse, have clearly shown Indigenous youth over the past weeks that Canada hasnt changed. Canada is akin to the abusive partner, expecting Indigenous youth to continually forgive its bad behaviour, to reconcile, forgive the violence inflicted on their bodies. This is a message to Canada: young people will not reconcile with a reality where our lives are expendable. Young people will not reconcile with a nation that continually fails us. Young people will not reconcile without seeing colonial systems dismantled and replaced with ones that purposely seek justice for Indigenous young people. To every Indigenous youth I say: I value your life, you come from proud people, you are loved. To Canada I say, witness this, you have an unjust nation. To Canada I say, your systems have failed us. Help us to build new ones. But for now, Canada, witness us, a nation unreconciled. Justice for Tina Fontaine, justice for Colten Boushie, justice for all Indigenous youth. Max FineDay leads Canadian Roots Exchange, a national non-profit that works with youth to advance reconciliation, and sits as a member of the interim National Council on Reconciliation. Prime Minister Justin Trudeaus eight-day state visit to India, which will come to an end on Saturday, may be the least successful foray into that country since the repelled Mongol invasions of the 13th century. Never mind the snubbing at the airport, where the prime minister was greeted by a lone junior minister. Or that the Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, did not welcome his Canadian counterpart via Twitter as is his common practice, announcing instead upon Trudeaus arrival that he would be tweaking his schedule to make room for a meeting with Donald Trump Jr., then in the country on business. Never mind that Trudeau mischaracterized a new investment deal between the two countries, overstating by a factor of four the promised Indian investment in Canada. Or the light schedule, which seemed to slate more time for tourism than diplomacy. Put aside even the prime ministers decision to dress himself and his family in ornate traditional Indian garb during his signature photo-ops, provoking widespread criticism and ridicule. Such costumes are unusual for world leaders and for good reason. As many have pointed out, Indians dont actually dress like that, except maybe on their wedding day. All of this might have amounted to mere embarrassment had the Canadian delegation, in an act of great carelessness, not invited a convicted attempted murderer and alleged terrorist to an official dinner, deepening emerging and potentially very costly diplomatic tensions between the two countries. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says B.C. MP Randeep Sarai is taking full responsibility for inviting Jaspal Atwal to receptions in Delhi, India. Atwal was convicted of trying to assassinate an Indian cabinet minister in 1986. (The Canadian Press) Many observers have suggested that Trudeaus perceived cold-shouldering may have been the result of growing concern within official India that the Liberal government is too soft on the so-called Khalistani cause, a Sikh separatist movement in Punjab. Trudeau has not always been careful to dispel this idea. Last year in Toronto, for instance, the prime minister attended an event where separatist flags and portraits of an extremist Sikh leader were prominently displayed. Indian government officials have called on Ottawa to take a harder line on Sikh separatist elements at home, which they believe promote terrorism in India. Surely one aim of the India trip was to ease these concerns. Thats no doubt why Trudeau met with Amarinder Singh, chief minister of Punjab, who has been an outspoken critic of the Canadian governments perceived indulgence of Sikh separatists. After their conference on Wednesday, Singh praised Trudeaus commitment to Indian unity. But whatever good will was earned by this effort was no doubt at the very least dented by the news on Thursday that Khalistani extremist Jaspal Atwal had been invited to two official receptions during Trudeaus visit. Atwal, who was convicted in 1986 of the attempted assassination of an Indian state minister, attended an event on Tuesday, where he was photographed alongside Sophie Gregoire Trudeau, the PMs wife, and Infrastructure Minister Amarjeet Sohi. The second invitation was rescinded when it was discovered who Atwal was. It turns out this unwelcome addition to the guest list was made by British Columbia MP Randeep Sarai, who issued an apology on Thursday. Trudeau also acknowledged the mistake. Asked how this was allowed to happen, the Prime Ministers Office said it does not comment on matters relating to the PMs security. But someone will have to explain and be held to account for this blunder. After all, the stakes are high. As India has opened its historically protectionist economy to the world in recent years, Canada has been jockeying to benefit from the emerging opportunities. Bilateral trade between the two countries currently amounts to a fairly meagre $8 billion per year. Trudeau has rightly said theres a lot of room to grow in this respect. This trip, with its blunders and scandals, is pretty much the opposite of how to achieve that growth. Trudeau has generally fared well on international trips, deploying his charm and charisma to great effect. But the international-headline-making disaster in India raises old questions about the prime ministers seriousness. Blundering around in his overly formal Indian outfits, inviting an alleged terrorist to dinner, Trudeau made of this important trip a bad and potentially rather costly joke. Read more about: We thought the almost decade-long muzzling of federal scientists in Canada was behind us when Stephen Harpers Conservative government was voted out in 2015. But apparently we were only partly right. According to a survey released this week by the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada, which represents more than 15,000 scientists, more than half of respondents say they still dont feel they can speak freely to the public and media about their work. Thats despite the fact that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and other ministers associated with science portfolios publicly announced in 2015 that scientists were free to discuss their work with each other and the public. While the number of scientists who dont feel they can speak freely is down dramatically from 90 per cent in 2013, in the Harper era, its still dangerous for Canadians. For example, 23 per cent of respondents said they are aware of cases where public health and safety has been compromised because of political interference with scientific work since the last election. That is unacceptable. The survey found roadblocks that prevent scientists from speaking out include managers who are resistant to change, media relations staff who are stopping researchers from talking to reporters, and a lack of whistle-blower protection. The Trudeau government should complete the good work it started more than two years ago in this area. It should remove the obstacles that remain to scientists speaking freely about the work they do on behalf of the public. Read more about: Poland led the way three decades ago in bringing down the Soviet empire and restoring freedom to half of Europe. Who can forget the historic role played by the Solidarity labour movement in discrediting communist rule there and across eastern Europe? Which makes it all the more disheartening that Poland is now firmly part of the growing trend away from liberal democracy in Europe. Under a government led by the countrys Law and Justice party, it has been turning toward nationalism, Polish pride and its own conservative brand of identity politics. Topping all this off is a new law that would make it a criminal offence punishable by up to three years in prison to suggest that the Polish nation or the Polish state was in any way complicit in the extermination of Jews during the Second World War. At best, this would put a major chill on independent historical research into the tragic, tangled events surrounding the Holocaust and the various roles that Poles played in it both as fighters against the German invaders and, as has also been well documented, as participants in the persecution of Jews. At worst, it could amount to a form of Holocaust denial, as some outraged Jews, including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, are arguing. The law has already put a major strain on relations between Poland and Israel, and recent remarks by Polands prime minister have just made that worse. In answering a question from an Israeli journalist, Mateusz Morawiecki made the inflammatory suggestion that Jews themselves had a role in committing the atrocities against their own people. There were Polish perpetrators, as there were Jewish perpetrators, as there were Russian perpetrators, as there were Ukrainian not only German, he said. Morawiecki has been justly condemned for drawing an equivalence between a tiny number of Jewish collaborators with the Nazis and the many others of almost all nationalities including Poles, Russians and Ukrainians who facilitated the work of the German killing squads. But aside from his clumsy rhetoric, the new law itself is the issue. It amounts to an attempt to criminalize legitimate historical inquiry in an area that is by its nature fraught with controversy. Only a very brave researcher will venture into these archives with the threat of official condemnation and possibly even a jail sentence hanging over his or her head. Its entirely understandable why the subject is so difficult for Poles, as it is for many other countries caught up in the maelstrom of the Second World War. Aside from Jews themselves, Poles suffered as much as anyone from Nazism. Three of the six million Jews killed during the Holocaust died in Poland and about three million other Poles were killed as well. The Polish state was erased in 1939 when Germany and the Soviet Union invaded and divided its territory between them. It was a national catastrophe, only to be followed immediately after the war by decades of communist rule. How various parts of Polish society conducted themselves during the years of Nazi occupation has long been a matter of historical contention. Unlike, for example, France, Poles had no collaborationist government to put an official stamp on any cooperation with their German occupiers. But theres no denying that anti-Semitism was widespread in Poland (as it was in many parts of Europe) and no shortage of examples of Poles who persecuted Jews, killed them outright or betrayed them to the Nazis. The Canadian-Polish historian Jan Grabowski of the University of Ottawa, for one, estimates that Poles were responsible for the death of some 200,000 Jews during the war. At the same time, Poles waged fierce resistance against their occupiers and there were many examples of Catholic Poles who came to the aid of their Jewish neighbours. Yad Vashem, Israels official memorial to the Holocaust, recognizes 6,706 Poles as being righteous among the nations those who sheltered or aided Jews. Thats more than any other country, and Yad Vashem says that considering the harsh punishment that threatened rescuers, this is a most impressive number. No wonder, then, that Poles bitterly resent any suggestion that as a nation they were generally complicit in Nazi atrocities. The new law, among other things, bans use of the expression Polish death camps rather than something along the lines of Nazi death camps on Polish territory. (The Star, along with many other news organizations, does not use that expression either after complaints from Polish organizations.) This is a debate that can have no end; as more information becomes available and successive generations process the traumas of the past, historians will continue to produce new interpretations of old events. Or at least thats how it should work. Instead, the new Polish law is bound to have the effect of curtailing explorations into areas that are particularly touchy for nationalists (including those who dominate the current government in Warsaw) who are concerned that revelations about collaboration with Nazis will feed what they regard as a politics of shame imposed on their country by foreign critics. This shouldnt be allowed in any sensitive areas of research, especially such a highly charged subject as the Holocaust. Cutting off debate or intimidating independent historians who may venture into uncomfortable areas will only feed suspicion that there is something to hide. Far better to encourage free intellectual inquiry and deal with whatever consequences flow from that. Every nation must eventually face up to the complicated realities of its own history. Trying to stop that from happening will only make the process longer and more difficult. For Poland, that means abandoning its ill-conceived attempt to criminalize historical inquiry. Syrian strikes kill more than 100, Feb. 21 In the face of the relentless slaughter of civilians, including many, many children, going on day in and day out in Eastern Ghouta, where is Canadas voice? Where is Canadas moral leadership? Canada and the rest of the world, it seems, has become desensitized to the horrors of the war in Syria. So many years have passed and so many lives have been lost that too many of us have become used to the images of childrens torn and bloodied bodies lying in the ruins of bombed hospitals. In the past few days, more than 290 civilians, people like us, have been murdered by the Russian and Bashar al Assad bombs. We click our phones to read about some other news. Its just another day for us, as incredibly fortunate and privileged citizens of Canada. We once had a prime minister who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, remember? We once stood out among nations as an inspiring force for humanitarian action and tolerance. It is sadly all too clear that the world can no longer look to the United States for leadership when it comes to brokering peace treaties and certainly not for leadership in ending the slaughter in Syria. But Canada has the potential to do much more than just use words to denounce the slaughter. Back in the summer of 1995, the United States took a leadership role in ending the genocidal war in Bosnia. It is time for Canada to step up to the plate now. Shame on us if we do nothing. Rickey Miller, North York Read more about: Trudeau affirms support for united India, Feb. 22 I could not stop myself from sharing my utter disgust at seeing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his family socializing with convicted terrorists and their supporters. At what point will rational and true patriots of Canada stand up to this atrocious behaviour of the PM? Trudeau will do anything to get votes, including having his spouse shake hands with terrorists. It is high time for Canada to stop harbouring and nurturing terrorists on its home soil. This is an utter disgrace for Canada as a nation and its standing in the world. While the rest of the world is fighting terrorists and people are dying in the process, our PM and his pathetic group of ministers invite terrorists to state dinners. This government is downright dangerous to our security. Atul Apte, Georgetown Prime Minister Justin Trudeaus India visit has sunk into an unwanted controversy of covert support to terrorists on Canadian soil and his childish role in playing to the galleries to appease a section of his voters in Canada. The head of our government needs to remember that he represents the whole of Canada and not just some selected voters with sympathies for overseas insurgent activities. His soft-glove approach and the under-preparedness of our top bureaucrats clearly demonstrated why, in spite of being a G7 nation, Canada is never taken seriously anywhere on this planet. We are just the kid neighbour of a mighty elephant who failed to grow up and deliver. Our honourable PM failed to engage in any serious interaction and negotiation to promote Canadian business interests. His happy family picture in front of the Taj Mahal may cater to his supporters but does not do anything to create opportunity for Canadian investors and businesses. Saikat Kumar Basu, Lethbridge, Alta. Read more about: Just when we think there is no deeper sewer into which Americas corrupt political system can descend, we finally see the first promising signs of resistance and redemption emerging from the debris. And for that, we can thank 19-year-old Florida high school senior Emma Gonzalez and her teenage friends, as well as U.S. special counsel Robert Mueller and his investigative team. Because of them, this has actually been an inspiring and hopeful seven days perhaps even historic in spite of the non-stop drama that keeps swirling around the Trump presidency. For the Trump administration, that drama is only deepening as it tries to respond to two recent epic events. One is the horrific Valentines Day massacre at a Parkland, Fla., high school, and the other is the explosive new indictment announced by the special counsel investigating Trump and his team. It is becoming increasingly clear that the aftermath from these developments pose potential danger to the Trump presidency. In recent days, there have been remarkable scenes in response to the devastating Florida school shooting that left 17 dead. Led by the surviving students, there have been emotional meetings and rallies urging stricter gun safety laws. At one rally, a student organizer Emma Gonzalez wiped away tears and said: If all our government and president can do is send thoughts and prayers, then its time for victims to be the change that we need to see. At another nationally televised town hall attended by thousands of Florida students, Sen. Marco Rubio and a leader of the National Rifle Association were jeered for refusing to support new gun control measures. As Gonzalez and her friends must now realize, there is no prospect for any meaningful gun control reform to be enacted by a Republican president and Republican-controlled Congress. In fact, on Thursday, President Trump repeated his support of an NRA proposal that some teachers should be armed as a deterrent for school shootings, praising the NRA leadership as Great American patriots. In spite of an accelerating pattern of school shootings and other gun violence on average, two dozen children are shot every day in the U.S. Republican politicians have consistently blocked any gun safety reform even though public opinion polls consistently indicate that most Americans favour this. The fact is that the NRA, as Americas gun lobby, effectively owns the Republican Party. In the last election, the NRA spent $14.5 million (U.S.) in campaign ads for Republican candidates, with most of it going to Trump, while spending $34.5 million in ads against Democrats. But it is politically where the Republicans and the NRA are at risk. The momentum that is building among many American young people against the NRA could easily become an important political issue. By next year, the millennial voting population in the U.S. those under the age of 35 is expected to exceed the baby-boomer population for the first time. Since assuming office, Trump and the Republicans have alienated women, immigrants, Muslims, Asians, Latinos and African Americans. It is not beyond their ability to turn off potential young voters as well. On the other major development in recent days the new Russian indictments unveiled by Robert Mueller the Trump administration also clearly sees the danger. Last weekend, after Muellers announcement, an agitated Trump responded with an angry, barely coherent storm of tweets that even included Oprah Winfrey as one of his targets. Muellers charges were aimed at 13 Russians and three companies for trying to subvert the 2016 election and bolster the Trump campaign. It was a breathtaking 37-page indictment outlining precisely how the Russians manipulated American democracy. Apart from demolishing Trumps earlier claims that alleged Russian interference in the election was a hoax, it seemed to set the scene for later indictments that will implicate Americans as well, and quite likely Trumps team. There may have been another reason why Trump reacted to the indictment with such fury last weekend. With Mueller providing so much detail, it will make any future move by Trump to get rid of him more difficult to justify publicly. Although seemingly unrelated, these two events the high school massacre and the Mueller indictment of the Russians found themselves intertwined in an ominous way. One hour after the Florida school shooting, Twitter accounts with links to Russia released hundreds of posts spreading misinformation and confusion in the U.S. gun control debate. President Trump, for his part, remained silent. Tony Burman is former head of Al Jazeera English and CBC News. Reach him @TonyBurman or at tony.burman@gmail.com. Read more about: If apparel oft proclaims the man, then Polonius who uttered those words in Hamlet would have quite literally given our prime minister a dressing down this week. From the viewpoint of the Shakespearean character, Justin Trudeau would have broken the basic rules: his clothes were as costly as money could buy, but gaudy, too, proclaiming him unserious. A charitable supposition would be that maybe just maybe since Canada is barely a blip on Indian consciousness, Trudeau decided to lean on his celebrity status to make an impression. That much he did. So groan-inducing has Trudeaus visit to India appeared thus far that it merits being rated as a cliched Bollywood drama. Share your thoughts Over-the-top sherwanis and kurta pyjamas, Bhangra sequences, overly choreographed family time overdoing the namastes. Then a touch of villainous melodrama in the form of a mistaken invitation to Jaspal Atwal, a man convicted of attempting to kill an Indian cabinet minister on Vancouver Island in 1986. Atwal was also charged, but not convicted, in connection with a 1985 attack on Ujjal Dosanjh, a former Liberal health minister and former premier of British Columbia. That faux pas for which the Liberals apologized would be a terrible development during any official visit. On this one, it gave lie to Trudeau and Defence Minister Harjit Sajjans appeasement of the Punjab chief ministers concerns of official Canadian support for the Sikh separatist movement. The demand for a separate nation of Khalistan is an issue that has little support among Sikhs in India. It does not enjoy unanimous support here, either. The concerns were fair: Trudeaus appearance at a Sikh parade in Toronto last year with yellow and blue Khalistan flags in the background and posters of Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale the leader of the Khalistani movement was not looked upon kindly in India. Read more: Trudeaus outfits in India seen as an over-the-top fashion faux pas, internet decides India-Canada relations at rock bottom after Trudeau invitation error, ex-Liberal cabinet minister says Editorial | Justin Trudeaus very bad trip to India may carry a steep cost Nor would Canada be sympathetic to a visiting foreign leader who posed with Quebec separatists. Many of the poor first impressions would have been avoided had planners simply switched Day 6 to Day 1. Trudeau, finally wearing a business suit, met Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday, got that equally cringe-inducing, but in this case gratefully received, trademark bear hug from Modi, and was received with state honours. Was there really no adviser in our PMO or the Foreign Office who said before the trip, Meet Modi first. Go easy on the clothes. Wrap up the visit in 3 days. Be prepared to deal with the separatist issue? Earlier in the month, an expert told Global News, Theres no question that the whole Khalistan question will overshadow this trip. Then an unnamed government official told the news outlet it was not expected to be a big issue. If he had a chance to counsel Trudeau, Omer Aziz, a former adviser at the Department of Global Affairs in the Liberal government, says he would have said, Its going to come up and you need to make sure you know what youre going to say. Before going to India, Aziz would have suggested Trudeau make a speech in support of united India and draw comparisons to separatist movements here. People in India think the Trudeaus have gone overboard with wearing traditional outfits Some of them say the Prime Minister should tone down the wedding-level formal clothing. (The Canadian Press) Trudeaus trip was billed as one to bolster economic and cultural connections. Because Canadas minorities of colour are consigned to hyphenated labels, and never viewed as simply Canadian, Canadian leaders end up viewing foreign policy through the lens of diasporic politics. And so, Indo-Canadians and Sikh-Canadians have come to expect images of a leaders visit to New Delhi, the requisite visit to the Golden Temple in Amritsar, perhaps a Hindu temple or two. But carry it too far and the symbolism of we care can become tiresomely reductive. Religious and cultural observances such as a cloth on the head may be seen as a sign of respect. Wearing clothing from the host nation could be seen as a bit of charming politicking on the sidelines of trade deals and policy development. As a main dish, overshadowing a $1 billion trade deal, its unpalatable. Neither Indians nor Indo-Canadians are quite so unsophisticated as to not detect being patronized. Aziz sees this trip as evidence that governments should hire and empower more staffers of colour who understand the complexities of the world. Literally all this was avoidable, he said. For all the talk of Trudeaus diverse cabinet, behind the scenes decision makers, staffers and bureaucrats remain monochromatic. I think that frankly minorities, brown folks, people of colour should say this is enough, says Aziz. Its time that millennials (like me) said either youre going to share power with us or were going to mobilize and youre going to suffer at the ballot box. Were not going to be treated as any ones vote bank. We dont need you talking down to us. We dont need you to begin every single speech saying diversity is our strength. What we need is at that beginning point of our conversation we need to be treated as equals, with respect. Then we can have a conversation about policy. Shree Paradkar writes about discrimination and identity. You can follow her @shreeparadkar Read more about: The National Union of Moroccos Women and the National Observatory for Childrens rights, both institutions chaired by Princess Lalla Meryem, held a meeting in Rabat to discuss the situation of women and children living in precariousness and ways to lift them out of this situation. During the closing session of the meeting, held Wednesday under the effective chairmanship of Princess Lalla Meryem, the coordinator of the National Initiative for Human Development (INDH), Nadira El Guermai, made a presentation surveying the efforts made by Morocco to combat precariousness. Morocco has launched several programs to support the social layers affected by precariousness, facilitate their social integration, protect them against delinquency and improve their living standards, she said. Governor El Guermai reviewed the results of the INDH since it was launched in 2005 and which includes a specific anti-precariousness program that benefited a large portion of the population. However, she noted, despite all the efforts made and all the results scored, more needs to be done to meet the challenges of ongoing social mutations. She also called for pooling efforts to reach an optimal coordination as part of convergence and good governance. Member of the economic, social and environmental council, Mohamed Hourani, on his part presented a road map on the fight against precariousness. The road map is based on four outlines namely knowledge, governance, law policy and policy elaboration, he said, stressing that this road map seeks to lay the bases for new alternatives to reinforce prevention against precariousness mainly in terms of digitization, green economy, circular economy and renewable energy. The closing ceremony was attended by children representing several associations from across Morocco. Princess Lalla Meryem, the eldest sister of King Mohammed VI, has been involved in the promotion of the condition of women and children for the past 30 years through the National Union of Moroccos Women and the National Observatory for Childrens rights. She is leading, through these two institutions, several initiatives aimed at rendering justice to women and children and improving their living conditions. The same day, Rabat hosted the 5th Islamic conference of ministers in charge of Childhood during which King Mohammed VI underlined the need to guarantee childrens basic rights to health, education, housing and social protection. In a message to the conference, the Moroccan Sovereign said children are the future of mankind, but they are facing numerous and interconnected dangers, which can undermine their potential and put their future in jeopardy if they are not provided with education, cultural guidance and rehabilitation. Such efforts should contribute to childrens integration into the knowledge and communication-based world, making them open to human civilization and to the changes we are witnessing today, said the Sovereign in his message, urging Islamic countries to invest in all sectors concerning child-related issues and challenges, by seeking to combat poverty, tackle the repercussions of climate change, ensure food security, keep abreast of the digital revolution and provide for security and stability. Deutsche Bank plans to fire 250 to 500 employees in its investment-banking and trading business, a person familiar with the matter said. It could be a way to free up money to hire and retain top producers. Is Deutsche Bank AG (DB) - Get Deutsche Bank AG Report trying to reinvent itself in the mold of Wall Street's Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) - Get Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. (GS) Report ? The German lender's plan to fire 250 to 500 employees in its trading and investment-banking division just weeks before annual bonuses get paid out resembles the strategy honed for years at Goldman: Fire underperforming employees, or those who aren't generating enough profits to justify keeping them, to save money that can be used to pay top performers bigger bonuses. And immediately set about hiring different employees - "upgrading talent," as they say in the headhunter business. The move comes less than a year after CEO John Cryan appointed Marcus Schenck, a former Goldman Sachs executive, to co-head Deutsche Bank's trading, investment-banking and corporate-lending operations. Earlier this month, Cryan said cost-cutting was a "critical component of improved and sustained profitability," after saying last year that the bank was "investing in people." "They're trying to get bankers who can make more rain," said David Hendler, an analyst at Viola Risk Advisors who follows Deutsche Bank. "So they're culling out the bankers that are just taking up space and not bringing in revenue growth." The planned job cuts, earlier reported by Bloomberg News, were confirmed by a person familiar with the matter. Affected employees will be notified by early March, the person said, just before bonuses are paid out for work done in 2017. On Wall Street, that's a big deal because a substantial portion of compensation for traders and investment bankers comes in the form of annual bonuses. Deutsche Bank, based in Frankfurt but with big operations in the U.S., has posted three straight annual losses totaling more than $10 billion, stung by big fines for misdeeds by U.S. authorities and a business slowdown that led to a 12% decline in revenue last year by 12%. In the beleaguered trading and investment-banking division, revenue plunged by 49%, beset by higher funding costs, low client volumes and unusually low volatility in markets. The dismal environment was the backdrop for Schenck's appointment in March as co-head of the trading and investment banking division alongside Garth Richie. Early in his career, Schenck was a consultant at McKinsey & Co. before joining Goldman Sachs in 1997. In 2006, he left to become CFO of the German energy supplier E.ON and later rejoined Goldman Sachs. Deutsche Bank hired him in 2015, and he served for a while as Cryan's CFO. The bank has acknowledged slow progress in reducing costs in the trading and investment-banking division due to needed increases in compensation for retaining top employees and recruiting new ones. It's a classic Wall Street conundrum: The problem with simply chopping employees is that it's hard to generate revenue without them. To get growth, the reasoning goes, a firm must have top producers who can bring in clients and transactions. And it so happens that the best people on Wall Street want to be rewarded richly. "This is like the negative downward spiral, where you cut costs, and you don't pay bonuses, so people leave," Viola's Hendler said. "So you're left with your C players and your B players and you wonder why your revenues aren't going up." On a Feb. 2 conference call with analysts, Cryan cited the stock-trading business as one that's changed dramatically over the past 10 years, from being dominated by banks to being "commoditized" and more broadly shared among players. And the business of helping companies and investors hedge interest-rate risk through long-dated derivatives - a type of financial instrument that pays out depending on the direction of markets - has faded as a source of fat profits, he said. "We need to be much more forward-looking and much more judicious about resource allocation in terms of capital investment in future systems and investment in people," Cryan said. It's an eat-what-you-kill-system, and on Wall Street they kill you if you're not killing more than you're eating. It's been the Goldman Sachs way for a long time. Now it may be the Deutsche Bank way. Looks like the cereal and snacks giant has gone on the hunt for a dog food company. General Mills (GIS) - Get General Mills, Inc. (GIS) Report is getting into the business of feeding cute puppies and kitties. The maker of cereal brands like Cheerios and Lucky Charms said Friday it will buy natural pet food company Blue Buffalo (BUFF) for $8 billion. Amid the humanization of pets, Blue Buffalo has prospered big-time. Over the past three years, Blue Buffalo has delivered compound annual net sales growth of 12% and adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) growth of 18%. It is a bold/transformative move & raises the stakes for the new CEO, Jeff Harmening -- we have long loved the pet category & Blue Buffalo is a leading brand in the fastest growing sub-segment," said Jefferies analyst Akshay Jagdale. "As such, we like the strategic merit but the price is steep and General Mills will have to work hard to extract value from the deal." For General Mills, the purchase is in keeping with its diversification efforts beyond slow growth packaged food. General Mills CEO Jeff Harmening reportedly told attendees at the CAGNY conference Tuesday that he will use M&A to "reshape" the company's portfolio. The aggressive tone comes after a wave of deals have descended on the packaged food space in recent months. In December, slow growth candy king Hershey Co. (HSY) - Get Hershey Company (HSY) Reportsaid it would acquire Amplify Snack Brands Inc. undefined in a blockbuster $1.6 billion deal. Hershey's big buy will expand its portfolio further into the snacking aisle with Amplify's popular brands such as SkinnyPop and Tyrells chips brands. Also in December, Campbell Soup Co. (CPB) - Get Campbell Soup Company Reportagreed to spend $4.87 billion on snack brand Snyder's Lance (LNCE) as it looks to expand beyond dreadful soup sales. TheStreet asked General Mills' Harmening about his appetite to do deals in December. Here is what he said: I don't think our view on M&A has changed because of two deals. Hershey bought a popcorn maker, which is great. Campbell's obviously did something that appears to be more transformational with Snyder's-Lance. What I would say is that M&A is one part of our growth strategy. The other parts are competing effectively where we are. Another is accelerating in some key platforms. We get the right to do M&A by doing the first two things well. We feel increasingly confident in our ability to execute M&A well because our base business is back on solid footing and we are back to executing. If you are going to be doing M&A, it feels better to be executing well on your base. Also, we have been able to grow prior acquisitions like Annie's and Epic. We have in fact accelerated our growth in Annie's. We have the capacity to do deals. Our cash flow is good, it improved in the first half of the year. But we are going to stay disciplined. We aren't going to buy things just because somebody else is buying something. It has to be the right fit for us. The drug likely wouldn't be approved in the U.S. before 2019, however. Japanese authorities have approved Shionogi & Co. Ltd.'s single-dose influenza drug Xofluza, the company said Friday, Feb. 23. The treatment may not be available in Japan prior to May as the national insurer has not yet set a price, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing a Shionogi spokesman. Later this year, Shionogi intends to file for approval for Xofluza in the U.S. and a decision is not expected before 2019, according to the report. Japan's Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare designated the drug, then known as S-033188, for priority review in October 2015. In October of last year, Shionogi said it had filed for approval to manufacture and sell the treatment. Xofluza requires a single oral dose. By comparison, patients take Roche AG's (RHHBY) Tamiflu for five days. In February 2016, Osaka-based Shionogi signed a license and collaboration pact with Roche for the development and commercialization of S-033188. As part of the deal, Shionogi agreed to develop the treatment in tandem with Roche globally, except Japan and Taiwan, which Shionogi retained exclusively. Roche's American depository receipts ended Friday's trading session at $29.75, down 0.3%. Roche gained the right to commercialize the drug worldwide except Japan and Taiwan, with Shionogi retaining certain co-promotion rights in the U.S. Shionogi will be entitled to receive royalties on sales of S-03318. In the U.S., flu activityremained elevatedduring the week ended Feb. 17, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. There were 13 influenza-associated pediatric deaths reported during the period. A cumulative rate of 74.5 confirmed influenza-associated hospitalizations per 100,000 population was reported, CDC said. Nordstrom is reportedly going private. Here's why TheStreet's founder Jim Cramer recommended the stock earlier this month. It may be bye-bye to public markets for luxury department store Nordstrom (JWN) - Get Nordstrom, Inc. (JWN) Report . Nordstrom shares spiked 6% on Friday on a Reuters report that the company's founding family is finalizing plans to take the chain private. A spokesperson for Nordstrom did not immediately return a request for comment. TheStreet's Jim Cramer and his Action Alerts Plus research team added Nordstrom to its charitable trust portfolio on Feb. 6 for a number of reasons. Taking advantage of the market correction, the team reasoned Nordstrom's earnings power was being undervalued amidst the selloff. Back in January, the company pre-announced a positive same store sales increase for the crucial November/December months, doubling expectations of a half a percent rise by achieving positive 1.2%. The team also liked Nordstrom's diversification. Nordstrom is not just luxury, it also appeals to the discount shopper through its Nordstrom Rack chain. "We think that trends here can improve as the business plays catch up to Kohls (KSS) - Get Kohl's Corporation (KSS) Report ," Cramer said. Plus the company is building new flagship store in Manhattan. The 47,000 square foot men's store will open in the spring of 2018, and the 320,000 square foot women's store will open in the fall of 2019. These clothing and accessories meccas should be powerful enhancers of the Nordstrom brand, and ring up healthy sales over time. Go inside the Action Alerts Plus investment club here. Berkshire Hathaway shareholders will look forward to hearing Warren Buffett detail his plans to improve the U.S. healthcare system as well as the results for his sprawling conglomerate when the Oracle of Omaha delivers his annual letter on Saturday. Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A) - Get BRK.A Report shareholders will look forward to hearing Warren Buffett detail his plans to participate in the U.S. healthcare system as well as the results for his sprawling conglomerate when the Oracle of Omaha delivers his annual letter on Saturday. Buffett, 87, has used humor in his much anticipated, and often quite lengthy, letter to address topics ranging from excesses on Wall Street to dysfunction in Washington as he also relates what's going on at Berkshire, whose businesses extend to holdings in insurance, utilities, building products, clothing and footwear, flight services, media, and real estate. Buffett himself also manages a portfolio of billions of dollars of equities and investments. The annual shareholders' meetings, taking place in the CenturyLink Center in Omaha, Nebraska, are routinely visited by 20,000 people. Buffett's message is usually upbeat. Last year he cited the "economic dynamism" and "miraculous" achievements the U.S. has achieved over its history, after saying in 2015 that American newborns were "the luckiest crop in history." Berkshire, which is holding about $109 billion of cash and equivalents, hasn't made a major purchase since it bought Precision Castparts more than two years ago. Last year it lost a bid to buy Texas power company Oncor, while its efforts to help buyout firm 3G Capital buy Unilever (UL) - Get Unilever PLC Sponsored ADR Report failed as the European food company said it wasn't interested. Watch 'Jolt' for what Buffett should really divulge on Saturday. Buffett may once again ask for companies that have low debt, consistent earnings and good management to give him a call, if they're interested in selling. With few whole companies out there to buy, Buffett has instead built a $28 billion stake in Action Alerts Plus holding Apple (AAPL) - Get Apple Inc. (AAPL) Report , making it Berkshire's largest stock holding by value, passing troubled San Francisco-based bank Wells Fargo (WFC) - Get Wells Fargo & Company Report . Another element shareholders will be looking forward to is Buffett's description of the independent healthcare company for their employees in the United States that Berkshire, Amazon (AMZN) - Get Amazon.com, Inc. Report , and JPMorgan Chase (JPM) - Get JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) Report announced in January. Amazon and JPMorgan & Chase are both Action Alerts Plus holdings. The joint venture would align Buffett's company with the biggest bank by assets in the U.S. and the online retail behemoth, which has already proved itself to be a disruptive force across several industries. Buffett may address the effects of the new, lower corporate tax rate achieved by President Donald Trump and a Republican-led Congress, which may include a significant increase in book value. He will likely take the opportunity to praise Gregory Abel and Ajit Jain, two long-time Berkshire executives who Buffett promoted in January to vice chairs of the company. At the time, Buffett said their promotion was "part of a movement to succession over time." Abel, 55, is currently the chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway Energy Company, which he joined in 1992. He's reportedly regarded by Wall Street as the most likely to ascend into Buffett's role eventually. Jain, 66, is the executive vice president of National Indemnity Company who joined the Berkshire Hathaway Insurance Group in 1986. He was named vice chair of the insurance operations. Along those lines, Berkshire shareholders will want to find out what effects the numerous natural disasters in the U.S. in 2017 will have on their insurance holdings, which include GEICO and Berkshire Reinsurance. Amnesty International has rebuked Algeria over its deplorable human rights record smeared by continuing discrimination against refugees and migrants. In its annual report, the international rights watchdog noted that Algeria failed to improve on human rights at all levels, registering degrading treatment of migrants by Algerian authorities. Arbitrary arrests, unjustified restrictions, prosecution of members of religious minorities, impunity for perpetrators of human rights abuses, unfair trials, mass expulsion of migrants, thus the report starts drawing the bleak picture of human rights in Algeria, where migrants continue to bear most of the brunt. Amnesty International recalls cases of inhumane treatment inflicted on migrants in Algeria, citing in particular the case of African migrants who are rounded-up and sent manu militari to the desert borders with Niger where they are abandoned in harsh conditions. The NGO also sheds light on the case of the Syrian refugees who were abandoned by Algerian authorities on the border with Morocco. Earlier this month, The International Organization for Migration (IMO) confirmed that it has saved 1000 Sub-Saharan migrants abandoned by Algerian authorities in the desert in tough conditions. Rounding up migrants across Algeria and deporting them without giving them an opportunity to challenge their expulsion or seek international protection as asylum seekers has been denounced by multiple human rights organizations, including Human Rights Watch. Niger has repeatedly protested the inhumane treatment suffered by its nationals in Algeria and the black manhunt launched by Algerian authorities, which are surfing on a wave of anti-migrant populism espoused by senior political figures in the country, who described migrants as a source of criminality and diseases and as representing a threat to national security. Civil society associations in Guinea, Gabon and Niger have urged the African Union to put the issue of the human rights violations by Algerian authorities against Sub-Saharan migrants on the agenda. Anti-migrant discrimination and xenophobic rhetoric were behind the recall of the Guinean Ambassador to Algiers late last year. The decision by Guinean President, Alpha Conde, who was then AU chairman, drew attention to the double speak of Algeria, which aspires to have a voice in Africa while mistreating Africans on its soil. At a time the African union puts the issue of migration on top of its concerns, Algeria, which often portrays itself as an actor in the continent, has flouted the basic principle of solidarity between African states. Tenaris SA manufactures and supplies steel pipe products. The firm operates through the following business segments: Tubes and Other. The Tubes segment includes the production and sale of both seamless and welded steel tubular products and related services mainly for the oil and gas industry, particularly oil country tubular goods used in drilling operations, and for other industrial applications with production processes that consist in the transformation of steel into tubular products. The Other segment includes all other business activities and operating segments, including the production and selling of sucker rods, industrial equipment, coiled tubing, heat exchangers, and utility conduits for buildings and the sale of energy and raw materials that exceed internal requirements. Its principal finished products are seamless and welded steel casing and tubing, line pipe and other mechanical and structural steel pipes for different uses. The company was founded in 1909 and is headquartered in Luxembourg. Read More The following companies are subsidiares of Exxon Mobil: AKG Marketing Company Limited, Aera Energy LLC, Al-Jubail Petrochemical Company, Ampolex (Cepu) Pte Ltd, Ancon Insurance Company Inc., Barnett Gathering LLC, Barzan Gas Company Limited, Caspian Pipeline Consortium, Celtic Exploration Ltd., Coral FLNG S.A., Cross Timbers Energy LLC, Ellora Energy Inc., Esmeroon Oil Transporta Imperial Oil Limited, Esso (Thailand) Public Company Limited, Esso Australia Resources Pty Ltd, Esso Deutschland GmbH, Esso Erdgas Beteiligungsgesellschaft mbH, Esso Exploration Angola (Block 15) Limited, Esso Exploration Angola (Block 17) Limited, Esso Exploration and Production Angola (Overseas) Limited, Esso Exploration and Production Chad Inc., Esso Exploration and Production Guyana Limited, Esso Exploration and Production Nigeria (Deepwater) Limited, Esso Exploration and Production Nigeria (Offshore East) Limited, Esso Exploration and Production Nigeria Limited, Esso Exploration and Production UK Limited, Esso Global Investments Ltd., Esso Italiana S.r.l., Esso Nederland B.V., Esso Norge AS, Esso Petroleum Company Limited, Esso Raffinage, Esso Societe Anonyme Francaise, Exxo Holdings Inc., Exxon Azerbaijan Limited, Exxon Chemical Arabia Inc., Exxon International Finance Company, Exxon Luxembourg Holdings LLC, Exxon Mobile Bay Limited Partnership, Exxon Neftegas Limited, Exxon Overseas Corporation, Exxon Overseas Investment Corporation, ExxonMobil (China) Investment Co. Ltd., ExxonMobil (Taicang) Petroleum Co. Ltd., ExxonMobil Abu Dhabi Offshore Petroleum Company Limited, ExxonMobil Alaska Production Inc., ExxonMobil Asia Pacific Pte. Ltd., ExxonMobil Australia Pty Ltd, ExxonMobil B Resources Company, ExxonMobil Capital Finance Company, ExxonMobil Capital Netherlands B.V., ExxonMobil Central Europe Holding GmbH, ExxonMobil Cepu Limited, ExxonMobil Chemical France, ExxonMobil Chemical Gulf Coast Investments LLC, ExxonMobil Chemical Holland B.V., ExxonMobil Chemical Services (Shanghai) Co. 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Ltd., InterOil Corporation, Jurong Aromatics Corporation Pte Ltd, MPM Lubricants, Marine Well Containment Company LLC, Mobil Australia Resources Company Pty Limited, Mobil California Exploration & Producing Asset Company, Mobil Caspian Pipeline Company, Mobil Chemical Products International Inc., Mobil Corporation, Mobil Equatorial Guinea Inc., Mobil Erdgas Verwaltungsgesellschaft mbH, Mobil Exploration & Producing Australia Pty Ltd, Mobil International Petroleum Corporation, Mobil Oil Australia Pty Ltd, Mobil Oil Exploration & Producing Southeast Inc., Mobil Oil New Zealand Limited, Mobil Producing Nigeria Unlimited, Mobil Producing Texas & New Mexico Inc., Mobil SerLimited, Mobil Venezolana De Petroleos Inc., Mobil Yanbu Petrochemical Company Inc., Mobil Yanbu Refining Company Inc., Mountain Gathering LLC, Mozambique Rovuma Venture S.p.A., Palmetto Transoceanic LLC, Papua New Guinea Liquefied Natural Gas Global Company LDC, Permian Express Partners LLC, Phillips Exploration LLC, Qatar Liquefied Gas Company Limited, Ras Laffan Liquefied Natural Gas Company Limited, Ras Laffan Liquefied Natural Gas Company Limited (II), SPI Limited, Saudi Aramco Mobil Refinery Company Ltd., Saudi Yanbu Petrochemical Co., SeaRiver Maritime Inc., South Hook LNG Terminal Company Limited, Tengizchevroil LLP, Terminale GNL Adriatico S.r.l, Trend Gathering & Treating LLC, Wolverine Pipe Line Company, XH LLC, XTO Delaware Basin LLC, XTO Energy Canada, XTO Energy Inc., and XTO Holdings LLC. We know the feeling. Photo: MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images There are times when I genuinely wonder whether I can hold up psychologically in our current politics and culture. My shrink tells me I am far from alone in this, and that everyone she listens to is consumed with a depression that swings from despair to rage to what can only be called learned helplessness. There are moments when everything I have come to believe in reasoned deliberation, mutual toleration, liberal democracy, free speech, honesty, decency, and moderation seem as if they are in eclipse. Emotionalism, tribalism, intolerance, lies, cruelty, and extremism surround us (and I have not been immune in this climate to their temptations either). Trump has turned the right into a foul, spit-flecked froth of racist reactionism, and he has evoked a radical response on the left that, while completely understandable, alienates me and many others more profoundly with every passing day. Hell, there have been many moments in the past couple of years when I have alienated the better part of myself. There is something about the current toxicity that has seeped into everyone. Trump himself seems hard to oppose without in some way mimicking him. Take the high road and you risk genteel irrelevance. Go down to Trumps level and you find yourself wrestling with a brawler whose indecency eventually defines you as well. (In some ways, the dynamics of the GOP primaries continue to this day.) And so the opposition party has found not a single spokesperson who can counter him in any compelling way, and, more to the point, it is constantly in danger of becoming simply a mirror image of the Trump right: based primarily on racial and gender identity, defined by rage, bent on revenge, and empowered by moral certainty. I will vote for a Democrat this fall and encourage everyone else to do so, because it is our only hope against accelerating authoritarianism. But Ill do so with the same kind of nausea that led me to support Hillary Clinton in 2016. I dont think there is a way out of this cycle of tribalism in the foreseeable future, given Trumps inexhaustible capacity to fuel it every minute of the day. Radicalization is a dynamic process. It can occur rapidly. I feel it in my own gut, if not my own head. In the end, it will consume all of us until some kind of catastrophe wakes us from this fraught and intensifying nightmare. And so I walk the dogs. And I meditate. And I smoke more weed in the evenings. And I browse the apps. And I find myself searching for figures outside this time and place who were in similar circumstances and yet kept their heads. You can never go wrong reading Orwell. But Im particularly drawn to W. H. Auden these days, not simply because of the transfixing wisdom and beauty of his poetry, but because of who he was, and how he led his life. I recommend two essays about him, one by Hannah Arendt in 1975 in The New Yorker and one by Edward Mendelson in The New York Review of Books. I stumbled upon both recently and am glad I did. Auden is an antidote to Trump and to our times. He despised celebrity; he ran from fame and money; he never signaled his many virtues to anyone; in fact, he went to great lengths to hide them from view. Once at a party I met a woman who belonged to the same Episcopal church that Auden attended in the 1950s, St. Marks in-the-Bowery in New York, Mendelson recalls. She told me that Auden heard that an old woman in the congregation was suffering night terrors, so he took a blanket and slept in the hallway outside her apartment until she felt safe again. He privately paid for the tuition of a succession of war orphans until his death; he made himself look like an asshole in demanding immediate payment for some work but only so he could quietly give the money to Dorothy Days homeless shelter in New York. Mendelson also recalls how I got a phone call from a Canadian burglar who told me he had come across Audens poems in a prison library and had begun a long correspondence in which Auden gave him an informal course in literature. Auden was especially pleased to get him started on Kafka. It turns out that there were countless such acts of quiet generosity. He hated to grandstand. He knew the temptations of the easy political stance. He gave a public speech in the U.S. just after he arrived here in 1939 and got a rapturous response from the liberal crowd. But he wrote to a friend afterward: I suddenly found I could really do it, that I could make a fighting demagogic speech and have the audience roaring It is so exciting but so absolutely degrading; I felt just covered with dirt afterwards. He took full, deep responsibility for his misjudgments born out of excessive, if well-intentioned, zeal. Arendt noted: He turned against his early leftist beliefs because events (the Moscow trials, the Hitler-Stalin pact, and experiences during the Spanish Civil War) had proven them to be dishonest shamefully so. She goes on: In the 1940s there were many who turned against their old beliefs, but there were very few who understood what had been wrong with those beliefs. Far from giving up their belief in history and success, they simply changed trains, as it were; the train of Socialism and Communism had been wrong, and they changed to the train of Capitalism or Freudianism or some refined Marxism, or a sophisticated mixture of all three. Auden, instead, became a Christian; that is, he left the train of History altogether. Most important of all, he never succumbed to the belief that evil was always on the other side, that those fighting for the good werent also capable of great wickedness, and self-deception. He was not one of those, in Mendelsons words, who can say of themselves without irony, I am a good person, who perceive great evils only in other, evil people whose motives and actions are entirely different from their own He observed to friends how common it was to find a dedicated anti-fascist who conducted his erotic life as if he were invading Poland. I love that line. But what he saw most potently was that victims are also capable of becoming victimizers, that the best intentions come wrapped in the crumpled tissue of human fallibility, that I and the public know / What all schoolchildren learn, / Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return. He was, like Orwell, a patron saint of anti-tribalism. Unlike Orwell, Auden found this wisdom and indeed way of life in Christianity, as so many others have over the millennia, which is why I worry about our day and age. We live in a post-Christian world, and even many who say they are Christian turn out to be craven sophists, dedicating themselves to an evil man for the sake of something they call good. So where do we go to get off the train of history now that faith has ended, to see it in some deeper perspective, outside the hot take of 30 seconds ago, the news of the last hour, or the most recent assault on reason and decency from the man at the head of the table? The left has denounced religion as insane; the right has redefined it into another twist on identity politics. But Audens religion makes more and more sense to me: He had no literal belief in miracles or deities and thought that all religious statements about God must be false in a literal sense but might be true in metaphoric ones. He felt himself commanded to an absolute obligation which he knew he could never fulfill to love his neighbor as himself he valued ancient liturgy, not for its magic or beauty, but because its timeless language and ritual was a link between the dead and the unborn, a stay against the complacent egoism that favors whatever is contemporary with ourselves. Perhaps the greatest gift my faith has given me is a sense of this grand perspective, a guard against presentism, a constant thorn in the side of my own ego and its enthusiasms. Mendelson notes that the book Auden wrote while returning in 1940 to the Anglican Communion of his childhood was titled The Double Man. It had an epigraph from Montaigne: We are, I know not how, double in ourselves, so that what we believe we disbelieve, and cannot rid ourselves of what we condemn. The only antidote to Trump and the politics he has forged and intensified is this kind of self-doubt and self-knowledge. It refutes him while never empowering him. It opens up the possibility, if we let it, that the insanities of todays right and left will not inevitably ratchet themselves into an ever tighter spiral of vengeance and mutual incomprehension, ending, as it must, in violence or the political mimicking of violence. They might even disable these impulses from the ground up, helping us not merely cope with this era of hate and division but to overcome it somehow before it obliterates even more of what we all love about this place we call home. (On these lines, I also recommend Bob Wrights concept of mindful resistance.) There is a political answer to Trump: Vote against him and his GOP backers wherever and whenever you can. But if this is not merely to replace one fever with another, there must also be an intellectual struggle to recover moderation and toleration, and a spiritual effort to find the peace no politics will ever provide. Yes, one side the red has a more urgent need for self-doubt and self-criticism than the other. But the moment we decide that our side has no need of uncertainty or perspective or moderation at all is the moment liberal democracy dies. Fired for Science A couple of stories collided in my web-reading this past week, and they both bring up the now-tortured question of gender, patriarchy, sexual harassment, and the rest. The first is a study and a really comprehensive, global one that shows, once again, that disparities between men and women in their choice of occupations actually increase as societies become more egalitarian. This study homes in on science and technology and finds that the more equality there is between men and women in the society as a whole, the greater the gap between the genders in STEM fields. The Atlantics Olga Khazan admirably reported on this latest finding, concluding that, while some cultural and social inhibitions might still discourage girls and women from these fields, ultimately, feeling financially secure and on equal footing with men, some women will always choose to follow their passions and those passions dont always lie within science. (For my own summary of many studies along these lines, see the second item in this diary from last year). The study itself found that the gap between boys science achievement and girls reading achievement relative to their mean academic performance was near universal. And each gender leaned in on their respective relative strengths. In a sane world, this would be no big deal. Who cares if men and women congregate disproportionately in different professions? Its no outrage that a huge majority of those employed in the publishing industry are women, for example so why should it be so appalling that over 80 percent of computer coding graduates are men? As long as we keep doing our best to ensure more baseline equality of opportunity, inequality of outcome should be seen, in my view, as a celebration of actual human diversity, rather than its abrogation. I dont want women and men to be interchangeable non-gendered humans. I love the differences in the world as much as our commonalities. And those differences may even become more pronounced as our real life choices expand. But in the world we now live in, I am actually committing an act of sexual harassment by merely writing the previous two paragraphs. Yes, Im citing a respected, peer-reviewed 2018 study. No, Im not drawing some idiotic conclusion that men are somehow better at math than women. I havent touched a single human being; I havent said anything personally to anyone; I dont work in an office. But, under current law, Im a sexual harasser who could be fired with cause for mentioning scientific data. Thats what the National Labor Relations Board found last week in a review of Googles termination of James Damore (its separate from his ongoing suit against Google). They found that Damores claim that there are differentials between men and women of this kind that may have some impact on the male-female balance at Google, and that there is greater variability among mens IQs than womens (another fact), were firable offenses. Money quote: [E]mployers must be permitted to nip in the bud the kinds of employee conduct that could lead to a hostile workplace. Airing these studies in the context of Googles aggressive diversity policies is thereby a form of abuse. The memorandum cited analogies like baselessly accusing someone of being a Klansman, or using sexually abusive remarks to a colleague, or demanding that an employee come out of the closet. In other words, according to the NLRB, referencing peer-reviewed studies can be grounds for firing someone, notwithstanding [Damores] effort to cloak his comments with scientific references and analysis, and notwithstanding not all women disclaimers. Notice that the word scientific is in quotes, where the science is not in dispute. And notice the dismissal of any argument that cites distributions and bell curves very basic statistical tools as if they are designed to obscure rather than reveal the complicated truth. This is not just another elite campus incident. Its embedded in federal employment law. Its practiced by one of the most powerful corporations on the planet. In the fight between science and todays social-justice movement, science has little chance. It will either conform to ideology or be banished from consideration. Obama and Wakanda I went to see Black Panther this week (a spoiler ahead). I know its asking for it for me to voice an opinion about the movie in public, but what the hell. I had a blast. With all the ponderous, if intelligent, commentary, you almost forget that its another comic-book action movie, but far better and far more interesting than most. If you have a thing for beautiful half-naked men, its not too shabby either. (Not since 300 have I seen so many pecs and lats and traps aquiver.) But its message also surprised me with its mainstreaminess. Its about racial magnanimity over revenge, global unity over tribal hatred. It doesnt shy from the deep, deep wounds of colonialism and slavery, but it doesnt posit revolutionary violence or racial payback as a response (even as it shows how understandable and even noble the roots of the urge for that payback are). It is, rather, a movie that brims with racial pride and self-confidence and humor and beauty. Its nearly-all-black cast both puts race at the center of the picture but also removes it from the foreground as you are simply brought into the human characters and drama. Its much more MLK than Malcolm X. Come to think of it, its quintessential Obama, a non-tribal tribal chieftain. But even in the racial uplift, there was nuance. The way in which colonizers like Bilbo were subtly condescended to was more powerful than an indoctrination course in whiteness. The whole concept of an Africanness that inverts the Wests technological prowess is, of course, genius (as well as poignant). The tragic semi-suicide of Killmonger keeps the raw wound of history open, its countless victims in our minds, while still positing a better future. Thats much harder to do than this movie made it seem. At least thats what this ticket-buyer felt. I cannot feel or appreciate this movie the way millions of others do, because I do not and cannot know the full range of ideas and feelings and arguments this movie is generating among African-Americans. But I have benefited from reading many reviews from varying perspectives on that theme, learned from them, and gained from them. And what I loved about this movie was its capacity to include anyone in its embrace. For a couple of hours, a fantasy entranced us, and its extraordinary box-office success proves the breadth of its simultaneously racial and yet transracial appeal. If only this formula could somehow be replicated in our politics and culture more generally. It once was, of course, not so long ago. Perhaps in the future, it will again. See you next Friday. WASHINGTON In 2013, an ATF official signed a letter to a member of Congress saying that two bump-stock devices examined by bureau technicians are not subject to the provisions of federal firearms statutes and are therefore legal. Now, three months after one such device was used to kill 58 in a mass-shooting in Las Vegas and more than a week since the Parkland, Fla., high school massacre, the author of that letter says it was a mistake and that federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives was wrong to OK the devices in the first place. I made a mistake in signing this document, said Richard Marianos, now retired after 27 years as an ATF agent, special agent in charge and assistant director. I relied on (ATFs) firearms technical branch to provide subject-matter expertise, but now after talking to other firearms experts and reflecting on my own career, anything that fires two or more rounds at the pull of a trigger is a machine gun, and should be regulated as such. Marianos, 52, was ATFs assistant director for public and governmental affairs when he wrote the letter to Rep. Ed Perlmutter, D-Colo., on April 16, 2013. In the letter, he stated that the two bump-stock devices the HellFire Trigger and the Slide Stock of Slidefire Solutions fell within the 84-year-old Federal Firearms Acts distinction between rifles that require one trigger pull per shot (legal) and rifles that emit automatic rapid-fire bursts (illegal, or strictly regulated). These devices do not provide an automatic action requiring instead continuous multiple inputs (trigger pulls) by the user for each successive shot, the Marianos letter states. Marianos, who also teaches at Georgetown University and is a consultant, called such distinctions hair splitting. If it walks like duck, quacks like a duck, its a duck, he said in an interview. In addition to the aftermath of the Las Vegas shooting, bump stocks landed in the news after 17 people were fatally shot Feb. 14 at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. On Tuesday, President Donald Trump directed Attorney General Jeff Sessions to issue what amounts to an administrative ban on bump stocks, which when attached to semiautomatic rifles like the AR-15 enable the weapons to fire just like machine guns typically between 400 and 800 rounds or more per minute. Senators including Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer said a bump-stock ban can only be achieved through legislation. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said: The ATF currently lacks authority under the law to ban bump stocks. The agency made this clear in a 2013 letter to Congress. An administrative ban could take years to promulgate through the cumbersome federal rule making process and would be subject to further delay through court challenges, said Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn. The Slidefire Solutions Slide Stock used by Las Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock is not itself a firearm. Rather, it is an after-market device attached to the mainframe of a semiautomatic rifle. Its flexible bridge between stock and mainframe essentially harnesses the weapon's recoil power to keep it firing round after round. After placing the frame on a shoulder, shooters pull back with their trigger finger and forward with their free hand. If done with the proper push-and-pull, the weapon convulses into a paroxysm of fire. Although technically there is a single trigger-pull per shot, the recoil presses the trigger to the finger at speeds exceeding a fingers natural ability to pull. Max Kingery, the ATF senior firearms enforcement officer who tested it at the ATF facility in Martinsburg, W. Va., has compared the operation of a Slidefire device to stretching a rubber band. In a 2013 interview, Kingery maintained ATF was following the law as written. We don't take a position on whether we like an item or don't like an item, said Kingery, a Marine Corps veteran. We simply classify it according to the law. Although the U.S. is a gun-friendly nation with up to 300 million firearms in circulation, machine guns have long been frowned upon. The 1934 National Firearms Act, approved by Congress in the wake of Prohibition-era gangsters popularizing the Tommy gun, imposes a tax and strict licensing requirement on anyone owning a machine gun. A 1986 law effectively banned all machine guns for non-law-enforcement use that were produced after its date of enactment. Only those under license prior to enactment would be considered legal. Under New Yorks strict gun laws, bump stocks are legal to purchase and possess but illegal to place on an actual semiautomatic rifle, according to State Police. Sign up for The Knick Get the latest news and some area history with our afternoon newsletter. Although the National Rifle Association generally opposes most efforts to rein in gun access in the wake of mass shootings, after the Las Vegas shooting, the organization called on ATF to immediately review whether these devices comply with federal law. Congress at that time appeared ready to make bump stocks illegal. But House Speaker Paul Ryan and other Republican leaders sidetracked legislative momentum by asking ATF to re-examine its ruling that the two devices were legal. ATF was in the midst of the review when Trump, after the Florida shooting, ordered Sessions to find a way to ban them without legislation. The ATF has a long history of tense relations with the NRA. Through the years, critics have said the bureau is loath to cross the NRA in making a decision for fear of its lobbying power on Capitol Hill. Indeed, the NRA over decades has succeeded in whittling away ATFs budget and agent force, and limiting its jurisdiction over guns. Asked whether that long history played a role in his 2013 letter, Marianos replied that he personally never feared the NRA. A streetwise Chicago native, Marianos said he was simply relying on the judgment of ATF experts in Martinsburg that the devices conformed to the laws one-trigger-pull, one-shot standard. My job was to follow the law, he said. I was a law enforcement officer, not the regulatory police. Did the bureau as a whole feel pressure in its decision-making? I couldnt tell you, Marianos replied. It was way above my pay grade. In any case, Marianos said he now believes that a semiautomatic rifle equipped with a legal bump stock is indistinguishable from an illegal machine gun. If youre in a police car and you hear a pop-pop-pop, youre not going to ask, Is that a bump stock or a machine gun? he said. Anyone with street experience would recognize that as automatic weapons fire. 3 1 of 3 Carlos Osorio Show More Show Less 2 of 3 Carlos Osorio Show More Show Less 3 of 3 A veteran executive who has led Ford's Lincoln luxury brand will now head American operations, replacing an executive who was ousted this week over allegations of inappropriate behavior. Kumar Galhotra , 52, will replace Raj Nair starting March 1, the company said Thursday. Ford Motor Co. said in a printed release that Galhotra will lead all aspects of the North American business, the company's primary source of revenue and profits. Its hard to say whether Governor Eric Greitens is in greater danger of imprisonment or impeachment. Photo: Jeff Roberson/AP/REX/Shutterstock The lurid saga of Missouris Republican governor Eric Greitenss extramarital love life just took a major turn for the worse today when he was indicted by a St. Louis grand jury on a charge of felony invasion of privacy. According to at least one media report, Greitens was taken into custody by the St. Louis sheriff, though you have to figure hell make bail pretty quickly. The charge stems from an alleged 2015 incident when Greitens was said to have taken surreptitious nude photographs of his illicit lover and then used them to blackmail her against telling anyone about their affair. The story came to light via a tape of the woman involved telling her then-husband about the affair and Greitenss threats (and also what sounded like some physical abuse as well). The governor has admitted having the affair, but is denying the blackmail and abuse claims. Now hell have to tell his side of the story in greater detail. To be clear, its taking the nude photographs without knowledge or permission that constitutes invasion of privacy. What makes it a felony is that Greitens reportedly transmitted the photo or photos in such a way that allows access to that image or video via a computer. The charge carries a maximum punishment of four years in jail. But aside from the legal peril Greitens faces, hes in big trouble politically. He is not a very popular man in Jefferson City, even among his fellow Republicans. The abrasive outsider campaign he ran to become governor in 2016 alienated some pols, and hes had a very rocky relationship with the GOP-controlled legislature the last year. Hes been under investigation not just for the sex scandal but for alleged campaign-finance and public-records violations. Theres already been buzz about impeachment proceedings against Greitens, and the indictment could make that real very quickly. Under Missouri law, a majority of the state House can bring impeachment charges against a governor, who would then be tried by a special panel of judges appointed by the state senate. Impeachable offenses include any violation of law involving moral turpitude; pretty clearly Greitenss alleged behavior would qualify abundantly. The governor has lawyered up lavishly, and shows no signs so far of making a strategic retreat into plea bargains or a resignation. Well have to wait and see if the sheer humiliation of endless public discussion of his alleged behavior as the lousiest of lovers will eventually break him. THE TICK Amazon New Episodes! The second part of Season 1, featuring six new episodes, drops today. Starring Peter Serafinowicz, Griffin Newman, Jackie Earle Haley and Valorie Curry, The Tick is based on the cult comic book by Ben Edlund, who also created this series. MARSEILLE Netflix Season Premiere! In Season 2, journalists surround the hospital where Robert Taro (Gerard Depardieu), the incumbent mayor of Marseille, is still in the intensive care unit as a result of his recent stroke. As the upcoming elections approach, Taro's absence offers Lucas Barres (Benoit Magimel) his shot to try to rise to power, but he is still nine votes short to become the new mayor of the city. The negotiations with all the different political parties begin, with the extreme right waiting backstage to make its move. MUTE Netflix Original Film! Set in Berlin in the near future, this film follows Leo (Alexander Skarsgard), who unable to speak from a childhood accident searches for his missing girlfriend through the full spectrum of the city's shadow-dwellers. As he seeks answers, Leo finds himself mixed up with Cactus Bill (Paul Rudd) and Duck (Justin Theroux), a pair of irreverent U.S. Army surgeons on a mission all their own. Described as a "soulful sci-fi journey," the film comes from director Duncan Jones (Moon). SEVEN SECONDS Netflix New Series! This anthological crime thriller comes from creator and executive producer Veena Sud (The Killing) and stars Regina King alongside breakout British actress Clare-Hope Ashitey. In the series, after a white cop accidentally hits and critically injures a black teenager, a northeastern city explodes with racial tensions, an attempted cover-up and its aftermath, and the trial of the century. UGLY DELICIOUS Netflix New Series! Over eight episodes of this docuseries, James Beard Award-winning chef David Chang travels the world with writers, chefs, activists and artists who use food as a vehicle to break down cultural barriers, tackle misconceptions and uncover shared experiences. Oscar-winning director Morgan Neville ("Twenty Feet From Stardom") helms the series. GREAT PERFORMANCES: "MOVIES FOR GROWNUPS AWARDS WITH 'AARP THE MAGAZINE'" PBS, 9 p.m. Watch as Helen Mirren receives the 2017 Movies for Grownups Career Achievement Award. The Movies for Grownups Awards were established to celebrate and encourage filmmaking that appeals to movie lovers with a grown-up state of mind and to recognize its artists. STRIKE BACK Cinemax, 10 p.m. More trouble for Section 20! Islamist terrorist Jane Lowry (Katherine Kelly) has recruited Magyar Ultra, the Hungarian gang of white nationalists that holds Mac (Warren Brown) hostage, to abduct a Russian chemical weapons expert. 2 DOPE QUEENS: "BLACK NERDS" HBO, 11:30 p.m. Series Finale! Orange Is the New Black star Uzo Aduba does her homework on the plight of "Black Nerds" (a.k.a. Blerds) in the finale of HBO's comedy specials featuring the "2 Dope Queens" Phoebe Robinson and Jessica Williams. Brought to you by the publishers of TV Guide. TV Guide 2018 Boasting art market superstars Thomas Struth and Jeff Wall, Magnum photojournalists Josef Koudelka and Gilles Peress, community collaborator Wendy Ewald, and seven other photographers of significance, "This Place" was naturally lauded when it first was first exhibited in Prague in 2014. But there were complaints, too. Can a dozen famous photographers, commissioned from outside of Israel and the West Bank, create perceptive, pertinent work? As outsiders? And should they? Can an artist, in good conscience, go to the West Bank and make work that is largely apolitical, that perpetuates a personal style and hesitates to comment? Six million dollars later we can see for ourselves in the latest iteration of "This Place," a single exhibition event spread among four upstate colleges this spring. There is a lot to take in, and some of the photographs are printed really large, so even with the University at Albany's art museum, the Tang at Skidmore, the spacious Wellin Museum at Hamilton College, and the compact Picker Gallery at Colgate University, there is no room to spare. Start with the big, lone Jeff Wall at the UAlbany's University Art Museum called "Daybreak," showing Bedouin olive pickers still asleep in the open air in the desert. Behind them is a gleaming Israeli prison under the grim dawn air. In this single observation, made with great care and minimal prearrangement, Wall clinically reveals the mismatch of cultures. A few paces away, Martin Kollar's plain-speaking color documentations of bizarre and sometimes disturbing situations reveal a dry wit and a visual critique of contemporary Israel. If these startling insights appear to be without judgement, they do contribute to a larger picture that builds as you go from artist to artist. In general, the strongest works in "This Place" manage some political bite. At the Wellin, a long grid of aerial views of human activity in the Negev desert by Fazal Sheikh is graphically stunning. But with a preponderance of topographic evidence, along with careful documentation, Sheikh also silently questions the displacement and "erasure" of Bedouin habitations due to relocations, forestation projects, and other changes since 1948. Wendy Ewald doesn't actually take pictures but rather hands out cameras to nonphotographers, and the results cover a huge range. Printed small, then showcased neatly on layers of shelves at both the Wellin and the Tang, they elevate the ordinary. These insiders from 14 different communities show their own worlds in their own ways, ranging from Palestinian women in East Jerusalem to Israeli women at a military academy. Also at the Tang, Gilles Peress' array of large color images provide dry observation without drama, unlike his more famous images of conflict zones. At the Picker, by contrast, the black and white horizontal panoramas by Josef Koudelka are some of his best work ever. He packs every image with a rich visual investment in places laden with hard-edged facts about the border wall: barbed wire, convoluted barriers, and graffiti. These are hard to appreciate small, in a long glass case. Luckily, one outcome of the larger scope of "This Place" is the many photographic monographs that resulted (from every artist except Wall and Peress). Check out Koudelka's stunning "The Wall." Trenchant, visually condemning stuff. In contrast, the panoramic black and white desert landscapes by Jungjin Lee are shorn of exterior meaning, reveling in brooding, gorgeous desolation. The large, gritty prints are imposing and well represented at Albany, though her book, "Unnamed Road," provides a more tactile sensibility. At the Picker, detachment from politics gets confusing with Nick Wapplington, who made bland, posed snapshots of newly arrived Israeli settlers in the West Bank (in housing, he points out, deemed illegal by the United Nations). Across the gallery, Rosalind Fox Solomon's black and white portraits try for something different and more photographically traditional, capturing diverse types, including many Africans and Christians, with honest, full expressions. There are several other bodies of work at each venue that overlap in appearance because they all use large format color film and a view camera, a level horizon, and unglamorized information. Stephen Shore's understated, precise land and city views describe and describe. German photographer Thomas Struth's visually similar contributions are tightly composed and ambiguous. A few images by the organizer of the "This Place" project, Frederic Brenner, follow suit, and even Wapplington employed a large format camera for his own iterations of detached observation. In all of these high-res images, most printed large and some quite beautiful, you can stare and study, but the point is often unclear. Is that particular housing actually a row of illegal settlements? Is that desert merely an example of forbidding terrain or is something more implied? Here we can fairly ask whether an artist can or should maintain such apparent secure loftinessare the photographers fiddling while Rome burns? Maybe. Some will argue we should have room for art on any terms. There might be lasting truths beyond elusive current events that are mined here. Brenner, in a 2014 interview for Time, said, "We want to look beyond the political narrative." And Peress philosophized, "I am not trying to capture anything." "This Place" is unique. It's rare to have a privately funded project with so many photographers gathered around a single goal and given generous (though not complete) freedom. One of the project's new goals for 2018 is to create debate and "interdisciplinary inquiry" at the college level, and that is happening at all four institutions, with rafts of special events, course integrations, and guest speakers. Take advantage. Some of the work does filter too easily into an academic zone, laden with potential meaning but also guarded and coded and restrained. But everything here is also terrific, and the more of the shows you can see, the more provocative sense it all makes. More Information If you go "This Place" Where: Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art, Hamilton College, 198 College Hill Road, Clinton When: Through June 10 Hours: Tuesday-Sunday, 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Admission: Free Info: hamilton.edu/wellin or 315-859-4396 Where: Picker Art Gallery, Colgate University, 13 Oak Drive, Hamilton, When: Through May 20 Hours: Tuesday-Friday 10 a.m.- 5 p.m., Saturday and Sunday, noon-5 p.m., Third Thursdays 10 a.m.- 8 p.m. Admission: Free Info: colgate.edu/campus-life/arts-on-campus or 315-228-7634 Where: University Art Museum, University at Albany, 1400 Washington Ave., Albany When: Through April 7 Hours: Tuesday 10 a.m. - 7 p.m., Wednesday - Friday 10 a.m. - 5 p.m., Saturday, noon-4 p.m. Admission: Free Info: albany.edu/museum or (518) 442-4035 Where: The Tang Museum, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs When: Through April 22 Hours: Tuesday-Sunday noon-5 p.m., Thursday, noon-9 p.m. Admission: Free Info: tang.skidmore.edu/exhibitions or 518-580-8080 See More Collapse William Jaeger is a frequent contributor to the Times Union. The room was dusky, the stage was small and the air was thick with emotion. But Illuminate Theater was made to shed light in the darkness, and once it started, it spilled everywhere. The disco ball on the ceiling did its part. "Shackles must be worn at all times," announced Illuminate founder Morgan Elizabeth, portraying a Middle Passage "flight attendant" in a piece from George C. Wolfe's "The Colored Museum." Later, actor Marquis Heath took the stage with a monologue on slavery and amnesia from Anna Deavere Smith's "Fires in the Mirror." More for you New York's slave past unearthed And then, one by one, the original works unfolded: pieces on parents and prejudice, on being black in a white school, on leaving the South with hope and sadness on the great migration to the North. "The South is no longer a place for black people," intoned performer Aaron Moore, channeling the grandfather who moved his family from Georgia to Rensselaer in the 1940s. "This land belongs to the ghosts." The ghosts and shackles were all evoked on a Tuesday in late January at Troy Kitchen, as Illuminate marked its six-month anniversary with an evening of monologues featuring performers of color. The topic: "Historical Trauma," covering slavery, genocide, inhumanity, the impact of hate and their lingering manifestations today. The space: full. People lounged on sofas, sat at the bar, crammed into corners and leaned against the wall. The Illuminate series will return to the Kitchen on Tuesday evening, Feb. 27 as ever, the fourth of each month with a night of monologues on the topic of "Black Love." The event will close as ever with a "talkback" session inviting questions and commentary from audience members, an occasion to break open yet more dialogue. "When I first started, my main goal was just to shine a light on people who I felt were not getting opportunities in the theatrical world in Albany," said Elizabeth, the actor-producer behind Illuminate. A graduate of Albany High School and Russell Sage College, she founded the series in response to frustrations faced by performers of color in a predominantly white theater scene. "I felt like a lot of the directors and some of the professional theaters in the area and some of the bigger theaters that have funding aren't necessarily looking for people of color," she said. "And if they are, it's very minimally. They're just kind of picking the same people that get used in everything." She decided to give that unsung talent a platform. "I wanted to put people of color on stage so that they could start getting cast in other things. But since then, it's become much more than that. It's become a platform for people to connect with each other and not just directors and actors. People have created bonds that I could never have predicted." Last month, the post-show talkback quickly took a turn toward the personal and impassioned, delving into pain and oppression. Social worker Lisa Good spoke of violence and the nature of "urban grief." One man wondered whether the only recourse is two separate nations: "It's America for them. It's America for me." Another, a man in a snap brim Nick Usher, husband of poet-performer Mz.Tu remarked on the importance of positivity and deliberateness. "The mind is just like soil, right? If you plant it right and you cultivate it, and you protect it, it will grow," he said. "So if you put prosperity and energy in it, it will grow into positivity and if you put poison in it, that will somehow manifest in the outputs that you give to the world." Elizabeth didn't foresee the therapeutic aspect to some of the talkbacks, but she embraces it. Neither did she anticipate the series' growing emphasis on original, personal monologues. "I didn't know that it was going to be so successful in this way. I thought it was going to be more of people performing produced or published pieces and then that would inspire a conversation. ... But I didn't think that it would be so personal," she said. "And the personal aspect kind of manifested itself naturally." Topics, so far, have covered social change, sexual assault and prevailing media narratives characterizing people of color. Each month, new performers audition; a handful of regulars have emerged. Tilting toward the series' one-year anniversary this August, Elizabeth is thinking about a permanent home. She's looking for funding, perhaps grants or donations from small businesses, as she'd like to keep performances free. And she's hoping, once money is secured, to move forward with plans to mount a fully staged production. Her mission remains unchanged: "To start conversations. And I wanted to have a platform for people to have discussions on subjects that are off limits in social groups. There's this big unspoken rule that you don't talk about religion with your friends, and you don't talk about politics, and you don't talk about money and I wanted to put everything on the table and have no off-topic conversations." Sign up for The Knick Get the latest news and some area history with our afternoon newsletter. And race. Race almost goes without saying. Race underscores everything. But race isn't all of it. "It's become a lot bigger than race," Elizabeth said. That night at the Kitchen, the crowd was mixed in age and ethnicity. "I've gone to events that people call 'black' events, and you look in the audience, and everyone is black. And I've gone to other events that people categorize as 'white' events, and the same thing" everyone is white. "And when I look into my audience, it's very diverse, in my opinion," she said. "And we've touched people's lives." After the show, as attendees tarried and chatted and wound their way out the door, Moore spoke of the role Illuminate plays for people of color in the arts scene and the broader region. "It's important to the community," he said, "because it gives a voice to the unheard. People who try to put racism and white supremacy and white privilege and all those isms under the rug it shouts to their face, loud, proud, that we're here, we're proud of who we are, we're proud of our history and we're proud of where we come from and no matter what you do or how hard you try to cover us up, we're going to speak on it. ... Illuminate shows through art that you can't silence us and we will no longer be silenced, or would even try to be silenced. "You will see me. You will see my color. You will hear my voice. You will feel my anger. You will feel my sadness. You will watch me walk. You will listen to me talk. And you will know my spirit and you will know I am proud to be black. I am proud to be an artist of color. I am proud to be a black artist." abiancolli@timesunion.com HUNTSVILLE - Kent Whitaker was praying when he got the news: The governor had spared his son. In an unexpected last-minute decision, Gov. Greg Abbott granted clemency to the Sugar Land man slated for execution Thursday, just minutes before he was to be strapped to the gurney in Huntsville. Thomas "Bart" Whitaker was sent to death row for targeting his own family in a 2003 murder-for-hire plot aimed at landing a hefty $1 million inheritance. "I'm thankful not for me, but for my dad," Whitaker said upon learning the news, according to a prison spokesman. "Whatever punishment I would have or will receive is just but my dad did nothing wrong. The system worked for him today." The commutation came after years of desperate pleas from the condemned man's father - the only other survivor of the attack - spurred the seven-member Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles to make a rare unanimous push on Tuesday for clemency, sending the final decision to the governor's desk. After two days of weighing the options - life in prison or death - Abbott announced his decision less than an hour before Whitaker was scheduled to die by lethal injection at 6 p.m. It is the first time a Texas governor has commuted a death row prisoner's sentence following a board recommendation since 2007. "In just over three years as Governor, I have allowed 30 executions. I have not granted a commutation of a death sentence until now," Abbott said late Thursday in a statement. "The murders of Mr. Whitaker's mother and brother are reprehensible. The crime deserves severe punishment for the criminals who killed them. The recommendation of the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles, and my action on it, ensures Mr. Whitaker will never be released from prison." In his reasoning, the governor cited father Kent Whitaker's passionate opposition to the execution and the condemned man's willingness to waive all parole claims as factors in his decision. Now, the 38-year-old will spend the rest of his life in prison - and not on death row. "I'm so grateful," Kent Whitaker told reporters outside the death chamber. Hours earlier, he'd already said his goodbyes to his son, who'd been given his last meal and withdrawn his final remaining motion for a stay. "What a fantastic outcome," said Thomas Whitaker's Houston-based defense attorney, James Rytting. "This is confirmation that victims' rights matter in Texas." ANGRY JURORS: 'The only way people are safe is if he is dead,' says juror in Fort Bend death row case But in a statement late Thursday night, Fort Bend County District Attorney John Healey pushed back against that notion. "I have never wavered in my support of the jury's decision," he said. "They heard all the evidence after a tremendous investigation and prosecutorial effort. What they didn't hear, but what I hope the governor heard as it was conveyed to several of his staff members with the expectation that the governor would know it, was that Tricia Whitaker's family was fully in favor of carrying out the execution." The December 2003 killings took place just after celebratory dinner marking Whitaker's supposed graduation from Sam Houston State University - a milestone that never happened. Before the ruse of a dinner, Whitaker had arranged for two friends to wait at the family's Sugar Lakes subdivision home and stage a fake burglary. When the family of four returned from the restaurant, a gunman opened fire as they walked through the door, killing 51-year-old Patricia Whitaker and 19-year-old Kevin. Initially, the case baffled police. But then, authorities learned after reading an article in the Houston Chronicle, one detective later said that Whitaker was no longer enrolled in college. He'd been out on academic probation. As police zeroed in on him as a suspect, Whitaker stole $10,000 from his father and fled to Mexico, where authorities eventually captured him and brought him back to Texas. The pair of slayings came after three years of planning and at least two previous murder plots - a fact that was not lost on the Fort Bend County jury. "We tried to find a way to not kill the guy as a jury," said one former juror, who asked to remain anonymous, citing concerns for her safety. "We tried really hard to follow the law - the law said he needed to be a continuing danger to society and we finally decided that he was because his method of killing was to get other people to kill for him. If he could convince college kids to kill for him, what would prevent him from getting other inmates to do it?" Triggerman Chris Brashear, Whitaker's housemate, pleaded guilty to murder and took a life sentence, while the getaway driver - neighbor Steve Champagne - agreed to a 15-year plea deal. Sign up for The Knick Get the latest news and some area history with our afternoon newsletter. From the outset, Kent Whitaker - who was wounded in the attack - argued against the state's harshest sentence. READ MORE: 'I have seen enough death,' says Sugar Land father fighting execution of son who had rest of family killed "I wrestled with God about my anger and desire for revenge," he said. "It's difficult to explain but he led me to a miracle of forgiveness where I forgave everyone involved with the crime long before I realized it was my son." Nonetheless, Whitaker was sentenced to death. In the years that followed, his father led the fight against death, speaking out passionately about his son's case, penning a book on it and forming the centerpiece of the clemency petition that moved the notoriously tough seven-member Texas parole board. "There is only one person on Earth who is intimate with the murderous attack, the lives and deaths of the other victims, and the life of Thomas Whitaker - Mr. Whitaker's father, Kent. Kent was there," the condemned man's attorneys wrote in their clemency petition. "For the rest of us, the case against commutation to a life sentence seems clear. We can't forgive; we have no sympathy. But clemency is not about something so simple as sympathy or as formidable as forgiveness." Full of graphic descriptions of the crime and Old Testament references, the petition was bolstered by a few dozen letters from friends, family, fellow death row inmates and even prison guards. It was a long shot, but on Tuesday the board sided with Whitaker. "This is beyond amazing," his father said tearfully at the time. "I can't tell you." But to the former juror, the board's vote - and the governor's decision - felt like a betrayal. "I really think Bart Whitaker is a master manipulator and I think he manipulated the parole board," she said. "He got his way with them the same way he did with the people he convinced to kill for him." Marshall Slot, the former Sugar Land detective who probed the case 15 years ago, said it made him "sick." "There's no definitive definition of a sociopath," he said. "It's someone who uses people as pieces in a game. And that's what Bart is." The last time a Texas governor agreed to commute a death row inmate's sentence to life in prison following a board recommendation was in 2007, when Texas Gov. Rick Perry spared Kenneth Foster's life. It had only happened three times before that. Washington The Trump administration has decided that it needs no new legal authority from Congress to indefinitely keep U.S. military forces deployed in Syria and Iraq, even in territory that has been cleared of Islamic State fighters, according to Pentagon and State Department officials. In a pair of letters, the officials illuminated the Trump administration's planning for an open-ended mission of forces in Syria beyond the Islamic State fight. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson foreshadowed the plan in a speech last month, saying that troops will stay in Syria to curb Iran and prevent the Syrian government from reconquering rebel-held areas. Though Tillerson also cited a need to mop up the remnants of the Islamic State group and keep from leaving a vacuum in which the group could regenerate, other administration officials put far greater emphasis on the extremists. In the letters, they said the continued potential threat from the Islamic State provided a legal rationale for the Trump administration to keep U.S. troops deployed there indefinitely. "Just as when we previously removed U.S. forces prematurely, the group will look to exploit any abatement in pressure to regenerate capabilities and reestablish local control of territory," wrote David Trachtenberg, deputy undersecretary of defense for policy. Sign up for The Knick Get the latest news and some area history with our afternoon newsletter. About 2,000 U.S. troops are in Syria, where nearly all the territory once held by the Islamic State has now been liberated. Tillerson deemed the group "substantially, but not completely defeated," warning that the insurgents remained a threat. Trachtenberg wrote the letter to Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., who had asked the Trump administration to explain its understanding of its authority to stay on in Syria. The State Department sent him a similar letter, which also argued that international law provided a basis for U.S. forces to remain in Syria despite the lack of consent from the Syrian government to protect Iraq and the United States from terrorists. And both letters said U.S. troops may strike at Syrian government or Iranian forces deemed to threaten Americans or Syrian rebel groups that are assisting the United States in fighting the Islamic State. MECHANICVILLE - The City Council on Thursday night approved the hiring of a labor lawyer to investigate charges that Mayor Dennis Baker threatened, harassed and demeaned members of the police department. The four commissioners, with Baker abstaining, voted to pay no more than $10,000 to attorney Robert S. Hite to look into the complaint filed by the Police Benevolent Association with the city Commissioner of Accounts Kimberly Dunn. Baker vowed he will be vindicated at the meeting. "I'm sick about what's going on," the Republican mayor told the handful of residents who showed up for the meeting. "It's embarrassing for the city, and the press doesn't help." He said the charges including that he "created an atmosphere of fear, unrest and discord among the members of the Mechanicville police" were false. This is the third vote on a resolution to hire Hite. At the last two meetings, with Baker and Dunn abstaining and a member absent, the five-member council came up short. On Thursday, all members were present and Dunn, who has two sons on the police force, did not abstain. She said she didn't want the resolution to fail again and it was her right to vote. "It's got to be investigated," Dunn said. Nick Rinaldi, a lifelong city resident, said the charges and subsequent investigation are "a witch hunt." "It's ludicrous," Rinaldi said. "Spending my tax money for this. It's a travesty. Denny didn't do this." He was also angry no public comment was permitted at the meeting. Sign up for The Knick Get the latest news and some area history with our afternoon newsletter. "You didn't see democracy there," Rinaldi said. "You see a dictatorship. We have men fighting for us so that we have the right to free speech and then they take it away." Baker has hired his own lawyer, James Walsh of Ballston who is well-known in Republican circles throughout the county. "We are looking forward to participating in a fair and impartial investigation," Walsh said. "The charges are basically baseless." When asked who will pay for Walsh's services, Baker said the city would pick up the bill. He plans on submitting an invoice. The cost of his representation was not discussed at the meeting. However, Commissioner of Finance Jodie Gilheany said that the city has no intention of paying Baker's attorney fees. More for you Mechanicville cops file wide-ranging complaint against mayor "We are only paying for the investigation," Gilheany said. "His lawyer is his expense." The late husband and wife duo whose estate was allegedly plundered by Town of Guilderland Judge Richard Sherwood and attorney Thomas Lagan were well-regarded in the Capital Region both for their business acumen and their diverse and widespread philanthropy. Warren and Pauline Bruggeman, of Niskayuna, were in their 80s when they died in 2009 and 2011, respectively, leaving behind millions of dollars in trusts for Pauline's siblings. On Friday, state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman accused Sherwood and Lagan, who provided estate planning and other financial services to the Bruggemans, of stealing more than $4 million from those trusts in recent years. Warren Bruggeman is most known for his tenure at General Electric, where he served as vice president of the nuclear energy business and restructured a financially ailing nuclear program into something commercially profitable. Born in Queens in 1925, he earned a bachelor's and master's degree in chemical engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, and was a graduate of the Columbia University Executive Management Program. After serving as a naval officer during World War II, Bruggeman began his GE career at the Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory in Schenectady, and went on to become general manager of Gas Turbine Engineering and Manufacturing. He left the area in 1979 to become vice president of GE's nuclear energy business, headquartered in San Jose, Calif. He and his wife, Pauline, were married in 1947. She was a native of Watervliet, a graduate of the Troy Business College and Sage Junior College, and worked as a secretary at Behr-Manning Corporation before her marriage. After his retirement, Bruggeman returned to the Capital Region and quickly became involved in the community and with various philanthropic causes. Much of his attention turned to his alma mater. He served on the RPI board of trustees from 1989 through 2000, and the presidential search committee that brought Shirley Ann Jackson to town. The couple donated frequently to the engineering school, creating the Warren H. Bruggeman '46 and Pauline Urban Bruggeman Distinguished Professorship and earning a name on a conference center inside the institute's new biotechnology and interdisciplinary studies center. "Mr. Bruggeman was an innovative thinker and an inspirational leader, and his wisdom and generosity have left an indelible mark on Rensselaer," Jackson said after his death. "We shall dearly miss him." Sign up for The Knick Get the latest news and some area history with our afternoon newsletter. He also chaired the Rensselaer Technology Park Committee, and was instrumental in growing the park. He served as an advisor and board member to MapInfo, a mapping analytics company founded by RPI students and based in the park. It eventually grew to employ 400 people at the park, and was sold to Pitney Bowes. The Bruggemans were also big supporters of Ukraine's business community. According to the couple's philanthropy website, Bruggeman had made a pledge to his wife's parents to assist Ukraine should it achieve independence from the Soviet Union. This eventually led to the couple's sponsorship of the first-ever business incubator in Ukraine, seeding other incubators and startups around the Eastern European country. Between the two of them, the Bruggemans volunteered with or served on the boards at a number of other area organizations including: Ellis Hospital, the Visiting Nurse Service Association of Schenectady, the Capital District YMCA, the Troy YWCA, Sunnyview Rehabilitation Hospital in Schenectady, RPI's Center for New Technologies, the Capital Region Technology Development Council and the Center for Economic Growth. TROY Firefighters put out a fire inside an apartment complex late Thursday. Displaced residents watched as city crews battled back flames at Hudson Terrace Apartments. A call came in at 8:20 for the fire, which damaged at least one apartment inside the complex. The building is located off Stow Avenue, a few blocks south of the Troy-Menands Bridge. No one was injured, said Fire Chief Thomas Garrett. Not Hillary Clinton fans. Photo: Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock Former Breitbart News editor Ben Shapiro was one of the many conservative personalities to take the stage at CPAC Thursday and celebrate the man in the White House. At one point during his speech, Shapiro listed Trumps accomplishments since taking office, including last years tax bill and the defeat of ISIS. He finished his list with this: Most of all, President Trump brought us one really fantastic thing Hillary Clinton is not and will never be president of the United States. The crowd went wild, and 471 days after the presidential election, erupted into a chant of lock her up. Why bother, shes already in a jail of her own making somewhere in the woods in upstate New York, Shapiro said, displaying the trademark wit that has the Times calling him the cool kids philosopher in November. SCHODACK Firefighters extinguished a large fire that heavily damaged a farmhouse leaving five people homeless on Rout e150 Friday morning, town police said. The fire was called in at about 5:30 a.m. Friday at 3047 Route 150 as several fire companies responded. The East Schodack Fire Department led the fight to put out the fire. Five adults were assisted by the American Red Cross of Northeastern New York Chapter. The adults received financial assistance for shelter, food and clothing. Police closed Route 150 to traffic between Burden Lake Road and Luther Road as fire departments were at the fire scene. Police said department fire investigators were at the scene to determine the cause of the fire. Brace yourselves! The weather in Tipperary is about to take a cold turn with Met Eireann issuing a Status Yellow cold weather warning for a full week! A blast of weather all the way from Siberia in Russia could be set to hit Ireland over the coming days according to the latest Irish and UK forecast as Spring sunshine is replaced by a sub-zero eastern weather front. Exceptionally cold weather is forecast for next week with significant wind chill and severe frosts. Disruptive snow showers are expected from Tuesday onwards, particularly in the east and southeast. The alert is in affect from today, Friday, February 23, to next Friday, March 2. Met Eireann says it will be dry settled but cold for the remainder of the weekend but a return to winter is its forecast. It is possible that the weather front that will keep weather settled until the weekend could end up pushing very cold Siberian weather east. Temperatures are set to fall to -1 Saturday night and -2 on Sunday night and Monday night, with chilly days. While the details of further outlook remain uncertain, Met Eireann cautioning at the moment that it looks like it will be a cold regime for early days of next week with easterly winds, and frosty nights with sub zero temperatures. Snow is also possible with the a risk of some wintry showers in some eastern and southern coastal counties and some may be of snow, but mainly dry elsewhere. The Met Office in the UK is also monitoring the situation. It says weather could potentially make a 'dramatic few days'. It warns that very cold weather could hit Ireland on Britain on Monday. How to disable the new Twitter font If you dont like Twitter's new Chirp font, heres how to get the old one back, and how to switch back if you change your mind. Google's digital assistant is about to pick up a new set of skills. The Google Assistant will soon be able to combine multiple tasks into a single command, speak multiple languages and set location-based reminders from one of Google's speakers. And look for the assistant to arrive on more Android phones, too. (Image credit: Google) Google outlined its assistant's newfound powers in a blog post published today (Feb. 23). Here's what you can expect Google Assistant to be able to handle in the very near future. Google Assistant will become a multitasker: The most intriguing new feature coming to Google Assistant was actually announced by Google last year. But Google says that Routines a feature that lets you accomplish multiple tasks with just one command will hit the U.S. in the coming weeks. Specifically, Google Assistant is adding support for six routines aimed at tackling tasks in the morning as you're trying to get out the door, during your commute to and from work, and upon your arrival back at home. In one specific example cited by Google, you'll be able to tell the assistant that you're home, and your Google Home speaker will turn on lights, start a playlist and pass along any home-related reminders about chores, calls or other tasks. It sounds a lot like features offered by both Amazon's Alexa assistant and Siri through Apple's HomeKit automation platform. Location-based reminders coming to more devices: You can already use the assistant on your Android phone to remind you of tasks when you're arriving at or about to leave a specified location. In the coming weeks, Google plans to add that capability to its Google Home speaker lineup. Google Assistant will speak more languages: Google's digital assistant is currently available in eight languages. That number will reach 30 by the end of 2018, with anish, Dutch, Hindi, Indonesian, Norwegian, Swedish and Thai among the languages joining the mix in a few months. More significantly, Google Assistant is going to become multilingual, allowing it to understand commands from multiple languages. Google believes this feature will be a big hit in households that speak more than one language. Initially, multilingual support will be limited to English, French and German with more languages coming over time. Better integration into more phones: You can already find Google Assistant on plenty of Android devices. But Google says it's working with phone makers at even deeper tie-ins, allowing phones to add more device-specific commands or to use wake words that activate the assistant even if the phone's screen is off. Specifically, Google teased new integrations for its assistant with hardware from LG, Sony and Xiaomi. Google Assistant will work with your wireless carrier: Google isn't satisfied with just phones turning to its assistant; it wants to work with your wireless provider, too. Through Google's Assistant Carrier program, the search giant says that wireless providers will be able to work with the digital assistant to let subscribers access customer support, add new services and get information about their monthly plan. Former Trump aide Rick Gates. Photo: Aaron P. Bernstein/Getty Images Former Trump campaign aide Rick Gates pleaded guilty Friday to two charges brought by Special Counsel Robert Mueller and promised to cooperate with the investigation into the Kremlins possible interference in the 2016 presidential election. Gates, who admitted to charges of conspiracy and lying to the FBI, could face up to 71 months in prison. He could serve less time depending on how much he helps prosecutors though, U.S. District Judge Amy Jackson said in court Friday. In his plea, Gates admitted to conspiring to defraud the U.S. from 2006 to 2017 by using offshore accounts to hide money he and Paul Manafort, his longtime partner and the former Trump campaign manager, received while working for Ukraine. He also copped to lying to the FBI just a few weeks ago. On February 1, Gates told the FBI that Ukraine was not discussed during a 2013 meeting with Manafort, Representative Dana Rohrbacher, and others. That was not true. Manafort put out a statement Friday following Gatess guilty plea: Notwithstanding that Rick Gates pled today, I continue to maintain my innocence. I had hoped and expected my business colleague would have had the strength to continue the battle to prove our innocence. For reasons yet to surface he chose to do otherwise. This does not alter my commitment to defend myself against the untrue piled up charges contained in the indictments against me. In a letter to loved ones obtained by ABC News before the plea hearing, Gates wrote that despite my initial desire to vigorously defend myself, I have had a change of heart. He went on: The reality of how long this legal process will likely take, the cost, and the circus-like atmosphere of an anticipated trial are too much. I will better serve my family moving forward by exiting this process. Gatess plea comes with an agreement to cooperate with Muellers investigation, but what form that will take is unclear. He is likely to testify against Manafort, as was reported over the weekend, but does he have anything to say about potential collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government during the 2016 election? Its certainly possible given his roles on the campaign. Gates joined the campaign with Manafort and remained involved even after Manaforts departure in August of 2016. The 45-year-old Gates went on to lead the campaigns efforts at the Republican National Convention and served on Trumps transition team. Gatess cooperation with Mueller is pretty clearly bad news for Manafort. What remains to be seen is whether he has the goods on anyone else. The world's biggest smartphone show kicks off next week in Barcelona, Spain, on Feb. 26, and one thing is certain: Samsung's Galaxy S9 should dominate this year's Mobile World Congress (MWC). (Image credit: MWC) Other phone makers will show off their devices at the week-long show, but Samsung will unveil a phone in Barcelona this month after focusing on tablets during last year's MWC. Tom's Guide will be on the ground in Barcelona to see the S9 and scope out the mobile trends that will define 2018. Here's everything we expect to see when Mobile World Congress kicks off. Galaxy S9 Steals the Spotlight The Galaxy S9 is expected to be the biggest announcement at MWC, even though most of the details about the device have already been leaked. Samsung will host a news event on Sunday (Feb. 25), with the invitation all but confirming the S9 is the guest of honor. (Image credit: Image Credit: VentureBeat) Samsung is teasing a "reimagined" camera in its newest flagship, which will look similar to last year's S8 but with more a more powerful processor, more capable Bixby assistant and in the larger S9+ a dual-lens shooter at long last. MORE: 5 Galaxy S9 Camera Improvements Samsung Needs to Win "[Samsung has] been teasing this as a reveal about a better camera, which is a smart play on their part," said Avi Greengart, research director for consumer platforms and devices at Global Data. "The Galaxy S8 camera isn't bad, but Google has the lead for mobile imaging and Samsung's brand is tied tightly to innovation. They can't let Google or Apple or anyone else get too far ahead of them." Based on reports, both the Galaxy S9 and S9+ will see upgraded primary lenses with adjustable apertures. Those aren't drastic improvements, but they are meaningful, and the alleged leaked photo samples look pretty impressive. "I don't know if this camera will indeed be a leapfrog above everyone else," said Greengart, "but if they can improve the camera while keeping everything that's great and refined about the S8, that alone is a significant upgrade." An overhauled camera could come at a premium. The S9 doesn't have an official price tag yet, but rumors suggest it will cost more than the $750 S8. The base-model S9 is expected to start at $850, the same price as the S8+, and the larger model could cost as a much as a Galaxy Note 8 at $950. Google's Pixel 2 XL starts at $850, while the iPhone X is $999. MORE: Galaxy S9's Killer Camera Will Beat Everything with This The Galaxy S9 is expected to be the first phone to feature a new Snapdragon 845 processor, and based on our benchmarks of that mobile processing platform, we're expecting to see faster performance over last year's Galaxy models (though it looks like the iPhone will retain its title as the fastest smartphone available). Other Handsets: Alcatel, Sony and Asus Of course, MWC is a mobile show, which means Samsung won't be the only major player with a hot new phone. (Image credit: Tom's Guide) The S9 is the most high-end device we expect to see in Barcelona, but companies such as Asus, BlackBerry, LG, HMD Global (which releases phones under the Nokia brand), Huawei, Sony and ZTE will all be in attendance, perhaps to show off a range of midtier and/or budget options. (Image credit: A still from Sony's teaser video for Mobile World Congress. (Credit: Sony/Twitter)) And we'll see a slew of phones that may never make it to the U.S. Huawei's announcements could fall into that category, as the China-based phone maker hasn't found carrier support for its phones in the States. Greengart expects Huawei to add to its more fashion-forward P lineup with a new device at MWC. Leaked images of what's reportedly Huawei's P20 phone have surfaced in advance of MWC. Then there's Vivo, the Chinese company that just released the X20 Plus UD, the first smartphone with a fingerprint sensor built into its display. The company reportedly has another phone on deck, the Xplay 7, which is rumored to come with its own in-display fingerprint sensor and a whopping 10GB of RAM. Its unclear if that phone will make it to the American market, as Vivo tends to concentrate its efforts on Asia and Russia. Here's when the big phone makers have scheduled their MWC events. Alcatel, Saturday, Feb. 24, 1 p.m. ET Huawei, Sunday, Feb. 25, 8 a.m. ET ZTE, Sunday, Feb. 25, 10 a.m. ET Nokia (HMD Global), Sunday, Feb. 25, 10 a.m. ET Samsung, Sunday, Feb. 25, Noon ET Sony, Monday, Feb. 26, 2:15 a.m. ET Asus, Tuesday, Feb. 27, 1:30 p.m. ET No LG Flagship LG has been a mainstay at Mobile World Congress, using recent shows to unveil new flagships like the G5 in 2016 and the G6 in 2017. LG may be back at MWC this year, but a new G7 is unlikely to appear with it. (Image credit: Tom's Guide) "LG has been dropping hints that it's not going to be making any big announcements at MWC," Greengart said. "I think well see some midtier phones from LG. LG has been hinting that the next G, probably the G7, is likely going to be introduced later this year." One rumor, based on comments from an LG executive in South Africa, suggests the company will come out with a new variation on the LG V30 it introduced last fall. The V30+, as it's rumored to be named, will reportedly have more advanced AI features than the first-generation version. LG has already indicated that it's moving away from regularly scheduled smartphone launches, focusing instead on coming out with new models when there are features to add. From a rumor that emerged last week, it sounds like that new phone will come out this June, when a new 6.1-inch phone, currently code-named Judy, is expected to deliver a brighter MLCD+ screen and a Snapdragon 845 processor. But again, that phone's unlikely to see the light of day at MWC. AI Everywhere The smart-speaker market is heating up, and even Apple has waded in with its own version, the HomePod. Gartner Research Director Roberta Cozza said she expects to see more integration of connected home devices and smart speakers with voice-activated assistants to give Amazon's Echo a run for its money. (Image credit: Image Credit: Apple) Greengart said he expects European carriers to make their own announcements about artificial intelligence in the home "as a way of selling carrier services." "Perhaps because Amazon isn't as well-established [in Europe] with the Echo, there's definitely a move by European operators to do AI on their own terms," Greengart said. MORE: 20 Alexa Skills That Will Make You a Better Cook 5G Is Coming Since MWC is the biggest mobile-focused trade show of the year, expect plenty of talk around the coming of 5G. "There are going to be a lot of infrastructure announcements, especially around 5G," Greengart said. Cozza said 5G will be "at the center" of MWC. (Image credit: Image Credit: David Becker/Getty) Carriers, chipmakers and smartphone manufacturers are gearing up for the final 5G specification to be agreed upon in June, so we expect to hear about real-world trials as the push to roll out 5G networks by the end of the year proceeds at full speed. Companies such as Intel, Qualcomm and Ericsson will be at the show to talk about real-world applications of 5G. For example, Qualcomm which last week announced that a slew of network operators and device makers would support its X50 5G modem plans to highlight new experience that will be possible with a 5G modem during MWC. A separate 5G Summit will bring together mobile- industry executives working on the next generation of wireless connectivity. Just don't expect to see any smartphones with 5G radios baked in just yet. Early 2019 is the soonest a device could launch. No Android Wear, But Plenty of Wearables Dont expect to see the next version of Android Wear at MWC. Google usually saves its announcements for its own conference, the developer-centric Google I/O, which will run May 8-10 this year. But there will be plenty of wearables on display in Barcelona, particularly devices focused on health. "This is an area where device vendors and software vendors and carriers and operators are all in alignment," Greengart said. "The technology has evolved to where you can do useful and exciting things. [But] there are some open regulatory issues." Devices that claim to offer clinical insights into your health or to diagnose medical conditions require government clearance in many countries. Nokia recently eliminated a Pulse Wave Velocity feature in its high-end Body Cardio scale via an over-the-air software update after deciding it might require approval from regulators. But some companies are pursuing that level of approval. Expect to see everything from wrist-worn blood-pressure trackers to AirPod-esque earbuds jam-packed with features, including heart-rate sensors and beamforming technology to change the volume levels of people around you. Both Cozza and Greengart expect companies to highlight augmented-reality headsets and useful applications for them at MWC. Cozza said she also expects app developers to show off what they've achieved with Google's ARCore, the company's augmented-reality software development kit for Android phones. Follow Us for All Your MWC Coverage Mobile World Congress runs from Feb. 26 to March 1 in Barcelona. Expect news to start trickling out on the Sunday before the event kicks off, as phone and device makers look to get a jump on the headlines. We'll be there live in Barcelona bringing you all the latest news. Just bookmark our MWC page to stay up to date on all the big announcements. In a surprising turn of events that not a lot of people saw coming this quickly, the Tesla Model S has shaken up the establishment after outselling some of its German rivals in Europe in 2017. The sudden twist comes as a surprise to a lot of people, even to those who have been bullish on the Model S ability to compete against models like the BMW 7 Series, Mercedes S-Class, and Audi A8. Its one thing to outsell these luxury sedans in the U.S. because thats already happening. But over in Europe, where these German titans are supposed to hold court? Big difference. According to the companys figures, sales of the Model S in the Old Continent spiked 30 percent to 16,132 units in 2017 Market researcher JATO Dynamics revealed Teslas surprising sales surge in Europe. According to the companys figures, sales of the Model S in the Old Continent spiked 30 percent to 16,132 units in 2017. That total is a few car-lengths ahead of the Mercedes S-Class, which saw sales grow three percent to 13,359 units and a long way ahead of the BMW 7 Series, which saw a 13-percent tumble in sales with 11,375 units sold. The numbers are telling considering that it wasnt that long when these same European automakers were thumbing their nose at Teslas vision of an all-electric car grabbing a foothold in this segment. Felipe Munoz, an analyst with market researchers JATO Dynamics, told Autonews that this is not something that companies like BMW and Mercedes can brush aside anymore. "This is an alarm for the traditional automakers such as Mercedes, he said. It says a smaller but smarter brand such as Tesla can beat them at home. Teslas success in Europe isnt just limited to the Model S as even the Model X has taken the market by storm. Sales of the electric SUV reached 12,000 units in 2017, a figure that put it on equal terms with the Porsche Cayenne, arguably the most popular premium SUV in the market today, and well ahead of the BMW X6, which sold around 10,000 units last year. Sales of EVs in the country spiked to record highs in 2017, opening up a staggering 52-percent market share in the country. To no ones surprise, Norway contributed the most to Teslas success story in Europe last year. Sales of EVs in the country spiked to record highs in 2017, opening up a staggering 52-percent market share in the country. As trends go, Teslas appeal in Europe should only increase over time. Thats why, according to Munoz, the European automakers need to act fast to get back pieces of that market share pie. European automakers need to address electrification faster because customers are showing more and more interest in such vehicles and it seems that the traditional industry "cant deliver on time," he said. References Read our full review on the 2017 Tesla Model S. Read more Tesla news. Source: Automotive News Mitsubishi will announce the full details on March 6, but we already have a good understanding of the changes coming for 2019. The U.S. is expected to get this new model, too, though it might not happen until 2020. Less than four months after the 2018 Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV arrived on U.S. shores in December 2017, Mitsubishi is launching an updated version at the 2018 Geneva International Motor Show in Switzerland this March. The updates focus on increased efficiency from this plug-in hybrid electric vehicle, but visual updates and interior improvements are also made. 2019 Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV Exterior Updated front fascia New 18-inch wheels Larger rear spoiler LED Headlights Mitsubishi isnt giving the 2019 Outlander PHEV a very in-depth visual makeover, but rather, a simple yet effective set of changes Mitsubishi isnt giving the 2019 Outlander PHEV a very in-depth visual makeover, but rather, a simple yet effective set of change that keep the three-row crossover from looking stale. The front receives most of the updates, with the grille taking on a slightly different shape; a bolder slid plate along front bumpers lower edge; the headlights going LED; and the fog lights getting new rectangular bezels that connect to the vertical accents under the headlights. New 18-inch alloy wheels with a more elaborate two-tone design are the only changes to the Outlander PHEVs sides. Around back, the rear spoiler over the tailgate is now larger, likely for aerodynamic reasons. 2019 Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV Interior Updated dashboard switchgear New gauge cluster Richer materials Better bolstered front seats New HVAC vents for rear passengers Inside, the 2019 Outlander PHEV now has higher quality leather seating, redesigned front buckets with thicker bolsters, reworked buttons on the dash, a new gauge cluster, new trim panels, and new HVAV vents for the rear passengers. Mitsubishi has not released imagines of the new interior, so well have to wait until the Geneva Motor Show for our first official look. Still, we dont expect massive changes to things like the 2+3+2 seating arrangement. 2019 Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV Drivetrain New 2.4-liter four-cylinder Larger battery now has 13.8-kWh 10-percent larger motors Expected EV range improvements past 22-mile current AWD is standard Note: Current engine pictured here. The old 2.0-liter four-cylinder with its Otto combustion cycle is replaced by a new 2.4-liter four-cylinder with the fuel-sipping Atkinson combustion cycle While the body and interior have relatively minimal changes, the drivetrain of the 2019 Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV has been deeply updated. The old 2.0-liter four-cylinder with its Otto combustion cycle is replaced by a new 2.4-liter four-cylinder with the fuel-sipping Atkinson combustion cycle. The Atkinson cycle keeps the intake valves open as each piston begins its compression stroke. This helps lower the compression ratio and therefore requires less fuel. In addition to the gasoline powertrain update, the battery and electric motors are now larger and will deliver more range than the outgoing Outlander PHEVs 22-mile EV range. The battery capacity grows by 15 percent, growing from 12 kWh to 13.8. This should also mean more time in EV mode before the gasoline engine kicks on in response to power demands. Charging should also be improved, too. The outgoing model could achieve an 80-percent charge in just 25 minutes at a DC Fast Charging station. On a 240-volt system, the 2018 Outlander PHEV would reach a full change in less than four hours. Even on a conventional 120-volt plug, a full charge was possible in less than eight hours. Having electric motors at both the front and rear axle means the Outlander PHEV is AWD. In fact Mitsubishi includes four driving modes: Snow, Normal, Sport, and 4WD Lock. Specifics about the 2019 Outlander PHEVs powertrain will likely be announced at the 2018 Geneva Motor Show, so well have to wait for that information. 2019 Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV Prices Mitsubishi has not released pricing on the 2019 Outland PHEV model, but we do know what the 2018 model lists for. It starts at $34,595 in its base SEL trim. Opting for the GT put the beginning price at $40,295. Expect a slight increase in price for the 2019 model, though not much considering Mitsubishis shaky footing in the U.S. 2019 Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV Competition As popular as SUVs and hybrid are these days, its extremely surprising Mitsubishi is the only automaker to combine the two, while mixing in a plug-in feature and an affordable starting price. It closest true competitor in the people-moving PHEV category is a minivan the Pacifica Hybrid. And for those who might not care are about the plug-in aspect, Toyota has its Highlander Hybrid. The Pacifica Hybrid looks and drives like any other Chrysler Pacifica, only it has a 16-kWh lithium-ion battery pack sitting under its second row. The battery is good for an impressive 33 miles of range when driven conservatively. When the juice is gone, the hybrid-specific 3.6-liter Pentastar V-6 running the Atkinson cycle kicks on and powers the front wheels via a Continuously Variable Transmission. When it comes time to charge, the van will reach 100 percent in just two hours on a 240-volt plug. Those with the standard 120-volt plug will need 14 hours. The EPA estimates the Pacifica Hybrid will get 32 mpg combined with just the gasoline engine and an impressive 84 MPGe with both the engine and hybrid system working together. Aside from its powertrain, the Pacifica Hybrid boasts seating for seven people in three rows of seating. Twin sliding doors make entry and exits easy and tons of cargo space behind the third row will swallow school projects and strollers. Pricing for the 2018 Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid starts at $41,090 before any government rebates and tax write-offs. Read our full review on the 2018 Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid. If plugging in and having a full battery at the start of your drive doesnt matter to you, Toyotas 2018 Highlander Hybrid offers many of the same benefits as the Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV, but without the need to, well, plug in. Power comes from a 3.5-liter V-6 running the Atkinson combustion cycle and a mild battery system that supplements the engine rather than providing a full-on electric driving experience. The result is 30 mpg city and 28 mpg highway. Pricing for the 2018 Toyota Highlander hybrid starts at $36,670 and ranges to nearly $50,000 with all the bells and whistled added. Read our full review on the 2018 Toyota Highlander Hybrid. Conclusion Mitsubishi might be hanging on by a thread in the U.S., but in other parts of the world, the automaker is doing decently well. The improvements to the Outlander PHEV for the 2019 model year should help its sales even more. Mitsubishi managed to move roughly 100,000 examples in the last three years inside Europe. While the Outlander PHEV remains Americas only true plug-in hybrid three-row crossover, its unlikely Mitsubishi will have a runaway success. Its too bad, really, as the Outlander PHEV might be a truly competitive vehicle. Sadly, its popularity is stifled by Mitsubishis forgettable public image and dwindling lineup. Love it Updated EV powertrain Reworked exterior Updated interior Expected EV range improvments Leave it Suffers from bad brand image Official details held until Geneva debut References Read our full review on the 2018 Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV. Read more Mitsubishi news. Read more Geneva Motor Show news. FAO Director-General: explore opportunities along the food chain, including urban food markets Agriculture will continue to generate employment in Africa over the coming decades, but opportunities should be explored beyond agriculture throughout the food chain in order to create enough jobs for young people, especially those in rural areas, FAO Director-General Jose Graziano da Silva said on Thursday. Countries need to promote a rural and structural transformation that fosters synergies between farm and non-farm activities and that reinforces the linkages between rural areas and cities, he added. This includes processing, packaging, transportation, distribution, marketing and service provision, especially financial and business services. Graziano da Silva made the remarks at FAOs Regional Conference for Africa which is primarily dedicated to the theme of creating decent and attractive employment in the continent, the worlds youngest in terms of the average age of its population. Estimates suggest that up to 12 million new jobs will have to be created every year to absorb new labour market entrants over the next 20 years. Today some 54 percent of Africas working force relies on the agricultural sector for livelihoods, income and employment, especially in family farming. With more people moving to cities, demand on urban food markets will grow, which in turn can generate job opportunities in all agriculture-related activities. But FAO believes that more must be done to create non-agricultural employment in rural areas, including agro-tourism and other services. Graziano da Silva pointed to FAOs regional programme, Youth Employment: enabling decent agriculture and agri-business jobs, which goes beyond farm jobs and seeks to develop capacity and scale up successful approaches through programme formulation and partnerships. More than ever, strategic partnerships are needed to bring together the African Union, the African Development Bank and the UN system and other development partners, the FAO Director-General said. He warned however that more profitable urban markets can lead to a concentration of food production in large commercial farms, and also the creation of value chains dominated by large processors and retailers. In this contest, smallholders and family farmers need specific policies and regulations. This includes providing access to inputs, credit and technology and improving land tenure, Graziano da Silva added, stressing how social protection programmes, including cash transfers can link public food purchase to family farmers production. Hunger, overweight and obesity Achieving Zero Hunger remains FAOs highest priority, one that it shares with African leaders who through the Malabo Declaration have committed to eradicating chronic undernourishment in their continent by 2025 in sub-Saharan Africa almost one person in four currently suffers from undernourishment. In his address, Graziano da Silva underscored that in line with Sustainable Development Goal 2, achieving Zero Hunger needs to go together with ending all forms of malnutrition, a consequence of which is the current global overweight and obesity epidemic. The situation is also worrisome here in Africa, Graziano da Silva said, citing a World Health Organization estimate that obesity-related diseases may become the biggest killer in Africa by 2030. Rapid urbanization and consumption of highly processed foods are the major drivers behind the increase in overweight and obesity. Yet many people in Africa are unaware that certain foods are unhealthy, or that being overweight presents a health risk, the FAO Director-General said. He urged for the need to act on two fronts focusing on both the production and consumption of healthy food, and called for ensuring more responsible advertising and information campaigns on food products. People must be aware about the pros and cons of what they are eating, and also be encouraged to eat healthy food. FAO assists countries on climate change Graziano da Silva also referred to climate change and other pressing issues in Africa and how FAO, together with its partners, is addressing them. FAO is working closely with a wide range of countries around the world that have formally requested the Organizations assistance to tap into financing from the Green Climate Fund. In Africa to date, FAO is currently supporting the development of six full project proposals in Benin, Gambia, Kenya, Republic of Congo and Tanzania several other readiness proposals. Hunger uptick in Africa can be reversed FAO Director-General Jose Graziano da Silva on Thursday expressed optimism that the recent uptick in global hunger levels will be reversed and that Zero Hunger remains attainable but added that doing so will hinge on boosting the resilience of communities in Africa, where current hunger trends are particularly worrying. The most recent UN global report on world hunger found that, after decades of decline, the number of hungry people on the planet went back up in 2016, largely due to conflict, climate-related shocks and economic slowdowns. Trends in Africa helped drive that increase. Some 23 percent of people in sub-Saharan Africa suffered from chronic hunger in 2016, while in East Africa, 34 percent of people did, according to the report. Even in some countries that have been successful at reducing food insecurity faced a setback, especially due to prolonged drought caused by the impacts of El Nino, Graziano da Silva noted in a speech at an event on Zero Hunger held during the FAO Regional Conference for Africa. However, the FAO Director-General also expressed optimism that an already-emerging and energetic response by the international community to recent negative hunger trends will help turn the tide. I firmly believe that 2016 was a point outside the curve, and not a reversal tendency, he argued. Causes for optimism One reason for optimism is that political will to redouble anti-hunger efforts is running higher than ever, Graziano da Silva said, as evidenced by the issues high prominence during the recent African Union Summit attended by the continents top leaders as well as UN Secretary-General Antonio Gutteres FAO launched Achieving Zero Hunger in Africa by 2025. Taking stock of progress, which contains the proceedings of the African Union High-Level Meeting on the topic. Two other factors provide additional cause for optimism, according to the FAO Director-General. For one, the Green Climate Fund has become operationally and is now channelling funding to developing countries to help them respond to climate change, including its impacts on food insecurity. Additionally, there are strong signs that the world economy is recovering, which will create favorable conditions for development. Zero Hunger is attainable. It depends on us, the FAO Director-General exhorted his listeners. It is time to redouble our efforts, and push for political commitment and timely, concrete actions such as never seen before, he said. In her statement to the FAO Regional Conference, African Union Commissioner of Rural Economy and Agriculture, Josefa Sacko, said that on the Commitment of Ending Hunger by 2025, we are lagging behind and there is still a lot of work to be done going forward on ending hunger by 2025, however also noting there was cause for optimism. We have the opportunity to pick out some key lessons, exchange views on what might impede our progress in achieving food and nutrition security and continue to strengthen coordination and partnerships among us, Sacko said. She mentioned the Africa Solidarity Trust Fund as a way to help move things forward. The Presidential Taskforce on the ECOWAS Single Currency Programme has adopted a revised roadmap for accelerating the use of the common Currency by 2020. The Presidential Taskforce, who met in Accra, Ghana, on Wednesday, also re-affirmed the political will to meet the deadline by 2020. The meeting, which is the 5th of such meetings to fast track the process, was attended by members of the Presidential Taskforce, comprising President Alassane Ouattara, La Cote dIvoire; President Mahamadou Issoufou, Niger; and President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, Ghana, who was the host. Also in attendance were Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Godwin Emefiele, who represented President Mahamadu Buhari; and the Governor of the Central Bank of Guinea, Mr. Lockney Babe,who represented Professor Alpha Conde, of Guinea. The meeting was graced by President Faure Essozimna Gnassingbe of Togo. In a Communique issued at the end of the meeting, Wednesday, the Taskforce adopted the report of the Ministerial Committee of Ministers and Governors. The purpose of the Ministerial Committee meeting was to propose a revised roadmap to fast track the use of the Single Currency to begin by 2020. The Taskforce acknowledged the quality of the conclusions as well as the relevance of the recommendations made by the Ministerial Committee. Additionally, the Taskforce re-affirmed the gradual approach where Member States which attained the convergence criteria, could start the monetary union while the other countries joined later. The Communique among others, re-affirmed Member States commitment to ratify and implement all relevant ECOWAS protocols and conventions. It welcomed the progress made by the Member States and encouraged them to continue the efforts toward meeting the convergence criteria and strengthening the multilateral surveillance mechanism. The Taskforce, however, expressed concern over the situation in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It urged the African Union to take measures and institute workable mechanism to move towards a peaceful solution in that country. The Members of the Presidential Taskforce agreed to hold their next meeting in Niamey, Niger, in May 2018. Background At the Extraordinary Summit of Heads of State and Government on 25th October, 2013, the Presidents of Ghana and Niger were appointed to oversee the creation of the single currency in a timely manner. The two Presidents constituted a Task Force, whose membership included representatives of the President of Ghana and Niger; Ministers of Finance of Ghana and Niger; Governors of the eight Central Banks of ECOWAS member States; ECOWAS and UEMOA Commissions; West African Monetary Agency (WAMA) and the West African Monetary Institute to advise them periodically on the monetary integration programme. The membership of the taskforce was reviewed in 2015 to include the Presidents of Cote dIvoire and Nigeria, as well as the Ministers of Finance of the two countries. The inaugural meeting of the Presidential Taskforce was held on 20th and 21st February, 2014 in Niamey. Subsequently, two other meetings were held in Accra on 7th and 8th July, 2014, with the last meeting held in Niamey from 4th to 6th February, 2015. The main objectives of the third meeting were to examine the revised roadmap on the realisation of the ECOWAS single currency by 2020; a proposal from the ECOWAS Commission on the creation of an ECOWAS monetary Institute by 2018; and the concern raised by the WAMZ Convergence Council on the revised macroeconomic criteria adopted by the 45th Ordinary Summit of the Heads of State and Government held in Accra on 10th July, 2014. After the third meeting, it was agreed, amongst others that the Central Bank financing criterion be reclassified as a primary criterion because of its strategic importance to monetary and price stability. The revised roadmap on the realisation of the ECOWAS single currency by 2020 was to be costed and sources of funding identified. A makeshift memorial for the victims of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting. Photo: Matt McClain/The Washington Post/Getty Images An armed police deputy who was on campus at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School as Nikolas Cruz gunned down 17 people last week was suspended Thursday because he never went in the building to stop the shooting. At a press conference Thursday, Sheriff Scott Israel said he suspended school resource officer Scot Peterson without pay after speaking to witnesses and watching surveillance footage from outside the school. What I saw was a deputy arrive at the west side of building 12, take up a position, and he never went in, Israel said. Peterson got on his radio at one point, Israel said, and remained outside the building for upwards of four minutes. After he was suspended, Peterson resigned and retired. Sheriff Scott Israel: Stoneman Douglas Resource deputy resigns amid investigation pic.twitter.com/hyo82OPA7R WSVN 7 News (@wsvn) February 22, 2018 Peterson should have went in. Addressed the killer. Killed the killer, Israel said. Asked how he felt knowing that a deputy remained outside the school while the massacre went on inside, Israel said, Devastated, sick to my stomach, there are no words. Two other Broward County deputies were placed on restricted duty, Israel said, as the department determines if they couldve done more or shouldve done more. Car sharing is rapidly growing in popularity, but many people still aren't quite sure what it is, how it works, and how it compares to other methods of transportation. How expensive is it? Do you have to pay for gas? What if there's no car when I need one? What about insurance? Where do you park it when you're done? Is it really better for the environment? Does it save you money? Is it available in my area? These are all questions that we're going to answer today. Car Sharing vs. Traditional Car Rental The first thing you need to know is that car sharing is a type of car rental. What makes it different from traditional car rental (Hertz, Enterprise, etc) is that it is designed to be convenient for people who want to rent cars for short periods of times (a few hours) and only pay for their usage (you are billed based on how long you have a car and the distance traveled). Another difference with a traditional car rental that makes car sharing more practical for people who don't own a car is that it allows you to access a car at any hour, not just business hours. And because the cars are spread around town in reserved parking, chances are there's one such parking close to where you live, making it easy to walk to it. Image: Zipcar Whether you will save money with car sharing is highly dependent on your usage. For some people car sharing will be the cheapest option, for others, it will be car rental, and for others, it will be owning a car. Zipcar, a big North-American car sharing company, has some online tools that can help you estimate how much money you could save by using car sharing. How Car Sharing Works So how does car sharing work in practice? It's pretty simple, really: First, you need to figure out which car sharing operator(s) operates where you live if any. The easiest way is probably to just do a Google search for "car sharing" plus the name of where you live. If you are in a big city, your chances are pretty good. If you are in a rural area, you're probably out of luck. Another way to find a shared ride is to look at Wikipedia's list of car sharing operators by country. Once you have found a car sharing service to join, you need to determine what conditions they put on membership. If we look at the biggest operator in North-America, Zipcar, we see that they require the member to be at least 21 years old and to have a valid driver's license (they run a driving record check, so if you have a history of reckless driving, you might not be able to get in). If you meet the requirements, it's as simple as filling out the online registration form and picking a rate plan (for example, here in Ottawa VRTUCAR has three different plans). Once you are in, all you need to know is where the cars are parked, and how to reserve one. There will be a little variation from one car sharing service to the other, but most of the big ones will send you a membership car that can be used to unlock the cars. Locating them is simple: Go to your car sharing's website and there should obviously-titled section (something like "find cars") that shows you a map of your area with the locations of all the reserved parkings. Once you know which is closest, you can reserve a car either online or by phone -- that's how you know that there will be a car for you when you get there. If your car sharing service offer more than one model, you'll be able to choose (a pickup to haul lots of stuff, a Prius for normal driving, etc). Once you get to the car, you usually unlock it with your membership card (the magic of RFID) and that's it. As long as you bring it back to the same parking spot in one piece, that should be all. Gas and insurance are covered in what you pay (membership fee + whatever extra you pay per hour and/or mile driven). Wasn't that simple? Is Car Sharing Greener Than Car Ownership? Is car sharing better for the environment than owning a car? And if so, how much? In the majority of cases where car sharing makes sense, it is indeed greener than owning a car. Depending on the location, each shared car can replace between 6 and 20 cars, and most shared fleets are recent models with the latest emission control, and many fuel-efficient options are usually available (lots of Prius hybrids, Civic hybrids, Yaris compacts, etc). So that's a good start: Fewer cars need to be manufactured, and the car sharing fleets are usually mostly composed of vehicles that are top tier when it comes to fuel economy and tailpipe emissions. Also, plug-in hybrids and electric vehicles will soon be part of car sharing fleets Another way that car sharing is green is by giving strong incentives to drive less. When you own a car, you already have very high fixed costs (car payments, insurance, maintenance, parking), so driving a bit more doesn't cost you that much more than what you are already paying. But with car sharing, the relation between what you pay and how much you drive is a lot more linear. Drive half as much, and you'll pay almost half as much (your yearly membership is fixed cost). This means that a lot fewer unnecessary trips are taken, and car sharing service members tend to walk and bike a lot more because they don't feel like "well, I have a car in the driveway and I'm paying through the nose for it, I might as well use it." The Future of Car Sharing The world is rapidly urbanizing and in the future, most of humanity will live in cities. At the same time, billions of people will want more personal mobility. If we do things right, our cities will be designed in ways that make them walkable and bikeable, and fast and efficient public transportation will provide the majority of trips. Car sharing can complement these means of transportation. It works better in densely populated areas (ie. cities), it works better for people who have other ways to get around most of the time (ie. for the daily commute), and it is less expensive than owning a car, especially in a city. It looks like the future is bright for car sharing! Hi all, I'm trying to plan a trip to OZ towards the end of April early May (from UK) for two weeks. My loose plans are thus: Fly to Cairns, stay there for 3-4 days (flexible) fly to Sydney, stay there for 3-4 days (again flexible) then the plan is to hire a car and drive down the sapphire coast as I have relatives who live near Cobargo (very small town about 5 hours drive south of Sydney) stay there for a couple of days, drive back to Sydney and fly home. I want to limit the amount of internal flights as much as possible, ideally to just Cairns to Sydney. I appreciate 2 weeks is short and I cant hope to see even 10%, but my main questions Centre around Cairns and getting the most out of that part of the trip. On arriving in Cairns where would be a good place to stay that isn't too far and a good base, and Ideally near to a beach What is/are worth seeing/a must see there that would be commutable within a day without flying? How long is it worth staying there in proportion to Sydney? As I said I know two weeks isn't very long, but my aim is to base ourselves in the three different places over the two weeks and take day trips out to different places, trying not to do too much and avoid spending too much time travelling/flying First thing I would do is book my last night in Alajuela... no way around that since your flight leaves 5:30am Don't search San Jose -look for closer to the airport. You already have your mind set on Arenal (which is a great location) now do you want to stay there the whole time or Monteverde via jeep/boat is a great option or do a beach? Manuel Antonio (I mentioned easyrider shuttle on another one of your posts) or other beach location is what you need to consider. i used booking.com as a tool as you can view by price etc.. and has an map to see where the hotels are.. then you can book directly but at least this way you see availability too. Edited: 3 years ago While Vung Tau is a favorite place of mine for personal reasons, it's more for R&R. For a traveler, I think I'd suggest a round of the Mekong. Start with a flight to Rach Gia (Kien Giang province) and head to Ha Tien near the Cambodian border. You could try to visit an island near shore in between these two towns. Back inland toward Chau Doc (also at a border) with a stop at the Tra Su mangrove forest - a must. The An Giang province has both a Khmer and Cham influence that reflects in the food. Head south along the Mekong rivers (you could cris-crossing between the lower and upper Mekong if you like). A few possible stops are Long Xuyen, Cao Lanh, Sa Dec, and Vinh Long before Can Tho (which is the major hub of the Mekong). If you have time, ever back to the southwest, toward Vi Thanh to Ca Mau. From there, follow the coast back toward Bac Lieu, Soc Trang, Tra Vinh, Ben Tre. From Ben Tre you have a few choices: 1. My Tho, Go Cong, Saigon. 2. My Tho, Go Cong, boat crossing to Can Gio to visit the Vam Sat Ecology Center (west side of Can Gio district), Saigon. 3. Hydrofoil to Vung Tau, Sai Gon. It sounds like a lot, but these towns are near to one another. With ten days, you would obviously have to cut it down to a few major places. With 2 weeks, you get to pick and choose between a few more. Have fun researching. Cheers, John -:- Message from Tripadvisor staff -:- This topic has been closed to new posts due to inactivity. We hope you'll join the conversation by posting to an open topic or starting a new one. To review the Tripadvisor Forums Posting Guidelines, please follow this link: http://www.tripadvisor.com/pages/forums_posting_guidelines.html We remove posts that do not follow our posting guidelines, and we reserve the right to remove any post for any reason. Winning. Photo: Eric Baradat/AFP/Getty Images Among a (tiny) fatalistic fringe of the far left, the idea that meaningful change can be made through electoral politics is a stale joke after all, if voting changed anything, theyd make it illegal. Meanwhile, a much larger number of mainstream progressives accept the vital importance of casting ballots, but devote virtually all of their energy and attention to federal elections. They know where Democrats stand in the 2018 generic ballot and have assessed the relative merits of every would-be 2020 front-runner but couldnt tell you the name of their state senator or representative. These are perfectly understandable ways of engaging in politics (or at least, the latter one is). But theyre also misguided because progressives can make real political change, really quickly, by getting involved in state and local elections. Recent events in Philadelphia, New Jersey, and Washington state have put a shiny spotlight on this reality. Larry Krasner is a former public defender and civil-rights attorney, whose clients included activists affiliated with Occupy and Black Lives Matter. And since January 2, hes been the district attorney of Americas fifth-largest city. In less than two months on the job, Krasner has ended cash bail for most nonviolent offenses in Philly (thereby drastically reducing the number of criminal suspects the city jails simply for being too poor to post bail); ceased prosecuting individuals caught possessing small amounts of marijuana, and dropped dozens of outstanding marijuana-possession charges; announced that, as a means of combating the drug-overdose epidemic, his office would not prosecute heroin addicts who use safe injection sites; launched a review of his offices past cases to identify instances of wrongful conviction or unfair sentencing, and explore means of rectifying such mistakes; and filed a lawsuit against several of Americas largest pharmaceutical companies for deceiving Philadelphians about the true dangers of opioid medications. In short, progressives have already radically reformed the criminal-justice system of a major American city. And all it took was 58,140 left-leaning Philadelphians turning out for last years Democratic primary for district attorney, and voting their values. Meanwhile, 2,400 miles away, legislators in Olympia have spent 2018 passing progressive reforms like theyre going out of style. Last fall, Democrat Manka Dhingra won a special election to a historically Republican State Senate seat by a little over 5,000 votes. Her narrow victory gave Democrats full control of the Evergreen States government. And theyre making good use of it. Since January 1, Washingtons State Senate has passed both automatic and same-day voter registration, measures that have been proven to expand voter participation and increase the diversity of the electorate; a ban on gay-conversion therapy; the abolition of the death penalty; new anti-harassment protections for transgender students in the states public schools; and stronger disclosure rules for campaign donors. These initiatives are expected to soon make their way to Governor Jay Inslees desk, and then into law. Back on the East Coast, newly elected New Jersey governor Phil Murphy signed his first two laws Wednesday. With the help of a unified Democratic State Legislature, Murphy restored $7.45 million in funding for family-planning clinics that had been cut by Chris Christie, and reformed the states Medicaid program to cover family-planning services. In his first weeks on the job, Murphy has also taken steps to liberalize the states medical-marijuana laws and vowed to fully legalize recreational cannabis by the end of his term. In sum: Your vote matters, especially in state and local elections and leftists can win and exercise significant political power by running on the Democratic ballot line, especially in races for prosecutors offices (because our system invests immense discretionary power in district attorneys). Elections arent everything. The far left is right to insist that workers, tenants, and communities can expand the boundaries of political possibility by organizing and exercising their collective power outside of the ballot box. Nonetheless, through good, old-fashioned electoral politics, progressives can make this country a significantly better place and in 2018, they already have. -:- Message from Tripadvisor staff -:- This post has been removed at the author's request. The author may repost if desired. Posts on the Tripadvisor forums may be edited for a short period of time. Once the edit period has expired, authors may update their posts by removing and reposting them. To read more about editing your posts, please follow this link: http://www.tripadvisor.com/help/how_to_edit_your_posts A great many people love keeping their private life out of the spotlight for their very own reasons, however, not for the socialites. These are individuals who live by the rule of either be popular or be popular. There's no other way. On account of their open lifestyle, we can without much of a stretch monitor them; be it their dressing, the men in their lives, their businesses, and the meetings and parties they go to. Here is a rundown of the most popular socialites in Kenya, who have made their way to the public gaze; well known for their beauty, talent, fashion, and showbiz. Zari Hassan Zari Hassan otherwise known as The Boss Lady, is the household name in the showbiz industry. From the men she beds, the garments she shakes and machines she spins, Zari Hassan news will be news any day, any time. Every definition of socialites rests on her, and Zari Hassan latest news raises her ratings even higher with every passing day. Her name has even been impelled more after the Zari Hassan and Diamond separation, which she did in a style. This Ugandan-born beauty is the woman with a killer body and beguiling style. Indeed, even just by taking a gander at Zari Hassan photos, you would not believe that she is a mother of five great kids. READ ALSO: Do Socialites in Kenya Compete? Vera Sidika vs Huddah Monroe Venessa Chettle This is a definitive showbiz act with regards to the world of socialites. Socialite, party animal and musician, Venessa Chettle is basically the lady who gets the attention from exposing her body crosswise over significant Kenya's web journals and tabloids. She has assembled her name from bonking female companions. She obviously gets a great deal of consideration and cash due to her sexuality. READ ALSO: Ndoa ya Ababu Namwamba yayumbayumba? Ujumbe wa mkewe wazua gumzo Risper Faith Who doesnt even know this very controversial socialite in Kenya, anyway? She is the lady who doesnt think twice about flaunting her body, lay down with every other tycoon around, get high on weed and still announce how she is saved in Jesus' Name on social media. At one time, this bootylicious show reported that she was stopping the business just to find nothing is more lucrative than parading 'hotness'. Vera Sidika Vera is an outstanding socialite in Kenya. She initially earned her fame by showing up in a music video by P-unit. In any case, with regards to this beauty, all of you know her as the independent boss queen and goal digger. Like her or despise her, Vera's name is as yet remaining steadfast. In spite of the fact that she flourishes in relationship controversies, she has likewise secured herself in the business world and is doing basically alright. READ ALSO: Who is Vera Sidika? Biography of the hottest Kenyan socialite! Huddah Monroe Huddah Monroe is one of the socialites Kenya who command a massive Youth following. She is beautiful, witty, independent and a successful business lady. Huddah, together with Vera Sidika have seen to the spreading of the western culture among the youth in Kenya. Most people first knew her as the Kenyan girl who participated in the Big Brother show, but years after that, the girl's star is still shining in the showbiz and business industry. She also said it openly that she makes money off rich men and it doesnt bother her at all. This splendid model who is rounding up millions out of supports is likely the best business mind media outlets has seen. Corazon Kwamboka Do we really need to talk about Corazon dearie, or the fact that every man loves the way her mammary organs sit exceptionally well on her tiny waste? Anyway, that aside. This lady not only thrives in controversies but she is also a successful lawyer, and independent model who earns a living from parading her goodies to those who care to look. Source: Tuko - Uhuru said he met with Magufuli in a bid to resolve "small, vexing differences" between the two East Africa states - Uhuru and Mafufuli said they had directed their ministers to meet and discuss the underlying issues especially those touching on trade and bilateral ties - Tanzania and Kenya have been at loggerheads especially after the former on two occasions burned chicks said to have been illegally imported from the later - Magufuli's government also auctioned thousands of cattle seized from Kenyan herders who were accused of grazing their animals illegally in Tanzania President Uhuru Kenyatta on Friday, February 23 met up with Tanzania President John Pombe Magufuli to discuss what he termed as small, vexing differences. TUKO.co.ke has learnt that Uhuru, alongside his Tanzanian counterpart rallied their ministers for a meeting to dispel any underlying issues between Kenya and Tanzania. Send 'NEWS' to 40227 to receive all the important breaking news as it happens READ ALSO: Ndoa ya Ababu Namwamba yayumbayumba? Ujumbe wa mkewe wazua gumzo Uhuru met up with Magufuli on Friday, February 23. Photo: Uhuru Kenyatta/Facebook READ ALSO: I have paid the ultimate price for supporting Raila Odinga-Homa Bay Woman Rep Gladys Wanga During their meeting at the Lake Victoria resort of Munyonyo, Magufuli conceded that indeed the two countries have had issues in the past, more recently the outrageous torching of chicken export from Kenya. We have small issues relating to businesses and traders between Kenya and Tanzania. We want Kenya and Tanzania ministers to meet urgently and resolve these issues, Magufuli spoke during the meeting. The two agreed to work together for the sake of Kenya and Tanzania. Photo: Uhuru Kenyatta/Facebook READ ALSO: I will be better than Matiang'i - Keriako Tobiko declares He also clarified that he did not bear any bad blood with Uhuru Kenyatta, despite the small differences. The two Heads of State meeting was set up barely days after an outrage from Kenyans regarding the incineration of about 5000 chicks. President Uhuru Kenyatta and Tanzania Head of State JJohn Magufuli have vowed to work together for the two countries. Photo: Uhuru Kenyatta/Facebook READ ALSO: Kenya now expresses anger against Magufuli's tough actions towards Kenyans The chicks estimated at a value of KSh 500,000, were said to have been harbored through the northern Namanga border. 5000 day old chicks were outrageously torched by Tanzanian authorities. Photo: Nation Maria Mashingo, the Principal Secretary in the Ministry of Livestock said they found sufficient evidence to warrant the chicks as illegally in the country, with the importer lacking sufficient documentation. The move to torch the day-old chicks fueled the diplomatic rift between the two countries as Kenyans felt that their neighbors were sabotaging their economy. Magufuli and Uhuru, however agreed that the two countries were directly affected by each others economy, hence the need to work together. Have anything to add to this article or suggestions? Share with us on newstuko.co.ke Homa Bay shook as governor Cyprian Awiti is out | TUKO TV: Source: Breaking News - Drama unfolded in Voi Town on Thursday, February 22, evening after angry mourners dumped a coffin with a body inside a supermarket - TUKO.co.ke has learnt that the irate villagers wanted the owner of the supermarket to pay for the deceased death - The deceased identified as Amos Mwambanga and his unidentified colleague passed on in a controversial circumstance after undertaking an illegal oath - They had been accused of stealing four goats from the owner of the supermarket There was drama in Voi town,Taita Taveta County on Thursday, February 22, evening after a group of angry mourners dumped a coffin with a body in it inside a supermarket The mourners who hail from Sagala location treated the management of the supermarket and passers by to a free cinema as they set the open coffin inside the business premise before breaking into sharp wails. Send 'NEWS' to 40227 to receive all the important breaking news as it happens READ ALSO: Wanawake wa Mombasa waerevuka, wapatia mafisi nambari za simu za waganga TUKO.co.ke has learnt that the irate villagers wanted the owner of the supermarket to pay for the deceased death. Furious mourners dump coffin in supermarket. Photo: iStock READ ALSO: Everyone I knew has now abandoned me - former TV anchor Louis Otieno shares his lonely and sad life after sickness According to reports from Voi, the deceased identified as Amos Mwambanga and his unidentified colleague passed on in a controversial circumstance after undertaking an illegal oath. It is reported that Amos and the other dead guy were forced to take the oath at Msherinyi village near Maungu after they were accused of stealing four goats belonging to the supermarket owner. The two are said to have taken the oath ,administered by a Tanzanian witch doctor to spot the suspect who had stolen the goats. READ ALSO: Kenyans plead with fast rising MC turned thug to surrender to avoid meeting Hessy's fury Furious mourners dump coffin in supermarket. Photo: iStock Speaking at the supermarket during the drama, Amos's relatives revealed that the deceased had been herding cattle and goats for the owner of the supermarket since 2016 and could not steal from him. The incident was confirmed by Voi OCPD Joseph Chesire who said the oath was suspected to have been mixed with poison,leading to the death of the two headers. READ ALSO: 18 mind-blowing photos of Nairobi chokoraa love birds transformed into unrecognizable slay king and queen on Valentines Demanding justice, the the mourners arrived at the supermarket in a pick-up carrying the coffin escorted by numerous motorcycles. Eye witnesses who spoke to members of the fourth estate revealed that the mourners were also demanding Sh 60,000 compensation so as to go and bury their loved one. The drama brought business to a standstill in the town for hours.However, peace was restored after police intervened. How to turn a Woman into a man: Makeup Tutorial | Tuko Lifestyle Source: Breaking News - Uhuru had a rib cracking moment when his Ugandan counterpart Yoweri Museveni apologised for poor air conditioning at the East African Community summit - Museveni had blasted the organisers for making the East African Heads of State sweat in the auditorium after the air conditioning system malfunctioned - East Africa Heads of States are meeting in Uganda for the annual East Africa Community meeting to chart way forward for the region Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni sent the internet into laughter when he was recorded complaining about the persistant heat wave. In his hilarious remarks, he called out the EAC summit organizers for letting the heads of state boil ,in a room that had no air conditioning. Send 'NEWS' to 40227 to receive all the important breaking news as it happens Museveni has been known for his tell it as it is attitude that has seen him call out numerous people for their callous mistakes. READ ALSO:CJ David Maraga reprimands lawyer who represented Uhuru at Supreme court READ ALSO:I only fear God - Moha Jicho Pevu tells Governor Joho and his brother after winning election petition The president even apologised to president Kenyatta and the other dignitaries for having to endure the harsh heat during the summit. To add a twist to it, Museveni even stated that the Ugandan organisers were always determined to inconvenience their visitors for unknown reasons. READ ALSO:Uhuru meets Magufuli to sort out differences days after Tanzania burned 5,000 chicks imported from Kenya Of course his guests could not help but chuckle in undertones as they fanned themselves continuously. He even fired a warning towards the event organisers stating that that would be the last time he would tolerate such unprofessional work from them. Source: Tuko News 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. More than 24 hours later, and no help has come for residents of Belle View, Diamond Road, Cl White, nationalist. Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images In every major speech of his presidency, Donald Trump has insisted that his brand of nationalism is color-blind and all-inclusive. Far from being a force for division, a politics that prioritizes the interests of citizens above domestic aliens and foreign publics would help Americans rediscover our loyalty to each other, Trump argued in his inaugural address, because when you open your heart to patriotism, there is no room for prejudice. In his first State of the Union last month, the president proclaimed that all Americans deserve accountability and respect, and that his immigration policies were designed to protect our citizens of every background, color, religion, and creed. Of course, the idea that Trumps movement was founded on a color-blind conception of American identity is patently absurd. The man began his career in conservative politics by denying the Americanness of the first black president, and launched his presidential campaign by deriding Mexican-American immigrants as a pack of drug-dealing rapists (with a few good people, he assumed, sprinkled in between). Throughout his campaign, Trump tacitly revealed that he does not consider nonwhite U.S. citizens fully American, as when he referred to a native-born federal judge as a Mexican. And in arguing for restricting family reunification (i.e. chain migration), the president has never expressed sympathy for the American citizens who wish to bring their brothers, sisters, or parents to this county through that program (a group of citizens that appears to include his own wife). Instead, in his remarks to Congress last month, Trump implied that the people who benefit from chain migration are not Americans at all; baselessly suggested that Americans who came to this country through chain migration are disproportionately terrorists; and argued that such immigrants pose a threat to our future a claim he neither elaborated on nor explained. Nevertheless, the president has rarely (if ever) explicitly argued that there is a category of American citizens for whom he and his movement do not stand. And the legitimacy of his nationalist ideology (such as it is) rests on the conceit that it is not a racially or ethnically exclusive creed. But on Friday at Conservative Political Action Conference, the president ripped that conceit to shreds. Referencing congressional Democrats opposition to his administrations proposed changes to legal immigration, Trump told the crowd of right-wing activists, Theyre willing to give us the wall. But they dont want to give us any of the laws to keep these people out. Here, these people are, by definition, a group of U.S. residents and citizens who have entered the country legally, through the existing immigration system (ostensibly, including his own father- and mother-in-law). Trump then turned his fire on the diversity visa lottery, and declared, in no uncertain terms, that he does not believe that all Americans deserve his respect. Lottery, think of the lottery. You have a country, they put names in, you think theyre giving us their good people? Trump asked rhetorically. So we pick out people, then they turn out to be horrendous and we dont understand why. This is, of course, not how the diversity visa lottery works. Every year, the United States reserves 50,000 visas for prospective immigrants from nations that have not sent many immigrants to America in the past (in many cases, because those nations were barred from sending immigrants to the U.S. for much of the 20th century, due to explicitly racist immigration laws). Millions of people apply for those slots, and the field is winnowed through a lottery. But these immigrants are self-selected (not appointed by their governments as Trump suggests), and must meet Americas stringent education and work experience requirements for all newcomers, and then undergo vetting by the State Department before entering the country (as opposed to being immediately flown to the United States, no questions asked, as Trump implies). Anyhow, in these remarks, Trump argues that the winners of the diversity lottery turn out to be horrendous meaning, once they arrive in this country and become American residents or citizens, they reveal themselves to be universally horrible. Is there a term for the kind of nationalist who regards entire categories of diverse Americans to be horrendous, by definition, and who tells demagogic lies about said people, promoting fear and loathing of such minorities, so as to build public support for banning their kind from our country and thereby preserving our future? Ukrainian servicemen fulfilling their duties in Donbas have destroyed an infantry fighting vehicle (IFV) of Russian mercenaries, the press center of the anti-terrorist operation (ATO) headquarters has reported. "The enemy's infantry fighting vehicle was destroyed today thanks to the skills of servicemen of the Mospino tactical group of the Allied Forces near the occupied [town of] Dokuchayevsk," the press center reported on February 22. According to the report, the IFV crew might have conducted intelligence of the frontline forces of the Ukrainian army. One Ukrainian soldier was killed and another one was wounded as a result of the enemy shelling of the positions of the Ukrainian Armed Forces in Donbas over the past day. Ukrainian Defense Ministrys Spokesman for ATO issues Dmytro Hutsuliak said this at a briefing on Friday, an Ukrinform correspondent reports. "Unfortunately, one serviceman was killed yesterday. We express our condolences to the relatives and friends of our soldier who heroically defended Ukraine against Russian aggression," Hutsuliak said. He also noted that one soldier was wounded as a result of the shelling of the positions of the Ukrainian military. His health condition was reported as difficult. According to him, Russian-backed militants again used weapons banned under the Minsk agreements. They fired 19 times at the positions of the Ukrainian Armed Forces over the past day. ish The European Commission is ready to continue the program of macro-financial assistance in Ukraine if necessary conditions are fulfilled. Christian Danielsson, Director-General for European Neighbourhood Policy and Enlargement Negotiations at the European Commission, said this is an interview with the Yevropeiska Pravda online newspaper. "First of all, the ongoing IMF program is an indispensable condition for providing such assistance. Now Ukraine is in talks with the IMF regarding the conditions for the continuation of the funding program. The consent must be achieved and further Ukraine's cooperation with the IMF should be announced so that we could take the next steps regarding the provision of macro-financial assistance to Kyiv," Danielsson said. Answering a clarifying question, he confirmed that the establishment of the Anti-Corruption Court in Ukraine is one of the IMF's conditions. "It's absolutely right! It is an important element of the IMF program. As for other requirements, youd rather ask our colleagues from the Fund," the representative of the European Commission noted. In addition, the European Union should determine its terms for providing such assistance, Danielsson said. This decision is taken not at sole discretion of the European Commission, it requires the approval of the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union. Danielsson recalled that the EU had already provided Ukraine with EUR 2.81 billion in macro-financial assistance apart from grants. ol In 2017, Donetsk region received 15.3 million euros and 17.4 million dollars from international donors for restoration and development of infrastructure. Director of the Department of Investment and Innovation Development and External Relations of the Donetsk Regional State Administration Oksana Holovko said this during a meeting at the regional administration on Thursday. "In 2017, the international donors allocated 15.3 million euros and 17.4 million dollars for the restoration and development of infrastructure and social facilities in Donetsk region," she said. According to her, the main areas for attracting funds from the international donors include restoration of housing, construction of hostels for internally displaced persons and thermal modernization of social facilities. "This year, the international support will be continued. Together with the Red Cross, we plan to implement two large projects to continue the restoration of the regional psychiatric hospital located in the village of Semenivka and to repair the city hospital in the town of Slovyansk," Holovko noted. In turn, Chairman of Donetsk Military and Civilian Administration Pavlo Zhebrivsky says that the international support can be also used for the development of the united territorial communities. ish The consultations have been already held with the first seven foreign GTS operators, who expressed their interest in the joint management of the Ukrainian gas transportation system. The talks with representatives of several more companies will be held in early March, said Vice Prime Minister of Ukraine Volodymyr Kistion. According to him, such European gas consortia as Eustream and Snam from Slovakia and Italy, Gazunie and GRTgaz from the Netherlands and France, Polish GAZsystem, Desfa (Greece), Reganosa (Spain), Verbunddnelz Gaz AG (Germany), Fluxys (Belgium) and Transgaz (Romania) have submitted their proposals. "Gas production in Europe is falling, and the demand is growing every year. We have a unique gas transportation system, the largest natural gas storage facility in Europe, we have second largest gas reserves among the EU countries, and therefore we see so much interest in Ukraine. We aim to find a very effective and reliable partner for the GTS management to ensure the maximum transit of Russian gas to Europe through the Ukrainian pipe and to guarantee Ukraine and Europe the energy security," Kistion said, the Government portal reports. ol The United Kingdom will strongly promote a process of transparent privatization in Ukraine. First Secretary at the British Embassy in Ukraine Cathy Cottrell said this during the round table discussion "Cooperation in the Parliament-Government-Naftogaz Triangle," an Ukrinform correspondent reports. "Along with the privatization program, we need to move towards transformation of inefficient enterprises into efficient ones. It is also very important to create independent boards of directors, to increase the transparency of reporting procedure to the parliament and the public. The British Embassy will support this work in every possible way," Cottrell said. She hopes that the law on privatization will help attract funds and carry out a transparent sale of state-owned enterprises. "We made a commitment to provide certain financial resources," Cottrell added. As Ukrinform reported, on January 18, 2018, the Verkhovna Rada passed the law on privatization of state-owned property. ish The State Emergency Service of Ukraine has issued warnings for mountainous areas in Ivano-Frankivsk region, where a considerable avalanche danger is expected on February 24-25. The State Emergency Service reported this with reference to the Ukrainian Hydrometeorological Center's forecasts. On February 24-25, a considerable (III) level of avalanche risk is expected in the Carpathian mountains due to a sharp drop in air temperature, the report reads. ish The U.S. consulate in Jerusalem that will very quickly become the site of the new U.S. embassy. Photo: Thomas Coex/AFP/Getty Images Up until now, the timetable for the highly controversial move of the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem was vague and not terribly immediate. Originally it was assumed the changeover would take three or four years. But during his trip to the Middle East last month, Vice-President Mike Pence told the Israeli Knesset that it would happen by the end of 2019. That raised eyebrows not just because of the firestorm the subject has raised in the region, but because theres no suitable facility for the embassy in Jerusalem at this point. Today we learned that the embassy move would now happen on May 14, 2018. Axios has the story: According to Israeli officials, in the first phase an interim embassy will be opened at the consular annex in West Jerusalem that handles visas and passports. The office of the ambassador will move to the building, and Ambassador David Friedman will work from there with a small staff. The consular annex will change its name to the U.S. embassy. The building, located in the Arnona neighborhood, will be an interim embassy and the permanent location of the embassy will be determined at a later stage. It actually appears the move will involve a three-stage process that could well take as long as the original plan. The ambassadors residence, for example, will remain in its current site near Tel Aviv, and the existing embassy will become a branch of the Jerusalem embassy. One factor complicating the construction of an actual new embassy in Jerusalem involves the Trump administrations apparent interest in financing a lavish new facility by supplementing public funds with private donations, mostly from donors in the evangelical Christian and American Jewish communities, according to the Associated Press. Indeed, heaping controversy on top of controversy, the administration is mulling an apparent offer from casino mogul and global right-wing political busybody Sheldon Adelson to cover whatever costs it cant defray from other sources. The whole idea is unprecedented, AP notes: Under any circumstance, letting private citizens cover the costs of an official government building would mark a significant departure from historical U.S. practice. In the Jerusalem case, it would add yet another layer of controversy to Trumps politically charged decision to move the embassy, given Adelsons longstanding affiliation with right-wing Israeli politics. So whats the big rush, given all the complications? May 14 is the 70th anniversary of Israels declaration of independence. And so this largely symbolic if politically fraught act will be driven by symbolism, not practical considerations. And it will happen before anyone has time to rethink it. Ukraine must create all conditions necessary for young scientists not to leave the country. President Petro Poroshenko said this in his speech during a meeting with young scientists on February 22, the press service of the Head of State reported. Ukraine must create all conditions for the graduates of the higher education institutions and scientists to have an opportunity of self-realization. Looking in the eyes of the young scientists and students, I am glad that they believe they can realize their developments. Ukraine needs your innovations to solve the topical issues, the President noted. The President stressed the importance for the youth to have access to the interactive lessons of the best lecturers of the world even in the rural areas. The Head of State emphasized that Ukraine implemented an ambitious program of rural medicine that provided for 4G Internet in every Ukrainian village. Petro Poroshenko emphasized that the National Council for the Development of Science and Technology had been established. The National Fund for Research is being set up now. "It had to be done 20, 25 or 30 years ago. The whole world has been working in such an algorithm for a long time. And it's nice that we are moving step by step in this direction," the President said. ish On Thursday, February 22, a meeting of the Ukrainian consul with the illegally detained citizen of Ukraine, Pavlo Hryb, was held in Russia. Spokesperson for the Foreign Ministry of Ukraine Mariana Betsa wrote this on Twitter. "A meeting of the Ukrainian consul with Pavlo Hryb who was illegally imprisoned in the Russian Federation was held on February 22. Thanks to the consuls, the meeting took place for the first time in the Ukrainian language," she wrote. She notes that Pavlo Hryb does not receive proper treatment. "We demand that Ukrainian doctors get access to the political prisoner. We again urge the Russian Federation to release Pavlo," she said. ish The law on the peculiarities of the state policy on ensuring Ukraine's state sovereignty over temporarily occupied territories in Donetsk and Luhansk regions has been published in the Ukrainian parliament's Holos Ukrainy newspaper. As reported, on January 18, 2018, the Verkhovna Rada adopted the law on the peculiarities of state policy on ensuring Ukraine's state sovereignty over temporarily occupied territories in Donetsk and Luhansk regions, in which Russia is recognized as an aggressor state carrying out temporary occupation of part of Ukrainian territory. The document identifies the date of the beginning of the occupation of part of Ukraine, in particular, Crimea and Sevastopol - February 20, 2014. The law on Donbas reintegration outlines the peculiarities of the state policy on securing Ukraine's state sovereignty in temporarily occupied territories in Donbas. The document foresees that the boundaries and list of districts, towns, villages and settlements, parts of their territories temporarily occupied in Donetsk and Luhansk regions are determined by the president under a motion from the Ukrainian Defense Ministry, prepared on the basis of proposals from the General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. According to the law, responsibility for financial or moral damage done to Ukraine as a result of Russian aggression is placed on Russia in accordance with generally recognized principles and norms of international law. In addition, MPs established that persons participating in Russia's armed aggression or involved in the Russian occupation administration are held criminally liable for violating Ukrainian legislation and norms of international humanitarian law. On February 8, 2018, Verkhovna Rada Chairman Andriy Parubiy signed the law. The law comes into force on the day following the day of its publication. op The funding in the amount of more than EUR 17 million is provided for the implementation of the projects for 117 Ukrainian organizations participating in the Horizon 2020 programme. President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko said this during a meeting with young scientists in the National Technical University of Ukraine Ihor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute on Thursday, February 22, an Ukrinform correspondent reports. "Ukrainian institutions and organizations every year take increasingly active part in the largest EU Framework Programme for Research and Innovation. According to the results of 446 competitions, the funding in the amount of more than EUR 17 million has already been provided for 117 Ukrainian organizations participating in the Horizon 2020 programme. Earlier we could only dream about it. And I can assure all the present that, in turn, I unreservedly support the progressive approaches to the formation of a system for supporting young scientists, Poroshenko said. The state will make every effort to create proper conditions for talented young scientists to work in the homeland, the President noted. Ukraine became an associated member of the EU Framework Programme for Research and Innovation "Horizon 2020" in 2015. ol A military nurse was killed in a shelling by militants in Luhansk region Feb 20. The U.S. Department of State has been informed of the death in Donbas of a 23-year-old Ukrainian medic Sabina Halytska, according to its spokesperson Heather Nauert. "We received reports that a Ukrainian medic was killed while trying to aid civilians near the contact line, reminding us that the conflict in eastern Ukraine continues to rage on. Civilians and first responders face real dangers every day," Nauert said Thursday. She stressed that it was Russia who "manufactured" the conflict in eastern Ukraine in 2014 and continues to control its proxy forces in Donbas. Read alsoU.S. honors memory of Ukrainian protesters killed on Maidan, calls on Kyiv to bolster reform"Russia has demonstrated repeatedly that it can stop the violence whenever it chooses. The United States once again calls on Russia to order its proxy forces to implement a complete ceasefire, to withdraw its forces and heavy weapons from eastern Ukraine and to agree to a robust UN peacekeeping mission," she said. As UNIAN reported earlier, a military nurse Sabina Halytska, 23, was killed in Luhansk region in as she came under militant fire while providing aid to civilians. She is survived by her parents and brother. A political scientist assumes that with through early elections Poroshenko might try to get rid of hesitant political allies. The probable dissolution of the Verkhovna Rada's 8th convocation by Ukraine's president may have two reasons, according to a director of the "Ukrainian Barometer" sociological service, political scientist and sociologist Viktor Nebozhenko. "The first one is that the president sees an obstacle in a "separatist "position of Prime Minister Groysman, who has been floating farther and farther away from the president's personal line. The second one is too much of a free-thinking by the Popular Front Party and his will to influence its program. In other words, Poroshenko needs early parliamentary elections not so much to safeguard a pro-presidential majority in parliament, but to clear the political field of the Popular Front," he told Glavred. Read alsoPoll: Over 90% of Ukrainians see political situation as "tense"The expert has stressed that Poroshenko may choose among the two paths: either to launch a brutal anti-corruption campaign against his former friends, that is, Popular Front leaders, or go for early parliamentary elections. "The option of early elections will not necessarily be chosen - it is totally possible that the prosecutor general will take up the fight against corruption, especially after the emergence of the Anti-Corruption Court. And this fight will be focused, first of all, on slamming the leaders of the Popular Front," said the political scientist, adding that through snap elections, Poroshenko will try to get rid of hesitant political allies. Read alsoPoroshenko remains committed to peaceful liberation of occupied territories"He needs his own political force. And this can be achieved in two ways - either by punishing people, or through elections. So far, it is difficult to guess which way the president will choose," Nebozhenko concluded. Russia broke so many international agreements that listing them all is a challenge, Johnson says. In an opinion piece published in European media, the UK Foreign Secretary marks four years since the events which led to the illegal annexation of Crimea. "On the night of 22 February 2014, the most powerful men in Russia gathered in the Kremlin and resolved to seize Crimea from Ukraine," Johnson wrote. The British foreign secretary adds that the Kremlin later made "elaborate efforts to give their decision a veneer of legitimacy including by staging a bogus referendum but that meeting between President Vladimir Putin and his security chiefs was designed to seal the fate of Crimeas people". Jonhson recalls how Vladimir Putin described the sequence of events in a documentary for Russian television, broadcast in 2015. "He decided to grab Crimea during that conclave in the Kremlin 3 weeks before the sham referendum. All those claims about how he acted to protect the regions people or uphold their wishes were, by Mr Putins own account, utterly mendacious," said Boris Johnson. "So it was that Russia seized 10,000 square miles from Ukraine and broke the first principle of international law that countries may not acquire territory or change borders by force." "Russias land grab in Crimea amounted to the first forcible annexation of the territory of a European country and the first forcible redrawing of a European frontier since 1945," he stressed, adding that, in the process, Russia broke so many international agreements that listing them all is a challenge. Read alsoPoroshenko says personally saw "little green men" on Crimea visit in 2014, there was "threat to life"Putin "trampled upon Article 2 of the United Nations Charter, the Helsinki Final Act and the Russia-Ukraine Treaty of Friendship. He also broke Russias specific pledge, contained in the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, to respect the 'existing borders of Ukraine' and 'refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine'." Johnson also recalled the downing of MH1 by a Russian missile, as well as Russia's continued aggression in Donbas: "To this day, Russia continues to deploy troops and tanks in a conflagration that has claimed over 10,000 lives and driven 2.3 million people from their homes." He also noted reports coming from Crimea of the oppression of the indigenous Crimean Tatar population and the harassment of those opposed to Russian annexation. Read alsoOperation "Crimea is Ours""In the end, the security of every nation depends on the essential principle that countries should not change borders or acquire territory by force. That is why the fate of Crimea matters to all of us," Johnson wrote. "We all have an obligation to stand up to Russia in a measured and resolute way. That means sustaining our Crimea-related sanctions against Russia for as long as the region remains under Kremlin control, and keeping further sanctions in place whilst the Minsk Agreements in eastern Ukraine go unheeded." He added that these measures are intended "to demonstrate that no country, however large, can dismember its neighbour and break international law without consequence". The General Staff and Commander-in-Chief will top the vertical of a military administration. Secretary of the Verkhovna Rada National Security and Defense Committee Ivan Vinnyk (BPP) says the head of the Anti-Terrorist Center under the SBU Security Service of Ukraine is to take a decision on the completion of the Anti-Terrorist Operation (ATO), while president of Ukraine on the launch of measures to ensure national security, aimed at changing the format of a military operation in Donbas. "In order to complete the ATO, we need the relevant decision of the first deputy of the SBU responsible for counterterrorism. To announce measures to ensure national security, a relevant decision should be taken by President, and later the General Staff creates a vertical management headed by the chief of the Joint Operational Staff, tasked with general correlation of troops in the relevant area and ensuring Ukraine's national security," Vinnyk told 112 Ukraine TV channel. Read alsoUkraine's Gen. Staff says ATO over, new Operation in Donbas kicking offHe specified that the General Staff and Commander-in-Chief will top the vertical of the military administration. He added that, according to the current Constitution, the president of Ukraine is Commander-in-Chief. Answering the question on who else will join the joint forces' staff, he said: "Article 8 of the law contains an exhaustive list of those who can be involved in measures to ensure national security, and this is the entire list of our military formations... It is possible to involve others. Doctors can be involved, too, if they are part of a relevant mission. They will be considered combatants and enjoy a full-fledged social protection, same as servicemen receive." Today, Feb 23, Law "On the peculiarities of state policy regarding the provision of state sovereignty of Ukraine in the temporarily occupied territories in Donetsk and Luhansk regions," commonly known as the Donbas reintegration law, was published in the Ukrainian parliament's official newspaper, Holos Ukrainy. The law will come into force Feb 24. It was Kukiz'15 who invited for consultations a Polish historian Wojciech Muszynski, known for his nationalistic anti-Ukrainian and anti-American statements. Rzeczpospolita journalist Wiktor Ferfecki has said the draft of the recently adopted Polish law banning Ukrainian nationalists' ideology was a product of advice by historians who had been frankly critical of Ukraine. The journalist claims that part of the law was written by representatives of the Kukiz'15 right-wing political movement (42 seats in the Polish Sejm, but no representatives in Senate). It is this part that concerns the introduction in the law on the Institute of National Remembrance of the definition of crimes of Ukrainian nationalists, according to Rzeczpospolita. It was Kukiz'15 who invited for consultations a Polish historian Wojciech Muszynski, known for his nationalistic anti-Ukrainian and anti-American statements. Muszynski not only helped in drafting the bill, but also appeared at a meeting of the justice and human rights commission in November 2016, where the draft was presented. Read alsoUkrainian historians warned of risks of traveling to Poland due to "anti-Bandera law"Another consultant was Vladimir Osadchiy, who had worked as a host for a pro-Putin news agency, Sputnik. In his statements, Osadchiy complains about the "great impudence of the Bandera community" in Ukraine and criticizes Poland's eastern policies. During the meeting, he also suggested that "the ideology of nationalism is spreading in Ukraine, becoming a mandatory state ideology." As UNIAN reported earlier, the Polish Sejm on January 26 voted for the bill submitted by the Kukiz'15 party setting a ban on promoting the so-called "Bandera ideology", with its historic roots stemming from Ukraine. Read alsoFM Czaputowicz says Donbas war threatens Poland's securityThe bill defines "crimes of Ukrainian nationalists and Ukrainian units who collaborated with the III Reich", introducing a possibility of launching criminal probes against deniers of such crimes. The official believes there should be no stalling of the issue. Ukrainian MP, presidential envoy to the Verkhovna Rada, Iryna Lutsenko, says Canada and EU countries will provide weapons to Ukraine following the United States' move. "As soon as the first stage is passed, Canada and European countries will be ready to provide us with lethal defensive weapons," Lutsenko told journalists, an UNIAN correspondent reports. Read alsoU.S. to allocate $200 mln for Ukraine's defense in 2019"I think that there will be no stalling, everything has its order," she said. As UNIAN reported, late in 2017, the Donald Trump Administration green-lighted the sales to Ukraine of lethal weapons, including Javelin anti-tank missile systems. Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Viktor Muzhenko said on January 17, 2018, that the Javelins could be delivered within two to six months. Following a shooting on Valentines Day that killed 17 of their classmates and teachers, the teenage students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, have stepped, with impressive force and eloquence, into new roles as gun-control activists. At this point, you probably know who they are. Youve likely seen David Hoggs interview with CNN immediately after escaping the school, staring into the camera asking that adults do something to keep children from being gunned down. Or Emma Gonzalezs speech at a rally in Fort Lauderdale last Saturday that inspired people on Twitter to, half-jokingly, cry for her to run for president. Or Cameron Kasky taking Marco Rubio to task during CNNs town hall on Wednesday night. Kasky asked Florida senator Marco Rubio if he would continue to take money from the NRA. Can you tell me you wont accept a single donation from the NRA? Kasky asked. Rubio hemmed and hawed around answering the question, finally telling Kasky who offered to fundraise the funds that Rubio historically has received from the NRA I will always accept the help of anyone who agrees with my agenda. Earlier in the day, Kasky tweeted that he was taking some time away from Facebook after receiving graphic death threats from NRA cultists. Kasky noted that unlike Twitter, which caps tweets at 280 characters, on Facebook his aggressors could threaten him for as many sentences as they like. Temporarily got off Facebook because theres no character count so the death threats from the @NRA cultists are a bit more graphic than those on twitter. Will be back when I have the time for it. Busy getting my feelings hurt by fellow teenagers at Br**tb*rt Cameron Kasky (@cameron_kasky) February 21, 2018 Kasky and his classmates have been very vocal on Twitter since the shooting, something that has given immediate power to their movement. Being able to hear their voices angry, hurt, scared, and unvarnished by parents or PR representation is one of the perks of the social-media era that these kids grew up in. Of course, this also opens them up to attack, something thats not just happening to Kasky. An old news video from CBS 2 Los Angeles about Hogg and a friend getting into a spat with a lifeguard on Redondo Beach was the No. 1 trending video on YouTube on Wednesday morning before it was taken down by YouTube for violating that platforms harassment rules. The videos caption claimed that Hogg was an actor, a lie that has been thrown around lately in an attempt to discredit Hogg and his peers as paid crisis actors brought in by anti-gun organizations. Stoneman Douglas students have dragged Donald Trump and right-wing pundit Tomi Lahren, which makes for a lot of Twitter faves and retweets, but also probably some particularly nasty Twitter mentions. Despite this, Kasky and his peers seem undeterred. Kaskys habit of calling out his trolls via quote-tweet makes this very clear. These teens have already survived a shooting. They know the very real damage bullets are capable of doing; they arent going to be fazed by cyberbullies. The MP says the force will consist of troops from countries that are not part of any security alliance. A UN peacekeeping mission in Donbas may amount to 30,000 people, including 20,000 military servicemen and another 5,000 police officers, a Ukrainian MP, presidential envoy in the Verkhovna Rada Iryna Lutsenko, told journalists in Kyiv citing unofficial reports, according to an UNIAN correspondent. The official says an important issue after the Joint Forces Staff is created in Ukraine will be its coordination and cooperation with the likely UN peacekeeping mission in Donbas. Read alsoRussia may unleash bloody massacre in Donbas to discredit peacekeepers, Ukraine expert"The talks are underway about a possible composition of the peacekeeping mission, this mission will consist of [troops from] countries that are not part of any security alliance," she added. Lutsenko stressed the importance of "the future peacekeeping mission to be deployed throughout the occupied part of Donbas not only to protect the OSCE SMM, but also to stand on an uncontrolled border section in Donbas to stop the movement of weapons into Ukraine." Hostile intelligence agencies attempted to sow discord and hatred through provocations in Zakarpattia and Bukovyna. The SBU Security Service of Ukraine reports on intensified efforts by Russian special services toward destabilization within Ukraine and discrediting the country in the eyes of global community. As reported by the SBU's press center, in February alone, there were 12 such provocations, including arson attempt at the premises of the Hungarian culture community center in Zakarpattia region. In addition, the SBU says Russian special services planned to organize a fake campaign in Uzhgorod to foment ethnic hatred. Read alsoPro-Putin right-wingers from EU behind arson attempt at Hungarians Union building in Zakarpattia Governor"We received information that Russia had ordered a subversive information campaign under the guise of public hearings on the topic: 'Observance of the national and cultural rights of Hungarians of Zakarpattia region in the context of Art. 7 of the Law of Ukraine On Education'. During the event, calls were supposed to be voiced for granting autonomy to the Hungarians of Zakarpattia region due to the alleged harassment on the part of Ukrainian authorities. Orchestrators planned to widely highlight propaganda stories on the issue in Russian media and actively share and repost them on social networks. SBU operatives documented that the coordinator of the campaign was a representative of a well-known public organization, while direct executor was a chairman of the charity fund from Kyiv," SBU Deputy Chief Viktor Kononenko said. In addition, the SBU documented that Russian citizen David Ponomarev, known for plotting terrorist attacks in Mykolaiv in 2015, had once again tried to organize a sabotage act in Mykolaiv and Uzhgorod. "SBU operatives have prevented even bolded provocations in Chernivtsi region. The executors, who were identified by the SBU, had received from Russia an advance payment for the arson at two Romanian schools in Bukovyna," the press center said. The enemy focused fire in the area of the Svitlodarska Duha bulge. Russia's hybrid military forces mounted 19 attacks on Ukrainian army positions in Donbas in the past 24 hours, with one Ukrainian soldier reported as killed in action (KIA) and another one -- wounded in action (WIA). According to Ukrainian military officials, the enemy focused fire in the area of the Svitlodarska Duha bulge, which is in the Luhansk sector. Read alsoUkrainian military intel: About 200 Russian officers arrive in occupied Donbas"In particular, the enemy used 120mm and 82mm mortars and a whole arsenal of infantry weapons near the villages of Luhanske and Troyitske. Several 82mm shells blew up near the villages of Krymske and Katerynivka. The occupiers also fired heavy machine guns and small arms on our positions near the villages of Zaitseve and Novoluhanske, as well as grenade launchers and machine guns near the villages of Hladosove and Lozove. In addition, infantry fighting vehicles and small arms were used against the Ukrainian defenders of the village of Novo-oleksandrivka," reads the report. In the Donetsk sector, the Russian occupation forces opened fire from mortars of various calibers on the Ukrainian positions near the villages of Novotroyitske and Pisky. A provocation may create another Srebrenica, the political scientist suggests. Director of the "Ukrainian Barometer" sociological service, political scientist and sociologist Viktor Nebozhenko has said modern history shows that the deployment of a peacekeeping mission in any conflict zone results if the final sharp outbreak of violence between warring sides. He stressed that there is a great risk that the deployment of peacekeepers to Donbas will be discredited by some monstrous provocation on the part of Russia, Glavred reports. Read alsoUkrainian military intel: About 200 Russian officers arrive in occupied Donbas"Just like Serbia did a massacre in Srebrenica, killing 6,000 Muslims... Speaking in Valdai in October 2017, Russian President Vladimir Putin bluntly said that an attempt to oust separatists and Russian troops from Donbas would lead to a horrible massacre. That is, the Kremlin directly says that, if peacekeepers emerge and Ukraine returns to the occupied territories of Donbas, the process will be discredited through a massive slaying of local separatists and all sorts of [mercenaries from] private military companies," the expert said. Nebozhenko added that by a possible provocation, Russia will try to show the world that neither the Ukraine government nor peacekeepers are able to save separatists. The threats include a "possible wide-scale operation" and "wide-scale aggression" by Russia against Ukraine, he added. The commander of Ukraine's armed forces has warned of possible "wide-scale aggression" by Russia against his country. Viktor Muzhenko, the Ukrainian military's chief of staff, told RFE/RL in a February 23 interview that Kyiv's army must be prepared for any type of Russian threat amid its ongoing war against Moscow-backed separatists in the east of the country. "We must be ready to stand against [aggression] now, tomorrow, a week after, a year after, three years after, until the moment when such a threat goes away," Muzhenko said. Read alsoNo more ATO: What Donbas Operation format change means for troops and civiliansThe threats include a "possible wide-scale operation" and "wide-scale aggression" by Russia against Ukraine, he added. His comments follow Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko's signing this week of a law that supporters say will help Kyiv restore control of territory that has been held by Russia-backed separatists in Ukraine's eastern regions of Luhansk and Donetsk since April 2014. The new law puts all military and law enforcement activities in eastern Ukraine under the control of the Ukrainian Army's top command, a move that formally ends what Kyiv has until now referred to as an "antiterrorist operation" in the area. "The antiterrorist operation will be over and we will move further to the operations by the joint forces," Muzhenko said. "That means a clear structure of the management system, the subordination of certain forces and resources to the military command, creation of the joint operative headquarters as the main body to manage the operation on the territories of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions," he added. The move will help to "more effectively administer Ukraine's armed forces" in the region, Muzhenko said. Two Su-57 fighter aircraft were filmed landing at Russia's Khmeimim airbase along the Mediterranean coast. The reported arrival of Russian Su-57 stealth fighter jets to Syria raises the level of complexity for the U.S. Air Force. "[The] reported arrival of Russian stealth SU-57 fighter jets to Syria 'raises the level of complexity for the (USAF) crew's to deal with," Gen. Mike Holmes was quoted by Kevin Baron, Defense One's Executive Editor, on Twitter as saying at the Air Warfare Symposium in Orlando, FL. JUST IN: Gen. Mike Holmes, @USAF_ACC, says at #AWS18 reported arrival of Russian stealth SU-57 fighter jets to Syria raises the level of complexity for the (USAF) crews to deal with. Kevin Baron (@DefenseBaron) February 22, 2018 Holmes is the Commander, Air Combat Command, Langley Air Force Base, Virginia. According to earlier reports, Moscow appears to have deployed an advanced new stealth fighter to its airbase in Syria, reports in Russian news media and online videos of the aircraft indicated on Thursday, February 22, according to The Guardian. Analysts say this could be a risky attempt to gain publicity and operational experience for the jet in one of the world's most tangled conflicts. "Their appearance comes at a fraught moment in the seven-year war, as the U.S. and Russia occasionally scramble jets to intercept each other over Syria and pro-regime warplanes pound the Damascus suburb of eastern Ghouta despite protests from the UN," The Guardian said. More than 330 people have been killed there since the bombing began on Sunday, according to reports. The deployment of two Su-57 fighter aircraft, which were filmed landing at Russia's Khmeimim airbase along the Mediterranean coast, would represent the latest high-tech military system Russia has exhibited in Syria. The actions block assets held by the firms in the United States and prohibit U.S. citizens from dealing with them. The United States said on Friday it was imposing its largest package of sanctions against North Korea on Friday, intensifying pressure on Pyongyang to give up its nuclear and missile programs. In addressing the Trump administration's biggest national security challenge, the U.S. Treasury sanctioned one person, 27 companies and 28 ships, according to a statement on the U.S. Treasury Department's website, Reuters said. The actions block assets held by the firms in the United States and prohibit U.S. citizens from dealing with them. Read alsoReuters: Ukraine progress should soften sanctions on Russia Germany's GabrielNorth Korea's missile and nuclear program is seeking to develop a nuclear-tipped missile capable of reaching the U.S. mainland. Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un have taunted each other through the media and in August Trump threatened to go beyond sanctions by bringing "fire and fury like the world has never seen." The Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control announced the measures, which are designed to disrupt North Korean shipping and trading companies and vessels and to further isolate Pyongyang. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin said in a statement the sanctions against the ships would help prevent Kim's government from conducting "evasive maritime activities that facilitate illicit coal and fuel transports and erode its abilities to ship goods through international waters." The ships are located, registered or flagged in North Korea, China, Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Marshall Islands, Tanzania, Panama and Comoros, Treasury said. Those targeted included a Taiwanese passport holder and mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore shipping and energy firms. The first two Su-57 arrived in Syria on February 22. Syrian activists have reported about the arrival of two more Russian stealth jets at the Khmeimim air base in Syria. "Thus, there are four advanced Su-57 stealth fighters in Syria," the WarJornal analytical platform, which monitors hostilities around the world, said on its Telegram channel on Friday, February 23. Read alsoUSAF Gen.: Arrival of Russian stealth fighter jets to Syria to raise complexity for U.S.Russia has thus deployed two Su-57S and two Su-57 jets. As UNIAN reported earlier, U.S. Air Force Gen. Mike Holmes announced on February 22 that the reported arrival of Russian stealth Su-57 fighter jets to Syria "raises the level of complexity for the (USAF) crew's to deal with." The first two Su-57 arrived in Syria on February 22. The fifth-generation Su-57, also known as the T-50, has been designed to compete with the U.S. F-22 Raptor and F-35 Joint Strike Fighter aircraft. According to the document, Gates lied when he said Ukraine was not discussed at the meeting. Former Donald Trump campaign official Rick Gates pleaded guilty Friday to two criminal charges in special counsel Robert Mueller's wide-ranging investigation of Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential campaign and related activities. Gates is now the third Trump associate known to be working with Mueller's investigation, and his plea deal will put the spotlight on former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, CNN reported. Prosecutors are trying to pressure Manafort to speak with prosecutors about what he knows, particularly about the campaign. Read alsoPOLITICO: Manafort trial likely to start in September at the earliestGates was Manafort's right-hand man for a decade, was privy to most, if not all, of Manafort's activities during the campaign and stayed in the Trump orbit after Manafort's exit. Manafort has pleaded not guilty to all charges against him. In Friday's hearing, Gates told a federal judge that he understood his potential sentence depended on his cooperation with prosecutors on the charges: conspiracy to commit to defraud the United States and making false statements. Gates, bearded and wearing a blue suit, tie and cuff links, listened to the judge read the offenses he is agreeing to plead guilty to and the possibility of being sentenced to up to 57 to 71 months in prison. He said "Yes, your honor" repeatedly as Judge Amy Berman Jackson read the court documents. Thursday, prosecutors described a "scheme" in which the two longtime business partners allegedly laundered $30 million, failed to pay taxes for almost 10 years and used real estate they owned to fraudulently secure more than $20 million in loans. Gates said that despite his "initial desire to vigorously defend myself," he has had a "change of heart" in order to protect his family, according to a letter sent to his family and friends, obtained by CNN from a Gates friend. "The reality of how long this legal process will likely take, the cost, and the circus-like atmosphere of an anticipated trial are too much," Gates wrote. "I will better serve my family moving forward by exiting this process." He wrote that it was "difficult decision" to make, but that ensuring his family's "well-being is first and foremost." Gates was caught in a lie by investigators after an interview on February 1, one of the days he spoke to investigators during plea negotiations, according to the plea document and a source familiar with the case. The document says Gates lied to investigators earlier this month about a 2013 meeting in Washington, attended by Manafort and others. According to the document, Gates lied when he said Ukraine was not discussed at the meeting. "Gates had participated with Manafort in preparing a report that memorialized for Ukraine leadership the pertinent Ukraine discussions that Manafort represented had taken place at the meeting," the new court filing says. That meeting, in mid-March 2013, was attended by Manafort, California Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, and former Rep. Vin Weber, who is now a lobbyist with Mercury LLC, according to lobbying disclosures filed last year with the Justice Department. Rohrabacher and Weber were not identified in Friday's court filings, though their positions were referenced and the description in the court filing matches the record of the meeting in the lobbying disclosures. MPs have warned ministry of Finance permanent secretary Keith Muhakanizi to back off parliament and wait for auditor general's report on the controversial $200m (Shs 715 billion) Preferential Trade Area (PTA) loan. The MPs accuse ministry of Finance of obtaining the loan by 'by false pretense', but in an interview with Daily Monitor, Muhakanizi branded the MPs as ignorant and biased with a conspiracy. PAC chairperson Angelina Osege (R) and her deputy Gerald Karuhanga address the media over the PTA loan Parliament's Public Accounts Committee (PAC) last year investigated the utilisation and disbursement of the PTA loan, in which Finance is accused of failing to disburse the money to the intended beneficiaries even after the PTA bank released the money. The loan proposal had originally been rejected by parliament on January 7, 2016, but ministry of Finance reportedly changed the objective of the loan, emphasizing medical supplies to get the required parliamentary approval on April 26, 2016. Despite the loan approval and acquisition, National Medical Stores (NMS) to date is yet to get the Shs 156 billion from the loan to purchase drugs. The loan was among other issues to ease finance expenditure pressure, resulting from the exchange rate depreciation in financial year 2015/2016. In its report to the House recently, PAC recommended that Muhakanizi be relieved of his duties and Finance minister Matia Kasaija be censored following their involvement in processing the said loan. However speaker Rebecca Kadaga resolved that the auditor general first audits the PTA loan before debate takes place in the House. At a press conference addressed by PAC members led by Angeline Ossegge at parliament, legislators warned Muhakanizi against what they believe is contempt of the House. We are surprised at the ignorance, behaviour and largely arrogance that even before we see whats in auditor generals report, we see them abusing parliament, PAC vice chairperson Gerald Karuhanga said. Its sad but Mr Muhakanizi must realize that no amount of abuse or disregard of parliament is going to deter us [MPs] from interrogating the ministry of Finance just like all other agencies of government that report to PAC, he added. The MPs argue that if Kasaija and Muhakanizi had listened to Bank of Uganda governor Emmanuel Mutebiles advice not to go for an interest loan, Uganda would be saved of interest to a tune of Shs 81 billion. Uganda will be required to pay an extra Shs 81 billion because of the responsible officers (Kasaija and Muhakaniza) insistence on borrowing non-interest free money. The auditor general is expected to investigate the issue and deliver a report to the house this month before parliament can decide on the fate of Muhakanizi and that of minister Kasaija. namuloki16@gmail.com (@FahadShabbir) Soaring financial costs from natural disasters sent profits plummeting at Swiss Re last year, the reinsurance giant said Friday Zurich, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 23rd Feb, 2018 ) :Soaring financial costs from natural disasters sent profits plummeting at Swiss Re last year, the reinsurance giant said Friday. Combined estimated claims from disasters such as Cyclone Debbie in Australia, Atlantic hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria, the Mexican earthquakes, and wildfires in California amounted to $4. 7 billion in 2017. The costs pushed profits down 91 percent to $331 million (268 million Euros). "2017 was clearly a challenging year for the industry -- and Swiss Re," CEO Christian Mumenthaler was quoted as saying in a company statement. (@FahadShabbir) Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Pakistan Stock Exchange (PSX), Richard Morin said that after the integration of Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad into a single National stock exchange, PSX performance has improved significantly. RAWALPINDI, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 23rd Feb, 2018 ) :Chief Executive Officer (CEO) pakistan stock exchange (PSX), Richard Morin said that after the integration of Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad into a single National stock exchange, psx performance has improved significantly. He said this during his visit to Rawalpindi Chamber of Commerce and Industry (RCCI) here Friday.He said more companies would be added to the PSX, hoping that companies from the SME sector would also be listed. He emphasized on beefing up investor protection, ease of doing business,better security for investors and building a new trading platform. Morin said that he wants to improve safeguards to boost the number of retail investors, who currently less than 0.2 percent of the nation's 200-million plus population. He expressed hope that RCCI and PSX, will increase cooperation and coordination to explore ways and means to initiate business support programs and project for SMEs. Richard also appreciated the role of RCCI in promoting business activities in the region. Earlier, RCCI chief Zahid Latif Khan in his welcome address said that PSX has now become one of the promising destinations for local and foreign investors. He invited Richard Morin to participate in the upcoming RCCI All Pakistan Chambers Presidents Conference Gawadar and International Rawal Expo. RCCI has been providing a great platform to attract investors and promote local businesses to show case and market their product including capital market,he added. Pakistan Board of Investment (BOI), in partnership with the International Finance Corporation and World Bank with the support from the United Kingdom government's Prosperity Fund, has launched a project to revive Pakistan's global appeal as an attractive location for both local and foreign investment ISLAMABAD, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 23rd Feb, 2018 ) :Pakistan board of Investment (BOI), in partnership with the International Finance Corporation and World Bank with the support from the United Kingdom government's Prosperity Fund, has launched a project to revive Pakistan's global appeal as an attractive location for both local and foreign investment. Chairman BOI Naeem Zamindar said said Pakistan Investment Climate Project aims to boost the country's investment competitiveness. He was addressing a workshop on "Knowledge Exchange Retreat Investment Policy and Promotion Strategy" organized by BOI with Collaboration of World Bank Group (WBG) here on Friday. He said the project will support BOI to improve Pakistan's investment policy and promotion strategy. It will also contribute to streamlining business regulation and creating opportunities for meaningful linkages between foreign and local firms in key sectors, Naeem said. The Chairman BOI, highlighted about how Pakistan's economy stands at a crucial vantage point with the potential to grow at the rate over 9% , technology building momentum to lift the nation towards prosperity. For this, Pakistan must attract new investment which will help the country create jobs for its youth, as 65 percent of young and growing population and its aspiration, he added. Naeem Zamindar also underscored the need to draw more overseas Pakistani business communities towards the country and on the need to integrate with China, which is most likely to transform into a 30 trillion-dollar economic wonder over the ensuing twenty-five years. He said the enablers for this growth are opportunity to leapfrog due to technological revolution, "our integration in to the growing Chinese economy due to China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) and the opportunity to tape the capital and know-how of our overseas strong diaspora." At a Knowledge Exchange Retreat organized by the BIO, sensor officials from the World Bank Group and the IFC were pleased and upbeat at their collaboration with the BOI. Country Manager IFC Pakistan, Nadeem Siddiqui, while speaking at the opening session of the event said that "Pakistan has the potential to attract higher levels of foreign direct investment in the coming years, given the BOI's investment promotion strategy taps into the economic potential of the provinces and the opportunities arising from the development of Special Economic Zones." He also stressed that BOI should continue to facilitate foreign investors by helping them obtain work visas without any hassle coordinating with Federal and provincial authorities to improve the regulatory environment. The need for improved coordination between the provincial and federal agencies was also highlighted by Chairman BOI, he added. It must be noted that international investors are eyeing Pakistan with renewed optimism. "Global experience confirms the regulatory certainty and policy predictability are essential for investors" noted Christine Qiang, World Bank Practice Manager responsible for Investment Policy and Competition. She added that"Pakistan Board of investment has an important role to play, with the provincial Boards of Investment, to advocate for and facilitate a stable and consistent policy environment for investors." Secretary BOI, .Samaira Nazir Siddiqui, while concluding the Knowledge Exchange Retreat thanked the IFC and WBG, and also acknowledges the support of Department of International Development of the UK Government for initiating investment climate and doing business reforms in Pakistan. She emphasized on Secretary BOI said that working closely with all the federal government authorities as well as provincial governments to ensure that investors in Pakistan are facilitated. She also stated that improving the investment policy and promotion framework will help attract , generate and retain investment into Pakistan. South Korea and Azerbaijan agreed on Friday to expand bilateral economic cooperation in infrastructure and other sectors, the finance ministry here said, Yonhap reported SEOUL, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 23rd Feb, 2018 ) ::South Korea and Azerbaijan agreed on Friday to expand bilateral economic cooperation in infrastructure and other sectors, the finance ministry here said, Yonhap reported. The two sides held high-level talks in Seoul to discuss ways to bolster trade and investment and help more South Korean firms participate in infrastructure projects in the Central Asian country, according to the ministry. Azerbaijan, located along the Caspian Sea, is known for its rich natural resources, including crude oil and natural gas. The country is working on projects to expand its infrastructure, such as roads and railways. In a meeting with Deputy Finance Minister Ko Hyung-kwon, Azerbaijan's deputy finance minister Emin Huseynov urged South Korean companies to join his country's efforts to expand infrastructure. Ko responded by saying that the Azerbaijan government should play a key role in wooing South Korean companies to the nation. The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Elementary and Secondary Education Foundation (ESEF) has set the target for the enrolment of 25,000 more students in the Girls Community Schools across the province from this academic year. PESHAWAR, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 23rd Feb, 2018 ) :The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Elementary and Secondary Education Foundation (ESEF) has set the target for the enrolment of 25,000 more students in the Girls Community Schools across the province from this academic year. A spokesman for the ESEF in a statement here Friday said that 75,000 students will receive vouchers this year through the Iqra Farogh-e-Taleem 'Education Voucher scheme'. The Girls Community Schools offer primary-level education and are made in partnership with local communities. Communities arrange for the space and an educated woman, living in the local community to become the teacher. Field work has been started in the province for the enrolment of children in these schools. Similarly, the Iqra Farogh-e-Taleem Education Voucher scheme is an initiative to provide education to children (ages 5-16) living in areas that do not have government schools. Through a voucher, these children are able to study in private schools. In addition to this, they are also provided with free textbooks, uniforms and shoes. The Elementary and Secondary Education Foundation (ESEF) in collaboration with private education service providers, aims to provide secondary level educational facilities through the opening of new schools across KP. The scheme is called "the New School Initiative" (NSI) through this scheme 12,500 out of school children will be enrolled across KP. The ESEF will be identifying potential areas through a survey conducted by the Bureau of Statistics, KP Government of KP. The Government will provide financial support to these new private schools in the form of tuition fees, text books and uniform for all out of school children identified under this scheme. Chief of Army Staff (COAS) General Qamar Javed Bajwa Friday presented Academic Excellence Awards to the students of Army Public Schools and College System (APSACS) who distinguished themselves in SSC and HSSC exams of Federal Board RAWALPINDI, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 23rd Feb, 2018 ) :Chief of Army Staff (COAS) General Qamar Javed Bajwa Friday presented Academic Excellence Awards to the students of Army Public Schools and College System (APSACS) who distinguished themselves in SSC and HSSC exams of Federal board. The COAS congratulated successful students, their parents and faculty for achieving excellent results, an Inter Services Public Relations press release said. "Our younger generation is our asset and we are proud of their achievement," he said. Reaffirming commitment to education, he said, "We will do our best to provide wholehearted support towards improvement of education in the country. A large number of students, parents of students, faculty and staff of the APSACS Secretariat attended the ceremony. (@rukhshanmir) Deputy Commissioner Khairpur, Jawed Jagirani Friday paid a surprise visit to the Civil Hospital Khairpur. SUKKUR, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 23rd Feb, 2018 ) :Deputy Commissioner Khairpur, Jawed Jagirani Friday paid a surprise visit to the Civil Hospital Khairpur. He checked the attendance of doctors, para-medical staff and inspected OPD, Medical ward, Operation Theater, ICU and Emergency Wards of the hospital. He also listened to the complaints of the patients and directed the hospital administrations to resolve their problems on urgent basis. He expressed his satisfaction over the cleanliness as well on-going development schemes. Medical Superintendent (MS) Dr. Muhammad Hassan Abro and other officers concerned accompanied the Deputy Commissioner. (@ChaudhryMAli88) The London-based world human rights watchdog, Amnesty International has expressed serious concern over the impunity enjoyed by the Indian troops for human rights abuses in Indian occupied Kashmir. ISLAMABAD, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 23rd Feb, 2018 ) :The London-based world human rights watchdog, Amnesty International has expressed serious concern over the impunity enjoyed by the Indian troops for human rights abuses in Indian occupied Kashmir. According to Kashmir Media Service, the Amnesty International in its annual report for 2017-18 posted on its website said that impunity for human rights abuses persisted in occupied Kashmir, with the Indian forces continuing to use inherently inaccurate pellet-firing shotguns during protests, and the authorities frequently shutting down internet services. The report, which was released in Delhi, said that in April, eight people were killed by the Indian forces, some of them by the use of excessive force, following protests during a by-election for an Indian Parliamentary seat. One voter, Farooq Ahmad Dar, the report said, was beaten by the army personnel, strapped to the front of an army jeep and driven around for over five hours, seemingly as a warning to protesters. It said that in May, the officer responsible received an army commendation for this work. The report said that in July, the Human Rights Commission of the occupied territory directed the puppet administration to provide Farooq Dar Rs one lakh as compensation, but in November, the authorities refused to pay. The report maintained that in June, a military court set up under the paramilitary Border Security Force acquitted two soldiers of killing 16-year-old Zahid Farooq Sheikh in 2010. It said that the BSF had successfully prevented the case from being prosecuted in a civilian court. In July, the report stated, an appellate military court suspended the life sentences of five army personnel convicted by a court-martial of the extrajudicial executions of three men in Machil in 2010. In November, it said, the Human Rights Commission repeated a directive issued to the puppet regime in 2011 to investigate over 2,000 unmarked graves. The report said that the Indian forces' personnel continued to use inherently inaccurate pellet-firing shotguns during protests, blinding and injuring several people. The authorities frequently shut down internet services, citing public order concerns, it added. The report said that the Indian authorities were using repressive laws to stifle freedom of expression while journalists and press freedom came under increasing attack. In September, journalist Gauri Lankesh, an outspoken critic of Hindu nationalism and the caste system, was shot dead outside her home in Bengaluru by unidentified gunmen. The same month, journalist Shantanu Bhowmick was beaten to death near Agartala while covering violent political clashes. The report said that in the same month, photojournalist, Kamran Yousuf was arrested in occupied Kashmir for allegedly instigating people to throw stones at the Indian forces under a law which does not meet international human rights standards. In December, a French film-maker conducting research for a documentary on the Kashmir conflict was detained for three days in Indian occupied Kashmir, it added. The arrest of former Director General Lahore Development Authority Ahad Cheema was not the breach of his basic human or constitutional rights as the law authorizes National Accountability Bureau (NAB) to inquire, investigate and collect evidence of corruption charges against anyone without any discrimination. ISLAMABAD, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 22nd Feb, 2018 ) :The arrest of former Director General Lahore Development Authority Ahad Cheema was not the breach of his basic human or constitutional rights as the law authorizes National Accountability Bureau (NAB) to inquire, investigate and collect evidence of corruption charges against anyone without any discrimination. The NAB is mandated to eradicate corruption from the country under NAO, a press release Thursday said. A person enjoying whatever position could never impress upon the NAB and could not impede the course of justice. NAB as an institution assures that the NAB would never deviate from the law, and always work under its mandate. The policy of NAB is based on non discrimination and upholding self respect of every 'accused.' Ahad Cheema 'has been apprehended as per law after showing arrest warrants that too with due respect and then he was shifted 'to NAB office. Ahad Cheema 'has been provided medicine, 'food and other essential items as per law. It may be kept in mind that the court can only judge the veracity of corruption accusations or a person is guilty or innocent. But apparently Ahad's arrest was required due to serious alleged allegations corruption against him and his role in the corrupt practices.'Ahad Cheema is accused of corruption worth million of rupees.' NAB Ordinance 1999 authorizes it'to inquire corruption charges and'collect evidence as per law. The NAB reminded that the case of Ahad Cheema is also subjudice in the court of law. A writ petition has already been filed in Lahore High Court.' So the merits or demerits of the case of Ahad Cheema could not be discussed or debated. (@FahadShabbir) Ambassador of Romania Nicolaie Goia called on National Security Adviser Lt. Gen (R) Nasser Khan Janjua on Friday. ISLAMABAD, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 23rd Feb, 2018 ) :Ambassador of Romania Nicolaie Goia called on National Security Adviser Lt. Gen (R) Nasser Khan Janjua on Friday. During the meeting, both the discussed issues related to promotion of bilateral relations, matters pertaining to regional security situation and regional connectivity. NSA warmly received the guest and said that Romania was a great country with rich history. Pakistan attaches great importance to its relations with Romania and considers Romania as an important member of European Union. The envoy traced the history of Pakistan Romania relations and said that ever since establishment of diplomatic relations in 1964, both the nations have come very close to each other. "Romania considers Pakistan as a credible and responsible country and supports Pakistan at every international forum including GSP Plus status which has increased Pakistan's exports to the EU by more than 30 percent." the Ambassador said. In addition, both the countries share the commonality of opinion on regional and international issues. The two countries have longstanding cooperation in political, economic, defence, cultural fields and people to people contact. We, however, need to increase our trade and strengthen the economic dimension of our relationship" he added. While discussing the prospects of regional connectivity, NSA told the Ambassador that Pakistan was an exceedingly important country not only for the region but for the world at large. Connectivity potential of Pakistan was unique and immense. Pakistan is a country of future from which whole of the world will benefit. "Participation of Romania in this connectivity will also bring Pakistan and Romania closer to each other" he added. Discussing the regional security environment, the envoy applauded Pakistan's efforts for regional peace and stability. We understand that Pakistan is caught in a complex security situation and is facing multidimensional challenges" he commented. NSA briefed the ambassador on regional security situation with particular reference to Afghanistan and reiterated that Pakistan and its people are determined to defeat the menace of terrorism to embrace a brighter future. To give new impetus to Pak-Romanian relations, both sides agreed to explore new avenues for cooperation and to increase the momentum of interaction. The minister of state for Primary Education, Rosemary Sseninde, has appealed to schools to emphasize teaching rather than giving many tests to learners. Senindes call came as she addressed a three-day international conference of the Association of Educational Assessment in Africa (AEAA) at Silver Springs hotel in Kampala, last week. Rosemary Sseninde The minister challenged the assessment bodies to make use of technology in examination setting and to continually train their staff to improve the quality of assessment and learning. Nine assessement bodies were represented at the meeting, from Cameroon, Kenya, Lesotho, Nigeria, Swaziland, South Africa, Malawi, Tanzania and Uganda. Ugandas national examinations board boss and AEAA chair, Dan Odongo, said the annual meeting offered an opportunity to reflect on changes in strategy. He said the assessors were in the country to appreciate various changes such as item capture theory (to learn how to better reinterpret subject material for exams), as well as equating tests (to ensure that every test was similar and thus able to obtain the same result). We are working to ensure that all examinations are of the highest quality and thus reliable as a benchmark of learning, he said. We are looking to ensure that exams are set according to similar standards across the countries, so that they are easy to equate. Commenting on whether a one-off national exam gives an accurate assessment over the study cycle, Odongo said he has not seen viable alternatives. I have heard about continuous assessment in school, but the practical side of this has become too complicated to implement as we do not have well-set and reliable tests in the various schools, he said. However, he revealed that there had been a consideration for more exams, such as one in primary five and senior two in addition to the current primary seven and senior four finals. but its main challenge is the cost of setting and administering this kind of examination. The meeting occurred a week after the release of O-level results, which state minister for Higher Education, Dr John C Muyingo, pointed out showed that teaching targets examinations. Our children are only reading what the teachers speculate will be in the exams instead of getting a wholesome education that would enable learners improve their skills, he said. mtalemwa@observer.ug (@ChaudhryMAli88) Anti-Narcotics Force (ANF) Pakistan organized a conference at ANF Academy to formulate joint mechanism against narcotics & drug abuse in educational institutions and devise a mutual framework in collaboration with educational institutions to protect the youth from the menace of drugs. RAWALPINDI, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 23rd Feb, 2018 ) :Anti-Narcotics Force (ANF) Pakistan organized a conference at ANF academy to formulate joint mechanism against narcotics & drug abuse in educational institutions and devise a mutual framework in collaboration with educational institutions to protect the youth from the menace of drugs. Secretary, Ministry of Narcotics Control Iqbal Mehmood, Higher education Commission (HEC), Heads/Representatives of Universities, Medical Colleges, Educational Institutions, Psychologists & Psychiatrists attended the conference while Prof. Dr. Mukhtar Ahmed, Chairman HEC was the guest of honor. Director General ANF Maj. Gen. Musarrat Nawaz Malik, addressing the participants highlighted importance of the forum in implementing the vision of "Drug Free Society" since the educators play the most important role in children's lives as mentors and cumulatively nation builders. He said the magnitude of drugs as a threat to human security is far more serious than meets the eye. "Drugs are silently killing far people than terrorism and rendering millions useless to the society; youth being most vulnerable to this menace," he added. He said drug abuse exacerbates juvenile crime rates and fosters low educational achievements. The government efforts alone cannot address drug-spread in educational institutions as it is basically a societal setback emerged from feeble social-bond, fueled by peer pressure, low self-esteem, stress, frustration, curiosity and communal surrounds, he added. He said drug threat to students can effectively be addressed by dedicated and involved faculty, since students respond more to teachers than parents. There is a dire need to devise a workable cogent strategy to counter narcotics prevalence which is creeping gradually in and around academic institutions, he said and emphasized that whole nation's approach is inevitable for success in this challenging task. Iqbal Mehmood presented an overview of the prevalent drug situation environment. The presentation was followed by discussion on agenda points of conference which mainly focused on devising joint mechanism, areas of cooperation, reasons of addiction, remedial measures, effective control and nomination of focal persons. Prof. Dr. Mukhtar Ahmed, Chairman HEC appreciated the public awareness campaigns being undertaken by ANF in educational institutions to alert youth from hazards of drug uses. He also offered his full organizational support to beat the use of drugs among the students of educational institutions. He said formulation of joint mechanism is the most effective way to counter drug abuse in educational institutions. The participants presented a number of invaluable suggestions that included; declaring educational institutions as smoke-free zone, incorporate security cameras for addict profiling, employing psychiatrist/psychologist in institutions, confidential sharing of information with ANF, organize mentors training drug-workshops, launching drug-awareness campaigns in institutions, strengthen student-teacher, student-parents and teacher-parents bonds, incorporate drug-awareness lessons in curriculum, provide extra-curricular opportunities for students, ensure playgrounds/sports for students, medical screening of suspected students, role of student literary societies in anti-drug campaigns, inward vigilance of educational institutions and ANF support to address external drug threat in institutions. The Secretary MNC in his concluding remarks thanked all the participants for their valuable contributions during discussion. He affirmed his commitment to render all possible help to educational institutions, relentlessly pursue dismantling of all Drug Trafficking Organizations operating in and around educational institutions and to leave no stone unturned in protecting the society in general and youth in particular from the menace of drugs. Chairman Faisalabad Development Authority (FDA), Sheikh Ejaz Ahmad will address open court here at FDA Complex on Saturday (Feb 24) FAISALABAD, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 23rd Feb, 2018 ) :Chairman Faisalabad Development Authority (FDA), Sheikh Ejaz Ahmad will address open court here at FDA Complex on Saturday (Feb 24). According to a statement, the open court will commence at 10:00 am in morning.The Chairman will hear public complaints regarding FDA and issue on the spot orders for redressal. (@ChaudhryMAli88) National Humanitarian Network (NHN) and ActionAid Pakistan have joined hands under Transforming Surge Capacity Project to provide human resource for emergency response by developing a national roster ISLAMABAD, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 23rd Feb, 2018 ) :National Humanitarian Network (NHN) and ActionAid Pakistan have joined hands under Transforming Surge Capacity Project to provide human resource for emergency response by developing a national roster. Former Chairman National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) Lt. Gen. (R) Nadeem Ahmed was the chief guest in the launching ceremony of NHN Surge Emergency Response Team (SERT) National Roster. Member NDMA Operations Brig Mukhtar Ahmed, Member NDMA Disaster Risk Reduction Muhammad Idrees Mahsud, officials of various NGOs also attended the ceremony. Addressing the launching ceremony of NHN Surge Emergency Response Team (SERT) National Roster, he praised the humanitarian organizations for their contributions in disasters, saying that all the organizations have done excellent job by providing assistance to the people facing hardships due to disasters. Gen. Nadeem Ahmed said he always feel great satisfaction to serve the people in need, adding that Pakistan have faced every kind of natural disaster like floods and earthquake. He proposed that there is need to create an expert pool of advisors on disasters issues, adding "we have trained so much fighting disasters situation." He said there must be a knowledge center of excellence to further strengthen our capacity of fighting any kind of disasters situation. He also shared his experience being a Chairman NDMA and give examples of challenges he faced. Senior official of NHN said that National Roster is focused on rapid deployment of technical experts for CAT-II emergency l on "assessment, food security, shelter, wash, protection and logistic sectors". A roster is a pool of candidates who have already been vetted as viable candidates through the application process and who are ready for immediate selection for emergency response. The basic aim of the SERT roster is enlisting the right people, ensuring they receive proper training, maintaining availability for deployment, retention they continue to constitute a key tool for providing additional human esources when surge is needed. Islamabad High Court (IHC) issued notices to the Election Commission of Pakistan, Attorney General and others in a plea challenging removal of clauses in nomination form under Election Act 2017 which were mandatory earlier for a candidate. ISLAMABAD, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 23rd Feb, 2018 ) :Islamabad High Court (IHC) issued notices to the Election Commission of Pakistan, Attorney General and others in a plea challenging removal of clauses in nomination form under Election Act 2017 which were mandatory earlier for a candidate. Justice Aamir Farooq ,after hearing the preliminary arguments, issued notice seeking their reply on the plea moved by Awami Muslim League (AML) chief Sheikh Rasheed. Barrister Sajeel, counsel for the petitioner pleaded that according to the amendments made in the Election Act 2017 in the name of electoral reforms, there would be no need to declare if the public representatives were tax evaders, loan defaulters, facing criminal charges or dual nationals. He said about 19 declarations on oath including tax record, profession, education and loan were deleted from the nomination forms submitting in the Senate Elections which were compulsory for a candidate in the past had been deleted in the newly-passed law, Elections Act 2017. The declarations deleted from the Election Act 2017 also include nationality of the aspiring candidates, properties, income and cases registered against them. Barrister Sajeel argued that Section 137 ,110 and Section 60 were violation of Article 19 of the Constitution as to know such information about the candidates was public right. He further pleaded that less details had been sought from a candidate in the new form of Election Act 2017 which was the right to know of every voter under Article-19. He requested the court to direct Election Commission to seek all the details from the candidates and restore the clauses eliminated from the nomination forms. The bench observed that another application challenging Election Act 2017 had been filed in the Supreme Court but these clauses were not challenged in the apex court, however it issued notice to the respondents and adjourned further hearing for a week. Pakistan on Friday denied the reports of talks between China and the separatists from Baluchistan regarding the protection of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor ISLAMABAD, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 23rd Feb, 2018 ) :Pakistan on Friday denied the reports of talks between China and the separatists from Baluchistan regarding the protection of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor. During his weekly press briefing, Foreign office spokesperson Dr Muhammad Faisal said that Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson has already rejected these speculations stating that both the governments have been working in coordination on security matters regarding the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). He said CPEC is a flagship project of Belt and Road initiatives and is a hallmark of Pak-China strong friendship. Regarding Pakistani troops in Saudi Arabia, he said a Pakistani military group is present there for training purposes not to take part in 'Saudi Itehad.' Dr Faisal said Foreign Minister Khawaja Asif visited Russia to hold bilateral consultations with the Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. Replying to a question he said both the Foreign Ministers reiterated that there was no military solution to the Afghan conflict and a negotiated settlement through an Afghan-led and Afghan-owned peace and reconciliation process was the only viable option for lasting peace in Afghanistan. The Spokesperson said that Pakistan has serious concerns over its probable placement in Grey-list of FATF and termed it as a clear violation of established rules. Regarding the recent statement of Indian COAS, he said that India is in habit of placing baseless allegations against Pakistan. It is a part of India's malicious designs against Pakistan. He said Indian occupation forces killed eight Kashmiris including 17-year old girl, Saima Wani and 55-year old mentally-challenged Syed Habibullah in Shopian and Budgam respectively. People in Srinagar and Poonch areas in Indian occupied Jammu & Kashmir were also martyred. He said the miseries of the people in IoK have increased day by day as the Indian occupation forces in Srinagar, Pulwama, Shopian, Islamabad, Kulgam, Baramulla, Kupwara, Bandipore districts continue to terrorize by illegal house searches, damaging properties and beating the people without any provocation in day and at night. The Foreign Office also paid condolences for Aseman Airliner air crash in the city of Semirom on 18 February on behalf of government and the people of Pakistan. (@FahadShabbir) Federal Minister for Overseas Pakistanis and Human Resource Development Pir Syed Sadaruddin Shah Rashidi said that Pakistan fully supports the initiatives taken by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) which will ensure legal and social protection for workers ISLAMABAD, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 23rd Feb, 2018 ) :Federal Minister for Overseas Pakistanis and Human Resource Development Pir Syed Sadaruddin Shah Rashidi said that Pakistan fully supports the initiatives taken by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) which will ensure legal and social protection for workers. "It is encouraging to see that OIC has successfully identified the issues related to Labour, employment and social protection. It has provided a platform to member countries to develop consensus on socio-economic development and decent work opportunities, the minister said during his address at the fourth OIC Labour Minister's Conference held from February 21-22, 2018 at Jeddah. According to a press statement received here on Friday, the conference aimed to explore labour market challenges in OIC countries and ways to generate and sustain job opportunities, as well as exchanging information on policies and successful programs. The event also addressed the implementation of youth employment programs, the activities of the OIC Occupational Safety and Health Network, and the OIC Public Employment Services Network. Pir Sadaruddin said that Pakistan has developed a legal and institutional framework to protect the rights of workers and to ensure fair and managed emigration of the workforce abroad, The Federal Minister said that Pakistan is rich in human capital with 61% of its population are made up of youth adding he said that more than 20,000 engineers, 18,000 doctors and over 350,000 technicians are graduating from Pakistani educational institutions. Rashidi said that Pakistan was manpower-rich country which provided trained manpower to many countries around the world, especially Saudi Arabia and middle East. While thanking Saudi Arabia for extending hospitality to Pakistani labour force, Mr. Rashidi underlined the role of expatriate workers in the development of any country. It helps boost the economies of both the host and the expatriate worker's country, the Minister said . He appreciated the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia for hosting this session, which demonstrates the attention given by the Saudi authorities, under the leadership of the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques and the Crown Prince, May God protect them ,to promoting all issues likely to elevate islam and Muslims and defend their legitimate causes, as well as their continued support for the Organization as the host State. The Federal Minister also held meetings with Labour Minister of Turkey Ms Jiulida Sari Eroglu,Labour Minister of Kuwait Mr Hind al Sabeeh, Labour Minister of UAE Mr Nasir Thani Al Hamli and Labour Minister of Somalia Mr Salah Ahmad Joma on side-lines of the conference. The leaders discussed matters relating to bilateral interest during the meetings. The conference, which was jointly organized by the Saudi Ministry of Labour and Social Development and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), and is being held under the theme "Developing A Common Strategy for Manpower Development." (@rukhshanmir) Interior Minister Ahsan Iqbal has said since both Pakistan and the United States were stakeholders in peace and stability in Afghanistan hence they should join hands to achieve this goal ISLAMABAD,(UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 23rd Feb, 2018 ) :Interior Minister Ahsan Iqbal has said since both Pakistan and the United States were stakeholders in peace and stability in Afghanistan hence they should join hands to achieve this goal. Expressing Pakistan's commitment to peace and stability in Afghanistan, he said, this called for Pakistan and the US to work together as if they failed even for a day such a situation will translate into a "big bonus" for the elements who were trying to destabilize the region. The interior minister was speaking at a formal ceremony held at the US Embassy to celebrate the US National Day and the President's Day on February 22 . He said both Pakistan and the US have special relationship and geo-politics of the region have made it inseparable, therefore they need to cooperate for peace and stability in the region. The minister said if there was peace in Afghanistan, Pakistan would get dividends and if there was instability there, it would suffer. Ahsan Iqbal said that Pakistan and the United Stated needed to work for strengthening the longstanding relationship. He said that trade between the two countries was now at the highest level because the private sectors from the two sides had done a good job. Now it was for the diplomats of two countries to achieve such level of cooperation in other fields as well, he added. The Interior Minister appreciated the US role in giving scholarships to Pakistani students under the Fulbright Program, adding he wanted more students from Pakistan to be in the best US universities. US Ambassador David Hale in his remarks on the occasion said that America had built roads, dams, hospitals and schools in Pakistan and wanted it a safe and prosperous country both for Pakistanis and the Americans. He said the United States had spent billions of Dollars for development and upkeep of Afghan refugees in Pakistan. The Interior Minister also joined the US ambassador in cutting the cake to mark the day. Among others, the ceremony was attended by a large number ofpeople including ambassadors of various countries, politicians andmembers of the parliament. Hottopics ofparticipants were the Supreme Court's Wednesdayverdict declaring former prime minister Muhammad Nawaz Sharif ineligible to hold the office of the president of the PML(N). The first president ofthe United StatesGeorge Washington's birthday was Feb 22, 1732 which is state holidayand is celebrated as National Day and Presidents' Day since 1885. In 1968, Congress passed the UniformMondayHoliday Bill, which moved severalfederal holidays to Mondays. During the debate on the bill, it was proposed to have birthday of George Washington be renamed as Presidents' Day to honor the birthdays of both George Washington and Abraham Lincoln (@FahadShabbir) Minister for Climate Change, Senator Mushahidullah Khan Friday said the PML-N government addressed issues of terrorism, economy and load shedding throughout its tenure in order to give relief to the masses across the country without any discrimination. ISLAMABAD, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 23rd Feb, 2018 ) :Minister for Climate Change, Senator Mushahidullah Khan Friday said the PML-N government addressed issues of terrorism, economy and load shedding throughout its tenure in order to give relief to the masses across the country without any discrimination. Pakistan Muslim League - Nawaz (PML-N), government after coming into power in 2013, had to face challenges of terrorism, economy and load shedding, he said while talking to a private news channel. The problems had been addressed by the efforts and prudent policies of the PML-N, he added. Commenting on the standard of the projects launched by PML-N government, he said many development projects including Rawalpindi Institute of Cardiology, had been completed to facilitate the people. To a question he said no corruption charges were proved against the former prime minister Nawaz Sharif. He said number of ministers working during the tenure of Pakistan Peoples Party had been charged with corruption. The ministers of Khyber Pakhtunkhawa were also leveling allegations against the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf chief for involvement in corruption, he added. :Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi on Friday attended the link-up ground-breaking ceremonies of Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) gas pipeline project and laying of power transmission lines and fibre optic, here at the Serhatabad city of Turkmenistan ISLAMABAD, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 23rd Feb, 2018 ) :Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi on Friday attended the link-up ground-breaking ceremonies of Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) gas pipeline project and laying of power transmission lines and fibre optic, here at the Serhatabad city of Turkmenistan. This was the first leg of the ground-breaking ceremony, which was also attended by Turkmenistan's President Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov, President of Afghanistan Ashraf Ghani and India's Minister of State for External Affairs M J Akbar, according to information received here. An Agreement on Tukrmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan power line was also signed on the occasion. A Pakistani cultural troupe performed at the occasion along with their counterparts from partner TAPI countries. Prime Minister Abbasi will later proceed to Herat, Afghanistan to attend the second leg of the ground-breaking ceremony. The ambitious natural gas pipeline project entered its practical phase in Pakistan after the process of initiating front-end-engineering-and-design (FEED) route survey was formally inaugurated last year. In part I of this interview published last week, Colonel (rtd) Fred Bogere talked about his unsuccessful opposition to President Musevenis proposal in 2005 to scrap presidential term limits and how he was subsequently hounded by the establishment. Today, Bogere, in the same interview with Baker Batte Lule, addresses himself to how Musevenis younger brother, Gen Salim Saleh, led the army and how he was sacked after careful negotiations Col Fred Bogere What was your role after the 1986 takeover? I was made the deputy intelligence officer, Mobile Division, whose commanding officer was Gen Salim Saleh. My boss was present-day Brigadier John Kasaija who joined us a year before we took power. Above us, we had the director of military intelligence (Maj Gen Mugisha Muntu) and Jim Muhwezi was the director for Internal Security Organisation (ISO). There was reorganisation of the units and I was called upon to take over as intelligence officer for 157 Brigade which was in charge of Kampala, Mityana, Luweero, Masaka, Jinja and Entebbe. That brigade was later sent to handle the emerging threats in the north; the likes of Alice Lakwena [Holy Spirit Movement rebels ED]. When they transferred the brigade, Saleh said I cannot leave town because he had seen my mobilisation skills. Within two months I was called to join the headquarters of the Mobile Division, which was sitting at the current-day Joint Clinical Research Centre in Mengo. After around four months of taking over, formal ranks were introduced and I was given the rank of captain. My boss, Saleh, was made a major general. Then we started getting training and I was promoted to major. I was also transferred and made deputy director of military intelligence (finance and administration), deputising Gen Muntu with two others in charge of counter intelligence: Paul Kagame [current president of Rwanda] and a deputy for technical intelligence. Later, I was transferred to Second Division in Mubende as intelligence officer. I was then called back for a course in Bombo and after made aide-de-camp to the army commander, who was now Saleh. I worked with him for all the short time he was army commander. Why didnt he last in that position? In most cases he would not agree with the president. They were always arguing on a number of things. What were the disagreements? I will keep them to myself. But after about one year, he was replaced. One thing that people dont know, and I hear Saleh also saying he was disciplined; that the president sacked him and he agreed to go. The fact is there were a lot of negotiations, before he [Saleh] was dropped, to the extent that the president sent a radio message pre-warning all units that there was something that was going to happen but everybody should remain calm. It was not normal; he knew Saleh was capable of causing trouble. As his ADC, we would go to Entebbe for meetings; I would not attend those meetings apart from a few where I would take notes. When he would be back to the car, he would say, No, I cant accept this. Sometimes he would take beer but me I dont drink; I would remain sober throughout. So, he would tell me to call his confidants in command then tell them: Mzee was telling me this but I have refused, I will not accept this How was your relationship with Saleh? It was really good. Up to now he remains a good friend although we no longer have a direct linkage on a daily basis for many reasons. One, he is too busy wherever he is and Im also busy wherever Im. But also, for the fact that we didnt maintain the cohesion of the struggle and everybody went on their own. Some went on rampage looking for wealth. In the end, we lost the course of the struggle. How would you rate Salehs leadership of the army? He was very decisive to the extent that one time the president said that, I dont want your Aminism. He told him that about twice. He thought that Salehs sensitivity and planning for the army was to the detriment of the country. That he was more bothered with the welfare of the army than the country. So, here we are with our commander whom we have been with through thick and thin. And again, here we are with the top political leader whom we have always trusted that whatever he plans is for our good. Sometimes it was hard to choose between a very good commander and the political leader we trusted a lot. Whatever they would say made a lot of sense and in many cases came to pass. Maybe, that time we were too young to understand what was going on. For Museveni, he could foretell what would happen. But even myself now, I can do that because when you look at things, you can tell that this will end up here with experience. Looking at the army commanders you worked with, who had his hands firmly on the pulse? I think Saleh. In terms of efficiency of the army and loyalty, he was the best for obvious reasons. He had been with us throughout; he is a brother to the president. But he is also this commander with rare charisma and capacity to advocate for the army without fear. So, that puts him in the number one slot. The others have always managed with a lot of disadvantages, not that they are inefficient. In terms of organising the army for the good political order of the country, an army that is answerable to the people, not an army of an individual, nobody rivals Muntu. And your worst army commander ever I think it was James Kazini (deceased). He was very reckless. He had this deep-seated anger against people who are educated. You would see him struggling to make rapid promotions of officers who would not question his command. He feared officers who had a background of the struggle who would stand up and say, No army commander, this is wrong. He couldnt tolerate those. He joined the NRA a bit late and so feared people he thought knew his weaknesses. In the reign of Gen Katumba Wamala we have heard stories of how limited his powers were He and General Jeje Odongo had limits in what they could or could not do in the army. Its not that they were inefficient; these were very well trained commanders who trained from Munduli in Tanzania hence having one of the most efficient training backgrounds. But for political reasons, their decisions were really limited and I would empathize with them. They couldnt really do much in the circumstances. This made them good commanders with a lot of limitations. In terms of our welfare, they couldnt do much to address it. When we had just come, we didnt complain a lot but over time, it was expected that salaries and housing would improve but when it didnt work out, we ended up blaming them. What happened to you after the sacking of Saleh as army commander? I remained in the army commanders office. The new army commander, Muntu, had no problem working with me because I had already worked as his deputy when he was director of military intelligence. That is his way of doing things; he is a very systematic officer who handles things on principle. He has no people he carries with him wherever he goes. His nature is institutional-based. He comes into an institution and whoever he finds there is the one he works with. He only called in the current Joint Chief of Staff [Joseph] Musanyufu to be one of his assistants to join me and present-day General Katumba Wamala as ADC because the army commanders office had a lot of work by then. We used to coordinate some of the police activities and the rehabilitation programmes. During Salehs reign, Katumba Wamala was ADC1 and I was ADC2. When Muntu came, he introduced ADC3. Later, I was sent to army headquarters to improve on the supplies department which had a lot of corruption. I was sent there to deputise Gen Jeje Odongo, all of us were under the chief of logistics who was Brig Ivan Koreta (now Lt Gen). Trucks would come to Mbuya barracks, go to the stores then simply go out without supplying. With my background in intelligence, it was very simple to find out and we captured those behind it. After that, I moved on to tackle the problem of ghost soldiers. I worked out a concept which I shared with the army commander. He asked me to write a work plan which he said he needed to discuss with me, Koreta and my director Odongo. My operation plan was passed and we got service support from the airforce that gave us helicopters; we needed machine guns to protect us. It was left to the army commander to appoint somebody to head it. He sent a message appointing Col Sserwanga Lwanga (deceased) deputised by me. That was around 1994. We started in Mbale because of the information about ghosts in that area. We would move with money and pay soldiers ourselves. We recovered a lot of money; about Shs 186 million. When you went to a unit, how many of them would be ghosts? We found a discrepancy of about 34 percent on average. We moved on to the second division. The commander there in Lira, Brigadier Peter Kerim, knew how Muntu and Sserwanga worked. He surrendered all those that were regarded as ghosts. He made our work simpler. Other units followed suit; by the time we moved there, they had almost clean payrolls. This army best knows me for this. How I wish we had pushed on with it because it had made good strides. What happened to the exercise? Politics came in; they claimed that we had not done well despite what we had recovered. The commanders started saying that they were using the money to pay vigilantes and Local Defence Units. But these people were not supposed to be paid but, rather, given food when they moved with troops. They somehow convinced the president and continued sending these monies we had discovered were for ghosts. What I think the commanders did was to relax their pursuit of the enemy and instability increased. When they were called, they said, the people who used to help us are no longer paid. Do you think we still have ghost soldiers now? I believe there are some but not to the magnitude they were then. They have computerised and I think this drastically reduced ghost soldiers. But in cases where the forces are scattered in South Sudan, others in Central African Republic, others in Somalia; its very easy to have ghosts. Where did you go after working in supplies? I was appointed director of education in charge of formal schools. Muntu sent me to that department to sort it out. These schools were started to cater for the children of our fallen comrades and some of our serving officers but they were in deplorable state. Kids sleeping on the floor; very poor feeding; yet lots of monies were being sent because we had sentimental attachment to these kids. My intervention addressed the concerns of the children and the staff. We made very big improvement. From being director, formal education, I was appointed Chief Political Commissar around 1999, taking over from Maj Gen Robert Rusoke and worked there for over a year. During my stay there, I rubbed shoulders with the then state minister of defence Amama Mbabazi [former premier -- ED]. What happened? In a parliamentary committee, I raised the concerns of the military about their welfare and the scandal of the army pharmaceutical industry. When we had just come, we came up with this concept of having a disciplined and productive army. We had gone into farming; pharmaceutical production here in Bugolobi, etc. That factory had been brought here on a $7 million loan by some Italians. Some samples were produced and a date was set for the president to commission it but I dont know what happened. When I became CPC, I wanted to know what happened because I speak on behalf of officers and men. As CPC, youre the link between the army and the politicians. I raised this in my report to the army commander; so, he subsequently made sure that I was part of a group that went to parliament to raise these issues. I told them that we live by Gods grace due to the peanuts we were getting. The minister didnt like it at all. After appearing before parliament, Muntu organised an audience with the president to put these issues directly to him, especially about the factory. By this time there was a proposal to sell the factory, even before it was operationalised, at just $800,000. The president sent a message to have a commission of inquiry that I should also be part of. There was a lot of noise against me. I stood my ground, but the commission never sat. I think they thought I was becoming a headache and just after one year and a half, I was appointed chief of logistics. Who was heading the pharmaceutical [project]? It was headed by Colonel Fred Mwesigye who is the current MP for Nyabushozi. At what point did you go back to school? After capturing power, I went and sat for A-level as a private student. Later, when I was Salehs ADC, he allowed me to go back to school and I enrolled at Law Development Centre for a diploma in law. As the director of education; as people came applying to study, I also applied at Makerere where I was admitted in 1998 to pursue a degree in law. Unknown to many, I didnt use the armys money for my studies yet it was me signing on other peoples papers. I chose to pay for myself because I planned to leave the army. We have a bondage system: if the army pays for your science degree, at the time of retirement, you are bonded for an extra nine years. It is six years for arts courses. Because I intended to retire, I didnt want the army to pay school fees for me. Where is Uganda headed? We have dug a foundation for this country to land in the hands of some disorganised characters by mass action that is uncontrollable. Until very recently this guy Abdallah Kitatta [the jailed patron of Boda Boda 2010 gang] told a press conference that if it wasnt him, the 2011 walk-to-work protests were taking Museveni. When you see those types of characters emerging and commanding the type of authority, having safe houses where they arrest people and take over their properties... And he has people he can gather in record time to unleash havoc, you know youre in trouble. The objective and subjective conditions are getting ripe every other day. Poverty is biting very hard everywhere. You saw what happened the other day when they had gone to bury the other young man [Mowzey Radio]. The youths took over the entire function and paralysed everybody. Whoever had a watch, phone, wallet; they lost them. Where was the state? Those are enough signals to tell us that unless we do certain things, we have set up a foundation for these characters to take over. We are going to be overwhelmed with these thugs taking over the mantle of the state. Anyway, what is left of the state? Somebody might think that the state is about the gun but we have seen powerful states crumbling. People cannot wake up every other day when billions are lost and nobody says a thing. In political science we have a saying that every system collapses under the weight of its own contradictions. You cant be the same person talking about transparency and fighting corruption yet billions continue to be lost and sometimes you directly defend those accused of corruption. You assume because you have held a press conference and said that one we shall handle its going to be enough. For somebody who has spent days without a meal, his interpretation is that somebody has stolen the money. We have lost the moral authority to direct the state machinery because when Bogere is a boss here, he cannot direct a Batte there because Batte is aware of the crimes that Bogere has committed; so, he is morally disarmed. You go to police you must pay for everything. You cant get officers to a scene of crime when you have not paid. Who doesnt know this? Where is the state? How can we have this as the order? Some of us have this illusion that development is about structures; no, the countrys development is about socio-economic transformation. But some people argue that the NRM government has achieved tremendous social and economic transformation for Uganda You cannot say that because some people have put up some structures which were not here 20 years ago, then that is development. These are the very people who tell us that before [they] came we collected very little but now we collect so much. The swine [a term used by Museveni to describe former presidents Idi Amin and Milton Obote] we got here used that little to build hospitals like Nakaseke, Gombe, Kiryandongo, Iganga. What have we put up with the so much we are collecting? You hear others say that we liberalised; we have so many radio stations, but that is not development initiated and directed by the government of Uganda. Yes, you might have worked out regulations but this is a global trend you dont have a choice over. Even in failed states like Somalia where they have no governments, these things are there. They are exploiting the ignorance of the people yet they know that programmes like universal primary education are UN programmes. What would you tell Museveni if you met him? I would remind him of what he used to tell us about African leaders and how they end up messing up their countries because of their longevity in managing affairs of the state. I would tell him that his time of retirement should have been now so that he organises a transition when he is still in control of that process. Any other delay could bring a situation that could bring a change that is not under his control. It could even come from the very people he is working with just like what you saw recently in Zimbabwe. Why should we wait for this? I would tell him, Kindly, sir, organise for us a soft landing. bakerbatte@observer.ug FAISALABAD, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 23rd Feb, 2018 ) :Regional Police Officer (CPO) Bilal Siddique Kamyana has paid a surprise visit to Khurarianwala police station and inspected its record. Police spokesman said here on Thursday that the RPO also checked daily entry register of the police station and directed the Station House Officer (SHO) to accelerate efforts for the arrest of maximum criminals including proclaimed offenders and court absconders. The RPO also issued directives to make the UC Squad patrolling more effective for the arrest of the street crimes and warned that no lethargy and negligence would be tolerated in this regard. APP/aar/ia Speaker, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Assembly, Asad Qaiser Friday issued the production order of the minority legislator Baldev Kumar to Home and Tribal Affairs Department so that he may be administered oath as member of the provincial assembly. PESHAWAR, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 23rd Feb, 2018 ) :Speaker, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Assembly, Asad Qaiser Friday issued the production order of the minority legislator Baldev Kumar to Home and Tribal Affairs Department so that he may be administered oath as member of the provincial assembly. In his production order, the Speaker directed the Home and Tribal Affairs Department for bringing Baldev Kumar to the provincial assembly on February 26, 2018. Baldev Kumar, is behind the bars for last two years as accused in the murder of late advisor to KP CM Sardar Soran Singh was No. II on the priority list of the PTI for minority reserves seat on the basis of which the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) had notified him as minority MPA on the vacant seat. However, he has not taken oath as MPA so far. Peshawar High Court (PHC) had issued orders for administering oath to Baldev Kumar as member of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and in the light of the same order the Speaker has issued his production order. (@FahadShabbir) Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi, Friday noting the critical role of Afghanistan in the success of Turkmenistan Afghanistan Pakistan India (TAPI) gas pipeline, said the project was vital for prosperity of the region. ISLAMABAD, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 23rd Feb, 2018 ) :Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi, Friday noting the critical role of Afghanistan in the success of Turkmenistan Afghanistan Pakistan India (TAPI) gas pipeline, said the project was vital for prosperity of the region. "Let today be the start of a new era of peace, trust and prosperity in the region," Prime Minister Abbasi said at Herat, Afghanistan on the second leg of the ground breaking of the TAPI pipeline project's link-up with road, rail and fiber-optic network. Turkmenistan's President Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov, President of Afghanistan Ashraf Ghani and India's Minister of State for External Affairs M J Akbar attended the event. Prime Minister Abbasi in his address, broadcast by the ptv, said the historic project would impact hundreds of millions of lives of the people of the region. He appreciated the vision of presidents of Afghanistan and Turkmenistan and congratulated the people of the countries involved in the project. He also thanked the leadership of the respective countries for bringing the people closer to each other by enhancing connectivity in the fields of energy, power, air, IT, rail and economic zones. He viewed that the interdependence in the region was vital for sustainable peace. The prime minister, appreciating the role of Afghanistan in the ambitious project, said TAPI could not happen without Afghanistan. He expressed gratitude to President Ashraf Ghani for ensuring success of this project and for bringing the people of the region closer. He was optimist that the project would strengthen historical ties and reiterated Pakistan's full commitment for Afghan peace and assured that the commitment would remain unchanged. The prime minister believed that no country was more interested in peace and stability in Afghanistan than Pakistan. He told the international gathering that Afghanistan would not find any better partner to peace than Pakistan. "Your success is our success. Your development is our development. Peace in Afghanistan is like peace in Pakistan," he remarked. (@ChaudhryMAli88) United Nations Development Programme(UNDP) Signing Ceremony of National Goodwill Ambassador would be held on Monday (Feb 26). ISLAMABAD, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 23rd Feb, 2018 ) :United Nations Development Programme(UNDP) Signing Ceremony of National Goodwill Ambassador would be held on Monday (Feb 26). An official of UNDP said renowned Pakistan Mountaineer Samina Baig, UNDP National Goodwill Ambassador,Dr. Brigitta Blaha, Ambassador of Austria to Pakistan, Neil Buhne, UN Resident Coordinator, Ignacio Artaza, Country Director, UNDP-Pakistan would attend the ceremony. UNDP partners with people at all levels of society to help build nations that can withstand crisis, and drive and sustain the kind of growth that improves the quality of life for everyone, she said. "On the ground in nearly 170 countries and territories, we offer global perspective and local insight to help empower lives", she added. ISLAMABAD, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 23rd Feb, 2018 ) :Vaping may help pneumonia-causing bacteria stick to cells lining the airways, likely boosting disease risk, researchers said. A study published in the European Respiratory Journal did not directly compare vapings effect to that of smoking tobacco cigarettes. But the findings did suggest that users of electronic cigarettes may be at higher risk of lung infection than people who do not vape, the research team said. "If you choose to take up e-cigarettes... this indicates a red flag that there may be an increased susceptibility" to pneumococcal bacteria, study co-author Jonathan Grigg of the Queen Mary University of London told, Health news reported. Grigg and a team conducted three types of experiment. One exposed human nose lining cells to e-cigarette vapour in the lab, another involved mice inhaling vapour and then being exposed to pneumococcal bacteria, the main cause of pneumonia. A third trial studied the nose lining of 11 e-cigarette users compared to six non-vapers. The team noticed a sharp increase in the amount of bacteria sticking to airway cells after e-cigarette exposure. Such adhesion has previously been shown to increase susceptibility to disease. "Some people may be vaping because they think it is totally safe, or in an attempt to quit smoking, but this study adds to growing evidence that inhaling vapour has the potential to cause adverse health effects," said Grigg. "By contrast, other aids to quitting such as (nicotine) patches or gum do not result in airway cells being exposed to high concentrations of potentially toxic compounds." E-cigarettes, said to contain no tar and fewer toxins than tobacco cigarettes, were developed as a safer alternative to tobacco smoking. But many people fear that a harmless veneer may make e-cigarettes a "gateway" for young people to lifelong nicotine addiction. Commenting on the latest study, Peter Openshaw, an experimental medicine professor at Imperial College London, said any evidence that vaping raised lung infection risk was "only indirect". "Although it is possible that vaping might increase susceptibility to pneumonia, the effect is likely to be lower than from smoking itself," he said via the Science Media Centre. "This study should not be used as a reason to continue to smoke rather than vape the evidence to date is that e-cigarettes are far less harmful than smoking." HANOI, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 23rd Feb, 2018 ) :China overpassed the United States to become Vietnam's biggest export market in January, the General Department of Vietnam Customs said on Friday. Vietnam exported roughly 3.7 billion U.S. Dollars worth of goods to China last month, up 106 percent against January 2017, said the department. Specifically, Vietnam exported nearly 895 million U.S. dollars worth of phones and their components to China, a 19-fold increase from January 2017; some 691 million U.S. dollars worth of computers, electronic appliances and components, up 80.1 percent; and 296.3 million U.S. dollars worth of vegetables and fruits, up 68.6 percent. Last month, Vietnam spent nearly 5.8 billion U.S. dollars importing products from China, said the department. (@rukhshanmir) Over 20,000 French farms could go bankrupt if the European Union concludes a major trade deal with four South American countries, France's biggest farm union warned Friday. Paris, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 23rd Feb, 2018 ) :Over 20,000 French farms could go bankrupt if the European Union concludes a major trade deal with four South American countries, France's biggest farm union warned Friday. Christiane Lambert, head of the National Federation of Agricultural Holders' Unions, said France risked losing "between 20,000 and 25,000 farms" if the EU signs a deal allowing tens of thousands of tonnes of tariff-free South American beef into the bloc. On Wednesday, beef farmers across France demonstrated against the deal which could see up to 99,000 tonnes of beef from the Mercosur trading bloc (Brazil -- the world's top exporter of the meat -- as well as Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay) flooding Europe every year. Some campaigners have raised concerns about the use of hormones in these countries which lead to artificially high growth rates in cattle -- a practice that is widespread in the United States but banned in Europe. Lambert told BFM television she was worried the EU would agree to waive food security norms in return for access to a market of 260 million South American consumers for EU cars and auto parts, dairy products and other goods and services. Fitch agency cut Brazil's sovereign debt rating again Friday, sending it deeper into junk status after the government gave up on attempts to get approval for pension reforms. Rio de Janeiro, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 23rd Feb, 2018 ) :Fitch agency cut Brazil's sovereign debt rating again Friday, sending it deeper into junk status after the government gave up on attempts to get approval for pension reforms. The long-term foreign Currency issuer default rating was cut below investment grade, from BB to -BB. "Brazil's downgrade reflects its persistent and large fiscal deficits, a high and growing government debt burden and the failure to legislate reforms that would improve the structural performance of public finances," Fitch said in a statement. The rating outlook was revised from negative to stable. President Michel Temer's government has conceded it cannot get enough support in Congress to pass cuts to the generous pension system before elections take place in October. Brazil's ministers have repeatedly described the cuts as necessary to restoring the country's fiscal health after a hard two-year recession. (@ChaudhryMAli88) A former South African soldier was sentenced to death in South Sudan on Friday for attempting to overthrow the government Juba, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 23rd Feb, 2018 ) :A former South African soldier was sentenced to death in South Sudan on Friday for attempting to overthrow the government. Ex-colonel William Endley, 55, was "sentenced to death by hanging" for espionage and conspiring to overthrow the government, said judge Lado Eriminio Sekwat at a court in the capital Juba. Endley, who can appeal the ruling, was also sentenced to nine years and four months in prison for other related crimes, which must be served before his execution. The South African was hired in 2016 to advise former vice president and rebel leader Riek Machar on the planned integration of rebel forces into the national army under the then peace deal. Weeks after the peace agreement collapsed during days of heavy fighting that rocked the capital in July 2016, Endley was arrested. He was charged along with rebel spokesman James Gatdet Dak, who was sentenced to death by the same court on February 12 for treason. South Sudan won independence from Sudan in 2011, but little more than two years later, civil war broke out over a dispute between Machar and President Salva Kiir. Tens of thousands have since died while four million have been forced from their homes as successive peace talks have failed. (@ChaudhryMAli88) SEOUL, Feb. 23 (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 23rd Feb, 2018 ) :South Korea agreed Friday to strengthen military cooperation with Switzerland and Latvia as the countries' defense chiefs met in Seoul. South Korean Defense Minister Song Yong-moo had separate talks with his counterparts, who are visiting to attend the closing ceremony of the PyeongChang Winter Olympics, according to his ministry. In sitting down with his Swiss counterpart Guy Parmelins, Song expressed his gratitude for the nation's contribution to peace efforts on the peninsula as a member of the United Nations Command's Neutral Nations Supervisory Commission. He requested support for South Korea's approach toward North Korea. The Swiss minister assured Song that his government will continue to abide by U.N. Security Council sanctions on Pyongyang for its nuclear and missile programs. During a meeting with Latvian Defense Minister Raimonds Bergmanis, Song also talked about ways to beef up military and arms industry partnerships between the two sides, according to the ministry. Song and the ministers agreed that the easing of tensions in Korea through the Olympics and inter-Korean dialogue will be conducive to peace and stability in Northeast Asia, the defense ministry added. Gen Salim Saleh Before he sacked his charismatic younger brother as army commander in 1989, President Museveni forewarned all army units that something big was going to happen. The radio message communicating the impending development, which turned out to be the astonishing removal of Gen Salim Saleh just a year into his posting, also advised the officers and men to stay calm. This is part of the revelations from an interview with retired Colonel Fred Bogere, who served as Gen Salehs aide de camp (ADC) when he was army chief, but came to prominence in 2005 as the Army MP who refused to vote in support of the presidential term limit amendment. One thing that people dont know, and I hear Saleh also saying he was disciplined; that the president sacked him and he agreed to go. The fact is, there were a lot of negotiations before he was dropped, to the extent that the president sent a radio message pre-warning all units that there was something that was going to happen but everybody should remain calm, Col Bogere said recently. In the wide-ranging interview, Bogere speaks about the frequent arguments between the brothers. Stretched by counter-insurgency operations in the North, West Nile and the far East, there were disagreements over how the then National Resistance Army was being managed. And yet soldiers generally had a romantic view of Saleh as a war hero; a free-spirited, wild-living sort of Robin Hood who happily broke the rules for the rank and file. Saleh, Bogere says, paid a lot of attention to troop welfare. But on more than one occasion, Museveni reportedly told off Saleh, not to bring Aminism to the army. This was probably a reference to former dictator Idi Amins unreasonably soft spot for the army, which encouraged indiscipline and partly led to his downfall in 1979. Although Bogere declined to delve into the details of the disagreements, he told The Observer that the firing was not normal; he [Museveni] knew Saleh was capable of causing trouble. Saleh was later rehabilitated and appointed commander of the armys Reserve Force (19902001), involved in resettling army veterans of the bush war, and senior presidential advisor on defence and security (19961998). Over time, the presidents brother withdrew from the public eye and immersed himself in a wide range of investments through a company known as Divinity Union, among many others. Bogere retired from the army in 2016 under strange circumstances. As one of ten army representatives in parliament, the colonel refused to support Musevenisbid for a third elective term in office. Under immense pressure, Bogere stood his ground and refused to accept the Shs 5 million which was given to each Movement MP, including army MPs, to vote for the proposal. In part I of the interview published last week, The Observer reported how he mobilised against the 2005 scrapping of Article 105(2) of the Constitution; the provision which set the two five-year term limits, actions which saw the colonel gain national acclaim but also become an outsider in a system he helped create. He remained on katebe (undeployed) for a while until he was finally let go in 2016. bakerbatte@observer.ug See 2nd part of interview Romanian President Klaus Iohannis on Friday signed a decree promulgating the implementation of the 'Indirect Fire Capabilities' chapter in the 'Multiple Launch Long-Range Rocket System' military acquisition programme, Agerpres quoted the Presidential Administration reports as saying BUCHAREST, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 23rd Feb, 2018 ) ::Romanian President Klaus Iohannis on Friday signed a decree promulgating the implementation of the 'Indirect Fire Capabilities' chapter in the 'Multiple Launch Long-Range Rocket System' military acquisition programme, Agerpres quoted the Presidential Administration reports as saying. The law is said to regulate the achieving of the 'Indirect Fire Capability Support' chapter in the 'Multiple Launch Long-Range Rocket System' military acquisition programme to help deter aggressions against Romania and articulate an appropriate response to the current and future challenges of the security environment. 'The implementation of the 'Indirect Fire Capability Support' in the 'Multiple Launch Long-Range Rocket System' acquisition programme is hereby approved by the Government of Romania awarding to the Administration of the United States of America Letter of Offer and Acceptance (LOA) specific of the Foreign Military Sales Program (FMS) for the purchase of three systems with 18 launching devices each, including, but not limited to, ammunition, command, control, sensors, logistic support, maintenance, cryptographic equipment and special arrangements, and staff training at all levels,' the law says. The funds necessary for the acquisitions will be provided for in the budget of the Ministry of National Defence. (@rukhshanmir) The Philippines has summoned US Ambassador to the Philippines to the presidential palace to shed light on the recently released US intelligence report that tags President Rodrigo Duterte as a "regional threat," Philippine and US officials said on Friday, Xinhua reported MANILA, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 23rd Feb, 2018 ) :The Philippines has summoned US Ambassador to the Philippines to the presidential palace to shed light on the recently released US intelligence report that tags President Rodrigo Duterte as a "regional threat," Philippine and US officials said on Friday, Xinhua reported. Duterte's office and the US Embassy issued separate statements about the meeting between Executive Secretary Salvador Medialdea and Ambassador Sung Kim on Thursday at the Malacanang presidential palace. The report, titled Worldwide Threat Assessment Report published by the Director of National Intelligence, is an annual assessment on conditions in each of the world's various regions based on widely available information. It placed Duterte's name under the heading "regional threats." The US Embassy said in a statement that Kim met with Medialdea to "explain the nature" of the report. "Their discussion focused on the references to the Philippines in the report, including clarifying that the information about the Philippines had been previously reported by media sources," the embassy said. As a result of the meeting, presidential palace said that Medialdea instructed the Department of Foreign Affairs of the Philippines, through its embassy in Washington, "to coordinate and engage with the U.S. agencies involved in the writing of the assessment." Medialdea further directed the embassy officials and staff in the U.S. "to provide the latter with accurate information on the realities happening on the ground in the Philippines, including the actions taken by (Duterte) and his administration to promote socioeconomic development for the country and provide a safe and secure environment for all Filipinos, respecting at all times the rule of law." The report stirred up the administration of Duterte, who took office in June 2016. He will serve a six-year, single term until 2022. On Wednesday, Presidential Spokesperson Harry Roque slammed the report, dismissing the U.S. intelligence community's assessment "as myopic and speculative at best." (@ChaudhryMAli88) SEOUL, Feb. 23 (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 23rd Feb, 2018 ) :South Korea and Azerbaijan agreed on Friday to expand bilateral economic cooperation in infrastructure and other sectors, the finance ministry here said. The two sides held high-level talks in Seoul to discuss ways to bolster trade and investment and help more South Korean firms participate in infrastructure projects in the Central Asian country, according to the ministry. Azerbaijan, located along the Caspian Sea, is known for its rich natural resources, including crude oil and natural gas. The country is working on projects to expand its infrastructure, such as roads and railways. In a meeting with Deputy Finance Minister Ko Hyung-kwon, Azerbaijan's deputy finance minister Emin Huseynov urged South Korean companies to join his country's efforts to expand infrastructure. Ko responded by saying that the Azerbaijan government should play a key role in wooing South Korean companies to the nation. South Korea Friday agreed to strengthen military cooperation with Switzerland and Latvia as the countries' defence chiefs met in Seoul, Yonhap reported SEOUL, Feb. 23 (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 23rd Feb, 2018 ) :South Korea Friday agreed to strengthen military cooperation with Switzerland and Latvia as the countries' defence chiefs met in Seoul, Yonhap reported. South Korean Defence Minister Song Yong-moo had separate talks with his counterparts, who are attending the closing ceremony of the PyeongChang Winter Olympics, according to his ministry, the report said. In sitting down with his Swiss counterpart Guy Parmelins, Song expressed his gratitude for the nation's contribution to peace efforts on the Korean peninsula as a member of the United Nations Command's Neutral Nations Supervisory Commission. He requested support for South Korea's approach toward North Korea. The Swiss minister assured Song that his government will continue to abide by UN Security Council sanctions on Pyongyang for its nuclear and missile programmes. During a meeting with Latvian Defence Minister Raimonds Bergmanis, Song also talked about ways to beef up military and arms industry partnerships between the two sides, according to the ministry. Song and the visiting ministers agreed that the easing of tensions in Korea through the Olympics and inter-Korean dialogue will be conducive to peace and stability in Northeast Asia, the defence ministry said. (@ChaudhryMAli88) Since the beginning of the current crisis last Aug. 25, Turkey has provided more than $10 million in humanitarian aid to Rohingya refugees in southeastern Bangladesh, the head of a Turkish state-run disaster relief agency said Thursday ANKARA, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 23rd Feb, 2018 ) :Since the beginning of the current crisis last Aug. 25, Turkey has provided more than $10 million in humanitarian aid to Rohingya refugees in southeastern Bangladesh, the head of a Turkish state-run disaster relief agency said Thursday. "Turkey, along with all official institutions, distributed more than $10 million" to the Rohingya camps in Bangladesh, Mehmet Gulluoglu, the head of Turkey's Disaster and Emergency Management Authority (AFAD), told Anadolu Agency. "We told Bangladesh authorities that we are ready to do more, to cooperate to help needy people along with local Bangladeshis and Rohingya refugees," he said. Gulluoglu said that since the beginning of the crisis, Turkey had provided active humanitarian aid such as shelters, food, clothing, and health care. "We set up a field hospital there. The first Rohingya child was born at the hospital on Feb. 19," he added. The hospital was built and is operated by Turkey's Health Ministry and AFAD to provide emergency health support for refugees. Gulluoglu said the camps in Bangladesh were some of the most crowded in the world, and that healthcare services were amongst the refugees' most urgent needs. "Since the hospital started to operate in early January, more than 2,000 people have been examined," he said. Gulluoglu added that work on a second field hospital and health clinics in the camps continued. (@rukhshanmir) Senior United Nations officials on Friday called for greater support for Syrian refugees as well as the communities hosting them amid escalating violence in the war-torn country. UNITED NATIONS, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 23rd Feb, 2018 ) :Senior United Nations officials on Friday called for greater support for Syrian refugees as well as the communities hosting them amid escalating violence in the war-torn country. "We are deeply shaken and distraught by the brutality and utter disregard for civilian lives we are witnessing in Eastern Ghouta and other parts of Syria today,"' UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi, UN Development Programme Administrator Achim Steiner and Emergency Relief Coordinator Mark Lowcock said in a joint statement. "We are urging an immediate ceasefire, protection of civilians and civilian infrastructure and unfettered humanitarian access to Eastern Ghouta, swift evacuation of sick and injured people and safe passage for civilians wishing to leave,"' they said. "Now more than ever, it is critical to sustain and reinforce international support to the neighbouring countries and communities hosting some 5.5 million Syrian refugees in Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and Egypt. They continue to provide a profound service to humanity at a time when inside Syria, inhumanity seems to be prevailing,"' they added. According to the UN, nearly seven years of relentless violence in Syria has displaced half of Syria's population, including 6.1 million internally displaced, and 5.5 million Syrians living as refugees in the region. Despite the generosity of the neighbouring countries, most Syrian refugee families "and many in their host communities" fall below the poverty line and struggle to meet basic needs, the release said. In December last year, UN agencies and some 270 non-governmental organizations released the 2018 Regional Refugee and Resilience Plan seeking $4.4 billion to support Syrian refugees and host communities in neighbouring countries. The Plan aims to provide protection for refugee populations, education, health, food security, livelihoods, and water and sanitation services to vulnerable groups. Meanwhile, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) on Friday launched an appeal for $194 million to help displaced Syrians living in and outside their war-torn country as well as the communities hosting them. Seven years into the armed conflict in Syria, the humanitarian situation continues to deteriorate. Over 13 million people are still in need of humanitarian assistance inside the country, with nearly 3 million people living in hard-to-reach or besieged areas. With its 2018 appeal, the UN migration agency seeks to assist 1 million people with non-food items and shelter support 800,000 people with access to safe water and services 500,000 people with health services 500,000 people with community-led protection services 200,000 people with livelihood opportunities 135,000 displaced people to receive adequate services in camps 35,000 children to attend school. "These interventions are vital to ensuring that Syrians get the life-saving assistance and livelihood support that many desperately need,"' said IOM Director General William Lacy Swing, from the Organization's headquarters in Geneva. Since the crisis began, IOM said economic growth within host countries has been severely affected. With high unemployment rates, especially among young people, and limited resource availability, it is challenging for governments and municipalities to provide basic services. IOM said it tracked 850,000 internally displaced persons returning to their areas of origin during 2017. During the same period, however, 2.9 million people continued to flee their homes, illustrating the continuing adverse effect of violence and conflict on the Syrian population. Access to Primary health care has been drastically reduced inside Syria, while agricultural production has been cut in half compared to 2011 levels. In 2017, IOM said it organized the transportation of over 37,000 Syrian refugees from Lebanon, Turkey, Jordan, Iraq and Egypt to 23 countries including Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Sweden, Norway, the United States and the Netherlands, among others. (@FahadShabbir) A UN rights commission in South Sudan said Friday there was sufficient evidence to charge at least 41 senior officers and officials with war crimes and crimes against humanity Juba, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 23rd Feb, 2018 ) :A UN rights commission in South Sudan said Friday there was sufficient evidence to charge at least 41 senior officers and officials with war crimes and crimes against humanity. South Sudan's four-year-old civil war has been characterised by extreme brutality and attacks on civilians. But no high-ranking officials have been held to account, despite African Union (AU) promises to establish a special court to try alleged crimes. "The court could be set up straight away and the prosecutor could begin working on indictments," said Yasmin Sooka, chairperson of the UN Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan. "Under the peace agreement, those indicted can no longer hold or stand for office. Ultimately this is the only way to stop the rampant devastation of millions of human lives by South Sudan's leaders," she said. The commission said it had forwarded a confidential list of suspects to the UN's High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein. Those named include three state governors, 33 generals and five colonels. The report -- based on 58,000 documents and 230 witness statements -- is a litany of horrors and extraordinary cruelty. Some victims were beheaded, burned alive or had their throats cut, others had their eyes gouged out or were tortured. Sexual violence was particularly prevalent with numerous accounts of gang rape and child rape, and in "cases reminiscent of Bosnia" of people forced to watch or participate in the rape of loved ones. In one instance a 12-year-old boy was forced to have sex with his grandmother or be killed. Men were also attacked, with some castrated and others raped. (@ChaudhryMAli88) National Harbor, United States, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 23rd Feb, 2018 ) :Florida college student Sarah Gibson renewed her National Rifle Association membership with a credit card swipe at a conservative conference Thursday, days after a deadly school shooting in her state triggered soul-searching about America's gun violence. "I don't think guns are the problem, they're in fact the answer," the 20-year-old said. "When you have more security and you have more people carrying (firearms), that is deterrence in itself." Gibson and thousands of fellow Republicans converged on the Conservative Political Action Conference near Washington, where they gather each year to celebrate their causes -- and, in 2018, the populist movement that swept President Donald Trump into office one year ago. Many speakers touted the administration's achievements including passing recent tax cuts, repealing job-killing regulations and appointing conservative judges. "It's been a year of promises made and promises kept," Vice President Mike Pence told the CPAC crowd, as he offered tough words to North Korea and urged Republicans to gird for battle in hugely consequential congressional elections this November. The ongoing and deepening investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 US election, and whether Trump's campaign colluded with Moscow, was barely a footnote in CPAC discussions. But it was impossible to ignore the ever-present tragedy of rampaging gun violence, which has roiled American political discourse and put gun rights advocates and opponents under a hot spotlight. While a moment of silence was held to honor the 17 people killed at a Florida high school, CPAC's attendees or speakers did not shy away from the issue. Several actually went on the offensive. NRA chief Wayne LaPierre hit back at what he called "the shameful politicization of tragedy," fighting a rearguard defense against street protests and mounting demands to tighten America's permissive gun laws. In his first public comments since the Valentine's Day rampage, LaPierre reiterated long-standing accusations that gun control advocates were seeking to roll back constitutional protections. The powerful gun lobby's spokeswoman, Dana Loesch, took it further, saying that "many in legacy media love mass shootings." Coming on the heels of a successful inaugural run in 2017, Third Thursday on 3rd, DTLVs newest tradition, returns to the 3rd street corridor at the Downtown Grand to claim its throne as King of the Streats and mark the beginning of its official 2018 residency. The monthly food truck and live art experience will hit the 3rd street blacktop every third Thursday of the month in 2018 (*weather permitting) beginning with a special Shamrock the Street edition on Thursday, March 15 just in time to kick-off St. Patricks Day festivities. This months event aims to give attendees of ALL AGES a bit of craic with five gourmet food trucks, street games, and Oswag give-a-ways PLUS additional property-wide celebrations on the luckiest day of the year. Speaking of lucky, the Downtown Grand will be pouring All-You-Can-Drink Green Beer (21+ over) for just $20 from 6pm-Midnight (on 3rdStreet as well as at Freedom Beat and Furnace Bar). Third Thursday on 3rd: March 15th, 6pm 9pm Food Trucks: Some of the citys most beloved food trucks will line the streets to form a tasty tunnel of delights highlighting the best mobile menus in town. This months line-up will include: Waffle Love, Cookie Bar, Hot Corn and More, Stripchezze, and Cousins Maine Lobster. Live Art: Two of the valleys top freestyle artists, *Jesse Hudson & *Recycled Propaganda, will entertain event goers with a LIVE art installation under the 3rd street lights. Along with an energetic MC throughout the night, DJ Edoc will provide the shamrock soundtrack for this animated experience designed to electrify bystanders with uninhibited street art and showcase two of the best street artists on the west coast. Street Games: 3rd street will be flush with all of your favorite street games including, Ping-Pong, cornhole, and foosball. Additional contests and prizes will be given away throughout the night PLUS a chance to play PLINKO to win gift certificates, and other Downtown Grand swag. *Jesse Hudson is a 19-year old photographer and artist based in Las Vegas whose art explores the psychology of everyday experiences and phenomenas. *Recycled Propaganda is a socio-political artist acclaimed for his graphic exploration of a broad variety of contemporary issues from global history to current affairs. St. Patricks Day: Saturday, March 17th The St. Patricks Day celebration continues into the weekend with an official Paddys Pint Crawl on Saturday, March 17th from noon midnight. $20 will get you all-you-can drink green beer at Freedom Beat, Furnace Bar, and the Citrus Grand Pool Deck. Wristbands will be available for purchase at the casino cage.Additionally, Hogs & Heifers will host its annual Las Vegas Valley Firefighters Parade & Skills Challenge on 3rd Street. Parade assembly begins at 10:30 a.m. in front of Hogs & Heifers. At noon, the parade will move from Fremont and Main, down Fremont to 3rd Street, culminating at Hogs & Heifers for the Firefighter Skills Challenge Competition. Hogs & Heifers very own Michelle Dell will serve as Grand Marshall of the parade. There will be fire trucks on display, Irish dancers, Honor Guards PLUS a Jameson Irish Whiskey ice luge and more! The "facade" of free press in Cambodia "collapsed" in 2017, according to the annual report of the country's preeminent media watchdog, released Wednesday. Optimism that media development in the country was headed in the right direction has evaporated, the Cambodian Center for Independent Media (CCIM) survey finds. Of the 75 journalists working within both pro-government and more independent outlets who were anonymously surveyed for the report, 92 percent considered the closure of scores of radio stations and other media outlets last year to be politically driven. "A sector that once offered a semblance of democracy with pockets of free and critical news coverage amid a sea of ruling party affiliated television and newspapers has been cut down and left reeling," it concluded. "Reporters say they work with a keen awareness that they could be next targeted for their work." In the lead-up to this July's national election, the government has orchestrated a prolonged crackdown on dissent that has seen the only viable opposition party dissolved, its leader jailed and its senior members banned from politics. Thirty-two radio channels across 20 provinces that broadcast non-government-aligned and often critical content were forced to close last year by the government. The Cambodia Daily newspaper was ordered to shut down over a disputed tax bill, and Radio Free Asia suspended its in-country operations citing threats, and amid a dispute over its tax status. Two of Radio Free Asia's former reporters, who allegedly continued to communicate with their head office afterward, have been charged with espionage, as has an Australian journalist for reasons that remain largely unexplained. Within this context, CCIM's survey found those who felt the industry was headed in the right direction had plummeted from 71 percent in 2015 (a report was missed in 2016) to 11 percent in 2017. Journalists who reported verbal or physical attacks at some point had risen 12 percent since 2015, while 47 percent said they had been threatened an 18 percent increase on the previous survey. Increasingly, journalists and sources were communicating through encrypted messaging, fearing reprisals. The biggest problems for journalists were identified as government influence and control (49 percent), and prosecutions or legal threats (18 percent). One positive note from the report was an increase in previously low rates of training that journalists said they had received, though much of that training appears to have come from government-affiliated entities. Mixed reactions Minister of Information Khieu Kanharith, who was shown an advanced copy of the report, and his undersecretary of state, Mean Sophorn, both canceled their scheduled appearances at the launch of the report. Those who did attend as guests at a panel discussion at the launch had mixed reactions to the report. Club of Cambodian Journalists President Pen Bonnar, who also is the news director of ruling party Senator Ly Yong Phat's TV station, PNN, said the report's findings were a bit overblown. "For me, for the closure of two or three media outlets as a journalist, I am sorry. I do not want to see the newspapers or radio shut down," he told VOA on the sidelines. "But the closure of those offices, I think it's not as bad as the report said that it is the catastrophe in Cambodia I do not think so, because there is lots of news media, listeners can find other sources." Huy Vannak, president of the Union of Journalist Federations in Cambodia, who simultaneously works as an undersecretary of state at the Ministry of Interior and in a senior capacity at several pro-government news outlets, suggested the idea of journalistic independence was largely a myth anyway. "For me, in politics I speak one thing, and in journalism I speak another. But I don't lie to the people. There is no one-size-fits-all resolution. There are varying issues in the media sector," he said. What is important is integrity and professionalism, he maintains, while also dismissing concerns about the security of journalists. Sometimes, Vannak said, he has had to report journalists with "mental illnesses" who cursed authorities at the Ministry of Information, and he said he urged reporters to avoid causing headaches by focusing on politics too much. Kulachada Chaipipat, advocacy manager of the Southeast Asian Press Alliance in Bangkok, said it was a major concern to see one of the beacons of press freedom in the region backsliding. "Compared to the other countries in the region, the picture here is not unique but it only adds up to a bad score on the regional media landscape," she said. "For Cambodia it is alarming, alarming because it is the country being viewed by outsiders beyond this region or media or press advocacy groups in the region as one of the shining examples of countries ruined from years of war and then to emerge as a vibrant democracy in transition," Chaipipat said. 'Fake news' Government officials took aim at one of the few independent media voices left in Cambodia this week, accusing local newspaper The Phnom Penh Post of misreporting that Germany had suspended preferential travel visas for some Cambodian officials. Deputy Prime Minister Sar Kheng reportedly called the article "fake news" fabricated by the opposition, despite the fact it was sourced from an official German parliamentary document later verified by the member of parliament who wrote it. Asked about the matter, Huy Vannak said he could not make a judgment, as it required further investigation, while Pen Bonnar told the audience he did not think the newspaper had done anything wrong. In an audacious bid to regain control and win back acceptance, powerbrokers who used to feed off the tainted Boda Boda 2010 gang have rebranded the notorious group as Boda Boda Industry Uganda Ltd, writes BAKER BATTE LULE. Abdallah Kitatta, the patron of the notorious Boda Boda 2010, may be incarcerated in Luzira prison but he is far from losing his grip on the boda boda industry. Boda boda riders in the city. The riders belong to different organisations Kitatta and core members of his organisation were last month rounded up by security operatives from the Chieftaincy of Military Intelligence (CMI) and later charged in the General Court Martial for possessing firearms that are a preserve of the armed forces. Following his arrest, an angry mob of bodaboda riders who accused his association of torture, theft, and extortion, among other crimes, stormed various Boda Boda 2010 offices in Bukesa and Nateete and torched them. In the days that followed, revelations of Boda Boda 2010 transgressions caused a public outcry, forcing the remaining group leaders to disperse and the group disbanded. However, The Observer has reliably learnt that notable Boda Boda 2010 figures have quietly re-emerged to spearhead its revival and are allegedly being helped by rogue elements within police. THE PLOT A boda boda leader, who preferred anonymity and attended a strategy meeting on February 1, said it was agreed to rebrand the whole group by dumping the Boda Boda 2010 name and shuffling the leadership. We agreed to put our differences aside and integrate rival members of different groups into our new structure. Police also agreed to back us as long as we regain acceptance among the riders, he said. We need this unity because Boda Boda 2010 was the biggest player in the industry but since the clampdown of operations, Boda Boda 2010 has lost hundreds of millions in revenue. Boda Boda 2010 has been renowned for working closely with the police and Gen Kale Kayihura, the police chief, defended their actions numerous times. Some sources further claim individuals within police were also beneficiaries of Boda Boda 2010s vicious control of the industry. Already, there are tell-tale signs. When The Observer visited the headquarters in Bukesa last week, renovations were underway and a new banner had been hoisted proclaiming Boda Boda Industry Uganda (BIU) had taken over. Even the ambulance that President Museveni donated to Boda Boda 2010 has been rebranded to reflect BIU. The new group claims to be an amalgam of 32 boda boda associations in Kampala. POLICE CAGEY However, police spokesperson Emilian Kayima denies such a meeting took place. Im not aware that they have formed a new association, but generally as police, we dont mind if they form a new organisation or reorganise the old one; its their business as long as they follow the right channels, he says. Our interest only comes in when there are security-related implications but if they are doing it right, we have no problem. There wont be any confrontation with the police; its their business. Boda Boda 2010 leader Abdallah Kitatta Meanwhile, BIU leaders claim that all major associations in the city agreed to come up with a joint leadership to clear the image of the industry that has been dogged by claims of being a safe haven for criminals. John Ssekitooleko, the BIU general secretary in charge of Kampala Central division, says at least 15 of their 32 associations are active in Kampala. Of the 15, he says Century Boda Boda riders association (previously believed to be a rival of Boda Boda 2010) and Kampala Metropolitan Boda Boda Entrepreneurs [Kambe] are part of them. In fact, Muhammad Kasujja, who has been secretary general of Century, is the interim chairman of BIU. There are some people who think BIU is the new Boda Boda 2010 but its not true, Ssekitooleko told The Observer in an interview. OPPOSITION However, Kanyike Kiviiri, one of the leaders of Kambe, claims BIU is the brainchild of Kitatta. It is him who registered that association using people he has been buying from our associations. Thats why when they formed it, they moved into the same offices of Boda Boda 2010. They are the same people and us as Kambe we have nothing to do with them, he says. He adds that there is no way one can join somebody whose interests are obscure. When they heard that the minister for Kampala [Beti Kamya] is organising to have one umbrella organisation, they rushed to form an association so as not to be left out, he says. Sulaiman Lubega, the leader of Century, however, flatly rejects claims that they joined hands with Kitattas people. Those are opportunists who have not been part of our struggle. They have been Kitattas men whom he has been grooming; he is their leader even in prison, Lubega says. If you claim that you are coming to unite everybody, how then do you take over offices of criminals? What message does that send? For us we see this as a reincarnation of Boda Boda 2010. Actually, Kitatta once said that even if he were to be arrested, there would be other Kitattas he has been grooming. Perhaps he knew what was coming and came up with a plan B, Lubega adds, observing that Kasujja was expelled from Century months ago. UNITED LEADERSHIP The emergence of BIU comes at a time when Kamya, the minister for Kampala, together with her counterpart in Security, Henry Tumukunde, are working to have all boda boda associations under one leadership. Previous efforts by Jennifer Musisi, the KCCA executive director, failed largely due to opposition from Boda Boda 2010 and senior elements within the police leadership. However, leaders of various associations say they also have no problem in having a united leadership. Kiviiri says: We should get leaders right from the stage to national level. The problem why we dont have an umbrella organisation is because every association that has been formed always looks for a godfather or patron. If we want to have central leadership, politicians and military men must stop meddling in boda boda affairs. For his part, Lubega, whose association is said to be working with army generals Salim Saleh and Tumukunde, says in order to organise the boda boda industry, there is need to invite all riders to decide their destiny. On the other hand, Ssekitooleko wants some conditions fulfilled before elections can take place. We have no problem with having central leadership, whether its done by the minister for Kampala, or by anybody else but there must be procedures that must be agreed upon, he says. RELIEF, LOST REVENUE Boda boda riders have got some relief now that there is no regulator on their industry. Until Kitattas arrest, which was triggered by the alleged involvement of several Boda Boda 2010 members in the murder of Case hospital accountant Francis Ekalungar, the group controlled and regulated boda boda riders in several parts of Kampala and Wakiso. They were in charge of the registration, monitoring, levying of assorted fees, and deployment as well as taking punitive actions on riders. They did all this at a fee they set unilaterally. There are no official records of Boda Boda 2010 operations but various industry players estimate that the groups sphere of influence affected around 50,000 riders at more than 1,000 boda boda stages. According to a boda boda leader who preferred anonymity, a rider would be charged between Shs 500,000 and Shs 1 million to work from a permanent stage. Ordinarily, this money wouldnt go to Boda Boda 2010 but in the general pool of the stage for welfare. Actually even this amount depended on how much a rider with the least saving had, he says. However if a rider chooses to leave for another stage, part of this money would be given back to him. However, there are several claims that this money was actually collected by Boda Boda 2010 officials. Meanwhile, The Observer interviewed different riders who say Boda Boda 2010 used to charge Shs 20,000 for an ID on first issue and thereafter Shs 7,000 for renewal every year. Failure to adhere to these conditions attracted a heavy fine if Boda Boda 2010 pounced on a rider. Ironically, the group had also usurped powers of the police to punish traffic offences. For offences such as being caught riding in restricted places like one ways, being found without a driving license, logbook, or even carrying more than one passenger, the fine depended on who, how and where you have been arrested. These fines could range from between Shs 40,000 and Shs 500,000. Many of the riders actually would just abandon their bikes at the different Boda Boda 2010 offices, he says Kiviiri. It remains to be seen whether BIU can ably fill the void left by Boda Boda 2010. bakerbatte@observer.ug Host Carol Castiel speaks with Elliott Abrams, Senior Fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, about his new book Realism and Democracy: American Foreign Policy After the Arab Spring. Abrams tells VOA that chaos is the real enemy of political progress and that a breakdown of law and order is what allows extremist groups like ISIS or al Qaida to move into the vacuum. Abrams says the U.S. should do more to promote democracy not only because it is a better form of governance for the Arab world but also because it is in the long-term national interest of the United States. Thousands of African migrants in Israel are facing growing uncertainty as a looming deadline for deportation approaches. "We are refugees, we are not criminals!" chanted dozens of protesting migrants, some of them symbolically wrapped in chains. The slogan goes to the heart of the tug of war between some 40,000 Africans who entered Israel illegally over the past 12 years and the Israeli government, which describes them as economic migrants and "infiltrators." Ovdat Ishmail, who came from Eritrea, says Israel's plan to deport the Africans is wrong. "We did not come to Israel seeking work, we are not economic migrants, and we are not infiltrators," he said, adding that they are refugees who fled from war-torn Eritrea and Sudan. Israel rejects the refugee claim and says it has made the Africans a fair offer: They can take $3,500 and a one-way plane ticket to Rwanda by early April, or face imprisonment. Most of the migrants say they prefer prison in Israel to returning to Africa where their lives will be in danger. About a dozen asylum-seekers were thrown in jail this week. Ishmail says they were rounded up without warning and didn't even have a chance to gather their belongings. The crackdown has been condemned by Israeli human rights groups, which say that since Israel was built by refugees from the Holocaust, the country has a moral obligation to help those facing a similar fate. Anat Ben Dor, director of the Refugee Rights Clinic at Tel Aviv University, said Israel is obligated under international law to protect the refugees, since sending them back to Africa poses a threat to their lives. Ben Dor also noted that Rwanda denies the existence of any agreement to take them in. She says those refugees who have gone there from Israel have no civil rights and are often mistreated and expelled. But Israeli officials insist that Rwanda is a safe destination for the Africans, whom they see as a menace. The government accuses them of undermining the Jewish character of the state and bringing poverty and crime to the streets of South Tel Aviv. Parliament member Yoav Kish of the ruling Likud party dismisses any connection between the migrant crisis and the Holocaust. He accused human rights activists of cynically distorting the truth, saying the Jewish people do not need self-righteous lessons in morality. While oncologist Edress Othman works to save cancer patients here in the U.S., his own family faces death back in Afrin, Syria. The doctor, who has lived in the United States for nearly two decades, says his family feels betrayed by Washington for not asking Turkey to stop its attacks on their city. Saleh Damiger of VOA's Kurdish service spoke with the doctor and filed this report. Archbishop Josiah Idowu-Fearon, secretary-general of the Anglican consultative council, is appealing to the leaders of South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) to end violence and restore peace. Idowu-Fearon said the Anglican Communion will join Catholics peace efforts on Friday. With these countries, No. 1, you will see that, the extent of the loss of lives, the extent of the suffering in these two countries, honestly, it is an embarrassment to Africa in general and the powers that be in the world in particular, Idowu-Fearon said. He said the conflict in the two countries is because of power struggle, adding, It has to do with an epidemic problem on the continent of Africa. ... Tribalism, corruption (and) power. The Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, who is the head of the Anglican Church, is also supporting Pope Francis call for Friday to be set aside as a day of prayer and fasting for South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Senior Anglican leaders, including Archbishop Peter Munde, acting primate of the Anglican Church of South Sudan, have endorsed the popes call as well. Pope Francis made the announcement on February 4 in his traditional Angelus address to crowds in St. Peters Square in the Vatican. South Sudans conflict began in 2013 as a power struggle between President Salva Kiir and Riek Machar, who was Kiirs deputy. The war has driven 2 million people from the country and left more than a million others a step away from famine, according to the United Nations. What we expect our bishops to do in their various provinces is to get their clergy and inform them with the updates on the situation in South Sudan where millions of people have been displaced [the same in DRC]. The priests will then inform their people [congregations], Idowu-Fearon said. Idowu-Fearon, the former bishop of Kaduna Diocese and the archbishop of the Kaduna province in the Church of Nigeria, said the leaders of DRC and South Sudan should put the interests of their people first. I will appeal to them just as my archbishop has been doing, the pope himself has been doing and some of the church leaders: Please come together. Agree on how to share power, get this country moving, he added. Catholic activists called for protests after Sunday worship last month in DRC, one year after President Joseph Kabila committed to holding an election to choose his successor by the end of 2017 an election that still hasnt been held. The delay has fueled suspicions that Kabila will try to remove constitutional term limits that forbid him to run again, as presidents in neighboring countries have done. The pope and Welby were scheduled to visit South Sudan in March last year, but the Vatican postponed the visit, citing security and logistical barriers. Australias deputy prime minister said Friday he will resign as leader of his party after weeks of pressure over an affair with a staffer that brought him into open conflict with his premier and threatened to shatter a decades-old coalition. Barnaby Joyce said he will step down Monday as leader of the National party, the junior partner in Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbulls center-right coalition, after resisting earlier calls to quit over the affair with his former media secretary, with whom he is expecting a child. He will remain in parliament, safeguarding Turnbulls shaky one-seat majority. Joyces decision came after a falling-out with Turnbull, who is in the United States for meetings with President Donald Trump and who declined to leave him in charge while he is out of the country. Joyce, a practicing Catholic, has been married for 24 years and has campaigned on family values. He said he decided to quit after an allegation of sexual harassment emerged Friday. He denied any wrongdoing but acknowledged the allegation had hastened his decision. I will say on Monday morning at the party room I will step down as the leader of the National Party and deputy leader of Australia, Joyce said. Joyce, whose support base rests in Australias traditionally conservative rural areas, wore his trademark Akubra bushmans hat as he spoke to journalists in Armidale, the farming town he represents about 485 km (300 miles) northeast of Sydney. Little-known outside Australia, Joyce made international headlines in 2015 when he deported two dogs brought into Australia by U.S. actor Johnny Depp without the proper paperwork, a row that became known as the war on terrier. The National Party will now elect a new leader, who will also become deputy prime minister under the terms of the coalition agreement with Turnbulls Liberal party. Joyces resignation will potentially heal the rift between the Liberal and National parties, a political alliance that has existed for nearly 100 years. Nick Economou, senior lecturer in Australian politics at Monash University in Melbourne, however said it would have been impossible for both Turnbull and Joyce to return to parliament next week after their public falling-out. In Australian politics, disunity is death, Economou said. Two-thirds of Australian voters wanted Joyce to resign, The Australian newspapers Newspoll showed earlier this week. An Australian parliamentarian says he has sought the intervention of federal police in response to threats from Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen to beat citizens of the country on their home soil. In a speech Wednesday in which he also threatened to boycott the ASEAN-Australia Special Summit in Sydney next month, Hun Sen said those who plan to demonstrate there should remember that my visit is an honor for their [Australian] government. If you burn my effigy, I will go after you and beat you up at your houses. I warn you in advance, he said. I want to be clear, if you have the right to burn [images of] me, I have the right to beat you up. At the summit, hundreds of protesters are planning to confront Hun Sen, who has ruled for more than three decades and recently had his countrys only viable opposition party dissolved ahead of elections in July. Before that he vowed to kill a couple hundred people if necessary in order to win the ballot and has orchestrated a sweeping, prolonged assault on the media, civil society and political opponents. Threats and sanctions The premiers inflammatory remarks this week came as Germany imposed punitive measures in response to these actions while the EU Council is reportedly about to request sanctions and a review of Cambodias crucial preferential access to their market. In his speech Wednesday Hun Sen also threatened his would-be Australian hosts that he will leave shame on the face at the scene if they dare treat him inappropriately. Cambodian-Australian Hong Lim, a veteran MP in the Victorian state parliament, said he contacted Australian Federal Police (AFP) on Thursday in relation to the threats and is taking the matter to Victorian State Premier Daniel Andrews as well as federal parliamentarians. Yeah I think they have an obligation to look after us and also if somebody is threatening to beat someone up thats illegal, thats a criminal offense and if they are actually following, thats stalking, thats a criminal offense. Lim said he was astounded that Hun Sen could make comments like this on the eve of a visit to another country, but that in Australia, the Cambodian PM seemed to get away with everything. I would have assumed that the federal police would have to go and get him at the airport and interrogate him. Any other person would have that consequence and why with this man is that not the case? It looks like Australia is now being blackmailed, or held hostage its my way or the highway, he said. 'Embarrassment' for Australia Only a few refugees in several years have been resettled under a controversial deal with Cambodia in exchange for tens of millions of aid dollars. Observers regularly suggest the deal is muzzling Canberra from speaking honestly about rampant human rights abuses and corruption under Hun Sens regime. Rather than seeing Hun Sens visit as an honor, Lim characterized it more as an embarrassment for Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbulls government. Canberras relationship with Phnom Penh is further complicated by the latters influence on in its long-term ambition for ASEAN membership and recent efforts Foreign Minister Julie Bishop has made, under domestic pressure, to secure the release of an Australian filmmaker charged with espionage in Cambodia. Australia has also just accepted as refugees the wife and family of slain Cambodian political activist Kem Ley, a hugely popular figure who was assassinated in 2016 in what many in the country consider to have been a state-sponsored hit. The Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and the Australian Embassy in Phnom Penh did respond to VOA requests for comment. The Australian Federal Police told VOA they had yet to receive a referral regarding the issue but would evaluate the situation in accordance with standard procedures if they did. Carl Thayer, an emeritus professor and the University of New South Wales and a regional expert, said Hun Sens threat could be seen as an incitement as information was surfacing that Phnom Penh was orchestrating a counter protest for the summit. Well, look, you know I think that obviously the federal police will have to listen and evaluate threats to Australian citizens and I think that the threat there is not that Hun Sen would do it but some of his supporters in this country, he said. Im told there is an attempt to organize some sort of pro Hun Sen activity to counter whats going on, he added, stressing details were very vague. Controversy in US Another assertion by the Cambodian premier, that his absence would invalidate any ASEAN consensus at the Australia summit, was not true, Thayer said. Hun Sen could, however, wreak havoc on Australias attempts to foster closer ties with the association by rallying members against them, he said. The Cambodian premiers family has courted controversy during several recent trips abroad. During a 2016 trip to the United States, his son Hun Manet was confronted by protesters everywhere he went and forced to pull out of one event while his bodyguards were accused of assaulting a process server attempting to hand them legal papers at another. Later that year when he traveled to Australia, his reception from the local Cambodian community was equally frosty. This week Germany announced that preferential visas had been punitively withdrawn from senior Cambodian officials, including Hun Sen and his family. The Financial Times has reported that EU Council Conclusions set for Monday will warn of a possible rollback of Cambodias duty and quota free access to their market and request enhanced monitoring of it. Moves in the United States are underway to impose targeted sanctions against members of Hun Sens regime including asset freezes. Leaders of Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Pakistan and its arch rival India jointly inaugurated construction work Friday on the Afghan section of a long-delayed multibillion-dollar gas pipeline connecting the four nations, raising hopes for regional cooperation and peace. A ceremony took place in the ancient Afghan city of Herat, attended by President Ashraf Ghani, his Turkmen counterpart, Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, Pakistani Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi and Indian External Affairs Minister M.J. Akbar. The long-awaited 1,814 kilometer pipeline, known as TAPI, will transport natural gas from the world's fourth-largest reserves in Turkmenistan through Afghanistan to growing economies of Pakistan and India, which are facing energy shortages. TAPI was originally conceived in the 1990s, but differences over terms and conditions, unending Afghan hostilities and regional rivalries are blamed for delays. Turkmenistan took the initiative in December 2015 and has since constructed its portion of the pipeline up to the Afghan border. President Ghani, while addressing Friday's ceremony, vowed Afghanistan believes in connectivity and will "not spare any efforts" to implement the project to connect South Asia with Central Asia after a century of separation. "This is the beginning of confidence in Afghanistan, confidence on national unity and harmony of the state and the people of Afghanistan," noted Ghani. Pakistani Prime Minister Abbasi reiterated his country's commitment to peace and stability in Afghanistan. "We are turning, by the grace of God, TAPI into a reality. It will provide shared regional prosperity and it will provide peace dividends," said Abbasi, whose country is accused of covertly supporting the Afghan Taliban, charges Islamabad denies as baseless. "I want to tell my Afghan brothers and sisters that your success is our success, your development is our development and peace in Afghanistan means peace in Pakistan," Abbasi emphasized. He termed TAPI critical for Pakistan's energy needs, saying it will provide about 10 percent of his country's total energy consumption. Expected cost Officials say the project, estimated to cost up to $10 billion, will carry 33 billion cubic meters of natural gas annually for 30 years and is extendable. The final cost, however, is anticipated to be much higher because of an accompanying power transmission pipeline and the fiber optic cable to be laid from Turkmenistan to Pakistan. Afghanistan will buy about five billion cubic meters of gas once the project is completed. Kabul also will earn up to $500 million in transit fees from the project, which Afghans expect will create about 25,000 jobs in their war-shattered nation. The Afghan section of the pipeline will run through five provinces in the south and southwest, including Herat, Farah, NImruz, and Helmand, before entering the southern Pakistan city of Quetta. Security concerns Taliban insurgents control or contest much of the Afghan territory along the TAPI route, raising security concerns for the pipeline. In a statement issued Friday, though, the insurgent group dismissed those concerns and pledged to protect the pipeline, reminding skeptics the TAPI was initially negotiated and brought to Afghanistan when the Taliban was ruling the country. The insurgency, which currently controls or influences about 44 percent of Afghan territory, blamed the 2001 U.S.-led invasion of the country for the delay in TAPI's implementation. Groundbreaking for the Afghan section took place at a time when Pakistan's relations with India have deteriorated and both countries are locked in daily border skirmishes in Kashmir. TAPI is dubbed by some as a "peace pipeline," citing the potential the project has to promote regional economic and security cooperation. But analysts remain skeptical about future progress in the wake of Islamabad's prevailing tensions with Kabul and New Delhi. Corruption is getting worse in many parts of the world, according to the nongovernmental group Transparency International, with Africa still the worst performing region. The organization's Corruption Perceptions Index does offer some surprises however, with some bright spots in West Africa, while highlighting alarming declines in some European nations. Henry Ridgwell reports from London. In Boston's Irish neighborhoods, word on immigration spreads quietly and quickly. Reporters are met with suspicion. "The last person who gave an interview, he ended up getting deported. You know that, right?" asked Thomas Callahan, an undocumented Irishman who reluctantly provided his full name. He and others recall John Cunningham a prominent, outspoken Bostonian who, like many undocumented Irish, overstayed a 90-day visa and was deported last year after nearly two decades in the U.S. A few months before his detainment, Cunningham had spoken about his status on Ireland's RTE television station. "The way things are going, it's not safe," Callahan said. "Everybody is walking on eggshells," added his friend P.J. The number of deportations among the Irish in the U.S. 26 removals in 2016, 34 in 2017 pales in comparison to those for numerous other ethnic groups in the United States. But the resulting 31 percent increase is still cause for concern in a community that, in recent years, has not been used to such scrutiny. WATCH: U.S. Deportations by Country "Most Americans, when you're working on jobs, they don't see you as an illegal immigrant," Callahan, a carpenter, said about being Irish. "They presume that you're all set just because you're white and you speak English little do they know that you're actually undocumented, as well." Though Callahan has lived in the country on an expired visa since 2002, he says the level of concern within his community has become "more prevalent" and has been on "a lot of people's minds" since President Donald Trump took office. The prospect of being jailed for weeks or months is what most frightens Callahan. But his mother is currently battling stage IV cancer in Ireland and he grapples with a decision he hasn't yet made: whether to permanently leave the life he has built and visit her before it's too late. Historical privilege The estimated number of undocumented Irish living in the U.S. varies drastically, from 10,000 to upward of 50,000. Dating back to the Great Irish Famine of the mid-19th century, thousands settled in Greater Boston. They remain the metro area's single-largest ethnic group at 23 percent. The much-maligned Diversity Immigrant Visa Program was originally intended to help Irish immigrants in the 1980s, when the bulk of U.S. immigration was shifting to Central America and Asia. In recent years, most winners of the diversity visa come from Africa and Asia. Trump has called for the program to be eliminated. The Irish today see a different set of immigration challenges than generations before them. Among them are extensive wait times for family-based immigrant visas and a complex employment sponsorship process, according to Kieran O'Sullivan, an Immigration, Detention and U.S. Citizenship Counselor at the Irish Pastoral Centre (IPC) of Boston. "Many people who even try and take on the process of getting sponsorship through employers fall out of status during that process, and some other immigrants don't have the price of the attorney's fees, the filing fees," O'Sullivan explained. Overall, the challenges faced by the undocumented Irish, he says, are like those of other immigrant groups. "The Irish landscaper is no different from the hardworking painter from Guatemala, who is here trying to provide for his family. Our fear is that it's driving people further underground," O'Sullivan said. WATCH: Boston Irish community on edge after increase in deportations "We would meet a lot of people who are struggling with depression and anxiety," added Veronica Keys, a clinical social worker at the IPC, whose clients represent a range of nationalities. "That would be true especially, I think, of the immigrant community, because they tend to be isolated, away from home. "[Those] from the Middle East or maybe an African country, they feel that they experience their discrimination more overtly," she said. But Callahan is feeling his own pain. "We're not stuck like the Mexicans, where they're going back to really bad times, but I'm here almost 16 years," he said. "It's very hard to leave. You've made a life here for yourself." Land of the free? In "Southie," a once predominantly working-class Irish neighborhood in South Boston, lavish modern apartments border decades-old pubs and family diners. Among Irish descendants who grew up and still live there, a mixed narrative on immigration emerges. "Who built America?" asked Pete Clougherty, a Galway, Ireland-native Vietnam veteran who immigrated with his parents in 1957. "The ones that came here before us!" "A lot of [undocumented immigrants] are running from bad things in their country," Clougherty said. "Where else could they turn to when stuff like that happens? Down the street, Mary Evans, a former custodian and third-generation Irish-American, recalls the "No Irish Need Apply" era of the 1850s as proof of her ancestors' hard-earned respect something that, in her mind, has been exploited by newer immigrants who misinterpret the meaning of "land of the free." "A lot of people's ancestors had to work their way up to get the respect that they got," Evans said. "When you're here illegally, it's like, you don't have any roots whatsoever here in America to prove that, 'Oh, I deserve that too.' Just like the Irish deserve this." Keys says that among the Irish population in the U.S., there is a generational divide in part due to a lack of awareness of immigration policy changes post-mid-century. "They say, 'Why can't they do it the same way we did it?'" However, Keys notes, understanding is growing. "The Irish are more vulnerable now, so it's probably made them aware of the fact that they have much in common with other immigrant groups," Keys said. "Boston in particular [is] Irish-American, largely. So, you sort of fool yourself into thinking that you're part of the majority." After boycotting presidential elections in 2016, Djiboutis main opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Renewal and Development (MRD), says it will not participate in legislative elections Friday, deepening concerns that democracy in the East African nation isnt working. In Djibouti, theres a problem of legitimacy, of democratic legitimacy, of parliamentary legitimacy because elections are never fair and free, Daher Ahmed Farah, the leader of MRD, told VOA. Farah said the government went back on a deal forged in late 2014 to establish an independent national electoral commission. Without an autonomous body to oversee voting, he said, its impossible to ensure the integrity of the process. Taking part in an election that is not fair and free means some kind of support to the farce, he said. Because it is a farce it is a masquerade. Despite interest in reform, Djiboutians push for democracy has come up short, Farah said, because the government suppresses dissent and stifles the press. Singular power Djibouti is a representative democratic republic whose president serves six-year terms. The current president, Ismail Omar Guelleh, has held office for nearly two decades, making him one of Africas longest serving leaders. In the most recent presidential election, in 2016, he won more than 86 percent of the vote. He succeeded his uncle, who led for 22 years following independence from French colonial rule. The National Assembly, Djiboutis legislative body, has 65 seats and also holds significant power. With the opposition boycotting the election the candidates for the legislature will represent the ruling party. Strategic placement Djibouti has little in the way of national resources, and its one of Africas smallest countries. But a strategic location in East Africa, where the Red Sea meets the Gulf of Aden, has made Djibouti an appealing spot for foreign military bases and a major player in regional politics. The United States, France, Japan, China and Italy each have bases in Djibouti, giving it an outsized footprint in a region with much larger economies and more advanced militaries. The French base also houses troops from Spain and Germany. But this international presence may have limits. Sim Tack is a former senior analyst at Stratfor, a group that tracks global military tactics and strategies. He said Djibouti faces significant security challenges, and that makes close alliances with foreign states appealing. That doesnt mean that every single one of those countries would immediately defend the Djibouti government when it gets into trouble. But it increases the odds of actually receiving some significant support when they do feel faced with some serious contestation. Stability For Farah, a foreign presence in Djibouti increases the countrys security, but that hasnt translated into benefits for everyday Djiboutians. [Djiboutis] stability matters, acknowledged, but stability must take into account the needs of people. Stability for whom? Stability, the real stability, is for people, is for development, is for social justice, is for a free economy. Its not for the regime. The current stability is only good for the regime, Farah said. Mohamed Siad Doualeh, Djiboutis permanent representative to the United Nations and its ambassador to the United States and Canada, did not respond to requests for an interview. However, top officials in Djibouti have met with members of an African Union observation mission and welcomed oversight from the international body. ABCNews.com(NEW YORK) -- Six months before Nikolas Cruz allegedly gunned down former classmates and teachers at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, he apparently texted a photo of an assault rifle, among a slew of other weapons, to a student he repeatedly threatened to kill. In an exclusive interview with ABC News Wednesday night, Enea Sabadini said it was the one time he did not report Cruz to school officials, despite a tirade of threats and insults from him via social media. Sabadini said he didnt take Cruzs messages seriously at the time. "If I was able to go back, I would have gone and reported him to police and told my mother about it," Sabadini told ABC News. Sabadini, who plays high school rugby, said his first interaction with Cruz occurred in August 2016. Cruz sent him direct messages on Instagram saying to stay away from his ex-girlfriend, whom Sabadini had just started dating. At that time, Sabadini hadnt met Cruz in person and didnt respond to his messages. "I was confused why, because I hadnt had any prior problems with this person," he said. "At first, I didnt answer back at all." Sabadini said Cruzs ex-girlfriend told him to ignore the messages, even though they included racial slurs, threats of murder and even of Cruz feeling depressed. "you know how f------ mad iam (sic) at you," Cruz wrote in one message. "you took my ex i been depressed." Still, she said Cruz was misunderstood. But, according to Sabadini, she added that he had been violent and abusive toward her. Then one morning, a week or two after school started that year, Cruz approached Sabadini at the school to apologize. "I think he knew where I sat with my friends in the mornings, so as I was walking toward my usual area, he pulled me aside to apologize," Sabadini said. "I accepted his apology and everything was cool." Just days later, Cruz again sent hostile messages to Sabadini and threatened some of his friends. Sabadini, who said he was "confused" by Cruzs hostility, chose not to respond to the messages again. But he and his friends reported the incident to school officials. It was unclear whether Cruz was ever disciplined for those messages. Then, one day after school when Sabadini was leaving school with friends, they noticed Cruz was following closely behind. A brief confrontation between Cruz and Sabadini ensued, in which Cruz yelled at Sabadini to stop talking to his ex-girlfriend. "We almost get into a fight, but I decide its not worth it and I walk away," Sabadini said. Suddenly, Cruz starts running toward Sabadini with pencils in each of his hands, holding them like daggers, in a stabbing stance, Sabadini said. Sabadini took off running and Cruz chased him down the street, Sabadini said. He eventually outran Cruz and reported the incident to school officials, he said. Another day at school, Cruz started a fight with Sabadini during lunch. The fight was captured on cell phone video and led to the brief suspension of both students. "I dont know why he came up behind me and decided to fight me that day," Sabadini told ABC News. "I was tired of all the things he had been doing to me and my friends." Sabadini said Cruz continued to send him threatening messages for a few weeks afterward and would occasionally give him the middle finger at school during lunch. The harassment finally stopped only when Cruz was expelled in December 2016, but "out of the blue" in the early morning hours of Aug. 17, 2017, the messaging attacks resumed, Sabadini said. Eventually, the harassment stopped completely - until the early morning hours of Aug. 17, the following summer. In screenshots of the series of Instagram direct messages provided to ABC News, Cruz apparently curses at Sabadini, uses a slew of derogatory insults and threatens multiple times to "kill" him. "You underground hispanic wall jumper ill (sic) will f------ destroy you," Cruz writes to Sabadini, who is Italian and African American. After sending the image of guns laid out on his bed, Cruz writes: "Dont f--- with me!!!!!" In further direct messages to Sabadini, Cruz says he "stole my ex" and that she meant "everything to me." Cruz writes that hes been "depressed" and "drinking" ever since, and all he can think about is "hurting" Sabadini. This time, Sabadini responds to Cruzs messages, saying he and the girl "broke up" in December 2016. But Cruz continues to threaten him. "you have no idea what iam (sic) capable of," Cruz writes. "Iam (sic) going to f-----g kill you." "Iam (sic) going to watch ypu (sic) bleed. Sabadini responds, "F-- off Im trying to watch YouTube." Cruz writes, "I will kill you !!!!!" "I am going to shoot you dead." Most of Sabadinis responses appear nonchalant with a sarcastic tone. He writes, "Hey man you should take a cold shower to calm down, I here (sic) they are refreshing." Sabadini told ABC News he didnt take Cruzs threats seriously at the time. Cruz had been expelled from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School unspecified disciplinary reasons, authorities said. "I did not really think much because he was no longer going to our school," Sabadini said. "I just thought nothing of it at the time." Months later, on Feb. 14, Cruz allegedly opened fire inside the school, killing 17 people and wounding dozens of others, with an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle authorities say he legally purchased a year ago. When Sabadini heard there was an active shooter on campus, he said he and his friends immediately knew it was Cruz. "I wasnt surprised," he told ABC News. He added that everyone who had interacted with him knew that "if anything was really to happen at the school, like a shooting, that he probably was the only one with enough hate to do so." Sabadini said he personally knew three of the students who were killed, and that he feels lucky to be alive. Cruz was arrested and charged with 17 counts of premeditated murder in the aftermath of the attack. The Instagram account associated with Cruz that directly messaged Sabadini appears to have been taken down. Sabadinis mother, Mayi Sabadini, told ABC News she believes its important for her son to share his story. "Even though Nikolas wanted to kill my son, I believe hes the 18th victim. His life is over, too. He is obviously very, very troubled," she told ABC News in a separate interview. Mayi Sabadini became emotional when talking about the loss and suffering of so many families, and said she cant believe her son was sucked in by Cruz's obsession and rage over the ex-girlfriend. "Kids have to tell their parents about any threat, every single threat. We know that now," she said. "There are many other troubled, sick kids like Nikolas at other schools. I feel very lucky my son is alive." Copyright 2018, ABC Radio. All rights reserved. The Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan (TAPI) electric power-line construction launch ceremony was held on February 23, a source close to the project told Trend. Ministry of Mines and Petroleum says the project will provide $500 million United States dollars annually in transit duties to Afghanistan. President Ashraf Ghani said that "TAPI is a sign of transforming Afghanistan from a confrontation point into a regional and worldwide cooperation point, and the nation not only welcomes the project but most importantly the concept". While the pipeline will allow Turkmenistan to find new consumers in Asia and cut its dependence on Beijing, which buys about 35 billion cubic meters of gas annually. Abbasi will then proceed to Herat, Afghanistan to attend the Afghan leg of the groundbreaking ceremony, it said. Lamar Odom on Ex-Wife Khloe Kardashian: 'I'm Happy For Her' But Lamar Odom expressed support for his pregnant ex-wife with a slew of well-wishes during an interview with Access Hollywood . He added with smile, "When she was with her second or third National Basketball Association ball player, I could see that". ".(Friday's) ceremony includes the inauguration of work on TAPI project, and the 500 kilovolt power project of Turkmenistan, which involves Afghanistan, Pakistan and Turkmenistan", Ghani's spokesman Shahhussain Murtazawi said. "Afghanistan believes in the connectivity policy, not separation". The launch of the project has meanwhile revived hopes among the people for an improved economic and political landscape in the country. "The second goal is to raise public awareness on the importance of these projects", head Heart of Asia Nations Integration Trend, Muhibullah Nawrozi, said. The TAPI pipeline will run from Galkynysh - the largest gas field in Turkmenistan - through the Afghan cities of Herat and Kandahar, and finally reach the Fazilka settlement located near the India-Pakistan border. "The construction work on the project will start after the completion of technical studies and achieving the financial close, which expected to be completed during this year", they said. The ambitious natural gas pipeline project entered its practical phase in Pakistan after the process of initiating front-end-engineering-and-design (FEED) route survey was formally inaugurated a year ago. Two car bombs exploded Friday in Mogadishu, the Somali capital, killing at least 18 people, the head of an ambulance service said. Dr. Abdulkadir Abdirahman Adan told VOA's Somali service that another 20 people had been wounded. He said most of the victims were civilians. Adan's casualty totals came from the site of the first blast, near Somalia's intelligence headquarters in the city's Abdulaziz neighborhood. Minutes later, another car bomb hit a checkpoint about 300 meters from Somalia's presidential palace. "We heard two big explosions, and gunfire is still echoing in two different directions of the city," Mogadishu resident Nur Abdulle told VOA. "After blasts, we could see a huge cloud of smoke into the air." A Somali intelligence official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told VOA that suspected al-Shabab militants in a vehicle had been stopped at the checkpoint and began firing before the car exploded. He said Somali security officials were pursuing militants who had escaped. No one claimed immediate responsibility for the blasts, but they had the hallmarks of al-Shabab, which has attacked dozens of government buildings, hotels, restaurants and other targets in Mogadishu in recent years. European Union leaders staked out opening positions Friday for a battle over EU budgets that many conceded they are unlikely to resolve before Britain leaves next year, blowing a hole in Brussels' finances. At a summit to launch discussion on the size and shape of a seven-year budget package to run from 2021, ex-communist states urged wealthier neighbors to plug a nearly 10 percent annual revenue gap being left by Britain, while the Dutch led a group of small, rich countries refusing to chip in any more to the EU. Germany and France, the biggest economies and the bloc's driving duo as Britain prepares to leave in March 2019, renewed offers to increase their own contributions, though both set out conditions for that, including new priorities and less waste. Underlining that a divide between east and west runs deeper than money, French President Emmanuel Macron criticized what he said were poor countries abusing EU funds designed to narrow the gap in living standards after the Cold War to shore up their own popularity while ignoring EU values on civil rights or to undercut Western economies by slashing tax and labor rules. Noting the history of EU "cohesion" and other funding for poor regions as a tool of economic "convergence," Macron told reporters: "I will reject a European budget which is used to finance divergence, on tax, on labor or on values." Poland and Hungary, heavyweights among the ex-communist states which joined the EU this century, are run by right-wing governments at daggers drawn with Brussels over their efforts to influence courts, media and other independent institutions. The European Commission, the executive which will propose a detailed budget in May, has said it will aim to satisfy calls for "conditionality" that will link getting some EU funding to meeting treaty commitments on democratic standards such as properly functioning courts able to settle economic disputes. But its president, Jean-Claude Juncker, warned on Friday against deepening "the rift between east and west" and some in the poorer nations see complaints about authoritarian tendencies as a convenient excuse to avoid paying in more to Brussels. At around 140 billion euros ($170 billion) a year, the EU budget represents about 1 percent of economic output in the bloc or some 2 percent of public spending, but for all that it remains one of the bloodiest subjects of debate for members. Focus on payments The Commission has suggested that the next package should be increased by about 10 percent, but there was little sign Friday that the governments with cash are willing to pay that. "When the UK leaves the EU, then that part of the budget should drop out," said Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, who leads a group of hawks including Sweden, Denmark and Austria. "In any case, we do not want our contribution to rise and we want modernization," he added, saying that meant reconsidering the EU's major spending on agriculture and regional cohesion in order to do more in defense, research and controlling migration. On the other side, Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis said his priorities were "sufficient financing of cohesion policy" a good deal for businesses from the EU's agricultural subsidies. German Chancellor Angela Merkel said there had been broad agreement that new priorities such as in defense, migration and research should get new funding and she called for a "debureaucratization" of traditional EU spending programs. Summit chair Donald Tusk praised the 27 leaders Prime Minister Theresa May was not invited as Britain will have left before the new budget round starts for approaching the issue "with open minds, rather than red lines." But despite them all wanting to speed up the process, a deal this year was unlikely. Quick deal unlikely Although all agree it would be good to avoid a repeat of the 11th-hour wrangling ahead of the 2014-20 package, many sounded doubtful of a quick deal even early next year. "It could go on for ages," Rutte said. He added that it would be "nice" to finish by the May 2019 EU election: "But that's very tight." Among the touchiest subjects will be accounting for the mass arrival of asylum-seekers in recent years. Aggrieved that some eastern states refuse to take in mainly Muslim migrants, some in the west have suggested penalizing them via the EU budget. Merkel has proposed that regions which are taking in and trying to integrate refugees should have that rewarded in the allocation of EU funding a less obviously penal approach but one which she had to defend on Friday against criticism in the east. It was not meant as a threat, the chancellor insisted. In other business at a summit which reached no formal legal conclusions, leaders broadly agreed on some issues relating to next year's elections to the European Parliament and to the accompanying appointment of a new Commission for five years. They pushed back against efforts, notably from lawmakers, to limit their choice of nominee to succeed Juncker to a candidate who leads one of the pan-EU parties in the May 2019 vote. They approved Parliament's plan to reallocate some British seats and to cut others altogether and also, barring Hungary, agreed to a Macron proposal to launch "consultations" with their citizens this year on what they want from the EU. French President Emmanuel Macron faces one of the biggest tests to date in his young presidency, as his Cabinet is examining controversial immigration legislation before parliamentary debate. A record 100,000 people asked for asylum in France last year, and like elsewhere in Europe, public opinion has soured against migrants. A metro rumbles overhead as a small group of migrants stamp their feet to stay warm on a cold morning. They are standing in front of a northeastern Paris office that processes asylum applications. I came to take refugee. I want to live here. I want a safe place. My government make problem for me. It follow me, Abdel Kader, a 46-year-old migrant, said. Kader is an engineer from Jordan, who crossed Egypt, Libya, the Mediterranean and Italy before arriving here three weeks ago. His story is not completely clear, but he says he faces danger if he returns home. No plan, I only want to take paper. The police catch me. Make trouble with me. I need paper, he said. If French authorities find Kaders story credible, he might benefit from proposed immigration legislation. It aims to speed up processing of asylum claims and make it easier for minors to get asylum status. But it also would toughen treatment for so-called economic migrants, sometimes doubling their time in detention centers and introducing jail sentences and fines for those crossing borders illegally to get here. Macron defends this mixed approach as firm and fair. He visited the port city of Calais last month, where a massive migrant squatter camp known as "the jungle" was demolished in 2016. Macron vowed there would never be another jungle although several hundred migrants are still camped out in Calais. A recent poll also shows most French believe there are too many immigrants here. But critics call the new legislation overly harsh. They include some members of Macrons own The Republic on the Move party, which includes politicians from the right and left. Some say it violates basic human rights. Louis-Georges Tin, who heads an umbrella association representing Africans from French-speaking countries, says deterring immigration also does not make economic sense. The best people from Africa, from Europe, from all over the world go in many other places now. We are losing age, we are losing expertise, we are losing human resources, we are losing our own identity, he said. The group of asylum seekers does not seem aware of the fierce debate over their future. A man who identified himself as Shinwari, from a part of Afghanistan with the same name, says after failing to get asylum in Austria, he is trying France. When told Macron has a new immigration law he is trying to get passed, Shinwari said, "Yeah, we heard. I came because everybody says he is a good man. We have hope here now. A few minutes later, police arrive to get the men to move on. Their final destination remains up in the air. The European Union and other international donors pledged more than half-a-billion dollars Friday to support a multi-national military operation in Africas vast Sahel region, which has fallen prey to smugglers, human traffickers and terrorists in recent years. Speaking after an international meeting on the Sahel in Brussels, European Union foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini said the pledges far exceeded initial expectations. She said they mirrored the strong international support for the so-called G-5 Sahel a regional development and security initiative headed by five Sahelian nations. Mogherini said the challenges facing Sahel spill well beyond the region, and demand a collective response although G-5 countries must define their own strategy and priorities. Along with African countries, Europe is concerned about the Sahel not only because it is a transit route for tens of thousands of migrants trying to reach its shores, but also because it fears it may become a launching pad for terrorist strikes at home. Insecurity has deteriorated in the region since 2011, and extremist attacks occur regularly. There are also fears that Islamic State group fighters fleeing Syria and Iraq are heading there. The United States has about 800 troops in Niger alone, while France has 4,000 forces in the region under its Barkhane anti-terrorism operation. Nigers president, Mahamadou Issoufou, noted the money raised will only cover the G-5 operations for this year. Continuous funding was needed, he said. And until security conditions improve in Libya, he added, it will be difficult to stabilize Sahel countries further south. International support includes billions of dollars in development aid for the region. French President Emmanuel Macron said in the next few weeks, the first development initiatives will be up and running, including in Malis restive central region of Mopti. Amnesty International says its new global report on human rights shows Irans record reflected some positive developments, but mostly remained poor, and in some areas worsened in the past year. The London-based groups annual State of the Worlds Human Rights report for 2017-2018, released Thursday, accused Iranian authorities of heavily suppressing peoples rights to freedom of expression, association, peaceful assembly and religious belief. It also said those authorities arrested and imprisoned peaceful critics and others after what it called grossly unfair trials before Islamic Revolutionary courts. The Amnesty report said torture and other ill treatment of detainees remained common and widespread and were committed with impunity in Iran. It also said floggings, amputations and other cruel punishments continued to be applied. Irans government had no immediate response to the rights groups allegations. In an interview with VOA Persians NewsHour program Thursday, Amnestys London-based Iran researcher, Raha Bahreini, said the blame for Irans perceived mistreatment of detainees lies with a series of official bodies: police, prison guards, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the judicial system. These groups not only failed to uphold their responsibilities to ensure the safety of prisoners, Bahreini said, but in some cases made conditions for prisoners worse. Iran has drawn particular scrutiny from rights activists in recent weeks for reporting three cases of Iranians committing suicide while in detention. Officials said two of those Iranians had been arrested during a wave of nationwide anti-government protests last month, while a third, Iranian-Canadian environmentalist Kavous Seyed-Emami, killed himself in Tehrans Evin prison earlier this month. Iranian authorities had arrested 63-year-old Seyed-Emami, managing director of the Persian Wildlife Heritage Foundation, Jan. 24, saying he was a suspect in a spying case. Iranian prosecutor Abbas Jafari-Dolatabadi told a local news agency that Seyed-Emami committed suicide after confessing to the charge and learning that others involved in the case had accused him of being a spy. North America-based friends and family of Seyed-Emami disputed those claims and called for further investigation. Iran-based callers to the Thursday edition of VOA Persians Straight Talk program also universally rejected Iranian officials assertions that the three recently reported prison deaths were cases of suicide. Several callers, who said they had been detained in Iran, said it is virtually impossible to commit suicide in an Iranian prison. One of those callers, who gave his name as Mohammad Hosein Heidari, said his prison uniform did not have a strap to hold up his pants. He said he initially thought the saggy pants were a form of psychological torture, but later realized that they were strapless to prevent prisoners from using straps to hang themselves. The mans account of being in detention could not be independently verified. Earlier this month, exiled Iranian rights activist Maryam Shafipour tweeted a similar point about steps taken by Iranian prison authorities to make it hard for prisoners to commit suicide. Shafipour, who was detained at Evin Prison in 2013 and released in 2015, said Iranian prison guards do not give any metal objects to prisoners, do not allow women to wear hijabs or head coverings inside their cells, and do not allow detainees to stay in a bathroom for more than 15 minutes. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani has not addressed the purported prisoner suicides directly. But he tried to strike a conciliatory tone on human rights in public remarks made during the anti-government protests of early January. He said the Iranian people have the right to peacefully criticize those in power, because the country belongs to them. He also said attention should be paid to demands of the people in the economic, cultural, social and security-related spheres. Bahreini said one positive development in Amnestys annual report was its first mention of discussions between Iran and the European Union related to human rights. Iranian and EU officials who met in Tehran last November held what they called an exploratory meeting about renewing a bilateral human rights dialogue. The Amnesty report criticized Iran for carrying out hundreds of executions in the past year after unfair trials, with at least two juvenile offenders confirmed by the group as among those executed. But Bahreini told VOA Persian that some executions were halted at the last minute because of additional information provided to authorities by family members and their lawyers. She said this was a sign that Iranian people are becoming better informed about human rights. More people are demanding respect for the rights of women, workers and minorities, despite government threats and oppression, Bahreini said. Behrooz Samadbeygi and Shahram Shahseta of VOAs Persian Service contributed to this report. When the first jet airplane lands Monday at Istanbul's newest airport, it will mark a milestone in what analysts see as a Turkish drive to accomplish with contracting dollars what it has not been able to achieve with traditional diplomacy. Long frustrated in its bid to join the European Union, analysts say President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has increasingly stressed trade and investment initiatives during his travels to European capitals, making his country second only to China in large-scale construction projects while muting the criticisms of Turkey's human rights record that have blocked accession to the E.U. Istanbul's third airport, when it officially opens in late October, will be able to handle up to 200 million passengers a year, outstripping most other global transport hubs and establishing Turkey as a crucial gateway linking Europe and Asia. European investment has been key to many of Turkey's mega-projects, such as the airport and a multi-billion-dollar wind turbine farm announced this week, and Erdogan is aggressively looking for more. "Our bilateral trade volume with Italy amounted to nearly $20 billion last year," he declared ahead of a scheduled visit to meet the pope at the Vatican earlier this month. "However, our potential is much higher than that. We aim to increase our bilateral trade volume to $30 billion in 2020." Italian companies have benefited from a number of Turkey's initiatives, winning several lucrative defense and construction contracts including for one of the world's tallest and widest suspension spans, Istanbul's Yavuz Sultan Selim Bridge, which was completed in 2016. The deals have been a boon for European companies during a period of austerity across the continent. Analysts say this point has not been lost on Turkey and that it increasingly sees such partnerships as useful tools in its efforts to quiet criticism over human rights and its military incursion into neighboring Syria. "Ankara is buying anybody and everybody with these infrastructure projects and everybody is happy with it," said political scientist Cengiz Aktar. "The Europeans get what they really want; they want to continue trade with Turkey," he said. "And to get the juicy infrastructural projects they are very happy with this. This is why they keep appeasing Turkey. And all these laments about what is happening to the rule of law in Turkey, this is just crocodile tears." Competition for those contracts in Europe is fierce, according to analysts. "These mega projects, construction infrastructure, tunnels etc., are incredibly lucrative," said political analyst Atilla Yesilada of Global Source Partners. "The loans taken out by the building consortium are given treasury guarantees," he said. "The cost is lower than a typical market loan. There is a revenue guarantee in dollar terms, so whether the project is profitable, does not make a difference - the government makes up the difference. It's like a treasure room, there is no way you can lose money on these." Arms deal with Britain Separately, Britain and Turkey have struck up a deep trade relationship, largely based on weapons sales, with Britain's BAE developing a military stealth jet for the Turkish armed forces. At the same time, London has voiced little criticism of Turkey over that country's human rights record or military operations in Syria. On Wednesday, the deputy chair of Turkey's ruling AK Party, Mehdi Eker, spoke at a meeting in the British parliament and voiced appreciation for Britain's stance on Turkey's ongoing military offensive in Syria against a Kurdish militia. "New realism" Ankara has already coined the phrase "new realism" to define its diplomatic strategy with European countries. Analysts suggest Turkish foreign policy is increasingly sidelining its relations with the European Union and instead focusing on bilateral relations with individual European countries, shaped by pragmatism. "Relations seem to be based on the idea, 'let's put our problems aside, not dwell on them, agree to disagree or whatever,'" said political columnist Semih Idiz of the Al Monitor website. "But there are practical issues that have to be addressed." "For all the bad vibes at the moment, there are construction and strategic arms deals being signed between Turkey and France and Italy," he said. "And after, the post-Brexit situation will undoubtedly speed up Turkish-British relations, not only because Turkey needs good allies in Europe, but because Britain needs the alternative markets and alternative partners." Idiz went on to say there are "a lot of areas for Turkish diplomacy to move in" as he referred Britain's pending exit from the European Union. Critics are increasingly citing the adage, "He who pays the piper calls the tune," in describing Europe's relations with Turkey. They say as long as Ankara has the money to dish out lucrative and seemingly endless contracts to European companies, then its "new realism" foreign policy with Europe seems set to continue. February marks the seventh anniversary of the Libyan revolution, but many Libyans believe there is not much to celebrate as they are still waiting for the birth of a democratic state. Since the fall of long-time leader Moammar Gadhafi in 2011, Libya has been torn apart by a power struggle waged by armed groups and competing governments. The lack of security and basic services has become part of daily life for Libyans. The oil industry, the main source of revenue, still has not returned to its pre-revolution earnings. Internal, external factors "Internally, Libyans still are suffering from the legacy of lack of institutions and the ability to formulate a political consensus that allows them to negotiate power through a constitution and build a state," said Esam Omeish, executive director of the Libyan-American Public Affairs Council. "They are still suffering from the overflow of weapons and the presence of militias that, unfortunately, prevent the ability to focus on political solutions rather than military ones." Omeish says regional intervention is the major destabilizing factor. He said Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and other states derailed the recovery in Libya by backing General Khalifa Haftar, the commander of the so-called Libyan National Army. Their backing, Omeish said, encouraged Haftar to resort to force instead of joining United Nations efforts to reach a political solution. Haftar has the backing of a rival government based in eastern Libya. Haftar opposes the national accord government in Tripoli, which was created by a U.N.-sponsored political agreement in 2015. Nayira Abada, a Libyan activist, thinks Libyans are moving toward a political consensus that could pave the way for a democratic state. "Looking to 2017 and 2018, we kind of understand and have more solid ground to reach a political agreement and we understood in general that we are reaching one goal, which is peace and security for Libya and the future generation," Abada said. U.N. mediation For three years, the U.N. and several Arab countries have tried to persuade the rival Libyan governments to comply with the 2015 deal. Abada said that to save the negotiating process, the new U.N. special representative for Libya, Ghassan Salame, introduced a three-stage plan: amend the disputed political agreement of 2015, reconstruct the U.N.-backed government in Tripoli, and draft a constitution ahead of legislative and presidential elections later this year. Aly Abu Zaakouk, a former minister of foreign affairs in the government of national salvation, argues that the most critical element needed is security. "Without security you cannot have elections, you cannot have civil society, so if those international actors can play a good role, then the elections can be doable and a hope for Libya can be achieved," Zaakouk said. But Abada thinks the new U.N. envoy could succeed. "I think everyone is excited about Ghassan Salame. He has done, so far, a good job by meeting and speaking to everyone from different parties and cities. In addition, he understood what the Libyans need and explained what they need to do in 2018. And we are seeing Salame speaking to key influencers to ensure that the elections run smoothly," Abada said. International community But even if Salame gets a deal, Omeish says Libya will need help from the international community, including the United States. "We have to use the will and the strength of the international players to force the spoilers, who are refusing to be part of the national accord path, in order to participate," Omeish said. "And we also need some international influence to be able to minimize meddling of the regional powers that has enabled some of the spoilers to continue on their path of imposing a military dictatorship despite the refusal of people to accept it." Omeish notes, however, that while Libyans are disappointed that the revolution did not immediately lead to a democratic transition, there was a massive turnout to mark the seventh anniversary. And demonstrators were making clear they see no future for dictatorship in Libya. President Emmanuel Macron has promised to prevent foreigners from buying up French farmland. The promise came as the centrist leader hosted a lunch for about 1,000 young farmers at the Elysee Palace, an event seen by critics as a bid to buy their goodwill ahead of the annual Paris International Agriculture Fair. For me, French agricultural lands are strategic investments upon which our sovereignty depends, so we cant allow hundreds of hectares of land to be bought by foreign powers without us knowing the aims of these purchases, Macron said. WATCH: International Agriculture Fair Opens Saturday in Paris He was alluding to news that a Chinese investment group had bought 2,700 hectares of prime farmland in central France in 2016 and 2017. The purchase provoked an outcry among French farmers and Macrons critics, who accuse the president of neglecting rural areas in favor of major urban centers. Chinese agriculture companies have been buying or leasing farms abroad for decades as they sought to feed an increasingly wealthy population of 1.4 billion people at home. Macron also sought to assuage fears among the farmers over trade talks with South America and an overhaul of subsidies for disadvantaged farm belts. Last week, farmers protested across France to oppose increased agricultural imports from South America, which they say are produced with lower standards than in Europe. Macron reiterated French red lines over food and farming standards and said he would demand a safeguard clause to suspend any trade accord if agricultural markets were disrupted. As investigators tried to piece together the motive in a grenade attack on the U.S. Embassy in Montenegro, concerns that the incident could shatter improved stability in the Balkans showed just how fragile the situation remains as the West and Russia battle for influence in the region. A 43-year-old Serbian war veteran threw an explosive device onto the U.S. Embassy compound in Podgorica overnight Thursday before blowing himself up outside the compound, the Balkan country's police said. The U.S. State Department said it did not know the motive or whether the assault was meant to be a suicide attack. But regional experts said it highlights how volatile the situation remains just below the surface in Montenegro, the NATO security alliance's newest member, and the region as a whole. "Since Jan. 1, we've seen a political assassination in Kosovo, a bombing attack in Montenegro, and Russian-trained paramilitaries assisting the rearming of the Dodik regime in Bosnia. The temperature keeps rising in the Balkans but few in Brussels or Washington seem concerned," said Jasmin Mujanovic, a political analyst and author of Hunger And Fury: The Crisis Of Democracy In The Balkans, based in Durham, North Carolina. "We will have to see how this develops, as a political point and narrative especially, within the context of the broader confrontation between Russia and the EU and NATO in the region; the target is highly symbolic and charged in that regard, especially given the attacker's apparent military background. And also because of Montenegro's only recent NATO accession, the apparent Russian [attempted] coup to thwart it, and the looming elections which are paving the way for the return of [former Prime Minister] Milo Dukanovic," he added. Although it's at the center of a historically volatile part of Europe, Montenegro split from Serbia in 2006 without the violence that accompanied similar moves by other republics in the former Yugoslavia, such as Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, and Kosovo. Podgorica has recognized nearby Kosovo as a sovereign country, something Serbia has refused for a decade to do, yet it also has a sizable Russian population, attracted by its coastline and fair weather. Still, the Balkan nation of around 600,000 is in the process of tightening cooperation with Washington after becoming the newest NATO ally in June. Its access to the Adriatic makes it a strategic asset for the security alliance, but the move has irked the Kremlin, which is fighting to maintain influence in the region. Montenegrin officials have accused several Serbian and Russian citizens of plotting a coup in 2016 parliamentary elections, claiming they planned to assassinate the prime minister and install a pro-Russian leadership to halt the NATO bid. 'Constant decline of democracy' The embassy incident also came while Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov was on a two-day visit to neighboring Serbia, which is juggling its close, warm ties with Moscow with an effort to join the European Union. "The security situation in the Western Balkans did not worsen in the past years in terms of violence, firearms use, or stability in general. However, the region continues to be a volatile geopolitical arena, with different players involved," said Marika Djolai, a conflict, peace, and development consultant and a London-based member of The Balkans In Europe Policy Advisory Group. "Issues such as corruption, money laundering, trafficking of drugs, people, and firearms continue to reinforce fragility and threaten stability. There is a trend of constant decline of democracy where the security continues to be an additional burden rather than part of a solution for this problem, showing clear disconnect," she added. Very short fuse Even if it may no longer be the powder keg it once was, analysts warned, the Balkan region remains a crisis zone with a very short fuse. Kosovo, which celebrated a decade of independence earlier this month, is still deeply divided between its dominant majority ethnic-Albanian population and its minority Serbs. The depth of that rift was seen in January with the assassination of a relatively moderate Serbian politician in the northern Kosovar city of Mitrovica and reactions that included Kosovo Prime Minister Ramush Haradinaj's suggestion of "institutions beyond Kosovo." Mitrovica is a divided city, a front line in the extended standoff between Belgrade, which does not recognize Kosovo, and Pristina. Hardly a month goes by without an incident there, despite the presence of EU and NATO forces. In Bosnia-Herzegovina, reports of paramilitary formations and news of major arms purchases by the Bosnian Serb police from neighboring Serbia have raised fears that the frozen Yugoslav civil war may be thawing. Meanwhile Macedonia, which also has a sizable ethnic-Albanian minority, last year almost descended into chaos when scores of demonstrators stormed parliament and attacked several lawmakers after an ethnic Albanian deputy was elected speaker, part of a two-year political crisis that sparked four elections, none of which produced a stable government. "To prevent political radicalization and ethnic polarization that could ignite armed conflicts, a more vigorous Western Balkan strategy led by Washington is urgently needed," according to Janusz Bugajski, a senior fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) in Washington. "Drift and delay in dealing with the Western Balkans can give a false sense of security. After years of relative peace and progress, a new crisis can erupt when ambitious nationalist politicians and foreign governments are intent on provoking armed conflicts to gain power or expand their influence," he added, saying it was too early to determine the impact of the Montenegro attack on policy or the region. For centuries, elephants have had a rich and proud history in Myanmar. Throughout the countrys past, the animals have been used for everything, including transportation, agriculture, construction and even warfare. For the military government that ruled the country for several decades until it ceded partial control to civilian government in 2016, the white elephant in particular was regarded as a symbol of power and prestige. But its survival is under threat. There are about 2,000 wild elephants left in Myanmar today, plus an estimated 5,000 that are captive. But conservationists warn that the loss of their habitat, increased conflict with humans, and the illegal trafficking of elephants and their parts could result in the extinction of the Asian Elephant in Myanmar. Earlier this month, the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environmental Conservation published the Myanmar Elephant Conservation Plan (MECAP). The plan, produced in collaboration with several prominent wildlife groups, aims to guide policies on the survival of elephants in Myanmar for the next 100 years and beyond. The Government of Myanmar decided to commission a review of the status, distribution and threats to elephants, Anthony Lynam, a senior advisor for the Wildlife Conservation Society told VOA by email. It is a visionary plan that will need bold action on the part of the government and supporting agencies for it to succeed. The MECAP is a plan that requires action on the part of multiple stakeholders for it to work. The challenge is to see how the Government can coordinate the plan to see this happen, he said. MECAP includes a series of 10-year plans as well as an overall strategy for what elephant conservation in Myanmar should look like. Skin in high demand One of the biggest threats to the survival of elephants in Myanmar is the illegal killing of the animals, particularly for their skin. It has been argued that poaching is a relatively minor threat to Asian Elephants because some males and all females lack tusks, the report said. However, the reality is that elephants are poached for a variety of other products (including meat and leather) in addition to ivory. Christy Williams, country director for the World Wildlife Fund in Myanmar, told VOA there had been a sudden increase in the number of elephants being killed for their skin in Myanmar in recent years. Elephants being targeted for their skin was something that happened occasionally, but then in 2016 or 2017 we started seeing that about one elephant was being killed every week, he said. Williams said when WWF researchers traveled to border towns in 2016, only a few markets were selling elephant skins. But when they returned about a year later, about 80 percent [of shops] were selling elephant skin, he said. One of the major challenges to combating the illegal trade of elephant parts, said Williams, was a lack of capacity, including limited budgets and insufficient staff. Additionally, he said, many of the markets selling the products are in border areas that are not directly under the governments control. Recommendations included improving the capacity of rangers on the ground, as well as educating people that the trading of elephant products is illegal. Another major challenge was the increase in conflicts between humans and elephants, particularly with the mammal's dwindling natural habitat, said Mark Grinley, project manager, Fauna & Flora International Myanmar. The natural habitat is being lost to the expansion of plantations, largescale agro industries and particularly palm oil, Grinley told VOA. The effects of the increased interaction between humans and elephants has included the loss of livelihoods for communities, as well as injuries and potential death both for humans and elephants. Recommendations for dealing with the issue included establishing a national management plan, supporting or creating local capacity and establishing early warning systems so that people know when elephants are nearby. As Myanmar undergoes development, the issue is unlikely to disappear, said Grinley. As the forest habitat is shrinking, Im afraid these problems are going to be more common, he said. Rotomac group owner Vikram Kothari and his son Rahul were sent to a one-day transit remand by Delhi's Patiala Court in relation to Rs 3,695 crore loan default case. The father-son duo will now be produced before a special court in Lucknow. The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) had arrested Kothari and his son on Thursday for allegedly defrauding a consortium of banks of Rs 3,695 crore. The duo was produced before Additional Chief Metropolitan Magistrate Samar Vishal where the agency demanded two-day transit remand. Kothari, on behalf of Rotomac Global Pvt Limited, had availed loans worth Rs 2,919 from a consortium of seven banks led by Bank of India to 2008 onwards, according to a CBI FIR. The amount increased to INR 3,695 crore, including the accrued interest, because of repeated defaults on payment, the agency said. The principal exposure of the banks regarding the loan is Bank of India Rs 754.77 crore, Bank of Baroda Rs 456.63 crore, Overseas Bank of India Rs 771.07 crore, Union Bank of India Rs 458.95 crore, Allahabad Bank Rs 330.68 crore, Bank of Maharashtra R49.82 crore and Oriental Bank of Commerce Rs 97.47 crore, the agency said. Bank of Baroda (BoB), one of seven lenders to Kothari, approached the CBI to file an FIR against Kothari, fearing that he may flee from India like diamond businessman Nirav Modi and his uncle Mehul Choksi, who are wanted in Rs 11,400-crore PNB scam. Moreover, Rotomac group of companies have been asked by the Income Tax Department to pay Rs 106 crores in taxes. The tax department had reportedly issued a note to Kothari and his family, asking why prosecution proceedings should not be initiated against the promoters for alleged tax evasion. The Income Tax Department had conducted raids against Rotomac group of companies back in 2014. The following assessment which concluded in 2017 led to detection of alleged income on which tax has not been paid. "Prosecution has already been initiated. Tax demand worth Rs 106 crore has also been raised against the company," a government official was quoted by Moneycontrol. The tax department had provisionally attached four immovable properties related to the Rotomac group on Wednesday, three in Kanpur and one in Ahmedabad. Earlier this week, 15 bank account of the group have been attached in various banks across Uttar Pradesh. The inquiry reveals Vikram Kothari used different methods to seek loan from these banks. As per the allegations, in a clear violation of FEMA (Foreign Exchange Management Act) Rules, he used loans availed for export to help his Kanpur-based company. He allegedly created many fake companies by furnishing forged documents to seek loans from these banks. Kothari had availed Rs 485-crore loan from Mumbai-based Union Bank of India and Rs 352-crore loan from Kolkata-based Allahabad Bank. A year later, he didn't pay either the interest or the loan. Last year, BoB, after declared him a wilful defaulter for the loan default, and he moved the Allahabad high court seeking removal of his name. The court declared he was "wrongly declared a wilful defaulter by BoB despite having offered assets worth over Rs 300 crore since the date of default". Anger and concern are growing among a group of parents in northern Nigeria, who say as many as 100 of their daughters are still missing after an attack by the Boko Haram militants. Government officials in Yobe state say some 50 girls remain unaccounted for in the Monday evening attack on Dapchi village. There have been conflicting reports over the number of girls accounted for and how many remain missing. Regional police and the education ministry initially denied that the students were abducted. Instead, they were said to be hiding in the bush after fleeing the attack. Nigerian authorities often downplay similar incidents. The Nigerian military on Wednesday claimed to have rescued 76 girls. But Yobe state governor Ibrahim Gaidam on Thursday visited the school where the Boko Haram militants struck and told parents that contrary to claims by the Nigerian army, no girls were rescued. Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari tweeted Wednesday evening that he would do everything he could to bring back the girls. Nigeria's central government repeatedly claimed in the past year that Boko Haram has been defeated. But the group continues to carry out deadly suicide bombings and other attacks. Boko Haram, which loosely translates as "Western education is forbidden," pledged allegiance to the Islamic State in 2015 and has launched a number of attacks on schools. The militia horrified the world when it abducted 276 girls from a boarding school in Chibok almost four years ago. That abduction sparked a worldwide outrage and triggered formation of the Bring Back Our Girls movement. Nearly four years later, more than 100 of the Chibok girls are still missing. Since Boko Haram began its insurgency in 2009, more than 20,000 people have been killed and 2 million others forced to leave their homes in northeastern Nigeria, Africa's most populous country. The group has used kidnapping as a weapon of war, abducting thousands of women and young girls, in addition to boys and men of fighting age. North Korea on Thursday accused United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres of "picking a quarrel" with Pyongyang by praising international sanctions for putting pressure on the country over its nuclear and ballistic missile programs. North Korea's U.N. mission said in a statement that Guterres had made "reckless remarks" during a speech last week to the Munich Security Conference. "This is nothing but an absurd sophistry inappropriate to his duty as Secretary-General of the United Nations and only make us to think whether he is a kind of henchman who is representing the United States," the North Korean U.N. mission said. The governments of U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un are in a standoff over the North's development of nuclear weapons capable of hitting the United States. Months of tension were marked by Trump and Kim exchanging insults, fueling fears of war, until this month when the relationship between North Korea and U.S. ally South Korea showed signs of thawing. The United States was to blame for the situation on the Korean Peninsula, said the North Korean U.N. mission, criticizing Guterres for not mentioning Washington in his Munich speech. Guterres told the conference: "It is important to note that the unity that the Security Council has been able to ... put, through sanctions, a very meaningful pressure over North Korea, and that pressure in my opinion is absolutely essential to be maintained." The Council has unanimously boosted sanctions on North Korea since 2006 in a bid to choke funding for Pyongyang's nuclear and ballistic missile programs, banning exports including coal, iron, lead, textiles and seafood, and capping imports of crude oil and refined petroleum products. The North Korean U.N. mission asked Guterres to push the Security Council to welcome "the process of improved inter-Korean relations and discouraging neighboring countries from disturbing the process." Kim Jong Un surprised the world when he said North Korea would join the Winter Olympics in South Korea, while South Korean President Moon Jae-in has delayed military exercises, feted Kim's sister at the Olympics opening ceremony in Pyeongchang, and given conditional consent to a summit. Guterres said in his speech that "even if the relations between the two Koreas improved, let's be clear that is not the central question we are facing. The central question remains the question of denuclearization." College campuses are ignoring the Constitution and spreading communist manifestos, said the National Rifle Association's Wayne LaPierre in an impassioned speech Thursday to a conservative group in Washington. "The U.S. Constitution is ignored" at U.S. universities, LaPierre, the NRA's chief operating officer, said to the Conservative Political Action Conference. "On college campuses, a communist manifesto is one of the most frequently assigned texts. Karl Marx is the most assigned economist." Marxist theory espouses socialism and communism, and is opposed to capitalism, on which the American economy is based. LaPierre's fiery speech, which preceded a speech by Vice President Mike Pence, accused "Democrats, liberals, European socialists and intellectual elites" of using the mass shooting at a Florida high school where 17 were killed last week as a "shameful politicization of tragedy." Since that shooting, in which students and teachers were slain by a 19-year-old former student with a semiautomatic assault weapon, high school students have rallied across the country to find solutions to gun violence in the U.S. The U.S. leads the world in mass shootings and gun possession, according to sources including the Gun Violence Archive. LaPierre said the U.S. should "immediately harden our schools" and protect "open soft targets for anyone bent on mass murder." In a meeting later in the day, President Donald Trump backed up LaPierre and the NRA. "We have to harden our schools, not soften them," the president said. "I really think the NRA wants to do what's right. I mean, they're very close to me, I'm very close to them, they're very, very great people." But he dismissed the idea of having armed security officers filling the hallways of high schools. "You would have 100, 150 security guys," Trump said. "Who wants that many security guards standing all over the place, loaded up with guns? But you could have concealed [weapons] on the teachers, they wouldn't know the people, nobody would know who they are, and it is a tremendous threat." Those teachers would receive bonuses, the president said. On social media, teachers across the country responded with the hashtag #ArmMeWith to reply to those suggestions. "#ArmMeWith enough counselors and social workers to meet the social and emotional needs of all students," read one placard on the Teach and Shine page on Facebook. "ArmMeWith well-funded schools that allow for smaller class sizes and more resource experts," said another, pointing to limited school funding in many school districts across the U.S. "OK. So the answer to regular mass murders at American schools is to arm the teachers," tweeted Michael Moran, observing from London with 27,000 followers. "But how are they going to pay for guns if they can't even afford pencils?" Pope Francis invited Catholics and members of all other religions Friday to observe a day of prayer, fasting and initiatives for peace, dedicated in particular to South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The pope's call for a rejection of violence and conflict comes as the Catholic charity, Caritas, warns of a major humanitarian emergency in the DRC. The pope said that while prayer is always an effective resolution, more can be done. Francis said each person "can concretely say 'no' to violence to the extent that it depends on him or herself because victories obtained with violence are false victories, while working for peace does good for all." Hundreds of Congolese and South Sudanese answered the pope's call Friday by attending special masses both at home and abroad. Pope Francis planned to visit South Sudan and the DRC last year, but was forced to postpone his trip due to ongoing conflict. South Sudan's conflict began in 2013 as a power struggle between President Salva Kiir and Riek Machar, who was Kiir's deputy. The war has driven 2 million people from the country and left more than a million others a step away from famine, according to the United Nations. The situation in both countries has deteriorated with increasing violence. Caritas predicts that 2.2 million children in the DRC will suffer from severe acute malnutrition this year, and 13.1 million people will need aid in order to survive. "The U.N. are not able to gather enough resources to be able to face the immediate problems of these people who are dying of lack of food, who are dying of lack of medicine," said Michel Roy, secretary general of Caritas Internationalis. "The situation is really a terrible one." In addition, elections are not being held due to the violence and existing insecurity, but Roy says this is the status quo that those in power want to maintain. And, he says, the international community is not doing its part either. "It seems it's not in the interest of major powers that peace comes back to the Congo. The international powers are not engaging mainly for economic reasons. Congo is very rich in natural resources of all kinds," Roy said. The solution to the DRC's current situation, according to Roy, is political; however, there appears to be a lack of will to change things. He adds the country has only plunged into greater uncertainty since President Joseph Kabila refused to step down when Kabila's constitutional mandate expired in 2016. "We know what the solution is," Roy said. "The solution is dialogue that will bring new elections and peace." Congolese bishops have repeatedly appealed to the international community to aid the political process and urged non-violent resistance at home. Using strong language, the country's bishops recently called on the entire population to take control of its own destiny by peaceful means. Under growing legal pressure from special counsel Robert Mueller, former Trump campaign aides Paul Manafort and Rick Gates took divergent paths Friday, with Gates pleading guilty to two felony counts and Manafort facing new charges in the Russia probe. Gates, 45, appeared in federal court in Washington to enter a plea of guilty to one count of conspiracy against the United States and one count of lying to FBI and special counsel investigators as recently as Feb. 1 while he was negotiating a plea agreement with Muellers office. As part of his plea deal, Gates agreed to cooperate with Muellers probe into whether the Trump election campaign colluded with Russia. He could potentially testify against Manafort as well. In return, prosecutors agreed to drop all other charges brought against Gates in two indictments handed down in recent months. The guilty plea came a day after a grand jury handed down a new indictment against Gates and Manafort, escalating the pressure on the two men. But while Gates cut a deal with Muellers office, Trumps former campaign chairman, Manafort, 68, remained defiant, even as Mueller announced new charges against him. Manafort indictment In a four-count superseding indictment disclosed shortly after Gates pleaded guilty, prosecutors accused Manafort of secretly paying former European Union officials to lobby members of the U.S. Congress on behalf of Ukraine. In a statement released Friday, Manafort said he had no plans to follow Gates lead and plead guilty. I continue to maintain my innocence, he said. I had hoped and expected my business colleague would have had the strength to continue the battle to prove our innocence, Manafort added in his statement. For reasons yet to surface, he chose to do otherwise. Gates could face 57 to 71 months in prison, but prosecutors could ask for a lower sentence based on his cooperation, Federal Judge Amy Jackson said. Before his plea, Gates faced decades in prison over a raft of charges brought by Mueller. Gates is the third former Trump campaign associate to plead guilty to criminal charges and agree to cooperate with Muellers investigation into whether there was collusion between the Trump team and Russia during the 2016 election. Former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos last year pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about their interactions with Russian officials. Meanwhile, Muellers office filed a superseding indictment against Manafort, charging him with paying former European politicians to lobby in the United States on behalf of a pro-Russia political faction in Ukraine. 2017 indictment Manafort and Gates were initially charged in a 12-count indictment in October in connection with a multimillion-dollar money laundering conspiracy tied to their political work in Ukraine. They also were accused of failing to register as agents of a foreign government. Manafort headed the Trump campaign from June to August 2016. Gates was brought into the campaign by Manafort and stayed on after Manafort was fired a few months later following revelations about his Russian connections. WATCH: Gates leaves court house The charges against Gates and Manafort are not related to a key question Mueller has been investigating since his appointment last May whether there was any coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia. Last week, Mullers office announced charges against 13 Russian nationals and three Russian entities for conspiring to disrupt the U.S. elections and tilt it in favor of the real estate tycoon. The indictment, however, did not allege collusion on the part of the Trump campaign. A generation of Rohingya children in Myanmar and Bangladesh will be condemned to a perpetual life in limbo unless coordinated international action is taken to end the violence and discrimination against the Rohingya people, according to the UNICEF report Lives in Limbo. More than half a million Rohingya refugee children are estimated to have fled to Bangladesh. The report by the U.N. children's fund says that these children face multiple dangers, including the imminent threat of floods, landslides and waterborne disease outbreaks during the upcoming monsoon and cyclone seasons, as well as the exploitation and early marriages that arise from living in congested, slumlike conditions. However, the situation for the estimated 185,000 children who remain in Myanmar's Rakhine state is considered even more grim, according to Simon Ingram, author of the report. He says families there reportedly are living isolated, fearful lives with minimal access to basic services. "I think, if we are looking for an indicator of the situation on the ground, there is the fact that people are still continuing to come at the rate of something like 1,000 or more a week, crossing into Bangladesh," Ingram said. "So, I think that that number itself speaks to the situation on the ground the anxiety, the fear, the continued threat of violence and the hope of those people and those communities." UNICEF is urging the Myanmar government to end the violence, to lift restrictions on Rohingya freedom of movement in Rakhine state, to provide for their basic needs, and to grant unlimited access to humanitarian agencies. UNICEF says the nearly 700,000 Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh will not return to their homes in Myanmar without guarantees of safety. In the meantime, it says, education offers one of the best opportunities for Rohingya children to achieve a better future. Five Congolese nationals were killed Thursday as the Rwandan police and army used live ammunition to disperse refugees who had spent three days camped outside the offices of the U.N. refugee agency in western Rwanda, the country's police announced Friday. According to a statement issued by police, We used proportional force that left 20 rioters and seven police officers injured. They were rushed to hospital. Five rioters unfortunately succumbed to their wounds." Police said they also arrested 15 refugees, accusing them of staging illegal demonstrations, taking hostages and inciting violence. Refugees say the number of deaths could be higher than announced by the police. On Thursday, the U.N. refugee agency UNHCR called for calm and restraint following reports of a protest turning violent in Rwandas Kiziba refugee camp. The camp in the Karongi district houses more than 17,000 refugees from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The protesters were reportedly angry about a recent 25 percent reduction in food assistance. Refugee protection and safety is our top priority, Ahmed Baba Fall, the UNHCR representative in Rwanda, said in a statement Friday. The refugees are demanding to be resettled in another country. If that does not happen, they say, they will walk back into the DRC. Refugees have the right to return to their country whenever they wish. But we urge refugees to make an informed decision and not to listen to misinformation or rumors, said Baba Fall. Rwanda hosts more than 173,000 refugees in six camps, including Kiziba, where some Congolese have lived for more than 20 years. Amazon's assault on the retail industry has brought misery to traditional retailers without a strong web presence. Less well noticed is the patchwork of European companies that are turning the e-commerce revolution to their advantage, supplying online giants with everything from forklift trucks and storage space to cardboard boxes and automated warehouses. Mainly bricks-and-mortar retailers such as Debenhams, H&M, and Marks & Spencer have faced a torrid few years as stretched consumers increasingly look online for bargains. Online retail sales are growing at double-digit percentage rates in every western European country, according to consultancy the Centre for Retail Research. In Britain, a fifth of transactions are now conducted online, a five-fold increase over the last decade. The world's dominant online retailer Amazon, whose shares have soared 73 percent in the last year, is outside the remit of most European investors because it is U.S. listed, so they have had to look for other ways of buying into the trend. One is investing in companies that have benefited from the rise of e-commerce. On February 16, warehouse owner Segro's shares hit a decade-high after it said space-hungry clients, many in online retail and logistics, continued to buy up storage. "There is a bull market in impatience," said Gary Paulin, head of global equities at broker Northern Trust. "Consumers want things sooner, faster, now." He advises clients to buy shares in Kion, a German forklift truck-maker that is automating warehouses for online retailers, speeding up deliveries in the process. He also flagged a turnaround at online supermarket Ocado. The company has long been targeted by short-sellers betting its share price will fall, but recently it has signed tie-ups with food retailers Casino and Sobeys, and its shares have more-than-doubled since November. Martin Todd, a fund manager at Hermes Investment Management, owns shares in Kion as well as DS Smith, a cardboard-box maker which supplies Amazon as well as a number of other online retailers. DS Smith is developing technology to custom-make boxes for Amazon that will help reduce large gaps in packages that increase freight costs. "You might think it is a pretty unsexy business ... [but] it is getting more high tech in what is traditionally a very low tech industry," Todd said. The company recently entered Britain's blue-chip FTSE 100 index for the first time. Buying some stocks exposed to online retail does not come cheap. Ocado shares are currently trading at more than 800 times forecast earnings, according to Eikon data. John Bennett, head of European equities at Janus Henderson Investors, said while traditional retailers were "absolutely dying," stocks such as Kion were too expensive for him to own. A judge in South Sudan has sentenced South African citizen William John Endley to death by hanging, after he was charged with spying, illegal entry to South Sudan and conspiracy to overthrow President Salva Kiir's government. Endley worked for rebel leader Riek Machar as a security adviser and was arrested in August 2016, days after fighting flared between government forces and Machar's bodyguards. At the end of Endley's five-month trial, presiding Judge Ladu Armenio read his final ruling in Arabic and a court official translated it into English. Armenio sentenced Endley to serve two consecutive prison terms of nine years and four months each, after which he will be hanged. Endley has 17 days to appeal. During the proceedings, it was reported to the court that Endley served as a major general while working for Machar's group, the SPLA-IO, and that he came to Juba with Machar in 2016 when Machar became first vice president, after the previous year's peace agreement. The prosecution also told the court that Endley procured firearms and ammunition and helped the rebel movement with military expertise, which according to the court is a violation of the South Sudan National Security Act 2014 and South Sudan's Criminal Procedure Act. Armenio said Endley's actions endangered state security and South Sudan's economy. Endley's attorney, Gar Adel, rejected the court's ruling, noting that Endley's previous attorney had withdrawn from the case. "The state was supposed to assign a lawyer temporarily. ... But he [Endley] had attended two sessions without a lawyer. When I came in, I lodged an application so that I was given time to talk to my client and to familiarize myself with the records, [but] the court refused," Adel told VOA's South Sudan in Focus. Endley's first defense team was led by Monyluak Kuol Alor, who withdrew from the case a month ago, arguing that Endley should be freed under Article 8 of the Cessation of Hostilities Agreement, which was signed in December by the warring parties. The clause requires all sides in South Sudan to release prisoners of war and political detainees. Endley first appeared in court in October with co-defendant James Gatdet Dak, Machar's spokesman. Two weeks ago, the court sentenced Gatdet to a 21-year jail term to be followed by death by hanging, sparking immediate condemnation from national and international human rights groups. U.N. Mission in South Sudan chief David Shearer condemned the death sentences for Endley and Gatdet. Family's reaction Endley's sister, Charmaine Quinn, said her family in Cape Town was devastated by the news. "We didn't expect this and we really are feeling very tired emotionally. We are really feeling so helpless," Quinn told South Sudan in Focus. Quinn said she has not received any word from the South African Embassy in Juba regarding her brother's sentence. She said her family has lodged concerns with the government in Johannesburg, which said the government would be releasing a statement soon, but that "it was just waiting for some information to come back." Quinn said that in the beginning, when her brother was arrested, the family felt it was not getting enough assistance from the government. "Then they were able to help us establish that he was still alive and there was some assistance offered to us when he was ill, and we were able to send money to him and get parcels to him," she said. She said she also has received phone calls from her brother. Now that her brother's sentence has been finalized, Quinn said she is trying to stay positive that "the government will come on board and give us the assistance we have been asking for." Quinn told VOA the family feels "the sentence is very unfair and we would like them to have the death penalty lifted, and with the appeal we would like to have him extradited back to South Africa" for a new trial. U.S. President Donald Trump has called a meeting early next week with key senators and Cabinet officials to discuss potential changes to biofuels policy, which is coming under increasing pressure after a Pennsylvania refiner blamed the regulation for its bankruptcy, according to four sources familiar with the matter. The meeting comes as the oil industry and corn lobby clash over the future of the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), a decade-old regulation that requires refiners to cover the cost of mixing biofuels such as corn-based ethanol into their fuel. Trumps engagement reflects the high political stakes of protecting jobs in a key electoral state. Oil refiner Philadelphia Energy Solutions (PES), which employs more than 1,000 people in Philadelphia, declared bankruptcy last month and blamed the regulation for its demise. Oil, farm state senators The meeting, scheduled for Tuesday, will include Republican Senators Ted Cruz of Texas, Chuck Grassley and Joni Ernst of Iowa, along with Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt, Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue, and potentially Energy Secretary Rick Perry, according to the four sources, who asked not to be named because they were not authorized to speak publicly on the matter. One source said the meeting would focus on short-term solutions to help PES continue operating. PES is asking a bankruptcy judge to shed roughly $350 million of its current RFS compliance costs, owed to the EPA which administers the program, as part of its restructuring package. The other sources said the meeting will consider whether to cap prices for biofuel credits, let higher-ethanol blends be sold all year, and efforts to get speculators out of the market. Officials at the EPA, Agriculture Department, and Energy Department declined to comment. A White House official, Kelly Love, said she had no announcement on the matter at this time. The offices of Cruz, Ernst and Grassley did not immediately return requests for comment. The sources said the options moving forward would be constrained by political and legal realities that have derailed previous efforts at reform. The Trump administration has considered changes to the RFS sought by refiners this year, including reducing the amount of biofuels required to be blended annually under the regulation or shifting the responsibility for blending to supply terminals, only to retreat in the face of opposition from corn-state lawmakers. Narrow options, broad resistance The EPA is expected to weigh in officially in the coming weeks on request by PES to the bankruptcy judge to be released from its compliance obligations. But any such move would likely draw a backlash from other U.S. refiners, who have no hope of receiving a waiver. Under the RFS, refiners must earn or purchase blending credits called RINs to prove they are complying with the regulation. As biofuels volume quotas have increased, so have prices for the credits, meaning refiners that invested in blending facilities have benefited while those that have not, such as PES, have had to pay up. PES said its RFS compliance costs exceeded its payroll last year, and ranked only behind the cost of purchasing crude oil. Other issues may have contributed to PES financial difficulties. Reuters reported that PES investor backers withdrew from the company more than $594 million in a series of dividend-style distributions since 2012, even as regional refining economics slumped. Regulators and lawmakers have been considering how to cut the cost of the RFS to the oil industry. In recent months, for example, the EPA has contemplated expanding its use of an exemption available to small refineries, a move that would likely push down RIN prices, but which both the oil and corn industries have said would be unfair. Cruz last year proposed limiting the price of RINs to 10 cents, a fraction of their current value an idea that was roundly rejected by the ethanol industry as a disincentive for new ethanol blending infrastructure investment. Senator John Cornyn, also a Texas Republican, is preparing draft legislation to overhaul the RFS in Congress that would include the creation of a new specialized RIN credit intended to push down prices, but it too faces resistance from both the corn and oil lobbies. After facing criticism from various quarters for letting Nirav Modi slip out of the country, the government on Friday moved the Mumbai bench of the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) to confiscate all the properties owned by beleaguered diamantaire Nirav Modi and his uncle Mehul Choksi. Ministry of Corporate Affairs (MCA) is said to have moved the NCLT for the attachment of assets belonging to Modi's wife Ami Modi, and brother Neeshal. According to a report in Mint, the Centre is looking to attach all assets of around 114 companies owned or controlled by Modi and Choksi. Meanwhile, fresh summons were issued against Nirav Modi, after he failed to appear and depose before the ED on Thursday. Stepping up its crackdown in the Rs 11,400 crore fraud involving Nirav Modi and his uncle Mehul Choksi, the income tax department on Thursday seized Gitanjali Gems' Rs 1,200 crore SEZ unit in Hyderabad. ICAI, the regulating body of chartered accountants, has also issued a show-cause notices to the auditors of PNB and Gitanjali Gems. This comes close on the heels of reports claiming that PNB has roped in PwC to look into India's biggest banking fraud and to make a case against 'absconding jewellers' Nirav Modi and Mehul Choksi. ICAI, the government-run regulator, has written to the Reserve Bank of India asking it to provide the list of the corporate borrowers of public sector banks which have an outstanding loan amount of Rs 2,000 crore and above. The list would be examined by the Financial Reporting Review Board of ICAI for any possible violation of applicable standards of accounting as well as auditing. Though the whereabouts of the celebrity jeweller, who goes by the title of 'haut diamantaire', are still unknown, the agencies want to cripple Nirav Modi's empire in India before zeroing in on his properties across Hong Kong, Belgium, US and Dubai. Besides, the institute has summoned a deputy general manager of the bank seeking details about the fraud. The deputy general manager of the bank has been summoned "to appear and produce a copy of FIR, all related documents in the said fraud, give details of the modus operandi used in the fraud", it added. "The Disciplinary Directorate of ICAI has issued show-cause notices to all central statutory auditors of PNB. Similarly, central statutory auditors who have done quarterly review of PNB have also been issued show cause notice. "Auditor of Gitanjali Gems Ltd has also been issued the show-cause notice in the matter," the ICAI said in a statement. The Enforcement Directorate (ED) on Thursday seized Nirav Modi's nine luxury cars, including a Rolls Royce Ghost, Porsche Panamera, two Mercedes Benz GL class, three Honda cars and a Toyota Fortuner. The CBI had earlier sealed a sea-facing property of beleaguered celebrity jeweller Nirav Modi in Alibaug near Mumbai. The ED has asked Sebi to freeze Mehil Choksi's shares in Gitanjali Gems. But what comes as a dampener for the investigative agencies is the fact that almost 78.56 per cent of the promoters' shares in Gitanjali Gems were pledged in December. At the end of quarter ending December 2017, Mehul Choksi held a 27.76 per cent shares of Gitanjali Gems valued now at Rs 94 crore. The ICAI has also written to the Ministry of Corporate Affairs requesting it to ask SEBI, CBI, ED and PNB to share their findings to enable it to accelerate the action against any chartered accountant who have played any role in this fraud. It has also set up a high powered group to study the systemic issues in the Punjab National Bank matter and suggest remedial measures and improvement in the banking system; and any other matter incidental thereto. The first meeting of the group is scheduled today. President Donald Trump said Thursday that he may pull the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency out of California, an idea so unlikely that some of his staunchest critics dismissed it as an empty taunt against the state over immigration policies. Withdrawing ICE, partially or completely, runs counter to Trumps record of dramatically increasing deportation arrests and pledging to beef up the agency with an additional 10,000 employees. The administration has been threatening more not less immigration enforcement in California in response to a new state law that sharply limits cooperation with federal authorities. The presidents suggestion, however impractical, was his latest attention-grabbing statement to pressure so-called sanctuary jurisdictions, which the administration claims are a magnet for immigrants who commit crimes. Pulling ICE out Frankly, if I wanted to pull our people from California you would have a crime nest like youve never seen in California, he said at the White House during a meeting with state and local officials on school safety and gun violence. All Id have to do is say is, ICE and Border Patrol, let California alone, youd be inundated. You would see crime like nobody has ever seen crime in this country. If we ever pulled our ICE out, and we ever said, Hey, let California alone, let them figure it out for themselves, in two months theyd be begging for us to come back. They would be begging. And you know what, Im thinking about doing it, he continued. Withdrawing ICE from the state with the largest number of people in the country illegally, two of its largest detention centers and thousands of investigators had never been floated or seriously considered. ICE referred questions to the White House, where spokesman Raj Shah said the administration wanted California to actually enforce immigration law rather than get in the way of it. The National ICE Council, the union representing detention officers and an early supporter of Trumps presidential bid, didnt immediately respond to a request for comment. ICE street presence Thomas Homan, ICEs acting director, has been saying for months that limits on cooperation in local jails would lead to a more active street presence of deportation officers. California better hold on tight, he told Fox News last month. Theyre about to see a lot more special agents, a lot more deportation officers in the state of California. If the politicians in California dont want to protect their communities, then ICE will. Last Friday, as ICE announced results of an operation in the Los Angeles area that included more than 200 arrests, Homan declared, Fewer jail arrests mean more arrests on the street, and that also requires more resources, which is why we are forced to send additional resources to those areas to meet operational needs and officer safety. Gangs and MS-13 Trump told the group that included Attorney General Jeff Sessions that his administration has targeted members of the violent MS-13 gang but has been getting no help from the state of California. Of MS-13, he said, They actually have franchises going to Los Angeles. Capt. Patricia Sandoval, a Los Angeles police spokeswoman, said MS-13 was not one of the most active gangs in LA and the citys police chief said in a statement Wednesday that they have been able to shrink MS-13s sphere of influence in Los Angeles. While it would be foolish to minimize the lethal brutality of street gangs and in particular MS-13 here in Los Angeles, we have seen a steady decline in gang membership and gang crime in the city, said Chief Charlie Beck. We have made our biggest impact, by arresting and incarcerating individuals who engage in violent crime and not the general deportation of the residents they victimize. Nicole Nishida, a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles County sheriffs department the nations largest said there are no known MS-13 members or structures within their territory, which spreads across nearly 4,000 square miles (10,360 sq. kilometers). The Justice Department has threatened to deny millions of dollars in federal grants to communities that refuse to share information with federal immigration authorities. Many cities have defied the threats, with lawsuits pending in Chicago, Philadelphia and California over whether the administration has overstepped its authority. The administration stepped up criticism of California after Jan. 1, when a law took effect to largely prohibit state and local law enforcement agencies from detaining people at ICEs request unless they have been convicted of any of hundreds of crimes outlined in a 2013 state law. U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a California Democratic, said Trumps comments were mean-spirited. President Trump today renewed his attacks on California with more insults and threats. The presidents obsession with our state is growing more outrageous by the day, she said. ICE critics dismiss Trumps idea Some of ICEs strongest critics in California dismissed the idea. His erratic comments reflect an obsession with criminalizing immigrants and shows a deep lack of knowledge of California and immigration laws, said the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, an advocacy group in Los Angeles. State Sen. Kevin de Leon, a Los Angeles Democrat who authored the new law, said, The presidents plan sounds perfectly fine but we know that will never happen and well work with ICE to remove actual dangerous criminals from our neighborhoods. California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, a Democrat and frequent Trump critic, didnt directly address the presidents comments. He issued a brief statement saying the state works with federal law enforcement daily and its efforts are geared toward stopping drug dealers, sex traffickers and other public safety threats. A business conference in India has renamed an address by Donald Trump Jr. after criticism that the original title of the talk suggested he was speaking on foreign policy issues that should be left to diplomats and government officials. The talk was initially titled "Reshaping Indo-Pacific Ties: The New Era of Cooperation," before it was rebranded as a "Fireside Chat." The conference, which Trump, Jr., executive vice president of the Trump Organization, attended Friday was organized by the prestigious The Economic Times newspaper in New Delhi and attended by the Indian business and political elite. In speaking with an Indian journalist, the younger Trump steered clear of all policy issues and tried to rest criticism that has dogged his trip. "I am here as a businessman. I am not representing anyone. I have been coming to India for over a decade," he said at one point. Deputy director of the Wilson Center's Asia program Michael Kugelman told VOA the "damage control" done by changing the speech to something innocuous" was a wise move, though given the backlash and outcry that had already ensued, that change may have come too late." In a letter sent to the American ambassador in India earlier this week, U.S. Senator Robert Menendez, the ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, expressed concern that the speech could "send the mistaken message" that Trump Jr. is speaking on behalf of the U.S. government. Trump Jr., who spoke about his experiences as the son of the U.S. president, told the audience that he rarely talked politics with his father any more. "We see him so little that when we are together, it's really about being a family." He accused American journalists of unfair criticism and praised the Indian media, saying they "are so mild and nice." Conflicts on interest Controversy about Trump Jr.'s visit erupted before he landed in India on Monday after newspaper advertisements offered buyers properties licensed by the Trump Organization "dinner and conversation" with the president's son, sparking concerns of ethics and conflict of interest. The Trump Organization has licensed its name to five projects being built by local developers in India, the company's largest market outside the United States. One luxury apartment complex is complete in Pune, while four others, are in varying stages of construction in Mumbai, Kolkata and Gurugram. In Delhi and Kolkata, customers who paid the booking fee of $ 38,000 were invited to dine with Trump Jr. Kugelman said there certainly is "something questionable about the president's son inviting buyers of his father's properties to meet with him." The head of one of the companies building the Trump Towers in India, Kalpesh Mehta, told reporters $15 million was put down by buyers on Monday. He said over $100 million worth of real estate has been sold in the towers coming up in Gurugram, near New Delhi. Trump Jr. has dismissed claims that his family business is benefiting from his father's presidency and told an Indian television channel that his family had gotten no credit for business it has lost because of self-imposed restrictions President Trump has applied to stay away from any new foreign business deals during his term in office. U.S. President Donald Trump on Friday recited the lyrics of a song seen as anti-immigration called The Snake to drive home his point about restricting immigration an inflammatory move that harkened back to his days on the campaign trail. In a speech to conservatives at a convention outside Washington, he also bashed opposition Democrats for failing to back his proposal for putting 1.8 million so-called Dreamer immigrants on a pathway to citizenship in exchange for tightening border security and severely restricting legal immigration. During his hourlong address, Trump pulled a piece of paper from his pocket and read The Snake, a ballad by Al Wilson about a reptile who repays a tender woman that nurses it back to health with a deadly bite. During his campaign, as well as in a speech early in his presidency, Trump used the song, based on one of Aesop's fables, as a less-than-subtle allegory about immigrants entering the United States. Some Republicans recoil On Friday, he made no secret about the comparison he was making. Think of it in terms of immigration, he urged attendees at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) as he launched into the song. You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in, he said, reading the final line of the song, before returning to his speech. And thats what were doing with our country, folks were letting people in, and its going to be a lot of people. Its only going to be worse. Some mainstream Republicans have recoiled at Trump's continued recitation of the lyrics. Trump's snake story is vicious, disgraceful, utterly racist and profoundly un-American, tweeted Steve Schmidt, a former campaign aide for president George W Bush. Democrats totally unresponsive In his wide-ranging speech, Trump warned that efforts to reach a deal on the status of undocumented migrants brought to the US illegally as children could fail and blamed his opponents. The Democrats are being totally unresponsive. They dont want to do anything about DACA, Im telling you, he said, referring to negotiations on Capitol Hill on replacing an expiring program that defers deportation for some undocumented migrants. Its very possible that DACA wont happen. Former president Barack Obama launched the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, whose recipients were given legal permission to work, live and go to school in the United States. DACA-related bills Last September, Trump announced he was rescinding DACA and called on Congress to craft a solution before March 5, setting off months of bipartisan negotiations. The Senate held votes on several DACA-related bills last week, but none of them advanced. Many conservatives in Congress including Senator Ted Cruz have been outspoken in their opposition to any legislation that provides amnesty to people who are in the United States illegally. President Donald Trump made a fresh appeal Friday for support to arm some teachers to help stem mass shootings targeting schools. Trump's pitch came during a speech before a friendly conservative crowd at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) meeting near Washington. Trump spent much of the past week dealing with the aftermath of the tragic high school shooting in Parkland, Florida. Although a new experience for Trump, it is a situation many of his predecessors are all too familiar with. Echoes of past tragedies Former Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama all faced similar tragedies while in office. They also dealt with political pressures in the aftermath demanding action. Trump is also beginning to see why presidents are often frustrated when they try to bridge what pollsters and political pundits often refer to as the great divide over guns in the United States. In the aftermath of the massacre at Columbine High School in Colorado in 1999, President Clinton sought to calm the nation. "We must do more to reach out to our children and teach them to express their anger and to resolve their conflicts with words, not weapons," he said. In 2007, it was left to President Bush to lead the grieving at Virginia Tech after a gunman killed 32 people before committing suicide. "May God bless and keep the souls of the lost, and may his love touch all of those who suffer in grief," he said at an on campus memorial service. And in 2012, an emotional President Obama wiped away a tear as he addressed the nation in the wake of the massacre of grade-school students in Newtown, Connecticut. "We've endured too many of these tragedies in the last few years. The majority of those who died today were children, beautiful little kids between the ages of five and 10 years old," he said. Searching for solutions Trump has expressed sympathy for the victims and families in the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. But he has also been forceful in pushing for solutions, including the controversial idea of arming some teachers. "I want to stop it and I know it is a little controversial to say, but since I started this two days ago, a lot of people who were totally opposed to it are now agreeing. They love their students and don't want their students to be killed or to be hurt," Trump told the CPAC attendees. Earlier this week at the White House, Trump heard from some of the students and parents, including surviving student Samuel Zeif. "I lost a best friend who was practically a brother, and I'm here to use my voice because I know he can't," he said at a White House "listening session" with people with ties to several mass school shootings. Polling on guns Recent polling shows a jump in support for additional gun restrictions, which is common following mass shootings. A new Marist poll found that 71 percent of those surveyed favor stricter laws governing the sale of firearms. A new Quinnipiac poll found that 66 percent support stricter laws, the highest level of support ever measured in that survey. "You know, if you think Americans are not paying attention or moved by these shootings, you are wrong," Quinnipiac assistant director Tim Malloy said via Skype. "In the last two years, we have seen a 20 percent jump in calls for stricter gun control." Trump has signaled support for tougher background checks for gun buyers and for raising the minimum age to buy an assault weapon from 18 to 21 years of age. It remains unclear if Trump can win over the National Rifle Association, or NRA, on those issues. The NRA is one of the country's most powerful lobbying groups and claims 5 million members. NRA Executive Director Wayne LaPierre received a rousing reception Thursday when he spoke to CPAC. "There is no greater personal individual freedom than the right to keep and bear arms, the right to protect yourself and the right to survive," he said. Mobilizing voters Despite the support for tough gun measures in the polls, analysts caution that it does not always translate into action at the polls. "NRA members are very reliable voters, so just because public opinion polls say people want background checks, that doesn't necessarily translate to people showing up at the polls," former Ohio state Senator Capri Cafaro, now with American University in Washington, said via Skype. But given the media attention to the students taking to the streets around the country, the demands for action in the wake of the Parkland shooting could last a bit, Malloy, of the Quinnipiac poll, said. "These young voices have jumped out in the last four or five days and appear to be at the tip of the spear of a movement," he said. "So the sense is, a movement that had started has now gained momentum and is accelerating and we may see some change out of this." The first opportunity to demonstrate change will come in this November's midterm congressional elections. The U.N. special envoy for Syria, Staffan de Mistura, is calling for an immediate cease-fire in Syria to stop the relentless bombing by the Syrian government, with support by its Russian ally, of civilians trapped in the besieged city of eastern Ghouta. Eastern Ghouta, a suburb of the Syrian capital, Damascus, has been subjected to what the U.N. special envoy for Syria calls horrific bombardment for the past six days. A U.N. spokeswoman in Geneva, Alessandra Vellucci, says de Mistura is urging a cease-fire to stop both the heavy airstrikes in this besieged city of nearly 400,000 inhabitants and the indiscriminate mortar shelling of Damascus by rebels on the ground in eastern Ghouta. The cease-fire needs to be followed by immediate unhindered, humanitarian access and the facilitated evacuation of medical cases out of eastern Ghouta, Vellucci said. The special envoy calls again upon Astana guarantors to hold an urgent meeting to reinstall the de-escalation. He warns that this situation cannot be a repeat of Aleppo. Last May, Russia, Turkey and Iran signed an agreement in the Kazakh capital, Astana, aimed at reducing violence between rebels and Syrian government forces in four so-called de-escalation zones in mainly opposition territories. This cessation of hostilities agreement appears to have run its course. Syrian activists report more than 420 civilians in eastern Ghouta have been killed this past week. The United Nations reports at least seven health facilities have been hit, putting several out of service. U.N. Security Council efforts to pass a resolution mandating a 30-day cease-fire, so far, have hit an obstacle. Western diplomats accuse Russia of delaying a vote on an agreement to support Syrian President Bashar al-Assads move to regain control of rebel-held eastern Ghouta. The U.N. Security Council failed to reach consensus Friday on a draft resolution implementing a 30-day cease-fire across Syria and lift sieges on towns, and said they would reconvene Saturday to vote. Council diplomats had planned to vote Friday morning, but twice postponed as negotiations to incorporate Russian concerns and amendments into the text dragged on without agreement. We have been close, but not able to close the gap completely, said Swedish Ambassador Olof Skoog, who is leading the negotiations with his Kuwaiti counterpart. "Look, I think we all agree that there needs to be a cease-fire. That has to be urgent, immediately. There is still some discussions on exactly how to define that. So that's what we're working on," Skoog added. A visibly frustrated and weary Skoog said they would not give up because the situation on the ground demands a cease-fire. He said work would continue and the council would reconvene at noon New York time on Saturday and vote. "I am trying to facilitate a meaningful outcome of this Security Council [effort] so I can only protect what we're trying to do and that is to have a resolution adopted yesterday. Now, we have not achieved that. I find that extremely frustrating given what we are faced with on the ground and I'm just saying that we're working on it and we're not giving up and I hope that we will adopt something forceful, meaningful, impactful tomorrow." U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley, who was not present at Fridays negotiations, tweeted, Unbelievable that Russia is stalling a vote on a cease-fire allowing humanitarian access in Syria. How many more people will die before the Security Council agrees to take up this vote? Lets do this tonight. The Syrian people can't wait. The joint Swedish-Kuwaiti effort demands at least a 30-day cessation of hostilities to allow in aid and evacuate the critically ill and injured. It also calls for the lifting of sieges in four specific locations, including eastern Ghouta. We are working on it, and we are not giving up, Skoog told reporters. I hope we will adopt something forceful, meaningful, impactful tomorrow. We are so close, council president Kuwaiti Ambassador Mansour al-Otaibi told reporters. We are working to have a consensus draft resolution. He said the main sticking point was over language in the first operating paragraph of the draft, which says the truce would not apply to terrorist groups including the Islamic State, al-Qaida and the Nusrah Front. Russia has pressed for language that adds associated groups and entities to that wording, but other members have resisted out of concern as to how broadly that could be interpreted. For instance, Russia regards the civil society first responders the White Helmets as having links to terrorists, whereas most other countries strongly disagree. The 10 elected members of the council expressed their unity earlier in the day for the need to quickly adopt and implement the cease-fire, standing publicly together outside the Security Council to support it. We've really taken our responsibility, Dutch Ambassador Karel van Oosterom told reporters of the elected members. We've tried to cross the bridge of the different interests that are there. Meanwhile, Syrian government warplanes supported by Russia pounded the rebel-held enclave of eastern Ghouta for a seventh straight day Saturday, killing at least three people, opposition activists and a war monitor reported. Fighting has escalated there as the Syrian military and its allied forces appear to be launching an all-out operation to re-take the area, which is one of the last near Damascus still under control of the armed opposition. The U.N. refugee agency is calling on Rwandan authorities to investigate police culpability in the deaths of at least five Congolese refugees during a recent protest of food ration cuts. The deadly confrontation took place Thursday when some 700 Congolese refugees from the Kiziba refugee camp were demonstrating outside the U.N. refugee agencys office in Karongi, in western Rwanda. UNHCR spokeswoman Cecile Pouilly says the situation got out of hand after police reportedly used tear gas to disperse the protesters and shots were fired. She says that resulted in several deaths and injuries among both the refugees and members of the police force. We regret that our continued appeals for maintaining calm and restraints were not heard. This tragedy should have been avoided. Disproportionate use of force against desperate refugees is not acceptable. UNHCR calls on authorities to refrain from further use of force and to investigate the circumstances of this tragic incident, she said. Pouilly blames much of the unrest on underfunding, which is severely affecting humanitarian operations in Rwanda. She tells VOA lack of money forced the World Food Program to reduce food rations for refugees by 10 percent in November, followed by another cut of 25 percent in January. These people are not only desperate over the lack of food. They are also desperate because of the lack of prospective (future). Some of them have been there for 20 years. There is very little hope for them. There is a great sense of despair. Many of them have been born in the camp and they see no future, Pouilly said. Kiziba refugee camp hosts more than 17,000 refugees from the Democratic Republic of Congo. More than 173,000 refugees from the DRC and Burundi live in six camps in Rwanda. Pouilly says she fears more violence could be in the offing if refugee needs are not met. She notes the UNHCR has received only two percent of its $99 million appeal for humanitarian operations in Rwanda this year. U.S. companies are taking a closer look at investments, co-branding deals and other ties to the gun industry and its public face, the National Rifle Association, after the latest school massacre. Petitions are circulating online targeting companies that offer discounts to NRA members on its website. #BoycottNRA is trending on Twitter. Members of the NRA have access to special offers from partner companies on its website, ranging from life insurance to wine clubs. For a second consecutive day, companies listed on the site have cut ties to the NRA as it aggressively resists calls for stricter gun control. The insurance company MetLife Inc. discontinued its discount program with the NRA on Friday. The software company Symantec Corp., which makes Norton Antivirus technology, did the same. Those defections arrived a day after the car rental company Enterprise Holdings, which also owns Alamo and National, said it was cutting off discounts for NRA members. First National Bank of Omaha, one of the nation's largest privately held banks, announced it would not renew a co-branded Visa credit-card with the NRA. NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre said this week at the Conservative Political Action Conference, that those advocating for stricter gun control are exploiting the Florida shooting which killed 17 people, mostly high-school students. "Evil walks among us and God help us if we don't harden our schools and protect our kids," LaPierre said Thursday. "The whole idea from some of our opponents that armed security makes us less safe is completely ridiculous." President Donald Trump has aligned himself with the NRA, suggesting some teachers could be armed so that they could fire on any attacker. U.S. corporations are moving in the other direction. On Friday, a large Wall Street money manager said it wanted to engage with major weapons manufacturers about what comes next. Blackrock Inc., which manages $6 trillion in assets, has become one of the largest stakeholders gun manufacturers like Sturm Ruger & Co., American Outdoor Brands Corp. and Vista Outdoor Inc. through indirect investments. The money is placed in index funds, so Blackrock cannot sell shares of individual companies within the index. Its fund clients invest in indexes that might contain companies like Ruger. On Friday, spokesman Ed Sweeney says Blackrock will be "engaging with weapons manufacturers and distributors to understand their response to recent events." Blackrock, through indirect investments, holds a 16.18 percent stake in Sturm Ruger, an 11.91 percent stake in Vista, and a 10.5 percent stake in American Outdoor, according to the data firm Factset. Shares of gun companies mostly fell in midday trading Friday. U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis has sent guidance to President Donald Trump on whether transgender troops should serve in the U.S. military, two days after a Defense Department deadline. Pentagon spokesman Major Dave Eastburn has confirmed to VOA that the secretary's recommendation was sent to the president early Friday. He would not discuss details of the guidance because it was a "private matter" between Mattis and Trump. Eastburn said the Pentagon expects Trump's policy announcement on transgender service members "no later than March 23." During Thursday's briefing, chief Pentagon spokeswoman Dana White told VOA the issue of transgender military service was "complex" and that the secretary was "taking his time" to review the information given to him. The Pentagon said last September that it began studying how to implement a directive by Trump to prohibit transgender individuals from serving. Trump expressed his desire to ban transgender people from serving in the military in a string of Twitter comments in July. He said he was ordering the armed forces to stop allowing transgender individuals to serve, after consulting generals and military experts. "Our military must be focused on decisive and overwhelming victory and cannot be burdened with the tremendous medical costs and disruption that transgender in the military would entail," the president tweeted. Hours later, the U.S. military's top general stressed to Pentagon leaders that there had been no change to the military's policy on transgender personnel despite Trump's announcement on Twitter. "There will be no modifications to the current policy until the president's direction has been received by the secretary of defense [Mattis] and the secretary has issued implementation guidance," the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Joseph Dunford, wrote in a memo obtained by VOA. Federal courts rejected parts of Trump's proposed ban, which sought to overturn an Obama administration policy that said transgender troops could apply to join the military, serve openly and seek medical care. Recruiting of transgender service members began January 1, after Trump's administration decided not to appeal federal court rulings that rejected the administration's request to put on hold a judge's orders requiring the military to begin accepting transgender recruits. The RAND Corporation has estimated that the number of transgender individuals currently serving in the active component of the U.S. military is between 1,320 and 6,630 out of a total of about 1.3 million service members. The consular section of the U.S. Embassy in Montenegro will be open Friday, but only for emergency services, after an attack on the embassy compound, the State Department said Thursday. Police on Thursday identified the man who threw an explosive device into the embassy compound as Dalibor Jaukovic, a former Yugoslav army soldier who had expressed anti-NATO sentiments. Jaukovic blew himself up outside the compound, the Balkan country's police said. U.S. and Montenegrin officials said no one else at the embassy was injured in the attack in the capital, Podgorica, early Thursday morning. A government statement said the device was most probably a hand grenade, and several journalists who saw the site reported no damage. After the incident, the U.S. Embassy made no changes to its standing travel advisory, instructing U.S. citizens to exercise normal precautions when visiting Montenegro. State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said visa appointments canceled Thursday would be rescheduled soon. Our embassy has no indication that the attack is part of an ongoing threat, although the investigation continues into the motives of the assailant, Nauert said in a briefing Thursday. Out of an abundance of caution, consular operations have been closed for the day today [Thursday], although the U.S. Embassy remains open for emergency services for U.S. citizens, she added. FBI spokeswoman Nora Scheland said, The FBI is providing assistance to our partners in Montenegro as part of their investigation. Shortly after the incident, the embassy issued a security alert telling people to avoid the area. State Department correspondent Nike Ching contributed to this report. A U.S. Navy hospital ship is heading across the Pacific on a humanitarian mission with stops planned in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Vietnam. The USNS Mercy left its home port of San Diego, California, on Friday, along with the expeditionary fast transport ship USNS Fall River. The ships are carrying some 800 military and civilian personnel from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, France, Peru and Japan. The Navy said the international team will partner with host nations to provide medical and dental exchanges, along with disaster-response training. Navy official Lt. Marycate Walsh told VOA on Friday that USNS Mercy's humanitarian mission in the Pacific, dubbed Pacific Partnership, is the largest annual disaster-response mission in the region. The first Pacific Partnership began in response to the December 2004 tsunami, which devastated several areas in South and Southeast Asia. After the mission concludes, the USNS Mercy is expected to travel to Japan before returning to California. The mission comes as a U.S. aircraft carrier is set to make a port call in Vietnam for the first time since the end of the Vietnam War, a signal of strengthening military ties between the former wartime enemies. A U.S. Navy official told VOA on Friday that the USS Carl Vinson was set to visit Danang in March. The idea of a potential carrier stop surfaced when U.S. President Donald Trump met Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc at the White House in May 2017. Talks continued in August when Vietnamese Defense Minister Ngo Xuan Lich met Defense Secretary Jim Mattis in Washington, and Mattis again mentioned expectations for a U.S. aircraft carrier stop in Vietnam during his visit to the country in January. The United States has sought closer ties with Vietnam as the nation has increasingly stood up to China's disputed territorial claims in the South China Sea. The U.S. Department of Justice wants to strip naturalized citizenship from five men who allegedly lied during their interviews and in paperwork about having sexually abusing children. Two of the defendants are from Mexico. The other three are from Colombia, Guyana and the Philippines. "Those who wish to become American citizens ought to respect our laws and seek citizenship lawfully and honestly," Attorney General Jeff Sessions said Thursday. "The Justice Department will continue to seek out fraudsters and bring them to justice by obtaining orders revoking their naturalized citizenship." All five men pleaded guilty to charges of sexually abusing children either before or during their naturalization processes, but withheld that information from immigration officers. Four of the men are under community supervision or on probation or have been ordered to register as sex offenders. A fifth man was sentenced to 40 years in a California prison. It is unclear if the men will be forced to return to their home countries if they lose their U.S. citizenship. A Movement for Democratic Change consultative meeting has resolved to have MDC-T vice president Nelson Chamisa as the partys 2018 presidential candidate. If endorsed by the National Council as the presidential candidate, the 40 year-old who has a Bachelors in Business Administration in Marketing, a Bachelors of Science (Hon) in Political Science, a Masters Degree in International Relations and Diplomacy, a Law Degree and a Degree in Theology, will face President Emmerson Mnangagwa in the presidential poll. In a meeting attended by 641 party supporters, including vice president Elias Mudzuri, several senior officials and others, also resolved that the National Council should nominate Chamisa as the acting MDC-T president until 2019. Minutes of the meeting indicate that the MDC-T consultative meeting further resolved that the National Council, which is the highest decision-making body outside congress, should reaffirm the support of MDC Alliance following the death of party leader Morgan Tsvangirai, who succumbed to cancer. The MDC consultative meeting also resolved to continue engaging party leadership who have a different view and foster unity amongst the leadership and to start candidate selection process in all constituencies and wards excluding those allocated to other MDC Alliance partners starting with consensus. These resolutions will be tabled before MDC-T National Council meeting to be held anytime next week. Some top officials who did not attend the meeting included MDC-T vice president Thokozani Khupe, chairman Lovemore Moyo, organizing secretary Abednico Bhebhe and several others said to be opposed to the MDC-T Alliance and Chamisas nomination to be the partys acting president. Apart from Chamisa and Mudzuri, other senior MDC-T officials that attended the meeting included Deputy National Chairperson Morgan Komichi, Secretary General Douglas Mwonzora, Deputy Secretary General Pauline Mpariwa, Treasurer General Theresa Makone, Deputy Treasurer Charlton Hwende, Deputy Organizer Amos Chibaya, Deputy Information and Publicity Thabitha Khumalo, Secretary for elections Murisi Zvizwai, National Youth Chairperson Happymore Chidziva and National Women Chairperson Lynette Karenyi-Kore. HARARE (Reuters) - Zimbabwes state diamond company will auction 1.56 million carats of diamonds over the next two months, the first time since March 2017 that the country is conducting such sales, the mines minister said on Thursday. Winston Chitando said Zimbabwe Consolidated Diamond Company (ZCDC) would conduct the separate auctions in March and April to sell diamonds it has stockpiled since last year. Thereafter, from current production, government anticipates ZCDC to have regular tenders throughout 2018, Chitando told reporters. Chitando said ZCDC had conducted a test sale two weeks ago, which was attended by buyers from countries such as Belgium, Dubai, Botswana and South Africa. The sale earned $829,000. The sales were halted last year while the company restructured. Chitando said this was to ensure there was enough time to align the marketing and sales framework to international best practice. (Reporting by MacDonald Dzirutwe. Editing by Jane Merriman) Four rallies taking place in Rome amid rising political tensions. Rome police chiefs have drawn up a security plan to deal with four separate demonstrations scheduled in the capital on Saturday 24 February, as political tensions increase in the lead-up to Italy's 4 March elections. The largest of the demonstrations has been organised by the national association of partisans (ANPI) whose Mai piu fascismo (fascism never again) march is expected to involve around 20,000 people. The protest is scheduled from 13.00-17.00, starting in Piazza della Repubblica and ending in Piazza del Popolo. Security chiefs have banned demonstrators from carrying blunt objects and rigid flag poles and from wearing helmets and hard hats, as well as any clothing or devices used to conceal identity. Police say the measure is designed to prevent groups of mobs from infiltrating the marches. The anti-fascist protest takes place amid rising political and racial tensions during an election campaign increasingly dominated by the issue of immigration. Italian interior minister Marco Minniti has also said there is a "concrete risk of the mafia conditioning the free vote." On 20 February the Sicilian head of the far-right political party Forza Nuova (FN) was hospitalised after being bound and beaten by six masked attackers in Palermo. On 21 February, in the north-west Trionfale area of Rome, a swastika and a message saying A morte le guardie ("death to cops") was scrawled on a monument honouring five police bodyguards killed by Red Brigades terrorists during the March 1978 abduction of former premier Aldo Moro, who was later slain by his captors. The other three demonstrations taking place in Rome on 24 February include a rally organised by trade union organisation Si Cobas against Italy's controversial Jobs Act - whose reforms are designed to create greater flexibility in the Italian labour market - from Piazza Esquilino and Piazza Madonna di Loreto. The demonstration is scheduled between 14.00 and 19.00 and is expected to involve around 4,500 people. A sit-in organised by the Movimento no vax, a movement against obligatory vaccines, is planned in Piazza Porta di S. Giovanni from 14.00-18.00, with around 10,000 protesters expected. The fourth demonstration, also in the afternoon, is scheduled outside the detention centre for illegal immigrants in Ponte Galeria, east of the capital, where pro-immigrant antagonist groups will protest Italy's current immigration legislation. The demonstrations will result in numerous public bus detours - for traffic updates see Muoversi a Roma website. One of Italy's few Renaissance castles open to the public is located an hour north of Rome in Bracciano. The Odescalchi Castle looms over Bracciano, a small hilltop town located an hour north of Rome, with spectacular views over the lake below. The majestic castle was completed by the Orsini family in 1485 as a fortress and a residence of the feudal lords of the period. Its strategic position saw it become the subject of a bitter fight for ownership over the centuries between powerful papal families such as the Borgia and Colonna. In the 16th century the Orsini family enlarged the castle, embellishing it with Late Renaissance frescoes, before it came into the possession of the Odescalchi family in 1696. The castle's furnishings were plundered during the French occupation, leading to its subsequent sale to the Torlonia family. In 1848 ownership of the castle once again passed to its current owners, the Odescalchi, who renovated the building to its former glory. Today it is one of Italy's largest and best-maintained castles, as well as being one of the few Renaissance castles in Italy open to the public. In addition to offering guided tours, the castle hosts cultural events, galas and receptions for weddings, including several high-profile wedding couples such as Tom Cruise/Katie Holmes. Sala delle Scienze. Photo Claudia Primangeli. Guided tours include a visit to 20 rooms, courtyards and priceless collections from the castle's six-century history. The castle is open for tours from 10.00 every day, with closing times differing between the summer (18.00/19.00) and winter seasons (17.00/18.00). Bracciano can be reached easily by train from Rome's central Termini station. For full visiting information, including reservations and ticket prices, see the castle's website. Please enable cookies on your web browser in order to continue. The new European data protection law requires us to inform you of the following before you use our website: We use cookies and other technologies to customize your experience, perform analytics and deliver personalized advertising on our sites, apps and newsletters and across the Internet based on your interests. By clicking I agree below, you consent to the use by us and our third-party partners of cookies and data gathered from your use of our platforms. See our Privacy Policy and Third Party Partners to learn more about the use of data and your rights. You also agree to our Terms of Service. But now, just 18 months later, it seems that Samsung, and the rest of the world, have shrugged off the crisis. Its next phone the Galaxy S9, set to debut on Sunday in Barcelona is expected to be a foil to Apples iPhone X. Most of the buzz about it centers on the quality of its camera rather than the integrity of its battery. From Greg Swank, 12-4-2 You are about to read a list of 45 goals that found their way down the halls of our great Capitol back in 1963. As... I Shall Not Hate, whose U.S. premiere Mosaic produced in 2016 during its inaugural season, is the first-person account by Izzeldin Abuelaish and Shay Pitovsky, based on Abuelaishs own book and the horrific tragedy that befell his family during the 2008-2009 conflict in Gaza between Israel and Hamas, Gazas governing organization. Abuelaish (pronounced A-boo-Lie-ish) is a fertility doctor, now living in Canada, who studied in Cairo and at Harvard, worked in an Israeli hospital and was supporting his wife and children in Gaza when horror, in the form of an Israeli tank missile, struck. Three of his daughters were killed in the attack. And yet, as explained by the character Abbas embodies in the 75-minute play, performed in Hebrew and Arabic with English surtitles, Abuelaishs having known and worked with Israelis wouldnt allow him to express hatred for them. Human-resources experts warn that employers could be fined or go to jail if they knowingly keep workers on the payroll after their permits have expired. And while the White House has said that young immigrants who lose DACA protections would not become immediate targets for deportation, Immigration and Customs Enforcement says anyone here illegally can be detained and, possibly, deported. According to a police report she said she had the BB Gun because if James Burris was the President the officers would shoot her to protect him and that she knowingly brought the gun with her. The police report said she held a pistol. It was not clear what type of gun she had. Saying it was the first time he had ever voted against a budget in his 23 years in the House, Landes said there are ways to provide health care to more residents without entangling Virginia with a failed federal policy and the strings that come attached to it. . . . Im sad that with this vote . . . we are becoming more like Washington and moving farther away from the Virginia way. Sen. Tony Mendoza (D) of the Los Angeles area said he may still run for the seat this fall, putting his party in an uncomfortable spot. His resignation letter takes aim at the leader of the Senate, Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de Leon, a fellow Democrat and Mendozas former roommate in Sacramento who was leading the effort to expel him. When my child told me, after months of struggle with his gender identity, that he believed he was a boy and not a girl as we had assumed, he put it this way: When I was a star in the sky, I told God I was a boy. But God made me a girl, and now I have to live with it. In church and at home, my child had always been told that what God made was good, perfect; that God doesnt make mistakes. And we still believe that. We believe that when the book of Genesis says God created humankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them. . . . God made us male and female, not male or female. I believe that God made my child a boy in a body that looks like a girls. With the support of an excellent therapist, our family, our faith community and our school, my child is living into the identity that God gave him in his heart and mind and soul, and he is thriving. He is happy and confident, and he knows that he is loved by his family, community and God. The Israel-Iran confrontation is the most dangerous new factor in Syria, which has become a gruesome cockpit once again after some months of relative quiet. The Syrian regime is trying to crush resistance in Ghouta, east of Damascus, where some of the rebels once had support from the CIA but are now struggling on their own. The bloodbath there has been horrific, and the U.N. Security Council on Thursday debated a resolution for a 30-day cease-fire. Russia resisted, evidently wanting to complete the bloody campaign. Mass shootings such as last weeks in Florida have prompted law enforcement and the media to look for patterns, and heres one that has emerged: A disturbing number of perpetrators have previously been accused of domestic abuse. Everytown for Gun Safety, a gun-control-advocacy group, analyzed FBI data on mass shootings from 2009 to 2016 and found that in 54 percent of cases, the victims included the shooters current or former spouse or intimate partner, or another family member and 16 percent of attackers between 2009 and 2015 had previously been charged with domestic violence. And then theres Trump. He took an absolutist guns-for-everybody position on the Second Amendment during the campaign and stuck with it even after the Las Vegas mass shooting, the worst in modern U.S. history. But before he entered politics, he was no die-hard opponent of gun control. He could not help but be affected by his m eeting Wednesday with gun-violence survivors. And despite what he told them, if you strapped him to a lie detector Id bet youd discover before the exhausted machine gave out that he doesnt really think arming homeroom teachers is a solution. Todays Headlines The most important news stories of the day, curated by Post editors and delivered every morning. Email address By signing up you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy Rather than focusing on compliance among its schools, DCPS should emphasize real mastery on the part of its students and support teachers in fostering it. DCPS should embrace so-called competency-based learning, which allows students to learn at their own paces and ensures that each student masters each prerequisite skill through appropriately challenging content before moving on to more advanced material. Credit- and unit-recovery courses, formerly an easy-to-exploit means of getting students the credits they need to graduate, should become rigorous yet flexible modules that help students achieve authentic understanding and dont deliver credit until students demonstrate that understanding. It shouldnt matter whether a student can master a years worth of content in two months or two years, or even whether a student comes to class. (Some of the most proficient students I taught rarely came to class; they already knew the material. Under strict policy, they would fail.) Who cares about a students attendance record if he or she is prepared to succeed at the next level? A ban has the endorsements of several of the partys top leaders, including Minority Whip Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) and Caucus Chairman Joseph Crowley (D-N.Y.) but not House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who has not commented on it since the shooting but tapped Rep. Ted Deutch (D-Fla.) to deliver a response, in which he called for the measure. The proposal in all likelihood is dead on arrival because Republicans control Congress and have not expressed support for it. We can see that the authorities intend to strike a balance between de-risking and financial stability, said Zhou Hao, an economist at Commerzbank AG, in Singapore, noting that personnel changes among the top financial regulators indicate that the targeting of company debt will intensify over the coming year. Russian service members did not take part in any capacity and Russian military equipment was not used, the statement said. It referred instead to Russian citizens who arrived in Syria of their own free will and for different reasons. The ministry, it said, does not have the authority to assess the validity and legality of their decisions. Russia has acknowledged that many of the attackers, who also included regular Syrian army troops and militias, were mercenaries. Outdoor Weber Contest Finalists Announced This Week February 22, 2018 OGDEN, Utah After two weeks of polling and more than 100,000 online votes, the top 10 finalists have been selected for the Outdoor Weber pitch contest, hosted by Weber State Universitys Hall Global Entrepreneurship Center and sponsored by Camping World Holdings. The contest invited students worldwide to create videos pitching outdoor-related business ideas for a chance to win a cash prize and one-on-one mentoring from entrepreneurship experts. The publics popular vote determined the top 25 competitors, and a panel of judges selected 10 finalists. In its inaugural year, Outdoor Weber has been a phenomenal success, proving there are many entrepreneurial trails still to blaze, said Brandon Stoddard, Hall Global Entrepreneurship Center director. One WSU student is among the finalists, bringing him closer to the possibility of winning $30,000 to develop his business idea. Colton Mouritsen hopes to create a mobile application to help users locate spots where wildlife has been seen. Users could capture photos with their smartphones and attach them to a map to pinpoint the sightings. The next phase of the competition is a three-day retreat to Snowbasin, Wolf Creek and Powder Mountain resorts in the Ogden Valley of northern Utah, March 22-24. Finalists will have opportunities to work with world-renowned experts to improve their business plans. They will make final presentations to a panel of judges at Ogdens Union Station on March 23 at 3 p.m. The winning idea will be announced that evening. Marcus Lemonis, chair of Camping World Holdings and star of CNBCs The Profit, will give the keynote speech following the final presentations at the Union Station held on March 23 at 5:30 p.m. The public is invited to attend the speech, though registration is required to reserve a seat. Registration will open to the public after March 12. A total of 80 contestants, including entrants from Canada and 13 U.S. states, submitted 90-second videos of themselves pitching innovative outdoor-related business plans. Some pitched ideas to make outdoor recreation safer. Others focused on making outdoor play more convenient. Altogether, participants contributed to more than 194,000 site views from voters. Weve only scratched the surface of these students potential, Stoddard said. We look forward to the final competitive event and future contests for many years to come. Visit weber.edu/wsutoday for more news about Weber State University. WESTPORT The Newmans Own Foundation has escaped crippling taxes thanks to new federal legislation that protects businesses, like Newmans, who give 100 percent of their profits to philanthropy. It would have ripped apart 35 years and $515 million in purpose-driven philanthropy, Bob Forrester, President and CEO of the Newmans Own Foundation, said Thursday at a press conference celebrating the legislative win. President Donald Trump signed into law Feb. 9 the Philanthropic Enterprise Act as part of the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2018. The new law allows private foundations to wholly own a for-profit business as long as the profits are dedicated to charity and the business meets certain governance conditions. This was a provision of the tax code written in a different era to solve a problem that doesnt exist any longer, Sen. Chris Murphy said of the 1969 law meant to bar individuals and entities from using the tax code to shelter their commercial earnings from taxation through philanthropies. For years Newmans Own and other groups had received a waiver to the tax law that was to expire this Fall. The original law likely did not anticipate the 1982 birth of Newmans Own, a food products company that donates 100 percent of its profits to nonprofit organizations around the world via the Westport-based Newmans Own Foundation. More than $500 million has been donated to nonprofits around the world from the sale of Newmans Own products, such as salad dressings, pasta sauce, and lemonade, through a novel business-philanthropy model protected by a string of IRS extensions which have allowed the company and foundation to remain in partnership. If the extension expired in November, as planned, and the new legislation not pushed through by Senators Murphy and Richard Blumenthal, the foundation would have to divest 80 percent of its holdings in the food company, from which the foundation derives its funding, and the foundations remaining 20 percent share in the company would have endured a 200 percent tax, effectively putting the foundation out of operation. I feel tremendous relief, Ingrid Milne, chief financial and operating officer for the Westport-based nonprofit SeriousFun Childrens Network, which organizes camps for children with serious medical conditions, said of the philanthropic enterprise legislation. Milne joined Newmans foundation employees on Feb. 22 at the foundations headquarters to celebrate the new legislation with Senators Murphy and Blumenthal. It was really worrying because Newmans Own has been instrumental in supporting the camps, which get a significant portion of their funding from Newmans Own. It would really have impacted the ability to serve the children with serious illness, so we were extremely relieved and thankful this passed so the great work can continue, Milne said. It seemed like such a nice thing to do. Howard J. Aibel is a longtime supporter of the Westport Country Playhouse. He saw his first production at the historic theater around 1953. As he became a successful attorney including serving as chief legal officer of ITT Corporation he continued to assist one of Westports town jewels. In 2005 he joined the Playhouse board of trustees. He currently serves as vice chair. I have found live theater to be life transformative, Aibel says. Being a support of the Westport Country Playhouse has been a rich and grand experience. To show his appreciation, Aibel gave $3 million to the theater. So far $500,000 is designated for current operations. Another half million is for working capital reserve. A bequest of $2 million to establish an endowment is held in an irrevocable trust. In return, the Playhouse decided to name the entire campus The Howard J. Aibel Theater Center of Westport Country Playhouse. Let no good deed go unpunished. Reaction was swift. Forget that no one, ever, will actually refer to The Howard J. Aibel Theater Center it will always be The Playhouse. (Aibels name will appear above the entrance, in letters smaller than the Playhouse name.) Forget too that the Playhouse property already bears other names. The Lucille Lortel White Barn Center honors Westports other theater the smaller place where, for half a century beginning in 1947, cutting-edge theater was produced. It was owned and operated by actress/producer Lucille Lortel who named it after herself. (It was also, technically, over the Norwalk line on Newtown Turnpike. Lortel knew the cachet of the Westport name.) Next to the Lortel White Barn Center at the Playhouse is the Sheffer studio space. This flexible area is named for one of Westports leading philanthropic families. Both Ann Sheffer and her late brother Doug worked at the Playhouse as teenagers; both supported a variety of theatrical endeavors as adults. No one begrudges those names on the Playhouse walls. Other theater plaques cite Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, whose half-century of support both behind the scenes and very publicly helped the theater through tough times. Woodward was a driving force behind an enormous renovation project in the early 2000s. But Aibels gift struck many the wrong way. The name of the Playhouse is not supposed to represent money, one resident wrote on a local forum. It should represent our community and history, especially the nationally known history of the Westport Country Playhouses contribution to American theater. Renaming it in honor of a contribution or contributor is a disgrace to the town and its artists. Others called it an embarrassment, and an example of hubris, not humility. Then there was this: This discussion is not be about Mr. Aibel, whose generosity and, from the sound if it here, fundamental goodness is not in dispute. What were debating is a principle, which is that a local institution that has been around as long as this one and beloved by generations of people, has at some level become community property regardless of its finances. Its name should reflect this history and not be changed lightly in response to financial exigencies. The Playhouse is hardly the only Westport institution named for a philanthropists gift. In 1919 Edward T. Bedford a director of Standard Oil, and one of the wealthiest Westporters ever bought the Westporter Hotel downtown, and announced he would build a Tudor-style YMCA in its place. You cant name a Y for yourself, but the original structure at the Post Road/Main Street intersection was always called the Bedford building. The Y moved out to Wilton Road where its now called the Bedford Center, in honor of contributions from the entire family including Ruth Bedford, who gave $40 million to the Y in her will but it was replaced by a retail/residential complex called Bedford Square. E.T. Bedford also provided funds for Bedford Elementary School (and Greens Farms El enough is enough, he must have figured). And who can forget Horace Staples? We hardly think about the name, but it sounds so much better than Westport High School. The towns richest citizen in 1884, he was proud of his gift to students. And he named it after himself. Other names honor Westporters who did not provide financial gifts. Think of Ned Dimes and E.R. Strait Marinas; Albie Loeffler, Jinny Parker and PJ Romano Fields, and the Lou Nistico Fieldhouse. Wakeman Field is named for the family that donated all that land next to (yes) Bedford Middle School. So thank you, Howard Aibel. I look forward to seeing you at the Westport Country Playhouse. Enjoy the show! If there was any doubt about whether or not it was just your business being threatened by looming technology issues, a new study by the national professional services firm, MNP, makes it clear just about everyone in Canada is aware change is coming. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 23/2/2018 (1301 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. If there was any doubt about whether or not it was just your business being threatened by looming technology issues, a new study by the national professional services firm, MNP, makes it clear just about everyone in Canada is aware change is coming. The study, Capturing the Change Wave: How Canadian Businesses are Transforming, found that 86 per cent of Canadian businesses are experiencing a business transformation or anticipate one in the next 12 months. PHIL HOSSACK / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS Scott Greenlay, MNPs Winnipeg-based director of the firms technology practice, said one of the reasons the study was commissioned is because most of the research available is based on findings in the United States. Scott Greenlay, MNPs Winnipeg-based director of the firms technology practice, said one of the reasons the study was commissioned is because most of the research available is based on findings in the United States. "Too much of what we see and read about (technology-driven change) is all about what is going on south of the border," he said. "And there has always been a perception that Canada is a little behind others. The fact that the majority of the businesses we talked to have a change initiative underway to really get ready for this tsunami that is coming, that is enlightening." Kevin Small, the owner and CEO of Agri-Fresh, a fresh produce trucking company, realizes change is happening and is trying to figure out how to address it. "There is so much going on," Small said. "The reports on Tesla and electric trucks are real. There are so many advances... autonomous trucks are coming." Agri-Freshs fleet of 40 trucks hauls fruit and vegetables from California and Arizona into the Prairie provinces and needs to do it as efficiently as possible. "The equipment is smarter than ever, with electronic control modules capturing all sorts of data from the equipment side," he said. The MNP report found about 80 per cent of businesses have at least one technology advancement currently underway, three-quarters have used a technology support provider to help manage their transformation and 37 per cent are making digital enhancements to products and services or are currently involved in some platform-integration effort. The fact that more companies are engaging outside help in technology transition is not just good news for MNP or ID Fusion, the Winnipeg IT service provider working with Agri-Fresh. The transition from the old-school Winnipeg tradition of doing things on the cheap will likely have a positive impact on the entire economy. "I have been practising in the technology field in Winnipeg for more than 30 years," Greenlay said. "Over the last 10 years, I see a whole new generation of thinking with Manitoba business leaders." Greenlay said the message should not be lost on companies that may think they cant afford to make a massive investment in technology. He said the right way to think about it is to consider how to reach new clients, find better ways of servicing existing ones or save money through operational efficiencies. Want to get a head start on your day? Get the days breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. "You need to start with that thinking then worry about how to get there," he said. "The neat thing about some new technologies is that it has never been faster or as inexpensive to adapt them as it is today." Smalls motivation is to try to implement new technology aids to better serve his customers. "We plan to take our fleet to 100 trucks in the next five to seven years," he said. "This is what is really making us look at technology. Because if we dont leverage technology, it will either help us or it will be something that will keep us from getting there." martin.cash@freepress.mb.ca Mayor Brian Bowman has escalated the latest funding dispute between city hall and the province, challenging the Pallister government to release the funding agreement for the completion of the southwest transit corridor. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 22/2/2018 (1302 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. Mayor Brian Bowman has escalated the latest funding dispute between city hall and the province, challenging the Pallister government to release the funding agreement for the completion of the southwest transit corridor. Bowman told reporters Thursday that theres been no resolution to the provinces refusal to pay its outstanding share of construction costs on the corridor project and he didnt know how the difference between the two levels of government can be resolved unless the Pallister government agrees to honour the terms of the written agreement. BORIS MINKEVICH / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS City of Winnipeg Mayor Brian Bowman. "They are not paying until such time as they feel changes are made for either an amendment or a new agreement," Bowman said. "We obviously expect the funding as contemplated in the agreement will be honoured. Weve been communicating that very clearly with the government." Bowman repeated claims he made a week ago that the changes the province wants would be "significant in additional costs to Winnipeg taxpayers. In the millions of dollars. It would be significant." Bowman would not detail the changes the province wants but described them as "fundamental changes to the agreement. Thats why it hasnt been agreed to." Want to get a head start on your day? Get the days breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. Bowman said a confidentially clause in the original agreement prevents city hall from disclosing what the province has been demanding, adding city hall has requested the Pallister government to make the deal public but they have yet to respond. A spokeswoman for Municipal Relations Minister Jeff Wharton said the province has received the city's request and it "will respond through official channels after careful review." Under the terms of the original funding agreement for the $587-million transit corridor project, city hall and the province were to each contribute $225 million and Ottawa the remaining $137.3 million. The overall cost of the project was subsequently lowered by $120 million as a result of a series of cost-saving moves implemented by the consortium building the corridor, with the savings to be shared equally by all three levels of government. A provincial government spokesman confirmed no payments have been made to city hall for the past year, adding the Pallister government believes the deal needs to be amended to reflect the lower overall cost and no payments will be made until city hall agrees to the changes. aldo.santin@freepress.mb.ca A handful of people set up a camp overnight on the grounds of the Manitoba legislature to protest the not guilty verdict in the Tina Fontaine death. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 23/2/2018 (1301 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. A handful of people set up a camp overnight on the grounds of the Manitoba legislature to protest the not guilty verdict in the Tina Fontaine death. "The Tina Fontaine case pushed me over the edge and its about that, but also its about the compounding with the justice system," said camp leader Darla Contois. BORIS MINKEVICH / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS Some members of the camp will take part in a protest later this morning. Social media posts in the hours after the not guilty verdict came announced the camp was going up to support calls for justice in both Fontaine's death and shooting death of Saskatchewan Cree man Colten Boushie. Waves of protests followed a not guilty verdict of a farmer charged in Boushie's death just weeks before the Winnipeg verdict Thursday. "Im not going to be leaving this camp," said Contois, bundled up in sleeping bags and blankets to ward off -16 C cold. An older woman who also spent the night introduced herself as a representative of the American Indian Movement and one young man identified himself as Matthew Shorting, one of the "crossover kids" featured in a recent Free Press story about kids in the child welfare system who end up before the courts facing the justice system. Contois said there was more on trial in the Winnipeg courtroom than Raymond Cormier, the accused in Fontaine's death, and when she heard the first news reports she was overcome with emotion about how Indigenous people have been marginalized since Canada was created. "There was the feeling I couldnt expect things to change by continuing on with my daily life. It felt impossible to just stay at home. I just knew I had to do something and take action." On Thursday a jury found Raymond Cormier, 56, not guilty of second-degree murder in the death of Sagkeeng youth Tina Fontaine, 15. Indigenous people across the country closely followed the trial proceedings and expressed frustration it would bring no justice for Fontaine or her family. Cormier was believed to be one of the last people to see Fontaine alive but there was no DNA or forensic evidence linking him to her death. Her body was pulled from the Red River wrapped in a duvet believed to belong to Cormier and weighted down with stones. The grisly discovery in 2014 triggered outrage and reignited calls for the national inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls called the next year. Contois and her supporters said they plan to keep the camp going until they see some indication the justice system will change. "What I imagine there to be is a conversation and a beginning that Indigenous people have a say in the justice system, " Contois said. What that might look like, shell have to wait and see, she said. "There are a lot of things we want to see different in this Canada [that] dont exist. In the past there has been a lot of assimilation and a disregard for us as Indigenous people and our role in this country, " Contois said. Want to get a head start on your day? Get the days breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. The camp is a small nylon tent, with a standing covered metal fire pit, some camp chairs and loads of blankets. "We brought the tent, a tarp and a cooler and as many blankets as we could. Weve had people coming all night. They brought the fire (pit), all the wood and tea and coffee and food." A social media post last night read: "We stand here for the justice we deserve and were not leaving until we get it." alexandra.paul@freepress.mb.ca The Winnipeg Transit driver who ran over and killed a 72-year-old woman has not only pleaded guilty and been fined, but is changing his life and career path to help seniors. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 22/2/2018 (1302 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. The Winnipeg Transit driver who ran over and killed a 72-year-old woman has not only pleaded guilty and been fined, but is changing his life and career path to help seniors. Hyun Yang, 48, was fined $2,500 and suspended from driving for a year after pleading guilty this past month to careless driving in the April 7, 2015, death of Gloria Davey. The sentence was a joint recommendation of Crown and defence lawyers. FACEBOOK Gloria Davey died after she was hit by a Winnipeg Transit bus at Keewatin and Burrows as she walked to a doctors appointment at about 9 a.m. on April 7, 2015. Yangs lawyer, Richard Wolson, told provincial court Judge Carena Roller that the man is no longer a bus driver. "He was asked to resign from Transit and he did," Wolson said during sentencing. "He said to me there could have been a union challenge, but his response was How could I drive? He has never driven a bus again." But Wolson said Yang decided to go back to school and change careers. He is months away from working as a nurse. "This is a man who has been deeply moved by this. It is a horrible tragedy," Wolson said. "He is now in nursing. His goal is to work with senior citizens... he feels he wants to give back to the community and the best way to do it is to work with people of Gloria Daveys age." Yang came to Canada from South Korea to be a Bible studies student, and decided to stay. He told the judge: "Im really sorry for the Davey family. "I deeply regret what happened I am praying for her every day, and for the rest of my life." Daveys family didnt submit a victim impact statement, but made it clear through Crown attorney Manoja Moorthy that the womans death has hurt her family. "They wanted the court to know she was a very independent lady, worked two jobs and raised four kids on her own. She was healthy and lived on her own." The Crown told the court Yang has a clean driving record and no criminal record. She said he worked for Winnipeg Transit for three years before the tragic death. Moorthy said the fatal collision occurred seconds after Yang let two passengers on the bus at Burrows Avenue and Keewatin Street. She said Davey, who was heading to a medical appointment, began walking onto the street when the walk signal came on. The bus, which was turning right onto Keewatin, ran over her. "He failed to direct passengers to seated positions past the yellow line (on the floor of the bus)," the Crown said. Want to get a head start on your day? Get the days breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. "If the two passengers were not (standing) there, he would have seen her." The judge said Davey died because of a few seconds of inattention when Yang failed to follow a Winnipeg Transit policy of making sure passengers were behind the yellow line, which is next to the driver. "Your carelessness caused the death of Ms. Davey," Roller said. "She was, from all reports, a remarkable lady. "She was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. There is nothing she did that put her in harms way." Daveys family could not be reached for comment. kevin.rollason@freepress.mb.ca The message Friday was one of love and reckoning, as hundreds marched through Winnipeg streets in honour of Tina Fontaine. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 23/2/2018 (1301 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. The message Friday was one of love and reckoning, as hundreds marched through Winnipeg streets in honour of Tina Fontaine. The demonstration began at 10:30 a.m., outside the Winnipeg courthouse where Raymond Cormier, 56, was acquitted Thursday of second-degree murder in the 15-year-old girl's death in August 2014. In the bitter morning cold, a prayer was given and the smell of burning sage and sweet grass filled the air, before people began streaming down York Avenue toward The Forks. The prayer was led by Thelma Morrisseau, one of the march's organizers, who asked for healing for Tina's family and loved ones. "This day is a day of love and peace and unity for our daughter, our granddaughter, our niece, our little sister that we have lost... We all feel it, too, because it could have been our daughter. It could have been our granddaughter. We don't want this to continue. We want it to stop," Morrisseau said. As she spoke, Thelma Favel -- Tina's great-aunt, who raised the girl on Sagkeeng First Nation, 145 kilometres northeast of Winnipeg -- inconsolably wept at the centre of the gathering, a red shawl wrapped around her slumped and shaking shoulders. RUTH BONNEVILLE / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS Thelma Favel, Tina Fontaine's great aunt, embraces her niece, Melena Bittern, while holding a red carnation and eagle feather at the centre of the Oodena Circle during rally for Tina at The Forks Friday. By the time the march got underway, some 400 people had gathered. The faces in the crowd represented a cross-section of Canadian society, unified under the banner of justice for Tina. In the middle of the march, a truck drove slowly flying flags: one Canadian, one First Nations. Those walking waved flags of their own, or held signs and placards above their heads adorned with messages such as: "Every girl is our daughter"; "Honour our sisters"; and "Second-rate justice for First Nations people." Amid the quick, rhythmic beating of handheld drums, a loud cheer erupted from the front of the march, and echoed down the line like an audible wave. In between chants for justice for Tina, demonstrators also referenced Colten Boushie, the 22-year-old Cree man shot to death in a confrontation with Saskatchewan farmer Gerald Stanley in 2016. Earlier this month, Stanley was acquitted of any criminal wrongdoing, sparking nationwide outrage. As the march made its way to the Oodena Sharing Circle at The Forks, the Canadian Museum for Human Rights loomed symbolically over the procession. Looking back toward the courthouse from the foot of the museum, the end of the line of people coming down York Avenue wasn't visible. By the time they had filled the sharing circle at The Forks, the sun had risen in the sky and the temperature along with it. RUTH BONNEVILLE / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS Thelma Favel, Tina Fontaine's great aunt, stands stoically next to her niece, Melena Bittern, while holding a red carnation and eagle feather at the centre of the Oodena Circle during rally for Tina at The Forks Friday. Favel was the first to speak; briefly, clutching sweet grass, roses and a feather in her hand, while doing her best to stay composed. "Please, I just want the violence to stop. Make it safe for our young people. Tina, I know is here beside me right now... Thank you so much. My heart is just over pouring with love," Favel said. Others who spoke included: Niigaan Sinclair, professor of native studies at the University of Manitoba; Nahanni Fontaine, NDP MLA for St. John's; Derrick Henderson, chief of Sagkeeng First Nation; Arlen Dumas, grand chief of the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs; and Chickadee Richard, an Anishinaabe elder. While the speeches varied, the responses didn't. Each time a speaker finished addressing the crowd, a large cheer erupted, accompanied by the banging of drums. What Favel has lived with since Tina's 72-pound body, wrapped in a duvet and weighed down with rocks, was pulled from the Red River in August 2014, is a "bloody nightmare," said Nahanni Fontaine. The politician also highlighted Sagkeeng First Nation has one of the highest rates of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls in the country. RUTH BONNEVILLE / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS Hundreds of people marched from the Law Courts to the The Forks holding signs in support of Tina Fontaine's family members after a not guilty verdict was issued to Tina's accused killer, Raymond Cormier. "After years and years and years of leadership by MMIWG families, first and foremost, alongside Indigenous women who for the last 40 years have stood and fought and yelled and cried with our blood and our sweat and our tears, Tina Fontaine still does not have justice. She is representative of so many missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls across the country," the MLA said. "She was our hope. She was families' chance at justice. And that hope and faith in the community and the justice system and we all failed her. And that is what is so significant about Tina. She was just a baby." The crowd then grew quiet, as a moment of silence was observed in honour of Tina. For 60 seconds, all that could be heard was the soft sound of the wind and the breathing of those in the crowd. Want to get a head start on your day? Get the days breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. Before the demonstration came to a close, Dumas delivered a fiery and impassioned speech, calling on Canadian society to finally deliver justice for Indigenous peoples. "I'm very angry and I'm very upset with what happened yesterday. We tried to give credit to the system that it would be fair and would be just. But each and every time, that system smashes you in the face it reminds you that it's a system of technicalities and its actually not about justice. We've been asking for justice for 40 years," Dumas said. "We want justice and we'll have it and we'll make sure that we get it. Because 40 years is too long to be talking. We demand it now and it's going to happen now." In addition to the Winnipeg march, demonstrations in Tina's honour had also been called for Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, Calgary and Halifax. ryan.thorpe@freepress.mb.ca Twitter: @rk_thorpe Indigenous leaders carried the emotional burden of their people as they reacted to Raymond Cormiers acquittal Thursday, saying the entire country is responsible for what happened to the teenager. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 22/2/2018 (1302 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. Indigenous leaders carried the emotional burden of their people as they reacted to Raymond Cormiers acquittal Thursday, saying the entire country is responsible for what happened to the teenager. Minutes earlier, a jury had found Cormier not guilty of second-degree murder in the August 2014 death of the 15-year-old. "Canadian society failed Tina Fontaine. Everybody, right now, across this country, should be ashamed of themselves for the injustice that just occurred here. Where is reconciliation really happening right now in this country when it comes to First Nations and Indigenous people?" asked Kevin Hart, a regional chief with the Assembly of First Nations. "We are continually marginalized. We live in Third World conditions. You set us up for failure right from the start and you take our children away... This murder is a clear example of how the (Child and Family Services) system, the Winnipeg police, and society in general has let us down again." Hart stood alongside Arlen Dumas, grand chief of the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs; Sheila North, grand chief of Manitoba Keewatinowi Okimakanak; Jerry Daniels, grand chief of the Southern Chiefs Organization; and Derrick Henderson, chief of the Sagkeeng First Nation, where Tina was from. They denounced societys treatment of Indigenous Peoples and the failure of the social safety net to prevent Tinas death. Her 72-pound body, which was wrapped in a duvet cover, was pulled from the Red River. While holding back tears, North called for peace after the verdict, which came on the heels of national protests sparked by the acquittal of Saskatchewan farmer Gerald Stanley in the 2016 death of Colten Boushie, a 22-year-old Cree man. PHIL HOSSACK / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS AMC Grand Chief Arlen Dumas speaks to media outside the Winnipeg Courthouse Thursday. "This is a difficult and tremendously sad day for our people. This is not the outcome anyone wanted. The system, everything that was involved in Tinas life, failed her. We all failed her. We, as a nation, need to do better for our young people," North said. "This is not the Canada I want to be a part of. All of us should be ashamed of what happened to her and Colten Boushie and to others." She said Thelma Favel, the great-aunt who raised Tina, had asked that there be no violence following the verdict. "I want to pass on a message from Thelma that we have to maintain the peace. She does not want to see any more violence against anyone. She does not want to see any retaliation. Because that is not what our people are about. She wants peace. She wants healing. She wants justice." Henderson, the chief of Sagkeeng First Nation, was solemn. "Justice was not served here today. Tina was loved by everybody. Theres not much I can say. An injustice was done to our people again. The system, the system has failed us," he said. Daniels, had passion and anger in his voice as he spoke, at times highlighting the way Canadian society discriminates against Indigenous people, at times calling upon all Canadians to come together and find solutions. "We know that the system is discriminating against us time and time again from the moment of contact. At every single level in which contact with Indigenous people happens we are being treated (with discrimination)," Daniels said. PHIL HOSSACK / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS An angry SCO Grand Chief Jerry Daniels speaks to media outside the Winnipeg Courthouse Thursday. "When are we going to take responsibility? When are the people of this country going to take responsibility and stand up and stop allowing it? Every single member of this country and this province is responsible for whats happening here today." Before the Indigenous leaders spoke, Valentina Duck, Tinas mother, was the first to leave the court building. Sobbing and swearing loudly, she quickly walked past the media, asking if they were happy with the outcome. Meanwhile, a few demonstrators gathered nearby, one waving a red First Nations flag and the other beating a drum. After Duck disappeared down the street, an Indigenous man standing at the side of the building smoking walked up to the media and asked, "What did everyone expect? Im disgusted with this country and justice system." Not long after Duck stormed out of the courthouse, Sue Caribou, an advocate for the Missing Murdered and Indigenous Women and Girls movement, came outside. A mixture of anger and pain was palpable in her voice as she shouted. Want to get a head start on your day? Get the days breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. "Not once do our people ever get justice. I have 10 murdered and two missing and to this f---king day we dont have justice!" she said, nearly breaking down in tears. Brian Bowman, the first Metis mayor in Winnipeg, issued a statement saying there was no doubt that "we all failed Tina." "No one can be blind to the racial tensions in our country. The work of the Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls is shedding light onto a dark past of violence and a history of racism in Canada." The discovery of Tinas body was, in part, a catalyst for the inquiry. There will be a walk to honour Tina, starting at 10:30 this morning outside the courthouse, making its way to The Forks via York Avenue. ryan.thorpe@freepress.mb.caTwitter: @rk_thorpe Craig Houle had only been on the job as a police officer for a few weeks when he crossed paths with Tina Fontaine. He missed an alert that flagged her as a missing person, and watched the 15-year-old girl walk away in the pre-dawn hours that summer morning in Winnipeg, nearly four years ago. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 22/2/2018 (1302 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. Craig Houle had only been on the job as a police officer for a few weeks when he crossed paths with Tina Fontaine. He missed an alert that flagged her as a missing person, and watched the 15-year-old girl walk away in the pre-dawn hours that summer morning in Winnipeg, nearly four years ago. She wasn't seen alive after that day. Nine days later, her body was pulled from the Red River tied in a duvet cover filled with rocks. Tina Fontaine is seen in an undated handout photo. The man accused of killing Tina Fontaine told an undercover officer there are three rules in crime: deny, deny, deny. "From that point forward, Craigs life simply took a different turn. He became obsessed with what happened. He blamed himself for her passing," criminal defence lawyer Richard Wolson said during a January sentencing hearing for Houle, who had found himself on the wrong side of the law. Tina's death is part of the reason Houle is no longer a police officer -- but not because of anything he did or didn't do during his field training the morning of Aug. 8, 2014, when he and his partner let Tina go, despite the fact she was listed as a missing person. What Houle did after her death became the reason the 27-year-old from Ebb and Flow First Nation faced, and ultimately avoided, a criminal record. SUPPLIED PHOTO FROM VIDEO RELEASED AT TRIAL Tina Fontaine walking to the parkade outside the University of Winnipeg's Helen Betty Osborne Centre on Ellice Avenue early on the morning of August 8, 2014. He pleaded guilty to two counts of possession of property obtained by crime under $5,000, and was granted a conditional discharge with an 18-month probationary period and 75 hours of community service work. The former officer's sentencing hearing happened less than a month before he testified in court during Raymond Cormier's second-degree murder trial, contributing to Crown prosecutors' timeline of events during Tina's last day. The day when police and Tina crossed paths It was after 5 a.m. on Aug. 8, 2014, when officer Craig Houle and his partner -- former constable Cornelis Brock Jansen, an eight-year member of the Winnipeg Police Service who was showing him the ropes -- pulled over a black pickup truck, and found 15-year-old Tina Fontaine in the passenger seat. She at first gave police a fake name -- "Tessa Twoheart" -- and a birthdate that would have made her 20 years old. When she eventually revealed her true identity, Houle scanned the police cruiser's on-board computer system, saw her photo but no warrants for her arrest. There was a flag that she had been a missing person in the past, but Houle would later testify he didn't notice any active alerts. click to read more It was after 5 a.m. on Aug. 8, 2014, when officer Craig Houle and his partner -- former constable Cornelis Brock Jansen, an eight-year member of the Winnipeg Police Service who was showing him the ropes -- pulled over a black pickup truck, and found 15-year-old Tina Fontaine in the passenger seat. She at first gave police a fake name -- "Tessa Twoheart" -- and a birthdate that would have made her 20 years old. When she eventually revealed her true identity, Houle scanned the police cruiser's on-board computer system, saw her photo but no warrants for her arrest. There was a flag that she had been a missing person in the past, but Houle would later testify he didn't notice any active alerts. She had a previous flag of be on the lookout for a missing person," he said. Neither Houle nor Jansen, his field trainer, made note of the fact Tina was only 15. They didn't make any notes at all on their interaction with her. She wasn't in trouble, and they let her go. During the second-degree murder trial of Raymond Cormier -- accused in the death of Tina, whose body was found Aug. 17, 2014, in the Red River -- Jansen testified his focus was on the driver, Richard Mohammed, who was irate and thrashing around in the back of the police cruiser after his arrest for driving with a suspended licence. Mohammed, who unsuccessfully sought a publication ban on his name, would later testify he picked up Tina on Sargent Avenue, in an area of Winnipeg's west end known for sex trade work, and asked her if she wanted to "party." He didn't know her name and he didn't know she was underage, he testified. Police had been following his truck since Tina climbed in, and there was no sexual contact between them before officers pulled the vehicle over on Isabel Street. Jansen testified he asked Tina -- after confirming with Houle there were no warrants for her arrest -- why she'd been reluctant to give the officers her real name. She had been reported missing by Child and Family Services after losing contact with her family in Sagkeeng First Nation, as what was supposed to be a weeklong trip to Winnipeg stretched into more than a month away from home. I went back and asked her, why have you been lying to me about your name? And she stated something to the effect of, I thought I might have been in trouble. I said, well, youre not in trouble, from the police anyway, and I asked her where she was living at the time and she stated it was at the Quest Hotel," Jansen said on the witness stand earlier this month in Winnipeg. The hotel was nearby, and it was around 6 a.m. by that point, Jansen said. Just given that she hadnt actually done anything wrong, we allowed her to go to the Quest She declined a ride, she didnt say that she was in any danger." A few hours later, Tina was found unresponsive in an Ellice Avenue parkade. Surveillance video footage showed her walking there in the rain with a newspaper over her head, and finding a spot to lay down and sleep. Passersby saw and called a security guard, Audrey Kohinsky, who testified Tina was unresponsive and her skirt was up. Paramedics roused the teen around 10 a.m., and took her to the Children's Hospital at the Health Sciences Centre. The physician who treated her, Dr. Andrea Wilkie-Gilmore, testified she believed Tina may have been sexually exploited, but the teen would not consent to a physical exam. Social worker Kim Chute, who was then working for Southeast Child and Family Services, picked up Tina from the hospital and brought her to a temporary CFS placement at the Best Western Charterhouse hotel downtown. Tina told Chute how she expected to get a bicycle from her friend "Sebastian," an alias used by Cormier. The teen left the hotel after 5 p.m., headed to Portage Place shopping centre, and was not seen alive again. Jansen is now a civilian member of the WPS. He was suspended from police duties after Tina was found dead, and he was given a notice of termination following an internal investigation. He filed a grievance, and resigned as a police officer before becoming a civilian property evidence technician. Katie May Close The jury was told of Houle's criminal conviction, and that he resigned from the police force after two years of service, but jurors weren't given any details about his thefts or what led to them. Houle, unlike the more experienced officer who was training him when they encountered Tina, was reinstated on the police force after an internal Winnipeg Police Service, six-month professional misconduct investigation. However, Houle blamed himself for the teen's death, and he blamed his resulting depression for his unexplainable thieving behaviour in the months after he returned to work. Three months after homicide investigators arrested Cormier as a suspect in Tina's death, Houle was arrested, too, in a different undercover investigation that revealed the constable was behind an online classified ad selling off WPS equipment. He admitted to stealing more than $8,000 worth of police and Canadian Armed Forces equipment, including ammunition, a tactical shotgun, brass knuckles, a plain-clothes police badge, grenade simulator, boots and flashlights. Over the course of three months with Houle on desk duty, items started to go missing from officers lockers and the WPS gym. On Feb. 22, 2016, a police officer noticed a listing on the website Kijiji, advertising WPS-issued tactical boots and a flashlight. The ad was traced to Houle, who later sold the flashlight to an undercover officer. The other items were discovered after police got a search warrant for Houle's apartment. "I don't even know why I did it. I was in a dark place. I was not myself," Houle told a probation officer, who quoted Houle in a pre-sentence report filed in court. "I had no purpose for the stolen items, didn't even use or wear them, and was not trying to sell them." Want to get a head start on your day? Get the days breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. After Tina's death, Wolson argued his client "simply felt that he didnt have a purpose. He fell into a deep depression." Since his arrest for the thefts, Houle has taken counselling and volunteered with several community groups, including the Bear Clan Patrol, Ma Mawi Wi Chi Itata Centre and Siloam Mission. Those efforts to "refocus" after losing his policing career and his involvement with the Royal Winnipeg Rifles infantry regiment played into a provincial court judge's decision to spare him a criminal record. "Every time a police officer steps out of line, its a very public matter, and its something that causes people to question whether or not those who are there to protect them are truly acting in the public interest. So I do take that as an aggravating factor," Judge Ryan Rolston told Houle. But he acknowledged Houle had recently graduated from the police training academy and was "wet behind the ears" when he encountered Tina. "What happened was a mistake. It was also not just your mistake, and it also doesnt put the responsibility of everything that happened to Tina Fontaine on your shoulders, and you need to come to grips with that if you havent already. Hindsight is always 20/20. Police officers are always called upon to make judgement calls on the street, and you and your partner made a judgment call that turned out to go the wrong way," Rolston said. katie.may@freepress.mb.ca Twitter: @thatkatiemay Ottawa will contribute $47 million over the next three years to create 1,400 daycare spaces in Manitoba. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 23/2/2018 (1301 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. Ottawa will contribute $47 million over the next three years to create 1,400 daycare spaces in Manitoba. "Many parents struggle with high and rising prices, and thats even if they can find daycare spaces," Winnipeg Liberal MP Dan Vandal told a news conference Friday in Winnipeg. Manitoba Families Minister Scott Fielding told reporters he soon will announce which centres in which communities will get the spaces a combination of newly planned and long-awaited daycare slots. Some of them will accommodate disabled children, and there will be an announcement for spaces for autistic children, the minister said. As of Jan. 31, provincial officials said, there were 16,032 children registered on the online waiting list, including prospective parents trying to line up spaces ahead of time. "Its going to take some time to narrow that down," Fielding acknowledged. "This is a historic day weve been waiting a long time," retiring Manitoba Child Care Association executive director Pat Wege said Friday. Nevertheless, while the plan would provide a good foundation, she said, "Its not going to solve Manitobas child-care problem... Its some brand-new (spaces) and some (existing centres) struggling to operate." Stealing some thunder from Fielding, Wege said the minister plans to announce a Manitoba action plan on child care in the next few weeks. "What it means for Manitoba depends very much on what they announce in the coming weeks in the Manitoba action plan," she said. "We havent seen a lot of new spaces in the last couple of years, so its anyones guess." Want to get a head start on your day? Get the days breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. Wege said the federal money may help some of Manitobas existing daycare centres, with 1,900 spaces that are underfunded and having trouble staying open. "Theyll be elated were talking about operating funding revenue." Fridays announcement, however, did not address low wages in the child-care sector, Wege said. "Its been a long-term problem. That is yet to come." Fielding said the province is spending $175 million a year on child care, which the federal funding will augment. Some of the money will pay for online training, some will improve accessibility in centres, the minister said. There will be incentives to open home-based child care, and money will go to 15 child-care centres in northern Manitoba "to add stability to their operations." Vandal noted the money comes from the federal Liberals previous promise of $7.5 billion in child-care funding over the next 11 years. nick.martin@freepress.mb.ca A rabbi whom police say molested minors in incidents from 1993 to 1999 was helping to run an Orthodox Jewish school in Winnipeg for several years after the alleged sex crimes, according to a 2011 newspaper interview. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 22/2/2018 (1302 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. A rabbi whom police say molested minors in incidents from 1993 to 1999 was helping to run an Orthodox Jewish school in Winnipeg for several years after the alleged sex crimes, according to a 2011 newspaper interview. Chabad-Lubavitch of Winnipeg said this week Yacov Simmonds, 42, was employed at its Jewish learning centre after the alleged crimes occurred as director of development a fundraiser rather than in the school with children. But in a 2011 interview with Hamodia, a Hebrew daily newspaper published in Jerusalem with a daily English edition in the U.S. and weekly English-language editions in England and Israel, Simmonds talked about his involvement in the day-to-day operations of the Winnipeg school. "We are running a day school that has classes through seventh grade," he said in the full-page article headlined, Winnipeg: Past, Present and Future. "We have adult night classes and a very successful summer yeshiva (Orthodox Jewish school)... There are many young people here who are thirsty for knowledge," Simmonds is quoted as saying. Simmonds has been charged with three counts of sexual assault, three counts of sexual interference and two counts of invitation to sexual touching. The alleged victims are three females. Police issued a warrant this past October for Simmonds, who is presumed innocent. Investigators believe he fled to the United States and "is aware of the warrant and is actively evading police," a statement issued by the Winnipeg Police Service said. On Thursday, someone with knowledge of the circumstances said Simmonds "had nothing to do with the running of the school," but may have occasionally worked a day or two as a substitute teacher. The centre is attended mainly by children of staff and other more Orthodox Jews "who arent comfortable with the level of observance at Gray Academy (of Jewish Education)." The source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said Simmonds wife and children are believed to be in the Detroit area while he has gone into hiding. Messages are circulating through the Jewish community, advising people to be on the lookout for Simmonds. "There is a Canadian warrant for his arrest, but he must first be found," one blogger posted. The blog post calls on anyone with knowledge of Simmonds whereabouts to get in touch with Winnipeg police. "Do not engage in any vigilante actions or even confront him, which will just up the likelihood that he will flee again." Police in Winnipeg said because its an active investigation they couldnt comment on whether or not they are looking at any extradition arrangements to bring Simmonds to Canada to face the charges, should he be found in the U.S. Want to get a head start on your day? Get the days breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. The Chabad-Lubavitch board of directors said earlier it broke ties with Simmonds before he was charged by police. "The matter was brought to our attention in January 2016, after which the centre concluded an agreement to terminate Rabbi Simmonds employment," the board said in a statement. In the August 2016 Chabad-Lubavitch newsletter, the board said Simmonds was "embarking on a career change" and expressed its gratitude for his years of service. The community wasnt informed about the allegations, but the tight network of learning centres in Canada and United States would be made aware of them, and Simmonds wouldnt be allowed to work in another lubavitch, the source said Thursday. However, the headquarters for the worldwide lubavitch movement, based in Morristown, N.J. the Rabbinical College of America still listed Simmonds as a lubavitch representative on its website Thursday. The college did not respond for a request to comment. carol.sanders@freepress.mb.ca She entered the courtroom crying, and Thelma Favels tears did not stop once the jury declared its verdict. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 22/2/2018 (1302 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. She entered the courtroom crying, and Thelma Favels tears did not stop once the jury declared its verdict. "My baby girl, my baby girl, my baby girl." From the centre of a prayer circle that surrounded her, moments after an 11-member jury acquitted Raymond Cormier of second-degree murder in the death of 15-year-old Tina Fontaine, the woman who raised Tina cried. She cried as family, friends, supporters and Indigenous leaders spoke the words to the Lords Prayer. She cried as a complement of sheriffs led Cormier out a back door of the Winnipeg courtroom, his ankles still in chains. She cried as the courtroom emptied, as the circle enveloped her and guided her into the hallway. "Thats my baby," Favel, Tinas great-aunt, repeated, her voice strained through sobs. "They took my baby away from me again, like her life didnt matter." After a three-week trial and about 13 hours of deliberations, jurors found Cormier, 56, not guilty Thursday afternoon, in a case that sparked international attention to the plight of the many missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls across Canada. Nearly four years after Tinas body was pulled from the Red River, her diminutive body tied in a duvet cover and weighed down with rocks, Favel, her family, and the community at large were left reeling. In the wake of the decision, Manitoba Court of Queens Bench Chief Justice Glenn Joyal thanked the jurors for the "difficult task" of their civil service. Meanwhile, Tinas mother, Valentina Duck, cursed and threatened Cormier as she left the room. PHIL HOSSACK / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS MKO Grand Chief Sheila North, centre, addresses the media outside the Winnipeg Courthouse Thursday after Raymond Cormier was found not guilty. "Just you wait," Duck said over her shoulder, glaring at a silent Cormier, who was seated in the prisoners box. Favel, who was Tinas primary caregiver, later made a plea for peace and calm, via her supporters. As a crowd of reporters waited outside the courthouse to document reactions to a verdict that prompted official statements from Manitobas justice minister, the Winnipeg Police Service and Winnipeg Mayor Brian Bowman, Indigenous leaders prepared to face the cameras with another prayer. This one to the Creator, asking for strength to continue to advocate for justice and uphold Tinas legacy. "To be the shield for the youth that we lost today," Grand Chief Arlen Dumas of the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs said, as he led the prayer and then stepped outside into the frosty air, just as the sun slipped below the horizon. "All the systems that were to protect Tina failed her," Dumas said. "How can we talk about reconciliation when the very nets that were asked to participate in do not fulfil what theyre supposed to fulfil? We can no longer maintain these mechanisms that are prescribed to us. If we want reconciliation and to truly protect our children and our families, we can no longer allow the status quo to exist. This is unacceptable." Crown prosecutors have 30 days to file an appeal of the decision; there was no immediate word on whether they will do so. Legally, the jurors -- seven women and four men, some of whom are visible minorities -- had only two choices in this case. If they believed Tina died by an unlawful act Cormier committed, they were to find him guilty. If they didnt believe Tina died by an unlawful act -- the official cause of her death was undetermined -- or if they didnt believe Cormier committed the unlawful act that caused her death, they were to find him not guilty of second-degree murder. The lesser charge of manslaughter was not an option in this case. "Clearly, to me, they considered a lot," said defence lawyer Tony Kavanagh. "To me, it was about the time that I would have expected," for jurors to spend on their deliberations, based on the legal instructions they were given and the evidence in the case. THE CANADIAN PRESS/JOHN WOODS Thelma Favel, centre, Tina Fontaine's great-aunt and the woman who raised her, weeps as she enters the law courts in Winnipeg with family and supporters the day the jury delivered a not-guilty verdict in the second-degree murder trial of Raymond Cormier, Thursday. Kavanagh and Andrew Synynshyn, who represented Cormier throughout the trial, thanked everyone involved in the case, and said they were aware of its wider implications, as well as the potential risk to Cormiers safety after his acquittal. Justice Minister Heather Stefanson said she cant comment on the specifics of the case because of the appeal period, but she described Tinas death "a horrible tragedy" for all Manitobans. "My heart is with her family as they continue to grieve the loss of their beautiful 15-year-old girl," Stefanson said in a statement. Cormier was one of the last people to see Tina alive. They met in Winnipeg in the summer of 2014, when Cormier was riding his bicycle down Charles Street and Tina and her teenage boyfriend stopped the much older homeless man and told him they had nowhere to go. Cormier admitted he was sexually attracted to Tina and admitted arguing with her before she died. His last words to Tina, he said, were "go jump off a bridge." There was no DNA or forensic evidence linking Cormier to Tinas body, even though investigators believed the duvet cover her body was found wrapped in belonged to him. Cormier repeatedly denied killing the teen, but Crown prosecutors argued the jury should have convicted him based on what they said were admissions of guilt in covertly recorded conversations. The defence presented different interpretations of those same recordings, and attempted to have the case tossed for lack of evidence prior to the jurys deliberations. Cormier was considered a suspect early in the investigation, and was first arrested and questioned on Oct. 1, 2014. He wasnt charged, but was jailed on theft and breach charges until June 2015, when the Winnipeg Police Service began a six-month undercover investigation that ended with Cormiers arrest for second-degree murder in December 2015. Want to get a head start on your day? Get the days breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. In a statement following the verdict, the WPS declined comment on the case, but said it "conducted an extensive investigation into the murder of Tina Fontaine." When she didnt return home to Favel after what was supposed to be a weeklong visit with her mother in Winnipeg, Tina was taken into care of Child and Family Services. She didnt stay long in any of her placements, ended up selling drugs to make money, and was believed to have been sexually exploited on city streets. She was reported missing four times to the WPS in the month before her body was found in the Red River on Aug. 17, 2014. The national conversation and calls to action that were renewed when Tina died are not over, Stefanson said in her statement. "This is not the end of the discussion about murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls. There have been far too many victims both in our province and across the country. Our government will never give up on our work to end the marginalization and violence that too many Indigenous women and girls experience in Manitoba." katie.may@freepress.mb.ca Twitter: @thatkatiemay Raymond Cormier has been found not guilty of second-degree murder in the death of Tina Fontaine. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 22/2/2018 (1302 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. Raymond Cormier has been found not guilty of second-degree murder in the death of Tina Fontaine. The 15-year-old was found dead in the Red River, wrapped in a duvet cover weighed down with rocks, on Aug. 17, 2014. She was reported missing eight days earlier. There was no DNA evidence connecting Cormier to her body. Emotions were raw after the verdict was read. Outside the courthouse, MKO Chief Sheila North delivered an emotional address. Raymond Cormier (left), Tina Fontaine (right) "This is a difficult and tremendously sad day for our people," she said. "This is not the outcome anyone wanted. The system, everything involved in Tina's life, failed her." North said Tina's primary caregiver, her great-aunt Thelma Favel, is making a plea for peace despite the trial's outcome. "She doesn't want to see any retaliation," North said. "That's not what our people are about. She wants justice." AMC Grand Chief Arlen Dumas, who spoke after North, said Tina's case and verdict have been devastating. "Our community has been saddened, outraged and devastated as we followed this trial and learned about young Tinas life. With this decision, justice is denied yet again, and a family and our community mourns again," Dumas said. CP Thelma Favel, centre, Tina Fontaine's great-aunt and the woman who raised her, weeps as she enters the law courts in Winnipeg with Chief Kevin Hart and supporters the day the jury delivered a not-guilty verdict in the second degree murder trial of Raymond Cormier, Thursday, February 22, 2018. THE CANADIAN PRESS/John Woods Grand Chief Jerry Daniels of the South Chiefs' Organization Inc. said in a statement the verdict is another contributing factor in the high number of murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls in Manitoba. "The justice system will not change without us standing together," Daniels said in his statement. "I stand with anyone who is willing to come together, ready to support one another, and to find solutions on the injustices we are facing in the country." Manitoba Justice Minister Heather Stefanson said she can't comment on the specifics of the case as there is an appeal period, but she called Tina's death "a horrible tragedy" for all Manitobans. "My heart is with her family as they continue to grieve the loss of their beautiful 15-year-old girl," Stefanson said in a statement. "This is not the end of the discussion about murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls. There have been far too many victims both in our province and across the country. Our government will never give up on our work to end the marginalization and violence that too many Indigenous women and girls experience in Manitoba." In the courtroom, Tina's birth mother, Tina Duck, swore at Cormier after the verdict was read. "F--- you, you f---er! Just you wait," Duck said as she left. PHIL HOSSACK / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS Left to Right, SCO Grand Chief Jerry Daniels, AMC Grand Chief Arlen Dumas, MKO Grand Chief Sheila North, and Regional AFN Chief Kevin Hart face the media outside the Winnipeg Courthouse Thursday after Raymond Cormier was found not guilty in the death of Tina Fontaine. Supporters gathered around Favel in a prayer circle in the courtroom as she cried, "my baby girl, my baby girl." "They took my baby away from me again, like her life didn't matter." Tina and Cormier met in the summer of 2014, when Cormier was riding his bicycle down Charles Street and Tina and her teenage boyfriend stopped the much older homeless man and told him they had nowhere to go. Cormier, now 56, was one of the last people to see Tina alive and admitted to arguing with her before she died. His last words to her, he said, were "go jump off a bridge." He repeatedly denied killing the teen, but Crown prosecutors argued the jury should convict him based on what they said were admissions of guilt in covertly recorded conversations. He was considered a suspect early on in the investigation and was first arrested and questioned on Oct. 1, 2014. He wasn't charged at the time, but was jailed on a theft and breach charge until June 2015, when the Winnipeg Police Service began a six-month undercover investigation that ended with Cormier's arrest for second degree murder in December 2015. Tina's death attracted international attention as her death caused a public outcry that renewed calls for an inquiry into disproportionately high rates of missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada. The federal government launched the independent inquiry in September 2016 and hearings got underway last year, but they were marred by several staff resignations amid complaints from victims families about a lack of communication and feeling left out of the process. A deadline for the commissioners final report from the national inquiry has been set for the end of this year, but they may ask the federal government for an extension. PHIL HOSSACK / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS An angry MKO Grand Chief Shiela North speaks to media outside the Winnipeg Courthouse Thursday. The trial before a jury and Chief Justice Glenn Joyal in Manitoba's Court of Queen's Bench lasted three weeks. Want to get a head start on your day? Get the days breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. Prior to the jury giving their verdict, Tina's great-aunt entered the packed courtroom sobbing, surrounded by her family and supporters. Joyal urged for for calm and order in the gallery before the verdict was delivered. In closing arguments to the jury on Tuesday, two versions of the accused killer were presented, as Crown and defence lawyers summed up their theories of the second-degree murder case: Cormier, the "haunted" killer with a guilty conscience who had sex with an underage girl and hurt her because he didnt want to be known as a pedophile; and Cormier, the "convenient scapegoat," because he was one of the last people to see her alive, left trying to make sense of how and why police suspect him of murder. "The words he speaks are admissions of murder, plain and simple," Crown prosecutor James Ross told the jury during his closing arguments. "Mr. Cormier, obsessed with and haunted by what he did, but not knowing the recording device was in his apartment, has revealed himself. Believe what he says, and convict him for what he did." However, the 56-year-old has maintained his innocence from the beginning, defence lawyer Tony Kavanagh said and he flat-out denied killing Tina in the same secret recordings the Crown said form the most damning evidence against him. "Mr. Cormier has indicated that hes guilty of not protecting her," Kavanagh said, adding "threadbare" evidence doesnt prove Cormiers guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Two women face murder charges, and two males have been charged with arson, in the death of a Winnipeg senior last month in the Maples. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 23/2/2018 (1301 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. Two women face murder charges, and two males have been charged with arson, in the death of a Winnipeg senior last month in the Maples. Police found the body of Parviz Lotfi, also known as Hossein Lofti, in his home Jan. 9. Parviz Lotfi, 77, was killed last month. Lofti, 77, was a longtime business owner who had been honoured by the city for his contributions to the North End. The Iraqi immigrant and his late wife operated a Main Street beauty salon for 33 years until 2014. On Friday, Winnipeg police said Lofti had been socializing at his home with two women on the evening of Jan. 5, when a physical confrontation occurred. It is believed the two women left Lofti in an incapacitated state in his Manilla Road house and fled in his vehicle, police said. A day later, they returned to the home with three other people, police said. A fire was set inside the house and various items were stolen, police said. Loftis bank and credit cards were used in the days following his death, police said. "Weve seen this in the past, when theres a homicide and suspects set a fire in an attempt to hide a crime," Winnipeg Police Service spokesman Const. Jay Murray said Friday. The fire damage was extensive enough to be visible from the street. Officers who investigated four days later reported spotting it as they approached the house. Investigators believe Lofti died shortly after the physical confrontation on Jan. 5. On Jan. 9, two women were pulled over by police in St. Vital. The registration showed the vehicle was registered to Lofti and the occupants raised the officers suspicions, which led police to Loftis home, police said. Want to get a head start on your day? Get the days breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. The two women stopped in St. Vital are not believed to be involved in Loftis death or the fire, police said, but were charged with possession of a stolen vehicle. "It was critical that these officers made that decision (to check Loftis home)," Murray said. "Lofti might not have been found for a week or more... Something didnt feel right, and part of being a good police officer is paying attention to your intuition, and these two officers demonstrated that perfectly." Officers were dispatched to check on Loftis well-being and thats when they found his body. The death was reported as the citys first homicide of 2018. Yvonne Littlejohn, 36, and Myra Dawn Bird, 35, both of Winnipeg, have been charged with second-degree murder. Charles Clayton Shabaquay, 43, of Winnipeg has been charged with arson and theft offences. A 17-year-old male has been charged with arson and theft, and a 15-year-old female has been charged with theft. It was bitterly cold outside the courthouse, which in a way seemed right, as if all the warmth had leached out of the world and vanished into the night. What remained: a gnawing absence, a silence and a cruel and indifferent wind. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 22/2/2018 (1302 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. Opinion It was bitterly cold outside the courthouse, which in a way seemed right, as if all the warmth had leached out of the world and vanished into the night. What remained: a gnawing absence, a silence and a cruel and indifferent wind. There are different kinds of justice. The one so many ached for did not visit Winnipeg on Thursday night. Winnipeg Free Press files Tina Fontaines body was recovered from the Red River on Aug. 17, 2014. Raymond Cormier, acquitted. Nearly four years after she died, nobody is accountable for the death of Tina Fontaine, a 15-year-old child recovered from the river. Her family, left without any closure for a shattering loss. Instead, there was the wall of media, huddled and freezing around the heavy court doors. There were the First Nations leaders standing together to give shape and voice to a grief this city has heard too many times. Too many times already, and the question that follows is worse: how many times more? "This is a very difficult and tremendously sad day for our people," MKO Grand Chief Sheila North said. "This is not the outcome anybody wanted. The systems, everything that was involved in Tinas life, failed her. Weve all failed her. "We, as a nation, need to do better for our young people," she continued. "We must understand why our Indigenous youth are marginalized in this way and stop it and seek to change it. "This is not right, this is not the Canada that I want to be a part of. Our young people are precious, theyre our future. And if theyre not healthy, none of us are healthy." So, consider this moment our charge, our instructions from a precious life lost, on how to do better. Raymond Joseph Cormier. In the coldest possible light, the verdict was right. It was, the judge reminded the jury, not on Cormier to prove his innocence, but on the Crown to prove guilt and though the Crown tried, it could not patch the holes in its case. The evidence against Cormier was threadbare, at best: no crime scene, no forensic evidence to tie him to a second-degree murder, not even a known cause of death. We may never truly know what happened to this child. The most damning parts of the Crowns case were the secretly recorded rants of a wildly erratic man. Many of his statements about Tina were shocking, repulsive and disturbing; his interest in the girl was sexually exploitative. Sometimes, speaking to friends or undercover police or just himself, he vociferously denied a hand in her death. Other times, he seemed to confess, rambling about being "haunted by something," a reference to "threw her in." Yet, his meandering manner of speaking muddied the context of what he was saying; it was hard to follow his train of thought. So, by the standards of this system, to hang a guilty verdict on those comments not enough, not enough. But justice can mean different things. So, if this kind of justice will not visit Winnipeg, perhaps others will. Because Tina is gone, but she is still with us, a ghost to haunt everything here that must be better, that must be different. There are two stories of what Tina meant to Winnipeg. In the first, there is the story of a vulnerable child who, despite multiple opportunities for intervention, was still swallowed up by the citys dark and broken places. In the days potentially even hours immediately before her death, Tina came into contact with multiple systems that, at least in theory, were intended to protect her: police, the health-care system and Child and Family Services. Or, consider how Tina had been missing for two weeks before her loving great-aunt in Sagkeeng, Thelma Favel, learned that she was missing. Child welfare workers had not taken steps to inform her; she had to call herself to find out. Yet, there is another story about what Tina meant to Winnipeg and this one is also important. Here, too, is a city that grieved for her and stood vigil for her. Here is a city that marched shoulder-to-shoulder in her name, a city that joined calls for an inquiry for her and other missing and murdered Indigenous girls and women. It is the chilling duality of this city that those two stories run on parallel tracks, never meeting. Both equally true, but stuck on their own journeys; the second story is more hopeful, but can seem powerless to stop the harm of the first. The truth of it all, as ugly as it is to admit, is that Tina became Winnipegs loved child only after she was dead. So what does justice look like, then, if not with someone held to account for her death? For one: training to ensure that never again will police encounter a vulnerable girl, who had been reported missing, in a car with an older man, and simply let her go. (The two officers in this case were suspended and later resigned.) More, more. Changes to CFS, to ensure that never again will a struggling child be able to vanish; that families are better informed if they do; that more steps are taken to search for and locate youngsters who are at such risk. And on the grassroots level, too, from where all violence against women and girls finds root. Whatever the truth of Cormiers involvement, it is reasonable to say his relationship to Tina, by his own words, was sexually predatory. The sad truth of it is, until we cut off that sickness at its root, until we can heal the violence in society to where vulnerable women and girls are not seen as disposable, or there to amuse there will be more lives thus taken. Want to get a head start on your day? Get the days breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. If this will change, let it start today. This morning, Winnipeggers will march for Tina again, this time meeting at the Law Courts Building at 10:30 a.m. If we are to have justice, then we must stand shoulder-to-shoulder to demand it. Because there is that more hopeful story, too, the one where Tina forced a city to examine its truth. With determination, that care can interrupt the path of the harm. That process is begun, and it must be tended. Tina is gone, and there is no conviction. The only justice for her now, is up to us to create. melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca We are reporting today from the battle lines of a nation at war, besieged by attackers on multiple fronts, yet tragically unable to even identify its prime enemy. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 23/2/2018 (1301 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. Opinion We are reporting today from the battle lines of a nation at war, besieged by attackers on multiple fronts, yet tragically unable to even identify its prime enemy. So we must begin not by analyzing another round of fresh battle plans from our frayed commanders. Instead, we need to consult our nations most sage philosopher, in the hopes that he can once again set us straight. I refer, of course, to Pogo, the possum who functioned as the philosopher king of newspaper comic strip Walt Kellys satirical swamp. "We have met the enemy and he is us," Pogo famously told us in the 1950s. And lo, Pogo is spot on, yet again, in the America of 2018. America today is a nation at war with itself. In one week: Fourteen Parkland, Fla., teens and three teachers were slaughtered at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. A mentally troubled, expelled student is accused of spraying his former classmates with a military-styled AR-15 assault weapon hed purchased legally. Cops went to his house 39 times; hed had mental counselling; teachers feared him. The FBI was twice warned he wanted to be a school shooter, but it shockingly failed to act. Background checks failed because federal, state and local computers didnt tell each other what they knew about the accused gunman, Nikolas Cruz, 19. Just days later, Floridas Republican state legislature refused to debate the gun controversy, yet found time to drone on about the perils of pornography. So teenage survivors of the Parkland massacre went to Tallahassee to courageously confront legislators for their un-American failures to act. Thirteen Russians with ties to the Kremlin were indicted by the Justice Departments independent counsel for launching an attack on the United States democracy, seeking to spread lies and dissent during the 2016 presidential election via cyberwarfare and also on the ground. The independent counsel is investigating evidence of ties between the campaign of the ultimate winner, U.S. President Donald Trump, and the government of Russian President Vladimir Putin. In his Pogo Papers anthology, Walt Kelly explained that he came up with Pogos core philosophy while thinking through the Cold War crisis that led to Sen. Joseph McCarthys anti-communist Cold War abuses and excesses in reaction to the Soviet efforts to infiltrate spies into the U.S. government. "In the time of Joseph McCarthyism... I attempted to explain each individual is wholly involved in the democratic process," Kelly wrote. "The results of the process fall on the head of the public, and he who is recalcitrant or procrastinates in raising his voice can blame no one but himself." Want to get a head start on your day? Get the days breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. McCarthys abuses were ultimately curtailed because Americas Republicans and Democrats used to say that politics stops at the waters edge. In todays multiple battles, we need to pay homage to, and heed, the patriotic instincts of the father of the modern conservative movement, Sen. Barry Goldwater. The Arizona Republican was a patriotic leader in both of the arenas that marked this past weeks major news. Goldwater famously posed with his rifle (the one he made!) for the National Rifle Associations recruitment ads, proclaiming: "I am the NRA." Yet, as the iconic "Conscience of the Conservatives" spoke out strongly in defence of the U.S. Constitutions Second Amendment, he also believed that no hunter should be able to buy military-style assault weapons. "Ive never used an automatic or semi-automatic for hunting," Goldwater once said. "Theres no need to... If any SOB cant hit a deer with one shot, he should quit shooting." Now, the NRA calls such talk blasphemy, while cutting off funding if pols dare speak such common sense and running primary opponents against them. This makes gun-toting Republicans cower in fear and run up their laundry bills, never mind that Ronald Reagan agreed with Goldwater. Gun enthusiasts need to re-channel the Goldwater/Reagan greatness they once admired, defend the common-sense strength of the Second Amendment and really make America great again. Martin Schram is a veteran Washington journalist, author and TV documentary executive. Tribune News Service That night, as distant storm clouds gathered, we met on the steps of the legislature. We held candles in the darkness as violent drums beat louder, and for an hour, or maybe a little longer, it seemed as if we could dream a peace to life. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 23/2/2018 (1301 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. Opinion That night, as distant storm clouds gathered, we met on the steps of the legislature. We held candles in the darkness as violent drums beat louder, and for an hour, or maybe a little longer, it seemed as if we could dream a peace to life. It was March 16, 2003, and the world waited anxiously to see if the United States would launch a new Iraq war. Atop the steps of the legislature, can you see, there was me, all of 21 years old. I had fallen quite accidentally into helping organize the local vigil, a story of its own. It was one of more than 6,000 happening that night around the world. We were beautiful that night, you know. In the faces below I saw people of all faiths, all ages. Some of them stepped up to speak: a minister, a priest, a teen named Jonny who spoke with passion and later grew up to be a leader. So we were Manitobans together, but also part of something bigger. That night, millions took to the streets, from Auckland to Winnipeg and Washington, D.C. The sky hummed with calls for justice; my chest swelled with love. "Surely," I thought, "surely, it will be enough." In that moment, I believed we could snuff the fuse of war. Four days later, American bombs shredded Baghdad. They broadcast the destruction live on CNN. "Shock and awe begins," the chyron read at the bottom of the screen, as if it were a Hollywood blockbuster. Oh, the strange things we remember: it was karaoke night at a bar near Confusion Corner. Somewhere between warbling renditions of Bon Jovi and Bob Seger, the ceiling-mounted TV flashed with lurid bursts of explosive light. At that moment, confronted by the futility of my hope, I buried my face in my hands and cried. The world grinds us down with time. It erodes the determination of conviction. We hope less, strive less, spend more time minding our own business. The thought that any one of us could actually make a difference begins to ebb away. At last, sufficiently drained of our idealism, we call it maturity: "This is how the real world works," we say. The greatest shame of all: its been almost exactly 15 years since I last believed that I could change the world. Yet this week, in the same place where that faith long since withered for me, I felt a flicker of that same feeling. A hope renewed, for a new generation of youth: this time, the teens of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School (MSD). Michael Laughlin / South Florida Sun-Sentinel Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School student Emma Gonzalez comforts a classmate during a CNN town hall meeting at the BB&T Center, in Sunrise, Fla., on Wednesday night. These are teens who, within the space of a week, were transformed from regular kids to massacre survivors, and then to portraits of resilience and national movement leaders. Teens who announced they would not be ignored. Even as I sit down to review their week, their energy astounds me. Within days of the mass shooting that left 17 people dead, they had begun organizing media blitzes and national days of action from their families living rooms. Speaking the language of social media the mother tongue of youth their age they developed a movement name and a hashtag: #NeverAgain. They spoke at rallies and vigils, they built networks of support amongst U.S. students. All this, while attending many of the 17 funerals for their slain peers and teachers. Some of their brightest lights became front-page names and, it appears, they will stay there for a while. Consider Emma Gonzalez, whose voice blazed with righteous fire as she called out political inaction on gun violence. Or David Hogg, a 17-year-old student journalist who interviewed his peers even as they hid out from the gunman. And they are magnificent and wild, in the way of youth that has seized onto the power of its promise. Some pledged they would not return to classes until a gun-control bill had been passed; until then, they plan to organize instead. On Wednesday, they shone in a town hall hosted by CNN, where they confronted figures including Republican Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and National Rifle Association spokeswoman Dana Loesch. They did not sit quietly, or hold back. Just look at how, over and over again, 17-year-old survivor Cameron Kasky pressed Rubio to renounce accepting donations from the NRA. (In the course of his political career, Rubio has received more than US$3.3 million from the group.) "In the name of 17 people, you cannot ask the NRA to keep their money out of your campaign?" Kasky asked. Somewhere in the middle of trying several ways to answer the question, Rubio admitted that he would not. The crowd jeered, and Kasky stood firm. He had done what he went there to do: hed called a politician to account. Even as the teens rose, the U.S. political machine tried to grind them down. Some are now trying to silence their voices and not only the conspiracy fans peddling the ridiculous hoax that the kids are so-called "crisis actors." There is also a legion of grown-ups who should know better. Such as the Fox News host who, during the CNN event, griped on Twitter: "What would you do if your child lectured and ridiculed a U.S. senator on national television?" Want to get a head start on your day? Get the days breaking stories, weather forecast, and more sent straight to your inbox every weekday morning. Sign Up I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement. Yeah, well, thats an easy question to answer. If any child of mine was so driven by passion and compassion to confront an elected official, to look power in the eye and call out for justice, I would cry tears of pride forever. What else do we hope for our children, if not for them to inherit the world? And to think, these teens are part of a generation that is regularly smeared as too soft, too disengaged, too absorbed in their phones. (Perhaps that explains some of the surprise that they should demand to lead, and not just follow.) In what the MSD youth built after horror, the truth is finally known. These young people endured what no one should endure and stand strong. In their shared trauma, they found a mission to sustain and bind them, a banner to unfurl. They have not yet learned that they cannot change the world and for them, I hope they never will. melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca The working class in New Zealand faces a continuing wave of job losses across a wide range of industries. Plans for about 500 job cuts were announced during January and early February alone. The job destruction gives the lie to claims by the Labour Party-led government, repeated by the corporate media, the trade unions and pseudo-left groups, that it is moving to improve living standards. In October 2017, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said soaring poverty and homelessness showed capitalism had failed and needed to be reformed. The reality, however, is that the government is working with big business and the trade unions to deepen the attacks on working conditions, wages and jobs that intensified following the 2008 financial crisis. The list of job cuts so far this year in New Zealand, which only has a population of 4.6 million, is staggering. On January 10, Rotorua rest home Cantabria sent a letter to 36 staff members informing them of redundancy after the facility was sold to Heritage Lifecare Limited. ABCorp, which employs around 50 workers in a Christchurch plant manufacturing plastic cards, told staff on January 18 it is moving operations to Australia. The plant may close as early as March 30. On January 26, childrens healthcare provider Plunket said it will axe 53 jobs in the central region when a restructure takes effect in April. A staff briefing document said the redundancies will reduce costs. A staff member told Fairfax Media this will involve computerising paperwork and replacing jobs with volunteers. The Plunket announcement came just months after Labours election campaign promise of 100 more nurses for Plunket and Tamariki Ora. Poriruas Vega Industries, which manufactures marine navigation systems, will close down within the next 9 to 12 months. Its 38 workers were informed after they returned from their New Year break. The company, founded in 1972, was purchased last August for $12 million by Canadian firm Carmanah. In early February, ANZ bank informed 39 staff in its Wellington call centre that their jobs will be axed and outsourced to Manila. ANZ reported an annual profit of $1.86 billion in October, a 20 percent increase and the highest profit ever reported by a New Zealand bank. In October, the trade union FIRST Union said Bank of New Zealand also planned to axe 100 jobs. Waiwera Thermal Resort made all its staff redundant on February 7 in preparation for a six-month refurbishment. The company refused to say how many workers were affected. Waiwera Group, which owns the resort, last year liquidated its bottled water company, Waiwera Water. Supermarket operator Foodstuffs announced on February 7 a proposal to close its Rotorua distribution centre in 2020, making 51 staff members redundant. This follows 14 finance and administration job cuts at Foodstuffs Dunedin distribution centre last November. On February 12, wood processing company Juken confirmed it will make 97 of its 200 Gisborne workers redundant, blaming a decline in demand from Japan. Stuff, which is by owned by Australias Fairfax Media, announced on February 21, that it will sell off or close 28 community and rural papers, eliminating at least 60 jobs over the next six months. The business has to sustain its earnings and if there are parts that arent doing their bit we have to make the decision to rationalise them and that is what we have done, Fairfax Media CEO Greg Hywood said. The Labour Party-controlled Rotorua City Council has been in a protracted dispute with workers at the Rotorua Aquatic Centre. The council handed over management of the centre to private firm Community Leisure Management, which decided to make 38 workers redundant. The council has delayed its final decision until February 28, after workers demonstrated and gathered 4,000 signatures on a petition opposing the decision. Major job cuts are also being threatened in the Auckland commuter rail network. Transdev, the French multinational transport company contracted by the Labour-dominated Auckland Council, proposed a restructure last May under which 160 on-board train managers could be made redundant. Since 2016, the Inland Revenue Department (IRD) has been planning to slash 1,500 jobs between 2018 and 2021. Last October, Otago University confirmed it will cut 160 support staff to save $15 million. In November, Massey University mailed 1,000 staff asking for voluntary redundancy. Sixty-nine staff members agreed. Also late last year, networking company Chorus announced it planned to reduce its staff. Chorus has not publicly announced the exact number but the trade union E tu said it was up to 119. Far from fighting the wave of redundancies, the trade unions are facilitating the offensive, dismissing any prospect of opposition. In a press statement on the ABCorp closure, E Tu spokesperson Joe Gallagher said: The short consultation period makes us think that the companys mind is made up. In response to Jukens announcement, the unions Ron Angel said E Tu and FIRST Union would negotiate to try to save these jobs, but the company is very serious about this proposal. Since the 2008 global financial crash, the unions have worked with the corporations and the government, enforcing sellout wage agreements and orderly redundancies. Strike activity is at an historic low point. As few as six work stoppages were reported in 2013, compared with a peak of over 200 in 1986. On February 3, Public Service Association (PSA) leader Erin Polaczuk told the Listener that the modern union saw no need for strikes, preferring to negotiate and go through the courts. The PSA last year collaborated with Auckland Council to cut 194 library jobs, and is playing a similar role on the axing of 1,500 IRD workers jobs. Labours industrial relations policy is designed specifically to restrict industrial action. It plans to introduce a new mechanism for unions and employers to negotiate benchmark wages across an entire industry. Industrial action would be banned during negotiations for the fair pay agreements. The Council of Trade Unions has welcomed the policy. The ongoing destruction of jobs exposes the pro-capitalist politics of the Labour Party. The 19841990 Labour government imposed big business-driven restructuring, privatisation and de-regulation, leading to tens of thousands of job losses in rail, forestry, meat processing and other industries. In 2000, the then-Labour government introduced the Employment Relations Act, with full support of the unions, which imposed tight restrictions on when strikes could be held. The author also recommends: Media frenzy over New Zealand PMs pregnancy distracts attention from inequality [25 January 2018] Continuing attacks on New Zealand public transport workers jobs and conditions [22 December 2017] Inland Revenue Department to axe nearly 2,000 jobs [10 August 2017] On February 14, an American horror story played out in southeastern Florida when 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz opened fire at Stoneman Douglas High School, killing 17 people, including 14 students. In April 1999, the country was stunned by the mass killing of 13 students and teachers at Columbine High School in Colorado by two students, who then committed suicide. In the course of the past 20 years, eruptions of homicidal violence have become almost commonplace, and the death tolls resulting from such incidents have in many cases far exceeded the terrible loss of life at Columbine. The 2017 attack in Las Vegas resulted in 58 deaths. The 2016 attack at the Pulse nightclub in Florida left 49 dead. The 2014 shooting in San Bernardino cost the lives of 14 people. The 2012 assault at Sandy Hook Elementary School claimed 28 lives. The attack on an audience at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, also in 2012, took 12 lives. The shooting at the Fort Hood Army base in 2009 resulted in 13 deaths. The killings are not only deadlier than in 1999. Such incidents occur much more frequently. Mass killings involving more than four deaths take place every 16 days in the US, 10 times more frequently than in the period between 1982 and 2011, when the average time between mass killings was 200 days. Unlike in the aftermath of previous shootings, this time the usual hypocritical appeals for unity and remembrance have been accompanied by a groundswell of anger. Students have spoken out sharply against politicians, including President Trump, and walkout demonstrations involving thousands of students have occurred at high schools and middle schools across the country. Student youth recognize that the wave of mass killings testifies to a deep-rooted sickness of American society. Justin Gruber, who hid in a classroom closet as Cruz gunned down his classmates, told ABC News Wednesday, I was born into a world where I never got to experience safety and peace. There needs to be a significant change in this country. The initial focus of the demonstrations has been on assault rifles, which have been used in numerous eruptions of homicidal violence. The fact that such weapons can be so easily obtained, even by youth with serious psychological disorders, is seen as an obvious expression of the irrationality of American society. The hatred of the fascistic National Rifle Association and the contempt for the politicians who take money from this reactionary organization is entirely legitimate. But the exclusive focus on gunswhich has been encouraged by the media and the Democratic Partyruns the danger of becoming an evasion from the deeper causes of the Parkland tragedy. Horrific events like the Parkland shooting seize headlines, but such incidents represent only a tiny fraction of the extreme violence of American society. Since 2000, there have been 270,000 murders in the US, 600,000 drug overdoses (200,000 involving opioids), 650,000 suicides (130,000 by veterans), and 85,000 workplace deaths. An estimated 700,000 people have died prematurely during this period due to lack of health care. Police killed over 12,000 people from 2000 to 2014, and up to 27,000 immigrants have died attempting to cross the US-Mexico border since 1998. The government has executed roughly 850 prisoners since 2000. Over 2.2 million adults are currently incarcerated in jails and prisons, with another 4.7 million on probation or parole. There are two critical factors in the phenomenon of American violence. The first is the extreme level of social inequality. There have been numerous scientific studies that establish a correlation between inequality and a high level of social violence. According to a 2009 book, The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger, there is a direct correlation between a countrys level of inequality and the level of social violence it exhibits. A 2004 article by British social epidemiologist Richard Wilkinson, who authored The Spirit Level, explains that the increase in violence associated with greater inequality is part of a broader shift in the nature of social relations. In the aftermath of the 2015 mass shooting in San Bernardino, California, Daniel M. T. Fessler, the director of the UCLA Center for Behavior, Evolution and Culture, wrote to the Los Angeles Times: What, then, makes our society so violent? Research indicates that a principal driver is income inequality. In addition to being among the most violent of industrialized nations, ours is among the most unequal, with wealth being concentrated in the hands of a few. In highly unequal societies like the United States, crushing exploitation, unfair treatment by profit-hungry employers, a lack of access to social programs, increased competition and extreme economic stress push millions to the psychological breaking point. A second factor is, undoubtedly, the impact of unending war, waged by the United States all over the world, on American society. The war on terror, now in its 18th year, dominates not only the political life of the United States, but its social culture as well. A 17-year-old high school student has not lived a day in his or her life when the United States has not been at war. Under the auspices of the war on terror, the government has armed the police with military equipment as part of the development of a total army. It has advanced its war aims through the perpetual exacerbation of moods of extreme nationalism, violence, paranoia, xenophobia, fear, suspicion and alienation. Worst of all, the number of people killed by the military forces of the United States in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Syria, Somalia and Pakistan is in the hundreds of thousands. To claim that the ongoing state of permanent war and mass surveillance has had no effect on the social psychology of the country is untenable. In Cruzs case, the 19-year-old reportedly sported his Junior Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) shirt as he unloaded clip after clip into the bodies of his former classmates and teachers. As always when sections of the population attempt to assert their social grievances, the political establishment has mobilized to manipulate popular aspirations and channel protests in reactionary directions. One faction of the ruling class has responded to the shooting by calling for more guns in schools. On Wednesday, Trump proposed to arm school teachers so they can kill potential shooters. The local sheriff in Parkland announced that all schools in the area will be occupied by police armed with AR-15 semi-automatic assault rifles, the same weapon used by Cruz. The Democratic Party has intervened to orient public debate behind gun control, seizing on popular hostility to groups like the fascistic National Rifle Association (NRA) that have profited from the nearly unrestricted proliferation of military-grade weapons. Though a law limiting the availability of assault rifles might reduce the number of deaths when shootings occur, it would not address the underlying causes of social violence. Other, and, one has reason to suspect, even more lethal means of destroying lives will be found. The root cause of such violence lies in the capitalist social system, based on ever-intensifying corporate exploitation, inequality, and war. This nightmarish American reality will be brought to an end only when capitalism is ended and replaced by socialism. The International Youth and Students for Social Equality warns that protests addressed to the Democratic and Republican Parties will fall on deaf ears. Students and youth must turn to the working class, the great progressive and revolutionary social force. 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United Arab Emirates United Kingdom of Great Britain & N. Ireland Uruguay, Eastern Republic of Uzbekistan Vanuatu Venezuela, Bolivarian Republic of Viet Nam, Socialist Republic of Wallis and Futuna Islands Western Sahara Yemen Zambia, Republic of Zimbabwe Welcome Guest! You Are Here: An audience of about 7,000 people booed Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) multiple times at a CNN town hall on school shootings Wednesday when he refused to say he would stop accepting donations from the National Rifle Association. High school junior Cameron Kasky, who survived the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High last week in Parkland, Florida, in which 17 people died, asked Rubio, Can you tell me right now that you will not accept a single donation from the NRA? Rubio replied that he would continue to take the NRAs money because people buy into my agenda and I do support the Second Amendment. Kasky continued, So, right now, in the name of 17 people, you cannot ask the NRA to keep their money out of your campaign? There is money on both sides of every issue in America, Rubio replied, and where that leaves us in policymaking is to look at the issues and make a decision based on what we think is right. Rubio has accepted $3,303,355 in donations so far from the NRA in his political career. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. The simple questions were the most devastating during the sometimes heated town hall, called Stand Up: The Students of Stoneman Douglas Demand Action Why do we have to march on Washington just to save innocent lives? student Ryan Deitsch asked Rubio. Rubio replied that there would be changes as a result of Deitsch and his classmates advocacy. Fred Guttenberg, whose daughter was killed in last weeks shooting, also confronted Rubio. Look at me and tell me: Guns were the factor in the hunting of our kids in this school this week. And look at me and tell me you accept it and you will work with us to do something about guns, he said. Dissatisfied with Rubios response, Guttenberg then called the senator and President Donald Trump pathetically weak. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. Kasky told Rubio it was hard to look at him without looking down the barrel of an AR-15, referring to the weapon authorities believe the gunman used in the massacre at Kaskys school. Story continues He then asked Rubio if he could tell a classmate sitting in the audience if he would live long enough to be able to enlist in the Army. Not only are you going to live to serve our country, but you, and all of you, have the chance to change our country, change not just our laws but the way we talk about our laws, Rubio said. Love HuffPost? Become a founding member of HuffPost Plus today. This article originally appeared on HuffPost. At his listening session on gun violence on Wednesday, President Donald Trump proposed arming teachers as a means of security, a move thats been met with condemnation from gun control advocates in Hollywood. I was a full time High School English teacher. This semester, Im teaching a High School Film Appreciation course, director Scott Derrickson wrote on Twitter. As a teacher and gun owner, let me say that arming teachers is the stupidest idea ever. Not an expert, but perhaps if we didnt have to spend time thinking about arming our TEACHERS, the United States could be ranked higher than 17th in worldwide education. This madness has to stop, wrote Frozen star Josh Gad, who vowed to take political action on gun control after learning a friends son was one of the 17 people killed in last weeks school shooting in Florida. Also Read: Trump Calls for Guns in Classrooms - 2 Years After Insisting He Wasn't for Guns in Classrooms At the event, in which families and survivors of school shootings were invited to the White House to speak directly to the president, Trump proposed that one solution to the recent rash of deadly school shootings might be to allow teachers to carry concealed weapons on school grounds. If you had a teacher who was adept at firearms, they could very well end the attack very quickly, he said. His critics were quick to point out that putting guns in schools simply raises the possibility of making deadly shootings more likely. On Thursday, Trump doubled down on his position, pointing to video games, movies as the causes of violence in addition of calling for teachers to be armed. Also Read: Colbert Mocks Florida Lawmakers for Going After Porn Instead of Dealing With Guns (Video) I am so glad that our sixth-grade teacher Mr. Rock, who used to smack kids on the top of the head with his knuckle when he thought they got out of line, didnt have a gun, director Judd Apatow wrote. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. 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Related stories from TheWrap: Story continues Josh Gad Pays Tribute to Family Friend Who Lost Son in Parkland Shooting Parkland Survivor Mistaken for Gunman at #NeverAgain Rally: 'The Law Has Failed Us' (Video) Trump Calls for Guns in Classrooms 2 Years After Insisting He Wasn't for Guns in Classrooms After the Florida legislatures refusal on Tuesday to consider a ban on assault rifles, celebrities including Ben Platt, Judd Apatow, Jenna Fischer, and Nick Offerman are applauding the efforts of student activists from Parklands Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School where 17 people, including students and adults, were killed and several others injured in a shooting last week pushing them to not give up. Seeing these incredible high school students speaking out and taking immediate action for gun control is the only truly encouraging thing Ive seen in this country since that time we had a real president, Dear Evan Hansen Tony winner Platt wrote on Twitter, while Offerman said in refusing to do anything about guns, legislators also voted to be replaced. In the days since last Thursdays shooting, many of the surviving students have spoken up on behalf of their murdered friends and classmates to argue fiercely for stronger gun control laws. Aside from spreading their message via news networks and social media, several students took a seven-hour bus ride to the Florida state capitol in Tallahassee this week, where they hoped to implore lawmakers to consider legislation that could prevent a similar incident from happening again. Sympathetic celebrities pushed back against this fear-mongering, defending the students integrity and encouraging their activism. Check out a selection of such tweets below. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. With just 30 minutes until he was due to die via lethal injection, Thomas Bart Whitakers life was spared on Thursday. The Texas man was to be executed for trying to kill his entire family. The 38-year-old succeeded in murdering his younger brother and mother and severely wounded his father, Kent Whitaker, in the brutal 2003 attack. In 2007, Bart was convicted of the murders and sentenced to death. On Thursday, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott commuted Barts sentence from death to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Abbotts decision followed a unanimous decision for commutation by the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles. In just over three years as Governor, I have allowed 30 executions. I have not granted a commutation of a death sentence until now, Abbott said in a statement explaining his reasoning for granting clemency. The murders of Mr. Whitakers mother and brother are reprehensible. The crime deserves severe punishment for the criminals who killed them. The recommendation of the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles, and my action on it, ensures Mr. Whitaker will never be released from prison. The Governors decision was influenced by Barts only surviving victim his father, as Kent had vowed he would one day forgive the person responsible even before he realized his son was to blame. Gov. Abbott mentioned grieving father Kents plea for a life sentence as he announced his clemency decision. Mr. Whitakers father, who survived the attempt on his life, passionately opposes the execution of his son. Mr. Whitakers father insists that he would be victimized again if the state put to death his last remaining immediate family member, he said in his proclamation. Also, Mr. Whitaker voluntarily and forever waived any and all claims to parole in exchange for a commutation of his sentence from death to life without the possibility of parole, Abbott continued, concluding, Mr. Whitaker must spend the remainder of his life behind bars as punishment for this heinous crime. Story continues In a clemency petition, Barts attorneys said his deeply religious father begged the district attorneys office with biblical quotations to seek life in prison for his son and was denied. Kent Whitaker and wife Tanya Imagine two people in your family who you love most. Now, imagine one of them murders the other. There must be punishment. But would you prefer execution? What if that person was your only remaining child? the lawyers wrote as reported by NBC News. According to the Texas Tribune, the last time the board recommended clemency for a death row inmate was in 2009, and the last time a Texas Governor approved it was in 2007. The Washington Post reports that the prosecutors of the case Fort Bend County District Attorney John F. Healey, Jr., and first Assistant District Attorney Fred Felcman believe Whitakers sentence is appropriate for the crime. I havent met any person aside from Mr. [Kent] Whitaker who says justice hasnt been served, Felcman said. But Kent, who calls himself the greatest victim in this case, told CBS News, You dont have to convince me how awful this crime was. He adds, Ive lived it for 14 years now. But that doesnt mean the death penalty was the right choice in this case. The Horrific Night On December 20, 2003, Whitaker told his father and mother Tricia that hed just completed his final exams at nearby Sam Houston State University and that he would be graduating, according to ABC News. To celebrate, the entire family, along with Whitakers younger brother, Kevin, 19, went out to a popular restaurant. The family gave Whitaker a Rolex and took photos of the occasion. We had a wonderful time before dinner and then packing up and driving over to the restaurant, and all the way home, Kent told the news outlet. But that joyous night quickly turned into a nightmare. Later that evening, Kevin and Tricia were both fatally shot by the door, while Kent was wounded. Whitaker, who had left the home after saying he was going to get his cell phone, returned and then pretended to try to confront the shooter and shot himself in his arm, he told ABC. After returning from the hospital, where he recovered from a 9mm bullet hole that had struck him six inches from his heart, Kent and Whitaker lived together for nearly seven months. Even when Whitaker became the main suspect, Kent stood by his son. He continued to deny it, and the police continued to say he was their suspect, Kent told The Washington Post. I didnt know who was telling the truth. I told the police, If I see something, Im going to tell you. But Im not going to abandon my son. Im going to stand with him through all of this even if hes responsible. Whitaker was eventually arrested in Mexico after investigators discovered he plotted the murders in the hopes of collecting the familys estate, which was worth more than $1 million. Whitakers friend, Chris Brashear, pleaded guilty to a murder charge and was sentenced to life in prison. His other friend, Steve Champagne, who drove Brashear from the house the night of the shootings, took the plea deal with a 15-year prison sentence in exchange for his testimony against Whitaker. Im 100 percent guilty, Whitaker testified at his trial in 2007. I put the plan in motion. Kent, who has since remarried, told the Post that this isnt just a case of a dad who is ignoring the truth about his son. Believe me, Im aware of what his choices have cost me. Kent has always believed that Whitakers sentence wasnt justified because no one in his family or his late wifes advocated for his execution. Im honoring their memory, Kent said about his family. I know they would not want Barts life taken for this. They would be horrified at whats happening. Angry students and parents from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida filleted Sen. Marco Rubio and NRA rep Dana Loesch at a CNN town hall on gun violence Wednesday night. Student Cameron Kasky demanded Rubio declare he would no longer take National Rifle Association money. He took nearly $10K during the 2016 election cycle. Rubio began to bob and weave, saying the influence of the NRA does not come from the millions of dollars it doles out to politicians in Washington. It comes from millions of people who support the agenda who that group represent. Rubio insisted he takes money only from those orgs that buy into my agenda. It did not play well with the 7,000 furious locals attending CNNs live Stand Up: The Students of Stoneman Douglas Demand Action. Rubio then insisted he will prevent any law that supports the killing of people, whatever the heck that had to do with it, but will always accept money from people who support my agenda. Throwing the mob a bone to gnaw on, Rubio said he would support legislation raising the age at which someone could buy a semi-automatic rifle from 18 to 21 years. But, wait a minute, the NRA does not buy into that agenda, as NRA rep Dana Loesch said later in the town hall explaining that she needed her shotgun when lived alone at age 20. Anyone old enough to vote and drive a car should have the right to a semi-automatic rifle, she said. Unless theyre crazy, she clarified. Rubio said he did not know what is the NRAs position on teachers being armed President Donald Trumps bright idea during his earlier Listening Session at the White House. Anyway, Rubio bravely called that a bad idea. Loesch, also bravely, asserted people not of right mind, who were a danger to self or others, should never have access to guns. But she blamed state and local authorities who do not properly handle mentally ill people for the cottage mass murder industry that has sprung up in this country since Columbine. Story continues Fred Guttenberg, whose daughter Jamie was among the 17 murdered last week at the high school by a former student, told Rubio his comments in the aftermath of the latest mass shooting were pathetically weak, demanding the senator acknowledge guns were the factor in the hunting of our kids in this school this week. The problems we face here today cannot be solved by gun laws alone, Rubio began to bob and weave again, getting interrupted often by the crowd who was not buying what he was shoveling. Rubio, for instance, warned that current semi-automatic weapon ban legislation has more holes than swiss cheese and order to close it up youd have to ban every semi-automatic rifle. Wild applause in favor of that idea hed tossed out as nutty stuff. Fair enough, Rubio conceded, genuinely surprised at the reaction, suggesting he needs to get out more. At one point, Guttenberg painted a picture for Rubio of his daughter running down the hallway at the high school, being shot in the back with an assault weapon. Its a weapon of war, he blasted. The fact that you cant stand with everybody in this building and say that, Im sorry. Town Hall moderator Jake Tapper tried his best to wrangle the testy crowd. But they were unhappy when he had to cut off the second panel just as they were warming up to whaling on Loesch because Don Lemons show was about to start. It may have marked the first CNN town hall at which the moderator got the raspberry from the audience. Anyway, when it finally ended, Tapper had had a good workout. Related stories NRA's Dana Loesch Claims CNN Town Hall Attendees Rushed Stage Screaming "Burn Her" CNN Gun Violence Town Hall Trounces Competition In Early Tally CNN Denies School Shooting Survivor's Claim It Scripted Town Hall Question The surviving students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, received a major boost this week, with the Obamas offering their full support for their efforts for gun reform. On Feb. 14, 17 people, 14 of whom were students, were shot to death at the school by a troubled 19-year-old ex-student with an AR-15 rifle. The student was arrested and is awaiting trial on 17 murder charges. The aftermath brought grief to the small Broward County community, as well as an outpouring of political activism from students there pushing for gun reform. Their actions spread to other schools and culminated in a remarkable CNN town hall, where Stoneman Douglas students grilled U.S. Rep. Marco Rubio and NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch on their resistance to gun control. Michelle Obama took to Twitter on Wednesday where she expressed her appreciation for the students' tenacity. "Im in total awe of the extraordinary students in Florida," she wrote. "Like every movement for progress in our history, gun reform will take unyielding courage and endurance. But @barackobama and I believe in you, were proud of you, and were behind you every step of the way." This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. On Thursday, former President Barack Obama also said that the students had his support. "Young people have helped lead all our great movements. How inspiring to see it again in so many smart, fearless students standing up for their right to be safe; marching and organizing to remake the world as it should be," he said. "We've been waiting for you. And we've got your backs." This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. Celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey and George and Amal Clooney have spoken out in support of the students as well. The students' actions have defied past calls to action regarding gun reform. Despite scores of mass shootings at schools since the infamous Columbine High School massacre in 1999, gun control efforts have gained zero traction. Instead, many states have loosened gun laws to allow for more liberal concealed weapons or open carry laws and expanding the range of locations where guns are permitted, such as colleges and parks. Story continues Watch Jimmy Kimmel call for gun control after the October mass shooting that left 58 people dead and injured nearly 600 at a country music festival in Las Vegas in the video below. RELATED CONTENT: Jimmy Kimmel Gets Emotional Discussing Florida School Shooting, Calls for Action Against Gun Violence Reese Witherspoon, Ellen DeGeneres and More Stars Express Grief and Outrage Following Florida School Shooting Jason Aldean Opens Up About Las Vegas Shooting in First TV Interview Since the Tragedy Related Articles: During an interview on The View, actress and comedian MoNique discussed her claims of pay disparity with Netflix. The Academy Award winner said that Netflix offered her $500,000 for a comedy special, compared to Chris Rock and Dave Chappelle, who each received $20 million, and Amy Schumer, who received $13 million. MoNique said that she didnt begrudge paychecks of the other comedy legends but added, When the vice president of Netflix says to my husband and our attorney, By the way, MoNique is a legend, too, well, if Im a legend, why wouldnt I get what the legends are getting? Wanda Sykes came to the defense of MoNique, saying that she was offered $250,000. Netflix told ABC that it did not comment on negotiations with its talent. Watch: Oprah Winfrey surprises her biggest fan, Tiffany Haddish Read more from Yahoo Entertainment: Tell us what you think! Hit us up on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or leave your comments below. In a visit to The Ellen DeGeneres Show on Thursday, Oprah Winfrey responded to Donald Trumps attacks on her recent 60 Minutes segment, where he called her very insecure. During Winfreys panel, she explored Americas division during Trumps presidency. The segment came shortly after her powerful speech at the Golden Globes, which led many to speculate if Winfrey would run against Trump in 2020. Over the weekend, he criticized her on Twitter. The questions were biased and slanted, the facts incorrect, Trump wrote. Hope Oprah runs so she can be exposed and defeated just like all of the others! This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. When DeGeneres asked about her response to the tweet, Winfrey shrugged and said she woke up and thought, What? What I actually really did was I went back and looked at the tape to see if there was any place that that could be true, she explained to DeGeneres. Did I feel like it was slanted or biased? She continued, I went back and looked at every tape, I called the producer because what actually happened was when you do 60 Minutes, you sit in a room with at least seven other people who critique the piece before you air it, before you do the introduction to it, and then they give you the critique. They critique every word and is this fair? You have this whole panel of people looking at whether it was fair. Winfrey said before the 60 Minutes segment aired, she went through it, specifically looking for areas that might seem uneven between the Republican and Democratic view points. The first time I saw it I said, theres something missing here from the conversation when I asked the question, Do you care what other people think about America? They only used the Democratic side. And I said I remember the guy Matt had said, No, were the only people that are worried what other countries are thinking of us. And I said, I think you should go back and put that in because it makes it more balanced. So, I was working very hard to do the opposite of what I was hate-tweeted about so, its okay, she said. Story continues Related stories 'Fire and Fury' Author Michael Wolff to Go on Speaking Tour 'Last Men in Aleppo' Producer Denied Visa to Attend Oscars Justice Department Announces Indictments of 13 Russians in 2016 Election Probe Subscribe to Variety Newsletters and Email Alerts! One student survivor asked Rubio to no longer accept donations from the NRA. By Desire Thompson Emotions were high at Wednesdays (Feb. 21) town hall where survivors of Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland addressed Florida lawmakers and the National Rifle Association about gun control. Hosted by CNNs Jake Tapper, Sens. Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Bill Nelson (D-FL), NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch and Rep. Ted Deutch were present to have what hoped to be a fluid conversation with students and residents of Broward County. The discussion turned in a debate several times as students poised straight-forward questions about gun reform and lawmakers friendships with the NRA. Fred Guttenberg, whose daughter Jaime was killed by the hands of gunman Nikolas Cruz, addressed Rubio and his previous comments on protecting gun laws. Sen. Rubio, I want to like you. Heres the problem. Your comments this week and those of our President have been pathetically weak, he said. Look at me and tell me guns were the factor in the hunting of our kids in the school this week. Student survivor Cameron Kasky also asked Rubio to stop taking donations from the NRA to which Rubio replied, The influence of these groups comes not from money. He added, You can ask that question and I can say that people buy into my agenda. Loesch deflected several questions by students while placing the blame for the shooting solely on Cruz. I dont believe this insane monster should have ever been able to obtain a firearm, Loesch said. Rubio promised a number of things to students like strengthening background checks, banning bump stocks and limiting magazine stocks. In the end, it seemed like many of the students didnt get the answers they hoped for. It was more of a debate than a discussion, Avery Anger told reporters. The 14-year-old hid in a closet during the Feb. 14 shooting. I dont feel like they answered the questions. Story continues Those watching at home also felt the same. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. One student absent from the town hall was Colton Haab. The teen told WPLG-TV he decided not to attend the town all after CNN reportedly gave him scripted questions for the discussion. CNN had originally asked me to write a speech and questions and it ended up being all scripted, Haab said. Haab, a member of the Junior ROTC, shielded fellow students from gunfire. He wanted to suggest veterans to work in schools but after his points were ignored, he decided not to attend. I expected to be able to ask my questions and give my opinion on my questions, said Haab.I dont think that its going get anything accomplished, he concluded. Its not gonna ask the true questions that all the parents and teachers and students have. CNN has denied the claims. There is absolutely no truth to this, said Richard Hudock, CNNs senior manager of public relations in a statement to The Hill. CNN did not provide or script questions for anyone in last nights town hall, nor have we ever. After seeing an interview with Colton Haab, we invited him to participate in our town hall along with other students and administrators from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Coltons father withdrew his name from participation before the forum began, which we regretted but respected. The outlet also released a statement on their social channels. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. President Donald Trump met with high school shooting survivors separately with written cues on how to express empathy. READ: Donald Trumps Reported Notes Serve As Sympathetic Cues During Gun Violence Town Hall This post Parkland Shooting Survivors Confront Marco Rubio & NRA Spokeswoman In Emotional Town Hall first appeared on Vibe. Security will definitely be a top priority when it comes to Meghan Markle and Prince Harry's feverishly anticipated wedding, the late Princess Diana's former bodyguard, Ken Wharfe, tells ET. ET spoke to Wharfe -- a former protection officer to Diana as well as her sons, Prince William and Prince Harry -- on Thursday. According to Wharfe, police will make sure nothing is overlooked for the massive occasion, and no expense will be spared. "From my own experiences -- and speaking to colleagues within the last few weeks -- Scotland Yard and neighboring police forces that will be part of this operation will be only too aware of how important it is to make sure that no stone is left unturned, and you know, one talks in this day of austerity of finance," he says. "Trust me on this occasion, finance has nothing to do with this. Scotland Yard, together with Thames Valley Police -- which will be policing this event -- money is not an object, and they make sure that the very best of security is put on display to make sure that security is not compromised." Meghan and Harry are set to marry on May 19 at Windsor Castle in London, England. ET learned on Thursday that the two faced an anthrax scare last Monday, when a white substance was sent in an envelope addressed to the couple along with a threatening letter, which a source told us had "racist overtones." The substance was tested and determined not to be anthrax, and Metropolitan Police are investigating the letter, which is being treated as a racist hate crime. "I think the very fact that such an incident's happened, and this package has been received, I think it sort of sends out a message, certainly to the security services ahead of the wedding in May," Wharfe tells ET. "And, you know, one has to be very alert, given the fact that Harry and Meghan are very high-profile individuals, and for the vast majority of people in the world, receiving messages of great joy and comfort. But in this world we now live in, we have ... what we call 'fixated individuals' that are determined in some way or another to corrupt that goodness. The great thing is that this package was found, which proves the security... issues that are in place are working." Story continues Wharfe is confident that security will be top notch at Meghan and Harry's nuptials. "With all the expertise and using all the templates of William's wedding, and other weddings in the past, the security there will be massive," he stresses. "As I said five years ago, when William was married, that I do not forsee any problems at all. There will be sort of fringe demonstration, perhaps, for those that are Republican that perhaps don't like the idea of a royal wedding, but the police are well versed in this and will use their experience over many, many years to ensure that the happy couple have a great day." For more on Meghan and Harry's big day, watch the video below: RELATED CONTENT: Meghan Markle and Prince Harry Were Sent Letter With White Substance and 'Racist Undertones' Meghan Markle and Prince Harry Enjoy 'Hamilton' Date Night Meghan Markle Gets Royal Aide Ahead of Wedding to Prince Harry Related Articles: Lala Kent Believes Tupac 'Took Over Her Body' After His Death While some believe Tupac Shakur is still alive despite being murdered over 20 years ago, Lala Kent has another theory the iconic rapper is living inside her. The Vanderpump Rules star, 27, was forthcoming about her belief that her body was the new home of the Hit Em Up rapper on Jenny McCarthys SiriusXM podcast The Jenny McCarthy Show on Wednesday. McCarthy, 45, asked Kent about her hood persona on Instagram and on the Bravo show, saying, I was gonna ask you how did this, like, sweet, beautiful Utah girl turn into like this cool, hood chick? Without missing a beat Kent said, I dont know where that comes from, I mean I am a firm believer that when Tupac died he took over my body. I know youre laughing but Im being for real. The TV reality star didnt stop there, adding that she had gotten a tattoo that read thug life. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. I feel so happy about it, she said. Its by my the inside ankle on my left and its up and down in my handwriting. It looks like a prison stamp. While Kent admitted she has never been in a fight before, she still feels as bougie and white as they come but I gets to clapping sometimes, pretend you know? McCarthy asked Kent again if she truly believed the soul of a rapper, who died in 1996, was inside her body. Kent was undeterred said, I do, and you know, Im sure he is not thrilled with his new body casing but Im not thrilled about the temper. Photo credit: Getty From Esquire NATIONAL HARBOR, MARYLAND - Wayne LaPierre could read the room. I hear a lot of quiet in this room," the NRA leader told the Thursday morning crowd at CPAC. "I sense your anxiety. You should be anxious. You should be frightened. LaPierre was referring not to the sustained fear of gun violence that much of the country has felt in the days after a mass shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida, but about the present culture wars. LaPierre spent more than 30 minutes offering CPAC extended dog whistles about the dangers of possible changes to the 2nd Amendment, arguing if one freedom goes, the rest will follow. LaPierre attacked the mainstream/national/liberal media as a conduit for a socialism tsunami that is scheduled to wipe out America any day now. He denounced what he sees as a lack of due process, calling it the "gold standard" of the socialist state. He warned of a dystopian future where children spy on their parents and personal information in "the cloud" is used against you. He attacked contemporary liberals in general, telling the CPAC audience, "They keep their movement growing by finding someone to be offended by something every minute of every day. From the Occupy movement to Black Lives Matter to Antifa, they agitate the offended, promote uncivil discourse, and ignore any sense of due process." This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. All of this was a roundabout way of finding anything except guns to blame for American gun violence, which may or may not be reaching a sea change moment as high school students continue to speak out after Parkland. We share a goal of safe schools, safe neighborhoods, and a safe country," LaPierre said. In a tone that was at once bemused, preachy, and exhausted, LaPierre condemned "the breathless national media" eager to smear the NRA. They hate the NRA. They hate the second amendment. They hate individual freedom. Photo credit: Getty LaPierre's speech followed a fiery warm-up from NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch, who berated the media for exploiting the Parkland tragedy "for political gain." Loesch drifted from the podium as her tone grew increasingly antagonistic, offering her own doomsday proclamation to the assembled CPAC crowd who refuses to come aboard with the NRA's mission: "We are just getting started, and it will be you who is left in the dust bin of history." Story continues It is important to note that both of these speakers set the stage for Vice President Mike Pence. President Trump tweeted his support for the NRA earlier this morning: This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. The president is scheduled to speak tomorrow. Related Video: You Might Also Like Cole Sprouse has never been one to shy away from big issues, and with gun control becoming possibly the biggest issue young people across the country are facing head on, Sprouse isnt holding back, joining the ranks of thousands calling out the pro-gun lobby. After yesterdays CNN town hall, where many of the students from Marjorie Stoneman Douglas school in Parkland, FL called out the NRA and Florida senator Marco Rubio for their roles in elevating a pro-gun agenda, former Fox News host Bill OReilly tweeted asking why anyone would bother listening to young people, especially those facing what he calls peer pressure. Sprouse responded, proving hes the hero many need in Hollywood these days. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. According to OReilly, the question on peoples minds is, should the media be promoting opinions by teenagers who are in an emotional state and facing extreme peer pressure in some cases? While the question was probably rhetorical to a point, Sprouse clapped all the way back, and responded effortlessly to OReilly, calling into question the former hosts fading celebrity. A bigger question: should young voters care about the opinions of balding men who value their trauma less than capital? OReilly was fired from Fox News in 2017 amid a number of sexual misconduct allegations, which he maintains are untrue. Since leaving the network, the former star has had some work as a right wing pundit, but has mostly stayed out of the spotlight. Sprouses tweet is a good reminder that mocking someones age or experience isnt how to disagree with them and actually diminishes your argument, which was the point of his clapback. Sprouse isnt the only young person taking the pundit to task for trying to silence the kids from Parkland. Marjorie Douglas Stoneman student (and Marco Rubios main opponent at the town hall session) Cameron Kasky also mocked the tweet from OReilly. Story continues This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. Should the media be promoting these teens? Yeah probably, Kasky tweeted at OReilly, adding, Thank u 4 asking tho dood ruok LOL I luv bein a kid w kidz r kool. It is cool in the shade. Have you been following the pundits post Parkland? Let us know @BritandCo! (photo via Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images) You Might Also Like When President Trump held a listening session with high-school students and parents affected by school shootings in the White House State Dining Room yesterday in the wake of last week's deadly shooting in Florida, his notecard made news. Photo credit: Carolyn Kaster/AP/REX/Shutterstock "I hear you," the card reminded him to say, along with some questions. Also notable, however, was the monogram on the cuff of Trump's shirt: "45." It's a number the 45th president seems to have embraced in his sartorial selections. He's also been spotted at Mar-a-Lago wearing a hat with it on the side. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. While the number is new for Trump, it's clear he's fond of monogramming. Last April when he stepped off Air Force One at Andrews Air Force Base after returning from Mar-a-Lago last April, the back of his Italo Ferretti tie revealed a "Donald Trump" label. Photo credit: Getty And of course, there are myriad examples of the Trump name on things he's owned and licensed it to: Photo credit: Getty Photo credit: Getty Photo credit: Getty We know the president has always liked to see his name in print - he even refers to himself in the third person. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. Maybe before too long he'll be calling himself "45" instead. You Might Also Like In The Know by Yahoo Lisa Barlow is ready for fans to finally see season 2 of "The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City." Gibson Johns interviews the Bravo star about all of the second season's hottest topics, including the Jen Shah scandal, how Lisa initially reacted to authorities showing up at Beauty Lab + Laser, the rollercoaster of emotions that followed and what her mentality is now when it comes to Jen. They also discuss Lisa's friendship with Meredith, what we can expect from the discussions around Mary Cosby's church this season, her iconic catch phrases from season 1 and much more. Two days after the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School massacre in Florida that left 17 people dead, a security officer at a California high school helped prevent an alleged copycat shooting. School resource deputy Marino Chavez was patrolling the campus of El Camino High School in Whittier during the lunch break on Friday, like he does every day, when he says he overheard a students abnormal remark about a plot to attack the school. I guarantee you the school will be shot up in three weeks, the 17-year-old student allegedly said, according to Chavez who spoke at Wednesdays press conference with the Los Angeles County Sheriffs Department. Chavez recalled confronting the student about his comment to which the teenager claimed he was joking. He didnt appear scared, but he was like, Well, I didnt mean it. I said, I know you students say a lot of things. But you cant be saying these words, the 26-year security veteran said of the student who police allege has an extensive disciplinary record. Adding, He was angry about a teachers issue about his earphones in class. He was not allowed to go to her class the next day so he was supposed to go the office. Chavez promptly alerted authorities after bringing the student into the school administration office where the teenager allegedly confirmed his comment. Marino Chavez Sheriff Jim McDonnell said deputies from the Norwalk Sheriffs Department responded by launching an investigation and serving a search warrant to the students home where a Smith and Wesson semiautomatic rifle was registered to the address. Authorities also discovered two AR-15 semiautomatic rifles, two pistols, 90 high-capacity magazines, and ammunition inside the residence, the sheriff said. An AR-15 was used by the 19-year-old gunman in the Parkland, Florida, mass shooting on Feb. 14. McDonnell said the student, who was arrested for making a criminal threat, was moving in the direction of an attack. Want to keep up with the latest crime coverage? Click here to get breaking crime news, ongoing trial coverage and details of intriguing unsolved cases in the True Crime Newsletter. Story continues Weapons discovered at the student's home The students older brother, 28-year-old Army veteran Daniel Barcenas, told authorities the weapons belonged to him, however, one of the AR-15 semiautomatic rifles was determined to be unregistered. On Tuesday, Barcenas was arrested and charged with six counts including criminal storage of firearm and failure to register a personal handgun. Im not a hero. Im just doing my job every day, Chavez said during the press conference. Since the Florida school shooting, McDonnell stated there have been at least 19 leads regarding violent threats on school campuses in the area. Parents, this should be a wake-up call for all of us. Please, talk to your kids, no matter how young, about the challenges we are facing in society today. If you dont, someone else will, McDonnell stressed to parents. Sophie Turner Talks About Going Back to Blonde and Her New Favorite Hair-Care Products Actress Sophie Turner talks about going back to blonde, her favorite Wella, hair-care products, and who she thinks has the best hair on Game of Thrones. My name is Sophie and I'm obsessed with Game of Thrones along with a large percentage of the Allure team (we actually have a channel on Slack, our instant messaging app, called Dames of Thrones where we gush about the show...or gushed, rather). And yes, I share the same name (well, nickname) as Sophie Turner, the actress who plays Sansa Stark on the show. So you can imagine my extreme excitement when I found out I'd have a chance to interview Turner at an event for Wella, the haircare brand for which she's now a spokesperson. It's no secret that unlike Sansa, Turner is not a natural redhead. She's been dyeing her hair for the role since she was 13. But with Game of Thrones coming to an end (tear), Turner has transitioned back to blonde with the help of her hairstylist, Christian Wood, hair colorist, Sonya Dove, and Wella's newest launches: Wellaplex, and in-salon bond repair treatment, and Fusionplex, and line of four products that all contain a potent blend of amino acids and micronized lipids that help to repair worn out hair fibers, protect the cuticle, and add a major dose of hydration. Traumatized from a previous attempt to go back to blonde, Turner couldn't say enough good things about her most recent experience. "The last time I bleached my hair it felt like straw," she said in our interview. "I didn't have the Wella products and my hair was like elastic when I brushed it, it would just snap." This time around, there's no snapping, no straw-like texture Turner's hair is soft and shiny, even after having to film in the cold, wintery weather of Belfast, Ireland. That is, if she can hold onto the products. Below, the now British blonde shares her hair tips, tricks, mishaps, and who's stealing all her bottles of conditioner. Allure: How do you keep your hair healthy while filming in cold climates like Belfast and Iceland? Story continues Sophie Turner: It's honestly thanks to the products we're talking about today. Like you say, I'm in cold climates and I'm dyeing my hair so much and curling it, so right there you've got the three main things that damage your hair: chemicals, heat, and environment. Really, the only way to help with that is Wellaplex, which is an in-salon service that repairs the bonds in your hair while you're having your hair dyed. The colorist just puts the Wellaplex in with the color so during the process of dyeing your hair it's already healing it. Then the Fusionplex is like a take-home thing, which is shampoo, conditioner, and mask. I use the products every day and my hair is so healthy and strong despite all the things I've done to it to go from red to blonde, especially since red is the hardest dye because you have to bleach the shit out of your hair to get it out. But my hair is in really good condition right now and it wouldn't be if I wasn't using this product. It's my favorite product. Every other launch they ask me, "What's your favorite product from the launch?" I'm like, "This is really great, but oh my god the Wellaplex." Because it's just that amazing. I also always use their heat protection spray. I was on holiday very recently and one of the things that you realize is you always use heat protection spray when you're curling or straightening your hair, but when you go on holiday, you only put sunscreen on and you forget about your hair. So now when I'm traveling or at the teach, I always put heat protection spray on my hair before I go outside. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. Allure: What is the one thing that you would never do to your hair? Turner: I feel like I would do anything, I really do. I'm very experimental, and having been a redhead for so long and not being allowed to do anything to my hair, now I'm like, "I just want to do everything!" It's like when you're told not to push a button or play with knives, all you want to do is push a button or play with knives. Allure: So then what would be the craziest thing you'd do to your hair? Turner: I'd be kind of down to dye it a crazy color like blue, or gray, or gunmetal. I definitely want to cut my hair shorter and just dye it a crazy color at one point. Like this sparkly pillow, this would be a cool hair color, all sparkling. How do I get glitter hair? Allure: You had to workout quite a bit for your role in X-Men. What's your go-to gym hairstyle? Turner: Oh my god. My gym hairstyle ... It's really tough going to the gym because I have these baby hairs that when I work out they just go out like this and I get devil horns. Allure: It's OK, I have a rattail at the back of my neck when I put my hair up. Turner: Me too and it curls when I go to the gym. It goes like, "Boink." So, I have to smooth down the hair and just keep it in a ponytail or a bun. That's my gym style; I don't do anything creative with it. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. Allure: OK, so from Instagram stalking you and Maisie [Williams], I've kind of sensed that she's a beauty person, or at least seems to really be into products and doing her makeup. Has she given you any tips, or advice, or tricks, or product recommendations? Turner: Nothing verbally, but honestly, Maisie is one of the most creative people I know when it comes to beauty or hair. I remember when she was 13 or something and she styled her hair up and she made a bow out of her own hair, it was crazy. She does crazy red eye shadow and insane stuff. It's really cool, so I'm very inspired by her. When I was a redhead I felt like I couldn't experiment crazy amounts with color because the color was [on my head] and I wanted [the color] to be subdued everywhere else. Now that I'm a blonde, I'm like, "Maybe I'll experiment?" So, she's inspiring me like that. The only way I think I inspire her is she uses my Wella products. She's just like, "These products are so fucking good." She just steals all my Wella. Allure: I talked with people like Christina Hendricks who go red and then never go back to their original color. Did you ever think you'd stay a redhead? Turner: For a while I definitely thought I would stay red, but the thing is, because I've been on the show for so long and I'm playing a character for so long, I want to differentiate myself and separate myself from that period in my life and from my character so I can be seen as versatile. I don't think I could ever commit to one hair color for a long amount of time. Maybe when I'm older and I'm retired, then I'll decide to be red for the rest of my life. But, right now I know that I'm probably gonna be ever changing. Sophie Turner as Sansa Stark on Game of Thrones COURTESY OF HBO Allure: Have you ever had a hair mishap while filming? Turner: Not while filming, but I had a hair mishap when I was five. I was literally just telling someone about this. I was five and my mom was like, "Go to bed." So, I ran up to bed. I had really dry lips so she put some Vaseline next to my bed, and then I was like, "Huh?" So, I just took a handful of the Vaseline and ran it all over my hair and it took days and days and days for it to come out. Or when I cut bangs for the first time when I was in seventh grade and I did not know how to style my hair. I had this really short bob and it was super frizzy, and then I cut these big, fat bangs and they were really frizzy and I was just like, "Great." I definitely had an awkward phase. Allure: Who on the Game of Thrones cast do you think has the best hair? I asked Carice van Houten the same question when I met her, but I can't remember who she said. Turner: Carice has pretty good hair, but it's probably Kit [Harrington]. I just don't want to inflate his ego anymore, but yeah, it's probably Kit. He does have amazing hair and it is naturally ringlet-y and glorious. Turner isn't the only actress who has gone red for a role. Discover more fiery-haired celebs below: Julianne Hough Is Now a Redhead and She Looks Gorgeous 9 Famous Red-Haired Celebrities Who Aren't Natural Redheads Julia Roberts Brings Back Her Iconic Pretty Woman Red Hair Color Take a peek at what's inside the February Allure Beauty Box: Wearing saggy pants is less a fashion statement than it is a political one and yet another state is trying to make it illegal. South Carolinas Bill 4957 dictates that anyone caught wearing pants hanging more than three inches below the hipbone and exposing skin is charged with a noncriminal offense. Notably, the bill targets men, not women. First-time offenders would be charged $25, second-time offenders would pay $50 or fulfill up to three hours of community service, and people caught three or more times would pay $75 and complete up to six hours of community service. Rep. Wendell Gilliard tells Yahoo Lifestyle he originally co-sponsored the bill, but on Wednesday, he withdrew his name due to priorities related to the Feb. 14 Florida school shooting. However, the bill is still under consideration, and Gilliard would like to see the issue pursued on a local level. Pants should be worn at the waist as a matter of decency and respect, Gilliard tells Yahoo Lifestyle. This is a fad from the music industry and kids of all races participate. Saggy pants are already unlawful in other South Carolina cities, as well as parts of Georgia, Louisiana, Florida, and New Jersey. Plenty of nightclubs and restaurants have banned the style on the grounds of decorum, despite a general backlash that the rule has racial undertones. And in 2013, a McDonalds franchise owner placed signs that read No Sagging Allowed in This Restaurant in several of his Dallas-based restaurants (children under the age of 3 were reportedly exempt). Photo: Getty Images Hilariously, lawmakers in Pikesville, Tenn., argued that saggy pants impair the ability to walk. According to the ordinance, there is evidence that indicates that wearing sagging pants is injurious to the health of the wearer, as it causes improper gait. According to NPR, the mayor even referenced a study (which turned out to be an internet hoax) claiming that men who wear saggy pants suffer from premature ejaculation. Story continues Even former President Barack Obama weighed in on the trend, telling MTV in 2008, Heres my attitude: I think passing a law about people wearing sagging pants is a waste of time. We should be focused on creating jobs, improving our schools, getting health care, dealing with the war in Iraq. Any public official who is worrying about sagging pants probably needs to spend some time focusing on real problems out there. Obama added, Having said that, brothers should pull up their pants. Youre walking by your mother, your grandmother, and your underwear is showing. Whats wrong with that? Come on. There are some issues that we face that you dont have to pass a law [against], but that doesnt mean folks cant have some sense and some respect for other people. And, you know, some people might not want to see your underwear Im one of them. The motivation behind saggy pants bans has been debated, with many claiming theyre racist or classist. For example, according to local station SCNow, councilwoman Cheryl Qualls rejected a 2016 saggy pants bill in Timmonsville, S.C., saying, It will increase racial profiling on some of our children here in Timmonsville and across the country. When one child can afford $50 for a pair of pants thats designed to show underwear and another child cannot and they are together and the child who cannot afford the $50 designer pants is also dressed identical to his friend, then youre now taxing the mother of the child who cant afford it. According to Anita Jones Thomas, dean of the College of Applied Behavior Sciences at the University of Indianapolis and a specialist in multicultural psychology, the origins of saggy pants help explain the controversy. Around the late 1980s, prisons banned belts due to concerns that inmates would use them to commit suicide, Thomas tells Yahoo Lifestyle. It was a response to a mental health crisis that largely affects African-Americans, who disproportionately fill the prison systems. At the same time, the laid-back style was adopted by rap artists who turned the look into a fashion trend. Today, many African-American churches run etiquette programs in which they educate boys on the history of the saggy pants style, Thomas adds. But the issue of whether saggy pants laws are unconstitutional isnt clear-cut. At face value, the answer is no, but it all depends on how the laws are applied, Shaundra Young Scott, executive director of the South Carolina chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, tells Yahoo Lifestyle. If theyre being used to discriminate against a certain group of people or conduct race-based stops, the answer is yes. She adds: We need to ask, who has the privilege of defining decency? One might argue that the hijab, goth clothing, or certain hairstyles are indecent. There are many ways to interpret fashion bans. Heres the crux, says Scott: The majority of people who wear saggy pants are minorities or poor people and banning saggy pants could reinforce discrimination or harassment that they already deal with every day. Read more from Yahoo Lifestyle: Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter for nonstop inspiration delivered fresh to your feed, every day. Photos: Warner Bros./MGM/United Artists Some films are happy just to get nominated for Best Picture. But these classics didnt even make the final cut of contenders. At the 90th edition of the Academy Awards on March 4, nine films will vie for the coveted Best Picture trophy. No matter which of those feted contenders eventually emerges victorious, all of them have now joined an illustrious group especially given that, over the course of the academys nine decades, quite a few all-time greats have failed to receive recognition in that category. How these classics could have been denied a shot at the awards top prize is, in hindsight, more than a bit baffling, no matter the stiff competition they might have faced in the year of their release. Whether its proof that the passage of time is required to determine true greatness or evidence that the organizations tastemakers arent as astute as theyd like the public to believe, the academys track record in this regard is less than flawless (to say the least). With a wealth of candidates from which to choose, these are our picks for the 15 worst Best Picture nomination snubs in Oscar history. City Lights (1931) The American Film Institute ranked Charlie Chaplins 1931 masterpiece as the 11th greatest U.S. film ever made, but back in 1931, the academy thought it was inferior to (sarcasm alert!) such well-known and admired movies as Skippy, East Lynne, and Trader Horn. Oof. My Man Godfrey (1936) Despite being a commercial smash and earning six other nominations, William Powell and Carole Lombards enduringly great screwball comedy was denied entry into the 1936 Best Picture race, proving not for the last time the academys bias against comedy. His Girl Friday (1940) The first adaptation of Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthurs play The Front Page, made in 1931, earned a Best Picture nom. Yet when it was redone, in superior fashion, by director Howard Hawks with stars Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell, it didnt make the cut no doubt because Grants other screwball effort that year, The Philadelphia Story, was chosen to compete for the award. Story continues The Third Man (1949) Starring Joseph Cotten and Orson Welles, Carol Reeds film noir (based on Graham Greenes novel) is widely regarded as one of cinemas crowning 20th-century achievements although not by the academy, which instead preferred the Deborah Kerr-headlined King Solomons Mines. Singin in the Rain (1952) Gene Kellys An American in Paris had won six Oscars (including Best Picture) at the prior years show, so in 1952, the academy decided to leave the stars legendary follow-up out of the nights biggest race a mistake of mind-boggling proportions. Rebel Without a Cause (1955) Likely too revolutionary for voters at the time of its release, Nicholas Rays unforgettable portrait of tumultuous teenager-dom highlighted by James Deans iconic performance was an academy omission that, 63 years later, is difficult to excuse. The Searchers (1956) Though the academy wasnt particularly apt to nominate Westerns in its major category, John Fords 1956 The Searchers now occupies a (if not the) peak position in the genres storied history, so its failure to secure a Best Picture nomination when William Wylers Friendly Persuasion did is a gaffe for the record books. Some Like It Hot (1959) There are few comedies as beloved and critically acclaimed as Billy Wilders gem starring Jack Lemmon, Tony Curtis, and Marilyn Monroe. In 1959, though, the academy wrongly thought it unworthy of inclusion. Psycho (1960) The list of stellar Alfred Hitchcock films to not earn a Best Picture nomination is long and includes Notorious, Vertigo, North by Northwest, and The Birds. Nonetheless, at the top of that embarrassing-to-the-academy rundown stands 1960s Psycho, the Master of Suspenses peerless tale of scary showers and scarier mothers. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) As with Rebel Without a Cause, Stanley Kubricks unconventional classic was presumably just too much for the old-fashioned academy to properly process, although that hardly lets them off the hook for failing to honor one of cinemas genuine all-timers. Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) With Star Wars already in the Best Picture running, its no enormous surprise that the academy left out Steven Spielbergs 1977 sci-fi drama. Regardless, that doesnt make the groups fondness for The Turning Point (11 noms, no wins) over Close Encounters any more defensible from a historical standpoint. sex, lies, and videotape (1989) Steven Soderbergh subsequently earned two Best Picture nominations in 2000 for Erin Brockovich and Traffic, but he couldnt get similar recognition for his breakthrough 1989 feature debut, which aside from winning the Cannes Film Festivals Palme dOr helped create the modern American independent film movement. Thelma and Louise (1991) Ridley Scotts 1991 cross-country saga may have earned six nominations, but when it came time to hand out the evenings final statuette, it had no shot because its deserved Best Picture nomination had instead been given to (take your pick) Bugsy or Beauty and the Beast. Boogie Nights (1997) Even though 1997 was a tremendous year for American movies, the academy went conservative with its Best Picture nominations leaving Paul Thomas Andersons Boogie Nights (a modern classic by a visionary director) on the sidelines while the likes of the slight As Good as It Gets and The Full Monty got the chance to lose to Titanic. Mulholland Dr. (2001) David Lynchs nightmarish tale of showbiz ambition and murderous intrigue topped numerous critics polls as the best film of the aughts. In the eyes of the 2001 academy, however, it wasnt even as good as In the Bedroom, which was to put it mildly an opinion of head-smacking craziness. Read more from Yahoo Entertainment: Hope Hicks, the White House communications director, has been named the most powerful person in Trumps Washington, by GQ. (Photo: Getty Images) Aside from Donald Trump, the most powerful person in Washington isnt the VP, the first lady, or even the first daughter its Hope Hicks, the presidents longest-serving aide. On Thursday, GQ magazine released a list titled The 50 Most Powerful People in Trumps Washington and White House communications director Hicks is ranked number one. The spots were based on a Shades of Power scale determined by degrees of ascendant, enduring, precarious, perplexing and surreptitious. Hicks power status was deemed perplexing. Hope is feared and revered in the West Wing, Kellyanne Conway, counselor to the president, who did not make the list, told GQ. To the public, she remains in the background. To the president, she is front and center. The 29-year-old who formerly worked in PR for Ivanka Trumps namesake clothing line, joined the presidents campaign as press secretary after the then-candidate called her in for a meeting. Mr. Trump looked at me and said, Im thinking about running for president, and youre going to be my press secretary, Hicks told New York magazine in April 2016. I think its the year of the outsider. It helps to have people with outsider perspective. According to the December book, Let Trump Be Trump, the president has referred to Hicks having about as much experience as a coffee cup but agreed that her good looks were a selling point. Hope Hicks stunned at a Japanese state dinner wearing a chic tux. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik) Although Hicks herself doesnt engage in social media, she does manage the presidents controversial Twitter account and as Politico reported in July, has earned the presidents trust by letting him do just as he pleases when it comes to dealing with the press. The rest of the time, Hicks reportedly handles up to 250 media requests, solely determining which news outlet gets access to the president. Despite her tireless work ethic and ability to fly under the radar, Hopes has been a subject of public fascination. The former model who worked for Ralph Lauren and Bloomingdales has been regarded as a fashion icon from her sharp black tuxedo with satin bowtie, $798 Stuart Weitzman boots, and gorgeous youthful looks. Story continues Her love life has also been scrutinized, particularly her former relationship with former staff secretary Rob Porter who resigned in February following abuse allegations from his two ex-wives. And although shes managed to operate under the radar, in January, the House Intelligence Committee asked Hicks to testify regarding her role in possible Russian election interference, per The Hill. Hope Hicks is listed among the most powerful people in Washington, per a new ranking, due to her role as the presidents gatekeeper. (Photo: Getty Images) Hicks surpassed Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, who ranked #37 due to Jareds reported idea to fire FBI director James Comey, which triggered the Russian investigation and Ivankas fall from grace as liberal game changer to scapegoat. Barack Obama scored 30th place due to taking up a rent-free space in Trumps head and outnumbering the presidents Twitter following and network Fox & Friends landed at #13 because more American presidents get their FBI conspiracy theories here than from any other source! GQ did not return Yahoo Lifestyles request for comment on why First lady Melania Trump did not make the list. However, Celebrity Big Brother castmate and former Trump aide Omarosa Manigault squeezed in at #50 in a category called The Myriad Ghosts of Trumps Political Past. Related Video: Read more from Yahoo Lifestyle: Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter for nonstop inspiration delivered fresh to your feed, every day. Ramallah (Palestinian Territories) (AFP) - Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas appeared on local television Friday to downplay concerns over his health after undergoing what were described as routine tests in the United States. In an interview with Palestine TV while in the US, 82-year-old Abbas rejected reports he had been rushed to hospital during his visit. "It was a suitable opportunity to be here to conduct some medical tests, and these tests have been conducted and now we left," he said after leaving hospital. "Thank God all the results are positive and reassuring." The health of the longtime smoker has long been the subject of speculation, with no clear successor identified. Abbas was in the US to meet with political allies amid a breakdown of communication with the US administration following President Donald Trump's controversial recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital. The Palestinians, who see the eastern part of the city as the capital of their future state, have said the US has disqualified itself as a mediator in talks with Israel and cut political ties with the administration. Trump is expected to propose a peace plan in the coming months. Abbas has been in power since winning presidential elections in 2005. He has remained in the role despite his initial mandate expiring as splits between the Palestinian factions have made fresh elections impossible. Johannesburg (AFP) - South Africa's top court on Friday reinstated a 24 year prison sentence for a Nigerian oil militant convicted of a series of terror attacks in his home country eight years ago. Henry Okah was jailed in 2013 for masterminding a number of attacks, including twin bombings which killed 12 people in the Nigerian capital Abuja during independence day celebrations in 2010. Okah's appeal was first heard by the Supreme Court of Appeal in 2014, which overturned four of his 13 terror convictions and reduced his sentence to 20 years, but the Constitutional Court in Johannesburg overruled the decision. "The appeal against his entire conviction... is dismissed," the Constitutional Court said in its ruling. "The convictions overturned in the Supreme Court of Appeal must be reinstated together with the sentences the High Court imposed." Okah had repeatedly denied any involvement in the blasts. Lawyers for Okah, who has been a permanent resident of South Africa since 2007, had argued it was outside the country's legal jurisdiction to put him on trial. "He was not extradited to Nigeria because, had he stood trial there, he would have faced the death penalty," said the Constitutional Court in its judgement. Okah, who was also convicted over two other explosions in 2010 in the southern Nigerian city of Warri, a hub of the oil-rich delta region, was the presumed leader of the Nigerian militant group Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND). MEND said it was fighting for a fair share of oil revenue for residents of the Niger Delta. The group has seen spin-offs by radicals who want independence for the region. A high court in the Nigerian capital Abuja is expected to hand down a ruling on March 7 in the trial of Okah's brother Charles for his alleged involvement in the 2010 independence day bombings. UPDATE, Feb. 23, 2018, 1:25 a.m.: The Alabama Department of Corrections has called off Hamms execution. Officials told reporters on the scene there was insufficient time to prepare before the death warrant expired at midnight. UPDATE, Feb. 22, 2018, 8:55 p.m.: The Alabama Department of Corrections says the U.S. Supreme Court has lifted its temporary stay, and Hamms execution is expected to proceed. UPDATE, Feb. 22, 2018, 6 p.m.: The U.S. Supreme Court has issued a temporary stay of execution in the case of Doyle Lee Hamm, according to Alabama media. When Doyle Lee Hamm was sentenced to death, Alabama was still using a yellow-painted electric chair, morbidly nicknamed Yellow Mama, to execute its inmates. It was 1987, Ronald Reagan was president, and Hamm had just been convicted of the murder of a motel clerk, whod been shot in the head during a robbery. More than 30 years later, Yellow Mama has been retired, and Alabama kills its inmates in other ways. Tomorrow, at 6 p.m., Hamm will be strapped to a gurney. He will be asked if he has any last words. Then, the medical team at Holman Prison will try to locate a vein in which to inject the lethal drugs in Hamms legs and feet. Doyle Lee Hamm has been on death row for three decades and will be executed on Thursday -- despite the fact he is already dying of cancer. His age and advanced cranial and lymphatic cancer make it likely his execution will result in severe and unnecessary pain. (Photo: Mississippi Department of Corrections via Doyle Lee Hamm's attorney) Yes, this is unusual; death row inmates typically receive lethal injection in veins in the arms or hands. However, this isnt the only thing that makes Doyle Lee Hamms case unique. Hamm is set to be executed tomorrow despite the fact he is already dying of cranial and lymphatic cancer. In 2014, a large cell lymphoma was found behind Hamms left eye, and an MRI test confirmed a tumor. Further examination and CT scans showed abnormal lymph nodes in his chest, lungs and abdomen. He received radiation to treat the cancer behind his eye in 2014; but because the abnormal lymph nodes in Hamms chest and lungs likely werent serious enough to kill him before he could be executed, medical staff left them untreated; and his condition deteriorated. Surgery to remove a cancerous lesion eating through Hamms cheek and bone was scheduled for last December, but on the day of the procedure, news broke that the Alabama Supreme Court had finally set his execution date. The warden canceled Hamms surgery and instead read him his death warrant. Story continues That an already dying man will soon be executed isnt the only issue here, however. Hamms age (he turned 61 on Valentines Day), his advanced cancer and the various treatments he has undergone to treat it have severely impaired his peripheral veins. Last month, Chief District Judge Karon O. Bowdre of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Alabama issued a stay of execution, writing that the execution of a terminally ill man with difficult-to-locate veins would be gruesome and could result in severe and unnecessary pain. In other words, when the time comes for the lethal cocktail injection, Hamms veins likely wont cooperate and could even rupture. Theres ample evidence this can, and does, happen, and the results are disastrous and disturbing. Last November, Ohio prison officials botched the execution of Alva Campbell, who at 69 years old was unable to walk unassisted and shuffled toward the death chamber with the help of a walker while toting an external colostomy bag. He suffered from emphysema and possibly an undiagnosed return of lung cancer. The state examined Campbell in the days leading up to the execution and made the decision to go forward, despite a nurse finding no suitable veins. During the execution, prison officials labored for the better part of a half hour to find a vein in which to inject the drugs. At one point, Campbell appeared to be crying. The execution was finally called off. Even on seemingly healthy inmates, lethal injection drugs dont always make it into the vein properly; an estimated 7.12 percent of all lethal injections are botched. In 1977, even lethal injection proponents were warning of the potential dangers: Dr. Jay Chapman, a medical examiner who was an early supporter of the practice, said the major hazard of using lethal drugs in the execution of criminals is missing the vein in establishing an intravenous pathway for the drugs. A Florida execution was botched in 2006 when drugs were accidentally injected into tissue instead of straight into the bloodstream. Angel Diazs execution lasted 34 minutes, and the process was so gruesome that then-Governor Jeb Bush called for a moratorium on executions. During Oklahoma inmate Clayton Locketts disastrous 2014 execution, the IV placed in his groin came loose, which meant the drugs were similarly injected into tissue. Lockett violently struggled and lurched, as if trying to free himself. By the time the order came down to halt the procedure, Lockett was dead. An autopsy later revealed blunt-force injuries from fighting the restraints. Given the severity of Doyle Lee Hamms medical condition, his longtime attorney asked an anesthesiologist to come to Alabama and examine his veins. According to an article from Alabama Media Group, the doctor was not allowed to bring any medical equipment into the prison, so they improvised by using the attorneys tie as a tourniquet. The doctor found only one potentially usable vein on Hamms entire body on his right hand and said even this vein was compromised and susceptible to rupture. He noted that if corrections personnel werent able to inject the drugs properly, it could cause Mr. Hamm to become paralyzed and consciously suffocate. However, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ordered an independent medical examination and concluded Hamm has accessible veins in his legs and feet. Hamm will be killed via lethal injection in one of those veins tomorrow barring any last-minute intervention. Prisoners are humans, and they have the right enshrined in the Eighth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution to a life free of cruel and unusual punishment. Furthermore, the Supreme Court has previously protected prisoners rights to medical treatment; in Estelle v. Gamble, the court ruled ignoring serious medical needs of prisoners is unconstitutional. The system failed Doyle Lee Hamm on both counts. It is the height of irony to give a man just enough medical treatment to keep him alive (though living in extreme pain) until the state is finally ready to kill him (in a manner that will likely cause extreme pain). As Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun famously wrote in 1994, No combination of procedural rules or substantive regulations ever can save the death penalty from its inherent constitutional deficiencies. Love HuffPost? Become a founding member of HuffPost Plus today. The continued utilization of capital punishment in a civilized society inevitably leads to a host of other logical fallacies, as well. Even if we ignore Hamms terminal illness, put humanity aside and instead consider the economics, the fact remains death penalty cases are more costly than non-capital cases. Data from states like California and Kansas show the costs of housing a death row inmate are higher than housing general population inmates. People will continue to debate the morality of capital punishment. Some believe in the value of retribution. In practice, however, the death penalty continues to fail the test of constitutionality and logic. Executing an inmate who A.) has spent more than 30 years on death row, B.) is already dying, and C.) whose illness makes it highly likely his execution will be botched is a travesty. Inmates like Doyle Lee Hamm should have their sentences commuted to life in prison what little life they have left. Hannah Riley is communications manager at the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta. She previously worked in criminal justice reform at the Innocence Project in New York. No work relationship exists between the Southern Center for Human Rights and Doyle Lee Hamm or his legal team. ALSO ON HUFFPOST OPINION I Have Written The Same Story On Mass Shootings A Dozen Times Women Arent Immune To Sexism Anywhere, Even At The Olympics Clarence Thomas Sexually Harassed Me. Yes, He Should Be Impeached. This article originally appeared on HuffPost. Its become a grim but familiar ritual for gun control activists: theres a mass shooting in America, cries for action on gun laws follow, and efforts for reform are ultimately stymied by a gridlocked government. But after 17 people were killed in a school shooting in Parkland, Fla., last week, there are glimmers of hope for proponents of gun control as President Trump and a few Republicans in Congress have signaled support for limited reforms. Trump directed the Justice Department Tuesday to develop regulations that would ban bump stocks, devices that are used to make legal semi-automatic weapons fire similarly to machine guns. The gun accessory drew national attention after last falls massacre in Las Vegas, during which a shooter rigged his weapons with bump stocks before opening fire on a concert in an attack that killed 58 people and injured some 500 more. The key in all of these efforts, as I said in my remarks the day after the shooting, is that we cannot merely take actions that make us feel like we are making a difference, Trump said at the White House. We must actually make a difference. In addition, the Washington Post reported that Trump is interested in the idea of raising the minimum age to purchase a semiautomatic weapon from 18 to 21. White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders said Tuesday that raising the age of purchase is on the table for us to discuss. The White House has also said it wants to look into the background check system. At a press briefing Tuesday afternoon, Sanders said the President supported efforts to reform the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS), which is used to determine whether a prospective buyer is eligible to purchase a firearm. Shooters in several recent massacres were able to purchase weapons due to breakdowns in the system, including the two men who carried out attacks on churches in Sutherland Springs, Tex. in 2017 and Charleston, S.C. in 2015. The Texas shooter was able to legally purchase a weapon despite having been convicted of domestic violence and discharged from the Air Force for bad conduct. The Air Force has said it failed to report the shooters criminal history to the NICS system. Story continues I know background checks are something that the President is supportive of making more efficient and looking at better ways to improve that process, Sanders said. And were going to continue to look at a number of other factors as well. Before he became a presidential candidate, Trump wrote in a 2000 book that he supported a ban on assault weapons. But he reversed that position in 2015 and campaigned on strong support for Second Amendment rights. On Wednesday afternoon, Trump met with parents, students and teachers who have been impacted by gun violence, including families and survivors of the Parkland shooting. Were going to pick out the strongest ideas, the most important ideas, the ideas that are going to work and were going to get them done, Trump said at the beginning of the listening session. Its not going to be talk, like its been in the past. Its gone on too long. He said he would be very strong on background checks and would put a strong emphasis on mental health. Its hardly the first time that modest gun restrictions measures have been raised in the wake of a shooting. And theres a clear push from the public to get something done now. In the aftermath of the Florida attack, support for stricter gun control laws is at an all-time high among American voters, according to a recent Quinnipiac University poll. Ninety-seven percent of Americans support universal background checks, the poll found, while some 83% are in favor of mandatory waiting period for firearm purchases and 67% support a ban on assault weapons. According to the survey, 67% of respondents say it is currently too easy to buy a gun in the U.S. About three-quarters believe Congress should do more to reduce gun violence. Ideas are out there. After the Sutherland Springs shooting, Republican Sen. John Cornyn, the Senate Majority Whip from Texas, introduced a bill that would, among other things, mandate federal agencies and states to upload all relevant information to the background check system. Just one record thats not properly reported can lead to tragedy, as the country saw last week in Sutherland Springs, Cornyn said at the time. This bill aims to help fix whats become a nationwide, systemic problem so we can better prevent criminals and domestic abusers from obtaining firearms. The bill, called the Fix NICS Act, has 35 co-sponsors from both sides of the aisle. A companion version was introduced in the House in mid-November, andafter being attached to legislation that would allow concealed weapons permit holders to legally carry firearms across state linesultimately passed the House with a vote of 231-198. Before leaving town for the Presidents Day holiday, Cornyn said he and leaders of the Senate Judiciary Committee would soon be huddling to discuss gun control policy, including the Fix NICS bill. On Tuesday Cornyn thanked Trump for signaling support for the legislation in a tweet. Sen. Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut, is a co-sponsor of Fix NICS and a supporter of gun- violence prevention measures. After 49 clubgoers were gunned down in Orlando in 2016, Murphy led a 15 hour filibuster on the Senate floor. In a statement to TIME, Murphy said hes glad that the president is open to the Senates billwhich he notes is Republican-led and supported by the National Rifle Association. But he said that more should be done. Im glad to hear the president is open to our Fix NICS Act, but lets not pretend this is some huge concession on his part, Murphy said. Its a good bill and we should pass it into law, but if this is all the White House is willing to do to address gun violence, its wholly insufficient. Sen. Pat Toomey, a Republican from Pennsylvania, told the Washington Post that he is also planning to introduce legislation that would expand background checks sometime soon. The measure will reportedly be similar to a proposal he and Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia put forward in 2013. (It failed despite overwhelming public support.) Under that bill, background checks would be required for online purchases and sales from unlicensed gun-show dealers. Were going to take a swing at that and Im hoping well be able to do it, Toomey told the Post. At the same time, outgoing Republican Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake tweeted Wednesday that he and Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein are working on a bill to raise the minimum age of purchase for AR-15s from 18 to 21. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. While most of these reforms would be modest, gun-control advocates are cautiously hopeful. Those represent tiny baby steps forward, Avery Gardiner, co-president of the Brady Campaign to End Gun Violence, says specifically of the Fix NICS Act and bump stock regulation. They are steps in the right direction, but they are not the sorts of meaningful changes that we need in order to reduce gun violence in this country. Gardiner says shes worried that Trumps previous positions on guns and cozy relationship with the NRA will mean that more significant reforms to gun laws will once again be blocked. But, she says, Id love to be proven wrong. The phrases I hear you and What can we do to help you feel safe? were included on President Donald Trumps handwritten notes before he met with survivors and family members of school shootings, including the one Feb. 14 at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. The presidents crib sheet, written in bold, black pen on headed White House stationery, was revealed in pictures taken by photographers for news agencies including Getty Images and the Associated Press. The visible notes include 1. What would you most want me to know about your experience?, 2. What can we do to help you feel safe?, 4. Resources? Ideas and 5. I hear you. During the White House listening session, which took place on Wednesday, Trump suggested that arming teachers could be one solution to stopping tragedy. If you had a teacher who is adept at firearms, they could very well end the attack very quickly, he said. The President also expressed a desire to strengthen background checks. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. The images of Trumps discussion points have gone viral on social media, with many criticizing the presidents seeming need for assistance in responding to the emotional testimonies of those affected by the shooting, which killed 17 people. What kind of person needs NOTES to show empathy to children who were under heavy fire from a maniac? wrote one Twitter user. Roses are red, Violets are blue, Tell me your thoughts about guns, And (5) I hear you, added another. Sometimes a noodle is just a noodle. At least, that's if you believe Lala Kent from Bravo's hit show Vanderpump Rules. In case you missed it, there was big kerfuffle after Kent and co-star James Kennedy had a screaming match on the show, which follows the employees of Lisa Vanderpump's restaurant SUR. The fight was sparked by Kent eating noodles from a plate belonging to Kennedy's girlfriend, Raquel Leviss. The scene climaxed as Kennedy sweatily shouted at Kent, over and over, "It's not about the pasta!" It was a bit odd, and online rumors claimed the shouting was not about linguineor any pasta, for that matter. Trending: Olympian Jan Blokhuijsen Tells South Korea 'Treat Dogs Better,' is Called Racist Podcast host Danny Pellegrino tweeted: "Lots of strangers are [direct messaging] me on insta to tell me that pasta is the cast code word for cocaine, so when Lala was talking about taking Raquel's pasta, it actually wasn't about the pasta. This may be lies, but if you know something say something." But on Jenny McCarthy's Sirius XM show on Wednesday, Kent denied the big fight was about drugs. "I gotta ask about this whole fuckin' pasta thing," McCarty said. "Is pasta Adderall, is pasta coke?" "No, it was legitimately pasta," Kent responded. "That day of filming the conversation was getting very, very heavy between James and [friend] Logan and just them being quote-unquote-gay. And I didn't like it so I tried to make the conversation more light-hearted by saying, 'The problem is we ate Raquel's pasta.'" Don't miss: All 90 Best Picture Oscar Winners, Ranked: Part 260 to 31 "And [Kennedy] went insane. I never thought it would go that far. I literally was shocked. Then people started saying pasta was a code-word for a drug that I've never touched in my entire life," Kent continued. "Keep in mind y'all, I did mushrooms one time, had a hell of time, never did them again. And then weed, which I've recently given up. I'm not a drug person, so I was actually very offended." Story continues Other cast members, including Kennedy, supported Kent's assertion that while the fight wasn't about pastapasta is, in fact, just pasta. Most popular: Scientists Are Developing a 'Happy Suit' for Astronauts This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. "Pasta is not the code-word for cocaine, I swear," said cast member Kristen Doute on Bravo's Watch What Happens Live last month. "I actually almost ate the pasta. It's the angel hair checca at SUR and it is a huge portion. I would have eaten it too." Some quick research does show SUR does have an angel hair checca dish that costs $18 and features basil, garlic, Roma tomatoes and olive oil. Of course if pasta was a code-word for drugs, why would anyone ever admit it? Perhaps we'll never really know. This article was first written by Newsweek More from Newsweek The armed security guard on duty during the Florida school shooting hid outside and never went in. Deputy Scott Petersen has now resigned after being suspended without pay following the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school that left 17 people dead. Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel said Peterson was the schools resource officer on the day Nikolas Cruz opened fire on students and staff at the school. Speaking on Thursday, he said: Scott Peterson was absolutely on campus for this entire event. He was armed, he was in uniform. After seeing video, witness statements, and Scott Petersons very own statement, I decided this morning to suspend Scott Peterson without pay pending an internal investigation. As is his right, Scott Peterson chose to resign. Resigned Scott Peterson resigned after it emerged he hid outside during the Florida school shooting (Picture: Broward County Schools) He said Peterson had served the necessary time and met the requirements for retirement so had resigned slash retired. What I saw was a deputy arrive at the west side of building 12, take up a position and he never went in, he added. DOES AMERICA NEED INCREASED GUN CONTROL? LATEST ANALYSIS FROM YAHOO: Mr Israel said video evidence suggested that Peterson stayed outside for four minutes and clearly knew there was a shooting. Asked what the deputy should have done, he said he should have went in, addressed the killer, killed the killer. Never went in the deputy on duty at the Florida school where 17 people were killed by gunman Nikolas Cruz never went in (Pictures: AP) The day before his resignation, the New York Times reported that Peterson had been seen seeking cover behind a concrete column. Peterson, who reportedly said he thought he did a good job during the shooting, was apparently Broward County Sheriff Parkland employee of the year and was nominated for Parkland Deputy of the Year. He was named the city of Parklands school resource officer of the year for 2014, with a press release reportedly saying he had been the SRO at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School since 2009 and was praised for handling issues with tact and judgement. It has also been suggested that Peterson had a run-in with Nikolas Cruz before the shooting. According to The Washington Post, the deputy is mentioned in a social services report, suggesting that he refused to share any information with them about an incident that took place with the teenager. The armed officer who failed to enter the Florida school where a shooter killed 17 people to engage the gunman believed he did a good job by calling in the location of the massacre, a union official has said. School resource officer Scot Peterson took up a position viewing the western entrance of the building that was under attack for more than 4 minutes, but "he never went in," Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel said on Thursday. Mr Peterson was suspended without pay and placed under investigation, then chose to resign, Mr Israel said. Jeff Bell, the president of the Broward Sheriffs Office Deputies Association, told the New York Post that Mr Peterson was "distraught" but believed he had acted correctly. He believed he did a good job calling in the location, setting up the perimeter and calling in the description (of Cruz), he said. But Donald Trump, the US president, suggested the guard may have behaved like a "coward" as he publicly criticised his actions. "He certainly did a poor job ... somebody was outside, they are trained, they didn't react properly under pressure or they were a coward," Mr Trump said. When asked what Peterson should have done, Israel said the deputy should have "went in, addressed the killer, killed the killer." The sheriff said he was "devastated, sick to my stomach. There are no words. I mean these families lost their children. I've been to the funerals. I've been to the vigils. There are no words." What I saw was a deputy arrive at the west side of Building 12, take up a position and he never went in, said Israel. The building is popularly known as "the freshman building." Israel said he would not release the video that shows Petersons actions at this time and may never do so, depending on the prosecution and criminal case. The shooting at Majory Stoneman Douglas High School by a gunman armed with an AR-15 style assault rifle has reignited national debate over gun laws and school safety, including proposals by President Donald Trump to designate more people - including trained teachers - to carry arms on school grounds. Story continues Gun-control advocates, meanwhile, have redoubled their push to ban assault rifles. Gun related incidents at US schools this year The suspect, 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz, has been jailed on 17 counts of murder and has admitted the attack. Defense attorneys, state records and people who knew him indicate that he displayed behavioral troubles for years. He owned a collection of weapons. Politicians under pressure to tighten gun laws in response to the mass shooting floated various plans Thursday. U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida said a visit to Stoneman Douglas prompted him to change his stance on large capacity magazines. The Republican insisted he is willing to rethink his past opposition on gun proposals if there is information the policies would prevent mass shootings. "If we are going to infringe on the Second Amendment, it has to be a policy that will work," Rubio said in an interview Thursday with The Associated Press. State Sen. Bill Galvano, who is helping craft a bill in response to the shooting deaths, said an idea gaining traction is a program that would allow local sheriffs to deputize someone at a school to carry a gun on campus. Galvano insisted the idea is not the same as arming teachers. He said the program would be optional and the deputized person would have to be trained by local law-enforcement agencies. Florida Senate President Joe Negron said both chambers are working on the legislation in response to the Parkland shootings. He said a final draft should be available "early next week at the latest." People light candles in front of mementoes placed in front of the fence of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Credit: CARLOS GARCIA RAWLINS/Reuters What won't be considered is a ban on assault-style rifles. That falls short of reform demanded by students who converged on Florida's Capitol to take their concerns to state lawmakers Wednesday. Outside the building, many protesters complained that lawmakers were not serious about gun control and said that in future elections they would oppose any legislator who accepts campaign contributions from the National Rifle Association. Timeline | US school shootings in 2018 A day after an emotional meeting with survivors and their families, Trump tweeted his strongest stance yet on gun control. He said he would endorse strengthening background checks, banning "bump stock" style devices and raising the minimum age to 21 for buying certain rifles. At a conference of conservative activists Thursday near Washington, Vice President Mike Pence said the administration would make school safety "our top national priority" after the shooting at the school in Parkland, Florida. Paris (AFP) - Armenia and Turkey are at odds over whether the World War I massacres and deportations of Armenians by their Ottoman rulers should be described as genocide. Armenians say up to 1.5 million of their kin were killed between 1915 and 1917, and have long sought international recognition that this was genocide. Turkey rejects the term and puts the number of dead at between 300,000 and 500,000. It says what happened was civil conflict and a collective tragedy. Around 20 countries and some parliaments have voted through laws or resolutions recognising there was genocide, to the fury of Ankara. The Dutch lower house on Thursday became the latest to vote such an acknowledgement but made clear that the government as a whole would not make such a judgement. Here is some background. - What happened? - Clashes between Armenians and Turks started at the end of the 19th century as the Ottoman Empire was falling apart, costing between 100,000 and 300,000 Armenian lives between 1895 and 1896, according to Armenian sources. Then, in October 1914, the Ottoman Empire entered World War I on the side of Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. On April 24, 1915 thousands of Armenians suspected of harbouring nationalist sentiments and being hostile to Ottoman rule were rounded up. On May 26, a special law authorised deportations "for reasons of internal security". The Armenian population of Anatolia and Cilicia, labelled "the enemy within", was forced into exile in the Mesopotamian desert. A large number were killed on the way or in the detention camps. Many were burned alive, drowned, poisoned or fell victim to disease, according to foreign diplomats and intelligence services at the time. The Ottoman Empire was dismantled in 1920, two years after the creation of an independent Armenian state in May 1918. - Genocide defined - A 1948 UN convention defines genocide as acts "committed with intent to destroy, in whole or part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group". Story continues Turkey accepts today that massacres were carried out and that many Armenians were killed while being deported, but is adamant this was not genocide. It says the Armenians collaborated with the Russian enemy during World War I, and that tens of thousands of Turks were killed at their hands. In April 2014, Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan for the first time offered his condolences over the massacres, calling them "our shared pain". Yerevan dismissed the statement. - National recognition - More than 20 countries have recognised the massacres of Armenians as genocide. Uruguay was the first, in 1965, and was followed by countries including Argentina, Belgium, Canada, Russia, Sweden and Switzerland. In 1996, Greece, which has conflictual relations with neighbouring Turkey, decreed April 24 "the day of memory of the genocide of Armenians by the Turkish regime". France was the first major European country to use the disputed term in 2001. The first pontiff to publicly utter the word "genocide" was Pope Francis, in April 2015. In 1981, Ronald Reagan, who was US president at the time, branded the massacres "a genocide" and more than 40 individual US states have taken similar action. Former president Barack Obama had promised to also recognise the killings as a genocide but did not follow through in his eight years in office. - Parliaments - The European Parliament recognised the killings as genocide on June 18, 1987. The German parliament did the same in June 2016, as the did the parliaments of Austria and Luxembourg in 2015. Welcome Guest! You Are Here: Home Regional News East Australia's scandal-hit deputy leader Barnaby Joyce announced Friday he was quitting and moving to the backbench amid claims of sexual harassment and controversy over an affair with a now-pregnant former aide. Joyce, whose National Party rules alongside Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull's Liberals, has been front-page news in Australia for two weeks since it emerged he had left his wife of 24 years for his younger former media adviser, who is now expecting their baby boy. The 50-year-old had insisted he would ride out the storm but his position became untenable on Friday when a sexual harassment complaint against him, which he denies, was lodged with the party by an unnamed woman. Joyce said at a press conference in Armidale, his rural New South Wales seat, that he would step down as Nationals leader and deputy prime minister at a party meeting on Monday. "It's incredibly important that there be a circuit-breaker, not just for the parliament, but more importantly, a circuit-breaker for Vikki (his lover), for my unborn child, my daughters and for Nat (his wife)," he said. "This has got to stop. It's not fair on them. It's just completely and utterly unwarranted, the sort of observation that's happened." Joyce, who has also been criticised for living in an apartment rent-free with now partner Vikki Campion after splitting with his wife, was due to be the acting prime minister this week with Turnbull meeting US President Donald Trump in Washington. But he opted to take leave. With Foreign Minister Julie Bishop also out of the country, the role has been assumed by Senate leader Mathias Cormann, who said ahead of Joyce's decision that any harassment claim must be taken seriously. "Any allegation of sexual harassment is a very serious allegation," he told reporters. "I understand that a formal complaint has been made, and that that complaint is being investigated." Joyce called the claim "spurious and defamatory" and said he wanted it investigated by the authorities. Story continues "I have asked that that be referred to the police," he said, while admitting it had been "the straw that broke the camel's back". "It's quite evident that you can't go to the despatch box with issues like that surrounding you." - Riveted Australia - The daily media headlines on the scandal have riveted the Australian public and sparked debate about workplace culture amid the global #MeToo movement against sexual harassment. But it has also highlighted the perilous state of the coalition government, which just a few months ago survived a crisis over lawmakers' dual citizenship that threatened its wafer-thin parliamentary majority. Last week a furious Turnbull, who relies on the smaller National Party to govern, savaged Joyce for "a shocking error of judgement", leading his deputy to fire back that the prime minister was "inept". In a statement from Washington, Turnbull Friday thanked Joyce for being "a fierce advocate for rural and regional Australia", while insisting the Nationals-Liberal coalition was "undiminished" by the scandal. But Labor opposition leader Bill Shorten called it "fundamentally damaged" and accused Turnbull of "an atrocious lack of judgement". "The fact that this scandal has dragged on for 16 days has been damaging to the government, but more importantly, the country," he said. Joyce's decision to quit came with colleagues reportedly growing increasingly frustrated with his handling of the love-child scandal. Joyce had opted to give several media interviews this week, at a time when he was expected to be on leave and out of the spotlight, prompting two of the party's backbenchers to publicly call on him to resign. Junior Nationals minister David Gillespie has indicated he would be a candidate for the vacancy, while reports said Veterans Affairs Minister Michael McCormack had significant backing. The new Nationals leader will automatically become deputy prime minister, under a coalition agreement between the two major parties of the centre-right. At the death of a patriarch, it is only a natural moment to compare the son to his father. Americas most famous preacher, Billy Graham, rose to the heights of religious power in America by uniting evangelicalism after a fundamentalist crisis in the early 20th century. His son, Franklin Graham, the heir to his religious empire, has risen to prominence by embracing the divisions of our time. The difference between father and son says as much about America as it does about the two men. The elder Grahams death at age 99 on Wednesday prompts a moment of particular soul searching for millions of evangelicals across the nation. Graham was diplomat, statesman, and personal counselor to presidents since Dwight D. Eisenhower. He single-handedly made evangelicalism relevant in the highest halls of power and in every nation across the globe. As Pope John Paul II was for Catholics, Graham was a beloved family member for evangelicals who shaped their daily lives around devotion to Jesus. He stood for unity across Christian traditions and across political divides. He represented gentleness, and he asked nations to be better. His son Franklin Graham represents a very different way. Franklin, 66, rose to political prominence in recent years as Billy Graham disappeared from public life to his home in the North Carolina mountains to finish out his days. Franklin has been the elder Grahams successor, and for the past two decades has run his dads Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and the international humanitarian organization Samaritans Purse. Read more: Inside Billy Grahams Powerful Relationships With U.S. Presidents The younger Graham, called by his fathers middle name, is known for his harsh words on Islam, gay marriage and the leaders of the Democratic Party. He says he does not care who he offends if he thinks he is right. He champions President Donald Trump and harnessed his followers to do the same. Most often, it is hard to imagine his words ever coming from the lips of his father. President Obama doesnt have any clue about the Christian faith, Franklin told TIME during the 2016 presidential campaign. That is why he gets behind these things that people have influenced him into, which is this big social agenda, and is to promote same sex marriage, homosexuality. Story continues But the differences between father and son may be less about the two men than the movements of their time. Billy and Franklin each reveal something bigger about his own generation. Each man shaped his time, but each also responded to it. Grahams death is the end of an era in American evangelicalism and in the country at large. Evangelicalism has lost its senior statesman, its unifying figure. That role was a given in America for much of the past century. But the American evangelical church was changing before Billy died. Billys church is not the church of his children. Franklins America is increasingly a godless generation. More than a third of millennials identify as religiously unaffiliated, more than any previous generation, according to the Pew Research Center. Only 41% of millennials say that religion is very important to them, compared to 72% of the greatest generation. The youngest generation of evangelicals is increasingly diverse, and more open to gay marriage than their elders are. They are more likely to see immigrants as a force for good, and more likely to be politically independent. Ironically, Billy gave evangelicals a vision beyond the fundamentalism that had taken hold during the evolution and creation debates and the Scopes Trial of 1925. Now pendulum of the culture has now swung back, and evangelicalism in politics has again taken a more fundamentalist turn. Trumps rise perhaps demonstrates this better than anything else. The white evangelical base that for decades looked to Billy for inspiration splintered in the 2016 election, after many of its young people supported Obama in 2008. Prosperity gospel and Pentecostal pastors found newfound political power in attaching themselves to Trumps rise. The culture wars relaunched, and American evangelicals fought over everything from race and women to immigration and leadership. Franklin is a product of this culture even as he is a shaper of it, just like his father was in his own time. This shift is about more than just the church. America itself is increasingly fractured. The nation resists institutions and their leaders across the board, not just in matters of religion. Beyond Pope Francis, in religious communities it is especially difficult to imagine giants of leadership taking hold the same way the did during the era of Billy Graham or Martin Luther King Jr. Billy himself faced criticism later in life, especially for his comments about Jews caught on tape in conversation with Nixon. In the immediate wake of Billy Grahams death, evangelicals mourn the death of a hero, but also of the idea that such a hero may be possible again. They face the question: what spiritual leadership, if any, will their culture produce in time ahead? Ottawa (AFP) - A landscaper accused of killing Toronto gay men was charged Friday with a sixth murder after human remains found hidden in large planters were matched to a missing person. Bruce McArthur, 66, was arrested in January following an investigation into the disappearances of two men from a predominantly gay neighborhood in downtown Toronto last year, which led police to the planters at a property that he used for storage. So far, the remains of three victims have been identified through fingerprints and dental records, Toronto police's lead investigator Sergeant Hank Idsinga told a press conference. DNA analysis "is still outstanding on the remaining three sets of remains" at the Toronto east side house, Idsinga said. The three identified victims are Andrew Kinsman, 49, who was known to have had a long-term sexual relationship with McArthur; Skandaraj Navaratnam, 40, who was reported missing in 2010; and Soroush Mahmudi, 50, whose disappearance was reported almost three years ago. McArthur is also charged with the premeditated murders of Majeed Kayhan, 58, 47-year-old Dean Lisowick, and Selim Esen, 44. - Cases going back decades - "I can't get specific about where the murders occurred. We do believe we have multiple murder scenes, though," said Idsinga. Police are also reviewing "multiple outstanding" murders, unexplained "sudden death" cases, and "hundreds of outstanding missing persons cases" going back decades for possible links to McArthur, he said. The investigation could take months, possibly years, he added. Authorities have searched upwards of 20 planters at the east side home, and expect to return with cadaver sniffer dogs to comb for more possible remains once the frozen ground thaws. Police are also looking at two other properties in the city, and have reached out to police forces abroad, where McArthur may have traveled, for help. Police have not yet said how the victims died. Story continues "I believe we have evidence on how some of them may have been killed. But that is as far as I'll go," Idsinga said. McArthur came under suspicion in September 2017 in connection with the disappearance of Kinsman, but police at first rejected suggestions that a serial killer was prowling Toronto's gay neighborhood. According to local media, police made a quick decision to enter McArthur's home and arrest him on January 18 when they saw a young man enter his apartment. Police found the man tied up on a bed, but unharmed. Court documents also indicate McArthur was convicted of assault with a weapon for attacking a man with a metal pipe in 2001. He was spared jail time, but was prohibited him from soliciting gay prostitutes and from possessing "poppers" -- a recreational drug used in sexual encounters -- and was ordered to undergo anger management. Last month, Idsinga said: "We believe there are more (victims) but I have no idea how many more there are going to be." Douma (Syria) (AFP) - Fresh bombardment on Eastern Ghouta killed dozens Thursday, bringing the number of dead civilians in a five-day assault by the Syrian government to more than 400. Mounting calls for a humanitarian truce in one of the bloodiest episodes of Syria's seven-year conflict failed to stop 46 more people being killed by air strikes and rocket fire. Regime backer Russia said there was "no agreement" at the UN Security Council on a 30-day ceasefire for Syria and presented amendments to a draft resolution that would allow aid deliveries and the evacuation of civilians from besieged Eastern Ghouta. As diplomats wrangled over a UN vote, which could take place on Friday, people huddled in basements while government forces pounded the enclave with rockets and bombs, turning towns into fields of ruins and even hitting hospitals. Aid group Doctors Without Borders said 13 of the facilities it supports in Eastern Ghouta were damaged or destroyed in three days, leaving remaining staff with very little to save the hundreds of wounded brought to them every day. In the hospital mortuary in Douma, the main town in the enclave just east of Damascus, bodies wrapped in white shrouds were already lined up on the floor, two of them children. - Nowhere safe - "Five days of air strikes and intense artillery fire by the regime and its Russian ally have killed 403 civilians, including 95 children," said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Morning rain appeared to initially keep warplanes away on Thursday but the sky cleared by midday and jets, some of them Russian according to the Observatory, soon returned. Russia has so far denied direct involvement in the assault on Ghouta but the pro-government Syrian newspaper Al-Watan reported on Thursday that Russian warplanes and advisers had joined the battle. The US said on Thursday Russia had "unique responsibility" for the deaths. "Without Russia backing Syria, the devastation and the deaths would certainly not be occurring," State Department Spokeswoman Heather Nauert told journalists. Story continues Regime and allied forces have been massing around the enclave, in which an estimated 400,000 people live, ahead of a likely ground offensive to flush out holdout Islamist and jihadist groups. "We are 14 women and children living in a room that is 10 feet wide, with no toilet and nowhere to wash," said 53-year-old Umm Abdo, who joined a large group in the basement of a school in Arbin. The brief respite provided by the rain on Thursday encouraged some residents to venture out of their basements and shelters, to buy food, check on their property or enquire about their relatives and neighbours. In the town of Hammuriyeh, a queue had formed outside a shop as starving residents tried to stock up but another rocket sowed panic and sent everybody back to their shelters. In Douma, a young boy tried to peddle lighters on the street but rocket fire quickly forced him to scamper back to cover. - Powerless - An AFP correspondent saw rescuers known as the "White Helmets" forced to abandon efforts to retrieve a wounded woman from the rubble of a collapsed home when air strikes resumed. When they ventured back to the site, the woman was dead. The indiscriminate bombardment and the strikes on medical facilities have sparked global outrage but few concrete options have emerged to stop the bloodletting. The aid community voiced its frustration as the world appeared once again powerless to stop a conflict that has left almost 350,000 dead in seven years and caused destruction rarely seen since World War II. Humanitarian agencies are "sickened that no matter how many times they've raised the alarm, taken the step of speaking out, called on the Security Council to do something, the violence and brutality will sink to new lows", said the Syria INGO Regional Forum. - Russia says 'no agreement' - At the UN, Russian Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia said sponsors Sweden and Kuwait were requesting a vote on the ceasefire plan even though they are "fully aware there is no agreement on it". The Security Council needs to reach a "feasible" agreement on a ceasefire and not take a decision that would be "populistic" and "severed from reality", he said. Talks for a deal between the regime and the armed groups controlling Ghouta appear to have stalled. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said jihadist fighters in Ghouta had rejected an evacuation deal. "A few days ago, our military in Syria suggested to the fighters that they withdraw peacefully from Eastern Ghouta, like the evacuation of fighters and their families that was organised in East Aleppo," he said. The head of the defence committee in Russia's lower house of parliament said Thursday that more than 200 new types of weapons were tested as part of his country's military support to the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. "It's not an accident that today they are coming to us from many directions to purchase our weapons, including countries that are not our allies," he said. By David Shepardson WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Hyundai Motor Co's Genesis brand topped the annual ranking of new vehicles by influential U.S. magazine Consumer Reports, while General Motors Co's electric Chevrolet Bolt was named top pick for compact green car. Millions of prospective auto buyers consult the magazine's rankings, which are based on road testing, reliability, safety and owner satisfaction scores. Hyundai has created a fledgling new luxury brand, Genesis, and the Consumer Reports rankings are based on just two models. Reuters reported last week that some potential buyers of Teslas long-delayed Model 3 sedan are concerned they will miss out on big federal tax breaks and are looking for alternatives like the Bolt. GM sold 23,297 Bolts in 2017. Tesla has told some holders of Model 3 reservations that they would not get their cars until 2019. Frustrated Tesla buyers, afraid that waiting could cost them a $7,500 electric vehicle tax credit, have factored into brisk demand for Bolts, according to GM dealers in California, the top U.S. market for electric vehicles. Volkswagen AG's Audi luxury unit was ranked second among brands. The VW brand was 16th and its Porsche brand was fifth. BMW AG ranked third, with Toyota Motor Corp's Lexus brand fourth. Kia Motors Corp was sixth, followed by Subaru Corp, Tesla Inc and Honda Motor Co's Honda brand. The Toyota brand was in 10th place. Toyota had four of the top 10 vehicle picks on the list, the most of any automaker, with the Corolla, Camry, Highlander and Sienna taking honors. Toyota's vehicles had the top scores for predicted reliability. U.S. brands lagged other automakers, but the Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV Chrysler brand ranked 11th. The automakers Fiat unit finished last among 34 brands rated, with its Ram brand 26th, Dodge 27th and Jeep brand in 33rd place. GMs top-selling Chevrolet brand ranked 23rd, while the Cadillac brand ranked 24th and GMC 28th. Ford Motor Cos Ford brand ranked 20th and its Lincoln brand 17th, but its best-selling F-150 pickup truck was named best pickup. (Reporting by David Shepardson; Editing by David Gregorio) Kolwezi (DR Congo) (AFP) - In global markets the price of cobalt, a mineral used in batteries for high-tech products from iPhones to Tesla electric cars, has nearly tripled to $81,500 a tonne in two years. But in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which produced two-thirds of the global supply of the coveted metal last year, artisanal diggers called "creuseurs" sell their best-quality ore for about $7,000 a tonne, blissfully unaware of how much the global price has rocketed. In Kolwezi, a mining town in southeastern DRC, Chinese entrepreneurs dominate the middle section of the market, purchasing the raw cobalt from miners and selling it on for refining. Transactions in the buying houses depend on the purity of the ore. There are approximately 30 major kinds of cobalt-bearing rock and over 100 more where the metal is present in smaller quantities. Handwritten signs at the buying houses in Kolwezi show the varying prices offered for a tonne: "3 percent = $500" and "15 percent = $7,000". The cobalt component is determined by a machine called "Metorex" which is used by the buyer. "The buyers have increased prices since the start of the year by five percent," said a miner called David, who was unaware that cobalt prices on the world market have reached such stratospheric heights. The middlemen -- predominantly Chinese and some Indians -- then sell the raw material to operators for semi-processing. - 80% exported to China - The big names in this part of the process are foreign-owned: China Molybdenum, Rangold, the Swiss firm Glencore and MMG, an Australian-Chinese venture, and the Indian-controlled Chemical of Africa. Only an initial treatment of the ore is possible in DRC at present. It results in an intermediary product composed mainly of hydroxide with a cobalt content of between 20 and 40 percent. "The DRC does not export finished products that are ready to be used by Apple, Samsung and the other big battery users in the world," said economist and activist Florent Musha. Story continues "It exports a mineral product which is in the process of being treated." Eighty percent of the country's production heads to China from the ports of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania and Cape Town in South Africa. In China, the metal is refined, by about a dozen companies. The largest producers include Jinchuan Nonferrous Metals Corp., Huayou Cobalt, Jiangsu Cobalt Nickel Metal and Shenzhen Green Eco-manufacture Hi-tech which each have annual refined cobalt production capacities of over 7,000 metric tonnes. "The production of refined cobalt in China has grown 20 percent. At 62,000 tonnes, it accounts for 60 percent of global output," Darton Commodities said. - Benefits? - But how much do the people of Congo benefit from the boom? "Today the world's biggest seller of cobalt is China," said Congolese economist Musha. "The product clearly does not benefit the Congolese economy." The cobalt sector has attracted widespread criticism from NGOs for use of child labour, hazardous working conditions, corruption and theft. Artisanal miners accounted for between 14 to 16 percent of the 80,800 tonnes of cobalt mined in the country last year, according to the London-based Darton Commodities, a specialist firm dealing in the metal. The DRC would like to refine its minerals but has run into problems, notably infrastructural glitches like erratic power supplies. There is some prospect of change. The government last year signalled its intention to reform its 2002 mining code, which was seen as favouring foreign investors at the expense of the local economy. It wants to ensure the repatriation of at least 40 percent of the revenue of minerals sold for export, and increase the fiscal take from "strategic minerals." At present, the state levies a tax of two percent on non-ferrous metals -- copper and cobalt -- which is based on the value of sales, from which some costs are deducted. The current draft of the revised plan -- now in the hands of President Joseph Kabila -- sees this rising to 10 percent. Shareholders in big mining corporations with interests in DRC have written to Kabila to express their concern, hoping that this version of the law will be revised, according to industry sources in Kinshasa. CNNs Alisyn Camerota discusses gun control with the NRAs Dana Loesch on Friday. (Screengrab via Yahoo News) The national spokeswoman for the National Rifle Association on Friday doubled down on her claim that members of the media love mass shootings, like last weeks school massacre in Parkland, Fla., because of the bump in television ratings that some networks experience in their wake. In a heated exchange with CNNs Alisyn Camerota on Friday morning, NRA representative Dana Loesch was asked by the New Day host why she would make such an inflammatory assertion. Because its true, Loesch said. I do think that many in the media do because they like the ratings aspect of it. And its true because its wall-to-wall coverage. They put the murderers face up on loop, on televisions all across America, more than they discuss the victims or survivors. Camerota called the claim malicious. I dont know anybody in the media that likes mass shootings, Camerota said. Youre wrong on every single level. We pray that theres never another one. And the idea of them being ratings gold guess what? Theyre not ratings gold. Because Americans have reached saturation levels. Theyre so sick of it. Its so heartbreaking that they actually often turn away. In fact, the gun industry, which is closely allied with the NRA, is the business that profits from mass shootings; gun sales surged after the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in Newtown, Conn., leading to a jump in accidental shooting deaths. Loesch accused CNN of allowing guests to paint the NRA and its members as child murderers. Weve never said that, Dana. Weve never said that, Camerota countered. In a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland on Feb. 22, Loesch accused news networks of chasing ratings in the aftermath of mass killings like the one at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Many in legacy media love mass shootings, Loesch said. Im not saying you love the tragedy, but you love the ratings. Crying white mothers are ratings gold. Story continues Camerota asked why Loesch would resort to using such inflammatory rhetoric at CPAC. Because its true, Loesch said. Its true, Alisyn. Its not true, you know this! Camerota replied. Its just not true! How dare you! Loesch, who appeared at a CNN-hosted town hall with Parkland, Fla., survivors earlier in the week, also accused the media and lawmakers at CPAC of unfairly targeting the NRA. We will not be gaslighted into thinking that were responsible for a tragedy that we had nothing to do with, Loesch said. She reiterated that stance on Friday while discussing solutions to curb gun violence. The NRA does bear some responsibility in fixing this, Camerota said. They do need to come to the table. No, we absolutely do not, Loesch said. Loeschs comments come as the NRA is facing pressure from lawmakers and President Trump to act in the wake of the latest school shooting. Trump has proposed expanding background checks and raising the minimum age for buying semi-automatic weapons from 18 to 21. On Thursday, President Trump predicted the NRA would back such changes. Theyre ready to do things; they want to do things, Trump said. You know, theyre good people. Theyre patriots. They love this country. But when asked Friday whether the NRA would back the new age requirement, Loesch said it would not. Raising the age is not going to solve psychosis, she said. Loesch said that when she was 20 years old, she lived alone and owned guns a shotgun and an AR-15 for her personal protection. I dont want anyone not to have the ability to defend themselves, she said. Read more from Yahoo News: Delta Airlines is facing criticism after one of its planes was stuck on the tarmac for almost 12 hours during an ice storm in Kansas City, leaving passengers stranded as they attempted to fly to Los Angeles. The flight was just one of many across multiple airlines which were cancelled or had its route significantly altered due to the wintry weather. Ann Ngo, who planned on returning home to California when she boarded the Delta flight, spent the next 12 hours snacking on food and waiting for the plane to take off, she told The Kansas City Star, which first reported on the delay. But the plane never left the ground. Just as passengers thought they were finally about to be airborne, they said a message came over the loudspeaker announcing that the flight had "timed out." Trending: Apple Launches Probe After Mistaken 911 Calls Traced to Repair Facility It was a sh--show, Ngo told the paper, noting that she had been on the plane from about 6:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. Other customers also vented their frustration, with many taking to social media to skewer Delta for what they said was poor communication with passengers. The gross incompetence associated with flight #2195 defies all logic, said passenger Matt Montgomery. He later described it as The worst air travel day experience in 20+ years of flying. Don't miss: Who is Thomas Bart Whitaker? Texas Prisoner Who Plotted Family Murder Spared Execution This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. Sports journalist Holly Rowe, who was also aboard the stalled plane, tweeted her frustration with the timed out explanation. Earlier in the day, she had tweeted her thanks to the crew who worked outside in the frigid temperatures, which reached lows of 18 degrees. Most popular: How Did Life Begin? Key Alzheimer's Protein Has Surprising Tie to the Primordial Soup This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. Even those who weren't on the plane grew frustrated with Delta, sending tweets about how the poor service in Kansas City would affect their business across the U.S. Story continues On Thursday, Delta responded to a number of passengers on social media, apologizing for the delay. Newsweek has reached out to the airline for comment. This article was first written by Newsweek More from Newsweek GettyImages-922470276 President Donald Trump's polarizing move to ban travel by people from several Muslim-majority countries set into motion a year of hate-filled rhetoric, Amnesty International said. In its annual audit of the worlds human rights in 159 countries, Amnesty issued a scathing attack on the Trump administrations immigration policy, saying that it imposed discrimination as a transparently hateful move. Trump entered the White House with a declaration to make a "safe, strong and proud" America. Trending: YouTube, Facebook Promote Conspiracy Video Claiming School Shooting Survivor is a 'Crisis Actor' Amid a global refugee crisis in which more than 21 million people have been forced to flee their homes due to war and persecution, the USA took extreme steps to deny protection to people in need, the reports preface said. In the aftermath of the San Bernardino shootings, which were carried out by a self-radicalized married couple, Trump called for "a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States. He has since sought to make good on his campaign promises. His actions have a very serious snowball effect across the world, Amnesty International Secretary-General Salil Shetty told Newsweek. This rhetoric has converted into policy actions that have been very harmful for the most marginalized people in the world." Shetty highlighted how the U.S., once a champion of human rights, has "significantly moved backwards" with the administration's decisions and propelled a divisive climate. Don't miss: UPDATE: Ohio 7th-Grader Who Shot Himself Inside Middle School Bathroom Has Died Just weeks into his presidency, Trump signed an executive order that froze all refugee admissions, while barring people initially from seven Muslim-majority countries (the number was later changed to six) from entering the United States for 90 days and all refugees for 120 days. It created an international uproar as critics said it spun the countrys narrative as being anti-immigration. On the ground, though, protests erupted as legal battles raged over the constitutionality for the travel ban. Story continues The initial order lowered the cap of an acceptance to 50,000 refugees in 2017, compared to the 110,000 limit by former President Barack Obama. To be clear, this is not a Muslim ban, as the media is falsely reporting. This is not about religionthis is about terror and keeping our country safe, Trump said amidst backlash. Most popular: Wetlands in California and Oregon Could Disappear with Sea Level Rise Over the course of the last year, Trump has pushed for implementation of his ban, which continues to be challenged. Most recently, the third version blocked entry of most people from Chad, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Syria and Yemen, along with North Korea and certain government officials from Venezuela. Last week, the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals 9-4 vote found the ban to be "unconstitutionally tainted with animus toward Islam. The Fourth Circuit is the second federal appeals court that struck it down. While Trump has called his restrictions a protective measure from terrorism by Islamic militants, Amnesty International has said Trump has made "policies that were discriminatory or otherwise contradicted international human rights principles." The human rights watchdog also pointed to Trump's campaign promise of a U.S.-Mexico border wall, attacks on the rights of women and girls, the LBGT community, and gun violence, as additional factors contributing to the grim picture in the U.S. The year also showed movement as the administration's policies propelled people to take action. "However, 2017 also demonstrated the enduring willingness of people to stand up for their rights and for the values they want to see in the world," the London-based Amnesty International said. The International Women's Day March, focusing on the U.S. and seen throughout world cities, became "one of the largest protest events in history," while the #MeToo movement encouraged survivors of sexual harassment and assault to confront abusers. The movement represented a larger shift in power dynamics as advocates rallied against sexism and discrimination. This article was first written by Newsweek More from Newsweek Dubai (AFP) - Dubai has said it is seeking international arbitration against Djibouti after the Horn of Africa nation terminated its concession at a key port that is the main transit route to landlocked Ethiopia. The emirate said the Djiboutian government's termination Thursday of the 50-year concession it granted to Dubai-owned DP World to operate the Doraleh container terminal in 2006 was "illegal". Announcing its decision on Thursday, Djibouti's transport ministry said that it was merely implementing a law adopted in November last year that "sets a legal framework allowing for the renegotiation, if necessary, of contracts already concluded dealing with the management or exploitation of strategic infrastructure". "In the current case, the contract of concession for Doraleh container terminal contains elements that are in flagrant contravention of state sovereignty and the higher interests of the nation," it said. But Dubai countered that the Djiboutian legislation flew in the face of international law, as repeatedly upheld by arbitration tribunals. "The illegal seizure of the terminal is the culmination (of) the government's campaign to force the DP World to renegotiate the terms of the concession," the government said late Thursday. "Those terms were found to be 'fair and reasonable' by a London Court of International Arbitration tribunal," it added. "DP World has commenced arbitration proceedings before the London Court of International Arbitration to protect their rights, or to secure damages and compensation for their breach or expropriation." The Dubai government said it found Djibouti's conduct to be "particularly oppressive and cynical" as two separate tribunals had recently dismissed its allegations of corruption in the awarding of the concession. The tiny nation of Djibouti has become a major strategic player because of its position on the Bab al-Mandab strait, the key shipping lane to Europe from the Gulf and Asia beyond. Story continues The United States, France, Italy, Spain, Saudi Arabia, Japan and China all have military bases in the country. China's base is immediately adjacent to the Doraleh terminal. The port is also the terminus for a Chinese-built railway between Djibouti and the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa which opened in 2016. More than 90 percent of the trade of Africa's second most populous nation passes through Djibouti. DP World has secured a string of port concessions in Africa, including one for Berbera in breakaway Somaliland up the Red Sea coast from the Bab al-Mandab. Asia Times, Richard Javad Heydarian Security, Asia Philippine leader's quip sets off a firestorm over his soft approach to Beijing's militarization of the South China Sea. Duterte to China: If You Want, Just Make Us a Province If you want, just make us a province, like Fujian, quipped Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte before an audience of Filipino-Chinese businessmen on February 19. Significantly, Chinese Ambassador to the Philippines Zhao Jianhua was in attendance among influential tradesmen and industrialists who applauded the Filipino leaders controversial statement. Duterte was also quick to downplay in his presentation rising concerns over Chinas militarization of artificially created islands in the South China Sea, including on nearby features claimed by the Philippines. Military bases, I must admit [its presence], but is it intended for us? You must be joking. Its not intended for us, claimed the Filipino president. Its really intended for those who China thinks will destroy them and that is America. The speech was Dutertes latest bid to defend his pro-China foreign policy, a shift away from the Philippines traditional reliance on treaty ally the United States which has sent shockwaves at home and across the region as revelations of Chinas expansionist designs come to light. His statements immediately provoked a firestorm in the Philippines, with government critics claiming that the country is at risk of becoming a full-blown Chinese satellite state under Dutertes accommodative leadership. Recommended: This Is What Happens if America Nuked North Korea Recommended: The Colt Python: The Best Revolver Ever Made? Recommended: Smith & Wesson 500: The Gun That Has As Much Firepower As a Rifle Public anger stirred over recent reports that China unilaterally named and registered five undersea features at the Benham Rise in the eastern Philippine Sea at the International Hydrographic Organization (IHO), an intergovernmental body that aims to ensure the worlds seas, oceans and navigable waters are properly charted and surveyed. Story continues The Benham Rise area falls well within the Philippines exclusive economic zone (EEZ), but there are growing concerns that Chinas naming of seabed features is a prelude to developing a military presence in the maritime area and may eventually lead Beijing into making territorial claims over the resource-rich area. In 2017, the Philippines officially rechristened the Benham Rise as the Philippine Rise to reassert its claim to the seismically active undersea region. Unlike the South China Sea, the eastern Philippine Sea and Benham Rise area is not contested by rival states. Latest satellite imagery shows that China has virtually completed building a sprawling network of military bases and facilities on contested features in the South China Sea. Those facilities are already being put to strategic use: a flotilla of Chinese naval and civilian vessels recently aggressively surrounded a Philippine Navy vessel conducting routine operations around Thitu Island. The Philippines has exercised control over the disputed land feature, which hosts a permanent Filipino community, for the past four decades. Manila aims to upgrade Thitus airstrip and civilian facilities later this year. China appears to be taking issue with that claim, in a bid to squeeze other claimants out of areas it controls. Indeed, there is a growing sense among many Filipinos that Dutertes concessional approach has failed to curb or stall Beijings territorial ambitions in the area. That realization has sparked new public rallies calling on the government to take a tougher stance against Chinas creeping presence in Philippine-claimed waters. It is absolutely unacceptable for the President, the top diplomat of the country, to joke about making the Philippines a province of China, said Congressman Gary Alejano, a strong critic of Duterte with a military background. A former naval officer-turned-legislator, Alejano has maintained deep ties with a Philippine defense establishment known to be wary of Dutertes policies and Chinas intentions. Last year, Alejanos military sources provided him with satellite imagery showing Chinas fast growing military presence on Philippine-claimed land features in the Spratly Islands. The outspoken legislator was also behind the latest report suggesting China is tightening the noose around Thitu Island by restricting the Philippine Navys access to the land feature. Frustrated with Dutertes perceived soft-pedaling vis-a-vis China, top Philippine defense officials seem increasingly keen to expose Chinas creeping consolidation of the South China Sea, both through media leaks and by providing damning information to known Duterte critics in Congress. Alejano appealed to nationalism in describing Dutertes recent speech as irresponsible banter. He said Dutertes colony quip was tantamount to a slap in the face of the many Filipinos, including our soldiers stationed in our occupied islands, who work tirelessly to defend our territorial integrity from China. Another legislator, Tom Villarin, warned that such statements, even in jest, reflect a habit of the president to defer always to the wishes of China and represented willful subservience at the expense of our sovereignty. Ariel Casilao, another left-leaning legislator, condemned what he views as Dutertes defeatist standagainst the continuing aggressive behavior of China in the South China Sea. Cognizant of growing domestic opposition to Dutertes China policy, the US Pentagon has doubled down on its efforts to maintain robust security cooperation with the Philippine defense establishment. Duterte has bid to loosen those ties, in part by downgrading annual joint war game exercises which previously pointed largely at China. Washington recently deployed a carrier battle group, the USS Carl Vinson, to the Philippines for the first time since 2014. While authorities portrayed the visit as a routine expression of the two treaty allies bilateral alliance, the deployments timing was telling. The visit came a week after the Pentagon made the unprecedented move of deploying a guided-missile destroyer Hopper within 12 nautical miles of the Scarborough Shoal. The shoal, which lies just about 100 nautical miles from the Philippine mainland, is claimed by Manila but has been occupied by China since a naval standoff in 2012. The Philippine defense establishment fears that Beijing may soon start to reclaim land around the shoal to eventually establish military facilities on it. Contrary to Dutertes statements and moves, the Philippine top brass have remained receptive and supportive of Americas efforts to keep Chinas maritime ambitions in check. Washington seems determined to step up its naval presence in the area with the cooperation of its regional allies, including the Philippines, as well as new partners such as Vietnam. The carrier group is also scheduled to visit Vietnams central Da Nang port for the first time in recent memory. China, however, remains undaunted. As a prominent Chinese academic recently made clear, Beijing has the right to build whatever it needs within its [claimed] territory, in the South China Sea. And increasingly Beijing is using US countermeasures as pretext to further expand its growing military footprint in the area. This article originally appeared in Asia Times. Image: Reuters Read full article By Joseph Ax (Reuters) - Two weeks before a gunman fatally shot 17 people at a Florida high school, Bill Lee, the president of the state's school administrators association, warned lawmakers that Florida's schools were vulnerable to just such an attack. "It's not a matter of if, but when," he wrote in the Orlando Sentinel on Jan. 29, urging legislators to boost spending on school security after two school shootings in other states in January. "Florida is one instance away from becoming the next Kentucky or Texas, and we must do something about it." Following last week's mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, Lee has renewed calls for more funding for matters ranging from mental health counseling to emergency lockdown systems. State lawmakers, facing pressure from angry students, have signaled they will boost security funding after failing to do so for years. "I wish the words had not been so prophetic," Lee said in an interview on Wednesday. Florida's Safe Schools program provides millions of dollars to more than 70 school districts for safety and security. Since 2002-03, however, funding for the program has dropped 25 percent per student, even as the threat of mass shootings has risen. The current budget includes $64.4 million for an eighth straight year, according to state figures. Before the shooting, Governor Rick Scott had proposed adding $10 million next year. INADEQUATE SECURITY Some parents have expressed anger that security measures at Stoneman Douglas were not more robust. "Who do they have on campus? I think there's only one security person," said Elana Cohn, 45, who has a child at the school. "That's for a school with 3,200 students." School officials in Broward County, where Stoneman Douglas is located, did not respond to requests for comment on security and Safe Schools funding. In many ways, last Wednesday's massacre highlighted the limits of school security measures, both physical, such as fencing and officers, and preventative, such as counseling. Story continues Like many other schools, Stoneman Douglas has a single entry point that requires proof of identity before a visitor can enter the sprawling campus during school hours. But as dismissal time approaches each day, exterior gates are opened to allow students to leave, said Jerry Graziose, the district's former head of school safety. That appears to be how the accused shooter, 19-year-old former Stoneman Douglas student Nikolas Cruz, entered the campus without being stopped. "At dismissal, unfortunately, you've got to open the gates to let everyone out," Graziose said. "You've got 3,000 people." Some parents said there had to be a better solution. "Security was not adequate," said Angela Burrafato, 51, who has one child at the school. "We know we can get around the single-point front door entrance, and it's a problem." OFFICER'S INACTION Safe Schools funding helps districts pay for school resource officers, or SROs, who are sworn law enforcement personnel assigned from local police departments. The armed SRO assigned to the school from the sheriff's office, Scott Peterson, stayed outside the building during the attack instead of trying to engage Cruz, Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel said on Thursday. Peterson resigned after being suspended as a result of his inaction. Israel did not say whether he could face criminal charges. Reuters was not immediately able to contact Peterson or a representative regarding his actions. State data shows that Broward County had 160 SROs in 2016, the latest year available, including 39 for the district's 30 high schools. That is comparable to or greater than the number in other large districts. Some staffers hold a dual role as security specialists or campus monitors. They are unarmed but have some training, Graziose said. One such employee at Stoneman Douglas, Aaron Feis, was shot to death while sheltering students. Jared Moskowitz, a Democratic Florida state representative and Stoneman Douglas graduate, said one officer was not enough. "It's like a mini-college," he said. "If you're on one side of campus, it takes minutes to get to the other side, and this whole thing was over in five minutes." On Wednesday, Israel, the Broward County sheriff, told reporters that some deputies would begin carrying semi-automatic rifles on school grounds. U.S. President Donald Trump suggested during a meeting on Wednesday with surviving students that arming teachers and other staff could help prevent school massacres. INTERVENTION PROGRAM Broward County received nearly $6 million this academic year from the Safe Schools program. While districts statewide spend more than 80 percent of those funds on SROs, Broward was an exception, devoting less than half the money on officers, although it may use local funds to help pay for SROs. Instead, the district dedicated millions of safe school dollars on an intervention program, where suspended students who would otherwise be sent home are diverted to off-campus centers, where teachers, counselors and social workers are assigned. The effort earned Broward national attention as a leader in alternative discipline that disrupts the "school-to-prison pipeline" by giving troubled children a chance to stay in school. It was not clear whether Cruz, who had a history of infractions before being expelled from Stoneman Douglas in 2017, benefited from that program. The Washington Post reported that he was sent to in-school suspension as well as off campus, citing school records. Since the shooting, school administrators across the country have said that more counseling is needed when students have emotional problems. But Lee, the school administrators association president, acknowledged there was no foolproof way of stopping a determined gunman, without turning school campuses into something akin to military installations. "I really don't know how you prevent someone who is bent on destruction from carrying it out to some degree," he said. "We want to be an education system. We don't want to be a mini-prison." (Reporting by Joseph Ax in New York; Additional reporting by Zachary Fagenson in Parkland, Fla., Bernie Woodall in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and Jonathan Allen and Gina Cherelus in New York; Editing by Frank McGurty, Peter Cooney, Bernadette Baum and Diane Craft) Quito (AFP) - Ecuador's efforts to negotiate the release of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange from its London embassy have failed, the South American country's foreign minister admitted Friday. "On the issue of mediation, I have to say very honestly that it has not been successful because two parties are needed to mediate. Ecuador is willing, by not necessarily the other party," said Foreign Minister Maria Fernanda Espinosa, referring to Britain. But she said her country would "continue looking for mechanisms, ways" to try to solve the standoff. Assange last week lost his legal battle to overturn an English arrest warrant against him, and with it his hopes of freely leaving the embassy, where he has been holed up since 2012. A judge at a court in London rejected the argument of Assange's lawyers that upholding an arrest warrant was no longer in the public interest, saying "arrest is a proportionate response." Assange was awaiting extradition to Sweden over a 2010 investigation into claims of rape and sexual assault when he breached his bail conditions to seek refuge in the embassy. Sweden dropped its investigation last year, but the British warrant for his arrest for jumping bail remains, meaning he would be detained if he stepped outside. The 46-year old Australian only rarely emerges onto the embassy balcony, citing concerns for his personal safety, but he frequently takes part in media conferences and campaigns via video link. Ecuador in December granted citizenship to Assange, and asked Britain to recognize him as a diplomat in an unsuccessful attempt to provide him with the immunity that could see him walk free. London swiftly rejected the move. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. On 2335 Dufferin Street in Toronto, there is a sign. Its an old school sign, one of those where you have to place individual letters behind a casing to spell out each word individually. Typically, this sign, which greets visitors at Fairbank Public School, will not feature personal messages. Then again, this isnt really a typical week. A teacher at the school is the father of Olympic bobsledder Phylicia George, who made history this year in becoming the first Canadian African-American female to compete in both the Winter and Summer Olympic Games. And on Feb. 21, George added another milestone to the resume: Olympic medalist. Bronze medalist in the womens two-man bobsled Kaillie Humphries and Phylicia George, of Canada, celebrate during the medals ceremony at the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea, Thursday, Feb. 22, 2018. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky) George and pilot Kaillie Humphries claimed a bronze medal in the two-person bobsled, .44 seconds behind Germany and .37 back from Americans Elana Meyers Taylor and Lauren Gibbs. Back in Ontario, the students, who watched Georges runs, had a message for their teacher: Mr. Georges daughter wins bronze. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. For George, the medal has been a long time coming. She made her Olympic debut in London in 2012, making the finals in the 100-meter hurdles, finishing in sixth. In Rio de Janeiro in 2016, she qualified for the finals in the same event and added a seventh in the 400-meter relay. A Florida inmate who was sentenced to death for the 1993 rape and murder of college student Susan Morris screamed murderers three times after receiving the lethal injection on Thursday evening at Florida State Prison. Eric Branch used his last words to address the team warden and two other officials present in the execution chamber, asking them to let Governor Rick Scott and Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi to carry out the execution instead. "I ask you to step out of line of duty and not participate in this. The governor wishes to be senator, and Pam Bondi wishes to be governor. Let them come down here and do it, the 47-year-old said, quoted in local news publication Pensacola News Journal. Ive learned that you are good people and this is not what you should be doing," he added. Trending: Trump Says Deputy Who Waited Outside During Florida School Shooting May Be a Coward,' Didnt Have 'Courage' Eric Branch Florida Department of Corrections An unidentified executioner standing behind a long curtain then administered the lethal injection, a mix of etomidate, bromide and potassium acetate. Branch than began thrashing about on his gurney, letting out what news reports described as blood-curdling screams. Murderers! Murderers! Murderers he yelled, before falling into unconsciousness, the Associated Press reported. He was pronounced dead at 6.05 p.m. Florida Department of Corrections spokeswoman Michelle Glady told reporters the procedure was carried out according to protocol and the screams were not a result of the lethal mix of drugs. Don't miss: Robert Reich: How to Find Hope in an Age of Mistrust Branch, who was also convicted of sexually assaulting and beating a 14-year-old girl in 1991, spent 24 years on death row after a jury sentenced him to death by 10-2a practice the U.S. Supreme Court has since ruled unconstitutional, requiring a death sentence to be issued by unanimous verdict. Story continues 02_23_Florida_State_Prison David Manning/Reuters The Florida Supreme Court then decided that the ruling would not apply to sentences issued before 2002. Branchs appeals were rejected first by the Florida Supreme Court, and by the U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday, just minutes before the execution was scheduled to start. The execution was attended by the victims family, who read a statement to remember the young woman they knew and loved. "Twenty-five years ago, Susan's life was suddenly and brutally extinguished. We have grieved for her longer that she was with us. Yet because of who she was... she will never be forgotten by those who love her," said the statement read out by the victim's sister, Wendy Morris Hill. This article was first written by Newsweek More from Newsweek The state of Florida was expected to execute a man convicted of the 1993 rape and murder of a college student. Eric Scott Branch was set to be put to death by lethal injection Thursday evening at Florida State Prison. Branch, now 47, was charged with the rape and killing of Susan Morris, a 21-year-old television production student the University of West Florida. Branch carried out the crime in an attempt to steal her car, according to evidence put forth in the case. Morris body was later found in a shallow grave near a nature trail, according to the Associated Press. Trending: Olympian Jan Blokhuijsen Tells South Korea 'Treat Dogs Better,' is Called Racist Branch appealed his execution on the grounds that the death penalty recommendation was not unanimous, which was later ruled unconstitutional. He also argued that 24 years on death row was cruel and unusual punishment. The Florida Supreme Court, however, denied his appeal in January, ruling that the new system does not retroactively apply to Branchs case. Eric Branch Florida Department of Corrections She had been beaten, stomped, sexually assaulted and strangled, Florida Supreme Court justices wrote in a denial of one of Branchs appeals, according to the Orlando Sentinel. She bore numerous bruises and lacerations, both eyes were swollen shut. Don't miss: All 90 Best Picture Oscar Winners, Ranked: Part 260 to 31 Prior to Morris death, Branch was also convicted of sexually assaulting and beating a 14-year-old girl in 1991. He was released mistakenly from Vanderburg County Community Correction Complex days before Morris was killed, according to WEVV-TV. Florida Governor Rick Scott signed Branchs death warrant in January. No one will ever bring our Susan Morris back, but someone, her murderer, will pay the price, said UWF President Emeritus Judy Bense after Scott signed the warrant, according to WEAR-TV. Most of the faculty have gone on so I sent them all notices and they were really glad to get this closure. Story continues Most popular: Scientists Are Developing a 'Happy Suit' for Astronauts Branch has not spoken to the media regarding his impending execution, though he has argued against it through court documents, according to the Pensacola News Journal. He will also be allowed to make a statement prior to his execution Thursday. There is the potential for Branchs death to be delayed, pending a last minute stay of execution. A total of 95 inmates have been put to death in Florida since the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1976, according to the Florida Department of Corrections. Florida State Prison Chris Livingston/Getty Images This article was first written by Newsweek More from Newsweek Brussels (AFP) - European leaders on Friday doubled their funding for a force tackling jihadists in the Sahel, but African leaders warned the money must come quickly if it is to be effective. The European Union announced an extra 50 million euros ($61 million) for the G5 Sahel force at a conference in Brussels with heads of state from Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania and Niger, taking total pledges by international donors to over 410 million euros. But just a fraction of that money is currently available to spend and Niger President Mahamadou Issoufou, the current chair of the G5 Sahel group, said it was needed urgently to deal with an influx of Islamic State (IS) group fighters driven out of Libya and Syria. The chaos in Libya, where rival militias, tribes and jihadists are vying for influence, is fuelling instability in the Sahel, Issoufou and African Union Commission chairman Moussa Faki Mahamat warned, calling for an international push to bring peace to the oil-rich state. "The Libyan crisis has been, we know, the detonator of the degradation of the security situation in the Sahel, and day after day, it contributes to its amplification," said Issoufou. "We must put an end to this chaos by restoring the authority of the Libyan state to the whole of its territory." - IS influx - Friday's meeting, attended by 32 leaders including French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, observed a minute's silence in honour of two soldiers from France's counter-terror force in West Africa who were killed in a mine blast on Wednesday. It was the latest in a surge of attacks underscoring the challenge facing the five countries, among the poorest in the world, which are on the frontline of a war against Islamist militants. Europe hopes that spending money to improve the security and economic situation in the region will help stem the flow of migrants seeking a better life across the Mediterranean and prevent the Sahel becoming a springboard for jihadist attacks on the West. Story continues The G5 force aims to train and equip 5,000 local troops to patrol hotspots and restore authority in lawless areas. As well as fighting militants, the force also tackles smuggling and illegal immigration networks that operate in the vast, remote areas on the margins of the Sahara. "Daesh fighters driven out of Libya and Syria are taking refuge in the Sahel, especially from Libya, so it's urgent the pledged funds are mobilised as quickly as possible," Mahamadou said, using an alternative name for IS. The force has so far set up a headquarters and command structure and carried out two operations, with French support, in the troubled "tri-border" area where Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso meet. It is intended to become fully operational in mid-2018, and to operate alongside France's 4,000 troops in the area as well as the UN's 12,000-strong MINUSMA peacekeeping operation in Mali. International pledges for the force now total 414 million euros, Mogherini said, but up to now only the 50 million euros has been made available. Mahamat said jihadist groups would likely step up attacks in Mali as the G5 force geared up, warning "they're not going to sit back with their arms crossed". Recent operations against militants in northern Mali have left around 30 rebels dead, Macron said, vowing "total determination" to defeat the threat. - Development push - Opening the conference, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said "security and development must go hand in hand" in the Sahel, an area almost as big as the EU where a fifth of the population do not have reliable food supplies. The bloc has budgeted nearly eight billion euros for development assistance in the Sahel from 2014 to 2020, while France pledged 1.2 billion euros over the next five years and Germany 1.7 billion euros. The EU's diplomatic chief Federica Mogherini said more pledges from individual countries were expected, saying "the price of not having peace has to be paid every day". As well as EU leaders and the United Nations, around a dozen other countries were represented by foreign ministers including Saudi Arabia, Norway, Morocco and Tunisia. Donations to the G5 so far have been led by Saudi Arabia with 100 million euros, while the United Arab Emirates has given 30 million euros and the US $60 million. France, a former colonial power, intervened militarily in Mali in 2013 to help government forces drive Al-Qaeda-linked jihadists out of the north. Within two weeks, the Sunni radicals were flushed out of most urban areas but they continue to mount attacks from desert bases. Violence spread from northern Mali to the centre and the south, and then spilt over into Burkina Faso and Niger. By Robin Emmott BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The European Union will start preparing sanctions against Myanmar generals over killings of Rohingya Muslims by formally calling on the bloc's foreign policy chief next week to draw up a list of possible names, two diplomats said. Any new travel bans and asset freezes would be the EU's toughest measures yet to try to hold the military accountable for the abuses, likely joining U.S. and Canadian sanctions already in place. "Ministers will call on (Federica) Mogherini to propose restrictive measures on senior members of the Myanmar military for systematic human rights abuses, without delay," one diplomat said on Thursday, referring to EU sanctions. Foreign ministers will also ask Mogherini and the EU's foreign service, the EEAS, on Monday to look at ways to strengthen the bloc's 1990s-era arms embargo on the Southeast Asian country that remains in place. Myanmar government spokesman Zaw Htay could not be reached for comment. Myanmar military spokesman Major General Tun Tun Nyi when reached by phone did not comment on the EU decision. In a statement expected to be released on Monday at a regular gathering of EU foreign ministers, the bloc is also expected to reiterate its call for the release of Reuters reporters Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, detained on Dec. 12 over accusations that they violated Myanmar's Official Secrets Act. The two had been working on a Reuters investigation into the killing of 10 Rohingya Muslim men who were buried in a mass grave in Rakhine state after being hacked to death or shot by ethnic Rakhine Buddhist neighbours and soldiers. No names of generals to be targeted for sanctions have been discussed, the diplomats said, but the United States said in December it was sanctioning Major General Maung Maung Soe, who is accused of a crackdown on the Rohingya minority in Rakhine. EU sanctions lists are often coordinated with Washington. The EU's decision to consider sanctions reflects resistance to such measures in the U.N. Security Council, where veto-wielding powers Russia and China said this month they believed the situation in Rakhine was stable and under control. The United States, as well as United Nations, have described the military crackdown in Myanmar as "ethnic cleansing". About 655,000 Rohingya have fled from Rakhine State for shelter over the border in Bangladesh, according to the United Nations. (Reporting by Robin Emmott; Additional reporting Shoon Naing; editing by Robert-Jan Bartunek and Mark Heinrich) The father of a girl slain during the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida has challenged politicians to make schools safer, saying during a meeting with Donald Trump that we as a country failed our children. We go the airport, I cant get on a plane with a bottle of water, butsome animal can walk into a school and shoot our children, Andrew Pollack said during a White House meeting attended by students, teachers and families affected by school shootings. Im very angry that this happened because it keeps happening, Mr Pollack continued. ...How many schools, how many children have to get shot? It stops here. Meadow Pollack was one of 17 students and teachers who died when a gunman opened fire at the Parkland, Florida school last week. She was 18. While students and teachers who survived the Florida shooting have vociferously called for new gun control measures, Mr Pollack said its not about gun laws right now, urging instead a focus on school safety. Im never going to see my kid again, Mr Pollack said. I want you all to know that. Never, ever will I see my kid - I want it to sink in. Its eternity. The President nodded and flashed a thumbs-up when Mr Pollack addressed him directly, saying Mr President, were going to fix it. In the aftermath of last weeks shooting, Mr Trump has signed a directive to ban the sale of a device called a bump stock that enables more rapid firing and has said he is open to tightening background checks for gun purchases. On the state level, Florida legislators rejected an effort to ban assault weapons as student survivors looked on. A top Republican has advocated measures to raise the age to buy assault rifles and to allow law enforcement to confiscate guns from people deemed to be dangerous. BGR Jack Black hinted in an interview before the pandemic that he may be ready to give up acting for good. Back in December 2019, he was telling people that after Jumanji: The Next Level, the hyperactive funnyman may give one more movie a go and then call it quits. And if and when that does The post Jack Blacks best movie ever has returned to dominate Netflix appeared first on BGR. Miami (AFP) - The Republican governor of Florida called Friday for a police officer to be assigned to every public school in the state, and for the minimum age for gun purchases to be raised from 18 to 21 in the wake of the Parkland mass shooting. "I'm calling for a mandatory law enforcement officer in every public school," Rick Scott told a news conference, as he unveiled a raft of safety measures in response to last week's deadly rampage. Scott said the southern US state "will require all individuals purchasing firearms to be 21 or older," and intended to make it "virtually impossible" for anyone with "mental issues" to acquire a gun. Students who survived the February 14 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School have stepped up pressure on the governor to take action to protect their schools, demanding stricter gun control laws. The self-confessed gunman, 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz, legally purchased the AR-15 semi-automatic assault rifle used to killed 17 people at the Parkland, Florida school. Scott, a Republican endorsed by the National Rifle Association, said the package of measures had been designed after meetings he held with some students. The measures do not include a ban on semi-automatic assault weapons like the AR-15. Instead, the state would raise the minimum age for all gun purchases to 21 from 18, and ban the purchase or sale of so-called "bump stocks," devices that enable semi-automatic weapons to fire at rates akin to machineguns. The plan calls for deploying a police officer for every 1,000 students in every public school in Florida from the start of the 2018 school year. An additional $50 million would be made available for mental health initiatives. US President Donald Trump on Tuesday also called for a ban on bump stocks. The devices were used by Las Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock, who killed 58 people at an outdoor concert October 1. Updated | Former Donald Trump campaign aide Rick Gates pleaded guilty at a hearing Friday to charges of federal conspiracy and making false statements. Related: Read Muellers new indictment against Manafort and Gates Muellers team first indicted Gates and his longtime associate, Paul Manafort, Trumps former campaign manager, last October on charges including Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) violations. On Thursday, a grand jury in Virginia issued a new indictment against the pair, containing new charges that include income tax violations. Trending: Taake's War with 'Antifa': Black Metal Band's Tour Is in Jeopardy as More Venues Cancel Following Nazi Controversy Criminal information in the case released Friday indicated that Gates was likely to plead guilty to one count of conspiracy against the United States and one of making a false statement to federal agents. Those charges only relate to the October indictment filed in Washington, D.C., not the one filed Thursday in Virginia. That suggests Gates will still face the charges in Virginia. 02_20_Rick_Gates_Mueller Aaron P. Bernstein/Getty Manafort responded Friday afternoon to Gates guilty plea by questioning why his former business partner would not continue to fight against the charges against them. Don't miss: Venezuela Must Stop April's Presidential Elections, Organization of American States Says Notwithstanding that Rick Gates pled today, I continue to maintain my innocence. I had hoped and expected my business colleague would have had the strength to continue the battle to prove our innocence, Manafort said. For reasons yet to surface he chose to do otherwise. This does not alter my commitment to defend myself against the untrue piled up charges contained in the indictments against me. Story continues Later on Friday, following the guilty plea and the Manafort statement, the special counsel announced a new indictment against Manafort in Washington, D.C. The new indictment contains five counts, related to money laundering, false statements and FARA violations. Gates is the fifth person to publicly do so in the Mueller probe. There had been speculation for days that such a plea was forthcoming. Thomas Green, a lawyer listed on the court docket for Gates, did not respond to requests for comment on Friday. Another lawyer who is reportedly representing Gates, Barry Pollack, also did not respond to requests for comment. Most popular: Ivanka Trumps Relationship With Nevada Senator Attacked By Republican Primary Opponent Gates has been a less public figure than Manafort, who has filed an ongoing lawsuit against the Department of Justice, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and Mueller, claiming that the special counsels investigation has gone beyond its legal authority. On Tuesday, Gatess name surfaced in a special counsel charge against Alex van der Zwaan, a Dutch lawyer. Van der Zwaan pleaded guilty to lying to federal agents about contact he had with Gates when they were involved with compiling a report on behalf of the Ukrainian government. Trump does not appear to have commented publicly about Gates. In October, following the initial indictment, he tweeted about the allegations, Sorry, but this is years ago, before Paul Manafort was part of the Trump campaign. But why aren't Crooked Hillary & the Dems the focus????? During a meeting in the Oval Office with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull on Friday afternoon, Trump did not respond to a question from a reporter about Gates. Additional reporting by Greg Price. This article has been updated to reflect Rick Gatess guity plea and to include a statement by Paul Manafort. It was later updated again to include information about a new indictment returned Friday against Manafort. This article was first written by Newsweek More from Newsweek Belgrade (AFP) - A four-million-euro mosaic depicting Jesus Christ inside the world's second largest Orthodox church was unveiled in Belgrade on Thursday. The giant mosaic, which weighs 40 tons and was worked on by 70 Serbian and Russian artists, decorates the central dome of the city's Saint Sava Orthodox cathedral. The unveiling was attended by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who arrived in the capital on Wednesday for a two-day visit, alongside Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic and Bosnian Serbia leader Milorad Dodik. Vucic commended the project for "weaving in millions of glittering pieces into one single message of brotherhood and solidarity" and thanked the lead artist, Russia's Nikolai Mukhin. The mosaic represents Christ's Ascension into heaven and was financed by Russian energy giant Gazprom. It was assembled in Moscow for a year before being transported to Belgrade. The construction of Saint Sava cathedral, which can accomodate up to 10,000 people, started in 1939, based upon the model of Haghia Sophia in Istanbul. But building was interrupted two years later with German occupation at the start of World War II. Neglected by former Yugoslavia's communist authorities, the project to finish the cathedral has gone on for decades. According to a deal signed in 2012, Russia is participating in the decoration of the cathedral dedicated to the Serbian Orthodox Church founder. While visiting the cathedral, Lavrov also met the head of Serbian Orthodox Church Patriarch Irinej. Serbia and Russia, both mainly Orthodox countries, are traditional allies. Pennsylvania Republicans took another stab at blocking a court-ordered congressional map on Thursday by filing a new lawsuit that asks a three-judge federal panel to step in. The suit comes one day after GOP leaders in the state said they had filed an emergency request asking the U.S. Supreme Court to block the new map. In January, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court struck down the congressional map that had been in place since 2011, saying it gave Republicans such a considerable advantage over Democrats that it violated the states constitution. The state Supreme Court gave lawmakers and the governor three weeks to agree on a map, and then stepped in to draw its own when the two parties failed to do so. In their appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court and in their Thursday suit, Republicans said the state Supreme Court didnt give them a meaningful chance to come up with a new map and that its decision to draw its own plan was unlawful. They argued only the U.S. Constitution grants legislatures the ability to draw congressional maps, and said they want the federal court to instruct the state to use the 2011 map for congressional elections this year. The U.S. Supreme Court rejected that argument earlier this month, when it declined to step in and block the state Supreme Courts order. Republicans are hoping the courts might be willing to take another look now that the map is in place. Wanda Murren, a spokeswoman for the Pennsylvania Department of State, said her agency was already working on implementing the court-ordered map and would continue to do so unless otherwise ordered by the courts. This 2011 file photo shows the state Capitol in Pennsylvania. (Photo: MLADEN ANTONOV via Getty Images) Lawyers representing the 18 voters who got the 2011 map struck down say the officials have no case in federal court because the state Supreme Court struck down the congressional map based solely on Pennsylvanias constitution. In a statement Wednesday, lawyers for the plaintiffs accused Republicans of taking frivolous legal action and wasting taxpayer money. Story continues The Republicans are suing Robert Torres, the acting secretary of the commonwealth, and Jonathan Marks, the commissioner for the bureau of commissions, elections and legislation. Lawyers for Torres and Marks have said they can run elections smoothly and on schedule with the new congressional map, but Republicans say it will cause chaos. Nominating petitions for congressional races are set to go out on Feb. 27, so the Republicans are asking the court to step in immediately. Our concerns stem from the attack on the constitution initiated by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court not the design of a map, Pennsylvania Senate Majority Leader Jacob Corman (R), one of the people who filed the suit on Thursday, said in a statement. What is at stake here is larger than the makeup of the Pennsylvania Congressional delegation. We are unwilling to acquiesce to the courts attempt to hijack the functions of the legislative and executive branches, he added. President Donald Trump also encouraged Republicans to challenge the new congressional map earlier this week. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. The map the court drew is considerably more competitive than the 2011 plan the GOP is fighting for. Under that map, Republicans consistently won 13 of the states 18 congressional seats despite winning around 50 percent of the vote. Republicans have expressed little interest in getting a new congressional map in place. Senate Majority Leader Joseph Scarnati (R) told the state Supreme Court that he wouldnt hand over data it had asked for because he believed the courts decision was unlawful. Republicans also moved to disqualify the vote of a Democratic judge on the court because he expressed opposition to gerrymandering when he was a candidate running for office. Corman filed the federal suit on Thursday with state Sen. Michael Folmer (R). GOP Reps. Lou Barletta, Ryan Costello, Mike Kelly, Tom Marino, Scott Perry, Keith Rothfus, Lloyd Smucker and Glenn Thompson also joined it. Related Coverage Top Pennsylvania Republican Says He'll Ignore Court Order To Help Fix Gerrymandering Supreme Court Won't Let Pennsylvania GOP Delay Drawing New Congressional Map Pennsylvania GOP Pleads With SCOTUS Again To Let Them Use Gerrymandered Map Also on HuffPost Love HuffPost? Become a founding member of HuffPost Plus today. Alabama State Capitol (Montgomery, Ala.) Pictured on Tuesday, Feb. 7, 2012. (AP Photo/Dave Martin) Alaska State Capitol (Juneau, Alaska) Pictured on Tuesday, Jan. 18, 2011. (AP Photo/Chris Miller) Arizona State Capitol (Phoenix) Pictured on Friday, April 23, 2010. (Photo by John Moore/Getty Images) Arkansas State Capitol (Little Rock, Ark.) Pictured on Wednesday, Nov. 30, 2011. (AP Photo/Danny Johnston) California State Capitol (Sacramento, Calif.) Pictured on Thursday, Jan. 5, 2006. (Photo by David Paul Morris/Getty Images) Colorado State Capitol (Denver) Pictured on Thursday, Oct. 26, 2006. (Photo by Doug Pensinger/Getty Images) Connecticut State Capitol (Hartford, Conn.) Pictured on Tuesday, Feb. 7, 1999. (AP Photo/Bob Child) Delaware State Capitol (Dover, Del.) Florida State Capitol (Tallahassee, Fla.) Pictured on Monday, Jan. 3, 2011. (AP Photo/John Raoux) Georgia State Capitol (Atlanta) Pictured on Tuesday, November 13, 2007. (Photo by Jessica McGowan/Getty Images) Hawaii State Capitol (Honolulu) Idaho State Capitol (Boise, Idaho) Pictured on Monday, Jan. 14, 2008. (Ned Dishman/NBAE via Getty Images) Illinois State Capitol (Springfield, Ill.) Pictured on Tuesday, Sept. 21, 2004. (AP Photo/Seth Perlman) Indiana State Capitol (Indianapolis) Pictured on Saturday, Feb. 4, 2012. (Photo by Jeff Gross/Getty Images) Iowa State Capitol (Des Moines, Iowa) Pictured on Wednesday, Aug. 10, 2011. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images) Kansas State Capitol (Topeka, Kan.) Pictured on Thursday, April 15, 2010. (AP Photo/Orlin Wagner) Kentucky State Capitol (Frankfort, Ky.) Pictured on Wednesday, April 12, 2006. (AP Photo/James Crisp) Louisiana State Capitol (Baton Rouge, La.) Pictured on Monday, Jan. 14, 2008. (Matthew HINTON/AFP/Getty Images) Maine State Capitol (Augusta, Me.) Pictured on Monday, Oct. 17, 2011. (AP Photo/Pat Wellenbach) Maryland State House (Annapolis, Md.) (Photo by Patrick Smith/Getty Images) Massachusetts State House (Boston) Pictured on Tuesday, Jan. 2, 2007. (Photo by Darren McCollester/Getty Images) Michigan State Capitol (Lansing, Mich.) Pictured on Wednesday, April 13, 2011. (Photo by Bill Pugliano/Getty Images) Minnesota State Capitol (St. Paul, Minn.) Pictured on Friday, July 1, 2011. (Photo by Hannah Foslien/Getty Images) Mississippi State Capitol (Jackson, Miss.) Pictured on Thursday, June 10, 1999. (AP Photo/Rogelio Solis) Missouri State Capitol (Jefferson City, Mo.) Pictured on Friday, Oct. 16, 2000. (Photo credit should read ORLIN WAGNER/AFP/Getty Images) Montana State Capitol (Helena, Mont.) Nebraska State Capitol (Lincoln, Neb.) Pictured on Wednesday, Nov. 25, 1998. (AP Photo/S.E. McKee) Nevada State Capitol (Carson City, Nev.) New Hampshire State House (Concord, N.H.) Pictured on Friday, Dec. 28, 2001. (Todd Warshaw//Pool/Getty Images New Jersey State House (Trenton, N.J.) Pictured on Friday, Aug. 13, 2004. (Photo by Chris Hondros/Getty Images) New Mexico State Capitol (Santa Fe, N.M.) New York State Capitol (Albany, N.Y.) Pictured on Sunday, March 16, 2008. (Photo by Daniel Barry/Getty Images) North Carolina State Capitol (Raleigh, N.C.) Pictured in 1930. (AP Photo) North Dakota State Capitol (Bismarck, N.D.) Pictured on Thursday, April 19, 2012. (AP Photo/Dale Wetzel) Ohio Statehouse (Columbus, Ohio) Pictured on Tuesday, March 8, 2011. (Photo by Mike Munden/Getty Images) This article originally appeared on HuffPost. Port-au-Prince (AFP) - Haiti on Thursday suspended the operations of British charity Oxfam pending the outcome of its investigation into allegations that its staff sexually exploited Haitians after a devastating 2010 earthquake. The country's ministry of planning and foreign aid said Oxfam GB had made a "serious error" by failing to inform Haitian authorities of the actions by their staff at the time they occurred. "These reprehensible acts, alleged crimes, acknowledged by the perpetrators as well as the NGO, are a serious violation of the dignity of the Haitian people," a government statement said. It said the charity was suspended for two months pending an internal Haitian investigation into the matter. Aviol Fleurant, the minister for planning and foreign aid, said that if Haiti's own investigations found "a link between the crimes committed and the money that Oxfam received to help the Haitian people I will see to it that the foreign ministry declares, in the name of the government, Oxfam-GB persona non-grata and will have to leave the country." "Haiti is no longer an NGO republic," he said after meeting with Oxfam's director for Latin America and the Caribbean, Simon Ticehurst. "We are not joking: the dignity of the Haitian people has no price." An investigation conducted by Oxfam a year after the earthquake had found that seven staff were accused of using prostitutes at an Oxfam-funded residence. The 2011 report, disclosed on Monday, also found that three staff members had physically threatened a witness. One official has acknowledged paying for prostitutes and the others were accused of harassment and intimidation. A young Haitian woman told The Times newspaper she had had relations with the former Oxfam country director in Haiti, Roland Van Hauwermeiren, when she was 16 and he was 61. Van Hauwermeiren denied to Belgian media last week, however, that he had organized orgies with young prostitutes in Haiti, and said he had "intimate relations" with "an honorable, mature woman" whom he did not pay. Story continues Four staff were fired for gross misconduct and three others, including Van Hauwermeiren, were allowed to quit. - Greater scrutiny - Oxfam formally apologized to the Haitian government on Monday for its handling of the scandal and for failing to report it promptly to local authorities. "It was not for Oxfam to decide whether a crime had been committed... that was the wrong decision," Oxfam GB's chief executive Mark Goldring said Tuesday at a hearing before a British parliamentary committee. Fleurant, the planning minister, said he had not ruled out demanding the extradition of Van Hauwermeiren and others to face charges in Haiti. "There could be an extradition: we could call for them to be brought back to Haiti," he said, adding that if that did not succeed "we could bring a civil action, or help the victims do so." The strong line taken by the government was met with approval by Haitian human rights groups. "It's a good decision and it also sends the right message to other NGO's operating in the mess of Haiti," said Haitian lawyer Mario Joseph, while warning that such talk "could be much ado about nothing if all the means to carry out an inquiry are not deployed to bring these people to justice." The Haiti scandal has opened the charity to greater scrutiny, leading to 26 new cases of sexual misconduct, most involving its international operations. Carlos Soto, owner of a floral service called Flowers From Our Heart, had an unexpected problem on the busiest day of the year: He had to turn down business on Valentines Day because he couldnt find enough workers to field all the orders he could have taken. A year or two ago, Id put an ad on Craigslist and get 100 or 150 resumes for a few positions, says Soto, whose Los Angeles-based service delivers flowers through a network of 30,000 local shops. This year, I placed several ads and got very few people. I could have used another six people. I would have been able to take more orders. With the U.S. economy in its ninth year of expansion, employers are fretting about a problem that seemed unimaginable just a few years ago, in the aftermath of mass layoffs and the Great Recession: a shortage of workers, from unskilled laborers needed to hammer nails to programmers and developers able to build complex software. The unemployment rate is a low 4.1% and probably headed below 4% at some point this year. The Labor Department says there are nearly 6 million unfilled jobs in the U.S. economy, close to a record high. Illustration by David Foster for Yahoo Finance For the first time ever, small-business owners said in a monthly survey dating to 1974 that the poor quality of labor is their biggest problem, rather than perennial gripes such as taxes, weak sales, costly health insurance or excessive regulation. In a recent survey of business owners by J.P. Morgan Chase, 54% said finding qualified workers would be a top challenge in 201810 points higher than the portion who felt that way last year. Yahoo Finance surveyed more than 1,100 people who own or manage a business, and interviewed a variety of them in depth, to determine why theres a shortage of workers, and what might be done about it. (Here are highlights from the survey.) Among our findings: More than half of employers say they cant find enough qualified workers To lure workers, employers are raising pay and sweetening benefitsand they still cant find people, in many cases Businesses struggle to find workers able to show up on time, finish a shift and pass a drug test Many businesses, like Carlos Sotos floral service, are giving up workand revenuebecause theyre chronically understaffed In some industries, employers fault lousy immigration policiesand feel President Trump is making the problem worse Workers, for their part, blame companies for offshoring jobs, skimping on training and setting standards unrealistically high This is how business owners and managers responded to the question. Source: Yahoo Finance survey conducted online via SurveyMonkey, Jan. 29-30 A diminishing pool of workers Story continues Economists emphasize that key data doesnt yet show workers are scarce throughout the economy. Job growth remains strong, for instance, with employers creating more than 180,000 new jobs per month, on average, since the start of 2017. If workers were scarce everywhere, that monthly average would be lower, perhaps below 100,000. And pay hasnt risen broadly throughout the economy, which is what normally happens when companies run short on staffing. Businesses are grumbling about the inability to find qualified workers, says Ryan Sweet, director of real-time economics at Moodys Analytics. But its isolated and concentrated regionally. I think whats happening is, it was easy to find qualified workers a few years ago. HR offices could wallpaper their offices with resumes. Now, its harder. The pool of available workers is diminishing. A widespread labor crunch could be coming in a few years, however, threatening Trumps goal of achieving annual growth rates of 3% or higher. And anecdotal reports today might be the first real sign of trouble. Todays hiring difficulties also highlight fissures in the economy and in society more broadly, including a failing education system in parts of the country, poor policymaking in Washington and even cultural and generational divisions. Such festering problems might finally be causing tangible economic damage. A lack of basic skills David Bird owns a construction firm in Lawrenceburg, Ky., called Bird, Pruitt and Associates, and says finding workers is the toughest its been since he started his company in 2000. Hes perennially short of roofers, framers, drivers and lesser-skilled laborers. I cant find anybody who can pass a drug test and show up for work, he tells Yahoo Finance. I havent hired anybody under 35 in two years who can read a tape measure and do a fraction in their head, to cut lumber to frame a house. Couldnt he train workers at rudimentary skills they ought to learn in high school? Not really. I cant be paying somebody $12 an hour on a customers construction site to teach them basic math, he says. Carlos Soto and his wife Jessielee Hernandez, owners of the California floral service Flowers From Our Heart. Theyve been turning down business lately because they cant find enough workers to take orders. Photo courtesy of Carlos Soto Bird has raised pay by about 50% during the last five years, to attract better workers. Unskilled workers start at $10 per hour, about a buck more than at local-fast-food joints, and pay rises quickly for workers who stick around. Average pay is around $15 per hour, and up to $20 for those with higher skills. Yet Bird still struggles. Ive got a head mechanic who comes in between 12 and 1 every day, and I cant fire him, because I cant replace him, Bird says. Last November, one worker quit and disappeared with a company truck, which took Bird two months to locate and reclaim. And theres a limit to what Bird can pay, because he cant easily pass on rising labor costs to customers. There a lid on what I can charge, because theres a lid on what my clients can pay for a chicken coop or porch addition, he says. Bird has started hiring ex-cons, provided their past crimes werent too severe. In theory, firms that cant find workers will raise pay until its high enough that qualified workers show up, or go to the trouble to get qualified. It absolutely doesnt work that way in real life, says Lori Hayes, co-owner of Calypso Kennels in Fredericksburg, Va. A lot of people dont really have a work ethic. They dont understand that when youre scheduled to work, you work. Jobs at the kennel start around $9 per hour for people with experience handling animals, and rise quickly to $10, $11 and $12 for workers who stick around. Once Ive trained em, Ill bump em up, Hayes says. And Ill bump, bump, bump. Still, most workers are gone within a couple of weeks, and sometimes within a couple of shifts. It probably takes 10 hires to get one that will last three months, Hayes says. And hardly anybody gives two weeks notice any more. Mostly, they just stop showing up. Economists point out that there are still an unusually large number of working-age Americans who arent working, sometimes described as the reserve labor pool. The labor force participation rate, which measures the portion of working age people who have a job or are looking for one, has fallen from a peak of 67.2% in 1997 to 62.7% today. Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute estimates that 7 million men between the ages of 25 and 54 could be working, but arent even looking for a job. Possible reasons: drug and alcohol addiction, families willing to support them, government benefits that discourage work, or mere lack of interest. Immigration policy problems To help push growth to 3% or higher, Trump signed legislation at the end of 2017 slashing the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%, with the tax cut meant to give firms of all types more incentive to invest and do business in the United States. But many of the businesses Trump is relying on to amp up spending already face a shortage of workers, and theyll have a hard time investing more if theres nobody to do the work. Apple, for instance, said it will boost spending in the U.S. on account of the tax cut, as did other big tech firms. But theres an acute shortage of workers in parts of the tech industry. If you talk to the Apples and Facebooks of the world, their business is almost being strangled by this lack of manpower, says Daniel Webster, owner of Lakewood Ranch Search and Recruiting, near Sarasota, Fla. Webster recruits tech workers for firms all over the country, typically for jobs paying well over $100,000. Some companies give up finding needed workers and meld two jobs into one. Others raid workers from nearby employers, in a kind of escalating arms race for talent. The Trump administration hasnt thought this through, and thats an understatement, Webster says. Tech firms strongly favor an increase in the number of H1-B visas that let foreign workers come to the United States to fill jobs when Americans workers arent available. The current limit on H1-Bs is 85,000 visas per year. But Trump favors less immigration, not more, and hes reviewing the H1-B program to assure its not being abused. Some news reports suggest Trump is tacitly putting new limits on H1-Bs by making it harder to qualify for them. His strident anti-immigration rhetoric has also spooked foreigners who have work visas, or might apply. The Trump administration has scared the bejesus out of these people, says Webster. They dont know if they will be allowed to stay, or if they go home for vacation, theyll be able to get back into the U.S. Immigration policy comes up frequently when employers suggest ways to ease the shortage of workers. We used to get a lot of Hispanics coming here to help with the work force, but we just dont see that any more, says Tim Colstrup, owner of Colstrup Sod Farm in Ellandale, Minn., about 30 miles south of Minneapolis. They were good workers. I dont mean to put down the white laborers, but a lot of the time, they wont do the work the minorities or the Hispanics were doing. Colstrup says hes having the toughest time finding workers in the 32 years his company has been around. He has automated parts of the farming operation where he can. But he still needs workers for plantings at construction sites. Like other employers, he has raised paywith little to show for it except higher payroll expenses. Workers say, thats good pay, but some of them still only work a few days, Colstrup says. I dont get it. Where is the drive to better yourself? David Bird, owner of the Kentucky construction company Bird, Pruitt and Associates. I cant find anybody who can pass a drug test and show up for work. Photo courtesy of David Bird David Bird, who owns the construction firm in Kentucky, also cited immigration when asked what might ease the labor shortage in his area. Our immigration policy is not working, he says. The American capitalistic system has depended on first-generation immigrants to do manual labor and entry-level jobs. Our current policy is a financial and paperwork disaster. He cites Trumps anti-immigration rhetoric, along with a thicket of federal, state and local requirements for legally hiring migrant workers. Ive got a bachelors and a masters degree, he says, and I cant figure it out. Its only going to get worse Workers, not surprisingly, are more likely to blame employers for problems filling the ranks. In the Yahoo Finance survey, conducted Jan. 29-30, 51% of business owners and managers said theres a shortage of workers in their area, but only 37% of workers felt that way. Business owners said the main problem is that workers are unqualified. Workers said the biggest problem is companies dont pay enough. Management and labor always see things differently, needless to say, a gap that persists even amid low unemployment. (Here are our detailed survey results.) Policymakers havent had much to say about the state of Americas workforce, and Congress isnt seriously considering any legislation that would address the problems employers complain about. But on the front lines, there are signs the problem may worsen to the point that it impedes economic growth, possibly prompting government action. I think its going to get worse, says Jeremy Boka, director of business development and sales for Perficut Site Management, a landscaping company based in Des Moines, Iowa. If we had the people, the economy would be able to spin faster. Perficut has about 30 open positions its struggling to fill, including field laborers, foremen, superintendents and managers. A dearth of workers is now cutting into revenue growth. We are going to have to be extraordinarily selective on what jobs we move forward with, Boka says. If we could get more people, we could grow 10% more this year. The outlook, however, suggests workers will become even harder to hire, not easier. Tech companies such as Apple, Facebook and Google are expanding in the area, and billions of dollars worth of new construction projects are underway. Those are all signs the competition for workers will intensify. As problems go, its a good one to have. But its still a problem, and its getting bigger. Confidential tip line: rickjnewman@yahoo.com. Encrypted communication available. Read more: Rick Newman is the author of four books, including Rebounders: How Winners Pivot from Setback to Success. Follow him on Twitter: @rickjnewman Follow Yahoo Finance on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn BEIRUT (AP) Doctors in Syrias rebel-controlled suburbs of Damascus said Wednesday they were unable to keep up with the staggering number of casualties, amid a ferocious bombing campaign by government forces that has targeted hospitals, apartment blocks and other civilian sites, killing and wounding hundreds of people in recent days. The bombardment has forced many among the nearly 400,000 residents to sleep in basements and makeshift shelters, and has overwhelmed rescue workers who have spent days digging out survivors from the wreckage of bombed out buildings. U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called for an immediate suspension of all war activities in the rebel-held Damascus suburbs known as eastern Ghouta where he said 400,000 people are living in hell on earth. The U.N. chief said a suspension of fighting must allow for humanitarian aid to reach all in need and the evacuation of some 700 people needing urgent medical treatment. Dr. Waleed Awata described a desperate, chaotic scene at the small hospital where he works as an anesthesiologist in the town of Zamalka, one of a cluster of settlements that make up eastern Ghouta. The facility, with just 17 beds, received 82 patients on Tuesday night alone, he said. We had to give them IVs and treat them on the floor, the 44-year-old physician told The Associated Press. He said the bodies of two women and two children killed in Wednesdays shelling were also brought to the hospital. The hospital was struck Tuesday by barrel bombs crude, explosives-filled oil drums dropped from helicopters at high altitudes as well as sporadic artillery fire, Awata said. Like many hospitals in the area, patients had been moved into the basement to shield them from airstrikes. No one was hurt but the hospitals generator, water tanks and several ambulances were damaged. Another doctor said he, too, was as the hospital where he works in the town of Saqba when it came under attack Tuesday, killing some of the patients and forcing others to be moved to nearby homes because the airstrikes made it too dangerous to take them to other hospitals. Story continues By God, I am exhausted in every sense of the word, said the physician, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he feared for the safety of relatives in government-controlled areas of Damascus. The international medical organization Doctors Without Borders said 13 hospitals and clinics that it supports have been damaged or destroyed over the past three days. The International Committee of the Red Cross called for immediate access to tend to the wounded, saying medical personnel in the rebel-held areas were unable to cope amid shortages of medicines and supplies. Syrian government forces supported by Russian aircraft have shown no signs of letting up their aerial and artillery assault on eastern Ghouta since they stepped up strikes late Sunday as part of a new, determined push to recapture the territory that has been controlled by rebels since 2012. The U.N. human rights office said in a statement Wednesday that at least 346 people had been killed in eastern Ghouta since the Syrian government and its allies escalated their offensive on the region on Feb. 4. At least 92 of those deaths occurred in just one 13-hour period on Monday, it said, adding that the toll was far from comprehensive, documented in the midst of chaos and destruction. Another 878 people have been wounded, mostly in airstrikes hitting residential areas. The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which closely monitors the fighting through activists on the ground, said at least 300 people have been killed since Sunday night alone. The dead included 10 people killed in a new wave of strikes Wednesday on the town of Kafr Batna. The oppositions Syrian Civil Defense search-and-rescue group, also known as the White Helmets, reported similar numbers, saying government forces targeted the town with airstrikes, artillery fire and barrel bombs. Photos and video posted by the Syrian Civil Defense and local activist groups showed scenes resembling the aftermath of an earthquake in Kafr Batna and rescuers searching the rubble for survivors. In one video, workers were seen carrying away a man, his hair and clothes covered in dust and debris, blood running down his face. Sirens wailed in the background and people screamed in panic. Photos showed children being treated for wounds at a hospital and bodies shrouded in white lined up alongside makeshift graves. The doctor in Saqba said he had returned home Tuesday to rest after two back-to-back days of treating the wounded when a barrage of rockets landed in his neighborhood, shaking his apartment and breaking the windows. Minutes later, the airstrikes began. The first one hit his house, the doctor said, adding that he couldnt see anything through the dust as he called out to his pregnant wife and two young children, ages 2 and 1. Neighbors came to their rescue and helped them evacuate to the basement, where they spent the night. They suffered only superficial wounds. Im one of the fortunate ones. I know that not everyone in my place in Ghouta would have been so lucky, he said. The U.N.s regional humanitarian coordinator for Syria, Panos Moumtzis, said he was alarmed by the very high number of casualties. Ghouta is a 10-mile drive from the hospitals in Damascus and its heartbreaking to think of children, women, and elderly who are in need, unable to be evacuated, and in a situation of fear, hiding in basements and not being able to go out, he said by phone from Amman, Jordan. Paul Donohoe, the Beirut-based media officer for International Rescue Committee, said his group supports five medical facilities in eastern Ghouta that, because of the severity of the bombardment, were only able to treat the most urgent cases. He said more than 700 people, including some with chronic illnesses that need urgent medical evacuation, were trapped. People are terrified. We need a cease-fire immediately because of the horrible, horrendous number of people who have died so far, he said. Rebels in eastern Ghouta retaliated by sending mortar shells crashing Wednesday into Damascus, seat of President Bashar Assads power. The Russian military is again supporting Assads forces as it did in the all-out assault on the rebel-held half of Syrias largest city, Aleppo, in late 2016, which drove the rebels from their enclave there. Tens of thousands of civilians were forced to flee their homes, and many have been unable to return. Hundreds more were killed in indiscriminate shelling and bombardment. A subsequent U.N. investigation charged that the campaign amounted to forced displacement of a population and rose to the level of a war crime. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said earlier this week that the assault on Aleppo could serve as a model for the military campaign in eastern Ghouta, which he said was necessary to uproot al-Qaida-linked militants from the area. On Wednesday, Russian President Vladimir Putins spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, rejected allegations from the U.S. and others that the Russian military shares responsibility, along with Assads forces, for civilian casualties in eastern Ghouta, calling such claims unfounded. Rep. Jackie Speier, D-Calif., and St. Basils Cathedral in Red Square in Moscow. (Photo illustration: Yahoo News; photos: Yuri Gripas/Reuters, Getty Images) Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee have a list of 20 to 30 witnesses they still want to question in the Russia investigation, but fear that Republicans will block them from doing so. I dont know were going to get a crack at them, Rep. Jackie Speier, D-Calif., told Yahoo News Skullduggery podcast. Speier said that Republican staff members on the panel may even have engaged in tampering with witnesses to thwart inquires into President Trumps or his campaigns ties to the Russians, but did not elaborate. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. Listen: Episode 7: Rep. Jackie Speier vents about the Russia investigation I think our investigation has been tied in knots from the very beginning, Speier said. So many of the witnesses we had come before us to testify were not subpoenaed, nor were their documents produced. So we were asking the questions without the benefit of documentation to determine whether they were telling the truth or not. Rep. Jackie Speier, D-Calif., a member of the House Intelligence Committee. (Photo: J. Scott Applewhite/AP) Asked if she has seen evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians that goes beyond what has already been made public, Speier said: I have seen evidence of an interest in coordinating with the Russians. Download or subscribe on iTunes: Skullduggery by Yahoo News Speier then laid out her suspicions at some length: Why is Donald Trump so unwilling to impose sanctions [against Russia] that Congress has passed and he signed into law, she said. And I think the answer is, he has financial arrangements with the Russians that we have yet been able to uncover. And I think it has something to with the fact that weve never seen his tax returns. There are too many relationships you can point to where Trump engaged with Russian operatives; where statements by the Trump sons have suggested they get most of their business from the Russians; the Russian oligarch who purchased his mansion in Florida for twice the value as the entire financial world was careening out of control in 2008 and, at the same time, that Donald Trump had a personal debt that was due. Story continues So I am very concerned that there is a corrupting nature of the Russians on Donald Trump and others that well never know, Speier continued. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif., with Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., also a member of the Intelligence Committee. (Photo: J. Scott Applewhite/AP) On the release of the Democratic rebuttal to the controversial memo written by House Intelligence Committee chair Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Ca., Speier said shes not optimistic her partys memo will ever be made public. The Nunes memo, she said, was the equivalent of a third-grade book report while the Democratic rebuttal was like a post-graduate dissertation with footnotes. But Speier said she doubts that the White House which has ultimate authority over what material is declassified for public release will ever approve a version of the Democratic memo that will be the least bit informative. I dont think there was ever any interest in making the rebuttal memo public unless it was totally redacted, so it was made meaningless, she said. Asked about special counsel Robert Muellers indictment last week of Russian trolls who worked for the Internet Research Agency and who set up phony Facebook and Twitter accounts to interfere in the U.S. election, Speier said the case pointed to a major intelligence failure by the U.S. government. Shame on all of us in the United States for not recognizing how pernicious this Internet Research Agency was going to be, she said. She noted there was even a New York Times Sunday Magazine article that exposed the groups operations some years ago, yet it wasnt taken very seriously. We can point fingers at a lot of folks for why [the Internet Research Agency was] able to flourish in the way they did. More Skullduggery from Yahoo News: The federal agency charged with processing immigration applications to the United States slashed the phrase nation of immigrants from its mission statement on Thursday. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) director, L. Francis Cissna announced the agencys new mission statement in a staff-wide email. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services administers the nations lawful immigration system, safeguarding its integrity and promise by efficiently and fairly adjudicating requests for immigration benefits while protecting Americans, securing the homeland, and honoring our values, the new mission statement reads. 913417534 Getty Images The USICSs former statement, which is no longer on its website, included the line "a nation of immigrants" and read, USCIS secures Americas promise as a nation of immigrants by providing accurate and useful information to our customers, granting immigration and citizenship benefits, promoting an awareness and understanding of citizenship, and ensuring the integrity of our immigration system, the former statement read. Trending: How Did Life Begin? Key Alzheimer's Protein Has Surprising Tie to the Primordial Soup The change was first reported by online news publication The Intercept. In his email to staff, Cissna wrote that the updated mission statement is straightforward and defines the agencys role in our countrys lawful immigration system and the commitment we have to the American people. The director also noted that the new change removes the word customers because it is a misinterpretation of their role; he agency should not be considered a mere production line or even described in business or commercial terms he noted. Story continues Cissna stated that calling immigrants and those who support immigration benefits customers promotes an institutional culture that emphasizes the ultimate satisfaction of applicants and petitioners, rather than the correct adjudication of such applications and petitions according to the law. All applicants and petitioners should, of course, always be treated with the greatest respect and courtesy, but we cant forget that we serve the American people, the director wrote. Don't miss: Who Is Scot Peterson, Florida Deputy Who Should Have Went In Killed the Killer? In an email to Newsweek, USCIS officials wrote that the White House did not instruct the agency to change its statement. The change has been approved by the Secretary of Homeland Security, USCIS noted. Cissna was confirmed as the head of USCIS in October 2017. He previously served as director of immigration policy at the Department of Homeland Security and was a volunteer immigration policy advisor to Donald Trumps presidential campaign. Human rights organizations have said that removing the immigration line from the mission statement does not alter the fact that the U.S. was built by immigrants. However, it does show how the Trump administration will "stop at nothing to demonize and dehumanize immigrants and refugees." Most popular: Why Does Kobe Bryant Not Want to Convince Players to Join the Lakers? We cannot separate 'immigrants' from 'Americans'we are intrinsically linked as children, parents, neighbors, and loved ones, said Human Rights First Director Eleanor Acer in a statement to Newsweek. By seeking to distinguish between the two, the administration is turning its back on our nations proud history and engaging in dangerous revisionism. Omar Jadwat, director of the Immigrant Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union, told Newsweek that it's obvious the Trump administration is continuing to divide immigrants from American-born citizens. "Its sending a message perfectly in line with what the administration has said and done so far, which is trying to set immigrants apart from other people in America; to paint them as a law enforcement issue as opposed to real individuals with a variety of real and valid concerns and claims," said Jawat. This article was first written by Newsweek More from Newsweek Tehran (AFP) - A video showing an Iranian policeman shoving a woman protesting against mandatory headscarves off her makeshift podium in a busy Tehran street sparked criticism on social media on Friday. The video of the solitary female demonstrator was apparently shot on Enghelab (Revolution) Street, where a woman was first detained in December after standing with her head uncovered waving a scarf on a stick. Since then several dozen Iranian women have published photos of themselves in the street or parks, their heads uncovered, waving their scarves in an act of defiance. The woman in the video is seen standing on a street cabinet with her arms raised in the air, her long blond hair worn in a high pony tail. Asked by two policeman to get down, she replies calmly: "Tell me what my offence is and I'll get down." "Disturbing public order," one of them says. A crowd then forms and starts clapping. In the second part of the video, apparently shot on a cellphone, one of the policemen steps up to the same height as the woman and shoves her off her podium, to the indignation of onlookers. "Where are the human rights?" a male voice asks. Lawyer and human rights activist Nasrin Sotoudeh wrote on Facebook that the policeman broke the law because "no man has the right to treat a woman like this". Twitter users also reacted with dismay. "Breaking the law while in law enforcement uniform is our problem in Iran," one tweeted. "The same police force that makes the girl fall over in Enghelab Street is the one responsible for ensuring the security and viability of the elections," said another. Since December around 30 women have been arrested in Tehran for defying a requirement under Iran's Islamic legal code to wear a headscarf. Turning to North Korea, the answer Im going to give is really quite easy to give, although the message is pretty dire. And that is that this is a really dangerous situation that were facing right now on the Korea peninsula. I would argue that there is no, from a mass casualty standpoint, that there is no more dangerous place on the earth than the Korean peninsula right now. This is all in the hands and the minds of a single person. And that of course is Kim Jong-un. What he does, what he decides to do, is going to be decisive of how this matter resolves. And it is not going to resolve well if he continues on the course that he is continuing on. The president of the United States has said, and he is committed to, seeing that Kim Jong-un is not able to marry together a delivery system with a nuclear weapon that he can deliver to the United States. He has said that very clearly. That is, our president has said that very clearly. And anyone who doubts the presidents commitment to see that that doesnt happen does so really at their own peril. The consequences of that are breathtaking when you think about how this could happen. There is no bloody nose policy. Senator Shaheen and I drilled down with the administration on that, and nobody knows where that came from. It appeared in the national media, the administration says theyve never used the term, theyve never considered the strategy, there is no such thing. And if you think about it, it absolutely makes sense. If this thing starts, its going to be probably one of the one of the worst catastrophic events in the history of our civilization. It is going to be very, very brief. The end of it is going to see mass casualties the likes of which the planet has never seen. It will be of biblical proportions. Anyone who doubts that this president isnt committed to that, I would suggest that they step back, take a breath, listen to what he has said, review the facts on the ground. This president has at his fingertips the ability to dispense what he has said hes going to dispense, if the North Korean regime, if Kim Jong-un, that he is, uh, the president can do this quickly, and as I said, it is at his fingertips. I respect any opinion that any of you may have regarding whats happened, what should happen, where its going to go, but please, please, dont ignore the facts that are there. Ivanka Trump is on the charm offensive in South Korea. The first daughter arrived Friday after flying commercial on Korean Air from Washington D.C., to Seoul. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. Ivanka, who traveled with White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, showed no sign of jet lag after the 14-hour flight, looking chic in a black-and-white houndstooth coat with a white turtleneck sweater. "It's a great honor to be here in South Korea with the U.S. delegation," Ivanka told the crowd that had gathered for her arrival. "We are very excited to attend the 2018 Winter Olympic Games to cheer for team USA and to reaffirm our strong and enduring commitment with the people of the Republic of Korea." She later changed into a black dress for dinner with South Korean President Moon Jae-in and First Lady Kim Jung-sook. She enjoyed a kosher, vegetarian meal of grilled tofu with "special marinade." She later thanked the couple in a tweet. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. On Saturday, Ivanka will cheer on Team USA during the final day of competition before heading to Sunday's closing ceremony. She is expected to smooth some tensions that flared during the vice president's visit last week. RELATED STORIES All the Olympic Medals Team USA Has Won in Pyeongchang Melania Affectionately Rests Hand on Trump's Arm at Mar-a-Lago Party Donald Trump Jr.'s Wife Vanessa Hospitalized After Opening Letter With White Powder Inside Related Articles: Jeremy Scott and Madonna attend the China: Through The Looking Glass Costume Institute Benefit Gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on May 4, 2015, in New York City. (Photo: Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images) Nothing Jeremy Scott does screams wallflower. Well, except for the Moschino Spring 2018 show, where he dressed models Gigi Hadid, Kaia Gerber, and Joan Smalls literally as human-sized bouquets. But aside from titillating our senses for the past two decades with over-the-top (and sometimes outlandish) runway collections, the 42-year-old fashion designer has also created style masterpieces for the boldest women in music. Bjork, Madonna, Rihanna, Katy Perry, Miley Cyrus, and Cardi B (just to name a few) have all hit the stage and red carpet rocking original, eyebrow-raising looks by Scott. All my girls have strong personalities. Maybe my work helps them be able to put that persona out there more and turn up the volume, Scott told Yahoo Lifestyle at an intimate beauty editor meet-up in New York City to celebrate his new collaboration with MAC Cosmetics. The mixtape-inspired collection is quite fitting for a designer whose muses belt the tunes to top Billboard hits and Grammy-nominated records. Its bursting with matte and glossy lip colors in vibrant hues of purple, red, pink, and orange, as well as cheek and eyeshadow palettes with look-at-me powders you can easily transition from day to night. And the products are outfitted in packaging that resembles old-school boomboxes, cassette tapes, and CDs. The MAC Cosmetics and Jeremy Scott collection is bolder than bold. (Photo: MAC Cosmetics) When reflecting on his younger days growing up in Kansas City, Mo., Scott revealed that it was Madonna who helped him get through high school and being persecuted for being gay in a small podunk town before Glee and gay marriage. I used to be like, Oh, wow! She has these gay dancers on Truth or Dare and she loves them and she thinks theyre cool and she celebrates them. Im going to be her friend one day and these people dont know. I put horse blinders on to deal with the persecution, he said. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. Fast-forward years later: Scott said it was an honor and blessing to have taken the pop star as his date to the Met Gala in 2015 and 2017 and count her as a friend. He added, So many women have been allies to the gay community thats an unsung story in how some gay men identify with these personalities and how empowering theyve been for my community in that way. Story continues Scott is also able to be a positive influence on the women he works with, cheering them on in return. He fondly remembers meeting Cardi B for the first time when the Bronx-born rapper admitted that she was nervous to perform at his Art Basel party. Styling her in a revealing gold sequin Moschino minidress for the affair, Scott told Cardi how proud he was of her. Already in an industry thats set up against women, and then in a genre thats already segregated against women, shes knocked out records, he said. Of course, she smashed the show. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. Scott has come a long way from being the teenager who was forced to build up an armor with his personal style and attitude to tackle skinheads chasing him through school hallways or mean girls slapping his face. And now, with an eponymous MAC makeup collection, he is providing yet another creative outlet for individuals who march by the beat of their own drum to wear what they want and do what they want. The MAC Cosmetics x Jeremy Scott collection is now available on maccosmetics.com and at MAC stores while supplies last. Read more from Yahoo Lifestyle: Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter for nonstop inspiration delivered fresh to your feed, every day. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau can't stop being the worst version of himself while touring India. During an official visit this week, Trudeau has once again dipped back into his charisma well to inspire good headlines, and global affection. Only this time, it looks like he's drowned. Every day of his trip, Trudeau opted to don grand, ceremonial outfits traditional for India. It can be presumed that he wanted to show respect and "fit in" with the people of the country. In reality, most saw it as trying to hard at best, or as cultural appropriation at worst. SEE ALSO: Everything you need to know to enjoy curling, the Winter Olympics' best obscure sport This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. Of course, this is nothing new for Trudeau. He's continually stuck his Disney Prince face into whatever photo op continues to build his brand as the good guy ally, the nerdy man of the people, and super hunk statesman. Well, the headlines that have come out of Trudeau's India visit have unraveled a bit of that perception. Press in the asian country and abroad have called out his embarrassing over-the-top dress as reeking of overcompensation. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. And so, the internet dragged him for it. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. Just chill, Justin. Just chill. Warsaw (AFP) - Latvia's central bank governor Ilmars Rimsevics, who is suspected of bribe-taking by anti-corruption authorities, claimed he was innocent in an interview with the Financial Times published Friday. The eurozone member's longtime governor, who was appointed in 2001 and also sits on the European Central Bank governing council, was detained last weekend by the Corruption Prevention Bureau (KNAB) and accused of having solicited and received a bribe of at least 100,000 euros ($125,000). Now out on bail, though barred from carrying out his duties, Rimsevics claimed that the accusations were the doing of several banks upset over his attempts to improve transparency regarding the bank accounts of non-residents in the Baltic country neighbouring Russia. "I just vehemently deny (these allegations)... I could only guess that I have been a very inconvenient public figure for several financial institutions in this country, thus making them for an extended period of time try to gather some evidence or (organise) provocations in order to remove me," he told the Financial Times. "It is a well-orchestrated action in concert among several individuals and banks who have served non-resident clients at various times... to whom I have become a burden." He believes the allegations against him are a result of his efforts to have banks undergo audits by US law firms in 2016 and 2017, which had lowered their profits. Just days after Rimsevics was detained, Latvia's financial sector got another shock, when the European Central Bank (ECB) announced it was freezing payments by the country's third largest bank, ABLV, because its finances had deteriorated in the wake of money laundering allegations from Washington. Several senior Latvian officials said there was no link between the two matters. Last week the US Department of the Treasury named ABLV "an institution of primary money laundering concern" and accused it of connections to North Korea's weapons development programme. Latvian police announced Friday they had begun probing the money laundering claims. The private sector bank's CEO Ernest Bernis for his part told reporters on Thursday that ABLV had sold a good chunk of its securities portfolio and was now ready for the payment freeze to be lifted. National Harbor (United States) (AFP) - Hardline former French MP Marion Marechal-Le Pen told American conservatives Thursday that her nation's far-right movement was "standing side by side" with the supporters and nationalist policies of President Donald Trump. "Just like you, we want our country back," the telegenic 28-year-old niece of failed presidential candidate Marine Le Pen said from the main stage of the Conservative Political Action Conference, held each year just outside Washington. Marechal-Le Pen is believed to be the first member of France's far-right National Front (FN) to address CPAC, a controversial move for a conference where US Vice President Mike Pence spoke to the crowd just minutes earlier, and where Trump himself is Friday's headliner. Marechal-Le Pen, who decided not to run in last May's French election, urged the crowd not to see her as the "terrifying" figure she said the American press makes her out to be, but as an ideological partner. "Here at CPAC, we are once again standing side by side in another battle for freedom," she said, speaking mainly in English. "I am not offended when I hear President Donald Trump say 'America first,'" she said to a loud cheer. "In fact, I want America first for the American people, I want Britain first for the British people, and I want France first for the French people!" She praised conservatives for putting their ideals at the forefront. "Let us build on what you have achieved here, so that on both sides of the Atlantic, a conservative agenda may prevail." Marechal-Le Pen made little mention of dropping out of politics, but did note that she recently launched a school of management and political science in order to "train the leaders of tomorrow." "The challenge is immense," she said. Marechal-Le Pen has insisted that her project is not partisan, and that the school will not be allied with any political party. Story continues Her hardline stance on immigration, Islam and abortion commands a loyal grassroots following, but her party has recently shut down speculation that the young scion of the Le Pen family was making a political comeback. Marechal-Le Pen also took aim at the European Union, a popular target for the far right. The EU has "imposed" its laws and regulations on her country, she said, and politically correct immigration policies were altering France's character as a millenium-old Catholic nation. "The result is the development of an Islamic counter society in France," she contended. "This is not the France that our grandparents fought for," she said, in an apparent nod to her grandfather Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of the FN. "Vive la France!" an attendee shouted out. Marion Marechal-Le Pen, the French National Front politician - REUTERS Marine Le Pen's niece has echoed Donald Trump as she called for a France first agenda and told US right-wingers: Just like you, we want our country back. Marion Marechal-Le Pen cited Mr Trumps election victory and the Brexit vote in 2016 as inspiration for France to distance itself from the European Union (EU). She used an address to the Conservative Political Action Conference on Thursday to praise the US presidents success in putting conservatism at the top of the political agenda. And she claimed the French youth is right-leaning and believers in national identity as she issued a call to arms for the populist revolution. Let me be clear here. Im not offended when I hear President Donald Trump say America first, Ms Le Pen said. In fact, I want America first for the American people, I want Britain first for the British people and I want France first for the French people." Ms Le Pen, a 28-year-old National Front politician whose aunt led the party in last years election, had faced controversy over her appearance from the US media given her hardline views. Taking to the stage, she joked away the row, saying she was less terrifying than the US newspapers had portrayed. In a 10-minute speech which saw mentions of the EU booed by the right-wing crowd, Ms Le Pen suggested she wanted to repeat in France what Mr Trump had achieved in America. Just like you, we want our country back. I came here to tell you that there is a youth ready for this fight in Europe today, she said. A youth who believes in hard work, who believe the flag means something, who want to preserve individual freedom and private property. Ms Le Pen repeatedly criticised the EU for slowly killing nation states and warned over the impact of political correctness and massive immigration in France. The last two years have shown one thing: Never underestimate the people, she said. Story continues Ms Le Pen continued:When the people are given the opportunity to take their country back, they will seize it. Through your actions and your talents, you have succeeded in putting conservatism right back to the top of the political agenda. Let us build on what you have achieved here so that both sides on the Atlantic a conservative agenda will remain. On April 20, the 19th anniversary of the Columbine shooting, high school students across the country are planning to walk out of their classes at 10 a.m. and march to demand an end to gun violence in schools. The person behind the National High School Walkout is a teenager from Connecticut: Lane Murdock. Murdock, 15, loves musical theater and poetry. The precocious teen has won a playwriting contest and regularly gives speeches at Ridgefield High School just a half-hour drive from Sandy Hook Elementary School where shes currently a sophomore. Her knack for communication will come in handy now that she finds herself in the middle of the national conversation about gun violence. On Valentines Day, Murdock was among the countless Americans horrified by the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. But when she returned home from school, she found her voice. It kind of started because we werent happy with how our nation and how our school have been dealing with the tragedy, she told Yahoo News. It started out with me personally. I went home and made the petition, which gained some good traction, and then made the Twitter account, which really blew up overnight. Murdocks petition to the U.S. Senate and president demanding action to stop gun violence was posted on change.org. She argued that politicians have been too complacent in the face of gun violence and that the voices of teenagers have not been heard. Signing the petition constitutes a pledge from the (teen) signers to walk out and let the government know that its time for a change. Lane Murdock of Ridgefield, Conn., conceived the National School Walkout after the mass shooting in Parkland, Fla. (Photo: Courtesy of Lane Murdock) The marchers will be wearing orange, which Murdock chose because hunters wear the color to avoid getting shot. Hunter orange sends the message: Dont shoot! It seemed to fit the movement well, in my opinion, she said. Two days later, as the petition and attention started to gain attention, Murdock sought out others to help with planning. Its definitely been a whirlwind. I want it to gain popularity and support because the movement is so important, but it doesnt prep you for when it actually happens, she said. Story continues What does she want her generation to do? Walk out, have sit-ins, hold hands, talk to each other and express how they feel because most high school students are not yet old enough to vote. We dont really get a say or anything like that in these issues, even though when shooters go in our schools theyre going to our classrooms and our spaces, she said. As far as the movement goes, we kind of wanted to be a way to give a voice to teenagers. Lane Murdock: seeking a voice for teenagers in the gun violence debate. (Photo: Courtesy of Lane Murdock) Since the National Walkout concept is only a week old, much more brainstorming and planning will be necessary before April 20. Murdock says more information will become available as the day approaches. Students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, where 17 people were murdered on Feb. 14, have been galvanized to work for political change. They held a rally for gun control at the Broward County federal courthouse in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and are similarly planning the March for Our Lives on March 24 in Washington calling on lawmakers to enact stricter gun laws. Murdock said members of her generation variously called Generation Z and the Homeland Generation differ from millennials because they grew up as digital natives, whereas the millennials experienced a shift. Kids like me can start a movement using a Chromebook computer theyve had since sixth grade, she said. Its easy to get into contact with people who have similar ideas or similar hopes. Though her generation is young and inexperienced, she said, they are brave, resilient and care about one another. She asked older people to listen and have patience as her generation enters the public eye and the national conversation many for the first time. She said she isnt accepting donations or working with any corporations, and that this movement is the definition of grassroots. We are motivated, passionate people. Were just doing it differently than a lot of other generations had done it before, she said. Murdock was born in her mothers home state of Texas, and moved to Ridgefield in 2006, when she was 4. She thinks that her writing experience has helped her prepare to speak to people nationally. But she was quick to note the importance of representation. She characterized the walkout as nonpolitical and anti-violence, and wants to elevate the voices of many teens throughout the U.S. not just hers. I think its really important that people know were a student-run movement. I want to make sure that during the course of this movement, Im not pushing my own ideology, but the ideology of the students nationally, she said. Thats why were kind of working and talking to students right now to see what they want to happen and what kind of change they want, because I dont want this to be the Lane movement, I want it to be a student movement. As of Friday, the petition has more than 166,000 signatures. Read more from Yahoo News: Police in London are investigating a letter sent to a royal palace, reportedly addressed to Meghan Markle and Prince Harry, containing a threatening white powder. The letter caused a full security scare, but an analysis of the substance found it to be harmless. The letter was sent to the couple on Feb. 12, according to Londons Evening Standard newspaper, which said the powder was purported to be anthrax, used as a weapon by bioterrorists. In a statement, the Metropolitan Police confirmed a suspicious package had been delivered to St James Palace on Feb. 12, but did not name the intended recipient: Police are investigating after a package containing a substance was delivered to St James Palace on Monday, 12 February. The substance was tested and confirmed as non suspicious. Officers are also investigating an allegation of malicious communications which relates to the same package. St James Palace contains the homes of Prince Charles and his wife, Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall, as well as the Queens daughter, Princess Anne, and Princess Alexandra, the Queens cousin. Earlier reports suggested that the letter had been sent to Kensington Palace, the home of Kate Middleton and Prince William. A similar incident occurred in the U.S. the same week, when Donald Trump Jr.s wife, Vanessa, opened an envelope that contained white powder, felt nauseous and was taken to New York City hospital as a precaution. A police department spokesman says a preliminary test of the powder indicated it wasnt dangerous. A spokesperson for the royal family told TIME that the palace would not be commenting on the story. People grieve in front of crosses and Stars of David placed in front of the fence of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School to commemorate the victims of the mass shooting, in Parkland, Florida, U.S., Feb. 21, 2018 (Photo: Carlos Garcia Rawlins / Reuters) When President Donald Trump held a listening session with survivors of gun violence, their family members and the parents of murdered students on Wednesday, much of the discussion focused on ways to enhance school security. The president recommended arming teachers, while one parent suggested that undercover police officers pose as teachers and school staff. Several parents called for more security officers at schools. Theres scant evidence that more cops and security guards on campus actually stop school shootings. Theres an abundance of evidence suggesting that more school security means more vulnerable students getting funneled at an early age into the criminal justice system. Black children are already more likely to get arrested at school. In 2012, black children represented only 16 percent of school-aged children, but 31 percent of those arrested. And when more cops are in school, these arrests are more likely to take place, even for minor misbehaviors. Its a phenomenon that advocates call the school-to-prison pipeline. The more we add security or police forces and so on to schools, the more likely it is the students who are already at risk of being seen as potential trouble makers get swept up into the justice system or suspended and pushed out of schools, said Aaron Kupchik, a professor at the University of Delaware, who studies this issue. The risks are even higher for students who are already more vulnerable. There have been scattered instances in which school security has helped foil an armed intruder. And some studies have found clear benefits of having cops in schools, as these schools are more likely to have emergency crisis plans in place and receive regular safety inspections. But these benefits come at a steep price one that could disproportionately impact black and brown students who are already more likely to face overly harsh discipline. One study found that schools with police are more likely to refer students to outside law enforcement for a range of behaviors including offenses that are more minor, like vandalism. Another study found that schools with cops had more school arrests for minor misbehaviors like disorderly conduct. Story continues And there is also the possibility of police brutality. A HuffPost investigation previously found schools with cops had officers that used Tasers over 80 times on children between 2011 and 2016. The instinct to increase school security after shootings makes sense University of Florida professor Jason Nance previously told HuffPost. Adding measures of security is a tangible action that school authorities can do to demonstrate to a worried constituency that they are trying to make schools safer. However, so far we dont have any hard evidence that more police officers in schools make schools safer, said Nance. Judith Browne Dianis is the executive director of The Advancement Project, a civil rights group that works to curb the school-to-prison pipeline. She said enhanced security measures at schools can make buildings look more like war zones and prisons than nurturing environments. Were worried this continues to be the knee-jerk reaction that politicians have after a school shooting - to not deal with the gun violence issue but instead to throw more money at law enforcement giving parents the perception of safety, instead of getting at the root cause of the violence, Dianis said. Also on HuffPost Protesters lie on the ground during a demonstration supporting gun control. Demonstrators chant during Monday's protest. Students and supporters hold signs as they protest outside the White House. Students protest against gun violence. Demonstrators chant outside the White House. Students and supporters gather on Pennsylvania Avenue. Love HuffPost? Become a founding member of HuffPost Plus today. This article originally appeared on HuffPost. Rabat (AFP) - Moroccan police on Friday arrested a newspaper publisher and prominent journalist, known for editorials critical of authorities in the North African country, a colleague said. Taoufiq Bouachrine, 49, was arrested during a police raid on his newspaper, Akhbar al-Yaoum, in Casablanca, Mounir Abou Al Maali told AFP. He said around 20 policemen in civilian clothes entered the offices of the newspaper and searched it. "They took pictures and confiscated the key," to the office, he said. Abou Al Maali said it was not immediately clear why Bouachrine was arrested. The Arabic-language newspaper also said on its website that Bouachrine had been arrested, but it was also unable to say why. It was not Bouachrine's first run with the authorities. In 2009, Bouachrine and Akhbar al-Yaoum cartoonist Khalid Gueddar were each given a four-year suspended jail sentence following two separate trials over a cartoon about a wedding which was deemed offensive to Morocco's royal family. The pair were also ordered to pay heavy fines and damages, while the paper was shut down. Bouachrine has also faced lawsuits from government ministers who have accused him of defamation. And in June 2010, Bouachrine was sentenced to six months for fraud relating to a property deal. Media watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF) ranked Morocco 133rd out of 180 countries in its World Press Freedom Index last year. Joseph Trevithick Security, The USS Jimmy Carter is one of a kind. The Navy Has One Nuclear Spy Submarine So Secret We Know Almost Nothing About It The unit makes no mention of intelligence gathering. But while the name implies a solely experimental function, the sailing branch routinely uses these types of monikers for special or elite groups. The near legendary terrorist-hunting SEAL Team Six is officially called the Naval Special Warfare Development Group. The service describes the spy ships it runs together with the U.S. Air Force as missile range instrumentation ships. The squadron responsible for flying around the president and his staff is now simply called Marine Helicopter Squadron One, but still uses the acronym HMX-1a nod to its experimental origins. On January 20, 2013, the Seawolf-class attack submarine USS Jimmy Carter left her home port in Bangor, Washington. Less than two months later, the submarine appeared at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii for repairs. It was all quite mysterious. During her time at sea, we dont know where Jimmy Carter was or what her crew of nearly 150 were precisely doing. The Seawolf class is one of the most secretive weapons in Americas arsenal, and information about the Navys Silent Service is difficult to discover. . . by design. (This first appeared in 2016.) We know Jimmy Carter was on some kind of mission, which the ships official annual history vaguely referred to as Mission 7. Performed under a wide range of adverse and extremely stressful conditions without external support, this deployment continued USS Jimmy Carters tradition of excellence in pursuit of vital national security goals, the history stated. Recommended: Why North Korea Is Destined to Test More ICBMs and Nuclear Weapons Recommended: 5 Most Powerful Aircraft Carriers, Subs, Bombers and Fighter Aircraft Ever Recommended: North Korea Has 200,000 Soldiers in Its Special Forces In this vessels official chronology, the mission warrants as much mention as a picnic in July and the crews Halloween party three months later. But Mission 7 was enough to earn the sailors a Presidential Unit Citation, which rewards extraordinary heroism in action against an armed enemy, according to an official Navy description. Story continues As the last of the Seawolf-class attack submarines, Jimmy Carter is unique. During her construction, the Pentagon added a special one-hundred-foot-long, 2,500-ton module called the Multi-Mission Platform. By the sailing branchs own admission, this space can accommodate undersea drones, SEALs and much more. More importantly, the hourglass-shaped section might allow specially trained teams to find and tap undersea communications lines and plant listening devices on the ocean floor. Its more than likely that the submarine is one of the Pentagons most stealthy spies. Another clue is the Presidential Unit Citation for Mission 7. For the sailing branch, this is akin to giving the boat itself a Navy Cross, the services second highest award. The criteria makes it clear that the mission must have been extremely difficult and hazardous. But the Secretary of the Navys citation for the subs 2013 performance is equally obtuse. Along with sailors from the even more obscure Detachment Undersea Research and Development, Jimmy Carter successfully completed extremely demanding and arduous independent submarine operations of vital importance to the national security of the United States, is how the memo described the operation. Both units overcame numerous obstacles to safely execute these demanding and complex tasks without incident. Two pictures attached to the report show the ships captain, Cmdr. Brian Elkowitz, and other officers holding the framed citation and associated pennant. In both cases, Navy censors blacked out one individuals face, ostensibly for privacy reasons. War Is Boring obtained these documents through the Freedom of Information Act. Every year, all ships, subs, squadrons of aircraft and commands on land are required to turn a historical report over to the Naval History and Heritage Command in Washington, D.C. But theres no requirement that the narrative go into any great or specific detail. And Jimmy Carters history is more a record of the secrecy surrounding the ships than her actual activities. While already guarded about submarines in general, the Navy is especially tight-lipped about the Seawolf-class boats. Originally intended to be the most advanced undersea attackers, Washington slashed the program after the Cold War and the threat of equally high-tech Soviet submarines appeared to evaporate. Instead of a planned fleet of nearly 30 ships, the Pentagon bought just three for more than $3 billion each. At more than 350 feet long and with a submerged displacement of more than 9,100 tons, the Seawolf class is the most expensive attack submarine ever built and the second most expensive undersea vessel of any type. The sailing branch eventually grouped together the USS Seawolf, Connecticut and Jimmy Carter as the core of Submarine Development Squadron Five. The units spartan Web site states it is responsible for testing new undersea listening gear and remote-controlled submersibles, either tethered to a larger sub or able to operate on their own. The group is also in charge developing new tactics for fighting in the Arctic, a region where submarines can easily hide from their opponents. Despite their current mission, each ship still has eight torpedo tubes, which can also fire Harpoon anti-ship and Tomahawk cruise missiles. The unit makes no mention of intelligence gathering. But while the name implies a solely experimental function, the sailing branch routinely uses these types of monikers for special or elite groups. The near legendary terrorist-hunting SEAL Team Six is officially called the Naval Special Warfare Development Group. The service describes the spy ships it runs together with the U.S. Air Force as missile range instrumentation ships. The squadron responsible for flying around the president and his staff is now simply called Marine Helicopter Squadron One, but still uses the acronym HMX-1a nod to its experimental origins. Further lending credibility to Jimmy Carters real spying mission, the Navy retired the equally shadowy USS Parche just four months before putting the new submarine into action. The sailing branch says Parche is the most decorated ship ever, with nine Presidential Unit Citations among other awards. Completed in 1974 as a Sturgeon-class attack sub, the Pentagon specifically upgraded the Parche to break into Soviet communications lines. Between 1978 and 1979, the submarine reportedly tapped into cables in the Sea of Okhotsk north of Japan as part of a mission dubbed Operation Ivy Bells. The Navy, with strong input from the NSA, was first sending Parche to Okhotsk to plant a second recording pod. . . to greatly increase capacity at the tap site, Sherry Sontag and Christopher Drew wrote in Blind Mans Bluff: The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage. She was being sent, in part, to prove herself before anyone dared to send her to that other, far more dangerous sea. Success at Okhotsk paved the way for missions in the far more crowdedand therefore dangerousBarents Sea. To hide from Moscows sub-hunters, Parche hid under the cover of the Arctic ice as she sneaked into congested shipping lanes. Nearly a decade later, the Navy sent Parche off for another overhaul. In 1991, the sailing branch sent the newly refurbished sub to join Submarine Development Squadron Five. Though their book was published before the submarine was finished, Sontag and Drew explained that Jimmy Carters expanded mid-section was to make room for the same gear Parche had carried into Soviet waters. No doubt the Navy and its partners at the NSA have made improvements since then. While General Dynamics Electric Boat was still putting the submarine together in 2001, NSA director Lt. Gen. Michael Hayden laughed off claims about breaking into undersea cables in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. Im not going to sit here and dissuade you from your views, Hayden said, before refusing to comment on Jimmy Carters mission. Two years later, the Journal again reported that the submarines role suggested an undersea spook, citing people knowledgeable about it. After more than a decade of apparently very active service, little else has slipped out about the ship or her operations. We could easily have to wait another decade or more for there to be any real confirmationlikely from a book like Sontag and Drews rather than the Navyabout Jimmy Carters unique history and details about Mission 7. Joseph Trevithick is a reporter for War is Boring, where this article first appeared. Read full article By Ola Lanre DAPCHI, Nigeria (Reuters) - Parents of schoolgirls newly abducted in northeastern Nigeria plan to join the Bring Back Our Girls movement that gained global prominence in a bid to win freedom for their girls, a community leader said on Friday. Islamist militant group Boko Haram is suspected to have kidnapped scores of girls on Monday from a school in Dapchi village, Yobe state. Most are thought to be teenagers. It would be the largest mass abduction since Boko Haram took more than 270 schoolgirls from the northeastern town of Chibok in 2014, sparking an online campaign that went viral and spurring several governments into action to try and find them. Many of those girls remain in captivity, though some have escaped or been ransomed. A roll-call at the school in Dapchi on Tuesday showed 91 students were absent, though estimates of the number of missing range from around 50 to more than 100. Parents said they have set up a committee in the village, which is around 100 kilometers (62 miles) from state capital Damaturu. "We have compiled 105 names of missing girls which we intend to give to the Bring Back Our Girls people in (the capital) Abuja," said committee chair Bashir Alhaji Manzu, whose teenage daughter, Fatima Bashir, is missing. The group would present its case to President Muhammadu Buhari, he said, adding that the group was angry with the government's response to the kidnapping. Boko Haram wants to create a state adhering to a strict interpretation of Islamic law. Its name roughly translates as "Western education is forbidden" in the Hausa language widely spoken in northeast Nigeria. The group has killed more than 20,000 people and put over 2 million to flight since its insurgency began in 2009. On Friday, Buhari said he was sending more troops and reconnaissance aircraft to look for them. "This is a national disaster," he said. "We are sorry that this could have happened and share your pain." Earlier this week Buhari sent security forces and a ministerial team to the area. "Some ministers came but they didn't even speak with any parent, principal or teachers of the school," he said. In a further sign of community anger, villagers confronted a convoy carrying Yobe state governor on Thursday when he said 76 girls reported to have been rescued were in fact still missing. Amina Usman, a 15-year-old student, was among the pupils who escaped the attack on Government Girls Technical College. She said she was washing when she heard gun fire and saw what appeared to be soldiers in vehicles. She fled when she realized that they were attackers and ran into the bush, later meeting a teacher and other escapees. "We met other girls and the teacher counted all of us. We were 65 girls in all .... I thought I will never see my parents or family again," she said, adding that she was too scared to return to the school. Kachalla Bukar, whose 14-year-old daughter was among those missing, said he had been told the insurgents fooled some students into thinking they had come to offer protection. "When we went to school on Tuesday she was not among girls that have been found. Her colleagues ... gave us our daughter's school box with her personal belonging .... That was when we realised our daughter is actually missing," he said. (Additional reporting by Felix Onuah in Abuja and Stephanie Ulmer-Nebehay in Geneva; Writing by Alexis Akwagyiram and Chijioke Ohuocha; Editing by Matthew Mpoke Bigg) Vice President Mike Pence issued an impassioned condemnation of North Korea at the Conservative Political Action Conference Thursday in response to criticism of his choice to ignore the North Korean Olympic delegation and sit during the countrys national anthem. The United States of America doesnt stand with murderous dictatorships, we stand up to murderous dictatorships, Pence told the crowd at CPAC. We will keep standing strong until North Korea stops threatening our country, our allies or until they abandon their nuclear and ballistic missiles once and for all. Vice President Mike Pence speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Maryland, February 24, 2018. Pence attracted media spotlight as the head of the U.S. delegation to the Olympics in Pyeongchang where he sat only a few feet away from the sister of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un during the opening ceremonies but did not acknowledge her. The U.S. has kept a hardline against the countrys aggressive nuclear weapons programs even as key U.S. ally South Korea has pursued a thawing relations. North and South Korean athletes marched under the same flag at this years Olympics for the first time since 2006. Pences CPAC address recounted what he described as a laundry list of accomplishments from the Trump administrations first year in office including tax reform, a changed atmosphere for law enforcement and regulatory rollback, among other things. 2017 was the most consequential year in the history of the conservative movement, he said. Pences address followed a speech from National Rifle Association Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre where the pro-gun advocate came out swinging in his first public remarks since a school shooting in Florida killed 17 people last week. For his part, Pence promised action from the White House to protect students and schools in the form of American solutions to confront and end this evil in our time. North Korea condemned Thursday an alleged U.S. plan to deploy a dozen advanced drones capable of conducting deadly precision strikes across the border at a time of relative calm on the Korean Peninsula. On Tuesday, South Korean newspaper Chosun Ilbo claimed the U.S. had scheduled the transfer of 12 MQ-1C Gray Eagle unmanned combat aerial vehicles to an air base in Gunsan, North Jeolla province in March and April. The report said the drones, which were upgraded versions of the MQ-1 Predator, would be used in military exercises that were to take place following the end of the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympics and Paralympics. The article said the weapons could be used to strike not only North Korean sites designated as high-priority targets, but individuals as well. Related: Can North Korea get South to join dispute with Japan over two islands in Asia? Trending: Did Trump Fail to Put Pakistan on the Terror Finance Watch List? "They openly claim that the drones equipped with precision-guided bombs and missiles target the supreme leadership of the DPRK and its major objects in contingency," North Korea's official Korean Central News Agency wrote Thursday, referring to the country by an acronym for its official title: the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. "The U.S. persistent introduction of new war equipment is aimed to spoil the atmosphere for improvement of the north-south relations and extremely aggravate the situation on the Korean peninsula and thus ignite a war of aggression on this land," it added. grayeagledrone2 U.S. Army Acquisition Support Center Don't miss: Missouri Governor Eric Greitens Charged In Blackmail Scheme Against Ex-Mistress Story continues Even as recent diplomatic breakthroughs allowed North Korean and South Korean athletes performed together at this year's Winter Olympic Games, tensions continued to play out as the U.S. approached the dialogue with suspicion. Before entering into talks, the U.S. has called on North Korea to first abandon the nuclear and ballistic missile program that has resulted in heavy international sanctions, but North Korean supreme leader Kim Jong Un has vowed to continue developing such weapons he argued would shield him from a potential U.S. invasion. The U.S. has neglected to intervene without such reassurances and North Korea has urged its southern neighbor to keep the U.S. out of inter-Korean peace talks. The Pentagon has, however, agreed to halt military exercises throughout the duration of the Olympic Games, which served as the basis on which the two Koreas began talking last month. Such drills are considered provocations by North Korea, which has decried South Korea's alliance with the U.S. since the two were pitted against one another during a three-year war in the 1950s that has not technically ended. While the recent thaw in relations surrounding the Olympic Games followed many failed attempts to reconcile the rivals in the past, historic steps have already been taken. Most popular: California Man Arrested After Threatening School Shooting Might Have Been Part of Conspiracy, Prosecutors Say RTX4WBIM KCNA/REUTERS Kim Jong Un's sister, Kim Yo Jong, became the first member of ruling family to visit South Korea when she joined the official delegation to Pyeongchang. During at least one event, she sat just feet away from Vice President Mike Pence, who has since accused her and her country of snubbing him for potential talks. North Korea had previously announced it would not meet with U.S. officials during the Olympic Games. North Korea has previously claimed it foiled U.S. and South Korean assassination plots on Kim Jong Un's life. In June, North Korea claimed to have captured "a heinous group of terrorists" plotting to attack the country's government headquarters with chemical and biological weapons. South Korea has also said its planned "frankenmissile" was capable of taking both North Korea's military and political leadership. This article was first written by Newsweek More from Newsweek Sanction aim to cut off sources of revenue for nuclear program, according to excerpts of plan released by White House Donald Trump will announce the sanctions in his CPAC speech. Photograph: Jim Bourg/Reuters Donald Trump announced on Friday a new package of sanctions against North Korea aimed at cutting off the smuggling routes the regime is using to evade a UN embargo and fund its nuclear weapons programme. Today I am announcing that we are launching the largest-ever set of new sanctions on the North Korean regime, Trump according to excerpts of a speech released by the White House ahead his address to a conservative conference. He said the treasury department will soon be taking action to further cut off sources of revenue and fuel that North Korea uses to fund its nuclear program and sustain its military. That new measures will target 56 vessels, shipping and trading companies that the US say have been helping North Korea evade international sanctions. The Trump administration scored its greatest diplomatic victory so far in September by persuading the UN security council to impose its strongest sanctions to date on the Pyongyang regime in response to its sixth nuclear test and a series of long range missile tests. Those sanctions included a cap on North Korean oil imports. However, since then, western intelligence sources have reported a string of ship-to-ship transfers of fuel in international waters by sanctions-busting ships. In December, it was reported that Russian ships were involved in the oil smuggling. The new US measures to be announced today are not expected to include Russian ships or companies, potentially raising new questions on the administrations soft approach to Moscow. NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. The National Rifle Association usually maintains a large presence at the Conservative Political Action Conference, an annual political confab that draws thousands of conservative activists from across the country. Some speculated, though, that the nations most powerful gun lobby would lower its visibility at this years CPAC, which began Thursday, given that a gunman armed with an assault-style rifle murdered 17 people last week at a high school in Parkland, Florida. Whenever a mass shooting occurs, for example, the NRA goes quiet. And no officials from the gun lobby appeared on a publicly released schedule of CPAC speakers online a curious omission for an organization that pays for top billing at the gathering. But after NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch was jeered by thousands of people over gun control at a CNN-sponsored town hall on Wednesday in Florida, she and the top NRA official not only appeared at CPAC Thursday, but they went on the attack blasting Democrats, the media, and the FBI over its failure to act on tips that may have stopped the shooter in Parkland. Each and every member of the National Rifle Association mourns the loss of the innocent, NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre said in a speech that was carried live by all three major cable news channels. But he quickly added that opportunists wasted not one second to exploit tragedy for political gain. LaPierre warned that growing calls from students for stricter gun laws would lead to a European-style socialist wave that would strip law-abiding citizens of their firearms. Referring to politicians who back stricter gun laws, he said, They hide behind labels like Democrat, left-wing, and progressive to make their socialist agenda more palatable, and that is terrifying. The shameful politicization of tragedy its a classic strategy, right out of the playbook of a poisonous movement, he said. Those pushing for more gun control in the wake of the Parkland massacre, he said, want to sweep right under the carpet the failure of school security, the failure of family, the failure of Americas mental health system, and even the unbelievable failure of the FBI. Story continues He also took a clear swipe at the FBI over the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, saying, What is hard to understand is why no one at the FBI stood up and called B.S. on its rogue leadership. I mean, really, where was the systemic resistance? Loesch took aim at a different target in her speech. Many in legacy media love mass shootings, Loesch claimed to a standing ovation. Im not saying you love the tragedy, but you love the ratings. Crying white mothers are ratings gold. Her comments echoed a video that NRA-TV released Wednesday, which slammed the mainstream media for being the casting call for the next mass shooting. In a sign of the NRAs status among conservatives, the group received two top speaking slots LaPierre and Loesch addressed attendees immediately prior to Vice President Mike Pence. The gun lobbys outsized influence also was evident in the halls of Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center, the massive complex that has hosted CPAC in recent years and where conservative stars like Ben Shapiro and Sebastian Gorka mix and mingle with selfie-seeking students and other activists. The NRA occupies the largest space among exhibitors at the event. It even offers a range simulator where attendees can practice shooting firearms. But while the NRA officials resisted the prospect of additional laws regulating firearms, congressional Republicans and President Donald Trump were entertaining other ideas a sign that political pressure for bigger changes is building in the wake of the Parkland shooting. Trump on Thursday met with state and local officials at the White House to discuss solutions to address gun violence. The president reiterated his support for raising the age when Americans can buy assault weapons such as the AR-15. The 19-year-old charged in the Parkland shooting was able to purchase an AR-15 rifle in Florida. It should all be at 21, Trump said at an event at the White House. And the NRA will back it. Theyre very close to me. Im close to them. The NRA wants to do the right thing, Trump claimed. Ive spoken to them often in the last two days. Its not a battle I think the NRA wants to do the right thing. Raising the minimum age for purchasing assault weapons could gain momentum in Congress. Republican Sens. Marco Rubio of Florida and Pat Roberts of Kansas have expressed interest in the proposal this week. Certainly nobody under 21 should have an AR-15, Roberts said Thursday. Some CPAC attendees who support gun rights agreed. I think raising the age is not a bad thing, its a good thing, Marie Zare, a New York commercial real estate broker, said. Zare, who recently obtained a gun permit for the first time, said she would also support arming some teachers in schools, another of Trumps proposals. We have, what, 340 million guns in this country? Zare said. Youre not getting rid of them. Theyre not going away. Love HuffPost? Become a founding member of HuffPost Plus today. This article originally appeared on HuffPost. By Ali Sawafta and Nidal al-Mughrabi RAMALLAH, West Bank/GAZA (Reuters) - Palestinians reacted on Friday with anger to reports that the United States will move its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem within months, saying this could destroy the prospect of a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Clashes erupted in Gaza and the occupied West Bank earlier on Friday in a weekly protest against U.S. President Donald Trump's stance on Jerusalem, which has also angered Arab political and religious leaders across the region and dismayed European allies. Palestinians claim East Jerusalem -- seized by Israel in 1967 and later annexed -- as the capital of a future state. Saeb Erekat, the Palestinian's chief negotiator in peace talks that have been frozen since 2014, said the U.S. move showed a "determination to violate international law, destroy the two-state solution and provoke the feelings of the Palestinian people as well as of all Arabs, Muslims and Christians around the globe". Erekat, who is also secretary-general of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, said: "Trump and his team have disqualified the U.S. from being part of the solution between Israelis and Palestinians; rather, the world now sees that they are part of the problem." Trump announced in December that the United States would recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital, setting in motion the embassy move and contravening decades of policy by the international community. A U.S. official told Reuters on Friday that the United States was expected to open its embassy to Israel in Jerusalem in May. This would be shortly after Israel's 70th anniversary. "This is an unacceptable step. Any unilateral move will not give legitimacy to anyone and will be an obstacle to any effort to create peace in the region," said Nabil Abu Rdainah, a spokesman for the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas. Abbas has rejected U.S.-led Middle East peace efforts as "impossible" since Washington's decision. Abu Rdainah said the only way to achieve peace, security and stability was Abbas's proposal -- outlined in an address to the United Nations Security Council in New York on Tuesday -- that an international conference should be held to kick-start the peace process, including a "multilateral mechanism" to oversee it. Abbas is still in the United States after undergoing medical checks in Baltimore on Thursday but will leave on Saturday, Abu Rdaineh said. In Gaza, a Hamas official, Sami Abu Zuhri, said: "Moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem is a declaration of war against the Arab and Muslim nation, and the U.S administration must reconsider its move." Twenty five Palestinians were wounded by Israeli army gunfire during clashes along the fence with Israel in Gaza on Friday, a Gaza health ministry spokesman. Protesters threw stones at the Israeli troops. Palestinian health officials said at least 20 Palestinians, most of them in Gaza, have been killed in protests against Trump's decision since the Dec. 6 announcement. (Reporting by Ali Sawafta and Nidal al-Mughrabi, Writing by Stephen Farrell, Editing by Angus MacSwan) President Donald Trump has spoken to and met with several survivors and family members of victims of last weeks school shooting in Parkland, Florida. Not all of them were happy to hear from him. Samantha Fuentes, a senior at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School where a former student killed 17 people after opening fire on the campus was at the hospital when the president called her. Fuentes, who was shot twice, told The New York Times that the president didnt make me feel better in the slightest. (Photo: MANDEL NGAN via Getty Images) He said he heard that I was a big fan of his, and then he said, Im a big fan of yours too. Im pretty sure he made that up, she told the Times. Talking to the president, Ive never been so unimpressed by a person in my life. In addition to speaking to victims by phone, the president met with Parkland families as well as other victims of gun violence at the White House on Wednesday. He received public backlash after a photo from the listening session showed him holding a notecard with a reminder to tell attendees, I hear you. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. Trump organized the listening session after declining to attend a CNN-hosted town hall event with survivors and parents a decision that some Parkland students called cowardly. The fact that [Trump] has organized [the listening session] just proves that hes scared of us and that he doesnt want to have to face us, Emma Gonzalez told CNN. If Donald Trump wants to listen to us, he should have taken the first invitation, Alex Wind said. We are not going to come to him. He is going to need to come to us. Florida Sens. Marco Rubio (R) and Bill Nelson (D), as well as NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch, attended the CNN event. Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) skipped it. The town hall was full of passion and outrage, much of it directed at politicians for what families saw as inaction on gun control. Fred Guttenberg, whose daughter Jaime was killed in the Parkland attack, told Rubio that, your comments and the comments of the President were pathetically weak. Story continues Parkland survivors were also quick to criticize Trumps defense of the National Rifle Association in the wake of the shooting. After the president tweeted that NRA leaders are great people and patriots, student Cameron Kasky said it was the WORST POSSIBLE THING TO SAY. Would American patriots try to buy our elections and our childrens lives by lobbying for lax gun laws even after massacres?, said another student, David Hogg. Love HuffPost? Become a founding member of HuffPost Plus today. This article originally appeared on HuffPost. Photo credit: Getty From Esquire (Permanent Musical Accompaniment To This Post) Being our semi-regular weekly survey of whats goin down in the several states where, as we know, the real work of governmentin gets done and where youre searching for the very souls whom already have been sold. The predominant issue out in several states right now involves the incredible campaign of the Republicans in Pennsylvania to maintain the ludicrously gerrymandered map they produced in their state legislature. (In the last election, the Democratic candidates piled up more votes, but the Republicans won 13 of the 18 legislative seats. This is the very living definition of a partisan gerrymander.) The states supreme court threw out the original map and gave the Republican legislature a chance to create a more equitable one. The Republicans produced another dead fish and the court threw that one out, too, and then drew up their own. That sent the Republicans up the wall. At the present moment, there is a serious movement to impeach the justices of the Supreme Court who have proven so inconvenient. Photo credit: AP This is a position adopted by no less than United States Senator Pat Toomey. This is somewhat similar to the situation in Iowa in 2009, when a majority of that states supreme court ruled in favor of marriage equality only to have three of the justices fall victim to a well-financed recall campaign. (Have I mentioned recently what a terrible idea an elected judiciary is?) The same arguments are being made in Pennsylvania that were made in Iowaimperial judiciary yadda-yadda. And, as we learn from Mother Jones, the Republicans also have thrown a last-minute Hail Mary in the general direction of the Nine Wise Souls in Washington, D.C. This is the Republicans second attempt to draw the U.S. Supreme Court into the case and avoid a map that is more friendly to Democrats. The two Republican leaders previously appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court matter last month, before the courts replacement map was implemented, but Justice Samuel Alito, who oversees appeals from states in the Third Circuit, denied their request. This time, they are returning with the new map in place and essentially the same arguments. Election law experts are skeptical that the Supreme Court will decide to take up the case. Story continues As with all things these days, the specter of an electoral cataclysm next November hangs over this desperate attempt by the Republicans to maintain the control that they have gathered to themselves since the 2010 census, and to ensure the survival of the gains they have made in their many-pronged assaults on the franchise. The original map was a product of that success. The new map gives the Democrats a legitimate shot at picking up four congressional seats. Thats what really has thrown this into DefCon 1. Photo credit: Getty Speaking of Iowa, theres some shenanigans going on with Governor Kim Reynolds and that states Medicaid program. In 2016, Reynolds embarked on an experimental attempt to privatize Medicaid in Iowa. This did not go at all well. From The Des Moines Register: Private insurance companies took over Iowa's Medicaid program in 2016. Since then, health care providers and Medicaid recipients have filed complaints about reduced services and delayed reimbursements. Representatives for the companies, which have dwindled from three to two in recent months, defend their work. The director of DHS also defends the new system but says he's working on addressing problems. Reynolds called a closed-door meeting with Medicaid providers and declined to invite any legislators. Neither did this go at all well. Again, from the Register: Democratic legislators recently asked if the public, including lawmakers or their representatives, could attend the informal groups meetings. Randol said no, which upset the legislators. This meeting should be open to the public, because problems with Medicaid affect all Iowa taxpayers, more than 600,000 Medicaid members and healthcare providers across the state, the legislators said in a prepared statement Wednesday. Hundreds of hospitals, nursing homes and other Iowa healthcare providers face financial jeopardy because of Medicaid privatization. This issue affects Iowans in every county. If theres going to be a bipartisan solution to this problem, more - not fewer - Iowans should be at the table for the discussion. The man overseeing the Iowa Medicaid experiment used to do the same kind of work for Sam Brownback in Kansas, so obviously, this was a fine hire. One more time, from the Register: Sen. Joe Bolkcom, who is a leading critic of Iowa's shift to private Medicaid management, said the state needs an administrator with experience, but not one with a Kansas track record. "We're vying with Kansas to have the worst Medicaid privatization in the country," said Bolkcom, D-Iowa City. "...Kansas has been an absolute disaster." Bolkcom noted the cascade of complaints about service cuts in Kansas' privatized Medicaid program, and a federal finding last January that Kansas' program was "substantively out of compliance" with laws and regulations. Foxhoven said in an interview Friday afternoon he had expected critics to comment on the fact that Randol was involved in Kansas' privately run Medicaid program. Good call. We move along to West Virginia where, on Thursday, all of the states public schools were closed because their teachers had walked off the job. The issues are fair pay and decent benefits. From CNN: The work stoppage comes after Gov. Jim Justice signed legislation late Wednesday night granting teachers a 2% pay increase starting in July, followed by 1% pay increases over the next two years. "We need to keep our kids and teachers in the classroom," Justice said in a statement after signing the pay raise bill. "We certainly recognize our teachers are underpaid and this is a step in the right direction to addressing their pay issue." But the bill did not address further concerns of teachers, including issues with the teachers' public employees insurance program, the rising costs of healthcare, and a tax on payroll deduction options, according to Campbell. The pay raise, which amounts to 4% over the next few years, is a reduction from an earlier version of the bill that proposed a 5% total increase in wages, Campbell said, also remarking that teachers in surrounding states make anywhere from $5,000 to $20,000 more than teachers in West Virginia. I certainly think that the priority should be in arming these teachers rather than making sure their insurance is in order in case of firefights. The relentless determination to other public education has entered a new, and very strange, phase. Photo credit: Getty And we conclude, as is our custom, in the great state of Oklahoma, where Blog Official Gentleman Farmer Friedman of the Plains brings us a tale of how that state has struck upon a solution to all that states problems. From the Tulsa World: The bill says that if funds are available, a poster or framed image of the national motto, In God We Trust, the U.S. flag and the Oklahoma flag shall be placed in each classroom, library and in any public building or facility maintained or operated by state funds. An amendment making it nonmandatory failed to secure approval. The measure said the images may be donated or paid for through contributions. The effective date of the measure is Nov. 1. A similar measure, Senate Bill 1378, by Sen. Nathan Dahm, R-Broken Arrow, also passed. The measure also requires the display of the Bill of Rights, U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence, pending available funding. (Here in the shebeen, we have met brother Dahm before, Last June, he tried to get all the wildlife in Oklahoma declared to be the property of Almighty God. I still dont know whether he checked with God to see if the Almighty really wanted to own that many lizards.) I predict that the Constitution falls off the wall within three days of being put up. This is your democracy, America. Cherish it. You Might Also Like The Philippine government summoned the US ambassador over an American intelligence report that listed President Rodrigo Duterte and his deadly war on drugs as a "regional threat", Manila said Friday. US envoy Sung Kim met Duterte's chief aide on Thursday to discuss the US "Worldwide Threat Assessment" released last week, the two nations said. Under a section headed "regional threats", the report listed Cambodian leader Hun Sen's crackdown on dissent, Duterte's war on crime and corruption as well as the flight of the Rohingya minority from Myanmar to Bangladesh. Duterte's spokesman Harry Roque said in a statement that Executive Secretary Salvador Medialdea summoned Kim over the report, which has drawn sharp criticism from the president's camp. "Duterte is no autocrat or has autocratic tendencies. He adheres to the rule of law and remains loyal to the constitution," Roque said this week in response to the report. Duterte was elected in 2016 in part on a vow to kill tens of thousands of criminals in a bid to rid the country of narcotics. The International Criminal Court this month launched a preliminary examination into allegations of thousands of extrajudicial killings committed during the president's narcotics crackdown. A US embassy statement said its ambassador met Medialdea to explain the nature of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence report, which the statement said was "based on widely available information". "Their discussion focused on the references to the Philippines in the report, including clarifying that the information about the Philippines had been previously reported by media sources," the embassy said. "The United States will continue to collaborate with the government of the Philippines," it added. Ties between Washington and its former colony had suffered under previous US president Barack Obama following his criticism of Manila's drug war, with the fiery Duterte calling him a "son of a whore". The two governments say relations have improved since the election in 2016 of US leader Donald Trump. When President Donald Trump took the stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) Friday morning, he clearly wanted to have some fun. You dont mind if I go off script a little bit? he asked the rowdy audience in Maryland. His prepared CPAC speech, after all, was a little boring, he said. For more than an hour, Trump held court, largely eschewing a teleprompter filled with prepared remarks on North Korea sanctions and remembrances for Billy Graham and the victims of the Parkland, Fla. shooting, instead choosing to ramble enthusiastically about familiar themes in his typical campaign style. (In fact, new sanctions on North Korea were supposed to be a major part of his CPAC speech, with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin scheduled to give a briefing on the news Friday morning. But Trump barely mentioned them, giving them just a brief nod at the tail end of nearly one hour and 15 minutes onstage.) Early in his CPAC speech, Trump caught a glimpse of himself in a TV monitor and joked, I try like hell to hide the bald spot, turning around to show the audience the back of his head. He said his administration has had the most successful first year in the history of the presidency, touting the passage of the tax bill, confirmation of a record-number of circuit court judges and moving the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem as some primary accomplishments. And he returned to his election victory in 2016, criticizing the media and saying winning the electoral college is much tougher than winning the popular vote. (He did not win the popular vote.) The CPAC crowd started a robust chant of lock her up! when Trump mentioned Democrat Hillary Clinton, to which Trump responded that the Clintons have committed a lot of atrocities. In another callback to his time on the campaign trail, Trump read the lyrics to Johnny Rivers The Snake, a song from the 1960s that tells of a woman taking in an injured snake, who then bites her, chiding her, You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in. He would often read it at campaign events talking about crimes committed by immigrants. Story continues As Trump pulled the printed lyrics out of his pocket Friday morning, he instructed his audience explicitly, You have to think of this in terms of immigration. During the off-script portion of his hour on the CPAC stage, Trump also tried to motivate the crowd for the November midterm elections saying that if Democrats win, theyll take away your Second Amendment. He asked the crowd to cheer for whether theyd rather have the Second Amendment right to bear arms or the tax cuts he passed last year, and the applause signaled a win for the Second Amendment. He didnt mention the shooting in Florida that took the lives of 17 people until later in his CPAC speech, when he temporarily returned to prepared remarks. Friday morning gave Trump the opportunity to flex his freewheeling campaign rhetoric in front of a supportive live audience. Its what he seems to enjoy the most about his late-in-life career switch to politics, and its what he gets far less of as Commander-in-Chief than he did as an outsider candidate. He seemed excited to talk about upcoming midterm elections, asking Republicans not to get complacent during the midterms. And looking ahead to winning a second term in 2020, Trump said, Hopefully were going to do that very easily. Police are treating the anthrax scare as a 'racist hate crime' - REUTERS The Royal Family has been caught up in an anthrax scare after a racist poison pen letter containing white powder was allegedly posted to Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. Police are investigating the suspect package, treating it as a "racist hate crime", after it was sent to St James Palace last week. The letter was opened by a member of staff and intercepted before it reached the Prince and Ms Markle, with specialist officers called in to investigate. Tests confirmed that the powder was harmless, with the couple informed about what had happened. The episode will likely leave members of the Royal Household deeply concerned about security ahead of the Royal wedding on May 19th, with the couple due to make several public appearances before then. Ms Markle is understood to already have specialist police protection, ahead of marrying into the Royal family. While she has previously been the subject of racist abuse online, this is the first known physical threat aimed at her and her fiance Prince Harry. The letter and powder were addressed to the couple at St James Palace, arriving on Monday, February 12. The couple live at Kensington Palace, and made a trouble-free public appearance in Edinburgh the next day. Police are now investigating whether there is any link between the incident and a package send to the Houses of Parliament the following day, reported to have been addressed to Amber Rudd, the Home Secretary. That parcel also contained powder found to be harmless. A spokesman for the Met confirmed police are investigating "after a package containing a substance was delivered to St James's Palace on Monday, 12 February". Prince Harry and Meghan Markle Credit: PA "The substance was tested and confirmed as non suspicious," he said. "Officers are also investigating an allegation of malicious communications which relates to the same package, and it is being treated as a racist hate crime. "Detectives are now investigating who sent the letter, and whether it is linked to white powder posted to the Palace of Westminster in the same week." Story continues No arrests have yet been made. A spokesman for Kensington Palace declined to comment. The Malicious Communications Act 1988 outlines the offence of sending letters with intent to cause distress or anxiety, which includes sending threats or messages which are indecent or grossly offensive. Such messages directed at Ms Markle will be of significant personal concern to the Prince, who has previously defended his partner against a wave of abuse and harassment. In November 2016, he issued an unusual statement detailing racial undertones in some sections of the press, and the outright sexism and racism of social media trolls and web article comments. Prince Harry is worried about Ms. Markles safety and is deeply disappointed that he has not been able to protect her, his communications secretary said then. Prince Harry and Meghan Markle: The story of their relationship, in pictures Security has been of paramount concern in the lead-up to the Windsor Castle wedding in May, where the couple are due to take a carriage ride through the streets to allow as many well-wishers as possible to see them. The Windsor destination is considered easier to police than the Duke and Duchess of Cambridges London wedding in 2011, which saw them travel between Westminster Abbey and Buckingham Palace. Then, it was said, the Met embarked on the biggest security operation in a generation with 5,000 police officers, snipers on rooftops and undercover officers mingling with crowds devoted to keeping the day running smoothly. Istanbul (AFP) - Over 200 people on Thursday protested outside the Russian consulate in Istanbul against the deadly assault on Syria's rebel-held enclave of Eastern Ghouta. More than 350 civilians have been killed in the five-day-old blitz by the Syrian regime led by President Bashar al-Assad in the rebel-held enclave near Damascus. Regime supporter Russia has been accused of taking part in air strikes but the Kremlin denied involvement, on Wednesday calling the accusations "groundless". The demonstrators, most of them Syrians, chanted slogans against Damascus as well as Moscow and another regime supporter, Iran, an AFP correspondent said. Others held placards saying "Russians, you are killing Ghouta's children, but history records" and "Children are dying of hunger in under-siege Eastern Ghouta". Protesters called on the major powers to bring pressure to bear to "end the bloodbath". Over three million Syrian refugees live in Turkey including nearly 540,000 in Istanbul after fleeing the conflict which began with anti-government protests in 2011. Now a multi-front war, Russia entered in September 2015, sending planes to back the Assad regime and turning the military situation around in Damascus's favour. Turkey, which has supported Syrian rebels in the conflict, has been working closely with Moscow and Tehran on a process to bring peace to Syria, despite occasional tensions. Turkish presidential spokesman Ibrahim Kalin on Wednesday said Turkey condemned the attacks and "urged the Syrian regime to immediately put an end" to them. "It is a crime against humanity. That is to say, killing innocent people in East Ghouta is unacceptable whatever the reason is," Kalin said. Yevgeniy Prigozhin is a man of many trades. A failed cross-country skier from St. Petersburg, Russia, who once spent nine years in prison for robbery, Prigozhin rose from running a hot dog stand in the 1990s to owning an upscale restaurant frequented by Russian President Vladimir Putin and other members of the nations political elite. Most recently, the man nicknamed Putins Chef was indicted in the United States by special counsel Robert Mueller for running a troll farm that conducted information warfare against the U.S. and attempted to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. Prigozhin also allegedly runs a business that profits off oil and gas deals in Syrian territories seized from the Islamic State militant group (ISIS). Trending: New Video Game Lets You Kill ISIS While Fighting as Hezbollah in Syria and Lebanon And now, reports also claim Prigozhin is the Putin ally who allegedly controls Russian mercenaries working in Syria. He was responsible for ordering a recent attack by Russian mercenaries and pro-government Syrian forces on U.S. troops stationed in Syria. 899208962 KIRILL KUDRYAVTSEV/AFP/Getty Images An unknown number of Russian nationals were killed in U.S. airstrikes in Syria on February 7 after about 300 fighters attacked U.S. troops stationed near a strategic oil field. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis has called the attack perplexing and added he does not understand why pro-regime forces would fire on U.S. troops. No American servicepeople were killed in the fighting that ensued. Don't miss: A Total F***-up: Russian Mercenaries in Syria Lament U.S. Strike That Killed Dozens Story continues Russian officials initially distanced themselves from the reports, pointing out that the people killed were not Russian servicemen and that their nationals can be found in many places around the world. Russia and the U.S. are generally in communication over their positions in Syria in order to avoid clashes. Sources, however, have said that dozens of Russians were killed in the recent attack while supporting the forces of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Their deaths highlighted the murky role of Russian mercenaries in the ongoing conflict in Syria, and gave rise to questions about how much Putin knows about the activities of Russian mercenaries abroad. Communications intercepted in January now provide some clues by demonstrating that Prigozhin had told a senior Syrian official that he had permission from a Russian minister to move fast and strong with the operation that led to the mercenaries death, The Washington Post reported Thursday evening. The communications show that he both knew about the planned attack and shared information with Syrian leadership. Most popular: Bishops Beckon Catholic Followers to Support Dreamers Amid Immigration Reform Prigozhin is known to have close ties with Putin, and it is unlikely that he works without the permission of Russias most powerful man. The mercenaries involved in the attack work for a company called Wagner, which employs Russian nationals and military veteransmany of whom are believed to have fought in the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. Wagner also provides foot soldiers who help fight ISIS in order to secure access to oil and gas fields that Prigozhin profits from. This article was first written by Newsweek More from Newsweek By Andrew Osborn MOSCOW (Reuters) - Two young anti-Putin activists trudged through a snow-logged Moscow housing estate on a recent Saturday, putting up fliers promoting a boycott of a presidential election next month. "It's not an election, it's a trick," read one, depicting a goggle-eyed caricature of Vladimir Putin, who polls show should be comfortably re-elected on March 18. A man donning a fur hat ripped one of the fliers down within a minute. A woman, told by the activists "our elections have been stolen", quietly shut her door in their faces. Unglamorous and at times disheartening for those involved, this is the sharp end of opposition leader Alexei Navalny's campaign to boycott an election he says amounts to the rigged reappointment of Putin, whom he likens to an autocratic Tsar. Navalny, a 41-year-old lawyer whose protests and corruption exposes of the sometimes gilded lives of government officials have irked the Kremlin, has been barred from the contest over what he says is a trumped up suspended prison sentence. Unable to challenge 65-year-old Putin at the ballot box and kept off state TV, he has devised a different strategy: A long-term political siege of a man most Russians consider invincible. "We want to tear Putin down from his pedestal," Vladimir Milov, an economic adviser and one of Navalny's allies, said in an interview. "Putin will get a formal victory, but we want to make it a pyrrhic victory. We want to use the election to show that he doesn't have as much support as he claims." Putin is credited with an approval rating of around 80 percent, bolstered by state TV, the ruling party and intense pride in parts of society over the 2014 annexation of Crimea and what the Kremlin has cast as military victory in Syria. Nobody doubts that a man who has seldom been off Russian TV screens for the last 18 years is headed for a landslide. "Leader of the political Olympus" was how Putin's spokesman described his boss last month, a nod to the fact that none of the seven candidates registered to run against him are a threat. Among them are a female TV celebrity whose father was Putin's political mentor, a pro-Putin businessman who says he's not cut out to be president, and a millionaire communist. The contest, say critics, is a poor imitation of democracy. LAME DUCK? Putin has dismissed Navalny as a troublemaker bent on sowing chaos on behalf of Washington. Navalny's immediate aim is to reduce turnout in the election by 10 percent or more with leaflets, social media, protests and telephone calls urging people not to vote. "We understand that Putin is reappointing himself and that all we can do is to make that reappointment less convincing," Oleg Stepanov, a senior Navalny activist, who has helped coordinate campaigning in Moscow, said. Turnout, according to official figures, was a healthy 65.25 percent in 2012 when Putin was last elected, and sources in the presidential administration have told the Russian media that the Kremlin is targeting a 70/70 scenario this time round, whereby Putin would win 70 percent of the vote on a 70 percent turnout. Leonid Volkov, head of Navalny's campaign, says turnout was inflated in the past and will only be in the 40-45 percent range this time, noting it fell below 50 percent in the 2016 parliamentary poll for the first time in the post-Soviet period. Navalny plans to deploy tens of thousands of observers on election day to chronicle and, he hopes, discourage fraud. Activists attending packed masterclasses in a grey Soviet-era Moscow tower-block learn how to monitor polling stations and hear warnings that "everyone" will lie to them. "Our strategy is for Putin to turn into a 'lame duck' on March 19 (the day after the election) and into a politician who cannot be re-elected," Volkov, the campaign chief, told activists in Yekaterinburg in January. "The authorities' actions suggest this issue (of turnout) is a painful one. Let's hit them where it hurts," he said. LONG-TERM SIEGE Armed with what they say will be irrefutable evidence of fraud and their principal grievance -- that Navalny was unfairly barred from standing -- Navalny's supporters plan post-election protests demanding the election is re-run and Navalny included. The Kremlin is unlikely to acquiesce and there is a risk of violence in Moscow and St Petersburg if the authorities crack down. Officials appear reluctant to do that however, to avoid fuelling a movement they say does not pose a serious threat. Opinion polls put Navalny's support at less than 2 percent and many Russians, who still get much of their news from state TV, say they do not know who he is. Backers note he won almost a third of the vote in a 2013 Moscow mayoral race and say he would become the "anyone but Putin candidate" if ever allowed to run, forcing Putin to a second voting round, although Putin would then win. The Kremlin's assessment is less generous. Putin, when asked about Navalny, makes a point of never mentioning his name, while Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Prikhodko, the target of one of Navalny's investigations, has called him "a political loser." Many of Navalny's supporters, attracted by his YouTube videos, investigations and informal direct language, are people aged 25-35 in big cities. They say others, including former government supporters, are joining them. "A time of change is coming," said Alexander, a 29-year-old businessman and Navalny supporter in the Urals city of Yekaterinburg who declined to give his surname. Navalny promises genuine political competition and democracy, pledging to depoliticise the judiciary, champion a free media, promote free market economics and introduce a visa regime for visitors from Central Asia and the South Caucasus. He talks directly to supporters through his online TV programs and now has more than 80 regional headquarters and some 200,000 volunteers. But he knows he will need a much bigger network and greater influence among Russia's 144 million people and will also have to keep campaign contributions coming in. For now, donations average around 500 roubles ($8.87) and around half are from grassroots supporters. The other half, say sources familiar with the situation, come from a number of millionaire businessmen who are not household names. Navalny has been jailed repeatedly for breaking draconian protest laws, says he and his family are being tracked by the security services, and his brother, Oleg, is in jail on what he says is a politically-motivated embezzlement charge. If, as recent Russian history would suggest, he fails to convert minority anger into majority change in next month's elections, there is a long-shot Moscow mayoral election later this year and a Moscow city parliament election the next. Further out, he will target a 2021 nationwide parliamentary election leading up to the next presidential race in 2024. "The result will perhaps not be immediate, but it will happen," said Madina Avsetova, 19, one of the two activists who spent a recent Saturday pasting up election boycott fliers. Svyatoslav Kotov, her 24-year-old co-activist, said they would need to work relentlessly. "We all want things to change quickly," he said. "But we understand that such change only happens in fairytales." (Additional reporting by Natalia Shurmina in Yekaterinburg; Editing by Philippa Fletcher) Jerusalem (AFP) - Resignation, early elections, or staggering on: a series of corruption allegations have threatened Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's grip on power, but there are a number of ways the crisis might play out. - The context - Netanyahu, in power since 2009, is currently facing at least six police inquiries related to him either directly or indirectly. On February 13 the police recommended he be charged for graft in two of them, while his wife is also accused of misusing public funds. The allegations have thrown into doubt the 68-year-old's political future and the fate of his coalition government, considered the most right-wing in the country's history and made up of six centrist, right wing, religious and nationalist parties. The pugnacious Israeli PM has protested his total innocence and confidence there will eventually be no charges. "I continue and I will continue to lead the State of Israel with responsibility, commitment and dedication," Netanyahu wrote on Facebook Thursday. - Staying put - For the moment at least the most likely scenario appears to be that nothing major will happen. Netanyahu's coalition partners have indicated they will wait for a formal indictment by the attorney general, which could be weeks or even months away -- if indeed it occurs. "Legally, as long as there is no charge, we remain in the government," said Naftali Bennett, education minister and head of the nationalist Jewish Home party, in a statement echoed by centrist Moshe Kahlon. Analysts said that the junior partners know that if they pull out and trigger an election then Netanyahu's Likud would likely triumph. "The coalition is closely watching opinion polls and no party would win more votes than Likud," said Denis Charbit, a political scientist at the Open University of Israel. And even if he is charged, Netanyahu would not legally be forced to withdraw. - Early elections - Story continues The current parliament's term is supposed to run until November 2019, but no Israeli government has completed a full term in decades -- with early elections the norm. The leader of the largest opposition party Labour, Avi Gabbay, has called for his allies to be prepared for early polls. Netanyahu himself called early elections in 2015 and upset the odds to win them. He could be tempted to do the same if he feels it would strengthen his position, especially if the public back his claims that he is the victim of a witch hunt, said Avraham Diskin, from Jerusalem's Hebrew University. Netanyahu On Facebook shared a poll which though the methodology was unclear indicated his party would be strengthened in a future election. - Resignation - Netanyahus predecessor Ehud Olmert was forced to resign in 2008 before being charged with corruption. But he was far weaker politically than Netanyahu is now, experts said. "He has support despite the issues, so he will certainly not withdraw voluntarily," said Charbit. But Israeli legal specialist Yoram Dinstein said that if Netanyahu is charged, "he will surely resign, although the law does not force him to". According to the law, if the prime minister resigns, the president can appoint someone else without new elections to form a new government if they are supported by a majority of MPs, said Dinstein. But in the absence of a government being formed with majority support, new elections are called. - Step down temporarily - Legally, Netanyahu could step back for 90 days without officially resigning, giving him time to settle his affairs. This could afford the man who has dominated Israeli politics for the last decade some breathing space. "None of the potential candidates for his succession in Likud will venture to stand against him during this time," Charbit said. "He has managed to appear irreplaceable, a kind of Julius Caesar, and no one wants to be Brutus." Tom Cooper Security, Middle East The fighter isn't ready for combat. Russia's Su-57 Deployment in Syria Is a Dangerous Farce Late in the evening on Feb. 21, 2018, a photograph appeared on social media purportedly showing two Russian Sukhoi T-50 prototype stealth fighters also known as PAK-FAs or Su-57s in the sky over Hmemmem air base in western Syria. While the photograph was rather blurry and could not be precisely geo-located, by the morning of Feb. 22 two videos appeared on the same social media depicting almost the same scene. A pair of T-50s escorted by an Su-35 interceptor. The authenticity of the photo and videos is still in question. But if T-50s are in Syria, itll be interesting to see how the Kremlin spins the deployment. Back in November 2017, Russian president Vladimir Putin ordered most of the Russian military contingent in Syria to withdraw, two years after Moscow intervened in the ongoing regional war. Despite Putins order, two T-50s appeared in Syria along with a Russian air force A-50 radar plane, four Su-25 attack planes and four Su-35s fighters. The warplanes arrived in Syria following weeks of intensive air strikes by Russian planes targeting areas controlled by anti-regime rebels in Idlib and East Ghouta. In other words, the T-50s deployment could be further proof that Putins withdrawal order was a lie. Recommended: Americas Battleships Went to War Against North Korea Recommended: 5 Places World War III Could Start in 2018 Recommended: How North Korea Could Start a War In any event, the stealth fighters presence in Syria raises other questions. The T-50 program has suffered a number of long delays since the types first flight in 2010. Early on, Russian officials announced that the type would undergo state acceptance trials in 2013 and enter operational service in 2015. That didnt happen. By 2013, the plan was for the T-50 to enter production in late 2016. To that end, in 2016 the Tikhomirov Scientific Research Institute of Instrument Design completed seven N036 radars designed for T-50s, three of which were installed on prototypes T-50-3, T-50-4 and T-50-5. All of these were in so-called reduced configuration, which means they had only a front-facing antenna and lacked the side-looking arrays. There has been no testing of the T-50s fire-control system nor any kind of live weapons trials for the type. Story continues On the contrary, the T-50 has suffered one failure after another. Most of the first five prototypes have developed severe structural problems, engine breakdowns and mishaps with cockpit glazing. India had agreed to co-finance the T-50, but well-placed Indian sources reported that the T-50s engines were unreliable, its radar inadequate and its stealth features badly engineered. Unsurprisingly, Moscow and Sukhoi failed to agree on further Indian financing. The Indians have instead asked for information from the United States regarding its F-35 stealth fighter. Sukhoi rushed five available T-50 prototypes to the air forces State Flight Center Base No. 929 at Akthubinsk in September 2016 to have them flight-tested by Russian military pilots. Rumor has it that in the same year, one of the T-50s released a weapon of unknown type from one of its internal stations for the first time. However, no testing was ever confirmed. The prototypes have only appeared carrying dumb bombs or dummy R-77 air-to-air missiles on underwing pylons. In early 2017, Sukhoi launched development of an entirely new integrated avionics suite for the T-50 designated IMA BK. The original integrated avionics suite, under development since 2004, proved insufficient. The IMA BK suite is years away from entering service. Later in 2017, Mikhail Pogosian, CEO of United Aircraft Company the consortium controlling Sukhoi and all of the Russian aviation industry left his position. Pogosian was the only UAC director with industrial management skills. To say that this collapsed the entire T-50 project would be an understatement. The Ministry of Defense in Moscow in late 2017 slashed T-50 procurement to just 12 copies for now. These 12 prototypes are supposed to undergo further research and development by 2025. Considering that Sukhoi has already assembled at least 10 of these, this means that production has essentially been terminated. In reportedly deploying T-50s, the Kremlin is outright gambling with precious prototypes and their pilots lives. It has sent into an active combat zone two supposedly stealth fighters that are anything but stealthy, that possess inadequate and incomplete sensors, incomplete fire-control systems and self-protection suites, no operational integrated avionics and are powered by unreliable engines. They have undertaken hardly any weapons-separation testing except for two types of free-fall dumb bombs and lack any other operational weapons bar their 30-millimeter internal cannons. On the top of that, the aircraft are then going to be flown by pilots who lack any kind of doctrine or tactics for the type and who cannot really depend upon the planes avionics and other systems. This article originally appeared on War is Boring. Image: Wikimedia Commons Read full article Dave Majumdar Security, The most likely reason for the Russian deployment is to refine the Su-57 design for production and to gain as much operational wartime experience as possible. Russia's Su-57 Stealth Fighter in Syria: This Is Testing in Actual War" Russia appears to have deployed two prototype Sukhoi Su-57 PAK-FA fighters to its Khmemeim airbase in Syria. While the reports of the stealth fighters arriving in Syria are unconfirmed, it would be highly unusual to deploy a developmental asset into a combat zone before it is ready for war. Indeed, the Russian moveif confirmedwould be the equivalent of deploying the Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor into combat during the late 1990s or early 2000s while the jet was still in the engineering manufacturing development (EMD) phase. However, deploying a developmental jet into combat to gather operational experience and data might not be unusual from the Soviet/Russian perspective. This is testing in actual war. The Soviets did that, Vasily Kashin, a senior fellow at the Center for Comprehensive European and International Studies at Moscow's Higher School of Economics, told The National Interest. Recommended: 5 Places World War III Could Start in 2018 Recommended: How North Korea Could Start a War Recommended: This Is What Happens if America Nuked North Korea The main purpose of the deploying the Su-57 to Syria is to gather as much operational experience and performance data as possible on the jets avionics. Not only can Russia test the performance of the Su-57s active electronically scanned array radar and electronic intelligence packages, there is an opportunity to perform some limited combat missions. It can carry strike weapons although it is not the main purpose, Kashin said. [The Russian Air Force] can also use the radar on actual foreign aircraft. It depends on how the plane designers evaluate the tests. While the Su-57 is still in its developmental phases, these particular examples that have been deployed to Syria are likely full-equipped airframes fitted with operationally representative avionics. Story continues Maybe these are late prototypes and tests were going well, Kashin suggested. While some have speculated that there might be a geopolitical aspect to the Su-57 deployment that seems unlikely to Kashin. I do not think there is a political dimension, Kashin said. The most likely reason for the Russian deployment is to refine the Su-57 design for production and to gain as much operational wartime experience as possible. Syria, to a large extent, has been used to prove out new Russian weapons and it is likely no different for the Su-57. It will be combat tested from the beginning, Kashin said. It will help to adjust serial production. While the Russian approach is unorthodoxand not without riskMoscow might reap benefits by flying the Su-57s over Syria. However, the Kremlin risks giving away an intelligence bonanza to U.S. forces who will be monitoring the Su-57s operations closely. Moreover, a new and immature aircraft is prone to technical faults. Thus, the Kremlins move is a gamble. Dave Majumdar is the defense editor for The National Interest. You can follow him on Twitter: @davemajumdar. Image: Creative Commons. Read full article United Nations (United States) (AFP) - Russia rejected a draft resolution Friday that would condemn Iran for failing to block supplies of missiles to Yemen's Huthi rebels and call for measures against Tehran, diplomats said. The Security Council is expected to vote on Monday on the British-drafted measure that would renew sanctions on Yemen for a year and address the findings of a UN report that pointed a finger at Iran. The report by a UN panel of experts found that Iran had violated the 2015 arms embargo on Yemen after determining that missiles fired by the Huthis at Saudi Arabia last year were made in Iran. Britain circulated the draft resolution last week and submitted an amended text following negotiations, but Russia on Friday rejected the latest version, diplomats said. Russia said the report's findings were too weak to justify a condemnation of Iran, diplomats said. Negotiations were set to continue over the weekend, diplomats said. The draft resolution "condemns" Iran for being in "non-compliance" with the arms embargo on Yemen by "failing to take the necessary measures to prevent the direct or indirect supply, sale or transfer" of short-range ballistic missiles, drones and other military equipment to the Huthis. Backed by the United States and France, the text specifies that the council will take "additional measures to address these violations" and that "any activity related to the use of ballistic missiles in Yemen" is a criteria for sanctions. Russian Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia on Wednesday said the draft resolution should focus on renewing the mandate of sanctions monitors for Yemen instead of taking aim at Iran. "We don't like condemnations at all, no, in general," Nebenzia said. "It's a resolution about the extension of the working group, not about Iran. So we should concentrate on extending the working group first," he said. The report by the UN experts bolstered US and Saudi claims that Iran was arming the Huthis, despite Tehran's strong denials. While the report found that Tehran had violated the embargo by failing to block the shipments, the experts said they were unable to identify the supplier. Yevgeny Prigozhin, who is believed to control the Wagner private military company, shows Vladimir Putin his food production facility in 2010 - POOL SPUTNIK KREMLIN A businessman known as Putin's chef spoke with top officials in Damascus and Moscow before Russian mercenaries he is believed to control launched a disastrous attack on US and Kurdish forces in Syria, according to US intelligence reports. The news comes just days after the businessman, Yevgeny Prigozhin, was indicted in the United States for allegedly running a pro-Kremlin troll factory that interfered in the 2016 election. The February 7 attack was the first deadly clash between citizens of Russia and the United States since the Cold War and suggests that tensions in Syria could grow even as the Islamic State is pushed back. Moscow initially denied the casualties. The foreign ministry later admitted at least five Russians had been killed and several dozen wounded, but said they weren't soldiers. Mr Prigozhin told a senior Syrian official in an intercepted communication in late January that he had received permission from a Russian minister for a fast and strong initiative and was waiting for a go-ahead from Damascus, according to intelligence reports seen by The Washington Post. Kirill Ananyev had been working as a military contractor in Syria and was killed in the February 7 US airstrikes, a friend confirmed to The Telegraph Credit: Twitter US intelligence has said it believes Mr Prigozhin controls the Wagner private military company, and the reports suggest he closely coordinated the group's operations in Syria with the Kremlin. The restaurant and catering magnate has in the past won lucrative contracts from the defence ministry. Close to Vladimir Putin, he has personally served the president on several occasions, including during meetings with George W. Bush. At the end of January, Mr Prigozhin told Syrian officials that he had a good surprise for Bashar Assad that would come between 6 and 9 February. Presidential affairs minister Mansour Fadlallah Azzam reportedly promised Mr Prigozhin would be paid for his efforts. During the same period, Mr Prigozhin began communicating more frequently with top Kremlin officials, including Vladimir Putin's chief of staff Anton Vaino and deputy chief of staff Vladimir Ostrovenko, according to the intelligence reports. He spoke with Russian officials again the day after the calamitous attack. Story continues Mr Putin's chief of staff Anton Vaino, left, who US intelligence said spoke with Mr Prigozhin before the attack, attends a Defender of the Fatherland Day ceremony on Friday Credit: Mikhail Metzel/TASS via Getty Images Employees at Mr Prigozhin's Concord Catering company and Concord Management and Consulting declined to comment when reached by The Telegraph. The Kremlin had not replied to requests for comment on Friday. On February 7, between 300 and 500 pro-regime fighters supported by artillery, tank and rocket fire advanced on a Syrian Democratic Forces base at an oilfield near Deir Ezzor, according to the US military. US special forces at the base called in airstrikes that killed 100 enemy fighters, it said. Many of those killed were Russians, a friend of one of the dead told The Telegraph last week. The Conflict Intelligence Team, which tracks Russian military activity, has named nine Russians who were killed in the strike and said many were Wagner group employees. It told The Telegraph that the Kremlin has come to rely on this illegal private military company to keep official casualty numbers low during its pro-Assad bombing campaign. Mr Putin promised not to deploy ground troops and said in December he would withdraw most forces. A Syrian pro-regime fighter who was also wounded in the US airstrikes on February 7 is seen in a hospital Credit: AFP/Getty Images A Syrian government contract seen by AP and Russian media promised a company linked to the Wagner group 25% of the profits from oil and gas fields its contractors could capture. But it remains unclear why the Russians were allowed to charge to their deaths after US commanders had repeatedly warned their Russian counterparts the force should not advance. Analyst Yury Barmin told The Telegraph that the Russian defence ministry may have been hostile toward Mr Prigozhin conducting a major operation without its approval. It looks like internal power struggle, he said of the February 7 incident. Mr Putin meets with George W. Bush and other world leaders at a 2006 dinner served by Mr Prigozhin, who is seen at right Credit: Sergei Zhukov/Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, file Mr Prigozhin has long been tied to the Wagner group, and his Concord Management and Consulting is headed by Dmitry Utkin, who was sanctioned by the United States as Wagner's leader, according to business records. A US indictment last week said Mr Prigozhin's trolls impersonated Americans on social media to exacerbate divisions and promote Donald Trump. Mr Putin, who thanked veterans of the Syrian operation in a speech last night, awarded a medal on Friday to the widow of a pilot who blew himself with a grenade after parachuting out over rebel territory. By Jack Stubbs and Denis Pinchuk MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was briefly detained on Thursday and accused of organising illegal protests, weeks before a presidential election in which he has been barred from running. The 41-year-old anti-corruption campaigner was repeatedly jailed last year for organising some of Russia's biggest protests, targeting what he says are the luxury lifestyles of President Vladimir Putin and his inner circle. Navalny's detention on Thursday came shortly after his campaign chief, Leonid Volkov, tweeted that he had been detained at Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport. Volkov later tweeted that he had been sentenced by a court to 30 days in jail. Navalny said Volkov had been planning to fly to the Russian regional republic of Bashkortostan to organise election-monitoring activities. Navalny's spokeswoman, Kira Yarmysh, said Volkov had been found guilty of organising illegal protests, and that it was "obvious" he was being punished for Navalny's calls for a boycott of the March 18 election, which Putin is expected to win easily. "As a high turnout is the Kremlin's main goal, the authorities are very sensitive about our efforts to reduce it," she said, adding that Navalny would keep up his calls. Navalny has been barred from running in the election over what his supporters say is a trumped-up suspended prison sentence. Instead, he hopes for a boycott to undermine Putin's legitimacy. Navalny tweeted that he had been detained by police on Thursday as he left a dental appointment. He was released just under an hour later, saying police had opened a case against him for organising illegal protests. "They offered me a lift somewhere, but I declined and have gone to work. I don't understand what happened and why it took seven people to detain me," he said. If found guilty, Navalny could also be jailed for 30 days, which would keep him behind bars until after the election. Story continues INCREASING PRESSURE Navalny has come under increasing pressure from authorities as he has sought to rally Russians against the election, which he says is a sham and a rigged contest. Although Putin looks certain to secure a fourth term against rivals of little standing, analysts say the Kremlin is keen to boost his legitimacy with a high turnout, and avoid the impression that voters have stayed home in protest at falling living standards. Navalny was detained at an anti-election protest in Moscow in late January and had his website blocked earlier this month after refusing to remove material covered in a court injunction. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Thursday but has previously said Navalny does not represent any real threat to Putin. Yarmysh said the head of Navalny's Anti-corruption Foundation had been sentenced to 10 days in jail on Tuesday for organising an unsanctioned protest in January. (Additional reporting by Kevin O'Flynn, Polina Devitt, Andrey Kuzmin, Maxim Rodionov and Denis Pinchuk; Writing by Jack Stubbs; Editing by Richard Balmforth and Kevin Liffey) Students across the country participated in school walkouts this week to demand action on gun violence, and two more widespread walkouts are planned for the next two months on March 14, to mark one month since the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida, and on April 20, the 19th anniversary of the Columbine shooting. (A major Washington, D.C., demonstration, the March for Our Lives, is set for March 24.) The protests are drawing attention not just for their impassioned plea, but for the ways in which various school districts are reacting to the organized action. Students expressing anger over gun violence in the form of protests are being met with disciplinary action at some schools. (Photo: Getty Images) Consequences for students participating in walkouts have been drastically different across the country. At Needville High School in Texas, students were threatened with a three-day suspension if they participated in the walkouts, according to a note posted on the schools Facebook page by Needville Independent School District superintendent Curtis Rhodes. The Needville ISD is very sensitive to violence in schools, including the recent incident in Florida, the note said. There is a movement attempting to stage walkouts/disruptions of the school through social media and/or media outlets. Please be advised that the Needville ISD will not allow a student demonstration during school hours for any type of protest or awareness!! Should students choose to do so, they will be suspected from school for 3 days and face all the consequences that come along with an out of school suspension. The schools Facebook page has since been taken down, but the note, which went viral after it was posted on Tuesday, was captured in screengrabs. Life is all about choices and every choice has a consequence whether it be positive or negative. We will discipline no matter if it is one, fifty, or five hundred students involved, Rhodes wrote, adding that even those who had notes from parents would not be spared from discipline, and asking the community to understand that we are here for an education and not a political protest. Story continues Photo: Getty Images Other school districts made similar threats. According to the Los Angeles Times, Steven Walts, superintendent of Prince William County (Va.) Public Schools, wrote an email to parents and students noting that there would be disciplinary consequences for students who cause disruptions or leave school without authorization. On the other end of the spectrum, Jerry Kalina, principal of Papillion-La Vista High School in Omaha, Neb., joined his students for a 17-minute walkout on Wednesday, one minute for each of the Parkland victims. I thought if kids are going to walk out, I want it to be controlled, and I want it to be a respectful situation in which our kids focus on the victims and their families, Kalina tells Yahoo Lifestyle. So I got on the intercom and we took a moment of silence for the victims, and I told the students that if they plan to walk out, that was their choice and they wouldnt get in trouble. When the bell rang to end the class period at 11:55, Kalina says, about 250 kids joined him outside in 18-degree weather. I roamed around the crowd kids were worried, they had looks on their faces I hadnt seen before, he says. I wanted to let them know that we are here for them, and to show some compassion and love. I didnt want to be a dictator; I wanted students to know that hopefully this is the start of something that will create change. In St. Charles, Ill., administrators took a similar approach. Once we were made aware of the walkout, the high school principal sent a message to staff saying that if a student tells you they are walking out, please allow them to do so, Carol Smith, St. Charles School District 303 spokesperson, tells Yahoo Lifestyle. We made sure there was supervision. Students met under the flagpole. They had conversations about what this meant, and when the 17 minutes were up they went back to school. Smith says that at St. Charles North High School, about 27 students participated in the walkout, and at St. Charles East, there were between 150 and 200. That discrepancy, Smith says, is likely because two St. Charles East students were killed as a result of gun violence just last year. Its been very, very difficult, so these students understood what they were doing, she says. As one of our students said, We may not be able to vote yet, but were a movement. Were starting to show people that we care and that we can make a difference. As a school district, how can we say no to that? How can we discourage them from doing something they are passionate about and they feel can make a difference [about] on a national level? Plenty of schools seem to still be hashing out how they will handle the upcoming walkouts. On Tuesday, Todd Gray, the superintendent of the Waukesha School District in Wisconsin, sent an email suggesting that those who participated in a walkout would face disciplinary action, according to the Journal Sentinel. By Wednesday, Gray had amended his message, explaining that students would be allowed to participate if given permission by a parent. Legally, schools can discipline students who ditch class for any reason, according to a blog post by Vera Eidelman, a William J. Brennan fellow with the ACLUs Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. But what the school cant do is discipline students more harshly because they are walking out to express a political view or because school administrators dont support the views behind the protest, she writes. In other words, any disciplinary action for walking out cannot be a response to the content of the protest. Much of the backlash against Rhodes, the Texas superintendent who threatened suspension, seemed to be the result of the content of his message. Its a quintessential First Amendment violation, and most Americans have an instinct about that, Georgetown Law professor Heidi Li Feldman told the Washington Post. Whats really weird about this is that they announced they will suspend people over the content of their off-campus protest. Content-based restrictions on speech are anathema to the First Amendment. So this looks like a total problem. Back in Omaha, meanwhile, Kalina says he believes that any good school administrator should react to specific situations rather than apply a blanket rule as moments like these come up. You have to use the common sense approach; you have to be compassionate. I could sense even as our day started on Wednesday that things were different; theyve been different since this happened. Kids seem on edge, he says, noting that 17 minutes of the school day wouldnt be especially disruptive to a school that goes through seven five-minute class changes a day. Young people need to be heard; we have to trust them and give them boundaries and a controlled setting and let them know that were here for them. I didnt want to talk suspension and punishment thats not what my students needed to hear. They needed to hear the opposite that they will be taken seriously, and they will be safe. Read more from Yahoo Lifestyle: Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter for nonstop inspiration delivered fresh to your feed, every day. By Denis Dumo JUBA (Reuters) - South Sudan sentenced a South African ex-colonel to death on Friday after convicting him of trying to bring down the government. Retired colonel William Endley, 55, had been providing advice to former-vice-president-turned-rebel-leader Riek Machar, whose forces have been fighting a civil war since 2013. Sentencing him to hang, Judge Lado Eriminio Sekwat said Endley had 15 days to appeal. Endley was convicted of conspiracy, supplying weapons, espionage, waging an insurgency, sabotage, terrorism and illegal entry into South Sudan. Defence lawyer Gardit Abel Gar called the verdict a miscarriage of justice and said Endley, who plans to appeal, was a political prisoner who should have been freed under a December ceasefire agreement. During the trial, Endley attempted to call six witnesses in his defence but none showed up to testify. "The court chooses to be incompetent and partial in the process," Gar said. "It is ... inconsistent with the just-signed cessation of hostilities agreement which has stated that all political detainees and prisoners of war should have been released." South Africa's Department of International Relations said they would be reviewing the verdict. "Our embassy in South Sudan will brief Head Office on the judgement and we will take it from there," said spokesman Nelson Kgwete. Endley was on trial alongside a former spokesman for Machar who was handed the death sentence earlier this month for incitement and conspiracy against President Salva Kiirs government. South Sudan won independence from Sudan in 2011 and descended into civil war in 2013, months after Kiir fired Machar as his deputy. Tens of thousands of people have been killed and a third of the population have fled their homes. Machar fled to Democratic Republic of Congo after fierce fighting broke out in Juba in July 2016 and is now in South Africa under virtual house arrest. (Reporting by Denis Dumo; additional reporting by Nqobile Dludla in Johannesburg; Writing by Katharine Houreld; Editing by Robin Pomeroy) After having her photo go viral, Anok Yai gained popularity on social media and now is a top model. (Photo: Instagram/Anok Yai) Anok Yai decided to attend Howard Universitys 2017 homecoming, but little did she know that it would be a life-changing experience. After a photographer snapped her photo, the internet marveled over Yais immaculate beauty. Many declared that she needed to be signed by a top modeling agency ASAP. Thanks to social media and a growing fan base, Yai has not only become a sought-after model but also just became the second black model to open the Prada show. Yahoo Lifestyle caught up with Yai back in October, and she revealed that she moved to the United States in 2000 and actually never modeled before. Ive always thought about modeling, Yai said. Its a dream that Ive wanted for a long time but always pushed to the side because of self-doubt and distractions from school. Now I see this dream as something a lot more obtainable. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. The 20-year-old also shared that she immediately started to receive offers after her photos went viral. However, she was keeping her options open before committing to anyone and confirmed that she wasnt going to ditch school for a modeling career. Fast-forward to four months later and Yai has officially signed with Next Models, which has led to amazing gigs, such as opening Pradas Fall/Winter 2018 show. She shared a photo on Instagram from the runway with the caption: This is something that Id only dream of. The rising model also mentioned how she couldnt believe she was only the second black woman to open for Prada, after Naomi Campbell back in 1997. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. Fans continue to flood Yais post with admirable comments such as Loving the representation and My dear queen do it for black girls you are beautiful. To say the least, Yai is already making a huge name for herself, and shes on the right path toward success. We will keep an eye out to see what other runway shows she slays this season. For now, keep scrolling to see some of her supermodel-in-the-making moments. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. Read more from Yahoo Lifestyle: Story continues Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter for nonstop inspiration delivered fresh to your feed, every day. After SpaceX successfully blasted three satellites into space early Thursday morning, the company tried to catch the Falcon 9 rocket's expensive nosecone, also known as a fairing, on a ship in the Pacific Ocean. The vessel, named "Mr. Steven," was outfitted with a giant net. According to SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, the boat missed catching the fairing by "a few hundred meters," but he thinks there's a simple fix: Bigger parachutes to better control the parachuting fairing. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. The fairing, which sheltered and released the payload during the rocket launch, parachuted down to the Pacific Ocean. A GPS guidance system helped guide the parachute close to the long, outstretched metallic arms of the awaiting ship. Assuming the nosecone is in good shape, SpaceX may still try and retrieve it from the water. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. Recovery of the rocket fairing is aimed at bringing down the cost of access to space, since this particular part of the rocket costs between $5 and $6 million dollars. SpaceX famously lands its rocket boosters back on Earth and reuses them in subsequent launches, but it never before attempted to catch a rocket's fairing. SpaceX plans to outcompete its rocket rivals by reusing most of its rockets, as opposing to building new components for each launch. SEE ALSO: Elon Musk's 'Starman' Tesla Roadster isn't your typical piece of space junk This launch, for example, featured a Falcon 9 rocket booster that had previously been to space in August 2017. SpaceX decided not to recover the rocket for a potential third launch, however. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. Instead, the rocket fell back to Earth and crashed into the Pacific Ocean. According to SpaceX firmware engineer Tom Praderio, "SpaceX is making room for its next iteration of Falcon 9 rockets," so it had no reason to land and reuse the rocket for a third launch. A screenshot of the Falcon 9 rocket second stage heading towards low-Earth orbit. The curvature of the Earth can be seen in the background. Image: spacex The Falcon 9 rockets have proven to be quite reliable, as SpaceX launched them into space 18 times last year, with no failures. The company plans to surpass these launch numbers this year. Story continues Besides the primary payload a Spanish satellite that can capture extremely high-resolution images of Earth SpaceX launched two of its own microsatellites. These satellites are a test, but likely the first of thousands of internet-beaming satellites called Starlink, which is intended to provide high-speed internet access to the web-deprived corners of the world, sometime in the early to mid 2020s. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. The Federal Communications Commission has yet to approve the SpaceX Starlink constellation, but last week FCC chairmen Ajit Pai urged commissioners to approve the bold space internet project. The PAZ satellite successfully separating from the Falcon 9 rocket. Image: spacex Golden State Warriors head coach Steve Kerr in the second half of an NBA basketball game Saturday, Feb. 3, 2018, in Denver. The Nuggets won 115-108. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski) Steve Kerr has spent the last week observing the protests and emotional efforts of the Stoneman Douglas shooting victims trying to convince their government to address the long overdue gun-control issue. Kerr has actively supported gun reform in the wake of previous mass shootings and on Thursday offered his support to the teenage victims-turned-activists. Via SI.com: I think its phenomenal, Kerr said. I think what those kids are doing is heroic. Its heartfelt. And I think its the beginning of some changeI really believe that. Im amazed any time I see them on TV or online. Its heartbreaking but inspiring all at once. I feel very encouraged. Weve got a generation thats grown up with these school shootings and mass shootings and theyre fed up. Historically, its the young generation that has to initiate change. You think about the Vietnam War. All the old white guys who kept sending the troops off to fight this ridiculous war. And all the young people who protested had to make change, create change. And so its the young people in the county now who are going to create the change we need in terms of how we handle gun violence, and how we do our best to curb it. Its amazing to watch them. Kerr is especially sensitive to the gun violence debate since his father, Malcolm, was assassinated in Beirut 34 years ago. He can also sympathize with the survivors whose lives have been altered forever by the trauma they endured. Kerr was an 18-year-old University of Arizona freshman at the time of his fathers death and he has remained a vocal advocate of gun control. Following the Oct. 1 mass shooting in Las Vegas that resulted in the deaths of 59 and injuries to hundreds more, Kerr declared that the country should offer more than thoughts and prayers. A month later, the murder of 26 churchgoers in Sutherland Springs, Texas resulted in Kerr describing gun violence as a public health crisis. Kerrs comments on Thursday echoed those of 2-time MVP Steve Nash. In a first person piece for The Players Tribune, Nash addressed the rampant gun violence gripping America. As a Canadian citizen, Nash brings a different perspective to the debate than Kerr as Canada is nearly devoid of the type of gun violence that plagues America. Story continues Many Americans want the right to bear arms to protect themselves or their families. I can understand this way of thinking, even if its not familiar to me. But the truth is that for every one time a gun is used in the home out of self-defense, there are four accidents involving guns in the home; eleven suicide attempts; and seven assaults or murders. You may say this doesnt apply to you that your weapon is safe and secure but sadly this is not the case for many Americans. Homes with guns have 22 negative outcomes for each time a gun is actually used not necessarily with success in self defense. First, we need to enforce and expand background checks for people trying to purchase a gun. We also need to require them to supply proof of proper storage, which they do in other countries with great success. Second, we need to more strictly regulate semiautomatic weapons, like the AR-15, which are so often used in mass shootings. These weapons make it easy for someone to kill many, many people in a matter of seconds. And seriously whats the counterargument here? Im just not sure what weapons like the AR-15 offer everyday society. But we do know the harm they cause: Without these weapons, deranged individuals such as the killer in Las Vegas wouldnt have be able to murder and injure so many victims in such a short amount of time. Lives would have been saved. Those people would be here with us now, going to work or school, or packing their kids a lunch. In summation, Nash also expressed support for the gun reform activism demonstrated by Stoneman Douglas survivors and students around the country. High school students decided that theyd had enough. The students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High, where the Parkland shooting happened, decided that theres been enough silence, enough violence and enough death. They decided that the future belongs to them. And while they may not know exactly how their future will turn out theyve experienced enough to know how they dont want it to turn out. We need to support them now. Inevitably, Nashs opinion will be discarded by many because he hails from our neighbor to the north, but its worth listening to his opinion. In contrast to the United States, Canadians dont stock up on semi/automatic assault rifles. As a consequence, they remain immune to rampant gun violence and still havent been subjected to the theoretical tyranny many Second Amendment supporters fear. There are 89 firearms per 100 residents in the United States, which is the most in the world by a significant margin. Thats nearly twice as many as the second and third nations, Yemen and Serbia, who have engaged in violent civil wars within the last 20 years. Canada ranks 13th, with 31 firearms per 100 residents, but averages 1 gun death for every 215,000 people in Canada, compared to 1 death for every 28,000 people in the United States. Nash doesnt advocate for a complete repeal of the Second Amendment and his argument for gun reform holds weight when you consider Canadas paucity of gun violence. DJ Dunson is a writer for Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at dunsnchecksin@yahoo.com or find him on Twitter or Facebook. Outside the White House gates, hundreds of middle and high school students took the fight for gun control into their own hands on Wednesday. They made public pleas, staged sit-ins and demanded that President Donald Trump take action. Refusing to be silent, local students marched down the D.C. streets chanting The NRA has got to go. One week after the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida that killed 17 students and staff members, its survivors have become some of the loudest critics of Capitol Hill. Their voices have propelled students from across the nation to engage in the national conversation on gun action. A chorus of solidarity rallies have occurred throughout the week from California to Florida. Students from multiple cities have staged walk-ins and rallies to voice frustration at the injustice they say is happening in legislature chambers. Trending: In Pictures: The 15 Worst Presidents in U.S. History Many said they couldnt wait until the national March for our Lives event scheduled for March 24. Instead, they have vowed to go full-steam ahead until gun violence is solvedand schools are safe. Busloads of Parkland students, many of whom witnessed the deadly shooting, traveled 450 miles to Floridas state capital on Tuesday to push state lawmakers for change. We elected you to do things that we believe in. Now we believe in something, do it, said Stoneman Douglas sophomore Daniel Bishop on the bus ride to the Florida capital. Don't miss: A Woman Who Broke Her Neck Doing An Inverted Sit-Up Has Shocked Doctors By Making a Full Recovery This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. Their efforts were thwarted within a few hours on Tuesday night when Floridas legislature rejected a ban on semiautomatic guns and large capacity magazines. Students were momentarily at a loss for words but quickly pushed together and refused to back down from efforts. Survivors confronted lawmakers and charged, "Never again" and "Shame on you!" at the state capital on Wednesday. That same day, schools across south Florida staged walk-outs in solidarity, with some students walking to the site of last weeks deadly incident. Story continues The Parkland students plan to meet elected officials on Wednesday, including Governor Rick Scott, who held a series of school safety workshops in Tallahassee on Tuesday to emphasize school emergency plans and an expansion of mental health services. Scott is expected to deliver a proposal on Friday that identifies issues from last week's school shooting and ways to prevent future occurrences. A town hall CNN debate, "Stand Up: The Students of Stoneman Douglas Demand Action," is being billed as an opportunity for students, parents and the Parkland community to take on elected officials, as well as the National Rifle Association (NRA) on national television Wednesday night. Most popular: Video: Jocelyne Lamoureux Downs Team Canada, Clinches U.S. Gold, With Triple Deke in Epic Olympic Shootout Some Stoneman Douglas students intend to be at President Donald Trumps listening session on Wednesday afternoon, where he was planning to meet survivors reeling from the tragedy. Trump plans to address gun laws and safety measures for schools, while advocating the steps as a priority for his administration. We must do more to protect our children, Trump said Tuesday at the presentation of the Medal of Valor to 12 public safety officials. A new national survey has also revealed that more Americans are in favor of stricter gun laws than ever before, according to the Quinnipiac University National Poll. In the aftermath of last week's mass shooting, it found that 66 percent of voters are in favor of stricter gun laws, compared to 31 percent against them. Following the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history in Las Vegas last fall, several bills were introduced in the House and Senate, such as the bipartisan measure banning "bump stocks," which give semi-automatic weapons the capability to be fired as if they were fully automatic. It had remained stalled, but under pressure, Trump moved to issue regulations to the Justice Department on Tuesday. This article was first written by Newsweek More from Newsweek By Johan Ahlander STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - Russia could try to influence the outcome of national elections in Sweden in September if authorities in Moscow feel their strategic interests are threatened, the Swedish security service said on Thursday. The service's head of counter-intelligence, Daniel Stenling, cited membership of NATO - which Sweden has debated joining - and security around the Baltic Sea as two important issues for Russia. "Russian espionage is still the biggest threat to Sweden," he told an annual press briefing. "We see that Russia has an intention to influence individual issues that are of strategic importance. If these issues become central in the election campaign, we can expect attempts at Russian influence." Stenling declined to say if his force had already seen evidence of such attempts. Russia - which has faced accusations of trying to affect the outcome of voting in the United States, France and Germany - has repeatedly denied meddling in elections in the West. On Tuesday, Latvia's Ministry of Defence said accusations of money laundering at one bank and bribery allegations against the central bank governor could be part of a foreign campaign to influence elections due there in October. It did not name a specific country Russia's annexation of the Crimean peninsula in 2014 and support for separatists in eastern Ukraine has strained relations with the West and the Baltic region has become a flashpoint. Sweden and other countries in the region have complained of repeated airspace violations by Russian military planes and Sweden has restationed troops on the strategically important island of Gotland in the Baltic Sea. Sweden has held military drills with several NATO members and has debated joining the military alliance for years. The Kremlin has warned of unspecified consequences if it did. The Social Democrats, the senior party in the current minority coalition government, have ruled out joining NATO. The security service said Sweden's decentralized, manual electoral system was difficult to manipulate, but the use of fake social media accounts and distribution of inaccurate news were also channels that could be used to influence opinion. Prime Minister Stefan Lofven has, along with many European colleagues, previously voiced concerns about possible foreign meddling and Sweden has set up a"psychological defense" agency. (Reporting by Johan Ahlander; editing by John Stonestreet) In the week since a gunman killed 17 people at a high school in Parkland, Florida, there has been a national reckoning from student-led marches to wall-to-wall media coverage to White House events about gun violence and how to stop it. For some black activists who have long been mobilizing around gun violence, the current wave of public attention and outrage over the issue is welcome. But it also invites the question of why theres been comparatively little attention and outrage focused on the even more common reality of routine gun homicides in the country, which disproportionately affect communities of color, and specifically black Americans. Prominent black organizers and public figures have also noted the largely positive public response to the student activists from Parkland most of whom are not black and who attended school in a largely white, relatively affluent Florida suburb compared to the frequent vilification of young black activists protesting gun violence, particularly police shootings. Its complicated, but I would encourage us to lean into the complicated, Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors said on a panel with HuffPost Editor-in-Chief Lydia Polgreen on Wednesday. Why dont black people get to be victims? Thats the question we have to ask ourselves ... Its a question not just for elected officials but its a question for us ... Who gets to be a victim? Im so grateful these children are getting the support they need, she added. And where is our support? This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. In the wake of the Florida shooting, students from Parklands Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School have led a bold wave of mobilizations organizing school walkouts, speaking at rallies and planning the nationwide March for Our Lives protest next month. The teens have been justifiably celebrated on social media, featured in the news (including at HuffPost), and some were even invited to the White House. HuffPost reached out to March for Our Lives, but did not immediately receive a response. Story continues Importantly, those bringing up this disparity are not criticizing the Parkland students activism quite the opposite. The only people seeking to discredit the teens so far seem to be right-wing conspiracy theorists claiming the teens are crisis actors. Still, the different public responses are telling: Theres justified, universal outrage at a shooting in a largely white, affluent area, but not so much at the frequent shooting deaths of black Americans; the public is praising Parklands student activists, but not so much Black Lives Matter organizers. Im excited these young people are getting attention, which they deserve, and theyre driving amazing social change, Dante Barry, co-founder of anti-racist, anti-violence organization Million Hoodies, told HuffPost on Thursday. But Im also disheartened and a little shocked to see folks like Oprah give $500,000 to [March for Our Lives], while shes seen black folks in the streets for years. The way people are responding to predominantly white communities is notable: Whose movement is more valuable to support? he added. Other communities that have been devastated by gun violence are still fighting for crumbs. Young black activists who have been mobilizing around gun violence, including police shootings, for several years are generally perceived negatively by white Americans, are often arrested for protesting, and have been labeled as extremists by the FBI. When black activists have taken to the streets to protest police shootings, members of law enforcement have met them in full riot gear, and at times attacked them with tear gas. By contrast, the largely non-black student activists from Parkland have been invited to a CNN town hall event with lawmakers. What happens is white people get to be everything they get to be victims, they get to be heroes, Cullors said on the Wednesday panel. Black people unfortunately continue to be criminalized for our moments of courage, mourning or grieving. When we go out to the streets to protest for our lives that matter, were given heavy police repression. This is a race question. A Black Lives Matter protester stands in front of St. Louis Police Department officers equipped with riot gear on Sept. 15, 2017. (Photo: Lawrence Bryant / Reuters) Mass shootings like the one in Florida often spur an important national conversation on gun control, particularly when shooters target schools, like at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, or when there are high death counts, like in Las Vegas last year. Yet while mass shootings have been on the rise in recent years, they represent just a portion of overall gun deaths in the U.S. annually. In total, there were around 12,500 to 15,500 gun deaths per year in the U.S. from 2014 to 2017, not including suicides, according to the Gun Violence Archive. According to data collected by Everytown for Gun Safety, an average of just over 100 people died each year in mass shootings from 2009 to 2016 with mass shootings defined as incidents in which four or more people were shot and killed, not including the shooter. The steady drumbeat of gun homicides that take place across the country every day disproportionately affect communities of color especially black people, who make up around 14 percent of the U.S. population but account for more than half the countrys gun homicide victims. There were also close to 2,000 police shootings annually in the past few years and black people are far more likely than their white peers to be killed in encounters with police. Im very impressed and inspired by what Im seeing these students do. Fighting for gun control I take my hat off to them, Cobe Williams, deputy director at Chicago-based gun violence prevention organization Cure Violence told HuffPost on Wednesday. I like what theyre doing, and were doing this on an everyday basis, he said. I applaud them, but we see this violence on an everyday basis. It could be one person or 24 people one person shot and killed is too many. Love HuffPost? Become a founding member of HuffPost Plus today. Also on HuffPost Protesters lie on the ground during a demonstration supporting gun control. Demonstrators chant during Monday's protest. Students and supporters hold signs as they protest outside the White House. Students protest against gun violence. Demonstrators chant outside the White House. Students and supporters gather on Pennsylvania Avenue. This article originally appeared on HuffPost. The superintendent of a Houston-area school district threatened students with three-day suspensions if they participate in gun violence protests during school hours. Student-led protests and walkouts have erupted across the country in the wake of the deadly mass shooting last week at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, that left 17 people dead. Participants have focused their energy on demanding lawmakers take action against gun violence. But Curtis Rhodes, superintendent of Needville Independent School District, warned students that they would face consequences for participating in such demonstrations. Please be advised that the Needville ISD will not allow a student demonstration during school hours for any type of protest or awareness!! Rhodes wrote in a statement posted Tuesday to Needville High Schools Facebook page. Should students choose to do so, they will be suspended from school for 3 days and face all the consequences that come along with an out of school suspension. Life is all about choices and every choice has a consequence whether it be positive or negative, he wrote. We will discipline no matter if it is one, fifty, or five hundred students involved. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. Amanda Johnson, a volunteer with the Texas chapter of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, accused Rhodes of fear-mongering and creating a missed opportunity. I cant believe that the superintendent, instead of cooperating with the students, is threatening them the way that he is, she said. School shootings are far more disruptive than a school walkout. School officials at one high school in Hollywood, Florida, roughly 30 miles to the south of Stoneman Douglas, told students there would consequences if they participated in a walkout on Wednesday. Ben Gamla Preparatory Academy Principal Gayle Iacono later agreed to let students protest for 17 minutes at noon in the school parking lot. But when students began the demonstration, they found the schools entry gates were locked, preventing them from leaving the school grounds. Story continues Students who jumped the fence to protest in front of the school were led back to class by school security personnel, according to local ABC affiliate WPLG-TV. Representatives for the Needville district and Ben Gamla Preparatory did not immediately respond to HuffPosts requests for comment. In contrast, some school districts have taken a more supportive approach to the demonstrations. For instance, the Leon County school system in Tallahassee, Florida, announced that it would excuse students who participated in a rally Wednesday at the state Capitol. Parents ultimately decide whether their children should attend school or participate in an out of school activity, a statement posted to the districts Facebook page said. These kids have got a very valid concern, Johnson said, noting that her organizations membership on Facebook had tripled since last weeks shooting. Theyre literally in fear for their lives. Love HuffPost? Become a founding member of HuffPost Plus today. This article originally appeared on HuffPost. By Jon Herskovitz AUSTIN, Texas (Reuters) - Texas Governor Greg Abbott commuted the death sentence of a convicted murderer less than an hour before he was set to be executed on Thursday, after the death row inmate's family begged for mercy and won a rare clemency recommendation. Florida executed a man convicted of the 1993 rape and murder of a college student, the state's Department of Corrections said. Alabama halted its planned execution on Thursday of a convicted murderer who has spent more than three decades on death row after his lawyers warned his failing health left him with veins that were unusable for a lethal injection. In Texas, Thomas Whitaker, 38, was convicted of masterminding a 2003 plot against his family in which his mother Tricia, 51, and brother Kevin, 19, were killed. His father Kent was shot in the chest but survived. Kent Whitaker, a devout Christian and retired executive, said he had forgiven his son and that his family did not want him to be executed. The father said in a clemency petition it was his right as a victim to seek mercy and it would make his pain worse if the death penalty were implemented. The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles recommended clemency in a unanimous decision on Tuesday based largely on the father's request. Abbott, a Republican, commuted the sentence to life in prison without the possibility of parole, saying various factors influenced his decision, including the father's wishes and the board's recommendation. Thomas Whitaker said: "I'm thankful for this decision, not for me but for my dad." "Whatever punishment I might have received or will receive will be just. I deserve any punishment for my crimes but my dad did nothing wrong," he was quoted as saying by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. Florida executed Eric Branch, 47, by lethal injection for the 1993 murder of University of West Florida student Susan Morris, the Department of Corrections said. His execution was the fourth this year in the United States, with the previous three in Texas. Story continues Alabama planned to execute Doyle Hamm, 61, at 6 p.m. (midnight GMT) for the 1987 murder of motel clerk Patrick Cunningham. It was delayed for a few hours for the U.S. Supreme Court to consider an appeal and eventually called off because the state "had insufficient time to prepare the inmate," prisons spokesman Bob Horton said. In legal filings, lawyers for Hamm said he has terminal lymphatic cancer, untreated carcinoma and severely compromised veins. They said Alabama was crafting a specialized protocol for the execution that was being rushed through, increasing the chances the procedure will be botched. The state responded that it knew what it was doing and could handle the lethal injection. It has not provided further details on why it halted the execution. (Reporting by Jon Herskovitz; Additional reporting by David Beasley in Atlanta and Bernie Woodall in Fort Lauderdale, Florida; Editing by Peter Cooney, Lisa Shumaker and Chris Reese) Washington (AFP) - Texas Governor Greg Abbott on Thursday issued a last-minute reprieve for a death row prisoner who hired a gunman to kill his family after his father, whom he sought to murder, pleaded for his son's life. Thomas Bartlett "Bart" Whitaker, 38, had been one of three men awaiting execution Thursday in three different US states. Another, Eric Branch, was executed as scheduled in Florida for the 1993 murder of a student. In a proclamation explaining his decision on Whitaker, Abbott wrote that the prisoner "must spend the remainder of his life behind bars as punishment for this heinous crime." The governor said he had taken into consideration the fact that "the person who fired the gun that killed the victims did not receive the death penalty, but Mr Whitaker, who did not fire the gun, did get the death penalty." He added: "Mr Whitaker's father, who survived the attempt on his life, passionately opposes the execution of his son. Mr Whitaker's father insists that he would be victimized again if the state put to death his last remaining immediate family member." - 'Thankful' - The Texas Department of Criminal Justice later issued a statement quoting Whitaker's reaction to the news. "I'm thankful for this decision, not for me but for my Dad," he said. "Whatever punishment I might have received or will receive will be just. "I deserve any punishment for my crimes, but my Dad did nothing wrong. The system worked for him today, and I will do my best to uphold my end of the bargain." Kent Whitaker had moved heaven and earth for years to try to get mercy for his son, whom he forgave from his hospital bed. Bart Whitaker was sentenced to death for hiring the hitman who killed his mother and brother and wounded his father in 2003. The gunman also shot him in the arm to provide a cover story for the family slaying. Police had originally assumed the shooting was a botched robbery, although the fact that only Bart's cell phone had been taken raised suspicions. Story continues Bart returned to live with his wounded father for seven months before it emerged that it was the son who hired the gunman. Kent, a devout Christian, said he had initially been "mad at God" after being shot in the thorax by the masked assailant who took the lives of his wife Tricia, 51, and his 19-year-old son Kevin. "I was wrestling with my faith," he said. "But God met me in the hospital room on the night of the shootings and helped me arrive at a 'miracle' forgiveness for everyone involved." "I live with the extent of the loss every day and am aware of how much it has cost me -- and am completely aware that all of that loss was the result of decisions made by my son," he said. - Executing a dying man - "But God helped me reach that complete forgiveness and I think He did that to help me rebuild my relationship with my son." Meanwhile, officials in Florida executed Eric Branch for murdering a student in 1993. The Florida Department of Corrections said he was visited by his daughter in the morning. His lawyers had launched final appeals based on the fact Branch was only 21 years old -- and therefore, they say, cognitively comparable to a juvenile -- at the time of his conviction, nor was he sentenced to death by a unanimous jury. Meanwhile, in Alabama, Doyle Hamm was facing execution after spending three decades on death row. He was condemned to death in 1987 for the murder of a motel employee during an armed robbery. Hamm is already dying of cranial and lymphatic cancer, and his lawyers fear execution by lethal injection would be torture, as he no longer has suitable veins. However, after a bitter legal battle, a court finally ruled on Tuesday that Hamm's execution will go ahead, on condition that he is injected in his legs or feet -- instead of his arms or hands, as would usually be the case. The Supreme Court issued a stay to halt the execution at 6 pm (2300 GMT), while it considers a last-minute appeal. In recent times, the highest number of executions in a single day occurred on December 9, 1999, when Oklahoma, Indiana, Texas and Virginia all executed a prisoner. But the highest number ever was on December 6, 1862 in Minnesota, when federal authorities hanged 38 members of the Dakota people, a Native American tribe. Washington (AFP) - Two death row inmates have won last minute reprieves, including a man whose father pleaded for his life even though his son had hired a hitman to kill his family, officials say. Texas Governor Greg Abbott issued the rare reprieve for Thomas Bartlett "Bart" Whitaker, 38, who had been sentenced to die Thursday for a 2003 murder-for-hire that took his mother and brother's life and left his father seriously wounded. "Mr Whitaker must spend the remainder of his life behind bars as punishment for this heinous crime," Abbott wrote in a proclamation explaining his decision, shortly before the scheduled execution. Meanwhile, convicted murderer Eric Branch was executed on schedule in Florida, but in Alabama an attempt to administer a lethal injection to another death row inmate, Doyle Hamm, failed, causing that execution to be halted. In commuting Whitaker's death sentence, Abbott said he had taken into consideration the fact that "the person who fired the gun that killed the victims did not receive the death penalty, but Mr Whitaker, who did not fire the gun, did get the death penalty." He added: "Mr Whitaker's father, who survived the attempt on his life, passionately opposes the execution of his son. Mr Whitaker's father insists that he would be victimized again if the state put to death his last remaining immediate family member." Kent Whitaker had moved heaven and earth for years to try to get mercy for his son, whom he forgave from his hospital bed. Police had originally assumed the shooting was a botched robbery, although the fact that only Bart's cell phone had been taken raised suspicions. Bart returned to live with his wounded father for seven months before the truth emerged that it was the son who hired the gunman. Kent, a devout Christian, said he had initially been "mad at God" after being shot in the thorax by the masked assailant who took the lives of his wife Tricia, 51, and his 19-year-old son Kevin. Story continues - Alabama execution halted - "I was wrestling with my faith," he said. "But God met me in the hospital room on the night of the shootings and helped me arrive at a 'miracle' forgiveness for everyone involved," he said. "Long before I ever even suspected that that forgiveness might extend to my own son." "I live with the extent of the loss every day and am aware of how much it has cost me -- and am completely aware that all of that loss was the result of decisions made by my son," he said. "But God helped me reach that complete forgiveness and I think He did that to help me rebuild my relationship with my son." Meanwhile, in Alabama, a state penitentiary system spokesman said Hamm's execution was suspended "out of an abundance of caution" because a vein could not be found that would take the lethal injection. Hamm was already dying of cranial and lymphatic cancer, and his lawyers had argued that he no longer had suitable veins and that a lethal injection would be torture. "This is exactly what I have been saying since July. Since July, I have been telling the state of Alabama that Doyle Lee Hamm does not have adequate veins for a lethal injection," Hamm's lawyer, Bernard Harcourt, said. The US Supreme Court had ruled late Thursday that the execution could proceed. Hamm, who has spent three decades on death row, was condemned to death in 1987 for the murder of a motel employee during an armed robbery. In Florida, Eric Branch, who was convicted of the 1993 murder of a student, was put to death at 7:05 pm Thursday (0005 GMT Friday) after last minute appeals were exhausted. His lawyers had argued that Branch, 21 at the time of the murder, was cognitively comparable to a juvenile and that the jury was not unanimous in sentencing him to death. In recent times, the highest number of executions in a single day occurred on December 9, 1999, when Oklahoma, Indiana, Texas and Virginia all executed a prisoner. But the highest number ever was on December 6, 1862 in Minnesota, when federal authorities hanged 38 members of the Dakota people, a Native American tribe. The top trends from London Fashion Week (Photo: Getty/Art: Quinn Lemmers) London Fashion Week was extra special this season for two main reasons: First, Queen Elizabeth II attended her first ever runway show for Richard Quinn, the recipient of her inaugural Queen Elizabeth II Award for British Design. Second, Christopher Bailey bid goodbye to Burberry, staging his final show for the British fashion house, a brand he has been with and helped grow into a multi-billion-dollar enterprise in the past 17 years. Designers like Quinn, who are still emerging in the fashion industry, as well as seasoned designers like Bailey, are a reminder that both new and old talent continue to shine at LFW. New brands like Halpern showed alongside successful labels like Marques Almeida, Simone Rocha, and Ashish, all of which continue to provide the flair and design wit that fashionistas have always loved about British design. This year was no different, with the exception of one newcomer who was not British, but Spanish: Delpozo. The brand has shown at NYFW for the past five seasons, but decided to decamp to LFW for the first time this year. Below, see the top four trends from London Fashion Week, and shop them now via our curated Polyvore trend boards: LFW Fall 2018 Trend Guide (Photo: Getty/Art: Quinn Lemmers) Christopher Baileys last show at Burberry paid tribute to the LGBTQ community in a powerful display of rainbow pride. His collection was full of color: rainbow-colored knits, ponchos, and coats all layered and intermixed with Burberrys classic check print. Other designers jumped onboard, with a 1970s style peace and love aesthetic, like Ashishs All I Want Is Love sweater and Molly Goddards take on a 70s psychedelic dress. LFW FW18 Trend Guide: Peace and Love LFW FW18 Trend Guide: Peace and Love by yahoostylebeauty Daisy Street cutout crop top, $29/Vans elastic shoes, $55/Milly crew neck top, $140/Kenneth Jay Lane geometric earrings, $115/Spiritual Gangster Rainbow Bebe white pants, $148 LFW Fall 2018 Trend Guide (Photo: Getty/Art: Quinn Lemmers) With Phoebe Philo soon to be out at Celine, is minimalism on its way out, too? Perhaps. At LFW, maximalist style thrived. Designers appear to be shifting towards bold, vibrant prints, colors, and cuts, as seen at Delpozo, Halpern, Richard Quinn, and Burberry. This fall, dont be nervous about mixing and matching your favorite bold floral printed dresses, blouses, coats, and even patterned hosiery. Remember, fortune favors the bold. Story continues LFW FW18 Trend Guide: Maximalism LFW FW18 Trend Guide: Maximalism by yahoostylebeauty Samoon womens plus size jacket, $215/Diane Von Furstenberg special occasion dress, $327/Max&Co. red blouse, $120/Gucci white jacket, $3,400 LFW Fall 2018 Trend Guide (Photo: Getty/Art: Quinn Lemmers) Tartan has been a part of Scottish history that continues to be reinvented, whether adopted by the grunge era, or by preppy and cheery Cher Horowitz on Clueless. For Isa Arfens first runway show at LFW, the designer introduced several tartan looks, including the off-the-shoulder ruffled blouse shown above, styled with cuffed jeans. As these British designers suggest, tartan can also be worn on dressier occasions, like Simone Rocha, who debuted a red-and-black bowtie tartan dress. LFW FW18 Trend Guide: Tartan LFW FW18 Trend Guide: Tartan by yahoostylebeauty Burberry coat, $2,640/Christopher Kane red miniskirt, $730/J.Crew vest, $64/Miu Miu shoulder handbag, $1,005 LFW Fall 2018 Trend Guide (Photo: Getty/Art: Quinn Lemmers) Logo mania and political statements have dominated seasons past, but now its all about quick-witted slogans. Mary Katrantzou was inspired by the iconic German architecture school Bauhaus for her latest collection, putting Work of Art across the hem on one of her heavy graphic dresses. Marques Almeida splashed Power Woman across a sweatshirt, while Christopher Kane took a more somber approach, writing More Joy on a black turtleneck. LFW FW18 Trend Guide: Slogans LFW FW18 Trend Guide: Slogans by yahoostylebeauty Mango embroidered top, $22/Mango tee shirt, $11/ Mango white top, $20/Dsquared2 print T- shirt, $270/Maison Margiela mens short sleeve shirt, $430/Lingua Franca blue shirt, $370/Mango mens cotton sweater, $70/Etsy blue shirt, $25 Read More from Yahoo Lifestyle: Fracking is the latest political statement at Fashion Week All the prettiest, boldest, and most powerful pantsuits from New York Fashion Week Calvin Kleins runway highlights Multiple Chemical Sensitivity disorder. What is it? Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter for nonstop inspiration delivered fresh to your feed, every day. The Trump administration has denied asylum to more than 100 Iranian Christians and other refugees who face possible persecution in their home country, despite White House promises to relieve the plight of religious minorities in the Middle East. The group of refugees, mostly Christians along with other non-Muslims, have been stranded in Vienna for more than a year, waiting for final approval to resettle in the United States. Now they face possible deportation back to Iran, where rights advocates say they face potential retaliation or imprisonment by the regime in Tehran for seeking asylum in the United States. U.S. Vice President Mike Pence has vowed action to alleviate the suffering of Christians in the region and the administration has condemned Tehrans treatment of religious minorities. But critics say the decision on the Iranian Christians shows the administration had failed to live up to its own rhetoric. The hypocrisy of this administration has no boundaries, said Hans Van de Weerd, vice president for U.S. programs at the International Rescue Committee. It criticizes the Iranian regime, encouraged the protests, but refuses to provide safety to those who flee and are not safe from the Iranian government. The Iranians applied for visas under a U.S. law known as the Lautenberg Amendment, designed to provide special refugee status to persecuted religious minorities, allowing them to resettle in the United States. The 1989 law was originally written to help Jews in the former Soviet Union and later was expanded to include Christian and other minorities in former Soviet states and Iran. Before President Donald Trump entered office, similar refugee cases under the Lautenberg Amendment had an approval rate of close to 100 percent. Prior to arriving in Vienna, the refugees go through initial screening, and Austria then issues transit visas on request of the State Department. Once in Austria, the refugees are interviewed by U.S. authorities. Story continues In the past, the procedure took a matter of weeks or a few months. But the process has ground to a virtual halt under Trumps tenure, and rights groups say the administration could be violating the U.S. law. The Lautenberg Amendment obliges the U.S. government to explain the reason for a denial of refugee status to the maximum extent feasible. But the applicants are being told that the denial is a matter of discretion, rights advocates say. A spokesperson for the State Department told Foreign Policy that the applications for resettlement had been rejected by the Department of Homeland Security but declined to provide a reason or other details. The DHS did not respond to requests for comment. These individuals were subject to the same rigorous process for resettlement as all refugees and, following input from all relevant departments and agencies, the applications for resettlement were denied, the spokesperson said in an email to FP. The United States, Austria, and other governments are working on possible options for the refugees, including resettlement or asylum elsewhere, according to the spokesperson. The United States will not force anyone to return to Iran, the official added. Rights advocates and experts who monitor the treatment of Christian communities abroad say the Iranians have few options and will most likely be forced to travel back to Iran, where they will face potential retaliation and imprisonment. The Iranians in Vienna are in desperate circumstances. Without income or the right to stay in Austria, they have but no choice to be deported to Iran, unless another nation steps up or Austria grants them asylum, said Van de Weerd of the International Rescue Committee. More than 4,500 other Iranians are registered in the program and have sponsors in the United States. But they are waiting in Iran for approval to travel to Vienna, Van de Weerd said. Trump has taken a tough stance on immigration, imposing restrictions on how many refugees the United States will accept and seeking a travel ban on citizens from a number of mainly Muslim countries, including Iran. But he has also promised to provide help for Christians in the Middle East. The apparent shift in how Washington enforces protections for certain categories of refugees has raised fears that the administration is seeking even broader limits on refugee resettlement. Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle have expressed serious concern over the case. Republican Rep. Randy Hultgren of Illinois and Democratic Rep. Jim McGovern of Massachusetts wrote a letter last month to Vice President Pence accusing the Departments of Homeland Security and State of thwarting the purpose of this law by failing to grant the presumption of eligibility to these applicants. The group of applicants marooned in Vienna include elderly and disabled people, and it was difficult to see any security threat from them, the letter stated. This sudden change in policy from almost a hundred percent acceptance rate to nearly complete rejection makes no sense, even on security grounds, the congressmen wrote. Moreover, Iranians previously admitted under the program with similar backgrounds have not posed a threat to the United States, it said. Since the Lautenberg Amendment was expanded in 2004 to include Iranians, about 30,000 have resettled in the United States. Apart from Assyrian and Armenian Christians in Iran, members of the Jewish, Mandaean, Zoroastrian, and Bahai communities have also received refugee status and resettled in the United States under the law. Irans Constitution, which portrays the Islamic Republic as an instrument of divine will, recognizes Shiite Islam as the official state religion. But while Iranian law contains provisions promoting religious freedom, it also places restrictions on the rights of religious minorities and treats members of the Bahai faith as heretics. Irans government denies that that religious minorities face persecution. The countrys mission at the United Nations in New York was not immediately available to comment. Conservative celebrity Ben Shapiro had a simple message to President Donald Trump: Stop lying. The message was delivered, with customary bluntness, during the Daily Wire editors CPAC speech Thursday afternoon. And it was generally well received by the hundreds of conservatives who packed a ballroom here in National Harbor, Maryland, to hear the young conservative thinker speak. We have to tell the truth, Shapiro urged his fellow conservatives. Although most of his speech was devoted to attacking the liberal culture of political correctnessa concept he neglected to defineShapiro explicitly criticized Trump for bragging about his inauguration crowd and seeming to side with the white nationalists involved in a deadly rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, last summer. "It is nonsense, it is immoral and it actually helps those who push PC, Shapiro said, using the acronym for political correctness, the defeat of which was the central subject of his speech, which he gave in his trademark rapid-fire delivery. Trending: Iran Plans Nuclear Submarines In Defiance of U.S. And Trump's Warnings This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. Although Shapiros criticism of Trump was relatively mild, it was nevertheless notable at CPAC, where the Trump presidency has been the source of unending adulation. Trump will speak at the conference on Friday morning, a day on from his Vice President Mike Pence taking the stage. When he first came to CPAC in 2011, Trump was something of a curiosity for conservatives. Now, he is the leader of the movement. Don't miss: Russian Embassy Cocaine Probe Reveals 12 Suitcases Filled with 858 Pounds of 'Very High Purity' Drug GettyImages-922967666 Alex Wong/Getty Images For the most part, however, it was Democrats and liberals who were the targets of Shapiros vitriol. What to others might be a contest between political parties is, for Shapiro, a Manichean struggle between conservatism and pure evil, otherwise known as the Democratic Party. Story continues We need to show that they're the liars, Shapiro said, and we're the truth tellers." This article was first written by Newsweek More from Newsweek People protest the Trump administration ending Temporary Protected Status for people from El Salvador in New York City: REUTERS/Andrew Kelly Donald Trumps racism against certain classes of immigrants invalidates his move to end protections for Haitians and El Salvadorans in the US, a new lawsuit alleges. President Trump has long made clear his dislike and disregard for Latino and Black immigrants, a complaint filed in a Massachusetts district court argues. The legal challenge, filed by the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights and Economic Justice on behalf of eight Haitian and El Salvadoran immigrants, contests the Trump administrations decision to rescind a designation that has allowed hundreds of thousands of immigrants from struggling nations to remain in America. In recent months the administration announced that it would phase out Temporary Protected Status (TPS) grants that were instituted after earthquakes devastated Haiti and El Salvador. Some 300,000 people from those countries have secured TPS, according to the lawsuit. The Department of Homeland Security has said the situations on the ground have improved enough in El Salvador and Haiti for people to return home. People from Haiti will see their statuses expire in June of 2019, with TPS set to end for Salvadorans in September of 2019. While the legal challenge disputes the notion that either country has stabilised enough to justify ending TPS - noting subsequent natural disasters, extreme gang violence in El Salvador and Haiti remaining economically stagnant - it also argues that Mr Trumps move to suspend TPS is impermissibly tainted by racial animus and therefore cannot stand. Official justifications are nothing but a thin and pretextual smokescreen for a racially discriminatory immigration agenda, the lawsuit alleges. It cites examples of Mr Trumps incendiary immigration rhetoric, including his references to rapists and people bringing crime from Mexico and Latin American during the presidential campaign and instances in which he reportedly said African immigrants would not want to return to their huts, denigrated Haitians as all having AIDS and complained about immigrants from s***hole countries during a discussion about immigrants from Haiti and El Salvador. Story continues The animus directed towards Latino and Black immigrants is a clear and unfortunate thread ruling throughout President Trumps statements - and his actualized by his Administrations policies, the complaint says. The Department of Homeland Security declined to comment on pending litigation. The White House has strenuously denied that Mr Trump holds racist views, as has the president himself. Washington (AFP) - US President Donald Trump has rolled out fresh sanctions against North Korea-linked shipping assets, hailing the package as the "heaviest sanctions ever" levied on the Pyongyang regime. Trump used a speech to conservatives just outside Washington to step up his campaign of "maximum pressure" designed to force North Korea to roll back its weapons programs. "We imposed today the heaviest sanctions ever imposed on a country before," Trump claimed at the end of a lengthy campaign-style address Friday. In light of past US embargoes, that is likely an overstatement, but Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin confirmed the sanctions covered "virtually all the ships" North Korea is "using at this moment in time." Speaking to reporters in Pyeongchang Saturday on a visit to the Winter Olympics, White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said: "Hopefully we'll see a change on the part of the North Koreans to start to denuclearise the peninsula, that's what our focus is." She added: "I can tell you the president won't make the mistakes the previous administration has and be soft or weak." Trump's administration is locked in a nuclear standoff with Pyongyang, which is trying to develop missiles that could deliver an atomic weapon to major US cities. The latest sanctions are designed to put the squeeze on North Korea's already precarious economy and fuel supply. In his speech Friday Trump had been expected to provide details of measures that target "56 vessels, shipping companies, and trade businesses," but skipped that part of his prepared remarks. "Frankly hopefully something positive can happen," he said instead. During a joint press conference with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, Trump said sanctions were only the first step. "If the sanctions don't work, we'll have to go to phase two. Phase two may be a very rough thing," he said, without elaborating. Story continues Mnuchin said there were signs the punitive measures were starting to have an impact, but did not elaborate. The North Korean military and broader economy depend heavily on imports of coal and oil from China and Russia. China, Pyongyang's only major ally, has steadfastly rebuffed Washington's calls for a full oil embargo -- fearing the chaotic collapse of the Pyongyang regime -- but has accepted caps agreed at the United Nations. - Reaffirming ties with Seoul - The timing of the new measures coincides with the arrival in South Korea of Trump's daughter Ivanka. She is attending the closing ceremony of the Winter Olympics, which have taken place against the backdrop of the crisis. The 36-year-old businesswoman and now top aide to her father has been tasked with reaffirming US ties with South Korea, which have been strained over how to deal with the North. She was hosted in Seoul by President Moon Jae-in, who has long advocated talks rather than confrontation with North Korea. "Mrs. Trump delivered a personal message to President Moon from President Trump about today's North Korea related sanctions announcement at a small meeting at the Blue House," the White House said. "They also discussed the continued effort on the joint maximum pressure campaign against North Korea." South Korean officials, who sit in a capital well within range of conventional North Korea artillery, have been spooked by Trump's talk of military confrontation. US officials worry meanwhile that North Korea is luring Moon into talks that are designed to go nowhere. North Korea's delegation at the closing ceremony will be headed by top general Kim Yong Chol, who is widely blamed for a series of attacks against the South including the 2010 sinking of a warship, with the loss of 46 lives. The White House spokeswoman said Ivanka would probably sit apart from the North Korean delegation at Sunday's closing ceremony. The Conservative Political Action Conference kicks off on Thursday, with scheduled speeches by Vice President Mike Pence and controversial French political figure Marechal-Le Pen, the niece of far-right leader Marine Le Pen. The conference held just outside Washington, D.C. in National Harbor, Maryland brings together conservative leaders each year. Pence is scheduled to speak Thursday at 10:35 a.m., and President Donald Trump is scheduled to address the conference shortly after 10 a.m. on Friday. Members of his Cabinet will also make appearances during the four-day conference, including Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, Energy Secretary Rick Perry and Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke. Wayne LaPierre, CEO and executive vice president of the National Rifle Association, is expected to speak at the conference, but his name has been kept off the published agenda. The NRA is a sponsor of the conference, but the organization has been facing heavy backlash in the wake of a high school shooting last week that left 17 people dead. Watch a livestream of the conference here. A social media campaign has been launched by teachers, who are using the hashtag #ArmMeWith to suggest how they would prevent another school shooting instead of providing them with guns. The debate on arming teachers has once again been ignited in the wake of the massacre at Parkland, Florida, where suspected gunman Nikolas Cruz killed 17 people after opening fire at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. President Donald Trump suggested that arming around 20 percent of teachers who are very adept at firearms could end an attack at a school very quickly. Trending: Pence Strikes a Somber, Conciliatory Tone At CPAC Even before Trump made the suggestion in front of survivors of the Parkland school shooting during a listening session at the White House, thousands of teachers were sharing their own ideas on how to prevent another tragedy using #ArmMeWith. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. #armmewith the resources and funding needed to help students experiencing mental health issues, suggested Brittany Wheaton, one of the first teachers to post using the hashtag. Southern Californian teacher Kimberly DeAllen said she needs to be armed with diverse books so I can better equip kids to celebrate differences. Margarette Anne used the hashtag to simply request that she be provided with pencils, paper, technology, books, art supplies, science supplies, school counsellorsNOT GUNS. Thousands of teachers across the U.S. have used the hashtag on Twitter and Instagram, with requests ranging from politicians who care more about kids than donations to smaller class sizes so that no student feels invisible." Among those who echoed teachers' statements was Mark Barden, a parent whose son Daniel was killed during the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting in Newtown, Connecticut in 2012. During Trump's listening session, Barden told the president, "Schoolteachers have more than enough responsibilities right now, then to have to have the awesome responsibility of lethal force to take a life. Story continues This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. As the debate continues, one law enforcement official has claimed that hundreds of teachers agree they should be armed in the wake of the Parkland shooting. Sheriff Richard Jones of Butler County, Ohio, said he had an incredible response after tweeted an offer of free concealed-carry classes to any teachers in his country. We have reached our limit. We had to cut it off at 300, he told Newsweek on Wednesday. In a series of tweets following the session with Parkland survivors, President Trump said he never said give teachers guns. This article was first written by Newsweek More from Newsweek Miami (AFP) - A police officer will be stationed at every public school in Florida, the state's governor announced Friday as part of a plan to improve security following last week's deadly high school shooting. President Donald Trump repeated his call, meanwhile, for arming some of America's teachers and claimed the controversial proposal was increasingly drawing support. The push to make schools safer came as the local sheriff's office released details of nearly two dozen visits to the residences of Nikolas Cruz, the 19-year-old behind the assault at Marjory Douglas Stoneman High School in Parkland, Florida. Speaking at a news conference in the state capital Tallahassee, Republican Governor Rick Scott unveiled a $450 million security plan in response to the Valentine's Day rampage. "There is nothing more important than the safety of our children," Scott said. "We must take care of our kids." "I am proposing at least one law enforcement officer for every 1,000 students," Scott said of putting police in public schools. Asked about Trump's proposal that teachers carry concealed weapons, Scott replied: "My focus is on providing more law enforcement officers, not on arming the teachers." Scott proposed a ban on "bump stocks" -- an accessory which turns a semi-automatic weapon into an automatic one -- and making it easier for courts "to prohibit a violent or mentally ill person from purchasing or possessing a firearm." Scott also said the age for gun buyers in the state would be raised from 18 to 21 -- a move opposed by the powerful National Rifle Association (NRA) gun lobby. The governor stopped short, however, of endorsing a ban on assault weapons -- a demand of many of the teenagers who survived the shooting at Stoneman Douglas that left 14 of their classmates and three staff dead. "I know there are some who are advocating a mass takeaway of Second Amendment rights for all Americans," Scott said -- referring to America's constitutional right to bear arms. "That is not the answer." Story continues "Keeping guns away from dangerous people and people with mental issues is what we need to do," he said. Trump also does not support a ban on semi-automatic weapons and in a speech to a conservative gathering near Washington, he returned again to his idea of arming teachers. - 'Shot the hell out of him' - Speaking to a receptive crowd of thousands of fellow Republicans at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), Trump said "well-trained" teachers could help stop school shootings. "Maybe 10 percent or 20 percent of the population of teachers," he said. "Not all of them, but you would have a lot. "And the beauty is it's concealed," Trump said. Referring to Cruz, the Stoneman Douglas assailant, Trump said "a teacher would have shot the hell out of him before he knew what happened." Trump claimed his proposal to arm teachers, which has been strongly criticized by the nation's largest teachers' unions, was drawing support. "Since I started this two days ago, a lot of people that were totally opposed to it are now agreeing," he said. "They don't want their students to be killed or to be hurt." Trump proposed measures preventing the mentally ill from obtaining weapons and to "really strengthen up background checks" for gun buyers. "And I really believe that Congress is going to get it through this time," he said. Lawmakers in Washington have been deadlocked on the gun debate, accomplishing nothing despite a spate of mass shootings and polls showing Americans support stricter gun laws by a two-to-one margin. - 'Coward' - Trump also criticized by name the sheriff's deputy who allegedly failed to take action against Cruz during the shooting spree, saying he had been a "coward." Scot Peterson has resigned after being suspended without pay. Three other Broward Country Sheriff's deputies also stayed outside the school and did not enter as the crisis unfolded, US media reported. The Wall Street Journal obtained a transcript of a call from a tipster to the FBI more than one month before the massacre, in which she expressed concern Cruz would "get into a school and just shoot the place up." The FBI has said it received such a call, which did not lead to any law enforcement followup, from a person close to Cruz, but it was the first time the details were made public. The 19-year-old had amassed multiple guns following his mother's death in November, and had posted on social media that "he wants to kill people," the caller said, describing a history of disruptive and violent behavior. "I know he's -- he's going to explode," she warned. The sheriff's office also released details of 23 calls to the various homes where Cruz lived over the past nine years. The earliest call dates from November 2008 when Cruz, then nine years old, threw a rock at another boy who had thrown a rock at him. Other calls to the police were from Cruz's late mother, Linda, after she was involved in altercations with her son or he was fighting with his brother. Two of the most disturbing calls -- in February 2016 and November 2017 -- were tips that Cruz was armed and may be planning to attack a school. The sheriff's office said an internal investigation was underway into how those calls were handled. President Trump has listed his decision last June to withdraw from the Paris Agreement on climate change high among his first-year accomplishments, describing the deal as totally disastrous, job killing, wealth knocking out at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Friday. But Trump might shift gears when the politics behind it change and has suggested to foreign counterparts that he would be open to keeping the U.S. in the agreement under the right terms, a former White House aide told TIME this week. The president talks about it when hes in meetings with foreign leaders overseas, says George David Banks, a former White House energy and environment adviser. Its not scripted. Hes not using talking points prepared by staff. He says it because its what he believes. Hes interested because he likes the idea of working out a better deal. Banks, who resigned last week after he was informed that he would not receive a permanent security clearance as a result of his past marijuana use, suggested that Trump could use returning to the Paris Agreement as a talking point in the 2020 election to appeal to moderates. It also would boost U.S. as it hosts that years G7 summit, says Banks. The president can walk out of his meeting with G7 Heads of State and say I renegotiated the Paris Agreement, says Banks. He takes it off the campaign and scores points with independents. But Trump would not actually be renegotiating the global deal, which won the unanimous support of more than 190 countries when it was brokered in 2015. Instead, Trump would likely revise downward the U.S. pledge to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Under President Obama, the U.S. said it would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by as much as 28% by 2025 with that reduction achieved in part through policies like the now-defunct Clean Power Plan. Trump could simply promise to meet current projections from the Energy Information Administration that show energy-related greenhouse emissions leveling off by the middle of the century. Story continues Such a move would allow Trump to claim that he had renegotiated the global deal on terms more favorable for the U.S., even though climate policy experts generally agree that countries can revise their commitments downward without any special renegotiation. That would remain in keeping with Trumps rhetoric about the U.S. only participating in global deals if it benefits the U.S. economy. It would have been a disaster for our country, Trump said at CPAC. They basically wanted to take our wealth away. Still, Trump remaining in the Paris Agreement at that point might be a Pyrrhic victory of sorts. Setting a lower greenhouse gas reduction target is not in keeping with the spirit of the global agreement. The deal calls for countries to periodically strengthen their targets and recent research suggests that countries commitments fall short of the deals goals. Moreover, many diplomats engaged on climate change policy have come to doubt that Trumps behind-the-scenes offer to reengage on the Paris Agreement is made in good faith. It may leave a few people guessing, but it doesnt buy you back your credibility, said former Secretary of State John Kerry last year of the administrations flirtation with reengagement. It doesnt put you at the table the way the United States should be. Ancient sketches of Ice Age animals, stenciled hands, and symbols painted on walls inside three Spanish caves were long suspected to have been left by humans. But with enhanced dating techniques, scientists now believe our thick-browed and extinct evolutionary cousins, Neanderthals, were truly responsible for the art. This would mean that we've been giving our hominid ancestors too little credit for their abilities. Researchers found these paintings are at least around 65,000 years old, predating the arrival of humans in Europe by some 20,000 years. Assuming the dating is accurate, then these paintings would be the earliest known cave art in the world. SEE ALSO: The accidental library: Why Elon Musk launched books to space that could last 14 billion years The research, published Thursday in the journal Science, concludes that in the absence of humans, Neanderthals must have created the advanced art, underscoring that these hominids were quite smart perhaps even matching our own intelligence. "These papers simply confirm what has been evident in other aspects of the archeological record and their biologies, that there are no evident differences between the Neanderthals and modern humans in terms of basic cognition, symbolic behavior, sociality, or communication," said Erik Trinkaus, a biological anthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis who was not involved in the study. Red ochre painting on a La Pasiega cave wall in Spain. Image: P. Saura In another Spanish cave, detailed in a related study also released Thursday, researchers dated marine shells that had been dyed and then stored in larger shell containers. These artifacts were dyed some 70,0000 years before humans ever stepped foot in the region. Some scientists might disagree that it was Neanderthals who painted such humanistic, advanced art, said Wil Roebroeks, a paleolithic archaeologist at Leiden University who was not involved in the study, in an email. But the evidence in favor of Neanderthal artwork is strong. Story continues A replicated drawing of some of the cave art. It's more difficult to see the symbols, animals, and detail on the calcified cave wall, shown in the image above. Image: Breuil et al. The cave painting "dates are solid," said Roebroeks. The researchers dated calcite minerals both below the paint and the calcite that had crusted on top to establish a window in time for when the painting likely was done. Roebroeks noted that the sample and dating work was done "carefully" by experienced archeologists. "Neandertals made 'cave art' deal with it," he said, using a spelling popular in the scientific literature. The Neanderthals used a red ochre paint on the cave walls, "an activity hitherto thought to be an exclusive 'modern human' phenomenon," noted Roebroeks. In fact, it seems that by the time humans finally arrived in Europe, "indigenous Neandertals had been producing red ochred motifs on cave walls for at least a thousand generations already," he said. This cave art might provide compelling evidence for Neanderthals' advanced intellect, but anthropologists already knew that Neanderthals were culturally advanced, even fashioning their own jewelry. David Frayer, an anthropologist at the University of Kansas, suspects Neanderthals caught eagles and used their sharp talons to make this jewelry. The talons, discovered near a rock shelter in Croatia, had been smoothed out around 130,000 years ago, long before other Neanderthal clans painted the walls of Spanish caves. Three hand stencil drawings in Maltravieso Cave. The hands can be seen in the top left, center (facing down), and center-right of the image. Image: H. Collado Even having held and inspected these Eagle talons, Frayer, who had no role in either study, finds the cave art impressive. "Yet, even me as a Neanderthal appreciator, would not have predicted they could have done these," he said via email. Of course, once humans arrived in Europe, they too began ornately painting cave walls. Lascaux Cave, in France, is covered in hundreds of detailed animals, including horses, deer, and bulls. But before Neanderthals went extinct for unknown reasons they proved their artistic and cultural prowess was similar to ours, even though their skulls were flatter and shaped differently. "This does not mean Neandertals were identical to modern humans, just behaviorally and mentally equivalent," said Trinkaus. "And it should put to rest the paleophrenoloigcal arguments about Neandertal abilities derived from their skulls." Twitter is taking action to shield survivors of last week's school shooting in Parkland, Florida, after they faced online harassment over their support for gun control. The Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School students, who are mourning the deaths of 17 of their classmates and teachers, were targeted by far-right commentators and groups, as well as by conspiracy theorists, with some going so far as to accuse survivors of being paid actors. "We are actively working on reports of targeted abuse and harassment of a number of survivors of the tragic mass shooting in Parkland," Twitter said in a tweet from an official account. Trending: Up to Five New Species Found in Vast Haul of Bizarre Creatures from Deep-Sea Abyss GettyImages-922467452 Joe Raedle/Getty "Such behavior goes against everything we stand for at Twitter, and we are taking action on any content that violates our terms of service," the social media giant added. The company said it has started verifying the accounts of a number of survivors in an apparent bid to shut down those questioning their credibility. Twitter's verification confirms that the account belongs to the person named in the bio and that they are a real person. "We are also using our anti-spam and anti-abuse tools to weed out malicious automation around these individuals and the topics they are raising," Twitter said. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. In the days following the deadly shooting, teenagers who survived the attack have rallied in support of gun control, bringing their demands for lawmakers to take action straight to Washington. Earlier this week, they met with lawmakers and members of the National Rifle Association (NRA) to urge them to support bans on assault-style rifles. They also asked senators whether they would refuse to take money from the NRA in the future. Story continues While the students have gained widespread support, others have targeted the teenagers for online harassment and bullying, with conspiracy theorists accusing them of being "crisis actors." The claims appeared to be endorsed by Donald Trump Jr., who "liked" two tweets featuring such speculation. Read more: After Florida Shooting, Paul Ryan and NRA Allies Targeted in Campaign To Oust Them in 2018 "I'm not a crisis actor," one student, 17-year-old David Hogg told CNN's Anderson Cooper on AC360 on Tuesday. "I'm someone who had to witness this and live through this and I continue to be having to do that." Most popular: Trump Needs to Involve the Arabs in the Israeli-Palestinian Peace Another student, 17-year-old Cameron Kasky, said he was forced to leave Facebook after receiving death threats from "NRA cultists." Right-wing pundit Dinesh D'Souza also sparked outrage after appearing to openly mock survivors of the school shooting on Twitter. D'Souza shared a photo of survivors' shocked reactions after Florida lawmakers voted down a ban on assault weapons, adding the caption: "Worst news since their parents told them to get summer jobs." The pundit also appeared to accuse the survivors of "politically-orchestrated grief," accusing them of being "phony and inauthentic." D'Souza apologized for the tweets around 15 hours after initially posting them, acknowledging that they were "insensitive to students who lost friends in a terrible tragedy. I'm truly sorry." Facebook and YouTube also received criticism on Wednesday after a video linking to unsubstantiated conspiracy theories was promoted on their websites. The video was viewed at least 200,000 times before it was pulled. This article was first written by Newsweek More from Newsweek By Karen Freifeld and Sarah N. Lynch WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A U.S. judge has ordered a closed hearing for Friday in the Russia probe case of Rick Gates, a former campaign aide for President Donald Trump, according to a court filing on Thursday. The hearing will deal with Gates' attorneys' request to withdraw from the case over what they have described as "irreconcilable differences." Gates was indicted in October, along with former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, and charged with conspiracy to launder money, conspiracy to defraud the United States and failing to register as a foreign agent for political work representing a pro-Russia Ukrainian political party. The charges are part of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to sway the 2016 presidential election. Trump has denied there was any collusion, and Russia has denied it tried to influence the contest. The hearing is the second sealed proceeding on Gates' legal representation. U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson has not yet ruled on whether Shanlon Wu, Walter Mack and Annemarie McAvoy, the three lawyers seeking to drop their representation of Gates, can withdraw from the case. Veteran Washington lawyer Thomas Green was spotted at the courthouse with Gates at a hearing on Feb. 14, but he has not filed a notice with the court saying he is representing Gates. The rift with the lawyers comes amid some news media reports that Gates is working toward a plea deal. Friday's closed hearing will take place two days after a sealed filing by the special counsel that suggests new criminal charges have been lodged in the case. The nature of the charges is unknown and it is unclear when the filing will be unsealed. (Additional reporting by Doina Chiacu in Washington; Writing by David Alexander; Editing by Jonathan Oatis) The U.S. should learn from China and genuinely protect human rights by restricting gun ownership, Chinas Global Times, the ruling Communist Partys official newspaper, wrote on Friday. The state-run Chinese newspaper published a critical editorial following the shooting last week at Floridas Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, where 17 students and staff were killed. The massacre reignited a long-running debate about gun control in the United States and abroad. Washington has been pointing an accusing finger at other countries over human rights.... However, more Americans have been killed by gunfire in the country than American soldiers being killed in all U.S. wars, the Global Times op-ed read. Trending: Apple Faces Child Labor Scrutiny as it Looks to Take Charge of Cobalt Mines It added, Gun ownership in China is strictly regulated, which helps reduce gun-related crimes and deaths. The U.S. should learn from China and genuinely protect human rights. GettyImages-922467452 Getty The hawkish news outlet, run by Chinas top propaganda organ Peoples Daily, called it inhumane to turn a blind eye to gun violence after the shootings on Valentines Day. Human rights have long been a source of tension between the worlds two largest economiesparticularly since 1989, when the United States imposed sanctions on China after a bloody crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators around Beijings Tiananmen Square. Don't miss: World's Oldest Cave Paintings Shows Neanderthals Were Making Art More than 20,000 Years Before Modern Humans Story continues China rejects criticism of its rights record, pointing to its success at helping millions escape poverty, and regularly attempts to deflect the issue by calling attention to its critics own problems. However, the ruling Communist Party does not tolerate political dissent, and President Xi Jinpings administration has seen a sweeping crackdown on rights lawyers and activists. Gun violence is rare in China because private gun ownership is restricted. The U.S. has no other choice but to adopt gun control. The right of life is the most fundamental [of] human rights. The right to bear arms cannot overpower the individuals right to live, the Global Times editorial said. Most popular: NRA Boycott Causes Hotel Chains, Rental Car Companies to Cut Ties Since the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in 2012, about 438 people have been shot in more than 200 school shootings across the U.S., The New York Times reported. On the afternoon of February 14, an assailant, later identified as 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz, stormed Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, with an AF-15 rifle. A picture is slowly forming of the suspected shooter, who was arrested shortly after the incident and briefly taken to Broward Health North hospital in Pompano Beach, Florida, before being transferred to the Broward Sheriffs headquarters. Broward Sheriff Scott Israel confirmed that Cruz was a former student at the school who was expelled last year for unknown disciplinary reasons. According to Cruzs attorneys, the teenager has been on suicide watch since his arrest and is reportedly sad and remorseful. One of the attorneys said Cruz had the mental state of a child. What was relayed to me was, He is such a child, Gordon Weekes, a chief assistant for Broward Countys public defenders office, told The Sun Sentinel. Thats the impression our attorneys are getting. This article was first written by Newsweek More from Newsweek United Nations (United States) (AFP) - UN diplomats pressed on Thursday with tough negotiations on a UN draft resolution demanding a 30-day humanitarian ceasefire in Syria, hoping to avoid a Russian veto at the Security Council. Sweden and Kuwait on Wednesday requested a vote on the measure, but by late morning Thursday, there was no decision to schedule the vote. The council will meet at 12:00 pm (1700 GMT) at Russia's request to discuss the crisis in Eastern Ghouta as the death toll from a fierce air campaign waged by Syrian government forces rose to 368. "There has to be a decision very, very soon. People are dying," said Sweden's Ambassador Olof Skoog. "Eastern Ghouta is under a barrage of fire. Children, civilians, are dying by the hundreds as we speak," French Ambassador Francois Delattre told reporters, calling for urgent action. High-level exchanges were taking place between capitals on the draft resolution that would demand a truce to allow for deliveries of humanitarian aid and medical evacuations, diplomats said. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was quoted by Russian news agencies as saying that Moscow could back the measure if it did not apply to rebel groups who are shelling Damascus. In a concession to Russia, the draft was amended last week to specify that the ceasefire does not apply to the Islamic State group or Al-Qaeda, but Lavrov appeared to put forward new demands. "The resolution that is on the table, we are ready to look at it, but we have offered very precise phrasing that would say that the ceasefire would under no circumstances extend to ISIL, Jabhat al-Nusra and those groups cooperating with them and systemically attacking the residential neighborhoods of Damascus," Lavrov said. US Ambassador Nikki Haley on Wednesday called for "immediate action" on the ceasefire and rejected Russia's demands, saying it was "simply preposterous to claim that these attacks on civilians have anything to do with fighting terrorism." The draft resolution would pave the way for the truce to go into effect 72 hours after the adoption of the measure and for aid deliveries and medical evacuations to begin 48 hours after that. Outside UN headquarters in New York, a coalition of aid groups put up three billboards, inspired by the film "Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri" that said "500,000 dead in Syria. And still no action? How come Security Council?. Juba (AFP) - A UN rights commission in South Sudan said Friday there was sufficient evidence to charge at least 41 senior officers and officials with war crimes and crimes against humanity. South Sudan's four-year-old civil war has been characterised by extreme brutality and attacks on civilians. But no high-ranking officials have been held to account, despite African Union (AU) promises to establish a special court to try alleged crimes. "The court could be set up straight away and the prosecutor could begin working on indictments," said Yasmin Sooka, chairperson of the UN Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan. "Under the peace agreement, those indicted can no longer hold or stand for office. Ultimately this is the only way to stop the rampant devastation of millions of human lives by South Sudan's leaders," she said. The commission said it had forwarded a confidential list of suspects to the UN's High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein. Those named include three state governors, 33 generals and five colonels. The report -- based on 58,000 documents and 230 witness statements -- is a litany of horrors and extraordinary cruelty. Some victims were beheaded, burned alive or had their throats cut, others had their eyes gouged out or were tortured. Sexual violence was particularly prevalent with numerous accounts of gang rape and child rape, and in "cases reminiscent of Bosnia" of people forced to watch or participate in the rape of loved ones. In one instance a 12-year-old boy was forced to have sex with his grandmother or be killed. Men were also attacked, with some castrated and others raped. - 'Sufficient evidence' - "The Commission believes the prevalence of sexual violence against men in South Sudan is far more extensive than documented; what we see so far is likely just the tip of the iceberg," said Sooka. The UN commission said soldiers and officials loyal to both President Salva Kiir and rebel leader Riek Machar were both responsible for crimes. Story continues It dismissed arguments that indisciplined soldiers might be to blame saying both the government and rebel "military hierarchies functioned effectively in terms of issuance, transmission, and respect for orders". The commission said its investigations had focussed on incidents where it could make "the case for individual command responsibility for widespread or systematic attacks on civilians." The commission also found widespread looting and deliberate ethnic attacks on entire communities and villages with the "destruction of dwellings... on an industrial scale." "There is a clear pattern of ethnic persecution for the most part by government forces who should be pursued for crimes against humanity," said Andrew Clapham, one of the commissioners. Describing South Sudan's justice system as "dysfunctional" the commission called on the AU to establish the 'Hybrid Court', modelled on tribunals in Sierra Leone, Cambodia and elsewhere. "There is sufficient evidence to conclude that... the parties to the conflict are deliberately targeting civilians on the basis of their ethnic identity and by means of killings, abductions, rape and sexual violence, as well as the destruction of villages and looting. These acts constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity," the commission's report said. Juba (AFP) - A UN rights commission in South Sudan said Friday there was sufficient evidence to charge at least 41 senior officers and officials with war crimes and crimes against humanity. South Sudan's four-year-old civil war has been characterised by extreme brutality and attacks on civilians. But no high-ranking officials have been held to account, despite African Union (AU) promises to establish a special court to try alleged crimes. "The court could be set up straight away and the prosecutor could begin working on indictments," said Yasmin Sooka, chairperson of the UN Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan. "Under the peace agreement, those indicted can no longer hold or stand for office. Ultimately this is the only way to stop the rampant devastation of millions of human lives by South Sudan's leaders," she said. The commission said it had forwarded a confidential list of suspects to the UN's High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein. Those named comprise three state governors, 33 generals and five colonels. The report -- based on 58,000 documents and 230 witness statements -- is a litany of horrors and extraordinary cruelty. Some victims were beheaded, burned alive or had their throats cut, others had their eyes gouged out or were tortured. - Rape 'reminiscent of Bosnia' - Sexual violence was particularly prevalent with numerous accounts of gang rape and child rape, and in "cases reminiscent of Bosnia" of people forced to watch or participate in the rape of loved ones. In one instance a 12-year-old boy was forced to have sex with his grandmother or be killed. Men were also attacked, with some castrated and others raped. "The Commission believes the prevalence of sexual violence against men in South Sudan is far more extensive than documented; what we see so far is likely just the tip of the iceberg," said Sooka. The UN commission said soldiers and officials loyal to President Salva Kiir and rebel leader Riek Machar were both responsible for crimes. Story continues It dismissed arguments that indisciplined soldiers might be to blame. Both the government and rebel "military hierarchies functioned effectively in terms of issuance, transmission, and respect for orders," it said. The commission said its investigations had focussed on incidents where it could make "the case for individual command responsibility for widespread or systematic attacks on civilians." It found widespread looting and deliberate ethnic attacks on entire communities and villages, with the "destruction of dwellings... on an industrial scale." The South Sudan war began as a battle between Kiir's majority Dinka tribe and Machar's Nuer. But it has since metastasized, spreading and fragmenting, while feeding on local grievances and long-standing ethnic animosities over access to land, resources and power. "There is a clear pattern of ethnic persecution for the most part by government forces who should be pursued for crimes against humanity," said Andrew Clapham, one of the commissioners. - 'Sufficient evidence' - Describing South Sudan's justice system as "dysfunctional" the commission called on the AU to establish the 'Hybrid Court', modelled on tribunals in Sierra Leone, Cambodia and elsewhere. "There is sufficient evidence to conclude that... the parties to the conflict are deliberately targeting civilians on the basis of their ethnic identity and by means of killings, abductions, rape and sexual violence, as well as the destruction of villages and looting. These acts constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity," the commission's report said. Disgust at the latest evidence of brutality was widespread. Britain's foreign minister Boris Johnson said on Twitter, "Reports of atrocities in South Sudan are among most troubling I have seen. Sexual violence being used as weapon of war against women, men, children & elderly victims. UK supports peace efforts but S Sudanese must honour ceasefire for the sake of their people." The last ceasefire, signed in December, was broken within hours while the latest round of peace talks in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa have stalled. Seif Magango of rights group Amnesty International said the UN report demonstrated "the critical need to establish the Hybrid Court for South Sudan". The report "should jolt the world into speedy action to address the horrific human rights violations that have continued unabated for four years of conflict in South Sudan," he said. A man walks at the Palm Jumeirah beach as the Burj Al Arab hotel is seen during sunset in Dubai February 23, 2014. REUTERS/Saleh Salem (UNITED ARAB EMIRATES Tags: SOCIETY) Conflicts of interest long common to parts of the annuity industry have crept into the structured settlement industry. If someone gets injured at an amusement park and sues the parks owner, both parties may come to a settlement. Instead of the defendant paying the settlement all at once in a lump sum, the two sides will often agree to a structured settlement. With the help of a broker, the defense will purchase a special type of annuity that provides periodic compensation to the injured party. Income for injury victims who received structured settlements have a special tax-free status, thanks to bipartisan legislation from the Reagan era. They also have blessings from plaintiff and defense bars and judges, which often consider them to be helpful options for the physically disabled. Pacific Life, a leading annuity provider, has been offering certain brokers who sell these structured settlement products luxurious trips to destinations like a 2016 trip to Bora Bora to learn how to exchange ideas. These are perks that insiders say incentivizes brokers to favor those products over other, potentially more sensible options. While they are not explicitly rewards for top-performing sellers, insiders say they function much the same. Pacific Life declined to comment for this article. Yahoo Finance reached out to three brokers who had photos from the Bora Bora trip with PacLife on their Facebook page; they did not respond. Pacific Life made a save the date announcement for a 2018 trip last summer and again in October. The destination: the Four Seasons Resort in the Maldives with a special junket to the Four Seasons Jumeirah Beach in Dubai for a select group of insurance brokers. According to the announcement, invitations will be sent out by late May, giving brokers ample time to get sales in. Insurers offer these trips because it helps them sell structured annuities to accident victims, said one member of the structured settlement industry who did not want to be identified because of possible professional repercussions. PacLifes annuity sales skyrocketed once it announced the Bora Bora trip. Story continues The invitation language is careful to frame the trip as an opportunity to promote, enhance, and grow the industry, but the fine print notes that attendees are required to sign an I-9, as the IRS may consider the trip as income. In other words, the trip is considered non-cash compensation by the company and the IRS. On Feb. 12, Pacific Life announced it earned a spot on the 2018 Worlds Most Ethical Companies list. Uncommon practice in the industry Pacific Life is the only major player in the structured settlement industry to offer brokers luxurious trips like this, according to industry insiders. (Yahoo Finance reached out to the top 10 providers in the industry, including Berkshire Hathaway, MetLife, AIG, Liberty Mutual, New York Mutual, Prudential, USAA, Amica, and State Farm. None of which said they have these trips.) According to Mark Wahlstrom, a structured settlements consultant with Wahlstrom & Associates in Scottsdale, Ariz., incentives were once in the industry but had dwindled down and is now a highly uncommon practice. To me, a structured settlement annuity carries a higher standard of care given the vulnerable population were dealing with, injury victims, said Wahlstrom. In every instance we should always be looking for the most suitable market, not the company thats offering us incentives. Thats why its uncommon and unwise because nothing should interfere with that decision process other than the best company at the best price. Pacific Life regains market share In 2014, Pacific Life had bottomed out on a two-year slide in the structured settlement industry in which it fell from the top position (17% market share) to number three (14%), behind Berkshire Hathaway and MetLife. In late 2014, the company announced its first trip, to Bora Bora, which took place in September 2016. The following year, Pacific Life surged back to recapture second place, regaining 16% of the market. In 2016, the company had 20% of the structured settlement business, generating over $1.2 billion in structured settlement sales, according to LIMRA, an industry group for insurance, retirement, and financial services. Undisclosed incentives vs. disclosed incentives A structured settlement is struck when an injured plaintiff and the defense agree on terms of how much money should be distributed. Generally, each party will hire its own broker, and the two brokers will arrange for an annuity to be bought. The brokers services are paid for by the annuity provider at a 4% commission, often 2% to each broker. While these fees are usually clearly disclosed to clients there is an ongoing lawsuit about this in the industry alleging this is not in fact true one veteran structured settlements consultant told Yahoo Finance they never heard a trip come up with a client. A 2016 ProPublica report found that a single free meal from a pharmaceutical sales rep was enough to incentivize doctors to prescribe their drugs more. So it stands to reason that a luxe trip to a tropical locale like Bora Bora or the Maldives complete with in-ocean bar, according to pictures posted on Facebook by some of the attendees could be big enough carrot to make a broker favor one annuity provider over another. Even if the non-cash perks are accepted on a good-faith basis, they could put a thumb on the scale. The annuity industrys reputation has been blemished before for not disclosing conflicts of interest. For years, seniors have fielded pitches for annuities, often enticed by a free dinner. While some annuities make sense for seniors, it is well-documented that brokers have long enjoyed non-cash perks like trips and other luxuries from annuity providers for securing new business. In a report from Sen. Elizabeth Warrens office in 2015, 13 of the 15 annuity companies surveyed admitted to offering kickbacks and that they were most frequently all-expense-paid trips to expensive vacation destinations such as Aruba, the Bahamas, and other resorts. The report added that this information is seldom disclosed to consumers. When these non-cash incentives arent disclosed, the parties buying the structured settlement annuities could more likely be steered toward more expensive options that may not be right for them. This behavior, which studies had shown costs retirees significantly, helped spur the Department of Labor to implement a fiduciary rule barring these practices for retirement accounts. Ethan Wolff-Mann is a writer at Yahoo Finance. Follow him on Twitter @ewolffmann. Confidential tip line: FinanceTips[at]oath[.com]. A sweeping regulation will change how Europeans use the internet People are taking Equifax to small-claims court and winning Theres only one financial reason to ever decline a raise A wild elephant Thursday trampled to death two people, including a child, as it rampaged through a Rohingya refugee camp in Bangladesh, officials said. The incident occurred at the massive Kutupalong camp in the southeastern border district of Cox's Bazar, where hundreds of thousands of Rohingya have taken refuge after fleeing what UN officials have called ethnic cleansing in Myanmar's Rakhine state. "The wild elephant trampled a Rohingya child to death... and then trampled another Bangladeshi man to death when it was chased by Rohingya refugees and local villagers," Ali Kabir, the district forest department chief, told AFP. Kabir said at least another five people were injured as the elephant rampaged through flimsy tarpaulin-and-bamboo huts, which were built on forest land after the influx of refugees began nearly six months ago. "It destroyed some 100 Rohingya huts," Mohammad Nikaruzzaman, the town administrator, told AFP, adding the lone wild elephant had separated from its herd. Cox's Bazar is home to more than 100 elephants, but the building of massive Rohingya settlements on the last remaining forest land in the region has put humans on a collision course with the wild animals. Since refugees began arriving in August last year, at least 13 people -- most of them Rohingya -- have been killed by wild elephants, Kabir said. "All these refugee camps have been built on forest land. And the deaths are occurring in what was formerly forest land," he added. There are two refugee camps in Cox's Bazar, but land in these settlements has been all but exhausted, with new arrivals clearing trees and other vegetation to build shelters. Miami (AFP) - All the world's wild horses have gone extinct, according to a study Thursday that unexpectedly rewrites the horse family tree based on a new DNA analysis of their ancestry. What most people thought were the last remaining wild horses on Earth -- known as Przewalski's horses -- were actually domesticated horses that escaped their owners, said the report in the journal Science. "This was a big surprise," said co-author Sandra Olsen, curator-in-charge of the archeology division of the Biodiversity Institute and Natural History Museum at the University of Kansas. "This means there are no living wild horses on Earth -- that's the sad part," said Olsen. The study is based on archaeological work at two sites in northern Kazakhstan, called Botai and Krasnyi Yar, where scientists have found the earliest proof of horse domestication, going back more than 5,000 years. To further dig into these roots, international researchers sequenced the genomes of 20 horses from the Botai -- based on teeth and bones unearthed from the sites -- and 22 horses from across Eurasia. Then, they compared these ancient horse genomes with already published genomes of 18 ancient and 28 modern horses. They discovered that Przewalski's horses descended from the earliest-known domesticated horses, kept by the Botai people of northern Kazakhstan some 5,500 years ago. That means what people thought were wild horses were actually feral, meaning they had escaped from domestication but were not originally wild. - A new quest - According to Beth Shapiro, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California Santa Cruz, the findings are "super interesting." "Certainly, it is surprising to see that Przewalski's horses are descended from early domestic horses, as this is not what people tended to believe," Shapiro, who was not involved in the study, told AFP. "Swapping the word 'wild' for 'feral' is a semantic change that may better reflect their evolutionary history but should not change their status. We should continue to protect Przewalski's horses as a population of wild horses." Story continues Przewalski's horses are considered an endangered species by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. The round-bellied, short legged, reddish brown to beige horses roamed Central Asia, Europe and China in prehistoric times. They were listed as extinct in the wild in the 1960s, but a number of breeding programs and reintroductions have helped bolster their numbers. The findings have also sparked a new quest -- to uncover the true origins of today's domestic horses. "Current models suggest that all modern domesticated horses living now descend from those first tamed in Botai, in the north of present-day Kazakhstan," said a statement from the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) scientist Ludovic Orlando. "Yet this genomic analysis yielded unexpected results." Since the Botai horses did not give rise to today's domesticated horses, "the origin of modern domestic horses must be sought elsewhere." An unnamed Good Samaritans quick thinking is being credited with saving a 12-year-old girl from being kidnapped by a woman believed to be homeless, KTLA reports. Amy Martinez of Santa Ana, Calif., told reporters that she walking to school when a strange woman, later identified as Claudia Hernandez Diaz, approached her. She just came up to me and went like this, Martinez said, describing Diazs bear hug. And then she started walking with me away. She told me in Spanish not to cry, but I wasnt even crying. The Lathrop Intermediate School student screamed for help, prompting a female bystander to take action. Cpl. Anthony Bertagna of the Santa Ana police told KTLA that the woman, who also has a student at the school, pretended to be Martinezs mother and was able to get Diaz to release the girl. She then accompanied Martinez to class, while Diaz was later arrested. I was thinking, Oh my gosh, Im going to live,' the preteen said of the womans heroic intervention. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. Read more from Yahoo Lifestyle: Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter for nonstop inspiration delivered fresh to your feed, every day. Marcelle Mancuso broke a vertebrae after she slipped off a bench while performing the exercise. (SWNS) A Brazilian fitness fanatic was left paralysed from the neck down after falling on her head while attempting an inverted sit-up at the gym. Marcelle Mancuso, 23, broke a vertebrae after she slipped off a bench while performing the exercise. Doctors starkly warned that she would be a tetraplegic for life and fitted a titanium plate into her spine, held by six screws. But after months of extensive physiotherapy, she eventually defied the odds and regained movement. She was attempting an inverted sit-up which went wrong (SWNS) Now, she is back at the gym and has even started doing the very exercise that caused her initial injury. It was just another normal day of training. I went to perform the abdominal inverted sit up, and was upside down, Marcelle said. I was attached to the equipment with a strip, which broke and the personal trainer could not hold me. I hit the back of my head on the floor, and immediately lost all body movements with the blow. My diagnosis was tetraplegia no movement in my arms or legs. Marcelle is now back in the gym once more (SWNS) Marcelle Mancuso broke her vertebrae after falling off a bench (SWNS) The doctors did not know if I would walk again or if I would stay on a bed forever. Describing her recovery, Marcelle said: I gave my best every day in physical therapy. I thought if my movements did not come back it would not be my fault, it would be destiny. I was willing to fight until the last minute. Gradually my movement came back. The doctors were surprised by my recovery. She attributes her recovery to her faith (SWNS) She has now made a miracle recovery (SWNS) One day when I was in the doctors office thanking the doctor who operated on me, he said: Do not thank me, thank the guy from the top this is his work meaning God. Marcelle who does bodybuilding, running and Muay Thai injured her neck while doing a training session at a gym in Sao Jose do Rio Preto, Brazil, in January 2016. An inverted sit-up involves performing an abdominal crunch on a gym bench which is raised at the end. Marcelle has defied expectations to make the miracle recovery (SWNS) The injury saw her breaking the fifth vertebrae in the neck section of her spine, as well as knocking another one out of place and squashing a third which compressed her spinal cord. Story continues I lost all the movements from the neck down when I hit my head on the floor, she recalled. I could move my eyes. I had to keep calm and began to pray. After her extensive recovery, she was able to walk again a mere six months later. It sometimes feels like it was a nightmare I have woken up from, she said. Geneva (AFP) - Farida Abbas Khalaf, one of thousands of Yazidi women abducted, raped and brutalised by Islamic State group fighters, says the jihadists' departure has not made it safe to return to Iraq. "Everything is still the same. The same people who joined (IS) are still in those neighbourhoods. How can we return and trust them again?" Khalaf said in an interview with AFP this week. "Who will guarantee that genocide will not happen again, by perpetrators using another name?" she asked, speaking through a translator. Khalaf was 18 when IS fighters arrived in her once peaceful village of Kocho in Iraq's northern Sinjar region on August 3, 2014. Speaking on the sidelines of a summit for human rights defenders in Geneva, the young woman with long black hair and sorrowful eyes said she and her family never expected to be attacked. "We hadn't harmed anybody, we hadn't offended anybody... We just wanted to live in peace," she said. But the Kurdish-speaking Yazidis, who follow a non-Muslim faith, became particular targets of hatred for the Sunni Muslim IS extremists that seized Sinjar in 2014 and unleashed a brutal campaign against the minority that the United Nations has called a "genocide". When IS jihadists descended on the village, they gave the Yazidis two weeks to convert to Islam -- or risk the consequences. Khalaf, who has written a book about her experience titled: "The Girl Who Beat ISIS", described what happened when those two weeks were up. - Taken to slave market - "They gathered all of us in the village and they asked us to convert. We refused, and they started killing the men," she told AFP. "That one day alone they killed more than 450 men and boys." Khalaf's father and one of her brothers were among those killed, and she was abducted. "When we were taken, they did everything to us. They raped women and girls as young as eight," she said. Story continues Khalaf was taken to one of IS's infamous slave markets, where Yazidi women and girls were sold and traded as sex slaves across the jihadists' self-proclaimed and since-crumbled "caliphate" in Syria and Iraq. "They picked the ones they wanted, just like they were at the supermarket or buying an animal," she said. In captivity, Khalaf said she managed to remain strong despite undescribable torment, seeking inspiration in her faith and upbringing, and in her desire to provide support to the younger girls held and ravaged alongside her. She said she never stopped thinking about escape, and after four months, a poorly locked door gave her and several other girls their chance to get away. After a long and arduous journey, she finally made her way to Germany, which has taken in more than 1,000 Yazidi survivors, providing them with refuge and psycho-social support. - 'Bringing IS to justice' - Asked what her daily life is like now, she said it was focused on helping ensure recognition of the genocide committed against the Yazidis and "bringing IS to justice". Baghdad declared victory over the jihadist group last December after a years-long battle to retake large swathes of territory the extremists seized in 2014. But that is far from enough, Khalaf said, insisting: "I want to see IS and those who committed these crimes in international court." She said she was consumed with thoughts of the estimated 3,000 Yazidi women and girls who remain in captivity, and of the thousands who have gotten away but remain stuck in poorly serviced camps in Iraq. "They need help, they need treatment, and they are not getting that" in the camps, she said, warning that without support, "many will die from suicide". She hailed Germany, Canada and Australia for taking in many Yazidi survivors, but said there was an urgent need for more countries to do their part. She also called on the international community to help rebuild the villages destroyed in Sinjar and to provide protection to Yazidis interested in returning home. "I could only consider going back once I see justice, an international court recognising this as a genocide, and with international protection," she said. "Otherwise, how can we know we will not face another genocide?" Special Counsel Robert Mueller has indicted 13 Russians and three Russian entities for meddling in the 2016 U.S. election. For anti-Trumpers, the indictments are proof positive that Donald Trump colluded with the Russians. For Trump supporters, the lack of any Trump campaign folks associated with this latest wave of indictments is exonerating (or, as Trump succinctly puts it, no collusion!). Either way, its too soon to tell. But the news has prompted Trump to raise a legitimate question: Obama was President up to, and beyond, the 2016 Elections. So why didnt he do something about Russian meddling? Indeed, if all this happened under Barack Obamas watch, shouldnt Trumps predecessor be the one shouldering the blame for Russian interference? And the answer, up to a point, is yes. The U.S. government under Obama knew what the Russians were doing. Obama was warned repeatedly by Eastern European governments that Russia was meddling in their own elections. And while Latvian elections dont exactly rank high on the list of an American presidents priorities, the White House could have guessed what the Russians were gearing up to do and should have sent them a forceful message to knock it off. Obama apparently issued a direct warning to Russian President Vladimir Putin when they met in person in September 2016, but it came too late and had little effect. The lack of defensive cyber weapons to deter the brunt of the meddling obviously complicated matters (and still does). Still, if you cant formulate effective cyber-defense measures, at least put together clear policies to deter future attacksgo on the offensive and freeze Russian bank accounts, threaten to publish embarrassing information about Putin and his inner circle, and so on. Instead it looks like there was barely any deterrence from the Obama administration and thats on him. By the time Wikileaks was starting to make waves in the presidential election with suspiciously timed email leaks, the response from the Obama administration was too weak and too late to stem the tide of false information. Story continues After the surprise result of Nov. 8, 2016, Obama shifted to damage control mode and addressed Russias disinformation campaign head on with sanctions. But even then he soft-pedalledin announcing the sanctions, he conflated Russias interference in U.S. elections with the harassment of U.S. diplomats in Russia (which goes on all the time), thus downplaying the meddling role of Russia in the election. In fairness to Obama, he had reasons to hesitate. Hillary Clinton looked poised to win the election, right up until the election results began rolling in. Why needlessly politicize an election that looked like it would withstand Russias disinformation campaign? Why call into question the legitimacy of a central tenet of democracyarguably THE central tenet of democracywhen it looked like the American people would overcome the challenge? Then there are Obamas more personal reasons. He probably didnt want his last significant act as President to be seen as political, tarnishing his legacy. He tried to get Republican leadership to help him raise the warning flags, but Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell refused to join him in a bipartisan condemnation of Russia. Pro-Obama folks will point to that as exculpatory, but it really isntit is up to the president of the United States to put the country ahead of personal legacy. And on that front, Obama failed. Spectacularly. But heres the thing: the failures of Obama do not excuse the failures of Trump. Russia was Obamas problem so long as he was commander-in-chief; since Jan. 20, 2017, it has been Trumps problem and he has somehow managed to do a worse job confronting the Russian threat than his predecessor. Read more: President Trump Tweeted Hes Been Tougher on Russia Than Obama. Thats Not True Trump and the U.S. intelligence community now have more extensive knowledge of Russias operations than Obama did, and more information continues to spill out. Yet Trump hasnt done a thing to deter the Russians from taking the same action in the 2018 elections and beyond; indeed, hes currently refusing to enforce sanctions passed by Congress in explicit retaliation against Russias U.S. election hacking. Trumps willful ignorance shouldnt surprise us. This is the man who couldnt handle Steve Bannon taking even partial credit for his election victory; of course he would refuse to acknowledge Russias role in his lifes most triumphant moment. Even when confronted with incontrovertible evidence from his intelligence agencies, he falls back on the trope that even if Moscow did try to influence the election, it failed to do so in any meaningful way. Again, this isnt proof of collusion; its proof that this is a highly insecure individual who cant countenance being overshadowed by anything or anyone, for good or ill. Obama got Russia wrong when he was president; thats inarguable. That was on him. Now its on Trump. By Jonathan Stempel NEW YORK (Reuters) - A federal appeals court on Friday rejected a gun rights group's constitutional challenge to strict New York City limits on how licensed handgun owners may use their weapons outside the home. By a 3-0 vote, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan said the restrictions on people who have licenses to have guns at home, known as "premises" licenses, did not violate the Second Amendment. Backed by the National Rifle Association, three gun owners and the New York State Rifle & Pistol Association had sought permission for holders of premises licenses to take guns to shooting ranges outside New York City, or other homes in New York state. Though license holders could take unloaded guns to seven ranges within the city, the plaintiffs said the city's restrictions amounted to a "near-complete ban" on gun transport. Premises licenses are different from "carry" licenses, which give holders broader freedom to take guns outside the home. Writing for the appeals court, Circuit Judge Gerard Lynch said the restrictions advanced the city's "substantial, indeed compelling" interests in protecting public safety and preventing crime, by regulating firearms possession in public. Lynch said that was enough to "easily justify the insignificant and indirect costs" imposed on gun owners' rights, despite a 2008 U.S. Supreme Court decision that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to own guns. The appeals court also rejected claims that the city impeded interstate commerce, and violated the plaintiffs' right to travel and First Amendment right to "expressive association." Neither the Rifle & Pistol Association nor its lawyer immediately responded to requests for comment. "We are pleased the court upheld this important rule," said Nick Paolucci, a spokesman for the city's law department. "Limiting public transport of handguns licensed for home possession makes us all safer." Story continues The decision was issued 1-1/2 years after oral arguments. It upheld a February 2015 ruling by U.S. District Judge Robert Sweet in Manhattan. Sweet wrote that there were at the time more than 40,000 active handgun licenses in the city. The case is New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc et al v. City of New York et al, 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, No. 15-638. (Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; Editing by Lisa Shumaker) The Judicial Selection Committee confirmed Thursday evening Prof. Alex Stein and Judge Ofer Grosskopf as Supreme Court justices. The pair will be replaces Justices Yoram Danziger and Uri Shoham, who will soon be retiring. Follow Ynetnews on Facebook and Twitter Earlier Thursday, the committee appointed 27 judges to magistrates' and district courts, as well as labor courts. The Supreme Court will soon have 2 new justices (Photo: Noam Moskovich) Supreme Court Chief Justice Esther Hayut said that, "The Judicial Selection Committee has chosen 27 judges today for all of the country's instances, as well as two excellent Supreme Court justices with top notch and impressive reputations. "One is an excellent jurist and a former academic, whereas the other is a longstanding and well-respected academic both in Israel and the world. I have no doubt both will make a significant contribution to the Supreme Court and enrich its rulings with their knowledge. "On behalf of all of Israel's judges, I wish to congratulate the candidates selected today to all instances and wish them great success in their new positions." Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked, who chairs the committee, said, "This is a day of celebration for the world of Israeli law. Outstanding nominees were selected, carrying unique and varied cultural background and life experiences. "When I began my term as justice minister, one of my central goals was to diversify the Supreme Court. I have little doubt their contribution to the court will leave its mark on the annals of Israeli law." "I began the move to change the Supreme Court's make-up a year ago by appointing four justices. This move concludes today by the appointment of two more. They are all part of the decision to return the court to its paramount objective: interpreting the legislative branch's norms rather than supplanting them," the minister concluded. The socially conscious justice: Ofer Grosskopf Central District Court Judge Ofer Grosskopf is an expert in civilian law. The 49-year-old justice is perceived as a socially conscious arbitrator who often stands with the weak, and is unafraid to voice his social views when presiding over class action lawsuits. Judge Ofer Grosskopf (Photo: Courts Administration) Grosskopf, a native of Israel, served in the Military Advocate General as an academic reservist and became a proper academic upon his discharge. He studied economics, was certified in law at Harvard University in 1999 and received a doctorate from Tel Aviv University, where he was a member of the faculty. The new justice first became a judge in 2009 after forsaking his career in academia and has written multiple articles and books that were published in Israel and abroad. He is considered a protege of former justice minister Prof. Daniel Friedmann. When Grosskopf made the jump into the judiciary, he said he wished to bridge academia and real life. Shaked's nominee: Prof. Alex Stein Stein is a former teen chess champion in the Soviet Union and a world renowned legal mind. He was afforded the support of Justice Minister Shaked and was considered the nominee with the highest chances of being confirmed. Minister Shaked considers Prof. Stein a juristic "conservative." Economically, his views line up with the minister's own capitalist viewpoint. Stein, 59, is considered one of the leading figures in Israeli academia in the fields of penal law, torts, medical malpractice, the economic approach to law and jurisprudence. He is the author of four books, including an innovative treatise on evidence law. Prof. Alex Stein His friend, Prof. Dudi Schwartz, said Stein is expected to bring the mind-set he used in chess to the bench, and added he was one of the world's leading legal academics. "He can bring the aroma of international legal modernity," Prof. Schwartz said. A petition against Stein's candidacy was submitted to the High Court as he has been a resident of the United states in the past 15 years. The petition was summarily rejected. During his meeting with the Committee, he was asked about his son, who did not serve in the army. Stein assured its members he will make Aliyah and complete his military service. Judge Shaul Shohat of the Tel Aviv District Court was also considered a leading nominee, but was eventually passed on in favor of Stein and Grosskopf. Zeev Sternhell published an article in Le Monde this week, under a title comparing modern Israel to the beginning of Nazism. Similar and identical articles have been published by Sternhell in Hebrew as well. Follow Ynetnews on Facebook and Twitter It didnt start today. Sternhell has been trying to turn Israel into a fascist state for the past 40 years. For 40 years now, he has been repeating the same chorus of falsehoods again and again. Forty years ago, Sternhell wrote about one Israel, which is liberal, moderate and educated, with a very Western Ashkenazi nature, compared to the other Israel, comprised of Jews of Sephardic descent, which he sees as aggressive, radical, clerical. Clearly, this generalization is racism, but Sternhell likely sees himself as the representative of enlightenment. The Nazis lied to brainwash the unenlightened masses; Sternhell is lying to get the message through to readers who are considered enlightened (Photo: Dudi Vaaknin) Nevertheless, Sternhell has won the Israel Prize, which is the most prestigious prize awarded by the State of Israel. Israel is, without a doubt, a special country, giving its most important prize to someone who calls it a fascist state. There is no other fascist state of this kind in the world. But Sternhell wont give up. Fascism is no longer enough. Now, hes moving to Nazism. Criticizing Israeli policy is perfectly okay, both on issues related to the Palestinians and on issues related to the peace process and to the attitude towards Israels Arab citizens. Thats exactly what 80 percent of Israeli journalists and academics are doing. They are ceaselessly criticizing. This isnt one of the characteristics of a fascist state, but Sternhell is insisting on creating a reality which has nothing to do with the facts. According to Sternhell, Israel is a monster for non-Jews living under its rule. A monster, no less. Is it true? By all possible standards, Israels Arabs are in a better situation than Arabs in all neighboring countries. They receive full citizen equality. There are businesspeople among thema new generation of young people working in high-tech, engineers, journalists, doctors and judges. When the president of the Jewish state, Moshe Katsav, was sent to prison, the panel of three judges was presided by an Arab judge, George Karra. Since then, that judge has made it to the Supreme Court. How many Arab judges are there in Europe's high courts? Zero, or close to zero. Within a decade, the number of Arab students in Israel had jumped by more than 100 percent. Is Israel really a monster for minorities? (Photo: Gil Yohanan) In the field of education, the gaps between Jews and Arabs have been reduced like in no other nation state in the world. In 2017, Arab students made up 16.1 percent of all students (compared to 26 percent in the age group). More importantly, in 2007 they made up only 9.7 percent. And in any event, within one decade their number has increased by more than 100 percent, from 20,000 in 2007 to nearly 47,000 in 2017. The jump in the number of Arab students over the past decade is much bigger than the smaller rise in the number of Jewish students. Is this the image of a country which is a monster for minorities? Is there any other Western state in the world that can present similar figures? The Palestinians have scored a noteworthy achievement under Israeli rule: In 1967, the life expectancy of Palestinians in the territories occupied by Israel was 48.6 years. In 2017, the life expectancy in the Gaza Strip was 74.2 years and the life expectancy in the West Bank was 75.2, higher than most Arab countries. In 1967, there wasnt a single higher education institution in the West Bank and in the strip. Today, there are more than 40 higher education institutions, and the number of university graduates is the highest in the Arab world. In 1967, only four of 708 communities were connected to running water. In 2004, there were already 641 communities which were connected to running water. There are many just claims against Israel. But is this the way a monster acts? Is this what Nazism looks like, or the beginning of Nazism? To prove how Israel has deteriorated, Sternhell presents comments made by two Knesset members, Miki Zohar and Bezalel Smotrich. The French public doesnt know this, but these two represent the extreme end of the Israeli Right. There are similar phenomena in every parliament in Europe. But no one thinks a certain country is fascist just because it has a few radical right-wing members of parliament. And in any event, the radical Right in France is bigger than the radical Right in Israel. Nevertheless, France isnt fascist and isnt experiencing the beginning of Nazism. Sternhell is trying to create the impression that Zohar and Smotrich represent Israel. In fact, they dont even represent the Right. Zohar is in favor of annexing the West Bank without giving the Arabs voting rights. Thats such a foolish stance, that when Zohar made it public he received wall-to-wall condemnations and was made a laughing stock in most media outlets. Sternhell is trying to create the impression that MK Miki Zohar represents Israel. In fact, he doesnt even represent the Right (Photo: Gil Yohanan) The Israeli Right, part of which supports an annexation, is usually also in favor of giving Palestinians full rights. Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely has clarified, I am in favor of giving them voting rights. I am in favor of annexation and granting citizenship. And President Reuven Rivlin, a rightist who is also in favor of an annexation, has clarified: I believe in the Greater Land of Israel. The price is civil rights for the Palestinians. Needless to say, most Israelis reject the right-wing stance in favor of an annexation, with or without civil rights. A recent survey revealed that most Likud voters are not in favor of an annexation either: Fifty-two percent of Likud voters prefer an agreement (based on a Jewish state alongside a demilitarized Palestinian state), only 31 percent support an annexation and 18 percent support a unilateral separation. But Sternhell is presenting the opinion of two MKs from the extreme right in a bid to turn Israel into an almost Nazi state. Lets be clear: Criticism against Israel and against Israels policy is legitimate. Annexing the territories is a foolish idea, and annexing without rights is racist apartheid. But there is a difference between criticism and demonization. Israel is a democracy. Sternhell can publish whatever he wantsincluding false claims about fascism, and even Nazismand win the Israel Prize. Most intellectuals and most journalists engage in criticism all the time. Usually, its legitimate criticism. But not Sternhell. His manipulations are an abomination. He is doing exactly what the radical and racist right does when it uses comments by Islamists-jihadists to argue that most or all Muslims are Nazis. With Sternhell, its even worse. He is adopting dark methods from the past. The Nazis demonized the Jews. Sternhell is demonizing Israel. The Nazis lied to brainwash the unenlightened masses. Sternhell is lying to get the message through to readers who are considered enlightened. Sternhelland he is not aloneisnt publishing articles that advance understanding, peace or reconciliation. All he is doing is fanning the flames of hatred and hostility. The responses to the article make it clear that the anti-Semites are celebrating. They have always argued that the Jews are the monsters. Sternhell is providing them with lies to reinforce them. In Israeli democracy, even auto-anti-Semites like Sternhell can be seen as enlightened and thinking people. But we mustnt let that confuse us. Sternhell and his likes belong to the racist and unenlightened camp. Recordings provided by Walla! News CEO Ilan Yeshua to the Israel Securities Authority during the Bezeq investigation reportedly convinced Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit to order the police to undertake its own inquiry into the matter, according to a Channel 10 News report Thursday. Follow Ynetnews on Facebook and Twitter The joint police-Securities Authority investigation led to a series of arrests earlier this week, as well as to suspended Communications Ministry director-general Shlomo Filber signing a state's witness agreement to testify against his benefactor Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Recordings by Walla! CEO Yeshua (L) showed he was told by Bezeq majority shareholder Elovitch to be in contact with PM's media adviser Hefetz regarding coverage (Photo: Orel Cohen, Motti Kimchi and Amit Sha'al) Channel 10 News reported Thursday evening that Attorney General Mandelblit was extremely hesitant about opening a police investigation into the affair, but was convinced by Yeshua's recordingsdubbed "golden evidence." The recordings led to the interrogation of Prime Minister Netanyahu's former media adviser Nir Hefetz. Yeshua recorded conversations in which he spoke about the meaning of his interference in editing articles going up on Walla! News. He was called in for questioning at the Securities Authority and investigators quickly realized he was cooperative and was willing to divulge how Shaul Elovitch, majority shareholder of Bezeqwhich owns Walla! Newsprovided him instruction on engineering articles to present the Netanyahu family in a flattering light. The Elovitch recordings provided the breakthrough in the investigation of Case 4000, in which the police are looking into suspicions that Elovitch and Bezeq received regulatory benefits from the Communications Ministry in return for the favorable coverage. Yeshua also told investigators he had realized the pressure was inappropriate and began recording his conversations with Elovitch. The first recording he played them had Elovitch issuing the explicit order. Shaul Elovitch (Photo: Reuters) The recordings clearly showed an attempt to sway Walla! News coverage by censoring negative content and promoting more positive one. Elovitch was heard telling Yeshua, according to the Channel 10 report, that the more positive coverage will change Bezeq's fortunes as well as its interests. Filber: 'Glad to come full circle' A law enforcement source said that the recordings "were one of the main things that broke down Shlomo Filber's resistance and led to the state's witness agreement," after Filber realized what had been taking place behind his back while he provided Elovitch with benefits as the Communications Ministry director-general. The source added that after his decision to cooperate with the police, Filber shook hands with the ISA investigators, with whom he was familiar from his previous interrogations, and said: "I'm glad to come full circle with you." The recordings allegedly convinced Communications Ministry Dir.-Gen. Filber to sign a state's witness agreement (Photo: Motti Kimchi) Meanwhile Wednesday, Yeshua was forced to confront Elovitch and Nir Hefetz, Netanyahu's former media adviser, as part of the ongoing corruption investigation. Yeshua claimed that Hefetz was the mediator in the Prime Ministers Office and that Elovitch asked him to be in contact with him. Police investigators brought Elovitch into the interrogation room and asked Yeshua, among other things, to repeat his testimony, according to which Elovitch gave the explicit order to portray the Netanyahu family in a more positive light. During the exchange, police presented Hefetz with the claims that Yeshua had made in his testimony and asked him if they were true. "Everything I have to say I answered you in the open testimony," he responded in the Lahav 443 fraud investigation unit in Lod to investigators from the Israel Police and Securities Authority. Hefetz was remanded until Monday (: ) X Police investigators said during Hefetz's remand hearing that he was keeping silent and being uncooperative. Hefetz himself complained to the judge about the conditions of his detainment, complaining about such things as flea bites. Hefetz, who was allegedly involved in the Bezeq affair, is also suspected of trying to bribe former District Court Chief Judge Hila Gerstel into tossing out an investigation against Sara Netanyahu in return for being appointed attorney general. Hefetz will remain in custody until Monday for his part in both affairs. Doron Herman of Channel 10 News reported that state's witness Shlomo Filber's testimony may embroil Netanyahu confidant Natan Eshel in the affair as well. Eshel is considered one of the people closest to the prime minister and was allegedly involved in Walla! News's sale, and possibly in other matters as well. The latest developments in the case have opened up a can of worms for the beleaguered prime minister, around whom questions are now being raised about his relations with other officials in the media. Yair Tarchitsky, who heads the Union of Journalists in Israel (UJI), submitted on Thursday to the Lahav 443 fraud investigation unit in Lod a complaint against Netanyahu and Filber, demanding that it be investigated whether their successful efforts to close the Israeli Public Broadcasting Corporation last year were intended to make way for a channel that was more favorable in its coverage of Netanyahu. In the complaint, it was claimed that similar to Case 4000, Netanyahu and Filber appear to have promoted improper moves against the publics interest with the aim of strengthening the premiers grip on the media and ensuring that the coverage was bent to his advantage. In addition, legal advisors from the UJI, along with other attorneys, implored the High Court of Justice to delay a decision on the appeals that were filed last year regarding the corporation until the conclusion of the relevant police investigations. Anti-fascist demonstrators have clashed with police in the northern Italian city of Turin as another night of violence has erupted in the waning days of Italy's divisive election campaign. Police fired water cannons Thursday night against the demonstrators, who were marching as the far-right CasaPound party was meeting in Turin. In recent days anti-fascist activists have been blamed for beating up a leader of the right-wing Forza Nuova party, while the most violent incident occurred earlier this month when an Italian right-winger wounded six Africans in a drive-by shooting. He said he was avenging the murder of an 18-year-old Italian woman allegedly killed by Nigerian migrants. On Thursday, Premier Paolo Gentiloni expressed full confidence that police could contain the spasm of vandalism and violence that has marked the final days of the campaign leading up to March 4 elections. Polls indicate a center-right coalition, which includes right-wing, anti-immigrant and nationalist parties could win. A major anti-fascist rally is planned for Saturday in Rome. North Korea is sharply criticizing UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres for supporting sanctions to pressure the country into negotiations with the US on denuclearization, saying he appears to be acting as a "henchman" representing the United States. North Korea's UN Mission stressed in a statement Thursday that there would be no nuclear issue on the Korean Peninsula if there was no "hostile policy" by the United States, which has intensified "into nuclear blackmails and threats." The mission called Guterres' remarks to the Munich Security Conference on February 16 "reckless" and "ill-minded behavior based on extreme prejudice without any consideration of impartiality"and without saying "a single word against the US who is (the) main culprit for all aggravation of current situation." Guterres urged international efforts to promote US-North Korea talks. US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley announced Thursday that the Trump administrations first draft of a Middle East peace plan, that wont be loved by either side, is approaching its completion and will be presented in the near future. Follow Ynetnews on Facebook and Twitter Speaking during a question-and-answer session at the University of Chicagos Institute of Politics, the staunch Israel ally told listeners, according to a report in the Washington Post, I think theyre finishing it up. Noting that President Donald Trumps chief negotiatorshis son-in-law Jared Kushner and Jason Greenblattare still going back and forth, she did not mention any specific deadline for the plans release. Nikki Haley (Photo: Reuters) Theyre coming up with a plan. It wont be loved by either side, and it wont be hated by either side, Haley said. Remaining vague on what the plan would entail, Haley said that the notion of a two-state solution, while still being publicly advocated by the Palestinians, was a matter for Israel and the Palestinians to decide. Its for them to decide, Haley said of Israel and the Palestinians when asked by Institute Director David Axelrod, a former senior adviser to President Barack Obama, if the US would propose an independent Palestinian state. It is hard for me to see how they would want a single state, she said, adding that she thinks they are pushing toward a two-state outcome. On Tuesday, during a meeting of the UN Security Council during which Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas called for an international Middle East peace conference to be convened by the middle of 2018, Haley defended Trumps decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israels capital and cautioned the Palestinians against absolutist demands, hateful rhetoric, and incitement to violence. Mahmoud Abbas (Photo: AFP) The problem is that the UN has proven itself time and again to be a grossly biased organization when it comes to Israel, she said, a fact which has made the problem more difficult to solve. The United States knows the Palestinian leadership was very unhappy with the decision to move our embassy to Jerusalem. You dont have to like that decision, you don't have to praise it. You don't even have to accept it. But know this, that decision will not change, Haley told Abbas, who walked out after delivering his remarks. The European Union will start preparing sanctions against Myanmar generals over killings of Rohingya Muslims by formally calling on the bloc's foreign policy chief next week to draw up a list of possible names, two diplomats said. Any new travel bans and asset freezes would be the EU's toughest measures yet to try to hold the military accountable for the abuses, likely joining US and Canadian sanctions already in place. "Ministers will call on (Federica) Mogherini to propose restrictive measures on senior members of the Myanmar military for systematic human rights abuses, without delay," one diplomat said on Thursday, referring to EU sanctions. Foreign ministers will also ask Mogherini and the EU's foreign service, the EEAS, on Monday to look at ways to strengthen the bloc's 1990s-era arms embargo on the Southeast Asian country that remains in place. Myanmar government spokesman Zaw Htay could not be reached for comment. Myanmar military spokesman Major General Tun Tun Nyi when reached by phone did not comment on the EU decision. A giant rally is scheduled to take place in south Tel Aviv Saturday in solidarity with illegal African migrants and asylum seekers, mainly from Sudan and Eritrea, who are soon to be deported to Uganda or Rwanda or face imprisonment in Israel. Follow Ynetnews on Facebook and Twitter In January, Israel began notifying thousands of Africans who entered the country illegally that they have three months to leave or face incarceration. The Population and Immigration Authority called on migrants at the same time from Sudan and Eritrea to leave "to their country or to a third country," meaning Rwanda or Uganda. Those who leave by the end of March will be given $3,500, along with airfare and other incentives. The movement orchestrating the rally, known as South Tel Aviv Against Deportation, is expecting thousands to flock to the area to attend from across Israel in a bid to display widespread opposition to the Knessets approval of the deportation plan two months ago. South Tel Aviv has been seriously affected by the wave of illegal migration in recent years that swept through Israels once-porous southern border. Ahead of the demonstration, activists from the Stand Together movement recorded a number of famous people in video that has recently been published calling on the public to attend. We need to tell the government clearly: We will not stand aside while you deport asylum seekers to a cruel journey of suffering. South Tel Aviv has been abandoned and neglected for years. The time has come to find a real and just solution for everyone, the activists said in the video. Shula Keshet, a resident of Tel Avivs Neve Sha'anan neighborhood and founder of the South Tel Aviv Against Deportation movement, said that the aim of the demonstration was to call on the government to refrain from deporting elderly inhabitants and asylum seekers. Our protest is not right wing or left wing. It is for everyone whose eyes are wide open, both to the distress of the residents and the distress of the asylum seekers, Keshet said. Meital Cohen, a resident of public housing, also spoke out against the government plans, suggesting that financial considerations were at play in the decision. We cannot allow the deportation of migrants from Africa to take place. If it succeeds with the refugees, me and my neighbors will be next in line. They dont want asylum seekers living on their expensive land, Cohen argued. They dont want the residents of the neighborhoods and they most certainly do not want residents of public housing. They basically want clean spaces so the land is available for the wealthy so they can make more profits. She also criticized the incitement that she said had permeated south Tel Aviv, led by people who are unfamiliar with the area. In south Tel Aviv there is incitement and a lot of brainwashing that is directed by activists, many of whom dont live in the neighborhood, Meital added, while another activist described the plan as illegitimate, inhumane. (Photo: Roee Idan) In an effort to counter the demonstration, crowds are planning to assemble from the other side of the camp, led by The Front for the Liberation of South Tel Aviv under the campaign banner of Remember Esther Galili, a victim whose murder came to symbolize anger over the migrants presence and galvanize protesters into action. The protest will take place exactly eight years after the Sudanese asylum seeker Yaakov Alpdel killed 70-year-old Esther Galili, near her home in the area near the Tel Aviv Central Bus Station after an argument broke out. Sheffi Paz, Suzy Cohen and Ayala Sinvani who are leading the demonstration in favor of the deportations were keen to highlight Galilis murder, arguing that it was being exploited by their opponents. This year, on the day marking the murder of Esther Galili, extremist left-wing groups are holding a giant rally under their banner of South Tel Aviv Against Deportation. Its enough to look at what is happening to understand the depths of the hypocrisy and the nerve of these movements, they said. (Photo: Motti Kimchi) They are not for south Tel Aviv. They are dont even know south Tel Aviv. For the resident of south Tel Aviv, the sense of security was taken, freedom of movement was snatched, and now theyre trying to take one thing that we have left and are insisting on stealing identity. Responding to the accusation however, Keshet bemoaned the fact that it was in fact the trios movement that was cynically exploiting Galilis death for political ends. We remember on this day and every day Esther Galili, may her memory be blessed, Keshet said. The terrible murder joins more instances of serious violence that have ripped south Tel Aviv apart over the years, whether they were carried out by asylum seekers or Israelis. The blood of the victims is on the heads of the criminals and we must not mark entire communities with the badge of disgrace which belongs to criminals in order to justify the deportations. Roads near the rally will be closed from 3pm on Saturday afternoon. Rwanda announced Friday that it would only absorb Eritrean and Sudanese asylum seeker being deported from Israel if the measures were in accordance with international law. Every statement suggesting that asylum seekers in Israel must choose between deportation to Rwanda or prison are offensive and misleading, an official statement by the Rwandan government read. The issue of asylum seekers is an internal Israeli issue, and Rwanda will be happy to help any asylum seeker who comes legally, it added. Ivanka Trump has landed in South Korea to attend this weekend's closing ceremony for the Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang. South Korea is rolling out the red carpet for her first visit since her father Donald Trump became US president. Her arrival at the airport Friday was broadcast live on TV. South Korean media reports said the special treatment includes the venue for dinner Friday with President Moon Jae-in: a traditional Korean house at Moon's office. A North Korean delegation will also attend the closing ceremony, but the South Korean government said it's unlikely that Ivanka Trump would meet North Koreans or defectors from North Korea. Hopes are high in South Korea that she may deliver a message from President Trump on North Korea. The witness accounts remain appalling. One South Sudanese man returned home after hiding from government soldiers to find they had blinded his mother, gouging out her eyes with spears. She had tried to defend her 17-year-old daughter from being raped by more than a dozen soldiers and didn't succeed. Seventeen soldiers then raped her. The family's father was beheaded. The latest report on human rights abuses in South Sudan's five-year civil war, released on Friday by a United Nations commission, includes that horrific day in Pagak town and many others as the team collects evidence in the hopes of one day finding justice. "I did not expect to be confronted with so much ritual humiliation and degradation deliberately done for multiple reasons. The suffering and cruelty was worse than anyone could have imagined," Andrew Clapham, a commission member and international law professor said. Rwanda announced Friday that it would only absorb Eritrean and Sudanese asylum seeker being deported from Israel if the measures were in accordance with international law. Every statement suggesting that asylum seekers in Israel must choose between deportation to Rwanda or prison are offensive and misleading, an official statement by the Rwandan government read. The issue of asylum seekers is an internal Israeli issue, and Rwanda will be happy to help any asylum seeker who comes legally, it added. The Israeli Foreign Ministry has issued a warning against travelling to certain localities in Colombia due to a string of criminal and terror-related incidents. The ministry said that the terror movement ELN (National Liberation Army) is responsible for deadly attacks and it is likely planning more attacks. It has also urged tourists to follow local news reports and to avoid staying in accomodation identified with Israeli tourists. The military Criminal Investigation Division (CID) has launched an probe into the possibility that the death of a Palestinian terrorist who charged at an Israeli force before being shot Thursday was caused by accidental inhalation of gas during a riot. Follow Ynetnews on Facebook and Twitter The incident, which took place during an IDF operational activity in the West Bank city of Jericho, was captured on CCTV and showed a soldier beating Yassin Omar al-Saradih with his rifle before he succumbed to his wounds. The soldiers who were involved in the incident are expected to be investigated on Sunday. Footage circulated by Palestinians in Jericho X According to the initial investigation, during the IDF operations around 50 Palestinians began rioting by throwing rocks, rolling burning tires and hurling Molotov Cocktails at the soldiers. During the violence, al-Saradih ran toward the soldiers brandishing a metal bar, prompting them to open fire on him. "In response to the immediate threat, the troops fired towards the assailant and confronted him from close range and were able to stop him," the IDF said. Suspect charges with an object in his hand "A knife was also found in his possession. Troops evacuated him to a hospital to receive medical treatment. His death was later announced. The incident is being reviewed." Before being evacuated, the soldiers used force when he tried to steal the weapon of one of the troops. After being arrested and checked by the medics, the Palestinian was said to be in fair condition. It later emerged during the investigation that the soldiers continued to use riot-dispersal techniques against the protesters near the spot where al-Saradih was handcuffed, leading investigators to consider the possibility that he was exposed to potentially fatal gas. Al-Saradihs condition was said to have deteriorated and he was evacuated and treated by IDF soldiers who eventually pronounced his death. After the incident and due to the fact that the terrorist was killed after being arrested by IDF soldiers, the CID launched an investigation which sought to ascertain through an autopsy the precise cause of his death. Man being knocked down by the soldiers Male and female soldiers belonging to the military unit responsible for the area claimed during the initial investigation that they believed that al-Saradih posed life-threatening danger, forcing them to use force after he attempted to snatch their weapon. The family of the man, however, claimed that he was violently attacked by the soldiers who arrested him and that he was taken from his home. According to Palestinian assessments, he died as a result of the blows that he received from one of the soldiers. His family also emphasized that he suffered from no medical issues. The Trump administration is considering an offer from Republican mega-donor Sheldon Adelson to pay for at least part of a new US Embassy in Jerusalem, four US officials told The Associated Press. Follow Ynetnews on Facebook and Twitter Lawyers at the State Department are looking into the legality of accepting private donations to cover some or all of the embassy costs, the administration officials said. The discussions are occurring as the new embassy clears its final bureaucratic hurdles. On Thursday, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson ended weeks of delay by signing off on a security plan for moving the embassy from Tel Aviv to the holy city, according to the officials, who weren't authorized to discuss the issue publicly and demanded anonymity. In one possible scenario, the administration would solicit contributions not only from Adelson but potentially from other donors in the evangelical and American Jewish communities, too. One official said Adelson, a Las Vegas casino magnate and staunch supporter of Israel, had offered to pay the difference between the total costexpected to run into the hundreds of millions of dollarsand what the administration is able to raise. Under any circumstance, letting private citizens cover the costs of an official government building would mark a significant departure from historical US practice. In the Jerusalem case, it would add yet another break with tradition after Trump's politically charged decision to move the embassy, given Adelson's longstanding affiliation with right-wing Israeli politics. It's not clear if there are any precedents, nor whether government lawyers would give the green light to accept Adelson's or anyone else's donations for the embassy. Adelson's unconventional offer was made around the time Trump announced in December he would move the embassy to Jerusalem. It would address the president's stated distaste for shelling out eye-popping sums for overseas diplomatic facilities. Although Trump has promoted the Jerusalem move as fulfilling a key campaign promise, he also was outspoken last month in blasting the $1 billion price tag for a new embassy in London. Since Trump's announcement, his administration has been sifting through options for fast-tracking the Israel embassy's relocation. Last month, Vice President Mike Pence announced during a visit to Israel that the embassy would move by the end of 2019possibly earlier. Ambassador David Friedman, who lobbied for Trump's decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital, has advocated moving the embassy as soon as possible. The US has looked at several possible sites. The most likely plan involves a phased approach to opening the embassy in Jerusalem's Arnona neighborhood at an existing US facility that handles consular affairs like passports and visas. The US could initially retrofit a small suite of offices in that facility to accommodate Friedman and one or two top aides such as his chief of staff. That would allow the administration to hang an "embassy" sign over the door and formally open it, perhaps in the next few months. The ribbon could be cut in time for Israel's Independence Day, Yom Ha'atzmaut, which takes place in April. The rest of the embassy staff would remain at first in America's current facility in Tel Aviv. Over time, the Arnona facility would be expanded to accommodate more embassy personnel. The expansion could ultimately involve an adjacent property that currently houses a home for senior citizens. It will come under US control in the next few years under a previous arrangement, officials said. Retrofitting just a few offices could be accomplished at minimal cost. But expanding the new embassy into a full-fledged complex that houses the bulk of America's diplomatic staff in Israel would easily cost more than $500 million dollars, officials familiar with the process said. Particularly pricey are the strict security requirements for embassies that are written into US law. VP Mike Pence addresses the Knesset (Photo: Yizhak Harari/Knesset ) It's unclear how much of the cost Adelson might be willing to cover. The White House declined to comment. An Adelson spokesman didn't respond to multiple requests for comment. The State Department said it had "nothing to announce" about the Jerusalem embassy move and would not "get ahead of any decisions by the secretary." "We have no confirmation or details about this hypothetical proposal," the State Department said. Kathy Bethany, the former cost management director for the State Department's Bureau of Overseas Building Operations, said she couldn't recall any instances of the US government accepting donations to build embassies during her tenure, which ended in 2014. "I don't know how well that would work," Bethany said. "Would we be beholden to putting their name on the building? I've never heard of that." The State Department's Foreign Affairs Manual lays out a process for accepting gifts from private citizens, including real estate. The process says gifts must be evaluated case-by-case through a process that includes ensuring the gift "would not give the appearance of a conflict of interest." Adelson, who donated $5 million to Trump's inaugural committee, is one of the Republican Party's biggest donors and a major supporter of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Adelson also finances Israel Hayom, a pro-Netanyahu newspaper that is distributed free throughout Israel. US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman (Photo: Matan Stern, US Embassy in Israel) If lawyers decide to allow donations for the Jerusalem embassy, it wouldn't be without significant political risk for Trump. The president already faces major criticism from Palestinians and others who say his decision to move the embassy to Jerusalem tipped the scaled unfairly in Israel's favor. Mort Klein, president of the pro-Israel group Zionist Organization of America and a close associate of Adelson, said accepting donations would be ill-advised. Klein said he knew Adelson was "deeply interested" in seeing the embassy relocate to Jerusalem but was unaware that the casino mogul had offered to help pay for it himself. "This is a government project. It's a government-run embassy," Klein said. "I don't want people to be able to say it was Jewish money." The United States Embassy in Israel will move from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in May 2018 to coincide with the 70th anniversary of Israel declaring independence, the State Department confirmed Friday night. Follow Ynetnews on Facebook and Twitter "We are excited about taking this historic step, and look forward with anticipation to the May opening," State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said. The embassy in Jerusalem will be gradually expanded in existing consular facilities in the Arnona neighborhood, while the search for a permanent site has already begun for what Nauert called a "longer-term undertaking." The US Consulate General in Jerusalem, where the new embassy is set to be housed (Photo: Atta Awisat) The interim embassy will have office space for the ambassador and a small staff and, by the end of 2019, a new embassy annex on the Arnona compound will be opened, Nauert said in a statement. The consulate in east Jerusalem will continue to serve Palestinians, and for security reasons US Ambassador David Friedman will continue living in the residence in Herzliya, north of Tel Aviv, and commute to the relocated embassy, another official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. Trump administration officials said Congress was notified of the impending move. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson signed off on the security plan for the new embassy on Thursday. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu praised the US decision, saying it "will turn Israel's 70th Independence Day into a much greater celebration." "This is a great day for the people of Israel," Netanyahu noted in a statement released Friday night. "Thank you, President Trump, for your leadership and your friendship." Palestinians reacted with anger to the move, saying this could destroy the prospect of a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Saeb Erekat, the Palestinian's chief negotiator in peace talks that have been frozen since 2014, said the US move showed a "determination to violate international law, destroy the two-state solution and provoke the feelings of the Palestinian people as well as of all Arabs, Muslims and Christians around the globe." PLO Secretary-General Saeb Erekat slams move (: ) X Erekat, who is also secretary-general of the Palestine Liberation Organization, went on to say that US President Donald Trump and his team "have disqualified the US from being part of the solution between Israelis and Palestinians; rather, the world now sees that they are part of the problem." He further lamented the fact the move would coincide with the Nakba Daythe 1948 Palestinian exodus, or how the Palestinians refer to the establishment of Israel. Nabil Abu Rdainah, a spokesman for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, also slammed the move, saying, "This is an unacceptable step. Any unilateral move will not give legitimacy to anyone and will be an obstacle to any effort to create peace in the region." Abbas has rejected US-led Middle East peace efforts as "impossible" since Washington's decision. Abu Rdainah said the only way to achieve peace, security and stability was Abbas's proposaloutlined in an address to the United Nations Security Council in New York on Tuesdaythat an international conference should be held to kick-start the peace process, including a "multilateral mechanism" to oversee it. Abbas is still in the United States after undergoing medical checks in Baltimore on Thursday but will leave on Saturday, Abu Rdaineh said. In Gaza, a Hamas official, Sami Abu Zuhri, said that "Moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem is a declaration of war against the Arab and Muslim nation, and the US administration must reconsider its move." US President Trump, at the Conservative Political Action Conference (Photo: Reuters) Israel will this year celebrate the anniversary on April 19-20. Israel proclaimed independence on May 14, 1948. A ribbon-cutting ceremony for the new American embassy is being planned for mid-May. The May opening marks a significant acceleration. Vice President Mike Pence had said previously the embassy would open by the end of 2019, while Tillerson had said it could take years. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is in contact with the US administration and will respond if and when an American announcement is made on the planned US Embassy move, an Israeli government source said on Friday. The source added that Netanyahu did not ask President Trump to advance the opening of the embassy, and was not involved in the decision to do so. Intelligence Minister Yisrael Katz on Friday congratulated Trump for expediting the embassy's move. "There is no greater gift than that! The most just and correct move. Thanks friend!" Katz said in a Twitter posting. Pressured against the move In a speech on Friday to a gathering of conservatives in suburban Washington, Trump recalled his controversial decision, saying he withstood enormous pressure to make the move. "I put the word out that I may do it. I was hit by more countries and more pressure and more people calling, begging me 'Don't do it. Don't do it. Don't do it,'" Trump said. "I said we have to do it. It's the right thing to do. It's the right thing to do, we have to do it. And I did it." Trump talks about embassy move X He said the campaign against moving the embassy was "incredible," but noted the campaign in favor of moving the embassy was also incredible. In December 2017, Trump announced that the United States officially recognizes Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and will move its embassy there, breaking with longtime US policy "I have determined that it is time to officially recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel," he announced, calling it "overdue" and in the best interests of the United States. Trump further stressed recognition acknowledged the "obvious," that Jerusalem is the seat of Israel's government despite the disputed status that is one of the key elements in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. "Israel is a sovereign nation with the right like every other sovereign nation to determine its own capital," Trump asserted. "Acknowledging this as a fact is a necessary condition for achieving peace." German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron on Friday asked Russian President Putin to support a U.N. Security Council resolution calling for an immediate, month-long ceasefire in Syria. The two European Union leaders appealed to Putinwhose military intervention in Syria gave President Bashar al-Assad the upper hand in the seven-year-old conflictto stop bombardments of the rebel-held pocket of eastern Ghouta. Warplanes from Assad's government forces and their allies pounded the densely populated enclave east of the capital Damascus for a sixth straight day on Friday. "France and Germany call for an immediate cessation of hostilities and the implementation of a ceasefire to provide civilian support, humanitarian access and medical evacuation, as called for by the UN," the two governemts said. "France and Germany call on Russia to shoulder its responsibilities in this regard," they said in a joint statement. Syrian opposition activists say bombardment of rebel-held eastern suburbs of the capital Damascus has killed 32 people. The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says Friday's 32 deaths raise to 462 the number of people killed since Sunday when government forces began a new wave of bombardment with warplanes, helicopter gunships, surface-to-surface missiles and artillery. The Ghouta Media Center, an activist collective, also put the number of Friday's deaths at 32 people, saying those killed included 13 people in the Damascus suburb of Douma, five in Ein Tarma and five in Shiefouniyeh. Opposition activists say the massive bombardment aims to pave the way for a ground offensive by government forces to capture one of the first areas that revolted against President Bashar Assad in 2011. WASHINGTON - The Trump administration escalated pressure on North Korea Friday by slapping sanctions on scores of companies and ships accused of illicit trading with the pariah nation. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said the US has now blacklisted virtually all ships being used by the North. The administration billed it as the largest installment of North Korean economic restrictions to date as it intensifies its campaign of "maximum pressure" to get the North to give up its nuclear weapons. President Donald Trump went further, declaring in a speech Friday at the Conservative Political Action Conference that it was "the heaviest sanctions ever imposed on a country before." -Young Ghanaian invention gets national recognition and award for his invention -The invention now known as the water bicycle was built to move on water -According to the inventor, the bicycle inspired by a documentary of how some children went to school Frank Darko, the young Ghanaian tertiary dropout who used his innovation and problem-solving skills to build a bicycle which is ridden on water has received a national award for his efforts in engineering. The young inventor was awarded for his invention which has come to be known as the 'Water Bicycle' or 'Water Bike', by the Ghana Institute of Engineers at the 2018 Engineering Excellence Awards held on February 22, at the Academy of Health and Sciences. Frank Darko READ ALSO: Gloria Akuffo held Shatta Wale during her naming ceremony Mother reveals The Awards Ceremony was under the theme, Engineering Research and Innovation: Important Contributors to Sustainable Development. According to the Institute, Frank was considered for the award due to his innovation in the field of engineering even though he was not a trained engineer. His award came from the public awards category for his substantial contribution to the promotion of engineering practice and innovation. Dr. Patrick Awuah, President of Ashesi University Speaking to YEN.com.gh after picking up the prestigious award, Frank Darko implored Ghanaians to be problem-solvers and stop complaining. He said that as a nation, its people are the only ones who could solve the problems we face. He therefore called on stakeholders and benevolent bodies to invest in his breakthrough invention so as to make the lives of many Ghanaians living in deprived areas easy. Speaking on how he came by his innovation, Frank revealed that he was watching a documentary sometime back about how some school children in deprived areas had to swim to school. He said he decided to finding a working solution to the problem and came up with his creation. Special Guests READ ALSO: Attack our prophecies and the nation will be doomed Prophet Nigel Franks story was published in the media first by YEN.com.gh and other media houses including British Broadcasting Corporation took it up. Aside the national award, Frank has been offered to full scholarships by the Takoradi Technical University to come back and finish his course in Graphic Designing and take up another course in Engineering. The special guest of honor at the Awards Ceremony was Dr. Patrick Awuah, president of Ashesi University. The president of the Ghana Institute of Engineers, Ing. Mrs Carlien Bou-Chedid graced the event together with some past presidents of the Ghana Institute of Engineers. A few months ago, YEN.com.gh had an encounter with a young Ghanaian inventor, Frank Darko who had created a bicycle that could move on water. He revealed that his invention started in August last year and with a lot of effort and hard work, he managed to finish his creation and tested it in a shallow dam in his area. READ ALSO: Social Media user exposes Fella Makafui and Zylofon boss, says she is his side-chick Now, the young inventor believing in his finished work decided to test it out on the sea to prove to the world that his invention had come to stay. Initial stages of the water bike In pictures the young inventor sent to YEN.com.gh, some people were seen taking turns to experience the unique invention. Frank Darko resides in Takoradi in the Western Region. The young inventor revealed that the special bicycle was his first invention but he had drawn up plans for many more inventions. Finished work being tested at sea He revealed that his creativity came about as a result of his matchless love for science, technology and the urge to solve day-to-day problems faced by people living in the community. READ ALSO: Shatta Wale would live long Nigerian musician, Davido Star Gist on YEN brings you an exclusive interview with upcoming music star S3fa: YEN is building a platform where Ghanaians can share local news and own experiences with each other. Witnessing an incident? Want to tell about a local problem? Know someone who is extremely talented and needs recognition? Your stories and photos are always welcome. Send us a message via YENs official Facebook page. Source: Yen - In a tweet, Dumelo sought to find out what the average Ghanaian would do with GHC 500 - It was however met with an interesting response from former British diplomat, Jon Benjamin - The former High Commisioner responded by saying he would purchase two buckets of spray paint, and then donate the rest to John Dumelo's foundation Former British High Commissioner, Jon Benjamin, may no longer be working in Ghana, but that hasnt completely cut him off the country. Ghanaian actor and entrepreneur, John Dumelos tweet was met with a hilarious response from the former British official. Dumelo, in a tweet, sought to find out from Ghanaians how best they would spend GHC 500. Former British High Commissioner, Jon Benjamin READ ALSO: Top Nigerian musician speaks on the prophecies concerning Shatta Wale's death In a report by Ghanacelebrities.com, one social media user stated he would immediately set up a poultry farm. Another stated that he would get himself a new phone, so he could better market his business, especially on social media. A third one stated he would buy a container for his mother, so she could start a trade. Yet another expressed his intention to purchase some second hand clothing, so he could sell. However Jon Benjamin, opted to injected a bit of comic relief into the scene. According to him, he would buy two buckets of spray paint and donate the rest to John Dumelos foundation. His response was construed to mean an attempt conceal the true colour of a V8 vehicle allegedly obtained under unclear conditions by the actor from the State. Benjamin, has on numerous occasions, mocked Dumelo on social media. His latest response, in that respect, is not surprising, as it would become one of the several instances he has ridiculed the actor online. READ ALSO: GES to investigate cases of sexual abuse at Ejisuman SHS Star Gist on YEN brings you an exclusive interview with upcoming music star, S3fa: Want to be featured on YEN.com.gh? Send us a message on our Facebook page or on Instagram with your stories, photos or videos Source: Yen.com.gh Guwahati: Patriotic Peoples Front Assam (PPFA), while appreciating the State chief minister Sarbananda Sonowal for issuing timely directive to the power department to prevent electrocution casualties in the coming monsoon season, urges for a pragmatic action plan on the layout of high voltage live wires and its timely maintenance. Expressing serious concern over the deaths of many individuals due to electrocution across the country, the forum insists on adequate public awareness about the safe use of electrical appliances and finally proposes for a national debate over the reduction of standard domestic supply voltages from 240 (alternate current with 50 hertz) to 120 or even lower in volt differences. It may be noted that Sonowal, while chairing a power department meeting asked the officials to put in place all the precautionary measures to avert the incidents of electrocuted deaths during the forthcoming monsoon season in the State. He ordered the department to replace bamboo electric poles, if there is any, with the concrete ones before the onset of monsoon. He also emphasized on public awareness about the electrical risk areas and directed the concerned officers to undertake extensive tours to all the localities to oversee important electric installations and help the department to forge cordial relationship with the locals. At the same time, Sonowal preferred the department to engage more local youths in the power project implementations. The PPFA in a statement batted for public awareness over the use of proper fuse wires (or other protective arrangements) as a precautionary measure in all electrical systems. Replacing the fuse wire with other conductors (of high current rating) in the electrical equipments is nothing but inviting a disaster, claimed the statement. As the electrical wiring can create public health hazards, the authority must deal with the safety issue in right perspective. Hence the State electricity department should create a responsive safety departmen along with trained safety officers at the earliest, pointed out the forum. India as a nation witnesses nearly 10000 people killed annually because of electrocution. Accidental electrocution (including few suicidal attempts) cases are reportedly high in Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, Chhattisgarh, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Jharkhand, Kerala, Odisha, Uttarkhand, Assam etc. Statistics reveal that Assam lost 979 human lives due to electrocution since 2001-02, where the highest number of electrocution casualties (88) was recorded in 2016-17. More shockingly the State witnessed 57 electrocution related deaths in the last monsoon (April, May, June and July of 2017) spell. Finally India should debate whether 110/120 volt may be an adoptable option in place of present 220/240 volt to reduce the fatality of the system. At least developed nations like USA, UK and even our Asian friend Japan use lower volt lines to reduce the risk factors, stated the forum adding that even if the initiative would need huge resources, the nation must put its weight for precious human lives. Multiple independent live/phases (each of 110/120 volt) with one neutral wire arrangement can be adopted where the customers may opt for single phase line only to use in lighting (preferably with LED bulbs), digital screening of television, computer, mobile phones etc and low watt fans, pointed out the statement. Others, who prefer to use heavy electrical appliances, may go for multi-phase supply lines, it added. Political tendencies not only distort and apresent the pasta to suit their political agenda; they can go to any extent to even lie about the events and their interpretation. aFacts are sacred; opinions are freea should have been the dictum for all those commenting on them, but as they say for the likes of Modi, aall is fair in love and wara. To promote his personal ambitions and to enhance the impact of his political agenda, he has been crossing all limits. At one level in order to glorify Sardar Patel; he is undermining Jawaharlal Nehru, and is trying to create a binary between them. For him this serves two purposes. One, as aModi parivara never participated in freedom movement they do look for an icon who was a part of freedom moment, and so have picked up Patel and are trying to appropriate him, despite the fact that Patel was very clear about the role of Modias ideological parents (Hindu Mahasabha-RSS), in the murder of his mentor, Mahatma Gandhi, aa as [a] result of the activities of these two bodies [the RSS and the Hindu Mahasabha], particularly the former, an atmosphere was created in the country in which such a ghastly tragedy became possibleaThe activities of the RSS constituted a clear threat to the existence of the Government and the State.a As far as tragic partition of the country is concerned there are so many scholarly works, which not only tell us the dynamics of Indiaas partition, but also throw a light on the complexity of the whole process. Yes, it is true that the complicated dynamics is so vast that many can pick up as per their own narrow picture. For the followers of Jinnah it was Congress which was responsible for Indiaas partition, and Modi seems to be in the same boat while putting the blame of partition on Congress and particularly on Nehru. There are three core reasons for partition tragedy. The biggest reason has been the British policy of aDivides and rulea. British knew that Indiaas major leadership is tilted towards socialism and may ally with Russian socialist block in international affairs. In pursuance of their imperialist vision they did want to cultivate a country, which can remain their subservient nation, thatas precisely the role Pakistan played in international affairs. The major factor assisting this British goal had been the two nation theory, originally propounded by Savarakar, the ideological founder of Modi ideology. The third reason had been Jinnahas assertion that aMuslims are a separate nationa, and so we want Pakistan. Lohia in his major book, "Guilty Men of Indias Partition", writes: "a one of the forces that partitioned the country was precisely this Hindu fanaticisma Those who have shouted loudest about Akhand Bharat, the present Jana Sangh (previous avatar of BJP, added) and its predecessors of the curiously un-Hindu spirit of Hinduism, have helped Britain and the Muslim League partition the country. They did nothing whatsoever to bring the Muslim close to the Hindu within a single nation. They did almost everything to estrange them from each other. Such estrangement is the root cause of partitionaa Similarly Jinnah had become more and more rigid about his demand for separate Pakistan over a period of time. Once Nehru stated that they are not bound by Cabinet mission plan, Jinnah rigidly adhered to the demand for Pakistan. At administrative level while Gandhi; by the time these machinations were being implemented by the British; was more involved on the ground, dousing the Hindu Muslim violence, leaving the issue in the hands of Nehru and Patel, his most trusted followers. Maulana Abul Kalam Azad in his seminal "India Wins Freedom", points out that it was Sardar Patel who was the first major Congress leader to have supported the British plan for Indias partition. Maulana himself never reconciled to the plan of partition, while Gandhi was the last person to have given a quiet acceptance to this, hoping that it will be a reversible process. Modias own colleague in the Central Cabinet, MJ Akbar, in his biography of Nehru (1988) "Nehru - The Making of India" says "Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, the strong man of India, had accepted the idea of partition even before Pundit Jawaharlal Nehru, the romantic." (page 406) One recalls that Jaswant Singh, Modias partyas major leader in his book (aJinnah Partition Independencea) did point out about the role of Patel in acceding to the pressure of circumstances and accepting the partition. It was due to this that Modi, the then Chief minister of Gujarat, banned this book in his state. About Kashmir imbroglio, lesser said the better. It was the creation of historical circumstances in which a Muslim majority princely state did not want to merge into Pakistan. In the face of attacks of groups of tribal, supported by Pakistan army, Maharaja Harisingh sought the help of India to save the situation. It was Sheikh Abdullah who was most insistent on help from India. Patel and Nehru were on the same page on this matter. Patel was even willing for a trade off Kashmir valley. Rajmohan Gandhi in his biography "Patel: A Life", tells us that Patel was thinking of making an ideal bargain: if Jinnah lets India have Junagadh and Hyderabad, Patel would not object to Kashmir acceding to Pakistan. He cites a speech by Patel at Bahauddin College in Junagadh, following the latters merger with India, in which he said: "We would agree to Kashmir if they agreed to Hyderabad." (Pages 407-8, 438) The final word on Patel-Nehru relations comes from none other than Father of the nation, Gandhi. While speaking to Indian Express he said, aBroadly speaking Nehru and Patel stood together on most issues, including Kashmir.a Modi is trying to construct this lie and keeps repeating it on most occasions as, despite being a lie it suits him ideologically. (Some references courtesy Sudheendra Kulkarni, Modis Dislike For Nehru Cannot Obliterate The Facts Thank you for reading! Please log in, or sign up for a new account and purchase a subscription to continue reading. If you are currently a print subscriber but don't have an online account, select this option. You will need to use your 7 digit subscriber account number (with leading zeros) and your last name (in UPPERCASE). Florida Supreme Court finds that state's Miller fix statute to death with Eighth Amendment problems has Alleyne Sixth Amendment problem | Main | Only one of three planned executions completed: Florida carries out death sentence, Texas Gov commutes at last minute, and Alabama misses deadline February 22, 2018 "A Pound of Flesh: The Criminalization of Private Debt" The title of this post is the title of this notable new big ACLU report. Here part of its executive summary: An estimated 77 million Americans one in three adults have a debt that has been turned over to a private collection agency. Thousands of these debtors are arrested and jailed each year because they owe money. Millions more are threatened with jail. The debts owed can be as small as a few dollars and can involve every kind of consumer debt, from car payments to utility bills to student loans to medical fees. These trends devastate communities across the country as unmanageable debt and household financial crisis become ubiquitous, and they impact Black and Latino communities most harshly due to longstanding racial and ethnic gaps in poverty and wealth. Debtors prisons were abolished by Congress in 1833 and are thought to be a relic of the Dickensian past. In reality, private debt collectors empowered by the courts and prosecutors offices are using the criminal justice system to punish debtors and terrorize them into paying even when a debt is in dispute or when a debtor has no ability to pay. The criminalization of private debt happens when judges, at the request of collection agencies, issue arrest warrants for people who failed to appear in court to deal with unpaid civil debt judgments. In many cases, the debtors were unaware they were sued or had not received notice to show up in court. Tens of thousands of these warrants are issued annually, but the total number is unknown because states and local courts do not typically track these orders as a category of arrest warrants. In a review of court records, the ACLU examined more than 1,000 cases in which civil court judges issued arrest warrants for debtors, sometimes to collect amounts as small as $28. These cases took place in 26 states Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Washington, and Wisconsin and Puerto Rico and the Northern Mariana Islands. Even without arrest warrants, the mere threat of jail can be effective in extracting payment even if that threat is legally unfounded. In the case of debts involving bounced checks, private collection companies now have contracts with more than 200 district attorneys offices that allow them to use the prosecutors seal and signature on repayment demand letters. Its estimated that more than 1 million consumers each year receive such letters threatening criminal prosecution and jail time if they do not pay up. But review of company practices has documented that letters often falsely misrepresent the threat of prosecution as a means of coercing payments from unknowing consumers. February 22, 2018 at 06:44 PM | Permalink Comments So this is not debtor prison. This is contempt of court prison. The article is a little misleading. Posted by: David Behar | Feb 22, 2018 6:50:19 PM When you get a subpoena, can you call the clerk and reschedule for a more convenient day? Posted by: David Behar | Feb 22, 2018 6:53:14 PM No, you can't. When the court subpoenas you to come on a certain date and time, you have to be there at that date and time. Posted by: Erik M | Feb 22, 2018 10:01:22 PM Erik. Then there is this. "...had not received notice to show up in court." Isn't evidence of notice required by the Fifth Amendment procedural due process? At least get a signed certified mail receipt, if not an attestation by a sheriff? Posted by: David Behar | Feb 23, 2018 1:28:27 AM Criminalization of bounced checks (which is framed as a fraud offense rather than a debt offense, but doesn't always involve fraud) is particularly problematic because, as I have learned from representing clients facing that charge, bounced checks are often written by identity thieves, resulting in criminal charges directed at someone who is already a crime victim, in a situation that is expensive to clear up (and not very procedurally well structured) even with a lawyer. Posted by: ohwilleke | Feb 26, 2018 2:16:55 PM Post a comment Kennebunk Post Extensive work on the steeple, the Aaron Willard Jr. clock and the weathervane of the 1824 building is complete. There has been a lot of talk about Trump giving the Little Rocket Man a "bloody nose" in a limited military strike that would somehow put a stop to North Korea's emerging ability to incinerate American cities - and actually there are several attack options that might give the North pause, without provoking a massive response that would lead to general war and the regime's downfall. Trump threatened to unleash "fire and fury" on North Korea and has called negotiation a waste of time. Trump called Kim Jong-un everything from "a sick puppy" to "Little Rocket Man" to "short and fat", prompting Pyongyang to unleash its own official diatribe. On 30 January 2018, Victor Cha, a hardliner widely seen as the incoming US ambassador to South Korea, had been rejected by the White House for the job. Cha's nomination was cancelled because he didn't support the "bloody nose" option - a limited strike to warn Pyongyang. The New York Times reported 01 February 2018 that the White House wanted the Pentagon to come up with detailed plans for a military attack against North Korea. Victor Cha wrote in a 31 January 2018 opinion piece for the Washington Post that "The president would be putting at risk an American population the size of a medium-size US city ... on the assumption that a crazy and undeterrable dictator will be rationally cowed by a demonstration of US kinetic power..." Herman Kahn (1922-1983) was a renowned strategist. Among his many books are "Thinking About the Unthinkable", "On Thermonuclear War", and "On Escalation: Metaphors and Scenarios". Kahn constructed an escalation ladder by which nations might work their way up a series of forty-four graduated rungs, all the way from "peace" to "insensate wargasm". But in between there were many other rungs, such as "slowmotion counterproperty," moving through "augmented disarming attacks," and so on. Escalation control was seen to have worked for JFK in the Cuban Missile Crisis, and failed for LBJ in Vietnam. What are some of the rungs in the Korean escalation ladder? This is the sort of stuff to which "clever briefers" are assigned, but these details have been in short supply in the public discourse. 1 - The US could use missile defense assets to shoot down North Korean missiles shortly after launch. These intercept attempts would probably succeed most of the time, and would deny the North test data on the performance of their missiles. Intercepting North Korean missiles would demonstrate American resolve to go beyond words and sanctions, and would not kill any North Koreans. The United States need not announce that it had destroyed a North Korean missile in flight, and the crew of the US Navy ship that fired the interceptor would be sworn to secrecy. Surely rumors would leak out, but it is a well known fact that not all missile tests succeed, so the North need not lose face in the process. It could just be "our little secret" between Washington and Pyongyang, that further long range missile tests will also prove futile. 2 - The most obvious option is to attack DPRK long range missiles while they are being fueled. North Korea launched the Hwasong-15 ICBM from a mobile launcher. This thing is way too big to be erected in a fully fueled state. Instead, they erect and then fuel it. There would be a convoy of fuel tank trucks, pump trucks, fire trucks in case there was a spill, and so forth. It would be an entire convoy, a large marching band of a dozen or so vehicles. The fueling would take about an hour. The ROK Kill Chain was launched 6 minutes after the Hwasong-15 launch, but if needed, could have been launched half an hour before the launch - striking first in the last resort - things could get pretty exciting. The DPRK knows this, and over the next few years will move to solid fuel missiles, which the regime could just drive it out of a highway tunnel and fire it, with essentially no warning. But in the meantime, the ICBMs are vulnerable on the ground while they are being fueled. Even if the convoy of vehicles converged as a flash mob to a pre-arranged locations [rather than a sore thumb string of trucks on a road], the launch process would be visible to US reconnaissance aircraft. During the Cold War, LeMay thought he could "foresee" a Soviet sneak attack, with SIGINT detecting a pause in Soviet air operations as everything was grounded before the sneak attack to load fuel and bombs etc, hence no airborne radio traffic [ maybe so, maybe not]. The "fueling their missiles" plot device in Crimson Tide was silly, but it would in fact hold true here. For bonus points, it is a widely advertised fact that the Supreme Leader likes a front row seat at these launches, and he might be turned into collateral damage. Since he was not being targeted "per se" it would not constitute an illegal political assassination. A pre-launch strike against the Hwasong-15 ICBM would only kill the two hundred or so North Korean troops actually associated with the launch, with minimal collateral damage [apart from possibly the Supreme Leader]. The United States need not announced that it had conducted such as strike, and the North would likewise be under no obligation to advertise the fact. If rumors leaked out, it could be explained away as an industrial accident. The permanent absence of the Supreme Leader might initially prove a bit awkward, but Kim Yo Jong, the sister of Kim Jong Un, seems to be ready to take over the job of Fearless Leader. 3 - Bomb leadership facilities. The North seems to have a string of a dozen of leadership compounds scattered around the country, much as Saddam Hussein had an archipelago of palaces strewn across Iraq. The precise function of these facilities is unclear, although a few include an impressive array of cookie-cutter mansionette guest houses that are presumably for the use of top echelon leaders. This target array has literally hundreds of aimpoints, but B-2 stealth bombers loaded out with hundreds of Small Diameter Bombs should do the trick nicely. There is no particular reason to assume that anyone of importance would be killed in the process, but the resulting smoking ruin should be food for thought for Northern leaders. Or is is possible that the Americans have "exqusite" intelligence on these compounds, and could time the attack to bag some collection of big-wigs gathered for a pow-wow in furtherance of their criminal enterprise [what if the RAF had bombed the Wannsee Conference?]. As with the in-flight interception of North Korean missiles, or a pre-launch attack on a mobile ICBM launcher, the US need not claim the attack, and the North need no acknowledge the attack [unless it materially changed the leadership lineup]. Rumors would surely leak out, and could be denied with a wink and a nod. 4 - Bomb high visibility regime prestige monuments. Pyongyang alone has a string of large, highly visible monuments and other structers that proclaim the power and the glory of the regime, and their sudden destruction would strike at the prestige of the regime. These structures include Kim Il-sung Square, the Grand People's Study House, the Juche Tower, the Museum of the Three Revolutions, the Triumphal Arch [slightly larger than that of Paris], the Mansu Hill with the Grand Monument [the enormous bronze statues of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il]. Or possibly the notorious Ryugyong Hotel, unfinishable 105-story, 330 meter-tall pyramid-shaped skyscraper in downtown Pyongyang. These prestige targets would normally be rather deserted in the wee hours of the morning, and so they could be demolished at the risk of only modest civilian casualties. Unlike the previous attack options, such a Baedeker Raid [you can look it up] would lack plausible deniability on either side, which is sort of the point. The Americans might face charges of war crimes, since the protection of cultural property during armed conflict is based on the principle that damage to the cultural property of any people means, in the words of the 1954 Hague Convention, "damage to the cultural heritage of all mankind." Because cultural property is normally civilian in nature, the general provisions of humanitarian law protecting civilian property apply. But the International Committee of the Red Cross notes that "A belligerent reprisal consists of an action that would otherwise be unlawful but that in exceptional cases is considered lawful under international law when used as an enforcement measure in reaction to unlawful acts of an adversary." American lawyers might argue that the North Koreans have committed so many transgressions of international law in recent decades that they have left themselves open to reprisal. Other lawyers would disagree, but lawyers exist to disagree. 5 - Bomb the housing. Human resource managers like to blather on about how people are our most valuable resource, but for the North Korean nuclear program this is literally true. Some fraction of the North's nuclear weapons complex may be scattered away in magic mountains, but clearly a substantial fraction of the program is out in the open at Yongbyon. A couple of reactors, enrichment, reprocessing, and all sorts of other activities associated with bomb-making. And housing - lots of housing for the thousands of workers who are essential to the North's bomb program. This housing has been substantially expanded in recent years, and one might argue that the larger West housing area is for North Koreans, while the smaller East housing area is for Iranian personnel. But in any event, there is housing for on the order of 5,000 people, who clearly work on the bomb program, and are not innocent bystanders. When the Brits finally screwed their courage to the sticking place and launched a massive air raid to destroy the V-2 rocket program facilities at Peenemunde, one of the main targets was the worker's housing. But the RAF had waited too long, and by then the center of the program had shifted to Nordhousen. An argument for striking too soon rather than too late. Bombing individual facilities at Yongbyon [or in Iran, for that matter], might set back the nuclear program for a few years. Israel bombed Iraq's nuclear program in 1981, but by the end of the decade Saddam was up to his old tricks. The staff of North Korea's nuclear program has taken decades to assemble, and would take decades to re-assemble. The Don has a handful of kinetic options to address the Little Rocket Man, but surely the Supreme Leader has a few tricks up his sleeve as well. These options would be evaluated within the context of escalation control [don't want things to get out of hand] and escalation dominance [finding the option that would be the last move, and a winning move]. Both escalation dominance and escalation control take place within the context of bounded rationality [neither side has perfect knowledge of their adversary's intentions or capabilities, and both sides have value preferences that shape their worldviews]. Both sides are bureaucratic actors, who must satisfice a variety of domestic and international stakeholders. Neither side is a perfectly "rational" actor who can optimize outcomes for a single variable. Indeed, both sides are incentivized to proclaim their irrationality, and both sides were doing a pretty good job of this in the warmup rounds. An all-out war on the Korean peninsula would result in the prompt collapse of the Korean People's Army [within a few days] and the implosion of the North Korean regime. The North might initiate the use of nuclear weapons to signal to China and Russia that they urgently needed to prop up the regime [as South Africa imagined using nuclear weapons to signal to other white countries that it needed a bulwark against African Communists]. The United States might retaliate with nuclear strikes against North Korea. The DPRK is a target-poor environment, with relatively few aimpoints that fall within traditional categories of counter-force, counter-value, counter-recovery, and so forth. In the Cold War, the Americans would have been content to leave the Soviet Union a "smoking, radiating ruin". But Japan is down-wind of the DPRK, and the South has plans for the North that do not encompass inheriting the world's largest burn hospital. Probably no one wants to go there, but both sides are contemplating the middling rungs that are kinetic but not hyper-kinetic. The American's have a few not-implausible options, as do the North Koreans. Many are familiar, while others might ratchet things up a bit. 1 - The regime a long history of planned assassinations and commando style attacks. In 1968, a team of 31 North Korean commandos were sent to the South to infiltrate the Blue House (the ROK presidential residence) and assassinate President Park Chung-hee. Kim Jong-nam, the half-brother of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, was killed in Malaysia in February 2017. North Korean defectors have also been targets of assassination attempts. 2 - The North has already demonstrated a capacity and a willingness to engage in a variety of deadly provocations. A North Korean torpedo sank the Cheonan, a South Korean navy ship, in March 2010 with the loss of 46 sailors. In November 2010, South Korea returned fire after North Korea fired dozens of artillery shells at Yeonpyeong island, one the South's border islands, killing two marines. 3 - Korean Airlines plane flight YS-11 was hijacked and flown to North Korea in 1969. North Korea freed 39 passengers on the plane, but 11 crew members and passengers were not returned. On 29 November 1987, North Korean agents hid a bomb on Korean Airlines Flight 858, killing all 115 on board. 4 - Four North Korean fighter jets intercepted a U.S. Air Force plane in international airspace over the Sea of Japan early 02 March 2003, and similar encounters followed. Nothing came of it then, but the DPRK has an air force with fighters, and long range anti-aircraft missiles. Both could be used to make airspace adjacent to the North hazardous to aerial navigation. North Korea does not have a declared Air Defense Identification Zone [ADIZ], and when China declared an ADIZ in the East China Sea on November 23, 2013, the zone overlapped with the pre-existing Japanese ADIZ. There are no internationally agreed rules of engagment for an ADIZ, but the standard procedure is that commercial aircraft identify themselves in advance, military aircraft do not, any air are subject to being intercepted and inspected, but all are allowed innocent passage. The North could do all kinds of annoying things with an ADIZ, as Muammar Gaddafi demonstrated when he proclaimed the Gulf of Sidra as its territorial waters and subsequently declared a "line of death". The USA crossed that line from 1981 and 1987, and various skirmishes resulted and aircraft downed and buildings bombed. 5 - South Korea is stuck between the North and the Americans, literally and politically. North Korea [and Russia and China] would like to eject the Americans from the Peniinsula, and would like to drive wedges between the ROK and USA. Any kinetic actions that created daylight between the USA and ROK would be to the good, from the regime's perspective. Kinetic actions aimed at the Americans, accompanied by kissy-face engagement with the South, might have some attraction. A limited missile attack on an American military based in the South, accompanied by proposing a summit between the leaders of the North and South, might be an attractive option. 6 - Restricted Submarine Warfare - Further up the escalation ladder, the North might declare a limited quarantine of the South, excluding American shipping. The South has dozens of diesel submarines, and could probably give the American blockade runners a run for their money. For American military vessels in waters immediately adjacent to the South, this might provide valuable training opportunities. But commercial shipping in Indo-Pacific sealanes would be another matter. The North would be challenged to identify an "American" freighter, given flags of convenience, but surely some container ship could be singled out for attention, and the maritime trade with the South greatly impacted. 7 - The North already has a demonstrated capacity and willingness to use offensive information operations, witness their attack on the movie "The Interview". The DPRK cannot make sewers flow backwards or other such cartoonish "Digital Pearl Harbor" exploits, but surely they can be annoying to American interests. 8 - The North announced an intent to conduct long-range missile tests that would bracket the American territory of Guam. Having a brace of North Korean reentry vehicles splashing down all in water adjacent to Guam would surely get people's attention. Some advance Notice to Aviators and Mariners [NOTAM] would make it street legal, and make sure that the audience was lined up for the show. 9 - Jumping over a number of rungs in the escalation ladder, the North could conduct an above ground nuclear test. It has been some years since there have been nuclear detonations other than underground tests, and such a test, with a grinning Supreme Leader in the foreground, would surely cause consternation. 10 - The North could credibly threaten to nuke an American city, to provoke a spontaneous evacuation of the populace. Make the threat a few days in advance, and then jerk people around by changing the target city and the date of attack. 11 - Further vexation might result from a nuclear test detonated at high altitude over Guam. A low yield detonation [a few kilotons] at high altitude [tens of kilometers] would get everyone's attention, but probably not produce appreciable physical damage to Guam or the citizens thereof. Some thought might be required to anticipate flash blindness or Electromagnetic Pulse [EMP] effects, but these might not be particularly severe. The Americans might be at a loss to respond. Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Geng Shuang's Regular Press Conference on February 23, 2018 2018/02/23 Q: Director-General Zhao Bentang of the Department of Latin American and Caribbean Affairs of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of China will meet with his Russian counterpart Shchetinin Aleksander Valentinovich and hold relevant consultation in Beijing on February 26. What would be the main topics of their consultation? A: As part of the consultation mechanism between the two foreign ministries, the China-Russia consultation on Latin American affairs has been held for ten rounds since 2001, contributing to better mutual understanding and China-Latin America and Russia-Latin America ties. The two sides agreed at the last round of consultation to hold the 11th round in Beijing in the near term to exchange views on the situation in Latin America, China-Latin America and Russia-Latin America relations. Besides Russia, China also has such kind of consultation mechanism on Latin American affairs with the ROK, Japan and the US. Q: According to reports, the China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan highway will open to traffic on February 25. Can you give us more details? A:China, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan successfully carried out a trial operation of the International Road Transport of Goods along the route Tashkent-Andijan-Osh-Irkeshtam-Kashgar from October 30 to November 1, 2017. Based on that, the three parties plan to officially put the International Road Transport of Goods into operation within this month and are stepping up efforts to achieve that. The China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan highway is an important connectivity project for this region. China would like to take this opportunity to enhance its transportation cooperation with Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan so that the Belt and Road Initiative would deliver more tangible benefits. Q: According to reports, on February 22, French President Emmanuel Macron promised that he is going to take measures to prevent foreign investors from buying French farms, and these measures are related to concerns that Chinese businesses are purchasing French agricultural land at cheap prices. What is your response to that? A: I am not aware of the specifics of the relevant business cooperation. The Chinese government always asks its enterprises to observe laws and regulations when expanding markets overseas. We also hope that the relevant party could provide an enabling environment and a level-playing field for Chinese enterprises' investments and operations there and contribute to the sound development of bilateral economic cooperation and trade. Q: According to the Reuters, a senior US official said that Australia, the United States, India and Japan are talking about establishing a joint regional infrastructure scheme as an alternative to China's Belt and Road Initiative. What is your comment? A: The Belt and Road Initiative proposed by China is meant to realize development for all by strengthening infrastructure and connectivity and fully tapping into the growth potential of all economies. Following the principle of shared benefits through extensive consultation and joint contribution since its inception five years ago, the Belt and Road Initiative has achieved fruitful outcomes in its pursuit for win-win results. With its positive effects felt so extensively, this Initiative has won widespread popularity. When representatives from more than 140 countries gathered in Beijing for the International Cooperation Forum of the Belt and Road Initiative in May, 2017, it was clear that this Initiative had won the vote of confidence from the international community. We have said many times that any country, as long as they share the same principle and vision, could take part in this open and inclusive initiative if they want to, including those mentioned by you. One last point I want to make is that infrastructure is an important driving force for economic development. We welcome larger inputs into the infrastructure field from other countries. All countries should strengthen such kind of international cooperation under the principle of openness, inclusiveness and mutually beneficial cooperation so as to promote regional and global economic development for the benefit of all. Q: According to a US website, during President Trump's visit to China last year, a scuffle broke out between Chinese and US security officials. Can you confirm this and what is your comment? A: We have taken note of this report. I know that the relevant authority on the US side has clarified the situation, saying that the report is false. I want to point out that President Trump's state visit to China last November was a great success. The working teams of the two sides closely communicated and coordinated with each other in a friendly and highly effective way before and during the visit. The two sides are quite satisfied with each other's work. Since November, UNHCR, the UN Agency for Refugees, has evacuated more than 1,000 highly vulnerable refugees from Libya and is identifying lasting solutions for them in third countries. On Tuesday, a flight brought 128 refugees from Tripoli to Niamey, in Niger, and yesterday, Wednesday 14, with a second flight, 150 refugees arrived in Rome from Tripoli. Thus, a total of 1,084 refugees have been evacuated from the start of UNHCR operations in three months." In writer/director Martin McDonaghs Golden Globe-winning, Oscar-nominated Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (Fox Searchlight), grieving, coveralls-wearing mother Mildred (Francis McDormand) will do almost anything to find the person who abducted, raped and murdered her daughter Angela (Kathryn Newton) seven months earlier. Renting three weathered billboards, on a foggy stretch of road, that havent been updated since1986 becomes her latest attention-grabbing plan. At the Ebbing Advertising Company, Mildred meets with Red Welby (Caleb Landry Jones), the small towns resident gay man, and pays him $5,000 for the first month. The red billboards with black typeface read: Raped While Dying, And Still No Arrests? and How Come Chief Willoughby?. Bill (Woody Harrelson), the chief in question, is well-aware that Angelas brutal murder case remains unsolved. But that doesnt mean hes stopped searching for answers. In addition to contending with Mildred, Bill, happily married to Anne (Abbie Cornish) and the father of two young daughters, has pancreatic cancer. He also has to deal with violent, racist and homophobic Officer Dixon (Sam Rockwell). Mildreds actions also impact others in her immediate orbit. Her high school student son Robbie (Lucas Hedges from Manchester By the Sea and Lady Bird) is also still grieving for his sister and is as supportive of his mother as he can be. Ex-husband Charlie (John Hawkes), an ex-cop known for his vicious temper and drinking problem, is enraged at Mildred. Denise (Amanda Warren), Mildreds co-worker at the towns gift shop, also gets dragged in to the situation. The thing that sets Three Billboards apart from other films about grieving parents looking for answers, such as recent Golden Globe winner In The Fade, as well as Rabbit Hole and Ordinary People, is the way that peripheral characters such as Bill, Dixon and even Red become as essential as Mildred. The subplots involving Bills suicide and subsequent gift to Mildred, Dixons relationship with his crazy mother (Sandy Martin), as well as his barroom encounter with the suspected rapist, and Reds hospital room encounter with Dixon feel as necessary to the story as anything involving Mildred herself. Unfortunately, Three Billboards completely falls apart in its final few minutes. Mildred and Dixon teaming up together feels as if McDonough, an award-winning playwright, didnt know how to end the movie. Ultimately, this is why Three Billboards doesnt actually deserve to win a Best Picture Oscar. Rating: B+ For anything or anyone to last 25 years in todays day and age is pretty significant. This goes double for the Miami LGBT scene, where you can be here today and gone tomorrow in the blink of an eye. One performer in the community who has beat the odds and finds herself busier than ever after 25 years in the business is comic drag queen Shelley Novak. Ive been so busy and so thankful at my age to be getting the work that Im getting and to stay relevant. Its so heartwarming, said Novak, known out of drag as Tommy Strangie. Novak celebrates her silver anniversary recognizing drag entertainers and club kids of the community with the 25th annual Shelley Novak Awards. The event will be held Thursday, March 1 at Kill Your Idol, 222 Espanola Way in Miami Beach. Novak said this year, she wanted to poll the community at Wigwood, pick everyones brains, everyone on that scene and have them choose the nominees for such categories as best drag name, best drag venue, best costumes, best make-up and most glamorous. It helps me because I dont have my finger on the pulse like I used to, Novak said. These kids know and I want to gear it all towards these new, young kids that are coming up. My favorite category is the best new artist because I like to give these young, up and coming, hungry kids a chance to get up and speak. These are the kids that are going out there and performing for drink tickets or maybe a cheeseburger. Theyre the ones wanting to keep these peoples parties going. Novak knows all about starting out new on the scene. She traveled from Boston to Miami Beach in October 1992 and never looked back. Miami Beach is my home. Theres nothing like it, she said. Novak said she started out as the typical drag entertainer, trying to lip sync and fit into that mold of the [drag queens] of that era. They would go and perform and lip sync and they were amazing at it, but I was just a terrible lip-syncer, Novak said. And one day the cassette broke ala Milli Vanilli. It was at Gloria Estefans hotel and she actually was the one to say listen, your voice might be terrible but get out there and sing. Dont lip sync anymore. Just do you. And that was the end of that. Novak said shes always been much better talking. Cocktail conversation was always my gig being an emcee, she said. But you know, 20 years ago it was edgy for a guy to throw on a dress, hit a speed and talk a mile a minute. That was edgy. Nowadays, drag is a different world and you have to find your niche. Novak said the success of RuPauls Drag Race has changed things so much where todays queens have to step it up. But she adds the nightlife is one big apple pie, and theres a piece for everybody. Theres enough pie for everybody. In 2016, Novak admitted she was floundering a little bit. It was during that time Athena Dion, anther local drag queen, asked her to help launch a new party at Score called The Lab Fridays. On Jan. 26, the weekly event celebrated its two-year anniversary. Ive always loved Shelley. She was one of the first drag queens I saw when I first came out onto the scene, so I wanted to make her a part of my project, Dion said. She had a lot of energy. She was coming out of a whole new part of her life, so she had all this passion like a new queen. She was ready, she dove into it, and it just blossoms from there when you have that passion. So it worked really well. Novak credits Dion and Score for her comeback. She even ended up winning Local Hero at the Pink Flamingo Awards. 2016 was a big comeback year for me, Novak said. Today, Novak hosts a number of regular gigs, including Not Your Standard Bingo on the last Sunday of every month at The Standard Spa in Miami Beach; Hollyweird Karaoke at PRL Bar in Hollywood every Monday night; and Karaoke Circus with startender Karloz Torres at Kill Your Idol every Thursday. That staff and those people at Kill Your Idol...the customers and the regulars, theyre like family, Novak said. Its such a great gig. Its my bread and butter. Speaking of bread and butter, Novak picked up another gig in December, Home Cookin at Racket in Wynwood. A reboot of the late 90s party from 20 years ago, Rackets Home Cookin offers free burgers and free barbecue every Tuesday with an open bar for two hours, which is unheard of, Novak said. So theyre giving you dinner and drinks while surrounded by beautiful people at a great spot. Theres no signs of stopping for Novak, who just last month performed at the 20th anniversary live concert for Hedwig and the Angry Inch at Gramps. I am busy and Im loving it, Novak said. Ive been really lucky. To be able to do what you love is not work. And Im happy to be able to do it and make people laugh. The nominees for the 25th annual Shelley Novak Awards are: BEST DRAG NAME: Gift with Purchase, Queef Latina, Helen Degenerate, Dang-Ho Yu Sickning, Hairy Bradshaw and Charlotte Shottgun. BEST COSTUMES: TP Lords, Kurt Fowl, Helen Degenerate, Andro Gin, Queef Latina and Jahsyra Pryce. BEST CLUB KID: Delishiz Li, Kunst, Kurt Fowl, Lisa Limbaugh and Rubberchild. MOST GLAMOROUS: Miss Toto, Kat Wilderness, Poizon Ivy, Athena Dion and Kourtney Sheers. BEST LATIN PERFORMER: Juleisy Y Karla, Adora, Marytrini, Josefina La Mujer de Los Globos and Mariloly. BEST MAKE UP: FKA Twink, Morphine Love, Persephone Von Lips, Jupiter Velvet, Andro Gin and Kurt Fowl. BEST NEW ARTIST: Dasha Dixx, Andro Gin, Candi Dixxx, Celia Booze, Sensitive Black Hottie and Dang-Ho Yu Sickning. BEST FORT LAUDERDALE QUEEN: Haus of Piss, Amanda Austin, Erika Norell, Nicole Halliwell and Daisy DeadPetals. BEST DRAG VENUE: Gramps, Flaming Classics, Kill Your Idol, Molto, Counter Corner and the Drag Brunch at R House Wynwood. BEST PERFORMANCE / NIGHT: Celebrity Deathmatch: Super Mario at the Hangar; Wigwood 2018; Elishaly DWitshes climbs a double decker bus; Persephone Von Lips performs 21 guns; Kunst performs All by Myself; and Hedwig and the Angry Inch 20th anniversary live concert at Gramps. BEST WIGS: TP Lords, Nelly Norell, Queef Latina, Athena Dion and Serena ChaCha. BEST DRAG KING: Andro Gin, Ded Cooter and King Femme. LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD: Helen Swan and The House of Lords. Leaders of several LGBT organizations recently came together to discuss the State of Our Community, the seventh annual business luncheon hosted by the Miami-Dade Gay & Lesbian Chamber of Commerce (MDGLCC). The annual networking luncheon and expo is an opportunity for elected officials of several municipalities to meet with prominent members of the LGBT community to share their plans for 2018 and how those plans would impact LGBT people living in South Florida. Steve Adkins, president and CEO of the MDGLCC, said the goal of the forum which took place Feb. 8 at the Courtyard by Marriott Miami Airport is to continue the ongoing dialogue of cooperation as we all attack the many challenges before us. The better we understand one another, the more quickly we can accomplish our mutual goals, Adkins said. While national politics has rewritten the ideology of what it means to be conservative or progressive, what it means to be a positive contributor to making our community a better place has not: involvement. Adkins said the MDGLCC has set forth as one of its 2018 goals to establish its first-ever advocacy council, which would work to establish policies and collaborations in alignment with the groups community objectives. The Miami-Dade Gay & Lesbian Chamber of Commerce believes in equality for all, Adkins said. To that end, the MDGLCC will take political positions on issues relating to commerce, equal rights and tourism. We will not endorse candidates or take positions which are divisive to our community. Adkins said the MDGLCC supports the following: the passage of a trans-inclusive employment non-discrimination (ENDA) policy; gender pay equality in the workplace; diversity and inclusion for LGBT-owned businesses; and implementation of pro-business, LGBT-inclusive policies at the federal, state and local levels of government. Damian Pardo, a financial advisor at the Pardo Group at Morgan Stanley in the Miami-Fort Lauderdale area, was one of the speakers at the MDGLCC event. He said while the get together was called the State of Our Community, it begged the question whose community? The LGBTQ community? The Miami Beach community? The Hispanic community? Wilton Manors? Its important because it frames the way we act and the way we live, said Pardo, who was also the head organizer of this years Gay8 festival in Little Havana. We tend to choose our office locations, where we eat, our homes, how we socialize...in our bubbles of comfort. Pardo said while we live in one of the most diverse communities in the country, it is also one of the most segregated. That means we are vulnerable to propaganda when used as a political tool, Pardo said. If you dont know an immigrant, you believe they are criminals. If you dont know a Hispanic person, you believe they dont want to learn English. Three years ago, Pardo started Gay8 a Pride event for every community in South Florida but hosted by the gay community to bring diverse groups and areas together for one fun day as a way to cross communities. LGBTQ people understand diversity better than most, Pardo said. After all, we are represented in every single community group and we understand you need to work together to get things done. While producing Gay8, Pardo and fellow producer Joe Cardona, who is a straight man, met with City of Miami Police many times. Pardo said the officers could not tell which one of them was the gay. Someone finally asked and so they learned Joe was straight and I was the gay one, Pardo said. Pardo said our current political system is our fault. Had we done a better job of crossing borders in our community, people couldnt have been so easily exploited for political favor, he said. Sadly, while we have gained progressive political victories, many can be easily reversed, and you cant legislate the way people feel...We will never win fighting money and power with just money and power. We can only win by changing hearts and minds and doing the hard and uncomfortable work of leaving our bubble meeting people where they are at, not where we want them to be. Leaders in high positions of elected office also spoke at the MDGLCC networking event, including Miami Beach Mayor Dan Gelber, City of Miami Mayor Francis Suarez and openly gay State Rep. David Richardson, who is running for Congress. Richardson appeared via Skype and said in Tallahassee theres a focus on LGBT related bills, including efforts to get a gay marriage ban out of statute and to separate an anti-discrimination bill regarding housing and employment protections for LGBT individuals. Richardson proposes to have one bill on housing protections and another on employment that is LGBT inclusive, but he says that isnt going anywhere with the Republican leadership in Tallahassee. The bill regarding anti-discrimination against the LGBT community that has been filed for the last 10 years or so is not moving. Its not being heard, Richardson said. I also cant get anyone here in the Republican leadership to hear the bill to get the gay marriage ban out of statute, even though theres a law in the books that says every year we clean up the statutes and delete the ones that are no longer applicable. City of Miami Mayor Francis thanked the Miami-Dade Gay & Lesbian Chamber of Commerce for inviting him to be a part of an important conversation in the LGBT community. Miami has long prided itself as being a uniquely diverse and inclusive city, one that welcomes and embraces people of all backgrounds, Francis said. To maintain this, I am focused on continuing to support organizations like the Miami-Dade Gay & Lesbian Chamber of Commerce, who are central to this element of inclusiveness that makes our city so special. Francis said he is well aware of the vital role the LGBT community plays in the welfare, identity and future of [his] city. That is why one of my goals is to form an LGBT Advisory Board, where the voices of the LGBT community can not only continue to be heard, but positioned in a way that can shape the manner in which we make decisions that are crucial to shaping our citys future, Francis said. I also fully intend to build upon the partnerships Ive formed with organizations like SAVE, led by Tony Lima, who I have had the pleasure of collaborating with to promote and advocate for the interests of LGBT equality. Although Francis said he is encouraged by his citys progress and the future of the LGBT community in Miami, he said we still face some challenges. We must build more bridges between our religious/spiritual communities and the LGBT community, Francis said. I am a firm believer in equality, tolerance and compassion. Religious identity should not preclude anyone from standing up for LGBT rights. If anything, it should embolden people to do so. Francis said the good news is that, through conversations like these and by continuing to work together, we can not only overcome these hurdles, but create a stronger and more unified community than ever before. Lets make sure that the entire world knows what Miami truly stands for: tolerance, diversity and inclusivity, Francis said. For the last three years, the PaLante Awards have honored South Florida activists for moving forward many human rights issues and other agendas. (PaLante is a Spanish term meaning move forward.) This year, the third annual ceremony which took place Friday, Feb. 16 tackled immigration, honoring three individuals and one organization doing their part to advance immigrant rights. During the ceremony, the PaLante Awards took a moment to remember the victims of the Broward high school shooting massacre and made a plea for stricter gun laws. I think that we all agree that it is time in the U.S. for us to have gun control, said presenter Marleine Bastien, a licensed clinical social worker and executive director of Fanm Ayisyen nan Miyami / Haitian Women of Miami. We need to continue to raise our collective voices to say enough is enough. In addition to recognizing this years immigration heroes, the PaLante Awards also served as a fundraiser to benefit the Gay8 Festival, which took place Sunday, Feb. 18, in Little Havana. Organizers and co-founders Damian Pardo and Joe Cardona say they are honored to be a part of the PaLante Awards, which salutes really exceptional people who are doing tremendous things in our community. Im proud to be standing amongst doers, not people who sit around and like things on Facebook and think they did something grand, but people who actually make a difference...people who do things and shape our community, Cardona said. I encourage each and every one of you to get involved in something, something that makes a difference. One of the youngest honorees this year was Christina Ponthieux, a 10-year-old Miami Shores Elementary student and TPS activist. Christina recently took to the stage during an Arcade Fire concert in Miami in front of thousands to advocate for the extension of temporary protection status for Haitian immigrants. We have a place in America. You know why? Because we are hard-working people; because we deserve to be here; because we dont give up easily, Christina said. A lot of us, we came here a long time ago coming for a brighter future, coming to learn. But right now were not feeling that welcome that we shouldve been given. So now we are fighting very hard to get what we want: the Green Card, residency, PPS, permanent protected status. Other honorees included: Juan Carlos Carabantes, a DACA champion and recipient who has advocated for immigration, LGBT rights and has pressed Congress to pass a clean DREAM act; Carlos J. Martinez, a public defender for Miami-Dade County and a champion for immigrant rights; and We Count!, a nonprofit dedicated to defending worker and immigrant rights in Homestead by offering leadership development, community education, coalition building and campaigns for social change. Attendees of the PaLante Awards also got to meet Ricardo Queralles, an HIV-positive Venezuelan who is being deported back to his country for a 12-year-old felony conviction and wont have access to his life-saving medication. Recently, my friend, Ricardo, when checking in for immigration was greeted with an ankle monitor and told to buy a plane ticket back to Venezuela and report back in 30 days, Pardo told attendees of the Miami-Dade Gay & Lesbian Chamber of Commerces State of Our Community business networking luncheon Feb. 8. Hes been in this country for 15 years but he has a felony conviction for possession of drugs from 12 years ago. Ricardo is HIV positive, and this country is set to deport him back to Venezuela, a country where you cannot obtain HIV drugs. [This is] a death sentence. Pardo says Queralles predicament is a double standard case of redemption, or second chances a concept rarely granted to immigrants in the United States. Redemption is a concept that seems to work for white men in politics or corporations or religious leaders, Pardo said. If you are a priest and you commit a sex crime, you get relocated. You have a different rule of law....Where was my friend, Ricardos, redemption for a crime he committed in 2006? Lynare Robbins, who serves on the Gay8 host committee and ran this years Womens Tertulia, made an announcement about a new human rights initiative that shes directing, which will implement a two-day human rights symposium to the 2019 Gay8 Festival. The program, called the ImpactOUT International Initiative, focuses on community-building relationships with activists and NGOs from Latin America and the Caribbean. We have a sponsor who will bring the activists to Miami next year, Robbins said. ImpactOUT, an enterprise of 4ward Miami, is an LGBTQ human rights program working regionally, nationally and internationally with the Washington D.C.-based International Institute on Race, Equality and Human Rights. The program will sponsor activists from Latin America and the Caribbean to attend a two-day LGBTQ human rights symposium that will be added to the Gay8 weekend in 2019. The symposium will focus on the Global South of the Americas, and will bring together South Florida activists with their Latin American and Caribbean counterparts to build relationships, partnerships and solidarity. ImpactOUT has also partnered with Pridelines Youth Services and Florida International Universitys LGBTQA Initiatives. One of the projects that ImpactOUT will be doing this year is creating an LGBTQ global youth education and training program and sending a group of LGBTQ youth, in partnership with Pridelines and FIU, to the United Nations Youth Summit in New York City. We want to create a new generation of global LGBTQ human rights leaders from the South Florida community who will work locally but also internationally, Robbins said. The United Nations is a crucial platform for youth activists to connect to and advocate at as their summits and commission hearings are spaces where activists have the ears of global thought leaders and where policies can take root. Paul Thomas, a volunteer for Gay8 and the PaLante Awards, summed up Fridays event in a few sentences. This years Community Award acknowledgment was regarding immigration and went to a young lady who is championing the cause for PPS (Permanent Protected Status), Thomas said. Carlos J. Martinez was also acknowledged as a champion for equality and immigration as the only Hispanic elected public defender in the whole U.S. And we had to talk with Ricardo Queralles, who is in a life and death situation with his immigration status as the country he could be sent back to does not provide the medical care he needs. What an amazing event. A Miami Beach dating website that wants to help Trump supporters find their perfect match is facing backlash for placing a convicted child sex offender as one of their models. Trump.Dating, only allows straight people on their site, previously had an authentic pro-Trump couple from North Carolina, Jodi Riddleberger and William Barrett Riddleberger, posing on their homepage. However, according to the Washington Post, the couples photo was removed when News & Observer reported that Riddleberge has a 1995 conviction for indecent liberties with a child. Riddleberg, according to the Greensboro News & Record, was accused of videotaping himself having sex with a 15-year-old when he was 25. As of Tuesday, the dating site now features a different middle-aged couple. Trump.Dating spokesman Sean McGrossler told the Washington Post in a statement that the previous couple does not reflect their image. The couples history was not revealed to us in anyway beforehand or while the photo was live on the site, McGrossler said. They are not spokesmodels. They are not spokespersons. They no longer represent the Trump.Dating image. This news comes after the controversy of having users only being able to select Straight Male, or Straight Woman, on the site, implying that you cant be pro-Trump and LGBT simultaneously. The sites premise, according to the news release of its launch this month, is that Users can rest assured every person they are talking to is behind the president, with red, white, and blue blood that flows for America each and every day. The Education Department will no longer be looking into transgender bathroom complaints. During former president Barack Obamas second term, schools were directed to allow students to use the bathroom that matched their gender identity, according to the Washington Post. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and Attorney General Jeff Sessions later removed the guidance under president Donald Trump and said they would only be looking at other forms of discrimination. Title IX prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex, not gender identity, Education Department spokesperson Elizabeth Hill said to the the Washington Post. Where students, including transgender students, are penalized or harassed for failing to conform to sex-based stereotypes, that is sex discrimination prohibited by Title IX. In the case of bathrooms, however, longstanding regulations provide that separating facilities on the basis of sex is not a form of discrimination prohibited by Title IX. Catherine Lhamon, who headed the Education Department's Office for Civil Rights during Obamas time in office, said the departments statement was appalling and deeply dangerous, to the Post. The federal courts have multiple times made clear that Title IX protects transgender students, Lhamon said. They just dont have the option to say, We just dont apply the law here. The Centaur upper stage that will help launch NOAA's Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite-S, or GOES-S, arrives at the Vertical Integration Facility at Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The Centaur will be mated to a United Launch Alliance Atlas V booster. GOES-S is the second in a series of four advanced geostationary weather satellites that will significantly improve the detection and observation of environmental phenomena that directly affect public safety, protection of property and the nation's economic health and prosperity. GOES-S is slated to launch March 1, 2018. Photo Credit: Kim Shiflett Larger image Please follow SpaceRef on Twitter and Like us on Facebook. NASA has a long and successful track record at Mars. Since 1965, it has flown by, orbited, landed and roved across the surface of the Red Planet. What can InSight -- planned for launch in May -- do that hasn't been done before? NASA's Mars InSight lander team is preparing to ship the spacecraft from Lockheed Martin Space in Denver, where it was built and tested, to Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, where it will become the first interplanetary mission to launch from the West Coast. The project is led by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. 1. InSight is the first mission to study the deep interior of Mars. A dictionary definition of "insight" is to see the inner nature of something. InSight (Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport) will do just that. InSight will take the "vital signs" of Mars: its pulse (seismology), temperature (heat flow), and its reflexes (radio science). It will be the first thorough check-up since the planet formed 4.5 billion years ago. 2. InSight will teach us about planets like our own. InSight's team hopes that by studying the deep interior of Mars, we can learn how other rocky planets form. Earth and Mars were molded from the same primordial stuff more than 4 billion years ago, but then became quite different. Why didn't they share the same fate? When it comes to rocky planets, we've only studied one in great detail: Earth. By comparing Earth's interior to that of Mars, InSight's team hopes to better understand our solar system. What they learn might even aid the search for Earth-like exoplanets, narrowing down which ones might be able to support life. So while InSight is a Mars mission, it's also more than a Mars mission. 3.InSight will try to detect marsquakes for the first time. One key way InSight will peer into the Martian interior is by studying motion underground -- what we know as marsquakes. NASA has not attempted to do this kind of science since the Viking mission. Both Viking landers had their seismometers on top of the spacecraft, where they produced noisy data. InSight's seismometer will be placed directly on the Martian surface, which will provide much cleaner data. Scientists have seen a lot of evidence suggesting Mars has quakes. But unlike quakes on Earth, which are mostly caused by tectonic plates moving around, marsquakes would be caused by other types of tectonic activity, such as volcanism and cracks forming in the planet's crust. In addition, meteor impacts can create seismic waves, which InSight will try to detect. Each marsquake would be like a flashbulb that illuminates the structure of the planet's interior. By studying how seismic waves pass through the different layers of the planet (the crust, mantle and core), scientists can deduce the depths of these layers and what they're made of. In this way, seismology is like taking an X-ray of the interior of Mars. Scientists think it's likely they'll see between a dozen and a hundred marsquakes over the course of two Earth years. The quakes are likely to be no bigger than a 6.0 on the Richter scale, which would be plenty of energy for revealing secrets about the planet's interior. 4. First interplanetary launch from the West Coast All of NASA's interplanetary launches to date have been from Florida, in part because the physics of launching off the East Coast are better for journeys to other planets. But InSight will break the mold by launching from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. It will be the first launch to another planet from the West Coast. InSight will ride on top of a powerful Atlas V 401 rocket, which allows for a planetary trajectory to Mars from either coast. Vandenberg was ultimately chosen because it had more availability during InSight's launch period. A whole new region will get to see an interplanetary launch when InSight rockets into the sky. In a clear, pre-dawn sky, the launch may be visible in California from Santa Maria to San Diego. 5. First interplanetary CubeSat The rocket that will loft InSight beyond Earth will also launch a separate NASA technology experiment: two mini-spacecraft called Mars Cube One, or MarCO. These briefcase-sized CubeSats will fly on their own path to Mars behind InSight. Their objective is to relay back InSight data as it enters the Martian atmosphere and lands. It will be a first test of miniaturized CubeSat technology at another planet, which researchers hope can offer new capabilities to future missions. If successful, the MarCOs could represent a new kind of data relay to Earth. InSight's success is independent of its CubeSat tag-alongs. 6. InSight could teach us how Martian volcanoes were formed. Mars is home to some impressive volcanic features. That includes Tharsis -- a plateau with some of the biggest volcanoes in the solar system. Heat escaping from deep within the planet drives the formation of these types of features, as well as many others on rocky planets. InSight includes a self-hammering heat probe that will burrow down to 16 feet (5 meters) into the Martian soil to measure the heat flow from the planet's interior for the first time. Combining the rate of heat flow with other InSight data will reveal how energy within the planet drives changes on the surface. 7. Mars is a time machine Studying Mars lets us travel to the ancient past. While Earth and Venus have tectonic systems that have destroyed most of the evidence of their early history, much of the Red Planet has remained static for more than 3 billion years. Because Mars is just one-third the size of Earth and Venus, it contains less energy to power the processes that change a planet's structure. That makes it a fossil planet in many ways, with the secrets of our solar system's early history locked deep inside. Learn more about InSight's mission goals and instrumentation at a live public talk, part of JPL's von Karman lecture series, on Thursday, Feb. 22 at 7 p.m. PST (10 p.m. EST). The event will be streamed live on http://YouTube.com/NASAJPL/live . More information about InSight is at: https://mars.nasa.gov/insight Please follow SpaceRef on Twitter and Like us on Facebook. The harness racing industry is mourning the tragic passing of Australian driver Nic Dewar. Nic, 18, was involved in a single vehicle car accident on Friday (Feb. 23). Dewar (pictured at right with Tim Tetrick) drove in a race at Shepparton on Friday afternoon and finished second with pacer Nor Nor West. Based in Young, Nic was passionate about his harness racing and in his succinct career drove 22 winners and 57 placegetters. As a mark of respect, drivers in Saturday nights Miracle Mile at Tabcorp Park Menangle will wear black armbands and Club Menangle will fly a flag at half-mast. On behalf of the entire harness racing fraternity, the Harness Racing New South Wales Board and Management extends their sincere condolences to Nics family and friends. Persons seeking counselling can contact the HRNSW Development and Support Program (DASP) which is a confidential counselling and advice service provided by HRNSW. Please join Standardbred Canada in offering condolences to the family and friends of Nic Dewar. (with files from HRNSW) New Vocations Racehorse Adoption Program is pleased to announce that a breeding to the leading Canadian trotting sire Kadabra has been donated to support its efforts to rehabilitate, retrain and rehome Standardbreds retiring from the track. Isabelle Vartanian donated the breeding in memory of her husband, Norman, who passed away last September. Norman was avidly involved in the harness racing industry for many years. The breeding will be offered at in an open-ended auction via ongait.com from 8:00 a.m. on Tuesday, February 27 through 12:00 noon on Wednesday, February 28. The purchaser owes a refundable 10 per cent deposit with the balance due to New Vocations with a live foal. Interested parties are encouraged to bid only for a mare that is a good breeding candidate and is not already booked. New Vocations reserves the right to void the purchase if the mare is over 18, has been barren two consecutive years or is due after May 5. For more information, please contact Dot Morgan at 937-947-4020 or [email protected]. (New Vocations Racehorse Adoption Program) 'The Billy Graham Tribute Channel' Debuts on SiriusXM to Honor the Late Founder of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association Contact: Kelly Klemmensen, Billy Graham Evangelistic Association , 704-401-2717, kklemmensen@bgea.org CHARLOTTE, N.C., Feb. 22, 2018 / Standard Newswire / -- The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association in collaboration with SiriusXM announced the launch of "The Billy Graham Tribute Channel," a limited-run channel headlined by the words of the late world-renowned Christian evangelist, Billy Graham. SiriusXM listeners nationwide will have access to the preacher's timeless messages from his seven decades of ministry.Launching to honor the late preacher's life, "The Billy Graham Tribute Channel" debuted on Wednesday, Feb. 21, at 12 p.m. ET and runs through Sunday, March 4, on SiriusXM channel 145 on satellite and via streaming. With Easter only a few weeks away, the BGEA and SiriusXM are also preparing upcoming messages to be presented on channel 145, focusing on the resurrection of Christ. "As we celebrate the life of Billy Graham we, along with SiriusXM, offer a channel featuring some of Mr. Graham's most memorable messages. The timeless messages found on 'The Billy Graham Tribute Channel' will do what Mr. Graham has done with such passion throughout his career; help point others to the hope found in Jesus Christ," said Jim Kirkland, executive director of Audio Media at the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association."SiriusXM is proud to celebrate the legacy of 'America's Pastor' by presenting 'The Billy Graham Tribute Channel,'" said Dave Gorab, Vice President and General Manager of Talk Programming, SiriusXM. "Now through March 4, SiriusXM listeners can reflect on the remarkable life and work of Billy Graham with a special channel dedicated to his seven decades of ministry."In addition to the catalog of Graham's inspirational messages and sermons, "The Billy Graham Tribute Channel" also includes personal reflections on the pastor's remarkable life from Billy Graham's son, Franklin Graham, along with other family members, music artists, ministry leaders, and former U.S. presidents. SiriusXM channel 145 will also carry Graham's memorial service live from the grounds of the Billy Graham Library in Charlotte, N.C., at 12 p.m. ET on Friday, March 2.Born in 1918, evangelist Billy Graham has preached the Gospel to nearly 215 million people in more than 185 countries and territories. Since the 1949 Los Angeles Crusade that vaulted Mr. Graham into the public eye, he has led hundreds of thousands to make personal decisions to live for Christ, which is the main mission of his ministry. Billy Graham passed away on Feb. 21, 2018.In addition to the collaboration with SiriusXM, the BGEAs audio ministry, Billy Graham Radio, accomplishes the mission of the association to proclaim the Gospel of Jesus Christ throughout the world by producing a number of online and broadcast programs. The newest program in the ministry's line-up is GPS: God. People. Stories. Each weekly GPS podcast features an inspiring story of how God has worked in someone's life. Decision Minute is a one-minute feature that airs on more than 600 radio stations. To listen to the programs, visit www.billygraham.org/radio About The Billy Graham Evangelistic AssociationThe Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (BGEA) proclaims the Gospel of Jesus Christ throughout the world by every effective means available. From its headquarters in Charlotte, N.C., the BGEA directs a wide range of domestic and international ministries. For more information, please visit www.billygraham.org . Get news updates on Twitter at www.twitter.com/BGEAnews Susan Stocker - Pool/Getty Images(PARKLAND, Fla.) -- The female tipster close to accused Florida high school shooter Nikolas Cruz told the FBI Cruz was "going to explode," according to a transcript of the Jan. 5 call more than a month before the shooting obtained by ABC News. "Its so much and I know hes hes going to explode," the woman said. The five-page transcript of the call obtained by ABC News detailed what had been reported the FBI knew about Cruz before he killed 17 students and teachers at his former school in February. The FBI has admitted to failing to follow up on the tip called in to the FBI's call center in January and sharing it with the bureau's FBI field office. The tipster also provided details about Cruzs concerning social media activity, identifying four Instagram accounts and troubling posts, and sharing details about his upbringing, foster family and concerning behavior. I just want someone to know about this so they can look into it, the tipster said. If they think its something worth going into, fine. If not, um, I just know I have a clear conscience if he takes off and, and just starts shooting places up. On the call, an intake specialist located in West Virginia, asked the caller for information about Cruz, and whether he had made any threats of violence or talk about ISIS. The tipster, whose name is redacted from the transcript but identified as an "unknown female," said Cruz expresses different things on social media and then he takes it off. Just recently, now he has switched it to he wants to kill people. And then he put that on his Instagram and about two days later, he took it off, the tipster said. The tipster described Cruz as a violent child who killed animals, posted frequently about firearms and ISIS, and was thrown out of all these schools because he would pick up a chair and just throw it at somebody, a teacher or a student because he didnt like the way they were talking to him. Its alarming to see these pictures and to know what hes capable of doing and-and what could happen, the tipster told the FBI on the call, according to a transcript reviewed by ABC News. I just think about, you know, getting into a school and just shooting the place up. The caller, who dialed the FBI on January 5th, left her name with the FBI for follow up questions and also identified the officer she had spoken with at the Parkland Police Department, who she had given all the information I had. I didnt know whether to call you or Homeland Security or who, but like I said when you look into this you can make the decision as to whether you want to go further or not, the tipster told the FBI in the call. I just want to, you know, get it off my chest in case something does happen and I do believe somethings going to happen, the tipster said. The intake specialist did not say if the agency would be following up with the caller. The FBI has admitted to not following proper protocol after the shooting at the high school last week that left 17 people dead, and properly following up on the Jan. 5 call to the tip line. The FBI has admitted to not following proper protocol after the shooting at the high school last week that left 17 people dead, and properly following up on the Jan. 5 call to the tip line. We have determined that these protocols were not followed for the information received by the PAL on January 5. The information was not provided to the Miami field office, and no further investigation was conducted at that time, the FBI said in a statement last week. FBI Director Christopher Wray has come under fire for the episode, including from Florida Gov. Rick Scott, who has called for Wray to resign over the FBIs failure to take action. Copyright 2018, ABC Radio. All rights reserved. Fiesta Hermosa will be back for Labor Day weekend, but with a new local look, slightly different name If Iran is the most prominent state sponsor of terrorism in the world, can its president be called a centrist? What about if under that president Iran has become the worlds leading executioner of all people per capita, and of women and children on an absolute basis? Does a president termed the Diplomatic Sheikh, a man who brags about deceiving the West in negotiations to buy time to advance Irans nuclear program; who describes such diplomatic engagement as jihad; and who calls for still more jihad and resistance against Israel while pointing 250,000 rockets at it, strike you as centrist? If that president served for 40 years at the highest levels of the Islamic revolutionary regime as the first official following the overthrow of the shah who, standing steadfast at Ayatollah Khomeinis side, called for public executions to chill opponents of the revolution, can he rightly be called a centrist? And how, pray tell, are we to distinguish between this supposedly centrist president and the Khomeinist regime under which he serves in the first place? In Iran, hardliner supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khameini is truly supreme. Khameini blesses or directs every aspect of national policy. The president is constitutionally subordinate. Further, the supreme leader has power direct and indirect over the Guardian Council, which is responsible for vetting and approving all presidential candidates, not to mention ratifying all legislation parliament passes. Just like there's no "moderate" Islam, there's also nobody rational in Iran's vile, repellent autocratic government, as a writer for the Federalist makes clear It makes no difference whether Iran's replaced a lot of their "presidents" over the years every 8 or so; what surely matters most of all is that they all must adhere to Islamic sheikhs who give the main commands. And, worst of all, they adhere to Islam.Sooner or later, forces who care will have to start raiding Iran if that's what it takes to stop their tyranny once and for all. Labels: anti-americanism, anti-semitism, dhimmitude, iran, islam, Israel, jihad, Moonbattery, political corruption, terrorism, United States, war on terror Ex-Trump campaign associates face more charges Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort arrives at federal court in Washington. AP, Washington : Dramatically escalating the pressure and stakes, special counsel Robert Mueller filed additional criminal charges Thursday against President Donald Trump's former campaign chairman and his business associate. The filing adds allegations of tax evasion and bank fraud and significantly increases the legal jeopardy facing Paul Manafort, who managed Trump's campaign for several months in 2016, and longtime associate Rick Gates. Both had already faced the prospect of at least a decade in prison if convicted at trial. The two men were initially charged in a 12-count indictment in October that accused them of a multimillion-dollar money-laundering conspiracy tied to lobbying work for a Russia-friendly Ukrainian political party. Manafort and Gates, who also worked on Trump's campaign, both pleaded not guilty after that indictment. The new charges, contained in a 32-count indictment returned by a federal grand jury in Virginia, allege that Manafort and Gates doctored financial documents, lied to tax preparers and defrauded banks - using money they cycled through offshore accounts to spend lavishly, including on real estate, interior decorating and other luxury goods. The new criminal case, assigned to U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III, comes a week after a separate Mueller indictment charged 13 Russians and three companies in a conspiracy to undermine the 2016 U.S. presidential election through a hidden social media propaganda effort. The charges against Manafort and Gates don't relate to any allegations of misconduct related to Trump's campaign, though Mueller is continuing to investigate potential ties to the Kremlin. Manafort spokesman Jason Maloni said in a statement that the former Trump campaign chairman is innocent and stressed that the charges "have nothing to do with Russia and 2016 election interference/collusion." Manafort "is confident that he will be acquitted of all charges," Maloni said. The charges against Manafort and Gates arise from their foreign lobbying and efforts that prosecutors say they made to conceal their income by disguising it as loans from offshore companies. More recently, after their Ukrainian work dwindled, the indictment also accuses them of fraudulently obtaining more than $20 million in loans from financial institutions. The new indictment increases the amount of money Manafort, with the assistance of Gates, is accused of laundering to $30 million. It also charges Manafort and Gates with filing false tax returns from 2010 through 2014 and in most of those years concealing their foreign bank accounts from the IRS. Need of patronisation of calligraphy emphasised Chittagong Bureau : Vice Chancellor of International Islamic University Chittagong(IIUC) Prof. AKM Golam Mohiuddin emphasised the need of patronisation in a transparent industry like caligraphy. He disclosed it while addressing the inaugural ceremony of three daylong Amar Ekhushey Program of IIUC at University Auditorium on Monday as Chief Guest. Pro-VC of IIUC Prof DrDelwar Hossain presided it. On first day of the three day long program on Monday was symposium and Bangla caligraphy competition at Kumira main campus as arranged by Fine Art sangsa. President of Fine Arts Parishad and not cartonist Ibrahim Mandol presents keynote paper in the symposium, IIUC sources said. Former Director of Dhaka Fine Arts Institute and reputed artist Prof.Dr.Abdus Sattar was the principal discussant on the occasion. Noted caligrapher Artist Abdur Rahim and the founder of Orbit and Sharifa Arts School Amirul Islam were present as discussants. Director of Students Affairs Division AJM Obaidullah delivered address of welcome on the occasion. The chief guest in his brief deliverations assures on behalf of the IIUC , we will try with best efforts to accommodate the caligraphy subject in the curriculum in all universities . Women in banking 'facing challenges' Manama : Women in the workplace, particularly in the banking sector, continue to be dismally represented, especially in more senior roles, said a top official. Al Salam Bank chairwoman and inJAz Bahrain executive director Shaikha Hessa bint Khalifa Al Khalifa was speaking at a Women in Banking roundtable attended by female banking executives from more than 15 institutions, according to a report in the Gulf Daily News. The forum is jointly organised by Citibank and the Bahrain Association of Banks (BAB) at the Kempinski Ixir Hotel. She gave a detailed account of the role of women in the banking and financial sector, pointing out that this is the largest single employer in the kingdom, with more than 14,400 people and women making up 37 per cent of it. "However, the majority of that percentile hold only junior to middle management roles," she said. "It is clear that women aren't currently progressing as far, or as high, as their male counterparts. This is not only a local issue, but also an epidemic that is spread across the globe." She listed the challenges facing women in the financial sector as the prevailing attitude towards women, an existing male-dominated workforce and the organisational culture and a lack of female role models. She called for proactive initiatives to counter the challenges to women's career advancement in banking. "The biggest challenge women face in their career advancement in banking today is not about organisational processes, but is about awareness, attitudes and the culture of the organisation," she said. "These issues ought to be changed if banks wish to achieve gender diversification at senior levels. This will call for a sizeable shift in both organisational and social culture and attitudes." The roundtable was also addressed by Sabah Khalil Al Moayyed, a banker with three decades of experience in the financial sector, most recently as chief executive of Eskan Bank, a post she relinquished only last month. She fully endorsed Shaikha Hessa's call for action to support and promote more women in the financial and banking sector. "I come from a family with high expectations of women in education and the professions," she said. "This was very important in allowing me to set my sights high in my chosen profession. I also realised that to progress in my chosen profession I had to acquire skills throughout the sector and I moved during my career through all departments of the banks in which I worked." Al Moayyed said she resigned as the Eskan Bank chief executive to devote her energies to empowering women and tackle housing issues in Bahrain. Citibank's chief executive Mazin Manna, who opened the roundtable, underlined the bank's commitment to diversity. "We recognise this as one of our competitive advantages, which is enhanced by attracting, retaining and developing the top female talent in the industry," said Manna. "At 53 per cent, women make up more than half of Citi's workforce globally. In Bahrain, 30pc of our Citibank workforce are women, of which 62 per cent are officers." - TradeArabia News Service. Jubilant Grameenphone employees celebrating the launching of 4G with Yasir Azman, Deputy CEO and CMO of the company recently. A self-contained single evidence enough for convicting an accused Appellate Division : (Criminal) Surendra Kumar Sinha CJ Syed Mahmud Hossain J Mirza Hussain Haider J Jharu and another. ... Appellants Vs State..........Respondent Judgment November 15th, 2016 Evidence Act (1 of 1872) Section 134 A single testimony if convincing and found to be full complete and self-contained, whether corroborated by other witness or not, is sufficient to bring home the charge and, as such, there will be no illegality in convicting an accused on the basis of such single evidence . ...... (12) Md Abdul Majid Sarkar vs the State, 40 DLR (AD) 83 ref. Nahid Sultana, Advocate-on-Record-For the Appellants. Basir Ahmed, Assistant Attorney-General-For the Respondent. Judgment Mirza Hussain Haider J : This Jail appeal has been filed against the judgment and order dated 7-7-2013 & 8-7-2013, passed by the High Court Division in Criminal Appeal No. 2500 of 2008 heard along with Criminal Appeals No. 2404 of 2008, 2551 of 2008 and Jail Appeals No. 421-423 of 2008 and also Death Reference No. 39 of 2008 allowing Criminal Appeals No. 2500 of 2008, 2551 of 2008 and Jail Appeal No. 421 of 2008 and thereby setting aside the judgment and order of the trial Court so far it relates to accused Abul Kalam Azad and Amirul and also dismissing the Criminal Appeal No. 2504 of 2008 and Jail Appeals No. 422 of 2008 and 423 of 2008 and affirming the judgment and order of conviction and death sentence passed upon the condemned prisoners Mokim and Jharu and thereby accepted the said death reference. 2. Facts, leading to filing of this Jail appeal, in a nutshell, are: That on 28-6-1994 at about 10-00/10-30 am, the victim Monowar Hossain along with some people had been working in his field near the house of one Badal Sarder at ViIi age Durlovpur under Police Station- Alamdanga, District- Chuadanga. Suddenly it started raining and all of them took shelter in the house of Badal Sarder. At about 11-00 am a group of people including the accused Mokim and Jharu led by accused Abul Kalam Azad came to the house of Badal Sarder from inside a near-by panboroz and dragged the victim Monowar Hossain to the courtyard of that house wherein on the order of accused Abul Kalam Azad, Mokim and jharu inflicted the ram dao and a Chinese axe blows indiscriminately upon the victim Monowar Hossain resulting in his eventual death. Thereafter on arrival of the neigbouring people to the place of occurrence the accused party ran away after ensuring the death of the victim. Subsequently, Omaruddin the brother of the victim Monowar Hossain, lodged an ejahar with Alamdanga Police Station against the accused appellant and others under Sections 302/34/114 of the Penal Code, whereup-on Alamdanga Police Station Case No. 11 dated 28-6-1994 was initiated under the aforesaid sections. 3. The police, after recording the statements of the witnesses under Section 161 of the Criminal Procedure Code and on the basis of confessional statements made by accused Sabironnessa, Md Abdur Rashid, Amirul and Helal Uddin under section 164 of the Criminal Procedure Code, complete the investigation and submitted chargesheet against all the accused persons including the present appellants Jharu and Mokim under Sections 302/34/114 of the Penal Code. 4. The records being transmitted to the court of Sessions, Chuadanga, Sessions Case No. 34 of 1997 was started. Ultimately the case was transferred to the Court of Additional District and Sessions Judge, 2nd Court, Chuadanga for trial who framed the charges against all the accused persons under Sections 302/34/114 of the Penal Code which was read over to the accused persons who pleaded not guilty and thereby claimed to be tried in accordance with law. 5. The defence version of the case, as it appears from the trend of the cross-examination of the prosecution witnesses, is that the accused persons are innocent and have been falsely implicated in the case out of previous enmity and bad blood and the alleged confessional statement of the appellant Amirul is a product of police torture, oppression and maltreatment. 6. In trial the prosecution examined 17 witnesses against which the defence witnesses none. Thereafter the accused persons were examined under Section 342 of the Criminal Procedure Code. Thereafter, the learned Judge, upon hearing the parties and considering the evidence, both oral and materials on record and also upon considering the confessional statements made under Section 164 of the Code of the Criminal Procedure by the co-accused persons, found five accused persons including the present appellants, guilty of the charges under Sections 302/34/114 of the Penal Code and convicted and sentence them to death by hanging and also to pay fine of Taka. 1 (one) lac each. In addition to the above the present appellants Jharu and Mokim were also found guilty under Sections 302/34 of the Penal Code as the allegation of inflicting deadly blows upon the victim and murdering him has been proved and as such, sentenced them with penalty of fine of Taka l(one) lac but acquitted them from the other charges brought against them by judgment and order dated 17-4-2008. 7. Being aggrieved by the said judgment and order the convict Abul Kalam Azad, Jharu, Mokim and Amirul preferred the above noted criminal appeals and jail appeals before the High Court Division. On the other hand, the trial Court sent a reference under Section 374 of the Criminal Procedure Code before the High, Court Division for confirmation of death sentence which has been registered as Death Reference No. 39 of 2008. All the appeals and the death reference were heard together and by judament and order dated 7-7-2013 and 8-7-2013 the High Court Division accepted the death reference in part and confirmed the death sentence imposed upon Mokim and Jahru and thereby acquitted Abul Kalam Azad and Amirul upon setting aside the judgment and order passed by the trial court as against them. 8. Being aggrieved by and dissatisfied with the aforesaid judgment and order of the High Court Division condemned prisoners Jharu and Mokim preferred Jail Petition No. 23 of 2013 before this Division which has been registered as the instant Jail Appeal No.3 of 2016. 9. Mrs Nahid Sultana, the learned Advocate-On-Record appearing on behalf of the appellants submits that the prosecution failed to prove the case beyond all reasonable doubt against the condemned prisoners and, as such, there has been miscarriage of Justice as the accused Amirul, on the basis of' whose confessional statement under Section 164 they were convicted, has been acquitted of the charge by the High Court Division along with the mastermind of the occurrence Abul Kalam Azad who allegedly passed the order of killing the victim and, as such, the High Court Division miserably failed to acquit the appellants. She next submits that the prosecution witnesses did not corroborate each other in bringing home the charge and, as such, the impugned judgment and order of conviction and sentence as well as the acceptance of death reference is liable to be set aside. 10. Per contra, Mr Bashir Ahmed, the learned Assistant Attorney General took us through the depositions of PWs, specifically PW 1,3,5,6 and 7 along with post mortem report and submits that the indiscriminate blows by ram dao and Chinese axe inflicted by condemned prisoners Mokim and Jharu upon the victim Monowar Hossain have been categorically proved. He, submits that PWs 3, 5, 6, and 7 have corroborated each other in respect of inflicting the deadly blows upon the victim by tire condemned prisoners Mokim and Jharu and, as such, the High Court Division, on proper appreciation of this aspect, came to a correct finding and accordingly, rightly confirmed the death sentence against the present appellants. Therefore there is no scope to interfere with the judgment and order complained of herein. 11. Under these scenario we have examined the materials on record including the evidence of the PWs. It appears that PW-1 is the brother of the victim who categorically stated the occurrence including inflicting of deadly weapons blows by the condemned prisoner Mokim and Jharu in the house of Badal Sarder upon the victim Monwar Hossain. He specifically mentioned the places on the body of the victim where Mokim with his ram dao in his hand and Jharu with his Chinese axe in his hand inflicted the blows. The other PWs corroborated the evidence of PW 1 whereupon PW 3, 5, 6 and 7 categorically said: ????? '?? ??? ????? ???? ??? ???? ???? ??? ??? ???? ?????? ?????? ??????? ????????? ??? ???? ??? ??? ????? ??- ??? ???? ???? ?????? ????? ???? ?????? ?????? ??????? ???? ? ???? ?????? ???? ????????? ??? ???? ?????? ?????? ???? ???????? ??? ??????? ??? ?????? ?????? ???? ????? ???? ? ????? ??- ??? ????? ????? ????? ???? '? ???? ??? ???? 12. This version has also been corroborated by PWs 4, 5, 6 and 7. On close scrutiny of the cross examination by the defence it appears that the corroborative evidence of the aforesaid PWs could not be shaken by the defence. The corroborative testimony of the witnesses being sufficient to prove the prosecution case beyond reasonable doubt there remains nothing which could help the appellants to take advantage. From the evidence of PW-ll the Doctor, who conducted the post mortem, it appears that the deadly weapon blow inflicted upon the victim Monowar Hossain as stated by PWs are found to be the reasons of death, which were ante mortem and homicidal in nature. So when the prosecution specifically proved in their corroborative evidence as to on which part of the body of the deceased the deadly injuries were inflicted and the same being supported by the post mortem report and when the prosecution specifically proved that those injuries were inflicted by the condemned prisoners Mokim and Jharu (appellants herein) there remains no doubt in finding them guilty of murdering the victim. A single testimony if convincing and found to be full complete and self Contained, whether corroborated by other witness oc not, is sufficient to bring home the charge and, as such, there will be no illegality in convicting an accused on the basis of such single evidence. In the present case the eye witnesses PW 3, 5-7 categorically gave vivid description of inflicting indiscriminate blows upon the victim by the appellant Mokim and Jharu, with the deadly weapons used by them, which are supported/ corroborated by other witnesses as well as by the post mortem report resulting death of the victim and such evidence could not be shaken by the defence. So the Courts below did not commit any illegality in finding the appellants guilty. 13. Moreover, upon reading the confessional statements, which have been corroborated by other accused persons as well as all the PWs, as a whole, it cannot be altogether ignored that the appellant with the intention of killing the victim inflicted indiscriminate blows by sharp cutting weapon used by them which attracted Section 300 "thirdly" of the Penal Code which reads as follows: "300. Except in she cases hereinafter excepted culpable homicide is murder, if the act by which the death is caused is done with the intention of causing death, or- Secondly- Thirdly, lf it is done with the intention of causing bodily injury to any person and the bodily injury intended to be inflicted is sufficient in the ordinary course of nature to cause death, or- 14. Since this clause provides culpable homicide is murder if such bodily injury intended to be inflicted is sufficient in the ordinary course of nature to cause death. This clause comprehends generally the commission of intentionally bodily injury which is intended to be inflicted is sufficient in the ordinary course of nature to cause death. When such act is committed with the knowledge that death is the ultimate result of such act or infliction of such bodily injury has probability of causing death the offence is murder. The core of this section is that the knowledge which accompanies the act must be death. The act was so imminently dangerous that it must in all probability cause death or such bodily injury as is likely to cause death. The confession as has been corroborated by the PWs, and supported by the post mortem report, clearly reveals that such bodily injury have been inflicted by the present appellants with knowledge and motive to kill the victim and has resulted death of the victim. Therefore the convict appellants cannot escape from the charge of murder punishable under Section 302 of the Penal Code. In the case of Md Abdul Majid Sarkar vs the State reported in 40 DLR (AD) 83 this Division held "when the act was done with the intention of causing such bodily injury intended to be inflicted as was sufficient in the ordinary course of nature to cause death. It falls clearly within the 1st, 2nd & 3rd clauses of S. 300 PC." 15. Apart from the above, the Magistrate who recorded the confessional statement of Amirul in his evidence as PW 9 categorically proved the statement under Section 164 which has been made upon following the legal procedure. But the High Court Division found the confessional statement of Amirul to be a retracted one as the same was not voluntary and thus the High court Division, upon considering the evidence, found that other than the confessional statement the prosecution could not prove the offence beyond all reasonable doubt against Amirul. Accordingly the High Court Division awarded him the benefit of doubt. Thus the confessional statement of Amirul cannot be the basis of conviction of the present appellants. Actually from the discussion of the evidence of PWs 1,3,5,6 and 7 who are the eye witnesses of the occurrence, and their testimony regarding inflicting the deadly blows upon the victim being duly corroborated by the PW 11, the doctor who conducted the post mortem, the High Court Division categorically found that the charge against the condemned prisoner Jharu and Mokim have been proved and accordingly found them guilty for conjointly killing the victim Monowar Hossain at the courtyard of the house of Badal Sarder. After making elaborate discussions on the basis of the fact and law the High Court Division ultimately accepted the death reference against Mokim and Jharu and thereby affirmed the sentence imposed upon them. 16. From the discussions made hereinabove and the law as has been looked into by the High Court Division we are of the view that the condemned prisoner appellants Jharu and Mokim failed to make out a case in their favour by which the judgment and order of conviction and sentence passed by the trial Court and affirmed by the High Court Division can be interfered with. Accordingly we do not find any merit in this appeal. Hence the jail appeal is dismissed. Remove difficulties slowing implementation of Dhaka Elevated Expressway The government failure to hand over land for 47km Dhaka Elevated Expressway (DEE) and contractor's failure to mobilize funds to build the mega project has virtually stalled its progress. We must say the government should show competent leadership to implement the project and many more such projects. Failure to timely implement the project will only add to the overall cost of the project to become a liability at the end. The authorities must be cautious about it. Media report said only seven percent work of the project has been completed in the last seven years to raise question as to why the authorities are failing to deliver. Meanwhile it was inaugurated twice to show government claim that big projects are underway but the government so far failed to issue the work order. The private investor of the DEE, has also repeatedly failed to mobilize funds for the public-private partnership (PPP) project, said a report in a national daily. The seven percent progress includes mobilization for the construction yard at Kawla on Airport Road, building of some piers and other work. According to the agreement, among other vital preparatory works, the government was required to hand over the land for the first segment of expressway route from the airport to Banani in six months. Italthai was required to get the fund and submit the financial estimate for the work order. Both have failed to fulfil their part of the job. The difficulties to hand over land still continue due to complications in land acquisition, resettlement and relocation of utility network. Meanwhile Ital-Thai Ltd is facing difficulties in getting fund; which it intended to get from International Finance Corporation of the World Bank. But it requires Environmental and Social Impact Assessment report for approving the loans. Italthai failed to get the assessment done in time. There was a provision for sovereign guarantee for the loan. But the government has unilaterally altered two vital ramps - one on Manik Mia Avenue and the other at Palashi, in addition to changes to ramp layouts at Tejgaon and Kakoli crossing to raise question on the revenue estimates. Ultimately the company is not getting the fund. However, the main problem now seems to be government failure to issue the work order but it is undecided on the ground if the company can't mobilize fund, there is no point offering the work order. In our view both sides should make serious exercise to go along or break apart. The other option is to find out another contractor capable to mobilize finance from international market. We are concerned any delay will only add to the project cost that must be avoided any way. Indian Army Chief`s allegation means complicity of government of Bangladesh REMARKS by Indian Army Chief, Gen. Bipin Rawat on Thursday that a 'planned influx' of people from Bangladesh into India's north-east is underway as part of a proxy war by Pakistan with support from China, so to keep the area disturbed. Moreover, he also said migration from Bangladesh are happening because of two reasons - first, Bangladesh is 'running out of space' and second, because of 'planned immigration' backed by China and Pakistan to keep the region at chaos. The General's complaint that people from Bangladesh are entering in large numbers to the north-east part of India to make settlement with the motive to destabilize the region is totally untrue. Such a plan for fomenting destabilisation in India is highly political and possible only with the help of Bangladesh government. At present India is dealing with the so-called Bengalee settler issue and even by Indian claim those people had settled in Assam before 1947 in undivided India. The enumeration of the so-called Bengalee settlers is also exempting those as a matter of policy. So possibly another humanitarian crisis in the line of Myanmar is underway in Assam. The Indian General's remarks amount to political subversion by the government of Bangladesh. No Indian Army Chief had made such remarks in sensitive political issues in the past. It may be some persons in India think Bangladesh is too eager for friendship with India and the government of Bangladesh will tolerate anything from India. We must say our government should take the issue with the Indian government about baseless allegation against Bangladesh. We do not want to hear any Indian army officer making political allegations against Bangladesh. If Indian government has to make any such political allegation let it do it. Modi hugs Trudeau amid Indo-Canada invitation embarrassment Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is greeted by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi as he arrives at the Presidential Palace in New Delhi, India on Friday. Dawn.com : Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi greeted his Canadian counterpart Justin Trudeau on Friday with a hug, one day after embarrassed Canadian diplomats had to revoke a party invitation for a man convicted of attempting to kill an Indian politician. The invitation was the latest blunder in Trudeau's eight-day visit, which has included everything from criticism of his colourful wardrobe to questions about whether his government is sufficiently critical of Sikh extremists. Jaspal Atwal, a Canada-based former member of a banned Sikh separatist group, had been invited by a Canadian member of Parliament to a Thursday evening party for Trudeau at Canada's High Commission in New Delhi. Atwal was convicted of trying to kill an Indian Cabinet minister during a 1986 visit to Canada. The minister was shot but survived. Atwal was imprisoned and became a businessman after his release. Canada quickly withdrew the invitation once it was discovered, with Trudeau telling reporters: "Obviously we take this situation extremely seriously. The individual in question never should have received an invitation." Earlier in the week, Atwal attended a Mumbai reception at which he was photographed with Trudeau's wife, Sophie Gregoire Trudeau. Modi still welcomed Trudeau on Friday with his signature bear hug, smiling at his wife and their three children, who also attended the formal outdoor ceremony. In a Thursday night tweet, Modi said he looked forward to meeting Trudeau and his family, adding "I appreciate his deep commitment to ties between our two countries". But it hasn't been an easy trip for Trudeau in many ways. He's been ridiculed in India on social media for his family's seemingly endless wardrobe changes, with the photogenic group often appearing in colourful Indian clothing, and has faced repeated insistence that he denounce Sikh extremism. "Sikh radicalism is the main issue," the Hindustan Times, one of India's largest newspapers, said in an editorial earlier this week. "Justin Trudeau should allay India's concerns on terrorism." Canada has a small but politically potent Sikh population, some of whom support a breakaway Sikh state, known as Khalistan, inside India. The Indian media often describe Trudeau's government as being soft on the Khalistan issue. Trudeau insisted that he'd told Indian politicians that was not true. "I was pleased to be able to make very, very clear that Canada supports one united India," he said after one meeting. 3 get nine months imprisonment each for selling turtles RAB Mobile Court on information recovered some rare species of turtles from city\'s Sakharibazar area on Friday and jailed three men for illegally selling those. BSS, Dhaka : A mobile court of the Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) yesterday sentenced three businessmen to nine months imprisonment each for selling endangered species of turtles in Shakhari Bazar area in the capital. The convicted were Ponir Chandra Das, 40, Dipok Nandi, 55 and Moyna Rani Das, 39. The member of the elite force arrested them from the city's Shakhari Bazar area yesterday morning while they were selling turtles of endangered species, Mahiuddin Faruqui, Senior Assistant Director of RAB-10, said. Acting on a tip off, the members of the wildlife conservation unit of the RAB-10 carried out a drive in the city's Shakhari Bazar area yesterday morning. Executive Magistrate of RAB Headquarters M Sarwar Alam, who led the court, inflicted punishment on the accused. 11 foreigners held from near Rohingya camps Staff Reporter : Eleven foreigners, who were found roaming around Rohingya refugee camps in Cox's Bazar without permission, have been detained by a team of the Rapid Action Battalion (RAB). They were interupted near the Rohingya relief center adjacent to Ukhia Degree College around 11:30am on Friday. When law enforcers asked for their identification, they could not show necessary documents like passport, visa or work permit, reports our correspondent from Cox's Bazar. Major Ruhul Amin, Camp Commander of RAB-7 in Cox's Bazar, told media that of the detainees, two are from UK, two are Italy and the rest seven are from Netherlands, Turkey, South Korea, Kenya, Brazil, Belgium and Norway. They were handed over to Ukhia Police Station, said Major Ruhul Amin. Officer-in-Charge (OC) of Ukhia Police Station Abul Khayer said, the detainees are involved with Medecines Sans Frontiers/Doctors Without Borders (MSF), an international medical humanitarian organization. to contact the police station with passport and visa, OC added. The Cox's Bazar district administration imposed restrictions in early October on entering the camps areas without prior permission. Driver, helper killed in road crash UNB, Feni : A pick-up van driver and his helper were killed and a worker was injured as a covered van hit the vehicle on Dhaka-Chittagong highway in Chhnua area of Sadar upazila on Friday morning. The deceased were identified as driver Iqbal Patwary, 30, son of Ahmed Ullah of Paschim Fazilpur area of Sadar upazila and helper Mohammad Shamim, 25, son of Mohammad Siraj Miah of Senbagh upazila in Noakhali district. Police said that the accident took place when the covered van hit the stationary pick-up van around 8:30am, leaving three people injured. Later, the injured were rushed to Feni Sadar Hospital where doctors declared the duo dead. Critically injured worker Mohammad Ali was taken to Chittagong Medical College Hospital. 153 arrested in 52 cases over question leaks Staff Reporter : Education Minister Nurul Islam Nahid on Friday said that a total of 153 people were arrested in 52 cases in connection with the question papers leakage of Secondary School Certificate examinations. "I am seeking supports from teachers and guardians to stop the spate of the question leak. Please hand these leakers over to law enforcers," Nahid said at a function at Film Development Corporation (FDC) auditorium in Dhaka. The minister also admitted his ministry's failure to find out the root cause of the question leak and said the enforcement agencies and the ministry are working to stop the menace. "We are adopting new measures based on suggestions coming from different sectors to make our efforts successful. But somehow the incidents of leaking the question papers are taking place," he said. Hinting to bring a major change in the SSC examinations, Nahid said, the ministry is coming up with some strategies ahead of the upcoming SSC examinations. "I think, the effort will bring result." About 150,000 people are involved in the process of setting and printing questions, said Nahid. "The disaster follows in when one of them gets into corruption." The ministers, secretaries and chairmen of boards cannot see the questions, he said. "Technology is an asset, but it creates some hassles as well. We are getting the examinees inside halls half an hour before the exams. We have ordered authorities to open the envelope exactly half an hour before the tests. Still some people are leaking them." Citing a recent question-answer session with Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, Nahid said, "Some journalists claim that questions are leaked 20 minutes before the examinations. May be it is not harmful, but still not acceptable." Terming the incident of question paper leak as a big factor, Nahid underscored the need for classroom-based education. "Our children will not grow perfect if we fail to educate them with contemporary and circumstantial education," he added. The Education Minister stressed the need for cultural events to build up physical and mental skill of the children. "World class education, knowledge and technology are needed if we want to build the new generation as architects of modern Bangladesh," Nahid said. It may be mentioned that the SSC and its equivalent examinations began across the country on February 1 simultaneously but question papers of the most the examinations have been leaked anyhow through social media. In a bid to stop the spate of the question leak, the government has already announced take 5 lakh as bounty for helping to catch those are involved in the incident. But the effort has already gone in vain. Ivanka in S Korea ahead of Olympics closing ceremony Ivanka Trump, the daughter of U.S. President Donald Trump, arrives at Incheon International Airport in Incheon, South Korea on Friday. AP : Ivanka Trump arrived in South Korea to flashing cameras and a live broadcast across South Korean TV two days before she will attend the closing ceremony for the 2018 Winter Olympics. She was given the red-carpet treatment in Seoul as the leader of the U.S. delegation as she landed at Incheon International Airport on a commercial airline, Korean Air, on Friday. "We are very very excited to attend the 2018 winter Olympic Games to cheer for Team USA and to reaffirm our strong and enduring commitment with the people of the Republic of Korea. So thank you for the kind welcome," she said to dozens of media reporters lined up at the gate. For hours before her plane's arrival, local news organizations repeatedly aired video of Ivanka's departure at Dulles International Airport in Washington, D.C. Reporters and analysts discussed whether she would bring a personal message from her father, President Donald Trump, or at least offer deep insight into how the core Washingtonians view North Korea. It's unknown whether she will meet with anyone from North Korea's own high-level delegation, which will attend the closing ceremony. Shafik Rehman, Mahmudur charge sheeted bdnews24.com : Police have filed charges against journalists Shafik Rehman, Mahmudur Rahman and three others over an alleged plot to abduct and kill Sajeeb Wazed Joy, son of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina. Hasan Arafat, senior assistant commissioner of the Detective Branch of police, submitted the chargesheet to the chief metropolitan magistrate's court on Tuesday. "The documents were kept at the special room of the magistrate for observation. Police received them on Thursday," said Sub-Inspector Jalal, registration officer of court police. The judge is due to sign the chargesheet on Mar 6, he said. The five accused are Shafik Rehman, former editor of weekly magazine Jai Jai Din, Mahmudur Rahman, acting editor of Bangla daily Amar Desh, Mohammad Ullah Mamun, vice-president of Jatiyatabadi Samajik Sangskritik Sangstha, a pro-BNP organisation, his son Rizve Ahmed Caesar, and Mizanur Rahman Bhuiyan, an businessman living in the United States. Mamun and Mizanur have been shown as fugitives in the chargesheet. Shafik and Mahmudur were the key conspirators in the abduction plot, SI Jalal said citing the chargesheet. Mohammad Ullah Mamun aided the conspiracy. A former vice-president of the US unit of the BNP, Mamun now lives in Connecticut. Police have accused Mizanur Rahman of funding the crime and working as an adviser. Mamun's son Rizve collected personal information on Joy from the US intelligence agency FBI and provided them to the other suspects, according to the chargesheet. Similar accounts are mentioned in a New Court document that handed a three-year jail term to Rizve in 2015 after founding him guilty of bribing an FBI official to obtain classified information. As per the court document, he handed the information to a Bangladeshi journalist in return for $30,000. The matter had triggered discussions in Bangladesh parliament. Joy, who lives in Virginia with his family, accused BNP leaders of conspiring to 'abduct and kill him' in a Facebook post in March that year. Bangladesh police started the case at Paltan Police Station in August 2015 over the "plot to abduct Joy". According to the case, Mamun and other top brass leaders of BNP and its allies united in Jasas office in Dhaka's Paltan, New York, different areas in UK and some Bangladeshi neighbourhoods before September 2011 to chalk out a plan to murder Joy after abducting him. Shafik Rehman was shown arrested in the case in April 2016. The journalist, known for his pro-BNP stance, was taken on remand twice that year. Police found classified information and documents on Joy after raiding his home in Dhaka's Iskaton, the DB had said. Shafik collected the data for writing an investigative report, his wife Taleya Rehman claimed. Shafik secured bail from the Supreme Court after spending five months in jail. Mahmudur Rahman, a former adviser to BNP chief Khaleda Zia, got arrested in a sedition case in 2013 from his office in Karwan Bazar in Dhaka. Police showed the inmate arrested in the 'plot to abduct Joy' case in 2016. "Mahmudur Rahman collected information like, the places he (Joy) visits, his work station, his family members etc from Miltan (Caesar's friend Mizanur Rahman Bhuiyan). Such information are enough to plot an abduction," DMP Additional Commissioner Monirul Islam had said then. Caesar used his friend Mizanur Rahman Bhuiyan to pass on the information to Mahmudur. Mahmudur secured bail in November 2016 after spending three years behind bars. Peaceful movement: BNP strategy is to get Khaleda free Reza Mahmud : The BNP has been holding peaceful agitation programme with three objectives. These include making the party stronger and well-disciplined, bringing the party Chairperson Begum Khaleda Zia out of jail, and to hold election under polls time government. The party high-command thinks that continuous movements are strengthening the party from its root levels. "The government has sent Begum Khaleda Zia behind the bar in a false case. But our leaders and activists throughout the country have remained unprovoked and steady. They are taking to streets almost everyday demanding Khaleda Zia's release from jail. The peaceful and continuous programme makes our organisation stronger and capable than previous days. It will be helpful to boost our workers morale to realise our demand for polls time neutral government," Dr. Khandaker Mosharraf Hossain, BNP Standing Committee member told The New Nation on Thursday. He said, the government has kept our party men on run filing thousands of cases against them. But now the workers and leaders feel that their back is facing the wall. In this situation, the leaders and workers are willingly taking to the streets nowadays. Senior leaders of the party said, there were huge pressures from the party men to choose hard line agitation programme. The leaders and workers have become angry over their chairperson's conviction. But the high-command had taken different strategy to introduce new type of agitation for long term positive effects. As per the strategy, the party started different peaceful public relation based programme including organising human chain, hunger strike and mass signature campaign. As a result the activists and supporters of the party, who made themselves inactive to avoid police harassments, have become active and gained indomitable energy. They said, such peaceful programme is not zeopardising public peace. So, the root level activists of the party and its general supporters are retaking part in those programmes. It gradually strengthens the party from its root level, said senior leaders. "The government wants to keep its political oppositions silent for ever. As per their plan, they seriously provoked our party men on February 8. But, our party men have shown patience. It is gradually proved that the patience is giving good result as the people's support making the party stronger," BNP Joint-Secretary General Syed Moazzem Hossain Alal told The New Nation. Alal also said, they are in movement to bring Khaleda Zia out of prison, make the party stronger and to compel the government to hold inclusive polls. Political analysts also praised the non-violent programme of the BNP. They said the party high-command has taken the right decision shunning the path of conflicts. "The BNP has taken wise decision by announcing people relation based and peaceful agitation programme. Such kind of programme should be followed by other political parties to eliminate the long day's bad culture of political conflicts. It may help the BNP to attain more popularity. As a result, the party may achieve its goal," Professor Dr. Md. Sharif Uddin of Jahangirnagar University told The New Nation. He said also that if the party continue such agitation, it may able to gain its all goals. 2 held over raping RMG worker in city banglanews24.com : A garment worker was allegedly gang-raped after she was picked up by some miscreants in Pallabi's Paris road area of the capital on Thursday night (February 22). Police detained 2 men in connection with the incident following a case filing by the victim herself. Police also admitted her to Victim Support Center in Tejgaon for medical checkup. On Friday (Feb 23), Pallabi police station officer-in-charge (OC) Dadan Fakir told Banglanews that the woman is resident of Pallabi area and works in a nearest readymade garment factory. She is married but has no contact with her husband. On Thursday night, the victim was having a conversation with a known person on Paris road. In the mean time, a man named Saiful and two of his aides- Hanif and Anwar- beat up the man she was talking to. Later they picked her up by force to Saiful's house and raped her, OC said. The OC also added that the victim, as plaintiff, filed the case. Later police detained Hanif and Anwar. US imposes largest package of sanctions against N Korea Reuters, Seoul : US President Donald Trump said on Friday the United States would impose the "largest-ever" package of sanctions on North Korea, intensifying pressure on the reclusive country to give up its nuclear and missile programs. In addressing the Trump administration's biggest national security challenge, the U.S. Treasury sanctioned one person, 27 companies and 28 ships, according to a statement on the U.S. Treasury Department's website. The Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control announced the measures, which are designed to disrupt North Korean shipping and trading companies and vessels and to further isolate Pyongyang. The ships are located, registered or flagged in North Korea, China, Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Marshall Islands, Tanzania, Panama and Comoros. Washington "also issued an advisory alerting the public to the significant sanctions risks to those continuing to enable shipments of goods to and from North Korea." "Today I am announcing that we are launching the largest-ever set of new sanctions on the North Korean regime," Trump said in excerpts of a speech he was to deliver on Friday to a conservative activist group. North Korea's missile and nuclear program is seeking to develop a nuclear-tipped missile capable of reaching the U.S. mainland. Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un have taunted each other through the media and in August Trump threatened to go beyond sanctions by bringing "fire and fury like the world has never seen." Tougher sanctions may jeopardize the latest detente between the two Koreas, illustrated by the North's participation in the Winter Olympics in the South, amid preparations for talks about a possible summit between North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and South Korean President Moon Jae-in. U.S. Vice President Mike Pence had hinted at such a sanctions package two weeks ago during a stop in Tokyo that preceded his visit to South Korea for the Pyeongchang Olympics. North Korea last year conducted dozens of missile launches and its sixth and largest nuclear test in defiance of U.N. Security Council resolutions. It defends the weapons programs as essential to deter U.S. aggression. It has been more than two months since North Korea's last missile test. Kim said he wants to boost the "warm climate of reconciliation and dialogue" with South Korea, which hosts 28,500 U.S. troops, after a high-level delegation, including his sister, returned from the Olympics. In an extension of that rapprochement, the North agreed on Friday to hold working-level talks on Tuesday for the Pyeongchang Winter Paralympics on the North's side of the border village of Panmunjom. In December the United Nations approved U.S.-drafted limiting North Korea's access to refined petroleum products and crude oil, which the North Korean Foreign Ministry said amounted to an act of war. So youre dining at a fancy restaurant and choose to splurge on some truffles to top off your repast. The server steps up and presents the vaguely ugly tuber. As the pungent slices rain down on your main course, the waiter announces that these truffles didnt come from Italy, the traditional provenance of this decadent garnish. They hail from Greece. Dont be shockedbe glad. Italians have successfully positioned their product as the most luxurious under the forest floor. But white Alba trufflestuber magnatum picoalso grow magnificently well in Greece. Even Aristotle mentions them in his writings, but they never made it into the local cuisine. Unlike Italys truffles, which have been dug up and eaten for centuries, Greeces truffles have remained largely undisturbed. At least they did until the Athens-based culinary exporter Eklekto saw their potential for the U.S. market. But theres an additional reason to embrace Greek truffles. Usually, countless middlemen touch an Italian truffle before it makes it to market, increasing the consumers chances of getting a counterfeit version. Eklekto partners Peter Weltman and George Athanas say they work only with a small group of Greek foragers and know exactly where the product is from. Apart from the forager working with his trusty dog, Weltman and Athanas are the only people that touch the truffles before export, the company says. Initially, it was mutual interest in Greek wine that brought Weltman and Athanas together, but a mutual friend and respected mycologist (a studier of fungi) pointed them to truffles. Bitten by the Greek truffle bug, Weltmana trained chef and sommelierbrought a cache of tubers back with him to San Francisco-area restaurants in 2016, jamming a pile of Greek Burgundys (also called black truffles) into a stinky backpack. You bring in caper leaves and its one thing, he says of these sales calls. But truffles are a whole other ballgame. Everywhere Weltman went, the kitchen staff gathered around to peer into his Tupperware. They loved the scent: more buttery and saltier than the smokier French version and different from the Perigordsmelanosporumthat he had later, which were more fruity, earthy and pungent. Still, they were sent off without a sale. Read also: Paris truffle find hailed as boon for urban gardeners In 2017, Eklektos foragers began unearthing the prized white truffle that, in addition to Italy and Greece, also comes from Slovenia and Macedonia. More than a few Italian truffles have a good chance of actually hailing from these countries, given the premium prices they command and the ease of exporting them. At Urbani, which controls 70 percent of the worlds truffle market, Vittorio Giordano, vice president of the U.S. and Canada division, says hes paying close attention to his Alba sources. As a truffle company, we have to keep an eye on the product, he says. If there are other areas producing the same truffle, we definitely have to pay attention. Nevertheless, with Alba prices climbing due to drought, the timing for Greek truffles was perfect. Last year, Italian truffles jumped to US$3,500 a pound wholesale. Greek truffles were slightly cheaper, going for US$3,150 a pound. Equally delicious, but not as rare, Perigords fetched US$840 a pound. In peak season, Tusk will spend around US$100,000 on truffles The same species as the Alba, Eklektos Greek white truffle smells and tastes just as delicious. One convert is chef Michael Tusk at San Franciscos Quince restaurant. Tusk is a prodigious user of the luxury ingredient. People are paying a lot of money, Tusk says of his dinners. Because of this, sometimes he would take over in the dining room for any cautious captains. I was never really fond of conservative shaving. It was either go big or go home. During his annual, eight-night, white truffle festival, he uses about two kilograms a day. In peak season, Tusk will spend around US$100,000 on truffles. When Weltman first pitched his burgundy truffles to Tusk in 2016, the chef didnt believe another countrys product could rival Italys. But after a year of soaring overhead, he reconsidered. It was a brutal year of expense and I thought Ill at least take a look, says Tusk. He began adding them to his risotto with tartufo bianco, a dish that includes both cultured white truffle butter and a generous shaving of truffles at the table, and agnolottini di fonduta, molten cheese-stuffed pasta with white truffles. The flavor was really good, he says. Last October, when Quince was awarded three Michelin stars, he requisitioned truffles to celebrate. He called up Far West Fungia wholesale and retail shop that carries the largest variety of truffle species in the Bay Area and which just received a large shipment of white tubers from Eklekto. General Manager Naomi Wolf delivered the goods personally. I think it was three pounds, a ludicrous amount, Wolf says. The smell and the taste were absolutely every bit as good as anything I got from Alba. George Chen, chef and owner of China Live and Eight Tables in San Francisco, first started using truffles in 2007 at Roosevelt Prime, a steakhouse in China. He continued to use Chinese truffles until 2010, when the market began to be flooded with inferior product. He started searching for alternatives. I heard that Greece had truffles, but I had never seen one, says Chen. Weltman showed up one day with large, bright, white truffles. They had few indentations, allowing for beautiful oval pieces when shaved. But that wasnt the real test. The smell and the taste were absolutely every bit as good as anything I got from Alba, Chen says. He began using them on his velvet chicken with roasted truffle veal jus and, in a riff on broccoli beef, seared wagyu finished with shaved white truffles. Taking a chance on a supplier with a new ingredient, especially an expensive one, is a risk many dont want to take. However, for this southern European country whose economy has problems, its a potential jackpot. Lefteris Lahouvaris, a Greek mycologist who works with Eklekto, estimates that Greece could export as many as three tons of truffles annually, translating into millions of dollars at wholesale prices in the U.S. Many have yet to be convinced. Chefs that include Yotam Ottolenghi and Alice Waters, both of whom showed interest, eventually passed on Greek truffles. At Far West, where some white Albas went for $5000 a pound last year, co-owner Ian Garrone says he will continue to carry the Greek truffles as long as theyre consistent. Its going to be determined by a few good seasons, he says. Im thinking its going to be an early white truffle season. If it can get in the market before Italian [truffles] get established, it has a really wonderful chance of being a mainstay. That said, Greece isnt the only unlikely source for truffles these days. Americas Pacific Northwest is garnering a reputation for its underground crop, too. At the annual truffle festival in Eugene, Oregon, where white truffle season begins in October and ends in March, chefs cook with massive amounts of the tuber. At one especially notable dinner, they created eight courses that paired European truffles alongside the local offerings. Guests unanimously preferred the native truffles, recounts Charles Ruff, the festivals culinary director. The best experience with any truffle, he says, is to enjoy it in its terroir. Japan tops the world as the country with the lowest rate of newborn mortality in 2016, followed by Iceland and Singapore, while Pakistan is the riskiest place to be born according to a new UNICEF report launched on Tuesday. "Japan, Iceland and Singapore are the three safest countries in which to be born, as measured by their newborn mortality rates," the report, called "Every Child Alive," said. "Babies born in Japan stand the best chance of surviving," it said, reporting a 1 in 1,111 risk of death for newborns in the country, followed by Iceland with a 1 in 1,000 risk and Singapore at 1 in 909. On the other hand, it reported that "children born in Pakistan face the worst odds" with a 1 in 22 chance of death. According to the 33-page report, the risk of dying as a newborn varies widely with location of birth. Annually, some 2.6 million babies die before turning a month old, with roughly one million of them dying on the day of birth. An additional 2.6 million babies each year are stillborn. Eight of the 10 countries with the highest newborn mortality rates are in sub-Saharan Africa. Following Pakistan, the Central African Republic and Afghanistan are the second and third most risky places to be born, respectively. "Japan has tackled this issue of every child alive historically and we have heavily invested our government resources and knowledge to solve this problem," Japan's Deputy Ambassador to the United Nations Yasuhisa Kawamura told an audience attending the New York launch of the report. Read also: Hello Kitty, Pikachu appointed ambassadors for Japan He also stressed the importance his country places on ensuring other nations are not left behind, referring to a global push to improve the lives of millions around the globe while placing special emphasis on the most vulnerable such as infants, whom he said need the greatest level of protection. "Most of all, newborns die because they are poor," said Henrietta Fore, UNICEF's executive director in New York. "Babies born to the poorest families are more than 40 percent more likely to die in the newborn period than the babies in the richest families." Despite the fact that roughly 7,000 newborn babies die every day -- with more than 80 percent of the deaths preventable with "basic solutions" such as affordable health care and well-trained medical staff -- Fore pointed to improvements made in countries such as Bangladesh, where the mortality rate has fallen by more than two-thirds. Bangladesh's Ambassador Masud bin Momen explained how his country has realized a dramatic reduction in newborn deaths from 241,000 in 1990 to 62,000 last year. His country, he said, has committed itself to improving the odds for babies by launching a national newborn health campaign recently. This has included the introduction of special newborn care units in public hospitals in 54 districts, though further support is needed in another 20 districts. He also said he anticipated the influx of Rohingya refugees from Myanmar would likely translate into thousands of pregnant women who will be facing difficulties in safely giving birth and in keeping their children alive. "We request UNICEF to immediately extend their Every Child Alive campaign to the Rohingya refugee camps and save lives," he said. The best bang for your buck! This option enables you to purchase online 24/7 access and receive the Sunday, Tuesday & Thursday print edition at no additional cost * Print edition only available in our carrier delivery area. Allow up to 72 hours for delivery of your print edition to begin. Print edition not available for Day Pass option. Left: Minister of Tourism, Cecil McKie boasts increasCorsel Robertson spoke of the positive impact the AIA had during its first year of operations. ed Airlines to SVG. Right: There is a new interest in St Vincent and the Grenadines, and that new interest is being attributed to the Argyle International Airport (AIA) which was opened on February 14, 2017. In only its first year of operation, the AIA has shown promise, and proven that there was a need for improved air access. That point was made by both the Minister of Tourismin and Sport, Cecil McKie and the Director of Airports, Corsel Robertson when they addressed a rally held last Saturday, to officially commemorate the Ist Anniversary of the opening of the facility. Robertson and McKie spoke to issues relating to increased air traffic passenger arrivals and overall improved air access in and out of the country. McKie detailed the flights that occurred within the five months preceding February 2018, saying that Sunwing Airlines had seven flights to this country since October last year, transporting a total of 1,250 passengers to and from Toronto. Easy Sky moved a total of 463 passengers, he said. He boasted that Air Canada had commenced operations at the AIA in just a matter of 303 days after opening, highlighting that it took some neighbouring Caribbean destinations far longer to do the same. That airline, McKie said, was responsible for brining in 1,220 passengers and taking out 1,153, and he projected that by April, passenger arrivals for that airline were expected to reach 1,740. Caribbean Airlines was expected to begin operations here offering Vincentians the opportunity to travel direct to New York, an agreement that has been signed on for three years initially, McKie said. "We are working hard to get other direct flights from the US and also from the UK because these markets are very important, the tourism minister said. It was noted that arrivals were up since the opening of the AIA. According to the data received, McKie said that arrivals were up by 11 percent over 2016. The Director of Airports in her presentation said that operations at the AIA have been better than expected. "I am very pleased to report that aircraft operations have been excellent. Not one single flight at the airport has been cancelled because of the airport any cancelled here was for another reason, Robertson said. Before the opening of the AIA, Robertson said that the E.T Joshua airport was losing flights. "There was a reduction year after year, up until 2016, she said. This trend had now reversed and the AIA has been realizing an increase in aircraft operation. The AIA has also proved safer to operate out of, and is in compliance with international aviation standards "We have come a long way since the establishment of air travel in SVG in 1943, she said. The Executive/Board of the Caribbean Farmers Network (CaFAN), including its Chief Coordinator Vincentian Jethro Greene, has been removed. At least, that is the stated position, of that regional networks 18 members. "Under Article 9 of the constitution and by unanimous resolution, we asked all Directors to be relieved of their duties, Errington Thompson, President of CaFAN member the Bahamas Agro-Business Co-operative Society Limited (BABCO), told THE VINCENTIAN during a telephone interview on Tuesday, February 20th. He assured then, that letters (of removal) were being dispatched to the Directors, headed by President, Norman Grant of Jamaica Agriculture Society. Chief Coordinator Jethro Greene of SVG was, according to reports, stripped of his post with immediate effect, immediately following a February 15 meeting of members, held via virtual means. CaFAN The Caribbean Farmers Network (CaFAN) was formed in 2004, the result of exploratory discussions among farmer organizations that began in 2002. It is a regional network of Farmers Associations and Non-governmental organizations in the Caribbean, with its headquarters in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, where it was originally registered. Membership of CaFAN presently consists of farmer associations from Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, Bahamas, Belize, Dominica, Grenada, Guyana, Jamaica, St Kitts/Nevis; St Lucia, SVG, Trinidad and Tobago and Suriname. The organizations major focus is to provide support, training, facilitate information sharing and to explore trading markets for agricultural produce within the Caribbean region as well as to markets in Europe. The Impasse The impasse between the members and the Executive/Board came as a result of concerns expressed about lack of transparency as per the Executives/Boards modus operandi. That concern and others were highlighted in a December 14, 2017 letter to the executive, signed by Pamella Thomas- Coordinator of CaFAN National Team Leaders. Concerns listed included: the inability of the secretariat to produce financial records for projects undertaken on behalf of the member countries; a pronouncement made by the Chief Coordinator. .Jethro Greene, in an email dated November, 2017, stating that the organization had no current financial members, nor elected officials; the acknowledgment of Pethion Greene, wife of Jethro Greene, as Accountant of CaFans Secretariat; the case of 20,000 Euros (EC$68,000) received by the Secretariat on behalf of hurricane relief for Dominica, with only EC$6,000 accounted for; and no Annual General Meeting being called for eight years. Thomas told THE VINCENTIAN that she had had no response to the letter mentioned above, and a string of others sent to the directors. CIPO takes action The impasse came to a head, Thomas said, when the organization was struck off the records of SVG Commerce and Intellectual Property Office (CIPO), under whose purvey CaFAN was registered. A letter from CIPO, dated November 22, 2017, to CaFAN, stated that pursuant to Section 51.1 of the Companies Act, Cap 143 of the Revised Laws of St Vincent and the Grenadines, where the company was registered, the organization had failed to honour its obligation to keep up to date with statutory filings, which include financial statements, annual returns and notices of appointment of change of secretary. The letter further indicated that the company failed to provide annual returns for each calendar year during the period 2011 and 2016 and its audited financial statements for each financial year for the period 2009 to 2016. Impasse unresolved A meeting hastily convened in Barbados on February 10, 2018 under instruction from President Grant, and attended by only four executive members, with Greene participating via Skype, was boycotted by a number of members as a mark of protest. The meeting, though Grant claimed otherwise, failed to resolve the impasse, but it was at that meeting that Greene was relieved officially of his duties, and Dhano Sookoo, President of the Agriculture Society of Trinidad and Tobago and a sitting Executive/Board Member, appointed to replace him in the interim. Additionally, according to Grant, a decision was taken to relocate Secretariat from St Vincent and the Grenadines to Trinidad and Tobago, and that the necessary work would be undertaken to have the organisation registered in Jamaica. The membership, from reports, had hoped that their no-show at the Barbados meeting would have indicated their no confidence in the Executive/Directors. They argued further, that the meeting was unconstitutional and that its decisions were in no way binding on them. The members have vowed to continue with efforts to restructure the organization, and plans are afoot to convene a meeting in which a new executive would be elected, as a first step in this direction. Not for the first time, a Caribbean-wide organisation has found itself in a scandal that reflects poorly on the regions ability to sustain an effort to work together. L-R: Senior Magistrate Rickie Burnett has called for an investigation into the allegation made by the accused against Corporal May; Catisha Pierre-Jack, now represented by legal counsel, had her not guilty plea accepted and Corporal Colin May was fingered by the accused of having convinced her to enter an original plea of guilty. Senior Magistrate Rickie Burnett has expressed serious concern about an allegation that Catisha Pierre-Jack, the first person to be charged under the Cyber Crime Act 2016, was told to plead guilty by the investigator Corporal Colin May. And according to Burnett, there needs to be an investigation into the claim. The dramatic twist occurred when Pierre-Jack returned to the Kingstown Magistrates Court last Friday. Pierre-Jack, 29-year-old seamstress of Lower Questelles, has been charged on four counts of libel by electronic communication. She is alleged to have posted on her Facebook page, January 30, 2018, libelous remarks, accusing her sister Crystal Pierre of abusing her daughter, using stolen documents to sell their mother Lauren Pierres house and putting their mother on the street, as well as poisoning a pot of food to kill her family. Pierre-Jack had pleaded guilty to the charges when she initially appeared before Burnett at the Kingstown Magistrates Court last week Monday, but sentencing was adjourned to last Friday. Pierre-Jack was not represented by a lawyer when she entered the guilty plea. However, when she returned to Court last Friday, Burnett indicated that he was in receipt of a letter from attorney Kay Bacchus-Baptiste, now representing Pierre-Jack. Bacchus-Baptiste was not in Court, but indicated in the letter that her client wished to change her plea to not guilty, since she had pleaded guilty on Corporal Mays prompting. As she stood before the Senior Magistrate last Friday, Pierre-Jack accused the investigating officer of telling her to plead guilty to the charges, during a conversation in the corridor outside the Kingstown Magistrates Court just before her Court appearance last week Monday. She said May had asked her how she was going to plead, and when she told him not guilty, he told her, "But you did make the post. The Magistrate then put the charges to Pierre-Jack again, and she pleaded not guilty on all counts. Burnett vacated the guilty plea, and accepted the plea of not guilty on all counts, which he said was "quite permissible. The matter has been adjourned to April 24. When contacted on Wednesday, Acting Commissioner of Police Colin John, who had just returned to the state, told THE VINCENTIAN that he could not make a comment as he had not yet received official communication on the recent development. The Cyber Crime Act was passed in parliament on August 12, 2016, amidst protests from local, regional and international organisations. The St Vincent and the Grenadines/Cuba Friendship Society joins peace-loving peoples, organizations and countries all over the world, in once again calling for the illegal occupation of Cuban territory, Guantanamo Bay to be specific, to be brought to an end by the Government of the United States of America, for the withdrawal of its military forces stationed there, and for the closure of the prison camp on that base. Guantanamo is but one of about 800 US military bases worldwide, but its existence on Cuban soil is in direct contradiction to the will of the Cuban people and Government who have consistently demanded its closure. February 23 marks the 115th anniversary since Guantanamo was occupied by US military personnel, ostensibly to "guarantee Cubas independence. Since the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, Cuba has been demanding the return of the 45 square mile base, and has consistently refused to collect the pittance of a "lease for the territory. It has taken the matter right to the United Nations, and year after year, the vast majority of nations in the UN family vote in favour of ending the occupation. However, the USA steadfastly ignores the democratic will of humanity, and not only continues to defy it by continuing to occupy Guantanamo, but has also placed a prison camp there, violating the rights of persons forcibly held and tortured there. The SVG/CUBA Friendship Society notes and supports the position of CARICOM countries, including our own, in calling for the return of Guantanamo to Cuban sovereignty, and appeals to our people and civic organisations to lend their voices to this just cause. Renwick Rose Jethro Greene has no intention of playing dead in the face of his dismissal and the grounds therein. Jethro Greene, former Chief Coordinator for the Caribbean Farmers Network (CaFAN), has threatened legal action against members of the organization. He gave notice of his intent in responding to allegations of a lack of transparency and possible misappropriation of funding from donor agencies, made by members of the organization. Among the claims brought against Greene, who was stripped of his post during a February 10 meeting held in Barbados and attended by the members of the executive only, was the failure to produce financial records, the alleged misappropriation of funds designated to hurricane relief in Dominica, the appointment of Greenes wife as the accountant for the organizations secretariat, among others. (See related story). However, in response, Greene told THE VINCENTIAN that the organization was his brainchild, and the initial funding was done here in St Vincent and the Grenadines. He further stated that the organization was set up as a means of sharing information among various farmers organizations throughout the region. According to Greene, the issues raised reflected a fight between factions, adding that he no longer wanted to be associated with CaFAN. "Let them fight over it. My strength is my vision and the energy behind that vision, Greene told THE VINCENTIAN. With regard to the allegations brought against him as it related to the lack of transparency, he explained that he was not accountable to the members of CaFAN. Based on the Chief Coordinators report issued on February 8, the use of project funding was dictated by donors, and all original receipts as it related to expenditure of donor funding were submitted to and collected by the donor agencies and not to or by CaFAN. "Any discrepancy which becomes a disallowed expenditure, therefore becomes the liability of ECTAD (Eastern Caribbean Trading and Agricultural Development Organisation) - one of the founding members of CaFAN, and not CaFAN,the report stated. The report further stated that there have been instances where ECTAD has had to absorb costs refused by the donor costs relating to rent, administration, utilities and other overhead costs. And in addressing the issue of having the organization written off the list of registered companies in SVG, the report indicated that CaFan is a virtual network: "hence payments to continue its legal registration is deemed unnecessary since the function of information and knowledge sharing does not require this. Based on the report, since 2009, fees for the continued registration and up- keep of CaFAN had been paid for from local and personal resources. Greene outlined in the report that some EC$2.5 million had been spent in registering and coordinating the organizations network, and that there are no current financial members nor elected officials and that CaFAN as a virtual and facilitating network, was not registered. He termed the action brought by the members as "wicked, adding that if there was a decision to continue the organization and to make it work, he had no issue with that. "But dont go at peoples name viciously, he said, hastening to add that he remained committed to helping farmers in his native St. Vincent. Grundfos Egypt, a leading manufacturer of pumps and water application systems, has officially opened a new branch in Alexandria, as part of its efforts to expand its distributor network and service facilities across Egypt. Ehab Eshaq, general manager for Grundfos Egypt, said that opening the Alexandria branch is aimed at serving the company's customers in the West Coast, Alexandria and the Delta area; ultimately reducing the burden of transporting pumps to Cairo for maintenance. Eshaq said: The opening of the Alexandria branch is part of the companys coordinated expansion plan that is expected to include branches and maintenance centres in other governorates in the upcoming period according to need. He praised customers support to date, which has already led to large contracts for the company in several mega projects including the one-and-a-half-million Feddan project, the administrative capital and the highland plateau, as well as private projects in the commercial, industrial and agricultural sectors. Eshaq continued: The company aims to increase sales by 10 to 15 per cent to GBP400 million ($556.8 million) by the end of this year, as the company won the supply of pumps for major national projects carried out by the government in the administrative capital. The Egyptian market is a promising market that the company is keen to address strongly, said Okay Barutcu, regional managing director for Eastern Europe, Asia, Middle East and North Africa at Grundfos International. Delayed by unfavourable winds during the past few years and the strict measures enforced by the Egyptian government, the Egyptian economy is now starting to look up, showing signs of recovery, with a faint rebound in foreign investment, he said. The company manufactures about 17 million pumps in different sizes and types annually. It also spends approximately 5 per cent of its annual sales on scientific research and development, in an effort to modernise its products and offer unconventional solutions he added. Barutcu explained that Grundfos is already dominant in a number of key markets across Egypt, and setting up a factory for the company's products in Egypt, which is an export base for the countries of origin, will position the company for further growth. Mohamed Yehia, maintenance manager at Grundfos Egypt, noted that the company provides maintenance and after sales service for its wide customer base, with unbeatable professional industry and application know-how. Yehia said: Our teams of highly skilled repair and maintenance service technicians provide fast and efficient repair work, which means minimized downtime, keeping disruptions and therefore expenditure to a minimum. It also provides engineers with the opportunity to participate in training courses focused on all types of maintenance and repair, he added. TradeArabia News Service Cathay Pacific will launch a seasonal non-stop service to cosmopolitan Cape Town later this year, directly linking this popular business and tourism destination with Hong Kong for the first time. The three-times-weekly service, from November 13, 2018 to February 18 2019, will complement Cathay Pacifics existing daily non-stop flights to Johannesburg and will be operated by state-of-the-art Airbus A350-900 aircraft. Cathay Pacific chief executive officer Rupert Hogg said: We are very pleased to be able to expand our services in Africa, a booming aviation market. Growing our reach to destinations that are not otherwise served from Hong Kong creates considerable new opportunities for business, trade and tourism, in addition to strengthening our home hub. He added that the new service will meet customer demand for travel to the scenic Western Cape throughout the southern hemispheres peak summer months, as well as provide an additional option for South African-based travellers looking to fly on Cathay Pacific to Asia and beyond via Hong Kong. The Cathay Pacific group has expanded its network significantly in recent times. In 2017, services to Tel Aviv, Barcelona and Christchurch were launched, while this January saw the inaugural service to Nanning. Other regional and international routes to commence in 2018 include Jinan and Brussels (March), Copenhagen (May), Dublin (June) and Washington DC (September). Alan Winde, Western Cape Minister of Economic Opportunities, said: We are thrilled that Cathay Pacific is launching a direct flight to Cape Town. This will allow us to unlock massive tourism potential from the East, a market which is already very important to us. Tim Harris, CEO of Wesgro, the official tourism, trade and investment promotion agency for Cape Town and the Western Cape, echoed that sentiment and added: This vote of confidence will help boost growth, help us land even more investment, and create additional jobs for the people of the Cape. We look forward to welcoming the first flight, and our team will work closely with the airline to help make the route a success. - TradeArabia News Service Diaa Al-Din Samout/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images(NEW YORK) -- After filming an airstrike on a hospital in rebel-held Eastern Ghouta, Syria, cameraman Diaa al-Din Samout checked on his uncles home next door. He found the building completely destroyed - and worried that his 73-year-old grandmother, his 6-month pregnant aunt and her four children who were home, would not make it out alive. But there is fate because they were all only lightly wounded, Samout told ABC News. Samouts uncle Ahmad wasnt home at the time of the attack in the town of Arbin on Tuesday, but he was nearby. Together, Samout and Ahmad pulled out the family while the camera captured the rescue. In the footage, two of the children emerged from under the rubble. Blood seeped down one of the childrens face as she screamed. Samout's grandmothers leg was broken before the attack, he said. She couldnt move and we pulled her out from under the rubble. This week in Eastern Ghouta is one of the deadliest the area has seen in years. Syrian forces and their Russian allies have pounded the besieged enclave, killing at least 416 civilians, including 96 children, since Sunday night, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a U.K.-based monitoring group. The death toll is likely to rise because dozens remain under the rubble after the continuous bombardment, which has also left more than 2,000 injured. In the town of Douma in Eastern Ghouta, Samira spent her morning trying to repair her apartment, which was damaged after a rocket was dropped on her street Wednesday night. The impact of the attack blew away her windows and doors, she said. The main entrance to her building was damaged as well. She now uses a couch to keep it closed because it no longer locks. They are still shelling us, Samira, who asked that her real name be withheld out of security concerns, told ABC News. When the attacks intensify I hide in the living room, which is the safest place in my apartment because there are no windows. There is just one shelter in her neighborhood, she said, and it only has room for a small number of people so she hides from the bombardment at home. An estimated 400,000 people are trapped in Eastern Ghouta with little access to food, water, fuel, electricity and health care. More than 20 hospitals there have been attacked since Sunday night, according to the Syrian American Medical Society, which supports hospitals in Eastern Ghouta. Doctors in the enclave say they dont have trauma drugs and surgical equipment, making it difficult, sometimes impossible, to save lives. We are currently only treating people with injuries from the shelling and most of them are children, Amani Ballour, a pediatrician and hospital manager in Eastern Ghouta, told ABC News. Sick people cant make it to the hospital because of the intensity of the strikes. She said her hospital received some 200 wounded and killed on Wednesday. I dont know how to describe what I feel when I see children in pieces and dead bodies, she said We dont know what to do. The United Nations Security Council met Thursday to discuss the situation in Eastern Ghouta at the request of Russia, president Bashar al-Assads main ally. At the emergency meeting, Staffan de Mistura, the U.N. Special Envoy for Syria, called for a ceasefire. There is a need for avoiding a massacre, because we will be judged by history, he said. Russias U.N. ambassador Vassily Nebenzia, called the resolution unrealistic and proposed amendments. The Syrian government and Russia say their military offensive against eastern Ghouta is necessary to overthrow rebels who have been firing mortars on Damascus. The recent surge in violence in Eastern Ghouta, which has been besieged by the Syrian government since 2013, is part of president Bashar al-Assads campaign to seize Syrias last remaining opposition-held territories. Copyright 2018, ABC Radio. All rights reserved. Jowai (Meghalaya), (IANS): National Peoples Party President Conrad K. Sangma on Thursday released the Peoples Document for Meghalaya at an election rally here. The Peoples Document highlights key aspects of governance in areas of economic planning and development, education, healthcare, infrastructure, public utilities delivery systems, agriculture, employment generation, youth welfare, women empowerment and environmental protection. Senior NPP leaders Prestone Tynsong and Sniawbhalang Dhar, NPP candidates from Jaintia Hills and other party functionaries were also present at the rally. Support TwoCircles This is not just another election manifesto; rather, it is the foundation on which the contractual obligation between the party and the people of Meghalaya stands upon. It is not only our guiding light, but will also act as a constant reminder of our promise to the people of Meghalaya which we must honour at all costs, Sangma said. He said that the main thrust of the Peoples Document is to bring about much-needed change, which the people of Meghalaya are desperately longing for. This is a very important moment in the history of Meghalaya because the National Peoples Party, along with the people will rise to the challenge of re-imagining and re-creating not only the destiny of the state, but most importantly, the present reality of our people, he said Sangma said that the ruling Congress has been trying to communalize the election, as they were scared of NPPs growing popularity. On the National Green Tribunal ban on coal mining, the NPP accused Chief Minister Mukul Sangma failed to take up the issue with the Central government. By Mirza Mosaraf Hossain, TwoCircles.net The plight of the nine workers who have been tortured, denied food and detained for thlast two months in Saudi Arabia has worsened, even as the Indian Embassy in Saudi Arabia said it was actively working towards the redressal of their grievances. In video messages shared with TwoCircles.net, the workers said they have been beaten up again, denied food and are currently detained in a basement-like structure in Riyadh. In a response to an email query from TwoCircles.net, the Indian Counselor in Riyadh added that the Embassy was fully cognizant of the issue and that the redressal will take time. Support TwoCircles The workers said that on Wednesday, February 21, they had been shifted from Al-Khafji district of Saudi Arabia to a location near the Indian Embassy in Riyadh. The nine workersall from West Bengal said they feared for their lives in Saudi Arabia and requested West Bengal CM Mamata Banerjee and Indian PM Narendra Modi to help them return to India. In their video messages, the workers said that their employers, who were working with another Indian contractor, had threatened them with dire consequences if they uttered any demands to return to India. The workers had arrived in Saudi Arabia in October 2017 with the help of two touts who assured them the job of carpenters in multinational companies and took a commission of Rs 1.3 lakh from each worker. But their time in Saudi Arabia did not turn out as planned. Instead of being employed as carpenters, they were compelled to work as sweepers and beaten up when they refused to do so. In January, when they first asked for West Bengal CMs help to return to India, their issue was picked up by the Bengali media. Since three of the workers were from Nadia district, the district administration asked the Indian Embassy in Riyadh for help following which the workers were paid a part of their salaries but continue to remain underworked, underfed and held as hostages to the company. The nine workers said they have been left disappointed by the inactiveness of the Indian Government. While speaking to TwoCircles.Net, the workers, some of whom were weeping, said they hadnt had anything to eat for the past three days. Shyamal Paul, one of the workers, questioned why the Indian government was not hearing their appeals. Why is our Government silent over our misery? We are pleading to our CM Mamata Banerjee, as well as PM Narendra Modi to take us away from here and let us come back to our homes. Another worker, Azahar Mondal, said, We were beaten yesterday evening indiscriminately when we refused to sign a blank Indian stamp paper. We did not sign because we dont know what they will write in the blank paper. We just want to go back home. By Siddhant Mohan, TwoCircles.net After a series of suspicious appointments in Aligarh Muslim University (AMU), the appointment of Public Relation Officer Omar Saleem Peerzada has also now come under the scanner. An RTI filed by a source close to TwoCircles.net has revealed that most of the academic records of Peerzada, including mark sheets, are currently absent from his personal records. Support TwoCircles The administration at Aligarh Muslim University had constituted a three-member committee on December 28, 2017 to examine the issue relating to the qualification and experience certificate submitted by Omar Saleem Peerzada at the time of his appointment as Public Relations Officer. However, Peerzadas appointment has not only put him under the scanner, but it has also turned the heat towards Zameeruddin Shah, the vice-chancellor in whose tenure Peerzada was appointed. A candidate who had applied for the post of PRO told TwoCircles.net on the condition of anonymity, There appears to be a quid pro quo. The then vice-chancellor Zameeruddin Shah was informed about the problems in the qualification of Peerzada, but he went ahead with the appointment anyway. The current administration should lodge an FIR against Shah just as it has happened with a former vice chancellor in a similar case of illegal appointment. As per the eligibility requirement, any person having a Masters degree and a five-year experience in mainstream media was eligible for the post of PRO. The RTI application demanded the details of the qualification and experience of Peerzada. The reply was shocking. The university archive section said that mark sheets were not available in the personal file of Omar Saleem Peerzada. Only certificates (4 pages) are available which are being sent to the RTI applicant. The RTI applicant, however, says that the reply was misleading. The university has not yet provided any document. An appeal in this regard is being filed. Another RTI reply by administration section of AMU says only the high school certificate of Peerzada has been verified so far and found to be correct. The three-member committee consists Prof Rahimullah Khan (retired), Prof Ibne Ahmad and Prof M Mursaleen. However, no timeframe has been given to the committee to submit the report. But many of the aspirants and those who applied are not satisfied with the formation of the committee. Another applicant for the post of PRO told TwoCircles.net, This committee is an eyewash. The committee is unlikely to give any adverse report despite being an open and shut case. The matter will ultimately go to court. We are just waiting for the report to come. However, while talking to TwoCircles.net, Omar Saleem Peerzada tried to debunk all the claims saying that the issue came to his knowledge when this reporter called him. He further said, My documents are already with the administration. If a committee has been constituted to look into my appointment, I am not aware of that until now. Peerzada, who said that the RTI cannot be used for news purposes, told TwoCircles.net that he will visit all the papers and facts related to the matter and revert with a suitable response. The story shall be updated if TwoCircles.net receives such a response from Peerzada. Copyright 1995 - . All rights reserved. The content (including but not limited to text, photo, multimedia information, etc) published in this site belongs to China Daily Information Co (CDIC). Without written authorization from CDIC, such content shall not be republished or used in any form. Note: Browsers with 1024*768 or higher resolution are suggested for this site. 0108263 License for publishing multimedia online Registration Number: 130349 Registration Number: 130349 When I walk around San Antonio, time telescopes. I'm here now with my eight-year-old son -- and I remember being eight in this city too, attending second grade at what was then called the Jewish Day School. As he spends time with his grandparents, I remember spending time here with mine. We walk on the riverwalk and share illicit bits of bread with the ducks, and I remember feeding ducks at his age from the back of a motorboat on the Guadalupe. I'm sure my parents brought me to the riverwalk when I was his age, though I think the area where we walk now wasn't so built-up then. He's come to San Antonio once or twice a year since he was born. There are places in my hometown that he remembers fondly but has outgrown. Like Kiddie Park. When we drive by it now on Broadway, my son remembers when the wee Ferris wheel looked huge and grand to him, and laughs. This year 's highlight is visiting a ranch outside of Castroville, which belongs to two of my parents' friends. When we first mention the outing to him, he asks, "What's a ranch?" which makes my parents laugh: my little Yankee boy doesn't know what a ranch is! (My father explains.) On the ranch we marvel at a chandelier made out of discarded deer antlers, learn about the difference between antlers and horns, and climb into a two-story treehouse that's built into a giant sprawling live oak. We pile into a red Suburban with the ranch manager and drive all around the land. While we're out roaming the land we spot zebras, and springbok, and water buck, and two kinds of deer bounding past prickly pear, sweet acacia, and mesquite. We see sharp-horned Watusi cattle at their feeder. We get to feed honey nut cheerios to fluffy Sicilian miniature donkeys who follow us around and take cheerios from our palms. It's sweet to be able to spend time with my son and my parents together, and to layer new memories for him (and me) atop the old. And when our time in San Antonio (and environs) is up, it's also good to return to our own beds and regular routines. The best of all possible worlds: to feel blessed in our going out, and in our coming home. Shabbat shalom to all. Photo: Texas flag, live oak tree, freight train. Taken in D'hanis, Texas. Iran will withdraw from the 2015 nuclear deal if there is no economic benefit and major banks continue to shun the Islamic Republic, its deputy foreign minister said Thursday. New York Post reports in its article Iran threatens to withdraw from nuclear deal that under the deal with Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia and the United States, Iran agreed to restrict its nuclear program in return for the removal of sanctions that have crippled its economy. Despite that, big banks have continued to stay away for fear of falling foul of remaining US sanctions something that has hampered Irans efforts to rebuild foreign trade and lure investment. Adding to those concerns, US President Donald Trump told the Europeans on Jan. 12 they must agree to fix the terrible flaws of the Iran nuclear deal or he would reimpose the sanctions Washington lifted as part of that pact. But even if Trump relents and issues fresh waivers to continue suspending those sanctions, the existing situation is unacceptable for Iran, Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi said. The deal would not survive this way even if the ultimatum is passed and waivers are extended, Araqchi, Irans lead nuclear negotiator, said in a speech at the Chatham House think tank in London. If the same policy of confusion and uncertainties about the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) continues, if companies and banks are not working with Iran, we cannot remain in a deal that has no benefit for us, Araqchi said. Thats a fact. Trump sees three defects in the deal: its failure to address Irans ballistic missile program; the terms under which international inspectors can visit suspect Iranian nuclear sites; and sunset clauses under which limits on the Iranian nuclear program start to expire after 10 years. He wants all three strengthened if the United States is to stay in the JCPOA. Araqchi said Trumps interpretation of the sunset clauses was wrong. There is no sunset clause in the JCPOA. Although the US administration and Trump are talking about sunset clause and that JCPOA is just for 10 years, that is not true, he said. Irans commitment in the JCPOA not to go for the nuclear weapons is permanent. He also reiterated Irans position that the JCPOA was a non-proliferation treaty and could not be linked to any other issue. If the nuclear deal is linked to Irans ballistic missile program or its regional activities, world powers not only will lose the JCPOA, but will make other issues more complicated and more difficult to resolve, he said. If we lose the JCPOA, we will face another nuclear crisis, Araqchi said. For the Europeans or the world community, when we talk about maintaining the JCPOA and saving it, its not a choice between the Iranian or the US market, its not a choice for economic cooperation: Its a choice between having security or insecurity, he said. North Korea is reportedly running out of hard currency and could be effectively broke by October, a South Korean lawmaker revealed Wednesday. Daily Caller reports in its article North Korea Expected To Go Broke By October As Cash Flow Dries Up that North Korea is facing tough international sanctions, punitive measures imposed on the rogue regime for its ballistic missile and nuclear weapons testing, and rumors have circulated for months that the Trump administrations maximum pressure campaign is taking its toll on the regime. If international sanctions against the North continue like this, all of North Koreas foreign currency earnings and overseas assets will be frozen, and its dollar (reserves) will dry up around October, South Korean lawmaker Rep. Kang Seok-ho, member of the conservative Liberty Korea Party and chairman of the parliamentary intelligence committee, revealed Wednesday, pulling from an unspecified analysis put together after discussions with intelligence officials, according to Yonhap News Agency. Our government should further strengthen cooperation with the international community on sanctions against the North, Kang added, asserting that North Koreas sudden willingness to engage the South is an attempt by Pyongyang to relieve the pressure and escape economic hardship. North Korea has become increasingly reliant on international trade in recent years, making sanctions potentially more effective at destabilizing the Norths fragile economic system, which functions as a command economy propped up by illicit market activities that survive on bribes and corruption. Pyongyang is estimated to have about $3 billion in foreign exchange reserves, Kim Byung-yeon, a professor of economics at Seoul National University, wrote in a recent article for the Korea JoongAng Daily . The coffers will fall further this year. By the second half, North Korea could be short on foreign exchange. Kim, acknowledging that the North Korean regime may have hoarded away additional funds, argued for tougher sanctions against North Korea. Ri Jong Ho, a former North Korean official in charge of securing funds for the regime, revealed last year that North Korea may not be able to withstand the sanctions it presently faces. I dont know if North Korea will survive a year [under] sanctions, he revealed last October at the Asia Society in New York. In late January, two Chinese sources reportedly with close ties to North Korean leadership told Radio Free Asia that North Korean despot Kim Jong Uns critical slush fund is drying up, as the young leader is believed to have spent millions of dollars on weapons testing and lavish luxury projects. As North Korea does not provide reliable economic information, it is difficult to know the true state of North Koreas economy or the impact of sanctions on the rogue regime. Azerbaijan State Theater of Young spectators hosted the event dedicated to the 26th anniversary of the Khojaly tragedy, the press service of the theater reported. The event was organized by the theater itself and the Azi Aslanov Central Officers Club of the Azerbaijani Defense Ministry. After the performance of the National Anthem of Azerbaijan, a minute of silence was observed in memory of the Khojaly tragedy victims. Turkey's forces will 'clear' the Syrian city of Manbij and all the area west of the Euphrates from terrorists, Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said. We will first clear Manbij from terrorists, and then will continue on our way until we make all of the west of the Euphrates safe for us and our Syrian brothers," Erdogan said, speaking at a meeting with provincial heads of ruling Justice and Development (AK) Party in Ankara. He added that the army has neutralized 1873 terrorists and have an area of 415 square kilometers under their control, Anadolu Agency reported. Figure skater Alina Zagitova has won the womens figure skating competition, becoming the first Russian gold medalist at the Pyeongchang Olympics. The 15-year-old Zagitova edged her friend and training partner Evgenia Medvedeva to end the gold drought for the Olympic Athletes from Russia. Thats the designation given to the nations competitors after Russia was officially banned by the IOC for a doping scandal. "I haven't fully realized yet that I've won," Zagitova said. "I think I need some time to understand that I won the Olympic Games." Evgenia Medvedeva, took the silver medal with 238.26 points while skating as Tolstoys tragic Anna Karenina. Kaetlyn Osmond of Canada won the bronze with 231.02 points, the New York Times reported. The other Russian skater, Maria Sotskova, took 8th place with a score of 198.10. In a bid to attract innovations from non-EU countries, Finnish authorities will lure talent with "startup residence permits," national broadcaster Yle reported. Starting April, Finland will issue residence permits to non-EU citizens, provided that they come up with radiant business ideas. A foreign company's prospects for excelling on both the Finnish and the international market will be assessed by the Business Finland organization, with a staff of around 600 people and almost 40 offices abroad. According to Jukka Hayrynen from Business Finland, the Nordic nation can clearly benefit from innovative foreign enterprise, with the best competitors potentially making millions. "We have a deficit of immigrants who create successful innovative companies. They have skills that cannot be obtained within the Finnish base culture, and hail from Africa, India, the Far East or South America, where markets are very large," Hayrynen explained. "Of course, we want more talented people to stay in Finland, but not everyone chooses our country," Hayrynen said, citing fierce competition for foreign talent between Estonia, Denmark, Holland, France and the UK. "We'd like to get our share," he added. Business Finland aims at promoting the Finnish government's objectives to clarify and simplify the business service system, foster the global spread of the Finnish innovation system, double the export volumes of small and medium businesses by 2020, as well as allocate human resources towards the client interface and operations abroad, Sputnik reported. US President Donald Trump described the nuclear deal with Iran, concluded in 2015, as monstrous. He criticised landmark agreement during his address at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington. "Who would have thought that you would give $ 150 million to a country that has no respect for us, RIA Novosti quotes him as saying. A symposium on the 26th anniversary of the Khojaly genocide was held at the German Bundestag on Feb. 22 The event, timed to coincide with the anniversary of the massacre of Azerbaijanis in Khojaly, was organized by the Azerbaijani Embassy in Germany, the Azerbaijan-German Forum and the German Atlantic Society with the support of the German representation of SOCAR. The head of the German Foreign Ministry Department for Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia, Diplomat Andreas Peschke noted that the tragedy of Khojaly left deep traces in people's memory and became the most acute escalation of the conflict. Peschke noted the crucial importance of resolving the conflict for the restoration of cooperation and trust between the sides. The German diplomat drew attention to the high level of relations between the FRG and Azerbaijan. He also mentioned the opening of the Goethe Institute in Baku in December 2017. According to the representative of the German Foreign Ministry, Azerbaijan, which is implementing the international transport projects, has managed to become the regional transport hub. During the discussions, Honorary Consul of Azerbaijan in Germany Otto Hauser noted the fallacy of the widespread opinion that the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict is frozen, and warned about the danger of maintaining the current status quo. The deputy of the Bundestag, Mark Hauptmann (CDU), expressed his regret that, despite the fact that Azerbaijan is affected party and a gross violation of the international law towards Azerbaijan, the conflict has not been resolved yet. He also expressed his dissatisfaction with the fact that, despite the adoption of the resolution on the recognition of the so-called Armenian genocide by the German Bundestag, the occupation policy of Armenia is perceived rather calmly. Moscow, Ankara and Tehran are preparing a meeting on Syria at the level of the foreign ministers in Astana, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov confirmed. "We will move forward based on the resolution of the UN Security Council," RIA Novosti quotes him as saying. The diplomat explained that he means Resolution 2254, which requires respect for the territorial integrity, sovereignty and independence of Syria. In addition, according to Lavrov, the resolution obliges not to hamper the citizens of Syria to negotiate independently and not to impose any outside solutions to them. Today Russia celebrates February 23rd Defender of the Fatherland Day. In the USSR it was named Soviet Army and Navy Day. February 23, due to tradition, became a state national holiday dedicated to all the generations of defenders of the Fatherland. Officially, as the name suggests, the holiday celebrates people who are serving or were serving in the Russian Armed Forces. But it has also more recently come to include the celebration of men as a whole. The history of the holiday begins in 1918 with the Red Army. On January 28, 1918, the Council of People's Commissars (Sovnarkom), established shortly after the October Revolution in 1917, led by Vladimir Lenin, adopted a decree on the establishment of the Red Army. On February 22, Sovnarkom issued a decree declaring that the country was in danger. On February 23, mass rallies took place in Moscow, St. Petersburg (Petrograd) and other cities across Russia, while volunteers flocked to the Red Army. On January 24, 1919, the establishment of the Red Army was suggested to be celebrated on the first Sunday before or after January 28, but since the proposal to mark this anniversary was sent in too late, the celebration was postponed until February 23. In 1922, a military parade was held on the Red Square in Moscow, laying the foundation for future mass celebratory events on this day. In 1923 it was officially named the Day of the Red Army and the Navy. The decision on the establishment of a holiday with a new name on February 23rd in Russia was taken in 1995. Officially, it looked like this: the Day of the Victory of the Red Army over the Kaiser's troops in 1918 was the Day of Defenders of the Fatherland. The modern Defender's Day appeared in 2001. This day became a day off, and became not only the professional holiday of those who have a direct connection to the army, but also of all those who defend, defended or only will defend the country. In 2006, Russian President Vladimir Putin put the word in the singular, making it Defender of the Fatherland Day. Art enthusiasts in Georgias capital Tbilisi can now view Classical works depicting 19th century Georgian cities and countryside by German painter Paul von Franken were donated to the Tbilisi Art Palace museum this week. Three paintings by von Franken (1818-1884), who came to be known as "The Painter of the Caucasus for his work in the region, will become part of the venues continual display. The works include the pieces Evening by the Kura River Near Tiflis, Caucasian Landscape with a Village and Oriental Cityscape. They were donated to Art Palace by Archil Gelovani, Chairman of the museums Board of Trustees and founder of the Pirosmani Foundation. Art Palace said the three paintings by von Franken would go on permanent display of the venue "in the nearest days. Gelovani obtained von Frankens paintings at prominent international art auctions including the Sothebys and Christies for a combined value of over $200,000. Born in the western German village of Oberbachem, von Franken emerged as a well-known landscape painter and a member of the Duesseldorf School of Painting. Associated with the late Romanticist period of classical art, the painter travelled cities and countryside of the Caucasus in the second half of the 19th century with a commission from the Russian government. Painting life and landscapes in the provinces of the region, von Franken also resided in Tbilisi with his wife in 1853. The artist died in Dusseldorf in 1884. HA NOI Up to 33 per cent of Vietnamese buyers are open to considering an electric vehicle (EV) as their next car, demonstrating the countrys strong potential to speed up the electrification of automobiles. The information was revealed in a Nissan-commissioned study titled Future of Electric Vehicles in Southeast Asia by Frost & Sullivan, a global growth consulting company. The study was commissioned by Nissan and based on 1,800 online customer responses and face-to-face discussions across six countries in ASEAN, including Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Viet Nam and the Philippines. The surveys results showed that one in three Southeast Asian consumers planning to buy a car was open to purchasing an EV. Across the region, two out of three consumers identified safety standards as the most important factor in purchasing an EV. Charging convenience was identified as the second-most important factor. Contrary to common perception, cost was not a deterrentin fact, customers surveyed were willing to pay more to own an EV compared to a conventional car. The study, however, showed that lower costs would prompt more people to consider electric cars. Three in four respondents said they were ready to switch to EVs if taxes were waived. Other incentives that would persuade consumers to buy an EV include the installation of charging stations in apartment buildings (70 per cent), priority lanes for EVs (56 per cent) and free parking (53 per cent). Trudy Harris, product communications manager at Nissan Motor Corporation in the Asia Pacific region, told online newspaper Zing.vn that the success of EVs depended on the co-operation between governments, businesses and other stakeholders. And co-operation does not only includes infrastructure, but also tax incentives and support for users to develop EVs in Asia in general and Viet Nam in particular. Viet Nam has a large internet-savvy young population. The number of internet users via smartphones is also very high. The survey shows that the interest of the Vietnamese people in EV technology surpasses cost or safety concerns, Harris added. VNS HA NOI In many seaports across Viet Nam, it takes vessels about 15 minutes or less to enter or leave the ports even if businesses have already submitted dossiers online, Vietnam News Agency has reported. ao Trong Hung, representative of HCM City-based Vietfrach a shipping company, said that thanks to administrative reforms, especially online procedures, the company submitted few paper dossiers/applications at the single window section when its vessels wanted to come or leave seaports. "Its much simpler than previously to fill and submit maritime applications at the single window - a system that allows businesses to declare information and submit documents in a standardised form once at a single location to complete all legal requirements concerning import, export and transit (regarding cargos, transport means and passengers)," Hung said. When time spent performing administrative procedures is reduced, businesses save hundreds of millions of Vietnamese ong per month on renting vessels, while costs for wharfs, berths, commuting and labour are also reduced. Le Van Thuc, director of Vung Tau Port Authority, said the port handles 30 administrative procedures relating to maritime activities and now, it takes business about 15 minutes to complete necessary procedures at the port. Now, once cargo arrives at port, goods can be loaded or unloaded immediately while previously, goods loading or unloading must wait until procedures are completed, Thuc said. He added that all procedures were publicised together as hotlines that allow applicants to contact heads of relevant sections if they have problems and want to complain. Nguyen Viet Khoa from a company that has vessels arrive at Vung Tau Seaport applauded administrative reforms at the port. Now, both goods owners and ship owners can submit applications online before their vessels arrive or leave the port. So, time is saved, he said. We dont have to go to the port to meet the port authority much. Instead, business contact relevant port officers via telephone and email to have registration work done, he said. Ha Quang Thang, head of sea ship department under Hai Phong Port Authority, said that when online procedures were available, applicants did not have to go to offices of border guards, customs, health inspectors or animal quarantine to ask for permissions. Meanwhile, these agencies did not need to go the ship for direct inspections all the time, which helped save time and reduce costs. The port also implemented the Facilitation of International Maritime Traffic Convention and accepted international application forms to avoid overlaps that inconvenience applicants, Thang said. Director of HCM City Port Authority Nguyen Hai Nam said the port was implementing online administrative procedures but it could not grant online permission for vessels to leave the port because digital signatures were not implemented properly. Director of the Ministry of Transports Marine Department Nguyen Xuan Sang said that forms and information of all 107 maritime procedures available online, which business could fill in and submit 35 forms online while the others still required paper based applications. The 35 forms include 24 procedures on ship registration, six procedures on crew management and five procedures on sea ships. The five sea ship procedures are available on Viet Nam National Single Window. The Marine Department developed an online database on ships and crew which helps save time when handling dossiers from Vietnamese vessels, he said. Sang said that the department continued to review and promote information and technology applications so more maritime procedures would be available via the national single window. VNS HA NOI Vietnamese farmers want to raise pigs on large farms but have little experience in treating large amounts of livestock waste, according to an environmental researcher from the Viet Nam Environment Administration (VEA). Although it has been a means of earning a living for generations of Vietnamese families, raising pigs has left negative impacts on the environment which are unresolved, said Nguyen Thi Thu Huong from VEAs Institute of Environmental Science at a conference on livestock breeding in Ha Noi on Thursday. Although Viet Nam ranks sixth globally in terms of pig production, its farmers are struggling with livestock waste treatment, she said. For farmers who raise pigs on a small-scale (10-100 pigs) inside their household farm, the amount of waste often overwhelms their biogas digesters. (A biogas digester, or a biogas plant, is a large tank used to treat pig manure.) Authorities of different localities have tried to overcome the situation by getting farmers to raise pigs in large-scale farms, Huong added. But as the number of pig farms surged in the past few years and so did the amount of waste, it became harder for farmers to treat the waste and for authorities to supervise the treatment process. Overlaps in management authority are a major issue, Huong said. The standards for waste discharge were written by both the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment and the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development. Some of them were not feasible. Some were only applicable for small-sized biogas plants used in households, not big ones on the farms. The two ministries should work together to phase out unnecessary, overlapping regulations, she added. Officials at the environmental and agricultural departments of provinces should study other livestock waste treatment technologies and equipment, and provide incentives to support local farmers in applying them, she said. Provincial environmental departments should have more qualified inspectors so as to closely oversee the waste treatment work all over the provinces, she said. As an example of new waste treatment initiatives, Nguyen Duy Huong, an owner of a large-scale livestock farm in Vinh Phuc Province, said he has been building on-site waste treatment systems as per instructions from the provinces Sub-Department of Animal Health. I was given VN20 million (US$880) last year to assemble a wastewater treatment system on the farm, he said. The wastewater no longer has black colour and foul odour. The Vinh Phuc Sub-Department of Animal Health aims to have more waste treatment models that can be easily applied throughout the whole province. It helped farmers build some 4,500 waste treatment plants since last year. VNS QUANG NINH The Vietnamese border guard detained three Chinese nationals carrying fake ATM cards, telephones, a subscriber identity module and a large amount of Vietnamese money. Mong Cai international border gates border guard in Quang Ninh Province said on Thursday the three persons were apprehended while trying to cross the border to China, according to Vietnam News Agency. They are suspected of using fake ATM cards to withdraw money from an ATM in Ha Long City in Quang Ninh Province, according to the Mong Cai border guard. The border guard issued an order to seize the objects and at the same time, handed over the three persons to Quang Ninh Province police for further investigation in accordance with the Vietnamese law. The border guard force came across the three Chinese nationals at 6.30am on Thursday during routine patrolling. After checking, the border guard found several types of bank cards, telephones and SIM cards, as well as more than VN36 million (US$1,582) in cash on them. The nationals, aged between 26 and 29, have been identified as Li Dang Yang (Guangdong Province in China), Wang Tao (Fujian Province) and Peng Yu He (Guangzhou Province). They confessed at the border guard station that at 3am on Thursday, they had used fake ATM cards to withdraw cash from an ATM in Ha Long City, after which they took a car to Mong Cai border gate to return to China. VNS YEN BAI The Department of Medical Service Administration under the Ministry of Health asked Yen Bai Province Peoples Commitee to investigate an assault on doctors at the provincial maternity and pediatrics hospital. Luong Ngoc Khue, the department head, told the Vietnam News Agency that the department on Thursday had directed the provincial department of health and the hospital to collaborate with law-enforcement agencies to investigate the attack, tighten security at medical facilities and provide the victims with comprehensive care. On the same day, Yen Bai Province Police announced a search for Le Hong Nam, 33, from Coc Leu District in Lao Cai City, Lao Cai Province, who was identified as leading the assault. Any information on Nam can be reported to Yen Bai Province Police via 069-2509-375 or 0945-809-888 (investigator Tran Xuan Truong). According to Nguyen Van Phong, the hospital director, Le Hong Nam took his wife to the hospital on February 20 for a caesarean section. After conducting a medical examination, the pregnant woman was transferred to the operating room. While the operation was being performed, Nam climbed on to the hospitals balcony to record a video. When a midwife asked him to stop, Nam harassed her and threatened to beat anyone he met after the operation, said Phong. Pham Hai Ninh and Hoang uc Trung, two doctors at the hospital, were attacked by Nam and 15 others when they stepped out of the operating room. Upon investigation, the provincial police identified Nam as the main attacker and launched a nationwide search for him. VNS QUANG NINH The first month of the Lunar New Year is the perfect time to make pilgrimage trips to pagodas and temples around the country to pray for happiness, good luck and prosperity in the year ahead. One surely worth visiting is Yen Tu Mountain in Quang Ninh Province, which is known as the holy land of Vietnamese Buddhism and attracts thousands of pilgrims in the first lunar month coming to find peace of mind and meditation. Tourists should attend the Yen Tu Spring Festival, the longest festival in the northern region, which lasts from the 10th of the first lunar month, which falls on February 25 this year, to the end of the third month. The festival is awash with traditional rituals, folk games, festivities and art performances to commemorate the king who founded the Truc Lam Zen sect in the late 13th century, laying the foundation for Buddhism in the country. VNS UNITED NATIONS, United States After two weeks of negotiations, Russia on Thursday told the UN Security Council that there was still no agreement on a 30-day ceasefire in Syria, dimming hopes of international action to halt the carnage in Eastern Ghouta. During a council meeting called by Russia, Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia presented a new raft of amendments to a draft resolution that would allow deliveries of humanitarian aid and medical evacuations during the pause. Negotiations on the draft presented by Sweden and Kuwait on February 9 have dragged on as hundreds of Syrians have died in a fierce government air campaign in the rebel-held enclave of Eastern Ghouta. Nebenzia told the council that Sweden and Kuwait had requested a vote on the draft resolution even though they are "fully aware there is no agreement on it." The Security Council needs to reach a "feasible" agreement on a ceasefire and not take a decision that would be "severed from reality", said Nebenzia before circulating an amended text. UN diplomats resumed talks in a last-ditch bid to avoid a Russian veto and a vote at the council was now considered for Friday. "We are trying to find a way forward," Swedish Ambassador Olof Skoog said after the meeting, adding that he was "leaning towards a vote" on Friday. The United States, France and Britain called for a quick vote to address the acute crisis on the ground. "The United States is ready to vote on this resolution right here and right now," said US diplomat Kelley Currie. "The assault from the regime is relentless, and the suffering is overwhelming." The US State Department later joined in the criticism, saying Russia had a "unique responsibility" for the situation in Eastern Ghouta. "Without Russia backing Syria, the devastation and the deaths would certainly not be occurring," spokeswoman Heather Nauert told journalists. Outside UN headquarters in New York, a coalition of aid groups put up three billboards, inspired by the film "Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri" that said "500,000 dead in Syria. And still no action? How come to Security Council?" Hell on earth More than 400 people have been killed in the five-day assault by the government on Eastern Ghouta, where UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said 400,000 Syrians are living in "hell on earth." In his address to the council, Nebenzia cited concerns over enforcing the ceasefire and questioned the feasibility of quickly launching a major aid operation to reach civilians and lift sieges. He accused supporters of the ceasefire of seeking to create "a scandal in order to step up pressure on the Syrian government and taint the Russian government." The draft resolution would pave the way for the truce to go into effect 72 hours after the adoption of the measure and for aid deliveries and medical evacuations to begin 48 hours after that. It demands the immediate lifting of all sieges including in Eastern Ghouta, Yarmouk, Foua and Kefraya and orders all sides to "cease depriving civilians of food and medicine indispensable to their survival." In a concession to Russia, the draft was amended during tough-going negotiations last week to specify that the ceasefire does not apply to the Islamic State group or Al-Qaeda. That would allow the Syrian government offensive to continue against Al-Qaeda-linked jihadists in Idlib, the last province in Syria outside the control of Damascus. The Russian-drafted text, obtained by AFP, specified that aid deliveries would happen "as security conditions permit" and added that "foreign military forces can operate in Syria only in coordination with its official authorities." "The Russian amendments are unacceptable," said a Security Council diplomat. French Ambassador Francois Delattre warned that failure to act to help Eastern Ghouta would deal a blow to UN credibility and could sound "the death knell of the United Nations." More than 340,000 people have been killed and millions driven from the homes in the war, which next month enters its eighth year with no end in sight. 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the progressive governments of the region. After the long and sad neoliberal night of the 1990s - which broke entire nations like Ecuador - and since Hugo Chavez won the Presidency of the Republic of Venezuela at the end of 1998, the rightist governments of the continent began to be overthrown like houses of cards, bringing Popular governments and aligned with Socialism of Good Living across our America. In its heyday in 2009, out of ten Latin American countries in South America, eight had leftist governments. In addition, in Central America and the Caribbean, there was the Farabundo Marti Front in El Salvador, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, Alvaro Colom in Guatemala, Manuel Zelaya in Honduras, and Leonel Fernandez in the Dominican Republic. In countries like Guatemala, with Alvaro Colom, or Paraguay, with Fernando Lugo; it was the first time in history that the left had come to power, and in the last case, broken centuries of constant bipartisanship. In May of 2008, the Union of South American Nations, or (UNASUR), was born and in February 2010, the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) was created with 33 members. Of the 20 Latin countries of the CELAC, 14 had Left governments, that is, 70 percent. The first part of the 21st century has undoubtedly meant years of advancement. The economic, social and political advances were historic and amazed the world with a climate of sovereignty, dignity, autonomy, with our own presence on the continent and in the whole world. Latin America didnt live through a time of change, but a real change of the times, which also substantially changed the geopolitical balance of the region. For this reason, for the de facto powers and hegemonic countries, it was essential to put an end to these processes of change that favored the vast majorities, and that sought a second and definitive regional independence. The Conservative Restoration Although the government of Hugo Chavez had to endure a failed coup d'etat as early as 2002, it was really since 2008 that undemocratic attempts to end the progressive governments intensified, as was the case of Bolivia in 2008, Honduras 2009, Ecuador 2010, and Paraguay 2012. Four attempts at destabilization, two of them successful - Honduras and Paraguay - and all against governments of the left. Starting in 2014 and taking advantage of the change in the economic downturn, these disjointed destabilization efforts are consolidated and constitute a real "conservative restoration," with never-before-seen right-wing coalitions, international support, unlimited resources, external financing, and so on. The reaction has since deepened and lost any limits or scruples. Now we have the economic boycott and harassment of Venezuela, the parliamentary coup in Brazil, and the judicialization of politics - 'lawfare' -, as shown by the cases of Dilma and Lula in Brazil, Cristina in Argentina, and Vice President Jorge Glas in Ecuador. The attempts to destroy UNASUR and neutralize CELAC, are also evident and, not infrequently, brazen. Not to mention what is happening in Mercosur. The failure of the FTAA at the beginning of this century looks to be overcome through the Pacific Alliance. In South America, at present, only three progressive governments remain: Venezuela; Bolivia; and Uruguay. The eternal powers that have always dominated Latin America and that plunged it into backwardness, inequality, and underdevelopment, return with a thirst for revenge, after more than a decade of continuous defeats. The Central Pillars of The Conservative Restorations Strategy The reactionary strategy is carried out regionally and is primarily based on two axes: the supposed failure of the left economic model, and the alleged lack of moral strength in the progressive governments. Regarding the first axis, since the second half of 2014, due to an adverse international environment, the entire region suffered an economic slowdown that turned into a recession during the last two years. The results are different between countries and subregions, reflecting the different economic structure and applied economic policies, but the economic difficulties of countries like Venezuela or Brazil are taken as an example of the failure of socialism, even when Uruguay, with a left government, is the most developed country south of the Rio Grande, or when Bolivia has the best macroeconomic indicators on the planet. The second axis of the new strategy against progressive governments is morality. The issue of corruption has become the effective tool to destroy the national-popular political processes in Our America. The emblematic case is that of Brazil, where a well-articulated political operation succeeded in removing Dilma Rousseff from the Presidency of Brazil, only to be shown to have nothing to do with the issues that they attributed to her. There is great global hypocrisy surrounding the fight against corruption. The Left: Victim Of Its Own Success? The left is also probably a victim of its own success. According to the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), almost 94 million people were lifted out of poverty and joined the regional middle class during the last decade, with the vast majority being a result of the policies of leftist governments. In Brazil, 37.5 million people stopped being poor between 2003 and 2013, and are now middle class, but those millions were not a mobilized force when a Parliament that itself is accused of corruption, dismissed Dilma Rousseff. We have people who overcame poverty and now - for what is often called objective prosperity and subjective poverty - despite having significantly improved their income level, ask for much more. They feel poor, not in reference to what they have, worse still to what they had, but to what they aspire. The left has always struggled against the current, at least in the Western world. The question is, is the left fighting against human nature? The problem is much more complex if we consider the hegemonic culture constructed by the media, in the Gramscian sense, that is, to make the wishes of the great majorities in line with the interests of the elites. Our democracies should be called mediated democracies. The media are a more important component in the political process than the parties and electoral systems; they have become the main opposition parties of the progressive governments, and they are the true representatives of business and conservative political power. It does not matter what best suits the majorities, what has been proposed in the election campaign, and what the people - the main actor in every democracy - has decided at the polls. The important thing is what the media approve or disapprove of in their headlines. They have replaced the Rule of Law with the State of Opinion. Is there a "Strategic Challenge?" The regional left faces the problems of exercising - or having exercised - power, often successfully, but exhaustingly. It is impossible to govern and make the whole world happy, even more, when so much social justice is required. We always have to be self-critical, but it's also about having faith in yourself. The progressive governments are under constant attack, the elites and their media will not forgive any error, they seek to lower our morale, make us doubt our convictions, proposals and objectives. Therefore, perhaps the greatest "strategic challenge" of the Latin American left is to understand that every transcendental work will have errors and contradictions. This article was originally published in Granma in Spanish. LOS ANGELES, CA, February 23, 2018 /24-7PressRelease/ -- Catherine Bauknight will be recognized for her documentary filmmaking and photojournalism as a recipient of the highly esteemed, Golden Rule International Award and Goodwill Ambassador presented by IChange Nations . The award ceremony will be held at Americana Community Room (889 Americana Way, Glendale, CA. 91210) Thursday, February 22 from 7:30 to 9:30 p.m. This award and the legal document will be submitted to the United Nations by Dr. Mussie Hailu, Founder and Board Chairman of the Interfaith Peace-Building Initiatives. The Golden Rule International is affiliated with the Interfaith Peace-Building Initiative Organization, Department of Public Information of the United Nations. The Golden Rule International Award and recognition as Goodwill Ambassador (Inter-Faith UN World Civility Golden Rule Ambassador), recognized by the United Nations, will be presented by humanitarian Dr. Gershom Sikaala, author and Tonga Prince of Southern Africa of Zambia. Catherine Bauknight contributes to humanity through documentary filmmaker and photojournalism for those who have no voice. This includes the documentary film, Hawaii A Voice For Sovereignty, photo essays in countries such as China, The Tiananmen Square Massacre, Ethiopia-Bad Water, Tuberculosis Epidemic in Peru, and Renaissance of the Catawba Indians in S.C. Bauknight says, "My work represents the culture of people, their story and the link to understanding humanity through the language of light." She has recently documented the DACA "Dreamers" and is currently working with the homeless in Pasadena, Calif. On April 5, 2018, the recognition that Bauknight is a recipient of the Golden Rule International Award will become historically connected with the Golden Rule Day, officially recognized by the United Nations and celebrated around the world. The goal of raising awareness of the Golden Rule Day is to promote peace among nations regardless of religion or culture. Other recipients of the Golden Rule International include Presidents of countries promoting peace and respect for humankind, including Ethiopia, Mozambique, Ghana, Burundi, and Zambua. The guest speaker at the event is Ambassador Dr. Clyde Rivers, Founder and President of IChange Nations. For more information about Catherine Bauknight, visit http://www.catherinebauknight.com and http://www.hawaiiavoiceforsovereignty.com. View her portfolio at https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1gVkgUxGt-dSlFDcld3djBKdzA/view ABOUT CATHERINE BAUKNIGHT Catherine Bauknight, "A Messenger of Cultural Voices," is a filmmaker, photojournalist, and journalist. Her documentary films and photographs elevate social change and communication between people of all cultures and ethnicities. Bauknight committed her talent as a photographer and filmmaker to tell the story of cultures of those who have no voice to speak out and create a better lifestyle for the present and the future after seeing the unjust events that happen in the world. # # # "Our growers could experience a catastrophic loss of sales," says Michelle Hennings, executive director of the Washington Association of Wheat Growers. RITZVILLE, WA, February 23, 2018 /24-7PressRelease/ -- When President Donald Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the agricultural industry warned that the consequences could be dire for our country's farmers. That warning appears to be coming true, as the remaining 11 TPP countries are close to formalizing the deal without the U.S., threatening the Pacific Northwest wheat industry's access to vital Pacific Rim markets, especially Japan. "If the TPP agreement is signed without the U.S. being a part of it, U.S. wheat will be put at a $65 per metric ton disadvantage. Both Australia and Canada, two of our closest competitors, will see lower tariffs, making those countries' wheat much more attractive than U.S. wheat," said Michelle Hennings, executive director of the Washington Association of Wheat Growers. "We could lose a huge part of our market. With more than 90 percent of the Pacific Northwest's wheat being exported, much of it to TPP countries, our growers could experience a catastrophic loss of sales, depressing farm gate prices even lower than they are today." U.S. Wheat Associates estimates that Japan's market share, the 2nd largest market of Washington wheat, would fall by 62.5 million bushels annually, resulting in increased stocks and lowering baseline wheat futures price by 50 cents a bushel. The wheat growers' leadership and staff continue to stress the importance of maintaining and strengthening free trade agreements, such as TPP, NAFTA and KORUS (the U.S.-Korea Free Trade Agreement), and how vital a stable agricultural industry is to a strong, growing U.S. economy. Fair and reciprocal trade deals supported by the Administration can secure export sales to Japan and help grow sales to other TPP countries, ultimately helping American wheat farmers. Marci Green, president of WAWG and farmer from Fairfield, WA added, "Agriculture is one of the few sectors that routinely enjoys a trade surplus. Having TPP go on without us threatens not only that surplus but the U.S. agricultural industry's stability as a whole. Farmers are already struggling with low commodity prices, as well as attacks on the farm safety net. We call upon President Trump to use his abilities to re-enter with Congress TPP and protect U.S. jobs and agriculture." Education and outreach are the heart of WAWG activity, all of which is aimed at helping Washington wheat families. Since 1954, WAWG has been dedicated to the enrichment of the Washington wheat industry as a nonprofit trade association, which depends on volunteers, membership dues and donations to carry out activities as representatives on the state and national levels. WAWG monitors state, transportation, research and natural resources policy and partners with the National Association of Wheat Growers to monitor national farm policy. Visit wawg.org for more information. For more information on this or other related issues, please contact Michelle Hennings, Executive Director of the Washington Association of Wheat Growers at, 509-659-0610, [email protected] Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Washington-Association-of-Wheat-Growers-194847140538562 Twitter: @WAWheatGrowers # # # Feb 23, 2018 | By Benedict 3D Systems has unveiled its new NextDent 5100 3D printer and 18 new NextDent resins for dental 3D printing. The news caps a busy week for 3D printing in dentistry, with several manufacturers launching products at LMT Lab Day Chicago 2018. No, 3D printing hasnt been swallowed by the world of dentistry, its just been a busy week for dental additive manufacturing. Thats because several major 3D printing companies have been attending LMT Lab Day Chicago 2018, a dental industry event showcasing the newest technologies in the business. Weve already seen new major new 3D printing products from Stratasys, and now its the turn of that other additive manufacturing behemoth, 3D Systems. The South Carolina company has used LMT Lab Day to unveil its new NextDent 5100 3D printer and 18 new NextDent resins for dental 3D printing, taking the entire NextDent portfolio to 30 3D printing materials. The NextDent 5100 3D printer lets dental laboratories and clinics produce dental devices at dramatically increased speed: up to 4x faster than other available solutions, according to 3D Systems. The 3D printer also reduces material waste and capital equipment expenditure, as well as reliance upon milling centers. The 3D Systems NextDent 5100 3D printer with Figure 4 technology Patients also benefit from the new 3D Systems 3D printer. The machine reduces the time required to make prosthodontics and orthodontics, simultaneously cutting down the number of required office visits. (With the 3D printer, dental labs can achieve a 70-80 per cent decrease in the amount of time needed to produce dentures.) The NextDent 5100 3D printer is powered by 3D Systems' proprietary Figure 4 technology, which facilitates high-speed 3D printing of dental devices and fixtures. It is compatible with industry-standard intra-oral scanning and software solutions. With 30 NextDent resins, 3D Systems can also claim to offer the largest number of dentistry-specific 3D printing resins of any dental material supplier. We're bringing a complete digital dentistry solution to the marketcombining an unmatched materials portfolio with leading 3D printing technology, software, and services, said Vyomesh Joshi, president and CEO of 3D Systems. We offer the industry's widest range of regulatory-approved 3D printing materials and technologies that allow dental labs and clinics of every size to drive precision, productivity, and efficiency at a reduced cost for a wide range of dental applications. The NextDent 5100 3D printer will cost less than $10,000. Pre-orders can be made in the second quarter of 2018, with general availability planned for Summer 2018. 3D Systems will also release the FabPro 1000, an entry-level machine suitable for dentistry, jewelry, and engineering. It will cost less than $5,000. Posted in 3D Printer Maybe you also like: Feb 23, 2018 | By Benedict In Missouri, a teenager has 3D printed a custom prosthetic arm for his veteran amputee father, while across the pond in the UK, a father has 3D printed a prosthesis for his 10-year-old son, who was born without a left hand. Its a lovely snapshot of 3D printing in 2018. 3D printing does great things in a lot of areas, but one of the most directly beneficial uses for the technology is prosthetics. All around the world, organizations like e-NABLE and Open Bionics are dramatically cutting the cost of prosthetic limbs for those in need, while individual makers are also designing and 3D printing their own prostheses using homemade designs or models sourced from the internet. This week, there are feelgood 3D printing stories from both sides of the Atlantic, both of which involved a parental bond between father and son. In St Louis, Missouri, teenager Robbie Freis used his 3D printing skills to fabricate a new arm for his father, a veteran who was injured in a 2003 RPG attack in Iraq. It was a touching endeavor, though Freis did have one ulterior motive for his project: getting his dad back on the video games! Robbie Freis 3D printed an arm for his amputee father (Image: KTVI/CNN) When my dad was injured in the Marines, he wasn't able to play video games with us for about 10 years, Freis said. And after I created that 3D printed adapter, he was able to play with us full speed. Freis used a 3D scanner to capture a 3D model of his fathers left hand, before flipping the model to make a perfectly fitting prosthetic right hand. The teenager, who wants to go into robotics in college, used his schools 3D printer to fabricate the prosthesis. The arm was 3D printed on a machine at Freis' school (Image: KTVI/CNN) But father-son acts of kindness can also go the other way. Over in England, 51-year-old Callum Miller has made a 3D printed arm for his 10-year-old son, Jamie. Callum had been researching prosthesis options on the internet when he came upon the idea of 3D printing an arm for Jamie. To this end, he contacted 3D printing charity Team UnLimbited to see if they could print him one. (We wrote about the 3D printed prosthesis charity and its efforts to provide free printed limbs last year.) Unfortunately, Team UnLimbiteds waiting list for physical 3D printed models meant there was an 18-month delay on orders. So Callum thought: why dont I just get a 3D printer myself? With an eBay-bought Chinese 3D printer in hand, the father downloaded a 3D model from the charity and 3D printed it himself. With no prior 3D printing experience, Callum Miller printed an arm for his son Jamie (Images: Mercury Press & Media) And funnily enough, the Millers also had computer games in mind: Other people can be a bit cautious about it but he can still do everything, Callum said of Jamies disability in the Daily Mirror. He plays the PS4 better than most people with two hands. And now, with an extra 3D printed hand to help him out, it looks like Jamie will be unstoppable. I think my new hand is really cool and I like using it a lot, the 10-year-old said. I feel like a bit of a superhero. I can catch a ball, hold stuff, and play games with it now. It might not be the last Jamie sees of a 3D printer, either: In the future I would like to learn how to make them like my dad so I can help other people who need them. Posted in 3D Printing Application Maybe you also like: Feb 23, 2018 | By Tess A team of students from the Eindhoven University of Technologys TU/ecomotive group has designed a 3D printed concept car that showcases the potentials of automotive evolution and, importantly, sustainable mobility. The concept vehicle, named Noah, was designed in collaboration with Oceanz, a Netherlands-based 3D printing company. Creating a sustainable concept car has become a yearly tradition at TU/ecomotive, and in recent years 3D printing has come to play a critical role in the conception of the vehicles design. This year marks the second time Oceanz has provided its 3D printing support to the student group. This years car, Noah, is a circular two-person car built entirely from recyclable materials. In fact, the cars chassis, body, and interior are primarily made up of bio-based materials, further ensuring the vehicles sustainable nature. The compact vehicle weighs only 350 kg and runs on electricity. Its top speed is about 100 km/h or 62 mph, and it reportedly has a range of roughly 240 km or 149 miles. (It's therefore the kind of car that would be useful for urban commuting.) The cars structure is also worth noting, as the TU Eindhoven students have come up with a design that can be easily disassembled. This means that, when the car is no longer in service, its parts can be taken apart and easily recycled. TU/ecomotive students holding clay model stand with Frank Elbersen from Oceanz 3D Printing Notably, the sustainable Noah car integrates a number of parts (both interior and exterior) that are 3D printed from Oceanzs durable EcoPowder material. The 3D printing company also provided the TU/ecomotive group with a lesson on how to design parts with optimal material usage. This enabled the students to design parts that were not only lightweight and more eco-friendly, but also cheaper than traditionally manufactured parts. This meeting was an eye-opener, said Jonathan Verhaar, a student at TU Eindhoven. We can make optimal use of the advantages of this technique from design to the final phase. We see a lot of possibilities for sustainability, but also for structure and complex forms. Of course, the 3D printed Noah car is still a concept vehicle, so dont expect to see it driving around town anytime soon. Still, the collaboration between the students and 3D printing company Oceanz did demonstrate how 3D printing can be used to transform automotive design and make it fit into a circular economy. 3D printing contributes to a very sustainable production technique, added Frank Elbersen from Oceanz. In addition to our expertise and possibilities, this is also a project that we would like to grow. With this group of students we are faced with a new era. We like to work with these trendsetters. With their knowledge we will be able to inform our customers further. To see more 3D printed cars, check out our list of amazing 3D printed cars & automotive projects from around the world. Posted in 3D Printing Application Maybe you also like: Anna Aslanyan in the London Review of Books: Theres a writer in England called er, Peter Ackroyd, David Bowie said in a short film he made in 2003, who wrote a book called Hawksmoor I think it was. Wasnt it? Yeah. Ackroyds 1985 novel struck him as a very powerful book, and quite scary, and in 2013 Bowie included it on a list of his favourite 100 books, ranging from the Beanoto The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. His son, the filmmaker Duncan Jones, recently launched #BowieBookClubto discuss dads favs on Twitter, choosing Hawksmoor as an amuse cerveau before we get into the heavy stuff. The novels protagonist, Nick Dyer, partly based on the architect Nicholas Hawksmoor, is a follower of a Satanic cult who consecrates his churches with human sacrifices. Hawksmoor is the name of his pale shadow, a modern-day detective investigating a series of murders that mirror those committed in the name of Dyers art. (Bowie had a longstanding interest in the occult. I was up to the neck in magick, he said of his Thin White Duke period, when he lived in that whole dark and rather fearsome never-world of the wrong side of the brain.) Ackroyds narrative shifts between the early 18th century and the 1980s, as does the idiom. In each of my Churches I put a Signe, Dyer says, so that he who sees the Fabrick may see also the Shaddowe of the Reality of which it is the Pattern or Figure. Hawksmoors speech, by contrast, came out of him like vomit carried him forward without rhyme or meaning: Sign? I know nothing about signs. When I translated Hawksmoor into Russian in 2010, I used a pastiche of late 18th-century Russian as the closest analogue to Ackroyds stylisation of early 18th-century English. More here. Screenshot - Them's Fightin' Herds (PC) Screenshot - Them's Fightin' Herds (PC) Screenshot - Them's Fightin' Herds (PC) Screenshot - Them's Fightin' Herds (PC) Screenshot - Them's Fightin' Herds (PC) Screenshot - Them's Fightin' Herds (PC) Screenshot - Them's Fightin' Herds (PC) Screenshot - Them's Fightin' Herds (PC) Screenshot - Them's Fightin' Herds (PC) Entwickler Mane6 hat bekanntgegeben, dass sein Prugelspiel mit dem Zungenbrecher-Namen Them's Fightin' Herds in Steams Early Access gestartet ist (wer mochte, kann den entsprechenden Steam-Key ubrigens auch im Humble Store erwerben). Das Spiel im Comic-Design schickt offenbar ausschlielich vierbeinige Tiere in den Ring.Das Design stammt von Cartoon-Produzentin und Entwicklerin Lauren Faust, die im Rahmen der Entwicklung auf die Z-Engine von Skullgirls sowie die Middleware "GGPO" zuruckgreift (Skullgirls-Besitzer sollen ubrigens eine Ermaigung auf den Kaufpreis bekommen). Die Vollversion soll vermutlich "in ein paar Monaten" erscheinen. Nach ihrem Start sollen regelmaig kostenlose Episoden veroffentlicht werden. Jede davon wird sich auf einen Charakter konzentrieren sowie diverse Freischaltungen, versteckte Szenarien und mehr mitbringen.Die Early-Access-Fassung enthalt momentan u.a. PvP-Modi fur lokale und Online-Duelle sowie einen kooperativen PvP-Modus. Ebenfalls schon dabei sind ein Arcade-Modus fur Einzelspieler sowie ein "Target Challenge Mode"."GAME FEATURES- Visual Pixel Lobby: Online multiplayer lobby system uses the same style of overworld as Story Mode to allow all players to explore (read: goof around in) locations within the world of Foenum with other players. Customize your avatar with cosmetic items you collect through Story Mode AND Multiplayer PVP/PVE gameplay!- Dynamic Music System: Rockin character themes that adapt in the heat of the battle makes every fight a treat to the players AND the spectators.- GGPO powered netplay for the smoothest possible fighting game experience.- More fighters are on the way, introducing more playstyles to the roster! Each fighter DLC release will include additional unlockable cosmetics, modes and character specific story mode expansions.- 4-button Fighting: A-Light, B-Medium, C-Heavy, D-Magic.- Magic System: Emphasize your characters special abilities through a dedicated button and a unique resource.- Juggle Decay: Opponents become gradually heavier during a combo, but ONLY after the juggle decay bar is filled. This manages combo length without imposing a hard limit. In addition, filling the juggle decay bar prevents standing infinites by removing the opponent's ability to remain standing for the rest of that combo.- Enhanced Super Attack: Spend an additional meter to add utility to your main super attack with effects that stay true to the characters unique personalities and talents!" If you're anything like us, you love the local, personalized, private and affordable experience that comes with some of the best Airbnbsand you could really do without the grime in the grout and the owner's clothes in the closet. This week, in celebration of the company's 10th anniversary, Airbnb gave us some luxurious new reasons to book it. At a news conference at the Masonic on Thursday, Brian Chesky announced that Airbnb Plus has launched with more than 2,000 homes in 13 international cities including San Francisco, Austin, Barcelona, London, Los Angeles and Cape Town. Each stay has been thoroughly vetted based on a 100-point quality checklist designed to guarantee a consistently comfortable stay every time you book. In other words, as The New York Times reports, when you reserve a Plus home, you're guaranteed to arrive to a kitchen fully stocked for cooking, a bedroom with plush linens on a decent mattress, a bathroom with cushy towels and toilet paper and no Head and Shoulders in the shower, and squeaky clean interiors. You'll even find hang space in the closets, an ironing board, and toiletries just for you, including shampoo. The polished kitchen of a luxe, loft-style stay in downtown San Francisco listed as Airbnb Plus. (Courtesy of Airbnb) If it sounds like a hotel, that's pretty much the pointeven the online surfing experience has been elevated with boutique hotelworthy professional photography of every Plus home. So, it's unsurprising that the average price of a Plus stay ($200/night) is double that of your average Airbnb. But the company is betting big on the success of Plus, with plans to roll out more than 75,000 homes in 50-plus destinations by the end of 2018. But the luxe mainstreamification of Airbnb doesn't end there. Chesky also teased the spring debut of Beyond by Airbnb, a collection of uber-high-end homes for first class travelers. Until then, peruse the Plus offering at airbnb.com/plus. Sometimes the best brunches come from the most unexpected places. These San Francisco and Oakland spots may specialize in wine, but their sumptuous morning meals are worth waking up for. Scopo Divino Courtesy of Scopo Divino/Facebook Scopo Divino Hammered gold leaf on the ceiling and back-lit wine cases add a bit of vintage New York glitz to this classy but comfortable Pac Heights enoteca. At the bar's new weekend brunch, Scopo Divino serves up hearty dishes including beef pot roast hash and meatball sandwiches, alongside eye-opening cocktails and wines by the glass. // 2800 California St (Pac Heights), scopodivino.com In the international auxiliary language Esperanto, Parigo means "pairing;" at this streamlined Marina bar, the name is a nod to the complementary and contrasting wines they recommend with every dish. At brunch you'll find mouthwatering eats like eggs in brioche with pistachio and duck sausage and Brussels sprout pesto, or crispy pork belly with cheddar grits. There are, of course, wine cocktails, as well as a variety of mules and a bloody mary bar. // 3232 Scott St (Marina), parigosf.com Indian Paradox This friendly neighborhood spot, painted in tones of purple, offers a unique interpretation of what a wine bar should be. After moving to the Bay Area from southern India, Kavitha Raghavan scrapped her plans to study electrical engineering and decided instead to try and fuse the food traditions of her native home with Northern California wines. At the aptly named Indian Paradox, you can start the day on a different foot with street food snacks, masala omelettes, and dosas. // 258 Divisadero St (Lower Haight), indianparadoxsf.com Noeteca Wine Bar Courtesy of Noeteca/Yelp Noeteca Wine Bar A Noe Valley staple, this simple, cozy cafe has been keeping the neighborhood lubricated for years with its robust wine list. At brunch, you'll find Frenchie fare such as quiche lorraine and the fanciful croque Napoleon, a savory bread pudding with layers of smoked ham and cheese. Do not miss the truffle pate plate and nutella bomboloni. // 1551 Dolores St. (Noe Valley), ordernoeteca.com Bellanico Bellanico is a comfy-casual neighborhood spot specializing in Old World (especially Italian) vintages. For brunch, you can indulge in both antipastithink hand-crafted burrataand seasonally rotating breakfast fare such as duck confit hash with poached eggs. For a morning meal of champions, try Bellanico's three-course brunch tasting with wine pairings ($42). // 4238 Park Blvd. (Oakland), bellanico.net Perle Courtesy of Perle/Facebook Perle Brightly lit with a marble topped bar and open kitchen at the back, Perle is a welcoming favorite in Oakland's Montclair Village. The wine bar's French-inspired, seafood-heavy menu shines at brunch with delectable bites like fried oyster deviled eggs and foie gras French toast. // 2058 Mountain Blvd (Montclair), perlewinebar.com District At District, the exposed wood beams, brick walls and dark leather and velvet seating create a men's club meets industrial factory vibe. But while whisky, in addition to wine, may dominate in the evenings, brunch is all about bottomless mimosas. Drink as many as you can alongside District's buffet brunch, laden with biscuits and sawmill gravy and buttermilk pancakes with butter rum syrup. // 216 Townsend St. (SoMa), districtsf.com Herlen Place Courtesy of Herlen Place/Yelp Herlen Place This bright, modern coffee and wine bar in Union Square is a chic escape from the hustle and bustle of downtown. Their brunch menu is exceedingly simplejust a few hearty, seasonally inspired dishes from chefs Laurent Manrique and Patrick Albertbut among them you'll find Herlen's interpretation of the Impossible Burger, the groundbreakingly "bloody" vegetarian hamburger smothered in your choice of toppings including blue cheese and caramelized shallots. // 334 Grant Ave (Union Square), herlenplace.com Uva Enoteca The European-inspired Uva Enoteca serves up an extensive menu of Italian wines and eats in a sophisticated but unfussy setting. At brunch, pair Uva's bottomless bellinis with truffled egg toast with fontina cheese, or go family-style with pizzas and pastas such as the boar bolognese lasagna with bechamel and Parmigiano-Reggiano. // 568 Haight St (Lower Haight), uvaenoteca.com Colombia was once the rising economic star of Latin America. Now it has a long list of challenges - and the latest is an unprecedented refugee crisis. Venezuelans are pouring in to flee the humanitarian disaster in their home country. Colombia was already dealing with corruption scandals, record cocaine production, proposed cuts in American aid, oil headaches and a costly peace agreement to end a 50-year civil war. Another blow came in December, when Standard & Poor's cut Colombia's credit rating to one level above junk status. And a presidential election is coming in May. The Colombian economy grew just 1.8% last year, the slowest pace since the global financial crisis a decade ago. In 2011, it was booming at 6%. "It's certainly not the star that it was four or five years ago," says Richard Francis, director of Latin America sovereign debt at Fitch Ratings. 'Numbers of people that would pose a challenge to any country' Venezuelans are suffering under severe shortages of food and medicine, a worthless currency and a political regime that many governments, including that of the United States, consider a dictatorship. Those crises are driving people into Colombia in huge numbers. More than half a million Venezuelans were living in Colombia last year, up 62% from the year before. Makeshift refugee camps are popping up in parking lots and parks in Colombia's largest border city, Cucuta. Colombia is both a place to stay and a point of passage. The number of Venezuelans crossing into Colombia en route to somewhere else rose 600% last year, to 231,000. President Juan Manuel Santos recently tightened border controls and ordered 3,000 more national guardsmen to the border. On the Colombian side, "hospitals are overflowing," says Raul Gallegos, a Bogota-based associate director at the global consulting firm Control Risks. "You have Venezuelans living in parks because they can't find a place to live. This will only get worse, and it will have a financial impact for the Colombian government." The United Nations High Commission for Refugees recently opened a third office along the Colombia-Venezuela border to complement the Colombian government's humanitarian efforts. Josef Merkx, UNHCR's representative in Colombia, told CNN that Colombian officials and border communities are doing their best, but are "strained." Latin America "is facing one of the largest population outflows in its history," Merkx said in an email. "Colombia had not been a host country to great numbers of migrants and refugees, and they are receiving numbers of people that would pose a challenge to any country." Other simmering problems The costly refugee crisis comes at a particularly tough time. Colombian leaders have imposed belt-tightening measures - higher taxes and cost-cutting at the state-run oil company - to reel in spending. Like many nations, Colombia suffered mightily from a plunge in oil prices that started in late 2014. Oil is Colombia's top export, and the economy depends heavily on commodities for growth. The oil downturn put Colombia in a hole, and it's still digging out. The country's mining, manufacturing and construction industries all shrank last year. That hasn't happened since at least 1999, government figures show. It faces a complication that many other oil-rich nations don't: Colombians citizens are legally allowed to halt or prevent drilling, exploration and extraction projects because of environmental or health concerns. As of December, there were 45 such petitions, according to a government agency. Experts say foreign companies are losing their appetite to drill there. "It's easier to do business in Venezuela's oil sector than in Colombia's oil sector," Gallegos says. "Colombia can't afford to be a country where local communities block extraction activity." Other problems have bogged down the economy. Santos' administration has been embroiled in a bribery scandal that has rocked Latin America. Experts say it has delayed or halted some public infrastructure projects. Another longstanding problem: Cocaine. The U.S. State Department reported that cocaine production in 2016 in Colombia rose to an all-time high, and the Trump administration has proposed cutting aid to Colombia by 36%. Implementing Colombia's peace agreement with the guerrilla rebel group known as FARC is one more financial burden. Humanitarian goals have been achieved: FARC rebels handed in weapons last year, ending a 50-year civil war. But integrating thousands of rebels and their captives into society is expensive. Santos raised taxes last year in part to pay for peace costs. Despite challenges, 'Overall the Colombian economy is healthy' Some economists say the challenges are mild in the big picture. Colombia hasn't had a recession since 1999. And despite the economic downturn, unemployment has remained around 9%. Its problems are northing compared to the misery next door in Venezuela. It doesn't face as many threats from the Trump administration as Mexico does. Its economy also didn't collapse with oil prices and corruption scandals like Brazil, which suffered through its longest recession. Colombia's once infamously high murder and crime rates have plummeted in the last 15 years. By almost all measures, it has progressed significantly from the dark days of drug lord Pablo Escobar. Santos received the Nobel Peace Prize last year for ending the civil war. Growth is projected to pick up a bit this year, too. The glass is half full, some say. "There will always be challenges," says Marc Hofstetter, an economist at the University of the Andes in Bogota, "but overall the Colombian economy is healthy." Brexit is entering some make-or-break weeks. The contentious issue of the border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland is coming due. Movement on all things Brexit -- be it the internal machinations of British Prime Minister Theresa May's government or direct talks with the European Union -- has been glacial. Agreements arrive incrementally, often accompanied -- to quote Matthew 13:42 -- amid much "wailing and gnashing of teeth" to the point that many of us want to close our ears until the next phase of Brexit is done with. But to do so this week would have meant missing some of Britain's constitutional crockery being banged around by those who should know better. Some hardline Brexiteers on both sides of the House of Commons have been undermining Northern Ireland's Good Friday Agreement (also known as the Belfast Agreement), calling it "unsustainable." The agreement has survived the tumult of 20 years of provincial point scoring. It ended 30 years of bloodletting. But now some appear prepared to see it sacrificed at the altar of a so-called hard Brexit. It smacks of politicking at its most dangerous -- staking peace and stability as the price in a power play to hobble May. The price for giving up on the Good Friday Agreement could be steep: It would likely invoke Ireland's wrath, cause a subsequent EU backlash and draw global opprobrium for bringing down one of the 20th century's most successful peace agreements. It would also put wind in the sails of those who dream of a united Ireland. Northern Ireland's majority may still be some way from that conclusion right now, but the interventions of the hardline Brexiteers are stirring anger south of the border. The escalation is happening for a number of reasons, chief among them the Democratic Unionist Party's inability to evolve. At the DUP's core is a desire to keep Northern Ireland an inseparable part of the United Kingdom. Right now it has the power to do that: Its 10 members of the British Parliament prop up May's government since she lost her majority in last year's general election. Since its inception, the party has remained rooted in a past bound by traditions that it believes makes Northern Ireland British. Yet DUP's politics are antithetical to mainstream mainland thinking. The party is staunchly against same-sex marriage, which is already legal in the rest of the UK following legislation by the Conservative Party under former Prime Minister David Cameron. Yet it now holds May's Conservative government hostage. On December 8, May's Brexit negotiators provisionally agreed to a 15-page, 96-point joint report with their EU counterparts ahead of an EU summit that allowed the UK to move from phase one of the Brexit negotiations -- agreeing to the terms of Brexit -- to phase two, agreeing to the outcome. It was initially applauded by Irish Deputy Prime Minister Simon Coveney: "Deal Confirmed! Ireland supports Brexit negotiations moving to Phase 2 now that we have secured assurances for all on the island of Ireland - fully protecting GFA (Good Friday Agreement), peace process, all-Island economy and ensuring that there can be NO HARD BORDER on the Island of Ireland post Brexit," Coveney said on Twitter. He was referring to points 49 and 50 in the UK-EU's joint report. But within minutes of Dublin's support came rejection in Belfast from the DUP. "Upon receipt of the draft text on Monday, the Democratic Unionist Party indicated to the Prime Minister that we could not support it as a basis for moving forward." Hours later, following talks with the DUP, May sent a letter of commitments to Northern Ireland to address the party's concerns. All of that back and forth made the EU nervous about what May's words actually meant for Brexit -- and more importantly her ability to deliver on them. The EU and UK eventually agreed to move onto the second phase of talks, but few were satisfied that any conclusion over the border had been reached, and many remain skeptical that it can be resolved. Another stumbling block in all of this has been the collapse of power-sharing talks that would see the Northern Ireland Assembly back on its feet, with the DUP and its archrivals Sinn Fein unable to reach any kind of agreement. May went to Belfast last week expecting to seal some kind of deal but left empty-handed, with most people blaming the DUP's refusal to accept a deal that would give the Irish language in Northern Ireland the same legal status Welsh has in Wales and Gaelic does in Scotland. Under normal circumstances, the DUP's hand would not be so strong. But May's members of Parliament know that those 10 DUP votes mean everything in Westminster, where the Conservatives are trying to push through Brexit legislation. It is perhaps for this reason that some hardline Brexiteers have come to the DUP's aid, pilling pressure on Sinn Fein by accusing it of being behind the failure of the power-sharing talks last week. Worse, some have said that the collapse of those talks proves that the Good Friday Agreement has failed. Owen Paterson, a Conservative lawmaker and former secretary of state for Northern Ireland, tweeted an article with the headline, "The collapse of power-sharing in Northern Ireland shows the Good Friday Agreement has outlived its use," while Daniel Hannan, a Conservative member of the European Parliament, wrote in an article that the "Belfast Agreement is often spoken about in quasi-religious terms -- literally, for it is more widely known as the Good Friday Agreement. But its flaws have become clearer over time." David Davis, Britain's secretary of state for exiting the EU, said earlier this week he wasn't aware of the issue when asked about the Good Friday Agreement being "talked down." By the end of the week, tensions over restarting Northern Ireland's power-sharing Assembly remained elevated, with the DUP contesting reports Sinn Fein was negotiating separately with May. "I'll be raising this matter with the secretary of state," DUP leader Arlene Foster said. Unlike the DUP's desire for the status quo, Sinn Fein has always wanted a united Ireland -- which it believes Brexit might hasten. Although the DUP is the biggest party in Northern Ireland, only 44% of people there voted to leave the EU. Sinn Fein has been more adept at marketing its arguments, both north and south of the border. It has ensured that the government in Dublin maintains pressure on May to uphold her commitments to the EU as stated in the 15-page agreement in December and that she keep the UK government's commitments to the Good Friday Agreement that gives Dublin a say in the affairs of the north. These are complex and emotive issues for everyone, but they inevitably will all come out in the wash when the reality of May's preferred vision for Brexit gets closer: the UK leaving the EU Customs Union while maintaining a frictionless border with Ireland. As things stand, these two desires are incompatible. How, for example, can a non-British citizen arriving by boat or plane in Dublin be stopped from entering the mainland UK by driving an hour north to Northern Ireland without some border controls if, as the DUP insists, Northern Ireland remains seamlessly linked to the mainland? The pressure on May is mounting when members of her own party are ready to call Northern Ireland's peace process dead. She came to office under a cloud of rampant Scottish nationalism that was threatening to end a union that has lasted more than 300 years. Direct from meeting the Queen, before even setting foot inside 10 Downing Street, she told the country she would not countenance Britain's breakup. "The full title of my party is the Conservative and Unionist Party, and that word unionist is very important to me. It means we believe in the union -- the precious, precious bond between England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland." Whether she can keep the union together will depend on her ability to pull her hardliners back from the brink of scuttling the Good Friday Agreement, and convincing the DUP that a marginally looser union might be the only one that can survive Brexit. WASHINGTON (AP) - President Donald Trump says he's considering pulling U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers from California because he claims the state is giving his administration "no help" in targeting the violent MS-13 gang. He says the nation's largest state would turn into what he's calling a "crime nest" if he withdrew the federal agents and that California officials would "be begging for us to come back." The president made the comment during a White House meeting with state and local officials on school safety and gun violence. (Copyright 2018 The Associated Press.) This year, Chico State students are facing a massive increase in the cost for higher education. Wednesday we told you about a proposed student fee increase of almost $200. Thursday the organization Students for Quality Education hosted a press conference and panel to provide student response to the planned increase. The organization is a statewide, student-run organization that fights for accessible, affordable and quality higher education. Organization member Jamie Cabrera said that while it may sound like a small increase for some, for others it has a big impact on their wallets. She said, "There is a big population here on campus who will not be able to do that, and that divide is just really disheartening. That's like 50 percent of the students who are gonna be struggling even more, who are already struggling as it is, who are working two jobs, who now have to work more hours who are forgetting about their studies, it's all real it's what we face every single day." Students with the organization from different CSU campuses will be gathering at the state capitol on April 4th to demand Governor Jerry Brown fully fund all of the CSU's. Redding, Calif -- Only a week after a deadly mass shooting at a high school in Parkland Florida, a viral social media threat is now striking fear in high schools all over the nation. Including Reddings own Shasta High School. "I get a call from one of my assistant principals, hey I don't know if you're aware of this. So we're talking and I'm still trying to wake up and it's like oh my God," said Shasta high principal Leo Perez. A user by the name Ray Andres posted Wednesday night , "I will not being telling people what my name is, but I will bring a gun to school tommorow, so be prepared to hear shoots." Following up with a message that read "Yes SHS is the school I want." "If you read one screenshot it presents the story of SHS, and there is no other information to make you believe it's anything other than us," said Perez. Redding police and Shasta High say after investigating, the vague threat that did not mention a city or state, they determined the post originated in Ohio. And Shasta High was safe. But rumor or not, some parents decided not to send their kids to school on thursday. Perez said attendance dropped Thursday by seven percent. So now, Redding Police are trying to ease those fears within the community. "We want to get that relief out to the public so people don't panic, and aren't afraid to send thier children to school," said lieutenant Jeff Wallace. Even though Redding Police say the threat was not aimed at Shasta High, the school did have added security just in case. According to our sister station in Ohio, police arrested a 17-year-old girl in connection to the threat. Shes facing a string of charges including panic. By John Stone The computers, records and data of Antonietta Gatti and Stefano Montanari have been seized by the Italian "Guardia di Finanza". Sanevax comment: BREAKING NEWS: This morning two scientists from Italy lost their computers, records, and data - all confiscated. Dr. Gatti and Dr. Montanari have been studying the potential effects of micro- and nanoparticles used in vaccines on the human body for years. One of them was scheduled to testify in court regarding an alleged vaccine injury. Several conference presentations were also scheduled over the next few months. Now, there is no data to present. Coincidence? Or, suppression of inconvenient scientific findings? The website of vacciniinforma.it reproduces the facebook page of Dr Montanari with the comment "FINANCIAL GUARD VISIT THE LABORATORY OF DRS GATTI AND MONTANARI, MEDICINE IS OBSTRUCTED AS USUAL". No one, of course, challenges the pharmaceutical industry in order to make money but the cozy relationship of the industry to the Italian government is well documented, and this will be a contentious event in the forthcoming Italian national election. A groundbreaking study "New Quality-Control Investigations on Vaccines: Micro and Nanocontamination" by Gatti and Montenari was published in the International Journal of Vaccines and Vaccination early last year: Abstract Vaccines are being under investigation for the possible side effects they can cause. In order to supply new information, an electron-microscopy investigation method was applied to the study of vaccines, aimed at verifying the presence of solid contaminants by means of an Environmental Scanning Electron Microscope equipped with an X-ray microprobe. The results of this new investigation show the presence of micro- and nanosized particulate matter composed of inorganic elements in vaccines samples which is not declared among the components and whose unduly presence is, for the time being, inexplicable. A considerable part of those particulate contaminants have already been verified in other matrices and reported in literature as non biodegradable and non biocompatible. The evidence collected is suggestive of some hypotheses correlated to diseases that are mentioned and briefly discussed. John Stone is UK (and European) editor of Age of Autism. Dutch Parliament Recognizes 1915 Armenian Massacre As Genocide The Dutch parliament has overwhelmingly voted to recognize the World War I massacre of Armenians as genocide, in a vote that will likely stoke further tensions with Turkey. Dutch lawmakers voted 142 to 3 "that parliament in no uncertain terms speak about the Armenian genocide." It also voted to send a cabinet representative to Armenia in April for the commemorations of the killings. Armenia has long sought to gain international genocide recognition for what it estimates to be 1.5 million Armenian deaths in the Ottoman Empire between 1915 and 1917. As the successor state to the Ottoman Empire, Turkey denies that the World War I-era deaths amounted to genocide and has lashed out at countries that have officially recognized the term. Tense Turkish-Dutch relations Relations between the two NATO allies have been tense since March 2017 when Turkish politicians were blocked from campaigning in the Netherlands for a referendum expanding President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's powers. Earlier this month, the Netherlands officially withdrew its ambassador from Turkey and said it would not allow a new Turkish ambassador to take up a position in the The Hague. The move was made in response to Turkey not recognizing the Dutch ambassador as part of the fallout from the dispute over the referendum campaigning. For years, the Dutch government has referred to the "question of the Armenian genocide," a vague wording that left it up to debate. Acting Dutch Foreign Minister sought to downplay the parliament's vote and stick with traditional policy. He said the government would not formally recognize the parliament's decision "We'll pay our respects to the victims and relatives of all massacres of minorities," Kaag said, adding that the government would show "restraint." "The cabinet will therefore not follow the House in this matter," said Kaag. The genocide proposal was put forward by the conservative Christian Union (CU) party, a junior coalition partner in Prime Minister Mark Rutte's four-party coalition government. The Turkish Foreign Ministry "condemned" the Dutch parliament's decision, saying a country that looked on during the Srebrenica massacre of Muslims in Bosnia had no place passing judgments. Dutch UN peacekeepers were on the scene in Srebrenica in 1995. It "noted" that the Dutch government would not abide by the parliament's decision. An 'event,' or a 'genocide' in 1915? Nearly 30 countries have formally recognized the massacres as genocide. Germany passed an Armenian genocide resolution last year. The decision triggered the start of a crisis in relations, including Turkey blocking German parliament members from visiting troops station at a Turkish airbase. When France formally passed a genocide resolution in 2011, Turkey temporarily recalled its ambassador; it did the same thing to Austria in 2016. Turkey refers to the Armenian massacre as the "Events of 1915." Ankara puts the number of Armenian deaths at 500,000 and points out that hundreds of thousands of Muslims died from combat, starvation, cold and disease in eastern Anatolia during the war. The official line is that ethnic Armenians represented a fifth column backed by Russia during World War I, and that the mass deportation and accompanying Armenian deaths were neither premeditated nor intentional -- a key requirement in the legal definition of genocide. Armenians have documented systematic mass murder, organized banditry, raping of women, pillaging of property, forced deportation and other atrocities. Thousands of Armenians, especially women, are believed to have been taken as slaves or brides and forced to convert to Islam. Hundreds of thousands of Assyrian Christians were also killed or uprooted in the dying days of the Ottoman Empire, in what many historians consider to be part of the same policy. IT specialist Kale Logistics Solutions has signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Cargonaut, the Schiphol cargo community service provider, to create a digital airfreight corridor between Holland and India. Mumbai Airport, India and Amsterdam Airport Schiphol, together with their cargo community system partners, Kale Logistics Solutions and Cargonaut, are pioneering a digital air corridor linking the two trading partners. The digital corridor will facilitate flow of information within the stakeholder chain and optimise cargo visibility across the stakeholder network, a statement said. Kale Logistics and Cargonaut expect to together develop a shared interface between their respective air cargo community systems. This interface will be capable of facilitating exchange of cargo status at each location, as well as allowing the interchange of shipment data. At any time, participants of the network will be in full control of their data. As a result, any unnecessary administrative paperwork involved in shipping between the two countries should be kept to an absolute minimum. Kale Logistics chief executive Amar More said: Kale Logistics has always been at the forefront of driving trade facilitation across the logistics and supply chain sector. Collaborating with an accomplished partner like Cargonaut has certainly given us an edge to extend our trade facilitation initiatives across Europe. We are very optimistic that this collaboration will set a benchmark for more such initiatives in the future. Cargonaut chief executive Nanne Onland added: The collaboration between Kale Logistics and Cargonaut fits perfectly in our mutual aim to create a Network of Trusted Networks. Together we can establish a virtual platform for our joined customers in India and the Netherlands. Trade facilitation initiatives like these are the way to the future in which airport communities, together with governments work closely together to improve, speed up and simplify the air cargo business for all involved, he said. ENDS Alabama native Laverne Cox has released her first music single, "Beat for the Gods." The dance tune is available today on iTunes, and has an accompanying video that can be seen in full via Out magazine. Cox, an actress and LGBTQ advocate, announced the song's debut on social media. It's here. My debut single #BeatForTheGods. Check out the first minute of the video here and click on the link for the full video and an interview about my inspiration for the song: https://t.co/TpiOInppbD pic.twitter.com/MA6Cz07CnP Laverne Cox (@Lavernecox) February 23, 2018 In an interview with Hilton Dresden of Out, Cox described "Beat for the Gods" as "a cute song for the kids to vogue to." "It really is an homage to that community, the kids who vogue, the kids who drag, the nightclub scene," Cox said. "Specifically the '90s ... It's really about queer club culture, drag culture, all the colloquialisms that are in it. All that lingo and language that I just love. It's an homage to that." Cox squashed any notion that she's trying to become a pop star, saying the song and video are simply another creative outlet for her. "Acting is my passion. It's always my priority," she said. "But I'm also an artist, and I loved the process of writing a song, recording it, arranging it, and then shooting a video, and producing it, coming up with the concept with the director, hiring a choreographer and dancers ... it's fun to create something in a different way. As an actress I'm always doing other people's projects, but this was me from start to finish. Hopefully I'll be producing more scripted content as an actress and producer. It was fun to be in the driver's seat creatively." Cox, who was born in Mobile, attended high school in Birmingham at the Alabama School of Fine Arts. She made her acting breakthrough on the Netflix series "Orange Is the New Black," playing Sophia Burset, a former firefighter and transgender inmate. Cox earned a 2014 Emmy nomination for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy Series for that role, and has appeared in ABC's "Doubt," Fox's "The Mindy Project," a 2016 TV remake of "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" and more. She's also the first openly transgender person to appear on the cover of Time magazine. Cox returns to television as the host of "Glam Masters," a reality series on Lifetime. The show's format is similar to "Project Runway" and lists Kim Kardashian West as an executive producer. Here's how Lifetime describes the concept: "The eight-episode series puts beauty influencers through themed challenges allowing them to put their best face forward to impress Cox, celebrity makeup artist Mario Dedivanovic, YouTube makeup expert Kandee Johnson and and Marie Claire senior fashion editor Zanna Roberts Rassi." "Glam Masters" debuts on Feb. 28 at 9 p.m. CT. A morning raid in western Jefferson County led to the confiscation of more than two dozen illegal gambling machines. The Jefferson County Sheriff's Office carried out the raid at a building in the 1500 block of Eighth Avenue North in Bessemer, said Chief Deputy Randy Christian. The operation followed complaints to the sheriff's office of an illegal gambling operation. Christian said over the course of a month, detectives developed information that the complaints were valued. They obtain a search warrant, which they carried out Friday. No one was at the building when lawmen arrived. They seized 25 gambling machines, cash and electronics. The investigation is ongoing, and arrests are expected A morning raid in western Jefferson County led to the confiscation of more than two dozen illegal gambling machines. The Jefferson County Sheriff's Office carried out the raid at a building in the 1500 block of Eighth Avenue North in Bessemer, said Chief Deputy Randy Christian. The operation followed complaints to the sheriff's office of an illegal gambling operation. Christian said over the course of a month, detectives developed information that the complaints were valued. They obtain a search warrant, which they carried out Friday. No one was at the building when lawmen arrived. They seized 25 gambling machines, cash and electronics. The investigation is ongoing, and arrests are expected. Authorities have released the name of a man killed when he was caught in crossfire in west Birmingham. The Jefferson County Coroner's Office on Friday identified the victim as Eric Anthony Roney. He was 51. The gunfire erupted at 7:57 p.m. in the 800 block of Fourth Avenue West, according to Birmingham police. Once West Precinct officers arrived on the scene, they found Roney wounded and rushed him to UAB Hospital. Roney was pronounced dead at the hospital at 8:31 p.m. Investigators said it appears there were other people in vehicles shooting at each other while driving in the area. Roney was standing outside his own vehicle near his home when he was struck. No arrests have yet been announced. Roney is Birmingham's 17th homicide victim this year, and the 24th in all of Jefferson County. Mayor Randall Woodfin released a prepared statement about the slaying. "I am saddened to hear about another senseless killing in our city. My condolences go out to Eric Roney's loved ones as our police department continues to investigate his death and find those responsible,'' Woodfin said. "Mr. Roney was getting out of his car when a stray bullet struck and killed him. His death should not have happened." "As I stated last week, I remain committed to working with the Birmingham Police Department, all city departments and the community to help reduce crime, especially violent crime, in Birmingham,'' he said. Acting Police Chief Orlando Wilson offered condolences to Roney's family. "Unfortunately, this is another example of how violence has a grip on the innocent people of this city,'' Wilson said. "As a part of Operation Step Up more officers will be hitting the streets to address issues such as this." Anyone with information on the deadly shooting is asked to call Birmingham homicide detectives at 205-254-1764 or Crime Stoppers at 205-254-7777. An 18-year-old Cullman County student is charged with a felony after authorities say she made an implied threat toward her high school. Sheriff Matt Gentry and Cullman County Schools Superintendent Shane Barnette announced the charge Friday during a joint press conference. Gentry said Emily Nicole Wilson is one of two students at the center at separate threats made Wednesday at two area schools. The incidents are the latest in a wave of similar threats that have hit Alabama and beyond following last week's deadly school shooting in Parkland, Florida. On Wednesday afternoon, lawmen and school officials received word about possible threats toward K-12 schools in Good Hope and Vinemont. In the Good Hope incident, a student posted a message on Facebook and Instagram that read, "Good hope school hum? Let me think about it." In the Vinemont incident, police say Wilson posted in a group text message with the words Vinemont School, a gun emoji and a date. "She is studious, had a math test coming up and was not prepared for the test,'' Gentry said. Investigators and school resource officers quickly mobilized, he said. By Thursday morning, they had concluded the Good Hope investigation and arrested a juvenile student. Because of the student's age, his name is not being released but he is no longer at school. On Thursday afternoon and into the evening, they identified Wilson and arrested her in the Vinemont investigation. She is charged with making a terroristic threat, which is a Class C felony in Alabama. She will not be returning to the school in Vinemont. "This is 2018 and this, these issues, are not a joke anymore,'' Gentry said. "The most valuable resource we have are our children. By their actions, they caused havoc and panic within a community." "At the sheriff's office, we take every situation serious and are going to investigate it fully,'' he said. "Our top priority is protecting our children." The sheriff urged all parents to be aware of their children's social media use. "Know who they're talking to on social media. Look at what apps they're using,'' he said. "It is a tool for sexual predators, a tool for people to elicit money, a tool for people to try to harm our children. We need to be aware." The attorney for a death row inmate who was set to be executed Thursday night is calling the attempt "botched," and a federal judge has cancelled a hearing she had set up to review what happened. Court records entered Friday show a hearing was set for Monday in U.S. Chief District Judge Karon O Bowdre's court. She ordered Doyle Lee Hamm to undergo a full medical examination on Saturday, and those results must be given to the court by Monday morning. The judge also ordered the state to preserve all evidence that could be relevant to the matter, including the clothing Hamm was wearing Thursday night when he was preparing to be executed. But on Friday afternoon Bowdre partially rescinded her order, canceling Monday's hearing and lifting the requirement for the doctor conducting the examination to file a written report by 9 a.m. Monday. Doyle Lee Hamm was set to be executed Thursday at 6 p.m. by lethal injection. He was granted a temporary stay by the U.S. Supreme Court before 6 p.m., but that stay was vacated just after 9 p.m. and the court cleared the way for 61-year-old Hamm to be put to death. At approximately 11:30 p.m., Alabama Department of Corrections Commissioner Jeff Dunn announced they wouldn't be executing Hamm that night, because medical personnel would not be able to prepare him for the procedure by midnight when the death warrant expired. Death warrants expire at midnight, meaning no execution can be started past 11:59 p.m. on the date specified on the warrant. Dunn did not specify what exactly the problem was and what medical personnel had been doing for more than two hours between when the stay was lifted and when medical personnel advised officials on the situation. Bernard Harcourt, Hamm's longtime attorney and a professor of law and political science at Columbia University, said on Twitter Thursday night, "they probably couldn't find a vein and had been poking him for over 2 1/2 hours.... as I had told them since July! Unconscionable. Simply unconscionable." Harcourt had argued to courts that Hamm had cancer and his veins could not support the lethal injection. A federal judge in Birmingham on Tuesday issued an order saying the execution could proceed, provided the state used veins in Hamm's lower extremities and did not attempt to use veins in his arms - a procedure the state had never tried before. The U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that order. During the arguments the Alabama Attorney General's office stated an independent medical examiner's report showed that, contrary to claims made on Hamm's behalf, the veins in his legs were suitable and and presented no obstacle to the execution. Early Friday morning, Harcourt called the execution attempt "botched." He said, "The Alabama attorney general, the Alabama Governor, the Governor's General Counsel, and the Alabama Commissioner of Corrections, should resign. Look at their statements before the attempted execution, and compare that to what happened with the botched attempted executions. They should assume responsibility, or resign." His comment referred to AG Steve Marshall, Gov. Kay Ivey, her counsel, and Commissioner Jeff Dunn. While several organizations and lawyers wrote to Ivey asking her to grant clemency for Hamm, Ivey did not respond to the requests. Marshall issued a video on social media Wednesday, confirming he received the same letters. "Tomorrow I will not request that Doyle Hamm's execution be stopped, but instead I will ask that justice be served," he said in the video. Marshall read a quote from the United Nations letter, asking the state to spare Hamm's life. "That petition attempts to paint a very sympathetic picture of Doyle Hamm," he said. "What I'm most convinced by is not the words of that petition, but instead what it doesn't tell you. Because it doesn't tell you the circumstances of the crime... and it gives you no understanding of the victim and the consequences to the victim's family of this heinous act." Hamm was convicted in the 1987 murder and robbery of Patrick Cunningham, a clerk at Anderson's Motel in Cullman. Cunningham was shot execution style and found dead behind the reception desk of the motel. He was a husband and father of two children. "Doyle Hamm received due process and more," Marshall stated in the video. Updated at 2:35 p.m. Friday Feb. 23, 2018 to indicate cancellation of Monday's hearing A man police are saying was an innocent bystander died Thursday after he was shot in the 800 block of Fourth Avenue West, according to Birmingham police. The shooting happened around 7:45 p.m., said Sgt. Bryan Shelton. Police arrived to find a man in his 50s shot. He was transported to UAB Hospital, where he was pronounced dead, he said. Shelton said it appears there were other people in vehicles shooting at each other while driving near the area where the man was found. He said the man was standing outside his own vehicle when he was struck. He said police do not have a description of the vehicles or the suspect at this time. The victim did not live in the 800 block of Fourth Avenue West, Shelton said. The 800 block of Fourth Avenue West between 9th Street West and Princeton Parkway was blocked off while police were investigating. The scene is just over half a mile from Legion Field. The victim has not been publicly identified. Additional details about the investigation were not immediately available. A Birmingham man is behind bars after police say he attacked a Trussville police officer with a boxcutter. Authorities identified the suspect as Freddie Wright Grant. He is 58. Trussville police responded about 8:40 p.m. Tuesday to Walmart on Trussville Crossings Parkway on a report of a theft in progress, said Sgt. Mike Bruce. An officer came in contact with Grant at the exit doors on the grocery side of the store. The suspect made physical contact with the officer and then attempted to flee on foot, Bruce said. As the officer was trying to arrest him, Grant pulled a boxcutter and tried to stab the officer. A physical struggle ensued until the officer was able to overpower Grant and take him into custody. Bruce said the officer received minor cuts and abrasions during the struggles during the fight, but didn't require medical treatment Grant was found in possession of a controlled substance. He is charged with first-degree robbery, second-degree assault on a police officer, unlawful possession of a controlled substance, resisting arrest and carrying a concealed weapon. He is being held in the Jefferson County Jail with bonds totaling $58,600. Authorities are trying to identify a man after he possibly tried to abduct a child in Tuscaloosa Thursday morning. Tuscaloosa police said they received information that a 9-year-old child was approached by a black male driving a small, white SUV, said Lt. Teena Richardson. The child's mother was the one to notify police. According to Richardson, the suspect demanded the child get into the vehicle so he could take him to school. The young boy ran home, and the suspect followed him. Once there, the boy's mother confronted the suspect. The suspect, police said, "demanded to take the child to school and became enraged and started clapping his hands angrily, saying hhe loved kids and he was going to take him.''' The boy's mother took the photo as the suspect drove away. Anyone who recognizes the suspect shown in the photo is asked to call the Tuscaloosa Police Department at 205-349-2121. No gun was found Friday at Huntsville High School, though school officials acknowledged investigating rumors of a threat. A message was sent to parents on Friday morning informing them of the investigation. School spokesman Keith Ward told AL.com on Friday that no gun was found at the school and the facility was never placed on lockdown. "There's not a lockdown, not a gun," Ward said. "That's all not true." Here is the text of the message sent to Huntsville High parents Friday: "This morning, we are investigating a rumor that a student has made a threat against Huntsville High School. In an abundance of caution, we treat all threats as if they are serious, using all available resources, including our security department and law enforcement, to investigate. Our safety protocols include adding extra security to our campus as well. "We wanted to make you aware of the situation to keep you informed. Whether this is a solely a rumor or actually a threat, the student or students who started this will be punished with the most severe penalty possible. Ensuring the safety of your children is our most important job. It is also important to us that you have the most up-to-date information available, so if we have more information about this incident, any additional updates will be sent out via SchoolCast." Tensions have been running high at school around the country in the aftermath of the Feb. 14 school shooting in Parkland, Fla., that took the lives of 14 students and three employees. There have since been waves of student arrests and suspensions involving firearms on school campuses. "Everything is fine," Ward said. "Just like any of these threats you've heard lately, we've got to go through and check them all out. I've heard every rumor you can imagine." Ward added that school officials did their "due diligence" in determining there was no danger to students or employees at the school. Huntsville High parents posted on Facebook that they checked their child out of school Friday after the rumors spread of a threat. The first time John Lewis traveled to Mississippi in 1961, he was arrested and jailed with other Freedom Riders, black and white, who challenged segregation in a bus station. Lewis, who is African-American, remembers going into a restroom labeled for white men only. A Jackson police officer told him and other young people in the group to leave. They refused. "The next words he said: 'You're under arrest.' And that was my introduction to the state of Mississippi and the city of Jackson," Lewis told The Associated Press on Thursday in a phone interview from Atlanta. After 37 days of being locked up in sweltering local jails and a notorious state prison on the disorderly conduct charge, Lewis was released. He continued working for racial equality in Mississippi and across the South in the 1960s, and as chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, he helped organize the 1963 March on Washington. Georgia voters elected him as a Democrat to the U.S. House in 1986, and he remains in office. Lewis, 78, returns to Mississippi on Friday, one of five people being honored for advancing civil rights. A private group called Friends of Mississippi Civil Rights organized a gala Friday and symposium Saturday to celebrate the new Mississippi Civil Rights Museum. Lewis' jail mug shot hangs in a gallery at the museum with those of other Freedom Riders. He was scheduled to speak at the museum's state-sponsored opening in December but canceled his appearance because Republican Gov. Phil Bryant invited President Donald Trump. Lewis said Thursday that he has never met Trump but, "I felt that I couldn't be there with him after he said some unbelievable things about individuals and about groups -- whether it's members of the African-American community or the Latino community or the Dreamers," younger immigrants who arrived in the country illegally as children and have been protected under President Barack Obama's Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA. "I just couldn't be there with him," Lewis said. The opening of the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum and the adjoining Museum of Mississippi History capped the state's bicentennial observation. The two museums are in downtown Jackson and are separate entities under a single roof. They are a short distance from the bus station where Lewis and the other Freedom Riders were arrested. The general museum skims 15,000 years of history, from the Stone Age to modern times. The civil rights museum concentrates on the intense period of social change from 1945 to 1976. Lewis grew up south of Montgomery, Alabama, and was 15 years old when a black 14-year-old from Chicago, Emmett Till, was lynched while visiting relatives near the small town of Money, Mississippi. A cousin who was with Till said he had whistled at a white woman in a country store. "I kept thinking that if something like this could happen to Emmett Till, it could happen to cousins of mine that were living in Buffalo, New York, or were living in Detroit, Michigan, when they came to Alabama to visit during the summer," Lewis said. One of the other people being honored Friday for civil rights work is Rita Schwerner Bender, who demanded answers from Mississippi officials after her first husband, Michael Schwerner, and two other activists, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman, were killed outside Philadelphia, Mississippi, in 1964 -- a case that became known by its FBI name, "Mississippi Burning." Bender, now an attorney in Seattle, said Wednesday that in accepting the award in Mississippi, she intends to urge people to stand up for justice. "Most social change doesn't happen without a demand side," she said. Bender said she also would emphasize the importance of public education: "How can we be a thriving democracy which provides for the intellectual development of all our people, for the health of our people, for our place as contributors on the world stage, without high quality education?" The other honorees are Ruby Bridges, a Tylertown, Mississippi, native who faced threats and ostracism when she became the first black child to integrate a public school in New Orleans in 1960; former state Rep. Robert Clark, who in 1967 became the first African-American of the 20th Century to win a seat in the Mississippi Legislature; and Democratic U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi. The Alabama Education Association has filed a lawsuit on behalf of three Montgomery Public Schools employees to block the sale of Georgia Washington Middle School to the Pike Road school system. AEA's lawsuit, filed against interim state Superintendent Ed Richardson, Pike Road Mayor Gordon Stone and others, said Richardson acted outside his authority and not in the best interest of Montgomery Public Schools when he announced the sale of Georgia Washington to Pike Road. Pike Road separated from the Montgomery County school system a few years ago. Richardson worked as a consultant to help Pike Road start its own school system and has a conflict of interest, the lawsuit claims. "Dr. Richardson is not looking out for the interest of children in Montgomery County," AEA Associate Executive Director Theron Stokes said at a press conference this afternoon. Richardson issued a statement in response to the lawsuit, saying his only interest is improving the quality of education offered to Montgomery students. "The student achievement in Montgomery's non-magnet schools are some of the lowest in the state," Richardson said. "In more than 50 years of education experience, and having been involved in numerous school interventions all across this state, I have never witnessed this kind of dismal student achievement. "It is wrong, deceptive, and dishonest to sit by and continue to watch young people, who are full of potential, graduate from high school with reading and math scores that are unacceptable and don't even approach Alabama's average - much less other states." Richardson said that if Georgia Washington is not sold, the Montgomery school system would have to lay off about 200 teachers and 75 support workers. The state took control of the Montgomery school system last year under an intervention initiated by former Superintendent Michael Sentance. The intervention was intended to correct academic and financial problems. Sentance resigned under pressure in September and Richardson was named interim superintendent. Two weeks ago, Richardson issued a report on the intervention, announcing the sale of Georgia Washington to Pike Road and the closing of three other schools. The Montgomery County Board of Education had voted to sell Georgia Washington to Pike Road for $11.25 million last year, but later reversed that decision after an impact study, the lawsuit says. The lawsuit says Richardson has no authority to sell the school over the Montgomery County Board of Education's opposition. Another issue in the lawsuit is $1.5 million owed to Montgomery Public Schools that the Alabama Department of Education mistakenly sent to the Pike Road school system. "Dr. Richardson has made absolutely no effort to get that money back," Stokes said. Richardson's intervention report says the Pike Road school system will pay $9.75 million for Georgia Washington, plus the $1.5 million inadvertently sent to Pike Road. Stokes said the issues should not be "commingled." "That was simply a debt owed that should be paid and it has not been paid," Stokes said. In January, 11 of Montgomery's schools were declared "failing" under the Alabama Accountability Act, and 17 schools received F's on the state's report card. Stokes noted, as does the lawsuit, that Georgia Washington and the other three schools planned for closing -- Chisholm Elementary, Dozier Elementary and Floyd Elementary -- are not among the schools labeled "failing." Richardson's intervention report says the closings are because of declining enrollment and the need to increase the school system's fund balance. Stone, Pike Road's mayor, issued a statement in response to the lawsuit. "The Town of Pike Road and its officials have always made and will continue to make decisions that are motivated by the goal of serving all of our citizens, especially the young people," Stone said. "We also remain committed to being good partners with our neighbors." The AEA lawsuit recounts the historic nature of the Georgia Washington campus, which was originally called the People's Village School and was founded in the 1890s by Washington, an African American educator. The school was renamed in Washington's honor after her death. Washington is buried on the campus. This story was corrected on March 12 at 2:32 p.m. to report the correct number of schools designated as "failing" in the Montgomery system. AEA Lawsuit vs Ed Richardson by Mike Cason on Scribd An Alabama legislator wants to change state law so that people younger than 21 could not buy assault-style semiautomatic rifles. Rep. Juandalynn Givan, D-Birmingham, introduced the bill on Tuesday in response to last week's mass shooting that claimed 17 lives at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. Authorities said the 19-year-old former student accused in the shooting legally bought the AR-15-style semiautomatic rifle that he used in the massacre. Federal law sets the minimum age to buy a handgun at 21 but allows 18-year-olds to purchase rifles. "The killer in Florida was able to go out and purchase an assault weapon, 19 years of age," Givan said. "That's ridiculous." States can impose stricter age requirements for gun purchases than the federal law, which Givan's bill proposes to do. Givan's bill defines "assault weapon." The definition includes semiautomatic rifles with detachable magazines and one or more other features, such as a pistol grip and second handgrip. Givan's proposal comes amid of wave of responses by lawmakers and others to the Florida shooting. Rep. Will Ainsworth has proposed a bill to allow schools to designate teachers and administrators who would receive training and carry concealed guns at schools. President Trump has endorsed the idea of trained teachers carrying guns, suggesting they should receive bonuses. Trump has also indicated he would support raising the minimum age to buy certain weapons. Senate President Pro Tem Del Marsh, R-Anniston, said age restrictions on gun purchases should be part of the debate on how to make schools safer. "It's only to me common sense that people have to be deemed mature to do certain things," Marsh said. "We do that on alcohol and cigarettes and other things. Obviously assault weapons should be one of them. So yeah, I can see that it's justified to look at raising ages. And it's worth the discussion for sure." Sen. Trip Pittman, R-Montrose, has proposed allowing school systems to tap a special pot of money for school security purposes. The Advancement and Technology Fund receives a portion of education tax revenues left over after the state reaches its annual spending cap. The fund received $56 million in 2016. Schools can use money from the fund for repairs and deferred maintenance, classroom instructional support, transportation and education technology and equipment. Pittman's bill would add school security to those allowed uses. House Speaker Mac McCutcheon, R-Monrovia, said some school systems need funding to help with security needs such as police officers assigned to schools, secure locks and surveillance cameras. McCutcheon said he was not ready to endorse any legislation, but wants to promote debate and a broad-based approach to improving school safety. The speaker, who is retired from a career in law enforcement, said the proposal to have some teachers carry guns raises questions about liability for schools. "They may go through a firearms course and be able to shoot the center out of the target," McCutcheon said. "But it's much, much more than that. It's the shoot, don't shoot, the mental capacity to being able to make those decisions. Being identified with the law enforcement community that would be responding. The safety of the children. All of these are things that we need to be discussing or debating." Alabama House Minority Leader Anthony Daniels, D-Huntsville, issued a statement opposing the idea of arming teachers. "Allowing loaded guns in all our classrooms will pose greater dangers to our students and to our teachers," Daniels said. "With access to qualified mental health services almost nonexistent in our state, putting guns in our schools is clearly not the answer." Daniels said law enforcement, teachers, mental health caregivers and others need to help determine the best way to improve school safety. "Let's make sure we are doing everything possible to keep guns from falling into the wrong hands and prevent these mass killings from happening in the future," Daniels said. Gov. Kay Ivey said policy-makers need to find ways to improve school safety other than arming teachers. Ivey suggested metal detectors as one possible part of the solution. Ainsworth said educators in his district asked for the legislation and said what it proposes would be comparable to armed, undercover air marshals on commercial flights. His bill has more than 30 co-sponsors. Marsh said discussions about school safety policies must involve those most directly affected. "I think we've just all got to decide to sit down, talk these things through and decide what's best and make sure the educators are in the room to have this discussion before we start dictating what they will or will not do in those classrooms," Marsh said. McCutcheon said he did not expect Ainsworth's bill or Givan's bill to advance next week. Givan said she hopes her bill can at least be discussed in a committee this year to help promote the debate. "And if they don't pass it this year, I'm coming back next year," Givan said. The body of Rev. Billy Graham will lie in honor at the U.S. Capitol next week, making the evangelist and presidential advisor only the fourth private citizen to receive the recognition. House Speaker Paul Ryan announced Graham, who died Wednesday at age 99, will lie in honor at the U.S. Capitol Rotunda from Feb. 28-March 1. So members of the public can pay their respects, the late Rev. Billy Graham will lie in honor in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda from Feb. 28 to March 1. For more information: https://t.co/LMnKWnnnkg Paul Ryan (@SpeakerRyan) February 22, 2018 Only 33 Americans - 11 of whom were presidents - have been honored with similar recognition. "Since Henry Clay in 1852, the U.S. Capitol Rotunda has been used as a place to pay tribute to the nation's most distinguished citizens. Made available for public viewing in the Rotunda, persons who have "lain in state" traditionally have been military officers or elected American officials, including 11 U.S. Presidents," the House historian website noted. In 1998, Congress recognized two Capitol Police officers who died in the line of duty by allowing their caskets to "lie in honor" in the Rotunda. Only one other civilian - Alabama native Rosa Parks, whose refusal to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus was a touchstone of the civil rights movement - received the recognition. Parks body lay in honor after her death in 2005. Before going to Washington, Graham's body will lie in repose in Charlotte, North Carolina at the Graham Family Homeplace at the Billy Graham Library. His funeral service is set for March 2. Individuals who have lain in state or in honor Sen. Henry Clay of Kentucky President Abraham Lincoln Rep. Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania Sen. Charles Sumner of Massachusetts Vice President Henry Wilson President James A. Garfield Sen. John Logan of Illinois President William McKinley Pierre Charles L'Enfant, reinternment of planner of the city of Washington, D.C. Navy Admiral George Dewey Unknown soldier of World War I President Warren G. Harding President William Howard Taft Army Gen. John Joseph Pershing Sen. Robert Taft of Ohio Unknown soldier of World War II Unknown soldier of Korean War President John F. Kennedy Army Gen. Douglas MacArthur President Herbert Hoover President Dwight Eisenhower Sen. Everett McKinley Dirksen of Illinois FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover President Lyndon Baines Johnson Vice President Hubert Humphrey Unknown soldier of the Vietnam War Rep. Claude Pepper of Florida Capitol Police Officer Jacob Chestnut Capitol Police Special Agent John Gibson President Ronald Reagan Civil rights activist Rosa Parks President Gerald Ford Sen. Daniel Inouye of Hawaii A former top adviser to President Donald Trump's campaign is scheduled to plead guilty on Friday in the special counsel's Russia investigation to federal conspiracy and false statements charges. Rick Gates is set to appear this afternoon at the federal courthouse in Washington for a plea agreement hearing. A court filing shows Gates has agreed to plea to charges accusing him of conspiring against the U.S. government related to fraud and unregistered foreign lobbying as well as lying to federal authorities. The plea could indicate he is planning to cooperate with special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation. Gates' scheduled guilty plea comes a day after a federal grand jury in Virginia returned an indictment against him and former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort accusing them of tax evasion and bank fraud. The 32-count indictment was the second round of charges against the two men. Gates and Manafort were initially charged last October with unregistered lobbying and conspiring to launder millions of dollars they earned while working on behalf of a pro-Russian Ukrainian political party. Gates' decision would mark the fifth publicly known guilty plea in the special counsel probe into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin during the 2016 campaign. The plea also comes quickly on the heels of a stunning indictment last week that laid out a broad operation of election meddling by Russia, which began in 2014, and employed fake social media accounts and on-the-ground politicking to promote the campaign of Donald Trump, disparage Hillary Clinton and sow division and discord widely among the U.S. electorate. The charges to which Gates is pleading guilty don't involve any conduct connected to the Trump campaign. Gates initially pleaded not guilty and has been facing up to 12.5 years in jail -- based on a 12-count indictment handed up in October accusing him and Manafort of acting as unregistered foreign agents and conspiring to launder millions of dollars they earned while working on behalf of a pro-Russian Ukrainian political party. His guilty plea will almost certainly reduce the prison sentence he could have faced if convicted at trial of all counts. A sealed charge in the case this week as well as closed-door discussions in recent weeks had brought speculation that a plea deal for Gates or some other development might be near. Gates' lawyers had filed a motion this month indicating that they had reached "irreconcilable differences" with their client. His new lawyer, veteran Washington white-collar attorney Thomas Green, formally took over Thursday. Green did not respond to a request for comment Friday. Green, a high-powered defense attorney, won a plea deal for former House Speaker Dennis Hastert after he was charged with concealing nearly $1 million of $1.7 million in secret payments to hide allegations of sexual abuse. As he was kept on house arrest, Gates frequently pleaded with U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson for leniency to attend sporting events with his four children. If Gates agrees to become a cooperating witness as part of a plea deal, he could give Mueller a closer look into Manafort's years of political consulting work in Ukraine, as well as other events that have sparked the interest of federal investigators. Gates had access at the highest levels of the campaign at the same time that Manafort, Donald Trump Jr. and Jared Kushner met with a team of Russians in Trump Tower in June 2016. He was also in the top ranks of the campaign when then-Sen. Jeff Sessions held a pair of undisclosed meetings with Russian ambassador to the U.S. Sergey Kislyak. For a few months in 2016, Gates was indispensable to Trump, leading the ground effort to help Trump win the Republican nomination and flying from state to state to secure Republican delegates in a scramble that lasted all the way until the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. But his power and influence waned once Trump fired Manafort in August 2016 after The Associated Press disclosed how Gates and Manafort covertly directed a Washington lobbying campaign on behalf of Ukrainian interests. Gates survived his mentor's ouster and worked through the election on Trump's inaugural committee -- but among Trump aides he earned the nickname "the walking dead." Gates also worked briefly with the outside political groups supporting Trump's agenda, America First Policies and America First Action, but was pushed out of that job last year. Gates was working for Tom Barrack, a close friend of Trump's, when he was indicted last October. A Montgomery man was sentenced to 150 years in prison after being convicted earlier this month of three robberies he committed in January 2017, according to the Montgomery County District Attorney's Office. Shaquille Upshaw, 22, was convicted earlier this of attacking and robbing three women on January 2, 2017, District Attorney Daryl Bailey said in a statement. Bailey said Upshaw had a "extensive criminal history." Upshaw was out on probation for violent 2012 robbery when he robbed again in 2017. Upshaw served three years for the 2012 robbery before he was released on probation in October 2015, Bailey said. While in prison he was accused of assaulting a corrections officer, possession of a weapon, possession of drugs, fighting other inmates and cited for disorderly conduct multiple times, officials said. A year and three months after his release on probation, he robbed and attacked three women in January 2017. Bailey said Upshaw approached a woman who had just exited the Walmart on Eastern Boulevard and was loading groceries into her car. He then attacked her and stole her purse. About twenty minutes later, Upshaw approached another woman who was exiting the Super Foods on McGhee Road and threatened her with a broken bottle. He then attacked her while trying to steal her purse. Upshaw attacked a third woman about five minutes later as she was leaving the Walgreens on Carter Hill Road, Bailey said. Upshaw dragged her across the parking lot, took her purse and fired shots at her. Judge Roman Shaul sentenced Upshaw to 50 years in prison for each robbery to run concurrently, leaving a total of 150 years in prison. The 150 year sentence will run consecutive to the remainder of the 2012 sentence. Bailey said he is pleased with the Upshaw's sentence. "Judge Shaul sent a strong and clear message to this community that we are tired of this senseless violence and that there are consequences when you commit these violent crimes. Hopefully Upshaw's reign of terror on our citizens is over and he will die in prison," he said. "Montgomery is a safer place without him." Mobile police department is investigating a series of threats made against local schools Friday morning. The schools targeted include Murphy High School, Baker High School, Davidson High School and Theodore High School. While a threat made against Baker, which only included the initials "BHS," was deemed to originally be about a school in New Mexico, the other threats are thought to be genuine. Because of the widespread issue, security is being increased at all schools in the Mobile County region. "No credible danger has been uncovered at this juncture, said a city of Mobile press release. "In an abundance of caution, the Mobile Police Department has assigned patrol officers to Davidson High School and Theodore High School tomorrow (Friday, Feb. 23), and they will join in all of the other efforts already underway to ensure our students, teachers, and citizens are safe." With numerous threats of harm being investigated in schools all across Alabama since the Feb. 14 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida where 17 students and faculty were killed by a former student, AL.com has rounded up answers to questions being asked about guns and safety on Alabama's K-12 and community college campuses. Parents and families are understandably concerned about whether their children are safe at school and what precautions schools are required to take. Other parents are wondering if they keep their child home from school when a threat has been made against their child's school, will the absence will be excused. The big question: is a gun ever allowed on a public K-12 or community college campus in Alabama? (Spoiler alert: no, not even with a concealed carry permit.) Here's a roundup of questions and answers regarding guns on campus, code red drills, and who makes the decision as to whether absences due to safety threats are excused. Are guns allowed on Alabama's public school K-12 campuses? No, with one exception: Sworn law enforcement officers are allowed to carry a gun onto a public K-12 school campus or into a school building. No teachers or faculty or other staff are ever allowed to have a gun on public K-12 school property. Ever. A 2014 Alabama Attorney General Opinion made that perfectly clear. Further, the opinion directed all boards of education to adopt a policy to that effect. The opinion reads in part: "A board of education that has not previously adopted an express policy prohibiting all persons, other than authorized law enforcement personnel, from bringing or possessing any deadly weapon or dangerous instrument on school property is required to do so." [Scroll down to see full opinion.] Are public K-12 schools required to have "code red" lockdown drills? Yes. Two code red drills are required each school year, with one being held in the first six weeks of the fall semester and a second being held in the first six weeks of the spring semester. (Alabama State Department of Education Compliance Monitoring Manual, p. 72) Will a student's absence be excused when a threat to their K-12 public school is discovered? The answer: maybe. That decision must be made by the local board of education, according to Alabama State Department of Education Communications Director Michael Sibley. "Our position is always whatever is in the best interest of the student," Sibley wrote in a statement to AL.com. "That is regarding any form of safety and/or making sure students are in an environment conducive to learning." The Alabama Attendance Manual lists among reasons for excused absences, "Emergency conditions as determined by the principal." (Alabama Attendance Manual, revised 2015, p. 29). What K-12 superintendents were told last week On Feb. 16, Alabama Interim Superintendent Ed Richardson sent a memo to all superintendents across the state laying out the rules regarding guns in schools. In addition to containing what state law says, Richardson made three additional points: First, students and school employees who violate the policy on guns may be disciplined. Second, anyone other than a student or school employee who brings a gun on campus should be told they are in violation of the school's policy and asked to leave. "If they fail to leave the property on request," the memo states, "they may be subject to arrest for criminal trespass." Third, schools should post notices "at all points of entry onto school property and into school buildings stating, 'FIREARMS PROHIBITED.'" Are guns allowed on Alabama's community college campuses? No, with one exception: Law enforcement officers legally authorized to carry such weapons who are officially enrolled in classes or are acting in the performance of their duties or an instructional program in which firearms are required equipment. (Alabama Community College System Board Policy 511.01: Firearms on Campus, effective 4-13-2016) Alabama Attorney General 2014 Opinion prohibiting guns on public K-12 school campuses by Trisha Powell Crain on Scribd type here Memorandum from Alabama State Superintendent of Education regarding guns in K-12 public schools - Feb. 16,... by Trisha Powell Crain on Scribd A 17-year-old girl was arrested in connection to a school threat that had law enforcement around the country on alert. The Clark County, Ohio Sheriff's Office said the female juvenile was taken into custody Thursday morning. Police said the juvenile, who has not been identified due to her age, admitting to sending out a threatening post under the alias name "Ray Andres." Schools around the country - including several in Alabama - were on alert after a message threatening violence at "SHS" went viral. The post said, "I will not be telling people what my name is, but I will bring a gun to school Tomorrow, so be prepared to hear shoots." A subsequent post read, "Yes SHS is the school I want." The unspecified acronym "SHS" alerted school authorities across the country, including in Sylacauga, Madison County and Scottsboro, all of which are home to an "SHS." Parents in each of the locations were informed of the social media threat Wednesday night with law enforcement saying the threat was not credible. The original post was intended for Springfield High School in Ohio, where the suspect is a junior, law enforcement said. She is being charged with felony inducing panic in juvenile court. Police presence at that school was beefed up this week, law enforcement said. The SHS threat comes a little more than a week after a lone gunman killed 17 people at a high school in Lakeland, Florida and a string of threats against schools across the country. Who's running Fairfield? Mayor Edward May II says he is. Fairfield's City Council says otherwise. Last week, the council launched its latest salvo in an ongoing war with the mayor by appointing a city manager to run the financially strapped city, essentially stripping May of his powers--like the potion used in "Black Panther" to strip the king of his panther-like powers. The council wielded a provision dug from the depths of the Code of Alabama (Article 2 of Title 11, Chapter 43-20) authorizing cities to appoint a city manager to be the "administrative head" of city government with the "power" and "duty" to, among other things, "appoint and employ all necessary [city] employees." Mary Roberson, the former city clerk, began her new duties as city manager on Monday, with a "slight" increase from her $55,000 annual salary, according to an email responding to an email I sent to the address provided on the Eddie Penny President City Council Facebook page. "...the Office of Mayor," the Council shared in a release last week, "will be primarily ceremonial in nature." May, however--to use a vernacular now-popularized by the young survivors of the Valentine's Day massacre of 17 students at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, FL--calls BS. "You can't change the form of government," he says. He contends the provision used by the council was taken out of context, relative to other statutes "and the law" applying to change in government. Indeed, Chapter 40-11 in the same Article reads: "No change from the mayor-council form of municipal government to the commission form of municipal government hereafter directed by vote of the electors of any municipality in this state shall become effective until October 1 of the general municipal election year next following the election at which such change is voted." "This demonstrates the total lack of competence I'm dealing with," he says. Ken Smith, executive director of the Alabama League of Municipalities, would not speak specifically to Fairfield's actions but said, with such a dispute, "it would ultimately be up to a court to determine who's right." "There are statutes that allow a city to hire a city manager," he added. "But I've not seen a court decision stating whether that is something that constitutes a change in the form of government." Smith said most of the municipalities that have moved to a commission form of government go through the due process of changing the form of government first, typically with the mayor and city council agreeing to do so. Then it is ratified with "a vote of the people." Of course, none of the above happened in Fairfield, which, as we all know, has much bigger problems than the ongoing arm (ego)-wrestling going on between branches of government--significant financial problems that may be slipping through the dysfunction at city hall. On Thursday, for instance, the response from Penny's email address said the council was "blindsided" by the news Wednesday that the city had made a past-due payment of $450,118.50 to the Birmingham Jefferson County Transit Authority from 2018 ad valorem taxes collected by the county, and that the BJCTA board unanimously voted to restore service to the city after it receives the remaining $123,967.44 owed. "The first we heard of this was from the article on AL.com and then saw the mayor on WBRC," the email read. After missed payments dating back to 2014, the BJCTA sued Fairfield in 2016 and suspended service to the city. A court order was ultimately issued calling for the payment to be made. The Jefferson County tax collector's office informed the BJCTA in late January that it would be receiving at least a portion of the monies owed. BJCTA executive director Barbara Murdock then informed May that the payment was forthcoming, leading to negotiation that culminated in the board vote to restore service. May says he believed city attorney Lucien Blankenship had informed the council of the payment since it had directed the attorney to reach out to the tax collector's office after $350,000 payment owed to the Jefferson County Health Department was paid from ad valorem 2018 taxes in January "without notification," the email read. "I honestly was not aware that they were not aware," May says. By then, the mayor says, the council had passed a resolution calling for the state attorney general's office to look into his spending, perhaps as they wondered about the delay in the arrival of ad valorem funds. As of this writing, Penny had yet to respond to an email confirming the resolution. "All I know is that the council did not pass a resolution to transfer funds," the email said. "We had been waiting for revenue to make February's huge bond payment and now we know why it has not been received." "If they had not been so busy trying to oust me from office," Mays says, "they probably would have discovered it." On Wednesday, May said it was a "blessing" to know its citizens would soon be able to ride Max Transit once again, "especially for our seniors and students at Miles College." Losing access to those funds, however, "is going to be devastating" to the city, according to the email from Penny's address, adding that ad valorem tax monies were slated to cover bond debt, salaries, utilities and other expenses. "We were expecting that money," May admits. The email said the city is "struggling to pay existing employees," and that a finance administrator was reassigned to at a community center position and, thus, was no longer providing the council with billing information." On December 6, the council voted to defund six positions (May's executive assistant, the municipal magistrate, court clerk, receptionist, parks and recreation administrator and revenue administrator). "We don't have enough staff to run the city," May says. "I'm juggling the best I can, but this is not how the city is supposed to be operated." Penny previously said the "huge" bond payment was $700,000; May, however, says the amount was $351,000 and that the city had the funds to cover the payment but contends the matter was never addressed by the council. "If only the council focused on solutions to our problems," the mayor says. "Since last October, everything has been aimed at usurping my authority. They've done nothing to address concerns of the city itself." The city's pockets were strained long before tensions emerged between May and the council--even before U.S. Steel chilled its last blast furnace in Fairfield in 2015 (costing 1,100 jobs); before the last Wal-Mart greeter locked the doors on its Fairfield store a year later (affecting 264 employees and costing the city 40 percent of its tax revenue); before Burlington shuttered in 2017; and before a tornado on June 22, 2017, destroyed three businesses: Express Oil, KFC and an ABC Store (the city loses tax revenue while they're rebuilding). May says he took actions--trimming payroll and reduce the city's debt--that brought Fairfield into the black for 2016 and 2017. "Those are the only years we've gotten through in the black in many years," May says. "And none of it has anything to do with any actions taken by the council." In January, after the vote to defund the city positions was ratified in court, May posted a notice of the closings at city hall. Yet almost immediate, Penny charged: "The City of Fairfield is not shut down," and declared that the city would "continue to operate with efficiency." This loggerhead is not unique. It replicates generational, in fact, tensions that have been playing out in political arenas across the nation for years and manifested in a wave of young mayors, councilpersons and other elected officials being voted into office since 2016. That strain is particularly acute in the African-American community, where, for generations, power was not ceded by the elders but snatched by precocious upstarts who refused to wait their turn. May will turn 40 in, yes, May of this year and he says much of the ire directed at him has come from the five older council members. "They're old enough to be my parents," he says. "They don't want to accept change. "They want to be five little mayors instead of the council." One of the councilors, May contends, referred to him as a "child" twice during an executive committee session. He admits to responding in a manner of which he's not proud. "I ignored it the first time but the second time, I couldn't and said. 'If I was a child, I'm not your child.'" The mayor says at the last council meeting he was told to be quiet by a council member. Did anyone in Fairfield watch what occurred in Birmingham last fall when the contentious relationship between Mayor William Bell and City Council President Jonathan Austin led to both of their defeats by an electoral wearied by the battles? Despite the biting remarks about his counterparts on the council, May, in a moment of calm, says, he's willing to work with anyone to improve Fairfield. "I'm a nice laid-back dude," he says. "I was a lover, not a fighter. All want to do is save this city." Fairfield's woes are deeper than any of the individuals involved, and its citizens are suffering dearly for it. If their tone and tenor at city hallf does not change soon, it may not matter who's running the city--or what's left of it to run. Roy S. Johnson's column appears in The Birmingham News, the Huntsville Times, the Mobile Register and AL.com. Hit me up at rjohnson@al.com or/and follow me at twitter.com/roysj. Indias second-largest state-run bank, PNB, has been defrauded of $1.8bn, and experts fear it may spread to other banks. New Delhi, India On the morning of February 16, Indias second-largest state-run bank, Punjab National Bank (PNB), quietly announced to stock exchange authorities in Mumbai that it has been defrauded of $1.8bn. But things did not stay quiet. Within minutes, panic had broken out in Indias financial markets. Indices tanked, especially bank share prices, as fears grew that the financial scandal was widespread. The news was widely reported by global media, not surprising, for this was no ordinary fraud: this was the biggest bank fraud of its kind in Asias third-largest economy. It took five days for Arun Jaitley, the finance minister, to break his silence. On February 20, he sought to hold the banks managers and its auditors responsible for the fraud, at the centre of which is Nirav Modi, a high-profile diamond merchant, his uncle Mehul Choksi and their associates. [Nirav Modi shares the same surname as Indias Prime Minister Narendra Modi but is not related to him]. Before the finance minister spoke, the position of the government and ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)on the scandal had, oddly enough, been announced by its top ministers, including Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman. Speaking about PNBs management and auditors at an event in New Delhi, Jaitley said: on the face of it, the answer seems, yes they (the banks managers) were. They were also found lacking in being able to check who amongst them, were the delinquents hereWhat are our auditors doing? Both internal and external auditors really have looked the other way or failed to detect (the fraud). The fraud, which occurred in one branch of PNB in central Mumbai, was apparently a misuse of letters of undertaking (LoUs) and the SWIFT international messaging system between banks, resulting in a subversion of checks and balances that are supposed to be an inherent aspect of standard banking practices. Ledger entries fudged An LoU is a kind of a bank guarantee enabling one bank in India to raise funds from the same bank or another banks foreign branch in the form of short-term credit in order to use it for payments to offshore suppliers or trading entities. SWIFT is an acronym for Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication. It provides a network that enables financial institutions across the world to send and receive information about transactions in a standardised and secure manner. To raise an LoU, the customer (importer) is supposed to pay a sum of margin money to the bank issuing the LoU and, based on that, they are granted a credit limit. But in Nirav Modis case, there was no credit limit, nor did he ever pay any margin money. Once the letter of credit is accepted, the lender or the foreign branch of the Indian bank, in this case, PNB, is supposed to transfer money to the Nostro account of the bank that has issued the LoU. [A Nostro account is one held in another bank in a foreign country in order to hold foreign currency.] What happened in this instance is that PNB and its affiliates extended credit to entities linked with Nirav Modi and Choksi that was far beyond stipulated norms, which is usually 90 days. The evidence in the still-ongoing scandal suggests that there were incomplete or fudged ledger entries and evergreening, a term that means advancing fresh loans to repay old loans, which is usually illegal. There was a complete breakdown of checks and balances in the banking system, Hemindra Hazari, a Mumbai-based independent analyst of Indias banking sector, told Al Jazeera. He pointed out that there is supposed to be a series of audits, first of the concerned bank branch, next by the headquarters of the bank, then by its internal auditors and external auditors and also a concurrent audit involving the countrys central bank and apex monetary authority, the Reserve Bank of India. It appears that all these systems of controls and compliances failed or were deliberately subverted. Its hard to believe that the entire team of managers and auditors were all incompetent in other words, it seems evident that these individuals were complicit in the fraud, Hazari added. Public vs private banks Not surprisingly, the scandal has raised a huge hue-and-cry in political circles in India. Opposition parties have called for the resignation of the finance minister and the setting up of an independent committee of investigators as well as a panel of Parliamentarians cutting across party lines. They have repeatedly mocked Prime Minister Narendra Modi who had promised a corruption-free administration when he assumed power in May 2014. The opposition has criticised Prime Minister Modi, who promised a corruption-free administration when he assumed power in 2014 [Denis Balibouse/Reuters] Government spokespersons, on the other hand, have not just blamed delinquent managers for the fraud but argued that the fraud had begun in 2011 when the opposition Congress party was in power. The scandal has sparked a big debate on the working of Indias banking sector, which was largely nationalised in the early-1970s. Currently, roughly 70 percent of banking assets in the country are in the public sector. Right-wing ideologues argue that the kind of fraud recently witnessed may not have taken place had banks been privately owned and controlled. The counterview is that a number of frauds have occurred in private banks and that the problem is not one of the kinds of ownership, but one of lax systems of compliance that promote corrupt practices. An important problem plaguing Indias banks is the extremely high incidence of loans that have not been repaid, described as non-performing assets or stressed assets. According to official estimates, the total quantum of bad loans in the countrys 38 listed commercial banks had exceeded Indian Rupees 800,000 crore at the end of June 2017 or the equivalent of over $125bn accounting for over a fifth of all loans given by banks. Even as the government has periodically infused taxpayers money to bail out banks, what has been particularly disconcerting is that the bulk of these unpaid loans have been disbursed to large corporate bodies and their promoters. Many economists argue that this has exacerbated inequalities of income and wealth in a country that has already been sharply polarised between the rich and the underprivileged. The PNB fraud has attracted considerable media attention because of the celebrity status of Nirav Modi, who is currently absconding outside India. He has been featured on catalogues of Christies and Sothebys and finds place in the list of the countrys top billionaires compiled by Forbes, which has estimated his net worth at more than $1.7bn. In less than a decade, he had set up fancy retail outlets in different parts of India and the world: New York, London, Hong Kong, Singapore, Mumbai and New Delhi. Celebrities from Hollywood and Bollywood including Kate Winslet, Dakota Johnson and Priyanka Chopra have endorsed or have been featuring wearing Nirav Modis fancy sparkling diamonds and jewellery. Indias law-enforcing agencies have arrested officials of PNB and companies headed by Nirav Modi and Choksi. But the storm over the countrys biggest bank fraud will not subside in a hurry. In a January 19 article about the impacts of climate change in Bangladesh, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof describes a coastal island on the verge of disappearance and farmers forced to marry off their underage daughters as a result of losses linked to sea level rise. This dystopic imaginary of Bangladesh in the time of climate change is well-worn territory. The key points in this ubiquitous narrative include: a land mass disappearing thanks to sea level rise, wretched and desperate inhabitants watching their land and livelihoods wash away, millions of climate refugees flooding out of the small countrys porous borders. There is no question that climate change is happening with impacts being felt in Bangladesh as in the rest of the world. Coastal Bangladesh, like coastal Manhattan, will suffer. The inhabitants of both of these communities will have to grapple with an uncertain ecological future. Yet in narratives like Kristofs, it is Bangladesh that is the climate sh**hole (albeit one that warrants our pity rather than scorn). These dystopic climate narratives share parallels with Donald Trumps already-fabled description of sh**hole countries migrants from which he believes are not desirable. Even in Kristofs more humanitarian guise, his narrative similarly conjures up a country defined by powerlessness, inferiority, dependency, and failure. These sh**hole narratives have real effects. In Bangladesh, the imaginary of an impending (or already existing) climate dystopia has exacerbated the threats faced by coastal communities. It does this by facilitating adaptation interventions that seek to transition people out of rural communities, instead of supporting their continued livelihoods within them. As I document in a recently published study, these interventions depend upon a vision of development in which urbanisation and export-led growth are both desirable and inevitable. The narratives also ignore long histories of foreign intervention in this coastal ecology that have made Bangladesh exponentially more vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. This history helps us to see that climate crisis is not, and has never been, inevitable. The global imaginary of Bangladesh as a dystopic climate 'sh**hole' not only anticipates a future climate crisis, it also produces it. In the 1960s, US and Dutch engineers built a massive system of embankments across Bangladeshs coast that were intended to expand rice production by closing off the entire coastal estuary and protecting farmland from seasonal monsoon flooding. At the time, it was the pinnacle of experimentation in development engineering schemes. Unfortunately, the designs created by foreign engineers were entirely unsuited to Bangladeshs tidal geography. The flawed designs resulted in chronic water-logging and land subsidence: essentially, rapid relative sea level rise. In the 1980s, urban elites in Bangladesh saw an opportunity for using these water-logged coastal lands to cultivate shrimp instead of rice. Responding to growing demand from the US and Europe, and with the support of foreign aid agencies such as USAID and the World Bank, the export industry for frozen shrimp grew quickly. The social and ecological impacts of this expansion have been similarly dramatic. The resulting soil salination has devastated local agricultural production, displacing countless sharecroppers and day labourers who depended on rice farming and subsistence production for their survival. This transition to shrimp cultivation was not inevitable; like the re-engineering of the coastal landscape, it was planned and carried out through outside intervention. Today, many outside development experts believe that agriculture in the region is no longer viable due to climate change. Instead, shrimp aquaculture, which further increases soil salination, thus compounding the experience of climate change for remaining residents, is celebrated as a key strategy in climate change adaptation in coastal Bangladesh. These adaptation strategies reflect the dystopic visions of a climate-changed future in which rural agricultural production in this region is already doomed. They are predicated on the idea that rural livelihoods in this region may not be worth saving. The global imaginary of Bangladesh as a dystopic climate sh**hole not only anticipates a future climate crisis, it also produces it. Despite the varied and extreme challenges faced by the farmers who inhabit this region, some residents have pursued an alternative vision of the future that challenges this bleak imaginary. Members of landless peasant collectives have mobilised to stem the transition to shrimp cultivation and return to farming rice. Their successes challenge the idea that agrarian production in this region is impossible in the time of climate change. Their efforts make plain that the residents of coastal Bangladesh are not helpless, and are as motivated to secure their own futures as communities in much richer waterfront areas like Manhattan. These residents deserve our solidarity, not our sympathy. Indeed, this solidarity is what climate justice demands of us. The views expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeeras editorial stance. By tearing down the walls that separate the causes and consequences of climate change we can force constructive action. Europe is facing its biggest refugee crisis since World War II. What is new this time around is that many of the displaced are being driven from their homes by the destructive effects of climate change. And this is just the beginning. As sea levels rise, swallowing island nations and swamping large parts of Bangladesh, and as droughts trigger food shortages across much of the global South, the refugee crisis will only worsen. And we can expect that Europes right-wing parties will respond by doubling down on their already-potent anti-immigrant rhetoric with a push to seal off the borders. Pundits on the left denounce this as a craven, mean-spirited stance towards those who are suffering the most from our collective climate crisis. And theyre right: opening the borders to climate refugees is a matter of basic justice. We need to devise policies to ensure that all have the right to access safe and habitable parts of the planet we share. But there is something more to be said here. An open border policy may also be the key to stopping climate change itself. Scientists tell us that on our present trajectory we have only a 5 percent chance of keeping global warming below the danger threshold of 2 degrees, as our addiction to endlessly expanding economic growth and consumption is swiftly wiping out the gains were making through technology and renewable energy. As a recent op-ed in the New York Times put it, The climate crisis? Its capitalism, stupid. We need a new economic system one that does not require this mad rush up an exponential curve but our leaders are unwilling to take that step. There is a yawning gap between the threat posed by climate breakdown and how little we are doing to address it. This is a puzzle. Why are we so willing to gamble thus with the fate of human civilization, with 95 percent certainty of catastrophe? Is it that were in denial? Are we just repressing a reality thats too traumatic to confront? Yes, probably. But its also something much simpler: a geography problem. The great irony of global warming is that its causes and consequences are inversely distributed. The rich nations of the global North are responsible for 70 percent of historical CO2 emissions, but they bear only about 18 percent of the total costs. Its the South that takes the hit: according to the Climate Vulnerability Monitor, the global South loses nearly $600bn each year due to drought, floods, landslides, storms and wildfires. As climate change worsens, their losses will reach a staggering $1 trillion per year by 2030. And then theres the human toll. Global warming claims some 400,000 lives each year worldwide many due to extreme weather events but most due to climate change-induced hunger and disease (pdf). Only 2 percent of these deaths occur in the North. The South suffers the rest, and the vast majority of climate mortality occurs in the countries with the lowest carbon emissions in the world. Yes, Britain has its floods, southern Europe its droughts, and the United States its hurricanes. But as devastating as these are for ordinary peoples lives, those governments have so far absorbed the costs and kept chugging along with the status quo more growth, more consumption, more emissions, more capitalism. They are not acting on climate change because they have no real reason to care. The consequences of their industrial over-consumption are harming lands far beyond their borders. Its a textbook case of moral hazard: they are willing to take the risk because someone else bears the cost. Of course, eventually, this will change. They will get serious when their coastal cities flood and their food imports dry up but by then it will be too late. The solution is simple, at least conceptually: open the borders. By tearing down the walls that separate the causes and consequences of climate change we can force a more honest reckoning with reality. Once the victims of climate change have the right to seek refuge in Europe and North America, it will obliterate the moral hazard of global warming. As rich nations finally start to feel the heat, so to speak, you can bet theyll act fast, doing everything in their power to ensure that peoples home regions remain livable. Even if it means pushing for a new, more ecological, economic model. This might seem unrealistic at a time of rising anti-immigrant sentiment. But either we do it now, finding orderly ways to integrate climate refugees and allowing ourselves to be spurred to action by the suffering were forced to confront, or down the road, were going to face a refugee crisis more severe, violent and destabilising than anything we can imagine. We have a choice. The views expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeeras editorial stance. African countries ban secondhand clothes imports African countries are trying to support their domestic textile industries, but pressure from the US and a flood of cheap clothing from China are making it difficult. National Party chiefs decision comes after PM Malcolm Turnbull announced ban on sex between ministers and staffers. Australian Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce has announced his resignation amid a scandal over an extra-marital affair he had with one of his staffers. Joyce, who became deputy prime minister of Australia two years ago, said the resignation would take effect on Monday and that he would also be stepping down from his role as leader of the right-of-centre National Party of Australia. The party is a junior partner in Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbulls government, which is headed by his Liberal Party. I will continue to fight for the people in the weatherboard and iron, for the people on the peripheral and the small regional towns, Joyce wrote on Twitter. I used my experience of these towns and my goal in life will always be to try to make their lives better. The announcement also comes after it was revealed that a sexual harassment complaint had been filed against him to his party. He has denied any wrongdoing. On Monday morning I will step down as the Leader of @The_Nationals and Deputy Prime Minister of Australia. I would like to thank everyone for offering their support to me, especially the people of New England. Barnaby Joyce (@Barnaby_Joyce) February 23, 2018 Turnbull and Joyce have become embroiled in a public spat since reports of the latters affair with staffer Vikki Campion became public. Australias ministerial code requires members of the government to declare relationships with members of staff. In response to the scandal, the prime minister announced a ban on government ministers having sex with their employees and later called Joyces actions a shocking error of judgement. Joyce hit back, calling Turnbull inept and implied that he had not informed him of the decision to resign when asked if had done so by reporters. The outgoing deputy prime minister said he had only given notice of his resignation to Senator Mathias Cormann, who is filling in as acting prime minister while Turnbull is on a visit to the US. Joyces announcement of his resignation is the latest blow to Turnbulls government and comes after a year of political instability brought about by a constitutional crisis surrounding legislators with dual nationality. In October last year, the High Court ruled that dual nationals could not hold elected office, forcing several members of the governing coalition who unknowingly held New Zealander nationality to stand down, including Joyce. Joyce was re-elected in a by-election for his constituency seat after stepping down and renouncing his citizenship of New Zealand. Central African Republic: Half the population needs aid Thousands of people in CAR have had to flee their homes, and now half of the country is in urgent need of aid. Parents express grief and disappointment after the government retracts a statement that some girls were rescued. Families of abducted Nigerian schoolgirls have expressed grief and disappointment after the authorities retracted a statement that some of the missing girls had been rescued by the military. Police said on Wednesday that 111 girls from the government Girls Science and Technical College, a state-run boarding school in Dapchi, in Yobe state, were unaccounted for after an attack suspected to be by the Boko Haram group on Monday night. The Yobe state government issued a statement on Thursday that the girls were rescued but retracted it within 24 hours, saying the information was not credible. Zainab, a 14-year-old schoolgirl, was one of the students abducted along with others; her mother could not bear the news that her daughter was not coming home yet. The mother is in hospital. She fainted on hearing that her daughter wasnt found. The grief is too much for her, Sule Ali, Zainabs father, told Al Jazeera. Witnesses told Al Jazeera that some of the attackers were dressed in military uniforms as they passed through the school gates. Many of the students who were alerted by gunshots, were able to scale the schools perimeter fence and escape. Some of them said they saw dozens of their schoolmates being led into a waiting truck. We heard gunshots. There was chaos everywhere, Hadiza Makinta, an escapee, told Al Jazeera. Four of us sisters started running together. She fell, and I fell down too. But someone picked me up. That was the last time I saw her. She was taken, Makinta said referring to her eldest sister. Residents hope the tragedy wont be as drawn-out as the 2014 Chibok incident where more than 270 girls were kidnapped from their school. More than a third of them are yet to be found. More than 20,000 people have been killed and two million others forced to flee their homes in northeastern Nigeria since Boko Haram launched a campaign in 2009 aimed at forming a breakaway state. Over the years, the armed group has kidnapped thousands of adults and children. Ali still hopes to hear good news about the return of Zainab. At least 38 are dead in two car bomb blasts, claimed by al-Shabab, reported near presidential palace in Somali capital. Twin car bombings and subsequent gunfire has left at least 38 people dead and 20 others wounded in the Somali capital of Mogadishu, medical workers said. A loud explosion reportedly took place on Friday, followed by a second blast and sustained gunfire which broke out near the presidents residence. The second blast took place beside a popular hotel. The Aamin Ambulance service, which confirmed the death toll, transported victims to the hospital. The armed group al-Shabab claimed responsibility for the attack. As far as we know, there has been one blast beside the presidential palace, and another close to a popular hotel, Major Mohamed Ahmed, a police officer, told local media. AAMIN Ambulance transported Victims to Hospital caused car explosion near Fiyad Hotel the more information will notes as soon as possible pic.twitter.com/L4rTgi20Ek Aamin Ambulance (@AaminAmbulance) February 23, 2018 The attack comes a day after the Somali government had issued a terror warning in the capital. The explosions shattered a months-long period of calm in Mogadishu, which is often the target of attacks by al-Shabab. In December, 18 police officers were killed when an al-Shabab fighter blew himself up inside the countrys main police academy in Mogadishu. The capital was also the target of a truck bombing in October that killed 512 people in the deadliest attack in Somalias history. The Somali government blamed that blast on the al-Qaeda linked al-Shabab. Will the appointment of a new Ethiopian prime minister only act to save the ruling party, or usher in deeper reform? Hailemariam Desalegns snap resignation as Ethiopias prime minister in early February set off a dramatic chain of events in a country that has seen mass, anti-government protests for several years. A state of emergency order soon followed the announcement, plunging Ethiopia even further into a state of political uncertainty. As it prepares to replace Hailemariam as the head of the party, the ruling Ethiopian Peoples Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) has been buying time to figure out its next move. In a country where the chairman of the ruling coalition has historically also taken on prime minister duties, questions continue to swirl around who could step in for Hailemariam. But any successor will have a difficult task ahead, and appointing a new prime minister will likely not be enough to satisfy Ethiopians demands for greater political reforms. A change of guard is not what the people want, said Tsedale Lemma, editor-in-chief of the Addis Standard newspaper. Instead, Ethiopians are demanding a fundamental change in the way the country is governed that would allow all interests to be heard and represented, she explained. As a country, this is not going to make so much of a difference. EPRDF is EPRDF, she said. The people of Ethiopia are not requiring a change of guard, they are requiring an overall change of the government a dynamic change, a fundamental change, [to] the way the EPRDF is considered so far. Oromo candidates The decision over who will succeed Hailemariam is vitally important, said Hassen Hussein, a writer and Ethiopia analyst based in the United States. He said it could either [present] a narrow path away from the precipice, or lead [Ethiopia] right into it. Hailemariam, who came to power after the death of his predecessor, Meles Zenawi in 2012, said he will stay on as a caretaker prime minister until a replacement is named. But since the engine of the protest movement has been the marginalisation of the countrys largest ethno-national group, the Oromo, Hussein said that not appointing an Oromo would have a devastating effect. If somebody from another [ethnic] group is installed, I think people will interpret that as, Well, there you go again. It will be deja vu, he told Al Jazeera. Mass anti-government protests have been ongoing in Ethiopias Oromia region, home to the Oromo, since 2015. The Oromo, who make up more than 34 percent of the population, have long complained about political and economic exclusion. One of the protesters central demands has been for greater political representation at the national level. The EPRDF is composed of four political parties, mainly divided along ethnic lines: the Tigrayan Peoples Liberation Front (TPLF), the Amhara National Democratic Movement (ANDM), the Oromo Peoples Democratic Organisation (OPDO) and the Southern Ethiopian Peoples Democratic Movement (SEPDM). The most prominent Oromo names being discussed to become prime minister are Lemma Megersa, president of the Oromia regional government, and his vice president, Abiy Ahmed, a leading figure in the OPDO. On Thursday, the 81-member OPDO central committee named Ahmed as the new chairman of the party, taking over from Megersa, who will now serve as deputy chairman, the Addis Standard newspaper reported. The move has been interpreted to mean that Ahmed will be the partys candidate for prime minister. Terrence Lyons, an associate professor at the School of Conflict Analysis and Resolution at George Mason University in the US, said if someone like Deputy Prime Minister Demeke Mekonnen, who is Amhara, is chosen instead, that could add further fuel to the fire of the Oromo protests. A divided coalition Lyons told Al Jazeera the appointment of the next prime minister is most important, however, for what it will say about what is happening inside the ruling party, which controls all 547 seats in Ethiopias parliament and has been in power since 1991. That year, the EPRDF originally formed as a collection of rebel groups fighting in a decades-long civil war overthrew a government headed by Mengistu Haile Mariam. Meles, the former EPRDF chairman and prime minister, was in charge during a transitional period in the early 1990s, before being formally elected in 1995 as prime minister. Hailemariam was a useful placeholder for the EPRDF after Meless death, Lyons said. He said the political system the EPRDF brought into force was very centralised, very hierarchical [and] decisions were made at the top and communicated down to the grassroots. But paradoxically, the coalition also granted local decision-making power and autonomy to newly formed regional governments, which were once again largely divided along ethnic lines. The regional states controlled courts and universities and radio stations and bureaus of agriculture and water and so forth, and so the political life began to become decentralised, Lyons explained. This kind of contradiction between centralising and decentralising [power] was always there, it was always going to be a problem, and now were seeing it. The process Many of the protesters have also complained in recent years about what they see as the disproportionate power wielded by the Tigrayan party within the coalition. The TPLF has dominated the ruling coalition from the outset Meles previously headed both the TPLF and the EPRDF despite the fact that Tigrayan people constitute only six percent of Ethiopias more than 100 million citizens. Both prime ministers since the party took power in 1991, Hailemariam and Meles, also chaired the coalition. Whoever is chairing the EPRDF has traditionally been the prime minister, Lemma said. This makes reforming the [political system] nearly impossible because party and government are one and the same and this is really what the Ethiopian people are fed up with, this blurred line. The 180-member EPRDF council is expected to meet within the next week to choose a new leader, Hussein said, and that leader would then either be confirmed by parliament as Ethiopias next prime minister, or have to propose someone else. {articleGUID} The EPRDF council is also expected to meet by early March to decide whether to formally accept Hailemariams resignation, Getachew Reda, a member of the bodys executive committee, recently told Bloomberg. Any candidate for prime minister must be a member of Ethiopias parliament. However, Getachew told Bloomberg that a candidate not currently sitting in parliament, like Oromo leader Megersa, could possibly be brought in after winning a special by-election. Hailemariam 2.0 Making the new chair of the Oromo party, Ahmed, the next prime minister would be historic, said Mohammed Ademo, founder and editor of OPride.com, an independent news website on Ethiopia. They could make history here by electing an Oromo for the first time and electing someone with a Muslim background, Ademo told Al Jazeera. It would also showcase Ethiopias religious diversity, insomuch as the country has historically been known as a Christian island in a sea of Muslims, Ademo said. The Oromo protests were preceded by widespread protests among Muslim Ethiopians who make up about 30 percent of the population in 2011 and 2012. They were angered by alleged state interference in their religious affairs. Several prominent Muslim leaders were arrested at the time. Im hopeful that the ruling coalition will make the right choice. Im hopeful that they will see to it that the people have a voice, Ademo said. For her part, the Addis Standards Lemma questioned how any new leader would be able to implement genuine reforms when Ethiopia remains strongly dominated by the security apparatus and business interests. How is [somebody] going to be an independent prime minister? He is going to be Hailemariam 2.0, Lemma said. She added that the government should allow opposition parties to participate in a snap election to establish a transitional government ahead of a scheduled vote in 2020, or launch an inclusive, national dialogue. Both measures would show that the government is willing [to see] a genuine change, she said. Opposition parties have been kept out of the Ethiopian parliament for decades and the government has used anti-terrorism legislation to arrest and detain several prominent opposition leaders. It would give a [sense of] relief to the Ethiopian people, knowing that the people that they want to represent them, are representing them in the government. That kind of transitional government would save this party from collapse and hence the government at the same time, Lemma said. But if the government only changes the person at the top, it will be a matter of when and not if the Ethiopian people revolt again. G5 Sahel military force still needs money Only half of the projected $500m that the G5 Sahel force needs has been raised, and African leaders are pushing the international community for more funding. Sikh commentators and organisations have criticised Gucci for using turbans in a recent runway show, saying the fashion brand has culturally appropriated their religious headpiece. A host of models wore turbans in Guccis show on Wednesday as part of Milan fashion week. By Friday, thousands had shared messages of anger and disappointment that the brand had used the Sikh religious symbol for profit. Many of the worlds 27 million Sikhs both men and women wear the turban. It covers the knot of hair which followers of Sikhism allow to grow naturally out of respect for Gods creation. Most Sikhs live in India. The models who wore the Gucci turban were mostly of European origin. The New York-based Sikh Coalition civil rights group tweeted on Friday: The Sikh turban is a sacred article of faith, @gucci, not a mere fashion accessory. #appropriation. We are available for further education and consultation if you are looking for observant Sikh models. In a tweet shared by 1,500 people, India-based restauranteur Harjinder Singh Kukreja said: Dear @gucci, the Sikh Turban is not a hot new accessory for white models but an article of faith for practising Sikhs. Your models have used Turbans as hats whereas practising Sikhs tie them neatly fold-by-fold. Using fake Sikhs/Turbans is worse than selling fake Gucci products. Several social media users noted that Sikhs are often discriminated. The Sikh turban is a sacred article of faith, @gucci, not a mere fashion accessory. #appropriation We are available for further education and consultation if you are looking for observant Sikh models.https://t.co/jv3E73UOH3 Sikh Coalition (@sikh_coalition) February 23, 2018 Diaspora Sikhs in the West were particularly targeted in the post 9/11 era, when followers of the faith were frequently mistaken for Muslims, and attacked. Tina Daheley, a British broadcaster born to a Sikh family, was among those who shared the story of a racist attack in Britain, which took place on Wednesday. An Indian Sikh man had been waiting at parliament in London to meet Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi, a Labour Party MP, when an attacker attempted to rip off his headpiece and said Muslim go back home. There are more than 400,000 Sikhs in Great Britain. While Gucci sends white models down the catwalk wearing turbans, a Sikh environmentalist has his turban ripped off outside parliament in a hate attack. As someone whose family has been on the receiving end of this sh** for decades, this is utterly depressing, said Daheley. User @kingkang3211 said: Wearing a turban as a Sikh makes me smile, privileged & truly honoured. People across the globe battle issues & get bullied because of it. @gucci used the beautiful turban as a fashion accessory, the question remains why a Sikh man couldnt model for them? We have so many Singhs. @gurpycolors tweeted: Appropriation! Sikh men are profiled and discriminated against every day for wearing a turban, yet when you put in on a white person, its suddenly fashionable and cool?!?! Fashion brands are frequently scrutinised for cultural appropriation. Earlier in February, high-street retailer Zara was mocked online for selling a checkered skirt that had a striking resemblance to a lungi, a loose garment worn by men in South Asia. In 2017, Marc Jacobs featured white models wearing their hair in dreadlocks. Haneen: Exhibition of Syrian childrens longings in war Artists have come together to visualise poetry written by child refugees, giving form to the impact that the war has had on their young lives. Set for March 4, the elections are billed as a test for right-wing populism and increasing anxiety over migration. Why is Italys election important? Italys upcoming election has been billed as a test for Europe amid growing right-wing populism and increasing anxiety over migration. With widespread anger over economic stagnation and far-right parties making gains across the continent, Italians will cast their ballots to choose a new government on March 4. Many of the countrys politicians have focused their ire on refugees and migrants, nearly 120,000 of whom arrived in Italy in 2017. Among the parties railing against immigration are the populist Five Star Movement (M5S), The League (also known as the Northern League), the self-professed fascist party CasaPound and the neo-fascist Forza Nuova. Whats expected? According to recent polls, none of the parties currently command the requisite 40 percent support level needed to create a government, a requirement that was introduced in a new law last year. In such a scenario, the president would have to find a cross-party solution to create a government, a grand coalition would have to be formed, or Italians would head back to the polls if no workable government is agreed upon. Cas Mudde, an associate professor in the School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Georgia, explained that no single election could be a test for the broader populist phenomenon. On top of that, Italy has long been an outlier, with a solid populist tradition going back at least till the early 1990s, Mudde, whose scholarship has focused on populism, told Al Jazeera. It also has very particular economic and political circumstances. Is Berlusconi in bed with the far right? Silvio Berlusconis Forza Italia party has struck a deal with The League, headed by far-right politician Matteo Salvini and a pair of smaller right-wing parties. While Berlusconi is personally barred from running in the elections, owing to a 2013 tax fraud conviction, the bloc led by his party was polling at an average of 36 percent as of last week. Northern League leader Salvini gestures during a television talk show in Rome [Remo Casilli/Reuters] In the past, Berlusconi, a media tycoon, served as prime minister for a combined total of nine years, making him the countrys longest-serving ruler since the end of the Second World War. {articleGUID} Salvini has pledged to deport upwards of half a million refugees and migrants. Earlier this month, a former local candidate for the League in Macerata was suspected of shooting and injuring six African migrants in a drive-by shooting. Although Salvini has railed in the past against the European Union, he has said he will not seek a referendum on Italys membership in the 28-country bloc. Daniele Albertazzi, a senior lecturer in European politics at Birmingham University in the UK, said that the Berlusconi alliance with right-wing parties is part of a very well established relationship. Berlusconi has been prime minister four times, and hes always had the support of the Northern League, he told Al Jazeera. Where does the left stand? Founded to bring together disparate centre-left parties in 2007, the Democratic Party (PD), which currently controls the governing coalition, is polling at around 23 percent. Under the leadership of former Prime Minister Matteo Renzi (2014-2016), the party has lost much of its support in recent months. Paolo Gentiloni, the countrys current prime minister and a PD member, is the most popular individual politician in the polls, with an approval rating of 47 percent, according to a survey in the daily Corriere della Sera. The PD has steadily lost support since it last won more than 40 percent of the vote in 2014. Just two years later, M5S surpassed PD in Rome and Turin in regional elections. Albertazzi explained that the decline in support for PD can be attributed to several factors, among them Renzis failed 2016 constitutional reform referendum that led to his resignation. One of the primary reasons the PD has lost the support of much of its previous base is that it has no clear message, Albertazzi added. No one knows what the PD stands for, but everyone knows what Berlusconi is for. Local media has observed that the partys primary problem appears to be the lack of potential coalition partners, likely rendering it unable to maintain its role in the government. What has become of the comedians anti-establishment party? M5S was polling at an average of 28 percent, making it the most popular individual party ahead of the elections. Founded in 2009 by a comedian, Beppe Grillo, the party has been described as anti-establishment, Eurosceptic and pro-environment. M5S ruled out the potential of creating a coalition before the elections. It was recently revealed that several party members had broken M5S protocol by failing to donate half of their salaries to small business. {articleGUID} Leader Luigi di Maio, who took over in September 2017 after being voted M5S prime minister, has promised to expel bad apples from the party before the nation takes to the ballots. Yet, the scandal appeared to have little impact on M5S in the polls, observers have noted. Although the party has rejected the left-right dichotomy of traditional politics, M5S is a member of the Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy in the European Parliament. That group includes right-wing parties, such as the United Kingdoms UK Independence Party (UKIP) and the ultra-nationalist Sweden Democrats. Explaining that M5S had adopted a combination of positions typically associated with the left and the right, along with a focus on issues like internet access and the environment, Mudde described the party as having an amorphous structure and a leader who stays out of practical politics. This makes it very hard to figure out who speaks for the party, Mudde said. He added: In the past years they have become more and more like a populist radical right party, however, being increasingly anti-immigrant and Eurosceptic. Although M5S has consistently advocated leaving the EU and the euro, the unified European currency used in many member states, its leader recently said that it preferred to stay in the bloc for the time being. Is the far right expected to gain ground? CasaPound was established in 2003 and describes itself as fascist. It has been accused of carrying out violence against political opponents and asylum seekers, charges it consistently denies. Founded in 1997, Forza Nuova also hails the legacy of fascist ruler Benito Mussolini and has been on the front line of anti-migrant organising. Both parties advocate the expulsion of refugees and migrants. While neither CasaPound nor Forza Nuova is likely to land politicians in the government, they have had an increasingly significant impact on the national discourse, particularly regarding migration, according to analysts. {articleGUID} In November, CasaPound grabbed nine percent of the vote in Romes Ostia district, sparking fears among critics and political opponents. More than a growth in numbers, there has been a growth in visibility and efficacy in the way they organise, Guido Caldiron, author of Extreme Right, a book about the far right in Europe, told Al Jazeera. In the 1990s, Forza Nuova tried but never succeeded to create a real party, but it was more of a movement, he explained. Now [the far right] has a stronger link with mainstream politics, he said, arguing that CasaPound and Forza Nuova have influenced the rhetoric of larger parties like the League. Caldiron added: This new wave goes along with the growth of the right in general in Italy They have been legitimised since the Berlusconi era of the 90s. The fact that they call themselves fascists is no longer a scandal. Nader Essam Assaf and his wife accused of killing Joanna Demafelis, who had gone missing in September 2016. One of the two suspects in the murder of a Filipina maid in Kuwait has been arrested and detained in Lebanon, according to the Philippine department of foreign affairs. Nader Essam Assaf, a Lebanese national, was arrested in his home country for the death of Joanna Demafelis, Alan Cayetano, the Philippine foreign affairs secretary, said in a statement on Friday. Cayetano said President Rodrigo Duterte welcomes the news of the arrest and expects Kuwaiti authorities to request the extradition of Assaf to stand trial in Kuwait. Assafs arrest is a critical first step in our quest for justice for Joanna, and we are thankful to our friends in Kuwait and Lebanon for their assistance. A second suspect remains unaccounted for. Demafelis had gone missing in September 2016, and her body was found in a freezer in an abandoned apartment in Kuwait earlier this month. She left for Kuwait in 2014 hoping to earn enough to support her family. The statement said a senior Kuwaiti security official informed the Philippine ambassador to Kuwait of the arrest. Earlier, Mousaed Al Thwaikh, Kuwaits ambassador to the Philippines, assured the Philippine government that his country would do everything it can to find the suspects. Assaf and his wife, Mona, a Syrian national, are accused of torturing and killing 29-year-old Demafelis. Mona remains wanted and is believed to be in Syria. They reportedly left Kuwait following Demafelis death. Interpol later launched a manhunt for the two suspects. Demafelis death prompted Duterte to order a ban on further deployment of Filipino workers to Kuwait, triggering a diplomatic crisis. Duterte had vowed to seek justice for Demafelis and other Filipino workers being abused by their employers abroad. {articleGUID} He also dispatched commercial aeroplanes to Kuwait to bring back to the Philippines all Filipino domestic workers who wanted to return home. In Kuwait, Renato Villa, Philippine ambassador, told Al Jazeera that he received almost 6,000 complaints of abuse towards Filipino workers in 2017 alone. Duterte had condemned what he sees as a pattern of mistreatment of Filipino workers. Kuwaiti officials have criticised the ban, saying Dutertes statements have only served to complicate the situation further. The Philippine government later clarified that workers with documents already in place can still leave for Kuwait. On Thursday, a delegation of Filipino officials travelled to Kuwait to discuss the controversy with their Kuwaiti counterparts. Myanmars government has razed at least 55 villages once populated by Rohingya, destroying with them evidence of crimes against the persecuted minority, according to Human Rights Watch (HRW). Satellite images released by the rights group on Friday show that, between December 2017 and mid-February, areas that were once full of buildings and greenery had been completely cleared. HRW described the actions by Burmese security forces as an ethnic cleansing campaign and called on the UN and Myanmars donors to demand an end to the demolitions. Bulldozing these areas threatens to erase both the memory and the legal claims of the Rohingya who lived there https://t.co/qp1VhCpqnQ pic.twitter.com/hb0o2eBblc Akshaya Kumar (@AkshayaSays) February 23, 2018 A total of 362 villages have been destroyed either completely or partially since Myanmars military began a campaign against the Rohingya in August last year, according to HRW. Brad Adams, HRWs Asia director, said the deliberate destruction of villages to hide evidence of grave crimes was obstruction of justice. The governments clearing of dozens of villages only heightens concerns about Rohingya families being able to return home, he said. Donor governments should ensure they dont provide any direct or indirect support that would hamper justice or assist those responsible for ethnic cleansing in their efforts to pretend the Rohingya do not have the right to return to their villages in northern Rakhine state. Reports about village demolitions have been filtering through from members of the Rohingya community long before satellite images appeared seemingly confirming the accounts. Rohingya activist Ro Nay San Lwin told Al Jazeera that he had heard reports of villages being razed from people on the ground. {articleGUID} I have been hearing about bulldozing the villages since the beginning of January, he said, adding: There were many houses, mosques and Islamic schools which remained intact in Maungdaw but those all were demolished and bulldozed. First Rakhine vigilantes enter the houses and take the things they want Then the authorities demolish and bulldoze. Since August more than 650,000 Rohingya have fled Myanmar to neighbouring Bangladesh where they live in camps on near the border. Those fleeing bring with them accounts of rape, killing, and the destruction of homes by Burmese soldiers and vigilante gangs. The UN has described their plight as textbook genocide, but little action has been taken by the international community to halt the Burmese governments campaign. Bangladesh and Myanmar have agreed on a deal to send Rohingya refugees back. As part of the repatriation deal, Rohingya will be held in holding centres, which Rohingya activists have called concentration camps. Negotiations over draft resolution on Syria delays UN Security Council vote as death toll in Eastern Ghouta escalates. The UN Security Council is expected to meet to vote on a draft resolution seeking a 30-day ceasefire in Syria, as the death toll in the besieged rebel enclave of Eastern Ghouta continues to rise. The meeting, however, has already been delayed multiple times as negotiations continue over the wording of the draft resolution. The vote on the resolution, drafted by Sweden and Kuwait, had originally been scheduled for 11am local time (16:00 GMT) on Friday. Al Jazeeras Diplomatic Editor James Bays, reporting from the UN headquarters in New York, said the ongoing delay was due to a disagreement between Russia and other Security Council members over the latest version of the resolution. There were certainly changes made [to the resolution] on Thursday after the Security Council meeting, he said. They [Security Council members] changed some of the language. Changes made altered the wording from UNSC decisions to demands, shifting the resolution towards a call for something to happen as opposed to deciding it should, our correspondent said. Calls for a ceasefire Sergey Lavrov, Russias foreign minister, said on Friday that Moscow was ready to support a resolution on Syria, but that [the resolution] does not guarantee a ceasefire, Interfax news agency reported. Nikki Haley, the US ambassador to the UN, has urged the Security Council to pass a resolution including a ceasefire plan. Its time to take immediate action in the hopes of saving the lives of the men, women, and children who are under attack by the barbaric Assad regime, she said on Wednesday. More than 400 people have been killed in Eastern Ghouta since Sunday, according to The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), as Syrian government forces backed by Russian warplanes continue their aerial bombardment of the Damascus suburb. Staffan de Mistura, the UN special envoy for Syria, stressed the urgent need for a ceasefire in comments made before Thursdays Security Council meeting. The humanitarian situation in Eastern Ghouta is appalling and, therefore, we need a ceasefire that stops both the horrific heavy bombardment of Eastern Ghouta and the indiscriminate mortar shelling on Damascus, he said. He added the ceasefire needs to be followed by immediate, unhindered humanitarian access and a facilitated evacuation of wounded people out of Eastern Ghouta. Antonio Guterres, the UN secretary-general, has appealed for an immediate suspension of all war activities in Eastern Ghouta. This is a human tragedy that is unfolding in front of our eyes, and I dont think we can let things go on happening in this horrendous way, he said on Wednesday. Eastern Ghouta, the last remaining rebel-held area near Damascus, has been under siege by government forces since 2013. It is home to about 400,000 people. Hundreds of thousands of people have died in fighting during Syrias seven-year civil war, and millions have fled the country. More than 40 South Sudanese officials may be guilty of crimes against humanity, the UN says. More than 40 South Sudanese officials may have committed crimes against humanity, the United Nations has said. A report on Friday by investigators from the UN Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan said the officials including military generals and state governors may be responsible for the rape and murder of civilians and recruitment of child soldiers. The officials were not named in the report. Children have been recruited by all sides in the conflict and forced to kill civilians; in many cases they have watched loved ones raped or killed, the report said. The scale of the hunger and destruction inflicted on the country by its political and military leaders defies description. South Sudan plunged into civil war in 2013, two years after gaining independence from neighbouring Sudan, when conflict broke out between forces loyal to President Salva Kiir and others allied to his former deputy, Riek Machar. Machar and Kiir signed a peace deal in August 2015 and formed a unity government the following April. It broke down three months later, and fighting has continued. The conflict has resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of people and left more than half of the countrys 12 million population in need of humanitarian aid, according to the UN. The report based on interviews with hundreds of witnesses, satellite imagery and nearly 60,000 documents will be used as evidence in future war crimes trials, due to take place under the terms of the 2015 peace deal. Prospect of prosecutions According to the agreement, South Sudans government will create a hybrid court with the Africa Union to try people accused of atrocities. Andrew Clapham, one of the reports commissioners, called for the court to be set up without further delay. Holding those in charge in South Sudan accountable for the intentional suffering they inflict on their own people is crucial to stemming this humanitarian catastrophe, Clapham said. The African Union should immediately move with South Sudan to establish the Hybrid Court. The UN estimates nearly four million people have been displaced by the fighting in South Sudan, around half of whom are seeking refuge in neighbouring countries. Individuals indicted for war crimes cannot hold or stand for office in South Sudan, according to the terms of the peace deal, Yasmin Sooka, chairperson of the UN Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan, said. Ultimately this is the only way to stop the rampant devastation of millions of human lives by South Sudans leaders, she said. Mawien Makol, South Sudans spokesperson for foreign affairs, told Reuters news agency the government would prosecute anyone found guilty of committing crimes. This is a responsible government, she said. Call to increase plutonium storage at New Mexico facility draws criticism from nuclear watchdogs. The US National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) has called for a tenfold increase in the levels of plutonium equivalent material stored at a New Mexico nuclear facility to allow for the resumption of plutonium pit production. The call has alarmed nuclear watchdog groups. If approved, the increased production of plutonium pits the core of nuclear weapons would occur at New Mexicos Los Alamos National Laboratory, a nuclear weapons facility, the NNSA said on Thursday. It would raise levels of plutonium equivalent material stored at Los Alamos from 38.9 to 400 grams. The NNSA made the call in an environmental assessment review, a study on the impact of a particular project that is meant to show compliance with US environmental regulations. The public will now have 30 days to comment on the environmental assessment. Pits, named after the hard centres found in fruits such as peaches or plums, are critical to nuclear weapons, according to the NNSA. They are about the size of a grapefruit. The Department of Energy plans to increase plutonium pit production to 30 pits annually until 2030 when the number will be ramped up to 80. Pit production was stopped in 2011. Cost to the budget and environment Watchdog groups expressed concern over risks to the environment and budgetary requirements needed for the increase. Nuke Watch New Mexico, a group that tracks environmental and budgetary oversight in US nuclear weapon facilities, questioned the need for the increase in a statement provided to Al Jazeera. The US already has some 15,000 pits stored at a facility in Texas, the group said. {articleGUID} Nuclear Watch Director Jay Coghlan said that instead of an increase, there should be a programmatic review of all aspects of expanded plutonium pit production, including the inevitable cost overruns, nuclear safety problems, and contamination. The expanded amount of radioactive materials has already required a $2m upgrades for facilities at Los Alamos, which recently reopened after a three-year closure over safety concerns. The Trump administration, which has taken an aggressive stance towards the use of nuclear weapons, requested an additional $210m for continued plutonium management at Los Alamos, according to the Los Alamos study group. The group also warned that increasing plutonium pit production to 80 cores annually is estimated to cost roughly $8bn more. The pit holds the radioactive materials either uranium, plutonium, or a mixture of both depending on the type of weapon which reach critical mass after the detonation of other explosives, causing a nuclear blast. In 1992, the Rocky Flats Plant, which produced replacement pits for the US nuclear stockpile, closed on the orders of then-President George HW Bush. The closure came after Rockwell International, the company contracted to run the site, was found to have violated work safety and environmental laws. The NNSA recouped its losses in 2007 when New Mexicos Los Alamos National Laboratory became capable of producing the pits following upgrades to the facility. Nuclear tensions The Los Alamos Study Group Director Greg Mello said the Trump administration is using ongoing tensions with Russia to justify spending on the nuclear stockpile. {articleGUID} The two nations were nuclear adversaries during the Cold War when the Soviet Union and the US rushed to produce equivalent levels of warheads in a policy known as mutually assured destruction. In the late 1980s, the US and USSR had between 30,000 and 40,000 nuclear warheads. The two countries signed the international Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) in 1968, which aims to limit the spread of such arms. Following the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, the US and Russia undertook a disarmament campaign. The US currently holds roughly 6,600 nuclear warheads, while Russias stockpile sits at 6,800, according to estimates from the Federation of American Scientists, an anti-proliferation group. The US does not produce new nuclear weapons, but existing warheads undergo extensive and costly life extension upgrades, resulting in a modernised arsenal. Mello said in a statement that the US government should respect the environment and its own budget by employing NPT-compliant disarmament for a change, not assuring mutual destruction forever. Latest US sanctions on North Korea are the heaviest ever, President Donald Trump says. The US has imposed its heaviest ever sanctions against North Korea, President Donald Trump says, as the US seeks to prevent North Korea from further developing its nuclear programme. The measures aimed at disrupting North Korean shipping companies and vessels will heighten pressure on North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, a US treasury department statement, said on Friday. This will significantly hinder the Kim regimes capacity to conduct evasive maritime activities that facilitate illicit coal and fuel transports, and erode its abilities to ship goods through international waters, Steven Mnuchin, treasury secretary, said. The president has made it clear to companies worldwide that if they choose to help fund North Koreas nuclear ambitions, they will not do business with the United States. The new sanctions target almost all shipping currently being used by North Korea, Mnuchin said. The measures prohibit US citizens from dealing with more than 50 vessels and companies, and one person, located in countries including North Korea, China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. Assets held by the firms within the US will also be blocked. Trump described the measures as the heaviest sanctions ever imposed on a country before in an address in Washington on Friday. He cautioned the US will have to go to phase two if the sanctions dont have Washingtons desired effect, adding that may be a very rough thing very unfortunate for the world, Reuters news agency reported. UN sanctions The announcement comes two months after the UN Security Council said it was imposing its toughest sanctions yet on North Korea. The Security Council unanimously voted to ban nearly 90 percent of refined petroleum exports to North Korea, and order North Koreans who work abroad to return to the country within 24 months, on December 22. North Korea announced in November it had successfully conducted a new intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) capable of reaching the US mainland. North Korean leader Kim Jong-uns government conducted several missile tests last year, drawing condemnation from the international community. Tensions on the Korean Peninsula appear to have eased in the last few weeks, however, with South Korea expressing it was cautiously optimistic of making progress with inter-Korean relations in the wake of a visit by North Korean officials during the Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang. Turkey has dismissed the Dutch parliaments vote to recognise the World War I killings of Armenians during the Ottoman Empire as genocide. In comments made to reporters in Ankara on Friday, Turkish EU Affairs Minister Omer Celik said the move was null and void and that Turkey expected Dutch officials to be more careful about the issue. His comments were coupled with a Turkish Foreign Ministry statement that described the 142 to three majority vote as baseless. The Turkish response questioned the right of Dutch officials to define the events as genocide, pointing to the Netherlands alleged role in allowing the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of Bosniak Muslims by Serbian paramilitaries. In June 2017, a Dutch court confirmed a ruling that held the countrys UN peacekeepers partially responsible for the Srebrenica killings. {articleGUID} The baseless decisions of the House of Representatives of a country who was a bystander to the Srebrenica genocide, an undying pain in the middle of Europe, have no place either in history or in justice, the Turkish Foreign Ministry statement said. Thus, they are neither legally binding nor have any validity, it added. Turkey has long opposed international attempts to describe the killings of Armenians more than a century ago as genocide. The countrys officials hold that killings took place on both sides and describe the events as a tragedy for both sides. Deteriorating ties Turkeys Foreign Ministry also summoned the Dutch charge daffaires on Friday, Anadolu news agency reported. The Netherlands formally withdrew its ambassador to Ankara in February, but Turkey had denied entry to the diplomat since March the previous year. Tensions between the two states escalated during campaigning for Turkeys 2017 constitutional referendum, in which a narrow majority gave Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan greater executive powers in a role that had until then been largely ceremonial. Dutch police prevented senior Turkish officials, including Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu, from addressing campaign rallies inside the Netherlands. The country, along with several other EU states is home to large diaspora Turkish communities, the majority of whom hold Turkish nationality and the right to vote in Turkey. Nicholas John Jagodzinski Nicholas John Jagodzinski, 19, was spotted picking up traffic cones by a University Police officer Wednesday night, according to a police report. At about 10:30 p.m., near the intersection of Northwest 19th Street and Northwest First Avenue, Jagodzinski picked up two orange cones belonging to Bobs Barricades behind Pi Kappa Alpha Fraternity and University Lutheran Church, according to the report. After his arrest, Jagodzinski said he took the cones to impress people watching, police said. Jagodzinski is a UF sophomore engineering major, UF spokesperson John Hines wrote in an email. Each cone was worth about $20, according to the report. Jagodzinski faces a charge of petty theft. Jagodzinski was taken to the Alachua County Jail and later released after posting a $500 bail. He could not be reached for comment. *** Juan Nicolas Pacheco Juan Nicolas Pacheco, 20, was arrested after police responded to a call about someone being passed out on a bench Thursday morning. At about 4 a.m. on the Northwest side of Ben Hill Griffin Stadium, Pacheco was found covered in vomit and smelling of alcohol, according to an arrest report. He told police he had been out drinking and gave officers his Florida drivers license, according to the report. While speaking to police, Pacheco took out his wallet and opened it, according to the report. Inside, police saw a Maryland drivers licence in the front clear slot. Enjoy what you're reading? Get content from The Alligator delivered to your inbox Subscribe Now Its fake. Its fake, Pacheco told police, according to the report. After his arrest, he told police he bought the license from ID God, according to the report. Pacheco is a UF junior biomedical engineering major, UF spokesperson John Hines wrote in an email. Pacheco was arrested on a charge of fraud for possession of a forged drivers license. He was later released on his own recognizance. He could not be reached for comment. Contact Robert Lewis at rlewis@alligator.org. Follow him on Twitter at @Lewis__Robert. Posted on: February 23, 2018 12:24 PM A Tennessee university with links to the US-based Episcopal Church is facing a growing backlash over its decision not to rescind an honorary degree to a journalist mired in allegations of sexual harassment. Charlie Rose was sacked as host of the networked CBS This Morning television programme last November after the Washington Post reported allegations from eight women claiming that he had made unwanted sexual advances, involving nudity, groping and lewd calls. For his part, Rose apologised for his inappropriate behaviour and admitted that he had behaved insensitively at times, while disputing the accuracy of some of the allegations. This week, the Board of Regents at Sewanee: The University of the South rejected calls to rescind Rose of the honorary degree which was conferred in Spring 2016, saying that We want to be clear that we have stood, and always will stand, against sexual harassment of women or men. At the same time, we do not believe it is our place to condemn the individual. In fact, we think there is grave danger were we to go down that path. We impose a penalty where appropriate, but we also offer forgiveness. The Board of Regents also asserted condemnation has no place here before elaborating on its ecclesiastical considerations in the matter, saying: Clarification comes in the question Is there a hierarchy of sin? Quickly followed by Are we all not sinners? Therein lies the ecumenical rub, the boards letter said. If we condemn a person then who among us sinners should not also be condemned? Sewanees Episcopal roots date to its founding in 1857 by clergy and lay leaders from dioceses across the south. It continues to be owned and governed by 28 Episcopal dioceses and offers a full range of degrees, in addition to training future church leaders in its seminary. Four Episcopal bishops and three Episcopal priests sit on the 20-member Board of Regents, including Florida Bishop Samuel Howard, who serves as an ex officio board member because of his position as Sewanee chancellor. Responding to the Board of Regents decision, eight professors from the universitys School of Theology a majority of the faculty members have written to challenge the decision. Framing their response within the larger, theologically grounded tradition of pastoral response to sin and forgiveness, they challenge the boards theological justifications. Respectfully, we must insist that there is a hierarchy of sin, long recognised in the tradition, the professors say. In the gospels, Jesus himself makes such distinctions, and he forcefully censures those who place a stumbling block before others that is, create scandal that impedes faith. The professors also cite the disciplinary rubric in the Book of Common Prayer that says clergy should prevent from taking communion those who are living a notoriously evil life and those who have done wrong to their neighbours and are a scandal. Public scandal is, in the tradition, regarded as a reason to send a message, the professors say. One struggles to think of a case of public scandal more obvious than the behaviour of Mr. Rose. When approached by the Episcopal News Service, a Sewanee spokeswoman said that the university had no additional statement to make following the professors letter. Yesterday (Thursday) more than more than 70 students, seminarians and staff staged a protest against the Regents decision. Many laid their gowns on the steps of All Saints Chapel and said they would not wear them again until the honorary degree is revoked. Posted on: February 23, 2018 2:59 PM Christians across the world from many denominations are praying today (Friday) for peace in South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo following an invitation from Pope Francis, supported by Anglican and other Christian leaders. The need for prayer was highlighted by investigators from the UNs Human Rights Council, who said today that they had identified more than 40 senior military officials who may bear individual responsibility for war crimes and crimes against humanity in South Sudan. Meanwhile, the UN Childrens Fund, Unicef, reports that at least 1.3 million people, including more than 800,000 children, have been displaced by inter-ethnic violence and clashes between the regular army, militia and armed groups in . . . in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, making the DRC home to one of the largest displacement crises in the world for children. The UN investigators report on South Sudan details appalling instances of cruelty against civilians who have had their eyes gouged out, their throats slit or been castrated, the Human Rights Council said in a statement. Children have been recruited by all sides in the conflict and forced to kill civilians; in many cases they have watched loved ones raped or killed. Children are also thought to make up a quarter of the sexual violence victims in a conflict where rape has reached grotesque levels. If the fighting continues unabated, only one in thirteen South Sudanese will finish primary education, blighting a whole generation. It is a similar situation in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where hundreds of thousands of children in the region no longer have access to health care and education, while many have suffered atrocities at the hands of combatants, Unicefs country representative Dr Tajudeen Oyewale said. It is simply a brutal situation for children with no end in sight. The agency reports that Children in eastern DRC are also being sexually abused and recruited to fight. Unicef and its partners have identified more than 800 cases of sexual abuse, although the true scale of sexual violence being perpetrated against children is believed to be much larger. The call to set aside today as day of prayer and fasting for the two countries was made by Pope Francis during his Angelus address earlier this month. In doing so, he called on the ecumenical community to join in, saying: I also invite non-Catholic and non-Christian brothers and sisters to participate in this initiative in the ways they consider most appropriate, but all together. Anglican leaders including the Archbishop of Canterbury, the chair of the Anglican Consultative Council, the Secretary General of the Anglican Communion, and the leaders of the Anglican provinces in South Sudan and Congo, have joined leaders from a large number of other denominations in supporting and echoing Pope Francis call. In addition to private prayer and fasting, a number of corporate prayer events have taken place and have been planned for the coming days. Anglican Communion staff in London prayed for the two countries during worship at the chapel in the Anglican Communion Office this morning. Prayers were also said in the chapel of Lambeth Palace, the London office and official residence of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Joining staff there, was Bishop Emmanuel Murye of the South Sudanese Diocese of Kajo-Keji who is visiting London. Afterwards, in a video posted on the official Lambeth Palace Twitter feed, he said: The prayer that world has today for DCR and South Sudan will be of great importance, which if God responds to it and I am sure God is going to respond it will be a great relief. And I think this a first move. I want to appreciate the Pope and I also want to appreciate our archbishops of the Anglican Communion, he said. I am sure God is going to respond. It was a privilege to have +Emmanuel of Kajo-Keji diocese with us for Morning Prayer today. Heres a message from him about the day of prayer for #SouthSudan and #DRCongo: pic.twitter.com/7Lskri3Lbh Lambeth Palace (@lambethpalace) February 23, 2018 Also taking part in the Morning Prayer service at Lambeth Palace was the former Bishop of Kajo-kejo, Anthony Pogo, who now serves as the Archbishop of Canterburys Adviser for Anglican Communion Affairs. He too welcomed the ecumenical calls for prayer. I have seen first-hand the suffering of the ordinary people as a result of the conflict in South Sudan, he told ACNS. This confirms the African saying that when two elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers most. It is important that peace is achieved in South Sudan and DRC to end the suffering of Gods people. The Anglican Primate of Sudan is taking part in prayers at All Saints Cathedral, Khartoum, one of a number of venues where prayer services are being held in Sudan. It is important that people come together to ask the Lord to have mercy on the people and forgive their sins so that peace is realised in the world, Archbishop Ezekiel Kondo said. The Primate and Archbishop of the Anglican Church of Burundi, Martin Nyaboho, has asked bishops in all nine dioceses in the province to organise a dedicated time of prayer on Sunday for their brothers and sisters from the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Sudan who are passing through hard times of crisis. He said that in just one week at the end of January, 7,000 people fled their eastern DRC homes when violence broke out between government forces and armed groups, and arrived in Rumonge, a town in a southern province of Burundi alongside Lake Tanganyika, seeking refuge. In a statement, Archbishop Martin quoted one of them: a man who disembarked from a boat having made the journey across Lake Tanganyika with his wife and five children: We are tired, hungry, but we thank God because we still alive, he said. Many didnt have that chance. The new arrivals are amongst thousands of Congolese refugees who are being housed in the Gasorwe refugee camp in Muyinga, and the Bwagiriza camp in Ruyigi, or in communities in Bujumbura and other cities. Archbishop Martin has appealed to Christians in Burundi to keep showing compassion, love and hospitality to people from the DRC, while preparing to welcome Burundians expected to return to the country from refugee camps in Tanzania. In an interview with Voice of America, the Secretary of the Anglican Communion, Josiah Idowu-Fearon, described the extent of the loss of lives and the suffering in the two countries as an embarrassment to Africa in general and the powers that be in the world in particular. And he urged the leaders of the country to put the needs of their people first. I will appeal to them just as my archbishop has been doing, the Pope himself has been doing and some of the church leaders: please come together. Agree on how to share power [and] get this country moving. In South Sudan, the countrys Catholic Bishops sent a message of thanks to Pope Francis for calling the world to pray. We reiterate our past messages, the killing must stop, they said. It is unacceptable to be negotiating positions and percentages while the killing continues. Posted on: February 23, 2018 4:50 PM The Bishop of Lahore, Irfan Jamil, has stressed the need to proclaim the gospel boldly as the first of five components for Christian life and witness. Bishop Irfan was speaking at conference for Pakistan church leaders being held as a follow-up to the Asia Mission Conference (AMC) held in Yangon, Myanmar, last October. Most of the 29 Pakistan church representatives invited to attend the AMC were denied Visas to enter Myanmar, so AMC organisers held this follow-up conference at the headquarters of the National Council of Churches in Pakistan. Addressing the conference, Bishop Irfan reminded participants of the ned to fulfil the need of servant-hood as a priority in Christian life and witness. We need five components in fulfilling our servant-hood, he said. First, proclaim the gospel boldly; second continue to develop the discipleship which should be our ongoing process in the church life; third have compassion on the people in need with action; fourth, keep your transforming spirit; fifth, remember our stewardship on Gods creation; this works only when we empty ourselves, trusting the power of Holy Spirit who moves us into action. The national consultation drew together 60 representatives from Pakistan churches to discuss the themes that emerged at the AMC gathering. In the opening address, the Revd Azhar Mushtaq of the Church of Pakistan stressed the importance of responding to the urgent call to churches in Pakistan to witness to the truth and light amidst dark realities and to follow Jesus Christ who transforms the world. In a presentation on prophetic witness to the truth and light, Father Emmanuel Assis from the Roman Catholic Church emphasised the necessity of listening while being engaged in prophetic witness. Today we are used to speaking too much, he said. Maybe people are affected by noise pollution. Whatever happens in our surroundings, it is important to listen, and listening leads us to respond to the mission of prophetic witness. Listening is the first process to respond and participate in the prophetic witnessing. The Moderator of the Church of Pakistan, the Bishop of Peshawar, Humphrey Peters, spoke about challenges to prophetic witness of the churches in Pakistan to the truth and light. He shared the real challenges from the day-to-day experiences and stories of struggles from Pakistan, and said that the stark realities of religious intolerance warrant the followers of Jesus Christ to be witnesses in the midst of challenges. Salvation Army Territorial Commander Iver Telfer challenged the participants in his presentation on accompanying the people and communities in Pakistan, and said: the churches in Pakistan have massive resources in the church, and we need to enable the people to achieve their God-given potential. The national consultation participants joined a group of invited guests at a special commemorative diamond jubilee celebration of CCA, which was founded to be the voice of the churches in Asia, the Bishop of Raiwind Azad Marshall, the former Bishop of Iran, said. During the past six decades CCA accompanied the Asian churches in various ways. The churches in Pakistan benefited in various ways through accompaniment of CCA and other Asian churches. (ANSA) - Brussels, February 21 - Jobs must be created rather than moved, European Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager said on the Embraco case Wednesday. As Premier Paolo Gentiloni said no to "fiscal dumping" and Industry Minister Carlo Calenda said scouting for new investors was going ahead, Vestager said the case would become a concern for the European Commission if taxpayers' money was used. Brazilian fridge compressor maker Embraco, a unit of US multinational Whirlpool, is moving 500 jobs to Slovakia where labour costs are lower and Italy has said State aid may be involved. "We're here to make sure the rules are respected and make sure that jobs aren't moved but created," Vestager told a press conference about her meeting with Calenda. "Everyone may have a reason to move, that's not our business, but it becomes a concern for us if taxpayers' money is involved", she said. "Funds should be used to create new jobs and not to move jobs from one country to another," she said. Vestager recalled that in 2014 and 2017 the Commission had "reinforced" the rules on State aid to industry. This was precisely because, she said "(EU) funds must be used to create jobs and not move jobs from one country to another". "Therefore it is an issue close to our hearts, as shown by the fact that we made stiffer rules". Vestager earlier said Embraco's offshoring 500 Italian jobs to Slovakia is a serious issue and the EC will assess it to see if State aid rules have been breached. "The Embraco case is a serious thing and the Commission will assess whether the rules on State aid have been respected, but let's not give judgements before knowing the real facts," Vestager said in Brussels. On Tuesday Vestager had promised Calenda she would be "intransigent" on the case. Italy argues Slovakia's low labour taxes and other incentives may have broken State-aid rules. The Brazilian unit of US multinational Whirlpool, which makes fridge compressors, is shutting its plant near Turin with the loss of almost 500 jobs. Invitalia, the industry ministry's inward investment agency, on Wednesday met an unnamed foreign firm that may be interested in the Italian plant of Embraco, Calenda said. "Scouting is going ahead," said Calenda, adding "I will meet trade unions next week and bring them up to date on developments". Premier Paolo Gentiloni, for his part, said "no to fiscal and social dumping in the EU". He said this was why the government had made the Embraco issue "an exemplary case". Earlier Economy Minister Pier Carlo Padoan said the European Union must be "severe" if Embraco's moving production from Italy to Slovakia involves State aid on the part of the eastern European country. "I have great confidence in the competence and objectivity of Vestager," Padoan said. "If there is State aid (allowing low labour costs), as is possible, I expect the Commission to take severe measures" because State aid "is a serious violation of the internal market", he said. (ANSA) - Rome, February 21 - Invitalia, the industry ministry's inward investment agency, on Wednesday met an unnamed foreign firm that may be interested in the Italian plant of Embraco, the Brazilian unit of US multinational Whirlpool which is shifting production to Slovakia, Industry Minister Carlo Calenda said. "Scouting is going ahead," said Calenda, adding "I will meet trade unions next week and bring them up to date on developments". Embraco is firing its 500 Italian workers at the plant near Turin and offshoring the jobs to the eastern European country. Italy has appealed to European Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager who has vowed to be "intransigent" if Slovakia is found to have used State aid to lure Embraco there. Premier Paolo Gentiloni, for his part, said "no to fiscal and social dumping in the EU". He said this was why the government had made the Embraco issue "an exemplaty case". Earlier Economy Minister Pier Carlo Padoan said the European Union must be "severe" if Embraco's moving production from Italy to Slovakia involves State aid on the part of the eastern European country. "I have great confidence in the competence and objectivity of Vestager," Padoan said. "If there is State aid (allowing low labour costs), as is possible, I expect the Commission to take severe measures" because State aid "is a serious violation of the internal market", he said. Vestager will give a press conference on the case later Wednesday. On Tuesday she promised Industry Minister Carlo Calenda she would be "intransigent". (ANSA) - Amsterdam, February 22 - European Parliament delegation chief Giovanni La Via said after inspecting the temporary Amsterdam home of the European Medicines Agency Thursday that "it's an intense moment, we asked a lot of questions and there weren't very many answers" from Dutch officials. He said "in fact we discovered that the adjustments to the office won't envisage a tender, and they think they'll be able to do it in time". He added "it also emerged that there is no alternative plan. If the work isn't ready in time there is no alternative". Italy has appealed against a November 20 decision to assign the EMA to Amsterdam rather than Milan amid concerns the Dutch city may not be ready to host the agency after it moves from London after Brexit. The temporary office is housed in the Spark Building, while the permanent home has yet to be built. ENI ship blocked off Cyprus leaves for other work Will drill elsewhere says Cypriot minister (ANSAmed) - Istanbul, February 23 - An ENI drilling ship blocked by the Turkish navy off the southern coast of Cyprus for two weeks is leaving to carry out "other activities" for the Italian energy giant, Cypriot Energy Minister Giorgos Lakkotrypis said Friday. The Saipem 12000 ship leased by ENI is now off the Cypriot port of Limassol for refuelling and will shortly leave for other drilling work, he told a local TV station. On Tuesday the Turkish navy extended through March 10 its Navtex notice of military activity off Cyprus in the eastern Mediterranean, which has been blocking passage of the Saipem 12000, Cypriot media said. The block has been preventing the ship from reaching the area planned for exploration through a license granted by the government in Nicosia. Nicosia has denounced the presence of the Turkish Navy in its "exclusive economic zone" as a violation of international law. Turkey, however, does not recognise the exclusive sovereignty of Cyprus and insists on the right of the Turkish-Cypriot community to divide the island's natural resources. In recent days, government sources in Nicosia said the Saipem 12000 wouldn't be able to remain waiting in the area if the Turkish naval block were to be extended, because it is committed to other activities planned off the coast of Morocco in the month of March. Based on estimates by industry professionals, costs to rent the drilling ship can reach a half-million euros per day. Syria: 2,000 civilians killed in Ghouta in 3 months '5,000 others injured, war of extermination' (ANSAmed) - ISTANBUL, FEBRUARY 23 - Over the past 3 months, over 2,000 civilians have been killed and almost 5,000 others injured in opposition-held Eastern Ghouta, east of Damascus. There are an estimated 400,000 civilians in the area, which has been under siege by the regime and allied forces since 2013. The figures were given on Friday at an Istanbul press conference by Salwa Aksoy, vice president of the Syrian National Coalition (SNC), in exile in Turkey. ''What is happening in Ghouta is a war of extermination and a crime against humanity,'' Aksoy said. The SNC added that, over the past three months, some 32 medical facilities had been destroyed by airstrikes by the regime and its allies, including Russia. The representative of the opposition to Syrian president Bashar Al-Assad said that, on the basis of UN regulations, Moscow should not be able to vote on the UN Security Council resolution on Ghouta under debate in New York since the country is directly involved in the conflict. (ANSAmed). 5 Italians fighting with YPG, says returned volunteer Kurds fought against ISIS, now under attack from Turkey (ANSAmed) - Rome, February 23 - Five Italian nationals are currently fighting in Syria in the Syrian Kurdish Popular protection units (YPG) in its battle against ISIS, a returned Italian "internationalist volunteer" has told ANSA. Three fighters are at the front in Afrin, one in Deir Ez Zor and the fifth, a woman, in Rojava, according to 30-year-old 'Gabar Carlo' from Puglia. He returned to Italy in mid-January after spending approximately 6 months in Syria and taking part in the liberation of Raqqa on the night of October 13-14. In all 250 international volunteers have fought on the various fronts since the start of the revolution in Rojava, according to Gabar. "However, now much fewer are left and it is difficult to quantify exactly how many there are," he added. "for a month now civilians and Kurdish rebels have been under attack from Turkey and its Islamist rebel allies," Gabar told ANSA. "The Turkish government is trying to eliminate those who founght against Daesh and for an egalitarian and anti-sexist society, with its army, the second largest military force in NATO, our ally." (ANSAmed). BEIRUT - Government air strikes continued to hammer Ghouta, east of Damascus, on Friday morning. The area is controlled by armed rebel groups and approximately 400,000 civilians have been living there under siege for five years. Six days of aerial bombardments and artillery attacks have left 417 civilians dead, of whom 96 minors and 61 women, and a further 2,116 people injured, the national observatory for human rights in Syria (Ondus) has said. Many of the wounded are in critical condition and risk death due to the impossibility of accessing medical treatment. Friday's strikes mostly targeted the areas of Ghouta closest to the capital: Arbin, Kfar Batna and Hammuriya. ISTANBUL - Over the past 3 months, over 2,000 civilians have been killed and almost 5,000 others injured in opposition-held Eastern Ghouta, east of Damascus. There are an estimated 400,000 civilians in the area, which has been under siege by the regime and allied forces since 2013. The figures were given on Friday at an Istanbul press conference by Salwa Aksoy, vice president of the Syrian National Coalition (SNC), in exile in Turkey. ''What is happening in Ghouta is a war of extermination and a crime against humanity,'' Aksoy said. The SNC added that, over the past three months, some 32 medical facilities had been destroyed by airstrikes by the regime and its allies, including Russia. The representative of the opposition to Syrian president Bashar Al-Assad said that, on the basis of UN regulations, Moscow should not be able to vote on the UN Security Council resolution on Ghouta under debate in New York since the country is directly involved in the conflict. (ANSAmed). Turkey has failed to avoid civilian casualties in Afrin, HRW 26 dead in 3 raids end January (ANSAmed) - ISTANBUL, FEBRUARY 23 - Turkey appears to have failed to take necessary precautions to avoid civilian casualties in three attacks in northwest Syria in late January 2018, Human Rights Watch said on Friday. The attacks centring on the Syrian Kurdish enclave of Afrin killed 26 civilians, including 17 children, the human rights watchdog said. The NGO then called on Turkey to investigate the strikes and make the findings publicly available. On Thursday the co-leader of the Turkish pro-Kurdish party HDP, Pervin Buldan, told ANSA that over 100 civilians have died since the start of the offensive on January 20. Instead, Ankara claims no civilians have been killed. (ANSAmed) US embassy to move to Jerusalem from May 14 - media Israel thanks Trump, Palestinians decry move (ANSAmed) - TEL AVIV, FEBRUARY 23 - The current headquarters of the US consulate in Jerusalem in the Arnona area will from May 14 serve as the US embassy in Israel. Israel celebrates May 14 as Independence Day. Israeli media quoted political sources as saying that Ambassador David Friedman would be moving that day from the Tel Aviv offices along with a small group of officials to Jerusalem. The sources said that initially only consular services would be provided. Minister of Transportation and the Minister of Intelligence Yisrael Katz thanked US president Donald Trump on Twitter. The spokesman for Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas, Nabil Abu Rudeinah, criticized the move, saying it harm peace efforts in the region. Hamas called it a ''declaration of war against the Arab and Muslim nation, according to media reports. (ANSAmed). ISTANBUL - Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Friday said the United States is operating a "lie machine" in relation to its continued support to the Kurdish self-defense units (YPG) in Afrin. "We are tired of reproaching their attempts to legitimize PKK terrorists," Erdogan said. "Whenever we say this they admit that we are right. They are a lie machine. Turkey is against these tactics," Erdogan said. The Turkish leader also returned to the subject of the offensive in northern Syria, now in its second month. "The operation will continue with a new strategy once the centre of Afrin has been surrounded as quickly as possible and the terrorists cut off from contact with the outside," Erdogan said. So far, Ankara has taken 415 sqkm of land and 'neutralised' (killed, injured or captured) 1,873 Kurdish 'terrorists' from YPG/PKK and ISIS, he added. It is not possible to verify the figures independently. Garmin has launched the GFCTM 600H flight control system for helicopter owners and operators a breakthrough in cost-effective technology that reduces pilot workload and improves mission effectiveness. This attitude-based (AHRS-derived) flight control system has a number of helicopter- tailored safety features, including stability augmentation system (SAS), Garmin Helicopter Electronic Stability and Protection (H-ESPTM), dedicated return-to-level (LVL) mode, hover assist, as well as overspeed and low speed protection. The GFC 600H can operate as a full-featured standalone flight control system, but also offers integration with compatible flight displays, including the Garmin G500H and G500H TXi flight displays, instruments and navigation sources. Garmin designed the GFC 600H to significantly reduce inflight workload, fatigue and stress levels for helicopter pilots who are often faced with complicated missions in adverse weather conditions or degraded visual environments, said Carl Wolf, Garmin vice president of aviation sales and marketing. The GFC 600H combines our industry-leading flight control capabilities with our helicopter experience and aviation safety technology expertise to deliver a system that ultimately allows pilots to focus more attention on accomplishing the multitude of missions they face while trusting their helicopter flight to us. With its advanced AHRS technology and redundant, cross-checking sensors, the GFC 600H was designed for smooth handling. The GFC 600H includes SAS that provides inputs to help stabilise the helicopter while hand-flying. The corrections provided by SAS serve to improve the helicopters basic handling characteristics by maintaining a commanded attitude. Designed with the pilot in mind, its cyclic-mounted trim controls allows for seamless interactions without taking a hand off of the helicopter flight controls during basic operations, including system initialization of the SAS in attitude mode, adjustments of the pitch and roll trim, and much more. While flying with SAS, pilots can easily fly through the flight control inputs for smooth maneuvers beyond the preset trim condition. Thanks to the hover assist mode, the system will also automatically detect a hover condition and provide flight control inputs to help maintain position over the ground. When equipped with the optional yaw axis control, the GFC 600H will also hold heading in hover. As a standard feature, Garmin H-ESP helps the pilot remain within a safe envelope when hand-flying the helicopter. Should the pilot exceed pre-determined pitch, roll or airspeed limitations, H-ESP provides a corrective force on the flight controls proportionate to the exceedance. H-ESP works in all modes even when the pilot is hand-flying the aircraft with the system not engaged and can be manually disabled to allow for maneuvering flight as needed. In potentially disorienting situations, the GFC 600H features a dedicated LVL mode that can be engaged by the pilot to automatically initiate recovery from unusual attitudes and return the aircraft to straight-and-level flight, helping to avoid a potential loss-of-control scenario. The flight director can be displayed on an optional G500H or G500H TXi flight display to help guide the pilots hand-flown inputs toward the desired flight path, including heading, altitude, vertical speed, and airspeed modes. For enroute and approach navigation, the system uses guidance from a compatible Garmin navigator, such as the GTNTM 750/650 series, to automatically fly approaches and search and rescue patterns. Additional vertical and lateral modes include altitude hold, altitude select, vertical speed, indicated airspeed and heading select. The GFC 600H features a stack-width mode controller with push-button controls and a night vision goggle (NVG) compatible display. Its robust architecture allows for both 2-axis and 3-axis configurations to provide the features and handling characteristics needed for a helicopter. Integrated smart servos provide pitch and roll inputs as commanded by the system, and the available third servo and collective sensor provide yaw axis control capability and smooth flight control adjustments when the pilot moves the collective. Digitally controlled, high-torque servos allow for faster, crisper, more powerful response, which enables the GFC 600H to perform with smooth efficiency and advanced capability. Pegasus Airlines has released a statement saying it is looking forward to expanding after weathering Turkeys tough times for Turkey's aviation sector in recent years. The airline said: By the time the Turkish government had suppressed the military coup of July 2016, it was clear that tough times lay ahead for the countrys aviation sector. A series of high-profile terror attacks including one devastating assault on Istanbuls Ataturk International Airport had already shattered Turkeys appeal as a tourism hotspot and intercontinental aviation hub. Political unrest only looked set to damage its reputation further. With flag-carrier Turkish Airlines and low-cost rival Pegasus Airlines both posting operating losses for the year their first in recent memory concerns grew that Turkeys era of double-digit passenger growth was grinding to a halt. The subsequent election of US president Donald Trump and the imposition of his laptop ban on Turkish and Middle Eastern carriers made 2017 appear no less ominous. Yet, despite battling headwinds on multiple fronts, the two network carriers rebooted their growth plans after bouncing back into profit. Amid a vastly improved security climate and a better-than-expected recovery in outbound demand, Turkeys aviation sector now looks stronger than ever. Emre Pekesen, sales and network planning director at Pegasus said: Its true 2016 was a very catastrophic year for every airline in Turkey. The coup attempt and the other security issues affected inbound traffic a lot. But all those issues seem to be solved right now, and for 2017, I can say, it has definitely recovered. The company will also be recruiting about 5,000 people in the years to come. Company has adopted 700 villages in Uttar Pradesh where it is providing medical facility, power, agricultural tools and technology to the villagers Lucknow: IT major HCL Technologies on Friday said it will invest about Rs 160 crore as part of its corporate social responsibility activity in the field of education, health and power. The company will also be recruiting about 5,000 people in the years to come, Sanjay Gupta, Executive Vice President HCL Technologies, said, adding in the next 12 months, the IT major will be creating 2,000 jobs. "We will spend an amount of Rs 160 crore as part of our CSR activity, we are also helping the villagers with cleanliness," he said on the sidelines of UP Investors Summit. The company has adopted 700 villages in Uttar Pradesh where it is providing medical facility, power, agricultural tools and technology to the villagers, he said. At the summit, he described UP as "karmabhoomi" (the land where one works) for HCL Technologies. "HCL began in UP from Noida from a small garage with four people with our chairman Shiv Nadar. At a company which started in 1976 with 4 people... 1.2 lakh people work now and it is a 7.5 billion dollar company....it all started in UP," Gupta said. He further said that working and expanding business in UP is not a challenge today. "This was 3 years back it was a myth. When we decided to set up an IT campus in Lucknow, questions were raised. In 2016, we started operations to develop talent in Lucknow and trained and skilling freshers. We have given about 2,000 technical and non-technical jobs. In next 12 months, we will recruit another 2,000 local talent," he said. Expansion of companies and businesses to tier 2 and 3 cities is very important to retain the talent and stop migration. The investors summit shows positive signs for the industry particularly the IT. UP meets all requirements to do business such as single window clearance, infra and connectivity. 2.0 was going to hit the screens on 27th April, but Rajinikanths Kaala Karikaalan release is announced then. Mumbai: Director Shankar, who is helming two major films, 2.0 and Indian 2, has announced that Indian 2 starring Kamal Haasan will go on floors soon, but nobody is sure when Rajinikanth and Akshay Kumar starrer 2.0 will release. While reports stated that 2.0 might be an Independence Day or Diwali release, Bollywood Life is pretty confident that the movie is a Diwali release. But how can a movie release without any drama this year? So the portal goes on to report that Aamir Khan has booked the date for his Thugs Of Hindostan, and Lyca Productions obviously wants to avoid the clash because they reportedly feel the movies wont be able to show their potential on the screen if there is a clash. A source told the portal, The makers want to release 2.0 during Diwali, so they tried to discuss things with Aamir Khan as his movie Thugs of Hindostan is scheduled to release on the same day. However, Aamir said a resounding no when they first approached him. The actor feels Diwali is the perfect time to release Thugs and hence, he is holding on to the date. But the source further clarified that Rajini intervened, saying, After Rajinikanth made a call, the talks have resumed and both Lyca and Aamir along with Yash Raj Films are figuring if something can be done. Adil Hussain, who is also part of the film, is completely clueless about the release date. In a twitter chat, when asked about 2.0s release date, the actor mentioned, No idea.. Also it is a Faulty Statement to say my Movie. It's @superstarrajini 's movie. I am a part of it. We are all Dwarf in front of him. Heres his tweet: No idea.. Also it is a Faulty Statement to say my Movie. It's @superstarrajini 's movie. I am a part of it. We are all Dwarf in front of him. https://t.co/OgoHyRX1MN Adil hussain (@_AdilHussain) February 21, 2018 2.0 was earlier reported to release on 27th April, but Rajinikanths movie Kaala Karikaalans release has been announced on the same day. Emraan Hashmi had announced Captain Nawab long back, but not much development happened on the film. Mumbai: Emraan Hashmi had announced Captain Nawab long back, but not much development happened on the film, and now it looks like theres some justification as to why the movie might be on hold. A source told DNA, Emraan had booked his dates for the spy thriller and even begun shooting for it. But now, the shoot has been temporarily stalled. Thats why his other films have been announced in quick succession. When asked about the reason, the source reveals, Director Tony DSouza and the entire team is awaiting a clearance from the Indian military to resume the shoot. In the movie, Emraan plays a double agent who represents India and Pakistan and lands in trouble when both countries find out about his betrayal. Given that he plays a man in uniform and it highlights the sensitive Indo-Pakistan relationship, the armed forces are wary of how it will be shot. They have raised a few questions and unless a clearance is received, work on the film cannot resume. Confirming the news, Tony said, Yes, we have sent the script to the Ministry of Defence. We are awaiting their clearance to proceed with the shoot. Further clarifying, he added, Anyone who makes a film on the army doesnt do it with an intention to hurt anyones sentiment. We have a lot of respect for the Indian Armed Forces. We had finished our first schedule, but we will shoot portions of the film featuring the Indian Army now. So, we needed the Ministry to give us a No Objection Certificate. It should come either by the end of this month or in the first week of March. Then, we would be good to go, Tony concluded. Varun Dhawan is shooting for Sui Dhaaga: Made In India with Anushka Sharma and promoting 'October'. Mumbai: Varun Dhawan is shooting for Sui Dhaaga: Made In India with Anushka Sharma. The actress is currently in the news for venturing into horror with Pari, and it looks like she has managed to even scare her co-star. Varun shared the latest poster of Anushka as Pari and he definitely appears scared of her. Sharing the same poster on his Instagram story, Varun captioned it, "Shooting with her." See his post: Varun Dhawan scared of shooting with 'Pari' Anushka Sharma. The actor himself is also promoting October, which is directed by Shoojit Sircar. Varun, it looks like cant get over his co-actress Banita Sandhu. In a chat with Pinkvilla, the actor ended up saying that hes fond of her and she took care of him. "Banita is someone that I'm so fond of. I can definitely say that she's done an incredible job. The amount that she has given to this film, very rarely an actor gives that. You give so much and then there's that extra percentage where you don't give because it can harm you also. But, she went for it. If I had to give people credit, I'd give dada (Shoojit Sircar) obviously, Juhi and I will give credit to Banita also for myself in the film because if it was not for her, if it was not for her eyes, if it was not for her soul, I would not be able to be me in this film," the actor stated. Varun revealed, "I started off wanting to be very protective of her because she is just 20 years old. She was small on set, everything is new to her. But, by the end, she was taking care of me. Not that I am a baby or anything like that (laughs) but honestly, by the end, the kind of connection that we got... that we always wanted to look out for each other. I would be so worried about her during certain scenes and she would be like, 'Varun, I got this, don't worry! I'm fine.' And I would be like, what is this girl made of? Because seeing her, this is happening to me, I just hope that she's okay. I'm excited for people to see her in this film." Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal told reporters, A lot of policemen are at my house. My home is being searched. The police team will retrieve CCTV footage and question staff members on what happened on Monday night at a meeting in which Chief Secretary Anshu Prakash was allegedly attacked by 2 AAP lawmakers. (Photo: ANI) New Delhi: A Delhi Police team was sent to Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal's residence in the Civil Lines area on Friday for collecting evidence related to an alleged assault on Chief Secretary Anshu Prakash by Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) MLAs. "A police team has been sent to the chief minister's residence for collecting all evidence, including CCTV footage, in connection with the alleged assault on the Delhi Chief Secretary," Additional DCP, North Delhi, Harinder Singh said. Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal told reporters, "A lot of policemen are at my house. My home is being searched." According to Delhi government spokesperson Arunodya Prakash, 60-70 policemen entered the chief minister's residence. "CM house taken over by police. Huge number of police force enters CM house without any intimation. Police Raj kills democracy in Delhi. Police spread all over inside CM house. If this what they can to do an elected CM, think what they can with poor people!!!" Arunodya Prakash wrote on Twitter. "There is minimum courtesy in democracy. Every citizen has rights under constitution. Is it an attempt to humiliate a CM who is working tirelessly for the poor and the last man of the society?" he tweeted. The police team will retrieve CCTV footage and question staff members on what happened on Monday night at a meeting in which Chief Secretary Anshu Prakash was allegedly attacked by two lawmakers of the AAP. Delhi Chief Secretary Anshu Prakash has alleged that he was beaten by the lawmakers in Arvind Kejriwal's presence after being called for a meeting at midnight. The chief secretary said he was attacked after being asked to explain why a three-year anniversary campaign of AAP was not being released. AAP legislators Prakash Jarwal and Okhla MLA Amantullah Khan were arrested by the police on Wednesday in connection with the alleged assault on the Delhi Chief Secretary during a meeting at Kejriwal's residence on Monday night. Meanwhile, the Delhi chief minister has sought time from LG Anil Baijal, to have a meeting. On Thursday, Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal's key aide VK Jain reportedly told a city court that he had seen ruling party lawmakers assault on chief secretary Anshu Prakash. Jain, a retired bureaucrat, said he had gone to the washroom during the meeting and when he returned, he saw two lawmakers hitting the Chief Secretary. He even claimed that the Chief Minister and his deputy Manish Sisodia watched silently. The statement, recorded before a magistrate, will be admissible as court evidence. (With inputs from PTI) 'Dhanush' missile is capable of carrying a payload of 500 kg and hitting both land and sea-based targets. Describing the test launch as "a complete success", the officials said all mission objectives were met during the trial. (Photo: PTI/Representational) Balasore (Odisha): India on Friday successfully test-fired the nuclear-capable 'Dhanush' ballistic missile with a strike range of 350 km from a naval ship off Odisha coast, defence officials said. The surface-to-surface missile, a naval variant of the indigenously-developed 'Prithvi' missile, was test-fired from the ship positioned near Paradip in the Bay of Bengal at around 10.52am, the officials said. 'Dhanush' missile is capable of carrying a payload of 500 kg and hitting both land and sea-based targets, the sources said, adding that its trial was carried out by the Strategic Force Command (SFC) of the defence forces. "The missile launch was part of training exercise by the SFC of Indian Navy," one official said. Describing the test launch as "a complete success", the officials said all mission objectives were met during the trial. The missile launch and its flight performance were monitored from DRDO telemetry and radar facilities in the Odisha coast," they said. The single-stage, liquid-propelled 'Dhanush', has already been inducted into the defence services. It is one of the five missiles developed by the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) under the Integrated Guided Missile Development Programme (IGMDP). The last trial was successfully tested on April 9, 2015, the sources added. Sources said that Atwals name had been removed from the blacklist by the Union home ministry. Jaspal Atwal, a convicted Khalistani terrorist, who was active in the banned International Sikh Youth Federation, posed with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's wife Sophie Trudeau at an event in Mumbai on February 20. (Photo: ANI | Twitter) New Delhi: Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeaus India visit plunged into yet another controversy on Thursday over a dinner invitation to convicted a Khalistani terrorist, Jaspal Singh Atwal, by the Canadian high commissioner to India. Though the Canadian high commission swiftly withdrew the invitation, the episode has embarrassed both the Canadian and Indian governments as it raises questions about how Mr Atwal, a Canadian national, managed to get an Indian visa and on the guest list for a dinner reception being hosted for Mr Trudeau in New Delhi on Thursday. While the Canadian high commission said it has rescinded Mr Atwals invitation, and refused to comment on the matter further as it concerns the PMs security, Indias external affairs ministry said it is trying to ascertain how the pro-Khalistan terrorist had entered India. Mr Atwal, a Sikh separatist active in the banned International Sikh Youth Federation, was convicted for trying to kill the then Punjab minister Malkiat Singh Sidhu in Vancouver in 1986. Sidhu was shot at twice on a road and survived, but was later assassinated in India. A judge called it an act of terrorism and sentenced Mr Atwal and three others to 20 years in prison. Sources said that Mr Atwals name had been removed from the blacklist by the Union home ministry. Reacting to the controversy, Mr Trudeau told reporters, Obviously we take this situation extremely seriously. The individual in question never should have received an invitation and, as soon as we found out, we rescinded the invitation immediately... The member of Parliament who included this individual has, and will, assume full responsibility for his actions. The Canadian PMO also said in a statement that Mr Atwal was not part of Mr Trudeaus official delegation. When asked how Mr Atwal got a visa, external affairs ministry spokesperson Raveesh Kumar said the government is ascertaining the details. We are checking to see how it happened... We are trying to find out how he managed to come in (into India)... whether it was through an OCI card or e-visa, he said. When asked whether action could be taken now against Mr Atwal, Mr Kumar said law enforcement agencies would have to be consulted on this. He described the Canadian high commissions earlier invitation to Mr Atwal as an oversight. The invite cancellation comes at a time when Mr Trudeaus alleged pro-Khalistan approach is being criticised by many in India, including Punjab chief minister Amarinder Singh, who raised the issue with the Canadian PM during a meeting. On his part, Mr Trudeau assured Mr Singh that his country does not support separatism in India or elsewhere. Top Indian government sources told this newspaper that Mr Atwal who was originally on an Indian government blacklist for his terror activities had been removed from the blacklist by the Union home ministry as part of an outreach to moderate elements in the pro-Khalistan lobby overseas who were seen to have given up their radical activities. Review of the blacklist is always done in consultation with the Punjab government and central security agencies. And after the government removes names from the blacklist, they can move freely around the world and even return to India. Reacting to the controversy, Mr Atwal told Canadas Postmedia that he did not plan to attend the dinner as he was in Mumbai on business, the Vancouver Sun reported. He also said it was unfair to raise his criminal conviction for shooting a visiting Punjabi Cabinet minister in Vancouver in 1986 given how long ago the crime occurred. During the UP Investors' Summit, the state government had signed 1,045 memorandums of understanding, worth Rs 4.28 lakh crore. The chief minister also thanked the partner countries of the summit -- the Netherlands, Japan, Czech Republic, Finland, Slovania, Mauritius and Thailand. (Photo: PTI/File) Lucknow: Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath on Thursday said the law-and-order situation in the state was excellent and assured the investors that UP was the best possible investment destination in the country. "I assure the investors that UP is the best possible investment destination. The law-and-order situation is excellent," he said, while addressing the valedictory function of the UP Investors' Summit. The BJP leader added that the single-window portal, which Prime Minister Narendra Modi had launched on Wednesday, was the first portal for obtaining digital approval. "Under this, a person can avail of the benefits, without going through red-tapism. The state has jumped to new heights in terms of ease of doing business," he said. "In the two-day summit, representatives from 10 countries, more than 6,000 participants and over 110 companies took part. As many as 32 parallel sessions took place at the summit," Adityanath said. During the summit, the state government had signed 1,045 memorandums of understanding (MoUs), worth Rs 4.28 lakh crore, he said, adding that these would generate more than 33 lakh jobs in the state. The chief minister also thanked the partner countries of the summit -- the Netherlands, Japan, Czech Republic, Finland, Slovania, Mauritius and Thailand. He said the prime minister had gifted a defence industrial corridor to Uttar Pradesh. The party workers also shouted slogans and sought action against the babus who assaulted AAP MLAs inside the Delhi Secretariat. Police personnel detain AAP leader Alka Lamba during a protest outside Union home minister Rajnath Singhs residence in New Delhi on Thursday. AAP workers on Thursday staged a protest outside Mr Singhs residence after he condemned the alleged assault on chief secretary Anshu Prakash. (Photo: PTI) New Delhi: Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) workers staged a protest of their own outside Union home minister Rajnath Singhs residence on Thursday morning after he condemned the alleged assault on chief secretary Anshu Prakash, who was beaten up by two AAP legislators in the presence of Arvind Kejriwal at the chief ministers residence on Monday night. The party workers also shouted slogans and sought action against the babus who assaulted AAP MLAs inside the Delhi Secretariat. AAP minister Rajendra Pal Gautam was detained along with five legislators including Girish Saini, Fateh Singh, Anil Vajpayee, Rakhi Bidlan, and Ajay Dutt among others. On Thursday, MLAs and workers of AAP had given a call of gherao and protest outside the residence of honble home minister of India at Akbar Road. As the area is under prohibitory orders (Section 144 of the CrPC), 89 persons were detained under the DP Act. Also, six AAP counsellors were among the detained persons. The detained were later released, a Delhi police official said. This came two days after the AAP legislator of Ambedkar Nagar, Ajay Dutt, filed a police complaint against Mr Prakash for the remarks he made during the emergency meeting at Mr Kejriwals residence on Monday night. A party official said the protest was also called against the biased inquiry made by the Delhi police against AAP legislators Amanatullah Khan and Prakash Jarwal, who were taken into judicial custody, on Wednesday, for allegedly assaulting the chief secretary. Reportedly, AAP minister Imran Hussain was manhandled at the Delhi Secretariat by a crowd protesting against the alleged assault. According to multiple video clips, his personal secretary Himanshu Singh was also beaten up. The PMs held talks, exploring ways to boost ties in several key areas, including trade and energy, education among others. Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Canadian counterpart Justin Trudeau on Friday inked six pacts and witnessed the exchange of MoUs between India and Canada. (Photo: Twitter/@MEAIndia) New Delhi: In a veiled message to his Canadian counterpart Justin Trudeau on extremism, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday said that India will not tolerate anyone who challenges unity and integrity of the country. Modi said that there should be no space for those who misuse religion for political motives and promote separatism. Modi's remark assumes significance in the light of the Trudeau government's soft stance on Sikhs who demand Khalistan. On Thursday, Khalistani terrorist Jaspal Atwal was reported to have been invited by Canadian High Commissioner Nadir Patel for a dinner in Delhi. PM Modi and his Canadian Trudeau on Friday inked six pacts and witnessed the exchange of MoUs between India and Canada. The two prime ministers discussed many issues including defence operation, terrorism and extremism. They also held extensive talks, exploring ways to boost ties in several key areas, including trade and energy, education, healthcare, IT, science and technology, defence and security, tourism and people-to-people contacts. Addressing a joint press meeting, Modi said the two countries renewed MoU on higher education which will enhance the exchange of Indian students to Canada. Justin Trudeau, in briefing with Modi, said, "we share common respect for democratic values, pluralism and democracy". "We share not only rich a history but a set of values that encourage a natural friendship between our two countries," he further said. Trudeau said India is a natural partner and a trusted friend for commercial cooperation as Canada looks to diversify its own economy and looks for new opportunities to do business beyond its boundaries. Earlier, External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj called on the Canadian prime minister and discussed various issues of mutual interest. (Photo: Twitter/@MEAIndia) "Picture speaks for itself! EAM Sushma Swaraj had a warm meeting with the Prime Minister of Canada Justin Trudeau and discussed ways to strengthen and deepen our partnership," Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) spokesperson Raveesh Kumar tweeted and posted a picture of the two leaders. Five days after landing in India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday welcomed his Canadian counterpart with a huge hug and also greeted his wife and three children. Trudeau was also given a ceremonial reception at Rashtrapati Bhawan. (Photo: ANI) Trudeau is expected to address a conference of young change-makers on Saturday. The ties between India and Canada have been on an upswing. Approximately 1.4 million Canadians are of Indian heritage and India is Canada's second largest source of immigrants. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was also given a ceremonial reception at the Rashtrapari Bhawan. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his family met Prime Minister Narendra Modi in New Delhi. (Photo: ANI) New Delhi: Five days after landing in India, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau met Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday in New Delhi. Prime Minister Modi welcomed his Canadian counterpart with a huge hug and also greeted his wife and three children. (Photo: Twitter/@PMOIndia) Trudeau was also given a ceremonial reception at Rashtrapati Bhawan. (Photo: Twitter/ANI) After receiving the guard of honour, Canadian prime minister and his family paid tribute to Mahatma Gandhi at Rajghat. Later, Trudeau also held talks with External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj. Modi and Trudeau are scheduled to hold bilateral talks at around noon. During the meet, the two leaders are expected to focus on trade, defence, civil nuclear cooperation, space, tackling climate change energy and education. Cooperation on counter-terror measures is also expected to be a key area of focus in view of India's concerns over Sikh radicalism in Canada. Earlier on Thursday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi posted a welcome tweet for Justin Trudeau. "I hope PM @JustinTrudeau and his family had a very enjoyable stay so far. I particularly look forward to meeting his children Xavier, Ella-Grace, and Hadrien. Here is a picture from my 2015 Canada visit, when I'd met PM Trudeau and Ella-Grace," Modi tweeted. The Canadian Prime Minister replied, "She remembers it well, @narendramodi! It's been great to visit so far - we'll see you today." Trudeau, who is on his maiden visit to India, arrived on Saturday evening and the Canadian PM and his family toured the country amid talks of snub by the political establishment over what's seen as Canada's soft stance on Sikhs who demand Khalistan. On Thursday, Khalistani terrorist Jaspal Atwal was found to have been invited by Canadian High Commissioner Nadir Patel for a dinner in Delhi. The dinner invitation to Atwal at a reception for Trudeau at the Canada House was cancelled. On Tuesday, Atwal had attended an event in Mumbai and was photographed with Justin Trudeau's wife Sophie Trudeau and Canadian minister Amarjeet Sohi. FinMin has written to Hong Kong branches of 4 Indian banks asking them to reconcile accounts and check for irregularities. The four lenders - SBI, Axis Bank, Allahabad Bank and Bank of India - were issued Letters of Undertaking (LoUs) by PNB's Mumbai branch. (Photo: File) New Delhi: Swinging into action following the Rs 11,400 crore PNB fraud, the finance ministry on Friday set up new regulatory measures. The ministry has written to Hong Kong branches of four Indian banks asking them to reconcile accounts and check for irregularities, news agency ANI reported. The four lenders - SBI, Axis Bank, Allahabad Bank and Bank of India - were issued Letters of Undertaking (LoUs) by PNB's Mumbai branch. Reconciliation of an account involves confirming whether the money leaving an account matches the amount that's been spent. ANI also reported that the public sector banks will now appoint a special representative or agency to monitor status for all loans of above Rs 250 crore and that a consortium of lenders cannot exceed 7 banks. Incidentally, Rotomac pens owner Vikram Kothari is alleged to have cheated a consortium of 7 banks of Rs 3,695 crore. Also read: CBI arrests Rotomac pens owner, son over Rs 3,695 cr loan default case A report in the Times of India said that these measures are effectively the first definitive steps taken by the finance ministry since the scam broke out, even as government agencies like CBI, ED and Income Tax department have cracked down on the accused. SC issues notice to the Delhi police on Swamy's plea seeking an SIT probe into the death of Sunanda Pushkar. Sunanda Pushkar was found dead under mysterious circumstances in a suite of a five-star hotel in Delhi on the night of January 17, 2014. (Photo: File) New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Friday sought the response of the Delhi Police on a plea filed by BJP leader Subramanian Swamy seeking an SIT probe into the death of Congress MP Shashi Tharoor's wife Sunanda Pushkar. A bench of Justices Arun Mishra and AM Khanwilkar issued a notice to the police on Swamy's plea, leaving open the question of maintainability of the petition. "Keeping the question of maintainability open, let a notice be issued," the bench said. The court was hearing Swamy's appeal against the Delhi High Court's October 26 verdict dismissing his plea for a probe into Pushkar's death by a court-monitored Special Investigation Team (SIT). Pushkar was found dead under mysterious circumstances in a suite of a five-star hotel in Delhi on the night of January 17, 2014. The high court had in 2017 rejected Swamy's plea for a court-monitored SIT probe into Pushkar's death and termed his public interest litigation (PIL) a "textbook example of a political interest litigation". Swamy, in his plea before the high court, had alleged that the police had "botched up" the probe and accused Tharoor of "interfering" in the investigation as a minister in the erstwhile UPA regime and later. The high court had chastised the BJP leader and his lawyer, who was a co-petitioner before it, for making "sweeping allegations" in the petition against Tharoor and the Delhi Police without giving any basis for such accusations. The high court had said that Swamy ought to have mentioned his political affiliation as well as that of Tharoor in his plea as these facts were important to the adjudication of the case. Nathuram Godse is celebrated as a hero on the BHU campus, which is very unfortunate, says Vikas Singh, state president, NSUI. Lucknow: The Banaras Hindu University (BHU) remained tense on Thursday after a group of students filed a complaint objecting to a play allegedly celebrating Nathuram Godse, the man who assassinated Mahatma Gandhi, was recently staged on the campus. The complaint was filed after a video clip of the controversial play Maine Gandhi Ko Kyon Mara, which was staged as part of three-day cultural festival, went viral on social media. Alleging sedition the students complained to the university authorities and the district administration, seeking action against those who depicted Godse as a hero and justified Gandhis assassination. Chief proctor Royana Singh confirmed that she had received a complaint. I have forwarded the complaint to police as well. We are going to check the facts and probe the allegations of sedition, she said. Vikas Singh, state president of NSUI, said, Nathuram Godse is celebrated as a hero on the campus, which is very unfortunate. The students said that the play was part of a conspiracy to tarnish Mahatma Gandhis legacy. Army Chief Gen Bipin Rawat sparked a controversy when he spoke about the 'faster' growth of the AIUDF in Assam. Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman refused to comment on Army Chief's statement while speaking to journalists on the sidelines of Uttar Pradesh Investors Summit. (Photo: File/ANI) New Delhi: Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Thursday refused to respond to questions about Army chief Bipin Rawats comments on the rise of Muslim-oriented political party led by Badruddin Ajmal in the Northeast. "I don't want to react to anything...Somebody said something, somebody talking about....why should I react?" Sitharaman told journalists on the sidelines of Uttar Pradesh Investors Summit when she was asked to comment on General Rawat's remarks. Army Chief Gen Bipin Rawat sparked a row when he spoke about the faster growth of the All India United Democratic Front (AIUDF). He implied that an influx of illegal Muslim migrants into the area is what has led to the growth of this party and an increase in the Muslim population in several districts of the state. Also read: China, Pak agents of illegal immigration in Northeast: Bipin Rawat "There is a party called AIUDF. They have grown in a faster time-frame than the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). When we talk of Jan Sangh with two MPs and where they have reached, AIUDF is moving at a faster pace in the state of Assam, the Army chief said. The AIUDF, formed in 2005, has three members in parliament and 13 legislators in the Assam assembly. The Army Chief also said the influx of people from Bangladesh into the Northeast was "planned" and part of proxy warfare by Pakistan with support from China. Responding to Gen Rawats comment, Army said there was nothing controversial in and that he had just mentioned "amalgamation and development". Also read: Army Chiefs remark on AIUDF growth shocking, says Badruddin Ajmal Badruddin Ajmal, reacting to the Army Chief's comments on his party, had said that the remarks were shocking. Pointing out that they take the Indian Army in very high esteem, Ajmal told this newspaper, I believe General Bipin Rawat has wrongly been briefed by his field officers. We as a political party have been upfront in demanding the NRC (National Register of Citizens) both at the Parliament and in the Assembly. The ED also seized a huge collection of imported watches from a workshop linked to Modi. Both Modi and Choski are said to have left the country last month before criminal cases were lodged against them. New Delhi: The ED on Friday issued summons to Nirav Modis wife Ami for questioning as part of its investigation into the alleged Rs 11,400 crore Punjab National Bank (PNB) fraud case. The agency also froze bank deposits and shares worth Rs 44 crore of the diamantaire. Besides summoning Ms Modi, an American citizen, the central probe agency has called his uncle and Gitanjali Gems promoter Mehul Choksi for questioning on February 26 at the ED office in Mumbai, sources said. Mr Modi, who failed to turn up for questioning on Thursday, has also been issued summons to appear before the agency on the same day. The ED also seized a huge collection of imported watches from a workshop linked to Mr Modi. ED officials said that they have issued fresh freeze orders against his bank accounts containing Rs 30 crore and shares worth Rs 13.86 crore of the Nirav Modi group under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA). The agency sleuths on Friday seized a large collection of imported watches, 176 steel almirahs, 158 corrugated boxes and 60 other containers after searches at multiple locations linked to Mr Modi over the last week, sources said. The ED had on Thursday seized deposits, shares and luxury cars worth over `100 crore from the businessman and his group. The total seizure by the ED in the case now stands at Rs 5,870 crore, officials claimed. Mr Modi, Mr Choksi are being investigated by the ED and other probe agencies following a complaint by the Punjab National Bank (PNB) that they allegedly cheated the nationalised bank to the tune of Rs 11,400 crore, with the purported involvement of a few employees of the bank. The CBI and the ED have registered two FIRs each to probe the case. Both Mr Modi and Mr Choski are said to have left the country last month before criminal cases were lodged against them. The two nations deplored the degradation of judicial independence and authority, and of democratic institutions in Maldives. New Delhi: Stepping up the pressure on Maldivian President Abdulla Yameen after the Maldives extended the state of emergency, both India and Canada on Friday in a joint statement deplored the degradation of judicial independence and authority, and of democratic institutions in the tiny archipelago nation. PM Narendra Modi discussed the situation in the Maldives with visiting Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. PM Modi said there was a similarity of views with Mr Trudeau on the issue of restoration of the independence of democratic institutions in the Maldives. Late on Thursday night, the Maldives had sharply criticised India, saying that statements by the Indian government on the situation ignore the facts and ground realities and are a clear distortion of facts. The joint statement released mentioned the situation in the Maldives, saying, The two leaders (PM Modi and PM Trudeau) expressed strong concern about recent developments in Maldives and their implications for a free society. As leaders of parliamentary systems, they deplored the degradation of judicial independence and authority and of democratic institutions, as well as respect for fundamental freedoms, including those of speech and assembly, constitutional rights and obligations under international law. The Government of Maldives was urged to ensure early resumption of the political process after revoking the state of emergency and to allow democratic institutions, including the judiciary, to function independently in a fair and transparent manner. The situation in the Maldives was discussed by the two Prime Ministers along with the situation in the Korean peninsula as well as Afghanistan. The Lokpal law seeks to bring the Prime Minister, Union ministers and members of Parliament under the purview of the anti-corruption ombudsman. New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi will chair a crucial meeting on appointment of Lokpal on March 1, the Centre informed the Supreme Court on Friday. The latest push for selecting the anti-corruption ombudsman comes amid sharp attacks by Congress president Rahul Gandhi on the government for not taking action even four years after the Lokpal Act was passed in Parliament. The meeting next month will also be attended by the leader of the single largest party in the Opposition, the government said, indicating a slight shift in its earlier stand under which it wanted an amendment to the law to replace the term Leader of the Opposition (LoP) with leader of single largest Opposition party in the list of members of the Lokpal selection panel. The Lokpal law seeks to bring the Prime Minister, Union ministers and members of Parliament under the purview of the anti-corruption ombudsman. Accepting the Centres submission, the apex court bench of Justices Ranjan Gogoi and R. Banumathi directed the department of personnel and training (DoPT) to file an affidavit on the outcome of the Prime Minister-chaired meeting by March 5 and posted the matter for hearing on March 6. The NDA had earlier said that in the Lokpal law enacted during the UPA regime there was no clarity over provisions to be opted for in case of the absence of an LoP. The Centre had argued that in the absence of an LoP in Parliament, the Lokpal selection committee could not be constituted. In the Lok Sabha, the largest Opposition party is the Congress which has only 44 members and lacks the requisite 10 per cent of the 545 seats to be eligible to nominate an LoP. The March 1 meeting on Lokpal will come close to Congress president Rahul Gandhi repeatedly attacking the Prime Minister and the BJP for not taking action even four years after the Lokpal Act was passed in Parliament. Last month, Mr Gandhi had posted an image of a tweet by the Prime Minister from December 2013, and asked him when the false promises will stop. Are the defenders of democracy & harbingers of accountability listening? he had asked. During the hearing in the apex court on Friday, attorney-general K.K. Venugopal told the bench the selection process delay was due to the death of senior lawyer P.P. Rao, who was one of the members in the panel, in September last year. The apex court was hearing a contempt petition filed by NGO Common Cause through advocate Prashant Bhushan for not implementing its April 2017 verdict on appointment of Lokpal. In April 2017, the apex court had told the Centre to set up the anti-corruption ombudsman under the 2013 law without waiting for Parliament approval of the standing committees suggestion for amending the law to include leader of single largest party in the place of LoP in the list of search committee members. Modi said that there should be no place for those who use sectarianism for political purposes and create divisions in society. Prime Minister Narendra Modi interacts with his Canadian counterpart Justin Trudeaus youngest son Hadrien as other family members listen in during a ceremonial reception in New Delhi. (Photo: AP) New Delhi: In a clear warning to pro-Khalistan, anti-India separatists operating from Canada, Prime Minister Narendra Modi after holding talks with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Friday said no tolerance would be shown to those challenging Indias unity and integrity. This is also being seen as a veiled message to the Trudeau government which is perceived by many to be soft on pro-Khalistan Sikh radicals. With Mr Trudeau by his side, Mr Modi said that there should be no place for those who use sectarianism for political purposes and create divisions in society. Those challenging the unity and integrity of our two countries cannot be tolerated. There should be no space for those who misuse sectarianism for political purposes and widen the gulf of divisions. Terrorism is a threat to democratic societies like India and Canada, Mr Modi said in his speech in the presence of the Canadian Prime Minister whom he described as my friend Trudeau. The Canadian Prime Minister described India as Canadas natural partner and trusted friend. The two countries also unveiled a framework for countering terrorism and violent extremism which mentioned threats from Khalistani terror groups Babbar Khalsa International and the International Sikh Youth Federation apart from the Pakistan-based terror outfits, LeT and JeM. The Khalistan issue has overshadowed Mr Trudeaus week-long visit to India that ended on Friday with the signing of six pacts on atomic energy, information technology, sports, intellectual property rights, energy dialogue and higher education. After the talks, the two Prime Ministers resolved to combat terrorism and violent extremism in all their forms and manifestations. In a veiled message to Pakistan, the two leaders also called for bringing terrorists to justice and holding accountable state sponsors of terrorism, including cross-border terrorism and further emphasised that no country should allow its territory to be used for terrorist and violent extremist activities. Both the countries agreed to step up trade ties apart from endorsing the continuation of uranium exports from Canada for peaceful use of civil nuclear power. On the economic front, the two countries agreed to intensify negotiations to finalise a Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement and a Bilateral Foreign Investment Promotion and Protection Agreement. The activities of the pro-Khalistan radical Sikh elements operating from Canadian soil is understood to have figured prominently during talks between the two Prime Ministers. India expects that the Trudeau government will now take firm action against radical Sikh elements in Canada, in line with the commitments in the joint statement and counter-terror framework. The Framework for Cooperation between India and Canada on Countering Terrorism and Violent Extremism mentioned that the two countries have committed to work together to neutralise the threats emanating from terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda, ISIS, the Haqqani Network, LeT, JeM, Babbar Khalsa International, and the International Sikh Youth Federation. The joint statement said, Recognising that terrorism, violent extremism and radicalisation to violence present acute challenges to global peace, stability and prosperity, the leaders resolved to combat terrorism and violent extremism in all their forms and manifestations. On economic ties, it said, To realise the full potential of bilateral trade and investment, both the sides will renew efforts to expand and diversify bilateral economic and commercial relations. The Delhi high court had on October 26 last year rejected Dr Swamis plea for a court-monitored SIT probe into Pushkars death. New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Friday issued notice to the Centre and the Delhi government on the special leave petition filed by BJP leader Subramanian Swamy, seeking a SIT probe into the mysterious death of Sunanda Pushkar, wife of Cong-ress MP Sashi Tharoor, on January 17, 2014, at a hotel in the capital. A bench of Justices Arun Mishra and A.M. Kanwilkar while issuing notice made it clear that the question of maintainability will be decided first before taking up the issue on merits. The court wanted Dr Swami to satisfy whether a third party, who is not in any way connected with the victim, could seek such a remedy. Dr Swami said the high court had erroneously rejected his petition. Dr Swami has moved the apex court after the Delhi high court had in October last year rejected the plea for a probe by a court-monitored Special Investigation Team (SIT) observing that being a politician he has no locus standi to file such a petition. He said he had filed a petition against former Tamil Nadu chief minister Jayalalithaa in the disproportionate assets case and he would satisfy his locus standi. He claimed that it took nearly one year for the Delhi police to lodge FIR in the case and the post-mortem report said that Pushkar had died of unnatural death. The bench, however, asked him to argue on the issue of maintainability. The Delhi high court had on October 26 last year rejected Dr Swamis plea for a court-monitored SIT probe into Pushkars death. Expelled BSP leader Nasimuddin Siddiqui joins party, likely to benefit Congress with Muslim votes. New Delhi: With BSP chief Mayawati playing hardball as far as a united Opposition platform against the BJP was concerned, the Congress seems to have begun manoeuvres to eat into her dalit vote bank in Uttar Pradesh as evident by the induction of expelled BSP leader Nasimuddin Siddiqui into the party fold on Thursday. Mr Siddiqui joined the Congress along with his 100 odd supporters amidst much fanfare at the AICC headquarters. All of his supporters, who joined the Congress, were either expelled or had quit the BSP following the partys rout in the 2017 Uttar Pradesh Assembly polls. Those who joined Congress included former MLAs O.P. Singh, Raghunath Prasad Shakwar, Vijendra Vyas, Haji Shaban and Arshad Khan. The 57-year old Mr Siddiqui, who had been one of the closest confidantes of the BSP supremo, also merged his outfit Rashtriya Bahujan Manch with the Congress. Though on the face of it, senior Congress leader and its General Secretary for Uttar Pradesh Ghulam Nabi Azad maintained that there was nothing for Ms Mayawati to worry as she had herself expelled Mr Siddiqui and his son following the rout in UP polls, the Congress has sent a clear signal to the Dalit Czarina that it was getting ready to encroach into her territory. Mr Siddiquis induction into the Congress comes days after Ms Mayawati announced joining hands with the H.D. Deve Gowda led Janata Dal (Secular) in Karnataka an alliance which is expected to hurt the incumbent Congress in the state. She is also dallying with parties including Ajit Singhs Rashtriya Lok Dal to pop up a third front in UP ahead of three crucial bypolls scheduled there. She has also stopped attending Opposition strategy meetings over the last couple of months. Congress sources said that Mr Siddiqui had met Party president Rahul Gandhi at least thrice in the last one month. Mr Azad said: Mr Siddiquis joining the party indicates the changing political circumstances in the country. This number will not stop here. Questioned whether the Banda strongmans joining would put a dampner on the issue of a larger Opposition alliance against the BJP, Mr Azad said that when the BSP chief had taken away sitting Congress MLAs on the eve of UP Assembly polls, his party had not complained and hence Ms Mayawati should also have no reason to be unhappy. A grand alliance is keeping in mind larger considerations. At one time, we cannot fight so many forces. Thus with mutual understanding we had forged an alliance with the Samajwadi Party before the UP Assembly polls and had also been open to allying with her. Greater alliances happen for bigger considerations, Mr Azad said. Mr Siddqui said: We would abide by the decision of the Congress National leadership on the issue of alliances with BSP. The expelled leader besides being the Muslim face of the BSP had been one of the closest confidantes of Ms Mayawati for the three decades of his political career until the crushing defeat of the BSP in the 2017 polls. He was also a co-accused with Mayawati in the Taj Corridor scandal. During the 2007 poll campaign, when the BSP experimented with new social engineering, he was projected as the partys Muslim face. When the BSP formed its first majority government, Siddiqui was among one of the most influential ministers. He had charge of about a dozen departments including PWD and excise. In 2010, his wife Husna became a party MLC, joining him in the Upper House. She also joined the Congress on Thursday. Before expelling him post-polls, Mayawati had stripped Mr Siddiqui of all his responsibilities in the party organisation in UP and transferred him to Madhya Pradesh. Soon after his expulsion, Mr Siddiqui had hit back at the BSP chief. Though not many consider him a popular leader, he is said to have a sizeable cadre base and his joining can benefit the Congress with Muslim votes from the BSP kitty. The JD (U) reacted strongly to the statement and said that the sole aim of the tour is to urge the economic superpower to invest in Bihar. Patna: As the four-day-long Japan tour of Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar ended on Thursday, RJD leader Tejashwi Yadav described it as a futile exercise. He took to Twitter to slam the chief minister by saying that he couldnt convince Prime Minister to include Patna University in the list of Central university, how can we expect him to woo investors from Japan. The JD (U) reacted strongly to the statement and said that the sole aim of the tour is to urge the economic superpower to invest in Bihar. They pointed out that Nitish Kumar had addressed a seminar at the Indian embassy in Tokyo where he urged investors to establish production facilities in the state. Efforts of the chief minister should be appreciated but the opposition parties especially the RJD doesnt understand this. The RJD was in power for fifteen years but they only pushed the state into darkness it was Nitish Kumar who brought change and has been working hard for the development of Bihar, JD-U spokesperson Niraj Kumar told this newspaper. The JD-U leader also criticised Tejashwi Yadav for raising doubts on the CMs Japan tour. The Prime Minister also thanked people for coming in large numbers to bless him. Guwahati: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday said that his government was working seriously to resolve the decades-old Naga political problem while indicating that an early solution was likely. Addressing an election rally at Tuenseng in Nagaland, Mr Modi said: We are working seriously to resolve the political problem. In coming months, we will hopefully reach an acceptable solution. For that all would have to walk together. He reiterated that it would strengthen democracy. We are holding talks with different groups and organisations, he added. Stressing the need for a stable government in the state, Mr Modi said: Nagaland needs a stable government. Over the last few years there have been frequent government changes, which does not augur well for the states growth. A strong and stable government is in the interests of Nagaland. He regretted: In the last four years, the Cabinet took the oath as many as four times. This is not good for the stability and development of the state. Asking the people to vote for the BJP-NDPP alliance, the PM said it was important to tackle corruption. Asserting that a BJP-NDPP government in Nagaland would plug loopholes causing the wastage of public money, Mr Modi said: A Prime Minister had once said that only 10 paise of a rupee sent by the Centre reaches the needy. It is time to change that situation. He added: With the help of technology, we will plug the loopholes which are causing wastage of public money. The Prime Minister also thanked people for coming in large numbers to bless him. People in such large numbers come to bless us when we take forward the agenda of Sabka Saath, Sabka Vikas. With your presence here, you have today answered people who do votebank and divisive politics, said Mr Modi. Pointing out that his vision for the Northeast was transformation by transportation, he said in less than four years, the Centre has added 500 km of national highways and planned to invest over Rs 10,000 crores in the roads of Nagaland. He said the NDA government at the Centre wanted to ensure power for all in Nagaland. We have brought the Saubhagya Yojana which will provide electricity to all homes. Till date, more than 10 lakh LED bulbs have been distributed in Nagaland, reducing the consumption of power, he said. The PM said the Centre would spend around Rs 1,800 crores to make the state capital Kohima a smart city. He said organic farming has a big market globally and the entire Northeast has immense potential for it. The BJP has fielded 20 candidates and its alliance partner NDPP 40 for the February 27 elections to the 60-member Nagaland Assembly. Officials said that Tiwari was a habitual offender and had been charged with nine cases of rape and sexual harassment since 2003. Police said that instead of taking the woman to Dahisar railway station as was agreed upon, Tiwari took her to an isolated building enroute and allegedly raped her. (Photo: Representational | File) Mumbai: A 27-year-old man was arrested for allegedly raping a film artiste in January, police said Friday. The man, identified as Pradeep Tiwari alias Chintu, was picked up Thursday by personnel from Unit 12 of Mumbai Police's Crime Branch from an auto-rickshaw stand in suburban Dahisar, officials informed. Officials said that Tiwari was a habitual offender and had been charged with nine cases of rape and sexual harassment since 2003. Police said that Tiwari had offered the 31-year-old survivor a lift on his motorcycle in the early hours of January 12 when she was returning from a photo-shoot in Vasai. The survivor, a resident of suburban Versova, was waiting to hail an auto-rickshaw in Dahisar when Tiwari chanced upon her. Police said that instead of taking the woman to Dahisar railway station as was agreed upon, Tiwari took her to an isolated building enroute and allegedly raped her. The woman filed a police complaint and a medical examination at the civic-run Cooper hospital confirmed the rape, following which a case was registered on January 14. The officer, Scot Peterson, was suspended without pay and placed under investigation, then chose to resign. The school resource officer at the high school took up a position viewing the western entrance of the building that was under attack for more than four minutes, but he never went in, Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel said. (Photo: AP) Fort Lauderdale: The armed officer on duty at the Florida school in US where a shooter killed 17 people never went inside to engage the gunman and has been placed under investigation, officials announced Thursday. The Valentine's Day shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School by a gunman armed with an AR-15 style assault rifle has reignited a national debate in the US over gun laws and school safety, including proposals by US president Donald Trump and others to designate more people including trained teachers to carry arms on school grounds. Gun-control advocates, meanwhile, have redoubled their push to ban assault rifles. The school resource officer at the high school took up a position viewing the western entrance of the building that was under attack for more than four minutes, but "he never went in," Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel said at a Thursday news conference. The shooting lasted about six minutes. Also Read: Arm teachers to end gun violence in schools: Trump's solution The officer, Scot Peterson, was suspended without pay and placed under investigation, then chose to resign, Israel said. When asked what Peterson should have done, Israel said the deputy should have "went in, addressed the killer, killed the killer." The sheriff said he was "devastated, sick to my stomach. There are no words. I mean, these families lost their children. .... I've been to the funerals. ... I've been to the vigils. It's just, ah, there are no words." There was also a communication issue between the person reviewing the school's security system footage and officers who responded to the school. Coral Springs Police Chief Tony Pustizzi said during a Thursday news conference that the footage being reviewed was 20 minutes old, so the responding officers were hearing that the shooter was in a certain place while officers already in that location were saying that wasn't the case. "There was nothing wrong with their equipment. Their equipment works," Pustizzi said. "It's just that when the person was reviewing the tape from 20 minutes earlier, somehow that wasn't communicated to the officers that it was a 20-minute delay." Pustizzi said the confusion didn't put anyone in danger. Nikolas Cruz had history of violence Gunman Nikolas Cruz, 19, has been jailed on 17 counts of murder and has admitted the attack. He owned a collection of weapons. Defense attorneys, state records and people who knew him indicate that he displayed behavioural troubles for years. Broward County incident reports show that unidentified callers contacted authorities with concerns about Cruz in February 2016 and November 2017. The first caller said they had third-hand information that Cruz planned to shoot up the school. The information was forwarded to the Stoneman Douglas resource officer. The second caller said Cruz was collecting guns and knives and believed "he could be a school shooter in the making." Also in November 2017, Cruz was involved in a fight with the adult son of a woman he was staying with shortly after his mother died, according to a Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office report. On 28 November, a 22-year-old man at the Lake Worth home told the responding deputy that he tried to calm down Cruz, who had been punching holes in walls and breaking objects, but Cruz hit him in the jaw, and the man hit Cruz back. Also Read: We call BS: Florida shooting survivor shames Trump for gun laws The deputy found Cruz a short time later at a nearby park. Cruz told the deputy he had been angry because he misplaced a photo of his recently deceased mother, and he apologized for losing his temper. The other man told the deputy he didn't want Cruz arrested. He just wanted Cruz to calm down before coming home. Politicians under pressure to tighten gun laws in response to the mass shooting floated various plans Thursday, but most fell short of reforms demanded by student activists who converged Wednesday on Florida's Capitol. Florida House Speaker Richard Corcoran said Thursday night that his chamber is going to recommend creating a special commission to investigate the "abject breakdown at all levels" that led to the shooting deaths. The Republican said the commission, likely be led by a parent of one of the slain children, would have subpoena power. Corcoran also said the news about the resource officer's failure to respond did not dissuade him from moving ahead with what he was calling the "marshal" plan to let local law-enforcement officials train and deputise someone at the school who would be authorised to carry a gun. "He's not indicative of the law enforcement community; that's not going to change our behaviour at all," Corcoran said. Also Read: Monster under our roof: Foster couple on Florida gunman Nikolas Cruz US and gun control State Senator Bill Galvano, who is helping craft a bill in response to the shooting deaths, insisted the idea is not the same as arming teachers. He said the programme would be optional and the deputised person would have to be trained by local law-enforcement agencies. US Senator Marco Rubio of Florida said a visit to Stoneman Douglas prompted him to change his stance on large-capacity magazines. The Republican insisted he is willing to rethink his past opposition to gun proposals if there is information the policies would prevent mass shootings. "If we are going to infringe on the Second Amendment, it has to be a policy that will work," Rubio said in an interview Thursday with AP. A day after an emotional meeting with survivors and their families, Trump tweeted his strongest stance yet on gun control. He said he would endorse strengthening background checks, banning "bump stock" style devices and raising the minimum age to 21 for buying certain rifles. At a conference of conservative activists Thursday near Washington, Vice President Mike Pence said the administration would make school safety "our top national priority" after the shooting at the school in Parkland, Florida. Calling school shootings "evil in our time," Pence exhorted those in positions of authority "to find a way to come together with American solutions." It was a markedly different tone than that deployed on stage minutes earlier by NRA Executive Vice President and CEO Wayne LaPierre, who delivered an unbowed defense of gun ownership and lashed out at Democrats saying they are using the tragedy for "political gain." Insiders revealed that Pakistan's traditional friend China withdrew its objections in putting Islamabad on the grey list. Pakistan Foreign Minister Khawaja Asif tweeted on Tuesday, Our efforts paid, FATF Paris 20 Feb meeting conclusion on the US-led motion to put Pakistan on the watch list. (Photo: File) Islamabad: The Financial Action Task Force (FATF) has taken the decision to put Pakistan on a grey list for terror financing, according to sources. The motion brought forth by the United States was backed by United Kingdom, France, and India. Insiders revealed that Pakistan's traditional friend China withdrew its objections in putting Islamabad on the grey list. The move will make it difficult for international financial institutions and banks to do business in Pakistan, as will it for Pakistani businesses to raise money overseas. Also Read: As US scrambles to put Pak on terror watchlist, watchdog gives 3-month pardon Pakistan, earlier this week, claimed that it has been granted a three-month reprieve to be placed on a terror-financing watch-list. Pakistan Foreign Minister Khawaja Asif tweeted on Tuesday, "Our efforts paid, FATF Paris 20 February meeting conclusion on the US-led motion to put Pakistan on the watch list. No consensus for nominating Pakistan, proposing three months pause and asking APG (Asia Pacific Group) for another report to be concluded in June". Asif was in Moscow when he posted on Twitter. Paris-based FATF, also known by its French name Groupe d'action financiere, is an intergovernmental organisation founded in 1989 to develop policies to combat money laundering. (By ChameleonsEye/Shutterstock.com) (By ChameleonsEye/Shutterstock.com) Austria is the latest country to begin a work and holiday visa arrangement with Australia which is now in operation.The arrangement allows young people from Austria aged between 18 and 30, to apply to stay in Australia for one year and undertake a period of short term work and study.The same reciprocal conditions also allow young Australians to work and holiday in Austria. And there is the possibility of a visa extension if some of the work is undertaken in regional locations.Assistant Minister for Home Affairs, Alex Hawke welcomed the start of the arrangement.'The work and holiday program gives young Australians and Austrians the opportunity to apply for a unique cultural exchange experience,' he said. 'These arrangements strengthen the positive relationship between our countries and will further build economic and people to people links.'There will be an annual limit of 200 visas for Austrian nationals, who can apply from now and the same number of Australians can travel to Austria under the arrangement.Austria has become the 23rd country to gain access to Australia's Work and Holiday program, joining a host of other countries from Europe, Asia and the Americas.However, a working holiday arrangement between Australia and Greece has not yet started despite a Memorandum of Understanding between the two countries being signed last year.An official start date has not yet been announced. It is understood that a final piece of legislation still need to go through the Greek Parliament before applications can get underway.Other countries with working holiday arrangements with Australia include Belgium, Canada, Cyprus, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Ireland,Italy, Japan, Korea, Malta, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Taiwan and the United Kingdom. Photo courtesy of Enterprise Holdings Enterprise Holdings announced it has cut ties with the National Rifle Association, following a growing backlash to the pro-gun lobby in response to the Parkland, Fla., shooting that left 17 dead Feb. 14. The sponsorship offered discounts to card carrying NRA members once they paid their $40 annual fee. Earlier this week, Think Progress published a list of companies that do business with or have sponsorships with the NRA. The list prompted many on social media sites such as Twitter to call for these companies to sever their ties with the NRA. An Enterprise Holdings spokesperson said that its partnership, which was offered with Enterprise, Alamo, and National, will officially be terminated March 26. Thank you @enterprisecares, @Alamo and @nationalcares. I ALWAYS use @enterprisecares when I travel and you never fumble. And you haven't fumbled this either. Well done, guys. https://t.co/Sbrj0SDsA9 Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) February 23, 2018 Many on Twitter thanked the auto rental company for canceling its discount program with the pro-gun rights group, which has consistently and successfully lobbied against gun reform and control legislation. Similarly, First National Bank of Omaha announced it will not renew its contract with the NRA to issue the NRA Visa Card, a spokesperson told the Huffington Post. Very glad that I can continue to use @Enterprise now that they have severed ties with the @NRA. I want to rent cars from a company that cares about safety above profit. #BoycottNRA Summer Brennan (@summerbrennan) February 23, 2018 According to Think Progress,True Car also offers various discounts to card carrying NRA members. This article was updated Feb. 22 at 2:08 pm to reflect that Hertz no longer has a partnership with the NRA. This article was updated Feb. 22 at 3:00 pm to reflect that Avis Budget Group no longer has a partnership with the NRA. SAL MORETTI: If Manson's in heaven, what does that mean for the rest of us? Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in your country. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to your market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism. Florida Gov. Rick Scott announced "major changes" Friday aimed at tightnening rules and keeping students safer on school campuses. The $500-million, three-prong plan is intended to try to prevent more mass shootings and school attacks. The plan involves gun laws, school safety and mental health, Scott said in a speech delivered during a news conference. "I want to make it virtually impossible for anyone who has mental issues to be able to use a gun," he said. "Some will say it's too much, and some will say it's not enough. I respect everyone's opinion, and I don't ridicule those who disagree with me," Scott added. The announcement comes nine days after 17 people were killed in a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland. The gunman, Nikolas Cruz a 19-year-old former Douglas student is charged in the deaths. He had a history of mental illness and depression, and his behavior had been reported to authorities on numerous occasions, authorities have acknowledged. During a news conference within minutes of the governor's, state House and Senate leaders unveiled their own plan, which includes some differences. House Speaker Richard Corcoran said Thursday that his chamber will recommend creating a special commission to investigate the "abject breakdown at all levels" that led to the shooting deaths. Gun laws Scott announced the creation of what he called the "Violent Threat Restraining Order." He wants to ban bump stocks and, with exceptions for military and law enforcement, raise the minimum age to buy a gun to 21. Right now, people can buy an assault weapon when they turn 18. Other key points include: A violent or mentally ill person would be banned from purchasing or possessing a firearm or weapon when a family member, "community welfare expert" or law enforcement officer files a sworn request and presents evidence to a court of a violent threat. Restrictions would be tightened on buying and possessing guns by mentally ill people under the Baker Act. A person with an injunction against stalking, cyberstalking, dating violence, repeat violence, sexual violence, or domestic violence would be prohibited from possessing or buying a firearm. School safety The governor is calling for a law enforcement officer mandatory at every public school who are sworn sheriffs deputies or police officers, and they must be present during all hours students are on campus. He wants one law enforcement officer per 1,000 students. This must be implemented by the start of the 2018 school year. Other initiatives: Scott wants to budget $450 million for this plan. Active shooter training as outlined by the Department of Homeland Security would be mandatory. Funding would be increased for measures such as metal detectors, bullet-proof glass, steel doors and upgraded locks. There would also be so-called "threat assessment" teams involving teachers, principals and state child welfare staffers. The goal would be to identify students who show signs of mental instability. Mental health Scott wants to allocate $50 million in additional funding for mental health initiatives such as counseling, crisis management and other critical mental health services. Also: Sheriff's Offices will have a Department of Children and Familiies case manager embedded in their department to solely work as a crisis welfare worker for repeat cases. More grants would allow sheriffs to establish special teams to coordinate with DCF case managers. "We are all elected to come to Tallahassee to represent the best interests of Floridians," Scott said. "And today, there is nothing more important than to do all we can to make sure a horrific and evil act like the Parkland shooting never happens again." Reactions from lawmakers During a response from members of the state House and Senate, Corcoran added that making sure a mass shooting at a school never happens again was the top priority. "What we know is we have experienced an unthinkable tragedy," Corcoran said. "And so, our (government) job is to lead...the number one thing that we are here for and exist for is to protect our people and keep them safe." Among the differences between the state Legislature's plan and Scott's: The plan spelled out by Corcoran calls for a three-day waiting period to buy a gun. Also, school personnel -- including teachers -- could carry guns on campus if they've taken enough training that would qualify them to be a law-enforcement officer. The Legislature also would empanel a fact-finding commission focused on why Parkland was allowed to happen. A commission isn't part of Scott's plan. His administration has come under fire for closing its investigation into the gunman, Cruz, who had been flagged as a potential threat. "It's our goal as a legislature to make sure that our schools are as safe as they can be," said Republican Sen. Joe Negron of Stuart. But "they've completely ignored the major message of this week, which is that Floridians want a ban on assault weapons," Democratic Rep. Carlos Guillermo Smith of Orlando countered. Sen. Bill Nelson said more still needs to be done. "Instead of listening to students & parents, Gov. Scotts plan bows to the NRAs demands," the Democratic senator said. "It does not expand criminal background checks or ban assault rifles, such as the AR-15. Raising the age to 21 is the bare minimum. We need to get these assault rifles off our streets." Lawmakers plan to get started to pass a final gun violence prevention package next week. There are two weeks left in the 2018 legislative session. Reactions from community Gov. Scott made his case loud and clear to Floridians like George Munson, a gun safety instructor and former officer. He said he agrees with the governor after 17 lost in Parkland. I don't see any reason for children to lose their lives going to school, said George Munson, a former officer and gun safety instructor. He told Spectrum News 13 that Gov. Scott is calling for good changes to the books from banning bump stocks that are used to fire a weapon rapidly, to keeping the mentally ill away from guns, where families can obtain a restraining order to help. They shouldn't be able to get a gun at all and that should be allowed in their record to stop the purchase of firearms, Munson said. He also agreed with Gov. Scott's request to put a deputy and officers at every school across the state. Munson said anyone who will have a gun on campus will need some rigorous training. I hope it works out for the betterment of all and our entire society throughout the country, he said. Its just a matter of don't talk about it now, let's do it. As for raising the age to purchase a gun to 21, he said he agrees as long as it doesn't interfere with sports like hunting that teens normally participate in as he did as a kid. The Marjory Stoneman Douglas High school resource deputy on duty the day of the mass shooting took up a position outside but never went in to investigate, the Broward County Sheriff said Thursday. During a news conference, Sheriff Scott Israel said the school resource officer, Scot Peterson, chose to resign and retire following a recommendation that he be suspended without pay for his actions during the massacre. The Valentine's Day school shooting in Parkland, Florida left 17 students and teachers dead, the deadliest school shooting since Sandy Hook in December 2012. Israel said video shows that Peterson was armed, in uniform and on campus at the time of the shooting. He said Peterson is seen in the video driving up outside the building where the shooting was happening and taking up a position outside. However, he didn't enter the building to confront the shooter. "What I saw was a deputy arrive at the west side of Building 12, take up a position, and he never went in," Israel said. Israel also said Peterson stood outside the building during the incident for approximately four minutes. The Sheriff said the video hasn't been released, and "we may never disclose the video, depending the prosecution and the criminal case," Israel said. Despite Peterson's retirement, the internal investigation will continue. Nikolas Cruz, a former Douglas High student, is charged in the deaths. Officials from the Broward Sheriff's office to the FBI have said they had received tips and calls for service about Cruz in the past few years. For Immediate Release, February 22, 2018 Contacts: Rebecca August, Los Padres ForestWatch, (805) 617-4610 x 5 Kimberly Rivers, CFROG, Citizens for Responsible Oil & Gas, (805) 727-1393 Ileene Anderson, Center for Biological Diversity, (323) 490-0223, ianderson@biologicaldiversity.org Complaint: Ventura County Put Water Supply at Risk of Oilfield Contamination County Failed to Require Pipeline Shutdown Following Flood Warnings SANTA PAULA, Calif. Three conservation organizations filed a formal complaint today against the Ventura County Planning Division for failing to enforce its own requirement to safeguard municipal water supplies and downstream communities from oilfield failures during floods. The Ventura County Planning Division failed to issue a required shut-down order for the Santa Paula Canyon oilfield following flash flood warnings issued for the area last month. The complaint follows new warnings from the U.S. Forest Service of increased flooding risk over the next several years following Decembers Thomas Fire, which burned about 440 square miles, including parts of the Los Padres National Forest immediately adjacent to the oilfield. Were shocked and disappointed that Ventura County officials and the oil company failed to temporarily shut down this oilfield when the surrounding hills were barren from a recent wildfire and flash flooding was predicted, said Rebecca August, Los Padres ForestWatch public lands advocate. We hope the county takes our complaint seriously and uses an abundance of caution when rain is predicted in the area. The health of our environment and communities is at stake. In approving the permit in 2015, the Ventura County Board of Supervisors required the operator of the field, at that time California Resources Corp., to temporarily shut down its 200-foot oil pipeline across Santa Paula Creek when flood warnings are issued. The current operator, Carbon California, took over the field last year and failed to comply with this permit requirement. The creek is a municipal and agricultural water supply for Ventura County, as well as critical habitat for endangered southern steelhead. The company also is required to submit a report identifying any structural damage from flooding and corrective measures taken. These are among several conditions the board approved in response to public concerns about safety when it granted the permit in 2015. In a recent report, the Forest Service said areas burned by the Thomas Fire, including the Carbon California oil-and-gas field, are at high risk of increased flooding and debris flow until vegetation in the upper watershed is reestablished over the next decade. Modeling has estimated flows to increase 2.2 times that of normal flows, the Forest Service recently concluded in its Burned Area Emergency Response report summarizing the hydrologic conditions in the Thomas Fire burn area. Overall, Santa Paula Creek will likely experience a pronounced increase in sediment and higher peak flows. Houses, roads and other infrastructure in and near the creek are at increased risk and should be assessed in detail for post-fire risks. Todays complaint points out that Ventura County officials put public health and environmental safety at risk by failing to require Carbon California to follow basic safety procedures. The complaint also notes that the oil company failed to submit a required fire protection plan to the Ventura County Fire Protection Bureau. With no plan in place, it is unclear what actions the company took after the Thomas Fire burned through the facility on Dec. 7, 2017. In addition, the complaint points out that the oil company failed to submit an incident report to the Ventura County Planning Division following the fire and the storms that followed in January. Ventura County is responsible for protecting Santa Paula Creek and communities downstream from these oilfields, said Ileene Anderson, a biologist at the Center for Biological Diversity. The county needs to enforce its own safety requirements. Officials dropped the ball after the Thomas Fire by failing to initiate safety measures to protect people and wildlife in harms way. The evidence available with this complaint demonstrates gaps in enforcement of permit conditions when it comes to oil and gas activities in Ventura County, not all operators always comply. The public relies on the county to provide vigorous oversight, said Kimberly Rivers, executive director of Citizens For Responsible Oil & Gas. The Planning Division must do a better job of holding the oil industry accountable and enforcing the terms of their permits. What Does the Offshore Resistance Look Like? Check It Out. We've been blown away by the fierce resistance that's grown around Trump's plan to dramatically ramp up offshore drilling in the Arctic, the Gulf of Mexico, and off the West and East coasts. Thousands of people already rallied in California earlier this month, but there's still lots of work to be done. Upcoming hearings and protests include one on Friday in Washington, D.C., and another in Raleigh, N.C., on Monday. Check out the full list of hearings and protests and sign up to get involved. Also check out this piece in Medium that pulls together amazing photos from the offshore resistance movement in California. Dalmatian has recently been awarded the Protea Hotels by Marriott advertising account. The new account gain was the outcome of a hotly contested, three-way pitch and consolidates a particularly successful business acquisition phase for the agency. Commenting on the new business, Dalmatian Managing Director Gabrielle Weinstein says, It is a huge privilege to work on one of South Africas most loved brands and we are particularly motivated by the incredible communication opportunities that exist within the hospitality business. We look forward to creating work that demands attention and contributes to the positive growth of this iconic hotel group.Group marketing manager for Protea Hotels by Marriott and African Pride Hotels, Avukile Mabombo, comments, We are excited about the prospect of this new partnership. The creativity and novel approach that Dalmatian offers is bound to assist us to strengthen our brand to make us even more appealing to the new markets we seek to attract.The Protea Hotels by Marriott win adds to Dalmatians recent new business haul, which includes the likes of Boschendal and the Norval Foundation. Restaurant group Spur on Thursday reported lower first-half earnings, after attracting fewer feet through its doors. Andrey Armyagov via 123RF Revenue declined 0.9% to R344.6m in the six months to end-December, as franchise fee income declined due to lower restaurant sales.Total franchised restaurant sales from continuing operations across the local and international operations declined 2.6% to R3.7bn. Franchised restaurant sales in SA dropped 3.0%, with the company attributing the drop in sales to lower discretionary spending, which flowed from weak local economy.The company, which owns brands such as Spur Steak Ranches, Panarottis, Casa Bella and RocoMamas, said it also channelled fee concessions to assist franchisees deal with tough operating environment. This left headline earnings from continuing operations down 11.8% to R96.8m, from a year ago period.A net 22 outlets across all brands in SA were opened, bringing the local restaurant base to 550. A further six outlets were revamped and six relocated to better trading locations. For the remainder of the financial year, Spur plans to open at least 21 restaurants in SA, as well as 10 internationally.The company declared an interim dividend of 63c a share, which was down 11.3% from the year-earlier period. MILAN, Italy - Gucci kicked off Milan Fashion Week in typical eccentric style on Wednesday as models carried replicas of their own heads on a runway transformed into a creepy operating room. Kobby Dagan via 123RF Suspense had already been building for the show by Gucci's star creative director Alessandro Michele due to the invitations - orange timers which counted down to the event in glowing red numbers.The first shock came when it started on time - almost unprecedented in fashion history.Then male and female models walked onto a runway amid operating tables under bright neon lights in the Gucci Hub, the brand's Milan headquarters, over the steady beeping of a heart monitoring machine.Michele introduced the "Cyborg Gucci" in the Fall/Winter 2018-2019 collection, which included a wild mix of cultures and symbols, from a pagoda hat to a balaclava, a classic burgundy velvet dress to a gold lurex jacket, fine lace to the logo of the New York Yankees.The models added to the transgressive vibe - not only did some carry replicas of their own severed head, but others were adorned with a third eye, or even a baby dragon."What touches me is not just the talent but also the dose of humour and self-deprecation on the part of Alessandro Michele," said actress Chiara Mastroianni. "His collection is so rich it will take time to understand everything," she said.Another first day highlight was the launch of the exhibition "Italiana: Italy Through the Lens of Fashion 1971-2001" by the National Chamber for Italian Fashion.Donatella Versace, Giorgio Armani, Pierpaolo Piccioli, Silvia Venturini Fendi and Jean-Paul Gaultier were some of the stars attending at the Palazzo Reale.The exhibition was organised by theme - Identity, Democracy, Logomania, Diorama, Project Room, Bazaar, Post-Production, Glocal and The Italy of Objects - and included the clothes by fashion houses such as Missoni, Armani, Versace, Krizia, Romeo Gigli and Gianfranco Ferre."There is no nostalgic intention but rather pride and willingness to celebrate fashion and reproduce its complexity," said curator Maria-Luisa Frisa."Italian fashion is a creative laboratory that has generated worlds, defined strong individual characteristics... and continues to do so today," she added. KOLWEZI - In global markets the price of cobalt, a mineral used in batteries for high-tech products from iPhones to Tesla electric cars, has nearly tripled to $81,500 a tonne in two years. Photo: Phys.org But in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which produced two-thirds of the global supply of the coveted metal last year, artisanal diggers called "creuseurs" sell their best-quality ore for about $7,000 a tonne, blissfully unaware of how much the global price has rocketed.In Kolwezi, a mining town in southeastern DRC, Chinese entrepreneurs dominate the middle section of the market, purchasing the raw cobalt from miners and selling it on for refining.Transactions in the buying houses depend on the purity of the ore. There are approximately 30 major kinds of cobalt-bearing rock and over 100 more where the metal is present in smaller quantities.Handwritten signs at the buying houses in Kolwezi show the varying prices offered for a tonne: "3 percent = $500" and "15 percent = $7,000". The cobalt component is determined by a machine called "Metorex" which is used by the buyer."The buyers have increased prices since the start of the year by five percent," said a miner called David, who was unaware that cobalt prices on the world market have reached such stratospheric heights.The middlemen -- predominantly Chinese and some Indians -- then sell the raw material to operators for semi-processing.The big names in this part of the process are foreign-owned: China Molybdenum, Rangold, the Swiss firm Glencore and MMG, an Australian-Chinese venture, and the Indian-controlled Chemical of Africa.Only an initial treatment of the ore is possible in DRC at present. It results in an intermediary product composed mainly of hydroxide with a cobalt content of between 20 and 40 percent."The DRC does not export finished products that are ready to be used by Apple, Samsung and the other big battery users in the world," said economist and activist Florent Musha."It exports a mineral product which is in the process of being treated."Eighty percent of the country's production heads to China from the ports of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania and Cape Town in South Africa. In China, the metal is refined, by about a dozen companies.The largest producers include Jinchuan Nonferrous Metals Corp., Huayou Cobalt, Jiangsu Cobalt Nickel Metal and Shenzhen Green Eco-manufacture Hi-tech which each have annual refined cobalt production capacities of over 7,000 metric tonnes."The production of refined cobalt in China has grown 20 percent. At 62,000 tonnes, it accounts for 60 percent of global output," Darton Commodities said.But how much do the people of Congo benefit from the boom?"Today the world's biggest seller of cobalt is China," said Congolese economist Musha. "The product clearly does not benefit the Congolese economy."The cobalt sector has attracted widespread criticism from NGOs for use of child labour, hazardous working conditions, corruption and theft.Artisanal miners accounted for between 14 to 16 percent of the 80,800 tonnes of cobalt mined in the country last year, according to the London-based Darton Commodities, a specialist firm dealing in the metal.The DRC would like to refine its minerals but has run into problems, notably infrastructural glitches like erratic power supplies.There is some prospect of change.The government last year signalled its intention to reform its 2002 mining code, which was seen as favouring foreign investors at the expense of the local economy.It wants to ensure the repatriation of at least 40 percent of the revenue of minerals sold for export, and increase the fiscal take from "strategic minerals."At present, the state levies a tax of two percent on non-ferrous metals -- copper and cobalt -- which is based on the value of sales, from which some costs are deducted.The current draft of the revised plan -- now in the hands of President Joseph Kabila -- sees this rising to 10 percent.Shareholders in big mining corporations with interests in DRC have written to Kabila to express their concern, hoping that this version of the law will be revised, according to industry sources in Kinshasa. Urbanisation has been a well-established trend in the 20th and 21st centuries. However, depopulation and deurbanisation in some countries and numerous cities are becoming serious problems for which no good solutions exist at present. Reasons of shrinking cities Lessons from China Infrastructure and shrinking cities People have steadily moved from rural to urban areas to improve their standard of living as well as quality of life. In 1950, 30% of world population was urban. A century later, 66% of people are expected to live in urban areas. In terms of absolute number, difference is stark. In 1950, 746 million people lived in urban areas. By 2046, it is estimated to be over 6 billion Not surprisingly, the global attention has focused on this rapid century-long urbanisation processes and their social, economic and environmental implications. In contrast, deurbanisation receives limited attention. If one searches deurbanisation in Google, the response is Did you mean: urbanisation?Deurbanisation happens for three main reasons. First, when fertility rate of a country dips below 2.1, its total population starts to decline and so does its urban population. Fertility rates in South Korea are now 1.17 and in Japan 1.44. Without immigration, a fertility rate of 2.1 is needed to have a stable population. If current trends continue, Japans population is expected to decline from 126.5 million at present to 88 million in 2065, 51 million by 2115, and to zero by around 3000 Second, in many cities, jobs in different sectors like manufacturing and mining are disappearing. Between 1950 and 2010, many American cities lost population : St Louis (62.7%), Cleveland (56.6%), Pittsburgh (54.8%) and Cincinnati (41.1%).Third, some cities have lost population due to resource depletion or technological changes. Yichun, a city in north-east China, close to the Russian border, was transformed from a sleepy to a bustling town due to unsustainable logging . Later during 2012-2016, Yichun lost 12% of population after its natural resources depleted.Chinas voracious appetite for natural resources to fuel its unprecedented continuous economic growth over the past three decades has meant that some 500 billion tonnes of resources, ranging from coal and iron ore to gold, have to be mined every year. Resource exhaustion and environmental degradation have contributed to rapid depopulation in many urban centres.Chinas National Development and Reform Commission has reported that 50 of Chinas 390 mining towns have already exhausted their resources that can be economically extracted. This has left three million people jobless, affecting an additional 10 million people.The Commission has given 44 cities the official status of being resource depleted. These cities are receiving Central Government funding to rejuvenate and restructure their economies by increasing employment opportunities and improving environmental conditions. More cities will earn this distinction unless natural resources management and environmental protection policies measures are formulated over a long-term basis.Technological development and economic considerations can also contribute to deurbanisation. For example, Khulna, Bangladeshs third largest city grew 20-fold between 1950 and 2000. Then as the jute industry declined, it lost more than 150,000 people (11% of the population) during 2001-2011.Throughout history, as population increased and urbanisation took place, all types of infrastructure for water, energy and transportation had to be built to meet the steadily expanding needs. All societies have had centuries of experience on how to expand infrastructural requirements. Considerable expertise and technology were developed to meet these advancing needs.What we are facing now is a different type of problem thats becoming increasingly familiar in both developed and developing countries. How can shrinking cities downsize the existing infrastructure that has already been built as well as to find a usable financial model for operating and maintaining them?Take Leipzig, Germany. During the post-1990 period, numerous buildings were renovated, water-efficient toilets and showers were installed and piped water and waste water facilities were increased by 50% . Consequently, leak detection and repair received priority, and water tariffs were increased to finance the necessary infrastructure expansion and modernisation. All these contributed to major changes in peoples perceptions of the importance of water conservation.The system which was initially designed to provide 200 litres of clean water per person per day dropped to only 92 litres. Fewer users, increased efficiency and less water demand by industries dramatically reduced water demands from 700,000 m3 to only 165,000 m3/day . This meant Leipzig now has a water demand of mid-1940s but a supply network which is significantly above what is needed.This has created new types of challenges. Lower demand means water stays in the pipes for longer periods increasing the risk for bacterial growth and microbial contamination, and thus health problems. Lower water use means lower waste water generation. This contributes to sedimentation in sewer pipes because low flow velocities. Thus, clean water has to be used to flush the sewer system periodically for proper maintenance.Leipzigs water utility is facing higher operation and maintenance costs, and also higher long-term investment costs for restructuring the water system, with a declining consumption and revenue.Another problem is that the unexpected but serious financial pressure is forcing the utility to focus on possible technical fixes due to lower domestic and industrial water use. This means lower priority to proper operation and maintenance practices will negatively impact long-term sustainability of the utility.In countries like Japan and South Korea and numerous cities are currently facing similar problems in downsizing their current infrastructure availability to meet reduced demands from their citizens and industries. Prosperous cities like Singapore now has to consolidate schools since the number of students have declined. All the resource depleted cities of China will have to consider how best to balance their infrastructure with decreased demands.This is an issue that needs urgent attention from policy makers and researchers, especially in countries and cities where deurbanisation have become a more serious problem compared to urbanisation. While urbanisation is a very important consideration which all developing countries need to manage urbanisation efficiently, a significant number of cities in these countries are witnessing depopulation, and finding they have constructed more infrastructure than they need and can manage.This is an issue that both policymakers and academics have not given enough attention in the past. Within the next decade we have to find cost-effective solutions. It will not be an easy task but appropriate solutions must be found which must be sustainable in operational and financial terms. The Vumelana Advisory Fund (Vumelana) - which supports the establishment of commercially viable partnerships between investors and beneficiaries of the land reform programme to create jobs, income and skills and demonstrate the value of community private partnerships (CPPs) as a contributor to successful land reform - has signed an agreement with the Kokame Communal Property Association (CPA) with the aim to support the community in identifying potential investors to work with them to make their land productive. Kokame CPA together with the Vumelana Advisory Fund and Croftland Business Development Giving serious attention to what happens after land has been transferred The private sector has to come to the party The CPA successfully acquired its land through the land restitution process in 2010 and has been attempting to source funding to support its growth and development. As with many CPAs, this has been difficult. Vumelana has appointed Croftland Business Development Services (Croftland BDS) to act as the transaction advisor to the CPA to facilitate the processAn opportunity was identified to link the CPAs property to Madikwe Game Reserve, one of the countrys exclusive Big Five reserves. Since then, ongoing talks and engagement have been taking place with the North West Parks Board, who fully supports the partnership and proposed initiative.Titus Seloro, deputy chairperson of the Kokame CPA, says: Since our claim was settled in 2010, we have not received any funding from the government. We were stuck, but with this arrangement between the CPA, Vumelana and Croftland we are hopeful of a bright future for our people and for job creation in our community. We trust that this will change our lives for the better.Mazwi Mkhulisi, programmes manager at Vumelana, explains: The community-private partnership model has been key in contributing towards pockets of success in a number of projects in which Vumelana has been involved.While it is true that the pace of land reform could be improved, serious attention ought to be given to what happens after land has been transferred to beneficiaries. Productive use of restored land will make South Africas land reform process a success. Vumelanas support for CPPs presents one of a range of possible solutions towards successful land reform, continues Mkhulisi.According to Tim Damons, CEO of Croftland BDS, land reform beneficiaries often look to the government to fund the development on their transferred land, but as we all know, state resources are limited. The private sector has to come to the party and this is where Vumelana steps in as an important enabler.When a viable project is identified, Vumelana makes use of one of their transaction advisors to take the project from concept stage all the way through to partnership agreements for the implementation of commercial ventures. We agree on the developmental concept with the community, package it and take it to market to find a suitable investor, explains Damons.We see real value in community-public-private partnerships like these and we believe that this approach will definitely lead to the upliftment of communities across South Africa. It alleviates some of the burden placed on government, who is a major contributor to socio-economic development, by finding innovative ways to build a better, brighter future for our people with the help and support of the private sector. This is how we build South Africa, adds Damons. Signature Lux Hotels has been acquired by Onomo Hotels. The Onomo Hotel Group has 10 hotels across eight African countries with a focus primarily on the business traveller - offering its clientele a unique, affordable guest experience - combining contemporary comfort and the art of African living. The group, which prides itself on its state-of-the-art security and connectivity, is present in business capitals such as Dakar, Abidjan, Libreville, Bamako, Lome, Cape Town, Johannesburg, Durban, Conakry and Kigali.It is this obsession with client service that has made the acquisition of Signature Lux Hotels a natural fit for the mid-scale specialist Onomo. Once Signature Lux Hotels was on our radar, we knew they had the right formula and product offering to take over the mid-scale hotel industry. They are ahead of their years in offering self-service check-in and technological add-ons that attract not only millennials but the traveller seeking convenience at an affordable price. They are a great addition to the Onomo portfolio and complement our current brand strategy, says Cedric Guilleminot, Onomo CEO.Regional operational director of South and East Africa, Samantha Annandale adds: With so many international companies exiting Africa and investment leaving our shores, it is encouraging to see that our group has a fully focussed African strategy. We have exceptional confidence in Africa, especially in the hospitality space and with our strong development pipeline we aim to become one of the leading hotel chains in Africa, for Africa.Signature Lux will now be known as Signature Lux by Onomo Hotels. Complementing its daily non-stop flights to Johannesburg, Cathay Pacific is set to launch a seasonal non-stop service to Cape Town - three-times-weekly from 13 November 2018 to 18 February 2019 - directly linking Hong Kong and the Mother City for the first time. Opportunity to unlock massive tourism potential from the East Cathay Pacific chief executive officer, Rupert Hogg said: We are very pleased to be able to expand our services in Africa, a booming aviation market. Growing our reach to destinations that are not otherwise served from Hong Kong creates considerable new opportunities for business, trade and tourism, in addition to strengthening our home hub.Hogg added that the new service will meet customer demand for travel to the scenic Western Cape throughout the southern hemispheres peak summer months, as well as provide an additional option for South African-based travellers looking to fly on Cathay Pacific to Asia and beyond via Hong Kong.The Cathay Pacific group has expanded its network significantly in recent times. In 2017, services to Tel Aviv, Barcelona and Christchurch were launched, while this January saw the inaugural service to Nanning. Other regional and international routes to commence in 2018 include Jinan and Brussels (March), Copenhagen (May), Dublin (June) and Washington DC (September).Western Cape minister of economic opportunities, Alan Winde said: We are thrilled that Cathay Pacific is launching a direct flight to Cape Town. This will allow us to unlock massive tourism potential from the East, a market which is already very important to us.CEO of Wesgro, Tim Harris echoed this sentiment and added: This vote of confidence will help boost growth, help us land even more investment, and create additional jobs for the people of the Cape. We look forward to welcoming the first flight, and our team will work closely with the airline to help make the route a success. The moment designer Lonny van Ryswyck took her shoes off on the Design Indaba stage, she opened many eyes to see the same thing in a different way. Isn't that what design is really about? Lonny van Ryswyck and Nadine Sterk I learned that that theres a moment for everything. First we have to seed, then we have to grow and develop and then we can harvest. In our society, we want results immediately, but we believed that we needed time to develop this project. Every grain of sand had a story to tell, and you have many different sands, like limestone sands, organic sands, big sands, and we are amazed that the industry is only using white sands to produce all the glass all over the world. We are over-mining, we are exhausting these mines, so there will be a point at which we wont have these sands anymore. In one way, we have access to a lot and on the other hand we have scarcity, and I think that if we can find that balance, then this is a way towards change. It soon made sense. She loves to stand in the dirt, she said, and remembers a time in 2003 when she was dancing on clay, pressing out the air bubbles, and in the morning, travelling by horse wagon to collect the clay. I was working with local artisans in Peru and I saw the whole process from digging the clay to making the vase, and this was a really beautiful moment because I had the feeling I was seeing clay for the first time. I had bought it in the shop to make things, but this time it was really different because I could feel its structure and it made me really happy.After graduating from Design Academy Eindhoven, Van Ryswyck and Nadine Sterk, who have since partnered to establish Atelier NL, went to Brazil together to work in the slums. They noticed that the locals were collecting plastic bottles and so they found a way to use them in their work. Working in a woodwork shop, they were able to use them to make wooden vases that could contain water. Thats when they realised they made a good team. I was mobilising all the people to collaborate and bring the bottles to the workplace and she was figuring out how to make a vase.On their return, their teacher advised them to stay in Holland and they thought they would explore for themselves what the land has to offer. So they decided to go digging for clay. In the beginning I didnt really know how to find clay, to the point that we became experts and I fell in love with the land again. When they opened the kiln, they discovered that the clays they had found had beautiful colours, from a dark brown to iron red and chalk yellow, unique to the place that the clay came from.After graduating, they were invited to do a project in the Noordoostpolder region. So they went out to meet the farmers, and although they had planned to be there for six weeks, they ended up staying for two years, digging clay, riding on tractors, seeing the crops grow...They also worked with Australian photographer Paul Scala who took portraits of the farmers . For us it was important to give a face to this clay, because polder clay was anonymous at the time, but when you have the farmers picture, one who works the land and knows everything about the land, the earth gets an identity If you say, 'this bucket of clay is from farmer Ben and he is growing leeks', and another bucket is from farmer Johnson and he is growing potatoes, all of a sudden, these buckets of clay have a value.Back at the studio, they transferred the clay from the region onto a map. They made 2,000 tiles and each one provided visual information of the soil and allowed them to understand what makes them unique.From this clay, they produced 'Polderceramics', which were exhibited all over the world. This collection marked a harvest time for Atelier NL, and they felt the need to thank the farmers, so they organised a meal and asked all the farmers to bring earth to the table. It was a beautiful day, the sun was shining and we brought the plates made from earth, and one of farmers came to me and said, I have to say something to you. Im very happy with your project. It makes me very proud of my land and it has only been 40 years, but I feel like I have a history. He said, When you first entered my field, I thought, gosh, you cannot make anything out of clay for ceramics out of my field, Im harvesting potatoes, but if my harvest is ruined, I can always harvest ceramic. That was such a big compliment because thats what we as designers can do, we can help people who are looking at the same fields every day, look at them in a different way.They began producing more of these ceramics in their factory that had previously been a church. Renting the space at the time, about two years ago they were told that they would need to leave as the owners had other plans, but as they had built their community there, they refused to leave and went out to their neighbours who believed in their work for support. So they put a portfolio together and went to the bank to apply for a mortgage. Rejected, on a rainy day with their feet quite literally in the mud, they picked up their chins and said, "OK, we dont have any money, but we do have buckets of clay in our basement and a whole community behind us. So they went back and asked their neighbours to help them fundraise by making small tiles, and in three weeks they made 3,000 tiles from different places in Europe to sell. Its really crazy to tell you that in one week we raised 80,000 and we went back to the bank with a suitcase full of dirt and we showed the social value of this place and they gave us a mortgage.Van Ryswyck and Sterk have actually followed the Roman trade, understanding the different minerals and sizes and where they come from.So, they started exploring their own recipes to make glass from wild sands. They had to buy their own kiln and did over 2,000 tests, which revealed different colours and materials. For us, its really important to document our work, so when we go somewhere, we not only collect sand, but also the stones and the twigs and the shells. It took some time, but they eventually found a recipe that worked. From every vessel, theyve stamped the location of where it comes from. This one is from the north of HollandTheir latest project is called To see the world in a grain of sand. They wanted to share their fascination and had the opportunity to do so as ambassadors of last years Dutch Design Week, by asking delegates to send their sand to them. We didnt know how it would work, but since August, people were sending their sand, their stories and pictures, and in the end over 400 people collaborated and sent us sands. But what I think is really beautiful is that once people fill their bottles of sand, they contain memory, they become a celebration and they understand the value of our work with sand. Bringing this project to South Africa, they actually created this years Design Indaba speaker gifts from sand taken from Theewaterskloof Dam in light of the water crisis in Cape Town.Sometimes people ask, 'cant we just send the sand to you? Why cant we just take sand from the beach and send it?' The answer is that because sand is a very valuable material, without sand we would not have buildings, glass or smartphones . And that brings us to Michael Welland, author of, who taught the duo a lot about the importance of sand.Together with Welland (who actually died a week before), they organised a symposium called 'The Abundance and Scarcity of Sand' in October last year.On her visit to South Africa for the Design Indaba Festival, Van Ryswyck went to Camps Bay and, of course, filled her hands with sand. When I take sand in my hand, I always wonder where it comes from, brought by rivers and sea, and just like grains of sand, we all came here together, we all have our own backgrounds and rivers and if we understand our qualities, together we can make beautiful colours. Hyprop Investments has continued its offshore push by acquiring an interest in two shopping centres in Croatia. Hyprop and its partner PDI Investment Holdings co-own Hystead, which announced it had acquired a 90% interest in City Centre one West and City Centre one East in the capital Zagreb.The purchase consideration net of 154.4m asset-based finance is 129.1m of which Hyprops effective share is approximately 77.5m or R1.12bn. The transaction is conditional on approval by the Croatian competition authority and is expected to close at the end of March 2018.Hyprops south-eastern Europe strategy is to acquire dominant shopping centres through Hystead. Hyprop has a 60% interest in Hystead and PDI a company associated with Louis Norval a non-executive director of Hyprop holds the remaining 40%. After the completion of this transaction Hystead will own six shopping centres in five countries with a gross asset value exceeding 740m.Hyprop wants to secure a separate listing of Hystead on the Euro MTF market of the Luxembourg Stock Exchange and on the main board of the JSE within the next six months.The other 10% would be retained by WKB 3 an Austrian-based company that developed and has been the property and asset manager of the two shopping centres through their operating company CC Real.Hyprop CEO Pieter Prinsloo said the deal was positive for Hyprop shareholders. The shopping centres were acquired at a combined property yield of approximately 7%. Asset-based funding with a loan-to-value of 55% has been secured on a five-year term and a bridge loan facility for the purchase consideration payable by Hystead has been secured until the listing occurs.City Centre one West has potential to add 13600m gross leasable area (GLA); City Centre one East has an additional 10000m GLA.Croatias economy is supported by a strong tourism sector rising real wages and improving regional trade according to Prinsloo. This is Hysteads second entry into an EU country following our acquisition in Bulgaria last year and further enhances the overall quality and profile of the Hystead portfolio.After the completion of the transaction Hystead would own six properties in south-Eastern the other four being Delta City Podgorica in Montenegro; Delta City in Belgrade Serbia; Skopje City Mall in Macedonia; and The Mall in Sofia Bulgaria. For Egyptian fashion designer Amna Elshandaweely, the Arab Spring uprising in Egypt in 2011, changed her life as she left the corporate world for fashion, becoming a social activist in the process and changing her life and the lives of those influenced by her activism. Amna Elshandaweely Amna Elshandaweely's latest fashion collection launched at Design Indaba 2018 in Cape Town, South Africa. She also showcased her unique talent in fashion at Design Indaba Day Two, unveiling her latest collection on the Artscape stage to enthusiastic applause at the close of her speech. The opening was just as dramatic, showing images of her first collection of eclectic designs, draped over models hung with traditional beads, heavy fabrics interwoven with brilliant colour and patterns, and posed against the stark background of dilapidated cityscapes, ruins and dark alleyways.Her work is dramatic, patterned, earthy, street wear with a unique interpretation, with gorgeous use of colour and patterned indigenous fabrics.It portrays women as strong, empowered, which is very different from some indigenous tribes she encountered in Egypt, where women are kept indoors from a young age to work on embroidering their wedding clothes for when they get married off in the mid-teens.According to her official bio on the Design Indaba website, the fashion designer combines ethics and aesthetics to create unique, trendy collections and, above and beyond the aesthetics, Elshandaweelys clothing collections unpack issues of identity. Specifically within issues such as Middle Eastern-African identity and colourism.She is influenced by these dichotomies in the land of her birth, such as how women across Africa are treated; as well as how dark skin in Egypt is often reviled and discriminated against, yet celebrated and adorned in places like Kenya, which she visited for a different perspective.Having a darker skin and curly hair herself, Elshandaweelys first act of defiance and in celebration of darker African skin, she used only dark-skinned models in her first collection, which was lauded for its bravery.In Kenya I saw women embracing their hair and darker skin colour. I just wanted to take that back to my country. To let people who are insecure about their skin colour and hair type know that there are other people who love their dark skin.She said she didnt realise she could have such an influence on how people perceived themselves and was overjoyed at the reaction, which opened up conversations in Egypt about race and identity. I got lots of comments on how Im affecting peoples lives. I was just a young girl of 22 years... and I realised I could influence people.Her second collection was sold out and she was chosen as one of the most successful entrepreneurs in her country.She is influenced in her collections by current social issues and how people are interacting with one another. She wants to break down stereotypes that exist, like her collection featuring young people in a park, in the hope that older generations would be more accepting of the vibrancy of the youth in a more modern Egypt today.Without the revolution, I wouldnt be standing here in front of you. Back then I worked in corporate. I felt there was proper change happening around me and there were a lot of people aiming for change.She launched her latest collect at Design Indaba with graffiti artists from Africa. I wanted to remind people there is hope. Does revolution really affect people? Im just doing it.Through art, we are the people who can change the world. That is why I am standing here. WASHINGTON (AFP): Elon Musk's Space-X sent a Spanish military satellite into orbit on Thursday in a hitch-less liftoff from California, extending the private space company's record of successful launches. Space-X, which proved the utility of its massive Falcon Heavy rocket earlier this month, put up the Paz imaging satellite and two of the company's own test internet communications satellites on a smaller Falcon 9 rocket. "Successful deployment of PAZ satellite to low-Earth orbit confirmed," Space-X said about nine minutes after liftoff at 6:17 AM (local time) from Vandenberg Air Force Base on the central California coast. The Paz satellite, from the Spanish government-controlled Hisdesat satellite operator, was sent into a low-earth orbit vertically circling the north and south poles, giving it a constant sunlit view of the earth's surface below. The launch took place a day later than planned; liftoff was scrubbed Wednesday due to high winds in the upper atmosphere. Besides the Paz satellite, the rocket carried two dummy satellites representing Musk's plan to place a thousands of low-cost satellites in orbit to provide global broadband internet service, including to poorly served low-income countries. In today's launch, Space-X did not attempt to land the first stage of the rocket on a sea-anchored barge as it had with the February 7 Falcon Heavy launch. Instead it tested the ability to catch the falling nose cone from the rocket on a small ship mounted with a massive trampoline like those set up as safety nets under circus aerialists. The faring was to descend with a guided para-foil to slow its speed and carry it into the ship. For help reaching an expert on deadline , please contact UB's media relations team at 716-645-6969 or ub-news@buffalo.edu . Noemi Waight AREAS OF EXPERTISE: Noemi Waights research centers on the use of technology in K-12 science teaching. She studies how tools such as computer-based models, databases and bioinformatics tools are adopted and used by schools. Her work is in-depth, documenting the full cycle from design and development of new tools to actual implementation and enactment in science classrooms. Her research helps to elucidate the Nature of Technology as it pertains to K-12 science education, empirically examining the factors and conditions that impact the adoption of technology in STEM education. Waights work has also evolved to examine the role of school leadership in STEM implementation, and the role of computer science to facilitate scientific understanding. This line of teaching and research interests includes the study of science education and leadership in international contexts, specifically Belize and Japan. UB to use $100,000 grant for student emergency assistance These emergency funds will undoubtedly help many students see their degrees through and keep them on the path to a successful future. BUFFALO, N.Y. The University at Buffalo will enhance its efforts to ensure that students experiencing unforeseen financial hardships are able to stay on track toward graduation, thanks to a new grant. UB has received $100,000 from the Gerstner Family Foundation and the Heckscher Foundation for Children to boost the universitys student emergency fund program. The grant is part of more than $600,000 that the two foundations awarded the State University of New York and SUNY Impact Foundation in December. One of seven SUNY campuses to receive funding, UB will award grants to eligible students experiencing unforeseen hardships that could impact their ability to stay in school. We are honored to receive these funds to better serve the needs of our students, says A. Scott Weber, vice president for student life. These emergency funds will undoubtedly help many students see their degrees through and keep them on the path to a successful future. Students who leave college do so because they are overextended and overwhelmed, many times because they experience financial hardship while managing the countless stressors of being a student, says Benjamin Fabian, assistant director in the department of student conduct and advocacy. Nationwide, Fabian notes that while 65 percent of students who drop out plan to return to school, ultimately only 38 percent do. Emergency financial assistance for students when they experience a crisis or some kind of unanticipated hardship can be the saving grace that keeps them connected to the university so that they can complete their degree, he says. The emergency funds will help offset such short-term financial needs as rent, utilities, transportation and food. Qualifying emergency situations include a death in the family, being a victim of a crime or accident, loss of property or income, or unanticipated educational expenses. The Gerstner and Heckscher Student Emergency Fund is now the second program UB offers for emergency student assistance. The Office of the Vice President for Student Life sets aside $15,000 annually to students in need through the UB Student Life Emergency Gift Fund, which is supported by gifts from the UB Fund for Student Life and the Random Acts of Kindness Fund. During the past academic year, only a third of requests for emergency assistance could be funded, says Colleen Connolly, associate director in the department of student conduct and advocacy. These emergency grants not only keep students in school, but are more likely to help motivate graduates to become engaged alumni, Connolly adds. The generous donation from the family foundations provides UB the opportunity to drastically enhance the emergency fund program that Student Life has managed for nearly 20 years, Weber says. Undergraduate students will directly benefit from the Gerstner and Heckscher Student Emergency Fund, while the UB Student Life Emergency Gift Fund can be more readily available to other members of our community, like graduate students. Adds Elizabeth Lidano, director of the department of student condcut and advocacy: Our emergency fund program has been sustained over many years by the generous support of all parts of the UB community: faculty, staff, parents, students and alumni. We are thankful to be able to add the Gerstner and Heckscher families to this group. Students in financial need can visit the Student Life Gateway for eligibility requirements for both funds and to fill out an application. UB faculty and staff can support the student emergency fund program by making a donation on the Giving to UB website. They were created in a short time for all time. Each one of them, in its beauty, was even then and at once antique, but in the freshness of its vigor it is, even to the present day, recent and newly wrought. Thus Plutarch described the buildings on the Acropolis as a showcase of Periclean Athens. Although he was writing half a millennium after the Parthenon was built, he touched on the essence of its enduring appeal. Few complexes have cast a greater spell on later generations and even fewer boast such a strange afterlife, its component parts dismembered and divided ... After a successful pilot, Coca-Cola has decided to expand its frozen fruit dessert offering in major metros. This is part of the company's strategy to build a portfolio beyond carbonated drinks. Coca-Cola India president T Krishnakumar said that the company planned to take the offering to the top five metros by this summer. The company has been testing this product in Bengaluru. Similarly, the company is also planning to come out with a few value-added dairy-related products, which are more ready-to-drink beverages, by the second half of 2018. Though the product would come out ... Dear Reader, Business Standard has always strived hard to provide up-to-date information and commentary on developments that are of interest to you and have wider political and economic implications for the country and the world. Your encouragement and constant feedback on how to improve our offering have only made our resolve and commitment to these ideals stronger. Even during these difficult times arising out of Covid-19, we continue to remain committed to keeping you informed and updated with credible news, authoritative views and incisive commentary on topical issues of relevance. We, however, have a request. As we battle the economic impact of the pandemic, we need your support even more, so that we can continue to offer you more quality content. Our subscription model has seen an encouraging response from many of you, who have subscribed to our online content. More subscription to our online content can only help us achieve the goals of offering you even better and more relevant content. We believe in free, fair and credible journalism. Your support through more subscriptions can help us practise the journalism to which we are committed. Support quality journalism and subscribe to Business Standard. Digital Editor Canada's spy agency had been warned about the repercussions of convicted Khalistani terrorist attending events with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on his tour to India, Canadian media reported on Friday. Trudeau's first bilateral visit to India was hit by a controversy over the dinner invitation to Atwal by the Canadian High Commissioner in New Delhi. Atwal had been convicted of shooting at visiting Punjab cabinet minister Malkiat Singh Sidhu on Vancouver Island in 1986. High Commissioner Nadir Patel cancelled Atwal's invite for the dinner, hosted last night for Trudeau, while the ministry of external affairs (MEA) said it will "ascertain" how Atwal entered India. The informant, who asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation, confirmed speaking to an agent from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) on February 17, hoping to alert the Canadian government to Atwal's criminal history. The person said to the CSIS agent that "this is an embarrassment for the prime minister and CSIS should send a note to the prime minister's office. And they sent a note". CSIS did not respond to requests for comment, Postmedia reported. A separate source told Postmedia that some members of the Punjabi-language media in Surrey sent news reports about Atwal's history to the Canadian High Commission in New Delhi on February 20. The source said it was widely known that Atwal, a former member of the terrorist International Sikh Youth Federation, was going to India to attend some of the events with Prime Minister Trudeau and the Canadian delegation. Despite the warnings, Atwal attended a reception on February 21 in Mumbai where he was photographed with Trudeau's wife Sophie Gregoire and Infrastructure Minister Amarjeet Sohi. The outcome has embarrassed Trudeau, who had made efforts in India to insist Canada is not soft on Sikh separatism and believes in a united India, the Vancouver Sun said. Atwal was also once accused of assaulting Indian-origin former British Columbia premier Ujjal Dosanjh. Dosanjh said the Canadian government demonstrated a lack of concern by inviting the man convicted of attempted murder in another case. Dosanjh, also a one-time federal Liberal cabinet minister, says he was taken aback when he found out that Atwal was invited to a dinner reception with the prime minister after attending another event with the Trudeau family earlier this week, the Globe and Mail reported. He said Atwal attacked him with an iron bar in 1985 over his opposition to Sikh extremism. The assault left Dosanjh with 80 stitches and a broken hand, but Atwal was acquitted of the crime. "It left me speechless about the lack of preparation or the depth of unpreparedness with which Mr Trudeau's trip went through," he said. A Delhi court on Friday granted the CBI's plea for one-day transit remand for Rotomac owner Vikram Kothari and his son Rahul to produce them before a Lucknow court in connection with a Rs 36.95 billion loan default case. The duo was produced before Additional Chief Metropolitan Magistrate Samar Vishal and the agency sought two-day transit remand from the court to take them to Lucknow. The court allowed a day's transit remand for both the accused, who were arrested yesterday for alleged default on loan repayment. A consortium of seven banks had extended loans worth Rs 29.19 billion to Rotomac Global Pvt Limited 2008 onwards, according to a CBI FIR. The amount swelled to Rs 36.95 billion, including the accrued interest, because of repeated defaults on payment, the agency has claimed. The CBI initiated the action on the complaint of Bank of Baroda, a member of the consortium led by Bank of India, which had approached the agency fearing that Kothari may flee the country like Nirav Modi and his uncle Mehul Choksi. The principal exposure of the banks regarding the loan is Bank of India Rs 7.54 billion, Bank of Baroda Rs 4.5 billion, Overseas Bank of India Rs 7.7 billion, Union Bank of India Rs 4.58 billion, Allahabad Bank Rs 3.30 billion, Bank of Maharashtra 498 million and Oriental Bank of Commerce Rs 974 million, the agency has said. The CBI had filed the case against Vikram, his wife Sadhana and Rahul, and unidentified bank officials. Citing a recent study by the Pharmaceutical Price Authority (NPAA), a few health groups on Thursday alleged that unethical practices of private hospitals are an outcome of the "regulatory vacuum" that allows them to monetise the vulnerability of patients. "The NPAA study that analysed patient bills from four prominent private hospitals is the newest evidence of overcharging and exploitation of patients," a joint statement released by the groups said. Gopendra Singh Parmar, father of Sourya Pratap who was treated for dengue at a private hospital in Gurgaon, claimed that more than 45 per cent of his bill of Rs 16 lakh was for medicines and consumables, on which the hospital appears to have taken huge margins. "The government must frame rules to contain the rates charged by hospitals to make them affordable. Otherwise, families will continue to be forced to sell their assets, beg and borrow in their desperation to treat their loved ones, just as in my case," he said. Non-scheduled drugs and diagnostic services constituted major components of charges billed to patients in the four private hospitals with margins as high as 1,192 per cent, the drug pricing regulator had said recently. For consumables such as three-way stop cock, BI valve, GS-3040, the margins were even higher. The purchase price of the device for the hospital was Rs 5.77 and a 1,737 per cent margin on procurement price was charged, the NPPA had said. With regards to existing regulation to control the prices of essential medicines through the Drug Prices Control Order 2013, Mira Shiva, co-convener of the All India Drug Action Network (AIDAN) pointed out several deficiencies. "Hospitals are easily able to use this to their advantage by choosing to prescribe more expensive medicines... AIDAN has consistently advocated for expansion of the scope of the DPCO to cover all essential and life-saving medicines and to reinstate a method of cost-based pricing that provides reasonable profits to companies," she said. There is a grave problem of absence of regulation of the rates of diagnostics because of which, according to surveys, diagnostics account for an increasing share of out-of-pocket expenditure in both in-patient and out-patient care, said, Dinesh Abrol, Working Group on Patent Laws. "The problem is being compounded in large private hospitals because they prey on patients by charging higher than market rates as well as adding on convenience fees," he said. The health groups claimed that "unethical practices of private hospitals are a direct outcome of regulatory vacuum, which allows them to monetise the vulnerability of patients". India and Canada today resolved to work together to neutralise the threats emanating from Sikh militant outfits Babbar Khalsa International and the International Sikh Youth Federation along with LeT and Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammed. This was announced in the 'Framework for Cooperation between India and Canada on Countering Terrorism and Violent Extremism' document, released after extensive talks between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Canadian counterpart Justin Trudeau. The document, which was finalised by India's Security Advisor and Security and Intelligence Advisor of Canada, also said that any acts of terrorism are criminal and unjustifiable regardless of their motivations, whenever, wherever and by whomsoever they are committed. "They recognised the urgent imperative to disrupt recruitment, terrorist movements and the flow of Foreign Terrorist Fighters, address the threat posed by cross-border and state-sponsored terrorism, stop sources of terrorist financing, dismantle terrorist infrastructure and prevent supply of arms to terrorists and counter violent extremism and radicalisation to violence," the document said. The top security officials of the two countries also emphasised the need to deny operating space to terrorist and violent extremist groups. "They committed to work together to neutralise the threats emanating from terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda, ISIS, the Haqqani Network, LeT, JeM, Babbar Khalsa International, and the International Sikh Youth Federation," it said. While Babbar Khalsa International, or better known as Babbar Khalsa, is a Sikh militant organisation now based in Lahore, Pakistan, and reportedly operates in Canada, Germany, the UK and some parts of India, the International Sikh Youth Federation is a proscribed organisation that aims to establish an independent homeland for the Sikhs of India in Khalistan. As multi-cultural, diverse, pluralistic societies, committed to democratic principles, human rights and the rule of law, India and Canada recognise the grave challenges posed by terrorism, violent extremism and radicalisation, it said. The two sides reaffirmed the shared resolve to combat terrorism and violent extremism in all their forms and manifestations. The security officials reviewed the ongoing collaboration between the law enforcement and security agencies of both countries and resolved to step up their bilateral cooperation under the supervision of the Security Advisors Dialogue, the Joint Working Group on Counter-terrorism and the Experts' Sub-Group. To this end, they committed to further develop exchanges and facilitate effective cooperation in the fields of security, finance, justice, and law enforcement, including, where appropriate, at the operational level. "India and Canada have agreed on this Framework for Cooperation on Countering Terrorism and Violent Extremism (the "Framework), the objective of which is to facilitate effective cooperation between law enforcement and security agencies and legal and policy practitioners," the document said. The framework is based on fundamental respect for the sovereignty, unity and territorial integrity of India and Canada. The framework consists of institutionalised cooperation between India's National Security Council and the office of Canadas National Security and Intelligence Advisor, and regular exchanges and coordination between India and Canada. It will be guided by the joint National Security Advisors Dialogue. The National Security Advisor of India and the National Security and Intelligence Advisor of Canada further acknowledged their partnership and commitment to strengthen cooperation in counter-terrorism capacity-building and to contribute to international efforts through the UN mechanisms and initiatives as well as groupings such as the Global Counterterrorism Forum, the Financial Action Task Force, and the G-20. The Jharkhand High Court on rejected the bail petition of former Bihar chief minister Lalu Prasad in a pertaining to the fraudulent withdrawal of Rs 8.9 million from the Deoghar Treasury. Justice Aparesh Kumar Singh rejected the bail petition of Lalu Prasad, saying he was the chief minister and finance minister during the scam period. The Public Accounts Committee kept the file for years, but no action was taken. Dismissing Lalu Prasad's defence, the judge said all the scam cases seemed to be done in his knowledge. Hence, the court is not inclined to release him on bail, the bench observed. A special CBI court had convicted Lalu Prasad in the instant fodder case on December 23 last year and was sentenced to three years and six months in prison. Lalu Prasad, who is the RJD president, is languishing in the Ranchi Birsa Munda jail since December 23 last. He has so far been convicted in three cases. Besides, the instant case he has been convicted in two other cases both related to the Chaibasa treasury. On September 30, 2013, he was convicted in RC 20 A/96 pertaining to fraudulent withdrawal of Rs 377 million from the Chaibasa treasury and convicted to five years of prison term. He, however, got bail in this case. A special Central Bureau of Investigation court had convicted him on January 24 last in case RC-68A/96 related to the fraudulent withdrawal of Rs 376 million from the Chaibasa treasury and sentenced him to five years of imprisonment. He faces another two scam cases for illegal withdrawal of Rs 39.7 million from the Dumka Treasury and Rs 1.84 billion from the Doranda Treasury. The over Rs 9 billion fodder scam cases are related to irregularities in the Animal Husbandry department in undivided Bihar in the 90s when the RJD was in power under Lalu Prasad. The Maldives has warned India against taking "any actions" that could hinder resolving the political crisis in the country, as New Delhi expressed its deep dismay over the extension of emergency in the island nation. The Maldivis' Foreign Ministry in a statement late last night said President Abdulla Yameen's government takes note of the public statements issued by the Indian Government that "ignore the facts and ground realities" with regard to the ongoing political developments in the Maldives. It said that India's assertion that the extension of the state of emergency for 30 days was unconstitutional is a clear "distortion of facts, which ignore the constitution and laws of the Maldives." "There is no doubt that the Maldives is experiencing one of the most difficult periods in the history of the nation. It is therefore important that friends and partners in the international community, including India, refrain from any actions that could hinder resolving the situation facing the country," it said. "The Government of Maldives reiterates its firm commitment to work closely with the international community, including India, to address the concerns they might have," the statement said. Persisting with its displeasure over the extension of emergency in the Maldives, India yesterday said it does not see a valid reason for the Maldivian parliament to do so and maintained that it continues to watch the situation in the island nation. India has expressed "deep dismay" over the Maldivian parliament accepting President Abdulla Yameen's recommendation to extend the state of emergency by another 30 days in a manner New Delhi dubbed as a "matter of concern". On Tuesday, the Maldives' Parliament extended the state of emergency by another 30 days, bolstering President Yameen's grip on power in the troubled Indian Ocean island nation. President Yameen had first declared emergency on February 5 after the Supreme Court ordered the release of a group of Opposition leaders, who had been convicted in widely criticised trials. Among them was exiled ex-President Mohamed Nasheed. The court said his 2015 trial had been unconstitutional. The state of emergency will now end on March 22. There has been international condemnation of the Maldivian government's moves, including the imposition of the emergency. The US has also expressed disappointment over the development in the Maldives and asked President Yameen to uphold the rule of law in the troubled Indian Ocean island nation. Yameen has rejected an offer of mediation by UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres. After holding extensive talks with his Canadian counterpart Justin Trudeau, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday made it clear that those challenging India's sovereignty, unity and integrity cannot be tolerated, seen as a veiled reference to the Canadian government's soft approach towards the Khalistan issue. Modi also asserted that there cannot be any place for those who misuse religion for political motives and promote separatism. "We discussed the entire gamut of bilateral partnership, and identified concrete steps to boost cooperation. We agreed to strengthen our defence cooperation," Modi said, while noting that terrorism and extremism were threats for democratic countries such as India and Canada. Trudeau's pro-Khalistan approach is being criticised by many including Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh, who raised the issue with the Canadian prime minister during a meeting. On his part, Trudeau had assured Singh that his country does not support separatism in India or elsewhere. Modi made it clear that those who challenge India's sovereignty, unity and integrity cannot be tolerated. After extensive talks between Modi and Trudeau, the two sides inked six pacts, including on energy cooperation. Modi, following his nearly two-hour long meeting with Trudeau, said during a joint media event with the Canadian prime minister, that it is important that the two countries work together to fight terrorism. Observing that Trudeau has visited various parts of India in last few days, Modi said the Canadian leader must have experienced the diversity of the country. On his part, Trudeau described India as a natural partner for commercial cooperation. Modi said they have also asked the officials of their countries to re-double their efforts to finalise the bilateral free trade agreement. Earlier, External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj called on the Canadian prime minister and discussed various issues of mutual interest. Swaraj had a warm meeting with Trudeau and discussed ways to strengthen and deepen the partnership between the two countries, Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) Spokesperson Raveesh Kumar tweeted. The Government of Canada flew Vancouver celebrity restaurateur and Chef Vikram Vij to India at the expense of taxpayer's money to cook for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and other ministers. Vij, the co-founder of Vancouver's Vij's restaurant, was flown to India as Trudeau is on a week-long trip in the country. At a meeting between the Canadian High Commissioner and a delegation to India, Vij was thanked for dinner. The meeting also included Canadian Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan and Innovation, Science and Economic Development Minister Navdeep Bains. The parliamentary secretary for national revenue, Kamal Khera tweeted about the meeting on Monday. Vij had cooked for an event that saw convicted Khalistani terrorist Jaspal Atwal attending the event. He had also cooked for a reception hosted by the Canadian High Commissioner on Thursday. Global Affairs Canada spokesperson Elizabeth Reid said that Global Affairs Canada covered Vij's airfare and accommodation, but did not disclose how much his trip cost the taxpayers. "Mr Vij's involvement will contribute to make the event a memorable celebration of the Canada-India friendship," Global quoted Global Affairs Canada spokesperson Elizabeth Reid as saying. Goldy Hyder, a communications strategist and CEO of Hill and Knowlton Strategies, said it was a "wise investment" to bring Vij to India during Trudeau's trip. "I think it's an opportunity for us to showcase our food, showcase our agricultural industry which is in great demand here in India," he said. Caught between logistical bottlenecks and surging demand from power plants, India will likely increase coal imports in 2018, industry executives said, in what would be a setback to the governments plans to cut the countrys dependence on foreign supplies. The projected higher coal demand, which would reverse two years of declines, will be a boon for international miners such as Indonesias Adaro Energy, Australias Whitehaven Coal or global commodity merchant Glencore. But, the countrys power plants and cement makers, the source of the resurgent ... India is seeking a reasonable price for crude oil from Saudi Arabia, Oil Minister Dharmendra Pradhan said on Friday, in a move that could help Riyadh regain top spot in supplying the world's third-largest oil consumer. "Some instrument can be developed so that the pricing is suitable for both of us," Pradhan said after a meeting with Saudi Arabian counterpart Khalid al-Falih. "We must get a reasonable price for crude oil and LPG (liquefied petroleum gas)," he said. Iraq surpassed Saudi Arabia in 2017 as the top supplier to India. ALSO ... India can be an end-to-end partner to nations looking to empower citizens through affordable communications solutions and digital infrastructure, said on Friday. Citing India's prowess in software services, laying down digital infrastructure, and its design capabilities, Sundararajan said the country is keen to share technology, training expertise, and know-how with other nations that face "similar challenges". "India is willing to share technology and the expertise in training people because we want to ensure that this is a full-fledged partnership, not a buyer-supplier arrangement," she said addressing India Telecom 2018, an international ICT expo. The secretary noted that every country is looking to empower citizens with communications access and termed building strong telecom infrastructure a "pivotal necessity". "India has significant capabilities, we can help handhold other countries with similar challenges," she added. Sikh politics has always revolved around identity issues, and political parties have worked on these issues in different ways, often with success and sometimes not. The movement for a separate Sikh state Khalistan was one such expression, but the decade-long violent phase of terrorism which resulted in pain, loss and suffering has caused the average Sikh in Punjab to turn her back on it. This is not to say that the ideology has been vanquished along with the terrorists. On the contrary, remnants of it are very much alive in present-day Punjab, but receive little ... The beautification of Uttar Pradesh's capital for the 2-day Investors Summit-2018, which concluded Thursday, cost over Rs 650 million to the state exchequer, according to an official. A senior district administration official said that Rs 660 million was spent on Lucknow's beautification for the summit, which had 7 countries as partners and attracted 6,000 participants. The summit generated investment pacts worth more than Rs 4 trillion from top businesses, according to the UP government. The official, who did not want to be identified, said that while Lucknow Municipal Corporation spent the most - Rs 242.5 million, Lucknow Development Authority (LDA) spent around Rs 130.8 million and Public work department - Rs 125.8 million. The rest was spent by various other departments. The event was the biggest such summit held in the state, the official said, adding that 22 chartered planes and more that 300 rooms in over 12 luxury hotels were booked besides construction of roads, putting up of hoardings and illuminating the entire city. The two-day investment summit witnessed the signing of 1,045 MOUs worth over Rs 4.28 trillion. Besides, investors present showed interest in making an additional investment worth Rs 4 trillion. "In the two-day summit, representatives from 10 countries, more than 6,000 participants, above 110 companies participated. As many as 32 parallel sessions took place in the summit," UP Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath said. The pacts signed have the potential to generate more than 33 lakh jobs in the state. Netherlands, Japan, Czech Republic, Finland, Slovania, Mauritius and Thailand were the seven partner countries of the summit. India signed a pact with Oman earlier this month that allows Indian Navy to use the port of Duqm. Strategic affairs experts contend that this could have far-reaching consequences for Indian Navys reach in the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean. In this Business Standard Special, Abhijit Iyer-Mitra analyses whether such hopes are misplaced. India has signed an amorphous deal, supposedly acquiring basing rights at the Omani port of Duqm. Yet again we're treated to an exasperating barrage of press reports on the "strategic" nature of this pact and that ... Disclaimer: Views expressed are personal. They do not reflect the view/s of Business Standard. Without mentioning the Punjab National Bank (PNB) fraud or the Reserve Bank of India, Modi said, I want to appeal to those who have been given the task of framing rules and maintaining ethics in financial institutions to perform their duty with full faith, particularly those who have been given the responsibility of monitoring and supervision. The prime ... Dear Reader, Business Standard has always strived hard to provide up-to-date information and commentary on developments that are of interest to you and have wider political and economic implications for the country and the world. Your encouragement and constant feedback on how to improve our offering have only made our resolve and commitment to these ideals stronger. Even during these difficult times arising out of Covid-19, we continue to remain committed to keeping you informed and updated with credible news, authoritative views and incisive commentary on topical issues of relevance. We, however, have a request. As we battle the economic impact of the pandemic, we need your support even more, so that we can continue to offer you more quality content. Our subscription model has seen an encouraging response from many of you, who have subscribed to our online content. More subscription to our online content can only help us achieve the goals of offering you even better and more relevant content. We believe in free, fair and credible journalism. Your support through more subscriptions can help us practise the journalism to which we are committed. Support quality journalism and subscribe to Business Standard. Digital Editor The non-profit Human Rights Watch on Friday urged the Myanmar government to stop the demolition of villages abandoned by the Rohingya minority in Rakhine state from where almost 700,000 members of the community have fled to Bangladesh. HRW said satellite images revealed that the government has bulldozed dozens of Rohingya settlements and added that they should be preserved as "crime scenes" to investigate allegations of atrocities against the military, reports the BBC. "Many of these villages were scenes of atrocities against Rohingya and should be preserved so that the experts appointed by the UN to document these abuses can properly evaluate the evidence to identify those responsible," said Brad Adams, Asia Director, HRW. "Bulldozing these areas threatens to erase both the memory and the legal claims of the Rohingya who lived there," he added. The Rohingya exodus started after August 25, 2017, when the military carried out a campaign in retaliation for attacks by a Rohingya rebel group on multiple government posts. According to the HRW statement, since late 2017, authorities have used heavy machinery to clear at least 55 villages of all structures and at least two of the demolished villages were previously undamaged. Between January 9 and February 13, bulldozers razed two settlements in the village of Myin Hlut that appeared intact in images from November 2017, the non-profit said. "Deliberately demolishing villages to destroy evidence of grave crimes is obstruction of justice," said Adams. HRW said that 362 Rohingya villages had already been completely or partially razed during the military campaign last year. The repatriation of Rohingya refugees, numbering around 688,000, should have began within two months of November 23, 2017 - when an accord between Bangladesh and Myanmar was signed - but Bangladesh decided to postpone the process in January. The non-profit has demanded that representatives of the UN be given access to Rakhine to study the allegations the army committed murder, rape and other crimes. Rattan Singh Kalsi kept photos of all his grown children in his room at the seniors home, but one of them towered over the rest. The photo anchored a kind of shrine to his daughter, Indira, who had died more than 30 years earlier, just as she was entering adulthood. Indira had grown up in Canada and Rattan had bought her a plane ticket so she could see India, the country their family had come from, and spend time with the relatives she might not get to see once the responsibilities of work and adult life set in. Naturally, Rattan, who had been middle-aged at the time of ... At least eight companies owned by the wealthy Gupta family accused of corrupt ties to former president Jacob Zuma, have filed for protection from creditors, documents showed on Friday. The Indian-born billionaire business associates of Zuma, were accused of using their political connections to win state contracts and influence cabinet appointments, in a report by an anti-graft watchdog in 2016. Zuma and the Gupta brothers deny any wrongdoing. The Companies and Intellectual Property Commission (CIPC), South Africa's companies registry office, shows on its website that eight ... Indian refiner Essar Oil is looking to raise over $1 billion from trading houses after its new Russian owners could not raise loans from major Western banks due to sanctions on Russia. Essar wants to borrow the money for 3-4 years and repay it with cargoes of refined products as it seeks to cut its reliance on lending from Indian banks, banking and trading sources familiar with the discussions said. It would be the first large multi-year pre-payment deal by Essar, which has previously engaged only in short-term deals. Russian oil major Rosneft, fund UCP and Swiss commodities ... The Indiana state Senate has passed a resolution recognising the "significant" contributions of Sikhism across the US and in the state of Indiana. The Senate resolution passed last week acknowledged that Sikhism, which was founded over 500 years ago and is currently the fifth largest religion in the world, "preaches a message of devotion, truthful living, equality of mankind and social justice". "Sikhs believe that people of different races, religions, or sexes are equal in the eyes of God and in the full equality of men and women," the resolution emphasised. The resolution concludes by highlighting the Sikhs' "significant contributions" in serving the US, Indiana and its communities as well as by stating that the faithful service of the Sikh community to Indiana and America "merits appreciation as an integral thread in the fabric of American plurality". Authored by Senator Aaron Freeman and Senator Jack Sandlin, the resolution was adopted on February 15 and presented to SikhsPAC, a political action committee representing American Sikhs, chairman Gurinder Singh Khalsa in open session on February 19, a statement said. "As Sikhs, we hold unity, dignity, respect, social justice, peace and prosperity as key tenets of a healthy, happy, holy life," Khalsa said. "During the invocation, I shared these values with our great legislators and asked for blessings upon our children, our educational institutions, the wellbeing of our elderly and those serving in the military" he said. State Senator Sandalin said the traditions and culture of Sikhism contributed to the vibrancy and diversity of the state. "With about 3,500 Sikh-owned businesses in Indiana, Sikhs have become one of the fastest growing business communities in our state, living a life of devotion and truthful living. "I was proud to present the Sikh community with a resolution and was moved by the prayer they offered before yesterday's Senate session meeting," Sandalin said. US President Donald Trump on Thursday enthusiastically embraced a National Rifle Association (NRA) position to arm highly trained teachers to fortify schools against mass shootings like the one last week. Trump, who said the armed teachers should receive extra pay as an incentive, promoted his idea as demands for stronger gun control intensified across the country. You give them a little bit of a bonus, so practically for free, you have now made the school into a hardened target, Trump said. The president estimated that 10 per cent to 40 per cent of school employees ... The United States is expected to open its embassy to Israel in Jerusalem in May, a US official told Reuters on Friday. US President Donald Trump announced last year that the United States recognized Jerusalem as Israel's capital, setting in motion the move of the embassy to Jeruslaem from Tel Aviv. The head of the National Rifle Association lashed out at gun control advocates on Thursday, saying Democratic elites are politicizing the latest mass school shooting in the United States to try to erode constitutionally guaranteed gun rights. NRA chief executive Wayne LaPierre echoed President Donald Trumps call to arm teachers to prevent school shootings, and weighed in on a long-running political and cultural divide over access to weapons that has been inflamed by last weeks massacre at a Florida high school that killed 17 students and staff. The elites ... Home Minister of Karnataka Ramalinga Reddy on Friday applauded the State Government for an additional allocation of 10 crore rupees for intelligence gathering. The leader took to his Twitter handle and said, "It is necessary. Even center allocates amount for this. Not only in our state, in other states too they do this. Even in CBI, NIA they reserve some money for it." The announcement came in the wake of recent budget speech presented by Siddaramaiah, in the State Assembly. In the budget speech, announced for the year 2018, the Karnataka Government allocated an additional amount of 10 crore rupees for intelligence gathering, with an eye on upcoming State assembly elections. However, the opposition condemned the recent move and stated that the act is against the rules. One Congress leader said, as far as the supplementary budget is concerned, it has only to be given for emergency works. Ramalinga Reddy hailed the State Government's decision and said that Karnataka is not the only State where money has been allocated for this purpose, but the same has been done in other States as well. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu on Friday felicitated the participants of a Joint Certificate Programme called Digital Transformation in Public Governance at the e-Pragati officer's graduation ceremony. The e-Pragati scheme is a joint venture by the Government of Andhra Pradesh and Indian School of Business (ISB). Cheif Minister Naidu attended the graduation ceremony of 96 officers from 51 departments that was held in Amaravati The ceremony was also attended by IT Minister Nara Lokesh, Civil Supplies Minister Prathipati Pulla Rao, Welfare Minister Nakka Ananda Babu, Dean of ISB, Professor Raj Srivastava and Executive Director of SRITNE Professor Deepa Mani. Speaking at the event, IT Advisor J. Satyanarayana spoke in detail about the journey of the idea of an integrated platform for all departments of the government and lauded the Chief Minister's vision of a citizen-centric governance model. In his address, IT Minister Nara Lokesh urged officials of all departments to participate in this transition to seamless, paperless and real-time governance. "Data should be democratised, which leads to the transparency of the state, and the fulfilment of the vision: Visible Governance and Invisible Government," said Nara Lokesh. The Chief Minister congratulated all the participating officers and lauded the efforts of the faculty at the ISB, which ensured more than 90% attendance for lessons that were taught using case studies, technological tools and other non-traditional methods of teaching. "Because of e-Pragati, ministries, departments and all officers are under scrutiny. In our recent review meetings, the number of days to dispose of a file has become a matter of competition between secretaries as well as ministers. The next goal is to ensure qualitative disposal," CM Naidu said during his address. He also spoke about the goal of ensuring that every family in AP will have one digitally literate person. "Technology is constantly changing, and I want the people of my state to have easy access to it. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The armed officer who was stationed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida did not enter the school during last week's deadly shooting, Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel announced on Thursday. An internal review found out that officer Deputy Scot Peterson was present at the campus of the Florida high school. With this, Paterson resigned on Thursday after Israel suspended him without pay. "Scot Peterson was absolutely on campus through this entire event. He was armed. He was in uniform," Israel said. "After seeing the video, witness statements and Scot Peterson's very own statement, I decided this morning to suspend [him] without pay pending an internal investigation," he added. "We're not going to disclose the video at this time, and we may never disclose the video, depending on the prosecution and the criminal case. But what I saw was a deputy arrive at the west side of building 12, take up a position and he never went in," Israel continued. Israel said Peterson chose to resign as he had met the necessary requirements for retirement. However, the sheriff asserted that the investigation would go on. When asked by a reporter what Peterson should have done, Israel said the latter should have "went in, addressed the killer and killed the killer." He further said that the video which he saw left him with "no words" and "absolutely devastated". Scores of students from Florida's Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School joined other students from other high schools on Wednesday as massive protests against ending of gun violence gained momentum across the US this week. Students from California to Washington D.C. held marches in solidarity with the survivors from the Florida high school. The crowd marched at the state Capitol complex in Tallahassee, with banners and posters and chanting slogans such as "Never again!" and "Shame on you!" US President Donald Trump has called for the reform in the country's gun law by taking several measures such as- undertaking background checks on gun purchases, increasing the age limit for purchasing weapons, arming teachers with concealed guns and so on. 19-year-old Cruz, went on a rampage at the high school in Parkland, Florida and gunned down 17 students and injured 14 others. He allegedly used an AR-15 assault rifle that he had purchased legally. Cruz was a former student and was expelled from the high school for disciplinary reasons. He has been charged with 17 counts of premeditated murder. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A sector commander level flag meeting was held between Border Security Force (BSF) and Pakistan Rangers on the international border in Suchetgarh area of Jammu. The BSF delegation comprising of nine officers was led by PS Dhiman, DIG BSF Jammu Sector. Brig Amjad Hussain, Sector Commander, Sialkot, Punjab led the Pakistan delegation which comprised of 11 officers. During the meeting general day to day border management issues were discussed. While reiterating BSF's commitment towards maintaing peace and tranqulity on the International border, BSF officials sought Pakistan Rangers' cooperation for the same, which was agreed by them, said Public Relations Officer, BSF, Jammu. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Government of Canada flew Vancouver celebrity restaurateur and Chef Vikram Vij to India at the expense of taxpayer's money to cook for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and other ministers. Vij, the co-founder of Vancouver's Vij's restaurant, was flown to India as Trudeau is on a week-long trip in the country. At a meeting between the Canadian High Commissioner and a delegation to India, Vij was thanked for dinner. The meeting also included Canadian Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan and Innovation, Science and Economic Development Minister Navdeep Bains. The parliamentary secretary for national revenue, Kamal Khera tweeted about the meeting on Monday. Vij had cooked for an event that saw convicted Khalistani terrorist Jaspal Atwal attending the event. He had also cooked for a reception hosted by the Canadian High Commissioner on Thursday. Global Affairs Canada spokesperson Elizabeth Reid said that Global Affairs Canada covered Vij's airfare and accommodation, but did not disclose how much his trip cost the taxpayers. "Mr. Vij's involvement will contribute to make the event a memorable celebration of the Canada-India friendship," Global News quoted Global Affairs Canada spokesperson Elizabeth Reid as saying. Goldy Hyder, a communications strategist and CEO of Hill and Knowlton Strategies, said it was a "wise investment" to bring Vij to India during Trudeau's trip. "I think it's an opportunity for us to showcase our food, showcase our agricultural industry which is in great demand here in India," he said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A Delhi Court on Friday rejected a bail plea filed by Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) MLAs Amanatullah Khan and Prakash Jarwal, in connection with an alleged assault on Delhi Chief Secretary Anshu Prakash. Yesterday, the AAP MLAs were sent to judicial custody for 14 days. Earlier, a Delhi Court had dismissed the police's application seeking their custody. Both the AAP MLAs were named in the FIR lodged by Prakash. They were arrested by the Delhi police on Wednesday. On Tuesday, the Chief Secretary had lodged a police complaint and alleged that he was manhandled at Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal's residence by the two lawmakers. The Chief Secretary said that he was attacked in the presence of Kejriwal, after being summoned to discuss Aadhaar-related problems. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Secretary of Indian Civil and Administration services (IAS) Manisha Saxena conducted a meeting on Friday with the Minister of State Home Affairs Hans Raj Ahir and Union Minister Jitendra Singh regarding the alleged assault on the Delhi Chief Secretary Anshu Prakash. Manisha Saxena informed that the entire association has been hurt by the incident of assault. She highlighted her concern regarding the security and the safety of the Indian bureaucracy. She told ANI, "We all had come here to meet Jitendra Singh and Hansraj Ahir and told them how much we have been hurt by this incident and our concerns towards our security and dignity. We have told them about how this incident happened and decisions taken by us till now. We are continuing our work for public interests, but are working only through written communication." She further demanded the Delhi government to provide security to the officers and guarantee them protection from any further instances of violence or misconduct. She also said, since last years, the Delhi Administration Subordinate Service (DAAS) association has been under pressure, forcing various bureaucrats to take voluntary retirement. She added, "Since these two Ministries are directly connected to Delhi government, that is why we wanted to tell them about this of the incident and our reaction. We all our government employees and are not affiliated by any (political party), (we) are greatly hurt by the incident and whatever we are doing is our Constitutional right". The Delhi Chief Secretary had alleged an assault on February 20 by the members of legislative assembly of Aam Aadmi Party and a case was registered with the Delhi Police. The ruling Aam Aadmi Party had refuted such claims and in return accused the Chief Secretary of abusing the party MLA. The Delhi bureaucrats on Thursday created a coordination committee and conducted a peaceful protest, condemning the incident of the assault. They were supported by the Indian Administrative Service of Delhi, Andaman and Nicobar Islands Civil Service (DANICS) and Delhi Administration Subordinate Service (DASS). (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) United States President Donald Trump's son Donald Trump Jr. on Friday praised the overall business environment in India and reiterated that it was easier to do business in India as compared to China. Speaking at the 4th Global Business Summit here, Trump Jr. said: "Indians do have a special entrepreneurial flair. It's easier to do business with Indians, because of the language, common law, the ability to build reliable relationships. It is almost like doing business back in the United States. For me, it has been, certainly been, easier to do business in India." He was replying to a question during the meeting on why the Trump Organisation chose to build ultra-luxury apartments in India first than in China. Trump Jr. also praised the Narendra Modi-led government over-pushing of reforms. Acknowledging that real estate in India had been going through a tough time, he saw it as a period of cleansing. "I have been coming here for ten years. Real estate was a four-letter word. People promised X, and delivered X minus a lot if anything at all." Things have changed a lot here, Trump Jr. said. On the development of luxury real estate projects in India, Trump Jr. stated that his business brought "authentic and truly global luxury" to India. "This is now a mature market, our clients fly the world over; they know what luxury is and they are seeking it here. India was behind in such projects, but it has now caught up with the global standards," he said. Also, he added that ever since Trump took over the president last year, the Trump Organisation would not sign any deals with any country, in order to avoid "conflict of interests" from the White House. Trump Jr. is on a week-long visit to India to endorse his luxury real estate project, the Trump Towers in Gurugram, Pune, Mumbai and Kolkata. He called on several real estate developers at Oberoi Hotel in Delhi and met with the members of real estate firms- M3M India and Tribeca Developers. According to business partners in India, many units in the Trump Towers are selling about 30 percent per square foot higher than the current market rates. Trump Jr.'s visit to India is expected to reinforce the trend. India is Trump Organisation's biggest international market, with four real estate projects underway in Mumbai, Pune, Kolkata, and Gurugram. The Trump Organisation has more business entities in India than in any other foreign country, financial filings show, with licensing bringing in estimated payments of 1.6 million dollars to 11 million dollars since 2014. Trump Jr.'s visit to India comes after his sister, Ivanka, visited Hyderabad in November last year to attend the Global Entrepreneurship Summit (GES). (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) EBARA Corporation recently held a seminar on pump at Myanmar Engineering Society (MES). The two-day event started on February 15 in Yangon. This was the 11th such seminar by EBARA in 24 years. Approximately 40 participants from government agencies, local governments and private-sector companies attended the event. The participants showed strong interest in issues, such as the plan of pump facilities for the water supply system, flood control and sewage improvement. EBARA plans to host five similar event in other countries like Vietnam and Thailand. Since the launch of the EBARA Hatakeyama Memorial Fund in 1989, it has organized more than 260 seminars at different locations around the world, welcoming more than 12,000 participants. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Number of activists and leaders of the agitating farmers were detained by the Haryana Police in Gharaunda, ahead of their march towards Delhi on Friday. The farmers were protesting here demanding a complete loan waiver, which was promised by the state government during elections. They raised slogans against Chief Minister Manoharlal Khattar Government for turning deaf ears towards the woes of the farmers. A member of the Rashtriya Kisan Mahasangh said that they only have two demands from the Government i.e. waiving of farmers loan and implement of Swaminathan Commission Reports. "We just want the promises made by the government should be fulfilled. First is to waive off the loans as promised during the election campaign and second to implement the report of Swaminathan Commission," he said. "The administration is following dictatorship. The farmers are being arrested from various places so that we don't reach Delhi," he added. Another farmer criticised the Khattar government for their behaviour towards the farmers and said that such response has never been witnessed under any government. "We were just agitation, we are not terrorists. We are the citizens of this state only. They have to bear the consequences of their action in the coming elections," he said. The Swaminathan Commission Report suggests reforms in the interests of farmers which could provide a solution to farmers problem. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI) has issued Show Cause Notices to the auditors of Punjab Bank (PNB) and Gitanjali Gems in connection with the Rs. 11300 crore scam. The statutory body has also summoned the deputy general manager of PNB and sough related documents in the said fraud. "The Deputy General Manager, PNB has been summoned in terms of powers as vested in Section 21C of the Chartered Accountants Act 1949 to appear and produce a copy of FIR, all related documents in the said fraud, give details of the modus operandi used in the fraud," the ICAI said in a statement. The ICAI has also written letters to Security and Exchange Board of India (SEBI), Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), Enforcement Directorate (ED) and Punjab Bank (PNB), urging them to share details of Rs. 11300 crore PNB scam. In the letter dated February 15, the statutory body also asked the agencies and PNB to share reports or findings in respect of the said alleged fraud including the copies of the specific findings in respect of the involvement of any Chartered Accountant or firm of Chartered Accountants. Further, the ICAI has also written to Reserve Bank of India (RBI) requesting them to provide the list of the corporate borrowers of public sector banks having an outstanding loan amount of Rs. 2000 crores and above. The Disciplinary Directorate of ICAI has also started its investigation into the matter as per the Chartered Accountants Act, 1949 and rules framed thereunder. ICAI has also written to the Ministry of Corporate Affairs requesting to prevail upon SEBI, CBI, ED and PNB to share their findings with ICAI to enable it to accelerate the action against any Chartered Accountants who have played any role in this fraud. The ICAI has also set up a high power group to study the systemic issues in the PNB matter and suggest remedial measures and improvement in the banking system, and any other matter incidental thereto. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) India and Canada on Friday signed six memorandums of understanding (MoUs) in various fields, including Information Technology, Petroleum and Natural Gas, Sports, Industrial Policy and Promotion, Cooperation in Higher Education, and Science, Technology and Innovation. A Joint Declaration of Intent between the Ministry of Electronics And Information Technology and The Department of Innovation, Science and Economic Development of Canada was signed in the field of Information Communications Technology and Electronics. The Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas and the Department of Natural Resources of Canada held Ministerial Energy Dialogue and also signed a MoU on cooperation in Sport. The two governments agreed to work together regarding cooperation on Intellectual Property Rights (IPR). Memorandums of understanding was also signed between the Government of India and Canada concerning cooperation in Higher Education as well as cooperation in the fields of Science, Technology and Innovation. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) India and Sri Lanka resolved to strengthen co-operation in preventing the smuggling of gold, drugs, fake Indian currency notes (FICN), wildlife, and other contraband across their route, and to address trade-related issues such as 'Country of Origin' frauds that impact the revenue of both nations, in a meeting held on February 22 and 23. The two-day meeting, which was held after ten years, focused on many areas of mutual interest to combat smuggling and improve trade facilitation by use of data analytics, new investigation techniques, inter-agency coordination, and capacity building. Debi Prasad Dash, the Director General of the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence (DRI), and P.S.M. Charles, the Director General of Sri Lanka Customs, discussed the modalities of joint co-ordination committee for investigative assistance under the Customs Mutual Administrative Assistance Agreement (CMAA), which was entered into between the two countries in 2015. They also discussed various issues relating to trade facilitation, automation, enforcement and Joint Working Group on data sharing. In 2016-17, DRI had effected seizures of gold in seven cases, weighing 54 kilograms, valued at about Rs 16 crore, smuggled from Sri Lanka into India through the sea route using country boats and cleared after landing on the coastal areas of Tamil Nadu. In 2017-18, 80 kilograms of gold smuggled in a similar manner, valued at about Rs 24 crore, and has so far been seized by DRI in eight cases. Recently, on February 21, DRI seized 130 pieces of gold with foreign markings, weighing 19.2 kilograms, valued at Rs 6.1 crores, at Mimisal, a small coastal village in Tamil Nadu, which was smuggled from Sri Lanka using a country boat. The coastal route was also used by drug traffickers, in January 2017. After extensive surveillance, Indian Customs officers seized six kilograms of heroin from a boat near Tuticorin. After apprehending three Indians who were attempting to smuggle the heroin by sea, the officers ventured into the sea in disguise and nabbed the Sri Lankan buyers in mid-sea in a risky operation. Apart from gold and narcotics, wildlife such as exotic turtles of central and north-east Indian origin and various marine species, are also being smuggled between the two countries by sea. Smuggling of foreign currency is also a shared concern, and both countries have seized large quantities of foreign currency in recent times. In today's meeting, it was agreed to hold regular meetings to exchange information to effectively combat smuggling between the two countries. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) World leading fabless semiconductor company, Unigroup Spreadtrum & RDA and American multinational company, Intel Corporation on Friday announced a long-term strategic collaboration on 5G. The companies plan to develop a 5G smartphone platform for the China market that will feature an Intel 5G modem and will be targeted to coincide with 5G network deployments in 2019. Integrating Intel's strong technical expertise in modems with Unigroup Spreadtrum & RDA's solid experience in chipset design, the companies will collaborate on 5G and develop Spreadtrum's first Android-based high-end 5G smartphone solution utilising an Intel modem and Spreadtrum's application processor "We are very excited to collaborate with Intel to build a leading 5G mobile platform. Unigroup Spreadtrum & RDA and Intel share the vision on transforming the mobile communication industry in the 5G era through technological innovation and innovation-driven revolution," said vice president, Tsinghua Unigroup and COO, Unigroup Spreadtrum & RDA, Jingming Wang. "Drawing on the strong potential for global industry development and Intel's profound experience, Unigroup Spreadtrum & RDA will persist on cultivating the 5G market and setting ourselves as a leading Chinese 5G high-end chipset brand," Wang added. "Undoubtedly, China will be an important market at the forefront of 5G. Together with Unigroup Spreadtrum & RDA, Intel looks forward to making a 5G smartphone experience a compelling reality for consumers in China," said vice president, Client Computing Group and general manager, Connected Products and Programs, Intel, Chenwei Yan. "Intel is working with industry partners and network operators to accelerate 5G technology innovation across network, client and cloud. Through this effort, we will bring our modem expertise from years of research and development in driving standards, conducting trials, and building platforms to create a seamlessly connected, powerfully smart 5G future," Yan added. This new collaboration on 5G between both parties is a long-term engagement including a series of product collaborations utilizing Intel XMM 8000 series modems in multiple product lines targeting diversified markets. The collaboration also marked the kick-off of "5G Global Leading Strategy" of Unigroup Spreadtrum & RDA. The company will continue increasing all-round investment in 5G technology aiming to be one of the world's leading 5G chipset brands. Based on the positive industry outlook and strong confidence in its 5G R&D process, Unigroup Spreadtrum & RDA plans to launch its first 5G commercial mobile platform in the second half of 2019. In 2014, Intel announced a minority stake investment in the holding company under Tsinghua Unigroup, which owns Spreadtrum Communications & RDA Microelectronics. The existing relationship created a solid foundation for mutual trust and set the stage for additional cooperation on 5G. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Congress leader Shashi Tharoor on Friday that he is looking for a conclusion in his wife Sunanda Pushkar's death case. Tharoor's statement comes hours after the Supreme Court issued a notice to the Delhi Police on Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Subramanian Swamy's appeal challenging the Delhi High Court order dismissing his plea for a Special Investigation Team (SIT) probe into Sunanda death case. "The Supreme Court has given a direction, let judicial procedure take its course. Anything that Delhi Police conveys to Court about how they have conducted their investigation, where it stands is welcome to us," Tharoor told ANI. "We all looking for a conclusion to this matter," Tharoor added. Earlier in the day, the Apex Court said the maintainability of the petition will also be decided. Swamy has moved the top court after the Delhi High Court had in October last year dismissed his plea seeking a probe by a court-monitored SIT into Pushkar's death. Pushkar was found dead under mysterious circumstances in a suite of a five-star hotel in Delhi on the night of January 17, 2014. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Uttar Pradesh Police on Thursday arrested a gang of 61 people for writing answers sheets on behalf of class 12 students in state's Tebtu village. Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP) R Pandey said the students were present in examination hall with their answer sheets but 61 people were found solving their papers in a nearby residence. Mass cheating in Uttar Pradesh has been reported during board exams for years. To prevent mass-scale cheating this year, Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath government has set up a framework. To ensure a free and fair examination, the state government has also installed CCTV cameras for strict vigilance in the examination centres. A total of 66,37,018 students were registered to appear in this year's UP board exams. Of 66,37,018, 36,55,691 students were to appear for the class 10th examinations, while 29,81,327 students were to appear for the class 12th board examination. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The future of fashion took centre stage at the Grand Finale of the Max Design Awards 2017-18, presented by India's largest value fashion brand Max Fashion. Held at National Institute of Fashion Technology (NIFT), New Delhi, the star-studded finale was a fitting end to the two month long hunt for the country's finest fashion design talent. Following last 3 year's extravagant event, the 4th year of Max Design Awards Grand finale was a bigger and glamorous spectacle. The finale show was judged by an esteemed panel of jury including Fashion Designers Rina Dhaka, Ashish Soni and Rahul Mishra along with Vasanth Kumar - Executive Director, Max Fashion, Kamakshi Kaul - Vice President Design, Max Fashion and Marc Robinson - Project Head, Max Design Awards. Max Design Awards is a prestigious platform to recognize and reward budding fashion design students. Max partnered with India's leading fashion design institutes and colleges this year to discover the country's foremost fashion design aspirants. Out of 1200 entries, 15 students were shortlisted for the grand finale where they showcased their designs. These finalists were given a month's timeframe to create garments as per their sketches for the grand finale. Each finalist presented two looks under the theme 'Craftivism' (Pret and Couture) to an audience that included the jury and invited influencers of the fashion media. The winners selected at the end of the evening are Top 3 Winners - Payal Popli (Pearl Academy Delhi), Robin Roy (NIFT Patna), Tulika Ranjan (NIFT Delhi) Best Ramp Appeal - Rajul Goldar (Pearl Academy Delhi) Most Popular Design - Ashneet Kohli (NIFT Delhi) Top 3 Winner receive a cash prize sum of Rs. 50,000/- each and the opportunity for a Fashion Photoshoot which will be featured in the leading fashion magazine Grazia India. "Max Fashion's aim has always been to democratize Fashion for all. Our objective is to find fresh and creative minds into the fashion industry through this platform. Youngsters today have extraordinary ideas and we are more than happy to give them such a wide platform to showcase their talent. Max Design Awards is an effort to recognise those who can take a spark of inspiration and brilliance and turn it into something that stands out on the ramp. I extend my heartiest congratulations to the winners of this year's edition of MDA," said Vasanth Kumar, Executive Director, Max Fashion. "Max Design Awards is a fantastic platform to discover budding fashion talent across the country. The energy of these young designers is infectious and their ideas are phenomenal. Their designs reflect their enthusiasm and fresh perspectives. Everyone here is a winner in some way or the other. I'm really excited to see their potential unfold," said Marc Robinson, Project Head, Max Design Awards. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Merck Foundation, a non-profit organization and a subsidiary of Merck KGaA Germany, is partnering with the First Lady of Gambia, Fatoumatta Bah Barrow, to empower infertile women across Africa. The partnership aims to achieve the Merck Foundation's objectives of raising awareness, building professional capacity and improving healthcare access in the field of cancer and fertility care in Gambia and other African countries. Bah-Barrow is the ambassador for the 'Merck More Than a Mother' campaign. "It was a great honor to appoint the First Lady of Gambia, Her Excellency Fatoumatta Bah-Barrow, as an ambassador of 'Merck More Than a Mother' campaign. Together, we have acknowledged and encouraged infertile women groups across the country for their courage to share their stories of suffering from infertility stigma. They are 'Merck More Than a Mother' heroines. I am thrilled and proud to be a part of this great day," said Dr. Rasha Kelej, CEO of Merck Foundation and President of Merck More Than a Mother. "We are engaging in humanitarian ventures to improve the lives of vulnerable groups in the society. My ambition is to meaningfully contribute to the improvement of lives of women and children and address issue of infertility in our society," said Bah-Barrow. She added, "Our partnership with Merck Foundation aims at empowering infertile women in The Gambia and ensure that they access information, education and health services by collectively working with stakeholders, communities, traditional communicators, religious leader and healthcare workers. With the support of Merck Foundation, the government is adopting important policies to enhance access and regulate safe fertility treatment." Merck Foundation is making history in Gambia, together with the Ministry of Health and the First Lady's Foundation; we will train the first oncologist and fertility specialist in the country. According to the Ministry of Health data, Gambia has never had an oncologist or a fertility specialist; nor a cancer care facility or a fertility clinic in the country. "I am very proud that Merck Foundation is contributing to shaping the future of Gambia by working closely with the First Lady, a wonderful lady. She is very passionate about improving healthcare in her beloved country," said Kelej CEO of Merck Foundation and President of Merck More Than a Mother. In Africa, including Gambia, childless women still suffer discrimination, stigma, and ostracism. An inability to have a child or to become pregnant can result in significant isolation, disinheritance or assaults; this often results in divorce or physical and psychological violence. During the community program, many infertile women from the community have been acknowledged by both Merck Foundation and the FaBB for their courage to share their sad tales of their suffering from infertility stigma, and ostracism by the society and their families "Merck Foundation salutes these infertile women in Gambia, who shared their stories of suffering and discrimination. H.E. Fatoumatta Bah-Barrow, the First Lady of The Gambia and me, appreciate these strong women and encourage them to establish their own and become independent. I'm very proud of our movement in The Gambia and the rest of Africa," Kelej added. The Merck Foundation also commit to support The Gambia through providing their oncology fellowship program to establish their first training oncologists in the country, First Lady of The Gambia emphasized. "Merck Foundation helps us to make history in The Gambia; we will have in the next two years our first oncologists and fertility specialists in the country. This will help improve access to Fertility and cancer care significantly as currently, we do not have both specialties, and we do not even have cancer care facility in The Gambia," said First Lady of The Gambia. The Merck Foundation also maintains its commitment to building capacity and improving access to quality and equitable healthcare solutions with particular focus on cancer and fertility care in Africa. So far, doctors from Uganda, Zambia, Ethiopia, Namibia, Tanzania, Ghana, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Botswana, Liberia, Rwanda, Kenya, Chad, Niger, Guinea, Gambia, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Bangladesh, Myanmar, and Nepal have benefitted from Merck Foundation training programs in fertility or oncology fellowships. Merck Foundation aims to expand to more African and Asian countries in the near future. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) North Korea will send a high-level delegation to attend the closing ceremony of the Pyeongchang Winter Games which is scheduled for Sunday. The delegation would be led by the head of national intelligence for North Korea, General Kim Yong-chol, the Yonhap news agency reported. General Kim is believed to have plotted several attacks on South Korea. United States President Donald Trump's daughter, Ivanka, will be leading the US delegation to Pyeongchang as well. However, South Korean officials announced that there will be no formal meeting between North Korea and the US at the event. A high-level delegation had arrived in Pyeongchang in South Korea to attend the opening ceremony of the Winter Games on February 9. The delegation was led by the North Korean ceremonial head of state, Kim-Yong nam, which also included the younger sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, Kim Yo-jong. South Korean President Moon Jae-in and South Korean Prime Minister Lee Nak-yon also called on the North Korean delegation. The North Korean leader pledged efforts to continue the reconciliation with its arch-rival South Korea, as relations between the two Koreas have warmed rapidly over the last few weeks. Yo-jong's visit to South Korea was the first visit by a member of the ruling Kim family ever since the Korean War ended in 1953. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Election Commission (EC) of Nepal on Thursday announced that the elections for the new president will be held on March 13. The EC on Thursday made the decision over the dates for the election after about a week of discussion with the political parties. "The meeting of the EC Officials commencing on Thursday under the chairmanship of Chief Election Commissioner, Dr. Ayodhi Prasad Yadav decided to hold the election of the president on 13th of March exercising the rights given to the commission that are stated in the bill concerning the elections of President and Vice President- 4 (2)," Nepal EC's spokesperson Nabaraj Dhakal said in a statement. The Nepal EC which now bears the authority for the announcement of the dates for the election of the state heads has set March 7 as the day for filing the nominations. The voting for the new state head or the first President of federal Nepal is scheduled to start from 10 a.m. and will go on till 4 p.m., and will witness voting from the representatives of federal parliament and the provincial councils. The electoral college, which is comprised of members from both federal parliament and provincial councils has the weightage of 79 and 48 votes respectively. The election for the new Vice President will be held a week later. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Washington D C [United States], Feb. 23 (ANI): One of Australia's leading academic experts on strategy and security in South Asia and the Indian Ocean region and others have said that ongoing political crisis in The Maldives could provoke an even larger crisis in the immediate future, possibly resulting in the involvement of both India and China. Speaking to ANI, Dr. David Brewster, a senior analyst with the National Security College, Australian National University, has predicted greater strategic rivalry between major powers, including India and China, as both have an eye on expanding their roles and presence in the Indian Ocean Region (IOR). Maldives' autocratic president Abdulla Yameen's move to crack down on the opposition to consolidate his power in the archipelago, is being seen by both diplomats and analysts as provoking a larger crisis that could draw China and India, and also lead to the recreation of a more multi-polar and complex Indian Ocean environment . "In the last few days we have seen growing strategic rivalry between major powers such as China and India as they expand their roles in the region," Dr. Brewster said. "We are now also seeing new players competing to build their own areas of influence and blocs in the Indian Ocean and this could be another concern for India", he added. Looking at the situation in The Maldives from the Indian perspective, Dr. Brewster and other experts have maintained that New Delhi is naturally concerned about China's growing influence and presence in the IOR, and is looking for ways to counter-balance Beijing by deepening its ties with the ASEAN and EAS nations Blocs on their respective approaches and initiatives. India is particularly alarmed by the growing Chinese presence in the region and is responding. On the diplomatic front, India has been deepening ties with Southeast Asian nations, many of which have been looking to India to counter-balance China's growing power and influence. This includes building forward operating bases or staging facilities in India's own Andaman and Nicobar Islands - near the Malacca Strait - as well as in island states such as Seychelles and Mauritius. The recent finalisation of logistics exchange deal between India and France also potentially opens up French facilities in the western Indian Ocean (such as Djibouti and Reunion) for use by India. "The latest development is a deal between India and Oman, under which the Indian Navy will have access to the port of Duqm in Oman for logistics and maintenance. The deal may also include the development of oil storage facilities near Duqm for use as part of India's strategic oil reserve," analysed Dr. Brewster From the Chinese perspective, experts and analysts have noted President Yameen's tilt towards China economically since assuming office in 2013, courting infrastructure investment, tourism flows, and signing a free trade deal with Beijing. Experts believe that the Maldives is just another front for the Chinese.The small island nation has become a significant target for Beijing's ambitious economic expansion. Its international airport, the major road connecting it to the capital and other projects fall under "One Belt, One Road." China has deep-rooted economic, political and military interests not just in the Maldives but also the Indian Ocean, and it's not going to be a win-win situation for India, reveal experts. From China's perspective it's a no-brainer - some two-thirds of the world's oil shipments cross the Indian Ocean, and those waterways are a critical part of Beijing's Belt and Road Initiative.China is also spending billions on Indian Ocean ports and related infrastructure in neighboring Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Nepal. This includes the development of a network of naval and military bases around the Indian Ocean littoral, starting with Djibouti (opened last year) and a new base likely to be built at or near Gwadar in Pakistan. "Further, China will seek partners in the Persian Gulf, East Africa and in the central/eastern Indian Ocean, although the exact identity of those partners is not yet certain. They will need this in order to provide coverage for the entire space to protect energy sources and transportation and its other interests in the Indian Ocean." revealed Dr. Brewster. According to experts, nuclear powers China, India and Pakistan are engaged in a strategic power game in the IOR. Although Pakistan has used the Maldives as an outpost for its spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), for years now, the pro-Pakistan and seemingly anti-India stance of the Yameen regime has given rise to concerns that the atoll nation could be the next hotspot of transnational terror organisations, which may carry out 26/11-type terror attacks against India reveal analysts. Already, the Maldives has witnessed a rapid radicalisation of its youth since Yameen came to power. There have been reports of many Maldivian youths joining jihadist groups in Syria. This radicalisation is sponsored by Wahhabi funds from Saudi Arabia - a country which is investing heavily in the Maldives for its own strategic interests.There were also reports that the Maldives was going to "sell" Faafu - one of its 26 natural atolls - to Saudi Arabia. And, this has alarmed India. As things stand today, the Maldives has become a potential military threat to India because of China and a potential terror threat because of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, and Yameen is directly responsible for it. Several new "non-traditional" players have become active in the Indian Ocean region, which may make the regional security environment much more complex than in the past. These include regional middle powers such as Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates (UAE), Turkey, and Iran, which have played little or no security role in the Indian Ocean in modern times. Two new power blocs have emerged in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Egypt on one side and Turkey, Iran, and Qatar on the other. These rivalries are now bleeding further into the Indian Ocean. Saudi Arabia has been engaging in active checkbook diplomacy with the tiny (Muslim) island states of Comoros and the Maldives in an effort to outflank regional rival Iran. Although many would consider it unlikely, the potential for a Saudi naval base in the Maldives is highly likely. Saudi Arabia's close relationship with the Maldives is also of growing concern to India. "I think there are many similarities with the Cold War in terms of major powers jostling for influence among smaller and poorer countries. But it is also much more complex, with many new players. In my view, in coming years the Indian Ocean will be much less peaceful than it was during the Cold War," said Dr. Brewster. The changes in the Indian Ocean strategic environment also underline doubts over Washington's commitment to the region, and some regional players appear to be positioning themselves for what they see as an inevitable draw down in U.S. forces. America's friends and competitors are very much aware that the U.S. shale oil revolution has put the United States on the path to becoming the world's biggest net oil exporter within the next decade. China's moves, and U.S. and Indian responses, have led some analysts to worry about a "new Cold War" brewing in the Indian Ocean. Although the Trump administration has recently announced its new "free and open Indo-Pacific strategy. It is not clear what this means in practice for the Indian Ocean. There is little evidence as yet that the United States is a serious player in countering the influence that Beijing is buying with its Belt and Road Initiative. Dr. Brewster explained, "The United States will need to do things differently in the Indian Ocean. With the Maldives however, the United States, Australia and others will expect India to take the lead. This has been the case since at least the 1980s. India's partners will support India's actions in the Maldives, but India must take the lead." Overall, experts feel that both India and China may not over extend themselves and engaged in what they refer to as " a real tussle over the Maldives, as the islands are too small fry for that. They, however, do admit that relations between the two Asian giants are touchy. The turmoil in Maldives is a reminder that as China seeks greater commercial and strategic influence in Asia in the coming years, frictions between the world's two most populous nations - one a democracy, the other an autocracy - are set to grow. Adding to that the new rivalries playing out in the Indian Ocean are to a large extent driven by rivalries centered in the Persian Gulf and the Levant. Dr. Brewster concludes, Just as we saw in the Cold War, the jostling of richer and more powerful countries for influence among small and weak Indian Ocean states can spill over into considerable political instability right across the region. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Financial Action Task Force (FATF) has taken a decision to put Pakistan on a grey list for terror financing, according to the sources. The motion brought forth by the United States (US) was backed by the countries like the United Kingdom (UK), France, and India. The insiders revealed that Pakistan's traditional friend China withdrew its objections in putting Islamabad on the grey list. The move will make it difficult for financial institutions and banks to do business in Pakistan and it will also make it difficult for Pakistani businesses to raise money overseas. Pakistan, earlier this week, claimed that it has been granted a three-month reprieve to be placed on a terror-financing watch-list. Pakistan Foreign Minister Khawaja Asif tweeted on Tuesday, "Our efforts paid, FATF Paris 20 Feb meeting conclusion on the US-led motion to put Pakistan on the watch list. No consensus for nominating Pakistan, proposing three months pause and asking APG [Asia Pacific Group] for another report to be concluded in June". Asif was in Moscow when he posted on Twitter. Paris-based FATF, also known by its French name Groupe d'action financiere, is an intergovernmental organisation founded in 1989 to develop policies to combat money laundering. The Enforcement Directorate (ED) on Friday froze assets of Nirav Modi worth Rs. 43.86 crore. The Punjab Bank (PNB) lodged two financial fraud complaints of Rs 11400 crore and Rs 280 crore against Nirav Modi, his family members and Mehul Choksi, owner of Gitanjali Gems. After the case was registered, the ED and the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) have swung into action. Continuing the raids, the ED on Friday froze Modi's bank accounts with a total balance of Rs 30 crore. It also froze shares worth Rs 13.86 crore held in a company of Nirav Modi. Acting on a tip-off, the ED also seized 176 steel almirahs and 60 plastic containers containing imported watches. The ED has been raiding various properties belonging to Nirav Modi and Mehul Choksi. On Sunday, the ED conducted raids at 45 locations across 15 cities in connection with the PNB fraud case. On Saturday, the ED conducted searches at 21 locations across India and seized diamonds, gold, precious stones and jewellery worth Rs 25 crore. It also visited four shell companies linked to Nirav Modi, Mehul Choksi and others. Till Saturday, the ED seized gems and gold jewellery worth Rs 5,736 crore. The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) also made several arrests in connection with the case. On February 20, the CBI arrested five high profile accused: Vipul Ambani, president, finance, Firestar International Pvt Ltd.; Kavita Mankikar, executive assistant and authorised signatory of the three accused firms, Arjun Patil, senior executive, Firestar group; Kapil Khandelwal, CFO, Nakshatra group; and Niten Shahi, manager, Gitanjali. Till now, the CBI has also arrested five PNB officials in the case, including a General Manager (GM) rank officer of the PNB, Rajesh Jindal. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A day after the Jharkhand Government banned the Popular Front of India (PFI) in the state, the party workers on Friday staged a massive protest outside the Jharkhand Bhavan in Delhi. The PFI was banned for allegedly spreading anarchy in the state. "From last six months, the PFI has come to a limelight as we providing legal support to the victims of mob lynching and cow vigilante in the state. We fight against the fringe elements those try to tarnish the social fabric of our society. Since we have been fighting those fringes the state government has implemented a ban on our party," a party worker told ANI. Earlier on Thursday, the Jharkhand police raided a training centre of the PFI in Pakur district of the state. The police also seized the party's banners, stamps and other documents. The PFI, which was banned under Section 16 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1908, is an extremist and militant Islamic fundamentalist organisation in India formed as a successor to the Development Front (NDF) in 2006. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Chhattisgarh Chief Minister Dr. Raman Singh has expressed grief over demise of Swachh Bharat mascot Kunwar Bai and said she will always be remembered for her good deeds. Chattisgarh's Swachh Bharat Abhiyan mascot 106-year-old Kunwar Bai died on Friday morning after suffering from prolonged illness. Raman Singh took to Twitter, and said, "My heart is deeply saddened on the demise of Kunwar Bai, who lit the lamp of cleanliness in Chhattisgarh and received honour of 'cleanliness messenger' from Prime Minister Shri @narendramodi ji. It is only the end of the body of mother Kunwar Bai, she will always be immortalised with her good deeds." Resident of Kotabharri village in Dhamtari, Kunwar Bai was in news as a mascot for Swachh Bharat campaign after she sold all her goats to construct toilet at her home. Not only was she applauded by Prime Minister Modi, the PM also touched her feet and felicitated her during a public meeting in Rajnandgaon in February 2016. Kunwar Bai was being treated at Raipur's Ambedkar Hospital where she was admitted on the directives of Chief Minister Raman Singh. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Income Tax (IT) department on Friday attached 12 more bank accounts of the Rotomac Group of companies, in addition to the 14 bank accounts attached earlier. According to IT sources, six prosecutions have been sanctioned against Rotomac Pens owner, Vikram Kothari. Earlier today, Vikram Kothari and his son Rahul Kothari were sent to a one-day transit remand by Delhi's Patiala House Court, in connection with a case of loan default of approximately Rs 3,700 crore taken from seven public sector banks. Both were produced before the court by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) in connection with the matter. The duo was arrested on February 22, and will be produced before the concerned court in Lucknow tomorrow. On February 22, the IT department had also slapped a showcase notice to the Rotomac group. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) United States President Donald Trump on Friday slammed Russia, Iran and Syria's actions in the ongoing Syrian civil war as 'disgraceful', according to media reports. "I will say what Russia, Iran and Syria have done recently is a humanitarian disgrace. What those three countries have done to those people over the last short period of time is a disgrace," Trump said. Elaborating on the US role in Syria to stop the civil war, Trump added, "We're there for one reason, we're there to get ISIS (Islamic State) and get rid of ISIS and go home. We're not there for any other reason and we've largely accomplished our goal." Trump also went on to criticise Russia, who are also conducting airstrikes in the besiege Eastern Ghouta region in Syria, who were "uniquely responsible" for the alarming rise in the death toll. As of now, regime forces have conducted bombings and airstrikes in Eastern Ghouta over the week, killing over 400 people, which also included hundreds of women and children, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR). A day after Russia vetoed a United Nations Security Council (UNSC) resolution on the situation in Syria's conflicting region of Eastern Ghouta, the UNSC council will vote on a decree on Friday, calling for a 30-day ceasefire in the war-torn nation, and allowing humanitarian aids be supplied to the area that has been largely exhausted. Eastern Ghouta, which houses around 400,000 residents, has remained under a crippling regime siege for the last five years. In May last year, Russia, Iran and Turkey signed an agreement to set up de-escalation zones, in order to prevent airstrike-related incidents in some parts of Syria. The de-escalation zones include- Idlib province, some parts of Latakia province, Hama and Aleppo provinces, Homs, Eastern Ghouta, Daraa and al-Quneitra provinces in southern Syria. Syria has been embroiled in a civil war since 2011. Protesters have been long demanding the resignation of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad over his autocratic rule. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) China, Saudi Arabia and Turkey have joined hands to block a move by United State President Donald Trump's administration to place Pakistan on an international terror-financing watch list. According to the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), the United States was working behind the scenes during the ongoing Paris meeting of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), so as to take action against Pakistan, which it believes that it has not acted against terrorist financing and the implementation of the United Nation Security Council (UNSC) resolutions. Saudi Arabia said that it was acting on behalf of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). Meanwhile, the US is still trying for the FATF to take a decision on Pakistan's stance on Friday. However, Islamabad claimed that it had foiled US-led efforts to ban 26/11 mastermind Hafiz Saeed's Jamaat-ud-Dawah (JuD) and Falah-e-Insaniat Foundation (FIF) from collecting charities after the country was granted a three-month reprieve by FATF. The FATF, a global body that combats terrorism financing and money laundering, met in Paris amid reports that the US with the support of some European allies was trying to place Pakistan on a list of countries that financially support terrorism. "The officials said the US effort, which included pressure on the Saudis, raised the possibility of a fresh vote on action against Pakistan as soon as Thursday. The Pakistanis were scrambling to shore up support," the WSJ report said. Washington has accused Islamabad of not taking steps to crack down on terrorist groups such as the Haqqani network and the Taliban. The latter has repeatedly denied such allegations. China has repeatedly blocked efforts of India, the US and the United Kingdom to designate Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) chief Masood Azhar as a terrorist under the Al-Qaeda Sanctions Committee. "Pakistan, on the other hand, feared that its name in the list of countries deemed 'high risk' for doing too little to curb terror financing, would have serious financial effects on the country," the WSJ said. "As a result of this inclusion, banks, other lenders and international companies seeking to do business with Pakistan could rethink financial ties, putting a damper on its already struggling economy, the daily added. US state department spokesperson Heather Nauert on Wednesday said that the FATF was expected to take a decision soon on adding Pakistan to the 'grey list' of countries not doing enough to curb terrorist funding. Pakistan was on the FATF 'grey list' from 2012 to 2015 and is now scrambling to avert being put back on the list over fears that its economy could be damaged. The US State Department in 2014 had named the JuD as "foreign terrorist organisation", a status that freezes assets of the organisation under its jurisdiction. Saeed is also looking to contest the 2018 general elections in Pakistan and has, thereby, formed a party by the name of Milli Muslim League (MML). New Delhi has, time and again, protested against Islamabad for harbouring Saeed, who is wanted for plotting the 2008 Mumbai attacks. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Srei Advisory, a division of Srei Infrastructure Finance Limited (Srei), and government of Uttar Pradesh on Friday signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) announcing a new co-operation agreement to rejuvenate Agra as an iconic tourist-cum-holiday destination. The proposal is expected to attract investments of around Rs. 25,000 crore in the state of Uttar Pradesh. MoU was signed between Srei Advisory and the Department of Infrastructure and Industrial Development, government of Uttar Pradesh. "The Taj Mahal draws millions of tourists to Agra every year. Hence, we have a responsibility to ensure that the city is as good as you have heard. Also, the Taj Mahal is not the sole attraction. The legacy of the Mughal Empire has left a magnificent fort and several mausoleums. We are delighted to partner the government of Uttar Pradesh in positioning Agra as an iconic tourist-cum-holiday destination. We would be interested in more such opportunities to develop holistic infrastructure facilities in the state," said senior advisor Srei Advisory, Dr. Ratiranjan Mandal. Srei Advisory will facilitate in developing the city into a unique tourist destination for all types of travellers. The project will accentuate Agra's historical, cultural, and heritage contours, promote lesser known monuments and temples, and expand tourists' focal point from the Taj Mahal to other world heritage sites in the city. Srei will create necessary infrastructure in hospitality, transport, city and river front beautification, logistic parks and warehousing with active support from the government of Uttar Pradesh. The company will also assist the state government and its agencies in mobilising resources and catalysing investments for creation of necessary physical, social, hospitality and recreational infrastructure. The project is expected to commence operations in financial year 2018-19, subject to necessary statutory approvals and clearances. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Kunwar Bai, who became the mascot of Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, has passed away at the age of 106. Inspired by the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, she had sold off eight to ten of her goats, her only assets, to raise Rs 22,000 to build toilets at her house, in her village of Kotabharri, in Dhamtari district of Chhattisgarh. Kunwar Bai, who was felicitated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi for her efforts to make her village open defecation free, was chosen as the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan mascot in 2016. Earlier, during a rally in Rajnandgaon, the Prime Minister had touched her feet and addressed her as "Ma Kunwar Bai Yadav". Kunwar Bai worked tirelessly to spread awareness about using toilets amongst her fellow villagers and as a result of her efforts, the district of Dhamtari became the first to be declared open defecation free in 2016. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Pakistani seminary Darul Uloom Jamia Haqqania will be granted furthermore funds of Rs 277 million to bring its madrassas to the mainstream. The decision taken by Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) led Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government raises the sum of funds granted to the "Father of the Taliban" Maulana Samiul Haq led seminary to Rs 577 million, The News International reported. The provincial government in its budget had last year allocated Rs 300 million to the Islamic seminary, with PTI chief Imran Khan saying Maulana Samiul Haq had assured him of bringing reforms in the syllabus and system of the seminary in return to this grant. According to Department of Auqaf sources, a summary of Rs 277 million funds for the seminary has been forwarded to Chief Minister Pervaiz Khattak. The funds, being perceived as a political stunt to get the Maulana's support ahead of the Senate elections this year, would be dispersed after the Chief Minister's approval. The Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam-Sami (JUI-S) led by Maulana Samiul Haq is an ally of the provincial government. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Higher Education Minister Mushtaq Ghani did not confirm the release of more funds. However, the minister said the provincial government aimed at helping other seminaries through the aid to Haqqania madrassah so that students after completing studies have both formal and religious education. Maulana Samiul Haq had close ties to Taliban founder Mullah Mohammed Omar and is currently the chancellor of the Deobandi Islamic seminary, which is the alma mater of many prominent Taliban leaders. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Friday held a "warm" meeting with External Affairs Minister (EAM) Sushma Swaraj in the national capital. MEA Spokesperson Raveesh Kumar informed that the two sides discussed ways to strengthen and deepen the bilateral India-Canada partnership. "Picture speaks for itself! EAM @SushmaSwaraj had a warm meeting with the Prime Minister of Canada @JustinTrudeau and discussed ways to strengthen and deepen our partnership," Kumar tweeted. Earlier in the morning, Trudeau inspected a guard of honour at the Rashtrapati Bhawan, after which, the Canadian Prime Minister along with his family paid tribute to Father of the Nation Mahatma Gandhi at the Rajghat. Prime Minister Narendra Modi received Trudeau, along with his wife Sophie and children Xavier, Ella-Grace, and Hadrien. The two leaders will hold talks later in the day on further strengthening India-Canada bilateral relations. The bilateral talks will focus on trade, defence, civil nuclear cooperation, space, climate change and education. Delegation level talks will also be held, with a number of agreements expected to be signed in several areas. The Canadian Prime Minister, who is on a week-long State visit, arrived in Delhi on Thursday. Trudeau attended a reception dinner at Canadian High Commission in the national capital, wherein he expressed that it's an absolute pleasure for him to be here in India. Sharing his experiences about his trip so far, Trudeau said this trip for him, on a personal level, has been about discovering India, sharing it, learning about it and sharing it with his kids. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) United States President Donald Trump's national security adviser (NSA), Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster will reportedly resign from his post and will head back to the military, according to defence and administration officials. Several sources told CNN that the push for a replacement comes after months of personal tension between McMaster and Trump. "General McMaster forgot to say that the results of the 2016 election were not impacted or changed by the Russians and that the only Collusion was between Russia and Crooked H, the DNC, and the Dems. One Republican insider explained that the tension between the pair comes from a difference in "personality and style," Trump wrote on Twitter. The White House would be in an "awkward spot" trying to oust McMaster because of the turnover in the position already. Although Pentagon officials are reportedly looking for a possible four-star military job for McMaster that could be viewed as a promotion, "some defence officials caution that the US President may not promote McMaster from three-star general to four-star general and force him to retire. Trump's first NSA, Michael Flynn, resigned last year after holding the post for just a month amid controversy over his contact with Russian officials over their alleged meddling in the 2016 US presidential elections. Most officials could not confirm what to offer a new job for McMaster, who might be nominated if he were to leave the White House. Among options to replace McMaster is General Vincent Brooks, the current commander of US forces in South Korea. "General Brooks is expected to leave his post on a scheduled rotation in the coming months but his successor has already been earmarked within the Army but not yet made public", several officials said. Another name doing the rounds is General John Nicholson who served as the commander of the US coalition in Afghanistan since 2016. Meanwhile, Congressmen close to Trump do not believe that McMaster's job is any safer now. "He is safe until he's not," a senior Republican said. "General McMaster works for President Trump. Any decision with regards to staff, the White House will make those determinations," chief spokesperson Dana White said. Meanwhile, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders on Tuesday said that Trump "still had confidence in General McMaster. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A prominent Sikh environmentalist from India, Ravneet Singh, who was allegedly attacked in the United Kingdom (UK) on Friday, called for the Indian government and the Gurudwara committees to indulge in "dialogue with other countries," saying that they should be known as 'Sikhs.' "The Indian government and the Gurdwara committees should be in dialogue with other countries. We should be known as 'Sikhs'. Turbans should be represented as a symbol of a religion," Singh said. Ravneet Singh, a resident of Punjab, was visiting Tanmanjeet S Dhesi, the Member of Parliament (MP) in the United Kingdom (UK), to discuss his global work in environmental protection. Singh was standing in a queue outside Portcullis House when the alleged attacker reportedly said "Muslim go home" and tried to remove his turban. "It happened inside the Parliament premises. I was not able to believe that it was a racist attack. Later he shook my turban, we realised that it had to be a racist attack," Singh added. On Thursday, the UK MP condemned the incident, saying, "Disgusted that someone filled with hatred tried to pull off turban of one of my guests standing in a queue outside British Parliament on Wednesday night." "I felt embarrassed that he would be left with a personal scar from his visit," he added. The Slough MP said he experienced a similar attack at school and called upon the government to properly monitor and record hate crime against Sikhs. "It has been pointed out previously on several occasions to the Government that their hate crime action plan totally ignores Sikhs. Given such incidents, the Government needs to address this genuine community demand to properly monitor and record hate crime against Sikhs," he added. He further said that such incidents harm the victim's self-respect and also show the country in a bad light. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Member of Parliament (MP) in United Kingdom (UK) Tanmanjeet S Dhesi on Thursday strongly condemned the alleged racial attack on his guest whose turban was pulled off while standing in a queue outside the British Parliament. Ravneet Singh, a resident of Punjab, was visiting the Slough MP to discuss his global work in environmental protection. Singh was queuing outside Portcullis House when the alleged attacker reportedly said "Muslim go home" and tried to remove his turban. Taking note of the issue, the Slough MP said, "Disgusted that someone filled with hatred tried to pull off turban of one of my guests standing in a queue outside British Parliament on Wednesday night." "Ravneet Singh from EcoSikh was visiting from India for about three weeks to discuss their work for the environment," he added. He further said that they have informed the police about the incident and would take action against the culprit after examining the CCTV footage. "After the attack, they and I spoke with the police, who said they would get the CCTV footage from outside Portcullis House and take action. I felt embarrassed that he would be left with a personal scar from his visit," he added. The MP said he experienced a similar attack at school and called upon the government to properly monitor and record hate crime against Sikhs. "It has been pointed out previously on several occasions to the Government that their hate crime action plan totally ignores Sikhs. Given such incidents, the Government needs to address this genuine community demand to properly monitor and record hate crime against Sikhs," he added. He further said that such incidents harm the victim's self-respect and also show the country in a bad light. "We need to work together to remove this evil and discrimination from our society," he added. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A day after Russia vetoed a United Nations Security Council (UNSC) resolution on the situation in Syria's conflicting region of Eastern Ghouta, the council will on Friday vote on the decree calling for a 30-day ceasefire in the war-torn nation, and allowing humanitarian aids be supplied to the area exhausted by five years of siege. The resolution proposed by Kuwait and Sweden was on Thursday opposed by Russia, which offered amendments to it. While Russia's UN ambassador Vassily Nebenzia described civilian testimonies from Eastern Ghouta as "mass psychosis", Under-Secretary-General and Emergency Relief Coordinator of the council Mark Lowcock said the situation in the region was "hell on earth". A spokesperson for the council said around 40,000 civilians were trapped in the rebel-held area under constant bombardment and needed humanitarian relief and medical evacuations. According to local doctors and monitoring groups, over 350 people have been killed in the battered suburb since February 18, marking one of the bloodiest periods of the country's seven-year civil war. As fighting continued in the enclave, doctors said its healthcare system was pushed to the breaking point, with medical staff forced to prioritise resources and leave grievously wounded patients to die. "Your obligations under the humanitarian law are just that, binding obligations," Lowcock said. "They are not favours to be traded in a game of death and destruction. Humanitarian access is not a nice-to-have. It is a legal requirement." Deputy US ambassador to the UN Kelley Currie accused Russia of "appearing to be intent on blocking any meaningful effort" to halt the bombing and save lives. "The Assad regime wants to bomb or starve all of their opponents into submission," The Washington Post quoted her as telling the council. Russia suspects the US wants to shift focus away from the necessity of starting the Geneva talks to launching plan "B" in the terror-hit country, the country's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said. The minister said the resolution aimed to accuse Damascus of everything and to protect the militants. Lavrov explained that Russian military forces working in Syria, particularly the Reconciliation Centre, have offered the militants to peacefully leave Eastern Ghouta, similar to the evacuation of militants with their families from Eastern Aleppo. "Jabhat al-Nusra and those who interact with them flatly refused this offer." As a key ally of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, Moscow has used its veto power at the UNSC nine times to block resolutions critical of the Syrian government. "We are ready to study the resolution that we were proposed to adopt, but the ceasefire regime does not cover the Islamic State, Jabhat al-Nusra and the groups that support them and regularly shell the residential neighbourhoods of Damascus," Sputnik quoted Lavrov as saying. Robert Mardini, the top representative for the International Committee of the Red Cross in the Middle East, said he was "shocked" by the level of violence around Eastern Ghouta and called for immediate access to its civilians. He told reporters in Beirut that the international aid agency had a humanitarian convoy at the ready but the Syrian authorities were yet to approve its passage, The Washington Post said. Eastern Ghouta's rebels, a small number of them linked with Al-Qaeda, have launched attacks on Damascus neighbourhood, killing 16 people since Sunday and forcing schools to close. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Disgraced Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein is sorry he invoked names of actors Meryl Streep and Jennifer Lawrence in a recent legal defense. "Mr. Weinstein acknowledges the valuable input both Meryl Streep and Jennifer Lawrence have contributed to this conversation and apologizes," a spokesperson for the 65-year-old said in a statement Thursday, according to E! Online. "Mr. Weinstein has been informed that his civil counsel responded in court to a class action lawsuit which improperly sought to include all actresses who had previously worked with Mr. Weinstein, even where those actresses have made no claim of wrongdoing. "Even though Mr. Weinstein has worked with hundreds of actresses and actors who had only professional and mutually respectful experiences with him," the statement added, "Mr. Weinstein has directed in the future that no specific names be used by his counsel, even where those actors have made previous public statements about him." In a federal court in New York on Tuesday, Weinstein's lawyer had cited comments made by Streep, Lawrence and Gwyneth Paltrow meant to suggest that not every woman who ever worked with Weinstein was abused or had a negative experience. Both the Oscar-winning actresses had then publicly called him out for using their quotes in court. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The work on the Afghanistan section of the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) gas pipeline project began in the war-torn country on Friday. Afghan President Ashraf Ghani inaugurated the 1,814 km-long gas pipeline that will feed Turkmenistan gas to Afghanistan, Pakistan and finally to India. The inauguration ceremony organised in Herat province of the country was also attended by Pakistan Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi, Turkmenistan President Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow, and Minister of State for External Affairs M.J. Akbar, Khaama Press reported. Ghani delivered the message of regional cooperation during the ceremony. He said Kandahar, Helmand, Nimroz and Herat residents have vowed to assist the Afghan forces in helping in the completion of the project work on time. According to Ghani, other projects, including electricity, fibre optics, and railway network, will also be implemented alongside the TAPI gas pipeline. Ghani said Herat province would remain the main roundabout between the Central and South Asia, but other provinces in the South and West would also benefit from the projects. "Herat gives the message of confidence, hope and rehabilitation to Afghanistan and the region. Afghanistan will not spare any efforts to implement the project," he said. Akbar said India was committed to supporting the long-awaited project, which would take two years to complete, but had been several years in the planning. The Pakistan Prime Minister said his country was committed to long-term economic goals which guaranteed stability in the region. Turkmenistan President stressed the need for increasing his country's cooperation with Afghanistan. He said the implementation of the TAPI project was the biggest achievement for the countries involved. The project is a rare show of cooperation between Pakistan and India as well as the often contentious neighbours Pakistan and Afghanistan. The pipeline will have a capacity to carry 33 billion cubic meters gas from Turkmenistan to Pakistan and India through Afghanistan. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A Memorandum of Understanding between the Government of the Republic of India and Canada's International Development Research Centre (IDRC), to usher the programme based research support in addressing current and future global and local developmental challenges, was signed on 22 February 2018 between Shri S. Selvakumar, Joint Secretary (Bilateral Cooperation), Department of Economic Affairs and Dr. Jean Lebel, the President of IDRC, Canada. During the signing ceremony, Indian side appreciated the contribution of IDRC in supporting quality research in various fields including finance, agriculture, industry and health in India. Since 1972, IDRC has funded 551 research activities worth CA$159 million in India through institutions, researchers and NGOs. During the last five years (2012-17), 96 research projects worth CA$ 51 million were funded by the IDRC in India. Powered by Capital Market - Live News (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) An Indo-German MOU has been signed for an Implementation Agreement in Sustainable Urban Development and Smart Cities in India, here today. The objective of the programme is to develop and apply concepts for sustainable urban development about the provision of urban basic services and housing in selected cities and Smart Cities in India. The Agreement was signed between Ministry of Housing & Urban Affairs(MoHUA), Government of India and Deutsche Gesellschaft f Internationale Zusammenarbeit(GIZ) GmbH, India on behalf of the Government of Federal Republic of Germany in the presence of Shri. Hardeep Singh Puri, Minister of State (IC) for Housing and Urban Affairs, Government of India and Dr. Martin Ney, the German Ambassador to India. The agreement was signed by Shri. Rajiv Ranjan Mishra, Additional Secretary, Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs and Ms. Annette Rkel, Deputy Country Director and Ms. Tanja Feldmann, Cluster Coordinator, Sustainable Urban and Industrial Development, Deutsche Gesellschaft f Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH India. Shri Hardeep Puri said that the technical cooperation measure will support approaches for sustainable urban development in the area of integrated planning, provision of affordable housing and basic services with particular focus on water, waste water and solid waste management and mobility. The 'Sustainable Urban Development Programme - Smart Cities in India' project is supported by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) and jointly implemented by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs, Government of India and Deutsche Gesellschaft f Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ). The project support to Government of India will seek to achieve the set target of promoting sustainable urban development under the national urban missions/programmes such as Smart Cities Mission, linking with the Sustainable Development Goal No. 11 'Make cities inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable'. The German contribution to the project is up to 8 million EUR. The project will continue for a duration of three years (starting from 2018 till December 2020). MoHUA and GIZ will jointly work on implementing Government of India's missions, the optimisation of the national orientation framework and the dissemination of practice-proven approaches on sustainable urban development. Amongst others, focus is given to integrated planning approaches for the three Smart Cities with development of local innovations and pilot approaches pertaining to the provision of affordable housing and basic services within the three cities. Experiences and learnings from previous technical cooperation measures in the area of the provision of housing and sanitation as well as solid waste management will be integrated into the new project. Powered by Capital Market - Live News (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) With an aim to creating a pool of highly-skilled workforce in the country, Google on Friday announced a three-day 'Developer Students Club' (DSC) summit in Goa. The summit -- from February 23 to 25 -- is aimed at giving the Indian student community a head-start on Machine Learning (ML), Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Mobile and Web Development technologies. "To broaden access to world-class technology curricula for students, we are delighted to launch the 'Developer Students Club' summit that would make it easy for students and developers to gain the skills they need to be successful in the changing technology landscape," William Florance, Developer Products Group and Skilling Lead, Google, said in a statement. The inaugural batch will see 200 student ambassadors from 98 cities across 170 colleges in India attend the three-day event. The students would learn about various emerging technologies through a series of engaging sessions from experts from Google and industry and hands-on one-to-one mentoring activities. The summit will also have a 'Design Thinking' workshop by university innovation fellows from across the country. --IANS sku/na/dg (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Kolkata Police's Special Task Force (STF) on Friday arrested a member of Islamist terrorist outfit Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB) from West Bengal's Murshidabad district in connection with the bomb blast case in Bihar's Bodh Gaya on January 19, a senior officer said. Police have already arrested three more JMB suspects from various parts of the state in relation to the case earlier this month. "Nur Alam Momin alias Alam, 24, a resident of Murshidabad's Dhuliyan was arrested on Friday morning from infront of a health centre in the district's Samshergunj area. He participated in a meeting with JMB leaders in Hyderabad, where the Bodh Gaya blast was planned," Murlidhar Sharma, Deputy Commissioner, Special Task Force of Kolkata Police said in a release. Alam was produced to Bankshall Court in Kolkata and has been sent to 10 days of police custody, he said. Alam, a trader of scarves and Islamic books, went to Hyderabad with five others in November last year for 15 days and met some important JMB leaders where they planned the Bodh Gaya blast. "Whether he went to Bodh Gaya or not is a matter of investigation," Sharma said. He also revealed that raids would be conducted at he various places where the accused had been hiding so far. Earlier this month, three more JMB suspects - Paigamber Sheikh, 24, Jamirul Sheikh, 31 and Ahmed Ali alias Kalu were arrested from Bengal's Murshidabad and Darjeeling districts. According to police sources, they revealed the name of Alam during interrogation. A low intensity bomb blast took place near Kalchakra ground in Bodh GayaA on January 19 when the Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama was present in town. A couple of crude bombs and large quantity of explosives were also recovered from the place. National Investigating Agency (NIA) is primarily probing the blast case. --IANS mgr/ssp/vd (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has said that he would not allow Philippine troops to participate in any armed conflicts involving the US. In a speech in Iloilo province late Thursday, Duterte said that he does not want the Philippines to be dragged into a war that has nothing to do with Manila, reports Xinhua news agency. "This time I will tell them, no more, I will not allow the deployment of (troops of my country)," Duterte said, adding that most of the US-led wars have nothing to do with the country's security. Duterte recalled the Iraq war. "I don't know exactly how many Philippine troops were deployed in that conflict. But as far as I can remember, the invasion was done and it turned out there was no weapons of mass destruction." The President also mentioned other wars that involved the United States. The Philippines is a treaty ally of the US. However, their relations have been strained in recent years. In a report issued this month, US intelligence community has tagged Duterte as a threat to democracy and human rights in Southeast Asia. --IANS ksk (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The United Forum of Bank Unions (UFBU), an umbrella body of nine unions in the Indian banking sector, on Friday decided to postpone their March 15 strike for early finalisation of wage revision, said top leaders of two large banking unions. "Owing to the vitiated atmosphere in the banking sector following the Rs 11,300 crore scam/fraud in Punjab National Bank, the unions have decided not to proceed with the March 15 strike," C.H.Venkatachalam, General Secretary, All India Bank Employees' Association told IANS. "The UFBU met at Chennai today (Friday) and decided to postpone the strike panned for March 15. Also it decided to step up campaign against reforms aimed at privatisation of government banks," D. Thomas Franco Rajendra Dev, General Secretary of the All India Bank Officers Confederation told IANS. Dev said UFBU has also agreed to campaign amongst public on the contribution of public sector banks and how the policies of the government and the Reserve Bank of India have weakened the government owned banks. The UFBU had earlier decided to go on strike on March 15 to press for early finalisation of wage revision. The wage revision was due in November 2017. --IANS vj/vd (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) India's largest biopharmaceutical company Biocon will expand its presence in Hyderabad while its subsidiary Syngene will set up a research and developmentm an official statement said on Friday. The expansion and new facility are expected to create 1,500 jobs, the company announced on the sidelines of 15th BioAsia. Biocon will increase its presence in APIs (Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients)/ Intermediates to add 500 new jobs, said a statement from the office of Telangana's Industry Minister K. T. Rama Rao, who met Biocon MD Kiran Mazumdar Shaw. The R&D lab will come up in Genome Valley to generate another 1,000 high-tech jobs. The minister gave an overview of the infrastructure that the state government is developing including Pharma City, Medical Devices Park and Genome Valley Phase 2. Earlier, a business delegation headed by Thailand's Deputy Commerce Minister Chutima Bunyapraphasara,met Ramo Rao, who explained about the state's proactive business environment and how the state has ranked number one in Ease of Doing Business index. He gave an overview of various priority sectors like pharma, life sciences, aviation, food processing etc. During a meeting with Italian Consul General in Mumbai Stefania Costanza, the minister said that the startup state of Telangana has become a role model state in attracting investments. Rama Rao also met Terri Bresenham, CEO & President, Sustainable Healthcare Division, GE, who expressed interest to collaborate with Telangana Academy of Skill & Knowledge in healthcare skilling. --IANS ms/vd (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) More certainty, predictability and clarity regarding retrospective taxation would help companies from the UK to invest more in India, Richard McCallum, Managing Director, UK India Business Council said here on Friday. "I think that if there was more clarity, certainty, predictability around retrospective taxation and (resolving) the Vodafone issue that would help the UK companies make their investment decisions in India," McCallum told IANS over a telephonic interaction. He, however added: "...the ease of doing business, operating environment in India as we know is significantly improving...and the UK companies are making the most out of it." Vodafone Plc last year said an international arbitration tribunal would begin trial on Vodafone's challenge to India's retrospective legislation to seek Rs 22,100 crore in taxes. On the issue of reported immigration problems faced by Indian proffessionals in the UK, McCallum said, the British High Commission in India has the largest visa issuing network in the world. "Despite what you might read in the press... number of students enrolling in higher education courses (in UK) is increasing now," he added. Regarding trade prospects between the two countries after Brexit, McCallum said: "I think Brexit presents opportunities, in regard to future trade agreements and addressing of non-tarriff barriers and so on." India and the UK have a strong relationship and it will continue to be very strong after Brexit, he added. McCallum is currently in India to promote the International Business Festival 2018 to be held in June. He is accompanied by Ian McCarthy, Director, International Business Festival and Christine Vaudrey, Head of International for the festival. On participation of Indian companies in the the upcoming event to be held in Liverpool, Britain, Ian McCarthy said: "We think that 20 delegates will come from India to the the festival." The festival begins on the June 12 and the delegations would focus on some of the specific sectors that the festival is promoting like, manufacturing, health, urbanisation among others, he said. This would be the third edition of the business festival, and is held every two years in Liverpool, Christine Vaudrey, Head of International, International Business Festival said. --IANS rrb/ag/hs (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Expanding its fruit based beverage offerings, frozen fruit dessert, getting into dairy based value added products and also exporting those products developed in India, are some of the plans of Coca-Cola India Pvt Ltd, said a top company official. He said the company's focus will be on 'fruit circular economy'-- enabling farmers to increase their yield, source pulp and launch fruit based products. The company is also planning to launch vegetable based beverage like carrot juice. "We are in the process of developing different fruit beverages including based on regional fruits and would soon be launching them. "Similarly we will also expand our portfolio of fruit flavoured sparkling drinks like Fanta. "After successful piloting of our frozen fruit dessert in Bengaluru, we will launch the product in major cities this April," T.Krishnamukar, President, Coca Cola India and Southwest Asia told select media here late on Thursday. He said the company plans to launch fruit juices based on the regional preferences. For instance, the company would launch mango juices based on mango varieties that are available and popular in a particular region so that there is also a local connect. "We are also working on a product based on gooseberries," he added. According to him, the company has tied up with Jain Irrigation that operates fruit pulping plants in different regions. "We have tied up with Jain Irrigation for sourcing and pulping mango fruit. Similarly we have a tie up with that company for oranges in Maharashtra. "We expect Jain Irrigation may start setting up an orange pulping plant and the first commercial orange pulp may be available sometime in 2020," Krishnakumar added. He said the company's focus on fruit beverages is in line with its philosophy of 'beverage for life' meaning to have a product for people in different age groups. "The philosophy now is to make the company bigger than the Coca-Cola brand. Presently the Coca-Cola group is a $21 billion brand," he said. According to Krishnakumar, Coca-Cola India with its focus on the 'fruit circular economy' will enable the growth in demand for fruits which in turn would improve the farm practices and increase the farmer income. "We felt we should be more relevant to the local community. Tastes, views vary based on regions. So we have to move global to local and local to global," he said. The company will launch the local fruit beverages-including the mango beverage- under the Minute Maid brand. "The fruit pulp content will be between 10 per cent to 25 per cent in such drinks," Krishnakumar added. He said the research and development (R&D) work for new products is being done in India and also in Shanghai in China. Speaking of exports, he said the company has started exporting Indian brands like the carbonated drink ThumsUp and masala soda RimZim to Bangladesh and later to Sri Lanka, Bhutan and other markets. "We want to build on Indian brand as a billion dollar beverage brand. We are not shipping the end product but the formula, brand and related matters," he said. Speaking of the sugar content in the company's beverages, Krishnakumar said work in on to reduce the sugar content in its drinks and in five years time the beverages sold by the company will have far less sugar content than what it currently has. On foray into the dairy products segment Krishnakumar said during the second half of the current year the company would launch value added dairy product. --IANS vj/in (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Condemning the ruckus created by a group of students during a seminar on Thursday, Delhi University's Satywati College (Morning) on Friday said it has suspended two students till the time the proctorial committee submits its report on the incident. "The Staff Council in its meeting held on February 22 unanimously condemns the unfortunate incident of misbehave, abuse and assault with a teaching faculty during a programme in Satya auditorium in strong words and unequivocal terms," said the letter issued by the college principal after the incident. "The staff Council also unanimously recommends the suspension of two involved students namely Kunal Yadav and Aman Awana from the college with immediate effect pending the recommendations of report inquiry...," it said. The incident happened on Thursday when a group of students tried to sabotage a programme on women safety when law faculty student Kawalpreet Kaur, who is also head of All India Students' Association, the student arm of Communist Party of India-Marxist Leninist at the Delhi University, was giving her speech. Both the suspended students are from the RSS-affiliated Akhil Bhartiya Vidyarthi Parishad. The students started with shouting slogans against AISA and Kawalpreet Kaur and also allegedly snatch and threw her phone on the ground when she tried to videograph their obstructionist activities. A police complaint has also been filed by the AISA leader at the local police station in this issue. --IANS vn/vd (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Delhi Police on Friday visited Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal's residence to look for evidence in connection with an alleged assault on Chief Secretary Anshu Prakash there by two AAP legislators just days back. Additional Deputy Commissioner of Police Harendra Kumar Singh told IANS that the "raid" was underway and police would be looking for CCTV footages besides questioning staff regarding the alleged assault. The Aam Aadmi Party termed the action "police raj" and said that there was no "intimation" prior to the search. Kejriwal told reporters outside his residence that he was "happy that the investigation is taking place" but said that they probe agencies should also garner "courage to question (BJP chief) Amit Shah" in the Justice Loya death case. "A lot of police has been sent to my house. Investigation is going on in my house. It is a good thing," Kejriwal later said in a tweet. This was the first time the Chief Minister has responded to the allegations on the assault. Kejriwal also said in another tweet that his Council of Ministers has sought an appointment with the Lt. Governor Anil Baijal later in the day. The Delhi Police is under the jurisdiction of Baijal. "CM house taken over by police. Huge number of police force enters CM house without any intimation. Police Raj kills democracy in Delhi. Police spread all over inside CM house. "If this is what they can do to an elected CM, think what they can to poor people," Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia's media advisor Arunoday Prakash said in a tweet. Earlier this week the Delhi Chief Secretary had alleged that he was beaten up by Amanatullah Khan and Prakash Jarwal -- Aam Aadmi Party MLAs -- in the presence of Kejriwal at the latter's residence on Monday night. Prakash on Tuesday said the incident took place when he was summoned to attend an emergency meeting at Kejriwal's home. On Thursday, the Chief Minister's adviser V.K. Jain told police that he saw Khan and Jarwal "physically assault" the Chief Secretary, according to Jain's statement recorded by the Delhi Police. Later in the day, Khan and Jarwal were sent to judicial custody for 14 days by a Delhi court. Scores of Delhi government employees across the city started a silent protest on Thursday to mark their support for the Chief Secretary. The IAS Association is heading the protest. Delhi government employees have decided to observe a five-minute silence outside their respective offices every day till steps were taken to "ensure safety and dignity" of government staff in the city. Bureaucrats had also taken a decision that they would not meet or talk over phone to the Chief Minister, his ministers or MLAs till Kejriwal accepts and apologises for the alleged assault and takes action. --IANS nkh/in/hs (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Biennial election for 58 seats of Rajya Sabha from 16 states will be held on March 23, the Election Commission announced on Friday. While the last date of nomination is March 12, counting of votes for all seats will be held on March 23, it said in a statement. The term of 58 Rajya Sabha members is due to expire in April and May this year. The retiring members include 10 from Uttar Pradesh, six each from Bihar and Maharashtra, five each Madhya Pradesh and West Bengal, four members from Gujarat and Karnataka while the number is three each for Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Odisha and Rajasthan. Two members will retire from Jharkhand while Chhattisgarh, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand have one retiring member each. Also, bye-poll for a seat from Kerala will be held on March 23 due to resignation of M.P. Veerendra Kumar. --IANS spk/vd (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Filmmaker Rajkumar Hirani, who is busy shooting for a biopic on actor Sanjay Dutt, says fiction cant beat facts. Hirani attended a special screening of the documentary titled "Raising The Bar", hosted by filmmaker Onir and producer Mitu Bhowmick Lange in association with Australian Consulate General Mumbai on Thursday. Asked about the importance of making documentaries, Hirani said: "I feel why should we see only fiction? We should watch documentaries because they can be very interesting as well." "Earlier, they never used to get platforms but I think they should get a platform so that more and more people can come forward to make documentaries. I think documentaries are really engaging as they are real, and fiction can't beat facts." The "3 Idiots" director said documentary filmmakers make films that are close to their heart. "Documentary filmmakers choose subjects which they feel about, which they are affected by or which they have seen around them. So, I feel it's nice that people come to know about these things," he said. "People make fictional stories to entertain the audience but a documentary filmmaker makes documentary which is closer to his or her heart." Will he ever make a documentary? Hirani said: "I am really fond of it. I want to make it and I will definitely make it. I have many subjects to tell and when the time will be right, I will speak more about it." "Raising The Bar" is a poignant tale which follows awe-inspiring stories of six young individuals with Down syndrome from two different continents who all meet at the World Down Syndrome Congress in Chennai. The documentary aims to create awareness and emotionally engage the audience with the universal message of inclusion and diversity, celebrating the differences that make us all unique. Helmed by National Award-winning director Onir, "Raising The Bar" is a 70-minute documentary which has won several awards internationally. --IANS iv/nn/bg (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) In a tug of war over flying taxis versus Hyperloop transport system, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi and Tesla CEO Elon Musk came out in the open on the micro-blogging site Twitter when the former took a swipe at Tesla over the need to dig tunnels for its Next-Gen mobility dream. Ride-hailing app Uber has announced that it will start its ambitious flying taxi project in Los Angeles by 2020 to deal with the city's traffic problem. Uber has also signed a Space Act Agreement with NASA to create a new air traffic control system to manage low-flying autonomous aircrafts. On the other side, Tesla is currently working on building tunnels to connect New York and Washington DC as part of its Hyperloop projects. The debate began when a journalist tweeted on Thursday on behalf of Khosrowshahi who is in New Delhi to attend an event. "New @Uber CEO @dkhos says why do you need to dig tunnels for @HyperloopOne @hyperlooptt when you can fly? Challenges @elonmusk what do you say to that sir @elonmusk," tweeted Anirban Ghoshal from www.vccircle.com. Musk replied to him: "If you love drones above your house, you'll really love vast numbers of 'cars' flying over your head that are 1,000 times bigger and noisier and blow away anything that isn't nailed down when they land." The Uber CEO replied back to Tesla CEO: "Challenge accepted. Improved battery tech (thx 2 @elonmusk) and multiple smaller rotors will be much more efficient and avoid noise + environmental pollution." Khosrowshahi also had a discussion with the Indian government over airport partnerships and future of commercial air travel. "Great meeting with the Minister of State for Civil Aviation, @jayantsinha, to discuss airport partnerships and future of commercial air travel in the form of flying cars," Khosrowshahi tweeted. On February 18, the Maharashtra government announced that it has entered into an agreement with Virgin Hyperloop One to construct a hyperloop route connecting Mumbai and Pune by 2025. --IANS ksc/na/dg (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Hollywood star Brendan Fraser is joining the #MeToo movement, with allegations of sexual assault by Philip Berk, former president of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA) that organises Golden Globes ceremony. In an interview with GQ magazine, "The Mummy" star alleged that Berk assaulted him at the Beverly Hills Hotel in the summer of 2003, variety.com reported on Thursday. "His left hand reaches around, grabs my a** cheek, and one of his fingers touches me in the taint. And he starts moving it around," the actor said. Berk recounted the incident in his memoir "With Signs and Wonders", but said he pinched Fraser's behind as a joke. According to Fraser though, it wasn't a joke and he was overcome with fear and had to remove Berk's hand. "I felt ill. I felt like a little kid. I felt like there was a ball in my throat. I thought I was going to cry," he said. He rushed home and told his wife about the encounter, but was afraid to go public with the incident as "I didn't want to contend with how that made me feel, or it becoming part of my narrative". Fraser, through his representatives, asked the HFPA for an apology, which Berk said he wrote, but added: "My apology admitted no wrongdoing, the usual 'If I've done anything that upset Mr. Fraser, it was not intended and I apologise'." Berk, who took a six-month leave of absence from the HFPA in April 2014 following backlash from his memoir but is still a member, denied the claim in an e-mail to GQ, saying: "Mr. Fraser's version is a total fabrication. "The HFPA stands firmly against sexual harassment and the type of behaviour described in this article. Over the years we've continued a positive working relationship with Brendan, which includes announcing Golden Globe nominees, attending the ceremony and participating in press conferences. "This report includes alleged information that the HFPA was previously unaware of and at this time we are investigating further details surrounding the incident." The actor said that the incident made him reclusive and he retreated from public life. He questioned if the HFPA blacklisted him as a result, since he was rarely invited back to the Golden Globes after 2003, variety.com reported. Fraser said he was emboldened to come forward by the #MeToo and Time's Up movements. --IANS dc/nn/ksk (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Breaking his silence over the massive PNB scam, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday said that the government will take strong action against those indulging in financial irregularities and asked supervisory agencies responsible to do their job to prevent such frauds. He also warned that his government will not tolerate embezzlement of public money. "Those entrusted with the responsibility of ensuring rules and ethics in various financial institutions should work with full dedication - especially those who are responsible for supervising and monitoring," Modi said while addressing a gathering at Economic Times Global Business Summit. He made it clear that the government would take strict action against irregularities in financial matters. "The illegal accumulation of people"s money is unacceptable, and this is the basic mantra of New Economy-New Rules," he said. Noting that the Union Government is going to complete four years of assuming office in a few months, he said that a definite change is now visible. "This change in the economic and social content represents the essence of the New Rules for the New India and the New Economy," the Prime Minister said. He said that in the last four years, the discourse has changed from India being a 'fragile five' economy to the target of India becoming a 'five trillion dollar' economy. Presenting figures to indicate how India is playing a key role in the entire world's growth, he said that in nominal terms, India's share of the world GDP has risen from 2.4 per cent in 2013, to 3.1 per cent in 2017. "India is performing better on various macroeconomic parameters," he said. Modi said that this change has come about due to a new approach and a new work culture. "India's competitiveness is being validated by the entire world today." Recalling that when he had last attended this Global Business Summit, GST was still just a possibility, he said: "Today it is a reality, which has delivered a better tax compliance system and a better revenue system." He also mentioned other major reforms such as the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code. Giving examples of the increase in pace in the various projects in the infrastructure sector, he said that speed, scale and sensitivity are important to ensure the success of the government's initiatives. "There is unprecedented investment being made today in infrastructure, agriculture, technology, health sector and education sector," he said mentioning the initiatives taken in the health sector, such as Mission Indradhanush, Jan Aushadhi Stores, and the Ayushman Bharat scheme. About the Digital India Mission, Modi said that the trinity of 1 billion bank accounts, 1 billion Aadhaar cards and 1 billion mobile phones, would create a unique ecosystem, not seen anywhere else in the world. Recalling that in his last address at the Economic Times Global Business Summit, he had spoken of Housing for All, Power for All, Clean Cooking for All, Health for All,and Insurance for All, he now outlined the steps that have been taken in regard to house construction, Ssaubhagya yojana, Ujjwala Yojana, and insurance. Saying that the government's initiatives are aimed at empowering the poor, the Prime Minister also mentioned the construction of toilets, distribution of loans through the Mudra Yojana and distribution of soil health cards. Chinese technology giant Huawei and telecom services provider Bharti Airtel on Friday announced to have successfully conducted 5G network trial under a test set-up in India. The trial was conducted at Airtel's Network Experience Centre in Manesar (Gurugram), the company said in a statement. "We are moving quickly to begin collaboration towards 5G interoperability and development testing (IODT). We look forward to work closely with our partners for developing a robust 5G ecosystem in India," said Abhay Savargaonkar, Director-Networks, Bharti Airtel. During the test trial, a user throughput of more than 3Gbps was achieved. This is the highest measured throughput for a mobile network in 3.5 GHz band with 100MHz bandwidth and end-to-end network latency of approximately 1 msec, the company said. "We have been focusing on developing 5G ecosystem and use cases and the show with Bharti Airtel impressively demonstrates the performance capability of 5G in 3.5 GHz band," said Emmanuel Coelho Alves, Director, Wireless Marketing, Huawei HQ. The setup demonstrated high-spectral efficiency and potential for diversified services such as Internet of Things (IoT) and Augmented Reality/Virtual Reality (AR/VR) that can be delivered by 5G technology to serve a digitally connected world. --IANS sku/na/bg (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Days after the Chief Secretary of the Delhi government accused Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) legislators of assaulting him, party MLA Naresh Balyan on Friday justified the act, saying anyone obstructing the work for the common man deserves a beating. "They are taking up to three to six months for doing work which should be done in three days. Why? Because Delhi Chief Minister abolished the commission system which earlier reigned. And as this system was eradicated, they (bureaucrats) started sitting on the files. "Whatever happened to the Chief Secretary...I say they should be beaten up, they should be thrashed... Whoever obstructs the work being done for the common man, should be meted out the same treatment," Balyan, the legislator from Uttam Nagar constituency, said at a public rally of the party. It was on Tuesday that Chief Secretary Anshu Prakash alleged that he was beaten up by two AAP MLAs -- Amanatullah Khan and Prakash Jarwal -- in the presence of Kejriwal at the Chief Minister's residence on Monday night, where he had been called for an emergency meeting. Later speaking to IANS, Balyan said his words were misconstrued and that he only meant that the public has a right to beat up erring officials. "My contention was people should be given ration on the basis of their ration cards and that people have a right to beat up those officials who are obstructing its implementation," he said. In an order issued on Tuesday, the Delhi government had stipulated that beneficiaries will no longer need their Aadhaar biometrics to buy subsidised ration, bringing the ration card system back for a while. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) flayed the Delhi Chief Minister, accusing him of fomenting lawlessness in the national capital. "Your own MLA ... he has threatened to hit any public servant, any officer, who does not agree with Arvind Kejriwal. What kind of situation do you want to prevail in Delhi -- lawful situation or a lawless situation," BJP spokesperson Sambit Patra told the media here. "Mr Arvind Kejriwal, we have seen in the past also how you have spoken against the very ethos of the Constitution of this country. You have always spoken about anarchy and you have yourself declared that you are an anarchist. "I firmly believe that this kind of anarchist mentality will never be beneficial for Delhi. So, I believe Arvind Kejriwal should be answering the question," he said. -- IANS nkh-vn/nir/bg (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) President Ram Nath Kovind on Friday said that India and Canada faced common challenges of terrorism and extremism and both the countries should stand united in the fight against these forces. The President's remarks came during his interaction with visiting Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, when he called on him at Rashtrapati Bhavan. "The democratic and pluralistic societies like India and Canada face common challenges from forces of terrorism and extremism. As strategic partners, we should stand united in the fight against terrorism, separatism and extremism," Kovind said in a statement issued by Rashtrapati Bhavan. Welcoming the Canadian Prime Minister, the President said that India attaches high priority to its partnership with Canada. "Our shared values of democracy, pluralism and the rule of law bind us together. In recent times, India and Canada have made significant progress in our cooperation in the areas of investment, education energy and connectivity," he said. The President said the India-Canada economic partnership holds immense potential. "The Indian economy is growing at a fast pace. It opens new opportunities for Canadian investments. India invites Canadian companies to partner its initiatives such as Make in India, Digital India, Start-up India, Smart Cities, infrastructure development and Skill India," he said. The President also emphasised that the two countries should look at ways to enhance and diversify their bilateral trade. --IANS bns/vsc/bg (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Indian Petroleum Minister Dharmendra Pradhan on Friday invited Saudi Arabia to participate in the Indian Strategic Petroleum Reserve Programme, an official statement said. Under the programme, the government has set up around five million tonnes of strategic crude oil storages at Visakhapatnam in Andhra Pradesh and Mangaluru and Padur (near Udupi) in Karnataka. and plans to construct additional strategic reserves in the second phase. In a meeting here with visiting Saudi Energy Minister Khalid A. Al-Falih, "Pradhan shared details of various investment opportunities in India in downstream and upstream sectors", the statement said. The Saudi Arabian minister also provided details of investment opportunities for Indian companies in his country, it said, further adding that "both sides agreed to conclude discussions regarding concrete investment proposals in a time-bound manner"." Al Falih is on an official visit to India from February 22-26. --IANS rrb/vd (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A day after reports surfaced that nearly 10,000 credit or debit card holders of Punjab National Bank (PNB) were affected by a data breach, the cyber security firm that detected the breach on Friday said it is now the responsibility of the bank to validate and take necessary actions. CloudSek Information Security, a company registered in Singapore that also has its office in Bengaluru, gave a detailed account of how they spotted the data breach and its communication with PNB. "On 20th Feb, we identified a listing that claimed to have multiple cards that belonged to PNB that were put up for sale on a DarkWeb site. We immediately tried reaching out to PNB using the cybercrime contact emails that were listed on their website. But that email bounced," CloudSek Chief Technical Officer Rahul Sasi said in a statement. "On 21st, Feb, 8.10 PM we were able to reach to PNB officials via a third party source. The PNB officials were quick to respond as we got a call back the same day 10.00 PM from PNB security officials. We provided them a detailed report about the leaked data," he added. "On 22nd, Feb, 1.10 we provided them with a more detailed report. And the officials ensured swift action," Sasi further said. The data available for sale includes names, expiry dates, Personal Identification Numbers and Card Verification Values. A report in Hong Kong-based English language news website Asia Times, however, claimed on Thursday that PNB's Chief Information Security Officer T.D. Virwani has confirmed that the bank was working with the government to contain the fallout from the data breach. According to Sasi, at this stage, CloudSEK has no method to ensure if a listed data is authentic or not. "Nor we do not put any effort to validate that data. It is the responsibility of the bank to validate and take necessary actions," he noted. Dark Web is an unexplored portion of the Internet which is not generally found on Google searches. The Dark Web hosts many underground services such as Hacking as a Service, insider information for sale, sensitive account information like Bank credentials and much more. "Many a time, credit card sellers try to dupe their customers by sandwiching a few valid credit card data between hundreds of fake data," Sasi said. CloudSEK said no other bank has been affected in this data breach. "We at CloudSEK maintain a unique hash related to the different data leaks for the past 2 years, and this hash helps us identify old/invalid leaks. This is how we have come to the conclusion that only one bank had unresolved leaks that are yet to be fixed," Sasi stressed. PNB is already reeling under a multi-crore-rupee financial fraud by two fugitive luxury jewellers. --IANS na/dg (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Jharkhand High Court on Friday rejected the bail plea of former Bihar Chief Minister and RJD chief Lalu Prasad who is lodged in the Birsa Munda Central Jail here after his conviction in a fodder scam case. Justice Apresh Kumar Singh rejected Lalu Prasad's bail plea after going through documents pertaining to his conviction by a CBI court in the fodder scam related to withdrawal of Rs 84.5 lakh from the Deoghar treasury. The High Court said bail could be granted only when the convict had undergone half of the sentence awarded to him. A special CBI court in Ranchi had convicted on December 23, 2017 and later sentenced Lalu Prasad to jail for three-and-half years in a case that pertained to withdrawals from the Deoghar treasury. The quantum of punishment was pronounced on January 6, 2018, by CBI Special Judge Shivpal Singh, following which the former Railway Minister had appealed in the Ranchi High Court. The Rashtriya Janata Dal chief got five-year imprisonment in Chaibasa treasury case. The High Court will hear the bail plea in the Chaibasa treasury case on March 9. Last Friday, High Court Justice Apresh Kumar Singh had granted four-week provisional bail on health grounds to former Bihar Chief Minister and co-accused Jagannath Mishra. Mishra was also handed out five-year jail and imposed a fine in the Chaibasa fodder scam case. He too had challenged the CBI court decision in the High Court. --IANS ns/tsb/dg (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Opposition parties in Jharkhand on Friday demanded the arrest of a BJP legislator on the charge of thrashing a land acquisition official over compensation. Bharatiya Janata Party legislator Sadhu Charan Mahto had on Thursday allegedly thrashed Saraikela Land Acquisition Officer Deepu Kumar at Raghunathpur village in Neemdih block, where compensation was being distributed for land acquisition for the National Highway-32 project. The legislator was said to have entered into an altercation with the officer and later manhandled him and even broke the windowpanes of his vehicle. The district administration was instructed by the state government to speed up distribution of compensation while the MLA was accused of opposing it. He had earlier asked the officer not to distribute the compensation. "The BJP government in Jharkhand, like what happened in Delhi, should immediately arrest the legislator. We condemn the BJP legislator's action in creating hurdles in official work and beating the official," Congress leader Kishore Sahdeo told IANS. The main opposition party, Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM), also condemned the incident and demanded action against the legislator. Jharkhand Administrative Service Association President Daniyal Kundulana said: "We condemn the incident and will chalk out our strategy to protest at our meeting." --IANS ns/tsb/bg (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A 27-year-old tribal youth said to be "not of sound mind" was beaten to death here in Kerala by a lynch mob which had accused him of theft, according to the mother. The turn of event on Thursday has elicited response from across the state after a perpetrator of the beating posted a selfie taken just minutes before the crime. Twitter had posts that said: "@CMOKerala... please take urgent action on this matter and bring the culprits in front of Justice." Speaking to the media here on Friday, Malli, mother of the slain youth Madhu, said: "It was yesterday (Thursday) evening that my son was beaten up by a group of people in the forest (near Attapadi-Agali) saying that he was a thief. Then he was handed over to the police and soon he developed complications. He was taken to a hospital, where he died. He is not a thief, instead he was not of sound mind," said the grieving mother. The entire episode was shot on a mobile and posted on social media. It was only after actor-director Joy Mathew had posted the visuals on the social media that various political leaders, including Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan condemned the incident. "This is some sort of a fascist Malayali psyche which has developed recently and has to be tackled. If the police wish to arrest me for sharing this video in the social media, let them do that," said Mathew. Vijayan in his Facebook post said: "This is in no way good for a literate society and the progress that our state has made. I have instructed the state police chief to see that all those who have had a role to be brought before the rule of law." The local tribal community are up in arms and have demanded that if the people behind the incident were not arrested, they would launch a protest. State Minister of SC/ST, A.K.Balan told the media: "Those who did it claim that this youth was a thief, but that's their allegation. The state government will act very strongly and none who have done this would be spared." State Police chief Loknath Behra said that he had handed over the case to Thrissur Inspector General of Police and "everyone who had done this would be brought to book". The body will be taken for an autopsy at the Thrissur Medical College hospital. --IANS sg/in/hs (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Indian Premier League (IPL) franchise Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR) can breathe easy after their star player Chris Lynn was told he does not need surgery following the latest shoulder injury the big-hitting batsman suffered in Australia's T20 tri-series final in New Zealand. "Chris got a positive result from the doctors who said he will not need surgery," Lynn's manager Stephen Atkinson said, according to a News Corp report quoted by ESPNcricinfo. Atkinson said the destructive batsman had received positive news from doctors after seeing specialists in Brisbane on Friday. "Chris is disappointed at missing the Pakistan Super League but he will be making every effort to play in the Indian Premier League and, if selected, the five one-dayers for Australia in England in June." Lynn dislocated his right shoulder after landing awkwardly while fielding during the ninth over of Wednesday night's T20 tri-series final at Auckland's Eden Park. "Chris dislocated his right shoulder after landing awkwardly on it when fielding the ball," said Bupa Support Team Physiotherapist Alex Kountouris. "I'm disappointed to not go to the Pakistan Super League as planned (this week), but I'll now focus on rehabilitation and working as hard as I can, with the hope to still take part in the Indian Premier League later this year," Lynn said. Lynn was supposed to travel from New Zealand direct to Dubai to feature in the Pakistan Super League. --IANS dm/ajb/dg (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Maldives President Abdulla Yameen did "convey that mediation was not wanted at this stage" when UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres spoke to him last week, Guterres's Spokesperson Stephane Dujrric has confirmed. The conversation between the two leaders took place on February 16, Dujarric said. The government of Yameen extended by 30 days on Wednesday the state of emergency that was declared on February 6 when Supreme Court Chief Justice Abdulla Saeed, another judge and several politicians and activists were arrested. "Obviously, we are all following the situation in Maldives with concern," Dujarric said. In an apparent response to a statement from the UN on Wednesday that Yameen had turned down the Secretary-General's offer to mediate between him and the opposition, Maldives Fisheries and Agriculture Minister Mohamed Shainee tweeted on Thursday that the President had not rejected a UN role in "All Party Talks". Asked about Shainee's claim, Dujarric reiterated that "the Secretary-General, in a conversation with the President, offered UN mediation, but the President conveyed that mediation was not wanted at this stage". "I can only speak for half of the phone call, and I can only speak for our half," Dujarric added. Asked about contacts with the opposition, which had written to Guterres asking for UN participation in talks with the government, Dujarric said: "I'm not aware that the Secretary-General has spoken to anyone in the opposition." In his tweet, Shainee claimed that Yameen had himself requested UN participation in talks and that the opposition was blocking the government's attempts to have an initial engagement with them, which he said the UN required. Earlier, the Joint Opposition led by former President Mohamed Nasheed's Maldivian Democratic Party wrote to Guterres asking him to mediate between them and the government and to oversee any talks held. The Maldives crisis began on February 1 when the Supreme Court unanimously overturned the terrorism conviction of former President Nasheed, as well as the convictions of eight other politicians on several charges. After the arrest of the Chief Justice Abdulla Saeed and the other judge, the other three judges remaining on the Supreme Court overturned the court's unanimous ruling ordering the release of the nine politicians. Meanwhile, Maldives mission to the UN has set up a modest photo exhibition showing both the nature wonders of the archipelago as well as everyday scenes from the country. (Arul Louis can be reached at arul.l@ians.in) --IANS al/in (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) German Chancellor Angela Merkel has made a renewed pledge for a more even redistribution of refugees across the European Union (EU). The Chancellor on Thursday said she wanted to see a European asylum system that was "stable and finally reflected principles of solidarity, especially with regards to the fair distribution of refugees in the EU", Xinhua news agency reported. Merkel made the comments during a speech in the German Federal Parliament (Bundestag), before she is scheduled to attend a special EU summit in Brussels. The veteran stateswoman suggested linking the transfer of EU subsidies to economically-weaker regions should be based on their engagement in EU asylum policy, so as to prevent free-riding issues. "When we redistribute the money from the structural funds, we need to make sure that the criteria for obtaining such aid include the engagement of many regional and communal governments in accepting and integrating migrants," she argued. EU interior ministers are trying to reach a final agreement on the shape of a "Dublin IV" system. Critics of the current rules have repeatedly highlighted that EU asylum policy puts member states at the Schengen Area's external borders at a disadvantage. Such countries include Italy and Greece, as they are legally responsible for the bulk of refugees. Following the temporary collapse of "Dublin III" in 2015, more than one million asylum seekers arrived in Germany. Together with Austria and Sweden, Germany has thus found itself in a situation in which it must shoulder a disproportionate share of the financial and logistical burden of the "refugee crisis". In order to ensure greater cohesion and effectiveness in EU asylum and immigration policy in the future, Merkel also demanded an expansion of joint efforts to secure the external border of the Schengen Area. The Chancellor emphasised that a "strong" and "confident" Europe would be an overriding objective for a prospective new "grand coalition" between Merkel's CDU/CSU conservative alliance and the Social Democrats (SPD). "Europe has never been more prominent in a coalition agreement," she noted. Merkel warned that Europe faced significant political and economic challenges which it could only overcome through close cooperation. She highlighted the impending exit of Britain from the bloc in 2019 as one such change. --IANS pgh/ (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Prime Minister Narendra Modi met his Canadian counterpart Justin Trudeau on Friday welcoming him with a hug ahead of a ceremonial reception at the Rashtrapati Bhavan, putting to rest speculations about the government cold-shouldering the visiting dignitary. After Trudeau, his wife Sophie, and children Xavier, Ella-Grace and Hadrien, alighted from a car on the forecourt of the Rashtrapati Bhavan. Modi shook hands with Trudeau and then hugged him. On Thursday evening breaking his silence since the Canadian Prime Minister's arrival in India on February 17, Modi said that he looked forward to the bilateral meeting on Friday. "I appreciate his (Trudeau's) deep commitment to ties between our two countries," Modi tweeted. At the Rashtrapati Bhavan, while Modi shook hands with Sophie Trudeau, Xavier and little Hadrien, he had a special hug reserved for Elle-Grace. On Thursday, the Indian leader had posted a picture of him playfully tweaking Elle-Grace's ears with Trudeau smilingly looking on during a visit to Canada in 2015. "I particularly look forward to meeting his children Xavier, Ella-Grace, and Hadrien," Modi said in his tweet. Hadrien, who will turn four this month, was the cynosure of all eyes at the Rashtrapati Bhavan as he stumbled and struggled to hold on to his hat as Modi playfully stroked his cheeks. The ceremonial reception optics came after much speculation that Modi and his government was cold-shouldering Trudeau during his eight-day state visit to India. The visiting dignitary and his family have since visited Agra, Ahmedabad, Mumbai and Amritsar. While Modi did not accompany Trudeau to Ahmedabad, a meeting with Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh in Amritsar on Wednesday was organised only at the last moment. Ties between New Delhi and Ottawa have been frosty of late as Canada was being seen as offering a platform to separatists demanding an independent Khalistan. On Thursday, fresh storm blew after it came to light that the Canadian High Commission here had extended an invitation to a convicted Khalistan separatist, Jaspa Atwal, for a reception in honour of Trudeau. The High Commission then rescinded the invitation while the Indian External Affairs Ministry said that it was ascertaining how a visa was issued to Atwal who holds a Canadian passport. Trudeau later said that the matter was being taken "extremely seriously" and that Atwal should never have received an invitation. The visit of Trudeau, who assumed office in November 2015, comes after the visit of Modi to Canada in April that year. Following Friday's bilateral summit between the two leaders, a number of agreements were expected to be signed. --IANS ab/in/ksk (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Two associates of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have been remanded in custody amid a corruption investigation. The Tel Aviv Magistrates' Court has extended the arrests of Shaul Elovitch, the controlling shareholder of Israel's giant telecom company Bezeq, and Nir Hefetz, Netanyahu's confidant and former media adviser. They will stay under arrest at least until Monday, the court said on Thursday, Xinhua news agency reported. Elovitch is suspected of being part of a bribery deal, in which Bezeq received regulatory and financial benefits from the Communications Ministry, which Netanyahu headed between 2014 and 2017 in addition to his capacity as prime minister. In return, Walla, a news site controlled by Elovitch, allegedly refrained from criticizing Netanyahu and gave him and his wife, Sara Netanyahu, positive coverage. Hefetz is a suspect in the Bezeq affair, called by the police "case 4000." He was also charged in a separated case with bribery, in which he sought to throw out a criminal case against Sara Netanyahu, said the police. Also on Thursday, the court extended the arrest of Shlomo Filber, who was until recently one of the closest associates of Netanyahu. Filber, who served as the director general of the Communications Ministry under Netanyahu, became a state witness against Netanyahu on Wednesday. Under the terms of his deal, he will stay in custody until he finishes his testimony. The media reported on Thursday that Filber told his investigators that he acted under direct orders from Netanyahu. The recent arrests came only a week after the police said there was sufficient evidence to charge Netanyahu with corruption in two other cases. Netanyahu denies any wrongdoing, saying the allegations are part of a witch-hunt by the media and "the left." His coalition has remained stable for now, with his major partners, the ultra-nationalist Jewish Home party and the centre-right Kulanu, saying Netanyahu will be required to step down only if the general attorney decides to indict him. --IANS pgh/ (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) American video streaming service Netflix is expanding its India slate with the addition of three new originals -- "Leila", "Ghoul" and "Crocodile". Netflix on Friday announced the addition of the three series. They will join a larger slate of original productions out of India including "Sacred Games", "Selection Day", and "Bard of Blood". "We are proud to continue to invest in original content in India. These three series, from the scary to the supernatural, represent the tremendous diversity that Indian storytelling holds for a global audience," Erik Barmack, Vice President of International Original Series at Netflix, said in a statement. "We are thrilled to work with some of the world's most talented writers and producers to bring these stories to life for India and the world," Barmack added. "Leila" tells the story of Shalini in search of the daughter she lost upon her arrest 16 years earlier. Set in the near future, the series is based on the book of the same name by Prayaag Akbar. Horror series "Ghoul" is based on Arabic folklore, and set in a covert detention centre. It revolves around Nida, an interrogator who turned in her own father as an anti-government activist and then arrives at the centre to discover that some of the terrorists held there are not of this world. Written and directed by Patrick Graham, the show will feature Radhika Apte and Manav Kaul. The third show "Crocodile" is written by Binky Mendez, and is an adult murder mystery thriller series set in Goa. Other details about the shows are yet to be announced. --IANS sug/nn/ (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Special counsel Robert Mueller has filed a new indictment against US President Donald Trump's former campaign aides, Paul Manafort and Rick Gates. The new indictment, filed on Thursday in US District Court in Alexandria, state of Virginia, includes new allegations of tax evasion and bank fraud against Manafort, former Trump campaign chief, and Gates, a former campaign aide, Xinhua news agency reported. They were charged in October last year with money laundering, conspiracy and other offences in federal court in Washington. They pleaded not guilty to those charges, which were also filed by Mueller. The new indictment comes a week after Mueller sought charges against 13 Russian nationals and three Russian entities, accusing them of interfering in the 2016 US presidential elections. According to the 32-count indictment, prosecutors alleged that Manafort and Gates laundered $30 million, failed to pay taxes for nearly 10 years and used their real estate to fraudulently secure over $20 million. But neither the October indictment, nor the additional charges, include allegations of collusion with Russia as part of the Trump campaign. Analysts say that Thursday's indictment is part of Mueller's effort to step up pressure on Manafort and Gates to cooperate with the collusion case as they prepare for trial later this year. Trump has repeatedly denied allegations of collusion between his campaign and Russians while describing the Russia probe as a "hoax" or a "witch hunt." --IANS pgh/ (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The United States' latest move on issuing H-1B visas to software engineers will not make much difference to Indian IT firms, apex industry body Nasscom said on Friday. "The new measure will be an unnecessary and expensive burden that will not make much difference to our member firms, which are in the business of providing solutions to client companies," said the National Association of Software and Services Companies (Nasscom) in a statement here. In line with US President Donald Trump's "Buy American and Hire American" policy, the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) on Thursday declared that the hiring firms have to prove that their employees working at a third-party worksite have specific and non-qualifying speculative agreements in specialty occupation. "The resilient Indian IT industry has demonstrated that as sponsoring employers, they maintain control over and relationship with their visa holders," Nasscom President R. Chandrashekar told IANS. Noting that the latest move appeared to be at odds with the Trump Administration's effort to reduce regulation and red-tape, the IT body said it was assessing the potential impact and would share details of the policy. "Initial perusal suggests that the new policy applies to all third-party placements and not just involving Indian or dependent companies," Nasscom said. The new policy envisages a detailed documentation of a legitimate employer-employee relationship while the latter is working at a third-party worksite. "The hiring firm has to prove that its employee working at a third-party worksite has specific and non-qualifying speculative assignments in specialty occupation," said USCIS in a release from Washington. The H-1B programme offers temporary US visas that allow firms to hire skilled overseas professionals working in areas with shortage of qualified American workers. Indians get most of the H1-B visas, although there are no national quotas for the facility nor is it specifically designed for Indians. Under the new policy, the USCIS says the employers must provide contracts and itineraries for employees who will work at a third-party location. Executive placement services major Head Hunters' Managing Director Kris Lakshmikanth said the new policy would, however, affect mid-size and smaller Indian IT firms, which will find it difficult to get H-1B visas from this year. "The new policy will not impact bigger Indian IT firms like TCS, Infosys, Wipro and HCL. But mid-size and smaller firms, which do body shopping and application development will be affected, as they will find it difficult to get inter-company papers from bigger clients for H-1B visas," Lakshmikanth told IANS here. Of the 65,000 H-1B visas the USCIS issues for October 1-September 30 period every year, about 40,000 are bagged by Indian firms, mostly in the services sector. The top 10 global firms, including TCS, Infosys, Wipro, HCL and Tech Mahindra, corner about 20,000-25,000, with the remaining shared by mid-size and smaller Indian firms. "As software majors like TCS, Infosys and Wipro work for global corporates and Fortune 500 firms, getting H-1B visas is not an issue, as they will get valid documents from their clients to apply for this category of visa," noted Lakshmikanth. Mid-size and smaller firms with few clients take huge money from techies desperate to work in the US and apply for H-1B visas on their behalf. Many of them are relatives or friends of these firms, which will have a subsidiary or a marketing office in the US. "Many Indian-origin engineers or technocrats living in the US over the last two-three decades have also set up IT firms to provide software services and products to American clients. They also apply and get H-1B visas on behalf of the techies who cough up huge amounts to work in the US," Lakshmikanth added. --IANS fb/nir/bg (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.) With Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau by his side, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday said there is no place for misuse of religion for political and divisive purposes, sending a clear message at a time Canada is perceived as having been soft on Khalistani separatists. "Terrorism and extremism are threats to our democratic and pluralistic societies," Modi told the media along with Trudeau following one-on-one and delegation-level talks between between the two countries here. "It is very important for us to come together to fight these forces," he said. "There should be no space for those who misuse religion for political purposes and divisive " Modi's candid remarks came during the last leg of Trudeau's week-long visit, which was marked by a certain cold attitude from New Delhi towards the visiting dignitary because of Canada's perceived support to Khalistani elements. In a major embarrassment to Trudeau, on Thursday his country's High Commission here had to rescind an invitation to a convicted Khalistani separatist, Jaspal Atwal, for a reception that was hosted in honour of Trudeau. After Trudeau's arrival on Saturday, it was only on Thursday evening that Modi tweeted his welcome message before greeting the visiting dignitary with a hug ahead of the ceremonial reception at Rashtrapati Bhavan on Friday. In his remarks, Trudeau avoided any reference to separatists or terrorism. "We share respect for democratic traditions and pluralism," he said adding the two leaders discussed ways to strengthen people-to-people ties between the two countries. Modi said the National Security Advisors (NSAs) of the two countries were giving finishing touches to the Framework for Cooperation and Countering Terrorism and Violent Extremism between the two countries. Modi said that during Friday's talks, both sides also discussed means to further deepen economic relations. "We have asked our negotiators to double their efforts to finalise the Bilateral Investment and Promotion Agreement and the Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement," he said. Bilateral trade between India and Canada stood at a C$8.02 billion (around $6 billion), which does not reflect the true potential. Following the talks, the two sides signed a joint declaration of intent for cooperation in the field of ICT and electronics, terms of reference for the India-Canada ministerial energy dialogue, and memorandums of understanding (MoUs) for cooperation in the areas of sports, intellectual property rights (IPRs), higher education, and science, technology and innovation. Stating that there are over 120,000 Indian students in Canada, Modi said that the renewal of the MoU on higher education would benefit students and teachers in both countries. He also called for increased exchange of skilled professionals and said that there are immense possibilities in the technology partnership. Describing Canada as an energy superpower, the Prime Minister said the North American country can help India meets its increasing energy needs. "Today we decided to expand our energy dialogue and chalk out the future of our energy partnership," he said. Stating that regional and global issues also came up for discussion, Modi said that the two sides assessed the situation in Afghanistan, the challenges of cross-border terrorism it faces, and the efforts being undertaken for a secure, prosperous and democratic Afghanistan. "We share similar views on marine transport and freedom of navigation in the Indo-Pacific region, the threat to the two Koreas from North Korea's proliferation efforts, and restoration of the freedom of democratic institutions in the Maldives," he stated. With Canada being home to around 1.2 million people of Indian origin, Modi said that people-to-people contacts formed an important foundation for the strategic partnership between the two countries. "We are committed to maintaining friendship and amity with the Indian community in Canada and seek their active participation in India's progress and development," he said. On his part, Trudeau said that both India and Canada share a set of values that make them natural allies. "As Canada looks to diversify its own economy and looks for new opportunities to do business beyond its boundaries, India is a natural partner and trusted friend for commercial cooperation," he said. The visit of Trudeau, who assumed office in November 2015, comes after Modi's visit to Canada in April that year, which was the first prime ministerial visit from India to that country in 42 years. --IANS ab/vsc/sac (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Pakistani intelligence officer Amir Zubair Siddiqui while working in Pakistan's High Commission in Sri Lanka as Visa Counsellor engaged people to indulge in espionage and terror activities in India, said an NIA supplementary chargesheet filed in a Chennai court in a 2014 case. The chargesheet was filed on Thursday by Special Public Prosecutor C.S.S. Pillai before judge P. Cheenthoorpandian of the Special Court for the National Investigation Agency (NIA) in Chennai, an official said on Friday. Now declared a persona non grata and cited as absconding by the NIA, Siddiqui during his employment in the Pakistan High Commission in Colombo from 2009 to 2016 plotted a terror attack along with two Chennai residents -- Balasubramanian and Noorudeen, the official said quoting from the chargesheet. Siddiqui and the two Chennai residents have also been chargesheeted in this case for circulating high quality counterfeit Indian currency, causing damage to the economic security of India. The original case was registered on April 28, 2014 by Tamil Nadu Police following arrest of a Sri Lankan national Mohd. Sakir Hussain in Chennai, who had arrived in India as per the instructions from Siddiqui to carry out subversive activities here. Siddiqui had planned to attack the US consulate in Chennai, Israeli Consulate in Bengaluru, Electronic City in Bangaluru, Eastern Naval Command headquarters in Visakhapatnam, various places of public congregations in south India and ports in India with the help of spies, said the chargesheet. Subsequently, a consignment of fake Indian currency with face value of Rs 2.5 lakh was seized from another accused Mohammad Saleem on May 1, 2014. The case was taken over by the NIA on June 21 on the orders of central government and a chargesheet was submitted against a Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agent Hussain, who was arrested by the CBI in 2013 on charges of indulging in spying activities, and one Saleem and one Sivabalan on October 23, 2014. Apart from Hussain and Sivabalan, Siddiqui had reportedly also sent several persons including one Arun Selvaraj to India to carry out attacks. During interrogation, ISI agent Hussain revealed that he used his counterparts Sivabalan, Salim and another person Rafeeque to circulate fake currency in Tamil Nadu. NIA sources said they did not mentioned Siddiqui in the first chargesheet because they were yet to collect proper evidence against him. "Now, we have strong evidence to prove his involvement in the terror plot." --IANS rak/nir (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Tamil Nadu Chief Minister K. Palaniswami on Friday appealed to the Jain community for industrial investments in the state that offers several advantages. Speaking at the Jain International Trade Organisation (JITO) Connect 2018 here, Palaniswami said the state offers advantages like single window clearance, peaceful law and order situation, uninterrupted power supply and human resource amongst others. He said the state will be organising the second Global Investors Meet in January next year. The first investors meet held in 2015 had more than 8,000 industrialists participating and Memoranda of Understanding (MoU) for an investment of around Rs 2,42,000 crore were signed. --IANS vj/nks/bg (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Israel's military has said it has begun deploying forces across the country as part of the preparations for a large-scale joint exercise with the US military next month. The military exercise, code-named "Juniper Cobra 2018," will take place from March 4 to 15, with the participation of 2,500 US troops routinely based in Europe and 2,000 Israeli Aerial Defense troops, logistics units, medical forces and other Israel Defense Forces (IDF) units. "This will be the largest IDF and USEUCOM (US European Command) joint exercise taking place this year," an Israeli military spokesperson said in a statement on Thursday, Xinhua news agency reported. "The aims of the exercise are to strengthen the cooperation and coordination between the two militaries, promote bilateral learning and enhance aerial defence capabilities," the statement said. The drill would simulate a scenario in which US forces are deployed to Israel to aid the IDF Aerial Defense forces. "Together they will perform computerized simulations of a variety of rocket threat scenarios in different regions," said the spokesperson. The simulations will include testing of the anti-ballistic missile system Arrow, Iron Dome anti-rocket system, the medium-range interceptor Patriot missile system, and David's Sling, which was designed to intercept medium-range missile from southern Lebanon's Hezbollah militants and became operational in April 2017. "The exercise demonstrates the strategic and fundamental cooperation between the IDF and the U.S. Armed Forces," Brig. Gen. Zvika Haimovich, the commander of the Aerial Defense Array, was quoted as saying in the statement. The drill would serve as "an opportunity for the IDF, the IAF (Israel Air Force) in particular, to enhance operational capabilities in the face of high-trajectory threats," he added. Lt. Gen. Richard M. Clark, the commander of US Air Force Third Air Force, also praised the strong military alliance between Israel and the United States. "The US and Israel enjoy a strong and enduring military-to-military partnership built on trust that has been developed over decades of cooperation," Clark said. "The Juniper Cobra exercises continue to strengthen this relationship, providing us with the opportunity to bolster interoperability and develop seamless integration with our Israeli partners," he said. It will be the ninth time the Juniper Cobra exercise has taken place in Israel since 2001. --IANS pgh/ (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A dozen activists who had chained themselves to a court in the northeastern Spanish region of Catalonia to protest the imprisonment of pro-independence figures were on Friday arrested. Police sources confirmed to Efe news that the 12 detainees formed the nucleus of a group of about 80 people who were attempting to block the entrance of the High Court of Justice of Catalonia to demand freedom for former regional Vice President Oriol Junqueras. Junqueras faces charges of rebellion and sedition for his role last year in a referendum and subsequent declaration of independence deemed illegal by Spain. The protest was called by the Committees for the Defence of the Republic, a network of groups of volunteers that aim to protect and uphold the region's declaration of independence. Police were seen carrying huge bolt cutters and trying to prise the activists away from their post. A majority of the protestors were sitting on the steps with some holding guitars or wearing clown noses, alongside a sign that urged people to "stop the coup d'etat". The sign referred to the Spanish state's application of Article 155 of the Constitution, which saw the region's autonomy rolled back, its government dissolved and fresh elections called, a move which some pro-independence hardliners saw as an attack on a fledgling sovereign republic. --IANS soni/dg (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Rajasthan Home Minister Gulabchand Kataria on Friday told the Assembly that the protesting farmers still under arrest will be released soon. "To maintain law and order in the city, around 332 persons were taken in custody. Of these 165 have since been released on bail while remaining 167 will be released soon, he said. These farmers were arrested while marching to gherao the Assembly here following High Court directions that banned any procession/rally or protest during working days in the state capital, he said. Kataria said the farmers were politely asked to end their protest since it flouted the High Court orders but they continued their march towards Jaipur. Meanwhile, farmers continued with their dharnas at different places and jammed Ramu ka Baas crossroad, Jaipur-Bikaner National Highway-52, following which the authorities arranged alternate routes for those wishing to travel from Jaipur to Sikar and vice versa. Cooperative Minister Ajay Singh Kilak assured that the loan waiver scheme announced by Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje Scindia in the state Budget will benefit those farmers who have been repaying their loan dues on time. "The government is very sensitive towards farmers. A high-level inter-departmental committee has been set up under the chairmanship of Kataria to look into issues related to farm loans and will work to redress the same. The first meeting of this committee is scheduled for February 28," he said. --IANS arc/tsb/bg (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A group of Sashastra Seema Bal (SSB) jawans on Friday forcibly took away a murder accused SSB commandant from the West Bengal police in South 24 Pargana district but later handed him back to police following intervention by top officials. The incident took place on Friday morning when the accused SSB commandant Deepak Kumar Singh, arrested on Thursday from Diamond Harbour for allegedly shooting a person during a raid, was being taken for a medical check up by police, a senior officer said. "Six or seven SSB jawans came and forcibly freed him from police while he was being taken for a medical check up. Singh and the SSB personnel then sped off from the spot in one of their vehicles," Additional Director General of Police, Law and Order, Anuj Sharma told IANS. The commandant was later handed back to police by the SSB personnel and has been produced to the court along with the the other accused in the murder case. "Singh was handed over to the police later. He has been produced to the court. I have already talked to the Inspector General of SSB regarding today's development. Let's see what happens," he said. However, he refused to give out any details on whether the state administration would take up the matter of intervention in police proceedings with the Central government. IG, SSB Shrikumar Bandopadhyay said he does not support the act by the troopers and that a departmental inquiry would be initiated against the accused officer as well as those involved in the incident. Singh was arrested from Daimond Harbour's Sarisha town along with two others, after he allegedly opened fire on a miscreant named Altaf while conducting a raid to catch fake currency smugglers on Thursday. He has been slapped with charges of murder. --IANS mgr/vd (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) US President Donald Trump announced the "heaviest" set of US sanctions against North Korea on Friday as his administration redoubled its efforts to starve Pyongyang of resources and force the isolated regime to abandon its nuclear ambitions. "We imposed today the heaviest sanctions ever imposed on a country before," Trump said at the close of a wide-ranging address to a conservative political conference, The Washington Post reported. The new measures target 56 vessels, shipping companies and other entities that Trump administration officials believe are used by North Korea to conduct trade prohibited under previous sanctions. Significant advances in its missile and nuclear weapons programs have made North Korea the most pressing foreign threat facing the Trump administration. The punitive measures, which follow multiple rounds of earlier sanctions, signal US officials' determination to use financial pressure to prompt North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un to relinquish nuclear weapons, and their concern that under-the-radar fossil fuel trade undermines their ability to do so. Trump made the announcement in the final moments of a more than hour-long address at the Conservative Political Action Conference outside Washington. "I love you, I respect you, I appreciate everything you have done for the country," the President said, pausing as the crowd applauded and a few chanted "U-S-A! U-S-A!" "I do want to say, because people have asked: North Korea," he said before briefly mentioning the sanctions. "Hopefully, something positive can happen. We will see." Senior US officials described elaborate steps that North Korea has taken to conceal its illicit shipping activities, including conducting prohibited ship-to-ship transfers, falsifying ship names and disabling vessels' automatic identification systems "to try to intentionally mask their movements." "We are determined through these efforts to increase the pressure and show Kim Jong Un that there is no other path to take but denuclearization," one official, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity, told reporters ahead of Trump's remarks. --IANS pgh/ (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has signed the United Nations Global Counter-Terrorism Coordination Compact. According to a statement on Friday, the Secretary-General said that the compact "establishes a set of guiding principles aimed at significantly improving the coordination and coherence of the United Nations system to support Member States on the implementation of the United Nations Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy", Xinhua reported. "The Coordination Compact is an agreement between 36 United Nations entities engaged in providing support to Member States on how to counter and prevent acts of terrorism and violent extremism. It will be signed by the heads of these entities, as well as Interpol and the World Customs Organization, as a symbol of their commitment to coordinating activities at Headquarters and in the field. It also adopts a common framework for monitoring and evaluation which will help to show the impact of UN efforts in this area," the UN chief said. "The principal aim of the United Nations Global Counter-Terrorism Coordination Compact is to ensure that the United Nations system can have a better impact and provide stronger and more efficient counter-terrorism capacity-building support to Member States," he concluded. The UN General Assembly adopted the Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy on September 8, 2006. The strategy is a unique global instrument to enhance national, regional and international efforts to counter terrorism. The adoption of the strategy fulfilled the commitment made by world leaders at the 2005 September Summit and builds on many of the elements proposed by the Secretary-General in his May 2, 2006 report, entitled Uniting against Terrorism: Recommendations for a Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy. The year 2016 marked the 10th anniversary of the UN Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy. The General Assembly reviews the Strategy every two years, making it a living document attuned to Member States' counter-terrorism priorities. Guterres put plans in motion last year to develop a new UN system-wide Global Counter-Terrorism Coordination Compact. He will convene this year the first-ever UN summit of heads of counter-terrorism agencies with the aim of forging new partnerships and improve trust between organisations. --IANS pgh/ (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The US State Department has said the United States is planning to open its embassy to Israel in Jerusalem in May, a move that has reversed long-time US policy and triggered global objection. The embassy will initially be located in the Arnona neighbourhood in a building that now houses consular operations of US Consulate General Jerusalem, said the State Department Spokesperson Heather Nauert in a statement on Friday, Xinhua reported. A new embassy annex on the Arnona compound is expected to be open by the end of 2019, Nauert added. Meanwhile, the US has started searching for a site as the permanent US embassy to Israel, a process which Nauert described could be "a longer-term undertaking." The embassy opening in May will coincide with Israel's 70th anniversary, the spokesperson added. Despite global opposition, Trump delivered one of his major campaign promises in December by recognizing Jerusalem as the capital city of Israel and demanded the State Department develop a plan to move the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Recently, Palestinian officials announced in many occasions that the US policies in the region threaten security and stability and cannot achieve peace in the Middle East. --IANS pgh/ (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein has apologised for using statements by stars Meryl Streep and Jennifer Lawrence in an effort to seek dismissal of a sexual misconduct lawsuit against him. "Even though Mr. Weinstein has worked with hundreds of actresses and actors who had only professional and mutually respectful experiences with him, Mr. Weinstein has directed in the future that no specific names be used by his counsel. Even where those actors have made previous public statements about him," theguardian.com quoted a spokeswoman for Weinstein as saying. She added: "Mr. Weinstein acknowledges the valuable input both Meryl Streep and Jennifer Lawrence have contributed to this conversation and apologises. "Once again, moving forward, Mr. Weinstein has advised his counsel to not include specific names of former associates; and to avoid whenever possible, even if they are in the public record." Six women are suing Weinstein and what they call the "Weinstein Sexual Enterprise", which they say includes his brother Bob and their co-founded studio The Weinstein Company, claiming they conspired to conceal Weinstein's widespread alleged sexual harassment. Lawyers for the Hollywood mogul filed a motion to dismiss the suit on Tuesday, arguing that it was "fatally overboard". Both Streep and Lawrence have spoken out against the motion filed by Weinstein's lawyers. In response to the motion, Lawrence described Weinstein as a "predator", reports theguardian.com. "For the record, while I was not victimised personally by Harvey Weinstein, I stand behind the women who have survived his terrible abuse and I applaud them in using all means necessary to bring him to justice whether through criminal or civil actions. Time's up," she said. Her comment follows Streep firing back at Weinstein, who said the action was "pathetic and exploitative" after his lawyers cited her saying she was never harassed by the producer in an attempt to shut the case down. After the success of the pilot project on Index-Based Flood Insurance (IBFI) for farmers in Bihar, the World Bank has shown interest in helping to scale up the plan across eastern India, officials said. "The World Bank is interested in scaling up IBFI in flood-prone districts across eastern India following the successful implementation of its pilot in flood-affected villages in Muzaffarpur district in Bihar, Griraj Amarnath, research group leader of water risks and disaster at the Colombo-based International Water Management Institute (IWMI), told IANS here. Amarnath said the World Bank was in talks with the IWMI to promote IBFI. "I am discussing the IBFI with the World Bank and we are hopeful that the outcome will be positive to provide help to flood-affected farmers on a large scale in India," he said. IBFI uses advanced modelling techniques with satellite data to enable quick insurance pay-outs to those affected by floods. The institute used remote-sensing data and simulation modelling to provide regular updates on flooding to the Emergency Operation Centre of the Disaster Management Department in support of relief operations and damage assessment. Satellite data has never been used before for providing insurance to flood-affected farmers. According to Alok K. Sikka, India representative at IWMI, the Agriculture Insurance Company of India (AICI) had agreed to pay out money to farmers based on the scientific method. "It is a real test on the ground and we have succeeded," Sikka said. The IBFI pilot project was carried out by IWMI in collaboration with Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR), AICI and Swiss RE, a leading global reinsurer. "It is a more reliable and credible way to safeguard rural livelihoods," Sikka said, adding that IWMI was likely to use it in more districts in Bihar and other flood-prone states in eastern India. The pay-out decision was determined on the basis of data indicating the actual depth and duration of flood waters in the paddy fields. Sikka said that of the 2,000 farm households involved in pilot-testing, 43 would receive compensation via bank transfers. On Thursday, the Union Minister for Agriculture, Radha Mohan Singh, handed over "dummy cheques" to 15 of the 43 farmers at the ICAR complex for Eastern Region here. The ministry had also agreed to discuss the IBFI scheme. Amarnath said the 14 farmers, who suffered total crop loss, received the full insured amount of Rs 20,000 per hectare. But other farmers received insured amount of Rs 7,000 to Rs 14,000, depending on the loss of crop. Within the the pilot-project area, floods had affected 36,620 hectares of paddy, mainly in the Madhurpatti and Bhatgaon villages. In the initial pilot stage, the insurance product was fully subsidised, covering rice crops in the 2017 monsoon season -- from early July until the end of October, with a total insured value of about Rs 46 lakh. IWMI is a non-profit, scientific research organisation focusing on the sustainable use of water and land resources in developing countries. It had selected Bihar for this pilot project as it is the country's most flood-prone state that suffers heavy agriculture losses every year. Experts have time and again stated that crop insurance can help farmers deal with the risks and losses associated with disasters like floods or droughts. (Imran Khan can be contacted at imran.k@ians.in) --IANS ik/hs/sac (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Election Commission on Friday announced that polling for 58 Rajya Sabha seats, set to fall vacant in April, will take place on March 23. The counting of votes will also take place on the same day. With barely a year left in the life of the current Lok Sabha, the changed Rajya Sabha numbers would have more of an impact in the first couple of years of the next Lok Sabha. Nearly a third of the members of the 245-seat Rajya Sabha retire every two years, and the changed numbers would determine the complexion of the House until April 2020. The results will increase the Bharatiya ... About 1,920 pilgrims from Tamil Nadu today left for Katchatheevu, an islet in the Palk Strait, to participate in the annual St Anthony's church festival, which would begin later this evening. Officials said the pilgrims, mostly local fishermen, were allowed to carry Rs 5,000 each and were checked before boarding the boats, they added. Ramanathapuram district collector S Natarajan saw them off at the fishing harbour here. The pilgrims, including 336 women and 52 children, set out for Katchatheevu in 62 mechanised boats and two country boats.They would return tomorrow, officials said. The piglrims carried a portrait of St Anthony and a wooden cross to be given as thanksgiving gift for the church. Last year, the pilgrimage was boycotted by Rameswaram fishermen after a fisherman was allegedly gunned down by the Sri Lankan Navy. Katchatheevu was ceded to Sri Lanka by India in 1974. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) An 18-year-old woman was set ablaze allegedly by some unidentified persons in Satni Bala Kheda village here, police said today. The woman had gone to market on a bicycle from her home yesterday when some unidentified persons allegedly threw some inflammable liquid and set her ablaze, they said. Senior police officials, including the superintendent of police Pushpanjali and Inspector general (zone) Sujit Pandey, also visited the scene of the incident, the police said. On a complaint filed by the woman's family, an FIR against unknown persons was lodged and investigations were underway, police station incharge Uttar Singh Rathore said. More details will be known after the post mortem examination, he said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Steven Ferdman/Getty ImagesAs Remy Ma continues her strong comeback following several years behind bars, her sister has been arrested for a shooting incident. Remeesha Alesia Blount was taken into police custody on Monday in Raleigh, North Carolina, according to The News & Observer. She is accused of shooting a woman and also firing several shots at a vehicle outside of a local bar. Blount has been charged with one count of assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill inflicting serious injury, three counts of assault with the weapon with intent to kill, shooting into an occupied vehicle, and discharging a firearm in the city. She has several previous arrests, including charges for assault with a deadly weapon, assault by pointing a gun, and shooting a gun inside city limits. Blount is now being held without bail. Remy served six years in prison for assault and illegal weapon possession, She was released in August 2014. Copyright 2018, ABC Radio. All rights reserved. The Amritsar special task force (STF) today arrested four alleged drug peddlers after recovering 2.5 kg of heroin from them in Punjab's Ferozepur district. Manjit Singh and his brothers -- Sharma Singh, Satnam Singh, and Gulshan Singh -- have allegedly been involved in drug peddling for the last several years. "They used to receive consignments and deliver it to other peddlers operating mainly in the districts of Amritsar, Tarn Taran, Ferozepur, and Fazilka," said Rachhpal Singh, assistant inspector-general of police, STF (Border Range). All the accused hailed from Jalalabad in Fazilka district. Manjit had procured agricultural land on a contract basis near Jalloke village, which is close to the International Border (IB), Singh said. The STF acted on a tip-off and recovered four packets of heroin from the fields in Jalloke, he added. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) At least 20 ayurvedic healthcare centres have recently been set up in Assam, Sikkim and Arunachal Pradesh, Union Minister Sripad Naik said today. Union Minister of State for AYUSH Sripad Naik addressed a national workshop on activities and contribution of the Central Council for Research in Ayurvedic Sciences (CCRAS). "The CCRAS has recently set up 20 ayurvedic healthcare centres in various parts of Assam, Sikkim and Arunachal Pradesh and these centres are contributing to the health care services in the remote districts of the NE region," he said. The centre in Guwahati will soon start In Patient Department services and Rs 1.5 crore has been sanctioned for the purpose, he said. The CCRAS under the Ministry of AYUSH has been engaged in research and developmental activities in the North-Eastern states since 1971, the Minister said. India has got a huge traditional medicinal heritage in the world and enjoys a special status in terms of indigenous system of health care practices, Naik said. He also inaugurated the new building of the Regional Ayurveda Research Institute for Gastro Intestinal Disorder here. Naik also urged the need to encourage farmers to cultivate more medicinal plants. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) All necessary arrangements have been made to ensure peaceful polling for Ludhiana Municipal Corporation and by-polls of two wards in Payal and Jagraon Municipal Councils tomorrow, a senior official said today. Elaborate security arrangements have been made for the elections and more than 4,500 cops have been deployed, he said. Around 5,400 employees of civil administration have also been engaged in the entire election process, District Electoral Officer-cum-Deputy Commissioner Pradeep Kumar Agrawal said after reviewing the preparations here. Agrawal exhorted voters to exercise their franchise fearlessly and to show enthusiasm for voting. As many as 494 candidates are in the fray for Ludhiana Municipal Corporation elections. Nearly 10.50 lakh voters are eligible to cast their votes to elect their representatives from 95 wards. There are 5.67 lakh male voters, 4.82 lakh females, and 23 transgenders. A total of 284 polling stations out of a total of 1,153 stations have been identified as sensitive where videography would be done. Agrawal informed that nine strong rooms would be set up at as many places where the electronic voting machine would be kept till the counting day (February 27). CCTV cameras would be installed for the round-the-clock supervision of the strong rooms. These cameras would be Wi-Fi enabled and any candidate can oversee the strong room by just entering a password which would be issued by the returning officer. The Punjab Government has declared holiday in all government offices, corporations, boards, and educational institutions tomorrow in all concerned election areas here. Dry days will be observed in Ludhiana, Jagraon, and Payal on the polling day and the counting day. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Railway police today arrested five persons for allegedly assaulting a TV journalist on a local train on the Western suburban line on February 21. Vishal Dongre (28), Vivek Dhumal (32), Ravindra Dhanavade (28), Sanjay Ambawale (32) and Rajesh Gothal (28) were arrested from Nallasopara on the outskirts of Mumbai by a team of Government Railway Police, said an official. The accused had allegedly thrashed up Sudhir Shukla, a TV journalist, and tried to throw him out of the running train, he said. The incident had taken place between the suburban Mira Road and Andheri railway stations. A group of passengers standing on the foot-board allegedly tried to stop Shukla from boarding the Andheri-bound train at Mira Road, saying there was no space inside. When Shukla managed to get inside, there was a heated argument and he was allegedly beaten up by the accused. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The AAP today accused the Delhi Police of acting like a bully at the behest of the Centre by entering Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal's residence "illegally" and said the action was aimed at "insulting and humiliating" him. The party's sharp reaction came after the police went to Kejriwal's residence saying its demand for the CCTV footage of the alleged incident of assault on Chief Secretary Anhu Prakash by AAP MLAs had not been met. AAP leader Ashutosh claimed the police had initially requested the video from the PWD department but did not take it. Without taking the name of BJP and its leaders, AAP MP Sanjay Singh said it is "unfortunate" that some "dictators" and people with a mentality of "hooligans" have captured power, be it Gujarat, Haryana, Maharashtra, Rajasthan or Madhya Pradesh. "The dadagiri by the Delhi Police at Arvind Kejriwal's residence is being done at the behest of the BJP. The Delhi Police is a mere puppet but the Centre is resorting to such dadagiri to dismiss the Delhi government," Singh said. Equating the Delhi Police with "Dhristashtra" the blind king in epic Mahabharat, who did not stop his sons from disrobing Draupadi in his royal court, Singh said the law and order enforcement agency has not even bothered to take action in cases involving assault on Delhi minister Imran Hussain and Delhi Dialogue Commission vice-chairman Ashish Khetan. Squarely blaming the Centre, Singh tweeted, "Without Modi government's directive, the police could not have indulged in such dadagiri." He said that the AAP will protest outside district headquarters and state capital headquarters to protest the sending of police team to the Delhi chief minister's residence. In a press conference, the AAP also showed a two-and-half-minute clip where senior police officials are seen inside the residence of the chief minister, purportedly asking questions about the wall paint of the room. "The police team went inside the chief minister's residence only to humiliate and insult him (Arvind Kejriwal)," AAP leader Ashutosh told reporters here. Terming the entry of the Delhi Police as illegal, J S Joon, AAP counsel, who is the defence lawyer for party MLAs Amantullah and Prakash Jarwal, arrested for allegedly assaulting the chief secretary, said there should have been a prior notice before entering the residence of the chief minister. "Such questions (on details of painting done at the chief minister's residence) are ridiculous and preposterous," said Joon. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A Delhi Police team was today sent to Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal's residence in the Civil Lines area for collecting evidence related to an alleged assault on Chief Secretary Anshu Prakash by AAP MLAs, an official said. "A police team has been sent to the chief minister's residence for collecting all evidence, including CCTV footage, in connection with the alleged assault on the Delhi Chief Secretary," Additional DCP, North Delhi, Harinder Singh said. Reacting to it, Kejriwal said, "A huge posse of policemen was sent to my residence. The entire CM residence is being searched over allegations of two slaps." "But when will Amit Shah be questioned in connection with Judge Loya's death," he asked on Twitter. Kejriwal said his council of ministers had sought an appointment with Lieutenant Governor Anil Baijal on the matter. "As the services come under the LG in Delhi, the council of ministers will request him to direct all bureaucrats to work with the AAP government even as the probe into the alleged assault on the chief secretary continues," an official said. According to Delhi government spokesperson Arunodya Prakash, 60-70 policemen entered the chief minister's office "without any intimation". "CM house taken over by police. Huge number of police force enters CM house without any intimation. Police Raj kills democracy in Delhi. Police spread all over inside CM house. If this what they can to do an elected CM, think what they can with poor people!!!" Prakash wrote on Twitter. "There is minimum courtesy in democracy. Every citizen has rights under constitution. Is it an attempt to humiliate a CM who is working tirelessly for the poor and the last man of the society?" he tweeted. AAP legislators Prakash Jarwal and Okhla MLA Amantullah Khan were arrested by the police on Wednesday in connection with the alleged assault on the Delhi Chief Secretary during a meeting at Kejriwal's residence on Monday night. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The acceptance of a bail bond furnished by an accused in the court is the discretionary power of the judge and does not confer any express right on the person for release, the Supreme Court held today. The top court said that section 88 of the CrPC was for the purpose and object of ensuring appearance of such person in that court or any other in which the case may be transferred for trial. The section says that when any person, for whose appearance or arrest the presiding officer of the court is empowered to issue a summon or warrant, is present, such officer may require such person to execute a bond, with or without sureties, for his appearance in the court or any other court to which the case may be transferred. A bench of Justices A K Sikri and Ashok Bhushan said the word used in Section 88 'any person' has to be given wide meaning, which may include persons who are not even accused in a case and appeared as witnesses. "Section 88 of CrPC does not confer any right on any person, who is present in a court. Discretionary power given to the court is for the purpose and object of ensuring appearance of such person in that court or to any other court into which the case may be transferred for trial. "Discretion given under Section 88 to the Court does not confer any right on a person, who is present in the court rather it is the power given to the court to facilitate his appearance, which clearly indicates that use of word 'may' is discretionary and it is for the Court to exercise its discretion when situation so demands," it said. The court's verdict came on a plea filed by an accused Pankaj Jain in a case under Prevention of Corruption Act, that also involves Yadav Singh, former Chief Engineer of Noida, Greater Noida and the Yamuna Expressway Authorities. Jain, who is partner in a construction company that is also accused in the case, said he had filed a bail bond under section 88 of CrPC before the Special CBI court in Ghaziabad and sought his release but the application was rejected. He moved against the decision before the high court which also dismissed his appeal, following which he moved the apex court challenging the provision itself. Jain has contended that he had not been arrested during the investigation and when he appeared before the Special CBI Judge, it was obligatory on the part of the court to have accepted the bail bond under Section 88 of the CrPC and release him forthwith. He said that although Section 88 uses the word 'may' but the word 'may' has to be read as shall causing an obligation on the Court to release on bond, those, who appeared on their own volition in the Court. The government, on other hand, had contended that high court and special CBI judge had rightly interpreted the provision and said that summons and non-bailable warrants were issued against Jain. It was argued that even the proceedings to declare him proclaimed offender were also initiated by the Special Judge and hence, he was not entitled for indulgence of being released on submission of bond under Section 88 CrPC. The bench said "the present is not a case where accused was a free agent whether to appear or not. He was already issued non-bailable warrant of arrest as well as proceeding of Sections 82 and 83 CrPC (proceedings for proclaimed offender) had been initiated. In this view of the matter he was not entitled to the benefit of Section 88 CrPC". Concluding its reasons, the apex court said that the word 'may' used in Section 88 confers a discretion on the Court whether to accept a bond from an accused from a person appearing in the Court or not. It said that both Special CBI Judge, as well as the High Court had given cogent reasons for not exercising the power under Section 88 CrPC. "We do not find any infirmity in the view taken by the Special Judge, CBI as well as the High Court in coming to the conclusion that accused was not entitled to be released on acceptance of bond under Section 88 CrPC. We thus do not find any error in the impugned judgment of the High Court," it said. It asked Jain to approach the Special CBI court for bail and directed the trial court to consider the application of bail if filed. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Union Minister Hansraj Gangaram Ahir today hinted that Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal may be questioned by the police in connection with the alleged assault on Chief Secretary Anshu Prakash by AAP MLAs at his residence. "Whosoever it may be, the police will question all those in whose presence the incident took place," he told reporters here. Ahir was responding to a question on the possibility of Delhi Police questioning Kejriwal for the alleged assault of Prakash. His comments came hours after a Delhi Police team was sent to Kejriwal's residence in the Civil Lines area for collecting evidence related to the alleged assault on the chief secretary. The union minister of state for home said a delegation of IAS officers has met him today and apprised him about the incident. "This is a very condemnable incident. How can one assault an officer. IAS officers have met me. I have listened to their grievances. Whatever is required, the Delhi Police is doing and will question whomever is required," he said. The Delhi chief secretary was allegedly manhandled by two AAP MLAs at Kejriwal's residence. The incident reportedly occurred Monday night in presence of Kejriwal and Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia. Prakash was called by Kejriwal regarding the issue of advertisements, which were not being released, a Delhi government official had said. However, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) claimed he had been called for a discussion on ration distribution. "The allegation of assault is totally bizarre and baseless," a senior official of the chief minister's office had said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) BJP national president Amit Shah's scheduled visit to Dimapur today was cancelled on health grounds, a senior leader of the party's state unit said here. Shah was scheduled to address an election rally here but his visit was called off on health grounds, BJP Media Cell convener K James Vizo said. Nagaland will go to polls for the 60-member Assembly on February 27 and votes would be counted on March 3. The BJP has entered into a seat-sharing agreement with the newly-floated regional party National Democratic Peoples' Party. The NDPP will contest in 40 seats and the BJP in 20. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Social activist Anna Hazare will be on a two-day visit to the state capital from February 26 to garner support for the proposed 'satyagrah' in Delhi to demand for the appointment of Jan Lokpal. "Anna will engage in various programmes on February 26 in Lucknow and on February 27 he will be in Sitapur and will leave for Pune on February 28 morning," coordinator of the 'India Against Corruption' (IAC) volunteers' association said. He said that the 'satyagrah' will rake the issue of plights of farmers and electoral reforms that India needs urgently. Hazare, who has been the face of the Lokpal movement, had last year chosen March 23 to launch the agitation 'satyagrah' as it happens to be the 'Shaheed Diwas' (Martyr's Day). (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A Sashastra Seema Bal (SSB) commandant, arrested in connection with a murder case, was "freed" from the police custody by the force's armed personnel by holding the policemen at gunpoint at the Diamond Harbour police station this morning, the police said. However, the officer, one of the prime accused in the case, was handed over to the police soon after, following instructions from highly-placed SSB officials. One of the police personnel was also allegedly assaulted by the SSB men. The incident drew sharp reaction from Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee who said that law-and-order was a state subject and that nobody should meddle with it. SSB Commandant Deepak Kumar Singh, Havildar Amitabha Pramanik and Mozammal Mondal, a cable TV business owner from Sarisha Haat in South 24 Parganas district, were arrested yesterday in connection with the killing of a cable TV company worker, Altaf Jamadar, another police officer said. Jamadar's body was recovered from the cable TV office and after initial investigations, the two SSB personnel and Mondal were arrested. "Several armed SSB personnel went to the Diamond Harbour police station this morning on the pretext of talking to the two accused and then, snatched the commandant by holding the police personnel at gunpoint, before fleeing in a vehicle of the force," Superintendent of Police (SP), Diamond Harbour Police District, Koteswara Rao told PTI. The SSB is a paramilitary force under the Ministry of Home Affairs, which is entrusted with the task of guarding India's border with Nepal and Bhutan. Senior police officers from the district, including Rao, led a large team of police personnel to the SSB camp located nearby, where the officer was allegedly given shelter. State Additional Director General of Police (Law and Order) Anuj Sharma spoke to West Bengal Inspector General (IG), SSB, Shrikumar Bandopadhyay, following which the officer was "immediately" handed over to the police, a police official said. When contacted, Bandopadhyay told PTI that strict action would be taken against the SSB personnel involved in helping the commandant escape from police custody. "I have already ordered an inquiry into the matter. Those found involved in the incident will be suspended and we will take strict action against them. My officers have already started the inquiry. I have sought a full report from them," he said. The SSB also sought a report from the ADG (Law and Order) and the SP of the district in this connection. "We have also sought reports from the ADG (Law and Order) and the SP on whether they can identify anyone who went to the police station and helped the prime accused SSB commandant come out of the police custody," Bandopadhyay said, adding, "Law will take its own course and the force has nothing to hide or save anyone." Asked if any action would be taken against the personnel of the Diamond Harbour police station on the ground of laxity, Sharma said, "We are looking into it. Nothing has been decided and a detailed report has been sought in connection with the incident." The injured police personnel, who was allegedly assaulted by the SSB men, was undergoing treatment at a nearby medical facility, Rao said. Meanwhile, the chief minister expressed her displeasure over the incident. Banerjee, who is currently on a visit to north Bengal, said law-and-order was a state subject and that nobody should interfere in it. When produced at the Diamond Harbour Court, the two SSB personnel were remanded to a 14-day judicial custody, while the other accused was sent to a five-day police custody, Rao said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Army has repulsed an attack by the Border Action Team (BAT), a mix of Pakistani regulars and militants, near the Line of Control in the Tangdhar sector of Jammu and Kashmir's Kupwara district, officials said today. No casualty was reported in the incident that took place last night, they said. A BAT team attacked Indian troops near the LoC in the Tangdhar sector, prompting the Army to retaliate. The exchange of fire continued for nearly an hour and the attack was effectively repulsed, an Army official said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Army's South Western Command will mark 2018 as the "year of war disabled" by reaching out to such soldiers and taking their needs to a logical conclusion. Army commander Lieutenant General Cherish Mathson today unveiled the plan in the South Western Command under him and said that the focus on disabled soldiers will be increased. "We will take up activities and travel an extra mile with increased focus to reach out to them," Mathson told reporters. "There are some veterans of World War II who are still alive and they as well as others disabled soldiers will be reached out to. They will be provided mobility aids," he said. The Command is organising an ex-servicemen rally in Rohtak in Haryana on Sunday, which is likely to be attended by almost 10,000 ex-servicemen, including many disabled veterans. "Mobility equipments, like wheelchairs and other aids, will be provided to them," he said. Similar events would be conducted in Rajasthan's Hanumangarh in March and later in Jaipur and other places in coming months. Defence spokesperson Lt Col Manish Ojha said that such rallies would be conducted every month and with special emphasis on the rehabilitation and welfare of ex-servicemen. "These rallies will act as a platform to interact with the disabled ex-servicemen and allow the defence agencies to re-dedicatethemselves for their help, Ojha added. The Army commander also informed that all the buildings in the command will be made disabled-friendly where ramps will be made for the convenience of disabled people. The Command has also planned 'Satatmilaap' initiative under which various teams are contacting every disabled soldier individually and registering their grievances. Dedicated agencies would take up the soldiers' complaints and solve their problems. These agencies will also help civilians who suffered disability due to any Army action, like in firing ranges, according to defence spokesperson Lt Col Manish Ojha. There are over 5,000 disabled soldiers in the entire area of the south western command with over 2,000 in Rajasthan alone. The Army commander said that a large number of soldiers get disabled while serving in Siachen's inclement weather. "There are soldiers who have their limbs totally gone or brain affected and so on," he said. Army Chief General Bipin Rawat had declared 2018 as the "year of war disabled" last year. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The US today accused Syrian President Bashar al-Assad of committing "war crimes" with Russian support in the strife-torn country where over 400 civilians have been killed in air strikes and bombardments in rebel strongholds in a week. White House Deputy Press Secretary Raj Shah said the US is monitoring the situation and has put the Assad regime as well as Russia "on notice". His remarks come as more than 400 civilians were killed over the last five days in the Syrian government's Russia-backed air strikes and bombardments in rebel strongholds. Bashar al-Assad has already committed war crimes. He has already gassed his own people with sarin, he has already committed unthinkable acts, Shah told reporters at a conference, when asked if President Donald Trump believes that Assad is committing "war crimes". Assad has been committing war crimes with support of the Russians, he claimed. We don't want that to continue, he said, adding the US is monitoring the situation. (We) don't want to get ahead of anything that may or may not be announced on that front. But you know the Assad regime and Russia's actions on this front are on notice, he said when asked what more can Trump do to stop the killings. At a separate conference the State Department Spokesperson Heather Nauert said more than 400 civilians have been "horrifically" killed by the Syrian regime. As we all know, they are backed by not only Russia but also Iran.It is a good reminder that Russia bears a unique responsibility for what is taking place there.Without Russia backing Syria, the devastation and the deaths would certainly not be occurring, she said. During a UN Security Council meeting on Syria in New York, the US urged the 15-member body to move forward with this ceasefire and humanitarian resolution immediately. It expressed concern over the situation in Eastern Ghouta, where fresh bombardments by Syrian government yesterday killed dozens. The pictures and videos are everywhere. Screaming parents digging through rubble to find their children. Doctors working frantically with no medicine and no equipment in underground hospitals to save whoever they can," said Kelley Currie, US Representative for Economic and Social Affairs. "These are not terrorists showing up in these makeshift emergency rooms. These are civilians. They are ordinary people under attack by a barbaric Assad regime that is bent on leaving eastern Ghouta levelled to the ground, with no regard for the 400,000 men, women, and children who live there, she added. No one needs to use their imagination to know what the Assad regime is planning, she said. It is exactly what we saw in Aleppo in 2016 and in Hama and Homs before that. The Assad regime wants to bomb or starve all of their opponents into submission. That is why, except for two small deliveries of aid, the regime has not allowed any medical convoys or deliveries of food into eastern Ghouta since November. And the bombing attacks have been relentless, Currie said. She alleged that the regime wants "to keep bombing and gassing" these 400,000 people and is counting on Russia to make sure the Security Council is unable to stop their suffering. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has committed "war crimes" with Russian support against his own people, the US said today, as it put the Assad regime as well as Russia "on notice" following massive civilian casualties in rebel strongholds of the strife-torn country. White House Deputy Press Secretary Raj Shah said the US is monitoring the situation in Syria, where more than 400 civilians were killed in the last five days in the regime-led air strikes and bombardments in rebel controlled areas. Bashar al-Assad has already committed war crimes. He has already gassed his own people with sarin, he has already committed unthinkable acts, Shah told reporters at a conference, when asked if President Donald Trump believes that Assad is committing "war crimes". Assad has been committing war crimes with support of the Russians, he claimed. We don't want that to continue, he said, adding the US is monitoring the situation. (We) don't want to get ahead of anything that may or may not be announced on that front. But you know the Assad regime and Russia's actions on this front are on notice, he said when asked what more can Trump do to stop the killings. State Department Spokesperson Heather Nauert told a separate conference that more than 400 civilians were "horrifically" killed by the Syrian regime. As we all know, they are backed by not only Russia but also Iran.It is a good reminder that Russia bears a unique responsibility for what is taking place there.Without Russia backing Syria, the devastation and the deaths would certainly not be occurring, she said. During a UN Security Council meeting on Syria in New York, the US urged the 15-member body to move forward with this ceasefire and humanitarian resolution immediately. It expressed concern over the situation in Eastern Ghouta, where fresh bombardments by Syrian government yesterday killed dozens. The pictures and videos are everywhere. Screaming parents digging through rubble to find their children. Doctors working frantically with no medicine and no equipment in underground hospitals to save whoever they can," said Kelley Currie, US Representative for Economic and Social Affairs. "These are not terrorists showing up in these makeshift emergency rooms. These are civilians. They are ordinary people under attack by a barbaric Assad regime that is bent on leaving eastern Ghouta levelled to the ground, with no regard for the 400,000 men, women, and children who live there, she added. No one needs to use their imagination to know what the Assad regime is planning, she said. It is exactly what we saw in Aleppo in 2016 and in Hama and Homs before that. The Assad regime wants to bomb or starve all of their opponents into submission. That is why, except for two small deliveries of aid, the regime has not allowed any medical convoys or deliveries of food into eastern Ghouta since November. And the bombing attacks have been relentless, Currie said. She alleged that the regime wants "to keep bombing and gassing" these 400,000 people and is counting on Russia to make sure the Security Council is unable to stop their suffering. Meanwhile, a top UN official said his office has received thousands of messages from civilians under bombardment in eastern Ghouta, as he stressed for stopping hostilities in the region. "United Nations agencies had described a picture of hell on Earth. There must now be a sustained cessation of hostilities enabling immediate, safe, unimpeded and sustained deliveries of humanitarian aid, evacuation of the critically sick and wounded and an alleviation of the suffering of the Syrian people," said Mark Lowcock, UN Under-Secretary-General and Emergency Relief Coordinator. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Assam government will be observing September 22 as 'Rhino Day' to generate public awareness on protection of the one-horned pachyderm, Chief Minister Sarbananda Sonowal has said. "A day dedicated to the approximately 2500 rhino population in the state will be a tribute to the rhinoceros - the pride of Assam," the chief minister said at the 10th meeting of State Board for Wildlife here last night. A State Rhino Project in line with National Rhino Project will be launched in Assam soon for protecting the pachyderms from threats of poaching, he said. The CM also asked the wildlife board to raise a quick response team to rush to the sites where animal deaths have occurred unnaturally. Taking into account the recent deaths of tuskers in railway accidents, Sonowal asked the board to initiate a survey of elephant corridors in the state with the help of the World Wildlife Fund. "Once the elephant corridor mapping in completed, we will hold a meeting with the Ministry of Railways to take remedial steps like creating tunnels or overpass for the elephants," he added. The meeting also discussed plans to form a wildlife health and research institute to study diseases of animals and suggest appropriate treatment mechanism, a govt official said. A Special Battalion will be raised to protect wild animals in Manas National Park, the official added. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Congress leader and Lok Sabha MP Shashi Tharoor today predicted the party would come back to power in Meghalaya on account of good performance record of its government whereas the BJP has no record of delivery. Tharoor said that the BJPs failure in delivery of its poll promises made in 2014 have left people of Meghalaya with no hope that they would deliver in the state. Elections in Meghalaya to the 60 assembly seats, in which the Congress will be contesting in all and the BJP in 47 seats, will be held on February 27. Stating that the BJPs biggest weakness is that they have no record of delivery even at the national level, Tharoor said, What make the people here suddenly believe that somehow in Meghalaya they will deliver when they have not done anywhere else? On the other hand the Congress government in the state has good performance record and that would help the party romp home. I believe that the Congress is in with a very good chance (of retaining power). The present government in Meghalaya actually got performances to point to and it can turn to the voters and seek rewards for our performances, Tharoor, who was here to campaign for the party, told journalists. He said the government here has proofs to its performances. The social audit law is a law and it exists. Meghalaya got the best record in women education, empowerment in the proportion of women in school and higher education and these are national figures maintained by the HRD Ministry, he said to drive home the point. Taking a dig at the BJP Government at the Centre, the All India Professional Congress chairman said, The BJP has failed spectacularly for three-and-a-half year to achieve anything at the central government level. And now they claim that they are going to achieve something in Meghalaya which will be an improvement on the achievement of the existing government? He also downplayed BJPs aggressive campaign which began here with the Central government offering Rs 70 crore as pre-poll sops under the Swadesh Darshan Schemes to the churches. The vigorous efforts by the BJP with the backing of the resources by the Centre will not work as money alone cant buy votes, he said. Claiming that the NDA Government has only renamed schemes initiated by the UPA Government, Tharoor said, What they have done is they have become a name changing government but a not a game changing government. Instead what they have initiated you have the demonetisation. It was a bad idea and badly implemented and you have the GST which was a good idea but badly implemented, he said. The Congress leader, who campaigned for Shillong-East candidate Ampareen Lyngdoh and held two small meetings at cafs her, also criticized the BJP ally, the National Peoples Party, with whom the BJP formed the government in Manipur. Calling it a masked party, Tharoor said the NPP pretends to be one thing while it speaks for local interests but also attaches itself to a party which in so many ways has betrayed the values of our country. The Member of Parliament and a former bureaucrat also accused the BJP Government of promoting a narrow minded idea of India which he said was an idea based on Hindutva that is their only message. Hitting at the reported attacks on Christians in BJP-ruled states, Tharoor questioned the real face of the BJP Government. In Meghalaya they come here and say that you can eat whatever you like and in the rest of India they beat and even kill people on suspicious of having eaten beef, he said. He also said that in Meghalaya they are opening their arms to all while in Delhi they even denied visas to a world Baptist leader Rev Paul Mzisa who wished to come here to celebrate 150 years of Christianity in the Garo Hills. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The BJP was ready to fight polls with or without the Shiv Sena, Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis today said. He, however, added that the BJP desired that the two parties fought polls together. "I do not read or listen to anybody in the party (Sena) because there is just one person who takes all its decisions. And I have good relations with Uddhav ji (Sena chief Thackeray). I keep meeting him on and off," Fadnavis said. He wasspeaking at a programme organisedby a channel here in suburban Bandra. Fadnavis further said, "I think we will fight the polls together. However, we are ready to fight it this way or that way." To a query regarding the spate of suicides at Mantralaya despite the government's farm loan waiver, Fadnavis said these incidents had no connection with the present government. "One person who committed suicide had complaints pertaining to the MPSC (Maharashtra Public Services Commission) paper he had answered in 2013. The other was a convict who had a written a letter to the Chief Justice to have his sentence reduced," he said. "Dharma Patil (a farmer who consumed poison and later died in hospital) had received a compensation of Rs 3 lakh from the previous government but then said he wanted a higher compensation. According to the law, once the compensation is accepted, it cannot be changed," he added. Replying to a query on former Congress leader Narayan Rane's induction into the NDA despite his alleged criminal records, Fadnavis said that Rane, as per his (Fadnavis) knowledge, had no case against him. Fadnavis added that Rane would be given a ministerial berth or an appropriate position at the right time. In reply to another query on NCP chief Sharad Pawar's praise of Rahul Gandhi, Fadnavis said that there couldn't be worse days for Pawar if he had to praise the Congress leader. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Actor Brendan Fraser has claimed that he was once groped by the former president of Hollywood Foreign Press Association. The non-profit organisation, formed 75 years ago, is the main organiser of the Golden Globes Awards ceremony, which is held annually in January. In an interview with GQ magazine, the "Mummy" star said the alleged incident took place during HFPA luncheon at the Beverly Hills Hotel in 2003. He alleged that former HFPA president, Philip Berk, came to shake his hand when he was leaving the crowded room. "His left hand reaches around, grabs my a** cheek, and one of his fingers touches me in the taint. And he starts moving it around," Fraser said, adding that in that moment he was overcome with panic and fear. "I felt ill. I felt like a little kid. I felt like there was a ball in my throat. I thought I was going to cry," Fraser added. In a statement to GQ, Berk, who is still a member of HFPA, denied the allegations and said, "Mr Fraser's version is a total fabrication." Fraser said he talked about the incident with his then wife Afton Smith, and even considered going public but did not. However, he contacted the HFPA through his representatives and reported the incident. Fraser said his reps asked the HFPA for a written apology. Berk acknowledges that he wrote a letter to Fraser about the incident but said, "My apology admitted no wrongdoing, the usual If I've done anything that upset Mr. Fraser, it was not intended and I apologise'. " According to reports, Berk also discussed the incident in his 2014 memoir, claiming he pinched Fraser's behind in jest. Fraser said in the wake of the #MeToo and Time's Up movements, he became determined to come forward with his story. "I know Rose (McGowan), I know Ashley (Judd), I know Mira (Sorvino) - I've worked with them. I call them friends in my mind. I haven't spoken to them in years, but they're my friends. I watched this wonderful movement, these people with the courage to say what I didn't have the courage to say," he said. "Am I still frightened? Absolutely. Do I feel like I need to say something? Absolutely. Have I wanted to many, many times? Absolutely. Have I stopped myself? Absolutely. And maybe I am over-reacting in terms of what the instance was. I just know what my truth is," he added. The Hollywood Foreign Press Association responded to the allegations in a statement, saying they are investigating the incident. "The HFPA stands firmly against sexual harassment and the type of behaviour described in this article. Over the years we've continued a positive working relationship with Brendan, which includes announcing Golden Globe nominees, attending the ceremony and participating in press conferences. "This report includes alleged information that the HFPA was previously unaware of and at this time we are investigating further details surrounding the incident," it said in the statement obtained by Variety. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The BSF and Pakistan Rangers today held a flag meeting along the International Border (IB) here during which the border guards of the two countries expressed their commitment to maintain peace and tranquility along the IB, which has seen a lull in ceasefire violations during the last fortnight "A sector commander-level flag meeting was held between BSF and Pakistan Rangers on the International Border (IB) in Suchetgarh area of Jammu district today," a senior BSF officer said. The BSF delegation comprising nine officers was led by P S Dhiman, DIG BSF Jammu Sector. Brig Amjad Hussain, Sector Commander, Sialkot, Punjab led the Pakistan delegation which comprised of 11 officers. "During the meeting, general day to day border management issues were discussed", he said. While reiterating the BSF's commitment towards maintaining peace and tranquility on the International Border, BSF officials sought Pakistan Rangers'cooperation for the same, which was agreed to by them, the officer said. "The meeting concluded in a cordial atmosphere," he said. There had been heavy ceasefire violation by Pakistan Rangers in January which forced 40,000 people to flee. 14 people including eight civilians and six jawans were killed and over 65 others were injured in Pakistan shelling and firing along LoC and International Border (IB) last month. The ceasefire violations by Pakistan have halted along the IB for the last fortnight, but they are still continuing along the Line of Control (LoC). (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Ahmedabad Bench of the Central Administrative Tribunal(CAT) has imposed a hefty fine of Rs 2 lakh each on 25 petitioners who had sought jobs in Railways under its 'LARGESS' scheme, held as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court a year ago. Dismissing the petitions, the CAT observed that the Liberalised Active Retirement Scheme for Guaranteed Employment of Safety Staff (LARSGESS) of Railways violated the fundamental rights of other meritorious candidates who were eligible for these jobs. Addressing a press conference here, Tribunal's Judicial Member K B Suresh, who passed the order yesterday, said the scheme, floated by the Railway Board many years ago, was a "back-door entry" for the wards of Railway employees. Under the scheme, wards of employees such as locomotive pilots or gang-men could get a job after the employee took voluntary retirement and proposed the name of a ward as his replacement. "I have dismissed petitions filed by 25 persons who pleaded that they should get a job in Railways under LARSGESS scheme, which I think is an unjust employment scheme. I have also imposed a fine of Rs 2 lakh on each of these petitioners," Suresh told reporters. The petitioners had approached the CAT after the Railways rejected their job applications. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Senior lawyer Mahesh Jethmalani, arguing for IPS officer Rajkumar Pandian who was discharged by the trial court in the Sohrabuddin Shaikh alleged fake encounter case, today alleged before the Bombay High Court that the CBI had fabricated evidence. The high court is hearing petitions filed by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and Rubabuddin Shaikh, Sohrabuddin's brother, challenging the discharge of five of the 14 accused police officers in the case. Jethmalani today claimed that statements of several prosecution witnesses were contradictory. As per the CBI, Sohrabuddin, his wife Kausar Bi and his aide Tulsiram Prajapati were abducted and brought to a guest house in Ahmedabad in a silver Toyota Qualis (before the alleged fake encounter) he said. "Its witnesses gave contradictory statements. Nathuba Jadeja, one of the drivers of the alleged vehicle, said the car was silver-coloured, but in his statement before the Gujarat CID in 2005, Gurdayal Singh, who was Pandian's driver, said it was a light blue car," the lawyer said. "After the CBI took over the probe in 2010, they created a story saying the Qualis was silver-coloured... So, while recording his statement before magistrate, Singh stayed silent on the colour of the car," the lawyer said. But in the CBI's charge sheet, Singh was again quoted as describing the vehicle as light blue, Jethmalani said. "That is because even in fabricating evidence, the CBI did a shoddy job. It merely copy-pasted Singh's statement given to the CID in 2005 without realising that the same would contradict the CBI's own story," he said. "The Supreme Court entrusted the CBI with the very important task of filling in the gaps in the Gujarat CID's probe. However, the CBI went ahead and forged documents and fabricated evidence to suit its case," Jethmalani alleged. Jethmalani had alleged yesterday that the story of fake encounter was cooked up by a "politically motivated CBI of that time". Sohrabuddin and others had never been abducted by the accused in the first place, the lawyer argued. The agency also forged the signatures of Pandian and some other accused police officials on the entry register of the CRPF guest house in Hyderabad to show that they had all returned to Hyderabad together on November 29, 2005 after the alleged fake encounter of Sohrabuddin and Kausar Bi, he said. Sohrabuddin Shaikh, a gangster with alleged terror links, and his wife Kausar Bi were killed in a suspected fake encounter by the Gujarat police in November 2005. Prajapati was killed in another alleged fake encounter by the Gujarat and Rajasthan police in December 2006. Of the 38 persons named by the CBI as accused, 15, including senior IPS officers D G Vanzara, Pandian, Dinesh MN, and BJP president Amit Shah, were discharged by the CBI court in Mumbai between August 2016 and September 2017. The argument before the HC would continue tomorrow. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The CBI today produced Rotomac owner Vikram Kothari and his son Rahul before a Delhi court in connection with the Rs 36.95 billion loan default case and sought their transit remand to take them to Lucknow. The duo was produced before Additional Chief Metropolitan Magistrate Samar Vishal. They were arrested yesterday for alleged default on loan repayment. Defence advocate Pramod Kumar Dubey raised objections to the jurisdiction of the court, saying the accused should be produced before a sessions court and not before a magisterial court. The court reserved its order till 2 pm on the issue of jurisdiction. A consortium of seven banks had extended loans worth Rs 29.19 billion to Rotomac Global Pvt Limited 2008 onwards, according to a CBI FIR. The amount swelled to Rs 36.95 billion, including the accrued interest, because of repeated defaults on payment, the agency said. The CBI initiated the action on the complaint of Bank of Baroda, a member of the consortium led by Bank of India, which had approached the agency fearing that Kothari may flee the country like Nirav Modi and his uncle Mehul Choksi. The principal exposure of the banks regarding the loan is Bank of India Rs 7.5 billion, Bank of Baroda Rs 4.56 billion, Overseas Bank of India Rs 7.7 billion, Union Bank of India Rs 4.5 billion, Allahabad Bank Rs 3.3 billion, Bank of Maharashtra 498.2 million and Oriental Bank of Commerce Rs 974 million, the agency said. The CBI had filed the case against Vikram, his wife Sadhana and Rahul, and unidentified bank officials. The CBI has registered a corruption case against the district magistrate of Bihar's Aurangabad, Kanwal Tanuj, and others, officials said today. The case pertains to alleged irregularities in acquisition of land in the Nabinagar area in the district for a power plant by Bhartiya Rail Bijlee Company Ltd (BRBCL), a subsidiary of NTPC Ltd, they said. The agency today carried out searches at the residence of the district magistrate in connection with the case. According to a CBI FIR, registered yesterday, about seven acres of land was illegally acquired by the accused. A different person, who has since died, was showed as the owner of the land. It was revealed that C Shiv Kumar, Chief Executive Officer, BRBCL, Nabinagar, had entered a criminal conspiracy with Tanuj, unidentified officers of the company, district administration and Gopal Prasad Singh, who has died, the CBI claimed. According to the FIR, Tanuj, an Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer of Bihar cadre, forged documents and showed Singh as the owner of the land. According to the procedure, possession of land is taken in the presence of the owners after identification of their land. When BRBCL staff and district administration officials went to the site on April 11 and 12, 2017 for possession, the claimant (Singh) allegedly could not identify his land and many villagers, who had gathered there, claimed the land did not belong to him, the FIR read. However, the accused officers got a cheque of Rs 2.07 crore issued from BRBCL in favour of Singh in May last year and the money was subsequently withdrawn, causing a wrongful loss to the company, it read. A case under relevant sections of the Indian Penal Code was registered against Kumar, Tanuj, unidentified officers of BRBCL and local administration, and other private persons, the CBI said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Centre is fully committed to protect the interests of the weaker section, physically challenged and SCs/STs in the country, Union minister Ramdas Athawale said today. The minister of state (MoS) for social justice and empowerment was speaking after holding review meetings with senior officers of Punjab, Haryana, Chandigarh and central government departments here, an official release said. The Dalit leader said the special component plan (SCP) for Scheduled Castes has been increased to around Rs 56,600 crore in this year's Union budget compared to Rs 52,000 crore last year. The government has organised over 7,000 camps for 'divyangs' (differently-abled people) for providing information and awareness in the country for their welfare. Moreover, nine lakh 'divyangs' have been provided with helping tools, Athawale said, according to the release. On another issue, the minister said four cases of atrocities against SCs were reported in Chandigarh since 2015. Earlier in the day, Athawale inaugurated a three-day trade fair -- 'Chandigarh Pragati Ka Maidan' -- at Sector-34 here. About 100 exhibition-cum-sale stalls are put up by different departments, MSMEs, startups and women entrepreneurs from Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Delhi, Haryana, Punjab, Jammu and Kashmir and some other parts of the country. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A jawan of an elite anti-Naxal commando unit was today injured in an exchange of fire with Maoist rebels in Chhattisgarh's Sukma district. A senior police official said that the jawan, part of the CRPF's elite CoBRA (Commando Battalion for Resolute Action) 208th battalion, took bullets in his leg during the firefight in the interiors of Kistaram today morning. The incident happened after security personnel, from Palodi camp, and Naxals came face to face near Komalpad forests when the forces were cordoning off the region as part of an anti-Naxal combing operation, officials said. He added that the Naxals opened indiscriminate fire which injured the CoBRA jawan. The rebels managed to flee even as the paramilitary personnel fired back, said officials. Reinforcements had been rushed in and the jawan had been brought back to Palodi camp, officials informed. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The daughter of Kargil MLA Asgar Ali Karbalai succumbed to injuries sustained in a gas cylinder blast in Jammu city today, police said. Zainab Karbalai suffered 70 per cent burn injuries when a gas cylinder accidentally caught fire and exploded at her residence here on February 10, they added. She died while undergoing treatment at a hospital in Mumbai, officials said. Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti expressed her condolences with the bereaved family. Jammu and Kashmir Legislative Council Chairman Haji Anayal Ali condoled the demise of Zainab Karbalai. Jammu and Kashmir Pradesh Congress Committee (JKPCC) President G A Mir expressed sorrow over the death. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Pakistan's ousted premier Nawaz Sharif said today it was slowly becoming clear that the corruption cases filed against him were "baseless" as he appeared before an anti-graft court for 19th time to face trial in the graft cases linked to the Panama Papers scandal. The 67-year-old Sharif, who was disqualified as PML-N chief by the Supreme Court on Wednesday, appeared before the the Accountability Court here along with his daughter Maryam and son-in-law Mohammad Safdar, who are co-accused in one of the three cases. The court recorded evidence of two witnesses including forensic expert Robert Radley and Raja Akhtar of the London-based firm Quist law through video-link. National Accountability Bureau (NAB) had provided their names in the supplementary evidence which the court accepted by rejecting objections of the defence team. Radley's recording of evidence began yesterday and was concluded today after he was cross-examined by Sharifs counsel Khawaja Harris. Akhtar also recorded his statement. Talking to reporters after the hearing, Sharif said there was nothing in the case and the statement of Radley had strengthened the argument of defence lawyers. "You (journalists) must have a fair idea whether our stance has been strengthened or that of the Joint Investigation Team (JIT)," Sharif said. JIT, whose lengthy probe last year led the Supreme Court to order start of corruption cases against Sharif and his family, was led by Wajid Zia. "We are getting answers to the JIT's questions that are slowly coming forward, and people are realising now that the cases are baseless," Sharif said. He also lashed out at the courts, saying after removing him as prime minister and president of his party "there will be another decision soon to ban him from taking part in elections for life". Sharifs daughter took to social media and stated that Radley's statement was a "watershed" moment in the case. "I was waiting for the day. I knew the witness they were banking on would be their watershed. I knew he could not lie. I had faith in Allah," she tweeted. A five-member bench of the Supreme Court on July 28 had disqualified Sharif over his undeclared income. The apex court also directed the NAB to file cases against him, and his children in the Accountability Court and directed the trial court to decide the cases within six months. The NAB had filed three cases on September 8 against Sharif and his family, and another case against Finance Minister Ishaq Dar. The three cases against the Sharifs are related to the Flagship Investment Ltd, the Avenfield (London) properties and Jeddah-based Al-Azizia Company and Hill Metal Establishment. Maryam and her husband are accused in the Avenfield properties case. The political future of Sharif, who leads the country's most powerful political family, has been hanging in balance since his disqualification. If convicted, Sharif could be jailed. Sharif's family alleges that the cases are politically motivated. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A delegation of IAS officers working under the Delhi government today met Union Minister Jitendra Singh and put forward their grievances following the alleged attack on Delhi Chief Secretary Anshu Prakash. The chief secretary of Delhi was allegedly assaulted by a few AAP MLAs on Monday night during an official meeting in the presence of chief minister Arvind Kejriwal and his deputy Manish Sisodia. Kejriwal's office has dismissed the accusation as "bizarre and baseless". "We have heard the members of the delegation. We took cognisance of all the grievances and concerns raised by them and necessary steps would be taken on it," Singh told reporters after the meeting here. He said the officers wanted to officially register their grievances with the personnel ministry, which is the cadre controlling authority of the Indian Administrative Service (IAS). The officers have submitted a memorandum mentioning some of their demands and necessary action will be taken on it, said Singh, Minister of State in the Prime Minister's Office. He said, "the common objective of all of us is that we should be able to get the best out of our officers and we must enable them to perform their work to the best of their potential in the interest of the nation." After the meeting, Delhi IAS officers association secretary Manisha Saxena said the minister has assured full cooperation. "He said he is overseeing the developments, and action, as per the law, will be taken. He said they will take every step to protect and uphold the dignity of the civil servants," Saxena said. On the allegation that the officers were allegedly acting at the behest of the BJP, she said, "We all are government employees. We are not related to any political party. We are angry at the development that took place. It is our Constitutional right to put across our grievances. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Former bureaucrat Dhir Jhingran has resigned from the Delhi government's State Advisory Council For Education to express solidarity with Chief Secretary Anshu Prakash, who was allegedly assaulted by AAP MLAs at the chief minister's residence. In his resignation to the Secretary (education), Jhingran said that he has been "deeply shocked and saddened" by alleged assault on Prakash, who is also his batchmate in the IAS, at the chief minister's residence. "As a mark of protest and in solidarity with Anshu Prakash, and also not wanting to associate further with a government that treats senior officers in this manner, I have resigned from membership of the State Advisory Council of Education...," Jhingran said in the letter. Reacting to Jhingran's resignation, Atishi Marlena, Advisor to Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia, said, "It is unfortunate that he was taken in by a false version of events". In protest against the alleged assault on Prakash by AAP MLAs earlier this week, officers' associations have boycotted meetings with AAP ministers and said they would only maintain written communication with them. Earlier in the day, Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal and his cabinet colleagues met Lt Governor Anil Baijal over the issue. After the meeting, Kejriwal said the L-G has assured them that all steps will be taken to ensure that officers start functioning normally. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Two Indian men were arrested by customs officials for allegedly trying to smuggle into the country 10 kg gold, worth Rs 2.79 crore, at the Delhi airport, according to an official statement. The accused were intercepted after their arrival from Dubai yesterday. "A detailed search of their baggage and personal search resulted in the recovery of 10 kg of gold concealed inside machinery being carried by them," the statement issued by the customs department said. The market value of the gold, which has been seized, is Rs 2.79 crore, it said, adding that both the passengers have been arrested. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Jharkhand Police today said it has raided the Popular Front of India's office in Chandrapada under Muffasil police station after the state government banned the outfit. The state government had on Wednesday banned the PFI for alleged links with terrorist group Islamic State, and police action happened a day later i.e. yesterday. The state government had said that some members of the group had gone to Syria and worked with the IS. Though no PFI members were arrested during the raid, the police seized the organisation's flags, banners, pamphlets, computer and CDs, officer-in-charge of the police station Santosh Kumar said. The PFI, which began from Kerala, is active in the Pakur district of Jharkhand. Police said the group is also active in Barhardwa, Udhwa and Rajmahal of adjoining Sahebganj district as well as in villages bordering West Bengal. They said the state headquarters of the banned organisation was in Chandrapada village of Pakur. Kumar had led the team that carried out the raid. Verification of the seized items is on and action would be taken accordingly, he said. The PFI had taken out a rally in support of controversial Islamic preacher Zakir Naik on July 13, 2016 in the district following which around 300 of its members were arrested. It had also pasted objectionable posters in the district and had taken out a massive rally on July 5 last year without prior permission from the district administration. They had organised the rally demanding the arrest of BJP leader Hisabi Rai for his alleged inflammatory speech. After the rally, they wanted to submit a memorandum to the district administration but were stopped near the town police station on the Pakur-Dumka road and asked to submit the memorandum there. However, the vice president of PFI, Jharkhand, Hanzla Sheikh, paid no heed to the police order and allegedly roughed up Sub-Divisional Police Officer (SDPO) Shravan Kumar. The PFI activists then clashed with the police and 50 of them were arrested, including Sheikh. In August last year, Pakur Deputy Commissioner Dilip Kumar Jha and Superintendent of Police (SP) Shailendra Kumar Burnwal had recommended the PFI be banned. A home department probe found that some members of the PFI have visited Syria through states in the South India and were working for the ISIS, the state government had said on Wednesday. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Maharashtra government today directedinsurance companies to deposit the compensation given to farmers under the Prime Minister Crop Insurance Scheme directly into their bank accounts. The state's agricultural department told these companies to deposit the compensation, given to farmers as part of the 2017 kharif scheme for damage to crops like paddy, moong, urad and soyabean, within a week. Following a review by Agriculture Minister Pandurang Fundkar, the state's Additional Principal Secretary Vijay Kumar convened a meeting of the five insurance firms involved in the scheme. Kumar told the companies that the Aadhaar numbers of the farmers who had registered themselves with the state's 'Aaple Sarkar' portal were linked to their accounts. Officials said that of the 81 lakh farmers who are part of the 2017 kharif scheme, some eight lakh farmers have registered on the government's portal. The meeting was attended by representatives of the Oriental Insurance, United India Insurance, Agriculture Insurance Company of India, National Insurance Company and Reliance General, said officials. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Did Pakistan's over zealous Foreign Minister Khawaja Asif put his foot in his mouth by prematurely claiming that Islamabad has avoided being placed in a watch-list by a global watchdog over terrorism financing? It seems so, going by a tweet of his Cabinet colleague and Interior Minister Ahsan Iqbal as well as the Foreign Ministry. On Wednesday, Asif had tweeted that Pakistan had foiled US-led efforts to place it on a terrorist financing watch-list after the country was granted a three-month reprieve by the Paris-based Financial Action Task Force (FATF). Foreign Minister Asif had tweeted that "our efforts paid" and "no consensus for nominating Pakistan" for the watch-list was reached at the conclusion of meeting on the US-led motion. The meeting proposed "three months pause" and asked APG (Asia Pacific Group) for "another report to be considered in June", he had tweeted. Asif said Pakistan was "grateful to friends who helped" to avoid being placed on the watch-list. But Interior Minister Iqbal tweeted today, cautioning against speculation on the matter until there is official confirmation of the FATF decision. "No official intimation of #FATF decision yet. We should not speculate till official statement is released," Iqbal said. Pakistan Foreign Office Spokesperson Dr Muhammad Faisal, in a weekly press briefing in Islamabad today, said Pakistan had serious concerns over the motion moved by the US and United Kingdom at the FATF, Radio Pakistan reported. Replying to several questions about the outcome of the meeting of FATF regarding placing Pakistan on in its "grey list" of nations not doing enough to counter terror financing, he said so far the outcome is "awaited". The Paris-based FATF international watchdog on money laundering and terror financing is going to announce its decisions including on the motion to place Pakistan on the terror-financing watch list after a week-long session concludes today. The FATF session is being held to review proposals that include putting Pakistan back on a list of countries which have failed to prevent terrorist financing. If adopted, the resolution would place Pakistan on the FATF grey-list of "jurisdictions with deficient anti-money laundering regimes." Pakistan was previously on the FATF watch-list from 2012 to 2015. The Wall Street Journal had named China, Turkey and Saudi Arabia as the 'friends' who had come to rescue Pakistan, saying that the three countries had blocked the US's motion to put Pakistan on the list. Pakistan had lobbied FATF member countries to keep it off the watch list, the report read. In the lead-up to the FATF plenary session, Pakistan government took control of three dispensaries run by Hafiz Saeed's Jamaat-ud Dawa (JuD) and the Falah-i-Insaniyat Foundation (FIF) in a rural area near the capital. Additionally, President Mamnoon Hussain on Feb 9 quietly promulgated an ordinance amending the Anti-Terrorism Act, 1997 to end a longstanding ambiguity over the status of the JuD and FIF by firmly placing them on the list of proscribed groups. The FATF, an intergovernmental body based in Paris that sets global standards for fighting illicit finance, had previously warned Islamabad it could be put back on the list without further efforts to crack down on the flow of funds to militants, Dawn newspaper reported. Pakistani officials and Western diplomats say being put on the FATF watch-list could deal a blow to Pakistan's economy, making it harder for foreign investors and companies to do business in the country, it said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Punjab National Bank on Friday said it did not consider the bid of global firm PwC for the forensic audit of accounts of Nirav Modi, accused in Rs 114 billion scam, in view of Sebi's order against the audit firm. Finding Price Waterhouse guilty in the multi-crore Satyam scam, Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) in January had barred its network entities from issuing audit certificates to any listed company in India for two years. In reply to clarifications sought by stock exchanges, PNB said it has initiated the process of assigning forensic audit in the accounts of Nirav Modi Group and bids were invited from major audit firms. "Bid from M/s PwC was also received but in view of Sebi order dated January 10, 2018, the same has not been considered," the country's second-largest bank said. The bank further said that it is finalising the forensic audit allocation amongst the remaining bidders according to the Central Vigilance Commissions (CVC) guidelines. The bank also denied reports that details of debit and credit cards of its thousands of customers have been leaked. "No card data breach has been detected in PNB's infrastructure. Bank's security infrastructure is strong enough and the bank has taken all necessary technical steps to safeguard customer data," it said. PNB said that it has a board-approved cyber crisis management plan in place which takes care of all aspects of customer protection. Earlier, PNB reported that it has been defrauded of Rs 114 billion by jewellery designer Nirav Modi and associates in connivance of certain bank officials. Gujarat's Patidar quota agitation spearhead Hardik Patel today said he did not consider Congress president Rahul Gandhi "my leader" and favoured the entry of Priyanka Gandhi into active The Patidar Anamat Andolan Samiti (PAAS) leader also announced that he would not contest next year's Lok Sabha election, despite attaining the eligibility age of 25 years. "I like Rahul Gandhi at a personal level, but I do not consider him as a leader because he is not my leader," Patel said at an event here. Patel, who has been agitating for reservation for the Patidar community of Gujarat, had worked closely with the Congress during the Assembly polls held in the state in December last year. During an interactive session organised by a television channel, Patel went on to add that Rahul Gandhi's sister Priyanka Gandhi should join active He claimed that if the Congress had supported his movement with "full capacity", the BJP's tally in the Gujarat Assembly polls would have been 60 seats and not 99. The Congress had bagged 77 seats in the 182-member House. "But it gives me great pleasure to see the full strength of the Congress representatives in the Gujarat Assembly. Now, they (Congress MLAs) are raising the voice of the people of Gujarat confidently," Patel said. To a query, he said, "No, I am not going to contest the Lok Sabha election next year against (Prime Minister Narendra) Modi. In fact, I have decided not to contest the election next year, despite the fact that I would be eligible to take a plunge into the electoral battlefield." Owing to the age limitation, 24-year-old Patel could not contest the Gujarat Assembly election. "I will be able to contest elections and no one can stop me from doing so. However, I think it is more important to feel the pulse of the people, whom I would represent in the Assembly or Parliament. First, I want to understand everything and most importantly, what the public wants and deserves," he said. Replying to another query, Patel admitted that he had a girlfriend and that he would be marrying her. Another quota leader, Alpesh Thakor, who is now a member of the Gujarat Assembly, claimed that the BJP could secure 99 seats in the state polls as it had "money and muscle" power. "Otherwise, the final tally (in the Gujarat Assembly) would have been quite different," he said at the event. "There were three movements going on for the last few years in Gujarat. The Patidar movement, the Dalit movement and the OBC movement. Everyone supported the Congress and that was the reason we got so many seats," said Thakor, who won from Radhanpur on a Congress ticket. Before returning to Gujarat, Patel met the vice-president of Mumbai Youth Congress, Suraj Singh Thakur, today. "Hardik wanted to know about the problems being faced by the students and unemployed youth in Mumbai and Maharashtra. He was very disappointed to know about the issues. We both are looking at each other, hopefully to protest against the anti-youth policies of the BJP government at the Centre and in the state," Thakur said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A massive fire swept through a pharmaceutical factory here today, injuring eight workers, three of them critically, police said. The blaze erupted in Jeedimetla area of the city around 6.30 am likely due to a reactor blast, and quickly spread to an adjacent chemical factory, fire brigade officials said. Nobody was injured at the chemical factory. Plumes of thick, black smoke shot up into the sky from the two premises. "Eight workers suffered injuries in the incident and were shifted to a private hospital. Three of the injured have suffered around 80 per cent burn injuries," Deputy Commissioner of Police (Balanagar Zone) Y Sai Sekhar told PTI. According to Regional Fire Officer (Central Region) V Papaiah, the fire department received a call at around 6.50 am, after which eight fire engines and four water tankers were rushed to the scene of the blaze, which was extinguished in about 90 minutes. When asked about the cause of the blaze, the senior fire official said a preliminary probe indicated it could have been triggered by a chemical reaction that led to a reactor blast at the pharmaceutical unit. A case has been registered in connection with the incident and a probe is on. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Elaborate security arrangements have been made for tomorrow's by-poll in Bijepur Assembly constituency, especially in the wake of pre-poll violence in and around Bijepur area, officials said today. Altogether 281 polling booths have been set up for the by-election, while 270 booths were there during the Assembly polls in 2014, Bargarh district Collector Yamini Sarangi said. "Of the 281 booths, 155 have been identified as critical. We have 12 dedicated squads to ensure free and fair polling in all the places," Sarangi said adding that CCTV cameras have been put up in 20 booths. The squads will rush to the booth concerned after receiving information on rigging and law and order, Bargarh SP Jai Narayan Pankaj said. "Six check posts have also been set up in the border areas where vehicles coming from outside will be stopped and disallowed to enter Bijepur constituency," he added. A series of violent incidents, including an attack on the brother of state Labour Minister Sushant Singh on yesterday night, has heightened the security perception ahead of the by-election. A total of five companies (500 personnel) of Central Para Military Force along with one company (85 personnel) of Odisha Swift Action Force have been deployed on poll duty, Bargarh district ASP Jaswant Senapati told PTI. This apart, 40 platoons (1200 personnel) of state armed police have been deployed on election duty, Bargarh district ASP Jaswant Senapati told PTI. Odisha's Chief Electoral Officer S Kumar said efforts are on to engage more executive magistrates to oversee the law and order situation during the polling. For the first time, Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) machines will be used in the Bijepur by-poll. Polling would be held from 8 am to 5 pm, while votes would be counted on February 28. The by-poll is necessitated due to death of Congress MLA Subal Sahu. His wife Rita Sahu is now the nominee for the ruling BJD. There are 13 other candidates are in the fray including those of the BJP and the Congress. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A former top adviser to President Donald Trump's election campaign pleaded guilty to federal conspiracy and false-statements charges in the special counsel's Russia investigation. The plea by Rick Gates revealed that he is planning to cooperate with special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation as it continues to probe the Trump campaign, Russian election interference and Gates' longtime business associate, Paul Manafort. Gates, 45, of Richmond, Virginia, made the plea at the federal courthouse in Washington. He admitted to charges accusing him of conspiring against the U.S. government related to fraud and unregistered foreign lobbying as well as lying to federal authorities in a recent interview. With his cooperation, Gates gives Mueller a witness willing to provide information on Manafort about his finances and political consulting work in Ukraine, and also someone who had access at the highest levels of the Trump campaign. Gates' plea came a day after a federal grand jury in Virginia returned a 32-count indictment against him and Manafort, Trump's former campaign chairman, accusing them of tax evasion and bank fraud. The indictment in Virginia was the second round of charges against Gates and against Manafort, who has denied any wrongdoing. The two men were initially charged last October with unregistered lobbying and conspiring to launder millions of dollars they earned while working on behalf of a pro-Russian Ukrainian political party. Gates' decision marks the fifth publicly known guilty plea in the special counsel probe into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin during the 2016 campaign. The plea also comes quickly on the heels of the stunning indictment last week that laid out a broad operation of election meddling by Russia, which began in 2014, and employed fake social media accounts and on-the-ground politicking to promote Trump's campaign, disparage Hillary Clinton and sow division and discord widely among the U.S. electorate. The charges to which Gates is pleading guilty don't involve any conduct connected to the Trump campaign. They largely relate to a conspiracy laid out in his indictments, but they do reveal that Gates spoke with the FBI earlier this month and lied during the interview. That same day, his attorneys filed a motion to withdraw from representing him for "irreconcilable difference." The court papers accuse Gates of lying about a March 19, 2013, meeting involving Manafort, a lobbyist and a member of Congress. Gates said the meeting did not include discussion of Ukraine, when in fact prosecutors say it did. The charges don't name the lobbyist or the lawmaker but filings with the Justice Department show Manafort and lobbyist Vin Weber of Mercury Public Affairs met with Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., on that date as part of a lobbying campaign on behalf of Ukrainian interests. On Friday, Manafort said in a statement that he maintains his innocence. "I had hoped and expected my business colleague would have had the strength to continue the battle to prove our innocence. For reasons yet to surface he chose to do otherwise," Manafort said. "This does not alter my commitment to defend myself against the untrue piled-up charges contained in the indictments against me." In court filings over the past few months, Gates gradually began to show the strain the case was placing on him and his family. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Fresh bombardment on has killed dozens, bringing the number of dead civilians in a five-day assault by the Syrian government to more than 400. Mounting calls for a humanitarian truce in one of the bloodiest episodes of Syria's seven-year conflict failed to stop 46 more people being killed yesterday by air strikes and rocket fire. Regime backer Russia said there was "no agreement" at the UN Security Council on a 30-day ceasefire for Syria and presented amendments to a draft resolution that would allow aid deliveries and the evacuation of civilians from besieged As diplomats wrangled over a UN vote, which could take place today, people huddled in basements while government forces pounded the enclave with rockets and bombs, turning towns into fields of ruins and even hitting hospitals. Aid group Doctors Without Borders said 13 of the facilities it supports in were damaged or destroyed in three days, leaving remaining staff with very little to save the hundreds of wounded brought to them every day. In the hospital mortuary in Douma, the main town in the enclave just east of Damascus, bodies wrapped in white shrouds were already lined up on the floor, two of them children. "Five days of air strikes and intense artillery fire by the regime and its Russian ally have killed 403 civilians, including 95 children," said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Morning rain appeared to initially keep warplanes away yesterday but the sky cleared by midday and jets, some of them Russian according to the Observatory, soon returned. Russia has so far denied direct involvement in the assault on Ghouta but the pro-government Syrian newspaper Al-Watan reported yesterday that Russian warplanes and advisers had joined the battle. The US said yesterday Russia had "unique responsibility" for the deaths. "Without Russia backing Syria, the devastation and the deaths would certainly not be occurring," State Department Spokeswoman Heather Nauert told journalists. Regime and allied forces have been massing around the enclave, in which an estimated 400,000 people live, ahead of a likely ground offensive to flush out holdout Islamist and jihadist groups. "We are 14 women and children living in a room that is 10 feet wide, with no toilet and nowhere to wash," said 53-year-old Umm Abdo, who joined a large group in the basement of a school in Arbin. The brief respite provided by the rain yesterday encouraged some residents to venture out of their basements and shelters, to buy food, check on their property or enquire about their relatives and neighbours. In the town of Hammuriyeh, a queue had formed outside a shop as starving residents tried to stock up but another rocket sowed panic and sent everybody back to their shelters. In Douma, a young boy tried to peddle lighters on the street but rocket fire quickly forced him to scamper back to cover. An AFP correspondent saw rescuers known as the "White Helmets" forced to abandon efforts to retrieve a wounded woman from the rubble of a collapsed home when air strikes resumed. When they ventured back to the site, the woman was dead. The indiscriminate bombardment and the strikes on medical facilities have sparked global outrage but few concrete options have emerged to stop the bloodletting. The aid community voiced its frustration as the world appeared once again powerless to stop a conflict that has left almost 350,000 dead in seven years and caused destruction rarely seen since World War II. Humanitarian agencies are "sickened that no matter how many times they've raised the alarm, taken the step of speaking out, called on the Security Council to do something, the violence and brutality will sink to new lows", said the Syria INGO Regional Forum. At the UN, Russian Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia said sponsors Sweden and Kuwait were requesting a vote on the ceasefire plan even though they are "fully aware there is no agreement on it". The Security Council needs to reach a "feasible" agreement on a ceasefire and not take a decision that would be "populistic" and "severed from reality", he said. Talks for a deal between the regime and the armed groups controlling Ghouta appear to have stalled. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said jihadist fighters in Ghouta had rejected an evacuation deal. "A few days ago, our military in Syria suggested to the fighters that they withdraw peacefully from Eastern Ghouta, like the evacuation of fighters and their families that was organised in East Aleppo," he said. The head of the defence committee in Russia's lower house of parliament said Thursday that more than 200 new types of weapons were tested as part of his country's military support to the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. "It's not an accident that today they are coming to us from many directions to purchase our weapons, including countries that are not our allies," he said. Former bureaucrats, including an ex-chief secretary of Delhi, and a retired Delhi Police commissioner have condemned the alleged attack on Chief Secretary Anshu Prakash by two MLAs of the ruling AAP, calling it "abhorring" and "deeply worrying". The alleged attack took place on Monday night at Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal's residence in Civil Lines area during a meeting. In an open letter, the former officials said that it was "more shocking that elected legislators associated with the ruling party perpetrated the attack". The letter was signed by former Delhi chief secretary D M Spolia, former Delhi Police Commissioner B K Gupta, former DDA vice-chairman Balvinder Kumar, and others. "We, the undersigned, strongly condemn the abhorrent attack on the chief secretary of Delhi at the residence of the the chief minister," they said, adding that "such an attack is deeply worrying". "We demand that the chief minister immediately speak up and apologise on the issue," they said in the letter. In the spirit of justice, it is demanded that the perpetrators of the attack be "punished at the earliest," they added. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Supreme Court today sought the response of Uttar Pradesh Police on a plea by former minister Gayatri Prasad Prajapati seeking bail in connection with an alleged gangrape case in which he is one of the accused. A bench comprising Justices A K Sikri and Ashok Bhushan issued notice to the police on Prajapati's petition challenging the Allahabad High Court's December last year's order dismissing his plea seeking bail in the case. The apex court fixed the matter for hearing on March 16. Prajapati was sacked as a minister by then Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav from his cabinet in 2016 during a family feud with his father Mulayam Singh Yadav and uncle Shivpal Yadav. He was later reinstated in the council of ministers in Uttar Pradesh. An FIR was lodged in the matter at Gautampalli police station in Lucknow after the Supreme Court last year rebuked the state police during the then Samajwadi Party regime for not registering the case. A Chitrakoot-based woman had accused the former minister and his accomplices of rape. She had also alleged that he had also attempted to rape her minor daughter. In his plea filed before the apex court, Prajapati has claimed that allegations levelled against him in the case were false and baseless and he should be granted bail since charge sheet has already been filed. He has said that after the charge sheet was filed before the trial court, he had applied for bail which was rejected, following which he had approached the high court. The apex court had in February last year directed the Uttar Pradesh Police to lodge an FIR against Prajapati and others in connection with the case of alleged gangrape. The order had come on a plea of the woman who had alleged repeated gangrape by Prajapati and others and sought the court's direction for lodging of an FIR. She had claimed that the alleged incident had first taken place in October 2014 and continued till July 2016 and when the accused tried to molest her minor daughter, she decided to lodge a complaint. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) In a fresh attack, the Congress today accused the NDA Government of complicity in not acting on complaints against PNB fraud accused Nirav Modi and Mehul Choksi filed by people who have been duped in Gujarat and elsewhere by the duo, and alleged that they were provided "protection at the highest level". Congress spokesperson Shaktisinh Gohil alleged that Nirav Modi and Choksi have not only siphoned off crores of rupees from India's banks, but have also duped India's middle class and common people of Rs 5,000 crore or more, by floating various schemes. He said a new "'Jan Dhan Loot Yojna has unravelled - where Gutanjali Gems promoters floated jewellery investment schemes like Shagun, 'Swarna Mangal Labh' (SML) and 'Swarna Mangal Kalash' (SMK) taking an estimated Rs 5,000 crore of public money". "A complicit Modi Government has even refused to publicly acknowledge this loot and duping of common man's money i.e. 'Jan Dhan Loot'," he told reporters. Gohil said as per the schemes, customers were lured with benefits of bonus and one free instalment at redemption and a large number of people were duped as payments were not paid to them. He said in Gujarat's Bhavnagar alone there are hundreds of complaints pending with the state police which did not act on them. He said people have given affidavits in September 2015 and made public such documents. Like in the case of banks, he said, the common man was duped by way of these schemes as neither the instalment paid nor jewellery given or amount returned. "Shockingly, instead of registering an FIR and arresting Nirav Modi, Mehul Choksi and others, Bhavnagar Police kept the matter pending and finally referred it by recording that it should be investigated by CID Crime, Gandhinagar," he said. He said the most interesting fact is that although complaints were given on October 10, 2017, Gujarat Police waited up to January 25, 2018 by when Nirav Modi and Choksi had fled the country along with their families. "It is indeed surprising that people were being defrauded with impunity and the entire government machinery of BJP remained a mute spectator. Complicity and protection at the highest level is, thus, writ large," he alleged, adding that there are hundreds of more such complaints across the country. Gohil also attacked the BJP Government in Gujarat for "promoting" Gitanjali Group as a "potential collaborator" at "Vibrant Gujarat Summit, 2017", despite a large number of complaints pending against the promoters. "Why is the BJP mum on the connections of Nirav Modi and Mehul Choksi to the BJP leadership?," he asked. The Congres spokesperson also asked whether Mehul Choksi was invited to a small gathering when Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated the Gold Monetisation Scheme in 2015? "Did Prime Minister not refer to Mehul Choksi with great affection in his speech, specially addressing him as 'hamaare Mehul bhai?'," he asked. "Why is Prime Minister, Shri Narendra Modi, fighting shy of admitting his connection to Mehul Choksi and Nirav Modi?," Gohil questioned, while putting another poser -- "whether the sister-in-law of BJP Spokesperson in Maharashtra Shaina N C was Head of Sales with Nirav Modi's companies". Gohil charged that Mehul Choksi and Gitanjali Group showcased creation by Shaina NC in August 2015 and the show was presided over by Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis's wife Amruta Fadnavis and daughter of the then Gujarat chief minister Anar Patel. They gave big advertisements in newspapers to exhibit their clout, he alleged The Congress leader also demanded that names of all such cheated people be made public. He said the government should answer why FIRs and action were not initiated against those behind such duping. Gohil also demanded that the prime minister should answer whether "Vibrant Gujarat is a platform for committing frauds". He said that had Nirav Modi and Choksi been arrested by the police, they would not have fled the country with public money. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Bombay High Court today said the Maharashtra government must adhere to a previous high court order mandating that Girgaum chowpatty area be used only for three public events- the Ramleela and Krishnaleela, the Ganesh and Durga idol immersion, and Chirstmas. The high court bench of justices A S Oka and P N Deshmukh was referring to the incident of fire at a 'Make in India' event held at Girgaum beach here in February 2016. The bench said it will pass a detailed order next week while reiterating that the Girgaum chowpatty area be used only for the above events and that all recommendations of the court-appointed committee that regulates activities along the Girgaum chwopatty area be followed. The bench was hearing a public interest litigation (PIL), which highlighted that the iconic beach was facing the threat of soil erosion. The Maharashtra government also filed a report in the HC today confirming that the beach was facing the problem of soil erosion. The government told the high court that a joint inspection conducted on February 15 this year by the city collector's office and the Public Works Department (PWD) had found that soil erosion had been taking place along the Girgaum beach in the city. The state said that it was looking into engaging the Central Water Power Research Station in Pune to identify the reasons for the soil erosion. The state submitted that it will take at least a year's time to fix the problem and restore the damage already caused by such soil erosion. To this, the bench said that the state must also ensure that no encroachments or illegal activities are allowed in the area. "This prompts us to reiterate that the chowpatty beach area must only be used for the three events as mentioned in our January 2016 order," the bench said. On January 28, 2016, another bench led by Justice Oka had refused permission to the state government to host a mega event at Girgaum chowpatty as part of the 'Make in India' Week in February that year. However, the Supreme Court had eventually allowed the event. However, on the night of the event, a major fire broke out near the stage on which a cultural dance performance was going on. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Anguished over teachers working for east and north Delhi municipal corporations not being paid salaries for over two months, the Delhi High Court today suggested to the civic bodies to hand over their schools to the AAP government if they cannot pay the wages of the teachers. Shocked that the teachers of the schools run by the two civic bodies were paid wages only till November last year, a bench of Acting Chief Justice Gita Mittal and Justice C Hari Shankar said "this cannot be countenanced". "What! You have not paid them since November? You cannot treat teachers like this. This cannot be countenanced. How can you expect the teachers to do a service if you do not pay them? If you cannot pay your teachers, hand over your schools to the Delhi government," the court said. It went on to add why the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) was trifurcated in 2011, of two of them have to "go with a begging bowl each time salaries, be it of teachers or safai karamchaaris, have to be paid". The observations came after the East Delhi Municipal Corporation (EDMC) said it had "paucity of funds" due to non-implementation of the Fourth Delhi Finance Commission recommendations by the AAP government. The court, thereafter, listed the matter for further hearing on March 8 and asked the Centre and Delhi government to inform it why the commission's recommendations have not been implemented and who is the custodian of funds that are to be released to the three corporations. The bench was hearing an NGO's plea seeking contempt action against the EDMC and the North Delhi Municipal Corporation (NDMC) for alleged violation of the high court's January 5 direction to clear all arrears of the teachers within a month. NGO Social Jurist, represented by advocate Ashok Agarwal, has contended that the salaries have not been paid to EDMC and NDMC school teachers from December last year. The high court's January 5 decision had come on the NGO's PIL highlighting non-payment of salaries to the teachers of EDMC and NDMC schools. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Delhi High Court today dismissed the bail plea of a former Congress councillor serving life term in a 1984 anti-Sikh riots case. A bench of Acting Chief Justice Gita Mittal and Justice Anu Malhotra said that convict Balwan Khokhar was getting the "best" healthcare in Tihar Jail here. The court's order came on Khokhar's plea for interim bail on the ground that he wanted to undergo treatment at the Sir Ganga Ram Hospital for a hairline fracture on his nose. Khokhar's counsel had claimed that his client had fallen down in jail on December 17, 2017 and suffered the injury and there was a swelling on his face. Khokhar, retired naval officer Captain Bhagmal, Girdhari Lal and two others were held guilty in a case relating to the murder of five members of a family in Raj Nagar area of Delhi Cantonment on November 1, 1984, a day after the assassination of then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. They have challenged their conviction and the award of life sentence by the trial court in May 2013. Congress leader Sajjan Kumar was acquitted in the case by the trial court. The trial court had awarded life term to Khokhar, Bhagmal and Girdhari Lal and three-year jail term to two others former MLA Mahender Yadav and Kishan Khokhar. The convicts have filed appeals before the high court while the CBI too has filed an appeal alleging they were engaged in "a planned communal riot" and "religious cleansing". The agency has also appealed against the acquittal of Kumar. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Madras High Court today came down heavily on banks for adopting different yardsticks to grant loans to billionaire businessmen and the affluent, who are given credit without adequate collateral security, and for the middle class and poor. "Though the banks would sanction loans and Letters of Understanding to billionaire businessmen and affluent even without sufficient collateral security and would take action for recovery only when the scam spins out of control, they are adopting a totally different yardstick in the case of middle income group and poor people across India," the court said. The division bench comprising justices K K Sasidharan and P Velmurugan stated this while dismissing an appeal by IOB against the order of a single judge which had asked the bank to consider an loan application of a girl belonging to a backward community in Tamil Nadu. The court slapped a Rs-25,000 fine on the bank for refusing to sanction an loan to the daughter of a poor farmer. The judges observed that banks are not concerned with the directives issued by the central government and Reserve Bank of India to help poor students by giving them loan. "Such instructions are violated by banks with impunity," the. It said the present case was a classic example of how IOB made the girl, belonging to a most backward community in Tamil Nadu, run from pillar to post without considering her application for Rs 3.45 lakh education loan. "The bank by filing the intra court appeal against the order of a single judge on November 30, 2012, succeeded in dragging the matter till completion of the course so as to make the matter infructuous. The Himalayan arrears in courts and inability of the system to prioritise cases also contributed for the delay and denial of justice to the poor student," the bench said. The matter relates to a loan application by the student who joined engineering course in a private college during the 2011-12 academic year. As she was not in a position to pay the fees, she applied for a education loan. Since IOB did not consider it, she moved the high court. A single judge directed the bank to reconsider it, based on the bona fide certificate issued by the college. However, assailing the order, the bank moved the present appeal. The counsel for the bank contended that the applicant completed her course in 2015 and as such, the prayer in her petition has become infructuous. Recording the submission, the bench said the banks have no case that education loan defaulters have contributed for the accumulation of the bad loans. "We are informed that the cumulative total of more than 50 companies or groups, each with over Rs 250 crore of loan arrears, classified as wilful default, works out to about Rs 48,000 crore," the bench said. Noting that banks are reluctant to sanction education loan in the absence of sufficient collateral security, the court said education is not considered an 'asset' by banks. The country would be denied of the service of scientists, doctors, engineers and other professionals in case financial assistance is not given to deserving students to come up in life, the bench said. The educated youth are an asset to the nation and their talents can be utilised for the growth of the country. Banks must realise this fundamental fact, the judges said. Holding that IOB's appeal was nothing but an abuse of the process of court, the bench dismissed its plea and imposed Rs 25,000 as costs, payable to the applicantwithin two weeks. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Madras High Court today issued a notice to the Apollo Hospitals on a plea by a woman, who claims to be J Jayalalithaa's daughter, seeking to know if it had preserved "biological samples" of the late chief minister collected during her hospitalisation there in 2016. Justice S Vaidyanathan issued the notice on a sub-application by the woman, who has already filed a petition claiming to be the biological daughter of Jayalalithaa and seeking a direction for a DNA test to establish her parentage. In her petition, the woman has claimed she had been given in adoption to Jayalalithaa's sister and her husband decades ago and she came to know about it from her foster father in March last year before he died. She has also sought a direction to exhume the body of Jayalalithaa and enable her and her family to cremate it on grounds that the late leader was an Iyengar Brahmin. Moving the application, counsel for the woman submitted that for DNA matching it was necessary to know whether the biological samples of Jayalalithaa had been preserved by the Apollo Hospitals where she died in December, 2016, after being treated for 75 days for various problems. The counsel said they had sent a notice to the hospital in this regard but there was no response. Hence, they were constrained to file the present application seeking a court direction to the hospital to state whether they had preserved biological samples of Jayalalithaa or not. In the resumed arguments on the maintainability of the main petition, Tamil Nadu Advocate General Vijay Narayan sought time to file the state government's counter. He said since the claim of the petitioner (adoption) was said to have taken place 30 years ago, records of the period were being verified and hence sought time. Counsel for the petitioner and the government also opposed the plea of AIADMK Karnataka state unit leader K A Pugazhendhi and one P A Joseph seeking to implead them as parties to the petition. The judge then adjourned the matter until March 7 for further hearing. In response to the court's directions, Jayalalithaa's niece Deepa and nephew Deepak have filed counter affidavits opposing the claim of the petitioner woman. While Deepak had dubbed the claim a bundle of lies, Deepa alleged the petition had been filed with an intention to cheat and grab properties of Jayalalithaa. Disputing the woman's version that she was given in adoption to Shylaja, claimed to be Jayalalithaa's sister, Deepak said Jayalalithaa and her brother Jayakumar (father of Deepak and Deepa) were the sole legal heirs of Sandhya, their mother. The woman had last year moved the Supreme Court with the same prayer but the latter refused to entertain it. The apex court, however, had said she was at liberty to approach the high court. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Allahabad High Court today stayed the order of the district magistrate of Bulandshahr directing handover of a gram sabha land to a nagar palika for construction of a dumping yard under 'Clean India' scheme. The DM had passed the order transferring the land to Nagar Palika Parishad, Gulawati on August 8 ,2017. A bench comprising justices Krishna Murari and Ajai Bhanot stayed the order on a petition by Satendra and three other elected members of Gram Sabha of village Kota. Appearing on behalf of the petitioners, counsel Vinod Sinha and Mahesh Sharma submitted before the court that the land could not be acquired and given to the town area without permission from authorities concerned. It was submitted that land in question is adjacent to two schools in a residential area, out of which one belongs to physically challenged children. The court also asked the state authorities to file a counter affidavit within six weeks. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Four houses belonging to the accused in the Kushmandi rape case were allegedly set on fire by a mob in South Dinajpur district today, but none was injured, the police said. The mob, comprising people from both South and North Dinajpur districts, protesting against the alleged gangrape of a mentally-challenged tribal woman, had gathered at Buniadpur in South Dinajpur district early in the morning, a police officer said. They then marched to Ghatpara village, before setting the houses on fire, he added. Fire and emergency services officials, with the help of villagers, brought the flames under control but by then, the fire had spread to a few other houses, Bipul Banerjee, Sub-Divisional Police Officer, Gangarampur, said. A number of police personnel were posted at the village to prevent a law-and-order problem in the village, he added. Meanwhile, on the condition of the victim, Pratip Kumar Kundu, Principal Professor at the Malda Medical College and Hospital, where the woman is being treated, said, "We cannot say anything for certain as of now," adding that the victim was speaking at times, but in a disjointed manner. The mentally-challenged tribal woman was allegedly gangraped in Kushmandi in South Dinajpur district on February 17 and brutalised by her tormentors, who had inserted an iron rod into her private parts, before fleeing the spot. On the fateful evening, the woman had gone to a fair at Patirajpur, on the inter-district border, from where she was forcibly taken away by several persons and gangraped in an agricultural field under a bridge. The locals spotted her the next evening and alerted the police, who rushed her to the Raiganj district hospital, where she underwent a surgery. Since the condition of the woman was said to be critical, she was referred to the Malda Medical College Hospital. A police complaint was filed by one of her neighbours. Two persons -- aged 50 years and 45 years respectively -- were arrested from Itahar in neighbouring North Dinajpur district in connection with the incident on February 20. West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee had told a rally in South Dinajpur the next day that the victim was like her ''own sister'' and that her government would take care of her future. An amount of Rs 4.12 lakh has already been transferred to the victim's bank account as compensation. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Delhi High Court today asked how the Delhi Assembly Secretary, who was loaned to the AAP government by the Centre for a year, can continue in his post when his parent department, the All India Radio (AIR), wants him back. Justice Rajiv Shakdher also asked how the Speaker of the Assembly, Ram Niwas Goel, can hold the official back without the consent of his parent department. "His (Assembly Secretary) tenure comes to an end in July 2018. How can he be absorbed in the Delhi Legislative Assembly without the consent of his parent department? If his parent department wants him back, can the Speaker hold him back? I, prima facie, don't think so," the judge said. The court also asked the official, Prasanna Kumar Suryadevara, who was present in court, as to where he wanted to go. To this, Suryadevara said he wanted to work in the legislature. The AIR, his parent department, said it had received a letter from him in December last year saying he wished to go to the Andhra Pradesh State Legislative Assembly. It also told the court that the official was borrowed by the Delhi government, which had relieved him in August 2016. It also claimed that the legislative assembly was the "sub-borrowing department" and had no say in the matter after the borrowing department relieved him. The AIR also questioned how Suryadevara's tenure was extended by a Deputy Secretary of the services department of Delhi government when the Lieutenant Governor has already ordered that he be relieved. "How can people assume powers which they do not have," it asked, adding "how can a Deputy Secretary over-rule the LG?" The court, after brief arguments, listed the matter for further hearing on April 17. It was hearing Goel's plea challenging the then Lieutenant Governor Najeeb Jung's order repatriating Suryadevara, an officer belonging to Newsreader-cum-Translator (Telugu) cadre, to the AIR. Goel had refused to relieve the official, insisting that since he, as the Speaker, held a constitutional office, the LG cannot repatriate the assembly secretary without his concurrence. Suryadevara had earlier served in the offices of Lok Sabha Speaker Somnath Chatterjee for five years and Rajya Sabha Chairman Hamid Ansari for over six years. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Terming as "unfortunate" the recent incident of alleged assault of Delhi Chief Secretary Anshu Prakash, Lieutenant Governor (LG) Anil Baijal today said there was no place for violence in a democratic society and that the government must take steps to rebuild the trust of its employees. The LG's comments came after Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal met him, along with his cabinet colleagues, following a Delhi Police team arriving at the chief minister's residence and seizing a hard disk of the CCTV camera system installed there in connection with the alleged assault of the chief secretary by Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) MLAs. Following the incident, the bureaucrats in the Delhi government have boycotted the meetings called by ministers. Baijal said no government could fulfil its promises to the people if its employees felt "demoralised and insecure". "The Lt Governor strongly condemned the incidents and termed them as most unfortunate. The Lt Governor noted that no government can fulfil its promises to the people if the employees feel demoralised and insecure. "There is no place for violence in a democratic and civilised society. Steps need to be taken to remove the mistrust between the government employees and the elected government, so that the development of Delhi and public interest do not get adversely affected," an official statement from the LG's office said. Meanwhile, the police today claimed that its action (of swooping down to the chief minister's residence) came after its request for CCTV footage from Kejriwal's residence did not yield any result. Several policemen today went to Kejriwal's official residence in the Civil Lines area here, where Chief Secretary Prakash was allegedly assaulted, in the presence of the chief minister, on the intervening night of February 19-20. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) India today asked the world's largest oil producer Saudi Arabia for a "reasonable" oil pricing that balances the interest of producer and consuming nations. After talks with visiting Saudi oil minister Khalid Al-Falih, Petroleum Minister Dharmendra Pradhan said India is a price sensitive market and so "we must get reasonable price for crude oil and LPG" imported from the OPEC nation. Saudi Arabia is india's second biggest source of crude oil after Iraq. This fiscal it will import 36.5 million tonnes of crude oil from Saudi Arabia. Also 25 per cent of LPG also comes from the Gulf nation. "What we discussed was that price of crude oil is such that it does not result in a loss to producers and at the same time protects consuming nation's interest," he said. "They (Saudi Arabia) was in agreement on the issue." Some mechanism will need to be deviced to address this, he said. India is world's third-largest oil importer, which relies on foreign countries to meet 80 per cent of its needs. About 85 per cent of its total oil imports and 95 per cent of gas imports come from OPEC nations. Pradhan said India has been asking the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec) to stop charging the premium from its Asian buyers. He reiterated New Delhi's decade-old demand and said oil producers should work towards "responsible price", which would allow major oil-consuming countries to provide energy to the common people at affordable rates. Pradhan's predecessors, particularly Mani Shankar Aiyar, had in the past raised the issue of so-called charging premium from Asian buyers, but the cartel has refused to act on the issue. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India today ceremonially broke ground on the Afghan section of an ambitious, multi-billion dollar gas pipeline expected to help ease energy deficits in South Asia. Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and Turkmen counterpart Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov joined Pakistani premier Shahid Khaqan Abbasi and India's External Affairs Minister Shri M J Akbar for the ceremony at gas-rich Turkmenistan's border with Afghanistan. Dignitaries including diplomats from the foreign missions in Turkmenistan were greeted by Turkmen songs and traditional nomadic tents serving up food on an overcast day at the border post of Serkhetabat, once the southernmost tip of the Soviet Union. Speaking at the ceremony, Ghani said the pipeline would "unite (the) countries" in quotes translated into Russian for reporters at the ceremony. "There were pessimistic voices, but now we are witnessing the construction of the gas pipeline," said Ghani, using the acronym for the conduit which takes its name from the four countries. The quartet aims to complete the 1,840-kilometre (1,143-mile) pipeline and begin pumping natural gas from Turkmenistan's giant Galkynysh gas field by the beginning of 2020. While the pipeline will traverse war-wracked Afghanistan, raising security concerns, the bulk of the 33 billion cubic metres of gas to be pumped annually through the conduit will be purchased by South Asian rivals Pakistan and India. Turkmen strongman Berdymukhamedov, whose country currently depends heavily on China as a market for its natural gas exports, called diversification of gas deliveries an "important part of the politics" of the isolated Central Asian country. And he said work on the Turkmen section of the pipeline was still ongoing. India's commitment to the pipeline has previously been questioned over its relationship with Pakistan and easy-access to liquified natural gas markets seen as potential stumbling blocks. But its external affairs minister hailed the project as "a symbol of our goals" and "a new page in cooperation" between the four countries in a speech at the ceremony today. The overall funding picture for the mammoth gas pipeline remains unclear, with commercial energy giants such as France's Total failing to follow up on reported interest in the project. Turkmenistan sits on the world's fourth-largest gas reserves but lost a major buyer in Russia after Russian energy giant Gazprom wound down imports of Turkmen gas and then ceased purchases completely in 2016. The political crisis in Maldives, the Afghanistan situation and the freedom of navigation in the Indo-Pacific was discussed during talks between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Canadian counterpart Justin Trudeau, with the two sides having a convergence of views on these issues. A joint statement, issued after wide-ranging talks between Modi and Trudeau, said the two leaders expressed "strong concern"over the recent developments in Maldives and their implications for a free society. They also "deplored the degradation" in Maldives of judicial independence and authority and of democratic institutions, as well as respect for fundamental freedoms, including those of speech and Assembly, constitutional rights and obligations under international law. "The Government of Maldives was urged to ensure early resumption of the political process after revoking the state of emergency and to allow democratic institutions, including the judiciary, to function independently in a fair and transparent manner," the statement said. Modi, at a joint press event after his extensive talks with visiting leader, said he discussed with Trudeau pressing regional and global issues. The two sides were on the same page on the need to restore independence of democratic institutions in Maldives, freedom of navigation in the Indo-Pacific and issues of non-proliferation related to North Korea, he said. Yesterday, the Maldivian Parliament accepted President Abdulla Yameen's recommendation to extend the state of emergency by another 30 days. Ever since the declaration of emergency in the island nation on February 5, the archipelago has plunged into a political crisis. Many leaders and even the chief justice have faced arrest. India has been critical of the emergency declared by Maldives. Modi and Trudeau also welcomed the continuation of uranium exports from Canada for peaceful use of civil nuclear power. In 2015, Canada had signed an agreement with India to supply nuclear fuel for a period of five years, the statement said. The two sides agreed to expand the ongoing "mutually-beneficial civil nuclear cooperation" by developing collaboration in nuclear science and technology. The leaders welcomed the signing of an agreement between the Department of Atomic Energy and the Department of Natural Resources Canada. The leaders also expressed their strong concern over the prevailing security situation in Afghanistan and noted that terrorist activities pose a grave threat to peace, security and stability of Afghanistan and the region. They called for immediate cessation of violence, renunciation of links with international terrorism and dismantling of infrastructure of support to terrorism from across borders of Afghanistan, the statement said. "Both sides reaffirmed their support to the government and the people of Afghanistan in their efforts to achieve an Afghan-led, Afghan-owned and Afghan-controlled national peace and reconciliation process and build a peaceful, secure, united, democratic, prosperous and pluralistic nation," it said. Modi and Trudeau reaffirmed the importance of lawful commerce and the freedom of navigation and over-flight throughout the Indo-Pacific region, in accordance with international law, including the rights and jurisdiction of states under United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). Canada is a Pacific rim country while India is prominent player in the Indian Ocean. The leaders supported bolstering regional connectivity through transparent development of infrastructure and use of responsible debt financing practises, while ensuring respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity, the rule of law and environment, the statement said, in a veiled reference to the One Road One Belt initiative of China. Modi also thanked Trudeau for Canada's support for India's accession to the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR), Wassenaar Arrangement and the Australia Group. Trudeau also reaffirmed Canada's strong support for India's membership bid for the Nuclear Suppliers Group. Trudeau and Modi also discussed the humanitarian and security crisis in the Rakhine state of Myanmar and across the border in Bangladesh. India and Bangladesh have been facing an influx of the Rohingya refugees from Myanmar ever since the escalation of violence in the Rakhine state. Canada and India called for the voluntary, safe and sustainable return of the people displaced, while stressing the importance of ensuring law and order and respect for human dignity in this process. The joint statement said the two leaders recognised that North Koreas continued enhancement of its nuclear and ballistic missile programme poses a "grave threat to regional security and global peace". Modi and Trudeau also called on North Korea to abide strictly by its international obligations and commitments. They also called on all states to implement rigorously relevant UN Security Council resolutions and hold accountable all those who have supported North Korea's nuclear and missile programmes. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Pakistan today said that India's desire to become a "regional hegemon" is casting a "dark shadow" in the region. Warning that Pakistani forces are ready to defend its borders against any threat, Foreign Office spokesman Mohammad Faisal in his weekly briefing said that "India's arms buildup has pushed the region into a vicious arms race". "Its (India's) hegemonic designs are a cause of serious concern, not only for Pakistan, but also for the entire region. India's desire to try to become a regional hegemon is casting a dark shadow on South Asia, he said. He criticised India for justifying the ceasefire violations "on flimsy pretexts" and said that ceasefire violations were a threat to regional peace and can lead to a strategic miscalculation. He urged India to allow the UN Military Observer Group in India and Pakistan (UNMOGIP) to play its role as per the UN Security Council resolutions. India maintains that UNMOGIP has outlived its utility and is irrelevant after the Simla Agreement and the consequent establishment of the Line of Control. Asked about Hindu pilgrims not being able to visit Katas Raj temple in Pakistan's Chakwal district, he said visas are issued by Pakistan High Commission on the basis of the Note Verbale (NV) issued by the Ministry of External Affairs to pilgrims. "In order to facilitate them, our High Commission allowed the pilgrims to submit their passports without the NoC. Unfortunately, the Indian Ministry of External Affairs did not issue any NV to the pilgrims, forcing them to withdraw their passports unfortunately, he claimed. He said that 503 Pakistanis have applied for Indian visas to attend the Urs of Khawaja Moinuddin next month and hoped that they will be allowed to participate in the ceremony. To several questions about the outcome of the meeting of Financial Action Task Force (FATF) regarding placing Pakistan on in its "grey list" of nations not doing enough to counter terror financing, he said so far the outcome is "awaited". On straining Pakistan-US ties, the spokesperson said the Trump administration took several unilateral actions in recent months that had an impact on bilateral relations. "We have categorically conveyed to the US that this relationship can move forward only in an environment of mutual trust and respect," he said. Asked about a report by British newspaper Financial Times that China is secretly holding talks with Baloch militants to protect its USD 60 billion CPEC, he said China has categorically rejected the report as baseless "so nothing more needs to be said on that." He also said that Pakistan and Russia agreed during recent visit of foreign minister Khawaja Asif to from a Joint Technical and Military Committee to support the bilateral efforts of cooperation in counter-terrorism and defence. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Parents of a three-year-old Indian-origin boy, who died in a UK hospital a few years ago, told an inquest into his death today that they feel "really let down" by the medical staff that was treating their son. Krishan Saujani died at Leicester Royal Infirmary in the city of Leicester in November 2015 after being taken to the hospital for vomiting and diarrhoea. His mother, 33-year-old Bhavini, told an inquest at Leicester Coroners Court that she felt the hospital staff ignored her and husband Shalin's growing concerns over their son's condition, who suffered from Down's Syndrome. "I just felt that we weren't being listened to when we were raising concerns about his low oxygen saturation levels. We were being told that the machines weren't picking it up, it was explained away as a machine error," she told the hearing. The mother recounted her son's final moments when she shouted for help as his heart stopped and doctors were unable to resuscitate him, Leicester Mercury reports. "Someone needs to take accountability and responsibility for what's happened," she said. Krishan's father also gave evidence to the inquest, which concluded today. "Krishan was my best mate, I called him my little buddy. We planned to do so much together," the 35-year-old said. Their son had a weakened immune system and was more vulnerable to infections due to his condition. Earlier in the week, the inquest was told the boy should have been moved to intensive care earlier and the head of paediatric services at the hospital in Leicester, doctor Samantha Jones, apologised for his death. "Krishan should have moved through the departments within the hour and preferably sooner if possible. I just want to say we are as a department terribly, terribly sorry," she said. Other doctors who treated the boy at the children's intensive care unit of the hospital Manish Arora and Nehal Thanawala also gave their evidence to the inquest hearing. While Arora told the court that he did not think the boy was critically ill, Thanawala said she had been "very concerned" about him. Expert witness Simon Nadel from St. Marys Hospital in London said the original diagnosis of vomiting caused by viral gastroenteritis "clearly in retrospect was not correct". "There was a failure of communication between the clinical teams looking after Krishan, leading to a lack of ongoing medical involvement," he said. At the end of the inquest, Coroner Lydia Brown ruled that Krishan's death was caused by "natural causes". However, the family may consider legal action over medical negligence. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Supreme Court on Friday agreed to hear on March 6 a plea of Karti Chidambaram, son of former Union minister P Chidambaram, seeking anticipatory bail in the INX Media money laundering case. However, the top court refused to stay the summons issued by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) asking Karti Chidambaram to appear before it on March 1, and said he can make a request in this regard to the competent authority. A bench of Chief Justice Dipak Misra, and Justices Amitava Roy and D Y Chandrachud said it will hear the matter on March 6 after senior advocate Kapil Sibal, appearing for Karti Chidambaram, sought time to file a proper application to challenge the ED proceedings. An FIR, filed on May 15 last year, had alleged irregularities in the Foreign Investment Promotion Board (FIPB) clearance to INX Media for receiving overseas funds to the tune of Rs 3.05 billion in 2007 when Karti Chidambaram's father was the Union finance minister. The apex court was hearing pleas, including the CBI's appeal, challenging the Madras High Court order staying a lookout circular (LOC) issued against Karti Chidambaram. The CBI had on September 1 last year said there were "good, cogent" reasons for issuing the LOC. The Chidambarams, however, have denied all the charges made against them. Earlier, a single judge bench of the Madras High Court had stayed the LOC issued against Karti and others in the graft case. Later, the apex court considered the CBI appeal and stayed the operation of the high court order staying the LOC. The Supreme Court, however, has kept to itself another batch of petitions pertaining to the registration of FIR in the corruption case. The Indo UK Institute of Health (IUIH), one of the largest healthcare infrastructure projects in the world, has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Uttar Pradesh government to invest Rs 1,000 crores for an integrated medicity in the state capital. The MoU was signed during the UP investors' summit that concluded yesterday. The medicity will have a 1,000 bed hospital and up to 20 per cent patients will be given free treatment at its facilities, Ajay Rajan Gupta, Managing Director and Group CEO, IUIH told reporters here. It will also have a medical college, nursing college, PG academy, and training facility for allied health professionals. It shall also have a separate zone for medical equipment and device manufacturing, and pharmaceutical production. Cutting-edge medical research will be carried out at the IUIH Medicities in areas as diverse as genomics and stem cells, translational research and clinical research leveraging on the patient data available. Chief Operating Officer of IUIH, Rajdeep Singh Chhina said the objective was to make every IUIH Medicity a medical tourism hub and attract the patient traffic from across the globe. "This will not just contribute to the exchequer but lead to overall development of the region too, in line with the government's Smart Cities initiative," said Chhina. He said that the IUIH has tied up with some of the leading implant companies, and medical equipment and device manufacturers. "Many of them would start their manufacturing operations in IUIH Medicities in accordance with Prime Minister Modi's 'Make in India' programme bringing the healthcare cost further down for patients in India," Gupta said. "Our e-Health and m-Health platforms will facilitate exchange of patients' medical records electronically using telemedicine, tele-radiology and tele-pathology for diagnostics etc," he said. The IUIH Medicity Programme was announced as a Joint Statement between the Prime Minister of India Shri Narendra Modi and the former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Mr David Cameron in 2015. It involves an investment of Rs 19,200 crores into Indian healthcare aimed at benefitting over 400 million Indians by opening 11 institutes across India in partnership with the world's best healthcare system - the National Health Service (NHS), UK. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Judiciary cannot project a fractured face to anyone and it is necessary for judges to be together as the extra-legal elements, who are waiting to take over, would destroy the institution, outgoing Supreme Court judge Justice Amitava Roy said today. Speaking at a function organised by the Supreme Court Bar Association (SCBA) in the apex court here, Roy said the top court is the guardian of the rule of law and "the bedrock of our existence is the faith, the trust and the credibility that this institution enjoys". "I intend to tell you that we, being the guardians of the rule of law, need to secure the same, otherwise the caveat is that extra-legal elements are waiting to take over. That would spell destruction of the institution. That would mean our extinction, because we survive for the institution which is not otherwise. Every institution is a collective entity," Roy said. He also said that despite all the reservations many have about the judicial process, people flock to the courts seeking refuge for justice. "This is because of the credibility this institution enjoys and the trust. I feel that we cannot in any way project a fractured face to anyone. If that happens, we lose credibility. If we lose credibility, we lose paramountcy of the judicial process. If we lose paramountcy of judicial process, the rule of law is undermined. I find each one of my colleagues are excellent judges by his or her own right. Individually they are brilliant, but it is necessary to be together. "We may exist as a musical note in isolation but that note would be only a sound of some frequency. It's only when we integrate and blend, a melody would emerge. A melody that is necessary for this institution," Roy, who retires on March 1, said. The remarks of the retiring judge assumes significance in the wake of the January 12 presser by four senior-most judges who had virtually revolted against Chief Justice of India (CJI) Dipak Misra. Reports had suggested that some other judges had expressed their displeasure over the incident. The Chief Justice and the Attorney General dropped hints at the function that Justice Roy would man "one of very big and important tribunals in the country". The CJI was all praise for the eloquent retiring judge and said that time was being cruel to everyone as the last three working days of Justice Roy has been lost due to the upcoming holidays on account of the Holi festival. Attorney General K K Venugopal asked the Centre to re-look the retirement policy of Supreme Court judges as they have to retire at the age of 65 years. "It's a pity that the judges of the Supreme Court of India, that is the highest court in the country, have to retire at 65 years. Look at all around the world. There is nothing ending at 65. Today, the longevity of Indians is 70 year. The advocates running around the corridors of the apex court are above 80. Now Justice Roy is retiring and look at the great loss of talent. I think it's time that the Government of India had a re-look," Venugopal said. Justice Roy was born on March 1, 1953 at Kolkata in West Bengal. He served as the Chief Justice of the high courts of Rajasthan and Orissa and was elevated as a Judge of the Supreme Court of India on February 27, 2015. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Tamil 'superstar' Rajinikanth on Friday said efforts were on to build a strong foundation for his proposed political party and asked his fans to keep quiet and "make noise at the right time." "It is being said others are making (political) noise and they (his fans and supporters) are keeping quiet.. let the others make noise, let us make the noise at the right time," he said to thunderous applause from his supporters. While Rajinikanth did not take any names on those making the apparent political noise, it is being seen as a veiled reference to his contemporary and one-time co-star Kamal Haasan, who has launched his political party "Makkal Neethi Mayyam" (MNM) in Madurai two days ago. Addressing his fans and supporters from Tirunelveli district, the superstar said if a political party in the state had the 'guarantee of a vote bank,' it was due to the "foundation" it had created. "We need (such) a strong foundation," he said adding efforts were on in this regard. Even to run a family "the head should be" proper, Rajinikanth said, adding right now the focus was on to create a foundation to support a strong structure -- the political party. Rajinikanth had on December 31 last announced that he will launch his political party and contest from all 234 seats in the next Tamil Nadu Assembly elections. Haasan had met Rajinikanth and leaders of various political parties ahead of launching his political parties. Rajinikanth had then said he prayed for "divine blessings" to be bestowed on his 'friend' Haasan and wished him success in his political endeavours. He also said he and Hassan had different styles in cinema, a possible indication that they may go separate ways in too. The BJP today dubbed Aam Aadmi Party leader Arvind Kejriwal as a dictatorially elected president of almost a private limited company after the latter took a dig at its president Amit Shah. BJP spokesperson Sambit Patra cited the arrest of 14 MLAs of the regional party at different points of time on charges ranging from violence to molestation and forgery to hit back. Attacking the Delhi chief minister, he said at a media briefing that Kejriwals decision to call the states chief secretary at his residence and the alleged physical assault on him was a case of bullying and thuggery. Delhi chief secretary Anshu Prakash has accused AAP MLAs of physically assaulting him during a meeting at the chief ministers residence and two lawmakers of the party have been arrested. The AAP has accused the Delhi Police of acting at the behest of the BJP. Patra also termed as deplorable and appalling the AAPs attack on Shah. I would like to say to Arvind Kejriwal that Amit Shah is a duly, democratically elected president of the largest political party of the world, leave aside the country. You are a dictatorially elected president of almost a private limited company party, he said. AAP leaders have targeted Shah over the case of death of judge B H Loya, who was dealing with the Sohrabuddin Sheikh case, and demanded an investigation against the BJP chief. Patra referred to Kejriwals defence of Jitender Singh Tomar, a former minister in his government, who was accused of having a forged law degree, and his former principal secretary Rajendra Kumar, charged by the CBI in a corruption case, to attack him. He protects a corrupt officer but targets somebody who cites a Supreme Court order to him, he said. The BJP leader termed as a lie Kejriwals claim that the meeting in which Prakash was allegedly assaulted was about food availability for the poor, saying neither the food minister nor the food secretary was present. Kejriwal wants a lawless situation, he said, adding that this kind of anarchist mentality will not be beneficial to Delhi. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Sri Lankan author Yudhanjaya Wijeratne will deal with a surreal landscape where technology and humanity intersect as he pens a trilogy on the "Commonwealth Empire", with the first volume of the speculative fiction series to hit book stores in November. The "Commonwealth Empire" trilogy will be published by HarperCollins India, which has also acquired Yudhanjaya's award-winning science-fiction work "Numbercaste". "The Inhuman Race", the first part of trilogy, will be published in November along with "Numbercaste". "The Inhuman Race" is about what it means to be human, and how the gears of history come to haunt us even as we race into the future. "Science fiction and fantasy are still very thin on the ground in these parts of the world, and I'm glad that Harper's decided to offer me a much longer-term working relationship than we usually expect from publishers," said Wijeratne. Diya Kar, Publisher (Fiction) at HarperCollins India, described Wijeratne as one of the most original and having extraordinary power of imagination. "We are constantly looking for new, exciting voices from the subcontinent. We are thrilled that Wijeratne has chosen to publish with us," she said. According to Commissioning Editor Swati Daftuar, Wijeratne's writing is taut and his plotting fantastic. "This is speculative fiction at its best - gripping, beautifully intricate, and so very relevant today," she said. "The year is 2033. The British Empire never fell. Communism never happened. The Commonwealth flies the flag of the Empire. Many of the Empires colonies are stripped bare in the name of British interests, powerless to resist. To the Far East, the Second Song Emperor rules China, and meditates upon an electronic empire built behind the Bamboo Curtain. "Upon this stage is Ceylon: a once-proud civilization tracing itself back to the time of the Pharaohs, reduced but not dead: for the Great Houses of Kandy still control the most lucrative trade routes; and even dust and ashes can serve a purpose," according to the book's blurb. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Congress today hit out at the state government's 'Magnetic Maharashtra' event and said that just Rs 6000 crore of the Rs 8 lakh crore worth of MoUs signed during the earlier 'Make in Maharashtra' initiative actually came into the state. Mumbai Congress chief Sanjay Nirupam today said that against a claim by chief minister Devendra Fadnavis of 30 lakh jobs being generated due to the event, just 42,000 jobs were created in the last two years. "If the government has not fulfilled the promises made in its previous event, what can be expected from the 'Magnetic Maharashtra event?" he asked. BJP leader Prasad Lad refuted Nirupam's claims and said that 3.91 lakh crore worth of MoUs from that time had fructified. Lad expressed confidence that 70 per cent of the MoUs signed during the 'Magnetic Maharashtra' business summit would also bring in investments. Shiv sena spokesperson Manisha Kayande, in a dig at the BJP, said the BJP had failed to keep its promise of reversing the damage done by the Congress in the past 60 years. "Problem like unemployment have not been solved. Population control measures have not been taken. There has been no decision on Article 370 and the Uniform Civil Code," Kayande said. The AIMIM's Imtiyaz Jaleel claimed the Sena would not have been the party it was today if its late chief, Bal Thackeray, had not targeted Muslims in the initial days of the party. Jaleel also questioned the Sena on why it was continuing the alliance with the BJP if it had so may issues with the latter. "The Sena will not do this because it cannot give up its attraction towards ministerial berths and power," he said. NCP leader Chitra Wagh claimed that the way in which demonsetisation was implemented had ruined the country's economy and had led to closure of factories and job losses. "The PM said he would be a 'chowkidar' to safeguard people's money. But instead of bringing back black money as promised, he let people run away after looting wealth," Wagh said. They were talking as panelists in a discussion organised by a channel. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Union minister V K Singh today sought to defend Army chief General Bipin Rawat's remark linking AIUDF's growth to illegal immigration in the northeast. "See, we have a habit of politicising everything. Let the Army chief say what he wants to. If you don't like it, you don't like it. That's it," Singh, Minister of State for External Affairs, told reporters on the sidelines of an event here. "Everything is being politicised these days," Singh, a former Army chief, said. Referring to reports of increase in Muslim population in several Assam districts, Gen Rawat had said the All India United Democratic Front's growth has been faster than that of the BJP in the 1980s. Addressing a seminar in New Delhi on Wednesday, Rawat had also said that a "planned" influx of people from Bangladesh into the northeast is taking place as part of proxy warfare by Pakistan with support from China with an aim to keep the area disturbed. AIUDF president Badruddin Ajmal had yesterday criticised the Army chief for his "politically driven comments" and said his responsibility is to lead the armed forces for the security of the nation and not to monitor the growth of a political party. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The husband of Monika Ghumber, candidate of Shiv Sena (Hindustan) from Ward no 31 in the upcoming Ludhiana Municipal Corporation elections, was allegedly attacked by two unidentified motorcycle-borne youths near Jain colony here, the police said today. The incident took place yesterday evening when Virinder Ghumber, along with some other supporters of her wife's party, were coming back from the poll campaign, said Additional Deputy Commissioner of Police Surinder Lamba said while quoting the statement given by the victim. Virinder told the police that he mistook the two youths as Shiv Sena (H) supporters. He said that the two first signalled them to stop the car, after which while discussing about the campaign one of them attacked him with an iron rod. "When Virender's supporters came out of the car, the accused fled the scene," Lamba said. The victim was rushed to the civil hospital where his condition was stated to be stable. Ludhiana MC polls candidate Monika Ghumber was not in the car when the incident took place, police confirmed. A case has been registered against the two unidentified youths, and hunt is on to nab the culprits, police said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Amidst the political turmoil, Maldives will hold presidential elections in September, the election commission has announced. The announcement was welcomed by incumbent President Abdulla Yameen, who is at loggerheads with the opposition, including the self-exiled former President Mohamed Nasheed. The commission has commenced preparatory works for the elections in September, according to an official statement yesterday without mentioning the date of polling. It noted that the commission has begun engaging with relevant authorities to collect data and information required prior to elections, noting the commission will release an official statement later. It said that a second round, if necessary, would be held within 21 days from the election day. The President's Office in a statement said it welcomed the announcement and encouraged all relevant stakeholders to offer the Elections Commission their full, unreserved support for the conduct of their work. "Free, fair and credible elections are the foundation of our democracy and it is essential for continuity of our nation's growth, stability and prosperity," the statement said. "The government of the Maldives extends its invitation to all international stakeholders to observe the electoral process and... urges the international community to provide support in bringing back normalcy in the Maldives. "It also requests the international community to refrain from any actions that could hinder resolving the situation the country is facing," the President's Office said. It further said that the government recommended all political parties and politicians alike to work towards, making the upcoming elections free and fair, rather than engage in a battle to topple the government and to destabilise the nation. The Maldivian Parliament earlier this week approved extending the state of Emergency in the country by 30 days following a request by President Yameen. The state of emergency will now end on March 22. Yameen was sworn in as the 6th president of the Maldives in 2013, ending nearly two years of political turmoil in the Indian Ocean island nation. Yameen had requested for an extension following the Supreme Court ruling on February 1 ordering the release of detained opposition leaders, including Nasheed. The President had first declared a 15-day state of emergency on February 5 after the Supreme Court ruling, which was, however, rescinded shortly after the declaration of the state of Emergency. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Prime Minister Theresa May will make a keynote speech next Friday on Britain's relationship with the EU after Brexit following a "very positive" meeting of her senior ministers, her spokesman said. "The prime minister will be setting out more detail of the government's position on Friday," he said. Confirmation of the much-anticipated speech comes after May gathered around a dozen of her senior ministers for an "away day" at her country retreat in Chequers yesterday. Their discussions lasted eight hours as they sought to thrash out their considerable differences on how closely aligned Britain should stay with the EU once it leaves the single market and customs union. "It was a very positive meeting and a step forward, agreeing a basis of the prime minister's speech on our future relationship," the spokesman said. The full cabinet will discuss the plans at their regular weekly meeting on Tuesday. The prime minister's speech is expected to take place somewhere in Britain, after May chose Florence, Italy for her last big Brexit address in September. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Canadian counterpart Justin Trudeau today held extensive talks on key issues of counter-terrorism and extremism as well as ways to boost trade ties, after which the two sides inked six pacts, including on energy cooperation. After their nearly two-hour long meeting, Modi, while addressing a joint media event with the Canadian prime minister, said they discussed the entire gamut of the bilateral partnership. Asserting that it is important that the two countries work together to fight terrorism, Modi said there should be no place for those who misuse religion for political goals. The prime minister also made it clear that those who challenge India's sovereignty and unity will not be tolerated. Modi's remarks come amidst criticism of the Trudeau government's soft approach towards the Khalistan issue. Observing that Trudeau has visited various parts of India in last few days, Modi said the Canadian leader must have experienced the diversity of the country. On his part, Trudeau described India as a natural partner for commercial cooperation. Earlier, External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj called on the Canadian prime minister and discussed various issues of mutual interest. Swaraj had a warm meeting with Trudeau and discussed ways to strengthen and deepen the partnership between the two countries, Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) Spokesperson Raveesh Kumar tweeted. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Former president Pranab Mukherjee today voiced concern over the "diminishing" days for Parliament sessions, and said that House sittings should be increased to ensure better scrutiny of expenditure proposals before they go into the budget. While delivering the 15th D T Lakdawala Memorial Lecture, he also lamented the disruption created by lawmakers in the House. In his nearly 70-minute-long speech on 'Parliamentary Democracy and its Challenges Today', Mukherjee took the audience through the journey of the different Acts passed during the days of the British East India Company to the eventual creation of the Republic of India through its Constitution. "I can claim with all modesty, after spending a large part of career in the Indian parliamentary system, 37 years in total in both the Houses and five years as a President. So, I want to talk about the problems and offer some suggestions for making it (system) better," he said. The first thing is the diminishing days of session, both in Parliament and state assemblies. "In the first and second Lok Sabha, the sessions were held for 26 weeks a year, that is nearly half of the year. So, I feel the length of session should be increased. The prime minister has the power to do it in consultation with the Cabinet. "And, if more sessions are held, that would mean more time can be spend by lawmakers on financial discussions," said Mukherjee, who held the President's office from 2012-17. "From an average of 127 days for Lok Sabha an 93 days for Rajya Sabha in the 1950s, the number of sittings of both the Houses has reduced to an average of about 75 days now," Mukherjee was quoted as saying in a copy of the speech, later distributed by the organiser, the Institute of Social Sciences. "Even on these days, most of the the time is lost in pointless partisanship and acrimonious blame-game between the treasury and opposition benches," he said. "What apparently guides the agenda of both the houses of Parliament is one-upmanship on divisive, malicious allegations and counter allegations," he was quoted as saying in the speech. The former president compared the scale of the first budget and that of Union Budget 2018, saying in the latter a number of demands (expenditure proposals) have been made. "But, what kind of scrutiny have been done, and how much prior discussion has gone into them," he asked. So, to have a better scrutiny of expenditure proposals, "we need to have more discussion in the House," he said. The 83-year-old former president also said simultaneous election of Assembly and Parliament would be difficult to hold, even by bringing an amendment in the Constitution. "Besides, diminishing days, the other issue is the disruption, and, I can tell that disruption can never be an effective way in Parliamentary democracy. "The dictum was 3D -- debate, dissension and decision, but some people have added an extra 'd', i.e., disruption. Instead of raising issues during a Question Hour and cross-examining a lawmaker, sloganeering wastes time of the House, "Mukherjee lamented, adding, "people must realise that disruption doesn't bring any harm to a government". J K Governor N N Vohra, who chaired the session at the event held at Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, also said their was a "growing concern" about the functioning of Parliament. "Political parties should hold internal elections and those with criminal records should not be allowed to contest," he said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Satellite imagery shows Myanmar authorities have bulldozed at least 55 Rohingya villages in northern Rakhine in recent months, Human Rights Watch said today, condemning the government for erasing evidence at sites where troops are accused of atrocities. Northern Rakhine has been nearly emptied of its Rohingya population since last August, when a military crackdown drove some 700,000 of the persecuted group across the border to Bangladesh. The UN has accused Myanmar of waging an ethnic cleansing campaign against the Muslim minority, who face acute discrimination in the mainly Buddhist nation. Myanmar denies the charge but has blocked UN investigators from investigating an area where thousands of Rohingya are believed to have been killed. Hundreds of Rohingya villages were already damaged by fire during the initial months of violence last year, when soldiers and Buddhist vigilantes terrorised communities with arson, gunfire and rape, according to refugees. Since November Myanmar authorities have further demolished at least 55 villages with heavy machinery, clearing out all structures and vegetation, satellite images obtained by Human Rights Watch showed. At least two of the flattened villages were previously undamaged by fires, the watchdog said. "Many of these villages were scenes of atrocities against Rohingya and should be preserved so that the experts appointed by the UN to document these abuses can properly evaluate the evidence to identify those responsible," said HRW's Asia director Brad Adams. "Bulldozing these areas threatens to erase both the memory and the legal claims of the Rohingya who lived there," he added. Myanmar's government spokesman could not be reached for comment. Haunting images of levelled villages first circulated on social media earlier this month after they were posted by an EU diplomat. At the time Myanmar's Social Welfare Minister Win Myat Aye told AFP the demolition was part of a plan to "build back" villages to a higher standard than before. Myanmar has trumpeted a government effort to rebuild violence-gutted Rakhine and welcome back refugees under a repatriation agreement with Dhaka that was supposed to commence in January. But many Rohingya refuse to return without the guarantee of basic rights and safety. Analysts have also sounded the alarm over the government's rehabilitation projects, calling the sweeping destruction of villages, mosques and property only the latest move to erase the Rohingya's ties to their ancestral lands, and prevent them returning. On Thursday UN agencies said they had struck a partnership with Myanmar and Japan governments to provide $20 million for humanitarian and development projects in Rakhine state, where authorities have restricted access for aid groups since the crisis. Food and other assistance would be provided to "people of all communities in Rakhine state," the UN agencies said in a statement, adding that access had improved but remained restricted in some areas. The 1.1-million strong Rohingya have been systematically stripped of their legal rights in Myanmar in recent decades. They have also been targeted by bouts of communal violence with ethnic Rakhine Buddhist neighbours and corralled into grim displacement camps in other parts of the state. Myanmar's army says its August crackdown was a proportionate counterstrike against Rohingya rebels who attacked police posts in late August, killing around a dozen officials. Many in the Buddhist majority revile the Rohingya and brand the group as foreign interlopers, despite their having lived in Rakhine for generations. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A notorious gangster and key accused in the sensational Nabha jailbreak of 2016, Ramanjit Singh Romi, has been arrested in Hong Kong, police said on Friday. A senior police officer confirmed the development and said Romi has been arrested in Hong Kong in connection with a robbery. He said the state police have already taken up the matter with the Ministry for External Affairs to initiate his extradition process. Romi was previously arrested in 2016, but was later released on bail. He allegedly jumped bail and escaped to Hong Kong. A Red Corner Notice was issued against Romi since his disappearance. His role is also suspected in targeted killings of 2016-17 in Jalandhar and Ludhiana, the police officer said. Punjab police said that he remained in touch with gangster Gurpreet Singh Sekhon, another key plotter and one of the six people to escape Nabha prison in November 2016. Sekhon and some of his associates were arrested in February 2017. Romi is believed to have supplied the escapees with money for their jailbreak, police said. Romi also faces charges of theft and forgery after police found a stolen car from him in Nabha in 2016. He was also charged with cheating after he was found in possession of several Chinese credit cards. Congress today urged upon the electoral college to stand in this election for secularism, god fearing and corruption-free government to salvage Nagaland society from being transformed into Hindutva. Nagaland Congress President K Therie also mocked at Prime Minister's promise of a corruption free government when his party was in alliance with "most corrupt leaders" of the previous government in the state. Congress is seriously concerned for Nagaland must install a god-fearing and secular-minded government to salvage Nagalands society from transforming into Hindutva, stated a release issued by Therie. Further maintaining that it will be foolish to expect change from NDPP and BJP who have completely ruined Nagalands culture, infrastructure and systems, Therie said Prime Minister Narendra Modi promises a corruption free government, however he is in alliance with the most corrupt leaders of previous government in the state. His (PM) promises of development will not fool the people of Nagaland, for the people have not forgotten the empty promises he has been making since 2014. Perhaps the change BJP-NDPP will bring will only be to collectively loot the state for another five years and leave a legacy of debt," he said. Asserting that Congress is committed to stand for the said virtues, Therie said We (Congress) stand by our commitment and will act as a deterrent in the new state assembly. Nagaland is going to polls on February 27 while counting of votes would be done on March 3. Congress has fielded 18 candidates out of a total of 60 constituencies in the state. NPCC President K Therie while expressing that Nagalands electorate has truly changed said that the democratic process of electing representatives through conscious voting has now changed to that of who can pay more. We have lost inherent values of honesty, decency and Christian principles, he pointed while adding that accepting and demanding cash and vehicles have become the new trend. Attributing such phenomena to the two elections of 2008 and 2013, he said corrupt governance have transformed the people into a culture of fulfilling their aspirations before the election itself as they do not believe they will see their MLAs after election. In other nations, people elect their representatives based on their standings on issues and prospects of the future but in our context, 80 per cent or more voters consider corruption as a normal system, he said. They do not believe in issues or think of the future. They only think of getting some quick cash or material benefit. This is most unfortunate for Nagaland, he said. It will also be foolish to vote for the Hindutva mission. Your prayer is to stop and protect persecution of Christians and therefore, your vote should not be cast for the persecutors of Christians and other minorities, he said. Congress believes in freedom of religion, culture and customs while the BJP believes in the Uniform Civil Code - One nation, one religion, one law and one tax, the NPCC president added. Expressing that the verdict of 2018 State General Election will be either for secularism or communalism, Therie urged upon people to educate the innocent voters for this elections verdict will change the course of our society and the present way of life may become history. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Neanderthals, rather than modern humans, created the world's oldest known cave paintings - suggesting they may have had an artistic sense similar to our own, a study has found. The research, published in the journal Science, shows that paintings in three caves in Spain were created more than 64,000 years ago - 20,000 years before modern humans arrived in Europe. "This is an incredibly exciting discovery which suggests Neanderthals were much more sophisticated than is popularly believed," said Chris Standish, an archaeologist at the University of Southampton in the UK. "Our results show that the paintings we dated are, by far, the oldest known cave art in the world, and were created at least 20,000 years before modern humans arrived in Europe from Africa - therefore they must have been painted by Neanderthals," said Standish. This means that the Palaeolithic (Ice Age) cave art - including pictures of animals, dots and geometric signs - must have been made by Neanderthals, a 'sister' species to Homo sapiens, and Europe's sole human inhabitants at the time. It also indicates that they thought symbolically, like modern humans, researchers said. An international team of scientists led by the University of Southampton and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany used a state-of-the-art technique called uranium-thorium dating to fix the age of the paintings as more than 64,000 years. Until now, cave art has been attributed entirely to modern humans, as claims to a possible Neanderthal origin have been hampered by imprecise dating techniques. However, uranium-thorium dating provides much more reliable results than methods such as radiocarbon dating, which can give false age estimates. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Nepal will hold presidential election on March 13 to elect the new president who will succeed the Himalayan nation's first woman President Bidhya Devi Bhandari. Though the president's term is for five years, the election this time is being held after two-and-a-half years as the country is implementing full federalism under the new Constitution, bidding farewell to the old centralised political system. The Election Commission announced the date for electing the country's third president after its officials yesterday held consultations with the government and various political parties. The EC has fixed March 7 for the nomination of candidates and the polling will be held on March 13. The vote counting will begin immediately after the polls on the same day. A candidate must receive a majority of the 884 votes --334 votes of parliament members and 550 of provincial assembly members- - to get elected to the post. If no candidate receives a majority of the total vote, the EC will hold a run-off election between the top two candidates. The date for the election of the vice president will be decided within a week after the president is elected. The elections of the president and vice president will be held on separate dates to ensure the representation of different communities and genders in the top two state posts, officials said. Bhandari was elected as the first woman president of Nepal in October, 2015. With the formation of the new Parliament, the tenure of the president expires. (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The NHRC has retained its 'A' status of accreditation with the Global Alliance of National Human Rights Institutions (GANHRI) for the fourth consecutive term, the rights panel today said. The accreditation is given to those human rights institutions, which, after a "rigorous process" of review every five years, are found "fully compliant with the UN-mandated Paris Principles," the National Human Rights Commission said in a statement. Justice H L Dattu, Chairperson of the NHRC, was presented the certificate at the ongoing annual meeting of GANHRI in Geneva from February 21-23. 'A' status accreditation also grants participation in the work and decision-making of the GANHRI, as well as the work of the Human Rights Council and other UN mechanisms, it said. The NHRC had got the 'A' status of accreditation first time in 1999 which it retained in 2006 and 2011 reviews, it said. "It was under the process of review for 2016, which was deferred to second session of 2017, when the Sub Committee on Accreditation of GANHRI recommended giving 'A' status again to the NHRC, India in November 2017," the statement said. The United Nations' Paris Principles provide the international benchmarks against which national human rights institutions can be accredited. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The NIA has filed a charge sheet against Pakistani intelligence officer Amir Zubair Siddique for allegedly conspiring to wage a war against India when he was posted in Sri Lanka in 2014, an official statement said today. He has been accused of hatching a conspiracy to cause explosions at the American consulate in Chennai, the Israeli consulate in Bengaluru, the Electronic City in Bengaluru and various other places of public congregation in south India, it said. Siddique was working in the Pakistan High Commission in Colombo as visa counsellor when the case was registered in 2014. Besides Siddique, two Chennai residents -- Balasubramanian alias Balan and Noorudeen alias Rafi -- have also been chargesheeted in the case for circulating high quality fake Indian counterfeit notes and causing damage to the economic security of the country, the NIA statement said. The charge sheet was filed in a special NIA court in Poonamallee here. The original case was registered on April 28, 2014 by the Tamil Nadu Police following arrest of one Sri Lankan national -- Mohd Sakir Hussaien -- in Chennai, who had arrived in India as per the instructions from Siddique to conduct subversive activities in India, the probe agency said. High-quality fake Indian counterfeit notes of face value of Rs 2.5 lakh were seized from another arrested accused Mohammad Saleem on May 1, 2014, it said. The case was taken over by the NIA on June 21, 2014 and a charge sheet was submitted against accused Hussaien, Saleem and others on October 23, 2014. In this case, Hussaien had earlier pleaded guilty in the court and was convicted for five years of imprisonment, the statement said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Agitating lawyers of the Orissa High Court today decided to continue their ceasework until adequate number of judges are appointed in the high court, a bar association official said. The ongoing relay hunger strike by the lawyers will also go on, High Court Bar Association secretary Satyabrata Mohanty said after a general body meeting. "The general body of the Bar Association will again meet on Monday afternoon to chalk out its next course of action," Mohanty said. The lawyers are on ceasework since February 12 and have launched a relay hunger strike from February 19, demanding appointment of judges in the high court. Against a sanctioned strength of 27 -- 20 permanent and seven additional -- judges, the HC currently has only 16 judges. A team of senior lawyers met two of the senior most judges of the High Court and apprised them of the concerns of the lawyers. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Pakistan today said it had arranged a visit of defence attaches of six countries, including from four permanent members of the UN, to the Line of Control to brief them about "Indian atrocities". A Pakistan Army spokesman said in a statement that defence attaches of the US, the UK, France, China, Turkey and Indonesia visited the LoC in Rawalakot sector. "Defence attaches were briefed about Indian atrocities along Line of Control and deliberate targeting of civilians by the Indian Army," according to the statement. It said they also interacted with victims of ceasefire violations by India and "gained first-hand knowledge about their sufferings". Yesterday, Pakistan summoned India's Deputy High Commissioner J P Singh here for the fourth time in a month to condemn "unprovoked firing" by Indian troops across the LoC. The Pakistan Foreign Office alleged that Indian forces have carried out over 335 ceasefire violations along the Line of Control and the international border in 2018, resulting in the deaths of 15 civilians and injuries to 65 others. The Foreign Office claimed that Indian forces committed more than 1,970 ceasefire violations last year. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas says he has undergone medical tests while in the United States and that he is in good health. Speaking on Palestine TV late last night Abbas said "it was a good opportunity to be here to do some medical tests." He says: "thank God all the results are positive and reassuring." He did not elaborate. Abbas was in the US where he spoke at the United Nations Security Council. The 82-year-old is a heavy smoker and appeared tired during his speech and breathed slowly Abbas was supposed to travel from the US to Venezuela. He is expected back in Ramallah tomorrow. An Abbas aide speaking anonymously in line with protocol said Abbas had been treated in a hospital in Baltimore. He called the tests "routine. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A petition has been filed in the Madras High Court seeking a direction to authorities not to consider the 11th standard marks for college admissions. When it came up, the court directed the Secretary, state school department, to take a decision after consulting academicians and others on a representation not to consider the 11th standard marks for college admissions. The petition was filed by a Puducherry-based advocate S Parimalam. Disposing of the PIL, the first bench, comprising Chief Justice Indira Banerjee and Justice Abdul Quddhose, said the petitioner can submit a representation to the Secretary, School department of Tamil Nadu, who in turn can take a decision after consulting experts in the field including academicians, teachers and students. The matter relates to a government order (G.O) in May last year making it mandatory to calculate the 11th standard marks also for college admissions. The G.O also directed holding a common public exam for the 11th and 12th standards and said while calculating the higher secondary examination passing out marks, the 11th standard marks would also be taken into consideration. The petitioner submitted that till date, only plus two (12th standard) marks obtained by students were considered for college admissions. It was submitted that a state board student would have to face continuously three public exams starting from the 10th standard if the order was implemented. This would be stressful for students, he said. Even in the Central Board of Secondary (CBSE), the 11th standard marks are not taken into consideration. Besides, the state board syllabus is not on par with the CBSE, he submitted. The petitioner prayed for a direction from the court not to consider the 11th standard marks while calculating the passing out marks for college admissions and sought quashing of the government order. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The on Friday accused Prime Minister of "promoting" private firms which inked diamond purchase pacts with Russia in 2015 after "cutting out" public-sector units MMTC and Hindustan Diamonds. Senior leader asked the prime minister to explain to the country "why he sidelined government-run entities and promoted private firms, some of which are facing investigation of defrauding banks". He accused the prime minister and the finance minister of not being forthcoming and honest in their response on the issue of bank fraud by and Noting that the situation in the is "very fragile", he asked the government to come out with a white paper on their state. He said both wilful defaulters and entities which have committed bank frauds have raised the risk for the Indian banking system, which in any case "needs urgent recapitalisation but the government does not have adequate funds". Sharma said that in December 2015, when Russian President Vladimir Putin came to India, "he (Modi) was personally present and helped in facilitating the signing of Diamond purchase agreements between 12 diamond companies, mainly from Gujarat and Mumbai, and Al Roza of Russia". These companies also included Rosy Blue Group, which is being prosecuted for defrauding banks, he told PTI, and asked "what the prime minister has to say about the support that has been given to the promoters of Winsom Diamonds". "All these details must come out. We are concerned as at that time also we had said that the government agencies and were negotiating for diamonds - MMTC and Hindustan Diamonds. These both were cut out and these private diamond entities were brought in. "Let the government explain the reasons why it was done," he asked. Sharma alleged, "The prime minister has been found wanting on the bank fraud issue. They are trying to distract the focus from the real issues. It seems the government is not serious about the action." Training his guns on Arun Jaitley, he said, "It is strange that the finance minister has chosen to break his silence but has blamed the banks. The country wants to know what action has been taken. The information that has been given by the agencies misleads the people more." The leader also sought to know who has evaluated the assets that have been seized and attached. The former union minister said public money needs to be secured and the Government of India and the Reserve Bank have a responsibility, both legal and moral, to assure depositors and citizens that their money is safe. "The government should also immediately release a list of the defaulters and the status report on the action that has been taken, which must be submitted to Parliament when it reopens. "The government must come out with a white paper on the state of banks and list of all wilful defaulters, together with a list of all bank frauds that have taken place in the last two-three years," he said, adding that it is important to know what has been its action and the losses incurred due to these two bank frauds and other such cases. Shares of Punjab National Bank fell further by 1 per cent today amid continued concerns about the fallout from a massive Rs 11,400 crore fraud that hit the company. Extending its yesterday decline, the stock slipped 1.09 per cent to end at Rs 113.40 on BSE. During the day, the scrip lost 2 per cent to Rs 112.35. At NSE, shares of the company fell by 1 per cent to close at Rs 113.45. In terms of equity volume, 31 lakh shares of the company were traded on BSE and over 4 crore shares changed hands at NSE during the day. The stock had lost over 2 per cent in the previous trading session also. Since February 12 till February 19, the stock has fallen almost 28 per cent. PNB had disclosed about the scam on February 14 through a regulatory filing. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) In an unprecedented move, a Delhi Police team today swooped down on the residence of Arvind Kejriwal and seized a hard disk containing CCTV footage in connection with the chief secretary 'assault' incident even as the chief minister knocked the Lt Governor's doors to ensure government work is not hit due to the boycott by bureaucrats. A total of 21 CCTV cameras and a hard disk were examined by the police. The hard disk was seized and any possibility of "tampering" with the system could be ascertained only after forensic examination, Additional DCP (North) Harendra Singh said. Fourteen CCTV cameras were running while seven were not working. Also, there was a time lag of 40-43 minutes with respect to the time of the alleged incident, the official said. Miffed by the move, the AAP accused the Delhi Police of acting like a bully at the behest of the Centre by entering the chief minister's house "illegally" and said the action was aimed at "insulting and humiliating" him. Without taking the name of BJP and its leaders, AAP MP Sanjay Singh said it is "unfortunate" that some "dictators" and people with a mentality of "hooligans" have captured power, be it Gujarat, Haryana, Maharashtra, Rajasthan or Madhya Pradesh. "The dadagiri by the Delhi Police at Arvind Kejriwal's residence is being done at the behest of the BJP. The Delhi Police is a mere puppet but the Centre is resorting to such dadagiri to dismiss the Delhi government," Singh said. In a press conference, the AAP also showed a two-and-half-minute clip where senior police officials are seen inside the residence of the chief minister, purportedly asking questions about the wall paint of the room. Police claimed that its action (of dispatching a posse to Kejriwal's house to collect evidence) came after its request for CCTV footage from the chief minister's residence "was not met". Several policemen went to Kejriwal's official residence in the Civil Lines area where Chief Secretary Anshu Prakash was allegedly assaulted in the presence of the chief minister on Monday night. Both Kejriwal and Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia met Anil Baijal and said the Lt Governor assured them that he will take all steps to ensure officers start functioning normally. Bureaucrats of the Delhi government had earlier decided to boycott all meetings called by the ministers. "Officers not attending meetings for last 3 days. Governance suffering. I m v concerned. LG assured he will take all steps to ensure officers started functioning normally. Council of ministers assured him all cooperation. All of us need to work together for betterment of Delhi," Kejriwal tweeted after the meeting. Sisodia said Baijal assured them that he will speak to the bureaucrats. However, the LG sent out a very strong statement after the meeting. "The Lt Governor strongly condemned the incidents and termed them as most unfortunate. The Lt Governor noted that no government can fulfil its promises to the people if the employees feel demoralised and insecure. "There is no place for violence in a democratic and civilised society. Steps need to be taken to remove the mistrust between the government employees and the elected government, so that the development of Delhi and public interest do not get adversely affected," an official statement from the LG's office said. Meanwhile, a delegation of IAS officers working under the Delhi government also met Union minister Jitendra Singh and put forward their grievances following the alleged attack on Prakash. After the meeting, Singh said, "We have heard the members of the delegation. We took cognisance of all the grievances and concerns raised by them and necessary steps would be taken on it." The officers have submitted a memorandum mentioning some of their demands and necessary action will be taken on it, he said Singh. The BJP launched an attack against Kejriwal and said his decision to call the states chief secretary at his residence and the alleged physical assault on him was a case of bullying and thuggery. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Pune rural police today questioned Hindu Ekta Aghadi leader Milind Ekbote, one of the accused in the Bhima Koregaon violence case. Ekbote, who has been granted an interim protection from arrest by the Supreme Court, was summoned to the Shikrapur police station in the district. A case has been registered against him and another pro-Hindutva leader, Sambhaji Bhide, at the police station for allegedly inciting the anti-Dalit violence that left a man dead near Bhima Koregaon war memorial in the district on January 1. "The Supreme Court has directed us to file a report before the March 14 hearing, and it has asked us to investigate the case, so today we summoned Ekbote and questioned him," said additional superintendent of police Sandip Pakhale. Police will again call Ekbote for questioning, he added. "We want his custodial interrogation, and we will fight it out in the Supreme Court," the police official added. Asked if Ekbote was cooperating, Pakhale refused to comment, only saying that police will file the report in the apex court. Ekbote was questioned for over three hours before he was allowed to go, said another police official. Dalits heading for 200th anniversary of the battle of Bhima Koregaon came under attack on January 1. Ekbote and some other pro-Hindutva leaders had earlier opposed the celebration of the battle. Dalits in Maharashtra celebrate the victory of East India Company forces over the Peshwa's Army in the 1818 battle, as the Company forces included soldiers from the Dalit Mahar community. The Bombay High Court, on February 2, rejected Ekbote's anticipatory bail plea. His plea is now pending before the Supreme Court. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) In an unprecedented move, a Delhi Police team today seized a hard disk containing CCTV footage from the residence of Arvind Kejriwal in connection with the chief secretary's "assault" incident, while the chief minister knocked on the LG's doors to ensure that the government's work was not hit due to the boycott by bureaucrats, even as the Centre hinted that the AAP supremo might be questioned in the case. A total of 21 CCTV cameras and a hard disk were examined by the police. The hard disk was seized and any possibility of "tampering" with the system could be ascertained only after forensic examinations, Additional DCP (North) Harendra Singh said, adding that there was a time-lag of 40-43 minutes with respect to the time of the alleged incident. He added that 14 CCTV cameras were working, while seven were not. The woes of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) government did not end there as former bureaucrat Dhir Jhingran resigned from its State Advisory Council For Education to express solidarity with Chief Secretary Anshu Prakash, who was allegedly assaulted by some AAP MLAs. To make things worse for the ruling dispensation, the party's legislator from Narela, Naresh Balyan, triggered a fresh controversy by saying officers, who created hurdles in the works meant for people's welfare, should be beaten up, days after Prakash alleged that he was assaulted by the AAP MLAs. Meanwhile, Union minister Hansraj Gangaram Ahir hinted that Kejriwal might be questioned by the police in connection with the alleged assault on the bureaucrat. "Whosoever it may be, the police will question all those in whose presence the incident took place," he told reporters here The AAP accused the Delhi Police of acting like a bully at the behest of the Centre by "illegally" entering the chief minister's house and alleged that the action was aimed at "insulting and humiliating" Kejriwal. Without taking the name of the BJP or its leaders, AAP MP Sanjay Singh said it was "unfortunate" that some "dictators" and people with the mentality of "hooligans" had captured power, be it in Gujarat, Haryana, Maharashtra, Rajasthan or Madhya Pradesh. "The dadagiri by the Delhi Police at Arvind Kejriwal's residence is being done at the behest of the BJP. The Delhi Police is a mere puppet, but the Centre is resorting to such dadagiri to dismiss the Delhi government," he said. At a press conference, the AAP also showed a two-and-a-half-minute clip, in which senior police officials were seen inside the residence of the chief minister, purportedly asking questions about the wall paint of the room. The police claimed that its action (of dispatching a team to Kejriwal's house to collect evidence) came after its request for CCTV footage from the chief minister's residence "was not met". The timing of the presence of the chief secretary at the chief minister's residence is important because Prakash has claimed that he was called at midnight and assaulted. The AAP, on the other hand, has claimed that Prakash had reached the chief minister's residence at 11.25 PM. "The time-lag of the CCTV cameras corroborates that the complainant was at the CM's residence at midnight (12.05 AM) and not at 11.25 PM, as was the plea of the AAP in the court," a top Delhi Police official said. If the time-lag of 40 minutes was added to 11.25 PM, it would match the time the chief secretary claimed to have reached at Kejriwal's residence, he added. Meanwhile, Kejriwal and his cabinet colleagues met Lieutenant Governor (LG) Anil Baijal and said the latter had assured them that he would take all steps to ensure that the officers started functioning normally. The bureaucrats in the Delhi government had earlier decided to boycott all the meetings called by the ministers. "Officers not attending meetings for last 3 days. Governance suffering. I m v concerned. LG assured he will take all steps to ensure officers started functioning normally. Council of ministers assured him all cooperation. All of us need to work together for betterment of Delhi (sic)," Kejriwal tweeted after the meeting with the LG. Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia said Baijal had assured them that he would speak to the bureaucrats. However, the LG sent out a very strong statement after the meeting. "The Lt Governor strongly condemned the incidents and termed them as most unfortunate. The Lt Governor noted that no government can fulfil its promises to the people if the employees feel demoralised and insecure. "There is no place for violence in a democratic and civilised society. Steps need to be taken to remove the mistrust between the government employees and the elected government, so that the development of Delhi and public interest do not get adversely affected," an official statement from the LG's office said. Meanwhile, a delegation of IAS officers working under the Delhi government met Union minister Jitendra Singh and put forward their grievances, following the alleged attack on Prakash. After the meeting, Singh said, "We have heard the members of the delegation. We took cognisance of all the grievances and concerns raised by them and necessary steps will be taken." The officers had submitted a memorandum, listing some of their demands, and necessary action would be taken on it, he added. The BJP launched an attack against Kejriwal and said his decision to call the chief secretary at his residence and the alleged physical assault on him was a case of bullying and thuggery. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) American real estate magnate Donald John Trump Jr. has said his father's presidency is definitely a "negative" for the family's business, but the senior Trump will be back to the business post-presidency. Trump Organization has not signed any new projects in India since Donald Trump took over as the president of the US in January 2017. The company had announced last year that it would not enter into any new foreign deals while Trump is the White House to avoid any conflict of interest. Stressing on how the Indian market is important for his company, Trump Jr., executive vice-president of the Trump Organisation said, "When we get back in business, India will be an important market for us." He was speaking at an event organised by the Lodha Group, the Trump Organisations local partner building the country's first Trump Tower here, late last evening. The elder son of Trump said he's been coming to India for the past decade and "nurturing relationships". "We have been here for over a decade, partnering with the right people, in the right market," he said. According to him, India is lacking in true luxury projects, but it's been catching up with the global standards in the past few years. "Buyers were paying for 'X' in search for luxury, but were getting 'X' minus a lot more," he said, adding, "This is changing now." The US president's son is in India on a week-long visit to expand Trump Organization's real estate business in Asia's third-largest economy. The New-York based company, since entering the domestic market in 2013, has launched four luxury residential projects with a revenue potential of $1.5 billion. On Thursday, Trump Jr. announced the structural completion of one of the four projects being built here in association with the Lodha Group. However, the entire 78-storey Trump Tower Mumbai is due for completion only in mid-2019. Other than the Mumbai project, the company's portfolio includes residential projects across Pune, Gurugram and Kolkata in association with local real estates developers such as Panchshil Realty, M3M, Tribeca, Unimark and IREO. The fifth one, which is expected to be a commercial office project, is likely to be launched soon. The company has brand-licensing agreements with local developers but has made no equity investments. India is already the $9.5-billion Trump Organization biggest residential real estate market outside the US. The Punjab Regiment and the ITBP were today presented the Republic Day best marching contingent trophies by the Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman here. The trophies were received by Punjab Regiment's Brigadier Sanjeev Soni, and Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP) Director General RK Pachnanda at a simple function held at the South Block. Congratulating the winners, Sitharaman said the marching contingents on Rajpath on the occasion of the Republic Day inspire the people. Minister of State for Defence Subhash Bhamre, Chief of Army Staff General Bipin Rawat, Chief of Naval Staff Admiral Sunil Lanba, Chief of Air Staff Air Chief Marshal BS Dhanoa and Defence Secretary Sanjay Mitra attended the function. The Punjab Regiment, one of the oldest formations of the Indian Army, bagged the best marching contingent trophy in the armed forces category after a gap of 25 years. The last time it won the trophy was in 1993. "Winning this prestigious trophy is a great moment for us. The contingent put in seven months' practice to achieve the feat," said Brigadier Soni, the Commandant of the Punjab Regiment Centre. Pachnanda said the trophy was a "tribute" to the over 8,999-strong force that worked day and night under inhospitable conditions to protect the borders of the nation. The ITBP, the Sino-India border guarding force, made a return to the national event after two years as part of a new policy to rotate various paramilitary contingents to keep the event time short. The 148-member squad was led by Assistant Commandant Akshay Deshmukh. "The contingent represented all formations of the force comprising members from almost all units," ITBP spokesperson second-in-command Vivek Kumar Pandey said. This is the 6th time that the force has won the trophy. The paramilitary force, under the Home Ministry, is primarily tasked to guard the 3,488-km-long China border. It renders various duties in the internal security domain, including anti-Naxal operations. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Tamil superstar Rajinikanth today praised his contemporary and Makkal Neethi Mayyam (MNM) founder Kamal Haasan, saying the "efficient" star would earn people's confidence. Responding to Haasan launching his political party MNM at Madurai on Wednesday, Rajinikanth, who is also set to take the political plunge, said though he and Haasan would be taking different paths, their destination would be only public welfare. "Though, all (of us) tread different paths, what matters is public welfare," he told reporters here. Asked about his opinion on the MNM, Rajinikanth said Haasan was an "efficient" person. "Kamal is efficient. He will earn people's confidence," he said. The February 21 launch of Haasan's party was "very nice," and was well organised, he said, adding that he had already wished the 'Vishwaroopam' star on his political journey but has once again extended his greetings after the launch of the MNM. While Haasan launched his party Makkal Neethi Mayyam on Wednesday, Rajinikanth had announced in December last year that he will enter Haasan had yesterday written in a Tamil weekly that he had earlier held a "secret" meeting with Rajinikanth to inform about his decision to enter The duo had then decided that even if they were in opposing camps, the respect for each other should be maintained. On Sunday, days ahead of the launch of his political party, Haasan had met Rajinikanth and held discussions, and later met DMK President M Karunanidhi. Meanwhile, responding to a question today, Rajinikanth welcomed the all-party meeting convened by the Tamil Nadu government yesterday to discuss the Cauvery issue. The meeting, chaired by Chief Minister K Palaniswami, was attended by DMK Working President and state Leader of Opposition M K Stalin, among others. The meeting had decided that an all-party delegation will meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi, urging him to set up the Cauvery Management Board and Cauvery Water Regulatory Authority as per the apex court's order to set up the bodies within six weeks. The all-party meeting was held days after the Supreme Court reduced the quantum of Cauvery water to Tamil Nadu by 14.75 tmcft. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A Delhi court today allowed one-day transit remand to the CBI to take Rotomac owner Vikram Kothari and his son Rahul to Lucknow to produce them before a court in connection with a Rs 3,695-crore loan default case, saying their presence in Uttar Pradesh was required to recover the alleged siphoned-off money. They were produced before Additional Chief Metropolitan Magistrate Samar Vishal by the CBI which sought 2-day transit remand to take them to Lucknow, alleging that the crime had global ramifications and it had to explore the modus operandi and recover the siphoned-off crime money which was generated after committing frauds with the bank. "Produce them before the concerned court within 24 hours," the judge said. The two accused were arrested yesterday for alleged default on loan repayment. While seeking their transit remand, the agency also claimed that it had to recover the crime proceeds and unearth the larger conspiracy. It sought the remand "to produce the accused before the competent court of M P Chaudhary, special judge, Lucknow, in the interest of justice". Advocate Pramod Kumar Dubey, appearing for Kotharis, opposed the plea, saying the accused were "illegally detained" and made scapegoat to save its own face. "You are making me a scapegoat to save your face since one of your accused has escaped from the country," the advocate said on behalf of the accused, without naming anyone. He said the accused was found at his own house. "I was not hiding. The question is who is hiding its face behind my custody," the advocate asked. In its application, the CBI said that the accused were arrested since they were "not cooperating with the investigation and giving vague answers". It said the examination of the accused was "mainly focussed on the modus operandi to commit the fraud with the bank and subsequent siphoning off the fraud amount parking of crime proceeds and its recovery." Earlier in the day, the defence counsel had objected to the jurisdiction of the court, saying the accused should be produced before a special CBI court and not before a magisterial court. However, the court dismissed the contention and decided to hear arguments on the CBI application seeking transit remand. A consortium of seven banks had extended loans worth Rs 2,919 crore to Rotomac Global Pvt Limited 2008 onwards, according to a CBI FIR. The amount swelled to Rs 3,695 crore, including the accrued interest, because of repeated defaults on payment, it claimed. The CBI initiated the action on the complaint of Bank of Baroda, a member of the consortium led by Bank of India, which had approached it fearing that Kothari may flee the country like Nirav Modi and his uncle Mehul Choksi. The principal exposure of the banks regarding the loan is Bank of India Rs 754.77 crore, Bank of Baroda Rs 456.63 crore, Overseas Bank of India Rs 771.07 crore, Union Bank of India Rs 458.95 crore, Allahabad Bank Rs 330.68 crore, Bank of Maharashtra 49.82 crore and Oriental Bank of Commerce Rs 97.47 crore, the agency has said. The CBI had filed the case against Vikram, his wife Sadhana and Rahul, and unidentified bank officials. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Russian aluminium giant Rusal said today the firm's founder Oleg Deripaska would step down from his business empire as it prepares for a multi-billion-dollar "shoot-out" for ownership of the country's biggest miner. Deripaska, who was among the first oligarchs to amass huge wealth in the years following the collapse of the Soviet Union, will make way for CEO Vladislav Soloviev to take up the role of president on March 15. Soloviev will be replaced by Alexandra Bouriko, who will become the first woman to helm of a major Russian metals group. Hong Kong-listed Rusal is set to go head-to-head with Vladimir Potanin's Interros in an ownership wrangle over mining company Norilsk Nickel. Rusal will seek approval from shareholders, it said Friday, to take part in an auction that will eventually decide which oligarch would buy out the other's stake in the world's biggest producer of nickel and palladium. The came as the metals giant revealed adjusted earnings before interest, taxes and amortisation in October-December rose to $586 million, up 42.2 percent from the previous year. Results were boosted by rising aluminium prices as well as global demand "amid coordinated economic growth in major regions of the world, including China, Europe and North America," Rusal said in a statement. But quarterly net profit was down 31.8 percent at $440 million owing to gains in the previous year after selling off one of its refineries. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Sadbhav Engineering today said it has been selected as the lowest bidder by National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) for a highway project in Uttar Pradesh for which it has quoted a price of Rs 981 crore. "The company has been declared the successful bidder by NHAI" for a project for NH 24 extension in Uttar Pradesh under National Highways Development Project (NHDP), Sadbhav Engineering said in a filing to the BSE. The project for construction of NH 24 extension 4-lane bypass starting from Behta Road and terminating at Sitapur Road in Uttar Pradesh under NHDP phase VII - package 2 will be undertaken on engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) mode, it said. The total length of the project is 32.89 km and will be completed in three years, the company said. It said it had quoted a price of Rs 981 crore for the project while the NHAI has estimated Rs 986.22 crore. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) World's largest oil company Saudi Aramco is interested in acquiring a stake in India's proposed Rs 1.8 trillion refinery in Maharashtra and a Rs 330 bn petrochemical complex in Andhra Pradesh, Oil Minister Dharmendra Pradhan said on Friday. After talks with Saudi Arabia's Energy Minister Khalid A Al-Falih, he said the oil kingpin is also interested in partnering in the second phase of strategic oil reserves India plans to build shortly. "We have moved beyond mere envisaging of interest and now modalities are being discussed," he said without elaborating. Besides Aramco, Abu Dhabi Oil Co (ADNOC) has also showed interest in the world's biggest refinery-cum-petrochemical complex that India plans to build in Maharashtra. State-run Indian Oil, Bharat Petroleum Corporation Ltd (BPCL) and Hindustan Petroleum Corporation Ltd (HPCL) are partners in the 60 million tonnes and adjacent petrochem complex. In Kakinada, state-owned HPCL and GAIL India are looking at building a 1.5 million tonnes capacity petrochemical complex at the cost of Rs 330 bn. "They are more than interested," he said. Pradhan said Saudi Arabia is India's most reliable partner, supplying close to a fifth of country's oil needs. Saudi Aramco, the Gulf nation's flagship oil firm, sells 36.5 million tonnes of oil annually to India. It had previously been interested in new greenfield refineries set up in India but none of the interests materialised in investments. The world's biggest oil producer was interested in the 9 mt Bhatinda refinery but exited the project in 1998. Thereafter, the refinery was set up by HPCL in joint venture with steel baron Lakshmi N Mittal. Saudi Aramco had also initially shown interest in IOC's 15 mt Paradip refinery in Odisha but walked out of the project in 2006. The Indian Oil Corp (IOC) set up the refinery on its own thereafter. The refinery-cum-petrochemical complex on the west coast is expected to be commissioned by 2022. Pradhan said also discussed during talks was the 6 million tonnes capacity strategic oil storage planned in second phase. ADNOC has filled half of the 1.5 million tonnes capacity underground oil storage at Mangalore that was built as part of Phase-1 of Strategic Petroleum Reserves (SPR) programme, he said. In phase-I, 5.33 million tonnes of storage capacity, enough to meet country's oil requirement of 10 days, has been built. He said the plan for phase-II will shortly go to the cabinet for approval. (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.) Justice L Nageswara Rao of the Supreme Court today recused from hearing a plea filed by Tarun Tejpal, the founder of Tehelka magazine, against the Bombay High Court order dismissing his petition seeking quashing of rape and other charges levelled against him by a former colleague. A bench comprising Justices Rao and S A Bobde took up the petition for hearing, but after senior advocate Kapil Sibal, representing Tejpal, referred to one of the documents in the case file, Justice Rao recused from hearing. Initially, Justice Bobde observed, "we are not interfering with it (high court's order)". Sibal, however, referred to one of the documents and said the issue in it should have been pointed out earlier by them. He also said that he was ready to make a statement that the matter could be heard by the bench. "List before the Bench of which one of us, (L Nageswara Rao, J) is not a member," the bench noted in its order. The Bombay High Court at Goa had on December 20 last year dismissed Tejpal's plea seeking quashing of charges against him. The trial court in Mapusa town of Goa had earlier framed charges against Tejpal under various sections of the IPC, including that of alleged sexual harassment and provisions related to rape. On December 6 last year, the apex court had asked the lower court to start examining witnesses in the case of 2013 against Tejpal, saying there would be no stay of the trial. Tejpal is alleged to have sexually assaulted a former colleague inside the elevator of a five-star hotel in Goa in 2013. Tejpal has denied all allegations levelled against him. He was arrested on November 30, 2013 by the Crime Branch after his anticipatory bail plea was rejected by the court. He has been out on bail since May 2014. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Supreme Court today refused to stay a summon order issued by the Enforcement Directorate against Karti Chidambaram in the INX Media money laundering case, after the CBI said he was "not a common criminal" but his plea for quashing the notice was a guise for an anticipatory bail plea. However, the top court asked Karti to request the competent authority for postponement of ED summons seeking his appearance on March 1. A bench of Chief Justice Dipak Misra, and Justices Amitava Roy and D Y Chandrachud said it will hear the matter on March 6 after senior advocate Kapil Sibal, appearing for Karti Chidambaram, sought time to file a proper application to challenge the ED proceedings. During the brief hearing, Sibal said Karti was not a common criminal that he was being called by the ED "month after month" and made to sit for "hours and hours". Additional Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, appearing for CBI, said that ED was not a party before the apex court and the respondent (Karti) should file a proper application challenging the proceedings in the money laundering case. "I agree that he (Karti) is not a common criminal. But has the court allowed a common criminal to move such an application? This is sheer abuse of the process of law," Mehta said and added that his plea for stay of the summon was "a guise of anticipatory bail application." Sibal said Karti had appeared twice before the ED on January 18 and February 15 and was made to sit for hours. "They have details of my bank accounts and property. They have all my details. I am not running away but still they issued summon for appearance on March 1. I will be returning to India on February 28 and then on March 1, I have to appear before the agency. What is this going on," he asked. The senior advocate said the ED case emanated from the same CBI case but there was no predicate offence as there was no proceeds of crime. Mehta again objected to the submission saying that without the ED being a party before the court, there can be no arguments in the case. When Sibal asked "So, are you planning to arrest him," Mehta responded saying "I not saying that he will be arrested". "This is CBI's case which is listed today. There can be no argument on the ED matter. He just wants a pre-emptive order to prevent the Enforcement Directorate from moving ahead," Mehta told the court. Sibal then told the court that the summon should be postponed till the time a proper application is filed to challenge the ED proceedings. The ASG then intervened urging the court not to make any observations but simply adjourn the matter. To this, the court asked Mehta whether the summons can be postponed or not. Mehta replied that if Karti makes a formal request, then the agency may look into it. The court then told Sibal that Karti has to make a request to the competent authority to defer the summons and then posted the matter for further hearing on March 6. The ED had registered a case against him and others in May last year. It had registered an Enforcement Case Information Report (ECIR), the ED's equivalent of a police FIR, against the accused named in a CBI complaint, including Karti Chidambaram, INX Media and its directors -- Peter and Indrani Mukerjea. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) For the third time in a row, Singapore has registered record arrivals from India with 1.27 travellers visiting the country last year. Over 1.1 million Indian travellers went to Singapore in 2016. Visitor arrivals from India into Singapore has crossed the one-million mark at 1.27 tourists, according to data from the Singapore Tourism Board (STB). India has moved a notch higher in becoming the third biggest source market for Singapore, from fourth earlier, ahead of Malaysia, but behind China, Indonesia. Tourist arrivals from India also registered the highest growth rate of 16 per cent among all other markets, according to STB. Six others out of the top 15 source markets, including China, witnessed over 13 per cent growth. "We are happy that Singapore continues to be perceived as one of the must-visit destinations," Singapore Tourism Board regional director - SAMEA, GB Srithar said. The board plans to focus on deepening and expanding partnership with travel trade partners, informed Srithar. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) AAP leader Somnath Bharti, facing a domestic violence case, today moved the Delhi High Court expressing his willingness to settle the marital dispute with his wife through mediation. On hearing this, Justice Anu Malhotra, said the court cannot directly send the AAP leader for mediation without hearing his wife. "How do I know that she has consented for mediation? She (Bharti's wife Lipika Mitra) has to be present here on the next date of hearing on March 20," the court said. Advocate Ashish Negi, appearing for Bharti, submitted before the court that his client was willing to settle the domestic dispute with his wife and hance the couple should be allowed to sit together in mediation. The lawyer said there was a scope of settlement between the two and Mitra has also given her consent to it. Bharti, Delhi's former law minister, has moved the application in a pending plea filed by his wife against the trial court's October 7, 2015 order granting bail to him in the domestic violence case lodged by her. The investigators had on April 5, 2016 filed a charge sheet before the trial court in the case, claiming the woman had alleged that Bharti had endangered the life of an unborn child she was carrying, by unleashing his dog on her. The MLA from Malviya Nagar assembly, who was granted bail in October 2015 after being in jail for eight days, had denied these allegations. Bharti's wife had on June 10, 2015 lodged a complaint against him with the Delhi Commission for Women and an FIR was lodged by the police on September 9, 2015 for allegedly subjecting her to domestic violence and trying to kill her. The AAP leader was arrested in the wee hours of September 29, 2015 after the Supreme Court had ordered him to surrender. The trial court had granted bail to Bharti on the ground that he was no longer required for investigation and observing that since he was a member of Delhi Assembly, there was no ground of apprehension that he may flee. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A special exception was made for Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's children -- Xavier, Ella-Grace and Hadrien -- to be at the ceremonial reception at the Rashtrapati Bhawan here today, senior officials said. Prime Minister Narendra Modi had yesterday said he was looking forward to meeting Trudeau's children and had posted a picture from his 2015 Canada visit, when he had met Trudeau and Ella-Grace. "There was a special exception made for the visiting leader's children to be at the ceremonial reception," a senior official said. After the ceremonial reception, Modi tweeted,"...Glad that I had the opportunity to meet his family as well". Modi also posted his picture with Trudeau and his family at the ceremonial reception. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Actor-comedian Stephen Fry has announced that he underwent an operation in January to treat prostate cancer. The 60-year-old actor, who stepped down last month as Bafta film awards presenter, shared details about his illness in a video on Twitter. "For the last 2 months I've been in the throes of a rather unwelcome and unexpected adventure. I'm sorry I haven't felt able to talk about it till now, but here I am explaining what has been going on," he wrote. In the video, Fry described cancer as an "aggressive little bugger" but believed an early detection saved his life. Fry said he discovered he had cancer after an MRI scan. He had gone to the doctor for flu but a health check revealed that his prostate-specific antigen (PSA) levels were high. The actor was offered the choice of radiotherapy or having his prostate removed to treat cancer and he chose surgery. "It doesn't seem to have spread, because what you don't want is to spread from one area to another, but one of the lymph nodes had something that called for active surveillance. It all seemed to go pretty well they took the prostate out, they took out 11 lymph nodes. The various bits that were taken out were examined and it turned out I had a Gleason score of nine, and considering 10 is the maximum, it was clearly an aggressive little bugger," he said. Fry said he decided to reveal his diagnosis as rumours had already started to spread. "Cancer is a word that rings in your head. 'I've got cancer,' I kept saying to myself. Good heavens. You're not supposed to get cancer. I know it's a cliche, but you don't think it's going to happen to you cancer is something that happens to other people. The actor said as far as he knows, he is cancer free now. "But if there's anything left on the bed of the prostate where they've taken it out, it may have spread and I'll have to get radiotherapy and the whole damn thing will start again. But for the moment I'm fit and well and happy. Fry said his doctors believe the early intervention saved his life, and urged "men of a certain age" to get their PSA levels checked. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A 17-year-old girl was allegedly hacked to death with a sword by an unidentified man outside her school at Kotma town here in the district, the police said today. The incident took place yesterday morning when the girl, a student of Class 12, was on her way to school to appear for her exams, they said. According to police, as per the information provided by the victim's family, a man was stalking her for quite some time. "The suspect was following the girl yesterday as well. When she reached near school, he suddenly struck the girl on her neck with a sword three to four times, killing her on the spot," Superintendent of Police (SP) Sunil Jain said. A school teacher, who witnessed the incident, raised an alarm after which the man fled from the spot leaving the blood-stained sword behind, the SP said. The school authorities informed the police about the incident. Police said they have recovered the body and also seized the sword from the spot. "Based on the inputs provided by the victim's kin, police have rounded up some suspects and the interrogation is on," the SP said. A case under IPC section 302 (murder) has been registered, police said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) With his Canadian counterpart Justin Trudeau by his side, Prime Minister Narendra Modi today delivered a firm message, saying those challenging India's sovereignty and unity cannot be tolerated, remarks seen as a subtle reference to Canada's soft-stand towards pro-Khalistani elements. In a statement at a joint press event after his extensive talks with visiting leader, Modi also asserted that there cannot be any space for those who misuse religion for political motives and promote separatism. "There should be no space for those misusing faith for political goals and sowing seeds of division. Those who challenge sovereignty, unity and integrity of our countries cannot be tolerated," the prime minister said. Following the talks, the two sides inked six pacts providing for enhancing cooperation in a number of areas including energy, information technology, trade, science and technology and sports. Modi said Trudeau and he agreed to fight terrorism and extremism and the National Security Advisers (NSAs) of the two countries have given final touches to the framework for cooperation on countering terrorism and violent extremism. "We reviewed entire gamut of our relationship and identified ways to strengthen the cooperation. First, we have decided to strengthen our defence cooperation. Terrorism and extremism are threats to democratic and pluralistic countries like India and Canada. It is important to come together to deal with these forces," Modi said. Trudeau government's pro-Khalistan approach is being criticised by many including Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh, who raised the issue with the Canadian prime minister during a meeting on Wednesday. On his part, Trudeau had assured Singh that his country does not support separatism in India or elsewhere. Referring to Trudeau's visits to various parts of India in last six days, Modi said, "I am confident, Prime Minister Trudeau must have realised enthusiasm and friendship towards Canada in India. He must have realised India's diversity and liveliness of our democracy." Modi said he discussed with Trudeau pressing regional and global issues, adding that the two sides were on the same page on the need to restore independence of democratic institutions in Maldives. On Afghanistan, the Prime Minister said there was a need to counter cross border terrorism and work to build a peaceful and democratic Afghanistan. He said both sides also discussed the situation in the Indo-Pacific region as well as North Korea's proliferation linkages. The Prime Minister said India wants to advance the strategic partnership with Canada as ties between the two countries are based on principles of democracy, pluralism and rule of law. On trade and investment ties, Modi said both sides agreed to deepen them and observed that there must be institutional mechanism to promote economic engagement. He said instructions have been issued to negotiators from both the sides to redouble their efforts to finalise the proposed Bilateral Investment and Promotion Agreement and the Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement. Modi said both sides discussed ways to expand cooperation in a range of sectors including energy, skill development, education, science and technology and innovation. He said India is proud of the achievements of the Indian people in Canada and expressed happiness over Trudeau bringing some of them to India as part of his delegation here. He said India is committed to friendship with Indians in Canada and wants their cooperation in the country's development. "People-to-people contact is the base of our strategic partnership," said Modi. Earlier, External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj called on the Canadian prime minister and discussed various issues of mutual interest. Swaraj had a warm meeting with Trudeau and discussed ways to strengthen and deepen the partnership between the two countries, Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) Spokesperson Raveesh Kumar tweeted. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Police arrested three people for robbing a trader last year at gun-point and recovered part of the loot, officials said here today. Narendra Kumar and his wife Malti were held hostage at their residence in Nehru Nagar colony of the city on the night of December 18, and robbed of Rs 7 lakh cash, ornaments worth Rs 20 lakh, a licensed pistol, an SUV and mobile phones, Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP) H N Singh said. The trader's driver, Ashok, a resident of Gautama Budh Nagar, and his accomplices, Dharampal and Mahavir, residents of Surana village of Muradnagar town in the district, were arrested in connection with the case, he said, adding that ornaments worth over Rs 5 lakh and the firearm were recovered from them. A search was underway to nab three others involved in the robbery, the SSP added. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) today denied it has withdrawn all forms of financial aid to students belonging to SC, ST and OBC communities, saying it continues to follow central government guidelines on scholarships. Significantly, TISS Students Union is on strike alleging that the administration has withdrawn financial aid provided to students from these categories, who are otherwise exempted from paying the tuition fee, the dining hall charge and the hostel fee. "The Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) categorically denies having stopped any scholarships for its students, and is continuing to follow all government guidelines on student welfare," the Institute said in a release here. Stating that the central government post-matric scholarship is paid by the social welfare/tribal welfare department of the respective state governments on receipt of applications submitted by eligible students, the statement said, these scholarships are transferred by the government concerned directly to the student bank accounts and that "Institute has no role either in the sanction or disbursement of the scholarships." "The role of the Institute is restricted to only certifying the bonafides of the student applicants. Therefore, the claim that the TISS administration has stopped central government post-matric scholarships for eligible reserved category students is incorrect." "Course fees for the eligible GOI post-matric reserved category students are still exempted. The students are only required to pay dining hall charges and hostel fees on actual basis, which is the norm in all universities," the statement said. The Institute also denied that semester examinations have been cancelled, saying that there was a class test which some students could not attend. "The Institute authorities are in continuous dialogue with the students since February 21. The administration team met a group of 20 student representatives on February 22 for three hours to discuss their charter of demands," the statement said. "For the 2016-18 batch, all the SC/ST GoI-PMS scholarship holders registered for the Masters' programme in 2016-18 will be permitted to continue with their studies and appear for examinations in March - April, 2018. "The hostel charges, additionally are waived off. The payment of dining hall charges are being deferred until the time that the students have the means to do so (as and when they receive the scholarship amount from the Government in their accounts or when they get employed). The consultation process is continuing," the statement added. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A high-power delegation,led by Tamil Nadu Industries Minister M C Sampath and rural Industries Minister Benjamin will leave on a five day trip to Japan next week to invite investments from that country. The Ministers, along with MSME Secretary, Dharmendra Pratap Yadav, Industries department Special secretary and Additional Chief Secretary, K Gnanadesikan, Tamil Nadu Industrial Guidance and Export Promotion Bureau, Vice-Chairperson Shilpa Prabhakar Satish would visit Japan between February 26 and March 2, an official release said. The visit by the delegation to Tokyo, Yokohama and Hamamatsu comes in the backdrop of the second edition of Global Investors Meet, scheduled to be held in January 2019, the release said. The delegation would participate in various seminars,meet Japanese business leaders and look at strengthening the trade and economic ties between tamil nadu and Japan. The team would meet officials of the Ministry of Economy Trade and Industry, Japan International Cooperation Agency and Japan Trade and Commerce Organisation. They would give detailed presentations at a seminar, where they would explain the advantages of investing in Tamil Nadu and meet prospective investors of Japan, it said. Members of the Tokyo Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Yokohama Chamer of Commerce and Industry, Hamamatsu Chamber of Commerce and Industry are expected to take part in the seminar. Tamil Nadu is home to about 600 Japanese companies and has been identified by that country as one of the potential states for investments. Japan was one of the Partner Nations at the first edition of the Global Investors Meet held in September 2015 under the leadership of the late Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa. Several Japanese companies had signed Memorandum of Understanding with the Tamil Nadu Government at GIM 2015 and had also implemented projects 'successfully', it said. During the trip, the delegation would meet top officials from the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, Japan, representatives of the Japan External Trade Organisation and also visit the headquarters of Yamaha Motors and Sumitomo. The programme is being jointly organised by the Tamil Nadu government, the Japan External Trade Organisation, Japanese Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Chennai and Embassy of Japan, the release added. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A 30-year-old tribal man was allegedly beaten to death by local people who accused him of stealing food articles from some shops at forest-fringe town Agali near here, triggering protests across the state today. Seven persons, including two who allegedly had a direct role in the yesterday's incident, had been detained, police said. Tribals and human rights activists staged protests in various parts of the state after photos and visuals of the fatal attack went viral on social media besides being telecast by TV channels. "Local people killed my son. He would have lived somehow. The guilty should be punished," the victim's mother Malli told TV channels. Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan condemned the incident, describing it as a "blot on Kerala's progressive society." State police chief Loknath Behera said a special investigation team had been set up to probe the incident and Thrissur Range IG would oversee it. The deceased, suspected to be mentally unsound, was identified as Madhu, hailing from Kadukumanna settlement of Attappady, one of the largest and most backward tribal hamlets in the state, police said. He was thrashed by some local people last evening alleging that he had stolen food articles from shops in the town and later handed over to police. Though he was rushed to nearby Agali government hospital by police, he vomited, collapsed and died on the way, police said. Some television channels aired visuals purportedly showing people taking selfies with Madhu with his hands tied. The shabbily dressed man, who was living in the forest near Mukkali here for some months, used to be seen wandering in the area, they said. Activists of various tribal outfits staged a protest here demanding the arrest of all the culprits and refused to allow police to take the body for post mortem to the Thrissur Medical College Hospital. They later relented after district collector and police officials held discussions with them. "Seven persons are under our custody. Of them, two have been identified as directly involved in the incident," Agali DySP T K Subrahmanyan told PTI. He said no external injuries were noticed on the man's body and post-mortem would be conducted tomorrow. Shocked relatives of Madhu said he was suffering from mental breakdown and had been staying away from home for some months. Vijayan said stringent action would be taken against all the accused to ensure that such crimes, specially against people from communities that are marginalised, did not recur. "This heinous act is a blot on the Kerala's progressive society. Kerala, as a whole, should stay extremely vigilant to ensure that that we continue to remain and progress as a caring, cosmopolitan society," he said in a statement. State Minister for SC/ST Welfare A K Balan said a magisterial probe would be conducted into the incident and the government would extend all help to the victim's family. Senior Congress leader A K Antony said exemplary punishment should be meted out to the accused and the state government should give compensation to Madhu's kins. Terming the incident as "shocking" and 'shameful', leader of the opposition in the assembly Ramesh Chennithala alleged the law and order situation had collapsed in the state. Meanwhile, Congress-led UDF and BJP has called for a dawn-to-dusk hartal in Mannarcaud in Palakkad district tomorow over the incident. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Trump administration has announced a new policy that makes very tough the procedure of issuing H-1B visas to those to be employed at one or more third-party worksites, a move that will hugely impact Indian IT companies and their employees. Under the new policy, the company would have to go an extra length to prove that its H-1B employee at a third-party worksite has specific and non-qualifying speculative assignments in speciality occupation. The H-1B programme offers temporary US visas that allow companies to hire highly skilled foreign professionals working in areas with shortages of qualified American workers. Indian IT companies, which are among the major beneficiaries of H-1B visas, has a significant number of its employees deployed at third-party worksites. A significant number of American banking, travel and commercial services depend on on-site IT workers from India to get their job done. The new move announced on Thursday through a seven-page policy empowers the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to issue H-1B visas to an employee only for the period for which he/she has worked at a third-party worksite. As such the issuing of H-1B visas could be of less than three years. This would reverse the tradition of issuing the H-1B visas for three years at a time. Effective immediately, the new guidance comes weeks ahead of the beginning of the H-1B visas filing season, which is expected to be April 2, for the fiscal year 2019 beginning October 1, 2018. The guidance says in order for an H-1B petition involving a third-party worksite to be approved, the petitioner must show by a preponderance of the evidence that the beneficiary will be employed in a speciality occupation and the employer will maintain an employer-employee relationship with the beneficiary for the duration of the requested validity period. When H-1B beneficiaries are placed at third-party worksites, the companies must demonstrate that they have specific and non-speculative qualifying assignments in a speciality occupation for that beneficiary for the entire time requested on the petition. While an H-1B petition may be approved for up to three years, the USCIS will, in its discretion, generally limit the approval period to the length of time demonstrated that the beneficiary will be placed in non-speculative work and during which the petitioner will maintain the requisite employer-employee relationship, an official statement said. Extensions of H-1B visas have become even tougher, in particular, if the employee has been on a bench for any part of their previous duration. Sometimes American companies abruptly end the contract of an employee, as a result, the workers temporarily do not have any work, which in IT parlance is called on the bench. During this period, while they maintain their H-1B visas status, official investigations have revealed that foreign IT workers on H-1B visas do not get paid, which the USCIS says is illegal and abuse of the system. "If an H-1B petitioner is applying to extend H-1B employment for a beneficiary who was placed at one or more third-party worksites during the course of past employment with the same petitioner, that petitioner should also establish that the H-1B requirements have been met for the entire prior approval period," the USCIS said. And if these conditions are not met, and if the petitioner did not comply with the terms and conditions of the original petition and did not file an amended petition on time, USCIS may have eligibility concerns about a subsequent petition filed to extend the beneficiary's employment, the policy memorandum said. The latest policy memorandum is part of President Donald Trump's 'Buy American and Hire American Executive Order' and the directive to protect the interests of US workers, it said. Employment-based petitioners who circumvent the worker protections outlined in the nations immigration laws not only injure US workers (eg their wages and job opportunities), but also the foreign workers for whom they are petitioning, it said. Companies seeking H-1B visas for their employees working at a third-party site, would now have an intensive paperwork to file before submitting their applications. This includes evidence of actual work assignments, which may include technical documentation, milestone tables, marketing analysis, cost-benefit analysis, brochures, and funding documents. The letter should provide information, such as a detailed description of the specialised duties the beneficiary will perform, the qualifications required to perform those duties, the duration of the job, salary or wages paid, hours worked, benefits, a detailed description of who will supervise the beneficiary and the beneficiarys duties, and any other related evidence, the USCIS said. US President Donald Trump has once again named India and China to defend his policy on climate change and reiterated that these countries and some others benefited the most from the Paris agreement while America didn't get any advantage. "We knocked out the Paris Climate Accord. It would have been a disaster. Would have been a disaster for our country," Trump said in his address today to the Conservative Political Action Committee. He was referring to his decision last year to withdraw from the Paris Agreement on climate change. On June last year, Trump had announced to withdraw the US from the Paris Agreement on climate change and renegotiate the deal that was agreed upon by over 190 countries during the previous Obama administration. Arguing that countries like China and India are benefiting the most from the Paris Agreement, Trump had said that the agreement on climate change was unfair to the US, as it badly hit its businesses and jobs. Defending his decision Trump said, "You know, basically, it said, "You have a lot of oil and gas that we found" -- you know, technology has been amazing. And we found things that we never knew. But we have massive -- just about the top in the world -- we have massive energy reserves. We have coal. We have so much". "And basically, they were saying, "Don't use it. You can't use it. So what it does is it makes us uncompetitive with other countries. It's not going to happen, I told them. It's not going to happen," he added. "And China -- their agreement didn't kick in until 2030. Right? Our agreement kicks in immediately. Russia -- they're allowed to go back into the 1990s, which was not a clean environmental time," Trump said. Commenting on India and other countries, he said, "Other countries, big countries -- India and others -- we had to pay, because they considered them a growing country. "They were a growing country. I said, What are we? Are we allowed to grow, too? Ok? No, Are we allowed to grow?," he said. "They called India a developing nation. They call China a developing nation. But the United States? We're developed. We can pay," Trump said. The President asked, if people understood about the Paris Accord and said that his country is in favour of his decision. "Because it sounds so good. It's like some of the environmental regulations that I cut. They have the most beautiful titles. And sometimes, I'd say, "Look, I'm just going to close my eyes and sign this, because you know what? I'm going to get killed on this one. And I get so much thanks. The country knows what I'm doing," he said. "We couldn't build. We couldn't farm. If you had a puddle on your land, they called it a lake for the purposes of environmental. I mean, it's crazy. It's crazy," Trump said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) US President Donald Trump has backed a proposal to arm school teachers with guns to prevent mass shootings, drawing criticism from certain quarters who accused him of promoting gun culture in schools. Trump's comments came as demands intensified for stronger gun control after a shooter killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on February 14. The incident reignited national debate over gun laws and school safety. "We have to harden our schools, not soften them up. A gun-free zone to a killer, or somebody that wants to be a killer, that's like going in for the ice cream," Trump said during a White House meeting with local and state officials on school safety. Trump said it was essential to provide concealed fire arms to teachers, who are highly trained. "I want certain highly adept people, people that understand weaponry, guns -- if they really have that aptitude. Because not everybody has an aptitude for a gun. But if they have the aptitude, I think a concealed permit for -- having teachers and letting people know that there are people in the building with a gun in my opinion, you won't have these shootings, he said. The president estimated that 10 per cent to 40 per cent of school employees would be qualified to handle a weapon he offered no data for the claim and said he would devote federal money to training them. "You give them a little bit of a bonus, so practically for free, you have now made the school into a hardened target," Trump said. His comments drew criticism from certain quarters who alleged that Trump was promoting gun culture in schools and it would be a massive financial burden on schools. Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, said Trump's emphasis on arming teachers revealed that he was in the thrall of the gun lobby. Mayor Rahm Emanuel of Chicago, who has been an outspoken advocate for gun control and is among Trumps most vocal critics, blistered the president. "No police officer, no educator of any note is advocating that what we need is more weapons on school campuses rather than fewer," said Emanuel. However, the White House Deputy Press Secretary Raj Shah said that there is lot of support for Trumps move in this regard. "We talked to teachers, we talked to folks in communities. I think there are a lot of people who if they are -- a lot of teachers who aren't currently trained would be willing to get trained. This is a very complex problem and we need serious solutions," he said. "I also think that if we really want school safety, a very serious idea is having trained individuals in schools with concealed weapons, because that will certainly deter potential attackers," Shah told reporters. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) An Ankara court today handed down multiple life sentences to the convicted mastermind of a 2013 attack in Turkey near the Syrian border which killed 53 people, state media reported. Turkey blamed the twin car bombings on May 11, 2013, in the southern border town in Hatay province on pro-Damascus groups. The Ankara court convicted Nasir Eskiocak over planning and executing the attack, and gave him 53 aggravated life sentences, which carry harsher conditions and replaced the death penalty in Turkey, state agency Anadolu reported. Eskiocak was found guilty of killing 53 people including five children and "trying to destroy the country's unity and integrity", the agency added. Ankara blamed the attack on "Acilciler" (meaning the Urgent Ones), an outlawed Marxist Turkish group linked to Syrian intelligence services. But the Syrian regime denied any involvement. The group is a branch of a far-left underground movement founded in 1972, the Turkish People's Liberation Party/Front (THKP/C). Following the clampdown after the 1980 military coup in Turkey, "Acilciler" went underground and its leader Mihrac Ural sought refuge in neighbouring Syria. The Turkish foreign ministry in late January sought explanations from Moscow over Ural's presence at the Syrian National Dialogue Congress hosted by Russia in the Black Sea resort of Sochi where representatives of Syrian civil society and met. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Police in Chhattisgarhs Jashpur district seized fake Rs 200 notes, with a face value of Rs 68,000, and arrested two persons, police said today. Omkar Yadav and Suresh Srivas were arrested yesterday from Farsabahar area here when the two were trying to sell these notes, Jashpur Superintendent of Police Prashant Thakur told PTI. In order to catch the two, police sub-inspector Sunil Das went as a decoy customer, officials informed. The two have told police that they got the notes from a person in Odisha. Officials said further investigations were underway. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Two people were injured in a shooting early today at Southeastern Louisiana University, the university said, nine days after a massacre at a Florida high school sparked a national uproar over US gun violence. "University Police confirmed incident occurred on North Campus involving several individuals. Gunshots fired, 2 individuals suffered non-life threatening injuries," the university said in a statement on Twitter. Students were warned by the school's emergency alert system at 4:01 am (local time), it said. "No present threat to campus community," it said, adding that university police were investigating the incident. The incident at the university in Hammond, Louisiana, came amid a national debate over gun control sparked by the killing of 17 students and adults at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida on February 14. President Donald Trump is under pressure to tighten US gun laws which allowed the Parkland shooter, Nikolas Cruz, to purchase an AR-15 assault rifle last year when he had turned 18, enter his former school and shoot dead 14 students and three adults. Trump was to make a speech today morning at the Conservative Political Action Conference near Washington in which he is expected to detail his ideas for gun control, including the controversial proposal to arm teachers in schools. The Allahabad High Court has questioned the intention of the Uttar Pradesh government to curb noise pollution, saying its attempts have been feeble and nothing much appeared to have been done to control the menace. The court said if the state government was not able to control noise pollution why does it not imposes a blanket ban on the use of loudspeakers in the state, like beacon lights. It said the directions issued by the government on January 4 in pursuance of the court's December 20 order to curb noise pollution were toothless and appeared to be of little use unless the check mechanisms were put in place. The court came down heavily on the government and said that its attempts have been "feeble and weak" and nothing much appeared to have been done, except indicating that almost all loudspeakers were installed with permission from the competent authority. Hearing a PIL seeking a ban on unauthorised use of loudspeakers at religious places, wedding ceremonies and other events, the Lucknow bench of justices Vikram Nath and Abdul Moin in their February 13 order said: "Needless to mention that despite issue of the order on December 20, 2017, the things have not changed even an iota, rather persons indulging in noise pollution have now become even more brazen about it." The court had issued detailed directives on December 20 on a PIL moved by lawyer Moti Lal Yadav to curb noise pollution because of the use of loudspeakers across the state. It had said the issue was "very serious" and should be dealt with an iron hand. It had asked the government whether it had permitted the use of loudspeakers at religious places, and if not, why action has not been taken under relevant laws. Present before the court, Principal Secretary (Home), Arvind Kumar, placed a government order issued on January 4 and tried to convey that the government had made it mandatory to obtain license before using loudspeakers at religious places or during celebrations, including marriage functions. Reacting critically to the government order, the bench said: "The government order of January 4 appears to give a blanket permission without any check or control on the persons seeking to install loudspeakers or who have already installed loudspeakers. Such blanket permission, in our considered opinion and that too without having any checking mechanism, is simply an attempt for a sham compliance of the Noise Pollution (Regulation and Control) Rules, 2000." The court said that without a check mechanism, the attempt to control noise pollution was a sham and hence if the government cannot have a fool-proof mechanism to control noise pollution, it should impose a complete ban on loudspeakers. For this, the bench suggested, suitable changes can be made to the Environmental Protection Act - like the Union government did with the Central Motor Vehicle Act to ban the use of beacon lights. "However, the same being a legislative function we cannot issue any direction at this stage but leave it to the collective wisdom of the government more particularly seeing the rampant noise pollution prevailing throughout the state", it said. The court summoned the principal secretary (home) and chairperson of the UP Pollution Control Board on March 12 to inform it about the development in the matter at the level of the government. It said it expects the state government to make a serious endeavour to tackle noise pollution. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte's spokesman says the government has summoned the US ambassador to discuss a global threat assessment by American intelligence agencies that mentioned Duterte along with the leaders of Cambodia and Thailand. Spokesman Harry Roque Jr says Executive Secretary Salvador Medialdea discussed the US intelligence community's Worldwide Threat Assessment report with US Ambassador Sung Kim yesterday. Roque said that Medialdea also asked Philippine diplomats to explain to Washington steps taken by Duterte to promote economic development and ensure security "respecting at all times the rule of law." The US report says "autocratic tendencies" are expected to deepen in some governments in Southeast Asia and mentioned that Duterte has suggested that he could suspend the constitution and declare a "revolutionary government". (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) US President Donald Trump today imposed the "heaviest-ever" sanctions on North Korea's shipping companies in a bid to prevent the reclusive nation from acquiring nuclear weapons and developing intercontinental ballistic missiles. Trump in his remarks at the Conservative Political Action Conference said he hoped "something positive" will come out of the latest round of tough sanctions. "North Korea - we imposed today the heaviest sanctions ever imposed on a country before," he said. "But hopefully something positive can happen. But that just was announced, and I wanted to let you know we have imposed the heaviest sanctions ever imposed," Trump said soon after the Department of Treasury announced a series of tough sanctions. "This action targets the deceptive shipping practices that have enabled the Kim regime to fund its dangerous weapons programmes," US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin told reporters at a White House conference. The latest American actions target shipping and trade companies, vessels and individuals across the world who are working on North Korea's behalf, he said. Mnuchin said the sanctions were against 27 entities, 28 vessels and one individual and added that all of them were involved in sanctions evasion schemes. These shipping and trade companies, vessels and one individual, totalling 56 designations are located, registered or flagged in countries all over the world, including North Korea, China, Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Marshall Islands, Tanzania, Panama and Comoros, he said. "Today's actions will significantly hinder North Korea's ability to conduct evasive maritime activities that facilitate illicit coal and fuel transports, and limit the regime's ability to ship goods through international waters," Mnuchin said. The American action is part of the ongoing maximum economic pressure campaign to cut off sources of revenue that the North Korean regime derives from the UN and US prohibited trade to fund its nuclear and ballistic missile programmes, he added. The US is also issuing a global shipping advisory in conjunction with the Coast Guard and the State Department to put everyone on notice of North Korea's illicit maritime tactics and underscore the significant sanctions risk of engaging in maritime business with North Korea, Mnuchin said. "We are releasing new imagery of the deceptive shipping practices used by those who aid and profit from illicit trade with North Korea. "These images from December 2017 reveal ship-to-ship transfers of fuel and other products destined for North Korea in an attempt to evade sanctions," he said. Mnuchin said the sanctions shine a spotlight on the practices employed by the government of North Korea to falsify identifying information on ships, and conceal illicit cargo. These sanctions evasion tactics are prohibited by the UN Security Council resolutions and we are fully committed to shutting down those who engage in trade with them, he asserted. "Through today's actions, we are putting companies and countries across the world on notice that this administration views compliance with US and UN sanctions as a national security imperative. Those who trade with North Korea do so at their own peril," Mnuchin said. The Treasury Secretary warned that the countries who do business with North Korea will not be able to do business with the US. A senior administration official told reporters that these designations are a critical part of the US' maximum pressure campaign to diplomatically and economically isolate North Korea. "These actions represent the latest development in the coordinated, whole-of-government US effort to disrupt, deter and dismantle North Korea's illicit maritime shipping activities that Pyongyang uses to skirt UN sanctions, and to fund its WMD programmes and delivery systems," the official said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A top American lawmaker, who was her country's first female fighter pilot, has congratulated Flying Officer Avani Chaturvedi for breaking India's glass ceiling by becoming the first Indian woman to fly a fighter jet solo. Chaturvedi became the first Indian woman to fly a fighter aircraft solo when she flew a MiG-21 bison in her first solo flight from the IAFs Jamnagar base on Monday. Congratulations to Flying Officer Avani Chaturvedi for breaking India's glass ceiling and touching the sky! The first Indian woman to fly a fighter jet solo, Congresswoman Martha McSally said in a tweet. Here's to many more women joining our ranks, said Congresswoman McSally who represents Arizona's Second Congressional District and serves on the House Committees on Armed Services and Homeland Security and as the chair of the Subcommittee on Border and Maritime Security. Prior to serving in Congress, McSally served 26 years in the US Air Force, retiring in 2010 as a full Colonel. She is the first female fighter pilot to fly in combat and first to command a fighter squadron in combat in United States history. A distinguished graduate of the US Air Force Academy and after training to fly the A-10 Warthog, she flew her first combat mission to Iraq from Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in 1995. During that assignment, she flew nearly 100 combat hours in support of Operation Southern Watch in the Middle East. McSally was next selected to become an A-10 Instructor Pilot in the 358th Fighter Squadron, becoming the first woman in US history to serve that role. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Vistara, the TATA-SIA joint venture, is all set to connect Kochi and Chennai to Kolkata from March end this year, the airline said in a statement today. The flight between Netjai Subhas Chandra Bose International Airport here and Kochi will be a daily one with a stopover at Chennai. There will be another daily flight to Chennai, the statement said adding the two services will commence from March 25. The airline has already added a third frequency between Kolkata and Delhi from mid February and it leaves for Delhi from Kolkata at 8.15 pm daily, it said. The existing two frequencies to Delhi from Kolkata are in the morning and in the afternoon, it added. "The launch of these new routes and flights from Kolkata reflects the commitment Vistara has to Kolkata and of the positive response we have received to our flights from the city," the Chief Strategy and Commercial Officer of Vistara, Sanjiv Kapoor, said. Vistara's Kolkata flights have high loads in all classes, Kapoor said. "Our strong acceptance in the market indicates there is room for a quality full service carrier in the market, with a sizable base of customers in all market segments including corporates," he added. The airline, a full-service carrier, had commenced flight operations from Kolkata on June 10, 2016. With these additions Vistara will connect Kolkata directly with Delhi, Chennai, Port Blair (Andamans) and Kochi, the statement said. Customers from Kolkata can also connect via Delhi to many other domestic and international destinations, including Chandigarh, Srinagar, Jammu, Amritsar and Lucknow and multiple cities internationally through Vistaras 21 international interline partners, it added. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Ministry of Human Resources Development has directed the Visva Bharati University to nominate two members to a search committee for selecting a new vice-chancellor for the varsity. The central university has been functioning without a fulltime VC for the last two years after the then Vice-Chancellor Sushanta Dattagupta was dismissed from the central university in February 2016. The Visva Bharati University received an e-mail from the HRD ministry yesterday asking it to hold a meeting of its Executive Council and the Court to nominate two members, Sougata Chatterjee, the acting Registrar of the university, told PTI. The Court is a university body having power to review the acts of the EC and the Academic Council. Some media reports said President Ram Nath Kovind has scrapped the previous panel of three names on the request of the HRD ministry, which had earlier forwarded these names. "We will soon fix a date for the meeting of EC and Court and make arrangements for nominating two names," Chatterjee said. Sabujkali Sen had taken over as the officiating VC of the varsity on February 3 as the seniormost functionary following the HRD ministry's directive. The HRD ministry's letter of February 3 had assigned Sen the charge of VC and stated that she would be in charge till the appointment of the new Vice Chancellor. But her term as the Director of Studies Educational Innovations and Rural Reconstruction of the university expires tomorrow. As per the University Act and Statute, the seniormost principal of a school, who is also member of the EC, takes charge of officiating VC. Asked if she knew about any development on the process to appoint a new VC, Sen told PTI, "I have read about it in a local daily. But I can't say anything." After Vice-Chancellor Dattagupta was dismissed in 2016, Prof Swapan Kumar Dutta became the officiating VC. He retired on January 27 and Sen assumed the charge on February 3. Sen had stated last week that the Visva Bharati cannot function without a fulltime VC. The university was established by Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore and has many notable alumni including filmmaker Satyajit Ray and economist Amartya Sen. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Harvey Weinstein has apologised for using statements by veteran actor Meryl Streep and Jennifer Lawrence in his defense against a class-action sexual harassment lawsuit. Weinstein's attorneys, Phyllis Kupferstein and Mary Flynn, had mentioned the names of prominent Hollywood A-listers, including Streep, Lawrence and Gwyneth Paltrow to prove that not all women had a negative experience of working with him. The motion claimed that Streep had stated publicly that "Weinstein had always been respectful to her in their working relationship." The document also included comments Lawrence made to Oprah Winfrey where she had said the producer had "only ever been nice" to her. However, the move did not go down well with Streep and Lawrence, who objected to being invoked in Weinstein's defense, reported Variety. "Even though Mr Weinstein has worked with hundreds of actresses and actors who had only professional and mutually respectful experiences with him, Mr Weinstein has directed in the future that no specific names be used by his counsel, even where those actors have made previous public statements about him. "Mr Weinstein acknowledges the valuable input both Meryl Streep and Jennifer Lawrence have contributed to this conversation and apologises. Once again, moving forward, Mr Weinstein has advised his counsel to not include specific names of former associates; and to avoid whenever possible, even if they are in the public record," the disgraced Hollywood producer's spokesperson said in a statement. In response to the motion, Lawrence described Weinstein as a "predator". Her comment followed Streep firing back at the producer. She said the action was "pathetic and exploitative". The lawsuit against Weinstein was filed by six female actors claiming that the producer, along with The Weinstein Company, used his power to bully women and cover up the cases of sexual misconduct. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The world's oldest known cave paintings were created by Neanderthals, rather than modern humans, showing that our extinct cousins were far from being uncultured brutes as previously believed, a study has found. A high-tech analysis of cave art at three Spanish sites, published in the journal Science, shows that the paintings were created over 64,000 years ago - 20,000 years before modern humans arrived in Europe. "This is an incredibly exciting discovery which suggests Neanderthals were much more sophisticated than is popularly believed," said Chris Standish, an archaeologist at the University of Southampton in the UK. "Our results show that the paintings we dated are, by far, the oldest known cave art in the world, and were created at least 20,000 years before modern humans arrived in Europe from Africa - therefore they must have been painted by Neanderthals," said Standish. This means that the Palaeolithic (Ice Age) cave art - including pictures of animals, dots and geometric signs - must have been made by Neanderthals, a 'sister' species to Homo sapiens, and Europe's sole human inhabitants at the time. It also indicates that they thought symbolically, like modern humans, researchers said. An international team of scientists used a state-of-the-art technique called uranium-thorium dating to fix the age of the paintings as more than 64,000 years. Until now, cave art has been attributed entirely to modern humans, as claims to a possible Neanderthal origin have been hampered by imprecise dating techniques, researchers said. However, uranium-thorium dating provides much more reliable results than methods such as radiocarbon dating, which can give false age estimates, they said. A team of researchers from the UK, Germany, Spain and France analysed more than 60 carbonate samples from three cave sites in Spain - La Pasiega (north-eastern Spain), Maltravieso (western Spain) and Ardales (south-western Spain). All three caves contain red (ochre) or black paintings of groups of animals, dots and geometric signs, as well as hand stencils, hand prints and engravings. According to the researchers, creating the art must have involved such sophisticated behaviour as the choosing of a location, planning of light source and mixing of pigments. "Soon after the discovery of the first of their fossils in the 19th century, Neanderthals were portrayed as brutish and uncultured, incapable of art and symbolic behaviour, and some of these views persist today," said Alistair Pike, professor at the University of Southampton. Dirk Hoffmann, of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, added that symbolic material culture - a collection of cultural and intellectual achievements handed down from generation to generation - has, until now, only been attributed to our species. "The emergence of symbolic material culture represents a fundamental threshold in the evolution of humankind. It is one of the main pillars of what makes us human," he said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) By Libby George and Ahmad GhaddarLONDON (Reuters) - The world's diesel markets are becoming easier to trade, with more transparency and uniform standards, a development that mid-size trader BB Energy sees as an opportunity to expand its team and develop a fully global presence. The company, founded in Lebanon 81 years ago, is aiming to go global with its distillates trading, moving beyond its Mediterranean roots and eyeing a team that can edge into business from Venezuela to Turkey that traditional oil majors view as too risky. Newly-hired global head of distillates, Frederic Lassau, told ... By Carolyn Cohn, Simon Jessop and Noor Zainab HussainLONDON (Reuters) - Standard Life Aberdeen (SLA) has agreed to sell the bulk of its insurance business to Phoenix Group for 3.24 billion pounds ($4.5 billion), allowing it to focus on savings and investment products.SLA will receive 2.3 billion pounds in cash and a 19.9 percent stake in Phoenix, which is raising 1 billion pounds to fund the deal to become Europe's largest manager of books of mature business from insurance companies.The sale is part of a long-standing drive by the Standard Life business to exit insurance, which carries ... HP Inc reported first-quarter revenue and profit on Thursday above Wall Street estimates as it sold more personal computers and printers, helping the company raise its full-year profit forecast. Shares of the company, which houses the hardware business of former Hewlett-Packard Co, rose 5.3 percent to $22.53 after the bell.The company said it expects fiscal 2018 earnings per share to be in the range of $1.90 to $2.00, up from $1.75 to $1.85. That number was above the average analyst estimate of $1.81 per share.HP Inc's personal systems business, which accounts for nearly two-thirds of the ... India's government fully endorses a dramatic move by domestic exchanges to cut off data to global bourses, sources familiar with the matter said, seeing it as vital to lure foreign investments into the country from Singapore and other financial centres. It was only after receiving the endorsement that India's three private stock exchanges National Stock Exchange, BSE Ltd and MSEI Ltd proceeded with the joint announcement on February 10 to stop providing data to foreign rivals, said two senior officials at the bourses. The sources declined to be identified ... Regional leaders launched construction work on the Afghan section of an $8 billion natural gas pipeline that will link the energy-rich Central Asian nation of Turkmenistan through Afghanistan to Pakistan and India. Ex-Soviet Turkmenistan holds the world's fourth-largest natural gas reserves but has been heavily dependent on gas exports to China after Russia cut back gas imports in the past few years. The project is expected to transport 33 billion cubic metres (bcm) of natural gas a year along an 1,800 kilometre (1,125 miles) route from Galkynysh, the world's ... ST. LOUIS (AP) A St. Louis grand jury on Thursday indicted Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens on a felony invasion of privacy charge for allegedly taking a compromising photo of a woman with whom he had an affair in 2015. The Republican governor responded that he made a mistake but committed no crime. St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner launched an investigation in January after Greitens admitted to an affair with his St. Louis hairdresser that began in March 2015. He was elected governor in November 2016. Thursdays indictment was followed with an announcement by House Republican leaders that they were forming a group of lawmakers to investigate the charges and answer the question as to whether or not the governor can lead our state while a felony case moves forward. In a statement following the indictment , the Republican governor was defiant and attacked the prosecutor who brought the charge. As I have said before, I made a personal mistake before I was Governor, he said. I did not commit a crime. With todays disappointing and misguided political decision, my confidence in our prosecutorial system is shaken, but not broken. I know this will be righted soon. The people of Missouri deserve better than a reckless liberal prosecutor who uses her office to score political points. Greitens attorney, in a separate statement, called the indictment baseless and unfounded. In 40 years of public and private practice, I have never seen anything like this, attorney Edward L. Dowd Jr. said. Gardners spokeswoman, Susan Ryan, responded: Despite the Governors personal attacks, the Circuit Attorney believes the courtroom is the appropriate place to argue the facts, not the media. Greitens legal team immediately filed a motion to dismiss the indictment on the grounds that any relationship with the woman was consensual. Some lawmakers renewed suggestions that Greitens should consider resigning, as they had done when the affair first become public last month. Democratic state Sen. Jamilah Nasheed of St. Louis called for an impeachment process to begin immediately. Gov. Greitens has to go, Nasheed said. Missourians thought they voted for a person of character and integrity, and instead they got a liar and alleged criminal. Any impeachment process must begin in the House with an investigation. The joint statement from House Speaker Todd Richardson, Speaker Pro Tem Elijah Haahr and Majority Leader Rob Vescovo did not specifically mention impeachment while noting that they were initiating an investigation. The indictment states that on March 21, 2015, Greitens photographed a woman identified only by her initials in a state of full or partial nudity without her knowledge or consent. The indictment said Greitens transmitted the image contained in the photograph in a manner that allowed access to that image via a computer. In 2015, the woman told her husband, who was secretly taping the conversation, that Greitens took the compromising photo of her at his home and threatened to use it as blackmail if she spoke about the affair. The penalty for first-degree invasion of privacy in Missouri is a sentence of up to four years behind bars. Greitens was taken into custody in St. Louis and released on his own recognizance. He is due in court for his first hearing on March 16, before Circuit Judge Rex Burlison. Greitens has repeatedly denied blackmailing the woman, but has repeatedly refused to answer questions about whether he took a photo. The indictment came about a month before the statute of limitations would have run out. The statute of limitations for invasion of privacy in Missouri is three years. Ryan, asked if additional charges could be filed, said the matter is still under investigation. Several lawmakers were questioned last week by investigators from Gardners office. Greitens, the 43-year-old father of two young boys, came into office as a political outsider, a brash Rhodes Scholar and Navy SEAL officer who was wounded in Iraq, emerging as the winner in a crowded and expensive GOP primary. A former boxer and martial arts expert, he has embraced the role of maverick. He responded to a Democratic attack ad in the fall of 2016 with one of his own in which he fired more than 100 rounds from a machine gun as an announcer declared hed bring out the big guns to fight Democratic policies championed by then-President Barack Obama. Greitens surprised many experts by defeating Democratic Attorney General Chris Koster in the November 2016 election. Some saw him as a rising Republican star with potential presidential aspirations. But governing hasnt always been easy, even though Republicans now control both houses as well as the governors mansion. Greitens and GOP lawmakers have often clashed, with him comparing some to third-graders and labeling them career politicians. He has also faced questions about so-called dark money campaign contributions and criticism for stacking the state board of education. His use of a secretive app that deletes messages is under investigation by Republican Attorney General Josh Hawley. Greitens charity, The Mission Continues, faced scrutiny during the campaign when Democrats accused him of insider politics for accessing the donor list to raise about $2 million through its top contributors. AP reporters Summer Ballentine, David A. Lieb and Blake Nelson in Jefferson City, Missouri, contributed to this report. SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) A California state senator accused of sexual misconduct resigned Thursday just ahead of a possible vote to expel him, delivering a scathing resignation letter that called the investigation a farce and underscored the Legislatures struggle to respond to the #MeToo movement. Democratic Sen. Tony Mendoza of the Los Angeles area said he may still run for the seat this fall, putting his party in an uncomfortable spot. His resignation letter takes aim at the leader of the Senate, a fellow Democrat and his former roommate in Sacramento who was leading the effort to kick him out. It is clear that Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de Leon will not rest until he has my head on a platter to convince the MeToo movement of his sincerity in supporting the MeToo cause, Mendoza wrote as he resigned. De Leon, who is running for the U.S. Senate seat held by Democrat Dianne Feinstein, said the Legislature wont tolerate abuse of power and a pattern of behavior that violates our harassment standards. An investigation found that Mendoza likely engaged in unwanted flirtatious or sexually suggestive behavior with six women, including four subordinates, a lobbyist and a young woman in a fellowship with another lawmaker. He is the third California lawmaker to resign over sexual misconduct allegations since the #MeToo movement erupted nationally last fall, leading millions of women to share their experiences on social media. Mendoza has consistently denied wrongdoing and blasted an investigation that he claimed was unfair, illegal and racially motivated. His complaints illustrate the Legislatures struggle to respond to growing demands for a change in a culture perceived as burying complaints and sheltering offenders. Removing senators from the process of deciding cases of sexual harassment involving their friends and roommates is imperative, said Sen. Andy Vidak, a Republican who first moved to expel Mendoza in January. The Mendoza mess has brought to light all of the flaws of our sexual harassment policies but hopefully will lead us to some resolution. The Legislature still hasnt adopted fair and transparent policies for sexual misconduct four months after dozens of women who work at the Capitol sent a letter calling for a change in culture, said Samantha Corbin, a lobbyist and co-founder of a group called We Said Enough that formed in the wake of the letter. Theres a lot of room for interpretation, theres a lot of ambiguity, and it does neither the victims nor the perpetrators any type of justice, she said. Its unfair for everyone. Mendozas resignation was the best solution for the women who accused him of misconduct, but it hasnt delivered justice or due process, Corbin said. Leaders of the Legislative Womens Caucus said more work remains to be done to ensure clear sexual harassment policies. Assemblywoman Susan Talamantes Eggman and Sen. Connie Leyva said the Legislature must ensure harassment claims are dealt with transparently and no one is beyond reproach. Mendozas resignation letter was hand-delivered by an aide moments after the Senate Rules Committee lifted his suspension so he could return to the Capitol and publicly defend himself against expulsion. His photo was quickly removed from a wall showing the sitting lawmakers and replaced with the seal of the Senate. Mendoza wrote that he wasnt able to see the evidence against him and was ordered to remain silent about the allegations. He said he couldnt get a fair hearing with so many of his fellow Democrats running for higher office and thinking about their own political futures. Lawyers who conducted the investigation released Tuesday found that Mendoza more likely than not engaged in behavior such as offering a 19-year-old intern alcohol in a hotel suite at a Democratic event, suggesting a young woman in a Senate fellowship take a vacation with him and rent a room in his house, and asking several women about their romantic lives. Mendoza, who is 46 and married, said in his resignation letter that more likely than not was a low standard of proof that didnt merit a penalty as high as expulsion. He called the Senates process farcical. Mendoza had taken leave and then days before he was set to return in January, the Senate Rules Committee suspended him because the independent investigation had not yet concluded. He doesnt plan to drop a lawsuit he filed last week seeking reinstatement. He alleged his suspension was unconstitutional, among other arguments. Elected officials need to hold themselves to a higher standard, and the Senate doesnt need to hold itself to the same standard as a court of law, said Kim Nalder, director of the Project for an Informed Electorate at California State University, Sacramento. So long as theres a process thats transparent and rigorous, thats what we should expect of them. The Senate could be challenged again soon. An investigation has concluded into Sen. Bob Hertzberg, whom at least three female colleagues say made them uncomfortable with hugs. The findings have not been made public. Two other Los Angeles-area Democratic representatives, Raul Bocanegra and Matt Dababneh, resigned last fall. Assemblywoman Cristina Garcia has taken leave after she was accused of groping. HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) A new congressional map in Pennsylvania on Friday survived a request from eight of the states Republican congressmen that federal judges throw it out immediately, but the case remained far from settled days before candidates will start collecting signatures to get on the primary ballot. Hours after they were appointed to the case, a three-judge panel declined to temporarily hold up implementation of the map put in place by the state Supreme Court on Monday. The new map substantially overhauls a GOP-drawn one that has helped produce a predominantly Republican delegation and was widely viewed as among the nations most gerrymandered. The three federal judges laid out a schedule for the parties to elaborate on their legal positions, including a March 9 hearing in Harrisburg. Congressional candidates in Pennsylvania are scheduled to start collecting signatures Tuesday to get their names on the primary ballot. The GOP congressmen and two Republican state senators sued two high-ranking state elections official on Thursday, asking the federal court to require the use of a Republican-drawn 2011 congressional district map for this years primary and general elections. They argue the map the state justices produced is biased in favor of Democrats, and the state court did not give state lawmakers sufficient time to produce a replacement map. A lawyer for Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf wrote the court Friday on behalf of the elections officials, noting that two other Republican leaders in the Legislature have a request for a stay of the new map pending before the U.S. Supreme Court. Deputy General Counsel Thomas Howell asked the federal court to defer action on the congressmens lawsuit until that request has been resolved. Howell claimed that the lawsuit against Wolfs acting secretary of state and the head of the Bureau of Commissions, Elections and Legislation has significant hurdles and is rife with legal and factual errors. The judicial panel, named pursuant to a federal law governing constitutional challenges to congressional reapportionment, consists of Judge Christopher Conner , a Pennsylvania-based district judge; Judge Jerome Simandle , a senior district judge from New Jersey; and Judge Kent Jordan , a circuit judge who was formerly a district judge in Delaware. Conner and Jordan were chosen for the federal bench by President George W. Bush, while Simandle was nominated by President George H.W. Bush. In the parallel case, House Speaker Mike Turzai and Senate President Pro Tempore Joe Scarnati on Wednesday asked the U.S. Supreme Court to put the new map on hold, arguing state justices overstepped their authority. On Thursday the leaders also asked the state Supreme Court to delay the map . Wolf and other parties were given until noon Monday to weigh in. The 2011 map has helped Republicans maintain a 13-5 edge in the congressional delegation for three elections. The Democrats who are the majority on the state Supreme Court ruled in January that the 2011 map violated the state constitutions guarantee of free and equal elections. After lawmakers did not enact a Wolf-supported plan during a two-week window, the judges drew their own map. Democrats have about 800,000 more registered voters in Pennsylvania, but President Donald Trump, a Republican, narrowly defeated Hillary Clinton in the state during the 2016 election. Democrats are hopeful that new Pennsylvania congressional districts will help them flip enough Republican seats to retake majority control of the U.S. House this year. Six Pennsylvania congressman elected in 2016 are not running again, an unusually large number. STARKE, Fla. (AP) The Latest on Florida Execution (all times local): 9 p.m. Authorities say they dont believe the loud scream that came from the mouth of a Florida inmate as he was being put to death in Florida for a 1993 rape and murder was caused by the lethal injection procedure. Forty-seven-year-old inmate Eric Scott Branch received the lethal drugs Thursday evening at the Florida State Prison in Starke. Branch was convicted of raping and killing 21-year-old college student Susan Morris in 1993. He screamed and shouted murderers! repeatedly. Asked whether Branchs scream could have been caused by the execution drugs, Department of Corrections spokeswoman Michelle Glady said afterward that there was no indication of that. She says that conclusion was confirmed by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. The murder victims family later released a statement saying they are still grieving the young womans death a quarter century ago. Wendy Morris Hill, the victims sister, read a statement declaring the slain woman will never be forgotten by those who love her. 7:30 p.m. A Florida inmate convicted of raping and killing a college student decades ago screamed and yelled murderers! repeatedly as he was being put to death. Authorities say 47-year-old Eric Scott Branch was pronounced dead Thursday evening after receiving a lethal injection at Florida State Prison. Branch was convicted of the 1993 rape and fatal beating of 21-year-old college student Susan Morris, whose naked body was found buried in a shallow grave. Just as officials were administering the drugs that included a powerful sedative, Branch let out a loud, blood-curdling scream. He then thrashed about on his gurney and yelled murderers! three times before falling silent with a groan. 7:15 Florida has executed a man convicted of raping and killing a college student in 1993 so he could steal her car. Authorities say 47-year-old Eric Scott Branch was pronounced dead at 7:05 p.m. Thursday after a lethal injection at Florida State Prison. Branch was convicted of the rape and fatal beating of University of West Florida student 21-year-old Susan Morris, whose naked body was found buried in a shallow grave near a nature trail. Evidence shows that Branch approached Morris after she left a night class on Jan. 11, 1993, so he could steal her red Toyota and return to his home state of Indiana. He was arrested while traveling there. Branch also was convicted of sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl in Indiana and of another sexual assault in Panama City, Florida. 6:30 p.m. The U.S. Supreme Court has denied last-minute appeals to halt the execution of a Florida inmate convicted of the 1993 rape and murder of a college student. The court rejected the appeals of 47-year-old Eric Scott Branch without comment Thursday, about a half hour after his scheduled execution was initially to have taken place. Authorities can now proceed with a lethal injection at Florida State Prison. Branch was convicted in the death of 21-year-old University of West Florida student Susan Morris, whose naked body was found buried in a shallow grave. Evidence in the case shows that Branch approached Morris after she left a night class on Jan. 11, 1993, so he could steal her red Toyota and return to his home state of Indiana. He was arrested while traveling there. 6 p.m. Florida authorities are awaiting a U.S. Supreme Court ruling on whether to proceed with executing an inmate convicted of the rape and murder of a college student. Forty-seven-year-old Eric Scott Branch was set to receive a lethal injection at 6 p.m. Thursday at Florida State Prison. But that time passed with correction officials still awaiting a decision on the inmates final appeals. Branch was convicted in the death of 21-year-old University of West Florida student Susan Morris, whose naked body was found buried in a shallow grave in 1993. Evidence in the case shows that Branch approached Morris after she left a night class on Jan. 11, 1993, so he could steal her red Toyota and return to his home state of Indiana. He was arrested while traveling there. 4 p.m. A man scheduled for execution in Florida for raping and killing a college student in 1993 has had his last meal and was described as in good spirits. Barring a last-minute stay, 47-year-old Eric Scott Branch will be put to death by lethal injection at 6 p.m. Thursday at Florida State Prison. Corrections Department spokeswoman Michelle Glady says his last meal was a pork chop, T-bone steak, French fries and 2 pints of Ben & Jerrys ice cream. He was visited by his daughter this morning and refused a meeting with a spiritual adviser. Branch was convicted of the January 1993 rape and fatal beating of 21-year-old University of West Florida student Susan Morris. Authorities say Branch killed Morris so he could steal her car. The womans body was found buried in a shallow grave. Florida is scheduled to execute a man convicted of raping and killing a college student in 1993 so he could steal her car. Barring a last-minute stay, 47-year-old Eric Scott Branch will be put to death by lethal injection at 6 p.m. Thursday at Florida State Prison. Branch was convicted of the rape and fatal beating of 21-year-old University of West Florida student Susan Morris whose naked body was found buried in a shallow grave. Evidence in the case shows that Branch approached Morris after she left a night class on Jan. 11, 1993, so he could steal her red Toyota and return to his home state of Indiana. He was arrested while traveling there. Branch was also convicted of another Florida rape and one in Indiana. HUNTSVILLE, Texas (AP) Texas Gov. Greg Abbott on Thursday spared the life of a convicted killer shortly before the mans scheduled execution for masterminding the fatal shootings of his mother and brother. In sparing the life of Thomas Bart Whitaker about an hour before he was scheduled for lethal injection, Abbott accepted the state parole boards rare clemency recommendation. Whitakers father, Kent, also was shot in the 2003 plot at the familys suburban Houston home but survived and led the effort to save his son from execution. Abbott commuted the sentence to life without parole. Im thankful not for me but for my dad, Bart Whitaker told prison officials after getting the word in a tiny holding cell a few feet from the death chamber. Any punishment that I would have or will receive is just, but my dad did nothing wrong. The system worked for him today. And I will do my best to uphold my role in the system. The seven-member Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles, whose members are appointed by the governor, recommended unanimously Tuesday that Abbott commute the sentence. Abbott, a Republican had the option of accepting the recommendation, rejecting it or doing nothing. Mr. Whitakers father, who survived the attempt on his life, passionately opposes the execution of his son. Mr. Whitakers father insists that he would be victimized again if the state put to death his last remaining immediate family member, Abbott said in a proclamation issued Thursday evening, adding that Whitaker had also agreed to waive all further rights to parole. Abbott, also citing the parole boards recommendation, added: The totality of these factors warrants a commutation of Mr. Whitakers death sentence to life in prison without the possibility of parole. It was only the fourth time since the state resumed executions in 1982 that the parole board has recommended clemency within days of an inmates scheduled execution. In the previous cases, then-Gov. Rick Perry, also a Republican, accepted the boards decision in one case and rejected the other two, who subsequently were put to death in the nations most active capital punishment state. Kent Whitaker said he was humbled and looked forward to hugging and touching his son. It was overpowering, he said of the governors decision, which he learned in a phone call from Keith Hampton, one of his sons lawyers. He and supporters were nearby the prison in a home used by inmate visitors and were standing and praying, Whitaker said. He put Hamptons call on his speakerphone. The room erupted, he said. Hampton said he was very relieved (Abbott) did the right thing. Texas Department of Criminal Justice spokesman Jason Clark said Bart Whitaker placed his arm through the bars of the holding cell after he was finished speaking with prison officials and asked to shake his hand. I havent touched another person in 13 years, Whitaker told Clark, who said he accepted the prisoners request. Death row inmates in Texas are kept alone in their cells for 23 hours a day and their one hour of recreation also is alone in a concrete wall enclosure. Agency spokesman Jeremy Desel said Whitaker would not be returned to death row but would be taken to a prison processing facility where hed be treated as a new incoming inmate and eventually assigned to a unit in general population, a process that likely would take a couple of weeks. Kent and Patricia Whitaker and their two boys had returned home the night of Dec. 10, 2003, following a restaurant dinner to celebrate Bart Whitakers college graduation when they were confronted by a gunman wearing dark clothes and a ski mask. Patricia Whitaker and her 19-year-old son, Kevin, were killed. Kent Whitaker and Bart were wounded. Nearly two years later, Bart Whitaker was arrested in Mexico after investigators determined he arranged the plot in hopes of collecting a family estate he believed was worth more than $1 million. Im 100 percent guilty, Whitaker testified at his trial in 2007. I put the plan in motion. He hated his parents and brother at the time, he said. Whitakers father said he loves and has forgiven his son, calling him a changed person. As the greatest victim in this case, you dont have to convince me how awful this crime was, Kent Whitaker said. Evidence showed the plot included two of Bart Whitakers friends and was at least his third attempt to kill his family. Whitakers wound to his arm was meant to draw attention away from his involvement. Unknown to his parents, the dinner celebration marking his graduation was a fraud. Hed dropped out of school months earlier. The gunman, Chris Brashear, pleaded guilty in 2007 to a murder charge and is serving life in prison. Steve Champagne, who drove Brashear from the Whitaker house the night of the shootings, took a 15-year prison term in exchange for testifying at Whitakers trial. ST. LOUIS (AP) Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens is blaming his felony invasion of privacy indictment on a reckless liberal prosecutor, holding fast to the assertion that any case stemming from his admitted extramarital affair is politically driven. The Republican governor and St. Louis Democratic circuit attorney, both just a little more than a year into their offices, certainly are political opposites. But a growing number of GOP lawmakers on Friday were questioning whether Greitens can continue to effectively lead while facing the indictment. The indictment handed down by a grand jury and stemming from an investigation launched by Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner alleges that Greitens took a compromising photo of a woman without her consent and transmitted the image to a computer. Greitens has admitted being unfaithful to his wife before he won election as governor but has denied criminal wrongdoing and has insisted that the affair with his former hairdresser was consensual. His attorney filed a motion to dismiss the indictment. Greitens claims the criminal case is politically motivated. The people of Missouri deserve better than a reckless liberal prosecutor who uses her office to score political points, Greitens said in a statement Thursday. Gardner didnt respond, but her spokeswoman Susan Ryan said the prosecutor will not be playing political games during this process. These personal attacks, while disappointing, will not distract her from her duty to serve justice and the citizens of this community, Ryan said Friday. While the state Republican Party was still supporting Greitens, some lawmakers, including some Republicans, were calling on him to resign or face legislative impeachment proceedings. In the wake of the grand jury criminal indictment, and with legal proceedings to come, I cannot see how he could effectively perform the duties of his office, let alone to lead with the kind of moral authority needed to make a positive impact, said Sen. Kevin Corlew, of Kansas City, one of at least four Republicans who were newly calling for Greitens resignation. Senate Majority Leader Mike Kehoe, a Republican from Jefferson City, said the indictment causes me to question whether the governor has the ability to effectively lead the state going forward, but he stopped short of calling for Greitens resignation. Other Republicans remained reserved in their judgment but expressed support for a legislative investigation into Greitens announced Thursday by GOP House leaders. An investigation is a necessary first step before an impeachment proceeding but does not necessarily lead to one. Former Missouri Supreme Court Chief Justice Mike Wolff said its up to the House to decide whether a state official can be impeached for conduct that occurred before he took office. The only statewide Missouri official to be convicted, impeached and ousted from office was Democratic Secretary of State Judy Moriarty in 1994. She was convicted of a misdemeanor for backdating her sons candidacy paperwork for a state House seat, then later impeached by the House and removed by the state Supreme Court. The prosecutor pursuing the case against Greitens was once a Missouri House member herself, serving two terms starting in 2012. Gardner came to politics after serving as a prosecutor in the circuit attorneys office under her predecessor, Jennifer Joyce, from 2005 to 2010. Missouri Republican Party executive director Sam Cooper called the indictment of Greitens a political hit job. But Democratic Rep. Alan Green of St. Louis County, chairman of the Missouri Legislative Black Caucus, defended Gardner, nothing that it was an independent grand jury that found probable cause to indict the governor. The circuit attorney is an elected official. Gardners office reviews up to 13,000 cases brought by police each year and files charges in roughly half of them, Ryan said. Gardner, who grew up in St. Louis and earned a law degree from St. Louis University, decided to run for the job leading an office of about 60 prosecutors when Joyce opted not to seek a fifth term in 2016. With unrest in nearby Ferguson still on the minds of people in St. Louis, where black residents slightly outnumber whites, Gardner, who is black, pledged to restore trust in the criminal justice system. Gardner, 42, defeated three other Democrats in the August primary, aided by $200,000 in late donations from a national super PAC partly funded by liberal billionaire George Soros. Her career path has some precedent: Democratic U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill also began as an assistant prosecutor before winning election to the Missouri House and later being elected the Jackson County prosecutor. The indictment has Greitens at a standstill. He canceled plans to go to Washington this weekend for a National Governors Association meeting, and the Republican Governors Association said Greitens no longer intends to serve on its executive committee. The indictment states that on March 21, 2015, Greitens photographed a woman identified only by her initials in a state of full or partial nudity without her knowledge or consent. The indictment said Greitens transmitted the image contained in the photograph in a manner that allowed access to that image via a computer. Soon after the affair began, the womans husband secretly recorded a conversation in which she described the alleged incident. She said on the tape that Greitens invited her downstairs at his home because he wanted to show her how to do a proper pull-up. She said Greitens taped my hands to these rings and then put a blindfold on me, took a photo of her partially nude, then warned her to remain silent. I saw a flash through the blindfold and he said, Youre never going to mention my name,' she said. Greitens, a married father of two young boys, has repeatedly denied blackmailing the woman. He has declined to say whether he took a photo. According to the Missouri Office of State Courts Administrator, 274 felony invasion of privacy charges have been filed in the state since 2004. But the data lists only one in St. Louis city apparently Greitens case. Greitens is a Rhodes Scholar and former Navy SEAL who entered the 2016 race as a brash outsider. He won an expensive primary, then defeated Democratic Attorney General Chris Koster in the general election. He has faced questions about dark money campaign contributions. His use of a secretive app that deletes messages is under investigation by Republican Attorney General Josh Hawley. Lieb and Nelson reported from Jefferson City, Missouri. AP reporter John Hanna contributed from Topeka, Kansas. Sign up for the APs weekly newsletter showcasing our best reporting from the Midwest and Texas: http://apne.ws/2u1RMfv ATMORE, Ala. (AP) The Latest on the scheduled execution of an Alabama inmate (all times local): 12:30 a.m. Alabamas prison commissioner says the state halted an inmates execution by lethal injection because medical staff were having difficulty connecting an intravenous line. Corrections Commissioner Jeff Dunn said Friday morning that staff did not think they could get the line connected before the death warrant expired at midnight Thursday. Dunn said it was a time issue. Officials first announced at 11:35 p.m. Thursday that the execution had been halted. Hamms attorney, Bernard Harcourt, said he had been arguing since July that Hamms veins were too compromised by illness for lethal injection. Harcourt had argued that lymphoma, drug use and hepatitis C had compromised Hamms veins to the point that lethal injection would be both difficult and unconstitutionally cruel. Alabama prison officials had told the courts that they planned to connect the intravenous line to usable veins below the knee. Hamm was sentenced to die after being convicted of murder in the 1987 slaying of a motel clerk. 11:45 a.m. Alabama officials have postponed a scheduled execution, saying there was not enough time to prepare the inmate before a death warrant expires at midnight. Doyle Lee Hamm was scheduled to die by lethal injection at 6 p.m. Thursday, but the U.S. Supreme Court delayed the execution while it considered Hamms request to block it. The court ruled about 9 p.m. that officials could proceed with the execution. Prison spokesman Bob Horton said there was insufficient time to prepare the inmate. Hamm was sentenced to death for the 1987 murder of Cullman motel clerk Patrick Cunningham during a robbery in which $410 was stolen. Cunningham was shot in the head. Hamms attorney had sought to stop the lethal injection. He argued that lymphoma, drug use and hepatitis C had compromised Hamms veins to the point that lethal injection would be both difficult and unconstitutionally cruel. Alabama prison officials have told the courts that they plan to connect the intravenous line to usable veins in Hamms lower extremities. 9 p.m. The U.S. Supreme Court has denied a last-minute bid to halt the execution of an Alabama inmate convicted of the 1987 killing of a motel clerk. Justices ruled Thursday evening that Alabama could proceed with the lethal injection execution of 61-year-old Doyle Lee Hamm. It was originally scheduled for 6 p.m., but the court temporarily delayed it while it considered Hamms bid to halt it. Corrections spokesman Bob Horton said the execution would move forward shortly. Hamm was convicted in the 1987 killing of motel clerk Patrick Cunningham. Cunningham was shot once in the head during a robbery where $410 was taken. Hamms attorney had argued that lymphoma and past drug use have damaged his veins too much for a lethal injection. 6 p.m. The U.S. Supreme Court has delayed the lethal injection of an Alabama inmate as it considers his request to block the execution. Justices issued the temporary stay at 6 p.m. Thursday, the same time that Doyle Lee Hamm was scheduled to be executed. The court will decide later whether to let the execution proceed Thursday evening. Hamms attorney argued that lymphoma and past drug use have damaged his veins too much for a lethal injection. Alabama prison officials have told the courts that they plan to connect the intravenous line to usable veins in Hamms lower extremities. Hamm was convicted in the 1987 killing of motel clerk Patrick Cunningham. 4:30 p.m. The Alabama attorney generals office is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to reject an inmates request to halt his upcoming execution. State lawyers on Thursday argued that the execution can be safely carried out, and there is no evidence that the inmates medical conditions will complicate the procedure. Doyle Lee Hamm is scheduled to be executed at 6 p.m. by lethal injection for the 1987 killing of motel clerk Patrick Cunningham. Hamm has asked justices to halt his execution. His attorney argued that lymphoma and past drug use have damaged his veins too much for a lethal injection. Alabama prison officials have told the courts that they plan to connect the intravenous line to usable veins in Hamms lower extremities. 3:23 p.m. An Alabama inmate is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to look at his case just hours before he is scheduled for execution. A lawyer for Doyle Lee Hamm asked the court Thursday to consider whether federal courts should be involved in developing execution procedures for infirm inmates. The 61-year-old Doyle has argued that illnesses and past drug use have damaged his veins too much for a lethal injection. The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals already has refused to stop Doyles execution, set for Thursday night. The judges said an expert found veins where a lethal dose could be administered. Hamm is on death row for the 1987 killing of motel clerk Patrick Cunningham. Prosecutors say Cunningham was fatally shot during a robbery in which $410 was taken. 12:45 p.m. An appellate court will not stop tonights scheduled execution of an Alabama inmate. The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Thursday denied a request from Doyle Lee Hamm to stop his execution. Hamm was convicted in the 1987 killing of motel clerk Patrick Cunningham. Prosecutors said Cunningham was shot once in the head while working an overnight shift in which $410 was taken. Hamm, who was diagnosed with B-cell lymphoma in 2014, has argued that the illness, prior drug use and hepatitis C have damaged his veins to the point that lethal injection would be both difficult and unconstitutionally painful. The appellate court, in an opinion, said a medical expert found that Hamm has some useable veins where the execution drugs could be administered. 5:07 a.m. Alabama is set to execute an inmate who argues his past drug use and cancer have too badly damaged his veins and will make the lethal injection unconstitutionally painful. Doyle Lee Hamm is scheduled to be put to death Thursday evening, convicted in the 1987 killing of motel clerk Patrick Cunningham. Prosecutors said Cunningham was shot once in the head while working an overnight shift in which $410 was taken. Hamm was diagnosed with B-cell lymphoma in 2014. His attorney urged the courts to block the execution, citing damage to Hamms veins from cancer, hepatitis C and former drug use. The state has indicated it will adjust its injection process by connecting an intravenous line to Hamms legs or feet after a medical expert said those veins were accessible. CANBERRA, Australia (AP) Australias beleaguered deputy prime minister resigned from the Cabinet on Friday over allegations that he sexually harassed a woman, but said he would not resign from Parliament. By staying in Parliament, Barnaby Joyce ensures that Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbulls single-seat majority in the House of Representatives is maintained. The allegation of sexual harassment adds to scrutiny Joyce has faced since news broke earlier this month that he and his former media secretary Vikki Campion are expecting a baby in April. Questions have been raised about her employment in two government jobs after working in Joyces office last year and the rent-free apartment owned by a wealthy political donor where Joyce and Campion now live. Joyce said his Nationals party, the junior partner in the ruling coalition, will pick a new leader on Monday. Its incredibly important that there be a circuit-breaker, not just for the Parliament, but more importantly, a circuit-breaker for Vikki, for my unborn child, my daughters and for Nat, he told reporters, referring to his estranged wife of 24 years and mother of his four daughters, Natalie Joyce. Whoever Nationals lawmakers choose as their new leader on Monday will become deputy prime minister. Joyce, a political maverick who has led his party since elections in mid-2016, said he would not accept any ministerial portfolio. As well as deputy prime minister, he was minister for infrastructure and transport. He said media reports that an unidentified woman had made a sexual harassment complaint against him was the straw that breaks the camels back. He denied the allegations, and said he requested they be referred to police for investigation. He has also denied a media report that he pinched a womans buttock while drunk in a Canberra pub several years ago. Nationals President Larry Anthony, the partys senior bureaucrat, said in a statement: The party will greet this news with a heavy heart but we understand and respect his decision to stand down as leader. Turnbull said in a statement the coalition government partnership is undiminished by the Nationals leadership change. Joyce and Turnbull have openly attacked each other since news of the deputy prime ministers office affair broke. Turnbull accused his deputy of making a shocking error of judgment by having an office affair. Joyce described his leaders remarks as inept and completely unnecessary. In a move interpreted by some as punishing his deputy for a politically damaging scandal, Turnbull did not appoint Joyce to the role of acting prime minister while Turnbull visits Washington this week. Turnbull explained Joyce was taking leave to consider his future. BEIJING (AP) Chinese police have ordered two men detained for 15 days after they posted pictures on the internet of themselves wearing Japanese World War II army uniforms at the site of one of the wars worst atrocities. Nanjing police said the sentences were imposed following widespread outrage online, underscoring the enduring sensitivity among Chinese over Japans invasion and occupation of much of the country in the 1930s and 1940s. The men, aged 22 and 25, were ruled guilty on the broadly defined charge of picking quarrels and provoking trouble and sentenced to administrative detention, a punishment short of jailing for which no trial is required. Individual actions of citizens should not challenge the dignity of the nation and its people, police said in a statement. No behavior in public settings or in cyberspace can cross the bottom line of the law. One of the two had been tracked to the southwestern province of Sichuan. The statement, dated Tuesday, didnt say how they were identified, although social media and government databases may have offered clues. The police statement said the two traveled to Nanjing over the Lunar New Year holiday and the pictures were taken in front of a bunker used by Chinese defenders during the 1937 Japanese assault that ended in the notorious Rape of Nanking. It said they distributed the photos on the popular QQ messaging service, from where they were reposted around the internet, stirring extreme rage and severe condemnation. Pictures of the two with faces obscured were posted on websites. One wore an officers uniform and carried a samurai sword, while the other wore puttees and carried what appeared to be a replica rifle. More than 70 years after the war ended, Japans relations with China remain fraught. Chinas ruling Communist Party derives much of its legitimacy to rule from its much-mythologized role fighting the Japanese, who were opposed mainly by Chiang Kai-sheks Nationalists. Many Chinese also believe Japan has never showed sincere contrition for the conflict, in which an estimated 15 million to 20 million Chinese were killed. A memorial hall and museum now stand at the site of a mass grave in the Yangtze River city and annual commemorations in December have been attended by President Xi Jinping and other high-ranking leaders. In 1937, Nanjing was Chiangs capital, to which he and his army had retreated following the Japanese occupation of Shanghai to the east after dogged fighting by the Chinese defenders. After entering the city on Dec. 13, Japanese imperial troops went on a six-week-long rampage, raping and murdering civilians and disarming soldiers, looting and setting much of the city aflame. China puts the number of dead at 300,000, although other estimates place the number considerably lower. | BY Ricki Green | Marcel and American Express have joined forces to give small businesses owners the help they need; introducing the celebrity intern. The new campaign supports the American Express Business Explorer Credit Card which was launched last year to give small and medium-sized businesses greater flexibility in managing their cash flow and greater rewards on their spending. The Card offers competitive benefits including: 100,000 introductory Bonus Points, an extra 50,000 Bonus Points each year, 2 passes to the Sydney Airport American Express lounge, plus much more. Australian small business owners are time-poor, risk-taking, multi-tasking champions. However, sometimes their passion for their business can mask how truly difficult it can be to run one. To prove just how well American Express understands this, the celebrity intern shows Australian comedian, Merrick Watts being put into local small businesses to see how he measures up when faced with the behind-the-scenes realities of running a small business. The series of advertisements show happy-go-lucky Merrick trying his best to keep up with the day-in, day-out demands of running a small business in six completely different situations. From plumbing, to pedicures and paperwork, even the simplest of responsibilities sees Watts fail miserably proving just how skilled small business operators are. Says Peter Likoudis, VP of marketing for American Express Global Commercial Payments: Small business owners are among the hardest working people on the planet. The American Express Business Explorer Credit Card aims to make things easier for them and was designed specifically for business owners from the beginning. The product has great rewards, tools to simplify payments and reporting, and cash flow benefits to make the card flexible for the realities of running a business. Weve taken a new direction with our celebrity intern campaign, using humour to show small business owners that we understand that running a small business isnt easy but that we are there to back them along the way. Says Scott Huebscher, ECD at Marcel Sydney: It was a great brief to be asked to come up with something completely different for American Express. Its been fun to work with them and Merrick to create light-hearted and humorous comms amidst a category that is typically serious. The celebrity intern will be launched online through YouTube and Facebook social media campaign. You can find more about the Business Explorer Credit Card here. Client: American Express Vice President, Marketing JAPA: Peter Likoudis Head of SME Prospect Marketing: Heidi Abbott Brand & Media Manager: Will Hasko Agency: Marcel Sydney Media: Mindshare Production Company: Guilty Content Director: Tony Rogers DOP: Peter Eastgate Executive Producer: Jason Byrne Producer: Victoria Schaw Post Production: The Butchery Editor: Tim Parrington | BY Ricki Green | Performance and data agency, iProspect has today announced that The Search Factory, which was acquired by Dentsu Aegis Network in June 2016, will rebrand to iProspect in Brisbane. This announcement marks the official launch of the iProspect brand in Brisbane, with the team of 29 adding to their Melbourne, Sydney and Auckland offices, and joining a team of 200 staff and the global network of over 4,200 specialists across 55 countries. iProspect Brisbane will be led by Michael Bell (pictured above right with iProspect CEO Dan Kalinski), co-founder of Search Factory. Bell has over 11 years of digital marketing experience working in both client and agency side roles. Recognised with numerous industry awards including a nomination as EY Entrepreneur of the Year, a placement in Smart Companys 30 Under 30, consecutive BRW Fast Starters placements and finalist for Start Up of the Year 2014, Bell has a strong grounding in all facets of digital marketing and a sharp eye for understanding the challenges business owners and managers face in the ever changing landscape of performance marketing. iProspect Brisbane will have the ability to roll out fully measureable and accountable cross channel capability to a higher standard than ever before, offering clients a full suite of search and performance products, including Paid Search, SEO, Paid Social, Data & Analytics, Display, Content & Creative, Conversion Optimisation and Lead Generation & Affiliates. | BY Lynchy | UOB Private Bank has released its latest films, once again building on the brands timeless values. The two new commercials communicate simple yet thought-provoking stories where values and relationships are put to the test. The two stories, The Book and The Newspaper Boy, share relatable human stories. And like their predecessors, the stories are brought to life in a timeless manner using a rich tone and feel. The UOB Private Bank campaign was created by BBH Singapore and shot by the acclaimed Director David Tsui. The films first appeared on television over the Chinese New Year period and on in-air media from February 15th 2018. Cecilia Wong, Head of Group Retail Marketing, UOB said, The UOB Private Bank commercials demonstrate the importance we place on values and in building deep relationships with our clients. In The Newspaper Boy, the story is reminiscent of how the relationships we nurture with our clients go above and beyond transactional relationships. In The Book, we have brought forth honour as the fundamental value that guides us in our decisions and actions. Credits Executive Creative Director: Joakim Borgstrom Creative Director: Jac Rodrigo Copywriter: Charlene Chua Art Director: Muk Koon Planning Director: Faraaz Marghoob Business Director: Megan Morrell Associate Account Director: Jade Cheng Account Executive: Priscilla Lim Agency Producer: Daphne Ng Production House: Moviola Asia Director: David Tsui Executive Producer: Ronnie Lee Director of Photogrpahy: Alan Yap news, latest-news A message of peace rang out across Lake Burley Griffin on Friday as Canberra's very own World Peace Bell was unveiled. After waiting in storage at the Australian War Memorial for two years, the Canberra Rotary Peace Bell will now live in a specially designed pavilion along the shores of the lake. All peace bells are identical, cast Japanese temple bells made from the melted coins of different UN nations. They serve as a reminder of the lives lost in violence. Canberra's 350 kilogram bell is the 23rd in the world, and the second in Australia. On Friday, local religious leaders and school students watched on as Wiradjuri dancer and elder Duncan Smith performed a special welcome to country. The Rotary Club of Canberra raised more than $120,000 to bring the bell to the capital, in a project that also marks the club's 90th anniversary. "[The bell] tolls to remind us to unite in a call for peace and perhaps there can be no greater time for that than right now," said Michael Rabey, who coordinated the project for the rotary. The bell will usually be rung on World Peace Day on the third Tuesday in September each year but you can expect to hear its sound long into the weekend. Members of the public are invited to ring the bell between 11am and 2pm on Saturday and Sunday. Australia's only other peace bell lives in Cowra, NSW. /images/transform/v1/crop/frm/silverstone-ct-migration/e9637fa2-a7b3-4142-b30d-f2c10c367bf3/r0_117_2000_1247_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg news, latest-news A Canberra man who set up an Instagram account to publish nude photos of a young woman sobbed as a judge sentenced him on Friday to nine months behind bars. Oliver James Simonetti, 20, faced a sentencing hearing in the ACT Supreme Court after he earlier pleaded guilty to a series of child pornography crimes committed in 2016. Simonetti messaged three girls, one of whom was 14, photos of themselves scantily dressed. He demanded nude photographs and threatened to share the photo if they did not comply. None of the victims complied, the court heard, but in one instance Simonetti created an Instagram account in one victim's name and the word nudes, the court heard. He used the account to carry out his threats, posting photos of the woman and inviting others to follow the account. On Friday, Simonetti pleaded guilty to using a carriage service to transmit, solicit and distribute child pornography, as well as using a carriage service to menace, harass or cause offence and intentionally possessing child exploitation material. In one instance, the court heard, the man sent the same young woman a photograph in which her breasts were exposed. When she asked how he got the photo he replied: "Revenge porn sites are great. Your life ends now you have until my shitty internet loads to stop me." He sent another woman, who was then 17, of a photo taken when she was 12, in which she was scantily dressed. The photo came with a threat that said the woman had five minutes to send back a full body nude photo. A girl aged 14 also received a message from Simonetti with a photograph of her wearing only a bra, taken a year earlier. Once again, Simonetti demanded nude photos to prevent the photograph being disseminated. He took part in an online chat group that involved the exchange of child pornography. The photographs included images of pre-pubescent girls and some in explicit poses. Police also found about 700 photographs of 154 different children on Simonetti's computers, phone and hard drive. Justice Michael Elkaim said the man had no criminal record, had been described as "decent and intelligent", wanted to apologise to the victims and expressed remorse. But he said the offences were too serious for the man to not serve time behind bars. Justice Elkaim said the abuse of children is not limited to the time when the abuse happens or the photograph is taken. "It is perpetuated each time an image is shared or seen by another person. It is capable of following a victim for may years into the future. "This is graphically illustrated in this case, where an apparently private photograph was distributed some three years after it was taken." He sentenced Simonetti, who sobbed for the half-an-hour it took the judge to deliver his sentence, to two-and-a-half years imprisonment, with nine months to be served full time and the rest suspended on $1000 security to be of good behaviour. He will be released in November. /images/transform/v1/crop/frm/silverstone-ct-migration/1d4985de-fe8f-4d1c-8dec-a8c7308c195a/r0_18_320_199_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg news, latest-news Lawyers have accused NSW Police of holding unlawful rifle training on an unlicensed shooting range near Goulburn. In August, as police ramped up their counter-terror capabilities, 47 officers from the NSW Public Order and Riot Squad descended on the 2000 hectare property near Collector for two week-long live fire training events. Public interest lawyers at the Environmental Defenders Office of NSW stepped in on behalf of locals to stop three further sessions in late 2017, arguing the range, known as Samuels' Run, was not yet approved and the high-powered gunfire was disrupting the community. As a result, NSW Police moved the events to an Australian Defence Force range, but a police spokesman maintained "all the right boxes had been ticked". The site is owned by Australian Target Systems, the main provider of shooting facilities to the Defence Force. Two months after the training, the company lodged a development application with the local council to build a specialised range on the property that would train police in lethal force. Both NSW Police and the QueanbeyanPalerang Regional Council told Fairfax the 2017 training was carried out under a special provision that allows authorities to set up temporary "emergency services facilities" without council approval. "Under this [law] NSWPF is permitted to assess and approve ... the training exercise on the Samuel's Run land," a police spokesman said. A second approval to use the site as a range was also granted, the spokesman said, but did not provide further details. In their letter to NSW Police in October, EDO lawyers argued the range was not set up by or on behalf of police and was instead part of the company's private enterprise, therefore they had "no legal basis to use it for [their] exercises". "While NSWPF is permitted to carry out emergency services at an emergency services facility without consent, this does not have the effect of authorising a shooting range that was built unlawfully," EDO solicitor Meg Lamb said. Chief operating officer of the company Lee Bath said police used ATS shooting targets and facilities at the site, but the company's involvement with the approval "extended to providing NSW Police with details of the property". "From there we were issued [an access] licence. How the licence was arranged and the processes involved is not something we know about," Ms Bath said. Local James McKay, who has a background in law, said NSW Police should investigate its own conduct to see whether officers committed an offence by firing at an unapproved range. Under the NSW firearms regulation it is an offence to fire a gun on or operate an unregistered shooting range. "It is beyond doubt that the property was used as a shooting range in the middle of last year...The tricky thing is that the activities may well have taken place with the involvement of police," Mr McKay said. Having sought his own legal advice, he has since reported the training to Crime Stoppers. The Canberra Times understands NSW Police cancelled upcoming events at Samuels' Run once neighbouring farmer John Reardon threatened further legal action through the EDO. Principal solicitor at the EDO Elaine Johnson said the organisation stood by its advice but it appeared to be a case of police being "accidentally" drawn into something unlawful and they had done the right thing by moving the events. Geoff Grey, who was left with severe hearing damage after 35 years in the Defence force, said gunfire from the training sessions had ripped through his home and art retreat three kilometres away. He also raised legal concerns with the NSW government but was told in a letter from the Department of Justice that all "relevant assessments and approvals, as required, were undertaken". "The training...is vital to ensuring the Public Order Riot Squad is supplied with the knowledge and skills to resolve armed offender situations," a spokesperson said. "Samuels' Run provides the optimal training environment to develop those skills. I am advised that there are currently no other ranges in NSW that accommodate...this type of training." While such facilities were available at the military base Holsworthy, access for police "was subject to Defence priorities", the spokesperson said. Neighbours fiercely oppose the proposal to build a permanent range on the site, claiming the "loud and alarming" gunfire will disrupt local business and livestock, and even cause distress to several former and serving Defence members living nearby. /images/transform/v1/crop/frm/silverstone-ct-migration/0b0b11eb-cc5f-437f-aa0a-4d70dbbd92fd/r0_127_2000_1257_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg news, latest-news With up to 300 millimetres of rain dumped in areas of south-east Queensland in the past two days, the weather bureau has warned residents to prepare for the possibility of flash flooding. Heavy rain was expected to continue into the weekend before easing to showers into next week, with the chance of isolated storms. Concerned residents couldn't monitor the fresh burst of wet weather coming on Friday afternoon at the Bureau of Meteorology's website, with the Brisbane radar down, as it has been since Wednesday. Brisbane fell short of its expected 26-degree maximum on Friday, which was more than 4 degrees below the February average. If forecasts bear out, Brisbane will have received a months worth of rain in four days by the end of the weekend. The Bureau of Meteorology issued a fresh flood watch on Friday afternoon encompassing all coastal catchments from Tewantin, in the Noosa region, down to Beenleigh, in Logan. Minor flood warnings were also in place for communities along the upper Dawson and upper Mary rivers. Hydrologists were keeping an eye on river catchments in the south-east to determine if the flood watch needed to be extended. BoM meteorologist Sean Fitzgerald said the Gold Coast hinterland had seen falls nearing the 300-millimetre mark during the past 48 hours, with Mount Tamborine recording 147 millimetres from 9am on Friday to 4.30pm. Nambour on the Sunshine Coast received 125 millimetres since 9am. During the same period, Brisbane Airport recorded 30-40 millimetres and the Brisbane metropolitan area saw up to 25 millimetres of rain. Mr Fitzgerald said consistent rainfall would hand around on Saturday, before easing into Sunday and reducing to showers. Monday and Tuesday were also expected to feature rain, but the bureau said it was still a developing situation. Mount Gravatt in Brisbane and parts of the Sunshine Coast hinterland had copped more than 100 millimetres of rain by 7am on Friday. Weather bureau meteorologist David Crock said the city was expected to comfortably exceed its average February rainfall of 158 millimetres, with most of south-east Queensland to follow suit. Theres certainly plenty more rain to come for the south-east today and into tomorrow as well, he said. Meanwhile, a Brisbane driver managed to escape his yellow sedan after being trapped in rising water in Rocklea on the southside. Emergency services were called about 6.20am but the driver had escaped from his car on Marshall Road by the time they arrived, police said. Police urged motorists to stay well away from flooded roads after a number of drivers also had to be rescued in the Wide Bay region on Thursday. /images/transform/v1/crop/frm/silverstone-ct-migration/b69b5f81-8194-4d9e-84c7-e850c2506a21/r0_236_4577_2822_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg Next months roster of activities at Northwest Regional Library offers topics for all ages. The following activities are free to the public: Adult Programs Exhibit: Birds of Southwest Florida March 1 30 Available during normal library operating hours: Monday, Wednesday, Thursday: 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Tuesday: Noon to 8 p.m.; Friday, Saturday: 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. English Caf 10:30 a.m., Thursdays, March 1, 8, 15, 22 Free, informal conversation sessions for adult ESOL/ESL students. Free Legal Clinic Bankruptcy 6 p.m. Tuesday, March 6 Florida Rural Legal Services presents a free legal information session regarding bankruptcy. Registration is required. Floridas Amazing Birds 3 p.m., Saturday, March 10 Jason Boeckman of Lee Countys Conservation 20/20 program discusses Floridas many feathered friends, both familiar and rare, and the more than 25,000 acres of nature preserves that exist across the county for residents and visitors to explore. New Movie Matinee 1:30 p.m., Wednesday, March 21 Join us for a showing of a newly-released-on-DVD movie each month. Well pop some popcorn and grab one of the hottest newly released DVDs to show. Movie ratings will vary and this program is primarily intended for adult audiences. Haunted Folklore of South Florida 2 p.m., Saturday, March 24 Have you heard the one about Calusa spirits who sing to draw people into the Manatee River? Or, was it music from a beautiful young girl kidnapped by a pirate? Join folklorist, author and legend tripper Christopher Balzano to learn the truth behind the myths and discover which of the areas ghost stories should make you shiver and which are just tall tales. Tea Time Talks 6 p.m., Tuesday, March 27 Get recommendations from friends, neighbors, and librarians on everything from recent releases to forgotten classics. Tea and cookies will be provided. No registration required. Storytime Baby Rhyme Time 10 a.m. Saturday, March 10 10:30 a.m. Wednesdays, March 14, 28 For babies up to 18 months. During this special storytime, you and your baby will learn new nursery rhymes and fingerplays, interact with puppets, sing, read books and dance. First come, first served. Toddler Tales 10:15 a.m., Mondays, March 12, 26 11:15 a.m., Mondays, March 12, 26 For ages 18-36 months. This interactive and active time for toddlers and their caregiver is designed to advance prereading and social skills. They will experience storytelling, wordplay, felt board stories, fingerplays, puppets, singing, music-making, socializing, dancing, and, of course, books. Space is limited to 15 children per class. Children must be registered for each class individually. Preschool Storytime 10:15 a.m., Thursdays, March 15, 29 11:15 a.m., Thursdays, March 15, 29 Your preschooler will continue to build relationships with other kids, books and the library in a storytime designed specifically for them. The stories and activities are more complex, but just as fun. First come, first served. Space is limited to 15 children per class. Children must be registered for each class individually. Family Storytime 10 a.m., Saturday, March 24 Your whole family is invited to this enjoyable, all-ages storytime that encourages the development of prereading skills through songs, rhymes, fingerplays and stories. First come, first served. Childrens Programs March Madness: Cats vs. Dogs March 1 31 Available during normal library operating hours: Monday, Wednesday, Thursday: 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Tuesday: Noon to 8 p.m.; Friday, Saturday: 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Vote for your favorite cat and dog characters. Stop by the Youth Service Reference desk each week for a new ballot and even make a guess on who will win: cats or dogs? You will have a barking good time helping choose the purrfect winners. Toddler-Preschool Movement and Stretch 10:30 a.m., Thursday, March 1 For ages 2-5. Caregivers help their toddlers and preschoolers learn about movement, stretching and mindfulness in this unique class designed just for them. Please wear comfortable clothing. Sponsored by the Friends of the Northwest Regional Library. Registration begins Feb. 8. Kids Read Down Fines 10 a.m. to noon, Saturdays, March 3, 17, 31 5 7 p.m.n Tuesdays, March 6, 20 Children and teens can earn a $2 credit for every 15 minutes they read in the designated area for a total of $8 in one session. Credit may be applied to cards issued to patrons age 18 and under only and applies only to charges on overdue materials. Please bring your library card. Stuffed Animal Sleepover 5 p.m., Tuesday, March 6 What happens when the library lights go out? Northwest Library is inviting all stuffed animals (and their humans) to a Stuffed Animal Sleepover. Bring a second favorite stuffed animal, listen to a story, and tuck in stuffy for the night at the library. Return the following day to pick them up and see what mischief ensued while you were away. Registration begins Feb. 6. All ages welcome. A Reading Celebration 10:30 a.m., Thursday, March 8 For children ages 2-5.Come and celebrate the love of reading with us. Seuss inspired game and activity stations will be available for children to enjoy with their caregivers. Sponsored by the Friends of the Northwest Regional Library. Kindness Club 4 p.m., Tuesday, March 13 Join us at the library to create kindness in our community. Kids can participate in fun activities designed to encourage kindness and help make the world a better place/ For grades K-5. Sponsored by the Friends of Northwest Regional Library. Registration begins Feb. 13. Lego Club 2 p.m., Saturday, March 17 Join us for a short story and Lego building activities. Legos provided for use during this program. STEAM Club: Gadgets and Gizmos 4:30 p.m., Tuesday, March 20 For children in grades K-5.Come and Join us for fun experiments and projects as we explore the world of STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Math.) Please dress appropriately for the creative process (dress for mess). Registration is required. Sponsored by the Friends of the Northwest Regional Library. Teen Programs Kids Read Down Fines 10 a.m. to noon, Saturdays, March 3, 17, 31 5-7 p.m., Tuesdays, March 6, 20 Children and teens can earn a $2 credit for every 15 minutes they read in the designated area for a total of $8 in one session. Credit may be applied to cards issued to patrons age 18 and under only and applies only to charges on overdue materials. Please bring your library card. Teen Tech Week: Libraries are for Creating March 5 9 Available during normal library operating hours: Monday, Wednesday, Thursday: 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Tuesday: Noon to 8 p.m.; Friday, Saturday: 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Drop by the Teen Zone and try out all of our gadgets, gizmos and resources through hands-on discovery, learning and creating. TAG Teen Advisory Group 4:15 p.m., Wednesday, March 7 For students in grades 6-12. Join us for fun, friends, food and some worthwhile community service. Teen on the Table Craft: DIY Beverage Coasters March 12 16 Available during normal library operating hours: Monday, Wednesday, Thursday: 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Tuesday: Noon to 8 p.m.; Friday, Saturday: 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Design and personalize your own beverage coaster. Use it to decorate your room and keep your furniture dry. The Northwest Regional Library is located at 519 Chiquita Blvd., N., in Cape Coral. For more information about a program or to register, please call the library at 239-533-4700. Check the Lee County Library Systems website at www.leelibrary.net to find out about programs at other locations. Call the host library, or Telephone Reference at 239-479-INFO (4636), for more information about a specific program. Come celebrate the 10th anniversary event of women who gather for a womens retreat entitled The Woman God Sees Saturday, March 17, at the Cape Coral First United Methodist Church at 4018 Coronado Parkway in Cape Coral, from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Women of any age, faith or any level of their faith journey are invited and welcomed to join the group to hear inspirational speakers Kayla Englehart and Kristin Coke. As early Christian education leaders, they will discuss their personal perspectives in meeting todays challenges of family, community and church life, as well as the significant impact that faith and God has in their lives. Other activities will include group discussions and sharing, music, a continental breakfast, lunch and guest gift bags all for the registration fee of $20 per person. Please note: free child care will be provided. For registration information, please contact Linda Udy at 586-871-3239. Registration deadline is March 12. This event is hosted by the United Methodist Women of the CCFUM and the proceeds from this event will benefit their work in missions. An Amber Alert has been issued for an 8-year-old girl police say was abducted from Oasis Elementary School by a man claiming to be her father. The Cape Coral Police Department issued the alert for Juliet Odierna after being notified of the on-campus abduction at 12:30 p.m. Thursday. According to the CCPD, Juliets father, Robert Odierna, has full custody of child, adding her mother, Jennifer R. Moschovas, has court-ordered supervised visitation only. Jennifers new husband Theodore Moschovas showed up at Oasis Elementary and falsely identified himself as Robert Odierna, bringing lunch. Moschovas then left the school with Juliet, a release from the CCPD states, adding Moschovas previously took Juliet and fled to Massachusetts. The abduction was discovered when Robert Odierna showed up to pick up Juliet only to learn that she had already been picked up. According to police, Theodore Moschovas the only person seen to have taken Juliet and the two may be in the company of the childs mother. Theodore and/or Jennifer Moschovas may be traveling in one of the following possible vehicles, police said: a white pickup truck (unknown make/model at this time) or a black Hyundai Accent (newer model) 4-door bearing temp tag CBN9123, police said. Anyone with information on their whereabouts is asked to contact the Cape Coral Police Department at (239) 574-3223 or 911. Do you ever wonder how the police get so much done? With a large team of volunteers backing up its world-class local law enforcement agency, its no wonder Cape Coral is the second safest city in Florida. Thats why Cape Coral police celebrate their appreciation for all their volunteers hard work. On Wednesday, the Cape Coral Police Department honored its Police Volunteer Unit with its annual Volunteer Appreciation Luncheon. The award ceremony took place at the Cape Coral Yacht Club, where the venue was packed with local law enforcement, volunteers, and public officials, who enjoyed catering provided by Mission Barbecue. Cape Coral Police Chief David Newlan expressed gratitude for the volunteers during the event. I want all volunteers to know how much they are appreciated. There are so many things they do for us on a daily basis; parking enforcement, fingerprints. I think it goes without saying how very much they are appreciated. This is just a small gesture of our gratefulness. The PVU makes up part of the CCPDs special operations bureau, which is comprised of teams of diverse units carrying out unique roles in law enforcement. We love to have the volunteer program. They are an integral part of our agency. They pick up a lot of the work load, directing traffic, doing house checks, distributing DNA kits, and so much more. We wouldnt do as well as we do without them, said CCPD Deputy Police Chief Lisa Barnes on the PVU. The PVU makes up 2 percent of our total operation budget, said Lt. Dana Coston with Public Affairs. The program donates an excess of $1 million per year in in-kind services. he PVU completed 52,992 volunteer last year, saving an estimated $1,279,266.88 in payroll, according to a report by CCPD. We are saving the taxpayers money, said Jerry Monroe, the PVUs volunteer coordinator who has served on the unit for nine years. Captain Mike Torregrossa of the CCPD addressed the crowd during a speech on the work ethic at the department. I have to remind myself constantly, that these guys arent getting paid. The amount of effort, not just the workload, but the effort and conscientiousness they bring forth. If I could, they would be officer of the year every year. I cant think of anything difficult about my job, Monroe said. Another volunteer chimed in, Dealing with us, obviously. The table of volunteers all broke out laughing. The PVU is like a family of public servants, who have their own inside jokes, and make the most out of volunteering. The work is very rewarding. Theres no two ways about it. We give back to the community to fulfill a need, to relieve the officers so they can chase the bad guys, said Monroe. Anyone can apply to become a police officer volunteer, as long as theyre a legal adult and can pass an extensive background test. In order to volunteer, you must go through a free 40-hour training program. But is volunteering for the PVU for anyone? You have to understand and know how to deal with the public, Monroe explained. You have to be willing to deal with different kinds of people, because you get your fair share of those who push back against authority. You need to take it with a grain of salt, and you cant have a hot temper. The PVU doesnt arrest people, make traffic stops, nor do they issue traffic tickets. They do, however, issue ordinance violations, handicap parking violations, assisting police on crash scenes, and conducting road and marine patrol. Rich Servello, the manager of PVUs Marine Patrol, has volunteered for the PVU for 12 years, and coordinates volunteers who work out on the water. The Marine Patrol not only help in keeping our waters safe, but they assist in keeping it clean as well. We dont stop boats, and we dont have sirens. But we do try to slow down speeders. And if we find debris out in the water, well clean it up. If its too big, well throw it in the boat ramp and call Citizens Action to pick it up, said Servello. Citizens Action is an organized group of concerned citizens that works with the city in addressing community issues, and can be contacted by dialing 311 in Cape Coral. Steve Pasquale is a retired officer with New York State, and has volunteered for the PVU for three years. The most memorable experience volunteering was Hurricane Irma. So many people were frustrated, and all they wanted was information. We would direct them wherever they needed to get it. Hurricane Irma is remembered as a pivotal moment in Southwest Florida, as the community came together, depending highly on volunteers and public service. This is a fantastic program; I wish we could do more for these people than this. I run into these people all the time, and they do a great job, said Cape Coral City Councilmember Rick Williams who attended the luncheon. The award recipients were presented awards by Corporal Phil Mullen, Deputy Chief Barnes, and Police Chief Newlan, who honored volunteers having served from five to 20 years, service recognition awards, and the volunteer of the year. Salvatore Recca, who was awarded for 20 years service recognition with the PVU, also said his goodbyes to the department, as he announced his retirement at the ceremony. Jeffrey Owens was chosen as the PVU volunteer of the year. Owens joined the volunteer unit in 2016, and since then, hes volunteered almost every detail including road patrol, the city hall lobby, kiddie prints, and traffic watch detail. Owens volunteered during Hurricane Irma, working as a police volunteer and was in charge of the shelter at Island High School. The program is ideal for all ages, and those that have free time and want to give back to the community. There is a current need for volunteers during weekends and evenings, and you can choose your own hours. If you have some time, and an interest in both giving back to your community and becoming part of Cape Corals enforcement agency, contact the PVU at (239) 242-3346. To the editor: The horrifying shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland on Feb. 14 has brought home to us all the vulnerability of our children to gun violence. Cape Coral is no exception. I started running for Congress in Southwest Florida long before this incident but the Parkland attack increases the urgency of breaking the deadlock in Congress on gun violence. I support the Second Amendment and know that the vast majority of gun owners are responsible, law-abiding citizens. That said, we absolutely can, and must, take common sense measures to reduce gun violence. Many of these measures are obvious and very specific: universal, vigorous background checks for all gun purchases; limiting civilian access to military weapons such as explosives, assault rifles, armor-piercing munitions, high-capacity magazines, and bump stocks that easily create mass-killing automatic weapons. Then there are broader measures that must be taken: we need better funded and equipped mental health programs and access to high-quality healthcare for all, especially our most vulnerable populations. We also need to reduce the unprecedented level of corruption that dark money and unscrupulous politicians have brought into our government. And we need federal support for protection of our schools and students. All of this simply makes sense. It will work for Cape Coral, Southwest Florida and America as a whole. David Holden, Democratic candidate the 19th Congressional District To the editor: Once a proud and respected profession, journalists have all but disappeared from the American landscape. Reporting actual events has morphed into reporter exaggerations, political preferences, and absolute lies all of which have served to destroy the value of the media business. Main Stream Media management people, in an attempt to justify circulation deterioration and viewer losses are quick to point fingers, Hillary style, in any direction away from themselves. Instead of correcting the problem, restoring trust, and rebuilding their business, they have chosen to play the blame game and, as a result, suffer losses along the way. Certainly a silly and immature business decision that can only lead to further erosion of their properties. Those properties being mismanaged by pompous and arrogant idiots are in a death spiral that can and will end in total destruction. As viewers and subscribers are reduced, advertisers, the principle supporters of all media operations, are beginning to realize that they no longer are getting the appropriate bang for their buck. The simple principle that all intelligent advertisers live by is: Its not the cost of the advertising that matters. Matching dollars spent against returns is the ONLY way to measure real cost. Unless media management people wise up, quickly, stop the fake news and the opinionated, politically motivated garbage, and rein in the purveyors of editorial crap, the future is bleak and will continue to produce dismal results. Americans are not stupid they want the facts and nothing less! Stop the silly attacks on President Trump, begin the appropriate applause, for all thats been done to make America great again, focus on unity and the issues and everyone will benefit. Dick Kalfus Cape Coral A Cape Coral girl abducted from Oasis Elementary School Thursday by her step-father has been found safe and sound. Eight-year-old-old Juliet Odierna was located by law enforcement in Alabama at 2 a.m. Friday, the Cape Coral Police Department reports. She was found with Theodore and Jennifer Moschovas, her step-father and her mother, who does not have custody of Juliet. The Moschovas are in police custody; Juliet is being placed temporarily in foster care until her father arrives to retrieve her, the release from the CCPD states. An Amber Alert for Juliet was issued Thursday after the CCPD notified of the on-campus abduction at 12:30 p.m. According to the CCPD, Juliets father, Robert Odierna, has full custody of child, her mother has court-ordered supervised visitation only. Theodore Moschovas, who police say is Jennifers new husband, showed up at Oasis Elementary and falsely identified himself as Robert Odierna, bringing lunch. Moschovas then left the school with Juliet, a release from the CCPD states, adding Moschovas previously took Juliet and fled to Massachusetts. The abduction was discovered when Robert Odierna showed up to pick up Juliet only to learn that she had already been picked up. CCPD officials credit Juliets fast recovery to both its investigative personnel and inter-agency efforts I simply cannot overstate how extremely proud of I am of all of you. The work you displayed yesterday into the overnight was awesome, said Captain Tony Sizemore of the CCPD Investigative Services Bureau in a statement to those who worked to locate Juliet quickly. I had the privilege of observing you all in action and I continue to be impressed. If the stakes werent so high, and real lives werent at stakeyou would be far more entertaining to watch than any tv cop show. But it is real life, and real victims being saved. Your composure, professionalism, teamwork and consistent results are something to behold. Take a moment to think about what youve accomplished. An 8-year-old child was abducted from a school and driven through three states and you were responsible for her safe rescue in roughly 12 hours. Thank you for ALL that you do. Im humbled and honored to work alongside all of you. The CCPD also thanked all of the agencies involved in working to locate Juliet after the Amber Alert was issued. The Cape Coral Police Department would like to thank the multitude of law enforcement agencies across the southeastern United States that assisted in this case, but especially our partners at the Florida Department of Law Enforcement who had boots on the ground with us from the very beginning, CCPD spokesperson Lieutenant Dana Coston said. We would also like to take the time to recognize and thank the citizens for their amazing response. Tips began flooding in within minutes of the AMBER Alert and our news release being issued. Juliets story was shared on social media thousands of times, keeping her face, and those of her abductors, in the spotlight. Oasis Elementary is part of the city of Cape Corals municipal charter school system. Jacquelin Collins, system Superintendent, issued a statement to parents Thursday. School personnel will adhere to existing policy that requires identification from all visitors and new procedures will be implemented, she said. The statement reads: Dear Parents and Guardians, Due to the incident that occurred today, involving an elementary student who was escorted off campus by a non-custodial parent, the following additional security measures will be implemented immediately: Self service sign-in will not be available. All check in will be through the receptionist. In accordance with classroom building protocol for entry, any person, volunteer, or visitor will be asked for a drivers license or a state ID to enter the administration building. Parents will no longer be allowed to eat lunch with their child. Birthday party treats can be dropped off in the front office and the teacher will distribute to class at a designated time. If you wish to discuss this further please contact the Superintendents office. Remember we are Four Schools One Vision. Thank you for your patience and understanding! Sincerely, Jacquelin Collins Superintendent The Cape Coral Police Department reported this afternoon that charges have now also been filed against Jennifer Moschovas for the abduction of Juliet Odierna, after the previous arrest of her husband Theodore Moschovas. After the issuance of an AMBER Alert and cooperation through the night between Cape Coral police and several law enforcement agencies, Theodore and Jennifer Moschovas, along with Juliet Odierna, were located by police in Eufaula, Alabama, at approximately 2 a.m., today, Feb. 23. Eufaula officers conducted interviews, as did Cape Coral Police detectives via telephone. Theodore Moschovas was placed under arrest by Eufaula police based on the probable cause outlined in the Cape Coral Police Department warrant request. Jennifer Moschovas was interviewed and released from the scene, as there was not yet enough probable cause to charge her with the crime. Detectives continued to work the case toward its conclusion, culminating in an arrest warrant for Jennifer. Eufaula (Alabama) Police re-located her at her hotel in Eufaula and placed her under arrest on the Cape Coral Police Department warrant. Jennifer was charged with Interference with Custody FSS 787.03(1), a 3rd degree felony. Source: Cape Coral Police Department Is it no wonder that ICBC has financial problems. Just drive down any road, or highway, in this province and the answer to ICBCs problems is obvious. Just about everyday, the Coquihalla is shut down due to an accident. I recently drove over the Coquihalla, which was covered in compact snow and ice, and was passed by a steady stream of vehicles doing well over the speed limit. Today as I was driving around town doing my errands on the icy compact roads, I had impatient people right on my bumper. When one drives the speed limit on our highways, it doesnt take long to realize you are the only one doing the speed limit. Virtually no one stops at stop signs. Seems people no longer know what turn signals are for, or how to use them. People pass on double solid lines and race to beat the yellow light turning red. People give you dirty looks when you slow down for school zones, or stop for a pedestrian at a marked crossing. Daily you see people texting and hitting the gravel shoulder on the highway, but continue to text, seriously people! What dont you get? You are the problem! Why do you think the laws dont apply to you? Society no longer takes responsibility for its actions and the corresponding outcome. I find it so pathetic that most people think they are good drivers. Its so easy to blame the government for ICBC s problems, but the reality is, it all starts with each of us. Cindy Nixdorf I read your letter's to the editor almost every day, one letter kind of caught my eye in particular. It was written by Roger Von Dach. And was about the idea of "A new government". After reading his letter it struck me that we as Canadians are so complacent with the status quo that we often respond to what's the use wanting to change the way we are governed because we can't change it anyway. There lies the problem, we as Canadians have allowed our politicians to take control our lives. Due to our ignorance and reluctance to demand change from the people we put into office, we have the status quo. We have politicians that ignore us, take us for granted, even go as far as misrepresenting the truths about their political intentions. These politicians, feel that they are above the law in that they can't be prosecuted for any violation of the common laws of Canada in that any regular Canadian Citizen would be charged, and if found guilty would be jailed, fined. or both. Our political leader's and political parties should be forced to sign a binding agreement or citizen contract that if they fail to perform to the people's ethics in totality, during the performance of their duties, regardless of their party affiliation or position that they hold and this contract is governed by a third party with no ties to any government interference. It is managed by a group of random citizens voted into this role from across the country. As for the senate, this is a total waste of resources, time and performs no useful results for the citizens of Canada. It is used by all political parties as their escape goats, in order to deflect the reality of our politicians, misuse of their decisions on behalf of Canadians. I agree that unless we as Canadians, start to really take interest in what our government of the day is doing day to day on our behalf. Our children's future will be in peril, our children's future depends on what we older citizen's do. If we do nothing now, our kids will never own a home, will not have a full time job, will not have medical coverage. will be able to provide food on the table, need I go on? I agree with Mr. Von Dach, we need a "new way to govern" and I'm willing to start now. Wayne Barron Chantelle Deacon Millions of people battle anxiety, and a large portion of them are youth and young adults. A local businesswoman has watched her Grade 6 daughter battle anxiety for years, so she's helped bring a film called Angst to the Vernon Town Cinema. "I had a signal from the universe and I knew I have to bring this here," said Lisa Gallie, owner of Big Sun Beachwear and Tanning. "That's my job in my community, it's something I can give back for people to see it's not weird, everyone has anxiety in different ways. "When kids are affected in a way that they can't manage we do have help right here in our community that is life-changing." Angst is a 56-minute film and virtual reality experience that explores anxiety, its causes, effects and what people suffering from anxiety can do for help. Ann Case says the film has the ability to change lives. "It's real kids being really open and honest about what they're going through," Case said. "After I watched it, I thought to myself, they should show that in all the high schools." If you think your child might suffer from anxiety, Case who is a counsellor with North Okanagan Youth & Family Services Society says counsellors are available at every school throughout Vernon. There will be a short Q & A following the movie and healthcare professionals will be available to provide more information. The film hits the screen at the Vernon Towne Cinema on Wednesday, Feb. 28 at 7 p.m. Tickets are available at Angstmovie.com or in person at Big Sun Beachwear and Tanning. Case says that there are a lot of local rescouces available for teens navigating the struggle with anxiety. Photo: The Canadian Press B.C. Premier John Horgan UPDATE: 4:15 p.m. The Alberta government has accepted an olive branch from British Columbia and is suspending its ban on the province's wine in an ongoing dispute over the Trans Mountain pipeline. Alberta Premier Rachel Notley took the step after B.C.'s John Horgan said his government will ask the courts if it has the right to protect its environment by restricting diluted bitumen in the pipeline. In the meantime, Premier John Horgan says the province will not proceed with proposed regulatory restrictions on the increase of diluted bitumen transportation through the province. Horgan says his government is filing a constitutional reference case on the issue, which has been at the centre of the heated dispute between B.C. and Alberta. He says the federal government declined an invitation to join the province in the reference question. Horgan denies the province is backing down in the dispute, saying the intention is to have cooler heads prevail. ORIGINAL: 3:15 p.m. The British Columbia government will ask the courts if it has the right to protect its environment by restricting diluted bitumen in the Trans Mountain pipeline. Premier John Horgan says his government is filing a constitutional reference case on the issue, which has been at the centre of a heated dispute between B.C. and Alberta. He says the federal government declined an invitation to join the province in the reference question. Horgan denied that the province was backing down in the dispute, saying the intention is to have cooler heads prevail. He says he wants B.C. and Alberta to be good neighbours, but the rest of Canada needs to know how strongly British Columbia feels about protecting its coastline. Alberta Premier Rachel Notley recently imposed a ban on B.C. wine in retaliation for a pledge last month by Horgan to reject increased levels of oil through the Trans Mountain pipeline until the province reviews spill safety measures. The B.C. New Democrat government is against expansion of the Kinder Morgan Canada pipeline from Edmonton to Burnaby, although it has already been approved by the federal government. Alberta sees Horgan's actions as an illegal way to kill the expansion. Notley and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau have made it clear that only Ottawa, not the provinces, has the authority to decide what goes in trans-boundary pipelines. Federal officials have been meeting with their B.C. counterparts to find a solution to the impasse. Notley, who has also scuttled talks to buy B.C. electricity, says she will take further retaliatory action if there is no progress in the talks. Horgan said his efforts to safeguard B.C.'s interests have generated a disproportionate reaction from Alberta. "The actions by the Alberta government threaten an entire industry and the livelihoods of people who depend on it," he said. "We have taken steps to protect our wine industry from the unwarranted trade action by the government of Alberta." Photo: Castanet Staff The co-accused in back-to-back truck thefts last summer was handed a 16-month jail sentence in Penticton court on Thursday. Michael Carlston was one of two men involved in a string of vehicle thefts on Aug 2. The 40-year-old Carlston was first arrested after trying to steal an ATV on Hudson Street. After fleeing in a stolen Ford F-350, he was eventually apprehended by police, but was released on a promise to appear. He was also under surveillance by the targeted enforcement unit. Nonetheless, just hours after being released, Carlston and his co-accused stole a Chevrolet pickup truck on Brandon Avenue. They were arrested a short time later on Taggart Crescent off of Highway 3A, and Carlston has remained in custody since then. He pleaded guilty on Thursday for theft of a motor vehicle and driving while prohibited. "I've gone through some issues in my life, a lot of drug use ... I realize I'm not young anymore and I can't keep living like this," Carlston told the courtroom, appearing by video from the Okanagan Correctional Centre. "I found myself in a city where I'm not from. The police seized my phone, I had no money ... I felt like I had no other option. I can't say that's an excuse because it's not, and I'm sorry for what I did." Defence lawyer Jordan Watt requested a 12-month sentence for his client. He explained Carlston's difficult upbringing on a First Nations reserve in Manitoba where he didn't know his father and was subject to constant abuse from his mother's boyfriends. Watt also noted the stolen vehicles were recovered intact and there was no dangerous driving involved. Crown prosecutor Nashina Devji asked for 21 months total, pointing out Carlston's lengthy criminal record which includes 17 convictions for possession of stolen property and eight driving prohibitions. Judge Robin Smith sentenced Carlston to 16 months in jail, minus 208 days of enhanced credit for time served. He also imposed a three-year driving prohibition. Smith acknowledged the accused's deeply-entrenched drug addiction of 25 years, but pointed out his 20-plus year criminal record loomed large in his decision. "He's an intelligent man, I've listened to him make corrections two or three times today, and every time he's been absolutely bang on," Smith said. "He's an intelligent person, he can do better than this... I have no doubts he's at a good point in his life to try to turn it around and do better." Photo: Okanagan College "The overdose crisis how did we get here? That question is on the mind's of many people these days. There were more than 1,400 deaths related to illicit drug use in B.C. in 2017, a dramatic jump from the 993 in the previous year. Addiction, especially opioid addiction, doesnt have a one-size-fits-all approach. Most chronic diseases dont, said Cheyenne Johnson. Johnson is the director of clinical activities and development at the British Columbia Center on Substance Use and the Canadian Research Initiative in Substance Misuse. Johnson will be speaking at the Okanagan College Kalamalka Campus in Vernon on March 9. The talk is open to the public and is part of the Science in Society Speaker Series. Johnson will share her views on stigma, science and social policy in Beyond opioids: the overdose crisis how did we get here? Harm reduction is the foundation of all substance-use care," stated Johnson. "It is the lens through which we provide programs, policies and services, such as needle distribution, safe consumption sites, overdose prevention and education. A renowned researcher in the field of substance use, Johnson will share her perspective on the challenges of dealing with one of the worst public health crisis in the provinces history. The discussion will provide a broad overview of the current overdose crisis and will also focus on the key gaps in improving the substance use system of care in B.C. Admission to the lecture is $7 in advance or $10 at the door. For advanced tickets call the Okanagan Science Centre at 250-545-3644 or go to okanagansisss.wordpress.com. If it seems like you've been seeing more car crashes so far in 2018, you may be right. ICBC has provided some numbers reflecting call volume for the Southern Interior of British Columbia. There were 5,727 calls in January 2018, up 6.5 per cent from January 2017, when there were 5,355 calls. In December 2017, there were 4,655 calls to the provincial insurance agency, while in the same month the year prior there were 5,400 calls, a 16 per cent drop. However, not all of those calls represent individual claims. ICBC is expected to post a $1.3 billion loss and there is a chance premiums could go up to cover that loss. Earlier this year, the NDP government capped injury claims in an effort to rein in rising costs. Alanna Kelly A Kelowna resident is advising people living near Academy Way to be aware of some four-legged neighbours frequently wandering around nearby. Larry Wright said he has spotted as many as four coyotes in one day near Vint Road and Academy Way. "If anybody has small children or pets I wouldn't leave them alone in the backyard at dusk or early morning," he said. Wright says he sees them all the time. "They've been living in this area long before the road was there, so they know where their hunting ground is," he said. Chantelle Deacon It seems a goose thought a duck was a stepping stone at Polson Park in Vernon Wednesday afternoon. A short video made its way to the Vernon Rant and Rave Facebook page causing a stir... of laughter. The video was captioned "Rave to the following ducks. Rant to that goose that totally took out that duck." "I was walking home [from school] and I like to stare at the ducks as they pass by because I like ducks and then they started following me all the way from the pond," said Cali Teneycke who filmed the ordeal. A swarm of ducks were parading down a pathway when a goose b-lines its way over a duck, but it doesn't seem to phase the duck too much. If you have ever laid a foot in Polson Park then you know it's a duck and geese breeding zone. Chelsea Powrie An after-school computer science program celebrated national Digital Learning day Thursday with a group of pre-teen coders. Kids aged 8-12 meet biweekly at the Penticton Library for free programming and hands-on electronics workshops during the "Hour of Code." "We previously had programs at the library for tweens and they weren't taking off like we wanted to," said Lara Harker, program organizer. "We wanted to expand and offer programming that supports what schools are doing in the direction of STEAM science, technology, engineering, arts and math." For Digital Learning Day, which is observed in locations countrywide, Harker decided to teach the kids some code using a Minecraft game. Instead of being able to control the characters with their mouse or arrow keys, the kids needed to use simple coding blocks to build their moves. "For a lot of our patrons, they don't necessarily have access to these technologies anywhere else, so we want to provide that opportunity to learn," Harker said. "It's just a really good transferable skill. If you know how to code, it's not just the coding, it's the aspect of problem solving as well." The Digital Learning Day event was Grade 5 student Sawyer Fader's first time coding, and he thought it was "really cool." He hopes to use the skills he learned in the future. "If you wanted to code a robot to learn around, you'd need to know how to code," Fader said. His mother, Julie Fortin, said the program was giving her son valuable insight into how technology work. "It's just a great program, it's an asset to have in our town," Fortin said. Harker said the teaching has gone both ways in her experience with the program. "I have learned so much putting these programs on and I always get excited when the kids walk in the door, because they're always excited, so it's great to be working with them and learning from them," Harker said. For more information on the ongoing after school programming club, visit the Penticton Library website here. Photo: Wikimedia Commons Greyhound's plan to slash bus routes around B.C. was made official Wednesday, and mayors of the two largest Similkameen communities are disappointed. Among the bus company's cuts are its route from Osoyoos to Vancouver, which will eliminate service to Keremeos, Hedley, Princeton, Eastgate and Manning Park on May 31. The decision was approved by the province's Passenger Transportation Board. "We're disappointed that the (PTB) obviously did not listen to all the letters that were sent throughout the region," said Manfred Bauer, Keremeos mayor and vice-chair of the Regional District Okanagan Similkameen. "In the Similkameen, we're left with absolutely no way of reaching the Lower Mainland via public transportation." Bauer also said a lack of direct communication from decision makers was disappointing which continued when the bus cuts announcement was made on Wednesday. "They did not contact us, they did not consult us... I heard about it through the news just like anybody else." Princeton Mayor Frank Armitage made a motion months ago that the provincial government needed to get involved in fighting Greyhound's proposed cuts. He was equally discouraged the Similkameen route couldn't be salvaged, and said he's displeased by a lack of leadership through the process from the provincial government. "What bothers me, quite honestly... is where do we go from here now? Who contacts who? Let's get organized and do it... We're not going to let this die quietly, it's too important to our region." The Ministry of Transportation told Castanet in December it has mulled the possibility of funding a private company to provide a rural bus service indicating, however, that they wouldn't decide anything until after the PTB's decision. Transportation Minister Claire Trevena said in a news release the bus cuts are "unfortunate." She said she plans to meet soon with local governments and other people who will be affected "to ensure continued bus service remains in place for those who depend on it." Bauer said a letter has already been sent to Trevena to rehash the urgent need to come up with a bus service plan. He added he'll be meeting with Boundary-Similkameen MLA Linda Larson on Friday with the goal of furthering the need for urgent action. Police have arrested a 24-year-old Signal Mountain man after a woman found a man in her downtown condo. Clay Walker Henley, of 2637 Laurel Creek Dr., was charged with aggravated burglary. In the incident that happened Dec. 13 shortly after 5 a.m., police responded to Lovemans on Market at 800 Market. The resident said she had seen a white male in her house. She said she heard noises from outside of her bedroom and thought it was possibly the newspaper being delivered. She said she went to check and, when returning from her front entrance to her bedroom, she noticed a man standing by the sliding door leading to her patio area. She said she grabbed a glass vase near her, screamed and yelled at the intruder to get out of her house. The woman said the man, who was wearing pants and a windbreaker, looked confused and did not act aggressively toward her. She said she again yelled at him to leave. After retrieving her cell phone from the bedroom, she said she searched her house but did not find anything. Some neighbors came over and also helped search, but did not locate anyone. Police also searched and did not find an intruder. Police noticed that the fire exit leading to the rooftop was unsecured from both sides. The woman said it should be locked coming in from the stairwell. Police advised the woman to alert property management to keep the fire stairwell locked. Police at a later date were notified by the woman, who said she had hired private investigator Kim Gavin. She said, through surveillance video, she and the investigator were able to identify Henley as the intruder. This year marks 30 years of service to the community by Hamilton County Emergency Medical Services (HCEMS). HCEMS was established under the administration of then County Executive Dalton Roberts in February 1988 to provide emergency medical care to citizens of Hamilton County. The service began with two ambulances and 17 employees providing coverage for the East and West sides of the County. In its first month as a service, HCEMS responded to 87 requests and transported 73 patients to the local medical facilities. Only one month later, HCEMS added three additional ambulances. With a total of five ambulances by December 1988 the service answered over 2,300 emergency calls in Hamilton County. HCEMS now operates 14 ambulances strategically placed throughout Hamilton County and employees 120 licensed paramedics and advanced EMTs. As the 9-1-1 provider for Hamilton County HCEMS responded to over 38,000 requests for medical services and emergency transportation to local hospitals in 2017. Over the years HCEMS has established and continues to maintain various divisions within the service including Training, Logistics, Tactical Medicine, Customer Service, Community EMS Education, and Special Events coverage for special events in Hamilton County such as Riverbend and Ironman Competitions among other community activities. Over the last four years, HCEMS has shown its support of the community by donating over $11,000 from its Annual Pink T-shirt Campaign, a fundraising effort to bring breast cancer awareness to the forefront in the area. HCEMS participates in National EMS Week by hosting a three-day celebration for all local EMS agencies, First Responders and their families. HCEMS Director Ken Wilkerson said, It has been exciting for me to see the 30 years of dedication and growth of HCEMS, its staff and employees. Our county leaders originally saw a need for EMS and made the decision to provide coverage for all Hamilton County citizens, a decision that is still supported by Mayor Coppinger and the current County leadership. Our dedicated employees continue to provide excellent pre-hospital, emergency care and live up to our service motto of Setting the Standard of Care. I am very proud to be a part of this service and its accomplishments over the years and look forward to future developments in our efforts to serve the people in our area with quality emergency medical care. Access Champions League trophy defence off to winning start, Lukaku bags again | Unseen Extra Romelu Lukaku's fourth of the season, and Chelsea's solitary goal on the night, was enough to secure a winning start to the Blues' European title defence against Zenit St Petersburg at Stamford Bridge. Take a closer look at another memorable European night at the Bridge, exclusively here... The GaAs nanocrystal has been deposited on top of a silicon germanium needle, as shown by this SEM-image. The rhombic facets have been colored artificially. A team at the HZB has succeeded in growing nanocrystals of gallium arsenide on tiny columns of silicon and germanium. This enables extremely efficient optoelectronic components for important frequency ranges to be realised on silicon chips. Gallium arsenide semiconductors have better optoelectronic properties compared to silicon. Those properties can be controlled and altered by specific nanostructures. Dr. Sebastian Schmitt, Prof. Silke Christiansen and their collaborators have succeeded to obtain such a nanostructure on a silicon wafer covered with a thin, surprisingly crystalline layer of germanium. Colleagues from Australia had produced the high-quality wafer and sent it to HZB. The thin film of germanium facilitates the growth of gallium arsenide crystals because the lattice constants of germanium and gallium arsenide are almost identical. They etched deep trenches in these wafers at intervals of a few micrometers until only a series of fine silicon columns topped with germanium remained on the substrate. Gallium arsenide was then deposited using metal organic vapor phase epitaxy (MOVPE). In this way, both gallium and arsenic atoms were systematically deposited on each germanium-capped silicon tower, forming a tiny, almost-perfect crystal. The germanium acts like a crystallisation nucleus, explains Schmitt who is the author of the study published in Advanced Optical Materials. The nano-architecture looks spectacular under the electron microscope. At first glance, it seems as if you can see a cube on the tip of each silicon needle. At second glance, it becomes apparent that it is actually a rhombic dodecahedron with each of the twelve surfaces an identical rhombus. This nano-structure exhibits unusually high optical emission after excitation with a laser, especially in the near-infrared region. As the GaAs crystals grow, germanium atoms also become incorporated into the crystal lattice, explains Schmitt. This incorporation of germanium leads to additional discrete energy levels for charge carriers that emit light when falling back to their original levels. The light is then amplified by means of optical resonances in the highly symmetrical nanocrystal, and the frequency of these resonances can be controlled by size and geometry of the crystals. A large number of these so-called photonic resonances could be detected in the experiment that also agree well with numerical calculations. Because the optical and electronic properties of semiconductors can be strongly modified by nanostructuring, such nano-architectures are well suited for developing novel sensors, light-emitting diodes, and solar cells, says Schmitt. Guest Commentary Fair maps for our children, for our Hispanic communities, for our futures My son will vote for the first time next year. And for his first time, the state of Indiana will have brand new legislative and congressional districts. It should feel like a clean... Voice of the People During the 13 years I have called Chesterton my home, there are few small-town activities I have come to enjoy quite like the high schools homecoming parade. It is always a beautiful moment of celebrating our students, gathering for an afternoon of fun and seeing... Voice of the People I find it hard to believe that the majority of Town employees will put their self-interest over the GREATER GOOD which is, the viability of the Town of Chesterton by not getting vaccinated. Our town tried to save money by self-insuring itself. We could be... Guest Commentary Local coalition aspires to achieve smokefree air for all More than 1 in 5 Indiana adults smoke cigarettes (21.5%), one of the highest rates in the nation, while the number of youths using vaping products remains a concern for anti-smoking advocates. Secondhand smoke is estimated... Herrera returned to the starting lineup on Wednesday in the first leg of the Champions League Round of 16 match against Sevilla, but suffered the injury in the 18th minute, and was forced off the pitch. Villarreal said Friday it was dismayed by the seriousness of the charges against Semedo and, although it respected "the presumption of innocence," it would suspend the player until the end of the legal process. The "YouTube" logo is seen on a tablet screen on December 4, 2012 in Paris. YouTube has apologized for the prominence of misleading videos about the Parkland, Fla., school shooting, which claimed that survivors featured in news report were "crisis actors" merely appearing to grieve for political gain. (Lionel Bonaventure / AFP/Getty Images) She declined to say how much the developers plan to pay for Yondorf Hall. The real estate sale will help pay for the new building with a 400-seat theater, which will replace the 299-seat Upstairs Theatre on its main campus, St. Germaine said. Steppenwolf also has theaters with 515 and 80 seats. There are many seniors in Chicago waiting to move into what would assuredly be a beautiful facility but the (Rauner) administration would rather cite outdated administrative rules then attempt to help seniors, and help communities develop, Feigenholtz said in an email Thursday. I decided to file HB 4223 as a last resort to try to protect senior housing before it is too late. "One of the reasons Walmart has acquired businesses like Jet and Bonobos is because they want to develop a premium offering that is very difficult to develop within the Walmart business," said Neil Saunders, managing director of research firm GlobalData Retail. "But it's very clear that these are separate vehicles selling higher-end brands and pushing up price points, that really goes against the fundamental tenants on which Walmart was built." About three years ago, my wife asked me, if I could do anything right now, what it would be? The answer was clear: tacos. So we looked for a spot, which would wind up being here. We opened two months after signing the lease. The antique part of the name is about all of the reclaimed, antique stuff in here. We go all over the Midwest looking for antiques, and our buddy Raun Meyn at the FoundRe builds most of our fixtures. Edible Arrangements is also involved in another federal court case in which it is accusing a Chinese retailer of shipping toxic birthday candles for use in the company's products. The Hour reports that $160,000 was spent on purchasing the candles, but it is not reported how much money was used on testing them or what the company is seeking in damages. She was sent to college but kicked out for infractions against the dress code. When she returns to Chicago, she finds herself estranged from the family, who are living in an all-white Kenwood, Hutchinson said. She leaves for Denmark, then returns to the United States after a year, to New York this time, and becomes a nurse, and in time, a respected librarian, too. Her marriage to Elmer Imes, one of the first prominent African-American physicists, vaults her into Harlems black creative class. Meanwhile, Chicago never leaves her mind for very long: Quicksand, her autobiographical first novel, tells the story of a woman who returns home to Chicago from college in the South Larsen had attended Fisk University in Nashville only to find she doesnt have the right recommendations for employment. Shes shunned by her church, and she walks to the front door of a wealthy uncle living in the Gold Coast. Once again, shes turned away. Trimble and Brown, board members of the Chicago Area Peace Corp Association, said theyre not sure why Illinois and Chicago rank so high in producing Peace Corps volunteers, but they agree that their stints were among the most memorable experiences of their lives. Peace Corps has this very true slogan: The toughest job youll ever love. And its very true, but it will also be the most fulfilling and interesting two years, potentially, of your life, said Trimble, a public relations representative for the Chicago Public Library. Service has always been important, I think, but if you want to be a more worldly aware and fulfilled person, Peace Corps will help you become that person. What we sacrifice when we fail to examine, thoroughly and honestly, why this country has one of the highest rates of death by firearm in the developed world, why mass shootings have broken out in churches and movie theaters, college campuses and a nightclub, an outdoor concert and, again and again, schools. He called me about that and I said, OK now, Mr. President, you need to understand, this is a serious crowd. Theyre not going to rally, theyre not going to cheer, thats just not who these people are, so dont take that the wrong way. Just pretend that its church, youre speaking in church. Its really interesting to have someone come from outside of CPS and really validate what the mayor and I know, what my team knows, what the students and principals who work so hard every day know is that CPS is on the rise, Jackson said during Thursdays panel. Its just another affirmation of the hard work that were doing in this city every day. In his job at the Illinois Department of Healthcare and Family Services, Janus works to help children caught up in their parents' divorce. To keep that job, he's had to pay thousands of dollars in fees to one of the most powerful political organizations in Illinois: the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. When the boy got off the bed and started running around, Ortiz grabbed him by the arm, dragged him to the kitchen and pinned him to the floor so he could not move, Santini said. Ortiz then got a large kitchen knife and used it to slash his sons throat repeatedly while he held the boy down with his other arm, he said. As for G Herbo, Scaduto said he was observed in the rear driver-side passenger seat and officers saw him placing a handgun in the pocket directly in front of him. She said the gun was a Fabrique National loaded with rounds designed to penetrate body armor. There was one in the chamber and 30 in the magazine, she said. Sianis says his breadth of experience in criminal, securities and administrative law makes him the most qualified candidate. Fetman said her three decades of legal practice in family law and a lifetime of hard work would make her a well-rounded judge versed in the law and that she is also able to relate to people. Leeming said his depth of experience in criminal law puts him head and shoulders above the other candidates and would provide much-needed perspective at the Leighton Criminal Court Building home to many judges who are former prosecutors where he believes he would likely end up. Kolodziejcz, who lived in the 6900 block of West Belmont Avenue, was pronounced dead on the scene at 2:46 a.m. on Jan. 1 where the car rested on an angle with its passenger door open in front of a fence topped with barbed wire, police and the Cook County medical examiners office said. Area Central Detective Cmdr. Brendan Deenihan said Ortiz became "very frustrated that he could not sleep while he was at home with the boy. The 2-year-old baby was running around and was keeping him awake. (Ortiz) grabs the 2-year-old in the kitchen and holds him down, (Ortiz) then retrieves a knife, cuts the baby in the throat, causing his death. All documents reflecting any orders, directives, instructions, or guidance to your law enforcement employees (including, but not limited to, police officers, correctional officers, and contract employees), whether formal or informal, that were distributed, produced, and/or in effect during the relevant timeframe, regarding whether and how these employees may, or may not, communicate with the Department of Justice, the Department of Homeland Security, and/or Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or their agents, whether directly or indirectly, the letter stated. One was addressed to Johnson and one to Preckwinkle. As Anderson chastised her son for clowning around in his class, she said the stranger sitting on the opposite end of the bench lashed out at her without provocation. He said Shut the (expletive) up, you black b---h! Im tired of hearing your mouth, Anderson recalled. In disbelief, Anderson said she asked the stranger who he was talking to, and the man said he was referring to her and her son, launching into a torrent of curses and slurs. "Now Astor Street is trying to buy the governor's mansion, $56 million deep in this campaign, trying to tell the Democratic primary voters of Illinois, that in this era of Trump and Rauner, an inexperienced billionaire is what we need," Biss said, without using Pritzker's name. One of the important things we can do in the next few weeks is to make sure not only that Chuy Garcia wins, but that he wins big, Sanders said to a crowd of several hundred people who cheered and chanted his name throughout his 30-minute speech. And that he helps bring in a slate of younger people who are running for office as well. City employees can be suspended or fired for violating the sexual harassment policy. But thats off the table for elected officials because they are officers under state law, and the Board of Ethics doesnt have the authority to suspend or remove them. If you look, and try to identify, that there are women who are qualified, and weve tried very hard to reach out and identify them, Pritzker said. He said it can be difficult to recruit from other firms because those in senior positions may be vested, where they share in the profits as part of their compensation. Trump, who has vowed to use force if necessary to prevent North Korea acquiring a nuclear-tipped missile that could strike the U.S. mainland, warned that if sanctions don't work, the U.S. would move to "phase two" in its pressure campaign against Pyongyang. He told a White House news conference that could be "very rough" and "very unfortunate for the world." He did not elaborate. The indictment handed down by a grand jury and stemming from an investigation launched by Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner alleges that Greitens took a compromising photo of a woman without her consent and transmitted the image to a computer. Greitens has admitted being unfaithful to his wife before he won election as governor but has denied criminal wrongdoing and has insisted that the affair with his former hairdresser was consensual. His attorney filed a motion to dismiss the indictment. Black entrepreneurs show us there is a way to create your own destiny, said Barber, who runs the marketing firm WDB Marketing. She began holding the gathering to spotlight and celebrate small business owners. We are job creators. We are community assets. This event is really about telling a new story, and changing perceptions. We are here and people should see us. There is no reason to think the Supreme Court would strike down any of these, much less all of them. Four federal appeals courts have upheld laws against assault weapons. Why? In accepting a ban enacted by Highland Park, Ill., the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said that by forbidding only one type of gun, the city leaves residents with many self-defense options. The justices have felt no need to disavow the decisions. Even if its impact was limited, the trolling campaign documented in the indictment is egregious for many Americans because it was conducted by foreigners and because the capacity for damage may be greater in the present internet-amplified era. But having lived through the Soviet system, I see a bigger threat than that: Limiting foreigners' ability to troll U.S. politicians, or even the political process as a whole, could be the first step toward doing the same for Americans. The next time someone rolls out a cage containing an actor impersonating a presidential candidate, it could be seen as a legitimate reason to investigate: What if the Russians (the Chinese, the North Koreans, the Iranians) are behind this? Even such an investigation would have the effect of censoring speech. 4. James Stockdale, presidential candidate Ross Perots running mate in 1992, spent part of the Vietnam War as a prisoner at the so-called Hanoi Hilton. But Stockdale wasnt just a POW he was also a spy who communicated with U.S. intelligence through one of the oldest tricks in espionage: invisible ink. His wife sent the POW a photo of a woman bathing in the ocean along with a letter saying Stockdales mother-in-law was having a good soak. The woman pictured was not his mother-in-law, who hated to swim, so he knew something was up. Stockdale soaked the photo in urine and found a message saying that his wifes letter could be used as a sort of carbon paper, allowing him to write invisible messages on his own letters back to her. Through that method, he was able to give U.S. intelligence the names of other POWs. But we see a stronger and more versatile candidate in Harold, a Harvard Law School graduate and former Miss America with constitutional law, criminal defense and policy experience. She has the drive, approachability and eloquence not only to set policy for this office but to explain its mission and exhort the people of Illinois to join it. Shed be effective speaking to young people statewide not only about the importance of the law and of integrity in government, but also about the violence they encounter and the education options that can uplift them. If you read up on that era, however, you will eventually come across this Tench Coxe quote from the very debates regarding the Second Amendment: Who are the militia? Are they not ourselves? Is it feared, then, that we shall turn our arms each man against his own bosom. Congress have no power to disarm the militia. Their swords, and every other terrible implement of the soldier, are the birthright of an American. ... The unlimited power of the sword is not in the hands of either the federal or state governments, but, where I trust in God it will ever remain, in the hands of the people. But as unfair as it would be to blame Trump for this tragedy, he tried to get ahead of it with the eagerness of a man who wanted to take the publics mind off his other embarrassments, such as, for example, ongoing investigations of Russias possible ties to his election campaign. To fully make amends, the chain even partnered with Studio@Gizmodo and Onion Labs to create a three-part podcast called "The Sauce" in which top executives admit their missteps and give fans a behind the scenes look at exactly what went wrong. The series also delves into how pop culture icon DeadMau5 ended up with a $15,000 gallon of Szechuan, which he shared with concertgoers. Eul said the red sedan was found with moderate damage to its front passenger bumper and fender several hours later in the parking lot of the Lorlyn of Batavia Apartments complex on the 1000 block of Lorlyn Circle, which is about a mile east of the Steak 'n Shake. "Observant citizens" also found a firearm police think the shooter used in a parking lot near the Steak 'n Shake, police said. Police said he created a social media post using the name of a classmate that threatened to commit a violent act against the school Friday. The classmate was unaware of his name being used and both he and his family were cooperative, police said in a post on Facebook. Whispering Meadows, located west of Route 47 and north of Cannonball Trail in Yorkville, is a subdivision started by Kimball Hill Homes before it went bankrupt. Fidelity and Deposit Co. financially insured the developer with a bond and has fought efforts to pay for completion of the infrastructure in the neighborhood. The city has done patch work as an interim solution to problems with existing roads there. Pulling out a box filled with sympathy cards and letters many from people he does not know Zanis says the support his family received has been monumental and appreciated. But every day people come to their home at the corner of Church Road and Indian Trail most from out of state requesting a cross. After his daughter's death, he placed a hand-printed sign on the door asking that they do not knock or ring as "we need to be with our family only." 4847 S. Kimbark Ave., Chicago: $3,200,000 | Listed: July 12, 2021 This six-bedroom home has five full baths, one half-bath, and an original winding carved staircase. The eat-in kitchen, which is large enough to accommodate an eight-foot table, is equipped with a Wolf range and two Bosch dishwashers. The primary bedroom suite has a gas fireplace, two walk-in closets and a spa bath with a double-sized steam shower, soaking tub, and two separate sink areas. The finished basement has a private office, a fully equipped fitness room, a game room, a theater room, a full bath, and a second laundry room. This home has a matching two-story coach house that includes three full garage stalls and a two-bedroom, one-bath apartment that can be used as an office or an in-law suite. A charming storybook playroom, landscaped grounds and a full SportCourt complete this home. Agent: Robert Sullivan, Berkshire Hathaway Home Services, 773-793-0458 *Some listing photos are virtually staged, meaning they have been digitally altered to represent different furnishing or decorating options. To feature your luxury listing of $800,000 or more in Chicago Tribunes Dream Homes, send listing information and high-res photos to ctc-realestate@chicagotribune.com. Join our Chicago Dream Homes Facebook group for more luxury listings and real estate news. The allegations that Mr. Park stole valuables worth thousands of dollars from his fellow classmates are unacceptable and will be met with the full force of the law, States Attorney Robert Berlin said in the news release. Not only did Mr. Park allegedly violate his peers personal space, he also caused an educational hardship on at least one occasion by allegedly stealing a students computer. City council candidates debate economic growth strategy, budget issues Four candidates for two at-large seats and three candidates for the District 1 seat debated public safety, economic development and road repair issues. A Hero Born, the first volume of famous Chinese martial arts novelist Jin Yong's Legends of the Condor Heroes, was on Thursday published in English for the first time. British publishing house MacLehose bought the rights to the book five years ago and commissioned the translation work to Anna Holmwood, a professional focused on Chinese-English literary translation. After years of hard work, the 400-page translation, priced at 14.99 pounds (20.8 U.S. dollars), finally hit bookstores. "I feel very excited and a little nervous also of course. It is a big moment for me personally," Holmwood told Xinhua from her home in Sweden. "If you are a fan of Lord Of The Rings and are looking for the next best thing, A Hero Born is definitely the book for you," Waterstone, one of Britain's biggest chain bookstores, said on its website. Jin Yong is the pen name of Louis Cha, 93, who now lives in Hong Kong. He is one of the best-selling Chinese authors alive with over 300 million copies of his works sold in the Chinese-speaking world. Despite their popularity, only few of Jin Yong's martial arts novels have been translated into English. The Legends of the Condor Heroes, one of his most well-known works, covers the Song Dynasty and features hundreds of characters, telling a story full of gravity-defying kung fu, treachery, loyalty and love. Holmwood, who has also translated works by other contemporary Chinese authors, said she became very involved in the details and admired Jin Yong's brilliant writing. "It is like I become captured in the world and the writing and it doesn't let me go," she said. Having studied history and Chinese at university, Holmwood spent many years in China. As a fan of Chinese classical poetry and literature, she recommended Jin Yong's novels to a book agent in 2012. "It was mainly because of the quality of the writing and also because of his status in Chinese culture. The publisher in Britain was very excited to see there was such a big beloved author who still hadn't been translated into English, at least not by a trade publisher," she recalled. She said translating Jin Yong was a big challenge in some ways, not only because of the specific culture, references and historical figures, but also because she knew it was going to attract a lot of attention. "Of course it does make me nervous that the translation will be read against the original in a way that most translations don't. So I have taken on the task with a humble heart," she said. At the same time, she wants her translation to be fun and easy to read. "I have really tried to emphasize fluency in English. I thought about how Jin Yong would speak to English readers. For me, translation is not just about making sure that it is accurate or correct word for word. If it's a fast and fun read in Chinese, it should be fast and fun read in English," she said. The Times called the book she translated "hugely entertaining" and selected it as Book of the Month. Paul Engles, editor of the book at MacLehose Press, shared with Xinhua how he enjoyed the reading: "It's a pure joy to read; a wonderful story full of loveable characters and abundant wit and charm. The setting is uniquely fascinating." "I can't wait to read the second volume in the series, which should be delivered early next year," he said. The Preliminary Hearing of the case of Chinese comedian Zhou Libo, who is facing weapon and drug charges, will be held on March 15, 2018, a judge announced on Thursday. Patricia A. Harrington, the judge in charge of the case, made the announcement on the case's latest court session at the Nassau County Court, New York. Zhou, together with his wife and lawyer, appeared at the court session Thursday, is charged with illegal possession of a handgun, possession of a controlled substance identified as crystal methamphetamine and driving while using a cellphone. If convicted, he may be facing a sentence up to 15 years of jail. On January 19, 2017, Zhou was stopped by the police in the town of Lattingtown, the United States, for his abnormal driving behavior. The police later found a black pistol holster, a loaded pistol, and two transparent plastic bags containing drugs in his vehicle. Zhou was arrested on the spot and was released on bail the next day. You are here: Business Fosun officials pose for a photo. [Courtesy of Fusun] Chinese conglomerate Fosun International Limited announced on Thursday it had purchased a controlling stake in French fashion label Lanvin. Fosun will become the majority shareholder while the current shareholders will retain a minority stake in Lanvin, according to Fosun. The French fashion house was established in 1889. Currently, Lanvin operates in more than 50 countries with women's wear, menswear, children's wear and accessories including footwear and leather goods. Founded in Shanghai in 1992, Fosun has being actively investing in the global fashion and consumer industry. Fosun recently founded the Fosun Fashion Group to deepen its foothold in the global luxury market. "As China becomes the main growth driver of the global luxury market, we are confident that Fosun can bring great incremental value to Lanvin with its global resources and expertise," said Cheng Yun, executive president of Fosun Fashion Group. "We are absolutely committed to Lanvin's high luxury positioning and the exceptional quality of its products manufactured in France and Italy," Cheng said. Pedestrians walk past a Givenchy store in Tianjin, China. [Photo/China.org.cn] The sales volume of the luxury market on the Chinese mainland hit 142 billion yuan (22 billion U.S. dollars) in 2017, up 20 percent year on year, according to a report released by the consulting firm Bain & Company. In 2018, sales growth is expected to reach between 10 to 15 percent, according to the consulting firm. Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming a major driver powering the upgrading of traditional industries and supply-side structural reform in China. A rising global front-runner in AI "China is among global front-runners in AI development, with AI research being conducted in a wide range of fields," said Tao Jianhua, deputy director of the National Laboratory of Pattern Recognition at the Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences. As of June, 2017, the number of Chinese AI companies reached 592, accounting for 23.3 percent of the world's total. The country saw 30,115 applications for AI-related patents in 2016 following a continuous increase for almost two decades. China has made many breakthroughs in AI research and its industrial applications. For example, the accuracy rate of a facial recognition system developed by Chinese internet giant Baidu is up to 99.84 percent, and Tencent, another Chinese internet conglomerate, set a record by achieving a recognition rate of 83.29 percent in the MegaFace challenge, an internationally recognized test known for its high level of difficulty. A growing trend of 'AI Plus' The growth rate of China's AI industry in 2017 is expected to be 51.2 percent, with its value reaching 15.21 billion yuan, according to statistics released by iiMedia Research, a Chinese consulting agency. The development of China's AI market is driven by a growing trend of "AI Plus," Tao Jianhua said. "AI is integrating rapidly with other sectors in China, producing a great number of AI products such as smart cars, wearable devices and intelligent robots," said Hao Liyang, an analyst from the China Internet Network Information Center. There is enormous potential to promote the integration of AI into traditional industries, especially manufacturing, as China is trying to further its supply-side structural reform and develop advanced manufacturing. A coming period of adjustment AI has become an appealing sector for investment and startups in China. By the end of June last year, China raised 63.5 billion yuan, 33.18 percent of the total global AI financing and only second to America on the list. However, bubbles are already growing in this seemingly booming market. Some insiders claim that China's AI industry will enter a period of adjustment in 2018. Some AI startups will go bankrupt at the end of 2018 after they run out of their financing, Li Kaifu, co-founder and CEO of Sinovation Ventures, said last year. China's AI sector is somewhat overheated, but the market will sift out uncompetitive companies and thus promote the healthy development of the industry, said Sun Ning, deputy director of the State Key Laboratory of Robotics and System. Increasing influence of AI on China's economy Science Magazine predicted that AI would drive global employment to 50 percent in 2045, and the figure in China would be 77 percent. A report released by Accenture, a global services company, shows that AI will boost China's labor productivity by 27 percent and generate $7.1 trillion for the country's economy by 2035. "AI will reshape various sectors in China, which means that companies have to conduct restructuring to promote AI application," said Chen Xiaobing, president of Accenture China. A plan for AI development issued by the State Council, China's cabinet, set the target of China becoming a major center for AI innovation and leading the world in AI technology and applications by 2030. To achieve this target, China needs to cultivate more AI professionals, Tao Jianhua said. As of March, 2017, more than 1.9 million professionals worked for the global AI industry, with 850,000 in America and only a little over 50,000 in China. The country is expected to witness an undersupply of more than 5 million AI professionals in the next few years. Tao Jianhua suggested three measures for China to cultivate more AI professionals, namely improving cultivation mechanisms, encouraging companies to train professionals and enhancing international talent cooperation. More than 13,000 vehicles remained in line for ferry transportation from Hainan province on Thursday evening due to heavy fog that continued to affect normal ferry services at Haikou ports, local authorities said. Qiongzhou Strait, which links Guangdong province with Hainan, has been shrouded by a heavy fog for seven days, the longest period since 1951, according to the Hainan provincial meteorological department. Official data show that by Thursday at 11:30 am, 9,825 vehicles had been ferried in the morning. And by 6 pm, there were still 13,251 vehicles lined up for transportation, with many of them having waited more than 14 hours. From Feb 15 to 21, ferries carried 86,109 vehicles leaving Hainan, but stranded cars continued to crowd roads near the three ports in Haikou, the provincial capital, as intervals of heavy fog affected normal ferry service, said a statement from the city government on Thursday. To help ease the traffic jam, the Haikou city government gave government employees a day off on Thursday. The government also asked its civil servants to join local volunteers in providing essential services to stranded passengers. Hainan, a popular destination for Chinese tourists during the Lunar New Year holiday, received 5.67 million tourists and more than 92,000 cars during the week, statistics from the provincial tourism development commission show. To compound problems, about 12:46 am on Thursday, a local Hainan freighter Xinying F069 sank after colliding with the passenger ferry Haikou 9 off New Hai'an Port in Xuwen, Guangdong province, with five people from Xinying F069 falling into the water. Staff members from Haikou 9, which carried more than 970 tourists, immediately conducted rescue work, saving three people. The other two remained missing. The sunken cargo ship has been raised, according to authorities. Haikou 9 docked safely at Xuwen at 6 am, with all 970 passengers and 140 vehicles. An investigation is underway to determine the causes of the collision, Haikou city government officials said. The number of cars coming to Hainan from mainland cities and regions has increased by 15 percent a year since Hainan was designated in 2010 by the central government to develop as an international tourism destination. There have been traffic jams from time to time during holidays, but the current one is the most serious. Flash Algerian Minister of Tourism and Handcrafts Hassan Mermouri on Thursday said his country is seeking to attract more Chinese tourists by easing the visa issuing procedures. Mermouri said an agreement between Algeria and China to facilitate visa issuance for Chinese tourists will be inked before the end of March. "The agreement has been outlined as it is due to be inked in Algeria before the end of the first quarter of this year," the APS news agency quoted Mermouri as saying on the sidelines of the opening of the 9th the International Tourism Fair being held in the western province of Oran. In addition to the Chinese tourists, Algeria also seeks to attract tourists from other countries such as Russia and the countries of Eastern Europe, Mermouri said. These steps are part of the ministry's strategy to promote the Algeria as a destination for tourists in international markets and restore its place as a destination of excellence, the minister noted. Neighboring nations to Algeria, including Tunisia and Morocco, which are widely known of being tourist countries, have already facilitated visa issuance for Chinese nationals. Algeria is aiming to diversify its economy to get rid of its full dependence on hydrocarbons, as tourism stands as a potential sector that could generate new revenues regarding the huge tourism potential of this North African nation, including its 1,250-km Mediterranean coast, breathtaking mountainous regions, and a desert with prehistoric attractions. Flash The Preliminary Hearing of the case of Chinese comedian Zhou Libo, who is facing weapon and drug charges, will be held on March 15, 2018, a judge announced on Thursday. Patricia A. Harrington, the judge in charge of the case, made the announcement on the case's latest court session at the Nassau County Court, New York. Zhou, together with his wife and lawyer, appeared at the court session Thursday, is charged with illegal possession of a handgun, possession of a controlled substance identified as crystal methamphetamine and driving while using a cellphone. If convicted, he may be facing a sentence up to 15 years of jail. On January 19, 2017, Zhou was stopped by the police in the town of Lattingtown, the United States, for his abnormal driving behavior. The police later found a black pistol holster, a loaded pistol, and two transparent plastic bags containing drugs in his vehicle. Zhou was arrested on the spot and was released on bail the next day. Flash Russia wishes to see terrorist group Jabhat al-Nusra and its partner groups excluded from the ceasefire in Eastern Ghouta, a suburb of Syrian capital of Damascus, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said at a press conference on Thursday. Lavrov landed at the Belgrade Airport on Wednesday afternoon to attend the ceremony of the 180th anniversary of diplomatic relations between the two countries. Speaking after meeting his Serbian counterpart Ivica Dacic, Lavrov said that Russia was the initiator of today's discussion at the UN Security Council about the draft resolution on the implementation of a 30-day humanitarian truce in Syria. "We are ready to take the proposed resolution into consideration. We suggested a very clear formulation that the ceasefire will not relate to Jabhat al-Nusra and groups with whom it cooperates which shell residential parts of Damascus with artillery fire," Lavrov said. He reminded that regular artillery fire has been coming from the area of Eastern Ghouta for the past year, terrorizing the civilians in Damascus - as well as that on several occasions they struck territory belonging to the Russian embassy and the building of the trade representation of Russia. "Every time when such terrorist attacks start from the area of Eastern Ghouta, we know that behind them is Jabhat al-Nusra and terrorist organizations that cooperate with it and each time we ask from the Security Council to give a principle-based assessment about these unacceptable terrorist acts. Each time our U.S. and European partners avoided to react," Lavrov said. He noted that "Western partners do not want to go so far to exclude terrorist from the ceasefire, which brings up many questions among Russians", and added that just days ago Jabhat al-Nusra and other organizations rejected the offer of Russian Army to leave Eastern Ghouta free-willingly and without their weapons. "They rejected the offer and continued to open fire towards the city from their positions, keeping the civilians from the Eastern Ghouta as a human shield," Lavrov illustrated. Flash Australia's deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce resigned on Friday just hours after accusations of sexual harassment against him were made public. Joyce announced he was stepping down as deputy PM of Australia. He has held the post since February 2016, a by-product of leading the National Party of Australia which is part of the governing Liberal National Party (LNP) coalition. His resignation came the day after Larry Anthony, federal president of the Nationals, confirmed that Joyce was the subject of a sexual harassment complaint which would be "taken seriously" and treated with "strict confidentiality." The complaint was the final nail in the coffin for Joyce who has been under intense pressure to resign since it was revealed that he had engaged in an extramarital affair with former media adviser Vikki Campion who is expecting their child in April. "On Monday morning at the party room meeting I will step down as the leader of the National Party and Deputy Prime Minister of Australia," Joyce told reporters in his New South Wales (NSW) electorate of New England on Friday. "I want to thank the people of New England. I am so humbled that today there were people who offered their support. I am so humbled and I thank you for the overwhelming support." "Over the last half a month there has been a litany of allegations. I don't believe any of them have been sustained," he said. "I have asked that the (sexual harassment) allegation be referred to the police." Since news of the affair broke, Joyce has been questioned over a series of promotions Campion earned within the National Party after her relationship with Joyce began. The saga prompted Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull to introduce a ban on sexual relationship between government ministers and their staff, a move that Joyce described as "inept." Andrew Broad, a Nationals Member of Parliament (MP) representing the Victorian electorate of Mallee on Thursday night became the first Nationals MP to publicly call for Joyce's resignation, saying Joyce was "not fit" for the role. The resignation came at the end of a week of personal leave that Joyce took so as to avoid becoming acting PM while Turnbull is in the United States for an official visit. Despite standing down as deputy PM, Joyce said there was not "a shadow of a doubt" that he would run for re-election in New England. The next leader of the Nationals and deputy PM will be voted on at a Nationals party room meeting on Monday. Veterans' Affairs Minister Michael McCormack is considered the frontrunner to ascend to the role. Kilamba, c. 2012 Anyone who has been to Luanda knows that the city lacks housing. The hotels are extremely expensive, and researchers h... HAVANA - A US Congressional delegation on Wednesday urged President Donald Trump's administration to improve relations with Cuba amid tensions stemming from alleged "acoustic attacks" against US diplomatic personnel in Cuba. At a news conference after a trip to Cuba where they met President Raul Castro and other government officials, the delegation, led by Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy, talked of the need to return to an era of engagement and cooperation. "It's important for the Trump administration to stop falling back on Cold War policy that didn't make sense decades ago and makes less sense now," Senator Ron Wyden said. The delegation began their visit on Monday by meeting with Cuban Foreign Ministry officials to talk about the alleged attacks suffered by US diplomats in the Caribbean nation. More than 20 US diplomats suffered health problems between November 2016 and August 2017, which Washington called "acoustic attacks". The incidents led to the partial closure of the US embassy in Havana and a halt in issuing US visas. "We need to get back our embassy fully staffed. ... There is no way we are going to have improved relations if we don't have the personnel here to do it," Leahy said. The delegation said it was a mistake for the Trump administration to make political decisions based on an inconclusive investigation. "I have no idea what happened to our diplomats here, US agencies that are investigating this matter also don't seem to have a clue and we may never know. It was a mistake to cut back on our diplomatic personnel in Cuba," Representative Jim McGovern said. The US State Department issued a travel warning last year, telling its citizens not to visit Cuba as some of the alleged attacks ostensibly occurred in hotels. "It was a mistake to put out a travel advisory on Cuba warning Americans about their safety if they travel here. We feel safe in Cuba and I urge the Secretary of State to cancel this advisory," McGovern added. The delegation's visit has been described as a "fact-finding trip" about the changes in Washington's policy toward Cuba. "For too long our policy toward Cuba has been guided by paranoia and suspicion, ... it has resulted in a policy that I would characterize as stupid. We need to learn from our history - 50 years of hostility and estrangement was bad for the US and Cuba," McGovern said. Last year, Trump backpedaled on thawing ties with Havana by limiting trade with and travel to the Caribbean nation. US companies are forbidden from engaging in any type of commercial activities with about 180 Cuban companies associated with the Cuban armed forces. US citizens are restricted from making individual trips to the island. Xinhua (China Daily 02/23/2018 page11) The Scottish government's radical plans to change its gender laws could pose a danger for the children, says a Catholic bioethics agency which issued a statement to voice its opposition against the proposal. The Anscombe Bioethics Centre said that the reforms pushed for in Scotland's 2004 Gender Recognition Act could become a problem for vulnerable children. This is because lawmakers might soon ask the Scots to "self-declare" their gender sans proper psychological and medical diagnosis if they have been living as a member of the opposite sex for at least two years. The proposal also planned to lower the age that will make obtaining a sex change certificate legal. Only individuals 18 years old and above were previously allowed by law, but that might soon change. The group said it was worried that people as young as 16 "might be invited to make a permanent change to their legal status via a mere self-declaration on a question as fundamental as gender identity." The ABC statement read. "Legal transition for a teenager, like other aspects of social transition, may prove a harmful distraction from the psychological issues that might have been addressed in their own right by the young person working together with mental health professionals and others." Scotland's Gender Recognition Act requires a diagnosis of gender dysphoria to allow a person's transition. The reforms, however, would be dangerous because it sends out a message to children that gender isn't factually or biologically determined, but rather fluid and changeable. "By moving to a self-declaratory model and de-medicalizing the wish to transition legally, we may fail to provide the necessary support for those affected by gender dysphoria in the form of contact with health professionals," Catholic Parliamentary Office's Anthony Horan said. He explained the church's opposition to the ideology, especially since similar proposals might also find its way in the governments of England and Wales. Pope Francis gave an assurance to abandoned kids in Romania that they are loved. He explained that it was the fragility of adults that has led some parents to give their children away for adoption. The Vatican recently released the transcript of the pope's conversation with the youth, which took place last Jan. 4. Pope Francis took questions from the children and was struck by a young man who wondered why his own mother rejected him two times. "Your mother loves you but she does not know how to do so, she does not know how to express it," the pope told the boy. " She cannot, because life is hard and unjust." The pope further said that it was not just economic poverty that makes adults fragile. Spiritual poverty, a parent's illness and a human's weakness to resist sins make them vulnerable as well. Pope Francis reiterated to the abandoned children that their situation was not their fault and that they should not grow skeptical. He acknowledged, however, that it was sometimes more difficult to help fragile parents. "It's a question of the immense fragility in adults, due to, in your case, much poverty, many social injustices that crush the smallest and the poorest," Pope Francis explained. The pope also admitted that the boy's questions caught him off guard and said: "I cried. I was close to you through my tears. I do not know why, but you gave me so much." The NGO "FDP protagonists in education" arranged for Pope Francis to meet the orphaned kids privately during his trip to Romania. They also asked the pontiff about life and death, sins and the state of the Church. Aside from the kids, the pope also saw some parents who made the difficult choice of giving up their babies. One mom said that she believes she made the right decision for her daughter's future even if society saw her as a bad mother. The pope guided and advised her that she should also seek refuge and comfort from a Christian community. Several American states will put their "In God We Trust" bill into effect. Arkansas and Florida will now require public schools to display posters bearing the phrase, while Oklahoma and Wyoming await the final approval from lawmakers. Authors of the bill in Arkansas celebrated their achievement last Monday, as Rep. Jim Dotson, one of the co-authors, told the press that state legislature passed the bill with 20-2 votes in the Senate and 78-1 votes in the House. Dotson's Bentonville School District also raised enough funds for the purchase of 891 posters, which would be displayed in public school classrooms and libraries. In Florida, lawmakers passed the bill with 97-10 votes in the House, but its senators have yet to come up with a similar proposal. Rep. Kim Daniels said that the state needed this legislature, especially with its latest tragedies. "[God] is not a Republican or a Democrat. He is not black or white," Daniels said, as reported by Tampa Bay Times. "He is the light, and our schools need light in them like never before." Oklahoma lawmakers, on the other hand, passed its "In God We Trust" proposal in the senate with 6-4 votes. The bill, however, cited that its poster implementation would depend on fund availability via voluntary contributions to schools. The Senate Appropriations Committee will still have the final say. Wyoming representatives are also awaiting final approval on a similar bill that will cover the display of the posters at the state's Capitol Building, aside from public schools. As with the Oklahoma bill, the budget for the poster will have to rely on donations or contributions. Governor Matt Mead will still have to officially sign the bill into a law. The phrase traces its roots to the Civil War in the 1800s, where a clergyman suggested that "In God We Trust" should be written on coins for their divine protection. Decades later in 1955, President Dwight Eisenhower approved a bill that required the phrase on paper money. The Americans eventually adopted it as their national motto. In 2020, we were the church on our heels. A global pandemic shut down much of our world. But the church has been on the move since it was birthed; it will continue to be on the move until God makes all things new. | Image: Omar Marques / Anadolu Agency / Getty Images Asylum seekers join 2016 protests in Vienna, Austria. A group of 100 Iranians, most of whom are Christians, are currently marooned in Vienna, Austria, and have been for the past year. Theyre caught in limbo between the American Dream they were promised and the threat of being forcibly returned to Iran. Their fate took a grave turn this month, as the US State Department confirmed that a number of the stranded refugees would not be granted resettlement in the US under the Trump administrations tighter requirements for refugees, leaving them with just weeks to leave Austria and return to Iran. On Wednesday, Austrian police raided the building where some of the Iranians have been staying, reported WORLD magazine. Travel and identity documents, including passports, were seized in the operation. These individuals were subject to the same rigorous process for resettlement as all refugees and, following input from all relevant departments and agencies, the applications for resettlement were denied, a department spokesperson said in a statement provided to CT. The United States will not force anyone to return to Iran, the statement continued. The United States, the government of Austria, and others are working together on protection options for denied applicants that could include resettlement or asylum elsewhere. The bad news comes after a year of uncertainty for the refugees in Vienna, which was meant to be only a stopover point as the refugees traveled from Iran to the United States. They arrived in the European capital city last January, granted passage to the West under the Lautenberg Amendment. A Cold War-era law passed by the US Congress to help Jews escape persecution in the Soviet Union, the policy was updated in 2004 to accommodate other persecuted religious minorities. Expecting to quickly move on to the US to unite with family and friends already living therea third were to be resettled in Californiatheir case stalled due to a hold enacted for unreported reasons toward the end of the Obama administration. The threat of denial notices from the US emerged as early as the first week of 2018, said Ann Buwalda, executive director of Jubilee Campaign, an organization that advocates for persecuted religious minorities. Now, a majority of the 100 refugees in limbo are believed to have officially received their rejections. The US has broken its promise to Iranian religious minorities, said Buwalda. "They traveled to Vienna at the invitation of the United States, with the understanding that they would soon be reunited with their American families. Instead, the refugee applicants in Vienna today have been forced to wait there for more than a year with no explanation for their delayed departures. They have no source of income, and many have spent down their life savings. End of a long wait Since 2001, nearly 33,000 members of religious minorities from Iran have been welcomed to America under the Lautenberg Amendment. Each of them passed through Austria, a longtime partner in the US immigration and family reunification process. All participants arrived in Vienna pre-screened and thoroughly vetted and, before 2017, the average wait-time for these individuals was less than three months, said Buwalda. For these 100 Iranians, howevermost of them from heavily persecuted communities of Armenian and Assyrian Christianssomething changed. High-level administration officials are monitoring the progress, a White House official toldThe Washington Free Beacon last month. Certain complexities exist that the administration has to work through, including human-rights concerns and national security. But the administration is certainly engaged. Back in January, a spokesperson with the State Department emphasized the vetting process these refugees must undergo. The safety and security of the American people are paramount, she said. For individuals who cannot be resettled in the United States, the US government-funded Resettlement Support Center (RSC) provides counseling on options, and the US government may also work with international partner organizations to identify other potential resettlement locations. In some cases, applicants who have been denied voluntarily choose to return to Iran. With the latest State Department update, the decision has been made for them; they are forced to return. The Iranians in Vienna are in desperate circumstances, Hans Van de Weerd, vice president of US programs at the International Rescue Committee, told Foreign Policy. Without income or the right to stay in Austria, they have but no choice to be deported to Iran, unless another nation steps up or Austria grants them asylum. Persecution and revival in Iran The prospect of going back to Iran is a daunting one for religious minorities who flee. According to Open Doors, which tracks the persecution of Christians around the globe, Iran comes in at No. 10 on its annual World Watch List. Violent protests have erupted in Iran in recent weeks. When demonstrations over the struggling economy and political oppression flared at the end of 2017, anti-regime sentiment flared as well, and quickly spread across the country. In a style Iranians had seen before, as recently as 2009, hardliners in the government cracked down. Thousands of protesters have been arrested and dozens injured and killed. Despite its poor human rights record and extreme persecution of Christians and other religious minorities, Iran is also home to one of the fastest-growing Christian populations in the world, according to David Yeghnazar, executive director of Elam Ministries. Iranians have become the most open people to the gospel, he said. Rampant government oppression hasnt managed to stifle explosive growth in the Iranian church. Last year, Christmas services were overflowing with worshipers, while Christian television and a network of underground churches are flourishing. Still, persecution under the Ayatollah is very realand deadly. Now that travel to the US and asylum in Europe havent panned out, going back to Iran bodes ill. A death sentence These deportations, during a human-rights crackdown in Iran no less, could be a death sentence for these persecuted Christians and other minorities, Nina Shea, director of the Hudson Institutes Center for Religious Freedom, told the Free Beacon in January. They would undermine the important statements against Irans repression by President [Donald] Trump, Vice President [Mike] Pence, and UN Ambassador [Nikki Haley]. From the early days of President Trumps campaign, he has vowed to protect Christian refugees. On January 16, designated Religious Freedom Day, President Trump called the US a champion for religious freedom around the world. He also said, We will be undeterred in our commitment to monitor religious persecution and implement policies that promote religious freedom. Vice President Pence, too, has promised to aid persecuted Christians, especially in the Middle East. Indeed, in the first year of the Trump administration, a plain reading of the resettlement data suggests that Christian refugees were prioritized. More than 53 percent of refugees admitted into the US during that period were Christians, while 32 percent were Muslims. By contrast, of the refugees admitted under President Barack Obama in 2016, 45 percent were Muslims and 44 percent were Christians. But its not that simple. While President Trump has admitted a higher percentage of Christians, he has also admitted far fewer refugees overallChristian or otherwise. In 2017, less than 30,000 refugees came to the US; in 2016, more than 93,000 were resettled. Assisting persecuted Christian refugees is made more complicated by the fact that, of the top 10 countries with the worst record of persecution against Christians (according to the World Watch List), citizens from seven of them face restrictions from entering the US under President Trumps travel banthe third iteration of which came into effect this past December. This means the Christians who live in the most repressive countries for religious minorities are the least able to find refuge in the US. Iranians are among the restricted groups. In the last two months of 2017, State Department data shows only two Christian refugees from Iran were resettled, though the State Department said it has resettled more than 800 Iranian religious minorities under the Lautenberg Amendment since last January. As for the Iranians trapped in limbo in Europe, far from their families in the US and Iran, the Trump administration will still have to decide how to proceed. The move in Europe to grant asylum may buy the US government time; but eventually, it must choose whether or not to unify the refugees with their families. The administration needs to act fast to stop this travesty, Shea told the Free Beacon. Additional reporting by Kate Shellnutt. 'The Billy Graham Tribute Channel' Debuts on SiriusXM to Honor the Late Founder of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association In celebration of Billy Graham's life, "The Billy Graham Tribute Channel" began airing Feb. 21. Limited-run channel showcases late Christian pastor's most inspiring sermons and uplifting messages. Contact: Kelly Klemmensen, CHARLOTTE, N.C., Feb. 22, 2018 / Launching to honor the late preacher's life, "The Billy Graham Tribute Channel" debuted on Wednesday, Feb. 21, at 12 p.m. ET and runs through Sunday, March 4, on SiriusXM channel 145 on satellite and via streaming. With Easter only a few weeks away, the BGEA and SiriusXM are also preparing upcoming messages to be presented on channel 145, focusing on the resurrection of Christ. "As we celebrate the life of Billy Graham we, along with SiriusXM, offer a channel featuring some of Mr. Graham's most memorable messages. The timeless messages found on 'The Billy Graham Tribute Channel' will do what Mr. Graham has done with such passion throughout his career; help point others to the hope found in Jesus Christ," said Jim Kirkland, executive director of Audio Media at the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. "SiriusXM is proud to celebrate the legacy of 'America's Pastor' by presenting 'The Billy Graham Tribute Channel,'" said Dave Gorab, Vice President and General Manager of Talk Programming, SiriusXM. "Now through March 4, SiriusXM listeners can reflect on the remarkable life and work of Billy Graham with a special channel dedicated to his seven decades of ministry." In addition to the catalog of Graham's inspirational messages and sermons, "The Billy Graham Tribute Channel" also includes personal reflections on the pastor's remarkable life from Billy Graham's son, Franklin Graham, along with other family members, music artists, ministry leaders, and former U.S. presidents. SiriusXM channel 145 will also carry Graham's memorial service live from the grounds of the Billy Graham Library in Charlotte, N.C., at 12 p.m. ET on Friday, March 2. Born in 1918, evangelist Billy Graham has preached the Gospel to nearly 215 million people in more than 185 countries and territories. Since the 1949 Los Angeles Crusade that vaulted Mr. Graham into the public eye, he has led hundreds of thousands to make personal decisions to live for Christ, which is the main mission of his ministry. Billy Graham passed away on Feb. 21, 2018. In addition to the collaboration with SiriusXM, the BGEAs audio ministry, Billy Graham Radio, accomplishes the mission of the association to proclaim the Gospel of Jesus Christ throughout the world by producing a number of online and broadcast programs. The newest program in the ministry's line-up is GPS: God. People. Stories. Each weekly GPS podcast features an inspiring story of how God has worked in someone's life. Decision Minute is a one-minute feature that airs on more than 600 radio stations. To listen to the programs, visit About The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (BGEA) proclaims the Gospel of Jesus Christ throughout the world by every effective means available. From its headquarters in Charlotte, N.C., the BGEA directs a wide range of domestic and international ministries. For more information, please visit Share Tweet Contact: Kelly Klemmensen, Billy Graham Evangelistic Association , 704-401-2717, kklemmensen@bgea.org CHARLOTTE, N.C., Feb. 22, 2018 / Christian Newswire / -- The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association in collaboration with SiriusXM announced the launch of "The Billy Graham Tribute Channel," a limited-run channel headlined by the words of the late world-renowned Christian evangelist, Billy Graham. SiriusXM listeners nationwide will have access to the preacher's timeless messages from his seven decades of ministry.Launching to honor the late preacher's life, "The Billy Graham Tribute Channel" debuted on Wednesday, Feb. 21, at 12 p.m. ET and runs through Sunday, March 4, on SiriusXM channel 145 on satellite and via streaming. With Easter only a few weeks away, the BGEA and SiriusXM are also preparing upcoming messages to be presented on channel 145, focusing on the resurrection of Christ. "As we celebrate the life of Billy Graham we, along with SiriusXM, offer a channel featuring some of Mr. Graham's most memorable messages. The timeless messages found on 'The Billy Graham Tribute Channel' will do what Mr. Graham has done with such passion throughout his career; help point others to the hope found in Jesus Christ," said Jim Kirkland, executive director of Audio Media at the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association."SiriusXM is proud to celebrate the legacy of 'America's Pastor' by presenting 'The Billy Graham Tribute Channel,'" said Dave Gorab, Vice President and General Manager of Talk Programming, SiriusXM. "Now through March 4, SiriusXM listeners can reflect on the remarkable life and work of Billy Graham with a special channel dedicated to his seven decades of ministry."In addition to the catalog of Graham's inspirational messages and sermons, "The Billy Graham Tribute Channel" also includes personal reflections on the pastor's remarkable life from Billy Graham's son, Franklin Graham, along with other family members, music artists, ministry leaders, and former U.S. presidents. SiriusXM channel 145 will also carry Graham's memorial service live from the grounds of the Billy Graham Library in Charlotte, N.C., at 12 p.m. ET on Friday, March 2.Born in 1918, evangelist Billy Graham has preached the Gospel to nearly 215 million people in more than 185 countries and territories. Since the 1949 Los Angeles Crusade that vaulted Mr. Graham into the public eye, he has led hundreds of thousands to make personal decisions to live for Christ, which is the main mission of his ministry. Billy Graham passed away on Feb. 21, 2018.In addition to the collaboration with SiriusXM, the BGEAs audio ministry, Billy Graham Radio, accomplishes the mission of the association to proclaim the Gospel of Jesus Christ throughout the world by producing a number of online and broadcast programs. The newest program in the ministry's line-up is GPS: God. People. Stories. Each weekly GPS podcast features an inspiring story of how God has worked in someone's life. Decision Minute is a one-minute feature that airs on more than 600 radio stations. To listen to the programs, visit www.billygraham.org/radio About The Billy Graham Evangelistic AssociationThe Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (BGEA) proclaims the Gospel of Jesus Christ throughout the world by every effective means available. From its headquarters in Charlotte, N.C., the BGEA directs a wide range of domestic and international ministries. For more information, please visit www.billygraham.org . Get news updates on Twitter at www.twitter.com/BGEAnews AFTAH: Is CPAC 'Conservative' When it Bans Pro-Family Exhibitors, Welcomes LGBTQ Activists? Contact: Peter LaBarbera, 312-324-3787, americansfortruth@gmail.com WASHINGTON, Feb. 23, 2018 /Christian Newswire/ -- Peter LaBarbera, president of Americans For Truth About Homosexuality (AFTAH.org), issued the following statement about the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC)'s decision to disinvite the pro-family group MassResistance as an Exhibitor sponsor. CPAC (Feb. 21-24) welcomed the LGBTQ activist Log Cabin Republicans as Exhibitors, but AFTAH received no response from CPAC when it applied and paid $2,000 to be an Exhibitor after MR was disinvited: CPAC's capricious action against MassResistance and its president, Brian Camenker, is an unconscionable sellout of real, principled conservative values. CPAC has it backwards: it is the homosexual-transgender activist group Log Cabin Republicans that doesn't belong at a conservative conference--not an organization fighting the fanatical, anti-Christian LGBTQ lobby. The Log Cabin Republicans' morally subversive agenda is to push for the acceptance of proud homosexuality and "gay marriage" within the Republican Party, and "rights" based on disordered yet changeable sexual behaviors and an ever-expanding array of "gender identities." This defies God's creation and is not conservative. MassResistance is the world's leading grassroots organization standing up to the homosexual-bisexual-transgender movement. Its dedicated followers expose efforts to "mainstream" deviant sex-and-gender confusion in schools and work to protecti.e., conservethe age-old institution of marriage as God ordained it. This is the essence of noble conservatism. After opening up the door to sexual immorality (with an "R" next to it), CPAC then went a step further by banning this heroic pro-family group, using as its pretext something Camenker said in a speech three years ago. Keep in mind that CPAC invited profane Milo Yiannopoulos, a self-described "Dangerous Faggot," to speak last year and also has welcomed atheists as Exhibitors. CPAC has squandered its moral authority by pandering to political correctness. It is teaching young conservatives all the wrong lessons about fairness and right versus wrong. CPAC's leaders owe an apology not just to Camenker and MassResistance but to principled, Reagan social conservatives everywhere. Share Tweet Step inside: Rene Magrittes Le groupe silencieux Click play to see how weve brought to life the mysterious world within this important work from 1926, in which perspective, pictorial illusion, and even the act of looking itself are rendered as agents of mystery. Offered in London on 27 February A flesh-coloured room recedes in perspective before opening out onto a landscape view of a waterfall-like curtain of stone, into which a castle on a stone bridge appears to recede. Various elements of figurative painting are displayed as if they are abandoned stage props. Among these is a backdrop-like board depicting a landscape of trees, shown leaning against one of the walls. It is partially covered by a crimson curtain reminiscent of the theatre, and is perforated with rectangular, cut-out windows. A square picture frame rests against the board. In front of it is a flesh-coloured wooden cube adorned with eyes. To the right of this room rests a wooden plank in the shape of a human figure. It introduces a strangely inanimate human presence into the enigma of the scene. Painted in 1926, Rene Magrittes Le groupe silencieux (The Silent Group) is an important example of his early Surrealist style. Perspective, pictorial illusion, sculpture, painting, and even the act of looking itself, are all rendered simultaneously as artifices and agents of mystery. The work is one of the finest of a pioneering series of oil paintings that the artist made between January 1926 and April 1927 in preparation for his first one-man show, Le Centaure, held at the Galerie le Centaure in Brussels in the spring of 1927. The exhibition marked a pivotal moment in Magrittes career, announcing him as an important new talent on the European avant-garde art scene. As with many of the pictures on view at the 1927 exhibition, Magrittes chief preoccupation in Le groupe silencieux is with displaying the lie of all imagery and picture-making, and in exposing the innate mystery that underpins outer appearance. The structures of painting and representation were subverted and twisted by Magritte into new, strange forms aimed at exposing the deeper mysteries of reality and perception DAS: The inside track on South Asian modern and contemporary Mumbai-based collector, author and gallerist Amrita Jhaveri and Kolkata-based gallerists Priyanka and Prateek Raja share their reflections on this years Dhaka Art Summit, introducing important voices from the region to an international audience Led by chief curator Diana Campbell Betancourt, the biennial Dhaka Art Summit (DAS) which was founded in 2012 by the Samdani Art Foundation with the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy and support from the government of Bangladesh seeks to create wider connections between South and Southeast Asia, with Bangladesh as the focal point. More than 300 regional and international artists were showcased this year at DAS, which was attended by leading museum directors such as Glenn Lowry of New Yorks Museum of Modern Art and Frances Morris of Tate Modern. Here, Amrita Jhaveri, Director of Jhaveri Contemporary in Mumbai, collector, and curator of South Asian Modernists 1953-63 at The Whitworth Gallery in Manchester, England, and Priyanka and Prateek Raja, whose Experimenter gallery is currently showing South Asian artists Bani Abidi and Naeem Mohaiemen, share their insights on DAS and the state of South Asian modern and contemporary art. Which South Asian artists would you recommend to new collectors, and why? Amrita Jhaveri: Works by Bangladeshi artists Novera Ahmed and Rana Begum feature prominently in my collection, but there are so many wonderful artists from across the region making very distinct works. With regard to modern art, I am very excited by the works of Mohan Samant (1924-2004) from India, who we will exhibit at Frieze in New York, as well as Shahid Sajjad (1936-2014) from Pakistan. Samant was an early modernist and a member of the Progressive Group. Sajjad, a self-taught sculptor who was active around the same period, was represented in Diana Campbell Betancourts Bearing Points exhibition at Dhaka Art Summit. Jhaveri Contemporary also represents some contemporary artists whose work I admire. Most of these artists are not in the mainstream of the art market and speaking personally, the element of discovery is the driving force in building a collection. Ayesha Sultana, Threshold, 2012-13. Solarised, scratched photographs with glue. Image courtesy the artist and Experimenter, Kolkata Priyanka and Prateek Raja: India-based sculptor Sahil Naik is young, has a brilliant practice, and a very bright future ahead of him. Photographer Sohrab Hura is exceptional; a Magnum nominee, he has recently been included in some of the most critically important exhibitions all over the world and is one of the leading practitioners of his generation. Looking at the subcontinent for young artists, Id recommend following Rathin Barman, Ayesha Sultana (above) and Sahej Rahal. For more experienced collectors, I would suggest looking into Naeem Mohaiemen, Bani Abidi and CAMP. Having visited early editions of the Dhaka Art Summit, what do you make of its evolving role in Bangladesh and South Asia? AJ: DAS changes with every edition, bringing a greater number of art professionals from around the world to Bangladesh. It is a platform for Bangladeshi artists and, more importantly, for them to be seen among their peers. In many ways it is both similar and distinct from the Kochi Biennale, which exhibits the vision of a single artist who is nominated as a curator. Dhaka draws upon the expertise of professional curators from around the world to engage with South Asia. Shikh Sabbir Alams works in the Samdani Art Award exhibition caught the eye of Priyanka and Prateek Raja. Installation shot from Kunstnernes Hus Oslo show in 2016. Image courtesy the artist P & PR: We have been to Dhaka Art Summit since its inception, and this year was our fourth visit in six years. DAS is one of the most significant exhibitions in South Asia and is a much-anticipated event. With every edition, the programme and the projects at the summit are increasingly ambitious and extremely well curated, consistently pushing the limits of contemporary art. This years summit was very strong in terms of content and, personally, in terms of discovery. I think all the curators, led from the front by Diana Campbell Betancourt, put together very thoughtful exhibitions. The talks and seminars programme was great, too. Installation image: One Hundred Thousand Small Tales at DAS 2018. Works by Anoli Pereira and T.P.G. Amarajeewa. Photo: Pablo Bartholomew Opper Zaman, Insulate, 2016. Casting plaster, found objects, nails, rope and projected film. Image courtesy the artist We're always interested in hearing about news in our community. Let us know what's going on! Go to form We attempted to send a notification to your email address but we were unable to verify that you provided a valid email address. Please click here to update your email address if you wish to receive notifications. Otherwise, you may click here to disable notifications and hide this message. AKRON, Ohio - Vintage postcard enthusiasts will soon be able to peruse a diverse collection of the missives, thanks to the work of University of Akron students. A Digital Humanities English class is working to digitize and archive the first 1,000 postcards in a 200,000 card collection donated by world-traveling psychologist David P. Campbell to the Drs. Nicholas and Dorothy Cummings Center for the History of Psychology. The class is made up of both undergraduate and graduate art, English and history students, some of whom wish to continue their education in archival studies in Library Science. The cards are organized in hundreds of binders by categories such as, "Lovers," "European Countries" and "Brutalities." Professor Hillary Nunn, coordinator of graduate certificate in literature, tasked each of the 11 students with choosing one favorite album. The students then paired off in teams of two to tackle a binder and archive its contents. The students are scanning the cards, many of which were mailed with messages on them, for a searchable repository that can be viewed here. Rosemary Herbet, who is archiving postcards from a "Lovers" album with Randall Slonaker, said some of the messages are odd. "There's a disconnect between the romantic images of courtship and the messages," she said. "Some are very surprising." One card that falls in that category boasts the image of a couple in an embrace on the front, yet announces news of the death of two family members in the message on the back, one a woman killed by a train. Slonaker was struck by the many postcards from the WWI era that indicated only brave men are worthy of fair women. Nunn said the group is being careful about including too much detail in the repository, such as names with addresses, in case family is still living in those locations. The class is adhering to copyright laws to determine what is public information. Some of the cards, also called "hold-to-light" cards, are transparent in places like windows and doors, said Ricky Marko. One surprising transparent card, which the students dubbed the "scary baby" card, shows a child with its eyes closed until it's held to light, when the eyes are open. The class devised a kind of light box to help them identify which cards have such hidden features. The "hold-to-light" cards will be scanned in three images, with one depicting them lit, said Zoe Orcutt. Nunn hopes future Digital Humanities classes will be able to continue the work to eventually digitize and archive the entire collection. To follow the students' work, check out their Institute for Human Science and Culture Blog. Want more Akron news? Sign up for cleveland.com's Rubber City Daily, an email newsletter delivered at 5:30 a.m. Monday through Friday. BROOK PARK, Ohio -- City administrators' offices, including the City Council office, will be moving after future renovations at the John A. Poloyne Community Center on Holland Road are completed. As part of that consolidation and recreation center update, Mayor Mike Gammella has proposed a change to the original plans by including a separate outside entrance to Mayor's Court. Gammella presented his idea to City Council at its Feb. 20 caucus, noting that the cost would be approximately $100,000. Mayor's Court will take place in the recreation center's Community Room, he said. "The way it's currently structured, prisoners, people coming in to pay their tickets, etc., will come right through the same entrance at the front that our residents, our seniors and our children do and go right through the rec center," Gammella said. "I find this unacceptable for our safety." He said he met with other city officials, as well as contractor Brewer-Garrett Co., and they recommended a new entrance. The door would be located on the south side of the recreation center building and face the police station across the street. "It would have a sidewalk with its own private entrance," Gammella explained to council. "This way, they would not be coming through the recreation center and have free rein there." In addition, he proposed that a metal detector be installed at the new entrance, referencing the recent Florida high school shooting where 17 people were killed. "If worse came to worst, (offenders) would have access into our recreation center (without the new entrance) if they started shooting," Gammella said, adding a metal detector could be "a deterrent" to anyone entering the building. "For the safety of the public, I think this is a much needed add-on." A police officer likely would be stationed at other doors inside the Community Room to ensure that no one at Mayor's Court gains access to the recreation center, Gammella said. And The Clerk of Court's office would be constructed near the new entrance and have bulletproof glass. "I agree with having the metal detector," Councilman Greg Stemm said. "I think it's a great idea." Councilman Richard Scott agreed, saying "It's something that is going to be needed." CLEVELAND, Ohio -- The city of Cleveland Heights will pay $200,000 to the family of a woman who was found dead in a city's jail cell in June 2015. The settlement was reached between the city and the family of Ralkina Jones. While cleveland.com noted the settlement in a story in January, the amount was not made public until Thursday, when attorneys filed documents with the Cuyahoga County Probate Court. The Cuyahoga County Medical Examiner's Office ruled her death accidental, though jail logs released to cleveland.com appeared to show that Jones, 37, may have been improperly medicated by jail staff during the two days she was held. HealthSpan, which owned an urgent-care facility where Jones was taken, previously agreed to pay $10,000 to settle its portion of the lawsuit. Of the $210,000, about 45 percent will go to attorneys' fees and expenses, according to documents filed in probate court. A hearing on whether a probate judge will approve the settlement is set for March 20. Attorneys for both sides did not immediately respond to emails seeking comment. Jones' family filed suit against the city and others in 2016. She was being held in the jail on accusations that she hit her ex-husband with a tire iron. Jones was seen in body-camera footage discussing her various health concerns and emphasizing that she needed to take her prescriptions. Jailers gave her drugs while she was being held, but her family said staff did not properly document when they administered her medication. The Medical Examiner's Office said Jones died of sudden cardiac death in association with postural tachycardia syndrome and obesity with amphetamine therapy. Her autopsy showed that Jones had oxycodone, butalbital, alprazolam and zolpidem in her system. The lawsuit also noted the surveillance video from the jail contained gaps and that jail staff did not properly check on Jones for more than six hours after she returned from urgent care, even though city policy required them to do so every hour and even though Jones was asking for medical attention. If you would like to comment on this story, please visit Friday's crime and courts comments section. CLEVELAND, Ohio - After numerous delays, the Cuyahoga County archive has moved into the Halle Brothers Warehouse, but the public will not have access to records until fall. The county is completing the move of several departments into the building at East 40th Street and Perkins Avenue following years of renovations. County Council in November 2013 agreed to sell the county archive building, a mansion built in 1874 on Franklin Boulevard on Cleveland's West side, for $650,000 to Welcome House Inc. The nonprofit company plans to convert the building into housing for residents with developmental disabilities. The county had expected to move out of the building by the end of 2015. It leased it for $10 a year until the end of 2017. The count keeps numerous records dating to 1802, including birth, marriage, maps and atlases. People seeking information can call 216-443-7250 or email archive@cuyahogacounty.us County Council approved a $10 million, 10-year lease in August 2014 for the warehouse building after numerous debates and discussions. The county spent about $6.6 million for renovations. Owner/landlord Greystone Properties LLC contributed $2.4 million. The building needed new wiring, HVAC, sprinkler, alarms and had to be handicap accessible. Renovations were supposed to be completed by last summer. The county is still moving into the building. The county's Board of Control agreed on Feb. 20 to pay All America Moving & Storage Company an additional $146,603 from June 30 through Dec. 31 to "relocate staff, boxes, shelving, equipment and furniture relating to the Storage Consolidation, Archives, RTA and the City Police Building." The Board of Elections has an operations center in the building. The building will hold records from the Department of Children and Family Services, the Department of Jobs and Family Services. The county also will store furniture and documents that had been housed at RTA's former garage in Newburgh Heights. The county paid RTA $219,000 in 2017 to store the items. Last November, the county bought the garage for $3.8 million and will move 185 employees and public works operations from three buildings into the facility in 2019. CLEVELAND, Ohio - In three years, the Cleveland Clinic will admit its first patient into its new hospital in London's West End. The 205-bed facility near Buckingham Palace will be the Clinic's third location in a foreign country and another step in the health system's international expansion strategy. "We'll be essentially taking our Cleveland Clinic culture and our Cleveland Clinic care model to London and working to integrate it with the local London healthcare dynamics," said Dr. Brian Donley, who earlier this month was named CEO of Cleveland Clinic London. Because real estate space is scarce in London, the Clinic is renovating a historic property for its new hospital. The health system signed a 123-1/2-year lease for 33 Grosvenor Place, a six-story, 198,000-square-foot building in central London, and already has begun demolition of the interior. Construction is expected to be finished by the end of 2020, and the facility will open to patients in early 2021. Opening a London location gives the Clinic access to doctors training in the United Kingdom and India and gives the healthcare system a presence in a market where it already has seen demand, Donley said. "A big part of this project is for us to attract the great talent in healthcare that exists in a worldwide fashion," Donley said. "The more international you are, the larger talent pool that you can pull from ...The larger the talent pool we can pull from, the better caregivers we have." The Clinic already operates sites in Toronto, Canada, and Abu Dhabi, UAE, as well as in Weston, Florida, Las Vegas, Nevada, and throughout Ohio. Donley plans to rely on lessons learned from each of those expansion and acquisition efforts in his strategy for London. "It's not just what we learned from Toronto, from Abu Dhabi. It's what we learned from Avon, from Akron General, from Cleveland Clinic Florida. We continually strengthen our model every time we go through an initiative like this," Donley said. "We've learned - good and bad - from all of these places, and we'll use all of this information as we go into London." At Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi, which opened three years ago, about one-third of the physicians were trained in Cleveland. In London, Donley intends to follow a similar plan. "It's an important component that we take a certain set of people from Cleveland so that we have that Cleveland Clinic culture in London," he said. About two dozen employees already are renting office space in London as the project gets under way. Donley is splitting his time between London and Cleveland until a replacement is named for his position at the main campus - chief of staff and chief of clinical operations. "A lot of his work is actually bringing this hospital to life," said Eileen Sheil, executive director of corporate communications for the Clinic. The Clinic plans to open a medical office building near the new hospital in 2020 that will be used for outpatient and physicians' visits. "The strategy there is for us to enter the market and be able to have our brand there with our outpatient activity," Donley said. "It also allows us to enhance our recruitment abilities as we bring our brand into the market." Cleveland Clinic London will have a full imaging suite, a full neurological suite with rehabilitation, eight operating rooms, endoscopy and catheterization labs; day case rooms for surgery and will offer specialty services for general surgery, cardiology and neurology. It will open slowly, offering a limited number of services as it establishes itself in the market, Sheil said. John Reiboldt, managing director of Coker Capital Advisors, an Atlanta-based healthcare mergers and acquisitions advisory firm, said the Clinic's expansion into London "makes a lot of sense." Reiboldt said London is a popular healthcare market, one where other large international healthcare providers already have established facilities. Another hot spot, he said, is China, where it has been rumored the Clinic is also considering establishing a presence. AKRON, Ohio -- A man is facing charges that accuse him of raping a woman at gunpoint, Akron police said. Dylante Richardson, 21, is charged with rape and aggravated robbery, police said. He was being held at the Summit County Jail on a $1 million bond. Authorities said Richardson asked a woman for a ride home on Feb. 4 because it was cold outside. The woman gave him a ride to Schiller Avenue, and when they arrived she asked to use the bathroom. The address on Schiller Avenue does not belong to Richardson, police said. Richardson walked her to the back of the building and raped her a gunpoint, officials said. He also took her cellphone and identification. Richardson is expected to appear in Akron Municipal Court Friday at 8:30 a.m. To comment on this story, visit Thursday's crime and courts comments page. CLEVELAND, Ohio - A year after Scot Rourke was hired to run Cuyahoga County's information technology department, he was dealing with rumors that he was benefiting financially from the county's relationship with his previous employer, OneCommunity. Rourke, who started with the county in December of 2015, wrote a memo to County Inspector General Mark Griffin and County Law Director Robert Triozzi on Dec. 2, 2016, saying he wanted to give them a "quick heads up" about some rumors he had heard "flying around." "Namely, the suggestion is out there that I am perhaps personally benefiting (monetarily) from a recent contract resolutions [sic] with OneCommunity, where I previously worked," the email states. He goes on to deny receiving any money from the company since he left or even having the potential to do so. (See the email and other communications below) Cleveland.com sought the email after Rourke was one of two top county administrators mentioned in a subpoena recently served on the county by public-corruption investigators. The subpoena also sought records related to contracts with OneCommunity and Hyland Software. Three days after Rourke sent his email, copying County Executive Armond Budish and Budish's chief of staff, Sharon Sobol Jordan, the Cuyahoga County Board of Control approved a $370,975 contract for work that OneCommunity had completed in 2015. The contract was not brought to the board for approval until 2016 because the work was audited to make sure it was performed by OneCommunity, not A&T, according to county records. The county has transitioned from OneCommunity to AT&T for broadband services. In an email to Griffin on March 1, 2017, Rourke provided further information about his relationship with OneCommunity, its spinoffs and other companies. Griffin issued an opinion to Rourke on March 7, 2017, but it did not mention OneCommunity. It did conclude, however, that his service as an advisory board member to a company called Secure State was not in conflict with his county job if he followed certain guidelines. The other county administrator named in the subpoena is Emily McNeeley, the county's IT general counsel and director of special initiatives. Investigators are seeking communications that Rourke and McNeeley may have had with OneCommunity after Jan. 1, 2016. The investigators also want any evidence of the two having access to records of contracts with OneCommunity or Hyland Software, a Westlake-based company where McNeeley's spouse, Lisa McNeeley is a manager of government contracts. Neither the McNeeleys nor Rourke could be reached for comment on this story. Emily McNeeley and Rourke were placed on paid leave by the county earlier this week. Rourke was a founder of OneCommunity in 2003, a company devoted to extending high-speed broadband service to hospitals, schools and government offices. He left in 2013 and in 2016 the company split into two new entities - forprofit Everstream and nonprofit DigitalC. M/C Partners and J.P. Morgan Asset Management announced in December 2015 that they were investing $50 million to make OneCommunity's for-profit subsidiary a separate company, now called Everstream. The infusion of capital was to pay off OneCommunity debt and to provide for expansion into commercial markets. In his December 2016 email to the inspector general, Rourke stated that he recently had "modest contact" with nonprofit DigitalC while working closely with Budish and Jordan in pursuit of a large grant. ALLIANCE, Ohio - Five Alliance High School freshmen accused of discussing plans to carry out a shooting told investigators they were joking, police said. The 15-year-old students are charged with making false alarms in the Wednesday incident at the high school, police said in a news release. Other students overheard the five freshmen openly discussing plans for a shooting at a lunch table, police said. Investigators also learned the freshmen had similar discussions on social media for weeks, police said. Other students alerted high school administrators, who called the police department. Officers came to the school and detained the freshmen, police said. The freshmen told investigators the plans were meant as a joke and they did not intend to harm anyone, police said. There is no evidence any of the freshmen tried to get a weapon or carry out an attack, police said. The five freshmen cooperated in the investigation, police said. They were taken to Faircrest Juvenile Detention Center to await juvenile court action. Alliance City Schools Superintendent Jeff Talbert released a statement urging students and parents to report anything suspicious to school officials or the police department. "As you are aware, the local and national culture is one of very little tolerance for threats to our children, and we will work with authorities to identify, stop, and handle all such cases," Talbert said in the statement. The incident happened one week after a 19-year-old former student killed 17 students with an assault rifle at a Florida high school. It also happened the day after a 13-year-old fatally shot himself with a long gun at a middle school in Jackson Township in Stark County. At least five other agencies - police in Akron, Elyria and Willoughby and sheriff's offices in Lorain County and Stark County - have investigated threatening messages posted on social media in the last week. Thus far at least five students accused of posting the various messages could face charges in juvenile court, authorities said. To comment on this story, visit Thursday's crime and courts comments page. Questo comunicato e stato pubblicato piu di 1 anno fa. Le informazioni su questa pagina potrebbero non essere attendibili. Market Outline: Asia Pacific Capnography Devices Market Capnography is the process of monitoring partial pressure or concentration of carbon dioxide in respiratory gases by using capnogram. It is majorly used as a monitoring tool during intensive care and anesthesia. Capnography helps to anesthesiologists to prevent the hypoxia and help to determine the situations that can lead to hypoxia and may cause irreversible brain damage. Due to these advantages, capnography is widely used in endoscopic suites, emergency rooms, x-ray rooms, and on-site emergency and trauma centers. In healthy individuals, difference between the arterial blood and expired CO 2 partial pressure is very small however, in presence of lung disease, and some congenital heart disease the difference is increased and can exceed 1 kPa. Market Dynamics: Asia Pacific Capnography Devices Market Increase in the prevalence of respiratory diseases such as COPD, pulmonary embolism, bronchospastic diseases and asthma, growing geriatric population, technological advances in capnography devices such as are anticipated to fuel the Asia Pacific capnography devices market. Moreover, wide range of applications of capnography such as hypoventilation, esophageal intubation, and endotracheal tube placement, rise in awareness about capnography devices among physicians, and adoption of newer technologies are expected to boost the market. However, alternative devices availability for capnography such as pulse oximeter, new clinical studies restraining the usage in non-intubated individuals, and issues associated with capnography usage are impedeing the growth of the market. A sample of this report is available upon request @ https://www.precisionbusinessinsights.com/market-reports/asia-pacific-capnography-devices-market/#ulp-4H8Z4LpNMLEuOnnx Market Scope: Asia Pacific Capnography Devices Market Capnography devices market is segmented on the basis of product type, technology, application, and end user Based on product type, market is segmented into the following: Capnographs o Micro-Stream Capnographs o Side-Stream Capnographs o Main Stream Capnographs Disposables Based on technology, market is segmented into the following: Hand-Held Monitors Stand-Alone Monitors Others Based on application, market is segmented into the following: Anesthesia Procedural Sedation Intensive Care Pain Management Emergency Medicine Others Based on end user, market is segmented into the following: Hospitals Clinics Ambulatory Surgical Centers To view TOC of this report is available upon request @ https://www.precisionbusinessinsights.com/market-reports/asia-pacific-capnography-devices-market/#ulp-c654SbFYO64MsOhu Country Analysis: Asia Pacific Capnography Devices Market Geographically, Asia Pacific capnography devices market has been segmented into China, Japan, India, ASEAN Countries, Australia & New Zealand, South Korea and Rest of Asia Pacific. China capnography devices market growth driven due to increase in the prevalence of COPD (approximately 3,953 COPD cases observed per 100,000 population), adoption of newer technologies, and improving healthcare infrastructure are propelling the market growth. India capnography devices market is projected to grow at a significant rate owing to increase in geriatric population, which may lead to rise in respiratory diseases prevalence. Increase in R&D activities for the innovation of newer technologies, rise in awareness about capnography devices, and launching of newer products are bolster the Japan capnography devices market. Competition Assessment: Asia Pacific Capnography Devices Market Some of the players in Asia Pacific capnography devices market include: Masimo Corporation (U.S.) Covidien plc (Medtronic, plc. (Ireland)) Nihon Kohden Corporation (Japan) Smiths Medical, Inc. (U.S.) Welch Allyn Inc. (U.S.) Koninklijke Philips N.V. (Netherlands) Dragerwerk AG & Co. KGaA (Germany) Need more information about this report @ https://www.precisionbusinessinsights.com/market-reports/asia-pacific-capnography-devices-market/#ulp-14mlyhjMGhVjZqa3 Key Features of the Report: The report provides granular level information about the market size, regional market share, and forecast from 2017-2023 The report covers in-detail insights about the competitors overview, key findings, and their key strategies The report outlines drivers, restraints, challenges, and trends that are currently faced by the industry The report tracks recent innovations, key developments and start-ups details that are working in the industry The report provides plethora of information about market entry strategies, regulatory framework and reimbursement scenario Get access to full summary @ https://www.precisionbusinessinsights.com/market-reports/asia-pacific-capnography-devices-market/ About Precision Business Insights Precision Business Insights is one of the leading market research and business consulting firm, which follow a holistic approach to solve needs of the clients. We adopt and implement proven research methodologies to achieve better results. We help our clients by providing actionable insights and strategies to make better decisions. We provide consulting, syndicated and customised market research services based on our client needs. Precision Business Insights mission is to provide high-quality market research reports and generate key insights to our clients. PBIs approachable strategies are to help clients to make key decisions for business growth. Precision Business Insights vision is to become most valued partner to fortune 500 companies by providing agile, accurate, and actionable market insights Contact to Precision Business Insights, Kemp House, 152 160 City Road, London EC1V 2NX Email: sales@precisionbusinessinsights.com Toll Free (US): +1-866-598-1553 Website @ https://www.precisionbusinessinsights.com Questo comunicato e stato pubblicato piu di 1 anno fa. Le informazioni su questa pagina potrebbero non essere attendibili. Europe Biostimulants Market: Market Estimation, Dynamics, Country Share, Trends, Competitor Analysis 2012 to 2016 and Forecast 2017 to 2023 Market Outline: Europe Biostimulants Market Biostimulants are the biological fertilizers used to increase the plant productivity and development, in addition to nourishment of agriculture products. These are formulated from micro-organisms, enzymes, trace elements, and plant hormones among others. Biostimulants help to improve the plant metabolism, nutrient availability, water holding capacity, and increase the production of antioxidants and chlorophyll. Biostimulants improve the plant growth and development entire the crop life cycle from seed germination to plant maturity. Market Dynamics: Europe Biostimulants Market Increase in the demand for quality food products with better yield, rise in adoption of sustainable farming practices, increase in R&D for cost-effective production process, and advantages of biostimulants such as decrease in chemical fertilizers using are anticipated to fuel the biostimulants market. Moreover, decrease in arable land due to increase in population, increase in government support such as providing subsidies on bio-fertilizers, and sudden changes in environment due to global warming affect the crop yield are the factors driven the biostimulants market over the forecast period. However, low awareness about biostimulants among farmers, high R&D expenditure, lengthy process for product approval, and fewer opportunities for patent approval due to easy raw material availability are restrained the growth of biostimulants market. A sample of this report is available upon request @ https://www.precisionbusinessinsights.com/market-reports/europe-biostimulants-market/#ulp-4H8Z4LpNMLEuOnnx Market Scope: Europe Biostimulants Market Biostimulants market is segmented on the basis of product type, crop type, application, and formulation type Based on product type, biostimulants market is segmented into the following: Humic Substances (Fulvic Acid and Humic Acid) Microbial Amendments Seaweed Extracts Vitamins and Amino Acids Trace Minerals Others Based on the crop type, biostimulants market is segmented into the following: Fruits and Vegetables Cereals and Row Crops Turfs and Ornamentals Others Based on the application, biostimulants market is segmented into the following: Foliar Treatment Seed Treatment Soil Treatment Based on the formulation type, biostimulants market is segmented into the following: Dry Products Liquid Products To view TOC of this report is available upon request @ https://www.precisionbusinessinsights.com/market-reports/europe-biostimulants-market/#ulp-c654SbFYO64MsOhu Market Summary: Europe Biostimulants Market Europe biostimulants market is growing at a significant CAGR owing to increase in R&D activities for the innovation of cost-effective biostimulants. Entry of new players into the market, non-toxicity nature of biostimulants, and low ecological footprints are anticipated to fuel the biostimulants market. Moreover, government initiatives encouraging the farmers for the adoption of biostimulants also upsurge the revenue of market. For instance, in June 2011, European Biostimulants Industry Consortium (EBIC) was formed to foster the role of biostimulants in agriculture to increase the product yield. Furthermore, Acquisitions and mergers, collaborations, product approvals, and launchings are the strategies followed by the market players to increase their market revenue in Europe biostimulants market. For instance, in July 2017, Valagro inked an agreement with Syngenta AG to supply the biostimulants for seed treatment. In addition, in May 2016, Sheriff Amenity launched Aminoturf, Rapidroot, and HumiKpro biostimulants in UK. Country Analysis: Europe Biostimulants Market Geographically, Europe biostimulants market is segmented into Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Russia, UK, Poland, and Rest of Europe. France biostimulants market is growing due to increase in the demand for quality food products, government initiations for improving the crop yield, and rise R&D activities are in the country. Germany biostimulants market accounted for significant share, which is attributed to increase in consumer preference for organic agro products, launching of newer biostimulants in Europe region, and collaboration between the companies. Russia biostimulants market has a significant growth rate owing to increase in agriculture production due to increase in population, government supporting for eco-friendly farming practices, and increase in the productivity of oilseeds and cereals. Need more information about this report @ https://www.precisionbusinessinsights.com/market-reports/europe-biostimulants-market/#ulp-14mlyhjMGhVjZqa3 Competition Assessment: Europe Biostimulants Market Some of the players in the global biostimulants market include: BASF SE (Germany) FMC Corporation (US) Syngenta AG (Switzerland) Arysta LifeScience Corporation (U.S.) Bayer CropScience AG (Germany) Valagro (Italy) Koppert B.V. (Netherlands) Biovert S.A. (Spain) Sheriff Amenity (U.K.) Notable Market Developments: Europe Biostimulants Market In June 2017, Valagro opened new biostimulants plant in Brazil for the expansion of business in Latin America region Key Features of the Report: The report provides granular level information about the market size, regional market share, and forecast from 2017-2023 The report covers in-detail insights about the competitors overview, key findings, and their key strategies The report outlines drivers, restraints, challenges, and trends that are currently faced by the industry The report tracks recent innovations, key developments and start-ups details that are working in the industry The report provides plethora of information about market entry strategies, regulatory framework and reimbursement scenario Get access to full summary @ https://www.precisionbusinessinsights.com/market-reports/europe-biostimulants-market/ About Precision Business Insights Precision Business Insights is one of the leading market research and business consulting firm, which follow a holistic approach to solve needs of the clients. We adopt and implement proven research methodologies to achieve better results. We help our clients by providing actionable insights and strategies to make better decisions. We provide consulting, syndicated and customised market research services based on our client needs. Precision Business Insights mission is to provide high-quality market research reports and generate key insights to our clients. PBIs approachable strategies are to help clients to make key decisions for business growth. Precision Business Insights vision is to become most valued partner to fortune 500 companies by providing agile, accurate, and actionable market insights Contact to Precision Business Insights, Kemp House, 152 160 City Road, London EC1V 2NX Email: sales@precisionbusinessinsights.com Toll Free (US): +1-866-598-1553 Website @ https://www.precisionbusinessinsights.com Questo comunicato e stato pubblicato piu di 1 anno fa. Le informazioni su questa pagina potrebbero non essere attendibili. Market Outline: Europe Capnography Devices Market Capnography is the process of monitoring partial pressure or concentration of carbon dioxide in respiratory gases by using capnogram. It is majorly used as a monitoring tool during intensive care and anesthesia. Capnography helps to anesthesiologists to prevent the hypoxia and help to determine the situations that can lead to hypoxia and may cause irreversible brain damage. Due to these advantages, capnography is widely used in endoscopic suites, emergency rooms, x-ray rooms, and on-site emergency and trauma centers. In healthy individuals, difference between the arterial blood and expired CO 2 partial pressure is very small however, in presence of lung disease, and some congenital heart disease the difference is increased and can exceed 1 kPa. Market Dynamics: Europe Capnography Devices Market Increase in the prevalence of respiratory diseases such as COPD and asthma in Europe region mainly in UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Switzerland, technological advancements in the capnography devices, and recommendations by European Resuscitation Council (ERC), Association of Anaesthetists of the Great Britain & Ireland (AAGBI), and Intensive care Society in U.K. for the using of capnography devices are anticipated to fuel the capnography devices market. However, alternative devices availability for capnography such as pulse oximeter, new clinical studies restraining the usage in non-intubated individuals, and issues associated with capnography usage are impede the growth of capnography devices market. A sample of this report is available upon request @ https://www.precisionbusinessinsights.com/market-reports/europe-capnography-devices-market/#ulp-4H8Z4LpNMLEuOnnx Market Scope: Europe Capnography Devices Market Capnography devices market is segmented on the basis of product type, technology, application, and end user Based on product type, market is segmented into the following: Capnographs o Micro-Stream Capnographs o Side-Stream Capnographs o Main Stream Capnographs Disposables Based on technology, market is segmented into the following: Hand-Held Monitors Stand-Alone Monitors Others Based on application, market is segmented into the following: Anesthesia Procedural Sedation Intensive Care Pain Management Emergency Medicine Others Based on end user, market is segmented into the following: Hospitals Clinics Ambulatory Surgical Centers To view TOC of this report is available upon request @ https://www.precisionbusinessinsights.com/market-reports/europe-capnography-devices-market/#ulp-c654SbFYO64MsOhu Country Analysis: Europe Capnography Devices Market Geographically, Europe capnography devices market is segmented into Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Russia, Poland, UK, and Rest of Europe. Germany capnography devices market is growing due to increase in the prevalence of COPD (approximately 6,155 cases observed per 100,000 people), increase in the R&D activities for the innovation of newer products, and expansion of business by market players are propel the market. France capnography devices market is projected to grow at a significant rate, which is attributed to rise in prevalence of COPD and other respiratory diseases (according to European COPD Coalition, 3.5 Mn COPD cases were present and approximately 16,000 people die every year), and mandatory usage of capnography devices in anesthesia conditions are expected to boost the market. U.K capnography devices market driven by increase in geriatric population and change in lifestyle, rise in focus on the development of newer devices by market players, and product approval and launchings are propel the market over forecast years in the country. Competition Assessment: Europe Capnography Devices Market Some of the players in the Europe capnography devices market include: Covidien plc (Medtronic, plc. (Ireland)) Masimo Corporation (U.S.) Nihon Kohden Corporation (Japan) Smiths Medical, Inc. (U.S.) Nonin Medical, Inc. (U.S.) Welch Allyn Inc. (U.S.) Koninklijke Philips N.V. (Netherlands) Dragerwerk AG & Co. KGaA (Germany) Viamed Limited (England) Need more information about this report @ https://www.precisionbusinessinsights.com/market-reports/europe-capnography-devices-market/#ulp-14mlyhjMGhVjZqa3 Key Features of the Report: The report provides granular level information about the market size, regional market share, and forecast from 2017-2023 The report covers in-detail insights about the competitors overview, key findings, and their key strategies The report outlines drivers, restraints, challenges, and trends that are currently faced by the industry The report tracks recent innovations, key developments and start-ups details that are working in the industry The report provides plethora of information about market entry strategies, regulatory framework and reimbursement scenario Get access to full summary @ https://www.precisionbusinessinsights.com/market-reports/europe-capnography-devices-market/ About Precision Business Insights Precision Business Insights is one of the leading market research and business consulting firm, which follow a holistic approach to solve needs of the clients. We adopt and implement proven research methodologies to achieve better results. We help our clients by providing actionable insights and strategies to make better decisions. We provide consulting, syndicated and customised market research services based on our client needs. Precision Business Insights mission is to provide high-quality market research reports and generate key insights to our clients. PBIs approachable strategies are to help clients to make key decisions for business growth. Precision Business Insights vision is to become most valued partner to fortune 500 companies by providing agile, accurate, and actionable market insights Contact to Precision Business Insights, Kemp House, 152 160 City Road, London EC1V 2NX Email: sales@precisionbusinessinsights.com Toll Free (US): +1-866-598-1553 Website @ https://www.precisionbusinessinsights.com Questo comunicato e stato pubblicato piu di 1 anno fa. Le informazioni su questa pagina potrebbero non essere attendibili. Market Outline: Europe Hemostasis Diagnostics Market Hemostasis diagnostics are the devices used to determine the hemostatic defects, which cause excessive bleeding. Hemostasis is defined as the stopping or slowing the blood flow from damaged blood vessel. During the hemostasis, blood changes from liquid state to the gelatinous state. Hemostasis maintained in the body by three mechanisms namely, blood coagulation, platelet plug formation, and vasoconstriction. Hemostasis diagnostics may help to predict the cause of bleeding during surgery by identifying the hemostatic defects in patients. Different types of tests such as prothrombin test, activated clotting time, platelet function, and other coagulation tests are carried to identify the hemostasis defects. Market Dynamics: Europe Hemostasis Diagnostics Market Increase in the prevalence of hemostasis related disease in Europe countries (according to The European National Registry of Congenital Coagulopathies 2017, the number of cases identified with hemostasis is increased from 7000 in 2000 to 11,000 in 2015), rise in number of surgery cases, rise in R&D investment for novel tests and devices innovation, and well developed healthcare infrastructure are expected to boost the hemostasis diagnostics market. However, high cost of advanced hemostasis products, and stringent regulations for the test approvals are expected to hamper the growth of hemostasis diagnostics market. A sample of this report is available upon request @ https://www.precisionbusinessinsights.com/market-reports/europe-hemostasis-diagnostics-market/#ulp-4H8Z4LpNMLEuOnnx Market Scope: Europe Hemostasis Diagnostics Market Hemostasis diagnostics market is segmented on the basis of product type, test type, technology, and end user Based on the product type, the market is segmented into the following: Systems Consumables Point-of-Care Testing Devices Based on the test type, the market is segmented into the following: Fibrinogen Test Activated Clotting Time Platelet Function Prothrombin Time Heparin & Protamine Dose-Response Test For ACT Activated Partial Thromboplastin Time Anti-Factor Xa Other Coagulation Tests Based on the technology, the market is segmented into the following: Optical Mechanical Electrochemical Others Based on the end user, the market is segmented into the following: Hospitals Clinics Diagnostic Centres Others (POC) To view TOC of this report is available upon request @ https://www.precisionbusinessinsights.com/market-reports/europe-hemostasis-diagnostics-market/#ulp-c654SbFYO64MsOhu Regional Analysis: Europe Hemostasis Diagnostics Market Geographically, Europe hemostasis diagnosis market is segmented into U.K., France, Germany, Russia, Spain, Italy, Poland, and Rest of Europe. U.K. hemostasis diagnostics market accounted for significant share, which is attributed to rise in prevalence of hemophilia (according to World Federation of Hemophilia Global Survey 2010, approximately 6,573 people are suffering from hemophilia), increase in prevalence of cardiovascular diseases, and adoption of newer technologies are expected to propel the market in U.K. France hemostasis diagnostics market is growing due to rise in funding for launching test kits. For instance, in March 2016, Emosis, a French company raised 1 Mn Euros funding from Cap InnovEst for the development of hemostasis test kits. Germany hemostasis market growth driven by increase in the R&D for innovation of newer products, rise in prevalence of hemophilia disease, and expansion of business by market players in the country. Russia hemostasis diagnostics market is rising due to organization of training programs for doctors on coagulation testing by market players. Competition Assessment: Europe Hemostasis Diagnostics Market Some of the players in the Europe hemostasis diagnostics market include: Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd. (Switzerland) Sysmex Corporation (Japan) Abbott Laboratories (U.S.) Alere Inc. (U.S.) Nihon Kohden Corporation (Japan) Siemens Healthineers (Germany) Danaher Corporation (U.S.) Instrumentation Laboratory (U.S.) Grifols S.A (Spain) Beckman Coulter, Inc. (U.S.) Emosis Diagnostics (France) Need more information about this report @ https://www.precisionbusinessinsights.com/market-reports/europe-hemostasis-diagnostics-market/#ulp-14mlyhjMGhVjZqa3 Key Features of the Report: The report provides granular level information about the market size, regional market share, and forecast from 2017-2023 The report covers in-detail insights about the competitors overview, key findings, and their key strategies The report outlines drivers, restraints, challenges, and trends that are currently faced by the industry The report tracks recent innovations, key developments and start-ups details that are working in the industry The report provides plethora of information about market entry strategies, regulatory framework and reimbursement scenario Get access to full summary @ https://www.precisionbusinessinsights.com/market-reports/europe-hemostasis-diagnostics-market/ About Precision Business Insights Precision Business Insights is one of the leading market research and business consulting firm, which follow a holistic approach to solve needs of the clients. We adopt and implement proven research methodologies to achieve better results. We help our clients by providing actionable insights and strategies to make better decisions. We provide consulting, syndicated and customised market research services based on our client needs. Precision Business Insights mission is to provide high-quality market research reports and generate key insights to our clients. PBIs approachable strategies are to help clients to make key decisions for business growth. Precision Business Insights vision is to become most valued partner to fortune 500 companies by providing agile, accurate, and actionable market insights Contact to Precision Business Insights, Kemp House, 152 160 City Road, London EC1V 2NX Email: sales@precisionbusinessinsights.com Toll Free (US): +1-866-598-1553 Website @ https://www.precisionbusinessinsights.com Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) recently called for a global ban on animal testing for cosmetics before 2023, for which it plans to launch a worldwide drive. Such a ban has already been in effect since 2013 in Europe and according to MEPs, this has not stunted the growth of the EU cosmetics industry. This follows two recent U.S. legislative moves to ban animal testing introduced by the states of California and Hawaii. According to MEPs, nearly 80% of countries worldwide still allow animal testing and the marketing of cosmetics tested on animals. Furthermore, some cosmetics have been identified as being tested on animals outside the EU before being re-tested in the EU using alternative methods. They note that most cosmetic ingredients are also used in other products, such as pharmaceuticals, detergents or foods, and may therefore have been tested on animals under a different legal framework. To work toward a global ban on animal testing for cosmetics and on the trade in cosmetic ingredients tested on animals, MEPs called on EU leaders to use their diplomatic networks to build a coalition and launch an international convention within the UN framework. This resolution was approved unanimously by 63 votes, with 1 abstention. It will be put to a vote at Parliaments March plenary session in Strasbourg. "I was half asleep and they had those packs and they spray like this. To me it looked just like the Ghostbuster pack. Then the number came on the screen and I said 'That's what I saw in the movie!' So I thought 'What I am going to say is, 'Who you gonna call' and let everybody else say 'Ghostbusters!'" Continue Reading Below Advertisement The other secret to the song is that because the whole thing was written in two days, they used a lot of loops. There's a reason "Who you gonna call" and "I ain't 'fraid of no ghosts" became massive catchphrases. They're repeated about a dozen times each. Apparently, that was less an artistic choice and more about not having to come up with more lyrics. Even the music video was surprisingly half-assed. Remember that spooky house that looks like a neon drawing? Continue Reading Below Advertisement That was done by drawing on glass and filming through it; an old established technique, but usually not done literally moments after the drawing is made. The cameos of celebrities turning to the camera and shouting "Ghostbusters!" were mostly called-in favors, with the one featuring John Candy obtained almost illegally. They went to the set where Candy was working -- on a totally different movie -- and wandered around having people yell "Ghostbusters" into the camera while the song was playing on a boombox. They got Candy to do the same, and then sprinted for the exits. As you can expect, they got in all sorts of trouble with the Screen Actors Guild for this, and prompted the SAG to take a little more of a stand on the practices around how music videos were made. Continue Reading Below Advertisement That's how you know you've done something really lazy -- when they bring in lawyers to prevent anyone from being that lazy again. Chris Bucholz is a Cracked columnist and your best friend. As the author of the amazing novels Freeze/Thaw and Severance, he thinks you should definitely go buy both of those now. Join him on Facebook or Twitter. Go ahead and get an Abbey Road poster for your dorm room. You know Chad's gonna be jealous. Don't you want Chad to be jealous? If you loved this article and want more content like this, support our site with a visit to our Contribution Page. Please and thank you. For more check out 6 Iconic Movie Scenes That Happened by Accident and 7 Times Being Totally Cheap Resulted In Movie Magic. Also follow us on Facebook. All it takes is a click. South Korea fortune-telling But like every other trade, it is having to contend with automation The Economist February 24, 2018 DESTINY is usually said to lurk in heavy drapes of purple velvet, in the wicked glint of a crystal ball, behind a veil of heady incense or in the tuck of a gold-chiffon turban. Your correspondent went in search of hers among a crush of Korean schoolgirls at the Broken Heart Tarot Club in booming Hongdae, a university district in Seoul. The cafes facade is an inviting jumble of pink neon signs and glowing graffiti. At the next table, a hip tarot reader spread a deck face-down for two girlfriends in oversized denim jackets, who took turns picking out cards and sipping on their lattes. He looked as cool as them, more rapper than rune-reader, in dark glasses with a chain around his neck. Interrogating the decorated cards costs 3,000 won (about $2.75) a question. A tarot reader assesses the character of her clients first. Two flicks of her wrist, and a pair of Queens appears. You chose the strongest set in the deck, she says brightly. Fame is within reach. Will a move to a new country go smoothly? The Beggar. The start will be hard, but you can succeed if you ask for help. Will the Koreas go to war? Death and The Emperor show up, apparently the tarot incarnations of Kim Jong Un (here a scythe-wielding woman in blue veils) and Moon Jae-in, the leaders of North and South Korea. Death plays tricks but the Emperor is wise, the reader assures. Broken Heart is among dozens of fortune-telling businesses on the street, packed between cheap clothes and cosmetics shops. Business is brisk. Other stores offer the Korean arts of face-reading, palm-readingone entices clients with a detailed mapping of Barack Obamas raised hand at his presidential swearing-inand saju. An ancient form of divination, saju analyses the cosmic energy at the hour, day, month and year of a persons birth from Chinese astrological records and texts. A seer at Broken Hearts says she began to study saju two decades ago (she says she found it hard to trust other fortune-tellers), but took up tarot recently to keep up with the times. The young like it. The cards are pretty, its cheap and its quick, she says. The otherworldly in South Korea will soon be a 4trn won ($3.7bn) business, predicts the Korea Economic Daily, a local newspaper. Paik Woon-san, head of the Association of Korean Prophets, estimates that there are over 300,000 fortune-tellers in the country, and 150,000 shamans, many of whom provide clairvoyance. Unusually in a country of evangelical Christians and devout Buddhists, it continues to thrive as anything from a bit of curious fun to a dependable guide for making everyday decisions. Duo, an online marriage agency, found that 82% of unmarried women and 57% of bachelors surveyed in 2017 had visited saju masters to ask about their love life. The practice survived government campaigns in the 1970s that urged citizens to junk juju and make their own fate; they were, after all, conjuring their own potent magic by building South Koreas economic miracle on the Han river. (The North has other reasons to dislike diviners, who are banned yet sought after; reports have trickled out of the authorities punishing those who make political predictions.) Now fortune-telling apps for smartphones are beguiling city kids, taking the occult into the otherworldliness of cyberspace. Handasoft, a software developer, has launched 13 apps in the past five years. Its most popular, Jeomsin, introduced two years ago, has been downloaded over 3m times. Every morning it sends users their personalised fortune for the day (other mobile prophecy-providers sell their detailed user data on to marketers, but Jeomsin makes money only from ads). Proffer your palm to the camera or snap a selfie, and another app provides instant face- and palm-reading. Shin Hyun-ho of Jeomsin reckons two or three new apps are being launched every day. More than two-thirds of those surveyed by Trend Monitor, a local market-research firm, said they see a fortune-teller at least once a year. Many visit between December and February, to see what awaits them in the new solar and lunar years. At Kyobo, South Koreas biggest bookstore chain, as many shelves are devoted to deciphering destiny as to understanding Koreas modern history, with primers including Your Winning Lotto Number is in Your Dreams. Diviners appear regularly in television dramas, sometimes as fraudsters but often to foreshadow a plot twist. In The Face Reader, a gifted seer employed by a 16th-century king correctly identifies traitors from their facial traits. It was among the highest-grossing films of 2013. Andrew Eungi Kim, a professor at Korea University, says soothsayers hold an everyday relevance in South Korea that they do not have in the West. He likens dropping in on one to occasional Sunday churchgoing in the West. The practice is passed on within familiesas one possible way by which to make sense of the world. Judgment and The Lovers Big junctures in life are a common time for a celestial steer. Careers fairs at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, in Seoul, reserve places for tarot readers. Students go to saju masters with lists of potential employers to determine those most likely to hire them. Businessmen might go to one to select a propitious date to launch a new venture. New parents routinely visit name-makers, another branch of fortune-telling, to help decide on the luckiest name for their baby. Couples check their compatibility before marriage, and one or both may be advised to change their first names to improve their matrimonial lot. In the past decade 1.5m Koreans have legally taken a new one. The clairvoyance business has also been able to thrive because fate is not fixed in Korean cosmology. Bad news can be mitigated with charms, often given in the form of an action: take up a religion, take out health insurance, stop eating red meat, do not even think about getting a tattoo. Repeat clients are thus ensured. Some even drop in for a weekly check-up. As palm lines and facial features evolve with age, so too, it is thought, does fortune. Rather than put a brave face on a luckless situation, a small number of Koreans simply change theirs. Some plastic surgeons have been educating themselves in physiognomy to advise their clients. (In The Face Reader, rivals to the throne modify the face of a contender to get the king to banish him.) Purists in the face-reading business lament that their jobs are getting tougher in plastic-happy Korea. In the posh district of Apgujeong (part of stylish Gangnam) the entrance hall of a prominent saju cafe is plastered with autographs from glitterati. Sotdae Saju Cafe offers clairvoyance with cocktails. Its saju master says counselling is the biggest part of his job. A lot of rich types around here are dissatisfied. Not long ago South Koreans were trying to survive. Now theyre trying to be happy, he says. Tae-young, a 30-something Seoulite, says she goes for a reading whenever things get too much, or if something worrisome is on her mind. Some say readings help them to accept whatever unhappy situation they are in. Few of those who see fortune-tellers take the readings as fact. Many say they offer an additional perspective. In a country where mental troubles are taboo, this is useful. Lim Chaewoo of the University of Brain Education in the city of Cheonan, south of Seoul, says that as modern societies have grown more complex, making decisions has become exacting. During the financial crisis in 2008, American stock traders and insurance brokers, themselves givers of advice, turned to psychics for a steer. Theirs seemed as good as any, in the circumstances. That saju and face-reading are recognised as academic pursuits in Korea also lends them some modern-day credibility. Janet Shin, a saju master and newspaper columnist who also lectures at universities, says that her clients include doctors, professors and religious types. Status within the profession is achieved through study and experience, as in other disciplines, rather than bluster. Kwon Hee-gwan, who offers readings from soothsaying tents near Tapgol Park in Seoul, is a firm believer in this. On a recent weekday evening, wearing a navy-blue cardigan and tie, he delicately examined clients palms with a bone-handled magnifying glass. Mr Kwon sees as many as 20 faces a day, and has worked on a total of 10,000 in his career. But that is only half the number necessary, he says, to know a clients troubles as soon as she enters his tent. Some contend that this is not as mysterious as it sounds. Face-readers consider cues like posture, body language and tone of voice in assessing a customer, much as people naturally assess physical appearance to guess someones emotional state. In pre-industrial Korea, when few people left their place of birth, many thought peoples faces were a record of their lifestyles and so in some ways a guide to their fate. Researchers even suggest that palm lines may be a fossilised record of a persons earliest moments, because they develop early in the womb. Maybe, then, they hint at a babys future health. If computers could process and dissect what contributes to human intuition, might they become the fortune-tellers of the future? In 2016 a computer programme beat Lee Sedol, a South Korean who is among the worlds best (human) Go players, by four games to one. Even the clairvoyants had not seen that coming. Already, robots are being taught how to anticipate human actionsin effect, reading the future. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have trained a system to foresee when two actors will kiss, shake hands, hug or high-five by feeding it millions of hours of television dramas. Chinese researchers have trained a computer to distinguish between criminals and non-criminals nine times out of ten. For many, all this portends a rather fearsome future. But a pair of South Korean artists at LOVOT LAB, a startup, offer a different vision. The pair tinker and exhibit above an old rubber-and-metals workshop in Mullae-dong, a run-down industrial neighbourhood of Seoul. In a corner of their studio, a small white robot sits cross-legged, surrounded by coils of sweet-smelling incense. Buddha I (pictured) has been programmed to read faces to detect a few basic emotions including happiness, anger and sadness, and dispenses lighthearted prophecies accordingly. Hong Hyuns of LOVOT LAB has never been to a fortune-teller. But part of his inspiration came from cracking open a fortune cookie. The prophecy told him to go east. As he had already decided to move from Chicago to New York, this put him in a good mood, he says. Many perfectly rational folk have been found to adjust their behaviour, even in tiny ways, after taking advice from cookies. Mr Hong was struck by how many go to have their fortunes read even as they laugh it all off. The robo-Buddha stirs from its slumber. You look happy today, it purrs. Good things will come to you. This article appeared in the Asia section of the print edition under the headline "Prophets and profits" https://www.economist.com/news/asia/21737289-every-other-trade-it-having-contend-automation-south-korea-fortune-telling Warren Mitchell pictured as Alf Garnett Frank Spencer, that emotionally underdeveloped and slightly incontinent mummys boy, had better watch out. Alf Garnett, monstrous (but hilarious) bigot and passionate West Ham United fan, should look to his laurels. Rising Damps Rigsby, the worlds most mean-spirited landlord, really ought to brace himself. Even Porridges Norman Stanley Fletcher, still doing time in Slade Prison, would be well-advised to keep his head down. For there is a new scourge at large of classic television and enduringly wonderful fictional characters, and it is called Ofcom. The broadcasting watchdog did not bat a regulatory eyelid when ITV2s Love Island reality show showed a couple conspicuously having sex two years ago before the watershed, nor raised a single objection when Channel 4 launched a series called Naked Attraction, a nude dating show which is an exercise in voyeurism masquerading as education. But it has just ruled against a specialist digital channel, Talking Pictures TV, following a single complaint about one three-letter word, now correctly considered racist, during its transmission of A Family At War, which first ran on ITV from 1970 to 1972. Sarah Cronin-Stanley, who started the channel with her husband and father three years ago and today has two million viewers, has conceded that the word is offensive. However, she argued that it needed to be considered in context, as a reflection of British attitudes during World War II. Ofcom was unsympathetic, finding the channel to be in breach of the broadcasting code and summoning it to discuss its approach, broadcastings equivalent of being called to see the headmaster and told to pull your socks up. And thus a brilliant TV drama from the early Seventies, which starred a young John Nettles, becomes the latest victim of establishment angst, as regulators crank up their increasingly ludicrous efforts to censor our collective memories. The hypocrisy is spellbinding, the sanctimony outrageous. And like all bullies, Ofcom picks the easiest targets. While titanic lewdness and profanity continue unabated in BBC1s Mrs Browns Boys and on countless primetime panel shows, an obscure digital channel is hauled over the coals for one word contained in one script written almost half a century ago. The offending episode portrays the British Army in North Africa in 1942, and a white soldier, ordering drinks from an Egyptian waiter, quipping: And hows the war going for you, Ahmed, you thieving old ***? As it happens, the unpleasant soldier is then upbraided by a colleague for his language, but that evidently did not satisfy Ofcom, which could not see past the word. The broadcasting watchdog did not bat a regulatory eyelid when ITV2s Love Island (pictured) reality show showed a couple conspicuously having sex two years ago before the watershed It is not a word that would find its way into a TV drama today, and rightly so. It is derogatory, demeaning, vicious and nasty. But surely were meant to learn from the past, not censor it. If modern sensibilities about race, gender, mental health and sexuality are to be applied retrospectively to TV programmes, then what is to stop the regulator from pouncing on the hapless Spencer in Some Mothers Do Ave Em, on the pugnacious Garnett in Till Death Us Do Part, on the incorrigible Rigsby from Rising Damp, on the irrepressible Fletch in Porridge? Or, for that matter, on the entire cast of every Carry On film ever made? They were all guilty of attitudes, or prey to mishaps, that could be construed as deeply offensive today by those whose job it is to find deep offence. Frank Spencer plays for laughs on being mentally and emotionally retarded. Alf Garnetts racism is a running theme as he talks of bloody foreigners although arguably, because of the programmes mocking portrayal of his bigotry, it helped race relations as opposed to harming them. Rigsby in Rising Damp regularly makes racist remarks to his black lodger, while in Porridge Scottish prison officer Mr Mackay is called Jock and there were racist and homophobic jokes about black and gay inmates. Yet to censor those shows would be to rob us of some of the greatest comic creations in TV history. Some of them have even transcended comedy to become cultural landmarks. The parliamentary record Hansard, for instance, is full of references to MPs joking about Frank Spencer and Some Mothers Do Ave Em. They are still evocative synonyms for abject haplessness and hence rather useful in political debate. Where will it end, this continual pandering to those who find victims everywhere, currently being fostered in the febrile atmosphere of the MeToo campaign against sexual harassment? Another classic sitcom, Dads Army, has already been criticised for featuring very few female characters. Another classic sitcom, Dads Army, has already been criticised for featuring very few female characters. Pictured is the cast It is perhaps only a matter of time before someone notices that there is no racial diversity, either, in the Walmington-on-Sea Home Guard. At least Private Frazer was Scottish. Moreover, what Ofcom is too myopic to realise is that the market and viewers common sense and decency also works. Quality should be the only justification for repeating dramas and comedies from the Sixties and Seventies. Shows such as Love Thy Neighbour and Mind Your Language, which were over-reliant on crude racism and sexism, have not stood the test of time. On the other hand, its perhaps worth remembering that another programme which has been cast into modern-day purdah, The Benny Hill Show, contained plenty of genuinely fine comic writing. Speaking of myopia, I still cherish the memory of Hills short-sighted continuity announcer squinting at his autocue and saying, Leyton Orient beat Hawaii 5-nil, before correcting himself: No, sorry, later on its Hawaii Five-O. I suppose even that would now be deemed likely to offend somebody, somewhere. Sarah Cronin-Stanley, responding to the telling-off by Ofcom, has argued that to censor classic TV is to treat mature viewers like children. The regulator has insisted that her channel needs to warn viewers beforehand if the programme they are about to watch contains outdated racial stereotyping but this, she says, would mean babysitting her audience. Hear, hear. Surely, the viewing public, not an anonymous body of morality police, should be the arbiters of what is and isnt acceptable. Television progamme Porridge with Ronnie Barker as Norman Stanley Fletcher After all, we are always free to complain, as indeed one person did about A Family At War. But we dont need to be spoon-fed, especially when, as in the case of Ofcom, its a self-important nanny populated by metropolitan types that is holding the spoon. Ofcom is nothing if not metropolitan. Set up by the Blair government in 2003, from 2006 its chief executive was Ed Richards, a Labour apparatchik whose main qualification was that he had been an adviser to Tony Blair. Richards successor Sharon White also worked for Blair, in his Downing Street policy unit. Ofcoms Left-liberal thinking perhaps explains its obsession with political correctness as well as its easy-going attitude to sex and crudity on TV. Whatever the case, scores of viewers of Cronin-Stanleys channel responded with alarm to Ofcoms heavy-handedness over Family At War. The response has been unbelievable, she said yesterday. I have had 200 calls since this morning just from viewers showing their support, saying: What can I do? The point is, she said, that anybody watching her channel knows the programmes to be nostalgic. If youre watching films from the Fifties, Sixties or Seventies they will show attitudes which were relevant then. Michael Crawford as Frank Spencer from Some Mothers Do Have 'Em She added that the company has no wish to offend its viewers and does censor the material it shows. When we really know someone would be offended, we do censor programmes. There have been various ones where the N word we have taken out. That classic 1955 movie The Dam Busters still hasnt been re-made, even though the project was announced, by director Peter Jackson, more than a decade ago. But a new script has apparently changed one all-important letter in the name of Wing Commander Guy Gibsons black Labrador-retriever, making it Digger. That is entirely right and proper, a tweak which gains in decorum what it loses in historical accuracy. But when we watch the repeats of the original film, do we really need the name to be edited out, as it sometimes is? Can we not be trusted to work out for ourselves that times have changed and that its not a name that would be given to a dog today? As so often, the only thing that needs to prevail here is common sense. Ofcom should be sensible in how it reacts to complaints though fat chance of that and the broadcasters should be sensible about what they transmit. Fat chance of that, either. Above all, it needs to stop worrying about programmes made years ago, and become far more vigilant about what gets transmitted now and its power to offend. Why should an elderly viewer in Hampshire, lets say, who might wince at the sight of genitalia or repeated use of that revolting word mother******, be treated with any less respect by the regulator than a young viewer in metropolitan Hammersmith who is outraged by something perceived as sexist? It is indefensible. And yet it happens all the time. From Gigi Hadid to Nicole Kidman, David Fisher has snapped some of the biggest celebrities on the planet. Now the veteran photographer has shared his expert tips on how to make sure you look your best in any picture - no matter what the occasion. Fisher, who is based in London but has worked around the world for Shutterstock, shared four rules to follow anytime you are in front of the camera. He illustrated each tip with a photo he has taken on the red carpet. Speaking to FEMAIL, Fisher shared his four go-to tricks... Take a step forward Confident: Loose Women's Linda Robson, second from right, takes a step forward from her co-presenters on the red carpet for the National Television Awards in January. Also pictured Stacey Solomon, Linda, Nadia Sawalha, Denise Van Outen and Gloria Hunniford A group shot is one of the most common set-ups for a photo on a night out but how do you make sure you stand out from the crowd? Fisher suggests taking a small step of the rest of the group so you are positioned slightly in front. 'That position can give the effect of being taller,' he explained. If looking a little on the short-side is a concern then ask the photographer to shoot from a lower angle so the lens is pointing upwards. Stand front and centre Star of the show: Actor Tom Cruise confidently stands between Revenant director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, left, and star Leonardo DiCaprio, right, at the Baftas in 2016 Another tip for standing out in a group shot is to take the centre position. It might seem domineering to insist on being in the middle, but it is the easiest way to ensure you'll like how you look in the photo. Fisher explained: 'That way you are at the centre of attention and you are not standing at an angle that is showing off your least favorite side.' Work out your quirks Perfect pose: Fifty Shades of Grey star Dakota Johnson nails the over-the-shoulder look at the Golden Globes last month. Fisher suggests working out what works best for you pre-event Stars like Beyonce might look effortless on the red carpet but part of that natural look is down to the practice they put in before getting in front of the camera. Fisher said: 'To really perfect your pose, its important to spend some time practising in front of a mirror and observing the various positions, pouts and poses you have. 'Take note of what you are most comfortable with and if there are some quirks that you want to avoid such as fidgeting with your outfit or hair.' For inspiration take a look at your favourite celebrities and try and mimic their best on-camera looks. Try this fail-safe pose Glamour: Penelope Cruz is the epitome of confidence at the premiere for Murder on the Orient Express in November 2017. Fisher said: 'Be sure to keep your chin up, look straight down the camera lens and stand tall for a more flattering pose' No matter what pose you go for, there is one fail-safe option that you can always fall back on. 'Be sure to keep your chin up, look straight down the camera lens and stand tall for a more flattering pose,' Fisher said. Most importantly, feel confident. Fisher added: 'Standing with confidence and being comfortable in your stance is most important when being photographed.' Most women will eventually find themselves going through menopause, but not many will have to go through it when they're only 32. That's exactly what happened to one Queensland mother-of-two after she decided to have both of her ovaries removed. Monique McLoughlin, 35, opted for surgery after she was told by doctors that she had a high-risk of ovarian cancer. 'I lost my right ovary in 2008 due to a cyst that was low malignant potential. If I didn't have it removed likely to become cancerous,' Monique explained. 'At the end of 2014 another cyst was discovered and removed that was also low malignant potential.' Monique McLoughlin, 35, (pictured) had her ovaries removed because she was considered 'high-risk' for ovarian cancer 'A decision had to be made, do I keep that ovary and run the risk of getting cancer or have that ovary removed,' she continued. Because the cysts had been discovered on Monique's ovaries on three separate occasions, the risk of cancer was high. Since Monique no longer has any ovaries she has been medically induced into menopause, meaning she doesn't have a period and isn't functioning hormonally as an average woman in her 30s. Cysts had been discovered on Monique's ovaries on three separate occasions so the risk of cancer was high She said the transition had been difficult physically and mentally. 'My symptoms of menopause were instant hot sweats. I would be feeling normal one second then I would be dripping wet with sweat the next,' Monique told FEMAIL. 'At night time I would be in bed, the air con would be on and I would wake up extremely hot, every limb felt like it was on fire, it was just hot. 'They were instantaneous and there would be no warning, I would just be left a sweaty mess.' Monique also found that during this time she was suddenly battling with anxiety, something she hadn't dealt with on this scale before. She puts this down to the fact that she wasn't producing the correct hormonal levels her body was once used to. 'Things I could most likely solve beforehand which were easy then became very difficult to process and figure out once I had them removed,' she said. Monique was in her mid-20s when her doctor brought up the idea of her having children 'Even doing the grocery shopping was a hard task as things became overwhelming. My body was put into an extreme situation after being used to being hormonally balanced.' 'Normally for women menopause is something gradual that they experience but for me, I was hit all at once.' Monique explained that going through menopause is never something she thought would happen to her. 'Being 32 you don't expect it, you equate menopause with something that happens later on in life when you're older and here I was at 32 going through it all. 'At the time I had small children, my youngest child was not yet two, so dealing with two small children and going through all of those symptoms was certainly a struggle. Since she was a teenager Monique has had numerous issues with her ovaries, but when she was younger she put the ache down to period pains or simply having 'eaten too much' 'In saying that my husband was nothing but supportive, very understanding and very caring, I got through those times because of him.' She said it took her a whole year to feel normal again and to get her body back on track. 'That year was very hard but fitness has been a massive factor in my life and I decided to participate in competitive body sculpting. 'It gave me focus and drive to put myself in a good head space to cope with everything that was happening. I can't thank fitness enough and the people that supported me.' Since she was a teenager, Monique has had numerous problems with her ovaries, but when she was younger she put the ache down to period pains or simply having 'eaten too much'. She was only in her mid-20s when her doctor suggested to have children. 'My symptoms of menopause were instant hot sweats. I would be feeling normal one second then I would be dripping wet with sweat the next,' Monique told FEMAIL 'I hadn't even began to think about having children at that stage of my life, I was very involved in my work and I had great plans,' she said. 'I had my life planned out in steps: get engaged, get married, have a honeymoon, do all the normal things that generally a couple does so it was a big shock to have to be discussing children at what I thought was such a young age. 'When you've got your life planned out and its not going the way you wanted to, it's very difficult.' The young couple were advised that they would have a lot of trouble falling pregnant naturally and it was recommended that they go through IVF, which was something Monique hadn't even began to think about. 'Normally for women menopause is something gradual that they experience but for me, I was hit all at once,' Monique shared Monique turned to fitness to help her process what was happening to her body 'At that stage my boyfriend Adam and I were just getting serious but we were thrown in the world of IVF, medication and specialists,' Monique explained. 'We had to sit back from it all, it just became all too much. I wasn't in the right frame of mind and and I backed out. 'We had a long discussion about trying naturally and if it happened it happened, and if it didn't we would review the IVF process in a years time when we felt comfortable.' Monique felt as if a snowball effect was occurring, they were being thrown into a world they didn't fully understand and it showed no signs of slowing down. 'We tried for eight months and then we were blessed to find out I was pregnant naturally at 27,' Monique explained. 'I can't thank my lucky stars enough that it happened the way it did. You hear so much about infertility and how IVF can take away so much from families through the journey of hope and loss.' Monique was in her mid-20s when she had her first ovary removed and this was when her doctor brought up the idea of her having children Monique told FEMAIL that at the beginning of all of this she gave Adam, her now-husband, the opportunity to walk away. 'I said to him, if this is too much, if you cant handle this, I wouldn't blame you if you broke up with me tomorrow,' she said. 'My husband was just amazing, sensitive, caring and supportive. I can't think of a better man than what I have in my husband. He stood by me through all of this.' The couple turned to IVF so they could conceive a second child. 'The only way I would be able to conceive now would be via egg donor as I don't have any ovaries that produce eggs but we're very blessed and so thankful to have the two children we do now,' she said. 'We are complete and thankful and so happy for the family we have.' Monique told FEMAIL that at the beginning of all of this she gave Adam, her now-husband, the opportunity to walk away Monique said that although she is healthy and happy, every journey is different. 'There are a lot of women out there who have had ovarian cancer or are dealing with cancer currently, it's got to be tough, and stories can't be compared,' Monique told FEMAIL. 'My biggest shout out is to my husband and my family, without them the love and the support I've had, it would have been very difficult.' She said she hoped her story could shed light on what she, as well as many other women go through when it comes to ovarian cancer. 'If I can help just one woman with her journey then my job is done. Awareness and education is key,' she said. 'It's vital to make sure women feel like they're in a safe space to share their story. If I can share my story hopefully I can let them know they're not alone.' A former McDonald's worker has lifted the lid on what it's really like to work at one of the world's biggest fast food chains. FEMAIL spoke exclusively to a former employee from a south-east London branch of the restaurant, who revealed the shocking truth about working under the famous golden arches. Robyn, who did not reveal her surname, revealed how the hygiene standards in her branch were shrugged off by co-workers who washed their hands just three times during a shift - rather than every half hour, as detailed in their staff policy. She recalled watching chefs pick their noses and take out the bins without washing their hands, shortly before handling food. Dealing with hundreds of customers very day was not always easy, and once Robyn even spotted a man watching pornography on his phone as he waited for his order. Speaking exclusively to FEMAIL, a former McDonald's worker revealed what it was like to work in one of their branches in South East London HYGIENE STANDARDS WERE LOW McDonald's instructs its staff to wash their hands with antimicrobial soap at least every 30 minutes, but Robyn said this wasn't the case in the restaurant where she worked. She said: 'The chefs and the till staff are meant to wash their hands every half an hour, that's in their policy, but I would see people picking their noses, wiping their mouths and handling foods. I was like ''I don't want to eat that.'' 'They'd wash their hands when they got in and when they went on their break, but that's it. They'd wash them maybe three times but it's meant to be at least five in a shift. It was really unhygienic.' She added: 'They'd take the bins out and then be handling food after and some people wouldn't wash their hands.' Robyn said chefs weren't very hygienic and would wash their hands three times a shift, when they were meant to wash them every half an hour CRAZY CUSTOMERS As one of the UK's most popular fast food outlets, McDonald's serves customers from all walks of life - which often means unsavoury characters stopping by. Robyn told how employees were treated like dirt' by their customers, with teenagers often deliberately making a mess so she would have to clean it up. 'It's degrading when you're at work,' she admitted. Robyn recalled an unpleasant Friday night shift when she came across a customer behaving very inappropriately as he waited for his food. She said: 'One Friday night a man watched porn while he was waiting for his burger. He was standing there with his back to the wall with his phone angled but I could see what he was looking at. I was only 17 at the time.' She said she'd never order a Big Mac because the beef burgers are often left waiting to be sold for a while The chicken products like Chicken Selects and the nuggets are the safest choice on the menu because customers can see them being prepared WHAT NOT TO EAT From fries to Big Macs, the McDonald's menu has a huge variety and plenty of purse-friendly options. But Robyn advises customers to only eat the fries and chicken products like McNuggets or the Chicken Selects as they can see them being prepared. She explained: 'Even when I go in there now I'd never get beef because it's just been sitting there and it tastes really dry. If you order it different to the way [it's advertised], it's freshly made - so ask for no onions, lettuce or whatever.' NO ROOM TO GROW McDonald's prides itself on offering career opportunities for its employees, and claims that 90 per cent of their business managers started off working as servers and chefs. However, Robyn says the restaurant she worked in would only take employees in for three months at a time because that was the probationary period, after which they would be eligible for a pay rise. She also claims that the recruiter led her on about the opportunities she'd have while working for the company. Robyn recalled how customers would deliberately drop food on the floor for her to clean up Robyn said: 'They always said you could work your way up. In the induction they played you videos and it made you think if you were in McDonald's you could travel around the world to America, India, all these places, but then they just want you to work for them and not give you pay rises.' A McDonald's spokesperson said: 'Food quality, hygiene and safety are of the utmost importance to us and we have strict standards and policies in place for which all of our people receive regular training. We take any allegation like this extremely seriously, and would welcome the opportunity to investigate further. 'Our people are at the heart of our business and, as a responsible and proud employer, we are committed to investing in and supporting them, if anyone has concerns we would encourage them to speak to us or their manager directly.' A woman has detailed her horrifying encounter with the 'worst roommate ever'. Speaking to New York Magazine, Alex Miller from Philadelphia shared how a stranger she welcomed into the spare room of her Chestnut Hill home eventually tried to assault her with a knife before murdering his brother and eventually killing himself. However, on first meeting, the man who identified himself as Jed Creek and claimed to be a lawyer from New York, seemed like the answer to her prayers after her former roommate had departed suddenly and she couldn't afford the rent on her own. Horror: Alex Miller from Philadephia has detailed her horrifying encounter with 'the worst roommate ever' who tried to force her out of her own home before assaulting her with a knife Desperate: She welcomed the man who called himself Jed Creek into her home after a former roommate left her Chestnut Hill home, pictured, but he quickly started doing strange things After a quick conversation on the couch where they discussed their shared interest in Buddhist meditation, he offered to move in immediately and wrote a check for $800 on the spot. Alarm bells should have been raised when the upper left hand corner of the check was left blank and his name also didn't appear anywhere on the piece of paper. However, when the check cleared in the bank the next day, Miller put it to the back of her mind, despite the fact her new roommate moved in without much furniture and fashioned a bed out of several comforters on the floor of his bedroom instead. Both dog owners, Miller shared how the two fell into a comfortable routine in the days following Creek's arrival. He would get up early in the morning to run with his dog, Zachary, and tended to both his dog and cat Abigail carefully, feeding Zachary brand-name kibble and giving Abigail cooked organic chicken. They also spent many nights drinking wine and watching The Rachel Maddow Show together. However, on their 11th day of living together, Creek refused to pay his share of the utility bills, stating that they covered a period before he moved in. 'We can handle this in court if you would prefer,' he wrote in a text message when Miller pressed him further. Miller said she realized she was dealing with something far more serious when several other strange things started to happen after their discussion about bills. Examples included Creek taking all the light bulbs from the living room so he could use them in his bedroom instead. He also removed the six chairs from the communal kitchen table and made them into a desk in his bedroom. Uncomfortable: Alex shared how Jed removed all the light bulbs from the living room and moved the kitchen chairs into his bedroom Imposter: After a series of strange things happened, Miller's mother did some research and found 'Jed Creek' was actually a man named Jamison Bachman Serial squatter: Bachman had also tried to evict a woman named Melissa Frost from her New York home, pictured, after Hurricane Sandy Harassed: Melissa shared how Bachman kicked down her doors, scuffed her floors and clogged her toilets with cat litter When Creek refused to pay his half of the rent after he found a cigarette butt in the toilet, claiming Miller had broken the 'covenant of quiet enjoyment', her mother put his phone number into Google and found that Creek was not his real name. 'Alex, we have a big problem,' she told her daughter. 'Jed Creek is not who he says he is.' His legal name was Jamison Bachman and Miller's mother found two articles about him detailing how he had tried to evict a woman named Melissa Frost from her home in New York in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. Raised in the affluent Elkins Park neighborhood in Philadelphia, Bachman had been popular and bright, eventually going on to study at Tulane University before excelling in law school at Georgetown the age of 45. However before he had even finished law school, he had involved himself in three tenancy disputes. Allowing him to move in after he told her his home had been destroyed, Frost was subjected to Bachman using his knowledge of tenancy laws to try and remove her from her home. He reportedly kicked down her doors, scuffed her floors and clogged her toilets with cat litter. 'He went from being this cordial, polite person who understood he was a guest in my house,' Frost said, 'to someone who was approaching me aggressively and flat-out saying, "This is my house now."' And when New York Magazine writer William Brennan reached out to over a dozen other people who had experienced Bachman as a tenant, he found that Bachman had a history of being a serial squatter, determined to force people from their homes. Lucky escape: Bachman was arrested and also had a protection order against him after he assaulted Miller with a serrated knife, slicing open her leg Brotherly love: Jamison's 64-year-old brother Harry, pictured, bailed him out of jail but his wife Caroline wouldn't let Jamison move into their home Tragedy: After Harry refused him a place to stay, he went on to murder his brother at his Elkins Park home in Philadelphia, pictured, before eventually killing himself A few days after Miller's mother, Susan, discovered Bachman's true identity, she let herself into Alex's apartment unannounced and confronted Bachman by using his real name. Miller then wrote him a letter using the letterhead from the lawyer's office she worked at part-time, saying the authorities had been alerted to his actions. She then organized a party with a dozen of her friends and described it as 'a send off' for 'the Serial Squatter Jamison Bachman'. She served Jameson whiskey and played rap music as she knew Bachman hated it, and when he eventually left his room, dumping cat litter in the toilet as he left, Miller decided to unscrew the doorknob from his bedroom door. Ignoring advice from friends, she stayed in the apartment that night and the next morning, was physically assaulted by Bachman he sliced her thigh open with a serrated knife he had been using to dice up cat food. When police officers were called to the scene, they arrested Bachman upon seeing the cuts on Miller's legs, and he was charged with aggravated assault. Miller was also able to obtain a protection order and when he was bailed out of jail by his brother Harry, Miller was able to get him arrested once more. Bailed out a second time by his brother, Bachman requested to stay with him but Harry's wife Caroline refused. Jamison Bachman then murdered his brother before eventually killing himself after he was arrested for his murder. She has strutted her stuff down the catwalk in all kinds of lacy lingerie for Victoria's Secret, but model Taylor Hill looks sexier than ever showing off her abs in the new Joe's Jeans Spring 2018 campaign. The 21-year-old poses in a slew of denim ensembles shot by Daniel Jackson and styled by Alex White in New York and feature Taylor showing off her toned midriff in little bralettes under her open jackets. The new Joe's spring collection is all about vintage washes, neutral colors and monochromatic looks which Taylor shows off in the photos like her head-to-toe pale pink ensemble. Scroll down for video Sexy: Taylor Hill looks sexier than ever in the new Joe's Spring and Summer 2018 campaign Photoshoot: The 21-year-old poses in a slew of denim ensembles shot by Daniel Jackson and styled by Alex White in New York Joe's Spring 18 collection is 'grounded in vintage washes, neutral palettes, utility and a new take on floral all while encompassing the same femininity and attitude you'd expect from Joe's.' The latest campaign for the premium denim lifestyle brand is part of the 18-month partnership Taylor has with Joe's and the latest campaign highlights a variety of new silhouettes and washes. All of the pieces from the new collection are available at Nordstrom, Saks Fifth Avenue, Bloomingdale's and Neiman Marcus as well as at select Joe's stores and on their website. Taylor gushed about the brand in a statement, 'I have loved working with Joe's over the past year and a half. I have been surrounded by the best photographers, stylists and designers in the business. 'Working with Daniel on this campaign was awesome - the new photography perfectly captures the collection.' Some of the styles Taylor is pictured wearing include The Cut Off Jacket and The Kass mid-rise slim straight ankle both in Dyanna. Jeans: The latest campaign highlights a variety of new silhouettes and washes that Taylor models Stunning: Joe's Spring 18 collection is all about vintage washes, neutral palettes and attitude Job: Taylor gushed about the brand saying, 'I have loved working with Joe's over the past year and a half and have been surrounded by the best in the business' In addition to those styles, she also wears the Twill Drea Jacket in Earth Army paired with The Charlie high rise skinny ankle. Jameel Spencer, Fashion Division President at Sequential Brands Group owner of the Joe's brand stated, 'We are excited to reveal our latest campaign with Taylor. She has proven to be the ultimate muse for the brand. 'Through our partnership over the last two years, it's been amazing to see how she's evolved and how we've been a part of her journey. We couldn't be more pleased.' In a black and white video that was released to accompany the campaign Taylor is featured lying down in a Canadian tuxedo of a cropped jacket and high-waisted jeans. Under her cropped jean jacket she's not wearing a shirt but instead dons a tiny white tube top that shows off her taut tummy. The SS18 campaign officially launched today across multiple digital platforms and outdoor advertising will run in Los Angeles and New York. Striking: Taylor also features in a beautiful black-and-white video for the campaign Making moves: Her third collection for the brand is set to debut in March True love: Taylor admitted last year that she has around 20 pairs of jeans, admitting that she has an 'obsession' with denim The Victoria's Secret model has been the face of the brand for over a year now and aside from starring in the brand's campaigns, the model also creates her own capsule collections with them. Taylor's third capsule collection with the denim brand will officially launch in March but for now things are heating up with her sexy campaign. Taylor is the perfect person to be the face of the denim brand and last year when the model's first campaign and collection with the brand came out, Founder and Creative Director, Joe Dahan had nothing but amazing things to say about her. 'Taylor is the ultimate Joe's girl - confident, feminine, and strong with a bit of rebellion. 'When we decided to create something together, she was immediately all in, she created mood boards, shared references and we bounced ideas off of each other.' Who better to star in a denim campaign than someone who is obsessed with jeans. Taylor said in a video released months ago for Joe's, 'In my closet, I probably have I wanna say 20 pairs of jeans. 'I have an obsession and really crazy collection.' It's a not uncommon for both men and women to indulge in a little shopping spree every now and then. But many Australian women are now feeling more guilty than ever for their purchases - especially if they spent more than they intended. This guilt is often so bad that is develops in an overwhelming feeling of shame - so why do they feel this way? Speaking to FEMAIL, the CEO of Australian company Wealth Enhancers, Sarah Riegelhuth, explained why those feelings develop and how women can rid themselves of them for good. 'Often these feelings come from a sense of wanting to give and look after others, and putting others before ourselves. Spending money on a little self-care can feel selfish,' she said. The CEO of Australian company Wealth Enhancers, Sarah Riegelhuth, has helped explain why those feelings develop (pictured) To change this way of thinking, Sarah recommends people set aside time each week to do something for themselves. 'This may involve spending money or it may not, but if we build a little into our budget for this, it really shouldn't be an issue,' she said. 'How we treat ourselves has a direct impact on how we show up for others, to be our best selves it's important to take time out to nurture ourselves.' Sarah also explained that feeling this way about spending money can also boil down to low-self esteem. To change the feeling of guilt you may have when it comes to spending money Sarah recommends that people practice self-love and self-compassion 'Learning about money, being in control of it and being intentional with it is a great way to build up our self esteem when it comes to money,' she said. 'Low self esteem can affect many areas of our lives, and money is certainly one of them. If we don't value ourselves, it's hard to value our money.' Sadly a lot of people have preconceived notions surrounding money which can often lead to them worrying about what others think about how they spend their cash. 'Worrying about what others think is pointless, what's most important is to connect with your own truth, follow that, and practice letting go of those thoughts around other people's opinions,' Sarah said. Sadly a lot of people have preconceived notions surrounding money which can often lead to people worrying about what others think That being said, Sarah said that justifying our purchases isn't necessarily a bad thing as it can hold ourselves responsible for our spending. 'However the need to justify our purchases to others tends to indicate that we've perhaps spent money we shouldn't have or feel as though we've spent money we shouldn't have,' she said. 'If we have our investments and savings covered, we're not racking up credit card debt and we're spending money we allocated for clothes actually on clothes, then we shouldn't feel any need to justify anything.' She explained that most of these feelings come from not using a budget and not being intentional around where we spend our money. Sarah explained that justifying our purchases isn't necessarily a bad thing as it can hold ourselves responsible for our spending 'Ultimately we've either spent more money than we could afford, or we feel as though we have,' Sarah said. 'To avoid conflict or judgement from a partner, friend or family member it can feel easier to just lie about the cost of something. 'Again, having a budget and being intentional with our money can totally alleviate these feelings.' Sarah explained that one of the things that financial shame stems from is the fact that many of us are taught how to manage money while we're at school. This means that many people assume that they should know everything they need to know to be able to control their finances. 'It's also still very much a taboo topic, so we can often feel isolated in our own financial situation and assume that everyone else has it together and it's just us who doesn't,' she explained. 'Talking more openly about money is a great way to help get a better grasp on how we're doing and normalise our relationship with money.' If you wake up feeling lethargic, constantly lack motivation and are craving sweet or salty food every day, you may be suffering 'adrenal fatigue'. The term is used to describe a collection of symptoms including body aches, low blood pressure and digestive issues and is thought to be caused by the 'burning out' of the adrenal glands in response to stress. 'It seems so many people these days are low in energy - probably because we live in such a face-paced, stressful world where our phones are always buzzing and we often forget to take some much needed time out,' Australian nutritionist Jessica Sepel said. 'It seems so many people these days are low in energy - probably because we live in such a face-paced, stressful world where our phones are always buzzing and we often forget to take some much needed time out,' Jess Sepel (pictured) said What is adrenal fatigue? Your adrenal glands sit on top of each kidney. Their role is to produce hormones, including adrenaline and noradrenaline both of which are used to prepare your body for fight or flight. Supporters of the unproven theory of 'adrenal fatigue' claim it occurs when the adrenal glands are 'burnt out' from producing these hormones in response to stress. Source: Health Direct Advertisement 'If we keep this up, being consistently tired for long periods of time, we can do our bodies some serious harm. 'In fact, it can cause our adrenals to collapse - sending us into whats called adrenal fatigue.' Ms Sepel said some of the tell-tale signs of adrenal fatigue in addition to the above include struggling to get up in the morning, getting a second wave of energy at 11pm, feeling unmotivated and getting sick often. For those who do suffer the above, Ms Sepel offered some simple daily steps to help ease symptoms naturally and help them boost their energy levels. 'Every night, whenever you can. I truly believe if people consistently got eight hours of sleep, many health problems would be solved,' she said 'Get eight hours of sleep,' Ms Sepel said. 'Every night, whenever you can. I truly believe if people consistently got eight hours of sleep, many health problems would be solved.' Ms Sepel also recommends getting into the 'stress free zone' daily by doing meditation or walking, giving up refined carbs and sugar and eating well and 'more often'. 'Have regular meals and snacks that are packed with nutrient-dense foods to keep your energy levels up,' she said. What are other ways to boost your energy levels naturally? Physical exercise: As long as its not too high-intensity, too often, movement is great to fight fatigue Spend time doing things that make you feel good: Love and passion are sure-fire ways of keeping yourself energised Have something to look forward to: Plan a big adventure or a weekend trip, an art class or even a night out on the town with your partner Get support: I am a believer in seeking professional support if you need it Advertisement 'Having some protein at each meal can also help stabilise blood sugars and avoid blood sugar drops,' Ms Sepel said 'Having some protein at each meal can also help stabilise blood sugars and avoid blood sugar drops. And, as always, eat more greens theyre rich in iron and are so easy to add to smoothies or juices.' Ms Sepel also advises those who think they may suffer from adrenal fatigue to get their levels tested and avoiding excess caffeine at all cost. 'Limit yourself to one cup of coffee per day if you can. You may think coffee will give you more energy, but long term it can cause your adrenals more stress and exhaustion,' she said. 'If you can, replace coffee with herbal teas a great way to increase your water intake (you should be drinking two litres a day!) while also nourishing your body.' Ms Sepel also recommends getting into the 'stress free zone' daily by doing meditation or walking, giving up refined carbs and sugar and eating well and 'more often' While many naturopaths and nutritionists believe adrenal fatigue is a legitimate condition, others are skeptical. 'It's something made up by naturopathic doctors; endocrinologists don't recognise it as a real condition,' Theodore C. Friedman, an endocrinologist at Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science, told the Sydney Morning Herald. Saul Marcus, a naturopathic doctor from Connecticut, disagreed. 'When it comes to adrenal fatigue, conventional medicine insists it doesn't exist. However, adrenal fatigue is essentially a stress reaction, and stress is very well understood as a cause of illness,' he told the publication. If you have unexplained fatigue or exhaustion that persists, see your doctor. Treating an underlying issue, such as a low thyroid level, can help reverse fatigue. A husband and wife with a 29-year age gap were forced to move 120 miles away from their home in Scotland after a stream of abuse from strangers. Kristine Mackenzie, 37, has been with Duncan, 66, for 20 years, despite suffering cruel taunts from neighbours labelled her husband a 'paedophile'. Despite meeting Kristine when she was 18, and he was 47, strangers in their hometown of the Isle of Skye labelled him a 'dirty old man'. Finally, after ten years of abuse, the couple relocated to Inverness to escape the cruel comments and stares. Kristine, a retail worker, said: 'I hated people taunting us, but we learnt to laugh off their ignorant remarks. Defiant: Kristine and Duncan, who met in 1998 aged 18 and 47 respectively, insist they are 'perfect for each other' despite suffering cruel taunts from strangers and neighbours After striking up a romance 20 years ago, the couple (pictured here on holiday) had to put up with strangers calling Duncan, now 66, a 'paedophile' and a 'dirty old man' 'I've never cared what anyone said, Duncan is the love of my life. When people called him names like paedo, it did hurt my feelings. 'But we've now been together for 20 years so have proven all the doubters wrong.' The mother-of-two, who met her husband-to-be through friends in 1998, recalled: 'Duncan was more than twice my age but, despite his greying hair, I thought he was gorgeous. 'At first, because Duncan was nearly three decades older than me, I tried to suppress my feelings. I was worried about what other people would think. But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't stop thinking about him.' Two weeks later, Kristine bumped into Duncan, a retired janitor, and he asked her out on a date. The following month they were officially a couple. Kristine, who relocated from the Isle of Skye to Inverness, said: 'I've never cared what anyone said, Duncan is the love of my life. When people called him names like paedo, it did hurt my feelings' Kristine says: 'Duncan was young at heart and so passionate. As we lived on a small island, we were conscious of people gossiping, so initially we kept our relationship secret. 'It was hard, but I didn't want Duncan getting grief from people for our huge age gap. He was so good with my young daughter Catrina and I didn't want to jeopardise what we had.' The couple took Catrina, now 20, for a walk through the town and were subjected to verbal abuse. Kristine said: 'People were staring at us and giving us dirty looks.I felt like we were on display. 'Then a man shouted, "Look at that pervert over there!" My heart sank when I realised he was pointing at Duncan. Tying the knot: In April 2010, the couple made it official when they married in a small ceremony in front of family and friends. They share daughter Jamie, 17 Part of the family: Kristine on her wedding day with Duncan's son Skye Lawson, now 38. The bride opted for a red sleeveless number instead of a traditional white gown 'It was so upsetting, but Duncan told me to take any notice. So we held our heads high and refused to let strangers' comments affect us.' In August 2000 Kristine gave birth to the couple's daughter Jamie, now 17. Kristine said: 'I worried that Duncan's age would mean he'd struggle with the demands of a newborn as he was 49 by then. But he was fantastic. He'd get up for the night feeds and play with her all day long.' Meanwhile Duncan's son Skye, 38, from a previous relationship, is often mistaken for Kristine's partner. The couple at their wedding with Kristine's daughter Catrina, left, and their daughter Jamie, right. Kristine said: 'We've been together for 20 years and have proven all the doubters wrong' She said: 'People used to think that I was in a relationship with Skye, not Duncan. Once, at a wedding reception, a lady asked Skye, "Aren't you going to introduce me to your girlfriend?" and looked at me. 'We burst out laughing. Luckily we all see the funny side.' But the couple continued to receive unwanted remarks from strangers in the street. Kristine says: 'One day when Jamie was six, someone shouted to Duncan that he was "a paedo". 'I was sick of the comments so, in March 2008, we decided to move to Inverness. It was hard leaving our home, but I knew a fresh start would be good for us.' Speaking about her husband and silencing their critics, Kristine said: 'He's an amazing dad and that's all that counts to any of us. We're a loving family and that's all that matters' In April 2010, the couple married in a small ceremony in front of family and friends. Kristine says: 'We're happy now in Inverness. We still get the odd comment from ignorant strangers. 'But we've been together for 20 years and have proven all the doubters wrong. Recently, a shop worker mistook Duncan for my dad. 'And people always think he's Jamie's granddad. But it doesn't bother her at all. 'He's an amazing dad and that's all that counts to any of us. We're a loving family and that's all that matters. 'We may have a 29-year age gap, but I know we're perfect for each other.' Furious mothers have slammed a breastfeeding tracking device, claiming that it is 'whipping up fear and anxiety' among women nursing their babies. A group of mothers have urged American maker Momsense to 'leave nature alone', calling for retailers to withdraw the gadget from their shelves. The app is designed to monitor how much milk a baby drinks by tracking his or her nursing noises. Momsense has responded to the criticism by saying that they 'care deeply about mothers', adding that the device is intended to be an 'assistive device'. However, mother-of-two Tessa Clark, from High Wycombe, has described the breastfeeding smart meter as 'disgusting', saying that it targets 'already vulnerable' mothers. Tessa Clark, 30, (pictured with her baby son) from High Wycombe, has described Momsense's breastfeeding smart meter as 'disgusting' Leanne Booth (pictured with daughter Cassia) said the tracker causes 'self-doubt' and is concerned that the overall bonding experience would be 'hindered' as the nursing mum would be distracted by the app Tessa, 30, said: 'Mums who are already vulnerable are going to fork out quite a considerable amount of money when they could be saving money and getting a face-to-face appointment at a breastfeeding clinic or seeing a lactation consultant. 'A lot of people are very concerned that they are not sharing any specific information about their research into how this app works. 'My main concern is that it's going to encourage mums to look at an app and faff around trying to set that up while not paying any attention to their baby.' She continued: 'Momsense claim to have worked out how much a baby swallows. Mums will get caught up on how much their baby is consuming and forget that babies need different amounts. Momsense's Smart Breastfeeding Meter is designed to monitor a baby's feed by tracking the baby's nursing noises, how much milk they drink, and how long the sessions last 'Breastfeeding is really tricky for most people and you have to pay attention to what this tiny human is telling you. 'If you're staring at this app, it will get in the way of that. I think that technology kind of gets in between the natural order of things in this case. HOW DOES THE BREASTFEEDING TRACKING APP WORK? Momsense offers a pair of specially designed headphones that includes a small sensor for the baby. This sensor is placed beneath the baby's earlobe, while the headphones connect to your smartphone. As your baby breastfeeds, the sensor amplifies and records each baby swallow. Using the Momsense app, you can track each nursing session. It provides a detailed report, including nursing duration, and the quantity of milk consumed. Advertisement 'Mums should know that their instincts are probably okay. I'd say 'watch your baby, not a screen'.' Leanne Booth, who breastfed three of her four children, is concerned that the overall bonding experience would be 'hindered' as the nursing mum would be distracted by the app. The health care worker, 27, said: 'As a breastfeeding mother and a peer supporter, I think it's undermining every breastfeeding experience it is used with. 'It will cause self-doubt and it is not possible to accurately determine whether a baby is "getting the right amount" as all milk is different and all babies have different nutritional requirements. 'The only signals a mother requires that a baby is getting enough milk is wet and dirty nappies and sufficient weight gain. 'Length of feeds and ounces taken has little to no relevance. 'The overall bonding experience would be hindered in my opinion as the mum will be concentrating on the app instead of looking at baby, listening to baby, talking and singing to baby. Leanne said it is not possible to accurately determine whether a baby is 'getting the right amount' as all milk is different and all babies have different nutritional requirements. The mother-of-four (pictured with daughter Cassia and five-month-old Elijah) also suggested the tracker is undermining the breastfeeding experience 'It would prevent the trust that grows throughout breastfeeding and it causes undue concerns over supply where it's likely unnecessary, causing mum to question herself and ultimately turn to artificial breastmilk substitute. 'In this tech-filled world, breastfeeding is one of the last things that is all instinct-based and natural.' Taking to Twitter, Leanne also criticised retailers for selling the product on its shelves. One breastfeeding counsellor, who goes under the name 'Lactivist' on her Facebook page and asked not to be named, claims Momsense didn't offer their product to the Lactation Consultants of Great Britain (LCGB) for testing when asked. She said: 'It takes away valuable money from mothers who could do without the extra stress. Tessa (pictured with her two children) said new mothers could get a face-to-face appointment at a breastfeeding clinic or seeing a lactation consultant instead of using the app She added that mothers should be paying attention to their babies, rather than the app 'The product hasn't been offered out after consultants from LCGB asked to test it for its accuracy either which is truly worrying.' She added that retailers should be 'more responsible' for the products that they put on their shelves. 'The best thing a mother can do if she is experiencing difficulty is to seek the support of La Leche League or one of the other breastfeeding charities in the UK,' she said. 'Buying products like the Momsense doesn't provide answers to questions. 'They only put fear into mothers with no help on how to make things better if they aren't already.' Tessa (pictured with her baby in a sling) said mothers should trust their own instincts when it comes to breastfeeding The mother-of-two also suggested that the tracker targets women who are ;already vulnerable' after just giving birth A Momsense spokesperson said: 'Momsense cares deeply about mothers and specifically about breastfeeding. 'Our company only believes in promoting all things that are good for a breastfeeding mom. 'It was made together with thousands of hours of moms and doctors working side-by-side to create a product that would help moms. The spokesperson added: 'We are not "forcing" anyone to buy anything - we are offering a simple tool to assist. 'There are many assistive technologies in the world for all different types of things - we are one of the only ones in the world that actually care about breastfeeding moms.' The Momsense headphones come with a sensor that is monitors the baby's swallowing sounds 'We believe that support, lactation consultants, and just talking with other breastfeeding mothers is always the best way to go. 'However, it's not always effective and sometimes even that causes massive consternation and problems for mothers who end up feeling pressure when things aren't going well for them. 'This product wasn't submitted to the LCGB testing but it was developed with several specialist advisors from Israel.' An LCGB spokesperson said: 'It's not our policy as an organisation to comment on or endorse any specific products aimed at families, and as an organisation whose members are predominantly accredited consultants, we are required to work within demonstrated and accepted evidence base from reputable sources. She has been living in the shadow of her older, more famous sibling since making her modelling debut in 2011. And it seems Lottie Moss is intent on following in her sister's footsteps as the starlet has just launched her debut clothing collection. The 20-year-old, who is signed with Storm Models, announced the news of her Lottie Moss x PacSun collection on Friday, a capsule range inspired by Brigitte Bardot comprising festival pieces such as sun dresses, play suits, vests and skimpy hot pants. Her half-sister Kate, 44, has been designing her hugely-successful eponymous range for Topshop since 2007 as well as collaborations with Longchamp and Wallis. Scroll down for video Lottie's turn in the limelight: The model has announced the news of her Lottie Moss x PacSun collection on Friday, a capsule range inspired by Brigitte Bardot Running in the family: Kate, 44, has been designing her hugely-successful eponymous range for Topshop since 2007 (pictured) as well as collaborations with Longchamp and Wallis Lottie's latest venture is Lotties first capsule collection as well as her first time designing an entire collection - although she has worked with PacSun in the past. Inspired by 'the colour pink and her personal tattoos', it is described by the California-based brand as 'California chic meets irreverent London attitude'. Modelled by Lottie herself, the collection, which starts at $24.95 (18) is characterised by pastel colours, pretty checks and some seriously short hemlines. Speaking about the collection, Lottie said: 'I love my sister's style. She definitely has influenced some aspects of my personal style.' Lottie Moss is intent on following in her sister's footsteps as the starlet has just launched her debut clothing collection featuring sun dresses (left) and crochet frocks (right) Inspiration: Inspired by 'the colour pink and her personal tattoos', the range is described by the California-based brand as 'California chic meets irreverent London attitude' Modelled by Lottie herself, the collection, which starts at $24.95 (18) is characterised by pastel colours, pretty checks and some seriously short hemlines It also consists of Liberty-inspired florals - like many of Kate's designs - along with bold stripes and flirty silhouettes. Lottie first started working with PacSun in 2016 for a denim campaign. She burst onto the scene with her modelling debut aged 13 in 2011, and hit headlines when she appeared as a bridesmaid at Kate's wedding to Jamie Hince. A beauty company whose products previously earned viral fame has fired its female co-CEO after its male founder displayed increasingly erratic behavior on social media. Deciem, which was created in 2013 in Toronto, Ontario, currently has nine brands under its control, including The Ordinary, and counts Estee Lauder among its investors. Last year, The Ordinary, which has acquired a cult following, was earning rave reviews and at one point had a 25,000-person wait list for its $7 foundation. But now, the company has come under fire and raised eyebrows after its founder, Brandon Truaxe, announced he was taking over Deciem's social media accounts, only to share a series of bizarre updates, while former employees of the company called it a 'terrible' place to work and accused Truaxe of being a bully. Drama: Deciem's co-CEO Nicola Kilner (left) is no longer with the company, a move that comes after a display of erratic behavior by founder Brandon Truaxe (right) on social media Mayhem: Truaxe announced last month he would take over Deciem's social media accounts and his posts have become increasingly bizarre ever since On Friday, the company's troubles took a new turn when its co-CEO Nicola Kilner, who has been with Deciem since the year of its creation, was ousted from the company. Kilner confirmed in a text to Racked that she is no longer with the company. 'Sadly yes. I'm too heartbroken to talk about it at the moment,' she wrote. The website said it had received a tip saying Kilner was let go. Truaxe later confirmed the information, telling Racked Kilner had been fired while Deciem's CFO Stephen Kaplan had resigned. Truaxe first claimed to have fired several people whose 'values' didn't align with his. 'I have terminated employment of several people at Deciem who do not subscribe to my peaceful values,' he told the website in an email before referring to his investor Estee Lauder. 'I have also cc'd Estee Lauder's management on here. I hope you're well and smiling.' Kaplan previously told Racked about Deciem, whose tag line is, rather aptly, 'The abnormal beauty company': 'We definitely have grown too quickly, there's no question, and that's part of why I was brought on.' It later emerged that Kilner's firing occurred after she and Deciem's director of operations, Shamin Mohamed Jr., had a conversation about Truaxe's mental health, Racked reported. Truaxe started questioning Kilner's loyalty and ended up siding with Mohamed. At the time, he was in London, UK, visiting Deciem's store in Covent Garden. The company's human resources director, Neha Gupta was present, and she later told Racked Truaxe seemed distressed. 'Brandon was crying on the floor. He was devastated,' she said. Gupta was the one who told Kilner she was fired. The former co-CEO added in another statement: 'I love Brandon and the team unconditionally and am too hurt to comment further.' Truaxe told the website in a statement of his own: 'I dont want to let people go. Hiring people is difficult. Firing them is very difficult, but when you have no choice, you have no choice. Ultimately, it doesnt affect me. The only thing that matters is that the consumers are buying the product. But the drama is just hurting my team.' Viral: Deciem's brand The Ordinary acquired a cult following in part thanks to its foundation Range: The company also offers more expensive products among its brands, such as this $60 serum sold by its label Niod The founder also shared Kaplan's resignation email with the website, revealing that the former CFO had cited Kilner's firing as the reason for his departure. 'Taking into account everything that has been going on over the last few days, and especially after seeing your email regarding Nicolas termination; I see no reason for my continued presence at Deciem,' Kaplan wrote in part. In turn, Truaxe told Racked about Kaplan: 'It is really destructive that Stephen could not just accept the fact that a 40-year-old is the CEO, and in his 60s hes reporting to me.' Following Kilner's ousting, Truaxe apparently took great pains to reassure Estee Lauder via an email to Leonard Lauder, chairman emeritus of the group. 'I'm out of breath and have left our store,' the note reads in part. 'I'll terminate Nicola with generosity and gentleness tonight. If your team starts to worry, please let them know that I am calm and am not making any irrational decisions. Im worried about your team's view of me more than anything... I'm so sorry, Leonard. I know you did not invest in me to live a painful drama. I'll work hard to make it up to you and your team.' A representative for Estee Lauder said in a statement: 'The Estee Lauder Companies is a minority investor in Deciem, and, as such, we do not have the power to control the companys operations, social media or personnel decisions. We believe in Deciems incredible creativity, innovation and product offerings.' Deciem's descent into social media mayhem started on January 24, when Brandon posted a video of himself announcing he had 'cancelled all of [Deciem's] marketing plans' because 'marketing is simply a way to try to convince people to buy what they don't want or don't need'. He then explained he would communicate directly with the brand's followers on its social media channels. Break: Kilner (left) did not disclose the reason for her departure, and did not specify whether she had resigned or been fired. Truaxe (right) said he terminated several people's employment The post came a week after Deciem shared a message saying 'someone we don't know wrote that Deciem is just another marketing company at the end', adding: 'It really hurt to read it.' After taking over the company's Instagram account, which currently has 342,000 followers, Truaxe started sharing a series of bizarre posts including behind-the-scenes information about the company, at one point apologizing to one of its competitors, Tiffany Masterson, the creator of skincare company Drunk Elephant. Drunk Elephant and The Ordinary both sell marula oil, but at different prices, and The Ordinary once appeared to take a jab at Drunk Elephant by writing that 'one would have to be drunk to overpay for marula oil'. The sentence, Truaxe said on Instagram, was 'a distasteful joke that arose from [his] familiarity with the beautiful brand'. He told Masterson in the public update: 'I'm sorry. When I met you at the WWD breakfast, I saw a beautiful soul. And you have worked hard to build a beautiful brand. Please forgive me.' Truaxe then shared more updates about Deciem and its products, before things once again took a turn for the bizarre. Earlier this month, on February 4, he posted seven photos and videos of piles of trash with the exact same caption. In the message, he pledged to stop using plastic in Deciem's shopping bags, foundation bottles, and dropperswhich could have been a standard update if not for several details, including the fact that it was posted several times in a row. Truaxe also appeared to address members of the company directly in his public post, writing: 'Alessandro and Hajar, please tell our suppliers that this plan will complete by end of 2018. Peter of Mong Packaging, I'm sorry that we won't use plastic any more. Take-off: Deciem, created in 2013 in Toronto, Ontario, currently has nine brands under its control, including The Ordinary (pictured), and counts Estee Lauder among its investors 'You're such a good person. I'll sponsor you and your family to come to Canada if you want and you can work at DECIEM. Alan of Idealpak, this direction means more business for you.' He apparently expected people to be surprised by his multiple identical updates, adding: 'Sorry everyone that I'll repeat this note several times today with different videos. I love you, Brandon. (It's sunny here.)' On the same day, Truaxe posted a photo of a man posing on the street dressed in athleisure, sunglasses and a hat, writing in the caption: 'Riad is our factory manager. His family adopted me when I needed help. His brothers Hashim and Faras run our US e-commerce. His other brother Ammar sells our products in Iraq, where they're from. His youngest brother Omar is coming to Canada to join Deciem.' Truaxe then addressed two specific people while offering more information about his romantic status and personal life. 'Astrid and@diafoley, Riad is not my boyfriend (I'm not gay),' he wrote. 'He's my brother and I love him (and his beautiful mother who's my mother). Because of Estee Lauder's investment, I have been able to give the family a gift of $500,000 in January. They're building a home. And Riad is now travelling the world with me until March. I love you, Riad. Astrid, see you in Amsterdam to build my baby, Avestan. Our baby, Avestan.' Also on February 4, Truaxe shared an emotional post about a soap that was given to him by 'a gentle old man' while he was traveling in Fes, Morocco. 'I almost walked past it,' he wrote about the soap, 'because being in the beauty business can sometimes blind me from seeing real beauty'. The next day, Truaxe indicated he had received some negative feedback as the result of his intense day of Instagram posting, but he didn't appear too concerned. 'Hi :-) I had the best time yesterday posting about my day. Many of you love what I did. But a few of you disliked it, criticized it and even unfollowed us. I won't argue with you,' he wrote. 'I'll listen to you and build a social content management team. We don't have such a team because our social content has always been my doing but it was too curated for no reason until recently.' Rude: When someone tagged Estee Lauder asking the brand to step in, Truaxe replied from Deciem's account: 'Bye bye. You don't even know which @esteelaudercompanies to tag' Strange: Another person tagged Estee Lauder and Sephora, which sells Deciem's products, prompting Truaxe to reply by once again sending out personal messages in a public update Not getting through to him: One Instagram user tried to talk some sense into Truaxe, but he responded simply with the sentence: 'You need more followers' and a kissy-face emoji Messages: Earlier this month, on February 4, Truaxe posted seven photos and videos of piles of trash with the exact same caption Things took another turn for the worse in the weekend of February 10 to February 11. Truaxe shared a video of himself addressing Deciem's followers, criticizing some of them for being 'disrespectful' and calling the company's account his property. He also announced that he would delete 'any negative comments unless it's constructive and useful criticism'. Around the same time, Deciem left a few disparaging comments on its own Instagram page, responding to public messages that attempted to alert Deciem's partners to Truaxe's behavior, or asked the company to hire a proper social media team. When someone tagged Estee Lauder asking the brand to step in, Truaxe replied from Deciem's account: 'Bye bye. You don't even know which @esteelaudercompanies to tag and you don't realize they don't control our company. And they won't agree with your stupid post. Brandon.' Another person tagged Estee Lauder and Sephora, which sells Deciem's products, prompting Truaxe to reply by once again sending out personal messages in a public update, The Cut noted at the time. 'Hi @esteelaudercompanies and @sephora,' he wrote. 'Sorry that miserable people keep tagging you because they wrongly think you control @Deciem. I love you. Say hi to Leonard, Fabrizio, Andrew, Shana, Lori, Arastoo. Artemis and Sam and Priya of Sephora: hi. Can't wait to launch Watercolors soon! @atavakoli when is the engagement?' One Instagram user tried to talk some sense into Truaxe, telling him: 'Please hire a social media team and pass over control of this account because it seems every time you post you just dig yourself and your company into a deeper hole.' Truaxe responded simply with the sentence: 'You need more followers' and a kissy-face emoji. The day after posting the video in which he called Instagram users 'disrespectful', Truaxe shared a new update insisting 'everything is OK', adding: 'I'm peaceful and will do all that needs to be done to make Deciem stronger.' Meanwhile, former employees of the company have been leaving scathing reviews on Glassdoor, describing Deciem as an 'unprofessional', 'sexist', and overall discriminatory, 'toxic' environment. 'Every negative comment on here is true and I experienced it for myself,' one former worker wrote. 'I find it ironic how it's a beauty company and its' management is completely sexist and demeaning towards women.' Questionable: Things took another turn for the worse in the weekend of February 10 to February 11. Truaxe shared a video of himself criticizing people for being 'disrespectful' What's in a name? Deciem's tagline, rather aplty, reads: 'The abnormal beauty company' Painful: Kilner (pictured with Truaxe in an archive shot) said she was 'too hearbroken' to discuss her departure from Deciem at the moment Asked about the company's pros, another person wrote: 'There are not many that come to mind'. They deemed their experience with the company as 'bad' from start to finish. Some reviews focused specifically on Truaxe. 'Every single review on here that describes the atrocious actions of the CEO are true,' someone wrote. 'And you will notice that as soon as the truth is written in a review which highlights the shocking behavior of the CEO four positive reviews are posted almost instantly. He is a bully and nothing more. 'He spend his day discriminating people of color, female employees and anyone he basically decides he does not like. He screams and belittle's employees on a daily basis. I have seen him completely break people down with his screaming and bullying.' Another person, who deemed their experience with Deciem to be the 'worst' of their 'entire life', wrote: 'Animals in the zoo are treated better. No respect for employees. Expected to work morning until night. 'CEO communicates to his staff by using aggressive and discriminatory language to get the job done and outrageous profanities and you must be thin or you will be called fat on a daily basis. I really feel so sorry for the people still working there.' Someone else deemed the company to be a 'toxic work environment' and added: 'Owner yells, screams , throws fits. Gossips about prior employees in a demeaning manner. Expects employees to laugh along with his child like behavior, if you don't your gone. Tends to hire employees with temporary work visas since he can get them for minimum wage. Don't apply if you are Canadian-born, over 40 or married.' A woman has revealed how a science experiment during a biology class led to her classmate finding out her dad wasn't her real father. California State University student Anya Hettich, 19, from San Bernadino, California took to the micro-blogging site to share details about what happened and explained that during an 8am biology class, the students were discussing blood type. She revealed that while discussing blood types, a classmate couldn't figure out why her blood type didn't make sense - her dad was blood type O while her mother was A yet she was AB. Reveal: Twitter user @anyahettich from San Bernadino, California, has shared how her classmate found out her dad wasn't her real father during a biology class (stock image) Confusion: The class was testing blood types and the girl couldn't figure out why her parents had O and A blood types but she was AB Formula: To have an AB blood type, one parent must be A and one must be B Scientific: Their professor explained that it was impossible for the girl's father to have an O blood type Story teller: The moment was detailed online by classmate Anya Hettich (pictured left) 'So on Monday were discussing blood types and this girl was trying to figure out why her blood type didnt make sense on her Punnett square,' she wrote. 'She told the prof her dad was O and her mom was A but yet she was AB. 'My prof explained that thats impossible, that shes confused on the blood types or something - she even drew out the different Punnett squares to show her,' she added. Blood type is based on the presence or absence of the A and B antigens on your red blood cells. The A blood type has only the A antigen and the B blood type has only the B antigen. The AB blood type has both A and B antigens, and the O blood type has neither A nor B antigen. Each biological parent donates one of two ABO genes to their child. The A and B genes are dominant and the O gene is recessive so if an O gene is paired with an A gene, the blood type will be A. Disbelief: The Twitter thread revealed that the girl didn't want to believe the test was right Burden of proof: However their professor told her to double check with her parents Family secret: The girl shared with the class the next day that her mom had an affair with her dad's stepbrother so her uncle was really her father Split: The girl also shared that her parents were now getting a divorce Anya then revealed that the girl was 'persistent that she wasnt wrong on the blood types' and was confident that there was something wrong with how their professor, Lisa Anderson was conducting the test. However, as the scientific evidence suggested otherwise, Professor Anderson told the girl to go back to her parents and double check their blood types. When the girl returned to class the next day, she announced to 'the entire class of 243 people', that her mom had an affair with her husband's brother who was actually his step brother. 'So technically, shes been raised by her uncle and not her dad her entire life - her mom hid it from the both of them for 21 years,' she explained. Anya concluded the thread by revealing that the girl's parents were now getting a divorce. Celebrities who have risen to fame for their cooking prowess regularly share snaps of their mouthwatering food on social media - but rarely do they reveal which meal is their favourite ever dish. Now a handful of food stars such as Bake Off winner Candice Brown have picked out the last dish they would eat before being sent off to a desert island for a new podcast hosted by chef and food writer Margie Broadhead called Desert Island Dishes - inspired by BBC Radio 4's iconic Desert Island Discs programme. Celebrities who have taken part include: Candice, Dragon's Den star Levi Roots, cookbook author Jasmine Hemsley, and chef and model Tess Ward. Their choices may surprise you, however... so can you match the dish to the food celebrity? 1. FOUR CHEESE MACARONI CHEESE Margie Broadhead created this recipe of four cheese macaroni cheese with panko breadcrumbs and cherry tomatoes after Candice Brown revealed mac and cheese is her favourite dish Candice Brown said she is dedicated to eating as much macaroni cheese as possible as she wants to try different varieties This four-cheese macaroni cheese dish topped with panko breadcrumbs was created by podcast host and chef Margie Broadhead for Bake Off winner and Dancing On Ice contestant Candice Brown, 33, after she revealed that it is her favourite dish. Newly engaged Candice said the meal was her ultimate 'comfort food'. She told Desert Island Dishes podcast host Margie Broadhead: 'I went on a date and we went to a restaurant in Cambridge and we had steak... But it was the side dish of mac and cheese that did it. 'This mac and cheese came over, and it hadnt even gotten on to the table and I was trying to put my spoon into it. It was just so so, so good. It was truffle based, crispy on top, a bit of bacon. 'Macaroni cheese to me is a real comfort food and if it is on a menu but I have to have it.' What is the Desert Island Dishes podcast? Desert Island Dishes is a podcast launched in 2017 by Margie Broadhead. Margie interviews high profiles figures such as Candice Brown about their favourite dishes, including the last meal they would eat before being sent off to a desert island. Margie then selects one of their favourite dishes and creates a recipe inspired by it for her interviewee. The show is inspired by BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs, where high profile figures are interviewed about their lives and they select their favourite pieces of music. Advertisement 2. BANANA PORRIDGE Margie created this recipe of banana porridge with caramelised banana, pecans, almond butter and jam after Levi Roots revealed porridge is close to his heart because of his grandma Levi Roots shot to fame in 2007 after securing investment for his Reggae Reggae sauce on BBC reality show Dragon's Den The dish above may look like a clean-eating blogger's favourite breakfast but this bowl of porridge topped with caramelised bananas is in fact a recipe created by Margie for Dragon's Den star and Reggae Reggae Sauce tycoon Levi Roots, 59. With no jerk sauce in sight, this dish is also topped with jam, almond butter and caramelised nuts too. Levi, who lived in Jamaica until he was 11, explained why he chose porridge as one of his Desert Island Dishes: 'My grandma was a fantastic porridge maker, and I even did a BBC programme about porridge. 'She made porridge out of anything: cornmeal, plantain, and banana porridge - all sorts of fabulous porridge. 'It was very cheap and youd just put it in one pot. Right throughout the day you serve porridge in Jamaica. And you dont eat porridge, you drink porridge!' 3. CHICKEN SOUP Margie created this stunning bowl of chicken soup after Jasmine Hemsley revealed it is her favourite food. It contains carrots, chicken and herbs as well as a refreshing slice of lemon and ginger Jasmine Hemsley is a wellness blogger who focuses on writing healthy eating recipes This beautiful bowl of chicken soup packed with plenty of vegetables and topped with edible flowers suits healthy eating-obsessed Desert Island Dishes interviewee Jasmine Hemsley, 38, down to a tee. Margie created a special recipe for her after the food writer, who is one half of Hemsley + Hemsley with her sister Melissa, chose chicken soup as one of her favourite meals on the podcast. Jasmine, who is half Filipino, said: 'Jasmine: Everyone knows what chicken soup is, its the remedy of absolutely everything! 'The Filipino version is called tinola, its a chicken soup but amped up with ginger. It just reminds me of childhood.' 4. GRILLED PINEAPPLE WITH ICE CREAM Margie Broadhead created this dessert of grilled chilli pineapple with coconut ice-cream dotted with pomegranate seeds for chef and model Tess Ward after she appeared on the podcast and revealed it's her favourite summer dessert Tess Ward wrote The Naked Diet and is Le Cordon Bleu trained This tropical dessert was created by Margie after chef and model Tess Ward, 27, revealed grilled pineapple with ice cream is her desert island dish. 'I really like doing char-grilled pineapple at barbecues. 'You marinade the pineapple in brown sugar with a bit of chilli oil and its really spicy and charred. Its also good with meat, but its great as a desert with ice cream.' Margie added: 'I asked Tess in her episode about her go-to dinner party dish and she divulged that whilst she isn't a huge pudding person, when she throws a summer barbecue she likes to serve her guests char-grilled pineapples cooked on the barbecue served with cooling coconut ice cream for pudding.' Adults in some parts of England are four times more likely to visit their dentist than others, new statistics have revealed. NHS Digital figures show 84 per cent of adults residing in the area ran by Norwich CCG have had a check-up in the past two years. By contrast, just 18 per cent of adults residing in the geographical area covered by North & West Reading CCG have sat in the dreaded chair. Officials urge patients to get checked-up at least once every two years, to keep on top of their dental health. NHS Digital figures show 84 per cent of adults residing in the area ran by Norwich CCG have had a check-up in the past two years But the new data shows just half of the adult population in England have seen their dentist between December 2015 and December 2017. Some 22.1 million patients received dental treatment in that time frame, shows data from all 207 CCGs in the country. However, this is the total number of appointments and doesn't establish how many individual patients have visited their dentist. It comes amid a worrying dental crisis which is forcing charities that normally assist third world countries to step in and help. Dr Richard Marques, of Wimpole Street Dental, told MailOnline: 'Some areas have better dental attendance than others which can be due to a multitude of factors. 'One is the availability of dentists in the area and another is the stability of the population. 'Some areas have a more transient population with lots of big companies and people moving in and out of the area. 'By contrast in Norwich they have a more stable family based population that will see the dentist more regularly. 'Ideally all adults should see the dentist every six months, with two years being the absolute maximum interval for an adult with perfect dental health.' South Tyneside CCG reported the second highest percentage (80.1 per cent) of adults who had visited their dentist in the past two years. WHERE WERE THE FIVE BEST, AND WORST, PERFORMING CCGS IN ENGLAND? THE FIVE BEST FOR GETTING ADULTS TO VISIT THE DENTIST Norwich: 84% South Tyneside: 80.1% Bradford City: 74.1% Great Yarmouth & Waverley: 73.6% South Reading: 69% THE FIVE WORST FOR GETTING ADULTS TO VISIT THE DENTIST North & West Reading: 18% Surrey Heath: 30% Richmond: 32.1% Tower Hamlets: 33% Barnet: 33.6% Advertisement Bradford City CCG collected third place (74.1 per cent) for adults seen, just tipping Great Yarmouth & Waverley CCG (73.6 per cent). At the other end of the scale, North & West Reading CCG, which covers a population of 106,000, was in its own league. The next closest area was Surrey Heath CCG, which reported only 30 per cent of adults had seen their dentist in the past two years. Richmond CCG (32.1 per cent), Tower Hamlets CCG (33 per cent) and Barnet CCG (33.6 per cent) were the other worst offenders. The figures, compiled by statistician Gemma Ramsay, also gave a breakdown of how many children saw an NHS dentist in the past year. Their time-frame was recorded over a period of 12 months, because they are urged to have more frequent check-ups of their developing teeth. Figures showed 6.9 million children were seen by an NHS dentist in 2017 - around 58.2 per cent of the child population. It was revealed in January that dentists in the UK are so inundated with targets and admin that they lack the time and resources to focus on health. This resulted in a 'national disaster' that has made patient treatment a low priority, according to a letter signed by more than 400 dentists. Dentaid, a charity which works across parts of Africa, Asia and Central America, set up its first UK scheme in West Yorkshire two years ago. The charity has since expanded its reach, with mobile services being set up in Hampshire, Cornwall and Buckinghamshire. A brave four-year-old from Philadelphia will donate live-saving bone marrow to his twin baby brothers in two weeks. Michael Pownall's four-month-old twin brothers, Santino and Giovanni, have chronic granulomatous disease, which is diagnosed in one in 500,000 people every year. The condition is an inherited primary immunodeficiency disease (PIDD) which increases the bodys susceptibility to infections caused by certain bacteria and fungi. But on March 8, they will receive their big brother's bone marrow - a transplant that is the only known cure for their disease. Four-year-old Michael Pownall (center) will donate his bone marrow next month to his twin baby brothers, Santino and Giovanni, in order to cure their rare immune disease Due to their condition, even a mild infection curable with antibiotics in healthy people could kill Santino and Giovanni. They babies and their parents have been at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia since their birth in October, unable to leave for fear that the boys could be exposed to a pathogen outside the facility. Their mother, Robin Pownwall, and her fiance have had to quit their jobs, and Robin spends most of her time at the hospital. Chronic Granulomatous Disease (CGD) affects only about 20 children born in the US each year. These babies' immune systems can fight of viral infections like the flu, but are nearly helpless against fungi and some bacteria. If a dangerous pathogen does find its way into either boy's body, their weak immune cells rush to attack it. Santino and Giovanni were born in October. Both boys have chronic granulomatous disease Michael's older brother, Dominick (right) also has the disease, which can cause lumps of wasted immune cells to build up in the body, and received a transplant from a donor Because the cells will not be able to eliminate the infection, they will simply gather at its site, forming a hard lump called a granuloma. If Santino or Giovanni gets a severe infection in their bones or skin, it could lead to dangerous abscesses in internal organs such as the lungs, liver and brain. The disease can be cured with a bone marrow transplant, but the process is complicated and it can be difficult to find a donor who is a perfect match. Michael's older brother Dominick also has CGD, but received a stem donation from an outside donor when he was an infant. The boys' mother Robin Pownall said that even though she and her fiance knew that the twins were at risk for the disorder, they were shocked when the diagnosis came back. Robin Pownwall (right) says her son Michael (left of center) is a 'hero' The family was thrilled to find out that Michael is a match for his little brothers They were relieved when tests revealed that Michael was a transplant match for both twins. Pownwall said the brave four-year-old is the family's 'superhero'. 'He could have said: "No mommy, I'm too scared and I don't want to," but he's ready to go,' she told Fox 11 News. 'When he gets the labs for the pre-testing, the nurses are amazed. They're like: "I cannot believe how brave he is." And he really is. It gives me chills,' she told the station. The surgery will take place at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia on March 8. Two hours after Michael's bone marrow is harvested, he will be able to watch doctors infuse it into his baby brothers. A study calling for a million more patients to be prescribed antidepressants on the NHS has sparked a backlash by experts who say it ignores the dangers. Prescriptions of the drugs have soared in recent years, but the major review by an Oxford-led research team claims thousands more should be dished out by GPs each day. Yesterday they said their findings ended the debate on the effectiveness of drugs for those with acute depression. They suggested doctors were squeamish about treating mental health problems with drugs and criticised ideological barriers standing in the way of more patients getting them. But last night experts hit back at the findings published in The Lancet medical journal, claiming they were misleading patients and doctors. David Healy has criticised the study for failing to address the risks of long-term anti-depressant use David Healy, Professor of Psychiatry at Bangor University, accused the authors of hyping the benefits but hiding the harms. Antidepressants carry a risk of side-effects ranging from loss of libido to disabling anxiety and agitation. Other studies have shown that in rare cases they can trigger suicidal and homicidal thoughts. Professor Healy said the short-term nature of the study, which looked at how patients responded after eight weeks, does not provide an accurate reflection of how most people take the drugs. 'You could put alcohol through these trials and show it is an antidepressant, he told The Mail. But it wouldnt be a good idea to have 10 per cent of the population taking alcohol. He criticised the study, which looked at 120,000 patients from more than 500 trials some of which had been funded by pharmaceutical companies for failing to address the risks of long-term use. While not officially classed as addictive, Professor Healy said the side effects of withdrawal were so severe, many patients end up taking them for long periods. The problem is more that what a lot of people are going to be hearing from this is that the drugs work really well, when they dont, and there are no harms being talked about. People assume they are safe, but they can be extremely risky. A record 64.7m antidepressants were dispensed in England in 2016, costing the NHS 267million About 80 per cent of people who get put on these pills by a GP will be on them for over a year and that will be because they cant get off them. Last night, lead researcher Dr Andrea Cipriani admitted there were limitations to the Oxford study and that more research was needed to ensure patients were being effectively matched to treatments. Potential risks and side-effects were not part of this review, he added. Medication should always be considered alongside other options, such as psychological therapies, where these are available, he said. Professor Carmine Pariante, of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, said the prescription of antidepressants would never be black and white but maintained the research was beneficial. He said the review showed there was no difference in findings, whether the research was funded through charities, a public body or pharmaceutical company. I think this should reassure patients and clinicians that were using them because they work not because of the spin from people who might make money out of it. I dont think anyone is looking to push antidepressants to those who dont need them. The guidance is very clear on who should be prescribed them and I am confident that clinicians are sticking to this. Dr Andrea Cipriani admitted the study had limitations and called for more research to be done An estimated one in 10 adults in Britain now take antidepressants, and 8.3 per cent have a recorded diagnosis of depression. A record 64.7m antidepressants were dispensed in England in 2016, costing the NHS 267million, according to NHS Digital figures. The new study, the culmination of over 35 years of research, concluded that antidepressants were an effective tool for treating people with acute depression. Half to two-thirds of patients typically suffering with symptoms including loss of self-worth, tiredness, sadness and disturbed sleep would benefit from drug treatment, researchers said. However, Dr James Davies, from the Council for Evidence-based Psychiatry, said the work simply supports what has been known for a long time that various drugs can have an impact on mood, thoughts and motivation. The study does not bury the controversy around the damage caused by unnecessary long-term prescribing and will unfortunately do nothing to help reduce this. Let's imagine that a pharmaceutical company unveils a new drug to treat cancer and makes the startling claim that it's 'just a bit more effective than a placebo'. You would not expect such an announcement to make global headlines, and you would certainly not expect eminent doctors to respond to the news by declaring that a million cancer patients should immediately be put on this new drug. But, as I shall explain, that is in effect precisely what happened yesterday with antidepressant drugs, following publication in The Lancet of a study by researchers at Oxford University. The best way to treat depression has become a war of ideology between those who believe symptoms can only be cured with therapeutic chemicals and others who see therapy as the best means The reaction in some quarters was such that you might have thought they had already garnered a Nobel Prize for their work. 'It's official: antidepressants are not snake oil or a conspiracy they work!' declared The Guardian. Many other headlines were just as breathless. The news stories parroted claims by researchers that GPs are too 'squeamish' about prescribing antidepressants and, most astonishingly, that in the UK around one million more patients should be prescribed them because the illness is underdiagnosed. But as the dust began to settle, quieter, wiser voices began to ask just what exactly was going on behind all the hype. The truth is that the Oxford study, although the 'largest ever', according to the researchers, is nothing new in itself: it simply analysed a mass of research data from hundreds of previous studies. From this it concluded that commonly used antidepressant pills can work better than placebo tablets for some types of depression. And that's it, really. Some of the antidepressants studied, such as amitriptyline, have actually been around since the 1950s. It had been established long ago that they were of some help. So why is the announcement such a big deal now, prompting some leading psychiatrists to whoop and holler in applause? The answer, of course, is that we are not talking about ordinary drugs here. We are talking about antidepressants. Anti-depressants work for major and moderate-to-severe depression, says Dr Andrea Cipriani (pictured) The debate about this class of drugs long ago stopped being simply a discussion on medical matters. Instead, it has become a war of ideology. On one side are those who see the symptoms of depression as a 'chemical imbalance' of the brain that can only be cured with doses of powerful, therapeutic chemicals. On the other side are the sceptics, who argue that depression is not one simple illness but due to a constellation of problems triggered by a variety of causes. Moreover, the sceptics say, to deal with these problems psychological support is often needed, with access to counselling and other talking therapies, rather than a medical cosh. And caught in between all of this are the poor patients. The lead author of the new study, Oxford psychiatrist Dr Andrea Cipriani, certainly came out with all guns ablaze. 'This is an important study because it is the final answer to the long-lasting controversy about whether antidepressants work for major depression,' he told reporters on Wednesday. 'They work for major depression and for moderate-to-severe depression.' It is highly unusual for a research scientist to declare their work to be 'the final answer'. Science moves forward, sometimes steadily and sometimes in leaps and bounds, through open discussion and debate about highly complex questions. And the questions about antidepressants are vast and infinitely subtle. Scientists have been debating them (often hotly) for decades. Nevertheless, no one has even yet managed to agree a definitive medical picture of what depression actually constitutes in the brain. 'Withdrawal symptoms were incredibly horrendous ' Katinka Newman descended into psychosis after being prescribed antidepressants to help her cope with a divorce. Mrs Newman, 53, an award-winning film-maker from London, began to have hallucinations after being prescribed escitalopram. At one point she thought she had been filmed killing her children on national TV. In fact, she had taken a kitchen knife and lacerated her own left arm. A diagnosis of psychotic depression was followed by a cascade of further prescriptions, and soon she was taking seven drugs. She spent the next year in a near-catatonic state, in and out of hospital. At one stage she moved into a flat on her own, effectively abandoning her two children, Oscar, 15, and Lily, 16. She was drinking heavily and smoking 70 cigarettes a day. In September 2013, Mrs Newman was sectioned at St Charles Hospital in West London, where she began a month-long process of weaning herself off the drugs. The withdrawal symptoms were 'indescribably horrendous', she said. She now campaigns against the destructive potential of antidepressants. Calling the Oxford study 'highly misleading' she added: 'Many of the five million people prescribed antidepressants in the UK are not acutely depressed, they are reacting to an adverse life event such as divorce or stress at work. Psychiatrists aren't warning people they can be impossibly difficult to get off, and the side-effects can last even after you come off them.' Advertisement The theory that depression is caused by chemical imbalances in the brain is still no more than that just a theory. Nor has anyone managed yet to show how antidepressant drugs work in the human brain if or when they do work. In my view, Dr Cipriani can't just drive his 'final answer' through all of this and declare the discussion closed. What's more, as the Mail reports today, Dr Cipriani's research itself leaves huge questions unanswered. Dr James Davies, from the Council for Evidence-based Psychiatry, is distinctly unimpressed. He calls Dr Cipriani's claim to have the 'final answer' to be both 'irresponsible and unsubstantiated'. Dr Davies says that while the new study shows antidepressant drugs to be better than placebo pills at lifting people's moods, 'the differences between placebo and antidepressants are so minor that they are clinically insignificant. They hardly register at all in a person's actual experience.' The level of mood improvement being claimed does seem remarkably modest not least when you realise that the nearly 80 per cent of the studies analysed by the Oxford study had been funded by pharmaceutical companies, which of course have a financial interest in the promotion of the drugs. Much of what they analysed was unpublished research, too, which means it had not undergone the sort of rigorous peer-review required by medical journals that ensures the results are unaffected by poorly designed studies or outright financial bias. Just as importantly, the drug trials studied by the Oxford analysis covered only eight weeks of antidepressant use, before it was judged whether the patients had benefited or not. As the treatment watchdog NICE (the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence) points out in its own guidelines, antidepressant drugs can take up to a month before they even start having an effect. Eight weeks was surely too short a time for anyone to judge. Moreover, this analysis bears no relation to how most patients are prescribed these drugs. Around half of people prescribed antidepressants are on them for more than two years. 'This study tells us nothing about their effects over the long or medium term,' points out Dr Davies. 'In fact,' he adds, 'There is no evidence that long-term use has any benefits, and in real world trials the outcomes are very poor.' The study period of eight weeks also completely ignores a problem that has dogged millions of long-term antidepressant patients over the decades: the sheer hell of getting off the drugs. There are numerous patient groups on the internet dedicated to helping victims wean themselves off antidepressants, in the face of withdrawal effects that include plummeting mood levels and suicidal thoughts, a loss of libido and bizarre physical manifestations such as electric shock sensations. Last month there emerged a ray of hope for such people when Public Health England announced a review into prescription pill dependency that would include for the first time ever . . . antidepressants. Around half of people prescribed antidepressants are on them for more than two years The review has been a vindication for the All Party Parliamentary Group for Prescribed Drug Dependence, and for the Mail, which has backed its calls for a national helpline to support patients left dependent on their prescription drugs through no fault of their own. The review is the closest that patients on antidepressants have ever had to a tacit official admission that there may be potentially widespread and debilitating problems associated with their use. But such progress can all too quickly be drowned out by the kind of cheerleading headlines we saw yesterday. And what must not be forgotten is that this latest study could not show that the drugs offer any help to people with less severe depression the most common form that prompts people to seek help from their GPs. Indeed, Professor Allan Young, the director of the centre for Affective Disorders at King's College London, reacted to the study by stressing that: 'We should be aware these findings only apply to major depressive disorder.' He also cautioned that 'the results are calculated from group data so individual patients may differ significantly in their responses.' NICE guidelines confirm that talking therapies such as cognitive behavioural therapy are most effective for mild depression. Studies also show that talking therapies are at least as effective as pills for more severe types of depression. 'I'm living proof these drugs work' Amy Pay was first prescribed antidepressants while studying for her A-levels, after suffering from a combination of severe depression, anxiety and obsessive compulsive disorder since she was a young teenager. 'I was in a really bad place,' she said. 'I thought that I was not going to reach my 18th birthday.' Amy, 26, says she hesitated before taking antidepressants, but made the decision after consulting a psychiatrist. She has now been taking sertraline for eight years, which she combines with cognitive behavioural therapy when she feels the need. Medication helped her thrive at Cardiff University and she left with a First in English Literature. 'I'm living proof that antidepressants work. Around a decade ago I hit rock bottom. Without medication and intensive support back then, I wouldn't be here now,' says Amy, who is now a freelance journalist. But GP surgeries are simply not providing anywhere near enough of this emotional support. That is surely the reason why the number of antidepressants given to patients in England has doubled in a decade, to the point where some analyses show they are being prescribed to 10 per cent of the UK population. In 2015, there were more than 60 million prescriptions written for non-hospital patients some 31 million more than in 2005, according to official statistics. So do we really need another million on these pills, as the Oxford study suggests? Well, the extra numbers would certainly help to bolster the influence and authority of Britain's psychiatric profession. For the ability to prescribe mind-altering drugs such as antidepressants is what gives them their particular power. Take away their prescribing pads and they would be stuck having to actually talk to and counsel their patients. Despite all the best pronouncements of researchers and scientists, the truth is that no one can really explain why some patients suffer on these drugs while others find them beneficial. For the moment, the mysteries remain as unfathomable as the human brain. We do have one certainty though pompous medical researchers brandishing big 'final answers' don't help. And properly funded, sensitive and supportive GP care for people in distress in the form of talking therapies would do no one any harm at all. A bride-to-be who was diagnosed with cancer just three days after getting engaged organised her entire wedding while inside an isolation bubble. Mother-of-two Katie Welsh, now 33, collapsed days after her boyfriend Dan Slawycz popped the question while on a romantic weekend away in February 2016. After being rushed to hospital, Ms Welsh, from Manchester, was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia and told the tumour, which was pressing on her windpipe, would have killed her if left any longer. While undergoing grueling chemotherapy, which caused Ms Welsh to lose her hair and 1.5 stone, she was kept in a sterile isolation unit for six weeks and only saw her children a handful of times. Although battling a life-threatening illness, Ms Welsh stayed positive by planning her May wedding, saying: 'It kept me going thinking about it and kept me occupied. Planning the wedding gave me something to look forward to.' Despite falling ill just five days before the ceremony, the wedding went ahead, with Ms Welsh now in recovery and well enough to return to work. Katie Welsh, who was diagnosed with cancer just three days after getting engaged, organised her entire wedding while inside an isolation bubble (pictured with her husband Dan Slawycz) Grueling chemotherapy caused the mother-of-two to lose her hair, resulting in her arranging for a wig to be shipped from the US and two dresses due to her dramatic 1.5 stone weight loss Mr Slawycz spent every night of Ms Welsh's six-week isolation stay with his fiance 'I did all my planning from the isolation unit' Ms Welsh said: 'I did all my planning from the isolation unit using an iPad. 'I think a lot of my friends thought I was marrying Dan because I thought I was dying, but that wasn't it; neither of us knew I was ill when he popped the question.' Browsing the internet when she could not sleep, Ms Welsh treated herself to a glittery pair of Jimmy Choo stilettos, as well as arranging for a real-hair wig to be shipped from the US and organising her bridesmaids' outfits. Ms Welsh was also forced to buy two wedding dresses after her dramatic weight loss meant the original option no longer fitted. She said: 'I had a sparkly white beaded dress but when I got home and tried it on it was so heavy I knew I couldn't wear it. 'I had to order a second one; it had a big lacy skirt and a lot of people said I looked like Sarah Jessica Parker in Sex and The City. 'I'd been 9.5 stone before and my weight dropped to eight stone.' Ms Welsh also recruited her future brother-in-law to be in charge of photography. The wedding almost did not go ahead when Ms Welsh became ill again five days beforehand Planning the big day while she could not sleep, Ms Welsh felt it gave her something to focus on WHAT IS ACUTE LYMPHOBLASTIC LEUKAEMIA? Acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL) is a type of blood cancer that starts from young white blood cells in the bone marrow. There are around 810 new cases in the UK every year. In the US, ALL affects approximately 1.7 adults per 100,000. Anyone can develop ALL, however, it mainly affects younger people. Many ALL symptoms are vague and flu-like, such as: General weakness Fatigue Fever Frequent infections Bruising or bleeding easily, including nosebleeds, heavy periods and blood in the urine or faeces Unexplained weight loss Bone or joint pain Breathlessness Swollen lymph nodes Feeling full Paler skin than normal Risks for developing ALL include exposure to radiation, smoking, being overweight and having a weak immune system. Research suggests being breastfed and exposed to childhood infections may reduce a person's risk. The main ALL treatment is chemotherapy. Patients may also have radiotherapy, steroids or bone marrow transplants. Source: Cancer Research UK Advertisement Fiance stayed with her every night While Ms Welsh recovered, Mr Slawycz camped out in the hospital every night, watching endless films and television series with his fiance, despite her being so tired she could barely stay awake. Every time he entered the isolation unit he was forced to vigorously scrub his hands with antibacterial soap, as well as wear as special pinafore. Ms Welsh's parents looked after her children, who were vaguely aware their mother was ill. She tried to communicate with them solely through FaceTime to hide the extent of her hair loss. Ms Welsh was also heartbroken to be separated from her Jackahuahua dog, Diego, during her chemotherapy. 'I managed to forget about everything for a second' Although Ms Welsh appeared to be well enough to go ahead with the wedding, she took a dramatic turn for the worse less than a week before the big day. She said: 'Dan had to ring the registry office three times to change the date because I was poorly. 'On the day he had to put my medication in his suit pocket. 'But I managed to forget about everything for a second.' After a quick civil ceremony in a registry office, the 20 guests ate steak and chips in a restaurant and then went to a casino. Ms Welsh said: 'When Dan proposed, I was really excited, but I never wanted anything big. 'I said "let's do it in a couple of months, with family and the children in a registry office and go for a meal afterwards". 'I didn't want to be the centre of attention.' After the ceremony Ms Welsh became ill again, forcing the couple to delay their honeymoon by nearly a year to ensure she was well enough to go to Cape Verde last March. They also celebrated New Year's Eve and Mr Slawycz's 30th birthday in hospital. Ms Welsh said: 'Dan's been amazing, he took six months off work to look after me. 'We will be celebrating five years together this July.' She added: 'The nurses in the hospital became my friends, I took them presents at Christmas. 'They looked after me so well when I was feeling tired and poorly.' She found the beading of her original dress (pictured) too uncomfortable in her condition Ms Welsh (pictured the day she got engaged) had few symptoms aside from a mild cough 'I didn't even feel ill' Despite her ordeal, Ms Welsh managed to find a bright side to her drastic weight loss, as doctors insisted she tried to eat 3,000 calories a day. She said: 'It's every girls dream being able to eat whatever you want. 'When I got out of hospital I told Dan I wanted to go to my three favourite restaurants in Manchester and I put on half a stone in a weekend. 'There was no way I was going to sit at home crying about it.' Despite Ms Welsh suffering some mild symptom prior to her collapse, her diagnosis still came as a complete shock. She said: 'I'd had a cough for a few weeks over Christmas and I'd been feeling tired. But everyone's tired at that time of year. 'In January I lost four or five pounds, but I'd been trying to eat healthily and I was pleased about the weight loss. 'Looking back it was the symptoms of cancer. It was crazy. I was still working full time, I didn't even feel ill.' An unprecedented outbreak of a disease that causes bleeding from the vagina has now killed 73 people in Nigeria, according to the latest figures. Health officials in the African country warn cases of Lassa fever have rocketed by nearly 50 per cent in a week. It comes just days after the World Health Organization named the deadly virus in its list of pathogens that pose the most 'urgent' threat. At least 913 suspected cases of Lassa fever have been recorded since the turn of the year, Nigeria's Center for Disease Control states. Health officials in the African country warn cases of Lassa fever have rocketed by nearly 50 per cent in a week By contrast, a cumulative toll of cases released last week revealed just 615 had been recorded since January 1. Elsie Ilori, manager of the NCDCs Lassa Fever Emergency Operations Centre, said the situation currently 'is overwhelming'. In an interview with Bloomberg, she explained that the current outbreak is 'more than what we have seen before'. The Lassa fever outbreak, which has struck 17 of Nigeria's 36 states, has already prompted international aid efforts. WHAT IS MOST LIKELY TO CAUSE THE NEXT EPIDEMIC? In February 2018, The World Health Organization released its annual list of lethal bugs that they warned there is an 'urgent' need to accelerate research into. The ones that they prioritised were: Crimean-Congo haemorrhagic fever Ebola Marburg virus disease Lassa fever Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) Nipah and henipaviral diseases Rift Valley fever (RVF) Zika Disease X Advertisement Nigerian officials praised the WHO earlier this week for its efforts in containing the outbreak, despite figures showing cases are on the rise. A separate statement released today by the WHO also warned of a potential spike in cases in two nearby countries on the west coast of Africa. It revealed a patient from Guinea had sought treatment in Liberia after becoming ill. She later died and was confirmed to have Lassa fever. Lassa fever is endemic in Nigeria and several other countries on the west coast of Africa, including Liberia and Guinea, according to the WHO. Symptoms begin with headaches, sore throats and vomiting, but it can trigger bleeding from the mouth, nose or vagina. However, they gradually progress to shock, seizures, tremors, disorientation and comas without prompt treatment. A quarter of patients will also experience temporary deafness that will eventually return, medical literature states. Pregnant women who contract the disease late in pregnancy face an 80 per cent chance of losing their child or dying themselves. It can either be spread by rats or from person-to-person by exposure to bodily fluids of someone who is infected. WHAT IS LASSA FEVER? Scientists first identified the virus causing Lassa fever in 1969. It belongs to the Arenaviridae family. According to the World Health Organization, only 20 per cent of victims will report any symptoms. Lassa fever is endemic in Nigeria and several other countries on the west coast of Africa, including Liberia and Guinea, according to the WHO. Symptoms begin with headaches, sore throats and vomiting, but it can trigger bleeding from the mouth, nose or vagina. However, they gradually progress to shock, seizures, tremors, disorientation and comas without prompt treatment. A quarter of patients will also experience temporary deafness that will eventually return, medical literature states. Pregnant women who contract the disease late in pregnancy face an 80 per cent chance of losing their child or dying themselves. It can either be spread by rats or from person-to-person by exposure to bodily fluids of someone who is infected. Advertisement It comes just a week after ten killer viruses that pose the most 'urgent' threat to humanity were revealed by concerned experts. The World Health Organization released its annual list of lethal pathogens that research should be fast-tracked for. Ebola and Zika, which both have caused brutal pandemics in the past four years, were named amid fears they could strike again. For the first time ever, 'Disease X' - representing a pathogen currently unknown to scientists - was mentioned by the WHO. The list came amid mounting fears of a global pandemic, with experts concerned about the flu season that rocked the world. Dr Tedros Adhanom, director general of the WHO, previously warned humanity is 'vulnerable' to an outbreak that could kill millions. Having an old father could knock years off your life, according to new research. Experiments on mice found the offspring of elderly males had a lifespan that was two months shorter on average - the equivalent of several years in humans. It follows previous studies suggesting a link between older fathers and a greater risk of epilepsy, autism and some cancers in their progeny. Researchers from Bonn, Germany, said although the findings were based on rodents, they may also apply to humans. Dr Dan Ehninger said: 'What we have described here are fundamental mechanisms in a mammalian model organism. These could also be relevant for humans.' Women have long been warned the older they are, the greater the risk of health problems for them and their baby. But there is a growing body of research that suggests a father's can also affect a baby's health. A new study found that older male mice produced offspring that died on average two months earlier than mice with younger fathers (file photo) Dr Ehninger and colleagues from the German Centre for Neurodegenerative Diseases in Bonn identified a rise in the number of chemicals related to ageing and disease in the mice born to older fathers. The sperm of old males, as well as the tissue from their offspring featured similar 'epigenetic' changes to their DNA caused by lifestyle factors. Where was the study published? The results published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences are indicative of influences on the ageing process handed down from father to son and could be relevant in a human context. Dr Ehninger said: 'Statistically, certain diseases occur more often in children of old fathers than in the offspring of young men. 'This is the case, for example, for psychiatric disorders such as autism or schizophrenia. 'Associations between paternal age and health outcomes in offspring, described by a number of epidemiological studies, could arise for many reasons. 'We wanted to address whether age-related biological changes in the male germ line could underlie effects on offspring health. 'Our study was focused specifically on lifespan and ageing-associated pathologies in old father offspring.' It follows previous studies suggesting a link between older fathers and a greater risk of epilepsy, autism and some cancers in their descendants (file photo) In the first study of its kind, his team compared two groups of mice that included the descendants of young and old fathers, with the former mated at an age of four months, and the latter at least 21 months. This would be roughly the equivalent to a man having a child in his 20s or 60s, respectively. How old were the mothers? The mouse-mothers were all four months old. All offspring grew up under the same living conditions and never had contact with their fathers. Offspring from both groups were examined at the age of six and 19 months. Professor Martin Hrabe de Angelis, director of the German Mouse Clinic, Munich, said: 'We looked at 13 biological parameters that had previously been shown to change during natural ageing in mice.' 'These included deposits in the kidneys, tissue changes in the lungs, as well as alterations in proteins associated with oxidative stress.' Age-associated traits were more pronounced in the 19-month-old offspring of elderly mice than descendants of young fathers. Dr Kan Xie, a member of Dr Ehninger's lab said: 'If you take our parameters as a reference, then you can certainly say the descendants of the old mouse-fathers aged faster than the offspring of young fathers.' What did the study find? Paternal age effects were also evident with regards to lifespan. Offspring of young fathers showed an average lifespan about two months longer than that of peers with old fathers. The scientists do not assume that the different development was caused by defects in the offspring's genome. Dr Ehninger said: 'Comparing the two groups of mice, we found no significant differences in mutation rates, at least not with the methodology employed in the present study.' But there were alterations in the sperm of the fathers with regards to epigenetic marks of the genome. Dr Ehninger said: 'We could show that the offspring of old fathers showed an increased activation state of the mTORC1 signaling pathway. 'This pathway is known to be an important regulator of growth and many metabolic processes.' Whether this is the case in humans, and to what extent, has not been tested and remains unknown. Dr Ehninger said: 'In this respect, our results cannot be directly applied to humans.' He points out data on the extent to which epigenetic marks of human sperm change with age are limited so far. But he added: 'However, our results provide a good reason to take a closer look at this.' Having children ages women's DNA by 11 years, new research suggests. Giving birth shortens women's telomeres by around 4.2 per cent, a study found. Telomeres cap the end of DNA strands, with longer lengths being associated with slower aging, longer lifespans and improved overall health. Such an extent of telomere shortening is greater than the effects of smoking or obesity demonstrated in previous studies. Study author Dr Anna Pollack from George Mason University, Virginia, told New Scientist: 'We were surprised to find such a striking result. It is equivalent to around 11 years of accelerated cellular ageing.' Researchers believe this may be due to the stress of raising children, particularly in countries without mandatory maternity leave, such as the US. They stress, however, more research into the link between motherhood and genetic ageing is required, with Dr Pollack adding: 'Were not saying "dont have children". Having children ages women's DNA by 11 years, new research suggests (stock) DOES BICARBONATE OF SODA MAKE WOMEN LESS LIKELY TO HAVE CAESAREAN SECTIONS? Bicarbonate of soda helps women avoid Caesarean-sections, research suggested in January 2017. When dissolved in water, the kitchen staple enables between 17 and 20 per cent of women having slow or difficult labours to give birth naturally, without harming their babies, a study found. Speaking on the BBC's Today show, study author Professor Susan Wray from the University of Liverpool explained bicarb neutralises acids in the uterus, which increases women's likelihood of giving birth vaginally. The bicarbonate used is the standard type available in supermarkets. Around one-in-four births in the UK and one-in-three in the US are carried out via c-section. Although usually safe, the procedure can cause blood clots, excessive bleeding and womb infections. The researchers, which included scientists from the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, analysed 200 women who had difficult or slow labours. Some of the women then drank water containing bicarbonate of soda. One hour later, they were given the hormone oxytocin, which is the standard-of-care during slow deliveries and causes the uterus to contract. Those not given bicarb were administered oxytocin immediately. The researchers believe consuming bicarb is a simple, cost-effective way to improve the wellbeing of mothers during labour all over the world. Advertisement How the research was carried out The researchers from George Mason University, Virginia, analysed 1,505 women aged between 20 and 44 who took part in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey between 1999 and 2002. Of which, 444 had never given birth. This survey was chosen because it measured its participants' telomere lengths via blood samples. The study's participants' live birth histories were determined via a questionnaire. The findings were published in the journal Human Reproduction. 'Its like adding three more drops to a teaspoon' The results contradict a study carried out in Malaysian women, which suggested having more children lengthens telomeres. According to the more recent investigation's researchers, this may be due to the participants in the former study receiving greater social support. Sex slows DNA ageing in women This comes after research released in July last year suggests having sex at least once a week slows aging in women, even if they do not enjoy being intimate. Being active between the sheets increases the length of women's telomeres, a study found. Women's telomeres lengthen with regular love making regardless of whether they are sexually satisfied in their relationship, the research adds. Researchers from the University of California in San Francisco believe sex may aid aging in women by dampening stress and boosting their immune systems. Researchers have today revealed the exact risk of having a heart attack or stroke from taking several common painkillers. The heart dangers of ibuprofen, celecoxib, mefenamic acid, diclofenac and naproxen - taken by millions worldwide to dampen pain - have been assessed. Taiwanese experts have concluded that the five different tablets could all affect the heart within four weeks, but some are more dangerous than others. They assessed the odds of a major cardiovascular event for each of the popular painkillers, using data from 56,00 adults with hypertension - high blood pressure. They discovered, on average, one in 330 adults who have been taking ibuprofen will experience a heart attack or stroke within four weeks. However, the drug, costing as little as 2p a tablet and available in corner shops, was found to be three times less dangerous than celecoxib, which will lead to one in 105 adults experiencing a heart attack or stroke. The dangers of ibuprofen and four other popular tablets, taken by millions of adults across the world to dampen their discomfort, were assessed The scientists found mefenamic acid posed the least threat, with just one in 394 users expected to suffer a stroke or heart attack. One in 245 adults will suffer a cardiovascular event from taking diclofenac - banned from sale over-the-counter in the UK three years ago due to its heart dangers. However, as many as one in 214 adults taking naproxen - which can be bought from pharmacies without prescription, could expect to suffer a heart attack or stroke. The findings, published in the British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology, highlight the known dangers of taking non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs. An array of evidence has emerged in recent years, linking the widely taken drugs to heart attacks and cardiac arrest - which can kill within minutes. But few studies published to date have been able to calculate the exact risk of major cardiovascular events between different NSAIDs. HOW MANY PEOPLE WILL EXPERIENCE A HEART ATTACK OR STROKE FROM TAKING PAINKILLERS? Taiwanese researchers calculated the exact risk of having a heart attack or stroke from taking several common painkillers. The dangers of ibuprofen and four other popular tablets, taken by millions of adults across the world to dampen their discomfort, were assessed. IBUPROFEN: 1 in 330 adults CELECOXIB: 1 in 105 adults MEFENAMIC ACID: 1 in 394 adults DICLOFENAC: 1 in 245 adults NAPROXEN: 1 in 214 adults Advertisement Nearly 56,000 patients with hypertension - high blood pressure - were monitored by researchers at National Yang-Ming University, Taipei. These patients are at an elevated risk of heart attacks and strokes, but are often unaware that taking common painkillers can boost their blood pressure further. Major cardiovascular events were classed as when patients were hospitalised for stroke, heart attacks, TIAs and angina. However, the scientists, led by Dr Yaa-Hui Dong, were keen to point out that there were no significant differences between the painkillers. And they warned the only significant increased risk was observed when comparing celeocxib and mefenamic acid. Dr Chia-Hsuin Chang, co-author of the study, said: 'Our results provide important information about the comparative safety of alternative NSAID use in patients with hypertension in real-world settings. 'Under low-to-moderate daily dose and a short-term treatment period, most commonly used NSAIDs have similar cardiovascular safety profiles.' Some cardiologists have called for far tougher controls on NSAIDs amid worrying trials delving into their true dangers. Professor Gunnar Gislason, from Copenhagen University Hospital in Denmark, last year called for them to be only available in pharmacies. He led a study that found people who take ibuprofen have a 31 per cent increased risk of cardiac arrest, researchers found. Emily Dumler stopped planning the rest of her life - or even her year - after two failed cancer treatments left the mother-of-three, then just 34, with six months to live. But the failure of the second treatment became the best thing that could have happened to her, qualifying Emily to become only the third person in the world to receive an experimental immunotherapy that saved her life. Emily, of Kansas City, Missouri, was diagnosed with stage three non-Hodgkin's lymphoma in October 2013. Now, at 36, she has been in remission for over two years and said that immunotherapy saved her life and is the 'future of medicine, but it isn't a walk in the park.' Emily Dumler was 32 years old when she was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma in October 2013. Pictured: Emily, left, and her husband Scott, right, in May 2013 Emily had multiple unsuccessful cancer treatments, including chemotherapy, before she signed up for the immunotherapy clinical trial 'It's really weird to think I'm a cancer survivor.' Emily told Daily Mail Online. 'You never really think a cancer diagnosis will happen to you.' Symptoms of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma include fever, enlarged lymph nodes, weight loss, and shortness of breath. However, Emily didn't experience any of those symptoms. 'I had no signs,' she said. 'Not even one thing that I could pinpoint.' Emily, who's the director of religious education at Sacred Heart Church, said the only sign she had was an upset stomach, which occurred the day she was admitted to a local hospital. However, Emily, who was at a friend's house supervising a play date, knew something was wrong when she went to the bathroom and noticed a significant amount of blood in her stool. Emily called her doctor, who urged her to go to the hospital. She went to urgent care, thinking it would be a quick visit, but doctors kept her in the hospital for 43 days because she had immune thrombocytopenia purpura (ITP) - a condition characterized by low levels of platelets, blood cells that prevents bleeding. 'This is a very serious condition,' she said. 'If you were to just slightly bump your head you can have internal bleeding.' During that period of time, doctors performed a series of tests and treatments, including 50 blood transfusions, steroids, and a splenectomy, a procedure that removes the spleen. Emily at the Bahamas with her family in May 2013, five months before she was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma Emily was placed on chemotherapy to boost her platelet count in the hopes that this would help her blood to clot, preventing internal bleeding. 'I was on chemotherapy before they even knew I had cancer,' she said. Emily said it was a bittersweet feeling when, after undergoing a PET scan, the doctors diagnosed her with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and realized the ITP was a symptom of the disease. 'I was relieved because we knew what we were dealing with,' she said, adding that if she hadn't been diagnosed she could've died from that symptom alone. Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma is a cancer that starts in white blood cells called lymphocytes, which are part of the bodys immune system. After six rounds of chemotherapy between October 2013 and January 2014, the non-Hodgkins Lymphoma - which was located in her small bowel - went into remission. During a routine colonoscopy in August 2014, doctors discovered the cancer had returned. 'I was devastated,' she told Daily Mail Online. 'Reality sunk in that this is going to be really challenging to get rid of at this point,' she said. In January 2015, she went to MD Anderson Cancer Center in Texas to receive an autologous stem cell transplant, a treatment used for patients whose lymphoma has relapsed or not responded adequately to treatment. HOW DOES CAR-T TREATMENT WORK? CAR-T therapy starts with filtering key immune cells called T cells from a patient's blood. In a lab, a gene is then inserted into the T cells that prompts them to grow a receptor that targets a special marker found on some blood cancers. Millions of copies of the new T cells are grown in the lab and then injected into the patient's bloodstream where they can seek out and destroy cancer cells. Doctors call it a 'living drug' - permanently altered cells that continue to multiply in the body into an army to fight the disease. Advertisement For the risky procedure, Emily was placed on high doses of chemotherapy to kill all the cancer cells. The procedure also killed and bone marrow - which produces blood cells. Then they put stem cells - which were collected from her bone marrow weeks before treatment - back into her body to 'refresh the immune system,' allowing the bone marrow to produce new blood cells' she said. However, in April she found out the transplant did not work. 'At that point, you're kind of out of options,' she told Daily Mail. Emily, who was down to 88 pounds after the stem cell transplant, was told she had just six months to live. Feeling hopeless, she stopped making plans with family and she stopped buying new clothes because she didn't think she'd be around long enough to wear them. 'I wouldn't book a trip because we didn't know what the summer would bring or if I would even be there,' she said. 'I didn't want to give up hope, but at the same time I felt hopeless,' she said. In May 2015, Emily's doctor told her that the only chance of survival was a clinical trial that used a type of immunotherapy called CAR-T (chimeric antigen receptor therapy) to treat cancer. Emily was given six months to live after multiple unsuccessful cancer treatments Emily Dumler with her family in November 2017 Pictured: Emily, second to left, with her daughters Lola, far left, Isabella, center, husband Scott, second to right, and son Hudson, far right After some research, she realized the immunotherapy clinical trial was opening the following week at the MD Anderson Center. She reached out to organizers of the trial to see if she was eligible. Emily heard there was one spot left in the experiment and she snagged it. 'This was the first time I felt hopeful,' she said. 'I was happy to have something that seemed promising.' The CAR-T therapy involves removing a patient's T cells and genetically engineering them to recognize and attack the patient's tumors. The T cells are then put back into the patient's body. Her cells were then shipped to a lab in California so scientists can re-engineer the T cells with receptors that bind to proteins specific to cancer. 'Those receptors seek out cancer cells in the body that can hide from the immune system,' Emily explained. Once the receptors seek them out they destroy them. Emily didn't get the T cells until two months later in July. 'It was a hard time to sit and wait,'she told Daily Mail Online. 'I was deteriorating and I was in a lot of pain.' When she got the cells back, they were infused into her blood through an IV. That took about five to 10 minutes. Emily became the third patient in the word to receive the immunotherapy treatment for non-Hoddkins lymphoma. While the immunotherapy did give Emily new hope, it wasn't an easy process. Emily is the third patient to receive CAR-T immunotherapy for non-Hodgkins lymphoma. Pictured: Emily in October 2017 'Immunotherapy is not a walk in the park,' she said, adding that she was hospitalized for nine days following the treatment. 'The beauty of immunotherapy is that is harnesses your own immune system to fight cancer,' she said. 'But it comes with serious side effects.' Those side effects included high fever, achiness, neurotoxicity, low blood pressure, and a high heart rate. She felt like she had a sever case of the flu. However, the scariest symptom she experienced was loss of cognitive function. '[The doctors] asked me to write about what I love about where I from,' she explained. 'I wrote something down on a piece of paper and handed it to them, thinking that I had answered the question' but it was a bunch of scribbles. This side effect only lasted about 36 hours, but at the time doctors didn't know what to expect since the treatment is so new and she's the third patient to ever receive it. A month later she went back to Texas for scans and it revealed she was in complete remission. 'They actually think the cancer was probably gone within days of receiving the T cells,' she told Daily Mail Online. Doctors are calling her cure a miracle and believe immunotherapy could be the future of cancer treatment. Emily, who's been cancer-free for two years, credits her remission to the multiple failed cancer treatments. 'In order to qualify for the CAR T trial, I couldn't have had an allogeneic stem cell transplant,' she said. 'It was a bummer that the stem cell transplant didn't work, but really down the road it all worked out for my benefit.' Our article Egyptian cleric says men can marry their own daughters if they are born out of wedlock published on 4 November 2017 stated that Mazen Al-Sersawi had suggested in a video that Islam allows men to have sex with their illegitimate daughters and marry them. In fact, Mr Al-Sersawi was citing the Imam who originally suggested this and went on to say that this was a major gaffe in the Imams sect. We apologise to Mr Al-Sersawi. Ministers are scrambling to convince consumer giant Unilever to keep its UK headquarters after the Dutch launched a charm offensive to woo the company. Greg Clark, the Business Secretary, has reportedly met bosses 'a lot of times' amid growing concern they will choose Rotterdam over London. If the FTSE 100 firm quits London it would abandon its HQ on the River Thames. It occupies a giant 1930s-listed building with tall, white columns. It is thought around 1,000 staff work there. Unilever, which makes Dove, Persil, Marmite and Lynx, is also being intensely lobbied by officials from the Netherlands, who have cut taxes in a bid to make the country more attractive. If Unilever quits London it would abandon its HQ on the River Thames which occupies a giant 1930s listed building with tall, white columns Unilever's decision, it is thought, will be made around March 31. Britain's 13th biggest company has an unusual dual-structure that keeps its UK and Netherlands arms legally separate with their own stock market listings. This means it has two 'headquarters', one in London and one in Rotterdam. Unilever pledged to simplify its management structure after seeing off a hostile 115billion takeover bid from US rival Kraft Heinz. And even though Paul Polman, Unilever's chief executive, has said the decision is not related to the UK's impending exit from the European Union, the timing has still attracted extra scrutiny. DO-GOODER WHO EARNS 7.4M Unilever boss Paul Polman earned 7.4m last year Unilever boss Paul Polman, 61, is that rare beast among FTSE 100 chiefs, one who feels duty-bound to run his company for the benefit of society rather than just its shareholders. Arriving at the helm of Unilever in 2009, Polman who earned 7.4m last year did away with quarterly profits updates, claiming they encouraged short-term thinking. He won over charities with sustainability projects, and then investors by keeping company profits at a healthy 2.9billion. The second of six children, his father worked in a tyre factory and his mother was a teacher. He studied economics at Cincinnati University, where he met his American wife, Kim, with whom he has three children. After 27 years at Proctor & Gamble, he joined Nestle, before being poached by Unilever. He's due to retire later this year. A move to ditch the firm's London base is likely to be seen as a snub but Unilever insists no decision has been made yet and Clark and his top official, Alex Chisholm, have had talks with the firm in a bid to persuade it to stay. They are still said to be optimistic. Unilever employs about 7,500 people in the UK and 3,000 in the Netherlands. The UK Government has said it is monitoring the situation but declined to comment further on the meetings. The company has refused to comment on whether a change would lead to job losses. But it could lose its place in Britain's FTSE 100 if it makes Rotterdam its main base. Profits at miner Anglo American have increased 45% to 6.3bn DIVIDEND RISE Profits at miner Anglo American have increased 45 per cent to 6.3billion while debt has almost halved to 3.2billion. Chief executive Mark Cutifani said dividends had increased by 40 per cent. DIRECTOR ROLE Georgina Kessel, former secretary of state in the Mexican Ministry of Energy, is joining the board of miner Fresnillo as a non-executive director. 5G TRIAL Mobile carrier O2 is to test cutting-edge internet services at its events arena in London. So-called 5G mobile technology, fast enough to stream a high-definition video without buffering, is set to be offered for free there from the second half of 2018. TAXI LAUNCH London-based technology star Citymapper has launched a taxi service in the capital to rival Uber. It has been licensed by Transport for London and is free in its first week. ON BOARD Joe Hurd, 48, a former adviser to Barack Obama, has joined the board of price comparison firm Go Compare. He runs a Silicon Valley investment business. PROFIT UP Lending firm Together Financial Services made a profit of 31.5million in the last three months of 2017, 1.8million more than a year earlier. CLEARING CALL Theodor Weimer, the boss of struggling German stock exchange Deutsche Boerse, has called on the European Union to redouble its efforts to steal the Citys business. Weimer said it would be a win-win if London is stripped of its valuable euro clearing rights. BANK LEASE Wall Street titan Bank of America has extended the lease at its City headquarters for an extra ten years until 2032. And Germanys Deutsche Bank has won planning permission for a new headquarters in London. BITCOIN PROBE MPs on the Treasury Select Committee have launched a probe into bitcoin amid fears the online currency is a Wild West where speculators face massive losses. They will look at whether regulation is needed. TARGET LOWERED Analysts at Berenberg have downgraded Hotel Chocolats rating and price recommendation after its new stores failed to be profitable in the year they opened. The bank has reduced its price target by 40p to 340p. The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) has moved out of the red for the first time in a decade with annual profits of 752 million. It beats the 6.95 billion loss RBS reported in its 2016 results as it dealt with misconduct charges, legacy issues and restructuring costs. Analysts had expected the bank to post a further bout of losses in its annual results for 2017 which were published this morning, but costs came in lower than markets expected. RBS has had to deal with a host of conduct issues, regulatory investigations and litigation over the past decade which has sparked huge losses The bank posted a 4 per cent increase in adjusted income and reduced expenses by 810 million, exceeding its 750 million target through cost-cutting and restructuring. Friday's figures take into account conduct and litigation costs of 1.29 billion, part of which was to help cover costs to deal with claims that it mis-sold mortgage-backed securities in the run-up to the financial crisis. The bank was bailed out by the government at the height of the financial crisis in 2008 when on the brink of collapse and is still 72 per cent owned by the taxpayer. It is far from out of the woods, as the lender has yet to reach what is expected to be a multibillion-dollar settlement with the US Department of Justice over the mortgage-backed securities sales that contributed to the crisis. Other costs included 175 million in provisions to cover costs surrounding mis-selling of payment protection insurance (PPI). The bank admitted that substantial additional charges and costs may be recognised in the coming quarters. RBS chief executive Ross McEwan, said: 'We have achieved profitability through delivering on the strategic plan that was set out in 2014. 'The first part of this plan was focused on building financial strength by reducing risk and building a more sustainable cost base. 'Our financial strength is now much clearer. Over the same period we have reduced operating costs by 3.9 billion. We still have more to do on cost reduction, however this reflects the progress we have made in making the bank more efficient.' 'We have apologised': RBS boss Ross McEwan said the bank was a 'safer organisation' than it was ten years ago when its GRG was working with small businesses McEwan also took the chance to recognise the mistakes made during the crisis over the treatment of small business in its Global Restructuring Group (GRG). He said the bank 'got a lot wrong' between 2008 and 2014 but added: 'Today this bank is a simpler and safer organisation, with colleagues now fully focused on our customers.' Its share price was down 4.5 per cent this morning, trading at 269p. RBS has broken its ten year duck and managed to squeeze out a profit in 2017, thanks in large part to a big fall in litigation and conduct costs,' noted Laith Khalaf, senior analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown. 'This is a stay of execution rather than a pardon however, because the bank is still facing a multi-billion dollar penalty from the US Department of Justice, which is now going to impair profitability in 2018.' 'The UK part of RBS is going great guns, and even the investment bank has held up reasonably well, considering a lot of the bad bank has been rolled into it. The banks capital position has improved again, though the prospect of a dividend still hinges on the final settlement with US authorities.' 'All in all, its been a tricky but momentous year for RBS, in which the bank has put to bed many of the legacy issues which have hampered performance since the financial crisis,' he added. A Pennsylvania-based offshoot of the Unification Church is encouraging couples to bring their AR-15 rifles with them to a commitment ceremony in the Pocono Mountains, a half-mile from an elementary school. World Peace and Unification Sanctuary in Newfoundland, Pennsylvania, says it planned the Feb. 28 ceremony long before last week's massacre at a Florida high school. Authorities say the alleged shooter used an AR-15. Tim Elder of the Unification Sanctuary said Tuesday that the church believes the AR-15 symbolizes the 'rod of iron' mentioned in the Bible's apocalyptic book of Revelation. The Unification Church (led by Hyung-Jin Moon and his wife, above) is holding a blessing that encourages believers in Pennsylvania to bring along rifles - the church claims the guns are referred to in the Bible 'This will be a big thing for us. It's a new stage for us because it incorporates the rod of iron, as it is in Revelations. Revelations talks about the returning Christ ruling with the rod of iron,' Elder said. 'This rod of iron is the AR-15, in today's terms,' he added. Up to 600 people are expected to attend the ceremony according to WNEP. Some parents are expressing alarm, but Elder says the weapons will be unloaded and secured. The controversy arises from the fact that the ceremony will take place near a school, soon after the Parkland Florida shootings, concerning area parents 'It's something I would consider keeping my child home. It's scary,' said Liz Zoccola. 'I wish they wouldn't have it at all. I don't think there's a good time to have it, especially this close,' Kendra Hanor added. The leader of the church is Hyung-Jin Moon. The church leader's father is the late Rev. Sun Myung Moon, founder of the Unification Church, which often is described as a cult. Real Housewives of Beverly Hills star Kyle Richards has closed her sprawling Manhattan clothing boutique 14 months after opening and has squeezed her merchandise into the back of a family-run shoe store, DailyMail.com can reveal. On Sunday, staff were seen frantically packing up the reality star's 1,800 sq ft Upper East Side boutique, Kyle by Alene Too, to move to smaller premises further down the street. In 2015, when the most recent advertisement was posted for the space, it was leasing for $33,750 a month - $225 per square foot. Their new home is in the back of The Shoebox, a family-run designer shoe chain with two locations in the city. It is the same size but cheaper at around $186 per sq foot. Details of their partnership are unknown but, if splitting the rent 50/50, Kyle's team would be responsible for $27,900 a month, almost $6,000-a-month less. The 49-year-old has not commented on the move but her business partner told DailyMail.com it was because a mystery retailer had been 'eyeing up' their large store and wanted to move in. She would not say who was taking over the lease or what exactly incentivised them to move out so quickly but promised: 'Business is good!' Going, going, gone: Kyle Richards' sprawling Upper East Side boutique is now empty Beverly Hills-based Kyle Richards (above earlier this month) has not commented on the move Kyle's merchandise has found a new home in The Shoebox's two Manhattan locations - Flatiron location and the Upper East Side. The news came as a shock to the Beverly Hills Housewives who just last week were seen on screens mingling at a September fashion week party at the old store. Lizzy Schwartz, Kyle's partner who works with her on all of her Alene Too boutiques, insisted there was nothing sinister behind it. 'Someone wanted my space, they had been eyeing it for a while. It all happened really fast. Business is good. I wouldn't have moved if it wasn't, I would have closed. 'It's going to be a bit smaller but this way we're in three stores. 'We're so lucky to have found a home in Shoebox,' she told DailyMail.com. The third location is in Manhasset, on Long Island, where they will also operate out of a Shoebox location. Rushed job: Kyle's business partner tells DailyMail.com the move was sudden and prompted by an offer from a mystery retailer who had been eyeing the space A team of staff were seen packing up the last of the glamorous merchandise on Sunday The huge,1,800 sq ft space was unoccupied this week after Kyle and her team packed up and shipped out. Its most recently advertised lease gave its monthly price at $33,750. The listing agent who organized that deal said he knew nothing of the change of hands What a difference a few weeks make: On February 6, Kyle was spotted outside the store (left). It is pictured (right) this week Richards' partner Lizzy Schwartz told DailyMail.com 'business is good' and it is down to someone else 'eyeing up' their old, leased space She said that the Beverly Hills location, which frequently appears on the show, and their Southampton premises will remain unchanged along with their store in Boca Raton, Florida. This was the sign in the window on Sunday, directing customers to the new space The real estate agent who produced their deal was not aware of it when contacted on Wednesday afternoon, after Kyle's stock was all packed up and set up down the street. The Shoebox renewed its lease on 3rd Avenue in November. It is double the size as Kyle's old store and is split over two floors which include its 1800 sq ft street level boutique and an 1800 sq ft basement for storage. It was being leased for $186 per square foot. The change was fast and unexpected, according to Schwartz who said she was approached just two weeks ago by the mysterious new lease-holder. She would not name them and details of the deal are not public. New home: They are now in the back of The Shoebox, a family-run designer shoe retailer with two locations in the city which will both stock Kyle's merchandise A Shoebox sales rep said Kyle's merchandise had already moved in to the 'back ' of the store where it would get a 'big' show Memories: In an episode of the show which was filmed in September, Kyle and Lisa Vanderpump fawned over the NYC location and its merchandise The 49-year-old eyed-up a pair of jade earrings which she joked about giving herself a discount on In recent episodes of her Bravo show, Kyle and her castmates shopped and frolicked in the Upper East Side location. The episodes were filmed in September last year when several of the women's daughters walked in fashion week. Kyle hosted a part in her boutique to coincide with the glitzy occasion. Beforehand, she was filmed shopping with co-star Lisa Vanderpump and eyeing up a pair of pricey jade earrings which she joked about giving herself a discount on. The boutique business is not her only gig. She recently produced the series American Woman to the ire of her famous sisters Kathy Hilton and Kim Richards who were angered that she had turned sensitive parts of their childhood into a sitcom. Her husband Mauricio Umansky has also found enormous success with his real estate company The Agency. Repeated requests for comment from Kyle's agent went unanswered. A former freemason found drunk and naked inside a huge pipe organ has appeared in court accused of damaging the historic instrument - insured for more than $1 million. Glenn Langford was arrested on Wednesday after allegedly flooding the Brisbane Masonic Memorial Centre and setting off the fire alarms. The 51-year-old faced charges at the Brisbane Arrest Court on Thursday and was granted bail. Glenn Langford was arrested on Wednesday after allegedly flooding the Brisbane Masonic Memorial Centre But he said his intentions were initially well-meaning and the night had got out of hand after downing a bottle of Johnny Walker whisky, 7 News reports. The court was told he had been meaning to hand out cheeseburgers to the homeless. Food was left scattered on the floor of the grand hall of the heritage-listed temple in Brisbane's CBD, which features one of the biggest organs in Queensland. It is feared the organ, installed in the 1930s, may be too damaged to be repaired despite it being insured for $1 million. The organ inside the hall is supposedly insured for more than $1 million but may be beyond repair Mr Langford is charged with allegedly damaging a number of organ pipes and destroying part of a decorative wall. He was also discovered naked along with clothes, a remote controlled police car and toy gun. The magistrate heard from Mr Langford's lawyer who explained he had last week lost his job and was getting over the breakdown of a 16-year relationship. Decorative wall was reported to be damaged and the pipes were also allegedly damaged overnight He was granted bail on the condition that he stayed more than 100 metres away from the centre in Ann Street. 'Things just got a little loose, I was out of it,' Mr Langford told 7 News. He apologised to 'all the righteous Freemasons everywhere'. 'I did have a lot of cheeseburgers to give to the homeless. I'm going to see a shrink and don't drink,' he added. Famed evangelist Billy Graham will lie in honor at the US Capitol next week, making him the fourth private citizen to receive the tribute. House Speaker Paul Ryan announced Thursday that the world-renowned preacher and spiritual counselor to American presidents will lie in honor at the Capitol Rotunda on Wednesday, February 28 and Thursday, March 1. After Grahams casket arrives at the Capitol, Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell will take part in a service. Grahams son, Rev Franklin Graham, was invited to attend. Rev Billy Graham, who died Wednesday at the age of 99, will lie in honor at the US Capitol Rotunda A hearse carrying the remains of Graham is seen arriving at the Billy Graham Training Center in Asheville, North Carolina on February 22, 2018 where a memorial was set up in his honor A woman is seen wiping away tears while visiting a memorial for Graham on February 22, 2018 in the Chatlos Memorial Chapel on the grounds of the Billy Graham Training Center in Asheville, North Carolina Several people stopped by the the Chatlos Memorial Chapel on the grounds of the Billy Graham Training Center in Asheville, North Carolina on February 22, 2018 to pay their respects to Graham Graham's daughter, Gigi (center), is seen being assisted to the Chatlos Memorial Chapel on February 22, 2018, where a memorial for her father is on display Well-wishers left notes behind at the Chatlos Memorial Chapel in Asheville, North Carolina on February 22, 2018 (Graham) spread the gospel in 185 countries during his 99 years on Earth, touching the lives of many and forever changing the course of the worlds spiritual health, Ryan said in a statement. Members of the public will be invited to pay their respects to Graham while he lies in honor. Graham died on Wednesday at the age of 99 from natural causes. He preached Christianity to more people than anyone else in history during his 70-year career, reaching hundreds of millions of people either in person or via TV and satellite links, his ministry said. Graham became the de facto White House chaplain to several US presidents, most famously Richard Nixon. According to a House History on the tradition, the Capitol Rotunda was first used to pay tribute to the nations most distinguished citizens in 1852. It was historically used to honor military officers and elected officials, including 11 US Presidents. In 1998, the Rotunda was used for the first time to honor private citizens following the deaths of Jacob J. Chestnut Jr and John M Gibson, two Capitol Police Officers killed while protecting the Capitol from an armed assailant. The last time the Rotunda was used for a private citizen was in 2005 when African-American civil rights activist Rosa Parks laid in honor. Graham will be the fourth private citizen laid in honor at the Capitol Rotunda. The famed evangelist is pictured above speaking at Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, Florida on October 22, 1988 Graham preached to millions of people and became a spiritual leader to US Presidents. He's seen above preaching at Bercy's Stadium in Paris on September 20, 1986 Graham (center) died at the age of 99 from natural causes. Pictured (l-r): Former Presidents George HW Bush and Bill Clinton with Graham, his son Franklin Graham and former President Jimmy Carter outside the Billy Graham Library in Charlotte, North Carolina on May 31, 2007 Graham (left) was close to a lot of US Presidents, including former president John F Kennedy (right). They are pictured above at the White House on December 12, 1961 Graham (right) was also close with former president Barack Obama (left). They are pictured at Graham's house in Montreat, North Carolina on April 25, 2010 Graham (right) is photographed above with former president George W Bush (left) at the Billy Graham Library on December 20, 2010 in Charlotte, North Carolina Graham's friendships with US Presidents goes back many years. Above, the famed preacher (center) is pictured with former president Ronald Reagan and Nancy Reagan in 1983 The reverend will lie in repose in his childhood home, which was moved to Charlotte several years ago on February 26 and February 27. The public will be allowed to pay their respects on both days from 8am to 10pm. A private funeral for Graham will be held on March 2 at the Billy Graham Library in Charlotte, North Carolina. More than 2,000 people have been invited to attend the service including President Donald Trump, Vice President Mike Pence and every former living president. A spokesman for the DeMoss Group, the public relations firm handling the funeral, told WKRN that Grahams son will perform the eulogy. The minister will be buried on the library property next to his wife Ruth, who died in 2007. His coffin, a plain pine casket, was built by inmates at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. Former Angola Warden Burl Cain told The Advocate that Grahams son, Franklin Graham, requested the coffin be made by the inmates after having seen the prisoners work during a visit in the early 2000s. Ruth Graham was also buried in a coffin built by the Angola inmates. Graham is survived by his five children and 19 grandchildren. President Donald Trump's approval rating hit 50 percent Friday in one major national poll for the first time since last June. The Rasmussen Reports daily tracking poll shows half of all Americans say Trump is doing a good job in office, while 49 per cent disagree. The president spent most of his first two months in office polling above 50 per cent, but a steady drumbeat of criticism and suspicion related to a trio of Russia investigations has dragged his numbers down. Yet the president's popularity has been buoyed by December's tax cut package, especially as Americans begin to see results in their paychecks. Trump's numbers in the Rasmussen poll have only been in the 50-plus territory on 14 per cent of his days in office. President Donald Trump has hit 50 per cent in Rasmussen's daily presidential approval tracking poll The last time Trump was at 50 per cent was in the middle of June 2017 Barack Obama polled better than 50 per cent 27 per cent of the time while he was commander-in-chief. Of the national polls that sampled Trump's job approval in the past month, the Rasmussen survey is the only one that sampled 'likely voters.' The others broadened their samples to include 'registered voters' whether or not they plan to cast ballots in the future and, in some cases, Americans at large. An average of polls maintained by Real Clear Politics shows that Trump's overall rating during the past two weeks is 42.2 per cent. Trump's current level of support is also above his performance level in the 2016 election, when 46.1 per cent of voters chose him over Hillary Clinton and a handful of minor candidates. Obama began his presidency at 67 per cent approval in the Rasmussen tracking poll, compared with 56 per cent for Trump. Barack Obama polled better than 50 per cent 27 per cent of the time while he was commander-in-chief nearly twice Trump's rate so far Trump has been fighting off a collection of political headaches, including a special counsel probe into whether his campaign colluded with Russians who aimed to meddle in the 2016 election. Nearly 20 women have accused him of some level of sexual harassment or abuse, depressing his support among female voters. The president has also been plagued by far greater turnover of senior staff than his predecessors, most recently losing his staff secretary following domestic violence accusations from two ex-wives. The instability of Trump's inner circle hasn't projected strength: Departures of his initial chief of staff, chief strategist, press secretary, health secretary, national security adviser, FBI director and a pair of communications directors have all been public-relations train wrecks. And Omarosa Manigault-Newman's ouster from the Office of Public Liaison led her back to reality television, where she trashes the administration at every turn. The Rasmussen poll is clearly an outlier among recent surveys, but it's also the only recent poll to sample 'likely' voters The Rasmussen Reports national poll was among the few that came closest to accurately predicting the results of the election that vaulted Trump to power. Unlike other polls that ask questions in live telephone interviews, it relies on push-button phone calls meaning voters who like Trump's performance in office aren't required to say so out loud to another person. Some political scientists have called the result 'The Trump Effect,' a phenomenon that explained how social distaste for the president might depress his numbers in polls that use live operators. Janna Bullock, 49, has been sentenced to 11 years in prison A New York socialite has been sentenced in absentia to 11 years in a Russian jail for allegedly embezzling more than 11billion rubles ($194million) from the Moscow treasury. US citizen Janna Bullock, 49, and her ex-husband Kuznetsov, as well as accused accomplices, allegedly fraudulently moved regional funds to offshore firms to finance an extravagant lifestyle. However it is not clear if she will serve her sentence because the U.S. and Russia have no extradition agreement, as seen in high-profile cases including that of NSA contractor Edward Snowden who left America in 2013. If she visits any of her lavish properties abroad, however, she may be extradited or held in agreement with the Russian government - just as France has done in holding her ex-husband Kuznetsov since 2013. But already some of her estates have been seized by the Russian government to repay the material damage it claims she has caused. Her seized properties include hotels Crystal and Pralong in France, an apartment in Paris, two apartments in Switzerland, a villa in Saint-Tropez, and fine art spanning 27 paintings and eight sculptures. Her extensive car collection has also been seized and includes 10 Rolls-Royce, Mercedes and Bentley cars, as well as a motor yacht. Bullock, 49, and her ex-husband Kuznetsov, as well as claimed accomplices, allegedly fraudulently moved regional funds to offshore firms to finance an extravagant lifestyle Bullock, left, with daughter Eugenia Bullock, center, has already had properties and cars seized outside the US Bullock grew up in the Belarusian town of Pinsk and went on to St.Petersburg where she taught Russian literature but her life changed when she emigrated to the US in 1990 and settled in the Russian enclave of Brighton Beach in Brooklyn. In New York she worked as a paralegal in the office of an immigration lawyer and soon after met Kuznetsov. She then started to work in the real estate business and went on to flip mansions and luxurious properties in Manhattan. Bullock also worked as an art dealer and sat on the board of the Guggenheim from 2007 to 2010. She lived a jet-set lifestyle running her hotels in France that became a hub for Russia's elite. She also launched a real-estate development company in Moscow that conducted substantial business with the Moscow Oblast government, whose finances were teetering at the time Bullock and Kuznetsov left Russia in 2008, according to RadioFreeEurope. Bullock rose in the New York social sphere flipping properties and working as an art dealer Bullock with her daughter Zoe Remmel (center), who made headlines in 2008 for her extravagant wedding Bullock (second left) smiles with daughter Zoe (right), her husband Towson Remmel (second right) and their young children in 2012 Bullock's younger daughter Eugenia, 21, poses with boyfriend in sparkling gold dress Bullock has been married four times. A source close to her tells Dailymail.com that Bullock still lives an exquisite life throwing parties at her $30million Hampton's mansion. The source says that Bullock hired publicists to legitimize her stance in American society as an art dealer and realtor. She has been most recently romantically connected to skin care mogul Peter Thomas Roth. She has two adult daughters Zoe Remmel, 28, and Eugenia Bullock, 21. Remmel made headlines in 2008 for her extravagant and expensive wedding to Towson Remmel with whom she has two children. Eugenia is enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania where she studies Politics, Philosophy and Economics; Russian and Eastern European Studies. The source says she now lives travelling between Miami and New York City. Lavish homes: She's famous for flipping pricey real estate such as this Hamptons home She owned his beach home in Heller, South Hampton which is now listed as a full season rental Her French Alpes Hotel Pralong (above) is a hot destination for Russian elite to ski White House communications director Hope Hicks has topped a list of powerful Washingtonians outpacing the president's chief of staff, even as her involvement with accused wife-beater Rob Porter drew scrutiny. Hicks, who is President Trump's longest serving remaining aide, is considered a key gatekeeper to the president, helping screen interviewers and plot strategy. She is well-liked and respected in the White House, but the 29-year-old has also been the subject of unwanted attention. Now, she's No. 1 on GQ's list of the 50 most powerful people in the city President Trump has called a 'swamp.' Hicks was revealed by DailyMail.com to be dating former White House staff secretary Rob Porter. Days later, DailyMail revealed that Porter was accused by two former ex-wives of abuse. Hope Hicks tops the list of most influential Washingtonians The scandal sent the White House reeling for days, as the story mushroomed to include questions about the internal handling of Porter and his failure to get a security clearance as well as Hicks' reported involvement in drafting a statement about Porter in response. Hicks placed ahead of Vice President Mike Pence, a seasoned operator from the Capitol who has earned a reputation for offering uninhibited public praise for his boss. She also topped chief of staff John Kelly, who has helped instill discipline in the Trump White House but has drawn criticism for his own handling of the Porter matter, leading to speculation he might get replaced. Hope Hicks heads to work wearing a chic camel colored coat in Washington D.C. Her relationship with Rob Porter came to a stunning conclusion after his ex wives accused him of abuse SECOND FIDDLE: Hicks topped Vice President Mike Pence SEMPER FI: Also lower on the list was White House chief of staff John Kelly, who has come under criticism for his handling of the Porter scandal Porter and Hicks watch on as U.S. President Donald Trump takes part in a welcoming ceremony with China's President Xi Jinping in Beijing, China, November 9, 2017 Other senior officials like Kellyanne Conway didn't make the cut Hicks has also earned a reputation for glamor sporting a fashionable tuxedo outfit for a banquet in Japan on a trip with the president. She was involved in the Air Force One drafting on a statement in response to the initial reports that Donald Trump Jr. had a meeting with Russians in Trump Tower in 2016. Her comments on a call with former Trump legal spokesman Mark Corallo let Corallo to conclude she may have been urging obstruction of justice when she said certain emails would never see daylight. She also met with Michael Wolff, who ingratiated himself in the West Wing and then delivered a book savaging President Trump. The nation's largest privately-owned bank holding company will stop producing credit cards for the National Rifle Association in response to customer feedback, a spokesman said Thursday. The Nebraska-based First National Bank of Omaha will not renew its contract to issue the group's NRA Visa Card, spokesman Kevin Langin said in a statement. 'Customer feedback has caused us to review our relationship with the NRA,' Langin said. Nebraska-based First National Bank, the nation's largest privately-owned bank holding company, has announced it will stop producing credit cards for the National Rifle Association The NRA has faced intense criticism after the school shooting in Parkland, Florida that left 17 people dead. Pictured are students calling for Congress to act on gun control on February 21 Langin declined to say when the contract would expire and would not elaborate on what sort of feedback the company had received. The company released the same statement dozens of times on Twitter in response to other users who called on the company to sever its ties with the NRA. Some users who identified themselves as customers pledged to take their business elsewhere. 'You have blood of these murdered people on your hands,' said one Twitter user. The announcement came after the progressive news website ThinkProgress listed the bank as a company that supports the NRA. ThinkProgress noted that First National Bank offered two NRA cards, each with a $40 bonus, and touted it as 'enough to reimburse your one-year NRA membership!' On Thursday, the bank's webpage that advertised the NRA card had been disabled. A cached version of the site touted the card as 'the official credit card of the NRA' and noted the benefits of membership. The NRA credit cards are part of a larger business in which the bank issues cards branded with organizations' logos, such as the sporting-goods store Scheels and the Best Western hotel chain. The NRA has faced intense criticism following the school shooting in Parkland, Florida that left 17 people dead, the latest in a string of high-profile mass killings in the U.S. 'Customer feedback has caused us to review our relationship with the NRA,' said bank spokesman Kevin Langin said A group that tracks the credit industry said the move could carry significant risks for First National Bank of Omaha. 'Many will applaud the move, but NRA members are famously loyal and the organization has shown itself as being very good at mobilizing its members,' said Matt Schulz, a senior industry analyst at CreditCards.com. 'However, banks are in the business of managing risks of all kinds, and First National clearly sees this as one they're willing to take.' First National Bank has banks in Nebraska, Colorado, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, South Dakota and Texas. The company is not the only one facing backlash over their relationship with the country's powerful lobbying group. The hashtag #StopNRAmazon has emerged on social media as people threaten to stop using the retail giant if the site doesn't stop carrying NRATV on its streaming service. Malcolm Turnbull's government may be at risk of imploding as the scandal involving Barnaby Joyce's pregnant former staffer continues to dominate Australian politics - but that didn't stop him jetting off to Washington. The Prime Minister ignored mounting domestic pressure over Barnaby Joyce's refusal to stand down over his messy affair with Vikki Campion, 33, and travelled 16,000km to Washington for a trip focusing on the American alliance and '100 years of mateship'. But despite touching down in Washington DC on Wednesday evening for a four-day visit, the Prime Minister is yet to meet President Donald Trump who's embroiled in the gun control debate following the Florida shooting that killed 17. Malcolm Turnbull touched down on Wednesday evening in Washington DC for a four-day U.S. trip The prime minister kick-started day one of his trip by taking a morning stroll with his wife Lucy around the Lincoln Memorial. Mr Turnbull then met with Treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin over breakfast where he praised the Trump Administration for its tax reforms. 'The reality is, the experience they are seeing here in the United States is they are seeing stronger economic growth because of those tax cuts,' Mr Turnbull said. Prime minister Turnbull faces growing domestic pressure with the unresolved Barnaby Joyce affair despite being on tour shaking hands with U.S. officials half way across the world Deputy prime minister Barnaby Joyce has been in crisis since it was revealed he was embroiled in an affair with former staffer Vikki Campion. The couple are expecting a child in April Through his appraisal of the U.S. tax reforms, he aimed to push his own Coalition's proposed company tax cuts. 'It underlines the importance of completing our tax reform program,' Mr Turnbull said. Mr Turnbull met with the Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen to discuss cyber security in light of confirmed Russian interference and cyber attacks during the 2016 presidential campaign. The Prime Minister visits Arlington cemetery to pay his respects to the 400, 000 American veterans The prime minister also paid respect to the one Australian World War II airman in Arlington cemetery Prime minister Turnbull and his wife Lucy brave the cold to visit Arlington cemetery on Thursday He also met with federal reserve chairman Jerome Powell, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, and National Security Agency director Michael Rogers. The Prime Minister later visited the Arlington cemetery to pay his respects to the 400,000 American veterans and one Australian World War II airman. While Mr Turnbull is shaking hands with high profile U.S. officials, there is growing pressure from his people at home. Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull meets U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell Malcolm Turnbull takes to social during his meeting with chairman of the Federal Reserve Jerome Powell. Ambassador of Australia to the United States Joe Hockey was also present during the talks While Mr Turnbull is shaking hands with high profile U.S. officials, his government is at risk of imploding over the Barnaby Joyce's scandalous affair with his former staffer This comes after Nationals MP Andrew Broad's comments against the deputy prime minister Barnaby Joyce a few hours after the prime minister landed in Washington DC. Andrew Broad publicly confirmed his zero confidence in the Nationals party leader. Mr Broad told the ABC on Thursday he had the endorsement of his local branch to call Joyce to resign as leader of the National party. This makes him the first federal Nationals MP to publicly call for Barnaby Joyce to resign. Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull meets Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen (centre) and National Security Agency director Michael Rogers (left) Mr Turnbull is experiencing growing pressure from the Australian public and media for being on tour in the U.S. while his government is in shambles The Turnbulls will be graced with a ceremonial welcome from Mr Trump and his wife, Melania this Friday. The two leaders will then meet privately in the Oval Office to work on the alliance, which comes after their shaky phone call last January on President Trump's eighth day in office. The leaders will meet to confirm their alliance and agreements on key issues including trade, TPP, cyber security, the continuing threat of North Korea and U.S. engagement in China. A call for help from a homeowner who found a snake in his kitchen has caused a wrangler to issue a stern public warning. The homeowner shared a picture of the small, juvenile snake with Sunshine Coast Snake Catchers, asking what type it was. But the snake wranglers took to Facebook on Wednesday to share the photo and point out to the public the potentially deadly mistake he made. Sunshine Coast Snake Catchers took to Facebook on Wednesday to share a photo sent in by a homeowner (pictured), and point out to the public the potentially deadly mistake he made Max from Sunshine Coast Snake Catchers said the homeowner incorrectly asked for the snake's identification by holding it. The snake turned out to be a notorious eastern brown, whose extremely venomous bite can prove deadly to humans. Max shared the photo with another request he received for snake identification when pointing out 'how not to ask' for snake identification. 'We are always happy to provide a snake identification service for anyone that has a photo of a snake - however I thought Id use these two examples of how not to do it,' he wrote. Max from Sunshine Coast Snake Catchers said the homeowner incorrectly asked for the snake's identification by holding it The second ID request he shared showed an unidentifiable snake in a distant pool 'The first image is a man holding a juvenile eastern brown snake (dangerously venomous!) asking for an ID ... 'If youre not sure of the snake species definitely DO NOT TOUCH IT - we have some seriously dangerous species here in Australia so always keep your own safety first!' The second image he shared showed an unidentifiable snake in a distant pool. Max added: 'If it is safe to get closer to the snake than the pool image, it will allow us to provide a confident ID.' A man has been charged with murder after a body was found at a beach camping ground. Police arrived at Telowie Beach in Germein Bay on South Australia's mid-north coast at 10.30pm on Thursday. The body of a 49-year-old man from Nuriootpa was discovered at the camping ground, 235 kilometres north of Adelaide. A man has been charged with murder after a body was found at a beach camping ground (pictured is Telowie Beach) Police arrested a Port Pirie man, 39, who was known to the alleged victim, and charged him with murder. The accused will appear in the Port Pirie Magistrates court on Friday. Major Crime detectives, joined by local detectives, remained at the scene early on Friday morning. A 27-year-old man is suspected of crashing his car into a hospital in Connecticut and then setting himself on fire with the cans of gasoline in his back seat. Steven Ellam allegedly drove into the entrance of the emergency room at Middlesex Hospital around 10am Thursday morning, Fox 61 reported. The bomb squad and state and federal authorities were called to the hospital to help, and Ellam was transported to Bridgeport hospital with serious burn injuries and is in critical condition. He is currently in critical condition, Middletown Mayor Dan Drew told the news station. Scroll down for video Steven Ellam is suspected of crashing his car into a hospital in Connecticut and then setting himself on fire with the cans of gasoline in his back seat A video of the incident taken by Monique Santos shows the entrance to the hospital enveloped in smoke and a car smashed into the front doors A video of the incident taken by Monique Santos shows the entrance to the hospital enveloped in smoke and a car smashed into the front doors. Mayor Drew said the act was intentional, but did not offer any speculation into what Ellam's motives might be. However, he did say he doesn't believe there is an active threat to the community, and that authorities believe it is an isolated incident. He said no threat was made to the hospital ahead of the incident. Immediately after the crash emergency responders evacuated roughly 30 patients and 20 staff members at the emergency room. All patients and staff at Middlesex Hospital are safe and accounted for. 'The bomb squads were there. But that was out of an abundance of caution, not because we had any information that anything was wired or connected,' Drew explained. 'In a situation like this, it's incumbent on us to make sure every contingency is explored.' Police quickly roped off Ellam's home on Millardo Lane in Middleton as the investigation continued. Several homes in the area were evacuated as a precaution. Mayor Drew said the act was intentional, but did not offer any speculation into what Ellam's motives might be Immediately after the crash emergency responders evacuated roughly 30 patients and 20 staff members at the emergency room. Ellam was also taken to a neighboring hospital and is in serious condition Police quickly roped off Ellam's home on Millardo Lane in Middleton as the investigation continued. Several homes in the area were evacuated as a precaution Two bomb-sniffing dogs were brought to his home with officers as they searched it. The FBI is assisting local police in the investigation, according to Fox. Officers have also been stationed at other municipal and education facilities in town for protection on the chance this was part of a terrorist plot. Emergency patients at Middlesex were brought to MidState Medical Center, the Hospital of Central Connecticut and Hartford Hospital until for the time being. Yale-New Haven Hospital and Hartford HealthCare have said they are increasing security as a precaution at emergency departments and some other locations. Ellam has an extensive criminal history in Connecticut that goes as far back as 2008, according to WFSB. He has been convicted of driving under the influence, criminal mischief and assault. In 2013 he was also found guilty of attempting to strangle someone. Protesters were removed on Thursday by Hawaiian State Sherif'fs deputies from the ruins of a hotel that was destroyed by a hurricane in 1992, located on sacred ground on the island of Kauai. In addition to shutting down the protest, state sheriffs arrested 23-year-old Mahealani Hanie-Grace for trespassing at Coco Palms in the city of Wailua, authorities said. The demonstrators have been occupying the property since last year in an attempt to block redevelopment of land where Hawaiian chiefs once lived and where Elvis Presley's character got married in the movie 'Blue Hawaii.' Protesters were removed on Thursday by Hawaiian State Sherif'fs deputies from the ruins of a hotel that was destroyed by a hurricane in 1992, located on sacred ground on the island of Kauai; Dozens of people are seen here supporting the occupants on January 28 The protest began when two men arrived claiming they owned the property because they descend from King Kaumualii, the last ruler of Kauai. They've since been joined by dozens of others. Hawaiian chiefs were born and lived on the property hundreds of years ago. Royalty favored the area for its plentiful water, which made it ideal for irrigating fields for the starchy vegetable taro, a staple crop. Coco Palms opened as a resort in 1953. Eight years later, it served as the backdrop for scenes in the Hollywood romantic comedy featuring Presley. Police have cited protesters for trespassing. Last month a judge issued an order to evict them. The public safety department said 25 deputy sheriffs participated in the raid. Sheriff's deputies from the Hawaii Department of Public Safety collect details at Coco Palms hotel in a raid on Thursday This photo from December 3, 2009 shows the Coco Palms Resort retail annex where one shop on the second floor was gutted by fire in Wailua on the island of Kauai in Hawaii Keala Lopez, who has been teaching Hawaiian to those gathered at the property, said people occupying the site are protecting the land and the natural resource. She said they won't give up now, and will just have to adapt. 'I don't think it will diminish our fire. It's inspiring for the community to see us continue,' Lopez said. 'We've been receiving so much support and aloha, so that I only feel stronger when situations happen.' The people occupying the Coco Palms site have been growing taro, a traditional Hawaiian staple, and other crops, she said. The effort is more about having a place to live and sleep, she said. 'It's a cultural calling to preserve and protect this place,' she said. Protestors are seen here on August 2 blocking the intersection of Kula Highway and Old Haleakala Highway in Maui, Hawaii; Protestors connected themselves with PVC piping to form a human chain across the road to try to block an equipment convoy for the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope being built at the summit of Haleakala, a Hawaii mountain held sacred by Native Hawaiians Workers are seen here using a lift to scale the exterior the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope at the summit of Haleakala in Maui, Hawaii on June 24, 2016; Five arrests were made early on August 2 when about 100 people tried to block an equipment convoy for a solar telescope being built on a Hawaii mountain Coco Palms has been shut since 1992, when Hurricane Iniki heavily damaged the property. Demolition began in 2016, with the goal of reopening in mid-2018. The clash has caused delays, but the developers hope to start construction soon after the protesters leave. The renovated hotel will have 350 rooms, including 22 master suites and about 50 junior suites. Hyatt will manage the hotel once it's reopened. The protest over the hotel's redevelopment is the latest example of Native Hawaiian activists taking a stand on cultural issues and sacred places. Protesters in recent years blocked a road leading to the summit of Mauna Kea, the Big Island's highest peak, to stop the construction of one of the world's largest telescopes. That case is currently before the courts. Detectives watched as former bikie kingpin Mahmoud 'Mick' Hawi's bullet-riddled body was removed from a 'locked, zipped bag' for a doctor to extract his sperm. New details have emerged of widow Carolina Gonzelez's last ditch effort to fulfil her desire to have a baby with her late childhood sweetheart. Ms Gonzalez urgently applied to court for the procedure to be performed last week after her husband was gunned down outside a gym in Sydney's south. He was buried at a traditional Islamic ceremony on Thursday afternoon - with tensions flaring between police and limousine-riding funeral guests, and Ms Gonzalez herself finding herself locked in an angry confrontation with online trolls. Mick Hawi's burial: Mourners held an empty coffin over their heads after piling dirt on the former Comanchero president's bare body at Rookwood necropolis on Thursday Hundreds of people gathered in the Islamic section of the graveyard to bury Hawi, the 37-year-old former national president of the Comanchero One of the at least 200 mourners to attend Hawi's funeral service bore a large tattoo reading 'Infidel' on his left forearm Hawi's family arrived and left the service in a fleet of Rolls Royces, Bentleys and a lone Porsche A sheikh is pictured arriving at the mosque for the funeral service on Thursday Hawi's wife Carolina Gonzalez (right, Hawi on left) made an urgent application to obtain her late husband's sperm within hours of his death Court documents obtained by Daily Mail Australia revealed the sperm procedure could only be performed with investigators examining his murder present. 'The Coroner... advised ... that the deceased is situated in a locked zipped bag and that the bag cannot be unzipped without the presence of detectives,' said affidavit written by Ms Gonzalez's lawyer. Gang squad detectives had no objection to the procedure being performed. The court approved the operation - but Ms Gonzalez will need the court's sign off to use the sperm to get pregnant via IVF. Hawi's funeral service on Thursday was monitored by a small army of police. A large crowd of men who arrived at the service in three white limousines were stopped on the way to Hawi's burial by bikie-busting Strike Force Raptor. One officer, Raptor 13 - Senior Constable Andrew Murphy - drew his Taser and shouted 'you're going to get searched' as tensions flared between the groups. Police were seen on every corner of the block near the funeral service on Thursday. It was a little more awkward for the Gangs Squad detectives who had to supervise his body A brigade of guests at the service arrived in three white limousines. They were later stopped by Strike Force Raptor officers while on their way to the burial A considerable group of men walked together down the street towards the Arncliffe mosque where Hawi was buried, with a man in a grew suit carrying a framed photograph of Hawi About 20 men, dressed head-to-toe in black, walked the street together following the funeral service Family members had requested funeral attendees leave their motorbikes at home - but this man clearly missed the memo Mourners embraced outside the mosque after the conclusion of the service 'Brother, there's 30 of us (and) there's two of you... show some respect' one of the men said as Raptor 13 pushes the surging group out of his face. 'I don't care, you're going to be searched, stand against the fence all of you... you're all being searched for firearms and drugs,' he responded. And just hours after her husband's body was covered with earth at Rookwood cemetery, a furious Ms Gonzalez fired up at trolls online. The bereaved widow was furious after a woman claimed Hawi's children were suffering because of their dad had been 'involved in things that cost him his life'. Furious: Carolina Gonzalez hit out at trolls on Facebook in the hours after her husband's funeral 'Before you speak you should have some facts!' she fumed. 'My husband did not do this to his children! 'If you only knew the truth, you would hide in a cave from embarrassment from what you have just written. 'My husband left that life a long time ago! How dare you write something like that? 'What you have done is worse to my kids - planting this seed in their head is not nice of you.' Police are still hunting for the man's killers. A police officer who was on duty at a Florida high school and did nothing to stop gunman Nikolas Cruz when he started his massacre has been suspended. Deputy Scot Peterson, who was armed with a handgun, didn't follow police procedure and immediately confront Cruz when he started his rampage killing 17 people with an AR-15 assault rifle, according to the Broward County Sheriff's department. Instead he took cover at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School for upwards of four minutes and 'never went in ', according to Sheriff Scott Israel who said Peterson's actions left him 'Sick to my stomach. There are no words.' Israel added that the school resources officer should have have 'gone in, addressed the killer and killed the killer.' The revelations come amid an intensifying debate about how to deal with school shootings, with many including President Trump and the NRA arguing that armed guards and teachers can 'instantly' take down gunmen. Scroll down for video Scot Peterson is seen speaking at a February 2015 school board meeting Peterson Scot Peterson, the school's resource officer, did not confront the gunman and instead stood positioned outside the school during the massacre, Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel (pictured right) said Thursday He 'never went in,' Israel explained, citing security footage, and adding that he was armed and in uniform when bullets started to rain. Pictured are students embracing after the shooting And in an interview with the New York Times, Coral Springs Officer Burton revealed Peterson hid from Cruz when the teenager started shooting. Pictured are students being treated after the shooting on Valentine's Day It took about 30 minutes after the gunfire started for police to track Cruz down. He is pictured with his public defender in his first court appearance last week WHAT ARE SCHOOL RESOURCE OFFICERS? Scot Peterson resigned from his position as the School Resource Officer at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on February 22 after it was revealed he did nothing to prevent the massacre a week earlier. School Resouce Officers (SROs) have been used in the United States since the 1950s as a liaison between local police offices and public schools, and to prevent crime on campus. They are defined by the US Justice Department as: sworn law enforcement officers responsible for safety and crime prevention in schools. The first SRO was put in a school in 1953 in Flint, Michigan, according to the Inter Faculty Organization. In the 1970s the officers became more common with the emergence of anti-drug and anti-gang programs, according to WBC News. Between 1975 and 2008 the use of SROs in American schools rose by 40 per cent. Advertisement Peterson, who is 54 years old and a veteran of the force, resigned when he was informed of his suspension and will qualify for his pension. And in an interview with the New York Times, Coral Springs Officer Tim Burton revealed Peterson hid from Cruz when the teenager started shooting. Burton said Peterson 'was seeking cover behind a concrete column leading to a stairwell,' because he was worried Cruz could be lurking in the lot. He said Peterson couldn't hear gunshots or screams to lead him to the precise location of the shooting. Even more shocking was the revelation that Peterson had been told in 2016 about Cruz's Instagram posts about opening fire at a school. Call logs released by the Sheriff's Office show that on February 6 of that year, a neighbor's son called police and told them Cruz 'planned to shoot up the school on Instagram'. The deputy who responded determined Cruz had knives and a BB gun and the information was forwarded to Peterson. Israel said Peterson resigned when he was told he was being suspended without pay while police conduct an internal investigation, NBC Los Angeles reported. He said the cop said he'd met the requirements for retirement. 'After seeing video and witness statements, and Peterson's own statement, I decided this morning... to suspend Scot Peterson without pay pending an internal investigation,' Israel said. He said the video shows Peterson arrive at Building 12, where most of the killing took place, and take position outside the school. Apart from getting 'on his radio' to alert police of the situation, Peterson did 'nothing' to prevent 17 innocent people, including 14 children, from being slaughtered, Israel said. Israel said that instead of just standing there, Peterson should have gone 'in, addressed the killer and killed the killer,' adding that instead he 'stood outside for upwards of four minutes.' He said that Peterson's lack of action left him 'devastated. Sick to my stomach. There are no words.' As Israel spoke there were tears in his eyes and he 'appeared emotional.' Peterson never discharged his gun during the shooting. But according to him, he did his duty. Peterson was reportedly 'distraught' about the deadly shooting, but 'believed he did a good job,' president of the Broward Sheriff's Office Deputies Association said. 'He believed he did a good job calling in the location, setting up the perimeter and calling in the description [of Cruz],' Jim Bell told the New York Post. His pension will be 75 per cent of the average of his top five earning years while on the job, Bell said. He also said that thought he didn't want to second-guess Patterson, he thinks not going after Cruz was a mistake. 'We have to act, even if that means risking our lies to save many, many more lives,' he said. The first photograph of Peterson was tweeted by CBS producer Marty Lebel. It came from a February 2015 school board meeting in which Peterson discussed incidents at Atlantic Terminal College in Coconut Creek, where he was given housing from around 2000. He told the board: 'Ive been a police officer for 30 years and Ive been a school resource officer for 25 years.' He described receiving a call alerting him to an alarm in the school's cafeteria. He said: 'And right there I knew, because Ive been at that school for many years, I knew right when I heard the cafeteria, you know when you get the hairs on the back of your neck going up, I said, "that never goes off". 'So I ran into my trailer, I grabbed my firearm and my ID and my shorts and my sneakers and I ran over to the cafeteria. As I got to the cafeteria, sure enough, there were four males inside the cafeteria. 'They saw me peaking through the glass, they obviously fled. I chased them, Im getting older, but I started chasing them, I identified who I was and as ironic as it may seem, they ran right towards my trailer. So they ran past, jumped over the fence, I jumped into my car, I apprehended two of them threw them in the back, kept going, grabbed the other two.' He described another 'chilling' incident when he heard banging on the front door and a facilities lady was there screaming. She said there was a man dressed all in black wearing a ski mask and armed with a gun. 'So I ran, put some shorts on, ran out with my firearm, while Im running to the school, I'm contacting Coconut Creek Police, we set up a perimeter. Long story short, we caught the individual when he ran across the Coconut Creek Parkway and he was hiding near a bank.' It was, however just an 18-year-old senior with a paintball gun. Peterson, who appears to be large in stature in a video of the meeting, also admitted: 'Im almost on my way out, Im 30 years...' Call logs released by the Sheriff's Office show that on February 6 of that year, a neighbor's son called police and told them Cruz 'planned to shoot up the school on Instagram' Peterson told the board: 'Ive been a police officer for 30 years and Ive been a school resource officer for 25 years' He had been investigated by his department twice before last week's shooting - once in 2015 when he wrote an email about the Resident On Campus Security Program. This is the same topic he discussed at the school board meeting. Around the time, officers were fighting to keep their mobile homes on school grounds. In it, he questioned the management of Chief Anthony Williams of the Broward District School Police. He was alleged to have not used common sense and good judgement in authoring the email, according to internal affairs reports in his personnel file. It was recommended he be counselled, according to USA Today. In another incident he was investigated in 1994 for his conduct, but it was unfounded and dropped. When last week's attack ended Cruz managed to ditch his semiautomatic AR-15 and slip away on foot. Within about seven minutes from when the gunfire began he was out of the school and in a nearby neighborhood where he was ultimately stopped by an officer from a neighboring police department. The first officers to enter the school did so roughly 10 minutes after gunfire started, but at that point Cruz had already escaped. It took about 30 minutes after the gunfire started for police to track Cruz down. After that it took an additional 15 minutes for police to identify him. Many students were still cowering behind locked doors for 45 minutes after the attack started, unsure if the person banging on their classroom doors was the shooter or the police. Peterson started working as a resource officer Stoneman Douglas in 2009, according to the Sun-Sentinel. He was responsible for investigating crimes related to stolen property, assault and narcotics offenses. Peterson is believed to be a divorced father-of-four; it's not clear if he ever remarried. He started working for the sheriff's office in 1985, and in 2016 made $75,673.72 annually, records show. The Palm Beach County Sheriff's office is reportedly providing protection to Peterson and his family after a request. He now lives in Boynton Beach, and a neighbor, Nelson Sandy, told the Sun Sentinel he saw Peterson leave his home around 3pm Saturday flanked by two officers. 'They were here today, three police officers and they all left together,' he said. In 2014, Peterson was presented with the title of School Resource Officer of the Year for the City of Parkland District by the Broward County Crime Commission because he proved 'to be reliable in handling issues with tact and judgment.' He'd been with the school for five years at that point. The press release for the award also says Peterson was active in 'mentoring and counseling' the students at Stoneman Douglas. Peterson was nominated for Parkland deputy of the year in 2017, according to an internal memo from the sheriff's office. He was called 'a dedicated SRO who values his position and takes pride in protecting the students, faculty and staff at his school.' In 2013 Peterson was also named Broward County Sheriff Parkland employee of the year. Two years later he was featured in a Sun-Sentinel article arguing the importance of SROs on school grounds, fighting for them to keep their jobs and perks when a Florida audit showed they were unnecessary. 'These colleagues work hard,' he is quoted as saying when told the scheme did not prevent crime. 'We are crime prevention, an audit report will never show how much we prevent.' And in an interview with the New York Times , Coral Springs Officer Tim Burton revealed Peterson hid from Cruz when the teenager started shooting. Burton, who used to be a professional baseball player, said Burton hid behind a concrete column Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel (pictured Wednesday night) said the school's resource officer Scot Peterson has been suspended without pay as police conduct an internal investigation, reported NBC Los Angeles He said Peterson was positioned outside the school, adding that he was armed and in uniform during the shooting. But when he heard the gunfire begin, he 'never went in,' Israel explained, citing security footage. Students are pictured the day after the fatal massacre Israel said that instead of just standing there, Peterson should have 'went in, addressed the killer and killed.' Students are pictured with their hands over their heads as they evacuate Marjory Stoneman Douglas High after the shooting During Thursday's conference Israel also addressed prior calls officers in Broward had received related to the gunman, many of which pointed to his instability and likelihood to carry out the crime he did. Since 2008, the agency received 23 calls about Cruz and his brother Zachary. He said two officers who previously responded to one of those calls, Edward Eason and Guntis Treijs, have been placed on restrictive duty. 'In two of the cases, after being briefed by internal affairs I've restricted two of our deputies to take statements and make a decision to see whether they should have and could have,' done something to prevent the Parkland tragedy, Israel explained. 'Our main goal at this point, absent of helping these families heal and keeping our schools safe, is making sure this killer receives the justice he deserves,' Israel said prior to Thursday's press conference. Israel also announced Wednesday that he has directed a new policy that will see Broward County deputies armed with rifles, including AR-15s, and stationed at schools. He said he does not support arming teachers. Cruz has been charged with 17 counts of murder after Thursday's shooting. He had previously been reported to police and FBI agents on multiple occasions due to his disturbing behavior at school and on social media, and particularly regarding his affliction with weapons. Teenagers wore their football jerseys to Feis's funeral in Coral Springs, Florida, on Thursday morning Former students and police officers also attended the service where Feis was eulogized as 'one of the greatest people' they all knew On Thursday afternoon grieving teenager football players wore their jerseys to the funeral of their hero coach who died saving students at the Parkland high school massacre. Coach Aaron Feis, 37, died while acting as a human shield by lying on top of students at Stoneman Douglas High School while gunman Aaron Cruz was killed Coach Aaron Feis, 37, died while acting as a human shield by lying on top of students at Stoneman Douglas High School while gunman Aaron Cruz was killed. He was among three adults who died trying to protect the youngsters. Fourteen students were also slain. On Thursday, mourners turned out en masse to attend Feis's funeral service in Coral Springs. He was a former student of the school and had been teaching there for eight years. Among the mourners was a student who said he had become a father figure to him. 'His time was infinite when it came to students and athletes,' Brandon Corona said. Feis's friend Joe LaGuardia said he knew instinctively that he would have been trying to save lives when he heard about the shooting. 'There wasn't a question in my mind that after I finished Ash Wednesday service I had to go and check out Aaron's Facebook page or get ahold of the family because I know that Aaron would be running to save lives, I just knew it.' 'He was one of the greatest people I know. 'I knew that the inspiration that his family and his wife gave him was the strength that allowed him to make a decision in split second in order to give his life over to his students in order to save them, even if it was only three students or a half dozen students. 'That was the Aaron I know,' he said. Sheriff Israel was among those who spoke at the service. He knew Feis before tragedy struck the school last week and remarked on how every football coach kept him on as an assistant. Some of the students wore ties beneath their Eagles jerseys. Others found comfort in one another and were able to smile through the morbid occasion Breaking Bad actor Dean Norris was accused of sexual assault while in New Orleans in June, authorities said, but was not arrested or charged with a crime. Norris, 54, was accused of forcing a sexual encounter against the will of a 32-year-old Ohio woman who was in the area on vacation, The Los Angeles Times reported. Ken Daley, spokesman for Orleans Parish District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro told DailyMail.com that the evidence presented at the time by the New Orleans Police Department (NOPD) was not sufficient to warrant charging Norris with a crime. 'The fact that the New Orleans police and DA, after a full investigation, did not issue a warrant or press charges confirms that these allegations are unsubstantiated and not credible,' said Michael Holtz, an attorney for Norris. Breaking Bad actor Dean Norris was accused of sexual assault while in New Orleans in June, authorities said, but was not arrested or charged with a crime It's not clear how Norris and the unidentified woman met, but she reportedly told the Times that the actor invited her and her friend to a bar after she asked him for a photo, and told him she was a fan of Breaking Bad. At some point, the woman said Norris, who was accompanied by another person, also invited both women to the condo where he was staying. The woman said she woke up the next morning without clothes on and confused, and did non remember going back to Norris's condo. She said she no recollection of portions of the evening because she had consumed a lot of alcohol. She said once she woke up, Norris forced her to have sexual intercourse with him, during which she repeatedly told him no and tried to physically stop him. 'I tried to block him, I told him no,' she said. 'What else can I do?' The woman said she reported the incident to NOPD a few days after she returned home to Ohio. She said she suffered physical pain after the assault, told her husband about the encounter and went to a hospital for a rape kit. 'Even though I'm not some Hollywood star, I still matter; it still matters that this happened,' she said. 'I need to stand up for myself.' The woman's husband told the Times that he could verify the events described by his wife. Norris' attorney the woman's description of events was not accurate, and has been contradicted by witnesses and evidence, though he would not describe the evidence he was referring to, which apparently was not enough for NOPD to take Norris into custody in June. 'Based upon the evidence collected to date, the NOPD did not believe it had sufficient probable cause to make an arrest,' Daley said in a statement provided to DailyMail.com. NOPD instead requested a non-arrest consulted with the DAs office, to get the prosecutor's opinion on whether the case should move forward. 'After a thorough review of case evidence by our office, we do not believe these allegations met our even higher standard to merit prosecution at this time,' Daley said. 'Both the accused and the alleged victim were fully cooperative with law enforcement and provided statements to detectives.' Norris is well-known for his role as DEA Agent Hank Schrader on AMC's Breaking Bad An analysis of data from the US Department of Justice by RAINN shows that out of every 1,000 rapes that take place in America, only 310 are reported to police; RAINN (Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network) is the country's largest anti-sexual violence organization Daley said he could not elaborate as to what type of evidence, beyond the statements taken from Norris and the Ohio woman, was presented. He added: 'Should additional evidence be made available, we certainly would re-evaluate the case.' An analysis of data from the US Department of Justice by RAINN (Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network), which is the country's largest anti-sexual violence organization, shows that out of every 1,000 rapes that take place in America, only 310 are reported to police. Of those 310 reported incidents, 57 arrests will be made, and only 11 of those cases will be referred to prosecutors. On average, seven of those cases will result in felony convictions, with only six convicted rapists will actually serve jail time. The DAs office told DailyMail.com it could not elaborate further as to what type of evidence was presented at the time these allegations were brought to light, or what type of additional evidence would warrant re-evaluation of a case like this. NOPD told DailyMail.com that it had no further comment at this time. Norris is well-known for his role as Drug Enforcement Administration agent Hank Schrader on AMC's Breaking Bad. He also appears in TNT's Claws, which was filmed, in part, in New Orleans. Norris resides in Temecula, California. Survivors of sexual assault can call the National Sexual Assault Telephone Hotline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673) to be connected with a trained staff member from a sexual assault service provider in your area. Simpsons showrunner Al Jean was quick to shut down Ted Cruz on Thursday after the Texas senator used the cartoon's characters to make a point. 'The Democrats are the party of Lisa Simpson and Republicans are happily the party of Homer, Bart, Maggie and Marge,' Cruz said at the Conservative Political Action Conference. Jean immediately took to Twitter to clear things up. '@TheSimpsons Ted Cruz says Maggie Simpson would vote for him. I think Ted's the one who could use a pacifier in his mouth.' Simpsons showrunner Al Jean (left) shut down Ted Cruz on Thursday after the Texas senator used the cartoon's characters to make a point. Cruz said: 'The Democrats are the party of Lisa Simpson and Republicans are happily the party of Homer, Bart, Maggie and Marge' Jean immediately took to Twitter to clear things up. '@TheSimpsons Ted Cruz says Maggie Simpson would vote for him. I think Ted's the one who could use a pacifier in his mouth' And Jean wasn't the only one to mock Cruz on social media. Anna Maltese also took to social media to criticize Cruz's remark. 'As a Simpsons animator for many years, I can say with 100% certainty that A) Lisa is officially the conscience of the family so...awesome. B) Neither Marge nor Homer are Republicans,' she tweeted. 'I think what this really comes down to is that @tedcruz is simply thirsty for a VO spot on the show and this - in addition to that Simpsons 'audition' video he made - is another cry for help in landing that gig,' she added Others also joined in on the criticism. Writer Joe Berkowitz tweeted: 'The entire point of the Simpsons is that Homer is a walking example of what not to do and Lisa is the voice of reason. Ted Cruz is the least self-aware organism on the planet.' Another user tweeted: 'Fun fact- Lisa Simpson grows up to be President. Ted Cruz does not.' Writer Joe Berkowitz tweeted: 'The entire point of the Simpsons is that Homer is a walking example of what not to do and Lisa is the voice of reason. Ted Cruz is the least self-aware organism on the planet' Another user tweeted: 'Fun fact- Lisa Simpson grows up to be President. Ted Cruz does not' In 2015, Cruz impersonated the cartoon family while on the presidential campaign trail in a BuzzFeed video That user was referring to the The Simpsons season 11 episode Bart to the Future, which first aired in March 2000, and showed a glimpse into the future where Lisa had just been elected President of the United States in 2030. 'You can't make this sh*t up! Yes, Ted Cruz, we are the party of intelligence. Lisa Simpson was literally the only intelligent character in The Simpsons,' another person wrote on Twitter. The Republican senator was discussing gun control at the conference in Washington, DC, when he made the remark, which isn't the first time he's referenced the show in his speeches. In 2015, Cruz impersonated the cartoon family while on the presidential campaign trail in a BuzzFeed video. Cruz's use of pop culture in his speeches also backfired in 2016 when he said that now-President Donald Trump was the model for the Back to the Future villain, Biff, in the second film. The franchise's screenwriter and Biff actor Thomas Wilson shut that remark down immediately and said that was absolutely inaccurate. Social media is causing a global mental health crisis among young people, according to the chief of a university hit by suicides among students. Hugh Brady, vice-chancellor of Bristol, said the pressure to appear perfect all the time online was causing anxiety and depression. He said social media sites such as Facebook and Instagram have become a burden for youngsters, who feel they have to pretend to be happy all the time. Seven students at Bristol have killed themselves in less than 18 months with three doing so within weeks of each other. Social media is causing a global mental health crisis among young people, according to the chief of a university hit by suicides among students Speaking for the first time since the tragedies, Professor Brady said they were symptomatic of a wider issue. He said many other universities are also seeing a rise in those with mental illness, with record referral rates to student counselling services. Unfortunately this is a global issue, he said. If you look over the last five to eight years across the UK, but equally in Canada and the US, the number of students seeking help for and declaring mental health issues has almost tripled. Asked what is causing the younger generation more stress, he said many felt the world was becoming more uncertain. He said youngsters often worried about political turmoil, student debt and global warming. But the burden of social media may well be the straw that has broken the camels back and particularly this issue of what some people refer to as perfectionism, he said. Professor Brady, who has 22-year-old triplets who are students, said he could see what his own children gained from social media, but he also understood the pressures. Its not OK to have a bad day, he said. In the world of social media you have to look like youre happy even when you are not. He said the university would be talking to the student body about exploring the potential benefits of a detox from social media, in the way weve detoxed in the past from substances. Asked what is causing the younger generation more stress, he said many felt the world was becoming more uncertain Five students took their own lives in a single academic year at Bristol, followed by a further two deaths the year after. Its always difficult, Professor Brady told the Guardian, adding that there was further concern over attempted suicide rates and a huge increase in referrals to counselling services within universities. Thats common to all universities, so something has changed, he said. He was speaking ahead of the launch of a new model of pastoral care at the university, which has been drawn up to address the growing mental health needs of students. This will include spending an additional 1million annually on workers who can support students and spot early signs of distress. For confidential support call the Samaritans in the UK on 08457 90 90 90, visit a local Samaritans branch or click here for details Advertisement The condition of the man shot at a tattoo parlour in Melbourne has deteriorated overnight as police continue to hunt his killers. A 35-year-old man who was shot execution style at Nitro Ink Tattoo Studio in Hampton Park, Melbourne, was rushed to hospital in a serious but stable condition on Thursday afternoon. But on Friday, a spokesperson from the Alfred Hospital said he was now critical. The victim remains in the intensive care with serious wounds to his upper body. His killers, two men who wore masks when they stormed the store, remain on the run as police continue to search, and may be linked to outlaw bikie gangs. Scroll down for video As Hawi's family and friends gathered for traditional prayers at a Sydney mosque at 1.20pm today, two masked men burst into Nitro Ink Tattoo Studio (pictured) in south-east Melbourne and gunned down a customer in a hail of bullets The shooting of a customer at a tattoo parlour during Mick Hawi's funeral may be linked to the Comanchero kingpin's execution. Pictured: Police investigate a burnt out Audi which they believe the shooters escaped in before setting it alight When the man was shot, Comanchero members were farewelling former president of the bikie association, Mahmoud 'Mick' Hawi. As Hawi's family and friends gathered for traditional prayers at a Sydney mosque at 1.20pm on Thursday, two masked men burst into the tattoo parlour in south-east Melbourne and gunned down a customer in a hail of bullets. The thugs then escaped in a silver Audi A6 before setting it on fire, police believe. The parlour was previously owned by the national president of the Comanchero bikie gang, Mick Murray, who is currently behind bars after a top secret investigation by Victoria Police's anti-bikie Echo taskforce earlier this year. The gunmen's bullets went through to next-door buildings but no-one else was hurt. As Hawi's family and friends gathered for traditional prayers at a Sydney mosque at 1.20pm today, two masked men burst into Nitro Ink Tattoo Studio in south-east Melbourne and gunned down a customer in a hail of bullets. Pictured: Victoria police officers monitor the scene of a shooting at a tattoo parlour in Hampton Park in Melbourne on Thursday The thugs escaped in a silver Audi A6 before setting it on fire and are still on the run, police believe. Pictured: A man named Tony carried a framed photograph of his slain friend as he led a procession of mourners towards the Al Zahra mosque for Hawi's funeral Asked in a press conference if the shooting was linked to Mick Hawi's murder, Inspector Mick Daly said detectives for the anti-bikie Echo taskforce were probing the possibility. There were six customers in the parlour when the men stormed in at 1pm. One witness said there were so many gunshots he 'couldn't count' them. When questioned at the scene, one man who appeared to work at the parlour told a Herald Sun reporter to 'f*** off'. Daily Mail Australia's calls to the parlour went unanswered on Thursday evening. There is no suggestion the parlour is still linked to Murray or the Comancheros and police said they were not aware of any bikie link. Asked in a press conference if the shooting was linked to Mick Hawi's murder, a police spokesman said detectives were probing the possibility. Pictured: Police at the scene of the shooting today Police gather near a burnt out car which they believe was the getaway vehicle after a shooting at a tattoo parlour in Melbourne which left a 35-year-old man fighting for his life There were six customers in the parlour when the men stormed in at 1pm. One witness said there were so many gunshots he 'couldn't count' them. Pictured: Police at the scene Slain bikie Mick Hawi pictured with wife Carolina - the Comanchero bikie boss' funeral was held on Thursday and was attended by dozens of family and friends who paid their respects Former Comanchero chief Mahmoud 'Mick' Hawi, 37, was shot dead outside the Fitness First gym in Rockdale, in Sydney's south last Thursday afternoon. His body of was taken out of a coffin and placed into a grave, as hundreds of mourners watched on in Sydney's south. Associates, family, friends and lawyers of the one-time crime kingpin gathered to pay their respects to the Lebanese migrant and father-of-two at an Arncliffe mosque. After 1pm prayers at the Al Zahra mosque in Arncliffe, a convoy of luxury cars followed the hearse carrying Hawi's bullet-riddled body to Rookwood Cemetery. There were no motorbikes in sight, nor bikie colours, as mourners were told by the Hawi family they were a 'no-go'. Mourners held an empty coffin over their heads at a nearby cemetery following the funeral service Among dozens of headstones, the massive crowd gathered to bury Mahmoud 'Mick' Hawi at Rookwood Cemetery Mick Hawi pictured at home. Family and friends gathered for his funeral today at a mosque in Sydney One woman was seen covering her face as she walked with other female mourners in Sydney on Thursday afternoon More than a dozen uniformed police officers watched as the family, including wife Carolina arrived at the grave site in a parade of white Rolls Royces, a Bentley and Porsche. Mosque officials said Hawi's bullet-riddled body was washed at the service and he was dressed per Islamic rites. Traditional blessings were also performed. At the graveside, prayers were sung and Hawi's body was removed from its casket, as per Islamic tradition. His body was then lowered into the cement-lined grave and a truck tipped earth on top of him. Close male relatives and friends finished the burial together with shovels and laid enormous bouquets of flowers for Hawi. A truck is seen lowering something towards the grave site as mourners gather around Mourners comfort one another after former Comanchero president Hawi is buried in Sydney on Thursday afternoon Hundreds attended the burial at Rookwood Cemetery near Lidcombe for the funeral of Hawi in Sydney on Thursday afternoon Islamic Friendship Association president Keysar Trad said followers of the belief 'don't bury with the coffin. We take the cadaver out of the coffins.' Concrete slabs are often laid at the bottom of graves to meet health requirements, Mr Trad said. Family and friends, including Hawi's father, then formed a line and shook hands with almost every attendee. Others stayed to pay their respects. Mourners were asked by Hawi's immediate family not to wear bikie colours nor arrive on motorcycles out of 'respect'. Many attendees wore shirts or hoodies with photographs of Mahmoud printed on the back. Most attendees, particularly the men, were photographed by undercover police officers as they arrived at the mosque. A convoy of luxury cars arrived at Hawi's funeral just before midday, believed to be transporting his wife Carolina and their two sons, as well as immediate family. Following the service, mourners poured out of the mosque, all dressed in black Many left the mosque with sombre faces, appearing moved by the service held for the former Comanchero president One man conversed with another, who appeared to be the Imam running Hawi's service As hundreds of mourners descended on the place of worship, a large police van sat outside the entrance, and police cars sat on most corners of the block, surrounding the mosque. Officers said they were there to ensure the funeral did not disrupt traffic. A large group of men in black T-shirts arrived in three white limousines. A man named Tony carried a framed photograph of the former Comanchero leader down the street as the others fell in line behind him. Two women, one wearing a shirt with Hawi's face emblazoned on it, kept their heads bowed as they farewelled the beloved former Comancheros president The Lebanese migrant was then buried in the Muslim section of the city's Rookwood necropolis. Hawi's body was released to the family by investigators on Wednesday, after an autopsy. He rose to infamy in 2009 for his involvement in a brutal brawl at Sydney Airport which resulted in the death of a Hells Angels associate. Hawi's coffin was taken from the mosque in a black hearse, accompanied by a lengthy funeral procession of white cars, following the service Both the hearse and Hawi's coffin were covered in a spray of flowers (pictured) Despite family members requesting attendees of the funeral arrive in cars and leave motorcycles at home, one man appeared to ride a BMW bike to the service His wife, Carolina Gonzalez, successfully made an urgent application to the New South Wales Supreme Court to obtain a sperm sample. Her lawyer submitted she still 'desires' to have more children with her late husband. An affidavit filed by her lawyer said they were advised by the Coroner that Hawi was 'situated in a locked zipped bag and that bag cannot be unzipped without the presence of detectives.' Police did not object to a urologist performing the procedure to obtain Hawi's sperm. Hawi's killers, who remain unidentified, are still on the run despite warnings from police they will not remain anonymous for long. The investigation into his murder continues. There was a large media and police presence at the Comanchero boss' funeral on Thursday Police were seen on every corner of the block surrounding the Arncliffe mosque Huge crowds of men and children were seen in the driveway to the mosque, where a luxury car was parked Many appeared distraught as they left the Arncliffe mosque on Thursday, clutching bottles of water Salim Mehajer has been found guilty of assaulting a female TV reporter by slamming a car door onto her outside a Sydney police station last year. The 31-year-old was found guilty of assault occasioning bodily harm against Channel 7 journalist Laura Banks, in an incident that left her with hand and back injuries. In sentencing, Magistrate Joanne Keogh criticised the behaviour of a media pack at the police station but still ordered a conviction to be recorded against Mehajer. Ms Keogh also criticised evidence given by Ms Banks calling her 'a witness of little credit' and 'not a witness that has stood up to the scrutiny of cross-examination'. Scroll down for video Property developer Salim Mehajer (right) has been found guilty of assault occasioning bodily hamr against TV reporter Laura Banks (left) outside a Sydney police station last year The incident took place outside Day Street police station on April 2 last year, where Mehajer had been taken early that morning after allegedly assaulting a taxi driver. In court on Monday to enter a not guilty plea, Mehajer said he felt 'cornered, bullied and harassed' by a media pack moments before he slammed the door on Ms Banks. The court heard Mehajer had traded insults with Ms Banks, who teased him about his height, after he asked if the jewellery she was wearing was a ring or a key ring. 'It all happened very quickly and my only thought was to leave,' Mehajer said of the door slamming. 'As selfish as this may sound I wasn't aware of the extent of the impact.' Ms Banks had been standing in the doorway of the Porsche trying to quiz Mehajer on the incident when the assault occurred. The court heard the pair had been trading verbal barbs before the incident, with Ms Banks asking the disgraced property developer if he had hit 'rock bottom'. Ms Banks, a former newspaper turned TV reporter, claimed her back was 'still quite sore' almost 12 months on from the incident. 'Can you get that thing off my leg? Can you stop touching me?' Mehajer told Ms Banks as she pushed a microphone towards him, the court heard Taking to the witness stand on Monday morning, Banks told the court she had been standing in the doorway of the Porsche trying to ask Mehajer questions when the alleged assault occurred Mehajer told the court he felt cornered, bullied and harassed before the car door incident, but said he 'absolutely (did) not' mean to slam Ms Banks in the car door She denied deliberately provoking Mehajer during their confrontation prior to the alleged assault. The 31-year-old journalist even suggested Mehajer had been flirting with her when he asked: 'Why are you attached to me?' 'It was almost suggestive, flirtatious,' Ms Banks told the court. 'He was suggestive in some of his comments. Asking me to get in the back of his car felt like that was suggestive and (had) innuendo behind it.' Labour was on the brink of a major Brexit U-turn last night after senior figures said the party wants to stay in an EU customs union. Jeremy Corbyn will risk accusations of betrayal when he outlines the policy on Monday in a shift aides claim will be seismic. Senior Labour figures said the partys new stance would include forming a customs union with the EU, even though it would make it impossible for Britain to strike independent trade deals. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is prepared to put aside his lifelong Euroscepticism to soften his stance on being part of the customs union The move could pave the way for a Commons alliance between Labour and Tory Remainers. Strategists believe inflicting a defeat on Theresa May over the issue could even bring down her Government and force an early election. Government sources yesterday confirmed key votes on the issue have been delayed until after Easter. Shadow chancellor John McDonnell said Labour could even end up backing a second referendum. He and Mr Corbyn are lifelong Eurosceptics, but have come under intense pressure from their union paymasters and party members to soften their stance. A customs union enables countries to trade freely without tariffs or customs checks. But it also requires members to adopt common tariffs and trading positions with the rest of the world. Shadow foreign secretary Emily Thornberry said Labour wanted to form a new deal that would look pretty much the same as the customs union we are in now. She told LBC Radio it was the only way to resolve the Northern Ireland border issue and avoid lorry parks at Dover, adding: We cannot see how anything else can work. Shadow Foreign Secretary Emily Thornberry said being part of customs union was only way to solve Irish border issue and avoid 'lorry parks at Dover' But she acknowledged it would mean Britain could only strike new trade deals with major markets like the US in partnership with the EU. It comes despite shadow international development secretary Barry Gardiner warning last year that such a move would be a disaster. Pro-Brexit Labour MP Frank Field last night said it risked betraying the millions of party supporters who voted to leave the EU in 2016. Tory Remainer Anna Soubry welcomed the apparent shift, saying it would be in the national interest. Earlier, Mr McDonnell said Labour policy on Brexit was evolving, adding: Our position is yes, we want to see on the table a customs union negotiation, not the customs union. Tory MP Craig Mackinlay said: A lot of Labours heartland areas voted very heavily to leave I think Labour will ignore them at their peril. A desperate search is on for a man believed to have gone missing from the same beach as a woman, whose body was found on Friday morning. Rescue helicopters are scouring off the shore of Maroubra beach, in Sydney's east, after men's and women's clothing was found near the body. The woman, aged in her 40s, was found by a passer-by at the beach's north end, near the intersection of Maroubra Road and Marine Parade, just after midnight on Friday. A desperate search (pictured) is on for a man believed to have gone missing from Maroubra beach, in Sydney's east He is believed to have gone missing from the same beach as a woman, aged in her 40s, whose body was found on Friday morning (scene pictured) Police and lifeguards are searching the area for a man, but conditions are hazardous and Maroubra beach (pictured) remains closed due to dangerous surf conditions Police and lifeguards are searching the area for a man, but conditions are hazardous and Maroubra beach remains closed due to dangerous surf conditions. A PolAir and Westpac Life Saver Rescue helicopter have also joined the search. The woman, who is yet to be formally identified, is believed to have taken a late night swim and drowned, according to Seven News. Police are not treating her death as suspicions, but investigations are ongoing. The woman, who is yet to be formally identified, is believed to have taken a late night swim and drowned off the shore of Maroubra beach, in Sydney's east (scene pictured) The grisly discovery was made by a passer-by at the north end of the beach (pictured), near the intersection of Maroubra Road and Marine Parade A report will be prepared for the Coroner. Police are urging anyone with information in relation to this incident to call Crime Stoppers. A year ago at the same beach, the body of a 23-year-old woman was found washed up on the sand, before the body of her 26-year-old male companion was found three days later. The couple drowned during an evening swim. Theresa May's Brexit war cabinet last night agreed to take back control of Britain's laws after we leave the EU. After eight hours of talks at the Prime Minister's country retreat Chequers, senior ministers agreed to pursue a strategy that will allow the UK to diverge from EU laws. Pro-Brexit ministers claimed they had achieved a significant step in ensuring a clean break with the EU - with one senior figure describing it as an 'outbreak of unity for now'. One Cabinet source said: 'Divergence has won.' But, in a concession to pro-Remain ministers, the pace and scale of any future divergence is likely to be fudged for months. After eight hours of discussions, the Brexit war cabinet reached an agreement. Pictured left to right around the table: Greg Clark, Gavin Williamson, Amber Rudd, Liam Fox, Philip Hammond, Boris Johnson, Karen Bradley, Julian Smith, No10 Brexit envoy Olly Robbins, Cabinet Secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood, Theresa May, David Lidington, David Davis, Michael Gove Theresa May headed to Chequers with her 10 most senior colleagues (and her right hand man Gavin Barwell, both pictured leaving Downing St) as they finally reached an agreement on the Brexit 'end state' Ministers, who did not leave chequers until 10pm, were tight-lipped about the precise details of yesterday's meeting. According to the BBC, one minister in the room claimed everyone was 'rather happy' at the end, with another saying the PM had 'played a blinder'. Another said they had reached a 'sensible compromise which pitches an ambitious ask but recognises that we will be in a negotiation'. Sources said they had agreed to seek an ambitious deal that would allow wide-ranging access to the single market for British goods and services on the basis of 'mutual recognition' of standards rather than membership of the customs union. In return, Britain would make a binding declaration not to undercut the EU by leading a 'race to the bottom' on workers' rights. Within this framework, Britain would have the 'right to diverge' from EU laws - particularly in emerging technologies like artificial intelligence. Mrs May and her war cabinet had earlier gathered for the crunch talks on the Brexit 'end state' after Brussels had launched a pre-emptive strike by dismissing the UK's ideas. Mrs May had suggested she wanted to stay within single market arrangements for certain industries while retaining the freedom to diverge completely in others. But a slide issued by the EU commission insisted that so-called 'three basket approach' is 'not compatible with the principles' of the bloc. Ministers are braced for a hardline response from the EU, with the 27 ongoing member states meeting today. Pictured are French president Emmanuel Macron, Belgian PM Charles Michel and Angela Merkel dining in Brussels last night Ministers were locked in talks until 10pm and were tight-lipped about the details, although one Cabinet source said: 'Divergence has won' Brexit Secretary David Davis arrived at Chequers for the crunch talks amid revelations the EU had launched a pre-emptive strike on UK ideas for the Brexit 'end state' Brexiteer fury at reports May is 'resigned' to caving in to Brussels demands for free movement during the transition period Theresa May is preparing to cave in on EU demands for full free movement during the Brexit transition, it has been claimed. The Prime Minister is said to be resigned about bowing to Brussels over citizens who arrive during the period getting permanent residency rights. The issue has threatened to derail the negotiations over an implementation phase that would avoid a cliff edge for businesses on both sides of the Channel. According to the Times, Mrs May is considering making a unilateral promise to EU citizens that they can remain after the transition. However, there are concerns the move could leave UK nationals living on the Continent with fewer rights than their EU counterparts. Brexiteers would also be up in arms about conceding the ground to Brussels. Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg Jacob Rees-Mogg, head of the influential European Research Group, of Tory MPs, said today he would be 'astonished' if Mrs May U-turned on her pledge to end permanent free movement rights in 2019. 'Mrs May said when she was in China that she wasn't going to do that and that people who came after we'd left would be subject to different conditions, which seems absolutely right. 'You've got to remember we are leaving the European Union on March 29 (2019), we will be out of the treaties on that day, we will not have any say in the rules that are made and, therefore, people who come after that day ought not to be allowed to have the full and permanent free movement rights. 'That would be quite wrong and they will know the conditions on which they come, which is important, so it's fair to people who come after that date. 'I'd be astonished if Mrs May would make a u-turn of that kind, she is a lady of great backbone and for her to kowtow to the European Union is, I think, unconscionable.' A Downing Street spokesperson said: 'We've set out our position the December joint report covers EU citizens arriving up until Brexit day, and the PM has been clear that for EU citizens arriving after that point there should be a different approach this will be a matter for the negotiations.' Advertisement Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt, who was not at the session, said this morning that Britain would not be accepting Brussels dictats on regulations. 'There will be areas and sectors of industry where we agree to align our regulations with European regulations: the automotive industry is perhaps an obvious example because of supply chains that are integrated,' he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme. 'But it will be on a voluntary basis, we will as a sovereign power have the right to choose to diverge and what we won't be doing is accepting changes in rules because the EU unilaterally chooses to make those changes.' Mr Hunt also made clear there is no intention of backing down on the PM's vow that the UK will not be in any form of customs union with the EU. Mrs May is facing a major rebellion on the issue with Tory Remainer Anna Soubry tabling an amendment to the Trade Bill and appealing for cross-party support. The meeting came after a slide issued by the EU commission warned that so-called 'three basket approach' favoured by Mrs May is 'not compatible with the principles' of the bloc Boris Johnson and Amber Rudd, pictured in Downing Street this week, were thought to be on opposite sides of the Chequers talks But Mr Hunt said: 'A customs union is one way of getting frictionless trade but not the only way.' The discussions at Chequers involved the 11 most senior Cabinet members. Before the meeting there were thought to still be significant differences between Brexiteer and Remainer factions on how far Britain should diverge from EU rules after we leave the bloc. What is Theresa May's 'three basket' Brexit approach? Theresa May has said she wants a 'three baskets' approach to Brexit - which will see the UK stick with EU rules and regulations in some areas and diverge in others. She first presented the idea in her Florence speech last year - the second of her two major speeches on Brexit. Under the approach, the British economy and post Brexit regulation falls into three broad areas. The first are areas where Britain wants to achieve the same regulatory standards as the EU through the same means. The second are ares where the UK wants similar outcomes but want to adopt different rules and regulations to achieve them. And the third are areas where the UK wants to compete with the EU and adopt a different approach to Emerging parts of the economy like robotics artificial intelligence may fall into this final basket. But Eurocrats in Brussels have warned that the three basket approach equates to 'cherry picking' and are opposed to it. Advertisement A series of previous meetings of the inner circle of ministers had failed to come to firm conclusions. Mrs May appeared to have enlisted some help to try and get a better outcome - with a border collie sheepdog seen being driven on to the estate in a Landrover. Remainers such as Philip Hammond and Amber Rudd reportedly argued for a softer approach, while Boris Johnson and Michael Gove favoured a cleaner break. The other ministers who attended were David Davis, David Lidington, Liam Fox, Karen Bradley, Gavin Williamson and Greg Clark, and chief whip Julian Smith. The group was carefully balanced between pro-EU and Eurosceptics, with Mrs May theoretically holding the balance between the sides. The PM's top Brexit civil servant Olly Robbins was also expected to have given presentations on parts of the negotiations. The talks also saw interventions from UK ambassadors to European capitals, including the top diplomat in Paris Ed Llewellyn - David Cameron's former chief of staff. The Chequers summit was part of a 'road to Brexit' series of events intended to set out the Government's ambitions for a post-withdrawal settlement with the EU. The series is due to culminate in a keynote speech by the PM, potentially next Thursday. Did the PM enlist a sheepdog to help her round up errant ministers as they row over Brexit? Theresa May appeared to have enlisted some unusual help with getting control of her ministers. A border collie sheepdog was seen being driven on to the Chequers estate in a Landrover before the Brexit war Cabinet meeting. It is not clear whether the animal was engaged in any particular duties - but observers joked it could be useful in rounding up Mrs May's senior team. Downing Street sources had earlier voiced optimism about the prospects of sealing the main points of the UK's negotiating plan. And despite significant differences between Brexiteer and Remainer factions on how far Britain should diverge from EU rules after we leave the bloc, an agreement was finally reached after eight hours of talks. A series of previous meetings of the inner circle of ministers had failed to come to firm conclusions. Advertisement Theresa May (pictured at No10 yesterday) appeared to have finally succeeded in hammering out an agreement between her senior ministers on Brexit The gathering of the Brexit war Cabinet was held at the PM's Chequers country retreat, and lasted until 10pm WHO'S IN BREXIT WAR CABINET AND WHERE DO THEY STAND? Prime Minister Theresa May Backed Remain, has since insisted she will push through Brexit, leaving the single market and customs union. Cabinet Office Minister David Lidington A strong Remainer during the referendum campaign, recently made clear he has not changed his mind about it being better if the country had chosen to stay in the bloc. Chancellor Philip Hammond Seen as one of the main advocates of 'soft' Brexit in the Cabinet. Has been accused of trying to keep the UK tied to key parts of the customs union for years after the transition ends. Home Secretary Sajid Javid Brought in to replace Amber Rudd after she resigned amid the Windrush scandal, Mr Javid was seen as a reluctant Remainer in the referendum. Many thought the former high-flying banker would plump for the Leave campaign, but he eventually claimed to have been won over by the economic case. He is likely to focus be guided by evidence about trade calculations in discussions over how closely aligned the UK should be with the EU. Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson The Brexit champion in the Cabinet, has been agitating for a more robust approach and previously played down the problems of leaving with no deal. He is unhappy with plans for a tight customs arrangement with Brussels - warning that it could effectively mean being lashed to the EU indefinitely. Environment Secretary Michael Gove Has buried the hatchet with Mr Johnson after brutally ending his Tory leadership campaign in the wake of David Cameron's resignation. Thought to be less concerned with short term concessions that Mr Johnson, but focused on ensuring the UK is free from Brussels rules in the longer term. Brexit Secretary David Davis A long-time Eurosceptic and veteran of the 1990s Maastricht battles, brought back by Mrs May in 2016 to oversee the day-to-day negotiations. He has said the government will be seeking a 'Canada plus plus plus' deal from the EU. International Trade Secretary Liam Fox Another Brexiteer, his red lines are about the UK's ability to strike trade deals with the rest of the world, and escaping Brussels red tape. Business Secretary Greg Clark On the softer Brexit side of the Cabinet, Mr Clark has supported Mr Hammond's efforts to maintain close links with the customs union. Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson A close ally of the Prime Minister and viewed by some as her anointed successor. He is believed to be siding with the Brexiteers on customs arrangements and the need for Britain to be able to diverge from EU rules. Northern Ireland Secretary Karen Bradley Supported Remain but a relatively unknown quantity on the shape of a deal. Replaced James Brokenshire, another May loyalist, after he resigned on health grounds last month. Advertisement David Davis, pictured in Athens, was also at the Brexit war Cabinet meeting last night and was a part of the discussions Two bosses of the predatory firm that has launched a hostile bid for defence giant GKN donated 170,000 to the Conservative Party. Melrose vice-chairman David Roper, 67, has donated 131,375 since 2014, while chairman Christopher Miller, 66, has given 40,492, according to figures published by the Electoral Commission. The Government is under mounting pressure to intervene to block Melroses 7.4billion bid for GKN amid fears it could harm national security and industry. GKN is a target for Melrose, which specialises in buying up underperforming businesses and turning them around before selling them on within three to five year GKN makes key parts for cars, aircraft and fighter jets. Its clients include the US and UK militaries, Airbus and Mercedes, and it employs 6,000 people in the UK and 58,000 around the world. Theresa May has signalled she will act to block the takeover if that is in the national interest. Yesterday it emerged the Government is exploring whether it can intervene on national security grounds. Last night Len McCluskey, head of the union Unite which is opposed to the takeover, said: In light of this revelation, it is also important that the Prime Minister stays true to her promise to act on the national interest. That means intervening to stop a great British manufacturer from falling into the wrong hands. Melrose said the company itself made no political donations. It declined to comment further on the donations last night. Melrose specialises in buying up underperforming businesses and turning them around before selling them on within three to five years. Its bosses are now battling GKNs new American boss Anne Stevens, 69, for control of the 259-year old firm. Mr Miller and Mr Roper founded Melrose with Simon Peckham, 55, the firms chief executive, after working together at conglomerate Wassall. They and finance director Geoffrey Martin, 50, could split 258million if the takeover of GKN is a success and they double the firms value. The company employs 6,000 people in the UK and 58,000 around the world They split 160million in May last year at the end of the latest five-year payout scheme. Rugby fan Mr Roper earned a basic salary of 548,000 at Melrose in 2016. He trained as an accountant at KPMG after a degree in metallurgy at Nottingham University. He rose to become deputy chief executive at Wassall where he earned the nickname The Grinder for his financial inquisitions of target companies. Mr Miller, who was paid 549,000 for the year ending December 2016, is a former acolyte of legendary City asset-stripper Lord Hanson. His family owns Harris and Sheldon, the Coventry-based industrial conglomerate which has hunting and fishing sites. Mr Miller and his brother Michael, 63, were ranked 868th on the Sunday Times Rich List this year with a net worth of 126million. GKNs board has slammed Melroses bid as cheap and opportunistic. GKN makes parts for the US-UK F-35 fighter jet, US B-21 stealth bomber and Eurofighter Typhoon. It is arguably the UKs most important engineering firm after BAE and Rolls-Royce. GKN, based in Redditch in Worcestershire (pictured), makes parts for the F-35 Anglo-American fighter jet, the Eurofighter Typhoon and the US's B-21 stealth bomber, as well as cars and aircraft around the world On Wednesday in a rare intervention Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson said he had concerns about the potential takeover. He said: There is no clarity as to what the true approach is going to be in terms of the GKN military side of the business. The Commons business committee is due to hold a hearing on the bid on March 6, with both GKN and Melrose due to give evidence. According to the register of interests Conservative peer Lord Glendonbrook, 76, the former owner of the airline BMI, owns shares in Melrose, among dozens of other companies. So does Lord Lupton, 62, an ex-treasurer of the Tory party. Melrose says of its bid for GKN: We believe that while there are no competition or national security issues, it is in fact in the national interest for Melrose to be the guardian of GKNs businesses. A Gambian-born butcher has been found guilty of murdering a sex worker after a harrowing two week trial. Sainey Marong, 33, admitted strangling Renee Duckmanton, 22, and setting her body on fire after picking her up from Christchurch's red light district in May 2016. Cheers of 'yes!' erupted from the public gallery on Friday after the Christchurch High Court jury's unanimous guilty verdict, delivered in just 50 minutes. A Gambian-born butcher (pictured) has been found guilty of murdering a sex worker after a harrowing two week trial Sainey Marong, 33, admitted strangling Renee Duckmanton (pictured), 22, and setting her body on fire after picking her up from Christchurch's red light district in May 2016 Marong had attempted to plead insanity during the trial, denying he had murderous intent, but his claims were dismissed by the jury, The NZ Herald reported. 'This has been a harrowing case for everyone involved and the right result has been achieved today,' said Detective Inspector Darryl Sweeney, speaking outside court on behalf of police and family. 'The result won't provide closure or solace for Renee's family, but it is important for everyone that they have answers and that the offender has been held to account.' Marong, who had searched the internet for necrophilia in the days before the murder, denied having sex with Ms Duckmanton's corpse. Cheers of 'yes!' erupted from the public gallery on Friday after the Christchurch High Court jury's unanimous guilty verdict, delivered in just 50 minutes (pictured is Renee Duckmanton) He told the court he had sex with Ms Duckmanton in the back seat of his car before an argument broke out when she asked to be taken back to Manchester Street. 'She started yelling at me ... that voice, that screaming, that yelling was agitating me ... The only method I could use to stop it was to compress her neck,' Marong told court. Crown prosecutor Pip Currie argued Marong was not insane at the time of the murder, Stuff reported. 'He took her life to fulfil his sexual fantasy and, at the time, he had the required intent to make him guilty of murder,' she said. 'None of the witnesses, the ones who were dealing with him, refer to any unusual behaviour.' Forensic psychiatrist Dr Dr Erik Monasterio described Marong's insanity defence as 'farcical'. 'In my opinion this proposition is preposterous. I have no evidence of what's being proposed here,' he said. Forensic clinical psychologist Ghazi Metoui agreed, finding Marong had a settled mental state at the time of the killing. Marong, who also made internet searches asking 'What chemical do kidnappers use', if fire destroys DNA, and looking for Christchurch sex workers. Defence counsel Jonathan Krebs claimed Marong was suffering from a 'disease of the mind' at the time of the murder. Marong said he had stopped taking insulin for his diabetes, could not sleep, was feeling strange for weeks and was obsessed with prostitutes and necrophilia. Mr Krebs told the jury his client was likely suffering from hypoglycemia and did not intend to assault Ms Duckmanton. The jury disagreed, and Justice Cameron Mander ordered Marong be remanded in custody until a sentencing hearing on April 20. Tech giants such as Amazon and Google could be handed hefty bills in future under a major shake-up of the UK tax system. The new rules would aim to stop the worlds biggest technology firms raking in billions from sales but only handing tens of millions of pounds to the Treasury. At the moment corporation tax is levied on profits. This means multinational companies can artificially reduce their UK bills using complicated company structures. But changes being considered by the Government could see the firms taxed on their sales instead. Mel Stride, the Financial Secretary to the Treasury, yesterday said a tax on revenue one of several options being looked at was the preferred route. He said current rules meant big tech companies are not being taxed fairly. At the moment they are generating very significant value in the UK, typically through having a digital platform with lots of users, he told the BBC. Google reported sales of 1billion that year in the UK. It posted a profit of 149million and paid 36.4million to the taxman That is driving a lot of value, so youre looking at social media platforms, online marketplaces, internet search engines where the tax regime is not taxing those activities fairly. We want to move to a situation where we are taxing those activities fairly. The worlds biggest technology companies have faced mounting criticism over their tax affairs. Apples UK retail arm raked in sales of more than 1billion in 2016 but recorded only 17.6million profits. This meant it paid just 13.8million in tax, a little over 1 per cent of sales. Internet shopping giant Amazon reported sales of 7.3billion in the UK in 2016 but its service arm paid no tax on a profit of 25.6million thanks to a complicated series of deductions including share awards to managers. Google reported sales of 1billion that year in the UK. It posted a profit of 149million and paid 36.4million to the taxman. The Government has already tried to make big companies pay more with its Google tax, which is levied on tech firms that attempt to limit their taxable profits by making royalty payments from a UK subsidiary to one in a country with lower taxes. But proposals first floated in Novembers Budget would take further measures to stop the companies diverting cash made from sales in Britain out of the country. However, Mr Stride said any changes would have to be handled carefully so small businesses were not also hit with huge bills. A consultation on the policy ended on January 31. Internet shopping giant Amazon reported sales of 7.3billion in the UK in 2016 but its service arm paid no tax on a profit of 25.6million thanks to a complicated series of deductions including share awards to managers Senior EU officials are also examining whether they could levy a sales tax on big technology firms. The companies insist they pay everything they are legally required to, prompting Mr Stride to say: Were not talking about tax avoidance, evasion or non-compliance, were talking about the way the system works. In recent months both Apple and Google have said they are open to tax reforms. Google boss Sundar Pichai said: We are happy to pay a higher amount, whatever the world agrees on as the right framework. An Apple spokesman said last year: We follow the laws, and if the system changes we will comply. There is growing speculation Barnaby Joyce will announce his resignation as Nationals leader on Friday afternoon. The Deputy Prime Minister has announced he will hold a news conference at 2pm today. Some members of his party are pushing for a leadership spill when the House of Representatives returns next week. Gone? There is growing speculation Barnaby Joyce will announce his resignation as Deputy Prime Minister at a press conference on Friday afternoon Victorian backbencher Andrew Broad yesterday said Mr Joyce 'needs to step down as leader of the National party'. The speculation comes weeks after Mr Joyce's affair with his former press secretary, Vikki Campion, was revealed. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull suggested his deputy 'consider his position' a week ago but Mr Joyce has forged ahead with a lengthy series of press interviews. He called on Australians to 'move on' from the affair in a Fairfax Media interview with Ms Campion this week. But the whispers surrounding Mr Joyce's hold on his position showed no sign of abating since. He was forced to deny a sexual harassment allegation as 'spurious and defamatory' on Thursday. Asked by Nine News whether he was still going no where on Friday, Mr Joyce said: 'Let's do the presser'. Calls to Mr Joyce's office went unanswered. A man (pictured) has been accused of attempting to snatch a young child before taking pictures of children through a Sydney school gate with a woman A man has been accused of attempting to snatch a young child before taking pictures of children through a school gate with a woman. He was pictured on Wednesday outside the gates of a public school in Sydney's west with a woman who appeared to be taking photos on a tablet. A picture of the man was shared to community page Police in the Area on Thursday, who said it had received a report of the same man trying to lure a young girl away from her mother at a Bankstown supermarket. 'This couple were taking photos of school kids yesterday ... police and school are aware of the incident,' the page wrote. The post went on to reveal the mother's allegations against the man, who is believed to be in his 50s. She claimed the man approached the child as she went to grab a trolley ten metres away. The man asked the girl if she 'had a Mac computer at home', before telling her to follow him, the mother claimed. The man was pictured on Wednesday outside the gates of a public school in Sydney's west with a woman who appeared to be taking photos on a tablet 'He goes 'come with me and I will show you some really great things on the computer',' she wrote. The mother said she rushed over and yelled at the man, who responded by saying he 'just wants to have fun'. 'I was about to bash him. Please ladies watch ur (sic) kids. Even if you can see them,' she wrote. 'Ladies be aware, I've seen him with my own eyes trying to convince my daughter to go with him in seconds.' The mother said she reported the man to police, before urging the public to remain vigilant. Police confirmed to Daily Mail Australia on Friday that they are investigating the incidents. They have urged anyone with further information to contact Bankstown Police or Crime Stoppers. A British couple are feared to have been kidnapped by a gang linked to ISIS in South Africa. The unnamed pair were abducted in KwaZulu-Natal province last week and have not been found, police said. The 74-year-old Briton and his 63-year-old wife, who live in Cape Town, were taken while holidaying near the town of Vryheid. Their vehicle was found on Wednesday in the city of Durban, almost 200 miles from where they disappeared. The victims' vehicle was found on Wednesday in the city of Durban (pictured above) - almost 200 miles away from where they disappeared - but there was no trace of the couple 'The Cape Town couple had left the Western Cape on February 5 and they were expected to return on February 15,' a police spokesman said. 'They were going on a trip to collect seeds and indigenous plants.' A male and female suspect were arrested in Vryheid with IS material allegedly in their possession. Sayfydeen Aslam Del Vecchio, 38, and Fatima Patel, 27, have been remanded in custody on charges of kidnapping and terrorism. They have not been named but have been described as a 74-year-old British man who moved to South Africa in the 1970s and his 63-year-old South African-born wife. The victims' vehicle was found on Wednesday in the city of Durban - almost 200 miles away from where they disappeared - but there was no trace of the couple. A spokesman for the Directorate of Priority Crimes Investigation, known as the Hawks, refused to comment on whether a demand for a ransom has been received. But he revealed that two suspects have been arrested - Aslam Del Vecchio, 38, and 27-year-old Fatima Patel - on charges of kidnapping as well as robbery and arson dating back to last year. The unnamed pair were abducted in KwaZulu-Natal province but have not been found, police said They were arrested on February 16 and had been on a wanted list after a sugar cane field in the region was torched. Earlier this week, the Foreign Office updated its travel advice for South Africa to include news of the kidnap under the advisory's terrorism section. But Captain Lloyd Ramovha said there was currently no suggestion that the disappearance of the couple was linked to terror. He said: 'As far as the ongoing investigation is concerned, nothing suggests any link to terrorism at this stage. 'We say that without wanting to pre-empt what eventually we will find but at this stage nothing points to a terrorist link.' An Foreign Office spokesman said: 'We are working closely with the South African authorities following the kidnap of two South African/British dual nationals and have offered consular support to the family.' 'As there is an ongoing investigation we cannot comment further.' A Michigan mother-of-two and her children were found dead behind an industrial building in Bay County, 100 miles north of where they lived, with a handgun at the scene, on Tuesday. The body of Nikita Landrum, 31, was identified on Wednesday, along with those of her 2-year-old son, Dariel Walker II, and her 3-year-old daughter, Mikayla Walker. The deaths of the three Oakland County residents is being investigated as a possible murder-suicide, the Oakland Press reported. Scroll down for video Mikayla (left) and Dariel were found dead behind an industrial building, alongside their mom The father of the children, Dariel Walker, Sr, who also lives in the Detroit area, has been arrested twice on domestic violence charges against Landrum, according to court records. It's not clear how long the three had been dead before they were found. Members of Landrum's community were shocked at the idea that she had killed her children, and then herself. 'She always seemed like a pleasant person,' neighbor Betsie Jackson told WDIV Channel 4 news. The Michigan mother-of-two and her children were found dead near a black Lincoln sedan behind an industrial building in Bay County, 100 miles north of where they lived Dariel Walker, Sr, is seen here with Walker, Jr, in a photo shared to social media It's not clear how long the tragic youngsters had been dead before they were found 'Im shocked,' she said. 'Because from appearances, you would never think something like that was going on.' Landrum had filed a complaint against the children's father on Friday claiming he had violated their joint custody agreement. In 2016, Walker, Sr, pleaded no contest to a charge of domestic violence against Landrum, and received a suspended sentence of 90 days in jail, probation and was ordered to have no contact with Landrum. That's apparently when Landrum moved out of the home they had previously shared in the Detrioit suburb of Farmington Hills on Forestville Street. Prior to that, Walker, Sr, was arrested on a domestic violence charge against Landrum in 2014. That time, he pleaded no contest to a reduced charge of disorderly person, and was placed on probation for six months. He was also order to have no contact with Landrum at that time, but that order was later amended at the now deceased mother's request to allow contact, so long as no assaultive or threatening behavior took place, the Oakland Press reported. Dariel, Jr (left) and Mikayla (right) are seen here in photos shared to social media At one point, both Landrum and Walker, Sr, had mutual protective orders against each other. After Landrum moved out in 2016, Walker, Sr, filed for joint custody of their children, which was awarded. Landrum's court filing from Friday was apparently prompted by Walker, Sr, keeping the children overnight on February 14 rather than returning them to their mother at the agreed upon time, the press reported. Walker, Sr (center), is seen here with his two children, Mikayla (left) and Dariel, Jr (right) Oak Park Police and Michigan State Police are investigating the deaths at this time. The Bay County Medical Examiner's Office could not be reached for an update on Thursday. Police reportedly went to a house in Oak Park on Monday to check on the mother and children, but they weren't there. The bodies were found at 8.00 am Eastern at the Bay County drain commission facility. Autopsies were performed on Wednesday Bay County Sheriff Troy Cunningham said on Thursday that whether the deaths of Landrum, Dariel, Jr, and Mikayla were the result of a murder-suicide would not be confirmed until at least Friday, and possibly later. Authorities said Landrum may have been in the middle of going through a custody battle with Walker, Sr. 'It's tragic,' Cunningham said. 'Something like this is so horrific. It's just beyond comprehension.' The National Domestic Violence Hotline can be reached at 1-800-799-7233, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. For confidential support call the National Suicide Prevention Line on 1-800-273-8255 A decorated Army officer has discovered he will be investigated over the death of an Iraqi teenager for the eighth time. Major Robert Campbell was last night revealed as the victim of a relentless inquiry into the Iraq War which he said had treated soldiers as 'political fodder'. Just weeks after he was given a medal for his service, and more than a decade after he was first cleared over the death, he received an email alerting him that yet another investigation will take place. Along with two colleagues in the Royal Engineers, Major Campbell is accused of forcing 19-year-old Said Shabram into a river in Basra where he drowned. A decorated Army officer has discovered he will be investigated over the death of an Iraqi teenager for the eighth time (stock image above) According to court documents seen by The Daily Telegraph, Major Campbell jumped into the water to save the teenager but witnesses claim Mr Shabram and a friend were forced into the water after being caught looting. Major Campbell, who was wounded in active service and suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, was first cleared of manslaughter at a hearing in Basra in 2006. The officer was badly injured when he fell from the roof of a building in Afghanistan in 2011. He told the newspaper: 'It has been 15 years and there have been no fewer than seven investigations and inquiries. 'No other army in the world that I know of treats its soldiers as political fodder like this.' Last September an exasperated Major Campbell became so distressed that he told then defence secretary Michael Fallon that he would have a fairer trial if he were in front of the International Criminal Court (ICC), which normally tries dictators for genocide. Although Major Campbell was first investigated in 2006, taxpayer-funded investigators opened up a new probe into Mr Shabram's death after being passed the file by discredited law firm Public Interest Lawyers. And after more than a year of questioning the officer and his comrades, the Iraq Historical Allegations Team (Ihat) referred the case to the Service Prosecuting Authority. An MoD spokesman told The Daily Telegraph it had a legal obligation to ensure the full facts of the alleged incidents were known (soldiers above on a training exercise in Basra, Iraq) Ihat was closed down by the Government last year. But the Iraq Fatality Investigations (IFI) has now launched a new inquiry into the incident. Major Campbell said: 'In December they cleared me, in January they awarded me my long service and good conduct medal, and a week ago they tell me I will have several more years of investigation ahead of me. 'I asked the MoD how long it would take and they said the shortest IFI inquiry so far took six months.' The fresh investigation comes despite the family of Mr Shabram having already received 100,000 in compensation from the Ministry of Defence in an out-of-court settlement. The MoD did not admit liability for the death. The IFI is an inquest-style inquiry designed to establish the facts of a case and can result in a pay-out to victims' families. In a letter to the MoD seen by the Daily Mail last year, Major Campbell wrote: 'Personally, I would welcome the ICC's involvement and an opportunity to finally and definitively put to rest this 13-year witch-hunt that seemingly has no end there is probably more chance of a fair and timely trial there, because in the UK there is no judicial process.' An MoD spokesman told The Daily Telegraph it had a legal obligation to ensure the full facts of the alleged incidents were known. Eric Scott Branch, 47, was executed by lethal injection on Thursday in Florida A Florida inmate convicted of raping and killing a college student decades ago has yelled 'murderers!' three times, thrashing on a gurney as he was being put to death, while death row inmates set to die in two other states won reprieves. Eric Scott Branch, 47, was executed by lethal injection and pronounced dead at 7.05pm on Thursday at Florida State Prison after the court rejected his appeals without comment. Moments before the execution, he asked Florida Governor Rick Scott and Attorney General Pam Bondi, both Republicans, to carry out the execution themselves. 'Let them come down here and do it. I've learned that you're good people and this is not what you should be doing,' Branch told the corrections officers in the room. Just as officials were administering the lethal drugs that included a powerful sedative, Branch let out a loud, blood-curdling scream, thrashed about on his gurney and then yelled 'murderers! murderers! murderers' before falling silent with a guttural groan. Also Thursday, Texas Governor Greg Abbott commuted Thomas Whitaker's death sentence and Doyle Lee Hamm's scheduled execution was postponed in Alabama. The day had been set to be the first in eight years that three states carried out executions on the same day. The family of Susan Morris makes a statement after the execution of Eric Scott Branch on Thursday. Branch was convicted of the 1993 rape and fatal beating UWF student Morris, 21, whose naked body was found buried in a shallow grave near a nature trail Branch was convicted of the rape and fatal beating of University of West Florida student 21-year-old Susan Morris, whose naked body was found buried in a shallow grave near a nature trail. Evidence shows that Branch approached Morris after she left a night class on January 11, 1993, so he could steal her red Toyota and return to his home state of Indiana. He was arrested while traveling there. Branch raped and murdered Susan Morris, 21, and buried her body in a shallow grave Branch also was convicted of sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl in Indiana and of another sexual assault in Panama City, Florida. After Branch was executed on Thursday, the Morris family issued a statement saying they are still mourning the victim's death a quarter century ago. 'Twenty-five years ago, Susan's life was suddenly and brutally extinguished. We have grieved for her longer that she was with us. Yet because of who she was ... she will never be forgotten by those who love her,' said the statement read out by the victim's sister, Wendy Morris Hill. Branch's last meal was a pork chop, T-bone steak, French fries and two pints of Ben & Jerry's ice cream, a Corrections Department spokeswoman said. He refused a meeting with a spiritual advisor. Death penalty protesters hold a vigil outside the Florida prison where Branch was executed Joseph Thornton, a Gainesville resident, rings a bell during a vigil for Eric Scott Branch In Texas, Thomas Whitaker, 38, was convicted of masterminding a 2003 plot against his family in which his mother Tricia, 51, and brother Kevin, 19, were killed. His father, Kent, was shot in the chest and survived. A devout Christian and retired executive, Kent Whitaker said he had forgiven his son and that his family did not want him to be executed. In a clemency petition, the father said if the death penalty were implemented, it would make his pain worse. On Tuesday, the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles in a unanimous decision recommended clemency based largely on his father's request. Abbott, a Republican, commuted the sentence to life in prison without the possibility of parole, saying various factors influenced his decision, including the appeals of the father and the board's recommendation. 'Im thankful for this decision, not for me but for my dad. Whatever punishment I might have received or will receive will be just. I deserve any punishment for my crimes, but my dad did nothing wrong,' Thomas Whitaker was quoted as saying by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. Also Thursday, the governor of Texas commuted Thomas Whitaker's (left) death sentence and Doyle Lee Hamm's (right) execution was postponed in Alabama Whitaker (left) set up the ambush that killed his mom and brother (right). His father (center) survived the shooting and, after learning to forgive his son, asked state officials for mercy Kent Whitaker (left) said he had forgiven his killer son (right) and that his family did not want him to be executed. The governor of Texas commuted the death sentence at the dad's request In Alabama, the lethal injection of an inmate was postponed after a brief stay from the US Supreme Court. Justices issued the temporary stay at 6pm on Thursday, the same time that Doyle Lee Hamm was scheduled to be executed, but said three hours later that the execution could proceed. Hamm's attorney had argued that lymphoma and past drug use have damaged his veins too much for a lethal injection. The stay was lifted at around 9pm, and the execution was resumed. But it was halted at around 11.35pm, shortly before the death warrant expired at midnight. Prison spokesman Bob Horton said there was insufficient time to prepare the inmate before the midnight deadline. Hamm was sentenced to death for the 1987 murder of Cullman motel clerk Patrick Cunningham during a robbery in which $410 was stolen. Cunningham was shot in the head. Campaigners warned of an Establishment stitch-up last night over the appointment of a tax-avoiding lawyer as head of the City watchdog. Victims of bank rip-offs calling for reform said they would not trust the Financial Conduct Authority if Charles Randell became chairman. They said his involvement in a notorious tax-avoidance scheme called Ingenious Film Partners 2 cast doubts on his ability to hold the City to account. Under fire: Charles Randell was involved in a tax-avoidance scheme called Ingenious Film Partners 2, which critics say casts doubt on his ability to hold the City to account Critics also raised doubts about the actions of Treasury mandarin Sir Tom Scholar, who oversaw Mr Randells appointment but decided not to tell Chancellor Philip Hammond about his tax affairs. The appointment was criticised by victims of wrongdoing by major lenders, and by entrepreneur Lawrence Tomlinson, who wrote a damning report on a toxic business banking unit at Royal Bank of Scotland. Its Global Restructuring Group falsely claimed many of the thousands of small firms it was meant to be helping were failing, before driving many into the ground. Those involved in the scam made a fortune in fees and kickbacks, but destroyed many small firms. Former clients want to see the FCA prevent further abuses. Mr Tomlinson said: Businesses affected by bad banking practice need a strong and decisive regulator who is unafraid to challenge large city institutions, holding culprits to account. I hope Randells past involvement in the City does not impede his judgment and create cultural bias on the side of the finance sector. 'His statements on his plans as chairman have been commendable, but can a leopard ever really change its spots? He has, after all, been part of the entrenched elite in the City. It emerged this week that Mr Randell ploughed more than 100,000 into the Ingenious scheme, which let backers limit tax bills by taking advantage of deductions for film producers. He claims his financial adviser told him the taxman had given it approval, but in 2013 HM Revenue & Customs wrote to him to warn about its concerns. Giving evidence to MPs on the Treasury Select Committee, Mr Randell said he immediately parted company with his advisor and paid 114,000 demanded by HMRC. The former partner at the law firm Slaughter and May, who reportedly earned 500 an hour from taxpayers for working on state bank bailouts during the financial crisis, explained what had happened to head-hunters who approached him about the FCA job, and asked them to pass this on to the Treasury. But mandarins overseen by Sir Tom who was responsible for David Camerons efforts to renegotiate Britains EU membership before the Brexit vote decided to interview him anyway. They gave him the job, which was then rubber-stamped by Nicky Morgan, chairman of the Treasury Select Committee, after grilling him herself about his tax affairs. But campaigners who are fighting for banking reform insisted last night that a rethink was desperately needed. Incoming chairman of the Financial Conduct Authority Charles Randell leaves his home in Dulwich, pictured right Nikki Turner, whose business was destroyed by rogue bank staff, now runs the campaign group SME Alliance. She said: Im really shocked. As arrogant as these people are, they must realise that their credibility has gone right out of the window. Theyre already on such fragile ground, because most victims dont trust the FCA anyway, and to put someone like this in charge is a slap in the face to the small business world and to all consumers. Its just another case of do what I say, not what I do, and if they wanted to build any trust they wouldnt go ahead with it. Anthony Stansfeld, the Police and Crime Commissioner for Thames Valley Police, which prosecuted a gang of rogue bankers who wrecked businesses for profit, added: Mr Randell is another Treasury plant who was put in there by civil servants who didnt tell the ministers. Theres a tremendous incentive not to rock the boat, and that permeates the whole system at the moment. A Treasury spokesman said: Charles Randell has extensive experience in UK financial services regulation and is the best person for the job. The FCA declined to comment last night. A man arrested on suspicion of murder after a badly mutilated body was found on a motorway has been released him on bail. The body of a mother-of-two, 32, was found by horrified drivers on the London-bound carriageway of the M20 near Ashford, Kent around 6pm on Tuesday evening. Detectives arrested a man, reported to be the unnamed woman's partner, on suspicion of murder when he came forward following a police appeal. He has since been released on bail. Grim discovery: Police closed the M20 motorway in Kent after the body of a 32-year-old, mother of two was found on Tuesday evening According to reports, police were scouring a holiday park in Kent for evidence on Tuesday night. It is thought that the woman had moved there from Ashford with her two children and new partner in November. Officers were also said to be investigating whether she was killed at the holiday camp on the Kent coast before her body was driven to the M20 and dumped. It is understood the woman's remains had been struck several times by passing cars and lorries, whose drivers were unaware of what was in the busy road. It is unclear whether she was killed on the motorway or was already dead when the cars ran over her body. The usually-busy motorway between London and the Channel Tunnel was closed yesterday and police confirmed that her partner was being quizzed Officers appealed for the driver of a silver Nissan Qashqai to come forward and a man handed himself in at a police station on Wednesday evening, Kent police said. He was released on bail on Friday morning until March 15. Police confirmed the victim was a 32-year-old woman from Kent and a post mortem is expected to take place at midday. Detective Chief Inspector Richard Vickery said: 'I would still like to hear from anyone who may have seen a silver Nissan Qashqai with registration number KY15 WWX on the M20 between 5.30pm and 6.30pm on Tuesday 20 February 2018. 'In addition, I would also like to hear from any motorists who have dashcam footage taken between 5.30pm and 6.30pm on Tuesday 20 February of the M20 London-bound carriageway between junctions 10 and 9. 'Any motorists who used the M20 after 6pm on Tuesday is asked to contact us if they believe they experienced anything unusual whilst driving and check their cars for signs of involvement in this incident.' One motorist said he was driving onto the coastbound stretch of motorway at about 6.20pm when he saw emergency services on the opposite side of the road. Police were seen combing the three-lane motorway for clues in the murder investigation The 21-year-old man, who asked not to be named, said: 'As I entered the motorway I expected to see a crash when I suddenly realised that it wasn't and unfortunately it appeared to be a body lying in the central lane with police and ambulance staff around it. 'Because of the torches being shone by police, [I could see] it appeared that the body had been struck by vehicles. 'It was very shocking. It is not a sight I would want anyone to witness. My condolences are with the family of the deceased.' The woman's remains were reportedly in such a bad condition that officers were initially unable to determine whether a man or woman was dead. The scene where the body was found. A man has been arrested on suspicion of murder and it is unclear if the woman died on the motorway or was dumped there Police closed off the motorway at Ashford, Kent and detectives from the Kent and Essex Serious Crime Directorate joined forces with the Kent Police Serious Collision Investigation Unit to investigate the incident. The M20 is a busy road artery linking the Channel Tunnel and Port of Dover to the M25 and London. A nationwide shortage of EpiPens was due to be solved on Friday, but instead the shipment of lifesaving medication has been pushed back another week (stock image) A nationwide shortage of Epipens has been extended for another week, leaving patients concerned they cannot get their hands on life-saving medication. The Epipen, which provides a shot of adrenaline to a person suffering a severe allergic reaction, has been at shortage levels since January 12. No similar treatment is currently available. The medication was due back on shelves on Tuesday, but the shortage has been extended for another week. A spokesman for Pfizer told Daily Mail Australia the shortage was due to 'component supply shortages and certain process changes'. 'We understand how important this product is to patients,' he said. 'We are working tirelessly to increase production and expedite shipments as rapidly as possible by addressing [these issues] which have temporarily constrained capacity at our manufacturing facility'. 'We are very confident in the safety and efficacy of EpiPen products being produced at the site.' A spokesman for Pfizer, who manufacture the drug, said 'component supply shortages and certain process changes' were to blame for the shortage An EpiPen delivers a lifesaving shot of adrenaline to a person experiencing a severe allergic reaction Pictured: A chemist shows an empty drawer which would typically be full of EpiPens A spokeswoman at the Department of Health confirmed the shortage had been extended by a week, with the product originally due back in stock on February 23, and now not expected until March 2. She told Daily Mail Australia the supply of EpiPen Junior had not been affected, and 'emergency supply of EpiPen for adults has been implemented where pharmacies can contact Alphapharm directly in order to obtain the product'. 'The Therapeutic Goods Association is continuing to work with Alphapharm and with stakeholders to verify the supply of EpiPen and EpiPen Junior to the Australian market. 'TGA has approved two other products but the sponsors of those products are not currently supplying the Australian market.' Allergy and Anaphylaxis Australia said earlier the root of the cause needed to be dealt with to stop the issue reoccurring. Spokeswoman Maria Said explained the 'roll on' of problems was a signal there was a larger factor at play. 'First and foremost I think we need to get to the bottom root cause of why we've got this shortage and why these shortages keep happening,' Ms Said said. The Therapeutic Goods Administration has approved two other similar devices, but they have not yet been made available in Australia. The major shortage follows the company's junior device running out in November, and a major recall of the lifesaving medication in March due to a product flaw. Without an Epipen, those experiencing a severe reaction would need to call an ambulance. In some cases though, patients have just moments to be administered an adrenaline shot before it is too late. Daily Mail Australia asked Pfizer what had caused the extra delay in delivering stock, but the company did not answer before deadline. Patients and pharmacists can contact Alphapharm on 1800 274 276 for information on stock availability of EpiPen (adult) and EpiPen Junior. A same-sex couple in Texas have sued the federal government after they were turned down as foster parents by the US government's Unaccompanied Refugee Minors Program (URM), allegedly because they don't 'mirror the holy family.' Lamda Legal filed a lawsuit against the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), on behalf of married couple Fatma Marouf and Bryn Esplin, on Tuesday in the US District Court for the District of Columbia. The United States Conference of Bishops (USCCB) was also named in the lawsuit. The lawsuit alleges that a local charity executive acting in the capacity of a federal contractor allegedly told Marouf and Esplin in February 2017 that foster parents must 'mirror the holy family,' and they would not 'qualify' to foster a child. 'Being denied the opportunity to foster a child because we dont "mirror the Holy Family," [which is] clearly code for being a same-sex couple, was hurtful and insulting to us,' Esplin said. 'More than that, though, insisting on such a narrow, religious view of what a family must look like deprives these children of a nurturing, supportive home.' Scroll down for video A federal lawsuit filed in Washington, DC on Tuesday claims a federal contractor told same-sex couple Fatma Marouf (left) and Bryn Esplin (right) of Texas that foster parents for refugee minors must 'mirror the holy family' and they would not 'qualify' The complaint focuses on statements allegedly made by executives at Catholic Charities of Fort Worth (CCFW). The women claim the CCFW's Director of International Foster Care is the person who told them they would not qualify as foster parents in the URM. They also claim that a woman named Donna Springer, chair of the executive committee of CCFWs board of directors, told them that none of the 700 children in the URM were LGBT, in response to their direct inquiry on the matter. In carrying out the mission of the URM, the federal government contracts with the USCCB, which oversees the CCFW as one of its subsidiaries. The women claim the CCFW's Director of International Foster Care told them they would not qualify as foster parents in the URM. 'The federal government was on notice when it funded USCCB that this organization refuses to provide services to same-sex spouses at taxpayer expense,' Lambda Legal Senior Counsel Kenneth D Upton said. 'Our government should not be favoring certain religious beliefs over others, to the tune of millions of dollars, and turning people away from government services based on their failure to conform to the dictates of a particular religious belief.' Beyond the constitutional discrimination claims being brought in the complaint, Esplin and Marouf said that they were 'shocked' and 'hurt' by such a denial, not only to them, but also to refugee children in need of homes. 'It's not just us that are being denied something,' Esplin said. 'It's the child, or that particular sibling set, that's also being denied.' Marouf and Esplin (facing forward) have been married for nearly three years The complaint focuses on statements allegedly made by executives at Catholic Charities of Fort Worth (CCFW); CCFW headquarters are shown here Esplin is an assistant professor of biothetics at Texas A&M University's medical school. Marouf is a law professor at the same university's School of Law. She's also the director of their Immigrant Rights Clinic. 'I think as an attorney who works with refugee kids and unaccompanied minors, I know that a lot of these kids, especially the unaccompanied minors coming from Central America, have gone through hell to get to the US, and I've seen firsthand their need to find families here, how they've often been separated from their parents of entire families,' Marouf said. She added: 'There are a lot of LGBT children who are coming as refugees who get refugee status because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. To say that you can't have families of certain sexual orientations or gender identities to be foster parents to them, when they, themselves, may have gotten the refugee status for that reason, is really sending those kids a mixed message that they're not OK the way they are.' Beyond the constitutional discrimination claims being brought in the complaint, Esplin and Marouf said that they were 'shocked' and 'hurt' by such a denial, not only to them, but also to refugee children in need of homes Esplin (right) is an assistant professor of biothetics at Texas A&M University's medical school; Marouf is seen at left Lambda Legal said that Marouf emailed the Office of Refugee Resettlement on the same day that the two women were told they did not 'mirror the holy family,' but she did not hear back from that office until two months later. When she did hear back, they asked for the names of the officials the two women had spoken with, and have heard nothing more, since. A spokesperson for CCFW has denied that Springer had any contact with the couple, but said that the then-director of child welfare services talked to them over the phone. CCFW also denies that anyone told the Texas couple that none of the 700 children were LGBT. 'We do not screen or otherwise ask the children we serve to self-identify if they are LGBT,' Katelin Cortney, the charity's communications director told the Dallas Morning News. 'We train our foster families to accept children from all cultures and walks of life so they can be as prepared as possible to welcome someone new into their home.' Both HHS and USCCB are named in federal complaint. HHS told ABC News that the federal agency does not comment on pending litigation. The USCCB could not immediately be reached for comment. The women have decided to move forward with the case because of how it may impact other members of the LGBT community, as well as children awaiting foster parents. 'When there's so many kids out there who need a loving home, and there's such a shortage of foster families in Texas, in general, to be turned away just because of our sexual orientation seemed very shortsighted,' Marouf said. '[It] doesn't take into account the diversity of refugees that are coming, and what their religions are or their cultural backgrounds are, and how we might actually be a pretty good fit for some of those kids.' Marouf and Esplin have been married for nearly three years. A man who fathered a child with his own daughter held 'some sort of power or control over her,' a court has heard. The Queensland man's incestuous relationship with the woman began when she was 18, after being absent from her life from the age of two, the Gympie Times reported. The pair both have IQ scores in the bottom two per cent of the population and their child suffers from 'significant intellectual difficulties'. Judge Gary Long told Gympie District Court the case raised concerns over 'the genetic integrity of the community', adding that the woman had been exploited. A man who fathered a child with his own daughter held 'some sort of power or control over her,' a court has heard (stock image) The woman's defence lawyer argued there was no reason to sentence her to jail because there was 'no apparent exploitation by her'. The barrister said the woman knew the man was her father during their sexual relationship, but had been 'unaware of this in the early stages'. Prosecutors told the court they accepted there was a 'degree of exploitation,' but there was 'a degree of mutuality as well'. The judge concluded there was no need 'supervision or rehabilitation' and placed her on a good behaviour bond, with no conviction recorded. Primary school students were left in shock after a snake fell through a cracked ceiling in a Western Australian classroom and brushed the arm of one student. The classroom of primary school students at Waggrakine Primary School in Geraldton, Western Australia's Mid West, were immediately evacuated. A staff member who is also a trained snake handler removed the snake from the evacuated classroom, Perth now reports. A 30cm snake 'brushed' the arm of a student after it squeezed through a cracked ceiling and fell into a class of primary school students at Waggrakine Primary School in Western Australia The school's principal Elisabeth Turner told Perth now that hot weather was the reason for the growth in baby snakes sighted around the school. 'From time to time when the weather is hot, baby snakes may be seen as there is bushland nearby, however we have a policy in place to ensure students and staff know how to act if they ever see a snake on school grounds,' Ms Turner said. She also said the student brushed by the snake was not hurt. The type of snake is not known but it was 30cm long and possibly venomous. A top charter school's founder has been fired after he was accused of sexual misconduct with a student. Michael Feinberg was ousted Thursday from KIPP, the chain of charter schools he helped to found. An investigation found credible a claim that he had sexually abused a student nearly two decades ago, according to The New York Times. Feinberg, was accused last spring of sexually abusing a minor female student in Houston in the late 1990s, a source told the Times. The investigation found her claim credible after interviewing the student and her mother who both gave the same sequence of events. Feinberg, who co-founded KIPP, one of the country's largest charter school chains, has denied the accusation. During the investigation, authorities reportedly found that Feinberg had sexually harassed two KIPP employees. One case resulted in a financial settlement in 2004. A letter that was sent Thursday afternoon to teachers, administrators and students, announcing Feinberg's dismissal, said that 'Feinberg's actions were incompatible with the leadership qualities that are central to our mission'. Feinberg was notified of his dismissal at a meeting in Houston. According to the Times, his lawyer, Christopher L. Tritico, said his client had never been told of the precise allegations against him, and had not been given a chance to defend himself. 'The investigation was conducted without even the most rudimentary form of due process,' Tritico. The claim regarding the minor student, who is now in her 30s, had not been previously reported to KIPP or other authorities. After an internal investigation last fall, KIPP Houston and the KIPP Foundation hired WilmerHale, a law firm that specializes in sexual misconduct allegations. KIPP, also known as Knowledge is Power Program, started in 1994 in Texas. The programs began with fifth-grade students and achieved extraordinary results with poor and minority pupils. Pictured is one of the school in Houston Feinberg joins numerous individuals who have been ousted from their positions over sexual harassment claims since sexual abuse allegations surfaced against Harvey Weinstein in October 2017. David Levin and Feinberg co-founded KIPP after they came together during their Teach for America program in the early 1990s. KIPP, also known as Knowledge is Power Program, started in 1994 in Texas. The programs began with fifth-grade students and achieved extraordinary results with poor and minority pupils. Close to 95 per cent of the students who attend KIPP schools are African-American or Latino. Currently, the school chain services nearly 90,000 students in 209 schools in 20 states. In his early years, Feinberg was a teacher and administrator in Houston where he taught fifth grade, but in his current role, he focused on fund-raising, lobbying, political advocacy and college partnerships. In 2016, Feinberg received $231,885 in compensation and benefits while working for KIPP's Houston schools, and $220,241 for work at the parent foundation in San Francisco, according to the Times. Barnaby Joyce has resigned as Deputy Prime Minister of Australia after a tumultuous fortnight of allegations and personal revelations - including of his unborn love child. Wearing his signature Akubra, a sombre Mr Joyce confirmed he was stepping down as Australia's second most senior politician at a hastily convened press conference in Armidale in his New South Wales electorate. 'On Monday morning at the party room, I will step down as the leader of the National Party and deputy leader of Australia. I have informed the acting Prime Minister, Mathias Cormann, of this,' he told reporters. Former Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce stepped down as leader of the National Party and Deputy Prime Minister on Friday Two weeks ago, it was revealed Joyce had been having an affair with former media advisor Vikki Campion, who is pregnant with his first son Joyce's Chief of Staff called a meeting with his Canberra office at 1.30pm on Friday ahead of the conference Joyce will remain on the backbench, and will remain the MP for New England. He says he won't endorse anyone to succeed him in the leadership role. Pressure had been mounting over the past week for Mr Joyce to quit but intensified yesterday after a sexual harassment complaint emerged against the Deputy PM. Some members of his party had also been pushing for a leadership spill when the House of Representatives returns next week. They may get one on Monday, with Joyce expected to formally resign at 8am, and no known contenders for the role yet. The New England MP's decision came after a fortnight of allegations and revelations regarding his conduct both personally and professionally Ms Campion's high-paying jobs following her removal from Joyce's office were also brought into question Joyce said he wanted the constant stream of reports to stop for his loved ones and for journalists, who he referred to as 'the poor buggers parked outside my house every day' Victorian backbencher Andrew Broad yesterday said Mr Joyce 'needs to step down as leader of the National party'. The speculation and its resolution comes weeks after Mr Joyce's affair with his former press secretary, Vikki Campion, was revealed. The former Deputy Prime Minister asked that his resignation be the 'circuit-breaker' for coverage on his new relationship and unborn son. 'I'd like to say that it's absolutely important, it's incredibly important that there be a circuit-breaker, not just for the parliament, but more importantly, a circuit-breaker for Vikki, for my unborn child, my daughters and for Nat,' he said. 'This has got to stop. It's not fair on them. It's just completely and utterly unwarranted, the sort of observation that's happened. 'On a humorous side, I think it's got to stop for the poor buggers who are parked outside my house every day. 'It's got to stop for them as well, they have got to go home.' Joyce told reporters he hoped his resignation would serve as a 'circuit-breaker' for persistent publication of stories about him and his loved ones Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull suggested his deputy 'consider his position' a week ago but Mr Joyce instead forged ahead with a lengthy series of press interviews. He called on Australians to 'move on' from the affair in a Fairfax Media interview with Ms Campion this week. But the whispers surrounding Mr Joyce's hold on his position showed no sign of abating since. He was forced to deny a sexual harassment allegation as 'spurious and defamatory' on Thursday. When asked if the allegation, made by an unknown Western Australian woman, had been the cause of his decision, he confirmed it had. Joyce said allegations he had sexually harassed a Western Australian woman were 'the straw that broke the camel's back' when it came to his decision to step down 'Obviously, it was confirmed by the allegations [of sexual harassment]that I read in the paper. I just thought that has to be the straw that breaks the camel's back,' he said. Joyce has referred the allegation to the police, and the Nationals are investigating. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, who is currently in the United States visiting President Donald Trump, was not alerted by Joyce before the press conference, The Age reported. The PM was having drinks when he was shown a report announcing Joyce had called a press conference amid speculation he would resign. News of Joyce's resignation was instead relayed to him via staff in Canberra about 12.30pm. Turnbull released a statement straight after Friday's press conference, thanking his Deputy for his service and denying the recent scandal had damaged the Coalition. Blunders and brilliance: The highs and lows of Barnaby Joyce's career as he resigns as Deputy Prime Minister Question time: Joyce has been under immense pressure in recent weeks THE AFFAIR Public revelations of Joyce's affair with former staffer Vikki Campion ignited a political storm. Campion's moves to Resources Minister Matt Canavan and Nationals whip Damian Drum's offices have come under heavy scrutiny. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull blasted Joyce's conduct, calling it a 'shocking error of judgement' and banned ministers from having sexual relations with their staff. Campion is due to give birth to their baby in April. CLOSET KIWI The High Court ruled Joyce ineligible to sit in parliament after it was revealed he held New Zealand citizenship by descent. He faced a by-election in December which he won by a whopping majority, collecting 65 per cent of the primary vote. PISTOL AND BOO Joyce made international headlines in 2015 when he told Hollywood star Johnny Depp's then wife Amber Heard her pair of pooches better 'bugger off' back to the US or he'd have them put down. Heard was placed on a one-month good behaviour bond over illegally smuggling Pistol and Boo into Australia and the couple filmed an awkward apology video. RENT FREE Joyce came under fire for living rent-free with Campion in an Armidale townhouse courtesy of wealthy businessman Greg Maguire. Joyce said Maguire contacted him to offer the house, meaning he didn't breach the ministerial code of conduct. GINA'S GEE UP Close mate and mining magnate Gina Rinehart handed him a $40,000 novelty-sized cheque for winning the inaugural National Agriculture Related Industries Prize last year. He later 'politely declined' the money, saying he was surprised to receive the award. PESTICIDES As agriculture minister, Joyce was responsible for shifting the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority from Canberra to Armidale in his New England electorate. Accusations of pork-barrelling surrounded the relocation and it later emerged the agency had spent almost $15,000 at a Maguire-owned hotel in Armidale. BARNABY BANK While he no longer held the agriculture portfolio when legislation cleared parliament, Joyce was behind the government's Regional Investment Corporation which will be responsible for managing up to $4 billion of regional loans. The 'Barnaby Bank' has been derided by Labor as a 'shocking pork-barrel' due to its location in Orange, where the Nationals lost a state by-election. Source: Australian Associated Press Advertisement 'I thank Barnaby for his service as Deputy Prime Minister and in his various Ministerial roles in which he has been a fierce advocate for rural and regional Australia,' he said. 'The Coalition between the Liberals and the Nationals is Australias most successful political partnership, having endured for more than 95 years. 'This partnership is undiminished and will continue to deliver opportunity and security for all Australians. 'Pending the Nationals election of a new leader and consequent Ministerial changes, the Hon. John McVeigh MP will act as Minister for Infrastructure and Transport.' Deputy leader of the Nationals, Bridget McKenzie, released a statement praising Joyce for having 'reenergised and grown the party'. 'He has always lead from the front and our colleagues and party membership always knew who he was fighting for in Canberra. 'His decision to stand aside is the right decision for the National Party, the nation and most importantly, his family.' Speaking to Fairfax Media, Joyce vowed his little boy would not be 'less loved than any of my other children' One Labor MP joked about 'putting his tea towel out' for Joyce after a strange photoshoot was published in Fairfax this week Opposition Leader Bill Shorten came out swinging after Joyce's announcement, telling reporters the scandal of the past two weeks showed why the Coalition agreement between the Liberal Party and the Nationals needed to be made public. 'The fact this scandal has dragged on for 16 days has been damaging to the government, but more importantly, the country,' he said. 'Mr Turnbull's handling of this has shown an atrocious lack of judgement. 'Two things must happen before the new leader of the National Party is elected. 'Turnbull must ensure this scandal and lack of leadership can never be allowed to happen again. 'One, the National Party cannot not be allowed, by virtue of a secret Coalition agreement, to have a 100 per cent [say in] who the Deputy Prime Minister is, Australians deserve better 'Two, the secret Coalition agreement dealing out positions in the Turnbull government must be made public. 'We can never see a repeat of this damaging scandal.' Joyce told reporters he wanted to be remembered: 'Just as I started'. 'I fought for the person in the weatherboard and iron, I fought for the person I believed was in the peripheries and the small regional towns. 'I used my experience of the towns, the Wolbrooks especially, and my goal in life is to try to make their life better. 'And I acknowledge in many areas I am rough around the edges and never tried to be anyone else.' If they could understand what was happening, Johnny Depp and Amber Heard's terriers Pistol and Boo would no doubt delight in Barnaby Joyce's fall from grace. The Nationals leader's resignation announcement on Friday afternoon followed what was no doubt the worst fortnight of his career. Even the revelation Joyce, 50, and his former staffer will soon have a secret love-child was far from the most colourful moment of the Deputy Prime Minister's career. The salt-of-the-earth former accountant, MP and father-of-four (soon to be five) has had an extraordinary run in the spotlight. From maverick to political master: Barnaby Joyce (seen shortly after his election as a Queensland senator) was known then as someone who did not toe the party line Joyce (left) and his arch-rivals: The Deputy Prime Minister will long be remembered for making an example of Johnny Depp and Amber Heard (right) The revelation Barnaby Joyce had a baby boy on the way with his former staffer Vikki Campion (pictured together) was the beginning of the end He first made waves as a maverick Queensland swing-voter in the Senate during the Howard government - drawing the ire of his party for failing to toe the line. 'He is probably the most interesting individual Senator that's come to Canberra in a long time,' political expert Brian Costa said at the time. He was right. By the Turnbull years, Joyce had risen to top rungs of government - and will be best remembered for his headline-grabbing antics while in the ministry. Many Australians watched with mirth when the then-Agriculture Minister decided to make an example of A-listers Johnny Depp and Amber Heard in 2015. The couple had smuggled a pair of Yorkshire terriers, named Pistol and Boo, into the country during a filming on the Gold Coast. Joyce didn't pull his punches when - as the minister responsible for the country's biosecurity - he said the canines needed to leave the country or face lethal injection. A straight-faced Mr Joyce said: 'Mr Depp has to take his dogs back to California or we're going to have to euthanase them. 'He's now got about 50 hours left to remove the dogs... 'It's time that Pistol and Boo buggered off back to the United States.' They did. Depp later labelled Joyce 'an inbred tomato'. This video - where Johnny Depp and Amber Heard spoke about the importance of biosecurity - was pilloried as a 'hostage clip' Pistol and Boo, spotted in paparazzi pictures of the home where Depp and Heard were living Little did Joyce know he had sparked an ongoing feud. Amber Heard was unforgiving when Joyce hit one of his lowest points last year - just as rumours about him and Ms Campion started to emerge. He was booted from Parliament by the High Court when it was revealed Akubra-wearing Joyce was actually a dual Australian-New Zealand citizen. To mark his devastating career setback, Heard sent him a box of New Zealand's 'finest Kiwi fruit'. (He was also nominated for the prestigous New Zealander of the Year award). A look back: Joyce is seen long before the shackles of high office were thrust upon him Aside from Hollywood shenanigans, Joyce has been an outspoken voice for regional Australia. He put carp - of all things - on the national agenda, when he launched a new effort to stop the herpes virus spreading through the country's stocks. He posed at a media conference holding a carp. 'These filthy mudsuckers will be terminated,' he posted to Facebook. Blunders and brilliance: The highs and lows of Barnaby Joyce's career as he resigns as Deputy Prime Minister Question time: Joyce has been under immense pressure in recent weeks THE AFFAIR Public revelations of Joyce's affair with former staffer Vikki Campion ignited a political storm. Campion's moves to Resources Minister Matt Canavan and Nationals whip Damian Drum's offices have come under heavy scrutiny. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull blasted Joyce's conduct, calling it a 'shocking error of judgement' and banned ministers from having sexual relations with their staff. Campion is due to give birth to their baby in April. CLOSET KIWI The High Court ruled Joyce ineligible to sit in parliament after it was revealed he held New Zealand citizenship by descent. He faced a by-election in December which he won by a whopping majority, collecting 65 per cent of the primary vote. PISTOL AND BOO Joyce made international headlines in 2015 when he told Hollywood star Johnny Depp's then wife Amber Heard her pair of pooches better 'bugger off' back to the US or he'd have them put down. Heard was placed on a one-month good behaviour bond over illegally smuggling Pistol and Boo into Australia and the couple filmed an awkward apology video. RENT FREE Joyce came under fire for living rent-free with Campion in an Armidale townhouse courtesy of wealthy businessman Greg Maguire. Joyce said Maguire contacted him to offer the house, meaning he didn't breach the ministerial code of conduct. GINA'S GEE UP Close mate and mining magnate Gina Rinehart handed him a $40,000 novelty-sized cheque for winning the inaugural National Agriculture Related Industries Prize last year. He later 'politely declined' the money, saying he was surprised to receive the award. PESTICIDES As agriculture minister, Joyce was responsible for shifting the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority from Canberra to Armidale in his New England electorate. Accusations of pork-barrelling surrounded the relocation and it later emerged the agency had spent almost $15,000 at a Maguire-owned hotel in Armidale. BARNABY BANK While he no longer held the agriculture portfolio when legislation cleared parliament, Joyce was behind the government's Regional Investment Corporation which will be responsible for managing up to $4 billion of regional loans. The 'Barnaby Bank' has been derided by Labor as a 'shocking pork-barrel' due to its location in Orange, where the Nationals lost a state by-election. Source: Australian Associated Press Advertisement 'These filthy mudsuckers will be terminated': Joyce, seen during his expansive campaign to cure carp herpes It's not clear whether his then-media adviser and resident social media expert Vikki Campion was responsible. There's little doubt the stress of the past few weeks - including a denied sexual harassment allegation - has taken a toll on him, Ms Campion, wife Natalie Joyce and his daughters. At a press conference announcing his resignation on Friday, Mr Joyce said he wanted to be remembered as the man who 'fought for the person in the weatherboard and iron. 'I fought for the person I believed was in the peripheries and the small regional towns,' he said. 'I used my experience of the towns, the Wolbrooks especially, and my goal in life is to try to make their life better. 'And I acknowledge in many areas I am rough around the edges and never tried to be anyone else.' Barnaby Joyce has baffled the country with his references to 'the people in the weatherboard and iron' as he announced his resignation. The Deputy Prime Minister quit on Friday afternoon after a tumultuous fortnight of allegations and revelations of his love child scandal. 'This is never about me. It's about the person in the weatherboard and iron, something that manifestly expressed what the National Party is about,' he said. Mr Joyce's press conference sent social media into meltdown, with thousands misinterpreting his references to his rural constituents. Barnaby Joyce has baffled the country with his references to 'the people in the weatherboard and iron' as he announced his resignation Mr Joyce's press conference sent social media into meltdown, with thousands misinterpreting his references to his rural constituents The former Nationals leader sparked widespread confusion with the 'weatherboard' references 'Love "The Weatherboard Nine" he keeps alluding to. Must be some new group of rural freedom fighters,' one wrote online. 'Lest we forget the weatherboard nine,' another commented, while yet another wrote: 'Free the weatherboard nine'. 'An odd, somewhat disjointed address. Still to find out what the hell "the weatherboard nine" refers to,' one comment read. The former Nationals leader arrived to meet reporters in Armidale at 2pm on Friday to announce his resignation. Mr Joyce's press conference sent social media into meltdown, with thousands misinterpreting the reference to his country constituents Another baffled social media user wrote on Friday afternoon: 'Free the weatherboard nine' 'This is never about me. It's about the person in the weatherboard and iron,' Mr Joyce said on Friday, sparking the confusion 'On Monday morning at the party room, I will step down as the leader of the National Party and deputy leader of Australia,' he said. 'I have informed the acting Prime Minister, Mathias Cormann, of this.' Mr Joyce will remain on the backbench, and will stay on as MP for New England. Barnaby Joyce speaks to media during the press conference in which he announced his resignation Kaylee Muthart, 20, gouged her eyes out on February 6 in Anderson, South Carolina Fresh details have emerged in the horror case of a woman who gouged her own eyes out in front of a church. Kaylee Muthart, 20, had been using meth for about six months when she freaked out on February 6 in Anderson, South Carolina, her mother told People in a new interview published on Thursday. Katy Tompkins, mother to Kaylee and six other children, said she thinks Kaylee first started used meth unintentionally last year, when someone gave her marijuana laced with the drug. Doctors believe that the meth she smoked earlier this month was also laced, with a chemical that caused her to hallucinate. She thought the world was 'upside down' and heard voices that told her to 'sacrifice her eyes' in order to make it to heaven. Just days before the incident, Kaylee had told her mother that she was ready to go into drug rehab. Kaylee had been smoking meth and hallucinated that the world was 'upside down', hearing voices that told her to 'sacrifice her eyes' in order to make it to heaven. Parishioners at the South Main Chapel and Mercy Center (pictured) heard Kaylee's screams and ran outside to find her holding an eyeball in her hand 'The day before it happened, which was my birthday, I was getting ready to have her committed, just to get her off the streets and away from it,' said Tompkins. 'But I was too late.' Parishioners at the South Main Chapel and Mercy Center heard Kaylee's screams and ran outside to find her holding an eyeball in her hand. She fought them off as they tried to help, and by the time paramedics arrived she had gouged out the other eye. A team of deputies finally managed to control Kaylee and she was airlifted to the trauma unit at Greenville Memorial Hospital. 'I can't even explain that feeling when I found out, it was horrifying. Complete terror,' Tompkins said of first hearing what her daughter had done. 'I was thankful she was alive, but I knew something was wrong with her.' Kalyee's mother Katy Tompkins (with her left) has spoken out in a new interview Kaylee remains hospitalized and doctors have cleaned and treated her orbital sockets to prevent infection. Doctors recommend that she get prosthetic eyes to preserve her facial structure and keep bacteria out of the sockets. Kaylee insists that she get aqua green prosthetics to match her natural eye color, her mother said. Tompkins said that after Kaylee gets out of the hospital and learns how to live without sight, she wants to share her story with others and warn young people of the dangers of drug use. 'I don't know how I'm getting through it, but she has given me strength. It's weird to say, but she uplifts me right now and she's the one that can't see. That's just the kind of person she is,' Tompkins says. 'I'm thankful. It's a horrible thing, but I'm still thankful because God spared her life.' The family has created a GoFundMe campaign to raise money for a seeing eye dog for Kaylee. A woman will face court after she allegedly drove down a set of stairs in Perth's city centre with her toddler in the car before attacking police officers on-foot. The 46-year-old is believed to have been allegedly affected by drugs or alcohol when she crashed her red Honda Civic in busy waterfront complex Elizabeth Quay about 6.40pm Thursday, The West Australian reported. She walked away from the crash scene with her child - who was less than two-years-old - still inside the car before a female officer attempted to arrest her, police said. She then allegedly punched the officer in the head and began kicking her legs. Scroll down for video The officer suffered scratches to the face, as well as bruising to the face and legs, police said. The Perth woman was eventually subdued when a second officer arrived and helped tackle her to the ground. Police charged the woman with assaulting a public officer, and she was due to appear in Perth Magistrates Court on Friday. A woman will face court after she allegedly drove down a set of stairs in Perth's city centre with her toddler in the car before attacking police officers on-foot A woman can be seen tussling with a police officer and security guard before another officer arrives on his bicycle The alleged assault was caught on camera and emerged on social media on Thursday night. In the video, a woman can be seen tussling with a police officer and security guard before another officer arrives on his bicycle. The woman is then wrestled to the ground while shocked passers-by watch on. A father in Chicago is accused of nearly decapitating his young son after the boy's body was discovered in a trash bag in their home, police said. Officers received a call from a home on South Avers Avenue in the Little Village neighborhood around 2pm on Wednesday. When they arrived, police found two-year-old Mateo Garcia Aguayo's body in a garbage bag in the kitchen of a second-floor apartment. Chicago Police Sept. Eddie Johnson told the Chicago Sun Times that the boy had been slashed across the throat and the wound was so deep that the child was nearly decapitated. Rolando Ortiz, 37, is accused of nearly decapitating his young son after the boy's body was discovered in their home. He faces first-degree murder charges Mateo Garcia Aguayo was found dead in a trash bag in is family's Chicago home on Wednesday Johnson described the scene as 'brutal and horrific'. The boy's father, 37-year-old Rolando Ortiz, was arrested for the child's death. Area Central Detectives Commander Brendan Deenihan said Ortiz was home alone with his son when he grew very frustrated that he couldnt sleep because the child was wandering around their home waking him. Ortiz allegedly grabbed a knife from the kitchen, held the little boy down and cut his throat, the Chicago Sun Times reports. When Ortiz realized that he had killed the child, Deenihan said he tried to cut his own wrists. He then put Aguayo in a garbage bag and called his wife but couldn't reach her. Police said Ortiz phoned his sister-in-law and confessed 'to killing the baby'. The sister-in-law called relatives who lived in the apartment one floor below Ortiz and they went to check on the child. When they found Aguayo's body they called 911. Ortiz allegedly fled the scene in his car, but was arrested about four hours later in Kankakee and brought back to Chicago. Deenihan said the father confessed to the grisly crime while in police custody. Relatives contacted police after Ortiz called his sister-in-law to allegedly confess to the killing Residents in the area left a cross and a basketball outside the home Aguayo lived in These are the kinds of tragedies that keep police officers working without sleep, Johnson said. '(The boy) was not old enough to make a wrong decision ... just a kid whose trust and safety was betrayed by one man he should not have to question - his father.' Aguayo's death was ruled a homicide and Ortiz, who has no prior arrests, faces first-degree murder charges. Police said six other children live at the home but they were not there when Aguayo was killed. Thomas Bartlett 'Bart' Whitaker, 38, was granted a commutation Thursday in Texas The governor of Texas has granted an 11th-hour commutation to a death row inmate who contracted a hitman to murder his mom and brother. Republican Governor Greg Abbott on Thursday commuted the execution of Thomas Bartlett 'Bart' Whitaker, 38, to a sentence of life in prison, just hours before he was scheduled to die. Whitaker had even been served his last meal of chicken enchiladas, rice, beans and vegetables before the execution was canceled. His father Kent Whitaker, a devout Christian who came to forgive him, had lobbied the state tirelessly for clemency in the case. 'Im thankful for this decision, not for me but for my dad,' Whitaker said, according to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. 'Whatever punishment I might have received or will receive will be just. I deserve any punishment for my crimes, but my dad did nothing wrong.' 'Mr Whitaker must spend the remainder of his life behind bars as punishment for this heinous crime,' Abbott wrote in a proclamation explaining his decision, shortly before the scheduled execution. Whitaker (left) set up the ambush that killed his mom and brother (right). His father (center) survived the shooting and, after learning to forgive his son, is asking state officials for mercy Abbott said he had taken into consideration the fact that 'the person who fired the gun that killed the victims did not receive the death penalty, but Mr Whitaker, who did not fire the gun, did get the death penalty.' He also cited the father's desperate petition for clemency. 'Mr Whitaker's father, who survived the attempt on his life, passionately opposes the execution of his son,' Abbott wrote. 'Mr Whitaker's father insists that he would be victimized again if the state put to death his last remaining immediate family member.' In 2003, Whitaker lied to his family that he was about to graduate from Sam Houston University and lured them to a celebratory dinner. A hitman he had hired staged a burglary in their home and lay in wait. When the family returned, Whitaker's mother Tricia, 51, and brother Kevin, 19, were killed. His father, Kent, was shot in the chest and survived. Whitaker returned to live with his wounded father for seven months before the truth emerged that it was the son who hired the gunman. Kent Whitaker (left) said he had forgiven his killer son (right) and that his family did not want him to be executed. The governor of Texas commuted the death sentence at the dad's request Kent, a devout Christian, told AFP that he had initially been 'mad at God' after being shot. 'I was wrestling with my faith,' he said. 'But God met me in the hospital room on the night of the shootings and helped me arrive at a miracle forgiveness for everyone involved,' he said. 'Long before I ever even suspected that that forgiveness might extend to my own son.' 'I live with the extent of the loss every day and am aware of how much it has cost me - and am completely aware that all of that loss was the result of decisions made by my son,' he said. 'But God helped me reach that complete forgiveness and I think he did that to help me rebuild my relationship with my son.' Not everyone agreed with Abbott's decision to commute the death sentence in the high-profile case. Death was the appropriate punishment, one of the jurors on the case told ABC 13. She is disappointed but not surprised by what the governor did. 'We came to the conclusion that Bart Whitaker was a master manipulator. He manipulated people into killing for him,' she said. Rapist and killer Eric Scott Branch, 47, (left) was executed in Florida on Thursday. In Alabama, Doyle Lee Hamm, 61, (right) was to be executed by lethal injection on Thursday night, but the execution was postponed 'The death sentence was the correct sentence. I also feel he manipulated the parole board and the governor,' said the juror, who asked not to be identified. Fort Bend County District Attorney John Healey told the station: 'I know the sentence of death was the appropriate decision, but I do respect the Governor's authority.' Also on Thursday, Florida went forward with the execution of convicted killer and rapist Eric Scott Branch, 47. In Alabama, Doyle Lee Hamm, 61, was to be executed by lethal injection on Thursday night, but the execution was postponed. The US Supreme Court ruled at about 9pm that the execution could proceed, after delaying it for three hours to consider the final appeals. However the state's death warrant expired at midnight, and officials said there was not enough time to carry out the execution. Samantha Fuentes was shot in both legs during the assault and was left with a piece of shrapnel behind her right eye said she felt no reassurance when Trump called her at her hospital room last week One of the survivors of the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School last week dismissed Trump's attempts to offer his condolences as disingenuous. Samantha Fuentes was shot both legs during the assault on Valentines day, after gunman Nikolas Cruz opened fire on his former classmates and teachers. The 18-year-old has been dismissed from the hospital but was left with a piece of shrapnel behind her right eye. Fuentes told the New York Times just after being discharged that she felt no reassurance when Trump called her at her hospital room last week. 'He said he heard that I was a big fan of his, and then he said "I'm a big fan of yours too." I'm pretty sure he made that up' Fuentes said after being discharged from the hospital. Scroll down for video 'Talking to the president, I've never been so unimpressed by a person in my life. He didn't make me feel better in the slightest,' Fuentes told the New York Times President Trump is pictured with his head down as he listens to survivors and their families. Fuentes said Trump referred to Cruz as 'a sick puppy' and 'said "oh boy, oh boy, oh boy," like, seven times.' 'Talking to the president, I've never been so unimpressed by a person in my life. He didn't make me feel better in the slightest.' She also said Trump referred to Cruz as 'a sick puppy' and 'said "oh boy, oh boy, oh boy," like, seven times.' Trump was also widely criticized as being disingenuous when a photo emerged that revealed he was holding a card with talking points - one of which read: 'I hear you.' The card seemed to suggest Trump needed to be reminded to offer his condolences to the people impacted by the 17 lost lives at the Florida high school. Other questions that were also visible on the card included: 'What would you most want me to know about your experience?' and 'What can we do to help you feel safe?' Colleagues said the notes were written by communications director and longtime aide Hope Hicks - who, along with press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, briefed the president before the session. They knew he could potentially be going to a volatile and emotional situation - but decided to allow news stations to broadcast the meeting anyway. 'I HEAR YOU': During his meeting with survivors and parents of the Parkland school massacre at the White House on Wednesday, Trump carried a cue card Other questions that were also visible on the card included: 'What would you most want me to know about your experience?' and 'What can we do to help you feel safe?' And a participant at the president's round-table meeting at the White House on Wednesday, 18-year-0ld Samuel Zeif, agreed with Fuentes, and said that he was shocked to see the president's cue card. 'Everything I said was directly from the heart, and he had to write down "I hear you,"' he said, frustrated. Zeif survived the massacre, and spoke at the meeting about his experience tearfully, calling for an all-out ban on assault weapons like the AR-15 Cruz used to take out his former classmates. He told the Times that though he spoke from the heart, he felt Trump did little to comfort or console him. 'Half the time during that meeting, his arms were crossed,' he explained. 'I kept wanting to say "Mr President, uncross your arms." To me that is the international sign for close mindedness; it's really just a big 'no.'" And a participant at Wednesday's White House meeting, Stoneman Douglas student Zamuel Zeif (pictured), said that he thought the president seemed standoffish Zeif told the Times that though he spoke from the heart, he felt Trump did little to comfort or console him. 'Half the time during that meeting, his arms were crossed,' he explained Samuel Zeif, an 18-year-old student who survived the massacre, spoke at the meeting about his experience tearfully and called for an all-out ban on assault weapons However, parent and avid Trump supporter Andrew Pollack, said Trump showed he and his family 'nothing but love.' Pollack's 18-year-old daughter was killed in the massacre last week, and he said he brought a picture of her along with him to the visit. He, his wife, two sons and Meadow's longtime boyfriend met with Trump briefly before the group meeting. 'The guy really cared, you know? He flew us in, he had a bus waiting for us, he made time for us,' Pollack said. 'He took pictures of my daughter that we brought and he said he was going to look at it every day.' Trump signed Pollack's white and gold 'MAGA' Hat, and then took he and his family members on a tour of the White House. 'He just said, "You guys are coming with me," and we were just talking about life as we walked,' Pollack explained. 'He's a regular guy. I wouldn't have been there if I didn't think he cared.' However, parent and avid Trump supporter Andrew Pollack, said Trump showed he and his family 'nothing but love.' Pollack is seen on the day of the shooting, holding up a picture of his daughter, whom he had not been able to contact since the massacre that claimed 17 lives Pollack's 18-year-old daughter was killed in the massacre last week, and he said he brought a picture of her along with him to the visit. He, his wife, two sons and Meadow's longtime boyfriend met with Trump briefly before the group meeting Andrew Pollack (center), who is an avid Trump supporter, described how his daughter Meadow Pollack was shot nine at last week's deadly shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. He was joined by his sons at Wednesday's White House event Pollack ended up attending the meeting, where he expressed his frustration that nothing had been done to address gun control. 'I'm very angry that this happened, because it keeps happening,' the bereaved father said, declaring that 9/11 'happened once, and they fixed everything. How many schools, how many children have to get shot?' 'The guy really cared, you know? He flew us in, he had a bus waiting for us, he made time for us,' Pollack said. 'He took pictures of my daughter that we brought and he said he was going to look at it every day' Pollack told Trump, 'It stops here with this administration and me. I'm not going to sleep until it's fixed. And Mr. President, we're going to fix it. Because I'm going to fix it. I'm not going to rest. 'Fix it! It should have been one school shooting and we should have fixed it! And I'm pissed! Because my daughter I'm not going to see again. She's not here. She's not here. She's at, in North Lauderdale, in King David Cemetery. That's where I go to see my kid now.' After listening to parents like Pollack for some time, Trump said he'd be looking at making concealed carry permits available to teachers, which he admitted after asking for a show of support is certainly 'controversial.' Trump also endorsed stricter background checks and pledged his administration to considering age limits for the purchase of semi-automatic rifles like the one the Parkland shooter used and new measures to treat mentally ill individuals. 'We're going to pick out the strongest ideas, the most important ideas, the ideas that are going to work and we're going to get them done,' the president said. 'It's not going to be talk, like it's been in the past. It's going on too long. Too many instances. And we're going to get it done.' Young women at a prestigious Sydney college have had their doors bashed down by older students, who share pictures of themselves holding up bras after sexual conquests, it has been revealed. Students who live at St John's College participate in numerous events at the beginning of the year, many of them reportedly centred around female first-year students. In one game called 'heavyweight,' male students take photos of themselves just after allegedly having sex with a girl and send it to their friends on Snapchat. The images, which show men brandishing bras, are often captioned 'heavyweight' or 'reigning heavyweight champion.' One common 'game' is the Fresher Five, which sees older male students rank new female students in their college by how 'f***able' they are. 'I was one of them on the list and have never felt like such a piece of meat in my life,' one woman told news.com.au. In one game called 'heavyweight' male students take photos of themselves just after allegedly having sex with a girl and send it to their friends on Snapchat. One photo shows a boy in bed holding up a bra. The images are often captioned 'heavyweight' or 'reigning heavyweight champion' 'I honestly had this huge boy grip me in a hug and whisper in my ear, 'You were in Fresher Five, watch out tonight.' The boys also organised the event with a Facebook group message titled Prime cuts and minute steaks. The opening post reads: 'Lads, gents and lords, fellas, ***ts and boarz, Judgement day is nigh . It's time to deliberate on fresher 5. With 60 [fresher girls] to consider, there's plenty of fish in the sea but someone's gotta sort the salmon from the carp.' Another game, called The Purge, sees the boys post sexual photos of each other on a closed Facebook group over a 24-hour period to try to embarrass each other as much as possible. Students who live at St John's College (pictured) reportedly participate in a myriad of events at the beginning of the year, many of them centred around female first year students The boys organised the event with a Facebook message thread titled Prime cuts and minute steaks. The opening post reads: 'Lads, gents and lords, fellas, ***ts and boarz, Judgement day is nigh . It's time to deliberate on fresher 5. With 60 [fresher girls] to consider, there's plenty of fish in the sea but someone's gotta sort the salmon from the carp' In one initiation in 2016, male and female freshers were locked in a communal bathroom and had fish guts thrown over them. Pictured: Freshers ask to get into a close Facebook group to view fresher girls Women at the college also revealed other traditions including one where red-headed freshers have to set their pubic hair on fire in front of others, with the winner lasting the longest before putting the fire out. In one initiation in 2016, male and female freshers were locked in a communal bathroom and had fish guts thrown over them. Another ritual involves older boys forcing the male freshers to dress up as goblins, consume alcohol and run around the college bashing down girls' doors. Some women have complained that male students regularly destroy the college, with some leaving faeces on the floor in the showers, or outside girls' bedrooms. Another tradition involves the male freshers referring to women as JETS - which stands for 'Just Excuse The Slag'. The freshers are not allowed to speak to or make eye contact with the women for the night. There were also complaints that the male students would 'gang up' for student elections and all vote for male candidates, barring the women from holding roles on committees. Female students have now formed an Equality Committee to bring changes. The rector of St John's college said in a statement: 'If any student proposing to come to St John's thinks that behaviour of the sort alleged is acceptable, they need to think again because this kind of behaviour is not accepted at St John's College. 'The college is deeply concerned by the claims which have been made. The College takes any allegation of this sort very seriously The College encourages reporting of any inappropriate behaviour.' Another game, called The Purge, sees the boys post sexual photos of each other on a closed Facebook group over a 24hour period to try to embarrass each other as much as possible President Donald Trump slammed CNN Thursday night in a tweet that included a claim that a Parkland shooting survivor 'quit' the network's town hall over a 'scripted question'. '"School shooting survivor says he quit @CNN Town Hall after refusing scripted question." Just like so much of CNN, Fake News. That's why their ratings are so bad! MSNBC may be worse,' Trump tweeted. The president was referring to the claim made by Colton Haab, 17, a member of the Junior ROTC who shielded students with Kevlar vests while Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School was under attack from gunman Nikolas Cruz. President Donald Trump slammed CNN Thursday night in a tweet that included a claim that Parkland shooting survivor Colton Haab (right) 'quit' the network's town hall over a 'scripted question' '"School shooting survivor says he quit @CNN Town Hall after refusing scripted question." Just like so much of CNN, Fake News. That's why their ratings are so bad! MSNBC may be worse,' Trump tweeted On Tucker Carlson Tonight on Thursday, Haab (right) said he was provided with a question that was not his own words Haab said he decided not to attend the televised meeting after the network rejected a question he wanted to ask and presented him with one of their own. 'CNN had originally asked me to write a speech and questions and it ended up being all scripted,' Haab told Miami's WPLG-TV. On Tucker Carlson Tonight on Thursday, Haab said he was provided with a question that was not his own words. 'They had taken what I had wrote and what I had briefed on and talked about, and they actually wrote the question for me,' Haab said. Haab said that's why he decided not to attend the town hall. 'Originally, I had thought that it was going to be more of my own question and my own say. And then it turned out to be more of just a script,' Haab told Carlson. 'And [the producer] had actually said that over the phone, that I needed to stick to the script.' The president was referring to the claim made by Haab, 17, a member of the Junior ROTC who shielded students with Kevlar vests while Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School was under attack from gunman Nikolas Cruz Haab said he decided not to attend the televised meeting after the network rejected a question he wanted to ask and presented him with one of their own. CNN claimed that Haab's father withdrew his name from participation before the forum began (Pictured, Haab's questions) CNN has denied scripting questions for Wednesday night's town hall meeting on gun control and safety with survivors of the Parkland massacre. The network released a statement on Thursday morning refuting Haab's allegation. It read: 'There is absolutely no truth to this. CNN did not provide or script questions for anyone in last night's town hall, nor have we ever. 'After seeing an interview with Colton Haab, we invited him to participate in our town hall along with other students and administrators from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School,' the statement continued. 'Colton's father withdrew his name from participation before the forum began, which we regretted but respected. We welcome Colton to join us on CNN today to discuss his views on school safety.' CNN's communications team were also quick to respond to Trump's tweet on Thursday. 'There is absolutely no truth to this story -- and we can prove that. CNN did not provide or script questions for anyone in last night's town hall, nor have we ever. Those are the facts. #FactsFirst,' the network's communications team replied. Haab said was planning to ask about school safety, and the possibility of using veterans as armed security guards in schools, but the questions were rejected by CNN. CNN aired the town hall on the Florida school shooting that included Florida Senators Marco Rubio (right) and Bill Nelson. It was moderated by CNN anchor Jake Tapper (left), and students and parents asked questions about gun control and school safety The network released a statement on Thursday morning that read: 'There is absolutely no truth to this. CNN did not provide or script questions for anyone in last night's town hall, nor have we ever' After allegedly being told he had to ask a scripted question, Haab decided not to attend the town hall. 'I don't think that it's going get anything accomplished. It's not gonna ask the true questions that all the parents and teachers and students have,' Haab said. Many GOP members have accused survivors of the Parkland shooting to be crisis actors. A video on YouTube that became the number 1 trending clip on the site claimed that 17-year-old shooting survivor David Hogg was a 'crisis actor' The video regurgitates a Californian news broadcast from summer 2017 which shows Hogg describing how a friend of his got into an argument with a lifeguard on the beach. A keen student journalist, Hogg, who was 16 at the time, said he started filming when his friend and the lifeguard got into an altercation. The teenager and his family moved to Florida from California, where they had lived for years, in 2014. He shared the video on his own YouTube channel where it gathered hundreds of views and attracted the attention of a local CBS channel which then filmed a segment on the fight. Because it was taken six months before the shooting at Florida's Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and was filmed in a different state, conspiracy theorists deduced that it was proof Hogg is an actor who has been hired to speak around the country. CNN aired a town hall on the Florida school shooting that included Senators Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Bill Nelson (D-FL) and the NRA's Dana Loesch and Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel. Rubio (left) was called 'pathetically weak' by a victim's father, Fred Guttenberg (right), for refusing to support an assault weapon ban during Town Hall meeting with Florida massacre victims and families Also in attendance at the town hall meeting were he NRA's Dana Loesch (right) and Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel (left) Moderated by CNN anchor Jake Tapper, students and parents asked questions about gun control and school safety. During the town hall, Rubio received a chorus of boos when he said that a ban on assault weapons would not have prevented the fatal shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. One of the first parents to take the stage was Fred Guttenberg, whose daughter Jaime was killed after being shot in the back as she ran away from the shooter, 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz, on Valentine's Day. 'Your comments this week and those of our president are pathetically weak. Look at me and tell me you will do something about guns,' the bereaved father implored. 'Were guns a factor?' Rubio did say that yes - guns were a factor, but insisted that an all-out ban on assault and semi-automatic weapons was not the answer. He said his reason for not supporting the ban is because it would outlaw roughly 200 types of guns - assault rifles - while the purchase of over 2,000 types of 'nearly identical' guns would still be legal. A woman has died after being run over during an attempted carjacking in a quiet suburban cul-de-sac. The woman, believed to be aged in her 50s, was seriously injured after being hit by a car in Cedar Court in Mirrabooka, Perth just before 10am on Friday, the ABC reported. The woman died in hospital a short time later, and the driver was arrested after a manhunt lasting 90 minutes. The male driver allegedly fled on foot before being caught by police The male driver allegedly fled on foot before being caught by police. Detectives and forensic police have cordoned off the street, and they are investigating the area. It is understood the man had attempted to steal the woman's car before she was hit with it. Police are interviewing neighbours in an attempt to gather more information on the incident. Queenslanders should expect a wet and wild last weekend of summer with the state's south east expected to cop a month's worth of rain in the next few days. The weather bureau has issued a severe weather warning for the Gold Coast, Hinterland and Border Ranges. The Bureau of Meteorology forcasted heavy rainfall and possible flash flooding across coastal and adjacent inland areas extending from the Sunshine Coast hinterland down through Brisbane and into the Gold Coast hinterland on Friday night and into Saturday morning. Scroll down for video Emergency services have warned motorists in Queensland's south east are warned to not drive through flooded roads This motorist decided to take the risk and found themselves in a spot of bother It appears some motorists aren't getting the message with Queensland Police having to help people get out of trouble near Brisbane Parts of the Gold Coast have already received 95 mm of rain on Friday, which made for dramatic weather photos shared on social media 'Six hourly rainfall totals of 90mm to 120mm are possible, with isolated heavier falls up to 150mm possible,' the warning states. 'Locations which may be affected include Brisbane, Gold Coast hinterland, Sunshine Coast hinterland, Logan and Ipswich.' Forecasters predict 24 hour rainfall totals of 150mm to 250mm, while heavier falls up to 300mm are possible around the Gold Coast hinterland and southern border ranges over the weekend. A moderate flood warning is in place for for the Upper Dawson River with a minor flood warning for the Mary River. There is an initial minor flood warning for the Logan and Albert rivers. Parts of the Gold Coast have already received 95 mm of rain on Friday while around 90 mm was expected to fall in Brisbane. More storms are likely across the weekend, with another 35mm possible in Brisbane on Saturday and 10mm on Sunday. It's been a wet week already in Queensland with more heavy rain expected in the coming days The Bureau of Meteorology forcasted heavy rainfall and possible flash flooding across coastal and adjacent inland areas extending from the Sunshine Coast hinterland down through Brisbane and into the Gold Coast hinterland on Friday night and into Saturday morning. 'Swift water crews are on standby across Queensland with this weekend's heavy rainfall,' Queensland Fire and Emergency Service posted on its Facebook page. 'Swift water firefighters have the ability to operate anywhere in the state and we're urging everyone to be safe this weekend. We don't want our firies entering dangerous floodwater unnecessarily.' Sky News Weather chief meteorologist Tom Saunders told news.com.au that heavy falls could possibly into next week. 'This is due to an influx of very humid air from the Coral Sea, which is undercutting colder air sitting above inland Queensland. 'Warm air and cold air never really get along too well and often this leads to extreme weather, and in this case heavy rain and severe thunderstorms.' Queensland Police posted this photo of the access to Edens Landing Railway Station on Friday Queensland Police have put up Facebook posts of what roads to avoid Beaches on the Gold Coast were deserted during Friday's wild weather Parts of the Gold Coast have already received 95 mm of rain on Friday while around 90 mm was expected to fall in Brisbane Gold Coast Mayor Tom Tate said the city is not expected to experience major flooding and will not affect Commonwealth Games in jeopardy. 'No need to panic, we're in good shape,' Cr Tate told the Gold Coast Bulletin. 'When you look at the overall allowance for wet weather for the Commonwealth Games we're well ahead.'So with these three days (of no work) we'll be fine. We're on schedule we've already factored in wet weather.' Further north, Townsville Airport 85mm has had its wettest week in 9 months with 85mm of rain recorded, while Mackay copped 91mm. Severe thunderstorm warning for heavy rainfall and damaging winds for people in parts of Northern Goldfields and Upper Flinders, Herbert and Lower Burdekin, Central Highlands and Coalfields, Central West, Capricornia, Wide Bay and Burnett, Maranoa and Warrego and Darling Downs and Granite Belt Forecast Districts. Two teenagers are posing as cancer patients for the Leukaemia Foundation and collecting donations in Queensland. The girls are not a part of any official charity and are collecting the donation in a deceitful way, police have warned. The teenagers who are door knocking in Toowoomba are around the age of 13 and have shaved their heads. Two teenage girls are posing as cancer patients for the Leukaemia Foundation and collecting donations (stock image) Queensland police believe the girls do not have Leukaemia and are investigating the the incident. They have also warned to not fall for the scam and to make a report if you have donated or have seen the pair asking for donations. 'Thankfully stories like this are very rare,' the Leukaemia Foundation's CEO Bill Petch told the Daily Mail. The teenagers who are door knocking in Toowoomba are around the age of 13 and have shaved their heads 'We're lucky to be able to count on thousands of people each year, many of whom have been impacted by blood cancer, legitimately raising money for the Leukaemia Foundation,' he said. 'If anyone has any concerns whatsoever about people fundraising for the Leukaemia Foundation in their community, please contact us straight away on 1800 620 420.' If you have been scammed by the teenagers or have any information about the incident contact greta.levy@mailonline.com. A 12-year-old girl was 'torn to pieces' and partly 'eaten' by a pack of stray dogs as she walked home from school in Ukraine, it has been claimed. Liza Kanareikina was ambushed by the animals in woodland on her daily route in the Ukrainian city of Khartsyzsk, 18 miles east of Donetsk, say police. When she failed to return home, her parents found her mauled and dismembered body in blood-strained snow. They found her remains ripped apart by the dogs 'as vicious as wolves', according to local reports in the rebel-held eastern Ukraine region. Liza Kanareikina (pictured) was 'torn to pieces' and partly 'eaten' by a pack of stray dogs as she walked home from school in Ukraine Pictures have emerged from Ukraine showing the spot where Liza's mutilated body was found Liza Kanareikina was ambushed by the animals in woodland on her daily route in the Ukrainian city of Khartsyzsk, 18 miles east of Donetsk, say police. Neighbour Natalia Skiba said: 'The child was walking back home and did not make it. 'She was found here in the forest, already torn to pieces.' One local report stated that pieces of her flesh were 'literally torn off her body, the snow around was red from blood.' Another, claiming that the girl was partly eaten by the wild strays, said: 'Police opened a criminal investigation and shot dead several dogs in order to check what was inside their stomachs.' Local Irina Filippova said: 'Police are questioning citizens and looking for any witnesses of the tragedy.' A neighbour of the dead girl, Dmitry Tsurkanov, said: 'I was driving by the scene and found her school bag. One local report claimed that the 12-year-old was partly eaten by the wild strays. Pictures show some of the many stray dogs in the city When she failed to return home, her parents found her mauled and dismembered body in blood-strained snow. Pictured: The spot where her body was found When Liza failed to return home, her parents found her mauled and dismembered body in blood-strained snow. They found her remains ripped apart by the dogs 'as vicious as wolves', according to local reports in the rebel-held eastern Ukraine region 'I opened it and saw notebooks, textbooks, one was Russian Language for the 6th grade.' No announcement has been made yet on the findings of forensic analysis. 'The results of forensic examination are not ready yet in the city police department,' said a report by Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper. 'So far police have refrained from comment (on the results).' Locals are becoming deeply concerned over stray dogs abandoned in the civil war beginning in 2014 which resulted in pro-Vladimir Putin rebels seizing concern of this part of eastern Ukraine. Police are still looking into the circumstances surrounding Liza Kanareikina's gruesome death Neighbours said they drove past the spot (pictured) and found Liza Kanareikina's schoolbag before the her body was discovered nearby Locals are becoming deeply concerned over stray dogs (pictured) abandoned in the civil war beginning in 2014 which resulted in pro-Vladimir Putin rebels seizing concern of this part of eastern Ukraine Many people left the blitzed region and abandoned their pets to wander the streets (pictured) One woman, called Galina, complained she was bitten by a stray while shopping at a local market. Many people left the blitzed region and abandoned their pets. Vladimir Tsimmerman, an official from the Donetsk city administration in the rebel-held region, said: 'This is one of the consequences of war. All of us understand that these dogs were abandoned and became wild. 'Now they are migrating from one town to another, and what is more sad from time to time they attack and bite people. 'Every month we take away 50 to 100 dogs. Half are brought back with chips and sterilised. The rest are destroyed.' The body of a woman found dead at a Sydney beach has been identified as a local mother-of-seven - and two of her sons are awaiting trial for murder. Vanessa Travers from Matraville in Sydney's south was going for a late-night dip on Thursday night when a passer-by spotted her limp body in the water. Tributes have been paid to the mother by friends and family after she was pulled from the water and an extensive search and rescue operation carried out. Tributes have been paid to Vanessa Travers after her body was found at Maroubra beach Police and life saving teams were sent to the beach at Maroubra in south Sydney The mother, who was a South Sydney Rabbitohs fan, was described as someone who would help out people in her community. Barry O'Rourke said: 'Rip Aunty Vanessa Travers. Love you and going to miss you so much. Can't explain how shattered I am you're gone.' Friend Jason Bryant added: 'RIP Vanessa Travers friends for 33yrs you will be sadly missed.' But she is also known in the area for different reasons. Last year, her two sons Ray and Jackson Travers were charged with the murder of 68-year-old homeless man Peter Hoffman and are awaiting trial. Ray Travers has been linked to the controversial Bra Boys group for his chest tattoo, which sports their trademark 'My Brother's Keeper' tag. The Bra Boys, however, have denied any affiliation with the brothers. The mother, who was a South Sydney Rabbitohs fan, was described as someone who would help out people But she was renowned for less positive reasons after two of her sons were arrested on suspicion of killing a homeless man last year Ms Travers was a mother of seven and said to be a big member of the Maroubra community Ms Travers' two sons Ray and Jackson Travers (pictured left) were charged with the murder of 68-year-old Peter Hoffman (right) The search for another person by police and the Westpac rescue helicopter was called off on Friday afternoon. It was sparked after a second pile of clothes was found on the beach close to where Ms Travers was found dead in the sand. But officers have concluded she was alone. She was discovered at the north end of Maroubra beach, near the intersection of Maroubra Road and Marine Parade, just after midnight on Friday. 'She was an amazing lady, she always looked after everyone else before herself,' Keira-Lee Dobbie said according to the Daily Telegraph. The Westpac search and rescue helicopter was scrambled to take part in the search for a second person A full scale search and rescue operation was initiated after the body was found on Friday morning Police are not treating her death as suspicions, but investigations are ongoing. A report will be prepared for the Coroner. A spokesman for the New South Wales Police Foirce said: 'Police are investigating after the body of a woman was found at Maroubra beach overnight. 'Officers from Eastern Beaches Police Area Command were called to the north end of Maroubra Beach, near the intersection of Maroubra Road and Marine Parade about 12.10am (Friday, February 23) after a passer-by found the body of a woman.' Swimmers have been warned not to go in the sea after dark because of difficulty in detecting the surf Lifesaving teams have warned swimmers not to go out to sea after dark. Stephen Leahy, from Westpac Rescue Helicopters, told Nine News: 'After dark beaches aren't patrolled and it's difficult to see what the surf conditions are like. Don't go swimming after dark.' Police are urging anyone with information in relation to this incident to call Crime Stoppers on 1800 333000. A senior police officer has been charged with having sex with a girl under the age of 10. The serving New South Wales Police officer is accused of historic child sexual offences dating back to the 1990s. He was arrested at his home at 9.45am on Thursday and taken to Belmont Police Station, south of Newcastle. A senior police officer has been charged with having sex with a girl under the age of 10. He was taken to Belmont Police Station (pictured) The senior constable faces two charges of having sexual intercourse with a child under the age of 10 and six charges of indecent assault on a child under the age of 10. The man has been bailed and will appear at Toronto Local Court on March 28. He has not been sacked. Jayson Doelz's body was found, bloodied and bruised, on the side of a country road outside Kersbrook in the Adelaide Hills in January 2012. The 27-year-old had been lured to a private property, owned by a known drug dealer, by three men who tied him up, tortured him for hours before eventually killing him and dumping his body by a road. Chad Badcock, the leader of the murderous three, was also a member of the infamous Comanchero bikie gang, the Supreme Court revealed on Friday. Mr Doelz, 27, was tortured in the Adelaide suburb of Pooraka in January 2012 before being stabbed to death Symone Doelz told the court her brother did not deserve the disgusting violence against him His membership in the outlaw gang was not used as evidence in the initial trial, but prosecutors argued that his bikie status and 'thuggish' offending history be considered during his sentencing hearing. In December, Badcock, along with Kim Wayne Barnes, and Shane Matthew Muckray were jointly convicted with Mr Doelz's murder. Doelz's family has maintained that the murders were in part a hate crime, driven by racism. Speaking outside the court his sister, Symone, said the family were upset and angry and what they believed to be a race crime, Adelaide Now reported. Family and friends of Doelz, who have been traumatised by his death, maintain that the murder was motivated in part by racism 'This was horrendous, disgusting, vile and putrid ... it was really inhuman ... Ive called them animals previously but I wouldnt say even an animal would do this.' 'Justice, for us, is them never walking the streets again because theyre not going to stop at Jayson ... these people just shouldnt be released.' Doelz, whose son was just two years old at the time of his murder, was lured to the house after an argument over a lost pair of designer sunglasses. He had been at the house a week earlier and shown Badcock and Barnes a collection of sunglasses he had. One of the pairs had gone missing, so Doelz begun to search the house for them. 'Apparently Mr Badcock got the impression that in looking for those sunglasses Mr Doelz was going through other people's belongings,' Prosecutor Emily Telfer SC, said when opening the trial in 2017, the ABC reported. Chad Badcock (pictured), the leader of the murderous three,was also a member of the infamous Comanchero bikie gang Kim Wayne Barnes (pictured), tortured Doelz with Badcock and then bundled him into the car Shane Matthew Muckray (pictured), drove the car with Doelz trapped in the back Badcock was pacing around the house, holding a hammer and calling Mr Doelz a 'lowlife thief', witnesses said during the trial. A week later he was still agitated and when Doelz got to the house he punched him then elbowed him in the head causing him to fall over and loose consciousness. They tied his hands behind his back and as he fell in and out of consciousness the pair continuously bashed him. 'Jayson Doelz was asking repeatedly what he had done wrong. He apologised repeatedly and promised that he would tell no-one about what had happened to him if he was just allowed to go,' Ms Telfer told the jury. They then bundled Doelz into a boot of a car, striking his face with a shovel. During the drive he managed to open the boot of the car and escape, but the trio chased after him and stabbed him in the head, neck, and buttock. Doelz, whose son was just two years old when the murder happened, went in and out of consciousness as the pair beat him 'Justice, for us, is them never walking the streets again because theyre not going to stop at Jayson ... these people just shouldnt be released,' said his sister They left his body there, and on the drive back they listened to the rap song 'We Murderers Baby' by Ja Rule. They boasted to each other about where they had stabbed him. The case went unsolved for years, until police made a breakthrough in 2016 when two witnesses made statements and led them to the killers. 'They are just pure animals who have killed Jayson, and also killed our happiness ... its like being stuck in a horror movie,' Doelz's partner, Rebecca, said to the court in a victim impact statement. A New Jersey archbishop raised a few eyebrows when he tweeted 'Nighty-night, baby. I love you' - but his spokesman said it was an errant message intended for his sister. Cardinal Joseph Tobin's spokesman said the leader of the Newark Roman Catholic archdiocese later deleted Wednesday's tweet because it was being misinterpreted. Spokesman Jim Goodness said Tobin, 65, has eight younger sisters and 'they're all his baby sisters'. Goodness said he doesn't know how the siblings were communicating before the message was tweeted out. New Jersey archbishop Joseph Tobin gave cause for concern when he tweeted 'Nighty-night, baby. I love you,' - but his spokesman said it was an errant message intended for his sister Cardinal Tobin's spokesman said the leader of the Newark Roman Catholic archdiocese later deleted Wednesday's tweet because it was being misinterpreted Tobin's Twitter account shows he tweets infrequently. The full tweet read: 'Supposed to be airborne in 10 minutes. Nighty-night, baby. I love you.' Tobin was installed as Newark's archbishop in January 2017. During the mass at his installation, he told the congregation that the 'chasm between life and faith' was one of the greatest challenges facing the church. Tobin succeeded Archbishop John Myers, who reached the mandatory retirement age of 75 in July and had been accused of mishandling sex abuse cases and criticized for spending lavishly on his retirement home. Spokesman Jim Goodness said Tobin (pictured), 65, has eight younger sisters and 'they're all his baby sisters'. Goodness said he doesn't know how the siblings were communicating before the message was tweeted out Pope Francis elevated Tobin to cardinal in November 2016, marking a transition in Newark away from an archbishop who was focused on drawing hard lines about Catholic orthodoxy and providing a fresh start for an archdiocese battered by controversies over Myers' leadership. Tobin had made a name for himself in the Vatican as the former No. 2 at the Holy See's office for religious orders, where he worked to heal relationships with U.S. nuns amid an uproar over two Vatican investigations into their adherence to doctrine. The inquiries began under Pope Benedict XVI and ended under Francis, who praised the sisters for their work with the poor and disenfranchised. Tobin was the archbishop of Indianapolis, where he opposed Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, who wanted to prevent Syrian refugees from settling in the state. An Italian town which is overtly anti-immigrant has been cited by Silvio Berlusconi's right-wing coalition as an example to follow if it wins elections next month. The authorities in Sesto San Giovanni, on the outskirts of Milan, have expelled nearly 200 migrants and blocked plans to build a mosque, The Times (paywall) reported. So strident are its anti-immigrant views that plans are also afoot to screen every migrant entering its streets through CCTV equipped with facial-recognition technology perfected in Israel. Anis Amri, the man who committed the 2016 Berlin Christmas market attack, was shot dead in Sesto San Giovanni Silvio Berlusconi's right-wing coalition has made no secret of its stridently anti-immigration policies Mr Berlusconi and his supporters are seeking to exploit several widely held grievances against immigrants 'This town is the absolute example for other Italian cities to follow. It's already carrying out our programme,' said Guido Della Frera, who is standing locally for election with Mr Berlusconi's Forza Italia party. Sesto San Giovanni has expelled 194 migrants who it is claimed were sleeping in the streets and disturbing people, which is a record for an Italian town, Mayor Roberto di Stefano said. 'What is happening now is the model for what happens next in Italy,' he said in his office overlooking the town's neat streets. 'We have shown it's possible.' Sesto, a former industrial town that is now effectively part of Milan, was once nicknamed the Stalingrad of Italy for its strong left-wing politics, but as the factories closed and migrants moved in, the mood began to change and there was a move towards more right wing politics. Former Prime Minister Berlusconi has spent the campaign in competition with his coalition partner, Matteo Salvini of the anti-migrant Northern League, to see who is the most assertive when it comes to throwing out the largest number of illegal migrants from Italy. The tactic appears to have borne dividends because the coalition now has a lead in the polls, reflecting a rise in intolerance in Italy since the arrival of 600,000 migrants over the past four years. The coalition has exploited four widely held grievances against immigrants - which critics say are mostly erroneous or are misconceptions: there are too many of them, they cost too much money, they laze about all day and they bring crime. A forensic police officer looks at graffiti reading in Italian 'Death to the cops' on a vandalized monument honouring police killed by Red Brigades terrorists, in Rome - there have been several acts of vandalism and violence committed during Italy's tense election campaign Mr Berlusconi is cheered by followers prior to a meeting with European People's Party President Manfred Weber in Rome on Wednesday Critics say that in fact illegal immigrants comprise less than one percent of the population, legal migrants bring in between 2.1 and 2.8 billion euros more than they cost while many illegal migrants cannot work until their paperwork is completed. Government figures show that in 2017 murders dropped by nearly 12 percent, robberies by 11 percent and burglaries by nine percent. Nevertheless Italy's migration surge has contributed towards the growing unpopularity of its centre-left government, which will almost certainly be removed from office on March 4. Interior Minister Marco Minniti meanwhile warned on Wednesday that Italian organized crime syndicates could try to influence the results of the March 4 vote which will determine the formation Italy's next government. 'The risk, is, unfortunately, concrete, that the Mafia can condition the free vote in our country,' Minniti said at a presentation of Parliament's annual report on organized crime. 'We understand that's a threat to the most important thing in democracy'. Already in the campaign acts of violence and intimidation have taken place. A bullet was sent in the mail to a parliamentary candidate and two people were knifed while putting up campaign posters. Justin Trudeau met with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday morning - the only high-level engagement of his eight-day trip to India. The pair embraced on the red carpet outside the Presidential Palace in New Delhi, seven days after Modi avoided meeting the Canadian Prime Minister at the airport when his plane initially landed. That move has been widely interpreted as a snub over Trudeau's perceived support for Sikh separatist groups, though Modi officially denies it. Justin Trudeau was embraced by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi outside the Presidential Palace in New Delhi on Friday morning The intimate moment between the two men came after Modi failed to welcome Trudeau to India when he arrived on Saturday in a move widely regarded as a snub The Canadian Prime Minister met with his Indian counterpart in the only high-level engagement of his eight-day trip to the country Trudeau had to hastily cancel a dinner invite for a former member of a banned separatist group on Thursday in a fresh blow to his image. Jaspal Atwal, who tried to murder an Indian minister on Canadian soil back in 1986, had been due to dine alongside Trudeau at a dinner hosted by the Canadian High Commissioner. The Prime Minister said he had no idea an invite had been extended to Atwal and withdrew it as soon as he was made aware. In a further embarrassing blow, images then emerged of Atwal posing with Trudeau's wife Sophie at an event in Bollywood on Tuesday night. Trudeau has received a deeply mixed reception in India, with some flattered by his visit, but others deeply scornful of his preening for the cameras and especially his traditional outfits - which have been described as 'tacky' and 'annoying'. Modi has officially denied snubbing Trudeau, and on Thursday issued a tweet saying he was excited to meet him and his family Trudeau, his wife Sophie, and children Xavier, Hadrien and Ella-Grace pose with Modi outside the Presidential Palace in New Delhi High-level politicians have largely avoided Trudeau during his visit to India over his perceived support for Sikh separatists While many praised his clothing during the first two days of his trip, patience was wearing thin by the time he attended a Bollywood gala on Tuesday night, before the tide turned against him on Wednesday. Ministers, authors, journalists and ordinary Indians lined up to mock him, saying his wardrobe made him look as if he was about to attend a wedding. Leading the criticism was Omar Abdullah, former chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir, who tweeted saying Trudeau's preening was 'all just a bit much.' 'We Indians do not dress like this every day sir, not even in Bollywood.' While Indian newspapers had initially praised Trudeau's attempt to cross cultural boundaries - describing the red kurta he wore on the first day of his visit as 'resplendent' and 'festive' - by Wednesday they lost patience as well. Trudeau has also been widely mocked for his traditional outfit choices while in the country, with many suggesting it looks as if he has been attending a wedding The outfit that seemed to cause most offence was this golden number he wore on Tuesday to meet Bollywood stars, with newspapers describing it as 'tacky' Trudeau donned traditional Sikh dress on Wednesday when he visited the Golden Temple 'Too flashy even for an Indian', proclaimed Outlook India while The Print suggested that he looked like he was auditioning to be a model. The tipping point seemed to come when Trudeau met the great and good of Bollywood, whose looks arguably inspired some of his own. But while the actors dressed down for the occasion, opting largely for black suits and shirts, Trudeau went all-out with a gaudy golden number. India Today described the choice of clothing as 'tacky', suggesting it was insulting to his guests. High-level politicians have also largely steered clear of Trudeau during his visit, and he has spent much of it trying to shake off the perception that his administration is a soft touch on extremists. During a visit the Golden Temple in Amritsar, the holiest site in Sikhism, he assured Punjab's chief minister that Canada does not sympathise with extremist movements. Canada is home to roughly half a million Sikhs and Trudeau's administration has been accused of being too cosy with those agitating for a separate homeland in India's northern Punjab state. Trudeau particularly riled New Delhi last year when he attended a parade in Canada at which Sikh militants were feted as heroes. Ousted Ukip leader Henry Bolton today admitted he and girlfriend Jo Marney had still been a couple during the racist texts row - despite previously claiming they had split. Racist messages sent by former model Miss Marney sparked the furore which led to Mr Bolton's removal as party leader last weekend after just five months in the role. Mr Bolton had publicly distanced himself from his 25-year-old girlfriend as he battled to keep his job, but admitted on LBC today that they had always been together. Racist messages sent by Jo Marney (left) about Meghan Markle sparked the furore which led to Henry Bolton's (right) removal as leader last weekend after just five months in the role Mr Bolton and Miss Marney were interviewed by host Nick Ferrari (left) on LBC this morning Asked by host Nick Ferrari if they were 'ever not together', Mr Bolton said 'No' - and on whether he had previously told 'fibs', he admitted that he was 'playing on words'. Miss Marney was asked if their romance was switched off and on, replying: 'It wasn't. It was to the general public, but it wasn't to me. I was fine with it. I was a Ukip fan.' She added: 'There was a bit of friction about it, but I understood. It's quite difficult to sit at home and watch your boyfriend on telly saying that he's not your boyfriend.' Asked if she could trust Mr Bolton, Miss Marney replied: 'Yeah, of course I can.' She then appeared to joke: 'Maybe the public shouldn't trust him but I certainly did.' Nick Ferrari (pictured) asked Miss Marney if the couple's romance was switched off and on, and she replied: 'It wasn't. It was to the general public, but it wasn't to me. I was fine with it.' She added that she was attracted to his 'many' qualities, adding: 'He's cheeky, he's funny, he makes me laugh, I think he's a gentleman. I think he's bloody great.' She was also asked how Ukip had treated her, replying: 'I think I've been used as a political pawn. I think there's certain people within Ukip who have their own political agendas at heart, rather than the party, to advance their own careers, and I think they've tried to destroy my character in order to get to Henry, in order to oust Henry. 'I'm not going to names, but a small group within Ukip. I think it's because they wanted to advance their own political careers. I think they were anti-Henry from the start.' Miss Marney then spoke about how it was instant attraction when she first met Mr Bolton in Kent, saying: 'We met at a Ukip lunch in Folkestone just before Christmas.' Asked if she could trust Mr Bolton, Miss Marney appeared to joke as she replied: 'Yeah, of course I can. Maybe the public shouldn't trust him but I certainly did' Mr Bolton added: 'Jo's an attractive lady. We were talking for about five minutes, and I thought, well, there's a sagacity here some of the comments she made about political things. 'We talked about the organisation of the party, we talked about some of the things going on in Kent. It was a very brief conversation.' Asked what the state was of his marriage to his wife Tatiana at this stage, Mr Bolton said: 'It was as it had been for some months. My wife and two children had moved to Vienna in July, by mutual agreement. 'There was no animosity over that, it was a practical move because I was going for the leadership and it was a way of ensuring there was some income coming to the family through my wife, because there was no other income. The row over the texts broke out when it emerged Miss Marney, 25, had said that Meghan Markle's mixed-race background would 'taint' the royal family Mr Bolton admitted that his wife Tatiana Smurova-Bolton has been left 'deeply hurt and upset' 'And at least that way we secured the future for the two girls no matter what the outcome of the leadership contest.' He insisted the 'romantic side' of his marriage was over when he met Miss Marney, but said his wife has been left 'deeply hurt and upset about this - so has her family'. The row over the texts broke out when it emerged Miss Marney had said that Meghan Markle's mixed-race background would 'taint' the royal family. Yesterday on ITV's This Morning she said the comments were 'disgusting', adding: 'The things that I said were meant to shock and they don't reflect my real views.' Mr Bolton made regular media appearances after the row broke out in January following the revelations in The Mail On Sunday, and had said at the time that the 'romantic side' of his relationship with Miss Marney was 'over'. A UN report has revealed the horrific human rights abuses committed in South Sudan's five-year civil war including the story a woman who says her 12-year-old son was forced to have sex with his grandmother to stay alive. The latest report was released on Friday by a United Nations commission in the hopes of one day finding justice. It includes a horrific day in Pagak town when one South Sudanese man returned home after hiding from government soldiers to find they had blinded his mother, gouging out her eyes with spears. She had tried to defend her 17-year-old daughter from being raped by more than a dozen soldiers and didn't succeed. Seventeen soldiers then raped her. The family's father was beheaded. A UN report has revealed the horrific human rights abuses committed in South Sudan's five-year civil war. Above, South Sudanese soldiers accused of gang-raping five foreigners, murdering a local journalist and looting a hotel, are led to their prison van in May 2017 It also includes what a South Sudanese woman told the commission - that her 12-year-old son was forced to have sex with his grandmother to stay alive. 'I did not expect to be confronted with so much ritual humiliation and degradation deliberately done for multiple reasons,' Andrew Clapham, a commission member and international law professor, said. 'The suffering and cruelty was worse than anyone could have imagined.' The findings, with 'sufficient evidence' against both President Salva Kiir's government forces and rebels, identify more than 40 senior military officials, including three state governors, 'who may bear individual responsibility for war crimes.' The report will be presented to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva next month. They also will be made available to judicial mechanisms such as a hybrid court for South Sudan, which long has been urged by the international community but has never appeared. Children play and draw on the floor of a World Vision tent as they wait for child protection specialists to evaluate their situations at the Imvepi reception center Untold tens of thousands have been killed in South Sudan since the conflict erupted in December 2013, just two years after independence from Sudan. More than two million people have fled the country, the largest refugee crisis since the Rwandan genocide 24 years ago. Millions who remain at home face hunger. The new report is an account of the gang-rapes, castrations, ethnic violence and other abuses that have left much of the impoverished nation in despair, while international frustration with the warring sides grows. An attempt at a cease-fire in late December was violated within hours. Disgusted, the United States announced a largely symbolic arms embargo and urged the UN Security Council to do the same. South Sudan's government did not immediately comment on the report on Friday. 'The human rights body should start putting the blame directly on the regime instead of blaming both sides,' opposition spokesman Lam Paul Gabriel told the AP. The latest report on human rights abuses in South Sudan's five-year civil war identified more than 40 senior military officials 'who may bear individual responsibility for war crimes.' Pictured, South Sudanese refugees cross a wooden bridge from South Sudan to Uganda While names of alleged perpetrators are being collected by the UN commission, they are not shared publicly to help protect witnesses who come forward. The names are being given to the UN human rights office in Geneva. The report, based on 230 witness statements and other materials, is the second since the UN commission was established in 2016 and the first since it was given a stronger mandate to preserve evidence and conduct investigations instead of simply monitoring and reporting. South Sudan's conflict is splintering into chaos, the new report says. What began as a 'power struggle' between Kiir and former Vice President Riek Machar has fractured into an estimated 40 armed groups across the country, with many fighting each other. But consistent patterns stand out, such as government attacks on unarmed, fleeing civilians in areas where no opposition forces were present, the report says. 'There is a clear pattern of ethnic persecution, for the most part by government forces,' Clapham said. Despite the latest accounts of abuses, South Sudan experts are skeptical that anything will change amid what the report calls a 'grave' lack of accountability. 'The recommendations of these human rights reports have not been implemented in South Sudan, making them useless,' Jacob Chol, senior political analyst and professor at the University of Juba, told the AP. He said human rights abusers should be barred from the South Sudan peace talks in neighboring Ethiopia. The talks reached a stalemate last week but are expected to pick up again next month. A jobless flytipper has been shamed after he was filmed dumping smelly jars of pickles, yoghurt, plastic bottles and other rubbish just two miles away from a tip. Terence Tyndall, 53, had no idea that his every move was being recorded by a CCTV camera. Crystal clear footage captured Tyndall smirking as he strolled off from the huge pile of filth after retrieving the heavy-duty bag in which he hauled the rubbish. The footage shows him arriving at the scene in a blue saloon towing a trailer on May 1 last year. The crystal clear footage shows Tyndall reversing into a clearing surrounded by shrubs and trees with his registration plate clearly on view for the camera Crystal clear footage captured Terence Tyndall smirking as he strolled off from the huge pile of filth after retrieving the heavy-duty bag in which he hauled the rubbish He turns around and reverses into a clearing surrounded by shrubs and trees with his registration plate clearly on view for the CCTV camera. Tyndall then gets out of the car and then loosens his cargo of rubbish, so it falls from the trailer when he drives off. Tyndall, of Blackley, Manchester, was tracked down thanks to the footage and pleaded guilty to illegally dumping waste on Bramley Street in Broughton, Salford. The flytipper was charged under the Environmental Protection Act 1990 at Manchester and Salford Magistrates' Court, where Tyndall was fined 480, ordered to pay costs of 170 and 480 in compensation to the authority. His five minutes of sham cost him a total of 1,128. Salford Council said the rubbish caused a 'strong, unpleasant smell' and attracted rats. The site is close to housing and an NHS rehabilitation home which had to be disinfected. When questioned by investigating officers, Tyndall said he borrowed a friend's trailer to collect a quad bike. He claimed the vehicle developed a puncture and, because he had no spare wheel, he left the trailer near shops at the end of the street. After returning he claimed someone had filled the trailer with jars, bottles and cartons. He told the council that he dumped the rubbish in 'desperation'. Cllr David Lancaster, the councils lead member for environment and community safety, said Tyndall made no attempt to check if the council tip would be able to take the waste. 'There are no excuses for dumping rubbish in the streets of Salford, creating a nuisance for local residents and wasting public money cleaning it up,' he said. 'Mr Tyndall has found this out to his cost.' The case formed part of a council crackdown on fly-tipping codenamed Operation Pandora, which has led to 50 prosecution so far. A worker has died after he was crushed by a pallet of gas cylinders at a grain silo in South Australia. The 50-year-old man was working at the grain wharf in Port Lincoln on Thursday afternoon when the heavy objects fell on top of him, trapping him. The man was eventually freed and taken to Port Lincoln Hospital and was later flown to Flinders Medical Centre in Adelaide, where he died on Friday, The Advertiser reported. SafeWork SA is investigating the incident. Work at the grain silos has been suspended. Advertisement These are the remarkable images of abandoned buildings in Estonia and elsewhere in the Nordic region. The chilling shots show everything from fairy tale castles, flooded prisons, disused casinos and abandoned bath houses. Abandoned Nordic, who compiled the photographs, now have 15,000 followers on Instagram. The duo behind the account met by chance, halfway across the world in Indonesia, despite them both hailing from Helsinki, Finland. Photographer Tanja Palmunen and writer Kimmo Parhiala regularly explore abandoned buildings together, going to great lengths to get the best shots, even using scuba equipment to access underwater locations. 'We travel to abandoned places around Nordic countries, and beyond, seeking places which have been taken over by silence.' the pair say. The sunken Soviet-era prison, in Rummu, Estonia. The prison camp was established just before the Second World War in 1938 and the 400-odd inmates were used for forced labour in local sandstone and slate mines. But mining came to a halt when the Soviet Union collapsed and Estonia became independent. As a result the groundwater pumps seized and the area was partially filled with water. 'This is why today scuba divers can find buildings and even the remains of the vocational school underwater,' Kimmo said. The two explorers from Abandoned Nordic used scuba equipment to film beneath the surface at Rummu in freezing temperatures. 'Visibility in the water was fair but rays of midday sunlight revealed the walls and the shapes of the buildings in front of us,' Kimmo said. 'We swam inside from a large doorway inside the basement of a building with a partially collapsed roof. 'Some of the rooms were completely underwater and were full of concrete and darkness. 'Even though the buildings were grey, the greenness of the water brought warmth to the scenery. 'Nature has taken over this world a long time ago.' 'We continued our dive towards the next group of buildings,' Kimmo said. 'Our exhale bubbles hit the roof of the rooms as they try to seek their way to the surface. 'This dive is very shallow, my gauge is showing that we are only 6 meters deep, basically at the surface. From a narrow doorway we manage to squeeze inside the next room. The rooms are basically empty, no items are left. A single beer bottle is lying on the floor. We hover weightlessly from room to room. The peaceful state of mind is turning into coldness. The water is 4 degrees Celsius. We are used to shivers when exploring the abandoned world but this time it is because I was actually freezing.' A derelict castle in Estonia. The castle was built by a Russian count for his German wife - but they never got to stay in it because he died in St Petersburg - allegedly of a broken heart - when he heard that she had died. 'Not once did the count, or his lady, see this majestic manor house which was waiting only for them,' Kimmo said. An abandoned manor house in Estonia. 'When visiting the Baltics and especially Estonia, one encounters numerous beautiful manor houses in various states of decay,' Kimmo said. 'Many locations are now under complete reconstruction or are being restored to their original beauty. 'But we visited the ones which havent been touched by construction tools. 'Many manor houses have an intriguing history which quite often ended when the Soviet era began. 'Because of the Soviet past, the country has many weird and dark stories to tell, if you are willing to dig a little deeper.' A derelict manor house in Estonia. 'The country is quite small,' said Kimmo. 'The drive from the capital Tallinn to Valga, which is in the border between Estonia and Latvia, takes less than three hours. 'This means that every corner of the country is reachable during the same day, and which ever place you can spot from Google or satellite pictures, you can reach from Tallinn. 'We have we been there so many times because one encounters numerous beautiful manor houses in various states of decay.' Another abandoned manor house in Estonia. It is estimated that at the beginning of the 20th century there were 1,245 manors in Estonia as well as more than 100 parsonages and other large country dwellings. But the manors received their first blow in 1905, when during the revolution that began in Russia rebels burned down more than 100 buildings. Even more devastating was the breakdown of relations between the Estonian peasantry and the Baltic German nobility that had already been tangled for some time. The mass construction of imposing manors mostly began in Estonia from the 1760s onwards and lasted for more than 150 years until the outbreak of World War I. In the 18th century and at the beginning of the 19th century, the main construction work was centered in northern Estonia, where a number of manors in the Baroque and Classicist styles were established. In the second half of the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th century, construction also intensified in southern Estonia. Other photos taken by the pair include this abandoned - and very frozen - villa in Finland An abandoned casino in Romania overlooking the Black Sea A disused psychiatric hospital in Norway Inside of an abandoned Norwegian psychiatric hospital An abandoned Soviet-era place of worship in an undisclosed location A grand dilapidated building, location undisclosed A dilapidated church in Finland Another dilapidated church in an undisclosed location A grand staircase in an abandoned Scandinavian bath house Inside the abandoned thermal bath house in Scandinavia The exterior of the abandoned thermal bath house in Scandinavia Another exterior shot of the abandoned thermal bath house in Scandinavia An abandoned railway tunnel, Finland An isolated and forgotten fairy-tale castle, location undisclosed The continuing deadly assault on a rebel held town in Syria has left nearly a hundred children dead and scores of others needing hospital treatment. Dictator Bashar al-Assad has continued the brutal wave of airstrikes and artillery bombardment on the area of eastern Ghouta, near the capital Damascus, supported by his Russian ally. Rescuers claim deadly napalm is being used to incinerate a rebel-held Syrian town where conditions have been described as 'hell on earth'. Two children - one with blood on her face - receiving medical treatment in a hospital A nurse washes the face of an injured child inside a hospital in Douma, eastern Ghouta A sobbing boy with a bloodied face is asked about his father as another nurse treats him in a hospital The UN Security Council delayed a vote on demanding a 30-day ceasefire in Syria to Saturday at noon to allow more time for negotiations. It has been in talks on a draft resolution on the truce since February 9. The White Helmets volunteers captured images of what it says were missiles loaded with flammable liquid raining down on the city of Hamouria in East Ghouta. At least 462 people have been killed and many hundreds injured, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group says. A boy injured by the Syrian regime and Russian assault is lies on a hospital bed awaiting treatment An injured girl receives medical treatment at a hospital in Douma, in the rebel held area of eastern Ghouta A wounded Syrian girl is carried by a man at a makeshift clinic following Syrian government bombardments in Douma A boy with a bloodied face lying on a hospital bed wrapped in a blanket. So far, 95 children have been killed by the attacks on eastern Ghouta A wounded Syrian boy sits at a makeshift clinic following Syrian government bombardments in Douma, in the besieged Eastern Ghouta region on the outskirts of the capital Damascus A White Helmet volunteer carries an injured boy to an ambulance after a bombing raid yesterday A missile that landed on the town of Douma is inspected by local people as it lies in the street The dead include at least 99 children. Syrian state media reported one person was killed and 58 injured from rebel shelling of sites in Damascus, including a hospital. In a tweet, pro-rebel White Helmets volunteers, said its video, which is mostly dark apart from burning material appeared to fall from the sky, shows missiles 'loaded with prohibited napalm' being dropped in 'residential neighbourhoods'. The use of napalm is banned in civilian areas by the United Nations Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons. Similar claims were made in 2015 after an alleged attack on the besieged city of Darayya. In 2013 young children and adults suffered horrific burns after being caked in a 'napalm-like' substance when a bomb was dropped on a school playground near the country's capital. Fresh bombardment on Eastern Ghouta killed dozens yesterday, bringing the number of dead civilians in a five-day assault by the Syrian government to more than 400. Mounting calls for a humanitarian truce in one of the bloodiest episodes of Syria's seven-year conflict failed to stop 46 more people being killed by air strikes and rocket fire. Regime backer Russia said there was 'no agreement' at the UN Security Council on a 30-day ceasefire for Syria and presented amendments to a draft resolution that would allow aid deliveries and the evacuation of civilians from besieged Eastern Ghouta. As diplomats wrangled over a UN vote, which could take place on Friday, people huddled in basements while government forces pounded the enclave with rockets and bombs, turning towns into fields of ruins and even hitting hospitals. Aid group Doctors Without Borders said 13 of the facilities it supports in Eastern Ghouta were damaged or destroyed in three days, leaving remaining staff with very little to save the hundreds of wounded brought to them every day. In the hospital mortuary in Douma, the main town in the enclave just east of Damascus, bodies wrapped in white shrouds were already lined up on the floor, two of them children. 'Five days of air strikes and intense artillery fire by the regime and its Russian ally have killed 403 civilians, including 95 children,' said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Rescuers claim deadly napalm is being used to incinerate a rebel-held Syrian town where conditions have been described as 'hell on earth'. Pictured: Rubble after an airstrike in Hamouria on Thursday Syrian children stand by the door of a house as smoke billows in the background durning shelling in Hamouria, in the rebel held besieged Eastern Ghouta region White Helmet volunteers inside an ambulance helps an injured man after bombing, in the rebel-held Douma Morning rain appeared to initially keep warplanes away on Thursday but the sky cleared by midday and jets, some of them Russian according to the Observatory, soon returned. Russia has so far denied direct involvement in the assault on Ghouta but the pro-government Syrian newspaper Al-Watan reported on Thursday that Russian warplanes and advisers had joined the battle. The US said on Thursday Russia had 'unique responsibility' for the deaths. 'Without Russia backing Syria, the devastation and the deaths would certainly not be occurring,' State Department Spokeswoman Heather Nauert told journalists. Regime and allied forces have been massing around the enclave, in which an estimated 400,000 people live, ahead of a likely ground offensive to flush out holdout Islamist and jihadist groups. An AFP correspondent saw rescuers known as the 'White Helmets' forced to abandon efforts to retrieve a wounded woman from the rubble of a collapsed home when air strikes resumed. When they ventured back to the site, the woman was dead. The indiscriminate bombardment and the strikes on medical facilities have sparked global outrage but few concrete options have emerged to stop the bloodletting. The aid community voiced its frustration as the world appeared once again powerless to stop a conflict that has left almost 350,000 dead in seven years and caused destruction rarely seen since World War II. Smoke rises in the aftermath of a raid by Assad regime forces on the outskirts of the town of Kafr Batna The attacks have caused destruction on a scale that has not been seen since World War II Fresh bombardment on Eastern Ghouta killed dozens yesterday, bringing the number of dead civilians in a five-day assault by the Syrian government to more than 400. This was the scene over Kafr Batn in Eastern Ghouta yesterday Humanitarian agencies are 'sickened that no matter how many times they've raised the alarm, taken the step of speaking out, called on the Security Council to do something, the violence and brutality will sink to new lows', said the Syria INGO Regional Forum. At the UN, Russian Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia said sponsors Sweden and Kuwait were requesting a vote on the ceasefire plan even though they are 'fully aware there is no agreement on it'. The Security Council needs to reach a 'feasible' agreement on a ceasefire and not take a decision that would be 'populistic' and 'severed from reality', he said. Talks for a deal between the regime and the armed groups controlling Ghouta appear to have stalled. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said jihadist fighters in Ghouta had rejected an evacuation deal. 'A few days ago, our military in Syria suggested to the fighters that they withdraw peacefully from Eastern Ghouta, like the evacuation of fighters and their families that was organised in East Aleppo,' he said. The head of the defence committee in Russia's lower house of parliament said Thursday that more than 200 new types of weapons were tested as part of his country's military support to the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. 'It's not an accident that today they are coming to us from many directions to purchase our weapons, including countries that are not our allies,' he said. The Trump administration is considering an offer from Republican mega-donor Sheldon Adelson to pay for at least part of a new U.S. embassy in Jerusalem, four U.S. officials told The Associated Press. Lawyers at the State Department are looking into the legality of accepting private donations to cover some or all of the embassy costs, the administration officials said. The discussions are occurring as the new embassy clears its final bureaucratic hurdles. On Thursday, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson ended weeks of delay by signing off on a security plan for moving the embassy from Tel Aviv to the holy city, according to the officials, who weren't authorized to discuss the issue publicly and demanded anonymity. In one possible scenario, the administration would solicit contributions not only from Adelson but potentially from other donors in the evangelical Christian and American Jewish communities, too. One official said Adelson, a Las Vegas casino magnate and staunch supporter of Israel, had offered to pay the difference between the total cost - expected to run into the hundreds of millions of dollars - and what the administration is able to raise. Israel backer: Sheldon Adelson - who is seen speaking to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, before a speech by President Donald Trump at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem in May last year - is offering potentially hundreds of millions for a new embassy building in the city Mega-donor: Sheldon Adelson, seen with ihs wife Miriam at one of the 2016 presidential debates, is a key Republican funder Capital: The decision to declare Jerusalem as Israel's capital in U.S. eyes sent shockwaves around the world and led to protests but State Department officials are now planning the practical elements of how to make the move Under any circumstance, letting private citizens cover the costs of an official government building would mark a significant departure from historical U.S. practice. In the Jerusalem case, it would add yet another layer of controversy to Trump's politically charged decision to move the embassy, given Adelson's longstanding affiliation with right-wing Israeli politics. It's not clear if there is any precedent, nor whether government lawyers would give the green light to accept Adelson's or anyone else's donations for the embassy. Adelson's unconventional offer was made around the time Trump announced in December he would move the embassy to the disputed city of Jerusalem. It would address the president's stated distaste for shelling out eye-popping sums for overseas diplomatic facilities. Although Trump has promoted the Jerusalem move as fulfilling a key campaign promise, he also was outspoken last month in blasting the $1 billion price tag for a new embassy in London. Since Trump's announcement, his administration has been sifting through options for fast-tracking the Israel embassy's relocation. Last month, Vice President Mike Pence announced during a visit to Israel that the embassy would move by the end of 2019 - possibly earlier. Ambassador David Friedman, who lobbied for Trump's decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital, has advocated moving the embassy as soon as possible. The U.S. has looked at several possible sites. The most likely plan involves a phased approach to opening the embassy in Jerusalem's Arnona neighborhood at an existing U.S. facility that handles consular affairs like passports and visas. The U.S. could initially retrofit a small suite of offices in that facility to accommodate Friedman and one or two top aides such as his chief of staff. That would allow the administration to hang an 'embassy' sign over the door and formally open it, perhaps in the next few months. The ribbon could be cut in time for Israel's Independence Day, Yom Ha'atzmaut, which takes place in April. The rest of the embassy staff would remain at first in America's current facility in Tel Aviv. Over time, the Arnona facility would be expanded to accommodate more embassy personnel. The expansion could ultimately involve an adjacent property that currently houses a home for senior citizens, officials said. That property is already set to come under U.S. control in the next few years under a previous arrangement. Retrofitting just a few offices could be accomplished at minimal cost. But expanding the new embassy into a full-fledged complex that houses the bulk of America's diplomatic staff in Israel would easily cost more than $500 million dollars, officials familiar with the process said. Backer: Adelson, who donated $5 million to Trump's inaugural committee, is one of the Republican Party's biggest donors and a major supporter of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Adelson also finances Israel Hayom, a pro-Netanyahu newspaper that is distributed free throughout Israel. Particularly pricey are the strict security requirements for embassies that are written into U.S. law. It's unclear how much of the cost Adelson might be willing to cover. The White House declined to comment. An Adelson spokesman didn't respond to multiple requests for comment. The State Department said it had 'nothing to announce' about the Jerusalem embassy move and would not 'get ahead of any decisions by the secretary.' 'We have no confirmation or details about this hypothetical proposal,' the State Department said. Kathy Bethany, the former cost management director for the State Department's Bureau of Overseas Building Operations, said she couldn't recall any instances of the U.S. government accepting donations to build embassies during her tenure, which ended in 2014. 'I don't know how well that would work,' Bethany said. 'Would we be beholden to putting their name on the building? I've never heard of that.' There are several ways, in theory, that it could happen. Short of donating directly to the embassy, citizens could always cut a general check to the U.S. Treasury, as politicians occasionally do to make a point about the national debt. The donors could unofficially 'earmark' their dollars as being intended to offset the embassy's cost. The State Department's Foreign Affairs Manual also lays out a formal process for accepting gifts from private citizens, including real estate. The process says gifts must be rigorously evaluated on a case-by-case basis and only allowed when the gift 'would not give the appearance of a conflict of interest.' Adelson, who donated $5 million to Trump's inaugural committee, is one of the Republican Party's biggest donors and a major supporter of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Adelson also finances Israel Hayom, a pro-Netanyahu newspaper that is distributed free throughout Israel. If lawyers decide to allow donations for the embassy, it would come with significant political risk for Trump. The president already faces major criticism from Palestinians and others who say his decision to move the embassy to Jerusalem - also claimed by the Palestinians for the capital of their future state - tipped the scales unfairly in Israel's favor. Mort Klein, president of the pro-Israel group Zionist Organization of America and a close associate of Adelson, said accepting donations would be ill-advised. Klein said he knew Adelson was 'deeply interested' in seeing the embassy relocate to Jerusalem but was unaware that the casino mogul had offered to help pay for it himself. 'This is a government project. It's a government-run embassy,' Klein said. 'I don't want people to be able to say it was Jewish money.' Former MPs still have thousands of pounds' worth of IT equipment they were loaned by parliament. One SNP politician defeated last June, Paul Monaghan, has two desktop computers, an HP laptop, an iPad and three printers, according to a list released by the House of Commons. The items are thought to be worth more than 3,000. Mr Monaghan says he has been waiting for them to be collected. Sinn Fein ex-MP Pat Doherty has apparently kept two 400 iPads, a 950 laptop and a 450 printer despite never having actually taken his seat in the Commons before retiring last year. Details of the outstanding items have been handed to MailOnline under freedom of information rules. One SNP politician defeated last June, Paul Monaghan, has kept two desktop computers, an HP laptop, an iPad and three printers, according to a list released by the House of Commons Sinn Fein ex-MP Pat Doherty (pictured left) has apparently kept two 400 iPads, a 950 laptop and a 450 printer despite never having actually taken his seat in the Commons. The disclosure says Labour's Steve Rotheram (right), who quit the Commons to become Liverpool Mayor, did not give back an iPad and a printer MPs can choose a package of IT equipment to take on loan from the House authorities at the beginning of each parliament - but it must be handed back. The budget for such kit rose from 5,950 per MP for the election in May 2015 to 7,200 last June. But the Commons said that as of February 9 - eight months after the national poll - 18 former MPs who left parliament at the vote still had equipment outstanding. Some of the politicians complained that there were errors in the list, and blamed the parliamentary authorities for failing to collect items. The House authorities stressed the disclosure was a 'snapshot' and they were 'in discussions' with the politicians about giving the kit back. The disclosure says Labour's Steve Rotheram, Jeremy Corbyn's former aide who quit the Commons to become Liverpool Mayor, did not give back an iPad and a printer. Mark Durkan, the former SDLP leader who was outsted from Foyle by Sinn Fein last June, has apparently not returned three Dell tablets. Daniel Kinahan, who represented South Antrim for the UUP until the election, is listed as holding on to an iPad and an iPad mini, as well as an HP latpop. Mr Kinahan insisted the equipment had in fact all been picked up from him in Northern Ireland last autumn. Stewart Jackson, who lost his Peterborough seat and is now chief of staff to David Davis, is said to still have an iPad, an HP laptop and two printers. He insisted Commons contractors had failed to turn up to collect the equipment in August last year, and he had heard nothing since. 'Typically incompetent and not very surprising,' he added. MPs can choose a package of IT equipment to take on loan from the House authorities at the beginning of each parliament - but it must be handed back Former Cabinet minister Peter Lilley apparently has a 4G iPad, and ex-Labour MP Simon Danczuk an HP laptop. The FOI reponse said it was not possible to give an estimate for the cost of the equipment as it would take officials too long. But the parliamentary IT service catalogue gives prices for a range of devices, including 450 for a 4G iPad, 947 for an HP laptop, 648 for a desktop computer, and 448 for a HP Laserjet Monochrome printer. A Commons spokesman said 1,000 items had been returned by MPs, but efforts were 'ongoing' to reclaim other equipment. 'The House of Commons is working with former Members who were defeated or who stood down in 2017 to retrieve all loan IT equipment and to clarify what has already been returned,' the spokesman said. 'In some cases logistical reasons may have been behind the non-return of equipment and further attempts are being made.' As everybody with multiple email accounts will know, its a hassle trying to remember all the requisite information - which name is the one for the Gmail login? Which password is the right one? Is there a dot in my gmail account? While Google cant automatically help you with the first two, its Gmail email service certainly can do something about the last issue. Turns out all those nights you spent tossing and turning, worrying about whether you signed up for Elton John ticket updates with an incorrectly-typed Gmail account or not, could have been avoided. Google provides a definitive answer as to whether dots matter in Gmail email addresses Thats because Google doesnt care about the dots in your gmail login. They just arent that important. On Google support, the company out right says that Dots don't matter in Gmail addresses. But what does that actually mean? Do dots in Gmail addresses matter to Google? The dots in question are the ones everyone naturally assumed are important and distinguish between two separate email accounts. An email sent to johnsmith@gmail.com is surely not one that wouldnt end up in the inbox of john.smith@gmail.com, right? Wrong. As Google points out: If your email is johnsmith@gmail.com, you own all dotted versions of your address. This means that the following gmail address variations all lead back to the same account: john.smith@gmail.com jo.hn.sm.ith@gmail.com j.o.h.n.s.m.i.t.h@gmail.com Google does not recognise characters and periods in Gmail addresses. It also means that the reverse is true: if you own the john.smith@gmail.com address, then you own the johnsmith@gmail.com as well. So it turns out its not only dots that are not as important as you think. According to Slate, Google will ignore a plus sign and anything that comes after it in a Gmail address. So anything sent to a johnsmith+spam@gmail.com address will still make its way to poor Johns gmail inbox. The tech company reveals if johnsmith@gmail.com and john.smith@gmail.com are different However, this does lead to a potentially useful inbox sorting tool. Even though it will all go to the same account, by providing variations of your email account, it can be a good way of manually sorting out your inbox: a johnsmith+spam@gmail.com for spam emails and johnsmith+tickets@gmail.com for anything ticket-related. However, Google does point out: If you use Gmail through work, school, or other organization (like yourdomain.com or yourschool.edu), dots do change your address. Do dots in Hotmail accounts matter? While dots in Gmail addresses dont matter, they certainly do on Microsoft Hotmail accounts. In a Microsoft community reply to this question, the company said: Adding a period (.) to your email address will be recognized as a different account in Outlook/Hotmail. A Labour MP today spoke of her daughter's 'heartbreaking' diagnosis with chronic kidney problems and wait for a donor as she urged others to back a change in the law. Julie Elliott told how her daughter Rebecca, 36, was given the shock diagnosis 18 months ago and now has to spend eight hours a day on dialysis. She said Rebecca, who has a six year-old daughter, went from a healthy marathon runner to not being able to walk to the end of her street when her condition was at its worst. Ms Elliott, MP for Sunderland Central, told the House of Commons: 'It came as a huge shock to Rebecca, to me to our family and friends. And to face the reality and fragility of life is very hard, but to face it about of my own children, even though an adult, is one of the hardest things I have ever faced. She spoke movingly about her her family's experience during a debate of a Bill which wants to introduce a system of opt out organ donation. The Government has backed a Private Member's Bill, introduced by Labour MP Geoffrey Robinson, so people are automatically signed up to the register but can opt out. Julie Elliott (pictured left, with her daughter Rebecca, centre, and sister Joan, right) told how her daughter Rebecca, 36, was given the shock diagnosis 18 months ago and now has to spend eight hours a day on dialysis Labour MP Julie Elliott today spoke of her daughter's 'heartbreaking' diagnosis with chronic kidney problems and wait for a donor as she urged others to back a change in the law Under current rules individuals have to sign up to allow their organs to be used in life-having operations after they dies. But campaigners point out that England has on of the lowest organ donor rates in Western Europe as many people do not get around to signing up to the register. Ms Elliott said she 'very rarely' talks about her family in public, but was moved to in order to back today's Bill. She told the Commons: But what has happened over the last 18 months could happen to anyone young or old, rich or poor, there is no exemption.' What are the rules around organ donation in England and how will Geoffrey Robinson's Bill change them? Under current rules England has an opt-in system of organ donation. It means that individuals must sign up to a register, or a family must agree for for organs to be donated after a person's death. Campaigners have pointed out that England has one of the lowest organ donor rates in Western Europe. Labour MP Geoffrey Robinson has introduced a Private Members' Bill to create an opt out system of organ donation instead. Campaigners estimate this would save around 500 lives a year. Under the proposed change, people would be signed up to the register automatically, and would have to say if they wanted to be taken off it. Mr Robinson said there will be clear rules to be exempt - and family members could rule that they do not want their relatives' organs donated. the Bill has cross party backing and has received support from Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn. It is making its way through the House of Commons and is expected to be given the parliamentary time to be made law - a rare feat for a Bill put forward by a backbencher. Advertisement She added: 'The shock that my daughter, who have been a happy and healthy young woman ad would occasionally run a half marathon or even a marathon - just weeks before her diagnosis she had got a place on the London marathon. 'For someone like that to become suddenly so ill is very hard to describe.' Ms Elliott, who has five children, said her daughter's health quickly deteriorated. She said: 'She was lying on the sofa. She wasn't eating much, if at all - the odd slice of toast....she couldn't walk to the end of the street.' She said her daughter now undergoes nightly dialysis, but is still waiting for a kidney. None of her family are a match. 'She is here and she is alive', Mrs Elliott said. 'And whenever she has a bad day,ad she has them occasionally, and she says she is sick of the dialysis, I say - just think, you are alive.' The Labour MP said she is still in shock at her daughter's diagnosis 18 months later, saying: 'It is indiscriminate, it is heartbreaking...The impact on our family has been huge - you go through a period of shock, disbelief and anger. 'The motions you go through is like a rollercoaster.' Ms Elliott thanked everyone who has donated their organs - saying: 'From the mother of someone on the list - thank you from the bottom of my heart.' Mr Robinson said this will increase the number organs available and help many others 'go on to have a new lease of life' thanks to the operation. His Bill, which is debated in Parliament today, has won the backing of MPs across the political divide - including Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn. And last night Health Minister Jackie Doyle-Price said the Government is backing the Bill. She said: 'Every day, three people die for want of a transplant, which is why this government is transforming the way organ donation works. 'We will be supporting the Bill at Second Reading and are working closely with Geoffrey Robinson to ensure it delivers. 'But as well as changing the law, we want as many people as possible to have their say on a future system that will save many more lives and would urge the public to have their say.' The Government has backed a Private Member's Bill, introduced by Labour Mp Geoffrey Robinson (pictured in the Commons today) to introduce an opt out system of organ donation in a move campaigners say could save 500 lives a year Geoffrey Robinson (pictured in the Commons today) said this will increase the number organs available and help many others 'go on to have a new lease of life' thanks to the operation Speaking this morning to introduce the second reading of the Bill, Mr Robinson said: 'None of us wants to think about the worst happening. 'It is challenging to have conversations with family and loved ones about ones wishes. 'But we must encourage these important discussion with families so that their real wishes can be known to their families and respected.' He thanks both he Prime Minister and the Labour party leader for their support for his Bill. Mr Robinson, the MP for Coventry North West, said: 'The Prime Minister really early on said to me that she had a personal interest and gave the Bill her personal support. I want to thank her for that. ' He added: 'I don't pretend my Bill is a panacea....but I think it will provide a new impetus to the increase in organ donors that we know this country urgently needs.' The Bill passed its second reading coming a step closer to being law. Downton Abbey creator Lord Fellowes has joined the fight to stop developers building a housing estate next to an Elizabethan manor that inspired Thomas Hardy. Campaigners say the controversial plans for 120 homes would 'damage the environs' of 16th century Wolfeton House in the village of Charminster, near Dorchester. It used to be owned by the Trenchard family, whose name provided the inspiration for the main character in Hardy's 1886 book 'The Mayor of Casterbridge'. Now 130 years later, Lord Julian Fellowes, is not prepared to 'stay silent' with 'Hardy's heritage under threat'. In his capacity as chairman of The Hardy Society, he has written to planners at West Dorset District Council to oppose the development. Downton Abbey creator Lord Julian Fellowes (pictured) has weighed into the fight to stop 120 homes being built 200 yards away from an Elizabethan manor in Dorset that inspired one of Thomas Hardy's novels Campaigners say controversial plans for 120 homes would 'damage the environs' of 16th century Wolfeton House (pictured) in the village of Charminster, near Dorchester He writes: 'I am afraid that, these days, the sight of my name on a letter to the planning department must be greeted by a low groan but as the president of the Hardy Society, I don't think I really have the right to stay silent when his heritage is under threat. I hope you can forgive me. 'It is true that Wolfeton House figured largely in Hardy's life, providing the model for settings in several stories and lending the name of the family who then owned it, the Trenchards, to the Mayor of Casterbridge, one of Hardy's most celebrated novels. 'But, quite apart from Hardy, it is also a historic place in its own right, probably the most historic in this part of Dorset, which may have been slightly overlooked. 'Once the new estate is built, the magic of the surroundings is gone and cannot ever be restored. 'I fully grasp you must find sites for more housing and in fact you have other developments going on which no one could object to. 'Can you please think again and find a place that does not destroy a major element in Hardy's story or dent our local history.' It used to be owned by the Trenchard family, whose name provided the inspiration for the main character in Hardy's 1886 book 'The Mayor of Casterbridge'. But developers want to build a housing estate in the field next door (pictured) Pictured: The field in the Dorset village of Cwhere West Dorset District Council wants 120 homes to be built to ease its housing crisis The 68-year-old peer, who lives in the nearby village of West Stafford, added: 'To destroy the context and setting of a great and ancient house is really to destroy the house, itself.' It is not the first time the Downton Abbey writer has become embroiled in a planning debate. In 2016 he wrote to planners opposing Prince Charles' Duchy of Cornwall Estate and its plans to build a housing estate behind Thomas Hardy's former home - Grade I listed Max Gate in Dorchester, Dorset. The local authority has recommend the plans be approved, to help ease pressure on the 1,570-person long housing list. Developers Land Value Alliances argue the estate, which would sit just 200 yards from Wolfeton House, would be 35 per cent affordable housing. The house's current owner, retired army officer, Captain Nigel Thimbleby, is a direct relative of the Trenchard family and is not prepared to let the plans go through without a fight. He is backed by a group of around 100 residents, The Landmark Trust and The Campaign to Protect Rural England and claims Hardy would be 'appalled' by the plans. Developers Land Value Alliances argue the estate (plans pictured), which would sit just 200 yards from Wolfeton House, would be 35 per cent affordable housing Pictured: An artist's impression of what the new Charminster housing estate would look like Wolfeton House's current owner, retired army officer, Captain Nigel Thimbleby (pictured with his wife Katharine), is a direct relative of the Trenchard family and is not prepared to let the plans go through without a fight Captain Thimbleby, 82, said: 'The parish council had voted unanimously against this development and we all thought it was unlikely to proceed. 'It was only recently that we realised we were being taken for a ride. 'We have got three weeks to sharpen our pencils and do battle and oppose these plans with vigour. 'Thomas Hardy was very committed to the Dorset countryside and he was a great walker. 'He used to walk to the house from his house just the other side of Dorchester and I have absolutely no doubt that he would be appalled at what is going on.' If plans are approved, it would be the first time in 400 years the surrounding landscape changes. The Landmark Trust, which was set up to save historically important buildings, said: 'The proposed residential development will result in present and future generations being unable to enjoy a scene that will not have significantly changed for the last 500 years until now.' The Campaign to Protect Rural England said there are 'very strong planning grounds for rejection', while Historic England have stated 'we are not convinced this application can be achieved without heritage harm'. A committee meeting will be held next month to make the final decision. Before Hardy's time, Wolfeton House was visited by Sir Walter Raleigh and King George III during his stays to nearby Weymouth. 68-year-old peer Lord Fellowes lives in the nearby village of West Stafford in a stately home called Stafford House (pictured) Lord Fellowes thinks Thomas Hardy's heritage is 'under threat' from the plans. He is pictured with his wife Emma at their Dorset home And in the 16th century it provided safe refuge for Archduke Philip of Austria and his Spanish wife Joanna of Castile after their ship was forced into Weymouth harbour by storms. Captain Thimbleby's relatives the Trenchards were the inspiration for the Henchard family the central characters of the Mayor of Casterbridge. Hardy's novel tells the tale of Michael Henchard, his wife Susan and baby daughter Elizabeth-Jane, who travel far and wide in the hope of bagging Michael a job. On their journey he gets drunk and jokingly agrees to sell his wife and daughter to a sailor for five guineas. After he realises what he has done, he searches the town but to no avail. When the sailor dies 18 years later, Susan and Elizabeth-Jane try to find Michael and find he is the Mayor of a town called Casterbridge. The long-lost lovers meet and decide to spare their daughter the shame of what happened and agree to pretend they have only just met. Wolfeton House also featured in the seventh of his short story collection A Group of Noble Dames. It was the home of The Lady Penelope, a character based on Lady Penelope D'Arcy, the wife of Wolfeton House owner George Trenchard. An accountant who had sex with teenage prostitutes should not be jailed because he helped bring down the child sex ring he used, his lawyer has argued. Rino Mura, 58, was one of three men found guilty of using child prostitutes who were pimped out by two teenage sisters in grotty hotels and carparks for three years in Warwick Farm, west Sydney. The ring was brought down after he called police in February 2012 when he was robbed at gunpoint while sitting in his car with a 13-year-old prostitute. Mura's lawyer today in court argued he should be let off jail because he chose to go to the police and co-operated with their investigation. Rino Mura (left leaving court today), 58, was one of three men found guilty of using child prostitutes who were pimped out by two teenage sisters in grotty hotels and carparks for three years in Warwick Farm, west Sydney Sydney accountant Rino Raymond Mura (left) leaves Parramatta District Court after his sentencing hearing in Sydney An accountant who had sex with teenage prostitutes should not be jailed because he helped bring down the child sex ring, his lawyer has argued. Pictured: Police take the sisters who ran the ring into custody 'That was a very significant event that brought about the end of this racket,' he said of the moment Mura dialled 000. Mr Sahade claimed the accountant told the 13-year-old to leave his car when he realised how young she was. He said Mura co-operated with police and that his actions saved other victims, News Nine reported. But the Crown noted that he pleaded not guilty and wants him jailed. Mura, found guilty of three counts of being a client of a child prostitute and two counts of possessing child abuse material, will be sentenced on 18 May. The Grandstand Motel (pictured) was one of the regular haunts used by the sisters for their sex ring This is the squalid room inside the Grandstand Motel at Warwick Farm, in western Sydney, that the two sisters rented so the homeless girls could have sex with 'fat old men' It comes after pictures emerged of the putrid motel room where two teenage sisters pimped out their victims to 'fat old men'. Surrounded by graffiti, soiled and broken furniture, police said the sisters - aged 16 and 19 when they began the child prostitution ring - rented rooms at the Grandstand Motel in Sydney's south west, for their makeshift brothel. The two girls have both been jailed over the child sex ring they ran for several years before they were arrested in 2012. Both girls had severe intellectual disabilities and IQs in the lowest one percent of the population. The younger sister was jailed for a minimum four years and her sibling a minimum of six. The rundown rooms were covered in dirt and grime (pictured). Daily Mail Australia it is not suggesting that the motel owners or staff knew of or were involved in the ring Surrounded by graffiti, soiled and broken furniture, police said the sisters, were aged 16 and 19 at the time they began the child prostitution ring Daily Mail Australia it is not suggesting that the motel owners or staff knew of or were involved in the ring. Using social media platforms such as Facebook, the two sisters would rope girls into joining the sex ring on the promise of shelter and drugs such as ice. After luring them in the sisters would take them to the Warwick Farm motel, carparks or housing commission units to meet with the men, The Daily Telegraph reported. The young girls were told to wear heavy make up to appear older to the men. The sibling pimps were brought up by their grandmother because their mother, who was addicted to heroin, spent most of their lives in jail After luring them in the sisters would take them to the Grandstand Motel, carparks or housing commission units to meet with the men Through Facebook or mutual friends, the pimps lured seven vulnerable girls aged 12 to 16 with the promise of shelter and drugs such as ice. Pictured: One of the sisters is taken in Some of the girls were pimped out for the price of a pack of nappies needed for one of the sister's children. The pimps threatened to kick them to the streets if they stopped working. One 13-year-old who had sex with three men in three days told NSW District Court: 'I was so alone. I still live in fear of being kicked out into the streets, having nowhere to go and no one to love me.' Sick: Father of six Bassam Darwich, 57, was convicted of using the child prostitutes Three men were convicted of using the child prostitutes: Rino Mura, 58, Bassam Darwich, 57, and Trevor Weger, 56. One of Darwhich's victims 'lay there crying... placing the pillow over her face until the sex had finished'. The crane operator was jailed for three years and six months. Weger was jailed for three years. The brothel was discovered when Mura called police after he was robbed at gunpoint in February 2012. Detectives felt something more sinister was going on and decided to investigate further. They found out Mura was with a 13-year-old prostitute who had been advertised as 'very pretty, size 10, big boobs, black hair' when he was robbed in a set up by the teenage sisters. The sibling pimps were brought up by their grandmother because their mother, who was addicted to heroin, spent most of their lives in jail. The eldest sister, who has three children in care, was jailed after pleading guilty to 21 counts of child prostitution. Judge Martin Blackmore said: 'Children are entitled to the protection of the law even when they are not protecting themselves.' Children's TV star Katy Ashworth has found new happiness with a carpenter she met on the set of a panto after a bitter custody battle with her ex who accused her of 'kidnapping' her young son. The popular CBeebies presenter is now living with joinery firm boss Mark Cooper, MailOnline can reveal. They live in Stretford, Greater Manchester, with the BBC host's four-year-old son who was at the centre of a public tug-of-love row two years ago. TV star Katy Ashworth, who was accused of 'kidnapping' her young son in a bitter custody battle with her ex-partner, has found love again with a carpenter she met during panto The popular CBeebies host fought a high profile court battle with the father of her son but has now found happiness with joinery firm boss Mark Cooper (pictured), MailOnline can reveal Ms Ashworth and her Australian film director former partner Ben Alcott (pictured) were involved in a custody battle over their son Charlie Katy won the custody battle for her son, (above) and now posts on Twitter about the joy of parenting and wading through tiny pieces of Playmobil together A friend of the couple said today: 'Katy has found happiness with Mark. She's been through a tough ordeal over the past few years but she's finally moving on and we're all so pleased for her. 'She gives a lot of joy to other people and deserves a happy life herself.' As the star prepares for a day of fun in Saturday with her young fans in Sussex, her boyfriend told MailOnline: 'We're together and we just want to get on with our lives.' Surrey-born Katy, 31, met Mark several years ago while she was starring in a Christmas show for which he had built the set. But the couple only moved into their cosy home, not far from the CBeebies studio at Salford Quays, last summer. As Katy, who got a first in drama from Exeter University, appears 'blissfully happy' in her family life, according to pals, she is also equally content at work. The avid social media user - who posts about her son and job but keeps her relationship with Mark low key - Tweeted last week: 'I've literally had the most fun in the CBeebies house over the last few days. Surrey-born Katy, 31, met Mark several years ago while she was starring in a Christmas show for which he had built the set but the couple only moved into their cosy home, not far from the CBeebies studio at Salford Quays, last summer As Katy, who got a first in drama from Exeter University, appears 'blissfully happy' in her family life, according to pals, she is also equally content at work. Pictured: All part of a day's work at Cbeebies The avid social media user - who posts about her son and job but keeps her relationship with Mark low key - Tweeted last week: 'I've literally had the most fun in the CBeebies house over the last few days. The entire team is like one big friendly family' 'The entire team is like one big friendly family and I feel soaked in goodness and gratitude for every single one of them.' She also describes happy family scenes to her 27,000 followers: 'My life at 8pm on a Saturday night. It's Play Mobil with my son and usually spend evening searching the living room floor for swords, axes, bows, helmets and shields.' Katy, whose bright and breezy, easygoing, girl next door personality endears her to millions of children and parents across the country, busies herself with work, family life and social commitments. A pal said: 'She is trying her best to put the past behind her.' Katy has been encouraging her followers to 'join in the fun' as she is due to host an interactive singing and dancing show at Burgess Hill School junior and nursery open day on Saturday. Katy met Australian film director Ben Alcott in Africa on the Good Food and Wine Show in September 2010 and they became a couple the following year. On May 18 2013 Katy announced on Twitter that she was pregnant and her son was born in October 2013. In September 2016 the pair were involved in a high profile international tug of love ordeal. Initially a court order prevented the actress from being named and she was simply referred to as a mystery BBC star. The ID ban was overturned by a judge at London's High Court after her victory. Ms Ashworth is now living with joiner Mark Cooper (right) after splitting with Ben Alcott (left), who has a new partner and lives in Australia Katy had planned to move to Australia to be with Ben and travelled there in April 2016 for a 'trial period'. But on discovery of his multiple affairs she brought her son back to the UK Ruling in the star's favour, the judge said: 'I found the mother's evidence to be clear and consistent and supported by the documents. I found the father's evidence to be inconsistent, unreliable and unconvincing' Katy was cleared of abducting her then toddler son from Australia - a claim brought by Ben. She had given evidence stating she had discovered her partner had been cheating on her with four other women when she briefly moved to NSW with her son to be with Ben. She had planned to move to Australia to be with her partner and travelled there in April 2016 for a 'trial period'. But on discovery of his multiple affairs she brought her son back to the UK. Ben then forced a family court battle over where the child lived, claiming the youngster was 'habitually resident' in Australia. A family court judge in Britain later ruled in Katy's favour, meaning the boy could stay with her. Judge Alex Verdan, in the High Court's family division, concluded that the child was not wrongfully removed from Australia by the star, who had always been his primary carer. He said: 'The father says this was a permanent move. The mother says it was a trial attempt to see if their relationship would work out long term.' Katy and her son stayed at her partner's for three nights and returned to the UK shortly afterwards. The judge added: 'The main reason the mother left Australia was that she discovered material on the father's computer which indicated to her his infidelity.' He said the star had emailed her partner saying: 'Ben, I know everything. I'm done. Have packed up and left.' She emailed again, after arriving back in the UK, adding: 'Thank goodness I found out all the lies before moving to Australia with you for good.' Judge Verdan said she had discovered evidence suggesting that he was having relationships with four other women. She had found 'women's clothing' and 'more importantly' messages on his computer from other females, the court heard. The film director accepted that 'on any reckoning' his personal life was 'very complicated' and said it was 'very difficult to balance the different female interests in his life' as his 'decks were very crowded.' Ruling in the star's favour, Judge Verdan stated: 'I found the mother's evidence to be clear and consistent and supported by the documents. I found the father's evidence to be inconsistent, unreliable and unconvincing.' Speaking from Australia, Ben, 44, who now has a new partner, told MailOnline: 'My lawyer told me last summer as part of the contact arrangements Katy had relocated to Manchester from Hampshire with her partner and our son' The judge added: 'My conclusion is that any agreement by the mother to move to Australia was based on a fundamentally flawed premise. 'If the mother had known the true state of affairs I am satisfied that in all likelihood she would not have moved to Australia with the child even for a trial period. 'I concluded that the child was not integrated to a sufficient degree in a social and family environment in Australia and that the mother was probably not integrated at all. The child had not put down roots. 'The mother did not wrongfully remove the child from Australia.' Speaking from Australia, Ben, 44, who now has a new partner, said he flies to London every four to six weeks and recently enjoyed speaking to his son on FaceTime - one of two weekly phone talks. He told MailOnline: 'My lawyer told me last summer as part of the contact arrangements Katy had relocated to Manchester from Hampshire with her partner and our son.' MailOnline has approached Katy for a comment. Jennie Gray was convicted after admitting previously to perverting the course of justice over a 'cover-up' to protect the six-year-old's father, Ben Butler after her murdered Ellie The mother of a six-year-old girl who was murdered by her father has lost a Court of Appeal bid to challenge her convictions. Jennie Gray was convicted of child cruelty and perverting the course of justice after a 'cover-up' to protect her partner Ben Butler in 2013. Butler was convicted of murder of Ellie in June 2016 following a trial at the Old Bailey and jailed for life with a minimum term of 23 years. Gray, 38, was sentenced to 42 months in prison. She applied to the Court of Appeal for permission to bring challenges in relation to both child cruelty and perverting the course of justice. But her bid was rejected on Friday morning. In 2016, the pair were found guilty of child cruelty for leaving the child with an untreated shoulder fracture shortly before she was murdered. Ellie suffered 'catastrophic' head injuries at the family home in Sutton, South London, in 2013. Her death came 11 months after she was returned to her parents following a custody battle. The six-year-old was cared for by her grandparents, Neal and Linda Gray, for the majority of her life. Gray was convicted of child cruelty and perverting the course of justice after a 'cover-up' to protect her partner Ben Butler, who murdered his daughter Ellie. Ellie suffered 'catastrophic' head injuries at the family home in Sutton, South London, in 2013 She was returned to her parents in November 2012 after Butler's conviction for violently shaking her as a baby was quashed. Her grandfather Neal Gray, who has severed all contact with his daughter, said he was 'very upset' that she had decided to apply for leave to appeal to overturn her conviction. Butler was accused of beating Ellie to death during a violent rage while he was home alone with her. Her death came 11 months after she was returned to her parents following a custody battle. The six-year-old was cared for by her grandparents, Neal and Linda Gray, for the majority of her life Gray pleaded guilty to perverting the course of justice after admitting to attempting to make it appear that her daughter had died two hours later than she actually did. The parents claimed the death was the result of an accident. Gray (left) was sentenced to 42 months in prison while her partner Butler (top) received a minimum sentence of 23 years for Ellie Gray's (bottom right) murder Butler's defence was that Ellie may had fallen while jumping on her bed while imitating cartoon character Peppa Pig. The parents have both appeared twice via video link from prison at inquest hearings into Ellie's death. Linda Dobbs, the retired high court judge presiding over the inquest, said the hearing would be article 2-compliant, which means the role of the state in Ellie's death would be examined. 'Were there failures on the part of the authorities, agencies and individuals to protect Ellie's life and prevent her death?' said Dobbs. The full inquest is due to begin on 12 March. Jean-Claude Juncker jibed that Britain would be better off if he was in charge today as Brexit tensions escalated. The EU commission president, who has called for Brussels to get sweeping new powers, delivered the barb at a summit this morning. Asked about the UK's proposals for a trade deal as he arrived at the gathering, Mr Juncker said: 'I'm not the British Prime Minister. It would be good for Britain if I was, but I am not.' But the quip was ridiculed by Brexiteers, with Tory MP Nigel Evans saying: 'I wouldn't put Juncker in charge of my wine rack.' The EU commission president, who demanded Brussels get sweeping new powers, delivered the barb at a summit today (pictured with EU high representative Federica Mogherini) Asked about the UK's proposals for a trade deal, Mr Juncker (pictured at a meeting to discuss the Sahel today) said: 'I'm not a British PM, it would be good for Britain if I was.' The spat came after Theresa May's Brexit war cabinet finally thrashed out a blueprint for the 'end state' of relations with the EU. After eight hours of talks at the PM's Chequers country retreat, senior ministers agreed to pursue a strategy that will allow the UK to diverge from EU laws. Gove gets into Twitter spat with EU official over claim Brexit will make it easier to ban plastic straws The Environment Secretary, pictured on Tuesday, suggested leaving the EU would make it easier for his country to take action to cut plastic pollution Michael Gove today became embroiled in a Twitter spat with a top EU official about his suggestion the UK could ban plastic straws after Brexit. The Environment Secretary, a leading Brexiteer, suggested leaving the EU would make it easier for his country to take action to cut plastic pollution. European Commission First Vice President Frans Timmermans responded on Twitter: 'One step ahead of you. EU legislation on single-use plastics coming before the summer. 'Maybe you can align with us? #EUDoesntSuck #StrongerTogether #PlasticsStrategy.' A few hours later, Mr Gove hit back, noting 'there has been no specific proposal - as yet - from the EU to ban straws'. 'Also waiting for the EU to catch up on microbeads - UK's ban is 1st in Europe #greenbrexit,' he tweeted. Advertisement Pro-Brexit ministers claimed they had achieved a significant step in ensuring a clean break with the EU - with one senior figure describing it as an 'outbreak of unity for now'. One Cabinet source said: 'Divergence has won.' But, in a concession to pro-Remain ministers, the pace and scale of any future divergence is likely to be fudged for months. The 'three baskets' approach would see the UK align with the bloc's rules in some areas and diverge in others. Downing Street confirmed today that Mrs May will deliver her long-awaited speech setting out her vision of post-Brexit relations with the EU next Friday. But the EU has already signalled a hard line against the British plans - saying it is 'not compatible' with the integrity of the single market. The 27 ongoing EU member states are in Brussels discussing how to fill the 12billion a year black hole left in budgets by the UK's departure. The EU commission has been calling for even more money to be pumped into EU coffers on top of closing the funding gap. Meanwhile, Michael Gove became embroiled in a Twitter spat with a top EU official about his suggestion the UK could ban plastic straws after Brexit. The Environment Secretary, a leading Brexiteer, suggested leaving the EU would make it easier for his country to take action to cut plastic pollution. European Commission First Vice President Frans Timmermans responded on Twitter: 'One step ahead of you. EU legislation on single-use plastics coming before the summer. 'Maybe you can align with us? #EUDoesntSuck #StrongerTogether #PlasticsStrategy.' A few hours later, Mr Gove hit back, noting 'there has been no specific proposal - as yet - from the EU to ban straws'. 'Also waiting for the EU to catch up on microbeads - UK's ban is 1st in Europe #greenbrexit,' he tweeted. A white homeowner from North Carolina who shot to death an unarmed black man after reporting 'hoodlums' in the neighborhood has been found guilty of first-degree murder. A mixed-race jury in Raleigh spent less than two hours on Thursday deliberating before finding Chad Copley, 40, guilty of premeditated murder in the death of 20-year-old Kouren-Rodney Thomas, which has drawn comparisons to the killing of unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin at the hands of George Zimmerman in Florida. Copley faces life in prison without parole when he is sentenced on Friday. Scroll down for video Guilty: Chad Copley, 40 (left), was found guilty on Thursday of premeditated murder in the death of unarmed 20-year-old Kouren-Rodney Thomas (right) in 2016 Copley, pictured in court on Thursday, faces life in prison without parole when he is sentenced on Friday Mother's anguish: Clutching a teddy bear containing an urn with her son's ashes, Helen Simone Butler-Thomas said after the verdict she wants everyone to know that Kouren was not a 'hoodlum' but a loving, protective child On the stand: Copley tearfully testified on Tuesday that he was defending his family by firing at men approaching his garage The case has drawn comparisons to the killing of unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin at the hands of George Zimmerman in Florida Some commenters on social media applauded Copley's guilty verdict Others praised the justice system and noted that Copley apparently showed no remorse during his trial Prosecutors had said Copley appeared bent on violence in August 2016, when he told 911 operators he was 'locked and loaded' to confront people he described as armed 'hoodlums' and launched a 'surprise attack.' Defense attorneys acknowledged Copley fired the fatal shotgun blast, but said he feared for his safety and was covered by the state's Castle doctrine, which allows people to use force to protect their home. During closing arguments defense lawyer Raymond Tarlton said Copley had acted in self-defense and the police investigation of the incident was shoddy, according to the Raleigh News & Observer. Copley tearfully testified on Tuesday that he was defending his family by firing at men approaching the attached garage where his son slept and lifting their shirts to show handguns in their waistbands. Copley said from the stand that he thought the loud, armed people in the street were friends of his own drug-taking son until he expressed fear about the unfamiliar crowd. No gun was found on Thomas or anywhere at the scene. Copley (pictured in his mugshot, left) was arrested in August 2016 after he opened fire from his window, striking and killing Thomas, who had attended a house party in the neighborhood The home of Raleigh shooting suspect Chad Cameron Copley is seen on August 9, 2016, two days after Thomas' shooting. Witnesses say the body lay close to a mailbox Prosecutors had said Copley (pictured in court in 2016) appeared bent on violence when he told 911 operators he was 'locked and loaded' He also admitted to the court that he lied to police nearly a dozen times about first firing a warning shot before aiming at Thomas' chest and other details. In a 911 call played for the jury, Copley could be heard telling the dispatcher: 'We've got a bunch of hoodlums out here racing. I am locked and loaded. I'm going outside to secure my neighborhood.' After the guilty verdict was announced, Thomas' mother, Helen Simone Butler-Thomas, appeared before the news cameras clutching a teddy bear containing an urn with her son's ashes and thanked his killer for 'telling the truth,' reported ABC11. 'If he didn't tell the truth...my son would have never been able to rest,' she said. 'He just wanted people to know that he wasn't a hoodlum, he wasn't a bad kid, he wasn't a thug, he wasn't a gang-banger, and I just wanted to clear his name.' Butler-Thomas described Kouren as a loving and protective child who 'didn't deserve to die on the curb.' She was accompanied by family members and her lawyer Justin Bamberg, who famously called Copley 'George Zimmerman 2.0' following his arrest. Unlike Copley, Zimmerman was acquitted of the charges of second-degree murder and manslaughter in 2013 after claiming self-defense under Florida's controversial Stand Your Ground statue. Bamberg said the Thomas family was pleased with the verdict, and that the ;only hoodlum there that day was Chad Copley.' This is the moment a reckless man narrowly escapes being hit by a fast-speeding train, after he drunkenly lay between the tracks as a train passed over. Derek Acton, of Harlow, Essex, was stumbling around drunk at Harlow Mill station when he decided to climb down from the platform and lay between the tracks. Moments later, a Greater Anglia train was seen passing over him at speed in the dramatic footage. Remarkably, Acton then climbed back onto the platform unharmed. This is the moment a reckless man narrowly escapes being hit by a fast-speeding train, after he drunkenly lay between the tracks as a train passed over Paramedics and police were quickly called to the scene on Saturday 28 October and Acton was checked over for any injuries. His actions cost Network Rail an estimated 11,700 in delay compensation. The 44-year-old was handed a twelve month community order, a 60 day alcohol abstinence requirement and a 570 fine, because of the stunt he pulled. Acton was charged with one count of railway obstruction and sentenced at Highbury Corner Magistrates' Court on Monday 19 February. Derek Acton, of Harlow, Essex, was stumbling around drunk at Harlow Mill station (pictured) when he decided to climb down from the platform and lay between the tracks Moments later, a Greater Anglia train was seen passing over him at speed in the dramatic footage Inspector Steve Webster from British Transport Police, said: 'Quite frankly, Acton is lucky to be alive. In his intoxicated state, he climbed down onto the tracks and lay in the path of a fast approaching train. His actions were baffling. 'I hope Acton sticks to his community order and the alcohol abstinence requirement. Hopefully he will steer clear of the tracks and avoid being involved in another near miss. 'The railway is an extremely dangerous place to trespass. Every year my officers are called to tragic incidents where someone has died or seriously injured as a result of being hit by a train. 'Please remember to stay off the tracks and away from danger.' Advertisement This incredible cockpit footage shows the moment a Nazi dive bomber started picking off 'sitting duck' British troops as they waited in line to board ships at Dunkirk. A Luftwaffe pilot can be seen pointing his warplane towards concrete 'moles' protecting Dunkirk's harbour that were used as a temporary pier to evacuate tens of thousands of soldiers. Chilling video, produced by the Nazi propaganda machine, shows the Junkers Ju-87 a Stuka dive bomber - unleash bombs and machine gun fire on its targets below. The events between May 26 and June 4 1940 were recounted in director Christopher Nolan's award-winning film Dunkirk last year. In the movie, Royal Navy Commander Bolton, played by Sir Kenneth Branagh, is tasked with organising logistics on the mole. More than 300,000 soldiers were rescued from the area in a matter of days as both Royal Navy and civilian ships ferried soldiers back across the English Channel to Britain. Incredible cockpit footage shows the moment a Nazi dive bomber started picking off 'sitting duck' British troops as they waited in line to board ships at Dunkirk The propaganda clip reveals the charred remains of a British destroyer on the beach at Dunkirk, with a huge hole blown through the centre of its hull The events between May 26 and June 4 1940 were recounted in director Christopher Nolan's award-winning film Dunkirk last year. In the movie, Royal Navy Commander Bolton, played by Sir Kenneth Branagh (pictured), is tasked with organising logistics on the mole Further clips show some of the rescue ships engulfed in flames as they sink beneath the surface of the water. The footage also shows pillars of smoke billowing from the oil refineries in and around the town of Dunkirk following a Luftwaffe assault on the trapped British soldiers, while another clip reveals the charred remains of a British destroyer on the beach, with a huge hole blown through the centre of its hull. After Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, Britain sent significant numbers of men to the continent, with commanders expecting a long drawn out conflict similar to the trench warfare of the First World War. But Germany had other plans, and on May 10 1940, after months of stand-offs between the two forces, Germany invaded Belgium, taking the allies by surprise and quickly capturing key strategic positions which allowed German forces to pour into Belgium. No one, not least Britain, expected this move from the Germans, and the allies were immediately forced onto the back foot. A Luftwaffe pilot (pictured) can be seen pointing his warplane towards concrete 'moles' that protect Dunkirk's harbour and were used as a temporary pier to evacuate tens of thousands of soldiers The footage shows German planes begin an assault on the harbour at Dunkirk as British troops gathered for evacuation across to the English Channel The Luftwaffe targeted British ships as they were picking up stranded troops. But incredibly more than 300,000 were evacuated from Dunkirk On the first day of the evacuation, under heavy attack from both the air and sea, approximately 7,669 men were ferried to safety. These numbers increased on a daily basis, peaking at a remarkable 68,000 men on May 31 The evacuation was hailed by then-Prime Minister Winston Churchill as a 'miracle of deliverance,' in parliament, and prompted his famous 'we will fight them on the beaches,' speech shortly after During the evacuation, British engineers used lines of submerged trucks as makeshift jetties. Hundreds of thousands of troops were ferried across the Channel to safety Then, almost as soon as the Allies were in place, the second phase of the German plan began as another invasion tore through the Ardennes, a region dismissed by the Allies as unsuitable for tanks and armoured vehicles. Thinking the forest was too thick and dense for any meaningful advance, the allies had left this part of their line woefully under-defended, something the Germans took full advantage of. In just 11 days, Germany had smashed through the allied lines and surrounded the British Expeditionary Forces, forcing a humiliating retreat to the one remaining available port; Dunkirk. There were approximately 400,000 men on the beaches of Dunkirk, and should the Germans have continued their advance the vast majority of these would have been wiped out. The footage also shows pillars of smoke billowing from the oil refineries in and around the town of Dunkirk following a Luftwaffe assault on the trapped British soldiers The clip captures the scenes of devastation on the beaches at Dunkirk with soldiers people around the remains of ships and army trucks However, the Germans halted their advance on May 24, giving the allies time to regroup and make plans for the evacuation of the port. This began on May 27, with a series of both Royal Navy and civilian ships ferrying soldiers back across the English Channel to Britain. On the first day of the evacuation, under heavy attack from both the air and sea, approximately 7,669 men were ferried to safety. These numbers increased on a daily basis, peaking at a remarkable 68,000 men on May 31. By the last day of the evacuation over 300,000 had been evacuated, while 40,000 were either captured or killed. The evacuation was hailed by then-Prime Minister Winston Churchill as a 'miracle of deliverance,' in parliament, and prompted his famous 'we will fight them on the beaches,' speech shortly after. The Comancheros boss has been placed in isolation in a maximum security jail because of fears he will be the next target in spate of bikie gang murders. Mick Murray, who is behind bars for an offence that cannot be reported, is being locked down on his own for 23 hours a day. Police fear he will be targeted next after a customer was shot 10 times in a Melbourne tattoo parlour during former Comancheros boss Mick Hawi's funeral on Thursday. Mick Murray (pictured), who is behind bars for an offence that cannot be reported, is being locked down on his own for 23 hours a day because of fears he will be the next target after a spate of bikie gang murders Hawi was blasted by a masked gunman as he sat alone in his Mercedes SUV after a workout at Fitness First in Rockdale, Sydney last week. It is thought that Murray is frustrated by the isolation because he does not fear for his own safety, reported the Herald Sun. It comes after a string of bikie murders has led to fears of an outbreak of underworld revenge killings. New South Wales Police Assistant Commissioner Mal Lanyon said officers were focusing on stopping retaliation. 'One of the things that we will focus on is ensuring we put sufficient resources out there to prevent any retribution that may occur as a result of Hawi's shooting,' Assistant Commissioner Lanyon told the Daily Telegraph. A string of bikie murders may lead to an outbreak of underworld revenge killings as police prepare for an increase in gang violence. Pictured is Mick Hawi, who was killed last week Detective Superintendent Debbie Wallace, head of the NSW Gangs Squad, said bikies did not have loyalties. 'It may seem romantic to join some sort of brotherhood but if you want to leave it comes at a significant cost - personal, financial and physical,' she said. The man shot at tattoo parlour Nirto Ink is fighting for his life as police hunt the shooters. The victim, 35, remains in the intensive care with serious wounds to his upper body. The shooting of a customer at a tattoo parlour during Mick Hawi's funeral may be linked to the Comanchero kingpin's execution. Pictured: Police investigate a burnt out Audi which they believe the shooters escaped in before setting it alight As Hawi's family and friends gathered for traditional prayers at a Sydney mosque at 1.20pm today, two masked men burst into Nitro Ink Tattoo Studio (pictured) in south-east Melbourne and gunned down a customer in a hail of bullets His killers, two men who wore masks when they stormed the store, are thought to be linked to bikie gangs. When the man was shot, Comanchero members were farewelling former president of the bikie association, Mahmoud 'Mick' Hawi. As Hawi's family and friends gathered for traditional prayers at a Sydney mosque at 1.20pm on Thursday, two masked men burst into the tattoo parlour in south-east Melbourne and gunned down a customer in a hail of bullets. The thugs then escaped in a silver Audi A6 before setting it on fire, police believe. The parlour was previously owned by the national president of the Comanchero bikie gang, Mick Murray, who is currently behind bars after a top secret investigation by Victoria Police's anti-bikie Echo taskforce earlier this year. The gunmen's bullets went through to next-door buildings but no-one else was hurt. An enforcer found decomposing in his car and a father shot outside his home: The men slain in a spate of recent gang killings By Ben Hill Mick Hawi - shot outside a gym in his Mercedes, February 2018 Hawi's assassination came despite the Camanchero gang head keeping a low public profile. Days earlier he had allegedly arranged to meet a so-called peacemaker because he knew a rival had put a bounty on his head - but the meeting never happened. Police are probing six theories as to why Hawi was killed, with a police source saying 'the man had more enemies than I've had hot dinners'. Ricky Ciano - decomposing body found in BMW, February 2017 Former Rebels motorcycle club enforcer Ricky Ciano's decomposing body was found in the back of his $130,000 BMW in February 2017 in the NSW Central Tablelands. Ciano, 35, left the bikie gang in 2015 and was told he must remove any tattoos linking him to the Rebels Former Rebels motorcycle club enforcer Ricky Ciano's decomposing body was found in the back of his $130,000 BMW in February 2017 in the NSW Central Tablelands (pictured with wife Rachel) Ciano, 35, left the bikie gang in 2015 and was told he must remove any tattoos linking him to the Rebels. Police are still investigating his death. Michael Davey - killed due to gunshot wounds, March 2016 Michael Davey, 30, died from gunshot wounds in western Sydney in March 2016. The heavily-tattooed Rebels bikie was known as the 'Prince of Penrith' and nicknamed 'Ruthless'. Michael Davey, 30, died from gunshot wounds in western Sydney in March 2016 The heavily-tattooed Rebels bikie was known as the 'Prince of Penrith' and nicknamed 'Ruthless' (pictured with former girlfriend Sarah Gerrard) Police were investigating if his death was caused by his own gang, as he reportedly had been looking to get out of the bikie fraternity. Kemel Barakat - shot in his bed, March 2017 Former Commanchero bikie Kemel 'Blackie' Barakat, 29, was shot dead in his bed in March 2017 by a gunman who crept into his apartment in Mortlake, in Sydney's south, in the early hours of the morning. Former Commanchero bikie Kemel 'Blackie' Barakat, 29, was shot dead in his bed in March by a gunman who crept into his apartment in Mortlake, in Sydney's south, in the early hours of the morning Barakat was shot a 'large number of times', and his death had been linked to the Hells Angels His wife Amanda found out her partner had been shot dead while she was holidaying in Thailand. Barakat was shot a 'large number of times', and his death had been linked to the Hells Angels. His assailant escaped and a burnt-out Mercedes was found in Belmore in the hours shortly after the execution-style slaying. Adrian Buxton - gunned down outside his home, May 2016 Father-of-one Adrian Buxton was gunned down outside his home while taking out the bins in western Sydney in May 2016. Father-of-one Adrian Buxton was gunned down outside his home while taking out the bins in western Sydney in May 2016 His wife and young son were inside the home at the time of the shooting. Buxton was understood to be a member of the Nomads Outlaw Motorcycle Club. Mark Easton - body found full of bullets dumped in bush - June 2016 The body of Rebels bikie member Mark Easter, 37, was dumped in remote bush off the Pacific Highway near Cowan, north of Sydney in June 2016. Council workers found his body full of bullets, and with no effort made to hide it. This is the heart-rending moment a mother knelt in front of her long-lost son crying after a 10-year separation. The woman, 56, had not seen her son since 2008 when he left their rural home in central China to look for work in southern China. What she didn't know was that she wouldn't be able to see him for the next decade - because he chose to live a homeless life 1,100 kilometres (699 miles) away from home. Ms Feng, who hasn't seen her son for a decade, kneels in front of him and bursts into tears during a long-awaited reunion in China. She hasn't seen her son since he left home to find work Her son, now 31 years old, had failed to find any jobs and been too ashamed to go home. So he chose to sleep on the street in Guangdong Province, leaving his worried mother waiting at their home for a decade in Hubei Province. His mother, on the other hand, missed him every day. She couldn't sleep properly and fell ill. The mother finally found her son on February 20 in the city of Dongguan after a group of volunteers informed her about his whereabouts. They took her to his shelter - an abandoned house. According to local volunteer group 'Let Love Go Home', the homeless man is called Wang Yun and his mother is known by the surname Feng. They are originally from Qichun County in Hubei Province. Volunteers first saw Mr Wang on February 17 when they went on the street to hand out dumplings to homeless people to celebrate the Lunar New Year. The woman is reunited with her son after volunteers told the family his whereabouts Mr Wang told the volunteers that he had come to Dongguan to look for work, but he failed to find any proper job after losing his ID card. Mr Wang said he felt he would disappoint his family, so he decided not to return home. Zhang Shiwei, the founder of the volunteer group, said the group's aim is to help connect homeless people and their families. Therefore, volunteers asked Mr Wang about his personal information. Mr Zhang said at first Mr Wang refused to tell the volunteers anything about himself, but volunteers managed to obtain his name and home address after telling him that they would help him find work. With the provided address, the volunteers tracked down the chief of Mr Wang's village who then informed his family. Mr Zhang explained: 'At first his father didn't believe us. He thought his son had died. 'He has a cousin who has university education. We sent a lot of videos of [Wang Yun] to her. It was her who convinced [Wang Yun's father] that we had indeed found him.' The 31-year-old man, Wang Yun (centre), was too ashamed to go home after failing to find jobs. His mother (second to the right) missed him every day and couldn't sleep well for a decade Mr Wang's father is said to be too ill to travel, but his mother immediately went to Shenzhen to see the son she had missed daily for 10 years. Upon seeing her son, Ms Feng immediately knelt in front of him while grabbing on to his legs crying out loud. Many volunteers were also moved by the scene and became teary. Ms Feng kept saying: 'Why didn't you come home? You have no idea how I lived through the 10 years.' Mr Zhang said Mr Wang also burst into tears after seeing his mother weeping. He said he would go home with her and try to make up for the time he had been away from the family. Mr Wang said he would try his best to help his parent run their family business. According to volunteers, the man has agreed to go home with his mother to live with them According to Mr Zhang, Mr Wang belonged to a growing group of migrants in China who choose to be homeless after failing to find their dream job in the city. Such social phenomenon is particularly common in Guangdong which has a large manufacturing industry. As China's economic growth slows down, it's becoming harder to find low-tier jobs; and too proud to tell their family the truth, these migrants become stuck in big cities. 'There is a huge wealth gap in China. Many people wouldn't reach their goal no matter how hard they try, so they choose to give up once for all,' said Mr Zhang. 'For each family who have a missing member, their pain is unimaginable. 'We hope the society could give more attention and help to this group of homeless people,' Mr Zhang urged. This is the astonishing moment a wild elephant went on the rampage through a refugee camp in Bangladesh killing two people, including a child. The enraged animal could be seen tearing through makeshift huts at the massive Rohingya refugee camp in Kutupalong as terrified refugees jumped into a river to escape. Chaos broke out as the elephant crushed up to 100 huts, injuring 30 and trampling an adult and child to death. Footage captures the astonishing moment a wild elephant went on the rampage through a refugee camp in Bangladesh killing two people, including a child The enraged animal could be seen tearing through makeshift huts at the massive Rohingya refugee camp in Kutupalong as terrified refugees jumped into a river to escape Dramatic footage, posted online by filmmaker Shafiur Rahman, shows people screaming as the animal ran amok among the crowded complex of flimsy tarpaulin-and-bamboo shelters. Panicked refugees resort to hurling items at the elephant which at one point appears to lunge at people before they swim frantically across a river to get away. It then turns and easily destroys a hut in its path. The incident occurred at the massive Kutupalong camp in the southeastern border district of Cox's Bazar, where hundreds of thousands of Rohingya have taken refuge after fleeing what UN officials have called ethnic cleansing in Myanmar's Rakhine state. 'The wild elephant trampled a Rohingya child to death... and then trampled another Bangladeshi man to death when it was chased by Rohingya refugees and local villagers,' Ali Kabir, the district forest department chief, told AFP. A young child was among the victims of the elephant's rampage at the camp in Bangladesh Chaos broke out as the elephant crushed up to 100 huts, injuring 30 and trampling an adult and child to death The huts were built on forest land after the influx of refugees began nearly six months ago. 'It destroyed some 100 Rohingya huts,' Mohammad Nikaruzzaman, the town administrator, told AFP, adding the lone wild elephant had separated from its herd. Cox's Bazar is home to more than 100 elephants, but the building of massive Rohingya settlements on the last remaining forest land in the region has put humans on a collision course with the wild animals. Since refugees began arriving in August last year, at least 13 people - most of them Rohingya - have been killed by wild elephants, Kabir said. 'All these refugee camps have been built on forest land. And the deaths are occurring in what was formerly forest land,' he added. There are two refugee camps in Cox's Bazar, but land in these settlements has been all but exhausted, with new arrivals clearing trees and other vegetation to build shelters. A gang of phone shop workers - including one who was studying law in university - stole customer details with a single key stroke and used the information to commit identity fraud. The gang spent up to 100,000 on alcohol, cigarettes, jewellery and hotels following their high-tech fraud. Vodafone workers Arslan Saghir, aged 25 years, and Iqra Hussain, also 25 years old and a law student, would use the print screen button to save images of customers details on work computers before passing the credentials onto accomplices. Iqra Hussain, left, worked in a Vodafone shop while studying law in Manchester when she became involved in the 100,000 fraud, she was jailed for six months. Arslan Saghir, right, was sentenced to 30 months in prison having pleaded not guilty to fraud by false representation Kamran Hussain, 31, and Zain Khan, 25 and his 23-year-old brother Faheem Ali Khan, would then use the stolen information to impersonate clueless victims and drain their bank accounts within days. As well as transferring money out of their accounts and extending overdrafts, the gang would take out high-interest payday loans. The fraudsters also signed up to costly phone contracts using the stolen details from the Carphone Warehouse through their inside man Hassan Hussain, 27. The phones would then be delivered to the homes of the gang. On occasions Fahim Ali Khan would impersonate the victims on the phone, including women. Faheem Ali Khan, Hassan Hussain and Arslan Saghir all denied charges of conspiracy to commit fraud by false representation. Hussain was jailed for 30 months and 20 months for two separate counts but these will be served at the same time, while Saghir was sentenced to 30 months in prison. Hassan Hussain, 28, from London, left, received a 30-month and 20-month sentence having been found guilty of two counts of conspiracy to commit fraud by false representation, his co-accused Kamran Hussain, 31, from Woking, right, was jailed for 21 months and 4 months having pleaded guilty to the same charges at Guildford Crown Court. All sentences run concurrently Kamran Hussain, Iqra Hussain and Zain Ali Khan all admitted to charges of conspiracy to commit fraud by false representation. Kamran Hussain was given 21 months in prison and four months in prison, for two different charges, to be served at the same time. Zain Ali Khan was given a three year term for one charge, and Iqra Hussain was sentenced to six months of custodial time for her one charge. The given sentences were handed out at Portsmouth Crown Court last week on Friday February 16, with trials having been heard in July last year. Haheem Ali Khan sentencing hearing has been adjourned to a later date. Detective Inspector Matt Durkin, of Surrey Police, said: 'This gang were fast and thorough - theyd empty their victims bank accounts within a couple of days, then take out further credit in the name of their victims and attempt to extract that as well. Faheem Ali Khan, 23, from Woking, pictured, is awaiting sentence having been found guilty to one count of fraud by misrepresentation 'I want to pay tribute to the meticulous work of investigating officer Steve Pott and financial investigator Graham Parker who investigated this case. Every victim had to be identified and interviewed, and every line of fraud had to be cross checked with the victims and the businesses that were targetted. 'Time and again the delivery addresses, telephone numbers and internet IP addresses came back to Zain, Faheem and Kamran.' Helen Ellwood from the Crown Prosecution Service said: 'There was a large volume of compelling IT evidence in this case, which helped the Crown Prosecution Service to prove that all the defendants were complicit with the fraud and all had either obtained or used peoples identities as part of this deception. 'Some of the defendants worked in shops serving the public and taking private information from them, including their credit card and bank details. 'None of the victims expected such details to then be passed to others for fraudulent use and this was a gross breach of the trust that customers had placed in them. A spokesman for Surrey Police said: 'Five people have been jailed for over 10 years following a nationwide 100K fraud investigation by us. 'Investigators from Surrey Police Serious and Organised Crime Unit and Financial Investigation Unit identified over 70 victims and over 300 fraudulent transactions by the gang, which was active from 2012 through to 2014. A sixth man is awaiting sentencing. 'Guildford Crown Court heard how Arslan Saghir, and Iqra Hussain stole sensitive customer details while working at Vodafone stores across Surrey and Hampshire; and also Manchester (where Iqra was studying law at university). 'While processing customer details for an upgrade, the pair would press Print Screen before submitting a credit check. They passed a screengrab (containing the victims personal data) to Woking-based Kamran Hussain, and brothers Zain and Faheem Ali Khan. 'These three men used the data to commit identity fraud - draining their victims bank accounts, taking out credit and contracts in the victims name, and stealing their money. 'The men bought background checks on victims using card details stolen from other victims; and Faheem called telephone banking pretending to be the victims - transferring money from savings, and extending overdrafts. Having emptied the victims accounts, the men would take out a payday loan in their victims names and extract that money as well. 'Faheem also used the stolen details to take out expensive mobile phone contracts with a Carphone Warehouse telesales call centre, using the sixth defendant Hassan Hussain (who worked for Carphone warehouse) as an inside man. The phones were delivered to the fraudsters home addresses in Woking and presumably sold on. 'Much of the gangs spending was on living a life of luxury - buying expensive clothes and jewellery; ordering fast food, alcohol and cigarettes to be delivered to their homes; and booking hotel rooms for nights away.' Advertisement A home in Sturgis, Michigan may look like your standard residence for modest living, but behind its unassuming doors lies a trip back in time, veiled in luxury. Priced at $375,000 (approximately 267,895) the nearly-6,500-foot home is a throwback to1970s style with interiors decorated in shag purple carpet and velvet staircase. A vision of modernity when it was built in 1979, the six bedroom home has not been redecorated since it was built and features extravagant features such as golden lions, a wood-panelled kitchen and a bar area made of glass. It was the vision of Iron Tycoon, Ralph Levin who initially filled it with arcade machines and is said to have done plenty of entertaining in the home. Pictured, this modest-looking home on the outside is a party organizer's dream on the inside, complete with pool, slide and hot tub - fun for the whole family! Pictured, a velvet staircase, shag purple carpeting and pinball machines are just few of the features dotted around the fascinating throwback abode Pictured, priced at $375,000 (approximately 267,895) the nearly-6,500-foot home is a throwback to a 1970s shindig with interiors decorated in shag purple carpet and velvet staircase According to Kalamazoo News, Mr Levin was teh founder of a scrap metal company, Sturgis Iron and Metal. Sturgis Iron and Metal by Steel Dynamics Inc in 2008, when Mr Levin retired, and remains one of the more successful recycling businesses of its kind in the United States. 'It's a house that was built to live life to the fullest,' said Dennis Bamber, the listing agent representing the property, who insists the four bedroom home is perfect for either a large family or someone who is looking to entertain. Pictured, a home in Sturgis, Michigan may look like your standard residence for modest living, but behind its unassuming doors lies a trip back in time, veiled in luxury The biggest selling points to the home are its size, location and the fact that it is in a modest neighborhood, explained the letting agency Listing agent Dennis Bamber said the home, pictured, was perfect for either a large family or someone who is looking to entertain. Pictured, the home comes with four bedrooms, two full bathrooms and two half bathrooms. An indoor swimming pool is also accompanied by a slide, sauna, hot tub, bar and 1.8 acres of outdoor space Ralph Levin, pictured, built the property in Sturgis that's now on sale for $375,000 The home also comes with two full bathrooms and two half bathrooms. An indoor swimming pool is also accompanied by a slide, sauna, hot tub, bar and 1.8 acres of outdoor space. Mr Bamber said: 'It's an 800-pound gorilla in a small neighbourhood,' insisting that a property of a similar size could ask around $1.5m (approximately 1.1m) in the Sturgis area. He added: 'The [family] pictures I've seen from the previous owners, looks like the kids had a ball here growing up here. 'The type of buyer could be someone with kids, it could be someone who's social and wants to entertain a lot, it has to be a buyer that has imagination.' The biggest selling points, Dennis said, are the home's size, location and the fact that it is in a modest neighbourhood. Sturgis is a city in southern Michigan that hugs the border with the state of Indiana. It's the largest city in St Joseph County, which has a population of about 61,018, according to a 2015 Census. Mr Levin lived in the home with his wife Renee, who passed away in 2016 two years after her husband. According to Mr Bamber, the site has been vacant for the last two years. The type of buyer, according to the letting agency, could be someone with kids, it could be someone who's social and wants to entertain a lot, it has to be a buyer that has imagination An indoor swimming pool, pictured, is also accompanied by a slide, sauna, hot tub, bar and 1.8 acres of outdoor space in this not so modest looking home in Sturgis, Michigan President Donald Trump renewed his war of words against the Salvadoran gang MS-13 on Friday, saying his long-promised southern border wall would stem the tide of murderers and drug dealers streaming into the U.S. 'MS-13 gang members are being removed by our Great ICE and Border Patrol Agents by the thousands, but these killers come back in from El Salvador, and through Mexico, like water,' the president tweeted. 'El Salvador just takes our money, and Mexico must help MORE with this problem. We need The Wall!' President Donald Trump went back on offense against MS-13 on Friday, complaining that a porous U.S. border is allowing the gang's members to enter the country at will '[T]hese killers come back in from El Salvador, and through Mexico, like water,' the president tweeted Trump said this month that in order to stop the gang, the government needs to change 'sad, weak and pathetic' immigration laws Trump's harsh rhetoric comes as the government's Citizenship and Immigration Services agency has quietly changed its mission statement to remove a reference to the U.S. as a 'nation of immigrants.' That surprising move was first reported by The Intercept. He said earlier this month in a video message that the only way to defeat MS-13 is to change America's 'sad, weak and pathetic' immigration laws. In a nearly three minute video posted to Twitter, Trump outlined his plan on combating the gang, which has tens of thousands of members in at least 40 states and is responsible for a steady drumbeat of gruesome deaths in the U.S. MS-13, also known as Mara Salvatrucha, was started in Los Angeles during the 1980s by Central American immigrants, mainly those from El Salvador. The gang later expanded to include Mexicans, Hondurans and other Central and South Americans. According to the FBI, its motto is 'Kill, rape, control.' The gang's members engage in a wide range of criminal activity including murder, rape, prostitution, robbery, home invasions and kidnapping. MS-13, also known as Mara Salvatrucha, was started in Los Angeles during the 1980s by Central American immigrants, mainly those from El Salvador. The gang later expanded to include Mexicans, Hondurans and other Central and South Americans Trump has been using gang violence as leverage to emphasize the three planks of his immigration policy platform MS-13 was declared a 'priority' last yer by the Department of Justice's Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force, allowing prosecutors to pursue any legal avenue to target members Two weeks ago Trump tied MS-13's rise to his demands for a major immigration policy overhaul. 'My Administration has identified three major priorities for creating a safe, modern and lawful immigration system: fully securing the border, ending chain migration, and canceling the visa lottery,' he said. Trump said 'loopholes' in the immigration system has allowed for 'criminals and gang members to break into' the country because the laws are 'so weak, so sad and so pathetic.' He said MS-13 and 'many other gangs' take advantage of those loopholes to not only enter the United States but find new recruits. 'The laws are bad and they have to be changed,' Trump declared. MS-13 was designated as a 'priority' last year by the Department of Justice's Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force. Attorney General Jeff Sessions said prosecutors are able to pursue any legal avenue to target the gang. A callous father who posted a disturbing picture of his nine-month-old son smoking on social media is facing jail. The 36-year-old man, named as Muzammil, is said to have put a cigarette in the child's mouth. He then asked his 18-year-old wife to take a picture at the family's village home in Bangkalan Regency, on the west of Indonesia's Madura Island. A callous father who posted a disturbing picture of his nine-month-old son smoking (above) on social media is facing six months in jail Police spotted the shocking picture after Muzammil posted it online. Officers are said to be aware that the mother of the baby took the photo but decided not to arrest her for reasons which have not been reported. Bangkalan Police spokesman Bidarudin said: 'We have secured the father for putting the cigarette in the infant's mouth, even if the baby is his own child. 'The child had the lit cigarette in his mouth. The culprit sat the child up, and he also held the child up by the arms because he was worried that (the baby) would get burned by cigarette ash.' The 36-year-old man, named as Muzammil (pictured centre in blue), is said to have put the cigarette in his nine-month-old child's mouth There is no specific charge in Indonesian law for encouraging a child to smoke, according to local media. But Muzammil could reportedly be jailed for six months under the Child Protection Act. Some 63 per cent of men in Indonesia are smokers compared with just five per cent of women. The proportion of under-18s who smoke increased from 7.2 per cent in 2014 to 8.8 per cent in 2016. This is the shocking moment the host of a TV talk show fought a guest speaker during a heated debate. The fight happened during a discussion on the War in Donbass, Ukraine, on the Mesto Vstrechi (Meeting Point) show on Russia's NTV channel. Ukrainian expert Dmitriy Suvorov and host Andrey Norkin battled it out after an emotional conversation. This is the shocking moment the host of a TV talk show fought a guest speaker during a heated debate Suvorov became upset after another guest claimed many children were dying in the region. The pair ended up shouting at each other and Suvorov started yelling: 'You b******! Show the photos!' Norkin suddenly decided to intervene and walked over to Suvorov and grabbed hold of him. Suvorov jumped to his feet, whipped off his glasses and angrily pushed Norkin away as the host jumped on a barrier to fight back. Ukrainian expert Dmitriy Suvorov (pictured in the pink shirt and grey ensemble) and host Andrey Norkin (pictured in royal blue) battled it out after an emotional conversation Members of the show's crew and other guests tried to separate the pair and the studio floor descended into chaos. Norkin is apparently knocked to the floor at one point while a woman, who had been sitting next to Suvorov and holding a microphone so he could be heard, is also sent flying. Norkin's co-host, Olga Belova, defended her colleague and said that Suvorov had been acting in a 'boorish' manner. She said: 'There couldn't have been any other outcome. Unfortunately I'm a woman, so I couldn't hit him.' Members of the show's crew and other guests tried to separate the pair and the studio floor descended into chaos The footage of the confrontation proved an instant online hit - attracting more than 150,000 views in less than 24 hours. Netizen 'Vasiliy Bushnev' said: 'Russian TV got flooded by moronic TV hosts', while 'Kung fury' commented: 'F*cking clowns. The things they are ready to do for TV ratings.' And another online commentator, going under the name of '3', noted: 'Both of them are adult men, but they still don't know how to fight.' The War in Donbass is an armed conflict between government forces and pro-Russian separatists in the Donbass region of Ukraine. The car of a missing teenager has been found abandoned 1,100km away from her Queensland home. Sarah Booth mysteriously disappeared five days ago after she was staying at a friends house. She never returned home and missed work the next day. Sarah Booth mysteriously disappeared five days ago after she was staying at a friends house Her gold Hyundai hatchback was abandoned in Rockhampton on Tuesday, a 12 hour drive from her home town Mareeba in north Queensland. Police and her family have not pieced together why the 19-year-old would have been heading towards Rockhampton. Sarah's older sister Brooke Buckingham told the Daily Mail that her disappearance is uncharacteristic and begs for her 19-year-old sister to come home. Police and her family have not pieced together why the 19-year-old would have been heading towards Rockhampton 'Know that we have an unconditional love for you, we are praying for you safe return and our hearts are aching,' she said. Sarah was last seen wearing a skirt,a pink short sleeve shirt with white writing on it. She is described as Caucasian around 152cm tall with shoulder legnth brown hair. Anyone who has any information about Sarah or her whereabouts have been asked to contact police. A drunk driver who killed an Afghanistan war veteran on his third DUI has been sentenced to just six months in jail. Daniel Swecker, 47, from Monument, Colorado, will report to jail on March 5 for the death of Nelson Canada, a 24-year-old war veteran who had a daughter and wife. Swecker was originally sentenced six years in jail after the fatal crash, which happened on Feb. 25, 2012. But he appealed without having to serve a single day in jail. On Thursday, he was sentenced 180 days in jail and four years of probation for vehicular homicide. Scroll down for video Daniel Swecker, 47, (left) was charged with vehicular homicide and sentenced only six months in jail on Thursday. He killed Daniel Canada (right), an Afghanistan war veteran, while driving drunk down a highway in Colorado. Canada died on impact District Attorney George Brauchler of Colorado did not agree with the judge's sentence of only six months. 'I respect the court and the process the court employed, but I respectfully and strongly disagree with the decision,' Brauchler said in a news release. 'He ran over and killed an active-duty soldier, one who had survived a deployment to Afghanistan only to be run over by a repeat drunk driver.' 'If the public needed another example of what is wrong with our law when it comes to vehicular homicide and DUI, here it is.' Canada, 24, was a war veteran and killed on impact when Swecker hit him while driving drunk. Canada is survived by his daughter, Triniece (pictured), and his wife, Darlene Swecker was driving drunk down a highway in Colorado when his SUV plowed into Canada, who was pulled over in the right lane. Pictured is Swecker's car after the collision In 2012, Swecker drove his SUV drunk down I-25, a main highway in Colorado, and hit Canada at 80mph before fleeing the scene. Just before the hit, Canada was riding passenger in his friend's car. He made his friend pull over so he could drive since the friend had been drinking previously. Swecker appealed his original sentence of six years before he had to serve a single day in prison. He now only has to serve six months in jail and four years of probation Canada was in the right lane when Swecker hit him, throwing the war veteran more than 124 feet into the air. Swecker reportedly got out of his vehicle, walked to a gas station nearby and called his wife who drove him back to the scene. Two hours after the incident, Swecker's blood alcohol level was .118 - a .08 in Colorado is considered drunk. Swecker was found guilty of vehicular homicide, driving drunk and fleeing the scene of an accident on May 2014. He was originally sentenced to six years in prison but was granted bond while he appealed. Judge Shay Whitaker suspended his six-year sentence on Thursday to only six months after Swecker used his time to stay sober. District Attorney Chris Wilcox, who prosecuted the case, told KKTV: 'Every step of the way, the defendant avoided taking any responsibility for his conduct. 'He blamed the victims and the way the road was built and the lab that tested his blood.' Swecker will report to his six-month sentence in jail on March 5. Canada is survived by his wife, Darlene, and daughter, Triniece. This is the moment forcibly removed two protesters who had chained themselves to the entrance of a court in Barcelona. The men were part of a protest called by the 'Commitees in defence of the Republic' to block the TSJC (Superior Court of Justice of Catalonia) on Friday. But Catalan Mossos d'Esquadra officers were pictured carrying the men away by force and clashing with other protesters at the scene. They were protesting the jailing of Catalan politicians and activists who are facing an investigation because of the Catalonia region's push for independence last year. Their supporters claim they are political prisoners - a charge which the national government in Madrid has vigorously denied, labelling them 'politicians in prison.' Catalan regional police officers (Mossos d'Esquadra) remove two chained men during a protest to block the TSJC (Superior Court of Justice of Catalonia) in Barcelona Former regional Vice President Oriol Junqueras, and activists Jordi Sanchez and Jordi Cuixart face possible sedition charges. Junqueras is also investigated for alleged rebellion and embezzlement, punishable with decades in prison. On Monday, a Supreme Court judge set bail for Marta Rovira, the Secretary General of the Left republican ERC party. She was questioned by an investigating magistrate for her role in the October defiance that triggered Spain's severest political crisis in decades. Catalan Mossos d'Esquadra officers were pictured carrying the men away by force on Friday It comes as former regional Vice President Oriol Junqueras, and activists Jordi Sanchez and Jordi Cuixart face possible sedition charges Catalan Mossos d'Esquadra officers carry a protester who blocked the Superior Court of Justice of Catalonia Fellow politician Marta Pascal, the leader of the conservative PDeCAT party, was also questioned on Monday. Judicial police have identified Rovira and Pascal as key players in the staging of a banned independence referendum and the declaration of secession Catalan lawmakers made based on its results. Both told the judge Monday that the October 27 independence had symbolic value, but no legal effect, according to witnesses of Monday's court proceedings. Protestors scuffle with Catalan Mossos d'Esquadra officers outside the court in Barcelona More than two dozen people, including politicians, elected lawmakers, and the regional police chief, are also under investigation for possible rebellion, sedition or misuse of public funds. In Spain, a judge can keep suspects in custody before deciding if they should be formally charged at the end of an investigation. Four suspects, including former regional Vice President Oriol Junqueras, remain in custody. Five former Catalan Cabinet members, headed by ex-regional President Carles Puigdemont, evaded court summons by moving to Belgium. Theresa May is facing a fresh Remainer onslaught after she finally won backing from ministers for her Brexit blueprint. The Prime Minister is facing a serious threat to her plans as Tory rebels unite with Labour, the Lib Dems and SNP to try to force the government to stay inside a customs union. Former minister Anna Soubry has tabled an amendment to the Trade Bill that could put Mrs May's slim Commons majority to the test. But Downing Street today made clear they would not cave in in the crucial issue, paving the way for a showdown in parliament. Meanwhile, Brussels has slammed her proposals for future trade ties, agreed by the Brexit war Cabinet last night, saying it will not allow the UK to pick and choose what regulations it follows. No10 has confirmed that the premier will make a major Brexit speech on Friday as negotiations reach a critical stage. After eight hours of discussions, the Brexit war cabinet reached an agreement. Pictured left to right around the table: Greg Clark, Gavin Williamson, Amber Rudd, Liam Fox, Philip Hammond, Boris Johnson, Karen Bradley, Julian Smith, No10 Brexit envoy Olly Robbins, Cabinet Secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood, Theresa May, David Lidington, David Davis, Michael Gove Angela Merkel and Emmannuel Macron were both at the EU summit in Brussels today EU commission president Jean-Claude Juncker (pictured in Brussels today) suggested that Britain would be better off if he was in charge Tory Brexit rebel Anna Soubry has tabled an amendment to the Trade Bill designed to force Britain to stay in the EU customs union After eight hours of talks at the Prime Minister's country retreat Chequers, senior ministers agreed to pursue a strategy that will allow the UK to diverge from EU laws. Pro-Brexit ministers claimed they had achieved a significant step in ensuring a clean break with the EU - with one senior figure describing it as an 'outbreak of unity for now'. One Cabinet source said: 'Divergence has won.' But, in a concession to pro-Remain ministers, the pace and scale of any future divergence is likely to be fudged for months. Ministers, who did not leave chequers until 10pm, were tight-lipped about the precise details of yesterday's meeting. According to the BBC, one minister in the room claimed everyone was 'rather happy' at the end, with another saying the PM had 'played a blinder'. Another said they had reached a 'sensible compromise which pitches an ambitious ask but recognises that we will be in a negotiation'. Sources said they had agreed to seek an ambitious deal that would allow wide-ranging access to the single market for British goods and services on the basis of 'mutual recognition' of standards rather than membership of the customs union. In return, Britain would make a binding declaration not to undercut the EU by leading a 'race to the bottom' on workers' rights. Within this framework, Britain would have the 'right to diverge' from EU laws - particularly in emerging technologies like artificial intelligence. But the proposals have been dismissed by the EU before being formally tabled. One diplomat told the Evening Standard: 'We cannot make sense of all the ideas they have floated because lots of them are inconsistent.' Ministers are braced for a hardline response from the EU, with the 27 ongoing member states meeting today. Pictured are French president Emmanuel Macron, Belgian PM Charles Michel and Angela Merkel dining in Brussels last night Ministers were locked in talks until 10pm and were tight-lipped about the details, although one Cabinet source said: 'Divergence has won' Brexiteer fury at reports May is 'resigned' to caving in to Brussels demands for free movement during the transition period Theresa May is preparing to cave in on EU demands for full free movement during the Brexit transition, it has been claimed. The Prime Minister is said to be resigned about bowing to Brussels over citizens who arrive during the period getting permanent residency rights. The issue has threatened to derail the negotiations over an implementation phase that would avoid a cliff edge for businesses on both sides of the Channel. According to the Times, Mrs May is considering making a unilateral promise to EU citizens that they can remain after the transition. However, there are concerns the move could leave UK nationals living on the Continent with fewer rights than their EU counterparts. Brexiteers would also be up in arms about conceding the ground to Brussels. Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg Jacob Rees-Mogg, head of the influential European Research Group, of Tory MPs, said today he would be 'astonished' if Mrs May U-turned on her pledge to end permanent free movement rights in 2019. 'Mrs May said when she was in China that she wasn't going to do that and that people who came after we'd left would be subject to different conditions, which seems absolutely right. 'You've got to remember we are leaving the European Union on March 29 (2019), we will be out of the treaties on that day, we will not have any say in the rules that are made and, therefore, people who come after that day ought not to be allowed to have the full and permanent free movement rights. 'That would be quite wrong and they will know the conditions on which they come, which is important, so it's fair to people who come after that date. 'I'd be astonished if Mrs May would make a u-turn of that kind, she is a lady of great backbone and for her to kowtow to the European Union is, I think, unconscionable.' A Downing Street spokesperson said: 'We've set out our position the December joint report covers EU citizens arriving up until Brexit day, and the PM has been clear that for EU citizens arriving after that point there should be a different approach this will be a matter for the negotiations.' Advertisement Asked about the UK's proposals for a trade deal as he arrived at a summit in Brussels today, Mr Juncker said: 'I'm not the British Prime Minister. It would be good for Britain if I was, but I am not.' The comment drew an angry response from Brexiteers, with Tory MP Nigel Evans saying: 'I wouldn't put Juncker in charge of my wine rack.' Environment Secretary Michael Gove - one of 11 Cabinet ministers at the Chequers meeting - said that divergence from EU regulations would allow Britain to impose 'even higher standards' in areas like environmental protection. He rejected suggestions there was a 'tension' between his environmental agenda and the UK's bid to secure freedom to set its own regulations, insisting the Government was seeking 'a green Brexit'. German Prime Minister Angela Merkel (pictured centre), French President Emmanuel Macron (pictured left) and Italian Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni (pictured right) arrive at the EU summit yesterday. Brussels has slammed Britain's Brexit proposals 'One of the things about Britain leaving the European Union is that it gives us the opportunity to look at all of these areas and see how we can meet even higher standards,' Mr Gove told reporters. But Mr Gove was mocked by the deputy head of the European Commission Frans Timmermans. Retweeting a report that Mr Gove might ban plastic straws, Mr Timmermans wrote: '@michaelgove One step ahead of you. EU legislation on single-use plastics coming before the summer. Maybe you can align with us? #EUDoesntSuck.' Earlier, Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt said Britain would not be accepting Brussels dictats on regulations. What is Theresa May's 'three basket' Brexit approach? Theresa May has said she wants a 'three baskets' approach to Brexit - which will see the UK stick with EU rules and regulations in some areas and diverge in others. She first presented the idea in her Florence speech last year - the second of her two major speeches on Brexit. Under the approach, the British economy and post Brexit regulation falls into three broad areas. The first are areas where Britain wants to achieve the same regulatory standards as the EU through the same means. The second are ares where the UK wants similar outcomes but want to adopt different rules and regulations to achieve them. And the third are areas where the UK wants to compete with the EU and adopt a different approach to Emerging parts of the economy like robotics artificial intelligence may fall into this final basket. But Eurocrats in Brussels have warned that the three basket approach equates to 'cherry picking' and are opposed to it. Advertisement 'There will be areas and sectors of industry where we agree to align our regulations with European regulations: the automotive industry is perhaps an obvious example because of supply chains that are integrated,' he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme. 'But it will be on a voluntary basis, we will as a sovereign power have the right to choose to diverge and what we won't be doing is accepting changes in rules because the EU unilaterally chooses to make those changes.' As Remainers marshal their forces for a push to water down Brexit, Jeremy Corbyn is expected to confirm a shift in policy on Monday to support staying in a customs union with the EU. Ms Soubry's amendment has already been signed by half a dozen Tory MPs - including former ministers Nicky Morgan and Stephen Hammond. Ex-attorney general Dominic Grieve today indicated he would back the change. Even if the amendment is passed, it could not legally bind the hands of ministers in the talks. However, it could be politically devastating and undermine Mrs May's credibility to conduct the negotiations. There are concerns that defeat could bring down the government. The discussions at Chequers involved the 11 most senior Cabinet members. Before the meeting there were thought to still be significant differences between Brexiteer and Remainer factions on how far Britain should diverge from EU rules after we leave the bloc. A series of previous meetings of the inner circle of ministers had failed to come to firm conclusions. Home Secretary Amber Rudd (pictured today, said ministers are united behind Theresa May's vision for Brexit Mrs May appeared to have enlisted some help to try and get a better outcome - with a border collie sheepdog seen being driven on to the estate in a Landrover. Remainers such as Philip Hammond and Amber Rudd reportedly argued for a softer approach, while Boris Johnson and Michael Gove favoured a cleaner break. The other ministers who attended were David Davis, David Lidington, Liam Fox, Karen Bradley, Gavin Williamson and Greg Clark, and chief whip Julian Smith. The group was carefully balanced between pro-EU and Eurosceptics, with Mrs May theoretically holding the balance between the sides. The PM's top Brexit civil servant Olly Robbins gave presentations on parts of the negotiations. The talks also saw interventions from UK ambassadors to European capitals, including the top diplomat in Paris Ed Llewellyn - David Cameron's former chief of staff. The Chequers summit was part of a 'road to Brexit' series of events intended to set out the Government's ambitions for a post-withdrawal settlement with the EU. WHY DO THE CUSTOMS UNION AND SINGLE MARKET MATTER AND WHAT COULD HAPPEN AFTER BREXIT? When Britain stays in a custom union with Brussels (the European Commissions headquarters is pictured) is one of the main points of Brexit contention The customs union and single market have emerged as crucial battlegrounds in the struggle over Brexit. The customs arrangements could decide the fate of the overall deal - as the UK has already said it will ensure there is no hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic. Here are the main options for what could happen after Britain leaves the bloc. Staying in the EU single market A Norway-style arrangement would be the deepest possible without formally staying in the EU. The single market rules out tariffs, quotas or taxes on trade, and guarantees free movement of goods, services, capital and - controversially - people. It also seeks to harmonise rules on packaging, safety and standards. Staying in the EU customs union The customs union allows EU states to exchange goods without tariffs, and impose common tariffs on imports from outside the bloc. But they also prevent countries from striking deals outside the union. Theresa May has repeatedly made clear that the UK will be leaving the customs union. Forging a new customs union Some MPs and the Labour leadership have raised the idea of creating a new customs union with the EU. This could be looser than the existing arrangements, but still allow tariff free trade with the bloc. However, many Eurosceptics believe it is impossible to be in a union without hampering the UK's ability to strike trade deals elsewhere. They also complain that it would mean accepting the EU's 'protectionist' tariffs against other parts of the world in areas like agriculture. The PM has also ruled out this option. A customs partnership Less formal than a union, this proposal would seek to cherry pick the elements that facilitate tariff-free trade - without binding the UK's hands when it comes to deals with other countries. One possibility could be keeping the UK and EU connected for trade in goods, but allowing divergence for the services sector. The partnership option was floated by the government in a position paper last year. 'Highly streamlined' customs This scenario would be a 'bare minimum' customs arrangement between the EU and UK. New technology would be deployed alongside a simple agreement to minimise friction. But there are fears that this could hit trade, and it is unclear how the system would work with a 'soft' Irish border. Advertisement The gathering of the Brexit war Cabinet was held at the PM's Chequers country retreat, and lasted until 10pm Mick Hawi's childhood friend has revealed the slain former Comanchero bikie boss asked her to look after his wife and two sons if anything happened to him. Kylie Hogan promised in a Facebook message to widow Carolina Gonzelez that she would never leave her side. She wrote under a photo of the couple: 'I have loved watching you two love birds since day 1 ... i made a promise to Mick i would never leave your side when you and the boys need me and i will always be there for u all. i love you babygirl ... RIP Mick ... i will truly miss seeing u ... love u xxxx (sic).' Mick Hawi's childhood friend (pictured) has revealed the slain former Comanchero bikie boss asked her to look after his wife and two sons if anything happened to him Kylie Hogan promised in a Facebook message to widow Carolina Gonzelez (pictured with Hawi) that she would never leave her side She wrote under a photo of the couple: 'I have loved watching you two love birds since day 1' Ms Hogan also posted a tribute to Hawi the day before his funeral. She called Hawi a 'wonderful husband, father, son, brother, uncle and friend'. 'I have so many wonderful memories with you growing up as a kid and watching you and Carol become parents to those beautiful boys,' she wrote on February 21. 'I promise to help look after them and always be there for them all. R. I. P Mick its not goodbye, its see you Later (sic).' It comes after new details emerged of widow Ms Gonzelez's last ditch effort to fulfil her desire to have a baby with her late childhood sweetheart by asking doctors to extract his sperm. Ms Gonzalez urgently applied to court for the procedure to be performed last week after her husband was gunned down outside a gym in Sydney's south. He was buried at a traditional Islamic ceremony on Thursday afternoon - with tensions flaring between police and limousine-riding funeral guests, and Ms Gonzalez herself finding herself locked in an angry confrontation with online trolls. Mick Hawi's burial: Mourners held an empty coffin over their heads after piling dirt on the former Comanchero president's bare body at Rookwood necropolis on Thursday Hundreds of people gathered in the Islamic section of the graveyard to bury Hawi, the 37-year-old former national president of the Comanchero One of the at least 200 mourners to attend Hawi's funeral service bore a large tattoo reading 'Infidel' on his left forearm Hawi's family arrived and left the service in a fleet of Rolls Royces, Bentleys and a lone Porsche A sheikh is pictured arriving at the mosque for the funeral service on Thursday Hawi's wife Carolina Gonzalez (right, Hawi on left) made an urgent application to obtain her late husband's sperm within hours of his death Court documents obtained by Daily Mail Australia revealed the sperm procedure could only be performed with investigators examining his murder present. 'The Coroner... advised ... that the deceased is situated in a locked zipped bag and that the bag cannot be unzipped without the presence of detectives,' said affidavit written by Ms Gonzalez's lawyer. Gang squad detectives had no objection to the procedure being performed. The court approved the operation - but Ms Gonzalez will need the court's sign off to use the sperm to get pregnant via IVF. Hawi's funeral service on Thursday was monitored by a small army of police. A large crowd of men who arrived at the service in three white limousines were stopped on the way to Hawi's burial by bikie-busting Strike Force Raptor. One officer, Raptor 13 - Senior Constable Andrew Murphy - drew his Taser and shouted 'you're going to get searched' as tensions flared between the groups. Police were seen on every corner of the block near the funeral service on Thursday. It was a little more awkward for the Gangs Squad detectives who had to supervise his body A brigade of guests at the service arrived in three white limousines. They were later stopped by Strike Force Raptor officers while on their way to the burial A considerable group of men walked together down the street towards the Arncliffe mosque where Hawi was buried, with a man in a grew suit carrying a framed photograph of Hawi About 20 men, dressed head-to-toe in black, walked the street together following the funeral service Family members had requested funeral attendees leave their motorbikes at home - but this man clearly missed the memo Mourners embraced outside the mosque after the conclusion of the service 'Brother, there's 30 of us (and) there's two of you... show some respect' one of the men said as Raptor 13 pushes the surging group out of his face. 'I don't care, you're going to be searched, stand against the fence all of you... you're all being searched for firearms and drugs,' he responded. And just hours after her husband's body was covered with earth at Rookwood cemetery, a furious Ms Gonzalez fired up at trolls online. The bereaved widow was furious after a woman claimed Hawi's children were suffering because of their dad had been 'involved in things that cost him his life'. 'Before you speak you should have some facts!' she fumed. 'My husband did not do this to his children! 'If you only knew the truth, you would hide in a cave from embarrassment from what you have just written. 'My husband left that life a long time ago! How dare you write something like that? 'What you have done is worse to my kids - planting this seed in their head is not nice of you.' Police are still hunting for the man's killers. First lady Melania Trump may be the reason why President Trump hasn't shown Chief of Staff John Kelly the door. Axios reported Friday that the first lady think Kelly is a 'pro' and 'likes him a lot.' The president, however, has been asking people's opinions about possible successors, privately telling friends, 'What's up with this guy? He can't get along with anybody?' Axios said. White House Chief of Staff John Kelly (left) has the backing of first lady Melania Trump (right), Axios reported Friday. While the president has been surveying staff and advisers to see if Kelly should go, the FLOTUS 'likes him a lot' and thinks he's a 'pro' Axios reported that President Trump is 'is displeased with a capital D with how the White House is functioning right now,' which means Chief of Staff John Kelly's days could be numbered ON DECK? President Trump reportedly wants (from left) Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy or Director of the National Economic Council Gary Cohn to 'beg' for Kelly's job, making the chief of staff easier to replace The website reported that the president was walking around Mar-a-Lago last weekend asking people their thoughts on Kelly. Trump had gotten into his head that nobody on his staff liked working under the general, though Melania Trump reportedly defended him. Trump took the temperature on his first Chief of Staff Reince Priebus too, before giving him the boot last July. Kelly took much of the flack for the most recent staffing scandal to rattle the White House, that dealing with Staff Secretary Rob Porter, who was accused of domestic abuse by both of his ex-wives. Kelly had known about the abuse allegations since October 2017, but kept Porter employed, and was even receptive to promoting him. Axios noted that the West Wing had become 'more chaotic' in the aftermath of the Porter scandal. However, there was no consensus on the president's next move. One source indicated that Kelly's firing seemed probable. 'The president is displeased with a capital D with how the White House is functioning right now,' the source told Axios. Axios' Mike Allen, attempting to read the tea leaves, said Kelly would leave 'sometime.' 'But the apparent imminence of his departure depends completely on which part of the cast you're consulting, and what the president's whim was in his most recent conversations,' the journalist said. Trump has a trio of picks he'd like to see as his third chief of staff: Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy or Director of the National Economic Council Gary Cohn. But he wants the men to 'beg for the job' in order to more easily push Kelly out, Axios said. As of now, none of them have. The website also warned that if Trump loses Kelly other staffers could walk out with him, including Cohn or National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, which in turn could motivate even more departures. Tony Blair today tore into 'sickening' Eurosceptics who he said are prepared to 'sacrifice' the Good Friday Agreement 'on the altar of Brexit'. Some Brexit-backing MPs have said the Northern Ireland peace deal is now 'defunct' and the UK must take a long look at whether it can be kept. But the former PM lashed out at the comments and warned that axing the 1998 agreement which he helped broker risks reigniting divisions and violence in the region. He also accused the Government of being deeply split over Brexit and repeated his call for a second referendum on the deal. Tony Blair today tore into 'sickening' Eurosceptics who he said are prepared to 'sacrifice' the Good Friday Agreement 'on the altar of Brexit' (file pic) It is the latest in a string of interventions by the Remain-backing ex PM, and enraged Brexiteers that said talk of another vote is 'nonsense'. Critics of Brexit have said quitting the EU customs union will mean imposing a hard border in northern Ireland and therefore imperils the Good Friday Agreement. What is the timeline of the Northern Ireland Troubles and peace process? August 1969: British Government first send troops into Northern Ireland to restore order after three days of rioting in Catholic Londonderry 30 January 1972: On 'Bloody Sunday' 13 civilians are shot dead by the British Army during a civil rights march in Londonderry March 1972 The Stormont Government is dissolved and direct rule imposed by London 1970s: The IRA begin its bloody campaign of bombings and assassinations in Britain April 1981 Bobby Sands, a republicans on hunger strike in the Maze prison, is elected to Parliament. He dies a month later October 1984 An IRA bomb explodes at the Grand Hotel in Brighton, where Margaret Thatcher is staying during the Tory Party conference Early 1990s: Margaret Thatcher and then Sir John Major set up a secret back channel with the IRA to start peace talks. The communications was so secret most ministers did not know about it. April 1998 Tony Blair helps to broker the Good Friday Agreement, which is hailed as the end of the Troubles. It establishes the Northern Ireland Assembly with David Trimble as its first minister. 2000s: With some exceptions the peace process holds and republican and loyalist paramilitaries decommission their weapons May 2011 The Queen and Prince Philip make a state visit to Ireland, the first since the 1911 tour by George V. In a hugely symbolic moment, the Queen is pictured shaking hands with Martin McGuinness - a former IRA leader. Advertisement But Brexiteers including Labour's Kate Hoey and Tory MP Owen Paterson have said the collapse of powersharing in Northern Ireland means the deal may have become outgrown. In an article published today, Mr Blair said: 'The continued failure of the Government to resolve the Northern Ireland question is an expression of (its dilemma). 'And now that its is clear there is no way round it, there are politicians prepared to sacrifice the Good Friday agreement on the altar of Brexit and declare that the peace agreed in Northern Ireland is not, really worth it. 'This is irresponsibility that is frankly sickening.' Ms Hoey, Labour MP for Vauxhall and a leading Brexiteer, has said: 'I think there is a need for a cold rational look at the Belfast agreement. 'Even if a settlement had been agreed a few days ago there is nothing to stop Sinn Fein or the DUP finding something else to walk out about in a few months. 'Mandatory coalition is not sustainable in the long term.' She added: 'We need to face reality - Sinn Fein don't particularly want a successful Northern Ireland. They want a united Ireland.' Mr Paterson has said: 'The collapse of power-sharing in Northern Ireland shows the Good Friday Agreement has outlived its use.' Mr Blair said that Britons who did not grow up during The Troubles do not realise the daily onslaught of violence which used to afflict the area. He told BBC Radio 4's World At One: 'When I was their age every morning I would wake up to news about Northern Ireland - to terrorism, destruction and difficulties. 'These last few years has sen that subside. 'To be able to put that on the table in relation to Brexit is something I think we should be able to do.' He also repeated his call for a second Brexit referendum to be held. Writing in the article he said: 'We need to see what Brexit really does mean following the negotiation. 'Debate it in Parliament. And then, if no agreement can be reached there, put it back to the people so that they can say whether the Brexit proposed is what they want or not.' Some 3,600 people were killed during the Northern Ireland Troubles, which saw the IRA wage a three-decade long campaign of bombings and assassinations. In Northern Ireland, republican and loyalist paramilitaries kidnapped, murdered and terrorised communities. But Brexiteers including Labour's Kate Hoey (pictured left) and Tory MP Owen Paterson (pictured right) have said the collapse of powersharing in Northern Ireland means the deal may have become outgrown The Government in Stormont was suspended and direct rule was imposed by Westminster. Meanwhile British troops were sent into Northern Ireland where they were stationed at check points. After three decades of violence and several short-lived ceasefires peace was finally brokered in 1998 when the Good Friday Agreement was signed. It re-established the devolved Assembly and the unionists and Sinn Fein went into a powersharing Government. But powersharing collapsed 13 months ago following a botched renewable energy scheme and the DUP and Sinn Fein have been locked in a bitter row ever since. Film set designer Alan MacDonald, 61,who worked on the Mamma Mia sequel as well as Kylie Minogue's tours killed himself just days after paying 20,000 for psychological treatment A film set designer who worked on the Mamma Mia sequel as well as Kylie Minogue's tours killed himself just days after paying 20,000 for psychological treatment. Alan MacDonald handed over the sum - described as 'deceptive' by the family lawyer at an inquest into his death - for a two-week stay at a private mental clinic shortly before taking his own life. The 61-year-old, who produced sets for more than a dozen films including The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and Oscar winning The Queen, is said to have felt shortchanged by his treatment. St Pancras Coroner's Court heard Mr MacDonald lived with bipolar disorder and had contacted the private clinic AddCounsel while 'extremely vulnerable' and experiencing suicidal thoughts. AddCounsel referred him to a psychologist, who then admitted him to a private hospital. Mr MacDonald then spent two weeks as an in-patient at Nightingale Hospital in Lisson Grove, in London. Lawyer Samantha Presland, a lawyer representing his family, said in addition to the hospital fees, Mr MacDonald had been charged 750 a day for counsellor fees. Ms Presland called the charges 'deceptive' and that the film set designer had been 'distressed' after paying the large sum for his fortnight's treatment and left feeling shortchanged, She said he felt he had 'paid out a lot of money and not got much in return'. She continued on to question the company's 'relationship director' Jonathan Edgeley and asked whether he had been transparent with the fees ahead of time. The 61-year-old, who produced sets for more than a dozen films including The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and Oscar winning The Queen (pictured), is said to have felt shortchanged by his treatment. Ms Presland asked: 'If you go direct to the Nightingale it's going to be 5,000 a week, give or take. If you want our additional services it would be approximately 750 a day.' He replied: 'No. I sent an email and invoice detailing costs.' Ms Presland pushed back: 'The costs are deceptive in terms of what you are actually outlaying'. It was explained at the inquest that a AddCounsel member of staff visited the patient daily. St Pancras Coroner's Court heard Mr MacDonald lived with bipolar disorder and had contacted the private clinic AddCounsel while 'extremely vulnerable' and experiencing suicidal thoughts (pictured: Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, a set Mr MacDonald worked on) Senior coroner Mary Hassell said: 'There doesn't seem to be a great deal that's added by that person popping in every day.' Representing AddCounsel, Victoria Weaver, said Mr MacDonald had been 'willing and seemingly able' to pay for the service Ms Weaver added: 'There is no evidence that he took his life that day because of the money that AddCounsel charged him.' Recording a determination of suicide, senior coroner Mary Hassell said: 'I think it's too easy to say it was the finances that made him decide the only way out was to kill himself. I think he was very anxious about a lot of parts of his life.' For confidential support, call Samaritans on 08457 90 90 90 or visit samaritans.org Insulate Britain also revealed that officers have only bailed 17 of the 181 activists - many of whom have already been arrested twice - meaning that they are free to try to block Britain's busiest motorway again. Home Secretary Priti Patel is under pressure to call out police failures as Tory MPs including fellow cabinet member Ben Wallace blasted officers for failing to 'act swiftly' and taking up to four hours to clear groups sitting in the middle of the motorway when it should have been done immediately. In a statement the group, an offshoot of Extinction Rebellion demanding Boris Johnson pays for all social housing to be fully insulated, said: 'People from Insulate Britain involved in blocking the M25 on Wednesday and released from custody this morning told the police that they would repeat the protest as soon as possible'. Ms Patel, who was in Dover with Border Force dealing with the Channel migrants crisis today, has not spoken publicly about the M25 debacle where irate drivers stuck for hours in miles of queues were stopped from taking the law into their own hands by police guarding the protesters. Among those who shut down the M25 at its busiest junctions twice in 48 hours despite being arrested were Cameron Ford, a 30-year-old carpenter, and climate activist and retired doctor Bing Jones. Other ringleaders included an organic farmer who compares himself to Mahatma Gandhi, a puppeteer, a vegan 'business coach' and a 'rebel' IT project manager. Kent, Hertfordshire, Surrey, Essex Police and the Met released the 90-plus members of Extinction Rebellion offshoot 'Insulate Britain' on Monday night, who in a staggering failure of police intelligence were then able to gather again and stroll back on to the M25 where many glued their hands to the road yesterday. Tara Newborn's family are furious her boyfriend Duane Ballin (pictured) has only been charged with GBH and not her murder A family has been left devastated after their daughter's boyfriend wasn't charged with murdering her, despite inflicting 37 horrific injuries on her before she died. Tara Newbold, 29, was found dead at her home in West Bridgford, Nottinghamshire on October 25 2016. She was discovered with injuries to her face, breasts, abdomen, buttocks, wrists, back and hips, as well as seven broken ribs, a punctured left lung and a bleeding mouth. But a post mortem examination concluded she died of cocaine toxicity - not her catalogue of injuries. Her boyfriend Duane Ballin, 35, who lived with her at the time, claims she attacked him with a vodka bottle and a rolling pin after finding out he had cheated on her. He says he struck her in self defence, accepting he caused 'virtually all her injuries' before turning up at at Nottingham's Bridwell police station saying 'I think I killed my girlfriend'. Yesterday at Nottingham Crown Court he was convicted of grievous bodily harm and was warned he faces years in jail. But Ms Newborn's parents Julie and Peter Dury have slammed both Ballin's sentence and the results of the post mortem, telling The Guardian: 'Tara was against drugs'. They told the newspaper Ms Newborn suffered routine abuse at the hands of Ballin and they 'never liked him'. The 29-year-old mother-of-three (pictured) was found dead at her home in West Bridgford, Nottinghamshire on October 25 2016. She had 37 horrific injuries but a post mortem ruled she died of cocaine toxicity After they moved in together in 2012 they claim they carried out several interventions to get her to leave him. They fought both the post mortem result and complained to Nottingham Police, but to no avail. Tensions spilled over outside the courtroom after the verdict. The shocking scenes were quickly brought under control by police officers and court security. Prosecutor Jonathon Dee told the jury at Ballin's trial she had injuries from the top of her scalp to her toes after she was savagely assaulted after a row. Ballin, 35, now of Woolsington Close, Strelley, Nottingham claimed his partner had attacked him after she found out he cheated on her. And he had claimed she smashed a vodka bottle on his foot and repeatedly tried to come at him with a rolling pin. Ballin claimed he took the utensil off her in the kitchen - then she punched him to the top of his nose. He said to the jury: 'I felt blood go down the back of my throat. I panicked because I couldn't see. Pictured: Floral tributes were laid outside Ms Newborn's home in Nottingham after she was found dead there in 2016 'I wafted my hand with the rolling pin until she got off me. She was trying to attack me at the time.' He accepted he fractured her ribs by hitting her with the rolling pin and causing 'virtually' most her injuries. But he denied causing GBH with intent, only pleading guilty to the lesser charge of causing grievous bodily harm. After the attack, they sat on the sofa talking, he claimed, and she told him she was having a panic attack, so he typed in 'sore throat' and 'panic attack' on the internet search engine. 'After I did the search she said to me she was going to be fine,' said Ballin. He went to sleep next to Ms Newbold on the sofa and when he woke her lips were blue and she was really cold. 'At first it was a shock,' he said. 'I was just asking her to wake up and shouting 'Tara', 'Tara', and then I tried to perform CPR; open her airways and pump the chest for a while.' Later that morning he went to police, calling emergency services on the way. He said to a detention officer at Nottingham's Bridwell custody suite: 'I think I killed my girlfriend.' Ballin told the court he had seen bruising to his partner's legs and had thought she might have bled internally. He told the court how he felt about what happened to her, saying he had not 'grieved yet because of the situation' and 'I feel sick' and 'I just don't feel like I can forgive myself'. Asked by his barrister, Rupert Jones: 'Do you regret what you did?' He replied: 'One hundred percent.' Judge Gregory Dickinson QC adjourned sentencing until Monday and remanded him in custody. He said 'a lengthy prison sentence is inevitable' and 'it is the nature of the type of prison sentence I need to consider'. A domestic homicide review is set to take place at the local authority Rushcliffe Borough Council, which Ms Newborn's family hope will give them answers. Commenting on the family's concerns, A CPS spokesman told the Guardian: 'We considered all of the evidence provided by the police and made a charging decision in accordance with the evidential test contained in the Code for Crown Prosecutors. 'The defendant was charged with an offence where the CPS was satisfied there was a realistic prospect of conviction.' Nottinghamshire police added: 'Tackling domestic abuse is one of our top priorities. To ensure that our actions are appropriate we are able to launch formal reviews into our processes, which we have done in this case. 'We follow where the evidence takes us to ensure offenders are brought to justice. All lines of enquiry were conducted in this case.' Stephen Fry has announced that he has undergone surgery from prostate cancer, after discovering he had the disease before Christmas. 'Here's hoping I get another few years left on this planet because I enjoy life at the moment and that's a marvelous thing to be able to say and I'd rather it didn't go away,' he said. Stephen Fry is a national treasure to many for different reasons. He is the voice of Harry Potter, narrating all seven J. K. Rowling books, and an elder statesman of British comedy, rising to prominence in the 1980s as one half of the comedy pair with Hugh Laurie, with the duo working together on A Bit of Fry & Laurie, Jeeves & Wooster, and Blackadder. For 13 years, Fry chaired the popular BBC show, QI and made the six-part BBC show called Stephen Fry in America. As well as his TV work, Fry is a mental health and depression campaigner, creating shows such as Stephen Fry: The Secret Life of a Manic Depressive, in which he explores his bipolar disorder. Fry is also a prolific writer, having written five novels including Mythos, a modern retelling of ancient Greek myths. He famously owns and drives his own London black cab. As of January 2015, Stephen Fry has been married to Elliot Spencer. What is Stephen Frys net worth? Stephen Frys net worth is estimated to be $30 million (21.4m), according to Celebrity Net Worth. Who is Stephen Fry? Stephen Fry was born in London on August 24, 1957 to a Jewish mother, Marianne Eve, and Alan John Fry, a physicist. Stephen Fry is probably best known for being one half of the comedy double act Fry and Laurie Frys grandfather, Martin Newman, actual name Neumann, was an eastern European Jew who moved to England in 1927 when he was hired by a beet factory in Bury St Edmunds for his agricultural expertise. Frys great-grandparents and other relatives were killed in the Holocaust. Though undeniably intelligent, Fry struggled with discipline and was expelled from Uppingham School at the age of 15, and later from the Paston School. There was also a run-in with the law at the age of 17, when Stephen served time in prison for credit card fraud. He was incarcerated for three months. Prison changed Fry and the broadcaster and writer subsequently got into Queens College, Cambridge. Despite admitting that he did absolutely no work at Cambridge (Fry graduated with a 2:1 in English Literature), the university was the place that would come to shape some of the works Fry is most famous for. Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie met at Cambridge While at Cambridge, Fry joined Footlights, the universitys theatre club, and met his long-term collaborator, the actor Hugh Laurie there, through Oscar-winning actress, Emma Thompson. Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie worked with Ben Elton on the Granada Television show Alfresco 'We knew we were lucky, Hugh Laurie, Emma Thompson and I, when we joined the Footlights. We saw all the Pythons and various other people on the walls of the clubhouse and thought that that door had been closed; we thought thatll never happen again, he said in an interview with The Cambridge Student. It was Fry and Lauries participation in the 1981 Cambridge Footlights review that led to them getting their first big break on TV. They were hired, along with Thompson to star in BBCs Theres Nothing To Worry About!, which was written by future Blackadder writer, Ben Elton. The show was retitled Alfresco and introduced the world to Fry and Lauries partnership. Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie have been long-term collaborators after meeting at Cambridge The duo went on to write the successful sketch show, A Bit of Fry & Laurie, which ran on the BBC for four series, spanning nine years. At the same time, the pair featured in the Blackadder series, though only getting proper scene time together in 1989s Blackadder Goes Fourth. Fry and Laurie also starred in Jeeves & Wooster, the 23 hour-long adaptations of P.G. Wodehouses novels. Stephen Fry, Harry Potter and the work on QI Stephen Frys voice work may give his TV work a run for its money. Coming to radio prominence in the 80s with Saturday Night Fry, Fry soon found himself a popular presence on various radio panel shows including Just a Minute and Im Sorry I Havent a Clue. Stephen Fry hosted the BBC comedy panel show QI for 13 years until he stepped down in 2015 His dulcet tones were put to influential use in the aughts when he became the voice of Harry Potter, narrating all seven of JK Rowlings novels. In February 2017 Fry narrated Audibles Sherlock Holmes stories. From 2003 to 2015, Fry served as the host of the BBC factual quiz show, QI. Fry described it as 'one of the best jobs on television'. Fry was on board from the pilot episode all the way through Series M. Sandi Toksvig took over from Fry at the start of Series N. And today's quite interesting news is that I've been announced as the new presenter of Qi. My dream telly job and I have huge shoes to fill Sandi Toksvig (@sanditoksvig) October 14, 2015 Stephen Fry books A prolific writer, as of February 2018, Stephen Fry has written five fiction books including 2017s 'Mythos: A Retelling of the Myths of Ancient Greece.' He has also penned five works of non-fiction and three editions of his autobiography. Frys first novel was 1991s 'The Liar.' His 1994 novel, 'The Hippopotamus' was turned into a film in 2015 and starred The Thick of Its Roger Allam. Stephen Fry depression and bipolar disorder Stephen Fry has battled mental illness for most of his life. He was suicidal by the age of 17 but was only diagnosed with bipolar disorder at 37. His first suicide attempt came in 1995, when he walked out of the West End production of Cell Mates and disappeared for days. Fry worked with the mental health campaign Heads Together (Pictured at the BAFTAs in 2017) 'I sat there for at least, I think, two hours in the car with my hands over the ignition key, he told the Independent. In a 2013 interview with the comedian Richard Herring, Fry revealed that he made a suicide attempt in 2012. 'I am the victim of my own moods, more than most people are perhaps, in as much as I have a condition which requires me to take medication so that I don't get either too hyper or too depressed to the point of suicide, he told Herring. Fry has become a leading campaigner on mental health issues. His BBC programme Life of a Manic Depressive won an Emmy and in 2017 Fry spoke to a psychiatrist in a film created by Heads Together, a mental health campaign led by Kate Middleton, Prince William and Prince Harry. In his film, Fry discussed his mental health issues and stressed the importance of talking about it: 'Talking was really a very strong part of the healing.' Stephen Fry married Elliot Spencer on January 17, 2015 in the town of Dereham in Norfolk Stephen Frys husband Elliot Spencer At the beginning of January 2015, news broke that Stephen Fry was set to marry his partner, Elliot Spencer. Oh. It looks as though a certain cat is out of a certain bag. Im very very happy of course but had hoped for a private wedding. Fat chance! Stephen Fry (@stephenfry) January 6, 2015 On January 17, 2015, the pair married in a small ceremony in Norfolks Dereham. Gosh. @ElliottGSpencer and I go into a room as two people, sign a book and leave as one. Amazing. pic.twitter.com/bPDQD5WQoB Stephen Fry (@stephenfry) January 17, 2015 How did Stephen Fry make his money? Stephen Fry has already had a career of ten men: author, broadcaster, writer, actor, director, so most of his money is made from these creative pursuits. In a career spanning nearly 40 years, Fry has come to dominate the British comedy scene Frys literary career saw him strike gold with his autobiographies with 2010s The Fry Chronicles making 1 million in its first two weeks. Frys accompanying Royal Albert Hall appearances for the autobiography reportedly pulled in 1.2 million alone. The actor also generates significant income from his voice-over work and adverts. His 2009 Marks & Spencer Christmas advert netted him 100,000 alone. As revealed in the Daily Mail in 2009, Stephen Fry was on BBCs secret Top Talent league table, where he was in the Top Tier - Highly Valued section along with the likes of Andrew Marr and Jeremy Paxman. A small town in Illinois is getting a slew of unwanted attention by fans of the dominating mega-movie Black Panther. Wauconda, Illinois, is pronounced the same exact way as the unfortunately fictional Wakanda - the most technologically advanced nation in the world and home to the Black Panther and super strong metal vibranium. Alise Homola, the executive assistant to the village administrator and mayor, shared with the Hollywood Reporter that she's received a plethora of calls and emails since the film's debut, last weekend. Wauconda, Illinois, is pronounced the same exact way as the unfortunately fictional Wakanda - the setting for Marvel's Black Panther Wakanda os the most technologically advanced nation in the world and home to the Black Panther - played by Chadwick Boseman - and super strong metal vibranium. T'Challa, aka the Black Panther, rules over the African utopia Wakanda (pictured) and has to protect it and the vibranium that calls it home from the likes of villain Killmonger, played by Michael B. Jordan 'At first, I was like, is there a full moon out?' said Homola, who has not seen the film even though it is showing at the Regal Cinema at Lake Zurich a mere six miles away. Located in Lake County, the small town boast a population of 13,758, according to the United States Census Bureau. It is approximately an hour and a half northwest of Chicago. Homola - who pegs herself as not being a superhero buff - shared that she thought it was pretty unusual to be asked about a metal she had never heard of before. People have been calling the village administrator and mayor's office asking about fictional metal, vibranium, and asking how the town in pronounced They've also been screaming 'Wakanda Forever' whenever the phone is picked up. People from the area have also been sharing screenshots to show the contrast of the two cities 'Someone called and asked how we pronounced the village name and when I told him, he began yelling, "Wakanda forever!" which I am guessing is from the film,' Homola added. "Wakanda Forever" is the battle cry from the movie that has galvanized the masses on social media and beyond into seeing the 'biggest movie in the world.' 'He was joking around about it,' she told the Chicago Sun Times. 'He just said that "I was searching the Wakanda from the movie, and your village came up, so I thought Id call you and give you a hard time."' According to the village website, Wauconda was named after a Native American chief 'who is buried somewhere on the southern bank of Bangs Lake, back of the Town Hall. The word means 'Spirit Water' in the native language Located in Lake County, the small town boast a population of 13,758, according to the United States Census Bureau. It is approximately an hour and a half northwest of Chicago Even the Wauconda High School has gotten inquiries to change its mascot from a bulldog, to a Black Panther but Principal Dan Klett told the Hollywood Reporter that that was a no go. On Wikipedia, someone went as far as adding an update to the town's page and said that it was 'orignally spelled "Wakanda."' People from the area have also been sharing screenshots to show the contrast of the two cities. T'Challa, aka the Black Panther and played by Chadwick Boseman, rules over the African utopia Wakanda and has to protect it and the vibranium that calls it home from the likes of villain Killmonger, played by Michael B. Jordan. According to the village website, Wauconda was named after a Native American chief 'who is buried somewhere on the southern bank of Bangs Lake, back of the Town Hall. The word means 'Spirit Water' in the native language. Even the Wauconda High School has gotten inquiries to change its mascot from a bulldog, to a Black Panther but Principal Dan Klett told the Hollywood Reporter that that was a no go On Wikipedia, someone went as far as adding an update to the town's page and said that it was 'orignally spelled "Wakanda"' While Waucondians aren't too thrilled about the added publicity to their small town, the Jackson International Airport in Atlanta has made sure to capitalize off the blockbuster Black Panther explores colonization and imperialism in its fictional country so it is almost fitting that it shares a similar name to a town named after a Native American given the history of genocide on Native people. While Waucondians aren't too thrilled about the added publicity to their small town, the Jackson International Airport in Atlanta has made sure to capitalize off the blockbuster. They offered flights to Wakanda, which quickly gained traction among social media users. The airport also shared songs that would be played on the flights, all having some connection to the characters and setting of the movie. They offered flights to Wakanda, which quickly gained traction among social media users. The airport also shared songs that would be played on the flights, all having some connection to the characters and setting of the movie Marvel is all too pleased by the attention Black Panther has gotten across the world. The movie has the largest opening in history for a Black director, under the tutelage of Ryan Coogler. It has gained the title of having second highest grossing opening in North American history, coming up second to 2016's Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Black Panther stars Boseman and Jordan along with Lupita Nyong'o, Danai Gurira, Angela Bassett, Forest Whitaker, Letitia Wright, Daniel Kaluuya, Winston Duke, Sterling K. Brown, Martin Freeman, Andy Serkis and many more. Kayla Mueller was captured by ISIS in 2013 while doing aid work in Syria and confirmed dead by US authorities in 2015 The parents of ISIS victim Kayla Mueller are hopeful of bringing her body home for a proper burial with the help of two captured jihadis. Marsha and Carl Mueller believe Alexanda Kotey and El Shafee Elsheikh, two members of the jihadi group known as The Beatles, may hold the key to finding their daughter's remains, which are believed to be somewhere in Syria. Kotey and Elsheikh were captured by Kurdish forces earlier this month while trying to sneak back into Europe and have been helping forensic teams identify the burial sites of ISIS victims. It is thought that Kotey and Elsheikh helped to torture Mueller before she died, and therefore might know where she was buried. Her parents say that finding her body will finally bring them closure by eradicating any possibility that she is still alive. Throughout 2017, after her death had been announced, government sources continued hearing rumors that she was alive somewhere in the Middle East. 'Until we have her back, we can never be sure,' Marsha told Arizona Central. Parents Carl and Marsha Mueller say they are hopeful of bringing her remains home with the help of two jihadis captured earlier this month Mueller's parents hope that seeing her body will allow them closure, because until then they cannot give up a sliver of hope that she is still alive Mueller was taken hostage by ISIS in 2013 while doing aid work in Syria and though she was confirmed dead by US authorities in 2015, the exact circumstances of her death remain unclear. ISIS claimed she was killed by falling rubble during a Jordanian airstrike. Pentagon staff said there is 'no doubt' she was killed by jihadis, but they do not know how. During her 18-month captivity, Mueller was taken as a wife by ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and raped multiple times, according to the testimony of Yazidi sex slaves who say they were kept alongside her. She was also forced to convert to Islam but did not truly accept the religion, the Yazidis said. While she acquiesced to all of Baghdadi's demands under the threat of being beheaded, in private she described what happened to her as 'rape', they added. Alexanda Kotey, 34 (left), and El Shafee Elsheikh, 29 (right), formed part of the jihadi group known as The Beatles and have been captured by Kurdish forces. It is believed they helped torture Mueller before she died, and may know where she is buried Kotey and Elsheikh took part in brutal ISIS beheadings alongside Mohammed Emwazi, also known as Jihadi John. US officials say they have been helping to identify the graves of some of his victims near Raqqa Kotey and Elsheikh formed half of the notorious Beatles group alongside Aine Davis and Mohammed Emwazi, also known as Jihadi John. They were dubbed The Beatles by their captives because of their British accents. Three of them were born in the UK, while Emwazi originated from Kuwait but grew up in London. Before his death in November 2015, Emwazi became ISIS 'executioner', beheading British and American prisoners in sickening videos that were posted online. Among the victims were James Foley, Steven Stoloff, Alan Henning, David Haines, and Peter Kassig. Last week it was reported that Kotey and Elsheikh had led a team of forensic experts to a mass grave outside of Raqqa where some of the remains are believed to have been buried. Aine Davis was also part of the jihadi cell. He was captured in Turkey and was sentenced to seven and a half years in jail in 2017 CNN said that it may be difficult to identify the remains since a large number of victims are buried at the site and ISIS has taken pains to disguise it. Emwazi himself was killed in a US airstrike in Syria in 2015 while Kotey and Elsheikh, both from West London, were captured by the Western-backed Syrian Defence Force last month as they were fleeing Syria to Turkey disguised as refugees. The SDF did not know the two Britons were part of the same cell led by Jihadi John. But after interrogations by US officials, it was discovered that they were the last two members of the gang. The fourth member, Aine Davis, was convicted of being a member of a terrorist organisation and jailed for seven-and-a-half years in Silivri, Turkey, in May 2017. Nightmare tenants caused $50,000 worth of damage to a man's home after he helped out a friend while he worked away. Knives were left sticking out of the walls, glass broken on the floor, wiring stripped out and soiled clothes were strewn throughout Tom Fraser's home in Goodna, Queensland, which he rented out when he moved interstate for his job. When he returned he found the house in a horrifying state but because it was privately rented he is now facing a struggle to fix it. Alleged drug users left the place totally trashed with drug items left throughout the property, A Current Affair reported. Nightmare tenants allegedly caused $50,000 worth of damage to Tom Fraser's home in Goodna, Queensland When he returned he found the house in a horrifying state and is now struggling to fix it Mr Fraser, a fly-in-fly-out rigger, left his home in the hands of a friend when he moved away in January 2017 and opted to save on real estate fees by agreeing a tenancy with the woman. The rent dried up though after six months Mr Fraser claims, leaving him with a battle to reclaim what he owns. When he came back from his work, he claims the whole house had been gutted and completely destroyed. But because he was renting to an old friend, who moved in with her young child, he thought the arrangement would be fine. Even the wiring in the house was completely stripped out Evidence of the previous occupiers remained inside the house including school books, uniform and women's clothing. Mr Fraser says he has to manage the mortgage payments and the repair bill all by himself after his home insurance expired during his time away when he was unable to resolve due to poor phone and email connection. 'One woman, one child - you'd think there would be no problem,' Mr Fraser told the Channel 9 program. Mr Fraser is now urging fellow landlords to make sure they rent their properties through an agent The rent dried up though after six months, Mr Fraser claims, leaving him with a huge repair bill 'All I ever tried to do was help that person and this is how I get repaid. 'I feel used, I feel abused, taken advantage of.' He is now urging fellow landlords to make sure they rent their properties through an agent rather than directly to the tenant. Rudy Grommen, the real estate agent he bought the property from in 2015, has now set up a fund to help start covering Mr Fraser's costs and the clean-up. A nearby real estate agent is trying to help Mr Fraser by setting up a fundraising page to pay for repairs Mr Fraser is not the only landlord who is locked in a battle with a tenant from hell after renting privately. Anne Coutts-Smith rented out her Logan townhouse and claims she is owed $5,000 in unpaid rent since November. She echoed Mr Fraser's statements to make sure potential landlords rent their properties through an agency in order to make sure they are properly protected through law with security bonds and other landlord rights. She found her tenant on Gumtree six months ago but even after allegedly issuing an eviction notice in December, she remains inside the house having changed the locks twice. 'She's squatting and I want her out,' Ms Coutts-Smith said. 'If I had my way I would break the lock in and get her out myself.' Anne Coutts-Smith rented out her Logan townhouse and claims she is owed $5,000 She added on one occasion when was able to get inside the house by breaking the locks on her own property, she found drug paraphernalia, faeces throughout the house, food lying around and the house in a complete mess. Police are reportedly looking into what action it can take over the dispute, the program said. Property law experts say the police have to obtain a warrant once the case has gone through a civil court judge before they can take action. If landlords enter at any time during a dispute they can be classed as trespassing on their own property, in accordance with the law. Photographs of Florida shooter Nikolas Cruz interring his dead mother and smiling by a Christmas tree reveal a stark contrast to the concerned phone calls officials received warning them about the teen who was 'collecting guns and knives'. The images from late November or December of last year were taken around the same time that a caller informed police they believed the 19-year-old would 'kill himself one day' and could be a 'school shooter in the making'. A 911 log released on Thursday by the Broward County Sheriff's Department reveals that police first were warned of Cruz's gun collection in February 2016. Almost exactly two years later, on February 14 of this year, Cruz killed 17 students and staff members at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland. Cruz's mother, Lynda, died of flu complications on November 1, and the teen and his brother Zachary, who has not been since he was involuntarily committed to a mental facility last week - moved in with their family friend Rocxanne Deschamps. Sometime between then and January, Cruz and Zachary were photographed placing an urn holding Lynda's ashes into a tomb. Nikolas Cruz (right) brother Zachary (left), who has not been since he was involuntarily committed to a mental facility last week, were photographed interring their mother in November or December last year In another photo believed to be taken around the same time, Cruz can be seen smiling in front of a Christmas tree Around the same time, a caller informed police that they believed Cruz would 'kill himself one day' and could be a 'school shooter in the making' The pair look somber as each brother holds one side of their adoptive mother's urn. A bouquet of flowers sits between them beneath the tomb. A second photo, obtained exclusively by DailyMail.com and believed to be taken around the same time, shows Cruz wearing the same outfit and smiling in front of a tall Christmas tree at an unknown location. During November 2017, the Cruz brothers were living with the Deschamps in Lake Worth, Florida, about 30 miles north of their home in Parkland. On November 25, Rock Deschamps, the 22-year-old son of Rocxanne Deschamps, called 911 to say Cruz had buried a weapon in his backyard and that it was not allowed. It is not clear if a police officer ever responded by going to the house. Four days later, on November 29, his mother called 911 again to say Cruz and her son had gotten into a fight and that Cruz was on his way to pick up a gun from 'Dick's' that he'd just bought. She said 'he had bought a gun from Dick's last week and is now going to pick it up'. Deschamps then told the operator Cruz had 'tons of ammo', 'has used a gun against people before', and 'has put the gun to others heads in the past'. Cruz's mother, Lynda, died of flu complications on November 1, and Cruz and Zachary moved in with their family friend Rocxanne Deschamps (pictured). On November 29, Deschamps called 911 to say Cruz and her son had gotten into a fight and that Cruz was on his way to pick up a gun from 'Dick's' that he'd just bought Cruz lived with the Deschamps family in their trailer in Lake Worth, Florida, in West Palm Beach for a few weeks in November Cruz's fight with Rock Deschamps was over a photograph of Cruz's late mother Lynda (pictured with Cruz as a baby) which he had misplaced That time, a sheriff's deputy responded. They found Cruz in a nearby park where he apologized for losing his temper. He then went back with the officer to the Deschamps home and made up with Deschamps' son. The sheriff's deputy left without making an arrest because of the reconciliation. Rock Deschamps signed a document refusing to press charges as a result. The fight was over a photograph of Cruz's late mother Lynda which he had misplaced. Details of both calls were released on Thursday by CNN which obtained records from Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office. The following day, on November 30, police in Parkland received a call saying Cruz was 'collecting guns and knives'. A caller said they were 'concerned [Cruz] will kill himself' and believed that Cruz was a 'school shooter in the making'. The call to Parkland officials came from someone in Massachusetts, and authorities advised the caller to contact the Palm Beach Sheriff's Office. Police had long been warned of Cruz's gun collection, with the first call coming in February 2016. The FBI was also warned of Cruz at least twice Not long after, Cruz left Deschamps' Lake Worth home to live with the Snead family back in Parkland. Police had long been warned of Cruz's gun collection, with the first call coming in February 2016. On February 5, 2016, a neighbor's son alerted officers to an Instagram post that showed Cruz, then a juvenile, holding guns and threatening to shoot up the school. The deputy who responded noted that Cruz, who was 17 at the time, had BB guns and knives but did not write up a report, choosing instead to notify the school. The FBI had been warned about him at least twice, including once by a YouTube user who saw a comment written by someone with his name who said they wanted to become a 'professional school shooter'. Paul Gold, Rocxanne Deschamps' former fiance, recalled how he drove him to his mother's funeral in November and said he was 'stoic' throughout. There were four people at the ceremony; Cruz, his brother Zachary, Roxanne and Paul and the meager turnout upset him. 'The boy was stoic. Not a tear. Not an emotion. I asked him if he was upset. He said: 'I'm upset because nobody came, and nobody cares about my mother,'' Gold said. 'I told him that his mother was loved by many, many people and they just couldn't make it, timing and whatnot. It was a complete lie. 'But I felt horrible. Here's this poor kid, and his mother dies, and not a soul shows up,' Gold added. Kimberly and James Snead took Cruz in after the Deschamps and they allowed him to keep his guns in the home DailyMail.com previously revealed that Cruz was asked to leave the Deschamps home because he wanted to keep guns on the property - something Rocxanne would not allow. Deschamps also filed court papers the day after the massacre trying to claim control of Cruz's $800,000 inheritance. Zachary, who will soon be 18, was committed to a hospital for psychiatric evaluation after the shooting on February 14. He was still living with the Deschamps beforehand. Both he and Nikolas were adopted by Cruz and her late husband Roger when they were babies. Roger died of a heart attack years ago and Lynda died of the flu in November. After he left the Deschamps home, Cruz went to live with Kimberly and James Snead in Parkland, where he had grown up. Mr Snead, a military intelligence analyst, and his wife Kimberly, a neonatal intensive care nurse, said that given a second chance, they still would have let Cruz into their home and let him bring his guns with him. One of the conditions of him being allowed to stay there was that he had to keep the guns in a safe. In a recent interview, Mr Snead thought he had the only key, but now believes Cruz found a way to get a second key. When asked how many guns Cruz had, Mr Snead was uncertain. As David and Louise Turpin are due to appear in court on Friday, lawyers representing their adult children gave an update on their progress nearly six weeks after the siblings were rescued from the family's 'house of horrors' in Perris, California. The couple were arrested last month after one of their kids escaped and alerted police that they were being held against their will in horrific conditions - many of the adult children chained to their beds for days and weeks at a time. All 13 of the kids were taken to the hospital after their rescue and it was determined that all but the youngest, a two year old, were malnourished. Since then, the six underage siblings have been discharged and sent to live in two foster care homes, while the seven adult children (the oldest being 29) continue to recover at the Corona Regional Medical Center. Scroll down for video The lawyers representing the seven adult Turpin children say they continue to recover from their years of abuse at the Corona Regional Medical Center. The six younger siblings have been split between two foster homes Last month, David (left) and Louise Turpin (right) were arrested after one of their daughters escaped the home and alerted police that they were being held against their will in horrific conditions. The couple are due in court for a hearing on Friday Attorneys Jack Osborn and Caleb Mason are representing the adult children, and gave an update on their progress to CBS This Morning on Friday. They say the hospital staff have converted a portion of the hospital to suit the needs of the adult Turpins, giving them outdoor space to exercise and play sports. They are also getting the chance to watch Harry Potter movies and use iPads for the first time. While they haven't been able to be reunited with their younger siblings yet, they keep in contact with them via Skype. The older Turpins are just getting used to the idea that they have rights as adults and can make their own decisions, like what they wear every day or read. Staff at the Corona Regional Medical Center have converted a portion of the hospital to suit the needs of the adult Turpin children - including giving them an outdoor space so they can exercise and play sports 'That's a big deal, deciding what they're going to read, deciding what they're going to wear, these are all things that are decisions they make every day that are new and empowering,' Osborn said. The adult children are excited by the prospect of getting to go to the beach, the mountains and the movies. 'I just want you to understand just what special individuals they are,' Osborn said. 'They all have their own aspirations and their own interests and now they may have an opportunity to address those, which is really exciting.' The resilient kids have already started planning for their futures, many saying they aspire to get a college education. Attorneys Jack Osborn (right) and Caleb Mason (left) are representing the adult children. They say the abused adults are just learning that they have rights, and are getting used to the idea of making decisions for themselves Corona Mayor Karen Spiegel has worked closely with the nurses taking care of the older children. She says the kids are very thankful for the kind treatment they have received. 'They talk about how warm and loving these kids are and so appreciative,' Spiegel said. 'Some of them have never really seen a toothbrush before. ... Things that we just take for granted mean so much to these kids.' David and Louise Turpin's procedural hearing will take place at 1:30pm PT. The couple have pleaded not guilty to nearly 40 charges each of torture, false imprisonment, abuse on a dependent adult and child abuse. David Turpin faces an additional charge of a lewd act on a child under the age of 14. Troubled Stranger Things star Charlie Heaton will not lose his job on the hit Netflix series - despite being refused entry to the U.S. for cocaine possession. One of the global hit show's executives confirmed to DailyMail.com that the English actor from Bridlington, East Yorkshire, is definitely returning for the third season. Fans had been concerned that 24-year-old Heaton - who plays Jonathan Byers on the show - would be fired or replaced after he was caught up in the cocaine bust at LAX airport in Los Angeles in October last year. The father-of-one was promptly put on a plane back to London, where he then pleaded his case with U.S. embassy officials to be let back in. Charlie Heaton (pictured with co-star and girlfriend Natalia Dyer) will return to Stranger Things' third season. He was denied entry to LAX in October over cocaine. The 24-year-old British actor from Bridlington, East Yorkshire, pleaded his case with U.S. Embassy officials Insiders say Netflix has assurance from Heaton that he 'would not let them down again'. He also met with U.S. officials in London. Filming starts in the next few days for the third run Stranger Things' costume designer Kim Wilcox said Heaton was not pushed out at Netflix despite the drug bust because the show's creators value him and 'their family atmosphere.' The award-winning designer said Heaton 'slipped' in his decision making and says that the 24-year-old English actor is a 'sensitive soul'. 'Charlie is returning,' she said. 'Charlie actually is one of my favorites of all the actors and I think he's a very sensitive soul. I think he's a good man and I think he's made some great decisions in his life and maybe this was just a time where something slipped.' She continued: 'I think he's a fine actor and he's a great ensemble player and I think that in his work and in his presentation at Stranger Things 2, myself and to everyone else, he is very professional and an incredibly generous human being, so I don't see why they wouldn't invite him back.' Stranger Things' costume designer Kim Wilcox (pictured) said Netflix was letting the coke bust slide, saying the show's creators value him and 'their family atmosphere' Wilcox, speaking at the Costume Designers Guild Awards in Los Angeles on Tuesday, added that the show's creators, the Duffer Brothers, were instrumental in the success and family feel of the production. That unity is what helped save Heaton, who dates his co-star Natalia Dyer, from the chop - as well as his successful plea to embassy officials not to be barred from entering the U.S. again. She said: 'The Duffers try and create this feeling of family and in large part, they succeed. You know we have all these children, we have their older siblings, we have their younger siblings, we have their dogs, we have their nannies, we have their parents, we have their teachers. 'It's a huge family and giant company, so I'm not surprised at all and I would have been surprised had they made a different decision.' Heaton's return is further aided by the fact that U.S. border officials will not press charges or take further action over being discovered with cocaine at the airport. Insiders say Netflix has assurances from Heaton that he 'would not let them down again', and that he met with U.S. Embassy officials in London. Filming starts in the next few days for the third run. U.S. officers refused Charlie entry after discovering cocaine and he was sent back to the UK, missing the Hollywood premiere for the second season of Stranger Things. A source connected to the show said: 'Charlie is not being charged with any crime, and does not face legal action if he returns to the U.S.' After the bust, fans got behind Heaton, whose character Jonathan Byers finally hooked up with love interest Nancy, his real-life girlfriend Natalia Dyer (pictured together in January), during the second series They continued: 'The Duffer Brothers and Netflix were very sympathetic to his plight. They have made it clear that he will have to stay out of trouble. 'His handlers have assured them that Charlie can overcome this hiccup and prove to them he does not have a substantial problem. 'There was sympathy for Charlie as they knew how much he loved the show, was a team player and felt bitterly disappointed at what happened.' After being sent back home following the incident, the young actor issued a statement, which read: '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. '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.' Fans have rallied behind Heaton, whose character Jonathan Byers finally hooked up with love interest Nancy, during the second series. His mother and sister previously said a small amount of cocaine found its way on to his wallet at a party two weeks earlier, or at a bar or at a shop without his knowledge. Family of the actor say he has never done drugs in the past and was not under the influence at the time he was stopped at the LA airport. The British actor, 24, has a three-year-old son with his ex-partner Akiko Matsuura (pictured with his son). Before his foray into acting, Heaton was a musician, playing drums for rock band Comanech Family of the actor say he has never done drugs in the past and was not under the influence at the time he was stopped at the LA airport. Pictured: Heaton with his ex Akiko Matsuura Heaton won the SAG Award for best supporting actor in a mini series last year and was a nominee this time. Stranger Things is the 24-year-old's breakout role. He launched his TV career in 2015, appearing in British series such as DCI Banks, Vera and Casualty. His big break into the American market came with Shut In, starring alongside Naomi Watts, Oliver Platt and Jacob Tremblay. Before his foray into acting, Heaton was a musician, playing drums for rock band Comanech. Costume designer Wilcox was nominated at the SAG awards, hosted by Gina Rodriguez at The Beverly Hilton in Beverly Hills. The Costume Designers Guild, IATSE local 892, is a union formed for the promotion and protection of the art of costume design. Two lorry drivers told how they saw Polish lorry driver Ryszard Masierak (pictured) 'parked' in lane one of the M1 at night but were able to pass him before a horror crash Two lorry drivers blasted their horns to alert a drunken trucker who had parked on the M1 shortly before a family of eight were killed in a pileup behind him. The pair told how they saw Polish lorry driver Ryszard Masierak 'parked' in lane one of the M1 and sounded their horns at they went by. But shortly after, a minibus carrying an Indian family on their way to Disneyland Paris, saw Masierak's stationary lorry and stopped behind it, switching on their hazard lights. Following behind was David Wagstaff in a HGV who failed to see either the lorry or the minibus and ploughed into them at 56mph - killing all eight occupants of the minibus sandwiched between the trucks. The jury, trying both Masierak and Wagstaff for causing the eight deaths by dangerous driving, had been told that the horrific Bank Holiday crash happened on an unlit stretch of the M1 near Newport Pagnall, Buckinghamshire. Evidence was found that the Polish lorry driver had been stationary in the carriageway for 12 minutes before the crash happened. He had also been drinking alcohol and empty cans of cider were found in the cab of his truck. Jared Peel and Guy Fox both gave evidence to the jury on Friday after footage from their dashcams showed the lorry belonging to Masierak in the first lane parked up. Giving evidence over a videolink, Jared Peel, a fully qualified HGV licence holder since 2003, confirmed that he saw the lorry and took action to pass it before sounding his horn in an attempt to alert the driver. He said: 'The vehicle behind me that overtook also blew his horn. I did that to try to get his attention and warn him what he is doing was dangerous. The lorry behind also fully illuminated his lights on full beam.' Shortly after, a minibus containing an Indian family of eight on their way to Disneyland Paris, also encountered Masierak's stationary lorry and managed to stop, switching on the hazard lights. But HGV driver David Wagstaff failed to see the parked vehicles and ploughed into them Mr Peel had previously told police he could see no reason why the lorry would have stopped. When questioned by Gillian Jones QC, representing Wagstaff, Peel said he saw Masierak's parked lorry about half a mile away and that he thought he had between 10 and 15 seconds to react. Mrs Jones added: 'You had your vehicle on cruise control and suddenly as you got closer you were catching up with the lorry pretty quickly. You perceived this vehicle was moving more slowly and just stopped. Wagstaff hit the minibus at 56mph, killing all eight occupants sandwiched between the two HGVs. He and Masierak deny causing death by dangerous driving 'It was not until you were 100 yards away that you appreciated this hazard was stationary. You gave yourself a time of 10 to 15 seconds to react, but in fact at half a mile back doing 56mph you had 32 seconds. But to you it felt a lot shorter as you said.' Guy Fox was driving a white Scania HGV on the night and also described the moment he encountered the parked lorry on the M1 as was shown on footage played to the jury. Mr Fox said: 'I could not see anything in the cab of the [stationary] lorry, I can't remember if it was dark or a light was on. 'I saw the lorry at about the two-thirds of a mile sign for the turn off. It was at the 300 yard marker that I realised the lorry was stationary. I looked in my mirror but there was a car in the middle lane. 'I indicated and the car sped up a bit and I moved over. I could not see the full flashers on the parked lorry, just the usual four lights on the back. It was a shock to me.' Nigel Lowe, a forensic scientist, confirmed the toxicology reports given in the opening speech to the jury by prosecutor Oliver Saxby, QC, and when quizzed by Judge Francis Sheridan to put it in layman's terms for the jury and others, whether Masierak was over the limit, he confirmed this. Mr Lowe said: 'It is difficult to answer that without knowing the full pattern of drinking but I am fully satisfied with the answers given.' Lavanya (right)and Karthikeyan (left) Ramasubramanian were among those killed in the crash Judge Sheridan replied: 'Well that's that then, if you are over, you are over.' Masierak, of Barnards Close, Evesham, Worcs., aged 32 years, is charged with a total of 20 counts relating to the collision including eight counts of causing death by dangerous driving, four counts of causing serious injury by dangerous driving and eight counts of causing death by careless driving while over the prescribed limit. Wagstaff, of Derwent Street, Stoke-on-Trent, Staffs., aged 54 years, is also charged with eight counts of causing death by dangerous driving and four counts causing serious injury by dangerous driving. The jury heard that he admitted careless driving but this was not accepted by the prosecution. Karthikeyan Pugalur Ramasubramanian, aged 33 years and wife Lavanyalakshmi Seetharaman, aged 32 years, who were from the Alwarthirunagar area of Chennai, India were one couple to die in the crash (subs note: all name spelling correct). Subramaniyan Arachelvan, aged 58 years, and his wife Tamilmani Arachelvan, aged 50 years, from the Saket area of Dehli, India were another couple who lost their lives in the collision. Also killed were 63-year-old Panneerselvam Annamalai from the Nagar area of Chennai, India, 26-year-old Vivek Baskaran from the Avaiyambalpuram area of Mayiladuthurai, India, and 27-year-old Rishi Rajeev Kumar from Kerala, India. The minibus driver and owner of Nottingham-based ABC Travels, Cyriac Joseph, aged 52 years and from Nottingham, was the only person killed in the crash with a British address. The case was adjourned until Monday. Advertisement Billionaire James Stunt was slapped with parking tickets on four different cars in one today as it emerged he has angered neighbours by allegedly leaving his vehicles running and taking up six spaces instead of two outside his 14million home. Residents living near his Belgravia mews property, which he moved into in the wake of his split from Formula One heiress Petra Ecclestone, are said to be furious. And the 36-year-old appears to have irked wardens after receiving four parking tickets this morning alone. Pictures taken today show tickets on his customised Range Rover, Rolls Royce and two Bentleys parked on the cobbled streets in the exclusive enclave. The 36-year-old has been given four parking tickets this morning alone - including this one on his customised Range Rover One of the billionaire's Rolls Royce cars had a ticket slapped on it - and homeowners living nearby say they are 'furious' One neighbour told MailOnline Stunt 'takes up other residents' parking spaces with his six cars' and claims he 'leaves the engines running for up to six hours' so his staff can move them if a traffic warden approaches Residents are also said to be unhappy about Stunt's phalanx of burly bodyguards which follow him whenever he ventures out of his Belgravia mansion, claiming it 'doesn't make the area look nice'. Petra Ecclestone (right) was granted a divorce from Mr Stunt in October after lawyers revealed that a settlement over the couples alleged 5.5billion fortune had been reached Pictured: Petra Ecclestone photographed leaving her gym in London on Thursday, February 22 Stun'ts fleet of cars include a 3.1million J.S. 1 Edition Aventador and a 180,000 Lamborghini Huracan. One neighbour, who asked not to be named, lives in a property which overlooks Stunt's Georgian townhouse. She and other long term residents, many of whom have lived in the area for some 20-30 years, say they are outraged. She told MailOnline Stunt 'takes up other residents' parking spaces with his six cars' and claims he 'leaves the engines running for up to six hours' so his staff can move them if a traffic warden approaches. But she says wardens are 'finally' ticketing the cars, and says council officials will now start clamping the vehicles. The homeowner told MailOnline: 'We are fed up. Everyone is allowed two bays but he is using six.' Residents are also said to be unhappy about Stunt's bodyguards, who follow him whenever he ventures out of his home, claiming it 'doesn't make the area look nice'. Stunt allegedly continues to park his cars in the bays outside his house despite residents having the use of a dedicated private garage around the corner, which caters for luxury and classic cars and offers a valet service. Parking wardens dished out four tickets this morning alone on the cars which were parked outside his 14 million home Stunt's fleet of cars include a Rolls Royce, a 3.1million J.S. 1 Edition Aventador and a 180,000 Lamborghini Huracan The 36-year-old, who runs an international gold bullion firm, met Bernie Ecclestones in 2006 and the pair married in 2011 at a lavish 12million ceremony in Italy. But they divorced last October and their acrimonious split was played out in the courts in the following months. Miss Ecclestone was granted a divorce from Mr Stunt in October after lawyers revealed that a settlement over the couples alleged 5.5billion fortune had been reached. At one hearing it was claimed that Mr Stunt, once rumoured to be worth an estimated 3.3billion, was abusive, violent and took overdoses during the marriage. He has denied the allegations. But the pair had been at loggerheads over their assets, including a 100million Chelsea mansion and a 158million home in Los Angeles. Stunt claimed to have been the victim of Britains biggest ever burglary in December, alleging some 90million of cash and valuables were stolen from his home. He told police that thieves had emptied the safe in the basement of his Georgian townhouse in Belgravia last month while he slept upstairs. Cash, gold and diamond jewellery worth up to 90million was stolen in the raid, according to The Sun on Sunday. One of the young survivors of the Parkland shooting, which left 17 dead, has quit Facebook after claiming he received death threats from anti-gun control activists. Cameron Kasky, 17, who created the hashtag #NeverAgain after the February 14 massacre at his school Marjory Douglas Stoneman High in Florida, wrote on Twitter: 'Temporarily got off Facebook because there's no character count so the death threats from the cultists are a bit more graphic than those on Twitter.' The message has so far garnered more than 35,000 likes. On the day of the shooting, Kasky addressed pro-gun advocates with a scathing Facebook post: 'I'm safe... Thank you to all the second amendment warriors who protected me.' Two days after shooter Nikolas Cruz, 19, carried out the massacre, Kasky launched the #NeverAgain campaign, urging his supporters to make it go viral - which it did. Scroll down for video Cameron Kasky (pictured), one of the young survivors of the Parkland shooting, which left 17 dead, has quit Facebook after claiming he received death threats from anti-gun control activists Kasky, 17, created the hashtag #NeverAgain after the February 14 massacre at his school Marjory Douglas Stoneman High in Florida Kasky (above, addressing students from his school) and others at the youthful vanguard of the anti-gun campaign plan to create a 'Badge of Shame' for politicians who continue to accept money from the National Rifle Association Since then, he and fellow survivors have started getting harassed online. Kasky and others at the youthful vanguard of the anti-gun campaign plan to create a 'Badge of Shame' for politicians who continue to accept money from the National Rifle Association. 'At this point, any politician on either side who is taking money from the NRA is responsible for events like this,' Kasky told ABC's This Week. 'The NRA is fostering and promoting this gun culture in which people like Nikolas Cruz can gun down 17 innocent lives in our school.' A representative for Facebook told Business Insider that it removes harassing content as soon as its moderators are aware of it. 'We want Facebook to be a safe and respectful environment. Bullying and harassment run counter to those goals, and have no place on Facebook or Messenger. We remove this content as soon as we're made aware of it,' a spokesperson said. Perhaps Kasky's most high-profile moment came on Wednesday, when he confronted US Senator Marco Rubio of Florida at a CNN 'town hall' event broadcast on prime time. Appearing relaxed and confident, the teen confronted the one-time presidential candidate, who has received funding from the NRA: 'Senator Rubio, can you tell me right now that you will not accept a single donation from the NRA in the future?' The question sparked a debate between the high school junior and Rubio, who said he would not refuse future NRA donations because 'people buy into my agenda - and I do support the Second Amendment. 'I will always accept the help of anyone who agrees with my agenda.' Among the other survivors who have since been harassed online are David Hogg. Earlier this week, Kasky confronted the one-time presidential candidate Senator Marco Rubio of Florida - who has received funding from the NRA - at a CNN 'town hall' event broadcast on prime time The 17-year-old aspiring journalist took refuge in a closet during the school massacre. Despite the terrifying circumstances, his instinct led him to film interviews with his fellow students while in hiding. The video went viral. Hogg was recruited by Kasky to help lead the #NeverAgain movement. But his experience in recent days lays bare the politicization of the issue. Hogg's father is a retired FBI agent and right-wing conspiracy theorists believe the agency is behind a shadowy campaign to bring down Trump. The teen has been attacked and harassed online, and even accused of being a 'crisis actor' paid to travel to tragedies to propagate liberal viewpoints. 'I am not a crisis actor,' Hogg said. 'I'm someone who had to witness this and live through this and I continue to be having to do that. I'm not acting on anybody's behalf.' Survivors of the shooting are planning a March For Our Lives event in Washington, DC, on March 24. A growing number of US companies are distancing themselves from the National Rifle Association in the wake of the latest school massacre in Florida. Petitions are circulating online targeting companies that offer discounts to NRA members on its website. #BoycottNRA was the second most trending topic on Twitter. Members of the gun lobby have access to special offers from partner companies on its website, ranging from life insurance to wine clubs. For a second consecutive day companies listed on the site have cut ties to the NRA as it aggressively resists calls for stricter gun control in the wake of the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, that left 17 dead. Scroll down for video Exodus: A growing number of US companies are distancing themselves from the National Rifle Association in the wake of the latest school massacre in Florida The rental car company Hertz tweeted on Friday that it has notified the NRA that it is ending the lobby's discount program Insurer Chubb Ltd. said Friday it is ending participation in the NRA's gun-owner Carry Guard insurance program, but it provided notice three months ago The insurance company MetLife Inc. discontinued its discount program with the NRA on Friday First National Bank of Omaha, one of the nation's largest privately held banks, announced that it would not renew a co-branded Visa credit-card with the NRA LIST OF COMPANIES THAT CUT TIES TO NRA: Hertz Chubb Met Life Symantec Teladoc Simplisafe Best Western Wyndham Hotels Alamo Rent A Car National Rent A Car Enterprise Rent A Car First National Bank of Omaha Delta Airlines United Airlines Advertisement The rental car company Hertz tweeted on Friday that it has notified the NRA that it is ending the lobby's discount program with Hertz. The insurance company MetLife Inc. also discontinued its discount program with the NRA on Friday. The software company Symantec Corp., which makes Norton Antivirus technology, did the same. National Rifle Association Executive Vice President and CEO Wayne LaPierre said at the Conservative Political Action Conference that those advocating for stricter gun control are exploiting the Florida shooting Insurer Chubb Ltd. said Friday it is ending participation in the NRA's gun-owner Carry Guard insurance program, but it provided notice three months ago. The program that provided coverage for people involved in gun-related incidents or accidents had been under scrutiny by regulators over marketing issues. Those defections arrived a day after the car rental company Enterprise Holdings, which also owns Alamo and National, said it was cutting off discounts for NRA members. First National Bank of Omaha, one of the nation's largest privately held banks, announced that it would not renew a co-branded Visa credit-card with the NRA. Nearly two dozen corporations nationwide offer incentives to NRA members, according to ThinkProgress.com, a news site owned by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. Amazon.com Inc and other online streaming platforms are also facing demands to drop the online video channel NRATV, featuring programming produced by the group. Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, founded after 20 first-graders were shot and killed at a school in Connecticut in December 2012, sent letters to Apple Inc, AT&T Inc , Amazon, Alphabet Inc's Google and Roku Inc on Friday, asking them to drop NRATV from their products. None of the companies immediately responded to requests for comment on the letters. Twitter reacts: #BoycottNRA was the second most trending topic on Twitter Comedian Tommy Campbell applauded the boycott, but called on politicians to follow suit There was also plenty of backlash on Twitter in response to the NRA boycott Some supports of the gun lobby rushed to join the NRA in response to the calls for a boycott 'We have been just disgusted by NRATV since its beginning,' Shannon Watts, founder of the Moms Demand Action group, told Reuters. 'It really propagates dangerous misinformation and inflammatory rhetoric. It tries to pit Americans against one another, all in an attempt to further their agenda of selling guns.' David Hogg, one of the outspoken student survivors of last week's attack who launched the #NeverAgain anti-gun violence movement, said the students would target any company with ties to the NRA, in addition to lawmakers who accept donations. NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre said in a blistering speech delivered on Thursday at the Conservative Political Action Conference that those advocating for stricter gun control are exploiting the Florida shooting which killed 17 people, mostly high-school students. 'Evil walks among us and God help us if we don't harden our schools and protect our kids,' LaPierre said. 'The whole idea from some of our opponents that armed security makes us less safe is completely ridiculous.' Parkland school shooting survivor David Hogg who launched the #NeverAgain anti-gun violence movement, said the students would target any company with ties to the NRA President Donald Trump has aligned himself with the NRA, suggesting some teachers could be armed so that they could fire on any attacker. American corporations are moving in the other direction. On Friday, a large Wall Street money management firm said that it wanted to engage with major weapons manufacturers about what comes next. Blackrock Inc., which manages $6trillion in assets, has become one of the largest stakeholders gun manufacturers like Sturm Ruger & Co., American Outdoor Brands Corp. and Vista Outdoor Inc. through indirect investments. The money is placed in index funds, so Blackrock cannot sell shares of individual companies within the index. Its fund clients invest in indexes that might contain companies like Ruger. On Friday, spokesman Ed Sweeney said Blackrock will be 'engaging with weapons manufacturers and distributors to understand their response to recent events.' Blackrock, through indirect investments, holds a 16.18 percent stake in Sturm Ruger, an 11.91 per cent stake in Vista, and a 10.5 percent stake in American Outdoor, according to the data firm Factset. Shares of gun companies mostly fell in trading Friday. Police are continuing a round-the-clock vigil on a suspected drug dealer who has refused to go to the toilet for the past 37 days after being arrested for allegedly swallowing his stash . Lamarr Chambers, 24, was arrested by police on Wednesday, January 17, for failing to stop in Ladyshot, Harlow, Essex, along with intent to supply Class A drugs. He has been held in custody for more than a month since his arrest as the police wait until he poos out the drugs he is believed to have swallowed. Chambers, 24, was arrested by police on Wednesday, January 17, for failing to stop in Ladyshot, Harlow, Essex, along with intent to supply class A drugs Essex police have regularly posted on Chambers' progress - or lack of it - on social media So far Chambers has spent more than a month custody without using the bathroom, but medics are constantly checking on him Police say they are perfectly happy to wait until Chambers deposits the Class A drugs he is alleged to have swallowed (file photo) Essex Police said there was 'no update' on the 24-year-old suspected gang member as they continue their vigil. Medical experts say there is a small chance of his bowels bursting but a force spokesman today refused to provide 'blow by blow' daily updates. They say there won't be an update on his condition 'until he has done what we need him to do'. Following Chambers' arrest, policing team Operation Raptor West tweeted to say: 'London gang nominal arrested for failing to stop for police and possession with intent to supply Class A drugs, male doesn't think we have the power to keep him until he removes said items from his bottom.' But more than a month later, the team based at Harlow police station, Essex, are still waiting. Operation Raptor West is Essex Police's gang and urban street crime unit for Harlow, Epping Forest, Brentwood and Thurrock districts. Chambers is undergoing daily medical tests but research shows that holding your poo for a significant amount of time might not be as bad as you think. Trish Macnair, from the Primary Care Society for Gastroenterology said: 'There's only so long you can hang on. London gang nominal arrested for failing to stop for police and possession with intent to supply class A drugs, male doesn't think we have the power to keep him until he removes said items from his bottom 'You won't get a devastating build-up of toxins that can poison the body in such a short space of time. 'You're just going to get a lot of uncomfortable stretching of intestinal tubes. 'This is an acute situation, not chronic. 'Ultimately, things will move through the bowel and it'll empty itself. 'Most people have been there.' She explains the longer you go without excreting the more uncomfortable it is going to be. She added: 'The suspect will feel his bowel moving, trying to empty. He'll be holding his sphincter tight.' Officers have claimed the 24-year-old is also refusing to eat, but Ms Macnair has explained that fasting will not prevent the suspect from doing what is natural. She said: 'Even if you're not eating, the bowel will still move. That's because only about a third of what you find in faeces is food debris. 'A lot of it is dead, friendly bacteria and the lining of the bowel which is constantly shedding, like skin. Plus, lots of fluid.' Ms McNair went to explain that there is a small risk of the bowel swelling and bursting but in a young, healthy person, you'd expect the bowel to empty itself before that happened. She added: 'I'm amazed he's held on for so long. It's only a matter of time.' The former owner of BHS, Dominic Chappell, has been ordered to pay 87,000 after an investigation by the pensions watchdog The former owner of BHS, Dominic Chappell, has been ordered to pay a 50,000 fine and 37,000 court costs for failing to disclose vital details to the pensions watchdog as part of its investigation into the collapse of the high street chain. Thrice bankrupt Chappell, 51, bought the high street chain from billionaire Sir Philip Green for just 1 in March 2015. The 88-year-old company crashed just 13 months later with the loss of around 11,000 jobs and 164 stores. The regulator, which has a responsibility to safeguard pensions, moved to protect the pensions of 19,000 members. Just days after it collapsed they ordered Chappell to hand over hundreds of documents in relation to the 571million pension blackhole at BHS. When he failed to comply, TPR charged Chappell with neglecting or refusing to respond to three Section 72 notices to provide information and documents in between April and May 2016 and February 2017. In the first ever prosecution of its kind Chappell, of Dorset, was hauled before a court last month. He was found guilty of all three charges and faced a maximum sentence of an unlimited fine for failing to comply with the notices. Chappell, 51, arrives at Barkingside Magistrates Court for sentencing today Chappell appeared at Barkingside Magistrates Court today, where he was fined 15,000 each for the first two charges (30,000) and 20,000 for the last charge with 37,430.84 court costs. Earlier he told the court there was a perception he had 'made millions out of BHS' but he had actually been left almost penniless by the collapse. He added: 'I have no funds as it stands.' Chappell claimed that he had 'no assets whatsoever' and also claimed a number of expenditures that came up to almost 9,000, including the 2,666 leasing of a 2017-plate Range Rover Alex Stein, prosecuting, said a letter handed to court Chappell claimed he had no assets whatsoever other than a share in a property. Chappell was asked to give evidence in the witness box under oath over his wealth and assets. He told the court he had a monthly income of around 2,700-3,000 acting as a consultant to a small cosmetic company. But he claimed he had extensive outgoings of almost 9,000. This is made up of 3,800 a month rent on his Dorset home, 2,666 leasing a 2017-plate Range Rover and 2,500 a month school fees for his two children, aged eight and 12, which he was in arrears on. He told the court: 'I'm an entrepreneur. It's the nature of the business. There are boom times and slack times. This is a slack period where I have huge amounts of cash flooding out of the door in relation to legal fees. 'I have no way of paying a large fine at the moment but I could speak to people to borrow a loan.' He said he had endeavoured to fully comply with the TPR requests for information and documents and had spent around 250k legal fees in the wake of BHS collapse. The high street company crashed with the loss of around 11,000 jobs and 164 stores The fine comes just weeks after Chappell, a former racing driver, was handed a formal demand for 10m from TPR as it attempts to plug the failed retailer's pension fund. The regulator has already agreed a deal with Sir Philip Green that he should pay 363million towards the pension deficit. District Judge Gary Lucie said: 'He is not being sentenced in any way for the collapse of BHS or the pension funds just the failure of him to comply with demands over the pension funds.' Chappell bought the chain from Sir Philip Green (pictured in 2014) for 1 He said the court must send a message 'to those in positions of power' that a failure to comply to TPR demands will lead to a substantial penalty. He said: 'There was a complete lack of remorse on Mr Chappell's part. The fine should therefore reflect that. 'In my view there has not been full and frank disclosure of his means. I'm not impressed by the lack of detail.' Mr Lucie proposed he pay 2,500 per calendar month. If Chappell does not have the means to pay the fine, it could lead to him being declared bankrupt for the fourth time. Nicola Parish of the TPR said: 'We prosecuted Dominic Chappell because, despite numerous requests, he failed to provide us with information we required in connection with our investigation into the sale and ultimate collapse of BHS. 'Choosing not to comply with our Section 72 notices has now left him with a criminal record and a bill of 50,000 both of which he could have avoided if he had simply done what was required of him.' After the case Michael Levy said Chappell was appealing his conviction on three charges of failing to provide documents to the TPR. Outside court Chappell said: 'It's not the outcome we wished for. The sentence was harsh. However we have launched an appeal, we did that a month ago. 'It would be inappropriate for me to say anything further till the appeal which we can run on a much more sensible basis and show the TPR for what they really are.' Chappell's assets include a house near Blandford Forum, which he says is heavily mortgaged and has no equity, and shares in a property investment company based in Gibraltar, which owns land in Portugal. Furious parents have slammed a primary school for inviting a drag queen to read stories to children. The performers are visiting the school to read tales about tolerance to the kids for World Book Day. Parson Street Primary School in Bristol is welcoming the Drag Queen Story Time (DQST) organisation on March 1. Parents have slammed a primary school for inviting a drag queen to read stories for children, pictured is Drag Queen Story Time The team of six drag queens in the project have performed to over 2,000 children in the UK during the past eight months. But a number of parents expressed concern about who the drag queens are and the age-appropriateness of the reading materials. One mother said: 'Lots of parents at the school are not happy about it but the headmaster says there's no negotiation. One of the drag queens involved in Drag Queen's Story Time that is coming to Parson Street Primary School 'He said if we don't like it we should take our kids out of school on an unauthorised absence. 'There are books dotted around the school about sexuality, they learn a lot about LGBTQ+ in school and that's fine. 'But I just think it's gone too far now and the head is using his position of power and influence to push this information on the children.' 'They are adult entertainers, I just don't see how that is age appropriate'. Several mothers also accused headteacher Jamie Barry of being 'vague' about which drag queens were attending the school and what stories they would be reading. But the school stated it takes the safeguarding of its pupils to be their absolute priority. It confirmed it has communicated information about DQST to the parents of the school prior to the event. Parson Street Primary School recently won the Gold Best Practice award from LGBT education charity Educate & Celebrate. Parents say they are also concerned whether or not the drag queens who volunteer with the self-funded organisation are DBS (police) checked. But the organisation reassured many of the drag queens it uses are already DBS checked for jobs they have done previously as teachers and volunteers. DQST organiser Tom Canham said: 'All of the reading material we use at our performances are specifically written for children, and cover all of the topics we engage with in an age-appropriate format. Parson Street Primary School, the school that has invited the drag queens in to read stories to children 'If parents have any worries, especially in regards to age appropriateness then I encourage them to go on our Facebook page. 'It has all the books and authors we use at readings. It ranges from The Hungry Caterpillar to And Tango Makes Three. 'When you introduce tolerance at a young age they take it on board. 'Many of these children will not be LGBT themselves but they will at some point come into contact with someone who is. 'We have an opportunity to provide our children with a better world in which to grow up, free from fear of rejection, or abuse, for being who they are. 'Drag Queen Story Time is proud to be working with fantastic organisations all across the country to help make that a reality.' Head Mr Barry said: 'We are a community-focused school and lots of effort is put into working in partnership with parents. 'We understand the concerns that have been raised and have spoken with many of our community to reassure them of the appropriateness of the activities planned. 'Children are at the centre of all that we do at Parson Street so it is fantastic that so many of them are excited about March 1. 'We know that many of our parents are also equally as excited and they look forward to also joining us on the day.' Parson Street Primary School is the first Bristol school to be awarded a Gold Practice Status for promoting equality and diversity. Cllr Anna Keen, Cabinet Member for Education and Skills for Bristol City Council, said: 'We are very supportive of children engaging with different groups of people in an educational setting as it teaches them about accepting themselves and others. 'We know that good reading skills can help set children up for life and reduce inequalities. 'Our experience of welcoming Drag Queen Story Time in to our libraries was very positive and successful.' Justin Trudeau has been caught on camera dancing the bhangra at a private dinner in New Delhi. The Canadian Prime Minister was back in traditional dress when he made a dramatic entrance at the event on Thursday night despite facing ridicule from Indians for his 'annoying' outfits during the trip. Trudeau walked out on stage at the Canadian High Commission to the sound of drums before breaking out his dance moves, to the approval of the crowd. But the reaction on social media was decidedly mixed, with some praising his style while others derided him as an embarrassment. Justin Trudeau broke into a dance on Thursday night as he made his entrance to a private dinner being hosted at the Canadian High Commission in New Delhi Back in traditional Indian dress, Trudeau walked out to the sound of drums before showing off his dance moves and waving to the crowd Atirav Kapur, from Delhi, tweeted: 'Can someone tell him Indians don't live like they are in a Bollywood set 24x7?' Another user going under by the name 'The Dark' added: 'Somebody should remind him every 10 minutes that he is a PM. Yasmine Mohammed, an author from Canada, said: 'So embarrassing. Can you imagine some dignitary coming to Canada dressed in a Canadian tuxedo dancing some Newfie jig or something? Ugh.' Another Canadian going by the name Jacqui remarked: 'Please, please, please India, keep him.' It comes after Trudeau was widely mocked on social media by Indians earlier in the week for his traditional outfits, which were branded 'tacky and annoying'. On Friday Trudeau then met with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi - the only high-level engagement of his eight-day trip to India. The pair embraced on the red carpet outside the Presidential Palace in New Delhi, seven days after Modi avoided meeting the Canadian Prime Minister at the airport when his plane initially landed. That move has been widely interpreted as a snub over Trudeau's perceived support for Sikh separatist groups, though Modi officially denies it. Justin Trudeau was embraced by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi outside the Presidential Palace in New Delhi on Friday morning The intimate moment between the two men came after Modi failed to welcome Trudeau to India when he arrived on Saturday in a move widely regarded as a snub The Canadian Prime Minister met with his Indian counterpart in the only high-level engagement of his eight-day trip to the country Trudeau had to hastily cancel a dinner invite for a former member of a banned separatist group on Thursday in a fresh blow to his image. Jaspal Atwal, who tried to murder an Indian minister on Canadian soil back in 1986, had been due to dine alongside Trudeau at a dinner hosted by the Canadian High Commissioner. The Prime Minister said he had no idea an invite had been extended to Atwal and withdrew it as soon as he was made aware. In a further embarrassing blow, images then emerged of Atwal posing with Trudeau's wife Sophie at an event in Bollywood on Tuesday night. Trudeau has received a deeply mixed reception in India, with some flattered by his visit, but others deeply scornful of his preening for the cameras and especially his traditional outfits - which have been described as 'tacky' and 'annoying'. Modi has officially denied snubbing Trudeau, and on Thursday issued a tweet saying he was excited to meet him and his family Trudeau, his wife Sophie, and children Xavier, Hadrien and Ella-Grace pose with Modi outside the Presidential Palace in New Delhi High-level politicians have largely avoided Trudeau during his visit to India over his perceived support for Sikh separatists While many praised his clothing during the first two days of his trip, patience was wearing thin by the time he attended a Bollywood gala on Tuesday night, before the tide turned against him on Wednesday. Ministers, authors, journalists and ordinary Indians lined up to mock him, saying his wardrobe made him look as if he was about to attend a wedding. Leading the criticism was Omar Abdullah, former chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir, who tweeted saying Trudeau's preening was 'all just a bit much.' 'We Indians do not dress like this every day sir, not even in Bollywood.' While Indian newspapers had initially praised Trudeau's attempt to cross cultural boundaries - describing the red kurta he wore on the first day of his visit as 'resplendent' and 'festive' - by Wednesday they lost patience as well. Trudeau has also been widely mocked for his traditional outfit choices while in the country, with many suggesting it looks as if he has been attending a wedding The outfit that seemed to cause most offence was this golden number he wore on Tuesday to meet Bollywood stars, with newspapers describing it as 'tacky' Trudeau donned traditional Sikh dress on Wednesday when he visited the Golden Temple 'Too flashy even for an Indian', proclaimed Outlook India while The Print suggested that he looked like he was auditioning to be a model. The tipping point seemed to come when Trudeau met the great and good of Bollywood, whose looks arguably inspired some of his own. But while the actors dressed down for the occasion, opting largely for black suits and shirts, Trudeau went all-out with a gaudy golden number. India Today described the choice of clothing as 'tacky', suggesting it was insulting to his guests. High-level politicians have also largely steered clear of Trudeau during his visit, and he has spent much of it trying to shake off the perception that his administration is a soft touch on extremists. During a visit the Golden Temple in Amritsar, the holiest site in Sikhism, he assured Punjab's chief minister that Canada does not sympathise with extremist movements. Canada is home to roughly half a million Sikhs and Trudeau's administration has been accused of being too cosy with those agitating for a separate homeland in India's northern Punjab state. Trudeau particularly riled New Delhi last year when he attended a parade in Canada at which Sikh militants were feted as heroes. The forgiving father of a death row inmate who had his sentence commuted on Thursday at the last minute has described their final goodbye and how he prepared to watch him be given the lethal injection. Kent Whitaker appeared on Megyn Kelly Today on Friday with his second wife Tanya to share their relief at Texas Governor Greg Abbott's decision not to execute his son Bart. In 2003, Bart orchestrated the murder of his brother and mother in a hitman plot which he set up hoping to inherit his family's fortune. The plan was for Kent to die too but he survived from gunshots inflicted by the two hitmen his son had hired who were waiting inside their home when they returned one night from dinner. Bart was arrested two years later after going on the run and he was sentenced to death despite his father's pleas for him to be given a jail term. Now 38, he was due to be executed at the death chamber in Huntsville, Texas, on Thursday night but an hour before the scheduled execution, Governor Abbott commuted his sentence. 'It is a day of great hope': Kent Whitaker and his wife Tanya spoke on Friday about the 11th hour commutation that his son Bart received on Thursday night, less than an hour before he was due to be sentenced It is the first time he has ever overturned a death sentence and came after unanimous vote from the parole board to spare Bart's life. Kent sobbed with relief after the announcement was made, relieved that his son would be allowed to live out his life in prison. He was waiting for confirmation of the execution - which he decided not to attend at the last minute - when he found out that his son, his only living relative, would in fact be allowed to live. Bart Whitaker, 38, will now spend the rest of his life in prison where his father says he is a model inmate and has been able to benefit others 'I think this is a day of great hope. He has been given a second chance at life and, I believe with all my heart, that he is going to take that and use it,' Kent said on Friday. The 69-year-old described in heartbreaking detail how he said goodbye to his son earlier in the day during their last face-to-face visit. 'We started the day not knowing what was going to happen, believing that Governor Greg Abbott would commute the sentence but not knowing. 'We drove to the prison for what could have been our last 2 hour visit and we started the visit kind of upbeat, expecting there to be a notification at any moment but nothing came and as the visit wore on, it became more and more obvious that one wasn't going to come. 'So by the time the visit ended at noon we were aware that this very well may be our last opportunity to see each other. 'It was extremely sad. We touched the glass with our hands and said goodbye and then we left and drove to Huntsville where the execution would take place and he was taken by a five-car parade to Huntsville to be prepared for the execution.' In 2003, Bart ordered the killings of his older brother Kevin and his wife Patricia. The plan was for his father to die too but Kent survived when two hitmen his son hired shot them all in their home after they returned from dinner. The plot was devised so that Bart could inherit the family's fortune which was estimated at the time to be more than $1million Kent, a devout Christian, forgave his son and has been fighting to keep him alive ever since. He accepts that he struggled with mental health issues and says he made a bad choice but pleaded with prosecutors and state officials not to kill him, claiming that he could use his time in prison to benefit others through community or education based programs Kent and Tanya were taken to a home which is laid on for the families of death row inmates who are about to be executed. Just before 5pm, they had their final phone call. 'It was so painful, they cut the phone off at five oclock. 'And so the time is ticking away, it is so silent in there and finally about 4:55, so we said okay, we are going to say goodbye now. 'And we told him how much we love him, how much god loves him and that we were coming to pray up into the minute,' Tanya said. Kent had always planned to watch his son's death from the observation room, explaining on Friday that he wanted Bart to know that he was loved and that someone cared for him. 'So he would know that somebody loved him and cared and acknowledged that he was there,' he said. In recent months however, the families of other death row inmates and others who have witnessed executions advised him against it. On Tuesday, the Texas Parole Board voted unanimously to commute Bart's sentence. It is the first time they have ever made such a decision. Kent and Tanya are pictured reacting to that news as their lawyer Keith Hampton reads it out Kent and Tonya embrace after being given the news of the parole board's decision. Governor Abbott took two days to consider it then followed by granting Bart clemency 'I've had so many people who witness these tell me over and over again, "you shouldn't be there. You do not want this to be your last memory of your son."' He decided then that Tanya would go to watch and that he would stay in the house and pray. She had left for the prison when the announcement came through from Governor Abbott's office. Bartt is pictured in his 2005 mugshot. He went on the run after the killings and was arrested in Mexico. He will never get out of prison Kent's lawyer called him to give him the news and he said he played it on speaker for others who had joined him to pray. 'When he did, the whole room the whole room just burst into cheers. Huge relief. It was another celebration when Tanya returned to the house. 'It was an amazing celebration, we just. It was a vindication of a lot of hard work on a lot of people's part,' he said. Kent is a devout Christian who had always vowed to forgive whoever killed his wife and son. He was unaware that Bart was behind the murder plot for months but, when he learned that he was, he stuck to his resolve. Both he and his late first wife's family pleaded with prosecutors not to seek the death penalty but they were ignored. In 2005, after his son's arrest, he met with the District Attorney and begged them not to sentence him to death. 'At the conclusion, the DA leaned over the table and asked, "So. Mr. Whitaker, you are asking me not to pursue the death penalty?" 'I got out of my chair and down on my knees and said, "Im begging you not to pursue the death penalty,"" Kent told The Washington Post at the start of the month. Prosecutors proceeded with their capital case and a jury convicted Bart unanimously. Fred Felcman, the prosecutor, opposed the clemency. Another inmate was given a last chance at life in Alabama on Thursday as Bart was spared. Doyle Lee Hamm was scheduled to be executed at 6pm but the medical experts administering it took two-and-a-half hours to find his veins and gave up afterwards. In Florida, Eric Scott Branch was not as lucky. He screamed 'murderers, murderers, murderers!' as he was given the lethal injection. Republican governor Eric Greitens, 42, was indicted on Thursday on felony invasion of privacy charges Embattled Missouri Governor Eric Greitens has slammed the 'reckless liberal prosecutor' after he was indicted for taking a naked picture of a woman he was having an affair with. The married Republican politician remained defiant amid calls for resignation and impeachment less than 24 hours after a St. Louis grand jury indicted him for felony invasion of privacy. He is accused of taking a compromising photo of a hairdresser during an extramarital affair the year before he was elected. St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner on Thursday announced the indictment that followed an investigation launched in January, a day after Greitens admitted to an affair with his St. Louis hairdresser that began in March 2015. Greitens released a statement saying he made a mistake but 'did not commit a crime.' He accused Gardner, a Democrat who was also elected in November 2016, of playing politics. 'With today's disappointing and misguided political decision, my confidence in our prosecutorial system is shaken, but not broken,' Greitens said. 'I know this will be righted soon. The people of Missouri deserve better than a reckless liberal prosecutor who uses her office to score political points.' The Missouri GOP appears to be standing by Greitens, releasing a statement on Friday that accused Gardner of being a flunky for liberal billionaire George Soros. 'Kim Gardner has received more than $200,000 from George Soros groups,' said Sam Cooper, executive director of the Missouri Republican party. 'Missourians should see this for what it is, a political hit job.' Scroll down for video The married father-of-two, 43, is accused of taking and sharing a naked picture of his mistress. He is pictured here with his wife Greitens is pictured with his family during a campaign event in August 6, 2016. He admitted to having a sexual relationship with the unnamed woman in March 2015 He continued: 'This law has never been prosecuted in this way and it is safe to say if Eric Greitens wasn't governor, it wouldn't have been this time either. We have a progressive anti-law enforcement Democrat wanting to single-handedly oust a law-and-order governor. 'We look forward to a bipartisan committee of legislators elected by people across Missouri to find out what's really going on - ensuring St. Louis liberals aren't controlling the future of our state.' Gardner's spokeswoman, Susan Ryan, responded: 'Despite the Governor's personal attacks, the Circuit Attorney believes the courtroom is the appropriate place to argue the facts, not the media.' The Missouri GOP appears to be standing by Greitens, releasing a statement on Friday pointing to the $200,000 that St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner (left) has received from liberal billionaire George Soros (right) Greitens canceled plans to go to Washington this weekend for the National Governors Association annual meeting. In a statement Friday, the Republican Governors Association said Greitens informed the group he would stay in Missouri 'to fight back against what his team has called a baseless charge.' The group said Greitens also 'no longer intends to serve' on its executive committee. Greitens' attorney called the indictment 'baseless and unfounded.' Attorney Edward L. Dowd Jr. filed a motion to dismiss the indictment on the grounds that any relationship with the woman was consensual. A few lawmakers from both parties suggested that Greitens should consider resigning, just as they did after he admitted to the affair on January 10. House Republican leaders announced they were forming a group of lawmakers to investigate the charges 'and answer the question as to whether or not the governor can lead our state while a felony case moves forward.' Dowd said the governor welcomes the review. Greitens emerges as winner of the Missouri governor's race on Nov. 8, 2016. Following his affair, his wife Sheena (right) chose to stick by his side The governor's former mistress claims he slapped her during an encounter in the same hospital where his wife was giving birth to their child. The family man is shown during his campaign in July 26, 2016 The joint statement from House Speaker Todd Richardson, Speaker Pro Tem Elijah Haahr and Majority Leader Rob Vescovo did not specifically mention impeachment, a process that must begin in the House with an investigation. But for some lawmakers, impeachment is on the table. 'Gov. Greitens has to go,' Democratic state Sen. Jamilah Nasheed of St. Louis said. 'Missourians thought they voted for a person of character and integrity, and instead they got a liar and alleged criminal.' Greitens, 43, has frequently vowed that he won't step down. He indicated Thursday he intends to stay and fight. 'This will not for a moment deter me from doing the important work of the great people of Missouri,' Greitens said in the statement. The indictment states that on March 21, 2015, Greitens photographed a woman identified only by her initials 'in a state of full or partial nudity' without her knowledge or consent. The indictment said Greitens 'transmitted the image contained in the photograph in a manner that allowed access to that image via a computer.' Soon after the affair began, the woman's husband secretly recorded a conversation in which she described the alleged incident. She said on the tape that Greitens invited her downstairs at his home because he wanted to show her 'how to do a proper pull-up.' An investigation was launched in January after Greitens admitted to a March 2015 affair with the unnamed woman. He is pictured wearing festive sweaters with his family on December 5 The woman's allegations became public last month, when KMOV aired an interview with her ex-husband, who recorded a conversation with his then-wife where she discussed the affair. Greitens was elected governor in November 2016 She said Greitens 'taped my hands to these rings and then put a blindfold on me,' took a photo of her partially nude, and then warned her to remain silent. 'I saw a flash through the blindfold and he said, 'You're never going to mention my name,' she said. Greitens has repeatedly denied blackmailing the woman, but has repeatedly refused to answer questions about whether he took a photo. Greitens was taken into custody in St. Louis and released on his own recognizance. He is due in court for his first hearing on March 16, before Circuit Judge Rex Burlison. He could face up to a four-year sentence if convicted. The statute of limitations for invasion of privacy in Missouri is three years, which means it was due to expire in less than a month. Ryan, asked if additional charges could be filed, said the matter is still under investigation. Several lawmakers were questioned last week by investigators from Gardner's office. Greitens, the father of two young boys, came into office as a political outsider, a brash Rhodes Scholar and Navy SEAL officer who was wounded in Iraq, emerging as the winner in a crowded and expensive GOP primary. A former boxer and martial arts expert, he has embraced the role of maverick. He responded to a Democratic attack ad in the fall of 2016 with one of his own in which he fired more than 100 rounds from a machine gun as an announcer declared he'd bring out 'the big guns' to fight Democratic policies championed by then-President Barack Obama. Greitens surprised many experts by defeating Democratic Attorney General Chris Koster in the November 2016 election. Some saw him as a rising Republican star with potential presidential aspirations. But governing hasn't always been easy, even though Republicans now control both houses as well as the governor's mansion. Greitens and GOP lawmakers have often clashed, with him comparing some to third-graders and labeling them 'career politicians.' He has also faced questions about so-called 'dark money' campaign contributions and criticism for stacking the state board of education. His use of a secretive app that deletes messages is under investigation by Republican Attorney General Josh Hawley. Greitens' charity, The Mission Continues, faced scrutiny during the campaign when Democrats accused him of insider politics for accessing the donor list to raise about $2 million through its top contributors. Thousands of poor women in India's Tamil Nadu state have been offered free cosmetic breast surgery, including implants, because 'poor people also have a right to look beautiful,' its health minister said. The southern Indian state is known for its populist schemes, which have previously included free canteens and providing thousands of disadvantaged people with goats, laptops and bicycles among other items. It will now offer cosmetic breast surgery free of charge to all women - for aesthetic or medical reasons - with priority given to those from the poorest sections of society. Thousands of poor women in India's Tamil Nadu state have been offered free cosmetic breast surgery, including implants. File photo shows women in the state 'If a poor woman desires to look beautiful, we will support her financially,' state health minister C. Vijayabaskar told AFP. 'Whether they require medical procedures or beauty treatment, it will be free.' Tamil Nadu is ranked among the top states in India's public healthcare system, compared with ailing government-run facilities in many other parts of the vast country. But critics of the new scheme said the state government is wasting public money on cosmetic surgery instead of spending money on treating serious ailments. 'It is sad that we are now focusing on beauty instead of life-saving surgeries,' Dr S. Elango, a former public health official in Tamil Nadu, told the Times of India newspaper. The southern Indian state is known for its populist schemes, which have previously included free canteens. File photo Cosmetic breast surgery is becoming increasingly popular in India, but private hospitals charge anywhere between $2,300 to $3,800 for a procedure - a year's wage for most Indians. More than 90,000 such procedures were carried out in the country in 2016, according to the International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, up from 50,600 in 2010. The Tamil Nadu scheme was launched Wednesday at a state-run clinic in state capital Chennai, with a promise to soon expand it to other districts of the state. V. Ramadevi, who heads the clinic, told AFP some women want such surgery because they 'face psychological issues that may severely impact their lives.' 'Their career, (their) marriage are derailed because they are taunted and their confidence is shattered,' she said, adding that the clinic expects up to 150 women a month to take up the offer. One of India's more prosperous states, Tamil Nadu has for decades offered freebies to its marginalised population, mostly under the government of popular actor-turned-politician Jayalalithaa. She died in 2016 but her party still rules the state. A Manhattan real estate attorney who in 2012 won full custody of her former lesbian partner's biological daughter after being deemed the more responsible of the two parents has been disbarred after she admitted to swindling clients out of $2million. Allison Scollar's name on Thursday was removed from the roll of attorneys in the State of New York, nearly two years after she secretly pleaded guilty to grand larceny as part of a deal with the Manhattan District Attorneys office. Scollar, 55, made headlines six years ago when she won a landmark legal victory over her estranged partner, Emmy Award-winning TV producer Brook Altman, 52, who lost full custody of her biological daughter, Harrison. Altman conceived the child in 2006 after receiving a sperm donation from a close friend, who later renounced his parental rights, clearing the way for Scollar to legally adopt her. Disgraced: Manhattan real estate attorney Allison Scollar (seen in her mugshot, left) has been disbarred after she admitted to swindling clients out of $2million. In 2012, she won full custody of her former partner's biological daughter (right) Landmark case: Brook Altman, left, was the girl's biological mother, but the judge ruled that Scollar, right, was the more responsible of the two parents A Family Court judge ruled in the fall of 2012 that Scollar was able to provide structure for Harrison and was more likely to look after the childs interests, rather than her own, whereas her birth mother 'behaved more as a friend or older sister than a responsible parent.' The girl, who is now 11 years old, has been splitting her time between the homes of her biological mother and Scollar as part of a court-ordered arrangement, but it is Scollar who currently maintains full custody of the girl. However, in light of Scollar's criminal conviction and disbarment, that could soon change. Speaking to the New York Post after her ex-girlfriends case was unsealed this week, a seemingly jubilant Altman gloated: 'Karma's a wonderful thing.' Referring to the language of the Family Court's ruling that had stripped her of her daughter's custody six years ago, Altman sneered at the notion that Scollar was a 'responsible parent.' She was an attorney who was stealing money right under everyones noses, the TV producer said. The girl, who is now 11 years old (center), has been splitting her time between the homes of Scollar and her biological mother (pictured left with her fiancee) Told you so: After learning of Scollar's disbarment and criminal conviction, Altman (pictured with her daughter), told a paper: 'Karma's a wonderful thing' Attorney Hal Lieberman, who represented Scollar before the Appellate Division, declined to comment on the disbarment on Friday. DailyMail.com also reached out to both Altman and Scollar and was awaiting their replies. Scollar allegedly paid Israeli con man Eli Luski (pictured) masquerading as a former Mossad agent $125,000 after he offered to bribe the Family Court judge presiding over her custody case The New York Daily News reported that Scollar allegedly stole $2million from legal clients' escrow accounts, and that she paid an Israeli con man masquerading as a former Mossad agent $125,000 after he offered to bribe the Family Court judge presiding over her custody case. Scollar avoided prison time by turning on her two alleged associates, her friends David and Jay Katz, and the bogus Israeli spy Eli Luski. She later secretly pleaded guilty to charges of grand larceny and mortgage fraud and was ordered to pay $600,000 in restitution. Scollar confirmed to the News that she was a 'cooperating witness' and boasted of helping the Manhattan District Attorney take 'very evil men off of the streets.' Jay Katz has challenged Scollar's version of events, claiming that she played a major role in the scheme, which netted a total of $5million for the crooks over the course of six years, and that she later threw her accomplices under the bus to maintain custody of her daughter. Scollar (pictured with Altman) was never charged with attempting to bribe the judge and dismissed the bribery allegation as 'nonsense' His brother David Katz told the paper that at the height of Scollar's legal battle against Altman in 2013, he acted as a liaison between Scollar and Luski, and handed him five checks totalling $125,000. The money was allegedly meant as a bribe for Manhattan Family Court Judge Gloria Sosa-Lintner, but Luski ended up pocketing the entire sum. He died at the Rikers Island jail last March. The Katz brothers served between six months and a year in prison in connection to the fraud case and were ordered to pay $830,000 in fines. Scollar was never charged with attempting to bribe the judge. Speaking to the News, she dismissed the bribery allegation as 'nonsense' and claimed that she was the victim of an extortion plot concocted by the Katz brothers and Luski. Scollar is due back in court in April for a custody hearing, which likely will revolve around her legal troubles and disbarment. My daughter and I are hopeful the judge will see people make mistakes, Scollar said. My ex will put my daughter in harms way to win this battle. Its all about winning for her. Scollar and Altman met on a blind date and fell in love. In 2006, four years into their relationship, Altman gave birth to her daughter Harrison, but tensions arose when the baby's biological father insisted he had a say in the raising of the child and the biological parents often took each other's side and alienated Scollar, according to the New York Post. After the couple eventually split in 2010, Altman took her daughter to California. In limbo: Scollar is due back in court in April for a custody hearing, which likely will revolve around her legal troubles and disbarment Scollar sought - and was immediately granted - temporary custody of the child by a New York judge, and Altman was ordered to return, setting the stage for a protracted and acrimonious legal battle. Judge Sosa-Lintner ultimately ruled in Scollar's favor, writing in her landmark decision that the biology of the child was irrelevant and that Scollar was 'indeed the more responsible parent looking out for the childs best interests, not her own interests'. She noted that Scollar had the child on a schedule, always brought her to school on time and to therapy appointments. Altman, on the other hand was a 'freer spirit' and a 'more laid-back parent' who would 'miss therapy appointments or be late to school or camp bus because she overslept or felt that play dates were more important than therapy or that play dates should end late in the evening so that the child and she were too tired to commit to a schedule.' Scollar told the New York Post days after she was awarded custody: 'Love doesnt just come from biology. And the minute I saw this little baby, I knew she was mine.' Naked Cowgirl Sandy Kane filed the bizarre suit against Cumia, his podcast and Compound Media on January 17 in New York Times Square's infamous Naked Cowgirl Sandy Kane has filed a handwitten lawsuit against Anthony Cumia for $2million for leaving her backside with bruises after a chair was pulled from under her. Kaned filed the bizarre suit against Cumia, his podcast and Compound Media on January 17 in New York, accusing a producer of Cumia's show for violating her 'civil rights.' Appearing on Cumia's podcast in August 2015, she asserts that 'his producer Keith [Maresca] violently pulled the rollaway chair out from under me,' and left her feeling 'traumatized and disoriented.' According to the lawsuit, she had gone on the podcast to sing a song 'congratulating him on his new podcast.' Kane states that she suffered a 'black and blue a** cheek,''terrible back pain,' 'anxiety, depression, paranoia and embarrassment' after landing with a loud 'bang.' Appearing on Anthony Cumia's (right) podcast in August 2015, she asserts that 'his producer Keith [Maresca] (left)violently pulled the rollaway chair out from under' her Afterwards, Kane claims that Cumia said 'Hug Keith Sandy!' and that Keith then pulled her 'bare chest to his.' The woman asserts she 'limped out of [the] studio.' She then accuses Cumia of posting the video online for his 'sexist pig' fans to bully and defame her. 'That fall I took when Keith violently pulled my chair from under me plus everyone laughed hysterically has ruined my Naked Cowgirl career plus my self esteem,' she wrote in the lawsuit. She then accuses Cumia of posting the video online for his 'sexist pig' fans to bully and defame her That fall I took when Keith violently pulled my chair from under me plus everyone laughed hysterically has ruined my Naked Cowgirl career plus my self esteem,' she wrote in the lawsuit The Naked Cowgirl - who has worked in Times Square for 10 years - now claims that because of the pain and trauma, she can only work two days a week instead of five. Kane states that she was advised, by her doctor, to go see a physical therapist but says she 'couldn't afford it!' Asking for 'two million dollars' she took it a step further and wrote in parentheses and all caps 'it should be more. Kane is asking for $2million in damages but wrote in all caps that 'it should be more!' She had previously sued Cumia and Gregg 'Opie' hughes in 2011 for shooting a hole through her cowgirl hat and vandalized her guitar. Sandra Kane - her actual name - performs in Time Square for tourist and recently appeared in 2017's 'The Florida Project. Compound Media could not be reached for a comment. Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders' son Levi is contemplating a Congressional bid in next door New Hampshire. Vice News first reported the 48-year-old's thinking, reporting that the younger Sanders is thinking of jumping in the race for retiring Democratic Rep. Carol Shea-Porter's seat, considered one of the most competitive districts in 2018. 'Oh absolutely, I'm definitely considering it. I'm excited, motivated, and interested in the race,' Levi Sanders said. 'I'm just dotting my 'i's and crossing my 't's.' Sen. Bernie Sanders' (left) adult son Levi Sanders (right) told Vice News that he's contemplating running for a Congressional seat in New Hampshire Levi Sanders (left) has the same political positions as his dad, Sen. Bernie Sanders (right), suggesting the only notable difference between the two is that he's a vegetarian Levi Sanders (pictured) served as a senior policy strategist for his father's presidential campaign. Here he attends a campaign event in April 2016 in New York Levi Sanders told Vice that his politics are nearly identical to his dad's. 'The basic difference is that Im a vegetarian and hes not,' Levi Sanders said. The elder Sanders launched what looked like it would be a long-shot presidential bid in 2016, but captured the enthusiasm of liberal Democrats, forcing the establishment candidate, Hillary Clinton, to compete in a four and a half month primary race. Sanders' platform was well known: healthcare-for-all, free college and taking on the billionaire class. Levi Sanders served as a senior policy adviser to his dad's campaign. Sen. Bernie Sanders' run rattled some in the Democratic Party, and it looks like Levi's potential bid could have the same effect. Establishment Democrats are supporting Chris Pappas, a former state House rep and fourth-generation restaurant owner who serves on the New Hampshire Executive Council, Vice said. Additionally, the Bernie wing of the party already had a candidate to back: Rep. Mark MacKenzie, one of Sen. Sanders' earliest supporters from the Granite State. In this 1995 photo Sen. Bernie Sanders (left) and his won Levi Sanders (center) attend a birthday party for the late Sen. Paul Wellstone (right) The state political director of the Sanders campaign is already working for MacKenzie, Vice pointed out. Beyond Pappas and MacKenzie, five other Democrats are already vying for Shea-Porter's seat. The younger Sanders may also get some flack for being a carpet-bagger. While he resides in New Hampshire, he doesn't live in the 1st Congressional district. The younger Sanders could follow in the footsteps of Sen. Rand Paul, whose father ex-Rep. Ron Paul had a national following thanks to his presidential bids. While Ron Paul represented Texas in the Congress and Rand Paul resided in Kentucky, the elder Paul's libertarian-leaning base swept in helped fund the younger Paul's campaign, giving him enough momentum to take out the Kentucky GOP's establishment pick, Trey Grayson, Kentucky's secretary of state. For Sanders both the primary and the general election could be challenging, though most generic ballots are showing Democrats with an advantage going into the fall, and history is on the party's side. Presidents' parties tend to lose Congressional seats during their first set of elections after inauguration. Author Rebecca Morris tipped off the Seattle Times to a Confederate flag in her neighborhood that was really the Norwegian banner A New York Times best-selling author who specializes in crime smelled trouble when she thought she saw a Confederate flag waving in her neighborhood. Author Rebecca Morris then tipped off the Seattle Times who went to investigate the banner waving in the Greenwood neighborhood of the city. However upon investigation it turned out that the suspected Confederate banner was actually the Norwegian national flag, raised by a patriot in support of Team Norway in the Winter Olympics. After understanding her mistake Morris acredited her misinterpretation to the heated political climate. 'Maybe thats the story were so stressed by all things political that we see things that arent there,' she said. Morris sent a tip to the paper saying she wanted to know what the flag meant in her community. 'Hi. Suddenly there is a Confederate flag flying in front of a house in my Greenwood neighborhood. It is at the north-east corner of 92nd and Palatine, just a block west of 92nd and Greenwood Ave N,' she said. 'Maybe thats the story were so stressed by all things political that we see things that arent there 'I would love to know what this "means" but of course dont want to knock on their door. Maybe others in the area are flying the flag? Maybe its a story? Thank you,' she added. Investigators immediately went to check out the commotion and found a flagpole with the US flag waving and directly below it red flag with blue and white stripes making a cross upon it. It was not the Confederate flag after all, despite sharing the same colors. The emblem of Southern heritage is red but differs from Norway because of its blue 'X' running along its width, with white stars within it. Close, but not quite: Morris mistook the Norwegian flag (right) for the Confederate streamer (left) because the two share the same colors, however different designs Represent: Homeowner Darold Norman Strangeland clarified that he waved the flag outside his home to support his Norwegian heritage as the nation sweeps gold in the Winter Olympics Support! Norwegians at Pyeongchang, South Korea wear Viking hats and wave the Norway flag to support their nation's strides in the Winter Games The flag in question was actually Norway's national flag, displayed by homeowner Darold Norman Strangeland in honor of Norway's performance in the Winter Olympics. 'Thats a Norwegian flag. Its been up there since the start of the Olympics,' he said to the Seattle Times. 'Im a proud Norwegian-American. My parents emigrated here in the mid-1950s. He skippered tugboats,' he added. The reporters at the Seattle Times then returned to the crime writer explaining the blunder. 'Are you kidding me?' she replied, saying after spotting the flag, she researched the image of the Confederate flag to assure it matched the one on the pole. Caught! Twitter users were quick to point fingers at the author for her flag blunder One user criticized her history knowledge when she mistook Norway's flag for the Confederate one Another user mentioned that her mistake was representative of America's poor education One local noted that Norwegian flags wave all year round in the area and are not uncommon After realizing her mistake she accredited the oversight to the heightened political climate 'Well, it does look like the Norwegian flag!' she said after re-assessing the streamer. Strangeland had a good reason to wave his nation's banner as Norway has raked in 13 gold medals, 14 silver, and 10 bronze thus far in the Winter Games. Twitter users were quick to point fingers at the author for her blunder, many claiming that the two flags look nothing alike. 'Geez! Research before you speak people,' one user wrote. 'And that is what is called American education,' another criticized. 'I bet she flunked history,' another user said. 'She lives in greenwood which is next to Ballard where they fly Norwegian flags year round & she still doesnt get it? And her opp. & subsequent fail & utter inability to express self deprecation & sense of humor at the situation she created is not surprising (sic),' one Twitter user said. One of Vladimir Putin's most loyal anti-Western cheerleaders was accused today of sexual harassment as the #Me Too movement reached the gates of the Kremlin. Women journalists complained that they had been abused by powerful 50-year-old Leonid Slutsky, who heads the Russian parliament's international affairs committee. One anonymous woman reporter covering politics complained that he had put his palm on her crotch. Another without naming herself said that 'he would only come to the studio if I had dinner with him'. Women journalists complained that they had been abused by powerful 50-year-old Leonid Slutsky (pictured). Slutsky has angrily denied the allegations When he arrived at her studio 'he tried to kiss me on the lips and touch my buttocks', she alleged. Slutsky has angrily denied the allegations and won the support of his ultranationalist party in insisting that the charges are untrue. Confronted by Dozhd (Rain) TV which first aired the women's claims, he said bluntly: 'Never. I'm not like that.' Slutsky - known for his pithy anti-Western quotes - told the online channel that he had spoken to all journalists working in the Russian parliament and none had admitted to making the claims against him. He threatened the channel with a lawsuit. The accusations against the prominent Bentley-owning politician were aired by Dozhd presenter Yelizaveta Antonova who admitted she had never herself faced unwanted advances from Slutsky. The accusations against the politician were aired by Dozhd presenter Yelizaveta Antonova (pictured), who admitted she had never herself faced unwanted advances from Slutsky Antonova described complaints she claimed to have received from her colleagues, saying that all asked to remain anonymous because they feared for their jobs. None of the women has complained to the police yet, said the channel. One woman journalist from the parliamentary pool said said she had approached Slutsky for a comment on a topical matter. 'He put [his] palm on my crotch and ran his hand up,' she said. 'It happened last year. 'I haven't communicated with him since and have been avoiding him.' She regarded his alleged actions and other comments he made to her as harassment, she said. LDPR presidential candidate Vladimir Zhirinovsky (above) said on TV: 'This is the first time I've heard this' Another journalist claimed harassment by the politician but said she did not complain because she feared she would be barred from working at parliament. Popular newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda has said that Slutsky 'prefers smart blonds but has no time for a private life'. He had been married and has an adult daughter, but is now divorced, it was reported. LDPR presidential candidate Vladimir Zhirinovsky said on TV: 'This is the first time I've heard this. 'I will talk to him [Slutsky], for sure, I'll find out.' Parliamentary journalist Yekaterina Vinokurova wrote: 'Wow, it seems #metoo is starting in this country' While the alleged behaviour may not be 'good', he claimed in rambling comments that Slutsky, an ex-banker, may have had a 'motive', in trying to get the women to 'take an interview from him'. Then he added: 'I remember that in junior high school we pulled the girls' pigtails so they turned and looked. 'There was no other way for us.' Zhironovky's son, Igor Lebevev, parliamentary vice speaker, said the allegations against the politician were 'a gross violation of ethics' and an insult. He vowed to seek to deprive the women journalists of their accreditation to parliament, a move that would stop them from working. Supporters of the women said that complaints against Slutsky, a graduate of the prestigious Moscow State Institute of International Relations, were made at least two years ago. But parliamentary journalist Yekaterina Vinokurova wrote: 'Wow, it seems #metoo is starting in this country.' Meanwhile one Twitter user said: 'It turns out that we have our own Harvey Weinstein in the State Duma (parliament).' Hollywood star Leonardo DiCaprio has been urged by Siberian children to get a taste of real cold - by copying them in taking the ice bucket challenge in minus 30C. The actor and environmental activist had voiced concern over climate change, but these 5-to-12 year olds made clear there's no sign of global warming in Yakutsk, the worlds frostiest city. Nine boys and one girl lined up wearing no more than their Tae Kwon Do kits - without tops - for a video appeal to the star. A boy steps up saying "Leo, privet! (Hi Leo!). "Thank you for thinking of us. Dont worry, we are doing well. Today the sun is even shining. Come and visit us, well share a bucket of cold water! Great luck! As his short speech finishes, the boy steps back to join his comrades in line. In the video - a group of young people get ready to do the Ice Bucket Challenge - despite it being nearly -30 Celsius outside 'Thank you for thinking of us!' one of the young boy says in response to DiCaprio's concern over global warming's effects on the region The young martial arts fighters shout a Tae Kwon Do welcome then stand motionless as their seniors pour buckets full of icy water on their heads. As the children run away in clouds of steam in the deep cold, the older warriors pour buckets of icy water over themselves, reported The Siberian Times. Yakutsk is capital of Yakutia, also known as the Sasha Republic, famous for diamonds as well as being Russias coldest region. As the buckets are dumped, a steam forms in the freezing air and the children run away in shock In a move of good sportsmanship, the adults in the video follow up and dump the remaining buckets on themselves The Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation had told on Instagram how thermometers broke when temperatures reached near-record levels this winter in Oymyakon, 575 miles east of Yakutsk. This highlights 'the effects of climate change in the worlds coldest inhabited village, claimed the foundation. Locals said they haven't recorded such levels in the past 15 years. Climate change is posing a real threat to local people's lives and life structures, changing the soils, the fauna and the flora. It was this post that encouraged the children to contact the star with their message. The Siberian children were pronounced healthy after their ice dip in minus 30C, colder than any recorded temperature ever in Britain. Despite temperatures of -53 Celsius, these fellows don't seem to feel the need to wear a shirt Sometimes the cold in Siberia is enough to freeze things on contact - like eyelashes for example! -62 Celsius is so cold, it's even more frigid than the average temperature on Mars of -55 Celsius Motorists making their way home could be forgiven for having to take a second glance in their mirrors after a toy car was spotted strapped to the back of a recovery lorry. The Little Tikes Cozy Coupe was pictured along a stretch of the M77 south of Glasgow, fastened to the back of a recovery vehicle. Social media users have been quick to jump on the bandwagon and share the hilarious image. Richard H tweeted: 'No sympathy for untaxed, or uninsured vehicles...serves them right. Bet Noddy's well p***** off!' The Cozy Coupe was spotted south of the M77 near Glasgow and has sparked huge debate on social media One Facebook user said: 'We buy any car'. Another said: 'Customer service at Little Tikes goes above and beyond.' One user posted: 'No tax, no MOT, no insurance... away to the crusher with you.' A source said: 'Apparently the driver straps it to the vehicle when he is called out to a job, and on the way back, with a load on board, it travels in the cab.' Dr J Hall added: 'Probably broke a wheel on the disgraceful A83.' Another person used the toy car as a political jibe, asking: 'Is this ruth Davidson car, cause she is in hiding.' The Cozy Couple was launched in 1979 and currently retails at 49.99. Advertisement Close to 300 residents of a Los Angeles County apartment complex have been evacuated from their homes after a fire ravaged the building. The fire started at approximately 3.30pm on Thursday in Pico Rivera, California, according to reporting from KABC-TV, and only injured three people. A vacant room on the third floor was believed to be the root of the fire. It would then disperse over the rest of the 'H' shaped complex. A fire started at approximately 3.30pm on Thursday in Pico Rivera, California 300 residents were forced to evacuate after the fire started in a vacant room on the third floor One resident, Jesse Aguilar, had tried grabbing a fire extinguisher to put the flames out as soon as he saw them on the third floor. 'By the time I got there, the flames were already too much. I saw the whole side of the wall just catch on fire,' he said. 'I started spraying the fire extinguisher on it and it was just too much. After I did that, the ceiling came down and when it came down that's when the fire department told me to evacuate.' Two people were taken to a nearby hospital for smoke inhalation, according to local authorities. A firefighter had to be taken to a hospital for heat exhaustion He added that he went from unit to unit, getting people to evacuate and even going so far to scare children so that they wouldn't go towards the fire. Two people were taken to a nearby hospital for smoke inhalation, according to local authorities. A firefighter had to be taken to a hospital for heat exhaustion. The massive scene saw at least 220 firefighters trying to calm the flames and save at least some of the units. The massive scene saw at least 220 firefighters trying to calm the flames and save at least some of the units 45 units were said to have been destroyed by smoke and fire while a total of 141 were also affected things like power outages, fire officials said. Residents were told to go to Rivera Park at 9530 Shade Lane and were told that they could bring small pets. Fire officials planned to stay on the scene overnight in an attempt to squash the blaze. 45 units were said to have been destroyed by smoke and fire while a total of 141 were also affected things like power outages, fire officials said Advertisement A bright, white UFO has been spotted over a remote part of northern Norway. The aircraft was seen by stunned onlookers in Bardufoss on Thursday afternoon. A short while later, it was seen again in 80 miles away in Troms. It lingered until after sunset then exploded neatly into two parts before disappearing into dust, according to witnesses. Perplexed locals shared photographs and videos of the structure as it hovered above them near the town of Troms on Thursday night. Tarquin Millington-Drake of Frontier Travels told DailyMail.com how he witnessed the spectacle. 'We thought it was a chopper coming towards us - a very bright light which came over the mountain and headed toward us - then it turned and went past us. Scroll down for video The bright shining light appeared suddenly above Bardufoss in Norway on Thursday afternoon as stunned onlookers watched. Above is the view of it from Wolf Lodge where a group of tourists mistook it for a chopper The stunning object appeared suddenly then 'turned' and went back over the valley as the group watched on in disbelief Tarquin Millington-Drake watched from the Wolf Lodge (above) and said the light slowed dramatically as it eased away from them Witnesses described how the object faded into 'dust' as it disappeared from view 'Then it seemed to explode but the explosion was very uniform and symmetrical like two butterfly explosions either side of the light. 'It then seemed to turn and go away but no longer as one bright light - just bright dust that faded,' he said. Mr. Millington-Drake watched it from the Wolf Lodge, a remote hideaway in Bardufoss where guests have up-close experiences with wolves. He and other guests were gathered around a fire outside waiting for the northern lights when the UFO appeared. Stunning photographs from the lodge show the group watching, stunned, as the UFO hovered above them, far outshining the stars. 'We assumed it was some special event laid on but the luxury Wolf Lodge but when our hosts starting taking photos it became clear that was not the case. 'It veered away from coming directly from us and just went across the valley. 'By now we were all watching intently and then suddenly it seemed to explode with those butterfly shaped wings. A video taken at the same site after dark captured the object as it faded, as described, from a bright light into what looked like dust The sightings were in northeast Norway on Thursday 'It slowed dramatically, now the bright light was more subdued and the light from the explosion joined to form an amoeba-like circle of light which then seemed to turn away from us and then slowly faded totally. 'It seems nobody in Bardufoss knows what it was. 'There is a big military base there but still no definitive theories from anyone.' So far the only explanation for the sighting is that it could have been Paz, a radar imaging satellite which was launched on Thursday from Elon Musk's Falcon 9. Musk's Tesla launched it on behalf of the Spanish Ministry of Defence. The satellite will orbit earth 15 times a day for five-and-a-half years taking photographs. It was launched in California on Thursday along with two Musk's StarLink, two prototype satellites whose later versions will beam broadband internet anywhere in the world. SpaceX, Musk's company which launched them, did not respond to DailyMail.com's requests for comment about the Norway sighting on Friday. Toys R Us is on the brink of collapse after being landed with a 15million VAT bill, leaving more than 3,200 jobs at risk. The children's retailer is preparing to appoint administrators early in the week as the firm is reportedly days away from going bust. Senior bosses are understood to have alerted the Pension Protection Fund (PPF) today as filing for administration will mean thousands nationwide will risk losing their income security. Bosses had been scrambling to find a business to rescue the troubled couple in its eleventh hour but time is running out with the Revenues deadline earmarked as Tuesday. Closing down: Sale signs outside the chain's Basingstoke store which has been earmarked for closure The news comes as the US arm of toy giant plans to close a further 200 stores putting thousands of jobs at risk as it attempts to avoid a total collapse of the business. Toys R Us closed 182 stores in the US last year, hitting 4,500 employees. The decision to close another 200 stores would take the total to almost 400 - roughly half of its estate in the US. It comes after the retailer saw disappointing sales over the crucial Christmas period as demand for online shopping continues to hammer the High Street at home and in the US. The US arm filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy last year but claimed at the time that the incident would have no impact on its UK operations. Toys R Us UK business is currently preparing to close 25 of its 105 stores after racking up losses of 673m in 2016. The loss-making business was forced to pay almost 10m into its 18.4m pension deficit by the Pension Protection Fund last year in order to secure a deal that prevented it from going bankrupt. Toys R US UK could go into administration at the end of the month unless a rescue deal is found Two possible buyers for parts of the struggling business are another toy store chain, The Entertainer, and investment firm Alteri, Sky News reported today. Toys R US employs more than 3,000 people in 105 British outlets and has been operating in the UK since 1985. The turmoil comes after bosses agreed a deal in December to keep it going. Toys R Us UK arm had been plunged into crisis last year after its American parent company declared bankcruptcy in the US and Canada. Bankruptcy proceedings in the US work differently to the UK, with companies able to seek court backing for a plan to rescue their business if they have the support of lenders. At first Toys R Us said stores in Britain would not be affected but soon afterwards bosses here announced they would axe hundreds of jobs and a quarter of the chains 105 stores in a bid to balance the books. Toys R US employs more than 3,000 people in 105 British outlets and has been operating in the UK since 1985. Its bid to push the changes through under a so-called company voluntary agreement hit a stumbling block, however, because of a row over a 30million black hole in its pension scheme. Toys R Us needed approval from the Pension Protection Fund, which refused to give it unless the firm injected nearly 10m into its retirement pot. After a tense showdown, bosses eventually agreed to pay 3.8million this year and another 6million over 2019 and 2020. That deal was supposed to give the company breathing space, however the fresh question of its finances will renew concerns about its ability to survive. President Trump was admonished on Friday for calling an armed cop who hid from the Parkland mass shooting a 'coward' by critics who reminded him how he dodged joining the army five times as a young man. The president was speaking at CPAC in Maryland where he was cheered on by a crowd of Republicans as he called for teachers to be given guns and firearms training in the wake of the Parkland shooting last Wednesday. He also used the opportunity to weigh in on the criticism of Scot Peterson, a uniformed community officer who was on the campus when the gunman opened fire but who hid behind a column outside as 17 students and teachers were slaughtered. Twitter critics responded angrily and questioned how Trump, who avoided joining the military five times, once claiming bone spurs in his feet made him medically exempt, would have acted had he been there himself. He used college as his excuse the other four times. 'I'd love to see how well President Bone Spurs would react to the chaos of a mass school shooting, students & teachers getting slaughtered right next to him, while he was expected to dodge bullets from an AR-15 and successfully neutralize the shooter with a handgun,' said one angry critic. 'The president who did NOT run toward the sound of the guns in Vietnam 50 years ago, now labels an officer with a handgun a "coward" for not running toward the sound of an AR15,' another said. Trump made reference to being in Vietnam during his speech but it had nothing to do with the war. President Trump spoke at CPAC in Maryland on Friday to give a combustive speech in which he called a cop who did not run into the Parkland massacre to help a 'coward' Trump was immediately slammed by critics who reminded him how he dodged the army draft five times including once because of 'bone spurs' in his heels Instead, he was speaking about a recent trip in November. He also found time to mention veteran John McCain, who was captured as a Prisoner of War during the conflict. Trump did not mention his service but instead slammed him for voting against his 'skinny' healthcare plan in July. "Remember, one person walked into a room when he was supposed to go this way (Trump enthusiastically gives a thumbs up) and he said he was going this way, and he walked in and he went this way (Trump throws his thumb down) and everyone said what happened? Trump is pictured in 1964 when he was in the New York Military Academy as an 18-year-old. He never served in the military 'What was that all about?I don't want to be controversial so I won't use his name. What a mess!' he said. Parkland cop Scot Peterson was armed on February 14 when the massacre took place but he hid outside McCain has still not returned to Congress since he left last year to privately battle brain cancer. His daughter Meghan reacted to Trump's comments on Friday by calling them 'potshots'. One Twitter user connected the two issues. 'Friendly reminder that John McCain endured torture for five years because he wouldn't leave his fellow airmen behind, whereas Trump got out of Vietnam because his feet hurt,' they said. Trump's avoidance of the draft was well-documented during his presidential campaign. In 1968, Trump told military officials he could not enlist because bone spurs in his heels were a physical disadvantage. He was 22 at the time and had just graduated. He got out of it the four previous times were for education. Trump also took a swipe at Republican congressman John McCain (Above with his daughter Meghan in November) for not siding with his healthcare bill in July. McCain has not been in Washington DC for months as he is battling brain cancer McCain did serve in Vietnam and was held as a prisoner of war for five years. He is pictured in 1967 after being rescued. Trump won his fifth military deferral the next year One Twitter user reacted angrily as Trump slammed the military veteran and politician Trump's 'coward' remark was in reference to Scot Peterson whose lack of action in the Parkland shooting was only confirmed on Thursday by his old boss. Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel revealed on Thursday that he had suspended Peterson after discovering how he stayed outside and hid behind a column as gumna Nikolas Cruz murdered students and teachers inside. Three teachers inside died as they tried to shield the students from his bullets. They did not have guns. Sheriff Israel said Peterson's actions made him 'sick to his stomach'. After being suspended without pay, he resigned this week. The Parkland shooting has reignited the national debate on gun reform and raised it to its most fever unignorable stage in Trump's presidency. On Thursday, the president shared his view that more firearms in schools were needed in order to end the violence. It has been labeled a 'colossally stupid' approach to the issue by experts who say it will only lead to more bloodshed. The Hollywood Foreign Press Association which runs the Golden Globes is investigating claims made by actor Brendan Fraser former president Philip Berk sexually assaulted him. Fraser, 49, claimed in a GQ interview released on Thursday that Berk attacked him at the Beverly Hills Hotel in 2003. The actor claims that when he reported the alleged assault, he was virtually blacklisted from Hollywood. His career then took a nosedive as he sought extensive medical treatment following years of doing his own stunts and spiraled into depression. Just hours after GQ published the piece, the HFPA announced that it would be investigating Fraser's claims. Brendan Fraser (pictured) told GQ he was sexually assaulted in 2003 by the then president of the Holly Foreign Press Association Philip Berk The alleged incident occurred in 2003 at the Beverly Hills Hotel while Fraser (left) was having lunch with the then-president of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, Philip Berk (right). Fraser said he became depressed after the incident, but Berk admits no wrongdoing The HFPA gave a statement to Us Weekly: 'The HFPA stands firmly against sexual harassment and the type of behavior described in this article. 'Over the years we've continued a positive working relationship with Brendan, which includes announcing Golden Globe nominees, attending the ceremony and participating in press conferences.' 'This report includes alleged information that the HFPA was previously unaware of and at this time we are investigating further details surrounding the incident,' the statement concluded. The alleged incident occurred in 2003 at the Beverly Hills Hotel while they were having lunch. 'His left hand reaches around, grabs my a** cheek, and one of his fingers touches me in the taint,' he told GQ, 'And he starts moving it around. I felt ill. I felt like a little kid. I felt like there was a ball in my throat. I thought I was going to cry.' After immediately leaving the luncheon, Fraser told his wife of the interaction but otherwise remained silent for fear of embarrassment and career damage. While he did not go public until now about the incident he says he did eventually report it to the HFPA, and according to him they rarely invited him back to the Globes after that. In the article, Berk says he wrote a letter to Fraser about the incident but 'admitted no wrongdoing.' Fraser said that he became depressed and he started telling himself he deserved what had happened to him. 'I was blaming myself and I was miserable - because I was saying: 'This is nothing; this guy reached around and he copped a feel'. That summer wore on - and I can't remember what I went on to work on next.' The actor, who was a household name in the 1990s and 2000s with hits such as George of the Jungle and the Mummy franchise, told GQ in a lengthy profile about how there had been a steady decline of acting roles in recent years. Several factors seem to have contributed including a failing marriage, a growing list of health problems and a spiral into depression. Fraser, who rose to fame in the 1990s and 2000s with hits such as Airheads (left) and the Mummy franchise (right) speculates that two reasons were the depression he suffered after he was sexually harassed and the breakdown of his body after years of stunts Fraser also says that the roles he was in took a physical toll on him. His physical prime from 1997's 'George of the Jungle' was fast-fading. 'By the time I did the third Mummy picture in China [in 2008], I was put together with tape and ice...'cause they're small and light and they can fit under your clothes. I was building an exoskeleton for myself daily.' Eventually the injuries he received while performing his stunts required multiple surgeries: He needed a lumbar laminectomy, a surgery that removes the back portion of a vertebra in the lower back, to create more room within the spinal canal. Fraser also says that the roles he was in took a physical toll on him. His physical prime from 1997's 'George of the Jungle' was fast-fading He needed multiple back surgeries, a partial knee replacement and vocal cord repair to name a few, Fraser (pictured, December 2016) said he was in and out of hospitals for almost seven years However, it didn't take and it had to be done again a year later. He underwent a partial knee replacement, more back surgery involving bolting various compressed spinal pads together and even surgery to repair his vocal cords. Fraser said he was in and out of hospitals for almost seven years. The actor has been enjoying a minor resurgence on television, with a lauded supporting part in Showtime's 'The Affair' and an upcoming role in FX's 'Trust'. 'Maybe I am over-reacting in terms of what the instance was,' he says about the Berk allegation. 'I just know what my truth is.' Malcolm Turnbull and Donald Trump continued to patch-up their relationship on Friday as the pair met in Washington, D.C. for the first time. The US President sat down with the Prime Minister in the White House Oval Office where the pair - despite initially sitting through 15 seconds of awkward silence - described their partnership as 'stronger than ever before'. Mr Turnbull's wife, Lucy, sat by his side, while Melania Trump looked in high spirits alongside the President, after weeks of appearing distant following cheating allegations against her husband. The meeting was not without drama when a 'mentally ill' woman rammed a white minivan into a security barrier outside the White House. A lockdown was immediately put in place with the powerful couples inside, before it was lifted half an hour later without shots being fired. The woman is said to have intentionally rammed her Chevrolet Uplander into the gate, before being arrested. Scroll down for video Malcolm Turnbull and Donald Trump continued to patch-up their relationship on Friday as the pair met in Washington, D.C. for the first time, alongside their wives Melania (left) and Lucy (right) Mr Trump sat down with Mr Turnbull (left) in the White House's Oval Office, where the pair described their partnership as 'stronger than ever before' Melania Trump looked in high spirits alongside the President, after several weeks of appearing distant following cheating allegations against her husband Mr Trump and the First Lady were both at the White House's back door to warmly greet the Turnbulls (left and right) inside on Friday The quartet weathered a security scare about 3.30pm after a 'mentally ill' woman rammed a white minivan (pictured) into a security barrier outside the White House The woman is said to have intentionally rammed her Chevrolet Uplander (pictured) into the gate, before being arrested Members of the US Secert Service closed off roads near the White House complex after the van crashed into a barricade Inside the White House, Mr Trump promised the Prime Minister an official visit Down Under, saying: 'We will be there.' He didn't elaborate on when the visit would be, but told reporters Australia is a 'great place'. Mr Turnbull and Mr Trump met a year after their relationship started on rocky ground, following a robust phone call about a 'bad deal' made by the Obama administration to accept refugees from Australian detention centres. 'I will be seen as a weak and ineffective leader in my first week by these people. This is a killer,' Mr Trump told him last February. But Mr Trump honoured the deal, before the pair claimed to have patched things up at their first face-to-face meeting in New York in May. Inside the White House, Mr Trump promised the Prime Minister an official visit Down Under, saying: 'We will be there' An awkward silence then befell the couples as they sat in the Oval House while reporters waited for someone to say something The First Lady stood by her husband and the Turnbulls as the group posed for photos Mr Trump heaped praise on Australia during a press conference, saying he hopes the US will follow the nation with its tough, 'merit-based' immigration policies Mr Turnbull and wife Lucy (left) sat through more than ten seconds of silence alongside the Trumps while reporters looked on Mr Trump and the First Lady were both at the White House's back door to warmly greet the Turnbulls inside on Friday. Minutes later, the leaders walked down the White House's colonnade together, deep in conversation, as their wives had a lively conversation just behind them. An awkward silence fell on the couples as they sat in the Oval House while reporters waited for someone to say something. Eventually Mr Trump said: 'The relationship we have with Australia is a terrific relationship and probably stronger now than ever before, maybe because of our relationship, our friendship. 'Were working on trade deals, were working on military and protection and all of the things that you would think we would be discussing today. A lot of good things will come out of this visit.' Mr Turnbull followed, saying: 'Its 100 years of mateship that were celebrating this this year, 100 years ago, the first time Australians and American soldiers went into battle together in the Battle of the Hamel, July 4 1918. 'We have been fighting side-by-side in freedoms cause ever since. One hundred years of mateship and 100 more to come.' Mr Turnbull and Mr Trump met a year after their relationship started on rocky ground, following a robust phone call (pictured) about a 'bad deal' made by the Obama administration to accept refugees from Australian detention centres Mr Trump also announced the US would name a new combat ship the USS Canberra The pair continued to put on a mostly united front, although they veered when discussing gun control and the Trans Pacific Partnership - which Mr Trump said he will hold out on signing Mr Turnbull (left) and Mr Trump spoke during a press conference after their meeting in the Oval Office Mr Turnbull praised Australia's gun control, although he refused to offer advice on US policy The pair held a joint news conference after their meeting at the White House Mr Trump could visit Australia this spring, when Trump attends regional meetings in the Pacific Mr Trump warned the world might be in for a 'very unfortunate day' if their latest sanctions on North Korea don't curb their nuclear missile program Mr Trump also heaped praise on Australia during a press conference, saying he hopes the US will follow the nation with its tough, 'merit-based' immigration policies. He also announced the US would name a new combat ship the USS Canberra. The pair continued to put on a mostly united front, although they veered when discussing gun control and the Trans Pacific Partnership - which Mr Trump said he will hold out on signing. Mr Turnbull then praised Australia's gun control, although he refused to offer advice on the US' policy. Mr Trump also warned the world might be in for a 'very unfortunate day' if their latest sanctions on North Korea don't curb their nuclear missile program. Mr Trump could visit Australia this spring, when Trump attends regional meetings in the Pacific. Mr Trump looked on as Mr Turnbull praised Australia's gun control, but stopped short of suggesting the US should adopt the same policy The US President and Prime Minister appeared to have put their tense first meeting behind them on Friday For the occasion, Melania wore a $3,595 gold-trimmed, double-breasted coat from Dolce & Gabbana Melania donned her signature blow-out as well as a smoky eye, and finished off her outfit with a French manicure She looked in the distance while she and Donald waited for the Australian couple Meanwhile, the first lady, 47, flashed a bright smile next to her husband, 71, wearing a $3,595 gold-trimmed, double-breasted coat from Dolce & Gabbana paired with equally sparkly, golden snakeskin five-inch stilettos. Her sunny disposition contrasted with her recent behavior, which has seen her shunning public appearances with her husband and keeping her distance. The Trumps weren't photographed holding hands at any point during Friday's visit however. Last month, the pair arrived separately to his State of the Union address, breaking with tradition. Their arrival followed claims Mr Trump had a sexual encounter with porn star Stormy Daniels after their son Barron, now 11, was born. There has been visible tension between the Trumps amid cheating accusations Melania has in the past few weeks declined to be seen with her husband on a couple of occasions A BB&T outage that left millions of customers unable to access their accounts overnight is finally starting to be resolved. Countless customers were left shocked and frustrated that BB&T was down overnight, an incident blamed on a technical issue, according to the bank. ATM and 24-hour phone service is being restored, according to company spokesman Brian Davis. Davis also stressed that the information customers could see in their accounts isnt fully updated but should be so later on Friday. A BB&T outage left millions of customers unable to access their accounts across the U.S. The BB&T outage was first reported on Thursday and impacted millions of customers who use the banks online banking, mobile and ATM services. The bank has blamed an equipment malfunction but has provided few details so far. Much of central North Carolina was impacted by the outage, along with the Washingto D.C., Atlanta and Philadelphia regions. The bank has stated that the incident doesnt appear to be a cyberattack of any kind, but rather a technical error. According to a statement released Friday by the bank, customers are now able to use their credit, debit and prepaid cards without any issues. At this time, many of our services are unavailable, including digital banking, Phone24, and ATM. Thank you for your patience as we work diligently to restore your services. We will continue to provide updates here and on https://t.co/mww5FRNlBb. BB&T (@BBT) February 22, 2018 What is BB&T? BB&T is a financial services company founded in 1872 and based in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The bank operates more than 2,100 branches spread across 15 states as well as Washington, D.C. Its currently ranked as the 15th largest bank in the United States with assets of at least $220 billion (157.5 billion) as of September 2017. BB&T Insurance Services, a subsidiary, ranks as the worlds fifth-largest insurance broker. Her grades were impeccable: Beatrice Mayhew was proud to call herself a model, straight-A student. She took her studies seriously and her diligence and exemplary attitude earned her respect among teachers and pupils alike. When it came to selecting a head girl, the 15-year-old was an obvious choice. Sensible and level-headed were words that were readily used to describe Beatrice. She hadnt even had a boyfriend nor did she really want one and, as for the sexually charged antics of other girls her age, she was smart enough to steer well clear. So the fact that Beatrice found herself lured into the web of one of Britains most depraved internet paedophiles is nothing short of chilling. In short, if it could happen to Beatrice, it could happen to anyones daughter. The trap was sprung so easily. Like most teenage girls, Beatrice was keen to earn a bit of extra pocket money and advertised her services as a babysitter on the sales website Gumtree Depraved: Dr Matthew Falder, who has been jailed for 32 years When a woman called Liz replied offering her work, she was delighted and quickly responded. But, instead of suggesting that Beatrice look after her children, Liz had an altogether different suggestion. Liz said she sketched life drawings tasteful naked portraits as a hobby and was looking for nude pictures on which to base her artwork. The drawings served as a sort of therapy, Liz explained. Any pictures Beatrice sent didnt need to be overtly revealing and would, she assured the teenager, be for her eyes only. In return, Liz would pay her the princely sum of 800. To a naive teenager like Beatrice, it seemed an incredibly enticing offer. It was an odd response to my babysitting advert, she says. But Id heard of people using life drawings to help deal with depression, and she made me feel I was in control of the kind of pictures I sent. So she snapped off a quick, tasteful, topless photo on her mobile phone and sent it over. It was to prove the start of an almost unimaginable nightmare, as Liz instantly transformed from caring older woman to cruel, anonymous predator, claiming that, unless Beatrice did exactly as she instructed, she would send that semi-nude image to all her family and friends. I felt stupid and trapped. The idea of people seeing me topless made me feel sick, she says today. I knew I couldnt let it happen. So she surrendered to Lizs threat and, over the following two months, was blackmailed into sending her over 200 more naked pictures each one giving Liz further leverage and leading to demands for ever more humiliating images. Vulnerable and frightened, Beatrice was coerced into holding up racist and homophobic signs. She photographed herself licking a toilet seat, and kneeling naked on the floor eating dog food from a bowl all the while too terrified either to tell her unsuspecting mother or refuse to send the pictures, in case Liz followed through on her threat to show them to everyone. I didnt know who Liz was or why she was doing this, but felt I had no option, says Beatrice. Liz was, in fact, Cambridge University graduate Dr Matthew Falder, who was this week sentenced to 32 years in prison for committing a catalogue of vile, paedophilic crimes online. Falder, 29, blackmailed at least 47 victims into sending humiliating pictures of themselves performing depraved acts, before sharing them with other paedophiles on forums on the dark web a part of the internet accessible only with specialist software that allows users to remain anonymous. Last June, following a two-year investigation the largest of its kind, led by the National Crime Agency (NCA) Falder was arrested at Birmingham University, where he worked as a postdoctoral geophysics researcher. When police searched his flat in Birmingham, they found thousands of images on a double-encrypted USB stick which showed abuse against children and babies. In my 30 years of law enforcement, I have never come across a criminal whose sole motivation was to cause pain and hurt to others, says Matt Sutton, the NCA senior investigating officer. The trauma to his victims has been breathtaking. Matthew Falder's desk and computer system in his flat. A paedophile who blackmailed his internet victims into carrying out degrading sex acts What makes his crimes even more unfathomable is that he came from a respectable background. Raised by a wealthy family from Knutsford in Cheshire, he was privately educated, before gaining a place at Cambridge University, where he was described as truly exceptional. He even had an unsuspecting girlfriend, and friends said he was the life and soul of the party. Beatrice whose real name the Mail is unable to use for legal reasons is now 20 and at university. Articulate and ambitious, she, like all of Falders victims, has suffered crippling ramifications. She has become estranged from her mother and is too frightened to have her picture taken at all. She is distrustful of strangers, too scared to meet a boyfriend and unwilling to tell even her best friend the full horror of what shes been through: I worry people will judge and am aware the pictures of me are still there, online. Her distressing story serves both as a chilling reminder of how vulnerable our children are in the digital age and a cautionary tale as to the complex mechanisms abusers use to ensnare even the most intelligent teenagers. Falder was very good at grooming his victims he came across as a genuinely nice woman, trying to boost girls confidence, says Dr Elly Hanson, a clinical psychologist who specialises in abuse and who gave a statement on the impact of Falders abuse on his victims for the prosecution. Once Falder had one photograph with which to blackmail his victims, the psychological obstacles from fear to shame preventing them from confiding in anyone often seemed insurmountable. Although the puppet strings the online abuser is pulling are not always easy for people outside the situation to appreciate, the victims enter a place where they will do anything to avoid their worst fears coming true, says Dr Hanson. Beatrice had posted her Gumtree advert in April 2013, when she was studying for her GCSEs. Liz said I should use a personal email address to contact her, she says. She said I could be pictured naked from the back or topless. But, minutes after Beatrice had emailed Liz the fateful first picture, all offers of payment were promptly abandoned and she received a reply with a drastically different tone. I was told I had two options. Option A, go along with what she asked or Option B, she would send the picture to everyone I knew, she recalls. She listed my friends on Facebook, so obviously had this information about me. She said if I didnt reply, shed choose Option B for me. For a self-conscious teenage girl, the thought of her classmates seeing her even half-naked was, as she puts it, unthinkable. She adds: Instead of being Beatrice the head girl, I would have been Beatrice the slut. Neither could she contemplate confiding in her fiftysomething mother, who brought Beatrice up as a single mum, but to whom Beatrice had never been close. As she was older, she was more traditional. I knew she wouldnt understand, she says. I felt so ashamed. I didnt feel I had any way out but to email Liz back and tell her Id do as she said. Her reply prompted an avalanche of emails, on a daily basis, from Liz, which sent Beatrices life careering out of control. She first ordered her to pose topless with a sign saying H2TC which, Beatrice now knows, is an acronym for Hurt to the Core, one of Falders preferred websites that specialises in hurtcore porn, or sexual abuse involving severe punishment, humiliation and pain. I suspected Liz was a man, but was too scared of making her angry to ask questions, says Beatrice, who says the demands got progressively worse. Within days, Liz was making her pose for pictures fully naked or as she took off her school uniform. Shed often ask for ten pictures at a time, says Beatrice. The emails always came late at night or first thing in the morning. Knowing theyd arrive stopped me sleeping. I couldnt concentrate at school. Refusing to comply, she quickly decided, was not an option: If I didnt do as she said, shed threaten to send everyone the pictures she had of me. Soon, she was spending up to an hour-and-a-half every evening in her bedroom sending pictures. Her mother was oblivious throughout. Its normal for teenagers to spend a long time in their room, so she didnt suspect anything, says Beatrice, who was also blackmailed into giving information about every aspect of her life. Liz asked how I got on with my mum. I felt I had to tell the truth, in case she realised, from accessing my Facebook page, that I was lying. Knowing we werent close, I now realise, made her feel better able to blackmail me because I was less likely to confide in her. Any pictures Beatrice sent didnt need to be overtly revealing and would, she assured the teenager, be for her eyes only. In return, Liz would pay her the princely sum of 800 (stock image) Dr Hanson explains: Offenders manipulate young people into feeling very powerless and this feeling makes it hard to seek help. In any case, Beatrice was unsure who to turn to. I thought my mum would hate me if she knew what I was doing, she says. Liz told Beatrice she knew where she lived and what school she went to. Beatrice became convinced Liz was someone she actually knew. I kept wondering if it was a neighbour or someone at school who had seen me naked, she says. I felt scared of everyone. As her anxiety escalated, the abuse intensified. Liz asked Beatrice what names classmates called her when she had been picked on and made her write them insulting words such as pancake (flat-chested) and pig with lipstick on her body. She was given deadlines in which to supply her pictures and was offered warped deals as to which photos she sent over next. Beatrice says: The more Liz got, the more she could ask for. We both knew it. And so she felt forced to pose naked with signs saying God Hates Fags and Gay People Will Burn In Hell horrific for any victim, but especially excruciating for a liberal teenager terrified of what her peers would think. She tried to research who Liz was online, but her email had been set up via the dark web, using a webmail email address that doesnt require users to identify themselves: Liz told me the software she used made her totally untraceable. She was right. When Beatrice did summon the courage to ask her to stop demanding pictures, even that was twisted into an exercise in abject humiliation: She made me film two videos one with reasons why she should stop and one with reasons she should keep doing it. Then, she alluded to the end of Beatrices ordeal to spur her into ever more humiliating acts. She said if I licked the toilet seat, it would be over sooner, says Beatrice, who was told to photograph herself eating dog food from a bowl on the floor: I felt worthless, less than human. It was horrific. It was two months before Beatrice summoned the courage to call support service Childline, who encouraged her to report Liz on a website dedicated to child exploitation. A police officer made contact and she was interviewed at her local police station. Telling them should have been a relief. Instead, she says: I still felt Id done something wrong. As she was only 15, her mother had to be informed by the police that Beatrice had reported a crime. Im not sure exactly what she was told and Mum never asked, says Beatrice, who adds that her relationship with her mother, to whom she hasnt spoken since moving out of home aged 17, was irrevocably ruined. I didnt trust her enough to talk to her about it. I dont think she understood, and I felt angry that I wasnt supported. The police took Beatrices phone as part of their investigation and she obtained a new email address. But, even though the demands for pictures ended, she remained haunted. Every day, I expected the pictures to be sent to everyone I knew. Liz had built up a detailed picture of my life. I expected her to turn up at my home at any time, says Beatrice, who was referred to counselling by the police and later prescribed antidepressants. I didnt trust anyone, even friends I thought, if I told them, theyd use the information against me. Meanwhile, the police investigation went nowhere until 2015 when the NCA became aware of a UK-based suspect who would later transpire to be Falder posting on these sick porn websites. The NCA called and said they thought my case was linked to other similar cases they were investigating, says Beatrice. It was horrific to think others had been through what I had. Police called Beatrice when Falder was arrested last June, but it wasnt until she read out her victim impact statement at Birmingham Crown Court last October, where even his abbreviated charge list was so long it took 35 minutes to read out, that she learned more about him. I was shocked he turned out to be a Cambridge graduate, she says. But Id imagined him to be a man on his computer in his bedroom. And he was. She saw him again at his sentencing hearing this week, where Falder stared impassively ahead, with scant regard for his victims. Knowing hes going to prison for a very long time and wont be able to hurt anyone else helps, she says. Yet her scars remain, along with the flashbacks of those photographs, her fear of being captured on camera, an unwarranted but burning shame and a crippling inability to trust. And to other girls approached by strangers online and the mothers who fear for their safety she has a stark warning: No matter how trustworthy a stranger might seem, remember, you dont know who youre talking to. Grooming gangs are still sexually abusing girls and young women across the country despite repeated warnings and prosecutions, a shocking report revealed yesterday. Efforts to stop the exploitation have been hampered by the authorities failure to understand why abusers target vulnerable white girls, the investigation found. The author of a report into the latest abuse scandal yesterday urged the Government to order a national study into the cultural influences on the offenders, predominantly from an Asian British background. The 18-strong Newcastle grooming gang. Top row left-to-right: Nashir Uddin, Taherul Alam, Hassan Ali, Mohammed Azram , Monjur Choudhury, Saiful Islam Middle row left-to-right : Abdulhamid Minoyee, Jahanger Zaman, Mohibur Rahman, Prabhat Nelli, Nadeem Aslam, Eisa Mousavi Bottom row left-to-right: Habibur Rahim, Badrul Hussain, Carolann Gallon, Abdul Sabe, Redwan Siddquee, Yassar Hussain The inquiry into gangs who groomed 700 girls and women in the North-East came four years after more than a thousand victims were found to have been abused in Rotherham, South Yorkshire. The new report revealed: The authorities effectively gave grooming gangs the green light to sexually abuse by failing to prosecute, instead locking up victims; One abuser an illegal immigrant granted indefinite leave to remain denounced British girls lack of morals and praised the availability of sex and drugs; The abuse of vulnerable victims is still taking place across the country and all children and vulnerable adults are at risk The serious case review by barrister David Spicer examined the actions of agencies involved in Operation Sanctuary, which was launched by Northumbria Police. The report identifies failures by police and social services, who repeatedly let down victims by not dealing with the abusers until a change of approach in 2014 when Operation Sanctuary began. It ultimately resulted in 112 offenders being jailed for a total of almost 500 years. Among them was an 18-strong grooming gang in Newcastle, whose members were found guilty of rape, sexual assault, trafficking and inciting prostitution. Police believe the case involved over 100 victims. Mr Spicer said that since the Rotherham abuse scandal was exposed in 2011, there had been a change of attitude by agencies and an injection of resources. But he concluded that more needs to be done to defeat the criminals. He noted: Despite comprehensive action to disrupt and prosecute perpetrators and the publicity that this has attracted, sexual exploitation continues. Perpetrators show remarkable persistence in targeting and grooming victims, undeterred by involvement of the police and other agencies. Attacker who 'would have been beheaded in homeland' An abuser who groomed teenage girls for sex would have been beheaded or stoned if he committed the same crimes in his home country, the report noted. The asylum seeker showed no regret for his behaviour even after he was found guilty and attacked the lack of morals of British girls. Before coming to Britain, the man, who was not named, spent ten years in Turkey, around five in Greece and some time in Italy and France. He had hoped to get to Canada. The report said: If convicted for rape in his home country, he would be beheaded or buried up to the neck and stoned. He was asked about what he thought about the United Kingdom and influences in his education. The serious case review was carried out by barrister David Spicer and it identified failures by police and social services He said you can get anything here any sex, drugs, alcohol. There is no control. He spoke in a derogatory way about lack of morals in British girls and did not go with Muslim girls because there are not many of them. He exploited a 15-year-old girl but told the inquiry team he was convicted only because of a conspiracy by the Government, police and the judge who paid the victims. The man was the only one of the abusers to agree to help the investigation. The report said it was unfortunate there was not more input from other perpetrators. The review noted the abusers were mainly not white but came from a diverse range of backgrounds including Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Indian, Iranian, Iraqi, Kurdish, Turkish, Albanian and Eastern European. Mr Spicer criticised the aggressive, 'inhuman' cross examination of witnesses during the trials of the accused, including at Newcastle Crown Court (pictured) The reports author, child sexual exploitation expert and barrister David Spicer, also criticised the aggressive, inhuman cross-examinations carried out by defence lawyers during the trials. He said: I am aware how easy it is to treat vulnerable witnesses badly. Its not a difficult process to confuse them and distress them. All the victims we spoke to said they were disgusted with their experience in the court and several of them had to have mental health treatment afterwards as they were suffering from trauma. One girl was questioned about material from her local authority records that she had no idea existed, let alone been released to the defence, Mr Spicer said. He added: Knowingly exposing a vulnerable, damaged person to that experience does seem to be inhuman and degrading treatment because you know they are going to be damaged by the process. Victims told Mr Spicer how they were raped while under the influence of drink and drugs. I never had sex when I was sober, one said. I wanted to leave. I was given drink. I kept saying no and fighting them off. I was very tired and fell asleep. When I woke, I had been raped. The review also said many victims did not realise they were being abused because the perpetrators made them think they were friends. One girl said: I didnt think what was happening was wrong. I thought they were my friends. They bought me drink and drugs. Advertisement The Government promised to look carefully at Mr Spicers 33 recommendations. He said more powers were also needed to protect adults who were being targeted, groomed and exploited. His report also highlighted that the men responsible for this particular model of abuse were from a predominantly Asian British minority background. Significantly, their beliefs are not known. Mr Spicer said professionals interviewed for his inquiry emphasised the lack of information about the profile and motivation for abusing that continued to hamper understanding how to stop it. He said national research needs to be conducted so guidance can be published for professionals on the most effective way of preventing exploitation. The report revealed how the authorities previously ignored the gangs of men from Bangladeshi, Indian, Iranian, Iraqi, Kurdish, Turkish, Albanian and Eastern European backgrounds operating in the Newcastle area. In some cases the victims themselves were placed in secure accommodation. Deterrent punishments were considered against them for being drunk and disorderly or making false allegations when they changed their accounts. Meanwhile, the abusers who raped young girls and plied them with drugs and alcohol in return for sex were not punished or disrupted, the report stated. The report looked into the authorities' response to child sexual exploitation in Newcastle (file picture) This sent an unhelpful message to perpetrators they were unlikely to be prosecuted encouraging an arrogant persistence, it said. It also had a significant impact on victims who learnt that nothing would be done. Although good recent practice by detectives was identified, their previous negligent approach was laid bare. Police failed to consistently investigate, formally interview and check the backgrounds of suspects, the report revealed. There were also no effective inquiries about why girls were found with older, unrelated men. Eight of the victims were interviewed for the inquiry. One said: They should have punished the men that were doing it and not me. The girls were horrified to be locked up, with one saying: I was put in a secure placement. I was a victim why was I there? Mr Spicer criticised the lack of professional curiosity by agencies and highlighted the failure to collect physical evidence. Nurses at sexual health services were praised in the report, but it said strict confidentiality rules meant little information could be passed on so identifying potential victims was extremely difficult. The report also detailed the failure of the criminal justice system and the Crown Prosecution Service to bring offenders to court. Once cases did go before a judge, Mr Spicer said many victims faced an ordeal when giving evidence. Prosecutors have admitted their approach to the credibility of witnesses was inappropriately cautious, the report states. It concluded: Unless there is change, which requires national debate, sexual exploitation is not likely to be prevented and early identification will remain difficult. Toll rises in Rotherham The total number of children sexually exploited by Asian gangs in Rotherham is even higher than the original estimate that provoked a national outcry. A report published four years ago by Professor Alexis Jay exposed widespread failures and negligence by the authorities, who did nothing to tackle paedophiles of mainly Pakistani heritage for fear of being labelled racist. She estimated 1,400 children in the town were abused from 1997 to 2013. A massive 7million-a-year investigation by the National Crime Agency aimed at bringing offenders to justice is ongoing. There are 144 officers working on Operation Stovewood and six trials due to take place this year. The team has identified 110 suspects so far, with the total number of victims now officially 1,510. Vida Morris, chair of the Newcastle Safeguarding Adults Board, apologised to the young women who fell into the gangs clutches. She said: We are profoundly sorry for the trauma they have suffered. No one can possibly begin to understand the devastating effects of sexual exploitation unless they have experienced it themselves. They have been brave beyond belief and have helped to make this city a safer place. Pat Ritchie, chief executive of Newcastle City Council, said: Sexual exploitation is happening across the country but what we have learned can be used to help others. We know it is still going on in our city, but we are doing everything in our power to prevent it. Darren Best, temporary Deputy Chief Constable of Northumbria Police, defended the force and said officers had changed their approach to exploitation victims. He said: We are not complacent. We need to be consistent and sure that we continue to get it right. Social media users love this former freemason so much they think he could be our next Australian of the Year contender. Those on Facebook were quick to throw support behind Glenn Langford, who was found drunk and naked inside a huge pipe organ. Mr Langford appeared in court on Thursday accused of damaging the historic instrument insured for more than $1 million. His apology to 'freemasons everywhere' sparked a strong social media reaction with one man jumping to his defence saying: 'What man hasn't woken up after a big night out naked, surrounded by cheeseburgers and full of regret'. Scroll down for video Australians have jumped to support a former freemason Glenn Langford, found drunk and naked inside a huge pipe organ Many people could relate to Mr Langford's 'big night out' on social media Mr Langford was arrested on Wednesday after allegedly flooding the Brisbane Masonic Memorial Centre and setting off the fire alarms. The 51-year-old faced charges at the Brisbane Arrest Court on Thursday and was granted bail. But he said his intentions were initially well-meaning and the night had got out of hand after downing a bottle of Johnny Walker whisky, 7 News reports. The court was told he had been meaning to hand out cheeseburgers to the homeless. Mr Langford is charged with allegedly damaging a number of organ pipes and destroying part of a decorative wall. He was also discovered naked along with clothes, a remote controlled police car and toy gun. Mr Langford's story has been so popular people suggested he would even make a good Prime Minister or 'early Australian of the Year contender'. 'What a nice apologetic Australian, surely we have all overindulged on a extra cheesburger or two and paid the price...early Australian of the year contender?' they said. Another user said he had known Glenn since he was 12 years old. 'He's a genuinely nice person, he has strong views, he wouldn't hurt a fly.' People could relate to Mr Langford's big night out with one Facebook user saying: 'I'm sure at some stage of our lives we've had a night like this, maybe not to the same magnitude but we've all had 'that' night.' The organ inside the hall is supposedly insured for more than $1 million but may be beyond repair One Facebook user praised Mr Langford for having the courage to apologise for his actions Decorative wall was reported to be damaged and the pipes were also allegedly damaged overnight Food was left scattered on the floor of the grand hall of the heritage-listed temple in Brisbane's CBD, which features one of the biggest organs in Queensland. It is feared the organ, installed in the 1930s, may be too damaged to be repaired despite it being insured for $1 million. Another Facebook user said Mr Langford seemed extremely sincere and hailed his courage to own up to his mistakes The magistrate heard from Mr Langford's lawyer who explained he had last week lost his job and was getting over the breakdown of a 16-year relationship. He was granted bail on the condition that he stayed more than 100 metres away from the centre in Ann Street. 'Things just got a little loose, I was out of it,' Mr Langford told 7 News. He apologised to 'all the righteous Freemasons everywhere'. 'I did have a lot of cheeseburgers to give to the homeless. I'm going to see a shrink and don't drink,' he added. Ifor Whittaker, previously Colin Pritchard, was convicted of abusing a boy from the age of 10 until he was 16 A former Anglican priest described as 'disgusting and despicable' has been jailed for sexually abusing a child with another vicar. Ifor Whittaker, previously Colin Pritchard, was convicted of abusing a boy from the age of 10 until he was 16. The court heard how the twisted 73-year-old conspired with a fellow vicar Roy Cotton, who has since died, to commit sex acts. Whittaker, from south London, was jailed for 16 years after a hearing at Hove Crown Court. He was told he will serve a minimum of 10 years in prison. He is already a registered sex offender for life after a previous conviction. The BBC reported Judge Paul Tain described the priest's behaviour as 'disgraceful, disgusting and despicable', He said: 'It was an obvious and clear case of grooming, where he carefully manipulated a vulnerable child.' Whittaker had 'attempted to bamboozle, cheat and mislead the jury', the judge said. The court heard how Whittaker plied the vulnerable child with alcohol and emotionally blackmailed him, telling him: 'No one will believe you over a priest'. The victim described how he would be abused by Cotton, the vicar of Brede in Sussex, and Whittaker would enter the room shortly after. The victim said he was 'passed like a toy' and felt he was being borrowed from Cotton by Whittaker. Sussex Police's Complex Abuse Unit received full co-operation from the Diocese of Chichester throughout the investigations. T hese investigations came as part of Operation Perry, which saw three other priests from the diocese convicted for sexual offences against young boys and men. Detective Constable Chris Smith of Sussex Police Complex Abuse Unit said: 'The victim, now a man in his 40s, was a vulnerable child when Whittaker took cynical advantage of him for his own sexual gratification. 'The victim told us that Cotton, although his principal abuser, 'passed me over like a toy to be borrowed by a friend'. 'We are glad that Whittaker has finally faced justice, and we have ensured that the victim, who gave evidence in court, has had access to sources of advice, counselling and support.' A spokesman for Sussex Police said: 'Following our investigations, and a trial over nine days, Ifor Whittaker, previously known as Colin Pritchard, was convicted of and sentenced at Hove Crown Court for seven offences against the boy, who was then aged between 10 and 14, between February 1987 and February 1991. 'They were two offences of inciting the boy to commit an act of gross indecency; two offences of gross indecency; two offences of buggery, and of conspiracy with another local vicar, Roy Cotton (since deceased), to commit acts of indecency with the boy. 'He was sentenced to a total of 16 years imprisonment.' House of horrors couple David and Louise Turpin appeared before a California court on Friday to face more detailed charges alleging the torture and false imprisonment of their 13 children. The couple now face three additional charges of child abuse, and Louise was charged with felony assault. In court Friday they sat a short distance apart and looked at each other lovingly, flashing a smile. The Riverside County District Attorney filed an updated complaint against the couple who are pleading not guilty to 37 charges. Scroll down for video David and Louise Turpin appeared before a California court on Friday. Both parents were handed three more charges of child abuse, and Louise was charged with felony assault. They smile at each other in court Friday Lawyers for the Turpins said they are both pleading not guilty to the additional charges. They looked lovingly at each other in court Friday The 'House of Horror' parents only spoke to confirm the date of the next court hearing The wide-ranging charges include torture, false imprisonment, abuse of a dependent adult and child abuse, as well as one count of lewd conduct with a minor against David Turpin. Lawyers for the Turpins said they are both pleading not guilty to the additional charges, filed today with the court but not yet published. Today we filed an amended complaint in the Turpin case this afternoon, said spokesman for the Riverside DA, John Hall, outside court after the hearing. We have amended the complaint to file three new charges on both defendants of child abuse, and one new count against only defendant Louise Turpin of felony assault. There have been no counts that have been removed, and no other additional counts other than those. It's further investigation that we've been doing in this case has led us to amend the complaint. That's not uncommon in cases, he added. It could add some time to the exposure that they're facing, I don't have that tabulated right now. Hall said he was not aware of any changes to the charges filed against the couple last month. David appeared in a black suit with a blue shirt, and had trimmed his hair since his first court appearance, and Louise wore a fitted black suit The Turpins face wide-ranging charges that include torture, false imprisonment, abuse of a dependent adult and child abuse, and one count of lewd conduct with a minor against David Evidence which will be passed to the defense in discovery includes 'voluminous' video and audio recordings, and physical evidence, according to Dave Macher, attorney for Louise Turpin. A Felony Settlement Conference was set for March 23 and a new preliminary hearing on May 14. David Turpin appeared in a black suit with a blue shirt, and had trimmed his hair since his first court appearance. He sat facing forward with an attorney sat between him and his wife. His wife wore a fitted black suit and sat watching the scores of journalists file into the court. The two only spoke to confirm the date of the next court hearing. The next hearing will be under proposition 115, which allows law enforcement witnesses to testify without having to bring in the victims yet. At that hearing the court is scheduled to hear testimony from police officers involved in the case, without the Turpin children being present. David sat facing forward with an attorney sat between him and his wife The Turpins children, aged between two and 29, have been taken into care and are split between two foster homes, sources say. The six underage siblings have been discharged and sent to live in two foster care homes, while the seven adult children continue to recover at the Corona Regional Medical Center. Having lived under the tyrannical and abusive rule of their parents their whole lives, the children have not experienced many of the things other children take for granted they are currently being introduced to iPads, Harry Potter movies, and even toothbrushes. Attorneys Jack Osborn and Caleb Mason are representing the adult children, and gave an update on their progress to CBS This Morning on Friday. They say the hospital staff have converted a portion of the hospital to suit the needs of the adult Turpins, giving them outdoor space to exercise and play sports. While they haven't been able to be reunited with their younger siblings yet, they keep in contact with them via Skype. The lawyers representing the seven adult Turpin children say they continue to recover from their years of abuse at the Corona Regional Medical Center. The six younger siblings have been split between two foster homes The older Turpins are just getting used to the idea that they have rights as adults and can make their own decisions, like what they wear every day or read. The resilient kids have already started planning for their futures, many saying they aspire to get a college education. 'That's a big deal, deciding what they're going to read, deciding what they're going to wear, these are all things that are decisions they make every day that are new and empowering,' Osborn said. The adult children are excited by the prospect of getting to go to the beach, the mountains and the movies. The alleged abuse was revealed when one of the children, a 17-year-old girl, escaped out of a window at their house in Perris, California, and called 911. Police arrested David and Louise Turpin at the property last month. Riverside County District Attorney Mike Hestrin said police found the girls 12 siblings inside the four-bedroom home, padlocked and shackled to the furniture, lying in their own urine and faeces. All 13 children were hospitalized, and were so malnourished they were at risk of shock. The eldest child, a 29-year-old woman, weighed just 82lbs (5 stone) when she was rescued. Officials said a total $570,000 has been donated from around the world to help pay for their healthcare and education. 'In cases like this there are long-term needs like behavioral health, housing, scholarships, educational support, tutors and medical needs,' Erin Phillips, a spokeswoman for the Riverside University Health System told CNN. 'It's been amazing the outpouring of love and sentiments,' Phillips said. 'It reminds us there is so much light in this world in contrast to such a dark case.' Staff at the Corona Regional Medical Center have converted a portion of the hospital to suit the needs of the adult Turpin children - including giving them an outdoor space so they can exercise and play sports Attorneys Jack Osborn (right) and Caleb Mason (left) are representing the adult children. They say the abused adults are just learning that they have rights, and are getting used to the idea of making decisions for themselves Attorneys Jack Osborn and Caleb Mason, who represent seven of the older children, said that staff had converted a ward at Corona Medical Center to make them more comfortable, with an outdoor area where they can exercise and play sports. 'That in itself is a new experience for them, understanding that they do have rights and they do have a voice,' Osborn told CBS. 'That's a big deal, deciding what they're going to read, deciding what they're going to wear, these are all things that are decisions they make every day that are new and empowering.' Corona mayor Karen Spiegel said nurses at the hospital looking after the Turpins children told her they were 'warm' and 'appreciative'. 'They talk about how warm and loving these kids are and so appreciative,' Spiegel told CBS. 'Some of them have never really seen a toothbrush before... Things that we just take for granted mean so much to these kids.' Detailing the allegations against the Turpins at a press conference last month, Hestrin said the children were 'hogtied' and subject to 'frequent beatings and even strangulation'. 'As a punishment starting many years ago they began to be tied up, first with ropes,' he said. 'One victim was tied up and hogtied. When that victim was able to escape the ropes the defendants started using chains and padlocks. 'These punishments would last for weeks or even months,' he added. 'The victims were often not released from their chains to go to the bathroom.' Hestrin said the couple engaged in the psychological torture of their children, taunting them at their home with toys and food that they were not allowed to touch. Hospital consultants have fought off a bid to strip them of bonuses worth up to 77,000 a year. The payouts are supposed to reward excellence but go to half of senior doctors, on top of their 90,000 average salaries. The scheme costs the NHS around 320million a year enough for 12,000 nurses, or 33,000 hip replacements. Pledging reform, Jeremy Hunt has described the flawed arrangements as disastrous. The Health Secretary insists that performance-related pay must reflect quality and responsibility rather than time served. Hospital consultants have fought off a bid to strip them of bonuses worth up to 77,000 a year, in a scheme which costs the NHS around 320million a year But the British Medical Association took legal action to protect the bonuses, and is on the brink of reaching an out-of-court settlement with the Department of Health saying the payouts cannot be threatened with withdrawal. Instead, hospitals must offer consultants the chance to apply for a new or more generous annual award. Campaigners said extending the scheme beggared belief amid intense financial pressures, cutbacks and a seven-year pay freeze for nurses. Paying consultants huge bonuses while leaving others locked in low pay is unfair and unsustainable, said Judith Jolly, the Liberal Democrats health spokesman. Worryingly, there remains a clear gender pay gap in the health sector. Male consultants are all too often paid more than their female counterparts. While we cannot put a price on the importance of saving lives, we must ensure that all those who work tirelessly for the NHS are given fair pay. Routine operations including hip replacements are already being rationed, and patients will soon be denied cough mixture, migraine pills and heartburn remedies on prescription. John OConnell of the TaxPayers Alliance said: When the NHS is struggling to provide basic services to people, it beggars belief that these unaffordable bonuses are still being given out freely, often regardless of performance. Jeremy Hunt has described the arrangements as disastrous. The Health Secretary insists that performance-related pay must reflect quality and responsibility rather than time served Doctors should use first names at work Doctors and nurses should refer to each other by their first names in an effort to cut down on patient deaths, Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt said yesterday. In the UK we are still very hierarchical in medicine. Its one of the only professions where we are talking about Mr this and Dr that rather than first-name terms, he said. In an operating theatre, if you have a hierarchy, you only have one pair of eyes spotting a mistake, whereas if you remove the hierarchy you can have eight or nine pairs of eyes spotting those potentially lethal mistakes. He added that the current system makes it practically impossible for doctors and nurses to be completely honest about their conduct. He was speaking at the World Patient Safety Summit in London where he announced plans to bring 2,000 pharmacists into GP surgeries in order to catch prescription errors. The move comes as research commissioned by the health department highlighted how more than 200million medication errors are made in the NHS every year. The mistakes could contribute to up to 22,000 deaths annually in England. Advertisement The Government must take a very close look at this scheme and ensure that taxpayers money never gets wasted on bonuses for staff who dont deserve them. Consultants have been paid big bonuses ever since the Health Service was founded in 1948. The then health secretary, Labours Aneurin Bevan, reportedly admitted to stuffing their mouths with gold to stop them switching to private hospitals. The clinical excellence awards are paid out to half the 46,000 consultants in the NHS, as well as to some GPs who do research. There are 12 levels ranging from 3,000 to 77,000 and successful doctors receive the payments for five years, after which they can apply to have them renewed. They are rarely withdrawn and many doctors receive them for the duration of their careers. The system has been described as an old boys club because the bonuses are handed out by panels of consultants who award them to their friends. Men are much more likely to be handed the highest bonuses than women, raising concerns that the scheme fuels the gender pay gap. A source at the British Medical Association said the deal was far better than consultants had hoped. Many had feared the awards would be scrapped altogether or, at the very least, that the top 77,000 payments would be cut. The arrangement will anger thousands of nurses whose pay has been frozen for seven years. Their average salary is 25,000 a year. The bonuses have counted toward consultants pensions on top of their final salaries when they retire. Awards granted after April will not qualify for this treatment. The system has been described as an old boys club because the bonuses are handed out by panels of consultants who award them to their friends The agreement is expected to be announced within the next few days by the Department of Health, the BMA and NHS Employers, the body which represents hospitals. The Department of Health is still locked in talks with the BMA about overhauling other aspects of the consultants contract. Officials are trying to remove the clause that lets the doctors refuse evening and weekend work. A departmental spokesman said last night the talks had been positive but were unlikely to reach a conclusion soon. A BMA spokesman confirmed the doctors union had taken legal action and discussed an out-of-court settlement. He added: Clinical excellence awards are designed to recognise the exceptional contribution of doctors who find new and innovative ways of improving the quality and delivery of care, benefiting patients and saving the NHS money in the long run. The BMA has been exploring a deal during negotiations in which existing award holders would be able to retain the awards they have already earned. We are working together with government to develop a successor awards scheme which continues to encourage and fairly reward excellence. Winston Churchill was in one of those black dog depressing periods in his life, the wilderness years, as he called them, when he was frustrated, nothing was going right and there seemed no outlet for all that potential for greatness he felt inside him. He was out of Parliament following the rout of the Tories in the 1929 general election and broke, having lost a fortune in the Wall Street Crash that same year. He threw himself into a heady social life. He drank and gambled and holidayed abroad as the guest of his chum, the wealthy newspaper magnate Lord Beaverbrook. At Beaverbrooks villa in France in the spring of 1930, he was introduced to the sassy Doris Delevingne, a society temptress who happens to be the great-aunt of supermodel Cara Delevingne. Winston Churchill wearing a top hat, long coat and using a walking stick, travelling to Westminster Abbey with his wife Clementine in 1930 He painted her then, if rumour is to be believed, bedded her though, given her track record, it was more likely she who did the bedding. According to much-repeated gossip, he slept with the voluptuous and highly skilled Doris at the Ritz in Paris where, after their fling, he apparently told her: Doris, you could make a corpse come. Another of her countless lovers claimed her phenomenal success with men was down to a sexual trick known as Cleopatras grip. Its not easy to think of Churchill the soon-to-be hero of World War II, his greatness captured in the film Darkest Hour, now winning Baftas and probably Oscars as a bad boy in this way. Certainly he was a passionate man when it came to politics. But in matters of sex, he was pretty much a non-starter, always seen as a steadfast, one-woman man loyal to the formidable Clemmie, and not interested in romance. His biographer, the politician Roy Jenkins, calls him probably the least dangerously sexed major politician on either side of the Atlantic since Pitt the Younger. So did he really stray in those dog days between the world wars? A book by biographer Lyndsy Spence hints very strongly that he did and a Channel 4 documentary next month called Churchills Secret Affair pursues the same theme. So far, the evidence is slim, resting on the fact that, to his wifes frustration, he did not dispel the salacious gossip about him and, on the contrary, seemed to revel in it, perhaps enjoying the boost it gave his ego. But if he really did succumb, the one person who could have proved irresistible, even to him, was the self-indulgent diva described by a cousin as the most arrogant, temperamental, foul-mouthed and ecstatically beautiful woman in London. Doris Delevingne was a courtesan in the tradition of Lady Hamilton and Nell Gwyn, who beguiled and entrapped wealthy men and lived on the riches they, in their infatuation, bestowed on her. (Doris, too, set her cap at a king Edward VIII only to find her way blocked by the similarly ambitious and sexually inventive Wallis Simpson.) She was a haberdashers daughter, born into a respectable lower-middle-class home in Streatham, South London, a far cry from the Mayfair haunts that would be a magnet for her in her drive to escape her roots and advance in the world. She began by selling second-hand evening dresses to actresses and chorus girls and was then swept into their demi-mondaine world of nightclubs and rich, footloose men on the lookout for fun. Doris Castlerosse, nee Doris Delevingne, posing for a portrait ni 1936, but did society's most beautiful woman count Winston Churchill as a lover? She was taken up by the actress Gertrude Lawrence whose infatuated lover Household Cavalry officer Philip Astley (his country home was Chequers no less, before it became the country residence of prime ministers) paid for the Park Lane flat the two women shared as well as the Rolls-Royce and chauffeur that drove them round London. This was the style she adored and would spend the rest of her life trying, largely successfully, to maintain as she cruised the high society of millionaires, aristocrats and celebrities in search of lovers and suckers. They flocked to her, drawn by her outrageous, loud-mouthed personality, knowing blue eyes and long legs, flaunted by her daringly high hemlines. She was rewarded with money, Cartier jewels, Schiaparelli dresses and silk stockings from Paris that she wore once then discarded. Her bad-girl reputation went before her and made her even more alluring. A bitchy female acquaintance suggested she write a book called Around The World In 80 Beds. She fell for a tall, handsome polo-playing American playboy, carpet heir Laddie Sanford. He set her up, then dumped her (for Earl Mountbattens wife) and broke her heart. Her avaricious eyes then fell on Valentine Browne, or Viscount Castlerosse as he was entitled to call himself, the balding son of an Anglo-Irish earl and so fat he couldnt bend over to tie his own shoelaces. Despite his physical shortcomings, he was as promiscuous as Doris and had women falling at his feet. It was from this position one of his lovers, performing a sex act on him, looked up and caught him reading the Evening Standard. She ditched him. A gargantuan and a glutton, he was also every bit as much a kept man as Doris was a kept woman. He got massively into debt and was bailed out by Beaverbrook, who touted him around as his travelling companion and court jester and gave him a job as a gossip columnist (writing in bed, propped up by pillows). Castlerosse and Doris became inextricably bound up in each other, in a relationship (and eventually a marriage) that was to become a daily hell of public rows, brawling and shouting matches. Once, after Beaverbrook spotted bruises on Doriss arm, he warned Castlerosse about his conduct, only for Castlerosse to roll up his trousers and show him her teeth-marks on his calf. Churchill met Doris Delevingne, a society temptress, in the spring of 1930, she also happens to be the great-aunt of supermodel Cara Delevingne (pictured) What the attraction was no one not even the two individuals concerned could say, but it was deep, lasting and terrifying. Nor did it bring the financial rewards she expected. When they married in 1928, his shocked parents cut him off without a penny. So Doris, now a viscountess with coronets stitched on her Crepe de Chine pillowcases, continued to ply her trade in adultery and intrigue. He spent money he did not have trying to keep her. She flaunted in his face the diamonds some new besotted lover had given her. They couldnt be in the same house and took separate suites at Claridges, continuing their marital warfare in the hotels grand corridors. That was the state of play in their marriage when she supposedly seduced Winston Churchill in 1930. Two years later, it seems, having had the father, she also had the son. Randolph Churchill was just 21 when she took up with him. Their affair was discovered by the maitre d of the Cavalry Club, who opened the door to an anteroom and was confronted by a pair of long, gorgeous legs waving happily in the air. Doris, whose face he could not see but whose legs were unmistakable, let out a gasp. When the man between the legs looked up, the maitre d saw it was Randolph Churchill. Get out! Randolph yelled. Soon, the secret affair was common knowledge among London society, and an alarmed Winston intervened and told his son to behave perhaps, suggests author Lyndsy Spence in her book The Mistress Of Mayfair thinking it bad form to go where he himself had once trodden. But Randolph, an overweight wastrel, persisted and even taunted Castlerosse that he was bedding his wife. He phoned Castlerosse and said: Guess where I am? before telling him he was in bed with Doris. He even had the gall to make it a reverse-charge phone call. A nasty feud developed. When they confronted each other at the Kit-Cat Club, Castlerosse threatened to hit his rival. Dont do that, replied Randolph. Im not your wife. At the San Carlo restaurant, the writer Evelyn Waugh recorded how Castlerosse hurled a vase at Randolph but he ducked and it knocked out Lady Birkenhead, whose husband had been on a wartime expedition to Yugoslavia with Randolph. It was all too embarrassing. Eventually, parental pressure from Winston prevailed. Doris and Randolph parted, she moving on with barely a backward glance to the next affair. Winston Churchill was recently brought back to world attention following the release of the Darkest Hour film, which sees Gary Oldman play the former Prime Minister She did, though, continue to correspond with Winston, and when they met up again at a villa party in the South of France (along with Clemmie) he painted her again, a full-length portrait in the shorts she always wore to flaunt her legs. Throughout all this, the state of the Castlerosse marriage carried on, but rockier than ever. Castlerosse filed a petition for divorce, withdrew it, then re-instated it. She continued in her wild ways. When introduced to a new man, she would ask if they had already slept together because shed been in so many beds she couldnt always remember. Such was her confidence in her seductive powers that she drew the photographer Cecil Beaton into her bed, even though she knew he was, in his own words, terribly homosexualist. She believed she could cure him. She failed, though fellow revellers listened outside their bedroom door and heard the effete Beaton squeal: Oh goody, goody, goody. Meanwhile, divorce proceedings dragged on but eventually, in 1938, the marriage was formally ended. By that time, Doris had found a new benefactor to bed wealthy American woman Margot Hoffman. She didnt mind being in a lesbian relationship. As her biographer puts it: She had no scruples when it came to sex. She used it as a means of survival. Margot bought a palace in Venice to entertain their friends and they had liveried gondoliers to glide them along the Grand Canal. But it was a dream that was about to shatter. When war broke out in 1939, Doris was in an enemy country, Italy. She fled to New York with Margot. But the two proved incompatible, however, as with so many of Doriss dalliances. They parted, and she was now on her own for the first time in her life and having to fend for herself. She was scared. She wrote to Castlerosse, who suggested that perhaps they should get back together again, if only she could get back to England not easy in wartime. And here came the final twist in the Churchill connection. She had been writing to him over the years, seeking his advice, offering help with his difficult children, trying to stay connected. There is not much evidence that he responded. Almost certainly he found her an embarrassment, not suitable for a man of his political ambition and high standing. It didnt help that she had been a close friend of the fascist Oswald Mosley, and at Blackshirt rallies sat at the front with his wife Diana, one of the notorious Mitford girls. Churchill had no truck with that. Doris had also deserted England at a time of war a bad mark against her. But there she was in America and appealing for his help. Whats more, she had in her possession that portrait he had painted of her. If she went public with it, it could be an embarrassment he did not need at a sensitive time in relations with Washington. Winston and the courtesan was not a headline he wanted to see. Doriss account, which may well be an invention, is that on a trip to America in 1942, Churchill invited her to a private party at his Washington hotel and insisted that she return home. One fact is indisputable. Someone pulled strings to get her on a Clipper plane to Britain. Such priority places were rare. Had Churchill quietly made sure she was whisked home and no longer able to cause him trouble? Its certainly possible. But home proved not to be as welcoming as she hoped. Castlerosse was there to greet her but was not about to remarry her, having a new wife in mind. Doris was on her own and penniless. She tried to pawn her diamonds but the police came calling. Such a transaction was forbidden in wartime. She could see no future, certainly not one that fitted with her image of herself. She was 42, her looks were failing, her allure had dimmed. She swallowed an overdose of barbiturates and never regained consciousness. And her dalliance with Churchill? However close it was, she took the secret to her grave. Sharia law should never become part of the British legal system, the Archbishop of Canterbury said yesterday. Justin Welby said the Islamic rules are incompatible with Britains laws, which have developed over 500 years on the principles of a different culture. He added that high levels of immigration from Muslim countries can have an impact on the accepted pattern for choosing a partner, on assumed ages of maturity and sexual activity, and especially on issues of polygamy. Archbishop Welbys comments follow the release earlier this month of a highly critical Home Office report that said all couples marrying in mosques should also have to go through a legally-binding civil marriage ceremony to shield wives from injustices under sharia. Justin Welby (pictured) said the Islamic rules are incompatible with Britains laws, which have developed over 500 years on the principles of a different culture They also reverse the position taken by his predecessor Lord Williams, who backed incorporating sharia into the British legal system. Archbishop Welby set out his reasons why sharia should not win official status in a book, Reimagining Britain. He said yesterday in advance of publication that British law has underlying values and assumptions that come from a clearly Christian tradition. Sharia law is not just about punishments, he added. It is something of immense sophistication, but it comes from a very different background of jurisprudence to the one from which British law has developed over the past 500 years. The Archbishop said in his book that the arrival of large numbers of Muslims in Britain there are thought to be 3.3million here has led many to challenge the values of the majority population. Among these are the right of people to choose their own husband or wife, and the need for monogamous relationships. He added: There has been and remains a demand for the introduction of those aspects of sharia law that affect family and inheritance... There are thought to be around 85 sharia tribunals in the UK. They settle disputes including divorce and business arguments among those willing to accept their jurisdiction The problem is reimagining Britain through values applied in action can only work where the narrative of the country is coherent and embracing. The Archbishop said: Sharia, which has a powerful and ancient cultural narrative of its own, deeply embedded in a system of faith and understanding of God, and thus especially powerful in forming identity, cannot become part of another narrative. Accepting it in part implies accepting its values around the nature of the human person, attitudes to outsiders, the revelation of God, and a basis for life in law, rather than grace, the formative word of Christian culture. Archbishop Welby said that the way people understand home and family are a vital basis of society. They face enormous pressures and need one legal basis of oversight and one philosophical foundation of understanding. For these reasons, I am especially sympathetic towards those Islamic groups that do not seek the application of sharia law into the family and inheritance law of this country, the Archbishop said. There are thought to be around 85 sharia tribunals in the UK. They settle disputes including divorce and business arguments among those willing to accept their jurisdiction. But there are concerns some of those who appear before them especially women lack full freedom of choice and may be subject to processes that would never be allowed in a court of law. The Archbishop's comments reverse the position taken by his predecessor Lord Williams (pictured), who backed incorporating sharia into the British legal system The Home Office sharia review, carried out by academic Mona Siddiqui, said some courts operate discriminatory rules. Men can divorce simply by demanding one, it said. But women are often obliged to pay large sums, sometimes seen as the equivalent of repayment of a dowry. In one case, a woman was denied a divorce until she paid her husband 18,000. The Siddiqui report recommended that all Islamic weddings should be backed by civil ceremonies so that Muslim brides have the full protection of civil law. Lord Williams backed the idea of sharia as a full part of the British legal system in a BBC interview and lecture ten years ago. He said people should be able to choose which jurisdiction they preferred, a choice that would mean Muslims could opt for courts that accept polygamy and outlaw the payment of interest in financial deals. Question time: Joyce has been under immense pressure in recent weeks THE AFFAIR Public revelations of Joyce's affair with former staffer Vikki Campion ignited a political storm. Campion's moves to Resources Minister Matt Canavan and Nationals whip Damian Drum's offices have come under heavy scrutiny. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull blasted Joyce's conduct, calling it a 'shocking error of judgement' and banned ministers from having sexual relations with their staff. Campion is due to give birth to their baby in April. CLOSET KIWI The High Court ruled Joyce ineligible to sit in parliament after it was revealed he held New Zealand citizenship by descent. He faced a by-election in December which he won by a whopping majority, collecting 65 per cent of the primary vote. PISTOL AND BOO Joyce made international headlines in 2015 when he told Hollywood star Johnny Depp's then wife Amber Heard her pair of pooches better 'bugger off' back to the US or he'd have them put down. Heard was placed on a one-month good behaviour bond over illegally smuggling Pistol and Boo into Australia and the couple filmed an awkward apology video. RENT FREE Joyce came under fire for living rent-free with Campion in an Armidale townhouse courtesy of wealthy businessman Greg Maguire. Joyce said Maguire contacted him to offer the house, meaning he didn't breach the ministerial code of conduct. GINA'S GEE UP Close mate and mining magnate Gina Rinehart handed him a $40,000 novelty-sized cheque for winning the inaugural National Agriculture Related Industries Prize last year. He later 'politely declined' the money, saying he was surprised to receive the award. PESTICIDES As agriculture minister, Joyce was responsible for shifting the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority from Canberra to Armidale in his New England electorate. Accusations of pork-barrelling surrounded the relocation and it later emerged the agency had spent almost $15,000 at a Maguire-owned hotel in Armidale. BARNABY BANK While he no longer held the agriculture portfolio when legislation cleared parliament, Joyce was behind the government's Regional Investment Corporation which will be responsible for managing up to $4 billion of regional loans. The 'Barnaby Bank' has been derided by Labor as a 'shocking pork-barrel' due to its location in Orange, where the Nationals lost a state by-election. Source: Australian Associated Press The evacuation from Dunkirk was one of the biggest operations of the Second World War and was one of the major factors in enabling the Allies to continue fighting. It was the largest military evacuation in history, taking place between May 27 and June 4, 1940 after Nazi Blitzkreig - 'Lightning War' - saw German forces sweep through Europe. The evacuation, known as Operation Dynamo, saw an estimated 338,000 Allied troops rescued from northern France. But 11,000 Britons were killed during the operation - and another 40,000 were captured and imprisoned. Described as a 'miracle of deliverance' by wartime prime minister Winston Churchill, it is seen as one of several events in 1940 that determined the eventual outcome of the war. The Second World War began after Germany invaded Poland in 1939, but for a number of months there was little further action on land. But in early 1940, Germany invaded Denmark and Norway and then launched an offensive against Belgium and France in western Europe. Hitler's troops advanced rapidly, taking Paris - which they never achieved in the First World War - and moved towards the Channel. It was the largest military evacuation in history, taking place between May 27 and June 4, 1940. The evacuation, known as Operation Dynamo, saw an estimated 338,000 Allied troops rescued from northern France. But 11,000 Britons were killed during the operation - and another 40,000 were captured and imprisoned They reached the coast towards the end of May 1940, pinning back the Allied forces, including several hundred thousand troops of the British Expeditionary Force. Military leaders quickly realised there was no way they would be able to stay on mainland Europe. Operational command fell to Bertram Ramsay, a retired vice-admiral who was recalled to service in 1939. From a room deep in the cliffs at Dover, Ramsay and his staff pieced together Operation Dynamo, a daring rescue mission by the Royal Navy to get troops off the beaches around Dunkirk and back to Britain. On May 14, 1940 the call went out. The BBC made the announcement: 'The Admiralty have made an order requesting all owners of self-propelled pleasure craft between 30ft and 100ft in length to send all particulars to the Admiralty within 14 days from today if they have not already been offered or requisitioned.' Boats of all sorts were requisitioned - from those for hire on the Thames to pleasure yachts - and manned by naval personnel, though in some cases boats were taken over to Dunkirk by the owners themselves. They sailed from Dover, the closest point, to allow them the shortest crossing. On May 29, Operation Dynamo was put into action. When they got to Dunkirk they faced chaos. Soldiers were hiding in sand dunes from aerial attack, much of the town of Dunkirk had been reduced to ruins by the bombardment and the German forces were closing in. Above them, RAF Spitfire and Hurricane fighters were headed inland to attack the German fighter planes to head them off and protect the men on the beaches. As the little ships arrived they were directed to different sectors. Many did not have radios, so the only methods of communication were by shouting to those on the beaches or by semaphore. Space was so tight, with decks crammed full, that soldiers could only carry their rifles. A huge amount of equipment, including aircraft, tanks and heavy guns, had to be left behind. The little ships were meant to bring soldiers to the larger ships, but some ended up ferrying people all the way back to England. The evacuation lasted for several days. Prime Minister Churchill and his advisers had expected that it would be possible to rescue only 20,000 to 30,000 men, but by June 4 more than 300,000 had been saved. The exact number was impossible to gauge - though 338,000 is an accepted estimate - but it is thought that over the week up to 400,000 British, French and Belgian troops were rescued - men who would return to fight in Europe and eventually help win the war. But there were also heavy losses, with around 90,000 dead, wounded or taken prisoner. A number of ships were also lost, through enemy action, running aground and breaking down. Despite this, the evacuation itself was regarded as a success and a great boost for morale. Support: Ever since Alexander Blackman was convicted tens of thousands of servicemen and women as well as the public have fought to see his murder convicted overturned Sergeant Alexander Blackman - known as Marine A - became the first British serviceman convicted of murder on a foreign battlefield since the Second World War. Here is a timeline of events in the case: 2011 March - Sgt Blackman deploys to Helmand province with 42 Commando as part of Op Herrick XIV. His unit is sent to Nad-e Ali, where it sees heavy fighting. Several marines are killed, including Sgt Blackman's troop commander, and others are maimed. September 15 - Taliban insurgents attack a small British patrol base. The attack is repelled with the aid of a British Apache helicopter gunship. Sgt Blackman and his marines are on patrol and sent to look for the fleeing attackers. They find one, lying gravely wounded, in the middle of a field. Sgt Blackman shoots him in the chest with his pistol. The killing is captured on helmet camera by one of the patrol. 2012 September - The video of the incident is found on a Royal Marine's laptop during an investigation by civilian police into another alleged crime. A police investigation begins. October 11 - Seven unnamed Royal Marines are arrested on suspicion of murder. 2013 October 23 - Sgt Blackman and two others go on trial at the Court Martial Centre in Bulford, Wiltshire, accused of murder. He is only identified as Marine A and his comrades as Marines B and C. They give evidence from behind screens. All three plead not guilty. November 8 - Sgt Blackman is found guilty of murder. The two other marines are acquitted. December 5 - A court rules Sgt Blackman, still only known to the world as Marine A, should be stripped of his anonymity. December 6 - Sgt Blackman, from Taunton, Somerset, is given a life sentence and told he must serve a minimum of 10 years in a civilian prison. 2014 May 22 - Sgt Blackman loses a Court of Appeal bid to overturn his life sentence. His minimum term is cut from 10 years to eight. 2015 September - A high-profile campaign begins to have Sgt Blackman freed, led by his wife Claire. December 16 - 1,100 pages of new evidence are handed into the Criminal Cases Review Commission in an attempt to have the conviction sent back to the Court of Appeal. 2016 December - The CCRC concludes there is a 'real possibility' of overturning the conviction, and grants an appeal. Later the same month, the Lord Chief Justice refuses a bid to grant bail, after prosecutors challenge new psychiatric evidence about his mental state at the time of the killing. December 21 - Sgt Blackman loses a bid to be released on bail in time for Christmas ahead of his appeal hearing. 2017 February 7 - Five judges, Lord Chief Justice Lord Thomas, Sir Brian Leveson, Lady Justice Hallett, Mr Justice Openshaw and Mr Justice Sweeney, begin hearing an appeal brought by Sgt Blackman to overturn his murder conviction at the Court Martial Appeal Court in London. March 13 - The Court Martial Appeal Court announces the appeal ruling will be given on March 15. March 15 - Sgt Blackman has his murder conviction replaced with manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility by the Court. A new sentence will be set at a later date. March 28 - Sgt Blackman was given a 7-year sentence for manslaughter with diminished responsibility, but was given credit for time served, and was freed on 28 April 2017. August 1969: British Government first send troops into Northern Ireland to restore order after three days of rioting in Catholic Londonderry 30 January 1972: On 'Bloody Sunday' 13 civilians are shot dead by the British Army during a civil rights march in Londonderry March 1972 The Stormont Government is dissolved and direct rule imposed by London 1970s: The IRA begin its bloody campaign of bombings and assassinations in Britain April 1981 Bobby Sands, a republicans on hunger strike in the Maze prison, is elected to Parliament. He dies a month later October 1984 An IRA bomb explodes at the Grand Hotel in Brighton, where Margaret Thatcher is staying during the Tory Party conference Early 1990s: Margaret Thatcher and then Sir John Major set up a secret back channel with the IRA to start peace talks. The communications was so secret most ministers did not know about it. April 1998 Tony Blair helps to broker the Good Friday Agreement, which is hailed as the end of the Troubles. It establishes the Northern Ireland Assembly with David Trimble as its first minister. 2000s: With some exceptions the peace process holds and republican and loyalist paramilitaries decommission their weapons May 2011 The Queen and Prince Philip make a state visit to Ireland, the first since the 1911 tour by George V. In a hugely symbolic moment, the Queen is pictured shaking hands with Martin McGuinness - a former IRA leader. ISIS' destruction of the biblical tomb of Jonah has revealed a once opulent palace and inscriptions detailing the life of an Assyrian King. Seven clay tablets, found in a palace hidden under the Tomb of Jonah in the northern city of Mosul, describe the rule of a king named Esarhaddon. The inscriptions describe Esarhaddon as 'king of the world', and claim he rebuilt the ancient cities of Babylon and Esagil during his reign. They also lay out the man's family history, giving scientists fresh insight into the ancient royal bloodline of Assyria. Scroll down for video The texts appear similar to the inscription pictured, found in an ancient palace in Nineveh, Iraq. It reads: 'The palace of Ashurbanipal, great king, mighty king, king of the world, king of Assyria, son of Esarhaddon, king of Assyria, descendant of Sennacherib, king of Assyria' The tablets were found in four tunnels dug by ISIS looters looking for Assyrian treasure beneath the Tomb of Jonah, a shrine sacred to both Christians and Muslims. The site was blown up by the terror group during its occupation of Mosul from June 2014 until January 2017, when the city was retaken by Iraqi forces. Archaeologists picking through ancient rubble left behind by the group found a previously undiscovered palace containing white marble murals of bulls, stone statues of demi-goddesses and seven marble inscriptions. New translations of the cuneiform tablets, thought to date back to the Assyrian empire in 672BC, show the texts describe King Esarhaddon. One inscription, in translation, reads: 'The palace of Esarhaddon, strong king, king of the world, king of Assyria, governor of Babylon, king of Sumer and Akkad, king of the kings of lower Egypt, upper Egypt and Kush [an ancient kingdom located south of Egypt]', according to a new report from Live Science. Previous research has found that Kush rulers once ruled Egypt, and the Niveneh inscriptions claim Esarhaddon defeated Kush leaders and chose new rulers to govern Egypt. A set of 2,700-year-old inscriptions have been found in an ancient palace buried under the ruins of a shrine in Iraq. The Nebi Yunus shrine - containing what Tomb of Jonah or 'Yunnus' as he is known in the Koran - was destroyed by ISIS militants in July 2014 (pictured) Archaeologists assessing the damage caused by Islamic State militants to the tomb of the prophet of Jonah have found an undiscovered palace. Here, a member of the Iraqi army stands next to Assyrian stone sculptures of demi-goddesses, pictured spreading the 'water of life' Seven clay tablets, found in a palace hidden under the Tomb of Jonah in the northern city of Mosul, describe the rule of an Assyrian king named Esarhaddon. The demi-goddess sculptures pictured were carved into the walls of the palace over 2,000 years ago WHO IS PROPHET JONAH OR 'YUNIS'? ISLAMIC AND CHRISTIAN VERSIONS The Prophet Yunis is widely regarded as the Islamic version of the prophet perhaps more commonly referred to in the Bible as Jonah. Jonah was famously swallowed by a whale or a fish, depending on the literature, and his Islamic narrative has some similarities as well as substantial differences to the Hebrew Bible story. The Quran describes Jonah as a righteous preacher of the message of God but a messenger who, one day, fled from his mission because of its overwhelming difficulty. The Quran says that Jonah made it onto a ship but, because of the powerfully stormy weather, the men aboard the ship suggested casting lots to throw off the individual responsible. The Prophet Yunis is widely regarded as the Islamic version of the prophet perhaps more commonly referred to in the Bible as Jonah When the lots were cast three times and Jonah's name came out each time, he was thrown into the open ocean that night. A gigantic fish came and swallowed him, and Jonah remained in the belly of the fish repenting and glorifying God. The Christian version of the story goes that a huge storm arises and the sailors, realising it is no ordinary storm, discover Jonah is to blame. Jonah admits this and tells them if he is thrown overboard, the storm will cease. The sailors try to dump as much cargo as possible before giving up, but feel forced to throw him overboard, at which point the sea calms. The sailors then offer sacrifices to God. Jonah is miraculously saved by being swallowed by a large fish in whose belly he spends three days and three nights. While in the great fish, Jonah prays to God in his affliction and commits to thanksgiving and to paying what he has vowed. God commands the fish to spew Jonah out. Advertisement Another of the tablets says that Esarhaddon 'reconstructed the temple of the god Assur [the chief god of the Assyrians],' rebuilt the ancient cities of Babylon and Esagil, and 'renewed the statues of the great gods'. The texts say Esarhaddon is the son of Sennacherib, who reigned over Assyria from 704681 B.C, and a descendent of Sargon II, who was also 'king of the world, king of Assyria', reigning 721705 B.C. The Nebi Yunus shrine - containing what Muslims and Christians believe to be the tomb of Jonah or 'Yunnus' as he is known in the Koran - was destroyed by ISIS militants in July 2014. The inscriptions describe Esarhaddon as 'king of the world', and claim he rebuilt the ancient cities of Babylon and Esagil during his reign. This image shows another archaeological find in the ISIS tunnels, which archaeologists have been exploring since January 2017 This image shows a winged bull carved into the palace, with archaeologist Layla Salih (right), who is leading a five-person team carrying out the emergency documentation of Jonah's tomb Weeks after overrunning Mosul and much of Iraq's Sunni Arab heartland, ISIS militants rigged the shrine and blew it up, sparking global outrage. ISIS militants believe giving special veneration to tombs and relics is against the teachings of Islam. Tunnels dug by the group were not professionally built, leaving them unstable and at risk of collapse, burying the ancient palace and its remaining artefacts. The finding is the first example of ISIS militants tunnelling underneath historic sites to find artefacts to loot. Excavations at the Tomb of Jonah had previously been carried out by the Ottoman governor of Mosul in 1852. And the Iraqi department of antiques studied the site in the 1950s. Neither dug as far as the ISIS militants. Pictured are two of the group's tunnels The finding is the first example of ISIS militants tunnelling underneath historic sites to find artefacts to loot. This image shows archaeologist Layla Salih in one of the ISIS tunnels It had long been rumoured that the shrine shared a site with an ancient palace. Excavations had previously been carried out by the Ottoman governor of Mosul in 1852. The Iraqi department of antiques also studied the site in the 1950s. But neither excavation had dug as far as the ISIS militants, leaving the palace undiscovered for 2,600 years. WHAT WAS THE ASSYRIAN EMPIRE? The Assyrian Empire was a complex Mesopotamian civilisation dating from 2,500 BC to around 600 BC. Mesopotamia, an area of ancient Asia, was where people first gathered in large cities, created governments, and learned to write. Alongside other Mesopotamian groups like ancient Babylon and the Sumerian cities, the Assyrian Empire was one of the earliest civilisations in history. As its height, the empire stretched from Egypt up through what is now Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and into Turkey. As its height, the Assyrian Empire (red) stretched from Egypt up through what is now Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and into Turkey Turkey's Kultepe district was home to a settlement of the Old Assyrian Empire from the 21st to 18th centuries BC. Over 1,000 cuneiform tablets were found in the area in 1925, revealing a rich and complex cultural heritage. Much of our knowledge of early human societies comes from stone tablets such as these, leading some scholars to label Mesopotamia 'the place where history began'. Advertisement The palace was renovated and expanded by King Esarhaddon after it was built for his father Sennacherib. It was partly destroyed during a ransacking as part of the Battle of Nineveh in 612 BC. Only a handful of these 'cuneiform' slabs have ever been uncovered from the Esarhaddon period. An Iraqi soldier standing in a section of excavated ISIS tunnel. It had long been rumoured that the shrine shared a site with an ancient palace. Excavations had previously been carried out by the Iraqi department of antiques in the 1950s, but they found nothing Inscriptions found in the tunnels lay out King Esarhaddon's history, giving scientists fresh insight into the royal bloodline of Assyria. Pictured is the entrance to one of the tunnels Archaeologists also unearthed two Assyrian empire-era winged bull sculptures within the Jihadist tunnels. Two murals in white marble show the winged bulls with only the sides and feet showing. In another section of ISIS tunnel the archaeologists found Assyrian stone sculptures of a demi-goddess, pictured spreading the 'water of life' to protect humans. Some of the larger sculptures were likely left behind by ISIS because they feared the hill might collapse, experts said. Mrs Salih, pictured here coming from the entrance of one of the ISIS tunnels, is leading a five-person team carrying out the emergency documentation of Jonah's tomb. She believes that ISIS forces looted hundreds of objects before Mosul was retaken by Iraqi forces 'I can only imagine how much Daesh discovered down there before we got here,' Mrs Salah (pictured) said. 'We believe they took many of the artefacts, such as pottery and smaller pieces, away to sell. But what they left will be studied' Other removable artifacts, especially pottery, were certainly plundered, according to archaeologist Layla Salih, who is in charge of antiquities for the Nineveh province where the shrine stands. 'I've never seen something like this in stone at this large size,' Professor Eleanor Robson, chair of the British Institute for the Study of Iraq, told the Telegraph last February. Professor Robson suggested they may have been used to decorate the women's quarter of the palace. 'The objects don't match descriptions of what we thought was down there, so Isil's destruction has actually led us to a fantastic find.' This image reveals the damage caused by ISIS to the site of Jonah's tomb. As the city of Mosul was finally retaken, Iraqi forces battling Islamic State unveiled the destruction left behind by the jihadis last month in a series of devastating photographs Weeks after overrunning Mosul and much of Iraq's Sunni Arab heartland, ISIS militants rigged the shrine, pictured here, and blew it up, sparking global outrage 'There's a huge amount of history down there, not just ornamental stones. 'It is an opportunity to finally map the treasure-house of the world's first great empire, from the period of its greatest success.' Mrs Salih, who is leading the five-person team carrying out the emergency documentation of Jonah's tomb, believes that ISIS forces looted hundreds of objects before Mosul was retaken by Iraqi forces. 'I can only imagine how much Daesh discovered down there before we got here,' she said. 'We believe they took many of the artefacts, such as pottery and smaller pieces, away to sell. But what they left will be studied and will add a lot to our knowledge of the period.' Amazon may be bringing its futuristic checkout-free supermarkets to more cities. The internet giant could open as many as six of its 'Amazon Go' grocery stores in 2018, Recode reports, citing sources close to the situation. A few of the new stores are likely to open near Amazon's headquarters in Seattle, where the first location opened last month, while other locations may be coming to Los Angeles. Scroll down for video The first 'Amazon Go' store opened last month and is located on the bottom floor of Amazon's Seattle headquarters. New locations may be coming to Seattle and Los Angeles this year Amazon has held 'serious talks' with LA developer Rick Caruso about bringing an Amazon Go store to the Grove, his 600,000-square-foot outdoor shopping Mecca, Recode noted. The firm worked on Amazon Go's 'Just Walk Out' technology for at least four years, ultimately pushing back the first location's public opening because it needed more beta testing. Amazon Go stores may be cashier-less, but they still have employees. The firm's only Go store, located in Seattle, has a sizable staff that makes food, stocks shelves and helps customers HOW DO AMAZON GO SHOPS WORK? To start shopping, customers must scan an Amazon Go smartphone app and pass through a gated turnstile. Ready-to-eat lunch items greet shoppers when they enter. Deeper into the store, shoppers can find a small selection of grocery items, including meats and meal kits. An Amazon employee checks IDs in the store's wine and beer section. Sleek black cameras monitoring from above and weight sensors in the shelves help Amazon determine exactly what people take. If someone passes back through the gates with an item, his or her associated account is charged. If a shopper puts an item back on the shelf, Amazon removes it from his or her virtual cart. Much of the store will feel familiar to shoppers, aside from the check-out process. Amazon, famous for dynamic pricing online, has printed price tags just as traditional brick-and-mortar stores do. Advertisement Amazon Go supermarkets have no checkouts and instead work by tracking what users buy with AI-powered cameras and weight sensors. Customers scan their smartphone with the Amazon Go app at a turnstile near the store's entrance, pick out the items they want and leave. By combining computer vision, machine learning algorithms and sensors, the online retail giant can tell what people have purchased. It then charges their Amazon account. If someone puts an item back, they aren't charged. The Go stores are part of Amazon's wider effort to disrupt the traditional brick-and-mortar retail industry. Amazon also opened a brick-and-mortar bookstore in New York City's Columbus Circle area last year. The firm now has more than a dozen Amazon Books stores across the United States, which also sell toys, electronics and small gifts. It's unclear whether Amazon plans to bring any Go stores to the east coast, but Recode noted that the firm could consider adding the Go system of cameras and sensors to Whole Foods stores. However, with Whole Foods counting 473 locations across the country, there may be some logistical challenges involved in that. Amazon Go stores may be cashier-less, but they aren't entirely without employees. Each store has employees that make food, stock shelves and help customers. Amazon hasn't confirmed that it plans to open six more Go stores, but Recode said the new locations may be coming to Seattle and Los Angeles' the Grove, an outdoor shopping center Amazon Go supermarkets have no checkouts and instead work by tracking what users buy with AI-powered cameras and weight sensors. They use Amazon's 'Just Walk Out' technology To start shopping, customers must scan an Amazon Go smartphone app via a QR code and pass through a gated turnstile. Sleek black cameras monitoring from above and weight sensors in the shelves help Amazon determine exactly what people take. Much of the store will feel familiar to shoppers, aside from the check-out process. Amazon, famous for dynamic pricing online, has printed price tags just as traditional brick-and-mortar stores do. Twenty-two states and Washington, D.C., are suing the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in a bid to reinstate net neutrality rules. The FCC voted in December to overturn the net neutrality laws, put in place by President Obama. The states are being led by New York's attorney general, Eric Schneiderman, and intend to fight the Trump administration's repeal of the rules that were designed to ensure an open and free internet. The commission's order overturning the rules was published in the Federal Register today and revealed the laws are set to expire on April 23. The order's publication allows legal challenges to be filed against it. In December the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) overturned net neutrality rules instated under President Obama. Today 22 states and Washington, D.C., filed legal charges against the FCC to prevent the rules from being overturned. The protesters opposing the FCC's decision were in Washington, D.C. Last month the states joined web browser developer Mozilla Corp and video-sharing platform Vimeo Inc in filing petitions ensuring their right to sue. However, they withdrew the petitions last Friday, agreeing to wait until the FCC published its official order that came out today. Among the states that have filed charges are California, Illinois, Massachusetts, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. The attorneys general who are suing argue that the FCC cannot make 'arbitrary and capricious' changes to existing policies. The Republican-led FCC in December voted three to two to overturn the 2015 rules barring service providers from blocking, slowing access to or charging more for certain content on the internet. Protestor Diane Tepfer held a sign with an image of FCC Chairman Ajit Pai outside FCC headquarters in Washington, D.C. Her sign labeled Pai as the 'Grinch who Stole the Internet', as the FCC's net neutrality decision came just before Christmas last year Schneiderman said: 'Repealing net neutrality will allow internet service providers to put corporate profits over consumers by controlling what we see, do, and say online.' But FCC Chairman Ajit Pai was confident the order would be upheld, according to a statement from his office. The White House Office of Management and Budget must sign off on some aspects of the net neutrality reversal before it takes effect, and that could take months. WHAT IS NET NEUTRALITY? Net neutrality is the basic principle that all internet traffic should be be treated equally. Whether you're trying to buy a necklace on Etsy, stream a series on Netflix, or upload a photo to Facebook, your internet service provider has to load all of those websites equally quickly. If net neutrality is lost, internet service providers (ISPs) like AT&T and Verizon could create special 'fast lanes' for content providers willing to pay more. Customers of streaming services like Netflix could see their subscription fees rise if the company chooses to pay more. Advertisement US Senate Democrats, who hold 49 seats in the 100-person chamber, have the backing of 50 senators for repeal, leaving them one vote short of a majority. Congressional aides said the official order triggered a 60-legislative-day deadline for Congress to vote on whether to overturn the FCCs decision. Democrats need 51 votes to win any proposal in the Republican-controlled Senate because Vice President Mike Pence can break any tie. Even if Democrats do win a Senate majority, reinstatement of net neutrality would also require a favorable vote in the House of Representatives, where Republicans hold a larger majority. The reinstatement would still then be subject to a likely veto by President Trump. The repeal of the net neutrality rules was a victory for internet service providers such as AT&T, Comcast and Verizon, conferring power over what content consumers can access. On the other side, technology firms including Google's parent company Alphabet Inc and Facebook have thrown their weight behind the congressional bid to reverse the net neutrality repeal. The FCC's December decision also sought to preempt states from imposing their own net neutrality rules. But governors in Vermont, Hawaii, Montana, New Jersey and New York have signed orders pledging to do business only with internet providers that abide by net neutrality rules. If you thought The Ring couldn't get any scarier, think again. A savvy programmer has figured out a way to make an iconic, albeit nightmarish, scene from 2002 horror film The Ring a reality. Using Apple's ARKit augmented reality software, the programmer was able to make a hauntingly real version of Samara, a young girl murdered in the film, crawl out of a TV and into his home. Scroll down for video Abhishek Singh posted the fear-inducing video to his YouTube channel on Wednesday. The video lasts just over a minute and starts off by showing real footage from the Ring. Samara walks toward the screen as it briefly cuts out, until suddenly she crawls out of the TV, stands up and walks toward him. The amazingly detailed AR figure walks close enough to Singh that he appears to stumble backwards in fear, before he leaves the room completely. Samara then follows him around his home, with her jet black hair covering her eyes and her realistic image even casting a shadow behind her. Singh said he used Unity, an augmented reality developer program, as well as ARKit to create the simulation. Programmer Abhishek Singh posted the fear-inducing video to his YouTube channel on Wednesday. The video lasts just over a minute but shows 'The Ring' villain following him The video depicts the main villain from 'The Ring,' a young girl named Samara who was murdered. Singh said he used Unity, an augmented reality plugin that's compatible with ARKit WHAT'S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN AR AND VR? Virtual reality is a computer-generated simulation of an environment or situation It immerses the user by making them feel like they are in the simulated reality throughimages and sounds For example, in VR, you could feel like you're climbing a mountain while sat at home In contrast, augmented reality layers computer-generated images on top of an existing reality AR is developed into apps to bring digital components into the real world For example, in the Pokemon Go app, the characters seem to appear in real world scenarios Advertisement Unity has a plugin that's compatible with Apple's ARKit. Another developer, Mike Woods, also reenacted the scene using ARKit. Woods posted the video to his YouTube channel last year, saying he showed his kids the scarily real simulation. Apple launched ARKit last September as part of its annual iPhone event, where it also released the 10th anniversary iPhone X. The new software became available on all iPhones with the release of Apple's latest mobile operating system, iOS 11. ARKit is a developer platform that lets users have augmented reality capabilities in apps, such as Pokemon Go. Augmented reality is a new type of technology that overlays animated images into real-life scenarios. It differs from virtual reality, which transports users into simulated environments, typically using a headset. Apple's system uses the cameras on an iPhone to detect a flat surface, or 'plane' to put the virtual objects on, such as a table or floor. Tim Cook has revealed that he is 'incredibly excited' about AR, but sees VR as isolating and 'not profound' With a combination of machine learning and the camera data, it can constantly adjust the image so the object appears secured to the correct surface without the 'jitters' or other AR systems. ARKit also makes use of the camera sensor to estimate the total amount of light available in a scene and applies the correct amount of lighting to virtual objects. Nissan's self-driving taxi service is ready for its first passengers. The firm will begin testing the service, dubbed 'Easy Ride', in Japan next week ahead of launching it commercially in 2020. Working alongside Tokyo-based mobile developer DeNA, the service will ferry passengers around a 2.8 mile stretch of Yokohama. Nissan has admitted the technology is not perfect and the cars would crash without occasional human intervention. However, the latest development is a challenge to ride-hailing companies such as Uber who are hoping to develop their own driverless taxi service. Scroll down for video Nissan is testing its 'Easy Ride' mobile app to book autonomous rides. The cars will use a 2.8 mile (4.5 kilometre) piece of road starting at Nissan HQ and will have a driver in the front seat, in the event human intervention is required Three hundred people have signed up to try out Easy Ride in order to fine-tune what Nissan is calling a 'robo-vehicle mobility service' app. The service was developed in a partnership, which began last year, with Japanese mobile game provider DeNA. DeNA has been working on driverless bus and delivery services in Japan. For now, the semi autonomous cars will be limited to a fixed route which includes going through a shopping mall area in this Japanese port city. 'I think the potential is quite large in the long term, especially in large cities such as Tokyo or Boston, where there is a need for point-to-point transit but little incentive to own cars,' said Nicholas Evans, an assistant professor at University of Massachusetts Lowell. Nissan's Easy Ride vehicle, centre, goes on a course during a test ride in Yokohama, near Tokyo. Starting next month, Nissan is testing on regular roads what it calls 'a robo-vehicle mobility service.' Called Easy Ride, it uses a cell-phone app to book semi-autonomous driven rides For Easy Ride, users first download a special app on their cellphones. The app is only in Japanese, but there are plans to offer it in several languages for tourists and other travellers. After logging on, voice recognition is used to set a destination, and the date and time for when the ride picks you up at one of four possible spots in Yokohama. Once in the back seat of the vehicle, a display shows your route on a digital map. It also recommends events such as concerts, historical landmarks, restaurants and other places to visit, which pop up as photos and text on the display. The service also includes coupons that can be downloaded and used at those spots. Nissan staff members are required to be in the driver seat at all time as Japanese law forids completely autonomous vehicles on the road For Easy Ride, users first download a special app on their cellphones. The app is only in Japanese, but there are plans to offer it in several languages for tourists and other travellers Like other autonomous technology, the Easy Ride vehicle is packed with cameras, sensors and radars to recognise pedestrians, intersections, traffic lights and other vehicles. Although it is capable of driving itself, Japanese law doesn't allow for completely self-driving cars so a member of Nissan staff will be in the drivers seat at all times. Nissan has already confessed that the system isn't perfect and humans have and will continue to be needed to step in to avoid a crash. Nissan have already confessed that the system isn't perfect and humans have and will continue to be needed to step in to avoid a crash. The glitches in the system are not stopping Nissan from starting trials next month WHAT ARE THE SIX LEVELS OF SELF-DRIVING AUTOMATION? Level Zero - The full-time performance by the human driver of all aspects of the dynamic driving task, even when enhanced by warning or intervention systems. Level One A small amount of control is accomplished by the system such as adaptive braking if a car gets too close. Level Two The system can control the speed and direction of the car allowing the driver to take their hands off temporarily, but they have to monitor the road at all times and be ready to take over. Level Three The driver does not have to monitor the system at all times in some specific cases like on high ways but must be ready to resume control if the system requests. Level Four The system can cope will all situations automatically within defined use but it may not be able to cope will all weather or road conditions. System will rely on high definition mapping. Level Five Full automation. System can cope with all weather, traffic and lighting conditions. It can go anywhere, at any time in any conditions. Tesla's Model 3 Sedan - one of the world's most advanced road-legal cars with autonomous elements - currently operates at Level Two autonomy. It is equipped for Level Three autonomy, which may be introduced in a future software update Advertisement Several companies, including Google's Waymo and Tesla's Autopilot are also developing autonomous vehicle technology. Outside of the American tech companies, just about all the major automakers, including Mercedes and Toyota, are developing self-driving cars. Uber has tried to roll out its own self-driving taxi in the US. In November, the company struck a deal to buy up to 24,000 autonomous cars from Volvo. Nissan has been one of the leaders and advocates for driverless cars in the industry. Although opinion is divided on the projection that as many as 10 million driverless cars will be on roads by 2020, everyone agrees the technology is going to grow. Professor Evans cautioned: 'In introducing technology, all it takes is for a couple of high-profile accidents for consumers to turn against manufacturers. 'It's in the self-interest of manufacturers for rigorous testing and public input on this new kind of technology,' said Evans, who studies the ethical dilemmas posed by emerging technologies such as drones and self-driving vehicles. The Easy Ride vehicle is packed with cameras, sensors and radars to recognise pedestrians, intersections, traffic lights and other vehicles. Nissan has been one of the leaders and advocates for driverless cars in the industry Easy Ride is still experimental, but future uses Nissan envisions include parents using it to pick up their children and tourists using it to easily find their way around but some glitches still remain Easy Ride is still experimental, but future uses Nissan envisions include parents using it to pick up their children and tourists using it to easily find their way around. Some glitches remain. In a recent demonstration for reporters, the app had problems launching because of a poor net connection at Nissan headquarters. When a reporter said, 'I want to eat a burger,' it successfully recommended several nearby joints. But it was not able to find the nearest New Balance store, or any other place to buy sneakers. The last 'wild' horses is the world are not truly wild, according to a shock DNA study. Przewalski's horses, a breed thought to be the last 'wild' species, are the descendants of escaped once-domesticated animals. The research turns the mysterious origin of domesticated horses 'upside down', experts claim. Scroll down for video Przewalski's horses were considered to be the last 'wild' species of horse but some of the horses were found to carry genetic variants causing white and leopard coat spotting patterns. This artists impression shows how the early horses may have looked Przewalski's horses now number roughly 2,000 in Mongolia. But researchers this week upended that theory on an examination of the genomes of dozens of ancient and modern horses. 'Our findings literally turn current population models of horse origins upside-down,' said Professor Ludovic Orlando, a molecular archaeologist at the French National Center for Scientific Research who led the study. Their study claims that Przewalski's horse, saved from extinction in the 20th century, descended from horses domesticated in northern Kazakhstan some 5,500 years ago by people in what is called the Botai culture. This suggests all wild horses are now extinct. The research showed that the Botai culture offers the earliest-known evidence for horse domestication, but that their horses were not the ancestors of modern domesticated breeds. 'The world lost truly wild horses perhaps hundreds, if not thousands of years ago, but we are only just now learning this fact, with the results of this research,' said University of Kansas zooarchaeologist Sandra Olsen, one of the researchers. The history of people and horses has been intertwined for millennia. Przewalski's horse, saved from extinction in the 20th century, descended from horses domesticated in northern Kazakhstan some 5,500 years ago 'Horse domestication was a critical innovation,' said archaeologist Alan Outram of the University of Exeter, who helped lead the study. 'Horse riding was the fastest form of transport for thousands of years, from the Copper Age over 5,000 years ago until the steam train. 'Even then it was really only the motor car that replaced it on a wide scale. Horses revolutionized human mobility, trade and modes of warfare,' Outram added. Przewalski's horse, named for a Russian who described them in the 19th century, is relatively small and stocky. Like horses depicted in prehistoric cave paintings, it is dun-colored with a dark erect mane. A modern-day domesticated herd of horses in Kazakhstan are descended from 15 individuals caught a century ago. Research has suggested the world truly lost wild horses centuries ago The current population is descended from 15 individuals caught a century ago, with Przewalski's horse later reintroduced into the wild. Some horses from the domesticated Botai herds escaped and became the feral Przewalski's horse, the researchers said. 'This means that we must continue the search for the true ancestors of modern breeds by gathering samples from places like Ukraine, western Russia, Hungary, Poland and that region,' Olsen added. The research was published in the journal Science. Catastrophic eruptions of super volcanoes that threaten to wipe out life on Earth could be predicted in the future, a new study suggests. Experts have been monitoring rumbling sounds produced by moving magma. They believe these sounds could help them develop more effective forecasting system for some of the world's most dangerous areas of tectonic activity, including Yellowstone. If it were to blow, the supervolcano at the US national park would be one thousand times as powerful as the 1980 Mount St Helens eruption, experts say. Scroll down for video Catastrophic eruptions of supervolcanoes that threaten to wipe out life on Earth could be predicted in the future, a new study suggests. Experts have been monitoring rumbling sounds inside the Villarica volcano (pictured), one of the most active volcanoes in the world Researchers set-up and maintained monitoring stations at the volcano just two months before a 2015 eruption. Studying this data they saw that, in the build-up to the eruption, the pitch of the infrasound increased while the duration of the signal decreased Researchers from Stanford and Boise State University tracked infrasound detected by monitoring stations on the slopes of the Villarrica volcano in southern Chile, one of the most active in the world. These noises, which have frequencies below the lower limit of human audibility, come from the turbulent lake of lava inside a crater at the volcano's peak and change depending on its activity. The team found that changes in this volcanic sound signalled a sudden rise in the lava lake level just ahead of a major eruption that took place in 2015. It was accompanied by rapid up-and-down motions of the surging lake near the crater's rim. Tracking infrasound in real-time and combining it with other information, including seismic readings and gas emissions, could help to alert people to when the volcano is about to blow. The researchers, however, have yet to determine exactly how much of a warning monitoring a volcano in this way would provide. 'Our results point to how infrasound could aid in forecasting volcanic eruptions,' said study co-author Leighton Watson, a graduate student at Stanford co-author of the study. HOW CAN RESEARCHERS PREDICT VOLCANIC ERUPTIONS? According to Eric Dunham, an associate professor of Stanford University's School of Earth, energy and Environmental Sciences, 'Volcanoes are complicated and there is currently no universally applicable means of predicting eruption. In all likelihood, there never will be.' However, there are indicators of increased volcanic activity, which researchers can use to help predict volcanic eruptions. Researchers can track indicators such as: Volcanic infrasound : When the lava lake rises up in the crater of an open vent volcano, a sign of a potential eruption, the pitch or frequency of the sounds generated by the magma tends to increase. : When the lava lake rises up in the crater of an open vent volcano, a sign of a potential eruption, the pitch or frequency of the sounds generated by the magma tends to increase. Seismic activity : Ahead of an eruption, seismic activity in the form of small earthquakes and tremors almost always increases as magma moves through the volcano's 'plumbing system'. : Ahead of an eruption, seismic activity in the form of small earthquakes and tremors almost always increases as magma moves through the volcano's 'plumbing system'. Gas emissions : As magma nears the surface and pressure decreases, gases escape. Sulfur dioxide is one of the main components of volcanic gases, and increasing amounts of it are a sign of increasing amounts of magma near the surface of a volcano. : As magma nears the surface and pressure decreases, gases escape. Sulfur dioxide is one of the main components of volcanic gases, and increasing amounts of it are a sign of increasing amounts of magma near the surface of a volcano. Ground deformation : Changes to a volcano's ground surface (volcano deformation) appear as swelling, sinking, or cracking, which can be caused by magma, gas, or other fluids (usually water) moving underground or by movements in the Earth's crust due to motion along fault lines. Swelling of a volcano cans signal that magma has accumulated near the surface. Source: United States Geological Survey Advertisement 'Infrasound is potentially a key piece of information available to volcanologists to gauge the likelihood of an eruption hours or days ahead.' For the study, researchers studied the snow-capped Villarica mountain volcano, which has an altitude of 9,300 feet (2,834 metres). The volcano looms over a lake and lies across from the city of Pucon, whose population increases to a quarter of a million people in the summer tourist season. At night, residents of Pucon can often see a scarlet glow from Villarica's lava lake, normally hidden well below the volcano's rim. After a 35-year period since the volcano's last eruption, the volcano erupted again on March 3, 2015. Experts found that changes in this volcanic sound signalled a sudden rise in the lava lake level just ahead of a major eruption that took place in 2015. This image shows a lava fountain within the Villarica volcano's crater A 'fountain' of lava erupted from the mountaintop nearly a mile (1.6 km) into the sky, spewing ash and debris and triggering bolts of lightning from the thick heat-generated clouds enveloping the summit. Around 4,000 people evacuated the area, but they were soon able to return to their homes as the risks of mudslides and flooding from melted snow was minimal. Co-author of the study Jose Palma set-up and maintained monitoring stations at the volcano just two months before the eruption, which captured its before-and-after sound activity. Studying this data researchers saw that, in the build-up to the eruption, the pitch of the infrasound increased while the duration of the signal decreased. Aircraft flyovers documented the changes in Villarica's lava lake, allowing researchers to explore connections between its height and the sound generation. According to Watson, this relationship can be explained via a musical analogy. Similar to a person blowing into a trombone, explosions from gas bubbles rising and then bursting at the surface of the lava lake create sound waves. Just as how the shape of a trombone can change the pitch of the notes it produces, the geometry of the crater that holds the lava lake modifies its sounds. The Villarica volcano in southern Chile (shown on map) erupted on March 3, 2015, after a 35-year period of inactivity. A 'fountain' of lava erupted from the mountaintop nearly a mile (1.6 km) into the sky, spewing ash and debris and triggering bolts of lightning For example, when the lava lake is deep down in the volcano's crater, the sound registers at a lower pitch or frequency - 'just like when a trombone is extended,' said Watson. When the lava lake rises up in the crater, a sign of a potential eruption, the pitch or frequency of the sounds increased, 'just like when the trombone is retracted,' said Watson. According to the research team, future research will try to tie infrasound generation to other critical variables in volcano monitoring and eruption forecasting, such as seismicity. Ahead of an eruption, seismic activity in the form of small earthquakes and tremors almost always increases. This seismic activity come from several miles undergound as magma moves through the volcano's 'plumbing system' of fractures and conduits that connect the volcano's opening the magma chambers in our planet's crust. Volcanologists think that changes in lava lake levels, and their associated infrasound, result from the injection of new magma through volcanic plumbing, increasing the odds of a violent outburst. Around 4,000 people evacuated the area around the Villarrica Lake and the Villarica volcano when it blew in 2015. They were soon able to return to their homes as the risks of mudslides and flooding from melted snow was minimal In light of this, the researchers say that the collection of infrasound should prove beneficial for forecasting events at 'open vent' volcanoes such as Villarica, where an exposed lake or channels of lava connect to the inside of the volcano to the atmosphere. By contrast, closed vent volcanoes, where the pooling magma remains trapped under rock until an explosive eruption occurs, do not generate the same type of infrasound and pose additional forecasting challenges. For example Mount St Helens in Washington state is a close vent volcano whose eruption in 1980 is recorded as one of the most lethal and destructive eruptions in the US. 'Volcanoes are complicated and there is currently no universally applicable means of predicting eruptions,' Dunham said. 'In all likelihood, there never will be. 'Instead, we can look to the many indicators of increased volcanic activity, like seismicity, gas emissions, ground deformation, and as we further demonstrated in this study infrasound, in order to make robust forecasts of eruptions.' The full findings of the study were published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. Psychologists have create a creepy machine that can peer into your mind's eye with incredible accuracy. Their AI studies electrical signals in the brain to recreate faces being looked at by volunteers. It could provide a means of communication for people who are unable to talk, as well as the development of prosthetics controlled by thoughts. The finding also opens the door to strange future scenarios, such as those portrayed in the series 'Black Mirror', where anyone can record and playback their memories. Scroll down for video Psychologists have create a creepy machine that can peer into your mind's eye with incredible accuracy. Their AI studies electrical signals in the brain to recreate faces being looked at by volunteers Test subjects were hooked up to electroencephalography (EEG) equipment by neuroscientists at the University of Toronto Scarborough. This recorded their brain activity as they were shown images of faces. This information was then used to digitally recreate the image, using a specially designed piece of software. The breakthrough relies on neural networks, computer systems which simulate the way the brain works in order to learn. These networks can be trained to recognise patterns in information - including speech, text data, or visual images - and are the basis for a large number of the developments in artificial intelligence (AI) over recent years. The team's AI was first trained to recognise patterns in pictures of faces, by studying a huge database of images. Once it was able to recognise the characteristics that make up a human face, it was then trained to associate them with specific EEG brain activity patterns. By matching the brain activity it observed in the test subjects with this information, the AI could then reproduce what they were seeing. The result was extremely accurate reproductions of the faces being observed by the volunteers. Speaking about the results Adrian Nestor, co-author of the study, said: 'What's really exciting is that we're not reconstructing squares and triangles but actual images of a person's face, and that involves a lot of fine-grained visual detail. 'The fact we can reconstruct what someone experiences visually based on their brain activity opens up a lot of possibilities. HOW ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCES LEARN USING NEURAL NETWORKS AI systems rely on artificial neural networks (ANNs), which try to simulate the way the brain works in order to learn. ANNs can be trained to recognise patterns in information - including speech, text data, or visual images - and are the basis for a large number of the developments in AI over recent years. Conventional AI uses input to 'teach' an algorithm about a particular subject by feeding it massive amounts of information. AI systems rely on artificial neural networks (ANNs), which try to simulate the way the brain works in order to learn. ANNs can be trained to recognise patterns in information - including speech, text data, or visual images Practical applications include Google's language translation services, Facebook's facial recognition software and Snapchat's image altering live filters. The process of inputting this data can be extremely time consuming, and is limited to one type of knowledge. A new breed of ANNs called Adversarial Neural Networks pits the wits of two AI bots against each other, which allows them to learn from each other. This approach is designed to speed up the process of learning, as well as refining the output created by AI systems. Advertisement 'It unveils the subjective content of our mind and it provides a way to access, explore and share the content of our perception, memory and imagination.' The method was pioneered by Professor Nestor, who has successfully reconstructed facial images from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data in the past. This is the first time EEG, which is more common, portable, and inexpensive by comparison, has been used. EEG also has greater resolution over time, meaning it can measure with detail how a perception develops down to the millisecond. Test subjects were hooked up to EEG equipment by neuroscientists at the University of Toronto Scarborough and then shown images of faces Their brain activity was recorded and used to digitally recreate the image using a technique based on machine learning algorithms. This image shows happy faces show to volunteers compared with their AI reonstructions Researchers estimate that it takes our brain about 170 milliseconds (0.17 seconds) to form a good representation of a face we see. This image shows netural faces shown to volunteers and their recreations after 180 milliseconds (ms) and 583 ms Researchers estimate that it takes our brain about 170 milliseconds (0.17 seconds) to form a good representation of a face we see. The EEG technique was developed by Dan Nemrodov, a postdoctoral fellow at Professor Nestors lab. He said: 'When we see something, our brain creates a mental percept, which is essentially a mental impression of that thing. 'We were able to capture this percept using EEG to get a direct illustration of whats happening in the brain during this process. The method was pioneered by Adrian Nestor, who has successfully reconstructed facial images from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data in the past. This is the first time EEG, which is more common, portable, and inexpensive by comparison, has been used The finding could provide a means of communication for people who are unable to talk, as well as prosthetics controlled by thoughts. This image shows the reflection of a face in the eye of a test subject WHAT IS AN EEG AND HOW DOES IT WORK? An electroencephalogram (EEG) is a recording of brain activity which was originally developed for clinical use. During the test, small sensors are attached to the scalp to pick up the electrical signals produced when brain cells send messages to each other. In the medical field, EEGs are typically carried out by a highly trained specialist known as a clinical neurophysiologist. These signals are recorded by a machine and are analysed by a medical professional to determine whether they're unusual. An EEG can be used to help diagnose and monitor a number of conditions that affect the brain. It may help identify the cause of certain symptoms, such as seizures or memory problems. More recently, technology companies have used the technique to create brain-computer interfaces, sometimes referred to as 'mind-reading' devices. This has led to the creation and design of a number of futuristic sounding gadgets. These have ranged from a machine that can decipher words from brainwaves without them being spoken to a headband design that would let computer users open apps using the power of thought. Advertisement 'fMRI captures activity at the time scale of seconds, but EEG captures activity at the millisecond scale. 'So we can see with very fine detail how the percept of a face develops in our brain using EEG.' The full findings of the study were published in the journal eNeuro. Previous breakthroughs in this area have relied on fMRI scans, which monitor changes in blood flow in the brain, rather than electrical activity. In January, 2018, Japanese scientists revealed a similar device which made use of fMRI to recreate objects being looked at, and even thought about. The technique opens the door to a scenario portrayed in the Crocodile episode of the latest series of Black Mirror, which features a device that can access and replay any memory Researchers from the Kamitani Lab at Kyoto University, led by Professor Yukiyasu Kamitani, used a neural network to create images based on information taken from fMRI scans, which detect changes in blood flow to analyse electrical activity. Using this data, the machine was able to reconstruct owls, aircraft, stained-glass windows and red postboxes after three volunteers stared at the pictures. It also produced pictures of objects including squares, crosses, goldfish, swans, leopards and bowling balls that the participants imagined. Although the accuracy varied from person to person, the breakthrough opens a 'unique window into our internal world', according to the Kyoto team. The technique could theoretically be used to create footage of daydreams, memories and other mental images. How fMRI scans track what happens in the human brain Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is one of the most recently developed forms of neuroimaging. It measures the metabolic changes that occur within the brain, such as changes in blood flow. Medical professionals may use fMRI to detect abnormalities within the brain that cannot be found with other imaging techniques, measure the effects of stroke or disease, or guide brain treatment. It can also be used to examine the brains anatomy and determine which parts of the brain are handling critical functions. A magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan uses a magnetic field rather than X-rays to take pictures of body. The MRI scanner is a hollow machine with a tube running horizontally through its middle. You lie on a bed that slides into the tube of the scanner. Equipment used in fMRI scans uses the same technology, but is more compact and lightweight. The main difference between a normal MRI scan and a fMRI scan is the results that can be obtained. Whereas a normal MRI scan gives pictures of the structure of the brain, a functional MRI scan shows which parts of the brain are activated when certain tasks are carried out. This includes language, memory and movement. Advertisement It could also help patients in permanent vegetative states to communicate with their loved ones. Writing in a paper published in the online print repository BioRxiv, its authors said: 'Here, we present a novel image reconstruction method, in which the pixel values of an image are optimized to make its Deep Neural Network features similar to those decoded from human brain activity at multiple layers. 'We found that the generated images resembled the stimulus images (both natural images and artificial shapes) and the subjective visual content during imagery. 'While our model was solely trained with natural images, our method successfully generalized the reconstruction to artificial shapes, indicating that our model indeed 'reconstructs' or 'generates' images from brain activity, not simply matches to exemplars.' The Kyoto team's deep neural network was trained using 50 natural images and the corresponding fMRI results from volunteers who were looking at them. This recreated the images viewed by the volunteers. Scientists in Japan in January 2018 announced they had developed an AI that can decode patterns in the brain to recreate what a person is seeing or imagining. This let them build up pictures of everything from simple shapes and letters to ducks and postboxes Experts used a neural network to predict visual features based on information taken from fMRI scans, which detect changes in blood flow to analyse electrical activity. This let them build up pictures seen by or imagined by volunteers, like this iguana Three volunteers were asked to stare at a range of images, including animals - like this owl - as well as aircraft and stained glass windows, while their brain activity was monitored The Kyoto team's neural network was trained using 50 natural images, like this swan, and the corresponding fMRI results from volunteers who were looking at them. This recreated the images viewed or imagined by the volunteers They then used a second type of AI called a deep generative network to check that they looked like real images, refining them to make them more recognisable. Professor Kamitani previously hit the headlines after his fMRI 'decoder' was able to identify objects seen or imagined by volunteers with a high degree of accuracy. The researchers built on the idea that a set of hierarchically-processed features can be used to determine an object category, such as 'turtle' or 'leopard.' Such category names allow computers to recognise the objects in an image, the researchers explained in a paper published by Nature Communications. Subjects were shown natural images from the online image database ImageNet, spanning 150 categories. They then used a second type of AI called a deep generative network to check that they looked like real images, refining them to make them more recognisable Although the accuracy varied from person to person, the breakthrough opens a 'unique window into our internal world', according to the Kyoto team. This image shows a selection of the objects recreated Volunteers were also asked to imagine shapes likes squares, crosses, as well as everyday objects from goldfish and swans to bowling balls They were also asked to picture letters of the alphabet with their mind's eye, which the system had less difficulty recreating Then, the trained decoders were used to predict the visual features of objects even for objects that were not used in the training from the brain scans. When shown the same image, the researchers found that the brain activity patterns from the human subject could be translated into patterns of simulated neurons in the neural network. This could then be used to predict the objects. Advertisement An incredible new timelapse reveals construction work on Saudi Arabia's Jeddah Tower, which is set to break the record as the world's tallest building when it is completed next year. The clip shows the skyscraper, which will stretch more than a 3,280ft (1,000 metres) above the Saudi city of Jeddah upon completion, as it is constructed from its foundations in early 2014 to its current height of 870ft (266 metres). The 170-storey building is set to surpass Dubai's Burj Khalifa as the world's highest building and will feature a hotel, apartments and offices, as well as a large outdoor viewing deck that doubles as an 'air park'. Scroll down for video The video, posted by YouTube user Checoblett, is a compilation of photographs taken of the tower since construction began in March 2014. It shows the building as its height rises floor-by-floor, with yellow scaffolding and enormous cranes gradually crawling up the structure's surging peak. As of February 2018, engineers have laid down 66 of the Jeddah Tower's 170 storeys, the video says. The building, which will remain a concrete and steel skeleton until its windows are added later into the build process, has now climbed to 870 ft (266 metres) of the tower's eventual height. Plagued by years of delays and funding issues, it now appears the Jeddah Tower, first proposed in 2008, may finally be on track for completion. Speaking in January, Mounib Hammoud, CEO of Jeddah Economic Company, told CNN: 'As of 2020, we'll start seeing things: You'll see the tower, you'll see the shopping mall, you'll see many other projects. The clip shows the skyscraper, which will stretch more than a kilometre (0.6 miles) above the Saudi city of Jeddah upon completion, as it is constructed from its foundations in early 2014 (left) to its current height of 266 metres (870 ft). Pictured right is the building in December 2015 The Jeddah Tower (artist's impression) is set to break the record as the world's tallest building when it is completed next year. Once dubbed 'Kingdom Tower', the 170-storey building is to rise more than a kilometre (almost 3,300 feet), surpassing Dubai's Burj Khalifa as the world's highest building The 170-storey building is set to surpass Dubai's Burj Khalifa as the world's highest building. Pictured is how it will measure up against some of the Earth's tallest man-made structures As the video progresses, it shows images of the building captured earlier this year. Pictured left is the building at night in January, while right shows a recent image of the Jeddah Tower, snapped earlier this month The tower will feature a hotel, apartments and offices. Pictured is its progress as of February 2018. Sixty-six floors of the tower's central spire have been built so far, while 60 floors of the 'wings' that flank it have been completed WHAT IS THE JEDDAH TOWER? Saudi Arabia's Jeddah Tower is set to break the record as the world's tallest building when it is completed next year Saudi Arabia's Jeddah Tower is set to break the record as the world's tallest building when it is completed next year. Once dubbed 'Kingdom Tower', the 170-storey building is to rise more than a kilometre (almost 3,300 feet), surpassing Dubai's Burj Khalifa as the world's highest building. It will feature a hotel, apartments and offices. Saudi Billionaire Prince Prince Alwaleed bin Talal first announced plans for the tower in August 2011. He claimed it would take 36 months to build after the start of construction, with an estimated cost of 900 million ($1.2 billion). By November 2014, a four-storey foundation was in place and Prince Alwaleed said the building would be finished in 2018. But that was before the kingdom felt the full force of a drop in oil revenues. In November 2015, Kingdom Holding said Jeddah Economic Company had reached a financing deal with Saudi Arabia's Alinma Investment to finish the Jeddah Tower, which then had 26 floors. In May 2017 it was announced the project had been pushed back again to the end of 2019. As of February 2018, engineers have laid down 66 of the Jeddah Tower's 170 storeys. The building, which will remain a concrete and steel skeleton until its windows are added later into the build process, has climbed to 266 metres (870 ft) of the tower's eventual 1,006 metre (3,300 ft) height. Jeddah Tower's construction fits into Saudi Arabia 2030, a government plan that aims to diversify the economy in the kingdom and reduce its dependence on oil. Once dubbed 'Kingdom Tower', the 170-storey building is to rise more than a kilometre (almost 3,300 feet), surpassing Dubai's Burj Khalifa as the world's highest building Advertisement 'Jeddah is going to be repositioned on the international scene of modern cities,' he adds. 'You speak about downtown Dubai - and now we're going to have downtown Jeddah.' Costs for the project had originally been estimated at around 900 million ($1.2 billion). But delays and an oil price crash have skyrocketed the total cost to at least 1.5 billion ($2 billion). The Tower is being funded by Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, who chairs Kingdom Holding Co whose affiliated Jeddah Economic Company is developing the spire-topped landmark. The 170-storey building is set to surpass Dubai's Burj Khalifa as the world's highest building and will feature a hotel, apartments and offices, as well as a large outdoor viewing deck that doubles as an 'air park' Plagued by years of delays and funding issues, it now appears the Jeddah Tower, first proposed in 2008, may finally be on track for completion The huge fund, compliant with Islamic sharia law, will also be used to develop the first phase of Jeddah Economic City. Delays and an oil price crash have skyrocketed the total cost to at least 1.5 billion ($2 billion) The City is an urban project surrounding the tower in the Obhur area north of Jeddah. The project contractor Saudi Binladin Group was among construction firms in the kingdom that suffered heavy financial losses after a collapse in oil revenues in 2014. The company, which has developed other prominent buildings in Saudi Arabia, was founded more than 80 years ago by the father of deceased Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. Binladin Group late last year said it had completed payment to 70,000 laid-off employees. Prince Alwaleed first announced plans to build the tower in August 2011, saying it would take 36 months to build after the start of construction. By November 2014, a four-storey foundation was in place and Prince Alwaleed said the building would be finished in 2018. But that was before the kingdom felt the full force of a drop in oil revenues. In November 2015, Kingdom Holding said Jeddah Economic Company had reached a financing deal with Saudi Arabia's Alinma Investment to finish the Jeddah Tower, which then had 26 floors. Prince Alwaleed announced in May 2017 that the project had been delayed again until 2019. Kingdom Holding has shares in the Euro Disney theme park, Apple, News Corporation and US banking giant Citigroup, among other firms. Prince Alwaleed first announced plans to build the tower in August 2011, saying it would take 36 months to build after the start of construction. Pictured left is a computer generated image of how it will look, and right, a model of the building Google Assistant will soon be able to speak more than 30 languages. The internet giant said Friday its digital assistant software would be available in more than 30 languages by the end of 2018 as it steps up its artificial intelligence efforts against Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri and others. New languages including Danish, Dutch, Hindi and Indonesian, among others, will be coming to Assistant this year, with more on the way throughout the year. Assistant will also become multilingual, 'so families or individuals that speak more than one language can speak naturally,' to the program, Google wrote in a blog post. Scroll down for video Google says its artificial intelligence digital assistant, currently used on its Google Home speakers, will be available in more 30 languages by the end of 2018 Google Assistant released its AI software in 2016 and the technology is available on the firm's connected speakers, Android smartphones, TVs, Android Auto and other devices. The new Assistant features are aimed at helping Google, which has been lagging in the market for connected devices against Amazon's Alexa-powered hardware, ramp up competition in new markets. While Alexa currently operates only in English, Google Assistant works in eight languages and the new initiative expands that. 'Android users are all around the world, so from the start, our goal has been to bring the Assistant to as many people, languages and locations as possible,' said Nick Fox, Google's vice president of Product, in a blog post. '...By the end of the year (Google Assistant) will be available in more than 30 languages, reaching 95 percent of all eligible Android phones worldwide,' he added. Google Assistant is currently available on the firm's voice-activated smart speaker, Google Home (pictured), as well as other devices like Android Auto, smart TVs and smartphones In the next few months, Google is making Assistant available in Danish, Dutch, Hindi, Indonesian, Norwegian, Swedish and Thai on Android phones and iPhones. Google plans to add more languages on more devices throughout the year, the firm said. The multilingual option will first be available in English, French and German, with support for more languages coming "over time," Fox wrote. It should be helpful for users who speak a native language at home, but speak another language, such as English, with their friends. WHAT LANGUAGES ARE COMING TO GOOGLE ASSISTANT? Google introduced its voice-activated AI, Assistant, in 2016 The technology is available on Android phones, the firm's voice-activated speakers, and other devices Currently, Google Assistant supports eight languages: English French German Italian Japanese Korean Spanish Portuguese Competition has been heating up between Google, Amazon and Apple to dominate digital assistants. Google will have an edge with Assistant's new language features Soon, it will be able to support 30 languages. The first languages becoming available are: Danish Dutch Hindi Indonesian Norwegian Swedish Thai Advertisement Prior to the multilingual feature, users would have to manually switch their language in the app. The move comes amid intense competition for artificial intelligence software on smartphones and other devices by Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Samsung and others. Amazon took the early lead with its Alexa-powered speakers and is believed to hold the lion's share of that market, with Google Home devices a distant second. Apple got a late start in the speaker segment with its HomePod, which went on sale this month in the US, Britain and Australia. However, Amazon and Apple's voice assistants lack multilingual capabilities, giving Google a noteworthy foothold over its rivals, at least for now. Between the mountains and the shining Mediterranean, Barcelona delights its visitors with a winning mix of shady plazas, elegant boulevards and astonishing architectural styles you wont find anywhere else. From buzzing barrios full of tiny tapas bars to the heights of the most famous unfinished building in the world, heres all you need to help you plan the perfect getaway. Barcelonas green lung: the Parc de la Ciutadella 0900: Breakfast Kick things off at the laid-back Cafe del Born Nou in El Born. With an ideal location opposite the El Born Cultural and Memorial Centre, its close to several major attractions and a hop and a skip from Barcelonas green lung; the Parc de la Ciutadella. Keep it simple with a coffee and pastry at the bar, or grab an outside table and fill up on Catalan sandwiches and scrambled eggs. 1000: Palau de la Musica Catalana Head to the Palau de la Musica Catalana, one of Barcelonas modernist marvels. This UNESCO-listed concert hall is one of the most admired buildings in the city, lavished with glazed tiles, mosaic pillars, carved stone and wrought iron. But it gets even better on the inside. The stained-glass windows and central skylight are nothing short of spectacular. See the interior on one of the 55-minute guided tours, which begin at 1000 each day. Tickets cost 20. 1100: El Born Spend a couple of hours exploring this artsy neighbourhood, known for its boutique shopping, chic restaurants and the cobbled, tree-lined Passeig del Born. At one end of the square sits the magnificent Santa Maria del Mar basilica, a 14th century Catalan Gothic icon. For amazing views over the surrounding district, take a guided tour of its rooftop and towers. The unmissable Santa Caterina Market is the brainchild of Catalan architects EMBT, who also designed the Scottish Parliament building. It boasts an extraordinary multicoloured ceramic-tiled roof which covers the market in a series of waves. Inside, find stalls laden with regional produce, from cured goats milk cheeses to seasonal fruits to a dazzling array of Spanish olives. Its a great place to stock up for a picnic. UNESCO-listed concert hall, Palau de la Musica Catalan Elsewhere in El Born is the tucked-away European Museum of Modern Art and the impressive Picasso Museum, which occupies a string of adjoining medieval palaces on Carrer Montcada. One of the most popular museums in the city, its permanent collection emphasises Picassos formative years. Its worth booking in advance if youre planning a visit, as the queues here can be long. 1400: Lunch Walk 20 minutes north to Passeig de Gracia, Barcelonas major shopping and commercial thoroughfare. The grand Eixample neighbourhood is probably the priciest area of the city for dining, but three blocks from the metro is the excellent 9 Granados where the daily lunch menu will only set you back 16.90. Set on a pedestrianised street, the restaurant has a mellow vibe and serves a range of Mediterranean-inspired dishes and tapas. Think grilled octopus, classic paella and plenty of vegetarian options, as well as delicious cheese boards and salads. Lunch is eaten later than youre probably used to at home, with most restaurants serving their Menu del Dia from around 13301530. The Santa Maria del Mar basilica, a 14th century Catalan Gothic icon 1600: Gaudi architecture Youre only here for 36 hours so resist the urge to take a siesta. Youre now close to some of the best Catalan art nouveau buildings in the city, starting with Gaudis dragon-roofed Casa Batllo. Part of a trio of modernist buildings collectively known as Manzana de la Discordia, this residence perfectly encapsulates the architects creative powers. It features a fantastical facade adorned with colourful glass mosaics, and a roof line shaped like an animals spine, covered with shimmering scales. Tour the marine-inspired interior and visit the rooftop for far-reaching views of the city. Ten minutes up the road, Casa Mila, also known as La Pedrera, was the last private residence Gaudi designed. One of his strangest buildings, it features an undulating stone exterior and an outlandish rooftop featuring 28 chimneys, or soldiers, said to have inspired George Lucass vision for the stormtroopers helmets in Star Wars. Both are open until 2100, giving you plenty of time to explore. 2000: La Rambla, dinner and drinks Head back towards the Gothic Quarter along La Rambla, the citys famed pedestrianised mall. Now its time to think tapas. Rather than settling in one place, try a few bars on for size with a couple of small plates and a glass of wine in each. Evening meals are eaten late anywhere between 2100 and 2330 but central venues are used to visitors eating earlier. Try Bar del Pi overlooking Placa del Pi; the biodynamic Cometa Pla, and locals favourite Bar La Plata, which still serves the same four tapas as when it opened in 1945. The Picasso Museum occupies five large medieval town houses Sunday 1000: Breakfast Its not the healthiest breakfast, but a bag of churros is a must when in Barcelona. At Xurreria Sagrada Familia theyve been serving these doughy treats since 1950. The choice includes churros stuffed with Nutella, cream or dulce de leche, or the original version coated with sugar and dipped in chocolate. Order a few and devour them in the park across the road. 1030: Sagrada Familia Its considered his finest work, yet Gaudis Sagrada Familia was only a quarter complete when he died. Still unfinished, with an end date that keeps edging ever further forward into the future, it nevertheless remains the irrefutable emblem of Barcelona and attracts more than 3,000,000 visitors per year. For the best experience and to truly appreciate Gaudis bizarre vision for the cathedral take a tour of the basilicas vast interior then the elevator to the roof via the Passion or Nativity towers. 1330: Lunch Head northwest to the hip district of Gracia and straight to Restaurant Gut on Carrer del Perill. This popular venue specialises in wholesome Mediterranean and Asian fusion dishes not a bad choice after a sugar-laden breakfast with a particularly good range of gluten-free and vegetarian dishes. Expect anything from Thai mussels and grilled squid to aubergine and quinoa hamburgers. 1530: Park Guell Head north to the World Heritage site of Park Guell, where Gaudi turned his attention to the natural landscape. It was originally intended as a suburb for the wealthy elite but eventually became a public space, celebrated for its gingerbread-style gatehouses, lizard fountain and superb views across the city. On the off-chance of rain, the Gaudi House Museum is a good diversion, with its collection of original Gaudi furniture and recreations of some of his private rooms. Casa Batllo's fantastical facade adorned with colourful glass mosaics 1800: Merienda time Jump in a taxi (its the quickest way) and head back to the old town theres still time for a snack (merienda) or two before you leave. The concept of street food hasnt caught on in Spain as much as other destinations, but you can grab a simple bocadillo in many a hole-in-the-wall spot. These humble sandwiches are made with baguette-style bread, rubbed with tomato and filled mostly with meat, cheese or fish, without any extra condiments or pickles. One of these will see you through until evening, as will a glass or two of cava in a neighbourhood bar. Try La Vinya del Senyor on Placa de Santa Maria. 2100: Depart for home She's always a consummate professional on a television set. Yet Amanda Holden nearly lost her cool as she fell victim to one of the famous Undercover segments on Ant & Decs Saturday Night Takeaway. In scenes due to air on Saturday's episode, the 47-year-old TV personality is left aghast when Ant McPartlin and Declan Donnelly perform a hidden camera stunt. Caught out: Amanda Holden nearly lost her cool as she fell victim to one of the famous Undercover segments on Ant & Decs Saturday Night Takeaway In what she assumes is just another normal day selling her homeware range at QVC, Amanda is left unaware that her Britains Got Talent colleagues are doing everything possible to cause complications and calamity behind the scenes. Amongst the pairs escapades are discarding dirty cups and banana skins around the supposedly good as new set, glueing a drawer stuck and leaving a bemused Amanda desperate to cut to a commercial break. As well as the on-set chaos, they instruct one of the production team to call her Mandy Pandy, much to her dismay, and the Geordie duo even invade the set in the middle of one of Amandas broadcasts. Cheeky! In scenes due to air on Saturday's episode, the 47-year-old TV personality is left aghast when Ant McPartlin and Declan Donnelly perform a hidden camera stunt A source told the Daily Star newspaper: 'They wreaked havoc on set. Amanda had no idea what was going on. 'It's the boys' most nervewracking hidden camera prank in the show's history. Since they know her so well, they were worried about being found out.' The first episode will also see Australian pop superstar Kylie Minogue perform, and the return of Scarlett Moffatt and Stephen Mulhern. Oh dear: In what she assumes is just another normal day selling her homeware range at QVC, Amanda is left unaware that her BGT colleagues are doing everything possible to cause havoc Gross! Amongst the pairs escapades are discarding dirty cups and banana skins around the supposedly good as new set and gluing a drawer stuck Confused? As well as the on-set chaos, they instruct one of the production team to call her Mandy Pandy, much to her dismay, and the Geordie duo even invade the set The appearance comes two weeks after Amanda and Ant were pictured engaging in a seemingly very heated conversation during the Britain's Got Talent auditions. In one image, the TV personality seemed to be snarling at the show host, before a member of the Britain's Got Talent production team interrupted their conversation and the event started. A source close to Amanda told MailOnline: 'Amanda and Ant are just chatting. This picture was taken whilst they were posing in front of hundreds of fans and press. There simply wasnt any form of heated discussion whatsoever.' One to watch: A source said: 'They wreaked havoc on set. Amanda had no idea what was going on. 'It's the boys' most nervewracking hidden camera prank in the show's history' Other stars: As well as Amanda, the first episode will also see Australian pop superstar Kylie Minogue perform, and the return of Scarlett Moffatt and Stephen Mulhern Amanda also shut down rumours of a feud as she took to Twitter to share a snap of the group laughing together and having 'too much fun'. She captioned the image: 'Im #loving #Manchester. Had a #fabulous #first #day up here- loads of fun. Too much #laughter @BGT' Undercover will feature in the brand new Ant & Decs Saturday Night Takeaway which returns to ITV on Saturday 24th February at 7pm. When she's not presenting Sunrise, she's busy doting over her pet Labrador Banjo, also referred to as B-Diddy. And although the adorable puppy has been with Samantha Armytage for nearly one-and-a-half years, Friday marked his first TV appearance. While the 41-year-old stuck to her duties in the Martin Place studio, Banjo was seen out-and-about with weather host Sam Mac in Bondi. Scroll down for video Move over Sam! Samantha Armytage's beloved dog Banjo makes his TV debut on Sunrise 'He really has been in a good paddock, and that's fantastic, as all dogs should be eating well,' joked Sam after revealing he hadn't seen the puppy for a long time. 'I think that's fat shaming,' shot back mum Samantha and co-host Natalie Barr. Meanwhile, the happy and excited dog opted to disobey commands and face his back to the camera. So exciting! While the 41-year-old stuck to her duties in the Martin Place studio, Banjo was seen out-and-about with weather host Sam Mac in Bondi. The happy and excited dog opted to disobey commands and face his back to the camera Made sure he was prepared! And while things didn't run completely smoothly for his first televised appearance, on Thursday night, the blonde beauty took to Instagram to reveal Banjo was prepped and ready for his live television debut 'He's really not facing the camera, mumma manager here has taught him how to look right into the camera,' said Samantha from the studio as she watched on with her arms crossed. 'I blame the cameraman.' And while things didn't run completely smoothly for his first televised appearance, on Thursday night, the blonde beauty took to Instagram to reveal Banjo was prepped and ready for his live television debut. Not letting him make a fool of himself: 'Preparing for his TV appearance in the morning,' she captioned a picture of Banjo, adding a crown emoji on his head and love hearts around him 'Preparing for his TV appearance in the morning,' she captioned, adding a crown emoji on his head and love hearts around him. Meanwhile, Sam took to social media to pose next to the adorable family pet. 'I generally don't get star struck...but today I won a meet n greet with @sam_armytage's Dog Banjo!' he captioned. 'I gifted him his first Drizabone! I'm no body language expert, but I think he was excited.' He's about to play one of the most important roles in his Hollywood career. But before Australian actor Burgess Abernethy was chosen to perform as Prince William in Lifetime's latest biopic Harry & Meghan: A Royal Romance, he was capturing mermaids on H20: Just Add Water. The 31-year-old became a sprightly young Zane Bennett on the series; a rich, local 'bad boy' who is one of the only characters to know about the mermaids secret aquatic abilities. He's one of us! Meet the Australian actor set to play Prince William on Lifetime's latest biopic... as it's revealed he used to capture mermaids on H20: Just Add Water He enjoyed an one-again off-again relationship with secret mermaid Rikki Chadwick, even naming a cafe after her in season two. And while their romance was tumultuous on the show, off-screen Burgess and Cariba Heine, who played Rikki for four years, became a fully-fledged couple. The handsome actor frequently uploads pictures of the pair to his Instagram page, but it's not clear whether Cariba will follow him to Vancouver, Canada, while he transitions into the crowned Prince. H20 just add success! The 31-year-old became a sprightly young Zane Bennett on the series He's not so little anymore! Beyond the teenage drama series Burgess also worked on Dance Academy in 2010, Peter Allen: Not the Boy Next Door in 2015 and Australia Day in 2017 They spent time together in Australia late last year, enjoying the company of a koala and taking in the sights of Sydney Harbour. Cariba is currently finishing filming for TV movie Everything Is Doing Great. Beyond the teenage drama series Burgess also worked on Dance Academy in 2010, Peter Allen: Not the Boy Next Door in 2015 and Australia Day in 2017. Sweet! He enjoyed an one-again off-again relationship with secret mermaid Rikki Chadwick, even naming a cafe after her in season two Will she? The handsome actor frequently uploads pictures of the pair to his Instagram page, but it's not clear whether Cariba will follow him to Vancouver, Canada (Burgess on H20) Hall of fame! Born on the Gold Coast Burgess has certainly enjoyed roles with a number of national productions And as most Australian celebrities get their start, he reprised the role of Sean Evans on Home And Away. Born on the Gold Coast Burgess has certainly enjoyed roles with a number of national productions, but the love story of Prince Harry and his American fiance Meghan Markle will spell the beginning of his international career. He will be 'married' to Laura Mitchell, who is best known for playing Oziel's mistress in Menendez: Blood Brothers, on the show as she takes up the position of Duchess of Cambridge. Pint-sized actors Preston Karwat and Briella Weintraub will play their children, Prince George and Princess Charlotte. Where the love began! They spent time together in Australia late last year, enjoying the company of a koala and taking in the sights of Sydney Harbour They're one of the most successful couples to have found love on The Bachelor. But even Tim Robards and Anna Heinrich have disagreements. Speaking to the Daily Mail Australia, fitness fanatic Tim revealed the one time he was forced to put his foot down during his relationship with Anna. Scroll down for video 'I told her to ditch the pink': Former Bachelor Tim Robards reveals he BANNED fiancee Anna Heinrich from having certain coloured towels in their joint bathroom adding 'her stuff takes up all the space' 'Anna wanted pink towels in the bathroom and I just said 'absolutely not'", he said. The 35-year-old explained the reason behind his aversion, saying he likes to 'take a bit of pride in my home'. Tim went on to say that the couple eventually found some middle ground and agreed to 'white towels'. But despite his insistence that Anna remove all pink towels from their joint bathroom, Tim reveals his 30-year-old finacee still 'takes up most of the bathroom space'. 'Yeah, I have some of my stuff in there but it's her products that take up the self,' he said. No way: Speaking to the Daily Mail Australia the fitness fanatic revealed the one time he was forced to put his foot down during his relationship with Anna Anna's choice: 'Anna wanted pink towels in the bathroom and I just said 'absolutely not'", he said. The 35-year-old explained the reason behind his aversion saying he likes to 'take a bit of pride in my home' The chiropractor has just been announced as the face of men's grooming brand Handsome. One of the reasons he agreed to join forces with the brand was because of it's packaging. 'I just love it,' he said. 'The bottles just look so great in the bathroom'. The fitness fanatic, who is busy preparing for his upcoming wedding to Anna, praised the product's for their natural and organic ingredients. 'Just like being careful about what you put in your body you have to be careful what you put on your skin,' he said, adding that the products 'really fit in with my natural and organic lifestyle'. Nature lover: The fitness fanatic, who is busy preparing for his upcoming wedding to Anna, praised the men's skincare line Handsome for their natural and organic ingredients 'Plus,' he added, 'the name is a little tongue-in-cheek'. Tim and Anna's love story began on the debut season of The Bachelor in 2013. They later became engaged in May last year, when Tim popped the question to the former criminal lawyer while on a boat. True love: Tim and Anna's love story began on the debut season of The Bachelor in 2013 As for wedding preparation, Tim told Daily Mail Australia he's not too stressed. 'I just need to lock down what suit I'm going to wear,' he said. 'I've got ideas, but how hard can it be matching a suit to a white dress?' Tim added that Anna still hasn't spoken to him about the style of dress she will be wearing - no doubt making his choice of suit just that much more difficult. The publicity savvy pair have refused to reveal the date or location of their upcoming nuptials. The Lifetime royal family is now complete. The network has unveiled its Prince William and Kate Middleton as well as their children Prince George and Princess Charlotte for its upcoming movie Harry & Meghan: A Royal Romance. William will be played by Australian actor Burgess Abernethy, best known for H20: Just Add Water, while the Duchess of Cambridge will be portrayed by Canada-based actress Laura Mitchell. Lifetime has unveiled its Prince William and Kate Middleton as well as their children Prince George and Princess Charlotte for its upcoming movie Harry & Meghan: A Royal Romance (L-R:Laura Mitchell, Preston Karwat, Briella Weintraub, Burgess Abernethy) George and Charlotte will be played by young actors Preston Karwat and Briella Weintraub, respectively. They join the previously announced Murray Fraser who plays the lead role of Harry, while Jamaican-American Parisa Fitz-Henley stars as his fiance. Bonnie Soper has been cast as Diana, and Maggie Sullivun is set to play Queen Elizabeth II. While Murray is relatively new to on-screen roles his co-star Parisa is best known for her role as Reva Connors in Jessica Jones back in 2015. The real deal: Harry & Meghan: A Royal Romance follows in the footsteps of Lifetime's William & Kate: The Movie, the network's 2011 rendition of Harry's older brother William's relationship with his now-wife, Kate Middleton As well as Canada, where Meghan previously lived, production is also set to take place in Los Angeles with lifetime looking to release the move in the coming spring. The real-life Harry and Meghan, meanwhile, will tie the knot on May 19. Parisa, 40, said on Instagram she is 'psyched' to finally be able to reveal she has been cast along with Murray in the highly anticipated movie, and noted she was 'so happy' to be working with him. The pair appear to be getting on famously both on and off set with Parisa sharing a selfie of herself and her co-star in bed earlier this week. This isn't the second time Murray has played in a royal-related work of fiction, since his acting credits also include PBS' Victoria, starring Jenna Coleman as the eponymous queen. The actor has also played in The Loch, a mini series and serial killer mystery that aired last year. Doppelganger: Bonnie Soper has been cast as Diana Real: The real Lady Diana Spencer, shortly after the announcement of her engagement to Prince Charles Harry & Meghan: A Royal Romance follows in the footsteps of Lifetime's William & Kate: The Movie, the network's 2011 rendition of Harry's older brother William's relationship with his now-wife, Kate Middleton. In that instance, Camilla Luddington, who plays Jo Wilson in Grey's Anatomy, was cast as the duchess, while William was portrayed by Nico Evers-Swindell. Lifetime revealed last month it was working on a movie based on the lives of Meghan and Harry, 35. The news was confirmed by head of programming Liz Gateley during a conference, Deadline reported at the time. Lifetime's film will portray the lives of both the Prince and the Suits actress ahead of their meeting, before detailing their meeting via a mutual friend. It will then follow the story of their secret romance, before the couple went public at the end of 2016, and subsequently announced their engagement in November 2017, garnering intense media attention. Mum: Maggie Sullivun is set to play Queen Elizabeth II Her Royal Highness: It is not the first time Her Majesty has been depicted on screen Director Menhaj Huda, who has worked on The Royals, a drama about a fictional British royal family, will work on the movie, while Merideth Finn and Michele Weiss will executive produce. While no release date has been confirmed, the channel's previous film William & Kate: The Movie aired 11 days before the pair's wedding on the 29th April 2011. Prince Harry and Meghan met in the summer of 2016 after being set up on a blind date by a mutual friend, thought to be fashion designer Misha Nonoo. In November 2016 Harry confirmed their romance after he released a statement asking for his girlfriend's privacy to be respected, revealing she had been subject to a torrent of abuse amid rumors of their romance. Just weeks later the Prince visited the American actress on set of Toronto-based legal drama Suits, before the couple were first sighted together in London during December 2016. Selfie: Murray Fraser who plays the lead role of Harry, while Jamaican-American Parisa Fitz-Henley stars as his fiance The duo then made a number of low key appearances together in 2017, and announced their engagement in November 2017, spending Christmas together with the Queen at Sandringham. The couple is now set to marry on May 19 this year at St George's Chapel at Windsor Castle in England. The news of Lifetime TV's new film came after it was reported that Meghan's ex-husband and film producer Trevor Engelson is making a show about a divorced American mother who moves to London to marry a British royal. The show, which is currently untitled, is believed to have been inspired by a conversation he had with producer Dan Farrah, musing on what would have happened if he and Meghan had had children together. She may have the kind of wardrobe most people dream of, but it's still not everyday Kim Kardashian rocks a ball gown. The reality star took to social media on Thursday to share a behind-the-scenes photo of herself in an over-the-top tulle pink gown that completely covered up her physique. Kim, 37, teased the release of an upcoming photo shoot with Sita Abellan by posting the extravagant snap. Belle of the ball! Kim Kardashian took to social media on Thursday to share an behind-the-scenes photo of herself in an over-the-top tulle pink gown that completely covered up her physique The elaborate dress was made of layers of salmon pink tulle that cascaded down her body and showed off some of her leg. She wore her platinum blonde hair down and rocked a pair of her now signature edgy sunglasses. 'Bts of this shoot with @sitabellan coming soon on my app!', she captioned the photo. Kim delighted fans earlier Thursday with a throwback photo from her husband Kanye West's 40th birthday. Surprise! Kim delighted fans earlier Thursday with a throwback photo from her husband Kanye West's 40th birthday The star famously treated husband Kanye West to a Japan trip back in June for his 40th birthday. And now the reality star has revealed that he didn't know where they were going until they were snacking up in the air. Kim took to Instagram on Thursday to share a snap of Kanye grinning from ear to ear while aboard a private jet with several Japanese snacks and magazines in front of him. That was nice! The star famously treated husband Kanye West to a Japan trip back in June for his 40th birthday She claimed that she had made the Life Of Pablo rapper guess where they were going by the accoutrements. Kim wanted to pull out all of the stops for her husband's big milestone last June, but she refused to give away the surprise she had planned for him until he jumped on board the jet and sussed out the clues - including sweet treats and reading material - she had strategically scattered around the aircraft. She accompanied the snap with the caption: 'Throwback to that time I surprised Kanye with a trip to Japan for his birthday! 'He had to guess where we were going based on the snacks and magazines I had the plane stocked with! He was happy! (sic)' Elle Fanning is a busy star with a booming acting career. And on Thursday, the 19-year-old actress made time for a fitness session. The makeup free actress was spotted leaving a Studio City gym while sporting a bright pink hoodie. No make-up, no problem! On Thursday, makeup free Elle Fanning was spotted leaving a gym in Studio City while donning a bright pink Rodarte Radarte hoodie She pulled her hair back into a tight bun while sporting a pink Rodarte Radarte pull-over hooded sweatshirt. The rest of her gym ensemble consisted of black yoga pants and black New Balance sneakers. Fanning seems to be choosing comfort over glamour lately, as she was spotted in a cotton light-blue Adidas set at Los Angeles International Airport on Wednesday. She added a pair of square sunglasses in the same blue hue while keeping her light blonde locks down loose. Productive session: The star walked out with a dewy but refreshed complexion High spirits: Fanning smiled during her walk to her car post gym session Fashionable fitness: Fanning sported a pink Rodarte Radarte pull-over hooded sweatshirt Working out! Her gym ensemble consisted of black yoga leggings and black New Balance sneakers Smiling: The Maleficent actress held her phone in her hand while leaving Shady lady! The Beguiled actress smiled at onlookers as she strode through Los Angeles International Airport on Wednesday in an Adidas set and matching sunglasses She also donned white sneakers that included pink and grey accents. Tuesday was a different story as the beauty was seen across the pond in England, where she was enjoying London Fashion Week. She stepped out with older sister Dakota while wearing a lovely blue and plum plaid suit teamed with slinky stilettos. The youngest Fanning sister was in the city to support Dakota's directional debut for Italian high-end fashion brand Miu Miu as part of the label's Women's Tales series. Sibling love! On Tuesday, the beauty was seen across the pond in England, where she was enjoying London Fashion Week with older sister Dakota The Maleficent actress has a whirlwind 2018 ahead, with four projects in the pipeline for this year and two more in early development. Her flicks Teen Spirit and A Rainy Day In New York are currently in post-production while her upcoming film, The Vanishing Of Sidney Hall premieres March 2. Beyond that, she's been announced as a lead in drama/romance All the Bright Places and the thriller Beware That Girl. The Shadow Factory (Nuffield Southampton Theatres, City) Rating: Verdict: Patriotic launch Southampton has a (slightly antiseptic) new theatre, the NST City. Could they not have devised a more romantic name? The Spitfire Theatre might have been more fun. After all, Southampton was home to the Woolston Supermarine Spitfire factory and in the autumn of 1940 the Germans bombed it, imperilling the RAFs ability to defend Britain. Aiming to please: Dobson and McRae in The Shadow Factory, showing at Nuffield Southampton Theatres In a play commissioned for the opening of the NST City, Howard Brenton looks at how Lord Beaverbrook, Minister for Aircraft Production, responded to that crisis. He requisitioned not only a local stately home, but several Southampton business premises. Within weeks, the Spitfire production line had been rehoused in them. Not everyone took this at first in the spirit of patriotic self-sacrifice. Mr Brenton devises a local laundry owner, Fred Dimmock, who boils with anger at the Governments high-handed ways. It is rather refreshing to see this bolshiness, though Fred later comes round and does his bit for the war effort. The Shadow Factory often resembles the sort of story-telling you might find at a community heritage centre, complete with some pretty feeble songs. But there are just about enough theatrical effects (clever lighting of the stage floor) to hold the attention. The story trots along, Left-winger Mr Brenton crowbarring in some predictions of the socialist upheaval that ousted Churchill at the end of the war. As for the acting, David Birrell plays fiery Fred, Lorna Fitzgerald is his sassy daughter, Daniel York is good as the Supermarine chief engineer and Hilton McRae makes a thoroughly believable Beaverbrook. Fearing that Churchill is again going to make him drink all night at The Ritz, Beaverbook says: Whats gonna get me first? The Luftwaffe or my liver? Anita Dobson does a couple of turns, neither wildly subtle. The audience liked best a moment when the Dimmock lass tells her parents she has a boyfriend. There is just one trouble. Whats that? Is he already married? What terrible drawback could he have? Pause. Then, to gasps: Hes from Portsmouth! 'The story trots along, Left-winger Mr Brenton crowbarring in some predictions of the socialist upheaval that ousted Churchill' (pictured: The real Churchill and Beaverbrook at the latter's 83rd birthday party) Hard Times (Viaduct Theatre, Halifax) Rating: Verdict: Trouble at mill Down at the bottom of one of those Halifax valleys, Charles Dickenss Hard Times is being staged in an old industrial mill. If this touring show is done with a sledgehammer, that may be understandable: compressing Dickens into less than three hours is hard. The story of utilitarian Mr Gradgrind and his more free-spirited children is done with shouting and blunt characterisation. Howard Chadwicks self-made Josiah Bounderby belongs to the Brian Blessed school of acting. Still, he injects some energy and the unveiling of Bounderbys deceit is a good comic moment. The hearty performances may in part have been driven by a need to overcome the Viaducts acoustics, particularly in this traverse format. A multi-tasking cast of ten uses minor costume tweaks (working class cameo? quick, flat cap and scarf!). There are also songs and parp-ety circus music. Need that drum be whacked quite so loudly? Victoria Brazier bends to almost 45 degrees to play nosy crone Mrs Sparsit. Anthony Hunts doomed factory hand, Stephen Blackpool, provides a welcome dose of reflection. The Halifax audience seemed to enjoy it, but I could have done with a stronger tragic idea of how Mr Gradgrinds bone-dry philosophies create the human tinder which will eventually catch fire. He's known for playing the hunky Jai Fernandez on Home And Away from 2008 to 2009. And after relocating to Hollywood in 2013, Jordan Rodrigues has well and truly cracked the big time. Talking to Today Extra about his role in the Academy Award nominated film Lady Bird, the 25-year-old revealed exactly who he took his acting inspiration from. Scroll down for video Rising star: On Friday, former Home And Away actor turned Hollywood star Jordan Rodrigues revealed on Today Extra that Hugh Jackman was his inspiration 'It's Hugh Jackman,' he said, adding that the Wolverine star is 'a huge inspiration to my career'. Recalling his past memories watching the 49-year-old's films, Jordan added he knew he wanted to follow in his footsteps. 'I remember watching him in when he played the role of Wolverine in X-Men and then I saw him in Sydney doing a stage production of Boy From Oz, and I just knew that was something I wanted to do.' Following in his footsteps: 'I remember watching [Hugh] when he played the role of Wolverine in X-Men and then I saw him in Sydney doing a stage production of Boy From Oz, and I just knew that was something I wanted to do' The Dance Academy star went on to say that he'd love to pursue a career in musical theatre just like the hunky Australian export. And although his rise to fame has been a slow and steady one, earlier in the year, Jordan told News Corp that he believed he arrived in LA 'at a good time'. 'It has been good because I have been able to work on projects that I am truly passionate about, projects that deal with social issues and that just have really strong characters,' he explained. Role of a lifetime: After relocating to Hollywood in 2013, Jordan Rodrigues has landed the role of Miguel McPherson in Lady Bird, the older brother of leading star Saoirse Ronan Up for five Academy Awards! The movie, directed by Greta Gerwig, follows Christine 'Lady Bird' McPherson's (left) last year in school and transition into college while detailing her first romance 'I think I got to Hollywood at a good time. I guess I am very lucky,' added The Fosters actor of Malaysian and Australian decent. Jordan's debut film Lady Bird, has been nominated for five Academy Awards. The movie, directed by Greta Gerwig, follows Christine 'Lady Bird' McPherson's last year in school and transition into college while detailing her first romance. A recurring theme emerged as celebrity media company White Management threw their annual party for clients and special guests in London on Thursday evening. Making an entrance at the exclusive Playboy club, Jessica Cunningham, Charlotte Dawson and Jess Impiazzi caught the eye in vibrant red outfits that ensured they claimed their fair share of the spotlight. Opting for a form-fitting evening dress, heavily pregnant Jessica, 30, drew attention to her growing baby bump as she made her way inside. Striking: Heavily pregnant Jessica Cunningham caught the eye outside the Playboy Club ahead of the White Management annual party on Thursday evening Incoming: Charlotte Dawson (L) and Jess Impiazzi (R) embraced a similar colour scheme ahead of their appearance at the annual event Matching strappy heels added to her vibrant look, while her brunette locks were neatly styled with a simple centre parting. Following close behind, Charlotte Dawson, 24, turned heads in a red lace embellished evening gown, distinctive by virtue of its thigh-high slash. Revealing plenty of leg, the dress ensured the reality star daughter of comedy legend Les Dawson commanded attention as she prepared to let her hair down at the event with her doting mother Tracey. Statement: Jessica had been involved in a hot debate earlier in the day, as she clashed with Marina Fogle on Good Morning Britain Looking good: Jess and Jessica struck a series of poses after making their way inside Pals: Jess was seen arriving with her CBB co-star Maggie Oliver, who showed off her trim figure in a black strapless dress Following close behind, Celebrity Big Brother star Jess Impiazzi caught the eye in a daring red crop top and matching flared trousers. Showing off her abs, the brunette glamour model, 28, was in high spirits as she greeted onlookers before joining guests inside the popular venue. Meanwhile Ola Jordan was out to show off her incredible figure on Thursday night, donning a slinky metallic frock to attend the celebrity party. Back together: Jess posed with Ashley James inside the Playboy Club on Thursday evening Glowing: Jessica, who is expecting her fourth child, looked radiant as she arrived at the party Still friends! Jess and Maggie looked thrilled to be reunited at the awards bash together, following their triumphant series of Celebrity Big Brother last month The 35-year-old dancer showed off her amazing curves in the strappy ensemble, flashing a hint of cleavage in the look, where she was joined by husband James. Ola showed off her amazing dancer's physique in the tight gold dress as she made her arrival at the party, styling her blonde tresses into voluminous curls. The stunning beauty teamed her look with matching gold gladiator heels, as well as several dainty necklaces. Lovely: Charlotte brought her mum Tracey as her date to the party The Polish beauty showed off her glowing complexion with a simple lined eye and defined brows finished off with a simple nude lip. Ola made her arrival at the annual celebrity bash hosted by White Management founder Vickie White, along with the glittering stars they keep on their books. Ashley James, Jess and Maggie Oliver also staged a Celebrity Big Brother mini-reunion at the party, as they were seen happily posing together. Ashley looked sharp in a black and white coat dress with a quirky studded clutch, while the Made In Chelsea beauty continued to sport her pink-blonde hair. The stunning beauty also sported a statement red lip to add a pop of colour to her look, along with matching red nails. Stunning: Ola Jordan showed off her incredible body in a slinky metallic dress on Thursday Happy couple: Ola was seen arriving at the bash with husband James, who she has been married to for 14 years Stylish: Celebrity Big Brother beauty Ashley James showed some serious leg in a black and white coat-dress On point: Ashley led a mini Celebrity Big Brother reunion, as some of this year's stars were seen back together less than a month after the final Chic: Maggie showed off her trim tanned figure in a strapless fitted black dress with a peplum hem Ashley posed up a storm with her CBB pal Jess, who flashed some serious abs in a matching white crop top and trousers combo. The gorgeous glamour model couldn't stop smiling at the party, sporting her brown hair in stylish crimped curls, arriving hand-in-hand with Maggie at the prestigious club. Former police detective Maggie showed off her trim figure in a fitted black dress as she walked into the party with Jess, after the pair formed a close friendship during their time in the house. Bunny in the making? Lizzie Cundy commanded attention in a Grecian white gown as she made her arrival at the party Curvy queen: Lizzie flashed her ample cleavage in a white and gold gown, with her brown hair poker straight hanging down her back Mother-son time: Calum Best was seen arriving at the party with his mum Angie Fabulous: TV presenter Tonia Braxton sported an off-the-shoulder black frock as she arrived at the party, and added a twist with a red bodybag Dynamic duo: Tonia was joined at the party by her daughter Antigoni, who looked equally stylish in a metallic jumpsuit Queen of breakfast: Kate Garraway donned a stripy blazer over an all-black look as she made her arrival at the party Loved-up: Former Celebrity Big Brother winner James Hill also posed up a storm with his girlfriend Naomi Hibbert Sparkling: TV presenter Anthea Turner looked far younger than her years in a metallic blouse upon arriving at the party She's 30 weeks pregnant with twins. And Kym Johnson was positively glowing as she attended to a few errands in Los Angeles on Thursday afternoon. The 41-year-old dancer displayed her growing baby bump in a large pink sweatshirt with a hilarious message emblazoned across the front. Scroll down for video Cute: Pregnant Kym Johnson was positively glowing as she attended to a few errands in Los Angeles on Thursday afternoon Kym rolled up the long sleeves of her cozy sweater which was plastered with the words 'Pardon My Bump' in big black lettering. Her lean dancer legs were covered in tight black leggings as she walked through the parking lot wearing a pair of black trainers. The Australian Dancing With The Stars pro wore her dark blonde hair straight with a distinct part down the middle. Bumping along: The 41-year-old dancer displayed her growing baby bump in a large pink sweatshirt with a hilarious message emblazoned across the front Johnson covered her relatively makeup-free face with a pair of dark sunglasses as she carried a light brown leather purse by her side. Kym and her husband Robert Herjavec are set to welcome twins later this year. She and Herjavec met when they were paired as dancing partners on the hit ABC reality competition series in 2015. Cute: Kym and her husband Robert Herjavec are set to welcome twins later this year; seen in LA in January She's continued to document her pregnancy journey on social media with pictures and funny captions. In January, the blonde beauty revealed she's 25 weeks along in a gorgeous bikini photo captioned, 'Suns out, buns out!' Her focus on fitness has yet to dwindle as Kym has shared a series of workouts and fitness tips to her 200,000 followers. Babymoon: In January, the blonde beauty revealed she's 25 weeks along in a gorgeous bikini photo captioned, 'Suns out, buns out!' She bravely shaved her head for charity this week. And Erin Bateman has shared striking and stunning pictures of her do, after documenting the event on Instagram earlier this week. The 28-year-old stunner posted two pictures of her new look after participating in the World's Greatest Shave a charity which raises money for cancer research. Bare-head beauty! Erin Bateman has shared two pictures of her brand new look, including this one in which she comically compared herself to Irish singer-songwriter Sinead O'Connor In the first picture posted on Wednesday, Erin posted a comical comparison snap of herself and Irish singer-songwriter Sinead O'Connor. Captioning the picture in jest, Erin wrote: 'Erin O'Connor hopefully when everyone was saying I look like her they meant young Sinead otherwise this just got awkward.' And on Thursday, the beauty also took to Instagram to share another gorgeous snap of her shaved head. Stunner! The 28-year-old stunner posted two pictures of her new look after participating in the World's Greatest Shave a charity which raises money for cancer research Accessorising with a chunky-chain watch and earring combination, Erin opted for a bold eyelash and subtle rose-hued lip. Captioning the post, she wrote: 'I literally look like all the emojis now because they're bald! Huge thank you to @injectables_byfreda for getting my skin and cheeks ready for the big shave-a-roonie.' Adding: 'My God-given bone structure would never have been able to pull of this shaved head look.' Finishing the post, Erin added the hashtags: '#baldlyf', '#shavedhead' and '#Melbournebeauty.' Before! Fans were quick to support her new look, with one writing: 'You look so beautiful. Very brave. I would love to have the guts you have to do this' Fans were quick to support her new look, with one writing: 'You look so beautiful. Very brave. I would love to have the guts you have to do this.' Another wrote: 'You look amazing! Congratulations, you did an amazing thing!' Erin is still happily dating her on-screen co-star husband, Bryce Mohr, 32. She announced her split from childhood sweetheart Jordan last week. And Emma-Jane Woodhams has been spotted for the first time since announcing her newly single status, as she attended the launch of her SR Signature skincare line. The 20-year-old former Love Island star showed off her incredible post-baby body as she doted on her son Alfie at the event in the Samantha Rose salon in Blackburn. Back on form: Former Love Island star Emma-Jane Woodhams showed off her incredible post-baby body as she attended the launch of her new skincare line in Blackburn on Thursday Emma showed off her incredible flat stomach in an off-the-shoulder pink cropped jumper, which the brunette beauty teamed with pink studded heels and distressed jeans. The brunette beauty was seen kissing and cuddling her adorable baby boy at the launch of the line, with her gorgeous tresses styled into a poker straight look. Emma made her first public appearance at the launch following the news that her relationship with Jordan was over, just weeks after the couple had become parents. The Oxford-born beauty revealed she had become a single mum in a candid Instagram post on Valentine's Day, which she confessed she was spending alone with her son. Adorable: Emma was seen doting on her newborn son Alfie as she attended the launch of her line, following her split from childhood sweetheart Jordan last week On point: Emma sported a cropped off-the-shoulder jumper and distressed jeans as she posed at the launch of her new line Looking good: Emma looked incredible just four weeks after giving birth to her son, as she revealed her new single status on Valentine's Day New venture: Emma was unveiling her new skincare line at a salon in Blackburn Posting an image of herself reclining on the bed in a pink feathered robe she wrote: 'Waiting for valentines day to roll on by because your single AF and more than happy just doing you'. Emma reiterated her single status after she was flooded with comments following a sweet snap she shared of herself in the bath with her little one. As a follower called her 'a lovely example to other young girls who may be facing being a young Mum alone', Emma responded: 'this just made me feel all warm so lovely thank you so much. Its extremely tough at times but i try to stay positive and look forward. 'i wouldn't change it for the world and everything i do now is for alfie and our future... and hopefully maybe one day a really genuine guy will come along and be another addition to mine and his little family and take care of us both [sic].' Over: Emma revealed she had split from childhood sweetheart Jordan just weeks after they became parents Last month, Emma announced the birth of her son with a sweet picture that she captioned: 'So finally... after a savage 52-hour labour, my baby boy graced the world with his presence. 'Very healthy 7lb 13oz, natural delivery at 16.12 the best moment of my life. We are both doing very well. Still no name.' Emma-Jane kept her followers abreast of her pregnancy journey, previously taking to Instagram to share a stunning, lingerie-clad snap in which she sported super scanty underwear. Single: The Love Island star - who famously dated Terry Walsh - revealed that she is now a single mother as she confessed she was spending Valentine's Day alone with her baby boy The beauty revealed her pregnancy in August, just months after splitting from co-star beau Terry Walsh. News of Emma's pregnancy first surfaced in The Sun, with a source claiming at the time that the brunette beauty is now '18 weeks pregnant'. They told the paper: 'Her romance with Terry didn't work out which gave her the chance to reignite her romance with Jordan. She can't wait to become a mum for the first time she's very excited for what's to come.' She slammed her husband Oliver Curtis on national radio this Friday, after the disgraced banker unleashed a tirade against her ex-lover Nabil Gazal. And just hours after her radio appearance, Roxy Jacenko announced she had dropped her $450,000 engagement down the sink. Taking to Instagram to document the unfortunate incident, Roxy uploaded a video of a plumber taking apart the sink in the bathroom of her Sweaty Betty PR offices. 'You know your seriously tired when you let your engagement ring go down the bathroom sink when washing your hands!' Roxy Jacenko dropped her $450,000 engagement ring down the SINK on Friday after slamming husband Oliver Curtis for taking a dig at her ex Nabil Gazal on live radio 'You know your seriously tired when you let your engagement ring go down the bathroom sink when washing your hands,' Roxy captioned the video. 'Thank you to my saviours @nutrendplumbingandtiling I can now go home tonight,' she added. In the video, Roxy was seen sheepishly smiling at the camera with ring in hand after the plumber had successfully saved her sparkler from a watery fate. 'Thank you to my saviours': Taking to Instagram to document the unfortunate incident, Roxy uploaded a video of a plumber taking apart the sink in the bathroom of her Sweaty Betty PR offices In a subsequent post, Roxy can be seen brandishing the pricey six-carat ring while flanked by a group trusty plumbers. 'Seriously what just happened? Thank you @nutrendplumbingandtiling,' she gushed in the caption. Oliver proposed to Roxy with the ring for a second time last year, following his jail sting for insider trading. 'Seriously what just happened?' In a subsequent post, Roxy can be seen brandishing the pricey six-carat ring while flanked by a group trusty plumbers Phew! Roxy beamed with elation after her prized ring was salvaged from the depths of her sink Ring a ding ding! Oliver proposed to Roxy with the ring for a second time last year, following his jail sting for insider trading Serious bling: The Nicholas Haywood ring is believed to be valued at up to $450,000 The Nicholas Haywood ring Roxy received is believed to be valued at up to $450,000 by a respected member of the National Council of Jewellery Valuers, which is more than double the $200,000 jewel she received when Oliver first proposed in 2010. Meanwhile, Roxy made an appearance on KIIS FM's Kyle And Jackie O Show earlier on Friday to promote her ambassadorial role for STAN without her husband- admitting she had banned Oliver from joining her in light of his recent outburst. 'I didn't invite him in again today, I thought there's no need,' she told the shock-jocks during the interview. 'I didn't invite him in again today, I thought there's no need': Roxy returned to KIIS FM without Oliver earlier onFriday, admitting she had banned him from joining her in light of his recent outburst against Nabil Gazal Roxy jokingly described the moment she told Oliver he wasn't welcome on the airwaves, adding: 'You stay home and look after the dog!' Earlier in the interview, the mother-of-two admitted that she was 'shell-shocked' when Oliver took it upon himself to unleash upon Nabil, calling him a 'low' human being. 'I thought, 'When did you start to talk? That's my job!'' Roxy admitted. They've been trying to keep a low profile since meeting on the set of Bachelor In Paradise last year. And at Thursday night's Cosmopolitan + Tinder Bachelor of the Year Awards, Jake Ellis and Megan Marx did their best not to be seen together. The reality TV couple were photographed leaving the event in separate cars, however both stayed in the same hotel after the event. Trying to keep a low profile? Bachelor In Paradise couple Megan Marx and Jake Ellis leave Cosmopolitan event separately ... before both sneaking into the same hotel Megan was seen leaving the event's venue with a group of women, appearing engrossed in her phone as she walked down the street. Meanwhile Jake made his way solo from the party, still wearing his tuxedo and carrying a gift bag. After leaving Coogee Pavilion in separate cabs, Megan and Jake arrived at Vibe Hotel in Rushcutters Bay within five minutes of each other. Hanging out with the girls: Megan was seen leaving the event's venue with a group of women Radiant in red! Megan wore a striking maxi dress which showcased her cleavage Texting Jake? Megan appeared engrossed in her phone as she walked down the street Shortly after arriving, Jake was seen ducking out of the hotel to grab a Uber Eats order from a courier. Megan and Jake were photographed together on the set of Bachelor In Paradise in Fiji last November. Since then the pair have tried to keep a low profile, however last month both Jake and Megan shared a series of similar Instagram photos taken on the Gold Coast. Going solo: Jake was seen waiting for a taxi to arrive separately Fell in love in Fiji? Megan and Jake were photographed together on the set of Bachelor In Paradise last November Quick purchase: Jake was also seen buying something from a convenience store Megan was seen posing on a balcony with the beach in the backdrop, and what looked like a shirtless man in the reflection of her sunglasses. Jake posted a photo to Instagram at the same time, which also saw him relaxing on a Gold Coast beach. The pair were also photographed holding hands and hugging while drinking at a Perth pub with former Bachelorette contestant Cameron Cranley. Dapper: Jake looked dapper for the event, wearing a tuxedo Former Bachelor contestant: Megan rose to fame competing on Richie Strahan's season High profile relationship: She made headlines for her romance with fellow contestant Tiffany Scanlon Ended after moving to Bali: Tiffany and Megan's romance ended in February 2017 Jake rose to fame competing for Georgia Love's affection on the 2016 season of The Bachelorette, finishing in the top four. Meanwhile Megan appearing in Richie Strahan's 2016 season of The Bachelorette, before embarking on a high profile but brief romance with fellow contestant Tiffany Scanlon. Daily Mail Australia has contacted both Megan and Jake for comment. Waiting: The blonde stunner could be seen waiting on the street for her car Back to their hotel? Megan hopped into the cab solo Bed time? Megan arrived at the hotel five minutes after Jake had arrived Her dad Lionel Richie recently dismissed her relationship with her older boyfriend Scott Disick as 'a phase.' But that phase is still going strong, judging by a shopping trip Sofia Richie, 19, and her beau Scott, 34, took to Barneys in Beverly Hills on Thursday. The model rocked a pair of ripped jeans for the outing. Famous offspring: The couple's 'phase' is still going strong, judging by a shopping trip Sofia Richie, 19, and her beau Scott Disick, 34, took to Barneys in Beverly Hills on Thursday The Tommy Hilfiger model paired the distressed blue jeans with a brown sweater and white Adidas sneakers. She wore her wavy brunette tresses untied, parted down the center and cascading down her shoulders. The 5'6" beauty shielded her eyes with a pair of dark shades. Effortless: Her reality TV star beau, meanwhile, went casual for the outing in sweatpants and a hooded sweatshirt Ripped: The Tommy Hilfiger model paired the distressed blue jeans with a brown sweater and white Adidas sneakers Brunettes have more fun: She wore her wavy brunette tresses untied, parted down the center and cascading down her shoulders Her reality TV star beau, meanwhile, went casual for the outing in sweat bottoms and a hooded sweatshirt. The ex of Kourtney Kardashian wore a fashionable stubble on his chin and sported a pair of shades for the excursion. The celebrity couple, who went public with their romance in September, entered the upscale department store together. Groomed: The ex of Kourtney Kardashian wore a fashionable stubble on his chin and sported a pair of shades for the excursion Future's so bright: The 5'6" beauty shielded her eyes with a pair of dark shades In a recent interview, Lionel Richie called his daughter's relationship with Scott, 'just a phase.' The 68-year-old pop icon made his point by stating the obvious in an interview on Sunday: he was 19 once too. Of the pair's high-profile relationship, he told News Corp: 'Its just a phase and Im going to stand real still in the corner, get me a good drink and not make too much noise.' They were the original Wildlife Warrior power couple, who lovingly worked alongside each other at Australia Zoo. And while Terri Irwin continues that legacy alongside their children Bindi, 19, and Robert, 14, it's without her rock and husband of more than 14 years, Steve. To celebrate her 'hero', the 53-year-old shared a little known fact about the Crocodile Hunter on what would have been his 56th birthday. Scroll down for video 'He was my hero': Terri Irwin shares an emotional tribute to her late husband Steve on what would have been his 56th birthday 'Thinking of Steve today. He was so many things to so many people. He was definitely a hero. He was my hero,' she captioned the post. According to the image she posted on Twitter, Steve was filming a documentary near Baja, Mexico, in 2003 when he overheard two scuba divers had gone missing in the area. Without a second thought for his project, Steve called in a search plane and his entire crew stopped filming for two days to look for them. He also valiantly escorted the sole survivor to safety. Steve's story: 'Thinking of Steve today. He was so many things to so many people. He was definitely a hero. He was my hero,' she captioned the factoid Australia's First Family: According to the image she posted on Twitter, Steve was filming a documentary near Baja, Mexico, in 2003 when he overheard two scuba divers had gone missing in the area The love story that was: Tragically, Terri's husband was killed by a stingray barb in 2006 when his daughter was only eight years old Sadly, her husband was killed by a stingray barb in 2006 when his daughter was only eight years old. Terri continues to post frequently about her partner, wishing him a Valentine's Day earlier this month. Previously, she also hinted at how long they'd been together. Australia Zoo tweeted: '26 years ago Steve proposed to Terri in the Queensland Reptile & Fauna Park.' The pair: Terri continues to post frequently about her partner, wishing him a Valentine's Day earlier this month Sweet! She told People magazine she hasn't been on a single date since he passed away 12 years ago 'From tiny beginnings, they grew that park into the now enormous Australia Zoo. The tree where they were first engaged is still standing here. Such a special love story of the greatest Wildlife Warriors.' Terri told People magazine she hasn't been on a single date since he passed away 12 years ago. 'Ive already had my happily ever after,' she said. 'I think its wonderful when people who have lost someone find love again, but Im not personally looking, and I havent been on a date in 27 years.' Kodak Black had three criminal charges dismissed by prosecutors after being arrested in January during a raid at his Florida home. The 20-year-old rapper, real name Dieuson Octave, remains jailed for violating his probation, according to an article on Thursday by TMZ. Prosecutors in Florida dismissed one charge each for possession of a weapon or ammunition by a delinquent, grand theft of a firearm and child neglect, said Kodak's attorney Bradford Cohen. Charges dropped: Kodak Black, shown in a mugshot following his arrest in January, had three charges dismissed in his criminal case Kodak was arrested on January 18 and filmed his arrest live on Instagram. Police raided his home after being tipped off that he posted an IG Live video of himself with a group of men with guns and drugs. The video showed his infant son near marijuana and a handgun. A Broward Sheriff's Office report said the raid found more 94.9 grams of marijuana and weapons at his Pembroke Pines home. Charges remaining: The 20-year-old Florida native, shown in December in California, remains jailed for violating probation The report said his safe contained cash and a loaded Glock with nine rounds and he had a Beretta handgun in his office that was reported stolen in December. Kodak still faces charges of marijuana possesion and possesion of ammunition. Prosecutors said they dropped the other three charges because they lacked sufficient evidence to move forward. Evidence lacking: Prosecutors dropped three charges against Kodak, shown last August in Inglewood, California, due to lack of sufficient evidence Kodak has been jailed several times in Broward County for violation probations and other charges. He scored his first Top Ten hit in 2017 with the track Tunnel Vision. The rapper deleted his Instagram account in 2017 after receiving fierce backlash for saying that he wasn't interested in 'darkskin' black women. He popped the question 12 days ago on stage at a screening of his film Yardie. And Idris Elba, 45, isn't letting his new fiancee Sabrina Dhowre, 29, out of his sight as he continues to promote the movie. On Thursday, the loved up couple were in Berlin for the city's film festival. All loved up: Idris Elba, 45, isn't letting his new fiancee Sabrina Dhowre, 29, out of his sight as he continues to promote the movie Yardie at the Berlin Film Festival on Thursday Luther star Elba posed for photos with his arm around his lady love at a Grey Goose event; the pair met while making the action adventure The Mountain Between Us in Canada. The model and former Miss Vancouver made her first public appearance with him at the Toronto International Film Festival in September. On February 10, the hunky actor went down on one knee at a cinema in London to ask Dhowre to marry him and presented her with a stunning diamond ring. On top of the world: The actor popped the question to the former Miss Vancouver on February 10 on stage at a London cinema at a screening of the movie that marks his debut as a director Music man: Elba, who also has a successful sideline as a DJ, spun the discs at the Yardie after-party, held in association with Grey Goose It is his first public relationship since he split with make-up artist Naiyana Garth, with whom he shares his three-year-old son Winston. He has also been married and divorced twice. Her was married to makeup artist Hanne 'Kim' Norgaard from 1999 to 2003, with whom he shares daughter Isan, born in 2002. His second to U.S. lawyer Sonya Nicole Hamlin lasted just four months with the couple divorcing in 2016. Filmmaker: Yardie marks the directorial debut of Elba, who said in Berlin he's keen to helm more movies going forward. He's believed to already have a new project in mind In the spotlight: 'I certainly want to direct more, after 30 years as an actor, this is the best of all worlds,' Elba said at a press call in Berlin Yardie marks the directorial debut of Elba, who said in Berlin he's keen to helm more movies going forward. Deadline.com reported Thursday he has already fixed on a follow-up project and is in the process of raising the money for it. 'I certainly want to direct more, after 30 years as an actor, this is the best of all worlds,' Elba said at a press call in Berlin. 'Its a very healthy time to be a filmmaker. If I can get another directing job, Ill be laughing, if its made in Hollywood or Berlin, Im there,' he added. She reportedly went into hiding after receiving public backlash for her secret dalliance with Dean Wells on Married At First Sight. And Davina Rankin, 26, was spotted looking decidedly downcast two weeks ago in the last photos taken of her before she went into lock-down. In the images, Davina is seen meandering down a suburban sidewalk alone with a frozen meal for one in hand. Feeling glum? Davina Rankin, 26, was spotted looking decidedly downcast two weeks ago in the last photos taken of her before she went into lock-down The personal trainer kept a low profile during the outing, going makeup free and wearing a sporty ensemble consisting of a grey hooded vest, pink crop-top and black running shorts. Her look was a far cry from the glamorous bikini model fans have come to expect on the show this season. Meanwhile, Davina also wore a ring on her engagement finger, possibly hinting that her fraught relationship with TV husband Ryan may have been salvaged since her affair with Dean on the show. Dinner for one? Davina was seen meandering down a suburban sidewalk alone with a frozen meal for one in hand Casual: The personal trainer kept a low profile during the outing, going makeup free and wearing a sporty ensemble consisting of a grey hooded vest, pink crop-top and black running shorts While her on-screen counterparts have been spotted out and about in recent days, Davina has avoided the spotlight, having shunned the red carpet and abandoned her popular Instagram page. In addition to this, Davina's rival Tracey has claimed that the brunette hasn't even responded to her text messages, telling 2Day FM's Em Rusciano: 'I did text her to ask if she was okay because it's not nice, the amount of bullying and backlash she has [received]'. 'I messaged her and I said I hope she was okay. I got no response. I don't think I'll be messaging her again!' she added. Silence: While her on-screen counterparts have been spotted out and about in recent days, Davina has avoided the spotlight, having shunned the red carpet and abandoned her popular Instagram page No frills: Her look was a far cry from the glamorous bikini model fans have come to expect on the show this season However, Davina has responded to requests for comment via text message over the last week. OK! magazine reported earlier this month 'sources close to the Brisbane-based beauty reveal she's gone into hiding, refusing to take part in any media interviews'. Her close friend, Gillian Goodwin, spoke to the publication about Davina's negative portrayal on the show, accusing Married At First Sight of typecasting her unfairly. 'You struck gold with this incredible woman and it is SO unfortunate you wasted an opportunity to showcase a truly genuine beauty inside and out by strategically editing and typecasting her by going down a totally unoriginal stereotypical avenue that has been done time and time again on reality TV,' she stated. Joan Smalls was feeling blue on Thursday as she left her hotel during Milan Fashion Week. The 29-year-old model stepped out in a long electric blue coat with a hoodie. The top model contrasted her coat with a short bright orange dress that featured a psychedelic breakfast cereal-box theme. Top model: Joan Smalls wore an electric blue overcoat on Thursday while leaving her hotel during Milan Fashion Week in Italy Joan completed her look with chunky black boots and white socks. The Puerto Rican beauty had her long dark hair pulled back into a high ponytail. Joan accessorized with hoop earrings and accentuated her natural beauty with thick eyeliner and pink lipstick. The Victoria's Secret model also carried a leopard print handbag. Psychedelic cereal: The 29-year-old model wore a short dress with a psychedelic cereal box graphic Joan earlier strutted the catwalk for the Max Mara fashion show. The IMG Models star also hit the runway on Wednesday for the Alberta Ferretti show. She was joined by sisters Gigi and Bella Hadid and Cindy Crawford's model daughter Kaia Gerber. Busy star: Joan earlier walked in the Max Mara show as part of Milan Fashion Week Mini vacation: The Victoria's Secret model took a mini vacation to Puerto Rico before Milan Fashion Week Joan took a break before Milan Fashion Week with a quick trip to Puerto Rico. The face of Moschino fragrance shared a photo of herself on Instagram with her parents Eric Smalls and Betzaida Rodriguez. She kept busy during NYFW as she walked in several shows including Brandon Maxwell, Tom Ford and B.E.B.A, while also closing the Tom Ford show. Joan also attended the Black Panther premiere in NYC and the amfAR gala. Catwalk queen: Joan is shown on the catwalk during the Max Mara show She is known for her skimpy outfits and her glamorous made up looks. But on Thursday, Iggy Azalea looked completely unrecognisable when she landed at Los Angeles' LAX airport after returning from a family vacation in Mexico. The Australian rapper, who is rarely captured without a full face of makeup, was seen completely bare-faced while leaving the airport. Iggy who? Iggy Azalea looked unrecognisable makeup free and wearing sweat pants while landing at Los Angeles' LAX airport after returning from a family vacation in Mexico on Thursday Typically seen with her long hair styled or wearing a pastel-hued wig, the busty blonde stepped out with her hair pulled back in an ordinary ponytail and shielded her eyes with sunglasses. The 27-year-old was also dressed uncharacteristically, opting for black yoga pants and rock T-shirt under a dark denim jacket. Keeping her overall outfit in line with her otherwise comfortable look, the beauty completed her look wearing Keds sneakers. Casual: The 27-year-old was also dressed uncharacteristically, opting for black yoga pants and rock T-shirt under a dark denim jacket While many have speculated over procedures resulting in the beauty's hourglass figure, Iggy has admitted to a boob job and multiple other cosmetic surgeries, however denied having butt implants. In an interview with Vogue in 2015, Iggy admitted: 'I did get bigger boobs! I'd thought about it my entire life.' And while she had initially planned to keep her boob jump under wraps, she eventually decided: 'I wasn't into secret keeping.' Following her boob job, Iggy admitted she had undergone plastic surgery for a nose job, sharing: 'Denying it is lame!' Made up: Iggy is often seen with her long hair styled or wearing a pastel-hued wig Gloria Estefan and her husband Emilio were the honorees at Univision's 30th Premio Lo Nuestro Thursday night in Miami. The influential Cuban-American couple, who wed in 1978, first came to fame with the Miami Sound Machine. Gloria, 60, went on to enjoy solo success while Emilio, 64, has successfully produced many Latino music top acts. Influential couple: Gloria Estefan, 60, and her husband Emilio, 64, were the honorees at Univision's 30th Premio Lo Nuestro Thursday night in Miami Mother-of-two Gloria looked gorgeous in a full-length black gown that hugged her curves. The dress featured white floral embellishments on the bodice and the long sleeves. She wore her long hair styled into a sophisticated ponytail. Her eyes were rimmed with black kohl and her lashes thickened with black mascara. She added rosy blush and matching lip color and accessorized with a pair of stunning diamond earrings. Stylish show: Gloria looked gorgeous in a full-length black gown that hugged her curves. The dress featured white floral embellishments on the bodice and the long sleeves Stunner: Her eyes were rimmed with black kohl and her lashes thickened with black mascara. She added rosy blush and matching lip color and accessorized with stunning diamond earrings Joining the Estefans at the event was Mexican beauty queen Ana Patricia Gamez. Gamez, who co-hosts Univisions morning show Despierta America, recently announced that she's pregnant with her second child with her husband Luis Martinez. She was accompanied to the show Thursday by her adorable two-year-old daughter Giulietta. Expecting: Joining the Estefans at the event was Mexican beauty queen Ana Patricia Gamez, who announced last month she is pregnant with her second child Her mini me: Gamez, who co-hosts Univisions morning show Despierta America, was accompanied to the show Thursday by her adorable two-year-old daughter Giulietta Gamez looked radiant in a low-cut white semi-sheer dress decorated with gold feathers. The plunging neckline on the embellished bodice showcased her cleavage and she added a pair of shiny sandal heels. She wore her long dark hair tied back from her face and falling loose around her shoulders. Little Giulietta was cute in a matching frock with white and gold bodice and ballerina-style tulle skirt. Gorgeous: Gamez looked radiant in a low-cut white semi-sheer dress decorated with gold feathers. The plunging neckline on the embellished bodice showcased her cleavage Natural beauties: Little Giulietta was cute in a matching frock with white and gold bodice and ballerina-style tulle skirt Also on the guest list was retired WWE wrestler Ric Flair. The 68-year-old opted for a white three-piece suit and white shirt that he left unbuttoned to show off his gold medallions. He added white shoes and a shiny light blue handkerchief in his jacket breast pocket. Walked the red carpet: Also on the guest list was retired WWE wrestler Ric Flair Stood out from the crowd: The 68-year-old opted for a white three-piece suit and white shirt that he left unbuttoned to show off his gold medallions She's been spending quite a bit of time with beau Justin Bieber lately. But on Thursday night Selena Gomez was alone as she stopped by a studio in Westwood, ostensibly to work on some new recordings. The 25-year-old Wolves songstress rocked quite a relaxed wardrobe for her night of work. Rolling solo: on Thursday night Selena Gomez was alone as she stopped by a studio in Westwood, ostensibly to work on some new recordings Apparently prioritizing comfort, she paired a white pullover with 'summer '92' emblazoned on the front with some classic black track bottoms with white stripes down each leg. White Puma trainers (that she designer herself) and white socks rounded out her casual ensemble. Selena, who is an ambassador for Puma, carried a black motorcycle jacket over her left arm with a pair of very distinctive aviator-style eyeglasses perched on her nose. Her brunette locks were tied up with a retro black scrunchie, and she appeared to be mostly make-up free save for some dark eyeliner a dash of peach lip gloss. Keeping it simple: Apparently prioritizing comfort, she paired a white pullover with 'summer '92' emblazoned on the front with some classic black track pants with white stripes down each leg Foxy four eyes! She carried a black motorcycle jacket over her left arm, and she wore a pair of very distinctive aviator-style eyeglasses Throwback: Her brunette locks were tied up with a retro black scrunchie While the Spring Breakers actress appeared quite focused on Thursday, on Wednesday she went to church with beau Justin Bieber. And on Monday the duo were celebrating Justin's father Jeremy's nuptials to longtime girlfriend Chelsey Rebelo. Honored guests and members of the wedding party all incorporated pink into their outfits. Natural beauty: she appeared to be mostly make-up free save for some dark eyeliner a dash of peach lip gloss On a mission: The Spring Breakers actress appeared quite focused on Thursday Justin's dad Jeremy, 42, tied the knot with Rebelo, 29, in an outdoor ceremony on Monday surrounded by friends and family. TMZ reports that Justin chose not to make a speech at the nuptials and that he was one of around only 30 guests at the intimate ceremony. The wedding took place in the backyard of one of the luxury villas and a local DJ and band handled the tunes, according to the website. His famous father has served in many different roles throughout his lengthy career. But Patrick Schwarzenegger, 24, seemed happy to have his dad Arnold by his side as the dashing pair enjoyed a late lunch with pals in the Brentwood area of Los Angeles on Thursday afternoon. The 70-year-old legend looked to be in great spirits as he walked ahead of his son after the duo grabbed a bite to eat at trendy Italian eatery Toscana. Scroll down for video Good times: Patrick Schwarzenegger, 24, seemed happy to have his dad Arnold by his side as the dashing pair enjoyed a late lunch with pals in the Brentwood area of Los Angeles on Thursday afternoon Arnold looked elated as he left lunch sporting a black leather jacket and a big grin across his face. The Terminator star donned a pair of dark blue jeans with a large silver belt buckle shining in the sun light. He showed off his impressive form through a tight white T-shirt which matched his crisp white Adidas trainers with the classic black three-stripe design down the sides. Smile! The 70-year-old legend looked to be in great spirits as he walked ahead of his son after the duo grabbed a bite to eat at trendy Italian eatery Toscana Nice: The former governor of the state of California slicked back his auburn hair and donned a pair of dark sunglasses as he walked to a waiting vehicle Built: He showed off his impressive form through a tight white T-shirt which matched his crisp white Adidas trainers with the classic black three-stripe design down the sides The former governor of the state of California slicked back his auburn hair and donned a pair of dark sunglasses as he walked to a waiting vehicle. Patrick looked equally casual and cool for the afternoon adventure sporting a white T-shirt and large denim jacket. He added a pair of cozy black distressed sweatpants to his ensemble in addition to a pair of bright white sneakers. Dressed down: Patrick looked equally casual and cool for the afternoon adventure sporting a white T-shirt and large denim jacket Cute: The budding actor covered his short brown hair with a red, white and blue trucker hat and sported a bit of stubble on his chin The budding actor covered his short brown hair with a red, white and blue trucker hat and sported a bit of stubble on his chin. Patrick has been dating model Abby Champion, 20, for two years and they were later spotted grabbing dinner in West Hollywood. The fitness enthusiast's 25-year marriage to Maria Shriver famously ended in 2011 after she discovered he'd fathered Joseph with the housekeeper Mildred aka 'Patty,' who graduated from culinary school in May. Grabbing dinner: Patrick and girlfriend Abby Champion later were spotted grabbing dinner in West Hollywood Going strong: Abby and Patrick have been dating for two years She is a former Miss Australia, who stars on The Real Housewives Of Sydney. And on Friday, the 38-year-old shared a sweet throwback childhood snap alongside her younger sister. In the snap the brunette beauty wears a white ruffle dress featuring a frilly a collar and a bow. Guess who! A former Miss Australia who is stars on The Real Housewives of Sydney (left) shared a sweet throwback snap with her sister from their childhood Her hair was styled with in two adorable pigtails with white scrunchies to match her outfit. Also matching the look was her blonde, pixie-haired sister wearing the exact same dress. The brunette little girl was revealed to be none other than Nicole Gazal O'Neil, posing with her sister Nora Milling (nee Gazal). Tagging her sibling in the photo, she captioned the snap: 'Sisters ,' along with #flashbackfriday. Sydney stunner: The brunette little girl was revealed to be none other than Real Housewives Of Sydney Star Nicole O'Neil (nee Gazal, pictured) with her sister Nora Milling (nee Gazal) Family love: Nicole (pictured right, with Nora on the left) comes from a very entrepreneurial family who run Gazal Corporation Limited, including her third youngest sibling Nabil (centre), who is also known for having been in a relationship with Roxy Jacenko Dozens of fans liked the throwback, including a family friend who wrote: 'I remember you two at this age.. very cute X.' While another commented: 'Aww So Sweet.' Nicole comes from a very entrepreneurial family who run Gazal Corporation Limited, including her brother Nabil, who once dated Roxy Jacenko. Nabil and the PR queen made headlines last year when they were spotted sharing a passionate kiss weeks before her husband Oliver Curtis' release from prison. Doting mum and wife: Nicole is married to businessman Adam O'Neill, and together share two daughters Damage control: As a result of Nabil's headline making kiss with Roxy, Nicole was forced to do the media rounds for Gazal Corp and her family saying: 'He has [been in the headlines]. Going into going into this show, I was very cautious to not drag my family into it' As a result of the controversy Nicole, who is married to businessman Adam O'Neill and together share two daughters, was forced to do damage control for Gazal Corp, appearing on The Morning Show. Keeping coy, she told hosts Larry and Kylie: 'He has [been in the headlines]. Going into going into this show, I was very cautious to not drag my family into it. 'And they were very discerned that I would bring the family into it.' On Wednesday, it was revealed Farrah Abraham is suing Viacom for $6 million after she was let go from Teen Mom for refusing to stop starring in adult films. Yet the reality star was putting her troubles behind her as she lived it up at celebrity hot spot Craig's restaurant in West Hollywood on Thursday during which she put on a sizzling display while showing off her eye-popping assets in a cami dress. The 26-year-old reality star looked sensational as she wowed in the scanty mini dress which she layered beneath a fur coat while adding in saucy knee-high boots and a Fendi handbag. Pretty in pink: Farrah Abraham was putting her troubles behind her as she lived it up at celebrity hot spot Craig's restaurant in West Hollywood during which she put on a sizzling display while showing off her eye-popping assets in a cami dress Farrah looked nothing short of sensational as she hit the town while putting her legal woes behind her with a broad smile on her face. Never shy of showing off her figure, she slipped into a skin-tight crushed velvet mini dress which clung to her frame due to its second-skin cut. The deeply plunging neckline showed off her eye-popping cleavage - the result of a whopping three boob jobs over the years. While she undoubtedly sported only the saucy mini while inside the eatery, she wrapped up against the February chill with her fur coat and boots. Sizzling: The 26-year-old reality star looked sensational as she wowed in the scanty mini dress which she layered beneath a fur coat while adding in saucy knee-high boots and a Fendi handbag Sizzling: Farrah looked nothing short of sensational as she hit the town while putting her legal woes behind her with a broad smile on her face Adding a splash of colour was the stunning star's flame red locks however she kept her make-up dewy and natural with a peach lip and fluttering eyelashes. Earlier in the week, Farrah hit back at Teen Mom through the courts, claiming the production company harassed, humiliated, discriminated against, disrespected, ridiculed, degraded, and sex shamed her. She accused it of 'wrongfully terminating her employment because she did not conform to gender stereotypes,' according to The Blast. She is seeking $1m for breach of contract, on top of another $5million in damages. Farrah starred in a 2013 sex tape, has appeared in several adult webcam shows, makes frequent trip club appearances. Ravishing red: Adding a splash of colour was the stunning star's flame red locks however she kept her make-up dewy and natural with a peach lip and fluttering eyelashes Lashing out: Earlier in the week, Farrah hit back at Teen Mom through the courts, claiming the production company harassed, humiliated, discriminated against, disrespected, ridiculed, degraded, and sex shamed her She also has her own line of sex toys and lingerie. However the mother-of-one was let go from the reality docu-series after refusing to drop what is a very lucrative second career for her. The moment she is confronted by executive producer Morgan J Freeman was captured on camera, and seen in a preview for the upcoming episode. 'You choose to work in the adult industry, we cant continue to film...' Freeman begins to tell her in the scene. 'Who are you to tell someone to chose one thing?' she fired back. 'Shoot me for being who I am.' She grabbed plenty of attention thanks to her incredible wardrobe choices during her latest promotional stint in London. But Jennifer Lawrence was keeping things casual as she left Claridge's Hotel in the capital on Thursday evening. The Oscar-winning actress, 27, looked worlds away from her racy sartorial choices and opted for comfortable leisurewear, teamed with a mosaic-style black jacket. Comfortable: Jennifer Lawrence was keeping things casual as she left London's Claridge's Hotel on Thursday evening after dazzling with her wardrobe choices over the past week Ready and raring to go for another round of Red Sparrow, the screen star opted for a slouchy grey top and black joggers as she got into a waiting cab. The Hunger Games beauty toted a black holdall as she left the swanky hotel, shielding her eyes in classic wide-rimmed Garrett Leight x Ulla Johnson sunglasses. Jennifer spiced up her casual garb with a shimmering gold drop pendant, while her glossy blonde tresses were left in a natural wave. The fresh-faced starlet opted for au-natural make-up, opting in light pink glossed lip teamed with her glowing complexion. Under the radar: The Oscar-winning actress, 27, looked worlds away from her racy sartorial choices and opted for comfortable leisurewear, teamed with a mosaic-style black jacket Simply stunning: The Red Sparrow star dazzled at a photocall at The Corinthia Hotel on Tuesday (L) and at the premiere at Vue West End in Leicester Square (R) On Tuesday, Jennifer turned heads in a striking black Versace gown as she attended a photocall for her new spy thriller, Red Sparrow. Despite looking sensational in her jaw-dropping black gown for the spy thriller's photocall on Tuesday, Jennifer received criticism on social media for wearing the slinky ensemble in the freezing cold. Talking to the Daily Mail, Jennifer hit back a day later, saying the revealing gown was her choice and joking that she will wear a bikini under a snowsuit next time. The actress said that she wore the dress for the photoshoot because it was fabulous. 'I wasnt going to cover it up with a coat or why would I wear it? It was Versace, she said. 'I was outside for five minutes and if I choose to be cold then I choose to be cold.' Low-key: The Hunger Games beauty toted a black holdall as she left the swanky hotel, shielding her eyes in classic wide-rimmed sunglasses Seriously though, why is this a controversy? I wore a beautiful dress that made me feel gorgeous. I was with a bunch of men and they were wearing coats. So what? 'People make controversies just for sport and its actually just irresponsible, because theres no controversy there. Red Sparrow is directed by Francis Lawrence, who previously directed Jennifer in the Hunger Games franchise. The film is based o the book by Jason Matthews, a former CIA officer - and co-stars Joel Edgerton, Jeremy Irons, Mary Louise Parker and Charlotte Rampling. However, Jennifer's promotion for the film has been somewhat tainted by viewer backlash from her recent appearance at the BAFTA Awards. Daring: Despite looking sensational in her jaw-dropping black gown, Jennifer received criticism on social media for wearing the slinky ensemble in the freezing cold National treasure Joanna Lumley was presenting the show for the first time after taking over from long-term host Stephen Fry. She introduced Jennifer as the 'hottest actress on the planet' ahead of her presenting the Best British Film gong, before Jennifer walked on and stated: 'That was a bit much, but thank you Joanna.' While it may have been meant as a joke, viewers went wild on Twitter - forcing Jennifer to defend herself against the accusations. Explaining the situation on ITV's Lorraine, she said: 'I love Joanna Lumley, when I saw her, I grabbed her and was like I love you, big me up on stage. 'Then she said these lovely things about me and as a joke I was like, calm down. Boy did that go wrong. I was at the BAFTAs for 15 minutes and offended England.' She's the breakfast radio host who had a stint on The Bachelor. And Heather Maltman has defended fellow reality star Davina Rankin, who has recently come under fire for her 'affair' with Dean Wells on Married At First Sight. Speaking to Daily Mail Australia on Friday, 31-year-old Heather called for trolls to stop bullying the star. 'People shouldn't be b**ches!' Heather Maltman (pictured) has defended fellow reality star Davina Rankin, who has recently come under fire for her 'affair' with Dean Wells on Married At First Sight 'She shouldn't have been a b**ch,' Heather said before adding: '[But] people shouldn't be b**ches.' 'I just think people should stop being b**ches, that's it!' She added: 'At the end of the day people shouldn't be b**ches.' Sympathy: Heather said Davina 'shouldn't have been a b**ch,' before adding: '[But] people shouldn't be b**ches to her' Anti-bullying: Speaking to Daily Mail Australia on Friday, the 31-year-old called for trolls to stop bullying the star Fans will remember the fun-loving brunette from The Bachelor in 2015, after she failed to win over Sam Wood. She has since moved to the Gold Coast and established herself as a radio host on the Gold Coast with Sea FM. Reality TV debut: Fans will remember the fun-loving brunette from The Bachelor in 2015, after she failed to win over Sam Wood While settling herself with the new job the aspiring filmmaker happened to find her happily ever after in blonde hunk, Matt Baker. In a bid to protect him from media scrutiny , she referred as 'Derick' in a bid to conceal his identity. Advertisement She's graced many a runway in her glittering career. Yet Gigi Hadid turned the catwalk into the dogwalk during Tod's Milan Fashion Week show on Friday as she stepped out with an adorable pooch under her arm. Proving to be the professional, the 22-year-old model managed to make quick changes into different ensembles, keep the dog under control and walk alongside her sister Bella, 21, during the short presentation. Dogwalk ready: Gigi Hadid turned the catwalk into the dogwalk during Tod's Milan Fashion Week show on Friday as she stepped out with an adorable pooch under her arm as well as her sister Bella With dogs featuring heavily in the Italian brand's Fall/Winter 18 campaign, Gigi was tasked with cradling a French Bulldog as she stormed the runway in an array of layers that bore a neutral colour scheme. Sheathing her sensational figure, Gigi donned an orange blouse unbuttoned to her cleavage that she wore beneath a thick brown shearling fleece and an oversized patchwork jacket. The star also donned a pair of tapered soft leather black trousers that she tucked into tangerine fur-lined boots that complemented the oversized handbag she toted with her free hand. Bark to her best: Proving to be the professional, the 22-year-old model managed to make quick changes into different ensembles, keep the dog under control and walk alongside her sister Bella, 21, during the short presentation From the catwalk to the dogwalk: With dogs featuring heavily in the Italian brand's Fall/Winter 18 campaign, Gigi was tasked with cradling a French Bulldog as she stormed the runway in an array of layers that bore a neutral colour scheme Leggy lady! The star also donned a pair of tapered soft leather black trousers that she tucked into tangerine fur-lined boots that complemented the oversized handbag she toted with her free hand Dressed to impress: Sheathing her sensational figure, Gigi donned an orange blouse unbuttoned to her cleavage that she wore beneath a thick brown shearling fleece and an oversized patchwork jacket For her second stunning ensemble, the blonde beauty kept her hair and make-up simple, slicking her golden locks in a side parting, and tucked behind her ears while she bore a neutral make-up palette that highlighted her natural beauty. Flashing some leg, the Vogue coverstar donned a taupe leather utility dress which cinched in at her tiny waist with a chunky belt and grazed her thighs to show off her tanned and toned pins, whilst she slipped her feet into black loafers. Adding to the glamour, Gigi layered up with a cream padded jacket and accessorised with a white handbag. Blonde bombshell: For her second stunning ensemble, the blonde beauty kept her hair and make-up simple, slicking her golden locks in a side parting, and tucked behind her ears while she bore a neutral make-up palette Leggy lady! Flashing some leg, the Vogue coverstar donned a taupe leather utility dress which cinched in at her tiny waist with a chunky belt and grazed her thighs to show off her tanned and toned pins, whilst she slipped her feet into black loafers Finishing touches: Adding to the glamour, Gigi layered up with a cream padded jacket and accessorised with a white handbag Meanwhile, Bella looked equally as incredible in a brown patent leather skirt that flashed her lean pins and she teamed with slouchy orange boots, the vibrant tone of which matched her bum bag. Keeping her phenomenal figure under wraps, the brunette beauty donned a cropped shearling jacket that she wore over a crimson blouse with a popped collar, and toted a leather brown shoulder bag. The Victoria's Secret model adopted the same beauty look as her elder sister, slicking her hair back and keeping her make-up palette neutral and dewy. Furry nice! Bella looked equally as incredible in a brown patent leather skirt that flashed her lean pins and she teamed with slouchy orange boots, the vibrant tone of which matched her bum bag Whilst Gigi seemed in great spirits as she joined Bella on the catwalk, the star recently made a damning statement about social media. Seen leaving the Fendi show with her sister on Thursday, she brandished a stamp on the back of her mobile phone, which read: 'Social media seriously harms your mental health.' The black and white sticker, clearly visible as her phone stuck out of her miniature handbag, mimicked the style of tobacco package warnings, which traditionally read: 'Smoking seriously harms you and others around you.' Gigi's bold statement comes 10 days after she pleaded with social media users to 'have more empathy for others.' 'You never really know the whole story,' she said. 'Use your energy to lift those that you admire rather than be cruel to those u dont. (sic)' Hell for leather! Bella changed into another stunning ensemble as she slipped her supermodel figure into an oversized gold zip adorned black leather jacket that she tucked into a pair of high-waisted trousers and boots Walk this way! Bella sashayed down the catwalk with confidence as she paraded in front of the crowds at the show Brunette beauty! The Victoria's Secret model adopted the same beauty look as her elder sister, slicking her hair back and keeping her make-up palette neutral and dewy She was responding to comments made about her physical health, calling out those who were 'so determined to come up with why my body has changed over the years.' She penned: 'For those of you so determined to come up w why my body has changed over the years, you may not know that when I started @ 17 I was not yet diagnosed w/Hashimotos disease; those of u who called me too big for the industry were seeing inflammation & water retention due to that.' She explained she has been 'properly medicated' for the past few years to manage the autoimmune condition which attacks her thyroid, and admits her figure isn't what she 'wants it to be'. Puppy love! The models stormed the runway with pet pooches in hand and in an array of colourful and chic ensembles Work it! Gigi and Bella looked phenomenal as they posed at the end of the show with the models on the runway Dazzling: The Hadid sisters looked in high spirits as they beamed broadly and clapped on the catwalk with the models All together now: The audience looked delighted by the show as they clapped the hardworking models and the glam designs She continued: 'Although stress & excessive travel can also affect the body, I have always eaten the same, my body just handles it differently now that my health is better. I may be too skinny for u, honestly this skinny isnt what I want to be, but I feel healthier internally and am still learning and growing with my body everyday, as everyone is. '...Not to judge others, but drugs are not my thing, stop putting me in that box just because u dont understand the way my body has matured (sic).' It comes after the siblings mother, Yolanda Hadid, 54, told the Press Association that it was her 'philosophy' to encourage her daughters to wait to become models until they were adults in order to protect them from the scrutiny you can face in the spotlight. Sitting pretty: Settled into the front row was the glamorous Olivia Palermo and her husband Johannes Huebl Leather-clad ladies: Russian-Swiss model Xenia Tchoumitcheva (L) dazzled in a brown leather skater dress, whilst French actress Alice David (R) looked phenomenal in a caped white dress that she teamed with trainers Two's company: Olivia and Johannes looked incredible as they posed with one another whilst waiting for the show to start She said: 'I didnt want them being judged during the most empowering, important time of a young womans life when you start your period, you get your boobies, its a very changing time in our life, that you need to be left alone. 'Like, just live life, be in your flip flops, do sports, learn to have a boyfriend, fall in love, fall out of love. Make or break, you have to experience life because if youre not given those life experiences, you dont have anything to give when youre in front of the camera. 'Its all about the perspective, its all about the pulling from life experiences, and if you havent had any life experience you dont have anything to give.' Chic and cheerful: Gigi looked phenomenal as she stepped out in patent patterned leather trousers and ankle boots Chest a glimpse: Gigi's sister Bella also looked phenomenal as she left the show clad in a plunging blazer and braces Yolanda said she was 'very rigid' about them not starting before the age of 18, although she said that Gigi did press her on that sometimes. 'Now four years later shes like "thank God you gave me those two extra years to be free and to live life and to be just me, because I could have never handled this amount of success at age 16"', she added. Gigi, 22, and Bella, 21, have enjoyed successful careers as models in recent years, recently appearing on the front cover of British Vogue magazine. Leggy lady! Gigi looked incredible in her patterned PVC trousers that were worn over fishnet trousers EastEnders viewers were left confused when new character Georgi delivered her child 'without an umbilical cord' on Thursday night's episode. The character first arrived in Albert Square with news of her pregnancy earlier this week. Eagle-eyed fans took to Twitter with their thoughts on the labour scene, with some referring to the newborn as an 'alien' due to the unrealistic nature of the birth. Quite the gaffe: EastEnders viewers were left confused as they noticed that new character Georgi delivered her child 'without an umbilical cord' on Thursday night's episode Friend in need: She had surprised Tina Carter (pictured) after she arrived in Albert Square with news on her pregnancy earlier this week Georgi - played by Holly Donovan - gave birth to her child at home with the help of sisters Shirley (Linda Henry) and Tina Carter (Luisa Bradshaw-White). However, viewers realised the newborn was delivered without an umbilical cord. One fan tweeted: 'Baby born on #EastEnders tonight and came out not covered in goo or attached to umbilical cord. How's that possible?' Intense: Georgi - played by Holly Donovan - gave birth to her child at home with the help of sisters Shirley (Linda Henry - pictured) and Tina Carter (Luisa Bradshaw-White) 'Baby born without umbilical cord, fantastic #EastEnders', another viewer sarcastically commented. 'Wow! Gives birth to baby boy, no umbilical chord attached. Alien? #Eastenders.' [sic]. 'Funny how that baby came out clean with no umbilical cord to cut #eastenders.' The character - who is a friend of Tina's daughter Zsa Zsa - was introduced to the soap as she sought for help from the barmaid when she revealed she arrived in Albert Square to get away from her mother. Weird: Viewers jumped to Twitter as they realised the newborn was delivered without an umbilical cord EastEnders representatives refused to comment on the labour scene. This is not the first time fans were left confused, as Lauren Branning's exit on last Friday's episode garnered attention from viewers who claimed she 'disappeared into thin air.' The character, played by actress Jacqueline Jossa, left following her sister Abi's funeral but was unclear where she was going and why she didn't take her boyfriend Josh with her. After being told by her on-screen father Max (Jake Wood) that 'life's short, be happy, live your life for the both of you,' she walked out of Albert Square for good. One fan posted on Twitter: Wait up did Lauren leave with Josh or just walk up that random path and disappear into thin air!? @bbceastenders #Eastenders 'So from out of nowhere Lauren decides she doesn't want to be with Josh after all? After trying to be with him for the best part of over a year? Unnecessary adding in that was not needed. #Eastenders', another tweeted. 'What was the point having that long build up of Lauren and Josh getting together only to have Lauren randomly leave him him in her last episode for no reason? Wtf. At least show the relationship breakdown rather than just have her walk past him without even a cya #Eastenders' Following her last scene as Lauren, Jacqueline bid farewell to her character: 'I will miss you Lauren Branning.' 'What is happening?' The exit of the key character left viewers asking what the point of the pair getting together was if they were going to break up in the final episode His ex-girlfriend - and the mother of his son - Stephanie Davis spoke out this week about the domestic abuse she suffered in their relationship. And Jeremy McConnell - whom Steph also vowed she would never get back together with - opted to drown his sorrows at the local Holiday Inn on Thursday night, which also happened to be his birthday evening. The former Beauty School Cop Out and Celebrity Big Brother star hit the hotel bar to drink wine with some friends, to toast turning 28 and to try and forget his troubles. Night Out, Holiday Inn! Jeremy McConnell hit the local hotel to drown his sorrows on his birthday... following ex Stephanie Davis' latest domestic abuse claims A tough time: His ex-girlfriend - and the mother of his son - Stephanie spoke out this week about the domestic abuse she suffered in their relationship The reality personality was out in Manchester for the evening and believed to be staying at the hotel, where he was joined by a small number of friends to finish off the evening. Looking typically casual in a white tee and ripped jeans, Jeremy was seen sipping wine before sitting down with a pal. It didn't look like his current girlfriend was there, although he shared boomerangs on his Instagram stories enjoying an Italian meal with others and later from what looked like the roof of the hotel. He also tweeted: 'What a day to be a narcissist! Happy birthday to me!' Downing his sorrows: Jeremy - whom Steph also vowed she would never get back together with - opted to drown his sorrows at the local Holiday Inn on Thursday night, which also happened to be his birthday evening Wine O Clock: The former Beauty School Cop Out and Celebrity Big Brother star hit the hotel bar to drink wine with some friends, to toast turning 28 and to try and forget his troubles Night cap: The reality personality was out in Manchester for the evening and believed to be staying at the hotel Speaking out: Stephanie has told for the first time of the full scale of domestic abuse she suffered at the hands of ex Jeremy - and vowed she would never get back together with him This was a dig at ex Stephanie, who had recently branded him with the same trait. In an emotional interview, the former Hollyoaks actress revealed reality star Jeremy battered her as she held her baby son - and crushed a glass into her hand during a blazing row. She suffered two severed tendons following the brutal attack and had to undergo surgery. One more: He was joined by a small number of friends to finish off the evening One for the road: Looking typically casual in a white tee and ripped jeans, Jeremy was seen sipping wine before sitting down with a pal Going inn: It didn't look like his current girlfriend was there, although he shared boomerangs on his Instagram stories enjoying an Italian meal with others and later from what looked like the roof of the hotel Stephanie, 24, told of her ordeal after Jeremy claimed she begged him to visit her home and said she still loved him in a barrage of emails, despite having a restraining order against him. But speaking exclusively to MailOnline, she said he contacted her first and insisted: 'It's complete rubbish, I responded to him not the other way round. 'The reason why I've always humoured him was because I've always been chasing that man I fell in love with on Big Brother. I always wanted to find that funny, charming guy but he is nothing but a narcissist and his mask slipped practically the moment we'd left the studio. He also tweeted: 'What a day to be a narcissist! Happy birthday to me' Fresh reports: Stephanie, 24, told of her ordeal after Jeremy claimed she begged him to visit her home and said she still loved him in a barrage of emails, despite having a restraining order against him 'When he got in touch blaming his problems on a drug addiction I wanted to believe him and did want to see him. 'But this was before I went into rehab and I'm now so much more stronger and I've realised that I don't need him any more. He has always got off on controlling me and using me to find fame and now that he can no longer do that, he's hitting out in the media.' 'For so long I felt like I didn't have a voice because I was too scared to speak out but I'm not going to be silent any longer. Shocking: A new photo shows Steph laying in a hospital bed recovering after McConnell allegedly crushed a broken glass into her hand following a row in a London hotel room. It shows her lying in a hospital bed with the oxygen mask still attached Post fight: Stephanie was pictured eating chips at a McDonald's restaurant after a fight with McConnell last June in which she had bruises on her arm. She told MailOnline that domestic violence continued right throughout their turbulent relationship Firstborn: Stephanie says she is stronger and happier after a spell in rehab as she battled alcohol problems. She is pictured holding their son, Caben-Albi George, who was born in January 2017 while he was in Thailand on a lads holiday 'I've seen and read things about me which are just not true and it's time people knew the truth. He was a bully who ruled through fear and left me contemplating suicide but I'm stronger now and determined to set the record straight.' Jeremy was sentenced to 20 months in prison suspended for 12 months in August last year for a separate assault on Stephanie in March that year at their home in Liverpool. He has always denied assaulting the actress. The pair met on Celebrity Big Brother in January 2016 and they became a couple after the show. An email sent by McConnell telling his ex Stephanie that he still loves her and hopes that he misses her At first she fell for his rugged good looks and Irish charm but it did not take long for the mask to slip. Following an argument, Jeremy grabbed Stephanie's hand as she held a glass of cola. Using his strength, he cupped her hand with his and smashed the glass so shards sliced into her fingers. She recalled: 'I yelped out in pain and instinctively threw my hand into the air and as I did so I accidentally caught Jeremy in the face. 'He always bruises easily because of his high cheek bones and he was left with a black eye, which he later posted images of on social media to get attention. 'Meanwhile I'm standing there with blood dripping out my hand, shaking in shock and fright. 'He'd deliberately broken the glass as I held it and then rubbed the shattered glass into my hand. 'Two of my fingers on my right hand just fell because he'd cut the tendons. I had to wear a cast and a splint afterwards but I used to wear long sleeved tops to cover it so photographers couldn't see. That was to protect him.' Surgeons reattached the tendons after an operation but nearly two years on she has limited movement in those fingers. Standing firm: Stephanie has opened up in detail about the ordeal She said he would fly into cocaine-induced rages and accuse her of cheating on him when I reality it was the other way round. Stephanie said: 'He would hit his head with his fist when we argued, it was like he was getting his frustration out that way. My home is full of dents and cracks because he would then start smashing up the furniture. 'He has scars on his wrist and his neck because when things got really bad, he'd cut himself in front of me. It was emotional blackmail. I was always accused of sleeping around because he was paranoid on cocaine but he was the one doing the dirty. He even admitted cheating on me during an Irish TV chat show.' The couple split in May 2016 but Stephanie fell pregnant with their first child. Their son, Caben-Albi George was born in January 2017 while Jeremy was in Thailand on a lads holiday. It's over: Stephanie insisted she would never get back together with reality star McConnell (pictured). She insisted that McConnell contacted her first and insisted: 'It's complete rubbish, I responded to him not the other way round' For a time, the couple rekindled their romance but Stephanie said his violent temper was never far from the surface. A few weeks after the birth of their son, Jeremy moved in to her home in Liverpool and head butted her in the face, Steph claims. Worse was to come, however, when they stayed at a central London hotel in March last year. Stephanie claimed: 'We'd had a lovely suite and they'd brought up a bottle of champagne but I didn't like to drink with Jeremy because of how violent he could become. I tried to stop him from opening the bottle and we got into a huge fight and he punched me and dragged me across the room. I was holding Caben at the time but he didn't seem to care. 'At one point I had to twist my body to shield my son and make sure I landed on the floor on my back. I had bruising all over my arm and when he stormed out I went downstairs and explained what had happened and checked into a new room.' Matters came to a head last summer when Stephanie finally decided to leave him for good. They checked into another hotel in Westminster in June where Stephanie was attacked again. Of their fights, Steph said: 'He would hit his head with his fist when we argued, it was like he was getting his frustration out that way. My home is full of dents and cracks because he would then start smashing up the furniture' She said she was once more punched and pushed. Fighting back tears she recalled: 'He hit me and then held a corkscrew to his neck. I used to have a default reaction, out of stress more than anything, I'd start laughing nervously and go to the window and wrap myself in the curtain. I didn't want to look back because I didn't want to see more blood. I just gazed out of the window. 'Grabbing Caben I ran out of the room and down the corridor but to make me react he pretended to collapse. I didn't want to go over to him in case he grabbed hold of me like in a horror film.' Stephanie fled to another hotel in north London but she was hiding a secret, she was pregnant again. He confronted two days later after she rang to tell him and told him where she had gone. She said: 'He turned up drunk, he'd been photographed lying on a park bench the previous day having gone on a bender. He met me in the lobby and said something like 'who in their right mind is going to want you now with two of my kids?' He grabbed me and head butted me and I ran back into the room. 'He followed and headbutted me in the face breaking the cartilage in my nose and started to smash up the four poster bed. I ran into the lobby with blood streaming down my face shouting for someone to call the police.' Jeremy blamed Stephanie for the fight and accused her of attacking him after photographs of him taken shortly afterwards showed him with two black eyes and bruised cheeks. Split: Stephanie says Jeremy now has no contact with their baby son since the pair separated He said Steph had just told him that she was pregnant for the second time - and then went 'mental' when she looked at his phone and saw he was following another woman on social media. He said: 'I swear I never laid a finger on her. I do not hit women and do not hit pregnant women. I did not touch her. Any marks that she has on her are self inflicted.' Steph was arrested on suspicion of GBH after the incident at the Royal Chace Hotel in Enfield on July 2 last year. The Metropolitan Police have now dropped the charge and she will face no prosecution. She said: 'I'm 5ft 2in and he's about 6ft 4in and powerfully built. He'd always tower over me even when I wore six inch heels. 'Yet he accused me of breaking up this big solid oak four poster bed and of assaulting him. He'd punched himself In the face which is why he had the bruises and then blamed me.' Before she entered rehab: McConnell sent her a grovelling email asking to rekindle their romance - despite having a restraining order preventing him from contacting her The violence and constant fear drove Stephanie to alcohol abuse and she entered rehab in November last year. After three months of therapy, including disclosing the beatings and assaults to counsellors, she emerged last month. She has not touched a drop of alcohol since and said: 'I used it as a coping mechanism. I didn't wake up every morning and feel like I had to have a drink, but every time I felt scared or worried I'd find comfort and solace in booze. When things got really bad I didn't want to live but didn't want to die either because I had Caben so I turned to drink every time.' Hitting back: Jeremy denied Stephanie's claims in a lengthy Twitter post on Wednesday to his 385,000 followers Before she entered rehab, Jeremy sent her a grovelling email asking to rekindle their romance - despite having a restraining order preventing him from contacting her. She replied, hoping that he had somehow changed, but gradually the messages began getting more threatening. He leaked some of her messages to the media accusing her of trying to encourage him to break the order and get back together. One read: 'I miss u, I miss our laughs and I miss our sex. Don't u? Just call me, I love you.' Jeremy hit out at the claims on Twitter, as he reasoned that the picture of Stephanie in hospital with blonde locks was not taken as a result of his violence. He addressed his 385,000 followers on Wednesday by posting: 'Have to honestly laugh at this human , when was she blonde with caben?. She is a compulsive liar with that mother and aunt of hers there poison all because I was going on ex on the beach , Iv all the back up I need to clear my name for anyone to think I laid a finger on her.' Jeremy continued: 'Her mum and aunt stood up in court and lied through there Teeth I will get justice, and as stupid as I was for never getting her done for the numerous times she attacked me , its pathetic people being brain washed on this 'I do know it shouldnt be public for important reasons, there is only so much you can watch and that is printed for caben to see when he is older I have to defend myself through articles at this stage ,its sick whats taking place and people are enabling that person. Its LIES'. Stephanie now plans to work closely with domestic violence charities and to hopefully make a documentary highlighting the dangers some women are in. She added: 'I've helped women who have undergone the same experiences as me and some who have suffered far worse, and it's made me feel so good. 'Domestic violence victims are not alone, there is help out there, and if I can put that message out then hopefully more women will come forward. I've lived that hell, I've lived that nightmare and wouldn't wish it on anyone.' She broke two of her front teeth and bruised her arms and legs when she slipped over in her bathroom earlier this month. And Roxy Jacenko still bore the results of her painful tumble, as she flashed the faded bruises on her thighs while attending the UnREAL Australian premiere bash. Despite her injuries, the 37-year-old PR maven looked typically stylish in a $2,350 printed Dolce & Gabbana dress as she partied at the Sydney event on Friday night. Ouch! Roxy Jacenko flashed painful looking bruises on her thighs from her 'very bad' bathroom fall earlier this month, while attending the UnREAL Australian premiere bash The Celebrity Apprentice star certainly took centre-stage in her brocade dress, which featured a thigh-grazing hemline and trumpet sleeves. Letting her statement dress do all the talking, she added height with an understated pair of black barely-there heels. Styling her golden tresses in her signature polished middle-parting, the PR guru framed her features with minimal make-up. Chic: Despite her injuries, the 37-year-old PR maven looked typically stylish in a $2,350 printed Dolce & Gabbana dress as she partied at the Sydney event on Friday night Looking good: The Celebrity Apprentice star certainly took centre-stage in her brocade dress, which featured a thigh-grazing hemline and trumpet sleeves As always, Roxy adorned herself with jewels, including her $250,000 diamond engagement ring from her husband Oliver Curtis and new eternity band, priced at $50,000. Last week, a friend of the entrepreneur told Daily Mail Australia that Roxy injured herself when she 'slipped over on the wet floor of her bathroom at home'. 'Roxy had a very bad accident in the evening,' the friend told Daily Mail Australia. Killer footwear: Letting her statement dress do all the talking, she added height with an understated pair of black barely-there heels Groomed: Styling her golden tresses in her signature polished middle-parting, the PR guru framed her features with minimal make-up 'She slipped over on the wet floor of her bathroom at home, fell onto the bath, hit her leg, arm and then face.' Having broken two of her front teeth, the source went on to add that Roxy had to have 'emergency dental work to fix the teeth'. Having founded the reputable company Sweaty Betty PR at just 24-years-of-age, Roxy has grown the business into a multi-million dollar empire, representing some of Australia's biggest brands over the past 13 years. Lost her footing: She broke two of her front teeth and bruised her arms and legs when she slipped over in her bathroom earlier this month Always one step ahead, Roxy founded The Ministry of Talent in 2012, the country's first management agency solely dedicated to digital influencers. Looking back over her career to-date, the event planner told Daily Mail Australia that the business has taught her to always take risks. 'From the day I started I took risks and never settled with what would be good enough or what would 'do'. I always did and continue to take risks that will see us break the rules and not conform.' Double trouble: She posed alongside fellow Stan ambassador Beau Ryan at the star-studded bash He's one of the kings of Saturday night television. Yet Declan Donnelly, 42, seemed to be a tad flustered filming weekday morning TV as he accidentally let out an expletive whilst chatting with Eamonn Holmes and Ruth Langsford on Friday's episode of This Morning. His co-presenter Ant McPartlin, 42, was on hand to help, however, swiftly reminding him of the time, yet he too fell foul to a blunder just moments later by accidentally walking in on Loose Women panellist Linda Robson getting changed. Scroll down for video Oops: Declan Donnelly, 42, accidentally let out an expletive whilst joining Ant McPartlin to chatt with Eamonn Holmes and Ruth Langsford on Friday's episode of This Morning The first mishap of the day came when Dec spoke about how hard it is to park outside the ITV studios when Saturday Night Takeaway is airing due to all the prop vans outside. He quipped: 'With all trucks and vans and props out there, we couldnt get in! We were saying its bl***y chaos out there, but its our chaos!' Swiftly picking up on his pal's slip of the tongue, Ant jumped in reminding the star: 'its half 12!' as Dec shot back: 'Sorry!' Oops: Just moments later Ant - who recently announced he is divorcing Lisa Armstrong - accidentally walked in on Linda Robson topless after getting the wrong dressing room That wasn't the only drama of the day, as just moments later Ant - who recently announced he is divorcing Lisa Armstrong - accidentally walked in on Linda Robson topless. Revealing the incident during an appearance on Loose Women, the Birds of a Feather star, 59, recalled: 'I was in my dressing room changing my top and Ant McPartlin came walking in on me! 'He got the wrong dressing room! He said "sorry Linda", and I thought did that just happen? Did Ant walk in me when I was half naked?!' Chatting away: The first mishap of the day came when Dec spoke about how hard it is to park outside the ITV studios when Saturday Night Takeaway is airing due to all the prop vans Oh dear: He quipped: 'With all trucks and vans and props out there, we couldnt get in! We were saying its bl***y chaos out there, but its our chaos!' Ant and Dec will be seen on screens next for the return of Saturday Night Takeaway. The first episode will also see Australian pop superstar Kylie Minogue perform, and the return of Scarlett Moffatt and Stephen Mulhern. The programme will be the first Ant has hosted since officially announcing his split from Lisa Armstrong. Shutting it down: Swiftly picking up on his pal's slip of the tongue, Ant jumped in reminding the star: 'its half 12!' as Dec shot back: 'Sorry!' One to watch: Ant and Dec will be seen on screens next for the return of Saturday Night Takeaway - which they chatted with Ruth and Eamonn about The presenter is currently going through what is said to be a 62m divorce from Lisa after an 11-year marriage. In a statement released to MailOnline on January 13, a spokesperson said: 'In response to the recent speculation in the media, Ant is very sad to announce that, after 11 years, he is ending his marriage to Lisa McPartlin. 'Ant asks for privacy at this difficult time, for both himself, Lisa and their immediate families. No further statement will be made.' She's the Aussie model who has confirmed she'll strut her stuff in the upcoming Melbourne Fashion Festival runway show in March for the brand. And on Friday Jennifer Hawkins looked runway ready as she posed for a snap in her driveway. The 34-year-old shared a stunning selfie to Instagram in a figure-hugging ensemble alongside a brand new luxury Land Rover. 'Big booty': Jennifer Hawkins looked runway ready as she posed for a snap in her driveway next to a brand new Land Rover Scroll down for video The former Miss Universe wore a black figure-hugging skirt and tight-fitting blush bodice. 'Big booty Velar, Land Rover Australia - off to dinner,' she wrote alongside the snap. In the snap, Jennifer's Blue Staffy makes a cameo appearance, as he sniffs around her trim pins. She's still got it! Former She was recently confirmed for the Myer Melbourne Fashion Festival runway show... after it was rumoured she may retire as face of department store this year Previously the former beauty-queen hinted at plans to settle down, suggesting she might be ready to end her modelling partnership with Australian department store, Myer. But on Thursday, the Face Of Myer, confirmed she will walk in the upcoming Melbourne Fashion Festival runway show in March for the brand. Taking to Instagram, the 34-year-old said she was 'looking forward to' fronting the two events on March 8. Long-standing ambassador! As The Face of Myer Jennifer has led trends and runways across the country for more than a decade, with 2018 marking her 12th year with the brand 'Hope to see you there,' the blonde beauty captioned the post, urging her followers to purchase tickets. As The Face of Myer Jennifer has led trends and runways across the country for more than a decade and is a proud supporter of Australian fashion brands. Meanwhile, Jennifer has certainly been hinting at settling down and starting a family with husband Jake Wall of late. 'Hope to see you there': The blonde beauty urged her followers to purchase tickets to her two runway shows on March 8 Statuesque frame: Jen is often hailed for her trim figure and youthful appearance She told Women's Health last year that she wants to have a farm and a family in the next 10 years. 'I always joke with Jake that I'd love to have a farm,' Jennifer told the publication. She added: 'I'd love to be living near the water and have a family.' She signed on for another two years as the face of Myer in August 2016 - meaning she could part ways with the brand soon. 'I'd love to be living near the water and have a family': She told Women's Health last year that she wants to have a farm and a family with husband Jake Wall in the next 10 years Jennifer, who joined the store in 2007, said at the time: 'I am so grateful for the opportunity Myer has given me over the last 10 years and I am excited about the next two years.' Jennifer - who was crowned Miss Universe in 2004 - added: 'I guess I want to build a life that I don't need a vacation from.' She praised surgeons after flaunting the results of her bottom enhancement just days ago. And Chantelle Connelly went for another round of cosmetic treatment as she received lip fillers at Jennifer Smith Aesthetics in County Durham on Thursday. The former Geordie Shore star, 27, was spotted reclining on a stretcher chair as a practitioner carried out the non-surgical procedure. Perfect pout: Chantelle Connelly went for another round of cosmetic treatment as she received lip fillers at Jennifer Smith Aesthetics in County Durham on Thursday The cosmetic surgery enthusiast looked relaxed during her lip treatment. Focusing attention on her latest procedure, the brunette beauty kept comfortable in a low-key tracksuit by Adidas, and pulled her raven-haired tresses into a slick ponytail. Wearing a big smile on her face, Chantelle looked pleased with the results as she was pictured glaring into a portable mirror as her lips bled a little. Following the treatment, the socialite guarded her full lips with her hands. Full lips: The former Geordie Shore star, 27, looked pleased with the results as she was pictured glaring into a portable mirror Cosmetic treatment enthusiast: The brunette beauty was spotted reclining on a stretcher chair as a practitioner carried out the non-surgical procedure Finishing up: Chantelle dabbed her swollen lips with a tissue after he procedure Chantelle's procedure comes shortly after she debuted the perky results of her bottom implants in Spain. The beauty went topless as she posed in a bright orange thong while crediting her surgeons for 'changing' her life thanks to their handiwork. The reality star slipped her surgically-enhanced curves into a pair barely-there bottoms. Life's a peach! Chantelle left little to the imagination as she debuted the results from her recent bottom enhancement in Spain on Sunday The television personality held onto her rich brunette locks while stood on a flight of stairs. The Newcastle native thanked her surgeons for her eye-popping look, writing: 'Thank you @serenecosmetic_ & @dr._aslani for literally changing my life... You have given me all my confidence back!' Chantelle flaunted her tiny waist in a plunging grey gym bra and figure-hugging leggings earlier in the week. Dare to bare! The Newcastle native went topless as she posed in a bright orange thong while crediting her surgeons for 'changing' her life thanks to their handiwork This is not the first time the star has attempted to perfect her plump rear, as she underwent a non-surgical bottom lift in March 2017. Taking to her Instagram account to show off the effects of her procedure, the star wrote: 'Getting the peach in check for summer with a @3dlipo bum lift!'. The image showed just her bottom - with reddened marks from the procedure - as she laid on a surgical table wearing grey panties and a green crop top. Chantelle's upload garnered more than 5,000 likes in half a day, and a string of messages of admiration from her fans. Work it: Chantelle flaunted her tiny waist in a plunging grey gym bra and figure-hugging leggings earlier in the week Stephen Fry is leaning on his loved ones, specifically his husband, in the wake of his prostate cancer diagnosis. The British entertainer shared the frightening news on his website on Friday, revealing that hed undergone surgery to have his prostate removed in January and was in the recovery process. Fry, 60, said his husband, Elliot Spencer, 27, has been a great support during this difficult time, adding that the process has been undignified and unfortunate. Fry and Spencer, who married in 2015 amid much buzz, have kept a low profile throughout their relationship. Their courtship, which is believed to have lasted about a year before they decided to wed, drew a lot of attention due to the nearly three-decade age gap between them. They proceeded anyway and have been quietly enjoying married life ever since. So what do you need to know about Elliot Spencer? Stephen Fry is relying on the support of husband Elliot Spencer after his cancer diagnosis Who is Elliot Spencer? Elliot Spencer is a photographer and comedian from Dereham, United Kingdom. His parents names are Robert and Melinda Spencer. A glimpse at his social media accounts suggests hes a big fan of music and often attends concerts. On February 21 he shared a photo from a recent Kendrick Lamar show, praising the rappers great performance. Spencer also appears to travel often. In December 2017 he shared a photo from the Arctic Circle. Preceding the snapshot were several photos of sled dogs and snowy scenes. He and Fry appear to have visited the Grand Canyon in Arizona together in July 2017. Spencer tweeted a photo of the couple before the natural phenomena. Elliot Spencer age Elliot Spencer is 27 years old, nearly 30 years younger than his husband. Stephen Fry, Elliot Spencer relationship Stephen Fry and Elliot Spencer met in 2012, according to Mirror U.K. They were introduced by friends at a house party. They began dating shortly after meeting and were spotted spending time together often. They were seen at the Savoy Hotel in London and the Ascot racecourse in Berkshire, England. Theyve remained private about much of their relationship. Spencer has shared a few photos of the two together on social media, but Frys appears to be dedicated to work, sights and the occasional photo of himself. Both Fry and Elliot have spoken with relative openness about their marriage, however. In 2015, Spencer told Mirror U.K., Humour is the key to everything. We laugh all the time. Humour is the binding thing in our life. I think thats what brought us together, Spencer added. Stephen Fry net worth Stephen Frys net worth is $30 million (21.4m) . He made his money through a number of means including acting, writing and working as a journalist. She has been strutting her stuff on the catwalks for Milan Fashion Week. So of course Bella Hadid put on her hottest looks for her stylish week when she was spotted leaving her hotel in the fashion capital, Italy on Friday. The statuesque supermodel, 21, gave onlookers a cheeky flash of her sideboob in her perilously plunging power suit. Sensational woman: Braless Bella Hadid showed off her impressive sideboob in her perilously plunging power suit during Milan Fashion Week, in Italy on Friday Brought in at the waist with a striking belt, the IMG model accentuated her model-honed figure and incredibly tiny waistline. The runway beauty swapped her sky-scraper stilettos from the Milan catwalk for a pair of comfortable trainers when she stepped out in the city. For a pop of pattern, the catwalk queen swept her brunette tresses underneath her quirky leopard print hat. Fabulous figure: Brought in at the waist with a striking belt, the IMG model accentuated her model-honed figure and incredibly tiny waistline Fashion faux pas: Bella narrowly escaped a wardrobe malfunction when she covered her cleavage with her hand on her trip around the fashionable city Ditching heels! The runway beauty swapped her sky-scraper stilettos from the Milan catwalk for a pair of comfortable trainers when she stepped out in the city Later in the day, the Instagram model headed to the glitzy Roberto Cavalli show where she wowed in a slinky scarlet number. Bella has been having a great time while she has been showcasing her best poses on the designer catwalks for Milan where she has joined forces with her sister Gigi. Enjoying herself in the fashion capital, the stunning model has treated her 16,900,000 followers to an inside look at her trip. Prowling around: For a pop of pattern, the catwalk queen swept her brunette tresses underneath her loud leopard print hat The beautiful brunette supported her sister Gigi on social media when she retweeted the fellow model's Twitter post. Blonde bombshell Gigi wrote on Twitter: 'Please, as social media users & human beings in general, learn to have more empathy for others and know that you never really know the whole story. 'Use your energy to lift those that you admire rather than be cruel to those u dont.' (sic) All about life: Enjoying herself in the fashion capital, the stunning model has treated her 16,900,000 followers to an inside look at her trip Jumanji: Welcome To The Jungle star Karen Gillan has claimed she wasn't as good an actress as she used to think, when starting out in the industry. The former Doctor Who sidekick - who is preparing to showcase her directorial debut in the form of film The Party's Just Beginning - has admitted that she realised that she had a lot of personal work to do in order to hone her skills. Appearing in The Circle, alongside Tom Hanks and Emma Watson, Karen, 30, admitted it was the former Hollywood legend who reassured her after she had re-thought her craft. 'I realised how s**t I was!' Karen Gillan has admitted she was 'delusional' about her acting abilities... and insisted that Doctor Who 'didn't catapult her anywhere' '[Tom] came up to me and told me I was good,' she told The Guardian. 'And it was one of those life moments. Maybe I've achieved some of what I wanted to, after realising how s**t I was!' Karen became a household name after starring in three series of Doctor Who as companion Amy Pond and has since broken into Hollywood with major roles in the likes of Guardians of the Galaxy alongside Chris Pratt. She told the publication that her success comes from the fact she had a re-evaluation of herself as an actress having been over-confident about her talent for many years. She said: 'I was delusional about my own acting abilities. When I was acting, I was really confident that I was good at it. I had suffered so many rejections, but it's like it has never phased me. Sidekick: Karen - who was the 11th companion to Matt Smith's Doctor Who from 2011 TO 2013 -has her next big blockbuster project lined up 'Then I had an awakening when I realised I wasn't as good as I thought I was - I watched myself in something and thought, "Oh my God, this is terrible, I need to get back to work on this and figure out how this is done."' She also said of Doctor Who that it 'never really catapulted me anywhere'; yet she has now stepped behind the camera and directed, written and starred in her own black comedy The Party's Just Beginning. The movie - which will premiere at the Glasgow Film Festival this weekend with Karen herself in attendance - follows a young woman who turns to sex and alcohol to cope with her grief following the suicide of her best friend. And despite being her directorial debut, she said it felt 'natural' to go behind the camera and direct. Radiant redhead: Karen recently took the lead female role in the remake of the classic Jumanji film, joining Dwayne Johnson and Jack Black The Scottish beauty said: 'Not the boss element; more about making all these decisions about this story I'd come up with. 'There was a second where you realise that you usually have someone to turn to and ask what to do, and that people were looking to me for that. I was like, "Oh, right! You should do that." 'But it felt natural. I just know that I want to direct. That's what I want to do with my life.' Karen - who now lives in New York - returned to her British roots as she graced the star-studded red carpet at the 71st BAFTA Awards at London's Royal Albert Hall on Sunday. She joined a host of female actresses on the carpet wearing black in support of the Time's Up movement, which raises awareness of sexual assault, harassment and inequality in the workplace and helps sexual assault survivors take legal action against their abusers. Commanding attention: Karen returned to her British roots as she graced the star-studded red carpet at the 71st BAFTA Awards at London's Royal Albert Hall on Sunday Stunner: The actress, 30, commanded attention in her sensational semi-sheer black gown The radiant redhead recently took the lead female role in the remake of the classic Jumanji film, joining Nick Jonas, Kevin Hart and Jack Black. The actress portrayed alter-ego Ruby Roundhouse, the tough-as-nails female avatar in the Jumanji game. Karen - who was the 11th companion to Matt Smith's Doctor Who from 2011 TO 2013 -has her next big blockbuster project lined up. Avengers: Infinity War is set for release in May, where fans can see the actress reprise her role as comic book super villain Nebula. She's no stranger to parading her surgically-enhanced figure in a slew of racy social media posts. So it's no wonder Chloe Khan boasted her sizzling assets as she enjoyed a steamy sauna session during her sun-soaked Turkey holiday on Thursday evening. The television personality, 26, displayed her perky posterior in a revealing green two-piece, shortly after the star was hit with claims that she doesn't go to the gym to keep herself in shape. Steamy: Chloe Khan boasted her sizzling assets as she enjoyed a sauna session during her sun-soaked Turkey holiday on Thursday evening Showcasing her tanned complexion, the reality star gave the camera a sultry gaze as she donned a bright green bikini. The former X Factor contestant also gave a peek at her leg tattoo while flaunting her peachy bottom. Despite in heated conditions, Chloe opted for her signature glamorous makeup look and styled her raven locks into loosely tousled waves. Busty beauty: She's no stranger to parading her surgically-enhanced figure in a slew of racy social media posts She recently came under fire when fans suggested she doesn't maintain her 100,000 surgically-enhanced figure. The Celebrity Big Brother star hit back at online trolls when she shared a very racy video on Instagram on Tuesday. Playboy pin-up Chloe, who has widely discussed her plastic surgery habits, insisted her incredibly tiny honed waistline was the fruits of her fitness labours. The skimpy bra, embellished with floral embroidery, struggled to contain her impressive cleavage. Addressing her 1,200,000, she said: 'Wobbly door frame ? B***H WHERE just because someones had a surgery does not mean they dont kain the gym everyday and just because someone Kains the gym everyday dont mean they havent had a surgery. 'I know so many fitness models / gym guru that have had bbl with my surgeon who will sware on everything they are natural and I dont blame them tbh because the hate is real . No drama anyway just saying.' (sic) The Instagram star has extensively discussed her experiences, the good and bad, of going under the knife. Racy display: The former X Factor contestant put her surgically-enhanced figure on parade in tiny lingerie for her sizzling video Sexy lady: Playboy pin-up Chloe, who has widely discussed her plastic surgery habits, insisted her incredibly tiny honed waistline was the fruits of her fitness labours Earlier in February, Chloe came to blows with Aisleyne-Horgan Wallace when she was slammed for advertising procedures in order to get them for free. The stars appeared on the show to debate whether the NHS should fund the cost of corrective procedures to botched surgeries carried out abroad. Chloe expressed her opinions fans should fund their own repairs while Aisleyne claimed everyone should be able to use the NHS for this. Blossoming beauty: The skimpy bra, embellished with floral embroidery, struggled to contain her impressive cleavage Aisleyne said: 'People don't go abroad and think, I'm going to have real bad problems when I come back, I'm going to have to turn to the NHS.' Chloe hit back: 'Do you not think that people should take responsibility for a choice, if you have surgery, it's your choice, you're taking a risk, you know that. 'I myself have had a very bad cosmetic surgery and I would never dream of looking to someone else to pay for it. It was abroad.' She's known for flaunting her incredible physique at London's hottest social haunts. And Petra Ecclestone seemed fresh off a workout as she stepped out of her local gym in London on Thursday. The 29-year-old F1 heiress left her workout clad in a striking red hoodie over a loose-fitting red shirt. Gym bunny: Petra Ecclestone cut a casual figure in cosy red hoodie and leather trousers as she stepped out after a gym session in London on Thursday Getting glamorous after her workout, the socialite slipped her lithe pins into a pair of patent black leather trousers. Petra kept up the casual vibe with her monochrome trainers as she chatted away on her mobile phone. Clutching onto a smoothie, the blonde beauty let her tresses fall in natural waves. The star carried a chic black snakeskin bag in the crook of her arm. Concentrating: Getting glam after her workout, the socialite slipped her lithe pins into a pair of patent black leather trousers Petra - seemingly flanked by a security guard - made sure to accentuate her natural beauty with plenty of mascara along with a smokey eye shadow and taupe lip. Her outing comes a few weeks after she was awarded sole custody of her three children following her divorce battle with ex-husband James Stunt. In late January, Petra was given has sole custody of four-year-old Lavinia and two-year-old twins James and Andrew. Happier times: In late January, Petra was given has sole custody of four-year-old Lavinia and two-year-old twins James and Andrew from her husband James Stunt Petra's father Bernie Ecclestone branded his daughter's billionaire ex 'an idiot' after she was granted permission to quit Britain and move to Los Angeles with her children. The Formula One boss said James Stunt 'used to be an honourable person' as he welcomed the decision of a judge to allow his daughter Petra to emigrate to the US. A judge told Petra that she would have sole custody of the three children she had with ex-husband James. Family drama: A judge told Petra that she would have sole custody of the three children and was granted permission to quit Britain and move to Los Angeles with her children But the Central Family Court in London ruled that an agreement had been reached that Mr Stunt could 'spend time with the children'. In a brief public statement, Her Honour Judge Gillian Brasse told the court: 'There have been lengthy proceedings in relation to the arrangements following the preceding divorce of Petra and Mr Stunt. 'The financial matters between them were agreed last year. Also an agreement at the end of last year that Miss Ecclestone could relocate to Los Angeles with her children was agreed.' Expensive divorce: Petra and James had been expected to fight over their 158million mansion in Los Angeles and a Grade II-listed home in London's Chelsea, worth up to 100million Her Honour Judge Brasse added: 'After a hearing I've ordered that the children will live with their mother Miss Ecclestone and I will make an order as to how much time they can spend with their father.' The warring former couple of Petra and James had been back and forth to court for 12 months while they geared up for the 5.5billion divorce battle. But when their legal teams came before a judge in October, it emerged lawyers had agreed what is believed to be one of Britain's biggest ever divorce settlements. Petra and James had been expected to fight over their 158million mansion in Los Angeles and a Grade II-listed home in London's Chelsea, worth up to 100million. At a hearing last year, a court was told James had signed a prenuptial agreement worth 16million. She recently confessed her teenage son Damian, 15, takes some of her sexy bikini photographs shared with her 845,000 Instagram followers. And Elizabeth Hurley, 52, stripped down to her bright blue two-piece once again and she treated her fans to a raunchy Instagram boomerang on social media on Friday. Hugh Grant's ex-girlfriend struggled to contain her sensational cleavage in her skimpy bikini top, which featured golden clips on the straps for a hint of sparkle. Amazing: Elizabeth Hurley, 52, paraded her age-defying figure in bright blue bikini on Friday after The Royals star confessed her son Damian, 15, takes her racy pictures Pulling out all the stops, the stunning model twirled to best showcase her fabulous figure in her eye-catching two-piece. Youthful Elizabeth exuded confidence as she kept her arms in the air, which best displayed her very flat stomach in the social media post. Proving she's not camera shy, the Bedazzled star wowed when she worked every angle and she flashed a glimpse of her peachy derriere in front of the lens. Elizabeth captioned the Instagram post, 'Twirling in my new bikini @elizabethhurleybeach.' Youthful: The 52-year-old star exuded confidence as she kept her arms in the air, which best displayed her very flat stomach in the social media post She's got confidence: Proving she's not camera shy, the Bedazzled star wowed when she worked every angle and she flashed a glimpse of her peachy derriere in front of the lens The brunette's saucy snaps come after Christine Lampard sympathised with Elizabeth's son Damian after the model revealed he takes all her sexy bikini pictures. Speaking on Thursday's episode of ITV's Lorraine, the WAG reasoned: 'He probably [feels embarrassed] Hes 15 its like "oh mum, not again!"' She added: 'It's Very odd, very odd. Stick with your friends to take those pictures'. Elizabeth revealed her son acted as her photographer after uploading a series of sizzling holiday snaps of herself braless and in a bikini for Valentine's Day. 'Colour splash': Elizabeth wowed for the camera in a black and white snap while her busty assets where highlighted in a bold, bright blue bikini Smokin' hot! The model also treated her followers to another image, with the same filter, which saw her putting all focus on her eye-popping front in a bright red two-piece The model, who rose to fame at 29 with her Estee Lauder cosmetics campaign, stunned her 833,000 followers with the suggestive images, but some were unsure how to take her confession, with several branding the relationship 'weird'. According to The Sun, she said: '[Damian] definitely takes some, but I do have other friends that I can torture for some too.' Damian, who was brought up in Gloucester by his mother and her then-partner Arun Nayar, has followed in her footsteps to become an actor. Shocked: This comes after Christine Lampard sympathised with Elizabeth's son after the model revealed he takes all her sexy bikini pictures The rising star has secured roles in Australian soap Neighbours and American drama The Royals. His father is American businessman and film producer Steve Bing, who denied paternity when Damian was born in 2002. He claimed he and Hurley had a 'brief, non-exclusive' relationship the year before, but a DNA test proved he was the father. Hugh Grant, a former flame of Hurley's, is Damian's godfather. Commenting on the unusual mother-son photography set up, 15-year-old George Conroy said: 'I'd be shocked and weirded out if my mum asked me to take a sexy bikini shot of her' He told the newspaper: 'Do Damian and Liz agree when a shot is sexy enough? How would they even judge that together? 'Even thinking about having that kind of chat with my mum makes me feel awkward.' Of her beach escapades, she added: 'I've been in the business for a really long time so my body is something I have to take care of and think about all the time. I use as much cream as possible on it.' She made shocking allegations against ex Jeremy McConnell on Wednesday. But Stephanie Davis was still smiling on Friday as she donned tight black leisurewear after leaving a gym session in Liverpool. The 24-year-old star flashed a beaming smile as she headed home, following her explosive revelations that ex Jeremy 'crushed a broken glass and hit her' in an exclusive interview with MailOnline. Still smiling: Stephanie Davis, 24, showed off her gym-honed physique in black leisurewear as she left a fitness session in Liverpool on Friday Stephanie sporting a clingy black T-shirt over matching tracksuit bottoms with a pink trim as she left the gym, keeping cool as she tied a hoodie round her waist. The former Hollyoaks star wore her dark tresses out of the way in a messy up-do, finishing off her look with black trainers and a red cross-body bag. Keeping her make-up as flawless as ever, Stephanie looked like she had barely broken a sweat as she exited the gym. Stephanie stunned fans on Wednesday when she revealed the true extent of Jeremy's domestic violence, telling MailOnline he 'crushed a broken glass and hit her.' The beauty added that she would never reunite with her former flame, despite being parents to son Caben-Albi. Glowing: The mother-of-one showed off her incredible figure in black tracksuit bottoms and a tight t-shirt, following her explosive revelations about ex Jeremy McConnell Trim: Stephanie tied her black hoodie around her waist as she exited the gym, keeping her dark tresses out of the way in a messy updo On point: Stephanie still sported flawless make-up, looking like she had barely broken a sweat Her revelations came after Jeremy claimed Stephanie begged him to visit her home and said she still loved him in a barrage of emails, despite having a restraining order against him. She said: 'It's complete rubbish, I responded to him not the other way round. 'For so long I felt like I didn't have a voice because I was too scared to speak out but I'm not going to be silent any longer. Stephanie also revealed that after an argument, Jeremy grabbed her hand as she held a glass of cola. Using his strength, he cupped her hand with his and smashed the glass so shards sliced into her fingers. Tense: Stephanie made explosive allegations about ex Jeremy's abuse of her in an exclusive interview with MailOnline on Wednesday Fighting on: In the interview Stephanie revealed that Jeremy crushed a broken glass and hit her, resulting in her having to have tendons repaired in her hand She recalled: 'I yelped out in pain and instinctively threw my hand into the air and as I did so I accidentally caught Jeremy in the face. 'He always bruises easily because of his high cheek bones and he was left with a black eye, which he later posted images of on social media to get attention. 'Meanwhile I'm standing there with blood dripping out my hand, shaking in shock and fright. 'He'd deliberately broken the glass as I held it and then rubbed the shattered glass into my hand. Never happening: Stephanie added that she would never get back together with Jeremy following his behaviour Fitness bunny: The former Hollyoaks star shares son Caben-Albi with son Jeremy 'Two of my fingers on my right hand just fell because he'd cut the tendons. I had to wear a cast and a splint afterwards but I used to wear long sleeved tops to cover it so photographers couldn't see. That was to protect him.' Stephanie then revealed an image of her recovering from the injuries in hospital for the first time, with the former Celebrity Big Brother star then revealing the attack was not a one-off. She said Jeremy would fly into cocaine-induced rages and accuse her of cheating on him when I reality it was the other way round. Battered: Stephanie shared this snap following her interview, saying Jeremy's abuse of her landed her in hospital Happier times: The couple had a turbulent on-off relationship for several months, before splitting for good in 2017 Stephanie said: 'He would hit his head with his fist when we argued, it was like he was getting his frustration out that way. My home is full of dents and cracks because he would then start smashing up the furniture. 'He has scars on his wrist and his neck because when things got really bad, he'd cut himself in front of me. It was emotional blackmail. I was always accused of sleeping around because he was paranoid on cocaine but he was the one doing the dirty. He even admitted cheating on me during an Irish TV chat show.' The couple split in May 2016 but Stephanie fell pregnant with their first child. Their son, Caben-Albi George was born in January 2017 while Jeremy was in Thailand on a lads holiday. Denial: Jeremy hit back at the claims on Twitter, posting that Stephanie is a 'compulsive liar' Jeremy hit out at the claims on Twitter, posting: 'Have to honestly laugh at this human, when was she blonde with caben? She is a compulsive liar with that mother and aunt of hers there poison all because I was going on ex on the beach, I've all the back up I need to clear my name for anyone to think I laid a finger on her.' Jeremy continued: 'Her mum and aunt stood up in court and lied through there Teeth I will get justice, and as stupid as I was for never getting her done for the numerous times she attacked me , its pathetic people being brain washed on this 'I do know it shouldnt be public for important reasons, there is only so much you can watch and that is printed for caben to see when he is older I have to defend myself through articles at this stage ,its sick whats taking place and people are enabling that person, Its LIES'. Kourtney Kardashian took a wild ride on a mechanical bull at a SoCal bar, likely Saddle Ranch Chop House, for her gal pal Virginia's birthday bash on Thursday night. The 37-year-old mother-of-three - who boasts 99.7M social media followers - shared an Insta-story of herself straddling the swaying hot seat, but not falling off it. The 98lb Calabasas socialite was still wearing the black Unravel FW/18 disco pants selected by her stylist Dani Michelle that she rocked at an earlier screening of Black Panther at Edwards Calabasas Stadium 6. Scroll down for video Weee! Kourtney Kardashian took a wild ride on a mechanical bull at a SoCal bar, likely Saddle Ranch Chop House, for her gal pal Virginia's birthday bash on Thursday night Ride 'em, cowgirl! The 37-year-old mother-of-three - who boasts 99.7M social media followers - shared an Insta-story of herself straddling the swaying hot seat, but not falling off it Spandex trousers: The 98lb Calabasas socialite was still wearing the black Unravel FW/18 disco pants selected by her stylist Dani Michelle In a preview for this Sunday's episode of Keeping Up with the Kardashians, Kourtney revealed she was considering having her eggs frozen for a possible IVF treatment in the future. 'What if I want a kid in the next 10 years? Wouldn't you rather have the insurance, like, sitting there? Janet Jackson just did it!' Kardashian told her baffled sisters Kim and Khloe. 'I'm saying if I am, like, in love and the person wants to have a kid...If I wanted to have it with my situation right this second, I would take out my IUD and I would get to work. Yay or nay? In a preview for this Sunday's Keeping Up with the Kardashians, Kourtney revealed she was considering having her eggs frozen for a possible IVF treatment in the future Kardashian told her baffled sisters Kim and Khloe: 'What if I want a kid in the next 10 years? Wouldn't you rather have the insurance, like, sitting there? Janet Jackson just did it!' She added: 'I'm saying if I am, like, in love and the person wants to have a kid...If I wanted to have it with my situation right this second, I would take out my IUD and I would get to work. But I don't need to. Right now, I'm good' 'But I don't need to. Right now, I'm good. [But] what if I want my love to come into the world?' Khloe figured the half-Armenian beauty was referring to her relationship with 24-year-old boxer-turned-model Younes Bendjima, whom she'd been romancing as far back as October 2016 when they met in Paris. The University of Arizona grad already has her hands full with - Mason, 8; Penelope, 5; and Reign, 3 - from her nine-year on/off relationship with Scott Disick, whom she split with in 2015. Keeping Up With The Kardashians airs Sundays at 9pm on hayu, Stream Mondays in the UK and Ireland. She recently dyed her hair hair to a very similar shade to her boyfriend's ex. Now it appears Sofia Richie is dressing like Kourtney Kardashian too. The 19-year-old stepped out on Thursday night in almost the EXACT same one Scott Disick's ex Kourtney wore earlier that day. Single white female! Sofia Richie rocked almost EXACT same outfit as boyfriend Scott Disick's ex Kourtney Kardashian on Thursday night The teen arrived at the Issey Miyake Launch Party at Milk Studios in Los Angeles in a long black leather jacket, black top and black trousers. Coincidentally, 36-year-old Kourtney had been photographed in a very similar ensemble en route to the movie theatre to watch Black Panther with brother-in-law Kanye West. While Kourtney provided Scott with his three children, Sofia revealed on Thursday night that they had started their own family too. 'He wanted the dog for a while, but he ended up surprising me with it,' she told PEOPLE of her new spotted Wiener dog. Brunette beauty! Sofia arrived to the event in a long leather coat and strappy black heels OG: Coincidentally, 36-year-old Kourtney had been photographed in a very similar ensemble earlier that day The couple wound up co-naming their new puppy Hershela. 'Her names [Hershela],' she shared with the media outlet. 'My boyfriend named herI kind of just ran with it. It made me laugh. I liked Hershey and he liked Hershela, so it was like a middle ground.' She couldn't help but gush over her new blue-eyed baby. 'I am obsessed with Wiener dogs, so Ive just been sitting at home staring at her all day like a psychopath,' she joked. 'I think this is like my first proper outing since I got her.' Puppy! While Kourtney provided Scott with his three children, Sofia revealed on Thursday night that they had started their own family too Sofia arrived to the event in a long-line black leather jacket and strappy heels. She carried a black clutch that she tucked under her arm to pose with a bottle of perfume. Scott did not accompany her to the launch party. 'My boyfriend named herI kind of just ran with it. It made me laugh. I liked Hershey and he liked Hershela, so it was like a middle ground,' she shared with PEOPLE Absent! Scott didn't accompany Sofia to the launch party on Thursday night Just days ago, Kim Kardashian was spotted on social media smooching the pooch. 'I just wanna clarify one thing, that is not my dog, it's Scott's and Penelope's dog... so, not mine,' she said in her snap. But that seems to only be half true. A source told Hollywood Life that 'Kims pretty much gone against Kourtneys wishes' and given the couple her stamp of approval.' Puppy love! Kim Kardashian was spotted on social media smooching the new pooch. A source told Hollywood Life that she has been hanging out with the couple on occasion After nine months of dating, Scott and Sofia have grown close. The daughter of Lionel Richie has even spent time with Disick's three children whom he shares with Kourtney Kardashian - Mason, eight, Penelope, five, and Reign, three. 'I just think he's the male version of me,' she told E! News in an interview. 'We have very similar humor.' Heating up! After nine months of dating, Scott and Sofia have grown rather close. She has even spent time with Disick's three children whom he shares with Kourtney KardashianMason, eight, Penelope, five, and Reign, three New member: Sofia added a new puppy to her mix after welcoming one last week Puppylove: The golden pooch had kind eyes as he or she slept in his or her kennel Playmates: The puppies seemed to hit it off immediately She is no stranger to showing off her incredible figure. But Bar Rafaeli chose a more casual look on Friday for the Milan Fashion Week Alevi' presentation, donning acid blue jeans over a sharp shirt and blazer look. The 32-year-old Israeli supermodel sported similar jeans to that of her fashion pal Joan Smalls, 29, who teamed hers with a matching cropped jacket. Looking good: Models Bar Rafaeli, 32, (left) and Joan Smalls, 29, (right) sported matching acid denim on Friday as they attended the Milan Fashion Week Alevi presentation Bar teamed her frayed boyfriend jeans with a sharp white shirt and velvet blazer, accessorising with a matching black clutch bag and gold strappy heels. The mother-of-two kept her blonde hair out of the way in a classic high bun, only adding a simple pair of gold hoops to finish the look. Bar looked amazing just a few months after giving birth to daughter Elle, her second child with husband of two years Adi Ezra. Chic: Israeli model Bar teamed her pale blue denim jeans with a stylish black velvet blazer and white shirt, accessorising with a matching leather clutch bag Strike a pose! Bar added to her slim model figure in gold strappy heels, styling her blonde hair into a chic high bun Dynamic duo: Bar was also seen posing up a storm with Saudi Arabian film producers Mohammed Al Turki Style squad: Bar also posed with fellow fashion stars Valentina Michetti and Afef Jnifen who looked equally glamorous at the style showcase Denim queen: Puerto Rican model Joan Smalls showed off her slim figure in a matching jeans and jacket combo, adding to her look with a quirky pink rain mac Stylish: Stunning Joan showed off her tiny waist with a white tee tucked into her jeans, accessorising with a pink handbag Meanwhile Puerto-Rican model Joan sported similar jeans to highlight her slim waist, though she teamed her distressed denim with a simple white tee. The Victoria's Secret star chose a more casual look, sporting a pink plastic rain mac under a cropped denim jacket, matching the coat with her small pink handbag. Joan kept her brown tresses styled into an effortlessly flicked look, highlighting her complexion with just a simple smoky eye and defined brows. Terrific trio: Joan was also seen posing with Valentina and Perla Alessandri Bright: German model Lorena Rae stood out in a mustard yellow blouse which flashed just a hint of her toned abs along with black tapered trousers Cool look: The stunning beauty styled her brown-blonde hair into relaxed curls Dramatic display: Valentina was also spotted at the vent with model Stella Maxwell, who donned a large overcoat as part of her all-black look Just the back? Stella sported a black overcoat and chunky pearl-studded boots as she made her arrival at the presentation Joan was seen posing up a storm with fellow fashion stars Valentina Michetti and Perla Alessandri who rocked extremely glamorous matching looks. Valentina sported long red velvet dress and matching shoes, while Perla donned a quirky white starred top and a gold paperbag-style skirt. It was star-studded affair for the latest installment of Milan Fashion Week, as German beauty Lorena also made a statement in a bright mustard blouse. The former rumoured girlfriend of actor Leonardo Dicaprio teamed the bright top with stylish black tapered trousers, keeping her blonde ombre looks loosely curled. Hugs! Valentina sported a long red velvet dress as she posed with Tunisian model Afef Jnifen Muted: Afef sported an all-black look, teaming a simple blouse with a leather skirt and leopard-print heels Stylish: Joan looked super chic in her double denim ensemble Making a statement: Joan layered up in a sheer pink mackintosh, pulling the hood up He is best known for his action man roles. And it seems like Colin Farrell is also a man of action when it comes to his lovelife. The 41-year-old actor packed on the PDA with his girlfriend Kelly McNamara while heading to lunch in Los Angeles on Thursday. Sweet smooch: Colin Farrell packed on the PDA with his girlfriend Kelly McNamara while heading to lunch in Los Angeles on Thursday The Phone Booth actor could not keep his lips off of his stunning girlfriend as he planted a kiss on her while walking with her through the trendy Los Feliz neighborhood. It seemed to be a relaxed day for the duo as they both rocked comfortable chic looks while out and about. Colin kept it casual in a blue denim jacket over a black T-shirt, Adidas track pants, and brown suede military boots. All love: the 41-year-old actor had his arm around his ladylove on the stroll Chill: It seemed to be a relaxed day for the duo as they both rocked comfortable chic looks while out and about Nice: The Phone Booth actor could not keep his lips off of his stunning girlfriend as he planted a kiss on her while walking with her through the trendy Los Feliz neighborhood The Lobster actor accessorized with a grey knit scarf and black designer shades as his short hair was disheveled. Kelly looked good in a long black coat over matching leggings and Vans Old Skool low tops. She also wore a pair of designer shades while juggling a hot coffee and holding hands with her man. Dapper: Colin kept it casual in a blue denim jacket over a black T-shirt, Adidas track pants, and brown suede military boots Rocking it: The Lobster actor accessorized with a grey knit scarf and black designer shades as his short hair was disheveled Matchy matchy: Both wore designer shades Her brunette tresses were pulled back in a messy bun as she let her natural looks show by going make-up free. The two have been in each other's lives for quite some time as they have been dating on and off for the past few years. Late last year, Colin gushed about Kelly during an appearance on the Ellen show, saying: 'My girlfriend she travels a lot as well with work so often times we're two ships passing in the night. But we make sure to find a port that we can, you know, rendezvous at.' Balancing act: His girlfriend juggled a hot coffee and holding hands with her man Relaxed: Kelly looked good in a long black coat over matching leggings and Vans Old Skool low tops Natural beaut: Her brunette tresses were pulled back in a messy bun as she let her natural looks show by going make-up free When asked by Ellen if she was in the business, the star said that she is not, before explaining: 'She travels a lot in her work and she works very hard. But yeah, It's been quite awhile now.' The former hell-raising actor later said that he 'adored' his stunning partner. Although Colin did not mention her name, the Irish Mirror revealed his beau to be part of U2's management staff Kelly McNamara. According to W magazine, the couple have been dating for two years. In the past, Colin has reportedly been romantically linked with such high-profile celebrities as Britney Spears, Demi Moore, Lindsay Lohan and Angelina Jolie. She has spent the past few weeks abroad working on a high-fashion photo shoot for her latest clothing collection. But Michelle Keegan appeared delighted to be back in Manchester on Friday. The actress, 30, looked effortlessly stylish in a blush pink polo knit as she prepared to film scenes in her hometown. Home sweet home: Michelle Keegan, 30, appeared delighted to be back in her hometown, Manchester on Friday The Our Girl star paired the cosy jumper with jet black skinny jeans and opted for comfort with a pair of chic white trainers. She styled her glossy brunette tresses in soft curls and complemented the look with gold-rimmed sunglasses and a slick of pink lipstick. While it's not known what Michelle was filming, the former soap star beamed with happiness as she chatted to crew members before filming got under way. Cosy: The actress looked effortlessly stylish in a blush pink polo knit as she greeted a film crew Low-key figure: The Our Girl star paired the cosy jumper with jet black skinny jeans and opted for comfort with a pair of chic white trainers The brunette beauty made no secret about her delight of returning home to Manchester. Taking to Instagram on Thursday, Michelle posted a snap of her in the city's streets and captioned the shot: 'Honey I'm home'. Michelle has spent the past few months in LA to spend time with her husband Mark Wright, who relocated to the USA after landing a presenting role of the show Extra. After flying back to the U.K last week, she then jetted off abroad to model her latest collection for Very. Mega-watt smile: While it's not known what Michelle was filming, the former soap star beamed with happiness as she chatted to crew members before filming got under way Honey I'm home! The brunette beauty made no secret about her delight of returning home to Manchester Rumours have surfaced that Mark and Michelle are reportedly looking to settle down in California so he can be close to his TV work. According to the Daily Star, the loved-up couple are house hunting in the Hollywood Hills and have already viewed several properties in the star-studded region. Sources told the publication the couple have already set a budget of around 2m and have spotted several properties they might be interested in - with a rule that they must have at least three bedrooms for when they want to start a family. Back in her hometown :Taking to Instagram on Thursday, Michelle posted a snap of her in the city's streets and captioned the shot: 'Honey I'm home' Having a laugh: The former Coronation Street actress joked around with two female crew members ahead of filming Loved-up: Michelle has spent the past few months in LA to spend time with her husband Mark Wright, who relocated to the USA after landing a presenting role of the show Extra Amal Clooney revealed her young children would one day attend school in America, as she spoke out to publicly back the Never Again movement. Speaking at the Watermark Conference in San Jose on Friday, the international human rights lawyer said she and actor husband George would be joining the March For Our Lives in Washington on March 24. 'I'm blown away by these students,' said Amal, referring to the survivors of last week's Florida school shooting, which killed 17. 'They are the best vehicle and best hope for change... The march we're attending is their march. They give me hope.' 'They are our best hope': Amal Clooney praises Parkland survivors as she reveals her twins with husband George will go to school in America; she spoke at the Watermark Conference in San Jose on Friday Future plans: In her speech Amal also revealed that her infant children, twins Alexander and Ella, would be attending school in America In her speech Amal discussed the fact that her infant children, twins Alexander and Ella, would one day be attending school in America, according to the event's social media page. Saying that the two were 'lucky' to have that opportunity, she cautioned that their lives would depend upon change. Amal and George have already promised $500,000 to the Never Again movement, which was founded by the survivors of last week's shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Oprah Winfrey publicly matched the power couple's donation, sparking a flood of money from famous faces. Opinionated: Amal's speech also touched upon the current political scene in the U.S., although she did not mention Donald Trump by name Intense: Speaking of a worldwide human rights 'free speech crisis', she said she had 'seen the president praise some of the dictators who are most responsible for this kind of behavior' Amal's speech on Friday also touched upon the current political scene in the U.S., although she did not mention Donald Trump by name. Speaking of a worldwide human rights 'free speech crisis', she said she had seen the president 'praise some of the dictators who are most responsible for this kind of behavior'. The British-educated Lebanese-born lawyer also shared her advice for younger women, telling them: 'Be persistent. Follow your passion. It doesn't matter if you don't exactly know where you're going to end up.' Speaking out: Amal was in conversation with NPR host Kelly McEvers Making her point: Amal was speaking at the Watermark conference in San Jose Ideals: Amal had plenty to say at the conference Wow: George Clooney's wife caught the eye with her bright yellow and black dress which flattered her fabulous figure He is set to reveal his side of the story in a one-off Jeremy Kyle special. Jeremy McConnell will recount the chaos of the last two years to the TV host amid claims that he domestically abused his ex Stephanie Davis. However, Jeremy didn't look worried about the Jeremy Kyle-style grilling as he left filming with a big grin on his face. Not fazed? Jeremy McConnell, 27 was spotted grinning as he left filming for a tell-all interview with Jeremy Kyle on Friday Shock claims: His ex Stephanie Davis (pictured earlier this week) recently revealed to MailOnline that reality star McConnell battered her as she held her baby son - and crushed a glass into her hand during a blazing row Jeremy and Stephanie's relationship has never been far from the headlines since they met on Celebrity Big Brother in 2016. The ex-couple are parents to one-year-old Caben-Albi and Jeremy's role as his father will no doubt be questioned during the hour-long special. Jeremy is also likely to be quizzed on his alleged drug use and the claims made by Stephanie than he smashed glass into her hand among other shocking allegations. His side of the story: Jeremy will recount the chaos of the last two years to the TV host amid claims that he domestically abused his ex Stephanie Davis All black: Jeremy who wore an all black ensemble didn't look worried about the Jeremy Kyle-style grilling as he left filming with a big grin on his face joined by two companions Headlines: Jeremy and Stephanie's relationship has never been far from the headlines since they met on Celebrity Big Brother in 2016 Stephanie recently revealed to MailOnline that reality star McConnell battered her as she held her baby son - and crushed a glass into her hand during a blazing row. She allegedly suffered two severed tendons following the brutal attack and had to undergo surgery. Stephanie, 24, told of her ordeal after McConnell claimed she begged him to visit her home and said she still loved him in a barrage of emails, despite having a restraining order against him. Fatherly-role: The couple share one-year-old Caben-Albi and Jeremy's role as his father will no doubt be questioned during the hour-long special Drug use? Jeremy is also likely to be quizzed on his alleged drug use and the claims made by Stephanie than he smashed glass into her hand among other shocking allegations Speaking exclusively to MailOnline, she said McConnell contacted her first and insisted: 'It's complete rubbish, I responded to him not the other way round. 'The reason why I've always humoured him was because I've always been chasing that man I fell in love with on Big Brother. I always wanted to find that funny, charming guy but he is nothing but a narcissist and his mask slipped practically the moment we'd left the studio. 'When he got in touch blaming his problems on a drug addiction I wanted to believe him and did want to see him. Hospitalised: Stephanie recently revealed to MailOnline that reality star McConnell battered her as she held her baby son - and crushed a glass into her hand during a blazing row leaving her in hospital 'But this was before I went into rehab and I'm now so much more stronger and I've realised that I don't need him any more. He has always got off on controlling me and using me to find fame and now that he can no longer do that, he's hitting out in the media.' 'For so long I felt like I didn't have a voice because I was too scared to speak out but I'm not going to be silent any longer. McConnell was sentenced to 20 months in prison suspended for 12 months in August last year for a separate assault on Stephanie in March that year at their home in Liverpool. He has always denied assaulting the actress. Support: Jeremy hugged a woman who appeared to be a crew member as he stood outside of Media City in Manchester ahead of the interview with Jeremy Kyle Domestic abuse claims: Following an argument, McConnell grabbed Stephanie's hand as she held a glass of cola and smashed the glass so shards of glass sliced into her fingers - she claims Following an argument, McConnell grabbed Stephanie's hand as she held a glass of cola. Using his strength, he cupped her hand with his and smashed the glass so shards sliced into her fingers. She recalled: 'I yelped out in pain and instinctively threw my hand into the air and as I did so I accidentally caught Jeremy in the face. 'He always bruises easily because of his high cheek bones and he was left with a black eye, which he later posted images of on social media to get attention. Hold tight: Jeremy, who according to Stephanie would fly into cocaine-induced rages, holds the hand of a friend who has accompanied him to the interview 'Meanwhile I'm standing there with blood dripping out my hand, shaking in shock and fright. 'He'd deliberately broken the glass as I held it and then rubbed the shattered glass into my hand. 'Two of my fingers on my right hand just fell because he'd cut the tendons. I had to wear a cast and a splint afterwards but I used to wear long sleeved tops to cover it so photographers couldn't see. That was to protect him.' A shocking image of her recovering afterwards shows her lying in a hospital bed with the oxygen mask still attached. The bloody attack was not a one-off, however, as McConnell continued with his violent and controlling behaviour, according to Stephanie. She said he would fly into cocaine-induced rages and accuse her of cheating on him when I reality it was the other way round. The couple split in May 2016 but Stephanie fell pregnant with their first child. Their son, Caben-Albi George was born in January 2017 while McConnell was in Thailand on a lads holiday. For a time, the couple rekindled their romance but Stephanie said his violent temper was never far from the surface, she claimed. Candice Bergen still has her razor sharp wit. In the March issue of Architectural Digest, the 71-year-old actress was asked what the oldest thing in her house was. The writer was referring to the furniture. 'My husband!' cracked the veteran actress about spouse Marshall Rose, 80. Bergen is plugging her new Murphy Brown reboot. Jab: Candice Bergen still has her razor sharp wit. In the March issue of Architectural Digest, the 71-year-old actress was asked what the oldest thing in her house was. The writer was referring to the furniture. 'My husband!' cracked the veteran actress about spouse Marshall Rose, 80 The star also showed off her stunning home in the Hamptons neighborhood of Long Island, New York. She also posed with her daughter, Chloe Malle, whose father is the late film director Louis Malle. 'Poor Marsh. Im sure there are some antiques that are older than Marsh,' Chloe said about her stepfather. Her family: She also posed with her daughter, Chloe Malle, whose father is the late film director Louis Malle; seen in 2012 And she has become famous for painting famous pets. Her clients include Barbra Streisand and Lena Dunham. Now she is going back to the small screen. She won five Emmy Awards and two Golden Globes for her 10 seasons as the title character on CBS sitcom Murphy Brown, that wrapped 30 years ago. In demand: Now she is going back to the small screen. She won five Emmy Awards and two Golden Globes for her 10 seasons as the title character on CBS sitcom Murphy Brown, that wrapped 30 years ago Made headlines: CBS has ordered 13 episodes of the show, which kicked off in 1988 and wrapped a decade later Now Bergen is set to reprise her role as the hard-bitten TV journalist in the reboot, according to Deadline Hollywood on Wednesday. The legend will play Murphy Brown and executive produce the sitcom along with the original creator Diane English. CBS has ordered 13 episodes of the show, which kicked off in 1988 and wrapped a decade later. The show was known for its political satire and for reflecting current events, subjects ripe for coverage in this day and age. It famously was referenced by Vice President Dan Quayle in a speech during the 1992 presidential campaign, according to Deadline. Diane said she first discussed bringing Murphy Brown back with CBS in 2012, an election year. So close: The Sweet Home Alabama star with her only child in 2016 in NYC Talks started up again around the time of President Donald Trumps inauguration a year ago. As for Candice's Murphy, the investigative journalist and TV anchor at the FYI network will return to a very different world with cable news, social media, fake news and a changed political and cultural climate. Talks are also underway with other original cast members to return. Murphy Brown is the latest of the broadcast TV revivals from the 1980s and 1990s, joining NBC's Will & Grace and ABC's Roseanne, set to return on March 27. With his dishes such as snail porridge and egg-and-bacon ice cream, Heston Blumenthal loves creating unexpected delights for diners at his celebrated restaurants. Now, the television chef is serving up surprises in his personal life. I can disclose that Blumenthal, 51, has become the father of a baby with French estate agent Stephanie Gouveia, right. Heston Blumenthal, 51, has become the father of a baby with French estate agent Stephanie Gouveia Even some of his good friends didnt know Stephanie was pregnant, I am told. The child was born just a few months after his divorce from Zanna, 52, with whom he has three children. During their marriage, he had an affair with American cookery writer Suzanne Pirret, who has said her favourite things are food and sex. Blumenthals spokesman tells me: I can confirm Heston and Stephanie have had a child at the end of last year, but we wont be giving any further information. (Very) Modern Manners Is it acceptable for a husband to advertise for companionship? Boris Johnsons brother-in-law Ivo Dawnay thinks so. The National Trust creative director has paid for a notice in the New York Review of Books under the headline: Adventure sought. Describing himself as a jaded, 60-something journalist, the husband of Celebrity Big Brother contestant Rachel Johnson says hes keen to do something, anything, before rendezvous with Grim Reaper. Dawnay, 65, says: Anything considered and companionship welcome, preferably somewhere warm if not tropical. Research, reporting, Princess-rescue or any other task, preferably legal, considered. If you are bored, share your ideas. Come too. Amiable Ivo tells me the response so far has been rather disappointing. Devasted after her father Ewan McGregor abandoned her mother, Eve, for a co-star 13 years his junior, Clara McGregor, pictured with her dad, has some cheering news in her own love life. The 22-year-old model is seeing music producer Jimmy Giannopoulos, 37. We met through friends, she tells me. Hes met part of my family. Jimmy is best known as half of the musical duo Lolawolf, with rocker Lenny Kravitzs daughter, Zoe. Until last summer, Jimmy was in a relationship with Sean Penns actress daughter, Dylan. They split after Jimmy was photographed being shouted at outside a New York cafe by Hollywood star Penn and Dylans mother, the House Of Cards actress Robin Wright. Charles's aide and a very odd friendship One is Prince Charless controversial but indispensable retainer and former valet, the other is socialite Petra Ecclestones ex-husband known for his flamboyant lifestyle. While royal courtier Michael Fawcett, 55, right, and James Stunt, far right the 36-year-old godson of former criminal gang boss Terry Adams would not appear to have much in common, I hear that they have become close chums. So close, indeed, that discussions have been held about Stunt lending works from his art collection to display at Dumfries House, Charless stately home in Scotland which Fawcett runs. Royal courtier Michael Fawcett, 55, left, James Stunt would not appear to have much in common, I hear that they have become close chums The move would be extraordinary as Charles is the heir to the largest private art collection in the world and would seem to have little need for more paintings. However, Kenneth Dunsmuir, executive director of Dumfries House Trust, confirms it accepts loans from donors who prefer to remain anonymous. Stunts ostentatious habits, such as being driven round London in a cavalcade of luxury cars, annoyed his former father-in-law, ex-Formula One boss Bernie Ecclestone, but perhaps they appeal to Fawcett. After all, Charles is hardly known for his frugality. When Samantha Cameron had the audacity to put a jar of Hellmans on the table alongside a roast chicken during a get-to-know-you dinner at 10 Downing Street, Sir Nick Cleggs wife, Miriam, publicly criticised the then Prime Ministers better half for failing to make her own mayonnaise. Now, Lady Clegg has admitted that she, too, sometimes falls back on processed foods. The highly paid Spanish lawyer used a Betty Crocker cake mixture for her son Miguels birthday this week. Swamped with work and cheating my way to my sons ninth birthday cake, Miriam confessed online. How on earth is it possible that despite my feminist credentials I still feel guilty about doing this? Pity she didnt think of that before shaming SamCam. He's the X-Files actor who surprised fans with his 2015 album Hell or Highwater. And now David Duchovny has revealed the real reason he decided to get into music. Speaking to The Daily Telegraph's BW Magazine the 57-year-old said it all started when he 'one day just picked up a guitar and didn't look back'. Scroll down for video 'I never set out to be a rock star': X-Files star David Duchovny reveals the truth behind his decision to become a musician in his mid-50s - despite never singing before in his life David is currently touring Australia for his second album, Every Third Thought. The veteran actor told the publication he never dreamed the hobby would see him performing to sold out crowds. 'I didn't set out to be a rock star,' he said, adding that while he 'never really sang in public' once he began he found it hard to stop. The actor also revealed that it took him a while before he was comfortable performing live as he never believed he had the chops to captivate a crowd. 'I eventually realised people don't come to shows to hear you hit all the notes,' he said. Musical journey: David Duchovny has revealed the real reason he decided to get into music saying it all started when he 'one day just picked up a guitar and didn't look back' Accidental: 'I didn't set out to be a rock star,' he said, adding that while he 'never really sang in public' once he began he found it hard to stop 'They come to have a good time, to hear songs and to hear it live'. He's called the process from first picking up that guitar to performing his music a live a 'very personal one''. David made the foray into music by playing guitar after splitting up with his wife, Madam Secretary star Tea Leoni, with whom he shares two children with. New career: David made the foray into music by playing guitar after splitting up with his wife, Madam Secretary star Tea Leoni (seen), with whom he shares two children with Hitting the right notes: 'I had more time on my hands and the need to get something out to commiserate musically with myself, in a way and give myself something positive to do,' he said In an interview with The San Diego Union-Tribune, he said that his divorce from the actress and time away from his kids gave him more free time to pick up the guitar. 'I had more time on my hands and the need to get something out to commiserate musically with myself, in a way and give myself something positive to do,' he said. In a 2015 interview with Rolling Stone, his vocal prowess was compared to The National front-man Matt Berninger. FBI turned musician: The X-Files actor said that before recently picking up a guitar he had never heard himself sing (pictured with co-star Gillian Anderson) 'If my voice sounds like anybody, I take it as a compliment,' he said. 'With singing, I just wanted to have some sense of when I open my mouth, what the f*** is gonna come out? It's not natural to me,' David added. David Duchovny will play Sydney's Metro Theatre on Saturday night before traveling to Wollongong, Newscastle and Brisbane. The Gypsy actress was honored at the 53rd annual Golden Camera Awards in Hamburg, Germany on Thursday night. She accepted the prestigious prize for Best International Actress. After a long flight back to the United States, Naomi Watts, 49, arrived in NYC on Friday afternoon in a tailored black ensemble that included a fancy fedora. Scroll down for video Traveling light! Naomi Watts was honored at the 53rd annual Golden Camera Awards in Germany on Thursday night. She arrived back in NYC on Friday afternoon Watts strolled through the airport pushing a carry on and one personal item. She donned a pair of high-waisted dress pants that boasted a single white stripe down the legs. Tucked into her pants was a plain black tee that she layered with a tailored black blazer. The actress tried to keep a low profile in heavily-tinted sunglasses and a wide-brim fedora. Brimming with beauty! The King Kong actress donned a pair of high-waisted dress pants that boasted a single white stripe down the legs The 49-year-old Australian beauty shared the red carpet on Thursday night with Scottish actor Ewan McGregor, 46, who would walk away with the top gong for Best International Actor. Naomi was the picture of elegance in a floor-length pink gown, which featured dainty floral embroidery and glittering beads. Her neckline plunged daringly low to offset the ladylike nature of her dress. Ethereal: Naomi Watts sparkled at Thursday night's Golden Camera Awards (Die Goldene Kamera), at which she collected one of the night's top gongs Ravishing: Elegant Naomi wore a beaded gown with a deep plunge in the front The King Kong star attended London Fashion Week before traveling on to Paris and Germany. She was spotted with her rumored beau Billy Crudup, 49, as they left the Vogue Fashion and Film post-BAFTAs party together. The Gypsy co-stars got close while filming the Netflix series and a source confirmed to PEOPLE in July that the pair were 'dating' in real life. Tisha Campbell-Martin reportedly wants her estranged husband of 20 years, Duane Martin, to pay up in new divorce documents. The 49-year-old Martin alum - who filed on Thursday in Los Angeles court - is seeking spousal support as well as physical and legal custody of their sons Xen, 16; and Ezekiel, 8; according to TMZ. The Film Independent Spirit nominee technically separated from the 52-year-old Daytime Emmy nominee in December 2016. Scroll down for video Not amicable: Tisha Campbell-Martin reportedly wants her estranged husband of 20 years, Duane Martin, to pay up in new divorce documents (pictured in 2014) 'After 27 years of being together and two amazing children, it pains me to announce that I've filed for divorce,' Tisha said in a statement. 'It's an emotional time and I graciously ask for privacy for me, our children and the rest of our family.' Despite one relationship ending, perhaps another one will be coming back together as she and co-stars Martin Lawrence and Tichina Arnold were seen outside a Burbank Morton's Steakhouse last month. Emerging from the restaurant, the trio chatted with TMZ, and when the possibility of reviving the show came up, Martin, 52, said: 'Never say never.' Filed Thursday: The 49-year-old Martin alum is seeking spousal support as well as physical and legal custody of their sons Xen, 16; and Ezekiel, 8 (pictured in 2015) It's over: The Film Independent Spirit nominee technically separated from the 52-year-old Daytime Emmy nominee in December 2016 (pictured in 2005) Tisha said in a statement: 'After 27 years of being together and two amazing children, it pains me to announce that I've filed for divorce. It's an emotional time and I graciously ask for privacy for me, our children and the rest of our family'(pictured in 2003) He clarified that 'we don't know nothing right now, but never say never.' When they were pressed further, 48-year-old Tichina offered the vague: 'Well, within life, there's always new beginnings, and there's always change, and there's always new plateaus where we have to reach, so we'll see what's happening.' Tisha, 49, vamped to the camera: 'We can't tell y'all s***.' Laughing, Tichina said: 'See, I was gonna put it a little more eloquently.' Throwback: Tisha and Martin starred as couple Martin and Gina on the sitcom from 1992 to 1997 Before the original series came to an end in 1997, it had been beset with scandal, with Tisha suing her leading man. Tisha accused Martin of sexual harassment and abuse and left the show, returning with the proviso that she and he would not have scenes together. Yet Martin - who denied the allegations at the time - and Tisha seem to have patched their friendship up, and appeared in cheerful spirits with Tichina this Thursday. During their interview with TMZ, the three of them mulled aloud what a potential revival of Martin - which originally ran from 1992 to 1997 - could look like. 'Well, I don't think we have to do it the same way': Said Martin: 'I just think we have to be funny and we have to be entertaining and give people heartfelt stories' 'It's still gonna be fun': Tisha added that a hypothetical new version of Martin would offer 'the truth,' which is to say 'Evolution' Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps: Martin himself has clarified that 'we don't know nothing right now, but never say never' 'Well, I don't think we have to do it the same way,' said Martin. 'I just think we have to be funny and we have to be entertaining and give people heartfelt stories.' 'And the truth,' added Tisha. Asked what the truth is, Tisha specified: 'I think, evolution. Evolution, you know? It's still gonna be fun,' she said, turning to Martin with a smile. 'Yeah,' said Martin, grinning back. 'But it's gonna be an evolution,' said Tisha, to which Martin concurred: 'That's right.' When the interviewer prodded them about whether a revived version of the sitcom would have a political angle, Tisha got a laugh by demanding: 'Why are you asking all this - didn't we just tell you, what - that we don't know?' 'We would definitely wanna be current,' said Tichina. 'You know, we're not trying to relive anything. We wanna give credence to the past, and to show how the past has evolved, and made us who we are.' She pointed out: 'We're blessed, because the '90s were a great time, and we would love to recreate it, just bring it back alive and give credence to it, and kinda tap into a place where people - ' 'We ain't telling y'all s***!' Tisha lightheartedly snapped at the camera. Nick Knowles' estranged wife recently hinted that she may have a new love interest. And it has since been revealed that Jessica Moor's new beau is 27-year-old RAF engineer, William Babbage. The couple allegedly met in Jessica's local pub four months ago and went on a string of dates while he was on leave. New beau: Nick Knowles' estranged wife Jessica Rose Moor, 30, has reportedly been dating William Baggage, 27, an RAF engineer, for four months. Jessica and Nick are pictured together in happier times William, who is 28 years younger than Nick, is believed to have already been introduced to the DIY SOS star. A source said: 'She is really happy. It's no secret that at times she has struggled with the split. 'But she gets on with Will like a house on fire,' reports the Sun. According to the source, Jessica's new love interest spends weekends at her place in Cheltenham. Moving quickly? William, who is 28 years younger than Jessica's ex Nick, 55, is believed to have already been introduced to the DIY SOS star MailOnline has contacted Jessica's spokesperson for comment. The blonde is in the midst of a bitter divorce battle with Nick Knowles, 55, who she has accused of 'emotional and physical abuse'. Jessica previously hinted she was in a new relationship, wishing a Happy Valentine's to a selection of her female friends, before going on to mention her 'actual Valentine'. Loved-up? Jessica previously hinted that she has a new man in her life as she shared a sweet Valentine's Day post In a clip, she teased 'Happy Valentine's Day to my actual Valentine!' '[My son] Eddie pipped you the post this morning at 7am and asked if I would be his Valentine but you never know... next year.' Jessica, 30 shares son Eddie, three, with estranged husband Nick, who she recently accused of subjecting her to 'years of intimidation, emotional and physical abuse', claims he strongly denied. Exes: Jessica and Nick had married in Rome in 2012 but announced their separation in January 2016, following almost four years of marriage Jessica and Nick had married in Rome in 2012 but announced their separation in January 2016, following almost four years of marriage. Their split was muddied by his fling with Emmerdale star Gemma Oaten and Jessica's shock cervical cancer diagnosis. Nick insisted at the time they were happily working on their marriage again and the pair were ensuring their son remained their priority, while Jessica had credited Nick for 'saving her life' following her cancer battle. In June 2016, Jessica had been diagnosed with stage one cervical cancer and had to have her cervix and pelvic lymph nodes removed. Celebrating: In a clip, the mother-of-one wished a Happy Valentine's to a selection of her female friends, before going on to mention her 'actual Valentine' The pair are in the midst of a divorce, with Jessica reportedly asking for more than 48,000 a year from him. According to The Sun, Jessica who is currently receiving 4,000 a month as part of their settlement, is demanding an extra 2,000 a month in order to fund their three-year-old son Eddie's education. 'Nick is distraught that Jessica has made these claims. She already gets 4,000 a month from him and he's funded her life for years,' a source told the publication. Former flames: Jessica previously credited Nick for 'saving her life' following her cancer battle. In June 2016, Jessica had been diagnosed with stage one cervical cancer Nick is reportedly refusing to pay Jessica the money and has said that he will pay Eddie's school the required fee directly. This comes after Jessica retaliated against her ex husband's response to her 'open letter about my divorce' posted on Twitter. In the long diatribe, she alleged 'years of emotional cruelty, physical abuse' by her husband as well as reportedly withdrawing their son Eddie from private education. However, sources close to the DIY SOS presenter denied the allegations - saying he 'only wants the best for his son'. Lisa Marie claimed that she is massively in debt to the tune of $16million amid divorce from Michael Lockwood. However her former flame believes that she is lying about what she owes. According to a Friday report from TMZ, the 56-year-old guitarist believes that 50-year-old Lisa Marie's math is incorrect. The site said that Lockwood said that his estranged wife claimed to be making $104,000 a month in 2016 while also claiming to owe the IRS $1.67million. Ouch:Lisa Marie claimed that she is massively in debt to the tune of $16million amid divorce from Michael Lockwood but he believes that she is lying about her debt according to TMZ He points out that would mean she owes more than she made in income in that year. The documents also state that she may have had an error in crunching the numbers when it came to the estate she owns in England which she previously claimed that she is way behind in mortgage payments for. Lockwood said it is still worth something, however, Presley left it out of her previous calculations. TMZ also reports that he is keeping up with his demand that she pay for his lawyer fees which total $450,000. TMZ reported last week that the 5daughter of Elvis Presley is drowning in debt to the tune of $16million. The discovery was made as the publication obtained divorce documents which detailed her financial deficit. According to the documents most of Presley's debt is from unpaid taxes from 2012 to 2015 which totals more than $10million. Duo: Lisa Marie is mom two kids - Riley Keough, 28, (pictured) and Benjamin Keough, 25 - with ex husband Danny Keough, Lisa Marie and Riley are pictured together back in October TMZ also reports that she has a house in the UK which she has been trying to sell because she is defaulted in the mortgage. The legal filing states that because of this that is another $6million owed. The former wife of Michael Jackson stated that the rest of the debt comes from credit cards and unpaid lawyer fees. This has all been brought to light as her estranged husband Michael Lockwood, 56, is demanding that she pay $450K for his attorney fees which she is claiming not to have. Last month TMZ reported that Lisa Marie, who is the only daughter of Elvis Presley, earns $4.2 million each year, which is about $350,000 per month. Lisa Marie filed for divorce in June 2016 after 10 years of marriage. They tied the knot in January 2006 in Kyoto, Japan; the former flames are parents to fraternal twin girls: Harper and Finley, nine. Lisa Marie is mom two kids - Riley Keough, 28, and Benjamin Keough, 25 - with ex husband Danny Keough. Ouch: According to the documents most of Presley's debt is from unpaid taxes from 2012 to 2015 which totals more than $10million According to The Wrap, she has already paid five installments from March until July of $10,000 to pay for his legal expenses - which was court ordered. She does not have to pay spousal support. They had signed a post nuptial agreement in 2007, which in January, Michael asked to get torn up. The document said that neither party, in the event of a divorce, will lay claim to the other person's assets. One month after his request, Lisa Marie claimed that he 'was discovered to have hundreds of inappropriate photos' allegedly on his computer and facing 'allegations of sexual abuse and neglect.' His lawyers have denied all of the allegations, according to People. The website adds that The Tennessee Bureau Of Investigation investigated the claims but didn't file any charges or open an official case. Fringe Test spinner Steve O'Keefe will return from a leg injury for NSW against Tasmania for their Sheffield Shield clash, starting on Saturday. O'Keefe, who was hurt in an innocuous fielding mishap during a Big Bash game on January 1, will replace injured quick Mickey Edwards at the SCG. He is one of three frontline spinners in the 14-man squad, joining Will Somerville and Dan Fallins, who claimed four wickets on debut in the last round. The Blues (27.54) sit third on the Shield ladder, just under five points behind first-placed Queensland (31.92), while Tasmania (29.14) are second. Tigers tweakers Jarrod Freeman and Mac Wright will travel to Sydney and are a chance to make their Shield debuts. Queensland have again named an unchanged side to play South Australia at the Adelaide Oval, with Joe Burns still recovering from a groin injury also sustained in the Big Bash. Australian T20 performers Aaron Finch and Glenn Maxwell will return for Victoria against Western Australia at the WACA, with Finch replacing Test squad member Peter Handscomb as captain. The pair replace Fawad Ahmed and Eamonn Vines in the side while Will Pucovski retains his place after notching 188, his maiden first-class century, against the Bulls in the last round. Less than nine points separate the six sides with three rounds remaining. THE WEEK AHEAD IN PARLIAMENT * House of Representatives is sitting over four days. * MPs will consider laws to make migrants wait longer for welfare payments, and cracking down on revenge porn. * Nationals party room will consider a motion on Monday brought by backbencher Andrew Broad for Barnaby Joyce to stand down as leader and from the frontbench. * No Senate sitting, but estimates hearings. * Question Time in the House is expected to focus on Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce, who has been on a week's personal leave in the wake of revelations his former staffer Vikki Campion is having his child. * Two state elections in Tasmania and South Australia and the Batman by-election in Victoria will put issues in these three states in the parliamentary spotlight. * The government has threatened to refer Labor MP Susan Lamb to the High Court over her UK citizenship, but is yet to act on it. * With the exit of George Brandis, Mathias Cormann will fend off Senate estimates questions from Labor's chief inquisitor Penny Wong. * Key topics for Senate estimates to include: Parliament House's security upgrade; MP expenses; the rollout of the new Home Affairs portfolio; the under-spend on roads; energy prices; Snowy Hydro 2.0; the Murray Darling Basin Plan; moving government agencies out of Canberra; Medicare; defence operations and spending; the economy and budget; and welfare reform. * Expert pot-stirrer, Nationals MP George Christensen, will seek parliament's support for a motion in favour of the Adani coal mine in Queensland, which he says will spark the creation of 15,000 jobs and improve the lives of Indians. Controversial Sydney businessman Salim Mehajer says prosecutors have reverted to "age-old stereotypes" by suggesting he was the co-ordinator of an alleged electoral fraud plot with his younger sister. Mehajer is fighting more than 100 charges relating to the 2012 election that saw him become a member of Auburn City Council. Magistrate Beverley Schurr on Thursday heard final submissions following a hearing held in 2017. Mehajer, 31, allegedly tried to influence the election - in which he and his sister Fatima Mehajer were both candidates - by submitting enrolment forms that gave false addresses in the Auburn area. Fatima Mehajer, now 28, was also prosecuted and previously pleaded guilty to 77 charges of giving false or misleading information. Commonwealth prosecutor Jeremy Rapke QC on Thursday said Salim Mehajer's desperation permeated the final written defence submissions which largely didn't address the evidence against him. Mr Rapke said the prosecution was excoriated in the submissions for reverting to "age-old stereotypes not consistent with this age" by alleging text messages between Mehajer and his sister identified him as the co-ordinator of the operation. The prosecutor suggested that no one familiar with all the evidence could conclude otherwise. Nonetheless, he said Mehajer was accused of acting as part of a criminal enterprise with his sister and it wasn't essential to determine if he was the protagonist to return a guilty verdict. A notion was also floated in the defence submissions that someone else could be responsible for forging documents and sending them to the Australian Electoral Commission, Mr Rapke said. But there was a large body of evidence pointing to Mehajer being the perpetrator. Defence lawyer Brett Galloway, who last month withdrew from another of Mehajer's matters citing an "ethical dilemma", made no oral submissions in court and said they would rely on their written submissions. The magistrate has reserved her decision until April 11 at Central Local Court. Mehajer, who's currently behind bars, has several scheduled court appearances in the meantime including a judgment on Friday over his alleged assault of a female television reporter and a NSW Supreme Court bail application in March. A Sydney magistrate has found former Auburn deputy mayor Salim Mehajer guilty of assaulting a female television reporter who was attempting to interview him. Mehajer had denied assaulting reporter Laura Banks in April 2017 when he slammed a car door on her arm as he left a Sydney CBD police station following his arrest over a separate alleged assault. At Downing Centre Local Court on Friday, magistrate Joanne Keogh found the 31-year-old guilty, saying he was reckless to the risk of harm when he closed the door. Barnaby Joyce wants to win the Nationals leadership vote and come away with some clear air. He won't get it. Even if Joyce wins on Monday - or doesn't even face a challenger - the scandal over his affair with staffer Vikki Campion will not go away. That's because at least two guaranteed events will bring the deputy prime minister's conduct and new relationship back into sharp focus. The first is Senate estimates hearings next week, where all of Joyce's expenses, his trips with Campion, staff appointments and his work as a minister will be heavily scrutinised. So far the Nationals leader has got away on technicalities. Technically, Campion was not his partner when she moved to Senator Matt Canavan's office, so, they didn't breach the ministerial code of conduct. Though they had been an item before the move, it is unclear whether they were still together, so he has skated through. And while Joyce says he didn't ask to be given a rent-free Armidale townhouse for six months, his rich businessman mate gave him one anyway. A minister asking for a gift is banned - but Joyce says he technically wasn't a minister at the time because he was a candidate fighting a by-election. Every technicality Joyce has relied on will be probed in forensic detail. The second guaranteed event is the birth of Joyce's new child, due in April. "The one thing that has deeply annoyed me is that there is somehow an inference that this child is somehow less worthy than other children, and it's almost spoken about in the third person," he told Fairfax during the week. "I don't want our child to grow up as some sort of public display. I have to stop it from the start. "It's a fact we are having a child, it's a fact it's a boy, it's not more or less loved than any of my other children." The mid-April birth will be news, there's no getting around it. Where will Joyce be in seven weeks? Still leader of the Nationals and deputy prime minister? Will it derail yet another week of the government's agenda? The third event that could keep Joyce in the headlines is any potential interview with his estranged wife Natalie. She has kept her silence - apart from a statement on the day the story broke - but some media outlets are reportedly courting her. "Natalie Joyce tells all" will guarantee headlines, if she decides to do it. And that's all without any further allegations coming to light, with Joyce denying the latest claims of sexual harassment. Joyce's story isn't going away unless he quits - which if you listened to Joyce on earlier scandals, he should have already done. In an interview in 2016 Joyce slammed Labor for letting scandals drag on, while coalition MPs had resigned. He was also reportedly "ruthless" in cabinet pushing Sussan Ley and Jamie Briggs to resign over their scandals. So why won't Joyce go? His colleagues still back him at this stage. Joyce's reputation is also on the line. He is only a step or two away from leaving politics as a "disgraced former MP". And money is also a factor. Joyce is on more than $400,000 a year as deputy PM, but he will be on half of that on the back bench. He's got two families to look after now. None of that matters to Malcolm Turnbull and the government, who are trying to push through new laws and business tax cuts while facing questions every day about Joyce. Perhaps the best summing up of Joyce's effect on the government comes from Joyce himself in December, when NSW deputy premier John Barilaro called on Turnbull to quit. "The worst possible insult in politics is you've done something unhelpful, worse than drowning a dog, worse than murder," Joyce said at the time about Barilaro's comments. "This is definitely in the category of very unhelpful." Joyce might want to reflect on those lines now. A former bouncer has been jailed for at least 16-and-a-half years for strangling his teenage bride whose body was buried in a shallow grave on a NSW beach more than two decades ago. Steve Frank Fesus, 47, was found guilty last year of murdering Jodie Fesus, 18, in August 1997 at their Shellharbour home on the NSW south coast before burying her body in a shallow grave at Seven Mile Beach, near Gerroa. In the NSW Supreme Court on Friday, Justice Peter Johnson jailed Fesus for 22 years, with a non-parole period of 16 years and six months. Yes, you can transfer your domain to any registrar or hosting company once you have purchased it. Since domain transfers are a manual process, it can take up to 5 days to transfer the domain. Domains purchased with payment plans are not eligible to transfer until all payments have been made. Please remember that our 30-day money back guarantee is void once a domain has been transferred. For transfer instructions to GoDaddy, please click here. A weekly round-up of news affecting your health: DEPRESSION Being kinder to oneself can lessen the link between perfectionism and depression, research has found. Perfectionists often push themselves harder than others to succeed, which can result in positive results, but can also cause problems. Perfectionism that involves self-criticism, concerns about making mistakes and concerns about being negatively evaluated by others has been linked to various mental disorders. This "maladaptive perfectionism" can lead to depression and burnout. An Australian study, published in the journal PLOS ONE has shown that being kind to oneself lessened this association between maladaptive perfectionism and depression. Researchers recruited about 500 teens from five Australian private schools and more than 500 adults by word of mouth, and the participants completed questionnaires to assess maladaptive perfectionism, depression and self-compassion. A higher score on the self-compassion scale moderated depression scores, the results showed. "Self-compassion, the practice of self-kindness, consistently reduces the strength of the relationship between maladaptive perfectionism and depression for both adolescents and adults," said lead author Madeleine Ferrari of Australian Catholic University. CANCER SURVIVORS A clinical trial has shown cancer survivors who take part in nutrition and physical activity intervention programs better maintain a long-term healthy lifestyle, which reduces their risk of the disease returning. Cancer Council NSW and the University of Newcastle this week released the results of a nutrition and physical activity trial for cancer survivors. The data, published in the American Journal of Health Behaviour, showed participants' weight and body mass index remained stable. Participants also kept up increased levels of physical activity in the 12 months after the trial. "Both of those factors - physical activity and a healthy weight - have been shown to reduce the risk of cancer recurrence and improve the psychosocial health of cancer survivors, so those results are really promising," said Annie Miller, the director of cancer support services at Cancer Council NSW. A year after the trial, 67 per cent of participants continued to improve their level of physical activity, 63 per cent maintained increased levels of moderate-to-vigorous exercise, and 46 per cent maintained their weight. Ms Miller encouraged all cancer survivors to join the Cancer Council's ENRICHing Survivorship program to help stay active. PROSTATE CANCER The first of 200 patients has been enrolled on an Australian-first nuclear medicine treatment for men with advanced prostate cancer. The TheraP trial will be carried out at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre and Royal Brisbane and Women's Hospital. Prostate cancer patients will be injected with a radioactive molecule that specifically attaches to cells with high amounts of prostate-specific membrane antigen (PSMA) - a substance found in many men with the disease. Injecting lutetium-177 PSMA617 (LuPSMA) allows the radioactive molecule to be delivered mainly to the prostate cancer cells wherever they have spread, while sparing most normal tissue. The study chair, Associate Professor Michael Hofman, says a pilot study has already showed promising results. The new randomised phase two study will compare treatment with the radioactive molecule Lu-PSMA against cabazitaxel chemotherapy for men with advanced prostate cancer. Results of the two treatments will be measured in terms of shrinking the cancer, improving pain, delaying the time until the cancer grows again, effects on quality of life, safety and how long men survive after the treatment. CLIVE PALMER'S POLITICAL HISTORY AND COMEBACK ATTEMPT: 2012 * April: Announces he will seek LNP pre-selection for the Brisbane seat of Lilley, held for Labor by former treasurer Wayne Swan. 2013 * April: Announces he will contest the Sunshine Coast seat of Fairfax, held by the LNP. * May: Sets up the Palmer United Party after falling out with Campbell Newman's LNP state government. * September: Narrowly wins Fairfax by 53 votes, making it federal parliament's most marginal seat. 2014 * July: PUP senators Jacqui Lambie, Glenn Lazarus and Dio Wang sworn in to parliament. They support axing the carbon tax, but save the Clean Energy Finance Corporation and Climate Change Authority. * September: PUP senators help government scrap the mining tax. * November: Lambie quits PUP to sit as an independent. 2015 * March: Lazarus quits PUP to sit as an independent. 2016 * January: Palmer's Queensland Nickel goes into administration. * April: Administrators announce liquidation of QN, accusing Palmer of taking money out of the company for private use. Government forced to use taxpayer money to pay hundreds of workers their entitlements. * May 4: Announces he will not re-contest Fairfax at the July 2 election. * May 23: Announces he will not contest a Senate seat at the July 2 poll. Palmer says he wants to enjoy his life and has given his service. * June: Palmer's nephew Clive Mensink, who was director of QN, leaves Australia months after the company collapsed, leaving $300 million in debts and hundreds without a job. He is wanted for questioning by police but remains on the run overseas. * July 2: PUP Senator Dio Wang, the party's only member left in parliament until the federal election, fails to win enough votes to return to the Upper House. 2017 * May 5: The Australian Electoral Commission deregisters PUP federally. * June: Liquidators lodge a claim against Palmer in the Supreme Court to try and claw back some of the $300 million in debts. He is sued for $73 million he allegedly transferred from QN. * Dec 11: Palmer denies in federal court QN was a "cash cow" for his flagship company Mineralogy to pay its bills. 2018 * Feb 15: Palmer, who puts his wealth at $4 billion, says he won't reopen QN if liquidators win a bid to freeze his assets. Instead, he will "enjoy the fruits" of his wealth. The comments come months after he said he wants the refinery to reopen, whether it's under his ownership or under the ownership of a third party. * Feb 23: Palmer announces PUP will be revived and the party will contest every seat in the House of Representative and the Senate across Australia at the next election due in 2019. A sparkling mini Sydney Opera House will feature on a Mardi Gras float for the first time at this year's 40th anniversary parade. The glittering replica Opera House will be on a 10-metre long float surrounded by 70 marching ushers, dancers and orchestra members led by an Opera Australia employee playing Dame Joan Sutherland. Anthony Carthew, who performs as drag queen extraordinaire Amelia Airhead, is producing the float designed by parade veteran George Savoulis. "I love to call this the campest building in Australia - you just look at it and there's nothing straight about it," Mr Carthew told AAP. "It's our destiny to do this." Sydney Opera House chief executive Louise Herron was surprised to discover Australia's most iconic building had never before featured in the parade up Oxford Street. "This (LGBTI) community is just so essential to everything the Opera House does and to not celebrate that community is kind of madness," Ms Herron told AAP. She said 2018 was the perfect year for the Opera House to debut at Mardi Gras given Australia has now legalised same-sex marriage. Mr Savoulis hopes his float will stand out from the 170 others to hit Sydney's streets on March 3. The stainless steel structure - which has been in production for about a year - features more than a kilometre of silver ribbon and lights which will constantly change colour. "The Opera House has been sitting down here, listening for 40 years, and now it's finally dressing up and joining the party," Mr Savoulis said. THE BRILLIANCE AND BLUNDERS OF BARNABY THE AFFAIR Public revelations of Joyce's affair with former staffer Vikki Campion ignited a political storm. Campion's moves to Resources Minister Matt Canavan and Nationals whip Damian Drum's offices have come under heavy scrutiny. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull blasted Joyce's conduct, calling it a "shocking error of judgement" and banned ministers from having sexual relations with their staff. Campion is due to give birth to their baby in April. CLOSET KIWI The High Court ruled Joyce ineligible to sit in parliament after it was revealed he held New Zealand citizenship by descent. He faced a by-election in December which he won by a whopping majority, collecting 65 per cent of the primary vote. PISTOL AND BOO Joyce made international headlines in 2015 when he told Hollywood star Johnny Depp's then wife Amber Heard her pair of pooches better "bugger off" back to the US or he'd have them put down. Heard was placed on a one-month good behaviour bond over illegally smuggling Pistol and Boo into Australia and the couple filmed an awkward apology video. RENT FREE Joyce came under fire for living rent-free with Campion in an Armidale townhouse courtesy of wealthy businessman Greg Maguire. Joyce said Maguire contacted him to offer the house, meaning he didn't breach the ministerial code of conduct. GINA'S GEE UP Close mate and mining magnate Gina Rinehart handed him a $40,000 novelty-sized cheque for winning the inaugural National Agriculture Related Industries Prize last year. He later "politely declined" the money, saying he was surprised to receive the award. PESTICIDES As agriculture minister, Joyce was responsible for shifting the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority from Canberra to Armidale in his New England electorate. Accusations of pork-barrelling surrounded the relocation and it later emerged the agency had spent almost $15,000 at a Maguire-owned hotel in Armidale. BARNABY BANK While he no longer held the agriculture portfolio when legislation cleared parliament, Joyce was behind the government's Regional Investment Corporation which will be responsible for managing up to $4 billion of regional loans. The "Barnaby Bank" has been derided by Labor as a "shocking pork-barrel" due to its location in Orange, where the Nationals lost a state by-election. Three men are behind bars after allegedly being busted with 700 ecstasy pills, ice, pot and a gun in the NSW central west. Officers from strikeforces Woolwash and Atony arrested the men aged 29, 38 and 49 after the commercial quantity of drugs and a weapon was found at six properties in Mudgee. The 29 and 39-year-old men were charged with weapons and drug offences related to the possession and supply of a commercial quantity of prohibited drugs. The 49-year-old was charged with receiving stolen property, weapons and drugs offences. All three men were refused bail to appear before the Mudgee and Dubbo local courts. Bill Shorten wants Malcolm Turnbull to publicly release the next coalition agreement between the Liberals and the Nationals and ensure it includes the power to sack the deputy prime minister. Mr Turnbull was unable to fire Barnaby Joyce as deputy prime minister despite a damaging scandal because only Nationals MPs could choose to replace their boss. "The government's first priority here must be to make sure we never see a situation where the prime minister is emasculated to the point he can have no say in the deputy prime minister," Mr Shorten told reporters in Melbourne on Friday. The next Nationals leader, to be decided on Monday, will need to exchange letters with the prime minister committing to a new coalition agreement. Former attorney-general George Brandis last year described the coalition agreement as a "private document ... exchanged between two individuals in their capacity as leaders of two political parties, not as public office holders". Labor has unsuccessfully sought the release of previous agreements in court. "The Nationals cannot be allowed, by virtue of a secret coalition agreement, to 100 per cent decide who the deputy prime minister is," Mr Shorten said. Greens leader Richard Di Natale said Mr Turnbull had been "powerless" to sack Mr Joyce "That is because he is a signatory to a secret agreement that never should have been made secret," Senator Di Natale told reporters. It is understood the agreement sets out priority policy areas, proposed major projects of interest to regional and rural areas, which portfolios the Nationals want on the frontbench and that the Nationals leader will be deputy prime minister. A war of words over poker machines and jobs has put a punctuation mark on the second-last week of campaigning before Tasmanians head to the polls. The future of electronic gaming machines in the state is a key point of difference between the Liberal government and Labor opposition ahead of a March 3 election. Labor has pledged to remove 2300 pokies from pubs and clubs by 2023, while the Liberal's want them to remain until 2043. The Liberals and hospitality groups say a pokies ban will cost jobs in the sector but the exact number was on Friday in dispute. An ABC report said claims that thousands of jobs would go was false. Treasurer Peter Gutwein told reporters in January removing the machines would "cost thousands of jobs" and industry estimated that around 5000 would be affected. But the ABC said Mr Gutwein relied on a gaming industry survey, which predicted a little more than 1000 jobs would go. Mr Gutwein hit back though, accusing the fact check of being incorrect. "In making their claim, the so-called fact checker 'imputes' I said that 5000 jobs would be lost. That is wrong," he said. "As our policy states: `The gaming industry estimates that around 5000 jobs are at risk if electronic gaming machines are removed from pubs and clubs`." Labor accused the government of trying to scare people. "With a week left until Tasmanians go to the polls, it's time the Liberals started telling the truth," shadow treasurer Scott Bacon said. Labor also sunk the boot into the government over a fruit-fly incursion that saw fresh produce recalled from the shelves of supermarkets across the state. A statewide recall is in place for produce from a fumigation facility in Melbourne after larvae from the pest were found in a nectarine at a Devonport grocery. Labor said the government had become lax on biosecurity, pledging to set up a specialist fruit fly taskforce if elected. The Liberals pushed their tough-on-crime stance by declaring outlawed bikie gangs would be banned from wearing insignia. They also made several tourism announcements including $1 million for the state's rugged west coast. A week of parliamentary sittings will begin on Monday with Nationals MPs and senators choosing a new leader following Barnaby Joyce's resignation. The scandal over the Nationals leader was set to dominate four days of House of Representatives sittings and Senate estimates hearings. But Mr Joyce's resignation on Friday will provide something of a circuit-breaker for Malcolm Turnbull, as he returns from a trip to Washington. The Nationals party room will meet at 8am AEDT on Monday to determine who will replace Mr Joyce and become deputy prime minister, with their choice of ministerial portfolio. The contest appears to be coming down to two candidates, ministers Michael McCormack and David Gillespie. Six hours later, the new leader will face his first question time test, with Labor expected to zero in on the secrecy behind the coalition agreement - a private letter exchanged between the Nationals and Liberals leaders which forms the basis of how they work together. The federal opposition is still also interested in whether Mr Joyce breached any ministerial standards, or expenses guidelines, over his affair with former staffer Vikki Campion, who is due to have his baby in April. Labor will also exploit the battle between Tony Abbott and his former cabinet colleagues. The former prime minister has used the parliamentary break to criticise ministers over their support for higher migration, and says the Joyce affair has been poorly managed "at the most senior levels of government". On Tuesday, the lower house will debate the government's plans to make waiting times longer for migrants who want welfare, while on Thursday revenge porn laws will be on the agenda. Senate estimates hearings will probe ministers and senior officials from government agencies and departments. Key issues to be explored will be the cost of health care, defence exports, offshore detention, the rollout of the new Home Affairs portfolio and controversial changes to the Murray Darling Basin Plan. KEY POLICIES IN THE FIRST WEEK OF THE SA ELECTION CAMPAIGN: HEALTH PROBE: * SA-BEST leader Nick Xenophon wants a royal commission into the state's health network. He argues it's the only way to get to the bottom of the sector's problems over services and the ballooning budget. Labor and the Liberals are opposed but it may be the best thing for a system mired in controversy. RENEWABLES: * South Australian Premier Jay Weatherill has doubled down and doubled down again on pushing the state's renewable energy strategy. This week he announced plans for SA to reach 75 per cent renewables by 2025 along with a 25 per cent target for renewable energy storage. PAYROLL TAX: * It's not particularly sexy but Opposition Leader Steven Marshall's plans to cut payroll tax for thousands of small businesses is a big deal, especially for those businesses. It's been endorsed by Business SA, which also wants tax cuts for larger companies. INFRASTRUCTURE: * Labor Premier Jay Weatherill has pledged a $2 billion infrastructure package to remove some of Adelaide's most dangerous level crossings, to further extend the city's tram network and to build a new deep-sea port on Spencer Gulf. JOB CUTS: * Business SA is obviously not standing in the election but weighed in heavily this week with calls for public sector job cuts. The organisation does not want to put a figure on it but has described the public service as "morbidly obese". Victoria's firefighters' union has urged its members to vote in favour of a new workplace deal following Fair Work mediation. The United Firefighters Union has changed their advice after initially calling for the enterprise agreement with the Metropolitan Fire Brigade to be rejected in next week's vote over the wording of the deal's controversial explanatory memorandum. "Now that the explanatory memorandum is reflective of the content of the enterprise agreement .... firefighters want to move forward," the union's Victorian branch secretary Peter Marshall told AAP on Friday. A NSW Police senior constable has been charged with the sexual and indecent assault of a girl under 10 in the 1990s when he was a teenager. The officer was arrested at his home on Thursday and charged with two counts of sexual intercourse with a child under 10, as well as six counts of sexual assault. The man, who was 15 at the time of the alleged crimes, was granted conditional bail to appear before the Toronto local court on March 28. Today's Birthday, February 24: Australian playwright and screenwriter David Williamson (1942 - ). As a young boy watching his parents fighting "day after day" David Williamson began to wonder why people were so often in conflict. It was an interest combined with a talent for writing dialogue that would see him abandon a career as a teacher and engineer to become Australia's most successful playwright and screenwriter. In almost half a century of writing Williamson has written close to a play a year as well as 12 screenplays and five mini-series. Born in Melbourne on February 24, 1942, Williamson grew up in rural Bairnsdale. Despite studying engineering at the University of Melbourne in 1960 and then later at Monash University, Williamson spent much of his time writing and acting in skits. After graduating in 1965 he began work as a design engineer and lecturer, while writing some of his early works. But it was his 1972 play The Removalists, a black comedy about police violence, followed closely by Don's Party, about an election night party that turns sour when a predicted Labor victory fails to eventuate, that first saw him get his big break. The success saw Williamson pursue writing full-time, a dream encouraged by his second wife, journalist Kristin Williamson, who would later write her husband's biography detailing their attempts at an open marriage. The 1980s saw Williamson's success as a playwright continue with hits like Sons of Cain and Emerald City further adding to his popularity. He went on to also write several screenplays, including the 1981 film Gallipoli starring Mel Gibson as well as The Year of Living Dangerously in 1982. In 2005 Williamson announced his retirement, citing health complications he blamed on the stress of writing plays. But the break wasn't for long with At Any Cost? and Don's Party sequel Don Parties On written in the years that followed. Williamson's plays have been performed in theatres across the world and he has won 12 Australian Writers' Guild Awards, five Australian Film Institute awards and has been nominated for many more. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull says he is looking forward to working with the new leader of the National Party after the resignation of Barnaby Joyce. Speaking to reporters in Washington DC on Friday (early Saturday AEDT) just hours before meeting President Donald Trump at the White House, Mr Turnbull thanked Mr Barnaby for his service as deputy prime minister. "He has personal issues that he has to address, as he said," Mr Turnbull said outside Blair House in Washington DC. Mr Joyce announced on Friday he will resign as Australia's deputy prime minister and leader of the Nationals following intense media scrutiny over his relationship with a former staffer, with whom he is expecting a baby in April. "I look forward now obviously to working with the new leader of the National Party who will be elected on Monday," Mr Turnbull said. A piece of Brisbane's history could end up in one of the world's most prestigious museums, with Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk due to visit the Smithsonian Institute in the US. As part of a trade mission to the US, Ms Palaszczuk will visit the Smithsonian on Saturday morning (AEST) to offer them some of the Edison tubes dug up earlier this month as part of the Queen's Wharf project. The tubes were some of the earliest forms of conducting electricity on a large scale and Brisbane was behind only London and New York in installing the technology in the 1880s. Several other international museums have expressed interest in Brisbane's Edison tubes. It comes as the premier prepares to join Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and other state and territory leaders to meet United States Governors at the National Governors' Association conference in Washington. Ms Palaszczuk said she planned to forge more international ties for Queensland after striking deals with Texas and South Carolina. "In Washington DC, its my intention to strengthen the partnership I initiated with Nevada Governor Brian Sandoval in 2016 to a Sister State partnership, recognising our common interests in energy, water management and mining technologies," the premier said in a statement. RSPCA Queensland is offering a reward for information about who put a dog in an Ipswich rubbish bin. Zorrow, the three-year-old foxie cross, survived being crushed in a garbage truck and was rescued by tip workers at the Willowbank landfill site. It's believed the dog was dumped in the truck late on February 6 or early the next day. Zorrow has since undergone a hip operation and remains in the care of RSPCA, which is offering $5000 for information that leads to a conviction. CCTV footage of the dog struggling for his life inside the truck has been viewed around the world. Just one of the seven Gold Coast students affected by a suspected drug overdose remains in hospital as investigations continue into how the teens acquired the drug. Gold Coast Heath confirmed on Friday afternoon a further three students had been discharged from Gold Coast University Hospital. Police are continuing to investigate the incident, which left the year 10 students from St Stephen's College in varying states. The students are suspected of buying the drugs online and police are investigating reports it was the Russian designer drug Phenibut, an anti-depressant used to treat anxiety and insomnia. The incident has shocked the Upper Coomera school's community, prompting calls for more action from governments to stop teenagers treating drug education "like a joke". An independent auditor will start assessing safety on construction of the Toowoomba Second Range Crossing after 17 heavy-vehicle rollovers since the project began 18 months ago. Queensland government officials met with senior representatives project operators Nexus on Friday for frank discussions about safety issues and concerns on the 41km bypass. Industrial Relations Minister Grace Grace and Transport Minister Mark Bailey met with Nexus after being alerted to the incidents by Workplace Health and Safety. In a statement, the ministers said it was an open and constructive meeting and the company embraced the safety audit which would begin on Monday. "There are up to 400 workers on this project," the statement read. "Their safety is our over-riding priority. "We made it clear that given there have been 17 plant rollovers and serious concerns raised by Workplace Health and Safety Queensland, we needed to see a significant improvement." Once complete, the $1.6 billion project will redirect heavy vehicles away from Toowoomba rather than through it, from the Warrego Highway at Helidon Spa in the east to the Gore Highway at Athol in the west. Hundreds of would-be Mirandas donning white dresses and boater hats are set to descend on Hanging Rock to celebrate the 50th birthday of the iconic Australian story. Fans of Joan Lindsay's book, Picnic at Hanging Rock, and Peter Weir's subsequent film have been invited to dress up as main character Miranda and take part in a flashmob dance at the site on Saturday. The squad of Mirandas will perform a dance inspired by the tale of schoolgirls who inexplicably vanish while on a Valentine's Day picnic. About 300 Macedon Ranges locals have spent weeks practising their moves, including the 'corset conga' and the 'Miranda mirror,' but organisers say everyone is welcome. "You don't need to know how to dance - it's all about having fun," Macedon Ranges Shire Council CEO Margot Stork told AAP. "Pack a picnic, put on a white muslin dress and boater hat and unleash your inner Miranda." Supposedly based on a true story, the tale has captured audiences the world over. "We have tourists from all over the world coming here to see the rock, it's enormously popular," Ms Stork said. "But we're all a bit divided on if it's a true story." Such is the tale's enduring appeal that Foxtel is releasing a six-part remake in May. Transfield Services was worried about asylum seekers potentially rioting as it looked to clean mould off the inside of tents at the Nauru detention centre, leaked emails show. The immigration department and then centre operator Transfield (now Broadspectrum) were warned about mould health risks to asylum seekers and staff in a top secret 2014 report, AAP has been told. The report by microbiologist Dr Cameron Jones said airborne and surface-bound fungal and bacterial cells and spores are capable of causing disease "by direct infection, toxicosis or by allergy". At least 20 former detention centre staff have become seriously ill from mould exposure, including an Australian teacher who now has a cognitive disability. Transfield may have misled a Senate inquiry over its efforts to fix a mould problem at the facility. Transfield manager Derek Osborn gave evidence at a parliamentary hearing on May 19, 2015 and insisted the company had a "detailed process to remove" the mould on asylum seeker tents. However, leaked internal emails obtained by AAP cast doubt over his evidence. An email dated May 12, 2015 from Transfield site manager Andrew White said a team had made good progress on cleaning mould off the outside of tents in the family and single male accommodation areas. However, the email warned cleaning the insides of tents had "quite a few complications". Mr White was "looking at conducting a workshop... in the near future" to come up with a plan. He said issues to consider included: "messaging" and "behavioural management team involvement". A former detention centre youth worker told AAP asylum seekers had been consistently complaining about mould in their tents and management did not want to validate those concerns. Dr Jones was barred from wearing safety protective gear, such as a plastic suit, googles and full face mask during his scientific testing on Nauru. "I was prohibited from wearing personal protective equipment by Transfield due to what they thought was a foreseeable risk of inciting a riot," he told AAP. "I myself became unwell after the inspections ... I had gastrointestinal problems and long-term sinus issues." Dr Jones' report gave both a single men's tent and a family tent mould ratings of four (visible mould growth greater than 10sqm). Broadspectrum insists it maintained a safe and healthy workplace for its employees while working at the detention centre until late October 2017. The Home Affairs Department denied there had been any illnesses as a result of mould exposure at the Nauru detention centre. However, Comcare said it received a complaint in 2016 from a worker employed by a contractor, who had been diagnosed with a respiratory condition after living at the Nauru detention centre. Fibromyalgia, sarcoidosis, neurological symptoms, chronic pain, chest infections and persistent coughs, are among the medical problems some ex-staff have developed. Mould exposure also exacerbated multiple asthma and sinusitis cases among asylum seekers, according to Doctors for Refugees. US President Donald Trump has warned a White House press conference with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull the world might be in for a "very unfortunate day" if America's latest sanctions on North Korea do not curb the rogue regime's nuclear missile program. Mr Trump and Mr Turnbull put on mostly a united front at the media event in Washington DC on Friday. While the leaders agreed on continuing pressure on North Korea with sanctions, "merit based" immigration and dealings with China and Syria, they did differ on the Trans-Pacific Partnership and gun control. "We'll have to see," said Mr Trump, when asked if all options are still on the table if the sanctions don't work. He did not rule out a "very rough day" with a military response toward North Korea "Maybe very unfortunate for the world," the president said. Turkey on Thursday strongly condemned the Dutch parliament's motion recognizing Armenian allegations of "genocide" during 1915 events. February 23, 2018, 09:28 Turkey condemns Netherlands' resolution on recognition of Armenian Genocide STEPANAKERT, FEBRUARY 23, ARTSAKHPRESS:"We strongly condemn the decision of the Netherlands' House of Representatives today to recognize the 1915 events as 'genocide'," Turkish Foreign Ministry said in a statement. Describing the Dutch parliament's decision as "baseless", the ministry said the decision has no place in either history or justice. "Therefore, it has no legal binding or validity," it added. It further said "Turkey's position regarding 1915 events is based on historical facts and principle of law." Turkey's position on the events of 1915 is that deaths of Armenians in eastern Anatolia in 1915 occurred after some sided with invading Russians and revolted against Ottoman forces. A subsequent relocation of Armenians resulted in numerous casualties. Ankara does not accept the alleged "genocide", but acknowledges there were casualties on both sides during World War I. Turkey objects to the presentation of the incidents as genocide but describes the 1915 events as a tragedy for both sides. Ankara has repeatedly proposed the creation of a joint commission of historians from Turkey and Armenia plus international experts to tackle the issue. Two young men who allegedly went on a crime rampage in Sydney's west broke into multiple homes, stole a car, and went on a spending spree with thieved credit cards. Police say the men, aged 19 and 20, were arrested on Friday after committing a number of break, enter and steal offences in the Quakers Hill, Castle Hill and Parramatta areas. At about 12.30am on Wednesday the duo allegedly entered a home on Tabooba Street, Constitution Hill, while the occupants were home. They took the keys to a BMW and drove off in the car, where they found credit cards to make several fraudulent transactions, police say. Police arrested the pair three days later at a home on Helena Street, Auburn, alleging they had targeted several other residences. The 19-year-old was charged with 16 offences including aggravated break and enter, obtain property/money by deception and steal motor vehicle. The 20-year-old was charged with 12 offences including aggravated break and enter, steal motor vehicle, possess prohibited drug and enter vehicle without consent of owner. They were both refused bail to appear at Parramatta Local Court on Saturday. Victorian children aged under five can receive free flu vaccinations before the peak season under a $3.5 million program announced by the state government. Under the program, all Victorian families with children aged six months to five can have their kids vaccinated from May, at GPs or community health services, before the onset of the peak flu season. Labor Health Minister Jill Hennessy on Saturday said the government will continue to urge the federal government to expand the national immunisation program to vulnerable groups including children. African migrants protest on February 22, 2018 outside the Saharonim Prison, where at least nine others have been incarcerated as part of Israel's policy of prison or deportation for migrants Hundreds of African migrants protested Thursday outside an Israeli prison where at least nine others have been incarcerated under Israel's controversial new policy of expelling or imprisoning them. They marched a short distance from the Holot open detention centre to Saharonim Prison, chanting slogans and carrying signs demanding the prisoners' release. They said they were on a hunger strike and vowed to continue it until a solution is reached. Israel is preparing to deport thousands of Eritreans and Sudanese who entered the country illegally and who do not have asylum claims under examination. The government has offered them a choice: leave by early April to their homelands or a third country, or face indefinite detention in prison. African migrants march from Holot to the Saharonim Prison on February 22, 2018 to protest at the imprisonment of several migrants under a controversial Israeli policy of detention or expulsion As many could face danger if returned to their home countries, Israel is proposing to send them to an unnamed third country, which migrants and aid workers say is Rwanda or Uganda. Israel plans to start by tackling the cases of single men who have not submitted asylum applications, or whose applications have been rejected. Authorities on Tuesday transferred the first Eritrean detainees, detained at the Holot open detention centre, to Saharonim Prison after they refused to leave the country. Israeli authorities said nine had been jailed, while migrants said the number was 12. Hundreds of detainees at the Holot centre went on hunger strike Tuesday night in protest at the move. Clasping their hands over their heads, protestors on Thursday chanted: "We are not criminals, we are refugees! No deportation, no more prison, we are not for sale, we are asylum seekers! Bring back our brothers!" African migrants protest outside the Saharonim Prison on February 22, 2018, after announcing a hunger strike over Israel's policy of prison or deportation for migrants Muluebrhan Ghebrihimet, a 27-year-old Eritrean, said that when he arrived in Israel six years ago, he had filed an asylum application, but it was rejected. "We are here to seek asylum, not to work or become rich," he said. He did not know when he would be sent to prison. A wave of African migrants arrived in Israel after 2007, crossing the border from Egypt's Sinai Peninsula. The porous border has since been largely sealed off, putting an end to arrivals. Migrants settled in the poor neighbourhoods of southern Tel Aviv, the country's commercial capital, but their presence has caused friction with some Israelis. Religious and conservative leaders, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, have presented Muslim and Christian migrants as a threat to Israel's Jewish identity. The government, considered the most rightwing in Israel's history, has been roundly condemned by the United Nations' refugee agency, academics and rights groups over its migrant plan. According to interior ministry figures, there are currently some 42,000 African migrants in Israel, half of them children, women or men with families, who are not facing the April deportation deadline. Israeli officials stress that no one they classify as a refugee or asylum seeker will be deported. Already indicted for money laundering and tax evasion, Paul Manafort, seen here after leaving a federal court in October 2017, and his associate Rick Gates were charged in a separate 32-count indictment with defrauding the US Internal Revenue Service Ex-Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort and his former partner Richard Gates were hit on Thursday with fresh charges of tax and bank fraud, as Russia election meddling special prosecutor Robert Mueller stepped up pressure on the president's former aides. Already indicted for money laundering and tax evasion, Manafort and Gates were charged in a separate 32-count indictment with defrauding the US Internal Revenue Service and lying to US banks in order to get some $20 million in loans. As with the indictment of the two released by Mueller on October 30, the new charges were unrelated to the 2016 election campaign of President Donald Trump. Instead, they grew from the work Manafort and Gates performed for Russia-backed former Ukraine president Viktor Yanukovych between about 2006 and 2014. Mueller's team alleges that the two laundered $75 million through offshore accounts, many of them in Cyprus, bringing a large portion of the proceeds into the United States as loans and purchases to avoid income tax. "Manafort and Gates generated tens of millions of dollars in income as a result of their Ukraine work. From approximately 2006 through the present, Manafort and Gates engaged in a scheme to hide income from United States authorities, while enjoying the use of the money," the new indictment said. A spokesman for Manafort said he "is confident that he will be acquitted." "Paul Manafort is innocent of the allegations set out in the newly filed indictments and he is confident that he will be acquitted of all charges," the spokesman said in a statement. A long-time Washington and international political consultant, Manafort served as Trump's election campaign chairman from June to August 2016, with Gates his deputy. Mueller's primary investigative focus is on whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russian interference in the election, and whether Trump tried to obstruct his investigation. Special prosecutor Robert Mueller's team alleges that the Paul Manafort and Rick Gates, seen here leaving a federal court in Decmber, laundered $75 million through offshore accounts But the mandate for Mueller, a former FBI director, is broad, and he has used it to go after Mueller and Gates for earlier behavior, with some analysts saying Mueller hoped to turn them into witnesses against others in Trump's circle. On January 3 Manafort sued Mueller for overstepping his mandate, calling the Russia probe "completely unmoored" from the special counsel's original jurisdiction. For years, Kent Whitaker (L) had moved heaven and earth to try and get mercy for his son Bart Whitaker (R), despite Bart's attempt on his life Two death row inmates have won last minute reprieves, including a man whose father pleaded for his life even though his son had hired a hitman to kill his family, officials say. Texas Governor Greg Abbott issued the rare reprieve for Thomas Bartlett "Bart" Whitaker, 38, who had been sentenced to die Thursday for a 2003 murder-for-hire that took his mother and brother's life and left his father seriously wounded. "Mr Whitaker must spend the remainder of his life behind bars as punishment for this heinous crime," Abbott wrote in a proclamation explaining his decision, shortly before the scheduled execution. Meanwhile, convicted murderer Eric Branch was executed on schedule in Florida, but in Alabama an attempt to administer a lethal injection to another death row inmate, Doyle Hamm, failed, causing that execution to be halted. In commuting Whitaker's death sentence, Abbott said he had taken into consideration the fact that "the person who fired the gun that killed the victims did not receive the death penalty, but Mr Whitaker, who did not fire the gun, did get the death penalty." He added: "Mr Whitaker's father, who survived the attempt on his life, passionately opposes the execution of his son. Mr Whitaker's father insists that he would be victimized again if the state put to death his last remaining immediate family member." Kent Whitaker had moved heaven and earth for years to try to get mercy for his son, whom he forgave from his hospital bed. Police had originally assumed the shooting was a botched robbery, although the fact that only Bart's cell phone had been taken raised suspicions. Bart returned to live with his wounded father for seven months before the truth emerged that it was the son who hired the gunman. Kent, a devout Christian, said he had initially been "mad at God" after being shot in the thorax by the masked assailant who took the lives of his wife Tricia, 51, and his 19-year-old son Kevin. - Alabama execution halted - "I was wrestling with my faith," he said. "But God met me in the hospital room on the night of the shootings and helped me arrive at a 'miracle' forgiveness for everyone involved," he said. "Long before I ever even suspected that that forgiveness might extend to my own son." "I live with the extent of the loss every day and am aware of how much it has cost me -- and am completely aware that all of that loss was the result of decisions made by my son," he said. "But God helped me reach that complete forgiveness and I think He did that to help me rebuild my relationship with my son." Meanwhile, in Alabama, a state penitentiary system spokesman said Hamm's execution was suspended "out of an abundance of caution" because a vein could not be found that would take the lethal injection. Hamm was already dying of cranial and lymphatic cancer, and his lawyers had argued that he no longer had suitable veins and that a lethal injection would be torture. "This is exactly what I have been saying since July. Since July, I have been telling the state of Alabama that Doyle Lee Hamm does not have adequate veins for a lethal injection," Hamm's lawyer, Bernard Harcourt, said. The US Supreme Court had ruled late Thursday that the execution could proceed. Hamm, who has spent three decades on death row, was condemned to death in 1987 for the murder of a motel employee during an armed robbery. In Florida, Eric Branch, who was convicted of the 1993 murder of a student, was put to death at 7:05 pm Thursday (0005 GMT Friday) after last minute appeals were exhausted. His lawyers had argued that Branch, 21 at the time of the murder, was cognitively comparable to a juvenile and that the jury was not unanimous in sentencing him to death. In recent times, the highest number of executions in a single day occurred on December 9, 1999, when Oklahoma, Indiana, Texas and Virginia all executed a prisoner. But the highest number ever was on December 6, 1862 in Minnesota, when federal authorities hanged 38 members of the Dakota people, a Native American tribe. An F/A-18E Super Hornet, manufactured by Boeing, is shown in this July 1, 2017 file photo Canada said Thursday it was allowing Boeing to submit a bid to replace the country's aging F-18 fleet, after an earlier trade dispute between the American manufacturer and Ottawa. The announcement came a month after the US International Trade Commission rejected a complaint filed by Boeing against its Canadian rival Bombardier, demanding nearly 300 percent anti-dumping duties on the C Series passenger plane. Boeing, which makes the Super Hornet, is one of five manufacturers invited to submit proposals in spring 2019 for an order of 88 advanced fighter jets, which are to be delivered in 2025, according to a Canadian government statement. The other manufacturers are US-based Lockheed Martin (F35), France's Dassault (Rafale), the Airbus group (Eurofighter Typhoon), and Sweden's Saab (Gripen). Ottawa will evaluate the bids based on "cost, technical requirements and economic benefits," the government said. The winning bidder will have to invest in Canada an amount equal to the value of the contract. "Our government is confident this will result in a robust competition, providing good value to Canadians and the Canadian economy," Minister of Public Services and Procurement Carla Qualtrough said Thursday. In December, the Canadian government scrapped a deal to buy 18 Boeing Super Hornets at a cost of more than $5 billion, following Boeing's complaint against Bombardier. Boeing had accused the Canadian company of selling the C Series, which can seat between 100 and 150 passengers, at a loss to Delta Air Lines. Missouri Governor Eric Greitens, seen here addressing a crowd at a Jewish cemetery in February 2017 after it was was vandalized, has been charged with photographing a woman in a state of undress without her consent The governor of the US state of Missouri was charged Thursday with criminal invasion of privacy for taking compromising photos of his former mistress without her knowledge, in an alleged blackmail case. Governor Eric Greitens was taken into custody and booked Thursday, according to the St Louis Post-Dispatch newspaper, after a grand jury issued the felony charge related to allegations that he blackmailed a woman with whom he was having an affair. Greitens has admitted to the affair in 2015, before he took office as the chief executive of the Midwestern state. According to the newspaper, Greitens took a photograph of the woman in a compromising pose -- bound and partially nude -- and threatened to publicize the image if the affair was exposed, charges he denies. The indictment document says that Greitens "knowingly photographed" an unidentified woman in "a state of full or partial nudity without (her) knowledge or consent." "The defendant subsequently transmitted the image contained in the photograph in a manner that allowed access to that image via a computer." The transmission of the photo made the offense a felony rather than a lesser misdemeanor, according to The New York Times. "As I have stated before, it is essential for residents of the City of St. Louis and our state to have confidence in their leaders," St Louis prosecutor Kimberly Gardner said in a statement. "They must know that the Office of the Circuit Attorney will hold public officials accountable in the same manner as any other resident of our city." Greitens has said he would not resign and denied blackmail allegations in a previous interview with a local television station. "There was no blackmail. There was no violence. The mistake that I made was that I was engaged in a consensual relationship with a woman who wasn't my wife," the governor told KTVI. The governor's lawyer called the criminal charge "baseless and unfounded," and vowed to file a motion to dismiss, according to the Post-Dispatch. The governor was released on his own recognizance, without a monetary bond. A court date of March 16 was set for the next hearing in the case. The EU funding boost comes as Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania and Niger, whose leaders attended a February 6 G5 Sahel summit in Niger, strive to tackle what one EU official warned is a "deteriorating security situation" in the jihadist-plagued region European leaders will Friday give a financial boost to a joint African force tackling jihadists in the Sahel at an international conference in Brussels, as fresh violence highlights the region's fraught security situation. The European Union will announce 50 million euros ($61 million) for the G5 Sahel force at talks with heads of state from Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania and Niger, adding to around 280 million euros already pledged by international donors. The high-level meeting attended by French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel comes after two soldiers from France's counter-terrorism force in West Africa were killed Wednesday when their vehicle struck a mine in northeastern Mali. It was the latest in a surge of attacks underscoring the challenge facing the five countries, among the poorest in the world, which are on the frontline of a war against Islamist militants. An EU official warned of a "deteriorating security situation" in Mali, with "daily attacks". The G5 force needs more funds to help it reach its target of 5,000 properly trained and equipped troops to patrol hotspots and restore authority in lawless areas. As well as fighting militants, the force also tackles smuggling and illegal immigration networks that operate in the vast, remote areas on the margins of the Sahara. The force has so far set up a headquarters and command structure and carried out two operations, with French support, in the troubled "tri-border" area where Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso meet. Intended to become fully operational in mid-2018, the G5 Sahel force operates alongside France's 4,000 troops in the area and the UN's 12,000-strong MINUSMA peacekeeping operation in Mali. "We expect in 2018 that we will be delivering more in terms of body armour, counter-IED material, trucks and even a hospital which will be built, we think, in Mali later this year," an EU official said. - Keep the pressure up - Friday's conference in Brussels aims to secure more international funding for the force. Donations so far have been led by Saudi Arabia, which has given 100 million euros. As well as 26 EU leaders and the United Nations, around a dozen other countries will be represented by foreign ministers including Saudi Arabia, Norway, Morocco and Tunisia. Macron's office said the fact so many countries were attending was "proof of the collective realisation of the Sahel's importance for the stability of Africa and also Europe". "The priority is to keep the pressure up and develop the capacities of the national armies," a French presidential official said, stressing that the G5 force was not an "exit strategy" for Operation Barkhane, France's anti-jihadist mission in the region. France, the former colonial power in the area, intervened militarily in Mali in 2013 to help government forces drive al-Qaeda-linked jihadists out of the north. Within two weeks the Sunni radicals were flushed out of most urban areas but they continue to mount attacks from desert bases. Violence spread from northern Mali to the centre and the south, and then spilled over into Burkina Faso and Niger. Today, as the new force is starting to take shape, experts are warning that the jihadists are becoming more sophisticated in their operations. An aerial view from July 30, 2015 of the Tamar Israeli gas-drill platform in the eastern Mediterranean Sea where the scramble for resources is seeing tensions flare between regional rivals Warships, militia threats and multi-billion dollar deals: the scramble for gas in the Eastern Mediterranean is fuelling hope and tensions across a volatile region. In an area riven by geopolitical feuds the quest for underwater resources has sparked dreams of economic transformation that could bind wary neighbours closer. But -- while there still remain major questions over the scale of deposits -- simmering disputes have erupted to the surface as the race for claims heats up. Off the divided island of Cyprus on Friday, Turkish warships forced back an Italian drillship after a two-week standoff that has stirred up a decades-long row and dragged in Egypt and the European Union. At the same time the US is trying to mediate between foes Israel and Lebanon as they spar for control along a disputed maritime border where Beirut is looking to catch up. "What we see is that energy becomes another flashpoint -- so when there is tension between countries, that tension spills over into energy," said Nikos Tsafos, a senior associate at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies. - Cyprus vs Turkey vs Egypt - February appeared to bring good news for the Greek-majority Republic of Cyprus. After a string of disappointments since a first find in 2011, Italy's Eni and France's Total announced they had hit potentially major gas deposits off the EU member's southern coast. But days later, Turkey once again began flexing its muscles. As an Eni drillship sailed to explore a contentious area it was blocked by Turkish warships who said they were conducting manoeuvres. After a costly two-week standoff, Ankara's forces refused to budge -- and when the Italian vessel tried to break the blockade it was forced to turn back, Cypriot officials said Friday. The confrontation is just the latest with Turkey over the hunt for gas around Cyprus. Once seen as an incentive to reunify the island, the struggle for resources has become a major stumbling block to restarting peace talks that collapsed last year. Ankara, which invaded in 1974 and supports a statelet in the north, has consistently sought to halt drilling -- saying it is defending the claims of Turkish Cypriots. Cyprus has enlisted the help of the EU, which eyes the region's resources as a potentially valuable alternative energy source, and warned that there can be no peace negotiations unless Turkey respects its "sovereign rights". Egypt, which sits on the region's biggest gas reserves and has a key agreement with Cyprus that allows development, has also traded angry barbs with Ankara. But Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan appears to have little incentive to give way as he plays to nationalist sentiments and looks to protect Ankara's role as a key transit hub. "I don't think Turkey is willing to spark a confrontation, but I think it cannot be fully dismissed," said analyst Andrew Neff from IHS Markit. "If one of these drillships wanders too far into disputed waters then I think we'll see Turkey engage in some additional 'gunboat diplomacy' in defence of its interests." - Lebanon vs Israel - Further to the east, Israel has been setting the pace ever since it made the first find in the region in 2009. And Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appeared jubilant -- and vindicated -- as he hailed a "historic" $15-billion deal to export gas to Egypt on February 19. "Many people did not believe in the gas plan," he said in a video. "This is a joyous day." Israel's authorities have pitched gas as a potential bonanza that can help smooth fraught relations with its neighbours. Thawing ties with Turkey, in addition to major supply deals with Jordan and now Egypt appeared to back up its claims. But to the north trouble is brewing. After years of debilitating political deadlock Lebanon earlier this month signed its first exploration deal with a consortium of Italian, French and Russian firms. The agreement includes a block on the disputed maritime border that Israeli officials insist belongs to the Jewish state. The United States has dispatched a senior official to try to mediate, but as the two sides spar the war-of-words is ratcheting up. The leader of Hezbollah -- which fought a war with Israel in 2006 and has missiles that could hit its offshore projects -- insisted it could win the "oil and gas war". "If Israel threatens you, you can threaten it," Hassan Nasrallah said. The Jewish state is taking no chances, bolstering its missile defence at sea and navy. But despite the sabre-rattling, some insist that given Lebanon's need for energy and Israel's multi-billion dollar deals on the line -- neither side is willing to start fighting. "I don't think that there is any question of it here because nobody is interested in a conflict," said Eyal Zisser, head of department of Middle Eastern history at Tel Aviv University. "It's all about money; everybody can lose, everybody can win." burs-del/dr "The Young Karl Marx," Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck's 15th feature-length release, dramatizes the famed political thinker's early years Still basking in acclaim for his visceral documentary on African-American social critic James Baldwin, Raoul Peck has turned his creative energies on another of history's indispensable political minds -- Karl Marx. The project comes with the Haitian filmmaker at the peak of his powers, having won best documentary at Sunday's Baftas -- Britain's version of the Academy Awards -- for "I Am Not Your Negro," his meditation on Baldwin's racial philosophies. The 64-year-old was still directing the Oscar-nominated documentary -- his 15th feature-length release -- when he began work on "The Young Karl Marx," a dramatization of Marx's early years that hits US theaters on Friday. A cerebral retelling of the birth of communism, it also works as a high-minded bromance between Marx and radicalized manufacturing heir Friedrich Engels that flourishes in the pubs and cafes of 1840s Paris. "The Young Karl Marx," says Peck, aims at a realistic worldview in which complex problems require rigorous solutions rather than the short-term thinking the director sees in US President Donald Trump. "Any problem you can throw at him, it's an easy problem. It's either the fault of certain people or a certain person and you can get rid of the person and the problem goes away," Peck told AFP. "No, it doesn't work that way. That's why we are in a time of populism, of simplification, of very individualistic reactions. It's because we've lost the big picture." Before they were 30, Marx and Engles had helped alter society with the publication of their clarion call to the working class, The Communist Manifesto, one of the most widely-read and influential texts of all time. - Rabble-rousing - Played by German actor August Diehl ("Inglourious Basterds"), Marx is introduced as a rabble-rousing Young Turk in his mid-20s, recently married to the aristocratic Jenny von Westphalen, portrayed by Vicky Krieps ("Phantom Thread"). In 1844 Paris they meet the dandyish Engels (Stefan Konarske), son of a wealthy German mill owner with factories in Manchester, who rebels against his father's mistreatment of his workers. Amid censorship, police raids and political upheavals, they preside over the development of the makeshift, disorganized labor movement into the most coherent revolution in political thinking since the Renaissance. Peck, who co-wrote with veteran French screenwriter Pascal Bonitzer, is the first director to helm a film about the early years of a man known mostly through the iconic image of the elder statesman with the wild, gray beard. Peck says the last thing he wanted was to make a film about a "somewhat surly but somewhat kindly, tired-looking Marx, speaking in English through his bushy beard in a vague political context while shedding a few tears at the successive deaths of his children, and cheating on his wife." Rather than relying on the glut of biographies and academic texts out there, Peck and Bonitzer researched their story by going straight to the horses' mouths, via their characters' mutual correspondence. "Those letters are very vivid, very alive. They have humor, they are funny," Peck told AFP. "They of course speak about theory and history, but also about their friends, their next voyage, the difficulties of finding a home, organizing et cetera." - Legacy - Born in Haiti, Peck was raised in the Congo, the US and France, serving as Haiti's minister of culture in 1996 and 1997. In 2001, Human Rights Watch gave him a lifetime achievement award for his work, most notably Lumumba (2000), which dramatized the rise and assassination of the Congo's first democratically elected leader. The realities of inequality -- whether between white and black America or the proletariat and the bourgeoisie of 19th century Europe -- has been a preoccupation of much of Peck's work. "People know today -- even people from the right will admit -- that if you are born in a poor family there is a very big chance that your life is going to be miserable," Peck says. "Even though they will say, 'But if you work hard you will make it,' take any statistic and you will see that it's not true." Peck's political awakening came as he was studying economic engineering at the Technical University of Berlin, where he became acquainted with Marx's three-volume tome Das Kapital. His first narrative feature since 2014's "Murder in Pacot," "The Young Karl Marx" takes little interest in Marxism's regression into Soviet and Chinese-style communism, or the extent to which Marx's doctrinal naivete can be blamed. Asked if he believes Marx and Engels left a better world than the one they were born into, the filmmaker asserts simply that they "did their job" and that it is up to us to ensure their legacy. "We can't put the rest on their shoulders. They created the instruments for us to analyze the situation and, by the way, I profited from that," Peck says. "Thanks to their work I understood the world I am living in, so what I tried to do with this film is the same: to try to give to a new generation, in a form they can understand, the instruments for their own change." Mountain Tea and Antaram, two Armenian herbal tea producers, have signed an export deal with German TeeGschwendner on the sidelines of the BIOFACH 2018 agricultural food expo in Nuremberg, Germany. February 23, 2018, 13:33 Armenian herbal teas to be exported to Germany STEPANAKERT, FEBRUARY 23, ARTSAKHPRESS-ARMENPRESS:Lukas Parobij, an executive of the German tea company, said they found out about the Armenian producers through the organic agriculture project of NABU and ACBA Credit Agricole Bank. I think the project created very good opportunities and prospects both for Armenian organic tea producers and for us, he said. In addition to the exports deal, the agreement also implies staff training. This is TeeGschwendners first regional project, and I can say that we found what we were looking for in Armenia, he added. The German company operates more than 130 specialized stores in 7 countries across 4 continents. Gunmen who escaped during the early days of the US-backed operation to recapture Marawi have led a series of fresh skirmishes with the security forces in Mindanao, says the military Months after being routed from the southern Philippine city of Marawi, jihadists are waging a fresh and deadly bid to set up a Southeast Asian caliphate in the same region, the military warned Friday. The gunmen have mustered a force of about 200 and fought a series of skirmishes with the security forces this year after government forces retook Marawi last October, Colonel Romeo Brawner told AFP. "They have not abandoned their objective to create a caliphate in Southeast Asia," said Brawner, a senior commander for a military task force that has since been protecting Marawi. "Mindanao is the most fertile ground," he said, referring to the Philippine's southern region. "Our countrymen are more vulnerable (to recruitment)." Struggling with widespread poverty and armed Muslim insurgencies seeking independence or self-rule, Mindanao must improve poor supervision of Islamic schools or madrasas where most young gunmen are recruited, he added. He said the armed forces were retooling to meet the challenge of the Maute group, which occupied Marawi over five months and has pledged allegiance to Islamic State group. Gunmen who escaped during the early days of the US-backed operation to recapture Marawi are leading the recruitment effort, flush with cash, guns and jewellery looted from the city's banks and private homes, Brawner said. The recruits are mostly locals, but an unspecified number of Indonesians, some with bomb-making skills, have recently arrived there, he said. - 'Ready for another Marawi' - Mindanao military officials said Maute gunmen murdered three traders in the town of Piagapo, near Marawi, in November. The military killed three jihadists in Pantar, another neighbouring town, on February 8, while police last month arrested three suspects over the Piagapo merchant killings. The military also reported skirmishes with Maute gunmen in the towns of Masiu and Pagayawan near Marawi last month. The renewed fighting came after Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte and other political leaders in the Mindanao region warned of a potential repeat of the siege of Marawi which claimed more than 1,100 lives. Duterte has imposed martial law over Mindanao until the end of the year in an effort to curb the militants' activities. Ebrahim Murad, head of the Philippines' main Muslim rebel group the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, which signed a peace treaty with Manila in 2014, also warned Tuesday that jihadists were recruiting and could seize another city. Murad said the 10,000-member MILF was battling pro-IS groups for influence in schools as the jihadists worked to infiltrate madrasas and secular universities. At the same time IS gunmen were making their way into the southern Philippines from Malaysia and Indonesia, he added, but gave no estimates. Speaking separately to reporters Friday, Brawner said the rebuilt Maute forces currently "do not as yet have the capability to launch another attack like what they did in Marawi", though he added this could change. The siege of Marawi forced the Philippine military, more used to low-intensity jungle warfare against guerrillas, to reorganise and to rewrite their doctrines, with a new emphasis on urban warfare training, he said. "So (on) the side of the armed forces we are ready for another Marawi siege, whether it happens in Marawi or elsewhere," Brawner said. Palestinian leader Mahmud Abbas speaks at the United Nations Security Council on February 20, 2018 in New York Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas appeared on local television Friday to downplay concerns over his health after undergoing what were described as routine tests in the United States. In an interview with Palestine TV while in the US, 82-year-old Abbas rejected reports he had been rushed to hospital during his visit. "It was a suitable opportunity to be here to conduct some medical tests, and these tests have been conducted and now we left," he said after leaving hospital. "Thank God all the results are positive and reassuring." The health of the longtime smoker has long been the subject of speculation, with no clear successor identified. Abbas was in the US to meet with political allies amid a breakdown of communication with the US administration following President Donald Trump's controversial recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital. The Palestinians, who see the eastern part of the city as the capital of their future state, have said the US has disqualified itself as a mediator in talks with Israel and cut political ties with the administration. Trump is expected to propose a peace plan in the coming months. Abbas has been in power since winning presidential elections in 2005. He has remained in the role despite his initial mandate expiring as splits between the Palestinian factions have made fresh elections impossible. Oil that has washed up on remote Japanese islands is likely from an Iranian tanker which sank in January Oil that has washed ashore on several southern Japanese islands is likely from an Iranian tanker that sank in the East China Sea last month, Japan's coastguard said Friday. Analysis of samples of heavy fuel that began washing up on remote Okinoerabu and Yoron islands this month found similar components to the fuel used by the Sanchi tanker, coastguard spokesman Takuya Matsumoto said. "We are not aware of any other maritime accident in the region that resulted in oil leaks," he told AFP. "So we have concluded that it is highly likely that the oil that reached (the two islands) is connected with Sanchi," he said. The sunken ship -- carrying 111,000 tonnes of light crude oil -- went down in a ball of flames on January 14 in Japan's economic waters in the East China Sea, sparking concerns it could lead to a massive environmental catastrophe. Late January, greasy sludge began to wash up on remote Japanese islands, known for seafood and pristine shores that lure holidaymakers. The oil washing ashore differs from the light crude that was the ship's cargo and is likely to be the fuel that was powering the vessel. At least 16 islands in the area saw oil reach their shores, and residents have collected a total of 90 tonnes of oil in their cleanup efforts, according to the local government. Tokyo has launched detailed studies of the accident's impact on the regional environment, although coastguard officials believe the leaking light crude oil is gradually dissipating. Oil samples from other islands showed different characteristics, but the tanker could have used various kinds of heavy oil in different tanks and equipment, Matsumoto added. "We are continuing our analysis. We believe it is premature to reach any conclusion about the oil coming to other islands," he said. The oil washing ashore differs from the light crude that was the ship's cargo and is likely to be the fuel that was powering the vessel Reviews of water samples collected in the region have not shown elevated levels of contamination, the coastguard said. The government has launched studies to analyse the accident's impact on the region's fisheries as well as ecosystems, including impacts on birds and coral reefs. The Sanchi caught fire after colliding with a bulk freighter in early January, setting off a desperate rescue mission by authorities. The bodies of only three of its 32 crew have been found so far. Environmental campaign group Greenpeace has urged authorities to boost clean up efforts and monitoring of regional waters. The type of condensate oil carried by the Sanchi does not form a traditional surface slick when spilt, but is nonetheless highly toxic to marine life and much harder to separate from water. Japanese police stand guard outside the General Association of Korean Residents in Japan that serves as a defacto embassy for North Koreans Two Japanese right-wing extremists were arrested Friday after firing shots at a Tokyo building that serves as a de facto embassy for North Korea, police said. No one was injured in the early morning attack, which only damaged the gate of the facility, but it marked a rare incident of gun violence in a nation that prides itself on strict weapons controls and street safety. The incident comes as North Korea commands extended global media attention with its participation in the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics. Satoshi Katsurada, 56, and Yoshinori Kawamura, 46, were arrested after allegedly firing "what appears to be a gun" several times around 3:50 am (1850 GMT), a spokesman for Tokyo Metropolitan Police said. "They were arrested on the spot," he told AFP, adding that no one was injured in the incident at the General Association of Korean Residents or Chongryon. The two men drove up to the building and fired shots toward the gate from their vehicle, local media said. No one was injured in the incident at the de facto North Korean embassy, but the shots damaged its gate They then came out of the vehicle and were arrested. The two men are associated with right-wing movements, with Katsurada known to have protested against North Korea in the past, media said. Nam Sung-U, deputy chair of Chongryon, called it a "despicable act of terror." In a statement, he blamed the Japanese government's "hostile policies" against the North for fuelling hatred toward ethnic Koreans in Japan. Dubai says it is seeking international arbitration against Djibouti after the Horn of Africa nation terminated its concession on a key port that is the main transit route to landlocked Ethiopia Dubai has said it is seeking international arbitration against Djibouti after the Horn of Africa nation terminated its concession at a key port that is the main transit route to landlocked Ethiopia. The emirate said the Djiboutian government's termination Thursday of the 50-year concession it granted to Dubai-owned DP World to operate the Doraleh container terminal in 2006 was "illegal". Announcing its decision on Thursday, Djibouti's transport ministry said that it was merely implementing a law adopted in November last year that "sets a legal framework allowing for the renegotiation, if necessary, of contracts already concluded dealing with the management or exploitation of strategic infrastructure". "In the current case, the contract of concession for Doraleh container terminal contains elements that are in flagrant contravention of state sovereignty and the higher interests of the nation," it said. But Dubai countered that the Djiboutian legislation flew in the face of international law, as repeatedly upheld by arbitration tribunals. "The illegal seizure of the terminal is the culmination (of) the government's campaign to force the DP World to renegotiate the terms of the concession," the government said late Thursday. "Those terms were found to be 'fair and reasonable' by a London Court of International Arbitration tribunal," it added. "DP World has commenced arbitration proceedings before the London Court of International Arbitration to protect their rights, or to secure damages and compensation for their breach or expropriation." The Dubai government said it found Djibouti's conduct to be "particularly oppressive and cynical" as two separate tribunals had recently dismissed its allegations of corruption in the awarding of the concession. The tiny nation of Djibouti has become a major strategic player because of its position on the Bab al-Mandab strait, the key shipping lane to Europe from the Gulf and Asia beyond. The United States, France, Italy, Spain, Saudi Arabia, Japan and China all have military bases in the country. China's base is immediately adjacent to the Doraleh terminal. The port is also the terminus for a Chinese-built railway between Djibouti and the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa which opened in 2016. More than 90 percent of the trade of Africa's second most populous nation passes through Djibouti. DP World has secured a string of port concessions in Africa, including one for Berbera in breakaway Somaliland up the Red Sea coast from the Bab al-Mandab. The G5 Sahel force is expected to be fully operational by the middle of 2018 European leaders on Friday doubled their funding for a force tackling jihadists in the Sahel, but African leaders warned the money must come quickly if it is to be effective. The European Union announced an extra 50 million euros ($61 million) for the G5 Sahel force at a conference in Brussels with heads of state from Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania and Niger, taking total pledges by international donors to over 410 million euros. But just a fraction of that money is currently available to spend and Niger President Mahamadou Issoufou, the current chair of the G5 Sahel group, said it was needed urgently to deal with an influx of Islamic State (IS) group fighters driven out of Libya and Syria. The chaos in Libya, where rival militias, tribes and jihadists are vying for influence, is fuelling instability in the Sahel, Issoufou and African Union Commission chairman Moussa Faki Mahamat warned, calling for an international push to bring peace to the oil-rich state. "The Libyan crisis has been, we know, the detonator of the degradation of the security situation in the Sahel, and day after day, it contributes to its amplification," said Issoufou. The Sahel region "We must put an end to this chaos by restoring the authority of the Libyan state to the whole of its territory." - IS influx - Friday's meeting, attended by 32 leaders including French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, observed a minute's silence in honour of two soldiers from France's counter-terror force in West Africa who were killed in a mine blast on Wednesday. It was the latest in a surge of attacks underscoring the challenge facing the five countries, among the poorest in the world, which are on the frontline of a war against Islamist militants. Europe hopes that spending money to improve the security and economic situation in the region will help stem the flow of migrants seeking a better life across the Mediterranean and prevent the Sahel becoming a springboard for jihadist attacks on the West. Niger's President Mahamadou Issoufou said the deteriorating situation in the Sahel had been triggered by the Libya crisis The G5 force aims to train and equip 5,000 local troops to patrol hotspots and restore authority in lawless areas. As well as fighting militants, the force also tackles smuggling and illegal immigration networks that operate in the vast, remote areas on the margins of the Sahara. "Daesh fighters driven out of Libya and Syria are taking refuge in the Sahel, especially from Libya, so it's urgent the pledged funds are mobilised as quickly as possible," Mahamadou said, using an alternative name for IS. The force has so far set up a headquarters and command structure and carried out two operations, with French support, in the troubled "tri-border" area where Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso meet. It is intended to become fully operational in mid-2018, and to operate alongside France's 4,000 troops in the area as well as the UN's 12,000-strong MINUSMA peacekeeping operation in Mali. International pledges for the force now total 414 million euros, Mogherini said, but up to now only the 50 million euros has been made available. Mahamat said jihadist groups would likely step up attacks in Mali as the G5 force geared up, warning "they're not going to sit back with their arms crossed". Recent operations against militants in northern Mali have left around 30 rebels dead, Macron said, vowing "total determination" to defeat the threat. - Development push - Opening the conference, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said "security and development must go hand in hand" in the Sahel, an area almost as big as the EU where a fifth of the population do not have reliable food supplies. France's President Emmanuel Macron said there was "a collective realisation" about the importance of the Sahel The bloc has budgeted nearly eight billion euros for development assistance in the Sahel from 2014 to 2020, while France pledged 1.2 billion euros over the next five years and Germany 1.7 billion euros. The EU's diplomatic chief Federica Mogherini said more pledges from individual countries were expected, saying "the price of not having peace has to be paid every day". As well as EU leaders and the United Nations, around a dozen other countries were represented by foreign ministers including Saudi Arabia, Norway, Morocco and Tunisia. Donations to the G5 so far have been led by Saudi Arabia with 100 million euros, while the United Arab Emirates has given 30 million euros and the US $60 million. France, a former colonial power, intervened militarily in Mali in 2013 to help government forces drive Al-Qaeda-linked jihadists out of the north. Within two weeks, the Sunni radicals were flushed out of most urban areas but they continue to mount attacks from desert bases. Violence spread from northern Mali to the centre and the south, and then spilt over into Burkina Faso and Niger. Former South African soldier William Endley, 55, has been sentenced to death in South Sudan on charges of espionage and trying to overthrow the government A former South African soldier was sentenced to death in South Sudan on Friday for attempting to overthrow the government. Ex-colonel William Endley, 55, was "sentenced to death by hanging" for espionage and conspiring to overthrow the government, said judge Lado Eriminio Sekwat at a court in the capital Juba. Endley, who can appeal the ruling, was also sentenced to nine years and four months in prison for other related crimes, which must be served before his execution. The South African was hired in 2016 to advise former vice president and rebel leader Riek Machar on the planned integration of rebel forces into the national army under the then peace deal. Weeks after the peace agreement collapsed during days of heavy fighting that rocked the capital in July 2016, Endley was arrested. He was charged along with rebel spokesman James Gatdet Dak, who was sentenced to death by the same court on February 12 for treason. South Sudan won independence from Sudan in 2011, but little more than two years later, civil war broke out over a dispute between Machar and President Salva Kiir. Tens of thousands have since died while four million have been forced from their homes as successive peace talks have failed. Syrian rescuers and civilians run in the Eastern Ghouta rebel enclave on February 22, 2018 Syrian regime air strikes and artillery fire hit the rebel-held enclave of Eastern Ghouta for a sixth straight day Friday killing 38 civilians, as world powers struggled to reach a UN deal to stop the carnage. More than 460 civilians, including over 100 children, have been killed in nearly a week of bombardment that has been one of the seven-year conflict's bloodiest episodes. Diplomatic haggling delayed a vote at the United Nations Security Council on a 30-day truce, with Kuwait's Ambassador Mansour al-Otaibi, who holds the council presidency, saying "we are very close" to agreement with Russia, Syria's ally. The Security Council is scheduled to meet at noon (1700 GMT) Saturday to vote on a draft resolution demanding a 30-day ceasefire, but it remained unclear whether Russia will veto the proposed measure. Amid the wrangling, US President Donald Trump slammed the actions of the Syrian government and its Russian and Iranian supporters as a "humanitarian disgrace." Few of Eastern Ghouta's nearly 400,000 residents -- mostly living in a scattering of towns across the semi-rural area east of the capital -- ventured out on Friday. An AFP correspondent in Douma, the enclave's main town, saw a handful of people stealthily crossing rubble-strewn streets to assess damage to their property or look for food and water. Bombardment of Eastern Ghouta The bombing has been relentless since government and allied forces intensified their campaign on Sunday and rocket fire soon forced everybody to run for cover. Exhausted and famished families cowered in cramped and damp basements, exchanging information on the latest casualties of the government's blitz. - Trapped bodies - A Syrian child walks past debris in Eastern Ghouta on February 22, 2018 Fresh strikes by the Syrian regime and its Russian ally, killed at least 38 civilians, including 11 children, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. The latest deaths brought to 468 the number of people killed -- among them 108 children -- since the escalation of the bombardment of the besieged area on February 18. More than 2,000 people have been wounded. Rebels have been firing back into the capital Damascus, where a hospital was hit, the official Syrian news agency SANA said. At the UN, US Ambassador Nikki Haley expressed dismay as negotiations dragged on to secure Russian approval for the ceasefire that would allow humanitarian aide deliveries and medical evacuations. "Unbelievable that Russia is stalling a vote on a ceasefire allowing humanitarian access in Syria," Haley posted on Twitter. "How many more people will die before the Security Council agrees to take up this vote? Let's do this tonight. The Syrian people can't wait." Russia has vetoed 11 draft resolutions on Syria to block action that targeted its ally in Damascus. In November, it used its veto to end a UN-led investigation of chemical weapons attacks in Syria. German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron wrote to Putin to ask him to back the ceasefire. Negotiations have stumbled over a key provision of the draft resolution that specifies when the ceasefire will begin. Following hours of tough negotiations, an amended draft resolution was circulated that demands a 30-day ceasefire "without delay," while stopping short of specifying the timing. A previous draft had said the ceasefire would go into force 72 hours after the adoption, but that was dropped from the text in a bid to reach compromise with Russia. In another concession to Russia, the draft also specifies that the ceasefire will not apply to operations against the Islamic State group or Al-Qaeda, along with "individuals, groups, undertakings and entities associated" with the terror groups. World leaders have expressed outrage at the plight of civilians in Eastern Ghouta, which UN chief Antonio Guterres called "hell on earth", but have so far been powerless to halt the bloodshed. "The UN says it is concerned and calls for a ceasefire, France condemns, but they have given us nothing," said Abu Mustafa, one of the few civilians on the streets of Douma Friday morning. "Every day we have strikes, destruction. This would draw tears from a rock," said the 50-year-old, who was escorting a wounded person to hospital. The enclave has been controlled by Islamist and jihadist groups since 2012. The main rebel groups in Eastern Ghouta rejected any deal that would see them or other residents relocated. "We categorically reject any initiative providing for inhabitants to leave their homes and be transferred towards any other location," they said in a letter addressed to Guterres. The area is completely surrounded by government-controlled territory and residents are unwilling or unable to flee the deadly siege. More than 340,000 people have been killed and millions driven from the homes in Syria's war, which next month enters its eighth year with no end in sight. Djibouti's president, Ismail Omar Guelleh, has been at the helm of the tiny strategic state since 1999 Djibouti was voting on Friday in parliamentary polls expected to hand a fresh victory to the ruling party of President Ismael Omar Guelleh in an election largely boycotted by the opposition. Polling began at 6:30 am (0330 GMT) among 194,000 voters, who will choose 65 deputies. The tiny Horn of Africa nation, a former French colony until 1977, has been ruled by Guelleh since 1999. He was re-elected as president in 2016, with 86.88 percent of the vote. Guelleh's UMP party is expected to ride to victory over a badly-divided opposition. Two parties -- MRD and RADDE and a faction of a third party, ARD -- are refusing to put forward any candidates, saying the elections are not fair or transparent. Zakaria Abdillahi, president of the Djibouti League of Human Rights and a former opposition legislator, said the country's electoral commission "is not independent -- its chairman is the prime minister's legal advisor." The law stipulates that 25 percent of seats in these legislative elections be attributed to women, compared to 10 percent in the outcoming assembly. President Rodrigo Duterte was elected in 2016 in part on a vow to kill tens of thousands of criminals in a bid to rid the country of narcotics The Philippine government summoned the US ambassador over an American intelligence report that listed President Rodrigo Duterte and his deadly war on drugs as a "regional threat", Manila said Friday. US envoy Sung Kim met Duterte's chief aide on Thursday to discuss the US "Worldwide Threat Assessment" released last week, the two nations said. Under a section headed "regional threats", the report listed Cambodian leader Hun Sen's crackdown on dissent, Duterte's war on crime and corruption as well as the flight of the Rohingya minority from Myanmar to Bangladesh. Duterte's spokesman Harry Roque said in a statement that Executive Secretary Salvador Medialdea summoned Kim over the report, which has drawn sharp criticism from the president's camp. "Duterte is no autocrat or has autocratic tendencies. He adheres to the rule of law and remains loyal to the constitution," Roque said this week in response to the report. Duterte was elected in 2016 in part on a vow to kill tens of thousands of criminals in a bid to rid the country of narcotics. The International Criminal Court this month launched a preliminary examination into allegations of thousands of extrajudicial killings committed during the president's narcotics crackdown. A US embassy statement said its ambassador met Medialdea to explain the nature of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence report, which the statement said was "based on widely available information". "Their discussion focused on the references to the Philippines in the report, including clarifying that the information about the Philippines had been previously reported by media sources," the embassy said. "The United States will continue to collaborate with the government of the Philippines," it added. Ties between Washington and its former colony had suffered under previous US president Barack Obama following his criticism of Manila's drug war, with the fiery Duterte calling him a "son of a whore". The two governments say relations have improved since the election in 2016 of US leader Donald Trump. A video showing an Iranian policeman shoving a woman protesting against mandatory headscarves off her makeshift podium in a busy Tehran street has sparked a storm on social media A video showing an Iranian policeman shoving a woman protesting against mandatory headscarves off her makeshift podium in a busy Tehran street sparked criticism on social media on Friday. The video of the solitary female demonstrator was apparently shot on Enghelab (Revolution) Street, where a woman was first detained in December after standing with her head uncovered waving a scarf on a stick. Since then several dozen Iranian women have published photos of themselves in the street or parks, their heads uncovered, waving their scarves in an act of defiance. The woman in the video is seen standing on a street cabinet with her arms raised in the air, her long blond hair worn in a high pony tail. Asked by two policeman to get down, she replies calmly: "Tell me what my offence is and I'll get down." "Disturbing public order," one of them says. A crowd then forms and starts clapping. In the second part of the video, apparently shot on a cellphone, one of the policemen steps up to the same height as the woman and shoves her off her podium, to the indignation of onlookers. "Where are the human rights?" a male voice asks. Lawyer and human rights activist Nasrin Sotoudeh wrote on Facebook that the policeman broke the law because "no man has the right to treat a woman like this". Twitter users also reacted with dismay. "Breaking the law while in law enforcement uniform is our problem in Iran," one tweeted. "The same police force that makes the girl fall over in Enghelab Street is the one responsible for ensuring the security and viability of the elections," said another. Since December around 30 women have been arrested in Tehran for defying a requirement under Iran's Islamic legal code to wear a headscarf. In the mid-1990s, Equatorial Guinea became one of sub-Saharan Africa's biggest oil producers, but little of that wealth has trickled down Equatorial Guinea's main opposition party "must be dissolved", the attorney general has said during the trial of 147 of its activists who are accused of "rebellion". "The Citizens for Innovation (CI) party should be dissolved, there is violence wherever it holds meetings," said David Nguema Obiang during the trial in Mongomo, excerpts of which were broadcast on state television Friday. "It doesn't even resemble a political party... It's like a paramilitary group." The mass trial, which began on February 12, involves CI activists and senior officials who were arrested following elections in November. The defendants are being tried on charges of rebellion, attacks against authority, public disorder and serious injury and damage, according to their defence. At the start of the trial, the public prosecutor sought the death penalty for all of them, but on Thursday said "all those who have nothing to do with the events... should be released." "The verdict is expected on Monday," said one of their attorneys, Fabian Nsue Nguema. They are being tried at the High Court in Mongomo on mainland Equatorial Guinea, in the hometown of President Teodoro Obiang Nguema, who seized power in the oil-rich former Spanish colony in 1979. He has been repeatedly accused of brutally repressing his opponents as well as electoral fraud and corruption. The ruling Democratic Party of Equatorial Guinea maintained its grip on power during the November 12 vote, winning 99 of the parliament's 100 seats, while CI won the other. The vote was widely criticised by the opposition as fraudulent. The trial is linked to scuffles which occurred a week before the vote when police tried to stop a campaign rally in Aconibe, the hometown of CI's leader, in which three police were hurt and their weapons -- three AK-47 assault rifles and a pistol -- were seized. Speaking to AFP, a regional diplomatic source said that "90 percent of the defendants were not even present" at the time. Those on trial include individuals who had been arrested in Malabo, the capital, and in the port city of Bata, the source said. Last month, the CI said one of its activists had died in custody after being tortured, saying he was one of about 200 supporters who had been arrested since November. Although the activist's death was confirmed in an interview with Obiang, who is Africa's longest-serving president, he denied claims of "mistreatment" and said it was due to ill health. Earlier this month, the EU denounced a "sharp decline" in human rights following the election and urged legal process to be fair and in line with international norms. In the mid-1990s, Equatorial Guinea became one of sub-Saharan Africa's biggest oil producers. But little of the wealth has trickled down -- about two-thirds of its 1.2 million people live below the poverty line. In 2015, Nguema announced a referendum would be held on the death penalty but the vote has never taken place. DR Congo's powerful Roman Catholic church has thrown its weight behind peaceful rallies demanding President Joseph Kabila step down Roman Catholics in the Democratic Republic of Congo on Friday heeded a call by Pope Francis to pray for peace, two days ahead of a planned protest against the regime. People flocked to a 6:00 am (0500 GMT) mass in the Our Lady of the Congo cathedral ahead of the march on Sunday called to press President Joseph Kabila to quit power. Two previous marches were banned by the regime and were dispersed with live ammunition, claiming 15 lives, according to the church, while the authorities put the toll at two dead. "In union with Pope Francis, let us pray that the Lord puts his peace in all our hearts," the celebrant urged worshippers. The pontiff has urged them to pray for peace both at home and in South Sudan, torn by a complex conflict with ethnic overtones. The latest peaceful protest in Kinshasa was called by the Lay Coordination Committee (CLC), an organisation close to the church which is an influential force in the troubled country. In a letter, dated February 20, the CLC called on Christians to march peacefully on Sunday "to say no to the dictatorship, a major obstacle to the holding of free, transparent, credible and peaceful elections". In a joint statement, the European Union, United States, Canada and Switzerland called on all parties involved to avoid violence and allow peaceful demonstrations to go ahead. Kinshasa city authorities have "neither authorised nor banned" the planned march, according to officials who said they had not been contacted by the organisers. AFP was unable to reach the CLC, which has been supported by Catholic bishops who urged the people "to remain upright and watchful". In the evening groups of mainly youthful activists gathered outside a church in the centre of the capital where 24-year-old Therese Kapangala was shot dead during one of the earlier marches. Political tension around the vast central African nation has grown since Kabila's second and final elected five-year term expired on December 20, 2016. He remains in power, citing the constitutional authority to do so as long as a successor has not been elected. Kabila first took office in January 2001 after his father Laurent-Desire Kabila was assassinated by an aide at the height of the Second Congo War, which drew in foreign armies and ended in 2003. Kabila was first returned to power in a presidential poll organised in 2006 with assistance from the large UN mission deployed in the country, but his victory in the next election in 2011 led to cries of fraud, violence and heated protest from the church. The next elections are planned for December 23, 2018, after being postponed for two years. Beijing still sees Taiwan as part of its territory to be reunified Taiwan replaced its China affairs chief Friday, promoting a minister associated with pro-independence politics in what it said was a bid to forge a "new phase" in relations with rival Beijing. Analysts said the move, part of a major reshuffle, signalled a push by President Tsai Ing-wen to take a more assertive stance as ties with the Chinese government grow increasingly frosty. China still sees Taiwan as part of its territory to be reunified and has cut off official communications with Taipei as Tsai refuses to acknowledge the self-ruling, democratic island is part of "one China". Chen Ming-tong will take over the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) which oversees Taiwan's relations with China. He previously served as head of the MAC from 2007 to 2008 under Taiwan's former president Chen Shui-bian, who was a staunch independence advocate. "Chen is familiar with cross-strait exchanges... he can also create a new phase and a new vision in cross-strait affairs by returning to the job," cabinet spokesman Hsu Kuo-yung told reporters. Presidential secretary-general Joseph Wu, a confidant of Tsai with expertise in international and cross-strait relations, also became the new foreign minister. The pair replace relatively conservative ministers, indicating Tsai's intention to take a more bullish approach to cross-strait relations, said Hung Chin-fu, a political analyst at National Cheng Kung University. "She aims to find a strategic balance, a dynamic equilibrium between the two sides so Taiwan won't be in a passive situation where it keeps taking punches by China," he told AFP. Tsai has pledged to maintain the "status quo" with Beijing but pro-independence politicians in her Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) have criticised her for not taking a tougher stance. Ties with Beijing have become increasingly tense since Tsai took office in 2016. Beijing has stepped up the pressure on her government with increased military drills and by wooing away Taiwan's dwindling number of diplomatic allies. When China last month began operating new flight routes in the Taiwan Strait without consulting the island, Taipei slammed the move as "reckless and politically motivated". Taiwan retaliated by blocking requests by two Chinese airlines to operate 176 additional cross-strait flights during the peak Lunar New Year holiday period. The reshuffle also aimed to boost support for Tsai's DPP ahead of her mid-term test with key local government elections by the end of 2018, analysts said. National Security Council secretary-general Yen Teh-fa is also set to replace gaffe-prone defence minister Feng Shih-kuan, who was criticised and ridiculed for giving himself a perfect mark of "100 points" when grading his job performance and for describing himself as "more handsome" than a top movie star. Prime Minister Narendra Modi (R) said he would not tolerate separatism, while Justin Trudeau has been at pains to quash perceptions in India that his Canada is a safe have for Sikh extremists Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke out against separatism Friday in an apparent warning to his Canadian counterpart, whose week-long visit to India has been marred by claims his administration is soft on Sikh extremists. Standing next to visiting Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Modi said India would not tolerate those who sought to challenge its integrity. "There should be no place for those who misuse religion for political motives and promote separatism," Modi said. "We will not tolerate those who challenge the unity, integrity and harmony of our countries." Although he did not mention Sikhs by name his words were seen as a clear reference to demands from some in the community for a separate homeland to be carved out of India. Trudeau has been at pains during his visit to quash long-simmering perceptions in India that his Canada is a safe haven for Sikh extremists. But on Thursday he was forced to admit that a Sikh found guilty of trying to assassinate an Indian minister in 1986 had been invited to dine with him in New Delhi. It was just one in a series of embarrassments that began the moment Trudeau and his family touched down on Indian soil. Indian newspapers were quick to point out that only a junior minister was deputed to meet the Canadian leader, interpreting that as a snub from Modi. During his visit Canada's telegenic premier, who is more used to global adoration than approbation, has also faced criticism for his decision to dress in colourful Indian outfits. In Mumbai earlier this week he even out-blinged Bollywood when he opted for a gold sherwani, traditional men's wedding attire, at a movie event attended by top Indian actors, all of whom wore western clothing. "What's catching everyone's attention is the Trudeau family's fascinating wardrobe choice -- too Indian even for an Indian," said weekly news magazine Outlook. Canada is home to roughly half a million Sikhs and Trudeau's administration has been accused of being too cosy with those who appear to back independence. Trudeau particularly riled New Delhi last year when he attended a parade in Canada at which Sikh militants were feted as heroes. Wreckage of an Iranian airliner is seen in the Zagros mountains Iran's civil aviation organisation has grounded ATR planes belonging to Aseman Airlines after one of them crashed this week with 66 people on board, state television reported Friday. The measure is temporary as authorities investigate the cause of Sunday's accident, which saw an ATR-72 twin-engine plane, in service since 1993, crash in Iran's Zagros mountains. Aseman, which is banned from flying in the European Union, operates five ATR-72s, according to the company's website. Flight EP3704 disappeared from radar around 45 minutes after taking off from Tehran on a domestic flight. No survivors have been found. The wreckage of the ATR, which is part-owned by Europe's Airbus, was discovered at a height of around 4,000 metres (13,000 feet) in the Dena range but bad weather has hampered recovery efforts. Helicopters have been unable to access the site and an operation to bring bodies down the mountain on foot has been suspended until Monday. The plane's "black box" flight recorders have also not yet been recovered. Wayne Lotter -- seen here at a Walk for Elephants event in Dar es Salaam in January 2017 -- was a major figure in the fight against ivory trafficking A court in Tanzania on Friday charged eight people with the murder of renowned conservationist Wayne Lotter who was shot dead in Dar es Salaam in August. The eight individuals were charged with murder and conspiracy to murder, according to court documents seen by AFP. Lotter, a 51-year-old South African conservationist, was a founder of the PAMS Foundation which worked to stop the poaching of elephants and trafficking of ivory in Tanzania. He was killed by unknown gunmen on August 16 while in a taxi on his way back from the airport. "We congratulate the Tanzanian Police Force for the arrest and charging of these individuals," PAMS said in a statement. "Wayne was a visionary conservationist working with indefatigable determination to save Tanzania's wildlife and we are relieved that some of the perpetrators responsible for his untimely death have been apprehended and are being brought to justice." PAMS had scored some big wins fighting the illegal wildlife trade, working with Tanzania's National and Transnational Serious Crimes Investigation Unit (NTSCIU) in the arrest of nearly 900 poachers and ivory traders. These include Chinese citizen Yang Fenlan known as the "Ivory Queen", who is currently on trial in Tanzania for illegally trafficking 706 elephant tusks between 2000 and 2014. Tanzania has been one of the African countries worst hit by elephant poaching, losing over 66,000 elephants in a decade, but interdiction efforts meant poaching has declined in recent years. Nigerian militant leader Henry Okah has always denied the charges against him South Africa's top court on Friday reinstated a 24 year prison sentence for a Nigerian oil militant convicted of a series of terror attacks in his home country eight years ago. Henry Okah was jailed in 2013 for masterminding a number of attacks, including twin bombings which killed 12 people in the Nigerian capital Abuja during independence day celebrations in 2010. Okah's appeal was first heard by the Supreme Court of Appeal in 2014, which overturned four of his 13 terror convictions and reduced his sentence to 20 years, but the Constitutional Court in Johannesburg overruled the decision. "The appeal against his entire conviction... is dismissed," the Constitutional Court said in its ruling. "The convictions overturned in the Supreme Court of Appeal must be reinstated together with the sentences the High Court imposed." Okah had repeatedly denied any involvement in the blasts. Lawyers for Okah, who has been a permanent resident of South Africa since 2007, had argued it was outside the country's legal jurisdiction to put him on trial. "He was not extradited to Nigeria because, had he stood trial there, he would have faced the death penalty," said the Constitutional Court in its judgement. Okah, who was also convicted over two other explosions in 2010 in the southern Nigerian city of Warri, a hub of the oil-rich delta region, was the presumed leader of the Nigerian militant group Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND). MEND said it was fighting for a fair share of oil revenue for residents of the Niger Delta. The group has seen spin-offs by radicals who want independence for the region. A high court in the Nigerian capital Abuja is expected to hand down a ruling on March 7 in the trial of Okah's brother Charles for his alleged involvement in the 2010 independence day bombings. Since 2013, South Sudan's cvil war has claimed tens of thousands of lives. Nearly four million people -- roughly a third of the population -- have been fled their homes A UN rights commission in South Sudan said Friday there was sufficient evidence to charge at least 41 senior officers and officials with war crimes and crimes against humanity. South Sudan's four-year-old civil war has been characterised by extreme brutality and attacks on civilians. But no high-ranking officials have been held to account, despite African Union (AU) promises to establish a special court to try alleged crimes. "The court could be set up straight away and the prosecutor could begin working on indictments," said Yasmin Sooka, chairperson of the UN Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan. "Under the peace agreement, those indicted can no longer hold or stand for office. Ultimately this is the only way to stop the rampant devastation of millions of human lives by South Sudan's leaders," she said. The commission said it had forwarded a confidential list of suspects to the UN's High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein. Those named comprise three state governors, 33 generals and five colonels. The report -- based on 58,000 documents and 230 witness statements -- is a litany of horrors and extraordinary cruelty. Some victims were beheaded, burned alive or had their throats cut, others had their eyes gouged out or were tortured. - Rape 'reminiscent of Bosnia' - Sexual violence was particularly prevalent with numerous accounts of gang rape and child rape, and in "cases reminiscent of Bosnia" of people forced to watch or participate in the rape of loved ones. In one instance a 12-year-old boy was forced to have sex with his grandmother or be killed. Men were also attacked, with some castrated and others raped. "The Commission believes the prevalence of sexual violence against men in South Sudan is far more extensive than documented; what we see so far is likely just the tip of the iceberg," said Sooka. The UN commission said soldiers and officials loyal to President Salva Kiir and rebel leader Riek Machar were both responsible for crimes. It dismissed arguments that indisciplined soldiers might be to blame. Both the government and rebel "military hierarchies functioned effectively in terms of issuance, transmission, and respect for orders," it said. The commission said its investigations had focussed on incidents where it could make "the case for individual command responsibility for widespread or systematic attacks on civilians." It found widespread looting and deliberate ethnic attacks on entire communities and villages, with the "destruction of dwellings... on an industrial scale." The South Sudan war began as a battle between Kiir's majority Dinka tribe and Machar's Nuer. But it has since metastasized, spreading and fragmenting, while feeding on local grievances and long-standing ethnic animosities over access to land, resources and power. "There is a clear pattern of ethnic persecution for the most part by government forces who should be pursued for crimes against humanity," said Andrew Clapham, one of the commissioners. - 'Sufficient evidence' - Describing South Sudan's justice system as "dysfunctional" the commission called on the AU to establish the 'Hybrid Court', modelled on tribunals in Sierra Leone, Cambodia and elsewhere. "There is sufficient evidence to conclude that... the parties to the conflict are deliberately targeting civilians on the basis of their ethnic identity and by means of killings, abductions, rape and sexual violence, as well as the destruction of villages and looting. These acts constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity," the commission's report said. Disgust at the latest evidence of brutality was widespread. Britain's foreign minister Boris Johnson said on Twitter, "Reports of atrocities in South Sudan are among most troubling I have seen. Sexual violence being used as weapon of war against women, men, children & elderly victims. UK supports peace efforts but S Sudanese must honour ceasefire for the sake of their people." The last ceasefire, signed in December, was broken within hours while the latest round of peace talks in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa have stalled. Seif Magango of rights group Amnesty International said the UN report demonstrated "the critical need to establish the Hybrid Court for South Sudan". The report "should jolt the world into speedy action to address the horrific human rights violations that have continued unabated for four years of conflict in South Sudan," he said. Florida Governor Rick Scott announced plans to station a police officer at every public school in the state A police officer will be stationed at every public school in Florida, the state's governor announced Friday as part of a plan to improve security following last week's deadly high school shooting. President Donald Trump repeated his call, meanwhile, for arming some of America's teachers and claimed the controversial proposal was increasingly drawing support. The push to make schools safer came as the local sheriff's office released details of nearly two dozen visits to the residences of Nikolas Cruz, the 19-year-old behind the assault at Marjory Douglas Stoneman High School in Parkland, Florida. Speaking at a news conference in the state capital Tallahassee, Republican Governor Rick Scott unveiled a $450 million security plan in response to the Valentine's Day rampage. "There is nothing more important than the safety of our children," Scott said. "We must take care of our kids." "I am proposing at least one law enforcement officer for every 1,000 students," Scott said of putting police in public schools. US President Donald Trump pushed his proposal to arm teachers during a speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference Asked about Trump's proposal that teachers carry concealed weapons, Scott replied: "My focus is on providing more law enforcement officers, not on arming the teachers." Scott proposed a ban on "bump stocks" -- an accessory which turns a semi-automatic weapon into an automatic one -- and making it easier for courts "to prohibit a violent or mentally ill person from purchasing or possessing a firearm." Scott also said the age for gun buyers in the state would be raised from 18 to 21 -- a move opposed by the powerful National Rifle Association (NRA) gun lobby. The governor stopped short, however, of endorsing a ban on assault weapons -- a demand of many of the teenagers who survived the shooting at Stoneman Douglas that left 14 of their classmates and three staff dead. "I know there are some who are advocating a mass takeaway of Second Amendment rights for all Americans," Scott said -- referring to America's constitutional right to bear arms. "That is not the answer." "Keeping guns away from dangerous people and people with mental issues is what we need to do," he said. Trump also does not support a ban on semi-automatic weapons and in a speech to a conservative gathering near Washington, he returned again to his idea of arming teachers. - 'Shot the hell out of him' - People applaud as US Trump speaks at CPAC Speaking to a receptive crowd of thousands of fellow Republicans at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), Trump said "well-trained" teachers could help stop school shootings. "Maybe 10 percent or 20 percent of the population of teachers," he said. "Not all of them, but you would have a lot. "And the beauty is it's concealed," Trump said. Referring to Cruz, the Stoneman Douglas assailant, Trump said "a teacher would have shot the hell out of him before he knew what happened." Trump claimed his proposal to arm teachers, which has been strongly criticized by the nation's largest teachers' unions, was drawing support. "Since I started this two days ago, a lot of people that were totally opposed to it are now agreeing," he said. "They don't want their students to be killed or to be hurt." Trump proposed measures preventing the mentally ill from obtaining weapons and to "really strengthen up background checks" for gun buyers. "And I really believe that Congress is going to get it through this time," he said. Lawmakers in Washington have been deadlocked on the gun debate, accomplishing nothing despite a spate of mass shootings and polls showing Americans support stricter gun laws by a two-to-one margin. - 'Coward' - Trump also criticized by name the sheriff's deputy who allegedly failed to take action against Cruz during the shooting spree, saying he had been a "coward." Scot Peterson has resigned after being suspended without pay. Three other Broward Country Sheriff's deputies also stayed outside the school and did not enter as the crisis unfolded, US media reported. The Wall Street Journal obtained a transcript of a call from a tipster to the FBI more than one month before the massacre, in which she expressed concern Cruz would "get into a school and just shoot the place up." The FBI has said it received such a call, which did not lead to any law enforcement followup, from a person close to Cruz, but it was the first time the details were made public. The 19-year-old had amassed multiple guns following his mother's death in November, and had posted on social media that "he wants to kill people," the caller said, describing a history of disruptive and violent behavior. "I know he's -- he's going to explode," she warned. The sheriff's office also released details of 23 calls to the various homes where Cruz lived over the past nine years. The earliest call dates from November 2008 when Cruz, then nine years old, threw a rock at another boy who had thrown a rock at him. Other calls to the police were from Cruz's late mother, Linda, after she was involved in altercations with her son or he was fighting with his brother. Two of the most disturbing calls -- in February 2016 and November 2017 -- were tips that Cruz was armed and may be planning to attack a school. The sheriff's office said an internal investigation was underway into how those calls were handled. Unlike service animals, which are trained to assist individuals with disabilities and typically have a "no pet" policy, therapy animals are meant to be pet. Marabella said all of PAWS' therapy pets wear a yellow vest or bandanna to alert and encourage people to interact with the animal. On the second and fourth Monday of every month, Ruth Schussler said she ties a yellow bandana around her 8-year-old Labradoodle, Koa, and walks around the old courthouse on Genesee Street. And together, they visit with participants in Auburn City Drug Court. On one occasion, Schussler said, Koa approached a family who seemed especially nervous. But when they discovered Koa's name meant "hope," their attitude changed. "They were quiet for several seconds and then they said, 'That's just what we need right now we need hope,'" she said. "They said Koa worked her magic and they felt much calmer after petting her." Schussler said she and Koa also visit The Commons on St. Anthony in Auburn. The pair has been volunteering there for three years. "Dogs do so much," she said. "They are not judgmental ... and they can bring so much joy and comfort. I like to be able to share that with other people." President Donald Trump described the new sanctions on North Korea as the 'heaviest' ever in an address to a conservative conference near Washington US President Donald Trump rolled out sanctions against North Korea-linked shipping assets Friday, hailing the package as the "heaviest sanctions ever" levied on the Pyongyang regime. Trump used a speech to conservatives just outside Washington to step up his campaign of "maximum pressure" designed to force North Korea to roll back its weapons programs. "We imposed today the heaviest sanctions ever imposed on a country before," Trump claimed at the end of a 90 minute campaign-style address. In light of past US embargoes, that is likely an overstatement, but Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin confirmed the sanctions covered "virtually all the ships" North Korea is "using at this moment in time." Trump had been expected to provide details of measures that target "56 vessels, shipping companies, and trade businesses," but skipped that part of his prepared remarks. "I do want to say because people have asked, North Korea," he said instead. "Frankly hopefully something positive can happen." Trump's administration is locked in a nuclear standoff with North Korea, which is trying to develop missiles that could deliver a nuke to major cities in the United States. The latest sanctions are designed to put the squeeze on North Korea's already precarious economy and fuel supply. Mnuchin said there were signs that effort was starting to have an impact, but did not elaborate. The North Korean military and broader economy depend heavily on imports of coal and oil from China and Russia. China has steadfastly rebuffed Washington's calls for a full oil embargo -- fearing the chaotic collapse of the Pyongyang regime -- but has agreed to caps agreed at the United Nations. - Reaffirming ties with Seoul - The timing of the new measures coincides with the arrival in South Korea of Trump's daughter Ivanka. She is attending the closing ceremony of the Winter Olympics, which have taken place against the backdrop of the crisis. Ivanka Trump stressed the need to keep up 'maximum pressure' on the North while South Korean President Moon Jae-in said it was important to build on the current rapprochement The 36-year-old businesswoman and model-turned-policy-advisor has been tasked with reaffirming US ties with South Korea, which have been strained over how to deal with the North. She was hosted in Seoul by President Moon Jae-in, who has long advocated talks rather than confrontation with North Korea. "Mrs. Trump delivered a personal message to President Moon from President Trump about today's North Korea related sanctions announcement at a small meeting at the Blue House," the White House said. "They also discussed the continued effort on the joint maximum pressure campaign against North Korea." South Korean officials, who sit in a capital well within range of conventional North Korea artillery, have been spooked by Trump's easy talk of military confrontation. US officials worry meanwhile that North Korea is luring Moon into talks that are designed to go nowhere. Ivanka Trump is not expected to meet North Korean officials on her trip. About 10 million Filipinos work overseas and their treatment abroad is often a political issue at home One of the two main suspects in the murder of a Filipina maid whose body was found stuffed in a freezer in Kuwait this month has been arrested, Philippine authorities said Friday. The murder of Joanna Demafelis prompted Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte to impose a departure ban for Filipinos planning to work in Kuwait, sparking a diplomatic flap between the two nations. Duterte has vowed to bring justice to Demafelis' family, lashing out at the Gulf state and alleging Arab employers routinely rape Filipina workers, force them to work 21 hours a day and feed them scraps. The Philippines' foreign affairs department said Kuwait informed Manila on Thursday that Lebanese national Nader Essam Assaf was in custody in Lebanon for Demafelis' murder. The 29-year-old Filipina's body, which allegedly showed signs of torture, was found inside a freezer in the abandoned apartment unit of the arrested suspect and his Syrian wife, who remains on the run. "President (Duterte) welcomes the news that Nader Essam Assaf is now in the hands of authorities in Lebanon," Philippine Foreign Secretary Alan Cayetano said in a statement. "Assaf's arrest is a critical first step in our quest for justice for Joanna and we are thankful to our friends in Kuwait and Lebanon for their assistance." Assaf and his wife have been the subject of an Interpol manhunt since Demafelis' body was found more than a year after her family reported her missing, the statement said. Authorities say some 252,000 Filipinos work in Kuwait, many as maids. They are among over two million Philippine nationals employed in the region, whose remittances are a lifeline to the Southeast Asian nation's economy. About 10 million Filipinos work overseas and their treatment abroad is often a political issue at home. Duterte this week sent a team of labour officials to Kuwait to seek greater protection for migrant workers. The president has said he is considering expanding the deployment ban to other countries if Filipinos were found to suffer abuse there. The US announces a May date for the relocation of its embassy to Jerusalem, a disputed city holy to three major religions The United States will relocate its embassy in Israel to Jerusalem in May, coinciding with Israel's celebration of the 70th anniversary of its independence, US officials said Friday. The decision sparked a furious reaction from Palestinians, who object to the US recognition of the disputed city as Israel's capital and call May 14 -- which in 2018 marks 70 years since Israel's declaration of independence -- Naqba, their "day of catastrophe." The choice of the date, a year earlier than originally forecast, is likely to further cloud efforts to restart peace talks between the Israelis and Palestinians, putting in greater doubt the traditional US role as an "honest broker." "We are planning to open the new US Embassy to Israel in Jerusalem in May. The Embassy opening will coincide with Israel's 70th anniversary," a State Department spokesperson said. In December, President Donald Trump broke with decades of policy to announce US recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital, drawing near global condemnation, deeply angering the Palestinians and sparking days of unrest in the Palestinian territories. Until now, the US embassy has been located in Tel Aviv. The new embassy will be located temporarily in a US consular building in Jerusalem's Arnona neighborhood, the US official said, while Washington seeks a permanent location. It will initially consist of the ambassador and a "small team," the official added. - 'Blatant violation of international law' - The Palestine Liberation Organization decried Washington's decision as a "provocation to all Arabs." "The American administration's decisions to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital and choose the Palestinian people's Naqba as the date for this step is a blatant violation of international law," PLO number two Saeb Erekat told AFP. He said the result would be "the destruction of the two-state option, as well as a blatant provocation to all Arabs and Muslims." The US move to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital broke with generations of international consensus that the city's status should be settled as part of a two-state peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians. Israel claims all of Jerusalem as its capital, while the Palestinians see the eastern sector as the capital of their future state. Trump said his defiant move -- making good on a 2016 presidential campaign pledge -- marked the start of a "new approach" to solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Israelis and Palestinians alike interpreted Trump's move as Washington taking Israel's side in the conflict -- a view reinforced by the White House's recent decision to withhold financing for the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA). Palestinian leader Mahmud Abbas delivered a rare address to the UN Security Council on Tuesday, calling for an international conference to be held later this year to launch a new, wider Middle East peace process and pave the way to Palestinian statehood. The revised schedule on the embassy move comes after US Vice President Mike Pence pledged only last month to move the embassy to Jerusalem by the end of 2019 in a speech to Israel's parliament that saw Arab lawmakers expelled after they shouted in protest. The southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu will now offer cosmetic breast surgery free of cost to all women -- for aesthetic or medical reasons -- with priority given to those from the poorest sections of society Thousands of poor women in India's Tamil Nadu state have been offered free cosmetic breast surgery, including implants, its health minister said Friday, because "poor people also have a right to look beautiful". The southern Indian state is known for its populist schemes, which have previously included free canteens and providing thousands of disadvantaged people with goats, laptops and bicycles among other items. It will now offer cosmetic breast surgery free of cost to all women -- for aesthetic or medical reasons -- with priority given to those from the poorest sections of society. "If a poor woman desires to look beautiful, we will support her financially," state health minister C. Vijayabaskar told AFP. "Whether they require medical procedures or beauty treatment, it will be free." Tamil Nadu is ranked among the top states in India's public healthcare system, compared with ailing government-run facilities in many other parts of the vast country. But critics of the new scheme said the state government is wasting public money on cosmetic surgery instead of spending money on treating serious ailments. "It is sad that we are now focusing on beauty instead of life-saving surgeries," Dr S. Elango, a former public health official in Tamil Nadu, told the Times of India newspaper. Cosmetic breast surgery is becoming increasingly popular in India, but private hospitals charge anywhere between $2,300 to $3,800 for a procedure -- a year's wage for most Indians. More than 90,000 such procedures were carried out in the country in 2016, according to the International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, up from 50,600 in 2010. The Tamil Nadu scheme was launched Wednesday at a state-run clinic in state capital Chennai, with a promise to soon expand it to other districts of the state. V. Ramadevi, who heads the clinic, told AFP some women want such surgery because they "face psychological issues that may severely impact their lives." "Their career, (their) marriage are derailed because they are taunted and their confidence is shattered," she said, adding that the clinic expects up to 150 women a month to take up the offer. One of India's more prosperous states, Tamil Nadu has for decades offered freebies to its marginalised population, mostly under the government of popular actor-turned-politician Jayalalithaa. She died in 2016 but her party still rules the state. "I'm calling for a mandatory law enforcement officer in every public school," said Florida Governor Rick Scott, pictured at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School directly after the February 14 shooting The Republican governor of Florida called Friday for a police officer to be assigned to every public school in the state, and for the minimum age for gun purchases to be raised from 18 to 21 in the wake of the Parkland mass shooting. "I'm calling for a mandatory law enforcement officer in every public school," Rick Scott told a news conference, as he unveiled a raft of safety measures in response to last week's deadly rampage. Scott said the southern US state "will require all individuals purchasing firearms to be 21 or older," and intended to make it "virtually impossible" for anyone with "mental issues" to acquire a gun. Students who survived the February 14 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School have stepped up pressure on the governor to take action to protect their schools, demanding stricter gun control laws. The self-confessed gunman, 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz, legally purchased the AR-15 semi-automatic assault rifle used to killed 17 people at the Parkland, Florida school. Scott, a Republican endorsed by the National Rifle Association, said the package of measures had been designed after meetings he held with some students. The measures do not include a ban on semi-automatic assault weapons like the AR-15. Instead, the state would raise the minimum age for all gun purchases to 21 from 18, and ban the purchase or sale of so-called "bump stocks," devices that enable semi-automatic weapons to fire at rates akin to machineguns. The plan calls for deploying a police officer for every 1,000 students in every public school in Florida from the start of the 2018 school year. An additional $50 million would be made available for mental health initiatives. US President Donald Trump on Tuesday also called for a ban on bump stocks. The devices were used by Las Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock, who killed 58 people at an outdoor concert October 1. The US announces a May date for the relocation of its embassy to Jerusalem, a disputed city holy to three major religions The United States said Friday it will relocate its embassy in Israel to Jerusalem in May, bringing forward the contested move to coincide with the Jewish state's 70th birthday -- and enraging Palestinians, who called it a "blatant provocation." Palestinians object to recognition of the disputed city as Israel's capital and say the embassy move could destroy a two-state solution to the decades-old Middle East conflict. Palestinians also object to the date chosen for the embassy move -- they call May 14, on which Israel declared independence in 1948, Naqba, their "day of catastrophe." Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu welcomed the announcement and thanked US President Donald Trump for his "leadership" and his "friendship." The embassy move is expected to complicate efforts to restart peace talks between the Israelis and Palestinians -- and jeopardize the traditional, if disputed, US role as an "honest broker" in efforts to resolve one of the world's most intractable conflicts. "In May, the United States plans to open a new US embassy in Jerusalem. The opening will coincide with Israel's 70th anniversary," State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert in a statement. Until now, the US embassy has been located in Tel Aviv with a separate consulate general located in Jerusalem that represents US interests in the Palestinian territories. The new embassy will be initially located in a US consular building in Jerusalem's Arnona neighborhood while Washington searches for a permanent location, "the planning and construction of which will be a longer-term undertaking," Nauert said. The interim embassy will contain office space for the ambassador and "a small staff," she said. Jerusalem "By the end of next year, we intend to open a new embassy Jerusalem annex on the Arnona compound that will provide the ambassador and his team with expanded interim office space," she added. Trump broke with decades of policy in December to announce US recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital and a pledge to move the embassy, drawing near global condemnation, enraging the Palestinians and sparking days of unrest in the Palestinian territories. It ruptured generations of international consensus that Jerusalem's status should be settled as part of a two-state peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians. - 'Destruction of two-state option' - The Palestine Liberation Organization immediately decried Washington's embassy announcement as a "provocation to all Arabs." "The American administration's decisions to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital and choose the Palestinian people's Naqba as the date for this step is a blatant violation of international law," PLO number two Saeb Erekat told AFP. He said the result would be "the destruction of the two-state option, as well as a blatant provocation to all Arabs and Muslims." Israel follows the Jewish lunar calendar, so this year's official independence celebration falls on April 19. "It will turn Israel's 70th Independence Day into an even greater national celebration," said Netanyahu, whose right-wing government is facing an uncertain future due to corruption allegations and police inquiries facing the prime minister. Israel claims all of Jerusalem as its capital, while the Palestinians see the eastern sector as the capital of their future state. US President Donald Trump -- shown here holding up a signed proclamation after his December recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital -- said moving the embassy is "the right thing to do" Trump said his recognition of Jerusalem -- making good on a 2016 campaign pledge -- marked the start of a "new approach" to solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Israelis and Palestinians alike have seen his move as Washington taking Israel's side in the conflict -- a view reinforced by the White House's recent decision to withhold financing for the UN agency for Palestinian refugees. Palestinian leader Mahmud Abbas this week travelled to the United Nations to call for an international conference by mid-2018 in which the United States would not have the central mediating role in launching a wider peace process. Trump's envoy for Middle East peace, Jason Greenblatt, and his son-in-law and advisor Jared Kushner subsequently met behind closed doors with UN Security Council ambassadors soliciting their support for a prospective Trump peace plan. While the Palestinians want a new international mechanism to shepherd peace talks, the details of the Trump plan and its timing are still unclear. The revised schedule on the embassy move comes after US Vice President Mike Pence pledged only last month to move the embassy by the end of 2019 in a speech to Israel's parliament that saw Arab lawmakers expelled after they shouted in protest. "The hardest deal to make of any kind is between the Israelis and Palestinians," Trump told reporters Friday at the White House. "We're actually making great headway. Jerusalem was the right thing to do." Taoufiq Bouachrine, director of Morroccan daily Akhbar al-Yaoum flashes a V for victory sign as he leaves a Casablanca court on October 1, 2009 after a hearing over a cartoon deemed offensive by the Moroccan royal family that his newspaper published Moroccan police on Friday arrested a newspaper publisher and prominent journalist, known for editorials critical of authorities in the North African country, a colleague said. Taoufiq Bouachrine, 49, was arrested during a police raid on his newspaper, Akhbar al-Yaoum, in Casablanca, Mounir Abou Al Maali told AFP. He said around 20 policemen in civilian clothes entered the offices of the newspaper and searched it. "They took pictures and confiscated the key," to the office, he said. Abou Al Maali said it was not immediately clear why Bouachrine was arrested. The Arabic-language newspaper also said on its website that Bouachrine had been arrested, but it was also unable to say why. It was not Bouachrine's first run with the authorities. In 2009, Bouachrine and Akhbar al-Yaoum cartoonist Khalid Gueddar were each given a four-year suspended jail sentence following two separate trials over a cartoon about a wedding which was deemed offensive to Morocco's royal family. The pair were also ordered to pay heavy fines and damages, while the paper was shut down. Bouachrine has also faced lawsuits from government ministers who have accused him of defamation. And in June 2010, Bouachrine was sentenced to six months for fraud relating to a property deal. Media watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF) ranked Morocco 133rd out of 180 countries in its World Press Freedom Index last year. President Donald Trump described the new sanctions on North Korea as the 'heaviest' ever in an address to a conservative conference near Washington US President Donald Trump has rolled out fresh sanctions against North Korea-linked shipping assets, hailing the package as the "heaviest sanctions ever" levied on the Pyongyang regime. Trump used a speech to conservatives just outside Washington to step up his campaign of "maximum pressure" designed to force North Korea to roll back its weapons programs. "We imposed today the heaviest sanctions ever imposed on a country before," Trump claimed at the end of a lengthy campaign-style address Friday. In light of past US embargoes, that is likely an overstatement, but Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin confirmed the sanctions covered "virtually all the ships" North Korea is "using at this moment in time." Speaking to reporters in Pyeongchang Saturday on a visit to the Winter Olympics, White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said: "Hopefully we'll see a change on the part of the North Koreans to start to denuclearise the peninsula, that's what our focus is." She added: "I can tell you the president won't make the mistakes the previous administration has and be soft or weak." Trump's administration is locked in a nuclear standoff with Pyongyang, which is trying to develop missiles that could deliver an atomic weapon to major US cities. The latest sanctions are designed to put the squeeze on North Korea's already precarious economy and fuel supply. In his speech Friday Trump had been expected to provide details of measures that target "56 vessels, shipping companies, and trade businesses," but skipped that part of his prepared remarks. Ivanka Trump stressed the need to keep up 'maximum pressure' on the North while South Korean President Moon Jae-in said it was important to build on the current rapprochement "Frankly hopefully something positive can happen," he said instead. During a joint press conference with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, Trump said sanctions were only the first step. "If the sanctions don't work, we'll have to go to phase two. Phase two may be a very rough thing," he said, without elaborating. Mnuchin said there were signs the punitive measures were starting to have an impact, but did not elaborate. The North Korean military and broader economy depend heavily on imports of coal and oil from China and Russia. China, Pyongyang's only major ally, has steadfastly rebuffed Washington's calls for a full oil embargo -- fearing the chaotic collapse of the Pyongyang regime -- but has accepted caps agreed at the United Nations. - Reaffirming ties with Seoul - The timing of the new measures coincides with the arrival in South Korea of Trump's daughter Ivanka. She is attending the closing ceremony of the Winter Olympics, which have taken place against the backdrop of the crisis. Ivanka (R) is attending the closing ceremony of the Winter Olympics The 36-year-old businesswoman and now top aide to her father has been tasked with reaffirming US ties with South Korea, which have been strained over how to deal with the North. She was hosted in Seoul by President Moon Jae-in, who has long advocated talks rather than confrontation with North Korea. "Mrs. Trump delivered a personal message to President Moon from President Trump about today's North Korea related sanctions announcement at a small meeting at the Blue House," the White House said. "They also discussed the continued effort on the joint maximum pressure campaign against North Korea." South Korean officials, who sit in a capital well within range of conventional North Korea artillery, have been spooked by Trump's talk of military confrontation. US officials worry meanwhile that North Korea is luring Moon into talks that are designed to go nowhere. North Korea's delegation at the closing ceremony will be headed by top general Kim Yong Chol, who is widely blamed for a series of attacks against the South including the 2010 sinking of a warship, with the loss of 46 lives. The White House spokeswoman said Ivanka would probably sit apart from the North Korean delegation at Sunday's closing ceremony. Italian fashion house Gucci is joining George Clooney, Oprah Winfrey, Steven Spielberg and others in donating $500,000 to the March For Our Lives gun control rally in Washington on March 24 Italian luxury fashion brand Gucci on Friday followed a slew of US celebrities in announcing a donation of $500,000 to next month's student march on Washington demanding tougher gun controls. The donation, first reported by Women's Wear Daily and confirmed by a Gucci spokeswoman in the United States, gives another huge boost to what is considered an unprecedented youth mobilization against gun violence following last week's shooting in Florida. "We stand with March For Our Lives and the fearless students across the country who demand that their lives and safety become a priority," the label said in a statement. "We have all been directly or indirectly impacted by these senseless tragedies." The rally is scheduled to take place on March 24, with sister rallies planned across the country to demand that US Congress come up with effective legislation to address the epidemic of gun violence in the United States. The Washington Post says organizers expect up to 500,000 people to attend, according to their event permit application. The rally is being organized by students from the Florida high school where a 19-year-old armed with a semi-automatic rifle killed 17 people in Parkland, Florida. On Monday, George Clooney and his human rights lawyer wife Amal, Oprah Winfrey, director Steven Spielberg and his actress wife Kate Capshaw, and film producer Jeffrey Katzenberg and his wife Marilyn each also pledged $500,000. Gucci creative director Alessandro Michele told Women's Wear Daily that he was "truly moved" by the courage of the Parkland students. "My love is with them and it will be next to them on March 24. I am standing with March for Our Lives and the strong young women and men across United States who are fighting for their generation and those to come," he said. Tapping into the millennial market, Gucci's pre-fall advertising evokes the French student protests of 1968, with Gucci-wearing rebels occupying a campus demanding change. Feb. 24, 1998 Elise V. Endicott, left, watches as Jonathan Rush performs CPR on a mannequin during a Red Cross CPR and first aid training course held at Port Byron High School Saturday. The course was held for students of the Finger Lakes School of Massage in Ithaca, whose state board requirements for licensed massage therapy include CPR and first aid certification. US President Donald Trump (L) and China's President Xi Jinping leave a business leaders event in Beijing on November 9, 2017 Donald Trump papered over superpower rivalries with China on Friday, saying relations had never been better but trade was a major problem. "I don't think we've ever had a better relationship with China than we do right now," Trump said, using trademark hyperbole. "Other than the fact that they've been killing us on trade for the last long period of time. Killing us." Trump regularly claims that his presidency has led to the "best ever" relationship with countries from Australia to Britain to China. "The only thing that can get in its way is trade. It's so one sided, it's so lopsided," he said, tearing into his predecessors. "The people that stood here so many years in this position, right where I am right now should never have allowed that to happen. It's very unfair to the United States." Trump also boasted about his relationship with Chinese leader Xi Jinping. "My personal relationship," he continued, "with President Xi is quite extraordinary. He is somebody that I like. I think he likes me. "With that being said, he likes China and I like the United States... as much as I like and respect President Xi, we have to straighten out the trade imbalance. It's too much," Trump added. The US Commerce Department recently recommended imposing heavy tariffs on China and other countries to counter a global glut in steel and aluminum. Beijing has warned it could take retaliatory action if necessary. Intensive air attacks continue in the besieged Eastern Ghouta region on the outskirts of the capital Damascus on February 23, 2018 as the UN Security Council considers a call for a 30-day ceasefire Since the start of the conflict in Syria in 2011, the United Nations has expressed outrage and indignation but has been powerless to stop the carnage. The latest attempt to secure agreement on a 30-day humanitarian ceasefire, has once more run into Russian resistance with a Security Council vote planned for Friday pushed back to allow more time for negotiations. - Numerous vetoes - In April 2011, six weeks after the start of a protest movement in Syria, veto-wielding powers Russia and China blocked a UN declaration proposed by Western countries condemning repression by the Syrian regime. On October 4, Russia and China together vetoed a draft resolution by Western countries threatening "targeted measures." In all, Moscow has used its veto 11 times to block resolutions in order to protect its Syrian ally from Western pressure. - Two mediators give up - In August 2012, Kofi Annan resigned as UN and Arab League mediator after five months of fruitless efforts, complaining of the lack of great power support for his mission. He said the increasing militarization on the ground and the clear lack of unity on the Security Council "fundamentally changed the circumstances for the effective exercise" of his role as mediator. Annan had proposed a six-point plan calling for a cessation of combat and a political transition. But the plan was never put into effect. Former Algerian foreign minister Lakhdar Brahimi then took up the baton. In early 2014, he organized in Geneva the first direct negotiations between the government and the opposition, under the auspices of the United States and Russia. But the talks achieved nothing concrete. Brahimi stepped down as mediator after two years of unsuccessful diplomacy. - Nine rounds at the UN - In early 2016, three rounds of indirect negotiations between the regime and opposition groups are held in Geneva, under the supervision of a third UN envoy, Staffan de Mistura. They hit an impasse over the modalities of a political transition and in the face of ceasefire violations. On December 14, 2017, at the end of a new cycle of negotiations, de Mistura accuses Damascus of causing the collapse of the talks by refusing to dialogue with the opposition. He called it a "big missed opportunity." On January 26, 2018, a ninth UN cycle of peace talks are held without success in Vienna, where negotiations had moved for logistical reasons. - 'Too little, too late' - In October 2016, de Mistura warned that the rebel stronghold in Aleppo would be completely razed by Christmas if the United Nations failed to stop the carnage. "Aleppo is now a synonym for hell," then UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon said at his last press conference on December 16, 2016. But the United Nations watched helplessly as the Syrian army besieged rebel-held areas of Aleppo, supported by Russia and Iran. A handful of observers arrived to monitor the evacuation of civilians at the end of December. "Too little, too late," a diplomat said. - Eastern Ghouta - On February 9, 2018, Sweden and Kuwait proposed a new draft resolution calling for a 30-day ceasefire and the lifting of sieges imposed by the belligerents, notably the regime, in several Syrian locales. But the negotiations have bogged down, while an intense air offensive on Eastern Ghouta on the edge of Damascus, where some 400,000 people have been living under siege since 2013, claimed more than 400 lives in five days. A planned vote at the Security Council was repeatedly delayed on Friday -- and eventually pushed back by a day in a bid to avoid a Russian veto. PHOENIX (AP) - Hernan Perez is going to play somewhere at some point. With Milwaukee adding outfielders Lorenzo Cain and Christian Yelich over the winter, It looks as if Perez might see a drop-off in playing time. But manager Craig Counsell isn't worried. "Every year he's on the team, you say 'I don't really know how this will work,'" Counsell said. "But when you play seven positions, it works. It works because he can play seven positions. You don't have to have it figured out with him." FILE - In this Aug. 10, 2017, file photo, Milwaukee Brewers' Jonathan Villar turns the double play after getting Minnesota Twins' Joe Mauer at second base during the fourth inning of a baseball game, in Milwaukee. econd base is one of the few areas where there will be spring training competition for the Milwaukee Brewers. Jonathan Villar is trying to bounce back from a subpar 2017 season, while utility players Eric Sogard and Hernan Perez are also in the mix. (AP Photo/Tom Lynn, File) The 26-year-old Perez started at seven different positions while appearing in a career-best 136 games last season. He even pitched an inning. He also hit .259 with 14 homers and 51 RBIs. Perez came up through Detroit's minor league system as an infielder and had never made an appearance in the outfield until 2016, when the Brewers began transitioning him into a utility role. He played 88 games in the outfield last year, including 34 starts in left primarily while Ryan Braun was injured. While the 14 homers were a career high, some of Perez's numbers were down slightly from the previous season. He batted .272 with 56 RBIs and 34 steals in 2016, compared to 13 stolen bases last year. Perez attributed part of the decline to sporadic playing time. It's not a complaint, but rather a reality he tries to manage the best he can. "When you play every day, you can make more adjustments," Perez said Thursday. Milwaukee's new outfield alignment could put Perez in the infield more, primarily at second base where he played while coming up through the Tigers' system. Jonathan Villar and Eric Sogard are expected to split time at second like they did last season. Villar began the year as the starter but was never able to duplicate the success of his breakout 2016 campaign, when he played his way into the Brewers' long-term plans by batting .285 with 19 homers, 63 RBIs and a major league-best 62 stolen bases as Milwaukee's starting shortstop. Villar, who turned down a multiyear contract after moving to second to accommodate top prospect Orlando Arcia, slumped out of the gate and never found a way out. "He's capable of (repeating) 2016," Counsell said. "That's why you give players like that chances - because he's certainly capable of something (good)." Sogard and Neil Walker, who came over in an August trade with the Mets, took over and Villar was a non-factor down the stretch, making just one start in the final month. Milwaukee had interest in bringing back Walker after he hit .267 in 38 games, but decided instead to stick with its current group for now. "Eric's there, Jonny's there, Hernan's everywhere," Counsell said. "We've got three players, and one of them steps forward and produces a lot or they share it in a way that makes the position productive." NOTES: The Brewers announced that former center fielder Geoff Jenkins will be honored in the team's Walk of Fame at Miller Park. Milwaukee's first-round pick in the 1995 draft, Jenkins hit 221 home runs in 10 seasons with the team, earning an All-Star selection in 2003. The team also announced that former general managers Harry Dalton and Doug Melvin and first baseman Prince Fielder would be added to Miller Park's Wall of Honor this season. HUNTSVILLE, Texas (AP) - Texas Gov. Greg Abbott on Thursday spared the life of a convicted killer shortly before the man's scheduled execution for masterminding the fatal shootings of his mother and brother. In sparing the life of Thomas "Bart" Whitaker about an hour before he was scheduled for lethal injection, Abbott accepted the state parole board's rare clemency recommendation. Whitaker's father, Kent, also was shot in the 2003 plot at the family's suburban Houston home but survived and led the effort to save his son from execution. Abbott commuted the sentence to life without parole. "I'm thankful not for me but for my dad," Bart Whitaker told prison officials after getting the word in a tiny holding cell a few feet from the death chamber. "Any punishment that I would have or will receive is just, but my dad did nothing wrong. The system worked for him today. And I will do my best to uphold my role in the system." FILE - This undated file photo provided by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice shows death row inmate Thomas Whitaker. The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles on Tuesday, Feb. 20, 2018, unanimously recommended the death sentence of Whitaker be commuted to life. Whitaker is set for lethal injection Thursday, Feb. 22, for masterminding the fatal shootings of his mother and brother at their suburban Houston home in 2003. (Texas Department of Criminal Justice via AP, File) The seven-member Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles, whose members are appointed by the governor, recommended unanimously Tuesday that Abbott commute the sentence. Abbott, a Republican had the option of accepting the recommendation, rejecting it or doing nothing. "Mr. Whitaker's father, who survived the attempt on his life, passionately opposes the execution of his son. Mr. Whitaker's father insists that he would be victimized again if the state put to death his last remaining immediate family member," Abbott said in a proclamation issued Thursday evening, adding that Whitaker had also agreed to waive all further rights to parole. Abbott, also citing the parole board's recommendation, added: "The totality of these factors warrants a commutation of Mr. Whitaker's death sentence to life in prison without the possibility of parole." It was only the fourth time since the state resumed executions in 1982 that the parole board has recommended clemency within days of an inmate's scheduled execution. In the previous cases, then-Gov. Rick Perry, also a Republican, accepted the board's decision in one case and rejected the other two, who subsequently were put to death in the nation's most active capital punishment state. Kent Whitaker said he was "humbled" and looked forward to hugging and touching his son. "It was overpowering," he said of the governor's decision, which he learned in a phone call from Keith Hampton, one of his son's lawyers. He and supporters were nearby the prison in a home used by inmate visitors and were standing and praying, Whitaker said. He put Hampton's call on his speakerphone. "The room erupted," he said. Hampton said he was "very relieved (Abbott) did the right thing." Texas Department of Criminal Justice spokesman Jason Clark said Bart Whitaker placed his arm through the bars of the holding cell after he was finished speaking with prison officials and asked to shake his hand. "I haven't touched another person in 13 years," Whitaker told Clark, who said he accepted the prisoner's request. Death row inmates in Texas are kept alone in their cells for 23 hours a day and their one hour of recreation also is alone in a concrete wall enclosure. Agency spokesman Jeremy Desel said Whitaker would not be returned to death row but would be taken to a prison processing facility where he'd be treated as a new incoming inmate and eventually assigned to a unit in general population, a process that likely would take a couple of weeks. Kent and Patricia Whitaker and their two boys had returned home the night of Dec. 10, 2003, following a restaurant dinner to celebrate Bart Whitaker's college graduation when they were confronted by a gunman wearing dark clothes and a ski mask. Patricia Whitaker and her 19-year-old son, Kevin, were killed. Kent Whitaker and Bart were wounded. Nearly two years later, Bart Whitaker was arrested in Mexico after investigators determined he arranged the plot in hopes of collecting a family estate he believed was worth more than $1 million. "I'm 100 percent guilty," Whitaker testified at his trial in 2007. "I put the plan in motion." He hated his parents and brother at the time, he said. Whitaker's father said he loves and has forgiven his son, calling him a changed person. "As the greatest victim in this case, you don't have to convince me how awful this crime was," Kent Whitaker said. Evidence showed the plot included two of Bart Whitaker's friends and was at least his third attempt to kill his family. Whitaker's wound to his arm was meant to draw attention away from his involvement. Unknown to his parents, the dinner celebration marking his graduation was a fraud. He'd dropped out of school months earlier. The gunman, Chris Brashear, pleaded guilty in 2007 to a murder charge and is serving life in prison. Steve Champagne, who drove Brashear from the Whitaker house the night of the shootings, took a 15-year prison term in exchange for testifying at Whitaker's trial. Kent Whitaker and his wife Tanya walk out of the Texas Capitol after learning the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles voted unanimously to recommend clemency for death row inmate Thomas Whitaker, Kent's son who was found guilty of setting up an ambush that killed his mother and brother in 2003. Despite the crime, his father had waged a desperate campaign to spare his life before Thursday's scheduled execution. The board recommended that Whitaker's sentence be reduced to life in prison as they read the reaction Tuesday, Feb. 20, 2018, in Austin, Texas. (Ralph Barrera/Austin American-Statesman via AP) Kent Whitaker, center, reacts to the his lawyer Keith Hampton, right, reading an email from the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles which voted unanimously to recommend clemency for death row inmate Thomas Whitaker, Kent's son who was found guilty of setting up an ambush that killed his mother and brother in 2003. At left is Kent's wife Tanya, whom he married later. Despite the crime, his father had waged a desperate campaign to spare his life before Thursday's scheduled execution. The board recommended that Whitaker's sentence be reduced to life in prison as they read the reaction Tuesday, Feb. 20, 2018, in Austin, Texas. (Ralph Barrera/Austin American-Statesman via AP) Kent Whitaker, center, reacts to the his lawyer Keith Hampton, right, reading an email from the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles which voted unanimously to recommend clemency for death row inmate Thomas Whitaker, Kent's son who was found guilty of setting up an ambush that killed his mother and brother in 2003. At left is Kent's wife Tanya, whom he married later. Despite the crime, his father had waged a desperate campaign to spare his life before Thursday's scheduled execution. The board recommended that Whitaker's sentence be reduced to life in prison as they read the reaction Tuesday, Feb. 20, 2018, in Austin, Texas. (Ralph Barrera/Austin American-Statesman via AP) HOUSTON (AP) - A federal grand jury has indicted a Brazilian couple accused of helping their grandson from Texas illegally remain in Brazil after his mother allegedly violated a custody order in a divorce case. Carlos and Jemima Guimaraes were each indicted Wednesday in Houston on two counts - international parental kidnapping and conspiracy. Prosecutors allege the couple helped their daughter, Marcelle Guimaraes, keep her son in Brazil after she took him there in 2013 and failed to return to the United States, violating a custody order. Marcelle Guimaraes was also indicted. The mother and boy remain in Brazil. Carlos and Jemima Guimaraes are in federal custody in Miami, where they were arrested earlier this month after arriving from Brazil. A court hearing to appoint them attorneys is set for Monday in Houston. STARKE, Fla. (AP) - The Latest on Florida Execution (all times local): 9 p.m. Authorities say they don't believe the loud scream that came from the mouth of a Florida inmate as he was being put to death in Florida for a 1993 rape and murder was caused by the lethal injection procedure. The family of Susan Morris makes a statement after the execution of Eric Scott Branch in Gainesville, Fla., Thursday, Feb. 22, 2018. The governor's office said Branch, 47, was pronounced dead Thursday after receiving a lethal injection at Florida State Prison. Branch was convicted of the 1993 rape and fatal beating of University of West Florida student Susan Morris, 21, whose naked body was found buried in a shallow grave near a nature trail. (Lauren Bacho/The Gainesville Sun via AP) Forty-seven-year-old inmate Eric Scott Branch received the lethal drugs Thursday evening at the Florida State Prison in Starke. Branch was convicted of raping and killing 21-year-old college student Susan Morris in 1993. He screamed and shouted "murderers!" repeatedly. Asked whether Branch's scream could have been caused by the execution drugs, Department of Corrections spokeswoman Michelle Glady said afterward that "there was no indication" of that. She says that conclusion was confirmed by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. The murder victim's family later released a statement saying they are still grieving the young woman's death a quarter century ago. Wendy Morris Hill, the victim's sister, read a statement declaring the slain woman "will never be forgotten by those who love her." ___ 7:30 p.m. A Florida inmate convicted of raping and killing a college student decades ago screamed and yelled "murderers!" repeatedly as he was being put to death. Authorities say 47-year-old Eric Scott Branch was pronounced dead Thursday evening after receiving a lethal injection at Florida State Prison. Branch was convicted of the 1993 rape and fatal beating of 21-year-old college student Susan Morris, whose naked body was found buried in a shallow grave. Just as officials were administering the drugs that included a powerful sedative, Branch let out a loud, blood-curdling scream. He then thrashed about on his gurney and yelled "murderers!" three times before falling silent with a groan. ____ 7:15 Florida has executed a man convicted of raping and killing a college student in 1993 so he could steal her car. Authorities say 47-year-old Eric Scott Branch was pronounced dead at 7:05 p.m. Thursday after a lethal injection at Florida State Prison. Branch was convicted of the rape and fatal beating of University of West Florida student 21-year-old Susan Morris, whose naked body was found buried in a shallow grave near a nature trail. Evidence shows that Branch approached Morris after she left a night class on Jan. 11, 1993, so he could steal her red Toyota and return to his home state of Indiana. He was arrested while traveling there. Branch also was convicted of sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl in Indiana and of another sexual assault in Panama City, Florida. ___ 6:30 p.m. The U.S. Supreme Court has denied last-minute appeals to halt the execution of a Florida inmate convicted of the 1993 rape and murder of a college student. The court rejected the appeals of 47-year-old Eric Scott Branch without comment Thursday, about a half hour after his scheduled execution was initially to have taken place. Authorities can now proceed with a lethal injection at Florida State Prison. Branch was convicted in the death of 21-year-old University of West Florida student Susan Morris, whose naked body was found buried in a shallow grave. Evidence in the case shows that Branch approached Morris after she left a night class on Jan. 11, 1993, so he could steal her red Toyota and return to his home state of Indiana. He was arrested while traveling there. ___ 6 p.m. Florida authorities are awaiting a U.S. Supreme Court ruling on whether to proceed with executing an inmate convicted of the rape and murder of a college student. Forty-seven-year-old Eric Scott Branch was set to receive a lethal injection at 6 p.m. Thursday at Florida State Prison. But that time passed with correction officials still awaiting a decision on the inmate's final appeals. Branch was convicted in the death of 21-year-old University of West Florida student Susan Morris, whose naked body was found buried in a shallow grave in 1993. Evidence in the case shows that Branch approached Morris after she left a night class on Jan. 11, 1993, so he could steal her red Toyota and return to his home state of Indiana. He was arrested while traveling there. _____ 4 p.m. A man scheduled for execution in Florida for raping and killing a college student in 1993 has had his last meal and was described as in good spirits. Barring a last-minute stay, 47-year-old Eric Scott Branch will be put to death by lethal injection at 6 p.m. Thursday at Florida State Prison. Corrections Department spokeswoman Michelle Glady says his last meal was a pork chop, T-bone steak, French fries and 2 pints of Ben & Jerry's ice cream. He was visited by his daughter this morning and refused a meeting with a spiritual adviser. Branch was convicted of the January 1993 rape and fatal beating of 21-year-old University of West Florida student Susan Morris. Authorities say Branch killed Morris so he could steal her car. The woman's body was found buried in a shallow grave. _____ Florida is scheduled to execute a man convicted of raping and killing a college student in 1993 so he could steal her car. Barring a last-minute stay, 47-year-old Eric Scott Branch will be put to death by lethal injection at 6 p.m. Thursday at Florida State Prison. Branch was convicted of the rape and fatal beating of 21-year-old University of West Florida student Susan Morris whose naked body was found buried in a shallow grave. Evidence in the case shows that Branch approached Morris after she left a night class on Jan. 11, 1993, so he could steal her red Toyota and return to his home state of Indiana. He was arrested while traveling there. Branch was also convicted of another Florida rape and one in Indiana. This undated photo made available by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement shows Eric Scott Branch in custody. Florida is scheduled to execute Branch Thursday, Feb. 22, 2018, for raping and killing a college students in 1993, so he could steal her car. (Florida Department of Law Enforcement via AP) This photo combo shows death row immates, from left, Thomas Whitaker from Texas, Doyle Lee Hamm from Alabama, and Eric Scott Branch from Florida. Executions are set for Alabama, Texas and Florida for the same night. If they are carried out as scheduled Thursday, Feb. 22, 2018, it would mark the first time in more than eight years that three convicted killers were put to death in the U.S. on the same day.(AP Photo/File) OTTAWA, Ontario (AP) - A stunning oversight that allowed a man convicted of attempted murder to be invited to a party in India with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is prompting many to say the Trudeau government is too close to Sikh separatists. Former Cabinet minister Ujjal Dosanjh has long accused his old party of being too friendly to Sikh separatists but said Thursday that the invitation of Jaspal Atwal to a reception was the last straw. Atwal was convicted of attempting to kill an Indian Cabinet minister in Canada in 1986. He was also charged, but not convicted, in connection with a 1985 attack on Dosanjh, a staunch opponent of the Sikh separatist movement's push for an independent state of Khalistan. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and wife Sophie Gregoire Trudeau, and children, Xavier, 10, Ella-Grace, 9, and Hadrien, 3, visit Sacred Heart Church in New Delhi, India, Thursday, Feb. 22, 2018. (Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press via AP) Trudeau's office said the invitation was a mistake and was rescinded as soon as Atwal was discovered on the guest list. However, he showed up at a reception earlier in the week in Mumbai and was photographed with Sophie Gregoire Trudeau, the prime minister's wife. Dosanjh said Canada-India relations have hit "rock bottom." Dosanjh said he couldn't believe what he was seeing when he saw the photograph and wondered how the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Trudeau's office and Canadian officials in India could be blind to it. Atwal was added to the guest list by British Columbia Liberal party lawmaker Randeep Sarai, one of 14 members of Parliament in India with Trudeau. Sarai has acknowledged he should have used better judgment. Trudeau's turbulent trip to India has drawn criticism from the opposition lawmakers and raised eyebrows internationally. Trudeau had to profess his support for a united India after meeting with the chief minister of Punjab, who had accused the prime minister of appointing Sikh separatists to his Cabinet. And some critics insist Trudeau is being snubbed by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, even though the two are to meet on Friday. Modi tweeted Thursday that he is looking forward to meeting Trudeau and that he appreciated "his deep commitment to ties between our two countries." But David Mulroney, a prominent former Canadian diplomat, said Modi's decision to wait five days to meet Trudeau is a deliberate demonstration of his displeasure over Canada's handling of the Sikh issue. JACKSON, Miss. (AP) - Ruby Bridges Hall, who faced threats and harassment when she integrated a southern school as a child several decades ago, said Friday that she is distressed by mass shootings in U.S. schools. "When I think about our babies today and them not being safe in school, I think that should be the next civil rights movement, you know, is to ban the assault weapons so that our babies can be safe," Hall said. She spoke at a gala in Jackson, Mississippi, where she was one of five activists being honored for advancing civil rights. Ruby Bridges Hall, a Tylertown, Miss., native who faced threats and ostracism when she became the first black child to integrate a public school in New Orleans in 1960, speaks with reporters prior to the Friends of Mississippi Civil Rights gala Friday, Feb. 23, 2018 in Jackson, Miss., where she and four other civil rights veterans were honored. (AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis) Hall, now 63, is a native of Tylertown, Mississippi. When she was 6 and known simply as Ruby Bridges, she became the first African-American child to enroll in an elementary school in New Orleans in 1960, accompanied by U.S. marshals. Some white parents withdrew their children, and she could only eat food brought from home because someone threatened to poison her. The gala Friday was to celebrate the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum, which has been open about 2 months. Many civil rights veterans boycotted the state-sponsored dedication of the museum in December because Republican Gov. Phil Bryant invited President Donald Trump to attend. The other honorees Friday were U.S. Rep. John Lewis of Georgia, who was deeply involved in voter registration and other civil rights activities in Mississippi and across the South starting in the early 1960s; Rita Schwerner Bender, who demanded answers from Mississippi officials after her first husband, Michael Schwerner, was one of three civil-rights workers killed by Ku Klux Klansmen in the state in 1964; former state Rep. Robert Clark, who in 1967 became the first African-American of the 20th Century to win a seat in the Mississippi Legislature; and Democratic U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi. The first time Lewis traveled to Mississippi in 1961, he was arrested and jailed with other Freedom Riders, black and white, who challenged segregation in a bus station. Lewis, who is African-American, remembers going into a restroom labeled for white men only. A Jackson police officer told him and other young people in the group to leave. They refused. "The next words he said: 'You're under arrest.' And that was my introduction to the state of Mississippi and the city of Jackson," Lewis told The Associated Press on Thursday in a phone interview from Atlanta. After 37 days of being locked up in sweltering local jails and a notorious state prison on the disorderly conduct charge, Lewis was released. He continued working for racial equality in Mississippi and across the South in the 1960s, and as chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, he helped organize the 1963 March on Washington. Georgia voters elected him as a Democrat to the U.S. House in 1986, and he remains in office. Lewis' jail mug shot hangs in a gallery at the museum with those of other Freedom Riders. He was scheduled to speak at the museum's state-sponsored opening in December but canceled his appearance because of Trump. Lewis said Thursday that he has never met Trump but, "I felt that I couldn't be there with him after he said some unbelievable things about individuals and about groups - whether it's members of the African-American community or the Latino community" The opening of the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum and the adjoining Museum of Mississippi History capped the state's bicentennial observation. The two museums are in downtown Jackson and are separate entities under a single roof. They are a short distance from the bus station where Lewis and the other Freedom Riders were arrested. The general museum skims 15,000 years of history, from the Stone Age to modern times. The civil rights museum concentrates on the intense period of social change from 1945 to 1976. Lewis grew up south of Montgomery, Alabama, and was 15 years old when a black 14-year-old from Chicago, Emmett Till, was lynched while visiting relatives near the small town of Money, Mississippi. A cousin who was with Till said he had whistled at a white woman in a country store. "I kept thinking that if something like this could happen to Emmett Till, it could happen to cousins of mine that were living in Buffalo, New York, or were living in Detroit, Michigan, when they came to Alabama to visit during the summer," Lewis said. At the gala Friday, a 7-year-old Mississippi girl named Gabriel Owen said she had portrayed Ruby Bridges at school a day earlier and admires her bravery. The second-grader got to meet her new idol and recited a speech she had memorized about the school integration in New Orleans. Hall smiled broadly, opened her arms and said to Gabriel: "Can I get a hug?" Gabriel nodded and stepped into the embrace. ___ Follow Emily Wagster Pettus on Twitter: http://twitter.com/EWagsterPettus . U.S. Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., speaks with reporters prior to the Friends of Mississippi Civil Rights gala Friday, Feb. 23, 2018 in Jackson, Miss., where he and four other civil rights veterans were honored. Lewis traveled to Mississippi in 1961, was arrested and jailed with other Freedom Riders, black and white, who challenged segregation in a bus station. He continued working for racial equality in Mississippi and across the South in the 1960s, and as chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, he helped organize the 1963 March on Washington. (AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis) Rita Schwerner Bender, whose first husband, Michael Schwerner, and two other activists, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman, were killed outside Philadelphia, Mississippi, in 1964 - a case that became known by its FBI name, "Mississippi Burning," speaks with reporters prior to the Friends of Mississippi Civil Rights gala Friday, Feb. 23, 2018 in Jackson, Miss., she and four other civil rights veterans were honored. (AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis) Former state Rep. Robert Clark, who in 1967 became the first African-American of the 20th century to win a seat in the Mississippi Legislature, speaks with reporters prior to the Friends of Mississippi Civil Rights gala Friday, Feb. 23, 2018 in Jackson, Miss., where he was one of five civil rights veterans honored. (AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis) U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., speaks with reporters prior to the Friends of Mississippi Civil Rights gala Friday, Feb. 23, 2018 in Jackson, Miss., where he was one of five civil rights veterans honored. (AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis) Ruby Bridges Hall, a Tylertown, Miss., native who faced threats and ostracism when she became the first black child to integrate a public school in New Orleans in 1960, listens as Gabriel Owens, 7, of Madison, Miss., performs her role as a young Hall, prior to the Friends of Mississippi Civil Rights gala Friday, Feb. 23, 2018 in Jackson, Miss., where she and four other civil rights veterans were honored. (AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis) U.S. Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., readies to cut a birthday cake given to him by the organizers of the Friends of Mississippi Civil Rights gala Friday, Feb. 23, 2018 in Jackson, Miss. Lewis and four other civil rights veterans were honored. Lewis traveled to Mississippi in 1961, was arrested and jailed with other Freedom Riders, black and white, who challenged segregation in a bus station. He continued working for racial equality in Mississippi and across the South in the 1960s, and as chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, he helped organize the 1963 March on Washington. (AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis) MOSCOW (AP) - Vladimir Putin doesn't tweet and he claims he doesn't have a smartphone. At first sight, the Russian president's reluctance to adopt the hyperconnected world's technology might seem at odds with the widespread belief that he signed off on a campaign to undermine the United States via social media. But he has something likely more important than gadgets - long experience in the KGB and its post-Soviet successor. From the czarist secret police to the present, Russian operatives have adroitly exploited humans' biases and their capacity to believe the unlikely. The elaborate campaign of bogus identities and inflammatory statements alleged in last week's U.S. indictment of 13 Russians used new technology and platforms, but drew on a century-old spirit. FILE In this file photo taken on Wednesday, Dec. 20, 2017, President Vladimir Putin, second right, Sergei Naryshkin, head of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, second left, Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, left, Federal Security Service (FSB) Director Alexander Bortnikov, attend meeting with intelligence officers on their professional holiday in Moscow, Russia. The Russian president's reluctance to adopt the hyperconnected world's technology might seem at odds with the wide belief that he signed off on campaign to undermine the United States via social media. (Mikhail Klimentyev, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, File) An early and especially notorious example was the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a pamphlet that purported to be the minutes of a secret meeting of Jewish leaders to plot world domination. First appearing in 1903, its origins are open to debate, but many scholars suggest it was commissioned by Okhranka, the czarist secret police, and spread by them to argue against growing calls for modernizing Russia. The hoax was spread abroad by Russians fleeing the Bolshevik Revolution and subsequent civil war, and penetrated the United States - the newspaper of industrialist Henry Ford printed them. Although long recognized as fictional, the text remains foundational in anti-Semitism. "Active measures" of Soviet disinformation could range from the elaborately clandestine to the almost childishly obvious. One of the latter was in 1984, when the national Olympic committees of many African and Asian countries received letters purportedly from the Ku Klux Klan saying their athletes would be attacked if they came to the Los Angeles Games. The CIA noted that the letters contained errors that native English speakers were unlikely to make and misspelled the group as "Ku-Klux Klan." In addition, the CIA said, no African or Asian countries allied with the Soviet Union were targeted. Nonetheless, Soviet media wrote about the letters, a common multiplier strategy. In an elaborate initiative that stretched tendrils through several countries, the KGB went after a dead man, Pope Pius XII. The Kremlin, disturbed by the Vatican's firm anti-communist stance, aimed to discredit the church's moral authority by portraying Pius XII as a Nazi sympathizer. According to Ion Pacepa, who headed the Romanian secret service before defecting, a top KGB general wrote the outline of a play attacking the pope and had compiled Vatican documents that had been spirited away by Romanian agents. Eight decades after the Elders of Zion seeped into the public mind, one of the KGB's most effective disinformation campaigns began. The first move was modest: a letter by an allegedly knowledgeable U.S. scientist in 1983 to a little-read newspaper in India claiming AIDS was the result of Pentagon biological-weapon experiments. The article attracted little attention - the paper was generally regarded as a Soviet mouthpiece - but resurfaced two years later when Russia's widely read Literaturnaya Gazeta used it as a "source" for a story contending AIDS was U.S.-created. Then a Russia-born East German doctor was brought into the process; he and colleagues produced a pamphlet detailing a theory about U.S. experiments on homosexual prisoners. Because the doctor had a good reputation and included verifiable facts in his writings, they gained considerable acceptance. In 1992, Yevgeny Primakov, the head of the Russian foreign intelligence reportedly admitted that the disinformation, codenamed "Operation Infektion," was initiated by the KGB. Primakov himself became a victim in 1999, when he was seen as a credible electoral challenger to Putin, who was then prime minister and preparing to run for president for the first time. A Sunday night commentary program by Sergei Dorenko, one of Russia's most aggressive and roguish broadcasters, featured grisly footage of someone undergoing a hip operation purportedly similar to one that Primakov was facing. His poll ratings soon plunged and he abandoned his bid. The genesis of the segment is unclear, but perhaps significantly, it aired on a TV channel that was majority-owned by the state and effectively controlled by notorious oligarch Boris Berezovsky, who at the time was a Putin supporter. Although the connections between Russian TV and intelligence agencies is speculative, state broadcasters in the Putin era are noted for exaggerated or outright false reports that apparently serve Russian interests. Notable recent cases include the 2014 claim that Ukrainian armed forces had crucified a child in the city of Slavyansk after soldiers regained control of it from pro-Russia rebels. No evidence supporting the claim was found. As tensions over a stream of asylum-seekers roiled Germany, Russia's state Channel One broadcast extensively about the supposed sexual assault of a teenage ethnic Russian girl by immigrants, suggesting that police were covering up the crime. Perhaps more humorously, state channels have obediently gone along with Putin's "action man" appearances, in which he engages in manly feats that sometimes are later shown to have been staged - including his alleged discovery of ancient Greek pottery while scuba diving and shooting a tiger that purportedly was about to spring upon a group of cameramen. Putin may not know how to use the tools, but he understands how their messages are received. Top stories of SAIC Motor in 2017 Shanghai (Gasgoo)- In the past 2017, SAIC Motor achieved outstanding performances in sales and profit. Besides, the automaker also did many actions to promote its production capacity, enrich the product portfolios and deepen its layout in new energy vehicle area. The reporter summarizes some important businesses of SAIC Motor in 2017 as below. SAIC Motor 2017 net profit expected to increase RMB 2.2 billion Last month, SAIC Motor announced its 2017 financial performance expectation. The automaker said the net profit attributable to shareholders may reach around RMB 34.2 billion, increasing 7% compared with RMB 32 billion of the previous year. After deduction of non-recurring gains and losses, the net profit attributable to shareholders grew by 7.8% from a year earlier to RMB 32.7 billion. The company owed its profit growth to the good sales performance. SAIC Motor 2017 sales exceed 6,930,000 in 2017 According to the figure released by SAIC Motor, the groups annual sales in 2017 reached 6,930,123 units, increasing 6.8% year on year. Meanwhile, the automaker produced 6,987,355 vehicles throughout 2017 with a growth of 8.22% from a year earlier. As to its two major JV branches, SAIC Volkswagen achieved a year-on-year sales growth of 3.06% to 2,063,077 units and the annual sales of SAIC-GM were up to 2,000,187 units, growing 5.99% compared with the year before. SAIC opens new vehicle plant in Thailand In December 2017, SAIC Motors new vehicle plant in Thailand was officially put into operation. The new plant is located near the port city of Chonburi involving an investment over $ 1 billion. With an annual production capacity of 100 thousand vehicles, the facility will become an important manufacturing base of SAIC Motors MG-branded vehicles. According to relevant sales data, MG was expected to deliver over 12 thousand vehicles in Thailand throughout 2017, jumping 50% year on year. SAIC Motor PV Pukou plants 1,000,000th vehicle rolls off production line In October 2017, the 1,000,000th vehicle of SAIC Motor Passenger Vehicle Co.s Pukou plant in Nanjing successfully rolled off the production line, which marks SAIC Motors self-owned brand entering into a new period. The Pukou plant mainly manufactures the New MG3, New MG6 and several models under Roewe brand. Particularly, the New MG6 attracted lots of attention since its official photo was released, and it's quite possible that the New MG6 would catch up with, even surpass the Roewe i6's sales volume in the future. SAIC Motor net profit increases 5.96% year on year to RMB 15.958 billion in the first half of 2017 On August 29, SAIC Motor released it 2017 half-yearly financial report, showing that the group achieved cumulative operating revenue of RMB 396.406 billion with a year-on-year growth of 12.85%. The net profit grew 5.96% from a year earlier to RMB 15.958 billion, exceeding the total sum of Dongfeng Group and GAC Group and ranking first among all listed automakers in China. The report also showed that SAIC Motor sold 3.175 million vehicles in the first half of 2017 with a year-on-year growth of 5.8%, accounting for 23% of total auto sales in China. SAIC Motor and CATL hold foundation stone laying ceremony for two JVs On June 19, SAIC Motor held a foundation stone laying ceremony for two joint-venture companies with CATL in Changzhou, Jiangsu Province. The two sides will invest over RMB 10 billion to establish a highly-intelligent, green and environmental-friendly battery production base, to actively promote the transformation and upgrade of Chinese auto industry. It was learned that the project plans to establish a factory of power battery with a total capacity of 36GWH, occupying an area exceeding 2,000 acres (around 1.333 million square meters). SAIC Motor earns Guinness World Records certificate SAIC Motor unveiled a Roewe i6 16T- the worlds first mass-produced internet vehicle and Roewe ei6- the worlds first internet new energy vehicle at the 2017 Shanghai Auto Show on April 19. On the same day, the Roewe i6 16T earned a Guinness World Records certificate for its 2.99-liter fuel consumption per kilometer. The pure electric SUV Vision- E Concept and the worlds first internet plug-in hybrid car- the Roewe e950- also made a debut at the show. SAIC-GM-Wuling to build assembly line in Qingdao In March of 2017, the government of Huangdao District, Qingdao City released 10 new-signing major industry projects on its official website which includes the project of SAIC-GM-Wuling passenger vehicles. Some media revealed that SAIC-GM-Wuling plans to build a vehicle assembly line in Qingdao West Coast New Area with a designed production capacity of 200 thousand units per year. This also indicates that once the assembly line is completed, the total annual capacity of SAIC-GM will increase to around 3.31 million units. MANILA, Philippines (AP) - Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte's top aide has summoned the U.S. ambassador to discuss a global threat assessment by American intelligence agencies that mentioned Duterte along with dangers facing democracy in Cambodia, Myanmar and Thailand. Presidential spokesman Harry Roque Jr. said Friday that Executive Secretary Salvador Medialdea discussed the U.S. intelligence community's Worldwide Threat Assessment report with U.S. Ambassador Sung Kim on Thursday. Medialdea also asked U.S.-based Philippine diplomats to explain to Washington steps taken by Duterte to promote economic development and ensure public security while "respecting at all times the rule of law," Roque said. Students from the University of the Philippines shout slogans during a rally at their campus following their walkout from their classes to call for an "end to President Rodrigo Duterte's rising dictatorship" Friday, Feb. 23, 2018 in suburban Quezon city northeast of Manila, Philippines. The students scored Duterte for the "worsening conditions of politics, the economy and human rights" and are now calling for his ouster. (AP Photo/Bullit Marquez) The U.S. Embassy said the discussion "focused on the references to the Philippines in the report, including clarifying that the information about the Philippines had been previously reported by media sources." Medialdea and Kim also discussed common interests and the "possibilities for expanding our partnership," with the meeting ending with a reaffirmation of "the strength of the broad and deep bilateral relationship," the embassy said. The U.S. report says "autocratic tendencies" are expected to deepen in some governments in Southeast Asia and mentioned that Duterte has suggested he could suspend the constitution, declare a "revolutionary government" and impose nationwide martial law. Duterte's declaration of martial law in the southern third of the country, which was in response to an Islamic State group-linked siege on the southern Islamic city of Marawi last year, has been extended through the end of 2018, according to the report, which outlined Duterte's moves without explicitly criticizing his actions. Duterte, who came to office in mid-2016, has been hypersensitive to criticism of his anti-drug crackdown and other policies, especially by Western governments, the United Nations and human rights groups. He told then U.S. President Barack Obama to "go to hell" and threatened to withdraw the Philippines from the United Nations over concerns they raised over his anti-drug campaign, which has left thousands of mostly poor drug suspects dead. BERLIN (AP) - German Chancellor Angela Merkel has shown her conservative party that she's still very much in charge and keen to shape its future, installing a close ally who's popular in her own right in a top party post following weeks of muttering over a difficult coalition deal. A congress of Merkel's Christian Democratic Union is expected to elect Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer on Monday as the party's general secretary, a week after the chancellor unveiled her surprise choice. The 55-year-old's new job, for which she is stepping down as governor of Saarland state, could put her in a position to fill Merkel's shoes one day - if she plays her cards right. The change comes at a critical time for the CDU following a lackluster election showing in September. That election saw the nationalist, anti-migrant Alternative for Germany party win seats in parliament for the first time, drawing some votes from conservatives fed up with a leftward drift under Merkel. FILE - In this March 27, 2017 file photo German Chancellor Angela Merkel, left, applauds after she handed over a bunch of flowers to the party's top candidate for Saarland, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, 2nd left, at the beginning of a party meeting at the headquarter of the German Christian Democratic Party (CDU) in Berlin, Germany, one day after the elections in the German state of Saarland. A congress of Merkel's Christian Democratic Union is expected to elect Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer on Monday, Feb. 26, 2018 as the party's general secretary (AP Photo/Michael Sohn, file) The chancellor has also just concluded her third coalition deal with the center-left Social Democrats, handing them the powerful finance ministry - to the dismay of many conservatives. That prompted unusually loud public grousing, coupled with calls for fresh faces in the Cabinet. The general secretary, a position that was Merkel's own stepping stone to the party leadership back in 2000, is responsible for day-to-day operations, election campaigns and generally making the party's voice heard in a crowded political landscape. "Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer could bring back former CDU members' and voters' feeling of having a political home," the conservative-leaning Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung wrote this week. "But she must rebut the suspicion that she was brought into the office of general secretary as Angela Merkel 2.0." The decision to put forward Kramp-Karrenbauer took a step toward acknowledging the pressure for renewal, though AKK - as she is often known - is only eight years younger than Merkel. Kramp-Karrenbauer says one of her main jobs will be to rework the party's program, though broadly in line with Merkel's emphasis on the center ground. "It must be a very broad center, and I think parties diminish themselves if they only think about who they can run after," she told ZDF television this week. "Our job must be to take the questions people have to the democratic center, and make them an offer - not to force them to seek the answers elsewhere." Kramp-Karrenbauer has, however, shown a greater willingness than the chancellor to cater to conservative rhetoric, which could be an important attribute now. A Catholic, she opposed legalizing gay marriage in 2017. In a largely symbolic gesture last year, she announced that she would prevent rallies by Turkish government officials in Saarland before that country's constitutional referendum. From 2000 to 2005, she was the first woman to serve as a German state's interior minister, or top security official, later taking charge of the education and labor ministries. She also has a taste for a political gamble that Merkel has lacked in recent years. Kramp-Karrenbauer had been governor for a few months when, in 2012, she ended a rickety three-way coalition with the Greens and pro-business Free Democrats over the latter's infighting. She joked that she risked becoming Germany's shortest-serving governor, "but the one with the longest name." Kramp-Karrenbauer's gamble paid off. She won the resulting election and formed a coalition with the center-left Social Democrats that has endured since. Her re-election last year was the first of a series of events that sapped then-Social Democratic leader Martin Schulz's challenge to Merkel. Now, "she is taking a courageous step," said Heribert Prantl, a senior editor at the daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung. "She is entering party headquarters without a network, she is not in parliament; she is taking a risk. The party appreciates that readiness to take a risk." FILE - In this Feb. 19, 2018 file photo Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, governor of German Saarland state and designated Christian Democratic Union party Secretary General, attends a party leaders' meeting in Berlin. A congress of Merkel's Christian Democratic Union is expected to elect Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer on Monday, Feb. 26, 2018 as the party's general secretary (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber, fi FILE - In this Feb. 19, 2018 file photo German Chancellor Angela Merkel, center, outgoing Christian Democratic Union, CDU, General Secretary Peter Tauber, left, and the governorof German state Saarland Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer arrive at a party leaders' meeting in Berlin, Germany. A congress of Merkel's Christian Democratic Union is expected to elect Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer on Monday, Feb. 26, 2018 as the party's general secretary. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber, file) FILE - In This Feb. 5, 2018 file photo Saarland governor Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer arrives for coalition negotiations between the CDU, CSU and SPD parties at SPD headquarters in Berlin. A congress of Merkel's Christian Democratic Union is expected to elect Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer on Monday, Feb. 26, 2018 as the party's general secretary. (Gregor Fischer/dpa via AP) FILE - The March 23, 2017 file photo shows governor of German federal state Saarland Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer during an election campaign in St.Wendel, Germany. A congress of Merkel's Christian Democratic Union is expected to elect Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer on Monday, Feb. 26, 2018 as the party's general secretary. (AP Photo/Michael Probst, file) FILE - In this Dec. 13, 2000 file photo Annegret Kramp-Kartenbauer smiles after being sworn-in as interior minister - the first female interior minister in Germany - of the Saarland state in Saarbruecken, southwestern Germany. A congress of Merkel's Christian Democratic Union is expected to elect Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer on Monday, Feb. 26, 2018 as the party's general secretary (AP Photo/Becker&Bredel, file) BRANDYWINE, Md. (AP) - Court records say the man who fatally shot a Maryland police officer earlier this week had been court-ordered to surrender his guns at least three times in the last five years. The Washington Post reports three different judges ordered Glenn Tyndell to "immediately surrender all firearms" after they found his wife, ex-wife and child needed protection. Prince George's County Sheriff's Col. Darrin C. Palmer says Tyndell had told deputies he'd turn himself in Tuesday. He didn't show. Prince George's County police say 37-year-old Tyndell shot Cpl. Mujahid Ramzziddin five times with a shotgun Wednesday when the off-duty officer attempted to intervene in a dispute between Tyndell and his wife. Tyndell then fled before being fatally shot by officers Luke Allen and Channing Reed, who have been place on paid leave. ___ Information from: The Washington Post, http://www.washingtonpost.com BERLIN (AP) - German automaker BMW says it's in talks to build battery electric models of its Mini cars in China, which would be the first time the iconic cars have been made outside Europe. BMW said in a statement Friday it has signed a letter of intent with Chinese manufacturer Great Wall Motor. China is the world's largest market auto market and BMW delivered 560,000 vehicles to customers there last year, of which some 35,000 were Minis. BMW already cooperates with local manufacturer Brilliance in China. The company says its main Mini plant in Oxford, England, will start producing the first battery electric models next year. BMW said making Minis in China wouldn't call into question its commitment to manufacturing in Britain, citing "significant investments" it has made in the country. LONDON (AP) - Brexit is little more than a year away but there is mounting evidence it's having a major impact on the number of European citizens looking to live and work in Britain. Figures released this week show net migration - the difference between those coming into Britain and those leaving - from other European Union countries falling below 100,000 for the first time since March 2013. Separate figures show the number of EU nationals working in Britain increasing by 101,000, its lowest amount since September 2013. Both indicate that the June 2016 vote to leave the EU has changed the dynamics of immigration into Britain, where the number of foreign arrivals and its impact on local communities, public services and wages was a key reason behind the Brexit vote. Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May leaves 10 Downing Street to attend the weekly Prime Ministers' Questions session, in parliament in London, Wednesday, Feb. 21, 2018. (AP Photo/Frank Augstein) Kallum Pickering, senior U.K. economist at Berenberg Bank, said Friday that Brexit is "working" already on the migration front, and that it may make the political calculus facing the British government a little bit easier. "It puts the government under less pressure than before to introduce restrictive migration policies in order to satisfy some voters' demands for reduced inflows of workers from the EU," he said. One of the pillars of being a member of the EU is the free movement of people to live and work anywhere in the EU. So a college graduate from, say, Romania, can pack a bag the day after graduation and go look for work anywhere else in the EU. After Brexit, or at least after any transition that the British government agrees on with the EU for the period after official Brexit day on March 29, 2019, that freedom of movement will ostensibly end. As with so many other Brexit-related issues, it's unclear what a future immigration system in Britain will look like but members of the government of Prime Minister Theresa May have said the country must remain "open" to foreign workers. Brexit is not the only reason behind the turn in the migration and employment numbers. The fact that many EU economies, and particularly those in the 19-country eurozone, are enjoying their best period of economic growth for over a decade has lessened the need for many to search opportunities abroad. In 2017, the eurozone economy expanded by 2.5 percent, way ahead of Britain's 1.7 percent growth. At the height of the eurozone debt crisis, job opportunities were scarce in many countries, notably in Spain and Greece, where unemployment levels rose to around 25 percent. So Britain, whose economy was growing more strongly than most in the EU, had a magnetic pull. In the two years up to the Brexit vote, which also coincided with some of the darkest times financially in the eurozone, the net number of EU citizens working in Britain rose by an average of 250,000 a year. Also, the relative attraction of Britain financially has diminished, indirectly because of the Brexit vote. After the vote to leave the EU, the pound sank against other currencies, particularly against the euro. One pound is currently worth around 1.14 euros, compared with 1.30 before - a fairly big hit, especially for those sending money back home from Britain. "When a place loses its appeal, people vote with their feet," Berenberg's Pickering said. For many parts of the British economy, the implications of this change in EU migration and employment could be profound. Agriculture is one sector that depends hugely on seasonal migrant labor, particularly from central and eastern EU countries. Amid worries that fruit and vegetables will be left to rot, Michael Gove, the country's environment minister and one of the most high-profile Brexit campaigners during the referendum, said this week that he "fully" understands industry concerns for the need for a post-Brexit seasonal agricultural workers' scheme and promised to announce more details shortly. Many public services, notably Britain's National Health Service, also rely heavily on migrants from the EU, so the government will likely be careful in the Brexit discussions ahead. Talks over the future trading relationship between Britain and the EU are reaching a key stage and the government is hoping to wrap up in the next couple of months an agreement on the transition, whereby the country maintains the free movement of labor for a period after Brexit as part of the bargain of retaining tariff-free trade. DAPCHI, Nigeria (AP) - The sound of gunfire rang out as residents gathered for evening prayers at the mosque. Soon the armed fighters showed up in their trucks and made their target clear: Where was the girls' school, they asked. Usman Katarko, a farmer, said he knew the men were not soldiers even though they wore military uniforms because there were Arabic inscriptions on their vehicles. "I heard them shouting: 'Show us where the school is! Show us where the girls' school is!'" he told The Associated Press. "When they eventually found the school, they abducted more than 90 girls. Most of them are our friends' and brothers' daughters." In this image taken from video, Lai Muhammed, Nigerian Minister of Information, speaks to the media in Dapchi, Yobe State, Nigeria, on Thursday Feb. 22, 2018. Parents in northern Nigeria say more than 100 girls are still missing three days after suspected Boko Haram extremists attacked their school. The announcement comes after government officials in Yobe state acknowledged that some 50 young women remained unaccounted for in the Monday evening attack. (AP Photo) Now parents say 101 schoolgirls are missing after the Boko Haram assault Monday evening, presenting Nigeria's government with its most wrenching challenge since the Chibok mass abduction of 276 schoolgirls in 2014 that shocked the world. Conflicting reports added to the confusion Friday over the fate of the young women who attended the boarding school in the northern village of Dapchi. "On the issue of the number of missing girls, we cannot give what we are not sure of ... Give us a few more time, please," urged Nigerian Information Minister Lai Muhammed, who visited the town by helicopter on Thursday. Confusion and a slow federal government response to the Chibok abductions ultimately led to an international "Bring Back Our Girls" movement that pressured Nigeria's leaders to make rescuing the schoolgirls a priority. While many of the Chibok girls escaped or were later freed through government negotiations, about 100 of the girls were said to be indoctrinated by their captors and had children with them. Those young women now seem lost forever to their families, unwilling to return home nearly four years later. Nigeria's government has repeatedly declared that Boko Haram is all but defeated after an eight-year insurgency that has spread into neighboring Niger, Cameroon and Chad and displaced millions of people. The declarations continued this week, even after the Dapchi attack. "They have been starved out of oxygen, and the oxygen they feed on is publicity so that they can grab the world's attention. But I can assure you that with the determination of our gallant military, the days of Boko Haram are numbered," the information minister said. While some of the Dapchi girls may still be in hiding, hope is fading with each day they do not return, especially given the multiple eyewitness accounts of students being taken away at gunpoint during the chaos on Monday. "Some of my colleagues were trapped and caught by the insurgents and were taken away," said 13-year-old Fatima Bako, who managed to hide. Sanusi Muhammadu is still waiting for word of his 14-year-old daughter, Aisha. He said that after some girls were found hiding in the bush, the parents were asked to come at 2 p.m. on Tuesday to collect them. Aisha was not there. The following day, news broke that the attackers had been intercepted in a nearby town and that some girls had been rescued. That report later proved to be false, adding to his heartbreak. "We were all happy on Wednesday night when the news broke that some of the girls had been rescued in Geidam town. But here we are, the same government is now saying that no girl has been rescued," he said. "But the government has a duty to rescue our daughters. It is the responsibility of government to get our daughters returned home to us safely because we put them in school believing that they are under the protection of government," he added. On Thursday, parents sobbed after Yobe state governor Ibrahim Gaidam urged them to "intensify prayers" as Nigerian security operatives continued searching the bush for survivors. "I urge you to be patient as we are not resting," he said. ___ Larson reported from Dakar, Senegal. Ivanka Trump's appearance at this weekend's closing ceremony of the Pyeongchang Olympics on behalf of the White House and the United States is a softer bookend to Vice President Mike Pence's awkward visit during the opening ceremony. Ivanka Trump has some popularity in Asia, and the perception of her as a smoother player in her father's administration - and, not inconsequentially, a younger one as well - allows the United States a photogenic representative at a games dominated by unusually adept PR moves from North Korea. The big question is this: After seeing some final events and glad-handing some American athletes, will she be placed in the same position as Pence - in a VIP box with a North Korean delegation? And if so, how will she respond and will she, unlike Pence, choose to interact? The answer could provide a coda to an extraordinary two weeks of Olympic political optics - and offer hints of the Trump administration's approach in coming weeks when it comes to the thawing of North-South relations on the Korean Peninsula. ___ Donald Trump Jr. isn't shy to say it: He's in India to sell. He says it's "nonsense" that some people say he's using his father's job as the leader of the most powerful nation to sell apartments in high-end Trump brand buildings. He got an enthusiastic welcome in a country where flashy wealth and important last names both carry enormous weight. His business partners announced his visit with glossy, front-page ads in leading newspapers. And on Monday, one day before he arrived, they parlayed his name into $15 million worth of sales. India is a huge market for the Trump Organization, which he is running with his brother during their father's presidency. It has more projects in India than any other country outside of the United States. Trump Jr. also says the presidency has actually cost the family "quite a bit of money in terms of lost opportunity," because the Trump Organization isn't signing new overseas deals while his father is in office to avoid potential ethical conflicts. In this combination of photos; left, on Tuesday, Feb. 20, 2018, Donald Trump Jr. gives a thumbs-up as he arrives for a meeting in New Delhi, India, and right, Friday, Feb. 23, 2018, Ivanka Trump arrives in Seoul, Korea, for the closing ceremony for the Winter Olympics. As President Donald Trump grapples with politics back home, two of his children are on high-profile missions in Asia, capturing his family's dueling interests. (AP Photo) South Korean President Moon Jae-in shakes hands with Ivanka Trump during their dinner at the Presidential Blue House on Friday, Feb. 23, 2018, Seoul, South Korea. Ivanka Trump has received a red-carpet welcome in South Korea as head of the U.S. delegation to this weekend's closing ceremony for the Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang. (Kim Min-Hee/Pool Photo via AP) MANILA, Philippines (AP) - A Lebanese man suspected in the death of a Filipina maid whose body was found stuffed in a freezer in Kuwait has been arrested, the Philippine foreign secretary said Friday. Alan Peter Cayetano said he has told President Rodrigo Duterte about the arrest in Lebanon of Nader Essam Assaf but added that Assaf's Syrian wife, who is also a suspect in the death of Joanna Demafelis, remains at large. The discovery of Demafelis's body on Feb. 6 in the apartment in Kuwait City, where it had reportedly been kept for more than a year, sparked outrage and refocused attention on the tragic plight of poor Filipinas toiling mostly as maids abroad. It prompted Duterte to ban the deployment of new Filipino workers to Kuwait, where many abuses have been reported. FILE - In this Wednesday, Feb. 21, 2018, file photo, protesters picket the Senate at the start of the probe in the death of an overseas worker in Kuwait, Pasay city south of Manila, Philippines. The Philippine president says a ban on the deployment of workers to Kuwait, where a Filipina was found dead in a freezer, will continue and could be expanded to other countries where Filipino workers "suffer brutal treatment and human degradation." (AP Photo/Bullit Marquez, File) Assaf and his wife employed Demafelis. Duterte and other officials have asked Kuwaiti authorities to hunt for the couple. "Assaf's arrest is a critical first step in our quest for justice for Joanna and we are thankful to our friends in Kuwait and Lebanon for their assistance," Cayetano said in a statement, adding that he expects Kuwait will seek Assaf's extradition. After attending Demafelis's wake on Thursday in her hometown of Sara in the central Philippines, Duterte told reporters the ban on the deployment of Filipino workers to Kuwait would continue and could be expanded to other countries. Duterte said Demafelis's body bore torture marks and signs that she was strangled. He said the government is conducting an assessment to "find out the places where we deploy Filipinos and our countrymen suffer brutal treatment and human degradation." The Philippines is a major labor exporter with about a tenth of its more than 100 million people working abroad. The workers have been called national heroes because the income they send home sustains the Southeast Asian nation's economy, accounting for about 10 percent of its annual gross domestic product. Philippine officials are under increasing pressure to do more to monitor the safety of the workers, who are mostly maids, construction workers and laborers. Labor Secretary Silvestre Bello III told a Senate hearing that he recalled three labor officers from Kuwait to be investigated over their failure to act on a request by Demafelis's family for help after she went missing in January last year, he said. Administrator Hans Leo Cacdac of the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration reported at least 196 Filipinos had died in Kuwait in the last two years, mostly for unspecified medical reasons but also four from suicide. Monitoring their wellbeing is difficult due to the sheer numbers of workers but also by improper documentation. Nearly 11,000 of the more than 252,000 Filipino workers in Kuwait are there illegally or are not properly authorized. BANGKOK (AP) - In a story Feb. 24 about Myanmar's parliament approving a budget for a fence along the border crossed by fleeing Rohingya Muslims, The Associated Press attributed information to the wrong lawmaker. It should be attributed to Aung Thaike instead of Myo Zaw Aung. A corrected version of the story is below: Myanmar parliament approves $15M for Rakhine border fence Myanmar's parliament has approved a budget of about $15 million for a fence and related projects along the same stretch of border Rohingya Muslims have crossed while fleeing a military crackdown BANGKOK (AP) - Myanmar's parliament has approved a budget of about $15 million for the construction of a fence and related projects along the border with Bangladesh in Rakhine state, from which about 700,000 members of its persecuted ethnic Rohingya Muslim minority have fled violence since last August. Lawmaker Aung Thaike said Friday the budget was proposed by the Home Affairs Ministry, the Defense Ministry and the Border Affairs Ministry, which are all controlled by the military. Deputy Home Affairs Minister Gen. Aung Soe testified Thursday, the day the budget was approved, that fences covering 202 kilometers (126 miles) of the 293-kilometer (182-mile) border have already been completed. There is widespread prejudice against the Rohingya because they are seen as illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, although they are long-time settlers. Most are stateless and face widespread social and official discrimination. The Rohingya fled largely in response to brutal violence by state security forces, who have been accused of gross human rights abuses and "ethnic cleansing." The security forces acted after a Rohingya militant group carried out coordinated attacks on more than 30 police outposts and other targets. Negotiations are underway to have the Rohingya return to Myanmar, but there is extreme concern that their safety and well-being is not guaranteed. Many have no homes left because their villages were leveled. The military's actions against the Rohingya are widely supported by Myanmar's Buddhist majority, which has little sympathy for the Muslim minority. In late October, the military received $5 million from private Buddhist donors to fund the border fence. WASHINGTON (AP) - The Trump administration hit more than 50 vessels, shipping companies and trade businesses with sanctions Friday, escalating pressure on North Korea over its nuclear program. The administration billed it as the largest installment of North Korean economic restrictions to date. President Donald Trump went further, declaring in a speech Friday at the Conservative Political Action Conference that it was "the heaviest sanctions ever imposed on a country before." While the number of companies from North Korea and other nations was high, the economic impact is unclear. It was certain to be less than previous U.S. measures that targeted large banks and business networks in China and Russia that deal with the North. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin gestures as he answers questions during a press briefing at the White House in Washington, Friday, Feb. 23, 2018. The Trump administration announced new sanctions on more than 50 vessels, shipping companies and trade businesses in its latest bid to pressure North Korea over its nuclear program. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais) However, it significantly tightens the noose on North Korean trading. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin told reporters that the U.S. has now imposed more than 450 sanctions against the North, about half of them in the last year - including "virtually all their ships that they're using at this moment in time." The United Nations Security Council has imposed three sets of sanctions on North Korea in the past year to deprive it of revenue and resources for its nuclear and ballistic missile development. The weapons pose an emerging threat to the U.S. mainland. Washington is particularly concerned about exports of North Korean coal that are prohibited by the U.N. sanctions and ship-to-ship transfers of imported oil and petroleum products. The Treasury Department said it was barring U.S. business transactions with nine international shipping companies from China, Hong Kong, Singapore and Panama, and nine of their vessels. It also blacklisted 16 North shipping companies and 19 of their North Korean-flagged vessels. Additionally, the department designated a Taiwanese citizen, Tsang Yung Yuan, and two companies he owns or controls. Tsang was said to have coordinated North Korean coal exports with a Russia-based North Korean broker, and attempted $1 million oil deal with a Russian company sanctioned for dealing with the North. Mnuchin said the actions will significantly hinder North Korea's ability to conduct evasive maritime activities that facilitate illicit coal and fuel transports, and "erode its abilities to ship goods through international waters." He vowed the U.S. would "do everything" to stop the ship-to-ship transfers. "We are putting companies and countries across the world on notice that this administration views compliance with U.S. and U.N. sanctions as a national security imperative. Those who trade with North Korea do so at their own peril," Mnuchin said. In his speech, Trump said "hopefully something positive can happen" from the sanctions pressure. The announcement comes as South Korea hosts the Winter Olympics, an occasion the two Koreas have used as an opportunity to ease tensions and restart talks. Although South Korea is a close U.S. ally, animosity between Washington and Pyongyang still runs high. Ivanka Trump, the president's daughter and adviser, arrived in South Korea on Friday to attend the closing ceremony this weekend. At a dinner with South Korean President Moon Jae-in, she reaffirmed "our commitment to our maximum pressure campaign to ensure that the Korean Peninsula is denuclearized." Mnuchin said Ivanka Trump had spoken to Moon about the new sanctions before the announcement. The U.S. government also issued Friday a global shipping advisory highlighting the sanctions risk to those who enable shipments of goods to and from North Korea. It alerted industries to North Korea's "deceptive shipping practices," which includes falsifying the identity of vessels and disabling transponders that track ships' movements. The Treasury Department published photos of a U.S.-designated North Korean vessel, Kum Un San 3, which it said used false identifying information and conducted an illicit ship-to-ship transfer, possibly of oil, with a Panama-flagged vessel that was among the ships sanctioned Friday. ___ Associated Press writer Matthew Pennington contributed to this report. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin speaks during a press briefing at the White House in Washington, Friday, Feb. 23, 2018. The Trump administration announced new sanctions on more than 50 vessels, shipping companies and trade businesses in its latest bid to pressure North Korea over its nuclear program. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais) Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin waits to take the podium to begin a press briefing at the White House in Washington, Friday, Feb. 23, 2018. The Trump administration announced new sanctions on more than 50 vessels, shipping companies and trade businesses in its latest bid to pressure North Korea over its nuclear program. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais) PITTSBURGH (AP) - A woman whose affair with a Pennsylvania congressman led to his resignation - and who's pursuing her own run for the U.S. House - is accused of threatening to kill her husband. The Tribune Review reports 33-year-old Shannon Edwards' husband was granted a restraining order against her in 2016. Her husband claims in court records Edwards made multiple threats to kill him, including saying she would use a steak knife or hire a hit man. He's seeking a divorce. Edwards' attorney says they can't discuss the matter. Edwards is seeking the Republican nomination to take on Democratic Rep. Mike Doyle. Republican Rep. Tim Murphy, an opponent of abortion rights, resigned in October after text messages obtained by The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette suggested he wanted Edwards to get an abortion when they thought she might be pregnant. Edwards is running in a neighboring district. ___ Information from: Tribune-Review, http://triblive.com WASHINGTON (AP) - Congress is reserving one of the nation's greatest distinctions for the Rev. Billy Graham, selecting him to lie in honor in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda next Wednesday and Thursday. America's most famous evangelist died Wednesday at his home in North Carolina at age 99. The Rotunda has long been considered the most suitable place for the nation to pay final tribute to its most eminent citizens. Among those who have lain in state or in honor in the Rotunda are 12 former presidents, including Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy, former military commanders Douglas MacArthur, George Dewey and John Pershing, and civil rights icon Rosa Parks. People view and photograph the hearse carrying the remains of Rev. Billy Graham arrives at the Billy Graham Training Center at the Cove on Thursday, February 22, 2018 in Asheville, NC. (AP Photo/Kathy Kmonicek) A look at some of the history and names behind the honor. THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN "LYING IN STATE" AND "LYING IN HONOR" The Senate Historical Office explains that there are no hard and fast rules on this, but "lying in state" ceremonies are usually reserved for deceased presidents and other elected officials. "Lying in honor" has become the phrase used in recent years to describe ceremonies for those who didn't serve in elected office. Graham is just the fourth to receive that designation. The others are two former U.S. Capitol Police officers who died in the line of duty in 1998 and Parks in 2005. The honor is essentially the same regardless of the language used, but "lying in state" ceremonies are accompanied by full military honors, while "lying in honor" ceremonies may only have a Capitol Police detail. ___ WHO DECIDES WHICH AMERICANS RECEIVE THE HONOR Either Congress can pass a resolution or congressional leadership can give the approval after consulting with survivors. In Graham's case, Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell announced the ceremony after conferring with the Rev. Franklin Graham. "With your approval, we will move forward with these arrangements, so that Americans have this opportunity to pay their respects to the Rev. Graham before he is laid to rest," they said in a letter to Franklin Graham. The House also agreed to a resolution on Friday providing for Graham to "lie in honor" in the Rotunda, sending it to the Senate for approval. ___ WHY BILLY GRAHAM GETS THE HONOR Ryan explained in his announcement that Graham forever changed the course of the world's spiritual health. He served as an adviser to 12 consecutive U.S. presidents and reached millions through radio, television and film. Graham is also greatly admired by many of the millions of evangelical Christians who associate themselves with conservative policies and the Republican Party. "I bet those lines are going to be long and beautiful, because he deserves it," President Donald Trump said Friday at a gathering of conservative activists. ___ CEREMONIAL TIES TO LINCOLN A platform hastily constructed to support the casket of Abraham Lincoln while the president's body lay in state has been preserved and is used to hold the coffins of all those who lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda. When not in use, the platform, or catafalque, is kept in a specially constructed display area in the Capitol Visitor Center. The catafalque is a simple base of rough pine boards nailed together and covered with black cloth. ___ OTHERS WHO HAVE LAIN IN STATE IN THE ROTUNDA The list maintained by the Architect of the Capitol includes several members of Congress, beginning with Henry Clay of Kentucky in 1852 and, most recently, Sen. Daniel Inouye of Hawaii in 2012. The non-elected officials who have lain in state include former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and Washington, D.C., planner Pierre L'Enfant. Lawmakers have also chosen to perpetuate the memory of service members who gave their lives in war by honoring unknown soldiers from World War I, World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War. OXON HILL, Md. (AP) - The Latest on President Donald Trump (all times local): 2:45 p.m. President Donald Trump says he has spoken to House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell about his plans to curb gun violence and bolster school safety in the aftermath of the deadly Florida high school shooting. President Donald Trump delivers remarks to the Conservative Political Action Conference, Friday, Feb. 23, 2018, in Oxon Hill, Md. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci) Trump says in a joint news conference with Australia's prime minister that making schools a "gun-free environment" doesn't increase safety. He says security guards typically don't know and don't love the children at schools. Trump again criticized the Florida deputy who didn't enter to try to stop the Florida shooter. He says the man standing outside the school "doesn't love the children." 11:30 a.m. President Donald Trump says only a fraction of teachers and administrators should have guns to protect students from attackers. Speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference Friday, the president said, "maybe 10 percent or 20 percent of the population of teachers, etc" should have concealed weapons. He added that "nobody would ever see it unless they needed it." Had this fraction of school personnel been armed last week when a shooter killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, a "teacher would have shot the hell out of him before he knew what happened." He called reports that he wants all teachers armed, "fake news." He said he only wants school personnel already trained with firearms to have guns, because they "love their students" and want to protect them. ___ 11:28 a.m. President Donald Trump says he goes to great lengths to hide a bald spot revealed in a recent photo. Speaking before the Conservative Political Action Conference Friday, Trump turned around onstage and smoothed the back of his famous hair. He said, "I try like hell to hide that bald spot, folks." The crowd cheered as Trump glanced at a monitor and added, "doesn't look bad. Hey, we're hanging in." During the 2016 campaign, Trump let a woman tug on the top of his signature flaxen coif to prove the hair there is attached to his head. The president's bald spot was exposed Feb. 2 when he turned away from cameras to climb aboard Air Force One. As Trump climbed the stairs, a wind gust blew aside a flap of hair. ___ 11:25 a.m. President Donald Trump is blaming ailing Republican Sen. John McCain for impeding efforts to repeal "Obamacare" in a speech in front of conservative activists. But he's refusing to mention the cancer-stricken senator by name. Trump tells the crowd, "I don't want to be controversial so I won't use his name, O.K." McCain's daughter, Meghan, told POLITICO'S Women Rule podcast earlier this month that the president had called her last year to say he would back off from criticizing her father. She said, "I don't believe he would go there again." ___ 11:15 a.m. The White House is inviting a prominent gun safety advocate to a meeting next week. Connecticut Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy tells The Associated Press the White House has asked to sit down with him. Murphy says, "I'm here to hear the White House out." He's not expected to meet with the president, but likely with his aides. It's unclear if other lawmakers are also invited. The Connecticut senator became an outspoken advocate for more gun restrictions after the 2012 elementary school shooting in Sandy Hook. ___ 11:10 a.m. President Donald Trump says the Rev. Billy Graham is among the few people who deserve to lie in honor in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda. Trump tells an annual gathering of conservative activists that few people are afforded the honor and "it's a big thing." The famous evangelist died Wednesday at his North Carolina home. He was 99. Trump says he bets the lines of people waiting to enter the Capitol next week to pay respects to Graham "are going to be long and beautiful, because he deserves it." The president says Graham was a "great man" who had a "great family" that was "for us" from the beginning. Trump did not say whether he would go to the Capitol to pay his respects. ___ 11:06 a.m. President Donald Trump is bringing back his biggest campaign hits for his speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference. Trump is speaking to an enthusiastic crowd at the annual gathering of conservative activist and playing to the crowd. Trump at one point asked if they minded if he went off script, saying his prepared remarks were a little bit "boring." He's also talking up his appearance in front of the group in 2011, calling it a love fest and his very first political speech. The crowd is responding with chants of "Lock her up!" ''Build the wall!" and "USA!" just like they used to do on the campaign trail. ___ 10:45 a.m. President Donald Trump is polling an audience of conservative activists on whether they prefer the Second Amendment or the tax cuts he signed into law late last year. Trump tells those gathered at the Conservative Political Action Conference that if the Democrats win seats in 2018 they will "repeal your tax cuts" and "take away your Second Amendment," which he says, "we will never allow to happen." Then Trump asked the crowd which priority they'd pick if they only had a choice of one. The cheers were louder for the gun rights, but Trump assured, "We're going to get them all." Trump has proposed increasing the minimum age for the purchase of certain guns in the wake of last week's school shooting in Florida. The National Rifle Association opposes the plan. ___ 10:40 a.m. President Donald Trump is urging his conservative supporters to keep up the enthusiasm heading into November's congressional election. Republicans control the House and hold a slim majority in the Senate, but Democrats are hoping to flip either or both chambers in the fall. Trump is telling attendees at the Conservative Political Action Conference that if Democrats win they will repeal new tax cuts and take away their constitutional right to bear arms. Trump notes that historically the party that controls the presidency suffers in the midterm elections two years later because after they "fight, fight fight" for the White House "nobody has that same drive" and "so you end up not doing that well." He tells his supporters that they have "got to keep up the enthusiasm." ___ 10:30 a.m. President Donald Trump is telling conservative activists that he's proven he's one of them. Trump is opening his speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference by reminding the group that when he first started running, people questioned the former Democrat's conservative credentials. He says, "I think now we've proved I'm a conservative." The annual conference on the outskirts of Washington is considered the country's highest-profile gathering of conservative activists. Numerous members of the administration have been speaking. ___ 10:11 a.m. President Donald Trump says the armed officer who didn't stop the gunman who carried out last week's Florida massacre was either a "coward" or "didn't react properly under pressure." Trump was leaving the White House to attend the Conservative Political Action Conference when he said: "When it came time to get in there and do something," Florida deputy Scot Peterson "didn't have the courage or something happened." Trump added, "He certainly did a poor job, there's no question about that." Officials announced Thursday that Peterson never went inside to engage the gunman at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School while the shooting that killed 17 was underway. Trump says this "could have been prevented." President Donald Trump speaks to reporters before boarding Marine One on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, Friday, Feb. 23, 2018, to travel to Oxon Hill, Md. to speak at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik) Trevor Tovsen, center, with the University of Maryland College Republicans, says the Pledge of Allegiance, during the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), at National Harbor, Md., Friday, Feb. 23, 2018, where President Donald Trump is expected to speak. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin) Millie March, 12, of Fairfax, Va., wears socks featuring President Donald Trump while awaiting his speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), at National Harbor, Md., Friday, Feb. 23, 2018. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin) James Manship, center, dressed as President George Washington, holds a pocket copy of the constitution while attending the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), at National Harbor, Md., Friday, Feb. 23, 2018. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin) Millie March, 12, of Fairfax, Va., center, wears socks featuring President Donald Trump while awaiting his speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), at National Harbor, Md., Friday, Feb. 23, 2018. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin) WASHINGTON (AP) - The Trump administration is considering an offer from Republican mega-donor Sheldon Adelson to pay for at least part of a new U.S. embassy in Jerusalem, four U.S. officials told The Associated Press. Lawyers at the State Department are looking into the legality of accepting private donations to cover some or all of the embassy costs, the officials said. The discussions are occurring as the administration plans a ribbon-cutting for a scaled-down, temporary embassy that will open in May - more than a year ahead of schedule. In one possible scenario, the administration would solicit contributions not only from Adelson but potentially from other donors in the evangelical Christian and American Jewish communities, too. One official said Adelson, a Las Vegas casino magnate and staunch Israel supporter, had offered to pay the difference between the total cost - expected to run into the hundreds of millions of dollars - and what the administration is able to raise. FILE - In this May 23, 2017, file photo, Sheldon Adelson, right, talks with Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, before a speech by President Donald Trump at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. Adelson has proposed paying for at least part of the new U.S. embassy in Jerusalem, four U.S. officials told The Associated Press, and the Trump administration is considering the offer. Lawyers at the State Department are looking into the legality of the highly unconventional proposal to cover part or all of the embassy's costs through private donations, the administration officials said. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci, File) Under any circumstance, letting private citizens cover the costs of an official government building would mark a significant departure from historical practice. In the Jerusalem case, it would add yet another layer of controversy to Trump's politically charged decision to move the embassy, given Adelson's longstanding affiliation with right-wing Israeli politics. The move of the embassy from Tel Aviv to the disputed holy city cleared a final bureaucratic hurdle this week when Secretary of State Rex Tillerson signed off on the security plan. In a letter sent to Congress, the State Department said the interim facility's inauguration will coincide with the 70th anniversary of Israel's independence on May 14. "It's the right thing to do," Trump said Friday of the embassy relocation. Adelson's unconventional offer, made around the time Trump announced in December that the embassy would move, would address the president's stated distaste for shelling out eye-popping sums for overseas diplomatic facilities. Although Trump has promoted the Jerusalem move as fulfilling a key campaign promise, he also was outspoken last month in blasting the $1 billion price tag for a new embassy in London. How quickly to move the embassy has been a source of intense debate within Trump's administration, said the officials, who weren't authorized to discuss the issue publicly and demanded anonymity. Tillerson, who opposed moving the embassy in the first place, advocated a go-slow approach and said it could take years. But Ambassador David Friedman, who lobbied Trump to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital, has pushed to move it sooner. To enable a May opening, the administration settled on a phased approach to building out the embassy at an existing U.S. facility in Jerusalem's Arnona neighborhood that currently handles consular affairs like passports and visas. Initially, the U.S. will merely retrofit a small suite of offices there to accommodate Friedman and one or two top aides. The rest of the staff will remain at first in America's current facility in Tel Aviv. The Arnona facility will be expanded accommodate a regular contingent of embassy personnel by the end of 2019, and ultimately is likely to spill into an adjacent U.S.-controlled property that currently houses a home for senior citizens, officials said. The State Department said a separate search was starting "in parallel" to eventually plan and build a permanent embassy. Israel's government hailed the impending move, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu saying on Twitter that it would turn Israel's anniversary "into an even greater national celebration." But Palestinian chief negotiator Saeb Erekat said the move showed Trump was determined to destroy prospects for a two-state solution and "provoke the feelings of the Palestinian people." Retrofitting just a few offices can be accomplished at minimal cost. But expanding to allow the bulk of America's diplomatic staff in Israel to work out of Jerusalem would easily cost more than $500 million dollars, officials familiar with the process said. Particularly pricey are the strict security requirements for embassies that are written into U.S. law. It's unclear how much of the cost Adelson might be willing to cover. The White House declined to comment. An Adelson spokesman didn't respond to multiple requests for comment. The State Department said it had "nothing to announce" and "no confirmation or details about this hypothetical proposal." Undersecretary of State Steve Goldstein added that there had been no "formal talks" with private citizens about funding. It's not clear if there is any precedent, nor whether government lawyers would give the green light to accept Adelson's or anyone else's donations. Kathy Bethany, the former cost management director for the State Department's Bureau of Overseas Building Operations, said she couldn't recall the U.S. government ever accepting donations to build embassies during her tenure, which ended in 2014. "I don't know how well that would work," Bethany said. "Would we be beholden to putting their name on the building? I've never heard of that." There are several ways, in theory, that it could work. Citizens could cut a general check to the U.S. Treasury and unofficially "earmark" their dollars as being intended to offset the embassy's cost. The State Department's Foreign Affairs Manual also lays out a formal process for accepting gifts, including real estate, requiring a rigorous review to ensure the gift "would not give the appearance of a conflict of interest." Adelson, who donated $5 million to Trump's inaugural committee, is one of the Republican Party's biggest donors and a major Netanyahu supporter. Adelson also finances Israel Hayom, a pro-Netanyahu newspaper that is distributed free throughout Israel. Allowing donations from Adelson or others would come with significant political risk for Trump. The president already faces major criticism from Palestinians and others who say his decision to move the embassy to Jerusalem - also claimed by the Palestinians for the capital of their future state - tipped the scales unfairly in Israel's favor. Mort Klein, president of the pro-Israel group Zionist Organization of America and a close associate of Adelson, said accepting donations would be ill-advised. Klein said he knew Adelson was "deeply interested" in seeing the embassy relocate to Jerusalem but didn't know whether the casino mogul had offered to help pay for it himself. "This is a government project. It's a government-run embassy," Klein said. "I don't want people to be able to say it was Jewish money." ___ Associated Press writers Ian Deitch in Jerusalem and Darlene Superville in Washington contributed to this report. ___ Reach Josh Lederman on Twitter at http://twitter.com/joshledermanAP FILE - In this Sept. 26, 2016, file photo, Chief Executive of Las Vegas Sands Corporation Sheldon Adelson sits with his wife Miriam waits for the presidential debate between Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and then-Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump at Hofstra University in Hempstead, N.Y. Adelson has proposed paying for at least part of the new U.S. embassy in Jerusalem, four U.S. officials told The Associated Press, and the Trump administration is considering the offer. Lawyers at the State Department are looking into the legality of the highly unconventional proposal to cover part or all of the embassy's costs through private donations, the administration officials said. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky, File) SAO PAULO (AP) - Brazil's president says he will not run in October presidential elections and maintains that a military intervention he recently ordered was not aimed at improving his low approval ratings. President Michel Temer was asked in a Friday interview with a Sao Paulo radio station if he would run for president if the intervention succeeds. He replied: "I am not and will not be a candidate for any elective office." Brazil's President Michel Temer receives military honors during his arrival to attend a meeting of the Defense Military Council, in Brasilia, Brazil, Thursday, Feb. 22, 2018. Brazil's congress approved a decree to put the military in charge of Rio de Janeiro's security forces as soldiers and police spread out throughout in the city to combat rising crime. (AP Photo/Eraldo Peres) Brazil's federal government issued a decree a week ago putting the military in charge of Rio de Janeiro's local police amid a spike in violent crime. ALEXANDRIA, Va. (AP) - A former transit-agency police officer was sentenced to 15 years in prison Friday after being convicted in a sting operation of attempting to help the Islamic State group. Nicholas Young, 38, of Fairfax, Virginia, became the first law-enforcement officer in the country to be convicted of a terrorism offense when a federal jury found him guilty in December on charges including obstruction of justice and attempting to provide material support to a terrorist group. Young had been a patrol officer in the D.C. region's Metrorail system and was known as "Officer Friendly" at the Takoma Park station where he was assigned. But the Muslim convert had been under surveillance going back at least as far as 2010. He was friends with Zachary Chesser, another convert who was sentenced to 25 years in prison for trying to join the al-Shabab terrorist group in Somalia and for making threats against the creators of the "South Park" cartoon series for episodes he deemed insulting to the Prophet Muhammad. In 2016, Young purchased more than $200 in gift cards he believed would be used to purchase mobile-phone apps the Islamic State could use to communicate securely. In reality, though, Young's Islamic State connection was an FBI informant. Young apologized for his conduct in a letter to the judge, but said he only bought the gift cards because he wanted to support a person he thought was a friend. At Friday's sentencing hearing, Young said he was prosecuted only after he refused an FBI offer to be an informant. At trial, Young's lawyers argued unsuccessfully that the sting operation amounted to entrapment. "I have never desired or encouraged any act of terrorism in this country, not now, not ever," Young wrote. But prosecutor Gordon Kromberg said Young's explanations of his conduct are disingenuous. "The only time he was ever asked to help ISIS, he accepted," Kromberg said. The FBI informant, known to Young as "Mo," had told Young that the gift cards were needed because the Islamic State was losing fighters, and they needed the gift cards to recruit more fighters by communicating with them securely through purchase of a specific mobile-phone app. Kromberg said Young engaged in a litany of bad conduct over the years, including travel to Libya, where prosecutors say Young served with a militant group that hadn't been officially designated a terrorist group. In addition, he said Young trafficked in Nazi memorabilia that flowed from anti-Semitic views that meshed with his embrace of militant Islam. He noted that Young was stockpiling body armor and thousands of rounds of ammunition, and that he engaged in conversations about smuggling weapons into a federal courthouse to free a Muslim prisoner, as well as attacking FBI headquarters. "What happened in July 2016 (with the gift card purchase) was not an aberration, not something out of character for the defendant," Kromberg said. Judge Leonie Brinkema said the evidence about Young's stockpiling of weapons and his comments about violence made the case "particularly troublesome." The 15-year sentence she imposed largely fell in line with other terror-related sentences imposed at the courthouse in recent years. Neither prosecutors nor the defense offered a specific recommendation to the judge. Chevy Chase (pictured) claimed that he was attacked. Now the other man speaks out A man has claimed he kicked Chevy Chase in self-defense after the comedian climbed into his vehicle yelling 'I am going to ruin your lives!' and tried to punch him. Long Islander Michael Landrio, 22, told his side of the story on Friday in an interview with the New York Post, saying his February 9 scuffle with the 74-year-old Chase in South Nyack, New York was purely in self-defense. Former Saturday Night Live star Chase had told police he was viciously attacked after he was cut off by another driver on the Tappan Zee Bridge and followed the vehicle, thinking his car might be damaged. Now Landrio, a UPS worker from East Patchogue, says that's now how the encounter unfolded at all. Landrio, a UPS worker from East Patchogue, was heading upstate with his girlfriend and another couple when he says Chase forced them off the road and tried to climb in the truck The incident unfolded after a road rage encounter on the Tappan Zee Bridge (pictured) Landrio was in the passenger seat with his girlfriend and another couple, all on their way to go snowmobiling upstate. 'We were in the right lane and as we came up to the bridge we went to the middle lane,' when a blue Mercedes flashed its lights and pulled next to them on the bridge, Landrio told the newspaper. 'It was an old guy yelling something we couldn't hear super pissed-off. We just tried to get the heck away from him. He followed us the whole length of the bridge, driving crazy.' He said the other driver pursued the truck he was riding in before both vehicles pulled over in South Nyak, on the west bank of the Hudson. 'My friend opened his window and just said, 'I apologize, we were just trying to go upstate,' he said. 'You know who the f**k I am?' Landrio said Chase screamed. 'Then he started cursing at me for no reason and said, 'I am going to ruin your lives!' I said, 'F**k you!'' Landrio, left with girlfriend, said he didn't even know who Chase (right) was until a cop told him Landrio said Chase yanked open the truck door while yelling 'I'm going to punch you in the nose' adding that the comedian 'had his hands in my face'. Landrio said that Chase took a wild swing at him that failed to connect, and he responded by kicking the actor, sending him sprawling out of the truck and onto the ground. Landrio said he closed the vehicle's door and locked it to protect himself and his friends, and an off-duty cop intervened and escorted Chase away. Police cited Landrio for second degree harassment with physical contact. Chase was not charged. Landrio, who has launched a GoFundMe campaign for his legal defense fund, says he didn't even have an idea who Chase was. 'I didn't know who he was I was just trying to defend myself,' he told the Post. A spokeswoman for Chase says the actor didn't get into the vehicle and didn't try to attack Landrio. WASHINGTON (AP) - The White House has announced a Baltic summit in April to celebrate the 100th anniversary of independence for Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. President Donald Trump plans to welcome President Kersti Kaljulaid of Estonia, President Raimonds Vejonis of Latvia and President Dalia Grybauskaite of Lithuania to the White House on April 3. The White House says Friday that the celebration will set the stage for another century of strong ties between the U.S. and these allies. President Donald Trump, left, accompanied by first lady Melania Trump, second from left, takes a question from a reporter as he welcomes Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull in the Oval Office at the White House, Friday, Feb. 23, 2018, in Washington. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik) The summit will focus on strengthening their security, business, trade, energy and cultural partnerships. It's also designed to highlight Baltic state achievements since independence. LOS ANGELES (AP) - Former Miami Dolphins offensive lineman Jonathan Martin, who has struggled with mental health issues after a 2013 bullying scandal that shook the NFL, was taken into Los Angeles police custody Friday after a threatening Instagram post on his account mentioned two former teammates who had harassed him. Martin was being questioned by investigators after the post showed a shotgun and referred by name to the private Harvard-Westlake prep school in Los Angeles that he once attended, a law enforcement official told The Associated Press. The official was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity. The post also included mentions of the Instagram usernames of former Miami Dolphins players Richie Incognito and Mike Pouncey and said suicide and revenge were the only options for a victim of bullying, the official said. FILE - This Aug. 28, 2014, file photo shows San Francisco 49ers' Jonathan Martin on the bench during an NFL football preseason game against the Houston Texans in Houston. A law enforcement official says ex-football player Martin was taken into Los Angeles police custody after a threatening Instagram post that spoke of bullying. The official says Martin was being questioned and was not under arrest. The official was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity. (AP Photo/David J. Phillip, File) The Harvard-Westlake prep school was evacuated earlier Friday after officials were made aware of the post. It was not immediately clear whether Martin posted the photo himself and he was not under arrest Friday afternoon. Martin left the Miami Dolphins midseason in 2013 after accusing teammates of bullying. An NFL investigation found that Incognito, Pouncey and teammate John Jerry engaged in persistent harassment directed at Martin. Incognito was suspended for the final eight games and sat out the 2014 season before joining the Buffalo Bills. The NFL's investigation also found that teammates threatened to rape Martin's sister, called him a long list of slurs and bullied him for not being "black enough." Martin is black and Incognito is white. Martin, who underwent counseling for emotional issues after the bullying scandal, posted on Facebook in 2015 that difficulties in football led him to attempt suicide multiple times. Martin, the son of two Harvard graduates, attended Stanford University. After he left the Dolphins, Martin played for the San Francisco 49ers and Carolina Panthers. He left the NFL in 2015. Representatives for the Miami Dolphins and the NFL declined to comment and referred questions to Los Angeles police. ___ Follow Michael Balsamo on Twitter at www.twitter.com/MikeBalsamo1 . ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) - Authorities say a western New York couple who sold satellite television contracts to state prisons illegally pocketed $375,000 that should have gone to DirecTV. New York state Inspector General Catherine Leahy Scott announced Friday that Richard and Christine Wertman of Lockport in Niagara County have pleaded guilty to grand larceny in connection with the scheme. Investigators say the couple signed contracts to provide DirecTV service to three state prisons and then used their technical skills to provide the service. But the couple never notified California-based DirecTV or passed along the company's cut of the proceeds. Scott said the couple's actions showed "stunning gall." As part of a plea deal, the Wertmans agreed to repay the $375,000. Reached by phone Friday, Christine Wertman declined to comment. WASHINGTON (AP) - The heaviest, the largest, the most impactful. Those were the superlatives the Trump administration used to describe its latest sanctions against North Korea. But were the Treasury Department designations of more than 50 companies and ships accused of illicit trading with the pariah nation really the toughest action yet by the U.S. and the wider world? Probably not. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin gestures as he answers questions during a press briefing at the White House in Washington, Friday, Feb. 23, 2018. The Trump administration announced new sanctions on more than 50 vessels, shipping companies and trade businesses in its latest bid to pressure North Korea over its nuclear program. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais) Here's a look at how President Donald Trump and a top lieutenant described Friday's sanctions to punish the North for its development of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles - and how they stack up against past economic restrictions that have been piled on Kim Jong Un's government in response to its illegal weapons tests. TREASURY SECRETARY STEVEN MNUCHIN: "The Treasury Department is announcing the largest set of sanctions ever imposed in connection with North Korea." TRUMP: "I do want to say, because people have asked, North Korea - we imposed today the heaviest sanctions ever imposed on a country before." As for Trump's blanket assertion, in sheer dollar terms, the U.S. has actually imposed much costlier restrictions on countries such as Iran, a far richer economy than North Korea's. Washington and its allies cut off tens of billions of dollars' worth of Iranian oil exports and shut the country's central bank out of the international financial system, among other steps, before eliminating those restrictions under a 2015 nuclear deal. In terms of the number of entities targeted Friday, Mnuchin is probably correct about the history of sanctions on North Korea. The department blacklisted "one individual, 27 entities, and 28 vessels" located, registered, or flagged in North Korea, China, Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Marshall Islands, Tanzania, Panama, and Comoros. That appeared to be the most companies or individuals designated by the U.S. at a single time. According to Mnuchin, there are now more than 450 U.S. sanctions against North Korea, about half of them in the last year. But in purely economic terms, both Mnuchin and Trump are well wide of the mark. The latest designations are primarily intended to crack down on North Korea's evasion of wider-ranging sanctions adopted by the United Nations Security Council and the United States that are more economically significant. Over the past year, the council has adopted three sets of sanctions banning North Korean exports of coal, iron ore, textiles, seafood products and other goods. If those measures are properly implemented, that would reduce the North's export revenues by 90 percent from 2016 levels or by $2.3 billion annually. Those sanctions are also heavily restricting North Korean fuel supplies. They capped refined oil imports at 500,000 barrels a year. That's a reduction from the 4.5 million barrels North Korea imported in 2016. It's because of those draconian restrictions that North Korea wants to conduct trade on the quiet with "ship-to-ship" transfers that the U.S. is determined to stop. With Friday's measures, Mnuchin said the U.S. has gone after "virtually all their ships that they're using at this moment." That's certainly a significant increase in pressure on North Korea as its foreign trade diminishes. But the Treasury Department did not give an overall figure for how much revenue the North would be deprived of because of the latest actions, other than to say that nine vessels of newly blacklisted foreign vessels "are capable of carrying over $5.5 million worth of coal at a time." The conservative-leaning Heritage Foundation did not think much of the new steps. "As impressive as the list is in length, it is underwhelming in its scope and fails to live up to the hype," it said. "Like his predecessors, President Trump remains reluctant to go after Chinese financial entities aiding North Korea's prohibited nuclear and missile programs." China is said to account for about 90 percent of North Korea's external trade and be its main access point to the international financial system. Past U.S. sanctions that have targeted Chinese companies have probably had a much bigger impact on North Korea's revenue streams. In November, the Treasury Department blacklisted three Chinese companies that it said had "cumulatively exported approximately $650 million worth of goods to North Korea and cumulatively imported more than $100 million worth of goods from North Korea." An even bigger Chinese trading partner of the North was blacklisted in September 2016: Dandong Hongxiang Industrial Development Co. According to a report by the U.S.-based research group C4AD and South Korea's Asan Institute for Policy Studies, Hongxiang carried out imports and exports worth a total of $532 million in 2011-15. It had also supplied aluminum oxide and other materials that can be used in processing nuclear bomb fuel. ___ Find AP Fact Checks at http://apne.ws/2kbx8bd The armed officer on duty at the Florida school where a shooter killed 17 people never went inside to engage the gunman and has been placed under investigation, police have announced. The Valentines Day shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School by a gunman armed with an AR-15 style assault rifle has reignited national debate over gun laws and school safety, including proposals by president Donald Trump and others to designate more people including trained teachers to carry arms on school grounds. Gun-control advocates, meanwhile, have redoubled their push to ban assault rifles. The school resource officer at the high school took up a position viewing the western entrance of the building that was under attack for more than four minutes, but he never went in, Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel said at a news conference on Thursday. The shooting lasted about six minutes. The officer, Scot Peterson, has been suspended without pay and placed under investigation, then chose to resign, Mr Israel said. The schools cross country team organised a run to honour their fallen coach Scott Beigel and other victims (Mike Stocker/AP) When asked what Peterson should have done, Israel said the deputy should have went in, addressed the killer, killed the killer. The sheriff said he was devastated, sick to my stomach. There are no words. I mean these families lost their children. Ive been to the funerals. Ive been to the vigils. There are no words. The suspect, 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz, has been jailed on 17 counts of murder and has admitted the attack. Students at dozens of US high schools walked out of class on Wednesday to protest gun violence (Mike Christy/AP) Defence lawyers, state records and people who knew him indicate that he displayed behavioural troubles for years and he is known to have had a collection of weapons. Politicians under pressure to tighten gun laws in response to the mass shooting floated various plans in the aftermath. US senator Marco Rubio of Florida said a visit to Stoneman Douglas prompted him to change his stance on large capacity magazines. Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School student Cameron Kasky asks a question to Senator Marco Rubio during a CNN town hall meeting (Michael Laughlin/AP) The Republican insisted he is willing to rethink his past opposition on gun proposals if there is information the policies would prevent mass shootings. If we are going to infringe on the Second Amendment, it has to be a policy that will work, Mr Rubio said. State senator Bill Galvano, who is helping craft a bill in response to the shooting deaths, said an idea gaining traction is a program that would allow local sheriffs to deputise someone at a school to carry a gun on campus. Mr Galvano insisted the idea is not the same as arming teachers. He said the program would be optional and the deputised person would have to be trained by local law-enforcement agencies. A day after an emotional meeting with survivors and their families, Mr Trump tweeted his strongest stance yet on gun control. He said he would endorse strengthening background checks, banning bump stock style devices and raising the minimum age to 21 for buying certain rifles. At a conference of conservative activists on Thursday near Washington, vice president Mike Pence said the administration would make school safety our top national priority after the shooting at the school in Parkland, Florida. Calling school shootings evil in our time, Mr Pence exhorted those in positions of authority to find a way to come together with American solutions. It was a markedly different tone than that deployed on stage minutes earlier by NRA Executive Vice President and CEO Wayne LaPierre, who delivered an unbowed defense of gun ownership and lashed out at Democrats saying they are using the tragedy for political gain. They hate the NRA. They hate the Second Amendment. They hate individual freedom, Mr LaPierre said. Rogue landlords in England who commit housing offences should be fined a minimum of 30,000 by magistrates to help drive up standards in the private rental sector, the Local Government Association (LGA) said. It said English Housing Survey figures show 27% of privately rented homes failed to meet decent homes standards in 2016 and 8% of properties had damp problems. Councils can enforce fines of up to 30,000 on private landlords for offences such as not complying with an improvement notice. The Local Government Association wants to see rogue landlords who commit housing offences fined a minimum of 30,000 by magistrates (Joe Giddens/PA) But the LGA said there should be more consistency across the courts, with common sentencing guidelines. Councillor Martin Tett, LGA housing spokesman, said: A key deterrent to rogue landlords would be for the Government to set common sentencing guidelines which delivers consistency across the courts. It is not right that the level of civil penalty could outweigh that which is handed out by magistrates. He continued: Many councils are already tackling issues in the private rental sector by bringing in landlord licensing schemes. But they are limited in how widely these can be introduced. We need to see these rules relaxed and councils given more freedom and flexibility in establishing schemes. Mr Tett said the majority of landlords are decent, responsible law-abiding citizens who do a great job in making sure their tenants are living in safe and quality housing. He continued: Unfortunately there is a minority of rogue landlords who give those good landlords a bad name. Richard Lambert, chief executive of the National Landlords Association (NLA), said: The NLA supports making the punishment fit the crime because too many of the criminals who operate in the private rented sector see the current level of fines as little more than a cost of doing business, and we would welcome greater consistency between civil and criminal penalties. However, establishing a 30,000 minimum fine goes too far in the opposite direction. Disproportionate punishments end up discrediting the whole system. Mr Lambert said local licensing schemes can be very effective when they are well targeted and backed by properly co-ordinated and funded enforcement. But he said too many have been introduced without any thought having been given to how to deal with what will be thrown up as a result. A Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government spokesman said: Everyone deserves a safe and decent home and we have given councils strong powers to crackdown on bad landlords and we expect them to use them. Since April 2017, local authorities have been able to issue civil penalties of up to 30,000 as an alternative to prosecution to cover illegal eviction or failure to comply with a statutory notice. We believe that a fine of up to 30,000 acts as a significant deterrent to rogue practices. Former MPs want the Scottish Government to give money to small businesses to help them prepare for Brexit. They also want the UK Government to provide extra cash to the devolved administrations for preparations to leave the European Union. The recommendations are part of a series made in a report by consultancy firm Momentous Change, set up by former SNP MPs Michelle Thomson and Roger Mullin, who lost their seats at the 2017 General Election. Roger Mullin and Michelle Thomson (Momentous Change/PA) Mr Mullin called on the Scottish Government to follow a Northern Irish scheme where eligible businesses receive 2,000 voucher for Brexit preparations. The Brexit and Scottish Business report has found a high level of concern among business leaders over leaving the EU but a lower level of preparation. More than 200 senior business figures were asked to rate their concern on Brexit from zero to 100, where the lower figure indicated no concern. The mean score was 68. The sector expressing the most concern was further and higher education with a score of 84, followed by life sciences (74) and financial and business services (72). Questioned on who they had consulted about their business preparations for Brexit more than a third (41%) had consulted no one, 33% had spoken to government agencies and the same percentage were consulting with business groups. A further 24% had talked to academics and 10% had consulted their banks. The top concerns of Scottish businesses on Brexit (Momentous Change/PA) Asked to rate their level of preparation for Brexit from zero to 100, with zero indicating no preparation, the mean score was 43. Higher and further education came top for preparation levels at 53, followed by financial and business services (49) and food and drink (47). The report found the top three priorities for respondents were access to labour, followed by market confidence and then regulatory issues. The study was carried out through interviews with 236 senior business figures and an online questionnaire. Mr Mullin said: Our research found that only 10% of our respondents have engaged with banks to date. This weakness in engaging with the SME sector and the lack of a duty of care to business customers seems to reflect negative aspects of current banking culture which have resulted in a fundamental lack of trust. Our recommendation is that the Scottish government provides financial assistance to support businesses to plan for Brexit. The best example we found came from Intertrade in Northern Ireland, which offers a 2,000 voucher to small businesses to spend on Brexit preparations. Do you have a #brexit plan? @Inter_Trade has developed a three step plan to help get on top of the issue. You can read it here https://t.co/6zMMcywLaU pic.twitter.com/gSfskdMZ2q InterTradeIreland (@Inter_Trade) February 14, 2018 Ms Thomson said there is current an built-in imbalance of power between SMEs and large banks as well as a lack of trust. She added: This is a serious disconnection and we need government and the banks to take some leadership and positive action to ensure that businesses get the support they need. Economy Secretary Keith Brown said the Scottish Government shares the business concerns raised in the report. He said: We have repeatedly made clear that, short of continuing EU membership, the best option to protect jobs and investment in Scotland is to remain within the European Single Market and Customs Union as shown by our economic analysis. Scotland has a strong enterprise network and, as EU negotiations develop, businesses can be confident that they will receive ongoing tailored and bespoke support. We are also taking action through the Scottish Growth Scheme and Scottish Investment Bank to ensure businesses have access to the finance they need to grow. Three stabbings in north London which caused the deaths of two young men are being treated as linked, police said as they revealed an 18-year-old has been arrested. Sadiq Mohamed, 20, died from serious stab injuries after being discovered in Malden Road, Camden, at around 10.15pm on Tuesday. At 8.30pm the same evening, 17-year-old Abdikarim Hassan was found with knife wounds in Bartholomew Road and died at the scene. Abdikarim Hassan (Family handout/PA) Around half an hour earlier, the Metropolitan Police discovered a 16-year-old boy in Aldenham Street who they believe was stabbed after he and another boy were chased by a group of three men. He remains in hospital with non-life threatening injuries. The Met said they were treating the incidents as linked due to their proximity in time and locations, the nature of the attacks and developing lines of inquiry. An 18-year-old man was arrested on Thursday evening at an address in Camden on suspicion of two counts of murder and one of grievous bodily harm (GBH), the force said. Detective Chief Inspector Paul Considine, leading the investigation, said the frequency with which young men are prepared to take each others lives was shocking. He said: What is clear is that there were three violent attacks, by a group of men armed with knives, within about two hours of each other and within about a mile of each other. I need the publics help to establish the exact circumstances in which two young men were murdered and another seriously injured, and to identify the people responsible. Teenager arrested as two murders in Camden are being linked. Both victims have also been named as detectives appeal for information and witnesses https://t.co/v8o4QOEyv9 pic.twitter.com/YfKFaZTjPg Metropolitan Police (@metpoliceuk) February 23, 2018 Officers believe Abdikarim, who died of a stab wound to the chest, was attacked nearby before staggering to the road where he was given first aid by members of the public. They have established that Mr Mohamed was with a friend when the pair were chased by four men down an alleyway before he was stabbed and the group fled. Police are pursuing a line of inquiry involving a blue van that was seen in the area of the two murders and are urging anyone with information to get in touch. On Wednesday, four men in their early 20s were arrested on suspicion of GBH in connection with the Aldenham Street stabbing and have been released under investigation. Anyone with information should contact the force on 020 8345 3734, or Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 555 111. Jodie Whittaker drama Trust Me will be returning for a second series but with a new cast. The BBC One drama starred the actress who has landed the lead role in Doctor Who as a fake doctor. But she will be absent from the second series, which will also feature a new storyline. Jodie Whittaker in Trust Me (Mark Mainz/BBC) BBC drama controller Piers Wenger said: The first series of Trust Me broke new ground for medical drama and Im delighted to be welcoming it back for a second run with a completely fresh cast and a shocking new story, which is set to become as big a talking point as the first. Screenwriter and NHS doctor Dan Sefton said: This follow-up series will bring the same tension and twists of the original show to a brand new medical arena. The second series will be filmed in Scotland and revolve around a hospital department in Edinburgh once again. The first instalment of the medical thriller, which aired in the summer, drew around six million viewers. The Cabinet has agreed to pursue a Brexit policy which will put Britain outside a customs union with the European Union but match Brussels rules in certain sectors in an attempt to achieve frictionless trade, Jeremy Hunt has said. The Health Secretary revealed that the Government was putting itself on a collision course with Tory Brexit rebels who are backing an amendment to the Trade Bill which would mandate the UK to form a customs union with Brussels on leaving the EU. The move presents an increased danger to Prime Minister Theresa May because shadow foreign secretary Emily Thornberry said Labour now backs a customs union which would look pretty much like the current one after withdrawal. Mr Hunt, who did not attend a Thursday meeting of the Brexit war cabinet at Chequers, said ministers agree that Britain must not be part of a customs union as it should have the right to strike free trade deals with other countries, and claimed frictionless trade was still possible without one. The Brexit `war cabinet at Chequers (Downing Street/PA) He told BBC Radio 4s Today programme: If we were a part of the customs union we wouldnt be able to negotiate trade deals independently with other countries and we wouldnt have full sovereign control of our destiny as a nation. But what we want is frictionless trade and we want to find a different way customs union is one way of getting frictionless trade but its not the only way and what were saying is we want to achieve frictionless trade by agreement between two sovereign bodies the United Kingdom and European Union. The Prime Ministers senior ministers who set Brexit policy attended an eight-hour meeting at Chequers on Thursday to plot a way forward after Tory tensions went public. Mr Hunt said a broad agreement was reached ahead of a planned speech from Mrs May next week to set out the Governments Brexit agenda. He said: I think the central understanding you have divergent views on a big issue like Brexit as you would expect but the central common understanding is that there will be areas and sectors of industry where we agree to align our regulations with European regulations: the automotive industry is perhaps an obvious example because of supply chains that are integrated. But it will be on a voluntary basis, we will as a sovereign power have the right to choose to diverge, and what we wont be doing is accepting changes in rules because the EU unilaterally chooses to make those changes. Tory Brexit rebel Anna Soubry, who has tabled the customs union amendment, said she has cross-party support and called on Labour to back it, tweeting: It would be in the national interest if the Government & official Opposition also backed it. I've tabled a new amendment to #TradeBill mandating Govt to form "a" Customs Union with #EU #Brexit. It's gaining x party support @ChukaUmunna @NickyMorgan01 et al. It would be in the national interest if the Government & official Opposition also backed it. https://t.co/DepbwMoKUf Anna Soubry (@Anna_Soubry) February 22, 2018 Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is to unveil a competing vision of how Brexit should work in what is being billed as a significant address on Monday, after some backbenchers called for more clarity from the leadership. Mrs May was also facing pressure from the Brexiteer wing of her party amid reports that EU migrants who arrive in the UK during any transition period will be allowed to stay permanently. Jacob Rees-Mogg, who chairs the European Research Group of backbench Tory Eurosceptics, said such a U-turn from the PM would be unconscionable. The Tory MP told Today: Mrs May said when she was in China that she wasnt going to do that and that people who came after wed left would be subject to different conditions, which seems absolutely right. Youve got to remember we are leaving the European Union on March 29 (2019), we will be out of the treaties on that day, we will not have any say in the rules that are made and therefore people who come after that day ought not to be allowed to have the full and permanent free movement rights. That would be quite wrong, and they will know the conditions on which they come, which is important, so its fair to people who come after that date. And Id be astonished if Mrs May would make U-turn of that kind; she is a lady of great backbone and for her to kowtow to the European Union is I think unconscionable. Alan Bennett has created a new play about an NHS hospital threatened with closure as part of an efficiency drive. The world premiere of Allejujah! will open in London, at the Bridge Theatre, in July. It is billed as being as sharp as The History Boys and as funny as The Lady In The Van, two of the 83-year-olds other famous works. It centres around The Beth, an old fashioned cradle-to-grave hospital serving a town on the edge of the Pennines, which is threatened with closure. Allelujah! (Bridge Theatre) A documentary crew eager to capture its fight for survival follows the daily struggle to find beds on the Dusty Springfield Geriatric Ward, and the triumphs of the old peoples choir (newest member: the Pudsey Nightingale). Allelujah! will be directed by former National Theatre director Sir Nicholas Hytner, in the pairs 10th collaboration. Their previous work together includes The Madness Of King George III, The Lady In The Van and The History Boys. In 2005, Bennett revealed that years earlier he had undergone treatment for cancer, saying that he used NHS and private hospitals and with the NHS, there are more jokes. Casting for Allelujah! is yet to be announced. Allejujah! will preview at the Bridge Theatre from July 11 with opening night on July 18. Syrian government warplanes supported by Russia have continued their bombardment of the rebel-controlled eastern suburbs of Damascus for a sixth day, killing five people, activists said. The death toll from the past week climbed to more than 400, with the number of casualties overwhelming rescuers and doctors at hospitals, many of which have also been bombed. This fresh bombardment comes a day after world leaders called for an urgent ceasefire in Syria to allow relief agencies to deliver aid and evacuate the critically wounded from besieged areas. However, Russias UN ambassador Vassily Nebenzia, who called Thursdays meeting, put forward last-minute amendments, saying the proposed resolution was simply unrealistic. A new vote is likely on Friday. The United States accused Syrian president Bashar Assad of planning to bomb or starve opponents in besieged eastern Ghouta into submission just as it did in Aleppo. Protests take place outside the Russian Consulate in Istanbul (AP) Kelley Currie, US ambassador for economic and social affairs, told the UN Security Council that the Syrian leader is counting on Russia, a key ally and veto-wielding member of the council, to make sure it is unable to stop their suffering. The oppositions Syrian Civil Defence Rescue Group reported new airstrikes in Douma, Arbeen and other towns that make up the eastern suburbs of Damascus known as eastern Ghouta. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said at least five people were killed in raids on Hammouriyeh, Zamalka, Douma and al-Marj. The UK-based group monitors the Syria war through a network of activists on the ground. Separately, Human Rights Watch has criticised the way Turkey is conducting its offensive in northern Syria, saying it has failed to take necessary precautions to avoid civilian casualties. United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Mark Lowcock speaks to the Security Council (AP) The New York-based group cites three attacks in the Afrin region in late January which it says killed a total of 26 civilians, including 17 children. In a statement, it called on Turkey to thoroughly investigate these strikes and make the findings public. Turkey launched an air and ground offensive in the Kurdish-controlled region on January 20, saying it aims to clear Afrin of Syrian Kurdish militia known as the YPG which Turkey considers to be an offshoot of its own outlawed Kurdish rebels fighting within Turkey. According to several estimates around 120 civilians have been killed so far in the offensive. Turkey denies hitting civilians. The YPG has accused Turkey of bombing a convoy of civilians that was crossing into Afrin to protest against Turkeys offensive, resulting in multiple casualties who were moved to hospitals in Afrin for treatment. Syrian state TV said a convoy carrying aid and heading toward Afrin has been targeted by Turkish artillery, inflicting more casualties. The broadcast gave no further details about Thursdays incident, which came two days after pro-government fighters began entering the predominantly Kurdish town to shore up the Kurdish forces, after reaching an agreement with the YPG. Turkey has threatened to bomb the Syrian forces if they work together with the Kurds. DUP leader Arlene Foster has said it would be astonishing if the Government granted funding for legacy inquests without an overall agreement. No one in the DUP was aware of the issue being progressed, she added, without a previous deal addressing other elements of Northern Irelands violent past being implemented. Sinn Feins Gerry Kelly claimed funding for coroner probes into disputed conflict deaths was agreed during recent talks on resurrecting Stormont powersharing. They dissolved in acrimony last week without a deal. DUP leader Arlene Foster (Yui Mok/PA) Mrs Foster said: No one in the DUP was aware of inquest funding being progressed in the absence of an overall agreement or a decision to advance all elements of the Stormont House Agreement. It would be astonishing if the Government granted funding for legacy inquests in the absence of an overall agreement to progress all elements of the Stormont House Agreement. She said it was a matter of public record that Sinn Fein has been talking to the Government about progressing legacy inquest funding. She added: I was aware of this during the talks. We were also talking to the Government about matters of importance to us. I will be raising this matter with the Secretary of State (Karen Bradley). Statement by Arlene Foster MLA | Democratic Unionist Party: https://t.co/AltEizvxeh DUP (@duponline) February 23, 2018 Sinn Feins Northern Ireland leader Michelle ONeill said: The British Government did commit to releasing the inquest funding and to go ahead with the consultation, minus the amnesty proposal for British State Forces. That represents positive progress towards the implementation of commitments from the Stormont House and Fresh Start Agreements. The British Government should never have been using victims as bargaining chips in the negotiations and they now need to implement their agreement, release the funds immediately and start the consultation. The Government said all discussions with Northern Irelands parties were in the context of how it would respond if there was a deal. A spokeswoman added: Regrettably there was no agreement. She said the Government has set out clear commitments to take forward the Stormont House Agreement legacy institutions, and to support inquest reform. As the Secretary of State made clear on Tuesday, she will be consulting on how to implement Stormont House legacy institutions as soon as possible. In 2014 the Government announced 150 million to support legacy reform in Northern Ireland. In 2016 Northern Irelands Lord Chief Justice Sir Declan Morgan requested cash be released as he outlined plans to address a major backlog in inquests. The latest report on human rights abuses carried out during South Sudans civil war contains harrowing accounts of beheadings, mutilations, gang rapes and other atrocities. In the document, released by a United Nations commission, one South Sudanese man is said to have returned home after hiding from government soldiers to find they had blinded his mother, gouging out her eyes with spears. The woman had tried to defend her 17-year-old daughter from being raped by more than a dozen soldiers. Seventeen soldiers then sexually assaulted the teenager, while the familys father was beheaded. A UN report has revealed shocking cases of murder, mutilation and rape during the five-year conflict (Julien Behal/PA) The UN team has collected evidence of human rights abuses over the five-year conflict, including those which took place in Pagak town, in the hopes of one day achieving justice. Andrew Clapham, a commission member and international law professor, said: I did not expect to be confronted with so much ritual humiliation and degradation deliberately done for multiple reasons. The suffering and cruelty was worse than anyone could have imagined. One South Sudanese woman told the commission that her 12-year-old son was forced to have sex with his grandmother in order to stay alive, the report said. The findings, with sufficient evidence against both President Salva Kiirs government forces and rebels, identify more than 40 senior military officials, including three state governors, who may bear individual responsibility for war crimes. The report will be presented to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva next month. It will also be made available to judicial mechanisms such as a hybrid court for South Sudan, which long has been urged by the international community but has never appeared. Untold tens of thousands have been killed in South Sudan since the conflict erupted in December 2013, just two years after independence from Sudan. More than two million people have fled the country, the largest refugee crisis since the Rwandan genocide 24 years ago. Millions who remain at home face hunger. The new UN report is an account of the gang rapes, castrations, ethnic violence and other abuses that have left much of the impoverished East African nation in despair, as international frustration with the warring sides grows. An attempt at a ceasefire in late December was violated within hours. The United States then announced a largely symbolic arms embargo and urged the UN Security Council to do the same. South Sudans government said it has asked the UN commission for the names of the accused senior military officials and will investigate. We cant condone anyone committing crimes and taking the law in their own hands, spokesman Ateny Wek Ateny said, while adding that such reports can sometimes be cut-and-paste and based on hearsay. Opposition spokesman Lam Paul Gabriel said: The human rights body should start putting the blame directly on the regime instead of blaming both sides. The names of the alleged perpetrators are being withheld for now to protect witnesses who came forward, the UN said. South Sudans conflict began as a power struggle between Mr Kiir and former vice president Riek Machar, but has fractured into an estimated 40 armed groups across the country, with many fighting each other. However, consistent patterns stand out, such as government attacks on unarmed, fleeing civilians in areas where no opposition forces were present, the report said. A man who has been barred from the hospital where his severely disabled son is being cared for fears that he might never see the youngster again. Lanre Haastrup outlined his fears after losing the latest round of a legal battle over treatment for 12-month-old Isaiah Haastrup. Mr Haastrup said he was in the hands of bosses at Kings College Hospital in London, who have imposed a ban after raising concerns about his behaviour. Three Court of Appeal judges on Friday dismissed a challenge by Mr Haastrup and Isaiahs mother, Takesha Thomas. Kings College Hospital, Denmark Hill, London (Andy Hepburn/PA) Isaiahs parents had complained that a High Court judge was wrong to allow doctors to stop providing life-support treatment to the youngster and move to a palliative care regime. But Lord Justice Patten, Lord Justice McFarlane and Lady Justice King, who had considered the case at a Court of Appeal hearing in London, said there was no basis for overturning Mr Justice MacDonalds decision. They said Mr Haastrup and Miss Thomas, who are both in their 30s and from Peckham, south-east London, had mounted a challenge based on hope, not reality. Mr Haastrup said they would make approaches to the Supreme Court and European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France. But he said he was worried that if those efforts proved fruitless he might not be with Isaiah for the last hours of the little boys life. Of course I am worried about that, he said. Im worried that I might not see Isaiah again. But I cant do anything about that. Its a matter for the hospital if they want to lift the ban. He added: But we are not giving up fighting for Isaiah. I think the Court of Appeal judges are wrong. We will try to take our case to the Supreme Court or the European Court of Human Rights. A hospital spokeswoman said the priority was to give Isaiah the care he needed. She said staff would support his family. This has been an extremely difficult time for Isaiahs family and all those involved in his care, said the spokeswoman. The decision to transfer Isaiah to palliative care is in his best interests and based on expert evidence. Our priority now is to provide Isaiah with the care he needs, working closely with and supporting his family. Mr Justice MacDonald had analysed evidence at a trial in the Family Division of the High Court in London in January. Specialists at Kings College Hospital said giving further intensive care treatment to the little boy was futile, burdensome and not in his best interests. They had asked Mr Justice MacDonald to give them the go-ahead to provide only palliative care Mr Haastrup and Miss Thomas wanted treatment to continue. Mr Justice MacDonald ruled in favour of hospital bosses but said doctors should continue treating Isaiah until appeal judges had considered the case. Manchester United manager Jose Mourinho refrained from fuelling the war of words with Antonio Conte ahead of former club Chelseas highly-anticipated visit. Having led the Blues to three Premier League titles, an FA Cup and a trio of League Cups across two stints in the Stamford Bridge dugout, the Portuguese is now focused on steering the Red Devils to glory. Sunday will be the fifth time Mourinho has led United into battle with Chelsea and the first since an intense public exchange with counterpart Conte. I dont want to speak about it, Mourinho said when asked about the tension with the Italian. I told you before Im not going to speak about it. Not at all. Thats not the point. Very good manager, fantastic team and thats what is important for me. Just that. January was dominated by the tit-for-tat public argument between Mourinho and Conte. The Portugueses comments that he did not need to behave like a clown touched a nerve with the Chelsea boss, leading him to accuse the United boss having senile dementia. It descended from there as Mourinho referred to a four-month suspension Conte served in relation to match-fixing, for which the Italian was later cleared of any wrongdoing. The Blues manager called the United boss a little man and the Portuguese returned fire by saying he treats Conte with contempt. Asked if the Sundays match meant more after that public spat, Mourinho said: No. No. To play against Chelsea will mean less and less and less with the years (going on). So, of course I left already a couple of years ago and next season three years ago, so step-by-step that feeling of I was the Chelsea manager, or I was their manager for them I think disappears. So, the real meaning of it is that two of the best teams in England, two of the biggest clubs, are playing one more match. Jose Mourinho enjoyed a successful time at Chelsea (Adam Davy/PA) I have a good relation with the (Chelsea) board. I dont forget how nice they were to me in a difficult period with my fathers departure. They showed me in that moment that they feel me as a friend, as somebody that did his best for the club and always respects the club. So, in relation to the board, they know that the relation with me is always good. With the players, I dont have any problem, I don have any regret, I dont have any stone (in) my shoes. No problems at all. And the fans are fans, with many of them in the street I feel that empathy and that relation that normally should be that connection, that feeling should be forever. When I play at Stamford Bridge, some reactions from the fans are just reactions. I dont care much. MPs have backed proposals that would end a time limit on expats taking part in British elections. A private members bill that would abolish the 15-year time limit was given a second reading by MPs amid confusion in the Commons. The Government had previously indicated it would support the Overseas Electors Bill tabled by Tory backbencher Glyn Davies. This happened because MPs shouted no, but no tellers appeared. When that happens the vote is called off. https://t.co/JQO6WTRbpc PARLY (@PARLYapp) February 23, 2018 Cabinet Office minister Chloe Smith said: British citizens who live overseas can find themselves abruptly disenfranchised after they have lived abroad for 15 years. And that happens even where they feel still closely connected to our country and still have every right to take part in elections that can affect them like every other citizen. To many, this is a terrible injustice, so these changes before us today have the Governments support. MPs heard that 4.9 million Britons of voting age live overseas, but only about 1.4 million are eligible to vote in UK elections, because anyone who has lived overseas for more than 15 years is not allowed to vote. Tory MPs highlighted campaigning on the issue by Harry Shindler who, they said, was the oldest living member of the Labour Party. Tory MP Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown pushed the issue to a vote (Parliament TV) Conservative MP Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown said: In this centenary year of Emmeline Pankhursts efforts to get women the vote in this country, the same thing must apply to voters of over 15 years longevity abroad. This would open up the franchise potentially to another million people. It must be the correct thing to do. Labour MPs argued over a number of technical aspects of the Bill, and said it would put further pressure on already stretched elections services. But one of the partys own MPs accused colleagues of trying to talk the Bill out after Sandy Martin spoke for 49 minutes. I have just spoken as President of @LabourInt in support of the #votesforlife bill. I am appalled that Labour frontbench are opposing the bill and trying to talk it out. Clearly in this case Labour Leadership is for the few not the many. Mike Gapes (@MikeGapes) February 23, 2018 Ilford South MP Mike Gapes, who spoke in support of the Bill, wrote on Twitter: I am appalled that Labour frontbench are opposing the bill and trying to talk it out. Clearly in this case Labour Leadership is for the few not the many. Tory backbencher Sir Geoffrey called for a vote on the issue during a speech by shadow Cabinet Office minister Cat Smith, four minutes before time was due to run out in the Commons session. Initially Sir Geoffreys so-called closure motion was contested, so a division was called and MPs went to vote on whether a vote should be taken to give the Bill a second reading. However, no tellers those who verify the count when MPs are voting were put forward by those who rejected Sir Geoffreys motion. As a result, the division was cancelled. The Bill was then given an unopposed second reading. It will now undergo detailed scrutiny by MPs at committee stage. It must then clear further stages in the Commons and undergo scrutiny in the House of Lords before becoming law. Mr Davies said: If people are a UK citizen, then in my view they should have the right to vote in a UK general election. I think it is as simple as that. To introduce some arbitrary timescale of 15 years, or 20 years, or five years, just is no longer appropriate. A former top adviser to President Donald Trumps election campaign has formally pleaded guilty to federal conspiracy and false statements charges in the special counsels Russia investigation. The plea by Rick Gates is a strong indication that he is planning to co-operate with special counsel Robert Muellers investigation as it continues to probe the Trump campaign, Russian election interference and Gates longtime business associate Paul Manafort. The 45-year-old Gates made the plea at the federal courthouse in Washington. He admitted to charges accusing him of conspiring against the US government related to fraud and unregistered foreign lobbying as well as lying to federal authorities in a recent interview. With his co-operation, Gates gives mr Mueller a witness willing to provide information on Manafort about his finances and political consulting work in Ukraine, and also someone who had access at the highest levels of the Trump campaign. Paul Manafort maintains his innocence (Jacquelyn Martin/AP) Gates plea came a day after a federal grand jury in Virginia returned a 32-count indictment against him and Manafort, Mr Trumps former campaign chairman, accusing them of tax evasion and bank fraud. The indictment in Virginia was the second round of charges against Gates and against Manafort, who has denied any wrongdoing. The two men were initially charged last October with unregistered lobbying and conspiring to launder millions of dollars they earned while working on behalf of a pro-Russian Ukrainian political party. Gates decision marks the fifth publicly known guilty plea in the special counsel probe into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin during the 2016 campaign. The plea also comes quickly on the heels of the stunning indictment last week that laid out a broad operation of election meddling by Russia, which began in 2014, and employed fake social media accounts and on-the-ground politicking to promote Mr Trumps campaign, disparage Hillary Clinton and sow division and discord widely among the US electorate. The charges to which Gates is pleading guilty do not involve any conduct connected to the Trump campaign. They largely relate to a conspiracy laid out in his indictments, but they do reveal that Gates spoke with the FBI earlier this month and lied during the interview. That same day, his lawyers filed a motion to withdraw from representing him for irreconcilable difference. The court papers accuse Gates of lying about a March 19 2013 meeting involving Manafort, a lobbyist and a member of Congress. Gates said the meeting did not include discussion of Ukraine, when in fact prosecutors say it did. The charges do not name the lobbyist or the lawmaker but filings with the Justice Department show Manafort and lobbyist Vin Weber of Mercury Public Affairs met with Representative Dana Rohrabacher on that date as part of a lobbying campaign on behalf of Ukrainian interests. On Friday, Manafort said in a statement that he maintains his innocence. I had hoped and expected my business colleague would have had the strength to continue the battle to prove our innocence. For reasons yet to surface he chose to do otherwise, Manafort said. This does not alter my commitment to defend myself against the untrue piled-up charges contained in the indictments against me. In court filings over the past few months, Gates gradually began to show the strain the case was placing on him and his family. As Gates was kept on house arrest, he frequently pleaded with US District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson for leniency to attend sporting events with his four children. Even on Friday, ahead of his plea, Gates had asked the judge to let him take his children to Boston for spring break so they could learn about American history in general, and the Revolutionary War in particular. On Thursday night, Gates emailed a brief letter to friends and family, telling them of his decision to plead guilty, Republican lobbyist Jack Burkman said. Its sad, said Burkman, who had hosted a fundraiser for Gates legal defence fund. Under the terms of the plea, Gates is estimated to face between 57 and 71 months behind bars. Prosecutors may seek a shortened sentence depending on his co-operation. AP The White House is on lockdown after a passenger vehicle struck a security barrier. The US Secret Service tweeted that the vehicle did not breach the security barrier of the White House complex. The agency added that the female driver of the vehicle was immediately apprehended. Police block 17th Street near the White House (Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP) Witnesses saw a commotion on the White House grounds as security officers responded. UPDATE: No law enforcement personnel were injured during the incident involving a vehicle hitting a barrier near the White House. U.S. Secret Service (@SecretService) February 23, 2018 President Donald Trump is hosting Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull at the White House. Mr Turnbull is remaining at the White House as the incident is being investigated. The Secret Service said no shots were fired during the incident, and no law enforcement personnel were injured. AP The fourth Briton to be killed by a helicopter crash in the Grand Canyon died of complications from his burns, a coroner has said. Jonathan Udall died in a Las Vegas hospital 12 days after the accident, which occurred while he was honeymooning with his wife, who remains critically injured. The 31-year-olds cause of death was given as complications of thermal injury by the Clark County coroner, a clerical assistant said on Friday. Mr Udall, originally from Southampton, was rescued from the fiery wreckage but died on Thursday in University Medical Centre of Southern Nevada, where wife Ellie Milward, 29, is being treated. The couples friends, Becky Dobson, 27, her boyfriend Stuart Hill, 30, and his brother Jason Hill, 32, died when the Airbus EC130 B4 crashed shortly before sunset on February 10. They had also been celebrating Stuart Hills 30th birthday with a trip to Las Vegas. On Friday, colleagues paid tribute to Mr Udall, who was a regional manager in the South East for Yorkshire Building Society, where he had worked for nearly 10 years. The companys chief executive Mike Regnier said that Mr Udall was well-known and well-loved by colleagues and everyone was deeply shocked and saddened by his death. Stuart Hill, 30 (left) and his brother Jason Hill, 32, who both died (Family handout/FCO/PA) He added: Jon was hugely passionate about his job and making sure customers got the best service possible. We are in touch with his and Ellies families and send them our deepest condolences. We hope to hear positive news about Ellie soon. We are offering colleagues, who are obviously shaken by this news, support at this upsetting time. More than 22,000 has been raised for the newlyweds on a JustGiving crowdfunding page. Friend Chris Tucker, who set up the page, announced Mr Udalls death on Thursday with a very heavy heart. He was strong, brave and I will never forget him, he said. Mourners gathered for a memorial service for Stuart and Jason Hill, killed in the helicopter crash in the Grand Canyon (Gareth Fuller/PA) The Mohave County Medical Examiner previously said multiple injuries killed Ms Dobson and the Hill brothers, all originally from Worthing, West Sussex. Hundreds of mourners attended a memorial service in the town to pay tribute last week. Seven candles were lit three of which were purple in memory of those who died and four white symbols of hope for those still in hospital at that time. The helicopter crashed on tribal land in a section of the Grand Canyon outside the national park where air tours are not as highly regulated. Two others Jennifer Barham, 39, and pilot Scott Booth, 42 were also treated in hospital. The cause of the crash is being investigated by the National Transportation Safety Board. A preliminary report said witnesses saw the helicopter do at least two 360-degree turns before hitting the ground. Investigators will interview witnesses, survivors, the helicopter operator and manufacturer and others before issuing a full report in at least a years time. Canadian police have charged an alleged serial killer with another murder, bringing the total to six. Detective Sergeant Hank Idsinga said the remains of three of the six victims have been identified, and there could still be other charges made. I believe there will be, he said. The remains were found at a property that alleged serial killer Bruce McArthur used as storage for his landscaping business. McArthur was arrested on January 18 on two counts of murder in connection with the disappearances of Andrew Kinsman, 49, and Selim Esen, 44, who were last seen in 2017 in a Toronto neighbourhood known as the Gay Village. From left to right, Selim Essen, 44, Sorush Mahmudi, 50, Dean Lisowick, Andrew Kinsman, 49, and Majeed Kayhan, 58 (Toronto Police Service via AP) Police identified Mr Kinsmans remains through fingerprints. Not long after his arrest, McArthur was charged with the murders of three more men: Soroush Marmudi, Majeed Kayhan and Dean Lisowick. Little is known about Mr Marmudi, a 50-year-old reported missing by his family in 2015. Mr Kayhan was a 58-year-old Afghan immigrant who was reported missing by his son in 2012, and Mr Lisowick was a homeless prostitute in his mid-40s. The latest murder charge involves 40-year-old Skanda Navaratnam, who went missing in 2010. Friends said McArthur employed and had a sexual relationship with Mr Navaratnam, who was last seen in 2010 leaving Zipperz, a now closed gay bar. McArthurs Facebook profile also showed he was friends with Navaratnam. Police said they identified the remains of Mr Marmudi and Mr Navaratnam, who was a refugee from Sri Lanka, through dental records. They believe there are multiple murder scenes, including McArthurs apartment. Authorities have checked at least 30 other places where McArthur was known to have worked, including some of Torontos wealthiest neighbourhoods. They expect to find more remains in planters they have retrieved from around the city and are currently investigating about 20 containers in which plants are grown. Police are also looking at a number of missing person cases to determine if there are connections to McArthur and are running down tips that have come in from around the world. Theres hundreds of outstanding missing persons occurrences that were looking at, Mr Idsinga said. We are tracing his whereabouts as far back as we can go. The 66-year-old McArthur is believed to have met his victims in the Gay Village and on gay dating apps for older and large men. Edward Royle, a lawyer for McArthur, declined to comment on the case. Mr Navaratnams disappearance was originally investigated as part of Project Houston, a police task force looking for him and two other men who went missing between 2010 and 2012: Mr Kayhan and Abdulbasir Faizi, 42. Police have interviewed some of McArthurs past known associates, but Mr Idsinga said evidence unearthed so far indicates he acted alone. AP From left: CIM Sri Lanka Membership Development Manager Sanjay Hettiarachchi, CIM Sri Lanka Chairman Brian Selvanayagam, First Capital Holdings PLC Chief Executive Officer Dilshan Wirasekara and First Capital Holdings PLC Branding and Marketing Services Manager Nisansala Munasinghe Renewing a successful working partnership of three consecutive years, a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed between The Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) Sri Lanka and First Capital Holdings PLC, committing to goals mutually benefiting both organizations and strengthening the respective brand identities in the market. Commenting on the partnership, CIM Sri Lanka Chairman Brian Selvanayagam said: We are honoured to partner with the investment bank, First Capital Holdings PLC. The cooperation is aimed at sharing industry insights through a series of initiatives planned throughout the year. We are grateful to First Capitals continued support to help promote CIM and its activities in Sri Lanka. First Capital Holdings PLC Director/Chief Executive Officer Dilshan Wirasekara said: We are pleased to collaborate with a renowned professional body such as the Chartered Institute of Marketing Sri Lanka. We are confident that this partnership will contribute in enhancing cross disciplinary know-how and the creation of new ideas, enabling us to maintain a competitive edge in the fast changing financial services industry. CIM Sri Lanka is the first International branch of CIM UK and is proud to claim the largest membership outside the UK. CIM Sri Lanka has always campaigned for high professional standards, greater recognition for the profession and marketing excellence in Sri Lanka through education, training and development. First Capital Holdings PLC is a full service investment bank providing a diverse range of advisory services and financial products. The companys integrated business platform comprises four specialised areas - capital markets advisory, wealth management, fixed income and equities. The company is listed on the Colombo Stock Exchange and is rated A- by ICRA Lanka Limited. You cant go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending ~C. S. Lewis Local Government Elections were held. The results baffled many a political activist; especially those who were backing the coalition Government consisting of the United National Party (UNP) and Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP). The most surprising element of the whole enterprise was the miserable performance of the official SLFP, the political party which had its birth, growth and full fruition during its turbulent journey in the socio-political seas in the country; the political party that was founded by S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike as an alternative to the then UNP; the political party that introduced a nationalist shade into the fabric of national conversation, was shattered and reduced into dust and debris. The official SLFP, although was headed by the President of the country, who deserted his party and defeated its candidate, which was visibly hijacked by those who introduced a very damaging culture of corruption into the body politic of Sri Lanka, looks a doomed and utterly pathetic political entity. The vastly liberal mindset of Bandaranaike (SWRD) has been set aside for narrow populist nationalism and rejection of minority rights and their legitimate grievances. The base of the SLFP has been thoroughly desecrated and debased. Satisfaction of its base, which amounts to an astonishing 32% to 35% of the total population, seems to bear fruit with the increasing escalation of cost of living playing right into the hands of a shrewd politician, who knows how to exploit the meandering and wretched psyche of a trusting voter. It is utterly futile and meaningless to present another set of corrupt set of politicos as an alternative. The Rajapaksas cannot be outdone in the field of corruption, fear-mongering and authoritarianism. The 44%, those who voted for the Pohottuwa (Lotus bud symbol), in the just concluded Local Government Elections, consisted of that 32% - 35% and the usually floating vote which is about 7% - 10% of the electorate. The Rajapaksa-led Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP) has totally swallowed the traditional Sri Lanka Freedom Party and Maithripala Sirisenas loss of its control seems absolute and final. The electorate has shown unmistakable signs of vulnerability. The populist slant it shows could well be accepted as an alternative to a more rational way of governance. That populist wave, if it continues to grow in numbers and strength, could overwhelm all rational thinking and conversation. Populism in its stark and transparent veil is concealing beneath its veneer of welfare fabric a corrosive dynamic of power-dealing and is attracting more and more followers. If Ranil Wickremesinghe chooses to ignore these propensities, the vote-drain that is taking place in his party, the UNP, would continue to its next logical station- disappearance. Reins of the UNP should be in the hands of non-politicos Forget about Maithripala Sirisena and his loss of control of the SLFP. The UNPs destiny should not rest on what the leader of the SLFP says or does. The UNP leader has a political textbook before him. Ranil Wickremesinghes own Uncle J. R. Jayewardene and its leaders such as R. Premadasa have provided that book and it has been proven right over and over again. Hand the running of the party, specifically the posts of Chairman and Secretary, to non-politicos, thoroughbred professionals. If neither is ready for a radical change, they are both committing political hara-kiri. They must realise that the way they had been going has not produced favourable results. Leaders who are ready for radical changes have always been successful while those who dont have dug their own graves. Ranil and Maithri must choose the former. JR did it the moment he became the leader in the wake of the demise of Dudley Senanayake. He made Ananda Tissa de Alwis the Secretary of the party and the moment Ananda Tissa announced his intent to contest at the General Elections which were scheduled for 1977, JR removed him from the Post and appointed Daham Wimalasena, a non-politico, to the post. After the election victory in 1977, N. G. P. Panditharatne, a well acclaimed private sector professional, the senior partner of a reputed accountancy firm, was appointed as Chairman of the Party and Daham continued as Secretary. The day-to-day affairs of the party belong in the hands of non-politicos. When such posts are held by politicos, in the present context, Malik Samarawickrama as Chairman and Kabir Hashim as Secretary, abuse of such powers is inevitable and could be damaging in the short, mid and long-runs. Ministers hardly have sufficient time to run their Ministries, then how can they manage the party-affairs is unthinkable. Ranil Wickremesinghe may be feeling a treacherous sense of insecurity, but his personal insecurities need to be subordinated to the major interests of the Party. Whereas JR has left a recipe for success, Ranil seems to be wallowing in a recipe for disaster. Ranils successor Furthermore, the results of the recently held Local Government Elections prove beyond a shadow of doubt that Ranils modus operandi has failed. He needs to realise that it is his fatal flaw, and sooner he does it, more beneficial for his party and its future successes. The second issue is centred on another vital factor: the successor to Ranil as leader of the Party. Ranil Wickremesinghe is, to be gentle with him, in a very unenviable position today. He needs to avoid another eruption, as it happened in the 2012 to 2014 period, within his own party, among the UNP Parliamentarians for a change in leadership. In such a confrontational context, Ranil has to refer to his Uncle JR again. Just prior to the General Elections of 1977, JR summoned all UNP organizers to Sirikotha. He did not give any particular reason for the meeting. However, he instructed Daham Wimalasena, the Party Secretary at the time, to prepare ballot papers. When all the organisers were in, JR stated that he intended to appoint a special committee to direct the affairs of the forthcoming General Elections in 1977. He distributed the ballot papers among the participants and asked them to name the first ten UNPers in their preferential order to man this committee. That was how R. Premadasa became the virtual successor to JR. Gamini Dissanayake was a close second to Premadasa. (Premadasa received 118 votes while Gamini D got 112). Ranil must follow this example without any delay. The country needs to know who would succeed him as party leader, a winner at the elections so that the country at large and the party, in particular, could know whether there was a future for the UNP! The Party will remember who won his electorate and who lost. Rural Vote Thirdly, when one looks at the way the rural folks seem to have left the UNP, it is of utmost significance that Ranil pays close attention to the fact that, ever since the demise of Premadasa, Gamini and Lalith, ever since 1994, the rural population and the so-called declasse remain divorced from the party and no conscious effort has been made to get a remarriage working. Over-dependence on the minority vote might help in the context of the Presidential elections, where the elections are held on a national level. Parliamentary and other local elections are held in each grassroots area where the prevalence of minority votes is minimal and negligible. The UNPs performance among Sinhalese-Buddhist vote-bloc is abysmal. The UNP-content of the rural vote seems not to exceed 25%-30%. That is simply not sufficient to win Parliamentary Elections. Why not institute a separate Ministry for Rural Development with substantial appropriations and hand that Ministry to a young Minister with a set of civil servants, who possess an unblemished record and reputation? The alarming genre of the civil service under the Rajapaksas deserves special attention. The culture of corruption and nepotism has swallowed our society head, body and foot. That culture has been embraced by our civil service and the rural folks have come to terms with it. As a result, each and every politician and civil servant has been tarred with the same brush. Honesty and financial integrity have become obsolete and those who are being served by the government servants have accepted bribes as a norm. There is no alternative to this culture other than a radical approach that could be adopted and make the rural men and women shed their fear of politicians by an efficient and honest group of politicians and civil servants. It may well be a tall order to expect our politicians and Government Servants to hold on to such lofty ideals, but there is no alternative. The only alternative is Rajapaksian culture of corruption. It is utterly futile and meaningless to present another set of corrupt set of politicos as an alternative. The Rajapaksas cannot be outdone in the field of corruption, fear-mongering and authoritarianism. The alternative must seem as a radical substitute; a departure from what was. Is the current UNP capable of confronting and be successful in handling such a heavy and arduous challenge? This is the dual-dilemma confronting the coalition. Maithripala Sirisena has to come to terms with the reality of the SLFP being out of his grip and Ranil Wickremesinghe is facing a draining of votes from the UNP. If neither is ready for a radical change, they are both committing political hara-kiri. They must realise that the way they had been going has not produced favourable results. Leaders who are ready for radical changes have always been successful while those who dont have dug their own graves. Ranil and Maithri must choose the former. The writer can be contacted at vishwamithra1984@gmail.com AFP: Over 20,000 French farms could go bankrupt if the European Union concludes a major trade deal with four South American countries, Frances biggest farm union warned yesterday. Christiane Lambert, head of the National Federation of Agricultural Holders Unions, said France risked losing between 20,000 and 25,000 farms if the EU signs a deal allowing tens of thousands of tonnes of tariff-free South American beef into the bloc. On Wednesday, beef farmers across France demonstrated against the deal which could see up to 99,000 tonnes of beef from the Mercosur trading bloc (Brazil -- the worlds top exporter of the meat -- as well as Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay) flooding Europe every year. Some campaigners have raised concerns about the use of hormones in these countries which lead to artificially high growth rates in cattle -- a practice that is widespread in the United States but banned in Europe. Lambert told BFM television she was worried the EU would agree to waive food security norms in return for access to a market of 260 million South American consumers for EU cars and auto parts, dairy products and other goods and services. She complained that the use by South American producers of hormones and of meat and bone meal - a type of feed banned in the EU since the BSE or mad cow crisis of the 1990s -would allow them to undercut their French counterparts by up to 30 percent. At a meeting Thursday with farmers, President Emmanuel Macron promised France would not budge on meat safety. There will never be beef with hormones in it in France. We shouldnt play with fear, he said, adding: There will be no reduction in our social, environmental or health standards. Negotiators from Mercosur and the EU resumed talks on Wednesday after edging closer to a deal during the last round in Brussels. Paraguays Foreign Minister Eladio Loizaga, whose country currently holds the rotating presidency of the Latin American bloc, said Monday that the two sides were in agreement on 90 percent of the issues, including beef exports to Europe. But EU Agriculture Commissioner Phil Hogan said it was very open as to whether there will be a successful conclusion at this stage. At the end of the previous round, the EU said it was willing to accept tariff-free imports of 99,000 tonnes of South American beef annually, compared to an initial offer of 70,000 tonnes. That sparked outrage among European farmers who accused Brussels of a sellout. Macron is expected to face questions on the issue when he visits the annual Paris farm show today. Aries (Mesha): Venus due to produce the effects of Vimala Yoga when it attains exaltation in your 12th House by the weekend might bring about a change in your disposition for the better. You will develop a positive outlook, a keen perception and an acumen. Meanwhile, an increase in income, higher status, help and the company of friends of higher status are held out by the Sun in the 11th House. Given the beneficial aspect of Jupiter over the 11th House, a rise in career is likely for those running the Maha Dasa of the Sun. Lagnadhipati Mars Swakshetra in the 8th House assures you of the benefits such as increased wealth, happiness and longevity. Taurus (Vrushabha): You can look forward to financial security, relief from debts in addition to enhanced popularity and reputation when Lagnadhipati Venus moves into your 11th House on March 2 to attain exalted status. Success in whatever activity you are engaged in and a happier time at your job are in the offing with the Sun in your 10th House. Foreign travel will materialize for those in appropriate circumstances. The planetary changes will bring about relief from mental and financial problems that had been troubling you. Gemini (Mithuna): Enhanced comforts and luxuries and a generally happy time are in the offing with Venus due to attain exaltation in your 10th House giving rise to the effects of Amala Yoga. Meanwhile, success in whatever plan or program you may embark on is assured by a powerful Sun with Mercury in your 9th House. Comforts, financial gains, business success, a rise in status and popularity and financial stability are also on the cards. Mars in your 6th House is highly favourable. You will win over enemies and gain respect and honour in the society. Cancer (Kataka): A time of general prosperity, happiness and achievements are in the offing thanks to Venus due in your 9th House by the weekend to attain exaltation. Meanwhile, a strong Sun in the 8th House can produce very favourable results. Matrimonial prospects are bright for bachelors and maidens. Problems relating to children are indicated by Mars in the 5th House. Time is not opportune for trading in stocks and shares either. You are advised to stay away from gaming activity as well. Leo (Sinha): An exalted Venus due in your 8th House by March 2 will protect you from untoward incidents and will bring you happiness and prosperity. However, given the Sun Mercury combination continuing in the 7th House you have to exercise extra-care, foresight and tact in dealing with business partners to avert disputes and conflicts. Family problems too are likely to trouble you. Mars Swakshetra in the 4th House giving rise to the effects of Ruchaka Yoga fortifies you with drive, energy, confidence and courage to take bold decisions and face challenges. Virgo (Kanya): A happy and prosperous time is ahead for you with an exalted Venus due in your 7th Kendra House. Sun in your 6th House continues to assure your career success, a whip hand over enemies and rivals, success at contests and competitions and monetary gains. This is a favourable position for those seeking political office in particular. Mars in your 3rd House fortifies you with much courage and self-confidence and holds out financial gains and short gainful journeys. Jupiter in the 2nd House assures a happy family life, financial stability and a positive outlook on life. Libra (Thula): An exalted Lagnadhipati Venus due in your 6th House shortly holds out success in contests and examinations and a happy and prosperous time. A happy family life is too indicated. Long-cherished dreams might come true thanks to Yogakaraka Saturn in the 3rd House Time on is auspicious for natives active in politics. A very happy time socially and financial gains are indicated. However, time is not favourable for property-related transactions. You may become inclined towards altruistic and spiritual activity due to Jupiter in the Lagna. Scorpio (Vrushika): A strong Venus due in your 5th House shortly holds out a happy family life and benefits from children. A good income, cordial relations with relatives and enhanced living comforts in addition to a happy time in social circles, success in educational pursuits and financial gains are on the cards. However, you are likely to suffer from digestive problems. A very favourable time when successes and achievements come to you with no effort is ahead with Lagnadhipati Mars continuing transit in your Lagna. Sagittarius (Dhanu): Enhanced comforts and luxuries, peace of mind and success in academic efforts are held out by Venus due in your 4th House to give rise to the effects of Malavya Yoga. A very favourable time is held out by the powerful Sun in the 3rd House. Sound health, increased wealth and a good time professionally and financially are in the offing. Natives prospecting for gems or other hidden treasures are in for luck. You have to act with restraint, foresight and mindfulness as the Saturn continues transit in your Lagna. Capricorn (Makara): Venus due to gain exalted status in your 3rd House holds a happy time at work and cordial relations with siblings and kith and kin. Financial stability, good health, a happy family life and monetary gains are indicated by the Sun Mercury combination in the 2nd House. Time on is not favourable for matrimonial matters except in cases of Rahu being strong at birth. You will have a good time with friends, relatives and family members. Swakshetra Mars in the 11th House is a source of strength for you. You are assured of success in all areas in life. However, you are prone to tensions and worries. Aquarius (Kumbha): Yogakaraka Venus due in your 2nd House shortly signifies a happy and prosperous time ahead. The Sun in the Lagna with Venus and mercury on either side imbues you with a buoyant spirit, a positive outlook, drive and dynamism. Comforts, sensual pleasures and monetary gains are assured. A happy time at workplace, a possible rise in career and even gainful foreign travel on the cards with a powerful Mars in your 10th House. You can look forward to a better or a steady income due to the favourable Saturn in the 11th House. Pisces (Meena): Your Lagna will gain immense strength when Venus moves into it on March 2 to attain exalted status and give rise to the effects of Malavya Yoga. You can look forward to a generally happy and prosperous time. You may develop a bent to help the lesser fortunate like the poor, the sick and the disabled. You have to avoid getting involved in law suits and litigation given Lagnadhipati Jupiter unfavorably placed in your 8th House. You can look forward to an enhanced income and more profits from whatever economic activity you are engaged in, thanks to a strong 11th House rendered beneficial by the aspect of Jupiter. Update : Hilton Colombo won the following at the Dubai culinarie 2018. 08 Silver 03 Bronze 02 Merit Six chefs from the Hilton Colombo flew to Dubai to participate in what is called one of the most prestigious culinary competitions in the world. The team led by Sous Chef Dammika Kahatagahadiwela, Chefs J.D.M.Dayarathne, M.R.T Sanjaya, Pubudu Athurugiriarachchi, D.K.Priyantha, Champika Rajapaksha, Indika Liyanage will compete in the Best Cuisinier/Cuisiniere; Five Course Dinner Menu, Beef Practical Cookery, Fish & Seafood Practical Cookery, Practical Cake Decorations, Four Plated Desserts, Pastry Showpiece, Chocolate Carving Showpiece, Practical Fruit & Vegetable Carving, Four Course Vegetarian Menu, Practical Sandwiches and Tapas, Finger Food. Also in the team from Sri Lanka will be Executive Sous Chef Chamlie Waidyaratne and Pastry Chef Ranjith Kapukotuwa who will officiate as ECG Marshals at the competition. The Emirates Salon Culinaire (ESC) is a series of practical and display-based culinary competitions; entry to which is open to professional chefs, pastry chefs, cooks and bakers. Some of the competitions are designed for entry by a single competitor; others are designed as team events. Each competition is called a class. Each class of the various competitions is intended to test the differing skills of entrants whilst also celebrating the preparation and presentation of food and its accoutrements in attractive and pleasing forms. Says would not speculate on implications of the Local Government poll results on the economic decision making of the central government By Chandeepa Wettasinghe Despite speculation in local spheres being high over the governments future economic decisions in the aftermath of the shocking Local Government polls drubbing, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) this week said that it is continuing to work with the government on the reforms the global lender of last resort had prescribed for the island nation.With regard to the current Extended Fund Facility programme with Sri Lanka more specifically, I would like to stress that the Fund remains fully engaged with the authorities as they continue to implement the IMF-supported economic reform programme to make growth more sustainable and inclusive, IMF Spokesperson Raphael Anspach said. Speaking to Mirror Business, he said that the IMF would not like to speculate on the implications of the local government poll results on the economic decision making of the central government. The IMF was responding with regard to a question raised on what the governments reaction would be in maintaining fiscal discipline in response to the polls, and whether the government had indicated that it would not move ahead with the cost reflective pricing formulae for fuel and electricity. Central Bank Governor Dr. Indrajit Coomaraswamy recently said there is no scope for fiscal indiscipline for the government, and that drastic expenditure increases may even result in Sri Lanka not being able to fully meet its debt service obligations. Both Dr. Coomaraswamy, and Institute of Policy Studies Chairman Prof. Razeen Sally have called on the government to continue their reform efforts and deliver results, instead of resorting to populist fiscal policies. Key reforms to be introduced under the IMF Extended Fund Facility include the cost reflective pricing formula for fuel in March, and a similar formula for electricity in September to bring state-owned suppliers out of loss-making territory. Both formulae were originally supposed to be in place by December 2016. However, given the current upward trend of oil prices, with the price of a barrel now trading at around US$ 70 compared to even less than US$ 30 in 2016, the Sri Lankan government has to absorb even greater losses when subsidizing fuel and electricity if the formulae are not introduced. These subsidies have resulted in the Treasury guaranteeing loans taken by the state-owned Ceylon Electricity Board and the Ceylon Petroleum Corporation. The IMF had in the past said that Sri Lanka remains highly vulnerable to a debt shock arising from these contingent liabilities until the two reforms are fully implemented by September 2018, due to the delays in implementing them. The international lender had said that the countrys debt stock would increase to 94 percent of gross domestic product from the current 80 percent if the country receives this debt shock. However, introducing the cost reflective mechanisms would result in consumers having to pay higher prices in the current scenario, where the coalition central government is becoming unpopular in the eyes of the public. The government slashed fuel prices in January 2015, when the global prices were US$40-50 per barrel, and the leading party in the coalition government had campaigned for the recent local government elections with commercials that reminded the citizens of the price cuts. AFP: Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India yesterday ceremonially broke ground on the Afghan section of an ambitious, multi-billion dollar gas pipeline expected to help ease energy deficits in South Asia. Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and Turkmen counterpart Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov joined Pakistani premier Shahid Khaqan Abbasi and Indias External Affairs Minister Shri M. J. Akbar for the ceremony at gas-rich Turkmenistans border with Afghanistan. Dignitaries including diplomats from the foreign missions in Turkmenistan were greeted by Turkmen national songs and traditional nomadic tents serving up food on an overcast day at the border post of Serkhetabat, once the southernmost tip of the Soviet Union. Speaking at the ceremony, Ghani said the pipeline would unite (the) countries in quotes translated into Russian for reporters at the ceremony. There were pessimistic voices, but now we are witnessing the construction of the TAPI gas pipeline, said Ghani, using the acronym for the conduit which takes its name from the four countries. The quartet aims to complete the 1,840-kilometre (1,143-mile) pipeline and begin pumping natural gas from Turkmenistans giant Galkynysh gas field by the beginning of 2020. While the pipeline will traverse war-wracked Afghanistan, raising security concerns, the bulk of the 33 billion cubic metres of gas to be pumped annually through the conduit will be purchased by South Asian rivals Pakistan and India. Turkmen strongman Berdymukhamedov, whose country currently depends heavily on China as a market for its natural gas exports, called diversification of gas deliveries an important part of the politics of the isolated Central Asian country. And he said work on the Turkmen section of the pipeline was still ongoing. Indias commitment to the pipeline has previously been questioned over its relationship with Pakistan and easy-access to liquified natural gas markets seen as potential stumbling blocks. But its external affairs minister hailed the project as a symbol of our goals and a new page in cooperation between the four countries in a speech at the ceremony yesterday. The overall funding picture for the mammoth gas pipeline remains unclear, with commercial energy giants such as Frances Total failing to follow up on reported interest in the project. Turkmenistan sits on the worlds fourth-largest gas reserves but lost a major buyer in Russia after Russian energy giant Gazprom wound down imports of Turkmen gas and then ceased purchases completely in 2016. INTERPOL had issued a Red Warrant' on former Sri Lankan Envoy to Russia Udayanga Weeratunga, naming him as a fugitive wanted by the Sri Lankan authorities, Police Media Spokesman SP Ruwan Gunasekara announced. Ex-diplomat Weeratunga was wanted in connection with certain discrepancies that had taken place in the acquisition of four MiG-27 fighter jets from the Ukrainian arms company 'Ukrinmash' in 2006 and financial misappropriation said to be taken place in overhauling four MiG fighter jets owned by the Air Force. According to SP Gunasekara the Financial Crimes Investigation Division (FCID) had received a complaint on March 10, 2015 over the incident. He said investigations had revealed that Mr. Weeratunga had interfered in the MiG deal and there had been suspicious deposits to his local bank accounts from foreign countries at this time. In order to obtain a statement relating to the investigation from Mr. Weeratunga, the Fort Magistrate had issued summons on him to appear in Court on July 15, 2016, an order that he dis-obeyed. SP Gunasekara explained that the Fort Magistrate had issued the open warrant for Mr. Weeratunga in October 20, 2016 for ignoring the court order and some USD 1.7 million amounts in his 16 bank accounts were ordered to be frozen. Later, the Criminal Investigation Division (CID) sought INTERPOL assistance to arrest Mr. Weeratunge who was evading the courts by living overseas and the INTERPOL issued a Blue notice over the ex-diplomat. SP Gunasekara said that Mr. Weeratungas diplomatic service had ended on February 28, 2015 but he had not returned his diplomatic passport No D3643585 to the Foreign Ministry and instead he had obtained a passport bearing the No N5400885 from the Immigration and Emigration Controller. In October 4, 2016 Mr. Weeratunga had travelled to the United Arab Emirates and the Immigration and Emigration Controller had impounded both his passports following an order made by the Fort Magistrate on June 30, 2017. Mr. Weeratunga was detained at the Dubai Airport on February 4 this year while in transit to the United States but was later released after being transferred to the Abu Dhabi authorities. A seven member delegation was dispatched to bring back the ex-diplomat on February 7, based on the bilateral understanding and the diplomatic relations between the two countries, however they were made to return home emptyhanded on February 13. A statement issued by Police Media Spokesman SP Ruwan Gunasekara yesterday said that Mr. Weeratunga had several opportunities to prove his innocence on the charges. However he was only attempting to create a false image over the countrys judicial system among the people by issuing media statements. He further said Mr. Weeratunga had never requested an opportunity to make a statement to investigation officers although he claims to have done so. Therefore, SP Gunasekara said it had been observed that Mr. Weeratungas claims were baseless and he was only evading the authorities without obeying the judiciary. Mr. Weeratunga is a Sri Lankan citizen. Instead of attempting to prove his innocence using social media, Mr. Weeratunga can appear before a court of law and prove his innocence, SP Gunasekara added. (Thilanka Kanakarathna) Nippon Paint celebrated the successful conclusion of the Asia Young Designer Award (AYDA) themed You for tomorrow future living as envisioned today, in Sri Lanka for the second consecutive year with a glamorous awards ceremony held at the Hilton Hotel Colombo recently. Held in collaboration with the Sri Lanka Institute of Architects (SLIA), the countrys apex body on Architecture, AYDA 2017 marked yet another vibrant journey of education, training, exposure finally culminating in recognition and opportunities for further training for both students of Architecture and Interior Designing with one student from each discipline being awarded Rs.100,000 and obtaining the chance to visit Malaysia (sponsored by Nippon Paint) for further training. Construction Industry Development Authority (CIDA) Chairman Eng. M.R. Jeyachandran graced the occasion as the chief guest. A host of other distinguished guests including leading Architects and Interior Designers also attended the ceremony. The Gold award winner for Architecture category was Dilushan Rajitha Maduranga from the University of Moratuwa and the Gold award winner of the Interior Design Category was Sachintha Fernando from the City School of Architecture. The winners will attend a three-day workshop held in Malaysia with the participation of 30 other Asias best young designers at the end of which all designers will present their creative concepts. The Platinum award winner of this competition will claim the grand prize of an all-expense paid (by Nippon Paint) three-month internship at one of the best Architectural/Interior Designing practices of Asia. Commenting on the scale and the importance of the competition, Nippon Paint Lanka Managing Director Raja Hewabowala said: Nippon Paint first launched AYDA as early as 2008 on a global scale to spark the creative talents of young Architects and Interior Designers and to infuse innovation and professionalism into their individual and collective journeys. Last year, we held the first ever AYDA competition in Sri Lanka which was a resounding success and generated a lot of enthusiasm amongst the students and the professional bodies of Architecture and Interior Designing. This year too we maintained that momentum to hold the competition for the second time. The amount of interest, creativity and the spirit of innovation we witnessed during AYDA 2017 was inspiring. I wish to thank SLIA for their assistance in carrying out AYDA 2017 which enabled Sri Lankan students of Architecture and Interior Design to be a part of an international scale competition and to congratulate all the winners. The two Silver winners Gihan Shanaka de Silva from the University of Moratuwa (Architecture category) and Yathindra Laknath Pallegoda (Interior Design category) from the City School of Architecture won Rs.50,000 each. The winner in the Best Colour Choice category, Romain Kaveesha from the City School of Architecture won Rs.25,000 while W.M.N.T.K. Wijekon from the University of Moratuwa emerged as the winner in the Green Innovation category claiming the price of Rs.25,000 as well. All participating Universities and Colleges were given the chance to win Nippon Paint worth Rs.50,000 each, which were granted to the University of Moratuwa and the City School of Architecture. AYDA 2017 was an opportune platform for young designers to explore and unleash their creative prowess and innovative thinking. It was wonderful to see young Architects and Interior Designers learning the art of applying what they have learnt to create concepts on such a prestigious platform. I am grateful to Nippon Paint Sri Lanka for opening up this opportunity to young Sri Lankan designers, commented SLIA President D.H. Wijewardana. From Left: Quick Tea Director Shayne Choksy, Quick Tea Operations Manager Razzali Noordeen, SFG Sustainability Assurance and Advisory Services Manager Lakmini Senadheera, CCC Kanishka Jayasinghe, SFG Snr. Sustainability Associate Sajeewa Ranasinghe and CCC Carbon Associate Sachini Jayakody Quick Tea (Pvt.) Ltd, a subsidiary of Sri Lankas largest Tea Exporter for over two decades- Akbar Brothers Ltd, became the recipient of yet another accolade for the diversified group of companies by being certified as a CarbonConscious Company. The certification was awarded to Quick Tea by The Sustainable Future Group (SFG), committing the company to a three-year journey of measuring, managing, and mitigating their overall carbon footprint. Certified CarbonConscious is part of a proprietary, diverse range of certifications developed by SFG following internationally accepted standards and protocols that overlook key environmental impact areas such as carbon, water, waste and biodiversity. Taking their standard of excellence one step further to ensure the companys environmental impact is managed as best as possible, Quick Tea partnered with the countrys foremost environmental consulting firm, the Carbon Consulting Company (CCC), to conduct detailed audits of the Companys operations to determine its current impact status and to identify areas for improvement. Recommendations were brainstormed with the newly introduced Green Team of Quick Tea and ideas were evaluated according to feasibility and alignment with the companys corporate and sustainability goals and objectives, which were then incorporated into a comprehensive carbon management plan with department-wise targets. On receiving the certification, Akbar Brothers Director Shiraz Akbarally commented: As a company that prides itself in innovative approaches and places high priority on ethical practices, we are always looking at ways to further expand our efforts in a more sustainable manner. Environmental performance is increasingly becoming a vital part of any business operation, and obtaining a green certification enables us to implement and maintain high standards in this area. Akbar Brothers are constantly beating the status quo, and this new accreditation reinforces our message to our clients and stakeholders that we are committed to a sustainable future. We would like to thank the CCC team for helping us embark on this exciting new journey that would no doubt prove beneficial in the long run. We are encouraged to see Quick Tea join the ranks of responsible businesses taking the steps necessary towards growing sustainability in the corporate sector of Sri Lanka, remarked CCC CEO Sanith de S. Wijeyeratne. It is truly admirable when a company not only understands the importance of protecting the environment, but takes action to reduce its impact. We hope other companies follow in their footsteps and join the global fight against Climate Change. Trade deficit exceeds US $ 1bn first time in 5 years Imports cross US $ 2bn mark for first time in history Exports surpass US $ 1bn for fifth time in 2017 2017 full-year trade gap hits US $ 10bn despite highest ever exports of US $ 11.4bn Earnings from textile and garment exports surpass US $ 5bn The notable increase Sri Lanka saw in export earnings was offset by racing imports in December 2017 to record the highest trade deficit for the first time in 5 years, the external sector data released by the Central Bank showed. Sri Lankas export earnings in December 2017 surpassed a billion dollar mark for the fifth month in 2017. But the country imported goods worth over US $ 2 billion in December, recording the highest monthly import figure in the history of the country. As a result, the trade deficit exceeded the billion dollar mark in December for the first time in more than 5 years. The last time Sri Lanka recorded a trade deficit of over a billion rupees was in 2012 November. Although the growth in export was a sound 19 percent for the month from a year ago, the countrys thirst for fuel, iron and steel, staples such as rice and other food and beverages, vehicles and gold pushed the import bill by almost 13 percent during the festive month from a year ago. The December fuel bill surged 32 percent year-on-year (YoY) to US $ 433.3 million and by 38 percent YoY to US $ 3.4 billion for 2017 with close to half of it spent on refined petroleum imports amid the rising global oil futures throughout last year. Global oil price flirts little under US $ 70 a barrel in the Brent futures exchange and if the price holds above that level it could cause definite worries for the island nation dependant on imported oil as the country runs an extremely fragile external sectors with a serious external debt hangover from 2019 onwards, analysts have cautioned. December trade performance provided a proxy for the full year performance as Sri Lanka recorded a US $ 10 billion hole in its trade in goods account. This was despite the US $ 11.4 billion in export earnings the highest ever recorded in a single year up 10.2 percent from 2016. Import expenditure closely followed with a 9.4 percent growth YoY to record US $ 21 billion. Little less than 50 percent of Sri Lankas imports come from India (21.4 percent), China (18.8 percent) and Singapore (6.2 percent). Sri Lanka has a free trade agreement with India and signed a fresh pact with Singapore in January this year. The authorities are working on a similar trade pact with China. Meanwhile, among the notable performances in the export basket were the textile and garment exports, which surpassed the US $ 5.0 billion milestone in earnings recording an increase of 3 percent YoY. During December such exports rose by a healthy 19.4 percent YoY to US $ 470 million. The restoration the GSP Plus facility to the European Union (EU) in May 2017, helped the local exporters to achieve such a feat, the Central Bank said. Earnings from garment exports to the EU increased by 27.2 percent YoY while garment exports to the USA and other non-traditional markets increased by 18.0 percent and 14.1 percent, respectively, during December 2017, the Central Bank said. Meanwhile, the higher average tea prices and the volumes during 2017 pushed the tea export earnings by 15.6 percent YoY in December to US $ 127 million and 21 percent YoY to US $ 1.5 billion for the full year, boosting the total earnings from the agricultural imports for the year. Records over US $ 2bn BoP surplus on strong financial account flows Sri Lanka recorded a surplus of US $ 2.07 billion in the Balance of Payment (BoP) in 2017 as the country received earnings from tourism, investments in to the stocks and bonds, direct investments and loans in dollars albeit some slow down in remittances. This is in comparison to a deficit in the BoP of US $ 500 million in 2016, the data showed. Although the worker remittances the single largest foreign income earner for the country slipped 1.1 percent in 2017 from a year ago still fetched US $ 7.2 billion to the country. Earnings from tourism were also up by 3.2 percent for the year to US $ 3.6 billion. Both remittance income and tourism earnings coupled with any other earnings from services exports such as information technology and business process management activities cover up the hole left in the trade in goods account which neared US $ 10 billion in 2017. Meanwhile, the financial account of the BoP is amply buttressed by the portfolio flows into the Sri Lankan stocks and bonds and the loans taken by the government of Sri Lanka through sovereign bonds and other lenders. The net inflows to the Colombo Stock Exchange during the 12 months were recorded at US $ 279 million against just US $ 19 million during 2016. Meanwhile, the foreigners invested US $ 1.67 billion in government bills and bonds during 2017, up from US $ 1.24 billion in 2016. Besides, the Central Bank raised US $ 1.5 billion in sovereign bonds in 2017. Further US $ 1.54 billion worth of long-term loans and a billion dollar worth of foreign currency term facility was taken by the government during the year. Proceeds of Hambantota port in the form of FDI as well as receipt of the fourth tranche under the EFF from the IMF were instrumental in strengthening the financial account of the BOP in December 2017, the Central Bank said. The foreign direct investments during the first 9 months reached US $ 766 million against US $ 397 million for the same period in 2016. As a result of these inflows plus the direct purchases of dollars from the market to the tune of US $ 1.6 billion, the gross official reserves of the country reached US $ 8.0 billion equivalent to 4.6 months of importsby end 2017 compared to US $ 6.0 billion recorded by end of 2016. Credit: Mary Ellen MatthewsArcade Fire will perform at the 2018 Juno Awards, the Canadian equivalent of the Grammys. The ceremony will be held March 25 in Vancouver. The night before the Junos, the Montreal indie rockers will be honored at the Juno Gala Dinner & Awards with the International Achievement Award, given to Canadian artists who've "achieved exemplary success on a global scale." Previous recipients include Celine Dion, Alanis Morissette, Bryan Adams and Drake. Arcade Fire is also nominated for several Junos this year, including Group of the Year and Album of the Year for Everything Now. For the full list of nominees, visit JunoAwards.ca. Copyright 2018, ABC Radio. All rights reserved. Nestle Lanka PLC put up a strong performance for its December quarter (4Q17), but saw its full year performance dented by sluggish market conditions and natural disasters. For 4Q17, the company reported earnings of Rs.21.94 per share or Rs.1.17 billion against earnings of Rs.16.01 a share or Rs.887.6 million reported for the corresponding quarter of the previous year. Sales for the quarter under review rose 15.6 percent year-on-year (YoY) to Rs.10 billion. However for the full year ended December 31, 2017, Nestle Lankas net profit fell 17.4 percent YoY to Rs.3.63 billion despite sales increasing by 3.1 percent YoY to Rs.37.6 billion. The company saw a 9 percent YoY increase in cost of sales as result reported a gross profit of 13.3 billion, down 6 percent YoY. The earnings per share for the fiscal 2017 fell Rs.67.64 from Rs.81.87 in fiscal 2016. Nestle Lanka share last traded on the Colombo bourse at Rs.1850. The severe drought and floods, resulting in weak consumer confidence and decline in consumer demand, adversely impacted results, Nestle Lanka said in an earnings release. Growth rates were further eroded by an increase in Value Added Tax, which coupled with unprecedented increase in coconut prices, had a negative impact on profit. Enhanced cost saving measures and a focus on driving efficiencies across the value chain helped in partly mitigating these impacts, it added. The company said it contributed Rs. 6.5 billion to the treasury as taxes, and Rs. 8.3 billion to the rural economy for procurement of milk and coconut. Meanwhile, Nestle Lanka said it initiated an investment of around Rs. 5 billion in early 2017, to expand production capacity for dairy and coconut based products in its Kurunegala factory, which will be funded through a judicious combination of internal accruals and borrowings. The company in a stock exchange filing said it will be borrowing US $ 12 million in this regard from Nestle Treasury Centre-Middle East and Africa Ltd., a unit of its parent Nestle S.A. in Switzerland. The filing said the loan will be disbursed in LKR. The director board has approved an interim dividend of Rs.25 per share on 22 February 2018 and proposed a final dividend of Rs.25 per share for the full year, to be approved at the companys Annual General Meeting on 4 May 2018. Switzerland-based parent, Nestle SA, holds a 90.82 percent stake in Nestle Lanka while Norwegian Central Bank Norges Bank holds 0.82 percent. Hon. Nimal Siripala De Silva - Minister of Transport and Civil Aviation Colombos favourite tastemaker in coffee is now back at the Bandaranaike International Airport with a slicker, bolder and more contemporary look. Since it was first opened in 2006, The Coffee Bean and Tea Leafs airport store has been the first and longest running international franchise at the BIA. The airport store embodies the CBTL philosophy of a home away from home - comfort and familiarity no matter where you go in the world. The franchise is one of the worlds most well-known brands, easily recognized by customers for its distinctive purple and white design. The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf first opened in 1963 in Hollywood, Los Angeles. Ten years later, the Airport Bean served its 3 millionth customer. The Coffee Bean remains the quintessential Hollywood brand- every celebrity has been snapped with a familiar CBTL takeaway cup in their hand. The Coffee Bean is known for its legendary Ice Blended range, concocted by a barista during an exceptionally hot summer in 1987 long before the advent of the frappuccino. Today, over three million customers walk into Coffee Bean stores around the world every day. In Sri Lanka, the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf was one of the very first coffee chains to identify Colombos promise as the urban hotspot it would become post-war. The flagship Maitland Crescent branch opened in 2007 and it has remained open through some of the countrys most intensely turbulent times. We remained committed to Sri Lanka because Sri Lanka was committed to us, says Roman Scott-Chairman of The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf, a subsidiary of the Calamander Group. We were the first international brand to come into Sri Lanka during the last stages of the war and although the times have changed for the better, our customer base remains as loyal as ever-exactly in proportion to the quality of product and service weve maintained since then. Hon. John Amaratunga - Minister of Tourism and Christian Religious Affairs The airport store reopens with a modern contemporary aesthetic. The new Coffee Bean design replaces the old darker wood with a brighter and slicker new California vibe. More grab and go food and beverages are available at the outlet. A more efficient layout has created more seating capacity and a larger kitchen with a full walk in chiller facility, ready to drum up an exciting and extensive variety of food and beverages. The official opening of the refurbished airport store on 20th February was attended by Chief Guest Hon Nimal Siripala De Silva - Minister of Transport and Civil Aviation, Guest of Hon. John Amaratunga - Minister of Tourism and Christian Religious Affairs, Saman Ediriweera - Chairman of Aviation Services Sri Lanka, Ranjith De Silva - Vice Chairman of Airport & Aviation Services Sri Lanka, Jeff Goonewardena - Director of Airport & Aviation Services Sri Lanka and The Chairman of The Calamander Goup Inc, Roman Scott. The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf BIAs 3 millionth customer with Roman Scott-Chairman of The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf Roman Scott-Chairman of The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf Deepani is a Grade 10 student who loves mathematics and science. Her parents are delighted and encourage her to continue in these fields, assuring her that she will have a bright future. But Deepani is worried that she is not learning all that she should her teachers in both subjects are not the best and at times, Deepani has been unable to clarify the doubts in certain areas. Deepani wonders whether she can continue in the field of sciences, if her teachers lack the competency to instruct and guide her. Without doing well in mathematics and sciences at the Ordinary Level Examination (O-Levels) next year, her dream to continue her studies in the science stream will be futile. Deepani is not alone in her concerns. The Institute of Policy Studies (IPS) research finds that at present, close to half the students who sit for O-Levels fail the exam. In fact, being unable to meet the minimum requirement of a credit pass (C grade) in mathematics or science at O-Levels is the main reason for the low number of students in the science streams in the Advanced Level (A-Level) classes. According to the 2016 School Census Preliminary Report, even of those who continue on to sit for A-Levels, less than a quarter (23 percent) is in the science stream, while only a further 10 percent is in the technology stream. The majority (66 percent) are in the arts and commerce streams. Similarly, the distribution of students in public universities is highly skewed towards the arts and social sciences, while the enrolments in the natural sciences are much lower. Generating a high share of university graduates, especially in the science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) subjects, is a policy priority for Sri Lanka, given the countrys goal of becoming a knowledge-based economy, driving competition through innovation. The 2018 budget speech correctly identified the need for improving the ratio of STEM to non-STEM graduates in the country. The foundation for STEM education at the graduate level needs to be laid at school level. Only those with a good foundation in general education will move on to tertiary level education, especially in the STEM subjects. A recent IPS research study highlights the need for good quality teachers for improving the education outcomes of children at O-Levels. A recent complimentary study examines the adequacy of quality teachers to teach science, mathematics and English at secondary level in the country. This article summarizes the main findings of the study. Surplus of teachers but not enough subject-qualified teachers According to the 2016 School Census data, Sri Lanka has an overall surplus of teachers, who usually teach mathematics and science subjects; that is, the number of teachers who mostly teach mathematics and science are more than the number recommended by the Education Ministry in the first circular of 2016, on determining the staff numbers in a school. However, this does not mean that all these teachers are subject qualified. A teacher with either a degree or a specialized training in a particular subject is considered as a subject-qualified teacher. Even though in many countries teachers need to be especially certified to teach a subject, Sri Lankas teacher service does not have such a requirement. As Figure 1 indicates, the shares of available teachers are more than the recommended number of teachers (over 100 percent), indicative of overall teacher surpluses. Nevertheless, the shares of subject-qualified teachers are much lower than the recommended number of teachers. Issues with allocation of teachers The Education Ministry clearly provides guidelines on the number of teachers recommended for each school, based on the number of classes, availability of subjects and the languages of instruction offered by the schools. However, our analysis shows that some schools have an excess of science and mathematics teachers, while others are sorely lacking in this regard. Our findings also show that more affluent schools, attended by wealthier students, have better teachers than less-advantaged schools. Unsystematic recruitment of teachers Unsystematic teacher recruitment is one reason for the inadequacy of teachers. If the teacher recruitments are properly planned, the number of teachers recruited should roughly match the number of teachers leaving the teacher service. But, an analysis of the School Census data shows that the teacher recruitments are done haphazardly and arbitrarily. In some years, more than 20,000 teachers are recruited, while during other years less than 5,000 teachers are recruited. Also, the teachers are often not matched to their subject-related education and training at recruitment. As Figure 2 shows, of the total number of science and mathematics teachers joining the teacher service in 2016, only a fraction was subject qualified. Limited pre-service teacher training opportunities The numbers of teachers trained by pre-service teacher training programmes are not adequate to meet the demand arising for teachers each year. The majority of teachers recruited to the teacher service in Sri Lanka are untrained graduates, followed by those with a National Diploma in Teaching (NDT). The untrained graduates have a degree but do not have pedagogical training. Those with the NDT are trained teachers without degrees. This is in contrast to the best practices in other countries. In most countries, a degree and a certificate in specialized teacher training is necessary to become a teacher. In Sri Lanka, only those who join the teacher service with a Bachelor of Education (BEd) have both a degree and specialized teacher training. But, the School Census 2016 data show that only a very small share of those joining the teacher service holds a BEd. Policy recommendations There is an urgent need to improve pre-service teacher training, currently offered at the National Colleges of Education and at universities, to match the demand for STEM teachers in schools. Improving and expanding the pre-service training of teachers and giving priority to recruiting teachers with proper pre-service training can help improve the availability of qualified teachers. Such training programmes should especially cater to the demand for teachers in different subject areas. Teacher training should also be well planned to meet the requirements of the teacher service. Further, the teachers should be certified to teach different subjects and the subject knowledge of teachers should be taken into consideration when filling vacancies. Lastly, the teachers should be allocated to schools according to need, so that no school has an excess of teachers and the teachers are evenly distributed across all schools. Allocating the teacher cadres for schools according to the available classes, subjects and mediums of instructions can prevent schools from recruiting teachers in excess. Unless qualified teachers are available in all classrooms, many students like Deepani will not be able to realize their dream of pursuing higher studies in the science and technology field. Unless the students interested in science and mathematics are encouraged from a young age and are given proper guidance, expanding science education at the tertiary level will remain a pipedream. (Nisha Arunatilake is Director Research and Ashani Abayasekara is a Research Officer at the Institute of Policy Studies of Sri Lanka (IPS). To share your comments with the authors, please write to nisha@ips.lk/ashani@ips.lk. For more articles, visit the IPS blog http://www.ips.lk/talkingeconomics/) At first, the hour-long President Trump meeting with students who survived last weeks Florida school shooting appeared to be an open discussion about ways to stop the killing. In Europe, it reminded some stakeholders of how they first began to brainstorm ideas, following a devastating string of school shootings here between 2002 and 2009. Does anyone have any idea of how to stop it?, Trump asked, after survivors and advocates had delivered powerful testimonies at the White House event that was broadcast live. But the search for any idea that could stop the shootings quickly led to a familiar proposal - and one that is extremely risky, according to those who have spent years successfully trying to prevent similar shootings in Europe on behalf of their governments. Trump did not make any conclusive promises at the end of the meeting, but as the conversation moved on he appeared to favour arming teachers themselves. Switzerland and Germany are among the leaders of an approach that was eventually also discussed during Trumps White House meeting on Wednesday. Almost an hour into the meeting, one participant voiced skepticism of the idea to arm teachers. I appreciate the point on arming teachers; its not something I personally support. Rather than arm them with a firearm, I would rather arm them with the knowledge on how to prevent these acts from happening in the first place. How do you identify the kids in your class that are most at risk?, she said. Whoever hopes that Trump will seriously restrict gun laws will likely be disappointed, wrote Germanys Der Spiegel magazine in a story published online. In fact, the opposite may happen. Apparently, Trump believes to be able to create more security at schools by adding more weapons, Spiegels Washington correspondent summarized in disbelief, before citing NRA donations to Trump. By Rick Noack (c) 2018, The Washington Post Feb 22, 2018 -BERLIN - Birthday wishes Call 281-422-8302 or email david.bloom@baytownsun.com to wish someone a happy birthday. We will print your birthday wish on Page 2 of The Sun. Happy Birthday Wishes The loan will finance water supply improvements and expansion in Bhagalpur and Gaya towns in Bihar. New Delhi: Multi-lateral funding agency Asian Development Bank (ADB) on Friday signed a USD 84 million loan agreement to finance water supply projects in two cities of Bihar. The loan will finance water supply improvements and expansion in Bhagalpur and Gaya towns in Bihar, ADB said in a statement. This is the second tranche of ADB's USD 200 million multi-tranche financing facility for Bihar Urban Development Investment Programme, which was approved in 2012. The Manila-headquartered funding facility is aimed at providing sustainable urban infrastructure and services in Bhagalpur, Gaya, Darbhanga and Muzaffarpur in Bihar. "The Project 2 will improve access to better quality and sustainable water supply for the people of Bhagalpur and Gaya towns. It will also promote better water management practices that will result in a citywide coverage with 24-hour uninterrupted supply of treated water of 135 liters per capita per day in both cities,a said Sameer Kumar Khare, Joint Secretary (Multilateral Institutions), Department of Economic Affairs, Ministry of Finance. The loan agreement was signed by Khare and ADB India's Resident Mission Country Director, Kenichi Yokoyama. "The loan finances will support civil works sub-projects and would benefit 1.1 million people in the two project towns with increased coverage of treated water supply by 2021; train 400 urban local body (ULB) staff in the management and operation and maintenance of water supply systems and help ULBs improve technical and financial management of the water supply operations," Yokoyama said. ADB said the two towns (Bhagalpur and Gaya) would achieve the national urban service goals or match many of the national averages for urban service delivery performance in India. The investment programme will assist ULBs in designing affordable tariffs for operations and maintenance cost recovery. The loan with a 25-year term, includes a grace period of 5 years. Company has adopted 700 villages in Uttar Pradesh where it is providing medical facility, power, agricultural tools and technology to the villagers. Lucknow: IT major HCL Technologies on Friday said it will invest about Rs 160 crore as part of its corporate social responsibility activity in the field of education, health and power. The company will also be recruiting about 5,000 people in the years to come, Sanjay Gupta, Executive Vice President HCL Technologies, said, adding in the next 12 months, the IT major will be creating 2,000 jobs. "We will spend an amount of Rs 160 crore as part of our CSR activity, we are also helping the villagers with cleanliness," he said on the sidelines of UP Investors Summit. The company has adopted 700 villages in Uttar Pradesh where it is providing medical facility, power, agricultural tools and technology to the villagers, he said. At the summit, he described UP as "karmabhoomi" (the land where one works) for HCL Technologies. "HCL began in UP from Noida from a small garage with four people with our chairman Shiv Nadar. At a company which started in 1976 with 4 people... 1.2 lakh people work now and it is a 7.5 billion dollar company....it all started in UP," Gupta said. He further said that working and expanding business in UP is not a challenge today. "This was 3 years back it was a myth. When we decided to set up an IT campus in Lucknow, questions were raised. In 2016, we started operations to develop talent in Lucknow and trained and skilling freshers. We have given about 2,000 technical and non-technical jobs. In next 12 months, we will recruit another 2,000 local talent," he said. Expansion of companies and businesses to tier 2 and 3 cities is very important to retain the talent and stop migration. The investors summit shows positive signs for the industry particularly the IT. UP meets all requirements to do business such as single window clearance, infra and connectivity. New Delhi: Ride hailing firm Uber on Thursday said it will continue to invest in India as it looks to grow business in the "incredibly important and core market" by up to 10 times in a decade. On his maiden trip to India, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi indicated that he would not go by the advice of investors like SoftBank, who want the US-based firm to scale back to countries where it already has a strong market position. Refusing to disclose how much Uber has invested in India, he said, "it is a lot and that investment is going to continue." For Uber, India is a loss-making proposition but it will continue to invest in the market because it believes in it, he said at a media round table at the start of his two-day visit during which he is likely to meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi and other leaders. Asked if SoftBank, which is also an investor in rival and India's market leader Ola, has asked Uber to focus on the profitable market, Khosrowshahi said the company's strategies are decided by the board. "While SoftBank may have an opinion, their's is not the only opinion in the room," he said. "And it is my belief that we as a company need to have a balanced profile in terms of growth and investment." Developed markets like the US will continue to get investments and will be profitable but Uber should "actively" invest in markets like India and Latin America because of their sheer size, he said. These markets have "huge growth ahead" for Uber, he said. Uber has some 3 lakh driver partners in 29 cities in India, he said. "We think we can increase by 5x, 10x over the next 10 years. That will require investment," he said. "In India at this point my firm belief is that the greatest value that we can create is to continue to invest and grow our product." SoftBank Vision Fund, which recently became Uber's largest shareholder with the formal closing of a USD 9.3 billion investment giving it 15 per cent stake, has reportedly stated that Uber should focus on recovering its market share in the US and growing in key European markets, to have a faster path to profitability. While India remains Uber's largest market outside of the US, it is also the biggest cost for the company. Asked if Uber was subsidising rides in the country to capture the market, Khosrowshahi said, "anytime you are creating a market, you actually have to pay to build up liquidity." For instance, Uber Pool, the ride-sharing platform where two more passengers share a car to travel to same or different destinations, is a losing proposition but the company believes in the product as it will help solve traffic as well as road congestion problems, he said. "We are investing in Indian market because we believe in the long-term viability of this market... we consider it incredibly important market for us, the core market for us," he said. The Indian market, Khosrowshahi said, is demanding in terms of pricing and if Uber was to succeed here, it can shape products globally. "India can essentially be a laboratory for us." Uber, he said, accounts for less than 1 per cent of miles driven in the world, and is an alternative to taxis. "What we really want is to be alternate to car ownership," he said adding problems of traffic and pollution that India faces can be solved with its pioneering share rides. He said operations in India are not profitable but India accounts for more than 10 per cent of Uber's trips globally. "I expect (India) to account for higher and higher trips going forward," he said. Uber accounts for less than 1 per cent of the USD 5 trillion transportation industry globally and capturing higher share "requires investments in big markets with population, that have lot of growth ahead of them." Uber CEO pledged to continue investing aggressively in Southeast Asia. "We expect to lose money in Southeast Asia and expect to invest aggressively in terms of marketing, subsidies etc," Khosrowshahi said. "From a competitive standpoint we think we can improve...We are cautiously optimistic and are leaning forward to invest," he said. Khosrowshahi, who took the helm in August after former CEO Travis Kalanick was asked to step down amid a litany of regulatory problems, driver and consumer scandals and court cases, said a new work ethics code has been implemented in the company that has just one norm - "we do the right thing. Period. New Delhi: India can be an end-to-end partner to nations looking to empower citizens through affordable communications solutions and digital infrastructure, Telecom Secretary Aruna Sundararajan said on Friday. Citing India's prowess in software services, laying down digital infrastructure, and its design capabilities, Sundararajan said the country is keen to share technology, training expertise, and know-how with other nations that face "similar challenges". "India is willing to share technology and the expertise in training people because we want to ensure that this is a full-fledged partnership, not a buyer-supplier arrangement," she said addressing India Telecom 2018, an international ICT expo. The secretary noted that every country is looking to empower citizens with communications access and termed building strong telecom infrastructure a "pivotal necessity". "India has significant capabilities, we can help handhold other countries with similar challenges," she added. It seems Punjabi superstar Diljit Dosanjhs latest song Pant Mein Gun has rubbed some people the wrong way. Mumbai resident Harjeet Singh, who claims to be offended by the song from Welcome to New York, has filed a complaint against Diljit, lyricist Danish Sabri and music composer Sajid-Wajid for obscenity. Vibhav Krishna, the lawyer representing the film's producer, says, Our client, Pooja Films, has been receiving numerous telephone calls. Many police complaints and pleas have been filed in objection to the lyrics. All these allegations are false and baseless. Wajid is genuinely stunned by the allegations. Mera TashanPant Mein Gunis my brother Sajids catchphrase and we used it to create a climactic song sequence for Diljit, who plays a guy with a do-or-die chance to perform on stage. Vulgarity ka toh koi sawaal hi nahin hai. In all the years that my brother and I have been composing songs for films, weve never resorted to double meanings or suggestive lyrics. As for a section of the Sikh community being offended, Wajid says, We would never ever dream of causing offence to any community. Diljit is a fine and responsible member of the Sikh community. He heard the song and he loved it. He is actually on the stage in the film with a gun in his hand. So where is the question of a double meaning? He feels people who protest should take up causes that are more meaningful. I seriously think protesters should stop barking up the wrong tree. They should look at the songs and music videos that deliberately objectify women and portray them in a crude and offensive manner, he concludes. Amitabh Bachchan will next be seen in '102 Not Out.' New Delhi: Seems like the tales of Amitabh Bachchan's struggle with Twitter are never-ending. Also read: Harsha Bhogle has interesting reaction to Amitabh Bachchan's apparent dig at him Recently, the 75-year-old actor posted on Twitter where he addressed the micro-blogging site as a person and pleaded with it to stop torturing him. The Bollywood veteran cited some issues in posting stuff on the site and alluded to a sudden drop in his number of followers, a few days back. T 2623 - Twitter , ( gender , ), , ! , 200,000 follower .. !! pic.twitter.com/D1F4xYiUyq Amitabh Bachchan (@SrBachchan) February 22, 2018 After some minutes, the actor again took to Twitter to post a Hindi poem dedicated to the site. He captioned the poem: "Mr/Ms Twitter dedicated to you". T 2623 - Mr/Ms Twitter dedicated to you : ? , , , , , !! pic.twitter.com/UuCmon8ky8 Amitabh Bachchan (@SrBachchan) February 22, 2018 Also read: Valentines Day Special: Amitabh Bachchan reminisces old times with wife Jaya in pic In the poem, the actor wrote loving words for Twitter and beseeched it to not get angry with him. Mumbai: Mahira Khan can surely enter the list of the most controversial celebrities in Bollywood, though she is just a film old here. The Pakistani actress seems to be getting discussed in the country only when her name gets tagged to a controversy, like her failure to come to India due to Indo-Pak ties during Raees or being snapped smoking with Ranbir Kapoor in New York. The actress is now involved in another controversy, for a change, not involving Indian actors, but theres a Ranbir connection for sure. Pakistani veteran actor Javed Sheikh, who had played Ranbirs father in Tamasha, is a part of this one. Mahira was felicitated with the Best Actress award at the LUX Style Awards 2018 held in Karachi, and a video of what happened when she went up on the stage, is going viral. After Mahira cheek kissed Mawra Hocane, another actress who has worked in Hindi films, she proceeded to collect her trophy from Shaikh. Also read: Ranbir breaks his silence on pics with Mahira: Very unfair the way shes being judged Whether he intended to do the same and Mahira smartly turned away from it, or she in a way hugged him, it was a super awkward moment on the stage. Watch the video and decide for yourself: Congratulations my favourite @TheMahiraKhan for winning the best actor award for #Verna you truly deserve it and I love you a lot #MahiraKhan #LSA2018 pic.twitter.com/Il5skyFZ1H Deep Basu (@deepbasu1) February 21, 2018 The incident reportedly got reactions from Pakistani media and social users, some trolling Sheikh for forcibly trying to kiss her and some pinning the blame on Mahira. Following the uproar, Mahira took to Twitter and reacted how silly stuff was floating around for news and how he was a legend and mentor to her and would 'vouch for him' always. I have just woken up to such silly stuff floating around. Its good to be aware and have an opinion but for Gods sake dont use anything and everything to make news. Javed Sheikh of all people! He is a legend and a mentor to all of us in this industry. Would vouch for him always. Mahira Khan (@TheMahiraKhan) February 21, 2018 Sheikh also had a reaction to it, posing with a pout with Jerjees Seja (CEO of Pakistans largest TV network, ARY Digital Network) and Faysal Qureshi (noted Pakistani actor and TV host) on this Instagram picture, the caption of which clearly hints at the controversy. Also read: Mahira Khan wears her attitude right After the Richard Gere-Shilpa Shetty and Mika-Rakhi Sawant controversies, heres another kiss to talk about, though in a different country. Mumbai: Priyanka Chopra is one of the most followed celebrities in Bollywood as well as Hollywood. She is truly a global icon, and so we dont really blame anybody to be obsessed with her. Co-incidentally, PeeCees doppelganger made its way to the internet and it got too hard to guess that this person was right in front of you but you never noticed her. American model Megan Milan recently shared a photo of her with a purple lipstick, and looking at this pic will surely remind you of our beloved PeeCee. Here it is: Teeth all pearly, hair all curly pic.twitter.com/QVoT1HqSd9 Megan Milan (@MeganMilan_) February 17, 2018 And here are some comments which the American model received, which also are anybody and everybodys thought at the first glance: you literally look like @priyankachopra btw you're looking absolutely gorgeous. pic.twitter.com/0TrYVjPX71 yasemin | padmaavat (@ysmnly) February 20, 2018 When you are suspended at Quantico but you have to get to your desk anyway https://t.co/1fFdQ3nh5q Mit (@Fair_N_sleepy) February 20, 2018 A mix of Priyanka Chopra and Michael Jackson Ali Baloch (@abaloch111) February 20, 2018 That's exactly what i thought no (@idhttforthis) February 20, 2018 As far as Priyanka is concerned, she might just get another BFF in Megan apart from Meghan Markle, who is all set to marry Prince Charles soon (and we expect Piggy Chops to be the bridesmaid there). For over three years, a woman had been suffering persistent bloating. After doctors examined her, they discovered two masses near her hip bones. Two surgical sponges were inside of her for almost nine years, The Sun reported. They were left behind during two c-sections the 42-year-old had undergone. One was done six year ago and the other nine years ago. The New England Journal of Medicine case report stated two "hyperdense, stringy" masses was seen on a CT scan. Doctors performed surgery on her to remove the sponges "covered in thick, fibrous walls" inside her abdomen. Sponges are used between the space of the colon and abdominal wall, "to stop the intestines getting in the way", the Dr Takeshi Kondo, from Chiba University Hospital in Japan where the woman was treated, told Live Science. It was a very huge tumour, the size of which was nearly the size of the head. (Representational image: Pixabay) Surgeons at Neurosurgical department of BYL Nair Hospital have removed a massive brain tumour - weighing 1.8 kg - which protruded from the top of the patient's skull. They feel it is the largest brain tumour in record. Santlal Pal, 31, who came here from Bhadohi, Uttar Pradesh, was admitted with swelling under the scalp, heaviness, headache and decreasing vision in both eyes. "This case is a very unique and rare case. It was a very huge tumour, the size of which was nearly the size of the head. Size, vascularity and the involvement of the brain and the bone possessed a challenge in the case," Dr Trimurti Nadkarni, Head, Department of Neurosurgical told ANI. "The operation lasted for about seven hours. During the operation, he lost tremendous amount of blood which is life threatening. So, constantly we had to transfer 11 units of blood during the surgery," he added. "After cross-checking medical records, we believe it could be the largest ever brain tumour to be successfully removed," he said. While watching lions in the wild can be a memorable experience, their behaviour at times may come across as a surprise to many. Over the past few years incidents like a monkey having sex with a deer and male lions mating in Kenya have been in the news. A family was shocked during their visit to a safari park in England when they spotted three male lions having sex with each other. It happened when the family tried to get a closer look of the big cats as the lions started an orgy in front of the children. While Danielle Harvey tried to cover her childrens eyes, her partner Damian drove away before the lions started mounting each other again. Meanwhile rangers said that what the family saw was normal behaviour which could also be seen in the jungles of Africa. The spokeswoman for the park told The Sun that the behaviour happens as lions live in coalition before taking over a pride of female lions. The tree cats were brought to the park a year back and are slowly being introduced to females. The public who got wind of the situation chased them away and in the melee, they attacked a woman, who suffered cut injuries, police said. Chennai: Police on Wednesday arrested six students, including two juveniles - all students of the Pachaiyappas college- for possession of weapons and attacking a member of the public while creating a ruckus in MKB Nagar near Vyasarpadi. The students had come prepared with weapons to assault students from another college. However, the public who got wind of the situation chased them away and in the melee, they attacked a woman, who suffered cut injuries, police said. Police said that tension was simmering for the past week between students of Pachaiyappa's college and Ambedkar government college who travel on MTC bus route No.57 plying between Vallalar Nagar and Red Hills. There was a similar clash about two months ago between students of the same colleges. We were aware of a possible clash and deployed forces along the route, a police officer said. On Wednesday evening, Pachaiyappas college students, Sudhakar, Malarmannan, Manikandan, Mohan, Dinesh and two juveniles got down at the traffic signal near Ambedkar College. One of them was also carrying a knife. When the public saw the students gathering with weapons, they attempted to chase them away. But, the students hurled stones at them and inflicted a cut injury on a 46-year-old woman, Kamalammal of BV Colony, Vyasarpadi. A patrol team, a few kilometres away, rushed to the scene and managed to nab six students. All students are from the Red Hills area, police said. While the two juveniles were sent to Borstal school, four others were remanded to judicial custody. Further investigations are on. The man died while being rushed to a hospital by the police. (Photo: Twitter | ANI) Palakkad (Kerela): A 35-year-old tribal man was beaten to death by the locals for allegedly stealing articles from some shops at Agali in Palakkad, Kerela, police said. The deceased, suspected to be mentally unsound, was identified as Madhu, hailing from Kadukumanna settlement of Attappady, one of the largest and backward tribal hamlets in the state. The shabbily dressed man, who was living in the forest near Mukkali for some months, used to be seen wandering in the area, police said. He was beaten up by the local people, who accused him of stealing articles from some shops in the town, and later handed him over to the police on Thursday. Some television channels aired visuals purportedly showing people taking selfies with Madhu with his hands tied up. Though, the police tried to rush him to the nearby Agali government hospital, he vomited, collapsed and died in the jeep itself and was declared by dead by the hospital, police said. Agali police has registered a case and some persons have been taken into custody, they said. "They are being interrogated and the arrest will be recorded after verification," a senior police officer told news agency PTI. Police said the post mortem would be conducted at the Thrissur Medical College hospital later, only after which the exact cause of the death will be known. However, Madhu's relatives told Malayalam channels that he was suffering from a mental breakdown and was staying away from home for some months. They also wanted exemplary punishment to the guilty. Meanwhile, Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan condemned the incident and said stringent action would be taken against the accused. Directions in this regard have been given to the director general of police, he said. "Such violence cannot be accepted in a civilised society. It cannot be accepted in anyway," Vijayan said in a Facebook post. The Thursday's incident is the third mob attack reported in Kerala in the past few weeks. Earlier in February, a transgender was harassed and stripped by a mob in Thiruvananthapuram. In January, a mentally unstable woman was beaten and tortured by three women in front of a crowd in Pallipuram. Her feet were burnt with an iron ladle. When a mobile video of the assault was circulated on social media, the police filed a case against the women. Bengaluru: A point book has been placed outside his office and the beat police have been told to increase patrolling near his home after advocate Shyamsundar, representing Vidwath in the case against Congress MLA, N A Haris son, Mohammad Nalapad Haris, sought police protection in the face of alleged threats. The advocate, who has been appointed special prosecutor in the case, met city police commissioner on Friday seeking protection after he was allegedly threatened by Nalapads supporters during the hearing of the case in the 8th ACMM court on Wednesday. When contacted, he said, Till now, the police have placed a point book at my office and the beat police and Hoysala patrolling police have been told to keep vigil. But I have been given no gunman or bodyguard. Asked if he felt the need for a gunman or bodyguard, Mr Shyamsundar replied in the negative. I am always out visiting courts. People don't have to wait near my house to attack me. But no matter what I will fight this case and see to it that the guilty are punished, he asserted. A senior police officer said the jurisdictional DCP had been directed to keep strict watch near the advocates house. We are also discussing deploying policemen at his office and will take a call on this soon, he assured. Kannada actor, Shivarajkumar and former Minister, Sriramalu, meanwhile, visited Vidwath at the Mallya hospital and wished him speedy recovery. They also requested the government to ensure that justice was done and the guilty punished. Visakhapatnam: Most of the ATMs in the villages of North Andhra districts were shut during the past two months. While people are facing severe cash crunch in villages, the onset of the marriage season has made them come to the city in search of ATMs with cash. Earlier, villagers used to come to city for buying readymade garments and electronic appliances as they dont get latest models at their place. However, all modern products are now available in rural areas too. In an unusual trend, they are now coming to the city for cash withdrawals. R. Srinivasa Rao, from Palasa in Srikakulam district, said that he had been looking for an open ATM without a no-cash board across Srikakulam, Vizianagaram and Visakhapatnam. He heard about the availability of cash in few ATMs at Vizag and came to the city on Thursday ahead of his daughters marriage. Next week, there is a marriage at our home. Lot of things are yet to be purchased. The bank manager was not ready to give Rs 50,000 cash though I have cancelled a fixed deposit in the branch. Even the recommendation from a local MLA didnt work, he said. Due to the ongoing cash crunch in rural areas, some banks are not allowing customers to withdraw more than Rs 5,000 a day. To withdraw above Rs 5,000 at time, a person needs to seek the permission of the branch manager and wait until evening. If any customer wants to withdraw a larger amount, there will be no response. Moreover, the bank officials have suggested using cards for payments. Cards are neither accepted by the purohit nor the caterer. Everyone wants to deal with cash only. I think the government is trying to forcibly implement card payments through cashless ATMs, said Mr Rao. In spite of repeated complaints from customers, the banks have not taken any action to control the situation. Most of the villagers have accounts in nationalised banks. The ATMs of these banks are completely out of cash. The officials of State Bank of India have not responded to our calls, while an Andhra Bank senior officer said that there is a shortage in the supply of cash from Reserve Bank of India. We cant mint currency. Whatever cash we receive from the public, is again being disbursed to customers. Still, we are managing to ensure our customers go from the branch with atleast some cash in their hand, the senior official said. Te Papa: Reinventing New Zealands national museum 19982018 By Conal McCarthy, published by Te Papa Press, $45.00 As New Zealands national museum Te Papa Tongarewa marks its 20th anniversary, a new book by leading museologist Conal McCarthy examines how the iconic institution that has benchmarked international best practice has evolved over the past two decades. I cannot think of another national museum, built in the last forty years, that has been more globally influential in changing how these institutions represent the nation and, more generally, the indigenous peoples of the world, says Professor Simon Knell of the University of Leicester in the foreword to Te Papa: Reinventing New Zealands national museum 19982018. Indeed, it is hard to think of another national museum that has so fundamentally rewritten the ethics of being a museum. McCarthy, who worked at Te Papa leading up to and over the time of its landmark opening (on February 14 1998), presents an honest appraisal of the museums origins, development, innovations, and some of the issues that have sparked national and local debate. He looks at how it was that a small country in the South Pacific could create such a bold statement of the latest museological trends and become a model for many others around the globe. And how it became the most loved, most visited, most debated, and therefore most prominent, museum in Australasia. As an academic who has researched and published widely on the subject of historical and contemporary Maori engagement with museums, McCarthy also analyses one of the most important aspects of Te Papas legacy its approach to biculturalism and its Maori museum practice, both of which have attracted international attention. What I have tried to do with this book is provide a record, and show how the exhibitions, programmes and policy grew out of the time and place, says McCarthy. Which is what those who work at Te Papa now engaged in the renewal of the permanant exhibitions are doing for their own times. History is made, so it can be unmade and remade. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Hyderabad: Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao on Thursday announced the formation of a new corporation named, Telangana Rashtra Rythu Samanvaya Samiti (Telangana State Farmers Co-ordination Committee). He said the proposed corporation would take the measures initiated by the government for agriculture development and farmers welfare at the grass roots level. He made it clear the proposed corporation will be a non-profit organisation and the funds allocated for it will be used for achieving the aims and objectives of the corporation. Mr Rao said, like the village and mandal farmers coordination committees, the district and state-level committees too will be formed soon. The CM held a review meeting at Pragati Bhavan. He said the coordination committees will have their specified duties and responsibilities and will play an active role in the agricultural operations, from sowing the seed to selling the produce at MSP. He said at least 51 per cent of these committees would be formed by farmers from the weaker sections and women. He said 2,630 Farmers Daises will be constructed across the st-ate, which will mean one for every 5,000 acres for the farmers to organise their meetings, discussions and exchange of views with one another. The CM asked officials to complete the construction of these daises soon. He wanted the farmers coordination committees to take this responsibility. The CM asked the Collectors concerned to identify lands for the purpose. He wanted them to procure lands either from the government, through donors or by purchasing the lands. Bengaluru: It was a sweet victory for the citizens yet again, as they pressured the government to retract its decision to amend the Karnataka Tree Preservation Act (1976). However, they have chosen not to rest on their oars. A group of citizens, led by tree doctor Vijay Nishanth, has already started preparing an 'environmental manifesto' keeping the environmental degradation in mind. With elections around the corner, the manifesto will be handed over to all the political parties and they have to address them in their own party manifestos, if they really have an intention to earn the votes of environment loving citizens, Nishanth said. "No matter which government comes to power, the environment has to be given the first priority. But all these years it is neglected and that is where people like us have to step in by registering our protests," he observed. As normal people even we have our own business and cannot always come out on streets and keep protesting. That in other ways gives a wrong notion that environmentalists and citizens activists have no better job to do, but to just protest every single move of government, Nishanth said and added, I shall be calling environmentalists, green crusaders, citizen activists and people from all walks of life like theatre personality Prakash Belawadi, former judge M.F. Saldana across the state to prepare this." He said the support from the youth and citizens has been overwhelming and with their encouragement, we shall influence the politicians to give first priority for the environment. Chopped tree unattended Even though felling of trees is governed by Karnataka Preservation of Trees Act (1976), this is hardly respected either by the citizens or the civic authorities. A few weeks ago, a coconut tree on 12th Main Indiranagar was hastily chopped down by the BBMP. When nearby residents questioned the officials, they said it was affecting the flow of water on the side drain, but they did not even bother to remove the chopped remnants. This is the case across the city. BBMP or Bescom employees come in vehicles, chop and trim trees randomly and vanish only to come and repeat the same next time. Mayor Sampath Raj was not available for comments. Flames engulfed the unit and thick, black smoke billowed into the air from its premises. (Photo: Twitter | ANI) Hyderabad: Four workers suffered minor injuries in a fire which broke out in a pharma unit at Hyderabad on Friday morning, police said. The fire broke out between 6:30 am and 7 am in the pharma unit located in the Jeedimetla area, a police official told news agency PTI. "Four people (all workers) suffered minor burn injuries," he said. Flames engulfed the unit and thick, black smoke billowed into the air from its premises, the official said. Half a dozen fire engines were rushed to the spot and the blaze has been brought under control, he said. Fire breaks out in a chemical factory in the Jeedimetla industrial area of Hyderabad (Photo: Twitter | ANI) An operation is on to find if anyone is still trapped inside the premises, the official said. The exact cause of the fire was not yet known, he added. Meanwhile, the Industrial inspector has informed that 20 members were on duty when the fire took place. He added that the main reason for the fire is due to an explosion in the reactor. "We expect that the fire will be controlled in some time, as of now five workers who were stuck inside in the chemical company have been rescued," said Assistant District Fire Officer GV Prasad. The Jeedimetla industrial area is home to hundreds of small scale industries, and larger chemical and pharmaceutical industries. Therefore, fire officials were concerned about the spread of fire. Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Canadian counterpart Justin Trudeau on Friday inked six pacts and witnessed the exchange of MoUs between India and Canada. (Photo: AP) New Delhi: In a veiled message to his Canadian counterpart Justin Trudeau on extremism, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday said that India will not tolerate anyone who challenges unity and integrity of the country. Modi said that there should be no space for those who misuse religion for political motives and promote separatism. Modi's remark assumes significance in the light of the Trudeau government's soft stance on Sikhs who demand Khalistan. On Thursday, Khalistani terrorist Jaspal Atwal was reported to have been invited by Canadian High Commissioner Nadir Patel for a dinner in Delhi. PM Modi and his Canadian Trudeau on Friday inked six pacts and witnessed the exchange of MoUs between India and Canada. The two prime ministers discussed many issues including defence operation, terrorism and extremism. They also held extensive talks, exploring ways to boost ties in several key areas, including trade and energy, education, healthcare, IT, science and technology, defence and security, tourism and people-to-people contacts. Addressing a joint press meeting, Modi said the two countries renewed MoU on higher education which will enhance the exchange of Indian students to Canada. Justin Trudeau, in briefing with Modi, said, "we share common respect for democratic values, pluralism and democracy". "We share not only rich a history but a set of values that encourage a natural friendship between our two countries," he further said. Trudeau said India is a natural partner and a trusted friend for commercial cooperation as Canada looks to diversify its own economy and looks for new opportunities to do business beyond its boundaries. Earlier, External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj called on the Canadian prime minister and discussed various issues of mutual interest. "Picture speaks for itself! EAM Sushma Swaraj had a warm meeting with the Prime Minister of Canada Justin Trudeau and discussed ways to strengthen and deepen our partnership," Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) spokesperson Raveesh Kumar tweeted and posted a picture of the two leaders. Five days after landing in India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday welcomed his Canadian counterpart with a huge hug and also greeted his wife and three children. Trudeau was also given a ceremonial reception at Rashtrapati Bhawan. (Photo: AP) Trudeau is expected to address a conference of young change-makers on Saturday. The ties between India and Canada have been on an upswing. Approximately 1.4 million Canadians are of Indian heritage and India is Canada's second largest source of immigrants. THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Opposition Leader Ramesh Chennithala handed over a letter written by Shuhaib's parents to Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan seeking a CBI probe. But the government did not come up with a favourable order. "We have decided to go to any extent with our protest. We will take up the issue in the Assembly session starting on Monday," said Mr Chennithala. CPM general secretary Sitaram Yechury's speech at the party state conference showed that the CPM was not ready to renounce political violence, he said. "Nobody spoke against the gruesome murders in Kannur. Instead, they have been repeating their statement that political violence is not their policy," he added. The UDF leaders took part in a fund-raising campaign for Shuhaib's family at 110 centres in Kannur district. The UDF will also observe February 24 as Shuhaib day and hold protest meetings in all the panchayats, said convener P. P. Thankachan. HYDERABAD: Bifurcation still has a major role in the politics of Andhra Pradesh. The state bifurcation in 2014 had its negative impacts on the Congress. Now, in the ensuing Assembly general elections, Special Category status issue is going to play a key role. The main agenda of all political parties, except the BJP, in AP is to gain Special Category status for the state in the coming elections. To get political advantage on this issue, main political parties in the state, Telugu Desam, YSR Congress and the Congress are contemplating strategies to get upper hand on others. YSRC and Congress are intensifying agitation, urging the Centre to grant a special tag to AP, in view of the coming elections. Keeping this in view, Telugu Desam also changed its view and is demanding a special tag to AP. All these years, political parties were silent on this issue, except YSRC that raised it a few times. Congress is being held responsible for the states bifurcation and BJP is being blamed for not granting a special tag to AP. In the previous elections, the Congress not only lost power but also did not win a single seat out of 175 Assembly constituencies in the state. But in the coming elections, BJP, which is being held responsible for not granting the special tag, has nothing to lose. With the alliance of TD, BJP won four Assembly and two Lok Sabha seats in the previous elections. In fact, BJP has no strength in AP to win on its own in the Assembly or Lok Sabha elections. Due to this, TD is planning to break the alliance with the BJP and has shifted its stand from a Special Financial package for the state to the Special Category status being demanded by other parties. AP Chief Minister and TD national president N. Chandrababu Naidu has been speaking about special status to AP since the last two days in all the meetings, and wherever possible. Congress and YSRC had been demanding for this special status since the states bifurcation when the TD was voicing for special financial package. The police team will retrieve CCTV footage and question staff members on what happened on Monday night at a meeting in which Chief Secretary Anshu Prakash was allegedly attacked by 2 AAP lawmakers. (Photo: ANI | Twitter) New Delhi: A Delhi Police team was sent to Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal's residence in the Civil Lines area on Friday for collecting evidence related to an alleged assault on Chief Secretary Anshu Prakash by Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) MLAs. "A police team has been sent to the chief minister's residence for collecting all evidence, including CCTV footage, in connection with the alleged assault on the Delhi Chief Secretary," Additional DCP, North Delhi, Harinder Singh said. Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal told reporters, "A lot of policemen are at my house. My home is being searched." According to Delhi government spokesperson Arunodya Prakash, 60-70 policemen entered the chief minister's residence. "CM house taken over by police. Huge number of police force enters CM house without any intimation. Police Raj kills democracy in Delhi. Police spread all over inside CM house. If this what they can to do an elected CM, think what they can with poor people!!!" Arunodya Prakash wrote on Twitter. "There is minimum courtesy in democracy. Every citizen has rights under constitution. Is it an attempt to humiliate a CM who is working tirelessly for the poor and the last man of the society?" he tweeted. The police team will retrieve CCTV footage and question staff members on what happened on Monday night at a meeting in which Chief Secretary Anshu Prakash was allegedly attacked by two lawmakers of the AAP. Delhi Chief Secretary Anshu Prakash has alleged that he was beaten by the lawmakers in Arvind Kejriwal's presence after being called for a meeting at midnight. Also Read: Delhi chief secy alleges assault by 2 AAP MLAs at Kejriwal's residence The chief secretary said he was attacked after being asked to explain why a three-year anniversary campaign of AAP was not being released. AAP legislators Prakash Jarwal and Okhla MLA Amantullah Khan were arrested by the police on Wednesday in connection with the alleged assault on the Delhi Chief Secretary during a meeting at Kejriwal's residence on Monday night. Meanwhile, the Delhi chief minister has sought time from LG Anil Baijal, to have a meeting. On Thursday, Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal's key aide VK Jain reportedly told a city court that he had seen ruling party lawmakers assault on chief secretary Anshu Prakash. Also Read: More trouble for AAP: Kejriwal aide saw party MLAs assaulting Delhi chief secy Jain, a retired bureaucrat, said he had gone to the washroom during the meeting and when he returned, he saw two lawmakers hitting the Chief Secretary. He even claimed that the Chief Minister and his deputy Manish Sisodia watched silently. The statement, recorded before a magistrate, will be admissible as court evidence. (With inputs from PTI.) New Delhi: Terming as "unfortunate" the recent incident of alleged assault of Delhi Chief Secretary Anshu Prakash, Lieutenant Governor (LG) Anil Baijal on Friday said there was no place for violence in a democratic society and that the government must take steps to rebuild the trust of its employees. The LG's comments came after Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal met him, along with his cabinet colleagues, following a Delhi Police team arriving at the chief minister's residence and seizing a hard disk of the CCTV camera system installed there in connection with the alleged assault of the chief secretary by Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) MLAs. Following the incident, the bureaucrats in the Delhi government have boycotted the meetings called by ministers. Baijal said no government could fulfil its promises to the people if its employees felt "demoralised and insecure". "There is no place for violence in a democratic and civilised society. Steps need to be taken to remove the mistrust between the government employees and the elected government, so that the development of Delhi and public interest do not get adversely affected," an official statement from the LG's office said. Meanwhile, the police on Friday claimed that its action (of swooping down to the chief minister's residence) came after its request for CCTV footage from Kejriwal's residence did not yield any result. Several policemen on Friday went to Kejriwal's official residence in the Civil Lines area here, where Chief Secretary Prakash was allegedly assaulted, in the presence of the chief minister, on the intervening night of February 19-20. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his family meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi in New Delhi. (Photo: Twitter | @MEAIndia) New Delhi: Five days after landing in India, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau met Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday in New Delhi. Modi welcomed his Canadian counterpart with a huge hug and also greeted his wife and three children. Trudeau was also given a ceremonial reception at Rashtrapari Bhawan. Prime Minister Narendra Modi hugs Canada PM Justin Trudeau. (Photo: Twitter | @MEAIndia) Modi and Trudeau are scheduled to hold bilateral talks at around noon. During the meet, the two leaders are expected to focus on trade, defence, civil nuclear cooperation, space, tackling climate change energy and education. Cooperation on counter-terror measures is also expected to be a key area of focus in view of India's concerns over Sikh radicalism in Canada. After receiving the ceremonial guard of honour at the Rashtrapati Bhavan, the Canadian Prime Minister and his family paid tribute to Mahatma Gandhi at Rajghat in New Delhi. #Delhi: Canadian Prime Minister #JustinTrudeau & his family pay tribute to Mahatma Gandhi at Rajghat. pic.twitter.com/M3sDqfgmPy ANI (@ANI) February 23, 2018 Earlier on Thursday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi posted a welcome tweet for Justin Trudeau. "I hope PM @JustinTrudeau and his family had a very enjoyable stay so far. I particularly look forward to meeting his children Xavier, Ella-Grace, and Hadrien. Here is a picture from my 2015 Canada visit, when I'd met PM Trudeau and Ella-Grace," Modi tweeted. The Canadian Prime Minister replied, "She remembers it well, @narendramodi! It's been great to visit so far - we'll see you today." Also Read: Modi-Trudeau meet today: PM looking forward to see Justin's children Trudeau, who is on his maiden visit to India, arrived on Saturday evening and the Canadian PM and his family toured the country amid talks of snub by the political establishment over what's seen as Canada's soft stance on Sikhs who demand Khalistan. On Thursday, Khalistani terrorist Jaspal Atwal was found to have been invited by Canadian High Commissioner Nadir Patel for a dinner in Delhi. The dinner invitation to Atwal at a reception for Trudeau at the Canada House was cancelled. On Tuesday, Atwal had attended an event in Mumbai and was photographed with Justin Trudeau's wife Sophie Trudeau and Canadian minister Amarjeet Sohi. Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman refused to comment on Army Chief's statement while speaking to journalists on the sidelines of Uttar Pradesh Investors Summit. (Photo: File) New Delhi: Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, on Thursday, refused to respond to questions about Army chief Bipin Rawats comments on the rise of Muslim-oriented political party led by Badruddin Ajmal in the Northeast. "I don't want to react to anything...Somebody said something, somebody talking about....why should I react?" Sitharaman told journalists on the sidelines of Uttar Pradesh Investors Summit when she was asked to comment on General Rawat's remarks. Army Chief General Bipin Rawat sparked a row when he spoke about the faster growth of the All India United Democratic Front (AIUDF). He implied that an influx of illegal Muslim migrants into the area is what has led to the growth of this party and an increase in the Muslim population in several districts of the state. Also read: Pak cause for migrant influx: Army Chief General Bipin Rawat "There is a party called AIUDF. They have grown in a faster time-frame than the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). When we talk of Jan Sangh with two MPs and where they have reached, AIUDF is moving at a faster pace in the state of Assam, the Army chief said. The AIUDF, formed in 2005, has three members in parliament and 13 legislators in the Assam assembly. The Army Chief also said the influx of people from Bangladesh into the Northeast was "planned" and part of proxy warfare by Pakistan with support from China. Responding to General Rawats comment, Army said there was nothing controversial in and that he had just mentioned "amalgamation and development". Also read: Nothing political or religious in Bipin Rawat's comments, defends Army Badruddin Ajmal, reacting to the Army Chief's comments on his party, had said that the remarks were shocking. Pointing out that they take the Indian Army in very high esteem, Ajmal told this newspaper, I believe General Bipin Rawat has wrongly been briefed by his field officers. We as a political party have been upfront in demanding the NRC (National Register of Citizens) both at the Parliament and in the Assembly. A collection of imported watches which were seized by the Enforcement Directorate during its searches on the premises of Nirav Modi on Friday. (Photo: PTI) Mumbai/New Delhi: Expanding its probe into the alleged PNB fraud, the ED on Friday summoned Nirav Modis wife Ami for questioning even as the agency froze bank deposits and shares worth about Rs 44 crore of the diamantaire. The Enforcement Directorate also seized a huge collection of imported watches from a workshop location linked to the billionaire diamond jewellery businessman. The ED officials said they have put fresh freeze orders on bank accounts containing Rs 30 crore and shares worth Rs 13.86 crore of the Nirav Modi group under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act. Besides summoning Modis wife Ami, an American citizen, the Central probe agency has called his uncle and Gitanjali Gems promoter Mehul Choksi for questioning in the case on February 26 at the ED office in Mumbai, they said. New Delhi: Stepping up the pressure on Maldivian President Abdulla Yameen after the Maldives extended the state of emergency, both India and Canada on Friday in a joint statement deplored the degradation of judicial independence and authority and of democratic institutions in the tiny archipelago nation. Prime Minister Narendra Modi discussed the situation in the Maldives with visiting Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Modi said there was a similarity of views with Trudeau on the issue of restoration of the independence of democratic institutions in the Maldives. Late on Thursday night, the Maldives had sharply criticised India, saying that statements by the Indian government on the situation ignore the facts and ground realities and are a clear distortion of facts. The joint statement released mentioned the situation in the Maldives, saying, The two leaders (Modi and Trudeau) expressed strong concern about the recent developments in Maldives and their implications for a free society. They deplored the degradation of judicial independence and authority and of democratic institutions, as well as respect for fundamental freedoms, such as free speech. The government of Maldives was urged to ensure early resumption of the political process. HYDERABAD: Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao on Friday warned that Aadhaar-Pattadar passbook linkage is a must and those who fail to do so will be treated as benami. He added that there were some people who were not coming forward to link their Aadhaar cards with their passbooks despite repeated appeals. They have to link Aadhaar with their passbooks, failing which the-ir lands would be identified as Benami, Mr Rao said during a review meeting held at Pragati Bhavan on the distribution of new electronic pattadar passbooks to land owners across the state on March 11. It was decided to link Aadhaar cards to bank accounts to maintain land records properly. But some people in Medchal and Rangareddy and some other districts ha-ve not linked their Aa-dhaar with the land reco-rds. Such people should give their Aadhaar deta-ils to the officials at the earliest. Lands of those who have not linked th-eir Aadhaar cards will have to be treated as Be-nami lands, he said. The CM directed offici-als to issue new e-pattadar passbooks to farmers owning assigned lands along with other farmers on March 11. He said the lands under the possession of the beneficiaries of assigned lands should be identified and clarity should be given on the ownership rights. The passbooks should be issued in the names of the owners. Every entry in the passbook should be scrutinised thoroughly and there should not be any mistake. While doing so, there should not be any undue haste. If a farmer who has land in the village is also the owner of non-agriculture land, those details also should be made as an entry in the passbooks and an additional column should be provided for this purpose. In the anxiety to complete the work of passbooks for distribution on Mar-ch 11, there should not be any mistakes in the passbooks, Mr Rao said. The CM said there is no objection even if there is some delay in printing the passbooks for the assignees but the entries in the passbooks should be examined thoroughly. The government should collect information not only about the farmers cultivating their own land but also farmers cultivating on the assigned lands, the CM averred. The CM also directed officials to provide drinking water to all the villages through Mission Bhagiratha by March 31. While laying the pipe-lines in the villages, a parallel project of laying internal pipe network in the villages should also be taken up, he said. New Delhi: In a clear warning to pro-Khalistan anti-India separatists operating from Canada, Prime Minister Narendra Modi after holding talks with Canadian PM Justin Trudeau on Friday said no tolerance would be shown for those challenging Indias unity and integrity. This is also being seen as a veiled message to the Trudeau government which is perceived by many to be soft on pro-Khalistan Sikh radicals. Modi said there should be no place for those who use sectarianism for political purposes and create divisions in society. The two countries also unveiled a framework for countering terrorism and violent extremism which mentioned threats from Khalistani terror groups Babbar Khalsa International, and the International Sikh Youth Federation apart from the Pakistan-based terror outfits LeT and JeM. The Khalistan issue has overshadowed Mr Trudeaus week-long visit to India. After talks, the two Prime Ministers resolved to combat terrorism and violent extremism in all their forms and manifestations. They also called for bringing terrorists to justice and holding accountable state sponsors of terrorism, including cross-border terrorism and further emphasised that no country should allow its territory to be used for terrorist and violent extremist activities. Both countries signed six pacts including on energy cooperation and agreed to step up trade ties apart from endorsing the continuation of uranium exports from Canada for peaceful use of civil nuclear power. Those challenging the unity and integrity of our two countries cannot be tolerated. There should be no space for those who misuse sectarianism for political purposes and widen the gulf of divisions. Terrorism is a threat to democratic societies like India and Canada, Modi said in his speech. Jaipur: Those who made law against superstitions are afraid of evil spirits. The lawmakers in Rajasthan believe that the state Assembly building is haunted by ghosts and want to perform a yajna to warn them off. The reason for this absurd behaviour being that ever since the Assembly shifted to this new building in 2001, not a single day all 200 MLAs sat together in the house. Those who raised demand for havan to ward off evil spirits are BJP MLAs. The debate was triggered following death of two ruling party MLAs. Nathdwara MLA Kalyan Singh Chauhan died this week while undergoing treatment at a private hospital in Udaipur, while BJP MLA from Mandalgarh Kirti Kumari died due to swine flu in August last year. What formed the basis of the MLAs fear is that the Assembly was built on a land that was earlier a cremation ground and even now the Assembly building is adjacent to a cremation ground. BJP legislator from Nagaur Habibur Rehman raised the matter asking Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan to conduct a pooja in the Assembly to get rid of this ominous thing. It was a cremation place where dead used to be buried, therefore, the place is a haunted. Why else would 200 MLAs never sat together in this House even once, he told media. Chief whip Kalulal Gurjar allegedly seconded this thought. It is possible that children were cremated here and their soul may not be at peace. We have asked the CM for havan, he said. On the other hand Congress legislators Govind Singh Dotasara and Dheeraj Gurjar accused the chief whip of spreading superstition. Meanwhile, renowned industrialist and former general secretary of Federation of Rajasthan Trade and Industry claimed that a part of the Assembly was situated on land that belongs to his family for which compensation has not paid for last 53 years and the matter is pending in the court. He denied that there were evil spirits in the Assembly. Staffers said that when the construction began rituals were performed. The matter has always been talked whenever something happens with an MLA in the Assembly. Once a senior leader was locked inside his room mysteriously and at that time too ghosts were made suspects. An unidentified man who attempted to break into a house in a village near Chengalpet, 40 km from the city, was allegedly lynched by villagers on Wednesday night. Chennai: An unidentified man who attempted to break into a house in a village near Chengalpet, 40 km from the city, was allegedly lynched by villagers on Wednesday night. Police sources said that the incident happened in Kandhaloor, a village under the foothills of a mountain near Chengalpet off GST road. Most of the occupants of the village are casual labourers. On Wednesday, around 11 30 pm, a man had attempted to break into a locked house there. The house belonged to Babu (40). Babu was undergoing treatment for tuberculosis at the Government Hospital in Tambaram Sanatorium and his wife was staying, police said. Hearing a noise, other villagers gathered and caught the robber red-handed. In a bid to escape from the villagers, the man had taken to his heels when he fell into an open drain there. He was then treated to mob justice. A passer-by who witnessed the commotion informed the police, after which Chengalpet taluk police rushed to the scene. Police secured the seriously injured thief and moved him to the government hospital where he was declared brought dead. We are yet to ascertain the identity of the man. Preliminary investigations have suggested that he had come to rob from one of the houses. He had suffered injuries on the back of his head, which we suspect to be from the fall in the open drain, a police officer said. Chengalpet taluk police has registered a case under section 174 CrPC (suspicious death) and are investigating. Police said that they would await the results of the autopsy to ascertain the exact reason for the death and alter sections if necessary. This is the second instance of a robbery suspect treated to mob justice in Kancheepuram district in the past six months. Four months ago, on October 4, 2017, an unidentified man who broke into the farmhouse of a retired central government official near Sri Perumbudur, 50 km from the city, died after he was beaten up by the caretakers of the house and the local villagers. Modified human cells can be used as drugs. They can be modified in lab and can infuse them back into cells, says Dr Shreeram Aradhya, chief medical officer of Novartis Pharma. Hyderabad: The breakthrough innovation, data and digital technology are the key priorities to lead innovation in Life Sciences sector in India. In breakthrough innovation, the main focus should be on high-end transformative innovation including personalised medicine said, Dr Shreeram Aradhya, chief medical officer of Novartis Pharma, during the keynote address at the BioAsia conclave. Terming personalised medicine as not a business risk, he said, Modified human cells can be used as drugs. They can be modified in lab and can infuse them back into cells. Due to the advancement in technology, there is increasing awareness in preventive medicine. Furthermore, real world data increasingly recognised as enabler of research and development and the next generation of platform is Data Science. He said Artificial intelligence and Machine learning are allowing to progress in Life Sciences sector in a better way. Technology is helping cut costs in the clinical trails Preventive medicine is inculcated using real-time monitoring with devices like patches, watches/bands, contact lenses, subcutaneous senors and integrated models. With digital therapies, drugs are being delivered in an intelligent way using assistance tools, apps, virtual reality, games and behavior change. Speaking about a development on enhancing outcomes in heart failure, Mr Shreeram said, Enhancing outcomes in a heart failure are recorded using a wifi-enabled device instead of frequent visits to hospitals. Bengaluru: The BJP has launched a Sack Haris campaign on social media to build pressure on Chief Minister Siddaramaiah to sack Shanthinagar Congress MLA NA Haris whose son, Mohammed Nalapad and his associates had brutally assaulted a youth at a cafe here last Saturday, from the party. The BJP Karnataka Unit tweeted, "Congress is not taking action against MLA Haris by saying they can't punish the father for a crime committed by his son. But the main culprit in this case is MLA Haris, who has abused his office to prevent proper investigation & due process of law. He must be sacked. Continuing in the same vein, the BJP tweeted, Police Inspector who followed MLA Haris' orders is suspended. But the man who gave orders in the first place, MLA Haris, is untouched. This is neither fair nor logical. There won't be justice in this case unless NA Haris is sacked. Why is CM protecting him? Mr Chief Minister Siddaramaiah, Kannadigas are asking questions. Why are you protecting MLA Haris who is misleading the ongoing probe? How is justice possible if the MLA is not sacked from the Assembly membership. Are you protecting MLA Haris who collects hafta from bars and pubs in Shanthinagar constituency?... Speak up, Mr CM. Hubballi: Launching a tirade against Chief Minister Siddaramaiah, State BJP president B.S. Yeddyurappa alleged that the Congress government is utilising funds meant for the welfare of the Dalit community, for the loan waiver scheme intended for farmers. Addressing a convention of Scheduled Caste and Tribe communities in Haveri on Thursday, he said that the party will launch a state-wide agitation against transfer of Rs 929 crore to waive off farmer loans which the government had done with an eye on votes ahead of the elections. He also said that he will send Congress leaders to jail by exposing all their scandals within three months after the BJP comes to power. Stating that more than 50 percent of the funds earmarked in the Budget have not been utilised, he demanded White Papers on fund allocation for the development of the Dalit community and money utilised for them by the government during the last five years. We will not allow the government to misuse the funds meant for Dalit welfare. A fund of Rs 160 crore is earmarked to give publicity to government schemes but Karnataka is pushed 10 years back in development. Where has all the money released by the Centre gone? Congress leaders are only engaged in looting the public exchequer. The BJP will launch an agitation after holding a discussion with party leaders about the strategy, Yeddyurappa said. He claimed that the state government is collecting 50 per cent commission from contractors of Upper Krishna Project by giving 25 per cent more allocation than the funds required for it. He also questioned Chief Minister Siddaramaiah as to where he got the wrist watch worth Rs 40 lakh from and why he returned it after a controversy erupted. Criticising AICC president Rahul Gandhi, he said the Congress leader has no moral right to talk about Dalits and Dr Ambedkar. He said that BJP is committed to fulfil all promises made by the party in its manifesto. Appealing to party workers to be present in large numbers during Prime Minister Narendra Modis rally in Davangere on February 27, he said that he will showcase the strength of the party during the convention. Terming Rahul Gandhi as an election Hindu for visiting religious institutions ahead of the Assembly elections, the BJP Karnataka in-charge Muralidhar Rao said that the state government has failed to safeguard the interests of Dalits and the Congress is using them only for vote-bank politics. HC has also given permission to erect 50 flex banners on February 24 as long as it does not violate the provisions of Tamil Nadu Open Places (Regulation of pasting of posters and fixing of Thatty Boards) Rules,1995 . Chennai: Pulling up the Coimbatore police for refusing to receive a representation, the Madras High Court has directed the Deputy Superintendent of Police, Periyanaickenpalayam, Coimbatore, to grant permission to an expelled AIADMK party functionary to conduct the event of the celebration of the 70th birth anniversary of the former chief minister late J. Jayalalithaa and to erect 50 flex banners on February 24. Allowing a petition from G. Anandan, Justice M.S. Ramesh, who gave the direction said such flex banners shall be erected subject to the condition that it does not violate the provisions of Tamil Nadu Open Places (Regulation of pasting of posters and fixing of Thatty Boards) Rules, 1995. It is open to the DSP to impose reasonable restrictions while granting permission for the function, the judge added. Petitioner contended that when he had submitted the representation to the police on January 24 seeking permission for the function, they refused to receive the same either in person or through the post. Additional government pleader D. Raja submitted that the petitioner had not gotten permission from the appropriate authorities and that if he was permitted to erect flex banners in 110 places, it would cause hindrance to the public and day-to-day affairs also in the locality. Pointing out that the conduct of the peaceful meeting or a public function was a fundamental right, subject to reasonable restrictions, the judge said so long as the petitioner seeks permission to conduct of a peaceful meeting and public function, the police may not be justified in refusing to receive the petitioners representation. However, the police can refuse to grant permission after receiving the same, if such conduct of the meeting may cause inconvenience to the public. The inspector of police will not be justified, at any point in time, in refusing to receive the said representation sent through posts. Such conduct would amount to dereliction of the ordinary duties of their office. I am constrained to observe that it was not appropriate on the part of the police officer to refuse to receive the postal cover, the judge added. Exactly a hundred years ago, a wedding took place in Bombay (now Mumbai). It was Spartan in its simplicity, covert in its execution, and dramatic in its audacity. On April 18, 1918, a beautiful young socialite the only daughter of wealthy Parsi parents converted to Islam to marry the love of her life. The following day, again without telling her parents, she left their palatial home and with nothing more than an umbrella and her faithful dog, she walked to the house of an affluent Muslim lawyer, whose house on Mount Pleasant Hill stood yards away from her former home. After a small, very private ceremony witnessed by strangers but not their families, Rattanbai Petit became Maryam Jinnah. Their marriage, which lasted almost 11 years, more than defied convention at the time; it remained impervious to rational analysis. Biographers of the Jinnahs from Hector Bolitho (1954) to Jaswant Singh (2009) grappled with the conventional image of Ruttie a beautiful, flighty, highly strung socialite still in her teens when she fell in love with a man 24 years her senior, and the lofty insularity of M.A. Jinnah an established barrister with a flourishing practice, known for leading a rigorously disciplined life, in which human emotions had little place. Had the British biographer James Pope-Hennessy met M.A. Jinnah, he might have applied the same sharp description to him that he did after observing the Duchess of Windsor. She is flat and angular, Pope-Hennessy wrote, and could have been designed for a mediaeval playing card. Sheela Reddys painstaking study Mr & Mrs Jinnah: The Marriage that Shook India (2017), has finally provided a newer generation of Pakistanis with an almost tangible holograph, in which they are able to see both the Jinnahs in the round. Her research began with her discovery of a cache of letters written by Ruttie to her friend and confidante Padmaja, the daughter of Congress freedom fighter and poetess Sarojini Naidu. Naidu had been one of his earliest admirers, lauding his virile patriotism and calling him in 1916 the Ambassador of Hindu-Muslim Unity. It is clear Ruttie Jinnah never intended her private letters ever to be published. Had that been her aim, she might have been more circumspect in her outbursts. She died on February 20, 1929, on her 29th birthday. One of her last letters to her husband contained this heartrending plaint: Try and remember me beloved as the flower you plucked and not the flower you tread on. It must be admitted that by temperament, the Quaid was seen as an undemonstrative, often unfeeling man. Yet, the love he nurtured for Ruttie was deep, sincere and sustained. His grief at her funeral in February 1929 was not simulated, nor was the remorse he expressed when he stopped at her grave before leaving Mumbai for the last time in August 1947. As a politician, Jinnah grew stronger after political defeats; as a man, he never recovered from the failure of his marriage. Now, a hundred years later, a modern Pakistani political leader has made a third marriage which can be described also as Spartan, covert, dramatic. After weeks of needless speculation, the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf has admitted that its leader the 66-year-old Imran Khan has married his spiritual counsellor. She is a middle-aged lady whose husband obligingly divorced her so that she could marry Imran Khan. Apparently, she convinced him that their union would propel his political career into an upward trajectory. One wonders how future biographers and social historians will analyse this unusual union. Mr Khans detractors are having a field day mocking his latest attempt to find a suitable spouse. That is not fair. If there is disappointment at the manner in which his latest nuptials were conducted, it is because the public had expected him to demonstrate his virile patriotism in a more discreet way. Pakistan is already short of heroes. The few left are proving to be effigies sculpted in ice. Actor Kamal Haasan has entered a political space that is fragmented after AIADMK supremo J. Jayalalithaas death. Having taken months for his formal plunge, the actor has chosen to project himself on the reformist path, with the anti-corruption plank foremost. His joining the fray is in Tamil Nadus highest traditions with a long history of association between films and politics as two scriptwriters and three actors have gone on to become chief ministers. What, however, is yet to be seen is whether an affinity for movie stars will still translate into votes in a more crowded political scene, where the other big silver screen star, Rajinikanth, may soon step in. What Kamal aims at goes beyond screen glamour as he wishes to change a system bogged down by graft at the highest levels of government. Beyond projecting himself as an anti-corruption fighter, Kamal has chosen a narrow platform to appeal to the atheistic Periyarist, Dravidian votebank. That places him directly in competition for one-half of Dravidian voters who regularly back the DMK. This also places him in no position to seek any pre-poll alliance or understanding with Rajini, his film contemporary for over 40 years. He has declared that politically he is neither left nor right, but at the centre, despite being seen in the company of Keralas Left CM Pinarayi Vijayan. His appeal is mainly to an electorate in shock after seeing a Tamil Nadu giant convicted under the Prevention of Corruption Act, even if the charges abated as she had died, but her companion and confidante is in jail. These are early days yet for a political novitiate to know all the ropes but Kamal did seem a little presumptuous by claiming a link to the late A.P.J. Abdul Kalams legacy of morality and ethicality in public life by starting his political yatra from his humble Rameswaram abode. But Kamal wasnt even seen at the Peoples Presidents funeral and he had only a passing association with the scientist who went on to become one of Indias most popular heads of state. With witty one-liners appealing to the audience, but in non-rhetorical style, Kamal has already set the tone for a politician connecting with people on the simplest terms. This straightaway means a change from Jayas style of exploiting charisma but remaining remote, and MGRs mystique. The hard part is, however, just beginning for Kamal and Rajini as they have to strive to translate their mass appeal into positive action on the EVM button. With Tamil Nadu likely to plunge into greater uncertainty if the court ruling goes against the Speakers decision to disqualify 18 AIADMK MLAs of the T.T.V. Dhinakaran faction, the states new leaders may have to face the people sooner rather than after a full five-year term in 2021, as the Lok Sabha elections are due to come up in just over a year. Kirari! For Arena uses multiple cameras to track the movements of the player. (Representative Image) Japanese telecommunications company NTT is hoping to bring an added dimension to the 2020 Tokyo Olympics by projecting live sporting events with its 3D hologram technology. NTT has been working on a new system it calls Kirari! For Arena, which, unlike its current technology, does not require sensors to be attached to an athletes body. The company is aiming to have the system ready by the time Tokyo hosts the next Summer Games. From all four directions, you can see players projected in the field moving in 3D, Kota Hidaka, senior research engineer at NTT Service Evolution Laboratories, said at a demonstration on Thursday. Kirari! For Arena uses multiple cameras to track the movements of the player. Images are then transported to devices which show 3D hologram figures real-time in a different location. So, for example, fans unable to watch a karate match in an arena could watch 3D holograms of the fighters battling it out live. We are hoping to establish the system and deliver the service in which people can enjoy watching games by gathering around the 3D hologram, Hidaka said. NTT is an official sponsor of the 2020 Tokyo Summer Olympics. Click on Deccan Chronicle Technology and Science for the latest news and reviews. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter. Click on Deccan Chronicle Technology and Science for the latest news and reviews. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter. The rear, however, is reminiscent of the recently launched Moto X4, especially with the curved glass panel and dual camera module. After Xiaomis Redmi Note 5 series launched in last week, it wasnt long before arch-rival Lenovo-led Motorola would be readying its midrange fighter, the G6 range. The Moto G6 has been out in the world of leaks and rumours for a while, and now we have another glimpse of the upcoming smartphone this time in all of its colours. Folks at Android Headlines have features a leaked image of Motorolas upcoming midrange G6 series, showing all the colours the phone will be available in. The photo is claimed to show the bigger G6 Plus and is expected to come in silver, gold, white, dark blue and cyan. Apart from the colours, one can also figure out what the G6 Plus will be made of glass and metal something that will differentiate it from its rivals in the market. The leaked photo also reaffirms the presence of a narrow-bezel 18:9 display. However, the bezels are not pretty thin, especially at the bottom with the Motorola branding and the fingerprints sensor, which is surprisingly still sitting at the front. There also appears to be an LED flash accompanying the selfie camera. The rear, however, is reminiscent of the recently launched Moto X4, especially with the curved glass panel and dual camera module. The G6 series is expected to debut with Android Oreo 8.0 and could be powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 630/636/660 chipset alongside 4GB/6GB of RAM and 64GB of storage. Expect Motorola to price it competitively to fight against the Redmi Note 5 Pro. Click on Deccan Chronicle Technology and Science for the latest news and reviews. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter. Click on Deccan Chronicle Technology and Science for the latest news and reviews. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter. What began as a power struggle between Kiir and former vice-president Riek Machar has fractured into an estimated 40 armed groups across the country, with many fighting each other. (Photo: AP) Juba(South Sudan): The witness accounts remain appalling. One South Sudanese man returned home after hiding from government soldiers to find they had blinded his mother, gouging out her eyes with spears. She had tried to defend her 17-year-old daughter from being raped by more than a dozen soldiers and didnt succeed. Seventeen soldiers then raped her. The familys father was beheaded. The latest report on human rights abuses in South Sudans five-year civil war, released on Friday by a United Nations commission, includes that horrific day in Pagak town and many others as the team collects evidence in the hopes of one day finding justice. I did not expect to be confronted with so much ritual humiliation and degradation deliberately done for multiple reasons. The suffering and cruelty was worse than anyone could have imagined, Andrew Clapham, a commission member and international law professor, said. One South Sudanese woman told the commission that her 12-year-old son was forced to have sex with his grandmother to stay alive, the report says. The findings, with sufficient evidence against both President Salva Kiirs government forces and rebels, identify more than 40 senior military officials, including three state governors, who may bear individual responsibility for war crimes. The report will be presented to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva in March. They also will be made available to judicial mechanisms such as a hybrid court for South Sudan, which long has been urged by the international community but has never appeared. Untold tens of thousands have been killed in South Sudan since the conflict erupted in December 2013, just two years after independence from Sudan. More than two million people have fled the country, the largest refugee crisis since the Rwandan genocide 24 years ago. Millions who remain at home face hunger. The new UN report is an account of the gang-rapes, castrations, ethnic violence and other abuses that have left much of the impoverished East African nation in despair, while international frustration with the warring sides grows. An attempt at a ceasefire in late December was violated within hours. Disgusted, the United States announced a largely symbolic arms embargo and urged the UN Security Council to do the same. South Sudans government did not immediately comment Friday. The human rights body should start putting the blame directly on the regime instead of blaming both sides, opposition spokesperson Lam Paul Gabriel said. While names of alleged perpetrators are being collected by the UN commission, they are not shared publicly to help protect witnesses who come forward. The names are being given to the UN human rights office in Geneva. The report, based on 230 witness statements and other materials, is the second since the UN commission was established in 2016 and the first since it was given a stronger mandate to preserve evidence and conduct investigations instead of simply monitoring and reporting. South Sudans conflict is splintering into chaos, the new report says. What began as a power struggle between Kiir and former vice-president Riek Machar has fractured into an estimated 40 armed groups across the country, with many fighting each other. But consistent patterns stand out, such as government attacks on unarmed, fleeing civilians in areas where no opposition forces were present, the report says. There is a clear pattern of ethnic persecution, for the most part by government forces, Clapham said. Despite the latest accounts of abuses, South Sudan experts are sceptical that anything will change amid what the report calls a grave lack of accountability. The recommendations of these human rights reports have not been implemented in South Sudan, making them useless, Jacob Chol, senior political analyst and professor at the University of Juba, said. He said human rights abusers should be barred from the South Sudan peace talks in neighbouring Ethiopia. The talks reached a stalemate last week but are expected to pick up again in March. The school resource officer at the high school took up a position viewing the western entrance of the building that was under attack for more than four minutes, but he never went in, Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel said. (Photo: AP) Fort Lauderdale: The armed officer on duty at the Florida school in US where a shooter killed 17 people never went inside to engage the gunman and has been placed under investigation, officials announced Thursday. The Valentine's Day shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School by a gunman armed with an AR-15 style assault rifle has reignited a national debate in the US over gun laws and school safety, including proposals by US president Donald Trump and others to designate more people including trained teachers to carry arms on school grounds. Gun-control advocates, meanwhile, have redoubled their push to ban assault rifles. The school resource officer at the high school took up a position viewing the western entrance of the building that was under attack for more than four minutes, but "he never went in," Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel said at a Thursday news conference. The shooting lasted about six minutes. Also Read: Donald Trump solution to end gun violence in school, arm teachers The officer, Scot Peterson, was suspended without pay and placed under investigation, then chose to resign, Israel said. When asked what Peterson should have done, Israel said the deputy should have "went in, addressed the killer, killed the killer." The sheriff said he was "devastated, sick to my stomach. There are no words. I mean, these families lost their children. .... I've been to the funerals. ... I've been to the vigils. It's just, ah, there are no words." There was also a communication issue between the person reviewing the school's security system footage and officers who responded to the school. Coral Springs Police Chief Tony Pustizzi said during a Thursday news conference that the footage being reviewed was 20 minutes old, so the responding officers were hearing that the shooter was in a certain place while officers already in that location were saying that wasn't the case. "There was nothing wrong with their equipment. Their equipment works," Pustizzi said. "It's just that when the person was reviewing the tape from 20 minutes earlier, somehow that wasn't communicated to the officers that it was a 20-minute delay." Pustizzi said the confusion didn't put anyone in danger. Nikolas Cruz had history of violence Gunman Nikolas Cruz, 19, has been jailed on 17 counts of murder and has admitted the attack. He owned a collection of weapons. Defense attorneys, state records and people who knew him indicate that he displayed behavioural troubles for years. Broward County incident reports show that unidentified callers contacted authorities with concerns about Cruz in February 2016 and November 2017. The first caller said they had third-hand information that Cruz planned to shoot up the school. The information was forwarded to the Stoneman Douglas resource officer. The second caller said Cruz was collecting guns and knives and believed "he could be a school shooter in the making." Also in November 2017, Cruz was involved in a fight with the adult son of a woman he was staying with shortly after his mother died, according to a Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office report. On 28 November, a 22-year-old man at the Lake Worth home told the responding deputy that he tried to calm down Cruz, who had been punching holes in walls and breaking objects, but Cruz hit him in the jaw, and the man hit Cruz back. Also Read: Shame on you: Florida shooting survivor calls out Trump over gun laws The deputy found Cruz a short time later at a nearby park. Cruz told the deputy he had been angry because he misplaced a photo of his recently deceased mother, and he apologized for losing his temper. The other man told the deputy he didn't want Cruz arrested. He just wanted Cruz to calm down before coming home. Politicians under pressure to tighten gun laws in response to the mass shooting floated various plans Thursday, but most fell short of reforms demanded by student activists who converged Wednesday on Florida's Capitol. Florida House Speaker Richard Corcoran said Thursday night that his chamber is going to recommend creating a special commission to investigate the "abject breakdown at all levels" that led to the shooting deaths. The Republican said the commission, likely be led by a parent of one of the slain children, would have subpoena power. Corcoran also said the news about the resource officer's failure to respond did not dissuade him from moving ahead with what he was calling the "marshal" plan to let local law-enforcement officials train and deputise someone at the school who would be authorised to carry a gun. "He's not indicative of the law enforcement community; that's not going to change our behaviour at all," Corcoran said. Also Read: Monster under our roof: Foster couple on Florida shooting gunman US and gun control State Senator Bill Galvano, who is helping craft a bill in response to the shooting deaths, insisted the idea is not the same as arming teachers. He said the programme would be optional and the deputised person would have to be trained by local law-enforcement agencies. US Senator Marco Rubio of Florida said a visit to Stoneman Douglas prompted him to change his stance on large-capacity magazines. The Republican insisted he is willing to rethink his past opposition to gun proposals if there is information the policies would prevent mass shootings. "If we are going to infringe on the Second Amendment, it has to be a policy that will work," Rubio said in an interview Thursday with AP. A day after an emotional meeting with survivors and their families, Trump tweeted his strongest stance yet on gun control. He said he would endorse strengthening background checks, banning "bump stock" style devices and raising the minimum age to 21 for buying certain rifles. At a conference of conservative activists Thursday near Washington, Vice President Mike Pence said the administration would make school safety "our top national priority" after the shooting at the school in Parkland, Florida. Calling school shootings "evil in our time," Pence exhorted those in positions of authority "to find a way to come together with American solutions." It was a markedly different tone than that deployed on stage minutes earlier by NRA Executive Vice President and CEO Wayne LaPierre, who delivered an unbowed defense of gun ownership and lashed out at Democrats saying they are using the tragedy for "political gain." Jaspal Atwal, a convicted Khalistani terrorist, photographed with Canadian PM Justin Trudeaus wife Sophie Trudeau at an event in Mumbai on February 20. (Photo: ANI) Toronto: Canadas spy agency had been warned about the repercussions of convicted Khalistani terrorist Jaspal Atwal attending events with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on his tour to India, Canadian media reported on Friday. Trudeaus first bilateral visit to India was hit by a controversy over the dinner invitation to Atwal by the Canadian High Commissioner in New Delhi. Atwal had been convicted of shooting at visiting Punjab cabinet minister Malkiat Singh Sidhu on Vancouver Island in 1986. High commissioner Nadir Patel cancelled Atwals invite for the dinner, hosted on Thursday night for Trudeau, while the ministry of external affairs (MEA) said it will ascertain how Atwal entered India. The informant, who asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation, confirmed speaking to an agent from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) on February 17, hoping to alert the Canadian government to Atwals criminal history. The person said to the CSIS agent that this is an embarrassment for the prime minister and CSIS should send a note to the prime ministers office. And they sent a note. CSIS did not respond to requests for comment, Postmedia reported. A separate source told Postmedia that some members of the Punjabi-language media in Surrey sent news reports about Atwals history to the Canadian High Commission in New Delhi on February 20. The source said it was widely known that Atwal, a former member of the terrorist International Sikh Youth Federation, was going to India to attend some of the events with Prime Minister Trudeau and the Canadian delegation. Despite the warnings, Atwal attended a reception on February 21 in Mumbai where he was photographed with Trudeaus wife Sophie Gregoire and Infrastructure Minister Amarjeet Sohi. The outcome has embarrassed Trudeau, who had made efforts in India to insist Canada is not soft on Sikh separatism and believes in a united India, the Vancouver Sun said. Atwal was also once accused of assaulting Indian-origin former British Columbia premier Ujjal Dosanjh. Dosanjh said the Canadian government demonstrated a lack of concern by inviting the man convicted of attempted murder in another case. Dosanjh, also a one-time federal Liberal cabinet minister, says he was taken aback when he found out that Atwal was invited to a dinner reception with the prime minister after attending another event with the Trudeau family earlier this week, the Globe and Mail reported. He said Atwal attacked him with an iron bar in 1985 over his opposition to Sikh extremism. The assault left Dosanjh with 80 stitches and a broken hand, but Atwal was acquitted of the crime. It left me speechless about the lack of preparation or the depth of unpreparedness with which Mr Trudeaus trip went through, he said. Foreign ministers will also ask Mogherini and the EU's foreign service, the EEAS, on Monday to look at ways to strengthen the bloc's 1990s-era arms embargo on the Southeast Asian country that remains in place. (Photo: File) Brussels: The European Union will start preparing sanctions against Myanmar generals over killings of Rohingya Muslims by formally calling on the bloc's foreign policy chief next week to draw up a list of possible names, two diplomats said. Any new travel bans and asset freezes would be the EU's toughest measures yet to try to hold the military accountable for the abuses, likely joining US and Canadian sanctions already in place. "Ministers will call on (Federica) Mogherini to propose restrictive measures on senior members of the Myanmar military for systematic human rights abuses, without delay," one diplomat said on Thursday, referring to EU sanctions. Foreign ministers will also ask Mogherini and the EU's foreign service, the EEAS, on Monday to look at ways to strengthen the bloc's 1990s-era arms embargo on the Southeast Asian country that remains in place. Myanmar government spokesman Zaw Htay could not be reached for comment. Myanmar military spokesman Major General Tun Tun Nyi when reached by phone did not comment on the EU decision. In a statement expected to be released on Monday at a regular gathering of EU foreign ministers, the bloc is also expected to reiterate its call for the release of Reuters reporters Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, detained on December 12 over accusations that they violated Myanmar's Official Secrets Act. The two had been working on a Reuters investigation into the killing of 10 Rohingya Muslim men who were buried in a mass grave in Rakhine state after being hacked to death or shot by ethnic Rakhine Buddhist neighbours and soldiers. No names of generals to be targeted for sanctions have been discussed, the diplomats said, but the United States said in December it was sanctioning Major General Maung Maung Soe, who is accused of a crackdown on the Rohingya minority in Rakhine. EU sanctions lists are often coordinated with Washington. The EU's decision to consider sanctions reflects resistance to such measures in the UN Security Council, where veto-wielding powers Russia and China said this month they believed the situation in Rakhine was stable and under control. The United States, as well as United Nations, have described the military crackdown in Myanmar as "ethnic cleansing". About 655,000 Rohingya have fled from Rakhine State for shelter over the border in Bangladesh, according to the United Nations. Texas Governor Greg Abbott issued a last-minute reprieve for a death row prisoner who hired a gunman to kill his family after his father, whom he sought to murder, pleaded for his son's life. Thomas Bartlett "Bart" Whitaker, 38, had been one of three men awaiting execution Thursday in three different US states. "Mr Whitaker must spend the remainder of his life behind bars as punishment for this heinous crime," Abbott wrote in a proclamation explaining his decision, shortly before the scheduled execution. Abbott said he had taken into consideration the fact that "the person who fired the gun that killed the victims did not receive the death penalty, but Mr Whitaker, who did not fire the gun, did get the death penalty." He added: "Mr Whitaker's father, who survived the attempt on his life, passionately opposes the execution of his son. Mr Whitaker's father insists that he would be victimized again if the state put to death his last remaining immediate family member." Kent Whitaker had moved heaven and earth for years to try to get mercy for his son, whom he forgave from his hospital bed. Bart Whitaker was sentenced to death for hiring the hitman who killed his mother and brother and wounded his father in 2003. The gunman also shot him in the arm to provide a cover story for the family slaying. Police had originally assumed the shooting was a botched robbery, although the fact that only Bart's cell phone had been taken raised suspicions. Bart returned to live with his wounded father for seven months before the truth emerged that it was the son who hired the gunman. Kent, a devout Christian, said he had initially been "mad at God" after being shot in the thorax by the masked assailant who took the lives of his wife Tricia, 51, and his 19-year-old son Kevin. "I was wrestling with my faith," he said. "But God met me in the hospital room on the night of the shootings and helped me arrive at a 'miracle' forgiveness for everyone involved," he said. "Long before I ever even suspected that that forgiveness might extend to my own son." "I live with the extent of the loss every day and am aware of how much it has cost me -- and am completely aware that all of that loss was the result of decisions made by my son," he said. "But God helped me reach that complete forgiveness and I think He did that to help me rebuild my relationship with my son." Meanwhile, in Alabama, Doyle Hamm is facing execution after spending three decades on death row. He was condemned to death in 1987 for the murder of a motel employee during an armed robbery. Hamm is already dying of cranial and lymphatic cancer, and his lawyers fear execution by lethal injection would be torture, as he no longer has suitable veins. However, after a bitter legal battle, a court finally ruled on Tuesday that Hamm's execution will go ahead, on condition that he is injected in his legs or feet -- instead of his arms or hands, as would usually be the case. Finally, Florida is scheduled to execute Eric Branch, handed a death sentence for murdering a student in 1993. His lawyers have launched final appeals based on the fact Branch was only 21 years old -- and therefore, they say, cognitively comparable to a juvenile -- at the time of his conviction, nor was he sentenced to death by a unanimous jury. North Korea sharply criticised U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres today for supporting sanctions to pressure the country into negotiations with the US on denuclearising, saying he appears to be acting as a "henchman" representing the United States. North Korea's UN Mission stressed in a statement that there would be no nuclear issue on the Korean Peninsula if there was no "hostile policy" by the United States from its founding over 70 years ago and if that policy hadn't intensified "into nuclear blackmails and threats." The mission called Guterres' remarks to the Munich Security Conference on February 16 "reckless" and "ill-minded behavior based on extreme prejudice without any consideration of impartiality" and without saying "even a single word against the US who is (the) main culprit for all aggravation of the current situation." Guterres told the conference that for the first time since the end of the Cold War the world is facing the "threat of a nuclear conflict." Successively tougher sanctions imposed by the U.N. Security Council to pressure North Korea are "absolutely essential to be maintained," he said. "The pressure also creates the opportunity for diplomatic engagement aiming at the denuclearising of the Korean peninsula," he told the conference, urging international efforts to promote talks between the US and North Korea. Guterres noted improved relations between North Korea and South Korea at the Winter Olympics in recent weeks. "But even if the relations between the two Koreas improved, let's be clear that is not the central question we are facing," he said. "The central question remains the question of denuclearising." North Korea's Mission asked Guterres "to refrain from his behaviour acts like somnambulist" and understand that the nuclear threat is from the U.S. which is developing more sophisticated nuclear weapons and has disclosed "its ambition for nuclear pre-emptive attacks" against the North. The statement reaffirmed that North Korea's nuclear forces are serving as a "strong deterrent to any nuclear threat and reckless, risky military provocation of the US" If Guterres really wants to solve the nuclear issue on the Korean peninsula, the mission said he should urge the Security Council to welcome "the process of improved inter-Korean relations" and discourage neighbouring countries "from disturbing the process." Fresh bombardment on Eastern Ghouta has killed dozens, bringing the number of dead civilians in a five-day assault by the Syrian government to more than 400. Mounting calls for a humanitarian truce in one of the bloodiest episodes of Syria's seven-year conflict failed to stop 46 more people were killed yesterday by air strikes and rocket fire. Regime backer Russia said there was "no agreement" at the UN Security Council on a 30-day ceasefire for Syria and presented amendments to a draft resolution that would allow aid deliveries and the evacuation of civilians from besieged Eastern Ghouta. As diplomats wrangled over a UN vote, which could take place today, people huddled in basements while government forces pounded the enclave with rockets and bombs, turning towns into fields of ruins and even hitting hospitals. Aid group Doctors Without Borders said 13 of the facilities it supports in Eastern Ghouta were damaged or destroyed in three days, leaving remaining staff with very little to save the hundreds of wounded brought to them every day. In the hospital mortuary in Douma, the main town in the enclave just east of Damascus, bodies wrapped in white shrouds were already lined up on the floor, two of them children. "Five days of air strikes and intense artillery fire by the regime and its Russian ally have killed 403 civilians, including 95 children," said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Morning rain appeared to initially keep warplanes away yesterday but the sky cleared by midday and jets, some of them Russian according to the Observatory, soon returned. Russia has so far denied direct involvement in the assault on Ghouta but the pro-government Syrian newspaper Al-Watan reported yesterday that Russian warplanes and advisers had joined the battle. The US said yesterday Russia had "unique responsibility" for the deaths. "Without Russia backing Syria, the devastation and the deaths would certainly not be occurring," State Department Spokeswoman Heather Nauert told journalists. The regime and allied forces have been messing around the enclave, in which an estimated 400,000 people live, ahead of a likely ground offensive to flush out holdout Islamist and jihadist groups. "We are 14 women and children living in a room that is 10 feet wide, with no toilet and nowhere to wash," said 53-year-old Umm Abdo, who joined a large group in the basement of a school in Arbin. The brief respite provided by the rain yesterday encouraged some residents to venture out of their basements and shelters, to buy food, check on their property or inquire about their relatives and neighbours. In the town of Hammuriyeh, a queue had formed outside a shop as starving residents tried to stock up but another rocket sowed panic and sent everybody back to their shelters. In Douma, a young boy tried to peddle lighters on the street but rocket fire quickly forced him to scamper back to cover. An AFP correspondent saw rescuers known as the "White Helmets" forced to abandon efforts to retrieve a wounded woman from the rubble of a collapsed home when air strikes resumed. When they ventured back to the site, the woman was dead. The indiscriminate bombardment and the strikes on medical facilities have sparked global outrage but few concrete options have emerged to stop the bloodletting. The aid community voiced its frustration as the world appeared once again powerless to stop a conflict that has left almost 350,000 dead in seven years and caused destruction rarely seen since World War II. Humanitarian agencies are "sickened that no matter how many times they've raised the alarm, taken the step of speaking out, called on the Security Council to do something, the violence and brutality will sink to new lows", said the Syria INGO Regional Forum. At the UN, Russian Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia said sponsors Sweden and Kuwait were requesting a vote on the ceasefire plan even though they are "fully aware there is no agreement on it". The Security Council needs to reach a "feasible" agreement on a ceasefire and not take a decision that would be "populistic" and "severed from reality", he said. Talks for a deal between the regime and the armed groups controlling Ghouta appear to have stalled. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said jihadist fighters in Ghouta had rejected an evacuation deal. "A few days ago, our military in Syria suggested to the fighters that they withdraw peacefully from Eastern Ghouta, like the evacuation of fighters and their families that was organised in East Aleppo," he said. The head of the defence committee in Russia's lower house of parliament said Thursday that more than 200 new types of weapons were tested as part of his country's military support to the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. "It's not an accident that today they are coming to us from many directions to purchase our weapons, including countries that are not our allies," he said. Army's 28 Division in a statement said that the alert soldiers manning the fence in Tangdhar sector foiled the BAT action by engaging the intruders in a gunfight that lasted for an hour. "In its continued efforts to destabilize the situation along the LoC and target Indian Army Posts, a BAT comprising of militants and actively supported by heavy shelling by Pakistan army from multiple posts tried to raid a forward post of Tangdhar sector," the statement said. Alert troops detected the movement of the BAT team which was trying to move towards army post under cover of heavy fire by enemy posts and effectively repulsed it causing causalities, it said and added, the exchange of fire continued for an hour. Sources said the Army had specific inputs suggesting that the Pakistan Army, along with terrorists, had concentrated in Tanghdar sector on its side to target Indian posts along the LoC. "The BAT attack could have inflicted damages if Indian troops weren't alert. After few BAT attacks last year, the army is on high alert. However, as Pakistani Army gives covering fire, the BAT sometimes crosses over the LoC," they said. This was the second such attack in last four days along the LoC in J&K. On February 19, two Indian soldiers were injured in a similar attack along the LoC in Khari Karmara sector of Poonch district. One intruder was also killed in the retaliatory action by the Indian army. Defence experts say that Pakistan's Special Services Group (SSG) forms the core of the BAT, besides, dreaded terrorists from Lashkar-e-Toiba, Hizbul Mujahideen and Jaish-e-Mohammad outfits, for trans-LoC action up to a depth of one to three kilometres. "As Indian posts are closer to Pakistan in Poonch sector, the rugged terrain and thicker forests give BATs an advantage to escape. The BAT usually mutilates the bodies of Indian soldiers to wage psychological warfare," they said. The BAT camps, unlike the largely make-shift terror-training camps and launch pads across the LoC, consist of around 40-50 Pakistan Army regulars and commandos being specially trained for cross-border raids and ambushes, experts said. Tamil superstar Rajinikanth today praised his contemporary and Makkal Neethi Mayyam (MNM) founder Kamal Haasan, saying the "efficient" star would earn people's confidence. Responding to Haasan launching his political party MNM at Madurai on Wednesday, Rajinikanth, who is also set to take the political plunge, said though he and Haasan would be taking different paths, their destination would be only public welfare. "Though, all (of us) tread different paths, what matters is public welfare," he told reporters here. Asked about his opinion on the MNM, Rajinikanth said Haasan was an "efficient" person. "Kamal is efficient. He will earn people's confidence," he said. The February 21 launch of Haasan's party was "very nice," and was well organised, he said, adding that he had already wished the 'Vishwaroopam' star on his political journey but has once again extended his greetings after the launch of the MNM. While Haasan launched his party Makkal Neethi Mayyam on Wednesday, Rajinikanth had announced in December last year that he will enter politics. Haasan had yesterday written in a Tamil weekly that he had earlier held a "secret" meeting with Rajinikanth to inform about his decision to enter politics. The duo had then decided that even if they were in opposing camps, the respect for each other should be maintained. On Sunday, days ahead of the launch of his political party, Haasan had met Rajinikanth and held discussions, and later met DMK President M Karunanidhi. Meanwhile, responding to a question today, Rajinikanth welcomed the all-party meeting convened by the Tamil Nadu government yesterday to discuss the Cauvery issue. The meeting, chaired by Chief Minister K Palaniswami, was attended by DMK Working President and state Leader of Opposition M K Stalin, among others. The meeting had decided that an all-party delegation will meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi, urging him to set up the Cauvery Management Board and Cauvery Water Regulatory Authority as per the apex court's order to set up the bodies within six weeks. The all-party meeting was held days after the Supreme Court reduced the quantum of Cauvery water to Tamil Nadu by 14.75 tmcft. "One of our key issues today is unemployment. Another is farmer suicides," said Yeddyurappa. "I am a farmer, and these are key agenda points for me. My pledge is to make Karnataka a model state that embodies the PM's 'Sabka Saath Sabka Vikas' initiative." "I am the first chief minister who introduced Bhagyalakshmi Yojana for women," he said. "Employment opportunities, safety and empowerment of women are focus points not just for the state, but for all of India, as you know." Yeddyurappa said that the police should be given a free hand when it comes to safety. "Giving a free hand to officers will ensure better law and order," he said, and "regarding crimes against women - immediate punishment." Yeddyurappa said that his party has a long-term plan for Bengaluru, which includes focusing on the Metro, suburban railways, lake rejuvenation and making it a green city as well as a silicon city. Former Karnataka Chief Minister and BJP Karnataka president BS Yeddyurappa put the focus on unemployment, farmer suicides and women's safety in the state. He was speaking Friday at a forum as part of Prajavani's 'Vision Karnataka' series. American real estate magnate Donald John Trump Jr. has said his father's presidency is definitely a "negative" for the family's business, but the senior Trump will be back to the business post-presidency. Trump Organization has not signed any new projects in India since Donald Trump took over as the president of the US in January 2017. The company had announced last year that it would not enter into any new foreign deals while Trump is the White House to avoid any conflict of interest. Stressing on how the Indian market is important for his company, Trump Jr., executive vice-president of the Trump Organisation said, "When we get back in business, India will be an important market for us." He was speaking at an event organised by the Lodha Group, the Trump Organisations local partner building the country's first Trump Tower here, late last evening. The elder son of Trump said he's been coming to India for the past decade and "nurturing relationships". "We have been here for over a decade, partnering with the right people, in the right market," he said. According to him, India is lacking in true luxury projects, but it's been catching up with the global standards in the past few years. "Buyers were paying for 'X' in search for luxury, but were getting 'X' minus a lot more," he said, adding, "This is changing now." The US president's son is in India on a week-long visit to expand Trump Organization's real estate business in Asia's third-largest economy. The New-York based company, since entering the domestic market in 2013, has launched four luxury residential projects with a revenue potential of USD 1.5 billion. Yesterday Trump Jr. announced the structural completion of one of the four projects being built here in association with the Lodha Group. However, the entire 78-storey Trump Tower Mumbai is due for completion only in mid-2019. Other than the Mumbai project, the companys portfolio includes residential projects across Pune, Gurugram and Kolkata in association with local real estate developers such as Panchshil Realty, M3M, Tribeca, Unimark and IREO. The fifth one, which is expected to be a commercial office project, is likely to be launched soon. The company has brand-licensing agreements with local developers but has made no equity investments. India is already the USD 9.5-billion Trump Organization biggest residential real estate market outside the US. JD(S) party worker Lokesh chopped off the left arm of a Congress party worker S Ravikumar at a saree distribution event in Gauribidanur taluk, on Thursday. Police said the incident occurred when a saree distribution campaign was going on at Arkunda village, Manchenalli and JD(S) and Congress workers clashed over an issue of election malpractice. Lokesh grabbed a machete and chopped off Ravikumar's left arm. The 'Sankranti Suggi' program was being held under the auspices of Chikkaballapur MLA Dr Sudhakar's Sai Krishna Charitable Trust in the village in the evening. Police added Congress leaders Srinivasa Reddy, Devaraj, S Ravikumar and Narayanaswamy were going door-to-door distributing sarees to women. They were resting in front of Ravikumar's house when the youth Lokesh attacked him. At that moment, JD(S) workers were standing in front of a provision store opposite Ravikumar's house belonging to Goverdhan. They are Ramesh, Goverdhan, Lokesh and Narasimhamurthy. Police said a skirmish broke out among the two groups about the saree distribution. Lokesh pulled out a machete from the provision store and chopped off the left arm of Ravikumar and injured the others. Police added When Lokesh attempted to strike at Ravikumar, the later tried to defend himself by blocking with his left hand. But the blow was so terrible that he has lost most of his lower arm, below the elbow. After administrating first aid, Ravikumar has been brought to Bengaluru for further treatment. Manchenalli police have registered a case against Ramesh, Goverdhan, Lokesh and Narasimhamurthy who are all absconding. A pall of terror hangs over the village currently. The police have ensured tight security following the incident. Superintendent of Police Karthik Reddy told DH that the actual cause for the clash is yet to be ascertained. "It will be known when Lokesh is interrogated," he added. The Army has repulsed an attack by the Border Action Team (BAT), a mix of Pakistani regulars and militants, near the Line of Control in the Tangdhar sector of Jammu and Kashmir's Kupwara district, officials said today. No casualty was reported in the incident that took place last night, they said. A BAT team attacked Indian troops near the LoC in the Tangdhar sector, prompting the Army to retaliate. The exchange of fire continued for nearly an hour and the attack was effectively repulsed, an Army official said. Award winning filmmaker Bharat Bala called upon filmmakers to travel deep into Indian territories to find stories disappearing due to globalisation. The Chennai-based filmmaker, whose recent work 'Maryan' which was received mighty well, was speaking at a master class on 'India, the Land of Stories' at Bengaluru International Film Festival. Bala, popularly known for his feature films 'Maryan' and 'Hari Om' talked about his ambitious project to make 100 short films on untold stories from the hinterland of the country, The audience got to experience his short film narrative with the screening of four visually rich films, each celebrating ethos of the culture explored in a short duration. 'Muthuvan Kalyanam' a visual lyric on a traditional tribal marriage in Silent Valley, Kerala, stood out as a metaphor for the filmmaker's quest in search of stories. As per tradition, the bride is placed in the heart of forest and the groom is challenged to find her; if he wants to marry her. The groom has to find the bride and the filmmaker his story. "India is the land of untold stories. Many of which, are on the verge of extinction. These stories are part of our lives and by celebrating them, we uphold the pride of our land and culture," he said. Though his stories are small in scope and content, the visual and background music are on a par with any feature film. Bala said he spent an entire day on a five second shot in the movie. And the result is a breathtaking scene where the camera focused on the newly wed tribal couple zooms out to show a hill and then a surrounding forest before dissolving. The boat race in Alleppey Valley, a ritual in Tamil Nadu and traditional music in Punjab formed subject of the three other movies. "My target is to make 1000 such movies for an India Film Collective. I am investing in 100 of them and 56 are complete," he said. He said he was waiting for the day when theatre audiences would get enthusiastic about watching such stories. Film on Mattur Bala said a film on Mattur, a village in Shivamogga where the entire population speaks in Sanskrit, is in post production stage. "Karnataka, like other states, will have 50-60 stories. I invite you to suggest such stories from your land," he said. Andhra Pradesh is all set to host the 24th edition of Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) Partnership Summit 2018 in Visakhapatnam from Saturday. The Andhra Pradesh government claims to have garnered an investment of Rs 14.89 lakh crore through the first two editions of the summit held in Visakhapatnam and hopes to secure Rs 2.56 lakh cr through 281 Memorandum of Understanding from its third edition. According to AP State Investment Promotion Board (APSIPB) the MoUs once materialize will fetch employment to 4.25 lakh people across the state. To beat fierce competition for investments, the state has created an institutional mechanism to track and monitor the investment procedures with a Special Advisory Task Force and an organizational structure. Following the two rounds of the summit, Andhra Pradesh catapulted into top position in the implementation of Business Reforms Action Plan (BRAP), along with being the top-ranked State in the World Bank's Ease of Doing Business (EoDB). The previous two editions hosted in Andhra Pradesh in 2016 and 2017 have been immensely successful, and have been major contributors towards state's growth. Andhra Pradesh is hoping to showcase the immense investment opportunities across Industry, Infrastructure, Urban Development, Tourism, IT, Education and Healthcare. The latest edition has sessions revolving around the automobile, tourism, aerospace, defence, textiles, renewable energy, food processing, medical equipment and electronics. There are special country sessions by Korea and Japan in the summit. Admitting that failure of linkage of SWIFT to core banking system (CBS) could have led to Rs 11,400 crore fraud at Punjab National Bank, the former head of the scam-hit lender today said there was an urgent need for banks to revisit their surveillance system and plug the loopholes. Usha Ananthasubramanian, who is now managing director and CEO of Allahabad Bank, said at her bank also SWFIT is not linked to CBS, and the process of linking both the systems is currently on. The country's second largest PSU bank has detected USD 1.77 billion scam where billionaire jeweller Nirav Modi allegedly acquired fraudulent letters of undertaking (LoU) from its Brady House branch in Mumbai to secure overseas credit from other Indian lenders. The fraud allegedly started in 2011 at PNB. "I want to tell you that there could be always (loopholes) because technology advances so fast that what is today could get obsolete tomorrow and you might not have upgraded. Now, it is time for all of us (banks) to very closely revisit (the surveillance system) and then take all steps that can create maximum security," Ananthasubramanian told reporters here today. The fraud allegedly started in 2011 at PNB. Before moving to Allahabad Bank, Ananthasubramanian was managing director and CEO of PNB between August 2015 to May 2017. She was also the executive director of PNB from July 2011 to November 2013. She said Reserve Bank has asked banks, who have not linked SWIFT to CBS, to complete the process by April 30, 2018. "That could be a deadline, but it is an outer limit. Today, the urgency is such that everyone wants this (linkage of Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication to CBS) project to be on fast track," Ananthasubramanian said. Last week, IBA held a meeting to discuss the scam at PNB. In the meeting Ananthasubramanian was present. It was also attended by Bank of India managing director and CEO, Dinabandhu Mohapatra, ICICI Bank chief financial officer N S Kannan and IBA deputy CEO B Rajkumar, among others. When asked about the outcome of the meeting by reporters today, Ananthasubramanian said, "I don't know anything about it". She also refused to divulge Allahabad Bank's total loan exposure to companies related to Nirav Modi. Last week, in a regulatory filing, Allahabad Bank had said it has an exposure of nearly USD 366.87 million in the form of Letter of Undertakings (LoUs). "The bank through its overseas branch at Hong Kong has been taking exposure with PNB as country party under various LoUs issued through authenticated SWIFT message," Allahabad Bank said in a filing. The bank also purchased some Buyers' Credit assets from Axis Bank extended against PNB LoU through risk participation. The Maldives has warned India against taking "any actions" that could hinder resolving the political crisis in the country, as New Delhi expressed its deep dismay over the extension of emergency in the island nation. The Maldivis' Foreign Ministry in a statement late last night said President Abdulla Yameen's government takes note of the public statements issued by the Indian Government that "ignore the facts and ground realities" with regard to the ongoing political developments in the Maldives. It said that India's assertion that the extension of the state of emergency for 30 days was unconstitutional is a clear "distortion of facts, which ignore the constitution and laws of the Maldives." "There is no doubt that the Maldives is experiencing one of the most difficult periods in the history of the nation. It is therefore important that friends and partners in the international community, including India, refrain from any actions that could hinder resolving the situation facing the country," it said. "The Government of Maldives reiterates its firm commitment to work closely with the international community, including India, to address the concerns they might have," the statement said. Persisting with its displeasure over the extension of emergency in the Maldives, India yesterday said it does not see a valid reason for the Maldivian parliament to do so and maintained that it continues to watch the situation in the island nation. India has expressed "deep dismay" over the Maldivian parliament accepting President Abdulla Yameen's recommendation to extend the state of emergency by another 30 days in a manner New Delhi dubbed as a "matter of concern". On Tuesday, the Maldives' Parliament extended the state of emergency by another 30 days, bolstering President Yameen's grip on power in the troubled Indian Ocean island nation. President Yameen had first declared emergency on February 5 after the Supreme Court ordered the release of a group of Opposition leaders, who had been convicted in widely criticised trials. Among them was exiled ex-President Mohamed Nasheed. The court said his 2015 trial had been unconstitutional. The state of emergency will now end on March 22. There has been international condemnation of the Maldivian government's moves, including the imposition of the emergency. The US has also expressed disappointment over the development in the Maldives and asked President Yameen to uphold the rule of law in the troubled Indian Ocean island nation. Yameen has rejected an offer of mediation by UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres. PTI PMS AKJ PMS PMS - IT and networking company Cisco on Friday announced the appointment of a new President for its Asia Pacific & Japan business. After three years at the helm of Cisco Japan, Miyuki Suzuki has been promoted to president for Asia Pacific & Japan. Charged with regional revenue growth across 18 markets, and propelling customer digital transformation and cybersecurity efforts, Suzuki will report to Chris Dedicoat, executive vice president of Worldwide Sales and Field Operations. Suzuki assumes the leadership from Irving Tan, who last month took on the newly created role of senior vice president of Operations and Digital, a company release said. Joining Chairman and CEO Chuck Robbins' executive leadership team, Tan will be responsible for driving Cisco's digital transformation across the company in partnership with Sales, Engineering and other functions. Miyuki Suzuki, President, Asia Pacific & Japan at Cisco said: "Asia boasts incredible diversity, with each country presenting new, and often untapped opportunities. With growing economies and increasing technological maturity, Cisco is positioning itself at the heart of regional innovation, enabling customers to collaborate and transform by taking the time to understand the needs of each individual market. I'm looking forward to the challenges ahead and developing new bridges." Currently based in Tokyo, Suzuki will relocate to Cisco's Asia Pacific & Japan headquarters in Singapore in the near future. In an alleged bid to meet the target set by the administration under the Chief Minister Mass Marriage Scheme, around a dozen couple, who were already married, were made to tie the nuptial knot again in Uttar Pradesh's Baghpat district. The mass wedding ceremony was held a couple of days back in which 92 couples took the wedding vows. It later turned out that several couples at the ceremony were already married and that they had been included only to meet the target. A probe has been ordered into the matter by the district authorities. ''We will take stern action against the guilty,'' said a senior district official in Baghpat on Friday. Under the scheme, the government bears the expenditure incurred on the weddings of widows, divorces, daughters of the widows and daughters of differently abled parents. According to the sources the government had planned to conduct mass weddings for 101 brides and grooms under the scheme in every district a few months back. The program had to be deferred at many places as barely a handful applicants got themselves registered. In the state capital, every block development officer had been asked to get at least ten applicants register under the scheme failing which action could be taken against him. The Jharkhand High Court on Friday rejected the bail application of RJD chief Lalu Prasad who is serving jail sentence in Ranchi in a fodder scam. Lalu on January 6 was sentenced to three and a half years of imprisonment in one of the six fodder scam cases - RC 64A/96 - after he was convicted for fraudulent withdrawal of around Rs 90 lakh from the Deogarh treasury. Moving the bail plea before Justice Aparesh Kumar Singh, Lalu's lawyer cited the RJD chief's poor health condition to buttress his point. The lawyer also placed on record Lalu's medical report, which showed that he had undergone valve replacement surgery in a Mumbai hospital. However, the plea failed to cut ice as the judge reportedly asked the incarcerated leader to "at least serve half of the jail sentence and then move the court for the bail plea." "Since the fodder scam took place in his full knowledge, the court is not willing to release him on bail," the HC judge observed. Lalu now has the option of moving the Supreme Court for securing bail. Lalu has already been convicted and jailed in three fodder scam cases, while he is facing trial in two other cases in Jharkhand. Apart from the five cases in the neighbouring state, Lalu is facing the sixth fodder scam case in Bihar which is related to fraudulent withdrawal from Bhagalpur treasury in the mid-90s. A 17-year-old girl was reportedly hacked to death with a sword by an unidentified man outside her school at Kotma town here in the district, the police said on Friday. The incident took place on Thursday morning when the girl, a student of Class 12, was on her way to school to appear for her exams, they said. According to police, as per the information provided by the victim's family, a man was stalking her for quite some time. "The suspect was following the girl on Thursday as well. When she reached near school, he suddenly struck the girl on her neck with a sword three to four times, killing her on the spot," Sunil Jain, Superintendent of Police (SP), said. A school teacher, who witnessed the incident, raised an alarm after which the man fled leaving the blood-stained sword behind, the SP said. The school authorities informed the police about the incident. Police said they have recovered the body and have also seized the sword. "Based on the inputs provided by the victim's kin, police have rounded up some suspects and the interrogation is on," the SP said. A case under IPC section 302 (murder) has been registered, the police said. Expanding its probe into the alleged PNB fraud, the ED today summoned Nirav Modi's wife Ami for questioning even as the agency froze bank deposits and shares worth about Rs 44 crore of the diamantaire. The Enforcement Directorate(ED) also seized a huge collection of imported watches from a workshop location linked to the billionaire diamond jewellery businessman. The ED officials said they have put fresh freeze orders on bank accounts containing Rs 30 crore and shares worth Rs 13.86 crore of the Nirav Modi group under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA). Besides summoning Modi's wife Ami, an American citizen, the central probe agency has called his uncle and Gitanjali Gems promoter Mehul Choksi for questioning in the case on February 26 at the ED office in Mumbai, they said. Modi, who failed to keep his date for questioning yesterday, has also been issued summons to appear before the agency on the same day. The agency seized a large collection of imported watches, 176 steel almirahs, 158 corrugated boxes and 60 other containers after searches at multiple locations linked to Modi over the last week, officials said. The ED, yesterday had seized deposits, shares and luxury cars worth over Rs 100 crore from the businesssman and his group. Fresh summonses were issued yesterday against Modi after he failed to appear before the agency. Modi had cited the temporary suspension of his passport and pending business issues as reasons for his non-appearance. The total seizure by the ED in the case is now over Rs 5,870 crore, officials claimed, adding it is being independently valued. Modi, Choksi and others are being investigated by the ED and other probe agencies after the fraud recently came to light, following a complaint by the Punjab National Bank(PNB) that they allegedly cheated the nationalised bank to the tune of Rs 11,400 crore, with the purported involvement of a few employees of the bank. The CBI and the ED have registered two FIRs each to probe the case. Both Modi and Choski are said to have left the country before criminal cases were lodged against them. As the situation on the borders in Jammu and Kashmir is heating up, more than 500 residents of the villages close to the Line of Control (LoC) in the Uri sector of Baramulla district have been shifted to safer locations by the authorities. "Due to firing/shelling from across in border areas of Uri about 500 people migrate to safer areas. DC/SSP on spot looking after the people," Director General of Police Shesh Pal Vaid tweeted. An official of the state government said the worst affected villages along the LoC in Uri are Balkote, Silkote, Tillawari, Thajal, Churanda, Batgra and Hathlanga. "Adequate arrangements have been made for the safe evacuation of the affected residents," he said and added that it was a preventive measure to ensure that there are no civilian casualties. These villages are just a kilometre away from the border and can be easy targets of shelling from across the LoC. Reports from these villages said there was total chaos and confusion as people were rushing towards safer places fearing more shelling by Pakistani troops. The Pakistani troops have been violating ceasefire in the Uri sector since Monday and there has been heavy shelling from across the border. Villagers at the forefront of the Pakistani shelling say they feel they are in a war zone with sounds of mortar bombs and the rattle of automatic weapons booming in the area. "There is a panic situation in our village as nobody knows what is going to happen. It is very difficult to live here. We just want security," Ishfaq, a resident of the area, told DH over the phone. Uri was in the news after the September 18, 2016 fidayeen (suicide) attack on an army base that left 19 soldiers dead and triggered the latest tensions between India and Pakistan. The Centre on Friday told the Supreme Court that it was considering to put in place safety and emission standards for quadricycles, a new category of commercial vehicle, meant for intra-city public transport. A bench of Justices Adarsh Kumar Goel and U U Lalit took note of the draft notifications issued by the Ministry of Road and Transport in June, 2017 on the safety and emission standards of the quadricycles. Additional Solicitor General Pinky Anand submitted the matter was at final stage. A group of writ petitioners contended there was an attempt to reduce the rigor of standards for the quadricycles, which was not desirable. The court, however, asked them to submit their suggestion to the Ministry within two weeks. Instead of their suggestions being considered by us, it should be put before the competent authorities and the matter be decided expeditiously, the bench ordered and disposed of a batch of petitions. The matter relates to the sale of small 4-wheelers with a mass upto to 1,500 kg and quadricycles. The petitioners contended safety and emission standards must be first laid down before the vehicles of this nature were introduced in the market. If it is not so done, it may endanger safety of all concerned, they claimed. On an appeal filed by Pune-based auto component maker SM Auto Engineering Pvt Ltd, the apex court had earlier in 2015 stayed a Karnataka High Court order of August 25, 2014 which had barred the introduction of quadricycle, which is a small motorised four-wheeler that is high on mileage, low on emissions, occupies less road space. It is described as an excellent intra-city public transport option. The apex court had then transferred to itself other petitions pending before different High Courts. Alleging that the wild elephant menace has increased in the district and officials have failed to check the menace, the members of Karnataka Rajya Raitha Sangha and Karmikara Aranya Horata Samithi, staged a protest along with farmers in town on Friday. The procession that began at Gandhi Maidan passed the General Thimayya Circle before culminating at Aranya Bhavana. The protesters shouted slogans against the officials for failing to check the wild elephant and tiger menace. When the protesters attempted to lay siege to the Aranya Bhavana, the police stopped them from doing so. The protesters warned that if they were not allowed to stage the dharna, the farmers from Mandya and Mysuru districts would join them in the protest. FIR against officials Addressing the protesters, JD(S) district president Sanketh Poovaiah said, "As many as 40 persons have lost their lives in the elephant attack in the district in recent times. The officials are showing a negligent attitude. When an elephant trampled a man to death in Siddapura, an FIR was also filed against the officials." Farmer leader Palibetta Ajith said that the elephants are camping in villages. The Chief Conservator of Forests (CCF) has not visited the spot to listen to the grievances of the people Raitha Sangha district president Manu Somaiah also addressed the protesters. CCF Lingaraj promised to convene meetings in three taluks shortly to discuss the elephant menace. A proposal to lay a railway track as fence on a 10-km stretch has been submitted to the government. US President Donald Trump will on Friday announce sanctions against 56 North Korea-linked shipping and trade entities, hailing the "largest-ever" package of sanctions on the Pyongyang regime. Trump will use a speech to conservatives just outside Washington to step up his campaign of "maximum pressure," according to excerpts. "Today I am announcing that we are launching the LARGEST-EVER set of new sanctions on the North Korean regime," Trump was to say according to the White House. The measures include sanctions against "56 vessels, shipping companies, and trade businesses" that Trump will accuse of "assisting North Korea in evading sanctions." Trump's administration is locked in a nuclear standoff with North Korea, which is trying to develop missiles that could deliver a nuke to major cities in the United States. The latest sanctions are designed to put the squeeze on North Korea's already precarious economy and fuel supply. The North Korean military and broader economy depend heavily on imports of coal and oil from China and Russia. China has steadfastly rebuffed Washington's calls for a full oil embargo -- fearing the chaotic collapse of the Pyongyang regime -- but has agreed to caps agreed at the United Nations. The timing of the new measures coincides with the arrival in South Korea of Trump's daughter Ivanka. She is attending the closing ceremony of the Winter Olympics, which have taken place against the backdrop of the crisis. The 36-year-old businesswoman and model-turned-policy-advisor has been tasked with reaffirming US ties with North Korea, which have been strained over how to deal with the North. She was hosted in Seoul by President Moon Jae-in, who has long advocated talks rather than confrontation with North Korea. South Korean officials, who sit in a capital well within range of conventional North Korea artillery, have been spooked by Trump's easy talk of military confrontation. US officials worry meanwhile that North Korea is luring Moon into talks that are designed to go nowhere. A Delhi court on Friday allowed one-day transit remand to the CBI to take Rotomac owner Vikram Kothari and his son Rahul to Lucknow to produce them before a court in connection with a Rs 3,695-crore loan default case. The CBI said their presence in Uttar Pradesh was required to recover the money that has reportedly been siphoned off. They were produced before Additional Chief Metropolitan Magistrate Samar Vishal by the CBI, which sought a two day transit remand to take them to Lucknow. Giving its reasons, the investigative agency said the crime had global ramifications and it had to explore the modus operandi and recover the siphoned-off money, which was generated after committing frauds with banks. "Produce them before the concerned court within 24 hours," the judge said. The two accused were arrested on Thursday for alleged default on loan repayment. The agency also said it had to recover the crime proceeds and unearth the larger conspiracy. Advocate Pramod Kumar Dubey, appearing for the Kotharis, opposed the plea, saying the accused were "illegally detained" and made scapegoat to "save your face". "You are making me a scapegoat to save your face since one of your accused has escaped from the country," the advocate said on behalf of the accused, without naming anyone. He said the accused was found at his own house. "I was not hiding. The question is who is hiding its face behind my custody," the advocate said. In its application, the CBI said that the accused were arrested since they were "not cooperating with the investigation and giving vague answers". Earlier in the day, the defence counsel had objected to the jurisdiction of the court, saying the accused should be produced before a special CBI court and not before a magisterial court. However, the court dismissed the contention and decided to hear arguments on the CBI application seeking transit remand. A consortium of seven banks had extended loans worth Rs 2,919 crore to Rotomac Global Pvt Limited from 2008 onwards, according to a CBI FIR. The amount swelled to Rs 3,695 crore, including the accrued interest, because of repeated defaults on payment, it said. The CBI initiated the action on the complaint of Bank of Baroda, a member of the consortium led by Bank of India, which had approached it fearing that Kothari may flee the country like Nirav Modi and his uncle Mehul Choksi. The CBI had filed the case against Vikram, his wife Sadhana and Rahul, and unidentified bank officials. The recognition of 383 unaided and aided PU colleges in Karnataka have not been renewed owing to academic shortcomings, Primary and Secondary Education Minister Tanveer Sait told the Legislative Council on Friday. Further, the minister said renewal of recognition of another 180 PU colleges have not been completed either because they have not sought renewal or the process has been delayed because of various factors. "The government will take necessary steps to protect the interests of students who are studying in these colleges," Sait said, without specifying what or how it will be done. According to statistics furnished by the government, 151 PU colleges whose recognition has not been renewed are in Bengaluru. The minister's response came with regard to a question raised by BJP MLC S V Sankanur on the number of PU colleges whose recognition has been renewed. "The number of PU colleges functioning in Karnataka as on 2015-16 is 3,547. Of them, recognition has been renewed for 2,984 colleges," Sait said. On hold The process of renewing recognition to 383 colleges has been put on hold because institutions have had zero admissions, low academic standards and other reasons, Sait said. Renewal of recognition to the other 180 colleges has been delayed as the Department of PU Education is verifying shortage of infrastructure, change in location, change in management and also to check whether these colleges are running departments or courses without permission. According to a November 2006 circular, recognition of PU colleges should be renewed every five or 15 years. "While it is normally once in five years that recognition is renewed, the process happens every year. It is also true that colleges face harassment from our officials during the process. That's why we have implemented an online system to grant recognition," Sait said. The department has started granting permanent recognition to colleges that are 15 years old, Sait said. Chaos, uproar and sloganeering marked the last day of the 14th Karnataka Assembly on Friday, with the BJP and the Congress members accusing each other of being corrupt. Chief Minister Siddaramaiah fired the fresh salvo at Prime Minister Narendra Modi, terming him the "facilitator of corruption in the country" and his government as "bhrastacharada gangotri." He accused Modi of "abetting" businessmen such as liquor baron Vijay Mallya and celebrity jewelry designer Nirav Modi. "It was none other than Narendra Modi who aided them. You (BJP) are the ones who are thugs, rowdies and corrupt," he charged. Irked by chief minister's accusation, the BJP members thronged the well of the House, and started shouting slogans such as '10% sarkar', 'goondagiri government', 'corrupt and looting government'. The BJP members even tore pieces of various Bills and hurled them around to register their protest. When leader of the Opposition Jagadish Shettar accused Siddaramaiah of avoiding tabling Kempanna Commission report on Arkavathy Layout, the latter hit back saying that BJP state president B S Yeddyurappa has been "indicted" in the report. It all started with Siddaramaiah re-asserting that his government would come back to power, claiming the credit for Rs 8,165 crore crop loan waiver. When Shettar taunted him for not waiving loans taken from nationalised banks, Congress member K N Rajanna came to the chief minister's defense, leading to an uproar. Rajanna said that the Centre was extending capital support to banks, which, instead of lending money to farmers in distress, was aiding big industrialists such as Nirav and Mallya in form of NPA loans. The BJP members, who took strong objection to this, staged a dharna in the well of the House. Siddaramaiah tried to give his reply to a discussion on state budget 2018-19, but in vain. He finally decided to table his his reply in the House. An upset Siddaramaiah was heard telling the BJP members that he would have got them "thrown out/expelled" of/from the House, if not Friday being the "last day of the current Assembly". BJP members walk out In the Legislative Council, BJP members walked out, arguing that there was no point in the chief minister's reply since the budget had not come up for discussion in the Upper House. "I've been a member of this house for 29 years. It's unfortunate that we have not been given an opportunity to discuss the budget," senior BJP member Ramachandra Gowda said, before his party staged a walked out. Siddaramaiah frowned and asked them why they did not discuss the budget all these days. He even urged JD(S) members to walk out if they wanted to. The Karnataka Appropriation (Vote on Account) Bill, 2018, that seeks to draw Rs 71,663.13 crores from the Consolidated Fund of the State of Karnataka for the initial three months of the coming financial year, was passed in both Houses of the legislature. The BJP on Friday accused Social Welfare Minister H Anjaneya of siphoning off crores of rupees meant for the benefit of the Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and minorities in the state. The B R Ambedkar Development Corporation, which functions under the Social Welfare department, has on January 2 this year sanctioned drilling of 1,800 borewells in Holalkere Assembly constituency in Chitradurga district under Ganga Kalyana scheme, throwing all rules to the winds. The Corporation has released funds to 18 contractors who were entrusted with the drilling work on the same day, BJP general secretary and MP Shobha Karandlaje told reporters. Anjaneya represents Holalkere (SC Reserve) constituency in the Legislative Assembly. Shobha's charges have come a day after Chief Minister Siddaramaiah dared the BJP to provide documents to prove that his government is corrupt. Siddaramaiah had also accused the BJP-led NDA government as "90% commission government." KTPP Act violated "No tender was called for awarding the work. The Karnataka Transparency in Public Procurement (KTPP) Act has been blatantly violated. The funds have been released to the contractors on the same day of approving the works. The entire money has been siphoned off," Shobha stated, releasing a set of documents to prove her charges. The BJP leader said the Corporation has altogether sanctioned drilling of 36,000 borewells at a cost of Rs 36 crores across 17 districts on January 2 this year, violating KTPP Act. The corrupt Congress government is looting the tax-payers' money at the fag end of its term. Borewell scam is only a tip of the iceberg. The prime minister (Narendra Modi) said it is 10% commission sarkar. But actually it is 100% commission sarkar, she charged. "The chief minister claims to be a champion of the Ahinda communities, but in reality he is protecting those who are looting the money meant for the SCs/STs and minorities," Shobha said, demanding that Anjaneya should be removed from the Cabinet immediately. She also demanded a CBI probe into the issue. Pillow scam The BJP lawmaker said Anjaneya was involved in a Rs 19-crore bed and pillow scam two years ago. But, Siddaramaiah did not take any action. Meanwhile, Anjaneya said Shobha's charges are baseless and that there is no irregularities in Ganga Kalyana scheme. He also said he is ready to face investigation by any agency. A conman posing as a politician cheated a city-based gold jeweller of Rs 94 lakh on the pretext of contesting in the upcoming assembly elections from Mysuru. Dheeraj D N, who owns a jewellery shop in Basaveshwara Nagar 4th Block lodged a complaint on February 21 after he learnt that the man was actually a conman, the police said. The accused, Somanna, is a native of Chitradurga and was introduced to Dheeraj in October 2017 by a common friend, Suraj, a businessman. They remained in touch for months before Somanna made a proposal to Dheeraj in January 2018, claiming to be a prospective MLA candidate at a constituency in Mysuru. The proposal was to organise mass marriages in the run-up to the elections and that he would like to carry out business deals with him. Somanna placed orders for around 320 mangal sutras weighing five grams each, besides 20 gold biscuits weighing 20 grams each and 30 gold biscuits weighing 30 grams that were to be given as gifts to dignitaries attending the marriage. Overwhelmed by the proposal, Dheeraj agreed and delivered the said gold to Somanna at a cafe in Sadashivanagar. Somanna promised to transfer the money online to Dheeraj's account. To make Dheeraj believe, Somanna even carried photocopies of his property documents, PAN card and other documents claiming that he had applied for a loan and it was under process, the police said. However, even after several days, Somanna did not transfer the money and continued to be elusive even over the phone, Dheeraj told the police. The victim then lodged a police complaint with the Basaveshwara Nagar police station and further investigations are underway. Filmmakers must get deeper into the Indian landscape to rescue stories disappearing in the rapid changes brought about by globalisation, award-winning director Bharat Bala has urged. Bala, whose movie 'Mariyaan' won critical acclaim, was speaking on the master class 'India, the land of stories' at the Bengaluru International Film Festival on Friday. The director who captured the imagination of the enthusiasts and critics alike with the feature film 'Hari Om' spoke at length about his ambitious project to take 100 short films on the untold stories of the hinterlands. The audience got a glimpse of his short film narrative as four of Bala's visually rich short movies were screened; each of them celebrating the culture it explored. 'Muthuvan Kalyanam', a visual lyric on a traditional tribal marriage in Silent Valley, Kerala, stood out as a metaphor for the filmmaker's quest in search of stories. The tradition places the bride in the middle of the forest and challenges the groom to find her to tie the knot. Oddly enough, the man's pursuit of the bride matches the director's own quest for the story. "Many of the untold stories are on the verge of extinction," Bala said. "These stories are part of our lives. By celebrating them, we'll uphold the pride of our land and culture." Bala may pick a simpler story, but he presents them with breathtaking effect with rich visuals and haunting soundscape. Little wonder that the short films have the effect of a feature film. He described his day-long wait to capture a five-second shot, producing a stunning vista where the camera zooms from the married tribal couple to the towering hill and the thick canopy of the forest before tapering off. His other short films captured the nuances of boat racing in the Alleppey Valley, a ritual in Tamil Nadu and traditional Punjabi music. "My target is to make a thousand movies for India Film Collective," Bala said. "I'm investing in 100 of them and 56 have already been completed." Bala said he is waiting for a day when the theatre-going audience would be enthusiastic to watch such movies. Two persons were killed on the spot after a jeep they were travelling was crushed between a truck and a bus, on the outskirts of the city on Friday morning. The victims are Kemparaju, (34) and Rakesh, (28), both residents of Gangothri Nagar in Tumakuru. They had come to Bengaluru and were returning home in a Mahindra Bolero when the accident happened near Thippagondahalli near Nelamangala at around 8.30 pm, the police said. Kemparaju was driving behind a Sea Bird Travels bus. When the bus slowed, he too slowed down. However, the truck coming from behind crashed into the jeep, the police said. Passers-by alerted the Nelamangala traffic police, who rushed to the spot. They had to use a crane to detach the mangled jeep and extricate the bodies from it. The police are on the hunt or for the driver who is absconding after the accident. Vidwath was brutally assaulted by Congress MLA N A Haris's son Mohammed Haris Nalapad at Farzi Cafe in Bengaluru on February 17. He has been in the ICU of Mallya Hospital since then. Vidwath's elder brother Sathwik said they had to shelve the plan to fly him to Singapore considering his fragile health condition. "There is no improvement in his condition. Doctors treating him here advised against travelling at this juncture," Satwik said. He added that his family is considering bringing doctors from Singapore. Vidwath's father J Loganathan, too, said that they are planning to get doctors from outside to treat his son. Doctors at Mallya hospital said, "His lungs are in good condition but he has difficulty in breathing due to nasal bone fracture. He is responding well to the treatment. He will be in the hospital for at least three weeks." Commodore Indru Wadhwani, CEO of Mallya Hospital, said that Vidwath is gradually improving but he is still under observation. Vidwath has a facial contusion, fractures on nasal bones and cheekbones. He has also sustained fractures on his ribs at lateral angles - right 4th to 9th and left 4th to 8th. Haris and his wife went to pay a visit to Vidwath at Mallya Hospital late on Thursday evening. But Vidwath's family denied them entry. A close friend of Loganathan said that Vidwath's father did not entertain any request from Haris to meet his son. Haris also tried to defuse the situation but his attempt failed. After nearly three years of planning, construction and unprecedented endeavor, a mere three months remain before the City of Del Mar moves into its sprawling new city hall and civic center on Camino del Mar, followed by a grand opening ceremony a month later. Officials say construction of the 9,000-square-foot city hall and 3,000-square-foot town hallset amid a 15,000-square-foot plaza with panoramic views of the Pacificwill wrap up in April. City employees expect to move into their new offices in May and June. Once theyre settled in, the city will celebrate its massive feat with a dedication event on June 30a few weeks more than two years since Del Mar demolished its dilapidated, outdated city hall on the 1.5-acre site. Assistant City Manager Kristen Crane updated the city council on the projects recent milestones at its Feb. 20 meeting. Finished concrete has been poured in the plaza. Installation of skylights in the breezeway already lent an open, outdoor feel. Inside the city hall and town hall, workers are busy putting ceiling grids, HVAC systems and motion detectors into place. City staff met this week with the fabricator of the dais from which residents will chastiseand occasionally praisecouncil members. Ta-da its finished, Crane joked as she showed a photo of the plaza with its finished concrete in place. Such levity embodies the citys remarkable feat in keeping the project on track: at $18 million, the facility is by far the biggest, most expensive capital project Del Mar has ever attempted. Despite dozens of unexpected complicationsforemost being last years particularly wet winter and difficult soil conditions discovered during excavationthe project has been able to hew closely to its expected timeline while staying comfortably within the citys contingency budget. The next two months will bring a flourish of finishing touches: installation of acoustic wood panels, the audio-visual system for city council meetings and special events, details on the amount, variety and arrangement of outdoor furniture. Irrigation lines will go in soon, which will allow landscaping work on the west side of the sound wall to begin. Next month, the city will award the contract for the solar-and-battery energy system that will provide nearly all of the facilitys power when the sun is shining. The last large piece is to finalize the facilitys operations, maintenance, special events and traffic plans. As with the Downtown Streetscape projectthe citys multi-year, $5 million plan for infrastructural upgrades in Del Mars downtown corridor, the first phase of which the council approved on Feb. 20city staff are piecing together the maintenance and operations plans that will lay out the difference in cost compared what the city has now. A 14-year-old Torrey Pines High School freshman was taken to a juvenile detention facility on Feb. 22 after allegedly making verbal and written threats to the Carmel Valley campus. Concerned Torrey Pines students first alerted the administration of a potential threat, which was directed at a pep rally that was to be held at school on Friday afternoon, Feb. 23. TPHS Principal Rob Coppo said as soon as the school became aware, they contacted the San Diego Police Department to investigate the threat. The police contacted the student off-campus, Coppo wrote in a message to parents. At no time were our students or school in danger. According to a news release, on the morning of Feb. 22, Northwestern Divisions Juvenile Services Team responded to the schools request and immediately began to investigate the situation. The school had suspended the student after he made the threats, the news release stated. On Feb. 22, at approximately 12 p.m., officers were able to make contact with the juvenile at his home for questioning, the news release stated. During the preliminary investigation it was determined that the juvenile had committed the crime of 422 PC Criminal Threats, and he was then detained and transported to San Diego Juvenile Hall Detention Facility. The pep rally that was threatened by the student has been rescheduled to next week, however, some students opted not to go to school on Friday, Feb. 23. Our kids are absolutely petrified to return to school today, said one parent whose child decided to stay home. In a message to Falcon families on the morning of Feb. 23, Principal Coppo said while there was a lot of speculation and rumors regarding the safety of school, the campus is safe. We have been working in coordination with SDPD and have addressed issues of safety on our campus, Coppo said. We can assure you that we do not have any active threats and our campus is safe. School is open and we are looking forward to having our students learning and participating in school activities. We would like to thank the concerned students who brought this matter to our attention. As part of our see something, hear something, say something campaign, we encourage all students to report their concerns to any staff member. We take all threats seriously and investigate promptly to ensure the safety of our schools. Student safety has been a focus at Torrey Pines following an incident in May 2017 in which a 15-year-old Torrey Pines student armed with a BB gun was fatally shot by San Diego police officers in the campus parking lot on an early weekend morning after he called 911. A suicide note was found in his pocket. The Feb. 22 incident is the second time this school year that students have alerted administration to a possible threaton Nov. 16 students reported that a fellow student was in possession of a BB gun on campus. In that case, staff and the SDPD were able to intervene quickly and the incident was resolved. Coppo stated that safety resources can be found on the school website and he encouraged parents to talk to students about the importance of speaking up any time they have a concern. We all play a role in the safety of our school, and we all need to work together to protect our Falcon family, Coppo wrote. This recent case is still actively being investigated and there are no more details at this time. Anyone with any information regarding this case is asked to contact CrimeStoppers at (888) 580-8477. Another resource for students is Students Speaking Out(studentsspeakingout.org) to make an anonymous phone, text or web tip about dangerous activity or crime at school or in the community. 15 February 2018 (EDF) Methane emissions from Pennsylvanias oil and gas sites may be more than five times higher than what oil and gas companies report to the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), according to a new analysis from Environmental Defense Fund.Methane is both a powerful climate pollutant and the primary ingredient of natural gas. The EDF analysis estimates Pennsylvanias oil and gas operators emit more than 520,000 tons of methane a year, primarily from leaky, outdated and malfunctioning equipment. This wasted gas causes the same near-term climate pollution as 11 coal-fired power plants, and results in nearly $68 million worth of wasted energy resources.The EDF analysis is based on peer-reviewed scientific research conducted at the states oil and gas sites in order to estimate the total amount of methane industry emits. The states published methane inventory, on the other hand, is based on data reported to DEP by operators, which significantly underestimate emissions, as not all facilities are required to report their pollution and operators who do report tend to use outdated methods for estimating emissions. Pennsylvanias methane history DEP announced it will finalize methane reduction requirements for new and modified oil and gas facilities by the end of March. The department also committed to regulating emissions from thousands of existing unconventional facilities within the next two months. EDFs analysis finds this could reduce the states emissions by 25% making bold action all the more urgent.We are pleased that the Wolf administration continues to promise bold action on methane. Pennsylvanians have known for quite some time that unchecked oil and gas pollution is making air quality and climate change worse, and now we have new insight as to just how severe and urgent this problem is, said Andrew Williams, Director of Regulatory and Legislative Affairs at Environmental Defense Fund. There is a clear, reasonable and cost-effective path forward for reducing the health, climate and economic risks of oil and gas emissions, and we look forward to working with Governor Wolf to make it happen for Pennsylvanias communities.The EDF analysis also estimates oil and gas companies emit more than 54,000 tons of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) nearly nine times more than oil and gas operators report to the state. VOCs contribute to higher ground-level ozone or smog levels in the region and can trigger asthma, respiratory illness and other health problems, particularly for people living in close proximity to oil and gas sites. Continuing state progress While the Wolf administration has committed to acting on methane pollution from unconventional wells, DEP has not made any proposal to address pollution from older, conventional wells. According to the EDF analysis, conventional wells are responsible for a significant part of the industrys methane emissions, and suggests some level of state intervention will be necessary to significantly reduce this harmful pollution in the long term. Save my User ID and Password Some subscribers prefer to save their log-in information so they do not have to enter their User ID and Password each time they visit the site. To activate this function, check the 'Save my User ID and Password' box in the log-in section. This will save the password on the computer you're using to access the site. Note: If you choose to use the log-out feature, you will lose your saved information. This means you will be required to log-in the next time you visit our site. Group pitches new plan: Medicare Extra for All' It would use Medicare's payment system as a framework to pool working-age people and their families, low-income people now covered by Medicaid, and seniors. By RICARDO ALONSO-ZALDIVAR Associated Press WASHINGTON A major liberal policy group is raising the ante on the health care debate with a new plan that builds on Medicare to guarantee coverage for all. Called Medicare Extra for All, the proposal was released Thursday by the Center for American Progress gives politically energized Democrats more options to achieve a long-sought goal. In a nod to political pragmatism, the plan would preserve a role for employer coverage and for the health insurance industry. Employers and individuals would have a choice of joining Medicare Extra, but it would not be required. That differs from the more traditional single-payer approach advocated by Vermont independent Sen. Bernie Sanders, in which the government would hold the reins of the health care system. Even though the plan has no chance of passing in a Republican-controlled Congress, center president Neera Tanden said, We think it's time to go bolder. There is consensus on the progressive side that universal coverage should be the goal and health care is a right, she added. Picking up on the leftward shift among Democrats, Republicans are already working up rebuttals. President Donald Trump tweeted earlier this month that Dems want to greatly raise taxes for really bad and non-personal medical care. No thanks! The Center for American Progress is a think tank that was closely aligned with President Barack Obama and 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. A 2005 proposal from the center foreshadowed Obama's Affordable Care Act. Medicare Extra would use Medicare's thrifty payment system as a framework to pool working-age people and their families, low-income people now covered by Medicaid, and seniors. A major missing piece: There's no cost estimate for the plan, although its authors say that's in the works. The proposal comes at a time when polls show intense interest among Democrats and some independents in a government-run system that would guarantee coverage and benefits while reducing the complexity and out-of-pocket costs associated with private insurance. The future of health care is expected to be a defining issue in the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries, and political messages will be tested and honed in this fall's midterm elections. A nonpartisan expert who independently reviewed the Medicare Extra plan said it could provide Democrats with a middle way to achieve their longstanding goal of coverage for all. It's an attempt to capture the enthusiasm for a single-payer system among the Democratic base, but trying to create a more politically and fiscally realistic roadmap, said Larry Levitt of the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation. To be sure, taxes would rise and the federal government would take on a larger role. It is in some ways repeal and replace,' but from the left rather than the right, Levitt added. Medicare Extra envisions a complex transition that would take the better part of a decade. Among its major elements: All U.S. citizens and lawful residents would be automatically eligible for coverage. Preventive care, treatment for chronic disease, and generic prescription drugs would be free. Dental, vision and hearing services would be included. Low-income people would pay no premiums or copays. Premiums and cost-sharing would be determined according to income for everyone else. Employers would have the option of maintaining their own plans or joining Medicare Extra. Workers could pick the government plan over their employer's. The proposal would preserve the tax-free status of employer-provided health care, subject to a limit. Seniors with private Medicare Advantage insurance plans through Medicare would be able to keep similar coverage, although the program would be redesigned and called Medicare Choice. Seniors would gain coverage for vision, dental and hearing services not now provided by Medicare. Long-term care services would be covered. Government would negotiate prices for prescription drugs, medical devices and medical equipment. Although costs and financing are not spelled out in the proposal, its authors acknowledge significant tax increases would be required. Options include rolling back some of the recently enacted GOP tax cuts for corporations and upper-income people, raising Medicare taxes on upper-income earners, and higher taxes on tobacco and sugary soft drinks. Subscriber content preview HELSINKI (AP) Two giant pandas on loan from China have been unveiled at a zoo in central Finland and they have frolicked, galloped, climbed trees and played in the snow after a month-long quarantine. Hua Bao, a 4-year-old male, and 3-year-old female Jin Baobao arrived in Finland on Jan. 18 and were immediately renamed Pyry (Snowfall) and Lumi (Snow) in Finnish. The Ahtari Zoo, 330 kilometers (205 miles) north of Helsinki, built a special Panda House annex for the pair. . . . India and Canada on Thursday signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) under which Canada's International Development Research Centre (IDRC) will assist the Indian government through ''programme based research support'' in addressing current and future global and local developmental challenges. S Selvakumar, joint secretary (bilateral cooperation) in the Department of Economic Affairs and Jean Lebel, president of IDRC, Canada, signed the MoU in New Delhi on Thursday. IRDC has already been providing support to Indian government initiatives in areas like finance, agriculture, industry and health through quality research, according to a government release. Since 1972, IDRC has funded 551 research activities worth CA$159 million in India through institutions, researchers and NGOs. During the last five years (2012-17), 96 research projects worth CA$ 51 million were funded by the IDRC in India. Australia's Deputy PM Barnaby Joyce quits over sex scandal Australia's scandal-hit Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce announced Friday he was quitting and moving to the backbench amid claims of sexual harassment, which come on top of controversy over an affair with a now-pregnant former aide. Joyce, whose National Party is part of the ruling coalition along with Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull's Liberals, has been front-page news in Australia for two weeks since it emerged he had left his wife of 24 years for his younger former media adviser, who is now expecting their baby boy. The 50-year-old had insisted he would ride out the storm but his position became untenable on Friday when a sexual harassment complaint against him, which he denies, was lodged with the party by an unnamed woman. Joyce said at a press conference in Armidale, his rural New South Wales seat, that he would step down as Nationals leader and deputy prime minister at a party meeting on Monday. "It's incredibly important that there be a circuit-breaker, not just for the parliament, but more importantly, a circuit-breaker for Vikki (his lover), for my unborn child, my daughters and for Nat (his wife)," he said. "This has got to stop. It's not fair on them. It's just completely and utterly unwarranted, the sort of observation that's happened." Joyce's decision to quit came with colleagues reportedly growing increasingly frustrated with his handling of the love-child scandal. Joyce had opted to give several media interviews this week, at a time when he was expected to be on leave and out of the spotlight, prompting two of the party's backbenchers to publicly call on him to resign. Junior Nationals minister David Gillespie has indicated he would be a candidate for the vacancy, while reports said veterans affairs minister Michael McCormack had significant backing. McCormack has announced he will stand for the leadership, declaring himself a fighter with the drive to deliver. His motto is "don't be silent when you ought to speak" which, local media points out, makes it the more curious that he has been conspicuously silent throughout Joyce's ordeal. The new Nationals leader will automatically become deputy prime minister under a coalition agreement between the two major parties of the centre-right. Joyce, who has also been criticised for living in an apartment rent-free with now partner Vikki Campion after splitting with his wife, was due to be the acting prime minister this week, with Turnbull meeting US President Donald Trump in Washington. But he opted to take leave. With foreign minister Julie Bishop also out of the country, the role of acting PM has been assumed by Senate leader Mathias Cormann, who said ahead of Joyce's decision that any harassment claim must be taken seriously. "Any allegation of sexual harassment is a very serious allegation," he told reporters. "I understand that a formal complaint has been made, and that that complaint is being investigated." Joyce called the claim "spurious and defamatory" and said he wanted it investigated by the authorities. "I have asked that that be referred to the police," he said, while admitting it had been "the straw that broke the camel's back". "It's quite evident that you can't go to the despatch box with issues like that surrounding you," he said. The daily media headlines on the scandal have riveted the Australian public and sparked debate about workplace culture amid the global #MeToo movement against sexual harassment. But it has also highlighted the perilous state of the coalition government, which just a few months ago survived a crisis over lawmakers' dual citizenship that threatened its wafer-thin parliamentary majority. Last week, a furious Turnbull savaged Joyce for "a shocking error of judgement", leading his deputy to fire back that the prime minister was "inept". In a statement from Washington, Turnbull Friday thanked Joyce for being "a fierce advocate for rural and regional Australia", while insisting the Nationals-Liberal coalition was "undiminished" by the scandal. But Labour opposition leader Bill Shorten called it "fundamentally damaged" and accused Turnbull of "an atrocious lack of judgement". "The fact that this scandal has dragged on for 16 days has been damaging to the government, but more importantly, the country," he said. McCormack widely seen as the front-runner for the deputy PM's post - acknowledged Joyce's two years in the job, saying, "His legacy will endure. I wish him well for the future." (Photo: Geneva Summit for Human Rights and Democracy)Pastor Evan Mawarire in Geneva on Feb. 21, 2018. Zimbabwean democracy dissident Pastor Evan Mawarire has expressed doubts as to whether Zimbabwe's military-installed president will be able to deliver on his promises to pull off free and fair elections for the nation's long-suffering people. The compelling pastor addressed the 10th Geneva Summit for Human Rights and Democracy this week calling on his country's new leader to deliver on his pledges to his nation. He told the AFP news agency in Geneva that Zimbabwe's legacy of ballot rigging, and political repression would take time to shed. "It's very difficult for me right now to believe that elections will be free, fair and credible because the history says otherwise", Mawarire said on the sidelines of the Geneva human rights summit, referring to Mugabe's tyrannical 37-year rule. "What they have done for 38 years is very different from what they are proposing they are going to do now". Mawarire is the pastor who galvanized Zimbabweans against the despotic rule of former president Robert Mugabe last year encouraging them to protest about corruption and economic mismanagement. The pastor who faced the wrath and might of Mugabe spoke to the Geneva gathering strongly but with measured words along with dissidents from countries including Vietnam, Venezuela, Turkey, Russian Iran and China. Zimbabwe's former ruler Robert Mugabe had observed his 94th birthday in private behind the walls of his Harare mansion on Feb. 21. This time it was without the lavish parties that marked such occasions during his nearly four-decade rule. Mugabe was ousted in a defacto coup by the military last November, paving way for his former deputy and protege Emmerson Mnangagwa to become president. Mugabe's police had arrested Pastor Mawirere as he led a church service for his protest campaign. 'OPEN FOR BUSINESS' He said at the Geneva summit, "The message from our new president is: "Zimbabwe is open for business, but the question we should be asking is whether Zimbabwe is open for freedom." Mawarire said, "More than anything else what we need is not just an economic breakthrough but a breakthrough of democracy and the rule of law." The organiser of last year's #ThisFlag protests faced 20 years in prison had he been convicted. After Mugabe was ousted, a Harare high court judge, however, ruled there was no evidence that he had "urged a violent removal of government." The former president, who reluctantly stepped down after soldiers placed him under house arrest at the age of 93, had long engaged in the hiring and firing of judges to follow the ruling party line. Tweeting a selfie taken in the courtroom, the smiling pastor called on his fellow citizens to join in "building a better Zimbabwe." He spoke to members of Zimbabwe's diaspora in London on Feb. 22. There, Mawarire said, "We need to move away from a situation where Zimbabwe is owned by a few - $15 billion goes missing and no one can account for it. He said, "We were incarcerated for demanding our rights - gone are the days when people remained silent - young people have gripped the idea of freeing themselves - our freedom is more important to us than ever before." Latest News UGC directs universities to consider Applied Mathematics as regular subject for UG admission The marks obtained by the candidates in this subject may be included for calculating the aggregate marks for Schools in Assam to reopen for class X from next week Classes will begin with not more than 30 students in a classroom Norwegian EdTech firm to help Indian students navigate their overseas aspirations It is also targeting making India a prime destination for foreign students to come and study in Indian HEIs By C hicago Tribune, Feb. 23, 2018 In an awkward onstage appearance this week, Gov. Bruce Rauner drank a glass of chocolate milk to demonstrate his belief in diversity. Its really, really good, Rauner said after taking a sip of the sugary drink. Diversity! The clunky corporate metaphor was the brainchild of Hyatt Hotels diversity and inclusion executive Tyronne Stoudemire, who appeared alongside Rauner on Wednesday at the downtown Chicago Thompson Center to discuss workplace diversity at a Black History Month event. Read More: Join us - become an Elderado today at: LarryElder.com Follow Larry Elder on Follow Larry Elder on Twitter "Like" Larry Elder on Facebook Blog Archive September (52) August (120) July (122) June (82) May (82) April (76) March (100) February (106) January (144) December (133) November (92) October (72) September (66) August (80) July (68) June (89) May (92) April (75) March (87) February (85) January (86) December (74) November (67) October (60) September (60) August (60) July (64) June (51) May (63) April (53) March (59) February (70) January (68) December (70) November (78) October (98) September (77) August (71) July (68) June (60) May (68) April (54) March (61) February (55) January (69) December (61) November (53) October (48) September (40) August (47) July (56) June (56) May (71) April (55) March (43) February (3) December (15) November (48) October (46) September (39) August (27) July (18) June (33) May (44) April (38) March (31) February (34) January (34) December (26) November (57) October (43) September (81) August (66) July (77) June (85) May (70) April (56) March (49) February (32) January (39) December (42) November (25) October (16) September (36) August (34) July (40) June (55) May (45) April (63) March (56) February (57) January (60) December (58) November (50) October (55) September (31) August (77) July (65) June (27) May (52) April (53) March (77) February (75) January (36) December (24) November (31) October (31) September (29) August (30) July (49) June (53) May (61) April (65) March (96) February (35) January (53) December (56) November (52) October (51) September (109) August (94) July (70) June (65) May (85) April (80) March (96) February (74) January (79) December (75) November (104) October (105) September (108) August (86) July (101) June (106) May (100) April (97) March (103) February (92) January (95) December (137) November (122) October (173) September (111) August (178) July (168) June (184) May (193) April (161) March (149) February (121) January (131) December (120) November (97) October (137) September (105) August (133) July (120) June (103) May (111) April (72) March (48) February (58) January (27) US plays its family card to justify YPG Admitting US-allied YPG forces were going to Syria's Afrin, US invented family lie for YPG forces mobility. Speaking at a press conference, US State Department Spokesperson Heather Nauert said that some of the YPG forces that theyre working with in the east, were starting to go to Afrin. Nauert said those forces that the US was working with "have familial relations, familial ties there, perhaps that's part of the reason why." SAME EXCUSE EVERY DAY Spokesperson said "What is going on in Afrin is taking away from the fight against Daesh." adding the US was in Syria to fight the Daesh terror organization. Operation Olive Branch was launched by Turkey on Jan. 20 to remove the PKK and its affiliate the Democratic Union Party (PYD) and its armed wing the YPG, as well as Daesh terrorists from Afrin in northwestern Syria. Brendan Fraser dominated the 90's and early 2000's with his hit blockbuster films and iconic roles. The actor is best known for his portrayal as Rick O' Connell in The Mummy trilogy but though the series made him a star, it cost him dearly. From the stunts he did in the films, Fraser had to receive a partial knee replacement, laminectomy and vocal chord surgery over a period of seven years. Furthermore, the actor's roles seemed to dwindle and he wasn't seen much on the big screen. Fraser is now speaking on why his career came to a halt. The reason why has shocked many. Fraser's Story Of Survival The 49-year-old actor claims that he was assaulted by former Hollywood Foreign Press Association President, Phillip Berk in 2003. The incident took place at a summer event when Fraser reached out to shake Berk's hand but Berk reached behind and grabbed the actor's butt and touched him inappropriately. "I felt ill, I felt like a little kid. I felt like there was a ball in my throat. I thought I was going to cry," Fraser stated. The actor commented that he became fearful of what had transpired and immediately rushed home to tell his then-wife, Afton Smith. "I became depressed, I was blaming myself and I was miserable-because I was saying, 'This is nothing; this guy reached around and he copped a feel," he continued. Berk denied the incident and claimed that it was "total fabrication", though he did write an apology to Fraser. Fraser also elaborated that he became "reclusive" after the assault occurred and felt that something had been "taken away" from him. Fraser also starred in the films, Bedazzled, Blast From The Past, George of the Jungle, Crash, and Gods and Monsters. Fraser isn't the only male in Hollywood to speak out against his attacker. Star Trek actor Anthony Rapp, accused Kevin Spacey of sexually harassing him when he was a teenager. Following Rapp, more actors outed Spacey as a sexual predator who has either groped or indecently exposed himself to them. White Chick's actor Terry Crews alleged that WME agent, Adam Venit, groped him at a public event. Fraser has joined the cast for the FX series, Trust, that is based on the abduction of John Getty II, which will premiere on Mar. 28, 2108. Fraser portrays James Flecther Chace in the series. Harvey Weinstein is apologizing to Jennifer Lawrence and Meryl Streep after citing their names in an attempt to get his lawsuit for sexual misconduct dismissed. In an official statement made in The Hollywood Reporter, Weinstein's representative acknowledged the input of the two A-list actresses and apologized for dragging their names into the case. "Moving forward, Mr. Weinstein has advised his counsel to not include specific names of former associates and to avoid whenever possible, even if they are in the public record," his rep continues. Lawyers Cite Streep, Lawrence Last Tuesday, Weinstein and his team of lawyers requested the dismissal of a racketeering lawsuit filed against the Hollywood mogul by six women who accused him of sexually assaulting or harassing them. Weinstein's lawyers pointed at the invalidity of the class-action status of the case, saying the claims would apply to every women who met or worked with the mogul, whether or not they claimed to have been abused. Streep and Lawrence were specifically mentioned. In the motion filed to the New York federal judge, the lawyers behind Weinstein picked out parts of their official statements on the tycoon and claimed both Oscar-winning actresses had good relationships with him. Gwyneth Paltrow was also named in the motion with Weinstein's counsel pointing out that while the Goop founder alleged to have been harassed while filming Emma, she worked with Weinstein again in Shakespeare in Love. The actresses responded quickly to their names being used in the motion with Streep calling the move pathetic and exploitive. Lawrence said Weinstein is a predator, saying that his team acted like they've always done by taking her words out of context so they could benefit from them. Weinstein's Apology The response from Weinstein's camp comes just as quick with the lawyers accepting responsibility for naming his former Hollywood colleagues. The official statement stresses that they will be keeping names out of court as they move forward. "Even though Mr. Weinstein has worked with hundreds of actresses and actors who had only professional and mutually respectful experiences with him, Mr. Weinstein has directed in the future that no specific names be used by his counsel, even where those actors have made previous public statements about him," the rep concludes. The list of Weinstein's alleged victims is a long one with the mogul facing over 70 sexual misconduct allegations since the reports first broke in October 2017. Weinstein has denied all nonconsensual claims made against him. It's been weeks since the star-studded birthday party of Ellen DeGeneres, but there are still incredible stories pouring in from the A-list guests. Take Oprah Winfrey, who was having so much fun that she didn't even recognize the famous leading man she was talking to at the bash. "I can't remember in my life having that much fun," Winfrey says during her appearance at The Ellen Show. She emphasizes, "In my life!" Oprah Completely Misses Leo's Identity The Oprah Winfrey Network host explains that she knows a lot of celebrities from her show throughout the years. However, she stresses, when they do show up for an appearance at her show, they look like how they do onscreen. At the DeGeneres birthday bash, the guests apparently came "in disguise," looking more like regular people. Besides, Oprah points out, she's a homebody who doesn't really go out a lot. "This guy passes by," Winfrey says, adding that he asked her how she's been and began to engage her in small talk. The talk show icon, who was talking to The Weeknd at the time, didn't have a clue who she was talking to. "So this guy comes back and I'm thinking, 'I know it's somebody, I know it's somebody, who is it?'" she continues. "Is it Justin Timberlake? I don't think it's Justin Timberlake." Fortunately, The Weeknd didn't have the same problem identifying the A-list star, telling him that he loved one of his films. When the mystery guest responded that it wasn't his favorite out of his filmography, Winfrey jumped at the chance to figure out who he was. "I go, 'So what was your favorite film?' And he says, 'The Aviator,'" Winfrey recounts that it finally clicked who the actor was: Oscar winner Leonardo DiCaprio. "And I say, 'Leonardo, you're so funny!'" The Weeknd even captured the conversation between the trio on his Instagram page. Despite the awkward encounter, Winfrey tells DeGeneres that the party was the most fun she's ever had. One particular highlight is the diversity of the people who attended the event, all from different backgrounds and industries. Possibly The Best Party Ever So many iconic moments took place at DeGeneres' 60th birthday party, including Kim Kardashian West posing for a photo with husband, Kanye West, John Legend, and Chrissy Teigen. Other A-list Hollywood stars also showed up such as Jennifer Aniston, Jennifer Lawrence, Adele, Reese Witherspoon, and many more. Witherspoon gathered all of the music industry guest and encouraged them to get onstage, which led to performances by Pharrell Williams, French Montana, Pink, Alessia Cara, and Melissa Etheridge. David Spade, who was passed a medical marijuana at the bash, was nearly as confused as Winfrey, mistaking DeGeneres for Justin Bieber for the first hour of being there. DES MOINES Wednesday afternoon at Grandview College in Des Moines, the Iowa Court of Appeals held oral arguments open to the public. The first of two cases before the judges was the appeal of Lee Christensen of Estherville. Christensen is convicted of second-degree murder for killing Thomas Bortvit June 6, 2015. Christensen was not in attendance. Oral arguments in appellate cases are argued by attorneys. Wednesday a panel of five, including Chief Judge David R. Danilson, Anuradha Vaitheswaran, Mary E. Tabor, Richard Doyle and Christopher McDonald, asked each attorney questions about their interpretation of laws and rules of procedure as each proceeded through their cases. Leon Spies was first as Christensen is the person seeking the appeal. He had 10 minutes, including answering questions from various judges, to present the case. Spies introduced the situation, stating, Lee Christensen was a gifted, talented, popular high school student and athlete who shot and killed a popular, gifted college student. Spies said, [Christensen] believed he would have unbiased jurors. Spies said he urged the court to find Christensens right to a fair trial was violated due to misconduct from jurors and a question from the Assistant State Attorney General to a crime lab investigator during the trial. Judge McDonald said, As I read the evidence, someone heard a rumor of something, and there was a social media post. I dont know that the jury poll allowed us to understand what was specifically heard. Judge Tabor said, When you try the case in a small community, how does this work in a practical matter? If we throw out a verdict based on a rumor, how can we ever have a jury trial in our small communities? Spies provided examples from the records of what jurors said they heard and when they heard it. Chief Judge Danilson said, We dont know what went on when the jury considered the lesser included offenses. Is not the rule in Iowa a reasonable probability that outside influence had an effect on the verdict? We do not know the exact nature of what was heard. Judge McDonald said, The jury foreman polled the other jurors about whether they were afraid to go to their cars after the verdict without accompaniment by law enforcement. They knew they were going to make someone mad with their verdict; it was, and these trials always are a tense environment. Judge Vaitheswaran said, To say the jury reached the verdict of second degree murder under duress seems vague and non-specific. No juror said, I violated the mandate to not view any media; I got on Facebook, I talked with my granddaughter, I talked out in the community.' Spies said, The timing is very important. The jurors left the jury room to go home [after stopping deliberations the night of June 30, 2016] but it was before they left the courthouse. Judge [David] Lester said he was troubled by what seemed to be the disregard of his admonition. He was clear and unmistakable. Where outside influence played a part, the test is met. Whether there was objective influence is an objective test. Kelli Huser, on behalf of the State Attorney Generals Office, said, In situations like this, we only have a backward look at what happened. This will probably be an issue as long as social media remains popular. Huser said the standard is whether the media or the outside threats of civil violence could reasonably be found to have an effect on the typical juror. The judges said their written ruling will be issued as soon as possible. The oral arguments that began promptly at 1:30 p.m. ended at 2:08. The case of Pinky, a pit bull type dog removed from the city of Des Moines, followed. In the last few years, the issues of security and counter-terrorism have gotten to the center of European interest. This trend is especially obvious in the mutual cooperation between the EU and its North African neighbors. Brussels is increasingly concerned about the large number of foreign fighters from North African countries who fought in the jihadist ranks in different conflicts across the Middle East. Europeans have a strong interest in understanding the security landscape and threats that emanate from North Africa as well as in cooperating with North African countries to address these. Despite the fact that the terrorists keep on permeating the borders of North African countries, national borders remain to have a major impact on the fight against terrorism. Because of the near-total breakdown of the Libyan state, jihadists have succeeded in establishing a solid presence in Libya. Importantly, from the European perspective, establishing relations and cooperation with functioning North African states is key. Tunisia and Morocco stand out in this respect: both countries have close ties to the EU and its member states, and are engaged in major campaigns against terrorism and radicalization. The trio together makes up the front line in the effort to establish zones of security on the southern shore of the Mediterranean. Tunisia and Morocco have capabilities to shape the fight against terrorism through their different approaches and distinct history. Nonetheless, the counter-terrorism strategies of both countries share a common shortcoming: they have prioritized the prevention of attacks and the disruption of terrorist cells, but have not paid sufficient attention to the legal and judicial regulations and laws to deal with people detained on terrorism charges. They have likewise omitted a wide range of factors that contribute to radicalization. Therefore, the EUs role lies in supplementing its current focus on technical and operational security assistance with more emphasis on areas such as the treatment of arrested suspects, socioeconomic factors that may contribute to radicalization as well as the states broader relationship with communities that are disproportionately vulnerable to terrorist recruitment. Brussels has worked closely with both Rabat and Tunis to fight jihadists within their territory and in Europe. This cooperation has been effective in many ways but more can be done. In Tunisia, it is important to follow through on the existing programs and encourage further openness within the Ministry of the Interior to help the institution improve its cooperation with citizens. Greater professionalism within the security services would also make a difference and it would make it easier for Europeans to share intelligence with Tunisia. In Morocco, the EU members, particularly France and Spain, should promote and support measures to fight corruption and abusive practices within the security services. While Morocco is not likely to establish a culture of genuine public accountability anytime soon, the EU should seek to encourage greater professionalism to make sure that the attention is focused on real threats while reducing public alienation from the authorities. Nevertheless, the most significant challenge is the same in both countries the treatment of radicalized individuals and the prevention of further radicalization. Since this is a complex issue that influences both North Africa and Europe alike, all sides should work together to explore better ways to handle radicalized individuals and to establish a mechanism by which to distinguish between committed jihadists and those who are more open to reintegration. The Southern Front Line: EU Counter-Terrorism Cooperation with Tunisia and Morocco Policy Brief by Fatim-Zohra El Malki and Anthony Dworkin European Council on Foreign Relations / ECFR. (The Policy Brief can be downloaded here) BMW SA Open hosted by the City of Ekurhuleni Glendower GC, City of Ekurhuleni, Gauteng, South Africa Hi, I am new to the forum and have recently inherited some money, in which I was thinking about investing in property. I reside permanently in the UK but wanted to look at buying a 1 /2 bed apartment out in the Paphos area outright, and then renting it out for a portion of the year as a holiday let. I have looked in to management companies in the area who can hold keys, do the meet and greet and clean the apartments between lets but are there any companies who would manage the property and include in that the actual advertising and arranging of the people who will actually rent the property. I can use the likes of Holiday Lettings etc but in an ideal world I would prefer to have a company do the finding of the guests and for me to pay the costs etc. At present I am just looking to see if someone can point me in the direction of a company who I can speak with and ask further questions I have. I appreciate you reading this and thanks in advance to anyone who responds. Lee Being bilingual is regarded as a great asset and one that keep the brain active, but new research has found that some young children may need help to cope with learning two languages at once.But scientists have made a major breakthrough in the assessment of language development among bilingual families and in the identification of those children who require extra support to improve their language skills.During a three-year study involving nine British universities researchers interviewed almost 400 families with two-year-old children learning English and another of 13 common additional languages.They were able to demonstrate for the first time that those learning English and a phonetically or grammatically close language, such as Dutch or German, knew more words in their other language than those learning more distant languages such as Mandarin or Greek.The team used the findings to create and test the first toolkit for health professionals to accurately assess how bilingual childrens language skills are developing.A large number of children in the UK grow up with two or more languages, but growing up bilingual also usually means these children acquire each language at a slower pace than monolingual peers, explained Dr Andrea Krott, of the University of Birminghams School of Psychology.Since up to 15% of children have delayed language acquisition due to developmental disorders, it is important to be able to distinguish whether the slow language development of a bilingual child is due to them being bilingual or is the result of a developmental impairment, she said.According to project leader Dr Caroline Floccia, associate professor in psychology at the University of Plymouth, while language is a foundation for harmonious development in a child and being bilingual is now a norm across the world, in the majority of cases, their development in each language is slightly delayed compared to that of monolingual children.She pointed out that this can have knock-on effects both for them and when they get to school for their peers. We are proposing the first practical solution to the problems faced by bilingual children, because the earlier we identify and tackle these potential issues, the more likely a positive outcome for the children and their prospects, she said.The test includes a list of familiar English words that parents tick off if their child recognises or can say them, and a similar list of familiar words in their additional language. It also features a questionnaire that assesses the proportion of time a child spends engaged in an English speaking setting compared with their additional language.This will allow practitioners to identify bilingual toddlers who may need additional support with their language development which has not been possible until now.Kim Plunkett, professor of cognitive science at the University of Oxford, explained that the work also provides researchers in the field of bilingual development with important new insights into the development of the bilingual mind. IN 2017 Lamb Master sheep stud launched a new breed into the Australian sheep market and it is now a registered trade mark. There was an overwhelming market response to this opportunity with all available sale rams being sold within the first week following advertising in Farm Weekly. Stud manager Brent Watson and stud master Neil Garnett said the benefits of the Lamb Master breed include high fertility, excellent body structure, early growth to maturity, full shedding white coat, sound feet and all terrain physical mobility. The sheep are only grassfed in order to protect their fertility and longevity and to allow those with the best constitution to express their superior qualities, Brent said. We promote the evolution of the breed through continuous selection to reflect market demand. Neil said their 2018 new generation lambs were displaying increased growth rates and an improved body structure, with overall quality and evenness. The stud is now taking orders for rams available in 2018. In late August Neil will class the rams and those animals will be available for delivery in September and October. Flock rams will fall into quality/pricing grades of $1000, $1250, $1500 and $1800 plus GST ($1100, $1375, $1650 and $1980 inc GST), while stud rams will be priced from $2000 to $5000 plus GST ($2200-$5500 inc GST). Confirmed orders will be filled in order of receipt and interested buyers are asked to contact Neil to discuss their annual ram requirements. This year the stud will be making small starter groups of Lamb Master ewes available for the first time. Brent said the stud was looking to breeders of white shedding type sheep to make contact with them and discuss Lamb Master ram breeding opportunities and what they can do for them. Another new venture for the stud in 2018 is that it intends to announce a Lamb Master ram breeding program in all Australian States later in the year once an information gathering period and discussions with interested breeders are complete. Brent said their intention is to have Lamb Master breeders strategically located in sheep breeding regions in Australia, which would provide rams to the industry that are classified to Lamb Master breed standards. For producers wanting to get to know more about the Lamb Master breed the stud will hold its first public field day on Friday, March 16, 2018, between 1pm and 4pm at 1465 Osmington Rd, Margaret River (turn into Hobson Rd and follow the signs about 500m). The formalities will commence at 2pm with both Neil and Brent presenting information about the breed and future plans for the stud. Also during the afternoon the stud will display about 160 adult animals including ewes and lambs for inspection. Brent and Neil will be available on the afternoon to answer questions and to discuss ram sales and breeding opportunities as well. For further details on the field day refer to the advertisement on page 21 in this weeks Farm Weekly. - More information: contact Neil Garnett neil@lambmaster.com.au or phone 0418 855 406 or Brent Watson brent@lambmaster.com.au (08) 9757 8135. Ms MacTiernan instructed the Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development last week to investigate the cause of the loss of 2400 sheep from the live export voyage in August 2017. This was the first time a minister has taken such action in 10 years. Emanuel Exports sent a total of 63,804 sheep on the 23-day voyage from Fremantle to Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, when 3.76 per cent of the sheep perished. The Australian Department of Agriculture and Water Resources published the figures of all livestock exports from July 1 - December 31, 2017, which highlighted that it wasnt unusual to lose sheep on long voyages, although this particular shipment exceeded the reportable mortality level of two per cent. Ms MacTiernan was advised by the WA Solicitor General that the State Animal Welfare Act 2002 applied to aboard live export vessels, and that WAs legal obligations were not inconsistent with Federal laws regarding live export. She said she had written to the Federal Minister for Agriculture and Water Resources David Littleproud to suggest a collaborative approach to the investigation between the State and Federal agencies. Our legal advice is that WAs animal welfare laws apply on live export ships as a government, we have an obligation to see those laws followed, Ms MacTiernan said. We have real concerns over the impact of heat stress on WA sheep on live export voyages and have made clear to industry that where there may have been breaches of the Animal Welfare Act, we have a responsibility to investigate. Maintaining public confidence in welfare standards in live export is absolutely vital to the ongoing sustainability of industry. Australian Livestock Exporters Council chief executive officer Simon Westaway said, Australian livestock exporters operate under the existing Federal regulatory system, which represents the worlds most comprehensive livestock export laws. Exporters comply fully with reporting requirements and any supply chain investigations conducted by the Department of Agriculture and Water Resources. Exporters have a proud track record of achieving continual improvement in the trade, and, as such, support ongoing Federal reform including the current review of the Australian Standards for the Export of Livestock (ASEL). Emanuel Exports managing director Graham Daws has been reported as saying the cause of the deaths was heat stress during the voyage. Mr Daws has declined to comment further while an investigation was underway, although the company said it would engage with government and comply with all their requirements. During early August 2017, around the time of the voyage in question, extreme weather was reported across the Middle East with temperatures in Kuwait reaching 47 degrees. In Iraq, birds were reported falling from the sky and trees caught fire. From July 1 to December 31, 2017, according to the Department of Agriculture and Water resources livestock mortalities report, Emanuel Exports shipped a total of 634,113 sheep and lost 6781, which equates to a total 1.06pc mortality rate during those six months. All the voyages left from Fremantle with one including Adelaide and all voyages went to the Middle East lasting from between 18 and 27 days. Emmanuel Exports has been involved in the live export of sheep to the Middle East since 1960 and is still working on opening up new markets for WA sheep. Last year managing director Graham Daws became the 2017 LiveCorp Hall of Fame recipient for his contribution to the industry. IT was smiles a plenty following last weeks Farm Weekly WA Supreme Bull Sale in Brunswick with buyers walking away with quality bulls and vendors seeing a rise in average and clearance on last year. With the grandstand in the Alan Evans Cattle Selling Complex filled to the brim with more than 100 registered buyers, a quality presentation of bulls across all breeds and a stronger cattle market since the beginning of the year, there were enough positives to suggest the sale would be solid. The quality line-up of bulls attracted plenty of support throughout the sale from not only local WA buyers but also New South Wales and South Australia and resulted in prices hitting a high of $20,500 for a Yallaroo Poll Hereford to go with another five bulls selling for $10,000 or more. In the joint selling effort the Elders and Landmark teams offered 116 bulls representing eight British and European breeds from 23 studs and sold 87, or 75 per cent under the hammer at an average of $5845. When compared to last years sale the average was up $500 and the clearance rate was up eight points. In last years sale the agents offered 129 bulls and sold 87 under the hammer for an average of $5345. Not only did the Hereford/Poll Hereford breed take top price honours it also came out on top in the average stakes at $8132 for the 19 bulls sold from the 22 offered. The next best average across the breeds was $6750 achieved by the Lincoln Red breed for two bulls offered and sold. The highest average for the European breeds and third best overall was $5563 and this was achieved in the Simmental offering when 16 bulls sold from 19 offered. Elders auctioneer Don Morgan said given the current cattle price climate it was a very good sale. The number of registrations was above expectations and there was plenty of interest in the cattle presented, Mr Morgan said. And as is always the case, the bulls of the highest quality sold well with some breeds in more demand than others. Landmark South West livestock manager Michael Rose agreed it was a pleasing result. The clearance was really good which reflected the quality of presentation across all breeds yarded on the day, Mr Rose said. Buyers were willing to spend money across the catalogue making for a positive result. In their 49th year of breeding Hereford cattle Yallaroo stud principals Rob and Heather Francis, Busselton, achieved their highest ever sale price and the sales top price, to continue their strangle-hold as the sales top price vendors for a fifth consecutive year. First-time buyer to the stud Paul Hawkins, Forrest View Grazing, Dinninup, with the assistance of Landmark Bridgetown agent Ben Cooper bid to $20,500 for the third bull in the Yallaroo team, Yallaroo Miracle M012 (P). Bidding kicked off at $6000 on the polled son of Mawarra Mustang (P) and quickly rose as Mr Morgan fielded a flurry of bids from around the stands but in the end it was Mr Hawkins who had the staying power and secured the bull to plenty of applause when it was finally knocked down. Miracle, which was an 2016 April Fools Day born calf, tipped the scales at 999 kilograms and had scan figures of 120cm2 EMA, 5.7 IMF, 11mm P8 fat and 8mm rib fat. It wasnt only Miracles outstanding length and growth which caught the eye of many prospective buyers, it also recorded outstanding growth EBVs, which rank it in the top 5pc of the breed for 200, 400 and 600-day weight. Miracle has EBVs of +8.6 birthweight, +13 milk, +42, +66 and +97 for 200, 400 and 600-day weights, +53 carcase weight (CWT), +2.5 EMA, -0.5 rib fat, -0.7 rump fat, +1 retail beef yield (RBY) and +0.1 IMF. Along with buying the top-priced sire Mr Hawkins and Mr Cooper also combined to secure the 837kg Yallaroo Munro M33 for $8500 from Yallaroo. The late May 2016 born Munro, is sired by Yallaroo Harvey H46 and is Yallaroo Silver Queen J5s first calf. It has growth EBVs of +25, +37 and +54 for 200, 400 and 600-day weights, along with positive fats with EBVs of +0.7 rib and +1.1 rump. The pairing continued their buying spree also picking up the 912kg Yallaroo Mason M19 and the 1067kg Yallaroo Majestic M3 both at $5000. Majestic is by Mawarra Aftershock and is in the top 5pc for 200, 400 and 600-day weights, while Mason is by Yallaroo Harvey and has positive fat EBVs of +1 for rib (top 15pc) and +1.7 for rump (top 10pc). Top price buyer Paul Hawkins, Forrest View Grazing, Dinninup, said the bulls he purchased had the sort of ideal growth and carcase traits he was looking for. We wanted stand out 200 and 400-day growth traits in the bulls we bought so they can be producing calves capable of being turned off as early as possible, he said. This was the first time the 700 breeder operation had bought bulls from Yallaroo, but Mr Hawkins said after inspecting the cattle prior to the sale he had been impressed. Robs bulls stand up very nicely and have everything you look for in a quality Hereford, Mr Hawkins said. We run all Poll Herefords, many of which weve bought out of Mt Riddick station over the past few years and we think the bulls weve bought will help our herd move forward and the horned sires will also add that bit of hybrid vigour as well. Losing bidder on the top-priced bullwas Peter Thomas, Waroona. - Angus The Angus breed got the sale underway with 25 bulls offered from four vendors including three selling Angus bulls in the sale for the first time. By the end of the run only 16 of the 25 bulls offered or 64pc had found new homes at an average of $5281 and to a top of $8000 twice, meaning the clearance for the breed was down 24pc on last year and the average was back $230. In last years sale 23 from 26 Angus bulls sold for a $5511 average. Return vendors the Kitchen family, Carenda stud, Katanning, were the biggest vendors in the run with an offering of 19 bulls and they sold 11 under the hammer at an average of $5091, back from $5596 last year when they sold 13 from 16 offered. Along with being the biggest vendor, the Carenda stud also sold one of the $8000 equal top-priced Angus bulls. Making the $8000 price tag in the Carenda team was Carenda Gatsby M18 (AI) when it was knocked down to the Venables family, FG & LV Venables, Cookernup. The 914kg Gatsby M18 is sired by Milwillah Gatsby G279 (AI) and is in the top 5-15pc of the breed for growth with figures of +52, +90 and +124 for 200 (top 10pc), 400 (top 15pc) and 600-day weight (top 5pc), while on the carcase side it ranks in the top 10pc for CWT (+73) and top 15pc for IMF (+2.9). Hes a good fleshy bull with strength, growth, depth and length, Oliver Venables said. I also liked the above average EMA figure (+5.5). The bull will go into a self-replacing Angus herd which Mr Venables said they were looking to increase the numbers in. This is the first time weve bought from Carenda and hopefully well see some good progeny out of this bull which will go on to be future breeders in our herd. The next best price in the Carenda team was $6000 paid twice, firstly by Woodburn Grazing Pty Ltd, Porongurups, for the 888kg Carenda Yogi M41 (AI) and then by 1080 Farming, Katanning, for the 874kg Carenda Thunder M14 (AI). Yogi M41 is by Booroomooka Yogi Z27 and Thunder M14 is by SAV Thunderbird 9061. The stud also sold two bulls at $5500 to Sandlewood Farms, Harvey and Hutton Pastoral, Witchcliffe. Matching the Carenda stud in the top price stakes was first-time Alf Lorkiewicz, White Valley stud, Dardanup, who started his Angus stud only a couple of years ago. Mr Lorkiewicz sole entry White Valley Marshall M8 created plenty of interest in the ring before being knocked down for $8000 to Greg Brown, Ponderosa stud, Albany. The well-structured Marshall, was purchased as a calf in utero sired by Coonamble Hunter H274 when Mr Lorkiewicz purchased Coonamble F194 (ET) at the Coonamble reduction sale in 2015. Marshall has EBVs of +4.4 birthweight, +16 milk, +49, +89 and +125 for 200, 400 and 600-day weight, +77 CWT, +6.3 EMA, +0.1 rib fat, +0.4 rump fat, +0.7 RBY and +1.6 IMF, these figure rank it in the top 5pc for CWT and top 10pc for 600-day weight. Mr Brown said the bull would provide a new bloodline for the stud with its Coonamble genetics on both sides. I really liked his quiet temperament and good shape, Mr Brown said. In addition to physical attributes he also had a good set of figures. Better known for their Red Angus bulls, Guy and Pat Jellicoe, Jutland Park stud, Serpentine, offered two Angus bulls for the first time from their recently established Angus herd and both sold under the hammer for a $6250 average. Their lead bull Jutland Madorda, like White Valley Marshall purchased as a calf in utero at the Coonamble reduction sale, sold for $7500 to JE & BLM Higgins, Frankland. The 940kg Madorda is by Coonamble Elevator and out of Coonamble G117 and ranks in the top 5pc for 400 and 600-day weight and top 10pc for 200-day weight and CWT. Hutton Pastoral picked up the second Jutland Park bull, Jutland Mandella for $5000 Rounding out the vendors in the run was another first time vendor John Annear, Trafalgar stud, Vasse, who offered three bulls and sold two under the hammer both at $4000. Bettina Downs Grazing, Pinjarra, purchased Trafalgar Essaff M23, which is sired by Esselmont Africa K6 and RP Bellairs, Mundijong, took home Trafalgar Chisum M51, which is by S Chisum 6175. Essaff ranks in top 10pc for milk (+22) and IMF (+3.3), while Chisum M51 is positive for fats at +1 rib and +1.3 rump. - Hereford/Poll Hereford The Hereford and Poll Hereford bulls were the second into the ring and set the sale alight achieving both a solid clearance and some sizzling prices. All up 22 Hereford and Poll Hereford bulls were offered by four vendors and with strong interest 19 (86pc) sold under the hammer for an $8132 average, meaning the average was up $132 on last year. Not only did Rob and Heather Franciss Yallaroo team of 10 bulls take top price honours, the team also achieved the highest individual vendor average when all 10 bulls sold averaged $9650. Along with the sales top priced bull Yallaroo also sold the sales $15,000 second top-priced sire to return buyer Eddie Wedge, Gingin. Mr Wedge purchased the studs lead bull, Yallaroo Mustang M14, which is a son of Mawarra Aftershock. The 985kg Mustang had a raw EMA scan of 126cm2 and ranks in the top 5pc of the breed for 200 and 600-day weights (+39 and +94) and top 10pc for 400-day weight (+63) and RBY (+1.6). The next best price in the Yallaroo team and the third top price overall was $12,500 paid by Gunyah Herefords stud principal Robert Hain, Cooma, New South Wales, for Yallaroo Marshall M35. Mr Hain travelled from New South Wales to Brunswick specifically for the Yallaroo sire he walked away with. He said it was the outstanding carcase traits of the Yallaroo sire that enticed him to make his first purchase from WA. This is the first time Ive bought from WA but I knew after seeing a picture of this bull online I had to investigate further, Mr Hain said. Rob sent me through a video of him walking and his presence combined with impressive carcase figures for his age got my attention. This bull has the cosmetics to match his excellent figures hes got sire appeal, tracks well and stands out so Im very glad to have him heading home with me. I run both horned and polled Herefords in my stud back at home and was in the market for a really good horned bull, he said. Of the 300 registered stud cows we have, about 80 are horned and I wanted so secure some more quality genetics to use over them. Marshall is sired by Yallaroo King K5 and weighed 971kg with scan figures of 130cm2 EMA, 5.9 IMF and 9mm for rib and rump fat. A fourth bull in the Yallaroo team hit the five-figure mark when Yallaroo Maverick M37 sold for $10,000 to Ingleby Pastoral, Milrulong, NSW, through Elders Nannup agent Terry Tarbotton. The 924kg Yallaroo King K5 son was above breed average for 200, 400 and 600-day weights and had an EMA scan of 122cm2. John House, House Poll Hereford stud, Dardanup, was another breeder to experience a strong sale with his team of six sires selling to strong enquiry. Five of the House bulls were destined for a new paddock after selling to a top of $11,000 and an average of $8100. The $11,000 top-priced House bull, House Magic M8, was purchased by the sales top-priced buyer Paul Hawkins, Forrest View Grazing. Magic M8 was dropped in March 2016 and is sired by Morganvale Furness (P). Along with great eye appeal Magic ranks in the top 10pc of the breed for growth (+38, +63 and +88) and carcase weight (+60) as well as top 15pc for EMA (+4.3). House Magnum M26 was another bull to break the five figure mark when it sold at $10,500 to TL OByrne & Co, Quindalup. Magnum M26 is a son of Morganvale Furness (P) and is in the top 10pc for EMA and above breed average for growth. Other better prices in the House run were $7500 for House Master M11 paid by Yandilla Grazing, Manypeaks and $6500 for House Maestro M14 which was knocked down to Landmark WAcommercial cattle manager Darren Chatley. Maestro is in the top 1pc for 200, 400 and 600-day weights, CWT, EMA, while Master ranks in the top 1pc for CWT and EMA plus top 5pc for 400 and 600-day weights. The Greenland Poll Hereford stud, Pemberton, offered and sold two bulls to a top of $5000 and an average of $4500. Greenland Might & Power (P) attracted $5000 when it sold to Fraser Trust, Chowerup. Might & Power is sired by Norolle 46 Real Power and ranks in the top 5pc for EMA (+5.6) and RBY (+1.7). The second Greenland bull in the sale sold for $4000 to DA Altria, Bridgetown. The Lynn familys Eskdale stud, Cunderdin, rounded out the vendors in the run when it offered a team of four bull of which two sold for an average of $4250. Topping the Eskdale line-up at $4500 was Eskdale Mergus F41 M13 (AI) (P) selling to Northampton producers PA & TS Husbands. The son of River Perry Fergus F14 M13, Mergus ranks in the top 5pc for CWT and EMA as well as top 10pc for 200 and 400-day weights. The other Eskdale bull to sell was Eskdale Michael C8 M16 (AI) (P) which was purchased at $4000 by PP & B Smith, Busselton. - Simmental A good line-up of 19 traditional and Black Simmental bulls from three vendors were next to be offered and 16 (or 84pc) of them sold under the hammer for an average of $5563. Compared to last year the average lifted $111 and the clearance was up 16pc. The Patterson familys Bullock Hills stud, Woodanilling, offered 17 traditional and Black Simmental bulls to be the sales second biggest individual vendor. At the completion of its run, Bullock Hills had sold 14 at auction to average $5607 to be among the sales strong averages for the bigger vendors. In the breakdown eight out of nine Black Simmentals sold for a $5313 average and six from seven traditionals sold for a $6000 average. Bullock Hills topped the Simmental values again this year but unlike last year when it was a Black Simmental which took top price honours this time it was a stylish traditional bull from the stud which rose to the top. Taking top price honours for Bullock Hills at $10,000 was Bullock Hills Max M50 (P) when it was knocked down to Norm Trigwell, Nu-Plains stud, Boyanup, who was buying with the assistance of Elders Boyanup agent Mal Barrett. The 958kg bull, which is by Bonnydale Lethal Weapon (P), is in the top 1pc of the breed for 600-day weight (+66), top 5pc for 400-day weight (+45) and CWT (+34) plus top 10pc for three of the four Simmental indexes. Mr Trigwell said while he had purchased sires from Bullock Hills in the past, the new Bullock Hills bull provides a total genetic outcross for the Nu-Plains herd. First and foremost the bull has to have a good temperament, Mr Trigwell said. It is early maturing and has a quality body all the way through with pretty good EBVs. He has a low birthweight and good growth rates and the fact that he is polled is a bonus. Another traditional bull Bullock Hills Mario M65 (P), which was also by Bonnydale Lethal, made good money selling for $7500 to PL & AM Bell, Munglinup, while return buyer to the stud CA Vinci, Beelerup, picked up two polled Willandra Jerry sons for $6000 (Bullock Hills Maverick M18) and $4000 (Bullock Hills Monza M95). In the Bullock Hills Black Simmental offering prices hit a high of $7500 for Bullock Hills Marley M69 (P) when it sold to RH Norman & Son, Busselton. The 844kg Marley was sired by Bullock Hills Hamish (P) and is in the top 1pc for three of the four Simmental indexes and top 5pc for EMA, rib fat and rump fat. The Busselton operation also paid $5000 for the 870kg Bullock Hills Magnum M39 (P) which is also a son of Hamish. The studs two lead bulls Bullock Hills Cowboy M5 (P) and Bullock Hills Marco M44 (P) both sold at $6000 to RH & SJ Manning, Busselton and GA & WM Abbott, Wagin, respectively. Brighton Farms stud principals Mark and Rose King, Donnybrook, had one bull in the Simmental line-up this year, Brighton Maynard (P) and it sold for $4000 to GE Payne, Karridale. The 800kg Maynard is by Bonnydale Kojak G082 and has growth EBVs of +22, +33 and +46 for 200, 400 and 600-day weight. The Tuckey family, Mubarn stud, Pinjarra, also only had one bull in the sale this year Mubarn Mississippi. Mississippi sold for $6000 to Landmark Waroona agent Richard Pollock who was bidding on behalf of MI & S Vuletic, Coolup. The long-bodied, well-balanced Mississippi is a son of Woonallee Howzat (P) and has growth EBVs of +25, +44 and +61 for 200, 400 and 600-day weights. - Blonde dAquitaine Three Blonde dAquitaine studs offered five bulls between them but unfortunately only one sold under the hammer for $3500. Securing the $3500 bid under the hammer was Uranongo Matrix from the Uranongo stud, Bridgetown, when Mr Pollock raised his bidding card to secure the 806kg bull. The January 2016-drop calf is sired by Uranongo Heist and scanned 111cm2 EMA, 2.9 IMF plus 5mm for both rib and rump fat on October 1st. A second Blonde bull from the Belini stud, Dardanup, Belini Max (D) did sell post sale with J & M Farming, Hopetoun, purchasing it privately for $4500. The 910kg Max was the first Blackwater Heston son to be offered in Australia. p Charolais When it came time for the Charolais line-up buyers were spoilt for choice with four studs offering up 29 bulls, the most by any breed in the sale and buyers responded accordingly pushing both the clearance and average for the breed up on last year. By the end of the run 21 or 72pc had sold under the hammer for an average of $5048, meaning the clearance was up five points and the average $812. Peter and Judy Milton, Copplestone stud, Dardanup, were the volume vendors in the Charolais run with a team of 15 bulls and with strong support they sold 12 under the hammer to the breeds $7500 top price and an average of $5333. Recording the $7500 price tag was Copplestone Macca M27 (P) when Landmark Boyup Brook agent Jamie Abbs had the final bid on the long, deep, thick bull for Gelorup operation Jenour & Son. Mr Abbs said the operation runs a purebred Angus herd and uses Charolais sires to produce quality crossbred calves destined for domestic feed and supermarket trade. Its focus is on 200 and 400-day weight EBVs, as well as good carcase traits, in particular EMA, Mr Abbs said. The 834kg polled Macca is sired by Ascot Frederick (P) and has EBVs of +0.4 birthweight, +19 milk (top 1pc of breed), +12, +31 and +39 for 200, 400 and 600-day weight, +23 CWT, +1.4 EMA, +1 rib fat, +1.3 rump fat and +0.4 IMF. Mr Abbs was also quick to snap up Copplestone Mandrake M58 (P/S) at $7000 and Copplestone Moby Dick M6 (P) at $5000 for other clients. The 820kg, March 2016-drop Mandrake, which is a son of Eagles Tor Jeep (P), ranks in the top 5pc of the breed for 200-day weight (+19) and top 10pc for 400 and 600-day weights (+35 and +49). Other bulls to sell well in the Copplestone team were Copplestone Magellan M59, a son of Palgrove Hagar (P), when it was knocked down at $6500 to AJ & WJ Ryan & Co, Pemberton, while Landmark Manjimup representative Brett Chatley bid to $6000 on behalf of Forrest Downs, Narrikup, for the 734kg Copplestone Master M64 (P), which was sired by Ascot Frederick (P). Elgin Park stud principals Jim and Belynda Quilty, Elgin, offered and sold six bulls at an average of $4750 and to a top of $6000. Inspiring the $6000 top bid in the Elgin Park team was Elgin Park Morocco M41 (P) (TW) when it was purchased by Fairbrass Park Charolais stud, Boyup Brook, which was giving buying instructions over the phone to Elders Busselton representative Clint Gartrell. The 16mo, 728kg Morocco is sired by Elgin Park Kenworth (P) and ranks in the top 5pc of the breed for 200-day weight (+19) and top 10pc for RBY, while it has raw scan figures of 120cm2 EMA, 4.1 IMF and 6mm for rib and rump fat. Two bulls made $5000 in the Elgin Park team Elgin Park Magnum M42 (P) and Elgin Park Mozart M22 (P). The 740kg, 16mo Magnum which is sired by Elgin Park Kenworth and ranks in the top 5pc for 200-day weight (+20) and top 10pc for 600-day weight (+48) was purchased by MF & MA Hutton, Capel. The Huttons also paid $4500 for the 934kg Elgin Park Master M20 (P/S) (AI). Mozart, which weighed in at 820kg and was 23mo was purchased by ED & JS Hoddell, Collie, with the assistance of Elders Brunswick representative Alex Roberts. Mozart had current scan figures of 126cm2 EMA, 4.1 IMF and 6mm for rib and rump fat. The Bellevue stud in its last supreme sale offered six bulls and sold two under the hammer both at $4000 to Hay Australia, Duncraig. The two bulls to sell were the 888kg polled Bellevue Masso (P) (TW), which is sired by LT Western Edge (P) and the 892kg Bellevue Meta (TW), which is a son of Bellevue Jonah (P). Both had an EMA scan of 124cm2. The Spring Valley stud, owned by Mark and Rose King, Donnybrook, rounded out the Charolais vendors in the sale. The Kings offered two bulls and sold one under the hammer for $6000 to RH Norman & Son, Busselton. The bull to sell was the 910kg Spring Valley Mighty (P) (AI). Mighty is sired by EC No Doubt (P) 2022 and has EBVs of -0.9 birthweight, +8 milk and +13, +25 and +34 for 200, 400 and 600-day weights. - Murray Grey This years Muray Grey offering saw three studs present collectively 13 bulls and by the end of the run 12 had sold under the hammer for a $4792 average, which was back $133 on last year. Top price honours in the breed for a second year running went to Cameron Harris, Nangara stud, Manjimup, when he sold his second bull Nangara Moonshine M7 for $7000 to Geoff Teasdale, GR Teasdale, Badgingarra, who was bidding over the phone with the assistance of Elders Waroona representative Michael Longford. The 822kg Moonshine is a son of Monterey Gangster G260 and is below breed average for birthweight (+2.6) and above average for growth (+23, + 37 and +57 for 200, 400 and 600-day weights). Mr Longford said Mr Teasdale, who runs a mixed beef herd that produces for the feeder market, selected the Nangara bull on its figures as a low birthweight bull for his heifers and asked him to check it for correctness and type. Nangaras other two bulls on offer also both sold during the auction when they were purchased by T Tate & Co, Treeton, at $4000. This meant Nangara cleared its offering of three bulls at an average of $5000. The Mighty stud, Boyup Brook, offered up six bulls and cleared all six to a top of $5500 and an average of $4250. Making the $5500 top price in the Mighty team was Mighty Master Plan M5 when it was secured by RH Norman & Son, Busselton. The 890kg son of Karakara Balfour B202 has growth EBVs of +15, +21 and +33 for 200, 400 and 600-day weights. Landmark Boyup Brook agent Jamie Abbs purchased two bulls from the Mighty line-up Mighty Mars Bar M12 and Mighty Marri M15 both at $4000 for Shorelands Pastoral Co, Bunbury. Both were sons of Bundaleer Fanatic F36. The studs other three bulls also sold for $4000 to AR & SM Penfold, Capel; Allen Family Trust, Gingin and Cherrybelle Farm, Glen Mervyn. The Wundam Park stud, Boyup Brook, rounded out the Murray Grey run with a team of four bulls of which three sold under the hammer for an average of $5667. The top price in the Wundam Park team was $6500 for Wundam Park Magnum M20 paid by WM Valli, Dardanup. The May 2016-drop Magnum weighed 778kg and was sold with scan figures of 111cm2 EMA, 5.2 IMF and 10mm for both rib and rump fat. Wundam Park Motana M11, a son of Corrick Eldorado 2nd 458, also attracted strong interest selling to Oceanview Corp Pty Ltd for $5500, while Maywill Farms, Waroona, paid $5000 for a Wundam Park Top Shelf K9 son, Wundam Park Musket M16. - Lincoln Red The Turner familys Tone Park stud, Boyup Brook, offered for the first time its Lincoln Red bulls in the supreme sale and they were snapped up by buyers. The stud offered two bulls in its debut offering and both found new homes quickly selling for an average of $6750. The studs lead bull Tone M9 attracted the most attention from buyers before finally being knocked down at $8500 to Landmark WA commercial cattle manager Darren Chatley, who was bidding on behalf of return buyers to the stud Churinga Park Pastoral, Coonawarra, South Australia. The 850kg, late March 2016-drop M9, which is sired by Tone J10, showed great thickness and structure in the ring. The studs second bull, Tone M22, which is sired by Tone F9 (AI) (P) and weighed 830kg, was purchased at $5000 by VA & AJ Blechynden, Manjimup. 2020 was a year marked by hardships and challenges, but the Fauquier community has proven resilient. The Fauquier Times is honored to serve as your community companion. To say thank you for your continued support, wed like to offer all our subscribers -- new or returning -- 4 WEEKS FREE DIGITAL AND PRINT ACCESS. We understand the importance of working to keep our community strong and connected. As we move forward together into 2021, it will take commitment, communication, creativity, and a strong connection with those who are most affected by the stories we cover. We are dedicated to providing the reliable, local journalism you have come to expect. We are committed to serving you with renewed energy and growing resources. Let the Fauquier Times be your community companion throughout 2021, and for many years to come. Image courtesy of army-guide.comThe owner and CEO of an armored vehicle company was sentenced Tuesday to 70 months in prison for selling armored gun trucks to the military that didnt properly shield soldiers from bullets and blasts. William Whyte, 72, of King City, Ontario, was sentenced in federal court in Virginia. He was convicted after a two-week trial in October 2017. Whyte was found guilty of three counts of major fraud against the United States, three counts of wire fraud, and three counts of criminal false claims. He was also ordered to pay restitution of $2 million. Whyte was indicted in 2012. Prosecutors said his company, Armet Armored Vehicles, had contracts worth $6.4 million with the U.S. Department of Defense for 32 armored vehicles. The contracts required each vehicle to be reinforced to stop an armor-piercing bullet. Each vehicle was also supposed to have effective mine-plating protection. The vehicles Armet provided were deliberately under-armored, the DOJ said. Despite the defects, Whyte and his employees represented that the armored gun trucks were adequately armored in accordance with the contract, the DOJ said. Whyte was arrested in Canada in 2016 and extradited to Roanoke, Virginia, where his company had an office. ____ Richard L. Cassin is the publisher and editor of the FCPA Blog. Karen Gillan used to be "delusional" about her acting abilities, admitting she thought she was more talented than she actually was. Karen Gillan The 30-year-old actress became a household name after starring in three series of 'Doctor Who' as companion Amy Pond and has since broken into Hollywood with major roles in 'Guardians of the Galaxy' and 'Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle'. Gillan believes her success comes from the fact she had a re-evaluation of herself as an actress and being over-confident about her talent for many years. Speaking to The Guardian newspaper, Gillan said: "I was delusional about my own acting abilities. When I was acting, I was really confident that I was good at it. I had suffered so many rejections, but it's like it has never phased me. Then I had an awakening when I realised I wasn't as good as I thought I was - I watched myself in something and thought, 'Oh my God, this is terrible, I need to get back to work on this and figure out how this is done.'" Now Gillan has stepped behind the camera and directed, written and starred in her own black comedy movie 'The Party's Just Beginning' - which follows a young woman who turns to sex and alcohol to cope with her grief following the suicide of her best friend. And despite being her directorial debut, Gillan said it felt "natural" to go behind the camera and direct. The Scottish beauty said: "Not the boss element; more about making all these decisions about this story I'd come up with. "There was a second where you realise that you usually have someone to turn to and ask what to do, and that people were looking to me for that. I was like, 'Oh, right! You should do that.' But it felt natural. I just know that I want to direct. That's what I want to do with my life." Harry Reid is to make his stage debut in 'Witness for the Prosecution' - his first role since departing 'EastEnders'. Harry Reid The 25-year-old actor bowed out of the BBC One soap when his character Ben Mitchell left Walford for France earlier this year, and he will next be treading the boards as Leonard Vole in the Agatha Christie production at London's County Hall. Harry's new alter-ego will be tasked with trying to convince the jury of his innocence after he is accused of murdering a widow to inherit her wealth. If Vole is sent down then it won't be the first time Harry has played the part of a criminal as he landed the role of Ben in 2014 when his character was released from prison for the manslaughter of Heather Trott (Cheryl Fergison). Call the Midwife's Lucy Phelps will star as Romaine, 'Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them' actor Richard Clothier will be Sir Wilfrid Robarts, The Alchemist's Julian Curry will portray Mr Justice Wainwright, and Shakespeare in Love actor Peter Moreton will take on the role of Mr Mayhew. While Harry is a new addition to the play to take on the role of Vole, former 'Heartbeat' actor Philip Franks will continue in the part of Mr Myers, and Richard Attlee, Jules Melvin and Hywel Simons will also return to the production. In November, Harry admitted it had been tough shooting his final scenes. He exclusively told BANG Showbiz: "I don't know whether I'm killed off or not, but I'd love to come back if he's alive. It's been difficult filming the final scenes." 'Witness for the Prosecution' is currently booking until 16 September 2018. Category Select Category Apparel/Garments Textiles Fashion Technical Textiles Information Technology E-commerce Retail Corporate Association Press Release SubCategory Select Sub-Category FIFA exists to govern football and to develop the game around the world. Since 2016, the organization has been evolving rapidly to become an organization that can more effectively serve our game for the benefit of the world. Regulatory News: United Company RUSAL Plc (Paris:RUSAL) (Paris:RUAL) Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing Limited and The Stock Exchange of Hong Kong Limited take no responsibility for the contents of this announcement, make no representation as to its accuracy or completeness and expressly disclaim any liability whatsoever for any loss howsoever arising from or in reliance upon the whole or any part of the contents of this announcement. UNITED COMPANY RUSAL PLC (Incorporated under the laws of Jersey with limited liability) (Stock Code: 486) CHANGE IN EXECUTIVE OFFICES OF DIRECTORS, RE-DESIGNATION OF DIRECTOR AND APPOINTMENT OF CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER The Board of Directors (the "Board") of United Company RUSAL Plc (the "Company") announces that Mr. Oleg Deripaska ("Mr. Deripaska"), an executive Director of the Company, has been re-designated by the Board as a non-executive Director of the Company and will cease to be the President of the Company; Mr. Vladislav Soloviev ("Mr. Soloviev") has been appointed by the Board as the President of the Company and will cease to be the Chief Executive Officer of the Company; and Ms. Alexandra Bouriko ("Ms. Bouriko") has been appointed by the Board as the Chief Executive Officer of the Company and will cease to be the Chief Financial Officer. All the aforesaid changes will come into effect from 15 March 2018. RE-DESIGNATION OF MR. DERIPASKA AS NON-EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR Mr. Deripaska, aged 50, has been re-designated by the Board as a non-executive Director of the Company and will cease to be the President of the Company with effect from 15 March 2018. Previously, he served as an executive Director of the Company since March 2007. From January 2009 to November 2014, he was the Chief Executive Officer of the Company, and the chief executive officer of RUSAL Global Management B.V. and the head of its Moscow branch. In respectively November and December 2014, Mr. Deripaska was appointed as the President of the Company and the president of RUSAL Global Management B.V.. From April to December 2010, Mr. Deripaska held the position of chief executive officer of En+ Management LLC. From 2010, Mr. Deripaska has been a director of En+ and during the period from December 2010 to July 2011, Mr. Deripaska held the position of chairman of the board of directors of En+. In July 2011, he was appointed as the President of En+ and from June 2013 to April 2014, he was the chief executive officer of En+. As at the date of this announcement, Mr. Deripaska is (within the meaning of Part XV of the Securities and Futures Ordinance (Chapter 571) of the laws of Hong Kong) interested in a total of 7,313,969,039 shares of the Company (representing approximately 48.14 of the total issued share capital of the Company). Save as disclosed in this announcement and as at the date of this announcement, Mr. Deripaska is independent from and not related to any other Directors, members of senior management, substantial shareholders or controlling shareholders (as defined in the Listing Rules) of the Company. Save as disclosed in this announcement, Mr. Deripaska has not held any directorship in any listed companies in the last three years preceding the date of this announcement. Mr. Deripaska will sign an appointment letter with the Company as a non-executive Director with effect from 15 March 2018. The length of service of Mr. Deripaska as a non-executive Director will be determined in accordance with the Articles. Mr. Deripaska's appointment may be terminated by Mr. Deripaska giving the Company one month's notice of termination and/or otherwise in accordance with the Articles. As a non-executive Director, Mr. Deripaska will be entitled to a fixed director's fee of 120,000 per annum, which is determined by the Board with reference to the performance of the Company, his duties and responsibilities and the prevailing market conditions. Mr. Deripaska will also be entitled to 10,000 per annum as a member of, and 15,000 per annum as chairman of, each Board committee to which he may be appointed. Save as disclosed above, there are no other matters relating to Mr. Deripaska's re-designation as a non-executive Director that need to be brought to the attention of the shareholders of the Company and there is no other information which is required to be disclosed pursuant to Rules 13.51(2)(h) to 13.51(2)(v) of the Listing Rules. THE APPOINTMENT OF MR. SOLOVIEV AS THE PRESIDENT Mr. Soloviev, aged 44, has been appointed by the Board as the President of the Company and will cease to be the Chief Executive Officer of the Company with effect from 15 March 2018. Mr. Soloviev remains an executive Director of the Company. As the President of the Company, Mr. Soloviev will be responsible for strategy and corporate development; external communications (public, government, international); supervision of the investment in Norilsk Nickel; succession planning; investor relations; research and development (including the supervision of such projects and the development of production systems) and coordination of initiatives on development of internal market. On or around 15 March 2018, Mr. Soloviev will also cease to be the chief executive officer of RUSAL Global Management B.V. and the head of its Moscow branch and will take up the office of the president of the company. As the President of the Company, Mr. Soloviev is entitled to a base salary of US$3 million per annum. He is also entitled to an annual discretionary bonus up to a maximum of US$3 million to be paid on the basis of achievement of key performance targets, in addition to other ancillary benefits. Mr. Soloviev will enter into a formal contract with the Company regarding his appointment as the President of the Company, the duration of which is expected to be three years. As at the date of this announcement, Mr. Soloviev was (within the meaning of Part XV of the SFO) interested in 1,311,629 shares of the Company (representing approximately 0.008% of the total issued share capital of the Company). Mr. Vladislav Soloviev was appointed as a member of the board of directors of En+ with effect from 1 January 2018. Save as disclosed in this announcement, Mr. Soloviev was independent from and not related to any other Directors, members of senior management, substantial shareholders or controlling shareholders of the Company. Save as disclosed in this announcement, Mr. Soloviev has not held any directorship in any listed companies in the last three years preceding the date of this announcement. Save as disclosed above, there are no other matters relating to the appointment of Mr. Soloviev as the President of the Company that need to be brought to the attention of the shareholders of the Company and there is no other information which is required to be disclosed pursuant to Rules 13.51(2)(h) to 13.51(2)(v) of the Listing Rules. THE APPOINTMENT OF MS. BOURIKO AS THE CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER Ms. Bouriko, aged 40, has been appointed by the Board as the Chief Executive Officer of the Company (the "Appointment of the CEO") and will cease to be the Chief Financial Officer with effect from 15 March 2018. As the Chief Executive Officer of the Company, Ms. Bouriko will be responsible for the management of the production and supply-chain across all divisions; financial management and corporate finance; sales and marketing; supervising the legal, human resources and public relations functions and implementation of production system in the members of the Group. Ms. Bouriko will also be appointed as the chief executive officer and the chairman of the Executive Committee of RUSAL Global Management B.V. on or about 15 March 2018. Ms. Bouriko has served as the Chief Financial Officer since October 2013. She is responsible for the financial planning, auditing and preparation of financial reports and the execution of the company's investment programs. From June 2013 to October 2013, Ms. Bouriko served on the Board as a non-executive Director of the Company. From November 2012 to October 2013, Ms. Bouriko was the Deputy CEO of En+. She was responsible for the En+ Group's operational management, enhancement of business effectiveness and improvement of the group's financial performance. Prior to joining En+ Group Alexandra Bouriko spent 16 years with KPMG in Russia and Canada (since 2005 she held the position of KPMG Partner). At KPMG, Ms. Bouriko worked with major Russian and international companies with a focus on metals, mining, oil and gas industries. Ms. Bouriko played key roles in the audits of IFRS, US GAAP and Russian GAAP financial statements of major Russian groups. Ms. Bouriko was in charge of initial public offering planning and preparation of major Russian metals and mining companies listed on the London Stock Exchange and the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. Ms. Bouriko graduated from the economic faculty of the Lomonosov Moscow State University. She is a member of the Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants and the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants. As the Chief Executive Officer of the Company, Ms. Bouriko is entitled to a base salary of US$3 million per annum. She is also entitled to an annual discretionary bonus of up to a maximum of US$3 million, which will be determined on the basis of achievement of key performance targets, in addition to other ancillary benefits. Ms. Bouriko will enter into a formal contract with the Company regarding her appointment as the Chief Executive Officer of the Company, the duration of which is expected to be three years based on a resolution of the board passed in relation to the duration of the agreement. As at the date of this announcement, Ms. Bouriko was not (within the meaning of Part XV of the SFO) interested in any share of the Company. Save as disclosed in this announcement, Ms. Bouriko was independent from and not related to any other Directors, members of senior management, substantial shareholders or controlling shareholders of the Company. Save as disclosed in this announcement, Ms. Bouriko has not held any directorship in any listed companies in the last three years preceding the date of this announcement. Save as disclosed above, there are no other matters relating to the appointment of Ms. Bouriko as the Chief Executive Officer of the Company that need to be brought to the attention of the shareholders of the Company and there is no other information which is required to be disclosed pursuant to Rules 13.51(2)(h) to 13.51(2)(v) of the Listing Rules. DEFINITIONS In this announcement, the following expressions have the following meanings, unless the context otherwise requires: "Articles" the articles of association of the Company. "associate(s)" has the same meaning ascribed thereto under the Listing Rules. "Basic Element" Basic Element Limited, a company incorporated in Jersey, which is beneficially controlled by Mr. Deripaska. "Board" the board of Directors. "Company" United Company RUSAL Plc, a limited liability company incorporated in Jersey, the shares of which are listed on the Main Board of the Stock Exchange of Hong Kong Limited and the Moscow Exchange. "Director(s)" the director(s) of the Company. "En+" En+ Group Plc, formerly En+ Group Limited, a company incorporated in Jersey, a substantial shareholder of the Company. "En+ Group" En+ and its subsidiaries. "Group" the Company and its subsidiaries. "Listing Rules" the Rules Governing the Listing of Securities on the Stock Exchange of Hong Kong Limited. "Norilsk Nickel" PJSC MMC NORILSK NICKEL, a company incorporated under the laws of the Russian Federation. "substantial shareholder" has the same meaning ascribed thereto under the Listing Rules. Pounds Sterling, the lawful currency of the United Kingdom. By Order of the Board of United Company RUSAL Plc Aby Wong Po Ying Company Secretary 23 February 2018 As at the date of this announcement, the executive Directors are Mr. Oleg Deripaska, Mr. Vladislav Soloviev and Mr. Siegfried Wolf, the non-executive Directors are Mr. Maxim Sokov, Mr. Dmitry Afanasiev, Mr. Ivan Glasenberg, Mr. Maksim Goldman, Ms. Gulzhan Moldazhanova, Mr. Daniel Lesin Wolfe, Ms. Olga Mashkovskaya, Ms. Ekaterina Nikitina and Mr. Marco Musetti, and the independent non-executive Directors are Mr. Matthias Warnig (Chairman), Mr. Philip Lader, Dr. Elsie Leung Oi-sie, Mr. Mark Garber, Mr. Dmitry Vasiliev and Mr. Bernard Zonneveld. All announcements and press releases published by the Company are available on its website under the links http://www.rusal.ru/en/investors/info.aspxhttp://rusal.ru/investors/info/moex/ and http://www.rusal.ru/en/press-center/press-releases.aspx, respectively. View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180222006419/en/ Contacts: United Company RUSAL Plc Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - February 23, 2018) - B2Gold Corp. (TSX: BTO) (NYSE AMERICAN: BTG) (NSX: B2G) ("B2Gold" or the "Company") announces a positive initial open-pit resource at the newly-discovered El Limon Central zone, at the El Limon property in Nicaragua, of 5,130,000 tonnes at a grade of 4.92 grams per tonne ("g/t") of gold containing 812,000 ounces of gold (refer to table below). This large, good grade new zone has the potential to decrease the El Limon Mine's cash operating costs and all-in sustaining costs per ounce, dramatically increase the El Limon mine life, and could lead to an expansion of the El Limon mill to a higher throughput rate which could potentially double annual gold production. The El Limon Central zone, at its closest location, is approximately 150 metres from the El Limon mill facility, extending southeast and northwest, adjacent to existing plant and administrative infrastructure. Historical records indicate that parts of the Central zone had been mined underground in past decades. B2Gold's recent exploration work indicates the underground mining was much more limited than previously thought. The El Limon central vein structure has been drill tested along a 2.2-kilometre strike length so far, and remains open to depth and along strike, and will be further drill tested during 2018. This structure has experienced some limited historic mining along its length. Further north, the structure extends along strike and this area is being drill tested at present. Highlighted results within the pit include 19.70 metres at 24.24 g/t gold (LIM-17-4119), 24.80 metres at 11.65 g/t gold (LIM-17-4112), 5.66 metres at 64.76 g/t gold (LIM-16-3984) and 15.70 metres at 20.04 g/t gold (LIM-17-4069). Below and beyond the resource pit limits to the north, drill highlights include 2.0 metres at 13.43 g/t gold (LIM-17-4184) and 20.35 metres at 3.0 g/t gold, including 4.1 metres at 6.85 g/t gold (LIM-17-4198). All widths noted are true widths. The Mineral Resource estimate was prepared in-house at B2Gold. A total of 248 drill holes (35,871 metres of drilling) were used in the gold grade estimate with more than 75% of the drill meterage (28,078 metres) coming from diamond drilling, completed by B2Gold. The remainder of the drilling was completed by previous owners during the late 1990s through early 2000s. Inferred Mineral Resources reported at different gold cutoff grades are presented as a sensitivity case. Cutoff Grade g/t gold Tonnes Grade g/t gold Ounces1 0.8 5,560,000 4.62 825,000 1.0 5,330,000 4.78 819,000 1.2 5,130,000 4.92 812,000 1.4 4,950,000 5.05 804,000 1.Mineral Resources are reported in accordance with NI 43-101 and the 2014 Canadian Institute of Mining, Metallurgy and Petroleum "Definition Standards for Mineral Resources and Mineral Reserves" (CIM Definition Standards). Mineral Resources that are not Mineral Reserves do not have demonstrated economic viability Inferred Mineral Resources are amenable to open-pit mining methods and are reported within a pit shell run using a gold price of US$1,400/oz., an average gold recovery of 83.8% (based on preliminary metallurgical testwork), and recent EL Limon Mine cash operating costs. The 2017 El Limon budget was increased to USD$7.00 million and included over 30,000 metres of drilling in 157 holes with a focus on the El Limon vein. The 2018 El Limon budget is USD$7.00 million and will include 24,900 metres in 132 holes, again, with a focus on the El Limon vein. B2Gold is currently conducting additional metallurgical testing on the El Limon Central ore and a study to evaluate the potential to expand the El Limon throughput to significantly increase annual gold production and reduce cash operating costs. The study is expected by mid-2018. El Limon Tailings Project Update In 2017, an initial study was completed regarding the potential re-processing of the old tailings at the El Limon Mine. Based on historic mill and drilling records, the tailings contain an estimated 9 million to 11 million tonnes with a potential gold grade of 0.80 g/t to 1.0 g/t. An ongoing drilling program is underway as part of a feasibility study which will confirm resources and grades, the optimum grind size, capital costs and final project economics. Based on the initial study completed in 2017, the Company believes that the project has the potential to produce an average of approximately 20,000 to 25,000 ounces of gold and 70,000 to 80,000 ounces of silver per year for approximately 9 to 11 years. The concept is to regrind the old tailings to a much finer grind size, process them through a new CIP plant and place the tailings in a new lined tailings storage facility. The potential quantity and grade included in the initial study is conceptual in nature, and there has been insufficient exploration to date to define a Mineral Resource, and it is uncertain if further exploration will result in the target being delineated as a Mineral Resource. The El Limon Mine has produced over 3 million ounces of gold since 1941, principally from the veins of El Limon, Talavera and Santa Pancha, the current focus of production. B2Gold purchased the mine in 2009, with the acquisition of Central Sun Mining, and the 19,200-hectare El Limon Mine is 95% B2Gold and 5% IMISA. The 2018 production forecast is between 55,000 to 60,000 ounces of gold. B2Gold's Quality Assurance/Quality Control The primary laboratory for El Limon drilling program is Bureau Veritas Minerals in Vancouver, Canada. Core samples are prepared at El Limon preparation facility with the pulp sent to Vancouver and analysed using 30g fire assay with atomic absorption finish as well as multi-element ICP-MS analyses. SGS Laboratories in Medellin, Colombia, is the umpire laboratory. Quality assurance and quality control procedures include the systematic insertion of blanks, standards and duplicates into the core sample strings. The results of the control samples are evaluated on a regular basis with batches re-analysed and/or resubmitted as needed. All results stated in this announcement have passed B2Gold's quality assurance and quality control ("QA/QC") protocols. Tom Garagan, Senior Vice President of Exploration, is the Qualified Person as defined under National Instrument 43-101, who has reviewed and approved the contents of this news release. About B2Gold Headquartered in Vancouver, Canada, B2Gold Corp. is the world's new senior gold producer. Founded in 2007, today, B2Gold has five operating gold mines and numerous exploration and development projects in various countries including Nicaragua, the Philippines, Namibia, Mali, Burkina Faso, Colombia and Finland. With the large, low-cost Fekola Mine now in production, B2Gold is well positioned in achieving transformational growth in 2018. In 2018, with the planned first full year of production from the Fekola Mine, consolidated gold production is forecast to be between 910,000 and 950,000 ounces. This represents an increase in annual consolidated gold production of approximately 300,000 ounces for the Company in 2018 versus 2017. ON BEHALF OF B2GOLD CORP. "Clive T. Johnson" President and Chief Executive Officer For more information on B2Gold please visit the Company website at www.b2gold.com or contact: Ian MacLean Vice President, Investor Relations 604-681-8371 imaclean@b2gold.com Katie Bromley Manager, Investor Relations & Public Relations 604-681-8371 kbromley@b2gold.com The Toronto Stock Exchange and the NYSE American LLC neither approve nor disapprove the information contained in this news release. This news release includes certain "forward-looking information" and "forward-looking statements" (collectively "forward-looking statements") within the meaning of applicable Canadian and United States securities legislation, including projections, guidance, forecasts, estimates and other statements regarding future financial and operational performance, events, production, mine life, revenue, cash flows, costs and the results of exploration, including, the potential for large, good grade new zone to decrease El Limon's cash operating costs, to increase its mine life by several years and to expand its mill to a higher throughput rate to potentially double annual gold production; timing of further drill testing; the results of an initial study completed in 2017 and the potential to produce an average of approximately 20,000 to 25,000 ounces of gold and 70,000 to 80,000 ounces of silver per year for approximately 9 to 11 years; 2018 production forecast of 55,000 to 60,000 ounces of gold; achievement of growth in 2018 and the consolidated forecasted gold production of between 910,000 and 950,000 ounces. Estimates of mineral resources and reserves, including the new inferred mineral resource estimate at El Limon, are also forward-looking statements because they constitute projections regarding the amount of minerals that may be encountered in the future and/or the anticipated economics of production, should a production decision be made. All statements in this news release that address events or developments that we expect to occur in the future are forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are statements that are not historical facts and are generally, although not always, identified by words such as "expect", "plan", "anticipate", "project", "target", "potential", "schedule", "forecast", "budget", "estimate", "intend" or "believe" and similar expressions or their negative connotations, or that events or conditions "will", "would", "may", "could", "should" or "might" occur. All such forward-looking statements are based on the opinions and estimates of management as of the date such statements are made. Forward-looking statements necessarily involve assumptions, risks and uncertainties, certain of which are beyond B2Gold's control, including risks and assumptions associated with the volatility of metal prices and our common shares; risks and dangers inherent in exploration, development and mining activities; uncertainty of reserve and resource estimates; risk of not achieving production, cost or other estimates; risk that actual production, development plans and costs differ materially from the estimates in our feasibility studies; risks related to hedging activities and ore purchase commitments; the ability to obtain and maintain any necessary permits, consents or authorizations required for mining activities; uncertainty about the outcome of negotiations with the Government of Mali; risks related to environmental regulations or hazards and compliance with complex regulations associated with mining activities; the ability to replace mineral reserves and identify acquisition opportunities; unknown liabilities of companies acquired by B2Gold; ability to successfully integrate new acquisitions; fluctuations in exchange rates; availability of financing; risks relating to financing and debt; risks related to operations in foreign and developing countries and compliance with foreign laws; risks related to remote operations and the availability of adequate infrastructure, fluctuations in price and availability of energy and other inputs necessary for mining operations; shortages or cost increases in necessary equipment, supplies and labour; regulatory, political and country risks; risks related to reliance upon contractors, third parties and joint venture partners; challenges to title or surface rights; dependence on key personnel and ability to attract and retain skilled personnel; the risk of an uninsurable or uninsured loss; adverse climate and weather conditions; litigation risk; competition with other mining companies; changes in tax laws; community support for our operations including risks related to strikes and the halting of such operations from time to time; risks related to failures of information systems or information security threats; ability to maintain adequate internal control over financial reporting as required by law; risks relating to compliance with anti-corruption laws; as well as other factors identified and as described in more detail under the heading "Risk Factors" in B2Gold's most recent Annual Information Form and B2Gold's other filings with Canadian securities regulators and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (the "SEC"), which may be viewed at www.sedar.com and www.sec.gov, respectively (the "Websites"). The list is not exhaustive of the factors that may affect the Company's forward-looking statements. There can be no assurance that such statements will prove to be accurate, and actual results, performance or achievements could differ materially from those expressed in, or implied by, these forward-looking statements. Accordingly, no assurance can be given that any events anticipated by the forward-looking statements will transpire or occur, or if any of them do, what benefits or liabilities B2Gold will derive therefrom. The Company's forward-looking statements reflect current expectations regarding future events and operating performance and speak only as of the date hereof and the Company does not assume any obligation to update forward-looking statements if circumstances or management's beliefs, expectations or opinions should change other than as required by applicable law. The Company's forward-looking statements are based on the applicable assumptions and factors management considers reasonable as of the date hereof, based on the information available to management at such time. These assumptions and factors include, but are not limited to, assumptions and factors related to the Company's ability to carry on current and future operations, including development and exploration activities; the timing, extent, duration and economic viability of such operations, including any mineral resources or reserves identified thereby; the accuracy and reliability of estimates, projections, forecasts, studies and assessments; the Company's ability to meet or achieve estimates, projections and forecasts; the availability and cost of inputs; the price and market for outputs, including gold; the timely receipt of necessary approvals or permits; the ability to meet current and future obligations; the ability to obtain timely financing on reasonable terms when required; the current and future social, economic and political conditions and other assumptions and factors generally associated with the mining industry. For the reasons set forth above, undue reliance should not be placed on forward-looking statements. Production results and the Company's guidance presented in this news release reflect total production at the mines the Company operates on a 100% basis. Cautionary Note to United States Investors The disclosure in this news release and in the documents described in this news release regarding mineral properties was prepared in accordance with Canadian National Instrument 43-101 ("NI 43-101"), which differs significantly from the requirements of the SEC set out in Industry Guide 7. Accordingly, such disclosure may not be comparable to similar information made public by companies that report in accordance with U.S. standards. The Company has prepared its public disclosures in accordance with Canadian securities laws, which differ in certain respects from U.S. securities laws. In particular, this news release refers to "mineral resources" and "inferred mineral resources". While these categories of mineralization are recognized and required by Canadian securities laws, they are not recognized by the SEC and are not normally permitted to be disclosed in SEC filings by U.S. companies. U.S. investors are cautioned not to assume that any part of a "mineral resource" or "inferred mineral resource" will ever be converted into a "reserve." In addition, "reserves" reported by the Company under Canadian standards may not qualify as reserves under SEC standards. Under SEC standards, mineralization may not be classified as a "reserve" unless the mineralization can be economically and legally extracted or produced at the time the "reserve" determination is made. Accordingly, information contained or referenced in this news release containing descriptions of the Company's mineral deposits may not be compatible to similar information made public by U.S. companies subject to the reporting and disclosure requirements of U.S. federal securities laws, rules and regulations. "Inferred mineral resources" have a great amount of uncertainty as to their existence and great uncertainty as to their economic and legal feasibility. It cannot be assumed that all or any part of an inferred mineral resource will ever be upgraded to a higher category. Historical results or feasibility models presented herein are not guarantees or expectations of future performance. Atos, a global leader in digital transformation, and Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions, announces a collaboration to deliver a new fully-managed cloud container solution Atos Managed OpenShift (AMOS) built on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, the industry's most comprehensive enterprise-grade container platform based on industry standards, including Linux container technologies and Kubernetes. AMOS enables customers to create and run cloud-native applications and migrate legacy workloads on enterprise hybrid cloud environments, in a fully-managed service, leveraging the power of open source container technologies (Linux container technologies, Kubernetes). Because AMOS is built on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, a container-centric hybrid cloud solution, it can deliver the flexibility customers seek from cloud-native and container-based applications. This new service is part of Atos Canopy Orchestrated Hybrid Cloud, which provides businesses with highly industrialized and automated end-to-end Cloud services including application and infrastructure transformation and management. Features and benefits the new service is designed to include: Fully-managed Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform: enables reducing the time, cost and complexity required to manage and operate container technologies so businesses can focus on product creation. enables reducing the time, cost and complexity required to manage and operate container technologies so businesses can focus on product creation. Deployable to multiple clouds: can be used across private, public and hybrid cloud landscapes. can be used across private, public and hybrid cloud landscapes. Complementary services and tools: a full development suite with a DevOps tool chain, enabling greater security risk compliance. a full development suite with a DevOps tool chain, enabling greater security risk compliance. Easier management of application development and delivery: stable platform with stronger security capabilities enables continuous creation, delivery, collaboration and development of apps across IT operational and development teams. stable platform with stronger security capabilities enables continuous creation, delivery, collaboration and development of apps across IT operational and development teams. Higher workload density with lower infrastructure costs Productivity increase and faster time-to-market Lower IT support time and costs "Atos has created, in collaboration with Red Hat, a number of market solutions for clients to support them on their digital transformation journey. Based on those successes and considering the opportunities in the open source cloud market, we are excited to collaborate with Red Hat on this new opportunity," said Ursula Morgenstern, Executive Vice-President Atos Global Business Platform Services, Atos "Red Hat, the global leading provider of open source solutions, welcomes the opportunity to expand our collaboration with Atos, a global leader in technology and cloud services. Together, Red Hat and Atos aim to accelerate the adoption of DevOps and agile application development and help transform operational capabilities to modernize applications on container technologies, deliver new microservices, and accelerate development processes. Red Hat looks forward to building on our successes and shared practices to provide a joint services framework that enables customer innovation across the hybrid cloud." Arun Oberoi, Executive Vice President, Global Sales and Services, Red Hat This announcement represents an exciting step change in the collaborative relationship which Atos and Red Hat have enjoyed for more than seven years. It is also the first development program from Atos' new Cloud Engineering Centre of Excellence, which is focused on building and bringing compelling business solutions using trusted technology partners and portfolios, such as that of Red Hat. Atos Managed OpenShift Service is expected to be available in early 2018. About Atos Atos is a global leader in digital transformation with approximately 100,000 employees in 72 countries and annual revenue of around 12 billion. European number one in Big Data, Cybersecurity, High Performance Computing and Digital Workplace, The Group provides Cloud services, Infrastructure Data Management, Business Platform solutions, as well as transactional services through Worldline, the European leader in the payment industry. With its cutting-edge technologies, digital expertise and industry knowledge, Atos supports the digital transformation of its clients across various business sectors: Defense, Financial Services, Health, Manufacturing, Media, Energy Utilities, Public sector, Retail, Telecommunications and Transportation. The Group is the Worldwide Information Technology Partner for the Olympic Paralympic Games and operates under the brands Atos, Atos Consulting, Atos Worldgrid, Bull, Canopy, Unify and Worldline. Atos SE (Societas Europaea) is listed on the CAC40 Paris stock index. About Red Hat Red Hat is the world's leading provider of open source software solutions, using a community-powered approach to provide reliable and high-performing cloud, Linux, middleware, storage and virtualization technologies. Red Hat also offers award-winning support, training, and consulting services. As a connective hub in a global network of enterprises, partners, and open source communities, Red Hat helps create relevant, innovative technologies that liberate resources for growth and prepare customers for the future of IT. Learn more at http://www.redhat.com. Red Hat's Forward-Looking Statements Certain statements contained in this press release may constitute "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements provide current expectations of future events based on certain assumptions and include any statement that does not directly relate to any historical or current fact. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by such forward-looking statements as a result of various important factors, including: risks related to the ability of Red Hat to compete effectively; the ability to deliver and stimulate demand for new products and technological innovations on a timely basis; delays or reductions in information technology spending; the integration of acquisitions and the ability to market successfully acquired technologies and products; fluctuations in exchange rates; the effects of industry consolidation; uncertainty and adverse results in litigation and related settlements; the inability to adequately protect Red Hat's intellectual property and the potential for infringement or breach of license claims of or relating to third party intellectual property; risks related to defects in Red Hat's offerings and third-party hardware upon which Red Hat's offerings depend; risks related to the security of Red Hat's offerings and other data security vulnerabilities; changes in and a dependence on key personnel; the ability to meet financial and operational challenges encountered in Red Hat's international operations; and ineffective management of, and control over, Red Hat's growth and international operations, as well as other factors contained in Red Hat's most recent Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q (copies of which may be accessed through the Securities and Exchange Commission's website at http://www.sec.gov), including those found therein under the captions "Risk Factors" and "Management's Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations". In addition to these factors, actual future performance, outcomes, and results may differ materially because of more general factors including (without limitation) general industry and market conditions and growth rates, economic and political conditions, governmental and public policy changes and the impact of natural disasters such as earthquakes and floods. The forward-looking statements included in this press release represent Red Hat's views as of the date of this press release and these views could change. However, while Red Hat may elect to update these forward-looking statements at some point in the future, Red Hat specifically disclaims any obligation to do so. These forward-looking statements should not be relied upon as representing Red Hat's views as of any date subsequent to the date of this press release. Red Hat, OpenShift and the Shadowman logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Red Hat, Inc. or its subsidiaries in the U.S. and other countries. Linux is the registered trademark of Linus Torvalds in the U.S. and other countries. View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180223005037/en/ Contacts: Red Hat, Inc. Stephanie Wonderlick, +1 571-421-8169 swonderl@redhat.com ARLINGTON, Va. and LONDON, Feb. 23, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --Interstate Hotels & Resorts - a leading global hotel management company of franchised branded and independent hotels and resorts - announces the appointment of Rogier Hurkmans as a regional vice president of operations for Continental Europe. Reporting to Ken McLaren, Interstate's executive vice president of international operations, Hurkmans will help to build the company's regional, multi-lingual operating platform, ensure operational excellence and achieve optimal profitability for managed properties. "We are delighted Rogier Hurkmans has joined our executive operations team in Continental Europe as we continue to enhance our above-property resources in the region," said McLaren. "Rogier will fortify our team as we continue to grow, and his wealth of experience driving quality metrics and delivering optimal hotel results, while building lasting partnerships with our ownerships groups, will be integral to our Continental European platform." Hurkmans joins Interstate with more than 30 years of hospitality experience. In his most recent position as cluster general manager with Wyndham Dubai Marina and TRYP by Wyndham Dubai, Hurkmans successfully established and implemented a cluster organization, driving sales and revenue management while overseeing day-to-day operations. As general manager of prestigious properties such as Steigenberger Hotel Berlin and Crowne Plaza Brussels-Le Palace, Hurkmans has a proven track record of growing market share, repositioning properties and consistently gaining recognition for exceptional guest satisfaction and quality. Hurkmans also brings a strong multilingualism to his new role, with fluency in English, Dutch and German, and proficiency in French. A global leader in third-party hotel management, Interstate Hotels & Resorts' depth of experience across all lodging segments and asset classes drives results in each of its managed hotels worldwide. For more information, please visit www.interstatehotels.co.uk or worldwidewww.interstatehotels.com. About Interstate Hotels & Resorts Interstate Hotels & Resorts is the leading U.S.-based global hotel management company, operating branded full- and select-service hotels, resorts, convention centers, and independent hotels. Currently, Interstate's global portfolio represents 540 properties in 12 countries inclusive of committed pipeline of signed hotels under construction or development around the world. The Company's experienced operators, industry leading platforms, and extensive management capabilities produce exceptional guest experiences and optimal returns for hotel owners and investors. For more information, please visit www.interstatehotels.co.uk or worldwidewww.interstatehotels.com. FOR MORE MEDIA INFORMATION: KERRI CRANNIS/MORGAN KING THE ZIMMERMAN AGENCY 850.668.2222 KCRANNIS@ZIMMERMAN.COM Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/644493/Interstate_Hotels_and_Resorts_Rogier_Hurkmans.jpg LONDON (dpa-AFX) - Standard Life Aberdeen reported that IFRS profit attributable to equity holders for fiscal year 2017 increased to 699 million pounds from last year's 368 million pounds due to the inclusion of post-merger Aberdeen profits and a 229 million pounds reduction in the loss from adjusting items to 40 million pounds. Earnings per share was 29.6 pence, up from 18.6 pence last year. Adjusted profit before tax was down by 1% to 1.039 billion pounds on a Pro forma basis and was up by 19% to 854 million pounds on a Reported basis. In August 2017 Standard Life plc and Aberdeen Asset Management PLC merged to become Standard Life Aberdeen. The Company also announces that, after serving eleven years as Chairman, Sir Gerry Grimstone has informed the Company's Board that he intends to stand down by the end of 2019. An Appointments Committee has been established and Simon Troughton, Deputy Chairman, and non-executive Director Melanie Gee, will lead the process to identify and appoint the next Company Chairman. Gerry Grimstone will continue in his role until this process is complete. Standard Life Aberdeen's Adjusted profit before tax on a Pro forma basis for fiscal year 2017 decreased by 1% to 1.039 billion pounds, driven by lower profitability at Aberdeen Standard Investments which saw additional costs compared to 2016 and flat revenue. On a Reported basis adjusted earnings per share has increased to 29.9 pence from 29.3 pence last year. On a Pro forma basis adjusted earnings per share was flat at 28.9 pence from 28.8 pence. On a Reported basis, fee based revenue increased by 28% to 2.111 billion pounds mainly due to the inclusion of Aberdeen revenue of 407 million pounds in the period since the merger completed. Pensions and Savings fee based revenue increased to 964 million pounds from the prior year's 861 million pounds as AUA benefited from strong net inflows and positive market movements, as well as a full year of ownership of Elevate. Standard Life Aberdeen plc said that Julie Chakraverty, Lynne Peacock and Akira Suzuki will retire from the Board of the Company at the conclusion of its next AGM, the exact date of which is still to be determined and will be announced in due course. Following these changes, the Board of Standard Life Aberdeen plc will comprise four executive directors, eight non-executive directors and the Chairman. The Board will be made up of two women and eleven men. Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX Kostenloser Wertpapierhandel auf Smartbroker.de Werbehinweise: Die Billigung des Basisprospekts durch die BaFin ist nicht als ihre Befurwortung der angebotenen Wertpapiere zu verstehen. Wir empfehlen Interessenten und potenziellen Anlegern den Basisprospekt und die Endgultigen Bedingungen zu lesen, bevor sie eine Anlageentscheidung treffen, um sich moglichst umfassend zu informieren, insbesondere uber die potenziellen Risiken und Chancen des Wertpapiers. Sie sind im Begriff, ein Produkt zu erwerben, das nicht einfach ist und schwer zu verstehen sein kann. MoneyTV with Donald Baillargeon television program, Copyright MMXVII, all rights reserved. MoneyTV does not provide an analysis of companies' financial positions and is not soliciting to purchase or sell securities of the companies, nor are we offering a recommendation of featured companies or their stocks. Information discussed herein has been provided by the companies and should be verified independently with the companies and a securities analyst. MoneyTV provides companies a 3 to 4 month corporate profile with multiple appearances for a cash fee of $11,995.00 to $17,250.00, does not accept company stock as payment for services, does not hold any positions, options or warrants in featured companies. The information herein is not an endorsement by Donald Baillargeon, the producer, publisher or parent company of MoneyTV. 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. According to Art.13 of the current Articles of Association, as well as according to Art.3 of the Federal Ordinance on Excessive Compensation, the directors are elected each year to hold office until the following annual shareholders' meeting. Directors may be re-elected. It is proposed that the Ordinary General Meeting in Lugano is to be chaired by Stefan Widegren. Fabio Cannavale, Erik Lautmann, Helene Mellquist, Helena Thrap-Olsen and Patrik Tigerschiold will stand for re-election, while Roberto Italia is proposed for election. Ottonel Popesco and Stefan Widegren will not stand for re-election. The Nomination Committee proposes Fabio Cannavale, Erik Lautmann, Helene Mellquist, Helena Thrap-Olsen and Patrik Tigerschiold to be re-elected as Directors for a further one-year term of office expiring at the Ordinary General Meeting to be held in 2019. The Nomination Committee proposes to elect Roberto Italia to the Board of Directors. The Nomination Committee furthermore proposes to nominate Patrik Tigerschiold as Chairman of the Board of Directors. With respect to the requirements in the Swedish Corporate Governance Code (the Code) that a majority of the directors elected by the shareholders' meeting are to be independent of the company and its executive management and that at least two of this majority also are to be independent in relation to the company's major shareholders, the Nomination Committee has carried out the following assessment: Fabio Cannavale, Roberto Italia, Helena Thrap-Olsen, Helene Mellquist, Erik Lautmann and Patrik Tigerschiold are all independent of the company and its executive management. Roberto Italia, Helena Thrap-Olsen, Helene Mellquist and Erik Lautmann are all also independent in relation to the company's major shareholders. The Nomination Committee therefore concludes that all requirements of director independence as set out in the Code are met. Shareholders representing more than 40 per cent of the votes support the above-mentioned proposals made by the Nomination Committee. Finally, and in accordance to Art. 7 of the Federal Ordinance on Excessive Compensation and with the Internal Regulations, the Nomination Committee proposes to elect the following Board members to be part of the Remuneration Committee for the year 2018/2019: Erik Lautmann Helena Thrap-Olsen Patrik Tigerschiold With respect to the requirements in the Code that all members of the Remuneration Committee, apart from the chairman of the Remuneration Committee, are to be independent of the company and its executive management, the Nomination Committee has come to the conclusion that all candidates proposed by the Board of Directors are independent of the company and its executive management. Reference is made to the motivated Nomination Committee Statement available on Cavotec's investor relations website http://ir.cavotec.com and attached to this press release. Cavotec SA Nomination Committee can be contacted via nominations@cavotec.com. ENDS For further details please contact: Kristiina Leppanen Group Chief Financial Officer & Investor Relations Telephone: +41 91 911 40 11 - Email: investor@cavotec.com Cavotec is a leading engineering group that designs and manufactures automated connection and electrification systems for ports, airports and industrial applications worldwide. Cavotec innovative technologies ensure safe, efficient and sustainable operations. TofindoutmoreaboutCavotec, visitourwebsiteatcavotec.com. The information in this release is subject to the disclosure requirements of Cavotec SA under the Swedish Securities Market Act and/or the Swedish Financial Instruments Trading Act. This information was publicly communicated on 23 February 2018, 11:10 CET. Attachment: https://cns.omxgroup.com/cds/DisclosureAttachmentServlet?messageAttachmentId=665394 ECR Minerals announced on Friday that its Australian subsidiary has been notified of the renewal of its exploration licence for a further five years. Mercator Gold Australia's renewed EL5433 licence represents the Bailieston gold exploration project in Central Victoria, of which the company has 100% ownership, which is located in the same district as the million-ounce Fosterville gold mine owned by Kirkland Lake Gold. Craig Brown, chief executive of ECR Minerals, said: "The renewal of EL5433 for ... Werbehinweise: Die Billigung des Basisprospekts durch die BaFin ist nicht als ihre Befurwortung der angebotenen Wertpapiere zu verstehen. Wir empfehlen Interessenten und potenziellen Anlegern den Basisprospekt und die Endgultigen Bedingungen zu lesen, bevor sie eine Anlageentscheidung treffen, um sich moglichst umfassend zu informieren, insbesondere uber die potenziellen Risiken und Chancen des Wertpapiers. Sie sind im Begriff, ein Produkt zu erwerben, das nicht einfach ist und schwer zu verstehen sein kann. The Queen will be sending a private message of condolence to the family of Billy Graham, Buckingham Palace announced Wednesday. The Netflix series The Crown portrays the real-life friendship between Rev. Billy Graham and Queen Elizabeth II. But Grahams relationship with other UK leaders got off to a rocky start after he repeatedly and publicly criticized economic interventionists. Graham believed deeply in the goodness of free enterprise and exchange. In 1949, he said of Clement Atlees postwar Labour ministry: The present government is killing all initiative and free enterprise. The system has not solved one of Britains economic ills. Instead it has created a thousand economic problems. Labour nationalized an estimated one-fifth of the British economy and constructed a cradle-to-grave welfare state. This, together with maintaining the posture of a global military power, led to what John Maynard Keynes described as economic Dunkirk. Some of Atlees policies, most notably the NHS, continue to generate new problems for UK patients. His words show the foremost evangelist of the last century cared about the economic, as well as the spiritual, well-being of the world. Graham came under fire for his views five years later, in 1954, when Grahams organization put out a calendar asking Americans to pray for the success of his first evangelistic campaign in the UK. It captioned one photo of London: What Hitlers bombs could not do, socialism, with its accompanying evils, shortly accomplished. Only 200 copies of the calendar were printed, but one of them fell into the hands of Mr. Hannen Swaffer. In addition to being a journalist, he was a socialist, racist, and spiritualist who held regular seances in his home. The American who wrote the text did not know that the Labour Partys 1945 election manifesto stated emphatically, The Labour Party is a Socialist Party, and proud of it. The proper noun Socialist could be applied to a Labour Party member. Swaffer promptly erupted, publicizing the quotation and, in the process capitalizing the word socialism to portray it as a direct reference to the party. I urge the Bishop of Barking to disown the Big Business evangelist, Swaffer wrote. And I urge him to call Billy Graham to repentance before he has the effrontery to start converting us. Graham usually went to pains to avoid putting political barriers in the way of proclaiming the Gospel. His assistant, George Wilson, responded that no reflection on the Labour Party was intended by the use of the word socialism which, he noted, was not capitalized in the original. The word socialism, he said, should be equated with materialism. I considered it a fair word to describe the current trend away from church-going. I regard it as meaning the same as secularism, he said. An MP tried to ban Graham from entering the UK a fate threatening his son, Franklin, more than 60 years later. However, Grahams mass meeting evangelism would be an instant success. As many as 120,000 people came to Wembley Stadium to hear him; two million people attended his 1956 crusade in all. Readers Digest found 72 percent of those who came to his early crusades remained active believers years later. Graham would return to the UK numerous times between 1954 and 1989. Along the way, he would become friends with Queen Elizabeth II, preaching for her numerous times in her private chapel and reportedly counseling her privately on the importance of forgiveness. Good manners do not permit one to discuss the details of a private visit with Her Majesty, but I can say that I judge her to be a woman of rare modesty and character, he wrote in his autobiography. She has gone out of her way to be quietly supportive of our mission. She would bestow upon him an honorary knighthood on December 6, 2001, because of incomparable contributions to civic and social life in the United Kingdom. Part of that contribution is reminding his listeners that the Western view has always held, in contrast to Marxism, that human beings are more than merely material creatures. Dialectical materialism cannot explain our views, nor satisfy our spiritual nature. Communism and Christianity have a headlong clash, Graham said in 1958. Karl Marx said that the problem of the world is social and we can build a utopia on earth. Human sin and brokenness stop us from building any Heaven on earth, he said. One wonders what he would make of the present UK, in which less than two percent of the population 760,000 people attends Church of England services weekly. Four out 10 adults who were raised as Anglicans define themselves as having no religion, and almost as many cradle Catholics have abandoned their family faith, reported the Guardian. Twelve Anglicans and 10 Catholics die for every new member a problem not encountered by the islands growing Muslim population, which is anticipated to triple in the next 30 years, according to the Pew Research Center. At the same time, socialism is growing in popularity. The Labour Partys present leader, Jeremy Corbyn, believed the fall of the Berlin Wall would pave the way for genuine socialism in the Eastern bloc and maintains his fidelity to socialism to this day. John McDonnell, the Labour Partys Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, has casually confessed, I am a Marxist and that theres a lot to learn from reading Kapital. However dark, it was worse during Clement Atlees Labour-majority Parliament. On the first day, Labour MPs sang the socialist anthem, The Red Flag. One suspects Rev. Grahams analysis would echo his words from 1952: The reason the Western world is failing now, in my opinion, is because the church has failed. The whole key to a successful democratic world, in my opinion, is the church. (Photo credit: Norway National Archives. This photo has been cropped. CC BY-SA 4.0.) The shareholders of Cavotec SA are invited to attend the Ordinary General Meeting (OGM) to be held on Thursday, April 12, 2018 at 15.00 (CET) at the offices of Cavotec SA, via Balestra 27, 6900 Lugano, Switzerland. Doors open at 14.30 (CET). For shareholders not wishing to personally attend to the OGM, an information meeting will be held on Wednesday, April 11, 2018 at 11.00 (CET) at the IVA Conferenscenter, Grev Turegatan 16 in Stockholm, Sweden. This meeting is open to shareholders and interested parties and will feature an update on Cavotec's recent business activities. Participation Only shareholders entered in the share register with the right to vote on April 3, 2018 will be entitled to participate in the OGM. Please note the following information: -- Shareholders whose shares are held through a bank or broker acting as a nominee with Euroclear Sweden AB must request their bank or broker to have their shares temporarily owner-registered with Euroclear Sweden AB. Such registration must be made no later than April 3, 2018. -- Shareholders whose shares are held through a bank or broker not directly acting as a nominee with Euroclear Sweden AB must instruct their custodian bank to register them as shareholders in the Share Register of Cavotec SA by sending a registration form to: Cavotec SA, c/o Computershare Schweiz AG, Share Register, Baslerstrasse 90, CH-4600 Olten. Such registration must be made no later than April 3, 2018. -- Shareholders who are already registered in the Share Register do not have to perform any additional steps and will be provided automatically with the registration form. -- Full instructions on the above procedures can be found on the full Notice of Meeting attached to this release or on Cavotec's investor relations website http://ir.cavotec.com . You do not need to attend the OGM in person. You can appoint the following persons to represent you: -- Mr Franco Brusa, Attorney-at-Law, Via G.B. Pioda 5, Lugano, Switzerland, has been appointed as independent shareholders' representative pursuant to Art. 9a of the Articles of Association. You may use the proxy form attached to this invitation or the Electronic Proxy as set out on http://anmalan.vpc.se/Cavotec2018 to appoint and instruct the independent proxy; -- Any third party by contacting them directly. NB: please sign, date and return the Registration/Appointment of Proxy Form in one of the enclosed envelopes by April 3, 2018 at latest, or complete the Electronic Proxy as set out on http://anmalan.vpc.se/Cavotec2017 by April 11, 2018 at 2pm at the latest. Alternatively, you may hand over your Proxy Form appointing the Independent Proxy at the Information Meeting on April 11, 2018, in Stockholm. For the full notice of the OGM, see the attached file, or visit http://ir.cavotec.com. For questions regarding participation to the OGM, please contact: Cavotec SA c/o Euroclear Sweden AB Box 191, SE-10123 Stockholm, Sweden Telephone: +46 84029283 ENDS For more information please contact: Kristiina Leppanen Group Chief Financial Officer & Investor Relations Telephone: +41 91 911 40 11 - Email: investor@cavotec.com Cavotec is a leading engineering group that designs and manufactures automated connection and electrification systems for ports, airports and industrial applications worldwide. Cavotec innovative technologies ensure safe, efficient and sustainable operations. TofindoutmoreaboutCavotec, visitourwebsiteatcavotec.com. The information in this release is subject to the disclosure requirements of Cavotec SA under the Swedish Securities Market Act and/or the Swedish Financial Instruments Trading Act. This information was publicly communicated on 23 February 2018, 11:30 CET. Attachment: https://cns.omxgroup.com/cds/DisclosureAttachmentServlet?messageAttachmentId=665411 RIYADH, Saudi Arabia, February 23, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Transparency International has launched its latest 2017 Corruption Perception Index (CPI), where Saudi Arabia's ranking continued to improve, moving up by five places from previous year's rank of 62 to a rank this year of 57. While the Index reflects on last year, the news comes in the wake of recent efforts by Saudi Arabia to fight corruption in the country, which has seen the country make bold moves including establishing a National Anti-Corruption Commission in November 2017. According to data released by the global anti-corruption organization on Tuesday, Saudi Arabia's overall score is 49 out of a 100. Among Arab countries, Saudi Arabia improved its ranking to third in the region and with a higher score than the regional average of 33. The recognition comes at a time of rapid development for Saudi Arabia, as it vigorously pursues its ambitious Vision 2030 agenda. Top Saudi officials hailed the report, saying that, "it marks a tangible result of Saudi Arabia's Vision 2030 plan and its commitment to accountability and continual improvement." The formation of the National Anti-Corruption Commission is just the latest move to increase transparency in the country, which involves several government agencies. These include Adaa, The National Center for Performance Measurement. "We are dedicated to achieving the objectives in the Vision 2030 plan, which includes improving transparency and accountability in every facet of our government, and this report shows we're making progress," said Minister of Economy and Planning Mohamed Altwaijri. "Saudi Arabia's use of The National Center for Performance Measurement (Adaa) to independently benchmark the performance of our public entities is one of many tools we can credit with improving our global standing." Husameddin AlMandani, Director General of Adaa, The National Center for Performance Measurement said: "Enabling transparency in government is one of the key reasons Adaa was created, and we are pleased that our efforts, and the full efforts in support of achieving Vision 2030, are showing true progression. It is important for global leaders to establish organizations that help to improve government efficiency and transparency." The Corruption Perceptions Index report analyzes public sector corruption perceptions in 180 countries annually and determines how each country scores against one another using a scale of 0 to 100, with 0 indicating highly corrupt and 100 as very clean. The 2017 report found that the global average corruption score is 43, unchanged from 2016. While the report generally showed little progress in eroding perceptions of corruption, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia's score increased to 49 from 46 since 2016. The drive for greater transparency and improved performance measurement is a key part of Vision 2030, and emblematic of Saudi Arabia's desire to work alongside multiple international partners to establish and consolidate best practice across a spectrum of public and private entities. Contact: Dur Kattan, PR & Communications Executive Director - The National Center for Performance Measurement (Adaa). dkattan@adaa.gov.sa, +966-920001156. First fragrance collection to debut in Fall 2018 NEW YORK, Feb. 23, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --Revlon, Inc., a leading global beauty company, announced today that it has signed an exclusive global license agreement with contemporary fashion brand AllSaints Retail, Ltd. for the development, marketing, and distribution of fragrances and ancillary products. Established in 1994, AllSaints is a global, contemporary brand with an independent spirit, known for its iconic biker jackets and creating apparel and accessories for men and women around the world. The core values of AllSaints are individuality with an East London attitude. "We are proud to partner with an industry leader, Revlon, to launch the AllSaints fragrance collection," said William Kim, CEO of AllSaints. "Revlon's strategic approach is perfectly aligned with our brand vision and global growth focus," he added. "As a brand, AllSaints is recognised globally for its fashion-forward, contemporary, Ready-to-Wear and bag collections and we look forward to creating a fragrance collection with Revlon which embodies these attributes." "We are thrilled to partner with AllSaints, and strive to translate their unique perspective on fashion to the world of scent," said Serge Jureidini, President, Revlon, Elizabeth Arden and Fragrances at Revlon. "AllSaints' impressive footprint and customer-centric mindset is perfectly aligned with Revlon's strategy and our focus to accelerate our global business," he noted. About AllSaints AllSaints is a global, digital, contemporary brand with an independent spirit, founded in 1994. Headquartered in East London, the brand designs a balanced collection of 50/50 menswear to womenswear Ready-to-Wear as well as handbags in-house. AllSaints has just under 3,200 employees across 31 countries and achieved sales of over 300M in its 2016 to 2017 financial year. The brand is obsessed with building a business model for the future, putting brand experience and the customer at the core of everything they do. AllSaints curates every aspect of the brand experience in-house, from store design and construction to the global web platform and the collections which can be found throughout Europe, North America, Latin America, Asia and the Middle East in over 240 directly operated stores, franchise stores, concessions and outlets. About Revlon, Inc. Revlon has developed a long-standing reputation as a color authority and beauty trendsetter in the world of color cosmetics and hair care. Since its breakthrough launch of the first opaque nail enamel in 1932, Revlon has provided consumers with high quality product innovation, performance and sophisticated glamour. In 2016, Revlon acquired the iconic Elizabeth Arden Company and its portfolio of brands, including its leading designer, heritage and celebrity fragrances. Today, Revlon's diversified portfolio of brands is sold in approximately 150 countries around the world in most retail distribution channels, including prestige, salon, mass, and direct to consumer. Revlon is among the leading global beauty companies, with some of the world's most iconic and desired brands and product offerings in color cosmetics, skin care, hair care, hair color and fragrances under brands such as Revlon, Revlon Professional, Elizabeth Arden, American Crew, Almay, Cutex, Mitchum, Elizabeth Taylor, Christina Aguilera, Britney Spears, Juicy Couture, Curve, Shawn Mendes and John Varvatos. Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/645376/Revlon_AllSaints.jpg 23 February 2018 MetalNRG PLC (the "Company" or "MetalNRG") Strategic Update, Board Restructuring and Director Financing MetalNRG plc (NEX:MNRG), the natural resource investing company quoted on the NEX Exchange Growth Market in London is pleased to provide a business update to shareholders encompassing a strategic update, board restructuring and director financing. Highlights: MetalNRG continues to build its portfolio with Cobalt, Lithium and Gold opportunities in North America (USA/Canada) and Western Australia (including the Pilbara); Project review work undertaken has created a pipeline of new resource projects and other investment opportunities particularly in recent months; The range of opportunities identified are more than MetalNRG could house internally and the Company has identified a route to secure shareholder value by assisting project owners with access to new investment, application of commercial management and where appropriate assist these entities in making application to trading on the NEX Exchange Growth Market or the Standard List of the London Stock Exchange; MetalNRG has progressed a number of potential new company initiatives and is now preparing, with advisors, to secure London Stock Exchange Standard List admissions for a new resource investing company and thereafter a number of new operating companies which will generally be focused on commodity or geography specific resource opportunities; In addition, the Board is considering moving MetalNRG to the standard segment of the London Stock Exchange to improve traded liquidity and provide wider access to capital for the Company; To ensure maximum efficiency and focus in pursuing MetalNRG's new development plan, Paul Johnson has stepped down as the Company's Chief Executive Officer and the Company has appointed Rolf Gerritsen as Chief Executive Officer with immediate effect. Paul Johnson will remain on the Board as a Non-Executive Director and will be focused on new project opportunities and assisting the new Chief Executive Officer with the development of new listed vehicles; Mr Gerritsen's remuneration package is to be weighted heavily towards successful delivery of corporate transactions; Mr Gerritsen will also be granted share options over 5 million MetalNRG ordinary shares with an exercise price of 3p per share and exercisable at any time after 12 months of service, until the third anniversary of his appointment. The options are also subject to the admission of one new investee company being admitted to a publicly regulated stock exchange; MetalNRG will help coordinate the listing of new companies to regulated stock exchanges and will receive shares in such companies as compensation for this coordination work. This will also reflect the value of any existing interest in projects and companies that are spun out of MetalNRG via application to trading on a regulated stock exchange. In addition, the Company may choose to invest pre-IPO, and upon IPO in new listed companies, to increase its exposure via obtaining further shares in these companies; As a demonstration of their commitment to the Company and its development plan, the new Chief Executive Officer, Rolf Gerritsen, and the outgoing Chief Executive Officer, Paul Johnson, will each invest 50,000 in subscribing for new MNRG ordinary shares at 2p per share and will be issued with 1 for 1 warrants exercisable at 3p per share and at any time for a period of three years from grant; The 100,000 investment by Mr Gerritsen and Mr Johnson demonstrates commitment to the business model and provides the Company with additional working capital to help finance a step change in growth within the Company; The Company's intention through the above developments is to become a London focused mining investment and development house, providing a mechanism for quality resource project owners to see proactive advancement and financing for their resource opportunities; Should the Company be successful, MetalNRG shareholders will see the value of their shareholding appreciate through project development internally and also from the increasing portfolio of stakes in new listed vehicles. Paul Johnson, MetalNRG's outgoing Chief Executive Officer commented "I am pleased that we have reached a point where leadership of MetalNRG can now be passed to Rolf Gerritsen, who is a capable and driven executive with extensive relevant experience. The level of work pressures in recent months has been considerable with numerous individuals, groups and organisations seeking finance, management and listings for their projects. My work time has been spent on developing these interests. As a result, through MetalNRG a substantial pipeline of new resource projects and other investment opportunities has been secured. In respect of those opportunities suitable for new listings, these will be available to MetalNRG should it wish to take them forward. In order to move these opportunities forward, MetalNRG needs a dedicated full-time Chief Executive Officer, not just to coordinate and manage MetalNRG's general corporate activities, but also to manage the process of new corporate transactions and the development of new listed companies. There is a lot of work to do, however, given the substantial equity participation of the board of MetalNRG and the remuneration package developed for Rolf, financial returns will only come for the Board and the shareholders if MetalNRG's development plan is successful." Rolf Gerritsen, MetalNRG's new Chief Executive Officer, added: "I look forward to building MetalNRG as an active constituent of the London resource investment and development community. There are certain ingredients needed to build a successful resource investing house in London. Access to deal flow is paramount and we certainly have that. We have strong support from investors for which we are grateful and this continued support will be needed as the new investee companies we create, and seek to move to trading on regulated stock exchanges, will be looking themselves to raise capital. Finally, an understanding of the marketplace including investors' expectations, market practice and, particularly in our case, the listing processes, is key. We have built that awareness internally and have the business advisory relationships needed to undertake our work. Taking a look at the market, despite being in the early stage of the resource sector recovery process, there are investable listed/quoted resource companies with modest market valuations. We therefore see an opportunity now to develop new reasonably valued listed companies which will be attractive to resource investors. Good quality listed resource companies with attractive portfolios and finance will, I believe, attract considerable interest which will provide an opportunity for MetalNRG to secure material capital gains. More information on our development will follow and I will ensure we regularly communicate new developments to the market." Financing Subscription Information Rolf Gerristen, MetalNRG's new Chief Executive Officer, will invest 50,000 in subscribing for 2,500,000 new MetalNRG ordinary shares at 2p per new share. In addition, Rolf Gerritsen will be issued with 2,500,000 warrants, each to subscribe for a further new ordinary share at an exercise price of 3p. The warrants will have a 30 month exercise life. Following the issue of the new MetalNRG ordinary shares and admission to trading, Rolf Gerritsen will hold 2,500,000 MetalNRG ordinary shares representing 1.73% of the then issued share capital of the Company. Paul Johnson, MetalNRG's outgoing Chief Executive Officer, will invest 50,000 in subscribing for 2,500,000 new MetalNRG ordinary shares at 2p per new share. In addition, Paul Johnson will be issued with 2,500,000 warrants, each to subscribe for a further new ordinary share at an exercise price of 3p. The warrants will have a 30 month exercise life. Following the issue of the new MetalNRG ordinary shares and admission to trading Paul Johnson will hold 17,413,634 MetalNRG ordinary shares representing 12.06% of the then issued share capital of the Company. In total 5,000,000 new MetalNRG ordinary shares are expected to be admitted to trading on NEX Exchange Growth Market on or around 9 March 2018. Total Voting Rights For the purposes of the Financial Conduct Authority's Disclosure and Transparency Rules ("DTRs"), following completion of the issue of the new MetalNRG ordinary shares referred to above, the issued ordinary share capital of MetalNRG will consist of144,326,404ordinary shares with voting rights attached (one vote per share). There are no shares held in treasury. This total voting rights figure may be used by shareholders as the denominator for the calculation by which they will determine whether they are required to notify their interest in, or a change to their interest in, MetalNRG under the DTRs. Background Biography and Regulatory Information - Rolf Gerritsen: Rolf Gerritsen is an entrepreneurial executive, with strong strategic, organisational, commercial and financial skills and an exceptional delivery record developed over the last 30 years. Rolf Gerritsen has specific focus on the Natural Resources sector including strategic development & implementation and sourcing capital for growth companies, special situations and restructuring. Rolf, who speaks 4 languages fluently has extensive international experience and has worked in Europe, The USA, Africa, Australia, Middle East, the Far East and South America. Over the last few years he has worked with the Boards of listed and private mining companies developing, designing and implementing growth strategies while ensuring the appropriate capital is sourced to deliver the plan. Recent experience includes: Initiated the acquisition of an AIM listed company, restructured the Board, the management team and raised funds to secure its survival. Worked with the board of an AIM listed mining company advising on all strategic investor relation aspects, raised more than US$90 million in project finance and equity to fund the development of a new mine which is now operational. Worked with the board of a private mining company and raised US$40 million to fund the reopening of a Nickel mine in Africa. Working with a private investment fund identifying investment targets on AIM, leading the investment process, the due diligence process leading to successful investments. Working with the board of an AIM listed Alternative Energy group on a secondary placement to strengthen their balance sheet to ensure funding can be put in place at a project level. Current Directorships and Partnerships Past Directorships and Partnerships over the last 5 years ECRG Limited None RCA Associates Limited Pearman Investments LLP Pursuant to Paragraph 21, Appendix 1 of the NEX Exchange Growth Market Rules for Issuers, ECRG Limited is in a Voluntary Arrangement for a period of 36 months and is making voluntary contributions to HMRC which commenced in May 2017. The Voluntary arrangement has been approved by a creditors meeting. The Arrangement included approximately 66,000 owing to HM Revenue & Customs. To date the amount paid to the administrators amounts to 24,000 and the total outstanding debt to creditors is currently 44,000. There is no further information that is required to be disclosed pursuant to Paragraph 21, Appendix 1 of the NEX Exchange Growth Market Rules for Issuers. The Directors of the Company accept responsibility for the contents of this announcement. This announcement contains inside information for the purposes of Article 7 of EU Regulation 596/2014. Contact details: MetalNRG PLC Rolf Gerritsen (Chief Executive Officer) +44 (0) 20 3778 0516 NEX Exchange Corporate Adviser PETERHOUSE CORPORATE FINANCE LIMITED Guy Miller/Mark Anwyl +44 (0) 20 7469 0930 Corporate Broker SI CAPITAL Nick Emerson/Andy Thacker +44 (0) 1483 413500 . NEW YORK, Feb. 23, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Forbes Travel Guide unveiled its annual Star Rating list, naming Baccarat Hotel New York as a new Forbes Travel Guide Five-Star Hotel. Baccarat Hotel New York is one of only two New York City hotels to receive the Five-Star award since 2016, and will be showcased with all the Star Rating recipients on ForbesTravelGuide.com. The Baccarat Hotel is owned by Sunshine Insurance Group, a comprehensive insurance financial group based in China that ranks among the country's most successful insurance and investment firms. Sunshine Insurance Group purchased the property from Starwood Capital Group in 2015. "When we created Baccarat Hotel New York we sought to reimagine the elegance and perfection of the legendary French crystal maker into a luxury lifestyle hospitality brand," said Barry Sternlicht, Chairman and CEO of Starwood Capital Group, Baccarat Hotel New York parent company. "We are thrilled to receive the Forbes Travel Guide Five-Star rating, its most prestigious and highest honor. It is a tribute to our team's hard work and dedication, providing our guests with an unparalleled level of luxury." About Baccarat Hotel New York: Baccarat Hotel New York is the first hotel and global flagship for the 254-year-old Baccarat crystal brand. Across the street from the Museum of Modern Art and steps from Fifth Avenue's legendary shopping, the 114 guest rooms & suites designed by Paris-based, luxury design team Gilles & Boissier delight the senses with lavish finishes and artisanal attention to detail. Amenities include stunning salon-style spaces where guests enjoy breakfast, cocktails, afternoon tea and fare; a beautiful barrel-vaulted bar featuring Baccarat crystal stemware; Spa de La Mer, the first of its kind in the world, and a 55-foot marble swimming pool reminiscent of La Cote d'Azur. For more information, visit www.baccarathotels.com. About SH Group: SH Group, an affiliate of Starwood Capital Group, is a global hotel brand management company that provides Starwood with significant proprietary investment opportunities and maximizes returns on hotel investments in the firm's dedicated hotel funds. SH Group owns the environmentally-focused 1 Hotels & Resorts brand and holds the Baccarat Hotel license, as well as other potential future hotel brands. Under the direction of President, Arash Azarbarzin, SH Group plans to continually expand, which will include bringing 1 Hotels to Los Angeles, Cabo and Haitang Bay. Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/645326/SH_Group_Baccarat_Hotel_New_York_Grand_Salon.jpg DUBLIN, Feb. 23, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- The "Power Transmission and Distribution Equipment - Global Strategic Business Report" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering. The report provides separate comprehensive analytics for the US, Canada, Japan, Europe, Asia-Pacific, Latin America, and Rest of World. Annual estimates and forecasts are provided for the period 2016 through 2024. Also, a five-year historic analysis is provided for these markets. Market data and analytics are derived from primary and secondary research. This report analyzes the worldwide markets for Power Transmission and Distribution Equipment in US$ Million by the following Segments: Transformers Switchgears Others The report profiles 215 companies including many key and niche players such as: ABB Limited ( Switzerland ) ) ABB Kuhlman ( USA ) ) Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited ( India ) ) CG Power and Industrial Solutions Limited (CG) ( India ) ) Diamond Power Infrastructure Limited ( India ) ) Eaton Corporation plc ( Ireland ) ) Cooper Industries plc ( Ireland ) ) Efacec Capital, S.G.P.S., SA ( Portugal ) ) GE Grid Solutions, LLC ( USA ) ) Hammond Power Solutions, Inc. ( Canada ) ) Howard Industries, Inc. ( USA ) ) Hubbell Incorporated ( USA ) ) Hyosung Power & Industrial Systems Performance Group ( South Korea ) & Industrial Systems Performance Group ( ) Hyundai Electric & Energy Systems Co., Ltd. ( South Korea ) ) Imefy Group ( Spain ) ) JiangSu HuaPeng Transformer Co., Ltd. (JSHP) ( China ) ) Kirloskar Electric Company Limited ( India ) ) KONCAR, Elektroindustrija d.d. ( Croatia ) ) Larsen & Toubro Limited ( India ) ) Mitsubishi Electric Corporation ( Japan ) ) Pioneer Power Solutions, Inc. ( USA ) ) Bemag Transformer ( Canada ) ) Jefferson Electric ( USA ) ) Harmonics Limited ( USA ) ) Regal Beloit Corporation ( USA ) ) S&C Electric Company Inc. ( USA ) ) Schneider Electric S.E. ( France ) ) Shihlin Electric & Engineering Corporation ( Taiwan ) ) Siemens AG ( Germany ) ) SPX Transformer Solutions, Inc. ( USA ) ) Toshiba Energy Systems & Solutions Corporation ( Japan ) ) Wilson Power Solutions Ltd. (UK) Wilson Transformer Company Pty Ltd. ( Australia ) ) Xi'an XD Transformer Co., Ltd. ( China ) Key Topics Covered: 1. INDUSTRY OVERVIEW Power Transmission and Distribution (T&D) Equipment: The Cornerstone of a Reliable, Cost-Effective, Efficient, and Sustainable Electricity System Surging Energy Consumption and the Resulting Rise in Power Production, Transmission and Distribution: Foundation for Market Growth Transformations in Power Transmission Technology over the Years Global Market Outlook Improving Economy Buoys General Market Optimism 2. COMPETITION Power T&D Equipment Marketplace: Moderately Consolidated ABB: The Largest Transformer Company in the World Built by Path-breaking Innovations ABB Dominates the High Voltage Power Transmission Market ABB's Portfolio of High-Efficiency Distribution Transformers Competitive Pressures Continue to Build Up in Power T&D Equipment Business Noteworthy Mergers, Acquisitions & Divestitures during the Years 2005 to 2017 Smart Grid T&D Equipment: Competitive Vendor Landscape ABB GE-Alstom Grid Prysmian Schneider Electric Siemens Volatile Raw Material Prices: A Key Cause for Concern for Manufacturers Table 10: Power Transformers Cost Breakdown (includes corresponding Graph/Chart) Raw Material Prices Alter Transformer Designs 3. MARKET TRENDS, ISSUES & DRIVERS Growing Demand for New-Age Power Transformers Offering Greater Reliability, Efficiency, Resilience, and Durability Drive Healthy Market Growth Self-Cooling Transformers from ABB An Ester Fluid-based Phase Shifting Power Transformer by Siemens Hybrid Power Transformers Technology Energy Efficient and Eco-Friendly Power Transformers Innovative Alternative Fluids Design Innovation in Large Power Transformers Dryformers by ABB Superconductor Based Power Transformers HTS Transformers: Energy Efficient, Lightweight, and Small Sized Gas-Insulated Power Transformers Future for Gas-Insulated Transformers Appears Bright IEC Standards for Gas-Insulated Transformers Powerformer: A Superior Replacement for Step-Up Transformer Innovative On-load Tap Changers (OLTCs) Improves Reliability and Safety Global T&D Vision of Increasing Renewable Energy in Power Systems Benefit Market Prospects for T&D Equipment Rising Utility Investments in Power T&D Infrastructure for Transitioning to the Smart Grid Standard Drive Market Adoption Power Infrastructure to Experience Considerable Transformation Driven by Technology Innovations Novel Hardware Components Set to Emerge Distribution Transformers with On-Load Tap Changers to Play Critical Role in Smart Grids Microgrids: Critically Important in Fulfilling Domestic Demand, Improving Reliability, and Enabling Local Control Smart Power Distribution Gains Momentum Myriad Benefits and Superior Attributes over Traditional Transformers Drive Strong Demand for Smart Transformers Smart Transformers for Smarter Power Transmission and Distribution Traditional Vs. Smart Transformers: A Comparison Growing Need to Curtail Energy Loss and Achieve Energy Savings Drive Demand for Distribution Transformers Key Barriers to Adoption of Higher Efficiency Distribution Transformers The Integrated Policy Approach for Transition to Higher Efficiency Distribution Transformers Efforts for Making Energy Performance of Distribution Transformers More Visible Universal Adoption of MEPS Needed for More Savings Economic Incentives Encourage Distribution Networks to Adopt Higher Efficiency Transformers Need for Policy Frameworks Public Policies Concerning Transformers at the Product, Utility and Market Levels Product Level Utility Level Market Level Switchgears: The Dominant Product Category Continue to Witness Growing Demand Technological Breakthroughs Support Switchgears Growth Upgrade of Obsolete Systems to Spur Demand for Switchgears Switchgear Equipment to Benefit from Recovery in Residential and Commercial Construction Energy Storage Set to Disrupt Investments in Transmission and Distribution Infrastructure Evolving Smart Cities and Smart Homes of the Future Necessitates Highly Capable Power T&D Networks Growing Threat of Global Warming Stokes Demand for Green Distribution Transformers Domestic Targets for Greenhouse Gas Emissions of Select Regions/Countries Green Transformer Program Supports Environmental Protection Benefits of Low-Loss Transformers Transformers Going Green, Ester Used for Insulation Purposes Advantages of Natural Ester Fluid Natural Ester Fluid-Based Amorphous Transformers Exponential Increase in Global Population & Urbanization Rate: A Mega Trend Favoring Market Expansion New Infrastructure, Upgrade, and Expansion Projects in Developing Countries Offer Immense Growth Potential Geographic Regions Ranked by Value % CAGR for 2016-2024: Asia-Pacific, Latin America, Rest of World, USA, Canada, Europe, and Japan (includes corresponding Graph/Chart) Rural Electrification Drive in Developing Countries Promote Growth Aging Power T&D Infrastructure Underscores Need for Replacement and Upgrades in Developed Markets Stabilizing Regulatory Environment Augurs Well for the Market Proposed/Approved Standards for Transformers in Select Countries 4. INNOVATIONS AND ADVANCEMENTS IoT Technologies for Power Transmission Wireless Power Transmission High Voltage Transmission (HVT) Lines Significance of Extra High Voltage (EHV) EHV-Related Issues and Solutions High Voltage Transmission Deployment Gain Traction Overhead Lines (OHLs) Ultra-HVDC Transmission Lines HVDC Transmission Lines for Transmitting Renewable Energy to Remote Places Intelligent Transformer Substations Intelligent Solutions for Distribution Grids Advanced Design Adoption of Regulated Distribution Transformers Notable Smart Transformer Innovations 5. PRODUCT OVERVIEW Electric Power T&D Equipment: A Prelude Electricity Generation and Transmission Ecosystem Types of Power Transmission and Distribution Equipment Power & Distribution Transformers Transformers Overview Categorization of Distribution Transformers based on Their Capacities Architecture of Transformers What Does a Transformer Do? Switchgears Medium-Voltage Switchgears Insulation Medium Remain Vital in Switchgears High-Voltage Switchgears 6. PRODUCT INTRODUCTIONS/INNOVATIONS Black & Veatch Establish Atonix Digital FirstEnergy Corp Renovates Existing Transmission Line Sterlite Power Wins Project from Brazil Government Entergy Louisiana Initiate Technology Upgrade 7. RECENT INDUSTRY ACTIVITY Rexnord Corporation Acquires Centa Power Transmission KONCAR Enters into Contract with Iberdrola IndiGrid Acquires Three Power Transmission Assets Iridium Communications Partners with Lindsey Manufacturing CKP group Acquires Diamond Power Infrastructure Crompton Greaves Terminates the Proposed Overseas Power Business Deal 8. FOCUS ON SELECT GLOBAL PLAYERS 9. GLOBAL MARKET PERSPECTIVE Total Companies Profiled: 215 (including Divisions/Subsidiaries 245) The United States (39) (39) Canada (3) (3) Japan (6) (6) Europe (84) (84) France (11) (11) Germany (8) (8) The United Kingdom (15) (15) Italy (10) (10) Spain (7) (7) Rest of Europe (33) (33) Asia-Pacific (Excluding Japan) (99) (Excluding Japan) (99) Middle East (6) (6) Latin America (5) (5) Africa (3) For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/7vcz22/global_power?w=5 Media Contact: 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 NEW YORK, NY / ACCESSWIRE / February 23, 2018 / South Jersey Industries, Inc. (NYSE: SJI) will be discussing their earnings results in their Q4 Earnings Call to be held on February 23, 2018, at 11:00 AM Eastern Time. To listen to the event live or access a replay of the call - visit https://www.investornetwork.com/company/2105. To receive updates for this company you can register by emailing info@investornetwork.com or by clicking get investment info from the company's profile. About Investor Network Investor Network (IN) is a financial content community, serving millions of unique investors market information, earnings, commentary and news on the what's trending. Dedicated to both the professional and the average traders, IN offers timely, trusted and relevant financial information for virtually every investor. IN is an Issuer Direct brand, to learn more or for the latest financial news and market information, visit www.investornetwork.com. Follow us on Twitter @investornetwork. SOURCE: Investor Network NEW YORK, NY / ACCESSWIRE / February 23, 2018 / Northwest Natural Gas Company (NYSE: NWN) will be discussing their earnings results in their Q4 Earnings Call to be held on February 23, 2018, at 11:00 AM Eastern Time. To listen to the event live or access a replay of the call - visit https://www.investornetwork.com/company/1329. To receive updates for this company you can register by emailing info@investornetwork.com or by clicking get investment info from the company's profile. About Investor Network Investor Network (IN) is a financial content community, serving millions of unique investors market information, earnings, commentary and news on the what's trending. Dedicated to both the professional and the average traders, IN offers timely, trusted and relevant financial information for virtually every investor. IN is an Issuer Direct brand, to learn more or for the latest financial news and market information, visit www.investornetwork.com. Follow us on Twitter @investornetwork. SOURCE: Investor Network Toronto, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - February 23, 2018) - Avalon Advanced Materials Inc. (TSX: AVL) (OTCQX: AVLNF) ("Avalon" or the "Company") is pleased to announce that it has completed the diamond drilling program on its Separation Rapids Lithium Project near Kenora, Ontario. As planned, six holes totalling 1,500 metres were completed in just under one month. The program ran very smoothly without delays or technical issues. The objective of the drill program was to expand lithium resources of both the lepidolite and petalite-rich mineralization and better define near surface resource geometry for mine planning purposes. Results from visual observations confirm continuity of lithium mineralization to depth with increased thicknesses of lepidolite-rich lithium mineralization on the east end of the deposit. Assay results are expected in four to six weeks. The main deposit consists of a large, zoned vertical pegmatite dyke typically averaging 15 to 35 metres in thickness, accompanied by a swarm of narrower mineralized dykes of similar but variable lithium mineralogy. These dykes tend to be lepidolite-rich on both the east and west extensions and on the northern side of the main petalite-rich portion of the deposit. Resource estimates to date have indicated that about 20% of the presently estimated tonnage is lepidolite-rich, accompanied by petalite, and the remaining portion is petalite with minor lepidolite content. Drilling on the main deposit involved four holes (SR18-77-80). Holes 77 and 78 tested depth extensions on the west end of the deposit to approximately 225 metres and encountered similar thicknesses of lithium mineralization as nearby holes. Holes 79 and 80 tested the east side of the deposit to similar depths and intersected a wider zone of lepidolite-rich lithium mineralization than anticipated. Hole 79 intersected 45 metres of mainly lepidolite-petalite mineralization, which represents a true thickness of approximately 20 metres. Two short holes, SR18-75 and 76, were drilled to test the Western Pegmatite, which is about 800 metres along strike from the main deposit. The results confirmed lateral continuity of the petalite mineralization over relatively narrow widths compared to the main deposit. Assay results will be disclosed once all results have been compiled and interpreted, following which an updated resource estimate will be prepared. The technical information included in this news release has been reviewed and approved by the Company's Vice President, Exploration, Dr. William Mercer, P. Geo (Ont), a Qualified Person under NI 43-101. The drill program was supervised by Senior Project Geologist, Chris Pedersen. Figure 1: Separation Rapids Lithium Project Block Model with 2018 Hole L ocations To view an enhanced version of Figure 1, please visit: https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/3386/33043_a3fca32.jpg Annual General Meeting Reminder Avalon also reminds shareholders that the 2018 Annual General Meeting of Shareholders will be held on February 27th at 4:30 pm at the Sheraton Centre Toronto Hotel - Kenora Room, 123 Queen Street West, Toronto, Ontario. An update on recent activities on the Separation Rapids Lithium Project and the East Kemptville Tin Project will be provided. About Avalon Advanced Materials Inc. Avalon Advanced Materials Inc. is a Canadian mineral development company specializing in niche market metals and minerals with growing demand in new technology. The Company has three advanced stage projects, all 100%-owned, providing investors with exposure to lithium, tin and indium, as well as rare earth elements, tantalum, niobium, and zirconium. Avalon is currently focusing on its Separation Rapids Lithium Project, Kenora, ON and its East Kemptville Tin-Indium Project, Yarmouth, NS. Social responsibility and environmental stewardship are corporate cornerstones. For questions and feedback, please e-mail the Company at ir@AvalonAM.com, or phone Don Bubar, President & CEO at 416-364-4938. Parents around the world share one thing in common: We want whats best for our children. Many low-income parents in America make significant sacrifices to ensure their children get a quality education. So its not surprising that poor parents in Kenya are willing to do the same. About fifteen years ago the government of Kenya implemented a free primary education program for all children. Why then do more than half of primary school students in Nairobi attend private schools? Why do poor parents choose to pay school tuition when they could send their children to school without paying fees? Stephanie Simmons Zuilkowski of Florida State University says its about education quality: One hypothesis is that there are simply not enough public school seats to accommodate children, particularly in densely populated informal settlement areas like Kibera or Mathare. But research conducted by myself and my colleagues supports another theory: we found that parents make great sacrifices to avoid public schools and place their children in private schools at significant financial cost. The main reason is that parents believe private schools offer better quality education than public schools. Other contributory reasons included perceptions of superiority and that younger parents were more likely to have children in the private schools than older parents. We interviewed more than 1,000 parents and head teachers at 93 public and private schools in Nairobi. We asked them about their schooling decisions and what words they would use to describe low cost private schools and public schools. Low cost private schools were described as being high quality, with harder-working teachers who were consistently present in the classroom. Homework was assigned regularly and teachers were observed by supervisors. Read more . . . Students are preparing for Future Lions 2018, AKQA's global undergraduate competition that aims to discover a new generation of talent helping to positively change the way we view the world. Providing a platform to discover and inspire young artists, coders and writers, Future Lions entrants often solve a variety of problems with purpose-led thinking. Sweden's Berghs School of Communication, Future Lions School of the Year for the fourth consecutive year, visited AKQA's Berlin studio last week to learn about a continuously transforming commercial landscape and the evolving set of skills and methods required to create breakthrough work. As part of their prize, Future Lions School of the Year winners are invited to participate in career workshops with AKQA's international teams. Twenty-two students pitched their final semester's projects to the AKQA Creative team, independent of this year's jury who evaluated each presentation, providing feedback and encouragement. An idea-mapping workshop also provided participants with a methodology to help organise their creativity in a practical and systematic way. Christopher Waldekrantz, Head of Marketing at Berghs School of Communication, said: "The opportunity to collaborate with the team at AKQA is one we value highly. At Berghs, we strive to educate the next generation of creatives who understand the challenges of today, but more importantly, the challenges of tomorrow. This preparatory session was incredibly useful for our students as it tested their existing thinking, and helped them prepare for life in the industry." Now in its 13th year, and in collaboration with the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, AKQA's Future Lions competition challenges students to connect people to an idea in a way not possible three years ago. There are no rules as to media or technology, and no specifics around product, service or target audience. The five student teams entering the best ideas will win registration to the Festival, taking place between 18 and 22 June 2018. Their winning ideas will be showcased in front of a large global audience on stage, and recognised across additional media channels. Over the past decade, the competition has launched the careers of over 70 of the world's most celebrated creatives. Of all Future Lions trophy winners, 99% are now employed by many of the most influential and respected creative agencies and organisations. The Future Lions 2018 call for entries will go live in March. Schools wishing to enroll their students in the competition should email futurelions@akqa.com for details. About AKQA: AKQA is an innovation and experience design agency. The future inspires us. We work to inspire. View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180223005323/en/ Contacts: AKQA Haley Hammerling, +973-747-4484 Senior PR Manager haley.hammerling@akqa.com NEW YORK, February 23, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- NetworkNewsWire Editorial Coverage Blockchain, the technology behind cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, boasts tremendous disruptive potential in a wide range of industries, including finance, infrastructure, supply chain management and even healthcare. SinglePoint, Inc. (OTC: SING) (SING Profile), a company with diverse interests and skills in the tech sector, has teamed up with ORHub, Inc. (OTC: ORHB) (ORHB Profile) to create a blockchain-based solution to improve the way hospitals collect and utilize operating room data to reduce supply chain costs, while IBM (NYSE: IBM) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) are exploring ways of using blockchain to more effectively share and audit medical data. With companies like HIVE Blockchain (TSX-V: HIVE) developing broader infrastructure applications, the potential for blockchain to improve efficiency across businesses is accelerating. It's an approach being pushed from inside the healthcare industry, with UnitedHealth Group (NYSE: UNH) also demonstrating interest in blockchain capabilities. Technology Driven Efficiencies Data collection and sharing is a growing problem for medical providers. Patient data has to be preserved and shared with those who need to know, while keeping it secure for the sake of patient confidentiality. Operational data is vital to driving evidence-driven improvements, as well as managing supply chains in an increasingly complex system. The sheer volume of data, and the challenge of maintaining security while sharing it with vested partners, portends a huge need within the industry. Many medical companies are now turning to blockchain technology as a solution. Though often associated with cryptocurrencies and financial interactions, blockchain has far wider applications. It provides a system for recording and sharing information without a need for a central organization controlling records. This reduces the risk of fraud or error and allows a complete audit trail, while improving the speed and efficiency with which information can be shared. In a medical context, it lets limits be set on who can see a patient's data, while keeping that data easily accessible to those with a legitimate need for access. Records can be kept secure for auditing without slowing down data sharing. And the information needed to manage all parts of a business can be quickly gathered and exchanged. Bringing Blockchain Expertise One company delving into this application of blockchain is SinglePoint (OTCQB: SING). Established as a mobile technology provider, the company has grown into a diverse holding company with a portfolio of investments in cannabis, blockchain and related technologies. By using an acquisition-based growth strategy, SinglePoint has significantly increased the technology and expertise it can bring to bear on a blockchain project and other corporate endeavors. This has led to a dramatic expansion in its services and a subsequent rise in its share price, from $0.01 to nearly $0.08 on volume of more than 3.5 million in a single year. Data integration is central to the challenge facing healthcare providers. The scattered nature of medical records means that one of the biggest problems is connecting the dots to provide better care and improve efficiency. Fortunately, the integration of existing systems lies at the heart of SinglePoint's work. Its acquisition of various blockchain companies has led to the deployment of integrated solutions in areas such as payment processing (http://nnw.fm/74SlQ). It is also providing technological solutions for supply chain management and delivery of goods, areas where the medical sector could benefit from improved data collection and process efficiency. New Initiatives SinglePoint recently announced its entry into the healthcare sector through a collaboration with ORHub, Inc (OTC: ORHB). In a letter of intent, the two companies defined their intention to create a blockchain services platform for healthcare applications. SinglePoint will design and develop blockchain-based solutions that can be added to ORHub's existing software, enhancing the value of data collected in and around operating rooms. With an initial budget of up to $750,000 in development costs, this marks the beginning of SinglePoint's work in bringing its blockchain expertise to hospitals. Given the data management needs of the medical sector, SinglePoint expects this to be the first of many contracts for the company in blockchain development, in the healthcare sector and beyond. "Having ORHub select SinglePoint as their solutions architect is fantastic," SinglePoint President Wil Ralston stated in the news release (http://nnw.fm/mL5vl). "We are beyond excited to dig into this project and develop a truly industry-changing solution. With the commitment from ORHub to fund the project, we are in a strong position to design, develop and execute on the solution. As part of this collaboration and broader corporate initiatives in the blockchain market, we are aggressively establishing working relationships with key blockchain engineers." Healthy Patients in Healthy Systems Data gathered at the point of care is vital to the health not just of patients but of hospitals and other healthcare providers. The past 20 years have seen huge efforts go into understanding healthcare processes, trying to trim the fat from a notoriously costly sector. While business analysts have been able to provide leaner systems, their work has always been reliant on data, and so held back by its limitations. Developments such as SinglePoint's new blockchain data solution will provide the fuel for future improvements across the sector. SinglePoint expects to unlock greater value from data captured across the operational system thanks to blockchain solutions. These will streamline medical records and improve their accuracy through dispersed record-keeping systems whose integrity is protected by blockchain systems. Better information sharing will improve the efficiency of inventory management and speed up billing cycles. Strong Supporting Systems Collaborations with other companies, like that with ORHub, are central to SinglePoint's success. Working with firms such as AppSwarm and SMART Cannabis Corp. (http://nnw.fm/T11oZ) has allowed SinglePoint to combine its own tech expertise with that of others, developing streamlined solutions for payment and deliveries. Steered by a leadership team with extensive experience in technology, engineering, marketing and raising capital, the company has grown and diversified from its initial holdings, increasing its presence within the tech sector. Following the completion of its recent annual audit, it uplisted to trading on the OTCQB Venture Market. Combining Technology and Health Care ORHub (OTC: ORHB) is an ideal partner for SinglePoint's step into hospital support. An advanced surgical software provider, ORHub focuses on providing real-time data capture and analytics around surgery. The company's surgical resource management ("SRM") software is already transforming the way hospitals deal with operating room data. It captures information before, during and after surgery, providing integrated measures previously unavailable to doctors and support staff. Hospitals and medical device vendors can use any web-enabled device to create a graphic depiction of the operation. This is then translated into an intelligent report linking every detail of surgery, creating a dynamic source of information. This allows real-time, data-driven decisions to be made that improve both patient care and profits. Accurate data reduces costs, increases accountability and improves efficiency across the board. "We consider ORHub to be the pioneer of surgical resource management innovation and our collaboration with SinglePoint to build out transformative healthcare blockchain solutions was a logical extension of our data platform. Our vision is to change the face of surgical healthcare by dramatically lowering surgical costs, aligning physician performance with surgical efficiencies improving hospital economics and patient outcomes. The power of the intelligent data we already capture at the point of care has far reaching implications that can be better deployed through blockchain solutions to resolve the waste in time and resources that have contributed to the cost burden placed on hospitals today. We believe that blockchain inspired technology will set the stage for surgical data to evolve into a new paradigm based on a real-time shared infrastructure platform that is more transparent, more accurate, more timely, more cost effective and easy to use," ORHub CEO Colt Melby stated in a press release announcing the partnership with SinglePoint. Other companies are looking at applying blockchain to medical records. Among them is IBM (NYSE: IBM), which is working with the FDA to explore how blockchain can ensure the smooth and secure exchange of medical data. The two-year project is looking at how blockchain can bring together data from a variety of sources, providing unique new insights for the benefit of public health. As well as supporting the accumulation of data, blockchain will allow it to be securely stored thanks to its nature as an unalterable distributed ledger. The IBM Blockchain in Healthcare blog (http://nnw.fm/O8jTF) provides greater detail on the technology's application and potential in the industry. As more capabilities of digital healthcare resources are uncovered, companies such as the UnitedHealth Group (NYSE: UNH) are increasingly integrating technology into their customer solutions. The U.S.-based health insurer has launched technological solutions for such diverse aspects of healthcare as diabetes monitoring and bill payment. Indicating the company's interest in blockchain, in April 2017 it posted a job opening for a full-time director of blockchain platforms and application development, a role within the company's Optum Technology segment. The now-expired job description hinted at UnitedHealth's expectation that blockchain could disrupt the healthcare industry: "We are about to disrupt healthcare by applying blockchain technologies. Here, innovation isn't about another gadget, it's about making healthcare data available wherever and whenever people need it, safely and reliably. There's no room for error." Outside of healthcare, blockchain is developing at an ever-accelerating rate as innovators in numerous industries identify the ability of the technology to solve key industry problems. Companies like HIVE Blockchain (TSX-V: HIVE) are attracting large investments to the sector, allowing the development of the infrastructure and technology to support blockchain. As the profits from this technology increase, so do investment and advances in the sector. Building Better Healthcare The secure, efficient and integrated use of data is a central challenge for health providers. Patient confidentiality means that data has to be treated with great sensitivity, and this has often been a barrier to sharing information. Yet such sharing can improve public health, individual patient care and the efficiency of healthcare providers. Blockchain offers a way to square that circle. It is secure, improves the efficiency of data sharing, and creates an incorruptible audit trail. As blockchain technology improves and is integrated with other advances in medical technology, it could provide the solution the sector needs. For more information on SinglePoint, visit SinglePoint (OTCQB: SING). About NetworkNewsWire NetworkNewsWire (NNW) is a financial news and content distribution company that provides (1) access to a network of wire services via NetworkWireto reach all target markets, industries and demographics in the most effective manner possible, (2) article and editorial syndication to 5,000+ news outlets (3), enhanced press release services to ensure maximum impact, (4) social media distribution via the Investor Brand Network (IBN) to nearly 2 million followers, (5) a full array of corporate communications solutions, and (6) a total news coverage solution with NNW Prime. As a multifaceted organization with an extensive team of contributing journalists and writers, NNW is uniquely positioned to best serve private and public companies that desire to reach a wide audience of investors, consumers, journalists and the general public. 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You are cautioned that such statements are subject to a multitude of risks and uncertainties that could cause future circumstances, events, or results to differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements, including the risks that actual results may differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements as a result of various factors, and other risks identified in a company's annual report on Form 10-K or 10-KSB and other filings made by such company with the Securities and Exchange Commission. You should consider these factors in evaluating the forward-looking statements included herein, and not place undue reliance on such statements. The forward-looking statements in this release are made as of the date hereof and NNW and FNM undertake no obligation to update such statements. NetworkNewsWire (NNW) is affiliated with the Investor Brand Network (IBN). About IBN Over the past 10+ years we have consistently introduced new network brands, each specifically designed to fulfil the unique needs of our growing client base and services. Today, we continue to expand our branded network of highly influential properties, leveraging the knowledge and energy of specialized teams of experts to serve our increasingly diversified list of clients. Please feel free to visit the Investor Brand Network (IBN) http://www.InvestorBrandNetwork.com Corporate Communications Contact: NetworkNewsWire (NNW) New York +1-212-418-1217 Office Editor@NetworkNewsWire.com Media Contact: FN Media Group, LLC NNW@FinancialNewsMedia.com +1-(954)345-0611 NEW YORK, February 23, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- CannabisNewsWire Editorial Coverage Out of 120 applicants, Manitoba recently awarded four master retail licenses, a monumental action as Canada prepares to legalize cannabis for recreational use this summer. The entities that now hold prized licenses to retail pot and its associated paraphernalia in the province are: Tokyo Smoke, a subsidiary of HIKU Brands (CSE:HIKU) ( OTC: DJACF) (DJACF Profile); a consortium of Delta 9 Cannabis Inc. and Canopy Growth Corp. (TSX: WEED) (OTC: TWMJF); National Access Cannabis (TSX-V: NAC) (OTC: NACNF); and 10552763 Canada Corporation. One key industry player that missed out on this licensing opportunity is MedReleaf (TSX: LEAF) (OTC: MEDFF). These licenses open the doors to considerable recreational retail revenue potential, and investors with foresight were quick to take action, with Aphria (TSX: APH) (OTC: APHQF) and Koicha Partners LP investing millions into the big four's newest presence, HIKU. New name, established brand Although the name HIKU is new, the brands behind it are well-known and have interesting back stories. Tokyo Smoke was named "best brand" at the inaugural Cannabis Industry Awards in December 2017, and in January 2018 the company joined forces with Doja Cannabis Company to create HIKU. HIKU is led by CEO Alan Gertner and President Trent Kitsch, who founded the best-selling men's brand, SAXX Underwear. Gertner ran a $100 million business as head of an Asia-Pacific-wide sales team during his tenure in corporate strategy at Google. When he found that what he thought was his dream job was less than fulfilling, he shifted gears and co-founded Tokyo Smoke with his father Lorne Gertner, formerly PharmaCan chairman (now Cronos Group), who was dubbed the 'Godfather of Canadian Cannabis'. Tokyo Smoke is a seasoned retailer, already running stores online and several successful brick-and -mortar shops, selling a range of experiential products that feature the creative use of cannabis. Established already in key markets like Toronto and Calgary, Tokyo Smoke's cannabis will soon be on shelves in legal recreational dispensaries in the United States. East meets West in merging of cannabis retail and production minds Partnering with Doja Cannabis, a seasoned Kelowna-based pot producer, was Gertner's first foray into production. The strategy of merging minds with industry expertise in producing and retailing pot brought Gertner, based in the east, and Kitsch, based in the west, to a new market in the Manitoban middle ground. The cannabis industry is growing at a rapid pace. While powerful players are teaming up to establish brand presence and formulate creative ways to differentiate themselves, the smaller contenders will begin to get weeded out. With Manitoba's major retail cannabis players now clear, the stage is set for companies to continue their push toward becoming Canada's first dominant cannabis retailers. HIKU, with shares trading over $2.50 and an estimated market cap topping $300 million, is definitely one to watch. Comparables: Aphria (OTCQB: APHQF) (TSX: APH) was founded in 2011 and is headquartered in Leamington, Ontario. The company calls itself one of the lowest-cost producers of marijuana, and produces dry cannabis, as well as cannabis oil of varying qualities and strength. Its cannabis is 100 percent greenhouse grown. Aphria's estimated market cap is over $2 billion. Canada's largest producer, Canopy Growth (OTC: TWMJF) (TSX: WEED), has a market cap of more than $4 billion, with shares currently trading over $22, a 61.3% increase over the last three months. Formerly known as Tweed Marijuana Inc., Canopy Growth was founded by Bruce Linton in 2014, and is based in Smiths Falls, Ontario. Canopy Growth is the first federally regulated, publicly traded cannabis producer in North America. It operates numerous production facilities across Canada and around the world with over 700,000 square feet of production licensed under Canada's medical cannabis framework. National Access Cannabis (OTC: NACNF) (TSX-V: NAC) National Access Cannabis' market cap is over $135 million; stock is trading over $1. The company operates medical cannabis care centers across Canada, National Access is adapting its established medical clinic model to meet the needs of the Manitoba retail market. National Access works alongside Health Canada and Licensed Producers to help qualifying patients gain access to their license. After receiving the Manitoba retail National Access announced it intends to deepen its relationships with CannaRoyalty Corp. and Cannabis Wheaton Income Corp. MedReleaf (TSX: LEAF) (OTC: MEDFF) was voted Top Licensed Producer at the Lift Canadian Cannabis Awards. MedReleaf is an Ontario- based, R&D-driven company dedicated to innovation, and delivering products to the global medical market, and providing brands and product assortment for the recreational consumer market. MedReleaf's market cap is currently over $2.26 billion. For a more in-depth look into HIKU Brands, visit HIKU Brands (CSE:HIKU; OTC: DJACF) or read the FULL Report: Cannabis Investors Need Three M's To Success: Money, Moxie, and Management About CannabisNewsWire CannabisNewsWire (CNW) is an information service that provides (1) access to our news aggregation and syndication servers, (2) CannabisNewsBreaks that summarize corporate news and information, (3) enhanced press release services, (4) social media distribution and optimization services, and (5) a full array of corporate communication solutions. 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Receive Text Alerts from CannabisNewsWire: Text "Cannabis" to 21000 For more information please visit https://www.CannabisNewsWire.com and or https://CannabisNewsWire.News Please see full terms of use and disclaimers on the CannabisNewsWire website applicable to all content provided by CNW, wherever published or re-published: http://CNW.fm/Disclaimer DISCLAIMER: CannabisNewsWire (CNW) is the source of the Article and content set forth above. References to any issuer other than the profiled issuer are intended solely to identify industry participants and do not constitute an endorsement of any issuer and do not constitute a comparison to the profiled issuer. FN Media Group (FNM) is a third-party publisher and news dissemination service provider, which disseminates electronic information through multiple online media channels. FNM is NOT affiliated with CNW or any company mentioned herein. The commentary, views and opinions expressed in this release by CNW are solely those of CNW and are not shared by and do not reflect in any manner the views or opinions of FNM. Readers of this Article and content agree that they cannot and will not seek to hold liable CNW and FNM for any investment decisions by their readers or subscribers. CNW and FNM and their respective affiliated companies are a news dissemination and financial marketing solutions provider and are NOT registered broker-dealers/analysts/investment advisers, hold no investment licenses and may NOT sell, offer to sell or offer to buy any security. The Article and content related to the profiled company represent the personal and subjective views of the Author, and are subject to change at any time without notice. The information provided in the Article and the content has been obtained from sources which the Author believes to be reliable. However, the Author has not independently verified or otherwise investigated all such information. None of the Author, CNW, FNM, or any of their respective affiliates, guarantee the accuracy or completeness of any such information. This Article and content are not, and should not be regarded as investment advice or as a recommendation regarding any particular security or course of action; readers are strongly urged to speak with their own investment advisor and review all of the profiled issuer's filings made with the Securities and Exchange Commission before making any investment decisions and should understand the risks associated with an investment in the profiled issuer's securities, including, but not limited to, the complete loss of your investment. CNW & FNM HOLDS NO SHARES OF ANY COMPANY NAMED IN THIS RELEASE. This release contains "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended and such forward-looking statements are made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. "Forward-looking statements" describe future expectations, plans, results, or strategies and are generally preceded by words such as "may", "future", "plan" or "planned", "will" or "should", "expected," "anticipates", "draft", "eventually" or "projected". You are cautioned that such statements are subject to a multitude of risks and uncertainties that could cause future circumstances, events, or results to differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements, including the risks that actual results may differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements as a result of various factors, and other risks identified in a company's annual report on Form 10-K or 10-KSB and other filings made by such company with the Securities and Exchange Commission. You should consider these factors in evaluating the forward-looking statements included herein, and not place undue reliance on such statements. The forward-looking statements in this release are made as of the date hereof and CNW and FNM undertake no obligation to update such statements. CannabisNewsWire (CNW) & NetworkNewsWire (NNW) are proud to be affiliated partners of the Investor Brand Network (IBN) About IBN Over the past 10+ years we have consistently introduced new network brands, each specifically designed to fulfil the unique needs of our growing client base and services. Today, we continue to expand our branded network of highly influential properties, leveraging the knowledge and energy of specialized teams of experts to serve our increasingly diversified list of clients. Please feel free to visit the Investor Brand Network (IBN) http://www.InvestorBrandNetwork.com Corporate Communications Contact: CannabisNewsWire (CNW) Denver, Colorado +1-303-498-7722 Office Editor@CannabisNewsWire.net Media Contact: FN Media Group, LLC NNW@FinancialNewsMedia.com +1(954)345-0611 MONTREAL, QUEBEC -- (Marketwired) -- 02/23/18 -- Relevium Technologies Inc. (TSX VENTURE: RLV)(OTCQB: RLLVF)(FRANKFURT: 6BX) (the "Company" or "Relevium"), is reporting on an operational update and areas of investment for financial Q2 2018 (October 1, 2017 to December 31, 2017). Aurelio Useche, President and CEO of Relevium stated: "The integration, optimization and scale up of BioGanix since acquisition has gone as expected." Mr. Useche continued: "Operationally we expected a learning curve and expected to overcome all challenges. I think the Operations Team has overcome all challenges and the Company is poised to drive growth in the 2018 calendar year. The e-commerce landscape for nutraceuticals is under constant change and we have been quick on our feet to adapt and maintain sales velocity." During the first six (6) months of operating BioGanix, the Company has focused on transitioning the business, accounts and assets. Following the successful transition which lasted until roughly November 1, 2017, the Company built up an internal Operations Team which subsequently set forth to optimize the business predominantly through conceptualization and deployment of the Mach 2.0 Marketing Engine. During this period, the Company did experience a temporary decrease in revenue. Since October 1, 2017 the Company has invested over CAD $250,000 for building out the infrastructure and acquiring the talent necessary to drive future growth of the BioGanix brand. These investments in technology, people and commercial agreements will also be integral in allowing the Company to execute on the plethora of product and brand launches it has planned for the 2018 calendar year. The Company expects to launch no less than three (3) new brands and over twenty (20) new products or SKUs in 2018. Launches will begin as soon as March 2018. The Company will provide further detail to this effect in a forthcoming news release. Mr. Abis Hussain, Senior Marketing Officer of Relevium Technologies: "We are really excited to start launching products. The Company has yet to launch products that fully reflect our collective efforts. The products that we will bring to market this year will really show our ability to find and market exclusive products. Prior to this, everything being marketed was part of the classic line launched by the previous BioGanix team. We believe our true colors and grit are about to shine." About Relevium Technologies Relevium is a TSXV-listed company focused on growth through the acquisition of businesses, products and/or technologies with a focus on e-commerce in the growing health and wellness sector. Relevium Technologies Inc. also holds patented intellectual property for the use of static magnetic fields for application on wearable devices. Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements This release includes certain statements and information that may constitute forward-looking information within the meaning of applicable Canadian securities laws. All statements in this news release, other than statements of historical facts, including statements regarding future estimates, plans, objectives, assumptions or expectations of future performance, including the timing and completion of the proposed acquisitions, are forward-looking statements and contain forward-looking information. Generally, forward- looking statements and information can be identified by the use of forward-looking terminology such as "intends" or "anticipates", or variations of such words and phrases or statements that certain actions, events or results "may", "could", "should", "would" or "occur". Forward-looking statements are based on certain material assumptions and analysis made by the Company and the opinions and estimates of management as of the date of this press release, including the assumptions that the Company will obtain stock exchange approval of the Offering, the proposed acquisition will occur as anticipated, that the Company will raise sufficient funds, and that the Company will obtain all requisite approvals of the acquisition. These forward- looking statements are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause the actual results, level of activity, performance or achievements of the Company to be materially different from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements or forward-looking information. Important factors that may cause actual results to vary, include, without limitation, the risk that the proposed acquisitions may not occur as planned; the timing and receipt of requisite approvals and failure to raise sufficient funds under the Offering. Although management of the Company has attempted to identify important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in forward-looking statements or forward-looking information, there may be other factors that cause results not to be as anticipated, estimated or intended. There can be no assurance that such statements will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on forward- looking statements and forward-looking information. Readers are cautioned that reliance on such information may not be appropriate for other purposes. The Company does not undertake to update any forward-looking statement, forward-looking information or financial outlook that are incorporated by reference herein, except in accordance with applicable securities laws. We seek safe harbor. On Behalf of the Board of Directors RELEVIUM TECHNOLOGIES INC. Aurelio Useche, President and CEO Like us on Facebook Follow us on Twitter Follow us on LinkedIn Contacts: For more information about this press release: Relevium Technologies Inc. +1.888.528.8687 investors@releviumcorp.com www.releviumtechnologies.com SHANGHAI, February 23, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Shanghai-based OperationIsKeyPartnerToPEPCO,Poundland, Dealz&PEP&CO PGS Now Fully Part of Pepkor Europe Ownership Structure Pepkor Global Sourcing (PGS) has been brought formally into Pepkor Europe ownership. PGS, which procures for Pepkor retailers in Africa, South East Asia and Europe is being restructured to reflect the fact that around 70 per cent of its sourcing is for Pepkor Europe retail brands such as PEPCO and Poundland. The structure change comes in the same month Pepkor Europe secured a two-year independent loan facility of 180m from a financial institution to replace planned investment from Steinhoff in full. Shanghai-based PGS is a key partner to Pepkor Europe brands Poundland, Dealz, PEP&CO & PEPCO with significant on-the-ground sourcing teams in China, India and Bangladesh. PGS, which already sources and manages around USD $600m of goods from China to Europe has ambitious plans to grow to support Pepkor Europe's own development plans. The loan facility, which supports Pepkor Europe's ongoing capital expenditure and investment plans for its retail brands - Poundland, Dealz, PEP&CO & PEPCO - and Steinhoff UK retailers Harveys and Bensons - has been welcomed by Chinese suppliers and their credit insurers, who have been briefed in a series of meetings. Sean Cardinaal, Chief Operating Officer of Pepkor Europe and responsible for PGS said: "Our Sourcing operation PGS has played a vital role in the success of our European brands-Poundland,Dealz& PEP&COin Western Europe & PEPCO in Eastern Europe. "All these brandsareallindependent, profitableanddelivering positive cash flows. "Because of this strength,wehaveworkedquicklytobring PGS into direct ownership andactivatenewsources of fundingtoreassureChinesesuppliers,implementour investment plansand secure the future of these successful businesses." Pepkor Europe is not dependent on working capital support from parent company, Steinhoff International N.V. It also confirmed this new two-year independent loan finance facility provided stability for its the retail brands and that it was business-as-usual in its stores and for its 29,000 employees across Europe. PGS currently manages over 100 Chinese clothing and footwear suppliers and 300 general merchandise suppliers linked to over 700 factories.It also manages 40 vendors in Bangladesh and 32 in India. Editors'Notes About Pepkor Global Sourcing PGS aims to be the number one sourcing partner for the retail brands in the group and will be responsible for over 55 per cent of non-domestic group sourcing by the end the 2018 financial year. Headquartered in Shanghai, PGS employs around 320 sourcing experts in 5 countries across the world, with a significant focus on China, Hong Kong, Bangladesh and India. Over the course of the current year it expects significant growth in support of growing retail brands within the Pepkor Europe group.It expects to double exports from China to almost USD $600m, triple trade with India to over USD $75m and ship over USD $118m more goods - a 60 per cent rise - from Bangladesh. About Pepkor Europe Pepkor Europe's mission is to provide its core shopper - "a mum on a budget" - with all of her regular household replenishment needs across volume consumables (FMCG), general merchandise and apparel. Its vision over the next five years is to build Europe's largest discount variety retailer with a target aspiration of 4,000+ stores across all major European geographies. InWestern Europe, Brands include Poundland (UK) and Dealz (Ireland, France and Spain), and PEP&CO (Pepkor Europe's clothing brand operating largely from "shop-in-shop" concessions).Poundland & Dealz have 879 stores across four countries, serving c7m customers per week and serving over half of UK households through Poundland. It has 18,000 colleagues. InEastern Europe, it operates 1,266 PEPCO stores in eight countries, employing 11,000 colleagues and serving 11m customers a month.PEPCO was established in 2004 in Poznan, Poland and has 769 stores in its home country. It now also operates stores in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania, Hungary, Croatia, Slovenia & Lithuania. Pepkor Europe Investment Plans Pepkor Europe investor & CEO Andy Bond provided an update on planned investment at Steinhoff's rescheduled meeting with lenders in London on 19 December 2017 Pepkor Europe which is responsible for Poundland, Dealz and PEP&CO in Western Europe and Pepco in Eastern Europe operates over 2,100 stores in 12 European markets. Key highlights from his presentation included confirmation that: Poundland/Dealz plans to open 180+ PEP&CO shop-in-shops in UK & Western Europe in FY18 and will launch its Dealz brand in Poland in February 2018 in FY18 and will launch its Dealz brand in in Pepco will open 250-300 stores per annum over the next three years Pepkor Europe's vision over the next five years is to build Europe's largest discount variety retailer with a target aspiration of 4,000+ stores across all major European geographies He also confirmed the strength of current trading within Pepkor Europe retail businesses: In FY17, PEPCO's like-for-like sales growth is in excess of 20 per cent and the retailer has recently expanded into two new territories ( Croatia & Slovenia ) & ) In the current financial year (YTD18), like-for-like sales are in a range between 8 & 25 per cent depending on the territory. Expansion continues with 50 new stores and one new territory In Poundland following a strong turnaround in FY17, like-for-like sales growth in YTD18 is currently tracking at +4 per cent. A further 21 PEP&CO shop-in-shops have been added, which are helping deliver an average of over 11 per cent LFL growth for Poundland stores with a PEP&CO He also outlined why Pepkor Europe was well positioned for future growth. IRVINE, California, Feb. 23, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --Vibes Modular announced today that the company will be attending the Mobile World Congress 2018 show and will be presenting its products at the ShowStoppers event at MWC. The show will be held in Barcelona Spain. The company willdisplay its sustainable share-worthy, device-agnostic accessories for the mobile industry's most popular smartphones. On the heels of a tremendous showing at the media invite-only ShowStoppers event at CES in Las Vegas Nevada in January 2018, Vibes Modular is excited about attending MWC. "The interest we have received from ShowStoppers at CES was incredible. We have already met with a few parties from the middle east, Europe and Asia expressing interest in strategic partnerships", says Shane Wilder, CEO of Vibes Modular. "There is a growing global interest in our products. We think MWC will open additional doors as leaders in mobile recognize the incredible disruptive opportunity for shareable and sustainable smartphone accessories." The Mobile World Congressshow runs from February 26 - March 1, 2018. The Vibes Audio team willdemonstrate its market available "ROXON' Modular Smartphone Systemline of products which starts with its global patent pendingBASEROX' Smartphone Case. "When we show the BASEROX case to consumers and the trade we hear a consistent message 'Why didn't I think of that', says Scharles, Wilder, Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer of Vibes Modular. The reverse side of the BASEROX case is carved out and has a patented trim ring which allows for the simple snap on, snap off usability for its accessories. And if a user changes phones, they simply need a new inexpensive BASEROX case. All of the ROXON line of accessories will still back snap in place. In addition, the company will be showing itsVOLTROX' thin form factor Power Bankand theVIBROX' Sound Engineat MWC which provides robust sound that emanates from a Bluetooth enabled vibration powered carbon fiber surface and includes conference calling, all from a thin lightweight accessory (that also snaps on to the back of the BASEROX case.) TheSTICKYMOUNT' adapterallows users to attach their VIBROX speaker virtually anywhere: the kitchen, a studio, a cooler, a surfboard, or shower, for example. As a bonus feature, the VIBROX Sound Engine is waterproof, and will be available to ship in Q2. Vibes Modularhas several products in its roadmap, some of which will be displayed at the ShowStopper booth. Just ask for Shane or Scharles and they'll happily walk you through the company's product development roadmap. "One of the questions we get asked a lot is 'Tell us about your manufacturing capability'. We chose the best in the world that can scale to millions of products. Capacity is in place", says Scharles. This year at Mobile World Congress the organization's central theme is sustainability. According to its website they are "Bringing the Sustainable Development Goals to life at MWC 2018." Vibes Modular sustainable positioning is based upon how the products can be reused. So many products are deemed unusable once a new smartphone version is created. To hedge against obsolescence from upgrading, one only has to change its Vibes Modular case (BASEROX) and continue to snap on Vibes Modular smartphone products. To learn more about the MWC ShowStoppers event gohere. To learn more about or to purchase Vibes Modular products now, go toVibesModular.com. Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/645338/Vibes_Modular_Voltrox_Baserox.jpg WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - BlackRock Inc. (BLK), the world's largest asset manager, said it plans to speak with gun makers and distributors following public outcry after the Florida high school shooting that killed 17 people. BlackRock, which had $6.3 trillion in assets under management as of December 31, 2017, holds shares in gun makers Sturm Ruger & Co. Inc. (RGR) as well as American Outdoor Brands Corp. (AOBC). BlackRock indirectly owns shares in the two companies through the exchange-traded funds under the company's iShares umbrella. These funds track indexes such as the S&P 500. Thus, the company is seen as being able to exert some pressure on the index providers to remove the gun makers from their listings. However, BlackRock said it cannot sell shares of a company in an index due to its fiduciary responsibilities. 'We focus on engaging with the company and understanding how they are responding to society's expectations of them,' BlackRock spokesman Ed Sweeney said. Shares of both gun makers gained on Thursday after President Donald Trump said Thursday that he does not want to ban the sale of an entire class of firearms. However, Trump has signed an order to propose regulation that bans bump-stock devices - accessories that can turn a semi-automatic weapon into an automatic one. Several members of the U.S. Congress have called for gun control in the wake of the Florida high school shooting. Lawmakers who tweeted their condolences over the shooting were criticized on social media. Screenwriter Bess Kalb, who writes for Jimmy Kimmel Live, singled out condoling senators by responding with the amount of money they have received from the National Rifle Association or NRA. 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. Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - February 23, 2018) - Southern Silver Exploration Corp. (TSXV: SSV) ("Southern") reported today that it has filed a technical report ("Report") prepared in accordance with Canadian Securities Administrators' National Instrument 43-101. The Report may be found under the Company's profile at www.sedar.com and on Southern's website www.southernsilverexploration.com. The Report, dated February 22, 2018, entitled "NI 43-101 Technical Report, Mineral Resource Estimate for Cerro Las Minitas Project, Durango State, Mexico" was prepared by Garth D. Kirkham, P.Geo., following the guidelines of NI 43-101 and NI 43-101F1. The resource estimate provides updated grade and tonnage estimates for four mineral deposits on the property at the Blind, El Sol, Las Victorias and Skarn Front zones which have been the focus of much of Southern's exploration activities on the property since 2011. Table 1: Base-case Mineral Resource Estimate for CLM Project Utilizing a 175g/t AgEq cut-off value: Indicated Zone Tonnes (Kt) Ag (g/t) Au (g/t) Pb (%) Zn (%) Cu (%) AgEq (g/t) ZnEq (%) Ag TrOz (000's) Au TrOz (000's) Pb (Mlbs) Zn (Mlbs) Cu (Mlbs) AgEq TrOz (000's) ZnEq (Mlbs) Blind Zone 3,168 86 0.05 1.8 2.1 0.11 279 5.9 8,739 6 128 145 8.0 28,461 414 El Sol 1,150 79 0.03 2.0 2.0 0.09 276 5.9 2,931 1 51 52 2.3 10,217 149 Las Victorias 708 122 0.70 2.0 2.5 0.23 403 8.6 2,772 16 32 38 3.5 9,177 133 Skarn Front 5,109 115 0.07 1.0 5.1 0.17 416 8.8 18,915 11 108 578 18.8 68,273 993 Total 10,135 102 0.10 1.4 3.6 0.15 356 7.6 33,356 34 319 813 33 116,127 1,689 Inferred Zone Tonnes (Kt) Ag (g/t) Au (g/t) Pb (%) Zn (%) Cu (%) AgEq (g/t) ZnEq (%) Ag TrOz (000's) Au TrOz (000's) Pb (Mlbs) Zn (Mlbs) Cu (Mlbs) AgEq TrOz (000's) ZnEq (Mlbs) Blind Zone 503 103 0.33 1.9 3.4 0.07 374 7.9 1,662 5 21 38 1 6,042 88 El Sol 264 61 0.06 1.7 2.5 0.04 263 5.6 515 1 10 15 0 2,233 32 Skarn Front 7,917 73 0.02 0.6 4.7 0.16 332 7.0 18,545 6 100 818 28 84,451 1,228 Total 8,685 74 0.04 0.7 4.5 0.15 332 7.0 20,721 12 131 870 29 92,726 1,349 Notes: The 175g/t AgEq cut-off value was calculated using average long-term prices of $16/oz. silver, $1,200/oz. gold, $2.75/lb. copper, $1.0/lb. lead and $1.10/lb. zinc and metal recoveries of 82% silver, 86% lead, 80% zinc and 80% copper were used to define the cut-off grades. The base case cut-off grade assumed $75/tonne operating and sustaining costs. All prices are stated in $USD. Resource Highlights Four separate mineral deposits were modelled in the resource update with the Blind, the El Sol and the Las Victorias deposits forming sets of sub-parallel, northwest-trending and steeply dipping mineralized zones which extend for over 1000 metres strike and up to 600 metres depth. The fourth deposit known as the Skarn Front, forms beneath the Blind, El Sol and Las Victorias deposits and is localized on the outer edge of the skarn alteration zone surrounding the Central Monzonite Intrusion. Thick zones of higher-grade mineralization cluster at the projected intersections of the Blind and El Sol zones and the Skarn Front, the outline of which forms an extensive "higher-grade" target area which rakes for over 800 metres diagonally and ranges from 300 to 600 metres in width. Significantly, this target region and other targets along the Skarn Front zone have been only partially drill tested to date. Mineral Resources that are not Mineral Reserves do not have demonstrated economic viability. Inferred Resources are considered too speculative geologically to have economic considerations applied to them that would enable them to be classified as Mineral Reserves. There is no assurance that any part of the Inferred Resource will be converted to Measured or Indicated Mineral Resources or ultimately converted to a Mineral Reserve. 2018 Exploration Program More detailed drilling is required, particularly to delineate the extent of the higher-grade lenses. Analyses of the block model has identified several new target areas for drill testing in 2018 as well as the previously described extensions of the Skarn Front in the Las Victorias and North Skarn Target areas (see NR-18-17, November 6th, 2017). Mapping and surface sampling on the new CLM West claim group is ongoing. Over 2400 chip and float samples have been collected on the claims to date which have successfully identified multiple target areas for drill follow-up in Q2, 2018 (see NR-02-18; February 21, 2018). Pre-development studies on the project are in progress with initial worked focused on the metallurgical characterization of the known mineral deposits; the results of which are expected in the coming weeks. Recent exploration on the company's flagship Cerro Las Minitas property, Durango Mexico has been funded by Electrum Global Holdings L.P. ("Electrum"), which has now earned a 60% indirect interest in the property through a US$5.0M earn-in on the property, with Southern Silver acting as operator of the on-going joint venture operations. A total of 108 drill holes for 49,348 metres have now been completed on the Cerro Las Minitas project with exploration expenditures of approximately US$15.1 million to the end of December 2017 with an exploration cost of $0.07 per AgEq ounce. About Southern Silver Exploration Corp. Southern Silver Exploration Corp. is a precious metal exploration and development company with a focus on the discovery of world-class mineral deposits in north-central Mexico and the southern USA. Our specific emphasis is the Cerro Las Minitas silver-lead-zinc project located in the heart of Mexico's Faja de Plata, which hosts multiple world-class mineral deposits such as Penasquito, San Martin, Naica, Los Gatos and Pitarrilla. We have assembled a team of highly experienced technical, operational and transactional professionals to support our exploration efforts in developing, along with our partner, Electrum Global Holdings LP, the Cerro Las Minitas project into a premier, high-grade, silver-lead-zinc mine. The Company engages in the acquisition, exploration and development either directly or through joint-venture relationships in mineral properties in major jurisdictions. Our property portfolio also includes the Oro porphyry copper-gold project located in southern New Mexico, USA. The Oro property consists of patented land, State leases and BLM located mineral claims which cover a highly prospective quartz-sericite-pyrite alteration zone, interpreted to overlie an unexposed porphyry center and distal sediment-hosted, oxide-gold target. Robert Macdonald, MSc., P.Geo., is a Qualified Person as defined by National Instrument 43-101 and he is responsible for the supervision of the exploration on the Cerro Las Minitas Project and for the preparation and review of the technical results in this disclosure. Garth Kirkham, P.Geo., and Principal of Kirkham Geosciences Limited is the Independent Qualified Person responsible for the preparation and disclosure of the Mineral Resource Estimate. On behalf of the Board of Directors "Lawrence Page" Lawrence Page, Q.C. President & Director, Southern Silver Exploration Corp. For further information, please visit Southern Silver's website at southernsilverexploration.com or contact us at 604.641.2759 or by email at ir@mnxltd.com. Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. This news release may contain forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements address future events and conditions and therefore involve inherent risks and uncertainties. Actual results may differ materially from those currently anticipated in such statements. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in forward looking statements include the timing and receipt of government and regulatory approvals, and continued availability of capital and financing and general economic, market or business conditions. Southern Silver Exploration Corp. does not assume any obligation to update or revise its forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except to the extent required by applicable law. Regulatory News: Eurofins (Paris:ERF): Eurofins Scientific (EUFI.PA), a global leader in environment testing, announces that it has acquired City Analysts Ltd. ("City Analysts"), a leading provider of accredited water chemistry and microbiological testing in Ireland. City Analysts is a centre of excellence for accredited cryptosporidium analysis and toxicity testing and is unique in providing mobile laboratory services throughout Ireland. The company also has expertise in niche areas of water testing, including aquatic microbiology, toxicology and parasitology. As one of the few laboratories in Europe with accreditation for aquatic toxicity testing, City Analysts has strong links with the pharmaceutical industry in Ireland. The company, which will remain under the leadership of its management team, will add a specialist testing facility in Dublin and Clare and 37 employees to Eurofins' existing workforce in Ireland, as well as a distribution and collection network, covering all of Ireland. The City Analysts acquisition is the second transaction completed by Eurofins Ireland in the past 12 months after the acquisition of Environmental Laboratory Services ("ELS") in the summer of 2017, and highlights Eurofins' commitment to further grow its Environment testing global footprint. Following these acquisitions, Eurofins' environment testing business has significantly expanded its service offering and its range of highly specialist laboratory services in Ireland. Moreover, Eurofins recently significantly expanded its laboratories and facilities in Dungarvan, Ireland, allowing the Group to double the volume of samples tested annually at this site. As a result of all these recent developments, Eurofins has become the number one environment testing player in Ireland, offering the most comprehensive portfolio of state-of-the-art environment testing services in the region. Comment from Dr. Gilles Martin, Eurofins CEO: "We are extremely pleased to welcome City Analysts and ELS to the Eurofins Group. These acquisitions, together with the expansion of our Dungarvan facilities, are an example of our commitment to Ireland and they reinforce Eurofins' environment testing portfolio and expand the range of services offered to our clients. The City Analysts team is an excellent addition to the Eurofins family of businesses. They share our commitment to quality, customer focus, team spirit and integrity, ensuring that our customers continue to benefit from our trusted support but with even more capabilities. Bringing colleagues from City Analysts together with ELS means we can extend our range of services and maximise the benefits we can bring to our Irish clients." For more information, please visit www.eurofins.com Notes for the editor: Eurofins a global leader in bio-analysis Eurofins Scientific through its subsidiaries (hereinafter sometimes "Eurofins" or "the Group") believes it is the world leader in food, environment and pharmaceutical products testing and that it is also one of the global independent market leaders in certain testing and laboratory services for agroscience, genomics, discovery pharmacology and for supporting clinical studies. In addition, Eurofins is one of the key emerging players in specialty clinical diagnostic testing in Europe and the USA. With over 30,000 staff in 400 laboratories across 42 countries, Eurofins offers a portfolio of over 150,000 analytical methods for evaluating the safety, identity, composition, authenticity, origin and purity of biological substances and products, as well as for innovative clinical diagnostic. The Group objective is to provide its customers with high-quality services, accurate results on time and expert advice by its highly qualified staff. Eurofins is committed to pursuing its dynamic growth strategy by expanding both its technology portfolio and its geographic reach. Through R&D and acquisitions, the Group draws on the latest developments in the field of biotechnology and analytical chemistry to offer its clients unique analytical solutions and the most comprehensive range of testing methods. As one of the most innovative and quality oriented international players in its industry, Eurofins is ideally positioned to support its clients' increasingly stringent quality and safety standards and the expanding demands of regulatory authorities around the world. The shares of Eurofins Scientific are listed on the Euronext Paris Stock Exchange (ISIN FR0000038259, Reuters EUFI.PA, Bloomberg ERF FP). Important disclaimer: This press release contains forward-looking statements and estimates that involve risks and uncertainties. The forward-looking statements and estimates contained herein represent the judgment of Eurofins Scientific's management as of the date of this release. These forward-looking statements are not guarantees for future performance, and the forward-looking events discussed in this release may not occur. Eurofins Scientific disclaims any intent or obligation to update any of these forward-looking statements and estimates. All statements and estimates are made based on the information available to the Company's management as of the date of publication, but no guarantee can be made as to their validity. View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180223005524/en/ Contacts: Investor Relations Eurofins Scientific Phone: +32 2 766 1620 E-mail: ir@eurofins.com Time Headline Errs on Settlement Growth | Main | Newsweek: Fake Traffic, Fake News February 23, 2018 Wheres the Coverage? Israel Thwarts an ISIS Terror Plot in Australia Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that his countrys intelligence services prevented an Australian plane from being shot down,? by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Many U.S. news outlets failed to report Netanyahus Feb. 2, 2018 remarks. Netanyahu told the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations that the terrorist attack would also have caused a huge malfunction in global air traffic, and this is just one of dozens of attacks that we have thwarted around the world. [The intelligence services] deserve all the support we can give, not only for protecting the citizens of Israel, but for protecting people all over the world? Israels Unit 8200, which is similar to the U.S. National Security Agency, intercepted encrypted communications between ISIS members in Syria and Australia. Unit 8200 specializes in collecting, deciphering and analyzing electronic communication, a field also known as signals intelligence. Times of Israel correspondent Judah Ari Gross noted that the Israeli army generally keeps mum on the operations? of the Unit (IDF reveals it thwarted attempted Islamic State bombing of Australian flight,? Feb. 21, 2018). Although Netanyahu didnt offer specifics about the foiled attack, Gross reported that two men were arrested in July 2017 for planning to place an improvised explosive device on an Etihad Airways flight out of Sydney. A senior ISIS operative sent the components of the device to Sydney from Turkey. The terrorists also planned to release highly toxic hydrogen sulfide gas in order to poison people. Australian authorities called the plan one of the most sophisticated plots that has ever been attempted on Australian soil.? The Times of Israel said that Australian police were unaware of the plot until July 26, 2017 when Israel notified them. The suspected ISIS operatives were arrested three days later. The same day that Israels Prime Minister revealed the foiled plot, the countrys defense forces also revealed that they had thwarted a recent Iranian cyber attack against Israeli public and private systems,? The Times of Israel reported. The revelations about Israel preventing terror attacks, international and domestic, should have prompted widespread media coverage. It did not. Although several Israeli outlets, as well as the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and NBC News covered the story, most U.S. news outlets failed to do so. The Washington Post, USA Today, The Baltimore Sun, Politico and others, didnt inform readers about Israel preventing the attack. The Posts failure is particularly noteworthy. The paper has filed several reports on ISIS operations and terror plots in Australia, with headlines like Australia terror raids are a reminder of the jihadists Down Under" (Sept. 18, 2014), Terrified of terror, Australia plans indefinite detention even after sentences are served? (Oct. 18, 2016), and others. Post opinion writer David Ignatius even filed an Aug. 18, 2016 dispatch from Canberra warning that Southeast Asia could be a haven for displaced Islamic State fighters.? That article noted that governments in the region have been working quietly with the United Statesto monitor and try to disrupt radical Islamic groups, and theyve had considerable success.? Preventing a sophisticated? mass casualty terror attack on Australian soil is also a considerable? successand one that deserves coverage. Posted by SD at February 23, 2018 01:33 PM Guidelines for posting This is a moderated blog. We will not post comments that include racism, bigotry, threats, or factually inaccurate material. Post a comment 9.4 million raised from the first tranche as announced on 25 January 2018 2.1 million raised from the second tranche, which was oversubscribed by 55% 2.4 million raised through the exercise of 21% of the first warrants Possibility of an additional 20.6 million raised if the remaining warrants are exercised Regulatory News: ASIT biotech (Euronext: ASIT BE0974289218) (Paris:ASIT) (BSE:ASIT), a Belgian biopharmaceutical company specialized in allergy immunotherapy, today announces that it has raised a second 2.1 million tranche in connection with the private placement approved by the Shareholders' Meeting on 7 December 2017. As result of a strong demand, the second tranche was oversubscribed by 55%. Overall, ASIT biotech has raised 13.9 million through this capital increase, consisting of: 9.4 million from the first tranche through the issue of 2,456,444 new shares (see press release of 25 January 2018); 2.1 million from the second tranche through the issue of 543,556 new shares; 2.4 million through the early exercise of 626,146 warrants attached to the new shares, i.e. 21% of the 3,000,000 shares reserved for this purpose. Each of the 543,556 new shares issued in connection with the second tranche at a price of 3.83 per share carries two warrants entitling their holder to subscribe for two new shares at a price of 3.83 per share. The first warrants are exercisable until 30 June 2018, and the second until 31 December 2019, provided that the first warrant has been previously exercised. These warrants are not transferable. Should the remaining warrants be exercised, the Company's cash position would increase by an additional 20.6 million. These additional funds would provide long-term support for the development of ASIT biotech's drug candidates. Thierry Legon, CEO of ASIT biotech, commented: "The completion of the second tranche of our private placement approved by our Shareholders' Meeting on 7 December 2017, one month only after the successful first tranche, demonstrates the keen interest from investors in our company. We are delighted with their strong show of confidence and remain fully focused on developing our different drug candidates for respiratory allergies and food allergies, for which there are currently no suitable and well-tolerated therapeutic solutions available." About ASIT biotech ASIT biotech is a Belgian clinical stage biopharmaceutical company focused on the development and future commercialization of a range of breakthrough immunotherapy products for the treatment of allergies. Thanks to its innovative ASIT+ technology, ASIT biotech is currently the only developer of AIT product candidates consisting of carefully size selected and qualified natural peptides extracted from highly purified original allergen. This innovation results in a short treatment, expected to improve patient compliance and real-life effectiveness. ASIT biotech's product pipeline entails two novel ASIT+ product candidates targeting respiratory allergy with the highest prevalence (i.e. grass pollen: gp-ASIT+ and house dust mite: hdm-ASIT+), that could significantly expand the current immunotherapy market. The Company believes that its innovative ASIT+ platform is flexible and would be applicable across a range of allergies. ASIT biotech has a headcount of 22 staff members, at its headquarters in Brussels and a laboratory in Liege, Belgium. Further information can be found at www.asitbiotech.com. Forward-looking statements All statements in this announcement that do not relate to historical facts and events are "forward-looking statements". In some cases, these forward-looking statements can be identified by the use of forward-looking terminology, including the words "believes," "estimates," "anticipates," "expects," "intends," "may," "will," "plans," "continue," "ongoing," "potential," "predict," "project," "target," "seek" or "should" or, in each case, their negative or other variations or comparable terminology or by discussions of strategies, plans, objectives, targets, goals, future events or intentions. Forward-looking statements include statements regarding the Company's intentions, beliefs or current expectations. By their nature, forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties because they relate to events and depend on circumstances that may or may not occur in the future. Forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance. Given these risks and uncertainties, you should not rely on forward-looking statements as a prediction of actual results. Any forward-looking statements are made only as of the date of this announcement and, without prejudice to the Company's obligations under applicable law in relation to disclosure and ongoing information, the Company does not intend, and does not assume any obligation, to update the forward-looking statements set forth in this announcement. Legal notice This announcement does not constitute, or form part of, an offer or invitation to sell or issue, or any solicitation of an offer to purchase or subscribe for shares of ASIT biotech SA (the "Company" and the "Shares"). Any purchase of, subscription for or application for, Shares to be issued in connection with the intended offering should only be made on the basis of information contained in the prospectus and any supplements thereto, as the case may be. This announcement does not constitute a prospectus and the information contained herein is for information purposes only and does not purport to be full or complete. Investors should not subscribe for any Shares except on the basis of the information contained in the prospectus that the Company expects to publish after its approval by the Belgian Financial Services and Markets Authority, and which can then be obtained at the Company's registered office and on www.asitbiotech.com. This announcement is not for distribution, directly or indirectly, in or into the United States or to any U.S. person within the meaning of the U.S. Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the "Securities Act"). The Shares have not been and will not be registered under the Securities Act and may not be offered or sold in the United States, except pursuant to an exemption from the registration requirements of the Securities Act. The Company has not registered, and does not intend to register, any portion of the intended offering of Shares in the United States, and does not intend to conduct a public offering of Shares in the United States. This announcement and the information contained herein are not for publication, distribution or release in or into the United States, Australia, Canada, Japan or any jurisdiction where to do so would constitute a violation of the relevant laws of such jurisdiction. The Company is responsible for the information contained in this press release. View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180223005593/en/ Contacts: ASIT biotech Thierry Legon, Tel.: +32 2 264 03 90 CEO investors@asitbiotech.com or Media and Investor Relations France NewCap Dusan Oresansky Alexia Faure, Tel.: +33 1 44 71 94 92 asitbiotech@newcap.eu or Media Relations Belgium Laure-Eve Monfort, Tel.: +32 2 290 90 93 monfort@comfi.be BRUSSELS (dpa-AFX) - The Swiss stock market ended Friday's session with a small loss and finished the overall trading week in the red. While investors remain in a cautious mood following the volatility earlier this month, some calm sees to have returned to the markets. The Swiss Market Index decreased by 0.21 percent Friday and finished at 8,948.19. The SMI ended the trading week with an overall loss of 0.4 percent. The Swiss Leader Index dropped 0.16 percent Friday and the Swiss Performance Index also lost 0.16 percent. Reinsurer Swiss Re jumped 2.5 percent after saying it is carefully assessing the strategic and financial implications of an approach by Softbank about taking a minority stake. Sika weakened by 0.7 percent. The construction chemicals company reported increased full year results, but investors were disappointed by the annual dividend. Lonza was among the weakest performing stocks of the session, declining 1.9 percent. Among the index heavyweights, Novartis dropped 0.8 percent and Roche fell 0.6 percent. Meanwhile, Nestle finished higher by 0.2 percent. Credit Suisse surrendered 0.6 percent after Barclays reiterated its 'Underweight' rating on the stock. UBS also slid 0.1 percent. Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX Werbehinweise: Die Billigung des Basisprospekts durch die BaFin ist nicht als ihre Befurwortung der angebotenen Wertpapiere zu verstehen. Wir empfehlen Interessenten und potenziellen Anlegern den Basisprospekt und die Endgultigen Bedingungen zu lesen, bevor sie eine Anlageentscheidung treffen, um sich moglichst umfassend zu informieren, insbesondere uber die potenziellen Risiken und Chancen des Wertpapiers. Sie sind im Begriff, ein Produkt zu erwerben, das nicht einfach ist und schwer zu verstehen sein kann. MONTREAL, QUEBEC -- (Marketwired) -- 02/23/18 -- Relevium Technologies Inc. (TSX VENTURE: RLV)(OTCQB: RLLVF)(FRANKFURT: 6BX) (the "Company" or "Relevium"), is pleased to provide further clarifications on its press release from earlier today. The Company has received several requests from active shareholders to clarify ambiguity in the language of the operational press release from earlier in the day. Aurelio Useche, President and CEO of Relevium stated: "The Company is very appreciative of the feedback from its shareholders who asked us to provide clarity over the press release." The first six months of operations have been successful in all fronts including sales revenue, which have continued to demonstrate an overall positive direction ahead of previous periods. The Company did highlight in the previous news release a revenue decline, which was in reference to the month of November. The decline was related to product adjustments and changes in marketing costs due to the implementation of the automation process. However, overall revenues for the six-month period were on target. The following is a summary of the message that was intended by the Company to communicate to shareholders: 1. The integration, optimization and scale up of BioGanix since acquisition has been successful and as expected. The transition period included an expected learning curve and the operating team has done very well in meeting the challenge 2. Sales revenues are on target and ahead of last year's results by the previous ownership. 3. The Company has made several important investments, not only to optimize current operations, but also to prepare the team for organic and acquisition-based growth. The following were also important updates management felt key to convey to its shareholder base: 1. The eventual launch of three (3) new brands, the culmination of the successful exclusivity agreements entered into by the company during the reporting. 2. The launch of over twenty (20) new products or SKUs in 2018 expected hit the shelves as soon as March 2018. Management looks forward to reporting Q2 2018 financial results next week. About Relevium Technologies Relevium is a TSXV-listed company focused on growth through the acquisition of businesses, products and/or technologies with a focus on e-commerce in the growing health and wellness sector. Relevium Technologies Inc. also holds patented intellectual property for the use of static magnetic fields for application on wearable devices. Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements This release includes certain statements and information that may constitute forward-looking information within the meaning of applicable Canadian securities laws. All statements in this news release, other than statements of historical facts, including statements regarding future estimates, plans, objectives, assumptions or expectations of future performance, including the timing and completion of the proposed acquisitions, are forward-looking statements and contain forward-looking information. Generally, forward- looking statements and information can be identified by the use of forward-looking terminology such as "intends" or "anticipates", or variations of such words and phrases or statements that certain actions, events or results "may", "could", "should", "would" or "occur". Forward-looking statements are based on certain material assumptions and analysis made by the Company and the opinions and estimates of management as of the date of this press release, including the assumptions that the Company will obtain stock exchange approval of the Offering, the proposed acquisition will occur as anticipated, that the Company will raise sufficient funds, and that the Company will obtain all requisite approvals of the acquisition. These forward- looking statements are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause the actual results, level of activity, performance or achievements of the Company to be materially different from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements or forward-looking information. Important factors that may cause actual results to vary, include, without limitation, the risk that the proposed acquisitions may not occur as planned; the timing and receipt of requisite approvals and failure to raise sufficient funds under the Offering. Although management of the Company has attempted to identify important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in forward-looking statements or forward-looking information, there may be other factors that cause results not to be as anticipated, estimated or intended. There can be no assurance that such statements will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on forward- looking statements and forward-looking information. Readers are cautioned that reliance on such information may not be appropriate for other purposes. The Company does not undertake to update any forward-looking statement, forward-looking information or financial outlook that are incorporated by reference herein, except in accordance with applicable securities laws. We seek safe harbor. On Behalf of the Board of Directors RELEVIUM TECHNOLOGIES INC. Aurelio UsechePresident and CEO Like us on Facebook Follow us on Twitter Follow us on LinkedIn Contacts: Relevium Technologies +1.888.528.8687 investors@releviumcorp.com www.releviumtechnologies.com A.M. Best has affirmed the Financial Strength Rating (FSR) of A+ (Superior) and the Long-Term Issuer Credit Ratings (Long-Term ICR) of "aa-" of the members of Intact Insurance Group (Intact Group), as well as the group's separately rated member, Intact Farm Insurance Inc. (Intact Assurance agricole) (Quebec). Concurrently, A.M. Best has affirmed the Long-Term ICR of "a-" and the Long-Term Issue Credit Ratings (Long-Term IR) of the ultimate parent company, Intact Financial Corporation (IFC) (Ontario, Canada) [TSX: IFC]. The outlook of these Credit Ratings (ratings) is stable. In addition, A.M. Best has affirmed the FSR of A (Excellent) and the Long-Term ICRs of "a+" of Atlantic Specialty Insurance Company (Atlantic Specialty) (New York, NY) and its rated affiliates. Collectively, these companies are referred to as OneBeacon Insurance Group (OneBeacon). A.M. Best also has affirmed the Long-Term ICRs of "bbb+" and the Long-Term IRs of OneBeacon Insurance Group, Ltd. (OneBeacon Ltd.) (Hamilton, Bermuda) and OneBeacon U.S. Holdings, Inc. (OneBeacon U.S.) (Delaware). The outlooks of these ratings are stable. (Please see link below for a detailed list of the companies and Long-Term IRs.) The ratings of Intact Group reflect its balance sheet strength, which A.M. Best categorizes as very strong, as well as its strong operating performance, favorable business profile and appropriate enterprise risk management (ERM). Intact Group maintains strong risk-adjusted capitalization, as measured by Best's Capital Adequacy Ratio (BCAR), with scores at the 99.6% level. Strong pre-tax operating earnings have outperformed the automobile industry composite over the most-recent five-year period, with operating earnings driven by net investment income and augmented by underwriting income. The favorable business profile reflects Intact Group's position as Canada's largest insurer of homes, autos and businesses, with strong brand name recognition across Canada. The ratings of Intact Assurance agricole reflect its balance sheet strength, which A.M. Best categorizes as strongest, as well as its strong operating performance, neutral business profile and appropriate ERM. Intact Assurance agricole maintains the strongest risk-adjusted capitalization, as measured by Best's Capital Adequacy Ratio (BCAR), with scores at the 99.6% level. Strong pre-tax operating earnings have outperformed the property industry composite by a wide margin over the most-recent five-year period, with operating earnings driven by underwriting income and augmented by net investment income. The neutral business profile reflects Intact Assurance agricole's concentration, as 100% of its written premiums are derived from Quebec. Intact Assurance agricole maintains strong brand name recognition, writing agricultural risks within Quebec. The ratings of OneBeacon reflect its members' balance sheet strength, which A.M. Best categorizes as very strong, as well as its adequate operating performance, neutral business profile and appropriate ERM. The ratings also reflect the significant implicit and explicit support given its affiliation with Intact Group, the lead rating unit of IFC. The ratings consider the protection afforded through an adverse development cover, as well as the benefits OneBeacon receives from its integration into Intact Group's scalable operations, which provide the group access to a common IT platform. Additional support includes the benefits of common investment management, reinsurance procurement and actuarial support, as well as corporate support, which includes legal, finance, ERM and modeling expertise. OneBeacon provides Intact Group with a U.S.-based specialty lines platform that augments Intact Group's existing specialty lines. Together, these entities provide Intact Group with a broad range of product offerings operating through a multichannel distribution model. A.M. Best will continue to monitor the integration of OneBeacon Ltd., as Intact Group utilizes the entity to support its North American specialty lines platform. For a complete listing of the members of Intact Financial Corporation's FSRs, Long-Term ICRs and Long-Term IRs, please visit Intact Financial Corporation. This press release relates to Credit Ratings that have been published on A.M. Best's website. For all rating information relating to the release and pertinent disclosures, including details of the office responsible for issuing each of the individual ratings referenced in this release, please see A.M. Best's Recent Rating Activity web page. For additional information regarding the use and limitations of Credit Rating opinions, please view Understanding Best's Credit Ratings. For information on the proper media use of Best's Credit Ratings and A.M. Best press releases, please view Guide for Media Proper Use of Best's Credit Ratings and A.M. Best Rating Action Press Releases A.M. Best is the world's oldest and most authoritative insurance rating and information source. For more information, visit www.ambest.com. Copyright 2018 by A.M. Best Rating Services, Inc. and/or its affiliates. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180223005818/en/ Contacts: A.M. Best Gordon McLean, +1 908 439 2200, ext. 5304 Senior Financial Analyst gordon.mclean@ambest.com or Raymond Thomson, CPCU, ARe, ARM +1 908 439 2200, ext. 5621 Associate Director raymond.thomson@ambest.com or Christopher Sharkey, +1 908 439 2200, ext. 5159 Manager, Public Relations christopher.sharkey@ambest.com or Jim Peavy, +1 908 439 2200, ext. 5644 Director, Public Relations james.peavy@ambest.com CALGARY, ALBERTA -- (Marketwired) -- 02/23/18 -- US Oil Sands Inc. ("US Oil Sands" or the "Company"), an innovator of oil extraction technologies, today announces that it has commenced a sale solicitation process ("SSP") for the sale of the Company or its assets. On September 14, 2017, US Oil Sands announced that the Court of Queen's Bench of Alberta granted the application of the Company's lender, ACMO S.a R.L., to appoint FTI Consulting Canada Inc. (the "Receiver") as receiver and manager over the assets, undertakings and property of US Oil Sands. The Receiver is charged with managing the day-to-day affairs of the Company during the period of its appointment and should be contacted with respect to any questions concerning the assets and liabilities of US Oil Sands. On November 16, 2017 the United States Bankruptcy Court for the District of Utah, Central Division, issued an Order under Chapter 15 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code recognizing the Canadian proceedings as a foreign main proceeding. On February 16, 2018, the Court of Queen's Bench of Alberta granted a Sale Process Order authorizing the Receiver to launch the SSP. The SSP is being undertaken by the Receiver's affiliate, FTI Capital Advisors - Canada ULC. In order to participate in the SSP, interested parties are required to follow certain participation requirements as outlined in the Sale Process Order. The Sale Process Order and related materials may be accessed from the Receiver's website at http://cfcanada.fticonsulting.com/usoilsands. The bid deadline for binding proposals is 12:00 p.m. (Calgary time) on April 6, 2018. There can be no assurance that the Company will be successful in its efforts under the SSP or that the Court will approve any competing bid that may emerge from the SSP. ABOUT US OIL SANDS INC. US Oil Sands is engaged in the exploration and development of oil sands properties and, through its wholly owned United States subsidiary US Oil Sands (Utah) Inc., has a 100% interest in bitumen leases covering 32,005 acres of land in Utah's Uinta Basin. The Company has developed a proprietary extraction process which uses a bio-solvent to extract bitumen from oil sands without the need for tailings ponds. The foregoing contains forward-looking information relating to the future performance of the Company. Forward looking information is subject to a number of known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from those anticipated in our forward-looking statements. Such risks and other factors include, among others, the ability of the Company to continue development of the PR Spring Project, changes in world commodity markets, the risks of the petroleum industry generally including, without limitation, those associated with the environment, delays in obtaining governmental approvals, permits or financing or in the completion of development or construction activities, title disputes, change in government and changes to regulations affecting the oil and gas industry, and other risks and uncertainties detailed from time to time in the Company's filings with Canadian securities regulatory authorities (available at www.SEDAR.com). Forward-looking statements are made based on various assumptions and on management's beliefs, estimates and opinions on the date the statements are made. Should one or more of these risks and uncertainties materialize, or should underlying assumptions prove incorrect, actual results may vary materially from those described in the forward-looking information contained herein. The Company undertakes no obligation to update forward-looking statements if these assumptions, beliefs, estimates and opinions or other circumstances should change, except as required by applicable law. Contacts: FTI Consulting Canada Inc. Suite 1610, 520 - 5th Avenue SW, Calgary, Alberta T2P 3R7 Tel: 403-454-6035 http://cfcanada.fticonsulting.com/usoilsands D-Wave Systems Inc., a Vancouver, Canada-based developer of quantum computing systems and software, raised $20m in funding. In April 2017, D-Wave closed on the first $30m tranche of convertible notes and received a conditional commitment from Public Sector Pension Investment Board (PSP Investments) for an additional $20m. The company has now satisfied all the key conditions to lock in the second tranche, which include fabrication and testing of a working prototype processor, and the installation of a D-Wave 2000Q system for a customer. It will use the funds to continue to deliver systems and software that provide real-world quantum computing and to push its technology forward. Led by CEO Vern Brownell, D-Wave develops and delivers quantum computing systems and software, which will enable solutions to the most challenging national defense, scientific, technical, and commercial problems. The systems are being used by some of the worlds most advanced organizations, including Lockheed Martin, Google, NASA Ames, USRA, USC, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and Temporal Defense Systems. U.S. operations are based in Palo Alto, CA and Hanover, MD. The prototype processor uses an advanced new architecture that will be the basis for D-Waves next-generation quantum processor. The D-Wave 2000Q system, the fourth generation of commercial products delivered by D-Wave, was installed at the Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab run by Google, NASA, and Universities Space Research Association. The new capital will bring D-Waves total funding to approximately USD220m. FinSMEs 22/02/2018 HealthCare.com, a search-and-compare health insurance shopping platform, acquired Pivot Health, a Phoenix-based provider and manager of specialty health insurance products. The amount of the all-cash transaction was not disclosed. Founded in 2016 by Jeff Smedsrud, Pivot Health develops, manages and markets proprietary, specialty health insurance products for individuals, including short-term medical, fixed indemnity and supplemental gap coverage. The company markets its products through a multi-channel approach, including, direct-to-consumer through its proprietary enrollment platform PivotHealth.com, through a network of independent licensed insurance agents and through selected online insurance brokers. Following the transaction, the company will continue to operate independently and focus on its current growth strategy. HealthCare.com will continue to manage its health insurance and Medicare comparison model that connects millions of consumers to brokers, carriers and call center partners, while finding opportunities to present Pivot Health products to interested consumers. Prior to founding Pivot Health, Smedsrud was a co-founder and CEO of HealthCare.com from 2014 to 2016 and previously sold four insurance marketing businesses to publicly-traded companies. He will continue to lead Pivot Health on a day-to-day basis and will join the HealthCare.com management team. The company had previously received financial backing from AXIS Capital (NYSE: AXS), a Bermuda-based global provider of specialty lines insurance and treaty reinsurance. Led by Howard Yeh, co-founder and CEO, and Jose Vargas, co-founder and Director, HealthCare.com is a search-and-compare health insurance shopping platform that connects consumers with its network of licensed insurance brokers and insurance carriers. The company has offices in New York City, Miami, and Guatemala City. FinSMEs 23/02/2018 Mercia Fund Managers has been awarded a 23.0m Proof-of-Concept and Early Stage Equity Fund. Part of the Midlands Engine Investment Fund, a collaboration between the British Business Bank and ten Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs) in the West Midlands and East and South East Midlands, the fund will be deployed across Mercias heartland of the Midlands, will be investing in rounds of up to 750k with additional funding potentially coming from Mercias EIS Funds into early-stage and growth companies. An established finance provider in the Midlands, Mercia has already invested circa 50.0m across the region and has a portfolio of over 36 active equity investments in the region. This is now the third new fund management contract which the British Business Bank has awarded Mercia in the past 12 months as it follows two Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund contracts, which the Group secured in February 2017. The Midlands Engine Investment Fund project is supported financially by the European Union using funding from the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) as part of the European Structural and Investment Funds Growth Programme 2014-2020, the European Investment Bank and the British Business Bank. It will also invest in equity finance through: Midven Ltd will operate a Venture fund focusing on the West Midlands Foresight Group LLP, will run a similar fund focused on the East & South-East Midlands Led by Dr Mark Payton, CEO, Mercia Fund Managers provides both equity and debt finance to small businesses based in the UK regions. The Group has more than 300 businesses in its portfolio, a record including 11 IPOs and manages in excess of 350.0m of third party funds, including Mercia EIS Funds. FinSMEs 23/02/2018 ProAktive Risk Group, a Doncaster, UK-based commercial insurance broker, raised 2.0m in a management buy-out. The MBO which gives control of the business to a long-serving management team led by Andy Morley and Ian Laycock was backed by debt funding from Mercia Fund Managers. Established in 2003 under its current name, though its origins date back to 1975, ProAktive Risk Group is an insurance broker and risk management consultancy which helps businesses reduce claims and premiums. Its consultancy services include HR, health and safety, business continuity planning and fleet risk management. The deal allows founder Jon Whiteley to step down from the day to day management though he will continue to play a role in the business and retain a significant shareholding. The buy-out was partially funded by deferred consideration on the part of Mr Whiteley. The business employs a team of over 50 staff. FinSMEs 23/02/2018 SEBI failed to act against Gitanjali Gems for stock price manipulation while RBI could not detect the fraud at PNB, but better coordination between the two regulators may have helped Editor's note: The Rs 11,400-crore bank fraud in Punjab National Bank, that was perpetrated by billionaire Nirav Modi in collusion with a few bank employees, has once again brought governance practices in Public Sector Banks (PSBs) back to public debate. There are questions raised on the way these entries function. A political blame game is on. But the problems in this sector are far beyond one instance of fraud. After five decades of bank nationalisation, India's public sector banks face deeper structural problems ranging from poor management practices, ineffective risk-management systems, vulnerability to a political-corporate nexus, large chunk of bad loans and lack of sufficient autonomy. Beginning today, Firstpost will publish a multi-part series that examines the serious structural problems that have engulfed India's state-run banks and the likely course of this industry, which constitutes 70 percent of India's banking sector assets. You can read the first, second and third part of the series here. Most commentators on the Punjab National Bank (PNB) scam have wondered how the rogue employee managed to fraudulently issue Letters of Understanding (LoU) to the tune of Rs 11,400 crores. It is by now understood that the absence of a link between the SWIFT system (through which the LoUs are authenticated) and the banks own IT system (Core Banking System) was the main flaw. But it is astonishing how this vital weakness and the consequent fraud went unnoticed by auditors. Even the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) did not detect it for seven years even though it now claims to have cautioned banks confidentially at least thrice since August 2016. In banking parlance, this was an operational risk which remained uncontrolled by those discharged with identifying and mitigating it. The final responsibility for risk management lies with the board of the bank and the banking supervisor of the country. Where did these two entities fail? There are several acts of omission that the RBI as the banking supervisor is guilty of. The RBI should have ensured that banks adopt risk management frameworks as per the Basel Committee guidelines. While there is a lot of justifiable emphasis on business risks (such as credit risk) in Indian banks, operational risk has been ignored. For instance, RBI has allowed banks to lag in implementing advanced technology and secure systems. Proper operational risk management by the bank would have red-flagged the IT systems flaw and the RBI should have insisted that the weakness be resolved in a time-bound manner, failing which action against the bank should have been initiated. Banks on their own may be reluctant to link the SWIFT system with CBS as it may be convenient for them to evergreen export-import accounts without the practice getting detected. While the RBI had publicly raised the issue of systems weaknesses in its Financial Stability Report, it did not actually act against recalcitrant banks. The SWIFT system requires multiple interventions to complete a transaction, starting with initiating the message, verifying it and recording the acknowledgement. It seems the rogue employee of PNB was either taking all these actions himself or was colluding with others. That is how he must have obliterated the return confirmation messages and destroyed paper trails. The RBI should have made sure that banks have proper controls in place to ring-fence these tasks as well as access to the SWIFT system at each stage of a transaction. The typical defence from banks seems to be that branches are overloaded with work and hence it is just convenient for one person to complete the transaction on behalf of many. In spite of additional workload involved, separating the tasks was imperative since the costs of a failure (even from an erroneous SWIFT entry) are high but the number of such LoUs on a day are not too many. The other defence from banks is the lack of expert staff. This became an excuse to continue with the same employee in this critical role for seven years. Apart from securing IT systems, employee risk must be evaluated through Know Your Employee guidelines and staff turnover at one post or branch should be effectively monitored. In fact, all banks must develop their own internal frameworks for operational risk management, whether RBI insists or not. The RBIs on-site monitoring system during branch visits uses the CAMELS framework (Capital, Asset, Management, Earnings, Liquidity and S is the much-neglected system and controls). The on-site inspections should have flagged all such cases where banks lag behind in terms of effective internal systems and controls. The RBI should have insisted that automatic alerts are generated whenever the value of credit exceeds authorized limits even for non-fund based guarantees such as LoU. The RBI inspectors should have also insisted on ring-fencing the front office (the initiator of a transaction) from the back office (the recorder of acknowledgement). It is not clear whether RBI inspectors visited this non-compliant branch even once in the past several years. While the RBI may mandate that banks introduce all these checks and balances, but if its on-site monitoring is weak, how else can banks be forced to implement the requisite controls? That brings us to the failure of the audit mechanism. The internal auditors should have cross-checked the paper trails from the SWIFT system and spotted any missing records. The concurrent auditor and the statutory (external) auditor should have verified all high value transactions carried out through the SWIFT system. That the auditors did not discharge their duties is a failure of the Audit Committee of the Board (ACB) that is supposed to oversee the internal and external audit process. Interestingly, PNBs ACB has five members, two of whom are nominees of the RBI and the government. The responsibility of overseeing operational risk management also lies with the board, particularly with its Risk Management Committee (RMC). Consider what the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision has to say on the principles of corporate governance of banks. The Risk Committee of the Board should have a chair who is an independent director and is not the chair of the board and the Committee should have a majority of members who are independent directors. PNBs RMC is not only chaired by the chairman of the board, it has seven members out of whom only one is an independent director, who also happens to chair the ACB! While we are citing PNB as an example because of the recent incident, many public sector banks have similar weaknesses in their audit and risk governance structures. Indeed, the Basel Committee makes it quite clear that the principles of corporate governance should equally apply to state-owned banks and it is the supervisory authoritys responsibility to ensure that the principles are followed. Not only did the RBI allow bank boards to violate these principles, in the case of PNB it allegedly ignored a letter from a whistleblower who happened to be a board member! The PNB scam is a failure of risk governance and risk supervision (by the board and the RBI). While investigation and prosecution of the guilty will take time, immediate steps must be taken to instil public confidence in the banking system. Specific action must be initiated at the senior levels to demonstrate accountability of the board and the supervisor. The government must announce concrete plans for improving governance of PSU banks. With the privatisation option unfortunately off the table, a bank holding company could do a better job of governing banks than the department of financial services. RBI must roll out the long overdue risk-based supervision method encompassing more intensive inspection of systemically important or high-risk banks and branches. If the RBI is unable to immediately act on the scam, it would be time to restart the discussion on forming a unified financial agency in India which can coordinate risks across market segments. This was a key recommendation of the Financial Sector Legislative Reforms Commission that was vehemently opposed by the RBI. For instance, in this case, SEBI failed to act against Gitanjali Gems for stock price manipulation while RBI could not detect the fraud at PNB, but better coordination between the two regulators may have helped (since Gitanjali Gems was also a beneficiary of the fraudulent LoU). With multiple functions currently weighing down the RBI and most of its attention going towards monetary policy and management of debt and forex, is the central bank really up to the task of regulating and supervising Indias banks? A super regulator for the entire financial sector may just be the answer. (The writers are faculty members at the Indian Institute of Management, Kozhikode (IIM-K), and have previously worked in central banking and commercial banking) Part I: Beyond PNB fraud, a deeper malaise lies in Indias state-run banks gifting them a slow death Part 2: PNB, Nirav Modi, Vikram Kothari arent the first; Indias PSBs have long been beaten by frauds Part 3: Nirav Modi scams shows its time Parliament reexamined banking laws, brought in transparency Its time the government looked at reversing Indira Gandhis decision on bank nationalisation which has proved to be a failure and give a serious thought on privatisation. Editor's note: The Rs 11,400-crore bank fraud in Punjab National Bank, that was perpetrated by billionaire Nirav Modi in collusion with a few bank employees, has once again brought governance practices in Public Sector Banks (PSBs) back to public debate. There are questions raised on the way these entries function. A political blame game is on. But the problems in this sector are far beyond one instance of fraud. After five decades of bank nationalisation, India's public sector banks face deeper structural problems ranging from poor management practices, ineffective risk-management systems, vulnerability to a political-corporate nexus, large chunk of bad loans and lack of sufficient autonomy. Beginning today, Firstpost will publish a multi-part series that examines the serious structural problems that have engulfed India's state-run banks and the likely course of this industry, which constitutes 70 percent of India's banking sector assets. You can read the first, second, third and fourth part of the series here On 20 July, 1969, the Times of India front page carried two major news developmentsIndira Gandhi nationalising 14 banks and Apollo entering Lunar orbit preparing for first-ever human landing on the moon. Both were landmark developmentsone for Indian banking landscape and the other for the world. The bank nationalisation happened through a formal ordinance and within an hour after Morarji Desai exited the Union government. The first set of banks which were nationalised were Central Bank of India, Bank of Maharashtra, Dena Bank, Punjab National Bank (PNB), Syndicate Bank, Canara Bank, Indian Bank, Indian Overseas Bank, Bank of Baroda, Union Bank, Allahabad Bank, United Bank of India, UCO Bank and Bank of India. This followed a second round of nationalisation in 1980 when six more banks were nationalised---Andhra Bank, Corporation Bank, New Bank of India, Oriental Bank of Commerce, Punjab and Sindh Bank and Vijaya Bank. Bank nationalisation, originally intended at taking banking services to Indias far-flung villages, was the first-ever reform Indias government banks witnessed since their birth and probably the biggest mistake too. It paved way for the growth of a group of inefficient entities, perennially prone to corruption, political manipulations and frauds. Yes, nationalisation certainly helped India push agricultural credit and other form of directed lending to certain sectors and push government schemes with no questions asked. But, these entities never learned to fend for themselves. Sovereign support made them complacent and never exposed to existential worries like their private counterparts. These banks competed to each other to appease their political bosses and were trained to approach the North Block with begging bowls every year for survival capital. Since nationalisation, nothing much has fundamentally changed in these institutions while their private and foreign sector counterparts went through radical transformation in terms of technology, orientation to various business verticals and managements approach. PSBs remained largely devoid of autonomy. The only time in the year when the state-run banks found mention in the Budget was when the government announced the capital infusion plan or any new government scheme where public sector lenders were to take up the role of roll out agencies. The fraud at PNB, Indias second largest bank by assets, where a few employees colluded with billionaire Nirav Modi to issue unauthorized Letter of Undertaking (LoU), is only the outcome of a long followed work culture where there are no clear benchmarks for accountability to management and investors, proper risk management framework, regulatory supervision and sense of ownership. Remember, in PNB, there were several checks in place, beginning with branch-level audits to board-level monitoring of high value transactions but nothing worked as no one bothered to follow these. The fraudsters happily did what they do best for a good seven years. P J Nayak panel--Promises never fulfilled In the recent past, one of the major reform proposals for PSBs came from a Reserve Bank of India (RBI) panel headed by former former Axis Bank chairman, P J Nayak. In May 2014, the panel submitted its report recommending privatisation of PSBs taking into account the low productivity and steep erosion in asset quality and for having demonstrated uncompetitiveness of public sector banks over varying time periods (read a Livemint report here.) Some of the major recommendations of the panel included: One, a category of authorised bank investors should be allowed to hold as much as 20 percent in banks without regulatory approval. Two, if a bank is identified as distressed, private equity and sovereign wealth funds should be permitted to take a controlling stake of up to 40 percent. Three, a bank investment company (BIC) be set up for PSBs to hold equity stakes in banks which are presently held by government. This body should be autonomous in nature. Four, the government should stop giving any regulatory instructions to banks applicable only to PSU banks as dual instructions are discriminatory. Four, the government should consider reducing its holding in banks to less than 50 percent to enable a level-playing field for public sector banks in matters of vigilance enforcement, employee compensation and the applicability of the right to information. If such incentivisation requires the government to hold less than 50% of equity in BIC, the government should consider doing so, as it will be the prime financial beneficiary of BICs success, the Livemint report said quoting the panel. But, sadly, most of the recommendations remained on paper. No one really paid any attention to the crucial proposals especially with respect to privatisation. Indradhanush comesand goes The next big promise of PSU bank reforms came with the Indradhanush scheme in August, 2014. Another set of reform promises were made but were to remain largely on paper. There were seven prominent action plans: a) appointing private sector candidates as the head of select PSBs, b) creation of a Bank Board Bureau (BBB) that will constantly engage with the Board of Directors of all the PSBs to formulate appropriate strategies for their growth and development, c) yearly capital infusion plan, d) strengthening risk control measures, project monitoring and dealing with defaulters, e) ensuring autonomy, f) framework of accountability, and g) bringing in governance reforms. How far has this action plan progressed? To cut a long story short, except for the appointment of some private sector candidates in PSBs and the annual capital infusion programme, other promises on improvement in risk management and governance have remained on paper. The logic of appointing private sector candidates to head state-run banks and hope for a change was flawed from the beginning since everything else, including the work culture remained the same in the banks. According to a report in Business Standard, BBB may wind up in March given that the bureau never lived up to expectations. One of the major mandates of BBB was to overhaul the human resource practices in state-run banks, including framing a code of conduct for management in PSU banks. As the PNB episode has now shown, there has not been much the BBB could do to achieve any of its stated mandates. At least the results arent visible so far. The promise of Rs 2.11 lakh crore capital infusion can help PSBs address their capital woes at least for the time being. Time to reverse bank nationalisation? PSBs have deeper structural problems that cannot be cured with capital alone. As the PNB episode has shown, the problem is much more deep rooted and requires a deeper surgery. Its time the government looked at reversing Indira Gandhis decision on bank nationalisation which has proved to be a failure and give a serious thought on privatisation. Bank nationalisation was done to spread banking services to distant areas in the country. PSBs have helped to achieve this objective to an extent, while private banks largely confined to state capitals and metros looking for better business. But, after five decades of nationalisation, these entities have proved to be inefficient under government ownership, which is precisely the reason why Nayak panel recommended privatisation. About 90 percent of total NPAs in the industry is on the books of PSBs. Like the PNB episode showed, these entities are highly prone to frauds and manipulations causing a big systemic risk. Learning lessons from the past, the government should look at privatisation at least now. As this writer argued in an earlier article, the trick to save the banking sector is to let them go from government control and let private sector take over these entities. The government can still stipulate directed lending to certain very needy segments. When private sector runs these banks, there will be more accountability and better lending practices. Again, the government need not privatise all the 21 PSBs. It can still retain five or six large banks with state-run character and use them for social sector banking and the roll-out of government schemes. But, by any yardstick one looks at the sector, we dont need 21 banks under government control. Its time to reverse Indira Gandhis bank nationalisation. Part I: Beyond PNB fraud, a deeper malaise lies in Indias state-run banks gifting them a slow death Part 2: PNB, Nirav Modi, Vikram Kothari arent the first; Indias PSBs have long been beaten by frauds Part 3: Nirav Modi scams shows its time Parliament reexamined banking laws, brought in transparency Part 4: Is the RBI really up to the task of regulating and supervising India's banks The US Congress has been pushing over the past year for greater pressure on India to dismantle economic barriers, and now House Republicans have raised the issue of the new round of duties with New Delhi. New Delhi: US businesses and diplomats are pressing India to cut tariffs, industry and government sources say, after New Delhis move to increase customs duties on dozens of products to help its flagship Make-in-India drive aggravated differences over trade. Ford, which has two plants in India, has sought a reversal of the new tariffs on auto components, while Apple Inc is concerned its iPhones have become even more expensive in the price-conscious $10 billion smartphone market. India and the United States have built close political ties and Prime Minister Narendra Modi was in Washington last summer, bear-hugging President Donald Trump in his personalised style of diplomacy. But trade friction is casting a shadow. A US State Department spokesperson in Washington told Reuters that India should lower trade barriers, which were holding back economic ties. Trump has already called out India for its duties on Harley-Davidson motorbikes, and this month Modi ordered them cut to 50 percent from 75 percent for high-end bikes. But that has not satisfied Trump, who pointed to zero duties for Indian bikes sold in the United States, saying he would push for a reciprocal tax against countries, including US allies, that levy tariffs on American products. It is important that India make greater efforts to lower barriers to trade, including tariff and non-tariff barriers, which will lower prices to consumers, promote development of value chains in India, said the State Department spokesperson, referring to Trumps comments on motorbikes. The US Congress has been pushing over the past year for greater pressure on India to dismantle economic barriers, and now House Republicans have raised the issue of the new round of duties with New Delhi. We conveyed our concerns to the Indian government last week to raising tariffs above WTO rates especially as it relates to information technology, a Republican aide in Washington said. Import taxes India announced higher import tax on electronics products such as mobile phones and television sets in December, and then on 40 more items in the Budget this month. These included goods as varied as sunglasses, juices and auto components. India says the move is aimed at giving local industry the chance to grow and is part of a broader plan to lift the share manufacturing makes up of GDP to a quarter, from around 15 percent, and create the tens of thousands of jobs needed for a young workforce. US commerce department referred questions to the US Trade Representatives (USTR) office in Washington, where a spokesman declined to comment. The Indian commerce ministry did not respond to a request for a comment on the US criticism of the import taxes. But a senior finance ministry official defended the decision to raise duties, saying it reflected a trend in other parts of the world. When all the major economies, including the U.S. and China, are following protectionist policies, why are we being questioned, the official said. Trade ties Bilateral trade between India and the United States has grown to about $115 billion in 2016 from $20 billion in 2001. The United States buys close to a fifth of Indias goods and services exports and its trade deficit has widened from $13 billion in 2006 to $31 billion in 2016. The USTRs office is fairly negative on India at this point and is analysing the impact of the customs trade tariffs on various American companies, an industry source aware of the matter told Reuters. They are more vigilant than earlier, they are in bulldog mode under Trump, the source said. A spokesperson for the USTRs office declined to comment. Even before the new round of hikes, India has been seen as one of the most protected major economies. The United States had an average tariff rate of 3.4 percent on imported goods in 2016, compared with 13.5 percent for India, according to the World Trade Organisation (WTO). China, which the Trump administration is targeting for its trade practices, had an average tariff rate of 9.9 percent that year. Apple, whose top-end iPhone costs nearly $1,700 after the company raised prices twice in recent months due to higher duties, is in talks with other firms on whether the issue could be raised at the WTO, an industry source said. Apple did not respond to a Reuters request for comment. Ford and European car-maker Volkswagen have written to Indian Finance Minister Arun Jaitley saying the new tariffs are going to hurt the auto sector and should be reviewed, sources said. Anurag Mehrotra, Ford Indias managing director, said the company has invested $2 billion in the country and the governments move would hit the automobile sector. Like many, we also see it as the return of protectionism, Mehrotra said, adding he expected car prices to rise up to 4 percent due to new duties. Andreas Lauermann, the head of Volkswagens India unit said it remains a challenge to invest further because of sudden tax hikes. Facing the heat over the alleged assault of Chief Secretary Anshu Prakash by a few AAP MLAs, Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal and his council of ministers sought Lieutenant-Governor Anil Baijal's help with the crisis. Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal and his council of ministers met Lieutenant-Governor Anil Baijal on Friday after a team of Delhi Police arrived at the chief minister's residence to review the CCTV footage in connection with the alleged assault of Chief Secretary Anshu Prakash by AAP MLAs. After the meeting, Kejriwal said that officers were not attending meetings for past three days due to the alleged assault on Prakash. On Twitter, he said that the governance was being affected because officers were skipping their work. Officers not attending meetings for last 3 days. Governance suffering. I m v concerned. LG assured he will take all steps to ensure officers started functioning normally. Council of ministers assured him all cooperation. All of us need to work together for betterment of Delhi Arvind Kejriwal (@ArvindKejriwal) February 23, 2018 Addressing a press conference, Delhi deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia said that the lieutenant-governor has assured that he would talk to the bureaucrats who have been striking work and that the public service won't stop. LG said that he will ensure officers come for meeting & work with ministers. CM has also said that he will ensure that no untoward incident takes place: Delhi Deputy CM Manish Sisodia pic.twitter.com/fF1kUhOyO7 ANI (@ANI) February 23, 2018 "We informed the lieutenant-governor about the state of governance and how bureaucrats have not been attending meetings in the past two to three days. They didn't even attend our phone calls. We have handed over a list of these officers to the lieutenant-governor," Sisodia added. After the meeting, Baijal tweeted that he has asked Kejriwal and his ministers to act on the "mistrust" among the government employees. He also condemned the incident as 'unfortunate' while saying that there was no place for violence in a democratic society. Met Hon'ble CM @ArvindKejriwal & his cabinet colleagues. Strongly condemn the recent unfortunate incidents. Advised elected Govt. to take steps to remove mistrust with Govt. employees so that development of Delhi is not affected. No place for violence in democracy. LG Delhi (@LtGovDelhi) February 23, 2018 Meanwhile, the bail applications of AAP MLAs Amanatullah Khan and Prakash Jarwal, accused of assaulting the chief secretary, were rejected by a Delhi court on Friday, ANI reported. AAP MLA Naresh Balyan stoked controversy on Friday when he tried to justify the alleged assault. "They (bureaucrats) are taking up to three to six months for doing work which should be done in three days. Why? Because the Delhi chief minister abolished the commission system which earlier reigned. And as this system was eradicated, they (bureaucrats) started sitting on the files. "Whatever happened to the chief secretary...I say they should be beaten up, they should be thrashed... Whoever obstructs the work being done for the common man, should be meted out the same treatment," Sanjeev Balyan, the legislator from Uttam Nagar constituency, said at a public rally of the party. Police searches Kejriwal's residence After a search at Kejriwal's residence in connection with the alleged assault, the Delhi Police said Friday that no camera was installed in the room where the incident reportedly took place and that they would go about the investigation based on the coverage by cameras installed in the corridor. The officials also said that seven of the 21 CCTV cameras in the house were not functioning. "The time of cameras at the chief minister's residence was running behind by 40.43 minutes," Additional Deputy Commissioner of Police (DCP) Harendra Kumar Singh told IANS while adding that hard disks of the cameras had been seized. The AAP termed the searches as "police raj" and said that there was no "intimation" prior to the search. Kejriwal told reporters outside his residence that he was "happy that the investigation is taking place" but said that the probe agencies should also garner "courage to question (BJP chief) Amit Shah" in the Justice Loya death case. "Investigation is going on in my house. It is a good thing," Kejriwal said in a tweet. ? Arvind Kejriwal (@ArvindKejriwal) February 23, 2018 VK Jain's statement On Thursday, the Delhi Police submitted Kejriwal's adviser VK Jain's statement at a city court that he saw Khan and Jarwal "physically assaulting" the chief secretary. The two legislators were sent to 14-day judicial custody. Jain had said during Wednesday's "question and answer" recorded by police that he had gone to the washroom in between the meeting and as he came out, he saw the two AAP MLAs "physically assaulting" the chief secretary. Jain recorded the statement on the same lines in front of a magistrate under Section 164 of the CrPC on Thursday. The AAP defended by stating that Jain had initially told police that he did not witness any assault and police has threatened Jain to change his statement. On Tuesday, the chief secretary had alleged that he was beaten up by the two AAP MLAs, in the presence of Kejriwal, on Monday night at the chief minister's residence where he had been called for an emergency meeting. With inputs from agencies 16:39 (ist) Union minister Jitendra Singh assures 'necessary steps' by Centre in Delhi chief secretary assault case A delegation of IAS officers working under the Delhi government met Union minister Jitendra Singh on Friday and put forward their grievances following the alleged attack on Delhi chief secretary Anshu Prakash. "We have heard the members of the delegation. We took cognisance of all the grievances and concerns raised by them and necessary steps would be taken on it," Singh told reporters after the meeting. He said the officers wanted to officially register their grievances with the personnel ministry, which is the cadre controlling authority of the Indian Administrative Service (IAS). Delhi IAS officers association secretary Manisha Saxena said the minister has assured full cooperation. "He said he is overseeing the developments, and action, as per the law, will be taken. He said they will take every step to protect and uphold the dignity of the civil servants," Saxena said. Click here to read more Even as Narendra Modi and Justin Trudeau are finally meeting in New Delhi, yet another fact has come to light which may prove to strain India-Canada ties. As Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Canadian counterpart Justin Trudeau will meet in New Delhi today, yet another fact has come to light which might serve a blow to relations between the two countries. A Canadian journalist, who had protested against Modi's visit to Canada in 2015, is part of Trudeau's delegation, reported The Indian Express. The report surfaces even as controversy rages over invitation to Jaspal Atwal a convicted Khalistani terrorist. Manvir Singh Saini is the journalist who is part of Trudeau's media delegation. In 2015, pictures of Saini holding banners which said "Modi is a Terrorist" had gone viral during the prime minister's visit to the country. Ties between India and Canada have shown signs of tension ever since Trudeau began his visit to India. First off, Modi not receiving his Canadian counterpart Justin Trudeau at the airport, a courtesy he extended to some world leaders in the past, had triggered speculation in Canada that it was a snub to him for the rising Sikh radicalism in that country. Commentators in Canadian media had highlighted that Union Minister of State for Agriculture Gajendra Shekhawat received Trudeau at the Delhi airport when he arrived on a seven-day India visit on Saturday evening and contrasted it against Modi himself receiving several world leaders at the airport. On official state visits to India, PM Modi personally greets and welcomes the Israeli PM, UAE Crown Prince and US President. For PM Trudeau, he sends a low-ranking official. Canada is back pic.twitter.com/ezsMtFTPzr Candice Malcolm (@CandiceMalcolm) February 17, 2018 There were stories in Canadian media that said Trudeau's perceived support for Sikh separatists may be the reason for the "snub". The Sikhs in Canada wield significant political clout and Trudeau's Cabinet has four Sikh members. The sources said the prime minister received around five leaders at the airport during the last three-and-half years which included the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, former US president Barack Obama, Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, and Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan twice. However, government sources had strongly rejected the speculation, insisting normal diplomatic protocol has been extended to Trudeau. They had also expressed surprise over the Canadian side preferring to schedule Trudeau's official engagements in Delhi at the fag end of the tour as against the normal practice of having bilateral meetings during the first part of such visits. The sources had said it is quite unusual for a visiting dignitary to slot important talks towards the end of a visit, besides setting aside little time for official engagements. A section of the Canadian media had also talked about the Indian prime minister's absence during Trudeau's visit to Gujarat, Modi's home state. "We have own set of parameters for measuring importance," an official had said while calling the criticism by Canadian media "unfounded". The sources had said there was no "substantive content" in Trudeau's programme in Gujarat for which the prime minister's presence was required. A controversy erupted on Thursday when Canadian high commissioner Nadir Patel invited Atwal for a dinner which he was hosting for the visiting Trudeau and his delegation. Photographs of Atwal with Trudeau's wife Sophie and Canadian minister Amarjeet Sohi at an event in Mumbai on 20 February went viral. Jaspal Atwal, a convicted Khalistani terrorist who was active in the banned Int'l Sikh Youth Federation, photographed w/Canadian PM's wife Sophie Trudeau at an event in Mumbai on 20 Feb. He was also invited for formal dinner with Canadian PM, invite being rescinded now (CBC News) pic.twitter.com/pT7P3eLq1L ANI (@ANI) February 22, 2018 Canadian Minister of Infrastructure and Communities Amarjeet Sohi, photographed with Jaspal Atwal at in Mumbai on 20 Feb. Atwal, a former member of banned terrorist group Int'l Sikh Youth Federation, was invited for dinner with #JustinTrudeau in Delhi, today (CBC News) pic.twitter.com/cO3h3YcUUA ANI (@ANI) February 22, 2018 Atwal is a convicted Khalistani terrorist who was active in the banned International Sikh Youth Federation. He was convicted of attempt to murder of Punjab minister Malkiat Singh Sidhu in Vancouver in 1986. After uproar in the Canadian media, the invite was cancelled. "The high commission has rescinded Atwals invitation. We do not comment of matters relating to the prime minister's security," PTI quoted the Canadian high commission as saying. The Atwal controversy came as the Trudeau familys ornate traditional Indian attire raised eyebrows, with the prime minister at one point donning formal wear typically worn by bridegrooms. Is it just me or is this choreographed cuteness all just a bit much now? Also FYI we Indians dont dress like this every day sir, not even in Bollywood. pic.twitter.com/xqAqfPnRoZ Omar Abdullah (@OmarAbdullah) February 21, 2018 An Ottawa-based advocacy group, Canada Taxpayers Federation, also said: "While it is understood that a prime minister will have to travel frequently, the proportion of time being spent actually meeting foreign counterparts on this trip does not suggest a good use of public money. A week is a long time for a prime minister to spend visiting one country, and a half of a day out of eight is very little official business." And even though Trudeau did eventually hold a meeting with Punjab chief minister Amarinder Singh, Canada initally did have cause for worry after Amarinder, speaking to Outlook in February, had said a "foreign hand" was responsible for fomenting unrest and reviving Khalistani extremism in Punjab. "On the face of it, there seem to be Khalistani sympathisers in Trudeau's Cabinet," he had alleged. In 2017, Singh had also accused Canadian defence minister Harjit Sajjan part of Trudeau's delegation of being sympathetic to Sikh separatists. However, when Trudeau met Singh on Wednesday, he assured him that his country does not support separatism in India or elsewhere even as he received a list of nine Canada-based operatives allegedly involved in promoting radicalism. With inputs from PTI This year's AIIMS MBBS exam notification comes with some important changes in terms of the schedule as well as in the number of available seats & campuses. The notification for MBBS admissions in the All India Institutes of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) was released on 1 February, 2018, by AIIMS New Delhi, the conducting authority of the entrance exam. This year's notification comes with some important changes in terms of the exam schedule as well as in the number of available seats and campuses. MBBS aspirants who wish to take admission at AIIMS are required to register themselves online for the entrance test, for which the application deadline is 5 March, 2018. From this year onwards, two new AIIMS campuses offering 50 seats each will also be open for admissions. The other significant change is in terms of the exam schedule. Until 2017, the exam was conducted in two shifts on a single day. From this year onwards, however, AIIMS MBBS 2018 will be conducted in a total of four shifts spread across two days, ie 26 and 27 May. This increase in the number of exam slots is indicative of an expected increase in the number of candidates and the higher competition likely to characterise this year's exam. Established by an Act of Parliament in 1956, AIIMS is an autonomous institution of national importance, highly regarded for the quality of education it offers. AIIMS New Delhi is among the only two institutions the other being JIPMER Puducherry which has the authority to conduct its own MBBS entrance exam. Besides these two institutions, the admissions to MBBS courses in all other medical colleges in India are done through NEET. What's new in AIIMS MBBS 2018? Two new AIIMS campuses: Two new AIIMS campuses, namely AIIMS Guntur (Andhra Pradesh) and AIIMS Nagpur (Maharashtra), have been added to the existing list of institutions. The two new AIIMS campuses will operate from temporary campuses until their final construction is completed. Siddharta Medical College in Vijayawada, Andhra Pradesh and Government Medical College in Nagpur, Maharashtra, will act as the host campuses for AIIMS Guntur and AIIMS Nagpur respectively.With the addition of the two new AIIMS, the total number of AIIMS institutions in the country now rises to nine. The other seven are AIIMS New Delhi, AIIMS Bhopal, AIIMS Bhubaneshwar, AIIMS Jodhpur, AIIMS Patna, AIIMS Raipur and AIIMS Rishikesh. Two new AIIMS campuses, namely AIIMS Guntur (Andhra Pradesh) and AIIMS Nagpur (Maharashtra), have been added to the existing list of institutions. The two new AIIMS campuses will operate from temporary campuses until their final construction is completed. Siddharta Medical College in Vijayawada, Andhra Pradesh and Government Medical College in Nagpur, Maharashtra, will act as the host campuses for AIIMS Guntur and AIIMS Nagpur respectively.With the addition of the two new AIIMS, the total number of AIIMS institutions in the country now rises to nine. The other seven are AIIMS New Delhi, AIIMS Bhopal, AIIMS Bhubaneshwar, AIIMS Jodhpur, AIIMS Patna, AIIMS Raipur and AIIMS Rishikesh. Increase in the number of seats: The establishment of the two new AIIMS has increased the total number of MBBS seats offered through the exam. From this year onwards, AIIMS will offer admissions to a total of 807 MBBS seats with the two new AIIMS admitting a batch of 50 MBBS students each. AIIMS New Delhi will offer 107 MBBS seats (out of which seven will be for foreign nationals) while the campuses in Bhopal, Bhubaneshwar, Jodhpur, Patna and Raipur will offer 100 MBBS seats each. The establishment of the two new AIIMS has increased the total number of MBBS seats offered through the exam. From this year onwards, AIIMS will offer admissions to a total of 807 MBBS seats with the two new AIIMS admitting a batch of 50 MBBS students each. AIIMS New Delhi will offer 107 MBBS seats (out of which seven will be for foreign nationals) while the campuses in Bhopal, Bhubaneshwar, Jodhpur, Patna and Raipur will offer 100 MBBS seats each. Exam to be held on two days: For the first time ever, AIIMS MBBS entrance exam will be held across two days with two shifts conducted on each day, ie a morning shift (from 9 am to 12:30 pm) and an evening shift (from 3 pm to 6:30 pm). Until last year, the exam was conducted in two shifts held on a single day. For the first time ever, AIIMS MBBS entrance exam will be held across two days with two shifts conducted on each day, ie a morning shift (from 9 am to 12:30 pm) and an evening shift (from 3 pm to 6:30 pm). Until last year, the exam was conducted in two shifts held on a single day. Online Counselling: For the first time, AIIMS New Delhi will conduct the counselling online. Till 2017, the counselling was conducted in an offline mode wherein qualified candidates were required to be physically present at the AIIMS New Delhi campus. Important dates of AIIMS MBBS 2018 Registration: 5 February onwards 5 February onwards Last date/time to apply: 5 March (till 5 pm) 5 March (till 5 pm) Date of Exam: 26 and 27 May (two shifts per day, 9 am to 12:30 pm and 3 pm to 6:30 pm) 26 and 27 May (two shifts per day, 9 am to 12:30 pm and 3 pm to 6:30 pm) Result Declaration: 18 June Eligibility Age: The candidates must have completed 17 years of age, on or before 31 December, 2018. The candidates must have completed 17 years of age, on or before 31 December, 2018. Qualifying Examination: Candidates must have passed Class 12 with Physics, Chemistry, Biology/Biotechnology and English scoring at least 60 percent (50 percent for SC/ST/OPH) aggregate marks. How to apply for AIIMS MBBS 2018? Online registrations for AIIMS MBBS 2018 have begun. Interested candidates will need to upload their scanned photograph, signature and left-hand thumb impression at the time of filling the application form. Given below is a quick overview of filling AIIMS MBBS 2018 application form: Go to the official exam website of AIIMS, click on 'Academic Course' and then select MBBS to fill the application form. The first step is to register. Start the registration process by clicking on Click Here button given under the New Registration box. Read the instructions and provide basic details like category, ID proof, mobile number, Email ID and more. Upon registration, the candidate ID and password will be sent to the registered mobile number and Email ID of the candidate. Log in using your candidate ID and password details and change your password as and when prompted by the system. Candidates will then be required to pay the requisite application fee. Before making the payment, candidates can check the cities available for the conduct of exam. The payment can be made online through credit/debit/net banking methods. General and OBC category candidates will have to pay INR 1,500 and those belonging to SC/ST will have to pay INR 1,200. OPH category candidates are exempted from paying the application fee. After the payment is made, candidates need to take a printout of the payment receipt for future reference. Next, choose the choice of exam city from the 155 cities available. For each state, city options will be displayed indicating total available/occupied seats. Proceed to fill the application form by giving academic and residential details. Candidates will be required to upload the digital copies of their scanned photograph (50 Kb to 100 Kb), signature (20 Kb to 100 Kb) and left-thumb impression (20 Kb to 100 Kb). Finally, print the duly filled application form and click on Final Submit to submit the application. On final submission, candidates will receive an acknowledgement email on their registered Email ID. Admit Card The admit card of AIIMS MBBS 2018 will be posted on the official website by 10 May. No candidate will be allowed to enter the exam hall without a valid admit card. Along with the admit card, candidates should take with them an original ID proof whose details match with those entered at the time of filing the application form. Qualifying Criteria Candidates will be required to score a certain stipulated percentage to qualify the exam. Candidates belonging to General Category will be required to score at least 50 percent marks, while those belonging to OBC category will be required to get a minimum of 45 percent marks. SC/ST category candidates will need to score at least 40 percent marks to be considered eligible for further AIIMS MBBS counselling and admission rounds. Given that the questions will vary for each shift, a normalisation procedure will be used to determine the qualification of candidates. As per this, the lowest of the four percentiles corresponding to the qualification percentage will be considered as the final qualification cut off. For example, if candidates in the first shift qualify at the 85th percentile and those in the other shifts qualify in the 82nd, 83rd and 84th percentiles respectively, then the 82nd percentile will become the overall qualifying percentile for AIIMS MBBS. There is a difference in qualifying the exam and being placed in the merit list. Upto four times the number of candidates will be called for counselling, as per the number of seats on offer in their respective categories. The percentile score of the last candidate invited for counselling as per this will therefore be the merit cutoff percentile of AIIMS MBBS. How to Prepare for AIIMS MBBS? With about three months remaining for the exam, candidates should first get familiar with the AIIMS MBBS exam pattern. The exam will consist of a total of 200 questions, with 60 questions asked from Physics, Chemistry and Biology each, and 10 questions each from General Knowledge and Aptitude & Logical Thinking. Although no official syllabus for the exam has been provided, candidates are recommended to cover Class 12 syllabus of NCERT thoroughly. Besides that, to clear their theoretical concepts, they can use other reference material if required. It is of immense importance that candidates practice MCQs based on the exam pattern. Regular practice of mock tests and previous year papers will help candidates get into examination mode, help them assess their preparation levels and pinpoint their weak and strong areas. Every wrong answer in AIIMS MBBS 2018 will attract a negative marking of one-third, while one mark will be awarded for correct responses. AIIMS MBBS Result The result of AIIMS MBBS 2018 will be declared on 18 June online. Along with the scorecard, the result will be declared in the form of roll number wise and rank wise lists of qualified candidates shortlisted for the counselling process. What after the result? After the declaration of the result, AIIMS New Delhi will conduct counselling online. During the counselling, candidates will be allotted MBBS seats in the different AIIMS institutions on the basis of their rank and category. Depending upon the vacancies, three to four rounds of counselling might be conducted. After the counselling is over, AIIMS New Delhi will release the final allotment list of candidates admitted to the 807 MBBS seats in the nine AIIMS institutions. Get all questions regarding AIIMS MBBS answered at Careers360 Q&A As many as 11 states and four union territories have not announced any change in the additional salary paid to anganwadi workers and helpers since 2015, according to government data By Shreehari Paliath As many as 11 states and four union territories (UTs) have not announced any change in the additional salary paid to Anganwadi (courtyard shelter or creches) workers (AWWs) and Anganwadi helpers (AWHs) since 2015, according to government data. India utilises the services of 1.18 million AWWs and 1.16 million AWHs under Anganwadi services in the Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS), an early childhood care and development programme to improve health and nutritional status of children between 0-6 years. The number of AWWs dropped 7 percent to 1.18 million in 2016 compared to 2013. AWWs and AWHs are part-time honorary workers from the local community who provide government services to children, pregnant and nursing women. AWWs and AWHs are already overburdened and underpaid for the various services that they are expected to render under ICDS. AWWs have been forced to shell out money from their own pockets due to delays. Nearly 40 percent of Anganwadi workers surveyed in 2014 in six states had to use their personal money to run the Anganwadi centre and 35 percent of them had not been paid on time, according to Progress of Children Under Six, 2016, report. In some states like Tamil Nadu, where the ICDS is robust, honorarium paid to the AWHs is higher than AWWs in Uttar Pradesh, added the report. The central government enhanced the honorarium of AWWs and AWHs by Rs 1,500 and Rs 750 per month to Rs 3,000 and Rs 1,500 per month, respectively with effect from 1 April, 2011. States and UTs provide additional salary to AWWs and AWHs out of their resources. Kerala, Tripura and West Bengal have not increased salary paid to AWHs or AWWs, according to data made available as of March 2015 and December 2017 to the Rajya Sabha. Uttar Pradesh, with nearly 1,70,000 AWWs and 1,50,000 AWHs, increased payments to Rs 1,000 and Rs 500 per month, respectively, as of December 2017, from Rs 200 and Rs 100 per month. Delhi increased the total salary (including centres allocation) to Rs 9,678 for AWWs and Rs 4,839 to AWHs, the Times of India reported on 22 July, 2017. The state government has also provided an additional Rs 500 and Rs 250, respectively, for internet/mobile charges, The Hindu reported on 22 July, 2017. States & UTs That Have Not Recorded Any Change In Anganwadi Wages State/UT Andhra Pradesh Assam Chattisgarh Dadra and Nagar Haveli (UT) Daman and Diu (UT) J&K Kerala Lakshadweep (UT) Madhya Pradesh Manipur Odisha Puducherry (UT) Sikkim West Bengal Tripura While Odisha hiked the remuneration of Anganwadi workers from October 2017, Karnataka increased the salaries after protests by Anganwadi workers. The wage increase in news reports for states like Odisha and Kerala does not reflect in the government response in Parliament. Despite two email requests and as many calls over three weeks to the Ministry of Women and Child Development and the state government of Kerala on clarification of wages, we have not received any response. We will update the copy if and when we receive it. Paliath is an analyst with IndiaSpend To say that General Bipin Rawat should have refrained from mentioning the names of political parties does not imply that the issue that raised by him is unimportant. Army chief General Bipin Rawat is being hauled over the coals for his recent comments made while addressing a seminar on the security situation in India's North East region, co-organised by the Centre for Joint Warfare Studies and the Integrated Defence Staff. This is unfortunate and condemnable. While evaluating his statement and the motives that are being attributed to it, it is important to remember the context, understand his intent and untangle the issues that the army chief has raised through his comments. This simple exercise could have precluded needless outrage and prevented a secular institution from being dragged into the mud of politics and communalism. Armys role as the guarantor of national security is sacrosanct. Its secular nature is beyond question. It is too valuable an institution to be used for electoral gains. As former GOC 15 and 21 Corps, Lt Gen (Retd) Syed Ata Hasnain, reminds us in Times of India, each of the army men is a special Indian whose life is placed on the line of duty for the nation, come hell or high water. All this demands that the individual soldier leaves his old identity behind and assumes the new, of being a true Indian... He warns us that politicisation of the army by stressing on the identity of soldiers is a "hidden agenda of the adversary, who is aware of the non-partisan nature and completely unified approach of our armed forces." It would be worthwhile putting the mudslinging and outrage in perspective. General Rawat has said or done nothing wrong. As the custodian of national security, he is a crucial stakeholder in maintaining the nation's unity, integrity and sovereignty. The army chief was doing his job in alerting us to the dangers of forced demographic inversion through infiltration and usage of such tactics as a legitimate tool in sub-conventional warfare. He was speaking inside the precincts of a space dedicated to discussing these specific issues. He wasn't addressing a political rally. One would assume that the Chief of Army Staff (COAS) knows his job and is better aware of the tools of proxy warfare than media commentators and sundry 'experts' who are taking potshots at him. It is a sad testament to the hyper-politicisation of Indian polity. From the Election Commission, Supreme Court to the armed forces, all premier public institutions and every public domain is one wide platform for political wrangling. This is the real danger to Indian democracy, not General Rawats comments which have been ripped out of context and are now being twisted to suit political agendas. While speaking on the context of India's strategic vulnerabilities at the 'Siliguri Corridor', the so-called 'chicken's neck' that came into sharp focus during the Doka La standoff, the army chief maintained that the security challenge in Indias northeastern regions are an "all encompassing problem" involving identity, development, security and demographic dimensions and that the solution lies in adopting a "holistic approach". Highlighting the need for development in the North East, and the requirement of these regions to be integrated better with India (the army chief related an anecdote involving Manipuri students who were mistaken for foreigners in New Delhi), General Rawat went into the topic of infiltration. He explained why infiltration is still happening despite Bangladesh enjoying a better HDI (human development index) than India and what must be the state's response. In his words: "Bangladesh has a better HDI than us today. Still, migration from Bangladesh is happening because of two reasons. One is lebensraum (living space in German). They are running short of space. A large part of their areas gets flooded during monsoons. So they have got a very constricted area to stay, so I think people will continue coming into our place. "And the other issue is a planned immigration that is taking place because of our western neighbours. They will always try and ensure that this area is taken over to playing the proxy dimension of warfare. You have to counteract a stronger nation with conventional operations, so you play a proxy game. And this proxy game is played well by our western neighbour, supported also by our northern neighbour. So to that extent, to keep this area disturbed we will continue to see some sort of migration happening." Some commentators have objected to this statement. Writing in Hindustan Times, Centre for Policy Research senior fellow Srinath Raghavan criticises the Generals statement "on planned immigration" engineered by Pakistan and China as "an absurd overstatement" that could lead to "diplomatic friction". One wonders if full spectrum of threat that China poses is properly understood in India. As this column has previously argued, Indian policymakers and wonks still tend to reflexively underplay the scope, scale and gravity of Chinese threat partly because this has roots in our collective memory of the 1962 war and the lessons that we have internalised. It has led to a denial of realities. To quote from a piece in The Diplomat, written by Mohan Mailk, professor at Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies and author of China and India: Great Power Rivals, "Many Chinese analysts maintain that 'India as a nation never really existed in history', and urge Beijing to remove an emerging security threat by initiating the balkanization of India into 20-30 independent states with the aid of friendly countries. A Huanqiu commentary on July 28, 2017, warned India not to mess with China: China has the capacity to make each of Indias northeastern states independent." Let us also take a look at a news report published by Times of India in 2009 where a quasi-official Chinese think tank laid down the recipe for breaking India into different pieces: "To split India, China can bring into its fold countries like Pakistan, Nepal and Bhutan, support Ulfa in attaining its goal for Assams independence, back aspirations of Indian nationalities like Tamils and Nagas, encourage Bangladesh to give a push to the independence of West Bengal and lastly recover the 90,000 sq km territory in southern Tibet." It is evident from the COASs statement that unlike some commentators, he has a better grasp of realities. Let us now look at the statement which has triggered maximum controversy. According to General Rawat, the land squeeze in Bangladesh and subsequent infiltration (planned or otherwise) of Muslim immigrants into India has resulted in a demographic inversion in different districts of Assam that, in turn, has affected the political fabric of the state where one political party has grown comparatively faster than others. "I dont think that you can change the population dynamics of this area. If it was five districts, eight to nine the inversion has taken place whichever be the government, there is a party called AIDUF. If you look at it, they have grown at a faster time frame than with the BJP grew over the years. When we talk of Jan Sangh with two members of Parliament and where they have reached, the AIDUF at a faster pace in the state of Assam. Finally, what will be the state of Assam, we have to take a call," he told the audience. Let us be clear. The reference to the two political parties was entirely avoidable. The COAS could have very well made his point without mentioning the names of BJP or AIDUF. This has distracted from the main issue, given the rise to controversy and presented a handle to detractors whose dislike of General Rawat stems from a perceived notion that he was handpicked by the Narendra Modi government. In that respect, most of the criticism floating on the ether against him is motivated by reasons that are political, not ideological or moral. However, to say that General Rawat should have refrained from mentioning the names of political parties does not imply that the issue that raised by him is unimportant. Demographic inversion in Assam is a hot button topic that sits at the crossroads of politics, faith, identity and national security. As a politico-military strategist, General Rawat is well within his rights to flag the issue. It is preposterous to allege a political motive to his statement. The National Register of Citizens that seeks to identify and enrol Indian citizens into the updated database arises from an anxiety that illegal immigration is changing the cultural identity of Assam. That infiltration is ongoing, real and not an opium-fuelled idea is borne by the fact that several independent studies indicate that indigenous population of Assam could turn into minorities in the near future. The 1998 report by then Assam governor Lt Gen (Retd) SK Sinha warned that "The unabated influx of illegal migrants from Bangladesh into Assam and the consequent perceptible change in the demographic pattern of the State, has been a matter of grave concern. It threatens to reduce the Assamese people to a minority in their own State, as happened in Tripura and Sikkim." Cautioning against seeing this as a problem only limited to Assam's demography, the report stated: "Its more dangerous dimension of greatly undermining our national security, is ignored. The long cherished design of Greater East Pakistan/Bangladesh, making inroads into the strategic land link of Assam with the rest of the country, can lead to severing the entire land mass of the North East, with all its rich resources, from the rest of the country. This will have disastrous strategic and economic consequences." A committee, headed by former chief election commissioner of India HS Brahma, in its report submitted last year, observed that principal factor causing galloping changes in the demographic composition of Assam is the unrestrained infiltration of illegal Bangladeshi migrants through the open Indo-Bangladesh international borders. These Bangladeshis like swarms of ants have spread in every nook and corner of Assam and grabbed land wherever any vacant government land be they khas/waste land, reserved forest land, village grazing reserves (VGRs) or professional grazing reserves (PGRs), char lands or water bodies or hills, tribal belts/blocks or satra land is available." It is evident that we are staring at a massive demographic inversion. However, the army chief, while flagging the security risk, sent a message of harmonious living. In his words: "We have got to appreciate living with all people who are living in our region irrespective of their caste, creed, religion or sex. I think if you understand that, we can live together happily, but the best part is amalgamate the kind of people that are living in the region and then start identifying people who are trying to create trouble." He also added that "Muslim population started coming into Assam as early as 1218 to 1236. That was the first time that Muslims entered Assam. So we have to understand that they are not late arrivers, they were the early arrivers who came concurrently with the Ahoms. Both these people have claims to the state of Assam and therefore the North East region." It is a pity that such an inclusive message from the COAS has been lost in the din and his name has been dragged through the mud. General Bipin Rawat is right to say that it will be problematic to segregate illegal immigrants in Assam, especially since a corrupt machinery has been providing documentation to illegal migrants for decades now At a seminar under the theme 'North East Region of India: Bridging Gaps and Securing Borders' at the Centre for Joint Warfare Studies in New Delhi this month, Army Chief General Bipin Rawat pointed out that a planned immigration is taking place from Bangladesh into the North East as part of Pakistan's proxy war against India with the aim of keeping the area disturbed. Rawat said, "I think the proxy game is very well played by our western neighbour (read Pakistan), supported by our northern border (China) to keep the area disturbed. We will continue to see some migration happening." Referring to reports of an increasing Muslim population in several districts of Assam, the army chief observed that the Badruddin Ajmal-led All India Democratic Front (AIUDF) has grown faster than the BJP grew over the years. He said that the solution to the problem lies in ensuring the development of the region by taking a holistic approach, adding, "I do not think you can now change the population dynamics of the area. If it was five districts to eight to nine, inversion has taken place whichever be the government. (sic)" Rawat said that efforts should be made to amalgamate the people living in the region through development, albeit those creating problems will need to be identified and segregated, which would be no easy task. "The government is looking at the North East in the correct perspective, and if that happens, the time will not be far that we will be able to amalgamate the region and ensure development. And with development comes control of the people who are living in this area," he added. Rawat also noted that migration is also taking place from Bangladesh because of a shrinking land space in the country for various reasons including floods. The Opposition and the AIDUF are up in arms against the army chief, even as he stated facts very relevant to the seminar the situation in the North East and what is affecting its security and stability. The AIUDF was formed in 2005 but has three MPs in the Lok Sabha and 13 legislators in the Assam Assembly facts known to all. It is also known that the influx of illegal Bangladeshis is a major issue in Assam and the state government is in the process of making a national register of citizens to identify those living illegally in the state which Rawat said will be no easy task. But let us first examine Rawat's statement about the shrinking land space in Bangladesh. A relatively small country, Bangladesh has an area of 1,47,570 square kilometres. Its population density is among the highest in the world. But if the army chief is speaking about shrinking land space in Bangladesh now, long before the formation of Bangladesh Sheikh Mujibur Rahman (pro-India leader in East Pakistan) wrote in his book Eastern Pakistan: Its Population and Economics that "...because East Pakistan must have sufficient land for its expansion, it must include Assam to be financially and economically strong". Get the message? If Bangladesh was looking at India's North East, and Assam in particular, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party under Khaleda Zia with its radical base, Islamist agenda and pro-Pakistan and pro-China leanings was running anti-India terrorist camps in Pakistan with Al-Qaeda and SSG instructors as per intelligence reports. MK Dhar, former joint director of the Intelligence Bureau (IB) wrote in his book Top Secret: India's Intelligence Unveiled, "Way back in 1992-93, the process of 'transplanting armed modules' (of Pakistan) in the heartland of India had started taking cognisable shape. Some of these cells were identified in Assam and West Bengal... SIMI had already started deputing 'volunteers' to Pakistan for training along with the mujahideen, Taliban, and Al-Qaeda cadres. They established firm linkages with Islamic Chhatra Shibir, Al-Qaeda affiliated HUJI, Al-Badr, Al-Jihad and other organisations in Bangladesh and were trained in facilities located inside Bangladesh under the very noses of Directorate General of Forces Intelligence (DGFI) and Border Guards Bangladesh (BDR)." Whether it was the greed for votes or kowtowing to their masters in Beijing, the Communist regime in West Bengal wholeheartedly facilitated illegal immigration from Bangladesh. According to two IPS officers (one later rose to become DG NDRF) attending the National Defence College course in the year 2000, a price was fixed for each adult and child illegal immigrant. Having paid "entry fee", they were shown a camping site where they could stay for two days while they were provided papers with Indian identity. This was a continuous flow for years on end and the "illegality" would obviously be difficult to establish. But that was not all. The Congress, having provided the handle to permanently destabilise Jammu and Kashmir with Article 370, struck Assam quite differently. In 1983, the Congress regime at the Centre passed the infamous Illegal Migrants [Determination by Tribunal] (IMDT) Act. Though the act was scrapped eventually in 2005 by the Supreme Court, by that time the original demography of Assam had been drastically altered. Article 370 gave a special status to residents of Jammu and Kashmir and no outsider could settle in the state, albeit illegal immigrant Rohingyas were colonised in Jammu by UPA II under the pretext of United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). The IMDT Act was applicable 'only to Assam'; in all other states, detection of foreigners is done under the Foreigners Act. Under the IMDT Act, the onus of proving ones nationality or otherwise lay on the complainant, not on the accused as is the case under the Foreigners Act. The excuse that Congress used was that it was protecting minorities, but that might as well have been unashamedly stated to protect illegal immigrants of Bangladesh. The IMDT Act was perhaps as anti-national if not more than Article 370. There was no Member of Parliament from Assams Brahmaputra Valley when the IMDT Act was passed. Should someone examine the profile of the persons involved in drafting the IMDT Act, and more significantly the highest offices they rose to thereafter, it would be an eye-opener. If General Rawat says that illegal immigration will likely continue then current West Bengal regime is no different from the Communists. In 2015, an English TV channel showed live a breach in the wall along the India-Bangladesh border through which illegal immigration was happening in broad daylight. When the reporter asked the security person sitting close by why he was permitting it, his response was there were orders not to interfere. The clip was taken off air in less than 10 minutes. But that's not all. According to a 2016 report, up to 3,000 cows are smuggled daily from India to Bangladesh. The China-Pakistan sub-conventional nexus remains strong in the North East. Chinas state-owned media has the gumption to say that if India pressures Pakistan on Kashmir, China can destabilise India in the northeast. But India needs to ruthlessly go after the snakes within the country. If Rawat says it will be problematic to segregate illegal immigrants, havent you read news reports of Aadhaar cards found lying in trash cans and even Aadhaar cards held by Rohingyas? Politicians and political parties conniving with the enemy need to be stamped out. The author is a retired lieutenant-general of the Indian Army Kolkata Police's Special Task Force (STF) on Friday arrested a member of Islamist terrorist outfit Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB) from West Bengal's Murshidabad district Kolkata: Kolkata Police's Special Task Force (STF) on Friday arrested a member of Islamist terrorist outfit Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB) from West Bengal's Murshidabad district in connection with the bomb blast case in Bihar's Bodh Gaya on 19 January, a senior officer said. Police have already arrested three more JMB suspects from various parts of the state in relation to the case earlier this month. "Nur Alam Momin alias Alam, 24, a resident of Murshidabad's Dhuliyan was arrested on Friday morning from infront of a health centre in the district's Samshergunj area. He participated in a meeting with JMB leaders in Hyderabad, where the Bodh Gaya blast was planned", Murlidhar Sharma, Deputy Commissioner, Special Task Force of Kolkata Police said in a release. Alam was produced to Bankshall Court in Kolkata and has been sent to 10 days of police custody, he said. Alam, a trader of scarves and Islamic books, went to Hyderabad with five others in November last year for 15 days and met some important JMB leaders where they planned the Bodh Gaya blast. "Whether he went to Bodh Gaya or not is a matter of investigation," Sharma said. He also revealed that raids would be conducted at he various places where the accused had been hiding so far. Earlier this month, three more JMB suspects Paigamber Sheikh, 24, Jamirul Sheikh, 31 and Ahmed Ali alias Kalu were arrested from Bengal's Murshidabad and Darjeeling districts. According to police sources, they revealed the name of Alam during interrogation. A low intensity bomb blast took place near Kalchakra ground in Bodh Gaya on 19 January when the Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama was present in town. A couple of crude bombs and large quantity of explosives were also recovered from the place. National Investigating Agency (NIA) is primarily probing the blast case. An assailant attacked a female student with a sword outside her school in Madhya Pradesh's Anuppur. The Class 11 student was hacked to death in broad daylight. A female Class XI student was hacked to death in Madhya Pradesh's Anuppur on Thursday, said media reports. The assailant had attacked the girl with a sword outside her school. Class 11th student hacked to death with a sword outside her school in broad daylight in Anuppur's Kotma yesterday, two arrested. SDOP Vijay Singh says, 'family registered complaint against two men who were earlier also accused of stalking the victim in 2014' #MadhyaPradesh pic.twitter.com/2L1LJri2lP ANI (@ANI) February 23, 2018 According to The Times of India, the attacker had been stalking the victim, Pooja Panika for years. Panika was going to school around 12.30 pm when the accused ran up to her and attacked her. The only eyewitness in the incident is a retired teacher who sounded the alarm. Soon after the incident, the police also arrested the suspect Dilip Sahu from his residence on the basis of statements given by Panikas family. The fact that the incident happened in broad daylight has shaken up the area which has resulted in the Superintendent of Police monitoring the probe, reported ABP News. Seventy years after Independence, a 7.5-kilometre long undersea cable has brought electricity to world-famous Gharapuri Isle, which houses Elephanta Caves Raigad: Seventy years after Independence, a 7.5-kilometre long undersea cable has finally brought electricity to the world-famous Gharapuri Isle, which houses the UNESCO World Heritage site Elephanta Caves, about 10-km from Mumbai, a top official said in Raigad on Thursday. The project to electrify the island, thronged daily by thousands of Indian and foreign tourists, has cost a total of Rs 25 crore and was completed in 15 months, said Maharashtra State Electricity Distribution Co Ltd Regional Director Satish Karape. "This is India's longest undersea power cable which took around three months to lay. Plus, we have installed a transformer in each of the three villages, six streetlight towers each 13-metre tall with six powerful LED bulbs and provided individual power meter connections to 200 domestic and a few commercial consumers. Intensive testing over past three days has been successful," Karape told IANS. A function will be held at the island later in the day when renowned social reformer Appasaheb Dharmadhikari will formally 'switch on' the power supply in the presence of Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis, his ministers Chandrashekhar Bawankule, Jaykumar Raval, Ravindra, and other dignitaries. Karape said that of the total project cost, the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority gave Rs 18.50 crore while the rest had been borne from the MSEDCL's own resources. The 22-KV cable has four lines, including one exclusive standby line, to ensure 24x7 high quality power to the islanders with sufficient excess capacity to take care of future requirements for more than 30 years, he explained. An unseasonal 'Diwali' has suddenly been ushered on the island, which used to be plunged into darkness after dusk in the absence of electricity at the three villages -- Raj Bander, Mora Bander and Shet Bander -- housing around 1,200 people, mostly engaged in fishing, farming, boat-repairs and tourism-related activities. Since the past few years however, the villagers managed with just three hours electricity courtesy power generators provided by the state government, but these were expensive and unreliable. The previous Congress-Nationalist Congress Party regime had initiated the proposal, but it fell through as the tender attracted a single bid, and later the Bharatiya Janata Party-Shiv Sena government revived the proposal almost two years ago. The 22-KV cable has been connected directly with the MSEDCL's Olwa sub-station, Panvel Division in Raigad on the mainland, Karape said. The official is hopeful that now, the islanders can get better educational institutions, boost tourism -- probably with overnight stay, subject to other governmental clearances -- install a lighthouse on the isle's hilltop, and even power the Elephanta Caves if the Archaelogical Survey of India permits. Since a small dam exists on this 16-sq km island, a water filtration plant can be set up to provide safe and clean drinking water to the locals and tourists, who now rely on bottled mineral water. The power connection is also expected to speed up work on the proposed 8-km long ropeway connecting Mumbai directly with Elephanta Island running above the Arabian Sea, planned by the Mumbai Port Trust (MbPT), and billed as a boon to nearly two million tourists who visit it annually. Inhabited since the 2nd Century BC, the island has seven big and small rock-cut caves temples carved between 5th-6th Centuries AD. It was designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987. The island also has two large British-era canons atop the hill. Presently, the thickly-forested island abounds in monkeys and other creatures, is accessible only by an hour-long voyage by motorboats and launches from Gateway of India or Raigad, with compulsory return in the evening. The Jharkhand High Court rejected the bail petition of former Bihar chief minister Lalu Prasad Yadav in a fodder scam case pertaining to the fraudulent withdrawal of Rs 89.27 lakh from the Deoghar Treasury Ranchi: The Jharkhand High Court on Friday rejected the bail petition of former Bihar chief minister Lalu Prasad Yadav in a fodder scam case pertaining to the fraudulent withdrawal of Rs 89.27 lakh from the Deoghar treasury. Justice Aparesh Kumar Singh rejected the bail petition of Lalu Prasad Yadav, saying he was the chief minister and finance minister during the scam period. The Public Accounts Committee kept the file for years, but no action was taken. Dismissing Lalu Prasad Yadav's defence, the judge said all the scam cases seemed to be done in his knowledge. Hence, the court is not inclined to release him on bail, the bench observed. A special CBI court had convicted Lalu Prasad Yadav in the instant fodder case on 23 December last year and was sentenced to three years and six months in prison. Lalu Prasad, who is the RJD president, is languishing in the Ranchi Birsa Munda jail since 23 December last. He has so far been convicted in three cases. Besides, the instant case he has been convicted in two other cases both related to the Chaibasa treasury. On 30 September, 2013, he was convicted in RC 20 A/96 pertaining to fraudulent withdrawl of Rs 37.7 crore from the Chaibasa treasury and convicted to five years of prison term. He, however, got bail in this case. A special Central Bureau of Investigation court had convicted him on 24 January last in case RC-68A/96 related to the fradulent withdrawal of Rs 37.62 crore from the Chaibasa treasury and sentenced him to five years of imprisonment. He faces another two scam cases for illegal withdrawal of Rs 3.97 crore from the Dumka treasury and Rs 184 crore from the Doranda treasury. The over Rs 900 crore fodder scam cases are related to irregularities in the animal husbandry department in undivided Bihar in 90s when the RJD was in power under Lalu Prasad Yadav. Supreme Court referred a matter relating to land acquisition to the CJI for constituting an 'appropriate bench' to deal with the 'piquant' situation that had arisen. The Supreme Court on Thursday referred a matter relating to land acquisition to the Chief Justice of India (CJI) for constituting an "appropriate bench" to deal with the "piquant" situation that had arisen after Wednesday's order by a three-judge bench which virtually stayed the operation of an 8 February verdict. A bench comprising Justices Arun Mishra and Amitava Roy observed that it would be appropriate if the matter was referred to the CJI for constituting an appropriate bench to deal with it and "to see whether we can proceed with the hearing or not" in the wake of Wednesday's order. Another bench comprising Justice AK Goel and Justice UU Lalit said, "that having regard to the nature of the issues involved in the matter, the issues need to be resolved by a larger bench at the earliest", reported The Indian Express. It directed that "these matters may be placed before the appropriate bench tomorrow i.e. 23rd February, 2018, as per orders of Honble The Chief Justice of India." Justice Mishra and Justice Goel were both part of the bench which delivered the 8 February verdict. On Wednesday, a three-judge bench had observed that if "judicial discipline" and propriety were not maintained, the institution will "go forever" while referring to the 8 February verdict passed by another three-judge bench which had held that compensation not availed within a stipulated five year period would not be a ground for cancellation of land acquisition. "We do not mind our order being set aside. We had said that the order (passed in 2014) was per incuriam (without due regard to the law) and it was permissible under the law. It is for the CJI to decide which bench should hear it," the bench said on Thursday. "Whether it amounts to judicial discipline or not, it is for the court to see. Whether it is judicial discipline, it will be decided," it said, adding that a two-judge bench should not proceed with the matter in view of Wednesday's order by a three-judge bench which "morally binds" it. "A piquant situation has arisen," the bench said after the advocates appearing in the matter referred to the order passed on Wednesday by a three-judge bench headed by Justice Madan B Lokur. In its 8 February judgment, the apex court with a 2:1 majority view, had held the 2014 verdict of another three-judge bench in Pune Municipal Corporation case was passed without due regard to the law (as per incuriam) and had said that land acquired could not be quashed due to delay on part of land owners in accepting compensation within five years due to litigation or other reasons. During the hearing on Thursday, Justice Mishra, who was heading the three-judge bench which had delivered the 8 February verdict, said the bench had taken a "considered view" in its judgement running into around 200 pages but "probably nobody would have read it completely". "You have started attacking it. First read it. Go through it. Let it be set aside. We do not mind," he observed. "Since larger issue is involved, we refer the matter to the CJI to be dealt with by an appropriate bench," the bench said while observing that Wednesday's order also involved land acquisition issues pending before high courts across the country. The three-judge bench had on Wednesday said that perhaps there has been a tinkering with judicial discipline in arriving at a conclusion in the 8 February verdict as the issue should have been referred to a larger bench in case of difference of opinion, as a 2014 judgement had held that non-payment of compensation would be a ground to cancel the land acquisition. "Taking all this into consideration, we are of the opinion that it would be appropriate if in the interim and pending a final decision on making a reference (if at all) to a larger bench, the High Courts be requested not to deal with any cases relating to the interpretation of or concerning Section 24 of the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013," it had said on Wednesday. The bench had also requested that the matters related to land acquisition listed before other benches of the apex court should be deferred till the case before it was decided as to whether a larger bench should hear the issue. On 8 February, the three-judge bench had held that once the compensation amount for land acquired by a government agency has been unconditionally tendered but the land owner refuses to accept it, this would amount to payment and discharge of obligation on part of the agency. The court had also then held that it will not be open to the person, who has refused the compensation, to raise the point that since the amount has not been deposited in court or paid to him, the acquisition has lapsed. The 2014 verdict was rendered unanimously by a three-judge bench which had held that "the deposit of compensation amount in the government treasury is of no avail and cannot be held to be equivalent to compensation paid to the landowners/persons interested". With inputs from PTI India and Canada resolved to work together to neutralise the threats emanating from Sikh militant outfits Babbar Khalsa International and the International Sikh Youth Federation along with LeT and Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammed New Delhi: India and Canada on Friday resolved to work together to neutralise the threats emanating from Sikh militant outfits Babbar Khalsa International and the International Sikh Youth Federation along with LeT and Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammed. This was announced in the 'Framework for Cooperation between India and Canada on Countering Terrorism and Violent Extremism' document, released after extensive talks between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Canadian counterpart Justin Trudeau. The document, which was finalised by India's national security advisor and national security and intelligence advisor of Canada, also said that any acts of terrorism are criminal and unjustifiable regardless of their motivations, whenever, wherever and by whomsoever, they are committed. "They recognised the urgent imperative to disrupt recruitment, terrorist movements and the flow of foreign terrorist fighters, address the threat posed by cross-border and state-sponsored terrorism, stop sources of terrorist financing, dismantle terrorist infrastructure and prevent the supply of arms to terrorists and counter violent extremism and radicalisation to violence," the document said. The top security officials of the two countries also emphasised the need to deny operating space to terrorist and violent extremist groups. "They committed to work together to neutralise the threats emanating from terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda, IS, the Haqqani Network, LeT, JeM, Babbar Khalsa International, and the International Sikh Youth Federation," it said. While Babbar Khalsa International, or better known as Babbar Khalsa, is a Sikh militant organisation now based in Lahore, Pakistan, and reportedly operates in Canada, Germany, the UK and some parts of India, the International Sikh Youth Federation is a proscribed organisation that aims to establish an independent homeland for the Sikhs of India in Khalistan. As multi-cultural, diverse, pluralistic societies, committed to democratic principles, human rights and the rule of law, India and Canada recognise the grave challenges posed by terrorism, violent extremism and radicalisation, it said. The two sides reaffirmed the shared resolve to combat terrorism and violent extremism in all their forms and manifestations. The security officials reviewed the ongoing collaboration between the law enforcement and security agencies of both countries and resolved to step up their bilateral cooperation under the supervision of the National Security Advisors Dialogue, the Joint Working Group on Counter-terrorism and the Experts' Sub-Group. To this end, they committed to further develop exchanges and facilitate effective cooperation in the fields of security, finance, justice, and law enforcement, including, where appropriate, at the operational level. "India and Canada have agreed on this Framework for Cooperation on Countering Terrorism and Violent Extremism (the framework), the objective of which is to facilitate effective cooperation between law enforcement and security agencies and legal and policy practitioners," the document said. The framework is based on fundamental respect for the sovereignty, unity and territorial integrity of India and Canada. The framework consists of institutionalised cooperation between India's National Security Council and the office of Canadas National Security and Intelligence Advisor, and regular exchanges and coordination between India and Canada. It will be guided by the joint National Security Advisors Dialogue. The national security advisor of India and the national security and intelligence advisor of Canada further acknowledged their partnership and commitment to strengthen cooperation in counter-terrorism capacity-building and to contribute to international efforts through the UN mechanisms and initiatives as well as groupings such as the Global Counterterrorism Forum, the Financial Action Task Force, and the G-20. The Supreme Court agreed to hear on 6 March a plea of Karti Chidambaram, son of former Union minister P Chidambaram, seeking anticipatory bail in the INX Media money laundering case. New Delhi: The Supreme Court agreed to hear on 6 March a plea of Karti Chidambaram, son of former Union minister P Chidambaram, seeking anticipatory bail in the INX Media money laundering case. However, the top court refused to stay the summons issued by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) asking Karti Chidambaram to appear before it on 1 March, and said he can make a request in this regard to the competent authority. A bench of Chief Justice Dipak Misra, and Justices Amitava Roy and DY Chandrachud said it will hear the matter on 6 March after senior advocate Kapil Sibal, appearing for Karti Chidambaram, sought time to file a proper application to challenge the ED proceedings. An FIR, filed on 15 May last year, had alleged irregularities in the Foreign Investment Promotion Board (FIPB) clearance to INX Media for receiving overseas funds to the tune of Rs 305 crore in 2007 when Karti Chidambaram's father was the Union finance minister. The apex court was hearing pleas, including the CBI's appeal, challenging the Madras High Court order staying a lookout circular (LOC) issued against Karti Chidambaram. The CBI had on 1 September last year said there were "good, cogent" reasons for issuing the LOC. The Chidambarams, however, have denied all the charges made against them. Earlier, a single judge bench of the Madras High Court had stayed the LOC issued against Karti and others in the graft case. Later, the apex court considered the CBI appeal and stayed the operation of the high court order staying the LOC. The Supreme Court, however, has kept to itself another batch of petitions pertaining to registration of FIR in the corruption case. By December 2017 among the private sector banks in the state, the Jammu and Kashmir Bank had one of the highest NPAs of Rs 1,149 crore, while as the public sector banks had total stressed assets of Rs 781 crores. Srinagar: The Jammu and Kashmir Bank has faced massive losses after some big companies failed to pay back the loans with Mehul Choksi-owned Gitanjali Gems alone owing to the state-run bank over Rs 150 crore. A Jammu and Kashmir Bank spokesperson said that a business account of M/S Gitanjali Gems was in its Fort Business Unit since 2012 wherein the bank had sanctioned a working capital loan of Rs 121 core under a consortium arrangement of 31 Banks led by ICICI Bank. Jammu and Kashmir Banks share in the total loan facilities of Rs 5,198 crore by the consortium was 2.33 percent. In the wake of recent developments of the company with the Punjab National Bank, the "consortium recently discussed and agreed that banks may individually decide to recall the facilities and may also freeze all the accounts except for allowing few mandatory payments. Acting swiftly JK Bank has already initiated freeze on all debits in the account of Gitanjali Gems Limited and issued recall notice to the company which will be followed by legal action." The spokesperson also said that the "bank had during its clean up and consolidation drive year and a half ago reckoned the account as a stressed account and consciously avoided additional exposure in the company." The bank also waived off bad debts and, as per the annual report for the year ended March 2017, which has quoted the directions of the Comptroller and Auditor General of India, "There are cases of waiver and write off of debts amounting to Rs 30.54 crores in addition to the waiver of unapplied interest of Rs 96.11 crores on account of negotiated settlement with the borrowers defaulting in payment." By December 2017 among the private sector banks in the state, the Jammu and Kashmir Bank had one of the highest NPAs of Rs 1,149 crore, while as the public sector banks had total stressed assets of Rs 781 crores. Among the public sector banks, the Punjab National Bank had the bad loans of Rs 147 crore and the State Bank of India had the highest NPA of Rs 198 crore in the state. Officials said that the Jammu and Kashmir Bank has failed to recover nearly Rs 150 crore from Gitanjali Gems in the last over two years and "the bad loans have incurred heavy losses on the bank." The Choksi-led diamond trading company was not repaid the Rs 120 crore loan which has now grown up to Rs 150 crore. The loan was given by the Jammu and Kashmir Bank "as part of consortium lending". In the financial year 2016-17, the bank faced a net loss of Rs 1,632.28 crore due to provisions made against bad debts to the tune of Rs 2,115.93 crore. The bank officials said that it was due to the poor management that "many accounts of the bank have turned into NPAs". "The lax management by the bank and the state government which owns a majority stake in it has been responsible for the loses," said a senior official. Officials said while the Jammu and Kashmir government has failed to provide the loans under different government schemes for generation of employment the loans given to some big companies "have been declared as substandard". "Many of the accounts have been declared as substandard and doubtful after irregular payments," said an official. "The bank faced a delay in recovery of Rs 90 crore from Vijay Mallya-led Kingfisher Airlines and footed losses in the shares of the air carrier," said a senior official, adding that "a Kolkata based agriculture company and a steel company are among the other major defaulters." Jammu and Kashmir Bank, the vice-president, Ashraf Ali, refused to comment over the NPAs. The bank chairman, Parvez Ahmad, was not available for comments. The performance of the bank under the current chairman has nosedived even as he and other board members take a hefty pay packet, officials said. Since his appointment on 6 September 2016, the bank chairman has been drawing a monthly salary of over Rs 5.50 lakh while as its directors drew a yearly remuneration of Rs 7 to 10 lakh. However many of the directors have skipped the meetings of the different committees and the companys board. State Finance Minister Haseeb Drabu, refused to comment on the banks performance. "It is for the bank to make any comments," he said. Drabu said that he has nothing to do with the functioning of the bank. However other than the majority stake in the bank, the state government under the Articles of Association of the bank appoints at least three directors and the finance secretary is also on the Board of Directors. The bank has further failed to disburse the credit to the small agriculture and industrial units under different government schemes. It was noted in a recent review of the banks that the Jammu and Kashmir Bank has only achieved a target of 77 percent from the annual credit plan of Rs 28,841 crore. The bank has taken note of the note of the losses faced due to the NPAs. The March 2017 annual report has noted, "Past two quarters have been really tough for banking Industry as a whole. J&Ks banking industry is already grappling with the huge NPA problem which resulted into heavy loss- booking during September and December quarters of previous financial year." It has further added that "the advances amounting to Rs 936.56 crores were not declared by the bank as NPAs as per RBI guidelines which were downgraded after those were identified by the statutory auditors." Indian and Pakistan soldiers on Friday traded heavy fire on the line of control (LoC) in Jammu and Kashmir's Rajouri district Jammu: Indian and Pakistan soldiers on Friday traded heavy fire on the line of control (LoC) in Jammu and Kashmir's Rajouri district, officials said. According to security sources, the Pakistan army resorted to unprovoked shelling and firing at defence and civilian facilities in Lam and Jhanger area of Nowshera on Friday evening. "A civilian house got damaged in Pakistan shelling. Fortunately, there was no casualty," said a source, adding that Indian positions are retaliating "effectively and strongly". Pakistani troops on Tuesday targeted a BSF jawan using a sniper in Tangdhar sector, resulting in injuries to him. The Pakistani troops also violated ceasefire in Uri sector of Baramulla district on Monday, resulting in injuries to three civilians. Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau set to meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi today, a day after controversy erupted over a Khalistani leader's dinner invitation with the former. Auto refresh feeds More visuals of the Trudeau family at the Sabarmati Ashram NDTV reported that Narendra Modi is not in Gujarat today and will not meet the Canadian PM today. What has caused concern, even annoyance in New Delhi is the Canadian prime minister and his partys hobnobbing with some who are seen as Khalistani elements. For instance, New Delhis hackles were raised in April last year after the Ontario legislature passed a private members bill it was moved by Harinder Malhi and she belongs to Trudeaus party that described the 1984 anti-Sikh riots as a "genocide". Trudeau will speak at IIM-Ahmedabad later in the day, reported Financial Express . He will speak on "Education and Investment Opportunities before an audience of students at IIM-A. Yogi Adityanath's refusal to meet Trudeau ahead of the Canadian prime minister's Taj Mahal visit and the uncertainty surrounding whether or not there will be a meeting with Captain Amarinder Singh notwithstanding, it's too early to call what Modi did (or didn't do) a snub. We'll need to wait at least until the duo finally meets in New Delhi. Justin Trudeau snubbed by Narendra Modi? Too soon to say, because Indian PM has thus far stuck to protocol His other family members wife Sophie and children also signed the register book, reported The Economic Times . The Canadian prime minister wrote: "A beautiful place of peace, humility and truth, that is as needed today as it ever was." Justin Trudeau will participate in several business roundtables to further promote bilateral trade and investment Trudeau to visit Mumbai, Amritsar and New Delhi after winding up Ahmedabad leg The potential path I was taking going into politics was entirely my own, not necessarily my father's. The decision was because I had to say certain things to the masses, not just because it was dynastic politics. Politics is unpleasant in certain ways and incredibly rewarding in other ways. Familial expectations isn't a way to be successful in politics. "Canada has enough fossil fuel resources to not be bothered about climate change but that's not the right path. It is important to take oil resources to market at a reasonable price. It's important to find a middle ground and move ahead in a responsible way,"Trudeau tells IIM Ahmedabad students. Climate change is essential and Canada has to take the lead: Trudeau While saying that US president Donald Trump shares similarities with him, Justin Trudeau says their policies are doing well for their economy. Both have an optimistic approach towards the future of investment, he added. Trudeau says Donald Trump and he are similar in more ways than one Citizens know when someone is trying to live up to some lofty familial expectation: Trudeau If you think that men and women should get equal opportunities, you are a feminist, it is that simple, says Trudeau. He goes onto explain that gender balance in terms of opportunities isn't the right thing to do but the smart thing to do in terms of growth. Canadian PM says he is a feminist and gender balance is a smart choice No statement on how a man looks is not even an eyelash-worthy of the kind of sexism that women have to face everyday in various ways, says Trudeau in response to how people commented on his nice hair when he was campaigning. The idea of ideal citizen does not just rest on surface attributes like ethnicity or racism, it is more dependent on shared values that a society subscribes to, says Trudeau. He adds that young people tend to get that kind of openness and they understand how defined you are in your choices. Idea of ideal citizen does not rest on surface attributes, says Trudeau Trudeau says Canadians are always excited at the prospect of trade Talking about the robust immigration system in Canada, Trudeau says, "More countries need to do more to welcome immigrants not because that is the right thing to do, because refugees who flee the persecution in their country for a better life in another, are extremely grateful to the country that welcomes them. They work very hard and contribute tremendously to the growth of the country that welcomed them. That is the Canadian story." Trudeau says that cynicism is spreading across the world and the way people easily draw lines along communities is deeply worrisome. Hope is important and can usher growth, cynicism telling voting is uncool doesn't, the Canadian PM says. I had advantage but I didn't go near discrimination, sexism that women go through daily: Trudeau Media is frustrating at times but it's essential to empower and support it: Trudeau Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau, who arrived in Mumbai on Monday, will on Tuesday meet industry leaders. According to the itinerary posted on Trudeau's official website, the Canadian prime minister will be meeting N Chandrasekharan of Tata Sons at 9 am before holding discussions with Infosys CEO Salil Parekh and Mahindra Group chairman Anand Mahindra. However, government sources strongly rejected the speculation, insisting normal diplomatic protocol has been extended to Trudeau, PTI reported. They also expressed surprise over the Canadian side preferring to schedule Trudeau's official engagements in Delhi at the fag end of the tour as against the normal practice of having bilateral meetings during the first part of such visits. Prime Minister Narendra Modi not receiving his Canadian counterpart Justin Trudeau at the airport, a courtesy he extended to some world leaders in the past, has triggered speculation in Canada that it was a snub to him for the rising Sikh radicalism in that country. The Indo-Canadian Business Chambers will be hosting the business forum where Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is also expected to participate in an armchair discussion along with veteran banker Chanda Kocchar at 3 pm. "SME has been the backbone of our 40 year collaboration. There are lot of untapped areas which need to be focussed on. 130 Indian companies were brought to Canada to increase bilateral trade. Today's forum is focused on building strong relationships between Indian and Canadian companies. Canada-India foundation also completed 10 years. It was formed to clarify public policy issues between the two countries. They've also pioneered the work of connecting the diaspora," said Kasi Rao, CEO of Canadian-Indian Business Council. Calling himself a "feminist", Trudeau also said "we as a society are underperforming" as women are not being given an opportunity to contribute to their full potential. He was addressing students at the prestigious Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIM-A). Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau said on Monday that heterogeneous society is the new reality of the 21st century and the biggest challenge is to understand how differences can become a source of strength, "something that India and Canada have done fairly well". Differences have to be source of strength in society: Trudeau "Prospect of doing business in India had been particularly favorable as the legal process is similar to Canadian common law. English language proficiency is a helping factor. Strong local partners are also important. GST and other reforms have given a more transparent and stable environment which helps us. We invest based on trends, are active in residential projects and so on. Lessons learnt in the last ten years is that you've to be patient. India presents a high growth potential along the Aasian markets," says Rita-Rose Gagne of Ivanhoe Cambridge. Prospects of doing business in india is favourable, says Rita-Rose Gagne of Ivanhoe Cambridge "The global pulse market is influenced not only by the commercial forces of supply and demand (trade) but also by government directions (policy) that can complement but also override commercial market direction. Perhaps no government is having a bigger impact on the pulse industry than the Government of India," he wrote in an editorial recently. "We won't go that big anytime soon as banks does not need physical braches. We need to make a transition from 'brick and mortar' to 'Click and mortar'. We want to have a branch in Calgary region. The diaspora evolves over time and we've to be relevant to this. What are he kind of values we can bring to the consumer is what's important," says Siddharth Sengupta of SBI. "I won't day what is the final price of pulses in India. But what I do know is that trade will help food security in India. What we need to find is the Indian policy perspective on Indian farmers and consumers and find the point of connection for global trade," Gordon Bacon, CEO, Pulse Canada. "Banking is getting thoroughly regulated than any other industries. Govt policies between the two countries effects business, but the host country regulator is important. The cost of compliance is driving financial institutes out of business. If we drive these businesses out of business, they're not going to stop doing business but will operate in shadows which is not good," says Siddharth Sengupta of SBI. "Every time I come to India it gives me an opportunity to reflect on the time when I was a young man and went to Canada and built my life there. The opportunities Canada has to offer is immense. 1.4 million Indian-Canadians have a strong bond of culture and values," says Amarjeet Sohi, cabinet minister of Canada. "Economic growth is on the top agenda of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Growth that helps everyone as businesses and individuals. The same values are also shared by Prime Minister Narendra Modi," says Sohi. According to media reports , Sohi was arrested under the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act for about 21 months in the late 80s for his alleged links with the Khalistan movement. However, he was released without being charged as no evidence was found against him. "IT companies are of particular interest. We want to see how we can help with Smart City challenges of major urban centres. Problems of transportation, social laws, etc. If we partner wet can find innovative solutions to these issues. The way the challenges work is we call municipality's to identify problems and then tech is used to solve these problems. We then fund viable projects. This is something that is inspired by Indian Smart City challenges," says Sohi. India and Canada can work on IT sector, says Amarjeet Sohi David Agnew, president of Toronto's Seneca College, spoke in glowing terms about the higher educational possibilities in Canada for Indian students. "According to Canadian system, we are a college offering diploma and degrees. We have 25,000 full-time students and 10 campuses in the Greater Toronto area. Internationalisation of education is a big topic and we are still a big receiver of international students. In all, 125,000 students from India are studying in Canada. We are focused on developing partnerships in India," Agnew said. Companies that they've incubated have created over 3,000 jobs, Khakar said. "These new companies are nimble enough to find out needs that are yet to be fulfilled and are coming up with innovative solutions for these issues. They're not just making copycat products but something innovative," he added. Devang Khakar, director of IIT-Bombay, spoke of the growing interest in entrepreneurship. "Twenty years ago, there wasn't much interest in entrepreneurship. But now many are either starting their own companies or working with start-ups. Now there's more focus towards doing innovative things in areas which were unthinkable in the past. For instance, some of our graduates have worked on something as old as ceiling fans and have won patents for their design. Students are thinking of entrepreneurship from the beginning. We also have a workshop for students in entrepreneurship. I think that this is a trend that is very strong. A lot of support is coming from outside, senior alumni are coming back to start their own companies." Devang Khakar, director of IIT Bombay, said, "We've collaborated with Canadian universities. There are a lot of exchange programmes. We are also building a large number of collaborations with Canadian universities. There are a lot of joint research projects going on. We are keen to build a special relationship with the University of Toronto. There's a great potential to learn a lot." Kirsty Duncan, minister for science and sport in the Canadian government, recalls it being a difficult time for woman scientists to break through in a male-dominated field like science. "It's an honour to be in India. I'm here to build on the strong ties between India and Canada. Science is the backbone of innovation. We can think of collaboration on artificial intelligence, healthcare, innovation, etc. Canada started funding AI by the 90s and we kept funding sciences as it matters. Now it's become mainstream. Everyone knows about Silicon Valley, but there's also Maple Valley." Canada has done a lot to promote science, says Kristy Duncan, minister for science India-Canada trade is worth just $8 billion, just a minor fraction of the $100 billion trade between India and the US, Jaspal Bindra, executive chairman of Centrum, said. "The purpose of the CEO panel is to find better business opportunities that can be explored between the two countries," Bindra said. Risk sharing can be an interesting model and both in India and Canada can look at that area for getting new innovative ideas to these market. E-commerce is disrupting the world everywhere. Bangalore has a lot of innovation happening and so have many Canadian cities. So I'd suggest the creation of a technology corridor between the two countries. We should be focusing on technology diplomacy," she said. Kiran Mazumdar Shaw, the chairperson of Biocon Limited, said both India and Canada have plenty of skill and talent. "We've to build a technology corridor between India and Canada. The US has created a good ecosystem with that. The risk appetite created in the US needs to be re emulated in other countries. Patricia Koval, chairperson of C-IBC, spoke about creating more business exchange opportunities. "We have strong educational ties between Canada and India. In terms of job creations, there's huge benefits in collaborative programmes," she said. Patricia Koval, the chairperson of the C-IBC, has complimented India for easing visa regulations and said Canada must do likewise. "US' visa renewal issues are a huge opportunity. I do think India has made fabulous drives on the visa system. Canada now needs to step up and facilitating the transfer of visas," Koval said. "Same goes for immigration," he added. "Canada is opening up for immigration. One complaint we get is that we are not getting enough immigration," Trudeau said about Canada's stance on immigration. He also emphasised the ease of doing business in Canada, "Companies can get visas within two weeks. Openness to international talent is a positive advantage in the world trade." When Kochhar asked Trudeau's thoughts on trade agreements, he said, "I worry about the impact of trade on globalisation. At a time when the world is turning away from trade, we are proud to be signing trade agreements. We know that trade leads to growth. But if we're are able to keep public support for the trade agreements. We ensure that small traders get benefits for these trade deals." At a time when the world is turning away from trade, we are proud to be signing trade agreements, Trudeau says With questions raised over his silence so far ever since Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau's arrival in India on Saturday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday evening welcomed him on his visit and said that he looked forward to meeting him on Friday. Addressing the controversy, Trudeau said the dinner invitation to Atwal, who was once active in the International Sikh Youth Federation, was rescinded as soon as the Canadian government received the information about him, ANI reported. Amid the row over the presence of Khalistani sympathisers in Canada's Cabinet, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has said that Jaspal Atwal should "never have received an invitation" to his event, even as India said it is ascertaining details on how the convicted militant obtained a visa. Justin Trudeau responds to Modi's tweet, says his daughter remembers his visit well As the two prime ministers finally meet at Hyderabad House in New Delhi at noon, something could still be salvaged out of this magnified mess. And the relationship between India and Canada is far too significant to allow it to be reflected in the buildup to that bilateral summit. But it will take the combined charm of Trudeau and Modi to elevate the public conversation over the debris left by the disaster so far. But those (Canada's) linkages (with Khalistan), frowned upon by New Delhi, could have escaped too much scrutiny if those who had scheduled Trudeau's visit had listened to India and ensured he stopped early in the National Capital for the government-to-government dialogue with Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Instead, they opted to have him gallivant across the country from Agra to Ahmedabad and Mumbai to Amritsar. In that period, people noticed Modi had not welcomed him with his trademark tweet (something he eventually did on Thursday, on the eve of their meeting), and the story of the 'snub' went global. It will take combined charm of PMs to mitigate bad vibes The Canadian prime minister was welcomed with a Guard of Honour, with the Canadian and Indian national anthems played in the background. This is the first engagement for the day for Trudeau's schedule. Following his official welcome at the Rashtrapati Bhavan in New Delhi, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau will move to the Rajghat next, where he will lay a wreath at Mahatma Gandhi's memorial. In 2015, photos of Saini holding banners that read "Modi is a Terrorist", "Modi you are not welcome in Canada", and "India out of Khalistan" had gone viral at the time. According to The Indian Express , Canadian journalist Manvir Singh Saini, who had protested Prime Minister Narendra Modi's 2015 visit to Canada, is part of Justin Trudeau's media delegation and has accompanied him to all official events so far. Writing for The Washington Post , journalist Barkha Dutt says that the unusual length of Trudeau's trip may help explain why it began on a "discordant note". The editorial quotes government sources as saying that India had requested Canada to shorten Trudeau's trip or sequence it differently, beginning with political talks. However, that did not happen. "India wanted to start the trip with political talks before Trudeau played tourist. The Canadians disagreed. Also, the Canadians expected Modi to accompany Trudeau to his home state of Gujarat, just as he had done with Shinzo Abe, Xi Jinping and Benjamain Netanyahu. India declined." Union minister Harsimrat Kaur Badal on Thursday urged Trudeau to start Toronto-Amritsar Air Canada flights on the sidelines of the India-Canada business session, reported Hindustan Times. As per the Canadian prime minister's website , Justin Trudeau, along with the Minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development, Navdeep Bains, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Chrystia Freeland, the Minister of Defence, Harjit Sajjan, the Minister of Infrastructure and Communities, Amarjeet Sohi, the Minister of Science and Minister of Sport and Persons with Disabilities, Kirsty Duncan, and the Minister of Small Business and Tourism, Bardish Chagger will hold an expanded bilateral meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi at Hyderabad House. The Sikhs in Canada wield significant political clout and Trudeau's Cabinet has four Sikh members. The (government) sources said the prime minister received around five leaders at the airport during the last three-and-half years which included the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, former US president Barack Obama, Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, and Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan twice. There were stories in Canadian media that said Trudeau's perceived support for Sikh separatists may be the reason for the "snub". First off, Modi not receiving his Canadian counterpart Justin Trudeau at the airport, a courtesy he extended to some world leaders in the past, had triggered speculation in Canada that it was a snub to him for the rising Sikh radicalism in that country. Ties between India and Canada have shown signs of tension ever since Trudeau began his visit to India. The Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, is known to go to extreme lengths to project himself as part of a cause. It is very evident on his India trip where he can been wearing dazzling sherwanis and performing bhangra at a Canada House event or wearing kurtas to the Golden Temple. Social media users were quick to latch on to this and began saying that 'it was too Indian even for Indians'. According to NDTV , Vivek Dehejia, an economics professor in Ottawa told Canada's Global News, "It's a little over the top. I understand on day one having to wear the traditional clothes, but now it's getting too much." 'Those challenging the sovereignty, unity and integrity of our countries cannot even be tolerated': Modi "We have agreed to strengthen our security cooperation. Terrorism and extremism are threats to democratic, pluralistic societies like India and Canada. It is important to come together to combat these." First, talked about how to come together to benefit both Indians and Canada." "I thank Prime Minister Modi for his warm reception here. We share, not only a rich history, but a natural friendship between the two nations. I'm glad to say we wrapped up a productive meeting and discussed mutual interests. 'Talked about how to come together to benefit both Indians and Canada': Trudeau "As Canada looks to do business beyond borders, India is a natural partner and trusted friend in commercial operations," says Justin Trudeau. Will not tolerate those who try to divide country, says Modi MoUs were signed on energy, higher education, trade and investment, sports etc. You can read the full list on the official MEA website. "We are committed to building friendliness with the Canadian-based Indian community and seeking active participation in India's progress. India-Canada is a natural partnership of shared values. I hope to have more robust partnership between the two countries and the bright future of our two countries." MEA refers to Canadian side as 'Iranian' on its official website #Tamils4JustinTrudeau is trending on Twitter. This fact becomes stranger when takes into consideration that Trudeau has neither visited Tamil Nadu nor said anything particularly focused on the Tamil community. Yet, for some reason, the ones who are most excited (at least on Twitter) about Trudeau's visit to India seem to be Tamilians. On his visit to India, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau has gone to a lot of places. He has been to the Sabarmati Ashram in Gujarat, Golden Temple in Amritsar and Jama Masjid in New Delhi. First, talked about how to come together to benefit both Indians and Canada." "I thank Prime Minister Modi for his warm reception here. We share, not only a rich history, but a natural friendship between the two nations. I'm glad to say we wrapped up a productive meeting and discussed mutual interests. 'Talked about how to come together to benefit both Indians and Canada': Trudeau "As Canada looks to do business beyond borders, India is a natural partner and trusted friend in commercial operations," says Justin Trudeau. There should be no space for those who misuse religion for political motives and promote separatism. We will not tolerate those who challenge unity and integrity of our countries: PM Modi Will not tolerate those who try to divide country, says Modi As #Canada looks to diversify its own economy and looks for new opportunities to do business beyond its boundaries, India is a natural partner and a trusted friend for commercial cooperation: #JustinTrudeau pic.twitter.com/39Xht4ECab MoUs were signed on energy, higher education, trade and investment, sports etc. You can read the full list on the official MEA website. "We are committed to building friendliness with the Canadian-based Indian community and seeking active participation in India's progress. India-Canada is a natural partnership of shared values. I hope to have more robust partnership between the two countries and the bright future of our two countries." MEA refers to Canadian side as 'Iranian' on its official website India is a natural partner and a trusted friend says Prime Minister @JustinTrudeau at the press remarks at Hyderabad House pic.twitter.com/kZYTx5YcBt #Tamils4JustinTrudeau is trending on Twitter. This fact becomes stranger when takes into consideration that Trudeau has neither visited Tamil Nadu nor said anything particularly focused on the Tamil community. Yet, for some reason, the ones who are most excited (at least on Twitter) about Trudeau's visit to India seem to be Tamilians. On his visit to India, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau has gone to a lot of places. He has been to the Sabarmati Ashram in Gujarat, Golden Temple in Amritsar and Jama Masjid in New Delhi. Latest update: Addressing the joint press conference, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said that the Indian government is committed to building friendliness with the Canadian-based Indian community and seeking active participation in India's progress. With questions raised over his silence so far ever since Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau's arrival in India on Saturday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday evening welcomed him on his visit and said that he looked forward to meeting him on Friday. "I look forward to meeting PM @JustinTrudeau tomorrow and holding talks on further strengthening India-Canada relations in all spheres," Modi tweeted. I look forward to meeting PM @JustinTrudeau tomorrow and holding talks on further strengthening India-Canada relations in all spheres. I appreciate his deep commitment to ties between our two countries. Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) February 22, 2018 "I appreciate his deep commitment to ties between our two countries," he said. In a separate tweet, Modi said that he hoped Trudeau had an enjoyable visit to India so far and that he particularly looked forward to meeting Trudeau's three children Xavier, Ella-Grace and Hadrien. He also posted a picture of him along with Trudeau and Ella-Grace during his visit to Canada in April 2015. I hope PM @JustinTrudeau and his family had a very enjoyable stay so far. I particularly look forward to meeting his children Xavier, Ella-Grace, and Hadrien. Here is a picture from my 2015 Canada visit, when I'd met PM Trudeau and Ella-Grace. pic.twitter.com/Ox0M8EL46x Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) February 22, 2018 Modi's comments came even as a row broke out about an invitation being extended to convicted Khalistan separatist Jaspal Atwal by the Canadian High Commission in New Delhi for a reception on Thursday night in honour of the visiting dignitary. The High Commission has since rescinded the invitation and the Indian external affairs ministry has said that it is being ascertained how India issued a visa to Atwal. In 1987, Atwal and three others were found guilty of the attempted assassination of a Punjab state minister who was on a visit to Canada the previous year and were sentenced to 20 years in prison. The incident was the latest to happen amid wide speculation of Modi and his government cold-shouldering Trudeau during his eight-day state visit to India that started on 17 February. The visiting dignitary and his family have since visited Agra, Ahmedabad, Mumbai and Amritsar. While Modi did not accompany Trudeau to Ahmedabad, a meeting with Punjab chief minister Amarinder Singh at Amritsar on Wednesday was organised only at the last moment. Ties between New Delhi and Ottawa have been frosty in recent times as Canada is being seen as offering a platform to separatists demanding an independent Khalistan. The visit of Trudeau, who assumed office in November 2015, comes after the visit of Modi to Canada in April that year. With inputs from IANS Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Canadian counterpart Justin Trudeau held extensive talks on key issues of counter-terrorism and extremism as well as ways to boost trade ties, after which the two sides inked six pacts Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Canadian counterpart Justin Trudeau on Friday held extensive talks on key issues of counter-terrorism and extremism as well as on ways to boost trade ties, after which the two sides inked six pacts, including on energy cooperation. Modi had received his Canadian counterpart ahead of their bilateral summit at the Rashtrapati Bhavan in New Delhi, putting to rest speculations about the government cold-shouldering the visiting dignitary. Warm reception at Rashtrapati Bhavan Trudeau was joined by his wife Sophie, and children Xavier, Ella-Grace and Hadrien at the Rashtrapati Bhavan. Modi shook hands with Trudeau and hugged him, giving him a warm reception contrary to reports of Canada being "snubbed." On Thursday evening, breaking his silence since the Canadian prime minister's arrival in India on 17 February, Modi said that he looked forward to the bilateral meeting on Friday. "I appreciate his deep commitment to ties between our two countries," Modi tweeted. I look forward to meeting PM @JustinTrudeau tomorrow and holding talks on further strengthening India-Canada relations in all spheres. I appreciate his deep commitment to ties between our two countries. Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) February 22, 2018 "I particularly look forward to meeting his children Xavier, Ella-Grace, and Hadrien," Modi added in another tweet. I hope PM @JustinTrudeau and his family had a very enjoyable stay so far. I particularly look forward to meeting his children Xavier, Ella-Grace, and Hadrien. Here is a picture from my 2015 Canada visit, when I'd met PM Trudeau and Ella-Grace. pic.twitter.com/Ox0M8EL46x Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) February 22, 2018 The ceremonial reception optics gain importance as they came after much speculation that Modi and his government were cold-shouldering Trudeau during his eight-day state visit to India. The visiting dignitary and his family have since visited Agra, Ahmedabad, Mumbai and Amritsar. Swaraj calls on Trudeau External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj then called on Trudeau and discussed ways to deepen bilateral relation between the two nations. "Picture speaks for itself!" External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Raveesh Kumar tweeted along with a picture of the leaders smiling warmly as they shook hands. Picture speaks for itself! EAM @SushmaSwaraj had a warm meeting with the Prime Minister of Canada @JustinTrudeau and discussed ways to strengthen and deepen our partnership. pic.twitter.com/4nB1QmwgQT Raveesh Kumar (@MEAIndia) February 23, 2018 Kumar tweeted that Swaraj had a "warm meeting" with Trudeau "and discussed ways to strengthen and deepen our partnership". Modi, Trudeau discuss terrorism, trade ties Later in the day, Modi and the Canadian prime minister held a bilateral summit following which a number of agreements across multiple sectors were signed. New momentum in the relationship! PM @narendramodi received Canadian PM @JustinTrudeau at the Hyderabad House ahead of the bilateral talks. pic.twitter.com/41Coy83qw6 Raveesh Kumar (@MEAIndia) February 23, 2018 After their nearly two-hour long meeting, Modi, while addressing a joint media event with the Canadian prime minister, said they discussed the entire gamut of the bilateral partnership. The two sides inked six pacts, including on energy cooperation. Shadow of Khalistan issue follow talks However, Modi also made it clear that those challenging India's sovereignty, unity and integrity cannot be tolerated, seen as a veiled reference to the Canadian government's soft approach towards the Khalistan issue. Modi also asserted that there cannot be any place for those who misuse religion for political motives and promote separatism. "We discussed the entire gamut of bilateral partnership and identified concrete steps to boost cooperation. We agreed to strengthen our defence cooperation," Modi said while noting that terrorism and extremism were threats for democratic countries such as India and Canada. Trudeau's pro-Khalistan approach is being criticised by many including Punjab chief minister Amarinder Singh, who raised the issue with the Canadian prime minister during a meeting. On his part, Trudeau had assured Singh that his country does not support separatism in India or elsewhere. Modi also said that it is important that the two countries work together to fight terrorism. Observing that Trudeau has visited various parts of India in last few days, Modi said the Canadian leader must have experienced the diversity of the country. On his part, Trudeau described India as a natural partner for commercial cooperation. Modi said they have also asked the officials of their countries to re-double their efforts to finalise the bilateral free trade agreement. According to IANS, ties between New Delhi and Ottawa have been frosty of late as Canada was being seen as offering a platform to separatists demanding an independent Khalistan. On Thursday, a fresh storm blew after it came to light that the Canadian High Commission in New Delhi had extended an invitation to a convicted Khalistan separatist, Jaspal Atwal, for a reception in honour of Trudeau. The high commission then rescinded the invitation while the Indian external affairs ministry said that it was ascertaining how a visa was issued to Atwal who holds a Canadian passport. Trudeau later said that the matter was being taken "extremely seriously" and that Atwal should never have received an invitation. The visit of Trudeau, who assumed office in November 2015, comes after the visit of Modi to Canada in April that year. With inputs from agencies By the time Trudeau returned to Delhi, the Khalistan issue was already at a crescendo, with no modifier. And the bad vibes became amplified Justin Trudeau, the Canadian prime minister, is used to adulation and with reason. He is a personable progressive, who makes the appropriate politically-correct pronouncements, and can also be pragmatic, as with his dealings with the president of his neighbour to the south. Given all that, his visit to India was supposed to be a charm offensive. But instead of the expected warm reception, what he has been greeted with has been pretty hot. That the Liberal Party, whether at the federal level or in provinces such as Ontario, panders to pro-Khalistani elements isn't exactly a state secret. Vote bank politics, as we know, works across political geographies, and in India, it's a fine art. But those linkages, frowned upon by New Delhi, could have escaped too much scrutiny if those who had scheduled Trudeau's visit had listened to India and ensured he stopped early in the National Capital for the government-to-government dialogue with Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Instead, they opted to have him gallivant across the country from Agra to Ahmedabad and Mumbai to Amritsar. In that period, people noticed Modi had not welcomed him with his trademark tweet (something he eventually did on Thursday, on the eve of their meeting), and the story of the 'snub' went global. Instead, the photo-happy prime minister could have had the first pictures coming out of India as those of the traditional guard of honour accorded at Rashtrapati Bhavan to a dignitary on a State visit. That would have been followed by images of the two prime ministers smiling together. Reports would still have focussed on how India expressed its concerns over the Sikh separatism matter on Canadian soil, but it would not have been accentuated by speculation of how the Indian government was giving him the old brush-off. By the time Trudeau returned to Delhi (where he also landed before taking off for other parts), the Khalistan issue was already at a crescendo, with no modifier. And the bad vibes became amplified as Toronto Sun reported that a person, once convicted of attempting to assassinate a visiting minister from Punjab, had been invited to the official dinner reception at the residence of Canada's high commissioner. Theres just so much damage control that the Canadian Prime Minister's Office could do, and multiple statements by Trudeau at pressers in Mumbai and Delhi, during his meeting with Punjab chief minister Captain Amarinder Singh, by Canadas foreign minister Chrystia Freeland have ensued with that objective. But the noise that has already built up makes those difficult to hear. As the two prime ministers finally meet at Hyderabad House in New Delhi at noon, something could still be salvaged out of this magnified mess. And the relationship between India and Canada is far too significant to allow it to be reflected in the buildup to that bilateral summit. But it will take the combined charm of Trudeau and Modi to elevate the public conversation over the debris left by the disaster so far. Click here to follow LIVE updates on Justin Trudeau in India A 27-year-old tribal youth said to be 'not of sound mind' was beaten to death in Kerala by a lynch mob which had accused him of theft Palakkad: A 27-year-old tribal youth said to be "not of sound mind" was beaten to death in Kerala by a lynch mob which had accused him of theft, according to the mother. The turn of event on Thursday has elicited response from across the state after a perpetrator of the beating posted a selfie taken just minutes before the crime. Twitter had posts that said: "@CMOKerala... please take urgent action on this matter and bring the culprits in front of Justice." Speaking to the media on Friday, Malli, mother of the slain youth Madhu, said: "It was yesterday (Thursday) evening that my son was beaten up by a group of people in the forest (near Attapadi-Agali) saying that he was a thief. Then he was handed over to the police and soon he developed complications. He was taken to a hospital, where he died. He is not a thief, instead he was not of sound mind," said the grieving mother. The entire episode was shot on a mobile and posted on social media. It was only after actor-director Joy Mathew had posted the visuals on the social media that various political leaders, including chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan condemned the incident. "This is some sort of a fascist Malayali psyche which has developed recently and has to be tackled. If the police wish to arrest me for sharing this video in the social media, let them do that," said Mathew. Vijayan in his Facebook post said: "This is in no way good for a literate society and the progress that our state has made. I have instructed the state police chief to see that all those who have had a role to be brought before the rule of law." The local tribal community are up in arms and have demanded that if the people behind the incident were not arrested, they would launch a protest. State minister of SC/ST, AK Balan told the media: "Those who did it claim that this youth was a thief, but that's their allegation. The state government will act very strongly and none who have done this would be spared." State police chief Loknath Behra said that he had handed over the case to Thrissur Inspector General of Police and "everyone who had done this would be brought to book". The body will be taken for an autopsy at the Thrissur Medical College hospital. The Maldives has warned India against taking 'any actions' that could hinder resolving the political crisis in the country, as New Delhi expressed its deep dismay over the extension of emergency in the island nation Male: The Maldives has warned India against taking "any actions" that could hinder resolving the political crisis in the country, as New Delhi expressed its deep dismay over the extension of emergency in the island nation. The Maldives' foreign ministry in a statement late last night said President Abdulla Yameen's government takes note of the public statements issued by the Indian government that "ignore the facts and ground realities" with regard to the ongoing political developments in the Maldives. It said that India's assertion that the extension of the state of emergency for 30 days was unconstitutional is a clear "distortion of facts, which ignore the constitution and laws of the Maldives." "There is no doubt that the Maldives is experiencing one of the most difficult periods in the history of the nation. It is therefore important that friends and partners in the international community, including India, refrain from any actions that could hinder resolving the situation facing the country," it said. "The Government of Maldives reiterates its firm commitment to work closely with the international community, including India, to address the concerns they might have," the statement said. Persisting with its displeasure over the extension of emergency in the Maldives, India on Thursday said it does not see a valid reason for the Maldivian parliament to do so and maintained that it continues to watch the situation in the island nation. India has expressed "deep dismay" over the Maldivian parliament accepting President Abdulla Yameen's recommendation to extend the state of emergency by another 30 days in a manner New Delhi dubbed as a "matter of concern". On Tuesday, the Maldives' Parliament extended the state of emergency by another 30 days, bolstering president Yameen's grip on power in the troubled Indian Ocean island nation. President Yameen had first declared the emergency on 5 February after the Supreme Court ordered the release of a group of Opposition leaders, who had been convicted in widely criticised trials. Among them was exiled ex-President Mohamed Nasheed. The court said his 2015 trial had been unconstitutional. The state of emergency will now end on 22 March. There has been an international condemnation of the Maldivian government's moves, including the imposition of the emergency. The US has also expressed disappointment over the development in the Maldives and asked president Yameen to uphold the rule of law in the troubled Indian Ocean island nation. Yameen has rejected an offer of mediation by UNSecretary-General Antonio Guterres. A 43-year-old man was on Thursday arrested in Navi Mumbai the Railway Protection Force (RPF) after he allegedly tried to forcibly kiss a woman commuter A 43-year-old man was on Thursday arrested in Navi Mumbai by the Railway Protection Force (RPF) after he allegedly tried to forcibly kiss a woman commuter, said media reports. #WATCH: Girl molested at Turbhe railway station in Navi Mumbai yesterday; accused has been arrested after complaint #Maharashtra pic.twitter.com/kwUfFhCZZG ANI (@ANI) February 23, 2018 The accused, identified as Naresh Joshi, molested the woman while she was waiting to board a local train to Ghansoli for work, according to CNN-News18. We have registered a case under IPC section 354 (A) (sexual harassment) and are investigating the matter, Krishna Kadam, inspector at Vashi was quoted as saying by Mumbai Mirror. The entire incident was caught on CCTV camera feed, which was being monitored by an RPF team. When the team saw the accused suspiciously hanging around the station premises after molesting the woman, constables were rushed to the spot. The police then approached the victim and based on her directions traced the accused to a subway, said the Mumbai Mirror report. In a similar incident in January, a 23-year-old man was arrested for abusing and forcibly kissing his ex-girlfriend in public on Carter road in Mumbai, Hindustan Times had reported. The woman had said that when she was with her friends on Carter Road, the accused blocked her path and forcibly kissed her. In another incident in the same month, an 18-year-old woman was allegedly molested on an Mumbai-bound express train. The victim had tweeted to police about her "harassment by an unidentified molester" while she was travelling in the Konark Express. With inputs from PTI PASCAGOULA, Miss. -- The Mississippi Maritime Museum is set to open in the middle of 2020, Board President Terry Bollman revealed at Thursday's General Membership Meeting. During Thursday's meeting, officers were elected to the maritime museum board and updates were given on the status of the museum and what is to come soon. One of those updates detailed what is happening with the museum and when it is set to open. "The actual museum itself which is going to be in the math and science building of the old Pascagoula High School is planned to open in mid-2020," Bollman said. "In the meantime, our intention is to start some programs before the museum's opening where we can reach out to the community." Bollman said one of the goals for the Maritime Activities Center, which opened in March of 2017 is to educate students about maritime history so that they can learn more about the heritage and the potential earn a living where they were born and raised. "This also gives us the opportunity to teach our young people what their heritage is and what type of opportunities that heritage and this industry can provide to them," Bollman said. Before the museum opens $4.75 million is needed -- $2.5 to go towards renovating the math and science building and outfitting. The remained of the $2.5 will go towards operation expenses when the museum officially opens. Companies will also have the opportunities if they choose to set up displays if it fits with the museum, according to Bollman. Ingalls Shipbuilding committed money and outfitting when it is time for the museum to open also Chevron, Omega Protein, and Mississippi Power are having conversations with Bollman and the board to contribute to the museum. Members of the community can become involved by taking a five-year pledge to donate fund either annually, quarterly, or monthly and any amount residents desire to donate is acceptable. Additional information can be found here. Jammu and Kashmir's public works department minister Naeem Akhtar's remarks on China's increasing proximity to Pakistan and Jaish-e-Mohammad has evoked a strong reaction from the Jammu and Kashmir police and central security agencies, who have denied Chinese involvement in any terror activity in the state. Jammu and Kashmir's public works department minister Naeem Akhtar's remarks on China's increasing proximity to Pakistan and Jaish-e-Mohammad has evoked a strong reaction from the Jammu and Kashmir police and central security agencies, who have denied Chinese involvement in any terror activity in the state. However, there is more to it than a mere exchange of words between the civilian government in Jammu and Kashmir and security agencies. China's relationship with Pakistan has flourished in past few years. However, the billion-dollar investment pledged by China in building the countrys highways, ports, railways and industries has caused an eye-sore in New Delhi. The investment is part of premier Xi Jinpings One Belt One Road (OBOR) initiative, an attempt to revive and modernise the traditional Silk Route. While many Asian, African and European countries have joined the Chinese initiative that is touted to transform the ways of global commerce, the BJP-led Centres decision to stay away from the initiative has not pleased its coalition partner, the Peoples Democratic Party, in Jammu and Kashmir. PDP and Chinese dragon None other than the PDP president and Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti raised the question of the Chinese dragon encircling New Delhi last year after a batch of Amarnath pilgrims were killed by suspected militants in Botengu village of south Kashmir's Anantnag. "Kashmir issue is not a law and order problem. It is happening because of external forces. The ongoing fight is a handiwork of external forces and now unfortunately China is also trying to meddle in it, Mehbooba had told media after briefing Union Home Ninister Rajnath Singh about the security measures taken after the attack on pilgrims. Mehbooba didnt blame the attack on China per se. But her larger point was that India should not isolate itself in the South Asian region by adopting the politics of disengagement when it comes to China and Pakistan. Her party has repeatedly asked the Centre to hold talks with Pakistan on Kashmir issue. In recent past, Mehbooba has also backed Beijing's proposal to build alternative routes through Jammu and Kashmir to link India with its OBOR initiative which "reinforces the need to rediscover traditional trade routes of Kashmir". A key part of the initiative, China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), passes through Pakistan-administered Kashmir. Her passionate plea for joining the CPEC came after China's ambassador to India Luo Zhaohui offered to rename the corridor and build alternative routes through Jammu and Kashmir to address New Delhis concerns. "We can change the name of CPEC (and) create an alternative corridor through Jammu and Kashmir, Nathu La pass or Nepal to deal with India's concerns," the ambassador had said. The PDP feels that New Delhi is missing out on the opportunity offered by CPEC to engage with Pakistan via China for resolving the Kashmir problem. If China offers to invest in Jammu and Kashmir, Pakistans role as a sponsor of terror in the region will start to diminish due to stronger Indo-China economic ties. "China making investment in Pakistan occupied Kashmir should alarm New Delhi but it also offers an opportunity to engage Pakistan diplomatically. Disengagement with either is no option because Jammu and Kashmir has been the primary victim of India-Pakistan aggression," a senior PDP leader told Firstpost. The Question of Masood Azhar Ideologue of the ruling Peoples Democratic Party, Naeem Akhtar, recently told a national daily that Masood Azhar has been adopted by the China because the country has blocked multiple attempts to designate the Jaish-e-Mohammad chief as a UN designated terrorist. Advocating dialogue with Pakistan over Kashmir issue, Akhtar however, incorrectly, told the newspaper that the Hizbul Mujahideen chief Syed Salahudin has been listed as a "global terrorist in UN but the great wall of China has been erected around Azhar". "China has been regularly vetoing attempts to designate him (Azhar) as a terrorist in United Nations. Such things dont happen without reason. Why only him? Why not others? Why didnt China block such moves in UN against other people? The China connection needs to be understood," he said. "Unlike earlier, the great game is literally being played inside Kashmir. The Kashmir issue isnt limited to the fight between India and Pakistan now. There is another major factor involved. It isnt Pakistan alone, it is China too," Akhtar, a confidante of the PDP founder, late Mufti Sayeed, said. The ever-changing geo-strategic landscape of the Asian subcontinent with Pakistan and US drifting apart after the latter suspended the annual military aid to the country due to continuing chaos in Afghanistan, and the reported talks between Chinese diplomats and separatist rebels in Balochistan, make the great game even more interesting. With converging economic interests of Russia, China, Iran and Pakistan on a host of issues, New Delhi can no longer afford to close its eyes to the emerging, new realities. By isolating itself in the region to please the US, New Delhi is opening fronts for more encounters like Doklam and Ladakh with the Chinese dragon, Professor Noor A Baba, Dean of Social Sciences at the Central University of Kashmir, said. With questions raised over his silence since Justin Trudeau's arrival, Narendra Modi welcomed him on his visit and said that he looked forward to meeting him. New Delhi: With questions raised over his silence so far ever since Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau's arrival in India on Saturday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday evening welcomed him on his visit and said that he looked forward to meeting him on Friday. I look forward to meeting PM @JustinTrudeau tomorrow and holding talks on further strengthening India-Canada relations in all spheres. I appreciate his deep commitment to ties between our two countries. Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) February 22, 2018 In a separate tweet, Modi said that he hoped Trudeau had an enjoyable visit to India so far and that he particularly looked forward to meeting Trudeau's three children Xavier, Ella-Grace and Hadrien. He also posted a picture of him along with Trudeau and Ella-Grace during his visit to Canada in April 2015. I hope PM @JustinTrudeau and his family had a very enjoyable stay so far. I particularly look forward to meeting his children Xavier, Ella-Grace, and Hadrien. Here is a picture from my 2015 Canada visit, when I'd met PM Trudeau and Ella-Grace. pic.twitter.com/Ox0M8EL46x Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) February 22, 2018 Modi's comments came even as a row broke out about an invitation being extended to convicted Khalistan separatist Jaspal Atwal by the Canadian High Commission for a reception on Thursday night in honour of the visiting dignitary. The High Commission has since rescinded the invitation and the Indian External Affairs Ministry has said that it is being ascertained how India issued a visa to Atwal. In 1987, Atwal and three others were found guilty of the attempted assassination of a Punjab state minister who was on a visit to Canada the previous year and were sentenced to 20 years in prison. The incident was the latest to happen amid wide speculation of Modi and his government cold-shouldering Trudeau during his eight-day state visit to India that started on 17 February. The visiting dignitary and his family have since visited Agra, Ahmedabad, Mumbai and Amritsar. While Modi did not accompany Trudeau to Ahmedabad, a meeting with Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh at Amritsar on Wednesday was organised only at the last moment. Ties between New Delhi and Ottawa have been frosty in recent times as Canada is being seen as offering a platform to separatists demanding an independent Khalistan. Trudeau's visit, who assumed office in November 2015, comes after the visit of Modi to Canada in April that year. NIA filed a chargesheet against former Pakistan diplomat Amir Zubair Siddiqui and two others for on charge of terror plot and waging a war against the India The National Investigation Agency (NIA) on Thursday filed a chargesheet against former Pakistan diplomat Amir Zubair Siddiqui and two others on charges of plotting a terror attack and waging a war against India, said media reports. According to The Hindu, Special Public Prosecutor CSS Pillai filed the charge sheet before Judge P Cheenthoorpandian of the Special Court for NIA in Poonamallee in Chennai. NIA has found that Siddique, while working in Sri Lanka from 2009 to 2016, engaged people to indulge in espionage and terror activities in India. Siddique now has been declared persona non-grata and cited as absconding by the NIA. The major plot of the suspects, including Siddiqui was unearthed when one Thamim Ansari was arrested by the CID in 2012, said the report. Siddiqui, according to Deccan Chronicle, had planned to attack US consulate in Chennai, the Israeli Consulate in Bengaluru, the Eastern Naval Command Head Quarter in Visakhapatnam and ports in India with the help of spies. He had reportedly also sent several persons including Mohammad Zakir Hussain, Arun Selvaraj and Sivabalan, to India to carry out attacks. Hussain, who was arrested by the CBI in 2013 on charge of indulging in spying activities, had confessed that Siddiqui had assigned him to carry out attacks. ISI agent Hussain, during the probe, also revealed that he used his counterparts Sivabalan, Mohammad Salim and Rafeeque to circulate fake currency in Tamil Nadu, said The New Indian Express report. Siddiqui was not named in the charge-sheet initially because we did not have proper evidences before. Now that we have strong evidence to prove his involvement in the terror plot, a supplementary charge-sheet was filed, NIA sources were quoted as saying by The New Indian Express. The PNB fraud highlighted a larger systemic problem raising questions about the effectiveness of regulatory framework followed by Indian banking system, risk management practices and vulnerability of Indian banks to fraudulent transactions that extends across the border The debate for a super regulator for Indian financial sector is back on the discussion table in the aftermath of Rs 11,400 crore LoU (Letter of Undertaking) fraud committed by billionaire Nirav Modi in collusion with certain bank employees. The fraud highlighted a larger systemic problem raising questions about the effectiveness of regulatory framework followed by Indian banking system, risk management practices and vulnerability of Indian banks to fraudulent transactions that extends across the border. Former RBI deputy governor and PNB chairman K C Chakrabarty went on to the extent to say that Indian banks have no risk management capacity (read an interview here). Does the current situation call for some radical changes in the regulatory structure? Lets look at the past efforts in this area. In March 2011, the government constituted the Financial Sector Legislative Reforms Commission (FSLRC). Its mandate was to comprehensively review and redraw the legislations governing Indias financial system. The FSLRC was of the view that the existing regulatory architecture is fragmented and is fraught with regulatory gaps, overlaps, inconsistencies and arbitrage. The commission submitted its report to the Ministry of Finance on 22 March, 2013, suggesting a draft Indian Financial Code to replace the bulk of the existing financial laws. The most important recommendations of the panel was creation of a super regulator for the Indian financial system but keeping RBI out of its ambit. The draft Code seeks to move away from the current sector-wise regulation to a system where the RBI regulates the banking and payments system and a Unified Financial Agency subsumes existing regulators like SEBI, IRDA, PFRDA and FMC, to regulate the rest of the financial markets, it said. Under this proposal, RBI will continue to handle monetary policy, regulation and supervision of banks and payment while all other financial sector activities will come under the unified regulator including stock market regulation, insurance and pension. The proposal, however, didnt go down well with former regulators. For instance, former RBI governor and former Prime Minister's Economic Advisory Council (PMEAC) chairman C Rangarajan had said that India does not need super regulator for financial sector markets but need better co-ordination among existing ones. "At this particular time, it may be advisable to continue with the existing system, rationalise the overlap if there are any and try to improve the co-ordination among different regulators," Rangarajan was quoted as saying in the report. Similarly, former chairman of IRDA, was quoted as saying, other countries which had opted for a super-regulator model had returned back to the original sector regulator model after realising that it is not working well. In a large country like India, you need expertise in each field. This proposal would lead to a situation where people at the lateral level would have very little background of the segment (example: insurance or stock markets) that they are working for. In some situations, a stock market expert could be working on insurance issue or vice versa," Rao was quoted as saying. But not all former regulators opposed the idea. For instance, G N Bajpai former Sebi chairman favored FSDC as a super regulator, saying it is the need of hour. In the context of the PNB scam, does the idea of super regulator make sense building on the structure proposed by Srikrishna panel? The RBI can still focus on its core functions---financial stability at a macro level and monetary policy. Perhaps the super regulator can take away certain functions such as risk management and monitoring of accounts from the central bank and other regulators to have a coordinated system? A section of bankers and sector-experts have been advocating this possibility for while now. Particularly in the current context, there may be a case given that increasing interconnectedness of financial institutions and complexity of transactions across segments. A super regulator can perhaps be given the risk management function across verticals while specific regulations pertaining to operations sectors can still be left to those individual institutions. Indeed, the RBI has done a commendable job in managing systemic risks by ring-fencing Indian banking system during the 2008 financial crisis. This was appreciated by the regulators across the world. But, repeated frauds and governance flaws in banking institutions it regulate raise questions on RBIs ability to ensure risks management tools are indeed operational at bank level. Remember, there are representatives of the central bank in the boards of large banks including PNB, who failed to monitor and identify a fraud of this magnitude for several years. This is despite having all the checks in place. The SWIFT software, purportedly used to conduct the PNB fraud, was subjected to multiple checks and audits but none worked to dig out the dirt. There cant be any excuses from the part of regulator for such a serious lapse. A super regulator, which will have the mandate on risk management across verticals, can perhaps do the job. According to top sources, the Enforcement Directorate has sought Suspicious Transaction Reports related to companies owned by Nirav Modi and Mehul Choksi as well as individual transactions of people associated with swindlers including Neeshal Modi, Ami Modi, Hemant Dahyalal Bhat, Aniyth Shivraman Nair and Dinesh Gopaldas Bhatia. The government has roped in Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU-India) to probe into one of the largest banking frauds orchestrated by Nirav Modi and Mehul Choksi bilking state-owned Punjab National Bank (PNB) of thousands of crores of rupees. According to top sources, the Enforcement Directorate (ED) has sought Suspicious Transaction Reports (STRs) related to companies owned by Nirav Modi and Mehul Choksi as well as individual transactions of people associated with swindlers including Neeshal Modi, Ami Modi, Hemant Dahyalal Bhat, Aniyth Shivraman Nair and Dinesh Gopaldas Bhatia. "In the first chunk, we have received around 67 STRs related to Nirav Modi and Mehul Choksi. We are expecting to get some more STRs related to Modi and Choksis companies by Monday or Tuesday. We believe in 2017 red flags related to these two individuals, who are on the run, were raised and subsequently forwarded by FIU for further probe. We have asked for the data starting from 2012 to find out how they tricked the system and may have moved the money abroad," the ED sources said. The STRs are generated and reported to the FIU by banking institutions and intermediaries when it appears to be made in circumstances of unusual or unjustified complexity or appears to have no economic rationale or bonafide purpose. The ED wants to know whether STRs related to Gili India Limited founded in December 2012, Gitanjali Jewellery Retail Limited formed in March 2012, Nakshatra World Limited, Gitanjali Infratech, Bezel Jewellery formed in June 2015, Asmi Jewellery India Limited and Gitanjali Exports Corporation Limited founded in July 2015 were forwarded to the agencies for further investigation. The ED sleuths probing the money laundering angle in the PNB fraud case told Firstpost that the investigation, in this case, is like onion peeling since Nirav Modi and his uncle Mehul Choksi were floating and closing down various companies in a suspicious manner. They said Gitanjali Gems Limited, a flagship company launched by Mehul Choksi in August 1986, floated another company Gitanjali Gold and Precious LLP in April 2015 for limited business activities. Almost a year later Choksi formed Mast Jewellery Distribution LLP in March 2016 that was in transactions with Gitanjali Jewellery Retail Limited, which he had founded in February 2012. "There is a lot of financial trickery between these two firms in import and export as well as transactions done between them domestically. At least six companies linked to Nirav Modi were receiving money since late 2014 from his four flagship companies including Firestar Diamond Private Limited and Firestar International Limited, which it seems, was used for round-tripping. This makes chasing and seizing assets and transactions much more difficult," the sources further said. The ED, hunting for Nirav assets, attached his bank accounts with Rs 30 crore balance and shares of Rs 13 crore value held in a company. The agency seized 176 steel almirahs, 158 boxes and 60 plastic containers containing imported watches. Earlier, the agency had seized deposits, shares and luxury cars which together it claims to be worth Rs 100 crore. The ED has also received a list of foreign registered companies linked to Nirav and Choksi on Friday to probe into money laundering and roundtripping. The probe agency had summoned Nirav to appear before the investigators for questioning, however, in his email, Nirav expressed inability to join the probe. The agency sleuths said they have asked the FIU about the details of three companies that Modi had floated on 19 March 2014 namely Neeshal Enterprises LLP, Paragon Jewellery LLP and Paragon Merchandising. Fresh summons was issued against diamantaire Nirav Modi, after he failed to appear and depose before the ED on Thursday, official sources said. Mumbai/New Delhi: Fresh summons was issued against diamantaire Nirav Modi, after he failed to appear and depose before the Enforcement Directorate (ED) on Thursday, official sources said. They added that Modi had replied to the ED's investigating officer (IO), who is probing the role of the diamond merchant and his uncle Mehul Choksi, the promoter of Gitanjali Gems, in the Rs 11,400-crore alleged fraud at the Punjab National Bank (PNB), and cited the temporary suspension of his passport and pending business issues as reasons for his non-appearance. Modi was summoned by the ED under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA). The sources said he had now been asked to join the investigation and appear before the central probe agency in Mumbai on 26 February. Modi, it is understood, had sent an e-mail to the ED, stating that while his passport was temporarily suspended, he was also dealing with the recent developments and investigations, pertaining to the alleged bank fraud, against his businesses in the country and hence, he was unable to depose before the agency. It maybe recalled that a few years back, liquor baron Vijay Mallya had cited the same reasons for not appearing before the ED and the agency had asked him to approach the nearest Indian embassy and get a travel document issued in order to return to the country. Meanwhile, it is understood, that Choksi, who has been summoned by the ED on Friday, will also be issued a fresh summons if he fails to appear. The agency on Thursday seized shares, mutual funds and luxury cars, worth over Rs 100 crore, of the group companies of Modi and Choksi. The ED raids against the duo, launched on 15 February, continued for the eighth day. Modi, Choksi and others are being investigated by multiple probe agencies, including the CBI and the Income Tax department, after it recently came to light, following a complaint from the PNB, that they allegedly cheated the nationalised bank to the tune of Rs 11,400 crore, with the purported involvement of a few employees of the bank. The CBI and the ED have registered two FIRs each in the case. Both Modi and Choksi are said to have left the country before the cases were lodged against them. The death of two Rajasthan lawmakers has triggered tensions among the state's MLAs, who fearing that the secretariat building has 'negative energies and evil souls', demanding a 'havan' and other religious ceremonies to get rid of them. Jaipur: The death of two Rajasthan lawmakers has triggered tensions among the state's MLAs, who fearing that the secretariat building has "negative energies and evil souls", demanding a 'havan' and other religious ceremonies to get rid of them. BJP MLA Habibur Rehman from Nagaur, told media that he has suggested to chief minister Vasundhara Raje to conduct havan in the building which will help in purifying the surroundings. The land on which secretariat stands had once accommodated a burial ground and crematorium and hence the evil souls are dominating here, he added. Kalulal Gurjar, the chief whip, also confirmed fears among members in the matter of untimely death of BJP MLAs one after the other to the fact that the secretariat building is haunted. Nathdwara MLA Kalyan Singh passed away on Wednesday while Kirti Kumari from Mandalgarh passed away last year after suffering from swine flu. The secretariat building was constructed in 2001 and accommodates a crematorium in its vicinity. Gurjar said that he too has requested the Chief Minister for performing 'yagya' and religious ceremony in the building to ensure that it gets rid of evil spirits and when it will be performed depends on the Chief Minister and the assembly Speaker. Canada's spy agency had been warned about the repercussions of convicted Khalistani terrorist Jaspal Atwal attending events with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on his tour to India, Canadian media reported Toronto: Canada's spy agency had been warned about the repercussions of convicted Khalistani terrorist Jaspal Atwal attending events with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on his tour to India, Canadian media reported on Friday. Trudeau's first bilateral visit to India was hit by a controversy over the dinner invitation to Atwal by the Canadian High Commissioner in New Delhi. Atwal had been convicted of shooting at visiting Punjab cabinet minister Malkiat Singh Sidhu on Vancouver Island in 1986. High Commissioner Nadir Patel cancelled Atwal's invite for the dinner, hosted last night for Trudeau, while the ministry of external affairs (MEA) said it will "ascertain" how Atwal entered India. The informant, who asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation, confirmed speaking to an agent from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) on 17 February, hoping to alert the Canadian government to Atwal's criminal history. The person said to the CSIS agent that "this is an embarrassment for the prime minister and CSIS should send a note to the prime minister's office. And they sent a note". CSIS did not respond to requests for comment, Postmedia reported. A separate source told Postmedia that some members of the Punjabi-language media in Surrey sent news reports about Atwal's history to the Canadian High Commission in New Delhi on 20 February. The source said it was widely known that Atwal, a former member of the terrorist International Sikh Youth Federation, was going to India to attend some of the events with prime minister Trudeau and the Canadian delegation. Despite the warnings, Atwal attended a reception on 21 February in Mumbai where he was photographed with Trudeau's wife Sophie Gregoire and Infrastructure Minister Amarjeet Sohi. The outcome has embarrassed Trudeau, who had made efforts in India to insist Canada is not soft on Sikh separatism and believes in a united India, the Vancouver Sun said. Atwal was also once accused of assaulting Indian-origin former British Columbia premier Ujjal Dosanjh. Dosanjh said the Canadian government demonstrated a lack of concern by inviting the man convicted of attempted murder in another case. Dosanjh, also a one-time federal Liberal cabinet minister, says he was taken aback when he found out that Atwal was invited to a dinner reception with the prime minister after attending another event with the Trudeau family earlier this week, the Globe and Mail reported. He said Atwal attacked him with an iron bar in 1985 over his opposition to Sikh extremism. The assault left Dosanjh with 80 stitches and a broken hand, but Atwal was acquitted of the crime. "It left me speechless about the lack of preparation or the depth of unpreparedness with which Mr Trudeau's trip went through," he said. MOSS POINT, Miss. -- Young girls at Moss Point High School's Career and Technical Education Center were introduced to polymer science during National Engineers' Week. Thursday is, "Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day" and Mississippi Power did just that. Three of their employees assisted 10-12 grade girls in making fragrances and bath salt. According to company spokesman Jeff Shepard, this is the fifth year the company has introduced science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) related field items to Jackson County students. Tenth graders Dajah Zinnimon and Kayla Sparrow said they enjoyed the activities and learning more about polymer science. "We were supposed to make bath balls, unfortunately, it did not turn out the way we thought, instead, we made different fragrances of bath salts," they said. Both Zinnimon and Sparrow said they enjoyed making the salts and looked at science as a way they can interact with their parents. "Instead of going places and buying fragrances, we can make them at home instead and save money," they said. "It is fun to create with family and friends. Initially, I didn't want to come, but I'm glad I did -- this was a new experience I enjoyed," Sparrow said. Teacher Qwantina Barlow said girls learning about STEM-related fields is important because it would expose them to new experiences and opportunities. "It is important because it gives the young ladies another avenue and realm of opportunities they maybe didn't know were available to them," Barlow said. "From what I can see, the girls are really interested in the experiments and seem to be learning a lot." Kim Washington from Plant Daniel assisted with the introduction of the various exercises for the young women to learn about. Washington said the girls' responses to the science was overwhelming. "It seemed as if the students really enjoyed the activities -- just in talking with them, they had no idea what to expect, but when they came in, they were pleasantly surprised with the hands-on events we had for them to participate in," Washington said. Although Zinnimon and Sparrow said they do not have a budding interest in engineering at this moment, they did acknowledge the possibility that if they first choice does not go as planned, a STEM-related profession could be on the horizon. Washington said she hopes Thursday's activities shows students they do not have to leave home to make a good living financially and that they can take care of their families right here along the Mississippi Gulf Coast. "STEM is the way of the future and it takes the students to make the world go around and allows us to have a viable community," Washington said. "I think it's important to get students involved. You can also make a pretty good living in STEM-related fields and for our county, it is a big deal." "You don't have to leave home to provide for your family -- you can make a decent living here," Washington said. "They just want to know what it is that we have going on and as a company in this community it's just good to be stewards of our community." An 18-year-old girl was burnt to death by unindentified goons in Uttar Pradesh's Unnao district. An 18-year-old girl was burnt to death by unindentified goons in Uttar Pradesh's Unnao district, reports have said. According to ANI, the girl was on her way to a nearby market on her bicycle in Bara Sagwar area. The bicycle was recovered from the spot where the incident took place. Girl burnt to death by unidentified miscreants on a road in Unnao's Bara Sagwar. She was going to a nearby market on her bicycle which was recovered from the spot. Body sent for postmortem pic.twitter.com/l5x5KMryc2 ANI UP (@ANINewsUP) February 22, 2018 The victim's body has been sent for postmortem. CNN-News18 further reported that the police had not ruled out the possibility of rape. According to NDTV, the victim's body was recovered by the side of a field outside her village with 100 percent burn injuries. A case of murder has been registered, a senior official told NDTV. #BREAKING -- 18-year-old burnt to death by unidentified goons in Uttar Pradesh's Unnao. Victim's body sent for post-mortem, rape angle in the case not ruled out | @pranshumisraa with more details pic.twitter.com/kjvZPSRJNk News18 (@CNNnews18) February 23, 2018 More details are awaited. With inputs from PTI The two-day Investors Summit organized by the Uttar Pradesh (UP) government drew to a close on Thursday evening with the address of President Ram Nath Kovind, who said that the state had the potential to become the biggest economic power in the country Lucknow: The two-day Investors Summit organized by the Uttar Pradesh government drew to a close on Thursday evening with the address of President Ram Nath Kovind, who said that the state had the potential to become the biggest economic power in the country and the turnaround in the fortunes had begun. "Youth from Uttar Pradesh are bringing laurels from all over the world and the state has also given nine Prime Ministers to this great country," he said while also pointing out that UP was also his birthplace. The summit, Kovind said, was a step in the right direction which will take UP to dizzying heights. Underlining the importance of the huge work force and also the biggest consumer base that the state offers, the President also pointed out his this was a major reason for investors to flock to the state during the investors summit. Several initiatives rolled out by the state government, like the ease of doing business, single window system and industrial security, had endeared many investors into putting their money in projects in Uttar Pradesh, he added. Kovind also said that in the last three years there has been record growth in foreign direct investment (FDI) in the country and the cashless payments system had enhanced the scope of growth. Earlier in the day defence minister Nirmala Sitharaman, railway minister Piyush Goyal and union finance minister Arun Jaitley addressed different sessions. Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath thanked the people of the state, the bureaucracy, the investors and prime minister Narendra Modi for the roaring success of the event. He once again reiterated the resolve expressed during the inaugural session on Wednesday to ensure that each MoU signed during the meet was taken to its logical conclusion. More than 1,200 MoUs were signed during the two day meet with investments of over Rs 4.35 lakh crore being committed by investors and industrialists like Mukesh Ambani, Gautam Adani, Subhash Chandra and Anand Mahindra. More than seven countries participated in the event. Opposition parties have however slammed the state government over the event and have accused it of blowing up people's money on a futile exercise. Former chief minister Akhilesh Yadav, of the Samajwadi Party, said that with no work to show, the BJP was once again resorting to tall promises even as deliverance on the ground was abysmal. The Congress has also said that the event was a non-starter and was likely to ring in not much in terms of investment and industrialization. In Mayawatis case, there was an impression that the chief minister was more concerned with her private benefits than the development of the state Uttar Pradesh, a state not known as investors paradise, is making news. On the opening day of the UP Investors Summit, the state has attracted memorandum of understanding (MoUs) worth a whopping Rs 4.28 lakh crore, and when it closes on Thursday, the figure is sure go further. Those queuing up to invest include the countrys biggest corporate houses. By all standards, it is not a mean achievement. If a substantial chunk of these investment proposal materialise in real terms, Uttar Pradesh will leave the Bimaru tag far behind, and forge far ahead to join the ranks of the developed states. Today, of course, it is at the bottom even below Bihar be it in terms of economic growth or human development index (HDI), not to talk of the happiness index. As the investors meet concludes, there will be a triumphant mood in Lucknows secretariat building, particularly on the floor of the chief ministers office. But there is a catch. For old timers who have been watching the state politics for decades, such spectacles bring out a cynical sense of deja vu. This not the first time the countrys most populous state organized an investor summit. In fact, it started such summits even before Gujarat launched its biennial Vibrant Gujarat in 2003. But unlike in Gujarat where the then chief minister Narendra Modi had been helming the summit, in Uttar Pradesh such shows were essentially run by bureaucrats, mostly under Mayawatis regime. Recall the swagger with which a commercial pilot-promoted-IAS officer, Shashank Shekhar Singh, had been organising investor jamborees with juniors like Navneet Sehgal in tow. After Singhs demise, Sehgal took charge to organise summits for Akhilesh Yadav with even more finesse and more aplomb. In Mayawatis case, there was an impression that the chief minister was more concerned with her private benefits than the development of the state. Taking a leaf out of Mayawatis book, Akhilesh imitated her like true follower. In both cases, bureaucrats of the state, highly skilled in creating an illusion of development, have greatly facilitated these leaders to slip into a state of conceit and complacency. Will Yogi Adityanath be any different from his predecessors? The jury is still out as Yogi has been grappling with complexities of governance. However, there are enough signs to suggest that in terms of governance, Yogi has been treading the beaten path. He is fed on a high dose of steroid of development delusion and states masculinity by the state bureaucracy and the police to create an impression that the state is right on the track. The ground reality is starkly different. Despite Yogis promise of making interior roads of the state pot-hole free, the streets in many parts of the state are in a bad shape. He does not talk about it anymore. Electricity supply in rural parts of the state has deteriorated compared to the past. And there are reports that the bureaucracy, which is steeped in corruption due to criminalised political culture of the state over decades, has refused to change its spots. Those who are familiar with the state could testify that bribe rates, instead of being contained, have been hiked in the new regime. On the other hand, the police have been giving a false sense of comfort by staging dubious encounters. [Read more about it in this article: Yogi Adityanath's Uttar Pradesh is in the grip of an encounter mania; Ab tak Attharah (18) and counting... In most cases, the police have been cooking up stories which run on a familiar script: small-time criminals getting killed in exchange of fire by police in self-defence. Interestingly, those running big crime syndicates in eastern UP or western UP remain untouched. It would be a travesty of truth to say that killing petty criminals in stage-managed encounters would instil a sense of security among people. Take for instance incidents of chain-snatching and loot which are rampant in Noida and Ghaziabad, the districts in close proximity to Delhi. Apparently, Yogi Adityanath has been following a trajectory of governance which relies heavily on the bureaucracy-created illusion of states masculinity and development. Ironically, this conforms precisely to the style of governance practised by Mayawati. There could be a silver lining only if he persistently pursues the developmental agenda the way Modi did in Gujarat. Otherwise, despite his religious training and his position as head of the Gorakhnath peeth, Yogi as chief minister would continue to remain under the spell of Maya, the great illusion! Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath, in a television interview, talked about his governments performance over the last 10 months, ahead of the investors summit held on February 21 and 22, 2018. By Chaitanya Mallapur Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath, in an interview, talked about his government's performance over the last 10 months, ahead of the investors summit held on February 21 and 22, 2018. We fact-checked five claims made by the UP chief ministeron direct benefit transfer (DBT), ease of doing business rankings, riots, dues paid to sugarcane farmers and hours of power supply to farmersof which two are unclear, one false, one true and one partially true. Claim: "In the last 10 months, Uttar Pradesh government has disbursed over Rs 80,000 crore to farmers via direct benefit transfer." In last 10 months, UP Govt has disbursed over Rs 80k cr to farmers via DBT. Govt is in progress to make 1 lk cr hectar land cultivable in coming years, says UP CM Yogi Adityanath in an #EXCLUSIVE interview with our Executive Editor @SupriyaShrinate. pic.twitter.com/F4fgZXrC9i ET NOW (@ETNOWlive) February 19, 2018 Fact: False. The UP government gave Rs 14,540 crore in 2017-18 under DBT through 682.5 million transactions, according to the governments DBT dashboard on 21 February, 2018. The government reported 49 million beneficiaries and savings of Rs 128 crore through these transactions. Achievements Rs 14,540 crore Rs 127.59 crore 68.25 crore 4.90 crore Direct Benefit Transfer By Uttar Pradesh Govt, 2017-18 Parameter Total Direct Benefit Transfer Savings Transactions Beneficiaries Source: Uttar Pradesh Government Direct Benefit Transfer Adityanath took over as the chief minister on 19 March, 2017, after the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won 312 out of 403 (77.4 percent) seats in the state Assembly elections held last year. As many as 634 million people have benefitted from DBT across the country in 2017-18 with Rs 1.03 lakh crore given till February 21, 2018. About 1,797 million transactions were reported with savings of Rs 57,029 crore. Under cash schemes like direct benefit transfer for liquefied petroleum gas (PAHAL), direct cash transfer for food grains and Atal Pension Yojana, the central government transferred Rs 82,287 crore to 407.8 million beneficiaries in 2017-18 (as on 21 February, 2018). The expenditure under in-kind schemes like Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana (Prime Ministers crop insurance scheme) and Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana (Prime Ministers scheme to provide free cooking gas connections to women from below poverty line households) was Rs 21,062 crore with 436.5 million beneficiaries. Claim: "We were at 17th position in ease of doing business, now we are at seventh position over a period of 10 months." In the ease of doing business, we were at No. 17th position. Now, we are at No. 7 position: UP CM @myogiadityanath to @SupriyaShrinate #YogiInterview TIMES NOW (@TimesNow) February 19, 2018 Fact: Unclear. Uttar Pradesh is ranked 14th in the ease of doing business ranking in 2017, maintaining its earlier position of 2016, according to the central government dashboard that tracks the implementation real-time as on February 21, 2018. The rankings are updated each time a response by a state is validated by the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion, a division of the commerce ministry. The state, however, has improved in terms of score from 84.52 percent in 2016 to 95.12 percent in 2017. The state was ranked 10th in 2015 with a score of 47.37 percent. Uttar Pradesh: Ease Of Doing Business Ranking, 2015-17 Year Rank Score (%) 2015 10 47.37 2016 14 84.52 2017* 14 95.12 Source: Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion; *2017 ranking as on February 21, 2018. Claim: "No riots took place in the state over the last 10 months." EXCLUSIVE: Yogi Adityanath says no riots took place in UP in 10 months; vows to promote Taj Mahal#YogiInterviewhttps://t.co/WNS21SCpEA TIMES NOW (@TimesNow) February 19, 2018 Fact: Unclear. Uttar Pradesh reported the most (195) communal incidents across the country in 2017 that killed 44 people and left 542 injured, according to this reply to the Lok Sabha (Parliaments upper house) on February 6, 2018. The state accounted for almost one-fourth of all communal incidents in the country last year. Source: Lok Sabha Communal incidents in UP increased 47 percent from 133 in 2014 to 195 in 2017, IndiaSpend reported on 9 February, 2018. The reply by the home ministry does not specify under which sections of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) these incidents were reported. The National Crime Records Bureau, under the home ministry, collects and maintains records of crimes across the country. Cases for riots are registered under section 147 to 151 of the IPC while cases pertaining to promoting enmity on ground of religion race and place of birth are reported under section 153A of the IPC. Kasganj in western UP witnessed communal violence on January 26, 2018, in which a 22-year old youthChandan Guptawas killed after being hit by a bullet. As many as 44 people were arrested in connection with the violence, which erupted over an unauthorised march on Republic Day, The Indian Express reported on January 27, 2018. However, the director general of police said that the Kasganj violence was a group clash and not a communal violence, Scroll.in reported on February 14, 2018. Claim: "We have implemented farm loan waiver and paid Rs 25,000 crore due to sugarcane farmers." Fact: Partially true. The Uttar Pradesh government paid Rs 23,044 crore (91 percent) out of Rs 25,387 crore due during the sugarcane crushing season in 2016-17, Ram Vilas Paswan, minister of consumer affairs, food and public distribution, told the Rajya Sabha in his reply on 11 August, 2017. The outstanding dues then were reported to be Rs 2,343 crore, as on July 31, 2017. Almost three months have passed since the crushing season began, but sugar mill owners are yet to pay the Rs 2,200 crore due to the farmers in Uttar Pradesh," The Hindu reported on 25 January, 2018. The UP government processed loan waivers of Rs 7,371 crore in the first phase, Livemint reported on 13 September, 2017. Only one million (11 percent) of the 8.6 million targeted debt-ridden farmers in the state could receive the maximum benefit of Rs 1 lakh under the scheme, The Times of India reported on 19 February, 2018. Claim: Farmers in Uttar Pradesh are receiving power supply for 18 hours in their villages. EXCLUSIVE: Yogi Adityanath says no riots took place in UP in 10 months; vows to promote Taj Mahal#YogiInterviewhttps://t.co/WNS21SCpEA TIMES NOW (@TimesNow) February 19, 2018 Fact: True. The average power supply to the agriculture sector in Uttar Pradesh was reported to be 18.08 hours per day in January 2018, according to Central Electricity Authoritys January 2018 report. As many as 13.7 million rural households in UP are yet to be electrified as on February 21, 2018, according to the central governments real-time dashboard. About a third of voters had said power cut was the biggest problem in the state, IndiaSpend reported on 6 February, 2017. As many as 38 percent of those surveyed said they faced power cuts every day while 16 percent said they faced power cuts every week. One more AIADMK MLA on Friday joined the TTV Dhinakaran faction, taking the number of MLAs supporting the rival leader to three, prompting the ruling party to accuse the dissident camp of 'brainwashing' legislators. Chennai: One more AIADMK MLA on Friday joined the TTV Dhinakaran faction, taking the number of MLAs supporting the rival leader to three, prompting the ruling party to accuse the dissident camp of "brainwashing" legislators. A Prabhu, representing Kallakurichi, called on Dhinakaran at his residence and said he joined the latter's camp out of his own volition. "Only Dhinakaran annan (elder brother) and Chinnamma (Dhinakaran's aunt VK Sasikala) have the capability to steer the party," he told reporters. Sasikala is currently serving a prison term at Parappana Agrahara Central Prison in Bengaluru after being convicted in a disproportionate assets case. Prabhu is the first AIADMK legislator to jump on to the Dhinakaran bandwagon after last year's disqualification of 18 MLAs. Two other MLAs E Rathinasabhapathy (Aranthangi) and VT Kalaiselvan (Vriddhachalam) had extended support to Dhinakaran August, 2017 ahead of the disqualification. Prabhu said several of his requests for his constituency like carving out a separate district with Kallakurichi as the headquarters remained unfulfilled. He said he took the decision to align with Dhinakaran "to effectively serve the people of his constituency." Senior AIADMK leader and Revenue Minister RB Udhaya Kumar, reacting to Prabhu switching loyalty, accused Dhinakaran faction of "brainwashing (MLAs) and spreading the net for them one after the other." "Those who (had already) deserted us are brainwashing, he (Prabhu) is good (nalla thambi)... he will come back... all of them will be back,"he said, adding Chief Minister K Palaniswamy had been fulfilling Prabhu's requests for the constituency. On Prabhu joining his faction, Dhinakaran asserted that "we did not persuade anyone (to join his camp). However, all legislators were in touch with his camp as all of them belong to the same party. "all of them are our kin," he said. S Karunas of Mukkolathor Pulippadai, an ally of the ruling AIADMK, who had won on a ruling party ticket, had accompanied Dhinakaran to the Raj Bhavan in September, 2017 indicating his support to the rival leader. Asked if he supported Dhinakaran now, Karunas said: "I will take a decision," but declined to elaborate. U Thaniyarasu (Kongu Ilaignar Peravai) and M Thammemun Ansari (Jayananayaka Manithaneya Makkal Katchi), two other allies of the ruling AIADMK had in the past acted in cohesion with Karunas on several issues. However,their present stand is not clear.The Kallakurichi MLA has joined the rival camp at a time when the Madras High Court's verdict on the disqualification of 18 Dhinakaran loyalists is expected soon. Estranged allies Congress and the NCP in Maharashtra on Thursday decided to jointly contest the upcoming polls in a bid to defeat the BJP-led NDA government Mumbai: In a major development, estranged allies the Congress and the NCP in Maharashtra on Thursday decided to jointly contest the upcoming polls in a bid to defeat the BJP-led NDA government in the state. The announcement was made after a joint meeting between Maharashtra Congress chief Ashok Chavan and his NCP counterpart Sunil Tatkare at the residence of Radhakrishna Vikhe Patil, the Leader of Opposition in the state Assembly. "We have decided to come together for all the upcoming polls to defeat the ruling BJP-Shiv Sena government. This was a primary discussion. We will meet once again to deliberate on the seat-sharing strategy," Chavan told reporters. Stopping short of announcing a formal alliance, Tatkare said, "Both parties have created an atmosphere that is conducive for an alliance. Our first focus is the bypolls to be held for the Bhandara-Gondia and Palghar seats." The bypoll to the Bhandara-Gondia Lok Sabha seat in east Maharashtra was necessitated following the resignation of its BJP MP Nana Patole, who returned to the Congress. The Palghar Lok Sabha seat, neighbouring Mumbai, fell vacant after the death of its BJP MP, Chintaman Wanaga, last month. The schedule for the bypolls is yet to be announced by the Election Commission. The Congress and the NCP are, however, yet to arrive at a consensus on the contestants for both the seats. Bhandra-Gondia is the pocket-borough of NCP stalwart and former Union minister Praful Patel, who had lost to Patole in the 2014 general election. NCP supremo Sharad Pawar had on Wednesday said that though weakened, the Congress was the only alternative to the BJP. "Even though the Congress is considerably weakened over the years, Rahul Gandhi has shown willingness to learn and engage with the people. If the people support him, the Congress can be revived and the fact is that a strong opposition is required to strengthen democracy," he had said. The NCP was part of the Congress-led UPA governments at the Centre and in Maharashtra earlier. The Congress-led Democratic Front (DF) government in Maharashtra, of which the NCP was a crucial component, had won three successive terms before it was dislodged by the BJP in the 2014 state Assembly polls. Both the parties had contested the 2014 Assembly polls separately. Interestingly, the Congress recently expressed "practical difficulties" in renewing its alliance with the NCP for the 2019 Lok Sabha election and Assembly polls in Maharashtra. In the saffron camp, the Sena and the BJP do not see eye to eye with each other. The Sena has been sulking ever since it was made to play the second fiddle to the BJP, which had won more seats than the Uddhav Thackeray-led party in the 2014 polls. Following severe strains in ties with the BJP, the Sena had last month announced to contest the Assembly and Lok Sabha elections on its own. Recently, Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis had held a closed-door meeting with Thackeray, triggering a speculation that the Sena was still keeping its alliance options open. Soon after Delhi Police visited Arvind Kejriwal's residence to look for evidence in connection with an alleged assault on Chief Secretary Anshu Prakash there by AAP legislators, the chief minister said that he fights with the Centre for the people. Soon after the Delhi Police raided Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal's residence to look for evidence in connection with the alleged assault on Chief Secretary Anshu Prakash by AAP legislators, party leaders slammed the police in a press conference. AAP leader Sanjay Singh said that only on the basis of a person's account, the Delhi Police has arrested two legislators and reached the chief minister's place. He also asked if the Delhi Police is dancing to the tunes of the BJP. Party leader Ashutosh said that the aim of the Delhi Police was only to humiliate. The Delhi Police on Friday visited Kejriwal's residence in the Civil Lines area for collecting evidence related to an alleged assault on Prakash by AAP MLAs. The Aam Aadmi Party termed the action "police raj" and said that there was no "intimation" prior to the search. CM house taken over by police. Huge number of police force enters CM house without any intimation. Police Raj kills democracy in Delhi. Police spread all over inside CM house. If this what they can to do an elected CM, think what they can with poor people! pic.twitter.com/gUP9UdB8IC AAP (@AamAadmiParty) February 23, 2018 AAP also tweeted a video of the police personnel at Kejriwal's house, saying the police asked about the paint and plaster in the room. CM CCTV - ' , ? ? ? pic.twitter.com/FEXxBMK2Yz AAP (@AamAadmiParty) February 23, 2018 Firstpost also interviewed Ashutosh about the controversy: Meanwhile, in a rally the chief minister said that he will continue to fight with the Centre for the people. "I fight the Centre for you. I fight bureaucrats for you. I fight for your betterment," he said. #LIVE -- I fight the Centre for you. I fight bureaucrats for you. I fight for your betterment. Will fight to get the work done: Delhi CM @ArvindKejriwal #AAPvsBabus #ThappadMystery pic.twitter.com/nHnXkj8QRd News18 (@CNNnews18) February 23, 2018 He hit out at bureaucrats saying that officers don't listen to the Delhi government and they have to fight to get any work done. He also launched an attack on the media and said that the media did not show any work done by the Delhi government for the people because they don't care about the city's welfare. Elaborating on the schemes of the Delhi government, Kejriwal said that they have started the construction of houses for the poor and education in government schools till standard 12 is free. He added that the Delhi government will also give a loan of up to Rs 10 lakh for higher education. Talking about job creation, he said that the Delhi government has opened skill development centres, which have a 100 percent placement rate. However, he said the only flaw of the Aam Aadmi Party is that they don't know how to do politics. "We are not netas," he said, while adding that this is the reason the BJP, Congress and media are after them. "We have lost ground in playing politics and that's why we suffer." #LIVE -- We do not know how to do politics, that is why BJP, Cong and media are after us. We have lost ground in playing politics and that's why we suffer: Delhi CM @ArvindKejriwal #AAPvsBabus #ThappadMystery pic.twitter.com/A3slMyMMnO News18 (@CNNnews18) February 23, 2018 Earlier this week the Delhi chief secretary had alleged that he was beaten up by Amanatullah Khan and Prakash Jarwal Aam Aadmi Party MLAs in the presence of Kejriwal at the latter's residence on Monday night. Prakash on Tuesday said the incident took place when he was summoned to attend an emergency meeting at Kejriwal's home. It all began with film star and the chief of Jana Sena party Pawan Kalyan calling upon the political parties in the state to move the no-confidence motion against the Modi government for not keeping its promises to the people of Andhra Pradesh. Andhra political parties are preparing for moving the no-confidence motion against the Narendra Modi government. More than irking the NDA government both the ruling and opposition parties in Andhra Pradesh are competing to capitalise on the public sentiment for special category status. Both the Telugu Desam Party and YSR Congress have their own reasons to play politics with the public sentiment. It all began with the film star and the chief of Jana Sena party who in 2014 campaigned for the TDP-BJP combine without contesting the elections, calling upon the political parties in the state to move the no-confidence motion against the Modi government for not keeping its promises to the people of Andhra Pradesh. The YSR Congress chief was quick to respond. In a bid to corner Pawan Kalyan who is considered to be still close to TDP chief N Chandrababu Naidu, YS Jaganmohan Reddy said that his party is ready to move the no-confidence motion in the last week of budget session and asked Kalyan to ensure the support of the TDP for the same. Jaganmohan even offered to extend support to the TDP if it takes an initiative to move the no-confidence motion against the Modi government. Kalyan immediately agreed to the challenge posed by Jaganmohan and even offered to procure the support of MPs of other parties too. However, Chandrababu Naidu said that moving the no-confidence motion is the last resort and his party would not hesitate to do so if the demands of the state are not met. Thus, the politics of Andhra Pradesh are revolving around the no-confidence motion. Quite interestingly, Jaganmohan who in the recent past extended unconditional support to BJP-led NDA in the presidential and vice-presidential elections is now talking about lack of confidence in the NDA government. The YSR Congress never focussed its tirade on BJP and instead continued to target TDP and the chief minister in person for the failure to get what is due from the Centre. Jaganmohan who had displayed so much confidence in the leadership of the prime minister that too in crucial elections could conveniently change his tone and tenor. The idea is not to cause any major embarrassment to the BJP but it is a clever bid to corner the TDP as it is a part of NDA. Jaganmohan's single point agenda seems to be ensuring the split in BJP-TDP alliance. Even today he does not categorically state that his party will not have any alliance with BJP before or after 2019 elections. Anyhow, the no-confidence motion cannot in any way cause any embarrassment to Modi-led NDA government which enjoys more than a comfortable majority. But, it would give an opportunity for different political parties to express their stand on how far the promises of bifurcation and the provisions of the act were implemented. Jaganmohan is emphasising on the special category status to Andhra Pradesh as promised by the then prime minister Manmohan Singh in Parliament. Here again, the politics come into play. In fact, the BJP was the author of the special status. The UPA regime agreed to a five-year special status to the residuary state of Andhra Pradesh only after the BJP vociferously demanded it. Especially, present Vice-President, M Venkaiah Naidu and present Finance Minister Arun Jaitley were instrumental in making the then prime minister announce it in Parliament. The BJP and the TDP have promised special status for 15 years during the 2014 elections. But, now, the BJP-led NDA government is reneging on this promises quoting the 14th Finance Commission. In view of the changed devolution formula, the concept of special category status became redundant, said the 14th Finance Commission report. The YSR Congress instead of targeting the BJP for not fulfilling its own promises of according special status uses the issue to hit at TDP chief. Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu has become vulnerable as he not only endorsed the Centre's proposal to offer special package in lieu of special status but has even praised the former. The YSR Congress is now all set to use the no-confidence motion to press for special status thus compelling Chandrababu Naidu to once again demand special status. But, the TDP lost its moral high ground as it avidly accepted a special package. The YSR Congress has nothing to lose by moving the no-confidence motion in Lok Sabha. But, Chandrababu Naidu can do it only after deciding to come out of NDA, a decision which he is yet to make. Jaganmohan is also capitalising on Chandrababu Naidu's dilemma by planning to move the no-confidence motion before TDP takes a call. However, the intriguing point is that the YSR Congress chief for no worthwhile reason to explain said that he would move the motion in the last week of the budget session knowing fully well that such an attempt may not be so useful in the last days of the session. YSR Congress critics interpret this as an attempt to prevent any embarrassment to Modi but accomplish the objective of putting Chandrababu Naidu in a dock. Though the Congress has no representation in Lok Sabha from the state, the pressure is mounting on the party leadership to join this no-confidence bandwagon. Thus the two warring parties, the TDP and the YSR Congress want to strike at each other but not wound BJP at this point in time. But, the politics around no-confidence inevitably challenge the BJP. The state unit is already on the offensive. If this politics of no-confidence crosses the Andhra coast to reach Delhi, the TDP may find it difficult to sail with the BJP and the YSR Congress may also find it equally difficult to have any electoral understanding with the BJP at least in the pre-election phase. Both Rajinikanth and Kamal Haasan are in a sense borrowing the MGR template, as the actor too acted in over 20 movies after he formed the AIADMK in 1972, till he became chief minister in 1977. A few weeks ago, I was watching a 2017 interview of Mani Ratnam done by Gautam Menon, two directors I deeply admire for their body of work and quality of craft. After Mani Ratnam had shared his thoughts about how the iconic Nayakan with Kamal Haasan happened, Menon said with the adulatory look of a fan. "I hope for further collaboration between you and Kamal Sir because lakhs of people want that." Ratnam's reply was practical. "He has done so much that unless you have really solid meat to give him, there is no point. I should have something to offer and then it is his choice. We should feel that we can take him to something else that he has not done before which is very difficult to find." Now with Kamal Haasan's foray into politics and his decision to bid goodbye to films after his two releases in 2018, it means Mani Ratnam, Gautam Menon who directed the edgy Vettaiyaadu Vilaiyaadu (Hunt and Play) with Haasan in 2006, or any other writer or director even if they have another brilliant script, would not be able to tempt the abhineta in Haasan transformed into a neta. I feel an obstacle for Kamal Haasan in his political innings will be Kamal Haasan, the actor. On Wednesday, when Haasan unveiled the name and logo of his political party Makkal Needhi Maiam in Madurai, one of his fans, Sundaresan pointed out that some of his ardent fans may not vote for him. "Some fans while they wish him well, want him to continue acting and entertain us with his craft. For a selfish reason, people with that kind of a mindset may say let others rule in politics, let Kamal rule in films," said Sundaresan. Rajinikanth, in contrast, is not letting his fans down. While his Kaala and 2.0 will release this year, he has signed up Sun Pictures next production, with young director Karthik Subbaraj, all of four films old in Kollywood, to wield the megaphone. Not just that, Sun Pictures that is owned by DMK leader M Karunanidhi's grand nephew Kalanidhi Maran, says it will be a "mammoth" and "colossal production". The announcement took everyone by surprise because it means Rajini won't be the 24x7 politician he is expected to be. The news enthused the Rajinikanth fans no end. But the film runs the risk of suffering from want of adequate attention from Rajinikanth especially if the government in Tamil Nadu falls this year and Assembly elections are announced by 2019. Would Kalanidhi Maran, who is bankrolling the project, have gone into the project without an assurance from the superstar that the movie will have his 100 percent commitment? If that is the case, it means that Rajini plans to have a call sheet attitude to his political avatar. It also means his decision to enter politics will be interpreted as a reluctant one, arising out of extraneous considerations. This approach of straddling two boats is highly unlikely to work in a state whose politics is in flux and the people of Tamil Nadu for a change, have a problem of plenty. Will the voters invest their trust in a man whose heart seems to be more in the reel than in the real? The calculation of Team Rajini possibly is that the superstar's best case scenario is to woo the people through the big screen. Imagine a larger-than-life Rajinikanth, mouthing politically loaded punchlines, with a cinema theatre becoming an alternative to a public meeting venue. More so if the movie releases just ahead of the polls. After Tamil Nadu has seen MGR winning elections even when he was in the hospital and a Jayalalithaa who was largely deemed inaccessible. While Haasan's Vishwaroopam 2 is more or less complete, Sabash Naidu, which is more of a comedy, is only 60 percent complete. The only reason why Haasan may still want to have an Indian 2 directed by Shankar releasing ahead of elections would be that it will showcase him in the role of an anti-corruption vigilante, that will be in sync with his political rhetoric. But does he have the time to don the greasepaint after having raised expectations in Madurai? Haasan however, has a Plan B. He is likely to host the second season of Bigg Boss in Tamil, that was a huge hit in 2017. The show on the small screen will give him the opportunity to reach the living rooms in Tamil Nadu every weekend and he is more than likely to use it as a quasi-campaign platform. He has already seen the reach and impact of his Thursday column in popular Tamil magazine Vikatan where he pulls no punches. Both Rajini and Haasan are in a sense borrowing the MGR template, as the actor too acted in over 20 movies after he formed the AIADMK in 1972, till he became chief minister in 1977. If the brush with celluloid did not make people doubt MGR's sincerity in politics, the argument goes the same should apply to the two stars. Kamal Haasan, the latest film star to don the political mantle, loves to talk in riddles Kamal Haasan, the latest film star to don the political mantle, loves to talk in riddles. He probably means well and is even serious about doing a good job in politics, but he often talks in what sounds like staccato bursts of arcane poetry. This makes his new party, which he calls Makkal Needhi Maiam (MNM) or Centre for People's Justice, a conundrum that leaves people scratching their heads and wondering what it's all about. If the name sounds as if it's a bunch of Maoist hotheads on the JNU campus, Haasan may be excused. Perhaps like the Italians, he has a fondness for outlandish names for political parties. Italy has parties called Us With Italy, Direction Italy, Five Star Movement and the like. Whatever the name, Wednesday's launch of Haasan's party was more like a teaser trailer that threw up hints, but stopped short of the mega premiere that his legion of fans had hoped it would be. Nobody can say the plot is thickening, because nobody knows what the plot is. If anything, the plot is only getting more confusing. A tantalising preview may be a nice thing if you want to ramp up suspense and interest before a film's release. But political parties need to be launched with more clarity, with no fear of spoilers. Considering the nasty experiences Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh have had with parties launched or led by movie stars, Haasan needs to tell people in simple, unriddled prose what he wants to do. The MNM leader's professed intention to tidy up the filth in Tamil Nadu's decadent politics and turn the state into a squeaky-clean place is admirable. But if he knows how he wants to achieve that noble objective, he hasn't shared it with us. A leader launching a party has to do much more than shooting off tweet-length sermons about the evils of corruption. Rhetoric against corruption, something in which most parties including the most corrupt of them indulge, can only be a part of a party's programme but not all of it. Modern voters, even those in Tamil Nadu where politics have reached abysmal depths, would be better off knowing a new party's political and economic agenda a bit more elaborately. Haasan's reputation as one of India's best actors and a gentleman also won't guarantee him votes. Apart from corruption, the only thing the actor has been consistent about is his allergy to communalism. That's a fine stand to take since nobody in the right mind supports communalism. And he has made no secret of the fact that he will keep a safe distance from Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his BJP. This has sent Modi-baiters and Left-leaning intellectuals into joyous raptures like happy children who have been handed lollipops. You can hear them sing songs of celebration, hailing Haasan as an angel dropped from heaven to fight the demon of Modi. This again, however, won't do to get him enough votes in Tamil Nadu, where Hindutva is not a big talking point. Haasan has a right to choose who or what he wants to fight, but who are his friends? Try to answer that question, and you again end up wondering what's going on. Arvind Kejriwal, Pinarayi Vijayan as role models? Haasan has left many in Tamil Nadu as well as those outside the state unenthused, dismayed and puzzled by holding up as his role models Arvind Kejriwal of AAP and Pinarayi Vijayan of the CPM. Is the actor unaware that AAP has failed people's expectations after a promising start as a party that took birth from an anti-corruption crusade? Hasn't anyone told him that, after winning Delhi elections, AAP turned into a party of intrigues, personality cult and ego clashes that would shame even the Congress? As for the CPM, it suffers from hallucinations about Communism that most of the world has discarded as ideological junk; it's a party that's making a slow disappearance from India. If Haasan isn't aware of all this, he must educate himself about things beyond Dravidian politics before picking his friends. Haasan will leave even his admirers wondering whether he is so ideologically confused that he should tap on the shoulders of Kejriwal, Vijayan and the likes to draw inspiration. So is Haasan a Leftist? Ask that question and you will get an answer by way of another riddle. He said in his launch speech on Wednesday that he chose the word 'Maiam' (which means centre) in the party's name because he is neither with "the left nor the right". That's not all. He went on to say in his column in Tamil magazine Ananda Vikatan on Thursday: "I want to reflect all those who are good to the country from the centre. People too seek that." You end up shaking your head. If Haasan revels at least in his vagueness, the other actor Rajinikanth, who too is taking the political plunge, goes about in a state of nothingness by saying, "yes", nothing and maintaining Sphinx-like silence on issues. Like a ballerina unsure of her footsteps, Rajinikanth is making a phased and slow entry into politics. Haasan is no NTR This reminds me of the days when superstar NT Rama Rao launched his Telugu Desam in 1982. His speeches, that I had the misfortune to attend, made little sense even to his closest friends. He misquoted historical figures and bandied about non-existent statistics without batting an eyelid as if he was reading from a bad script, made worse by his insufferable movie-like gesticulations. But he got away with it because the Congress had made such a grand mess of itself, that with his demigod status in Andhra Pradesh, NTR's very presence on the scene helped him sweep the polls. He didn't need to bother to offer a meaningful, alternative programme. Haasan won't be as lucky. He wants to jump into the vacuum that he believes the demise of J Jayalalithaa has left behind, but even Rajinikanth wants to set his foot in the same no man's land. Besides, neither Jayalalithaa's AIADMK, nor the DMK shows signs of any irreparable decay in Tamil Nadu's politics. They are not in the same predicament as the Congress experienced in Andhra Pradesh in 1982. Both Haasan and Rajinikanth need to make clear what their respective parties stand for if they want to take voters away from the two Dravidian parties. In the absence of that, only one thing may happen: Despite their public bonhomie, they will end up fighting each other to occupy the same political space while one of the Dravidian parties walks away with victory. Two heroes fighting for the same heroine isn't new. But the villain walking away with her in the end won't make a good movie. The author tweets @sprasadindia OCEAN SPRINGS, Mississippi -- Two Ocean Springs High School freshmen have been arrested after they were overheard "shooting up the school" Tuesday morning. According to Jackson County Sheriff Mike Ezell, another student overheard the 14- and 16-year-old boys discussing the threat and notified campus police. The 14-year-old was arrested Wednesday night, with the 16-year-old taken into custody Thursday afternoon. Both were transported to the Jackson County Youth Court, charged with interfering with a school session, a misdemeanor. Ezell said the investigation is continuing. In an advisory sent to parents just prior to the announcement of the arrests, Ocean Springs superintendent Bonita Coleman acknowledged the threat, saying the district was fully cooperating with law enforcement. "The Ocean Springs School District will prosecute to the fullest extent of the law any individual posing a threat to our school district," Coleman wrote. "The Ocean Springs School District will take all threats, real or perceived, seriously. School officials always take immediate action upon any threat against our schools. We will always place the safety and well-being of our students and staff as our top priority." Coleman said the district continues to promote the "See Something, Say Something" campaign, and that "school safety is everyone's business." "Any time a student, parent or member of the public has information concerning any type of threat against the district or a school, we ask that you notify us as soon as possible. Threats are not considered to be a joke, and any type of threat against a school should not be taken lightly. "Upon becoming aware of such threats, local law enforcement and school officials should be notified immediately." Siddaramaiah dubbed NDA government a '90 percent commission sarkar', retaliating to Narendra Modi's taunt that ruling Congress govt in Karnataka was a '10 percent commission sarkar'. Bengaluru: Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah on Thursday dubbed the NDA government a '90 percent commission sarkar', retaliating to Prime Minister Narendra Modi's taunt that the ruling Congress government in the state was a '10 percent commission sarkar'. "It's Prime Minister Narendra Modi who runs a '90 percent commission sarkar' in Delhi. He should prove the charge that our government takes 10 per cent commission," Siddaramaiah said in Bengaluru. Addressing BJP rallies in Mysuru on 19 February and in Bengaluru on 4 February, Modi said Karnataka is ruled by a 10 percent commission Sarkar. Replying to a motion of thanks to the address Governor Vajubhai R Vala delivered on 5 February to the joint session of the legislature, Sidddaramaiah told the legislators in the assembly that the previous Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government in the state was the most corrupt one from 2008 to 2013, with three chief ministers in five years. "PM Modi should give evidence on the charges he levelled against our government. Let him prove that we take commission. If he says we take 10 percent cut, then his government takes 90 percent commission," asserted Siddaramaiah on the 6th day of the 10-day budget session in Vidhana Soudha. Accusing the prime minister of indulging in shoot and scoot, the chief minister said it was Modi who revelled in 'hit and run' tactic during his visits to the state for addressing his party's (BJP) rally' "The BJP has failed to prove the charges Modi and its leaders made against our government and me. Otherwise, they should withdraw them and apologise to the people of the state for insulting them," said Siddaramiah. Locking horns with the chief minister, opposition BJP leader in the assembly Jagadish Shettar alleged the ruling Congress government was number one in corruption. "The people know what happened during the BJP's 5-year misrule, when the rich mining district Ballari was turned into a republic by its members," recalled Siddaramaiah. Protesting against the chief minister's remarks, the BJP members staged a walkout amid noisy scenes. Ahead of Meghalaya polls on 27 February, Chief Minister Mukul Sangma speaks about his poll strategy, cleansing Congress of dissidents and why he believes his party will return to power in March Tura, Meghalaya: Mukul Sangma swore in as Meghalaya chief minister for the second time in 2013. With 29 Congress MLAs and the support of eight independent and two NCP MLAs, Sangma walked into the Meghalaya Assembly. Things have changed since then. Several of the Congress MLAs have either left or have been expelled while NCP has accused the chief minister of not giving the party its due in the last five years. Former party member Pynshngainlang N Syiem has joined the newly-floated People's Democratic Front (PDF) and National People's Party (NPP) chief Conrad Sangma is expecting to cash-in on the anti-incumbency factor. With Meghalaya all set to go for polls on 27 February, Firstpost spoke with Chief Minister Mukul Sangma about his poll strategy, cleansing Congress of dissidents and why he believes Congress will return to power in March. You are among the very few Meghalaya chief ministers who have been able to complete a full term. Poor development in the state and unfulfilled promises, these are the opponents charges against your government. Is this election going to be the toughest in your political career? We take this election battle as a challenge and we have done our job. We have promised people what we need to promise, and it has been reflected in our party manifesto. I must tell you one thing: out of the promises we made in the party manifesto for 2013 election, we have been able to implement almost all. As you embark upon the whole affair of governance over a period of five years, you will be confronted with a number of issues and challenges. You will evolve. We have been able to deal with those issues to set a new benchmark with respect to maintaining transparency and effective delivery of programmes. NPP, a Garo hills party, is now making inroads in Khasi and Jaintia Hills, where Congress was strong. Is Congress losing confidence? We are strong in both the eastern region of Khasi-Jaintia hills and the western region that is Garo hills. In 2013, we had 16 MLAs out of 36 in the eastern part and 13 MLAs out of 24 in the western part. That was the first time Congress managed to have 29 MLAs in a house of 60. For the first time in the history of Meghalaya, we formed the government without a regional party being part of the coalition. But senior MLAs from Khasi and Jaintia Hills have left your party. How much is the dissidence within Congress going to affect you? These leaders were instrumental in creating instability. So, there was a need for the party to cleanse itself. We have taken this as a privilege because BJP was poaching MLAs, and not just Congress MLAs, independents, MLAs from NCP and other parties too. So its a culmination of the exercise that BJP has been indulging in... in looking out for leaders since they do not have a base here. They have made a mockery of the system of democracy. BJP promises if they are voted to power, they would solve the deadlock as far as the coal mining is concerned. Do you think its a far-fledged promise and is anti-environment? NGT has not banned coal mining. NGT has banned illegal and unregulated coal mining. Now its incumbent upon the government to ensure that every mining activity in the state is in accordance with the various statutory laws of the land. To fulfil the provisions of law with respect to environmental safety and health, in 2012, the government came up with a notification on mine development and its regulation. Meanwhile, the ban by the NGT on illegal and unregulated mining came into force (in April 2014). We already have a whole policy in place. What is required now is for the people to actually take advantage of this whole solution that has already been put in place for the miners. Unregulated coal mining is suicidal for the environment and anyone who is for it is definitely anti-environment. Isnt this a Mukul Sangma vs Conrad Sangma election? How do you see it? Its not correct. The reality is that its a fight between Congress and BJP and its associates. Its as simple as that. BJP is instrumental in driving all other parties in the North East Democratic Alliance (NEDA). NPP and UDP are associates of NEDA. So its simple: its a fight between Congress and the BJP-led coalition. And Meghalaya saw massive protests against the beef ban last year. (The state Assembly later passed a resolution against the Centres notification restricting the sale of cattle for slaughter.) Do you feel the state wont welcome all those regional parties aligning with BJP? You have seen what is happening in all BJP-ruled states. Their whole agenda and their fringe elements are acting against the people. So, in Meghalaya, it is a fight with the only party that stands in the way of BJP in opposing their agenda. BJP has only engaged in aggressive marketing, and Modi, I must say, is an expert in it. Meghalaya has a history of a fractured mandate. You had to take the support of Independents last time, and this time around, its Congress vs all the regional forces. Are you comfortable? Do you have regional parties on your side? Meghalaya is one of the few states which has demonstrated the ability of coalition government. You are associated with inherent challenges when you have a coalition government. Notwithstanding that background, what we are looking at is to have a comfortable majority with a full mandate from our beloved people. We are sure that we will come up with the required numbers to form the government. (Syeda Ambia Zahan is a Guwahati-based freelance writer and a member of 101Reporters.com, a pan-India network of grassroots reporters.) As one of the only constituencies in Meghalaya not reserved for STs, Phulbari often sees a starkly different flavour of politics vis-a-vis rest of state. Phulbari, Meghalaya: As one of the only constituencies in the Meghalaya Assembly not reserved for the Scheduled Tribes, Phulbari often witnesses a starkly different flavour of politics vis-a-vis the rest of the state. Here, campaign posters are printed in Bengali, and even historically Garo parties deliver speeches in non-tribal languages although the area falls within the district of West Garo Hills. With only 26 thousand-odd voters, Phulbari is a complex constituency to understand, its incumbent MLA Abu Taher Mondal says. "It is not only divided along lines of caste, creed and religion but also sharply separated on linguistic lines. We have over 12 thousand Muslim voters, eight thousand-plus Christian voters and around 5.6 thousand Hindu voters," he said. "Although issues of development are crucial to our people, the voters pay importance to the alignment of the leaders, religious and otherwise. The profile of the leader plays a major role here I feel that every election in Phulbari is like a new ball by a bowler; you never know if he will throw an in-swing or an out-swing," Mondal, who is the lone non-tribal MLA of the outgoing Assembly, said. Of the candidates contesting the polls from Phulbari this year, there are two Muslims, one Garo Christian, and one Hindu candidate. "So, you can see the kind of lines being drawn in these polls," Mondal added. Phulbari is some 80 kilometres away from the nearest major town of Tura, the administrative headquarters of the district. However, the drive from Tura to Phulbari takes well over three hours because of the dreadful road conditions, an issue that has remained a campaign-favourite for all parties, other than the ruling Congress. "This patch looks more like a network of potholes connected by bits of road, rather than the other way around," BJP spokesperson Nalin Kohli said at a rally on Thursday. Mondal, who also served as the Speaker of the current Meghalaya Assembly, says he is being unfairly targetted over the issue. "The work of an MLA should not be justified by the state of one particular road. Everybody attacks me on this, but six MLAs share different stretches of this road," he said, before pointing to logistical delays and extreme weather for the road's poor condition. Perhaps because of this lack of infrastructural connectivity with other towns, Phulbari, which rarely witnesses even commercial airplanes in its skies, witnessed four choppers land in the heart of the town over the last few days. Three of them belonged to the convoy of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who signalled the Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP) strongest ever campaign in this part of the state. The BJP has never had a significant presence in the Garo Hills and did not even have a strong campaign through the previous decade, according to local residents. "Phulbari, especially, was never a BJP territory; at least it hasn't been for a very long while. This is the first time we are witnessing the party come out in such force and campaign here," Mohammed Jubbar Ali, who owns an electronics outlet in the town, said. Modi's presence in the campaign is sure to make a difference in the neighbouring constituencies as well, Ali said. "After Modi's rally, BJP is being talked about a lot more here. It's all about the Modi wave, isn't it?" Ali's son Mohammed A Islam, who also works in the outlet, says that in Meghalaya, the BJP is not campaigning as a party for Hindus. "We would support the BJP because we would like some change. We understand the party may be against Muslims in other parts of the country, but it is showing an entirely different face here," he said. In the adjacent non-reserved constituency of Rajabala, Sofior Rahman has been chosen to represent the BJP, who insisted that his candidature proves the secular intentions of the party. "If the BJP were indeed communal, why would I, a Muslim, be given a BJP ticket?" Rahman asked in Bengali at a rally on Thursday. Modi, too, did not shy away from bringing religion into his election pitch. In his Phulbari rally on Thursday, he said, "I would like to tell the people of Meghalaya that my government mobilised all resources to free 46 nurses from Kerala mostly Christians from Islamic State's captivity in Iraq." He appealed to the locals to give BJP a chance at serving them, adding, "If you do not like our work in the government, remove us from power after five years." However, BJP's decision to bring its biggest campaign star to the dusty and remote town of Phulbari was not random, Mondal said. "They knew they didn't have a chance in the chief minister's constituency, so the next option would be to send the party's main campaigner to the Speaker's constituency. If I do meet Modi, I will thank him for his visit here, because his rally clearly shows how important it is for them to defeat me." The unusual demographics of the region come to the fore in campaigns by other parties as well. Conrad Kongkal Sangma, chief of the National People's Party (NPP) a party seen as a strictly Garo organisation chose to address the crowd in this West Garo Hills town in Hindi on Wednesday, attacking the Congress and its policies. NPP candidate for Phulbari, Rahibul Islam, continued on the anti-Congress pitch in Bengali, saying "I will undo the Congress' wrongs and bring in better education facilities and infrastructure, if voted to power, inshallah." However, none of the NPP leaders attacked the BJP or its campaign in the state. In fact, Islam said he would understand if people wished to vote for the "wide-admired" prime minister, but pleaded with them to reject the Congress. Both the BJP and NPP have dismissed speculations of a pre-poll alliance. "It is absurd to say that there is no pre-poll alliance (between the BJP and NPP), after their partnership at the Centre and Manipur government. Maybe they fear that if they make it official, there will be political repercussions, given the religious and ethnic make-up of the state," Mondal said. The Bangladesh border is less than 60 kilometres away from Phulbari, but the issue of illegal immigration does not come up in election rallies in the area. "Listen to the Bengali accent of the locals, it is identical to the one heard in Bangladesh. But these people had migrated a generation ago, at least. Illegal migration is not really an issue here anymore," a local restaurant owner said, wishing to remain anonymous. "We share borders with Assam, not Bangladesh. I don't think illegal immigration is an issue here at all. Nobody can prove it," Mondal said, "If there are Bangladeshis living here, they should be thrown away I have no issues saying that. We do not want outsiders settling here either; we are already facing land problems." Mhao Humtsoe, the leader of the Lotha tribe, said that not everyone is satisfied with the way the Nagaland peace talks are being carried out. As the BJP attempts to make further inroads into the North East by making the ongoing peace talks with Naga cessationist groups its main poll plank in Nagaland, Mhao Humtsoe, leader of the Lotha tribe, says not everyone is satisfied with the way the peace talks are being carried out. He says that many people are not happy with the peace talks as the territorial boundary of Nagaland is not yet demarcated and the peace talks do not include the demand for integration of the Naga territories. Lotha is a major Naga tribe residing in the hilly terrain of Wokha district. Known as a hunter tribe earlier, Lotha now has a population of more than five lakh and plays a decisive role in four of the 60 Assembly constituencies in Nagaland. Humtsoe leads the civil society organisation Lotha Ho Ho. Naga civil society organisations are mostly apolitical in nature and they keep a safe distance from electoral politics. Humtsoe spoke to Firstpost on the condition that no issue related to electoral politics would be addressed in the conversation. Speaking on the Naga peace talks, he said, "Though people welcome the talks, they are not satisfied with the way it has been taken ahead. One important reason is that Nagalands territorial boundaries are not yet demarcated. So, the question arises about which territory the peace talks are being carried out? And whether the peace talk is about the Nagas or about some other people?" Significantly, Nagaland has a long-standing border dispute with neighbouring state Assam. The Nagaland State Act of 1962 defines the borders of Nagaland. Nagas did not accept the borders defined by it and demanded that Nagaland should comprise of the erstwhile Naga Hills and all Naga-dominated areas of North Cachar and Nagaon district of Assam, which a notification issued in the year 1866 had defined as Naga territory. The disputed areas are now densely inhabited by non-Nagas as well. Humtsoe's voice is unlikely to be representative of all Lothas, but it can be predictive of the resistance the BJP may face in few pockets in the constituencies where the former Congressman's views strike a chord. He further asserted that the talks should be about the Naga people living in a clearly demarcated Nagaland and not a vague area. "The geographical territory of Nagaland can be extended to the Naga areas falling in political boundaries other than Nagaland if the Government of India wants," said the former Congress MLA. Integration of the Naga areas has all along been one of the most contentious issues in the Naga peace talks. The insurgent outfit NSCN (IM) has been demanding the formation of a greater Nagalim by integrating Naga-inhabited areas in Assam, Manipur, Arunachal Pradesh and Myanmar. The Centre has repeatedly ruled out any possibility of integration of Naga territories in the final agreement. The ongoing Naga peace talks even without the possibility of integration of Naga territories have been seen as a silver lining by many in the insurgency-ridden state of Nagaland. In fact, all the political parties in Nagaland are claiming their share of credit for it. Significantly, former chief minister of Nagaland Neiphiu Rio, who had earlier been seen as a flag bearer of the demand for integration of Naga territories told Firspost in an exclusive interview: "Though physical integration of Naga territories is said to be not possible by the Government of India, but cultural, political and social integration is required and both sides seem to have agreed with it." Rio is the chief ministerial candidate of the NDPP-BJP alliance. But Humtsoe suggests that integration of Naga areas should also be a part of the talks. "The peace process should not only result in people's integration but also in geographical integration," he said. He also said that though many political parties are claiming credit for the peace talks, people are yet to be sure as to which claim to trust upon because the contents of the agreement are yet to be known. Lotha dominated areas in Nagaland are seen by the BJP as its stronghold. It has fielded candidates in three constituencies, including former home minister Y Patton in the state government who has recently joined the saffron party switching his political affiliation from Naga Peoples Front. Though the BJP sees the Lotha populated area as its stronghold, party insiders also say that there is still some resistance in some pockets. The saffron partys success would depend on the overcoming these challenges. Shiv Sena chief Uddhav Thackeray said the Rs 11,400 crore scam at the PNB had pushed the controversy surrounding the purchase of Rafale fighter jets. Mumbai: Shiv Sena chief Uddhav Thackeray, taking a swipe at Prime Minister Narendra Modi, on Thursday said the Rs 11,400 crore scam at the PNB had pushed the controversy surrounding the purchase of Rafale fighter jets to the back-burner. "Bigwigs indulge in corruption and leave the country. However, poor farmers, who have taken small loans but are unable to repay them, are forced to end their lives. Until this contrast ends, fixing nets in Mantralaya (to prevent suicides) will not solve the issue. How were loans worth thousands of crores given?" he questioned. He asked how it was possible for some people to siphon off thousands of crores of rupees in the past two-three years when, during demonetisation, ordinary people were asked several questions when they went to their banks to withdraw cash. "Scams are coming out in the open one after the other. Due to this issue (the Punjab National Bank scam), the Rafale scam has been put on the back-burner," Thackeray said. He was speaking to reporters here after launching a book by Sena MLC Neelam Gorhe, who completed 20 years in the party. The Sena chief said there was an atmosphere of suspicion towards banks in the country today as people had deposited their life's savings thinking that banks were safe. However, when a bank is bust by someone intentionally, the government takes responsibility of just Rs 1 lakh, he said. "I have asked Sena MPs to meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi or the finance minister and submit a memorandum, asking that the government take complete responsibility for people's money. If the government can wring our necks and collect taxes, why can't it safeguard our money?" Thackeray questioned. On a query on his absence from the "Magnetic Maharashtra" business summit, Thackeray said that no actual work was done despite several MoUs being signed and 'bhoomipujan' being conducted. "I will now go only for the actual inauguration of projects. Many a times, policies of the Centre and the state change and projects don't take off. It remains to be seen how many projects actually fructify this time. Care should be taken to ensure that the money, received by way of investments, is not taken away like how (Nirav) Modi did," he said. The Shiv Sena on Friday hit out at Sharad Pawar over his recent comments against caste-based reservation, saying the NCP chief had always 'supported' caste politics and was inconsistent in his political views. Mumbai: The Shiv Sena on Friday hit out at Sharad Pawar over his recent comments against caste-based reservation, saying the NCP chief had always "supported" caste politics and was inconsistent in his political views. The saffron party said that Pawar's remarks that reservation should be given to the financially backward people and shouldn't be caste-based, is only intended to earn brownie points. "Pawar is respected in Maharashtra as well as at the national level, but he was never consistent with the stands he took in politics. He has always been a supporter of caste-based politics," the Sena said in an editorial in its mouthpiece Saamana. Pawar, during a one-of-its-kind interview with Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) chief Raj Thackeray in Pune on Wednesday, spoke against caste-based reservation. Pawar had said, "This (reservation) is a sensitive issue. Dalits and Adivasis should be given reservation, there is no problem with it...People of other castes are holding rallies for reservation. I clearly believe that reservation should not be given based on caste, but to people who are financially backward." The Sena pointed out that when the Maratha community started taking out silent marches across the state for their various demands, including that of quota in jobs and education, Pawar had extended his support, saying they should be provided reservation. "Many leaders, including (NCP leader) Ajit Pawar, had taken part in the Maratha morchas. (Sharad) Pawar has already supported reservation for Marathas. Then why did he change his stand during his interview in Pune?" the Sena asked. "Pawar is respected for his vast political experience. In 2014, he was the first to announce support to the BJP for government formation in Maharashtra. But today, defeating the BJP-led dispensation is his sole aim. At least now, he should remain firm over this stand," it said. Sena chief Uddhav Thackeray recently attacked Prime Minister Narendra Modi over the ongoing Punjab National Bank fraud case and said that the Rs 11,400 crore scam at the PNB had pushed the controversy surrounding the purchase of Rafale fighter jets to the backburner. The Shiv Sena, Bharatiya Janata Party and the constant confusion surrounding their fateful alliance in Maharashtra is in news again. Sena chief Uddhav Thackeray recently attacked Prime Minister Narendra Modi over the ongoing Punjab National Bank fraud case and said that the Rs 11,400-crore scam at the PNB had pushed the controversy surrounding the purchase of Rafale fighter jets to the backburner. "Bigwigs indulge in corruption and leave the country. However, poor farmers, who have taken small loans but are unable to repay them, are forced to end their lives. Until this contrast ends, fixing nets in Mantralaya (to prevent suicides) will not solve the issue. How were loans worth thousands of crores given?" PTI quoted Uddhav as saying. He asked how it was possible for some people to siphon off thousands of crores of rupees in the past two-three years when, during demonetisation, ordinary people were asked several questions when they went to their banks to withdraw cash. "Scams are coming out in the open one after the other. Due to this issue (the Punjab National Bank scam), the Rafale scam has been put on the backburner," Uddhav reportedly said. He was addressing the media after launching a book by Sena MLC Neelam Gorhe, who completed 20 years in the party. The remarks by Uddhav are the latest among the recent salvos fired by the Sena against the ruling party. The Sena chief has forever been critical of the Centre's policies towards Maharashtra and has also cribbed that it has not been given adequate representation in the Union Cabinet. The Sena's attacks on Modi's central policies and Maharashtra chief minister Devendra Fadnavis have become more frequent and often delivered in scathing editorials in its mouthpiece Saamna. After a fractious campaign during the Assembly election, Shiv Sena decided to join the BJP-led Fadnavis government in Maharashtra. Allies since the early 90s, Sena-BJP relations hit a low point ever since the latter emerged as number one party in Maharashtra post the 2014 state Assembly election. Interestingly, there is still no clarity over their alliance in Maharashtra. Shiv Sena also questioned the BJP over the absence of Uddhav from the recent 'Magnetic Maharashtra' event in Mumbai, asking whether it was due to "protocol issues" or the "politics of exclusion". "This is not the first time that it has happened. During the bhoomipujan of the Ambedkar memorial in October 2015 and later, ahead of the foundation stone laying ceremony of Shivaji memorial, the BJP played petty politics," Neelam Gorhe, Sena spokesperson, was quoted as saying by PTI. "If there were protocol issues as is being claimed, it is of no consequence. Did the BJP not have protocol issues when Nirav Modi was clicking pictures with Modi at Davos? Or is the BJP simply playing politics of exclusion," she questioned. She pointed out that there was no communication between the BJP and its National Democratic Alliance (NDA) allies currently. While leaders from both the parties are busy slinging mud at each other, quite publicly, reports have hinted that the two reluctant allies are not really "keen" on breaking the alliance. Firstpost reported that the NDA leaders held meetings with Sena leaders in Mumbai, Aurangabad and Delhi. Further, the party has also offered its partner in the state the chance to contest between 140 and 144 seats seats in the Assembly polls slated for 2019. The so-called olive branch could have been extended by NDA because off late the BJP has run into trouble with its other allies in the country Chandrababu Naidu's Telugu Desam Party in Andhra and the Akalis in Punjab. The Sena unilaterally and unequivocally decided to end the coalition and go it alone in the 2019 Assembly and Lok Sabha elections in January, but its leaders have been making various statements along those lines throughout the past year. Public criticism of the state government of which the Sena is a member and jabs at the Modi government at the Centre notwithstanding, there appears to be a realisation in the BJP and Shiv Sena camps that the parties need each other in the upcoming elections. Firstpost also reported that there have been three top secret meetings between members of the two parties since November 2017. "Highly-placed BJP sources confirmed to Firstpost that the the plan to restore the coalition came about in October 2017, leading to the meetings between the parties. The BJP committee for the first meeting included Fadnavis, Revenue Minister Chandrakant Patil and Finance Minister Sudhir Mungantiwar. Other ministers like Vinod Tawde and Pankaja Munde, and former minister Eknath Khadse have reportedly been kept out of these meetings. Representing the Shiv Sena were Uddhav's personal assistant and party secretary Milind Narvekar, Rajya Sabha MP Anil Desai and Industry Minister Subhash Desai. Sena MP and spokesperson Sanjay Raut has been excluded for the time being." Claims to quit the alliance has been made so many times that even leaders have stopped believing in it. "Uddhav saheb has said the same thing at least thrice in the last one year. There is nothing new in his criticism of the BJP government and Modiji. We are not surprised by his announcement," senior BJP leader and spokesperson Madhav Bhandari was quoted as saying by Livemint after the January announcement. With inputs from agencies Asheeta Regidi On Day 13 of the Aadhaar hearings yesterday, senior counsel Gopal Subramaniam concluded his arguments for the petitioners. The petitioners discussed the risks of profiling and private party access to this data in the Aadhaar system. The intervention applications from companies stating that their business models needed Aadhaar to function were pointed to in this regard. The conflict of a filed authentication being assumed to be a fake profile, and the discretionary powers of the UIDAI to deactivate Aadhaar were also raised. Lastly, the petitioners sought compensation for those who suffered due to the system and requested an extension of the March 31st deadline for Aadhaar linkages. Collection of fingerprints and purification of electoral rolls Discussing various issues with the Aadhaar system, the petitioners first contention was that without criminality or proof of any offence being committed, people cannot be asked to give their biometrics. The case of Selvi v. State of Karnataka was quoted, wherein the Supreme Court had ruled on tests like brain fingerprinting and narco analysis without consent and had also discussed the collection of fingerprints. Next, the National Electoral Roll Purification and Authentication Programme, which had required Aadhaar to be linked with electoral rolls for their purification, was raised. On the directions of the Supreme Court in 2015 order in the Puttaswamy case, this linkage was suspended, and the Election Commission clarified that linking Aadhaar to voter cards was optional. Risks of profiling via SRDH, etc and access by Pvt parties Further discussing the invasive nature of data collection in the Aadhaar system, the petitioners argued that while Aadhaar was being linked to bank accounts for prevention of money laundering, the NPCI was making this data available to third parties. Also, access to individual profiles was possible through the State Resident Data Hubs, which had no restriction on the data collected on an individual. Rakesh Dwivedi, the senior counsel on behalf of the State of Gujarat, interjected at this point arguing that all data in SRDH had been erased after the enactment of the Aadhaar Act. The intervention application from the Digital Lenders Association and others, stating that they needed Aadhaar for their businesses to function, was also raised. The Bench, at this point, asked for credible information on exactly how much access private parties had to the information in the database. The Bench also pointed to Section 57, which allows private parties to use Aadhaar for authentication purposes only, asking how then do private parties gain access to data. The petitioners responded that the seeding of Aadhaar with multiple databases allowed such entities to gain access to information on people. Inadequate safeguards for biometric updates and failed authentication The petitioners also pointed to the fact that related definitions under the Aadhaar Act, such as of biometric information and core biometric information were open-ended definitions, allowing the addition of new forms of data via regulations. On being asked by the Bench if this allowed the inclusion of DNA in the future, the petitioners answered in the affirmative. The petitioners also pointed to the proposed creation of DNA databanks. The Aadhaar Enrolment and Update Regulations were also raised, on the fact that the burden of updating data was on the individuals, and that unlike with updating demographic data such as address and phone numbers, people couldnt know when to update their biometric data. On the Bench suggesting that people could do so upon authentication failure, the Petitioners argued that the issue with this was that failed authentication led to the person being seen as a ghost or fake profile. It is simply assumed that biometrics were captured properly at the time of enrolment and the failed authentication is an attempt by the person to duplicate. The provisions of Regulation 27-29 under the Aadhaar Enrolment Regulations, particularly the clause which allowed deactivation or cancellation of an Aadhaar number at the discretion of the UIDAI (See Regulations 27(1)(iv) and 28(1)(f)), were argued to be completely inadequate. The lack of a prescribed procedure to safeguard this power or the need for substantive reasonableness was pointed to. Section 33 of the Aadhaar Act, which allows the disclosure of information on an individual, including identity information and authentication records, pursuant to a Court order, was also pointed to. This is because this section requires the UIDAI to be heard prior to passing an order on such a disclosure, but doesnt give the same opportunity to the individual whose data is being disclosed. In summary, a failed authentication could lead to entitlements being annulled, thus resulting in permanent disablement. Data retention must be within reasonable limits Points raised previously were also summarized, that in the absence of a data protection law, the injury to people through the dangers of profiling, metadata collection and big data analytics were heightened. Data retention, it was argued, must be reasonable and subject to limits, and data retention of an entire population is extremely risky. The uncertainty and probabilistic nature of biometric systems were reasserted. The L1 Identity Solutions contracts were also referred to, which indicate that a foreign entity had possession of the algorithm and that the data was with L1 even if the UIDAI had ownership over it. This data, which includes personal data of the UID holder, could be subject to collection, use and analysis as required. Compensation for those excluded and extension of deadlines Gopal Subramaniam concluded his arguments with two main prayers, firstly that the Court grant compensation to those who were excluded, with exemplary damages in the case of starvation deaths. Secondly, he requested the Court to extend the March 31st deadline. To the second prayer, the Bench stated that appropriate interim orders would be passed at the time. Sources of the Arguments: Live Tweeting of the case from the Twitter handles @SFLCin and @prasanna_s, and LiveLaw Reports. Read our past coverage of the on-going Aadhaar Supreme court hearing: Why SC needs to look into technical evidence of Aadhaars surveillance capabilities Lack of governmental ownership of CIDRs source code can have serious consequences Will State give citizens rights only if they agree to be tracked forever, asks lawyer Shyam Divan Coalition for Aadhaar: A collective of private companies wants to ensure that Aadhaar ID and related services continue to be offered Petitioners argue on centralisation of data and challenge Aadhaars claims on savings Petitioners argue for a voluntary ID card system that does not collect user data Petitioners argue that receipt of govt benefits cannot be at the cost of compromising fundamental rights Aadhaar is architecturally unconstitutional, argue the petitioners Petitioners argue that Aadhaar violates dignity by objectifying and depersonalizing an individual The author is lawyer and author specialising in technology laws. She is also a certified information privacy professional. IANS In a tug of war over flying taxis versus Hyperloop transport system, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi and Tesla CEO Elon Musk came out in the open on the micro-blogging site Twitter when the former took a swipe at Tesla over the need to dig tunnels for its Next-Gen mobility dream. Ride-hailing app Uber has announced that it will start its ambitious flying taxi project in Los Angeles by 2020 to deal with the city's traffic problem. Uber has also signed a Space Act Agreement with NASA to create a new air traffic control system to manage low-flying autonomous aircrafts. On the other side, Tesla is currently working on building tunnels to connect New York and Washington DC as part of its Hyperloop projects. The debate began when a journalist tweeted on Thursday on behalf of Khosrowshahi who is in New Delhi to attend an event. "New @Uber CEO @dkhos says why do you need to dig tunnels for @HyperloopOne @hyperlooptt when you can fly? Challenges @elonmusk what do you say to that sir @elonmusk," tweeted Anirban Ghoshal from www.vccircle.com. Musk replied to him: "If you love drones above your house, you'll really love vast numbers of 'cars' flying over your head that are 1,000 times bigger and noisier and blow away anything that isn't nailed down when they land." The Uber CEO replied back to Tesla CEO: "Challenge accepted. Improved battery tech (thx 2 @elonmusk) and multiple smaller rotors will be much more efficient and avoid noise + environmental pollution." Khosrowshahi also had a discussion with the Indian government over airport partnerships and future of commercial air travel. "Great meeting with the Minister of State for Civil Aviation, @jayantsinha, to discuss airport partnerships and future of commercial air travel in the form of flying cars," Khosrowshahi tweeted. On February 18, the Maharashtra government announced that it has entered into an agreement with Virgin Hyperloop One to construct a hyperloop route connecting Mumbai and Pune by 2025. Reuters Chinas Huawei is forging closer commercial ties with big telecom operators across Europe and Asia, putting the company in prime position to lead the global race for next-generation 5G networks despite U.S. allegations it poses a security threat. Huaweis dominant position in China set to become the worlds biggest 5G market by far is well-documented. However, it has also been making in-roads in the rest of world to compete with rivals Ericsson and Nokia in several lucrative markets, including countries that are longstanding U.S. allies. 5G networks, now in the testing stage, will rely on denser arrays of small antennas and the cloud to offer data speeds up to 50 or 100 times faster than current 4G networks and serve as critical infrastructure for a range of industries. Deals to start building 5G networks are still largely a year away, but Huawei has signed 25 Memorandums of Understanding (MoUs) with telecom operators to trial 5G equipment, a Reuters review of company reports and announcements found. These MoUs - pre-cursors to potential commercial contracts include agreements with Britains BT, Bell Canada (BCE), Frances Orange Germanys Deutsche Telekom and global player Vodafone. Huawei lags behind Swedens Ericsson, with 38 MoUs, and Finlands Nokia, with 31, according to the data, which does not include deals that have not been made public. However, the Chinese companys existing partnerships with operators could give it an extra edge; as of 2016, Huawei said it had supplied more than half of the 537 4G networks globally and 59 of the 90 4.5G networks an intermediate step before 5G. Existing network footprint is important because operators still need to maintain their legacy ... networks and could save money by using the same vendors, said Stefan Pongratz, a top industry analyst with research firm DellOro. Huawei also has the home advantage: the firm and smaller, domestic-focused peer ZTE are each guaranteed about a third of Chinas 5G network contracts, under Beijings policy, while foreign players have to compete for slivers of the market. By 2025, 1.2 billion people worldwide are set to have access to 5G networks a third of them in China, according to the GSMA, a global trade group of nearly 800 mobile operators. There are however potential risks ahead; Huawei, like its rivals, has spent billions of dollars developing 5G network technology, there are no guarantees about when operators around the world will adopt the new technology. Many cash-strapped operators want to see significant consumer and business demand before allocating capital, something out of Huaweis control. Some emerging markets have yet to adopt 4G, putting major 5G moves at least a decade off. Triple The Size Unlisted Huawei is triple the size of either Nokia and Ericsson in terms of its annual revenue, which totaled about $92 billion last year, half of it from China. It sold 32 percent of global mobile radio access gear - antennas and base stations - in the last quarter, against Ericssons 30 percent and Nokias 25 percent, according to market research firm DellOro. Ericsson has been under heavy pressure to cut costs in recent years at a time of dwindling profits, while Nokia has had to integrate multiple acquisitions in its networks business. Nokia said it was confident its broad 5G portfolio, which also includes software and services to manage networks, would allow it to win a bigger slice of the telecoms market. Ericsson said its longstanding ties with customers and advanced 5G patent portfolio would keep it competitive. All our customers are looking at 5G, a spokesman said. Huaweis 5G MoUs include non-binding agreements with big telecom operators in South Korea, Japan and Australia, Italy, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, on top of Britain, Germany, France and Canada. Potential commercial benefits aside, these agreements indicate that many countries allied to the United States do not share Washingtons security concerns. A bill introduced in the U.S. Senate earlier this month would bar equipment from Huawei from any U.S. government networks to prevent Chinese spying. A leaked presentation from a U.S. National Security Council staffer earlier this year suggested the U.S. government build its own 5G network - a proposal that was widely ridiculed by industry experts. Huawei categorically rejects U.S. spying concerns. Huawei is trusted by governments and customers in 170 countries worldwide and poses no greater cyber-security risk than any (communications) vendor, sharing as we do common global supply chains and production capabilities, a spokesman said. Operators Reject Spying Fears Bruce Rodin, vice president of wireless networks for Bell Canada, said his company used an external cyber-security firm to conduct extensive testing of Huawei products. Weve been doing it for about 10 years and never seen malicious code or backdoors, Rodin told Reuters, characterizing the U.S. moves as an effort to protect American companies. Its a commercial thing. They are protecting their industry, he said. Deutsche Telekom said it cooperates with Huawei on many levels and found no evidence of security risks. The hardware is built to Deutsche Telekoms specifications and is examined by our own security department, a spokesman said. Orange told Reuters it is cautious with Huawei as with any supplier. Thomas Jarzombek, a member of the German parliament and digital spokesman for Angela Merkels Christian Democrats, said that in the wake of revelations about U.S. spying by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, American tech companies were not necessarily to be trusted either. This month, a trade mission by British Prime Minister Theresa May to China included a glowing endorsement of Huawei for its commitment to Britain. Debates over the timing of 5G deployment will top the agenda at Mobile World Congress, Europes biggest annual technology conference taking place next week in Barcelona. The industry is counting on the new technology to trigger a wave of growth in equipment sales and mobile services starting in 2020. Legal notices 1) The material on this blog has been created by W. Blake Gray, is protected under US copyright law and cannot be used without his permission. 2) To the FTC: In the course of my work, I accept free samples, meals and other considerations. I do not trade positive reviews or coverage for money or any financial considerations, unlike certain famous print publications which have for-profit wine clubs but, because they are not classified as "bloggers," are not required by the FTC to post a notice like this. tech2 News Staff The most anticipated event for smartphone users, Mobile World Congress 2018 (MWC), is just around the corner, making rumour mills work overtime. A number of reports have emerged about what we can see at MWC when it comes to smartphones or other technologies. In this storm of leaks, rumours and reports, Google is expected to launch the first Android Go-powered smartphones at its conference along with more Android One-powered devices. The company is also expected to launch ARCore 1.0 months after launching the first version last year. The reason Googles plans are far from rumours is that the company posted a detailed blog post about Android Go and Android One confirming that its partners will announce new Android devices at MWC. Google also confirmed that it will showcase new features for Google Assistant and Google Lens. Hiroshi Lockheimer, Senior Vice President for Platforms and Ecosystems at Google added that even though Android powers more than 2 billion active devices in the market, there are new emerging markets where consistency is more important in the experience that Android offers. The company added that users will start seeing first set of Android Oreo (Go Edition) devices starting next week. Google also reaffirmed its commitment to Android One devices and added that its partners will share news about new and upcoming Android One devices at MWC 2018. Android Go and Android One devices are not the only items that Google will launch, as an exclusive report by Variety revealed that Google is going to make a major push to bring augmented reality (AR) to Android at MWC. Google will launch the ARCore framework which will allow third-party developers to make and then launch AR-powered apps to Android-powered devices. The report points out that the company has been testing the preview version of ARCore on its Pixel line-up of devices since the reveal. According to the plans, Google is planning to bring ARCore of 100 million smartphones in the near future. The report adds that the Samsung Galaxy lineup along with the Note 8 will be the first to get ARCore support at MWC. Android Police also confirmed that Google is rolling out ARCore 1.0 through Google Play update to existing devices that already have the preview version of ARCore. tech2 News Staff Google will now allow businesses to send multimedia messages to Android users with Rich Communication Services (RCS). The company has started RCS business messaging so that brands can use multimedia-rich messages that are more useful to users instead of the text-only SMSs that a business would generally send. This means that if you have booked a movie ticket with BookMyShow, then instead of merely sending the confirmation, the business can send the QR code as an image, a message with the address of the theatre and quick action buttons to book an Uber according to the timings of the show. According to a report by The Verge, only a handful of companies are actually backing the initiative after Google invested a year on it. Some of the most notables include DHL, Booking.com and Subway. According to the blog post by Google, the company is working with 43 carriers and device makers to ensure that the native messaging experience on Android is improved. We can only presume that it means ensuring that Android Messages app is bundled with as many Android devices in the market as possible. What is interesting to note here is that RCS is based on the Universal Profile 2.0 standard and more and more companies have expressed their commitment or support for Universal Profile. Google has teamed up with Sprint in the United States and the company is working with Telcel to bring RCS to Mexico in the near future. It plans to bring RCS to more regions and businesses in the coming months. Google also added that its partners will showcase the power of RCS at Mobile World Congress 2018 (MWC). Bangladesh's High Court on Thursday accepted petitions by imprisoned former premier and main opposition BNP chief Khaleda Zia seeking bail and challenging a five-year jail term given to her by a lower court on graft charges. Dhaka: Bangladesh's High Court on Thursday accepted petitions by imprisoned former premier and main opposition BNP chief Khaleda Zia seeking bail and challenging a five-year jail term given to her by a lower court on graft charges. The 72-year-old three-time former prime minister was sentenced by Dhaka's Special Court on 8 February in connection with the embezzlement of 21 million taka (about $ 250,000) in foreign donations meant for the Zia Orphanage Trust, named after her late husband Ziaur Rahman, a military ruler-turned-politician. "The (two-judge) bench accepted the petitions and fixed Sunday for hearing her bail prayer particularly," a High Court official told newsmen. He said the bench comprising judges M Enayetur Rahim and Shahidul Karim simultaneously stayed fine of Tk 2.10 crore ($1=Tk80) that the trial slapped on Zia alongside the prison term and asked authorities concerned to forward the case records in 15 days for hearing on the appeal petition. The High Court order came as Zia s counsels filed two petitions two days after the defence counsels challenged her conviction against the lower court verdict. Zia s lawyers earlier said in their 1,223-page prayer they cited 25 grounds for her acquittal alleging that the verdict was politically motivated to debar her from contesting upcoming elections, an allegation denied by prime minister Sheikh Hasina's government. Political analysts feared the BNP was facing political crisis after Zia s conviction, which is likely to disqualify her from contesting elections. The BNP had boycotted the general election in 2014 and spearheaded a protracted street campaign enforcing a nationwide blockade coinciding with its first anniversary that saw some 500 people dead in arson attacks. Zia, however, appears to be seeking to contest the next polls set for December this year. BNP s secretary general Mirza Falhrul Islam Alamgir last week told a protest rally that the party would not take part in polls discarding Zia saying "no national election will be held without BNP Chairperson Khaleda Zia". But Prime Minister Hasina said her government could do nothing if BNP again decides to boycott the upcoming polls. The elections will be held in due time, she added. Haiti suspended the operations of British charity Oxfam pending the outcome of its investigation into allegations that its staff sexually exploited Haitians. Port-Au-Prince: Haiti on Thursday suspended the operations of British charity Oxfam pending the outcome of its investigation into allegations that its staff sexually exploited Haitians after a devastating 2010 earthquake. The country's ministry of planning and foreign aid said Oxfam GB had made a "serious error" by failing to inform Haitian authorities of the actions by their staff at the time they occurred. "These reprehensible acts, alleged crimes, acknowledged by the perpetrators as well as the NGO, are a serious violation of the dignity of the Haitian people," a government statement said. It said the charity was suspended for two months pending an internal Haitian investigation into the matter. An investigation conducted by Oxfam a year after the earthquake had found that seven staff were accused of using prostitutes at an Oxfam-funded residence. The 2011 report, disclosed on Monday, also found that three staff members had physically threatened a witness. One official has acknowledged paying for prostitutes and the others were accused of harassment and intimidation. A young Haitian woman told The Times newspaper she had had relations with the former Oxfam country director in Haiti, Roland Van Hauwermeiren, when she was 16 and he was 61. Van Hauwermeiren denied to Belgian media last week, however, that he had organised orgies with young prostitutes in Haiti, and said he had "intimate relations" with "an honourable, mature woman" whom he did not pay. Four staff were fired for gross misconduct and three others, including Van Hauwermeiren, were allowed to quit. Oxfam formally apologized to the Haitian government on Monday for its handling of the scandal and for failing to report it promptly to local authorities. "It was not for Oxfam to decide whether a crime had been committed... that was the wrong decision," Oxfam GB's chief executive Mark Goldring said Tuesday at a hearing before a British parliamentary committee. The Haiti scandal has opened the charity to greater scrutiny, leading to 26 new cases of sexual misconduct, most involving its international operations. Local Sheriff Scott Israel said on Thursday that the armed officer on duty at the Florida school in US where a shooter killed 17 people stayed outside instead of confronting the gunman Fort Lauderdale, Florida: The armed officer on duty at the Florida school in US where a shooter killed 17 people never went inside to engage the gunman and has been placed under investigation, officials announced Thursday. The Valentine's Day shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School by a gunman armed with an AR-15 style assault rifle has reignited a national debate in the US over gun laws and school safety, including proposals by US president Donald Trump and others to designate more people including trained teachers to carry arms on school grounds. Gun-control advocates, meanwhile, have redoubled their push to ban assault rifles. The school resource officer at the high school took up a position viewing the western entrance of the building that was under attack for more than four minutes, but "he never went in," Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel said at a Thursday news conference. The shooting lasted about six minutes. The officer, Scot Peterson, was suspended without pay and placed under investigation, then chose to resign, Israel said. When asked what Peterson should have done, Israel said the deputy should have "went in, addressed the killer, killed the killer." A telephone message left at a listing for Peterson by The Associated Press wasn't immediately returned. The sheriff said he was "devastated, sick to my stomach. There are no words. I mean, these families lost their children. .... I've been to the funerals. ... I've been to the vigils. It's just, ah, there are no words." There was also a communication issue between the person reviewing the school's security system footage and officers who responded to the school. Coral Springs Police Chief Tony Pustizzi said during a Thursday news conference that the footage being reviewed was 20 minutes old, so the responding officers were hearing that the shooter was in a certain place while officers already in that location were saying that wasn't the case. "There was nothing wrong with their equipment. Their equipment works," Pustizzi said. "It's just that when the person was reviewing the tape from 20 minutes earlier, somehow that wasn't communicated to the officers that it was a 20-minute delay." Pustizzi said the confusion didn't put anyone in danger. Suspect Nikolas Cruz had history of violence Shooting suspect Nikolas Cruz, 19, has been jailed on 17 counts of murder and has admitted the attack. He owned a collection of weapons. Defense attorneys, state records and people who knew him indicate that he displayed behavioral troubles for years. Broward County incident reports show that unidentified callers contacted authorities with concerns about Cruz in February 2016 and November 2017. The first caller said they had third-hand information that Cruz planned to shoot up the school. The information was forwarded to the Stoneman Douglas resource officer. The second caller said Cruz was collecting guns and knives and believed "he could be a school shooter in the making." Also in November 2017, Cruz was involved in a fight with the adult son of a woman he was staying with shortly after his mother died, according to a Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office report. On 28 November, a 22-year-old man at the Lake Worth home told the responding deputy that he tried to calm down Cruz, who had been punching holes in walls and breaking objects, but Cruz hit him in the jaw, and the man hit Cruz back. The deputy found Cruz a short time later at a nearby park. Cruz told the deputy he had been angry because he misplaced a photo of his recently deceased mother, and he apologized for losing his temper. The other man told the deputy he didn't want Cruz arrested. He just wanted Cruz to calm down before coming home. Politicians under pressure to tighten gun laws in response to the mass shooting floated various plans Thursday, but most fell short of reforms demanded by student activists who converged Wednesday on Florida's Capitol. Florida House Speaker Richard Corcoran said Thursday night that his chamber is going to recommend creating a special commission to investigate the "abject breakdown at all levels" that led to the shooting deaths. The Republican said the commission, likely be led by a parent of one of the slain children, would have subpoena power. Corcoran also said the news about the resource officer's failure to respond did not dissuade him from moving ahead with what he was calling the "marshal" plan to let local law-enforcement officials train and deputise someone at the school who would be authorised to carry a gun. "He's not indicative of the law enforcement community; that's not going to change our behavior at all," Corcoran said. US and gun control State Senator Bill Galvano, who is helping craft a bill in response to the shooting deaths, insisted the idea is not the same as arming teachers. He said the programme would be optional and the deputised person would have to be trained by local law-enforcement agencies. US Senator Marco Rubio of Florida said a visit to Stoneman Douglas prompted him to change his stance on large-capacity magazines. The Republican insisted he is willing to rethink his past opposition to gun proposals if there is information the policies would prevent mass shootings. "If we are going to infringe on the Second Amendment, it has to be a policy that will work," Rubio said in an interview Thursday with AP. A day after an emotional meeting with survivors and their families, Trump tweeted his strongest stance yet on gun control. He said he would endorse strengthening background checks, banning "bump stock" style devices and raising the minimum age to 21 for buying certain rifles. At a conference of conservative activists Thursday near Washington, Vice President Mike Pence said the administration would make school safety "our top national priority" after the shooting at the school in Parkland, Florida. Calling school shootings "evil in our time," Pence exhorted those in positions of authority "to find a way to come together with American solutions." It was a markedly different tone than that deployed on stage minutes earlier by NRA Executive Vice President and CEO Wayne LaPierre, who delivered an unbowed defense of gun ownership and lashed out at Democrats saying they are using the tragedy for "political gain." India's initiatives provide a small moral window out of the impasse over Rohingya crisis, making its diplomacy of reassurance critical for repatriation. The three-way diplomacy between Myanmar, Bangladesh and India on the Rohingya crisis has entered a more settled phase. The Bangladesh-Myanmar agreement on the repatriation of the refugees has given both sides a face-saver to mull the next steps. Firing diplomatic salvos at one another has made way for quibbles over the process. India welcomes the agreement and the establishment of the joint working group, but the details are fuzzy. Many reckon the process is unworkable. The 23 January deadline for starting repatriation has passed. The key question: will the refugees return? Given the logjam, India has launched the diplomacy of reassurance. The relief it provided for the refugees in Bangladesh dealt with the immediate crisis. India has now moved on to address the day after. Under the agreement signed last November between the then Foreign Secretary S Jaishankar and U Soe Aung, the Myanmar deputy minister for Social Welfare, Relief and Resettlement, India pledged $25 million for the development of Rakhine state. Under the Rakhine State Development Programme, India despatched the first team to Myanmar on 8 February. Prefabricated housing projects are also being discussed. Sripriya Ranganathan, the joint secretary in the Ministry of External Affairs, dealing with Bangladesh and Myanmar, says: "Until some infrastructure is created, they (the refugees) won't go back. With specific, targeted assistance, once the return stream begins, it will create momentum for more people to return. This, to our mind, is the only way of restoring normalcy and harmony in Rakhine state." Beneath the concrete and pillars of construction lies a nuanced diplomacy. India's initiative binds the three nations into a web. By allowing India to construct shelters, Myanmar acknowledges it needs to take back the refugees. Why else would shelters be built? There is reassurance for Bangladesh, and importantly, insurance for the refugees. The right to return is important, but the will to return is even more so. The refugees will feel safer if they have shelters, with the psychological assurance of an Indian "guarantee" of sorts, in the roof over their heads. But this is only a long-term prospect. India's twin initiatives provide a small moral window out of the impasse. If they embrace the Rakhine State Development Programme with good faith, the concerned will find it difficult to dodge repatriation. In an ideal situation, this initiative would allow everybody partial satisfaction. The key issue is to create safety for their return. Every Rohingya understands this. Why has India chosen creation of physical infrastructure as a way forward? In the imperfect world we live in, reconstruction is better than agitation. A solution lies in direct dialogue between Bangladesh and Myanmar, not petitions in the chancelleries of Geneva or New York. The need is to build trust and encourage the return of the refugees. How do Bangladeshis view India's role? Last October, when I was in Dhaka, there was dismay that India had sided with Myanmar. India's statement last September at the UN Human Rights Council, calling for restraint by the Myanmar security forces, and the immediate and safe return of displaced persons, was brushed aside. In contrast, China came out squarely in Myanmar's support, but Bangladesh adopted strategic silence. Bangladeshis knew China would not alienate Myanmar. Expectations from India were extravagant. While China is unwavering in support of Myanmar, India's approach has been constructive. "We have adopted a pragmatic posture," says Ranganathan. Is Bangladeshi opinion about India's role changing? Ranjan Basu says in the Dhaka Tribune: "From the very beginning of the Rohingya crisis, India has played a seemingly balanced diplomatic role without offending either Myanmar or Bangladesh." It is another matter that the Bangladesh government continues to ask India (and China) to do more. When will repatriation begin? Myanmar has agreed to take back 300 a day across designated points, with repeated calls for the return of the refugees. With no guarantees of their safety, the refugees are reluctant to return. For Bangladesh, which has hosted Rohingya refugees in the past, the situation is stark. Few returned. Many melted with the Bangladeshi multitudes. There is doubt it will be different this time. Aung San Suu Kyi has said that Myanmar will abide by the recommendations of the Kofi Annan-led Rakhine Advisory Commission. But it is not clear how this impacts the ground situation. Until the process begins, we don't know what will happen. It may not be realistic to expect Myanmar will take back all 600,000 refugees. Despite contention, there is common ground. Al-Qaeda in the Indian subcontinent, Islamic State, and Chechen groups expressed solidarity with the Rohingyas. The three countries directly affected are united in opposing Rohingya radicalisation. The author is a former ambassador. He has served in Bangladesh. Pakistan's recent move to curb terrorism seems to be motivated by fears that it is likely to suffer from the findings of FATF, which is reviewing its case. Recently, Pakistan rather belatedly amended its Anti-Terrorism Act 1997 to bring it in line with its commitments to the United Nations, an obligation that it should have fulfilled long ago. During the same period, Pakistani law enforcement publicly announced the take over of some properties belonging to the Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD) and its affiliate, the Falah-e-Insaniyat Foundation (FIF). These hurried actions are predictable given that this occurs every time the country comes under the threat of being labelled a terrorist state. This time around, these actions seem to be motivated by fears that the country was likely to suffer from the findings of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), which was engaged in reviewing actions taken by members to curb terrorist financing. Such a listing puts the country in a category of those considered "deficient" in preventing terrorist financing, and which then leads to a series of measures labelled 'due diligence' by members of the FATF. Translated into simple English, this means that Pakistan is rather less than likely to get its hungry hands on the millions of dollars of assistance it needs. Pakistan's Anti-Terrorism Act 1997 is, on the face of it, well in line with the requirements of counter-terrorism law among democracies the world over. The problem is that its undoubtedly stringent clauses depend on whom the state considers a terrorist, and whether or not they are on the Fourth Schedule, which is the listing of individuals who are considered as terrorists. This listing is the basis on which counter-terrorism and policing action are authorised. Just who are the "Fourth Schedulers" has been the something of a mystery, even within the country. The supposed nodal agency for counter-terrorism is the NACTA (National Counter Terrorism Agency), an organisation that has had to fight for funds and staff, and which has the unenviable task of justifying Pakistan's CT policy. Its website only states that it has over 8,000 people on the list and that it has frozen up to PKR 157 million in 5,089 bank accounts. That's tuppence for organisations like the JuD, whose budget in 2010 was assessed in a secret intelligence memo as more than $5.2 million. Moreover, it appears that about 5,000 of these are from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, particularly Swat, an area that has been extremely troublesome in terms of activities of the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan. Another 140 are from Gilgit Baltistan as part of a listing made after locals began protesting against the China Pakistan Economic Corridor. An unknown number possibly the highest are from Balochistan, where the Pakistani forces and intelligence have been fighting a raging insurgency. Another hundred odd are from the Sindh province, where the listing expanded as the Rangers moved into the area to conduct counter-terror operations. The only well known Fourth Scheduler is Hafiz Saeed and a few others of his ilk. In short, the majority of these listed but unknown terrorists are nothing to do with those considered as international terrorists by the UN but are those who are ranged against the Pakistani state itself. A little more is known about Pakistani law in terms of the status of banned organisations. The NACTA recently put up a list of proscribed organisations in which JuD and FIF are listed as "under watch" from January 2017 onwards. This action is taken under ATA Section 11D which also allows the right of appeal and is only valid for six months at a time. It was, therefore, unclear whether the JuD and its affiliates were in fact legally banned organisations or not. A banned organisation cannot hold rallies, collect donations, and operate any institutions, much less run colleges and schools as the Jamaat was clearly doing, even while the FIF continued its activities including assistance to Rohingya refugees of Myanmar. The new Anti-Terrorism (Amendment) Ordinance, 2018 Ordinance signed by President Mamnoon Hussain on 13 February would or should change all of this. The Ordinance will simply insert the words "listed under the United Nations Security Council Act (1948) into the section which provides the legal basis for proscriptions. Legally, as the State Bank has noted, Pakistan is supposed to do this as a rule. The State Bank of Pakistan says clearly "The Ministry of Foreign Affairs issues Statutory Regulatory Orders to provide legal cover for implementing sanction measures under Security Council Resolutions. These require assets freeze, travel ban and arms embargo". This Pakistan has yet to do, though it regularly showcases apparent actions from time to time. In early 2017, for instance, when faced with a looming threat from the new Donald Trump administration, the state reacted by including Saeed as well as three others in the Fourth Schedule. Saeed was later released, and nothing much happened to the 'mother ship' Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT)/JuD because it was legally not yet a terrorist organisation under Pakistani law, despite it being part of the UN sanctions list. The new Ordinance should remove that anomaly. All organisations and individuals designated by the UN are now legally part and parcel of Pakistan's counter-terrorism laws, requiring the state to take action against them and that includes the head of the LeT Saeed. As of now, media reports indicate that the government has moved to take over some properties of JuD and FIF, which include a stud farm, a swimming academy, and its central facility the Markaz-e-Taiba at Muridke. This is actually the second time that the government has 'taken over' this institution. The first was 2009. At the time, the Punjab government was supposed to have made an inventory of JuD assets, under the charge of a chief administrator, reporting to the Lahore district commissioner. Clearly, nothing has changed in eight years. The institution continues under the protection of 100 plus JuD guards. The only change is that they have been joined by a few added policemen. The changed law now requires Pakistan to take action against not only Saeed but also the Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), a listed terrorist organisation. It requires the state to close down assets of these bodies, or at the very least takeover and re-engineer their schools, colleges and training centres away from a violent interpretation of Islam. Most of all, it needs to take away the millions of dollars that are part of the funds of these organisations, and which feed terrorism elsewhere. New designations by the US treasury department reveal an extensive financial network that includes fundraising in the Gulf and financing of not only the Taliban but also Al-Qaeda, apart from operations in Afghanistan. Indian intelligence has considerable details about Lashkar financing of the fight in Kashmir. This needs to be dovetailed with the US data and extensively publicised to be able to provide clinching proof that is legally sustainable, to indict and pressure Pakistan into acting against terrorist groups. Meanwhile, it can be expected that various analysts will soon be writing about the difficulties that Pakistan is likely to face in 'taking on' the Lashkar and its affiliates. These arguments have been heard before, and need to be weighed against the realities that led to the likes of Mullah Abdul Baradar, one time Taliban strongman, being 'detained' in Pakistan for daring to open negotiations directly with the Afghan government; or the death of Mullah Akhtar Mansoor who tried to get out from under Pakistan's thumb and chart his own course. Pakistan has its own effective way of dealing with recalcitrant terrorist leaders. And it doesnt include giving them even the slenderest chance to bite the hand that feeds it. The U.S. Department of Education, thanks in large part to Secretary Betsy DeVos, has been in the news quite a bit over the last year or so. So what do Americans think about the department after a banner year for coverage? A new poll from the Pew Research Center released earlier this month found that 53 percent of those surveyed view the Education Department favorably, compared to 42 to percent who view it unfavorably. Those may look like pretty good numbers. But when you compare the favorable/unfavorable numbers for nine other federal departments and agencies, the Education Department comes in dead last when it comes to favorable ratings. The U.S. Postal Service, by contrast, gets a favorable rating from 88 percent of those polled, while the Environmental Protection Agency gets 60 percent and the Department of Justice gets 59 percent. The Education Department also has the highest share of Americans who view the agency unfavorably among those 10 departments and agencies Pew asked about. If you look into the Pew numbers a little more closely, something else emerges. The partisan gap between Democrats and Republicans when it comes to how they view the Education Department is smaller than for some agencies, but larger than for others. And when it comes to how they view several other parts of the federal government, Democrats view of DeVos department plunges dramatically, while there is a smaller drop-off for Republicans. Take a look: DeVos herself has done very poorly in public opinion polls since she took over as secretary, compared to other Trump adminstration officials. However, keep something in mind: Based on other surveys, the publics view of the Education Department may have improved recently . Heres Pews poll results about various federal departments and agencies released in November 2015 under the Obama administration: The 2015 poll found that 51 percent of Democrats or those who lean Democrat approved of the Education Department, while just 36 percent of Republicans or those who lean Republican did so. Several federal departments have seen their approval ratings spike recently. The IRS, for example, went from being viewed less favorably overall than the Education Department in 2015 to more favorably in 2018. The 2018 Pew poll surveyed 1,009 adults age 18 and over, and 405 were interviewed on a landline, while 604 were interviewed on a cell phone. The poll has a margin of error of 3.7 percentage points. Cant get enough of Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos? Check out some of our best coverage: UPDATED A co-founder of KIPP, the largest charter school network in the country, has been fired over allegations of sexual misconduct with a child. Michael Feinberg was accused of sexually abusing a student in the late 1990s an allegation that surfaced this past spring, according to a statement put out by the charter network Thursday evening. KIPP Houston Public Schools and an independent law firm hired by the network investigated the allegations. KIPP officials also contacted Texas Child Protective Services. Feinberg denies all allegations against him. While the statement from KIPP states that neither investigation initiated by the network was able to definitively confirm that Feinberg abused a student, investigators did, however, find the allegation to have credibility. KIPP has terminated our co-founder Mike Feinberg due to allegations of misconduct that run counter to our values. Please read our letter to KIPP families here: https://t.co/f5Dq0xslJd KIPP Schools (@KIPP) February 22, 2018 During the course of KIPPs investigation of the misconduct involving a student, the network hired the law firm WilmerHale, which found two other misconduct allegations against Feinberg. Those were from two adult employees of KIPP Houston, both of whom had been students in the charter network. One reached a financial settlement. The other allegation could not be corroborated, according to KIPP officials. Feinberg did not want to settle the lawsuit, according to his lawyer Chris Tritico. Tritico also said that WilmerHale was not the first law firm hired by KIPP to investigate the sexual abuse allegation from the 90s. And the first firm retained by KIPP found the allegation not to be credible. Mr. Feinberg is certainly very upset and saddened by the action of the KIPP board, after all hes done with, and for, education and in founding KIPP Academy, said Tritico. They terminated him from his position, from the company that he founded, based on findings that said they didnt confirm any allegations, yet they found credibility. Well thats an impossible standard to defend against. In their statement posted on the networks website Thursday, KIPP Foundation CEO Richard Barth and KIPP Houston Public Schools chief Sehba Ali said they understood the news would come as a shock to KIPP families and staff. In light of the nature of the allegations and the passage of time, critical facts about these events may never be conclusively determined, the statement reads. What is clear, however, is that, at a minimum, Mr. Feinberg put himself into situations where his conduct could be seriously misconstrued. We believe that Mr. Feinbergs actions were incompatible with the leadership qualities that are central to our mission. Its hard to overstate KIPPs prominence in the charter school movement. The network helped pioneer the no-excuses college-prep charter school model defined by strict codes of student conduct and a laser focus on getting students into college. Feinberg, along with his fellow Teach for America alumna David Levin, launched KIPP, or the Knowledge Is Power Program, in Houston in 1994, and then shortly thereafter took their school model to New York City. KIPP has since grown into arguably the most successful charter school network in the country. Its track record on boosting test scores and college enrollment among the primarily low-income, minority students it serves, has helped turned the network into a national juggernaut. With 209 schools in more than two dozen cities, KIPP continues to expand. The news of the allegations against Feinberg reverberated through the charter school and broader education community Thursday night. Some charter advocates expressed shock and at times disbelief on social media over the allegations against such a revered member of their movement. I am heartbroken and angry. Heartbroken for @kippbigdog & his family, and angry that his years of service having saved so many lives and doing so much good does not permit giving him the benefit of the doubt or second chances. https://t.co/DKnZYCq5xu Jeanne Allen (@JeanneAllen) February 22, 2018 Sitting at home in WV, stunned by the KIPP announcement. But Ill tell you this: If Mike Feinberg needs a character reference, sign me up. There are few greater heroes in American education than @kippbigdog . Nelson Smith (@NelsonSmith60) February 23, 2018 I dont know the details of Mike Feinbergs departure from KIPP, but I do know that for the past 25 years there hasnt been a bigger champion or harder worker for education equality in Americas underprivileged neighborhoods. John Arnold (@JohnArnoldFndtn) February 23, 2018 Its unclear what impact the allegations against Feinberg may have on KIPP. Just this past September, the networks New York City chapter announced that it had hired an outside law firm to investigate decade-old claims there of sexual misconduct. In a letter informing students and parents about the allegations and pending investigation, KIPP officials did not say how many staff or students were involved, only that they were not currently with the network. Related stories: Photo: Knowledge is Power Program co-founder Michael Feinberg speaks during the final session at the National Governors Associations annual meeting in 2005, in Des Moines, Iowa. Charlie Neibergall/AP-File . , ... The Mi TV is here. It would be safe to say that this is the next big category for Xiaomi in India. A 55 inch 4K HDR capable television panel for Rs. 39,999? By any measure thats a steal but Xiaomis hardware is usually only part of the equation. Similar to MIUI on their phones, the company has worked hard to introduce the Patchwall interface on their television. More than just an interface, it is a paradigm shift in how television makers approach usability. So how well does the entire package work? Read on to find out. Xiaomi Mi TV 4 specifications 55-inch (3840 x 2160 pixels) 4K display with 178-degree viewing angle, 8 ms, 6000: 1 contrast ratio 2GB DDR4 dual-channel RAM, 8GB internal memory (eMMC 5.1) MIUI TV with PatchWall AI based on Android WiFi 802.11 a/b/g/n (2.4 / 5GHz) 2X2, Bluetooth 4.2 LE, 3 x HDMI 2.0, AV, 1 x USB 2.0 x 1, USB 3.0 x 1, Ethernet Supports H.265 4K at 60 / 30 fps, H.265 1080P at 60 fps, H.263 1080P at 30 fps, MPEG1 / 2/4 DivX4 the VC-1 / WMV3 1080P at 60 fps, REAL 8/9/10 1080P at 30 fps 2x 8W speaker for DOLBY AUDIO, DTS-HD Design Design is an obvious element to consider when planning out a new component for your AV system. With the Mi TV 4, Xiaomi has done an exemplary job. There is nothing cheap or budget about how the television looks. Up front, the design is minimal with thin black bezels and a small bar along the bottom edge that holds the IR receiver, power on LED. At first glance, the design language isnt all that different from the Mi Mix series of phones. Looked at from an angle, there is a blue tint along the edge. Xiaomi claims that the television is the slimmest LCD panel in the world and at 4.9mm, we are inclined to believe them. A metal sheet over at the back gives the screen added structural strength. The attention to design continues with the stand that is both discrete and fashion forward. With the panel mounted on the stand, the screen appears to float above the surface. This does add a bit of complexity if youre a stickler for cable management but looks really nice both up front and from the side. At the back, ports are well marked out and are easily accessible. Between the three HDMI ports, two USB ports, component in and S/PDIF out, there are just enough ports available. We wouldve liked a standard line out port to easily connect with other speakers though. You can use the built-in Bluetooth 4.2 connectivity to pair with wireless speakers and headphones. Software Weve talked in depth about Patchwall OS before. The Mi TV 4 runs Android with a custom interface onboard that has been designed ground up to integrate your DTH and internet TV sources into one single infinite scrolling interface. A whole lot of the groundwork here has been done by Sensara that has built the stunning TV guide app for the Mi TV 4. The integration also lets you see how much of a movie or show playing on your STB has already passed which is something nobody else has attempted. Xiaomi has worked with a number of streaming services like Voot, Sony Liv and Alt Balaji for content recommendations on the homescreen. Unfortunately, Netflix or Prime Video are not supported at the moment which drastically reduces your options. Being an Android based TV, you can sideload apps but Netflix or Prime Video do not work even when sideloaded. What we really missed was Youtube integration since that is one of the most popular video services in the country. As of now, the only way to get view Youtube on the Mi TV 4 is via the browser app. Similar to how streaming services work, Patchwall is able to build a profile of your content preferences based on the content you watch. The operating system is able to learn your preferences across streaming services and even on the basis of the content you watch on DTH. The integration extends further by allowing you to interface with your set-top box directly without having to switch remotes. The television does this using the included USB to iR cable. Similar to the Mi Remote app on Xiaomi phones, selecting a channel in the TV Guide app broadcasts a signal over the cable that is then broadcast to the STB. Essentially the television emulates the remote of almost any set-top box out there allowing you to control it with a single remote. Display Performance The Xiaomi Mi TV 4 has a 55-inch SVA panel and supports HDR and 4K content. At the price point, these are already some fantastic spec but specs alone do not make a television. Calibration and panel performance has a lot more to do with it. Xiaomi says that they are using a Samsung sourced edge-lit LED lit panel that theyve custom tuned. Owing to the nature of SVA panels, the Mi TV 4 looks vibrant and has well saturated and contrast-rich colors similar to what you get out of the box on Samsung televisions. Theres a robust level of controls available to tame the colors but the out of box experience too should please most users. The television supports 85% of the NTSC color gamut. We ran some basic calibration tests and adjusted the white point marginally which made the screen more natural looking and appealing to look at. For an edge lit panel, we found the backlighting to be spread out very evenly. The blooming effect visible in lower end / older local dimming arrays is minimal here and the television performs rather admirably. While we werent able to measure maximum brightness levels, they proved to be sufficient for a well-lit room. It doesnt go as bright as some of the LG and Samsung 4K panels weve tested but its not bad. The panel supports HDR10 and not Dolby Vision which means some HDR content might not be supported on Netflix even if you have a source that can output that. We tested out the television with the Nvidia Shield for Ultra HD 4K playback and generally came back impressed. The benefits of HDR support arent the most obvious due to limitations of the screen and overall brightness level. In addition, the viewing angles arent quite the best. While Xiaomi claims 178 degrees, we observed degradation of colors when viewing from the sides and the sweet spot for viewing was mostly within a viewing angle of 120 degrees. Another area where we felt a compromise had been made was in the upscaling of HD or SD content to 4K. There were noticeable jaggies due to over-sharpening here and the overall effect wasnt as good as weve seen on higher-end televisions. The television is a 60Hz panel, in fast action scenes we noticed a bit of judder. Conclusion The Xiaomi Mi TV 4 is a fantastic value for money proposition. The hardware is a league above anything in its price range and the Patchwall UI is a genuine pleasure to use. Its not quite the most stunning panel around but the sheer price to performance ratio here almost makes us negate that thought. Once Xiaomi is able to pad up the software experience and make it a bit more robust, we feel the Mi TV 4 could easily hold its own against televisions twice the price. As it stands, you definitely cannot go wrong with the Xiaomi Mi TV 4. At Rs. 39,999, the Mi TV 4 is more television than you can shake a stick at While many educators disagree with President Trumps proposal to arm some teachers and school staff to prevent school shootings, Jeffrey Woofter, the superintendent of West Virginias Barbour County school district, is not one of them. Woofter, a former sheriff, does not think that all school personnel should be armed. But he believes that trained staffteachers, administrators, or custodiansshould be allowed to carry concealed weapons or have access to concealed weapons on campus. That would make schools much safernot more dangerousand allow school officials to respond faster in the case of a school shooting, and ultimately save lives, he said in an interview. West Virginia law bars firearms inside schools unless the person is a certified law enforcement officer. Budgetary constraints have prevented the districts have putting school resource officers in all of its seven schools. While there are resource officers at the high school, local officers regularly visit the middle schools, they are not permanently stationed there, said the superintendent, whose district is located about 120 miles from Pittsburgh. Schools are just sitting ducks because people know that you are not permitted to carry in schools, and that just makes them vulnerable, Woofter said. President Trump made the proposal about possibly arming teachers on Wednesday after meeting with school shooting survivors and parents. Last weeks shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., which left 17 dead, has been followed by a clamor for more gun control measures. The presidents proposal was panned by educator groups . Some teachers asked to be armed instead with supplies to do their jobs. Others threatened to quit. And some Parkland educators who spoke with Education Week reporter Evie Blad pushed back on the idea. Trump clarified his remarks on Thursday, saying that he supported allowing trained staff, such as those with military backgrounds, to carry guns. He also floated the possibility of a monetary bonus for those who did so. In 15 states, districts can allow select personnel to carry concealed loaded guns in schools. The Toppenish School District in Washington state, for example, adopted a policy in 2014 to allow trained administrators to carry guns, the local PBS station KTCS 9 reported. Education Week and News Hour correspondent Kavitha Cardoza reported in December on the debate over whether educators should be armed on campus. Lori Lowe, the superintendent of the Morgan Local School District in McConnelsville, Ohio, who supports arming educators, told Cardoza that student safety was her primary concern. It can take up to half an hour for police to respond to some schools during an emergency in her rural school district, she said. A Line of Defense Woofter, the West Virginia superintendent, stressed that any move to arm school staff should require extensive training and certification, and the staff cannot be mandated to carry, he said. I dont think you can safely put a weapon on someone who is not comfortable having it and using it if need beheaven forbid, he said. Woofters thinking is informed in part by his career in law enforcementhe served two terms as the elected sheriff in Hancock County before going into teachingand by 2015 incident that occurred at the districts Philip Barbour High School just days into his first school year as a superintendent. A 14-year-old student wielding a handgun held a class hostage , but a teacher and the local police department were able to talk down the student without any physical injuries or fatalities. While the teacher did a heroic job, things could have ended differently if the student had started firing upon entering the school and school officials had to wait five minutes for the police to arrive, he said. He said he did not want to turn schools into fortresses with metal detectors at every entrance. And he also knew that even with significant firearm training police still make mistakes. But having some school officials who were prepared to respond in emergencies makes sense, he said. I would feel more comfortable if I knew there were trained people in a school building, that no one knows they are armed, just in case a tragic situation starts to unfold, he said. At least there would be some protectiona line of defensewhich doesnt exist right now. As an additional deterrent, schools could display warning signs that the premises were protected by personnel carrying concealed weapons, but the identity of those carrying the weapons would not be revealed, he said. And while Woofter is supportive of having trained, armed educators on campus, he doesnt plan to spearhead such an effort in West Virginia. But Id absolutely lend my support to it, he said. Avenir Telecom, under its Energizer brand is already releasing smartphones. Today it has announced that it will introduce new Energizer POWER MAX P16K Pro Android smartphone with whopping 16,000mAh battery at the Mobile World Congress 2018 in Barcelona next week. Few years back OUKITEL introduced K10000 smartphone with 10,000mAh battery and 10 days of battery life. The company also says that it will have an ultra slim design, even though it packs a huge battery. It will have a 5.99-inch 18:9 Full HD+ display, 6GB of RAM and 128GB of internal storage. Since it packs a huge battery it should be quite heavy, but it should last for weeks. Hope the company will offer fast charging support since it will takes hours to charge the huge battery. The company will share complete specifications of the smartphone as well as the image of the phone at the ShowStoppers on 25th February, Sunday in Barcelona. Xiaomi today announced that it has signed Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Microsoft to collaborate in cloud computing, artificial intelligence and the development of equipment for use with notebook computers. The companies will also collaborate in personal assistants using their own existing devices, including Microsofts Cortana. We have signed a Strategic MoU today with @Microsoft to collaborate in cloud support, AI and laptop-type devices. This will help accelerate our pace to bring more exciting products and services to our users, and also allow Microsoft to reach more users using Xiaomi products! pic.twitter.com/7AHhDVQQhu Wang Xiang (@XiangW_) February 23, 2018 Microsoft Azure cloud platform will support Xiaomis user data storage, bandwidth, computing and other cloud services in international markets Mi AI Speaker with Cortana integration is also in the plan. Xiaomi and Microsoft will also explore multiple cooperative projects based on a broad range of Microsoft AI technologies, such as Computer Vision, Speech, Natural Language Processing, Text Input, Conversational AI, Knowledge Graph and Search, as well as related Microsoft AI products and services, such as Bing, Edge, Cortana, XiaoIce, SwiftKey, Translator, Pix, Cognitive Services and Skype. Partnership with Microsoft is not new for Xiaomi. In 2015 Microsoft tied up with Xiaomi to offer Windows 10 ROM for the Xioami Mi 4. In 2016 Xiaomi acquired 1,500 patents from Microsoft and said that it will pre-load Microsoft Office and Skype apps on its Android smartphones and tablets. The same year it also introduced Mi Notebook running Windows 10. With the latest partnership Xiaomi expects to bring more new products and services to its users and also allow Microsoft to reach more users using Xiaomi products. Commenting on the partnership, Xiaomi Senior Vice President Wang Xiang, said: Microsoft has been a great partner and we are delighted to see both companies deepening this relationship with this strategic MoU. Xiaomis mission is to deliver innovation to everyone around the world. By collaborating with Microsoft on multiple technology areas, Xiaomi will accelerate our pace to bring more exciting products and services to our users. At the same time, this partnership would allow Microsoft to reach more users around the world who are using Xiaomi products. Harry Shum, executive vice president of Microsofts Artificial Intelligence and Research Group said: Xiaomi is one of the most innovative companies in China, and it is becoming increasingly popular in various markets around the world. Microsofts unique strengths and experience in AI, as well as our products like Azure, will enable Xiaomi to develop more cutting-edge technology for everyone around the world. Source UPDATED A letter from College Board President David Coleman about the Parkland school shootings has sparked accusations that the testing organization used the tragedy to promote its Advanced Placement Program. The company apologized after an outpouring of anger and criticism. Emailed yesterday to College Board members, who include K-12 and college professionals, Colemans letter reflected on the Feb. 14 shootings in Florida and the wave of student activism they have launched. He pointed to a recent speech by Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School student Emma Gonzalez, and noted that it was infused with references to her AP Government class. Coleman wrote that he was compelled to share the unadulterated, impassioned voice of a student, drawing on her education as both shield and sword in the aftermath of terrible events. Colemans letter also singled out comments that Stoneman Douglas student David Hogg made in a recent interview with CNN . Hogg mentioned that his AP U.S. History class helped him appreciate the value of journalism in shaping history. David Hoggs words honor Advanced Placement teachers everywhere, for they reflect their power to open worlds and futures to students, Coleman wrote. Another section of the letter triggered criticism, too. At one point, Coleman appears to critique Gonzalez speech. I do not write today to endorse Emmas every word. Her speech may have benefited from a less partisan approach and an attempt to better understand the positions of gun rights proponents, Coleman said. College Board Letter by cgewertz on Scribd UPDATED Colemans letter prompted Jennifer Pfannerstill, a biology teacher at North Shore Country Day School in Winnetka, Ill., to resign her position Thursday afternoon as chair of the College Boards science academic advisory committee. She also quit the companys academic advisory council. I cannot advocate for, and stand by, [an] organization that in one of our nations times of trial, would question the very students who allow them to exist and would promote itself as the only program to teach students how to use evidence, she wrote in an open letter to Coleman and other College Board leaders and members. The reaction to Colemans letter on Twitter was anything but supportive. The director of admissions at the State University of New York at Geneseo posted: No words. What was @CollegeBoard thinking? Why? I hope a follow up message is being drafted to explain the reason behind the original message. https://t.co/ISEMlksSXe Dr. Kim Harvey (@KHarv28) February 22, 2018 The dean of admissions at Worcester Polytechnic Institute weighed in: In all seriousness, who are the individuals at the @CollegeBoard that wrote and approved the sending of this message?! Absolutely disgusted with the horrible judgement. An apology should be made immediately in addition to fixing the mistakes that would allow this to be sent. pic.twitter.com/bbETbcaMm9 Andrew B. Palumbo (@InsideAdmission) February 21, 2018 The associate vice president for enrollment management and marketing at DePaul University, had this to say: Seriously, @CollegeBoard How many people did you have take a look at that email that David Coleman just sent about the Florida shooting? Did you try to turn a national tragedy into a promotional opportunity? Ive seldom seen something in poorer taste. Jon Boeckenstedt (@JonBoeckenstedt) February 21, 2018 Arun Ponnusamy, the chief academic officer at Collegewise took to Twitter to suggest that Coleman read the school counselor associations guidelines on how to help students after a shooting . Plenty of others had anger to share. @collegeboard email using parkland kids to pat urself on back is beyond insensitive mindy stecklow (@MindyStecklow) February 22, 2018 David Coleman should resign. This is vile. RT @altotus : This is disgusting, @collegeboard . Ive never through much of the organization, but this is low. https://t.co/dtxxzrwWFt Jared C (@Minus423) February 22, 2018 Tone deaf, self serving, narcissistic and worse. Stunning day for @CollegeBoard - seems the entire college admissions world is waiting for an apology. #EMchat #CollegeAdmissions pic.twitter.com/iDO2APeVQV Mark Campbell (@markcampbell) February 22, 2018 The College Board was silent about the controversy Wednesday, even as it responded on Twitter to one studentss demand for a test fee refund. But on Thursday, it issued an apology. This past week, our hearts have ached for the students, educators, and families in Broward County, the organization said in a statement. The purpose of our letter to members was to put the focus on the remarkable students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and to share their voices. We sincerely apologize that our words have taken the focus away from the needs of their community at this terrible time. Get High School & Beyond posts delivered to your inbox as soon as theyre published. Sign up here . Also, for news and analysis of issues that shape adolescents preparation for work and higher education. Photo: Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School student Emma Gonzalez wipes away tears during a CNN town hall meeting this week in Sunrise, Fla. Michael Laughlin/South Florida Sun-Sentinel via AP Famed music producer Quincy Jones has "learned [his] lesson" after facing flack over a recent interview where he claimed to know who killed John F. Kennedy and that he dated Ivanka Trump. On Thursday afternoon, Jones issued a detailed statement on Twitter regarding the "silly" information he revealed in the now-infamous interviews. The music mogul tweeted, "A couple of weekends ago, my six daughters (who I am beyond proud of) took me aside for a surprise 'family intervention' because of some of the silly things I've said in two recent interviews and...I have learned my lesson!" The 85-year-old music producer, who referred to himself as an "imperfect human," admitted that his "word vomit and bad-mouthing" was "inexcusable," but added that his intentions were misunderstood. "I tried to relay about racism, inequality, homophobia...you name it," he explained. "I have already reached out to my friends privately, but when you live a public life, you have a responsibility to be an example, and since I do lead a public life, I wanted to make a public apology," his statement continued. In Jones' February interview with Vulture magazine, he shared shocking claims that comedian Richard Pryor slept with "Godfather" actor, Marlon Brando. Brando used to go cha-cha dancing with us, Jones told Vulture. He could dance his a off. He was the most charming mother f---er you ever met. Hed f--- anything. Anything! Hed f--- a mailbox. James Baldwin. Richard Pryor. Marvin Gaye. Watch the latest video at foxnews.com The producer also claimed that the late Michael Jackson stole a lot of his material from other artists. Michael stole a lot of stuff. He stole a lot of songs. [Donna Summers] State of Independence and Billie Jean. The notes dont lie, man. He was as Machiavellian as they come . . . Greedy, man. Greedy, he said. In a January interview with GQ, Jones revealed that he had 22 girls all around the world who all know about each other. "Everywhere," he assured the interviewer. "Cape Town. Cairo. Stockholmshe's coming in next week. BrazilBelo Horizonte, Sao Paulo, and Rio. Shanghaigot a great girl over there from Shanghai, man. Cairo, whew." At the end of Jones' Twitter statement, he issued an apology to "anyone who [his] words offended," making it clear that he is "not afraid to say [sorry]." "I am especially sorry to my friends who are here with me and those who aren't. These friends are like blood family to me," he said. The father of actress Rashida Jones then thanked his family for encouraging him to acknowledge and apologize for his recent claims. "To my dear family and friends....thank you for your grace. Thank you for calling me out when I've clearly made a mistake...many mistakes. Even though sometimes it's difficult to receive criticism or discipline, (especially publicly), I want you to know I hear you." The most important figure in the Star Wars universe, Mark Hamill, will be honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. However, his Star Trek rival wasnt above taking a friendly jab at his inclusion in the neighborhood. William Shatner, who played Captain James T. Kirk on the original run of the hit science fiction series, took to Twitter to both congratulate Hamill and share some advice about joining the Walk of Fame club, of which hes a member. Congratulations! BTW ask for a star on the south side of the street. Im on the north side and dont want to devalue the neighborhood," he wrote. Shatner, who is a self-proclaimed lover of all things science fiction, routinely mocks the Star Wars crew in public, but all in good fun. Hamill made note of Shatners jab in a follow up tweet noting that the occasion wouldnt be as special without one of the 86-year-old stars trademark digs. Thanks, Bill. It wouldnt be as special without a classic Shatner-burn from you! Live Long, But Get Lost, he said, co opting the famous Star Trek slogan made popular by Leonard Nimoy as Spock. Hamill previously tweeted a note to fans expressing his shock to be given a spot on the famous stretch of land in Los Angeles. In doing so, he made a jab of his own at fellow Walk of Famer, Donald Trump, who made his way there for his work on his hit reality show The Apprentice. Can't say this is a dream come true because I was never foolish enough to think something like this could ever happen. When part of me doubts I deserve such an honor, I remind myself that someone got a "Star" for just one crappy reality show, the notoriously liberal star wrote. Hamill will get his star on March 8. The assassinations of her husband and brother-in-law werent the only tragedies Jackie Kennedy Onassis dealt with in her lifetime. New York Times best-selling biographer J. Randy Taraborrelli, who has recently published a new book titled Jackie, Janet & Lee, revealed unearthed letters penned by the former first lady alleging her mother was the victim of elder abuse. Jackie O, who died in 1994 at age 64 from cancer, feared her mother, Janet Lee Auchincloss, was a victim. Citing letters, the book claims Kennedy was sure her mom's third husband, Bingham Morris, was mistreating her. What really surprised me was Jackies adamant sense that her mom was a victim of elder abuse, Taraborrelli told Fox News. This man that her mom was married to at the time, either sexually or physically in some way was abusing Jackies mom. And Jackie became a warrior for her mother and began a campaign to have Morris evicted from the family home," Taraborrelli said. "And the complication of this story was that because Janet was suffering from Alzheimers, she kept changing her story So when Jackie had this man evicted, her mother became confused and was wondering where her husband was. And this was torturous, as you can imagine, for Jackie. And this was a private ordeal she was going through while she was working at Doubleday as an editor. And pretty much nobody knew about this outside of the family. Taraborrelli said that while the results were inconclusive to determine whether or not Auchincloss was being abused, her most famous daughter was determined to make sure she was safe from harm. What we know for sure is that Jackie believed it, said Taraborrelli. We know that from her handwritten letters to her stepbrother. And, from the doctors that she consulted that were interviewed for my book, we know that she absolutely believed it. "And there was no way Jackie was going to doubt her mom There are a lot of theories and we will never really know the truth. But what we do know based on Jackies handwritten letters is that she believed it. Taraborrelli revealed some doctors, who disputed Kennedys concerns, believed she may have been plagued with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) that still haunted her after the deaths of her husband and his brother Robert, as well as a history of troubled pregnancies. Her third child, Patrick Kennedy, was stillborn in 1963. ...She had not been able to save them, said Taraborrelli. So now she was going to save her mom. Some people felt that was going on. It wasn't the only time Kennedy was thought to be tormented by the horrifying events of her past. When her husband was killed in 1963, Taraborrelli claimed the first ladys mother and younger sister, Lee Radziwill, feared the grief-stricken mother of two would harm herself. Both Lee and Janet were extremely concerned about Jackie because she was suffering from such PTSD, he explained. Jackie began to drink, take pills and she began to talk about suicide. And she began to talk about it a lot. And she began to consult with a priest named Father McSorley about whether or not she would see Jack on the other side if she killed herself. "A lot of people were very alarmed by this, including Lee. And Lee did everything she could think of to help her sister But this was the mid-1960s and nobody really knew what to do, except just prescribe medication. Jackie was given a lot of medication and she spent quite a few years really not in her mind. Taraborrelli suspects it may have been one of the reasons why Radziwill, who was originally having an affair with Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis while still married to Polands Prince Radziwill, let her beau woo her sibling. Her older sister turned to Aristotle for comfort after Bobby was assassinated in 1968, which was long after his relationship with Radziwill came to an end. "The flame was gone as far as he was concerned It was all over for Lee. She made a decision in 1968 to let her sister have Onassis because Lee felt that if something were to happen to Jackie how would Lee then be able to ever live with herself? Taraborrelli hinted Jackie O may have allegedly felt her younger sister wasnt around enough as Auchincloss mental health deteriorated until her death at age 81 in 1989. Its unknown whether Radziwill was privately coping with her mothers grim fate. Still, her alleged absence didnt go unnoticed. When Janet was suffering from Alzheimers, Jackie was present and available all the time to Janet And Janet kept asking, Wheres my Lee? The relationship between the sisters became more strained when Auchincloss gave her younger daughter $750,000, a decision Jackie O was allegedly not in favor of. According to my sources, the reason she didnt want Lee to have the money was because she didnt feel Lee deserved it, said Taraborrelli. And Jackie resented it and had some hard feelings about that. There were a few years after Janets death where Lee and Jackie were not in touch. "Then in January 1994, Jackie was diagnosed with cancer on pretty much the exact same day Lees son was also diagnosed again with the recurrence of cancer. This brought the sisters back together again. But they only had a few months There just wasnt enough time. Out of the three women, only Radizwill remains today. Over the years, the American socialite has become a fashion designer, an interior decorator, actress and author. She went on tour with the Rolling Stones, he added. She was friends with Andy Warhol and Truman Capote. She did it all Jackie lived in a gilded cage. Even after she was out of the White House and was living in New York, she was still pursued by paparazzi. "She always had to be careful. Lee was never careful From my understanding, she doesnt have any regrets at all. She realized she had a different life from her mother and sister. But in many ways, maybe it was a better life." James Woods thanked fellow actor Brendan Fraser for speaking against former Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA) president Philip Berk and shared his own story about the organization. On Thursday, Fraser revealed in an interview with GQ that he believed his career in Hollywood declined because he suffered depression after he says he was groped by then-HFPA president, Berk. After the news of Fraser's interview spread, Woods shared the article on his Twitter page and claimed he too had been blacklisted by Berk, but for political reasons. The conservative actor tweeted, I recommend this interview highly. I, too, was blacklisted by that individual at #HFPA after nine Golden Globe nominations. During a press junket with HFPA, he asked if I would support Hillary Clinton if she ever ran for president. Never nominated again. But Woods, 70, made sure to clarify that he did not experience any form of sexual misconduct from the former HFPA president. For the record, however, he was never physically sketchy with me in any way similar to that alleged by Brendan Fraser in GQ," the actor added in a separate tweet. "He was probably aware I might have knocked his teeth out, had he tried. Final note: Im so glad Brendan Fraser is back entertaining us. Im a big fan. In the "What Ever Happened to Brendan Fraser? interview, the "Mummy" actor detailed the alleged incident. His left hand reaches around grabs my ass cheek, and one of his fingers touches me in the taint. And he starts moving it around. I felt ill. I felt like a little kid. I felt like there was a ball in my throat. I thought I was going to cry. The incident, which Fraser claims took place at the Beverly Hills Hotel in 2003, left a "reclusive" Fraser feeling frightened and depressed. The 49-year-old star pins his career decline on the incident, saying that he was never invited back to the Golden Globes ceremony after that year. Berk denied the allegation and told GQ that Fraser's career "declined through no fault of ours. According to The Wrap, the HFPA released a statement on Thursday regarding Fraser's claims. The HFPA stands firmly against sexual harassment and the type of behavior described in this article. Over the years weve continued a positive working relationship with Brendan, which includes announcing Golden Globe nominees, attending the ceremony and participating in press conferences. This report includes alleged information that the HFPA was previously unaware of and at this time we are investigating further details surrounding the incident. In the GQ article, Berk said he sent a letter to Fraser regarding the alleged incident but admitted no wrongdoing. Woods, meanwhile, has battled his own scandal regarding sexual misconduct allegations. Last year, Amber Tamblyn claimed Woods hit on her when she was 16. Woods dismissed her claim and stated it was a lie. Two Mexican restaurants just outside of Denver, Colo., have been forced to shut down following a salmonella outbreak earlier this week. The Burrito Delight restaurants in Fort Lupton and Dacono were temporarily closed by the Weld County Department of Public Health and Environment after 10 people including one child who was admitted to the hospital became infected with food poisoning, Food Safety News is reporting. VEGAN YOGURT RECALLED FOR CONTAINING MILK Carrie Hanley, Weld County director of community health services, said Thursday she expects more salmonella cases to be reported in the coming days, adding that this has the potential to become a large outbreak. The infections are being traced back to two separate Burrito Delight-catered events on the Aims Community College campus on Feb. 9 and Feb. 13, where five people were said to be sickened, KUSA reported. Two more were possibly linked to another catered work function, while two additional children became ill after eating at the Fort Lupton location, KUSA added. One of those children was later admitted to the hospital. WOMAN BUYS FISH FROM COSTCO, FINDS LIVE WORM INSIDE Food Safety News further noted that Burrito Delights Fort Lupton location was inspected Thursday and was cited for multiple violations, such as employees failing to wash their hands and a dead mouse in a sticky trap. The two restaurants will be allowed to reopen once staff are retrained and the facilities are determined to be in clean, operating order during a subsequent investigation. Weld County, however, does not plan to further fine or penalize Burrito Delight. FOLLOW US ON FACEBOOK FOR MORE FOX LIFESTYLE NEWS The loss of business is penalty enough, said the departments director of environmental health services. A massive bar brawl broke out at a British pub in Leeds on Saturday morning, ultimately landing one man in jail and another in the hospital. Footage of the large-scale scuffle shows around 20 people throwing punches, stomping, and even hurling heavy wooden stools at each other at the Arc Bar in the Headingley, West Yorkshire. Staffers at the Arc Bar can also be seen attempting to calm the situation, only for the fights to flare up again. 23 BOOTED FROM CARNIVAL CRUISE FOLLOWING 'BLOODBATH' OF A BRAWL These were some very ugly scenes where people were punched, kicked and stamped on and glasses and chairs were thrown, said James Entwistle, of the Leeds District criminal investigation department, to The Sun. Police say the fight initially broke out between two people at around 12:30 a.m., but soon devolved into chaos as fellow patrons and friends became involved. The video shows how there was very little that the bars security could do to control the situation and it was clearly a shocking thing for staff and other people in the bar to witness, said Entwistle. MAN CALLS IN A FAKE BOMB THREAT TO GET WIFE TO LEAVE BAR Authorities later arrested one 21-year-man on suspicion of violent disorder, though he has since been released. Another brawler, 28, was taken to the hospital for treatment of a head wound. The West Yorkshire Police are currently asking the public for help in identifying additional suspects. We are treating this as an incident of violent disorder and are carrying out inquiries to identify those involved, said Entwistle, adding that police are relying on the bars CCTV footage. FOLLOW US ON FACEBOOK FOR MORE FOX LIFESTYLE NEWS We would like to hear from anyone who knows the identity of any of those shown fighting in the clip we have released or who recognizes themselves as a witness," he added. Its been a foul week for KFC. The fast-food chain issued a full-page apology for the chicken crisis that forced hundreds of U.K. locations to close after running out of poultry. The cheeky advertisement ran in local papers across the country and features a KFC chicken bucket that instead reads FCK. COLORADO BURRITO RESTAURANTS CLOSED FOLLOWING SALMONELLA OUTBREAK "A chicken restaurant without any chicken. It's not ideal, the ad reads. Huge apologies to our customers, especially those who travelled out of their way to find we were closed. And endless thanks to our KFC team members and our franchise partners for working tirelessly to improve the situation. It's been a hell of a week, but we're making progress, and every day more and more fresh chicken is being delivered to our restaurants. Thank you for bearing with us." KFC blamed the chicken shortage on an issue with DHL, their new delivery company. The chicken crossed the road, just not to our restaurants, KFCs British branch tweeted Sunday. Weve brought a new delivery partner on board, but theyve had a couple of teething problems getting fresh chicken out to 900 restaurants across the country is pretty complex! The drama continued when KFC workers were accused of smuggling raw chicken into one of the chains restaurants. Video surfaced showing two workers carrying six bulging and gloopy shaped black bags into the KFC restaurant in Erith, southeast London. FOLLOW US ON FACEBOOK FOR MORE FOX LIFESTYLE NEWS Hungry patrons have been so upset by the lack of chicken that some have even gone so far as to contact local police, who had to issue a statement reminding people that it is not a police matter if your favourite eatery is not serving the menu that you desire. A cow briefly escaped death by ramming a fence and swimming to an island in southern Poland. The cow was being led toward a truck bound for the slaughterhouse on January 23, BBC reports, when she broke free and ran through a metal fence. The cows owner, Mr. Lukasz, advised workers to tranquilize the large farm animal before transport, but they failed to do so and were overpowered by the bovine. One farm worker sustained a broken arm and bruised rib during the cows escape. EMOTIONAL SUPPORT DOG ON SOUTHWEST FLIGHT INJURES CHILD The cow swam out to the nearby Polish islands of Lake Nyskie where she remained for weeks, thwarting capture. Mr. Lukasz said he tried to capture her from the island, but each time he went to retrieve her, the cow would swim off, BBC reported. "I saw her diving under water," Mr. Lukasz told Wiadomosci of when he would come to the island. When firefighters came to rescue her, the cow swam out to a nearby peninsula on the island to escape them, BBC reports. Mr. Lukasz eventually gave up on returning her to the farm and instead visited the island to leave food for the animal. The fugitive cow has been called a hero by one local politician, Pawel Kukiz, who made it his mission to save her from the slaughter permanently. She fled heroically and swam to an island in the middle of the lake where she remains until today, Kukiz wrote on Facebook last Friday. Some have suggested the cow be shot, but Kukiz and others vehemently opposed the idea. Kukiz wrote in his post that he wished to see the animal live happily ever after and die a natural death. Though Kukiz admits he is not a vegetarian, he still wanted to reward [the cow] for her attitude. FOLLOW US ON FACEBOOK FOR MORE FOX LIFESTYLE NEWS Kukiz worked on a plan to find a sanctuary for the runaway cow, deciding to hire a vet to tranquilize the bovine and transport her safely off the island. Unfortunately, four weeks after her jailbreak, the Limousin beef cow was captured as part of a rescue attempt and died from stress, according to a report. The cow was shot with three sedatives before she was supposed to be loaded into a truck and taken to a farm, but died before she got there. Political and business leaders in Mississippi are working to pass a law that would flush fake urine down the toilet. The Mississippi Urine Trouble Act would ban the sale or use of synthetic human urine for the purposes of defrauding a drug test, including one for employment. Republican State Representative Andy Gipson, who sponsored the legislation in the Mississippi State House, says the problem may provoke laughter but it's actually a serious situation. Artificial human urine is being sold [and] used by at least some to deceive and to defraud on drug tests, Gipson told Fox News in his office at the state Capitol. A box of fake urine can be purchased at truck stops and novelty shops throughout the state. Fox News obtained a package of the substance, which is labeled as fetish urine on the outside of the box. The package included instructions, a three-ounce bottle of yellow liquid along with a few hand warmers, instructions and a temperature sensor attached to the bottle. The only thing the purchaser needs to do is heat it up with the hand warmers and a rubber band. The content list contains a massive list of chemicals. Gipson's measure received nearly unanimous support in the state house by a 113 to 2 vote on February 6. He predicted the bill has a 50 percent chance of being passed by the state senate after it was advanced to the Judiciary Committee for consideration earlier this month. Those caught using the fake liquid could face up to six months in jail, a $1,000 fine or both. Maury Hull is the vice president of human resources for Hol-Mac Corporation. The steel fabrication company employs nearly 1,000 workers in the state, all of whom need to be drug tested before taking a job at the company. Its truly a safety issue for our company like other companies in the state of Mississippi that have workers that are sometimes in a dangerous environment, Hull said. Synthetic urine use or trying to mask a drug test is very alarming to me when we start seeing it show up on random drug tests [and] on pre-employment drug tests. Hulll noted that human resources at his company received some inside information about the deceptive testing schemes. He now believes they have eliminated the problem, but hopes the law prevents the threat from spreading. Hol-Mac offers a two-strike policy and works with employees to get clean if their test results are positive for an illegal substance. I would not be happy to know that somebody working next to me [is] under the influence of any type of drug, said Ashley Locke, who is a team leader of the machine shop at Anel Corporation in Winona, Miss. That puts my life in danger, she added. The Mississippi Associate of Self Insurers lobbied on behalf of companies in the state, including Hol-Mac Corporation, to get lawmakers to consider legislation banning the use of artificial urine. Companies where employees operate heavy machinery were huge supporters of the bill, according to executive director Dan Gibson. Its about the health and safety of Mississippians [and] creating a better workplace and a better work environment here in our state, Gibson said. Hopefully the senate will see the value of that and they will pass the bill. At least 13 states have laws banning the sale or use of artificial urine for drug testing purposes. Colorado is also considering a similar resolution. State Rep. Gipson says he is hopeful the bill will be taken up by the state senate due to the overwhelming bipartisan support it received in the state house. The Mississippi State Senate Judiciary Committee has until February 27 to bring up the bill for debate. Kicking off the next six weeks of guest bloggers is John Thompson, a former inner-city teacher and self-described anti-reformer. In a previous life, John was an award-winning historian before shifting gears to teach high school in Oklahoma City. In 2015, he published A Teachers Tale: Learning, Loving, and Listening to our Kids , arguing that test-fueled reform is doomed to fail. This is the last in a series about rethinking my classroom experiences. I very much appreciate an opportunity to pass on anecdotes that speak to why Big R Reforms have failed. Twenty years of these interactions, along with listening to colleagues and studying education research, have made me what Rick Hess dubbed a little r reformer. Life is complex. Simplistic quick fixes dont work in education any more than they do in the rest of life. These re-readings of material cut from A Teachers Tale were prompted by a trip to the Oklahoma State Capitol, which brought back so many wonderful memories of legislators and my students schooling each other. The only bad memory was hearing a John Marshall student say, They say were bad. We may be bad, but were not as bad as Centennial. That ubiquitous statement made my stomach churnjust like it did when I was teaching at Marshall and Centennial. I bet educators in other urban schools have heard an identical sentiment over and over, with only the names changing. The last thing our kids needed was a continual reminder of their shortcomings. However, the reward-and-punish version of school reform could not function without the drumbeat of criticisms and the data-driven recording of deficiencies. Test-driven reform unavoidably deteriorated into an unflinching focus on the remediation of low-skilled students who didnt measure up. Given the fundamentally macho mindset of a reform movement which celebrated the punitive, it was not surprising that Oklahoma City Public Schools bet the farm on remediation to get students to pass the four End-of-Instruction (EOI) exams required to graduate. It was shocking, however, that bubble-in test prep was marketed under the brutal name EOI boot camp. One Centennial student nearly broke into tears when explaining why she dropped out of school: They wanted me to go to EOI boot camp! Why? I didnt do anything wrong. Our students lacked plenty of basic skills when measured by primitive standardized tests. The way to improve their academic performance, however, would have been to invest in their strengths. Affluent kids probably wouldnt ace tests about the routine challenges that inner-city kids face, but we dont force them to pass graduation exams on what it takes to navigate the foster care system, to find affordable health care, or find a safe place to live. Our dysfunctional schools problems are intertwined and interrelated. Reformers made a terrible mistake when they gambled on a couple of leverage points: better instruction inside the four walls of the classroom and competition based on invalid and unreliable metrics. They tried to intimidate a fearful culture of compliance. Reformers forgot that teachers and administrators are employees who work within a system they didnt design. We educators need to engage in bureaucratic politics to do our jobs according to our consciences. We win some, but we also lose plenty of battles. Throughout my career, we went months at a time successfully making the extra effort to keep our school orderly and to teach effectively. We werent blameless when things went wrong, but usually it was an increase in gang violence and/or ill-conceived political mandates that unraveled the progress and threw our school into months of dysfunction. And as Campbells Law explains, when systems face unreliable and invalid accountability metrics that are impossible to meet, the results arent pretty. Even a generation ago, reformers should have understood that the problem isnt the percentage of low-income students. The challenge is extreme concentrations of students from generational poverty who have endured multiple traumas and come from troubled neighborhoods lacking social capital. Rather than focusing unflinchingly on what is wrong in those communities and schools, we needed conversations and partnerships. We should have built on childrens, families, and educators strengths. Rather than imposing a data-driven blame game, reformers should have listened to why only a small percentage of classes could provide instructional excellence before safe and orderly learning environments were established. The answer isnt punishment. Even though a credible code of conduct is necessary, its not sufficient. Chronic absenteeism and tardiness must be addressed, not covered up by jukin the stats. Students cant learn and earn a diploma if they dont attend class. And none of those challenges can be tackled without a system of student supports. Im not saying that every low-performing school failed the way that John Marshall and Centennial did. But I bet the stories of other defeated schools, especially those that were made worse by school reform, were equally complex. Im also saying that to improve, we must listen and learn from flesh-and-blood students and tackle real-world problems, not focus on made-up metrics. John Thompson Martin Shkreli, the embattled pharmaceutical CEO, was sentenced to seven years in prison for securities fraud. The so-called Pharma Bro was convicted last year on charges that he deceived investors through failed hedge funds. Weeks later, he had his $5 million bail revoked when he posted what was a considered a threat to Hillary Clinton. The 34-year-old, who is probably best known for hiking up the price of a life-saving drug, was charged with securities fraud, conspiracy to commit securities fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud; a jury found him guilty on three of eight counts. From his social media presence to his leadership of pharmaceutical companies, heres a look at Shkrelis life and controversies. March 2018 A federal judge sentenced Shkreli to seven years in prison on March 9 for for defrauding investors in two failed hedge funds. Shkreli, in a break from his usual assured persona, cried as he told U.S. District Judge Kiyo Matsumoto he made many mistakes and apologized to investors. "I want the people who came here today to support me to understand one thing, the only person to blame for me being here today is me," he said. "I took down Martin Shkreli." He was also fined $75,000 and received credit for the roughly six months he has been in prison. September 2017 Shkrelis bail was revoked and he was sent to prison the night of Sept. 13 because of what was perceived as a threat to a former presidential nominee he posted on social media. Shkreli offered on Facebook $5,000 to anyone who could grab Hillary Clintons hair while she was on her book tour. U.S. District Judge Kiyo Matsumoto said the post could be seen as a solicitation of an assault as she revoked his $5 million bail. The Clinton Foundation is willing to KILL to protect its secrets. So on HRCs book tour, try to grab a hair from her. I must confirm the sequences I have. Will pay $5,000 per hair obtained from Hillary Clinton, his post said. Shkrelis defense argued that the post was simply political satire, but the judge didnt buy it. The government told the judge that the message alarmed the Secret Service detail that protects Clinton, a former Democratic presidential candidate and first lady. It also argued that it fit a pattern of veiled threats against female journalists who rebuffed Shkreli's social media advances and of taunts aimed at prosecutors in his case. Shkreli will now await his sentencing at a federal jail in Brooklyn instead of his Manhattan apartment where he would often live stream parts of his day. He faces a maximum sentence of 20 years. August 2017 A Brooklyn jury found Shkreli guilty on three counts on August 4. The jury deliberated for five days before reaching a verdict. June 2017 Shkrelis trial began on June 26, and he faces up to 20 years in prison. Several potential jurors told the New York judge they couldn't be fair toward Shkreli. One woman said that she knew the former executive as "the most hated man in America" for his price gouging. The judge dismissed her and several other potential jurors after they made negative comments about Shkreli during jury selection. Shkreli "travels to the beat of a very unique drummer." Defense attorney Benjamin Brafman Despite advice from his lawyers, Shkreli didnt lay low ahead of the trial. He was active on social media, particularly on YouTube and Facebook. Shkreli "travels to the beat of a very unique drummer," his defense attorney said. April 2017 Brooklyn U.S. District Court Judge Kiyo Matsumoto ruled that Shkreli and his former lawyer be granted separate trials. Both Evan Greebel and Shkreli requested separate trials and both have pleaded not guilty. Greebel is charged with one count of conspiracy for allegedly helping Shkreli. He would later be found guilty of conspiring to commit securities fraud and wire fraud. As Greebel has called Shkreli a serial liar, Matsumoto said trying the two men together would present a serious risk that Shkreli will not receive a constitutionally fair trial. January 2017 After consistently harassing a female journalist on Twitter, Shkreli was eventually banned from the social media site. Shkreli changed his Twitter page background to images of freelance journalist Lauren Duca and photo-shopped himself over her husband in one photo. How is this allowed, Duca tweeted along with a screenshot of Shkrelis account. However, Shkreli made additional accounts since his ban. September 2016 After Hillary Clinton left a 9/11 memorial service due to illness, Shkreli tracked down the presidential candidate to shout at her a question. Why are you so sick? Shkreli shouted at Clinton as she left her daughters apartment. I enjoyed screaming 'why are you so sick' and 'go trump' at @HillaryClinton. Get well soon bae! he tweeted later. This same month, Shkreli raffled off a chance to punch him in the face. February 2016 Shkreli refused to testify in front of Congress instead invoking his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination while smirking at lawmakers who peppered him with questions about why he so drastically raised the price of Daraprim. "It's not funny, Mr. Shkreli. People are dying and they're getting sicker and sicker." Rep. Elijah Cummings "Drug company executives are lining their pockets at the expense of some of the most vulnerable families in our nation," Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., said during the hearing. "It's not funny, Mr. Shkreli. People are dying and they're getting sicker and sicker." Rep. Buddy Carter, R-Ga., a pharmacist, said he was disgusted by price-hiking drug companies. December 2015 Shkreli was arrested on securities fraud and wire fraud charges unrelated to the rising drug price while he headed Turing Pharmaceuticals in December 2015. Prosecutors said when Shkreli ran a different pharmaceutical company, Retrophin, he would use the companys cash and stock to pay back hedge fund investors for money that Shkreli lost. These actions allegedly took place between 2009 and 2014, according to court documents. Shkreli engaged in multiple schemes to ensnare investors through a web of lies and deceit, U.S. Attorney Robert Capers said at the time of Shkrelis arrest. Shkreli was released on a $5 million bail. The day of his arrest, KaloBios Pharmaceuticals terminated Shkreli as its CEO. The company announced that the young pharmaceutical executive also had resigned from its board of directors. September 2015 Shkreli first became a contentious household name at the end of 2015 when he was chief executive of Turing Pharmaceuticals. His company drastically jacked up the price of a potentially lifesaving drug, Daraprim, from $13.50 to $750 per pill. Turing acquired Daraprim in August 2015. The drug is the only approved treatment for toxoplasmosis, an infection which is especially risky for pregnant women, people with AIDS and cancer patients. Shkreli defended the price hike, saying it was necessary in order for his pharmaceutical company to make a profit, spend money on research and keep up with operational costs. If there was a company that was selling an Aston Martin at the price of a bicycle, and we buy that company and we ask to charge Toyota prices, I dont think that should be a crime, Shkreli told CBS This Morning. Then-Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton encouraged Shkreli to do the right thing and lower the cost of the drug to its original price. Clinton also promised to hold accountable anyone who is price gouging American families and jacking up costs for no good reason. Donald Trump, also a candidate at the time, called Shkreli a "spoiled brat." The Associated Press contributed to this report. Snapchat and Instagram filters are changing the way young people look at themselves. A new phenomenon of using filtered selfies as a guide for plastic surgeons is on the rise, and has been coined Snapchat Dysmorphia by Dr. Matthew Schulman, a board-certified plastic surgeon in New York City. The filters an effect that can transform the users facial features, typically by smoothing skin and enlarging eyes and lips have been accused of making people forget what they truly look like. MOM BLAMES PLASTIC SURGERY ADDICTION ON 'SELFIE DYSMORPHIA' Theres an issue with losing perspective on what you actually look like, and its not something we talk about much, Renee Engeln, professor of psychology at Northwestern University, and author of Beauty Sick: How the Cultural Obsession with Appearance Hurts Girls and Women, said to the Huffington Post. Its not enough [to] have to compare yourself to these perfected images of models, but now youve got this daily comparison of your real self to this intentional or unintentional fake self that you present on social media. Its just one more way to feel like your falling short every day, Engeln added. Were at a new level when we actually lose touch with our own face or look surprised when we look in the mirror, she said. So more are turning to plastic surgery to make that Snapchat filter face a permanent look. Everybody basically is using a filter on their own and theyre either taking that next step to bring it to me saying, Hey, this is what I want to look like, Schulman said to the Post. Though Engeln points out, seeking smooth and blemish-free skin isnt a new concept from the social media age. FOLLOW US ON FACEBOOK FOR MORE FOX LIFESTYLE NEWS Theyre not changing the content of our beauty standards, she said to the Post. Theyre just making images of it more widely available. Dr. Michelle Yagoda, a facial plastic surgeon in New York City, told the Post that constantly seeing altered selfies could have serious negative effects on peoples self-esteem, but doesnt think that many will be affected by the syndrome. I think any time youre able to shade out imperfections and make a better picture of yourself, it affects the way we see each other and the way we see ourselves, she said. I think this is a real problem, but I doubt that its going to be significantly affecting more people than regular body dysmorphic disorder does. Currently body dysmorphia disorder affects 1.7 to 2.4 percent of the population. The Duchess of Cambridge picked up a henna tattoo when visiting an artist hub with husband Prince William. The couple visited the opening of a fire station in Sunderland, England, which has been converted into a space for local artists, People reported. The royals enjoyed performances and conversations and, when an 18-year-old artist asked the Duchess if shed like a henna tattoo, she happily agreed. The small floral design on her hand is expected to fade away within two weeks. KYLIE JENNER RELEASES MAKEUP COLLECTION INSPIRED BY DAUGHTER STORMI "I said, 'Would you like a design?' and she was like, 'Yes, if you don't mind,'" artist Shajida Begum told reporters. "She was saying that it was really pretty. I was just telling her how it works. I was telling her when she can wash it off I said, 'When it becomes flaky.'" FITNESS BLOGGER CALLED OUT FOR DAMAGING WORKOUT VIDEOS TARGETING CHILDREN Royal enthusiasts need not worry that the henna design poses any threat to her baby due in April. People magazine notes that the natural henna tattoo is safe to use during pregnancy, as it is derived solely from plants. FOLLOW US ON FACEBOOK FOR MORE FOX LIFESTYLE NEWS Later that day, the Duchess traded her heels for boots, tied her hair in a ponytail and put on a hard hat to visit the new Northern Spire bridge over the River Wear, which is currently under construction. She did her part by tightening a bolt, E! News reported. NEW You can now listen to Fox News articles! Black History Month, which takes place each February, reminds me and other African-Americans of our past and the wrongs committed against our people. However, the real lesson to be learned is not in the pain of the past, but how black Americans have not and must not let those events define who we are as individuals. Yes, there was a time when our ancestors were forcibly taken from their homes, dehumanized, treated like animals and sold into slavery. After slavery, the era of convict leasing became popular. Southern states passed Black Codes, which were laws intended to criminalize people of color. Because many black people were unable to pay even small jail fines, they were sentenced to labor. As a result, convict laborers were leased to plantations, lumber camps and mines to be used for forced labor. It was the era of slavery by another name. After convict leasing, African-Americans lived through the horrors of segregation. Today, we now are faced with the difficult issues of prison overpopulation, unfair sentencing regulations and a society that appears to be the most prejudiced and xenophobic in the last 50 years. But nevertheless, history has taught us to never see these things as the defining characteristics of who we are, but instead to understand that our identity is much bigger and more significant than the circumstances we face. Real success has never been found in defining ourselves or finding value in what we do in life. Identity is not about whats readily visible to casual observers. Identity is about whats deep inside of us, not only our uniqueness as individuals, but also the internal realities that are not determined by anything external. When we perceive those gifts rightly, we draw strength and pursue our destinies based on the truth of who we really are. Black history is evidence of this. Everything we think, everything we do, and the entire way we see and relate to ourselves flows from our sense of identity our personal assessment of who we are and why we are significant. Our identity is the compass that guides us through every aspect of life and keeps us grounded and centered in the things that matter most. We each figure out who we really are and why we are so valuable one discovery at a time. Often, before we get down to the core of whom we really are, we first have to strip away who we are not. History is littered with people who have allowed themselves to become stuck in the pain and disappointments of life. While there are some who point fingers of judgement at the statistics and stereotypes of African-Americans, I believe that our history shows that we have the capacity within us to forge into a great future regardless of the obstacles in front of us. Black history serves as a constant reminder that every challenge that African-Americans have faced and overcome is part of the significant reasons why our identity is so special. NEW You can now listen to Fox News articles! Congress recently rejected immigration proposals that would have prioritized the needs of illegal immigrants over American citizens. The Senate defeated three immigration amendments that would have given amnesty to the hundreds of thousands of "Dreamers" brought into the U.S. illegally as children without immediately ending chain migration. The defeat of these proposals is good news. If Washington truly wants to look out for the interests of all Americans, lawmakers need to end chain migration, which is both a national and economic threat this country and its working-class. Just before Christmas, Egyptian-born terrorist Ahmed Amin El-Mofty opened fire on police officers in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Earlier in December, Bangladesh native Akayed Ullah tried to set off a pipe bomb near Times Square in New York City. Both men came to the United States through a process known as chain migration, which allows recent immigrants to obtain green cards for their extended relatives in foreign countries. The White House has vowed to end chain migration, dubbing it a national security threat. The flow of terrorists and criminals into a country is a serious national security threat but there's an even more pressing reason to eliminate chain migration. The policy, which allows high volumes of low-skilled workers to flood the country, depresses wages and undermines job prospects for Americans. Right now, our immigration system gives priority for green cards to the extended family members of recent immigrants. After becoming a citizen, an immigrant can start a "chain" by sponsoring his parents, siblings, and adult children for green cards, which grant lifetime work and residency privileges. These new arrivals can sponsor their own relatives, who in turn can sponsor even more relatives. The system doesn't take immigrants' skills or educational backgrounds into consideration. Virtually all that matters is whether the prospective immigrants are lucky enough to already have family members in the United States. Chain migration has caused a spectacular surge in immigration over the past 50 years. In the 1950s and 1960s, legal immigration numbered about 250,000 each year. Today that figure tops 1 million people annually. Immigrants who migrated after 1996 brought an average of 3.45 additional family members. Future immigration levels will increase even further if Congress provides amnesty to the roughly 800,000 illegal aliens who received temporary work permits and a reprieve from deportation under President Obama's Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. If these people receive green cards, they'd be able to sponsor additional family members often the parents who illegally brought them to the United States. All told, a DACA amnesty could prompt up to 6 million foreign nationals to enter the country. American workers particularly those with limited skill sets would suffer the consequences of this influx. Most immigrants who arrive via chain migration have limited formal educations, so they compete against lesser-skilled Americans for the same jobs. Among native-born Americans 25 and older, just 12 percent lack a high-school diploma; among naturalized citizens and non-citizens in that age range, nearly 30 percent failed to complete high school. Nearly half of the high-school dropouts in this country are foreign-born. Competition from lesser-skilled foreign workers has increased unemployment among vulnerable Americans. High school dropouts have an unemployment rate of about 8 percent, roughly triple the rate for college graduates. When factoring in underemployed workers and discouraged workers who have left the labor force entirely, that rate nearly doubles. Increased competition also drives down wages. Consider what happened in Miami in the 1980s. The sudden arrival of roughly 125,000 Cuban refugees from the Mariel Boatlift boosted Miami's workforce by 8 percent and increased the number of high school dropouts in the city by nearly 20 percent. The increased competition in the low-skilled sector tanked wages for the least-skilled workers by between 10 and 30 percent. In total, Harvard economist George Borjas estimates that immigration has reduced wages for high school dropouts by up to 5 percent. Working-class Americans cannot withstand endless competition from thousands upon thousands of low-skilled immigrants willing to work for very low wages. Thankfully, there's a bill in Congress to relieve these workers. The Securing America's Future Act, introduced by Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., would end chain migration and the diversity visa lottery. It would strengthen our borders and mandate that all employers verify that their employees are legally eligible to work in the United States. It's time for Congress to put America's working class first by stopping the influx of low-skilled foreign laborers whose only qualification is having a family member in the United States. NEW You can now listen to Fox News articles! In a recent tweet, President Trump asked: Why didnt Obama do something about the (Russian) meddling? Its a good question, especially since, as President Trump pointed out, all of the Russian meddling took place during the Obama administration. The answer to President Trumps question is that over the course of eight years the Obama administration neglected to take cybersecurity seriously, even though in 2013 Defense Secretary Leon Panetta warned of a coming (cyber) Pearl Harbor. Despite repeated intrusions, and though independent agencies concluded that our defenses against hackers were woefully inadequate, the Obama White House made only cosmetic attempts to protect our vital agencies and infrastructure. When this lack of preparedness led to damaging virtual break-ins, President Obama declined to confront the bad actors trying to steal our secrets. This came in spite of President Obamas easy access to Silicon Valley. The only time the White House called in some help from tech titans was when the ObamaCare rollout crashed, embarrassing the president. Not when the Chinese invaded the White House computer network in 2012 or when North Korea penetrated Sonys systems; the big guns were summoned only when the presidents legacy program teetered on the brink of collapse. In 2014 then-Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., who served on the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, published a report on the dangerous lapses in the governments cyber preparedness, based on 40 reports and audits, including from the Government Accountability Office. Federal agencies, Coburn reported, had neglected to implement even the most basic safeguards, such as resetting passwords or downloading software updates. The report contained details of a hack of our Nuclear Regulatory Commission, for instance, in which data on the countrys 85,000 dams was stolen from the unprotected computers of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The information included estimates of the potential death counts that would result from the failures of individual dams. The most significant intrusion during President Obamas two terms was the 2015 penetration of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), in which sensitive information (Social Security numbers, birth dates, health histories, fingerprints) on 22 million people many with top security clearances was stolen. Not only did the White House allow the break-in to occur officials there lied about the severity of the attack. OPM officials initially told the Wall Street Journal that no sensitive data had been stolen, though the FBI had informed them otherwise. The Journal reported that the day OPM made that dishonest claim, former Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano emailed to tell friends at the University of California that people who had gone through a security clearance were at risk. She had apparently received a heads-up. That theft was said to have been the work of the Chinese. The OPM breach was not unique. During the Obama years the Pentagon, the CIA, the Department of Commerce, Department of Homeland Security and the National Nuclear Security Administration were all hacked. After the OPM attack, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said at a security conference: Until such time as we can create both the substance and the psychology of deterrence, this is going to go on. He argued that unintended consequences and other related policy issues made creating such deterrents difficult. In other words, the Obama White House did nothing when China hacked the OPM, or when North Korea invaded Sony because there were overarching political considerations. Think climate accord and a nuclear stand-down. But it was the White Houses tolerance of Russian intrusions that in retrospect was the most dangerous action. In 2013 Russia took advantage of a Microsoft glitch to hack into NATOs computer systems, the new Ukrainian government and several European Union agencies. President Obama did nothing to respond to this aggression, emboldening Moscow. Over the next two years Russian agents invaded the State Department and ultimately penetrated not only the White House but also the Pentagon. The thefts of data were not as public as the plundering of OPM by the Chinese; the Russians appeared to be accumulating virtual weapons. In late 2015, the FBI warned the Democratic National Committee (DNC) that Russian hackers had breached its computers. A few months later the same group of Russians ensnared John Podesta, Hillary Clintons campaign chair, harvesting his emails. The Russians sat on their stolen material until a few weeks before the Democratic National Convention, when they then forwarded the hacked emails from the DNC to Wikileaks. The resulting uproar, which cost DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz her job, was only the beginning, as we now know. Because President Obama was beholden to China for agreeing to join the Paris Climate Accord and because he needed both Russia and China to sign off on the Iran nuclear deal, he chose not to push back against their criminal invasions of our private and public institutions. As Luke Thompson has argued in the National Review, this lack of confrontation only encouraged more bad behavior. Our country has been wracked by discord for more than a year, and the Trump presidency has been severely weakened by charges that his team colluded with the Russians to defeat Hillary Clinton. There has been no evidence of such behavior, but the investigation goes on, dividing the nation and undermining Americans confidence in our law enforcement and intelligence agencies, as well as our president. The Justice Department has concluded that the Russians wanted to sow discord in the United States. This will be Obamas legacy: he allowed them to do so. NEW You can now listen to Fox News articles! In announcing new sanctions Friday against North Korea, President Trump made it clear that the communist nation will pay a big price for stockpiling nuclear weapons and long-range missiles that pose a threat to the U.S. and other countries. The president spoke to the Conservative Political Action Conference about the tough new sanctions designed to make the rogue regime in Pyongyang feel even greater economic pain for its decision to become a nuclear power. Make no mistake, these sanctions will have some bite. They apply to 27 shipping companies and 28 ships registered in North Korea, China and five other nations. The Trump administration says the companies and ships are helping North Korea evade international restrictions on fuel imports and a ban on coal exports. The sanctions are designed to cut off foreign cash that North Korea desperately needs. The action by the Trump administration blocks assets held by the sanctioned entities in the U.S. and bars U.S. citizens from dealing with those entities. The North Koreans could even decide that its time to up the ante and prove to the world beyond the shadow of any doubt that they can start a nuclear war. Coming on the heels of multiple United Nations Security Council resolutions as well as unilateral sanctions imposed earlier by the U.S., South Korea and Japan the new U.S. sanctions will intensify the diplomatic and economic isolation of North Korea under a maximum pressure strategy that can only mean trouble for dictator Kim Jong Un and his regime. Indeed, these sanctions are coming at the worst possible time for the North. With reports Pyongyang could be tapped out of foreign exchange and dollar reserves come October, this is tantamount to bankruptcy for the regime. So where do things turn next? There are only two paths I can see going forward. The first is what I would wish would happen, but seems highly unlikely. Under my hoped-for scenario, North Korea comes to its senses and decides to negotiate not just with South Korea but also with the U.S. The Kim regime decides to make an effort to reach out to Ivanka Trump who is in South Korea right now to attend the closing of the Winter Olympics. Remember, Ivanka Trump is not just the presidents daughter but a trusted adviser who has the presidents ear. The North would be wise to take the opportunity to approach her seriously. From such an opening, both sides could slowly work towards a framework to denuclearize the Korean peninsula. Such negotiations would be difficult and could take years. However, any effort that would result in atomic disarmament of North Korea which may have as many as 60 nuclear bombs would be a welcome breakthrough. This is the Trump administrations goal. But my heart and a decade-plus of studying the North tell me we are closing in on a spring crisis. As I noted just this week, the Olympic pause in tensions will be short-lived. I believe that North Korea will demand in the coming days and weeks the complete cancellation of large U.S.-South Korean joint military exercises, which have already been delayed until the end of April. My own sources in the Pentagon have suggested that as of this moment those military exercises especially the large Foal Eagle exercise that involves 300,000-plus South Korean soldiers are still a go. This will enrage the North Koreans and they will respond in some fashion. And, in fact, in its propaganda outlets North Korea has already declared that the U.S.-South Korean military exercises need to be cancelled. Once the North realizes that this will not happen, it will have many options to push back. I would expect Kim to test at least one more nuclear weapon as well as send long-range missiles into the sky. The North could even decide to fire an intercontinental ballistic missile deep into the South Pacific and show off new warhead technology that can pierce the atmosphere and destroy a city. This would make clear to the world that North Korea can destroy an American city and kill millions of our own people. From here it could get worse. The North Koreans could even decide that its time to up the ante and prove to the world beyond the shadow of any doubt that they can start a nuclear war. Kim could decide on an atmospheric test of a nuclear bomb. If that were to happen, I would argue that the Trump administration might feel it had no choice but to launch what has been called a bloody nose strike on the regime. Enjoy the last few days of the Olympics and the Paralympics. After that, it seems all but certain all hell is going to break loose in Northeast Asia. Again. NEW You can now listen to Fox News articles! President Trump went off script waaaay off script Friday as he touted his achievements, cracked jokes and attacked his critics in a wide-ranging speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in convention center packed with hardcore supporters. The president was in rare form joking about his "bald spot," reading a poem titled "The Snake" and even calling his own prepared speech "boring" before vaulting off on a 75-minute stem-winder speech just outside Washington. "CPAC has always been about big ideas and putting them into action," President Trump began, reading from a teleprompter. But as he read in a monotone, the president suddenly caught his own image on a giant video monitor. "What a nice picture that is, look at that, Id love to watch that guy speak, oh God," the president said as he looked at his larger-than-life image, while the audience began cheering. He then turned his back to the crowd watching himself on the big screen and pantomimed fixing his hair, primping and pressing the tops and sides. "Ohhhhh, I try like hell to hide that bald spot, folks, I work hard at it, he said after turning back to face the crowd. Doesn't look bad," he said, looking back at himself. "Hey, were hanging in, we're hanging in, we're hanging in there, right? Together we are hanging in! From there it was all bets off. Trump the teleprompter reader had suddenly morphed into Trump the guy who will say anything that pops into his mind and the crowd ate it up. Then for over an hour the president would read a portion of his speech from the teleprompter and blast off on one wild tangent after another before returning to his script. He was not about to do the one thing he just can't stand to do be boring. By the way, you dont mind if I go off-script a little bit, because, you know its sort of boring, the president said to whoops and cheers from the now-enthralled crowd. Sort of boring. Got this beautiful speech, everything's wonderful, but its a little boring. He covered all the bases saying he was a conservative; boasting about his tax cuts and cutting regulations and making conservative judicial appointments; saying he had the best first year of any president ever. He spiced it all up with endless Trumpisms and the kind of digressions that make him seem like a regular guy just shooting the breeze down at the local bar after a few beers. Sometimes, the president got carried away, like when he said he'd fulfilled more promises than he has made. But he always returned to the red meat, referring to Hillary Clinton at one point, which brought chants of "Lock her up!" from the crowd. On illegal immigration, he said simply, "they'll sneak in through a window." At one point early on, a protester rose up and shouted something. Security removed the man as the crowd shouted him down. Trump broke off in mid-sentence and waited for the disturbance to end -- joking with event organizers about how the protester got in. Then he tossed out another hefty hunk of red meat for the true believers, mocking the "fake news" about how they'll cover the minor interruption. "For the media, the fake news back there, they took very good care of them, they were very gentle, he was very obnoxious," he said. "But tomorrow the headline will be: 'Protesters Disturb.' One person doesn't deserve a mention, doesn't deserve a headline." But the president was serious and intense at times, too. Why do we protect our airports and banks, but not our schools? President Trump asked. When we make schools gun-free zones, it just puts our students in far more danger. On the high school shooting in Florida last week that left 17 dead, the president said: There are not enough tears in the world to express our sorrow. They have suffered beyond anything I have ever witnessed." But he always went back on the offensive. At another point, President Trump took aim at Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. -- a mainstream media darling but a reviled figure among many of the CPAC attendees for voting against ObamaCare repeal. "I dont want to be controversial, so I wont mention his name," the president said of McCain. Too late. Everyone knew who he meant. As he kept whipping up the crowd, the president whipped himself up, too. Near the end, he had a heavily sweaty upper lip and a shiny nose. But he wasn't done yet. He asked the crowd if they wanted him to do "The Snake." Its a poem, sort of a version of the Frog and Scorpion fable from Aesop. The crowd cheered, so Trump read the poem, with a one word intro: "Immigration." The president read: On her way to work one morning Down the path alongside the lake A tender-hearted woman saw a poor half-hearted frozen snake. His pretty colored skin had been all frosted with the dew "Poor thing," she cried, "I'll take you in and I'll take care of you." "Take me in, oh tender woman, take me in for heaven' sake Take me in, oh tender woman," sighed the vicious snake. She wrapped him all cozy in a comforter of silk And laid him by her fireside with some honey and some milk. She hurried home from work that night and soon as she arrived She found that pretty snake she's taken in had been revived. "Take me in, oh tender woman, take me in for heaven' sake Take me in, oh tender woman," sighed the vicious snake. She clutched him to her bosom, "You're so beautiful," she cried "But if I hadn't brought you in by now surely you would have died." She stroked his pretty skin and kissed and held him tight But instead of saying thank you, that snake gave her a vicious bite. "Take me in, oh tender woman, take me in for heaven' sake Take in, oh tender woman," sighed the vicious snake. "I saved you!" cried the woman, "And you've bitten me, heaven's why? "You know you're bite is poisonous, and now I'm going to die!" "Oh, shut up silly woman!" said the reptile with a grin. "You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in!" "And that's what we're doing with our country, folks," President Trump said. "We're letting people in and it's going to be a lot of trouble, it's only getting worse." The president, looking like he might never leave the stage, went through his accomplishments again: Jobs up, wages up, unemployment down, economy good, "massive tax cuts." Finally, he wrapped it all up with a "we're going to make America great again and I will never, ever ever let you down." Then he stepped away from the podium as the first bars of the Rolling Stones' classic "You Can't Always Get What You Want" blared in the ballroom. But that part was "fake news." The crowd got exactly what it wanted. NEW You can now listen to Fox News articles! After each mass public shooting in the U.S. such as the horrific attack at a Florida high school last week that killed 17 people gun control advocates keep pointing to Australia as the role model America should follow to reduce gun deaths. If only reducing crime and suicides was so easy. In reality, gun control efforts in Australia have not been as successful as weve been led to believe. In fact, the only proven policy to stop gun attacks is deterrence by allowing law-abiding citizens to defend themselves and others, as President Trump correctly pointed out Thursday on Twitter and in remarks at the White House. The president tweeted: If a potential sicko shooter knows that a school has a large number of very weapons talented teachers (and others) who will be instantly shooting, the sicko will NEVER attack that school. The president added: Cowards wont go there ... problem solved. Must be offensive, defense alone wont work! European countries such as Belgium, France and the Netherlands have even stricter gun control laws than Australia does, but their mass public shooting rates are at least as high as those in the United States. This effective action proposed by the president has been greeted with disdain by most of the media. Instead, news organizations such as USA Today , the New York Times and the Washington Post have all run stories in recent days crediting Australias 1996-1997 gun buyback program with cutting the firearm homicide and suicide rates in half, and eliminating mass public shootings. Our friends in Australia have been only too eager to offer advice telling us to follow their example. Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop recently offered to explain to Americans the best gun control regulations. Over this past weekend a church in Australia got international attention for putting up a sign saying: When will they love their kids more than their guns. Responding, anti-gun politicians from Hillary Clinton to President Obama have pointed to Australias gun laws as a model that we should closely examine. But looking at simple before-and-after averages of gun deaths in Australia regarding the gun buyback is extremely misleading. Firearm homicides and suicides were falling from the mid-1980s onwards, so you could pick out any subsequent year and the average firearm homicide and suicide rates after that year would be down compared to the average before it. The question is whether the rate of decline changed after the gun buyback law went into effect. But the decline in firearm homicides and suicides actually slowed down after the buyback. Australias buyback resulted in almost 1 million guns being handed in and destroyed, but after that private gun ownership once again steadily increased and now exceeds what it was before the buyback. In fact, since 1997 gun ownership in Australia grew over three times faster than the population (from 2.5 million to 5.8 million guns). Gun control advocates should have predicted a sudden drop in firearm homicides and suicides after the buyback, and then an increase as the gun ownership rate increased again. But that clearly didnt happen. For other crimes, such as armed robbery, what happened is the exact opposite of what was predicted. The armed robbery rate soared right after the gun buyback, then gradually declined. Gun control advocates like to note that there has been no mass public shooting in Australia since the buyback. But they are simply picking out a country that happens to prove what they want it to prove. European countries such as Belgium, France and the Netherlands have even stricter gun control laws than Australia does, but their mass public shooting rates are at least as high as those in the United States. During the Obama administration, the per capita casualty rate from shootings in the European Union was actually 27 percent higher than the U.S. rate. Even excluding fights over sovereignty and including the recent attacks in Las Vegas, the Texas church shooting in November, and the Florida school massacre, the number of mass shootings in the rest of the world has been much worse than in the U.S. since at least as far back as 1970. Many point to the widely covered work by the University of Alabamas Adam Lankford, who claims that 31 percent of mass public shootings from 1966 to 2012 have occurred in the U.S. But Lankfords totals dont line up with others, and he has refused repeated requests to release a list of his cases. New Zealand also provides a useful comparison to Australia. They are both isolated, island nations, and have similar socioeconomics and demographics. Their mass murder rates were nearly identical prior to Australias gun buyback. From 1980 to 1996, Australias mass murder rate was 0.0042 incidents per 100,000 people. New Zealands was 0.0050 incidents per 100,000 people. After 1997, both countries experienced similar drops in mass murders, even though New Zealand had not altered its gun control laws. It would be just as misleading for gun control critics to cite only New Zealand as it is for gun control advocates to cite Australia. The right approach is to look at a lot of similar places and see what gun control measures actually made a difference. To do just that, Bill Landes of the University of Chicago and I collected data on all multiple-victim public shootings in all the United States from 1977 to 1999. We examined 13 different gun control policies, including: waiting periods, registration, background checks, bans on assault weapons, the death penalty, and harsher penalties for committing a crime with a firearm. But only one policy reduced the number and severity of mass public shootings: allowing victims to defend themselves with permitted, concealed handguns. Since 1950, all but six U.S. mass public shootings have happened in areas where general citizens were banned from having guns. And in Europe, every single mass public shooting has occurred where guns are banned. Killers have good reason to avoid places where people have guns. In dozens of cases concealed-carry gun permit holders have stopped mass public shootings. In the Texas church shooting last year, the killer was killing the wounded when a man living near the church shot him. Yet gun control advocates keep focusing on laws that wont make any difference. None of the mass public shootings since at least 2000 would have been stopped by universal background checks. Relying on Australia requires a misreading of the evidence, and requires that we ignore what has happened in all the other countries with strict regulations. The truth is that gun control hasn't worked for anyone. Conservative commentator Ben Shapiro on Thursday told activists that the era of political correctness is over in the age of Donald Trump as president, while encouraging conservatives to fight liberalism with the truth. The era of political correctness is over, Shapiro said at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference outside Washington. Political correctness is dying a slow, painful, bloody, agonizing death. And all I can say is hell, yeah. Like other speakers here, Shapiro addressed the recent school shooting in Florida, and accused the media of unfairly treating conservative views on guns. He asked the audience to raise their hands if they care about the people murdered in Parkland, Fla. He also asked them to raise their hands if they believe in Second Amendment rights. See, both things can go together, media, Shapiro said. At one point during his speech, Shapiro celebrated Trumps defeat of Democrat Hillary Clinton in the presidential race and the crowd began chanting lock her up, lock her up. Shapiro went on to encourage the young conservatives in the audience to stay truthful when debating liberals. Theres nothing wrong with poking fun at the left, he said. Just make sure that what you say can be backed up with evidence. Shapiro added: We need to show that they are liars and we are the truth tellers. And that means telling the truth about everything. It means that when our own side fails, we have to call it out. Earlier in the day, Vice President Mike Pence and NRA leader Wayne LaPierre delivered speeches to the activists. CPAC, known for attracting a large number of college students, also held a panel on liberal bias on college campuses titled Kim Jong Un-iversity: How college campuses are turning into reeducation camps. Marcus Fotenos of the group Turning Point USA said of university professors: Whats really sad is they dont value reason or truth.how do we operate in an environment where they dont value reason? Grant Strobl of Young Americas Foundation told the story of how, at the University of Michigan, he requested to be called His Majesty after the school allowed students to change their personal pronouns to whatever theyd like. This policy is insane, he said. President Trump and other members of his administration are scheduled to address CPAC on Friday. The armed Broward County sheriffs deputy assigned to the campus of Stoneman Douglas High School took position outside of the freshman building during the mass shooting there last week, but a security video shows he never entered the building to try to stop the gunman, Sheriff Scott Israel said Thursday. Israel suspended the Deputy Scot Peterson without pay pending an investigation, he said. The deputy opted instead to retire. Seventeen people died when a former student entered the building, opening fire with an AR-15. Fifteen more were injured. Im devastated, sick to my stomach. There are no words, Israel said of the conclusion that the deputy had failed to act. He said the deputy clearly knew a shooting was going on. The school-based deputy remained outside of the building for upwards of four minutes, Israel said. The shooting lasted six minutes. What I saw was a deputy arrive at the west side of building 12, take up a position, and he never went in, Israel said, describing footage he reviewed from outside of the freshman building. Israel also reviewed witness statements and statements by Peterson himself, he said. The sheriff also restricted the responsibilities of two other deputies Thursday pending a review of how theyd investigated previous tips about the suspected gunman, former student Nikolas Cruz. Officers had received more than 20 calls about Cruz in recent years, Israel said. The revelation that the school deputy failed to act during the shooting added to a list of possible missed opportunities to intervene. The FBI said on Friday that it had failed to properly investigate a January tip from someone close to Cruz, who said he was concerned about his disturbing social media posts and desire to kill people. Related reading on the shooting at Stoneman Douglas High School Follow @evieblad on Twitter or subscribe to Rules for Engagement to get blog posts delivered directly to your inbox. Paul Manafort's prison stay was extended Wednesday nearly a week after he was sentenced to 47 months on bank and tax fraud charges in a separate case. The former Trump campaign chairman is now slated to spend a total of 81 months in prison. He was given extra prison time at his second sentencing in connection with his guilty plea related to foreign lobbying and witness tampering. In August, Manafort became the first Trump campaign associate to be found guilty by a jury as part of Special Counsel Robert Muellers long-running probe. He was convicted of eight bank and tax fraud charges at that time. PAUL MANAFORT SENTENCED ON FOREIGN LOBBYING AND WITNESS TAMPERING CHARGES Manafort has been the subject of an investigation over his dealings in Ukraine several years ago he didnt file as a foreign agent until June 2017. But Mueller has incorporated that investigation into his probe of Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election and possible collusion with Trump associates. Manafort was convicted on multiple counts of financial fraud last year in connection with his Ukranian work, and is in prison. In November, Mueller accused Manafort of lying "on a variety of subject matters" since his plea deal, thus violating that agreement. Read on for a look at Manafort's work with the Trump campaign and how he is connected to the Russia investigation. What kind of foreign work did Manafort do? A GOP operative who worked for former Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, Manafort reportedly began his work in Republican politics in the 1970s. Eventually, Manafort was hired by former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, a controversial pro-Russia politician who was ousted from power twice. After Yanukovych was elected president in 2010, Manafort reportedly stayed on as an adviser and worked on other projects in Eastern Europe, including the Party of Regions political party. Manafort also worked for Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska. In 2005, Manafort allegedly came up with a plan to influence U.S. politics, business dealings and the media in order to greatly benefit the Putin government, according to The Associated Press. Deripaska is a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, and signed a $10 million annual contract with Manafort in 2006; they maintained a business relationship until at least 2009. Financial records obtained by The New York Times indicated that Manafort was in debt to pro-Russian interests by up to $17 million prior to joining Donald Trumps presidential campaign. He also took more than a dozen trips to Moscow and frequently talked to Putin allies over a period of about 10 years, McClatchy reported. He traveled to Kiev at least 19 times in 20 months after the February 2014 removal of Ukraines pro-Russia leader. How was Manafort involved with Trump's campaign? Manafort joined Trump's presidential campaign in March 2016 to help wrangle delegates ahead of the Republican National Convention in Ohio, something he'd done for former President Gerald Ford. Just two months later, Manafort became Trump's campaign chairman. Manaforts resignation from the campaign was announced on August 19, 2016, after The Times reported that he'd received $12.7 million in undisclosed cash payments from Yanukovychs pro-Russian party between 2007 and 2012. Manafort and Donald Trump Jr., the president's eldest son, met with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya in June 2016. She reportedly was said to have damaging information on Trumps campaign rival, Hillary Clinton, which was "part of Russia and its governments support for Mr. Trump." What was Manafort charged with? Along with his former business associate Rick Gates, Manafort was initially indicted in October 2017 on multiple counts that included: conspiracy against the U.S., conspiracy to launder money, false statements and failure to file reports of foreign bank and financial accounts. Nearly four months later, in February 2018, the pair were hit with additional tax evasion and bank fraud charges. These charges involved much of the same conduct Manafort and Gates were initially accused of, but the amount of money Manafort said to have laundered through offshore accounts increased to $30 million. In June 2018, Mueller's team brought additional charges of obstruction of justice against Manafort and Konstantin Kilimnik, an associate. The charges against Manafort and Gates dont relate to allegations of misconduct during Trumps campaign. Mueller also accused Manafort of secretly paying former European politicians to lobby on behalf of Ukraine. Manafort was found guilty of eight counts in August in the first trial victory for Mueller's team. The judge declared a mistrial on 10 other counts after jurors failed to reach a unanimous verdict. In September, Manafort pleaded guilty as part of an agreement with Mueller's team ahead of his second trial. According to Politico, the plea deal includes a 10-year cap for how long Manafort will be in prison. It also includes allowing Manafort to serve his time for both trials concurrently. He received a nearly 4-year prison sentence on March 7 after a federal jury in Virginia convicted him on eight counts of bank and tax fraud last year. A week later, on March 13, he received an additional three and a half years on foreign lobbying and witness tampering charges. Manafort previously maintained his innocence despite all of the charges brought before him but he has since expressed remorse for his actions. "I am sorry for what I have done and all the activities that have gotten us here today," Manafort said in a written statement in March, begging a judge for mercy. Fox News' Ann Schmidt, Jake Gibson, Alex Pappas, Matt Richardson and The Associated Press contributed to this report. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis is expected to recommend to President Trump that transgender people can serve in the U.S. military if they can deploy overseas, a U.S. official with knowledge of the secretarys thinking on the issue told Fox News Thursday. The official said Mattis did not want to go against recent federal court orders which ruled Trumps proposed ban on transgender people serving in the military is unlawful. FLASHBACK: MATTIS FREEZES TRUMP BAN ON TRANSGENDER TROOPS PENDING REVIEW Mattis' expected decision was first reported by The Washington Post. Officials tell Fox News that Mattis' thinking has also been shaped by his recently announced policy that any service member unable to deploy with his or her unit for more than 12 months must leave the military. Mattis has not yet given his recommendation to the president. Pentagon spokeswoman Dana White told reporters Thursday the secretary's recommendation would be given to the president later "this week." FLASHBACK: TRUMP ANNOUNCES BAN ON TRANSGENDER INDIVIDUALS SERVING IN MILITARY The official announcement about transgender policy is expected from the White House no later than March 23, according to officials. The Pentagon was caught by surprise this past July when Trump tweeted that transgender people were no longer welcome in the military "in any capacity." The following month, Trump demanded that military recruitment policy consider transgender as "a disqualifying psychological and physical" condition. Since then, three federal courts have ruled against the ban and some Senate Republicans -- including military veterans Joni Ernst of Iowa and John McCain of Arizona -- have voiced their objections. The Associated Press contributed to this report. Special Counsel Robert Mueller filed a 32-count indictment Thursday hitting former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and aide Rick Gates with fresh charges of tax evasion and bank fraud. Manafort is specifically charged with five counts related to filing false income tax returns and four counts of failure to report foreign bank and financial accounts. Gates is accused of 11 counts related to filing false income tax returns and three counts of failure to report foreign bank and financial accounts. Both men are accused of nine counts of bank fraud and conspiracy to commit bank fraud. Prosecutors claim the men doctored financial documents, lied to tax preparers and defrauded banks -- using money they cycled through offshore accounts to spend lavishly, including on real estate, interior decorating and other luxury goods. The new indictment comes a week after Mueller filed charges against 13 Russians, accusing them of a vast conspiracy to undermine the U.S. presidential election. The charges against Manafort and Gates don't relate to any allegations of misconduct related to Trump's campaign, though Mueller is continuing to investigate potential ties to the Kremlin. Manafort spokesman Jason Maloni said in a statement that the former Trump campaign chairman is innocent and stressed that the charges "have nothing to do with Russia and 2016 election interference/collusion." Manafort "is confident that he will be acquitted of all charges," Maloni said. Manafort and Gates were initially charged in a 12-count indictment last October that accused them of a multimillion-dollar money-laundering conspiracy tied to their foreign lobbying work. They are accused of directing a covert Washington lobbying campaign on behalf of pro-Russian Ukrainian interests. Manafort and Gates pleaded not guilty to the initial charges. The charges against Manafort and Gates arise from their foreign lobbying and efforts that prosecutors say they made to conceal their income by disguising it as loans from offshore companies. More recently, after their Ukrainian work dwindled, the indictment also accuses them of fraudulently obtaining more than $20 million in loans from financial institutions. The new indictment increases the amount of money Manafort, with the assistance of Gates, is accused of laundering to $30 million. It also charges Manafort and Gates with filing false tax returns from 2010 through 2014 and in most of those years concealing their foreign bank accounts from the IRS. The new indictment was returned by a federal grand jury in Alexandria, Va. It leaves open the possibility that Manafort or Gates could face additional state charges of filing false tax returns. In a document that accompanied the new indictment, prosecutors said they had filed the charges in Virginia, rather than Washington where the other case is pending, because the alleged conduct occurred there and one of the defendants objected to them being brought in Washington. The indictment comes amid ongoing turmoil in the Manafort and Gates defense camps. Manafort has been unable to reach an agreement with prosecutors over the terms of his bail and remains under house arrest, while Gates's lawyers withdrew from the case after acknowledging "irreconcilable differences" with their client. A new lawyer, Thomas Green, entered an appearance Thursday on Gates's behalf. Mueller was appointed in May to investigate potential coordination between Russia and the Trump campaign. He took over an ongoing FBI investigation into Manafort's foreign lobbying work. After a two-month stretch that produced no charges, the new indictment is part of a flurry of activity for Mueller's team within the past week. Besides the charges against the Russians, Mueller's team on Tuesday unsealed a guilty plea from a Dutch lawyer who admitted he lied to investigators about his contacts with Gates. Manafort and Gates, who also worked on Trump's campaign, both pleaded not guilty after their indictment last fall. Two other people who aided Trump in the campaign or in the White House -- former national security adviser Michael Flynn and former campaign foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos -- have pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about their foreign contacts. Neither man has been sentenced. Both are cooperating with the investigation. Mueller is also examining whether Trump obstructed justice through actions including the firing last May of FBI Director James Comey. His team has expressed interest in interviewing the president. Fox News' Jake Gibson and Jon Decker contributed to this report. The Associated Press also contributed to this report. Special Counsel Robert Mueller is the only known Republican on the team investigating Russian meddling and potential collusion with Trump campaign associates during the 2016 presidential election, according to a review by Fox News. The majority of the 17 publicly confirmed attorneys on Muellers team are registered Democrats -- and others have made Democratic political donations. That donation history has long fueled concerns from Trump-aligned Republicans about potential bias in the unit. While any team of investigators is bound to have members with their own political views, the Democratic-leaning makeup of this particular team was underscored when The Daily Caller reported that no registered Republicans were working under Mueller. There appear to be only two asterisks to that stat: The Caller reported that Mueller lawyer Zainab Ahmad was registered as a Republican at the age of 18 but has since changed her registration status to unaffiliated; and Mueller himself was known to be a Republican when appointed to lead the FBI in 2001 by then-President George W. Bush. Mueller's current party registration is not clear. A review by Fox News shows that of the 17 attorneys, at least nine attorneys are registered Democrats. Others have registered with no party declared, or their registration was not known. And a review of political donation records shows at least 10 of Muellers attorneys -- including some of the registered Democrats -- have donated to Democratic candidates and causes like former President Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., and the Democratic National Committee. Mueller's team has been particularly active in recent days, securing a major indictment against more than a dozen Russian nationals last week and on Thursday bringing new charges against Trump campaign officials Paul Manafort and Rick Gates. The pace is sure to bring new scrutiny to the team itself. According to Mueller's office, his team includes 17 attorneys: Ahmad, Greg Andres, Lawrence Rush Atkinson, Ryan Dickey, Michael Dreeben, Kyle Freeny, Andrew Goldstein, Adam Jed, Scott Meisler, Elizabeth Prelogar, James Quarles, Jeannie Rhee, Brian Richardson, Brandon Van Grack, Andrew Weissmann, Aaron Zebley, and Aaron Zelinksky. Quarles, whose voter registration is unknown, is a former partner at WilmerHale. He donated over $7,000 to Obama in the last decade, and $2,700 to Clintons 2016 presidential campaign. He did, however, also donate $2,500 to Jason Chaffetz, the former Republican congressman from Utah, in 2015. Rhee, a registered Democrat and former partner at WilmerHale, also donated a total of $5,400 to Clinton. Rhee donated a combined $4,800 to Obama in 2008 and 2011, along with smaller contributions to the DNC and Democrats running for Congress. MUELLER PROBE: MEET THE LAWYERS WHO GAVE $$ TO HILLARY, NOW INVESTIGATING TEAM TRUMP Weissmann, a registered Democrat who served as general counsel at the FBI and was an assistant U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, donated a combined $2,300 to Obamas campaign in 2008 -- and in 2006, contributed at least $2,000 to the DNC. Andres, a registered Democrat and a former partner at Davis Polk and former assistant U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, donated at least $2,700 to Gillibrand in 2017, along with smaller donations to other Democratic candidates. Dreeben, whose voter registration is unknown, is an appellate attorney for the Office of the Solicitor General. He donated $1,000 to Clinton in 2006, and a combined $1,000 to Obama in 2007 and 2008. While Trump allies called into question the Democratic donations of Mueller's attorneys last year, there has been a renewed focus on the team after the release of anti-Trump text messages from two former members -- FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, who were romantically involved. READ FBI'S STRZOK, PAGE TEXTS ABOUT TRUMP Despite the scrutiny Mueller has faced throughout the probe, Justice Department policy prohibits the consideration of political affiliation in personnel matters involving career employees meaning, an attorney on detail has a right to their own political beliefs. All employees and applicants for employment should receive fair and equitable treatment in all aspects of personnel management without regard to political affiliation, U.S.C. 2301 (b) (2) reads. Identifying candidates as liberal or conservative by the activities or organizations with which they are affiliated can be used as a proxy for political affiliation and thus can violate CSRAs prohibition, according to the Justice Department rules. Using ideological affiliation can violate the requirement that the government use hiring practices for career positions that ensure it identifies the best qualified applicants through fair and open competition. Former Obama administration official Ben Rhodes announced Thursday the release of his new book that will detail his time in the White House. The book, entitled "The World As It Is," will be released on June 12, according to his tweet. Rhodes moved up from speechwriter for President Barack Obama to deputy national security adviser. His book will cover events such as the killing of Osama bin Laden, the Arab Spring, negotiations with Cuba, and the Iran nuclear deal. In 2016, Rhodes gave a now-infamous interview to New York Times Magazine in which he said that the administration had created an "echo chamber" concerning the Iran nuclear deal. He was referring to a large number of "arms-control experts" who "hundreds of often-clueless reporters" relied on for information about the nuclear deal, one of the key achievements of Obama's second term. Click for more from The Washington Free Beacon. A Kentucky Senate panel heard testimony last week from a woman who says she was coerced into marrying at age 16. She urged lawmakers to pass legislation making marriage only for adults -- and curb an endemic child-marriage problem in the state. Donna Pollard, 34, who got pregnant a year after she got married, said she was pressured into wedlock with an abusive and violent man of 30 who first approached her when she was 14, the Louisville Courier-Journal reported. The man, or perpetrator as she called him, was working at a treatment center supposedly providing mental health counseling. Soon the relationship turned sexual and she was encouraged by her mother herself a bride at 13 to tie the knot. "The clerk didnt even look up at me from her computer. She only asked: Which ones the minor? She didnt assess if I was safe or needed something." Donna Pollard, victim of child marriage. The clerk didnt even look up at me from her computer. She only asked: Which ones the minor? She didnt assess if I was safe or needed something. He was 30 years old at the time, but nobody questioned the fact that he was so much older, Pollard told the Guardian. Shortly after marrying, Pollard tried to flee her abusive husband and go to a domestic violence shelter, but because she was a minor she was turned away. Pollard also tried to rent a place to live but no one would let her because she was a minor. "I felt just completely and totally trapped," Pollard told Kentucky Senate Judiciary Committee last Friday. "I'm frankly embarrassed that Kentucky doesn't have such law." Kentucky state Sen. Alice Forgy Kerr She is now advocating for legislation that would raise the required age for marriage in the state from 16 to 18 and create protections for underage girls to prevent coercion. "I'm frankly embarrassed that Kentucky doesn't have such a law," Republican state Sen. Alice Forgy Kerr told the Courier-Journal. She claims the existing law plays into every negative stereotype about Kentucky." Various studies show Kentucky having the third-highest rate of child marriages in the country. Texas is first, although it recently passed a law raising the age limit of marriage, and Florida is second. Last year, then-Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey came under fire after refusing to sign a bill that would have banned child marriage in that state, saying it would trample religious freedoms, Reuters reported. Roughly 200,000 children were wed between 2000 and 2015. But contrary to popular misconceptions, less than 10 percent of child marriages in Kentucky are between two teenagers the rest are between a teen girl and an older man, Jeanne L. Smoot of the Tahirih Justice Center told the Courier-Journal. "Teens marrying teens is not the case," she said. Such marriages often include child brides, Smoot said, meaning underage girls pressured into marrying older men as a way to hide evidence of their sexual relationship with a girl who cannot legally consent to sex. "Pregnancy can be a red flag that a girl has been raped, she said. Kentucky state Sen. Julie Raque Adams is sponsoring a bill that would increase the legal age for most marriages in the state to 18. The bill would let 17-year-olds marry with a permission of a district judge, but only if the age difference between the teen and the other party is fewer than four years. If it passes, it will be the first update to Kentucky's law since 1998, when the required age for marriage was raised to 16. "I'm hopeful," Pollard said about lawmakers passing the bill. "We have to stop giving predators the opportunity to hide their offenses behind a marriage license." Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner illustrated his commitment to workplace diversity in the state Wednesday -- by drinking a glass of chocolate milk. Rauner was joined onstage by Tyronne Stoudemire Hyatt Hotels vice president of global diversity for a presentation about diversity in the workplace during a Black History Month event, the Chicago Tribune reported. Stoudemire, who is black, poured the governor a glass of milk he said represents the white men at the top of most organizations. He added chocolate syrup to represent diversity and it sank right to the bottom of the glass. When you look at most organizations, diversity sits at the bottom of the organization, Stoudemire said. You dont get inclusion until you actually stir it up, he said, and prompted Rauner to start stirring. Its really, really good, Rauner said after taking a sip. Diversity! Stoudemire told the Chicago Tribune that he has used the chocolate milk act for 16 years to simply display the lack of diversity at top Fortune 500 companies and added that the governor didnt know what he was getting into and credited him for his willingness to step up. He didnt comment on the governors efforts to increase diversity in Illinois government. According to a spokeswoman for Rauner, the chocolate milk demonstration received a standing ovation from the crowd. Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens lashed out against a St. Louis prosecutor Thursday, hours after a grand jury indicted him on a felony invasion-of-privacy charge related to an extramarital affair. "I know this will be righted soon," Greitens wrote in a Facebook post. "The people of Missouri deserve better than a reckless liberal prosecutor who uses her office to score political points." The governor was referring to Circuit Attorney Kimberly Gardner, whose office announced Greitens' indictment Thursday. The charge stems from an incident that allegedly occurred in March 2015, she said. Meanwhile, some Missouri lawmakers from both sides of the aisle promised an investigation of the governor's behavior -- and some Democrats called upon the Republican to resign. We will carefully examine the facts contained in the indictment and answer the question as to whether or not the governor can lead our state while a felony case moves forward, House Speaker Todd Richardson, a Poplar Bluff Republican, told the Kansas City Star. The people of Missouri deserve no less. We will begin the process of tasking a group of legislators to investigate these serious charges. "Gov. Greitens has to go, state Sen. Jamilah Nasheed, a St. Louis Democrat, told the paper. Missourians thought they voted for a person of character and integrity, and instead they got a liar and alleged criminal. Greitens, 43, was booked at the St. Louis Justice Center, officials told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. He was released on his own recognizance, St. Louis Circuit Attorney spokeswoman Susan Ryan told the Associated Press. According to Gardner's news release, the grand jury "found probable cause" that Greitens broke a state law. The indictment said Greitens allegedly took a photo of a person - who was identified only by initials - "in a state of full or partial nudity" without their knowledge or consent and "in a place where a person would have a reasonable expectation of privacy," according to the Post-Dispatch. It adds that Greitens allegedly "transmitted the image contained in the photograph in a manner that allowed access to that image via a computer," which is a felony, according to Gardner's release. MISSOURI'S GREITENS ADMITS HE WAS 'UNFAITHFUL' BUT DENIES BLACKMAIL ALLEGATION An investigation into Greitens' behavior was opened in January following his admiting to an affair, reportedly beginning in March 2015. Local station KMOV-TV previously reported that Greitens allegedly threatened to publicize nude images of the woman he was having the extramarital relations with if she exposed their relationship, according to her ex-husband. The man secretly recorded a conversation with his then-wife, in which she reportedly admitted to having an affair with Greitens. The recording alleges that Greitens invited the woman to his home and the sexual encounter was consensual. In the tape, the woman claims the governor asked her to "come downstairs" at his home where he would show her "how to do a proper pull-up." The woman alleges he then taped her hands, blindfolded her, took a partially nude photo of her and then warned her to stay quite about the sexual encounter. DIRTY DETAILS OF MISSOURI GOVERNOR'S AFFAIR FUEL RESIGNATION CALLS "You're never going to mention my name, otherwise there will be pictures everwhere," Greitens allegedly said. While acknowledging that he was "unfaithful" in his marriage, Greitens denied allegations that he blackmailed the woman. Gardner declined to comment to the Associated Press but Ryan confirmed the indictment stemmed from the alleged photo. In his statement following the indictment, Greitens maintained that he "did not commit a crime," and said the charge was a "misguided political decision." "As I have said before, I made a personal mistake before I was Governor," he said. "I did not commit a crime. With today's disappointing and misguided political decision, my confidence in our prosecutorial system is shaken, but not broken." Gardner is a Democrat who has faced her own share of scrutiny. Last summer, after Gardner's first six months on the job, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported that at least a dozen experienced prosecutors had left her staff. By August, St. Louis radio station KMOX was reporting that staffing issues were having an effect on the resolution of criminal cases. In January, a St. Louis judge disqualified Gardner's office from prosecuting a police shooting case, the Post-Dispatch reported. The judge ruled that the removal would "avoid an appearance of impropriety" because her office was simultaneously investigating whether the shooting was justified. In a separate statement, Greitens' lawyers called the charges "baseless and unfounded," in a statement to the Post-Dispatch. They'll reportedly file a motion to dismiss the charges. Greitens, a Republican, is a decorated former Navy SEAL officer whose received a Bronze Star and Purple Heart, among other awards, according to his service record. He enlisted in the Navy in 2000. He was elected as governor in November 2016. Fox News' Lucas Tomlinson, Barnini Chakraborty and the Associated Press contributed to this report. Florida Gov. Rick Scott unveiled a $500 million "action plan" to prevent gun violence Friday more than a week after 17 students and faculty members were brutally gunned down at a local high school. The Republican governors plan does not include a ban on specific weapons, but it does aim to raise the minimum age to purchase a gun to 21 years old, establish law enforcement officers and mental health counselors in Floridas schools and vastly restrict mentally ill people from accessing firearms. Scott began a press conference Friday by reading the names of the 17 shooting victims from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland. Unfortunately, none of the plans Im announcing today will bring any of them back, but its important to remember them, said Scott, adding he would work with the state legislature aggressively over the next two weeks to implement his ideas. Heres a look at seven things Scotts proposal would do. Raises minimum age to purchase a gun to 21 It would prohibit anyone under the age of 21 from purchasing or possessing a firearm. There would be exceptions for certain individuals, however, including: National Guard members, active duty service members and law enforcement officials. He said his plan would ban bump stocks, but would not prohibit specific firearms, such as the AR-15 the type of semi-automatic rifle shooting suspect Nikolas Cruz used. Bans guns for those with mental illnesses People with a mental illness will not be able to purchase or possess a gun, Scott said. "I want to make it virtually impossible for anyone who has had mental issues to use a gun." Gov. Rick Scott, R-Fla. I want to make it virtually impossible for anyone who has had mental issues to use a gun, Scott said Friday. I want to make it virtually impossible for anyone who is a danger to themselves or others to use a gun. His plan creates what he calls the Violent Threat Restraining Order, which gives family members, welfare experts or law enforcement officials the ability to inform a court that a persons firearms may need to be confiscated or the person should be blocked from purchasing a weapon. The family member, welfare expert or law enforcement official would sign a sworn statement and provide evidence of a threat of violence involving firearms or other weapons to a court, Scott explained. There would be speedy due process for the accused and any fraudulent or false statements would face criminal penalties, he added. His plan also places restrictions on gun purchases by people who have been subject to the Baker Act, a state law that allows people to be involuntarily committed. Places law enforcement officers in schools Scotts plan which provides $450 million to schools would place at least one law enforcement officer at every school. He suggested one officer for every 1,000 students be in place by the start of the 2018 school year. Sheriffs departments would be permitted to offer training for school personnel or reserve law enforcement officials in protection measures upon a school's request. And the Department of Homeland Securitys active shooter trainings would become mandatory. Funding will also be increased in order to provide school hardening measures, such as: bullet-proof glass, metal detectors, steel doors and new locks. Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School had one armed resource officer on staff at the time of the shooting. But Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel said the officer never went in[to] the building during the deadly rampage. During a press conference, Scott said he did not agree with arming teachers. Establishes mental health counselors at schools Scotts proposal allocates funding to place mental health counselors at every school. These counselors cannot serve dual roles, like teaching or academic advising, Scott said. Every student must have the opportunity to meet one-on-one with a mental health professional, and receive ongoing counseling as needed. Restricts gun access to those who have committed acts of domestic violence, stalking We will prohibit a person from possessing or purchasing a firearm if they are subject to an injunction for protection against stalking, cyberstalking, dating violence, repeat violence, sexual violence or domestic violence, Scott said. Those who make shooting or bomb threats to schools will face a harsher penalty, he added. Provides $50 million for mental health initiatives We must expand mental health service teams statewide to serve youth and young adults with early or serious mental illness by providing counseling, crisis management and other critical mental health services, said Scott, announcing he would allocate $50 million for additional mental health programs. Establishes new see something, say something hotline The governors plan would also establish a new, anonymous statewide hotline online, on the phone and through an app. Days after the shooting, Scott slammed the FBI for failing to follow up on a tip that expressed concerns about Cruz's erratic behavior and disturbing social media posts. He called for the resignation of FBI Director Christopher Wray and promised an immediate investigation. "We constantly promote see something, say something, and a courageous person did just that to the FBI," Scott said in a statement last week. "And the FBI failed to act. See something, say something is an incredibly important tool and people must have confidence in the follow through from law enforcement. The Associated Press contributed to this report. A federal grand jury unsealed new charges against ex-Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort in Special Counsel Robert Muellers Russia probe on Friday, as Manafort blasted his former business partner Rick Gates for pleading guilty in the case. Muellers office unsealed a superseding indictment against the 68-year-old Manafort, including conspiracy against the United States, conspiracy to launder money, failing to register as an agent of a foreign principal, giving false and misleading Foreign Agents Registration Act statements and providing other false statements. Meanwhile, Gates pleaded guilty Friday afternoon to federal conspiracy and false-statement charges at a Washington courthouse, in a strong indication he plans to cooperate with the probe. As Gates entered his plea, Manafort issued a brief statement maintaining his innocence and swiping at his former associate. Notwithstanding that Rick Gates pled today, I continue to maintain my innocence," Manafort said in a statement. "I had hoped and expected my business colleague would have had the strength to continue the battle to prove our innocence. For reasons yet to surface he chose to do otherwise." Both Gates and Manafort were in business together and worked on the Trump campaign. A federal grand jury in Virginia on Thursday had returned a 32-count indictment against Gates and Manafort on tax evasion and bank fraud charges. "This does not alter my commitment to defend myself against the untrue piled up charges contained in the indictments against me, Manafort said of Gates' plea. A superseding criminal complaint says Gates is charged with conspiracy against the United States between 2006 and 2017. Gates is also accused of making a false statement Feb. 1 to the Special Counsels Office and the FBI about a March 2013 meeting between Manafort, a lobbyist and a member of Congress. Gates could become a key cooperator for Mueller with intimate knowledge of Manafort's years of political consulting work in Ukraine, as well as other events that have sparked the interest of federal investigators. United States District Judge Amy Berman Jackson said Gates could face 48 to 71 months in prison and a fine of $20,000 to $200,000. The plea documents say Gates shall cooperate fully, truthfully, completely, and forthrightly with the special counsels office. According to the complaint, Gates and Manafort worked as unregistered agents of the government of Ukraine, generating tens of millions of dollars in income. The White House on Friday distanced itself from Gates. This indictment has nothing to do with the White House or the president, deputy White House communications director Mercedes Schlapp said Friday on Fox News. As you know, we have been cooperative with the special counsel. And as we continue to see, there's no evidence of collusion, no evidence of wrongdoing. Prosecutors accuse Gates and Manafort of hiding payments from Ukraine by laundering money through scores of United States and foreign corporations, partnerships, and bank accounts. MANAFORT, GATES INDICTED ON NEW TAX AND BANK FRAUD CHARGES Millions were funnelled into foreign companies and bank accounts in Cyprus, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines and the Seychelles, the complaint says. But the duo falsely claimed they had no foreign bank accounts, prosecutors said. The complaint says Gates and Manafort were required under the law to report their work for foreign governments but did not do so. Prosecutors also accuse Gates and Manafort of responding with a "series of false and misleading statements when the Department of Justice asked about their activities in 2016. Manafort used his hidden overseas wealth to enjoy a lavish lifestyle in the United States, without paying taxes on that income, the complaint says. Gates is also accused of using money from offshore accounts to pay for personal expenses, including his mortgage, childrens tuition and interior decorating of his Virginia residence. Gates transferred more than $3 million from offshore accounts to other accounts under his control, according to the complaint. It says more than $75 million flowed through Gates and Manaforts offshore accounts. It would mark the fifth publicly known guilty plea in the special counsel probe into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin during the 2016 campaign. Gates had access at the highest levels of the campaign at the same time that Manafort, Donald Trump Jr. and Jared Kushner met with a team of Russians in Trump Tower in June 2016. He was also in the top ranks of the campaign when then-Sen. Jeff Sessions held a pair of undisclosed meetings with Russian ambassador to the U.S. Sergey Kislyak. For a few months in 2016, Gates was indispensable to Trump, leading the ground effort to help Trump win the Republican nomination and flying from state to state to secure Republican delegates in a scramble that lasted all the way until the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. But his power and influence waned once Trump fired Manafort in August 2016. The plea also comes quickly on the heels of a stunning indictment last week that laid out a broad operation of election meddling by Russia, which began in 2014, and employed fake social media accounts and on-the-ground politicking to promote the campaign of Donald Trump, disparage Hillary Clinton and sow division and discord widely among the U.S. electorate. Gates initially pleaded not guilty and has been facing up to 12.5 years in jail -- based on a 12-count indictment handed up in October accusing him and Manafort of acting as unregistered foreign agents and conspiring to launder millions of dollars they earned while working on behalf of a pro-Russian Ukrainian political party. Fox News Jake Gibson, Catherine Herridge, John Roberts and The Associated Press contributed to this report. Defense Secretary James Mattis, breaking with President Trump, has formally recommended that transgender troops be allowed to serve in the U.S. military provided they can deploy overseas. A senior U.S. official confirmed to Fox News that Mattis made the recommendation to Trump on Friday. The official announcement about transgender policy is expected from the White House no later than March 23, according to officials. Over the summer, the Pentagon was caught by surprise when the president tweeted that transgender people were no longer welcome in the military in any capacity. The order was later blocked in federal court. A separate official said Mattis recommendation would not violate those recent orders that declared Trumps ban on transgender people serving in the military unlawful. The focus on being able to deploy is part of a broader push. Mattis recently issued a new policy saying if any servicemember was unable to deploy with his or her unit for more than 12 months, excluding the combat wounded, that person would be kicked out of the military. We've come out with a policy that if you're not deployable for a year or more you're going to have to go somewhere else, Mattis told reporters recently. Officials told Fox News that its this new policy for non-deployable troops and the recent court orders that have shaped the secretarys thinking about transgender people serving in the military. In addition, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff had raised concerns about kicking out transgender troops who were already serving honorably. The defense secretarys new deployment policy makes it unlikely the Pentagon would continue paying for sex reassignment surgery since the recovery time is often longer than a year. Sen. Bob Menendez will not face a new bribery and corruption trial after all, federal prosecutors said last month. The Department of Justice had announced earlier this year that it intended to retry the New Jersey Democrat after a federal judge declared a mistrial in the case in November, but ultimately walked away from the pursuit. Menendez was accused of accepting a plethora of donations and gifts from a wealthy friend in exchange for political influence. Both Menendez and the doctor, Salomon Melgen, maintained their innocence. From the very beginning, I never wavered in my innocence and my belief that justice would prevail. I am grateful that the Department of Justice has taken the time to reevaluate its case and come to the appropriate conclusion, Menendez said on social media following the announcement. Menendez is up for re-election this year. He was selected to replace former Gov. Jon Corzine, D-N.J., in the Senate in 2005. He rejoined the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee as its ranking member on Feb. 6, after stepping down from the post when he was indicted in 2015. Read on for a look at what Menendez was accused of and what happened in the trial. What was Menendez accused of? Menendez, 64, accepted an abundance of campaign donations, gifts and vacations from Salomon Melgen, a Florida ophthalmologist, prosecutors alleged when Menendez faced trial in 2017. In return, prosecutors claimed, he used his position to lobby on behalf of Melgens business interests. Melgen allegedly directed more than $750,000 in campaign contributions to entities that supported Menendez, according to the indictment, which prosecutors said were inducements to get Menendez to use his influence on Melgen's behalf. Prosecutors have also accused Menendez of trying to hide the gifts. Melgen paid for Menendez and his girlfriend to stay for three nights at a Parisian hotel where rooms typically cost about $1,500 per night and allowed the senator the use of his private jet, according to prosecutors. Federal prosecutors said that Menendez sold his office for a lifestyle that he couldnt afford. The indictment also alleged that Menendez pressured State Department officials to give visas to three young women described as Melgen's girlfriends. What was the senators defense? Both Menendez and Melgen pleaded not guilty and Menendez has vehemently denied the accusations against him. Throughout the original trial, defense attorneys sought to prove that Menendez and Melgen have been friends since before the former became a senator, and the trips were nothing more than friends traveling together. Is there anything else to know about Salomon Melgen? Melgen, 63, was convicted of 67 counts of health care fraud in April 2017 in what the Palm Beach Post called one of the biggest Medicare fraud cases in the U.S. Melgen was sentenced to 17 years in prison on Feb. 22 for Medicare fraud, as he persuaded patients to undergo treatments they did not necessarily need. Aside from Menendez, Melgen has given significant amounts of money to a variety of Democratic lawmakers, according to public records. How did the trial end? After the jury again informed the judge they could not reach a decision, U.S. District Court Judge William H. Walls declared a mistrial, saying he found no alternative. The mistrial was declared on Nov. 16. The Associated Press contributed to this report. Rick Gates, a business associate of President Trumps former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, pleaded guilty Friday to federal conspiracy and false-statement charges stemming from Special Counsel Robert Muellers investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election. Like Manafort, Gates was hit with new charges on Feb. 22 that included allegations of tax evasion and bank fraud. Gates, 45, and Manafort, 68, were initially indicted in October, with the accusation of a multimillion-dollar money-laundering conspiracy tied to lobbying work for a Russia-friendly Ukrainian political party. But because of Gates' guilty plea agreement, Mueller has moved to drop the 22 tax and bank fraud charges against him. Heres a look at who Gates is and how he is tied to Trump and the Russia investigation. Who is Rick Gates? A reported protege of Manaforts, Gates, too, worked for the Trump campaign and outlasted Manafort. Like Manafort, Gates helped wrangle delegates at the high-stakes 2016 Republican National Convention. The onetime deputy campaign manager also helped start the nonprofit America First Policies (AFP), created to advance the White Houses agenda. But Gates eventually left the group, reportedly due to his ties to Manafort. Erin Montgomery, a spokesperson for AFP, distanced the nonprofit from Gates. "We believe it is important to clarify that Rick Gates' association with America First Policies was informal and limited, and, as noted in press reports, ended around March of this year," Montgomery told Fox News. But even after leaving the nonprofit, Gates still visited the White House multiple times, the Daily Beast reported. The publication alleged that Gates is disliked by Trump. How is he connected to the Russia investigation? During Manaforts work with Ukraine, Gates would fly to Moscow to take meetings with Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska, The New York Times reported. And Gates name has appeared on documents linked to companies that Manaforts firm has set up to receive payments in Eastern Europe, according to the newspaper. Everything was done legally and with the approval of our lawyers, Gates has told The Times. Nothing to my knowledge was ever done inappropriately. Gates was also named alongside Manafort in a 2011 Ukrainian racketeering lawsuit. What has he been charged with? A 32-count indictment, unrelated to allegations of misconduct during the Trump campaign, returned by a federal grand jury in February alleged that Gates and Manafort doctored financial documents, lied to tax preparers and defrauded banks using money they cycled through offshore accounts to spend lavishly, including on real estate, interior decorating and other luxury goods. Specifically, Gates was accused of 11 counts related to filing false income tax returns and three counts of failure to report foreign bank and financial accounts. Along with Manafort, he was accused of nine counts of bank fraud and conspiracy to commit bank fraud. The indictment alleged Gates and Manafort fraudulently obtained more than $20 million from financial institutions in loans after their Ukrainian work subsided. The indictment also increased the amount of money Manafort, with the help of Gates, is accused of laundering to $30 million. Gates pleaded guilty to the charges on Feb. 23. After Gates' plea, Mueller moved to drop the 22 bank and tax fraud charges against him. The decision to drop the more expansive charges against Gates could suggest that the former Trump campaign official is cooperating and providing good information to Mueller's team. Notwithstanding that Rick Gates pled today, I continue to maintain my innocence, Manafort responded to Gates' guilty plea in a statement. I had hoped and expected my business colleague would have had the strength to continue the battle to prove our innocence. For reasons yet to surface he chose to do otherwise. Gates has struggled with his lawyers. His initial representation withdrew after acknowledging irreconcilable differences with their client. Fox News' Jodie Curtis, Sam Chamberlain, Jake Gibson, James Rosen and Brooke Singman contributed to this report. The Associated Press also contributed to this report. President Trump on Friday announced what he called the "heaviest"-ever set of sanctions on North Korea, targeting the regime's shipping and trading companies as tensions flare anew with Pyongyang. The president mentioned the plan during the very end of a lengthy and freewheeling address to the Conservative Political Action Conference outside Washington. "We imposed today the heaviest sanctions ever imposed on a country before," Trump said. "Hopefully, something positive can happen." Under the plan, the Treasury Department aims to cut off sources of revenue and fuel used to boost the country's nuclear program and military. The sanctions specifically target one individual, 27 entities, and 28 vessels. The administration also put out an advisory warning of sanctions risks for those who enable the shipment of goods to and from North Korea. Treasury is aggressively targeting all illicit avenues used by North Korea to evade sanctions, including taking decisive action to block the vessels, shipping companies, and entities across the globe that work on North Koreas behalf, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said in a statement. In a conference call with reporters shortly before the Trump speech, the Treasury Departments Office of Foreign Assets Control detailed the sanctions which are aimed at, among other things, hindering the regime's ability to transport coal and fuel in international waters. Officials said the sanctions are meant to further isolate the regime and advance a U.S.-led pressure campaign. "We are aggressively targeting their abilities," a senior administration official said on the call. The sanctions announcement follows Vice President Pence's trip to South Korea for the opening of the Olympic Winter Games, where he sat just seats away from Kim Jong Un's sister. Speaking at CPAC on Thursday, Pence made clear the U.S. continues to take a firm stance against Pyongyang's nuclear program and the regime. I say the United States of America doesnt stand with murderous dictatorships, we stand up to murderous dictatorships, and we will keep standing strong until North Korea stops threatening our country, our allies or until they abandon their nuclear and ballistic missiles once and for all, Pence said. The vice president also slammed the media for its at-times positive coverage of the North Korean dictator's sister, Kim Yo Jong. For all the media fawning over the sister of the North Korean dictator, I think its important that every American knows who this person is and what shes done, Pence said Thursday. The sister of Kim Jong Un is a central pillar of the most tyrannical and oppressive regime on the planet, an evil family clique that brutalizes, subjugates, starves and imprisons its 25 million people. Meanwhile, Ivanka Trump and the U.S. delegation arrived in South Korea on Friday to attend the closing ceremony of the Olympics. "My daughter, Ivanka, just arrived in South Korea. We cannot have a better, or smarter, person representing our country," President Trump tweeted on Friday. Fox News John Roberts and Megan Woods contributed to this report. President Donald Trump recently ordered Guantanamo Bay to remain open indefinitely, making good on his tough campaign rhetoric on the embattled military prison. Trumps executive order also mandated that Secretary of Defense James Mattis put together a task force and conduct a review of policies regarding individuals captured during a battle, including their potential detention in Guantanamo Bay. Mattis recently told reporters that its his objective to send foreign-born nationals captured on the battlefield to their home countries for trial. We're gathering up hundreds now of detainees, he said. The important thing is that the countries of origin keep responsibility for them. How they carry out that responsibility -- there's a dozen different diplomatic legal or whatever ways, I suppose. But the bottom line is we don't want them going back on the street. Perhaps the most well-known Guantanamo Bay prisoner is Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who has been charged with war crimes for his alleged role as the architect of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. Former CIA Director Gen. Michael Hayden publically admitted to waterboarding Mohammed. Ali Hamza Ahmad Suliman al Bahlul, the former propaganda chief for Al Qaeda, is another notable prisoner who has been charged and convicted of war crimes. He has been held at Guantanamo for over 16 years. Majid Khan is the only known legal U.S. resident to be held at the prison; hes been charged with war crimes and held for over 11 years. Khans torture, detailed in the Senates 2014 Torture Report, included being deprived of sunlight and rectally force-fed. The executive order was met with swift condemnation by Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wa., the ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee. He said the prison is an international eyesore that undercuts our national security. The prison, opened by former President George W. Bush in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks, has long been the target of international and domestic ire. Beyond persistent and credible reports of torture from United Nations human rights groups, Guantanamo Bay has been the subject of numerous lawsuits regarding the illegal detention of suspected terrorists. A review of detaining policy is long overdue, and its a good step, Alberto Mora, a senior fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, told Fox News. I think that seeing Guantanamo Bay as the repository for our principal high-value targets in the war on terrorism is too restrictive. Mattis carte blanche to develop a task force and recommend action on Guantanamo Bay, granted by the executive order, could open the door to the potential shuttering of the prison, Mora said. Such a move would finally realize the ambitions of former President Barack Obama, who ordered the prison closed on his second day in office in January 2009. Mattis has a free hand to make recommendations as he sees them, Mora said. I hope the president would be open-minded to review all of Mattis recommendations. In an emailed statement, a Department of Defense spokesperson said the agency, along with its partners, will use the 90-day review to determine a disposition for individuals captured on the battlefield. The military prison, stationed at the U.S. Naval Station in Cuba, currently holds 41 prisoners, all of whom have been there for over a decade. According to Human Rights First, a nonprofit, nonpartisan advocacy organization, the Trump administration plans to indefinitely detain 23 Guantanamo prisoners without charge or trial. The prison cost taxpayers about $445 million in 2015, according to a Defense Department plan detailing the closure of the prison. Costs to detain 80 prisoners could be lowered by an estimated $180 million if they were moved to a U.S.-based facility, according to the report. Were using 2000 soldiers to guard 41 prisoners, Mora said. The expense is astronomical. It provides no additional security than provided by a supermax. Supreme Court Justices have sided with plaintiffs in all four detainee rights cases brought before them, one of which helped establish their right to habeas corpus or the right to challenge illegal detention before a judge. A total of nine prisoners have died at Guantanamo. Six of those deaths were ruled suicide, according to the U.S. Southern Command, the joint command in charge of the prison. Guantanamo detainees alleged that during hunger strikes, prison personnel would force feed them by sticking tubes down their nose and into their stomach, pumping liquid in food to keep them alive. Human Rights Watch, an international humanitarian organization, reported that detainees were forced to sit in their own excrement and endure sexual humiliation from female interrogators. John Bellinger III, a former George Bush administration attorney and senior fellow with the Council on Foreign Relations, said the presidents executive order is more politically symbolic than substantive. Its two things, Bellinger said. Its consistent with campaign statements he made about keeping Guantanamo open, and second, to undo Obama administration initiatives, particularly President Obamas signature initiatives. He said the future detention of prisoners at Guantanamo, especially captured ISIS fighters, is a ticking legal bomb, which he believes will lead Mattis to recommend that no new prisoners be sent there. Why would the Secretary of Defense or the Justice Department want to send someone to Guantanamo, where they will immediately be given the right to challenge their detention, Bellinger asked. The legal battle centers on the right of habeas corpus granted to Guantanamo detainees in the Boumediene v. Bush case. The Supreme Court ruled that enemy combatants have the right to challenge their detention as unlawful before a judge. These cases, Bellinger said, can take years to resolve. Whats happened here is that Guantanamo has really turned out to be a legal headache with the Justice Department, Bellinger said. With almost every detainee, they are challenging their detention with years of litigation in federal courts. Mora, who also served as military council for former President Bush after 9/11, said the prison as currently structured doesnt serve the national interest. He still believes the U.S. needs to be able to detain people captured on the battlefield, but only temporarily and an ideal policy would be one that efficiently transfers individuals to their home countries, something Gen. Mattis is currently pursuing. Trumps executive order has stirred waters internationally, opening the possibility for countries to demand no Guantanamo guarantees, which Bellinger said were effective during the Bush administration. I think other countries would certainly be unhappy if the president were to send new people to Guantanamo, Bellinger said. Right now theres more of a wait and see attitude to see if the presidents order is more of a political statement than it is an actual change in policy. President Trump on Thursday threatened to pull U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers from California if state officials continue to refuse to assist federal agents in immigration initiatives. Trump, during a White House meeting, said that if he followed through with the threat, the state would have a crime nest like youve never seen in California. "All Id have to do is say, ICE and Border Patrol, let California learn,'" the president said. Trump added that California state officials were doing a lousy management job, and criticized them for supposedly harboring criminals, the San Diego Union-Tribune reported. Frankly, its a disgrace, the sanctuary city situation, the protection of these horrible criminals in California and other places, Trump said. If we ever pulled our ICE out and we ever said, Hey, let California learn and let them figure it out for themselves, in two months, theyd be begging for us to come back. They would be begging, he added. Since Trump took office in January 2017, his administration has ratcheted up enforcement of immigration laws -- clashing with the liberal policies of California. Last month, U.S. Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Kamala Harris, both California Democrats, sent a joint letter to ICE Acting Director Thomas Homan, requesting detailed information on rumored upcoming raids in California, the Sacramento Bee reported. Diverting resources in an effort to punish California and score political points is an abhorrent abuse of power, not to mention a terrible misuse of scarce resources, the letter read in part. "We don't conduct raids, Homan said during an interview with Fox News. We conduct targeted enforcement operations. We don't go into neighborhoods, knocking on a bunch of doors, looking for people that are different than us. Trump did not elaborate on his remarks, but his comments made the rounds on social media. Opinion was divided. Feinstein tweeted: The presidents obsession with California is growing more outrageous by the day. His attacks are not only mean-spirited, theyre patently false. Fox News Todd Starnes tweeted: Trump says hes thinking about pulling ICE agents from California. Thats actually a great idea. Let the Democrats take care of all the illegals. The U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem will open in May to coincide with the 70th anniversary of Israel declaring its independence, Trump administration officials said Friday. A senior State Department official said Secretary of State Rex Tillerson approved a security plan late Thursday for an embassy location to open in Jerusalem. We are excited about taking this historic step, and look forward with anticipation to the May opening, State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said in a statement on Friday. Officials told Fox News the embassy would initially be located in the neighborhood of Arnona on a compound that currently houses the consular operations of the U.S. Consulate General Jerusalem. Initially, the embassy will consist of the Ambassador and a small team. Nauert said that the Consulate General would "continue to operate as an independent mission with an unchanged mandate" from its Agron Road location. An official also told Fox News that the hope is for the U.S. to develop only a footprint there in May, with a target of a fuller complement and facility by the end of 2019. By the end of next year, we intend to open a new Embassy Jerusalem annex on the Arnona compound that will provide the Ambassador and his team with expanded interim office space, Nauert said, noting that the State Department has started the search for a permanent embassy site, and said that planning and construction would be a longer-term undertaking. Administration officials said that Congress would be notified of the May move on Friday. A ribbon-cutting for the new embassy is slated for mid-May. Israels anniversary of its independence is May 14, 1948. President Trump formally recognized Jerusalem as Israels capital in December 2017 by directing the State Department to begin the move of the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. This is nothing more or less than a recognition of reality, Trump said upon his announcement. It is also the right thing to do. It is something that has to be done. The president stressed, however, that the decision was not intended in any way to reflect a departure from our strong commitment to facilitate a lasting peace agreement between Israel and Palestine. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu thanked Trump for the courageous and just decision, while Palestinian President Mahmood Abbas warned of the gravity of consequences for the peace process and security and stability in the region and the world. The U.S. is the first country to move its embassy to Jerusalem a territory that is claimed by both Israelis and Palestinians. Other countries with diplomatic relations with Israel maintain their embassies in Tel Aviv. There are currently about 1,000 personnel in the embassy in Tel Aviv, and officials have said it will take time to address security, design and cost concern. A State Department official told Fox News Tillerson stressed that the State Department would do nothing to compromise the safety of those who work and visit the embassy. The decision to move the embassy has been controversial, dating back decades. A law passed in 1995 under the Clinton administration considers Jerusalem the capital, and even mandates the move of the embassy there. DEMS BLAST TRUMP FOR JERUSALEM DECISION, DESPITE PAST SUPPORT But the law allows for a loophole, used by former Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama: an option to issue waivers every six months to delay the move from Tel Aviv. Trump also initially took advantage of that loophole, which Republicans have long called to be closed. His first waiver was signed in June 2017. Administration officials said in December that Trump would sign a waiver that would prevent jeopardizing State Department funding while the relocation process began. The May opening of the new embassy is ahead of schedule, as Vice President Pence said that it would open by the end of 2019, and Tillerson initially suggested it could take years. The first footprint of the embassy will consist of just a few offices inside an existing U.S. facility in Jerusalem. Fox News Rich Edson, Nick Kalman, Jennifer Griffin, Dvora Olinksy, Alex Pappas and The Associated Press contributed to this report. The new U.S. embassy in Israel is set to officially open in Jerusalem on Monday as President Trump has formally recognized the holy city as the countrys capital. The opening comes after a day of celebratory festivities in Israel juxtaposed with mass protests along the border of Israel that left at least 52 Palestinians dead and more than 1,000 injured Monday. It was the bloodiest day of weeks of demonstrations that has cast a cloud over the embassy opening. The Trump administrations decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital was heralded by many pro-Israel activists but decried by Palestinians and Americas Arab allies. Ahead of the opening, Trump tweeted its a great day for Israel." Read on to find out why the decision is so contentious and why it wasnt accomplished before. Finding the capital The international community and until 2017, the U.S. largely does not recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel as it is claimed by both Palestinians and Israelis. Like other countries, the U.S. kept its embassy in Tel Aviv, approximately an hour away. The U.S. moving its embassy could cause significant harm to the U.S. credibility as a mediator for peace talks between Israelis and Palestinians, said Dylan Williams, vice president of government affairs for J Street, a left-leaning pro-Israel advocacy organization. Williams added that the move could undermine confidence from Palestinians and Arab countries that the U.S. would remain an impartial negotiator in efforts to create peace in the Middle East. Even seemingly minor changes of Jerusalems status quo either in fact or in law have historically had the impact of sparking violence, Williams said. Support for Jerusalem Millions of evangelical eyes were on Trump, waiting to see if he would keep his campaign promise to move the embassy, longtime Pastor John Hagee told Fox News ahead of the president's official announcement. "I can assure you that 60 million evangelicals are watching this promise closely because if President Trump moves the embassy into Jerusalem, he will historically step into immortality," Hagee said. "He will be remembered for thousands of years for his act of courage to treat Israel like we already treat other nations." "If he does not, he will be remembered as just another president who made a promise he failed to keep which would generate massive disappointment in that strong evangelical base that went to vote for him against Hillary Clinton," he added. "Trump will be remembered for thousands of years for his act of courage to treat Israel like we already treat other nations." Pastor John Hagee Hagee is the founder and senior pastor of Cornerstone Church, a megachurch in San Antonio, Texas. He founded the nonprofit Christians United for Israel in 2006, as well. A March 2016 Gallup poll found that the majority of Americans didnt express an opinion when asked if the U.S. embassy should move from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. But of those who did have an opinion, Americans were split with 24 percent supporting a move and 20 percent disagreeing with relocation. Congressional authority Trump isnt the only president to declare his intentions to move the U.S. embassy; both former Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush also pledged to move the embassy only to abandon the idea once in the White House. Congress approved in 1995 the funding and relocation of the embassy to Jerusalem by 1999. But the law included a stipulation, allowing for presidents to sign continuous waivers to stall the relocation. Every president since had used the waiver in an effort to avoid conflict with the peace negotiations. The Associated Press contributed to this report. Remains of a 2,600-year-old statue with an inscription written in Egyptian hieroglyphics has been discovered in a temple at Dangeil, an archaeological site along the Nile River in Sudan. Found in an ancient temple dedicated to the Egyptian god Amun, the statue depicts Aspelta, who was the ruler of the Kush kingdom between 593 B.C. and 568 B.C. Some of Aspelta's predecessors had ruled Egypt, located to the north of Kush. Though Aspelta didn't control Egypt, the inscription says (in translation) that he was "King of Upper and Lower Egypt" and was "Beloved of Re'-Harakhty" (a form of the Egyptian sun god "Re") and that Aspelta was "given all life, stability and dominion forever." "Being 'Beloved of a god' confers legitimacy on a ruler," wrote archaeologists Julie Anderson, Rihab Khidir el-Rasheed and Mahmoud Suliman Bashir, who co-direct excavations at Dangeil, in an article published recently in the journal Sudan and Nubia. The "Kushite kings were closely tied to Re," they noted. [See Photos of the Newfound Statue with Hieroglyphics] While Kush lost control of Egypt during the reign of a king named Tanwetamani (reign circa 664653 B.C.), his successors, including Aspelta, still called themselves "King of Upper and Lower Egypt," Anderson, an assistant keeper at the British Museum, told Live Science. The title "may be viewed as general assertions of authority using the traditional titles, and not a claim to Egypt," Anderson said. Putting Aspelta back together In 2008, archaeologists found parts of the Aspelta statue, including the head, along with statues depicting two other Kushite kings Taharqa (reign ca. 690664 B.C.) and Senkamanisken (reign ca. 643-623 B.C.). However, those Aspelta statue parts held little of the hieroglyphic inscription, preventing archaeologists from firmly identifying the statue as depicting Aspelta. It wasn't until new pieces of the statue that had the hieroglyphic inscription were discovered during fieldwork in 2016 and 2017 that archaeologists could identify the statue and begin the process of putting it back together. Archaeologists won't know the statue's exact dimensions until more reconstruction work is done, but, based on what they have so far, they estimate that the statue of Aspelta is "approximately half life-size." Amun temple The Amun temple, where the statues of Aspelta, Taharqa and Senkamanisken were discovered, dates back at least 2,000 years. The statues were likely constructed during the lifetimes of their respective kings and were displayed long after those kings died, Anderson said. "Statues might be displayed in temples, particularly the forecourts of temples, after the reigns of the kings, as they may have served as intermediaries between the people and the gods in popular religion," Anderson told Live Science. People used the Amun Temple until the late third to early fourth century, when the temple ceased to function. The kingdom of Kush also collapsed during the fourth century. Later burials Between the late 11th and early 13th centuries, long after the Amun temple had fallen into ruin, people were digging graves in the ruined temple, archaeologists found. Eight tombs excavated during the 2016 and 2017 field seasons contained the remains of several adult women and at least one juvenile. Inside those tombs, the researchers found a trove of jewelry, including necklaces, beaded belts, rings, bracelets and anklets. Altogether, the eight tombs held about 18,500 beads and more than 70 copper bracelets, she noted, adding that it dates back to a time when Christianity was widely practiced in the area. The vast amount of jewelry "suggest this is an elite group" Anderson said, but archaeologists aren't sure about who these people were. The excavations at Dangeil are a mission of the National Corporation for Antiquities and Museums (NCAM), Sudan. The mission is sponsored by the Qatar-Sudan Archaeological Project. Mahmoud Suliman Bashir and Rihab Khidir el-Rasheed are both archaeologists with NCAM. Originally published on Live Science. A rare letter from the Beatles to an Atlanta DJ is up for auction in the U.K. this weekend. The letter, which bears the letterhead NEMS Enterprises the management company set up by Beatles manager Brian Epstein, was sent to DJ Paul Drew of WQXI Radio. Written on Sept. 6 1965, the typed letter thanks Drew for his help during their 1965 tour of the U.S. The letter is signed by all four Beatles in matching black ballpoint pen. LONG-LOST BABE RUTH RADIO INTERVIEW RESURFACES Auction house Henry Aldridge & Son notes that the letter was written just six days after the end of the Beatles 1965 U.S. tour and only six days before they started recording sessions for the album Rubber Soul. The Beatles write: Dear Paul, we just thought that we would like to write to you all and say thanks very much for your help on the tour. We enjoyed it and appreciated your patience and co-operation. Hope to see you next year. Drew accompanied the Beatles on their chartered plane during their1964 and 1965 U.S. tours, according to Henry Aldridge & Son. He also interviewed the band on a number of occasions and introduced them at a concert at Atlanta Stadium on Aug. 18. 1965. LONG-FORGOTTEN TIME CAPSULE DISCOVERED IN SPACE NEEDLE The lot also includes a letter from Beatles press officer Tony Barrow to Drew, dated Aug. 5, 1965, which accompanied details for the fab fours forthcoming U.S. tour. Drew, who died in 2013 at the age of 78, had a hugely successful career in radio, becoming vice president of programming at RKO in the 1970s. Billboard described the DJ as one of the major architects of Top 40 radio. The DJ also interviewed the former Beatles many times during their solo careers, according to Henry Aldridge & Son. PRINCESS DIANA'S LETTERS TO AIDS VICTIM SURFACE, UP FOR AUCTION NEMS Enterprises took its name from the Epstein familys North End Music Stores business in Liverpool. The Beatles letter, which has a pre-sale estimate of 8,000 to 12,000 ($11,187 to $16,781) will be auctioned Saturday by Henry Aldridge & Son. Follow James Rogers on Twitter @jamesjrogers Threats to the United States are evolving everyday and the technology is getting significantly more advanced. A new missile in development that was recently tested in rural New Mexico takes the technology of THAAD (Thermal High Altitude Area Defense), which can knock an intercontinental ballistic missile out of the sky, and puts it into a five pound, two-and-a-half foot projectile. Its a very advanced technology, very complicated rocket science. Its like hitting a bullet with a bullet, said Michaela Dodge, a missile defense specialist for the Heritage Foundation. But we can do it and its great news for us. US NAVY DESTROYER TESTS NEW DEFENSE SYSTEM, TAKES OUT BALLISTIC MISSILE The system is called the Miniature Hit to Kill Missile (MHTK), and it's being developed by Lockheed Martin. The missile travels twice as fast as sound as it hones in on incoming threats and destroys them with kinetic energy. It targets the incoming projectile using a radar system, and continuously adjusts its course in flight. Were making body-to-body contact, said Chris Murphy, Lockheed Martins head of business development for the MHTK. Instead of getting close to it and making a big explosion, what we do is actually, the nose of our missile hits the part of the incoming round that we want to hit. When the MHTK makes impact with the incoming round, it causes the threat to explode. But unlike THAAD, which can destroy missiles carrying nuclear warheads, the MHTK is designed to destroy mortars, rockets, artillery and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. "The U.S. Army and international customers have made it clear today's global security environment demands agile, close-range solutions, said Tim Cahill, vice president of Integrated Air and Missile Defense at Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control. The MHTK is designed for defense, and Murphy said wont be used to take out enemy targets. The idea is to provide protection from a large area from a launcher or two launchers that can reach out and defeat the incoming rounds before they get anywhere close to our soldiers, he explained. Murphy pointed out that a mortar the size of a two-liter bottle of soda can injure or kill a soldier if it hits within one hundred yards. The entire missile stays together, and the entire missile is what delivers the lethality or the impact to the incoming round, he said. Lockheed Martin hopes the missile will compete for a government contract to be integrated into a larger missile defense system. The MHTK does not yet have a price. This is a rush transcript from "Your World," February 23, 2018. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated. NEIL CAVUTO, "YOUR WORLD" HOST: And to John's point here, that echoes a possession that the Florida governor, Rick Scott, is taking to prohibit the types of weapons that were used in that attack last week to those under 21, that you would have to be at least 21 to buy such weapons. They would include Airstrikes 15 and other semiautomatic and related weapons. That is something that the NRA strictly opposes. Democratic Congressman Jim Himes of Connecticut on all of these developments. Congressman, thank you for coming. What do you think of that? The president didn't mention this at CPAC, Congressman, but he is talking about raising the age for those who want to purchase those firearms to 21. REP. JIM HIMES, D-CONNECTICUT: Yes. Well, look, let me start by giving credit where credit is due. I have been a pretty tough critic of this president for a year or so, but I give him a lot of credit for listening, as he did the other day, to some pretty horrible stories, and coming up with ideas that I think we should be talking about. I get a little more excited about his discussion of a universal background check. That's something of course that has 97 percent or so of the American public behind it. Today, you don't get a background check if you make a private sale, if you buy at a gun show. That's an easy win that, would it solve all of the problems? Of course it wouldn't. But just doing that, consistent with Second Amendment rights, I do suspect we could take some steps to keeping guns out of the hands of people who should not have them. CAVUTO: Now, part of that is also to make it more difficult, if not impossible, for those with mental issues to ever get their hands on gun. The problem is relaying that or finding a uniform way to have that in records that would be available to gun store owners and the like. The argument for that is there are laws on the book for this sort of thing. But they're sporadically enforced. What do you think of that? HIMES: Yes. No, that's right. We do have a mechanism. The federal government of course cannot compel states to report people who have been adjudicated with mental issues. But there are a lot states that do. There's a lot of states that don't. Look, I do that we should provide incentives to states to contribute to that database where a gun store, a gun dealer can check to see if somebody has been ruled a danger to themselves or to others. I would even -- I just happen to have come from a meeting with a bunch of law enforcement guys here in Fairfield, Connecticut. And we should also talk about that moment when somebody has a temporary retraining order issued on them because they have been deemed to be violent towards their wife or whatever it may be. I understand this gets into touchy constitutional issues. But there's moments when it would be good for the police on a temporary basis to say hey, for some period of time here, we have got to take the weapons out of the house, as long as there is some question about whether somebody is prone to be violent. CAVUTO: Congressman, you have studied this issue far more closely than I. But the one pattern I do see emerging in this latest is something that has happened time and time again, the failure of agencies to essentially talk to one another, whether it's police relaying the 39 times they went to Nikolas Cruz's home for a variety of reasons, that officials didn't either know or that wasn't telegraphed to more people. The FBI botching this January 5 call by someone who was very concerned about the school shooter, that he might pull something like this off. And then it got lost. We have seen it on Boston on Patriots' Day after the slip-up, not being communicated about the Tsarnaev brothers by the FBI to local police. We saw it after 9/11. I can go back further and further. Is there anything afoot that you know of when we are talking about preventing this sort of thing to really get this under control? Because that is a consistent pattern. HIMES: Yes. No, it's a great question, Neil. And, as you point out, it's a tough one. Right? It sounds like the case in this individual in Florida, I mean, the tips and the threats and the brandishing of firearms, again, that's the kind of situation where I would love to see local law enforcement be able to say hey, for some limited period of time here, there's a very explosive situation, for some limited period of time, perhaps pursuant to a restraining order or whatever it would be, local law enforcement ought to have the right on a temporary basis to remove somebody's weapons. But it's hard, because you made reference to the Boston case. Look, the FBI check out the Tsarnaev brothers in Boston. And as these policemen that I was just talking to up in Fairfield told me, if somebody has not actually committed a crime or if there's not actually threatening to commit a crime, there's not a lot that law enforcement in that instance can do. So, yes, I think we can make some progress there. But it's a tough one. CAVUTO: All right, Congressman, thank you very, very much. We appreciate it. HIMES: Thank you, Neil. CAVUTO: All right. END Content and Programming Copyright 2018 Fox News Network, LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Copyright 2018 CQ-Roll Call, Inc. All materials herein are protected by United States copyright law and may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, displayed, published or broadcast without the prior written permission of CQ-Roll Call. You may not alter or remove any trademark, copyright or other notice from copies of the content. Parents of young children know that extended air travel can be exasperating for little ones, which makes one Hawaiian Airlines flight attendants thoughtful gesture all the more sweet. Passenger Rachel Yuen Nihi told KHON2 that during a recent late-night flight to Los Angeles, a mother traveling alone with her three small children struggled to comfort her youngest, a crying toddler, tossing and turning for 45 minutes. DELTA PASSENGERS ENDURE NEARLY 12-HOUR DELAY BEFORE FLIGHT IS CANCELED: REPORT A couple in front of her kept turning around; giving her a stink eye. As if she was purposely trying to inconvenience them. I watched the woman in front turn around and snicker something at her children and all I could think of was, 'You wait until this seatbelt sign comes off,'" she wrote on Facebook. Yuen Nihi, who was traveling with her husband without their children, felt frustrated and was about to give the rude passenger a piece of her mind when an aircrew member intervened. Right before I could get out of my seat a flight attendant walks over and asked to hold her son. The mother seemed reluctant, embarrassed and at her wits' end. She had tried for at least 45 minutes and nothing worked, Yuen Nihi wrote. The toddler reached out and the flight attendant rocked him ... Up and down the aisle until he finally gave in. This is true Aloha spirit. DANCE TEAM PERFORMS FOR SOUTHWEST PASSENGERS AT AIRPORT TERMINAL "#HawaiianAirlines you should be proud of the people you hire who go beyond the call of duty and remind the world that kindness isnt all that uncommon. I didnt get her name but Im sure someone knows who she is. To that flight attendant, thank you for your kindness. It was noticed all around that flight. You gave a mother a moment to breathe and you have no idea how priceless this was for everyone around to see. Mahalo Nui! FOLLOW US ON FACEBOOK FOR MORE FOX LIFESTYLE NEWS KHON2 later identified the angelic Hawaiian Airlines flight attendant as Gina Reyes. A mother of four and former surrogate mother, Reyes told the outlet that shes been a flight attendant for nearly three years and is always comforting babies on long flights. I saw a place where I could help. I was rocking and singing to him. I was singing lullabies to him, Reyes said. I think its nothing more than what most of us at Hawaiian Airlines do. Thats our love and we get to love on our passengers. "It is always heartwarming to witness the level of attention and care our employees provide to our guests," Hawaiian Airlines told Fox News of the sweet scene. Walt Disney World Resort has announced that Disney's Animal Kingdom welcomed a baby Nile hippopotamus born at the park on Jan. 13. Park officials say that roughly a dozen guests were able to experience a magical moment at the park's Kilimanjaro Safaris attraction, as they were the first to learn that the hippo calf is a male named Augustus. Augustus, weighing in at about 168 pounds, is the first hippo born at the park in 13 years. Park officials say that he is often seen staying close to his mom, Tuma, and is already winning guests over with his playful nature. Walt Disney World Resorts says that the birth of Augustus marks another success for the dedicated and highly trained team of animal care experts at Disneys Animal Kingdom. Nile Hippos are a vulnerable species with a declining population, so this is an important contribution to the worldwide conservation and understanding of these amazing creatures. Augustus parents, Tuma and Henry, were reportedly chosen to breed through the Species Survival Plan (SSP), which is overseen by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA). The SSP ensures responsible breeding so there will be healthy and diverse animal populations for years to come. This article originally appeared on Fox 35. Tourists leaving Las Vegas can now dispose of their leftover, legally-purchased marijuana at specially designated bins outside the McCarran International Airport, rather than hastily smoking it before the flight, or just donating it to a "chill bro" on the way out of town. The green receptacles of which there are 13 so far have been bolted to the ground in high-traffic areas outside the airport and its car rental area, The Las Vegas Sun is reporting. The Department of Aviation moved to install the bins, or amnesty boxes, after Clark County instituted a ban on marijuana possession and advertising at McCarran back in September. DELTA PASSENGERS ENDURE NEARLY 12-HOUR DELAY BEFORE FLIGHT IS CANCELED "The amnesty boxes are offered as a way to help people comply with this ordinance," airport spokeswomanChristine Crews told The Associated Press. The sale of recreational marijuana has been legal in Nevada since July 2017. Possession of up to one ounce of marijuana, or up to 1/8 ounce of concentrated marijuana, was legalized the previous January, according to The Sun. In 2017, tourists who neglected to dispose of their leftover marijuana before arriving at McCarran would have to deal with the Las Vegas Metro Police, who would ultimately determine if the tourist was carrying a felony amount. However, Officer Aden Ocampo-Gomez of the Las Vegas police force said no citations have been issued stemming from the airport's new ordinances on marijuana possession and advertising, passed in September. PLANE OVERSHOOTS RUNWAY AT NIGERIAN AIRPORT, SKIDS OFF INTO BUSHES Spokeswoman Crews added that the amnesty boxes will be monitored to prevent tampering. The drawer pulls out; you drop your stuff in and you close it. You cant really get your hand in there. If you start tampering with them, youd be detected pretty quickly, she told the Sun. A contractor has also been hired to collect and dispose of the receptacles contents multiple times per week. The county aviation department said it plans to install at least seven additional amnesty boxes at McCarran and nearby airports, but possibly more. FOLLOW US ON FACEBOOK FOR MORE FOX LIFESTYLE NEWS The Associated Press contributed to this report. The home of the former school resource deputy who stayed outside the Florida high school as last weeks massacre unfolded was being protected Friday by law enforcement officials even as President Trump called out the ex-cop, suggesting he was a "coward." Reporters who attempted to approach the West Palm Beach home of ex-Broward County Sheriff's Office Deputy Scot Peterson were reportedly met with resistance from at least six police officers who were standing guard outside. They prevented us from approaching the house, WSVNs Frank Guzman tweeted Thursday. An Associated Press reporter said he approached Petersons home Thursday night, seeing lights on inside and cars present. He rang the doorbell twice, but no one answered. TIMELINE OF FLORIDA SCHOOL SHOOTING Before departing for his speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Friday morning, Trump, in a set of fiery remarks, lambasted Peterson. "When it came time to get in there and do something, he didn't have the courage, or something happened," Trump said. "He certainly did a poor job. That's the case where somebody was outside, they are trained, they didn't react properly under pressure or they were a coward." Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel said Peterson, who was armed when gunman Nikolas Cruz opened fire at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, never went in[to] the building that was under attack. He said the school resource officer instead took up a position viewing the western entrance of the building. Israel said he was devastated, sick to my stomach after learning of Petersons inaction during the school shooting that left 17 people dead. The sheriff said he believes Peterson remained outside the building for roughly four minutes, while the shooting in total lasted around six minutes. Israel said the officer never fired his weapon. "What matters is that when we, in law enforcement, arrive at an active shooter, we go in and address the target," the sheriff said. "And thats what shouldve been done." When asked what Peterson should have done, Israel said the deputy should have "went in, addressed the killer, killed the killer." He added: There are no words. I mean, these families lost their children...I've been to the funerals...I've been to the vigils. It's just, ah, there are no words." Peterson resigned Thursday after video surveillance showed he never entered the school, even though he clearly knew there was a shooting taking place, officials said. Officer Tim Burton of the Coral Springs Police Department, who responded to the shooting, told The New York Times that Peterson was seeking cover behind a concrete column leading to a stairwell. The Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office confirmed to WTVJ that Peterson's family requested privacy and protection following Peterson's resignation. Student Jenna Jorsten told WSVN that she was in shock Peterson stayed outside -- especially after learning of unarmed teachers and students risking their lives to save others. If hes the one with a gun, he should be the one out there with the gun trying to protect the kids, she said. Why was he hiding outside? It just makes no sense to me whatsoever. I mean it just doesnt make sense to me at all. FLORIDA SCHOOL SHOOTING SURVIVORS DREAD PARKLAND CAMPUS RETURN Cruz, 19, has been jailed on 17 counts of murder and police said he confessed to being the shooter. Defense attorneys, state records and people who knew him indicate Cruz displayed behavioral troubles for years. Two other deputies from the Broward County Sheriff's Office have been placed on restrictive duty as officials investigate "whether or not they could have done more, shouldve done more." The officers were identified by WSVN as Edward Eason and Guntis Treijis. Their restricted assignments come as authorities found they responded to at least 23 calls regarding Cruz or his brother since 2008. In two of the instances, Col. Jack Dale said, protocol might not have been followed. Israel said an investigation remains ongoing. The Associated Press contributed to this report. A convicted killers execution Thursday was overturned shortly before he was scheduled for lethal injection when Texas Gov. Greg Abbott granted him clemency. Thomas Bart Whitaker, 38, was set to die Thursday night for masterminding the fatal shooting of his mother, Tricia, and brother, Kevin, at their Houston home in 2003. His father, Kent, was also shot in the same attack but survived and led the effort to save his son from execution. Just an hour before Whitaker was to be executed, Abbott accepted the rare clemency recommendation from the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles, which was a unanimous. Abbott commuted the convicts sentence to life without parole. Abbott had the option of accepting the recommendation, rejecting it, or doing nothing. "Mr. Whitaker's father, who survived the attempt on his life, passionately opposes the execution of his son. Mr. Whitaker's father insists that he would be victimized again if the state put to death his last remaining immediate family member," Abbott said in a proclamation issued Thursday evening. It was only the fourth time since the state resumed executions in 1982 that the parole board has recommended clemency within days of an inmate's scheduled execution. Whitakers commutation came as two other executions in Alabama and Florida were scheduled for Thursday evening. Eric Branch, 47, was executed Thursday evening at Florida State Prison in Bradford County, authorities said. Branch, who was convicted of raping and killing 21-year-old college student Susan Morris in 1993, let out a blood-curdling scream and shouted murderers! three times before he succumbed to the lethal drugs. The scheduled execution for Doyle Lee Hamm, however, was delayed as the U.S. Supreme Court considers his request to block the execution. Hamm, 61, was set to die at 6 p.m. for the 1987 shooting death of Alabama motel clerk Patrick Cunningham during a robbery. However, his execution was pushed back at the last minute and was later postponed because officials said there was not enough time to prepare him before the death warrant expired. The number of executions in the U.S. peaked at 98 in 1999 and has trended downward since. So far in 2018, three prisoners have been executed in the U.S, all in Texas. Last year, 23 prisoners were executed in the nation, three more than the previous year. If Whitaker, Branch and Hamm were all executed Thursday, it wouldve marked the first time in more than eight years that three convicted killers were put to death in the U.S. on the same day. Fox News Lucia Suarez Sang and The Associated Press contributed to this report. A Texas man has been charged with murder after allegedly shooting a postal worker on a Dallas highway for making a hand gesture that angered him. The Department of Justice formally announced Thursday that Donnie Arlondo Ferrell, 25, had been charged with one count of murder of an officer or employee of the United States while such officer or employee was engaged in or on the account of the performance of official duties. Ferrell was arrested Wednesday after a standoff in Hutchins, about 11 miles southeast of Dallas, FOX4 reported, citing multiple law enforcement sources close to the investigation. Dallas police have said 58-year-old Tony Mosby was shot Monday about 2:30 a.m. while driving a postal truck just before the Margaret McDermott Bridge near downtown. When authorities arrived at the scene, they found Mosby dead in the cab of the 11-ton box truck, which had struck a guardrail. US POSTAL WORKER KILLED IN SHOOTING ON DALLAS HIGHWAY According to the DOJ, two people approached the FBIs office in Fort Worth, Texas, on Wednesday with information related to the shooting. They reportedly told investigators that they met Ferrell and another person on Sunday at restaurant in Dallas. After making several stops, all four individuals left a pool hall around 1:30 a.m. They went on to say that the unidentified driver of the vehicle began driving erratically, trying to pass the Postal Service truck on its left side. It was then that Ferrell, sitting in the passenger seat, fired several shots at the truck. The two individuals told investigators that they saw the truck crash into the barrier. According to the DOJ press release, when one of the occupants of the vehicle asked Ferrell why he had fired his gun, he reportedly responded that the driver of the USPS truck had made a hand gesture towards their vehicle and that angered him. Ferrell could face life in prison and a fine of $250,000 if found guilty. Family members have described Mosby as a dedicated worker, as well as a trustworthy father and grandfather. POSTAL WORKER KILLED IN DALLAS HIGHWAY SHOOTING CALLED 'ROCK OF THE FAMILY' "He was the rock of the family and part of that glue is gone. And I think that's what's going to help heal his children and his brother and his sister is bringing this person to justice," Sylvia Mosby, his sister-in-law, told FOX4. Authorities said the deadly shooting happened 11 days after someone shot at two Dallas police officers in a squad car about a mile away from Monday's episode, at about the same time of the morning. In that encounter, the officers were not seriously injured. Police said there's no evidence linking the two crimes; there have been no arrests for the attack on the officers. An upstate New York hunter who fatally shot a neighbor he mistook for a deer is no longer facing charges. According to the Democrat & Chronicle , Chautauqua (shuh-TAH'-kwah) County District Attorney Patrick Swanson says the manslaughter charge against Thomas B. Jadlowski has been dismissed. County Judge David Foley had an issue with how the prosecutor instructed grand jury members during questioning. Swanson says he expects to decide within a week whether to present the case to another grand jury. Rosemary Billquist, a hospital worker and hospice volunteer, was shot Nov. 22 while walking her dogs in a field behind her home. Jadlowski heard Billquist cry out after firing, ran to her, called 911 and administered first aid until emergency responders arrived. ___ Information from: Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, http://www.democratandchronicle.com A Chicago man was charged with murder Thursday for allegedly slitting the throat of his 2-year-old son to the point of near decapitation, authorities said. Rolando Ortiz, 37, was looking after his son, Mateo Garcia Aguayo, on Wednesday afternoon, but became frustrated because the child was running around and was keeping him awake, Area Central Detectives Cmdr. Brendan Deenihan said during a news conference, according to the Chicago Tribune. Thats when Oritz held his son down and cut his throat with a kitchen knife, Deenihan said, according to the paper. The father then tried to slit his own wrists after realizing what he had done, Deenihan added. Mateo wasnt old enough to make a bad decision. Mateo wasnt old enough to take the wrong path in life, Chicago police Superintendent Eddie Johnson said, according to the Tribune. He was just an innocent kid whose trust and safety was betrayed by one man he should never have to question: his father. "He was just an innocent kid whose trust and safety was betrayed by one man he should never have to question: his father." Chicago police Superintendent Eddie Johnson According to police: Ortiz placed the body in a trash bag, and unsuccessfully attempted to call his wife at work. He then dialed his sister-in-law to confess to the brutal crime. The woman contacted two family members, who live on the floor below, to check on the child where they discovered Mateo in the garbage bag and Ortiz bleeding. Ortiz fled as the family called 911 but was apprehended roughly four hours later in Kankakee, Ill., with the help of several agencies, the Chicago Sun Times reported. He was taken back to Chicago where he confessed to the killing of his son Wednesday, authorities said. Mateo had six other siblings, but none were home at the time of the killing. The boy was pronounced dead at the scene, authorities said according to the Times. Oritz faces one count of first-degree murder, the Tribune reported. The school resource deputy who remained outside of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., during last weeks bloody massacre believed he did a good job, a police union official said Thursday. According to the official, Broward County Deputy Scot Peterson thought he carried out his responsibilities during the Valentines Day rampage, even though he failed to enter the school and engage a suspect who authorities say killed 17 students and faculty members with an AR-15-style assault rifle. He believed he did a good job calling in the location, setting up the perimeter and calling in the description [of the suspect], Jeff Bell, president of the Broward Sheriffs Office Deputies Association, told the New York Post. At a news conference Thursday, Broward Sheriff Scott Israel excoriated Peterson -- who has resigned -- for his failure to enter the school and engage the shooter. Israel said the deputy should have went in, addressed the killer, killed the killer. But Bell while not condemning the deputy proposed that it was an error not to engage the suspect, whom authorities identified as Nikolas Cruz, a 19-year-old former student of the school. We have to act, even if that means risking our lives to save many many more lives. I would demand that from our union members, the union official told the Post. During the attack, Peterson reportedly held a position outside the western entrance of the building for more than four minutes. The shooting lasted about six minutes. The Thursday news conference also revealed there was a communication error between the person reviewing the schools surveillance cameras and responding officers. Coral Springs Police Chief Tony Pustizzi said that it wasn't communicated to the officers that [the tape] was a 20-minute delay." Because of the delay, officers heard that the shooter was in a certain location while officers already there were saying that wasn't the case. Responding officers had been looking for Peterson because he knew where to access the cameras, but the deputy was not inside the building at the time. The tape delay confusion didn't put anyone in danger, Pustizzi said. Peterson chose to resign and retire after Israel suspended him without pay and placed him under investigation. Fox News' Katherine Lam and the Associated Press contributed to this report. As the debate rages over how to prevent future school shootings, it's emerged there may have been dozens of opportunities to stop Florida gunman Nikolas Cruz before he killed 17 people last week. Local law enforcement declined to arrest Cruz on numerous occasions, including two incidents in which he allegedly involving a gun. The FBI failed to follow through on two reports pegging Cruz as a possible school shooter. And Thursday it was revealed a cop on the school campus Cruz targeted chose to hide rather than fight. Palm Beach County police officers were posted outside the home of disgraced former deputy Scot Peterson on Friday following his resignation a day earlier, after officials citing surveillance video said he never went in Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School while the attack was unfolding. He should have went in, addressed the killer, killed the killer, his ex-boss, Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel, said after reports emerged Thursday of Petersons inaction, prompting widespread outrage. But rewinding the timeline from the moment Cruz burst through the door of the Parkland school on Valentines Day, there now appears to be countless instances where law enforcement, academic and medical officials could have stopped the 19-year-old Cruz and spared the lives of the young students and staff killed in one of the countrys deadliest school attacks. FBI gets two warnings about Cruz, specifically involving the possibility of a school shooting In a scandal prompting Attorney General Jeff Sessions to order an immediate review," the Federal Bureau of Investigation said it received a tip about Cruz the month before the attack, but mishandled the information after receiving the call. The caller provided information about Cruzs gun ownership, desire to kill people, erratic behavior, and disturbing social media posts, as well as the potential of him conducting a school shooting, the FBI said in a statement. However, the information that agents were told Jan. 5 by the caller, identified by the bureau as someone close to the shooter, never made it to the FBIs Miami Field Office, where appropriate investigative steps would have been taken. The information the caller presented also should have been assessed as a potential threat to life," the bureau admitted. Months earlier, in September, the FBI also received a tip about a troubling YouTube comment made by a user named Nikolas Cruz that said Im going to be a professional school shooter. A special agent in charge of the bureaus Miami division said the comment was investigated but authorities could not determine its origin or find any connection to South Florida, where the shooting took place. "It is now clear that the warning signs were there and tips to the FBI were missed," Sessions said after reports of the blunders emerged. "We see the tragic consequences of those failures." Local police pay visit after visit to shooters home, but Cruz manages to stay out of jail -- or a hospital Frequent fights with their mother and each other. Items being thrown about. One out of control escapade after another allegedly involving Cruz and his brother Zachary unfolded at the home of their adoptive mother in Parkland, according to police records. Despite local law enforcement reportedly receiving dozens of callsbetween 2011 and 2016, with issues ranging from domestic disturbance to child/elder abuse," state investigators deemed the shooter low risk and felt he was unlikely to hurt anyone other than himself. Israel admitted in the wake of the shooting authorities received "20 calls for services in the last few years, with local media putting the number as high as 39. Israel says every one of those calls will now be looked at and scrutinized. Social services and mental health professionals also investigated Cruz in 2016 after Snapchat videos were uncovered showing him cutting both of his arms. But a visit by a mental health clinician at Henderson Behavioral Health ended with a determination Cruz was not at risk to harm himself or others, and the teen was instructed to sign a safety contract. A Florida Department of Children and Families report obtained by Fox News also showed that it closed its investigation into Cruz in November, based on his caregivers protective capacity, in-home services through Henderson, and engagement in school." Months later, after Cruz's massacre, he told police that voices in his head -- called demons by law enforcement sources -- told him to carry out the attack, according to reports. School disciplinary problems start piling up Cruz was frequently in trouble at school in the years leading up to the shooting. He was suspended for a day in January 2017 for assaulting someone and got into a fight months earlier, according to disciplinary records obtained by the Sun-Sentinel. The records also said Cruzs adoptive mother was called in more than a dozen times for discussions and Cruz was often sent to counseling. One report mentioned bullets were found in his backpack. A former classmate said Cruz followed her around, would abuse his girlfriend and even talked about killing his friends' parents. The former classmate and another student also claimed the shooter used to sell knives out of his lunch box. Cruz ended up getting expelled from Marjory Stoneman last year for disciplinary problems and bounced around a few alternative schools before reappearing there, rifle in hand, on Valentines Day. Reports also linked Cruz to frequent trouble during his time at Westglades Middle School, where he apparently was disciplined for insulting teachers and staff, using profanity and racking up unexcused absences and at least one fight. An officer was on scene during the shooting, and did nothing Peterson was near the shooting site for four minutes of Cruz's six minute rampage. But instead of the armed, trained officer engaging Cruz -- something that could have saved several lives -- Peterson remained outside, taking shelter behind a concrete barrier, according to authorities who viewed surveillance film. President Trump lambasted Peterson on Friday after being asked about the former deputy. "When it came time to get in there and do something, he didn't have the courage, or something happened," Trump said. "He certainly did a poor job. That's the case where somebody was outside, they are trained, they didn't react properly under pressure or they were a coward." A human foot that washed ashore on Vancouver Island in December belonged to a Washington state man, officials said Wednesday, the 13th such case of a foot behind found along British Columbia's coast since 2007. Stanley Okumoto, 79, was reported missing in September 2017 by authorities in Kitsap County and some partial remains were discovered in November of that year near Neah Bay, the Sooke News Mirror reported. In December, a tibia and fibula attached to a human foot with a white sock and running shoe washed up on the Canadian island along the Jordan River, according to The Seattle Times. Mike Johns, 56, told CTV Vancouver Island News in December he and his dog were walking along the river and the dog made the discovery. He said the foot was totally intact. It was unclear how Okumoto died. The New York Times reported the leg was found in a section of British Columbia known as king tides. Officials believed the strong currents could have brought the foot from Washington to Canada. It's not clear if there's any link between the gruesome discoveries. Welcome to Fox News First. Not signed up yet? Click here. Developing now, Friday, Feb. 23, 2018 A Parkland, Fla., massacre survivor tells Fox News he pulled out of a CNN town hall because producers rewrote his question and told him to 'stick to the script' Outrage is growing after reports that a deputy never entered the Parkland, Fla., school where last week's shooting took place Russia Special Counsel Robert Mueller indicts former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and aide Rick Gates on tax and bank fraud charges President Trump is expected to address CPAC on Friday TUNE IN: 'Life, Liberty & Levin' hosted by Mark Levin premieres on Fox News this Sunday at 10 p.m. ET. THE LEAD STORY - 'STICK TO THE SCRIPT': A Florida student says he chose not to participate in CNN's town hall debate on gun violence Wednesday because network producers rewrote his question ... Colton Haab, a junior at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, where 17 people were slain Feb. 14, told "Tucker Carlson Tonight" he did not attend the event when he realized it would be a "total waste of time." "They had taken what I had wrote and what I had briefed on and talked about, and they actually wrote the question for me," Haab said. "Originally, I had thought that it was going to be more of my own question and my own say. And then it turned out to be more of just a script. And [the producer] had actually said that over the phone, that I needed to stick to the script." CNN denies that it scripted questions for any of the participants at the town hall, which was attended by U.S. Sens. Marco Rubio and Bill Nelson, both of Florida, and National Rifle Association spokeswoman Dana Loesch. 'SICK TO MY STOMACH': Police are reportedly guarding the home of a deputy who was on patrol at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., after it was revealed he never entered the school when the Feb. 14 massacre took place ... Deputy Scot Peterson, of the Broward County Sheriffs Office, resigned Thursday after video surveillance showed he never entered the school, even though he "clearly" knew there was a shooting taking place, officials said. He was stationed on the schools campus when a suspect identified by authorities as Nikolas Cruz opened fire with an AR-15 rifle, killing 17 people. Sheriff Scott Israel said during a news conference Thursday that video showed Peterson took up a position but "never went in." The sheriff said he believes Peterson remained outside the building for roughly four minutes, while the shooting in total lasted around six minutes. Israel said the officer never fired his weapon. A union official said Peterson thought he did a "good job" in his response to the shooting. Sheriff Israel disagreed, telling reporters he was "devastated. Sick to my stomach. There are no words." The revelation about the school deputy's failure to act came as President Trump floated the possibility of paying teachers a "bonus to carry concealed firearms, stressing both the importance of school security and the strengthening of some gun laws in wake of the Parkland tragedy. MUELLER CASTS WIDE NET: Special Counsel Robert Mueller filed a 32-count indictment Thursday, hitting former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and aide Rick Gates with news charges of tax evasion and bank fraud ... Manafort is specifically charged with five counts related to filing false income tax returns and four counts of failure to report foreign bank and financial accounts. Gates is accused of 11 counts related to filing false income tax returns and three counts of failure to report foreign bank and financial accounts. Both men are accused of nine counts of bank fraud and conspiracy to commit bank fraud. The new indictment comes a week after Mueller filed charges against 13 Russians, accusing them of a vast conspiracy to undermine the U.S. presidential election. TRUMP AT CPAC: President Trump is expected to address the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) for the second straight year on Friday ... While he was fresh off his inauguration and greeted as a conquering hero at last year's gathering, expect the president to use CPAC 2018 to highlight the accomplishments of his first year in office, attack the "fake news" of his detractors in the mainstream media and perhaps slam Special Counsel Robert Mueller's Russia probe, Hillary Clinton and former President Obama. Trump may also address the gun control debate sparked anew by the school shooting in Parkland, Fla. Tune in to Fox News at 10 am ET to watch live coverage of President Trump's address at CPAC. NEW SHOW: 'LIFE, LIBERTY & LEVIN': Mark Levin makes his Fox News Channel hosting debut with the premiere of "Life, Liberty & Levin" this Sunday at 10 p.m. ET ... The popular nationally syndicated radio host's program will explore the fundamental values and principles undergirding American society, culture, politics, and current events, and their relevance to the nations future and everyday lives of citizens. "Life, Liberty & Levin" will feature in-depth, long-form, thought-provoking interviews. On Sunday, Levin will talk to economist and syndicated columnist Walter E. Williams. AS SEEN ON FOX NEWS COLUMBINE'S LESSONS STILL NOT LEARNED: "I've heard 'it's never going to happen here, it's not going to happen here,' but guess what? It's happening everywhere, and it happens every month. So prepare for it, hire somebody to protect your children and let them go to school that way." Grant Whitus, a former SWAT team leader who was the first officer to enter Columbine High School during the 1999 mass shooting, on "Your World with Neil Cavuto," arguing that any school district that doesn't have armed security will be "setting themselves up for a lawsuit." WATCH DEMS FIRING BLANKS: "The Democrats seem to want to ban bad guys and good guys from having weapons. I don't understand why we would ban good guys." Jesse Watters, on "The Five," arguing the GOP has been the "party of ideas" on how to prevent mass shootings, while Democrats have not. WATCH 2018 WINTER OLYMPICS North Korea spy chief, accused in deadly attacks on South Korea, to lead Olympic delegation at closing ceremony. Ivanka Trump's Olympic visit sparks speculation about media's reaction. Twitter attacks German figure skater for performing to 'Schindler's List' score. U.S. medal winners | Full coverage THE SWAMP Trump: Without ICE, California would be 'crime nest.' Indicted Missouri governor blasts 'reckless liberal' prosecutor. Mattis expected to back transgender troops -- if they can deploy, official says. ACROSS THE NATION Husband of Alabama double-life mom arrested in her murder. Child marriage protects predators, must end, former bride tells Kentucky lawmakers. Driver crashes car into Connecticut hospital, sets himself on fire. MINDING YOUR BUSINESS Ousted Ford executive Raj Nair to lose $10M in bonuses, keep retirement benefits and health care. Feds want 'Pharma Bro' Martin Shkrelis millions. Ford F-150 wins top truck, Tesla is best American brand in Consumer Reports rankings. After Florida massacre, bank ends NRA-logo credit card, rental car firm ends NRA member discount. FOX NEWS OPINION Tammy Bruce: Tracking the real collusion -- Obama knew foreign entities were interfering; he did nothing. On Black History Month, an African-American civil rights pioneer reflects on today's political landscape. U.S. passivity in the face of Syrian atrocities is hurting our global interests. HOLLYWOOD SQUARED Chevy Chase gets into roadside fight with young drivers who had to look up who he was. William Shatner takes friendly shot at Mark Hamill over Walk of Fame star. Comedian Michelle Wolf set to host White House Correspondents Dinner. DID YOU HEAR ABOUT THIS? Hit a bullet with a bullet: New defensive missile could prevent close range attacks. Archaeologists may have found the Prophet Isaiah's 'signature.' 'Hero' cow escapes slaughterhouse and hides on island for a month. STAY TUNED On Fox News: Fox & Friends, 6 a.m. ET: The Rev. Franklin Graham reflects on his life and death of his father, the Rev. Billy Graham; Secretary of Energy Rick Perry previews his CPAC speech; and a look at some of Consumer Reports' top cars. Tucker Carlson Tonight, 8 p.m. ET: Ying Ma, author of "Chinese Girl in the Ghetto," on why China is the real threat to the United States. Hannity, 9 p.m. ET: Judge Jeanine Pirro and Tomi Lahren break down President Trump's speech at CPAC. The Ingraham Angle, 10 p.m. ET: Michelle Malkin sounds off on the latest in the gun debate in wake of the tragedy in Parkland, Fla. Fox News @ Night, 11 p.m. ET: A special interview with Rick Harrison of "Pawn Stars." On Fox Business: Mornings with Maria, 6 a.m. ET: Guests include: Patrick Byrne, Overstock.com CEO; House Majority Whip Steve Scalise; Glenn Youngkin, Carlyle co-CEO; U.S Olympian skier Torin Yater-Wallace. Varney & Co, 9 a.m. ET: Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto; Mike Bless, Century Aluminum CEO. On Fox News Radio: The Fox News Rundown podcast: Fox News correspondent Matt Finn and a Florida teacher on the debate over whether arming school officials will prevent mass shootings. On Monday, the Supreme Court will hear a challenge out of Illinois to public union payments. Fox News Radio Washington correspondent Jared Halpern details both arguments in the case and why Supreme Court observers are closely watching Justice Neil Gorsuch. Plus, commentary from "Fox News Sunday" host Chris Wallace. Want the Fox News Rundown sent straight to your mobile device? Subscribe through Apple Podcasts, Google Play, and Stitcher. This Weekend on Fox News: Neil Cavuto Live, Saturday, 10 a.m. ET: Guests include: Parkland student Ariana Klein on her meeting with President Trump; House GOP Conference Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers will be live from CPAC on the gun control debate. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke on the recent announcement to expand oil and gas drilling off of California's coast. And Liberty University President Jerry Falwell Jr reflects of the life of the Rev. Billy Graham. #OnThisDay 2013: Ronda Rousey beats Liz Carmouche in the first round of the UFCs first womens bout, in Anaheim, Calif. 1945: During World War II, U.S. Marines on Iwo Jima capture Mount Suribachi, where they raise two American flags (the second captured in the iconic Associated Press photo). 1927: President Calvin Coolidge signs a bill creating the Federal Radio Commission, the forerunner of the Federal Communications Commission. Fox News First is compiled by Fox News' Bryan Robinson. Thank you for joining us! Enjoy your day, and weekend! We'll see you in your inbox first thing Monday morning. EDITORS NOTE: After student Colton Haab said a CNN producer insisted he use a question that the network scripted for him, the students father, Glenn, forwarded an email to media outlets including Fox News, claiming it served as proof. On Tuesday, Feb. 27, Glenn Haab acknowledged he omitted words in that email, but added, There was nothing malicious behind it. A German Shepard is being hailed as a four-legged angel after reportedly getting hit by three bullets while protecting his owner during a home invasion attempt this week in Washington. Javier Mercado, 16, said the dog, named Rex, came to his rescue after burglars broke into his home Wednesday afternoon in Des Moines. I started hearing barking, a lot of barking, and then one of the guys screamed, 'Get the dog! The dog bit me, the dog bit me!'" Mercado told Q13 Fox. The teen said he called 911 while hiding in a closet and the intruders left when they heard police sirens nearby. Rex, who is 2 years old, cried out after being hit with a bullet that went into his neck and others that struck his hind legs, according to Mercado. I just want to thank my dog, Mercado told Q13 Fox. If it wasnt for him, I feel like I wouldnt be standing here right now. Rex is now recovering at a local veterinary hospital and police have not yet made any arrests in the case, the station added. It was not immediately clear why the house was targeted. Responding officers, which included a SWAT team, did find a smashed sliding door when they approached the home to inspect the scene, Kiro 7 reported. Rex is an angel, said Julia Cadena, Mercados mother. Hes my four-legged angel that we had at our house. The Latest on the South Carolina public health agency's handling of a profane message from its Twitter account (all times local): 2:40 p.m. The chief spokesman of South Carolina's public health agency has been removed from its communications staff listing following the posting of a profanity-laced Twitter message critical of President Donald Trump. A list provided Friday to The Associated Press no longer includes Tim Kelly among communications staff at the Department of Health and Environmental Control. A tweet Wednesday from the agency's official account called Trump a "tool," modified by an expletive and had #ParklandStudentsSpeak attached. Since last week's deadly shooting, students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, have spoken out in favor of gun control. Agency spokesman Tommy Crosby told the AP that the employee intended to tweet from a personal account and was fired. Following an open-records request from AP for information on employees with access to the account and its login history, messages to Kelly have gone unanswered. ___ 1:20 p.m. South Carolina's public health agency says an employee has been fired after posting a profanity-laced message critical of President Donald Trump. A tweet posted Wednesday from the Department of Health and Environmental Control's official account called Trump a "tool," modified by an expletive and had #ParklandStudentsSpeak attached. Since last week's deadly shooting, students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, have spoken out in favor of gun control. Agency spokesman Tommy Crosby told The Associated Press on Friday the employee intended to tweet from a personal account. Crosby wouldn't confirm if agency chief spokesman Tim Kelly was still employed. Kelly told the State he didn't think an employee was responsible. Following an open-records request from the AP, Crosby took over media communications. Messages to Kelly have gone unanswered. Civilians have been killed, their neighborhoods destroyed and at least one water treatment plant heavily damaged in the Turkish military offensive against the Kurdish-held Syrian enclave of Afrin, according to video, photos and on-the-ground accounts reviewed by Fox News. Some of the reporting, which included the apparent deaths of children, is too graphic to publish. Some of the accounts of what is happening in Afrin also cannot be independently verified. The Turkish intervention, called Operation Olive Branch, began in late January and, according to national security specialists, further complicates the conflict in Northern Syria involving Kurdish forces that worked with the United States to rout the Islamic State (ISIS). The Turkish attempt to drive the Kurds from Afrin places the U.S. in a very difficult position," said Tara Maller, a former military analyst for the CIA who is now a senior policy adviser with the Counter Extremism Project. "If the U.S. is seen as abandoning the Kurds, its allies and the most effective fighting force against ISIS, it could result in the loss of credibility and an unwillingness for others to cooperate with the U.S. in the future against ISIS and other terrorist groups. While some 2,000 U.S. forces are in the region, Turkey has threatened to clear the Kurds from its border with Syria. The strategy could impact the town of Manbij, widely reported to be a base for U.S. troops. Maller, who reviewed photos and video for Fox News, said that "there are U.S. troops in this area, in physical proximity to the fighting. The U.S. has said it is not moving its forces from this area and would hit back hard if attacked. At the same time, the U.S. wants to avoid alienating Turkey and pushing it further into Russias sphere of influence. The U.S. must work through diplomatic channels to lessen the tension in the area and prevent this confrontation from drawing in other players and becoming a separate war, which will only embolden ISIS and other radical groups. Afrin is home to the Peoples Protection Units, or YPG, a Kurdish militia. The Turkish government maintains the YPG is a terrorist group and offshoot of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which has waged a military struggle against Turkey since the 1980s. At the same time, however, YPG is a central element of the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces that now control great swaths of Syria. Returning from overseas last week, U.S. Defense Secretary James Mattis gave a wide-ranging brief to reporters, one that touched on the Afrin conflict. Mattis said Secretary of State Rex Tillerson had recently visited the Turkish capital, Ankara, where he dealt with issues causing friction and a loss of rapport between us and our NATO ally Turkey. Mattis continued. And while we understand their (Turkeys) legitimate security concerns, as I've mentioned several times, that does not align with us concurring with attacks into areas that were not sources of violence before the attack into Afrin, for example. Asked how mechanisms would work with Turkey in Afrin and Manbij, he said: That's exactly what we have to work out. That's -- as you said, we're going to put them in place. So there's a commitment now to work them out. We have to put them -- we have to draw them up together, and then we have to employ them. The aim of the Turkish operation is to "stop attacks and border harassments, indiscriminate shelling of urban areas, harboring, equipping and training of terrorists, suicide bombers and assassins," according to a fact sheet sent to Fox News from the Turkish Embassy in Washington. Turkey also maintains that "all precautions are taken to avoid collateral damage to the civilian population" in the operation, a claim sharply disputed by Kurdish groups. At the Munich Security Conference this month, Turkeys minister of foreign affairs called Operation Olive Branch a legitimate right (for) self-defense, adding that "supporting a terrorist organization against another terrorist organization (ISIS) is a big mistake and risking the future of the country, a reference to the YPG. Maller, of the Counter Extremism Project, said ISIS has been beaten back, but emphasized that the terror group would likely stage a comeback, and the U.S. will need its Kurdish allies again. ISIS continues to have a formidable presence" along the Syria-Iraq border and "is capable of striking quickly and often. Also, ISIS continues to successfully radicalize and recruit individuals globally, while inspiring followers to carry out attacks. Over time, it is quite possible that ISIS could again gain strength, as it has done before, should the war in Syria drag on and Iraqs government remain weak and under the sway of Iran. "While the absolute number of ISIS fighters in Syria and Iraq may have fallen, the group remains dangerous and continues to spread to Africa, Asia and other parts of the world." Afghanistan's president and Pakistan's prime minister have launched a 1,814 kilometer (1,130 miles) gas pipeline that will feed Turkmenistan gas to Afghanistan, as well as Pakistan and eventually to India. The first part of the inauguration Friday took place in Turkmenistan, on the border with Afghanistan's western province of Herat, followed by a ceremony in Afghanistan. The launch was shown live on Afghan television. Heavy security will guard the pipeline construction through Afghanistan, said Jelani Farhad, spokesman for the Herat provincial governor's office. Farhad says: "It's a golden day for Afghanistan today. It will help our economy and create thousands of jobs." The long awaited pipeline project, which is known by the acronym TAPI, is expected to take two years to complete. The man who blew himself up this week after tossing a grenade at the U.S. Embassy in the capital of Montenegro was an ex-soldier who reviled NATO, backed Russia and posted pro-Marxist memes online, according to authorities and social media. Dalibor Jaukovic, 43, apparently received a commendation from former Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic for his service during NATO's bombing of Serbia and Montenegro in 1999, authorities said Thursday. A Facebook account purported to be Jaukovic's last year posted a photo of a plaque -- seemingly signed by Milosevic -- celebrating his contribution in the fighting. The account also included an ominous message along with the image: "no to NATO." Radio Free Europe reported that Jaukovic also joined a Facebook group titled "Russophiles," where in February he wrote: "Shame on Montenegro. Fascists are closer to us than Russians." And in January, Jaukovic reportedly posted a meme supporting Marxism and Leninism, Radio Free Europe reported. Jaukovic had no criminal record and the attack wasn't an act of terrorism, police said. Police added they were investigating his motives and whether he had acted alone. They said security has been enhanced throughout the country. "Measures are being taken together with the FBI agents to check the social networks this individual has used," senior police official Enis Bakovic said. The U.S. State Department said it doesn't believe the attack "is part of an ongoing threat." Police said in a statement earlier that an assailant threw a bomb into the embassy yard and then killed himself by activating another one around midnight Wednesday. The blast created a crater but caused no other material damage to the embassy property, the statement said. The embassy said Thursday all staff were safe and accounted for after the incident. "Measures are being taken together with the FBI agents to check the social networks this individual has used." Assistant police chief Enis Bakovic Police said Jaukovic was a Montenegrin citizen born in neighboring Serbia in 1976. Many in Montenegro remain opposed to the country's NATO membership because of the air war the alliance waged to stop the war in Kosovo when Montenegro was still part of Yugoslavia. Montenegro joined NATO last year despite strong opposition from Russia, its traditional Slavic ally. Several people, including two Russian secret service operatives, are on trial in Podgorica on charges that they wanted to overthrow Montenegro's government in 2016 because of its pro-Western policies. Nauert said the embassy would only perform emergency consular services for the remainder of the week. Previously scheduled visa appointments will be rescheduled. The Associated Press contributed to this report. An upcoming visit to the United Nations' top human rights body by Iran's justice minister is attracting criticism since the European Union has issued sanctions against him for rights violations. Critics say Seyyed Alireza Avaei has no place before the Human Rights Council. He's among roughly 100 dignitaries expected to attend a council segment Tuesday. The EU imposed sanctions on Avaei and other Iranian officials in October 2011. It said as president of Tehran's judiciary, Avaei was responsible for arbitrary arrests, denying prisoners' rights and increasing executions. Council spokesman Rolando Gomez said Friday that nations get to decide who speaks for them at the rights body. Avaei's presence could cast a shadow on the council, which U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley disparaged last year as a place where rights abusers can whitewash their images. Could not establish database connection. DB: bostonimc and SQL: --> The administrator has been notified and will resolve the problem ASAP. next Image 1 of 2 prev Image 2 of 2 While Italy's economic growth has picked up this year, it belies grim realities below the surface, few of which are being addressed directly as politicians stump for a national ballot on March 4. The economy is forecast to grow by a decent rate of 1.5 percent this year, but that still lags the wider eurozone's estimated 2 percent. The economy is smaller than it was at the start of the economic downturn in 2008, unemployment remains at a high 10.8 percent and wage growth is below 1 percent. Household savings, long held as the counterweight to Italy's enormous government debt, have dwindled. Jack Allen, an analyst at Capital Economics says: "None of the parties seem likely to address some of the major underlying sources of Italy's economic weakness." Police have arrested two Japanese men believed to be right-wing activists for shooting at North Korea's de facto embassy in Tokyo. Police said Friday that the men fired several shots at the General Association of Korean Residents in Japan, a pro-Pyongyang group representing ethnic Koreans in Japan. They said the men, aged 46 and 56, drove by in a vehicle and one of them fired several shots. The gate was damaged but nobody was injured. Police said their motive was not known. Patrolling police rushed to the closely monitored organization and arrested the man on the spot, confiscating a gun. Tokyo has no diplomatic ties with Pyongyang, but tens of thousands of pro-Pyongyang ethnic Koreans live in Japan and still have relatives in the North. The Philippine foreign secretary says one of two suspects in the gruesome death of a Filipina housemaid whose body was found stuffed in a freezer in an apartment in Kuwait has been arrested in Lebanon. Foreign Secretary Alan Peter Cayetano said in a statement Friday that he has informed Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte about the arrest of Lebanese Nader Essam Assaf, but added the latter's Syrian wife, also a suspect, remains at large. The discovery of Joanna Demafelis's body on Feb. 6 in the freezer in Kuwait City, where it had reportedly been kept for more than a year, has refocused attention on the tragic plight of poor Filipinos toiling abroad and prompted Duterte to ban the deployment of new Filipino workers to Kuwait, where many abuses have been reported. South Sudan's special high court has sentenced a South African military veteran to execution by hanging. Retired colonel William Endley, a former adviser to past Vice President Riek Machar, had been convicted on charges of conspiracy and attempting to overthrow the government. His lawyer, Gar Adel Gar, calls the sentence a "mockery of justice" and says they plan to appeal it next week. Endley has been detained since August 2016. He is one of two people associated with opposition leader Machar who now face a death sentence for allegedly conspiring against the government. The other is James Gatdet Dak, Machar's former spokesman. Rights groups have condemned the death sentences and called on South Sudan's government to reconsider. The country's civil war is now in its fifth year. The conflict in Syria has dragged on a year longer than World War II now, and is only getting worse in places like rebel-held Eastern Ghouta - where bombs, rockets and shells continue to rain down on a terrified population. The situation can only be described as catastrophic, Abd, a 28-year-old voluntary rescue worker with the Syrian Civil Defense, otherwise known as The White Helmets, told Fox News on Thursday. Continuous, continuous shelling at every moment. Life has ceased. Civilians the women and the children are waiting for death. An estimated 400,000 people are currently trapped inside Eastern Ghouta, on the outskirts of Damascus. More than half are said to be children, and almost all are in dire need of humanitarian aid. More than 400 have been reported killed, and almost 2,000 wounded in the last week alone. Hundreds of bombs are dropping on us, there have been 300 airstrikes in the past three days, Firas Abdullah, a 24-year-old opposition activist and aid worker, told Fox News on Thursday afternoon from his basement in the Eastern Ghouta town of Douma. People are suffering from their wounds. We can hear the crying and the screaming of the women and children in their homes. Syrian and Russian warplanes have taken part in the bombing, according to Abdullah, who said there have also been drone strikes. For 24 hours a day they are capturing everything about where all the civilians are, filming where the crowded places are, he continued. Because it is civilians they want to kill. There are few medical professionals left to tend to the injured, activists say. The bombing campaign escalated on Feb. 4, according to reports, and among its targets hit many medical clinics. More than a dozen such facilities have been struck in just the last week. As a result, there aren't enough medical professionals left to tend to the injured. Most of the victims are women, children and the elderly. They have been in their basements for more than three days, the barrel bombs are penetrating small buildings, and killing people even in these basements, said Khaled Almilaji, CEO and Chairman of the Sustainable International Medical Relief Organization (SIMRO), a non-partisan foundation focused on suppling public health services to war-torn parts of Syria. Photographs and videos obtained by Fox News show hauntingly empty streets in Ghouta, as families bunker down in ad-hoc underground caves and shelters. Already dwindling supplies of rice and water are fast disappearing. And broken bodies lay dead beneath the rubble, as tiny bloodied children are carted from their decimated homes on makeshift stretchers. Most people eat once a day and some eat every other day, mostly just vegetables and rice if they can find it, said Abd. Schools have been suspended for more than two months due to the shelling. We need international action to save the remaining civilians. For those trapped inside, there seems nowhere to flee. Anyone who tries to leave will get shot by snipers, Abdullah said. We are stuck on an island here. I want to demand the world helps us in a humanitarian way. What is happening in Eastern Ghouta is a genocide. Aid agencies have complained for months that they have not been able to reach the hardest-hit areas, and are calling for an urgent ceasefire. There were reports on Friday that the Syrian government had finally agreed to a ceasefire, but that information could not be confirmed. We have warehouses and trucks of supplies ready to go, but we need a humanitarian pause in the fighting and the government needs to give us facilitation, Jan Egeland, Secretary-General of the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) told Fox News. We are hoping to get an agreement for something to start this weekend. We have not been able to get any convoys into Eastern Ghouta since November. During most of 2017, Egeland said aid workers were often held at gunpoint by pro-regime forces, and forced to remove medical supplies from their vehicles everything from scissors and surgical items to trauma care equipment under the premise they did not want wounded rebel soldiers to be treated. VICTIM OR THREAT? IRAQ HAS PLAN FOR ISIS FIGHTERS' WIVES, CHILDREN SYRIA'S ANTIOCH CHURCH PATRIARCH: US SANCTIONS ARE HURTING CHRISTIANS TOO Youssef Sadaki, a Syrian political and social investigator with the Orient Research Center, concurred the wounded of Ghouta simply have no place to go. Few emergency rooms are operable, and the only supplies permitted to enter in months came 10 days ago in the form of a small UN convoy. The convoy was able to provide basic supplies to some 8,000 people - a mere two percent of the population. The U.S. State Department expressed deep concern over the increasing violence this week, condemning the Syrian and Russian governments for their actions. The White House said Washington endorsed the UNs plea for a ceasefire to allow aid and medical supplies to enter. The attacks have not been one-sided. Egeland said rebels in Eastern Ghouta have fired some 800 rockets into government-held territory in Damascus some of that prior to the uptick in the air assault. Eastern Ghouta had previously been designated as a de-escalation zone, and was thus designed to be a safe zone. But that's not how it has held up. The Assad government deems all opposition forces to be terrorists, and insists they are targeting dangerous jihadist groups, and not civilians. Russia - Assad's ally and protector - asserts illegal armed formations had rejected demands to lay down their arms. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov called accusations they were complicit in civilian deaths unsubstantiated. The governments in Damascus and Moscow have also denied claims of using barrel bombs against civilians. Civilians in Eastern Ghouta also told Fox News they are surrounded by Iran-backed, pro-Assad militia groups. Irans deputy foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, this week conceded to the BBC that Iranian troops were in Syria to battle terrorist elements. But Abd, of the White Helmets, staunchly rebuffed assertions that Al-Qaeda-affiliated groups like Al-Nusra were operating inside the besieged region as propaganda. They are killing us under the name of killing Al-Nusra, he lamented. But there are not here. J. L. BELL is a Massachusetts writer who specializes in (among other things) the start of the American Revolution in and around Boston. He is particularly interested in the experiences of children in 1765-75. He has published scholarly papers and popular articles for both children and adults. He was consultant for an episode of History Detectives, and contributed to a display at Minute Man National Historic Park. Posted 2/23/18 Citizens Memorial Hospital will host a free Lunch and Learn seminar about carpal tunnel syndrome from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. Friday, March 2, in the CMH Community Rooms, 1500 N. Oakland in Bolivar. The Free Freightnet Membership List your company in the Freightnet directory. It's Free, it's Easy and your company can be displayed in front of potential freight buyers within 24 hours. Posted 2/23/18 The Springfield Regional Arts Council is accepting nominations for the 2018 Ozzie Awards through Wednesday, Feb. 28. Winners will be honored at the ninth annual Flights of Fancy, southwest United States Court of Appeals, Eleventh Circuit. UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, Plaintiff - Appellee, v. WILLIE HENDERSON, Defendant - Appellant. No. 17-11931 Decided: February 21, 2018 Before WILSON, JORDAN, and ROSENBAUM, Circuit Judges. Willie Henderson appeals his 93-month sentence, imposed upon resentencing, arguing that the sentence is procedurally unreasonable. This is the second appeal to come before us involving Henderson's sentence. After careful consideration, we affirm. I. A federal grand jury indicted Henderson on multiple counts of dog-fighting, drug, and firearm offenses. After he was charged in a nine-count indictment, Henderson pled guilty to two counts: (1) conspiracy to travel in interstate commerce in aid of unlawful activities and to sponsor and exhibit a dog in an animal-fighting venture, in violation of 18 U.S.C. 371 and 1952, and 7 U.S.C. 2156 (Count One), and (2) being a felon in possession of a firearm, in violation of 18 U.S.C. 922(g)(1) and 924(a)(2) (Count Nine). The district court accepted the plea, and the remaining counts were dismissed. A probation officer prepared a presentence investigation report (PSR) calculating Henderson's guideline range using the multiple-count adjustment rules of Chapter 3, Part D, of the Guidelines Manual. The probation officer separated the offenses into three groups and determined the adjusted offense level for each group. See U.S.S.G. 3D1.1-3D1.3. Ultimately, the probation officer concluded that a total offense level of 20 should be applied to Henderson. Using a criminal history category of IV and a total offense level of 20, the probation officer concluded Henderson's guideline range to be 51-63 months' imprisonment. Neither the government nor Henderson objected to the PSR. During Henderson's original sentencing, the government asked for a sentence at the high end of the 51-63-month range, while Henderson asked for a sentence at the low end of the range. The district court asked the parties whether the sentences on the two counts should run concurrently or consecutively. The government responded that a consecutive sentence was warranted based on Henderson's past criminal history and the nature of his current criminal offense. Henderson argued that a consecutive sentence was not warranted but recognized it was within the court's discretion to impose a consecutive sentence. The district court sentenced Henderson to the statutory maximum of 60 months as to Count One and 63 months (the high-end of the guideline range) as to Count Nine. In addition, the court ran the sentences partially consecutivelythe sentence on Count Nine was to run concurrently with the final 30 months of the sentence on Count One, for a total sentence of 93 months' imprisonment. In support of that sentence, the court relied on Henderson's criminal record, which consisted of three felony drug offenses, four misdemeanor drug convictions, a felony firearms conviction, and a conviction for resisting an officer in a traffic offense. Henderson objected to the sentence because it ran partially consecutively and on both procedural and substantive grounds. On appeal, Henderson asserted that the district court used the incorrect offense level when it rendered its sentence. Henderson claimed, and the government agreed, that his total offense level was actually 19, even though he was sentenced as if his total offense level were 20. The error occurred as a result of a miscalculation by the probation office when grouping the offenses under U.S.S.G. 3D1.1-3D1.3. As a result, Henderson's guideline range based on a criminal history category of IV and a total adjusted offense level of 19 should have been 46-57 months, and not 51-63 months. Because of the sentencing error, we vacated the original sentence and remanded the case to the district court for resentencing. On remand, the parties agreed that the original PSR was correct except for the calculation of the total offense level as 20 when it should have been 19. During the resentencing hearing, the district court recognized the correct guideline range of 46-57 months, based on a correct offense level of 19 and a criminal history category of IV. The government noted that the facts and circumstances of the case remained the same and requested that the district court again impose a total sentence of 93 months' imprisonment. To achieve the sentence, the government asked that Henderson be sentenced to 57 months (the upper end of the guideline range) on each count, with Henderson serving 21 of the months of his two sentences concurrently. Henderson asked for the district court to reconsider how it structured the sentence and sought a sentence of 87 months, to account for the six-month reduction under the new guidelines analysis. He argued that increasing his sentence by running the sentences on Counts One and Nine partially consecutively based on his criminal history would be improper double counting because his history had already been considered when determining the applicable guideline range. In addition, Henderson contended that an increased sentence would create an unwarranted disparity in sentence between himself and his co-defendant, who was sentenced to 16 months' imprisonment. Finally, Henderson's counsel opined that, in his experience, consecutive sentences are highly unusual. After considering the parties' arguments, the district court sentenced Henderson on each of Counts One and Nine to a period of 57 months' imprisonment. The term of imprisonment as to Count Nine was to run concurrently with the final 21 months of the term as to Count One and consecutively thereafter, for a total term of imprisonment of 93 months. Thus, Henderson's sentence remained the same upon remand. The district court noted that it was imposing the sentence outside the guideline range based on the nature and circumstances of the offenses, the history and characteristics of the defendant, and the seriousness of the offense, and to promote respect for the law and deter criminal conduct. The court also emphasized that Henderson was serving a term of probation for drug and firearm offenses at the time he committed the offenses in this case. Finally, the district court noted that it had considered Henderson's extensive prior criminal record that included seven prior felony drug convictions, three prior misdemeanor drug convictions, and three prior felony firearms convictions. Henderson again objected to the sentence on procedural and substantive grounds and renewed his disparity argument as to his co-defendant's sentence. The district court overruled Henderson's objections and entered an amended judgment on April 18, 2017, with an accompanying Statement of Reasons explaining the sentence. Henderson timely filed his appeal. In this appeal, Henderson argues that his 93-month sentence is procedurally unreasonable for two reasons. First, he claims the district court's new sentencewhich totaled the same 93-month term of imprisonment as his original sentencewas based on the same incorrect original guidelines error. Although Henderson agrees the district court sentenced him to the correct guidelines maximum of 57 months as to each count, he notes it allowed only 21 months to be served concurrently so that the total term of imprisonment is still 93 months. Henderson argues that because the 93-month aggregate was originally based on the incorrect maximum, the district court erred in structuring the sentences on remand to fit the same term. Put simply, Henderson asserts the prior incorrect range continued to affect his sentence on remand. Second, Henderson claims the district court procedurally erred by inadequately explaining its decision at resentencing. II. We review the reasonableness of a sentence under a deferential abuse-of-discretion standard. Gall v. United States, 552 U.S. 38, 51 (2007). In determining whether a sentence is reasonable procedurally, we must ensure that the district court committed no significant procedural error during sentencing. United States v. Alberts, 859 F.3d 979, 985 (11th Cir. 2017) (quoting United States v. Pugh, 515 F.3d 1179, 1190 (11th Cir. 2008) (quotation omitted)); see also Gall, 552 U.S. at 51. We may find a sentence to be procedurally unreasonable if the district court makes such errors as (1) failing to calculate (or improperly calculating) the guideline range, (2) treating the Guidelines as mandatory, (3) failing to consider the factors [set out in 18 U.S.C. 3553(a)], (4) selecting a sentence based on clearly erroneous facts, or (5) failing to adequately explain the chosen sentenceincluding an explanation for any deviation from the guideline range. United States v. Dougherty, 754 F.3d 1353, 1358-59 (11th Cir. 2014) (citation omitted). The Supreme Court has made clear that the federal Guidelines are the sentencing court's starting point and initial benchmark. Gall, 552 U.S. at 49. Consequently, federal courts must begin their analysis with the Guidelines and remain cognizant of them throughout the sentencing process. Molina-Martinez v. United States, 136 S. Ct. 1338, 1345 (2016) (quoting Peugh v. United States, 569 U.S. 530, 541 (2013)) (emphasis in Molina-Martinez). The Guidelines have been described as the framework for the sentencing proceedings and anchor the district court's discretion. Id. (quoting Peugh, 569 U.S. at 542, 549). So a district court that improperly calculate[es] a defendant's Guidelines range has committed a significant procedural error. Id. (citation and internal quotation marks omitted). But the Supreme Court has also made clear that the Guidelines serve as only one factor that courts must consider in determining an appropriate sentence. Kimbrough v. United States, 552 U.S. 85, 90 (2007). A district court may tailor the sentence in light of other statutory concerns as well. Id. at 101 (citation omitted). Consequently, district courts may vary upward from the Guidelines. Moreover, a district court's acknowledgment that it has considered the 3553(a) factors and the parties' arguments is sufficient. United States v. Sarras, 575 F.3d 1191, 1219 (11th Cir. 2009). It is not required to state on the record that it has explicitly considered each of the 3553(a) factors or discuss each of them. Id. Where a district court imposes an upward variance, however, it must have a justification compelling enough to support the degree of the variance. Gall, 552 U.S. at 50. III. First, Henderson claims the district court committed procedural error because on remand it based its new sentence on the original guideline error. We disagree. True, the district court handed down the same sentence after the case was remanded. But the record reflects no procedural error, and it shows consideration of the accurate guideline range. At Henderson's resentencing hearing, the district court recognized this Court's remand instructions and noted the error in the initial guideline calculation. The district court's remarks during resentencing reveal that it did not base its new sentence on the initial erroneous guideline range. Instead, it explained that it based Henderson's new 93-month sentence on the nature and circumstances of the offense, the history and characteristics of the defendant, the seriousness of the offense, the promotion of respect for the law, and the deterrence of criminal conduct. See 18 U.S.C. 3553(a). During resentencing, the district court explained, The Court has considered the presentence report prepared following your guilty plea and the changes mandated by the Circuit Court of Appeals, and the Court again accepts the plea agreement in this case and adjudicates you guilty of Counts 1 and 9 of the indictment. The advisory sentencing range is 46 to 57 months, considering an offense level of 19 and a Criminal History Category of IV. In imposing the sentence in this case, the Court has considered the advisory sentencing range and the sentencing factors found at 18 U.S.C. 3553(a) and has made an individualized assessment of the facts presented. The Court has determined that a sentence within the advisory sentencing range is inappropriate in this case. Therefore, the Court will impose a sentence outside the advisory guideline system. The district court's explanation makes clear that it based the new sentence on the correct guideline range46-57 months. The Statement of Reasons issued by the district court on resentencing also demonstrates that the court did not base its new sentence on a misreading of the Guidelines. In this document, the district court specifically acknowledged its error in imposing the original sentence: The one (1) level increase in the offense level at paragraph 71 [of the PSR] does not apply. The court then sentenced Henderson on each of the two counts at the upper end of the correct guideline range. While the court arrived at the same sentence as it did initially, it did not do so by failing to consider the proper guideline range or erroneously basing the new sentence on the original guideline error. Rather, the district court began with the appropriate guideline range and ran the sentences partially consecutively to arrive at a 93-month term of imprisonment. As the Supreme Court has explained, [e]ven if the sentencing judge sees a reason to vary from the Guidelines, if the judge uses the sentencing range as the beginning point to explain the decision to deviate from it, then the Guidelines are in a real sense the basis for the sentence. Molina-Martinez, 136 S. Ct. at 1345 (quoting Peugh, 569 U.S. at 542) (emphasis in Molina-Martinez). And, contrary to Henderson's suggestion, the district court was within its discretion to impose on remand the same sentence even though the guideline range changed. See e.g., United States v. Rosales-Bruno, 789 F.3d 1249, 1257 (11th Cir. 2015) (rejecting criminal defendant's implicit assumption that the district court was required to impose a lower sentence at resentencing because the guidelines range had been lowered). IV. Second, Henderson claims that the district court committed procedural error because it failed to provide an adequate explanation for his sentence. Although Henderson specifies that he appeals his sentence on procedural grounds only, the government construes the challenge as one on substantive grounds as well. We agree that, as argued, Henderson's challenge to the adequacy of the district court's explanation is in part a challenge to the substantive reasonableness of the sentence. We therefore address the applicable standard when addressing a criminal defendant's claim that his sentence is substantively unreasonable. We review the substantive reasonableness of a sentence for abuse of discretion, examining the totality of the circumstances and the purposes of sentencing stated in 3553(a). Alberts, 859 F.3d at 985 (citing United States v. Moran, 778 F.3d 942, 982 (11th Cir. 2015) (quotation omitted)). The 3553(a) factors include the nature and circumstances of the offense; the history and characteristics of the defendant; the applicable guideline range; and the need to reflect the seriousness of the offense, deter criminal conduct, and protect the public from the defendant's future crimes. See 18 U.S.C. 3553(a). The weight assigned to any particular factor is within the discretion of the district court. Alberts, 859 F.3d at 985. This abuse-of-discretion standard allows a range of choice, as long as the choice does not constitute a clear error of judgment. United States v. Irey, 612 F.3d 1160, 1189 (11th Cir. 2010) (en banc) (citation and quotation marks omitted). Abuse of discretion can be shown when the district court (1) fails to afford consideration to relevant factors that were due significant weight, (2) gives significant weight to an improper or irrelevant factor, or (3) commits a clear error of judgment in considering the proper factors. Id. (citation omitted). When determining the substantive reasonableness of the sentence imposed, we give due deference to the district court's decision that the 18 U.S.C. 3553(a) factors justify the extent of the variance. United States v. Hayes, 762 F.3d 1300, 1307 (11th Cir. 2014). We will vacate the sentence only if we are left with the definite and firm conviction that the district court committed a clear error of judgment by arriving at a sentence that lies outside the range of reasonable sentences dictated by the facts of the case. Irey, 612 F.3d at 1190 (quoting Pugh, 515 F.3d at 1191). We will not set aside a sentence merely because we would have decided to impose a different sentence. Id. at 1191 (citation omitted). Turning back to Henderson's contention that the district court erred because it failed to provide an adequate explanation for his sentence, we disagree. A sentencing judge is required to set forth enough of an explanation to satisfy this Court that he considered the parties' arguments and has a reasoned basis for exercising his own legal decision making authority. Rita v. United States, 551 U.S. 338, 356 (2007). What is enough depends on the circumstances of the case. Id. Here, the district court explained its reasoning for the sentence as follows: The Court has imposed a sentence outside the guideline system based on the nature and circumstances of the offenses and the history and characteristics of the defendant. The Court notes that Mr. Henderson was serving a term of probation for drug and firearm offenses at the time he committed the offenses in this case. That probation term was later revoked and he was serving a revocation sentence in Suwannee County, Florida, Circuit Court Docket Number 03-CF-171 at the time of the original sentencing in this case. The Court has also considered the defendant's extensive prior criminal record that includes but is not limited to seven prior felony drug convictions, three prior misdemeanor drug convictions, and three prior felony firearms convictions. The sentence is also imposed to reflect the seriousness of the offenses, to promote respect for the law, and to afford deterrence to criminal conduct. In fashioning an appropriate sentence, the Court has considered the totality of the circumstances and the defendant's extensive prior criminal record. Although Henderson urges this Court to find the district court's explanation to be cursory, in fact, the explanation is legally sufficient. The district court is not required to explicitly discuss each of the 3553(a) factors. United States v. Docampo, 573 F.3d 1091, 1100 (11th Cir. 2009). Nor must the court give all of the 3553(a) factors equal weight. The sentencing court is permitted to attach great weight to one factor over others. Rosales-Bruno, 789 F.3d at 1254 (citation and internal quotation marks omitted). And it is within the discretion of the sentencing court to decide how much weight to assign a particular sentencing factor. Id. (citation omitted). Here, the district court made clear that it imposed the sentencing variance based on Henderson's record, which included, but was not limited to, seven prior felony drug convictions, three prior misdemeanor drug convictions, and three prior felony firearm convictions. The court also found significant that Henderson was serving a term of probation for drug and firearm offenses at the time he committed the dog-fighting and gun offenses in this case. In addition, the court noted that by the time Henderson was sentenced in this case, the State of Florida had revoked his probation in another state criminal case. This was not, as Henderson suggests, a cursory explanation. And it was within the district court's discretion to give significant weight to Henderson's criminal history. See United States v. Williams, 526 F.3d 1312, 13231324 (11th Cir. 2008) (per curiam) (holding that the weight given to any specific 3553(a) factor is within the district court's discretion and that consideration of previous offenses fits squarely into one of the 3553(a) factors, the history and characteristics of the offender). The district court's explanation was sufficient to justify Henderson's 93-month sentence on remand. See Gall, 552 U.S. at 50. As for Henderson's assertion that the district court's sentence amounts to improper double counting, we also disagree. The PSR shows that many of Henderson's prior criminal convictions were not given criminal history points, so they did not factor into his criminal-history category. The district court permissibly recognized that the guideline range did not fully account for all of Henderson's criminal history. And it explicitly noted in its Statement of Reasons that Henderson's record included prior firearm convictions that were not used to calculate the criminal history category. We have upheld upward variances based on the defendant's prior criminal history even where the crimes were included in the calculation of the guideline range. See Williams, 526 F.3d at 1324. See also Rosales-Bruno, 789 F.3d at 1261 (noting the broad leeway district courts have in deciding how much weight to give prior crimes committed by the defendant). Henderson also contends that the district court did not account for the disparity between his sentence and that of his co-defendant, who received a 16-month sentence. Section 3553(a)(6) requires district courts to consider the need to avoid unwarranted sentence disparities among defendants with similar records who have been found guilty of similar conduct. But Henderson and his co-defendant were not similarly situated. Henderson's co-defendant did not plead guilty to a firearms offense and, significantly, he had no criminal history. Nor was Henderson's co-defendant on probation at the time he committed the offenses. Id. These facts sufficiently distinguish the two defendants, and the district court was within its discretion to overrule Henderson's disparity objection on this ground. As we have noted, a well-founded claim of disparity assumes that apples are being compared to apples. Docampo, 573 F.3d at 1101 (citation omitted). Finally, the sentence imposed is not substantively unreasonable. The sentence on each count is materially lower than the statutory maximum, an indication of reasonableness. And we cannot say that the district court abused its discretion in choosing to emphasize the fact that Henderson was serving a term of probation for drug and firearm offenses at the time he committed the dog-fighting and gun offenses in this case and that by the time he was sentenced in this case, the State of Florida had revoked his probation in another state criminal case. V. In sum, the district court committed no procedural or substantive error. It correctly calculated the applicable guideline range on remand, allowed the parties to present arguments as to what they believed an appropriate sentence would be, considered the 3553(a) factors, and adequately explained its reasoning for imposing the sentence. We therefore affirm. AFFIRMED. PER CURIAM: French farmers used tractors to block motorways and other major roads to protest against negotiations between the EU and South American trade bloc Mercosur, and their governments own plans to slash farm subsidies in disadvantaged areas. More than 20,000 farmers took to the roads across 90 government districts on Wednesday (21 February), according to Frances biggest farming union, the FNSEA. French farmers are particularly disgruntled about EU talks to strike a free trade agreement with Latin American Mercosur trading bloc countries, which include Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay. See also: In pictures French farmer protests likened to civil war If a free trade deal is struck, this would see tariffs removed on EU imports of beef and other agricultural commodities from Mercosur countries. French farmers say this would put them at a significant disadvantage compared with their South American counterparts, who have significantly lower costs of production than EU countries. French beef farmers fear an EU/Mercosur free trade deal will flood Europe with cheap beef and put thousands of European beef farmers out of business. British farmers would be squeezed by an EU/Mercosur free trade deal as this would increase supply in EU markets with cheap beef, which would depress prices for British beef. However, after Brexit the UK will be free to strike its own trade deals with EU and non-EU countries. Subsidy cuts Protestors are also angry that French president Emmanuel Macron is considering to overhaul subsidies for farmers who farm land in disadvantaged areas, and introduce more wolves in rural areas. The FNSEA said in a statement: Ahead of the opening of the annual Paris International Agriculture Fair, we wanted to raise big concerns with President Macron that this deal risks closing down the production of beef, sugar, ethanol and poultry. Are we going to accept thousands of (French) farmers going out of business? Are we going to accept products that dont have the same health, social and environmental rules as our own? On Thursday (22 February), president Macron invited around 1,000 young French farmers to the Elysee presidential palace before the annual Paris farm show, in a bid to ease tensions. Mr Macron told the young farmers that France would never allow imports of hormone-treated beef even if Brussels signed a free trade deal with Mercosur. He also promised there would be no reduction in Frances high food standards following this negotiation. Funding pledges Mr Macron announced a plan to invest 5m (4.4m) in French agriculture, to help farmers switch to more environmentally friendly farming methods. His target is for 22% of France to be farmed organically by 2022, up from the current rate of 6.5%. He also announced a crackdown on foreign investors buying up French farmland and the creation of a 1m (880,000) funding pot for young farmers loans. Im constructing the face of French agriculture for future years thats all I care about, Mr Macron told young farmers. Yes, there are decisions that are sometimes hard to take. Yes, there are home truths that do not please everyone. Yes, there are lots of mountains to climb. But were going to do it together because we share this responsibility and I know how much this means to you. Raiders Good out for season Free Access HENDERSON, Nev. Las Vegas Raiders right guard Denzelle Good suffered a torn ACL in his left knee in Monday nights 33-27 overtime victory over the Baltimore Ravens and is out for the season, a source... Running game carrying the load The Gaffney Indians were able to establish its running game in a dominant performance against Mallard Creek this past Friday. Behind an offensive line that shut down the Maverick defense,... Gordon and Clemson teammates have record-setting performance Gaffneys Zach Gordon helped the Clemson golf team make history as five Clemson golfers shot in the 60s in the same round for the first time in seven seasons on... Oregon, Iowa enter top 5; Arkansas has 1st ranking since 16 Free Access By ERIC OLSON AP College Football Writer Oregon and Iowa were the big movers in The Associated Press college football poll after road wins over top-10 opponents. The Ducks victory over... United States Court of Appeals, Second Circuit. YANJUN WEI, Petitioner, v. JEFFERSON B. SESSIONS III, UNITED STATES ATTORNEY GENERAL, Respondent. 16-3102 Decided: February 22, 2018 PRESENT: ROBERT A. KATZMANN, Chief Judge, PETER W. HALL, DENNY CHIN, Circuit Judges. FOR PETITIONER: Thomas V. Massucci, New York, NY. FOR RESPONDENT: Chad A. Readler, Acting Assistant Attorney General; Russell J. E. Verby, Senior Litigation Counsel; John D. Williams, Trial Attorney, Office of Immigration Litigation, United States Department of Justice, Washington, DC. UPON DUE CONSIDERATION of this petition for review of a Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) decision, it is hereby ORDERED, ADJUDGED, AND DECREED that the petition for review is DENIED. Petitioner Yanjun Wei, a native and citizen of the People's Republic of China, seeks review of an August 29, 2016, decision of the BIA affirming an October 5, 2015, decision of an Immigration Judge (IJ) denying Wei's application for asylum, withholding of removal, and relief under the Convention Against Torture (CAT). We assume the parties' familiarity with the underlying facts and procedural history in this case. Under the circumstances of this case, we have reviewed the adverse credibility determination as modified by the BIA. See Guan v. Gonzales, 432 F.3d 391, 394 (2d Cir. 2005). The standards of review are well established. See 8 U.S.C. 1252(b)(4); Lin v. Mukasey, 534 F.3d 162, 165-66 (2d Cir. 2008). The agency may, [c]onsidering the totality of the circumstances, base a credibility finding on an asylum applicant's demeanor, candor, or responsiveness, the plausibility of the account, and inconsistencies in her statements and other evidence, without regard to whether an inconsistency, inaccuracy, or falsehood goes to the heart of the applicant's claim. 8 U.S.C. 1158(b)(1)(B)(iii); Lin, 534 F.3d at 163-64. Substantial evidence supports the agency's determination that Wei was not credible. Wei's testimony is inconsistent as to whether her mother was aware of her Falun Gong practice. Compare App. 117 (Only my husband know.), with App. 135 (my mother aware of it). To the extent that she denied her mother's knowledge, moreover, it was reasonable for the agency to find that testimony implausible given that her mother lived with Wei in a small home in which Wei claimed to practice Falun Gong for one to two hours per day. Although Wei explained that her mother went for a walk every time Wei practiced Falun Gong, the IJ was not required to accept that explanation. See Majidi v. Gonzales, 430 F.3d 77, 80 (2d Cir. 2005). The agency also did not err in concluding that Wei's testimony about her arrest undermined her claim. Wei testified that the police handcuffed her and then ordered her to put on her coat. Although a minor point, the IJ was not precluded from relying on the implausibility of the police telling Wei to put on an article of clothing after they had handcuffed her. Although Wei contends that handcuffed persons often wear coats thrown over their heads or upper bodies, the IJ's skepticism of her testimony was based on a plain reading of the record, and [d]ecisions as to which of competing inferences to draw are entirely within the province of the trier of fact. Delmage v. Corio, 232 F.3d 38, 44 (2d Cir. 2000). The agency's demeanor findings, to which [w]e give particular deference, further support the adverse credibility determination. Chen v. DOJ, 426 F.3d 104, 113 (2d Cir. 2005). The record supports the conclusion that Wei became hesitant and nonresponsive on cross-examination, requiring the attorney to repeat questions to elicit direct and complete answers. Moreover, Wei failed to resolve her credibility issues with reliable corroboration of either her Falun Gong practice or past persecution. See Yang v. Gonzales, 496 F.3d 268, 273 (2d Cir. 2007). The IJ reasonably gave diminished weight to a discharge letter from Wei's previous employer and a detention notice from the Kaifeng Municipal Public Security Bureau because the drafters were unavailable for cross examination and the documents were unauthenticated. And the only evidence of Wei's Falun Gong practice was a letter from a friend and photographs of Wei posing in various unidentified positions. See Y.C. v. Holder, 741 F.3d 324, 334 (2d Cir. 2013). We note that the agency erred in finding that Wei was unable to explain how the police became aware of her Falun Gong practice given her testimony that a residential committee member reported her activities. In addition, the agency erred in finding that Wei was not consistent as to the day on which she was arrested, as there is no contradiction between her arrest on a Saturday and her testimony that she worked that day. Her testimony makes clear that although she generally worked Monday to Friday, she also worked on weekends when necessary. But given (1) the inconsistency and implausibility of her testimony concerning her mother's knowledge about her Falun Gong practice; (2) the demeanor finding; and (3) Wei's lack of reliable corroborating evidence, substantial evidence supports the agency's adverse credibility determination. The errors do not mandate remand because the agency's ultimate ruling is supported by the substantial evidence and it is clear that the same decision would be made on remand. Li v. Lynch, 839 F.3d 144, 149-50 (2d Cir. 2016). The adverse credibility determination is dispositive of asylum, withholding of removal, and CAT relief because all three claims are based on the same factual predicate. See Paul v. Gonzales, 444 F.3d 148, 156-57 (2d Cir. 2006). For the foregoing reasons, the petition for review is DENIED. FOR THE COURT: Catherine O'Hagan Wolfe, Clerk of Court Peter Davis is chief of the Galveston Island Beach Patrol. The views in this column are Davis and do not necessarily represent those of the Beach Patrol, Galveston Park Board of Trustees or any other entity. The first flu shots of the year are being offered in the Southland. 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. Senator Lamar Alexander said this week that he supports giving Dreamers legal status and a chance to become citizens. He also stressed the importance of border security. During WREGs Live at 9 show, broadcast from Memphis on Wednesday, he was asked about what is going to happen to the Dreamers, those young people who were brought undocumented as children into the country and have been protected from deportation by the DACA program. Well what should happen is what I voted for in 2013, which was to resolve the problem, he said. Give them legal status so they're law abiding, and give them over the long term the opportunity to be a citizen. Which is what should've happened. Senator Alexander also talked about border security and the fence, and the E-Verify system for employers. If we passed the 2013 bill, we'd have solved our border security problems, we'd have 700 miles of fence, 20,000 new border patrol people, e-verify for employers, and we dealt with the DACA problem. What we should do today, I co-sponsored the President's proposal, which only got 39 votes. I thought he made a very reasonable proposal. I co-sponsored and voted for narrower bipartisan proposal, which got 54 votes. We need 60. So we need to keep working to make sure we take care of the Dreamers, and take care of border security. Those are two things. A clerk at the Mapco on Hamill Road said a man had handed him what he thought was a hundred dollar bill and he almost gave him the change in return. The clerk said he never gave the man the money, but when he confronted the suspect he left the area. The "100 dollar bill" clearly had printed on it front and back it was for motion picture use only. The clerk also tested the obviously fake money with a currency pen and it also failed that test. * * * At the same Mapco, a white male, approximately 5'10" with a red beard and red hair, came in and passed off a fake $100 bill (also motion picture money) in exchange for $8 in gas. In return the suspect received $95 cash back. The manager gave police the fake money and showed officers surveillance video of the incident. Police have a possible suspect after reviewing surveillance video. The counterfeiter was driving a red pickup truck. * * * A woman on Chamberlain Avenue said sometime after midnight, someone broke out the right side front window of her 2011 Jeep Compress and rummaged through the vehicle. She said her wallet and its contents were taken along with a pair of Beats headphones. She canceled the credit cards that were in her wallet. * * * A resident of 3rd Avenue reported a theft of an ATV. He said the vehicle was removed from his back porch in the middle of the night. It is a dark green, 2004 Polaris 500 ATP. He paid approximately $3,000 for it. * * * George Stuart, who lives on Island Avenue in North Chattanooga, said he was clearing out brush around his house when he found a tombstone. The tombstone was new but had a date of 1923 on it. An officer placed the tombstone in police property. * * * At H&R Block on Rossville Boulevard, officials said George Cheeks came in to file his tax return. Police said, "After filing George was not happy with the amount he was getting therefore he decided to throw a temper tantrum in the middle of the store. This is the second incident of George causing a scene at the store. The manager informed me she would have police respond to the store if he came in again to inform George he is not longer welcome on the property." * * * Police responded to a shoplifting at Dollar General on Lee Highway. The manager said three black females came into the store and took over $300 worth of merchandise without paying for it. Photos of the suspects were sent out to see if they can be identified. * * * A man told police between 4 p.m. and 6 a.m. the following day, someone made four ATM withdrawals from his First Tennessee Bank account totaling $1,200. The man said he is still in possession of his debit card. He said he does not know how the thief was able to obtain his card information, including his PIN. * * * A woman said someone had somehow cloned her SunTrust debit card and made three ATM withdrawals from her Suntrust Bank account. The first was for $463.50, the second for $403.30 and the last for $83.30. The woman did not know the locations of the ATMs. * * * Officers responding to 307 Cherry St. were told that an unknown white male had damaged a device the parking enforcement company uses. The device was suction-cupped to the front windshield of a vehicle in violation. It was partially pried off the windshield and appeared to have a hole in the top. The suction-cup destroyer remained on scene for a short time but had left prior to police arriving. * * * Police were dispatched to a verbal disorder at an apartment on Douglas Street. Officers found a man sitting outside of the apartment. He said his girlfriend lived in the apartment and had just caught him cheating on her. He said she kicked him out, but his belongings were still inside the apartment. Police made contact with the girlfriend, who had gathered his belongings and had them sitting by the door. She said she had caught him messaging other girls on his cell phone asking them to send him nude photos. She said she asked him to gather his things and leave her apartment but he refused and started begging and pleading with her to not kick him out. She said she again told him to leave and he became verbally aggressive and threw a few of his personal items across the room as he started swearing and screaming. She said that is when she called the police. She said she wanted him to take his things and leave and wanted him to never contact her again and to leave her alone. Police explained to the man that any form of contact with the ex-girlfriend would be unwanted and reported to police. Officers escorted the man into the apartment to retrieve his belongings and he departed. Two candidates have withdrawn from the upcoming county elections after qualifying earlier. Attorney Timothy Deere will not be running as a Democratic candidate for Circuit Court judge, Division IV. Candidates in the Republican primary are Kyle Hedrick and Catherine Cate White. Sheldon Wright, an employee of the register of deeds office, has withdrawn from the Republican primary for that post. Rep. Marc Gravitt and Randy Johnston, of the assessor's office, are still in the GOP primary for register of deeds. Vickie Schroyer, who works in the office, is a Democratic candidate. Announcement in accordance with article 8, 1 of the Belgian Royal Decree of 27 April 2007 on public takeover bids Gfi Informatique aims to support its international ambitions by strengthening its operations in Belgium and Luxembourg Saint-Ouen (France) and Huizingen (Belgium), 23rd February 2018 - Gfi Informatique, a major player in digital solutions and services, and Realdolmen, a leading IT provider in Belgium and Luxembourg, announce today the signing of a transaction agreement, pursuant to which Gfi Informatique will file with the Financial Services and Markets Authority (FSMA) in the following days a voluntary and conditional takeover bid in cash for the shares of Realdolmen, at the price of 37.00 per share. Strategic rationale for the transaction Realdolmen is a single-source IT integrator supporting clients through the complete ICT-lifecycle, combining support services in both infrastructure and applications with product offerings. Its main divisions are IT & business consulting services and IT business support with a focus on upper SMEs. With around 1,250 highly trained employees, Realdolmen provides services to over 1,000 customers in Belgium and Luxembourg. With this transaction, Gfi Informatique aims to strengthen its footprint in Belgium and Luxembourg, in line with its international expansion strategy. It will fully rely on Realdolmen's management and employees to further develop a platform for the Benelux. Gfi Informatique intends to focus on business continuity and develop joint actions in services offerings by leveraging both companies' solutions. Main terms of the transaction The proposed transaction is a voluntary and conditional takeover bid in cash for all outstanding shares and warrants of Realdolmen at a price of 37.00 per share and an equivalent price per warrant. The proposed share bid price represents a premium of 11% compared to Realdolmen's last closing price on 22nd February 2018, and a premium of 22% and 28% compared to the volume weighted average share price over 3 months and 6 months, respectively. The proposed price corresponds to a transaction value of around 196 million. The offer will be conditional to Gfi Informatique holding more than 75% of Realdolmen's fully diluted share capital and more than 75% of the voting rights. Consistent with its fiduciary duties and subject to review of the final bid prospectus, the bid is unanimously supported by Realdolmen's board of directors. Furthermore, the board of directors will provide its formal response to the proposed takeover bid in a memorandum of reply in accordance with the applicable legal provisions A group of entities and persons affiliated to the Colruyt family and QuaeroQ CVBA, long-term shareholders of Realdolmen representing together 21.94% of its share capital have executed with Gfi Informatique an undertaking to tender their shares to the offer. Realdolmen will not tender its 3,192 treasury shares to the offer. After the close of the bid, Gfi Informatique intends to launch a simplified squeeze-out bid, if the conditions for such a squeeze-out bid are met. Comments "With the support of Realdolmen executive leadership, the combination of our respective operations and our complementary portfolios gives us the potential to create a mid-market champion in Europe." declared Vincent Rouaix, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Gfi Informatique. Henri Van Engelen, chairman of Realdolmen's board of directors: "After the successful transformation of Realdolmen we are excited with the opportunity to continue our journey as a member of a leading European IT services company. It will allow us to lever our complementary portfolios and build on Realdolmen's strengths to serve mid-size companies. The price offered represents a significant premium on the historical share price of the company." Marc De Keersmaecker, general manager of Realdolmen: "For our employees, customers and partners these combined forces open up access to a new and scaled-up international ecosystem, allowing them to further realize their goals, their ambitions and their potential." Disclaimer This communication does not constitute a formal notification of a voluntary public takeover bid, an offer, or a solicitation of any offer, to buy or subscribe for any securities. Any offer will be made only in compliance with and by means of a prospectus approved by the FSMA according to the Belgian Law dated 1 April 2007 relating to public takeover bids. This communication is not for release, publication or distribution, in whole or in part, in or into, directly or indirectly, any jurisdiction in which such release, publication or distribution would be unlawful. Any non-compliance with these restrictions may constitute a breach of financial laws and regulations in such jurisdictions. Gfi Informatique expressly disclaims any liability for such a breach of these restrictions by anyone. The items in this press release other than historical facts are estimates. They do not constitute guarantees because of the inherent difficulties in forecasting results. Actual results may differ considerably from explicit or implicit forecasts About Gfi Informatique Gfi Informatique is a major player in value-added IT services and software in Europe, and occupies a strategic position in its differentiated approach to global firms and niche entities. With its multi-specialist profile, the Group serves its customers with a unique combination of proximity, sector organisation and industrial-quality solutions. The Group has around 15,000 employees and generated revenue of 1,132 million in 2017. Gfi Informatique is listed on the Paris Euronext, Euronext (Compartment B) - ISIN Code: FR0004038099. For more information: www.gfi.world About Realdolmen Realdolmen is an independent ICT expert with over 1,200 highly skilled ICT professionals, serving more than 1,000 customers in the Benelux with their strategical, tactical and operational ICT demands. In every cooperation Realdolmen endeavors to realize the potential of people and organizations and wishes to make ICT human again. All of this guided by the company motto "To get there, together". The Tennessee Historical Commission and Tennessee Wars Commission Thursday announced that they have awarded nearly $700,000 in grant funding to preserve over 15 acres of critical Civil War battlefield land in three counties through the Tennessee Civil War Sites Preservation Fund, including $47,500 for Wauhatchie. Successful grantees were awarded funds to preserve land associated with the 1863 Battle of Wauhatchie in Chattanooga, land adjacent to Fort Donelson in Dover, and a tract in Franklin near the epicenter of the Nov. 30, 1864 battle. The successful grantee organizations were the Civil War Preservation Trust and Franklins Charge. These grants will help our partners in preservation conserve these historic lands forever, said Tennessee Historical Commission Executive Director Patrick McIntyre. "The funding will help obtain an important tract in the area already conserved along the Tennessee River at Browns Ferry, and enhance the area at Fort Donelson National Battlefield. In addition, grant funding will make a critical contribution to the restoration of a core portion of the Franklin Battlefield property just south of the Carter House State Historic Site. The specific projects and awards are as follows: Gold Tract, Dover, Stewart County. Applicant: The Civil War Preservation Trust $20,000 This project will acquire one parcel, consisting of 11.18 acres. The property is located near the southwestern portion of the Fort Donelson National Battlefield and was the site of troop movements and combat during the Battle of Fort Donelson, Feb. 11-16, 1862. Mohr Tract, Chattanooga, Hamilton County. Applicant: The Civil War Preservation Trust $47,500. This project will acquire one parcel, consisting of 3.61 acres. The project is located at the northern portion of the Chattanooga (Browns Ferry) Battlefield and was the site of troop movements of the 23rd Kentucky Infantry, U.S.A. during the Battle of Wauhatchie, Oct. 27, 1863. A part of the larger battle and siege of Chattanooga, Wauhatchie, or Browns Ferry, established the bridgehead upon which the Union army built their Cracker Line and allowed them to ultimately break the lines of the besieging Confederate troops. Spivey Tract, Franklin, Williamson County. Applicant: Franklins Charge $630,000 This project will acquire one parcel, consisting of .7 acres. The property is located just south of the Federal entrenchment line at the Carter familys farm and lies west of, and adjacent to, Columbia Pike in the city of Franklin. During the Battle of Franklin on Nov. 30, 1864 it was over this tract that multiple Confederate brigades of Browns Division charged against hastily entrenched Federal troops and were repulsed repeatedly, taking frightening casualties in the process. The Confederate failure at Franklin to score a decisive victory, coupled with their extensive casualty rate, allowed the Federal army to remain in control of Nashville and from it strike the death blows of the Confederacy. The TCWSPF grant program, begun in 2013, is funded through a portion of growth funds in the Real Estate Transfer Tax. It has proven to be a critical source of matching state funding for the Federal American Battlefield Protection Program, that is available for the preservation of properties associated with the 38 most significant Civil War sites in Tennessee. Additionally, grants can assist in funding the acquisition and protection of Underground Railroad sites eligible for the National Register of Historic Places or eligible for designation as a National Historic Landmark. The amount of funds available for grants in Tennessee this year is expected to be $1.4 million. This represents the largest amount of funds ever available for TCWSPF grants, due to the growth of the States Real Estate Transfer tax. The TCWSPF grants provide a 50 percent match, with the applicant providing for the matching 50 percent. "Grant programs like this one are critical in ensuring that Tennessee continues to lead the way in preserving and protecting the sites of conflict in which we can interpret all of our shared history as both Tennesseans and Americans, said Tim Hyder, director of Programs for the Tennessee Wars Commission. To date the TCWSPF has been utilized to award over $1.5 million in funding, which has helped permanently preserve and protect nearly 160 acres of threatened Civil War battlefield land in Tennessee. For more information about the Tennessee Historical Commission and Tennessee Wars Commission, please visit the Web site at http://www.tnhistoricalcommission.org. One of Irelands premier tenors, Paul Byrom, will perform at the Red Bank Cumberland Presbyterian Church on Tuesday, March 20, as part of his 14-city 10 Years On tour, celebrating more than 10 years that hes been entertaining in the United States and other locations beyond his native Ireland. Review for Paul Byrom: Fans remember him as one of the original members of the world-renowned all-male singing group Celtic Thunder, which he joined in 2007. During his time with them, the group had six #1 World Billboard albums and appeared in several television specials on PBS stations throughout the country. Since leaving the group in 2010, hes had a highly successful solo career, with his first post-Celtic Thunder recording This is the Moment also debuting at #1 on the World Billboard Chart. He began his official classical training in his hometown of Dublin when he was just seven years old. By the time he was 14, hed recorded his first album, The Golden Voice, and subsequent recordings landed on Irish and Billboard charts. Byrom comes from a musical background. His mother is a concert pianist and his father played guitar as a hobby. As a result, he grew up listening to both classical and mainstream music, ranging from Mozart to Buddy Holly to the Eagles, and this wide variance in genre and style influences his song choices to this day. He has performed for dignitaries such as Emperor Akihito of Japan, former Irish Presidents Mary McAleese and Mary Robinson, as well as U.S. President Barack Obama and Speaker of the House John Boehner. But he always enjoys performing for North American audiences who range in age from teens to grandmothers in their 80s, who appreciate his classical voice yet his sense of humor, showmanship and his ease with any musical genre. His performance at Red Bank Cumberland Presbyterian Church will feature songs to touch the heart and uplift the soul, and hell share humorous stories of his musical career as well as tidbits of his personal life. The concert is a blend of many song types, including show tunes and classical something for everyone. Because the tour occurs in the month of St. Patricks Day, hell be sure to include several Irish favorites. He still lives in Dublin, in a small seaside area called Blackrock. While he enjoys traveling to share his musical talents with concertgoers, he declares himself a proud Irishman who likes to fly the flag when hes away from home. Deep inside, he says hell always be Dublin through and through. The concert begins at 7:30 p.m. and runs for two hours, but as a special treat, attendees can choose to have a chance to meet Paul and have their photo taken with him prior to the show, if they choose the Meet and Greet package. General admission tickets are $35 and the Meet and Greet package (concert, pre-show photo plus early seating) is $45. Tickets or more information can be found at www.paulbyrom.ie. Red Bank Cumberland Presbyterian Church is at 115 Morrison Springs Road. For more information call 877-1383. The marine environment is critical to Grenadas economy and closely linked to the islands income generating tourism sector. Grenadas tri-island ocean state is not just a hub of maritime activity, but also home to unique marine biodiversity A bipartisan group of governors unveiled a blueprint on Friday for improving the nations health care system.Democratic Govs. John Hickenlooper of Colorado and Tom Wolf of Pennsylvania, Republican Govs. John Kasich of Ohio and Brian Sandoval of Nevada, and Independent Gov. Bill Walker of Alaska discussed their plan at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.Their proposal -- which expands on a letter they wrote to Congress in August -- is aimed at stabilizing the marketplace, making plans more affordable and giving states more flexibility.The governors made a point to argue that, despite the partisan rhetoric in Congress, the goals of delivering high-quality care and reducing costs or covering more people and being fiscally responsible are not mutually exclusive.We reject these false choices," they wrote. "Other sectors of the economy have delivered greater output at lower cost over the last 30 years. We should expect the same high performance and continuous improvement from our health care system."They are urging President Donald Trump to restore cost-sharing reduction payments to insurers, which pay for the subsidies that most low-income people on marketplace plans receive. The White House ended those payments in October, triggering premium hikes.The governors also encouraged the federal government to approve and help fund more state reinsurance programs, which protect insurance companies from the most expensive patients. Alaska has a successful reinsurance program that has kept marketplace premiums steady while other states have seen prices skyrocket.More innovation in state Medicaid programs, they say, is needed. In particular, states should shift away from a fee-for-service model to a value-based system of care. To do that, they're asking forinvestments in transition plans to make the change easier.The governors also recommend Medicaid programs to incorporate the idea that making peoples living environments better -- clean air, safe housing -- will make them healthier overall.Governors were instrumental in blocking Republican efforts last year to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act (ACA), President Barack Obama's signature legislation. But with repeal efforts seemingly over and health care on the backburner as immigration and gun laws take center stage, some people are skeptical of the influence these governors could have.The people who signed that letter are moderates. Moderates dont control Congress, Gail Wilensky, a health care economist who was administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services during the H.W. Bush administration, told Kansas acted improperly when it tried to cut off Medicaid dollars to Planned Parenthood under former Gov. Sam Brownback, a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday.Brownback, who has now taken a position in President Donald Trump's administration, sought to block Planned Parenthood from receiving Medicaid funding for breast exams, birth control and other services in 2016.Brownback's objection to sending Medicaid dollars to Planned Parenthood stemmed from the fact that the organization also provides abortion services, but those procedures are not paid for with Medicaid dollars. A federal district judge blocked Kansas from cutting off payments to the women's health care provider in 2016.Two years later and less than a month after Brownback left office, the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed that the state lacks the authority to prevent Medicaid recipients from obtaining services from Planned Parenthood.The ruling said states have broad authority to ensure that Medicaid providers are qualified to provide medical services."But this power has limits," the ruling said. "States may not terminate providers from their Medicaid program for any reason they see fit, especially when that reason is unrelated to the provider's competence and the quality of the healthcare it provides."Brandon Hill, the president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Great Plains, said in a statement that the ruling "sends a strong message that state officials should not play politics with Medicaid _ or the health care and wellbeing of Kansans."Kendall Marr, Gov. Jeff Colyer's spokesman, said in an email that the new governor's team was studying the decision and "considering further legal options. We will continue the fight for life."Colyer has made his anti-abortion stance a centerpiece of his first few weeks as governor, calling for an amendment to the Kansas Constitution to protect the state's abortion restrictions as the state Supreme Court weighs whether the constitution provides a right to abortion in a separate, ongoing case. A grand jury in St. Louis indicted Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens on Thursday, putting him in legal peril and raising the question of whether he can survive the political fallout."Republicans are going to say it's politically motivated, but indictment is pretty serious," says Ken Warren, a political scientist at St. Louis University.After news of the indictment broke, the Missouri House launched an investigation "We will carefully examine the facts contained in the indictment and answer the quesion as to whether or not the governor can lead our state while a felony case moves forward," the chamber's top GOP leaders said in a statement.The charges stem from an extramarital affair Greitens had before being elected governor in 2016. Greitens has admitted to the affair, but he has denied accusations of a blackmail scheme from the woman's ex-husband. The woman has refused to speak publicly about the matter. On a recording the ex-husband made without her knowledge, she quoted Greitens as saying, "You're never going to mention my name, otherwise this picture will be everywhere."Greitens had refused to confirm or deny whether he took a picture of the woman.The indictment charges him with felony invasion of privacy, stating that he "knowingly photographed [the woman] in a state of full or partial nudity" without her consent, where she had a reasonable expectation of privacy. The indictment further states that Greitens transmitted the photograph electronically."The law makes it a felony if a person transmits the image contained in the photograph or film in a manner that allows access to that image via a computer," St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner said in a statement.Greitens was booked and released on Thursday. A hearing has been set for March 16.If convicted, Greitens could face up to four years in prison. But invasion of privacy charges are difficult to make stick."The charges against my client are baseless and unfounded," Greitens' attorney Edward L. Dowd Jr. said in a statement. "My client is absolutely innocent. We will be filing a motion to dismiss."On Facebook, Greitens wrote that he had "made a personal mistake" but "did not commit a crime." He called Gardner a "reckless liberal prosecutor who uses her office to score political points."Gardner, a Democrat, was working against a deadline, with a three-year statute of limitations on the charge due to run out next month.Since becoming governor just over a year ago, Greitens has managed to alienate many legislators, including members of his own party. He made a habit of criticizing legislators by name on social media, while outside groups affiliated with him ran negative ads against those who crossed the governor. His own agenda -- including his recent push for a sizable tax cut -- has mostly stalled."Hes burned so many bridges, GOP lawmakers might see this as their opening to force him to resign," says John Messmer, a political scientist at St. Louis Community College who is running for Congress as a Democrat. "Rumors and gossip is one thing. Legal charges might be a game-changer."Indeed, two additional GOP legislators called for Greitens to resign Thursday."In the wake of the grand jury criminal indictment, and with legal proceedings to come, I cannot see how he could effectively perform the duties of his office, let alone to lead with the kind of moral authority needed to make a positive impact," state Rep. Kevin Corlew wrote on Facebook.Republican state Rep. Nate Walker, an early Greitens supporter, was among five GOP legislators who called on Greitens to resign last month. In the wake of the indictment, he said his fears that Greitens would continue to be wounded by bad news had been confirmed.On Thursday, GOP state Sen. Rob Schaaf tweeted , "...he's done," apparently completing a thought he'd tweeted on Jan. 10, the night the news of the affair first broke: "Stick a fork in him."Gail McCann Beatty, the Democratic floor leader in the state House, also urged him to step down on Thursday."It will be extremely difficult for the governor to effectively do his job with a felony indictment hanging over his head," she said in a statement.Greitens canceled a planned trip to Washington for a meeting of the National Governors Association this weekend. He has spent some time seeking to mend political fences in recent weeks, but he has not signaled any intention to step down."Many in Jefferson City view everything associated with St. Louis as purely motivated by Democrats with an ax to grind," Messmer says, "so his supporters might blow this off as purely politically motivated."In Missouri, indictment proceedings would begin in the state House. If the House were to approve articles of impeachment, the case would then be tried by "seven eminent jurists" who would be elected by the state Senate.Greitens may never be impeached, but the indictment makes his road to political recovery that much steeper."Greitens doesn't have a lot of friends in the Missouri Legislature," says Warren, the St. Louis University political scientist. "There are a lot of people who wouldn't mind dumping him." Amid federal inaction on gun control, the Democratic governors of Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York and New Jersey have formed a multi-state coalition to better share information and pool resources to combat gun violence."We have waited for Washington to do something and of course that never quite happened," Gov. Dannel P. Malloy told reporters on a conference call Thursday. "We can't wait for the federal government to act. We have states with good intentions, with good laws. Let's take it to the next step. Let's work across our borders."The states will collaborate on several fronts, including creating a multi-state task force to trace and intercept illegal guns and establishing a regional gun violence research consortium through their public colleges and universities.There will also be an effort to share information across state lines that isn't readily available in the FBI's National Instant Criminal Background Check System for gun sales.Connecticut has a law barring people subject to a temporary restraining order from buying guns, but those people can easily travel to another state and purchase a firearm, Malloy said.Similarly, New York State has a database of tens of thousands of people deemed too mentally unstable to carry firearms but those names are not part of the federal database that other states would use to see if they are eligible to buy a gun."We're neighbors, and a lot of our folks go to one another's states to make other types of purchases," Malloy said. "The probability is they also go across our borders to make gun purchases."The governors said the coalition, which is being called States for Gun Safety, was in the works before the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. last week but the 17 deaths there prompted them to step up their efforts."In light of that awful tragedy we felt we wanted to accelerate," said New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy.Murphy noted how Democratic governors similarly banded together to form the United States Climate Alliance, agreeing to adhere to the terms of the Paris climate agreement despite President Donald Trump's move to withdraw the U.S. from the deal.Last month, Malloy, Murphy and Cuomo announced they were preparing a federal lawsuit over the sweeping tax reform legislation that was enacted by Congress last year on the basis that it treated their states unfairly by limiting the deduction for state and local taxes."I think you could argue with great credibility and passion that states and governors will have never mattered more in the absence of federal action or the unwinding of federal action," Murphy said.Meanwhile, Trump Thursday signaled his strongest support for new gun laws since taking office. In a tweet he said he would be "strongly pushing" comprehensive background checks, with an emphasis on mental health, and supported raising the age to buy rifles to 21 and banning so-called "bump stocks," which allow semi-automatic guns to fire at near-automatic speeds. But he provided no further details.Democrats, including Sen. Chris Murphy, one of the Senate's strongest supporters of stricter gun laws, were wary."Let's be clear what 'comprehensive background checks' means -- subjecting all commercial sales (gun stores/shows, online sales) to checks," Murphy wrote in a tweet. "If that's what you mean, I'm listening." When politicians talk about pensions, its usually about the enormous weight they place on government budgets. According to the Volcker Alliance, where we are consultants, state and local governments are on the hook for $1 trillion in unfunded pension liabilities.Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle push for pension reform, a word often used in a positive sense, to rescue dollars that could instead be used for other services. But what about future retirees? Is pension reform positive for them?In many cases, not so much.Since the Great Recession, every state except Idaho has made changes to the pension benefits they offer public employees, according to Luke Martel, director of the employment, labor and retirement program at the National Conference of State Legislatures.States have chipped away at pension benefits in many different ways -- eliminating cost-of-living increases, reducing employer and hiking employee contributions, and raising the retirement age, to name a few. But because of long-standing contracts, employees who are already on the payroll when reform takes place are spared most of the cuts. Its new employees who bear the biggest financial burden.A lot of plans have become a lot less generous, says Richard Johnson, director of the Urban Institutes retirement policy program. New hires may be lulled into a false sense that they are getting enough to tide them over when they retire, and often this might not be the case.According to a 2014 study of 24 states, pension reform has dropped new employees average expected retirement amount by 7.5 percent. The impact varies tremendously, but pension reform has been particularly extreme in some states: Expected retirement benefits are 20 percent less in Alabama and Pennsylvania, and 18.5 percent lower in Maryland.To reduce their pension costs, almost half the states (19) have developed retirement plans that are a hybrid of defined-benefit (DB) plans, in which employees are guaranteed an employer-funded pension based on their salary and years worked, and defined-contribution (DC) plans, in which employees and employers pay toward their retirement. But half of those states (9) give employees the option of choosing a DC plan instead of a DB or hybrid plan. (That could be desirable for people who don't plan on staying in the public sector long because defined-contribution plans are portable from one employer to the next.)Up until this year, the nine states with options had all automatically enrolled new employees in the DB or hybrid plan. But starting this year, new state employees in Florida and new teachers in Michigan will now be automatically placed in the states investment plan that is similar to a 401(k).Previously, you defaulted into the defined-benefit pension plan, says Keith Brainard, research director for the National Association of State Retirement Administrators (NASRA). Michigan and Florida switched, and the default is now the defined-contribution plan.But in both Florida and Michigan, new employees still have the option of making a conscious choice to be covered by the states traditional retirement plan. Most, however, will likely accept the choice the state makes for them.Its hard for a young employee to think about something thats 40 years down the road, but they shouldnt assume that the default is the best choice for them. Its worth it to do a little homework and research, says Matthew Strom, vice president and actuary of the Segal Group in Chicago, which works with state and local governments to design and manage retirement systems.Despite their push for pension reform, states dont want to leave their employees hanging.Many, including Ohio, have established supplemental tax-deferred accounts to help employees save for retirement. These are in addition to the retirement plan offered by the state. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 63 percent of state and local employees had access to these supplemental accounts in 2017 -- up from 54 percent in 2007.There is a greater need for supplemental savings because of pension reform, and [states] recognize that, says Keith Overly, executive director of the Ohio Deferred Compensation Program and president of the National Association of Defined Contribution Administrators.To increase the likelihood that employees will save, Ohio started auto-enrolling them in the supplemental savings program in 2013, forcing them to opt out rather than in. This simple change has contributed to a dramatic increase in participation -- from about 10,000 employees in 2013 to about 32,000 in 2017, according to Ohio data.Overly believes strongly in the need for supplemental savings: With or without pension reform, I dont think theres been adequate savings for retirement. Teachers across West Virginia walked off the job Thursday, demonstrating at the state Capitol and at some schools in frustration over what they say is state leaders' refusal to pay them and fund their benefits adequately.Late Wednesday, Gov. Jim Justice announced that he had signed a bill, passed by the state Senate earlier in the day, that would give teachers a 2 percent raise as of July 1, and a 1 percent raise each of the following two years, as well as raises for other public employees.Teachers say those raises would be swallowed up by premium hikes and benefit cuts from the Public Employee Insurance Agency. At the governor's urging, PEIA board members froze those cuts for a year, but teachers say a long-term solution is needed.More than 1,000 demonstrators were in line Thursday morning at the Capitol's West Wing entrance, waiting to express their displeasure with state lawmakers.Randi Weingarten, national president of the American Federation of Teachers union, joined protesters on the Kanawha River side of the state Capitol. About 200 people were there shortly after 8:30 a.m., when a honking bus let off a dozen more. The crowd chanted "Fed up, fired up!" and "Enough is enough!""I'm reporting for duty on the picket line," Weingarten said. "They are engaged in a righteous and fundamental American values fight for dignity and respect."She said West Virginia teachers have been "disrespected by their government officials who think it's more important to give tax cuts to the wealthy and to corporations" than to invest in education."People are saying we can't actually live and teach and we need the Legislature to actually treat us like the priority education should be," she said.Weingarten said the first step to ending the walkout by March 10, the end of the legislative session, would be "to not do what the Senate did, which was actually to lower the House proposal."The state Senate shaved a year off the House of Delegates' proposed teacher pay raise of 2 percent next school year, followed by three years of 1 percent annual increases.Donald Thomas, a teacher at Putnam County's Hurricane High School, was among those protesting in front of the Capitol. He expressed a commonly heard comment on the already enacted freezing of Public Employees Insurance Agency health insurance premiums and other aspects of PEIA benefits through the middle of 2019.Amid the growing protests from public school employees, Justice proposed that move, which stopped previously approved benefit cuts from occurring, and Republican legislative leaders have pushed to find funding to support the freeze."They want to wait until after November, I think is the problem most people have, trying to shut us up for the election," Thomas said. "I feel like that's what most people are taking from the 17-month freeze."In Boone County, a group of teachers held up signs and waved to passing drivers in front of Scott High School."These are issues we've wanted to address for a while now," said Scott High teacher Kelli Vance. "Especially with it being statewide action, it goes to show it's a bigger deal to us than they thought."Heather Ritter, a librarian at Scott, said: "When we went to the Board of Education's website last night and saw the entire state was red-- that was amazing. They weren't unified in 1990, but we are today."Counties highlighted in red denoted ones that were taking part in today's protest. Eventually, the entire map was colored red Wednesday evening. The Governors Official Program is comprised of a wide range of constitutional and legal duties and ceremonial and community engagements. Each year, the Governor hosts thousands of visitors to Government House to take part in investiture and award ceremonies, Open Days, receptions and meetings, and travels widely throughout Queensland to support the activities of Patron groups. View a chronological record of the Governors daily program below. On Thursday, in the morning, at 1 William St, His Excellency the Honourable Paul de Jersey AC presided at a meeting of Executive Council. In the afternoon, at Government House, the Governor and Mrs Kaye de Jersey hosted a reception in support of the Indigenous Literacy Foundation, and the Governor addressed guests. In the evening, at the Queensland Performing Arts Centre at South Bank, the Governor attended the Great Public Schools Association of Queensland Centenary Music Showcase and addressed guests. The welfare of the citizens, socioeconomic progress and infrastructural development of the country are the main priorities of Government for a modern Mauritius. To this end, Government is providing various measures and working on various projects to improve the daily lives of the population. The Prime Minister, Minister of Home Affairs, External Communications and National Development Unit, Minister of Finance and Economic Development, Mr Pravind Kumar Jugnauth, made this statement yesterday at the inauguration of a Customer Service Centre ( CSC) in Central Flacq. The Minister of Housing and Lands, Mr Purmanund Jhugroo, as well as several Ministers and other eminent personalities were present at the event. A souvenir magazine marking the fifth anniversary of the District Council of Flacq was also launched on this occasion. In his address, Prime Minister Jugnauth highlighted that the CSC, which is an innovative project, is in line with Governments vision of providing efficient and high quality services to the citizens. The CSC, he underlined, will act as a one stop-shop by bringing essential services under one roof for the residents of the region so as to connect easily with different institutions. He called upon the citizens to make proper usage of the facilities that have been put at their disposal. He emphasised that the CSC will be beneficial for the people in terms of time-saving and efficiency . On this score, he spoke of the online Citizen Support Portal, which has been set up at the Prime Ministers Office to provide better services to address complaints and queries of citizens. As regards enhancing the quality of life of citizens, Prime Minister Jugnauth reiterated that Government is working towards the provision of adequate facilities in several sectors. These comprise: a new Ear, Nose and Throat hospital at Vacoas; a flyover at Phoenix; the setting up of the state-of-the-art Multi-Sports Complex at Cote dOr; and the New Supreme Court project , amongst others. Speaking about Rodrigues, the Prime Minister indicated that he will be on an official visit to the island on Friday 23 February 2018 whereby consultative meetings will be held pertaining to the forthcoming budget. Moreover, as Mauritius is set to celebrate its 50th Anniversary of Independence, the Prime Minister appealed to everyone to maintain the unity, peace and harmony that define the multicultural Mauritian society. For his part, Minister Jhugroo, underlined Governments support in the setting up of the CSC and lauded the concerted efforts of the District Council of Flacq for the implementation of the project. He spoke of the construction of a new headquarters for the District Council of Flacq, to be located next to the Fire and Rescue Services Headquarters and opposite Flacq Coeur de Ville commercial complex. The CSC The building of the CSC which was formerly the Fire Station of Flacq has been completely revisited and expanded with major renovation works. Different services are proposed, namely: Civil Status Office; Ministry of Arts and Culture (CELPAC); District Councils Planning and Health Department; Ministry of Gender, Child Development and Family Welfare; Citizen Advice Bureau; Central Water Authority; Treasury; Police Post; Probation Office; and, Village Council of Flacq. It also provides the following facilities: lift, ATM services, common waiting room, parking facilities for 200 vehicles at 25 metres from the Centre. L ibrary facilities, reference books, periodicals, magazines as well as internet facilities are also offered. Government Information Service, Prime Ministers Office, Level 6, New Government Centre, Port Louis, Mauritius. Email: gis@govmu.org Website: http ://gis.govmu.org A meeting to explore prospective avenues of cooperation and promote and facilitate the development of Japanese business activities in Mauritius was held yesterday in Port Louis. It was chaired by the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Regional Integration and International Trade, Mr Seetanah Lutchmeenaraidoo. The objective was also to contribute in the deepening of mutual understanding and the development of economic and trade relations between both Japan and Mauritius. A Japan Business Mission to Mauritius co-hosted by the Japanese Chamber of Commerce and Industries in South Africa (CCIJ) and the Japan External Trade Organization (JETRO) participated in the meeting. The Japanese Ambassador to Mauritius, Mr Yoshiharu Kato, and the Secretary for Foreign Affairs, Ambassador Mrs U. C. Dwarka Canabady, were also present. In his statement, Minister Lutchmeenaraidoo underlined that with the inauguration of the Japanese Embassy in Mauritius, last year, an era of greater cooperation is being defined not only with regards to the private sector but also at the level of Government-to-Government. He encouraged Japanese companies to use Mauritius as a base to invest in Africa and suggested that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Regional Integration and International Trade or the Board of Investment could act as coordination centre for those companies. Speaking about the advantages offered by Mauritius, the Minister explained that the situation of the country is quite exceptional as it is a member of all major African organisations, that is, African Union, COMESA, and SADC. The country is now completing trilateral negotiations whereby the EAC-SADC-COMESA will become one organisation and the countries signing this agreement will have access to 600 million consumers, he pointed out. In addition, a free trade zone, Jin Fei, will be launched in Mauritius and the country is part of Africa, offers facilities of ease of doing business, and will be setting up a regional Renminbi clearing centre with China for Southern Africa, he stated. During the meeting, the Minister invited Japanese investors to consider using Mauritius as a regional headquarter for their companies. The Bank of Tokyo and Insurance companies have also been invited to open a branch in Mauritius. Moreover, Mr Lutchmeenaraidoo expressed confidence that a strong-member Mauritian delegation will go to Japan to further deepen relations with Japan, and announced the hosting of a Japanese week to mark the 50th anniversary celebration of Mauritiuss accession to Independence. For his part, the Japanese Ambassador to Mauritius, Mr Yoshiharu Kato observed that the Japanese-Mauritian ties are being enhanced and the presence of the Japan Business Mission to Mauritius represents an effort in reinforcing our relationships and these efforts will be perpetuated. The Head of Mission of the Japan Business Mission to Mauritius and also Managing Director of Sumitomo Corporation Africa, Mr Kazuyuki Takahashi, expressed a keen interest in building a strong partnership and working together with Mauritius in terms of business ventures and investment prospects, and also to further unlock Mauritiuss and Africas potential. The CCIJ is currently undertaking a three-day prospecting mission in Mauritius to explore investment opportunities in industries such as Financial Services, ICT, Logistics, Textiles and Agri-business. Moreover, since the last TICAD VI (6th Tokyo International Conference in African Development Summit) hosted in 2016, in Kenya, CCIJ member companies have been looking for new opportunities to expand their businesses not only in South Africa but also to the Sub-Saharan African region including Mauritius. (TNS) The Federal Communications Commission on Thursday formally published its reversal of net neutrality regulations, returning to a light-touch form of regulation of Internet service companies that will mostly take effect April 23.The FCC voted 3-2 in December to rescind Obama-era regulations that required equal access to the Internet, but published its final ruling, called the Restoring Internet Freedom Order, in the Federal Register The commission turned back its regulations to a light-touch regulatory scheme that enabled the Internet to develop and thrive for nearly two decades, the final ruling said. The Commission restores the classification of broadband Internet access service as a lightly-regulated information service and reinstates the private mobile service classification of mobile broadband Internet access service.Big Internet companies like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast supported the repeal, saying net neutrality regulations added unnecessary layers of laws governing the industry.But the action now turns to Congress, where Senate Democrats are mounting a push to get both houses to override the FCCs ruling, and to various states, including California, where state representatives, attorneys general and governors have introduced laws lawsuits and executive orders that could mandate net neutrality policies within their borders. Homeland Security tech Texas lawmakers take the lead (TNS) In the future imagined by the Department of Homeland Security, an army of small drones will hover over the southwestern border, outfitted with facial recognition technology that can cull criminal histories of people on the ground. Advanced cameras will instantly identify drivers and passengers as they cross international bridges into Mexico. Artificial intelligence software will comb through the social media accounts of immigrants seeking to enter the country.The idea of a virtual wall is regularly invoked by opponents of the physical wall, including a host of border-area politicians, who say emerging technology offers a cheaper, smarter, less intrusive way to protect the southern border. Its especially popular in Texas, where the Rio Grande, a prevalence of private property and geographic impediments like Falcon Lake and Big Bend complicate construction of steel fences or concrete panels.But the specific features of the virtual wall are often overlooked, beyond a general sense of cameras and sensors. In reality, the proposed border surveillance tools have the power to capture reams of personal data from immigrants and citizens alike, raising privacy questions neither lawmakers nor department officials have fully answered.The futuristic technologies are closer than one might think. Amid the Trump administrations push for a physical border wall, plans spelling out the details of a virtual wall have been percolating in Congress for months, largely driven by a pair of Texas lawmakers. Earlier this month, Customs and Border Protection announced a test program for facial recognition cameras at the Anzalduas International Bridge near McAllen.Civil liberties advocates complain there has been little public discussion about the details or implications of the new surveillance tools. Were normalizing all this technology without input from the community, said Astrid Dominguez, border rights director for the American Civil Liberties Union. People dont realize its already happening.Coming amid reports that Customs and Border Protection is seeking to join the intelligence community, which would give the agency greater access to confidential information, the legislation has heightened fears over the agencys surveillance powers.The problem is that a lot of people havent understood the implication of these proposals, said Jake Laperruque, staff attorney with the Project on Government Oversight . They are very sweeping and can affect immigrants and citizens very broadly.For instance, he said, proposed legislation that details the surveillance effort doesnt adequately define where drones that potentially will be equipped with powerful facial recognition technology can fly or whether they can capture data on U.S. citizens. They dont specify if they can only record the border itself or the entire 100-mile border zone, he said, referring to the area U.S. law allows the Border Patrol to operate without a warrant. There are no limits on that, no oversight.Customs and Border Protection officials say the technology will make Americans safer and traveling less painful. In airports, where facial recognition exit systems are already operating at nearly a dozen international airports, agency officials say the technology could one day do away with Transportation Security Administration lines and the need for boarding passes, or even passports.In Buffalo, N.Y., the agency is testing facial recognition scans of truck drivers in an effort to quicken the pace of trade and improve scrutiny of tractor-trailers, which carry much of the illegal drugs entering the country.The potential for transformation here is just amazing, Colleen Manaher, CBPs executive director of planning, program analysis and evaluation, said during a recent conference on border security in San Antonio. I cant wait until tomorrow.New tools raise bigger questionsWhen McAllen Mayor Jim Darling first heard about the federal governments plan to conduct facial recognition scans of drivers and passengers crossing the international bridge just outside his border city, he wasnt sure what to think.I was a little surprised, he said of the biometric scans of motorists leaving Texas. I didnt know exactly what the info would be used for. My primary concerns generally (were that) the public has a right to know how that information is used.The pilot program at the Anzalduas International Bridge, scheduled to begin as early as this summer as part of an effort to better track foreign nationals, has drawn attention in part because of its technological novelty. Customs and Border Protection is working with Silicon Valley to build cameras that can see into moving vehicles and capture images of multiple passengers, even those in back seats, as they drive into Mexico.The images would be matched to existing passport, visa or other identity photos, though they could someday be run through FBI databases of terror suspects and other wanted individuals.Privacy concerns along an increasingly militarized border are not new. Some border residents have complained of the blimp-like aerostats equipped with powerful cameras that have long been a fixture of the Texas border skyline; last year, the Texas Observer revealed the Texas National Guards use of so-called dirt-boxes, equipment that mimics cellphone towers and can gobble up the cellphone information of those below. The Texas Department of Public Safety regularly flies a Pilatus spy plane over the border (and some inland Texas cities ). And earlier this month, a Laredo-area rancher sued the Border Patrol over a surveillance camera it placed on his property without his consent in a case that could define the agencys powers on private property near the border.Facial recognition would provide powerful new capabilities. Unlike fingerprinting and iris scanning, the recognition technology can be used at a distance and on groups of people, and it doesnt require the consent of individuals being scanned.NEC Corp., one of the leading providers of facial recognition tools, touted the technologys potential uses at this months Border Security Expo in San Antonio. In marketing materials for its NeoFace Express scanner, the company says it could be used at stadiums, amusement parks and other high-demand, high-traffic areas.But while it has made dramatic leaps forward in recent years, the technology still suffers from accuracy questions. A recent MIT study of three commercial systems found that compared with a 99 percent accuracy rate for white men, some artificial intelligence algorithms have error rates of up to 35 percent for darker-skinned women.Critics say that could lead to false positives for minorities, an especially problematic concern at the Texas-Mexico border.Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, a border security expert at George Mason University, said the technology could mean border residents in Texas will further lose their expectation of privacy as they go about their daily lives. There are unintended consequences of this that are also affecting these communities, she said.Pushing hashtags like #StartUpDHS and making appearances at tech gatherings like South by Southwest , the Department of Homeland Securitys Silicon Valley office issues grants of up to $800,000 to seek help with a slew of challenges, including the development of energy harvesting fabrics, 3-D mapping, and improvements to facial recognition technologies.In one of the offices first efforts after opening in 2015, border officials sought a partnership with tech companies to build small drones that could work in extreme weather conditions and remote areas without strong cellular or Wi-Fi signals to detect, identify and track multiple subjects.The 2016 solicitation to industry sounds like the stuff of science fiction: In one hypothetical scenario, officials imagined Border Patrol agents being able to control drones through a panel integrated into the forearm of his or her uniform. The panel has a visual display that allows the agent to see the raw data feed from the (drone) sensors that can identify humans via facial recognition or other biometric at range.Two years later, the department says five companies are working on the drone technology, though its not clear when they might take to the sky.A Customs and Border Protection spokesman said, While biometrics was one of approximately 30 types of technologies that were in the original solicitations (for the drones), no awards were made related to biometric capability.Still, the drone program has set off alarm bells among civil liberties groups who worry it could eventually be used to surveil American citizens without their knowledge or consent.Millions of U.S. citizens and immigrants live close to the U.S. border, and deployment of drones at the U.S. border will invariably capture the personal information from vast numbers of innocent people, wrote attorney Adam Schwartz of the Electronic Frontier Foundation this month.Rather than a threat to personal privacy, officials say technology like drones will become an indispensable aid to agents in the field.Our Border Patrol agents operate in harsh terrain under extreme physical conditions with backup oftentimes being miles away, wrote acting Commissioner Kevin K. McAleenan last year. We are always looking to stay at the forefront of improvements to technology to give our front line personnel more tools and capabilities, enabling them to make decisions that protect both them and the individuals they interact with.In Congress, lawmakers are fighting low-temperature battles over Customs and Border Protections surveillance powers, a debate thats received little oxygen compared with clashes over President Donald Trumps big, beautiful wall.Over the last year, Texas Republicans U.S. Rep. Michael McCaul and Sen. John Cornyn have sponsored legislation spelling out details of a virtual wall, including the small drone program, more license plate readers and facial recognition technology at land borders.According to an aide with the House Homeland Security Committee, which McCaul chairs, the legislation merely codifies and sets deadlines on Customs and Border Protections existing efforts. The Project on Government Oversight, however, argues the legislation will give the agency broad, new powers. version of their legislation has been endorsed by Trump, but suffered a 60-39 defeat in the Senate this month during failed negotiations on an immigration and border security bill. Laperruque of the Project on Government Oversight said senators from both parties had issues with the bills surveillance powers.One controversy the Texans bills seek to address is whether border agents have the right to take biometric readings of U.S. citizens.Customs and Border Protection officials say they have broad authority to check the citizenship of all who enter and leave the United States, a stance has drawn sharp opposition from some members of Congress, including Sens. Mike Lee, a Utah Republican, and Edward Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat.In fact, Congress has pointedly neglected to authorize biometric exit scanning for U.S. citizens, the pair wrote in a December letter to the agency.In a nod to the controversy, McCauls legislation specifically exempts U.S. citizens from biometric screenings at land border exits like the one at the Anzalduas bridge. But the bill is less clear on the mechanics of doing so. The facial recognition technology must first scan a person before determining their citizenship, so all drivers and passengers logically would have their faces scanned.The staffer with the House Homeland Security committee said the information of American citizens would likely be purged quickly from the system.But thats not in the statute, points out Schwartz with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The tendency of government is to get and hold the data as long as possible.At airports, Customs and Border Protection officials purge the data of U.S. citizens after 14 days. Schwartz and others worry that even if the data is purged, it is subject to theft or possible misuse by another government agency during that time.Also unclear is how the facial recognition data would be linked to other federal databases or if U.S. citizens would be part of future efforts. Right now, border officials match face scans to passports, visa photos and other identification documents to determine immigration status. But the proposed legislation calls for eventually linking the scans to databases of suspected terrorists and other wanted individuals.Harrison Rudolph, an associate at Georgetown University Laws Center on Privacy and Technology , said that raises the specter of mission creep and the possibility the technology could be used to spy on American citizens without their consent.McCaul declined to discuss privacy concerns related to the technology. The committee staffer said federal agents are already able to conduct criminal searches on individuals entering or leaving the country, though there is currently no systematic way of identifying those leaving by land.These are extremely powerful tools that can be abused, Laperruque said. Leaving it up to them to decide how far to take it is not a great idea. The eVito, the second all-electric production model from Mercedes-Benz Vans after the Vito E-Cell of 2010, has been orderable since November 2017 with deliveries to begin in the second half of 2018. At the test site in Arjeplog with its driving dynamics stretches, turning loop and forest stretch, the vehicles were required to demonstrate their handling, efficiency, ergonomics and comfort under extreme conditions. During test drives on frozen lakelands and on the test site, charging and driving in cold conditions as well as anti-cold protection of the drive components, software and their interfaces (e.g. brakes, ESP) were tested using special metrology equipment. Mercedes-Benz said that winter trials in Northern Sweden have shown that the new electric eVito vans perform handily under low-temperature adverse conditions. The new eVito was tested for several weeks in the Scandinavian winter, in temperatures down to minus 30 degrees Celsius (-22 F). The focus of the trials in Arjeplog near the Arctic Circle was on cold-starting as well as charging and driving characteristics at sub-zero temperatures. How a battery-electric vehicle responds to different climatic conditions is essential to practical fleet management. Thus, in addition to cold-starting and defrosting characteristics, the focus of the testing was also on battery range. With its installed battery capacity of 41.4 kWh, the range of the new eVito will be around 150 km (93 miles). Even in unfavorable circumstances such as at Arjeplog, customers have a range of 100 km (62 miles) available. The van must also appeal to the drivers who are out and about in it day after day. The interior heating must work reliably at low temperatures, and the window heating must ensure a clear view as rapidly as possible. Other factors include safe handling on snow and ice, as well as winter-resistant components throughout. All these parameters were tested in Arjeplog by around 30 engineers, electronic specialists and mechanics from Mercedes-Benz Vans. The winter trials are to be followed by summer trials. In summer the eVito will be subjected to further testing in Spain, in temperatures of up to 35 degrees Celsius (+95 F) in the shade. Mercedes Benz Vans is planning the electrification of all its commercial model series in the coming years. The start is being made with the eVito, which customers are able to order at a price of 39,990 (US$49,000) (in Germany, excluding VAT). The first 1000 orders will be rewarded with a service package which includes a wallbox. The eVito will be followed by the eSprinter in 2019. The line-up will then be rounded off by the Citan. The German luxury carmaker BMW will join forces with China's Great Wall Motors Company Limited to shift part of the production of its "Mini" brand to China, the Munich-based company announced on Friday. The German luxury carmaker BMW and China's Great Wall Motors Company Limited have signed a memorandum of understanding on the joint-venture for Chinese Mini production. [File photo: IC] Under the joint venture, electric Mini vehicles will be manufactured in China from 2019 onwards. While production is initially scheduled to continue at Mini's traditional British factory in Oxford, BMW warned that the future of the plant was uncertain and would ultimately depend on the outcome of Brexit negotiations between the European Union (EU) and United Kingdom. The Chinese automobile, the country's largest producer of Special Utility Vehicles (SUVs), was first reported to be discussing the possibility of a cooperation with BMW in October 2017. Both parties have now signed a memorandum of understanding, although the exact details of the joint-venture, including the exact location for Chinese Mini production and the level of investment, are yet to be determined. Once finalized, BMW's joint-venture with Great Wall Motors, which is based in Baoding, Hebei province in north China, will already be the second such agreement with a Chinese firm after having already teamed up with the local carmaker Brilliance. China is the single largest market for automotive sales in the world. BMW emphasized on Friday that its new partnership was complementary to the one previously entered with Brilliance and the company would hence not attempt to create a parallel Chinese sales operation for electric Mini vehicles. Mini sold a relatively modest 35,000 out of a total of 372,000 cars in China last year. BMW intends to grow the brand's presence in China significantly in the future with the help of local partners such as Great Wall Motors and Brilliance Auto, a Chinese automobile manufacturer headquartered in Shenyang, the capital of northeast China's Liaoning province. In addition to production of the first battery electric MINI at the main plant in Oxford starting in 2019, this signals a further clear commitment to the electrified future of the MINI brand. The BMW Group is in advanced discussions to ramp up the global success of its MINI brand through a new joint venture in China. A key element of the brands continued strategic development will be local production of future battery-electric MINI vehicles in the worlds largest market for electromobility. To this end, the BMW Group has signed a letter of intent (LoI) with the Chinese manufacturer Great Wall Motor. The MINI Electric Concept as presented at the IAA 2017. The BMW Group said that large-scale produced MINIs with battery-electric drivetrains will be available from 2019. Click to enlarge. Next steps will be to agree on the details of a possible joint venture and cooperation agreement and clarify aspects such as the choice of production location and concrete investments. The BMW Group has no plans to set up an additional sales organisation in China. Independently of its strategic considerations towards the MINI brand, the BMW Group will further expand its BMW Brilliance Automotive (BBA) joint venture in China with its partner, Brilliance. In addition to its two automobile production locations, BBA already runs an engine plant, which includes a battery factory for electrified BMW brand vehicles produced locally in Shenyang. This is the first battery factory operated by a premium automobile manufacturer in China. In recent years, BBA has become a cornerstone of the BMW brands success in its largest market and serves as a model for the continued development of MINI in China. Around 560,000 BMW brand vehicles were delivered to customers in China in 2017more than in the next two largest markets, the US and Germany, combined. In 2017, China was MINIs fourth-largest market, with around 35,000 units delivered. The successful strategy for expansion of the BMW Groups global production network obeys a clear rule: Production follows the market. However, expansion of the BMW brand in its largest markets, such as China, has not led to a decrease in production at the companys German plants. Between 2007 and 2017, production in Germany increased by close to a quarter to around 1.15 million vehicles per year. At the same time, almost half of all BMW production now takes place at plants outside Germany. Federal, state and local government stakeholders along with industry representatives met to discuss regional and Marine Corps autonomous vehicle proving grounds, to watch autonomous vehicles begin testing , and to tour the installation at Marine Corps Air Station (MCAS) Miramar (located near San Diego) earlier this week. The representatives came from the San Diego Association of Governments, California Department of Motor Vehicles, California Department of Transportation, California Energy Commission, California Highway Patrol, Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center Pacific (SSCPAC), Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., and MCAS Miramar. MCAS Miramar, as a part of the Marine Corps Mobility Transformation effort, is exploring innovative options to make transportation smarter, cheaper, more accessible and more efficient. This initiative seeks to engage industry stakeholders, collect market research, execute and analyze demonstrations catered to installation characteristics, and share information to enable installations to create local solutions. We hope to be able to integrate these types of systems into our combat forces and into our garrison forces and that they will allow us to bring broader and more diverse technology to the Marine Corps and the military. Col. Jason G. Woodworth, commanding officer of MCAS Miramar MCAS Miramar is scheduled to host a number of projects that will showcase the installations commitment to mobility transformation, energy security, resilience and innovation. A collaborative agreement facilitated by SSCPAC in San Diego initiated the first project. In this project MCAS Miramar will facilitate autonomous vehicle testing by industry stakeholders, to include Qualcomm Technologies. Two routes on the air station, a rural and urban route, will provide opportunities for stakeholders to initiate autonomous vehicle testing and development projects. The rural route is located on East Miramar where autonomous vehicle technology testing began early February 2018. The second project, born of a partnership between the Marine Corps and the state, is planned for later this year. It will pilot the use of autonomous vehicles including electric, autonomous vehicles that are also vehicle-to-grid (V2G) capable. This program will assess the feasibility of autonomous vehicles as a means of transportation for official and personal use on the air station and the effectiveness of V2G technology. Two autonomous, electric 15-passenger vans will follow the preprogrammed, urban route, which will cover the installations most frequented locations in the morning, afternoon and evening. When not operating on the preprogrammed schedule, the two vans will be available on-demand along the route. In addition to testing autonomous driving technology, the vans will be V2G capable, which means they can connect to the air stations microgrid via a bi-directional electric-vehicle charging station. This demonstration supports MCAS Miramars commitment to energy resilience by testing technology that will allow facilities to continue to operate if energy supplies are compromised. Haiti - Humanitarian : OXFAM Great Britain suspended for 2 months in Haiti Thursday, after a meeting with Simon Ticehurst, Oxfam International Regional Director for Latin America and the Caribbean, Aviol Fleurant, the Minister of Planning and External Cooperation announced that it was decided a precautionary measure against the NGO, Oxfam Great Britain (Oxfam GB), consisting of a suspension of two months of the recognition granted to this NGO for serious misconduct https://www.icihaiti.com/en/news-23597-icihaiti-flash-oxfam-will-hand-its-investigation-report-to-the-haitian-government-copy-of-report.html in accordance with the provisions of the Constitution, the Decree of 14 September 1989 governing Non-Governmental Organizations in Haiti and Haitian criminal laws. "Haiti is no longer a Republic of NGOs [...] We are not joking, the dignity of the Haitian people is priceless," said Minister Fleurant after the meeting adding that his Ministry may take other precautionary measures to protect the rights of victims, the interests of the Haitian State and those of the population. This measure has no impact on the course of public action initiated by the Public Prosecutor's Office near the competent courts. It extends over the two months of the institutional investigation will last conducted by the Ministry of Planning on behalf of the Government "If, during the two months of the investigation, I find a link between the crimes committed and the money that Oxfam GB had received as aid on behalf of Haitians, then I would make sure that Oxfam GB is declared "persona non grata" in Haiti and that it leaves the country without delay," said the Minister of the Interior. "Oxfam will continue to work on major reconstruction and development projects in Haiti, helping people through other affiliates (Oxfam Italy, Oxfam Spain, Oxfam Quebec...) but we anticipate Oxfam GB's temporary suspension will have a significant impact on the organization [...]" said a spokeswoman for the organization. See also : https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-23613-haiti-news-zapping.html https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-23604-haiti-news-zapping.html https://www.icihaiti.com/en/news-23597-icihaiti-flash-oxfam-will-hand-its-investigation-report-to-the-haitian-government-copy-of-report.html https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-23563-haiti-news-zapping.html HL/ TB/ HaitiLibre Haiti - Politic : The United Front of the Diaspora meets the MHAVE Wednesday a delegation of the United Front of the Diaspora, a Haitian organization based in Miami, led by Judge Lionel Jean Baptiste, in tour on Haiti met Yolette Mengual the Director General of the Ministry of Haitian Living Abroad (MHAVE) who was accompanied by technical staff of the Ministry and members of the Cabinet of the acting Minister Stephanie Auguste. The United Front of the Diaspora called for the effective integration of compatriots from abroad in all spheres of decision-making and recalled that a document proposing the amendment of more than 50 articles of the Constitution had been submitted in November 2017 to the Special Committee of the Chamber of Deputies on the amendment of the Constitution https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-22775-haiti-politic-constitutional-amendment-the-diaspora-wants-representatives-in-parliament.html Me Lionel Jean Baptiste addressed among others at this meeting: the enjoyment of civil and political rights of compatriots living outside the country, the creation of a database of Haitian skills in the diaspora, the return of the Haitian nationality to the grandsons of Haitians living abroad to allow them to represent the country in areas such as sport, culture etc... It intends to fight the social exclusion of which is victim, in his eyes the diaspora and wished that the MHAVE has a representative in each consulate or embassy to take the grievances of the diaspora. Robert Vaval, cabinet member of Minister Auguste believes that the Diaspora has an important role to play in the development of the country. According to him, no development is possible in Haiti without the active participation of the Haitian diaspora at all levels. For his part, Yolette Mengual emphasized the ongoing projects at MHAVE as: the drafting of a draft law on the census and the participation of the Diaspora in the next elections; the setting up of the Consultative Council of the Diaspora Observatory, a body composed of Technical Directors of the MHAVE and some representatives of Haitian diaspora associations, tasked with drafting legislation on the involvement of the diaspora in all the social, political and economic activities of the country. Before leaving the country for the United States, the delegation must go to the Primature meet the technical cabinet of the Prime Minister, Lafontant and Parliament to bring the claims of the Diaspora to representatives of both Houses. See also : https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-22775-haiti-politic-constitutional-amendment-the-diaspora-wants-representatives-in-parliament.html HL/ HaitiLibre Haiti - Corruption : Haiti ranked 157th out of 180 countries progresses slightly Transparency International has just published its annual report 2017 on the Corruption Perception Index in 180 countries around the world. This year Haiti is in the top 25 of the most corrupt countries, randing 157th with 22 points, tied with Burundi, Uzbekistan and Cambodia. At regional level (America) Haiti is ranked penultimate, Venezuela being the most corrupt country of the region. With 29 points the Dominican Republic occupies the 135th place (down 15 places compared to 2016). Recall that in 2016 Haiti was ranked 159th out of 176 countries https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-19908-haiti-economy-corruption-haiti-poorly-rated.html This years results highlight the connection between corruption and inequality, which feed off each other to create a vicious circle between corruption, unequal distribution of power in society, and unequal distribution of wealth, stresse Transparency International. The interplay of corruption and inequality also feeds populism. When traditional politicians fail to tackle corruption, people grow cynical. Increasingly, people are turning to populist leaders who promise to break the cycle of corruption and privilege. Yet this is likely to exacerbate rather than resolve the tensions that fed the populist surge in the first place. Over two-thirds of the 176 countries and territories in this year's index fall below the midpoint of our scale of 0 (highly corrupt) to 100 (very clean). The global average score is a paltry 43, indicating endemic corruption in a country's public sector. Top-scoring countries (yellow in the map below) are far outnumbered by orange and red countries where citizens face the tangible impact of corruption on a daily basis. "In too many countries, people are deprived of their most basic needs and go to bed hungry every night because of corruption, while the powerful and corrupt enjoy lavish lifestyles with impunity [...] We can not afford the luxury of waiting. Corruption must be fought urgently so that people's lives improve around the world" underline Jose Ugaz, Chair of Transparency International. HL/ HaitiLibre Haiti - News : Zapping... Cap-Haitien : Fire at the Tabernacle Market The Directorate of Civil Protection (DPC) informs us that in the night of Thursday to Friday the rapid intervention of the firefighters of Cap Haitien has helped to control a beginning of fire that had declared at the Tabernacle market. One only regret minor damage. PAP Sidewalk release The City of Port-au-Prince has proceeded to sidewalk clearance operations in the Turgeau Bourdon and Canape Vert areas. National Fire Corps, passed but not published The Deputy of Mirebalais Abel Descollines encourages President Jovenel Moise to publish in the official newspaper "Le Moniteur" , the bill establishing the National Fire Corps, voted by the Lower House in 2016 https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-17333-haiti-politic-2-bills-voted-in-the-chamber-of-deputies.html then by the Senate last year. The NUMC before the Senate The members of the Superior Council of the National Police (CSPN) led by Prime Minister Jack Guy Lafontant were in the Senate Wednesday to respond to the various concerns of the Senate Committee "Justice and Public Security". This very lively session allowed the Commission to obtain answers on public security. Note that the Minister of Justice did not show up. "I liked the quality of the interventions," said Sen. Joseph Lambert, Speaker of the Senate. Binational Tourism On Thursday, Ms. Colombe Emilie Jessy Menos, the Minister of Tourism paid a courtesy visit to the Dominican Ambassador Alberto Despradel, who has been working in Haiti for eight months to discuss multi-destination tourism between the two countries. Ambassador Despradel reaffirmed at this meeting the commitment of his country with Haiti, particularly in the field of tourism. Fire : Deputy Bodeau encourages the Government Deputy Gary Bodeau, Speaker of the Lower House, encourages the Government to embrace the cause of the "Port Market" traders and wants every commune of the West to have a fire department capable of intervening effectively if needed to limit the damage. Follow-up meeting with IDB On Thursday, Branly Eugene, the Director General of the Ministry of Agriculture and Ministry of Agriculture, met with officials from the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) to discuss progress of the preparation of the Public Management Strengthening Program to improve service delivery in Haiti. HL/ HaitiLibre The Whisky Club launches in Birmingham By Jo Gilbert Whisky Club THE MUSEUM OF THE JEWELLERY QUARTER, 7580 VYSE STREET, BIRMINGHAM B18 6HA thebirminghamwhiskyclub.co.uk Birmingham whisky lovers will rejoice at this new bar dedicated to the famous spirit, ranging from popular and affordable to more esoteric drams. Its founder is Amy Seton of the Whisky Clubs Group the force behind the Birmingham and Bristol Whisky Festivals and is her first bar, which she hopes will provide a permanent home for members. Located inside Birminghams Museum of the Jewellery Quarter, the bar will list over 300 different whiskies with tasting flights available. There will also be a small selection of premium spirits, wines and beers to complement the whisky range, including barrel-aged beer, gins from whisky distillers and aged gins. Doors opened to the public on February 14. Q&A: Anita Jackson, Wines of Chile By Andrew Catchpole With a special focus on Chile at Spring SITT, Harpers caught up with UK director Anita Jackson for a lowdown on the current buzz. What lies behind Chiles generally positive performance in the UK? Its definitely the off-trade that drives the UK for Chile; the performance in the on-trade is less impressive. When you look at the key varieties, Chile has increased its UK Sauvignon Blanc sales by 6% and has 26% of all Sauvignon sales in the UK. Its not all about traditional styles, but they are a major part of what is driving the market for us Sauvignon Blanc, Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot, then red blends, and then Chardonnay. An interesting fact is that Malbec sales are up 51%, quite a substantial rise although from quite a small base. Consumer say I didnt know Chile grew Malbec, but a lot of vines are more than 100 years old and its long been a stalwart there, so theres a lot of potential. What of the new wave of wines causing the buzz? I love what is going on, with a lot more boutique wineries growing for Chile. Its what really impresses a wave of innovation, of new styles, of thinking outside the box. Pais is seeing a massive renaissance, as is Cinsault, with a lot of developments in the south, while its also very interesting in Maule. This used to be a workhorse region, but it now has a renegade image, as have Itata and Bio Bio, and what we are finding is a lot of wineries going even further down, to the Lake District. So Chile is really exciting now, pushing the boundaries, still discovering what works. Its exciting times. Where do you see the most potential for growth? We definitely want to target the on-trade. Weve just had a group of sommeliers go out to Chile and come back completely wowed people such as Ronan Sayburn, Gui Mahout, Laure Patry and Martin Lam. These are high-profile people and their peers respect what they are saying. If they are spreading the message that Chile is exciting, looking beyond the tick-box of house wines, this will have a trickle down effect. We are also going to younger sommeliers who are more impressionable and open and dont have a preconceived idea of Chile. Budgets are limited, but where we can, we also want to work with the independents. Its a sector that can hand-sell premium Chile, so its also about getting that message across to them, to look beyond the entry-level Sauvignon and Cabernet and Merlot. How important is the UK market to Chile? Chile knows that the UK market is in decline, but fortunately for Chile we are still in growth, and also going great guns in places such as Asia. The strategy is that the UK is still a very important market for Chile, with a raft of opinion formers who are listened to internationally, and we feel that this is the market where we can launch the innovations and exciting stuff that is going on. So its exciting for the UK, which is probably going to see all these new things coming through before countries such as the US and Asia. Im very comfortable talking about the Pais and even natural wines here, because the market is much more open to new ideas. And this is helping dispel the idea that Chile is only safe. You will be showing New Wave Chile at SITT what can visitors expect to discover? We can tick the boxes in the traditional styles, weve had a very good vintage and prices havent increased too much, but also look out for those cool-climate styles, the new blends, and the more Mediterranean styles available. Its really about the excitement. And also dont forget the Malbec it can be extraordinarily good, some sublime styles. Volume and value shipments to the UK on a roll for Portugal By Jo Gilbert Portugal has seen a rise in the value of its exports to the UK new figures show. Over the past year, sales of Portuguese DO wines to the UK have increased by 37.1% in value an increase, officials say, which has been driven by an even more substantial 45.8% increase in volume (26,124 hl in 2016 compared to 38,100 hl in 2017). The figures were announced at the Wines of Portugal Grand Tasting in London yesterday, where representatives of the official body said the figures are in line with a growing perception of quality and value of Portuguese still wines around the world. Jorge Monteiro, president of ViniPortugal, said: The consistent growth of Portuguese still wine imports to the UK is a reflection of our continued commitment to driving awareness of these wines. Whilst these wines are still an emerging category in the UK, this positive trend proves that consumers are still keen to discover the quality and versatility that Portuguese wine has to offer. Portuguese wine is still something of a niche category in the UK. It is the worlds eleventh biggest wine producing country behind Italy, France Spain, the US, Australia, China, Chile, South Africa, Argentina and Germany (OIV, October 2016 figures). Around 85 producers exhibited at yesterdays tasting which aimed to show the fun and colourful side of Portugal according to organisers, with masterclasses, speed-tastings hosted by Dirceu Vianna Junior MW, and a new restaurant area, which matched international dishes with Portuguese wines. 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! 15 Times Major Media Outlets Used a Statistic about Plastic Straws Based on Research by a 9-Year-Old A number's popularity does not prove its accuracy. by Christian Britschgi , Reason, Jan. 26, 2018 Yesterday, I reported that the oft-cited, debate-driving statistic that Americans use 500 million plastic straws a day was the product of a 9-year-old's guesstimations. Despite those shaky factual foundations, the 500 million figure has quickly spread, virus-like, across the media landscape and even into our shops and schools. Visitors to the D.C. tea house Teaismjust a short walk from Reason's D.C. officewill be confronted with the questionable fact on a small poster adorning the restaurant's single-use straw dispenser, replete with a picture of a cute sea turtle. Meanwhile, impressionable children at the Mount Vernon Community School in nearby Alexandria, Virginia, are coming home with "Straw Wars" handouts citing the same dubious figure. It's easy to understand how the school could have been led astray, given how ubiquitous this claim is in the media. Please see below for a list of just a few of the news outlets that have cited this "fact"or otherwise quoted people saying it without any critical pushbackin their reporting: Activist groups are also quick to promote the claim. Among them: And of course government officials have embraced the number too. The National Park Service has touted it. So has California Assemblyman Ian Calderon . It's in the text of a Hawaii bill that would ban the distribution of plastic straws in the state. It's sad that so many outlets are treating the rigorous survey work of an elementary school student as the statistic about plastic straw use. But it's not very surprising. Attempts to ban plastic strawsor indeed any plastic producthave as much to do with signaling your environmentalist bona fides as they do with actually cleaning up the oceans or saving the planet. So people pushing the claim have little incentive to investigate it. And the media have every incentive to hype the impact of a phenomenon they're covering. This website uses cookies primarily for visitor analytics. Certain pages will ask you to fill in contact details to receive additional information. On these pages you have the option of having the site log your details for future visits. Indicating you want the site to remember your details will place a cookie on your device. To view our full cookie policy, please click here. You can also view it at any time by going to our Contact Us page. (Reuters) Billionaire investor Ray Dalio, who founded worlds largest hedge fund Bridgewater Associates, thinks there is a relatively high chance the U.S. economy will stumble into a recession before the next presidential election in 2020. To read this article: (HedgeCo.Net) The Securities and Exchange Commission today charged a former bitcoin-denominated platform and its operator with operating an unregistered securities exchange and defrauding users of that exchange. The SEC also charged the operator with making false and misleading statements in connection with an unregistered offering of securities. The SEC alleges that BitFunder and its founder Jon E. Montroll operated BitFunder as an unregistered online securities exchange and defrauded exchange users by misappropriating their bitcoins and failing to disclose a cyberattack on BitFunders system that resulted in the theft of more than 6,000 bitcoins.The SEC also alleges that Montroll sold unregistered securities that purported to be investments in the exchange and misappropriated funds from that investment as well. We allege that BitFunder operated unlawfully as an unregistered securities exchange. Platforms that engage in the activity of a national securities exchange, regardless of whether that activity involves digital assets, tokens, or coins, must register with the SEC or operate pursuant to an exemption. We will continue to focus on these types of platforms to protect investors and ensure compliance with the securities laws, said Marc Berger, Director of the SECs New York Regional Office. As alleged in the complaint, Montroll defrauded exchange users by misappropriating their bitcoins and failing to disclose a cyberattack on the exchanges system and the resulting bitcoin theft. We will continue to vigorously police conduct involving distributed ledger technology and ensure that bad actors who commit fraud in this space are held accountable, said Lara S. Mehraban, Associate Regional Director of the SECs New York Regional Office. The SECs complaint, filed in federal district court in Manhattan, charges BitFunder and Montroll with violations of the anti-fraud and registration provisions of the federal securities laws. The complaint seeks permanent injunctions and disgorgement plus interest and penalties. The SECs investigation was conducted by Daphna A. Waxman, Daphne Downes, and Valerie A. Szczepanik in the New York Regional Office. Ms. Waxman and Ms. Szczepanik also are members of the SECs Distributed Ledger Working Group and the Enforcement Divisions Cyber Unit. The litigation will be led by Dugan Bliss. The case is being supervised by Lara S. Mehraban. In a parallel criminal case, the U.S. Attorneys Office for the Southern District of New York today filed a complaint against Montroll for perjury and obstruction of justice during the SECs investigation. The SEC appreciates the assistance of the U.S. Attorneys Office and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Trump Jr.'s visit to India is expected to reinforce the trend. He continued: "It's sort of a shame". Trump Jr said he wasn't even sure if the deals that were in the pipeline would remain after the Trump presidency, but said he would use the interim period to foster relationships with partners in India. Trump Jr.'s visit prompted one Democratic senator to press the American ambassador to India to explain if the embassy in New Delhi had provided any aid or guidance to the president's son. The company had announced previous year that it would not enter into any new foreign deals while Trump is the USA president. For at least a week before Trump Jr. arrived in India on Tuesday, several major Indian newspapers carried glossy, front-page advertisements boasting, "Trump has arrived". He will also deliver a foreign policy speech at an event where Premier Narendra Modi is key-note speaker. "I am concerned that Mr. Trump's speech will send the mistaken message that he is speaking on behalf of the president, the administration or the United States government, not as a private individual, or that he is communicating official American policy", Menendez, the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, wrote. For over a week, full-page newspaper ads promised a February 23 night dinner with Trump Jr.to buyers who put down a $39,000 deposit for an apartment in a new Trump project in a New Delhi suburb. Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon in his new book expressed derision and astonishment over a 2016 meeting between Trump Jr., his father's top campaign officials and a Russian lawyer, terming it "treasonous". US President Donald Trump's eldest son described India as an important market for The Trump Organization, but said the global company will lose out on new deals because of self-imposed restrictions put in place by his father since he took office. Critics on Capitol Hill and elsewhere have pointed out that Secret Service agents assigned to protect the Trump sons accompany them on these private business trips to promote the family's brand name, racking up costly hotel bills and draining the agency's budget. The Trump Organisation has also lent its brand to developments being built with local partners in Kolkata, Mumbai and Pune. The 37-year-old Lodha Group is ranked the largest in India by sales, having clocked over Rs 8,200 crore last year from 7,200 units across various projects. Although the businessman may have thought he was paying a compliment, some found the comments jarring, the National Public Radio (NPR) website reports. The Rwanda National Police will soon launch investigation into the cause of protests that erupted on February 20 at Kiziba Refugee Camp in Karongi District, the home to thousands of Congolese refugees. As the relevant local and worldwide institutions came together to discuss and peacefully resolve the issue, RNP continued to monitor the situation to ensure that security prevails, the statement says. The camp now hosts more than 17,000 refugees. The wounded were rushed to hospital where five protesters succumbed to their injuries. Fifteen of the rioters have also been arrested for instigating the violence, RNP says, adding that "most of the refugees have since returned to Kiziba camp". The country's refugee population has risen sharply recently as people flood in from eastern Congo, where resurgent ethnic and inter-communal violence has uprooted hundreds of thousands. The UNHCR on Thursday called on the refugees and the Rwandan authorities to keep calm and show restraint. UNHCR says that so far this year, more than 42,000 have already arrived, bringing the total number of Congolese refugees in Uganda to a quarter of a million. "The number of deaths caused by acute diarrhoea is 26 over the period from 15 to 18 February", said Duniya Aslam Khan, spokeswoman in Uganda for the United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR). It also said some refugees have indicated their desire to return to the DRC and urged the refugees to make an informed decision and not to listen to misinformation or rumoUrs while they have the right to return to their country. On Tuesday, the refugees said soldiers had shot at them and wounded at least two people, when around 2,000 people from among the 17,000 living at Kiziba camp in western Rwanda marched out to protest against a 25 per cent cut. WFP warns about potential larger ration cuts if monthly requirements of US$2.5 million are not met. "This tragedy should have been avoided, and disproportionate use of force against desperate refugees is not acceptable", Cecile Pouilly, UNHCR spokeswoman, said in a statement. Rwanda hosts over 173,000 refugees in six camps, including Kiziba, where Congolese refugees have lived for over 20 years. "Money laundering is a concern to the United States as it affects a North Atlantic Treaty Organisation ally in Latvia", Sullivan told reporters. Citing those events, the defence ministry said: "There is a high possibility that this is a wide information operation from outside and its aim is to show Latvia as (an) untrustworthy ally". Rimsevics denied any wrongdoing at a press conference on Tuesday (20 February). As reported, Bank of Latvia Governor Ilmars Rimsevics, who is suspected of extorting and accepting a bribe, has decided not to step down. "I have not demanded or received any bribes", Rimsevics told a news conference on Tuesday. Rimsevics said he would remain at his post. Just a week later, Latvia's anti-corruption authority detained central bank chief Ilmars Rimsevics, who sits on the rate-setting council of the European Central Bank, over bribery allegations. An Associated Press investigation found that a Latvian bank is accusing Rimsevics of seeking bribes for years, abusing his power and being connected to individuals involved in money laundering from Russian Federation. "I have become the target of some Latvian commercial banks, to destroy Latvia's reputation", he added. Latvian Prime Minister Maris Kucinskis called an emergency cabinet meeting for Monday, sayng there are "no signs" of threat to the Latvian financial system. Neither Norvik Bank nor Guselnikov immediately responded to requests from Reuters for comment. "We have heard the allegations of corruption in the financial sector which are serious and impact the reputation of the financial sector", she said after an extraordinary meeting of the regulator and other relevant institutions on Sunday. The biggest banks, subsidiaries of Nordic heavyweights like Swedbank and SEB, focus on domestic lending, but there are a number of small banks that handle mainly overseas client money. Washington has "for many years. been working together with Latvia to combat corruption, money laundering and other threats to global security" and will continue to do so, Nauert said in a statement released late on Tuesday. The U.S. Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network has said non-resident banking increases the risk that criminals could use the banks to conduct fraudulent transactions. "It's a sanction that indicates the seriousness with which the United States takes money laundering, particularly money laundering as described in the FinCEN report", he said of a recent U.S. Treasury announcement demanding restrictions on Latvian bank ABLV. ABLV has rejected FinCEN's allegations. Without a credible plan, supervisors could declare the bank failing or likely to fail. "Each day that Mr. Rimsevics remains in the central bank's leadership significantly worsens" the situation, Reizniece-Ozola said. A new wave of deadly Syrian government bombardment in the opposition-held eastern suburbs of the capital Damascus yesterday killed 13 people, as world leaders and aid groups called for an end to the carnage that has left hundreds of people dead in recent days. If agreed, the ceasefire would allow for the delivery of critical supplies and the evacuation of the wounded. Mark Lowcock, the UN's humanitarian aid chief, said nearly 300 people had died during the past three days of shelling and airstrikes. Earlier on Thursday, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov expressed Moscow's readiness to consider the ceasefire in Syria, but only if it does not cover the Daesh, the al-Nusra Front and other terrorist groups which "conduct systematic shelling of the residential quarters of Damascus". Russia, which has used its veto 11 times since the conflict began to protect Syria, and the rest of the Security Council, should support the humanitarian resolution when it comes to a vote, Human Rights Watch said. Ahead of the Council meeting, United Nations humanitarian chief Mark Lowcock called the dire situation in eastern Ghouta "a living example of an entirely known, predictable, and preventable humanitarian disaster unfolding before our eyes". A commander in forces fighting Assad's government told Reuters news agency that the bombing aimed to prevent the rebels from targeting the eastern areas of Damascus with mortar bombs. German Chancellor Angela Merkel called on the European Union to step up pressure on Russian Federation and Iran to end the violence. The Syrian government, which is supported by both Russian Federation and Iran, has persisted in its unlawful siege of Eastern Ghouta and indiscriminate attacks, including by using barrel bombs in populated areas. The group, including prominent Syrian opposition figures, on Thursday chanted Syrian songs and slogans denouncing a Syrian government forces' bombing campaign that has targeted hospitals, apartment blocks and other civilian sites. German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Thursday said that European nations - and Syria's backers - must do more to halt the violence. "There is a need for avoiding the massacre, because we will be judged by history", UN Syria envoy Staffan de Mistura said. Now a multi-front war, Russian Federation entered in September 2015, sending planes to back the Assad regime and turning the military situation around in Damascus's favour. "There is a responsibility there". Assad and his deplorable regime must stop committing additional atrocities and must not be further abetted by backers in Moscow and Tehran. The draft resolution also calls for the immediate lifting of sieges including in eastern Ghouta, Yarmouk, Foua and Kefraya. The Security Council is expected to vote tomorrow on a resolution aimed at implementing the cessation of hostilities and lifting sieges on areas like Eastern Ghouta. The United States, France and Britain called for a quick vote to address the acute crisis on the ground. "These are civilians. They are ordinary people under attack by a barbaric Assad regime that is bent on leaving eastern Ghouta levelled to the ground". "Is Russia listening? I'm not sure that they are". Nauert insisted that the administration was "fully engaged" with the crisis. A Western diplomat said Russian Federation was responsible for sabotaging a much needed humanitarian pause in the fighting. "Unfortunately our Western partners do not agree to exclude terrorists from the truce", he added. The Russian military conceded Wednesday that conditions in Eastern Ghouta constituted a "critical humanitarian" situation but claimed talks to resolve the conflict had been "derailed". Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, February 20) Fresh off the success of the ASEAN Summit last year, the Philippines will this time host the Asian Development Bank's (ADB) Annual Meeting in May. An estimated 3,000 delegates - mostly finance ministers, central bankers and civil society leaders - will gather in Manila on May 3-6. Finance Secretary Sonny Dominguez, who will chair the meeting, said delegates would focus on ways the ADB could better help the poor across the region. Topics on the agenda include financial technology, women entrepreneurship, climate change resilience, and infrastructure investment. Dominguez said the agenda is aligned with the Duterte administration's push for rapid and inclusive growth. "Over the past five decades, the ADB poured over $250 billion into the Asia-Pacific region. The programs of the Bank no doubt helped transform this region into one of the most progressive and dynamic regions of the world. Notwithstanding, the Asia-Pacific continues to be home to some of the poorest communities. There is a challenge for inclusiveness here," Dominguez said in a briefing on Tuesday. Meanwhile, ADB Secretary Woochong Um said it was the perfect time for the Philippines to host the 66 other member countries of the Bank. The economy is booming - the ADB expects growth to hit 6.8% this year - and momentum should continue with critical programs like tax reform and Build, Build, Build, he explained. Um said, "I think we have a very good story to tell the visitors. So, more than the tourism and other benefits, I think the world will find out what good things are happening in the country." Manila has been home to the ADB ever since it was founded in 1966. The Bank is one of the country's largest sources of development funding, lending an average $770 million a year in the last decade. In 2017, ADB loans to the Philippines hit a record $1 billion, with programs on youth employment, capital market reform, infrastructure preparation and road construction in Mindanao. Unlike the yearlong ASEAN Summit, the ADB Annual Meeting will be a much more "frugal" and "efficient" affair. Dominguez said the budget was slashed by half to P90 million this year from P200 million when the Philippines last hosted in 2012. Most events will be held in the ADB Headquarters in Mandaluyong City, he said. Other venues are all within the nearby Ortigas Center as well, minimizing the impact on traffic. He added it was unlikely the government would need to declare holidays for the duration of the ADB Annual Meeting since most students will already be on summer break by then. Timothee Chalamet, the Jewish actor up for best actor this year, shown at the Screen Actors Guild Awards in Los Angeles, Jan. 21, 2018. By Gabe Friedman (JTA)-If one thing jumps out about the nominations for the 90th annual Academy Awards, it's the lack of big Jewish headlines to be plucked from them. "The Shape of Water," Guillermo del Toro's latest fantasy-tinted film, about an amphibian creature housed in a government laboratory, led the pack with 13 nominations. Nevertheless, here are the Jewish nominations and storylines from another year of great cinema: "Call Me By Your Name" gets four nominations. "Call Me By Your Name" is the biggest Jewish triumph in this year's nomination slate. The film, an adaptation of Egyptian-born Jewish novelist Andre Aciman's book of the same name, traces a romance between two young Jewish men in 1980s Italy and is full of Jewish themes. It garnered nominations for best picture, lead actor (Timothee Chalamet, who is Jewish), adapted screenplay and best original song ("Mystery of Love," written by indie rocker Sufjan Stevens). Was James Franco snubbed after #MeToo backlash? A few months ago, the Jewish actor was considered a shoo-in for the best actor category. His comedic performance in "The Disaster Artist" as Tommy Wiseau, the eccentric (that word might be generous) director of the real film "The Room"-considered by some to be the worst film of all time-was almost universally hailed by critics. He won a Golden Globe for the role earlier this month. But less than two weeks ago, the Los Angeles Times published an article with accounts of five women who accused Franco of sexual misconduct. While the best actor category is loaded with talent this year (from Denzel Washington to Gary Oldman), multiple headlines called Franco's exclusion a response to the misconduct reports-and a snub. Israel's best film didn't make the cut. "Foxtrot," an Israeli drama about the aftermath of a military tragedy, had been on the shortlist for best foreign language film after winning a prestigious prize at last year's Venice International Film Festival, stoking hopes for what could have been Israel's first Oscar win. "In the Fade," a German drama that centers on a neo-Nazi murder story and won a Golden Globe in this category, didn't make the final Oscar list either. Surprise! Two Jewish industry legends are nominated yet again. Yes, Daniel Day-Lewis has won the best actor award three times already-but he announced last year that he is retiring, so this might be our last chance to see the Jewish actor grace us with his presence at an awards night. The iconic method actor is nominated for his performance in Paul Thomas Anderson's "Phantom Thread," in which he plays a famous dressmaker. Steven Spielberg's latest film, "The Post"-a drama about the Pentagon Papers starring perennial Spielberg collaborator Tom Hanks-is up for best picture. That seemed inevitable, but the one relative surprise here is that Spielberg didn't get another coveted best director nomination. He was passed over for talented newcomers Greta Gerwig and Jordan Peele, in addition to del Toro, Anderson and Christopher Nolan (for "Dunkirk"). It was another good year for a pair of Jewish composers. For the prolific Jewish composer Hans Zimmer, 2017 was business as usual. He wrote or co-wrote scores for three films, including one for "Dunkirk" that earned him an Oscar nod. Benj Pasek, one half of the musical duo behind the score for the Broadway hit "Dear Evan Hansen" and the lyrics of "La La Land," added to his rapidly growing legend with a nomination for best original song for "This is Me" from "The Greatest Showman"-a musical about P.T. Barnum. LOS ANGELES (JTA)-With the Academy Awards on the horizon, there is no shortage of high-quality films to see in theaters and on the small screen. Getting a jump on the festivities, here are five of the best Jewish-themed ones to watch this awards season, from Oscar contenders to short gems. "Foxtrot" Directed by Samuel Maoz and starring Lior Ashkenazi and Sarah Adler, "Foxtrot" is a wrenching film about an array of dark topics: parental grief after the death of a soldier son, the joys and stresses of marriage, and the boredom of army life. But it is also about Israeli control of the West Bank and how, in the filmmaker's view, Israel's occupation humiliates the occupied and hardens the occupier. After being named the second-best film at the Venice International Film Festival and winning best film at Israel's Ophir Awards, it's on the shortlist for the Academy Award for best foreign language film. In a phone interview with JTA, Maoz described his movie as "the dance of a man with his fate." He said "there are many variations to this dance, but they end up at the same starting point." In more concrete terms, the film follows an affluent Tel Aviv couple who learn their son has died in the line of duty. The film has come under fire from Miri Regev, Israel's controversial minister of culture and sports. "It is inconceivable," she declared publicly, "that movies which shame the reputation of the Israel Defense Forces... and that are supported [financially] by the state... are selected to showcase Israel cinema abroad." Maoz did not directly address Regev's criticism, but said, "When my brothers are dying, I have the right to make such a movie." "Foxtrot" will open in U.S. theaters on March 2. "In the Fade" Germany's "In the Fade" dramatizes the rise of neo-Nazism in the country over the past few years through the murder of a Kurdish man, his German wife and their small son by a neo-Nazi couple. The neo-Nazi theme is timely in light of the rise of the far right in Europe and, as demonstrated by the white supremacist rally last summer in Charlottesville, Virginia Director Fatih Akin, a German native of Turkish descent, attributes Germany's growing neo-Nazi sentiment largely to hostility to the large number of refugees, mainly from Muslim countries, who have been admitted into Germany. "The new neo-Nazis are different from those of the 1980s and '90s," he told JTA. "Then they were outcasts and easily recognizable as skinheads. Today's neo-Nazis are still criminals, but they look like everybody else." "In the Fade," fresh off a Golden Globe win for best foreign film, is also one of the nine films on the Oscar shortlist for best foreign language film. It's out now in U.S. theaters in a limited release. "In the Land of Pomegranates" In Hebrew, the word for pomegranate has a double meaning: It can mean either the fruit that symbolizes rebirth or a hand grenade. The documentary "In the Land of Pomegranates," directed by Israeli Hava Kohav Beller, wrestles with these conflicting meanings as it explores the chasm between the ways that young Israelis and Palestinians think about each other. The film follows young men and women who have been brought together in a scenic German town for a program called "Vacation from War." They live under the same roof, go on joint excursions in the lovely countryside, take a riverboat cruise and argue earnestly for hours on end. The program started in 2002 and, as one of the organizers put it, "Our goal is not to make participants love each other. If only five people change their attitudes... that's progress." Even this modest goal seems unreachable in the film, although it inadvertently clarifies why decades of peacemaking efforts have proven largely fruitless. Most of the arguments are on the level of "Hamas is a terrorist organization," as an Israeli participant charges, to which the Palestinian response is, "We are just trying to get back the land you took from us." However, the largely pessimistic view is brightened by a couple of episodes that bridge the conflicts. One scene shows Palestinians dancing the dabke and Israelis dancing the hora-and both performances are almost identical. "In the Land of Pomegranates" will open in U.S. theaters in February and March. "The Number on Great-Grandpa's Arm" How does one teach very young children about the Holocaust? An upcoming HBO short documentary, slated to premiere on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, attempts to provide a model for that daunting task. In "The Number on Great-Grandpa's Arm," Holocaust survivor Jack Feldman and his American-born great-grandson Elliott bond as the 10-year-old (he's now 12) prompts his ancestor to speak about his Holocaust experiences. Feldman emigrated after the war and settled in Rochester, New York, where he opened a fish market. He ran the business successfully, though with one quirk. As an African-American customer notes, "Jack has known what hunger is, so he gives free fish to a customer too poor to pay." An Israeli soldier does a mock dance with his rifle in "Foxtrot." Veteran documentary filmmaker Amy Schatz was attracted to the project because, she said, there is hardly any material on the Holocaust suitable for children and their families. Her goal was to transmit the survivor's experience "gently and with clarity." Catch the short on HBO, which began showing on Jan. 27. "116 Cameras" "116 Cameras," which is one of 10 films on the Oscar shortlist for best short documentary, gives a behind-the-scenes look into the filming of a Holocaust survivor's testimony. It shows how filmmakers preserve the memories of Eva Schloss, Anne Frank's surviving stepsister, in the form of an interactive, 3-D, holographic image. The project was a product of Steven Spielberg's Shoah Foundation at the University of Southern California. You can watch the film now on The New York Times website. Samuel Ethan Poteshman, son of Hali and Mike Poteshman of Winter Park, will be called to the Torah as a Bar Mitzvah on Saturday, March 3, 2018 at Congregation of Reform Judaism in Orlando. Sam is in the seventh grade at Lake Highland Preparatory School where he is on the Honor Roll. His interests include playing piano since he was in second grade, making movies, watching YouTube videos and spending time with friends. Sam is also on the middle school robotics team. For his mitzvah project, Sam has volunteered at Give Kids the World working at Katies Kitchen, Mama Marys Pizza and has helped set up for a parade. Sharing in the familys simcha will be Sams parents, his brother, Matthew; grandmother, Ida Weisman of Staten Island, New York; grandfather Norman Poteshman of Northbrook, Illinois; and family and friends from California, Colorado, Illinois, New Jersey and Florida. Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, February 23) The Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR) on Friday filed a tax evasion case against the local franchiser of U.S. brand Dunkin' Donuts. Led by the Prieto family, Golden Donuts Inc. (GDI), the exclusive franchiser and license grantee of Dunkin' Donuts, is facing a P1.12-billion tax evasion complaint before the Department of Justice. BIR filed the complaint against GDI President Walter Spakowski, Treasurer Miguel Prieto, Chief Financial Officer Pedro Paraiso, and Vice President for Finance and Administration Jocelyn Santos. "GDI and its corporate officers are likewise being held civilly liable in the complaint for income tax, value added tax and expanded withholding tax deficiencies, all covering taxable year 2007, in the total amount of PhP1,118,331,640.79, inclusive of surcharges and interests," BIR said in a statement. BIR said sales invoices issued by various suppliers were "intentionally altered" to conform to substantiation requirements. It said it started the investigation against GDI when it received a "confidential information" that the company made a substantial under declaration on its sales. GDI denied evading taxes, saying its tax liabilities for 2007 have been settled as of 2012. "Further, it has always been compliant with all tax laws and regulations, as evidenced by tax clearances issued by the BIR over the years," the GDI said in a statement. The GDI said it has not received a copy of the complaint yet, but is ready to respond to allegations in the proper forum. Duterte and Prietos President Rodrigo Duterte in April 2017 said the Prieto family, which he said owns Dunkin' Donuts in the country, has not been paying the right taxes since the previous administration. "Inquirer ang may-ari ng Dunkin' Donuts. Alam mo ba 'yan? At may utang 'yan sila na taxes, inayos ni (former BIR Commissioner) Kim Henares. Walang ibinayad o nabayad ng konti lang," he said in a speech in Puerto Princesa on April 6, 2017. The President has repeatedly called out Inquirer, also owned by the Prieto family, for alleged biased coverage against his administration. The government in August also accused the Prieto and Rufino families of owing the country P1.676 billion in unpaid rentals for the Mile Long commercial property in the Makati Central Business District. BIR is going after tax delinquents under its Run After Tax Evaders program. (JNS)As a small Islamic sect of an estimated 20 million peopleabout 1 percent of the global Muslim populationthe Ahmadiyya community is a persecuted minority across the Middle East. But at the southern entrance of the northern Israeli city of Haifa lies Kababir village, home to 2,000 residents, 70 percent of whom are Ahmadi Muslims. In Kababir, Ahmadis enjoy full religious and cultural freedom and pray in the only Ahmadi mosque in the Middle East, opened in 1934 and redone in 1979. The safe haven they have found in the Jewish State, as compared to the broader Middle East, mirrors that of the Druze, Bahai and Christians. According to Israeli Ahmadiyya community leader Muhammad Sharif Odeh, the Ahmadis have complete religious freedom in Israel, especially compared to their brethren in the rest of the region and in Pakistan, where Ahmadis cannot use any religious symbols or even greet each other with a traditional Arabic salutation. Ahmadis in Arab countries in the Middle East suffer a lot, Odeh said. They are not allowed to have mosques or minarets, and they go to jail for their beliefs and are persecuted against. Despite their safety and freedom in Israel, there is a long way ahead for Israeli Ahmadis in the realm of civil and political rights, said Odeh, who spoke of being discriminated against by Israelis for being Arab and by other Muslims for being Ahmadi. The Ahmadiyya movement was established in 1889 by Punjabi Hazrat Mirza Ghulam Ahmad. He claimed to have received revelations from Allah, who imposed the duty upon him to rejuvenate Islam through universal reformation and peaceful means. Ahmadi Muslims assert that they are true Muslims, but believe that the founder of their community is Mahdi, the shadow prophet of Islam and their messiah. They also believe that while the Quran is their final book of law, its inspiration and revelation continues with their caliphs. The Ahmadiyya Muslim community arrived to Israel in 1927, when the first Muslim missionary, Maulana Jalalud-Din Shams, was sent from India to the Near East and Middle East to convey the message of Mahdi. By the early 1930s, Israels Kababir village had become the center of the Ahmadiyya Muslim community in the entire Middle East. Ahmadiyya doctrine centers on the belief that the Prophet Muhammad forbade wars and the use of weapons, and that it is the duty of Ahmadis to achieve universal peace based on justice and to establish the sovereignty of Islam in the entire world through education. Mirza Ghulam Ahmad came to fix interpretations of the Quran, that the holy book is a source of care for everybody and of love, rather than killing, hatred and violence, said Odeh. He continued, The idea that you can use the sword to promote jihad is not true Islam. Jihad does not refer to promoting war, but fighting the evil inside us and spreading the word of the Quran to the world with kindness and care. The Ahmadiyya philosophy, explained Odeh, is to teach, repair and educate people for love, humanity, universal peace, harmony and cooperation. As such, Ahmadis believe that it is important to take care of other faiths holy places before their own mosques, and there is a special Ahmadiyya committee in Israel that helps locals in need regardless of their religious backgrounds. Additionally, Kababir is home to an elementary school that educates local Ahmadis, Jews and Christians alike. Ninety-percent of the school is Ahmadi, and the rest are Jewish and Christian, said Kababir spokesperson Muath Odeh, a cousin of Muhammad Sharif Odeh. It shows that if you want to create coexistence, its possible. But Muhammad Sharif Odeh is not optimistic that this universal message of love is being played out in the world, or even in Israel. He is skeptical of the influence of politicians, who care only about their own self, party and chair, as well as security forces who, in his view, initiate collective punishment and non-defensive wars. Politics is the art of lies, said Odeh, who described the current Israeli leadership as making a peace process for the sake of the process, not of the peace. Its a new way of idol worship to value stones over people, he said, conveying that he views both sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as wrongheaded and lacking regard for human life. Nevertheless, the Ahmadis are considered to be pro-Israel and leaders in coexistence efforts. I am a Muslim, Palestinian, and I am here. It is a good thing that there is an Israeli state, said Odeh, who said he has a good relationship with many members of the Knesset, including Joint Arab List party leader Ayman Odeh, who lives in Kababir, and Likud lawmaker Yehuda Glick, whom Muhammad Sharif Odeh said has prayed at his mosque twice. The Ahmadis renounce terrorist attacks as well as the capturing or killing of Israeli soldiers, not only because bloodshed is against their religious teachings, but because they believe that only governments have the authority to start wars. Odeh said, We are creating fanaticism in the West Bank and Gaza. It has become a greenhouse for terrorism and radicalism. Palestinians play with plastic and wood guns while Israelis play with dolls. Barbarism isnt the solution, we must respect peace agreements. You cant send people to kill others and say you want peace. Ayman, a 32-year-old Ahmadi convert from Nablus who asked to be identified only by his first name, condemned the Feb. 5 terrorist attack in which an Israeli Arab terrorist fatally stabbed Rabbi Itamar Ben Gal, a 29-year-old Israeli father of four, on his way to his nephews brit milah. I cry when I see innocent people die, said Ayman, whose family disowned him when he converted to the Ahmadiyya sect. They do this in the name of my god, my prophet and my book. I need to do hard work to fix what [the terrorist who killed Ben Gal] did. Chancellor of Ariel University Yigal Cohen Orgad (L) and then Israeli Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz at a cornerstone ceremony for the school's science center. January 15, 2013. (JNS)-Israel's Knesset voted Feb. 11 to make Ariel University in Samaria the state's ninth accredited institution of higher learning. The vote officially places the university under the auspices of Israel's Council for Higher Education. Parliamentarians voted in favor of the bill, 56-35. Full accreditation will enable Ariel University to advance plans to develop a medical school. Ariel, one of Israel's largest Jewish settlements, has approximately 20,000 residents. Accreditation of the university had been difficult to achieve, in part due to its location in "Area C," a section of Samaria under Israeli military and civilian control. No other Israeli universities are located in the disputed territories. Jerusalem Affairs Minister Ze'ev Elkin celebrated the Knesset vote in a tweet, urging the government to apply full Israeli law across the entire region, writing since "applying Israeli sovereignty on Ariel University, let's begin to apply Israeli sovereignty on Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria," Elkin tweeted. In the days leading up to the vote, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tabled a scheduled vote in the Likud Central Committee that would push the government toward extending Israeli law throughout the entire Judea and Samaria region, insisting that any such initiatives would need to be fully coordinated with the United States. "On the subject of applying sovereignty, I can say that I have been talking to the Americans about it for some time," Netanyahu reportedly told a faction of his Likud party Monday. Yet, the White House has denied that any such conversations have been taking place. "Reports that the United States discussed with Israel an annexation plan for the West Bank are false," said White House spokesman Josh Raffel on Monday. "The United States and Israel have never discussed such a proposal, and the president's focus remains squarely on his Israeli-Palestinian peace initiative." (JNS)-Rabbi Bradd Boxman of Kol Tikvah, a Reform congregation in the town close to Boca Raton, held a healing and memorial service after the mass shooting that was attended by community members. According to Rabbi Boxman, a large number of students from his congregation was enrolled at Marjory Stoneman Douglas. Rabbi Jonathan Kaplan of Temple Beth Chai counseled parents at the local Marriott hotel whose children were still unaccounted for. Kaplan said that Jamie Guttenberg was among his congregants, and he had tutored her for her Bat Mitzvah in August 2016, the Forward reported. Rabbi Shuey Biston, director of outreach and development of Chabad of Parkland, said the Jewish community in Parkland was very tight-knit. "This is a small community, where nearly half of the population is Jewish, so everyone has been touched by what has happened," Biston told Chabad.org. "The phones at Chabad have been ringing off the wall as people come for emotional, spiritual and material support." Rabbi Mendy Gutnick, youth director at Chabad of Parkland, said that many of the teens are still in shock. "There is one girl we know who was standing between two friends who were shot dead. How can she not be scarred by something like that?" Gutnick told Chabad.org. The attack was committed by Nikolas Cruz, 19, who was expelled from the school last year for disciplinary problems. Cruz, who was arrested by police shortly after the attack, was charged with 17 counts of premediated murder and ordered to remain in jail without bond by a judge on Thursday. Officials said that Cruz, who used an AR-15 assault rifle for the attack, had a "very disturbing" social-media presence, which included showing a large number of guns and sharing pictures of small animals he had shot, NBC News reported. What does a retired clinical chemist with two grown children and no formal Jewish education know about the Talmud? As it turns out, a lot... Maggie Anton grew up in a secular Jewish household, and had little investment in her Judaism until she was married. In 1992, she joined a women's Talmud class at the home of Rachel Adler, now a professor at Hebrew Union College in Los Angeles. Surprised by how much she loved engaging in the Hebrew and Aramaic text, she delved even deeper into the text and its commentaries. She learned that Rashi, the 11th century French scholar famous for his commentary on the Torah and the Talmud, had no sons, but several daughters. Intrigued by tidbits from tradition-like reports that Rashi's daughters wore t'filin-she began researching his family and his time. The result was the award-winning series of Jewish historical novels, "Rashi's Daughters." Her next project was a two-part series on life among the Rabbis of the Talmud in the 3rd century, including the prevalence of magic, titled "Rav Hisda's Daughter." Most recently, she published "50 Shades of Talmud: What the First Rabbis Had to Say About You-Know-What," a light-hearted look at our Sages' surprisingly progressive views on sexuality. Anton will be Congregation Ohev Shalom's Edward S. Ackerman Scholar-in-Residence during the weekend of March 2-3. At services on Friday night, which will begin at 6:15 p.m., she will speak on "Breaking Barriers: The Making of a Talmud Student"; a Shabbat dinner (paid RSVP required) will follow. On Shabbat morning, services begin at 9:30 a.m., and Maggie will speak on "How Women Shaped Rashi's Community." Following services and Kiddush lunch, she will present "Jewish Magic? Believe It!" The weekend concludes on Saturday evening at 7:30 p.m., with Havdalah and a presentation on "50 Shades of Talmud." Anton will be available to sell and sign her books. Sponsorship opportunities are available, and all sponsors receive a signed copy of the Maggie Anton book of their choice. For more information, including RSVPs and reservations for Shabbat dinner, call 407-298-4650 or email Office@OhevShalom.org. Purim begins at the end of February! (Feb. 28, March 1-2) The Jewish Pavilion staff and volunteers will be celebrating with the Elder Residents in many of Orlando's assisted living, independent living, memory care and rehab facilities. There are plenty of "parties/plays" on JP program directors' schedules and they welcome volunteers to come and join in the fun! Please contact the Jewish Pavilion office to participate with programs. Call 407-678-9363 and "Make a Difference in the Lives of Others" Tikvah Fund debuts Maimonides Scholars Program for Jewish high school juniors and seniors NEW YORKThe Tikvah Institute for High School Students has announced a new summer program in partnership with the Maimonides Fund, which will take place from June 24 through July 8, 2018. The program is geared towards Jewish public and private school students who are motivated to learn more about Jewish philosophy, culture and history. Students who will attend this two-week immersive summer institute come with a passion to learn more about the intersection between their Judaism and the modern age. The program aims to quench that thirst by offering courses with seminar leaders and lecturers who encourage dialogue and debate. The program will highlight and discuss the challenges confronting the Jewish community in Israel, America and throughout the West. Recognizing that these students will face challenges to their Jewish commitments and their support of Israel when they enter college campuses, the program empowers them to be prepared to face this with enhanced knowledge and sophistication. By building an intellectual community, these students will have access to fellow students, their instructors and their Tikvah mentors who they can turn to as a resource in the future. Lecturers and seminar leaders will include: Dr. Daniel Gordis; Dara Horn; Dr. Michael Doran; Dr. Ronna Burger; Dr. Samuel Gregg; Rabbi Dr. Jacob J. Schacter, Professor Michael (Avi) Helfand; Dr. Darren Staloff; Shuli Taubes; Rabbi Mark Gottlieb and Kate Havard. Maimonides is considered the quintessential Jewish renaissance man, combining his mastery of and passion for Judaism and his commitment to engage the wider world of learning in his roles as physician and philosopher. The Maimonides Scholars Program is training the next generation of Jewish thought-leaders through this program which will offer dialogue and debate around key issues facing our students and young adults todaythe intersection between their religion and the modern age, said Rabbi Mark Gottlieb, founder and dean of the Tikvah Institute for High School Students. The goal of our program is to train these students to take on leadership positions in the Jewish community on campus and beyond. In order for them to be leaders, were teaching them a broader base of knowledge and wisdom through history, politics and philosophy. The program will take place at Yale University and is open to high school juniors and seniors. The total cost for the program is $400, which covers a portion of the actual costs for books, materials, and food. All other onsite program expenses, including housing, are fully subsidized by the program. Both merit and need-based financial aid is available. The application deadline is March 6. For more information or to apply, please visit http://www.MaimonidesScholarsorg. (JNS)-Two Israeli soldiers who accidentally entered the Palestinian city of Jenin on Monday were attacked by a mob of dozens of young Palestinians who also stole one of their weapons. The two soldiers, a man and a woman, were lightly to moderately injured. Images of the female soldier's bloody face circulated through social media, after she was injured from shattered windshield glass. She was evacuated to a hospital in Afula. Video from the attack shows the mob haranguing and attacking the soldiers as they cried out. An initial investigation found that the soldiers had been misdirected into the Palestinian city by the Waze navigation app on their journey from Shavei Shomron in Samaria to Afula in the Jezreel Valley. A Palestinian Authority policeman intervened to protect the Israeli soldiers, ultimately firing into the air to disperse the crowd. Over 100 members of the PA security forces were called out to escort the soldiers to safety and return their jeep to Israel, according to a PA security official interviewed by The Jerusalem Post, who also said that the effort was made both to protect human life as well as to prevent Israeli reprisals in Jenin if either of the soldiers were killed. Israel has made multiple incursions into Jenin in recent weeks, including a clash during a manhunt for the murderer of Rabbi Raziel Shevah, who was killed in a drive-by shooting attack in December. It is not uncommon for Israelis-including soldiers-to accidentally enter Palestinian-controlled areas. Between Jan. 1, and Nov. 8, 2017, 564 Israelis were returned to Israeli authorities after accidentally entering into Palestinian areas. (JNS)The annual funding Israel receives from the United States may be increased by $200 million in 2019, according to President Donald Trumps fiscal year budget request. Israel is expected to receive $3.3 billion in 2019. The requested funds are the result of a $38 billion 10-year memorandum of understanding signed between Israel and the United States at the end of President Barack Obamas term in office. The additional proposed funds are being apportioned to provide assistance to bolster Israels capacity to defend itself and maintain its qualitative military edge. Part of the funds will go toward prioritizing funding for a U.S. Embassy facility in Jerusalem which will begin once design and construction plans are finalized, according to a fact sheet released by the State Department. The administration has announced that the embassy will officially move from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in 2019, while a new facility in the capital will take years to complete. Israels eastern neighbor, Jordan is also scheduled to receive an increase of $275 million, to $1.275 billion in 2019. The budget request requires congressional approval before being finalized. (JNS)A senior Palestinian Authority official this week declared that Nikki Haley needs to shut up. Hes referring to the U.S. permanent representative to the United Nations. If a representative of any other regime had used such language against a female American diplomat, feminists everywhere would be up in armsand rightly so. But for some reason, Palestinian misogyny gets a pass. The P.A.s Saeb Erekat made his ugly remark about Ambassador Haley in an interview with the Palestinian website Al-Watan Voice on Feb. 3. It came soon after another misogynistic remark, this time by P.A. chairman Mahmoud Abbas, who told the Palestinian Central Council on Jan. 14 that Haley wears high heels not for elegance, but to use to hit anyone who attacks Israel. If anybody thinks that all these hostile remarks about women are somehow a response to the Trump administration, think again. The Palestinian leaderships practice of making demanding remarks about female U.S. diplomats has been going on for years. When Condoleezza Rice was secretary of state, an official P.A. newspaper, Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, called her (on June 23, 2002) the dark-complexioned lady, the Black Lady and this pitiful woman. On Nov. 3 of that year, Al-Hayat Al-Jadida railed against Rice for her loose way of sitting, when she puts one leg on top of the other. The writer then alluded to Bill Clintons affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. Another official P.A. newspaper, Al-Ayyam, referred to Rice (on June 22, 2003) as a black widow, a single black lady and a black raven, and patronizingly compared her to African-American supermodel Naomi Campbell. The P.A.s problem with women is not limited to Republicans. In its Oct. 3, 1997 issue, Al-Hayat Al-Jadidas editor in chief denounced Arab leaders whom, he said, would have sung love songs to then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright were it not for her advanced age and the fact that she has passed her prime. Imagine the reaction if an American or an Israeli official declared that some female Palestinian representative needs to shut up or has a loose way of sitting or has passed her prime. Angry denunciations would flood the op-ed page of The New York Times. The U.N. Security Council would meet in urgent session. J Street and Jewish Voice for Peace would issue fiery press releases. Yet for some reason, the feminists in the Jewish peace camp have said nothing about the Palestinian leaderships latest verbal abuse of a female American diplomat. At least theyre consistent, I suppose. After all, J Street and Jewish Voice for Peace were silent when female candidates in the last P.A. municipal elections were prevented by the P.A. from putting their own names on the ballots. The P.A. authorities listed them only as sister of or the wife of. And they were silent when the Palestinian womens rights group TAM reported that 18 Palestinian Arab women were murdered in honor killings in 2016. (Honor killings are homicides in which men murder female relatives whom they suspect of violating Islamic fundamentalist morals, such as premarital relations, dressing provocatively or being seen in the company of an unauthorized male.) And they were silent when Amnesty International reported that women and girls living under P.A. rule during the past year continued to face discrimination in law and in practice, and were inadequately protected against sexual and other violence, including so-called honor killings. True peace will come to the Middle East only when the Palestinian Authority adopts democracy, pluralism and tolerance, including an end to its mistreatment of women. Instead of harassing Israel to make more concessions, J Street and Jewish Voice for Peace should be campaigning to reform the Palestinian Authority. Is this asking too much? Palestinian misogyny should be no more acceptable than any other kind of misogyny. Stephen M. Flatow, a vice president of the Religious Zionists of America, is an attorney in New Jersey and the father of Alisa Flatow, who was murdered in an Iranian-sponsored Palestinian terrorist attack in 1995. (JNS)U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley made headlines on Jan. 2 by saying that President Donald Trump has decided to stop funding UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Work Agency, until the Palestinians agree to come to the negotiating table. On Jan. 16, the presidenton the advice of U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillersonagreed to transfer $60 million for now, as opposed to slashing all of the funding overnight. But the other $65 million of this usual installment has been held in reserve. The total amount of money paid to UNRWA by American taxpayers is approximately $370 million per year. UNRWA was established in the wake of the Arab-Israeli war of 1948 to handle the Palestinian refugee problem, set up to deal with the immediate crisis resulting from the Israeli War of Independence. It has camps in Judea and Samaria, Gaza, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria. The other refugees from World War II were taken under the U.N. High Commission of Refugees, whose mandate calls for immediate resettlement in their host nations. The Arab League, however, rejected that for the Palestinian refugees because they wanted them to be a constant thorn in the side of the newly established Jewish state. This is the only refugee agency in the world whose mission is not for refugees to be resettled, integrated and re-entered into the workforce of their host countries, but whose mission is to instill in the minds of their population that they will one day return to their grandfathersor rather, great-grandfathersorchards and vineyards in Haifa and elsewhere. In the absence of a solution to the refugee problem, UNRWA continues to redefine the word refugee to mean anyone who is a descendant of the 1948 war. Thus, from the original 700,000 refugees, UNRWA now claims to service approximately 5 million Palestinian refugees. This agencys conduct, although dressed in the benevolent clothing of a welfare agency, borders on the immoral because it implants within this population an unrealistic expectation that only serves to keeps the conflict alive. Not only does it perpetuate a psychology of victimhood, it entraps those being served into a perpetual state of poverty. Rather than getting on with their lives, they are trapped into perpetually reliving a conflict that happened 70 years ago. A study of the new UNRWA textbooks, recently published by the Center for Near East Policy Research, found that for decades now, UNRWA has used textbooks that delegitimize and demonize the state of Israel and the presence of Jews there, and advocate for violent struggle as opposed to peaceful coexistence with the Jewish state. In fact, inside UNRWA schools are pictures of Israel depicted as Palestine, posters praising the brave shahids (martyrs) who have killed civilians and an educational curriculum consisting of constant brainwashing for a violent jihad to despise and even murder Jews, and to liberate all of Palestine. Pageants involve children as young as 4 years old, dressed in military garb, with rifles in hand. These children are being systematically programed to die for Al Quds (Arabic for Jerusalem) or any other part of Palestine. They are brainwashing an army of jihadists who keenly await the first opportunity to kill innocent civilians. This is the worst sort of child abuse and exploitation imaginable. They are condemning these childrenand any unfortunate civilian who might cross their pathsan early grave. This comes in total conflict with the U.N. General Assembly Resolution 54/263s own Convention on the Rights of the Child: Optional Protocol on the Prohibition of Children in Armed Conflict, barring the use of children under the age of 15 in combat. Yet when it comes to this egregious practice, the United Nations chooses to look the other way. This directly conflicts with an institution whose very charter speaks about practicing tolerance and living together with one another as good neighbors; reaffirming faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of every human person, and of all nations, great and small; establishing conditions for justice and respect for international treaties; and employing international machinery for the promotion of the economic and social advancement of all peoples. How these UNRWA camps and their hate-infested educational system can be an agency of the United Nations, with its lofty founding principles, continues to baffle me. Given the deeply entrenched institutional biases of the United Nations against Israel, we can expect that UNRWA will soon find other donors. But that doesnt mean that the United States, which had by far been the largest donor nation, has to continuously foot the bill. The American taxpayer has other priorities than continuing to fund this corrupt and hypocritical agency. Sarah N. Stern is founder and president of the Endowment for Middle East Truth, an unabashedly pro-American and pro-Israel think tank and policy shop in Washington, D.C. Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, February 22) Actress Kathryn Bernardo is going back to her roots as a girl scout. The young star, a former member of the organization herself, is now the newest ambassador of the Girl Scouts of the Philippines (GSP). Photos posted by Star Magic on Thursday show Bernardo donning the familiar GSP green uniform, with a green and white scarf. And with her signature poise, Bernardo fit the part of a role model to a tee. Videos posted on the Girl Scout of the Philippines Facebook page show the actress giving an inspirational speech to the young scouts. "Ever since I was a kid, super masaya ako na naging part ako ng girl scouts because aside from the camping, I know yung mga pinaglalaban ng girl scout," she said. [Translation: I've been happy to be part of the Girl Scouts since I was a kid, because aside from camping, I know what values they fight for.] She said she hopes to fulfill the group's expectations of her - even if only "one step at a time." "I'm really excited to work with this, my new family to promote different type of values to the youth to the kids... medyo matagal na since naging girl scout ako [It's been a while since I was a girl scout] and I'm willing to learn everything again," Bernardo added. The actress also read to participants at the event, in addition to giving books to a daycare library. As girl scout ambassador, Bernardo will help promote girl scout advocacies, including reading. The Girl Scouts of the Philippines is an international organization that provides "a non-formal progressive educational program based on spiritual values and the ideal of service." It was founded in 1940 and is open to those aged four to 21 years old. Aside from her role as GSP ambassador, Bernardo also worked with the Commission on Elections this year to encourage women to vote and run for the upcoming barangay and Sanguniang Kabataan elections in May. On Tuesday a delegation of diplomats from the US Consulate in Jerusalem came to Bethlehem to participate in a meeting of the local chamber of commerce. When they arrived in the city, Fatah members attacked them. Their vehicles with diplomatic license plates were pelted with tomatoes and eggs by a mob of protesters calling out anti-American slogans. After the Americans entered the hall where the meeting was scheduled to take place, some of the rioters barged in. They held placards condemning America and they shouted, Americans Out! Some of the demonstrators cursed the Palestinians present, accusing them of treason for participating in a meeting with Americans. According to the news reports, the scene became tense and violent. The American officials beat a speedy retreat. As they departed the city, the Fatah rioters continued attacking their cars, kicking them and throwing eggs at them, until they were gone. On Saturday, Fatah members in Bethlehem-area UN camps convened to carry out a very public peoples tribunal. Trump and Vice President Mike Pence were tried for racism and bias against the Palestinians. The tribunal found them guilty and sentenced the president and vice president to death by hanging. Their bodies, the judges decided, were to be burned. The implication of the trial was clear. Americans like Israelis should be killed. The burning effigies themselves were a natural consequence of PLO and Fatah chief and Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbass call last month for Trumps house to be destroyed. That is, both the assault on the consular officers Tuesday and the riot on Saturday were simply Abbass followers carrying out his orders. He put the Americans in his crosshairs. And they are pulling the triggerfor now, with effigies and eggs. It isnt hard for Abbas to set his people against the Americans. Palestinians hate Americans. In large part, anti-Americanism among Palestinians redounds to two things. First, incitement. For 25 years, the US-financed PA has used all the tools at its disposal to indoctrinate the Palestinians to hate America almost as much as they hate Israel. Second, like the Iranian regime, the Palestinians view the US and Israel as two sides of the same coin. And indeed, their hatred for the US is the mirror image of Israelis love for it. While the Palestinians topped the list of people who view the US as their enemy, Israel topped the list of nations that view the US as their partner. Ninety percent of Israelis view the US as their partner. All Abbas needed to do was call for Trumps house to be destroyed and mobs of Fatah members were only too happy to go into the streets and burn the president in effigy. President Donald Trump and his advisers can play by Fatahs rules or they can walk away. Trump, for his part, seems more than willing to walk away from the whole business. Over the past week Trump threatened to cut off all US aid to the Palestinians three times. In his appearance with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at Davos last week, Trump made clear that he wouldnt be overly upset if the peace process disappears. I can tell you that Israel does want to make peace, Trump said. The Palestinians, he continued, are going to have to want to make peace too, or were going to have nothing to do with it any longer. When asked about the implications of his recognition of Jerusalem as Israels capital for prospects for peace, Trump turned to Netanyahu and said, You [Israel] won one point, and youll give up some points later on in the negotiation, if it ever takes place. I dont know that it ever will take place. Jason Greenblatt, Trumps chief peace negotiator, seems less sanguine at the concept that the peace process is over. At a meeting in Ramat Gan this week with ambassadors from EU member states, one of the ambassadors asked Greenblatt whether Jerusalem is still a subject for negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, or whether, as Trump said in Davos, the issue is settled and is in Trumps words, off the table. Greenblatt reportedly answered that Trump mischaracterized the situation at Davos. Jerusalem is still a topic for negotiation between the sides, as Trump made clear in his December 6, 2017, declaration recognizing Jerusalem as Israels capital, Greenblatt said. Greenblatts statements over the past several days paint a picture of an administration unclear on what to make of the Palestinian response to Trumps recognition of Jerusalem. On the one hand, they continue to maintain that peace can only be based on reality and therefore, recognizing Jerusalem was necessary for peace to ever be achieved. Along these lines, at his meeting with the European ambassadors, Greenblatt also told them that their insistent condemnation of construction in Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria as an obstacle to peace is wrong. Construction of housing in the settlements has no impact on prospects for peace, he insisted, rightly. The last time any US envoy said anything approaching Greenblatts reported remarks was 2003. But then, Greenblatt wouldnt let go of the hope that the Palestinians are interested in cutting a peace deal. Speaking in Brussels at a donor conference for the Palestinian Authority, Greenblatt repeated over and over that the US is committed to the peace process. Then there was his fawning message to PA Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah, who participated in the conference. The sole reason the conference in Brussels was convened was to raise tens of millions of dollars for Hamdallah to shove into bank accounts controlled by Abbas and his kleptocrat underlings. It would have been rather odd if Hamdallah wasnt there to beg in person. And yet, Greenblatt didnt treat Hamdallahs presence in the meeting room as no big deal. He didnt call him out publicly for the dangerous assault by Fatah activists against US diplomats in Bethlehem the day before. Instead Greenblatt gushed, I am particularly pleased to see you Prime Minister HamdallahI hope, as a sign of the Palestinian Authoritys continued commitment to the process which we have undertaken together. Despite our differences, we remain committed to continue working together to use our best efforts to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Given the fact that the day before Fatah members attacked US diplomats in Bethlehem, and four days earlier they burned Trump and Pence in effigy, it would have been reasonable for Greenblatt to publicly excoriate Hamdallah and the PA for their actions. The fact that Greenblatt failed to call him to account, but rather gushed at Hamdallahs presence like a teenage girl over a rock star, shows that the Americans are still unclear why the Palestinians have taken a sword to their relations with Washington. Greenblatt, like his colleagues at the consulate and the State Department, dont understand what is happening because they think that the peace process is about negotiating. But thats never been what the peace process has been about. If it were about negotiating then the Palestinians would have been held accountable for their breaches of every commitment they ever made to Israel. But they have never been held to account. Only Israel has been held to account. Indeed, Israel has been attacked despite the fact that it has upheld all of its commitments. Meantime, the Palestinians have never honored any of their commitments to Israelor to the US. They never canceled or amended the PLO Charter that calls for Israels annihilation. They never ended their incitement to murder Israelis. They never ended their sponsorship or finance of terrorism. They never extradited terrorists who murdered Americans to the US to stand trial. They certainly never extradited terrorists to stand trial in Israel. Indeed, they have never recognized Israels right to exist. As far as the Palestinians are concerned, the peace process is a process of unconditional Israeli surrender to all of their terms. The role of the US as the sponsor of the peace process is to coerce Israel to make concessions that together will lead to its unconditional surrender. And for the better part of the past quarter century successive US administrations have played by the Palestinians rules. But then Trump showed up. When Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israels capital, he took something away from the Palestinians. That has never happened before. And now, reports that the administration is considering holding the UNs Palestinian refugee agency UNRWA to the same definition of refugee as the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees means another Palestinian high card is in danger. If Trump carries out his threat, then the only Palestinians who will be eligible for refugee status will be the 20,000 Palestinians who left Israel between 1947 and 1949. In one fell swoop, Trump would wipe out the Palestinian demand to destroy Israel through mass immigration of five million foreign-born Arabs to its territoryin the framework of peace. In an interview with Fox News, chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat was asked what the administration can do to placate the Palestinians anger and convince them to renew their contacts with Washington. Erekat said the only thing the US can do is cancel its recognition of Jerusalem. Meaning only unconditional American surrender to Palestinian demands will bring America back into the PLOs good graces. At the entrance to Jericho a sign is hanging saying that Americans and dogs are not welcome. Signs on shop windows in Ramallah and Jericho inform all US and British visitors thinking of coming inside that they are required to apologize for their governments policies. Its time for Greenblatt to understand that the peace process is over. And unless Trump intends to humiliate himself and America and sell Israel down the river like his predecessors did, the peace process will not be resuscitated. The longer he and his colleagues pretend away the truth, the more they imperil themselves and empower a people that will be more than happy to move beyond eggs and tomatoes and effigies and banners. Originally published in The Jerusalem Post. Caroline Glick is the senior Middle East Fellow at the Center for Security Policy in Washington, DC, the deputy managing editor of The Jerusalem Post and a contributor to the Jewish World Review. Just northeast of Purdue University lies Tippecanoe Battlefield Park, offering a window to a time when disparate peoples struggled to dominate Indianas forests and prairies. The park relates this clash of cultures at the site where American Indian warriors attacked encamped American troops in the predawn hours of Nov. 7, 1811, hoping to realize the ambitions of two Shawnee brothers. Around 1807 Tecumseh emerged as the political leader of a spiritual movement started by his brother, Tenskwatawa, aka the Prophet. Together they hoped to build a pan-Indian tribal federation that spanned the Great Lakes region, an independent nation opposed to the United States and allied with the British in Canada. The brothers appeals drew some 1,000 warriors from more than a dozen tribes to Prophets-town, which they founded in the middle of Indiana Territory. Territorial Governor William Henry Harrison wanted statehood. In 1810 he finalized the Treaty of Fort Wayne, negating earlier treaties and expertly playing area tribes off against each other to buy land for new settlements. Weeks later an infuriated Tecumseh led 400 armed warriors down the Wabash River to meet with Harrison at his Vincennes home. For three days each lectured the other, ultimately finding no common ground. A year later Tecumseh again met with Harrison at Vincennes, this time to discuss the murders of frontier settlers. The stubborn statesmen remained at loggerheads. Then Tecumseh gave Harrison two critical pieces of information. First, he said large numbers of Indians would soon settle the disputed lands, and second, he would head south to recruit more tribes to his cause. The dual threat gave Harrison reason and opportunity to strike. The governor assembled an army of 1,000 men, including militiamen and mounted volunteers from Indiana and Kentucky, as well as 250 uniformed regulars. They marched north, arriving at Prophetstown, near the junction of the Wabash and Tippecanoe rivers, late on November 6. An Indian emissary under a white flag met them and requested a cease-fire until the next days meeting with the Prophet. Agreeing in principle, a wary Harrison encamped his men atop a narrow, wooded triangular knoll a mile west of town. The front and rear lines, each 300 yards long, faced east and west respectively, while the camps northern, left flank stretched 150 yards. The Americans placed command tents, supplies, horses and cattle in the middle and ringed them with bonfires. The troops slept in their clothes, weapons at the ready. Outnumbered nearly 2-to-1 and with little ammunition, the Indians relied on surprise. Silently working their way around the camp that drizzly night, they had begun to infiltrate the camps northwest corner in the predawn hours when spotted and fired on by a sentry. Over the next two hours, as the Prophet prayed, his warriors tormented Harrisons men, inflicting 188 casualties. At sunrise the tables turned, the Indians withdrawing as the Americans gave chase, killing some 50 warriors and wounding another 70. A day later Harrisons men advanced on Prophetstown, only to find it deserted but for an old woman too sick to flee. Sparing the woman, they looted and destroyed the town and marched home. Harrison claimed to have defeated the Shawnee brothers, and newspapers echoed his version of events. But while he had succeeded in damaging the Prophets reputation, the next several months proved how wrong he was to claim victory. No Indian murderers surrendered, and Harrison had failed to disperse Tecumsehs followers, who returned the next summer to rebuild Prophetstown. Killings of white settlers by Tecumsehs men rose from fewer than 10 in 181011 to 46 in the first half of 1812. That summer President James Madison condemned Britains alleged support of Tecumseh in his list of arguments for war, and Congress obliged. In the subsequent War of 1812 Tecumseh fought with the British until killed at the Battle of the Thames in 1813. The Prophet later founded a village on reservation land in Kansas and died there, destitute, in 1836. Harrison held a rally at Tippecanoe during his 1840 presidential run, but for much of the next century and a half the site was a Methodist picnic area and youth camp. In 1873 history-minded locals fenced in the battlefield, and in 1908 state and federal officials added an 85-foot memorial obelisk bearing a statue of Harrison. The site was designated a national historic landmark in 1960. Archeological artifacts and items related to Harrisons short presidency anchor the present-day museum, managed by the Tippecanoe County Historical Association [tippecanoehistory.org]. Manila (CNN Philippines Life) In the latter half of 2017, a New York Times expose ignited a movement that gave sexual assault survivors around the world the courage to speak up, not just about their experiences, but against the shame, the stigma, and the culture that keeps women silent. As the #MeToo movement went viral, it spread across every media platform available and into conversations at the dinner table, breaktime chit-chat at the office, and impassioned drinking sessions among friends. At each and every one of these pockets of discourse, two things were clear sexual assault was, and remains to be, an epidemic, and women were tired of taking all the responsibility for it. Yet unpacking the complexities of sexual consent, sexism, and power dynamics teaching people over and over again that no one is entitled to another persons body, regardless of the persons sex, the situation, or the relationship of the parties involved; that harassment is a violation of consent, and that consent must be actively given; that in whatever setting or context, no means no, silence means no, an absence of any affirmative response means no; that the victim is never at fault; that the harasser must be held accountable for their actions, and so on all of this still appears to be a responsibility that most women have no choice but to take, lest the movement goes to waste. And so we persist. Which is why, at least for me, hearing a host on a morning news show blame a 19-year-old woman for allegedly falling prey to a gang rape is less jarring than it is familiar. Last Monday, Umagang Kay Ganda host Anthony Tabernas comments struck a chord, playing a familiar tune in my head: the same old things Ive heard time and time again from so many people. Pambihira naman, o. Eto po ay hindi first time na nangyari, napakadaming pagkakataon na 'yang eyeball eyeball na 'yan, ang mas delikado, nakipag-eyeball ka na nga, nakipag-inuman ka pa. 'Yan ang problema, yun ang mabigat sa lahat, lalot puro lalake ka-inuman mo, said Taberna. When co-host Jeff Canoy attempted to defend the woman and shift the blame to the suspected rapists, Taberna interjected, adding: Hindi, sa totoo lang, madali sabihin y'ang sa lalaki eh. Pasensya na dun sa biktima, 'yun dapat mabigyan ng katarungan. Pero ito para sa future na pangyayari. Kapag ka ikaw ay babae, wag kang papasok sa lungga ng mga tulisan. Once again, I am reminded of how the woman must always carry two weights: On one shoulder is the burden of taking responsibility for the faults of others, brought upon by a culture that sets two distinct standards for men and women. Boys will be boys, one saying goes. Kababaeng tao, says another. Its a culture that rewards men and punishes women for exploring the same thing sexuality and simultaneously encourages male entitlement while discouraging female autonomy. This is rape culture, which breeds the harmful notion that male-incited sexual violence is inevitable because that is what weve come to expect of them, and that the womans job is to stay alert, vigilant, and avoid tempting the proverbial beast resting inside every man. The narrative is unfair for both parties, and frankly, it is beyond exhausting, it is destroying women. According to a study, 35 percent of women around the world have experienced physical or sexual violence, and around 120 million girls have experienced forced sex or other sexual acts. Another study states that in the Philippines alone, one woman or child is raped every hour. The effects of sexual violence on women are profound, such as PTSD, depression, and anxiety among others. On her other shoulder, the woman must carry another burden that of educating people about how abiding by these standards and ideals do nothing to prevent sexual harassment, assault, and rape from happening. Not one bit. Its what countless #MeToo stories have told us. Its evident in each and every Weinstein story. Its displayed in museums. Taberna has since apologized for his victim-blaming, but only after hundreds of complaints online explaining why what he did was wrong. Why, after numerous stories told and shared, complaints made and arguments fought, do we still seem to keep fighting the same battles, holding up so much on our shoulders? Like a parasite, rape culture has dug its roots so deeply into our beliefs and ways that its as easy to propagate it as it is to unmindfully make harmful statements on television. In fact, Taberna is not the only public persona who has made such a statement in public. In February, newscasters Ted Failon and Noli de Castro victim-blamed a woman who was allegedly harassed by her Uber driver. Our president has also cracked more than one rape joke in the past. Its a song that you cant get out of your head. Its something we have memorized, despite not really knowing the meaning of the words. And so, though tired, we must persist. But hopefully, as we learn how important it is to keep speaking up, more voices can join in to drown out the noise. The government must move immediately to clarify the implications of the removal of the backstop from the phase 1 main Withdrawal Agreement document, says Fianna Fail Spokesperson on Brexit Stephen Donnelly TD. Deputy Donnelly is pressing for answers following confirmation by the Department of Foreign Affairs that the backstop would not appear in the legal agreement, but would be part of a separate protocol. Deputy Donnelly commented. When we were briefed by the Taoiseach in December, we were assured that the so-called backstop was bulletproof', 'rock solid' and 'cast iron. The removal of this guarantee from the legal agreement raises concerns. "It allows yet more time for this commitment to be watered down. It separates it from the main body of the Withdrawal Agreement. In anybody's language, this feels like a political fudge - and when it comes to the Northern Ireland border, that cannot be tolerated. Within the December agreement there are three layers of protection from a hard border. The first is that the UK economy will remain fully aligned with the EU. The UK government has said repeatedly that they will not do this. "The second is that the UK government propose specific solutions to address the unique circumstances on the island of Ireland. "This has not happened either. That leaves us with the backstop as the only remaining option to protect Ireland from a hard Border. It cannot be allowed to fail. "What is particularly worrying is that the first two layers of protection are to be included in the main body of the Withdrawal Agreement, and only the third, the 'backstop', is to be separated out." He concluded: "This deal must include upholding the commitments that the Taoiseach has already made. Any backsliding at this point would be disastrous for the people of Ireland, both north and south. Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, February 22) More Boracay establishments may face closure after the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) issued notices of violation (NOV) to 30 more Boracay establishments with environmental lapses. Speaking to CNN Philippines' On the Record, DENR Usec. Jonas Leones revealed the number of establishments served NOVs in Boracay have increased to 81 as of Thursday. "'Yung 51 natin since last Feb. 15 (that 51 was as of February 15). As of now, the DENR has already issued the notice of violation to 81 establishments and show cause orders ordered to forestland illegal occupants and those occupying within the 30-meter limit from the shoreline of the beaches," he said. Leones did not name any of the establishments as the department has yet to hear their sides. The move comes after President Rodrigo Duterte ordered a crack down on violators of environment laws in Boracay, pointing out sewerage issues in the world-famous island. He directed DENR Sec. Roy Cimatu to fix concerns hounding the popular tourist destination within six months, or he would close it. The directive has triggered a crack down on erring Boracay establishments. The DENR, the Department of Tourism (DOT) and the Department of Interior and Local Government have also collaborated to fast-track efforts to address Boracay's issues. Cimatu, who estimated only 50 to 60 percent of percent of Boracay establishments comply with the country's Clean Water Act, had earlier warned violating companies he would give them two months to install or connect to the island's sewage treatment facility or close them. The move is part of the Environment Department's three phase approach to fixing Boracay's woes. Aside from sending out show-cause orders to facilities not connected to sewage treatment plants, DENR also plans to dismantle illegal structures and identify properties built on Boracay's wetlands and forest lands. Boracay has consistently been named one of the best islands in the world. The DOT said it generates around 50 billion in annual receipts. Last year, more than two million tourists visited the island, according to Malay Municipal Tourism office records. Subscribing to our services is a three step process. First you have to create an account and then you have to pick if you want to subscribe to digital and or print. Some people only want to be a digital subscriber to get access online and others want to also receive the print edition. If you are already a print subscriber and want online access, it is free, you simply have to create an online account and then attach your print subscription account number to the online account you create. As an existing print subscriber it is easy to get FREE access to all our online content. When you click get started below it will walk you through creating an online account to attach your print subscription number to. After your account is created it will ask you to either add a subscription for online access or click on the print subscriber button. Click the print subscriber button header and it will open a dropdown, now click on get started. The page will reload and you will be prompted to enter an account number and a zip code. IT IS VERY IMPORTANT TO USE THE NUMBER OFF OF THE MOST RECENT ISSUE OR ANYTHING AFTER JANUARY 28, 2019 TO GAIN ACCESS! OLD ACCOUNT NUMBERS WILL NOT WORK The account number and zip code are easily available on your most recent issue of the High Plains Journal or Midwest Ag Journal in the address fields as is shown here. Sometimes the account number has extra zero's in front of it, just ignore those. Story updated to include revised headline. Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, February 22) The government is studying proposals to declare a state of calamity in Boracay and shut the island down for as long as 60 days. Tourism Assistant Secretary Ricky Alegre revealed Thursday the Department of Interior and Local Government (DILG) floated the idea during an inter-agency meeting with the Tourism and Environment Departments on Boracay's environmental issues. "DILG also presented one of the proposals, which is to declare a state of calamity... the effect of which is it is supposed to allow everybody that's helping to work and rehabilitate Boracay to move faster," Alegre told CNN Philippines' On the Record. "There's a proposal for a closure for 60 days." Alegre said Department of Tourism (DOT) Secretary Wanda Teo had met with stakeholders from travel agencies and tour groups who suggested if the government pushes through with the idea, to start it during the off-peak season in June. DENR Undersecretary Jonas Leones, who confirmed there was such a proposal, said the a state of calamity would help government agencies fast-track rehabilitation efforts for Boracay. "We can easily access funds... We can easily solve the problem in Boracay if the President will declare a state of calamity in the island," he said. The move comes as the government cracks down on establishments on the island with environmental violations. President Rodrigo Duterte, in a speech last February 10, ordered Environment Secretary Roy Cimatu to fix issues hounding the popular tourist destination within six months, or else he would shut it down. Just on Wednesday, DILG, DENR, and DOT also held an inter-agency meeting to discuss what measures they can take to help save the island. But a Boracay business organization says closing the whole island may not be the best solution for Boracay's woes. Boracay Foundation Incorporated Executive Director Pia Miraflores said she prefers another proposal mentioned by Alegre the alternate closure of portions of the beach. Alegre had earlier said the government could close portions of the beach and reopen them again once they've been rehabilitated. "For me, I would say that the best thing would be just to close certain areas of Boracay. those problematic areas," Miraflores said. She added, while she has not heard of the proposal before, the declaration of a state of calamity in the island would be able to "fast-track" the releasing of funds. Alegre, for his part, emphasized the possible shut down was just one of the proposals the government is eyeing. "The government wants to work with the private sector with this. Everybody has a stake. We're willing to listen and we're consulting," he said. Boracay has consistently been named one of the best islands in the world. The Department of Tourism said it generates nearly 50 billion in annual receipts. Last year, more than two million tourists visited the island, according to Malay Municipal Tourism office records. Letter: BMC: A North County Perspective To the Editor: With all of the recent news on Berkshire Medical Center, the registered nurses' contract disputes and a looming second strike by the Massachusetts Nurses Association, we shouldn't be surprised that financial rating agencies have expressed concern for the future of our community hospital. The costs of the union's demands and funding replacement nurses during the strike, combined with significant reimbursement changes, all have a negative impact on BMC. The community and the nurses' union must understand that we depend on Berkshire Health Systems to be healthy. I am a North Berkshire resident and business owner, and I have seen up close what Berkshire Health Systems means to our community. When I heard that North Adams Regional Hospital was closing in 2014, I immediately decided it was time to see how my business could help. We contacted organizations that were based in the former hospital, as well as BMC, to inquire about providing them commercial space. I met with senior level BMC staff who were working overtime to maintain services in the immediate aftermath of this health-care crisis for our community. These individuals were physically and mentally drained, but nonetheless worked tirelessly to restore services in a rapid manner. We provided space for a few services and it was amazing how fast BMC mobilized its employees, as well as, subcontractors who worked around the clock to ready the spaces for occupancy. BMC purchased the former hospital for what I thought at the time was the deal of the century. I've since learned that what looked like such a great deal did not come without a subsequent huge investment for the new owner. I wanted to be involved with the reopening, so I contacted BMC again. As a result, our construction division, a North Adams-based firm, was brought in to do renovation work for them. Since that time I have witnessed a very significant investment by BMC, which has turned the facility into a modern-day health center and has provided employment for many in North Recent projects have resulted in Community Health Programs moving to the North Adams campus of BMC, with major renovations and infrastructure investments by BMC to make that happen. A new modern laboratory was constructed, also requiring major infrastructure upgrades. The busy medical imaging department underwent a complete renovation, as well. A Renal Dialysis Center was opened by BMC to meet the increasing needs of the community. A 10,000 square-foot wing was created providing easy and efficient access to primary-care providers and specialty practices. And, a first-class orthopedics center was constructed providing residents of our area some of the best care available, close to home. I also witnessed the human side that these investments have brought to the facility and community at large. When my firm first started working on the campus, there were empty parking areas and little foot traffic in the corridors. It was sad to see such little life, but I knew that was going to change. I now see parking lots again full, an increase in medical professionals in the corridors, friends and neighbors going about their business as many services are now restored, and many local contractors being employed to rebuild this facility. If the nurses' union continues its tension with our community hospital, BMC will only be weakened. And if that happens, who will be there next time to respond to a community in crisis? David Moresi Moresi & Associates North Adams, Mass. 'The Art of the Oscar Picks': The Devil Is in The Details On a recent gloomy night I pondered weak and weary, not because I was necessarily weak or weary, but because I like the expression and it was time to make my Oscar picks, an annual tradition I abhor with no small amount of dread and disdain. All the same, I was determined that this year's choices would be the likes of which the world has never before seen. Believe me. They'd be so correct that people would be bored by them. I'm like a smart person. I went to the best schools. I make great deals. All I had to do was get a little help from the outside. It's all the rage, y'know? Thus it was quite fortuitous that, after channeling the modus operandi of New Hampshire farmer Jebez Stone, who you'll remember agreed to sell his soul to one Mr. Scratch in return for seven years of good crops, a bird fluttered into my den of iniquitous literature. Perching just atop my computer screen, the raven, in a distinctly Russian accent, offered his services. He explained that it would be in code, that the Oscar winners were each coupled to the various moral and political afflictions with which his superiors had been besmirching the land. I asked what my cost would be for such collusion. "Only your integrity," quoth the raven. "It's all part of a much bigger program. But don't use the word collusion. There's no collusion." "You mean, like the Russians meddling in America's electoral process?" I asked, sounding ridiculously naive to myself. "Yeah, but the Russians are just pawns in this, Mike," the bird assured, a stark seriousness in his one cloudy eye affirming that the conspiracy he alluded to was the biggest plot ever hatched in the history of humankind. He further explained, "It's these two really big powers who have been fighting it out since time immemorial, each trying to win over what you'd call the electorate. "This recent episode started as a wager, the guy with the tail betting the one with the long white beard that he'd resign if he couldn't disparage the greatest democracy the world has ever known. The Fiendish One has sent his agent." "Yipes! You mean ... .?" I was stunned. "So, I assume we have a deal," further quoth the raven, who then handed, or should I say, winged, me a disk, noting that contained therein were identified the scourges perpetrated upon the United States by the ill-willed emissary of his employer. Hidden within each was encoded the winner of an Oscar. Surprisingly, I felt no great pang of guilt. I rationalized that by listing all the wrongs committed against America by the wicked agent and his toadies, I'd be doing a public service. Besides, if suspected of hacking, I'd blame Hillary. No Collusion. No Collusion. After the black bird departed my premises, informing that he would contact me "nevermore," I popped in the disk and began deciphering the codes coordinated with the Oscar winner in each of the seven major categories. Hidden just a few bytes beneath the offense of Spewing Vulgarity Unbecoming the Highest Office of the Land was the winner of Best Song: "This is Me," from "The Greatest Showman." Encrypted within the violation, Disrespecting the First Amendment by Disparaging the Institution of a Free Press, was found the winner of Best Supporting Actor: Sam Rockwell for "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri." It was stirring. I was getting the hang of it. Who knows, maybe next I might figure out how to put Netflix on my TV. Moving on excitedly, the next deceit I tackled was, Failing to Defend and Uphold the Constitution of the United States, which divulged that the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress would be bestowed on Allison Janney for "I, Tonya." Just two or three cyber spaces away, enfolded within the corruption associated with Failing to Disclose all Financial Ties in Keeping with the Law and Spirit of the Constitution's Emoluments Clause, I found that the Best Actor Oscar would go to Daniel Day-Lewis for "Phantom Thread." Further ensconced within the codes, citing the delinquency, Failing to Defend the Civil Rights of all U.S. Citizens Against all Enemies Foreign and Domestic, Including more than Tacit Ambivalence toward Hate Groups and Individuals Committing Domestic Violence, it was disclosed that the winner of the Best Actress category would be Sally Hawkins for "The Shape of Water." Sowing Discord and Further Dividing the Citizenry by Blatantly Choosing Party and Personal Interests over the Wellbeing of the Country was the classification of objectionable behavior that cached the winner of Best Director: Guillermo del Toro, for "The Shape of Water." And, in cyber sleuthing my way to finding out that "The Shape of Water" would also win the Best Film Oscar, I was brought to the seventh despicable and perhaps deadly sin, Lies, Lies, More Lies ... and Maybe Even some Videotape. Unfortunately, space considerations preclude listing the egregious transgressions cryptogrammatically assigned to the remaining 17 Academy Award categories. But take your pick. Whether it's support of alleged sexual molesters, daily unveilings of sexual misconduct or championing a sham of a tax reform plan inviting our wealthiest citizens to raid Fort Knox, there were more than enough un-American and just plain disgusting offenses to cypher-correspond with several years of Oscar picks. So, I'll just list the remaining winners below. They're all great, terrific picks like no other the best you've ever seen. Believe me. And if I'm wrong, I'll deny it and say they were actually President Obama's picks. Finance Committee Chair Elisabeth Goodman, center, conducts Wednesday's meeting. Williamstown Finance Committee Begins Budget Review Town Manager Jason Hoch explains his FY19 budget to the Finance Committee. WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. As the Finance Committee convened to face the very local task of reviewing the town's fiscal year 2019 spending plan, national events were not far from the members' minds. "Do we have adequate funding and all the resources we need to make sure our schools are protected?" Committee member Dan Gendron asked Police Chief Kyle Johnson. "We want to make sure we give you whatever you need." Johnson was one of several department heads on hand to support Town Manager Jason Hoch as he began a department-by-department review of next year's proposed budget. It is the Fin Comm's job to examine the full budget and make a recommendation to May's Annual Town Meeting. Johnson assured the committee that the Williamstown Police Department works closely with officials at the town's public and private schools to both promote safety and prepare for the worst case scenario, like was just seen in Parkland, Fla., where 17 people at a school were killed by a gunman using an assault rifle. "[Officer Michael] Ziemba, part of his everyday activities is working with the schools," Johnson said. "It's a constant planning and networking position for him. You can never be 100 percent prepared, but it's on our minds and the schools' minds." He noted that Ziemba consulted with the design team that developed the renovation/expansion project at Mount Greylock Regional School and the department has assisted in training school personnel in the Alert, Lockdown, Inform, Counter Evacuate protocol endorsed by, among others, the National Association of School Resource Officers and the Massachusetts Juvenile Police Officers Association. "Financially, we lack for nothing in this area," Johnson said. "If, down the road, there's a big change, if there's a resource officer assigned to the school, we'll have to change the budget." Overall, the Fin Comm members were pleased with the budget Hoch presented. The biggest adjustment for town officials this year is the one-time switch of moving all the Williamstown Elementary School operational expenses out of the town budget and into the Mount Greylock Regional School District budget. The elementary school, formally a town department, was consolidated into a PreK-12 district by virtue of a November 2017 vote in the towns of Lanesborough and Williamstown. "It means some things traditionally baked in as town items move to the regional budget and some things that had been in the school budget move into the town budget," Hoch explained. That school budget a major cost center that can have significant impacts on the town's tax rate is being developed by the Transition Committee that governs Mount Greylock. The town side of the ledger, meanwhile, projects a net increase of only $97 in expenses from FY18, Hoch reported. Meanwhile, town non-property tax revenue (state aid, license and permits, hotel/meals tax revenue and the like) is expected to increase by $95,587. "If you take those two items, like for like, that means we're at a net decrease for an impact on the tax rate for town operations," Hoch said. Hoch gave much of the credit for the minimal growth in town expenses to the town's treasurer, who represents Williamstown on the board of Berkshire Health Group, the joint purchase group that provides health insurance for municipal employees in towns throughout the county. "The health insurance premium increase is zero percent," Hoch said. "Because of [Janet Sadler] pushing at Berkshire Health Group. Janet kind of pushed her colleagues to say, We're in a healthy spot at Berkshire Health Group, we don't need to do a further increase.' She swayed them to follow that. That gave us a huge leg up through the rest of this stuff." Across the board in town, Hoch's budget calls for the customary 2.5 percent increase in salaries with no major new expenses in any of the departments reviewed on Wednesday night. From a bookkeeping standpoint, there was one other major change in addition to the school budget shift as the town aggregated all of its employee benefits into a single line item instead of itemizing them in each department throughout the town. "In small departments, a change for one person [marriage or the birth of a child, for example] radically changes the budget," Hoch said. "So we've pulled all the health insurances out of each department and moved them into the insurance line, which lives in finance and administration. This is a shift between [cost centers], not a spending increase. "In some of the other departments, you see net decreases. The main driver for those will almost uniformly align with moving the health insurance out." Committee member Michael Sussman noted that the prior practice of keeping each employee's benefits in his or her department created unfair burden on individual department managers if there was a sudden change in an employee's health care plan during the fiscal cycle. "The flip side of it, Jason, is where are you going to get that money if that happens?" Sussman asked. Hoch explained that movements up and down in the cost of health care plans will more likely balance out as they're spread over a wider pool. "In a one-person department, if you change a staff person, you can wildly distort the budget," Hoch said. "This way, we can aggregate for all town employees in one budget." Sadler added that the budget line item for health insurance includes room for a couple of extra plans. "Any excess goes to free cash," she said. The Finance Committee will continue its review of town departments on Feb. 28 while anticipating its first look at the Mount Greylock budget in early March. Hoch, meanwhile, told the committee he would like to discuss details of his plan for funding the new police station in early April. He did share that the planning process for the renovation and expansion of the former Turner House is going well and that he expects to go to bid on the project funded by an anticipated $5 million bond that will be proposed to town meeting in the spring. Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, February 23) Despite public support for legalizing divorce, the Catholic Church said doing so would harm institutions that the government should protect. "The Church is all for the protection of rights especially of the aggrieved parties," said Fr. Jerome Secillano, Executive Secretary of the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines, in a Thursday statement. "While divorce may indeed vindicate the rights of women, as congressmen believed, it is unfortunately to the detriment of marriage and family as sacred institutions that should otherwise be protected by the State," he added. "Divorce is anti-marriage and anti-family!" The statement came after the House of Representatives committee on population and family relations approved on Wednesday a measure that would allow divorce in the Philippines. Read: House panel approves substitute bill on divorce Under the bill, married couples may end their marriage for several reasons, including abuse, infidelity and irreconcilable differences. The proposed measure also allows spouses separated for at least five years to file for absolute divorce. At present, the Philippines and the Vatican are the only countries without divorce laws. A 2015 Social Weather Stations survey found that three in five Filipinos favor legalizing divorce. Providing options But Taguig Rep. Pia Cayetano, one of the bill's authors, said the government is simply providing another legal option for spouses in bad marriages. "Having a divorce (bill) in a country does not make people rush into it," she said on Wednesday. "Let's legalize it na para maayos na, para 'di magkaroon ng problems sa properties. Mas maayos ang relationship because it ended." [Translation: Let's legalize it so that it's fixed, so that there won't be conflicts over properties. The relationship is better because it ended.] The Family Code of the Philippines currently provides two ways for couples to separate. First is legal separation which allows spouses to split up, but not to remarry and annullment, which allows spouses to remarry because the marriage is considered invalid from the start. Cayetano, whose own marriage was annulled, said couples tend to stay in broken or abusive marriages because getting an annulment is a long and expensive process. "For someone and usually it's a woman to obtain an annulment, she would have to prove that the person is psychologically incapacitated," she said. "On its own, beating up your wife or not being a responsible partner by coming home drunk everyday is not a ground to annul the marriage." Cayetano added that rising from the trauma of a failed marriage should not be a living nightmare. "Under the divorce decree, we recognize specific grounds that could exist before the marriage or during the marriage," she said. "It is simply providing closure for a marriage that is already dead." Cayetano believes the House has a good chance of passing the divorce bill, but whether or not it will be passed in the Senate is a different story. Divorce in Senate? Sen. Win Gatchalian said on Thursday that divorce has not yet been discussed among senators, adding that passing a divorce bill needs a lot of considerations. "I don't believe in what I call a drive-through divorce," he said. "I believe na isa sa mga grounds to allow separation, whether it's annulment or divorce, is kung merong abuso na ginagawa or merong pananakit or violence na nangyayari. What we need is a clear process for people to follow." [Translation: I believe that one of the grounds to allow separation, whether it's annulment or divorce, is if there is abuse or violence that is happening.] Meanwhile, Presidential Spokesperson Harry Roque said he would clarify President Rodrigo Duterte's stand on divorce. Duterte said during the presidential campaign in March 2016 that he was against the move. Read: LOOK: Presidential candidates' stand on divorce, death penalty, Marcos "I will seek clarification within the day if his position on divorce and that he is against divorce still stands," Roque said in a Thursday Palace press briefing. CNN Philippines Senior Correspondents Cecille Lardizabal and Ina Andolong and Digital Producer VJ Bacungan contributed to this report. Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, February 23) Executive Secretary Salvador Medialdea "summoned" U.S. Ambassador to the Philippines Sung Kim on Thursday to discuss an intelligence report calling President Rodrigo Duterte a threat to democracy in Southeast Asia. Presidential Spokesperson Harry Roque said Medialdea made the move as the government wanted to defend the President from the accusation. The U.S. Embassy in Manila confirmed the meeting, saying Medialdea and Kim discussed the U.S. Intelligence Community's worldwide threat assessment report. "Ambassador Kim explained the nature of the report - an annual assessment on conditions in each of the world's various regions based on widely available information," the U.S. Embassy said in a statement. "Their discussion focused on the references to the Philippines in the report, including clarifying that the information about the Philippines had been previously reported by media sources." It said the meeting ended with both countries "reaffirming the strength of the broad and deep bilateral relationship." In a statement on Friday, Roque said Medialdea also ordered the Philippine embassy in Washington to "coordinate and engage" with U.S. agencies involved in writing the assessment to provide them "accurate information" on what is really happening in the country. According to its website, the U.S. Intelligence Community is a multi-agency community that collects, analyzes, and delivers foreign intelligence and counterintelligence information to the U.S. government. Roque said officials and staff of the Philippine embassy were told to explain to U.S. officials the "actions taken by the President and his administration to promote socioeconomic development for the country and provide a safe and secure environment for all Filipinos, respecting at all times the rule of law." In its recently-published worldwide threat assessment report, the U.S. agency said democracy and human rights in many Southeast Asian countries will "remain fragile" this year due to corruption, "cronyism" and "autocratic tendencies." "In the Philippines, President Duterte will continue to wage his signature campaign against drugs, corruption, and crime," the report concluded. It added the President has suggested declaring a revolutionary government, and imposing nationwide martial law. Roque earlier called out the U.S. report for being "myopic" and "speculative at best," saying the President is not autocratic. House Speaker Pantaleon Alvarez, meanwhile, urged the Department of Foreign Affairs to file a diplomatic protest against the U.S. Israels #1 Export The Fellowship | February 23, 2018 Israel's #1 Export Why are you visiting Israel? Ive posed that question to tourists at the Western Wall, at the airport or on my flight, or visitors from the many groups my husband leads as a tour guide. I have asked that question so many times I already know what the answer will beat least I thought I did until I spent time with a group of South Korean Christians in Israel on a tour with The Fellowship. Usually the answer is to walk in the land of the Bible or to walk where the prophets walked or to see the Bible come alive. And dont get me wrong even though I know what the answer will be, I still love hearing it. I love to hear that Israel is a place where Christians feel inspired, connected, and that they too love the land that the Jewish people cherish. But the Christians from South Korea had something else to say. They are just as devout as any other Christian group I have met. And they enjoyed walking the land of the Bible just as much as the next Bible believer does. But this group had an additional agenda: to learn how Israel in general, and The Fellowship in particular, help the needy. They told me that we are innovative, creative, and highly effective when it comes to our charity work. They hoped to learn from us, partner with us, and take ideas home to South Korea. The South Korean group especially loved that all of our charity work is based on the Bible, deeply rooted in Scriptures entrenched in the hearts of those who care for Israels needy. I visited several sites with them, and at each they pointed out that The Fellowships programs were both Bible-based and extremely innovative, often solving multiple problems with one ingenious solution. One of my first visits with the group was to the Neve Michael Youth Village near Caesarea. Yael Eckstein welcomed them to the Holy Land and then spoke about how the Youth Village has completely changed the concept of a typical orphanage by mimicking a normal family life in every way possible, something the children there are missing. Actual families live in the village, with ten children assigned to each, forming one family unit with all the caring, support, and sense of belonging that goes with it. Yael quoted Proverbs 22:6, Start children off on the way they should go, and even when they are old they will not turn from it, explaining that we give these children from broken homes all of the tools when they are still young so that they can build wonderful lives when they are grown. The Youth Village is not merely a practical solution to the problem of children with parents who cannot properly care for them, it is the fulfillment of biblical values. The Ben Shemen Youth Village adds an amazing twist to the same concept of family-oriented care. At the heart of this peaceful village we visited is some of Israels greatest technology all run by the kids who live there. From the most advanced chicken coop in the country to a hydroponic greenhouse, the kids in Ben Shemen are on the cutting edge of agricultural technology. These children have a loving environment, a top education, and the experience that can ultimately land them great jobs when they are grown transforming from needy in Israeli society to being the needed in our countrys economy. There are many more examples. The Fellowship Hotline based on Lamentations 3:56, which says, Do not close your ears to my cry for relief, is a place that anyone in Israel can call with just about any problem. The staff speaks seven languages, partners with 550 organizations nationwide, as well as with the main utility providers in Israel, and have access to 900 volunteers across the country. Whether the caller is struggling to put food on the table, needs medical advice, or is coping with a psychological issue, someone will hear them and help them. Susans House is a Fellowship program for at-risk children. Named after the founders wife who passed away at a young age, Susans House was his way of turning tragedy into hope. This colorful workplace gives teenagers and young adults who have been living on the streets a place to learn arts and crafts and sell what they have created. Susans House gives these young adults life skills, a career path, a way to earn money, and most importantly, positive self-worth and self-esteem that keeps them off the streets. Helping out the other end of the lifespan is Yad LKashish, or Lifeline for the Elderly, another Fellowship-supported program that uses art and creativity, this one lifting up and caring for Israels elderly. In the entryway of Yad LKashish is a large sign with Psalm 71:9 on it: Do not cast me away when I am old; do not forsake me when my strength is gone, once again displaying the biblical nature of The Fellowships programs in Israel. Yad LKashish provides for the most vulnerable among us, many of whom are Holocaust survivors or new immigrants to Israel. But you wont find anyone getting a handout there. In order to preserve dignity, cultivate comradery, and provide a sense of purpose, the program is designed to teach the participants a craft which is then sold. Crafts include carpentry, metal work, embroidery, paper crafts, silk painting, and more. The elderly workers are paid, provided a daily hot meal, and given free transportation. Yet they also receive so much more a sense of belonging, of purpose, of friendship, and of being cared for. There is much to say about each one of these programs and the many more that I did not visit with the group. Israel is changing the way we help the poor and the needy all based on the fundamental biblical directive to love your neighbor as yourself (Leviticus 19:18). As Israels 70th birthday approaches, we celebrate all that she has contributed to humanity. Its wonderful that we export Jaffa oranges around the globe and invented cherry tomatoes. Its amazing that we share agricultural innovations with countries in need. Its astounding that Israel has created some of the greatest technological innovations and has produced lifesaving medical breakthroughs. And its impressive that we teach security techniques and provide advanced and effective military equipment. But Id much rather see this: that Israels #1 export would be our techniques in helping the needy. In that way, we will truly fulfill our national mission to be a light unto the nations and a blessing to the world. Thailand has enjoyed a relatively stable petroleum law regime since 1971 when the Petroleum Act BE 2514, 1971 (PA) and the Petroleum Income Tax Act BE 2514, 1971 (PITA) were enacted. Thailand adopted a modern form of petroleum concession, which has been updated from time to time. There have been 20 bid rounds, the last in 2007. A number of commercial oil and gas discoveries have been made, and as of 2017, there were 38 concessions in force. However, Thailand has limited geological prospects for oil and gas, and it imports more than 40% of its natural gas requirements. Thailand imports natural gas from Myanmar (18% of demand), the Thai-Malaysian Joint Development Area (JDA). State-owned oil and gas company, PTT, which had a monopoly on the distribution and sale of natural gas in Thailand, started importing LNG in 2011. In 2017, 12% of natural gas demand was met by LNG imports. In the past, PTT was (with few exceptions) the purchaser of all natural gas, and it owns the pipeline transportation system. A 21st bid round was announced in 2014, but was cancelled in 2015 following a number of challenges by non-governmental organisations, with others arguing that the concession was not a favourable fiscal regime for the state. In 2017, amendments to the PA and PITA were approved, which provided for rights to explore, develop and produce petroleum to be granted by way of concession agreement, production sharing contract (PSC) and service contract (SC). In December 2017, the Minister of Energy said that two tenders would be conducted in 2018: the auctioning of the Bangkot and Erawan gas blocks in the Gulf of Thailand, followed by the 21st bid round for the rights to 22 blocks. As of January 10 2018, the Department of Mineral Fuels had not published forms of PSC or SC, nor any ministerial regulations/notifications governing their application. It remains uncertain how the new auctions will be managed, and whether the oil and gas industry will agree to the proposed new terms. Additional pending issues include: (a) the resolution of Thailand and Cambodia's overlapping claims area; and, (b) the implementation of decommissioning, particularly of platforms and wells in the Gulf of Thailand. In January 2018, the Energy Minister announced the end of the Electricty Generating Authority of Thailand's and PTT's monopolies, and the deregulation of power generation. The Power Development Plan is to be revised, with the amendments being finalised by March 2018. The deregulation of LNG imports was also announced. The Petroleum Institute of Thailand (PTIT) is the best source of information and statistics on the petroleum business in Thailand. The main regulators of the petroleum sector in Thailand are: the Ministry of Energy, which establishes policies and plans for the energy sector; the Energy Regulatory Commission; the Department of Mineral Fuels; and the Department of Alternative Energy Development and Efficiency. Ratana Poonsombudlert Albert T. Chandler Sawanee Gulthawatvichai 2021 Euromoney Institutional Investor PLC. For help please see our FAQs. Share this article As one of Vietnam's efforts to strengthen the national banking system, which has been unstable in recent times, on November 20 2017 the National Assembly introduced a new law amending and supplementing a number of articles of the 2010 Law on Credit Institutions (Amended LOCI). The new law came into effect on January 15 2018. The Amended LOCI mainly focuses on regulations dealing with underperforming credit institutions. In particular, it concentrates on, among others, the plans that are available for dealing with those credit institutions which are subject to special control by the State Bank of Vietnam (SBV), including: (i) the recovery plan; (ii) the merger, consolidation and transfer of all shares and capital contributions plan; (iii) the dissolution plan; (iv) the mandatory transfer plan; and, (v) the bankruptcy plan. Bankruptcy appears for the first time as a plan for restructuring the banking system. Previously, after considering proposals from its specially appointed control board supervising a credit institution, if the SBV decided to discontinue the credit institution's special control/recovery plans due to the institution's inability to recover, the credit institution would be requested to apply for a court declaration of bankruptcy under the general laws on bankruptcy. There were no specialised regulations on handling the rights of the credit institution's customers other than the general principles set out under the laws on bankruptcy. Under the Amended LOCI, the special control board may consider whether the credit institution should undergo bankruptcy proceedings in the early stages, without the need to apply a recovery plan first. After the issuance of in-principle approval of bankruptcy by the government or the prime minister, a bankruptcy plan will be proposed based on the actual status of the credit institution. The SBV will submit the proposal to the government for approval and after obtaining the approval, will direct, inspect and supervise the implementation of the approved bankruptcy plan. Notably, the Amended LOCI identifies the minimum compulsory contents of a bankruptcy plan, including (i) the assessment of the actual situation and the handling process of the credit institutions subject to special control; (ii) the assessment of the impact of bankruptcy plan's implementation on the safety of the banking system; (iii) a deposit payment plan for individual customers; and, (iv) a roadmap for the implementation and responsibilities involved in carrying out the bankruptcy plan. With this new legal framework for bankruptcy of credit institutions, it seems that Vietnam's government is ready to let a credit institution be declared bankrupt which has never happened in practice before on the condition that a detailed bankruptcy plan has been adopted by the special authorities (ie the SBV and the Deposit Insurance of Vietnam), instead of applying the general bankruptcy regulations alone. Including bankruptcy as one of the available measures for restructuring the banking system is expected to promote the implementation of the project on restructuring underperforming credit institutions and dealing with non-performing loans in the 2016 to 2020 period. This is a strong action by the government which should be an effective measure for eliminating weak credit institutions from the system. Nguyen Thi Thanh Huong Nguyen Thi Ha Thu 2021 Euromoney Institutional Investor PLC. For help please see our FAQs. Share this article Imperial Valley News Center After Parkland, President Trump Demands More Than Just Action Washington, DC - "Its not going to be talk like it has been in the past. Its been going on too long; too many instances. And were going to get it done." ~President Donald J. Trump President Donald J. Trump, Vice President Mike Pence, and Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos sat down yesterday with more than 40 students, teachers, and community leaders to discuss how America must improve safety at schools across the country. The President and his team had one goal above all else for the listening session: to gain important perspective from members of the K-12 education community, including individuals who have confronted some of the cruelest acts of violence in recent American history. Unfortunately, when horrific tragedies like this happen, everybody wants a quick and a simple answer, but there isnt one, Press Secretary Sarah Sanders said this week. But we want to make sure that were addressing the problem. And we want to make sure that were meeting and talking with as many people that not only are affected, but that play in this process as possible. The meeting drew more than a dozen participants from the Parkland, Florida, community, as well as students and teachers from the Washington, D.C., area. Also in attendance were leaders such as Nicole Hockley and Mark Bardentwo of the founders of Sandy Hook Promise, a nonprofit started after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting to help prevent gun-related deaths caused by crime, suicide, and accidental discharge. For much of the afternoon, students led the discussion. Fifteen-year-old Justin Gruber reminded those gathered that 19 years ago, one of the most high-profile school shootings in history happened at Columbine High School. I was born into a world where I never got to experience safety and peace, Gruber said. This has to never happen again. The question-and-answer session covered a range of topics that concern students, teachers, and families, including the need to reduce violence and improve access to much-needed resources at Americas schools. I think we also need to focus on prevention, Hockley said. How do we prevent these acts from happening? How can we help identify and get help for people who are at risk of hurting themselves or others before they pick up any weapon? Many participants emphasized the need to get past partisan politics. We all need to realize that we all have different points of views, Stoneman Douglas High School junior Ariana Klein said. Together were going to be able to work to a solution. Huck Pollack, the brother of a student who was killed last week, echoed the call for civility. Censorship has got to stop. And thats how we find the solutions, by listening to everyone, having an open mind. In the days following the Parkland shooting last week, President Trump addressed the Nation and issued a Proclamation honoring the victims and their loved ones. He also spoke with Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), who has proposed legislation to strengthen the Federal background check system. The President has expressed his support for efforts to improve the federal background check system, and, in the coming days, we will continue to explore ways to ensure the safety and security of our schools, Sanders said this week. As the President has said many times, it is the right of every American child to grow up in a safe community. Beginning Farmer Training Program moves forward Sacramento, California - A recently developed beginning farmer training program has officially been approved by the California State Division of Apprenticeship Standards. The California Farm Academy Beginning Farm and Ranch Manager Apprenticeship Program has been established by the Center for Land-Based Learning (CLBL) as a means to increase the number of young people who are prepared to take on managerial roles on the farm. There is an increasing need to further develop the next generation of farmers and ranchers to become skilled farming professionals. As older farmers begin contemplating retirement, those management positions will need someone to step in and take over. There have also been other efforts in recent years aimed at enabling young and beginning farmers to start their own operations. Having an accredited apprenticeship like this for agriculture in California is a big milestone, said CLBL Executive Director Mary Kimball. California is facing a shortage of qualified farm managers and operators, as an entire generation is on the cusp of retirement. This is also incredibly helpful to beginning farmers in the state, who finally have a legal, formal apprenticeship program approved by the State that trains to one standard, Kimball noted. The Beginning Farm and Ranch Manager Apprenticeship provides professional training for producing specialty crops. The program requires 250 hours of coursework and another 3,000 hours of paid on-the-job training on a farming operation. Participants will receive hands-on experience under the mentorship of a seasoned farmer. After completing the program, apprentices will have the necessary education and business management skills to advance their professional agricultural career. The effort to get the beginning farmer training program approved was a collaboration between CLBL, Soil Born Farms and the Division of Apprenticeship Standards. The California Department of Food and Agriculture was also integral to the two-year process with grant funding provided by their Specialty Crop Block Grant Program. This story was updated to include a report from CNN Philippines Correspondent AC Nicholls. Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, February 23) Students in Metro Manila and other parts of the country staged a walkout on Friday to protest a number of issues, such as charter change, federalism, tax reform law, and martial law in Mindanao. Carrying banners and shouting anti-government slogans, they marched from their campuses to Mendiola near Malacanang Palace in the afternoon. Manila police estimated their number at 200, but the demonstrators said there were 1,500 of them. They brought an effigy of President Rodrigo Duterte dressed as a king. It held a rod that had a Swastika, a symbol of Germany's Nazi party in the early 20th century. The image also had a long cape that had a list of the policies the protesters believed are oppressive. It also wore a sash of the flags of the United States and China, with the label "Good dog." In front of the effigy were men wearing goon-like masks resembling Defense Secretary Delfin Lorezana, Intelligence Chief Hermogenes Esperon, Interior Secretary Eduardo Ano, Armed Forces Chief Rey Guerrero, and Police Chief Ronald "Bato" Dela Rosa. Kabataan Party-list Representative Sarah Elago slammed what she called the looming dictatorship, and said the protesters would not hesitate to call for Duterte's resignation. Students from the Ateneo de Manila University, Polytechnic University of the Philippines, University of the Philippines, and University of Santo Tomas joined the protest. The League of Filipino Students listed similar gatherings in Baguio, Cebu, and Iloilo City. University of the Philippines Diliman Chancellor Michael Tan encouraged students to participate in activities "as part of their education." UP vendors and jeepney drivers also joined in, with drivers honking their horns in support of the protest. Both sectors are affected by the tax reform law which raised taxes on sugar-sweetened beverages and fuel and the public utility vehicle modernization plan. Related: Crackdown on jeepneys leave UP students, personnel stranded Youth group Anakbayan said President Rodrigo Duterte should address issues hounding his administration. "We dare this delusional dictator to face the wrath of the people and address legitimate people's concern hurled at him," said Anakbayan Secretary General Einstein Recedes. Presidential Spokesperson Harry Roque said Malacanang had no plans to stop militant students from walking out of their classes, but reminded them of the risks in joining protests. Roque on Thursday warned students, especially those from state universities, that they could get kicked out of school if they participated in demonstrations. "Bahala po sila kung gusto nilang ma-kickout sila. Sayang po yan lalong lalo na yung sa nakikinabang sa libreng tuition," he said in a media briefing. [Translation: It's up to them if they want to get kicked out. Don't waste the opportunity of free tuition.] Roque pointed out that students in state universities benefitted from free tuition which was made possible with the help of hardworking overseas Filipino workers like slain Joanna Demafelis. The domestic helper's body was found in a freezer in Kuwait and brought back to the country this week. "Karapatan po nila yan, konsensya po nila yan [It's their right, it's their conscience]," he said. Speaking to CNN Philippines' News Night, Chief Presidential Legal Counsel Sal Panelo meanwhile said the government "encourages" protests as long as they are done within the bounds of the law. "We have repeatedly said that the Duterte administration encourages street protests and that protest we're witnessing now that they're having is the most eloquent truth that this administration does not impede, impinge, violate freedom of the press and of speech," he said. He said it was the protesters' right to speak their mind regardless of whether the government accepts it or not. Panelo added, however, protesters shouldn't "convert the streets into anarchy" and spread "false news" about the administration. "You can go to the streets, you can march you can raise your voices to the highest decibel, we won't mind that. But the moment you disturb the peace, the moment you violate the rights of others, then that would be against the law," he said. Earlier this month, Duterte threatened to replace protesting students with "smart" Lumad students, a statement that was criticized by youth leaders and Lumad school ALCADEV. Related: KABATAAN hits Duterte threat vs. student protesters, says more walkouts to come Duterte has been criticized here and abroad for his bloody war on drugs, which has seen some 4,000 killings in police operations since 2016. Human rights watchdogs give a higher figure. They say it's about 13,000 deaths. The President has also been criticized for his pivot towards China, strengthening relations with the Asian giant despite its continued militarization of disputed islands in the West Philippine Sea. CNN Philippines Correspondents AC Nicholls and Rex Remitio contributed to this report. CDFA Secretary Karen Ross meets with Canadian Minister of Agriculture Lawrence MacAulay Sacramento, California - Today, Secretary Ross met with Minister Lawrence MacAulay, Canadian Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food, reaffirming the strong and collaborative trade relationship between the two governments. Canada is Californias second largest export destination for agriculture products, valued at more than $3.4 billion. As NAFTA renegotiation occurs at the federal level, underscoring the importance of California-Canadian trade is important. It is estimated that California agricultural exports to NAFTA countries supports more the 36,000 jobs. In her meeting with Minister MacAulay, Secretary Ross highlighted some priority California issues related to wine, dairy and produce and thanked Canada for their ongoing friendship and continued engagement on the issues. Over the last 15 years, California agricultural exports to the NAFTA region have expanded from $1.5 billion (2000) to $4.52 billion (2015). Approximately 16 percent ($3.4 billion) of total California agricultural exports are destined for Canada. Canada is one of the most diversified markets for California agricultural products. Polaris Acquires Historic Glamis Beach Store and Surrounding Property Glamis, California - Polaris Industries Inc., in partnership with the LeBlanc family, is announcing the completed purchase of the 166-acres of land and buildings associated with the historic Glamis Beach Store in Glamis, California. When my father first opened the doors of the Glamis Beach Store in 1979 his mission was to provide Glamis visitors a home base stocked with all the amenities they need while enjoying the dunes, said Jeannie Mama Jeannie LeBlanc. It only makes sense to partner with the leader in the off-road recreational community to carry on the traditions that he created. The LeBlanc family created the iconic establishment within the dunes community and we are honored to carry that legacy forward, helping to preserve and protect all that is great about Glamis, said Bob Mack, senior vice president of Corporate Development & Strategy, Polaris. For so many riders, the dunes and the Glamis Beach Store are part of a lifetime of riding memories and we plan to make sure that riders and visitors can continue to experience all the dunes have to offer, including a visit to the Beach Store, as a part of their Glamis adventures for many years to come. Polaris has partnered with the LeBlancs in the past, utilizing the Glamis property to host Camp RZR for the last six years. This signature event takes place in late October, serving as a kick off to the dunes riding season, and a celebration of the riding culture and comradery that is created among riders. More than 20,000 attended Camp RZR in 2017 and the acquisition of the property will allow Polaris to continue to expand the event. For the rider and dunes community, the iconic Glamis Beach Store represents the epicenter of the dunes, so when we were looking for a location to hold our first Camp RZR we only had one place in mind, said Craig Scanlon, chief retail and marketing officer, Polaris Off-Road Vehicles. To the riders, community and many at Polaris, Glamis is an extraordinary place and our goal is to continue the unique aspects that make this area special and to help it thrive. Polaris acquired the property from the Estate of Beach Store founder Eurgene LeBlanc. Polaris expects to work with Jeannie LeBlanc, other local business owners, the dunes community and Imperial County officials to improve the services available in the Glamis riding area, while preserving the rich history and character of the property. Glamis is one of the most popular off-road riding areas in the USA with riders coming from all over the world to experience its massive sand hills. The Glamis Beach Store has been a central part of the Glamis experience since 1979 and will continue in operation. About Polaris Polaris Industries Inc. (NYSE: PII) is a global powersports leader that has been fueling the passion of riders, workers and outdoor enthusiasts for more than 60 years. With annual 2017 sales of $5.4 billion, Polaris innovative, high-quality product line-up includes the RANGER, RZR and Polaris GENERAL side-by-side off-road vehicles; the Sportsman and Polaris ACE all-terrain off-road vehicles; Indian Motorcycle midsize and heavyweight motorcycles; Slingshot moto-roadsters; and Polaris RMK, INDY, Switchback and RUSH snowmobiles. Polaris enhances the riding experience with parts, garments and accessories, along with a growing aftermarket portfolio, including Transamerica Auto Parts. Polaris presence in adjacent markets globally include military and commercial off-road vehicles, quadricycles, and electric vehicles. Proudly headquartered in Minnesota, Polaris serves more than 100 countries across the globe. Visit www.polaris.com for more information. Support Continues to Build for the Presidents Infrastructure Initiative Washington, DC - The Presidents effort to rebuild Americas infrastructure continues to gain support from the American public and commentators. Polling RASMUSSEN REPORTS: Support High for Trumps Infrastructure Plan President Trumps plan to fix the nations ailing infrastructure calls for generating $1.5 trillion in upgrades through ventures involving the federal government, state government and private industry. Most voters support the proposal, and among those voters, most like the idea of finding outside sources to help fund it. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 65% of Likely U.S. Voters favor Trumps major plan to improve Americas infrastructure, including highways, bridges and tunnels. Commentary THE OKLAHOMAN EDITORIAL BOARD: Infrastructure Could Benefit from Trumps Regulatory Reforms Deregulation has been a major focus of the Trump administration, and those efforts have paid off in increased economic activity. So Americans should welcome news that President Trump has included regulatory streamlining in his infrastructure proposal. BLOOMBERG VIEW EDITORIAL BOARD: Trumps Hardest Construction Job President Donald Trump is offering some good ideas with his infrastructure proposal. Some aspects are indeed promising. Giving states and cities an incentive to spend more on their own public works makes sense, especially when borrowing costs are moderate. Encouraging them to impose user fees, such as tolls, might help control costs and leave them less reliant on Washington. Attracting private investment is likewise a sensible goal. In addition to boosting available funds, it could lead to more efficient and innovative projects, and thereby reduce public maintenance costs down the road. On a problem that Congress has avoided for too long, this plan offers a decent start. THE HILL CONTRIBUTOR LIZ PEEK: Trump Infrastructure Plan Will Boost Spending, Cut Costs So, we have to be smarter in how we finance our needed investments, and to save money, we need to cut regulations to speed the permitting process. Thats what Trump is proposing, and he has it exactly right. UBS AMERICAS PRESIDENT TOM NARATIL IN USA TODAY: Trumps Infrastructure Plan Is Gaining Support from Small Businesses Four out of five business owners we spoke to support the idea of splitting costs between the public and private sectors. They particularly find public-private partnerships (P3s) to be the most appealing way to quickly and effectively mobilize dollars for our crumbling infrastructure. Thats where the Trump Administrations infrastructure plan comes in. The elements that have already been made public include several provisions that seek to leverage the combined strengths of the public and private sectors. REASON FOUNDATIONS ROBERT POOLE: Assessing the White House Infrastructure Plan The White Houses more nuanced approach is not intended as a massive stimulus program, which is not what America needs. What we do need is much better targeting of investment to infrastructure projects that deliver better value for money. Both the Incentives Initiative and the Transformative Projects Program are aimed at this kind of project. And the former, in particular, is aimed at expanding the use of long-term public-private partnerships (P3s), for which hundreds of billions in private equity capital is interested and available. That plus meaningful streamlining of the permitting process should open the door for significant new investment in American infrastructure. AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTES R. RICHARD GEDDES IN THE WALL STREET JOURNAL: Why Some Stops Are a Cut Above the Rest Mr. Trumps plan would allow rest areas to be converted into valuable revenue-producing assets. Many are strategically located with easy on- and offramps, sidewalks, streetlights and restrooms already installed. Adding restaurants and shops would be inexpensive and profitable. The renovated stops could also offer amenities such as electric-vehicle charging stations. Pacific Partnership Mission Prepares to Enhance Disaster Response Cooperation, Strengthen Ties in Indo-Asia-Pacific Singapore - The U.S. Navy will join allied and partner nation militaries for the 13th Pacific Partnership mission, scheduled to begin February 23. This annual maritime operation will help improve disaster response preparedness, resiliency and capacity while enhancing partnerships with participating nations and civilian humanitarian organizations throughout the Indo-Asia-Pacific region. Pacific Partnership is the largest annual multilateral disaster response preparedness mission conducted in the Indo-Asia-Pacific. This year's mission will be led by Commander, Destroyer Squadron 31 and staff, embarked on the hospital ship USNS Mercy (T-AH-19) and the expeditionary fast transport ship USNS Fall River (T-EPF 4) and will include more than 800 military and civilian personnel from the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, France, Peru and Japan. "Through Pacific Partnership we are deepening integral ties with our allies and partners across the Indo-Asia-Pacific region," said Rear Adm. Don Gabrielson, commander, Task Force 73, the executive agent for Pacific Partnership 18. "The challenges we face with natural and manmade disasters do not respect borders or national sovereignty. This dynamic mission enables many nations and subject matter experts to come together to pursue solutions to complex problems while enhancing preparations for disaster emergencies that reduce the severity of their impact. The foundation of trust created through Pacific Partnership engagement helps foster a cooperative environment that encourages collaborative approaches to improving the lives and conditions for the people of this region and beyond." Mercy will make mission stops in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, and Vietnam while USNS Fall River (T-EPF-4) will visit Yap, Palau, Malaysia, and Thailand. Medical, dental, civil-engineering and veterinary teams will partner with each host nation to conduct civic-action projects, community health exchanges, medical symposiums and disaster response training activities. Additional community relations engagements will occur in each mission stop to enhance relationships and camaraderie with citizens of the host nations. Following the mission stops, Mercy will also visit Japan during its return transit across the Pacific Ocean. Engagements between Pacific Partnership participants and host nations are intended to improve capacity, enhance regional partnerships and increase multilateral cooperation for preparedness. "Our staff and team have come together to form a dynamic team of professionals and we are ready to execute this mission and engage with our partners throughout the Indo-Pacific," said Capt. David Bretz, commodore, Destroyer Squadron 31. "We are excited about forging new friendships and deepening partnerships across the region." Pacific Partnership began in response to one of the world's most catastrophic natural disasters, the December 2004 tsunami that devastated parts of South and Southeast Asia. The mission has evolved over the years from emphasis on direct care to an operation focused on enhancing partnerships through host nation subject matter expert and civil-military exchanges. Pacific Partnership 2018 will have several other distinctions: * A multinational command-and-control structure will be used to include a deputy mission commander from the United Kingdom and mission chief of staff from Australia. * The mission will visit Sri Lanka for a second consecutive year to enhance ties with the Indian Ocean nation. * Pacific Partnership will continue to leverage the U.S. National Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security (WPS), a plan backed by Executive Order 13595 and UN Security Council Resolution 1325. Integration of WPS into Pacific Partnership yields opportunities to engage with partner nations on the topic of gender integration and perspectives, as well as preparedness in dealing with vulnerable populations (women, children, elderly and disabled) during and in the aftermath of crises. * This year's mission will return to Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam, where the United States continues its legacy of strong cooperation and defense ties with these nations. White House Press Secretary on the Syrian Regime Attacks on Eastern Ghouta Washington, DC - The United States strongly condemns recent attacks on the people of Syria in Eastern Ghouta by Russia and the Assad regime. We offer our condolences to the families of those killed and wounded and call on the international community to condemn these horrific attacks. The targeted destruction of medical facilities in Eastern Ghouta and the continued use of siege tactics, which starve Syrian civilians and prevent humanitarian access, are especially troubling. We fully support the call from the United Nations for a cessation of violence to allow for the unfettered delivery of humanitarian supplies and urgently needed medical evacuations of civilians. The United States also calls upon Russia and its partners to live up to their obligations with respect to de-escalation zones, particularly those in Eastern Ghouta, and to end further attacks against civilians in Syria. Assad and his deplorable regime must stop committing additional atrocities and must not be further abetted by backers in Moscow and Tehran. The regimes horrific attacks demonstrate an urgent need for the UN-led Geneva process to advance toward a political resolution for Syria that respects the will of the Syrian people, in accordance with the UN Security Council Resolution 2254 and the November 2017 Da Nang Joint Statement from President Donald J. Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. This Isnt Our Last Love Letter Dear Don Don, Way back in 92 I walked into the room and knew Never felt this way before I shook your hand while gazing into your eyes And the feeling grew As I took a seat I knew A love that would have my heart Forever I knew Way back in 92 They say love at first sight doesnt always last or isnt true We were the exception to that rule Our love had no where to hide A spark set fire As if this is how the universe started I never doubted our love or what we could do Together we grew Forming a bond everlasting That became our glue My euphoria was YOU Im eternally grateful for the love and life we shared For how fortunate we were : to have and to hold through sickness and in health Til death do us part Until we are together again This isnt our last love letter I love you with all my heart and soul Yours forever, Deirdre (Mrs. Hank Snow) Im fortunate to have fallen in love with, marry and make a life with the sharpest, coolest, funniest, most rare, bad ass, tender loving, loyal man on the planet, my husband Don Imus. A True American Hero I dont know why it has been so hard for me to write about my dear friend Don Imus. I certainly know what he meant to me, my family, my charity, my hospital and the millions of fans that listened and loved him for so many years. I keep reading all the beautiful condolences that people are writing about how much a part of their lives were effected by listening to him over the years. But what most people dont talk enough about is what he did for all of us. In every sense of the word, he was an American Hero. His work with children with so many different illnesses and his dedication to their future was unmatched by anyone I have ever known or heard about. Besides raising over $100,000,000 for so many causes, he took care of young people for over 20 years in a state where he could not breathe. Along with his incredible wife Deirdre, he created a world where children were not defined by their disease. That was a miracle! He was a miracle. I will miss him ever day for the rest of my life. I was blessed to be a part of his and Deirdes life. No one will ever do what he did. I love you Don Imus - A TRUE AMERICAN HERO David Jurist IMUS IN THE MORNING FIRST DAY BACK! Its an extraordinary tale with a whiff of Banksy about it, although surprisingly, he was not involved. In a landmark ruling, 21 New York street artists have sued and won $6.7m in damages from the owner of a building who destroyed their graffiti when he had the building demolished. Following a three-week trial in November, on 12 February, Judge Frederic Block ruled against Jerry Wolkoff, owner of the 5Pointz complex in Queens, New York, conferring the biggest award of $1.3m on the buildings mastermind-curator, graffiti artist Meres One, real name Jonathan Cohen. The demolition of the former factory site turned graffiti mecca began in August 2014. The year before, artists had tried to oppose the warehouses destruction, but an attempt to win an injunction to prevent the owner from knocking it down was unsuccessful. 5Pointz mastermind Jonathan Cohen, aka Meres One, who won $1.3m in the landmark court ruling (Thee Erin/Flickr) (Thee Erin/Flickr, CC BY-SA) In the 1990s, Wolkoff had agreed to allow the derelict factory to be used as a showcase for local graffiti talent. Called the Phun Factory, it was later renamed 5Pointz by Meres One in 2002. Under the artists watchful eye, it evolved into an aerosol art centre and became famous the world over, a huge draw for graffiti aficionados and tourists alike. In the end, Wolkoff profited from the graffiti and its destruction, when the value of the complex went up from $40m to $200m and permission to build luxury condos was obtained. Destroying 5Pointz, the judge stressed, permitted Wolkoff to realise that value. Judge Block accepted that 45 artworks at the centre of the case had recognised stature and must receive protection under the US Visual Artists Rights Act (VARA), a piece of legislation which was introduced in the US in 1990 to protect artists moral rights but has rarely been applied in their favour. The rationale used by the court to confirm these artworks were of merit was crucial. To be considered such, works of art dont need to be mentioned in academic publications or be considered masterpieces, as the expert for the property owner had argued. It was enough, the judge said, for the 5Pointz artists to show their professional achievements in terms of residences, teaching positions, fellowships, public and private commissions as well as media coverage and social media presence. Judge Block also carefully examined Wolkoffs behaviour. The artworks even those that could be easily removed as they had been placed on plywood panels were whitewashed prior to demolition without giving artists the 90-day notice required by VARA. And the owner did so, the judge stressed, while conscious of the fact the artists were pursuing a VARA-based legal action. Such behaviour, the judge concluded, was not acceptable. 5Pointz had become a popular tourist attraction (P Lindgren) Such blatant disregard for an important legal provision pushed the judge to award the artists the maximum amount of damages allowable under the law. And although he did not grant the injunction requested by the artists in 2013, the judge had warned Wolkoff that he would be exposed to potentially high damages if the artworks were finally considered of recognised stature, as they were by the 12 February ruling. The court also took into account that 5Pointz had become an attraction for visitors to New York, with busloads of tourists, schoolchildren and even weddings heading to the site. Also thanks to Meres Ones savvy stewardship for more than a decade, not only was the complex painted regularly by talented graffiti artists from all over the world, 5Pointz also attracted movie producers, advertising companies and bands, and was used as a location for the climax for the 2013 film Now You See Me. The judge did not attach much importance to the fact that several artworks at 5Pointz were not meant to be permanent, an argument that had also been relied on by Wolkoff to claim that the pieces could not be protected. But the court reminded him that VARA protects both permanent and temporary art. This is an important provision of the law, especially when all that makes a work transient is the site owners expressed intention to remove it. This ruling may well embolden other graffiti artists to sue property owners who destroy artworks without following the correct procedure, even beyond the US. It may also make owners of buildings whose walls host graffiti more careful. Most important, the huge amount of damages awarded in this case will convince many that ignoring legal provisions and disregarding legitimate graffiti art is not a good idea. Judge Block made clear he awarded the maximum penalty allowable to deter other building owners from behaving in the same disrespectful way as Wolkoff. Finally, the decision clearly marks the evolution of graffiti and street art, long considered to be temporary or transient art forms. It is now clear that artistic movements such as these aim to become more permanent forms of art, and that they have achieved a status similar to the one traditionally held by works of fine art. So the gap between street art and fine art is narrowing. As 5Pointz curator Meres One put it: This case will probably change the way art is perceived for generations to come. Enrico Bonadio is a senior lecturer in law at The City Law School, University of London. This article was first published in The Conversation (theconversation.com) Netflixs next big-budget science fiction movie has landed, Mute, the streaming service no doubt hoping the Duncan Jones-directed movie will avoid the negative reviews received by both Bright and The Cloverfield Paradox. Unfortunately, the initial consensus is not looking good, the first batch of reviews praising the visuals with multiple comparisons to Blade Runner but criticising the pacing, plot, and unbalanced handling of weighty subject material, many commenting on the way Mute handles a subplot about paedophilia. Set 40 years into the future, Mute follows Alexander Skarsgards Amish muted bartender who traverses Berlin in search of his missing girlfriend. Perhaps the most scathing reviews come from The Independent and The Guardian, who both awarded the movie one-star, along with The Telegraph, who gave two-stars, adding: Jones conjured intimacy on the surface of the Moon, but in the crowded streets of futuristic Berlin, theres no real feeling. Hollywood trades were also negative, Varietys critic calling Mute an over-designed but otherwise uninspired slice of sci-fi noir and The Hollywood Reporter saying: The handsomely downbeat atmospherics overwhelm its themes of love, parenthood, crime and punishment. Below are a handful of snippets from reviews. Mute is available now on Netflix. 27 films to look out for in the first half of 2018 Show all 27 1 /27 27 films to look out for in the first half of 2018 27 films to look out for in the first half of 2018 Black Panther Released: 12 February 12 February Director: Ryan Coogler Cast: Chadwick Boseman, Michael B. Jordan, Lupita Nyong'o, Forest Whitaker, Danai Gurira, Martin Freeman 27 films to look out for in the first half of 2018 The Greatest Showman Released: 1 January 1 January Director: Michael Gracey Cast: Hugh Jackman, Zac Efron, Michelle Williams, Rebecca Ferguson, Zendaya, 27 films to look out for in the first half of 2018 Darkest Hour Released: 12 January 12 January Director: Joe Wright Cast: Gary Oldman, Kristin Scott Thomas, Ben Mendelsohn 27 films to look out for in the first half of 2018 Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri Released: 12 January Director: Martin McDonagh 12 JanuaryMartin McDonagh Cast: Frances McDormand, Woody Harrelson, Sam Rockwell, Caleb Landry Jones > Twentieth Century Fox 27 films to look out for in the first half of 2018 Coco Released: 19 January 19 January Director: Lee Unkrich ,p>Cast: Anthony Gonzalez, Gael Garcia Bernal, Benjamin Bratt, Renee Victor 27 films to look out for in the first half of 2018 Downsizing Released: 19 January 19 January Director: Alexander Payne Cast: Matt Damon, Christopher Waltz, Jong Chau, Kristen Wiig, Jason Sudeikis 27 films to look out for in the first half of 2018 Early Man Released: 26 January 26 January Director: Nick Park Cast: Eddie Redmayne, Tom Hiddleston, Maisie Williams, Timothy Spall 27 films to look out for in the first half of 2018 Fifty Shades Freed Released: 9 February 9 February Director: James Foley Cast: Dakota Johnson, Jamie Dornan, Kim Basinger 27 films to look out for in the first half of 2018 Maze Runner: The Death Cure Released: 9 February 9 February Director: Wes Ball Cast: Dylan O'Brien, Thomas Brodie Sangster, Kaya Scodelario, Giancarlo Esposito, Aidan Gillen 27 films to look out for in the first half of 2018 The Shape of Water Released: 16 February 16 February Director: Guillermo del Toro Cast: Sally Hawkins, Octavia Spencer, Michael Shannon, Michael Stuhlbarg, Doug Jones 27 films to look out for in the first half of 2018 Annihilation Released: 23 February 23 February Director: Alex Garland Cast: Natalie Portman, Jennifer Jason Lee, Gina Rodriguez, Tessa Thompson, Oscar Isaac 27 films to look out for in the first half of 2018 Dark River Released: 23 February 23 February Director: Clio Barnard Cast: Ruth Wilson, Mark Stanley, Sean Bean 27 films to look out for in the first half of 2018 Red Sparrow Released: 2 March 2 March Director: Francis Lawrence Cast: Jennifer Lawrence, Joel Edgerton, Jeremy Irons 27 films to look out for in the first half of 2018 Tomb Raider Released: 16 March 16 March Director: Roar Uthaug Cast: Alicia Vikander, Walton Goggins, Daniel Wu, Dominic West, 27 films to look out for in the first half of 2018 A Wrinkle in Time Released: 23 March 23 March Director: Ava DuVernay Cast: Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon, Mindy Kaling, Zach Galifianakis 27 films to look out for in the first half of 2018 Pacific Rim: Uprising Released: 23 March 23 March Director: Steven S. DeKnight Cast: John Boyega, Scott Eastwood, Charlie Day, Burn Gorman 27 films to look out for in the first half of 2018 Roman J Israel, Esq Released: 23 March 23 March Director: Dan Gilroy Cast: Denzel Washington, Colin Farrell, Carmen Ejogo Columbia Pictures 27 films to look out for in the first half of 2018 Isle of Dogs Released: 30 March 30 March Director: Wes Anderson Cast: Bill Murray, Bryan Cranston, Edward Norton, Tilda Swinton, Scarlett Johansson 27 films to look out for in the first half of 2018 Ready Player One Released: 30 March 30 March Director: Steven Spielberg Cast: Tye Sheridan, Olivia Cooke, Ben Mendelsohn, Mark Rylance, Simon Pegg 27 films to look out for in the first half of 2018 Avengers: Infinity War Released: 27 April 27 April Director: The Russo Brothers Cast: Robert Downey, Jr, Chris Hemsworth, Scarlett Johansson, Josh Brolin 27 films to look out for in the first half of 2018 Untitled Han Solo Film Released: 25 May 25 May Director: Ron Howard Cast: Alden Ehrenreich, Emilia Clarke, Woody Harrelson, Donald Glover 27 films to look out for in the first half of 2018 Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom Released: 8 June 8 June Director: J.A. Bayona Cast: Bryce Dallas Howard, Chris Pine, B.D. Wong, Toby Jones 27 films to look out for in the first half of 2018 Deadpool 2 Released: 1 June Director: David Leitch 1 JuneDavid Leitch Cast: Ryan Reynolds, Morena Baccarin, T.J. Miller, Zazie Beetz, Josh Brolin 27 films to look out for in the first half of 2018 Ocean's 8 Released: 22 June 22 June Director: Gary Ross Cast: Sandra Bullock, Cate Blanchett, Mindy Kaling, Sarah Paulson, Anne Hathaway, Olivia Munn, Helena Bonham Carter, Rihanna, Matt Damon 27 films to look out for in the first half of 2018 Ant-Man and the Wasp Released: 29 June 29 June Director: Peyton Reed Cast: Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lilly, Michael Douglas, Michelle Pfeiffer 27 films to look out for in the first half of 2018 Soldado Released: 29 June 29 June Director: Stefano Sollima Cast: Benicio del Toro, Josh Brolin, Jeffrey Donovan, Catherine Keener, Matthew Modine 27 films to look out for in the first half of 2018 The Incredibles 2 Released: 13 July 13 July Director: Brad Bird Cast: Craig T. Nelson, Holly Hunter, Sarah Vowell, Samuel L. Jackson The Independent Christopher Hooton 1/5 When Paul Rudd's antics and the kidnapping storyline finally combine, it's in a woefully confusing way that manages to be both boring and melodramatic while giving paedophilia one of the most curious cinematic treatments on record. The Guardian Charles Bramesco 1/5 Watching Jones passively bob in the deep end of his imagination, a viewer longs for the compulsory baseline competence of the big studios anything but the blandness masquerading as future cult bait. The Telegraph Ed Cumming 2/5 The script has none of the reserved cool which made Moon so appealing. In the circumstances, Skarsgard might feel he escaped lightly with a part that involves almost no speaking. The plot hangs on relationships which simply dont ring true. [Paul] Rudd, in particular, is poorly cast, lacking the menace his role demands. Jones conjured intimacy on the surface of the moon, but in the crowded streets of futuristic Berlin, theres no real feeling. Variety Peter Debruge an over-designed but otherwise uninspired slice of sci-fi noir a stock missing-persons mystery in which a wordless bartender goes searching for his girlfriend through the sketchy near-future Berlin underworld. Access unlimited streaming of movies and TV shows with Amazon Prime Video Sign up now for a 30-day free trial Sign up The Hollywood Reporter - Sheri Linden All the genre bells and whistles, however finely crafted, get in the way of the storys undercurrents of longing and grief. Uproxx Amy Nicholson I should be clear that Mute isnt a good movie. It manages to be both bizarre and boring. While I admire Jones inventive details like a bowling ball that looks like a giant die, or a severed cow cartoon shilling for steak, or the way cell phones have advanced to where people dont acknowledge theyve answered a ring before screaming hello into a startled room, the film simply looks cheap. LA Times Kevin Crust Jones reportedly conceived of the film years ago. However, as the story evolved and took on more emotional themes he never found the right balance between the sentimental and the hard-boiled. As resonant as the personal may potentially be, it gets lost in a quagmire of influences. GameSpot - Michael Rougeau Mute is a bad joke about itself, the movie version of a Weird Al Yankovic song (an Amish Paradise sequel set in the future?), only if the filmmaker wasnt aware it was supposed to be a parody. Its like Mute underwent so many rewrites that the scenes and characters no longer match up or like its a first draft that never underwent a single edit, though considering how long Jones was trying to get this made 12 years! the former seems more likely. GQ Tom Philip Doing the talking here instead are two black market American surgeons, Cactus Bill and Duck (Paul Rudd and Justin Theroux), who make good use of their chemistry and comedy bona fides to bring some effective, unrehearsed levity to some corners of Mute. That is until a dreadfully tasteless (and needless!) subplot ruins that, too. If there is redemption to this film, it comes in Rudd and Therouxs easy partnership and some impressive set design work. But thats about it. The Wrap Robert Abele Ultimately, its hard to sense the same director who embedded us so thoroughly in the carefully heightened atmosphere of philosophical adventure that was Moon. Here, a Sam Rockwell cameo glimpsed in a news clip detailing a Lunar Industries imbroglio clues us in that Mute is set in the same world as that earlier film. But the connection doesnt extend, regrettably, to the filmmaker behind both movies. ScreenRant Sandy Schaefer Mute is a middle of the road sci-fi/Noir offering that resembles a lower-grade version of the actual Blade Runner sequel that came out last year, Blade Runner 2049. Jones spent several years working on the project, but the final movie result feels like an intriguing concept that he simply wasnt able to realize as fully. Netflixs confidence in filmmakers vision and willingness to take huge leaps just because an idea sounds cool and original is quite admirable and has led to the big-budget realisation of some great projects that might otherwise have never seen the light of day. Unfortunately, Mute represents the nadir of this paradigm-shifting strategy. Duncan Jones impressive 2009 feature, Moon, feels more like a fluke with every subsequent entry into his filmography. Mute was supposed to be a return to idiosyncratic form for the director after the financially successful but critically-maligned franchise movie Warcraft, but youll spend the two-hours-and-six-minutes feeling embarrassed for him, and you will watch it, because its fascinating to try and work out why anyone felt there was a film to be made here, let alone on this scale. Alexander Skarsgard plays Leo, a mute Amish bartender mute, I assume, simply because Jones felt like writing a mute protagonist, the characters inability to talk being quickly explained at the films opening with a flashback to an accident where Leos throat was sliced by a speedboat propeller (that classic Amish injury; whatever happened to a good old grain thresher?). He is madly in love with Naadirah (Seynab Saleh), a cocktail waitress at the bar he tends in dystopian Berlin, who goes missing under suspicious circumstances, leading Leo on a Taken-esque mission to track her down. But wait! Theres a second storyline, tonally (and initially narratively) oblique, that stars Paul Rudd and Justin Theroux as a pair of wise-cracking, for-hire surgeons. One of them is possibly a paedophile. Both are characters lifted directly, Jones has confirmed, from Robert Altmans 1970 comedy M*A*S*H, the similarity going right down to Rudds handlebar moustache. Justin Therouxs shawl cardigan-wearing surgeon, moments after being outed as a paedophile, heading out for a night on the tiles in dystopian Berlin. So thats the lay of the land, and how wildly undulating it is, the action cutting between Skarsgard running around futuristic Berlin which looks like if Warner Bros licensed a Blade Runner theme park with a weaponised table leg hes whittled, and Rudd and Theroux, whose character names are Cactus and Duck by the way, tenpin bowling and shooting the shit and perving on girls like theyre in deleted scenes from Dazed and Confused. A good word to describe Mute might be berserk. In one scene, Duck is mortified to be outed by his good friend Cactus over workplace sexual misconduct involving children, but then Cactus gets a bit of good news and the pair immediately put things behind them and go out on the town for celebratory burgers, Duck flipping traffic off out the sunroof. This was intentionally absurd, I suppose, but jars with the supposedly serious and sombre central plot strand. In The Shape of Water, Sally Hawkins gave an incredibly moving performance as a mute, conveying so much emotion without words, whereas Skarsgard is just frustratingly silent and dull, to the point where it feels less like hes a mute and more like hes just doing the whole hard-boiled, Liam Neeson, no-need-for-words-when-I-can-thump-henchmen-with-my-table-leg character thing we know from revenge thrillers. The film somehow simultaneously looks like it cost $100 million and $100,000, which, in fairness, might just be down to how emphatically Blade Runner 2049s VFX team knocked it out of the dystopian vista park recently, while the score, left to provide the emotion while the protagonist is silent, overdoes this and generally feels quite amateurish. What good is there to speak of in Mute? The idea for an app that just orders takeaway to wherever your phone is, I guess, and Paul Rudd, who does the best possible job with some very clunky dialogue. His scenes with Theroux are so long though that you almost forget about the whole kidnap storyline running in tandem, killing its momentum, and when the two plot elements finally combine, its in a woefully confusing way that manages to be both boring and melodramatic, while giving paedophilia one of the most curious cinematic treatments on record. Clearly expecting a mixed response to Mute ahead of its release on Netflix last night, Jones tweeted a picture of a jar of Marmite, which, with its love-it-or-hate-it analogy, if anything does a disservice to the spread. Every artist at the Grammys when youre looking at them on screen and you see their faces all theyre thinking is, Dammit are we next? Imagine Dragons frontman Dan Reynolds is explaining the relief of being able to just sit and watch the Grammy Awards, because the pressure of singing in front of hundreds of your peers is, understandably, quite terrifying. Its impossible to be in the moment and enjoy it, he says. The most intimidating performances weve ever done were playing Fleetwood Mac for Fleetwood Mac (at a Stevie Nicks tribute performance during Grammys week), and playing The Beatles Revolution in front of Paul McCartney. Youre thinking, Theres no way we can do this justice, and theyre watching us do it. The Grammys has that kind of vibe. He, bassist Ben McKee and I are sat in a weird kind of meeting room at a Manhattan hotel ahead of the 60th Grammys ceremony, where Imagine Dragons were nominated for best pop vocal album and best pop group performance. Four years ago they took home the Grammy for best rock performance for Radioactive, and also blew the audience away with an incendiary mashup of that same track and Kendrick Lamars m.A.A.d City. That was a cool night, Reynolds says, we had a lot of fun. Kendrick is amazing, and deserves all that hype, and hes a good human being too I think people sense that. Hes so willing to be creative and get into something different. While theyve teamed up on a few occasions with different artists including for the brilliant Sucker For Pain featuring Lil Wayne, Wiz Khalifa, Logic, X Ambassadors and TY Dolla $ign their own albums are feature-free; they prefer to avoid the current trend of having 10 or more guest artists on one record. Its all the hype right now, but its not what I grew up on, Reynolds shrugs. Not that its a bad thing to do, but the bands I listened to ... I would buy their album and I wanted to hear 10-plus tracks from that artist. So were really particular about who we work with, rather than thinking about whos all the rage right now, as some forced thing. He makes a half-hearted attempt at a British accent: Its not our cup of tea. I think its really important whatever youre doing to be honest with it, he continues. Fans are much more intelligent and intuitive than artists know or give credit to. If it comes from a place thats not authentic, people can read right through it. As long as youre doing you, nobody can argue with that. But when youre jumping on something because of a trend to sell records thats the demise of an artist. He pauses, grinning. But who knows, maybe next year well put out a reggaeton album. You have my permission to call us out if that ever happens. Enjoy unlimited access to 70 million ad-free songs and podcasts with Amazon Music Sign up now for a 30-day free trial Sign up Their latest album Evolve saw the band work with acclaimed musician Justin Tranter, whose songwriting credits including Justin Bieber, Britney Spears, Kesha. Selena Gomez and Camila Cabello. While Reynolds still writes the bands lyrics, he says it was incredible to work with someone who helped bring out a new side of him as a writer, and the band as a whole. I think it really allowed us to go to some different places, it made us speak a little more clearly as a group, McKee suggests. We were able to be creative and keep throwing all these ideas out, but also have an outside voice focus all of that, trim the fat and pull us back to the texture we were chasing. The people who get acknowledged the least are co-writers, Reynolds says. Justin is so key he never begged for the credit on a song, but he deserves to be seen, because he is a talented artist whos been doing rad s**t for a long time. With this album Dan was really coming from a place where he was more sure of himself, McKee notes of Reynolds songwriting. Wed had some time off to connect with our lives outside the band, so there was less of that trying to figure out what the hell is going on. He looks to Reynolds: It felt like you were writing from a more declarative place, more clear about where you were. Something the band learned from their latest album was how constructive it could be to take longer periods between releasing new music, allowing for more time to re-examine themselves and their work. Where their second record Smoke + Mirrors followed swiftly on from their hit debut and an exhausting global tour, Evolve seemed like more of a considered, careful recording process. An album and a tour cycle is a really big thing to take on, McKee nods, physically and psychologically it removes you from everything that isnt Imagine Dragons. You forget who you were before the band, and the more you get wrapped up in that, the more youre affected by something like a bad piece of press. You need to have balance. I think you can hear a little bit of sickness in Smoke + Mirrors, not bad music, but theres a beautiful brokenness to it. But we write and make better music when were coming from this more empowered place and we enjoy performing it more; it makes for a better tour and experience for all of us. With this latest album, Dan was really coming from a place where he was more sure of himself (Eliot Lee Hazel) Reynolds is one of several artists to speak openly about his battles with depression, which he has dealt with over the years on a really heavy level. Both he and McKee believe its important to be frank about mental health, about having a therapist (people are afraid of that word), and says theres almost an obligation for artists to make sure their fans know theyre often going through the same issues. When McKee was a teenager he was sent to therapy as a punishment, he says, and loathed every moment because it was implied that it was something to be ashamed of. Still to this day Im working to get over that, he says. Reynolds and guitarist Wayne Sermon both grew up as members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints or the Mormon church and the band have been raising awareness of the issues involving LGBT+ youth within that religion: Reynolds fronts the Don Argott-directed documentary Believer premiered at Sundance Film Festival where he visits with heartbroken parents of gay children and teenagers who took their own lives after being rejected by their church; meets other teenagers who have managed to navigate their faith and sexuality. I was kicked out of BYU (Brigham Young University) a Mormon college for having sex with my girlfriend, he says. It was this really strange thing of feeling, like this was a beautiful thing in my life yet I was supposed to feel bad about it. It was really the first time I dealt with depression. I had to stay at home, live with my parents while all my friends went off to college. It was a really shameful process for me, being made to feel bad about something that should have been celebrated. That did a lot of damage to me, and still has, to this day. And thats on such a minor scale compared to what our LGBT+ youth in Mormonism deal with, which is being told their innate sense of being and sexuality is flawed and that they should feel bad about it. In Utah the number one reason for death among teenagers is suicide, thats likely a lot to do with the shaming Utah is basically all Mormons. There are also statistics that show if an LGBT youth is not accepted in their home or environment theyre eight times more likely to take their own life. Three times more likely to take part in risky drug use. Its a broken culture, that needs to be fixed, and the first step is hopefully shining a light on it. Because Mormons dont want to talk about it. And its not just Mormonism, its all Orthodox religion. Hes bugged by people who try to brush off the issue by suggesting teenagers should simply leave the religion. Of course it isnt that easy, a frustrated Reynolds points out: Youre asking the kid to to get kicked out of their home, and that increases their risk of suicide. These kids didnt choose their religion, and they didnt choose their sexuality either. Much of Reynolds desire to shine a light on the issues within Mormonism stem from an episode of the musical dramedy Glee, which featured a cover of Imagine Dragons song Its Time by an LGBT+ character sending an encouraging message to his love interest. It sparked a surge of messages to Reynolds from Imagine Dragons fans who assumed because he was raised Mormon, and is a straight, married father he wouldnt support their sexuality. Its impossible for me to reach out to all of those people and respond to each one just to say, Thats not true, I support you 100 per cent, he says. But because thats my culture, thats my history Mormons were at the forefront of fighting against marriage equality for gay couples, so theres a lot of ground to make up. The last couple of years have been the first time in my life where Ive allowed myself to follow my heart regardless of whether its going to offend people along the way. I was raised in a home where you were taught not to rub society up the wrong way. To never offend people. Now Ive just decided if youre not offending people youre doing something wrong, youre not trying to make progress. To make progress you have to have hard discussions sometimes you have to be offensive. Imagine Dragons new single Next To Me is out now they are currently on tour in the UK. Believer the documentary about LGBT+ youth and the Mormon church, was produced via Live Nation Productions and is set to be released by HBO this summer. Time stands still in a former Soviet military hospital in Budapest which was abandoned when the last Russian troops left Hungary in 1991. Soldiers wounded in Afghanistan were among those treated here. Now, the 70,000sq m- (17-acre) complex lies derelict its walls crumbling, its floors torn up, its windows broken. Traces of the Russian presence are everywhere. In one of the apartments where doctors and soldiers lived with their families, a copy of the Russian newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda has been left behind. It dates from 20 November 1988 and the front page details a visit by Mikhail Gorbachev to India a memento of the final years of communism under the last leader of the Soviet Union. In one room, health records and empty medicine bottles lie scattered on the floor. A document reveals that a Russian soldier named Sergei G, who was born in 1962 and served as a driver, was brought to the hospital in 1983 with severe burns on his hands and neck. It is not clear whether his wounds were from the war in Afghanistan, which the Soviet Union invaded in 1979, or what eventually became of him. First opened in 1904 as a private mental institution, the hospital was occupied by the Red Army as it advanced against the Nazis in 1945. New buildings, including a huge surgery department, were added later. Now they are eerily quiet, with only pigeons flying in and out. Water drips from the ceilings of the operating theatres. Budapests abandoned Soviet military hospital in pictures Show all 12 1 /12 Budapests abandoned Soviet military hospital in pictures Budapests abandoned Soviet military hospital in pictures Apartments used by Russian soldiers and doctors at the former Soviet military hospital, which has been derelict since 1991 when the last Russian troops left Hungary Reuters Budapests abandoned Soviet military hospital in pictures Medicine bottles lie on a windowsill. Theyve been untouched for nearly 30 years Reuters Budapests abandoned Soviet military hospital in pictures A staircase in the abandoned hospital, which was first opened as a mental institution Reuters Budapests abandoned Soviet military hospital in pictures Paint surrounding a power socket cracks and peels away from the wall Reuters Budapests abandoned Soviet military hospital in pictures Broken furniture and Russian signs lie scattered on the floor Reuters Budapests abandoned Soviet military hospital in pictures A Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper dating from 1988 lies on the floor in a building that was once apartments where Russian doctors and soldiers lived with their families Reuters Budapests abandoned Soviet military hospital in pictures A courtyard in the former Soviet military hospital. Many locals recall the place when it was full of soldiers Reuters Budapests abandoned Soviet military hospital in pictures A surgery department in the derelict hospital, where water drips from the walls and ceiling Reuters Budapests abandoned Soviet military hospital in pictures A sign in Russian: Soldiers Canteen Reuters Budapests abandoned Soviet military hospital in pictures The former hustle and bustle of the hospital has been replaced by silence pigeons are now the main visitors Reuters Budapests abandoned Soviet military hospital in pictures Balconies in the former hospital, where Red Army soldiers were treated during the Second World War Reuters Budapests abandoned Soviet military hospital in pictures Writing on the wall of the surgery department. They packed everything in rail carriages and left the bare walls to us Reuters With the fall of communism across Eastern Europe and the collapse of the Warsaw Pact military alliance, Moscow brought home its troops from around the region. But Laszlo Hajdu, 70, mayor of the Budapest district where the hospital is located, said that in 1991 the Hungarian government was not willing to pay the Russians compensation for what they had invested in the hospital. They packed everything in rail carriages and left the bare walls to us, Hajdu says. We said farewell to them in June 1991 with vodka, according to Russian customs, and they left in tears ... I was there when we took over the buildings. That marked the start of a long saga of changing ownership rights, and searches still unresolved to find new investors. Locals still remember the days when they lived next to the Soviet military complex. Soldiers were treated here, there was a tall, white stone wall surrounding the buildings and they peeked over the fence ... We were not allowed into the territory of the hospital, says Margit Arkos, 63. When they left, there was a big sale, nearly everyone living around here bought chairs, sofas, she says. Its incredible that nearly 30 years have passed, and they have still not been able to decide what should happen to this hospital. Gucci has been heavily criticised after the luxury fashion label sent white models down the runway wearing traditional Sikh turbans for its autumn/winter 2018 show. Canadian actor and model Avan Jogia began the backlash, in a tweet saying: could you not find a brown model? alongside an image of a white male model wearing a blue turban. His tweet quickly gained traction on the platform, with users responding by branding the Italian fashion label offensive and irresponsible. Yo.. @gucci ... I mess with you guys... but this isn't a good look for you, the 32-year-old wrote. And please, other people of colour, this happens to ALL of us, say something even if it doesn't apply to you personally. I got you, if you got me, he added in a subsequent tweet. Recommended Extra eyeballs are the hot new fashion trend for fall My blood is boiling right now, responded one of Jogias followers, who described creative director Alessandro Micheles decision to incorporate turbans into his collection as cultural appropriation. As a Sikh, I see this as a huge sign of disrespect and disregard towards Sikhism. It isnt hard to educate yourself on the significance of a turban. This isnt a mere fashion accessory! Thank you Avan for speaking out on this. The same follower went on to post news clippings illustrating Sikhs being harassed and verbally abused for wearing turbans. We wear turbans and we are the bad guys, Gucci wears them and its fashion?? No, they added. It comes after a Sikh man had his turban ripped from his head in a racist attack while he was queueing outside Parliament in London on Thursday. Traditionally in Sikhism, a turban is worn by both men and women as a symbol of piety, honour and spirituality. Almost all of a persons hair is typically concealed within the headgear, however, models hair could be seen tumbling out of the turbans at the Gucci show. Are severed heads 'the next big thing'? (Rex Features) Turbans were not the only talking point in Gucci's avant-garde fashion show, with some of those sent down the runway holding models of baby dragons and severed versions of their own heads. The Independent has contacted Gucci for comment. A plus-size blogger has called out Topshop for making half sizes while refusing to cater to plus-size women. Earlier this month, high street fashion brand Topshop announced that it would be introducing in-between sizes in its denim range a move that many considered to be revolutionary. However, one woman is here to remind us why this is a problem. At a size 22, fashion blogger Callie Thorpe implores women to celebrate the joys of fashion no matter their size, but it can be difficult to practice what you preach when brands outright refuse to cater for you. The body positivity campaigner says that because of this she does most of her shopping online. There are very few brick and mortar stores that cater to above a size 18 and its frustrating. As a woman I just want to look and feel as stylish as my friends who are smaller than me, Thorpe told The Independent. For this reason Ive always found the actual experience of shopping uncomfortable, it just makes you feel bad about yourself. Case in point, Topshops decision to introduce half sizes is only within the same range of sizes that it already offers, UK four to UK 16 a move that Thorpe openly criticised online by sharing an image from a magazine praising the launch with the sub-head Size Does Matter. Brands are wild. They will go as far to make half sizes to cater to people that can already find clothes in their size across the entire high street BUT wont make plus size clothes above a 16, she wrote. I guess size doesnt matter if you are plus size then. Yes, believe it or not, in 2018 the stigma surrounding plus-sized fashion is alive and well. But, why are so many fashion brands unwilling to expand their size range despite the obvious lack of options available to larger women and the potential growth it could offer them financially? Currently, the average dress size in the UK is a size 16 meaning that Topshop, and so many other retailers, are missing out on an entire consumer base thats willing to splash its cash. Fashion news in pictures Show all 22 1 /22 Fashion news in pictures Fashion news in pictures ATP World Tour Finals 2015 Designer Christopher Kane and actress Rose Leslie at the 2015 Barclays ATP World Tour Finals Getty Images Fashion news in pictures Beauty spot Get down to your nearest H&M store quick! The brand has launched a mammoth beauty collection, and all at budget friendly prices Fashion news in pictures VMA crisis Miley Cyrus hosting the VMAs was never going to be a modest affair. The latest is a costume copying scandal. Fashion news in pictures Cover girl Interview magazine unveiled its newest issues featuring cover image selfies of your favourite stars Fashion news in pictures Nadal in the nude The tennis star has stripped off as the new face of Tommy Hilfiger underwear, fragrance and tailoring Fashion news in pictures Spy drama The Man From U.N.C.L.E is more than just your average spy movie, we're obsessing after the seriously stylish sixties fashion Fashion news in pictures Queen B Beyonce has been revealed as the star of the prestigious September issue of US Vogue Fashion news in pictures May the force be with you Max Factor revealed a collaboration with Star Wars, makeup artist Pat McGrath has made these looks to celebrate the upcoming film release Fashion news in pictures Pop model Gigi Hadid stars in Calvin Harris' new music video Fashion news in pictures McQueen magic Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty closes as the V&A's most popular exhibition ever Fashion news in pictures Politics of style Samantha Cameron is crowned the best dressed woman in the world by Vanity Fair Rex Features Fashion news in pictures Model behaviour Brooklyn Beckham lands a modelling contract GETTY IMAGES Fashion news in pictures Olympic dreams Stella McCartney is on board once again to design the Team GB Rio 2016 kit Fashion news in pictures Birkin blow-up Jane Birkin asked for the iconic bag to be renamed due to animal cruelty concerns TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP/Getty Images Fashion news in pictures Gigi's new gig Gigi Hadid was announced as the new face of Topshop Fashion news in pictures Blahnik's bags Manolo Blahnik is to launch a debut handbag collection Fashion news in pictures Sister act Siblings were the subject of Balmain's new ad campaign featuring Kendall and Kylie Jenner as well as other famous model siblings Fashion news in pictures Caitlyn's couture Caitlyn Jenner makes her red carpet debut in an Atelier Versace white gown Fashion news in pictures Casino couture The Chanel couture show opens with A-list stars making their way to a casino in the centre of the catwalk - think Kristen Stewart, Julianne Moore and Vanessa Paradis Fashion news in pictures Scentsational Miu Miu kicks off couture week with the launch of its very first fragrance Fashion news in pictures Midnight at the museum The V&A announces all night openings for the final two weekends of the Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty exhibition Fashion news in pictures New York Fashion Week Beth Ditto walks the catwalk at Marc Jacobs spring/summer 2016 show Getty Images In fact, the UK plus size market was estimated to be worth 6.6bn last year and, according to Price Waterhouse Coopers - a multinational professional services network its only going to grow with an forecasted rise of five to six per cent over the next four years. You would think that designers and businesses would be jumping at the chance to reach out to this practically untapped market, however clearly thats not the case, but why? I think it comes down to upholding a brand image and quite honestly it seems as though they are ashamed to associate with something that society still deems as unacceptable, Thorpe explains. The market for plus size fashion is huge and is growing so I just dont understand why other than bias. "Im not saying that making in-between sizes is bad but why not cater to all women? Why exclude a certain body type if you are so concerned with fit being important? All of us who are different or perhaps I should say average (as actually the average woman in the UK is now above a 16) just want to feel included and we have money to spend. The Independent has contacted Topshop for comment. The UK Government has denied that it is planning to issue its own version of bitcoin. But the plan hasn't been entirely ruled out, and the Bank of England is actively watching the potential impact of a government introducing its own digital currency. The UK's central bank has long been rumoured to be exploring the possibilities opened up by digital currencies like bitcoin, which threaten traditional fiat currencies like the pound. Some of that work has even led to rumours that the UK could launch a digital currency all of its own, either in tandem with or instead of the pound. Gadget and tech news: In pictures Show all 25 1 /25 Gadget and tech news: In pictures Gadget and tech news: In pictures Gun-toting humanoid robot sent into space Russia has launched a humanoid robot into space on a rocket bound for the International Space Station (ISS). The robot Fedor will spend 10 days aboard the ISS practising skills such as using tools to fix issues onboard. Russia's deputy prime minister Dmitry Rogozin has previously shared videos of Fedor handling and shooting guns at a firing range with deadly accuracy. Dmitry Rogozin/Twitter Gadget and tech news: In pictures Google turns 21 Google celebrates its 21st birthday on September 27. The The search engine was founded in September 1998 by two PhD students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, in their dormitories at Californias Stanford University. Page and Brin chose the name google as it recalled the mathematic term 'googol', meaning 10 raised to the power of 100 Google Gadget and tech news: In pictures Hexa drone lifts off Chief engineer of LIFT aircraft Balazs Kerulo demonstrates the company's "Hexa" personal drone craft in Lago Vista, Texas on June 3 2019 Reuters Gadget and tech news: In pictures Project Scarlett to succeed Xbox One Microsoft announced Project Scarlett, the successor to the Xbox One, at E3 2019. The company said that the new console will be 4 times as powerful as the Xbox One and is slated for a release date of Christmas 2020 Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures First new iPod in four years Apple has announced the new iPod Touch, the first new iPod in four years. The device will have the option of adding more storage, up to 256GB Apple Gadget and tech news: In pictures Folding phone may flop Samsung will cancel orders of its Galaxy Fold phone at the end of May if the phone is not then ready for sale. The $2000 folding phone has been found to break easily with review copies being recalled after backlash PA Gadget and tech news: In pictures Charging mat non-starter Apple has cancelled its AirPower wireless charging mat, which was slated as a way to charge numerous apple products at once AFP/Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures "Super league" India shoots down satellite India has claimed status as part of a "super league" of nations after shooting down a live satellite in a test of new missile technology EPA Gadget and tech news: In pictures 5G incoming 5G wireless internet is expected to launch in 2019, with the potential to reach speeds of 50mb/s Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures Uber halts driverless testing after death Uber has halted testing of driverless vehicles after a woman was killed by one of their cars in Tempe, Arizona. March 19 2018 Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures A humanoid robot gestures during a demo at a stall in the Indian Machine Tools Expo, IMTEX/Tooltech 2017 held in Bangalore Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures A humanoid robot gestures during a demo at a stall in the Indian Machine Tools Expo, IMTEX/Tooltech 2017 held in Bangalore Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures Engineers test a four-metre-tall humanoid manned robot dubbed Method-2 in a lab of the Hankook Mirae Technology in Gunpo, south of Seoul, South Korea Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures Engineers test a four-metre-tall humanoid manned robot dubbed Method-2 in a lab of the Hankook Mirae Technology in Gunpo, south of Seoul, South Korea Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie 'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures Engineers test a four-metre-tall humanoid manned robot dubbed Method-2 in a lab of the Hankook Mirae Technology in Gunpo, south of Seoul, South Korea Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi Rex Gadget and tech news: In pictures Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session Rex Gadget and tech news: In pictures A test line of a new energy suspension railway resembling the giant panda is seen in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China Reuters Gadget and tech news: In pictures A test line of a new energy suspension railway, resembling a giant panda, is seen in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China Reuters Gadget and tech news: In pictures A concept car by Trumpchi from GAC Group is shown at the International Automobile Exhibition in Guangzhou, China Rex Gadget and tech news: In pictures A Mirai fuel cell vehicle by Toyota is displayed at the International Automobile Exhibition in Guangzhou, China Reuters Gadget and tech news: In pictures A visitor tries a Nissan VR experience at the International Automobile Exhibition in Guangzhou, China Reuters Gadget and tech news: In pictures A man looks at an exhibit entitled 'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures A new Israeli Da-Vinci unmanned aerial vehicle manufactured by Elbit Systems is displayed during the 4th International conference on Home Land Security and Cyber in the Israeli coastal city of Tel Aviv Getty But a senior government minister denied that the Bank of England was planning to introduce such a technology. Barry Sheerman, a Labour MP, asked "whether the Government will introduce a fiat digital currency". The question was posed towards the beginning of February. Recommended MPs to consider bitcoin regulation as part of cryptocurrency inquiry Now the government has confirmed that it won't launch such a currency, though suggested it had looked into it and didn't rule out the introduction of such technology in the future. "The Bank of England does not currently plan to issue a central bank-issued digital currency," said John Glen, the City minister. "However, the Bank is undertaking research to better understand the implications of a central bank issuing a digital currency." The Bank of England's digital currencies page makes clear that the bank is watching the development of digital currencies but it doesn't see any immediate threat from them. "We have assessed private digital currencies and concluded that while they are interesting, they do not currently pose a material risk to monetary or financial stability in the UK," it reads. "We continue to monitor developments in this area." Weve teamed up with cryptocurrency trading platform eToro. Click here to get the latest Bitcoin rates and start trading. Cryptocurrencies are a highly volatile unregulated investment product. No EU investor protection. 75% of retail investor accounts lose money when trading CFDs. BMW is in talks with a Chinese carmaker to build electric Mini cars, alongside production in Oxford which is due to start in 2019. The partnership between BMW and Great Wall Motor will most likely see electric minis made for the local Chinese market. BMW and Great Wall Motor have yet to disclose the exact location of the new production line or when it will start making electric Minis in China. Recommended How electric car batteries sparked a cobalt frenzy in 2017 The German carmaker announced, last July, plans to build the zero-emissions vehicle in Oxford beginning in 2019. Mini currently makes around 60 per cent of its approximately 360,000 compact cars a year at the Oxford plant, according to Reuters. Rival carmakers have already signalled their intent to claim a share of Chinas growing electric car market. Chinas increasingly favourable policies towards building battery-powered vehicles are attracting carmakers to the region. In December, Ford said it aims to launch 15 new electric cars by 2025 in China. According to Bloomberg, China surpassed the US in 2015 to become the worlds biggest market for electric cars. A deputy Governor of the Bank of England has warned that Brexit is hampering the UKs productivity growth. In a speech in Cambridge, Sir Dave Ramsden said that the UKs departure from the EU is imposing a dampening affect on the UKs productivity, defined as the amount of output the UK workforce can produce per hour worked and the key ingredient of rising household living standards. Recommended This is why it matters that UK productivity has fallen again The dampening effect of Brexit on productivity growth both through the effect of uncertainty on business investment in the short run and through the need to anticipate and respond to post Brexit trading relationships is likely to continue for some time, he said. UK productivity growth actually grew by 0.8 per cent in the final quarter of 2017, according to the latest estimate from the Office for National Statistics. Combined with the 0.9 per cent expansion in the third quarter, this was the strongest six month period for productivity since the financial crisis over which time output per hour has been essentially stagnant. Despite this recent surge, the Banks latest forecasts are for output per hour growth to remain subdued over the next three years, growing at well below pre-financial crisis rates. Sir Dave, who joined the Bank as deputy Governor for markets after a long career working at the Treasury last year, said that, regardless of Brexit, it is reasonable to argue that we are in a new paradigm of lower productivity growth, and that is reinforced by the global nature of the weakness. Mark Carney signals earlier interest rate hikes for UK However, Sir Dave did suggest that the Brexit drag on productivity could ease if the negotiations with the EU progress smoothly this year, reducing the uncertainty for firms. If there is clarity around the transition and future trading arrangements post Brexit, this could continue to reduce uncertainty, support business investment and lead to a stronger than expected pickup in productivity growth, he said. He also highlighted that some evidence from the Banks Decision Maker Panel Survey suggesting that the negative impact of Brexit on business investment growth may be lower in 2018 than 2017. Many other industrial surveys have shown that Brexit has caused firms to shelve investment plans until the outlook on future trade arrangements with the EU is clearer. Sir Dave, along with fellow deputy governor Sir Jon Cunliffe, was one of two members of the nine-person Monetary Policy Committee at the Bank who voted against raising rates to 0.5 per cent last November, on the grounds that he was not convinced that average wage growth was yet picking up as hoped. More than 3,000 people are needlessly dying each year in the UK because they cannot afford to properly heat their homes, new research has revealed. The UK has the second-worst rate of excess winter deaths in Europe, a study by National Energy Action and climate-change charity E3G found. The organisations called for urgent action to end to the devastating but entirely preventable tragedy that they say amounts to a cold homes public health crisis. The death toll looks set to rise next week as the UK braces for an imminent polar vortex predicted to bring harsh frost, snow showers and freezing temperatures. A total of 168,000 excess winter deaths have been recorded in the UK over the latest five-year period. Of 30 countries studied, only Ireland has a higher proportion of people dying due to cold weather. Almost 17,000 of those people are estimated to have died as a direct result of fuel poverty and a further 36,000 deaths are attributable to conditions relating to living in a cold home, the research found. The number dying through cold each year is similar to the amount who die from prostate or breast cancer. The research was published to coincide with Fuel Poverty Awareness Day on Friday which aims to highlight the problems faced by those struggling to keep warm in their homes. It comes just 24 hours after Centrica, which owns British Gas, announced plans to cut 4,000 jobs after a weak year in which it made 1.25bn profit. The companys chief executive, Ian Conn, said the Governments energy price cap - designed to prevent loyal and vulnerable customers being ripped off - was partly to blame for the layoffs. Pedro Guertler, of E3G, who co-authored the research, said the winter death figures were not only a tragedy but a national embarrassment. This epidemic is entirely preventable and E3G and NEA are calling on the UK Government to reinstate public capital investment in home energy efficiency to fix the cold homes crisis, he said. As well as ending needless suffering and premature deaths, it would also address a wide range of national infrastructure priorities. The impact of fuel poverty and cold homes is far wider than just the number of fatalities, the researchers said. GP surgeries and A&E departments - already at breaking point - are placed under unnecessary additional strain. Infants living in cold conditions have a 30 per cent greater risk of being admitted to hospital or primary care facilities, and are almost three times more likely to suffer from coughing, wheezing or respiratory illness. In later life, the impact of a cold home often compounds poor physical health and loneliness, the report states. Living in cold conditions also increases the risk of health problems including cardiovascular and respiratory diseases, as well as falls and injuries. A 2012 study by Age UK calculated that cold homes cost the NHS 1.36bn per year. Beyond the terrible scale of cold-related winter deaths, people experiencing fuel poverty can also struggle with poor mental health and this can sadly lead to total social isolation and even suicide, said Peter Smith, director of policy and research at NEA and co-author of the report . This preventable tragedy must end, he said. The UK Government must support the strong case for the re-introduction of adequate public capital investment - a necessity if we are to make the UKs homes warmer and safe for human habitation. UK news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 UK news in pictures UK news in pictures 6 September 2021 Traders in the Ring at the London Metal Exchange, in the City of London, after open-outcry trading returned for the first time since March 2020, when the Ring was temporarily closed due to the pandemic PA UK news in pictures 5 September 2021 People enjoy the warm weather on Sandbanks beach, Poole PA UK news in pictures 4 September 2021 Demonstrators from Animal Rebellion and Nature Rebellion protest in Trafalgar Square in London. PA UK news in pictures 3 September 2021 South Africa's Ntando Mahlangu (centre) wins the Men's 200 metres T61 Final ahead of second placed Great Britain's Richard Whitehead at the Tokyo 2020 Paralympic Games PA UK news in pictures 2 September 2021 A young common seal on the beach at Horsey Gap in Norfolk, as hundreds of pregnant grey seals come ashore ready for the start of the pupping season. PA UK news in pictures 1 September 2021 Goldfinches fighting over food in a garden in Strensham, Worcestershire PA UK news in pictures 31 August 2021 Gold Medallist Sarah Storey of Britain celebrates on the podium Reuters UK news in pictures 30 August 2021 Extinction Rebellion protesters hold a a tea party on Tower Bridge in London EPA UK news in pictures 29 August 2021 A police office tussles with a demonstrator on Cromwell Road outside the Natural History Museum during a protest by members of Extinction Rebellion in London PA UK news in pictures 28 August 2021 Members of the British armed forces 16 Air Assault Brigade walk to the air terminal after disembarking a Royal Airforce Voyager aircraft at Brize Norton, Oxfordshire POOL/AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 27 August 2021 Fabio Quartararo crashes during a MotoGP practice session at the British Grand Prix, Silverstone Circuit Action Images via Reuters UK news in pictures 26 August 2021 An Extinction Rebellion activist holds a placard in a fountain surrounded by police officers, during a protest next to Buckingham Palace in London Reuters UK news in pictures 25 August 2021 Gold Medallist Great Britains cyclist, Sarah Storey, celebrates after winning the Womens C5 3000m Individual Pursuit Final at the Tokyo 2020 Paralympic Games. It was her 15th Paralympic gold Reuters UK news in pictures 24 August 2021 A demonstrator dressed as bee during a protest by members of Extinction Rebellion on Whitehall, in central London PA UK news in pictures 23 August 2021 Former interpreters for the British forces in Afghanistan demonstrate outside the Home Office in central London AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 22 August 2021 Police officers form a line in front of the entrance to the Guildhall, London, where protesters have climbed onto a ledge above the entrance during an Extinction Rebellion stage a protest PA UK news in pictures 21 August 2021 People take part in a demonstration in solidarity with people of Afghanistan, in London Reuters UK news in pictures 20 August 2021 People zip wire across the sea from Bournemouth pier towards the beach. PA UK news in pictures 19 August 2021 Supporters of Geronimo the alpaca gather outside Shepherds Close Farm in Wooton Under Edge, Gloucestershire PA UK news in pictures 18 August 2021 Former Afghan interpreters and veterans hold a demonstration outside Downing Street, calling for support and protection for Afghan interpreters and their families PA UK news in pictures 17 August 2021 Military personnel board the RAF Airbus A400M at RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire, where evacuation flights from Afghanistan have been landing Reuters UK news in pictures 16 August 2021 Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer takes part in a minute's silence at Wolverhampton police station for the victims of the Plymouth mass shooting last week PA UK news in pictures 15 August 2021 2Storm, a ten-metre tall puppet of a mythical goddess of the sea created by Edinburgh-based visual theatre company Vision Mechanics, makes its way alongside the seafront at North Berwick, East Lothian, during a performance at the Fringe By The Sea festival PA UK news in pictures 14 August 2021 A woman and two young girls look at floral tributes in Plymouth where six people, including the offender, died of gunshot wounds in a firearms incident PA UK news in pictures 13 August 2021 Forensic officers in the Keyham area of Plymouth where six people, including the shooter, died of gunshot wounds in a firearms incident on Thursday evening PA UK news in pictures 12 August 2021 Children ride horses in the River Eden in Appleby, Cumbria, during the annual gathering of travellers for the Appleby Horse Fair PA UK news in pictures 11 August 2021 Stella Moris (left) reacts after talking to the media outside the High Court in London, following the first hearing in the Julian Assange extradition appeal, n London, following the first hearing in the Julian Assange extradition appeal. The US government has won the latest round in its High Court bid to appeal against the decision not to extradite Julian Assange on espionage charges PA UK news in pictures 10 August 2021 Students react after they receive their A-Level results at the Ark Academy, in London Reuters UK news in pictures 9 August 2021 The final athletes from Great Britain arrive home including Jason Kenny, Laura Kenny and Katie Archibald (front left-right) at Heathrow Airport, London following the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games PA UK news in pictures 8 August 2021 Great Britain's Laura Kenny during the closing ceremony of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games at the Olympic stadium in Japan PA UK news in pictures 7 August 2021 People from the Glasgow Southside community take part in the Govanhill Carnival, an anti-racist celebration of pride, unity and the contributions immigrants have made to the community in Govanhill, at Queen's Park, Glasgow PA UK news in pictures 6 August 2021 Chijindu Ujah of Britain, Zharnel Hughes of Britain, Richard Kilty of Britain and Nethaneel Mitchell-Blake of Britain celebrate winning silver as they pose with Asha Philip of Britain, Imani Lansiquot of Britain, Dina Asher-Smith of Britain and Daryll Neita of Britain after they won bronze in the women's 4 x 100m relay during Olympic Games Day 14 Getty UK news in pictures 5 August 2021 A protester places flowers on a photograph of an executed man during a demonstration organised by supporters of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) to protest against the inauguration of Iran's new president Ebrahim Raisi in central London AFP via Getty UK news in pictures 4 August 2021 England's Joe Root looks on as India's KL Rahul doesn't make it to a catch during day one of Cinch First Test match at Trent Bridge, Nottingham PA UK news in pictures 3 August 2021 Great Britain's Laura Kenny and Jason Kenny with their silver medals for the Women's Team Pursuit and Mens Team Sprint during the Track Cycling at the Izu Velodrome on the eleventh day of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games in Japan PA UK news in pictures 2 August 2021 Great Britains Charlotte Worthington competes during the Womens BMX Freestyle Final at the Tokyo Olympics PA UK news in pictures 1 August 2021 EPA UK news in pictures 31 July 2021 James Guy, Adam Peaty and Kathleen Dawson celebrate winning the gold medal in the mixed 4x100m medley relay final at the Tokyo Olympics AP UK news in pictures 30 July 2021 Great Britain's Bethany Shriever and Kye Whyte celebrate their Gold and Silver medals respectively for the Cycling BMX Racing at the Ariake Urban Sports Park on the seventh day of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games in Japan PA UK news in pictures 29 July 2021 Team GB's Mallory Franklin during the Womens Canoe Slalom Final on day six of the Tokyo Olympic Games. She went on to win the silver medal Getty UK news in pictures 28 July 2021 Canoers on Llyn Padarn lake in Snowdonia, Gwynedd. It was announced that the north-west Wales slate landscape has been granted UNESCO World Heritage Status PA UK news in pictures 27 July 2021 A view of one of two areas now being used at a warehouse facility in Dover, Kent, for boats used by people thought to be migrants. PA UK news in pictures 26 July 2021 A woman is helped by Border Force officers as a group of people thought to be migrants are brought in to Dover, Kent, onboard a Border Force vessel, following a small boat incident in the Channel PA UK news in pictures 25 July 2021 Vehicles drive through deep water on a flooded road in Nine Elms, London AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 24 July 2021 Utilities workers inspect a 15x20ft sinkhole on Green Lane, Liverpool, which is suspected to have been caused by ruptured water main PA UK news in pictures 23 July 2021 Children interact with Mega Please Draw Freely by artist Ei Arakawa inside the Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern in London, part of UNIQLO Tate Play the gallery's new free programme of art-inspired activities for families PA UK news in pictures 22 July 2021 Festivalgoers in the campsite at the Latitude festival in Henham Park, Southwold, Suffolk PA UK news in pictures 21 July 2021 A man walks past an artwork by Will Blood on the end of a property in Bedminster, Bristol, as the 75 murals project reaches the halfway point and various graffiti pieces are sprayed onto walls and buildings across the city over the Summer PA UK news in pictures 20 July 2021 People during morning prayer during Eid ul-Adha, or Festival of Sacrifice, in Southall Park, Uxbridge, London PA UK news in pictures 19 July 2021 Commuters, some not wearing facemasks, at Westminster Underground station, at 08:38 in London after the final legal Coronavirus restrictions were lifted in England PA The report highlights a number of additional benefits that would result from preventing fuel poverty, including helping the UK meet its carbon-reduction targets, improving air quality, reducing the UKs reliance on foreign gas imports, creating a healthier workforce, and supporting the energy-efficiency industry. The authors called on the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy to commit to stronger regulations on energy efficiency including a commitment to ensure all low-income households are certified as EPC level C by 2030. To achieve this, it recommends funding a coordinated programme of local schemes to help people implement energy efficiency improvements as well as a nationwide safety-net grant for those in particular need. The report also said the Chancellor, Philip Hammond, must commit to trialling systematic infrastructure investment in the next Budget. Action on cold homes and fuel poverty has not kept pace with need in recent years and progress has stalled with the number of homes being insulated each year falling 90 per cent since 2012. There is now a large gap between action to deliver warm and efficient homes, and the ambition to do so, which needs to be urgently filled, the report said. The report looked at fatality numbers between December and March compared with the four months before and after, across 30 countries over five winters. Those figures put the UK sixth-worst in Europe but this skews the results to make the number of excess winter deaths in relatively warm countries with short winters appear more dramatic while under-reporting cold-related deaths in cooler countries. After adjusting for this, the authors found that the UK is the second-worst country for excess winter deaths. The Royal Bank of Scotland today celebrates turning its first profit in 10 years, surpassing analyst expectations to post annual gains of 752m after suffering a huge 6.95bn loss for 2016. The lender has come a long way since being bailed out to the tune of 45bn by Gordon Browns Labour government in 2008 at the height of the financial crisis. RBS chief executive Ross McEwan hailed todays announcement as a really symbolic moment but stressed the bank still had much to do by way of restructuring and cost reductions. But how did RBS - still 72 per cent-owned by UK taxpayers - come to suffer its decade in the red? Heres a reminder of the banks turbulent recent history. Onset of the financial crisis RBSs demise began in October 2007 with its doomed 49bn takeover of Dutch bank ABN Amro, then the largest deal ever enacted in financial services. Recommended RBS has no reason to crow about its first profit in ten years Having over-extended its resources with the acquisition, RBS commenced a 12bn rights issue in April 2008 to generate funds. The cash call saw it place its entire insurance company portfolio up for sale including household names like Churchill and Direct Line. That August, the bank posted its first loss in 40 years, down 691m for the half-year an early omen of what was to come. At this point, the 2008 financial crisis hit, when the March rescue of Wall Street investment bank Bear Sterns by JP Morgan Chase was followed by the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September. Government bailouts begin In the market chaos that followed, the Treasury announced its emergency plan to inject 37bn of taxpayers money into RBS, along with Lloyds and HBOS. The banks CEO, Sir Fred Goodwin, who would subsequently become a poster-boy for the crisis and the focus of much public anger, was replaced by investment banker Stephen Hester in November 2008, a reputed turn-around specialist. The governments recapitalisation of RBS began in December 2008, when the state acquired 2.3bn shares for 15bn. This was not enough, it soon became apparent, the bank forecasting 28bn in losses for the year the following January. Fred The Shred under fire Fred Goodwin was duly hauled in front of a Treasury select committee and apologised for his part in the disaster. By April 2009, Chancellor Alistair Darling had injected another 5bn, followed by a further tranche of 25bn in December. Having made a total investment of 45bn in RBS on behalf of UK taxpayers, the Government owned an 80 per cent stake in the bank, but Brown and Darling were determined not to nationalise it, delegating control of its interests instead to UK Financial Investments, a quango. Fury at Goodwins 709,000-a-year pension erupted at the banks AGM that April, where his generous retirement package was opposed by 90 per cent of investors as the former chief executive found himself described as a benefits scrounger. He subsequently agreed to give up 200,000 of his pension that June after further waves of highly personal public protest against his reign. Goodwins torrid time continued when a Financial Services Authority report blamed him for multiple poor decisions during his stewardship of RBS in December 2011. He was duly stripped of his knighthood a month later. Meanwhile Hester, his successor, had singularly failed to plug the leaks or push up the companys share price to the Governments all-important solvency target of 502p. Hester turned down a 1m bonus amid further waves of public anger. Fines and misdemeanours That summer, a new crisis hit the beleaguered bank. An IT meltdown left customers entirely unable to access their current accounts, a farrago for which RBS was fined a cool 56m. It was again reprimanded in February 2013 for its part in the Libor-rigging scandal. The FSA found that the bank had demonstrated widespread misconduct, this time resulting in a fine of 390m. Recommended Royal Bank of Scotland posts first annual profit in a decade Mervyn King, outgoing Governor of the Bank of England, then revealed he had been advising the Banking Standards Commission to break up RBS into good and bad banks since 2009, urging that the former be sold. Coalition Chancellor George Osborne continued to reject Kings counsel, preferring to keep faith with Hesters insistence that the step was unnecessary and that RBS could be salvaged and returned to growth in its current form. Osborne would later confess that he regretted the decision. Unable to turn RBS around as promised, Hester announced his departure in June 2013 and was replaced as CEO by New Zealander Ross McEwan that October. McEwan moved quickly to streamline the business, placing an emphasis on cost reduction and restructuring, giving RBS a greater focus on high street banking in the UK and Ireland. Today it operates in just 12 countries, compared with 38 in its pomp. Just a month later, Lawrence Tomlinson, entrepreneur-in-residence at the Department for Business, produced a report accusing RBS of asset-stripping struggling small firms for profit. The bank hotly denied the charges but some 270 businesses threatened legal action. A year later in November 2014 RBS was in trouble again, this time among a number of banks accused of rigging foreign exchange markets. Sell-off talk begins Osborne announced his intention to sell the states stake in June 2015 despite its share price still dwindling at 361p, well short of the magic break-even mark and meaning doing so would result in multibillion pound losses. People want to see they get their money back, he said, while the Unite union countered that a deal at this time would short-change the public. Osborne nevertheless went ahead and sanctioned the sale of a 5 per cent stake, despite its resulting in a 1bn loss for the exchequer. The taxpayers stake in RBS fell to its current holding of 72 per cent. In February 2017, RBS conceded that it would not turn a profit until 2018 a promise on which it made good today - after enduring a full decade of annual losses. New Chancellor Philip Hammond greeted the admission by saying we have to live in the real world and arguing that the states sake will ultimately probably have to be sold at a major loss. 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. Despite todays good news and the feeling that McEwan has finally revived the banks fortunes, RBS is still not out of the woods. Shares dropped 4 per cent in value today over fears that it might be about to incur further heavy fines, this time from the US Department of Justice over claims it mis-sold mortgage-backed securities. Lecturers and students dance along to steel drums on the steps outside the university building. But they are not here for a celebration. They are on the picket line at Soas University of London for the first day of strikes against changes to the lecturers pensions. The university is just one of 57 across the UK hosting mass walkouts this week. Thirteen more days of strike action are expected to take place until Friday 16 March. Recommended Thousands of students demanding compensation for cancelled lectures The dispute centres on proposals put forward by Universities UK (UUK) for changes to the universities superannuation scheme (USS). The University College Union (UCU) has argued that the current proposals would leave a typical lecturer almost 10,000 a year worse off during retirement. But UUK says the pension scheme has a deficit of more than 6bn that cannot be ignored. Speaking to The Independent from the picket line, Tom Armstrong, UCU branch president of Soas, called the proposals appalling. He said: It is the removal of a guaranteed pension for lecturers. The cold winters day did not stop students from coming out in force to support the strikers on the picket line at Soas, who provided their lecturers with hot water bottles, tea and biscuits. It has been excellent, Mr Armstrong said. What has been particularly heartening is the support from students and UNISON members as well. The reaction has been excellent. And across Soas and its neighbouring universities - Birkbeck College, University College London, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and Senate House hundreds attended. It has kind of got a bit of a carnival atmosphere without the weather, Mr Armstrong said. As tens of thousands of lecturers and academics took to the picket line in the first day of action, a new YouGov survey revealed that three-in-five students backed their lecturers in the dispute. And the student support became even clearer when a group of protesters occupied the headquarters of UUK just 500 yards from Soas - with their banners and drums. Police officers were called to the Bloomsbury office where they stopped people from entering the front of the building while students were still inside. One sign in the window of Woburn House called the UUK out for citing their own reports when justifying their contributions to the economy. But not all students have been as supportive. On the Exeter University students guild website, some suggested playing Margaret Thatcher speeches to strikers to remind them about the value of hard work". Meanwhile, Conservative minister Liz Truss, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, tweeted her support for excellent lecturers who had decided to cross the picket line. Student news in pictures Show all 34 1 /34 Student news in pictures Student news in pictures South Korean policemen detain a student demonstrator during a protest against South Korean President Park Geun-Hye EPA Student news in pictures South Korean policemen detain student protestors during a protest against South Korean President Park Geun-Hye outside the National Assembly in Seoul, South Korea. The protesters demanded that the parliament takes steps to impeach President Park Geun-Hye EPA Student news in pictures Filipino demonstrators face off with anti-riot police during a protest near the US Embassy in Manila, Philippine EPA Student news in pictures Hundreds of protesters including Indigenous People, students and militant groups marched towards the US Embassy to protest against the presence of US military troops and condemning the violent dispersal which left at least forty people hurt including twenty police officers and three people who were run over by a police van EPA Student news in pictures A federal judge in Mexico has ordered that a once-fugitive police chief be held on charges of kidnapping in the disappearance of 43 students Student news in pictures A man holds up a photograph of a missing student with a caption reading 'We are missing 43,' during a meeting marking the 25-month anniversary of the disappearances of 43 students in the southern state of Guerrero, in Mexico City. A federal judge in Mexico has ordered that a once-fugitive police chief be held on charges of kidnapping in the disappearance of 43 students AP Student news in pictures Miguel Perez, an intern student from the University of Puerto Rico School of Medicine, puts away his cell phone before walking into the operating room at the Dr. Isaac Gonzalez MartInez Oncological Hospital in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Once they complete their general surgery training, many residents are moving to the United States in search of better wages, one of the main factors linked to the current shortage of specialists in the Island Student news in pictures Fewer EU students have applied to start university courses in the UK next autumn. There was a 9% fall in the numbers who had applied for courses, according to admissions service UCAS. PA wire Student news in pictures University students protest against President Nicolas Maduro, in Caracas, Venezuela. Masses of protesters jammed the streets of Venezuela's capital on the heels of a move by congress to open a political trial against Maduro, whose allies have blocked moves for a recall election AP Student news in pictures University students protest against President Nicolas Maduro, in Caracas, Venezuela AP Student news in pictures Thousands, most of them high school students, march during a demonstration in Madrid, Spain, on a one day strike to protest about the country's education law that increases the number of annual exams AP Student news in pictures Students gather on the west mall to confront the Young Conservatives of Texas student organization over a controversial bake sale on The University of Texas campus in Austin, Texas. The Young Conservatives of Texas chapter at the University of Texas-Austin sparked the protest with an affirmative action bake sale. The club encouraged students to buy a cookie and talk about the disastrous policy that is affirmative action Student news in pictures Donald Parish Jr, right, confronts Electrical and Computer Engineering senior Dewayne Perry over a controversial bake sale on The University of Texas campus in Austin, Texas. The Young Conservatives of Texas chapter at the University of Texas-Austin sparked the protest with an affirmative action bake sale. The club encouraged students to buy a cookie and talk about the disastrous policy that is affirmative action AP Student news in pictures Brigham Young University announced that students who report sexual assault will no longer be investigated for possible violations of the Mormon-owned school's strict honor code that bans such things as alcohol use AP Student news in pictures Students of secondary education march to protest against the final examinations and LOMCE (The Improvement Quality Education Law) law, after a call by trade unions, in Murcia, Spain EPA Student news in pictures South African police have used stun grenades and rubber bullets to disperse hundreds of protesters who had marched to the parliament building to call for free university education, where the finance minister was giving a budget speech AP Student news in pictures Police break up student protests outside the parliament in Cape Town, South Africa Reuters Student news in pictures South African Policemen fire rubber bullets at student protestors in Cape Town, South Africa AP Student news in pictures A student protestor is hit by a rubber bullet in Cape Town, South Africa AP Student news in pictures An injured student is helped by colleagues during protest outside the parliament during South African Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan's medium term budget speech in Cape Town, South Africa Reuters Student news in pictures Plaintiffs and bereaved families of elementary school students killed in the tsunami that followed a major earthquake in northeastern Japan in 2011, show banners that say 'victory in a suit filed with the Sendai District Court' in Sendai. A Japanese court ordered municipalities to pay $13.7 million dollars to families of school children who were swept away to their deaths by the 2011 tsunami Getty Student news in pictures A group of student at Ewha Womans University calls for a thorough investigation into those involved in years of engagement with state affairs backstage by Choi Soon-sil, a personal confidante of South Korean President Park Geun-hye, at the school's front gate in Seoul, South Korea EPA Student news in pictures Students raise placards during a strike action called by the student union, in Madrid against university entry exams Getty Student news in pictures Libyans throw a newly graduated student into a fountain as they celebrate during the graduation ceremony for students from the Faculty of Pharmacy at the Al-Arab University in the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi Getty Student news in pictures Libyans celebrate as they attend the graduation ceremony for students from the Faculty of Pharmacy at the Al-Arab University in the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi Getty Student news in pictures Libyans celebrate as they attend the graduation ceremony for students from the Faculty of Pharmacy at the Al-Arab University in the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi Getty Student news in pictures Thousands of Thai Catholic students take part in mourning tributes and in singing the Thai Royal Anthem to honour late Thai King Bhumibol Adulyadej at Saint Dominic School in Bangkok, Thailand EPA Student news in pictures Students of Silpakorn University paint portraits of the late Thai King Bhumibol Adulyadej at the university campus in Bangkok Getty Student news in pictures A student of Silpakorn University paints a portrait of the late Thai King Bhumibol Adulyadej at the university campus in Bangkok Getty Student news in pictures St Andrews University students take part in a foam fight known as Raisin Monday in the Lower College Lawn behind St Salvator's Quadrangle following the Raisin Weekend PA wire Student news in pictures St Andrews University students take part in a foam fight known as Raisin Monday in the Lower College Lawn behind St Salvator's Quadrangle following the Raisin Weekend, an annual tradition where student 'parents' inflict tasks on the unfortunate first-years they have adopted as 'children' as part of a mentoring scheme PA wire Student news in pictures Students at the Cuba's National Ballet School (ENB) in Havana, Cuba Reuters Student news in pictures Students at the Cuba's National Ballet School (ENB) take part in a practice in Havana, Cuba Reuters Student news in pictures Students at the Cuba's National Ballet School (ENB) wait in line to enter a classroom in Havana, Cuba Reuters The entrances to the buildings at Soas were lined with people carrying leaflets and placards about the strikes, making it very difficult for academics and students to cross. Paul O'Connell, a law lecturer at the university, told The Independent the flawed pension scheme proposals could force large numbers of people into poverty. He said: We are taking a stand now on the question of pensions which is important but it is also part of a bigger fight for many of us, which is about the future of higher education. More than 90,000 people have signed online student-led petitions, from 30 different universities, demanding compensation for the loss of teaching hours. Mr OConnell added that he thought it was fair to ask universities for a refund. The NHS makes hundreds of millions of prescribing errors and mix-ups which contribute to as many as 22,300 deaths a year, according to a major report commissioned by the Government. Errors include failures to properly monitor patients on powerful drugs, poor communication between GPs and hospitals, and giving patients the wrong medication. While the potential risk can be as low as giving the wrong strength inhaler, it can also mean that the medication for seriously ill patients in hospital is mixed up, with potentially lethal consequences. In a speech today Health and Social Care Secretary Jeremy Hunt will announce new measures to reduce errors, improve patient safety and bring down the cost of mistakes which stands at 1.6bn a year. But experts from the Royal College of GPs (RCGP) said doctorss workloads were unsafe and that the long term solution is to ensure the NHS is properly funded and staffed. Labour shadow health minister Justin Madders said the 100,000 unfilled NHS jobs in England, revealed in official data this week, was having a huge impact on patient safety. The research, conducted by university academics in Manchester, Sheffield and York and published today, identified more than 230 million medication errors a year that took place in the NHS. The report said: We estimate that 61.4 million and 4.8 million errors occur in England per annum that have potential to cause moderate or severe harm, respectively. On average, 712 deaths a year were definitively linked to adverse drug reactions being the main cause of death. UK news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 UK news in pictures UK news in pictures 15 September 2021 Children pose by ice sculptures depicting people collecting water by charity Water Aid to show the fragility of water and the threat posed by climate change in London AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 14 September 2021 Heavy rain covers the A149 near Kings Lynn in Norfolk PA UK news in pictures 13 September 2021 Luke Jerram's 'Museum of the Moon' at Durham Cathedral PA UK news in pictures 12 September 2021 Inspirational young fundraiser Tobias Weller crosses the finish line, near his home in Sheffield, as he completes his latest epic feat where he swam and triked his way to the end of his awesome year-long Ironman Challenge. This is the third challenge Tobias, who has cerebral palsy and autism, has completed, raising more than 150,000 for his school and Sheffield Children Hospitals charity PA UK news in pictures 11 September 2021 British player Emma Raducanu, holds up the US Open championship trophy winning the women's singles final of the US Open in New York AP UK news in pictures 10 September 2021 People paddle board during a misty morning in Ullswater, the second largest lake in the Lake District, Cumbria PA UK news in pictures 9 September 2021 Troops from Wiltshire based 4 Armoured Close Support Battalion Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers during final inspection at Wellington Barracks in London, ahead of providing troops for the Queens Guard PA UK news in pictures 8 September 2021 Workers cross London Bridge during the morning rush hour in London Reuters UK news in pictures Mixing it up: Painting it up press view in London A gallery employee poses for photographers next to a painting entitled Prairie by British artist, Louise Giovanelli during the exhibition 'Mixing it up: Painting it up' at the Hayward Gallery in London EPA UK news in pictures 6 September 2021 Traders in the Ring at the London Metal Exchange, in the City of London, after open-outcry trading returned for the first time since March 2020, when the Ring was temporarily closed due to the pandemic PA UK news in pictures 5 September 2021 People enjoy the warm weather on Sandbanks beach, Poole PA UK news in pictures 4 September 2021 Demonstrators from Animal Rebellion and Nature Rebellion protest in Trafalgar Square in London. PA UK news in pictures 3 September 2021 South Africa's Ntando Mahlangu (centre) wins the Men's 200 metres T61 Final ahead of second placed Great Britain's Richard Whitehead at the Tokyo 2020 Paralympic Games PA UK news in pictures 2 September 2021 A young common seal on the beach at Horsey Gap in Norfolk, as hundreds of pregnant grey seals come ashore ready for the start of the pupping season. PA UK news in pictures 1 September 2021 Goldfinches fighting over food in a garden in Strensham, Worcestershire PA UK news in pictures 31 August 2021 Gold Medallist Sarah Storey of Britain celebrates on the podium Reuters UK news in pictures 30 August 2021 Extinction Rebellion protesters hold a a tea party on Tower Bridge in London EPA UK news in pictures 29 August 2021 A police office tussles with a demonstrator on Cromwell Road outside the Natural History Museum during a protest by members of Extinction Rebellion in London PA UK news in pictures 28 August 2021 Members of the British armed forces 16 Air Assault Brigade walk to the air terminal after disembarking a Royal Airforce Voyager aircraft at Brize Norton, Oxfordshire POOL/AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 27 August 2021 Fabio Quartararo crashes during a MotoGP practice session at the British Grand Prix, Silverstone Circuit Action Images via Reuters UK news in pictures 26 August 2021 An Extinction Rebellion activist holds a placard in a fountain surrounded by police officers, during a protest next to Buckingham Palace in London Reuters UK news in pictures 25 August 2021 Gold Medallist Great Britains cyclist, Sarah Storey, celebrates after winning the Womens C5 3000m Individual Pursuit Final at the Tokyo 2020 Paralympic Games. It was her 15th Paralympic gold Reuters UK news in pictures 24 August 2021 A demonstrator dressed as bee during a protest by members of Extinction Rebellion on Whitehall, in central London PA UK news in pictures 23 August 2021 Former interpreters for the British forces in Afghanistan demonstrate outside the Home Office in central London AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 22 August 2021 Police officers form a line in front of the entrance to the Guildhall, London, where protesters have climbed onto a ledge above the entrance during an Extinction Rebellion stage a protest PA UK news in pictures 21 August 2021 People take part in a demonstration in solidarity with people of Afghanistan, in London Reuters UK news in pictures 20 August 2021 People zip wire across the sea from Bournemouth pier towards the beach. PA UK news in pictures 19 August 2021 Supporters of Geronimo the alpaca gather outside Shepherds Close Farm in Wooton Under Edge, Gloucestershire PA UK news in pictures 18 August 2021 Former Afghan interpreters and veterans hold a demonstration outside Downing Street, calling for support and protection for Afghan interpreters and their families PA UK news in pictures 17 August 2021 Military personnel board the RAF Airbus A400M at RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire, where evacuation flights from Afghanistan have been landing Reuters UK news in pictures 16 August 2021 Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer takes part in a minute's silence at Wolverhampton police station for the victims of the Plymouth mass shooting last week PA UK news in pictures 15 August 2021 2Storm, a ten-metre tall puppet of a mythical goddess of the sea created by Edinburgh-based visual theatre company Vision Mechanics, makes its way alongside the seafront at North Berwick, East Lothian, during a performance at the Fringe By The Sea festival PA UK news in pictures 14 August 2021 A woman and two young girls look at floral tributes in Plymouth where six people, including the offender, died of gunshot wounds in a firearms incident PA UK news in pictures 13 August 2021 Forensic officers in the Keyham area of Plymouth where six people, including the shooter, died of gunshot wounds in a firearms incident on Thursday evening PA UK news in pictures 12 August 2021 Children ride horses in the River Eden in Appleby, Cumbria, during the annual gathering of travellers for the Appleby Horse Fair PA UK news in pictures 11 August 2021 Stella Moris (left) reacts after talking to the media outside the High Court in London, following the first hearing in the Julian Assange extradition appeal, n London, following the first hearing in the Julian Assange extradition appeal. The US government has won the latest round in its High Court bid to appeal against the decision not to extradite Julian Assange on espionage charges PA UK news in pictures 10 August 2021 Students react after they receive their A-Level results at the Ark Academy, in London Reuters UK news in pictures 9 August 2021 The final athletes from Great Britain arrive home including Jason Kenny, Laura Kenny and Katie Archibald (front left-right) at Heathrow Airport, London following the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games PA UK news in pictures 8 August 2021 Great Britain's Laura Kenny during the closing ceremony of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games at the Olympic stadium in Japan PA UK news in pictures 7 August 2021 People from the Glasgow Southside community take part in the Govanhill Carnival, an anti-racist celebration of pride, unity and the contributions immigrants have made to the community in Govanhill, at Queen's Park, Glasgow PA UK news in pictures 6 August 2021 Chijindu Ujah of Britain, Zharnel Hughes of Britain, Richard Kilty of Britain and Nethaneel Mitchell-Blake of Britain celebrate winning silver as they pose with Asha Philip of Britain, Imani Lansiquot of Britain, Dina Asher-Smith of Britain and Daryll Neita of Britain after they won bronze in the women's 4 x 100m relay during Olympic Games Day 14 Getty UK news in pictures 5 August 2021 A protester places flowers on a photograph of an executed man during a demonstration organised by supporters of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) to protest against the inauguration of Iran's new president Ebrahim Raisi in central London AFP via Getty UK news in pictures 4 August 2021 England's Joe Root looks on as India's KL Rahul doesn't make it to a catch during day one of Cinch First Test match at Trent Bridge, Nottingham PA UK news in pictures 3 August 2021 Great Britain's Laura Kenny and Jason Kenny with their silver medals for the Women's Team Pursuit and Mens Team Sprint during the Track Cycling at the Izu Velodrome on the eleventh day of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games in Japan PA UK news in pictures 2 August 2021 Great Britains Charlotte Worthington competes during the Womens BMX Freestyle Final at the Tokyo Olympics PA UK news in pictures 1 August 2021 EPA UK news in pictures 31 July 2021 James Guy, Adam Peaty and Kathleen Dawson celebrate winning the gold medal in the mixed 4x100m medley relay final at the Tokyo Olympics AP UK news in pictures 30 July 2021 Great Britain's Bethany Shriever and Kye Whyte celebrate their Gold and Silver medals respectively for the Cycling BMX Racing at the Ariake Urban Sports Park on the seventh day of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games in Japan PA UK news in pictures 29 July 2021 Team GB's Mallory Franklin during the Womens Canoe Slalom Final on day six of the Tokyo Olympic Games. She went on to win the silver medal Getty UK news in pictures 28 July 2021 Canoers on Llyn Padarn lake in Snowdonia, Gwynedd. It was announced that the north-west Wales slate landscape has been granted UNESCO World Heritage Status PA The number of deaths where medication errors played a part ranged from anything between 1,700 to 22,303. The authors said there was no evidence that other health systems are any safer but the NHS now needs better processes to spot drug errors and prevent them in the future. In a speech to the Global Patient Safety Summit, in London today, Mr Hunt will say: This new study shows medication error in the NHS and globally is a far bigger problem than generally recognised, causing appalling levels of harm and death that are totally preventable. At the summit he is expected to propose a new central database of prescribing data. This will join up medications given in GP practices with reasons for hospital admissions and allow doctors to determine if a patient ended up in hospital because of drugs they were or should have been given. The Government will also speed up the roll-out of electronic prescribing systems between GPs and pharmacists, which could cut errors by up to 50 per cent in a bid to end illegible or incomplete paper prescriptions. The final measure includes protections for pharmacists to prevent them being prosecuted where a genuine error such as an interaction with another medication the pharmacist wasnt aware of happens. These steps are intended to make the NHS better able to learn from mistakes and to help promote the working across hospitals, GPs and pharmacies that the NHS is working towards. Jeremy Hunt: When NHS frontline staff signed up for medicine, they knew about the pressurised environment they were getting into Professor Helen Stokes-Lampard, chair of the RCGP, said GPs work hard to avoid making mistakes, and while the report shows errors are rare, doctors are human and mistakes occasionally happen. She said that improvements to the monitoring systems already widely used by GPs are welcome, but added: The long lasting solution to this is a properly funded NHS with enough staff to deliver safe patient care. What is essential, is that highlighting that prescribing errors do occasionally happen is not used to admonish hardworking NHS staff including GPs for making genuine mistakes. But to address the root cause, and in general practice that is intense resource and workforce pressures, meaning that workloads and working hours are often unsafe for GPs and our teams. Mr Madders said: Its essential the Government gives the NHS every support possible to reduce avoidable mistakes. If we want the NHS to be the safest in the world then there are fundamental issues that need to be addressed. Ministers have to be much clearer about what extra funding and capacity theyll be providing so that NHS staff can to do their jobs to the best of their ability, without mistakes, and to really ensure our NHS is as safe for patients as it can possibly be. Todays report drew its findings from 36 studies on medication error rates in GPs, pharmacies, care homes and hospitals. Older patients were most likely to be affected, and doctors warned that the growing number of older people living longer on multiple long-term drugs for chronic conditions meant these risks would only increase. The cost to the NHS was estimated at 98.5m for the 712 confirmed deaths from drug errors in hospital, the report says. But when the extra cost of patients made seriously ill, or potentially killed, by drug errors in primary care the estimated cost to the NHS is 1.6bn and 3.8 million bed days. Professor of Health Economics at the University of York, Mark Sculpher, said: Although these error rates may look high, there is no evidence suggesting they differ markedly from those in other high-income countries. Almost three in four errors would never harm patients and some may be picked up before they reach the patients, but more research is needed to understand just how many that is. So I wrote a comic book, which features a lead character who bears a striking resemblance to one of the most infamous figures of the punk scene of the 1970s. The first issue of Punks Not Dead, with art by Martin Simmonds along with a creative team of Aditya Bidikar, Dee Cunniffe and Shelly Bond, hit the stands this week, and is about a 15-year-old kid who is the only person who can see or hear the ghost of a long-dead punk rocker called Sid. Spirit of punk: the anarchist ghost appears with all the hallmarks of Sid Vicious (IDW) Is it Sid Vicious? Well, no, because Sids been dead nearly 40 years, and as we know, outside of comics and books and films, ghosts dont actually exist. But maybe our ghostly Sid does think hes Sid Vicious, at the very least, and thats a mystery that will be solved as the comic progresses. Sid is by no means the first musically-inspired character to appear in comic books. Indeed, theres a long-standing and very strong tradition of pop and comics intersecting, either tonally and thematically or with actual appearances on the printed page by real-life musicians. Probably one of the earliest mash-ups between comics and music was in May 1959 when all-American troubadour and actor Pat Boone had a starring role in an issue of the title called Supermans Girl Friend, Lois Lane. A smiling, waistcoated Boone is seen on the cover, tinkling his ukulele as Lane plays at the piano on their collaborative venture about the Super-Boy Scout (presumably not, as a quick aside to comic books crossing over in the other direction into music, either Laurie Andersons O Superman or Black Laces Superman). The cape-clad hero flies into the scene, offering some quick criticism (Its a great tune!) but declaring with foreboding: But I must use all my superpowers to prevent it becoming a hit! Well, it made a change from beating up Lex Luthor every issue. Perhaps the most ubiquitous rock stars to appear in comics are the American band Kiss who, lets face it, look like comic characters themselves in real life with their over-the-top stage costumes and elaborate make-up. Marvel Comics had a particular fascination with Kiss in the 1970s, first putting the band into an issue of Howard the Duck and then giving them their own title with a twist. For the first issue of that in 1977 each of the band members had a syringe of their actual blood drawn by a registered nurse which was then poured into the vat of red ink at Marvels printers in New York and used to print the comic. Simpler, happier times; thered probably be a raft of health and safety legislation that would prevent that these days. Piece of Kisstory: the bands first eponymous title, complete with blood (Gregg Koenig) Two decades later Kiss again got their own title from publisher Image Comics, which ran to 31 monthly issues, and a few years later they got yet another comic from Dark Horse. Their most recent appearance has been in a series from IDW publishers of my own Punks Not Dead. Kiss also made a 2011 appearance with the cast of one of Americas best loved and most enduring comic books, Archie. Not widely known in the UK until the recent television adaptation in the form of Riverdale, the comics featuring the eponymous perpetual teen Archie Andrews and his pals Jughead, Betty and Veronica have been a mainstay of US culture since the 1930s. Archie comics have been diversifying and expanding wildly in recent years, and in 2017 they launched a title called The Archies, written by Alex Segura and Matt Rosenberg with art by Joe Eisma and Matt Herms, in which the gang formed a band and hit the road, with some very special guests, as they say in the pop industry. Having rocked out with punk icons The Ramones, the time-hopping Archies have played gigs with The Monkees and contemporary acts such as Chvrches and, most recently, Canadian indie-pop duo Tegan and Sara. Two mainstays of American culture come together when Archie meets the Ramones (Archie Comics) Aside from real-life musicians jumping into the world of comics, there are a number of titles that have been more reflective of the spirit of music. This Damned Band, written by Paul Cornell with art by Tony Parker (Dark Horse Comics) posited a fictional 1970s metal band called Motherfather who, like many outfits of the time, used the imagery of black magic and Satan worship in their act. The difference being that Motherfather were actually worshipping a very real Satan, and came across like a crazy mix of Spinal Tap and The Exorcist. But the most ambitious comic that tapped into the whole musical landscape must be Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvies Phonogram series (Image Comics). Told over three separate series Rue Britannia, The Singles Club and The Immaterial Girl, Phonogram is a tour de force that revolves around Dave Kohl, a phonomancer who uses music to manipulate magic, and the cast of individuals who tread similar paths hidden from the rest of us. The first volume was drenched in Britpop and featured Kohl searching for the missing Britannia, the actual goddess of Britpop, with later storylines focussing more on the troubled Emily Aster, leader of the coven of London phonomancers. Its a quite astonishing creation in terms of its originality and how it taps into the zeitgeist of popular music. To further cement the links between music and comics, several musicians have made the leap into creating their own comic books. Perhaps the most high profile is Gerard Way, frontman of the American rock band My Chemical Romance. A lifelong comics fan, Way actually had his first comic published in 1993, at the age of 16. On Ravens Wings was cancelled after two issues due to problems with the art team, but Way, after founding My Chemical Romance, persevered and in 2007 wrote the highly-acclaimed series Umbrella Academy, with art by Gabriel Ba. Umbrella Academy is currently in development as a TV series for Netflix, and for the past couple of years Way has been doing his dream gig curating an imprint, Young Animal, for one of the Big Two US publishers DC comics, for which he also writes the titles Doom Patrol and Cave Carson. Artists from the worlds of rap and hip hop have had a good strike rate with comics, including Tyrese Gibson with his 2007 title Mayhem, about a Daredevil-style vigilante in Los Angeles, and Wu-Tang Clans Ghostface Killah, who penned a six-issue comic to be released in conjunction with his 12 Reasons To Die album. Darryl McDaniels of Run DMC set up his own publishing imprint, Darryl Makes Comics, in 2013, kicking off with DMC, a superhero version of himself. Rob Zombie, founding member of the metal band White Zombie, has made several forays into comics writing over the years, concentrating (as you might expect) on horror comics such as Rob Zombies Spookshow, Whatever Happened to Baron Von Shock, and The Nail, with echoes of the down and dirty horror comics of the 1950s which earned the attention and ire of the government in the US, leading to strict regulations for many years on what could be shown in comic books. Gerard Ways acclaimed series featured easter eggs which referenced his band an added bonus for fans (Dark Horse Comics) While comics and music are, of course, totally different media, its perhaps natural that they should cross over as much as they do. On the most superficial level, theres probably some shared DNA between those who obsess over the physical artefacts of both, those who collect vinyl and those who collect comic books, filing both in protective sleeves, in orders that might seem arcane to outsiders by label, or imprint, or creator, or publisher. But more than that, pop music and comics have both often been dismissed as disposable culture which, nevertheless, endures. And both of them have a redemptive quality to their art; a song can make you feel better, or sadder, or both, in three or four minutes; it might take a comic book 15 or 20 to do the same job. They both provide a quick emotional hit that can linger for a long time. In music and comics, independence is feted, and its in the corners of both media away from the commerciality and control of the big corporations where creativity and invention can run unfettered. New ideas are explored, transgressive attitudes are fostered, progressive thinking is nurtured. Comics and music create tribes, communities, a sense of belonging, especially for those who feel they have something of the outsider in them, or sense they are out of step with a lot of mainstream culture. And finally, both allow for ambition and inclusion. We can teach ourselves to play the guitar, we can pick up a pen and write, or draw. We can look at our heroes, and do our level best to become them, whether thats a rock star or a comic artist. As Sid Vicious once said: You just pick a chord, go twang, and youve got music. Punks Not Dead #1, published by Black Crown/IDW, is out now Among the movers and shakers of Scotland over the span of the second half of the 20th century, Gerald Elliot would on any reckoning be in the top 10. Elliot, who has died aged 94, spent his working life at Edinburghs Christian Salvesen, the company named after his great-grandfather the Norwegian businessman who in 1872 who set up what was then a whaling company. His descent from Christian Salvesen was though his mother Magda, and his cousin Sir Maxwell Harper Gow commando and Lord Lovats staff captain in Normandy on D-Day took over as chair of the business when Elliot retired in 1988. Elliot started off in 1948 as bag carrier to his uncle Captain Harold Salvesen. Having read philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford, he was deputy chairman at the firm 1973 to 1981, and then chairman until 1988. During that time, any driver on a motorway would be familiar with the ever bigger Salvesen lorries transporting goods across Britain and the Continent. On a never-to-be-forgotten occasion, I was present when an old Labour Edinburgh politician, knowing that Gerald Elliot was a millionaire 50 times over, said jocularly: Gerald, what do you know about Marxism and Communism? Came the gentle, soft-spoken reply: For three years I was supervised by a man who wrote one of the most significant books on Karl Marx Isaiah Berlin, Fellow of New College, Oxford. When I interviewed Berlin years later, Berlin said: Hows my pupil and friend Gerald Elliot, whom you must know in Edinburgh, doing? A clever and agreeable gentleman. The philosopher assumed that everyone in Edinburgh knew Elliot and his assumption was quite right. Interrupted in his degree by the Second World War, Elliot served with the field force of the Indian Army between 1942 and 1946, in the course of which he learnt fluent Urdu. Half a century later, he spent part of his retirement learning Persian and Arabic as a matter of interest and personal challenge. In 1948 he joined the family firm cooperating closely with his cousin Sir Maxwell Harper Gow. Elliot was to write the fascinating book, A Whaling Enterprise. The first chapter starts: This is the chronicle of the grandeur, decline, and eventual extinction of the Antarctic whaling industry. It is linked with the fortunes of the Norwegian-Scottish company Christian Salvesen, for half a century one of the leading venturers in Antarctic whaling and closely concerned in the international struggles, eventually fruitless, to preserve the Antarctic whale stock, and save the industry. Elliot, while proud of the courage of the whalers, was instrumental along with his cousin Harper Gow in diversifying Salvesen into the great international firm that it became, because he was a conservationist and understood that whaling sooner rather than later would have to come to an end. In his younger days Elliot was very familiar with the South Atlantic, not least the two disused whaling stations on the Falkland Islands which were sold to an Argentine scrap dealer called Constantino Davidoff. The transaction indirectly triggered the 1982 war. For 20 years he remained silent on the subject. Davidoff had trouble transporting the scrap, he told The Scotsman in 2002. He got pretty desperate so he went to the Argentine government and they evidently decided this was a great opportunity to go into South Georgia, at the same time as they were planning the attack on South Falkland. When Davidoffs party arrived it was aboard an Argentine warship. In Edinburgh, Elliot served on numerous committees. He was chairman of the Forth Ports Authority from 1973 to 1979; and as MP for the south bank of the Forth I knew what a force he was for innovation and the modernisation of both Leith and Grangemouth. As chairman of the Scottish Arts Council form 1980 to 1986 he supported the Edinburgh International Festival in difficult times and was immensely helpful to its successive directors of the festival. One of Elliots particular interests was Scottish Opera where he was chairman between 1987 and 1992. It is no exaggeration to say that had it not been for his personal generosity Scottish Opera would simply have ceased to exist. Elliot was one of Edinburgh Universitys most important supporters. The Binks Trust, the Elliot familys charitable trust, made grants of seven figures to a range of projects including African studies, the Centre for Theology and Public Issues. As chairman of the Edinburgh University Court I was told by those who had long memories and experience that Gerald Elliot was one of its most useful ever lay members. As president of the University of Edinburgh Development Trust and chairman of the board of trustees of the David Hume Institute, he was able to assist the university in branching out to new areas of scholarship. The extensions which have been such a success for the National Museum of Scotland originate during the time of Elliots chairmanship. It was a matter of some good-natured mirth that Elliot, who was secretary of the National Whaling Board 1953 to 1962, should in 1950 have married Margaret Ruth Whale the daughter of the Rev John Whale and sister of the distinguished religious correspondent of the Sunday Times and the BBC. Theirs was a quite outstandingly successful partnership. Gerald Henry Elliot, businessman, born 23 December 1923, died 28 January 2018 The writer of this updated obituary, Tam Dalyell, died last year Dr Gunter Blobel was the a Nobel Prize-winning biologist who drew parallels between the beauty of cellular structures and baroque architecture. Blobel, a fellow at New Yorks Rockefeller University since 1967, used the money he won for his protein research to mend war-ravaged buildings in his native Germany. Blobel, who has died aged 81, spent decades studying the movement of proteins, biologically indispensable molecules that transmit signals, defend against viruses or bacteria, transport atoms or molecules, and catalyse chemical reactions. Each human cell contains about a billion proteins, most of which live for several days before they must be replaced by still more proteins of several thousand varieties. While healthy cells are abuzz with their production and movement, newly formed proteins always seem to know their destination, Blobel and his colleagues observed in the early 1970s. The string-shaped molecules were apparently imbued with a secret code, or were following a hidden blueprint that ensured they reached the correct location within or outside the cell. I kept asking myself, Blobel said in 2004, If I were to design a system, how would I do it? He envisioned a process whose elegance and simplicity would have delighted the architects he had idolised since he was a boy, passing through the streets of Dresden, Germany, days before the city was levelled by British and American bombers in the Second World War. Proteins, he speculated, are encoded with the molecular equivalent of a postcode or luggage tag, a sequence of amino acids that help a particular protein reach its destination within the cell. It was the kind of hypothesis that alternately delighted and infuriated his colleagues, some of whom felt that Blobel, a man who threw himself into imaginative speculations throughout his career, strayed too far from established fact. It was also entirely correct. He would deny it, but it was almost as if he had one of these streaks of clairvoyance, says Sanford Simon, a Rockefeller University biophysicist and former student of Blobel. What he really cared about was the chase of going down and experimentally testing something. He wanted to understand the architecture of the cell. Blobel laid out the beginnings of his idea with colleague David Sabatini in 1971, and four years later he published an article with Bernhard Dobberstein that outlined the theory in detail. In place of a postcode, the researchers described a proteins signal sequence, which attracts a postman-like signal recognition particle that delivers the protein to its destination, typically a membrane-enclosed cellular feature called an organelle. That delivery particle then helps the protein enter the organelles membrane, functioning like a key in a lock. The Frauenkirche is one of the Dresden landmarks Blobel was passionate about restoring Gunters work in many ways initiated the whole modern era of what we call molecular cell biology, Richard Klausner, former head of the Americas National Cancer Institute, said after Blobel was awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine in 1999. It began to merge the observational approaches of cell biology, looking, describing structure, so that scientists could figure out how molecular information underlies the structure and functioning of the cell. Blobels research also resulted in major medical advances, including scientists ability to produce mass quantities of proteins such as insulin, and the realisation that several genetic disorders including cystic fibrosis and diseases that cause high cholesterol and kidney stones are triggered by signal-sequence errors. Such far-reaching consequences were part of the reason Blobel, who had initially planned to work as a physician, became a medical researcher. It was only by studying the fundamental workings of the cell, he reasoned, that diseases could be understood and possibly defeated. Gunter Blobel was born in Waltersdorf, a Silesian town in the 1930s located in Germany that is now in Poland. His father was a veterinarian, and his mother was a homemaker from a well-to-do farming family. Blobel said his childhood was a perfect 19th-century idyll, filled with slow meals and sleigh rides to his grandparents farm, until the family fled the Soviet Red Army in 1945. He later said that he was staying at a relatives farm near Dresden when he watched a flying armada stream toward the city. For an eight-year-old, this was all very impressive, he said. The bombing was so bright that you could read the newspaper by the red sky. Though a young Gunter spent only a short time in Dresden, the sight of buildings such as the Frauenkirche, a high-domed 18th-century church that was destroyed in the bombing, instilled in him a love of architecture that lasted until his death. He later gave lectures alongside architects, Simon said, describing the similarities shared by man-made structures and microscopic cells. Blobel graduated from the University of Tubingens medical school in 1960 and, at the suggestion of his oldest brother, a veterinarian on the faculty of the University of Wisconsin, completed his education in the United States. He received a doctorate in oncology from Wisconsin in 1967 and subsequently joined Rockefeller University on a research fellowship. Beginning in 1986, he also worked as an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, a medical research organization based in Chevy Chase, Md. In 1976, he married Laura Maioglio, owner of the New York restaurant Barbetta, an elegant theater-district destination founded by her father at the turn of the century. Our schedules meshed, he once told the Times, because she worked late at the restaurant and that gave me the opportunity to come home late from the lab. In addition to his wife, Blobel is survived by three brothers and two sisters. His oldest sister, Ruth Blobel, was killed in an airstrike at the close of the Second World War. It was in her honour that Blobel donated all of his $1m Nobel winnings to Friends of Dresden, a group founded in 1995 to help renovate and rebuild some of the structures Dresden lost during the war. The funds were used to construct a synagogue destroyed during the Kristallnacht attack on German Jews, and to rebuild the Frauenkirche. It was like a call, Blobel said 2001. And I had to answer the call. Gunter Blobel, Nobel prize-winning biologist, born 21 May 1936, died February 2018 Washington Post Grooming gangs abused more than 700 women and girls around Newcastle with arrogant persistence after police appeared to punish victims while letting the perpetrators walk free, a case review has found. The report into the response by authorities to child sexual exploitation found that before a large-scale police operation was launched in 2014, officers actions were sending an unhelpful message to perpetrators. It warned that abusers are still preying on girls across the UK, and called for urgent action from the Government. Investigators said the abuse could not be stopped without work to understand the profiles, motivations and cultural influences of perpetrators, after finding similarities with grooming in Rotherham, Rochdale and Oxford. Officials found that although a crackdown on child exploitation was swiftly launched when victims came forward in 2014, the abuse had not been halted. Unlike some other areas, Newcastle agencies did not try and sweep this under the carpet but actively went looking for it and as a result a large number of perpetrators were arrested and prosecuted, and victims saved from further trauma, said former barrister David Spicer, who led the review. Sadly, it is still happening in Newcastle and other cities, but this city is determined to tackle it. After examining evidence on the abuse of hundreds of girls in the North-east, investigators concluded that local authorities claiming there is no grooming in their area are not looking hard enough. Operation Sanctuary: "We do not believe that what we have uncovered is unique to Newcastle" Pat Ritchie, chief executive of Newcastle City Council, said the council would enact all recommendations from the report. Sexual exploitation is happening in towns and cities across the country but what we have learned can be used to help others, she added. We know it is still going on in our city, but we are doing everything in our power to prevent it, disrupt it and deal with it, and support the victims for years to come. Northumbria Police had identified more than 700 potential victims of grooming in the region by August through Operation Sanctuary, but expected the number to rise. Temporary Deputy Chief Constable Darren Best said society had undergone a sea change in the knowledge and understanding of grooming in recent years. We are far from complacent and recognise we still have work to do to ensure we consistently identify victims and carry out comprehensive investigations on their behalf, he added. What cannot be clearer is that safeguarding the vulnerable is everybodys business. Before 2014, police were responding to incidents on an ad hoc basis, with efforts by authorities trying to persuade victims to keep away from the abusers and change their behaviours. The review found the approach led to consideration of deterrent punishments of victims for being drunk and disorderly or for making false allegations when accounts were changed. This sent an unhelpful message to perpetrators they were unlikely to be prosecuted or prevented from continuing to abuse encouraging an arrogant persistence, it added. UK news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 UK news in pictures UK news in pictures 11 September 2021 Arsenals Takehiro Tomiyasu attempts to control the ball during the Premier League match at The Emirates Stadium PA UK news in pictures 10 September 2021 People paddle board during a misty morning in Ullswater, the second largest lake in the Lake District, Cumbria PA UK news in pictures 9 September 2021 Troops from Wiltshire based 4 Armoured Close Support Battalion Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers during final inspection at Wellington Barracks in London, ahead of providing troops for the Queens Guard PA UK news in pictures 8 September 2021 Workers cross London Bridge during the morning rush hour in London Reuters UK news in pictures Mixing it up: Painting it up press view in London A gallery employee poses for photographers next to a painting entitled Prairie by British artist, Louise Giovanelli during the exhibition 'Mixing it up: Painting it up' at the Hayward Gallery in London EPA UK news in pictures 6 September 2021 Traders in the Ring at the London Metal Exchange, in the City of London, after open-outcry trading returned for the first time since March 2020, when the Ring was temporarily closed due to the pandemic PA UK news in pictures 5 September 2021 People enjoy the warm weather on Sandbanks beach, Poole PA UK news in pictures 4 September 2021 Demonstrators from Animal Rebellion and Nature Rebellion protest in Trafalgar Square in London. PA UK news in pictures 3 September 2021 South Africa's Ntando Mahlangu (centre) wins the Men's 200 metres T61 Final ahead of second placed Great Britain's Richard Whitehead at the Tokyo 2020 Paralympic Games PA UK news in pictures 2 September 2021 A young common seal on the beach at Horsey Gap in Norfolk, as hundreds of pregnant grey seals come ashore ready for the start of the pupping season. PA UK news in pictures 1 September 2021 Goldfinches fighting over food in a garden in Strensham, Worcestershire PA UK news in pictures 31 August 2021 Gold Medallist Sarah Storey of Britain celebrates on the podium Reuters UK news in pictures 30 August 2021 Extinction Rebellion protesters hold a a tea party on Tower Bridge in London EPA UK news in pictures 29 August 2021 A police office tussles with a demonstrator on Cromwell Road outside the Natural History Museum during a protest by members of Extinction Rebellion in London PA UK news in pictures 28 August 2021 Members of the British armed forces 16 Air Assault Brigade walk to the air terminal after disembarking a Royal Airforce Voyager aircraft at Brize Norton, Oxfordshire POOL/AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 27 August 2021 Fabio Quartararo crashes during a MotoGP practice session at the British Grand Prix, Silverstone Circuit Action Images via Reuters UK news in pictures 26 August 2021 An Extinction Rebellion activist holds a placard in a fountain surrounded by police officers, during a protest next to Buckingham Palace in London Reuters UK news in pictures 25 August 2021 Gold Medallist Great Britains cyclist, Sarah Storey, celebrates after winning the Womens C5 3000m Individual Pursuit Final at the Tokyo 2020 Paralympic Games. It was her 15th Paralympic gold Reuters UK news in pictures 24 August 2021 A demonstrator dressed as bee during a protest by members of Extinction Rebellion on Whitehall, in central London PA UK news in pictures 23 August 2021 Former interpreters for the British forces in Afghanistan demonstrate outside the Home Office in central London AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 22 August 2021 Police officers form a line in front of the entrance to the Guildhall, London, where protesters have climbed onto a ledge above the entrance during an Extinction Rebellion stage a protest PA UK news in pictures 21 August 2021 People take part in a demonstration in solidarity with people of Afghanistan, in London Reuters UK news in pictures 20 August 2021 People zip wire across the sea from Bournemouth pier towards the beach. PA UK news in pictures 19 August 2021 Supporters of Geronimo the alpaca gather outside Shepherds Close Farm in Wooton Under Edge, Gloucestershire PA UK news in pictures 18 August 2021 Former Afghan interpreters and veterans hold a demonstration outside Downing Street, calling for support and protection for Afghan interpreters and their families PA UK news in pictures 17 August 2021 Military personnel board the RAF Airbus A400M at RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire, where evacuation flights from Afghanistan have been landing Reuters UK news in pictures 16 August 2021 Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer takes part in a minute's silence at Wolverhampton police station for the victims of the Plymouth mass shooting last week PA UK news in pictures 15 August 2021 2Storm, a ten-metre tall puppet of a mythical goddess of the sea created by Edinburgh-based visual theatre company Vision Mechanics, makes its way alongside the seafront at North Berwick, East Lothian, during a performance at the Fringe By The Sea festival PA UK news in pictures 14 August 2021 A woman and two young girls look at floral tributes in Plymouth where six people, including the offender, died of gunshot wounds in a firearms incident PA UK news in pictures 13 August 2021 Forensic officers in the Keyham area of Plymouth where six people, including the shooter, died of gunshot wounds in a firearms incident on Thursday evening PA UK news in pictures 12 August 2021 Children ride horses in the River Eden in Appleby, Cumbria, during the annual gathering of travellers for the Appleby Horse Fair PA UK news in pictures 11 August 2021 Stella Moris (left) reacts after talking to the media outside the High Court in London, following the first hearing in the Julian Assange extradition appeal, n London, following the first hearing in the Julian Assange extradition appeal. The US government has won the latest round in its High Court bid to appeal against the decision not to extradite Julian Assange on espionage charges PA UK news in pictures 10 August 2021 Students react after they receive their A-Level results at the Ark Academy, in London Reuters UK news in pictures 9 August 2021 The final athletes from Great Britain arrive home including Jason Kenny, Laura Kenny and Katie Archibald (front left-right) at Heathrow Airport, London following the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games PA UK news in pictures 8 August 2021 Great Britain's Laura Kenny during the closing ceremony of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games at the Olympic stadium in Japan PA UK news in pictures 7 August 2021 People from the Glasgow Southside community take part in the Govanhill Carnival, an anti-racist celebration of pride, unity and the contributions immigrants have made to the community in Govanhill, at Queen's Park, Glasgow PA UK news in pictures 6 August 2021 Chijindu Ujah of Britain, Zharnel Hughes of Britain, Richard Kilty of Britain and Nethaneel Mitchell-Blake of Britain celebrate winning silver as they pose with Asha Philip of Britain, Imani Lansiquot of Britain, Dina Asher-Smith of Britain and Daryll Neita of Britain after they won bronze in the women's 4 x 100m relay during Olympic Games Day 14 Getty UK news in pictures 5 August 2021 A protester places flowers on a photograph of an executed man during a demonstration organised by supporters of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) to protest against the inauguration of Iran's new president Ebrahim Raisi in central London AFP via Getty UK news in pictures 4 August 2021 England's Joe Root looks on as India's KL Rahul doesn't make it to a catch during day one of Cinch First Test match at Trent Bridge, Nottingham PA UK news in pictures 3 August 2021 Great Britain's Laura Kenny and Jason Kenny with their silver medals for the Women's Team Pursuit and Mens Team Sprint during the Track Cycling at the Izu Velodrome on the eleventh day of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games in Japan PA UK news in pictures 2 August 2021 Great Britains Charlotte Worthington competes during the Womens BMX Freestyle Final at the Tokyo Olympics PA UK news in pictures 1 August 2021 EPA UK news in pictures 31 July 2021 James Guy, Adam Peaty and Kathleen Dawson celebrate winning the gold medal in the mixed 4x100m medley relay final at the Tokyo Olympics AP UK news in pictures 30 July 2021 Great Britain's Bethany Shriever and Kye Whyte celebrate their Gold and Silver medals respectively for the Cycling BMX Racing at the Ariake Urban Sports Park on the seventh day of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games in Japan PA UK news in pictures 29 July 2021 Team GB's Mallory Franklin during the Womens Canoe Slalom Final on day six of the Tokyo Olympic Games. She went on to win the silver medal Getty UK news in pictures 28 July 2021 Canoers on Llyn Padarn lake in Snowdonia, Gwynedd. It was announced that the north-west Wales slate landscape has been granted UNESCO World Heritage Status PA UK news in pictures 27 July 2021 A view of one of two areas now being used at a warehouse facility in Dover, Kent, for boats used by people thought to be migrants. PA UK news in pictures 26 July 2021 A woman is helped by Border Force officers as a group of people thought to be migrants are brought in to Dover, Kent, onboard a Border Force vessel, following a small boat incident in the Channel PA UK news in pictures 25 July 2021 Vehicles drive through deep water on a flooded road in Nine Elms, London AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 24 July 2021 Utilities workers inspect a 15x20ft sinkhole on Green Lane, Liverpool, which is suspected to have been caused by ruptured water main PA It also had a significant impact on victims who learnt that nothing would be done against perpetrators. A total of 17 men and one woman have been convicted of offences including rape, sexual abuse, supplying drugs and trafficking for sexual exploitation in a series of trials over the Newcastle case. Of eight victims covered in the trials, six were white and two were of African heritage, while the perpetrators came from a diverse range of backgrounds including Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Indian, Iranian, Iraqi, Kurdish, Turkish, Albanian and Eastern European. Recommended Newcastle grooming gang victim sleeps with knife by bed after rape The court heard how teenagers and young women were picked up off the streets, then groomed and given alcohol and drugs before being coerced or forced into sex at so-called sessions in Newcastles West End. Victims described being raped while they were asleep, unconscious or incapacitated after being forced to drink and take drugs. I wanted to leave but I was given drink, one said. I kept saying no and fighting them off. I was very tired and fell asleep. When I woke, I had been raped. Another added: When I was out of it they could do anything they wanted to me. A judge concluded that the defendants selected their victims not because of their race, but because they were young, impressionable, naive, and vulnerable, including young girls and women with learning difficulties and mental health issues. The review said victims in the wider North-east included a 12-year-old girl who fell pregnant and other teenagers who underwent abortions, as well as others left with devastating long-term trauma causing substance abuse, mental illness and relationship breakdowns. Canning Street in Newcastle, where grooming gang member Yassar Hussain lived (Lizzie Dearden) It warned that one girl had suggested boys were among the victims, and that the sexual exploitation of male victims is likely to be under-reported and hidden. The review said that while perpetrators individual beliefs are not known, they all appear to come from a non-white, predominantly Asian/British minority ethnic culture or background as in Rotherham, Rochdale and Oxfordshire, while a grooming gang in Bristol were from a Somali background. The review found that arrogant perpetrators show remarkable persistence over long periods in targeting and grooming victims, undeterred by involvement of the police and other agencies. Mr Spicer said: Tackling sexual exploitation must address the perpetrators not only preventing their activities but understanding their motivation. He added that cultural beliefs and practices have a significant impact on abuse, affecting both how abusers treat victims and how able victims feel to report their abuse. One member of the Newcastle gang, Badrul Hussain, once told a white female ticket inspector: All white women are only good for one thing for men like me to f*** and use like trash. Thats all women like you are worth. One of the two victims from an African background said her parents blamed her for being raped and believe in spirit possession, adding: They were going to kick me out. Mr Spicer attempted to interview jailed grooming gang members in Newcastle but only one an asylum seeker who plans to return home at the end of his sentence agreed. He admitted abusing girls, including a homeless victim, but displayed no regret and claimed the victims knew what they were doing, accusing the Government, police and a judge of paying witnesses in a conspiracy against him. Asked about his views on the UK, the man said you can get anything here... sex, drugs, alcohol and spoke in a derogatory way about lack of morals in British girls and did not go with Muslim girls because there are not many of them. Northumbria Police Chief Constable Steve Ashman and Pat Ritchie, chief executive of Newcastle City Council after the Operation Shelter trials in August (PA) Muslim girls have been abused by grooming gangs in other parts of the country, with a 2013 report containing dozens of case studies. The review found that before Operation Sanctuary started in 2014, perpetrators in Newcastle were not consistently investigated and disrupted as victims were unwilling to make complaints. However, once the true extent of the problem became apparent, the police, the Crown Prosecution Service, the city council and partners across the city put in place a range of measures to disrupt, arrest and imprison offenders while supporting victims regardless of whether they were able to give evidence in court or not, Mr Spicer said. In Newcastle, decisions about taking action were not influenced by lack of concern or interest, misplaced fears about political correctness or fear of being seen as racist. Neither was there any evidence of ineffective leadership or inappropriate interference by senior officials or political leaders to prevent action being taken. After two victims who did not know each other reported being abused in early 2015, Operation Shelter was launched and led to the initial arrest of more than 30 men and exposure of abuse dating back to 2007. A multi-agency response to sexual exploitation was set up to take new reports and continues to operate, directing victims to both law enforcement and specialist support and becoming a national blueprint. A total of 15 national recommendations included a review of private hire vehicle licensing, issuing specific guidance on the grooming of vulnerable adults and improving cooperation between agencies including the NHS, social care and police. Mr Spicer also called for the Government to look at whether new laws should be created to address the behaviour and involvement of grooming gang members and ensure victims are treated sensitively in court to encourage others to come forward. The learning from this review does not only apply to Newcastle, the report concluded. It is hoped that it will be used to influence and shape services in other areas of the country and inform the need for national reform. The Government has outlined 40m worth of packages to tackle child sexual exploitation, and child abuse specialists are conducting research into different forms of offending. A spokesperson said: These are abhorrent crimes that have had a devastating impact on the lives of the victims involved. We have done more than any other Government to tackle child sexual abuse. It has been declared a national threat and we are investing millions of pounds to enable officers to actively seek out and bring offenders to justice. We will now look carefully at the recommendations in the joint serious case review. An 18-year-old has been arrested on suspicion of murdering two young men who were stabbed to death within two hours of each other in north London. Police confirmed the deaths of Abdikarim Hassan, 17, and Sadiq Aadam, 20, in Camden on Tuesday evening. The suspect was also arrested on one count of grievous bodily harm after a 16-year-old boy was stabbed outside a block of flats. He remains in hospital with non-life threatening injuries. Mr Hassan died in front of his mother after being stabbed in the chest at around 8.30pm. Mr Aadam died a short time later, with witnesses saying he had been slashed with a samurai sword. Despite being given first aid by police, both men died at the scene of the stabbings. Police say Mr Aadam and a friend were chased by a group of four men along an alleyway before the attack. The friend was unharmed. Paul Considine, the detective chief inspector leading the investigation, said: "What is clear is that there were three violent attacks, by a group of men armed with knives, within about two hours of each other and within about a mile of each other. Shocking CCTV released of stabbing in London "I need the public's help to establish the exact circumstances in which two young men were murdered and another seriously injured, and to identify the people responsible. "Today, I am asking local residents or those people who were out in the area that night to think back - and if they saw something that may help us, please get in contact. I can understand why some people may be reluctant or nervous about coming forward but we need your help. We will treat your information in the strictest of confidence." Mr Aadam is reportedly the third member of his family to die in a knife attack in five years. Mohamed Aadam, his brother, was murdered in the middle of the day in Camden Town in September, weeks before his 21st birthday, The Camden New Journal reported. Their cousin, Mohamed Abdullahi, also known as Lefty, was murdered in June 2013 aged 20. UK news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 UK news in pictures UK news in pictures 16 September 2021 Sheikeh MOhammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, leader of Abu Dhabi, leaves Downing Street after meeting with Boris Johnson PA UK news in pictures 15 September 2021 Children pose by ice sculptures depicting people collecting water by charity Water Aid to show the fragility of water and the threat posed by climate change in London AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 14 September 2021 Heavy rain covers the A149 near Kings Lynn in Norfolk PA UK news in pictures 13 September 2021 Luke Jerram's 'Museum of the Moon' at Durham Cathedral PA UK news in pictures 12 September 2021 Inspirational young fundraiser Tobias Weller crosses the finish line, near his home in Sheffield, as he completes his latest epic feat where he swam and triked his way to the end of his awesome year-long Ironman Challenge. This is the third challenge Tobias, who has cerebral palsy and autism, has completed, raising more than 150,000 for his school and Sheffield Children Hospitals charity PA UK news in pictures 11 September 2021 British player Emma Raducanu, holds up the US Open championship trophy winning the women's singles final of the US Open in New York AP UK news in pictures 10 September 2021 People paddle board during a misty morning in Ullswater, the second largest lake in the Lake District, Cumbria PA UK news in pictures 9 September 2021 Troops from Wiltshire based 4 Armoured Close Support Battalion Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers during final inspection at Wellington Barracks in London, ahead of providing troops for the Queens Guard PA UK news in pictures 8 September 2021 Workers cross London Bridge during the morning rush hour in London Reuters UK news in pictures Mixing it up: Painting it up press view in London A gallery employee poses for photographers next to a painting entitled Prairie by British artist, Louise Giovanelli during the exhibition 'Mixing it up: Painting it up' at the Hayward Gallery in London EPA UK news in pictures 6 September 2021 Traders in the Ring at the London Metal Exchange, in the City of London, after open-outcry trading returned for the first time since March 2020, when the Ring was temporarily closed due to the pandemic PA UK news in pictures 5 September 2021 People enjoy the warm weather on Sandbanks beach, Poole PA UK news in pictures 4 September 2021 Demonstrators from Animal Rebellion and Nature Rebellion protest in Trafalgar Square in London. PA UK news in pictures 3 September 2021 South Africa's Ntando Mahlangu (centre) wins the Men's 200 metres T61 Final ahead of second placed Great Britain's Richard Whitehead at the Tokyo 2020 Paralympic Games PA UK news in pictures 2 September 2021 A young common seal on the beach at Horsey Gap in Norfolk, as hundreds of pregnant grey seals come ashore ready for the start of the pupping season. PA UK news in pictures 1 September 2021 Goldfinches fighting over food in a garden in Strensham, Worcestershire PA UK news in pictures 31 August 2021 Gold Medallist Sarah Storey of Britain celebrates on the podium Reuters UK news in pictures 30 August 2021 Extinction Rebellion protesters hold a a tea party on Tower Bridge in London EPA UK news in pictures 29 August 2021 A police office tussles with a demonstrator on Cromwell Road outside the Natural History Museum during a protest by members of Extinction Rebellion in London PA UK news in pictures 28 August 2021 Members of the British armed forces 16 Air Assault Brigade walk to the air terminal after disembarking a Royal Airforce Voyager aircraft at Brize Norton, Oxfordshire POOL/AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 27 August 2021 Fabio Quartararo crashes during a MotoGP practice session at the British Grand Prix, Silverstone Circuit Action Images via Reuters UK news in pictures 26 August 2021 An Extinction Rebellion activist holds a placard in a fountain surrounded by police officers, during a protest next to Buckingham Palace in London Reuters UK news in pictures 25 August 2021 Gold Medallist Great Britains cyclist, Sarah Storey, celebrates after winning the Womens C5 3000m Individual Pursuit Final at the Tokyo 2020 Paralympic Games. It was her 15th Paralympic gold Reuters UK news in pictures 24 August 2021 A demonstrator dressed as bee during a protest by members of Extinction Rebellion on Whitehall, in central London PA UK news in pictures 23 August 2021 Former interpreters for the British forces in Afghanistan demonstrate outside the Home Office in central London AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 22 August 2021 Police officers form a line in front of the entrance to the Guildhall, London, where protesters have climbed onto a ledge above the entrance during an Extinction Rebellion stage a protest PA UK news in pictures 21 August 2021 People take part in a demonstration in solidarity with people of Afghanistan, in London Reuters UK news in pictures 20 August 2021 People zip wire across the sea from Bournemouth pier towards the beach. PA UK news in pictures 19 August 2021 Supporters of Geronimo the alpaca gather outside Shepherds Close Farm in Wooton Under Edge, Gloucestershire PA UK news in pictures 18 August 2021 Former Afghan interpreters and veterans hold a demonstration outside Downing Street, calling for support and protection for Afghan interpreters and their families PA UK news in pictures 17 August 2021 Military personnel board the RAF Airbus A400M at RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire, where evacuation flights from Afghanistan have been landing Reuters UK news in pictures 16 August 2021 Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer takes part in a minute's silence at Wolverhampton police station for the victims of the Plymouth mass shooting last week PA UK news in pictures 15 August 2021 2Storm, a ten-metre tall puppet of a mythical goddess of the sea created by Edinburgh-based visual theatre company Vision Mechanics, makes its way alongside the seafront at North Berwick, East Lothian, during a performance at the Fringe By The Sea festival PA UK news in pictures 14 August 2021 A woman and two young girls look at floral tributes in Plymouth where six people, including the offender, died of gunshot wounds in a firearms incident PA UK news in pictures 13 August 2021 Forensic officers in the Keyham area of Plymouth where six people, including the shooter, died of gunshot wounds in a firearms incident on Thursday evening PA UK news in pictures 12 August 2021 Children ride horses in the River Eden in Appleby, Cumbria, during the annual gathering of travellers for the Appleby Horse Fair PA UK news in pictures 11 August 2021 Stella Moris (left) reacts after talking to the media outside the High Court in London, following the first hearing in the Julian Assange extradition appeal, n London, following the first hearing in the Julian Assange extradition appeal. The US government has won the latest round in its High Court bid to appeal against the decision not to extradite Julian Assange on espionage charges PA UK news in pictures 10 August 2021 Students react after they receive their A-Level results at the Ark Academy, in London Reuters UK news in pictures 9 August 2021 The final athletes from Great Britain arrive home including Jason Kenny, Laura Kenny and Katie Archibald (front left-right) at Heathrow Airport, London following the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games PA UK news in pictures 8 August 2021 Great Britain's Laura Kenny during the closing ceremony of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games at the Olympic stadium in Japan PA UK news in pictures 7 August 2021 People from the Glasgow Southside community take part in the Govanhill Carnival, an anti-racist celebration of pride, unity and the contributions immigrants have made to the community in Govanhill, at Queen's Park, Glasgow PA UK news in pictures 6 August 2021 Chijindu Ujah of Britain, Zharnel Hughes of Britain, Richard Kilty of Britain and Nethaneel Mitchell-Blake of Britain celebrate winning silver as they pose with Asha Philip of Britain, Imani Lansiquot of Britain, Dina Asher-Smith of Britain and Daryll Neita of Britain after they won bronze in the women's 4 x 100m relay during Olympic Games Day 14 Getty UK news in pictures 5 August 2021 A protester places flowers on a photograph of an executed man during a demonstration organised by supporters of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) to protest against the inauguration of Iran's new president Ebrahim Raisi in central London AFP via Getty UK news in pictures 4 August 2021 England's Joe Root looks on as India's KL Rahul doesn't make it to a catch during day one of Cinch First Test match at Trent Bridge, Nottingham PA UK news in pictures 3 August 2021 Great Britain's Laura Kenny and Jason Kenny with their silver medals for the Women's Team Pursuit and Mens Team Sprint during the Track Cycling at the Izu Velodrome on the eleventh day of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games in Japan PA UK news in pictures 2 August 2021 Great Britains Charlotte Worthington competes during the Womens BMX Freestyle Final at the Tokyo Olympics PA UK news in pictures 1 August 2021 EPA UK news in pictures 31 July 2021 James Guy, Adam Peaty and Kathleen Dawson celebrate winning the gold medal in the mixed 4x100m medley relay final at the Tokyo Olympics AP UK news in pictures 30 July 2021 Great Britain's Bethany Shriever and Kye Whyte celebrate their Gold and Silver medals respectively for the Cycling BMX Racing at the Ariake Urban Sports Park on the seventh day of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games in Japan PA UK news in pictures 29 July 2021 Team GB's Mallory Franklin during the Womens Canoe Slalom Final on day six of the Tokyo Olympic Games. She went on to win the silver medal Getty Mr Abdullahis father and the Aadam brothers uncle, Aydarus Ahmed, has campaigned to end knife violence since his sons death. "The frequency with which young men are prepared to take each others' lives is shocking," Mr Considine said. "We all have a part to play in preventing this. If you know something about these murders then please do your part in helping us with this investigation. "One line of enquiry that we are urgently pursuing is that a blue van was seen in the area of the two murders. If you saw a vehicle that caused you concern due to how it was being driven or the people inside it then please get in touch with us." London has seen large rises in knife crime since then. Recorded incidents rose by 23 per cent in the capital during the 12-month period to the end of September last year, according to the Office for National Statistics. Anyone with information is asked to contact the investigations team on 020 8345 3734, or call Crimestoppers anonymously on on 0800 555 111. A man has been charged with the manslaughter of Louella Eve Fletcher-Michie who died at the Bestival music festival in September. Ceon Broughton, 28, from Enfield, North London, will appear before magistrates at a special hearing on 24 February. Mr Broughton is believed to have been Ms Fletcher-Michies boyfriend and has been charged with manslaughter by gross negligence. Senior investigating officer Neil Devoto said: "Following a detailed investigation, we have consulted with the Crown Prosecution Service, which has this evening authorised a charge of manslaughter. "Louella's family has been updated with this development and our thoughts remain with them at this very difficult time." Ms Fletcher-Michie, 25, was found dead in the woods on the edge of the festival site at Lulworth Castle. Dorset Police said a post-mortem examination was carried out shortly after Ms Fletcher-Michies death and it showed that there were no clear signs of an assault. UK news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 UK news in pictures UK news in pictures 16 September 2021 Sheikeh MOhammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, leader of Abu Dhabi, leaves Downing Street after meeting with Boris Johnson PA UK news in pictures 15 September 2021 Children pose by ice sculptures depicting people collecting water by charity Water Aid to show the fragility of water and the threat posed by climate change in London AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 14 September 2021 Heavy rain covers the A149 near Kings Lynn in Norfolk PA UK news in pictures 13 September 2021 Luke Jerram's 'Museum of the Moon' at Durham Cathedral PA UK news in pictures 12 September 2021 Inspirational young fundraiser Tobias Weller crosses the finish line, near his home in Sheffield, as he completes his latest epic feat where he swam and triked his way to the end of his awesome year-long Ironman Challenge. This is the third challenge Tobias, who has cerebral palsy and autism, has completed, raising more than 150,000 for his school and Sheffield Children Hospitals charity PA UK news in pictures 11 September 2021 British player Emma Raducanu, holds up the US Open championship trophy winning the women's singles final of the US Open in New York AP UK news in pictures 10 September 2021 People paddle board during a misty morning in Ullswater, the second largest lake in the Lake District, Cumbria PA UK news in pictures 9 September 2021 Troops from Wiltshire based 4 Armoured Close Support Battalion Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers during final inspection at Wellington Barracks in London, ahead of providing troops for the Queens Guard PA UK news in pictures 8 September 2021 Workers cross London Bridge during the morning rush hour in London Reuters UK news in pictures Mixing it up: Painting it up press view in London A gallery employee poses for photographers next to a painting entitled Prairie by British artist, Louise Giovanelli during the exhibition 'Mixing it up: Painting it up' at the Hayward Gallery in London EPA UK news in pictures 6 September 2021 Traders in the Ring at the London Metal Exchange, in the City of London, after open-outcry trading returned for the first time since March 2020, when the Ring was temporarily closed due to the pandemic PA UK news in pictures 5 September 2021 People enjoy the warm weather on Sandbanks beach, Poole PA UK news in pictures 4 September 2021 Demonstrators from Animal Rebellion and Nature Rebellion protest in Trafalgar Square in London. PA UK news in pictures 3 September 2021 South Africa's Ntando Mahlangu (centre) wins the Men's 200 metres T61 Final ahead of second placed Great Britain's Richard Whitehead at the Tokyo 2020 Paralympic Games PA UK news in pictures 2 September 2021 A young common seal on the beach at Horsey Gap in Norfolk, as hundreds of pregnant grey seals come ashore ready for the start of the pupping season. PA UK news in pictures 1 September 2021 Goldfinches fighting over food in a garden in Strensham, Worcestershire PA UK news in pictures 31 August 2021 Gold Medallist Sarah Storey of Britain celebrates on the podium Reuters UK news in pictures 30 August 2021 Extinction Rebellion protesters hold a a tea party on Tower Bridge in London EPA UK news in pictures 29 August 2021 A police office tussles with a demonstrator on Cromwell Road outside the Natural History Museum during a protest by members of Extinction Rebellion in London PA UK news in pictures 28 August 2021 Members of the British armed forces 16 Air Assault Brigade walk to the air terminal after disembarking a Royal Airforce Voyager aircraft at Brize Norton, Oxfordshire POOL/AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 27 August 2021 Fabio Quartararo crashes during a MotoGP practice session at the British Grand Prix, Silverstone Circuit Action Images via Reuters UK news in pictures 26 August 2021 An Extinction Rebellion activist holds a placard in a fountain surrounded by police officers, during a protest next to Buckingham Palace in London Reuters UK news in pictures 25 August 2021 Gold Medallist Great Britains cyclist, Sarah Storey, celebrates after winning the Womens C5 3000m Individual Pursuit Final at the Tokyo 2020 Paralympic Games. It was her 15th Paralympic gold Reuters UK news in pictures 24 August 2021 A demonstrator dressed as bee during a protest by members of Extinction Rebellion on Whitehall, in central London PA UK news in pictures 23 August 2021 Former interpreters for the British forces in Afghanistan demonstrate outside the Home Office in central London AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 22 August 2021 Police officers form a line in front of the entrance to the Guildhall, London, where protesters have climbed onto a ledge above the entrance during an Extinction Rebellion stage a protest PA UK news in pictures 21 August 2021 People take part in a demonstration in solidarity with people of Afghanistan, in London Reuters UK news in pictures 20 August 2021 People zip wire across the sea from Bournemouth pier towards the beach. PA UK news in pictures 19 August 2021 Supporters of Geronimo the alpaca gather outside Shepherds Close Farm in Wooton Under Edge, Gloucestershire PA UK news in pictures 18 August 2021 Former Afghan interpreters and veterans hold a demonstration outside Downing Street, calling for support and protection for Afghan interpreters and their families PA UK news in pictures 17 August 2021 Military personnel board the RAF Airbus A400M at RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire, where evacuation flights from Afghanistan have been landing Reuters UK news in pictures 16 August 2021 Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer takes part in a minute's silence at Wolverhampton police station for the victims of the Plymouth mass shooting last week PA UK news in pictures 15 August 2021 2Storm, a ten-metre tall puppet of a mythical goddess of the sea created by Edinburgh-based visual theatre company Vision Mechanics, makes its way alongside the seafront at North Berwick, East Lothian, during a performance at the Fringe By The Sea festival PA UK news in pictures 14 August 2021 A woman and two young girls look at floral tributes in Plymouth where six people, including the offender, died of gunshot wounds in a firearms incident PA UK news in pictures 13 August 2021 Forensic officers in the Keyham area of Plymouth where six people, including the shooter, died of gunshot wounds in a firearms incident on Thursday evening PA UK news in pictures 12 August 2021 Children ride horses in the River Eden in Appleby, Cumbria, during the annual gathering of travellers for the Appleby Horse Fair PA UK news in pictures 11 August 2021 Stella Moris (left) reacts after talking to the media outside the High Court in London, following the first hearing in the Julian Assange extradition appeal, n London, following the first hearing in the Julian Assange extradition appeal. The US government has won the latest round in its High Court bid to appeal against the decision not to extradite Julian Assange on espionage charges PA UK news in pictures 10 August 2021 Students react after they receive their A-Level results at the Ark Academy, in London Reuters UK news in pictures 9 August 2021 The final athletes from Great Britain arrive home including Jason Kenny, Laura Kenny and Katie Archibald (front left-right) at Heathrow Airport, London following the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games PA UK news in pictures 8 August 2021 Great Britain's Laura Kenny during the closing ceremony of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games at the Olympic stadium in Japan PA UK news in pictures 7 August 2021 People from the Glasgow Southside community take part in the Govanhill Carnival, an anti-racist celebration of pride, unity and the contributions immigrants have made to the community in Govanhill, at Queen's Park, Glasgow PA UK news in pictures 6 August 2021 Chijindu Ujah of Britain, Zharnel Hughes of Britain, Richard Kilty of Britain and Nethaneel Mitchell-Blake of Britain celebrate winning silver as they pose with Asha Philip of Britain, Imani Lansiquot of Britain, Dina Asher-Smith of Britain and Daryll Neita of Britain after they won bronze in the women's 4 x 100m relay during Olympic Games Day 14 Getty UK news in pictures 5 August 2021 A protester places flowers on a photograph of an executed man during a demonstration organised by supporters of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) to protest against the inauguration of Iran's new president Ebrahim Raisi in central London AFP via Getty UK news in pictures 4 August 2021 England's Joe Root looks on as India's KL Rahul doesn't make it to a catch during day one of Cinch First Test match at Trent Bridge, Nottingham PA UK news in pictures 3 August 2021 Great Britain's Laura Kenny and Jason Kenny with their silver medals for the Women's Team Pursuit and Mens Team Sprint during the Track Cycling at the Izu Velodrome on the eleventh day of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games in Japan PA UK news in pictures 2 August 2021 Great Britains Charlotte Worthington competes during the Womens BMX Freestyle Final at the Tokyo Olympics PA UK news in pictures 1 August 2021 EPA UK news in pictures 31 July 2021 James Guy, Adam Peaty and Kathleen Dawson celebrate winning the gold medal in the mixed 4x100m medley relay final at the Tokyo Olympics AP UK news in pictures 30 July 2021 Great Britain's Bethany Shriever and Kye Whyte celebrate their Gold and Silver medals respectively for the Cycling BMX Racing at the Ariake Urban Sports Park on the seventh day of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games in Japan PA UK news in pictures 29 July 2021 Team GB's Mallory Franklin during the Womens Canoe Slalom Final on day six of the Tokyo Olympic Games. She went on to win the silver medal Getty Miss Fletcher-Michie was the daughter of actor John Michie, who played neurosurgeon Guy Self in BBC medical drama Holby City. Following her death, Mr Michie said the family had "lost an angel". A suspected neo-Nazi has been arrested by counter-terror police amid a crackdown on a banned far-right group. The 46-year-old man was detained on suspicion of being a National Action member and malicious communications. He remains in custody for questioning following a dawn raid at his home in Lincoln by the Counter Terrorism Policing North West unit. Detective Chief Superintendent Dominic Scally said: The arrest forms part of a wider operation into the activities of a proscribed organisation. The man remains in custody to be questioned by specialist officers and our investigation continues. Those involved in proscribed organisations have a detrimental effect on the communities others work so hard to build so it is essential people contact us with information so we can put a stop to those who support extremist ideologies. The man faces being charged with offences under the Terrorism Act and Telecommunications Act. National Action, seen in York, has been banned (National Action) Lincolnshire Police, which supported the raid, said the operation was pre-planned and it is not believed there is any threat to the local Lincolnshire community at this time. National Action became the first far-right terrorist group to be banned by the Government in December 2016, making membership a criminal offence carrying a sentence of up to 10 years' imprisonment. The Government has since proscribed two of its aliases, Scottish Dawn and NS131 (National Socialist Anti-Capitalist Action), which had been operating in the Midlands. Extending the ban in September, Amber Rudd vowed to combat the vile racist, homophobic and anti-Semitic groups and their ability to glorify violence and stir up hatred. I will not allow them to masquerade under different names, the Home Secretary said at the time. By extending the proscription of National Action, we are halting the spread of a poisonous ideology and stopping its membership from growing protecting those who could be at risk of radicalisation. Founded in 2013, National Action promotes the idea that Britain will inevitably see a violent race war and has been linked to violent plots, while its members ran what activists called a terror training camp at its former base in Warrington. UK news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 UK news in pictures UK news in pictures 15 September 2021 Children pose by ice sculptures depicting people collecting water by charity Water Aid to show the fragility of water and the threat posed by climate change in London AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 14 September 2021 Heavy rain covers the A149 near Kings Lynn in Norfolk PA UK news in pictures 13 September 2021 Luke Jerram's 'Museum of the Moon' at Durham Cathedral PA UK news in pictures 12 September 2021 Inspirational young fundraiser Tobias Weller crosses the finish line, near his home in Sheffield, as he completes his latest epic feat where he swam and triked his way to the end of his awesome year-long Ironman Challenge. This is the third challenge Tobias, who has cerebral palsy and autism, has completed, raising more than 150,000 for his school and Sheffield Children Hospitals charity PA UK news in pictures 11 September 2021 British player Emma Raducanu, holds up the US Open championship trophy winning the women's singles final of the US Open in New York AP UK news in pictures 10 September 2021 People paddle board during a misty morning in Ullswater, the second largest lake in the Lake District, Cumbria PA UK news in pictures 9 September 2021 Troops from Wiltshire based 4 Armoured Close Support Battalion Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers during final inspection at Wellington Barracks in London, ahead of providing troops for the Queens Guard PA UK news in pictures 8 September 2021 Workers cross London Bridge during the morning rush hour in London Reuters UK news in pictures Mixing it up: Painting it up press view in London A gallery employee poses for photographers next to a painting entitled Prairie by British artist, Louise Giovanelli during the exhibition 'Mixing it up: Painting it up' at the Hayward Gallery in London EPA UK news in pictures 6 September 2021 Traders in the Ring at the London Metal Exchange, in the City of London, after open-outcry trading returned for the first time since March 2020, when the Ring was temporarily closed due to the pandemic PA UK news in pictures 5 September 2021 People enjoy the warm weather on Sandbanks beach, Poole PA UK news in pictures 4 September 2021 Demonstrators from Animal Rebellion and Nature Rebellion protest in Trafalgar Square in London. PA UK news in pictures 3 September 2021 South Africa's Ntando Mahlangu (centre) wins the Men's 200 metres T61 Final ahead of second placed Great Britain's Richard Whitehead at the Tokyo 2020 Paralympic Games PA UK news in pictures 2 September 2021 A young common seal on the beach at Horsey Gap in Norfolk, as hundreds of pregnant grey seals come ashore ready for the start of the pupping season. PA UK news in pictures 1 September 2021 Goldfinches fighting over food in a garden in Strensham, Worcestershire PA UK news in pictures 31 August 2021 Gold Medallist Sarah Storey of Britain celebrates on the podium Reuters UK news in pictures 30 August 2021 Extinction Rebellion protesters hold a a tea party on Tower Bridge in London EPA UK news in pictures 29 August 2021 A police office tussles with a demonstrator on Cromwell Road outside the Natural History Museum during a protest by members of Extinction Rebellion in London PA UK news in pictures 28 August 2021 Members of the British armed forces 16 Air Assault Brigade walk to the air terminal after disembarking a Royal Airforce Voyager aircraft at Brize Norton, Oxfordshire POOL/AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 27 August 2021 Fabio Quartararo crashes during a MotoGP practice session at the British Grand Prix, Silverstone Circuit Action Images via Reuters UK news in pictures 26 August 2021 An Extinction Rebellion activist holds a placard in a fountain surrounded by police officers, during a protest next to Buckingham Palace in London Reuters UK news in pictures 25 August 2021 Gold Medallist Great Britains cyclist, Sarah Storey, celebrates after winning the Womens C5 3000m Individual Pursuit Final at the Tokyo 2020 Paralympic Games. It was her 15th Paralympic gold Reuters UK news in pictures 24 August 2021 A demonstrator dressed as bee during a protest by members of Extinction Rebellion on Whitehall, in central London PA UK news in pictures 23 August 2021 Former interpreters for the British forces in Afghanistan demonstrate outside the Home Office in central London AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 22 August 2021 Police officers form a line in front of the entrance to the Guildhall, London, where protesters have climbed onto a ledge above the entrance during an Extinction Rebellion stage a protest PA UK news in pictures 21 August 2021 People take part in a demonstration in solidarity with people of Afghanistan, in London Reuters UK news in pictures 20 August 2021 People zip wire across the sea from Bournemouth pier towards the beach. PA UK news in pictures 19 August 2021 Supporters of Geronimo the alpaca gather outside Shepherds Close Farm in Wooton Under Edge, Gloucestershire PA UK news in pictures 18 August 2021 Former Afghan interpreters and veterans hold a demonstration outside Downing Street, calling for support and protection for Afghan interpreters and their families PA UK news in pictures 17 August 2021 Military personnel board the RAF Airbus A400M at RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire, where evacuation flights from Afghanistan have been landing Reuters UK news in pictures 16 August 2021 Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer takes part in a minute's silence at Wolverhampton police station for the victims of the Plymouth mass shooting last week PA UK news in pictures 15 August 2021 2Storm, a ten-metre tall puppet of a mythical goddess of the sea created by Edinburgh-based visual theatre company Vision Mechanics, makes its way alongside the seafront at North Berwick, East Lothian, during a performance at the Fringe By The Sea festival PA UK news in pictures 14 August 2021 A woman and two young girls look at floral tributes in Plymouth where six people, including the offender, died of gunshot wounds in a firearms incident PA UK news in pictures 13 August 2021 Forensic officers in the Keyham area of Plymouth where six people, including the shooter, died of gunshot wounds in a firearms incident on Thursday evening PA UK news in pictures 12 August 2021 Children ride horses in the River Eden in Appleby, Cumbria, during the annual gathering of travellers for the Appleby Horse Fair PA UK news in pictures 11 August 2021 Stella Moris (left) reacts after talking to the media outside the High Court in London, following the first hearing in the Julian Assange extradition appeal, n London, following the first hearing in the Julian Assange extradition appeal. The US government has won the latest round in its High Court bid to appeal against the decision not to extradite Julian Assange on espionage charges PA UK news in pictures 10 August 2021 Students react after they receive their A-Level results at the Ark Academy, in London Reuters UK news in pictures 9 August 2021 The final athletes from Great Britain arrive home including Jason Kenny, Laura Kenny and Katie Archibald (front left-right) at Heathrow Airport, London following the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games PA UK news in pictures 8 August 2021 Great Britain's Laura Kenny during the closing ceremony of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games at the Olympic stadium in Japan PA UK news in pictures 7 August 2021 People from the Glasgow Southside community take part in the Govanhill Carnival, an anti-racist celebration of pride, unity and the contributions immigrants have made to the community in Govanhill, at Queen's Park, Glasgow PA UK news in pictures 6 August 2021 Chijindu Ujah of Britain, Zharnel Hughes of Britain, Richard Kilty of Britain and Nethaneel Mitchell-Blake of Britain celebrate winning silver as they pose with Asha Philip of Britain, Imani Lansiquot of Britain, Dina Asher-Smith of Britain and Daryll Neita of Britain after they won bronze in the women's 4 x 100m relay during Olympic Games Day 14 Getty UK news in pictures 5 August 2021 A protester places flowers on a photograph of an executed man during a demonstration organised by supporters of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) to protest against the inauguration of Iran's new president Ebrahim Raisi in central London AFP via Getty UK news in pictures 4 August 2021 England's Joe Root looks on as India's KL Rahul doesn't make it to a catch during day one of Cinch First Test match at Trent Bridge, Nottingham PA UK news in pictures 3 August 2021 Great Britain's Laura Kenny and Jason Kenny with their silver medals for the Women's Team Pursuit and Mens Team Sprint during the Track Cycling at the Izu Velodrome on the eleventh day of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games in Japan PA UK news in pictures 2 August 2021 Great Britains Charlotte Worthington competes during the Womens BMX Freestyle Final at the Tokyo Olympics PA UK news in pictures 1 August 2021 EPA UK news in pictures 31 July 2021 James Guy, Adam Peaty and Kathleen Dawson celebrate winning the gold medal in the mixed 4x100m medley relay final at the Tokyo Olympics AP UK news in pictures 30 July 2021 Great Britain's Bethany Shriever and Kye Whyte celebrate their Gold and Silver medals respectively for the Cycling BMX Racing at the Ariake Urban Sports Park on the seventh day of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games in Japan PA UK news in pictures 29 July 2021 Team GB's Mallory Franklin during the Womens Canoe Slalom Final on day six of the Tokyo Olympic Games. She went on to win the silver medal Getty UK news in pictures 28 July 2021 Canoers on Llyn Padarn lake in Snowdonia, Gwynedd. It was announced that the north-west Wales slate landscape has been granted UNESCO World Heritage Status PA It praised the murderer of Labour MP Jo Cox, who was killed by a far-right extremist during the EU referendum campaign and called for white jihad against perceived enemies including Jewish people and the LGBT community. Several alleged members are currently facing separate trials, including British soldiers and a man accused of buying a machete with the intention of murdering Labour MP Rosie Cooper. A former National Action recruiter, who cannot be named for legal reasons, was convicted of inciting racial hatred last month after describing Jewish people as parasites that needed to be eradicated. The real enemy is the Jew, he told a demonstration. You can call me Nazi, you can call me fascist. That is what I am. Security services have warned of the increasing threat emanating from both the far-right and Isis, which is being fuelled by remote radicalisation online. The past year has seen a record number of terror arrests in the UK, with five attacks carried out in London and Manchester, and several plots foiled. Police urge anyone with information to call the Anti-Terrorist Hotline in confidence on 0800 789 321. A student is facing life in prison for murdering a man over a WhatsApp argument about who was "least gay". Paul Akinnuoye, 20, from Tunbridge Wells in Kent, stabbed to death Jordan Wright, 19, after the pair traded gay insults in a group called Ice city boyz, a court heard. The defendant called Wright a batty boy, and he retorted: On your mums life Im straighter than you. The argument escalated and led to the pair agreeing to a fight in Shooters Hill, south-east London. Akinnuoye armed himself with a small knife but the victim, who was due to start a construction apprenticeship days later, regarded it as a fist-fight ting, the court was told. On the evening of 19 April last year, the defendant travelled from Tunbridge Wells and met with a group of men, including Wright, in Blackheath. German nurse Niels Hoegel who killed 'out of boredom' could be country's worst serial killer after being charged with 97 murders Wright suffered repeated stab wounds, collapsed and died. In the struggle, part of the knife was left at the scene while the defendant made off in a taxi. A specialist sniffer dog found a piece of red plastic on the ground which Akinnuoyes housemates later identified as belonging to a set of knives. He tried to dispose of his phone and cover his tracks, prosecutor Tony Badenoch QC said. During his trial, the defendant accepted he was at the scene but blamed someone else for the killing. A jury at the Old Bailey deliberated for a day to find him guilty of murder. UK news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 UK news in pictures UK news in pictures 15 September 2021 Children pose by ice sculptures depicting people collecting water by charity Water Aid to show the fragility of water and the threat posed by climate change in London AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 14 September 2021 Heavy rain covers the A149 near Kings Lynn in Norfolk PA UK news in pictures 13 September 2021 Luke Jerram's 'Museum of the Moon' at Durham Cathedral PA UK news in pictures 12 September 2021 Inspirational young fundraiser Tobias Weller crosses the finish line, near his home in Sheffield, as he completes his latest epic feat where he swam and triked his way to the end of his awesome year-long Ironman Challenge. This is the third challenge Tobias, who has cerebral palsy and autism, has completed, raising more than 150,000 for his school and Sheffield Children Hospitals charity PA UK news in pictures 11 September 2021 British player Emma Raducanu, holds up the US Open championship trophy winning the women's singles final of the US Open in New York AP UK news in pictures 10 September 2021 People paddle board during a misty morning in Ullswater, the second largest lake in the Lake District, Cumbria PA UK news in pictures 9 September 2021 Troops from Wiltshire based 4 Armoured Close Support Battalion Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers during final inspection at Wellington Barracks in London, ahead of providing troops for the Queens Guard PA UK news in pictures 8 September 2021 Workers cross London Bridge during the morning rush hour in London Reuters UK news in pictures Mixing it up: Painting it up press view in London A gallery employee poses for photographers next to a painting entitled Prairie by British artist, Louise Giovanelli during the exhibition 'Mixing it up: Painting it up' at the Hayward Gallery in London EPA UK news in pictures 6 September 2021 Traders in the Ring at the London Metal Exchange, in the City of London, after open-outcry trading returned for the first time since March 2020, when the Ring was temporarily closed due to the pandemic PA UK news in pictures 5 September 2021 People enjoy the warm weather on Sandbanks beach, Poole PA UK news in pictures 4 September 2021 Demonstrators from Animal Rebellion and Nature Rebellion protest in Trafalgar Square in London. PA UK news in pictures 3 September 2021 South Africa's Ntando Mahlangu (centre) wins the Men's 200 metres T61 Final ahead of second placed Great Britain's Richard Whitehead at the Tokyo 2020 Paralympic Games PA UK news in pictures 2 September 2021 A young common seal on the beach at Horsey Gap in Norfolk, as hundreds of pregnant grey seals come ashore ready for the start of the pupping season. PA UK news in pictures 1 September 2021 Goldfinches fighting over food in a garden in Strensham, Worcestershire PA UK news in pictures 31 August 2021 Gold Medallist Sarah Storey of Britain celebrates on the podium Reuters UK news in pictures 30 August 2021 Extinction Rebellion protesters hold a a tea party on Tower Bridge in London EPA UK news in pictures 29 August 2021 A police office tussles with a demonstrator on Cromwell Road outside the Natural History Museum during a protest by members of Extinction Rebellion in London PA UK news in pictures 28 August 2021 Members of the British armed forces 16 Air Assault Brigade walk to the air terminal after disembarking a Royal Airforce Voyager aircraft at Brize Norton, Oxfordshire POOL/AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 27 August 2021 Fabio Quartararo crashes during a MotoGP practice session at the British Grand Prix, Silverstone Circuit Action Images via Reuters UK news in pictures 26 August 2021 An Extinction Rebellion activist holds a placard in a fountain surrounded by police officers, during a protest next to Buckingham Palace in London Reuters UK news in pictures 25 August 2021 Gold Medallist Great Britains cyclist, Sarah Storey, celebrates after winning the Womens C5 3000m Individual Pursuit Final at the Tokyo 2020 Paralympic Games. It was her 15th Paralympic gold Reuters UK news in pictures 24 August 2021 A demonstrator dressed as bee during a protest by members of Extinction Rebellion on Whitehall, in central London PA UK news in pictures 23 August 2021 Former interpreters for the British forces in Afghanistan demonstrate outside the Home Office in central London AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 22 August 2021 Police officers form a line in front of the entrance to the Guildhall, London, where protesters have climbed onto a ledge above the entrance during an Extinction Rebellion stage a protest PA UK news in pictures 21 August 2021 People take part in a demonstration in solidarity with people of Afghanistan, in London Reuters UK news in pictures 20 August 2021 People zip wire across the sea from Bournemouth pier towards the beach. PA UK news in pictures 19 August 2021 Supporters of Geronimo the alpaca gather outside Shepherds Close Farm in Wooton Under Edge, Gloucestershire PA UK news in pictures 18 August 2021 Former Afghan interpreters and veterans hold a demonstration outside Downing Street, calling for support and protection for Afghan interpreters and their families PA UK news in pictures 17 August 2021 Military personnel board the RAF Airbus A400M at RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire, where evacuation flights from Afghanistan have been landing Reuters UK news in pictures 16 August 2021 Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer takes part in a minute's silence at Wolverhampton police station for the victims of the Plymouth mass shooting last week PA UK news in pictures 15 August 2021 2Storm, a ten-metre tall puppet of a mythical goddess of the sea created by Edinburgh-based visual theatre company Vision Mechanics, makes its way alongside the seafront at North Berwick, East Lothian, during a performance at the Fringe By The Sea festival PA UK news in pictures 14 August 2021 A woman and two young girls look at floral tributes in Plymouth where six people, including the offender, died of gunshot wounds in a firearms incident PA UK news in pictures 13 August 2021 Forensic officers in the Keyham area of Plymouth where six people, including the shooter, died of gunshot wounds in a firearms incident on Thursday evening PA UK news in pictures 12 August 2021 Children ride horses in the River Eden in Appleby, Cumbria, during the annual gathering of travellers for the Appleby Horse Fair PA UK news in pictures 11 August 2021 Stella Moris (left) reacts after talking to the media outside the High Court in London, following the first hearing in the Julian Assange extradition appeal, n London, following the first hearing in the Julian Assange extradition appeal. The US government has won the latest round in its High Court bid to appeal against the decision not to extradite Julian Assange on espionage charges PA UK news in pictures 10 August 2021 Students react after they receive their A-Level results at the Ark Academy, in London Reuters UK news in pictures 9 August 2021 The final athletes from Great Britain arrive home including Jason Kenny, Laura Kenny and Katie Archibald (front left-right) at Heathrow Airport, London following the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games PA UK news in pictures 8 August 2021 Great Britain's Laura Kenny during the closing ceremony of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games at the Olympic stadium in Japan PA UK news in pictures 7 August 2021 People from the Glasgow Southside community take part in the Govanhill Carnival, an anti-racist celebration of pride, unity and the contributions immigrants have made to the community in Govanhill, at Queen's Park, Glasgow PA UK news in pictures 6 August 2021 Chijindu Ujah of Britain, Zharnel Hughes of Britain, Richard Kilty of Britain and Nethaneel Mitchell-Blake of Britain celebrate winning silver as they pose with Asha Philip of Britain, Imani Lansiquot of Britain, Dina Asher-Smith of Britain and Daryll Neita of Britain after they won bronze in the women's 4 x 100m relay during Olympic Games Day 14 Getty UK news in pictures 5 August 2021 A protester places flowers on a photograph of an executed man during a demonstration organised by supporters of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) to protest against the inauguration of Iran's new president Ebrahim Raisi in central London AFP via Getty UK news in pictures 4 August 2021 England's Joe Root looks on as India's KL Rahul doesn't make it to a catch during day one of Cinch First Test match at Trent Bridge, Nottingham PA UK news in pictures 3 August 2021 Great Britain's Laura Kenny and Jason Kenny with their silver medals for the Women's Team Pursuit and Mens Team Sprint during the Track Cycling at the Izu Velodrome on the eleventh day of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games in Japan PA UK news in pictures 2 August 2021 Great Britains Charlotte Worthington competes during the Womens BMX Freestyle Final at the Tokyo Olympics PA UK news in pictures 1 August 2021 EPA UK news in pictures 31 July 2021 James Guy, Adam Peaty and Kathleen Dawson celebrate winning the gold medal in the mixed 4x100m medley relay final at the Tokyo Olympics AP UK news in pictures 30 July 2021 Great Britain's Bethany Shriever and Kye Whyte celebrate their Gold and Silver medals respectively for the Cycling BMX Racing at the Ariake Urban Sports Park on the seventh day of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games in Japan PA UK news in pictures 29 July 2021 Team GB's Mallory Franklin during the Womens Canoe Slalom Final on day six of the Tokyo Olympic Games. She went on to win the silver medal Getty UK news in pictures 28 July 2021 Canoers on Llyn Padarn lake in Snowdonia, Gwynedd. It was announced that the north-west Wales slate landscape has been granted UNESCO World Heritage Status PA Judge Philip Katz QC adjourned sentencing to a date to be fixed and remanded the defendant in custody. Detective Inspector Jo Sideaway, of the Homicide and Major Crime Command, said the murder devastated the victims family and caused a big shock to the local community. Wrights mother, Katharine Alade, said: You dont realise until it happens to you how far reaching one moment of madness can be and what an impact it can make on your life forever. There is not one day when I dont shed tears. I could have dealt with him dying at such a young age through illness, but not by the hands of a boy the same age as him and over what? His father Neville Wright added: He was very loving, funny and a very caring person, as well as a very popular person. I think of him every day ... of what he would have achieved in life he is gone, but not forgotten. Additional reporting by PA The family of a man who killed himself in prison has said he was failed by the system, claiming he was deprived of the specialist care he needed despite begging for help. Anthony Paine, 35, had been in HMP Liverpool for five months and was due to be released in two weeks when he was found hanging in his cell on Monday. He died shortly afterwards in hospital. Just weeks before his death, Paine had sent his mother Janet a letter stating that nobody was doing anything to help [him] and pleading: Help me. Mr Paine sent his mother a letter from the prison on 5 February urging for help (Chelsea Paine) Mr Paine had been sentenced to 18 months in January for affray and endangering the public after climbing onto a roof. His sister Chelsea Paine, 26, told The Independent that despite her brothers long history of self-harm the prison appeared to have no care plan in place for him. She accused the justice system of giving him a death sentence. She said her mother had written to the judge to ask him not to send her son to jail, saying he would not be able to handle it, but an independent psychiatric report which reportedly lasted 15 minutes had concluded that he was fit for custody. She had later phoned the prison with concerns over her son's psychological state. Its disgusting. He begged and begged for help. The prison had no care plan in place, said Ms Paine. He had been in a cell with another inmate who he got on with, but weve now been told he had been in a cell on his own. Apparently he was screaming for help in his cell and booting the door all day on Monday. Apparently the panic button in his cell didnt work. Tony has never ever in his life harmed anyone else. Hes always harmed himself. Hes got the longest history of self-harm, and they just left him. Ms Paine described her brother as an "amazing person" whose mental health problems weren't adequately attended to in jail (Chelsea Paine) He was an amazing person. He had the biggest smile. He was mischievous. He loved his fishing; he loved everyone in his family so much. He was so looking forward to coming home in two weeks time. Mr Paine is the third inmate to have died by suicide at the jail since inspectors made an unannounced visit in September, which concluded that conditions in the jail were the worst ever seen and there had been an abject failure to provide a safe regime. He is the 39th inmate to have died in jail across England and Wales since the start of the year, and the 13th self-inflicted death, according to figures collated by charity Inquest. Recommended Prisoner dies at HMP Nottingham three weeks after urgent warning One of those was Darren Capewell, 37, whose body was found in his cell at HMP Nottingham just two days after he arrived at the jail. A month before, the Chief Inspector of Prisons issued the Justice Secretary with an urgent notification due to serious concerns about the prison, saying it was fundamentally unsafe and required immediate action. An inquest on Tuesday found a Lithuanian teenager who was arrested for stealing sweets hanged himself in HMP Wandsworth after staff failed to respond to his call for help. Eighteen-year-old Osvaldas Pagirys had been found five previous times with a ligature around his neck during his three months in prison, but left in isolation on the day he died. Responding to Mr Paines death, Pia Sinha, Governor of HMP Liverpool said: This is a tragic case and my deepest condolences are with Mr Paines family and friends. There will be a full Prisons and Probation Ombudsman investigation into exactly what happened. We have also acknowledged the wider challenges the prison faces and have taken immediate action to address them, including investing in specialist staff to provide training in prisoner safety and self-harm prevention. They said there would be an independent investigation by the Prisons and Probation Ombudsman, saying this limited what could be said at the present time. The father of a brain-damaged baby fears he will never see his son alive again after being barred from the hospital caring for him. Doctors could withdraw life support from Isaiah Haastrup after judges at the Court of Appeal denied a challenge by Lanre Haastrup and Takesha Thomas. The High Court previously said the one-year-old boy could be allowed to die against his parents wishes after doctors said further treatment was futile, burdensome and not in his best interests. Speaking outside the court, Mr Haastrup said it was a sad day. No one else will stand up for him so we have to, the father added. We are fighting for our son, who was negligently harmed. Mr Haastrup hit out at Kings College Hospital in London for banning him from seeing his son after he allegedly lost his temper and made threats towards staff. I think the hospital should be ashamed of themselves with the way theyve treated us, he said. How can you ban me from seeing my son despite having a judgement for him to die? Ms Thomas insisted her son was responsive but specialists have said further intensive care treatment is futile and won court permission to give only palliative care. UK news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 UK news in pictures UK news in pictures 16 September 2021 Sheikeh MOhammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, leader of Abu Dhabi, leaves Downing Street after meeting with Boris Johnson PA UK news in pictures 15 September 2021 Children pose by ice sculptures depicting people collecting water by charity Water Aid to show the fragility of water and the threat posed by climate change in London AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 14 September 2021 Heavy rain covers the A149 near Kings Lynn in Norfolk PA UK news in pictures 13 September 2021 Luke Jerram's 'Museum of the Moon' at Durham Cathedral PA UK news in pictures 12 September 2021 Inspirational young fundraiser Tobias Weller crosses the finish line, near his home in Sheffield, as he completes his latest epic feat where he swam and triked his way to the end of his awesome year-long Ironman Challenge. This is the third challenge Tobias, who has cerebral palsy and autism, has completed, raising more than 150,000 for his school and Sheffield Children Hospitals charity PA UK news in pictures 11 September 2021 British player Emma Raducanu, holds up the US Open championship trophy winning the women's singles final of the US Open in New York AP UK news in pictures 10 September 2021 People paddle board during a misty morning in Ullswater, the second largest lake in the Lake District, Cumbria PA UK news in pictures 9 September 2021 Troops from Wiltshire based 4 Armoured Close Support Battalion Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers during final inspection at Wellington Barracks in London, ahead of providing troops for the Queens Guard PA UK news in pictures 8 September 2021 Workers cross London Bridge during the morning rush hour in London Reuters UK news in pictures Mixing it up: Painting it up press view in London A gallery employee poses for photographers next to a painting entitled Prairie by British artist, Louise Giovanelli during the exhibition 'Mixing it up: Painting it up' at the Hayward Gallery in London EPA UK news in pictures 6 September 2021 Traders in the Ring at the London Metal Exchange, in the City of London, after open-outcry trading returned for the first time since March 2020, when the Ring was temporarily closed due to the pandemic PA UK news in pictures 5 September 2021 People enjoy the warm weather on Sandbanks beach, Poole PA UK news in pictures 4 September 2021 Demonstrators from Animal Rebellion and Nature Rebellion protest in Trafalgar Square in London. PA UK news in pictures 3 September 2021 South Africa's Ntando Mahlangu (centre) wins the Men's 200 metres T61 Final ahead of second placed Great Britain's Richard Whitehead at the Tokyo 2020 Paralympic Games PA UK news in pictures 2 September 2021 A young common seal on the beach at Horsey Gap in Norfolk, as hundreds of pregnant grey seals come ashore ready for the start of the pupping season. PA UK news in pictures 1 September 2021 Goldfinches fighting over food in a garden in Strensham, Worcestershire PA UK news in pictures 31 August 2021 Gold Medallist Sarah Storey of Britain celebrates on the podium Reuters UK news in pictures 30 August 2021 Extinction Rebellion protesters hold a a tea party on Tower Bridge in London EPA UK news in pictures 29 August 2021 A police office tussles with a demonstrator on Cromwell Road outside the Natural History Museum during a protest by members of Extinction Rebellion in London PA UK news in pictures 28 August 2021 Members of the British armed forces 16 Air Assault Brigade walk to the air terminal after disembarking a Royal Airforce Voyager aircraft at Brize Norton, Oxfordshire POOL/AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 27 August 2021 Fabio Quartararo crashes during a MotoGP practice session at the British Grand Prix, Silverstone Circuit Action Images via Reuters UK news in pictures 26 August 2021 An Extinction Rebellion activist holds a placard in a fountain surrounded by police officers, during a protest next to Buckingham Palace in London Reuters UK news in pictures 25 August 2021 Gold Medallist Great Britains cyclist, Sarah Storey, celebrates after winning the Womens C5 3000m Individual Pursuit Final at the Tokyo 2020 Paralympic Games. It was her 15th Paralympic gold Reuters UK news in pictures 24 August 2021 A demonstrator dressed as bee during a protest by members of Extinction Rebellion on Whitehall, in central London PA UK news in pictures 23 August 2021 Former interpreters for the British forces in Afghanistan demonstrate outside the Home Office in central London AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 22 August 2021 Police officers form a line in front of the entrance to the Guildhall, London, where protesters have climbed onto a ledge above the entrance during an Extinction Rebellion stage a protest PA UK news in pictures 21 August 2021 People take part in a demonstration in solidarity with people of Afghanistan, in London Reuters UK news in pictures 20 August 2021 People zip wire across the sea from Bournemouth pier towards the beach. PA UK news in pictures 19 August 2021 Supporters of Geronimo the alpaca gather outside Shepherds Close Farm in Wooton Under Edge, Gloucestershire PA UK news in pictures 18 August 2021 Former Afghan interpreters and veterans hold a demonstration outside Downing Street, calling for support and protection for Afghan interpreters and their families PA UK news in pictures 17 August 2021 Military personnel board the RAF Airbus A400M at RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire, where evacuation flights from Afghanistan have been landing Reuters UK news in pictures 16 August 2021 Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer takes part in a minute's silence at Wolverhampton police station for the victims of the Plymouth mass shooting last week PA UK news in pictures 15 August 2021 2Storm, a ten-metre tall puppet of a mythical goddess of the sea created by Edinburgh-based visual theatre company Vision Mechanics, makes its way alongside the seafront at North Berwick, East Lothian, during a performance at the Fringe By The Sea festival PA UK news in pictures 14 August 2021 A woman and two young girls look at floral tributes in Plymouth where six people, including the offender, died of gunshot wounds in a firearms incident PA UK news in pictures 13 August 2021 Forensic officers in the Keyham area of Plymouth where six people, including the shooter, died of gunshot wounds in a firearms incident on Thursday evening PA UK news in pictures 12 August 2021 Children ride horses in the River Eden in Appleby, Cumbria, during the annual gathering of travellers for the Appleby Horse Fair PA UK news in pictures 11 August 2021 Stella Moris (left) reacts after talking to the media outside the High Court in London, following the first hearing in the Julian Assange extradition appeal, n London, following the first hearing in the Julian Assange extradition appeal. The US government has won the latest round in its High Court bid to appeal against the decision not to extradite Julian Assange on espionage charges PA UK news in pictures 10 August 2021 Students react after they receive their A-Level results at the Ark Academy, in London Reuters UK news in pictures 9 August 2021 The final athletes from Great Britain arrive home including Jason Kenny, Laura Kenny and Katie Archibald (front left-right) at Heathrow Airport, London following the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games PA UK news in pictures 8 August 2021 Great Britain's Laura Kenny during the closing ceremony of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games at the Olympic stadium in Japan PA UK news in pictures 7 August 2021 People from the Glasgow Southside community take part in the Govanhill Carnival, an anti-racist celebration of pride, unity and the contributions immigrants have made to the community in Govanhill, at Queen's Park, Glasgow PA UK news in pictures 6 August 2021 Chijindu Ujah of Britain, Zharnel Hughes of Britain, Richard Kilty of Britain and Nethaneel Mitchell-Blake of Britain celebrate winning silver as they pose with Asha Philip of Britain, Imani Lansiquot of Britain, Dina Asher-Smith of Britain and Daryll Neita of Britain after they won bronze in the women's 4 x 100m relay during Olympic Games Day 14 Getty UK news in pictures 5 August 2021 A protester places flowers on a photograph of an executed man during a demonstration organised by supporters of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) to protest against the inauguration of Iran's new president Ebrahim Raisi in central London AFP via Getty UK news in pictures 4 August 2021 England's Joe Root looks on as India's KL Rahul doesn't make it to a catch during day one of Cinch First Test match at Trent Bridge, Nottingham PA UK news in pictures 3 August 2021 Great Britain's Laura Kenny and Jason Kenny with their silver medals for the Women's Team Pursuit and Mens Team Sprint during the Track Cycling at the Izu Velodrome on the eleventh day of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games in Japan PA UK news in pictures 2 August 2021 Great Britains Charlotte Worthington competes during the Womens BMX Freestyle Final at the Tokyo Olympics PA UK news in pictures 1 August 2021 EPA UK news in pictures 31 July 2021 James Guy, Adam Peaty and Kathleen Dawson celebrate winning the gold medal in the mixed 4x100m medley relay final at the Tokyo Olympics AP UK news in pictures 30 July 2021 Great Britain's Bethany Shriever and Kye Whyte celebrate their Gold and Silver medals respectively for the Cycling BMX Racing at the Ariake Urban Sports Park on the seventh day of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games in Japan PA UK news in pictures 29 July 2021 Team GB's Mallory Franklin during the Womens Canoe Slalom Final on day six of the Tokyo Olympic Games. She went on to win the silver medal Getty Isaiahs parents are working to delay the withdrawal of life support and are considering an appeal to the European Court of Human Rights. We see Isaiah on a daily basis, we know what our son does and the doctors have got it wrong, Mr Haastrup said. They shouldnt rush to end his life. But he is worried that if those efforts proved fruitless he might not be with Isaiah for the last hours of the little boys life. Of course I am worried about that, the father added. Im worried that I might not see Isaiah again. Recommended High Court rules doctors can turn off life support for toddler But I cant do anything about that. Its a matter for the hospital if they want to lift the ban. On Thursday, he lost a separate legal battle to overturn Kings College Hospitals ban on him entering the premises. Mr Justice Mostyn said Mr Haastrup had not demonstrated any legal error by hospital officials or shown that they had acted irrationally, and the ban is already being reviewed. Mr Justice MacDonald analysed Isaiahs case at a trial in the Family Division of the High Court in London in January, ruling in favour of doctors but saying they should continue treating the baby until appeal judges had considered the case. Isaiah has been on life support since being born with brain damage thought to have been caused by oxygen deprivation on 18 February 2017, and remains in a paediatric intensive care unit. Kings College Hospital accepts his condition was partly contributed to by a delay giving his mother an emergency caesarean, but said the main reason was a rare event where her womb ruptured during labour. The case follows controversy over Charlie Gard, another severely ill baby whose life-support treatment was switched off following a high-profile court battle between his parents and Great Ormond Street Hospital. The parents of a brain-damaged toddler, Alfie Evans, are currently mounting an appeal after a High Court ruling that doctors could allow him to die at Alder Hey Childrens Hospital in Liverpool. Theresa Mays plan for a post-Brexit trade deal has been immediately written off by the EU as pure illusion less than 24 hours after she convinced her ministers to back it at a special lock-in session of Cabinet intended to sort out the UKs trade stance once and for all. Speaking after an informal summit of EU27 leaders in Brussels, European Council President Donald Tusk said Britain still did not understand that it could not have its cake and eat it, warning that the EU would push ahead with its own plans if the UK did not produce something substantial. Mr Tusk told reporters it would be much better if the UK had an idea of what it wanted ahead of next months meeting, but that we cannot stand by and wait. The public slap down comes after ministers backed a vague promise of ambitious managed divergence at a lock-in away day at the PMs country residence Chequers. What could the sticking points be in the Brexit trade deal? Our intention is to adopt these guidelines whether the UK is ready with its vision of our future relations or not, Mr Tusk told reporters. Naturally, it would be much better if it were, but we cannot stand by and wait. I hope to have some more clarity about the UKs plans this week when I meet Prime Minister May in London. He added: I am glad that the UK government seems to be moving towards a more detailed position, however if the media reports are correct I am afraid that the UK position today is based on pure illusion. It looks like the [have your] cake [and eat it] philosophy is still alive. From the very start it has been a key principle of the EU27 that there can be no cherry picking and no single market a la carte. This will continue to be a key principle, I have no doubt. The Friday summit was convened with the main intention of hashing out the first stage of the next EU budget, and filling a financial hole left by Britains departure. The European Commission wants cuts to spending on agricultural subsidies and cohesion funds help for poorer member states which make 70 per cent of the EU budget. Countries are also being asked to contribute more to make up the shortfall, while other revenue-raising measures such as a plastic tax have also been proposed. The bloc also wants to increase spending on immigration and border control to tackle the migration crisis, a particular priority of the Austrian government, which will chair the EU council in the second half of this year. Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt explained the position the UK Cabinet had come to on Brexit trade on BBC Radio 4 this morning. He said the UK wanted frictionless trade while also leaving the customs union. Ministers went to Chequers to hash out a solution (PA) He said there was a central common understanding that there will be areas and sectors of industry where we agree to align our regulations with European regulations, such as the automotive industry. But he added: But it will be on a voluntary basis. We will, as a sovereign power, have the right to choose to diverge, and what we wont be doing is accepting changes in rules because the EU unilaterally chooses to make those changes. The proposal appears to be one that has already been ruled out by the European Unions negotiators. Michel Barnier, the chief negotiator, has repeatedly said that trade barriers would have to be erected were the UK to leave the customs union and single market, and that Britain cannot cherry pick parts of the EU to remain in. The biggest issues facing UK on leaving EU Show all 8 1 /8 The biggest issues facing UK on leaving EU The biggest issues facing UK on leaving EU Post-Brexit immigration workers sorting radishes on a production line at a farm in Norfolk. One possible post-Brexit immigration scheme could struggle to channel workers towards less attractive roles - while another may heighten the risk of labour exploitation, a new report warns. PA The biggest issues facing UK on leaving EU Customs union A key point in the negotiations remains Britain's access to, or withdrawal from, the EU customs union. Since the referendum there has been hot debate over the meaning of Brexit: would it entail a full withdrawal from the existing agreement, known as hard Brexit, or the soft version in which we would remain part of a common customs area for most goods, as Turkey does? No 10 has so far insisted that Brexit means Brexit and that Britain will be leaving the customs union, but may be inclined to change its position once the potential risks to the UKs economic outlook become clearer. Alamy The biggest issues facing UK on leaving EU Northern Ireland-Irish border Though progress was made last year, there has still been no solid agreement on whether there should be a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. To ensure borderless travel on the island, the countries must be in regulatory alignment and therefore adhere to the same rules as the customs union. In December, the Conservative Partys coalition partners, the DUP, refused a draft agreement that would place the UK/EU border in the Irish Sea due to its potential to undermine the union. May has promised that would not be the case and has suggested that a specific solution would need to be found. Getty The biggest issues facing UK on leaving EU Transition period Despite protests from a small number of Conservative MPs, the Government and the EU are largely in agreement that a transitional period is needed after Brexit. The talks, however, have reached an impasse. Though May has agreed that the UK will continue to contribute to the EU budget until 2021, the PM wants to be able to select which laws made during this time the UK will have to adhere to. Chief negotiator Michel Barnier has said the UK must adopt all of the laws passed during the transition, without any input from British ministers or MEPs. EPA The biggest issues facing UK on leaving EU Rights of EU citizens living the UK The Prime Minister has promised EU citizens already living in the UK the right to live and work here after Brexit, but the rights of those who arrive after Brexit day remains unclear. May insists that those who arrive during the transition period should not be allowed to stay, whereas the EU believe the cut-off point should be later. Getty The biggest issues facing UK on leaving EU Future trade agreement (with the EU) Despite this being a key issue in negotiations, the Government has yet to lay out exactly what it wants from a trade deal with the EU. Infighting within the Cabinet has prevented a solid position from being reached, with some MPs content that "no deal is better than a bad deal" while others rally behind single market access. The EU has already confirmed that access to the single market would be impossible without the UK remaining in the customs union. Getty The biggest issues facing UK on leaving EU Future trade agreements (internationally) The Government has already begun trying to woo foreign leaders into prospective trade agreements, with various high profile state visits to China, India and Canada for May, and the now infamous invitation to US President Donald Trump to visit London. However the UK cannot make trade agreements with another country while it is still a member of the EU, and the potential loss of trade with the world's major powers is a source of anxiety for the PM. The EU has said the UK cannot secure trade deals during the transition period. EPA The biggest issues facing UK on leaving EU Financial services Banks in the UK will be hit hard regardless of the Brexit outcome. The EU has refused to give British banks passporting rights to trade within the EU, dashing hopes of a special City deal. However according to new reports Germany has suggested allowing trade on the condition that the UK continues paying into the EU budget even after the transition period. Getty Documents released by the European Commission on the eve of the Chequers meeting reiterated that the plan Ms May was attempting to convince her ministers of crossed EU red lines and would not be acceptable. The Prime Minister is currently trying to negotiate the transition period for Brexit, and wants to complete it before the March summit of the European Council, where she will meet other EU leaders. After that summit both sides hope to move to discussions about what framework trade will be conducted in, though a full trade agreement would only be negotiated after Britain leaves in March 2019. Parliament is heading for an impasse over Brexit that makes a further referendum on Theresa Mays proposed deal ever more likely, says Tony Blair. The former Prime Minister dismissed the Governments claim of a new unity and purpose after the Chequers away day arguing the Cabinet was still trying to have cake and eat it. Mr Blair said there were still irreconcilable differences between ministers and, just as crucially, no majority in Parliament for any of the many proposed versions of Brexit. There is a real possibility of an impasse in Parliament, he told BBC Radio 4s World at One programme In those circumstances, Mr Blair said, the case is ever more stronger for this going back to people to allow them a final say in the deal that is actually agreed by the Government. Arguing the Commons is key, he added: I think it is increasingly unlikely that they are going to get a proposition through the House of Commons. If they cant, at that point, they are faced with a choice between an election and a referendum. The arch-Remain supporter also dismissed any chance of the EU agreeing to the Governments proposal for managed divergence from Brussels regulations. It would be rejected as an attempt to break free from the rules of the single market and customs union which are required of everyone else while the UK demanded to keep their benefits. The biggest issues facing UK on leaving EU Show all 8 1 /8 The biggest issues facing UK on leaving EU The biggest issues facing UK on leaving EU Post-Brexit immigration workers sorting radishes on a production line at a farm in Norfolk. One possible post-Brexit immigration scheme could struggle to channel workers towards less attractive roles - while another may heighten the risk of labour exploitation, a new report warns. PA The biggest issues facing UK on leaving EU Customs union A key point in the negotiations remains Britain's access to, or withdrawal from, the EU customs union. Since the referendum there has been hot debate over the meaning of Brexit: would it entail a full withdrawal from the existing agreement, known as hard Brexit, or the soft version in which we would remain part of a common customs area for most goods, as Turkey does? No 10 has so far insisted that Brexit means Brexit and that Britain will be leaving the customs union, but may be inclined to change its position once the potential risks to the UKs economic outlook become clearer. Alamy The biggest issues facing UK on leaving EU Northern Ireland-Irish border Though progress was made last year, there has still been no solid agreement on whether there should be a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. To ensure borderless travel on the island, the countries must be in regulatory alignment and therefore adhere to the same rules as the customs union. In December, the Conservative Partys coalition partners, the DUP, refused a draft agreement that would place the UK/EU border in the Irish Sea due to its potential to undermine the union. May has promised that would not be the case and has suggested that a specific solution would need to be found. Getty The biggest issues facing UK on leaving EU Transition period Despite protests from a small number of Conservative MPs, the Government and the EU are largely in agreement that a transitional period is needed after Brexit. The talks, however, have reached an impasse. Though May has agreed that the UK will continue to contribute to the EU budget until 2021, the PM wants to be able to select which laws made during this time the UK will have to adhere to. Chief negotiator Michel Barnier has said the UK must adopt all of the laws passed during the transition, without any input from British ministers or MEPs. EPA The biggest issues facing UK on leaving EU Rights of EU citizens living the UK The Prime Minister has promised EU citizens already living in the UK the right to live and work here after Brexit, but the rights of those who arrive after Brexit day remains unclear. May insists that those who arrive during the transition period should not be allowed to stay, whereas the EU believe the cut-off point should be later. Getty The biggest issues facing UK on leaving EU Future trade agreement (with the EU) Despite this being a key issue in negotiations, the Government has yet to lay out exactly what it wants from a trade deal with the EU. Infighting within the Cabinet has prevented a solid position from being reached, with some MPs content that "no deal is better than a bad deal" while others rally behind single market access. The EU has already confirmed that access to the single market would be impossible without the UK remaining in the customs union. Getty The biggest issues facing UK on leaving EU Future trade agreements (internationally) The Government has already begun trying to woo foreign leaders into prospective trade agreements, with various high profile state visits to China, India and Canada for May, and the now infamous invitation to US President Donald Trump to visit London. However the UK cannot make trade agreements with another country while it is still a member of the EU, and the potential loss of trade with the world's major powers is a source of anxiety for the PM. The EU has said the UK cannot secure trade deals during the transition period. EPA The biggest issues facing UK on leaving EU Financial services Banks in the UK will be hit hard regardless of the Brexit outcome. The EU has refused to give British banks passporting rights to trade within the EU, dashing hopes of a special City deal. However according to new reports Germany has suggested allowing trade on the condition that the UK continues paying into the EU budget even after the transition period. Getty I will be really interested to see that deal, Mr Blair said. I literally dont understand what they mean. This is cake and eat it. He also launched a fierce attack on senior Conservatives who are undermining the Good Friday Agreement that had brought peace to Northern Ireland apparently viewing it as an obstacle to Brexit. It is not just alarming but sickening that people are seriously now saying that it doesnt matter if the Good Friday Agreement stays or it doesnt stay, Mr Blair warned. In an article for The Independent, attacking the road to Brexit series of speeches being made by senior ministers, Mr Blair wrote: Each speech in this bizarre parade of Government ministers designed to show unity only further exposes the division. They all try to pull the sword out of the stone, huffing and puffing away, and all fail. This is because there is no escape from the binary nature of the choice over future trading arrangements. Mr Blair also issued a challenge to the Labour Party to oppose Brexit, as Jeremy Corbyn prepares to deliver his own key speech on withdrawal on Monday. He released a study accompanying his article to show the economic pain from Brexit and that the UK needs EU migrants, adding: It is good that the Labour Party position is evolving. But it must align it fully with its policy programme. To carry on pretending that there is Brexit and then, separate from Brexit, there is the NHS, education, crime etc. is ridiculous. If the evidence we present in this paper of all the economic forecasts is only half right, Brexit will reduce the scope for Government spending dramatically. Mr Blair added: The last thing Britain could sensibly do is to leave Europe and then pursue a sort of leftist version of the European social democracy it had just abandoned. Conservative rebels have warned they have the support of growing numbers of MPs in a bid to force Theresa May to keep Britain in a customs union with the EU. Former cabinet minister Dominic Grieve said he believed a broad swathe of the Conservative party in Parliament backed a proposed amendment to Ms Mays trade bill that would secure the change in government position. Increasing numbers of Conservatives and Labour MPs were signing up to the proposal on Friday, with prominent Tory Remainer Anna Soubry among their number claiming there would be many others. It comes as Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn plans to make a Brexit speech on Monday in which he is also expected to signal backing for staying in a customs union, leaving major questions over whether Ms May can maintain her opposition to one. Speaking on the BBCs Daily Politics, Mr Grieve said: My view has always been that the national interest lies in our maintaining [tariff free trade] and, if that means being in a form of customs union, then I dont think thats something that we ought to rule out. The former Attorney General added: If the Government were defeated eventually on this, then the Government would, I would assume, be required to keep us, or seek to negotiate keeping us, in a customs union if that of course can be obtained from our EU partners. The next stage of the trade bill has been delayed until after April, in large part because government whips are attempting to manage the rebellion over the customs union. David Davis tries to dispel post-Brexit chaos fears If passed, the amendment would make it an objective of an appropriate authority to take all necessary steps to implement an international trade agreement which enables the UK to participate after exit day in a customs union with the EU in the same terms as existed before exit day. Labour MP Chuka Umunna, who also signed the amendment, said: Parliament is in the driving seat, and there is a majority to continue participating in a customs union with the EU. A string of Labour frontbenchers have indicated that their party is moving towards backing maintaining the UK in a customs unions with Europe, with Jeremy Corbyn set to deliver a keynote speech on the issue after the weekend. Earlier on Friday, Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt made clear that the Governments position was not to take the UK into any kind of customs union but rather to secure frictionless trade through a trade agreement. Nigel Farage has said Donald Trump would be very welcome in the UK, suggesting the British public were beginning to "get the Trump message". The former leader of UKIP was on Fox News ahead of his appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). He urged people not to judge the UK on the comments made by the left, singling out Jeremy Corbyn and Sadiq Khan. Mr Farage, who was the first British politician to meet Mr Trump after he won the US presidential election in 2016, said people in the UK were beginning to warm to the President. Please dont judge my country by London Mayor Sadiq Khan, Mr Corbyn and the left who every time the President is going to visit the UK promise mass street protests, Mr Farage said. Actually the truth of it is that in the UK too people are beginning to get the Trump message and he would be very welcome to come to our country. Theresa May invited Mr Trump to the UK when the two met at Davos with a visit expected to take place in the second half of the year. Mr Trump had cancelled his planned visit to the UK in February, where he had been expected to open the new US embassy in London. Mass protests have been planned if Mr Trump does visit, with social media events already organising a potential march. Mr Khan had said that Mr Trump was not welcome in the capital and that he had finally got the message. In a statement last month, Mr Khan said: It appears that President Trump got the message from the many Londoners who love and admire America and Americans but find his policies and actions the polar opposite of our citys values of inclusion, diversity and tolerance. His visit next month would without doubt have been met by mass peaceful protests. 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 Corbyn also reacted positively to the news that Mr Trump would not be coming to the UK Cancellation of President Trump's State Visit is welcome, especially after his attack on London's mayor & withdrawal from #ParisClimateDeal, he tweeted at the time. A one-month-old rhino calf has been filmed suckling its dead mothers body after she was killed by poachers in South Africa. The older rhino lies unresponsive in a puddle of mud as her infant tries to feed in footage released by an animal rescue charity. Rhino 911 said the mothers horn had been hacked off hours before she was found in a national park this week. The footage was filmed by Nico Jacbos, a pilot for the charity, which uses a helicopter to rescue injured and orphaned rhinos. In the video, Mr Jacobs is heard saying: The tragic scene of a poached mother. The little baby, a heifer calf, trying desperately to suckle some milk. Theres no response from the mother. A team tranquillised the young female with a dart before taking her in a jeep to its rhino orphanage, where staff named her Charlotte. She was fed with a bottle, and was given a blindfold and earplugs to minimise stress as she recovers from the trauma of losing her mother and adjusts to her surroundings. More than 7,000 rhinos were slaughtered in South Africa in the last 10 years as poaching soared to record levels. Some 1,028 were killed last year, compared to just 13 in 2007. While the reasons for the sudden surge are complex and hotly contested, an increase in demand for rhino horn in Asia is believed to have played a part. A man who hired a gunman to murder his mother and brother has had his death sentence commuted 30 minutes before the lethal injection took place. Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott spared the life of Thomas Bart Whitaker after the inmates father begged for his son not to be killed. Whitaker was jailed for life without parole for a 2003 scheme to inherit his family's considerable wealth by having his parents and 19-year-old brother murdered. Mr Whitaker's roommate ambushed the family at their suburban Houston home as they returned from a dinner where Whitaker's father, Kent, had received a Rolex as a present. The gunman shot and killed Whitaker's mother, Tricia, and brother, Kevin. Kent Whitaker was also shot and badly wounded but survived. He subsequently forgave Whitaker and fought for him to be spared the death penalty. Keith Hampton, Whitakers lawyer, said the family were in the prisons so-called hospitality room waiting to be taken to the death chamber to view the execution when he called and told them the execution would no longer take place. I said the sentence has been commuted, and there was a lot of crying and clapping on the other end of the phone, Mr Hampton told NBC News. 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 Abbotts decision to save Mr Whitaker is the third time in three decades a Texas governor has granted clemency to a death row inmate on a humanitarian basis. Explaining his decision in a statement, the governor said: "Mr Whitaker's father, who survived the attempt on his life, passionately opposes the execution of his son. "Mr Whitaker's father insists that he would be victimised again if the state put to death his last remaining immediate family member. "The totality of these factors warrants a commutation of Mr Whitaker's death sentence to life in prison without the possibility of parole." Whitaker said he was grateful he had avoided execution in a statement to prison officials. He said: "Any punishment that I would have or will receive is just, but my Dad did nothing wrong. The system worked for him today. And I will do my best to uphold my role in the system." A Republican governor who touted his credentials as a proud husband and father has been charged over allegations he blackmailed a former mistress with nude photographs. Eric Greitens denies the accusations and remains defiant amid calls for his resignation, or even impeachment. A St Louis grand jury indicted the Missouri governor for invasion of privacy, alleging the 43-year-old took a compromising photo of a woman during an affair the year before he was elected. Kim Gardner, St Louis circuit attorney, announced the charge following an investigation launched in January after Mr Greitens admitted he had been "unfaithful" with his hairdresser in 2015. Mr Greitens said he made a mistake but "did not commit a crime. He accused Ms Gardner, a Democrat who was also elected in November 2016, of playing politics. "With today's disappointing and misguided political decision, my confidence in our prosecutorial system is shaken, but not broken," Mr Greitens said. "I know this will be righted soon. The people of Missouri deserve better than a reckless liberal prosecutor who uses her office to score political points." Ms Gardner's spokeswoman, Susan Ryan, responded: "Despite the Governor's personal attacks, the Circuit Attorney believes the courtroom is the appropriate place to argue the facts, not the media." Mr Greitens' lawyer, in a separate statement, called the indictment "baseless and unfounded. Lawyer Edward L Dowd Jr filed a motion to dismiss the indictment on the grounds that any relationship with the woman was consensual. A few lawmakers from both parties suggested that Mr Greitens should consider resigning, just as they did after he admitted to the affair on 10 January. House Republican leaders announced they were forming a group of lawmakers to investigate the charges "and answer the question as to whether or not the governor can lead our state while a felony case moves forward. Mr Dowd said the governor welcomes the review. Republicans 'openly considering Donald Trump's emotional stability' The joint statement from House Speaker Todd Richardson, Speaker Pro Tem Elijah Haahr and majority leader Rob Vescovo did not specifically mention impeachment, a process that must begin in the House with an investigation. But for some lawmakers, impeachment is on the table. "Governor Greitens has to go," Democratic state senator Jamilah Nasheed of St Louis said. "Missourians thought they voted for a person of character and integrity, and instead they got a liar and alleged criminal." Mr Greitens has frequently vowed that he will not step down. He indicated on Thursday he intends to stay and fight. "This will not for a moment deter me from doing the important work of the great people of Missouri," Mr Greitens said in the statement. The indictment states that on 21 March, 2015, Mr Greitens photographed a woman identified only by her initials "in a state of full or partial nudity" without her knowledge or consent. The indictment said Mr Greitens "transmitted the image contained in the photograph in a manner that allowed access to that image via a computer. Soon after the affair began, the woman's husband secretly recorded a conversation in which she said Mr Greitens took the compromising photo at his home and threatened to use it as blackmail if she spoke about the affair. Mr Greitens has repeatedly denied blackmailing the woman, but has repeatedly refused to answer questions about whether he took a photo. 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 Greitens was taken into custody in St Louis and released on bond. He is due in court for his first hearing on 16 March, before circuit judge Rex Burlison. He could face up to a four-year sentence if convicted. The statute of limitations for invasion of privacy in Missouri is three years, which means it was due to expire in less than a month. Ms Ryan, asked if additional charges could be filed, said the matter is still under investigation. Several lawmakers were questioned last week by investigators from Ms Gardner's office. Mr Greitens, the father of two young boys, came into office as a political outsider, a brash Rhodes Scholar and Navy SEAL officer who was wounded in Iraq, emerging as the winner in a crowded and expensive GOP primary. A former boxer and martial arts expert, he has embraced the role of maverick. He responded to a Democratic attack ad in the fall of 2016 with one of his own in which he fired more than 100 rounds from a machine gun as an announcer declared he'd bring out "the big guns" to fight Democratic policies championed by then-President Barack Obama. Mr Greitens surprised many experts by defeating Democratic Attorney General Chris Koster in the November 2016 election. Some saw him as a rising Republican star with potential presidential aspirations. But governing hasn't always been easy, even though Republicans now control both houses as well as the governor's mansion. Mr Greitens and GOP lawmakers have often clashed, with him comparing some to third-graders and labelling them "career politicians. He has also faced questions about so-called "dark money" campaign contributions and criticism for stacking the state board of education. His use of a secretive app that deletes messages is under investigation by Republican Attorney General Josh Hawley. Mr Greitens' charity, The Mission Continues, faced scrutiny during the campaign when Democrats accused him of insider politics for accessing the donor list to raise about $2 million through its top contributors. Additional reporting by AP A death row inmate who raped and killed a student 25 years ago screamed and yelled murderers three times as he thrashed around on a stretcher during his execution. Eric Scott Branch, 47, was put to death by lethal injection at Florida State Prison decades after attacking 21-year-old Susan Morris, whose naked body was found buried in a shallow grave near a nature trail in 1993. He was convicted of raping and beating to death the University of West Florida student in 1994 Recommended Florida shooting suspect may plead guilty to avoid death penalty The governors office said Branch was pronounced dead at 7.05pm on Thursday. As officials were administering the lethal drugs, included a powerful sedative, he thrashed about on his stretcher and shouted Murderers! murderers! murderers!" before falling silent. Moments earlier, he had addressed the prison officers in the room, saying Governor Rick Scott and Attorney General Pam Bondi should have carried out his execution. Let them come down here and do it, he said. Ive learned that youre good people and this is not what you should be doing. Outside the prison a group of demonstrations were protesting against the death penalty, including Herman Lindsey, a former death row inmate who was exonerated in 2009. Theres no way to guarantee were not killing innocent people, Mr Lindsey said. Herman Lindsey talks to people during a vigil for Eric Scott Branch in Gainesville, Florida (AP) Prosecutors said Branch approached Ms Morris after she left a night class on 11 January, 1993. In denying one of Branchs appeals, the Florida Supreme Court noted that the crime was particularly brutal. She had been beaten, stomped, sexually assaulted and strangled, judges wrote. "She bore numerous bruises and lacerations, both eyes were swollen shut. Branch was arrested while driving home to Indiana in a red Toyota car he stole from Ms Morris. He also was convicted of sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl in Indiana and another sexual assault in Panama City, Florida, that took place just 10 days before the fatal attack on Ms Morris. The jury in his murder case recommended the death penalty by a 10-2 vote under Floridas old capital punishment system, which was ruled unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court in 2016. The higher court decided juries must reach a unanimous recommendation for death which judges cannot overrule, and Florida legislators subsequently changed the system to comply. 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 One of Branchs final appeals to the US Supreme Court involved whether he deserved a new sentencing hearing because of that jurys 10-2 vote in his 1994 trial. However, the Florida Supreme Court has ruled that the new system of sentencing does not apply to inmates sentenced to death before 2002. Branch claimed in a last-minute appeal that the Florida courts decisions on which inmates get new sentencing hearings is unfair and arbitrary. In court documents, Branchs lawyers say this prohibits about 150 Florida death-row inmates from having their sentences reviewed. The US Supreme Court rejected that appeal with comment on Thursday, as well as another which Branchs lawyers had filed. Meanwhile, executions due to take place in Texas and Alabama were cancelled. Among the inmates given reprieves was Thomas Bart Whitaker, 38, was on death row for masterminding the fatal shootings of his mother and brother at their suburban Houston home in 2003. Whitakers father, Kent, said he forgave his son, and the state parole board recommended that governor Greg Abbott commute the sentence to life in prison. In Alabama, Doyle Lee Hamm was sentenced to die for the 1987 killing of a motel clerk during a robbery. He has fought his death sentence, arguing there is a risk of a botched execution because of damage to his veins due to lymphoma and other illnesses. It was postponed after officials said there was not enough time to prepare the inmate before a death warrant expired at midnight. Major car hire companies have ended their discount programme for members of the National Rifle Association (NRA) as have two financial institutions. The change in policy was announced by Enterprise, which includes the Alamo and National brands, and will take effect 26 March, the company confirmed to The Independent. The move appeared to be in response to the recent mass shooting at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida during which 14 children and three adults were killed by a gunman using an AR-15 assault-style weapon. All three brands took to Twitter with the same post and the Enterprise account had interacted with Twitter users who had called the company out publicly. The car hire discount had been available to any NRA member who had paid the organisations $40 annual fee and were just three of the 22 companies offering a special price for the powerful lobbying group in Washington. In the wake of the tragedy, surviving students have been constantly and passionately advocating for an assault weapons ban and gun control reform through media appearances, tweets at politicians taking money from the NRA, lie-ins, marches, and a visit to the White House. Florida student Emma Gonzalez passionately calls for gun control at rally after school shooting Calls for companies that associate with the NRA grew louder as the groups President Wayne LaPierre said that gun control advocates, like the Parkland teenaged survivors, hate freedom at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on 22 February. US President has also been advocating for arming teachers with guns but did not discuss imposing a ban on assault-style weapons like the AR-15. Florida shooting in pictures Show all 10 1 /10 Florida shooting in pictures Florida shooting in pictures Police arrest a suspect in connection with the shooting at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida Reuters Florida shooting in pictures Parents wait for news after reports of a shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida AP Florida shooting in pictures Anxious family members wait for news of students AP Photo/Wilfredo Lee Florida shooting in pictures Students being evacuated from the school AP Florida shooting in pictures Students being evacuated from the school Getty Florida shooting in pictures People gather waiting for word from students AP Florida shooting in pictures Parents waiting for news on their children AP Florida shooting in pictures People gather at a hotel where students were taken after the shooting Getty Florida shooting in pictures Florida Governor Rick Scott speaks to the media as he visits Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School following the shooting AFP/Getty Florida shooting in pictures Dr. Igor Nichiporenko, Medical Director Trauma, left, and Dr. Evan Boyer, Medical Director, Emergency Services, speak about treating victims and the suspect at a press conference outside Broward Health North hospital AP The car hire companies decision comes just after the First National Bank of Omaha, which decided to stop issuing the NRA-branded Visa credit or debit card. The bank had been doing so for a decade, but customer feedback prompted them to ditch the card, according to a Twitter announcement. Several customers had taken to social media threatening to close their accounts if the banks endorsement continued. Also responding to client concerns, the worlds largest asset manager BlackRock Inc has also decided to speak with weapons manufacturers and distributors like Sturm Ruger & Company Inc and American Outdoor Brands Corp. BlackRocks clients have responded in a way they have not to previous mass shootings. We are working with clients who want to exclude from their portfolios weapons manufacturers or other companies that dont align with their values, the companys statement sent to The Independent read. BlackRock explained that it wants to to understand their response to the Parkland shooting. Divestment, however, is not a possibility because of the way indices are set up. Given our inability to sell shares of a company in an index, even if we disagree with management, we focus on engaging with the company and understanding how they are responding to societys expectations of them, the statement read. The companies have several options with how to deal with the issue. They could have no response to the criticism after the Parkland shooting. A decision could be made to divest from the assault-style AR-15, labeled as "the most popular rifle in America" by NRA spokesperson Jennifer Baker. Or, the companies could wade into the debate on gun control reform by discussing age restrictions or stronger background checks akin to what Mr Trump has even advocated. One person was injured after a massive fire broke out at an apartment complex near Los Angeles. Some 100 firefighters responded to the three-alarm blaze in Pico Rivera, according to reports. Officials said they had successfully evacuated residents. Firefighters were forced to exit the building and go into defensive mode to battle the flames, the Los Angeles County Fire Department said. Responders were directing streams of water from multiple directions, including from an adjacent roof. A shared attic allowed the flames to spread quickly across the complex, officials said. Footage from the scene showed thick back clouds of smoke billowing from flames consuming the buildings roof. California fires: in pictures Show all 36 1 /36 California fires: in pictures California fires: in pictures A man watches the Thomas Fire in the hills above Carpinteria, California AFP/Getty Images California fires: in pictures Santa Barbara harbor stands as wildfire burns along the coast during the Thomas Fire REUTERS California fires: in pictures Flames from the Thomas Fire burn in the hills of Montecito, California AFP/Getty Images California fires: in pictures Fire personnel drive along West Lilac Road near Bonsall Rex Features California fires: in pictures The Thomas Fire burns on a hillside behind Lake Casitas in Ventura AFP/Getty Images California fires: in pictures Chatsworth firefighters Zach Reynolds, left, and Steven Salazar clear hot spots at a home destroyed by the Skirball Fire on Casiano Road in Bel-Air Rex Features California fires: in pictures A home is consumed by fire Getty Images California fires: in pictures A mountain lion is removed from a truck. Nearly 200 animals were evacuated from the Wildlife Waystation when the Creek fire started. Rex Features California fires: in pictures Firefighters battle the Lilac fire in Bonsall AFP/Getty Images California fires: in pictures Kalorama Apartments that was partially destroyed in the fire Rex Features California fires: in pictures Inmate firefighters fight a fire in an avocado orchard at the Ojai Vista Farm EPA California fires: in pictures Flames consume a structure as the Lilac fire burns in Bonsai, Calif AP California fires: in pictures Inmate firefighters fight a fire in an avocado orchard at the Ojai Vista Farm EPA California fires: in pictures Firefighters monitor a section of the Thomas Fire along the 101 freeway Getty Images California fires: in pictures Firefighters work to extinguish the Thomas Fire as it burns past the 101 Highway towards the Pacific Coast Highway in Ventura AFP/Getty Images California fires: in pictures Firefighter Dan Whelan is silhouetted against the sun as he battles a wildfire burning near Faria State Beach AP California fires: in pictures A firefighter is working on extinguishing the Lilac Fire Reuters California fires: in pictures Firefighters work to extinguish the Thomas Fire as it burns past the 101 Highway AFP/Getty Images California fires: in pictures A wildfire threatens homes as it burns along a hillside in La Conchita, Calif AP California fires: in pictures A car drives past as the Thomas Fire burns a hillside south of Casitas Springs, California AFP/Getty Images California fires: in pictures Firefighters try to extinguish fire at a house in the Bel Air district of Los Angeles Rex Features California fires: in pictures A burnt-out car is seen at the Bel Air district of Los Angeles Rex Features California fires: in pictures A burning house at the Bel Air district of Los Angeles Rex Features California fires: in pictures Firefighters battle to contain flames to a home on fire in the Bel Air neighborhood of Los Angeles Rex Features California fires: in pictures LA city firefighters try to save a winery storage building that is own by billionaire Rupert Murdoch Rex Features California fires: in pictures A firefighter tries to extinguish fire at a house in the Bel Air district of Los Angeles Rex Features California fires: in pictures A burning house at the Bel Air district of Los Angeles Rex Features California fires: in pictures Los Angeles City firefighter Francisco Martinez protects a home as firefighters battle the Skirball Fire in Bel-Air Rex Features California fires: in pictures The Thomas Fire burns behind trails on Old Baldwin Road in Ojai, California AFP/Getty Images California fires: in pictures Members of the Reinhardt family sort through the remains of their family home after the Thomas wildfire swept through Ventura, California AFP/Getty Images California fires: in pictures Heavy smoke covers the seaside enclave of Mondos Beach beside the 101 highway as flames reach the coast during the Thomas wildfire near Ventura, California AFP/Getty Images California fires: in pictures A family wears face masks as they walk through the smoke filled streets after the Thomas wildfire swept through Ventura, California AFP/Getty Images California fires: in pictures Flames from the Thomas fire burn above a truck on Highway 101 north of Ventura AP California fires: in pictures Trees are seen through the haze at the burnt out Vista del Mar Hospital after the Thomas wildfire swept through Ventura, California AFP/Getty Images California fires: in pictures A woman involved in a traffic accident waits to get towed beside a wall of flames on the 101 highway during the Thomas wildfire near Ventura, California AFP/Getty Images California fires: in pictures The Thomas Fire burns along a hillside near Santa Paula, California AFP/Getty Images The Los Angeles County Sheriffs department was assisting in efforts to aid people affected by the fire, directing evacuees to shelter. The Red Cross also dispatched volunteers to help evacuees. Southern California has endured an unusually intense series of wildfires in recent months, including around Los Angeles County, with dry and unseasonably warm weather helping to feed the flames. Oprah Winfrey has said she decided not to hit back at Donald Trumps late night Twitter rant about her because she does not like giving attention to negativity. The US President labelled the talk show host, who is rumoured to be considering a presidential bid, insecure in social media posts earlier in the week. He said he hoped Winfrey would throw her hat into the presidential ring in 2020 so she can be exposed and defeated just like all of the others! The world leader was commenting after watching her interview on 60 Minutes a political panel discussion shown on US broadcaster CBS News. Just watched a very insecure Oprah Winfrey, who at one point I knew very well, interview a panel of people on 60 Minutes, Mr Trump tweeted. Recommended Oprah reveals decision on 2020 presidential election Winfrey has been careful not to say anything disparaging about Mr Trump in response and instead explained that she decided not to rise to his bait. "I don't like giving negativity power, so I just thought, 'What?'" she told the Ellen DeGeneres Show. But the media mogul said she watched the segment again to see if the criticism Mr Trump levied at her had any real basis. Winfrey explained producers of the show had even made sure to include an additional response from a Trump supporter at her own request to guarantee balance. Winfrey was also pressed about Mr Trumps tirade about her on Jimmy Kimmel Live!. Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Show all 29 1 /29 Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Inauguration - 20 January 2017 US President Donald Trump acknowledges the audience after taking the oath of office as his wife Melania (L) and daughter Tiffany watch during inauguration ceremonies swearing in Trump as the 45th president of the United States on the West Front of the US capital in Washington on 20 January, 2017. Photographer Jim Bourg: "This photo was shot with one of two remote cameras. The cameras were monitored and triggered remotely and the pictures were transmitted to clients worldwide within minutes of being taken." Reuters/Jim Bourg Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Obama farewell address - 10 January 2017 US President Barack Obama wipes away tears as he delivers his farewell address in Chicago on 10 January, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "In his final days in office, Obama made a visit home to Chicago. As he spoke from the stage to his wife and daughter in the audience, he became emotional when he talked about what they had sacrificed during his time in office. I turned from photographing the Obama women embracing to find him onstage wiping away tears." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Inauguration - 20 January 2017 A combination of photos shows the crowds attending the inauguration ceremonies to swear in U.S. President Donald Trump at 12:01pm (left) on January 20, 2017 and President Barack Obama sometime between 12:07pm and 12:26pm on January 20, 2009. Reuters/ Lucas Jackson/Stelios Varias Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Liberty Ball - 20 January 2017 US President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump attend the Liberty Ball in honour of his inauguration in Washington on 20 January, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "What I see when I look at this picture is the end of a very long day, not to mention weeks and months of preparation by many photographers, editors and network experts and the beginning of everything since." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Inaugural Law Enforcement Officers and First Responders Reception - 22 January 2017 US President Donald Trump greets Director of the FBI James Comey as Director of the Secret Service Joseph Clancy (L), watches during the Inaugural Law Enforcement Officers and First Responders Reception in the Blue Room of the White House on 22 January, 2017. Photographer Joshua Roberts: "I have covered the White House for 16 years and normally either the President or the pool is in position when an event starts. In this case the President was not where anyone expected him to be. In fact, he was almost blocking the door when the pool came in. We had to scramble to find a position without bumping him or the furniture as he greeted and thanked members of law enforcement for their security efforts during the inauguration. Luckily, he greeted FBI Director James Comey a few seconds after the pool had made its way into the room." Reuters/Joshua Roberts Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Private phone calls to world leaders - 28 January 2017 US President Donald Trump, is joined by his staff, as he speaks by phone with Russia's President Vladimir Putin in the Oval Office on 28 January, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "Very early in the Trump administration, weekends were as busy as weekdays. On Trump's second Saturday the official schedule said he would be making private phone calls to a number of world leaders including Russia's Vladimir Putin. I arrived early and, before sitting down at my desk walked up to Press Secretary Sean Spicer's office. He, too, was just taking his coat off. I gingerly made the suggestion that previous administrations had sometimes allowed photos of such phone calls through the Oval Office windows on the colonnade. To my mild shock, he didn't even think about it twice. "We'll do it!" he said. In truth, I really only expected the Putin call, but we were outside the windows multiple times throughout the day as the calls went on." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Senior advisor Kellyanne Conway - 27 February 2017 Senior advisor Kellyanne Conway (L) attends as US President Donald Trump welcomes the leaders of dozens of historically black colleges and universities (HBCU) in the Oval Office on 27 February, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "We're often asked how much access we have to the Trump administration, and the answer is we have an awful lot. President Trump himself is very comfortable in the spotlight, and his aides are similarly unfazed by cameras. In this instance, senior advisor Kellyanne Conway was so comfortable in our presence she seemed not to consider the optics of kneeling on a Oval Office sofa to take pictures with her phone." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Angela Merkel heads to Washington - 17 March 2017 Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel and US President Donald Trump hold a joint news conference in the East Room of the White House on 17 March, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "Chancellor Merkel made one of the earliest important visits of any US allies to meet Trump in his first months in office. When world leaders give joint news conferences they don't always tend to give each other their full attention - but Merkel watched Trump intently at several key moments, and here seemed particularly rapt." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Trump welcomes truckers to the White House - 23 March 2017 President Trump reacts as he sits on a truck while he welcomes truckers and CEOs to attend a meeting regarding healthcare at the White House on 23 March, 2017. Photographer Carlos Barria: "The White House organised a listening session with truckers and CEO's of major American companies, regarding healthcare reform. An 18-wheeler tow truck was parked on the South Lawn of the White House and as Trump welcomed the truckers someone invited the him to come and sit in the driver's seat. Trump jumped into the cab and started yelling and pretending to drive - creating one of the most memorable pictures of the year. A lesson learned, always be prepared for the unexpected." Reuters/Carlos Barria Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Air Force One - 6 April 2017 US President Donald Trump talks to journalists members of the travel pool on board the Air Force One during his trip to Palm Beach, Florida on 6 April, 2017. Carlos Barria: "During the many trips to President Trump's residence in Florida it is usual to see the president coming to the back of the plane to chat with journalists. During one of the trips to the so called 'Winter White House', Trump had a long talk with reporters while the Air Force One entertainment system was playing one of the latest Star Wars movies. As I was listening to Trump talk I was also looking at the movie waiting for a part of the movie to frame the mood of the day. Of the many scenes, I choose the one with Darth Vader." Reuters/Carlos Barria Donald Trump's first year: in pictures 100 Days - 27 April 2017 US President Donald Trump speaks during an interview with Reuters in the Oval Office of the White House on 27 April, 2017. Photographer Carlos Barria: "A day before President Trump's hundred days in office I was part of the team that interviewed the commander-in-chief in the Oval Office. I was only allowed to photograph Trump during the last five minutes of the interview. The time was very tight so I had to move fast as I had pictures in mind that I wanted to shoot. I walked into the Oval Office and saw that the President had printed maps of the country showing areas in red where he won. I raised my hands holding my camera as high as possible to get the best view of the scene using a 16mm wide angle lens." Reuters/Carlos Barria Donald Trump's first year: in pictures 100 Days - 27 April 2017 US President Donald Trump reacts as he arrives at Harrisburg international airport, before attending a rally marking his first 100 days in office in Pennsylvania on 29 April, 2017. Photographer Carlos Barria: "President Trump travelled to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania to celebrate his hundred days in office with a victory rally. He was in friendly territory as he won with a big difference over his opponent Hillary Clinton in Pennsylvania, during the November elections. As usual when the commander-in-chief arrives local residents gather to greet him. This time a small group of military personnel attended the arrival. Surrounded by secret service agents Trump walked from the Air Force One and raised his hand in a sign of victory as the crowd cheered him on." Reuters/Carlos Barria Donald Trump's first year: in pictures White House staffers - 2 May 2017 White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer (L) and White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus watch as US President Donald Trump presents the U.S. Air Force Academy football team with the Commander-in-Chief trophy in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington on 2 May, 2017. Photographer Joshua Roberts: "Covering the White House does not just mean covering the President. White House staffers are an important part of the story and their relationship with the President and each other is an indicator of how things are going in the West Wing. The tendency is to focus exclusively on the President once an event starts but I always try to look around to see how people are reacting as things unfold." Reuters/Joshua Roberts Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Secret Service - 4 May 2017 Secret Service agents use a presidential limousine as cover from spraying water as US President Donald Trump lands via Marine One helicopter in New York on 4 May, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "The best part of any trip to New York City with the sitting US President is the helicopter ride into Manhattan. The ride out at night can be stunning. Here, Secret Service agents protect themselves from the spray from the East River as Trump lands on the helipad." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures NATO Summit - 25 May 2017 US President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump wait the arrival of French President Emmanuel Macron (unseen) before a lunch ahead of a NATO Summit in Brussels on 25 May, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "One of the best parts of travelling overseas for White House coverage is the chance to see the U.S. president in different environments and (literally) a different light. Here, Trump and his wife came out of the shadows to greet France's President Macron." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Trump meets Putin at G20 summit - 7 July 2017 US President Donald Trump meets with Russian President Vladimir Putin during their bilateral meeting at the G20 summit in Hamburg, Germany on 7 July, 2017. Photographer Carlos Barria: "On July 7, I witnessed one of the most important meetings of President Trump's first year in office. Trump met Russian President Vladimir Putin during a bilateral meeting at the G20 summit in Germany. The world's eyes were on these two leaders after speculation about Russian interference during the 2016 US elections. We entered the room for less than two minutes, where I took dozens of pictures. But there was this very interesting moment when Trump extended his hand to Putin for a handshake. Putin paused for a second and looked at Trump's hand. That was the picture that I was looking for, a little moment that seemed to say a lot." Reuters/Carlos Barria Donald Trump's first year: in pictures First lady - 8 July 2017 First lady Melania Trump chats with US President Donald Trump during their return from Germany at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland on 8 July, 2017. Photographer Carlos Barria: "After President Trump's trip to Germany he arrived back at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland. First Lady Melania Trump said goodbye to Trump as she was heading off in a different direction that day. While chatting a breeze blew Melania's hair up in the air." Reuters/Carlos Barria Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Made in America product showcase - 17 July 2017 Vice President Mike Pence laughs as President Donald Trump holds a baseball bat as they attend a Made in America product showcase event at the White House on 17 July, 2017. Photographer Carlos Barria: "This summer the White House organized an event to showcase 'Made in America' products. All kinds of exhibitors brought their products as the President and Vice President toured the event. One of the companies was Marucci Sport, a manufacturer of baseball bats based in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. As Trump approached a table full of baseball bats, photographers at the event, including me, rushed to get a good angle hoping that he would pick up a bat. As we predicted, he did. He took one and joked around as though he was hitting something hard. The only thing closer to him right there, was the media." Reuters Donald Trump's first year: in pictures White House staffers - 25 July 2017 Former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski says hello to reporters as he and White House advisors including Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci accompany President Trump for an event celebrating veterans at AMVETS Post 44 in Ohio, July 25, 2017. Jonathan Ernst: "The most visible person in any White House is naturally the President, followed by the press secretary. But there are also the staff who support them. For those of us covering the Trump administration, there seem to be more compelling figures in the West Wing than ever before. It's crucial to know who's who and why they're important. When I raised my camera and back-pedalled ahead of the group to take this image Lewandowski gave me a hello. I liked the photo, but had no idea it would go a little bit viral, especially since Scaramucci, who was the biggest mover and shaker that week, was hidden back in the pack. But I guess the image catches a glimpse of what it's like to be a West Wing staffer on the road." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Campaign rally - 3 August 2017 US President Donald Trump arrives at a rally in West Virginia on 3 August, 2017. Photographer Carlos Barria: "President Trump travelled to Huntington for one of his usual campaign rallies. While members of his family spoke to the crowd he was waiting under a black curtain to be introduced. Suddenly he walked onto the stage, one of the first frames that I took was of his hand. I set my exposure for the light on the stage hoping to create this dark background and it worked." Reuters/Carlos Barria Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Staring into the solar eclipse - 21 August 2017 Without his protective glasses on, US President Donald Trump looks up towards the solar eclipse while viewing with his wife Melania and son Barron at the White House on 21 August, 2017. Photographer Kevin Lamarque: "On a day when everyone, and I mean everyone, was told not to look at the eclipse without protective glasses, Trump, President of the United States, couldn't help himself." Reuters/Kevin Lamarque Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Hurricane Harvey - 2 September 2017 US President Donald Trump poses for a photo as he and first lady Melania Trump help volunteers hand out meals during a visit with flood survivors of Hurricane Harvey at a relief centre in Houston, Texas on 2 September, 2017. Photohrapher Kevin Lamarque: "Trump, eager to deliver the image of a hands-on response to Hurricane Harvey, made this visit to a relief centre and obliged this woman with a selfie as Melania continued to work." Reuters/Kevin Lamarque Donald Trump's first year: in pictures White House - 15 September 2017 Donald Trump welcomes 11-year-old Frank Giaccio as he cuts the Rose Garden grass at the White House on 15 September. Frank, who wrote a letter to Trump offering to mow the lawn, was invited to work for a day at the White House along the National Park Service staff. Frank was so focused on his task that he did not notice the President arrive to surprise him. He took his father jumping in to grab his attention and point Trump out. Photographer Carlos Barria said: The image of Trump shouting at a kid who is mowing his lawn might have many interpretations in today's politically polarized United States. But for me it was just a kid who loved what he was doing, to the point he almost appeared to ignore the President." Reuters/Carlos Barria Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Take a knee - 27 September 2017 A man kneels with a folded U.S. flag as the motorcade of U.S. President Donald Trump passes him after an event at the state fairgrounds in Indianapolis, Indiana, U.S., September 27, 2017. In September, soon after Trump had made comments condemning NFL players who kneel during the national anthem, he made a day trip to a rally in Indianapolis. Jonathan Ernst managed to capture a man on one knee with a tri-folded flag and was able to use a portion of the sign on the building he was kneeling in front of to track the man down and tell his story in full. US Army veteran Marvin Boatright wanted to send a message against social injustice. Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Hurricane Maria - 3 October 2017 President Donald Trump throws rolls of paper towels into a crowd of local residents affected by Hurricane Maria as he visits Calgary Chapel in San Juan, Puerto Rico on 3 October, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "During an afternoon visit to Puerto Rico for President Trump to survey damage from Hurricane Maria and greet some of its victims, Trump made a stop at a church where food and supplies were being distributed. Among the items were paper towels and Trump, apparently caught up in the moment, decided to distribute some of the rolls." Reuters Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Jared Kushner - 1 November 2017 White House Senior adviser Jared Kushner sits behind President Trump during a cabinet meeting in Washington on 1 November, 2017. Photographer Kevin Lamarque: "The role of Jared Kushner has gone through a series of changes. He began front and centre as a high profile adviser, but as time has passed and issues surrounding him have surfaced, he has become more of a background figure." Reuters/Kevin Lamarque Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Trump in China - 9 November 2017 Donald Trump and China's President Xi Jinping shake hands after making joint statements at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on 9 November, 2017. Photographer Damir Sagolj: "It's one of those "how to make a better or at least different shot when two presidents shake hands several times a day, several days in row". If I'm not mistaken in calculation, presidents Xi Jinping and Donald Trump shook their hands at least six times in events I covered during Trump's recent visit to China. I would imagine there were some more handshakes I haven't seen but other photographers did. And they all look similar - two big men, smiling and heartily greeting each other until everyone gets their shot. But then there is always something that can make it special - in this case the background made of US and Chinese flags. The first time it didn't work for me. The second time I positioned myself lower and centrally, and used the longest lens I have to capture only hands reaching for a handshake." Reuters/Damir Sagolj Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Air Force One - 10 November 2017 US President Donald Trump boards Air Force One to depart for Vietnam from Beijing Airport in Beijing, China, November 10, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "There is a Reuters photographer in the tight pool covering the US president for every appearance he makes 365 days a year. This was just one of 32 images of mine that were transmitted on the Reuters wire of President Trump visiting China and Vietnam that day. You never know when a sudden interaction, a gust of wind or a unique facial expression will lead to a striking image that grabs peoples' attention." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures ASEAN handshake - 13 November 2017 Donald Trump registers his surprise as he realises other leaders, including Russia's Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, Vietnam's Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc, President of the Philippines Rodrigo Duterte and Australia's Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, are crossing their arms for the traditional "ASEAN handshake" as he participates in the opening ceremony of the summit in Manila on 13 November, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "Having covered a few ASEAN summits, I knew to expect the ASEAN handshake. Not everyone in the room knew to expect the ASEAN handshake. A lot was written about this unscripted moment, and what deeper meaning it might have. The simple truth is that sometimes in life there are unscripted moments." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Displaying Mr Trumps tweet on the screen behind them, Jimmy Kimmel asked: Have you ever been insecure anytime in the last 35 years? Im trying to think about, have I ever ... Im trying to think when that would be, Winfrey replied. Asked if she had ever thought about responding to Mr Trump via Twitter, she said: Not a second. Kimmel replied: I would love to have your password so in case he ever does this again I can take care of this, you know? But Winfrey remained careful not to explicitly criticise Mr Trump, saying: You dont win by meeting any kind of negativity head-on. Winfrey interviewed seven individuals who voted for Mr Trump and seven who voted against in the interview which the president fiercely criticised. Her line of questioning sparked a heated debate between the ideologically opposed groups in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Winfrey, a Democrat and steadfast supporter of Hillary Clinton, has repeatedly insisted she harbours no ambitions to run for president in spite of rising calls for her to do so. Winfreys capacity to significantly influence public opinion has been branded The Oprah Effect. The talk show host, who is the first and only black person in the US to become a multi-billionaire, is a significant influencer in the country. One estimate suggested that her endorsement of Barack Obama between 2006 and 2008 delivered over a million votes in the 2008 Democratic primary race. Most of the Parkland school shooting survivors were still a twinkle in their parents' eyes the day two gunmen shot and killed Coni Sanders father in a massacre at Columbine High School in 1999 the largest school shooting in America at the time. But less than 20 years later, on 14 February 2018, a gunman opened fire on Marjory Stoneman Douglas, killing 17 students and staff members in a shooting that officially pushed Columbine to fifth on the list of Americas deadliest school shootings. This has been 18 years of, every time there is a mass shooting all of the adults start screaming at each other and telling each other why theyre wrong, said Ms Sanders, who has worked as a forensic therapist for violent offenders since her father, Columbine High School teacher Dave Sanders, was murdered. I think that this is kind of a wake-up call for people, she said of the Parkland shooting, because its the kids saying enough is enough. Indeed, since the day of the shooting, many students of Stoneman Douglas have spoken up unequivocally about the need for more gun control. They have staged rallies and walkouts, lobbied legislators, and even held a listening session with President Donald Trump. Their passion has convinced some people that this will be the moment that changes history: the moment that Congress takes significant action on gun control, for the first time in more than 20 years. The amount of time that [the Parkland students] spend on social media and networking and problem solving is amazing, Ms Sanders said. And I know that thats a complaint a lot of people have about younger generations, but this is what change looks like now. She added: These kids are going to change the world. Florida shooting in pictures Show all 10 1 /10 Florida shooting in pictures Florida shooting in pictures Police arrest a suspect in connection with the shooting at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida Reuters Florida shooting in pictures Parents wait for news after reports of a shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida AP Florida shooting in pictures Anxious family members wait for news of students AP Photo/Wilfredo Lee Florida shooting in pictures Students being evacuated from the school AP Florida shooting in pictures Students being evacuated from the school Getty Florida shooting in pictures People gather waiting for word from students AP Florida shooting in pictures Parents waiting for news on their children AP Florida shooting in pictures People gather at a hotel where students were taken after the shooting Getty Florida shooting in pictures Florida Governor Rick Scott speaks to the media as he visits Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School following the shooting AFP/Getty Florida shooting in pictures Dr. Igor Nichiporenko, Medical Director Trauma, left, and Dr. Evan Boyer, Medical Director, Emergency Services, speak about treating victims and the suspect at a press conference outside Broward Health North hospital AP Others, however, are less optimistic. Asked whether this massacre would be the one to spark change, Scarlett Lewis replied simply: They said that about Sandy Hook too, and that was five years ago. Ms Lewiss son, Jesse, was killed in the school shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012. He was six years old. Twenty-six students and teachers were killed that day when 20-year-old Adam Lanza opened fire on the Connecticut primary school. Many of the victims families rallied for stricter gun control laws after the shooting, and some even sued a gun manufacturer. Congress has introduced dozens of gun control bills in the years since, none of which have passed. Veronique Pozner, who lost her son, Noah, in the shooting, shared Ms Lewiss scepticism. She, too, thought more action would be taken in the wake of Sandy Hook. Youve got little tiny children in first grade being slaughtered, she said. If thats not an impetus for change, if that doesnt propel the narrative forward, what possibly could? Florida shooting survivor asks Marco Rubio if he'll stop taking donations from the NRA There are some signs, however, that the narrative is being propelled forwards after the Parkland shooting. Mr Trump has endorsed expanding background checks for gun purchases, and raising the minimum age for such purchases from 18 to 21. Florida Senator Marco Rubio a steadfast advocate for gun rights relented in a town hall with victims families, saying he would support measures to increase the minimum age. But at a major conservative political conference later that week, National Rifle Association (NRA) vice president Wayne LaPierre railed against efforts to expand gun control. The leader of the powerful, pro-gun lobbying group told a cheering crowd that gun control advocates were trying to get rid of the second amendment and make all of you less free. At the same conference, Mr Trump told the audience: Theres nobody who loves the second amendment more than I do and theres nobody who respects the NRA [more]. Jenny Hubbard, whose daughter, Catherine, died in the Sandy Hook shooting, says she has been avoiding coverage of this shooting. It was too painful, she said, to watch all of the parents pacing outside the school that day Valentines Day wondering whether their child had survived. It was the same place she had been in five years ago. But Ms Hubbard has heard about the Parkland students: their walkouts, their marches, their speeches on gun control. Ms Hubbard doesnt believe gun control alone will solve the problem of school shootings, but she appreciates the importance of the students speaking out. If having our youth teach us that they want to be heard is what makes us actually hear what theyre saying, then thats a good thing, she said. Its unfortunate that it takes them having to march to be heard, she added. They should have been heard a long time ago. The agency tasked with overseeing immigration into the US has removed the phrase a nation of immigrants from its mission statement. US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), which oversees the granting of citizenship and green cards, announced the change via an internal email. USCIS employees are passionate about upholding the rule of law and ensuring the integrity of our immigration system, wrote USCIS Director L Francis Cissna in an email obtained by The Independent. "...To reflect these principles, and to guide us in the years ahead, I am pleased to share with you our agencys new mission statement." The new mission statement reads: US Citizenship and Immigration Services administers the nations lawful immigration system, safeguarding its integrity and promise by efficiently and fairly adjudicating requests for immigration benefits while protecting Americans, securing the homeland, and honouring our values. Among other things, the statement removes references to secur[ing] Americas promise as a nation of immigrants and adds the phrase securing the homeland. People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Show all 16 1 /16 People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Demonstrators march during the "Day Without Immigrants" protest in Chicago, Illinois, February 16, 2017. Theopolis Waters/Reuters People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Demonstrators march during the "Day Without Immigrants" protest in Washington, DC, U.S., February 16, 2017. Aaron P. Bernstein/Reuters People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Protesters march in the streets outside the Texas State Capital on 'A Day Without Immigrants' February 16, 2017 in Austin, Texas. The crowd, which grew to well over a thousand participants, marched from the Austin City Hall to the Texas State Capital. Across the country hundreds of restaurants and eateries are closing for the day to protest President Trump's immigration policies and to highlight the contributions of immigrants to U.S. business and life. Drew Anthony Smith/Getty People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Protesters march in the streets outside the Texas State Capital on 'A Day Without Immigrants' February 16, 2017 in Austin, Texas. Drew Anthony Smith/Getty People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants AUSTIN, TX - FEBRUARY 16: Protesters march in the streets outside the Texas State Capital on 'A Day Without Immigrants' February 16, 2017 in Austin, Texas. Drew Anthony Smith/Getty People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Demonstrators march during the "Day Without Immigrants" protest in Chicago, Illinois, February 16, 2017. Theopolis Waters/Reuters People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Demonstrators march during the "Day Without Immigrants" protest in Chicago, Illinois, February 16, 2017. Aaron P. Bernstein/Reuters People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Protesters march in the streets outside the Texas State Capital on 'A Day Without Immigrants' February 16, 2017 in Austin, Texas. The crowd, which grew to well over a thousand participants, marched from the Austin City Hall to the Texas State Capital. Across the country hundreds of restaurants and eateries are closing for the day to protest President Trump's immigration policies and to highlight the contributions of immigrants to U.S. business and life. Drew Anthony Smith/Getty People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Protesters march in the streets outside the Texas State Capital on 'A Day Without Immigrants' February 16, 2017 in Austin, Texas. Drew Anthony Smith/Getty People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Protesters march in the streets outside the Texas State Capital on 'A Day Without Immigrants' February 16, 2017 in Austin, Texas. Drew Anthony Smith/Getty People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Protesters march in the streets outside the Texas State Capital on 'A Day Without Immigrants' February 16, 2017 in Austin, Texas. Drew Anthony Smith/Getty People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Protesters march in the streets outside the Texas State Capital on 'A Day Without Immigrants' February 16, 2017 in Austin, Texas. Drew Anthony Smith/Getty People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Protesters march in the streets outside the Texas State Capital on 'A Day Without Immigrants' February 16, 2017 in Austin, Texas. Drew Anthony Smith/Getty People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants Protesters march in the streets outside the Texas State Capital on 'A Day Without Immigrants' February 16, 2017 in Austin, Texas. The crowd, which grew to well over a thousand participants marched from the Austin City Hall to the Texas State Capital. Across the country hundreds of restaurants and eateries are closing for the day to protest President Trump's immigration policies and to highlight the contributions of immigrants to U.S. business and life. Drew Anthony Smith/Getty People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants High school student Kathia Suarez holds up a sign as she protests with others outside the Grayson County courthouse in downtown Sherman, Texas, Thursday, Feb. 16, 2017. LM Otero/AP People strike across America for A Day Without Immigrants High school senior Vicky Sosa holds a sign outside the Grayson County courthouse in downtown Sherman, Texas, Thursday, Feb. 16, 2017. In an action called "A Day Without Immigrants," immigrants across the country are expected to stay home from school, work and close businesses to show how critical they are to the U.S. economy and way of life. LM Otero/AP The agencys new statement also does not refer to the population it serves as customers. Mr Cissna explained the change in his email, saying that the agencys work was too important to be regarded as "a mere production line", or even be described in "business or commercial terms. Use of the term leads to the erroneous belief that applicants and petitioners, rather than the American people, are whom we ultimately serve, he added. All applicants and petitioners should, of course, always be treated with the greatest respect and courtesy, but we cant forget that we serve the American people. USCIS officials said the change, first reported by The Intercept, was developed by Mr Cissna during a conference with USCIS leadership. The new statement, they said, reflects the directors priorities of fairness, lawfulness and efficiency, protecting American workers, and safeguarding the homeland. Trump during election campaign: "The truth is, our immigration system is worse than anyone ever realised" Over the years, the phrase a nation of immigrants has become synonymous with the United States the motto of which is E Pluribus Unum, or Out of Many, One. President Donald Trump has made it clear, however, that he would like to cut down on the number of immigrants entering the country, both legally and illegally. Among other things, the president has proposed ending the diversity visa lottery, reducing chain migration, and building a wall on the border with Mexico. We're asking Congress to support our immigration policy that keeps terrorists, drug dealers, criminals, and gang members out of our country, Mr Trump told a roundtable of law enforcement officers recently. We want them out. We dont want them in. The Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), which once attracted a broad range of Republicans, is underway for another year. But the largest annual gathering for conservative activists has essentially become the Trump administration show. Mr Trump is set to speak on Friday at the conference, which features sessions with titles such as We Refuse to Be Suckers: The New Trump Doctrine and New Sheriff in Town: How Trump is Taking Down Lawless Government Agencies. Around a dozen members of his administration, including Vice President Mike Pence, having already spoken or are due to speak during the four-day event. Free trade has long been considered to be a conservative principle but the President and his administration have espoused a protectionist agenda, part of Mr Trumps America First approach. The latest edition of the conference is creating another platform for the Presidents controversial policies on trade and immigration. CPACs lineup boasts almost 60 big-name speakers a sharp decrease from the reported 166-plus speakers the conference advertised last year. Along with pro-Trump politicians and political commentators like Sean Hannity, the 2018 CPACs speakers include right-wing populists Marion Marechal-Le Pen of France, the niece of Front National (FN) leader Marine Le Pen, and Nigel Farage. The conference already appeared to be moving further right last year, with the appearance of Steve Bannon. On the CPAC stage, Mr Bannon spoke of economic nationalism and corporatist media, ideas that he had carried to the White House from his time running Breitbart News. Despite Mr Bannon leaving the White House, past and current members of Breitbart are again present at CPAC this year. At CPAC 2018, you are never far from pro-Trump sentiment. Some attendees walk around the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center, the Maryland base for the conference, wearing Make America Great Again hats, possibly purchased at the Official Trump Store located next to a booth for the Institute for Free Speech. Books touting conservative ideology, as well as Mr Trumps book The Art of the Deal, can be purchased at the Conservative Book Clubs bookstore. 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 Shiva Ayyadurai, who is challenging progressive Senator Elizabeth Warren for her Massachusetts Senate seat, has also set up his own booth. Those that walk by are handed a flyer ridiculing Ms Warren for her claims of Native American heritage. It features an edited photo of Ms Warren wearing a headdress underneath the slogan, Only a REAL INDIAN Can Defeat the Fake Indian an apparent reference to Mr Trumps much maligned nickname for the Massachusetts senator of Pocahontas. While the scheduled speakers display CPACs new populist tones, think tanks fill out the rest of the events agenda. Booths for traditional conservative organisations, including the Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute and the American Conservative Union, are all housed in a giant ballroom in the convention centre. The appearance of Ms Marechal-Le Pen was one that Matt Schlapp, the head of the American Conservative Union, which organises CPAC, had to defend against criticism from conservatives who had expressed dismay at her connection to the Front National, and her hardline views. NRA chief Wayne LaPierre says elites don't care about America's children in wake of Florida shooting Marion is a classical liberal, a conservative, Mr Schlapp wrote on Twitter about Ms Marechal-Le Pen. He also told Fox News: Shes for traditional marriage, shes pro-life, she doesnt believe that the welfare state solves problems and, yes, she wants to make sure when people immigrate into France that they want to be French and love the country. Former GOP communications director Tara Setmayer made clear that defence would not be enough. Reason #1245 why I wont be attending CPAC anytime soon anymore. It used to be a must attend yearly event for decades for conservatives. Since Trump & Matt Schlapp took over... Milo was invited last year! Now Le Pen?? she tweeted. As she spoke on Thursday, Ms Marechal-Le Pens speech was greeted warmly, with hearty boos greeting every mention of the European Union as she accused the bloc of slowly killing ancient nations. She joked that she was less terrifying than US media had said, but made clear her intentions. Im not offended when I hear President Donald Trump say America first, she said. In fact, I want America first for the American people, I want Britain first for the British people and I want France first for the French people. Marion Marechal-Le Pen, niece of right-wing populist French politician Marine Le Pen before her address at CPAC (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters) There was also an airing for a favourite chant of Mr Trump, after another speaker, Ben Shapiro of Daily Wire, recalled the fate of Democrat presidential nominee in 2016, Hillary Clinton. President Trump brought us one really fantastic thing, Hillary Clinton is not and will never be president of the United States, Mr Shapiro said as the crowd chanted lock her up! which had become a staple of Mr Trumps campaign rallies. Outside of the speakers, the titles of some of the forums and sessions certainly caught the eye. One was Kim Jong Un-iversity: How College Campuses are Turning into Reeducation Camps, and there was also a session called What You Dont Know about the Dirty Dossier, Trump, and Russia. Another theme that appears to be reflected in this years conference is Mr Trumps hatred of the media, with one session being titled An Affair to Remember: How the Far Left and the Mainstream Media Got in Bed Together. Away from some of the more outlandish elements, the conference is still the centre of the conservative political world for a few days. On Thursday, National Rifle Association chief executive Wayne LaPierre blasted the media for its coverage of another mass shooting last week and for being eager to smear the NRA, one of the most powerful gun-rights lobbying organisations. The Parkland, Florida massacre last week that left 17 people dead has re-energised the heated gun control debate going into the annual political conference, which is meant to celebrate and discuss conservative principles, including support for the Second Amendment. Activists are demanding the National Rifle Association (NRA) reveal if it received donations from Russia, after it was reported the FBI is investigating whether a Kremlin-linked Moscow businessman channelled money to the groups campaign to help Donald Trump win the election. With the influence of the NRA under mounting scrutiny following a school shooting in Florida and the campaign led by students to change the countrys gun laws, campaigners say it is vital that investigators uncover if the powerful lobbying group group used any Russian money to help elect Republican members of Congress and Mr Trump during the 2016 race. It is against the law to use foreign money in federal election campaigns. It was recently reported the FBI was focusing its attention on Alexander Torshin, a former member of the upper house of Russias parliament and currently deputy governor of Russias central bank, who is said to have a close relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin. The 64-year-old gun enthusiast is also said to be a Life Member of the NRA. Recommended Former Trump campaign aide pleads guilty in Russia investigation Since McClatchy News first reported Mr Torshin and the donation were being investigated, campaigners have been seeking to pressure the NRA to come clean about its funding. Kristin Brown, co-president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, told The Independent that the NRA, which was founded in 1871 as a recreational group designed to promote and encourage rifle shooting on a scientific basis, today got most of its funding from gun manufacturers. Mr Torshin is said to be close to Russian leader Vladimir Putin (Getty) NRA members should be outraged if even a portion of this alarming story is true. The NRA tells its members that it defends Americas freedoms, she said of the McClatchy News report. If the NRA is actually a front for Russian interests and interfered with our elections, actively or passively, then they have undermined the very democratic freedoms they purport to represent. We can only wonder how many true patriots will decide that this is the last straw and give up their NRA memberships. Florida shooting survivor tells Marco Rubio he could get the same NRA money from ordinary citizens Giffords, the gun safety group set up by former congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, who narrowly survived an assassination attempt in 2011, said if it was true the NRA had accepted a donation, it would be an insult to members and a threat to our democracy. The NRA was once an organisation dedicated to gun safety and sportsmanship, but today its been overtaken by lobbyists and has grown increasingly out of touch with the gun owners it claims to represent, said Giffords Executive Director Peter Ambler. The NRA spent a record $55m during the 2016 election cycle, directing money towards campaigns and adverts supporting members of congress it judged to be most supportive of its aims and polities. Senator Marco Rubio, who this week was publicly challenged by a Florida shooting survivor to vow to refuse to take NRA money, has received at least $3.3m from the NRA during his career, the sixth most of the current members of Congress. During the 2016 election, the NRA scored Mr Rubio A+, its highest ranking. The largest amount of money from the NRA in 2016, a total of $30m, went to Mr Trump. It helped pay for advertisements supporting his campaign and attacking that of his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton. The money was spent by a wing of the NRA that is not legally obligated to reveal who its donors are. Recommended NRA representative says media loves mass shootings Mr Torshin has long had been known for his links to Republicans and gun advocates. Reports suggest Mr Torshin was in 2011 introduced to David Keene, then the NRA president, by Kline Preston IV, a Nashville-based lawyer who has for many years done work in Russia. Mr Kline confirmed he had introduced the men and said Mr Torshin was a gun enthusiast. Indeed, several years ago he established a gun rights movement in Russia called the Right to Bear Arms. The group is run by Russian activist Maria Butina, who completed her post-graduate studies in the US and has been active in forging links between gun rights advocates in both countries. I dont know what Senator Torshin does with his money, Mr Preston said this week. The claims that these Russians funded money to the Trump campaign through the NRA are baseless. He added: There is nothing there. Its a snipe hunt hunting for something that does not exist. ThinkProgress said that in May 2013, Mr Torshin attended the NRA national convention in Houston. Two years later, Mr Torshins gun group hosted an NRA delegation in Moscow. Among those who reportedly attended were Mr Keene, NRA Vice President Pete Brownwell, NRA donor Arnold Goldschlager and David A Clarke, who was then the Milwaukee County Sheriff and later came close to being asked to join Mr Trumps administration. He is currently a contributor at Fox News. Mr Torshin attended the NRAs 2016 convention in Louisville, Kentucky, where he is said to have met with Mr Trump and shared a table with the Donald Trump Jr at one of the dinners. Bloomberg News said the Spanish authorities for three years investigated Mr Torshin as part of a probe into how Russian criminals were allegedly money laundering assets in Spain. The investigation ended in 2013 and no charges were ever brought. Mr Torshin told the news site he was innocent of any wrongdoing. Im a public individual and Im not hiding anywhere, Mr Torshin said. Senators on Capitol Hill investigating possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Moscows alleged interference in the 2016 election have also been looking at Mr Torshin. In November 2017, Senator Diane Feinstein, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, wrote to several former advisers to Mr Trump, asking for copies of any communications they had with Mr Torshin, the NRA or Ms Butina. 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 Among those to receive a request was JD Gordon, a political adviser who was last year in the news after it emerged that during the Republican National Convention, he spoke to Russias US Ambassador Sergey Kislyat about Mr Trumps desire to reset the strategic relationship between the two countries. Asked about the letter from Ms Feinstein, Mr Gordon said by email: I dont know Alexander Torshin and have never had any contact with him. He added: Though I can say that those continuing to throw about unsubstantiated allegations related to Trump-Russia need to be prepared for legal action and Congressional investigations. Relying on alleged FBI leaks is a dangerous game because (a) leaking information from classified investigations is a felony, and (b) defamatory claims may be entirely false. The FBI said it could not comment on whether it was investigating Mr Torshin. In keeping with our usual practice, we do not comment on whether or not we are investigating a particular matter, said spokesperson Carol Cratty. The office of Special Counsel to the Defence Department, Robert Mueller, did not respond to enquiries, nor did Mr Torshin and Ms Butina. The NRA also failed to respond to questions. This week, the groups president, Wayne LaPierre, claimed Democratic elites were politicising the mass shooting in Florida to try to erode constitutionally guaranteed gun rights. The elites dont care not one whit about Americas school system and school children, Mr LaPierre told the annual gathering of the Conservative Political Action Conference. Their goal is to eliminate the Second Amendment and our firearms freedoms so they can eradicate all individual freedoms. A Florida Republican is urging House Speaker Paul Ryan to move "immediately" on gun control reforms after President Donald Trump endorsed several potential approaches. Rep Carlos Curbelo tweeted at Mr Ryan after Mr Trump said that he would like to see the legal age for obtaining a long gun raised to 21 from 18, and for strengthening the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS), including through greater mental health screenings. With Mr Trump's "support, @SpeakerRyan should immediately allow the House to consider common sense gun safety proposals @RepCurbelo has been calling for - strengthening NICS, including mental health in background checks, raising purchasing age of long guns to 21, banning bump stocks," a tweet from Mr Curbelo's account reads. The call for gun control reforms comes just eight days after a 19-year-old man wielding an AR-15 killed 17 people at a Florida high school, including 14 students. That shooting, at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, has led to an intense debate over how to stop the gun violence epidemic in America, with student survivors of the massacre leading the charge and pledging that their school will be the last of the United States' mass shootings. Mr Curbelo has told news outlets in the aftermath of that shooting that he thinks Congress needs to hold debates on gun control legislation to try and find a way to solve the crisis. Congress should debate "reasonable, common-sense gun safety laws" that "protect rights for responsible citizens, people who are responsible gun owners, but will prevent those who want to do harm to innocent people form obtaining these weapons," Mr Curbelo said on ABC's This Week. Florida shooting in pictures Show all 10 1 /10 Florida shooting in pictures Florida shooting in pictures Police arrest a suspect in connection with the shooting at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida Reuters Florida shooting in pictures Parents wait for news after reports of a shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida AP Florida shooting in pictures Anxious family members wait for news of students AP Photo/Wilfredo Lee Florida shooting in pictures Students being evacuated from the school AP Florida shooting in pictures Students being evacuated from the school Getty Florida shooting in pictures People gather waiting for word from students AP Florida shooting in pictures Parents waiting for news on their children AP Florida shooting in pictures People gather at a hotel where students were taken after the shooting Getty Florida shooting in pictures Florida Governor Rick Scott speaks to the media as he visits Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School following the shooting AFP/Getty Florida shooting in pictures Dr. Igor Nichiporenko, Medical Director Trauma, left, and Dr. Evan Boyer, Medical Director, Emergency Services, speak about treating victims and the suspect at a press conference outside Broward Health North hospital AP Mr Trump has announced that he will instruct his Justice Department to ban so-called bump-stock weapons accessories that allow semi-automatic weapons to fire at a near-automatic rate. He has also conducted meetings with student survivors of mass shootings, and the parents of children who have been killed in those attacks. He has said that he would like to see teachers with concealed carry permits, and has floated the idea of giving those educators bonuses for packing heat at work. Mr Trump has also said that he would like to increase security at schools through modifications to the infrastructure that could keep gunmen out of classrooms when future shootings occur. Donald Trump has always been rather sensitive about this hair. On several occasions during the 2016 election campaign, in an attempt to convince people it was real and not a wig, he asked people in the crowd to take hold and pull it. So it it was something of a surprise when Mr Trump, in a seemingly unscripted moment, admitted that like many men of a certain age, he was struggling against baldness. I try like hell to hide that bald spot, the President said, taking to the stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference outside of Washington, as he looked at live footage that showed the back of his head. Putting his hands on on head and smoothing down his hair, he added: It doesnt look bad. Were hanging in. Trump supported by chants of 'USA! USA! USA!' during CPAC speech Michael Wolffs controversial book, Fire and Fury: Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, claims Mr Trumps eldest daughter, Ivanka, is among those who do not think much of the way the President styles his hair. She is said to have often described the mechanics behind it to friends, Mr Wolff wrote. World news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 World news in pictures World news in pictures 30 September 2020 Pope Francis prays with priests at the end of a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 29 September 2020 A girl's silhouette is seen from behind a fabric in a tent along a beach by Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 September 2020 A Chinese woman takes a photo of herself in front of a flower display dedicated to frontline health care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic in Beijing, China. China will celebrate national day marking the founding of the People's Republic of China on October 1st Getty World news in pictures 27 September 2020 The Glass Mountain Inn burns as the Glass Fire moves through the area in St. Helena, California. The fast moving Glass fire has burned over 1,000 acres and has destroyed homes Getty World news in pictures 26 September 2020 A villager along with a child offers prayers next to a carcass of a wild elephant that officials say was electrocuted in Rani Reserve Forest on the outskirts of Guwahati, India AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 September 2020 The casket of late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is seen in Statuary Hall in the US Capitol to lie in state in Washington, DC AFP via Getty World news in pictures 24 September 2020 An anti-government protester holds up an image of a pro-democracy commemorative plaque at a rally outside Thailand's parliament in Bangkok, as activists gathered to demand a new constitution AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 September 2020 A whale stranded on a beach in Macquarie Harbour on the rugged west coast of Tasmania, as hundreds of pilot whales have died in a mass stranding in southern Australia despite efforts to save them, with rescuers racing to free a few dozen survivors The Mercury/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 22 September 2020 State civil employee candidates wearing face masks and shields take a test in Surabaya AFP via Getty World news in pictures 21 September 2020 A man sweeps at the Taj Mahal monument on the day of its reopening after being closed for more than six months due to the coronavirus pandemic AP World news in pictures 20 September 2020 A deer looks for food in a burnt area, caused by the Bobcat fire, in Pearblossom, California EPA World news in pictures 19 September 2020 Anti-government protesters hold their mobile phones aloft as they take part in a pro-democracy rally in Bangkok. Tens of thousands of pro-democracy protesters massed close to Thailand's royal palace, in a huge rally calling for PM Prayut Chan-O-Cha to step down and demanding reforms to the monarchy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 September 2020 Supporters of Iraqi Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr maintain social distancing as they attend Friday prayers after the coronavirus disease restrictions were eased, in Kufa mosque, near Najaf, Iraq Reuters World news in pictures 17 September 2020 A protester climbs on The Triumph of the Republic at 'the Place de la Nation' as thousands of protesters take part in a demonstration during a national day strike called by labor unions asking for better salary and against jobs cut in Paris, France EPA World news in pictures 16 September 2020 A fire raging near the Lazzaretto of Ancona in Italy. The huge blaze broke out overnight at the port of Ancona. Firefighters have brought the fire under control but they expected to keep working through the day EPA World news in pictures 15 September 2020 Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny posing for a selfie with his family at Berlin's Charite hospital. In an Instagram post he said he could now breathe independently following his suspected poisoning last month Alexei Navalny/Instagram/AFP World news in pictures 14 September 2020 Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, former Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba and former Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida celebrate after Suga was elected as new head of the ruling party at the Liberal Democratic Party's leadership election in Tokyo Reuters World news in pictures 13 September 2020 A man stands behind a burning barricade during the fifth straight day of protests against police brutality in Bogota AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 September 2020 Police officers block and detain protesters during an opposition rally to protest the official presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus. Daily protests calling for the authoritarian president's resignation are now in their second month AP World news in pictures 11 September 2020 Members of 'Omnium Cultural' celebrate the 20th 'Festa per la llibertat' ('Fiesta for the freedom') to mark the Day of Catalonia in Barcelona. Omnion Cultural fights for the independence of Catalonia EPA World news in pictures 10 September 2020 The Moria refugee camp, two days after Greece's biggest migrant camp, was destroyed by fire. Thousands of asylum seekers on the island of Lesbos are now homeless AFP via Getty World news in pictures 9 September 2020 Pope Francis takes off his face mask as he arrives by car to hold a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 8 September 2020 A home is engulfed in flames during the "Creek Fire" in the Tollhouse area of California AFP via Getty World news in pictures 7 September 2020 A couple take photos along a sea wall of the waves brought by Typhoon Haishen in the eastern port city of Sokcho AFP via Getty World news in pictures 6 September 2020 Novak Djokovic and a tournament official tends to a linesperson who was struck with a ball by Djokovic during his match against Pablo Carreno Busta at the US Open USA Today Sports/Reuters World news in pictures 5 September 2020 Protesters confront police at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, Australia, during an anti-lockdown rally AFP via Getty World news in pictures 4 September 2020 A woman looks on from a rooftop as rescue workers dig through the rubble of a damaged building in Beirut. A search began for possible survivors after a scanner detected a pulse one month after the mega-blast at the adjacent port AFP via Getty World news in pictures 3 September 2020 A full moon next to the Virgen del Panecillo statue in Quito, Ecuador EPA World news in pictures 2 September 2020 A Palestinian woman reacts as Israeli forces demolish her animal shed near Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank Reuters World news in pictures 1 September 2020 Students protest against presidential elections results in Minsk TUT.BY/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 31 August 2020 The pack rides during the 3rd stage of the Tour de France between Nice and Sisteron AFP via Getty World news in pictures 30 August 2020 Law enforcement officers block a street during a rally of opposition supporters protesting against presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus Reuters World news in pictures 29 August 2020 A woman holding a placard reading "Stop Censorship - Yes to the Freedom of Expression" shouts in a megaphone during a protest against the mandatory wearing of face masks in Paris. Masks, which were already compulsory on public transport, in enclosed public spaces, and outdoors in Paris in certain high-congestion areas around tourist sites, were made mandatory outdoors citywide on August 28 to fight the rising coronavirus infections AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 August 2020 Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe bows to the national flag at the start of a press conference at the prime minister official residence in Tokyo. Abe announced he will resign over health problems, in a bombshell development that kicks off a leadership contest in the world's third-largest economy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 27 August 2020 Residents take cover behind a tree trunk from rubber bullets fired by South African Police Service (SAPS) in Eldorado Park, near Johannesburg, during a protest by community members after a 16-year old boy was reported dead AFP via Getty World news in pictures 26 August 2020 People scatter rose petals on a statue of Mother Teresa marking her 110th birth anniversary in Ahmedabad AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 August 2020 An aerial view shows beach-goers standing on salt formations in the Dead Sea near Ein Bokeq, Israel Reuters World news in pictures 24 August 2020 Health workers use a fingertip pulse oximeter and check the body temperature of a fisherwoman inside the Dharavi slum during a door-to-door Covid-19 coronavirus screening in Mumbai AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 August 2020 People carry an idol of the Hindu god Ganesh, the deity of prosperity, to immerse it off the coast of the Arabian sea during the Ganesh Chaturthi festival in Mumbai, India Reuters World news in pictures 22 August 2020 Firefighters watch as flames from the LNU Lightning Complex fires approach a home in Napa County, California AP World news in pictures 21 August 2020 Members of the Israeli security forces arrest a Palestinian demonstrator during a rally to protest against Israel's plan to annex parts of the occupied West Bank AFP via Getty World news in pictures 20 August 2020 A man pushes his bicycle through a deserted road after prohibitory orders were imposed by district officials for a week to contain the spread of the Covid-19 in Kathmandu AFP via Getty World news in pictures 19 August 2020 A car burns while parked at a residence in Vacaville, California. Dozens of fires are burning out of control throughout Northern California as fire resources are spread thin AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 August 2020 Students use their mobile phones as flashlights at an anti-government rally at Mahidol University in Nakhon Pathom. Thailand has seen near-daily protests in recent weeks by students demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Prayut Chan-O-Cha AFP via Getty World news in pictures 17 August 2020 Members of the Kayapo tribe block the BR163 highway during a protest outside Novo Progresso in Para state, Brazil. Indigenous protesters blocked a major transamazonian highway to protest against the lack of governmental support during the COVID-19 novel coronavirus pandemic and illegal deforestation in and around their territories AFP via Getty World news in pictures 16 August 2020 Lightning forks over the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge as a storm passes over Oakland AP World news in pictures 15 August 2020 Belarus opposition supporters gather near the Pushkinskaya metro station where Alexander Taraikovsky, a 34-year-old protester died on August 10, during their protest rally in central Minsk AFP via Getty World news in pictures 14 August 2020 AlphaTauri's driver Daniil Kvyat takes part in the second practice session at the Circuit de Catalunya in Montmelo near Barcelona ahead of the Spanish F1 Grand Prix AFP via Getty World news in pictures 13 August 2020 Soldiers of the Brazilian Armed Forces during a disinfection of the Christ The Redeemer statue at the Corcovado mountain prior to the opening of the touristic attraction in Rio AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 August 2020 Young elephant bulls tussle playfully on World Elephant Day at the Amboseli National Park in Kenya AFP via Getty An absolutely clean pate a contained island after scalp reduction surgery surrounded by a furry circle of hair around the sides and front, from which all ends are drawn up to meet in the centre then swept back and secured by a stiffening spray, it quoted her as saying. Last year, Harold Bornstein, who is said to have been Mr Trumps long-term doctor for many years, told the New York Times the real estate magnate used a prostate-related drug to promote hair growth. Earlier this year, Ronny Jackson, an US admiral and physician who documented Mr Trumps annual medical, reported the President was was taking Propecia, a medicine to prevent baldness. This month, video footage of Mr Trumps hair being blown right, left and centre as he boarded Air Force One to travel to Florida went viral. Donald Trump has announced what he has termed the largest ever set of sanctions against North Korea. In the latest of a series of measures seeking to add pressure on North Korea over its nuclear programme, the US government is targeting more than 50 vessels, shipping companies and trade businesses with sanctions. The President announced the measures at the Conservative Political Action Conference, and was to be followed by a public announcement from the Treasury Department. 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 Today I am announcing that we are launching the largest-ever set of new sanctions on the North Korean regime, Mr Trump said at the CPAC event outside of the Washington DC. The sanctions are targeted at sources of fuel and cash for Pyongyang. During Mr Trumps first year in office, North Korea has, in defiance of much of the international community, been aggressive about testing intercontinental ballistic missiles that could theoretically reach the US mainland, even if US experts believe they may not yet be capable of carrying a nuclear payload with them. Mr Trump has responded with several sets of sanctions and sabre threatening and threats that have matched that of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. Dan Coats: 'North Korea will be the most volatile and confrontational WMD threat in the coming year' He has mocked the 36-year-old as rocket man, bragged that he has a bigger nuclear button at his disposal than his North Korean leader and told the UN General Assembly that the US may be obliged to totally destroy the country if it continues to represent a threat to the US and its allies in the region, notably South Korea and Japan. The announcement comes as South Korea hosts the Winter Olympics, an occasion the two Koreas have used as an opportunity to try to restart talks. Vice President Mike Pence was to have met with with North Korean officials, including Kim Jong Uns sister, Kim Yo Jong, and Kim Yong Nam, North Koreas ceremonial head of state. But the North Koreans pulled out of the meeting before it could happen, apparently upset by some of the Mr Pences comments. Mr Pences office said they believed the abrupt cancellation was a sign that US attempts to exert pressure on the regime were working. North Korea dangled a meeting in hopes of the vice president softening his message, which would have ceded the world stage for their propaganda during the Olympics, Mr Nick Ayers, the Vice Presidents Chief of Staff, told reporters. New charges have been filed against former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and his deputy by special counsel Robert Mueller's team, increasing pressure on the duo as they prepare for an expected trial later this year. Mr Mueller's team unsealed the indictments of Mr Manafort and his business partner, Rick Gates, on fresh tax and bank fraud allegations Thursday, months after both men were hit with a 12-count indictment last year. Those original indictments were the first criminal charges filed by Mr Mueller's probe into the 2016 race, but did not relate to the campaign and instead focused on financial transactions involving Mr Manafort and Mr Gates. That includes work by the men for a Ukrainian political party, and alleged failure to notify US authorities that they were lobbying on behalf of a foreign government. Both men have pleaded not guilty to the earlier charges. "Paul Manafort is innocent of the allegations set out in the newly filed indictments and he is confident that he will be acquitted of all charges," Jason Maloni, Mr Manafort's spokesperson, said in a statement. "The new allegations against Mr Manafort, once again, have nothing to do with Russia and 2016 election interference/collusion. Mr Manafort is confident that he will be acquitted and violations of his constitutional rights will be remedied." New indictments were expected to be filed against the two men, though it was not previously clear on what grounds. Mr Manafort served as President Donald Trump's campaign chairman from June 2016 until August of that year. Mr Gates was also an official on the Trump campaign. The newly unsealed indictments allege that Mr Manafort attempted to avoid paying taxes on "tens of millions of dollars" in income resulting from their work as consultants for the Ukrainian government, former Ukrainian President Victor Yanukovych, as well as Ukrainian political parties. The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Show all 17 1 /17 The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Paul Manafort Mr Manafort is a Republican strategist and former Trump campaign manager. He resigned from that post over questions about his extensive lobbying overseas, including in Ukraine where he represented pro-Russian interests. Mr Manafort turned himself in at FBI headquarters to special counsel Robert Muellers team on Oct 30, 2017, after he was indicted under seal on charges that include conspiracy against the United States, conspiracy to launder money, unregistered agent of a foreign principal, false and misleading US Foreign Agents Registration Act statements, false statements, and seven counts of failure to file reports of foreign bank and financial accounts. Getty The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Rick Gates Mr Gates joined the Trump team in spring 2016, and served as a top aide until he left to work at the Republican National Committee after the departure of former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort. Mr Gates' had previously worked on several presidential campaigns, on international political campaigns in Europe and Africa, and had 15 years of political or financial experience with multinational firms, according to his bio. Mr Gates was indicted alongside Mr Manafort by special counsel Robert Mueller's team on charges that include conspiracy against the United States, conspiracy to launder money, unregistered agent of a foreign principal, false and misleading US Foreign Agents Registration Act statements, false statements, and seven counts of failure to file reports of foreign bank and financial accounts. AP The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation George Papadopoulos George Papadopoulos was a former foreign policy adviser for the Trump campaign, having joined around March 2016. Mr Papadopoulos plead guilty to federal charges for lying to the FBI as a part of a cooperation agreement with Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation. Mr Papadopoulos claimed in an interview with the FBI that he had made contacts with Russian sources before joining the Trump campaign, but he actually began working with them after joining the team. Mr Papadopoulos allegedly took a meeting with a professor in London who reportedly told him that Russians had "dirt" on Hillary Clinton. The professor also allegedly introduced Mr Papadopoulos to a Russian who was said to have close ties to officials at the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Mr Papadopoulos also allegedly was in contact with a woman whom he incorrectly described in one email to others in the campaign as the "niece" to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Twitter The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Donald Trump Jr The President's eldest son met with a Russian lawyer - Natalia Veselnitskaya - on 9 June 2016 at Trump Tower in New York. He said in an initial statement that the meeting was about Russia halting adoptions of its children by US citizens. Then, he said it was regarding the Magnitsky Act, a US law blacklisting Russian human rights abusers. In a final statement, Mr Trump Jr released a chain of emails that revealed he took the meeting in hopes of getting information Ms Veselnitskaya had about Hillary Clinton's alleged financial ties to Russia. He and the President called it standard "opposition research" in the course of campaigning and that no information came from the meeting. The meeting was set up by an intermediary, Rob Goldstone. Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort were also at the same meeting. Getty Images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Jared Kushner Mr Kushner is President Donald Trump's son-in-law and a key adviser to the White House. He met with a Russian banker appointed by Russian President Vladimir Putin in December. Mr Kushner has said he did so in his role as an adviser to Mr Trump while the bank says he did so as a private developer. Mr Kushner has also volunteered to testify in the Senate about his role helping to arrange meetings between Trump advisers and Russian Ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak. Getty Images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Rob Goldstone Former tabloid journalist and now music publicist Rob Goldstone is a contact of the Trump family through the previously Trump-owned 2013 Miss Universe pageant, which took place in Moscow. In June 2016, he wrote to Donald Trump Jr offering a meeting with a Russian lawyer, Natalya Veselnitskaya, who had information about Hillary Clinton. Mr Goldstone was the intermediary for Russian pop star Emin Agalaraov and his father, real estate magnate Aras, who played a role in putting on the 2013 pageant. In an email chain released by Mr Trump Jr, Mr Goldstone seemed to indicate Russian government's support of Donald Trump's campaign. AP images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Aras and Emin Agalarov Aras Agalarov (R) is a wealthy Moscow-based real estate magnate and son Emin (L) is a pop star. Both played a role in putting on the previously Trump-owned 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow. They allegedly had information about Hillary Clinton and offered that information to the Trump campaign through a lawyer with whom they had worked with, Natalia Veselnitskaya, and music publicist Rob Goldstone. Getty Images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Natalia Veselnitskaya Natalia Veselnitskaya is a Russian lawyer with ties to the Kremlin. She has worked on real estate issues and reportedly counted the FSB as a client in the past. She has ties to a Trump family connection, real estate magnate Aras Agalarov, who had helped set up the Trump-owned 2013 Miss Universe pageant which took place in Moscow. Ms Veselnitskaya met with Donald Trump Jr, Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort in Trump Tower on 9 June 2016 but denies the allegation that she went there promising information on Hillary Clinton's alleged financial ties to Russia. She contends that the meeting was about the US adoptions of Russian children being stopped by Moscow as a reaction to the Magnitsky Act, a US law blacklisting Russian human rights abusers. Getty Images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Mike Flynn Mr Flynn was named as Trump's national security adviser but was forced to resign from his post for inappropriate communication with Russian Ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak. He had misrepresented a conversation he had with Mr Kislyak to Vice President Mike Pence, telling him wrongly that he had not discussed sanctions with the Russian. Getty Images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Sergey Kislyak Mr Kislyak, the former longtime Russian ambassador to the US, is at the centre of the web said to connect President Donald Trump's campaign with Russia. Reuters The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Roger Stone Mr Stone is a former Trump adviser who worked on the political campaigns of Richard Nixon, George HW Bush, and Ronald Reagan. Mr Stone claimed repeatedly in the final months of the campaign that he had backchannel communications with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and that he knew the group was going to dump damaging documents to the campaign of Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton - which did happen. Mr Stone also had contacts with the hacker Guccier 2.0 on Twitter, who claimed to have hacked the DNC and is linked to Russian intelligence services. Getty Images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Jeff Sessions The US attorney general was forced to recuse himself from the Trump-Russia investigation after it was learned that he had lied about meeting with Russian Ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak. Getty Images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Carter Page Mr Page is a former advisor to the Trump campaign and has a background working as an investment banker at Merrill Lynch. Mr Page met with Russian Ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak during the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland. Mr Page had invested in oil companies connected to Russia and had admitted that US Russia sanctions had hurt his bottom line. Reuters The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Jeffrey "JD" Gorden Mr Gordon met with Russian Ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak during the 2016 Republian National Convention to discuss how the US and Russia could work together to combat Islamist extremism should then-Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump win the election. The meeting came days before a massive leak of DNC emails that has been connected to Russia. Creative Commons The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation James Comey Mr Comey was fired from his post as head of the FBI by President Donald Trump. The timing of Mr Comey's firing raised questions around whether or not the FBI's investigation into the Trump campaign may have played a role in the decision. Getty Images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Preet Bharara Mr Bahara refused, alongside 46 other US district attorney's across the country, to resign once President Donald Trump took office after previous assurances from Mr Trump that he would keep his job. Mr Bahara had been heading up several investigations including one into one of President Donald Trump's favorite cable television channels Fox News. Several investigations would lead back to that district, too, including those into Mr Trump's campaign ties to Russia, and Mr Trump's assertion that Trump Tower was wiretapped on orders from his predecessor. Getty Images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Sally Yates Ms Yates, a former Deputy Attorney General, was running the Justice Department while President Donald Trump's pick for attorney general awaited confirmation. Ms Yates was later fired by Mr Trump from her temporary post over her refusal to implement Mr Trump's first travel ban. She had also warned the White House about potential ties former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn to Russia after discovering those ties during the FBI's investigation into the Trump campaign's connections to Russia. Getty Images To do so, court fillings show, the two men disguised the incoming money as loans from offshore corporate accounts, which made millions of dollars in unreported payments to bank accounts the men held in the United States. Mr Manafort, the charges say, also used offshore corporate accounts to purchase property in the United States, and that both men used the money to make improvements on and refinance properties they own in the US. The filings allege a second stage of the money laundering and tax evasion scheme, in which the men used their improved properties as collateral, and to extract loans from financial institutions. The men were able to get more than $20m in loans by "falsely" inflating Mr Manafort's company's income, and by not disclosing its existing debt on their loan applications, the document says. All told, the filings say, the two men oversaw the flow of $75m from offshore accounts, including the laundering of $30m that Mr Manafort hid from US federal tax agencies. Mr Gates did so with roughly $3m, according to the charges. The new filings come at a particularly confusing time in the original proceedings. Just last week US District Judge Amy Berman Jackson criticised the prosecution and defence for "unacceptable delays" in the case, which does not have a trial date yet. It is not even clear who will be the lead defensive lawyer yet. The two men were hit with a 12-count indictment in October, which focused on their alleged failure to notify US authorities that they had acted as lobbyists for a foreign government. Finding a Job Virtually Everything has gone digital, down to job interviews. That was proven when the Indiana Department of Workforce Development set up an in-person job fair, complete with tents, handouts and 32 businesses. The marketing and recruitment staffs were willing and ready to interview candidates but just 15 potential employees arrived to the job fair. In November 2017, the same department held several job fairs but, this time, they were all virtual. The fairs were accessed via video conferencing methods and the turnout was quite different over 100 people showed up. Hundreds more could watch the days events on-demand, since they were recorded and posted. This test proved job seekers want a more relaxed way to look for jobs. But, how does one prepare for a virtual job fair, as opposed to an in-person one? Here are some tips so you are fully prepared to attend. Finding the fairs is a simple Google search away and, once you have stumbled upon the one(s) youd like to attend, you must reserve a spot spaces are limited. It is an audience forum, so businesses will present the company and job opportunities, so make sure to download the proper video conference app ASAP. Now you can prepare for a virtual interview. You have the app, now you need a high quality webcam so you can look your absolute best to employers. A lot of the rules that follow are very similar, if not identical, to creating your own video conferencing space. Neutral background and lack of clutter is vital followed by fitting the camera to your face, preferably top of head to waistline. Clothing should be neutral no patterns or loud, neon colors taking away from what you are saying. Balancing your face, background, and clothing is the lighting, which should be very soft, but not one-sided. Try out a demo call just to see how it looks before jumping into a virtual job fair. A resume and cover letter are great leave-behinds for employers; create digital versions to associate with your name. You will be able to meet face-to-face with these employers through the most popular chat forums like Skype, Hangouts, GoToMeeting, and Zoom, which provide screen sharing. This also gives functionalities to display a virtual portfolio if you are sharing videos, media, etc. Are you ready for the new wave of interviewing and job hunting? Edited by Erik Linask China has detained two men for 15 days after they were pictured wearing Japanese World War II army uniforms at the site of one of the conflicts worst atrocities. The Chinese men, aged 22 and 25, provoked widespread online outrage after posting the images of the prank, which inflamed enduring sensitivities over Japans invasion and occupation of much of the China in the 1930s and 1940s. Nanjing police said the pair were ruled guilty on the broadly defined charge of picking quarrels and provoking trouble and sentenced to administrative detention, a punishment short of jailing for which no trial is required. Individual actions of citizens should not challenge the dignity of the nation and its people, police said in a statement. No behaviour in public settings or in cyberspace can cross the bottom line of the law. The men travelled to Nanjing over the Lunar New Year holiday and the pictures were taken in front of a bunker used by Chinese defenders during the 1937 Japanese assault that ended in the notorious Rape of Nanking. They sent the photos on the popular QQ messaging service, from where they were reposted around the internet, stirring what police described as extreme rage and severe condemnation. Pictures of the two with faces obscured were posted on many websites. One wore an officers uniform and carried a samurai sword, while the other wore puttees and carried what appeared to be a replica rifle. Police did not say how the men were identified, although social media and government databases may have offered clues. One of the two had been tracked to the south-western province of Sichuan. More than 70 years after the war ended, Japans relations with China remain fraught. Chinas ruling Communist Party derives much of its legitimacy to rule from its much-mythologised role fighting the Japanese, who were opposed mainly by Chiang Kai-sheks Nationalists. Many in China also believe Japan has never showed sincere contrition for the conflict, in which an estimated 15 million to 20 million Chinese were killed. A memorial hall and museum now stand at the site of a mass grave in the Yangtze River city and annual commemorations in December have been attended by President Xi Jinping and other high-ranking leaders. In 1937, Nanjing was Chiangs capital, to which he and his army retreated following the Japanese occupation of Shanghai after dogged fighting by the Chinese defenders. After entering the city on 13 December, Japanese imperial troops went on a six-week rampage, raping and murdering civilians and disarming soldiers, looting and setting much of the city aflame. China puts the number of dead at 300,000, although other estimates place the number considerably lower. New satellite pictures purport to show how the government of Myanmar is bulldozing the remains of villages that were burnt to the ground to drive out Rohingya Muslims. The photographs are said to reveal that dozens of empty settlements have been destroyed far more than previously believed. Human rights groups say authorities are eliminating crucial evidence of the mass atrocities carried out against the ethnic Rohingya minority. The villages in Rakhine state were set ablaze after violence erupted last summer, when security forces drove hundreds of thousands of Rohingya into exile, in a brutal clearance operation. The government of Myanmar strongly denies any wrongdoing, saying its military operation in Rakhine is a proportionate response to terrorist groups operating in the region. One woman said she was shocked by what she saw when she recently returned from Bangladesh to her old home in Myin Hlut. Most houses had been torched last year, but now, everything is gone, not even the trees are left, said 18-year-old Zubairia. They just bulldozed everything I could hardly recognise it. She said other homes that had been abandoned but not initially damaged had now also been flattened. All the memories that I had there are gone, she told AP. Theyve been erased. The crisis in Rakhine state began in August after Rohingya insurgents launched a string of unprecedented attacks on security posts. Myanmars armed forces are accused not just of burning Muslim villages with the help of Buddhist mobs, but also of massacres, rapes and widespread looting. Campaigners say the government is wrecking scores of crime scenes before any investigation takes place, and the Rohingya believe it is a drive to destroy their culture to make it impossible for them to return. The new aerial photographs show at least 28 villages or hamlets were bulldozed in a 30-mile radius around Maungdaw between December and February; on some of the cleared areas, construction crews had erected new housing and helipads. Human Rights Watch says the number of villages wrecked is at least 55. The images offer a window into what is effectively a part of Myanmar that is largely sealed off to the outside world. Myanmar bars independent media access to Rakhine state. Recommended Villages burned to the ground as Rohingya Muslims flee Burma The government claims it is trying to rebuild a devastated region, and for months has been expanding roads, repairing bridges and constructing shelters, with a large transit camp at Taungpyo, near the Bangladesh border. The camp opened last month to house returning refugees, who have yet to arrive. Myint Khine, a government administrator, said some of the new homes were intended for Muslims. But that does not appear to be the case so far, and many Rohingya fear authorities are seizing land theyve lived on for generations. A government list in December indicated 787 houses would be built, most for Buddhists or Hindus. Only 22 were slated for so-called Bengalis the word Myanmar nationalists often use to describe the Rohingya, who they say are illegal migrants from Bangladesh. Mr Khine said: Of course we have been using machines like earth removers and bulldozers because we have to clear the ground first before building new houses. Chris Lewa, whose Arakan Project monitors the persecuted minoritys plight, said the destruction would make it even harder for the Rohingya, who have no citizenship and few rights, to ever reclaim their land. How will they identify where they lived, if nothing is left, if nothing can be recognised? Mr Lewa said. Their culture, their history, their past, their present its all being erased. When you see the pictures, its clear that whatever was left the mosques, the cemeteries, the homes theyre gone. Richard Weir, a Myanmar expert with Human Rights Watch, said: Theres no more landmarks, theres no trees, theres no vegetation. Everything is wiped away, and this is very concerning, because these are crime scenes. Theres been no credible investigation of these crimes. And so, what were talking about really is obstruction of justice. Mr Weir added: We dont know where all the graves are ... because there is no access. Additional reporting by AP Australias deputy prime minister Barnaby Joyce has finally resigned after a series of sex scandals that have plagued the Australian government and dominated the news agenda for weeks. Mr Joyce, a major figure in Australian politics and leader of The Nationals, the junior coalition partner, will not resign from parliament in order to maintain Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbulls wafer-thin majority. But his move to the backbenches comes as a result of insurmountable pressure over revelations of an affair he had with a former staffer, who was also appointed to a number of unadvertised roles in his team. Mr Joyce and the former member of staff, Vikki Campion, are now expecting a baby in April. And Mr Joyce admitted that a new sexual harassment allegation against him, made in the media this week by an unidentified woman, was the straw that breaks the camels back. He has denied the allegation and asked that it be referred to police for investigation. Other questions swirling around Mr Joyce include those about his current living arrangements. After leaving his wife, Natalie Joyce, of 24 years and mother of his four daughters, he and Ms Campion now live rent-free in an apartment owned by a wealthy political donor. He described his resignation on Friday as necessary for both parliament and his family. He has also denied a media report that he pinched a womans bottom while drunk in a Canberra pub several years ago. The Nationals, the traditional party of farmers and rural voters, will select a new leader on Monday. Its incredibly important that there be a circuit-breaker, not just for the parliament but more importantly, a circuit-breaker for Vikki, for my unborn child, my daughters and for Nat, he told reporters. Under the terms of the coalition agreement, whoever is chosen to replace Mr Joyce will also automatically become deputy prime minister. Mr Joyce, a political maverick who has led his party since elections in mid-2016, said he would not accept any ministerial portfolio. As well as deputy prime minister, he was minister for infrastructure and transport. The Nationals president Larry Anthony, the partys senior bureaucrat, said in a statement: The party will greet this news with a heavy heart but we understand and respect his decision to stand down as leader. Mr Turnbull said in a statement that the coalition government partnership is undiminished by the Nationalss leadership change. Mr Joyce and Mr Turnbull have openly attacked each other since news of the deputy prime ministers office affair broke. Mr Turnbull accused his deputy of making a shocking error of judgment by having an office affair. Mr Joyce described his leaders remarks as inept and completely unnecessary. In a move interpreted by some as punishing his deputy for a politically damaging scandal, Mr Turnbull did not appoint Mr Joyce to the role of acting prime minister while the PM visits Washington this week. Mr Turnbull explained that Mr Joyce was taking leave to consider his future. Additional reporting by agencies The European Commission has hinted the EU could ban single-use plastics after Michael Gove said there was some concern Europe may prevent the UK from outlawing plastic straws. Frans Timmermans, vice president of the EUs executive cabinet, told Mr Gove on Twitter: One step ahead of you. EU legislation on single-use plastics coming before the summer. Maybe you can align with us? The announcement came shortly after the Environment Secretary announced he was looking into the legal basis for ditching single-use straws. Recommended Michael Gove says he wants to ban plastic straws Mr Gove told Sky News: Plastic straws are a scourge. Theyre just one example of the ways in which we pollute the oceans and damage marine wildlife. I want to do everything we can to restrict the use of plastic straws and were exploring at the moment if we can ban them. He added: There is some concern that EU laws mean that we cant ban straws at moment, but Im doing everything I can to ensure that we end this scourge and I hope to make an announcement shortly. Straws are not just another example of plastic waste they can be lethal... I believe we need to act and Im exploring now what we can do as quick as possible within the law. But Dr Viviane Gravey, lecturer in European politics at Queens University Belfast, told The Independent Mr Goves comments were basically nonsense. It is especially nonsense for just that example of plastic straws, she said. We know that the Scottish government within the EU is saying that they are going to ban them by the end of 2019. That means during the transition or implementation period... still while being bound by all EU law. Mr Gove has previously said he was haunted by seeing images of plastic pollution in the oceans on the BBC series Blue Planet II. The move comes just a day after official figures revealed the number of straws purchased by Parliament has doubled in the last three years. Blue Planet shows mourning whales whose newborn may have been killed by plastic Data from the House of Commons Commission showed the number of straws bought had gone up from 6,000 in 2014-15 to 12,250 in 2016-17. On Wednesday, Mr Timmermans told a conference there is urgent work to do following Chinas decision to limit imports of plastic waste. We will find ways to reuse and recycle more plastic and avoid microplastic leakage, he said. During an announcement on EU plans to ensure all plastic is recyclable or reusable by 2030, Mr Timmermans specifically mentioned plastic straws as something that needed to be outlawed. If children knew what the effects are of using single-use plastic straws for drinking sodas, or whatever, they might reconsider and use paper straws or no straws at all, he told The Guardian. Ways to reduce your single-use plastic Show all 6 1 /6 Ways to reduce your single-use plastic Ways to reduce your single-use plastic Plastic water bottle for a reusable beverage container Instead of continually buying drinks in plastic bottles you can switch to a reusable beverage container and reduce your single-use of plastics. Selfridges' Bobble 550ml filtered water bottle costs 12.95 and includes a replaceable carbon filter that filters water as you drink, removing chlorine and organic contaminants in the process. You can buy it from selfridges.com Getty/Selfridges Ways to reduce your single-use plastic Coffee cup for a Travel coffee mug It is estimated that the UK throws away around 2.5bn disposable coffee cups a year and almost all are incinerated, exported or sent to landfill because their plastic lining makes them expensive to recycle. The new Latte Levy in the UK means there will now be a 25p charge on every disposable coffee cup bought by consumers. Pret A Manger announced that it will double its discount to 50p in an effort to reduce waste. By swapping to a reusable cup you will be able to help cut the cost of disposable coffee cups. This Keep Cup Brew, cork edition, travel cup in Fika is just one of the many available to purchase. It fits under most commercial coffee machines, is splash-proof and ideal for transporting your coffee whilst on the go. You can buy this particular cup for 19.99 from trouva.com. Getty/Trouva Ways to reduce your single-use plastic Plastic bags for reusable cloth bags An eco-friendly alternative to an ordinary plastic bag is this lightweight shopping bag. It comes with a practical pillowcase pocket and features a black and white ink splatter design. Convenient and durable it also has a matte black spring clip to attach it where you need it. You can buy this from paperchase.co.uk for just 5.00. Getty/Paperchase Ways to reduce your single-use plastic Coffee pods for a pot of coffee Cut your plastic coffee pod usage with a cafetiere. This Barista and Co, 3 Cup Gold Cafetiere, from Habitat offers a simple way to brew and serve in style. Made from borosilicate glass and plated stainless steel with an ergonomically designed handle, the cafetiere is built to last and a pleasure to use; a fine metal filter produces a smooth coffee that retains its natural oils. You can buy it for 30 from habitat.co.uk. Getty/Habitat Ways to reduce your single-use plastic Balloons for eco-friendly decorations Instead of using plastic balloons at your party try swapping them for some eco-friendly bunting. Handmade in Scotland, the bunting comprises thirteen brightly coloured pennants which spell out the words 'Happy Birthday', and uses lettering that has been printed onto 100 per cent recycled card. Included is 11ft of natural jute twine to hang the pennants on, and everything comes packaged in a cello bag. You can buy this bunting from Little Silverleaf on notonthehighstreet.com for 12.50. Getty/notonthehighstreet Ways to reduce your single-use plastic Plastic straw for a reusable bamboo one Swap plastic straws for reusable ones made of bamboo. These straws are handmade in Bali and crafted by local balinese artisans. Made of organic and natural materials they are the best eco-friendly alternative to plastic, steel or glass straws. You can purchase them from Bali Boo on Amazon.co.uk for 13.99. PA/Bali Boo/Amazon We are going to choke on plastic if we dont do anything about this. How many millions of straws do we use every day across Europe? I would have people not use plastic straws any more. It only took me once to explain to my children. And now... they go looking for paper straws, or dont use straws at all. Between eight and 12 million tons of plastic are dumped in the worlds seas each year. If current levels of pollution continue, there will be more plastic than fish in the seas by 2050, according to statistics from the United Nations. But a recent survey revealed UK families are now making concerted efforts to cut their plastic use by returning to traditional shopping methods. The study found that 93 per cent of families said they were trying to use fewer plastic items. However, only 17 per cent said they were able to afford pricier alternatives. Dubbed granny shopping, three in five families said they bought loose fruit and veg, not pre-packed, while 44 per cent were once again choosing washing powder in cardboard boxes instead of pre-wrapped capsules in a plastic tub. One in eight women in France have been raped at least once in their lifetime, a new report suggests. Four million women have been victims of penetrative sexual violence roughly 12 per cent of the countrys female population according to a study by Paris-based think tank Fondation Jean Jaures. More than half (58 per cent) said they had suffered inappropriate behaviour, with 43 per cent claiming they had been touched without their consent. Half of women said they had been verbally insulted or the target of sexist remarks and one in five said they had received pornographic emails or text messages, the report found. Researchers said they felt compelled to conduct the study to gain a better understanding of the prevalence of sexual misconduct in French society and measure its effects on victims health. They believe the problem has become a major public health issue. The study also revealed the majority of women surveyed had been affected multiple times and by different types of harassment. The disturbing figures are revealed amid a global crackdown on the sexual assault and harassment of women and girls. In France, the Balance Ton Porc (rat on your pig) movement has gained widespread traction, with women across the country taking to social media to share their experiences. UK news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 UK news in pictures UK news in pictures 11 September 2021 Arsenals Takehiro Tomiyasu attempts to control the ball during the Premier League match at The Emirates Stadium PA UK news in pictures 10 September 2021 People paddle board during a misty morning in Ullswater, the second largest lake in the Lake District, Cumbria PA UK news in pictures 9 September 2021 Troops from Wiltshire based 4 Armoured Close Support Battalion Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers during final inspection at Wellington Barracks in London, ahead of providing troops for the Queens Guard PA UK news in pictures 8 September 2021 Workers cross London Bridge during the morning rush hour in London Reuters UK news in pictures Mixing it up: Painting it up press view in London A gallery employee poses for photographers next to a painting entitled Prairie by British artist, Louise Giovanelli during the exhibition 'Mixing it up: Painting it up' at the Hayward Gallery in London EPA UK news in pictures 6 September 2021 Traders in the Ring at the London Metal Exchange, in the City of London, after open-outcry trading returned for the first time since March 2020, when the Ring was temporarily closed due to the pandemic PA UK news in pictures 5 September 2021 People enjoy the warm weather on Sandbanks beach, Poole PA UK news in pictures 4 September 2021 Demonstrators from Animal Rebellion and Nature Rebellion protest in Trafalgar Square in London. PA UK news in pictures 3 September 2021 South Africa's Ntando Mahlangu (centre) wins the Men's 200 metres T61 Final ahead of second placed Great Britain's Richard Whitehead at the Tokyo 2020 Paralympic Games PA UK news in pictures 2 September 2021 A young common seal on the beach at Horsey Gap in Norfolk, as hundreds of pregnant grey seals come ashore ready for the start of the pupping season. PA UK news in pictures 1 September 2021 Goldfinches fighting over food in a garden in Strensham, Worcestershire PA UK news in pictures 31 August 2021 Gold Medallist Sarah Storey of Britain celebrates on the podium Reuters UK news in pictures 30 August 2021 Extinction Rebellion protesters hold a a tea party on Tower Bridge in London EPA UK news in pictures 29 August 2021 A police office tussles with a demonstrator on Cromwell Road outside the Natural History Museum during a protest by members of Extinction Rebellion in London PA UK news in pictures 28 August 2021 Members of the British armed forces 16 Air Assault Brigade walk to the air terminal after disembarking a Royal Airforce Voyager aircraft at Brize Norton, Oxfordshire POOL/AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 27 August 2021 Fabio Quartararo crashes during a MotoGP practice session at the British Grand Prix, Silverstone Circuit Action Images via Reuters UK news in pictures 26 August 2021 An Extinction Rebellion activist holds a placard in a fountain surrounded by police officers, during a protest next to Buckingham Palace in London Reuters UK news in pictures 25 August 2021 Gold Medallist Great Britains cyclist, Sarah Storey, celebrates after winning the Womens C5 3000m Individual Pursuit Final at the Tokyo 2020 Paralympic Games. It was her 15th Paralympic gold Reuters UK news in pictures 24 August 2021 A demonstrator dressed as bee during a protest by members of Extinction Rebellion on Whitehall, in central London PA UK news in pictures 23 August 2021 Former interpreters for the British forces in Afghanistan demonstrate outside the Home Office in central London AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 22 August 2021 Police officers form a line in front of the entrance to the Guildhall, London, where protesters have climbed onto a ledge above the entrance during an Extinction Rebellion stage a protest PA UK news in pictures 21 August 2021 People take part in a demonstration in solidarity with people of Afghanistan, in London Reuters UK news in pictures 20 August 2021 People zip wire across the sea from Bournemouth pier towards the beach. PA UK news in pictures 19 August 2021 Supporters of Geronimo the alpaca gather outside Shepherds Close Farm in Wooton Under Edge, Gloucestershire PA UK news in pictures 18 August 2021 Former Afghan interpreters and veterans hold a demonstration outside Downing Street, calling for support and protection for Afghan interpreters and their families PA UK news in pictures 17 August 2021 Military personnel board the RAF Airbus A400M at RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire, where evacuation flights from Afghanistan have been landing Reuters UK news in pictures 16 August 2021 Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer takes part in a minute's silence at Wolverhampton police station for the victims of the Plymouth mass shooting last week PA UK news in pictures 15 August 2021 2Storm, a ten-metre tall puppet of a mythical goddess of the sea created by Edinburgh-based visual theatre company Vision Mechanics, makes its way alongside the seafront at North Berwick, East Lothian, during a performance at the Fringe By The Sea festival PA UK news in pictures 14 August 2021 A woman and two young girls look at floral tributes in Plymouth where six people, including the offender, died of gunshot wounds in a firearms incident PA UK news in pictures 13 August 2021 Forensic officers in the Keyham area of Plymouth where six people, including the shooter, died of gunshot wounds in a firearms incident on Thursday evening PA UK news in pictures 12 August 2021 Children ride horses in the River Eden in Appleby, Cumbria, during the annual gathering of travellers for the Appleby Horse Fair PA UK news in pictures 11 August 2021 Stella Moris (left) reacts after talking to the media outside the High Court in London, following the first hearing in the Julian Assange extradition appeal, n London, following the first hearing in the Julian Assange extradition appeal. The US government has won the latest round in its High Court bid to appeal against the decision not to extradite Julian Assange on espionage charges PA UK news in pictures 10 August 2021 Students react after they receive their A-Level results at the Ark Academy, in London Reuters UK news in pictures 9 August 2021 The final athletes from Great Britain arrive home including Jason Kenny, Laura Kenny and Katie Archibald (front left-right) at Heathrow Airport, London following the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games PA UK news in pictures 8 August 2021 Great Britain's Laura Kenny during the closing ceremony of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games at the Olympic stadium in Japan PA UK news in pictures 7 August 2021 People from the Glasgow Southside community take part in the Govanhill Carnival, an anti-racist celebration of pride, unity and the contributions immigrants have made to the community in Govanhill, at Queen's Park, Glasgow PA UK news in pictures 6 August 2021 Chijindu Ujah of Britain, Zharnel Hughes of Britain, Richard Kilty of Britain and Nethaneel Mitchell-Blake of Britain celebrate winning silver as they pose with Asha Philip of Britain, Imani Lansiquot of Britain, Dina Asher-Smith of Britain and Daryll Neita of Britain after they won bronze in the women's 4 x 100m relay during Olympic Games Day 14 Getty UK news in pictures 5 August 2021 A protester places flowers on a photograph of an executed man during a demonstration organised by supporters of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) to protest against the inauguration of Iran's new president Ebrahim Raisi in central London AFP via Getty UK news in pictures 4 August 2021 England's Joe Root looks on as India's KL Rahul doesn't make it to a catch during day one of Cinch First Test match at Trent Bridge, Nottingham PA UK news in pictures 3 August 2021 Great Britain's Laura Kenny and Jason Kenny with their silver medals for the Women's Team Pursuit and Mens Team Sprint during the Track Cycling at the Izu Velodrome on the eleventh day of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games in Japan PA UK news in pictures 2 August 2021 Great Britains Charlotte Worthington competes during the Womens BMX Freestyle Final at the Tokyo Olympics PA UK news in pictures 1 August 2021 EPA UK news in pictures 31 July 2021 James Guy, Adam Peaty and Kathleen Dawson celebrate winning the gold medal in the mixed 4x100m medley relay final at the Tokyo Olympics AP UK news in pictures 30 July 2021 Great Britain's Bethany Shriever and Kye Whyte celebrate their Gold and Silver medals respectively for the Cycling BMX Racing at the Ariake Urban Sports Park on the seventh day of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games in Japan PA UK news in pictures 29 July 2021 Team GB's Mallory Franklin during the Womens Canoe Slalom Final on day six of the Tokyo Olympic Games. She went on to win the silver medal Getty UK news in pictures 28 July 2021 Canoers on Llyn Padarn lake in Snowdonia, Gwynedd. It was announced that the north-west Wales slate landscape has been granted UNESCO World Heritage Status PA UK news in pictures 27 July 2021 A view of one of two areas now being used at a warehouse facility in Dover, Kent, for boats used by people thought to be migrants. PA UK news in pictures 26 July 2021 A woman is helped by Border Force officers as a group of people thought to be migrants are brought in to Dover, Kent, onboard a Border Force vessel, following a small boat incident in the Channel PA UK news in pictures 25 July 2021 Vehicles drive through deep water on a flooded road in Nine Elms, London AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 24 July 2021 Utilities workers inspect a 15x20ft sinkhole on Green Lane, Liverpool, which is suspected to have been caused by ruptured water main PA It emerged in the aftermath of the Harvey Weinstein scandal and the Me Too movement in the US and other countries. Frances culture minister, Marlene Schiappa, has been vocal in her support of both campaigns. She has called for on the spot fines of 5,000 (4,300) to be handed to harassers. In France, if a woman is sexually assaulted, her first thought is, Now Im dirty and no one will ever want to marry me the social responsibility of the victim, she told The Guardian. Twenty euros would be a bit humiliating, 5,000 would be more of a deterrent. At the moment, many men are saying, Its not a big deal, were only having fun. And we say, No. Researchers surveyed 2,167 women over the age of 18 online between 6 and 16 February 2018. The decision to cast a mixed-race teenager in the role of French heroine Joan of Arc in annual celebrations has sparked a barrage of racial abuse from far-right sympathisers. Mathilde Edey Gamassou, 17, made history to become the first mixed-race person chosen to take on the leading role in the traditional event, which will see her riding on horseback through the city of Orleans. But the teenager, whose father is Franco-Beninese and whose mother is Polish, has been targeted on social media and far-right websites. Ms Gamassou beat around 250 other girls to be given the role. She met all the criteria required to play Joan of Arc in the celebrations, as decided by a committee of representatives from Orleans council, local organisations, the church and the army. These include having lived in in Orleans for at least 10 years, going to school in the city, being a Catholic and giving her time to others. Benedicte Baranger, president of the Jeanne D'arc Association of Orleans told AFP that Ms Gamassou was chosen for who she is, an interesting person and a lively spirit, and said she was saddened by the hateful backlash. The abuse had become so serious that the public prosecutor in France announced it would be investigating at least two related tweets, according to the BBC. One of the tweets is reported to have included images of bananas and the second involved a baboon. There was also discriminatory commentary on various French far-right websites, and further angry social media posts from those who felt the selection was rewriting history. 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 One Twitter user said: We are the only ones who have to sacrifice our history, the white race in Europe here for thousands of years. Be proud of us, we are a great people. Many sprung to the defence of the teenager. Marlene Schiappa, a French politician serving as the Secretary of State in charge of Equality between Women and Men tweeted her support for Ms Gamassou. She said: The racist hatred of fascists has no place in the French republic." The Mayor of Orleans, Olivier Carre, also tweeted his joy at being a part of a ceremony introducing the teenager. He posted pictures of the event and said: What an honour to present the girl who will be Joan of Arc in the 2018 celebrations. He praised Ms Gamassou for her courage, faith and vision. Recommended Joan of Arc remembered at a new museum in Rouen Ms Gamassous father, Patrice Edey Gamassou, stood firmly in defence of his daughter. He told Bourdoin Direct on RMC: "Jeanne d'Arc was treated in her day as a 'foreigner' by her opponents, she wasn't French. We are living the same story. We want to tell them, my god, forgive them, they don't know what they are doing." Ms Baranger also told the news channel: "Personal attacks are hateful We chose Mathilde not because we wanted to felt obligated to appear open, that's not my problem, she was chosen for her skills." Joan of Arc is celebrated across France for her role in liberating Orleans from the control of the English in 1429 during the Hundred Years War. The liberation of the city is often seen as a turning point in the conflict. Joan was later burned at the stake, aged just 19. She is seen as a figurehead for the liberation across France, and is particularly revered by members of far-right organisations. Two people have been shot dead outside a bank in Zurich. The killings happened in broad daylight in the middle of the Swiss city's downtown area. Police assured the public that the situation was now under control and that there was no danger. 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 It still isn't clear why the attack happened. Police said there is no indication that it is tied to terrorism. Images circulating online show two people lying flat on the ground outside a branch of the UBS bank. Recommended Two hikers missing after avalanche in Swiss Alps Eyewitnesses suggest a number of shots were fired during the incident. It is also not clear whether the police have apprehended the shooter, but there is a heavy police presence on the ground. Authorities told local media they were responding to an incident in downtown Zurich, near the Swiss financial hub's main train station. Police confirmed in a tweet that the incident had happened on Lagerstrasse, a road running right through the centre of Zurich. The area would remain closed off until further notice and police are on the scene, the tweet said. The UN is struggling to agree the terms of a resolution which would impose a 30-day ceasefire in Syria as the death toll in the regime assault on eastern Ghouta climbs to more than 400. At least 428 people, including 98 children, have been killed in the aerial offensive on the besieged rebel suburb of Damascus in one of the worst episodes of violence in the seven-year-long war. A sixth day of air strikes, including illegal barrel bombs, shelling and rocket fire, continued unabated in the area on Friday. More than 22 medical facilities have been damaged, leaving thousands of injured people unable to access adequate help. Scenes of devastation in Syria after deadly shelling and airstrikes and eastern Ghouta The UN is due to vote on a resolution at 1600 GMT on Friday which would order a temporary cessation of hostilities and immediate access for aid convoys to millions across the country. Ahead of the vote, the European Union issued a statement from all 28 members insisting on the importance of a ceasefire. The European Union is running out of words to describe the horror being experienced by the people of eastern Ghouta, the bloc said. Unhindered humanitarian access and the protection of civilians is a moral duty and a matter of urgency... the fighting must stop now. Russia, a key ally of Syrian President Bashar al Assad, has historically used its position as a permanent member of the security council to veto most UN action in Syria's war. Eastern Ghouta bombings: Syrian war in pictures Show all 14 1 /14 Eastern Ghouta bombings: Syrian war in pictures Eastern Ghouta bombings: Syrian war in pictures A Syrian woman and children run for cover amid the rubble of buildings. AFP/Getty Eastern Ghouta bombings: Syrian war in pictures Smoke rises from buildings following the attack on the village of Mesraba in the rebel-held besieged Eastern Ghouta region on the outskirts of the capital Damascu. AFP/Getty Eastern Ghouta bombings: Syrian war in pictures Injured children receive medical treatment. EPA Eastern Ghouta bombings: Syrian war in pictures A Syrian man carries a child injured. AFP/Getty Eastern Ghouta bombings: Syrian war in pictures An injured child receives treatment following bombings on several areas of eastern Ghouta. EPA Eastern Ghouta bombings: Syrian war in pictures A child reacts inside a hospital after relatives were injured in the bombing. EPA Eastern Ghouta bombings: Syrian war in pictures Syrian children cry at a make-shift hospital in Douma following air strikes on the Syrian village of Mesraba. AFP/Getty Eastern Ghouta bombings: Syrian war in pictures Syrian Civil Defense group extinguishing a store during airstrikes and shelling by Syrian government forces. AP Eastern Ghouta bombings: Syrian war in pictures A wounded 12-year-old Syrian boy, cries as he receives treatment at a make-shift hospital. AFP/Getty Eastern Ghouta bombings: Syrian war in pictures Syrians carry a wounded man. AFP/Getty Eastern Ghouta bombings: Syrian war in pictures An injured man covered with blood at a medical point. Reuters Eastern Ghouta bombings: Syrian war in pictures People sit a medical point in the besieged town of Douma, Eastern Ghouta. Reuters Eastern Ghouta bombings: Syrian war in pictures Syrian Civil Defense running to help survivors. AP Eastern Ghouta bombings: Syrian war in pictures Injured children receive medical treatment. EPA On Thursday Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said that Russia would consider a resolution which did not cover Isis, the Nusra Front and other groups who are shelling residential quarters of Damascus. However, it is al Qaeda linked groups in east Ghouta - believed to make up a small proportion of the rebel fighters there - which Mr Assads forces say they are currently targeting, raising the possibility any agreed ceasefire would not cover Ghouta. The area is supposedly already covered by a 2017 de-escalation agreement brokered by several world powers. At the Security Council in New York on Thursday several Western countries accused Russia of stalling for time by asking for changes to the draft which would create loopholes to continue the current assault. Frances representative said that a failure to act on the tragedy in Syria could spell the end of the United Nations itself. Everything must be done to avoid a humanitarian crisis that flouts every principle the organisation stands for, Francois Delattre added. Russian ambassador Vassily Nebenzia said that the international community was suffering from mass psychosis over the situation. Global media outlets acting in coordination, disseminating the same rumours in recent days, in no way does anything to help improve understanding of this situation, Mr Nebenzia told the council session. Syrians make fuel from plastic waste Show all 8 1 /8 Syrians make fuel from plastic waste Syrians make fuel from plastic waste Sifting through plastic: the workshop uses plastic from bottles and other waste materials to produce liquid and gas fuels. The liquid is refined into gasoline, diesel and benzene fuels, which in turn are sold for domestic and commercial use Reuters Syrians make fuel from plastic waste Khodor, 20, at the workshop in the rebel-held and besieged neighbourhood of Douma, Damascus Reuters Syrians make fuel from plastic waste Back to basics: a man checks the heat of a pipe pouring with fuel Reuters Syrians make fuel from plastic waste Khodor, 20, must keep an eye on the burning plastic inside the workshop in Douma Reuters Syrians make fuel from plastic waste A young man takes a container of the locally made fuel, which can be used for domestic heating and on farms and bakeries Reuters Syrians make fuel from plastic waste Abu Fahad on a rest break with his colleagues inside the workshop, where the air is heavy with toxic fumes Reuters Syrians make fuel from plastic waste Fuel drips into a container at the workshop. Most locals are glad of the family-run business, which has restored a degree of normality to the region Reuters Syrians make fuel from plastic waste Khodor extracts fuel from plastic in the workshop Reuters East Ghoutas rebels have responded to the Syrian and Russian operation with some of the worst rocket attacks on neighbouring areas of Damascus in years, killing 16 people. Syrian state media reported that peace talks with the rebels over medical evacuations and aid deliveries in the last few days have failed. Several previous UN-brokered ceasefire attempts in Syria have quickly fallen apart over the course of the seven-year-long war. More than 500,000 people have been killed in the complex conflict, and half the pre-war population of 22 million displaced from their homes. Human Rights Watch (HRW) has condemned Turkeys offensive on a Kurdish held area of northern Syria as causing unnecessary civilian casualties, as some counts put the toll as high as 120. The statement on Friday cited three attacks in the contested canton of Afrin in late January that killed a total of 26 civilians, including 17 children. The Turkish military had failed to take necessary precautions before carrying out the strikes and must conduct a thorough public investigation, the rights group said. Explosions as Turkey confirms airstrikes on Afrin, Syria It appears that vulnerable civilians are facing displacement and death because of the way Turkeys latest offensive is being conducted, said Lama Fakih, the organisations deputy Middle East director. Turkey is obligated to take every feasible precaution to avoid harming or killing civilians, and to help them if they want to flee the violence. On Friday, Turkeys President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, said the army would be extending Operation Olive Branch, at the same time making every effort to avoid harming any civilians. The Defence Minister, Nurettin Canikli, has previously dismissed reports of harmed civilians as false. The air and ground offensive utilising Free Syrian Army fighters began on 20 January, opening a new front in Syrias bloody seven-year-old conflict. Turkish attack on Afrin, northern Syria in pictures Show all 9 1 /9 Turkish attack on Afrin, northern Syria in pictures Turkish attack on Afrin, northern Syria in pictures Smoke billows following a Turkish airstrike on a village in the Afrin district, on 28 January, 2018. Turkey launched operation "Olive Branch" on January 20 against the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG) militia in Afrin, supporting Syrian opposition fighters with ground troops and air strikes AFP Turkish attack on Afrin, northern Syria in pictures Smoke billows from surrounding villages during the Turkish military operation against the Kurdish enclave on 28 January, 2018 AFP/Getty Turkish attack on Afrin, northern Syria in pictures Twenty-year old Kifah al-Moussa, a Syrian Arab woman living among the Kurds of Afrin province, was working on a chicken farm in the village of Maryameen when a Turkish aircraft bombed the building at midday on 21 January, wounding her in the chest. When she recovered consciousness, she found eight people from one family lying dead around her Yara Ismail Turkish attack on Afrin, northern Syria in pictures Mohamed Hussein, a 58-year-old Kurdish farmer, lies in the Afrin hospital, wounded in the head and eye after his home was bombed by Turkish aircraft on the second night of the attack Yara Ismail Turkish attack on Afrin, northern Syria in pictures Syrian Kurds sit on benches overlooking a street in Afrin, on 28 January, 2018. Above is a memorial to martyrs who died in the fight against Isis AFP/Getty Turkish attack on Afrin, northern Syria in pictures Smoke is seen rising on the Syrian side of the border, at Hassa, near Hatay, southern Turkey as Turkish jet fighters hit People's Protection Unit (YPG) positions, on 28 January, 2018 AFP/Getty Turkish attack on Afrin, northern Syria in pictures A Turkish made T-155 Firtina (Storm) howitzer is dispatched to the border at Hassa near Hatay, southern Turkey, on 28 January, 2018 AFP/Getty Turkish attack on Afrin, northern Syria in pictures A Turkish soldier waves a flag on Mount Barsaya, northeast of Afrin, on 28 January, 2018 Reuters Turkish attack on Afrin, northern Syria in pictures Turkey-backed Free Syrian Army fighters are seen in Barsaya mountain, northeast of Afrin, on 28 January, 2018 Reuters The attack is designed to clear out Kurdish YPG fighters which Ankara sees as inextricably linked to the Turkey-based separatist PKK from the border region. It is widely believed to have been sparked by Turkish anger at renewed US support for the YPG and Arab-Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which its Nato ally has backed as the most effective ground force against Isis. The HRW statement comes a few days after paramilitary forces loyal to the government of Syrian President Bashar al Assad arrived in the area from Aleppo to support the Kurdish troops. The two sides have at times been in direct conflict and at others have formed realpolitik alliances during Syrias war. In protests against the Turkish offensive across Kurdish areas of Syria on Thursday, demonstrators waved posters of Kurdish political leader Abdullah Ocalan and Mr Assad side by side. The alliance has worried observers of the war, who fear it could trigger a complicated escalation in fighting. Also on Friday, Turkey said it had shelled a YPG weapons convoy in Afrin, which Kurdish officials immediately claimed was a 40-strong chain of civilian vehicles also carrying food and medicine to areas affected by fighting. The attack killed at least one person and injured 10, YPG spokesperson Birusk Hasaka said. Despite international calls to halt the offensive, President Erdogan has remained bullish, repeatedly threatening that his forces could extend their offensive as far east as Manbij which could bring them into direct conflict with the US-backed SDF coalition and stationed US troops. IAG, the parent company of British Airways, has reported a very good full year performance with even better results predicted for 2018 at current fuel prices and exchange rates. The airline group, which also includes Aer Lingus, Iberia, Level and Vueling, has reported an operating profit of 3,015m (2,655m) before exceptional items for 2017. The figure is 18.9 per cent higher than 2017. Willie Walsh, the chief executive, said: All our airlines performed extremely well with their best-ever individual financial results, strong operational performances and commitment to customer service. He said the turnaround at the Spanish low-cost subsidiary, Vueling, which had a torrid 2016, had been particularly outstanding. Revenue rose 1.8 per cent across the group, though it fell 1 per cent relative to available seat kilometres. The seat factor the proportion of capacity filled increased by 1 per cent to 82.6 per cent, ahead of the IATA worldwide average. Costs at British Airways increased, due to more expensive pay-as-you-go engine contracts, higher maintenance costs because of additional flying, and compensation arising from the power outage in May 2017 which wrecked the travel plans of hundreds of thousands of BA passengers over a bank-holiday weekend. British Airways is expanding aggressively at Gatwick, having acquired the slots previously used by Monarch at the Sussex airport. It is believed to have paid more than 50m for the take-off and landing rights, which will increase the number of flights by 28 per cent. Alex Cruz, chief executive and chairman of BA, said the new slots would be used for European flights in 2018: The focus this year is short haul. Youll see increase in frequency to well-known destinations. In terms of ambition, there are opportunities to grow our very, very successful long-haul network from Gatwick. In a webcast, Mr Walsh repeated his opposition to any increase in charges at Heathrow to pay for a third runway, saying: We think the airport can be expanded without any increase in passenger charges. Heathrow has said We can do this for 14bn. We think that is excessive. On Thursday, Heathrows chief executive, John Holland-Kaye, said: For Britain to thrive post-Brexit, the Government needs to crack on with Heathrow expansion as quickly as possible with a vote in Parliament before the summer. The largest part of the IAG network is represented by North America, at almost 30 per cent. Transatlantic capacity was increased with new flights from Aer Lingus, British Airways and Level, which launched from Barcelona in June 2017. Next month a new Level route from Barcelona to Boston will begin, replacing Punta Cana, with a new base at Paris Orly offering services to Montreal, New York and the French Caribbean islands of Guadaloupe and Martinique. Mr Walsh said: Level has exceeded our expectations. It gives us significant advantages over our competitors. Our plan in the short term is getting to about 15 aircraft. Recommended How British Airways flight routes have changed over the last 20 years IAG has recommended a dividend of 0.145 per share, bringing the full-year dividend to 0.27. With the dividend and share buyback, we returned more than 1bn [880m] to our shareholders last year, said Mr Walsh. Our confidence in IAGs future remains undaunted and today were announcing our intention to undertake a share buyback of 500m [440m] during 2018. George Salmon, equity analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown, said: Cheap fuel and stronger economic growth have helped IAG fly with tailwinds over 2017. However, neither of these factors are under IAGs control, so to some extent, the groups recent success has been a function of being in the right place at the right time. What investors will really crave is underlying improvements, not shots in the arm from favourable external factors. The euro and sterling have strengthened against the US dollar by more than 10 per cent over the past year, making fuel and aircraft leases priced in dollars cheaper. Long Island Medium (Theresa Caputo) works for Satan Shes charming, shes whacky, and shes got funny hair and crazy fingernails- shes also working for the devil. Sound harsh? Good. ... Fr.Longenecker vs Michael Voris Quote: "If the faith is in imminent peril, prelates ought to be accused by their subjects, even in public."-St. Thomas Aquinas ... Catholic Controversy over "Son of God" movie It is seldom that I disagree with Michael Voris from Church Militant TV , but today I do. It seems some of the more traditional leanin... Saint Peter taught me to love Pope Francis Anyone who has been following my blog [along with family and friends] know that I have had serious issues with Pope Francis since Holy We... Banning Children from Gay Pride Parades ** WARNING : Adult homosexual content GRAPHIC GAY PRIDE PARADE PHOTOS ** Should children be banned from gay pride parades? Ye... What's up with Life Teen Catholic Youth Ministry? So I'm on Twitter when I see Ryan Fitz retweet a Creaky tweet about Catholic Life Teen Youth Ministry that caught my eye. Someth... Lonely: I pray for someone I came across two stories on Twitter recently about lonely people. The first was about an elderly woman who sat alone in her house for ye... Fr James Martin says the Virgin Mary opposed Jesus Christ because Jesus was crazy Father James Martin strikes again, taking another shot at the Holy Mother of God on his Facebook page . Martin says... get this.... Unbelievable Mass Abuses Today in my email box I received an email with a link to a Youtube video entitled " The Novus Ordo is not catholic "<--click th... The news agenda is dominated by melodramatic scandals that act as simplified versions of reality in which roles are allocated to accusers, victims, perpetrators and those condemned for failing to prevent wrong-doing. A few scandals are rooted in reality, such as those focused on Harvey Weinstein or Jimmy Saville, but others are becoming ever more exaggerated or phoney. The media knows a good story when it sees one, regardless of whether it is true or false. It is interesting how the same characteristics crop in each scandal, however different they might at first appear: the most dubious sources of information are treated as credible; these sources gain the status of victims whom it is forbidden to criticise; the accusations against the person or institution under attack are vague, multiple and toxic; the trivial or shaky nature of the original crime is forgotten as the scandal is spiced up with claims of a cover-up, something which can never be wholly disproved even by the most thorough going disclosure. There is a high degree of hypocrisy in the media pretence that it is duty-bound to report the most unlikely and obviously partisan allegations. In fact, it loves these stories of gladiatorial combat between angels and devils, though the scenario has often been concocted for partisan political purposes. The aim of any PR or propaganda person is to create stories that they know the press will be unable to leave alone. Fabricating a scandal is not difficult: an example of this is Hillary Clinton, who was cumulatively damaged by a series of fake scandals: the Whitewater real estate scandal in the 1990s from which she made no money; her use of a private email account that revealed no secrets; and the absurd attempt to hold her responsible for the murder of the US ambassador in Benghazi in 2012. As with most fake scandals, the aim was to slide away from any substantive charges but create a general belief among voters that she was slippery and evasive. In Britain most scandals have a sexual element, but allegations of a cover-up are now so prevalent that anybody is vulnerable, however innocent. Even the most bizarre accusations are taken seriously. Take two recent cases: in 2015, the Church of England announced that George Bell, one of the most distinguished Anglican bishops of the twentieth century, famous for his principled criticism of the carpet bombing of German cities in the Second World War, was denounced by his own church for sexually abusing a child some 63 years previously. Having died in 1958, he could not defend himself and the accusation came from a single woman, Carol, while nobody else had complained about his behaviour. Yet without any real evidence being produced, the church decided to say it believed her, paid compensation and denigrated one of its most highly regarded members. Oxfam's head of safeguarding: In one instance 'a woman had been coerced to have sex in exchange for aid' An independent inquiry was established by Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, which found that the original report was shoddy and ill-informed. This should have elicited an apology from Archbishop to the memory of Bishop Bell since there was no evidence that he had done anything wrong. But Welby was evidently more frightened of being accused of a cover-up in defending Bell and did no such thing. Instead, the Archbishop agreed that Bell has great achievements to his name such as looking after Jewish children in flight from the Holocaust and helping German Christians resist Hitler but it turned out that a single unsupported allegation made 50 years after the event outweighed this. We realise that a significant cloud is left over his name, said the Archbishop, adding that Bell had been accused of great wickedness. There are echoes here of the psychology and behaviour that fuelled the great witch craze in Europe of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, during which anybody who did not support the most crazed allegations of the witch-finders feared the accusation that they themselves were complicit with the witches. The same point is made by the story of another pretended scandal even more bizarre than that of Bishop Bell. This time the accuser, called Nick, claimed that he had been the victim of a VIP paedophile ring operating from the Carlton Club and an apartment block called Dolphin Square in London. Members of the supposed ring included Edward Heath and Leon Britain, the former Home Secretary, along with Field Marshall Lord Bramall. The ring, according to Nick, had murdered three boys, one of whom was knifed by an MP. The Metropolitan Police opened an investigation which found these allegations credible and true, despite a complete lack of evidence other than from Nick himself. The police even held a press conference in 2015 outside Heaths old home in Salisbury appealing for his victims to come forward. Why should such obvious nonsense receive such publicity? In part, because the press and public alike enjoy stories in which members of the establishment are unmasked as child molesters. But such is the merciless nature of modern scandal generation that few dare defend those who should be very defensible such as Bishop Bell, Edward Heath or Oxfam. UK news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 UK news in pictures UK news in pictures 10 September 2021 People paddle board during a misty morning in Ullswater, the second largest lake in the Lake District, Cumbria PA UK news in pictures 9 September 2021 Troops from Wiltshire based 4 Armoured Close Support Battalion Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers during final inspection at Wellington Barracks in London, ahead of providing troops for the Queens Guard PA UK news in pictures 8 September 2021 Workers cross London Bridge during the morning rush hour in London Reuters UK news in pictures Mixing it up: Painting it up press view in London A gallery employee poses for photographers next to a painting entitled Prairie by British artist, Louise Giovanelli during the exhibition 'Mixing it up: Painting it up' at the Hayward Gallery in London EPA UK news in pictures 6 September 2021 Traders in the Ring at the London Metal Exchange, in the City of London, after open-outcry trading returned for the first time since March 2020, when the Ring was temporarily closed due to the pandemic PA UK news in pictures 5 September 2021 People enjoy the warm weather on Sandbanks beach, Poole PA UK news in pictures 4 September 2021 Demonstrators from Animal Rebellion and Nature Rebellion protest in Trafalgar Square in London. PA UK news in pictures 3 September 2021 South Africa's Ntando Mahlangu (centre) wins the Men's 200 metres T61 Final ahead of second placed Great Britain's Richard Whitehead at the Tokyo 2020 Paralympic Games PA UK news in pictures 2 September 2021 A young common seal on the beach at Horsey Gap in Norfolk, as hundreds of pregnant grey seals come ashore ready for the start of the pupping season. PA UK news in pictures 1 September 2021 Goldfinches fighting over food in a garden in Strensham, Worcestershire PA UK news in pictures 31 August 2021 Gold Medallist Sarah Storey of Britain celebrates on the podium Reuters UK news in pictures 30 August 2021 Extinction Rebellion protesters hold a a tea party on Tower Bridge in London EPA UK news in pictures 29 August 2021 A police office tussles with a demonstrator on Cromwell Road outside the Natural History Museum during a protest by members of Extinction Rebellion in London PA UK news in pictures 28 August 2021 Members of the British armed forces 16 Air Assault Brigade walk to the air terminal after disembarking a Royal Airforce Voyager aircraft at Brize Norton, Oxfordshire POOL/AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 27 August 2021 Fabio Quartararo crashes during a MotoGP practice session at the British Grand Prix, Silverstone Circuit Action Images via Reuters UK news in pictures 26 August 2021 An Extinction Rebellion activist holds a placard in a fountain surrounded by police officers, during a protest next to Buckingham Palace in London Reuters UK news in pictures 25 August 2021 Gold Medallist Great Britains cyclist, Sarah Storey, celebrates after winning the Womens C5 3000m Individual Pursuit Final at the Tokyo 2020 Paralympic Games. It was her 15th Paralympic gold Reuters UK news in pictures 24 August 2021 A demonstrator dressed as bee during a protest by members of Extinction Rebellion on Whitehall, in central London PA UK news in pictures 23 August 2021 Former interpreters for the British forces in Afghanistan demonstrate outside the Home Office in central London AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 22 August 2021 Police officers form a line in front of the entrance to the Guildhall, London, where protesters have climbed onto a ledge above the entrance during an Extinction Rebellion stage a protest PA UK news in pictures 21 August 2021 People take part in a demonstration in solidarity with people of Afghanistan, in London Reuters UK news in pictures 20 August 2021 People zip wire across the sea from Bournemouth pier towards the beach. PA UK news in pictures 19 August 2021 Supporters of Geronimo the alpaca gather outside Shepherds Close Farm in Wooton Under Edge, Gloucestershire PA UK news in pictures 18 August 2021 Former Afghan interpreters and veterans hold a demonstration outside Downing Street, calling for support and protection for Afghan interpreters and their families PA UK news in pictures 17 August 2021 Military personnel board the RAF Airbus A400M at RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire, where evacuation flights from Afghanistan have been landing Reuters UK news in pictures 16 August 2021 Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer takes part in a minute's silence at Wolverhampton police station for the victims of the Plymouth mass shooting last week PA UK news in pictures 15 August 2021 2Storm, a ten-metre tall puppet of a mythical goddess of the sea created by Edinburgh-based visual theatre company Vision Mechanics, makes its way alongside the seafront at North Berwick, East Lothian, during a performance at the Fringe By The Sea festival PA UK news in pictures 14 August 2021 A woman and two young girls look at floral tributes in Plymouth where six people, including the offender, died of gunshot wounds in a firearms incident PA UK news in pictures 13 August 2021 Forensic officers in the Keyham area of Plymouth where six people, including the shooter, died of gunshot wounds in a firearms incident on Thursday evening PA UK news in pictures 12 August 2021 Children ride horses in the River Eden in Appleby, Cumbria, during the annual gathering of travellers for the Appleby Horse Fair PA UK news in pictures 11 August 2021 Stella Moris (left) reacts after talking to the media outside the High Court in London, following the first hearing in the Julian Assange extradition appeal, n London, following the first hearing in the Julian Assange extradition appeal. The US government has won the latest round in its High Court bid to appeal against the decision not to extradite Julian Assange on espionage charges PA UK news in pictures 10 August 2021 Students react after they receive their A-Level results at the Ark Academy, in London Reuters UK news in pictures 9 August 2021 The final athletes from Great Britain arrive home including Jason Kenny, Laura Kenny and Katie Archibald (front left-right) at Heathrow Airport, London following the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games PA UK news in pictures 8 August 2021 Great Britain's Laura Kenny during the closing ceremony of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games at the Olympic stadium in Japan PA UK news in pictures 7 August 2021 People from the Glasgow Southside community take part in the Govanhill Carnival, an anti-racist celebration of pride, unity and the contributions immigrants have made to the community in Govanhill, at Queen's Park, Glasgow PA UK news in pictures 6 August 2021 Chijindu Ujah of Britain, Zharnel Hughes of Britain, Richard Kilty of Britain and Nethaneel Mitchell-Blake of Britain celebrate winning silver as they pose with Asha Philip of Britain, Imani Lansiquot of Britain, Dina Asher-Smith of Britain and Daryll Neita of Britain after they won bronze in the women's 4 x 100m relay during Olympic Games Day 14 Getty UK news in pictures 5 August 2021 A protester places flowers on a photograph of an executed man during a demonstration organised by supporters of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) to protest against the inauguration of Iran's new president Ebrahim Raisi in central London AFP via Getty UK news in pictures 4 August 2021 England's Joe Root looks on as India's KL Rahul doesn't make it to a catch during day one of Cinch First Test match at Trent Bridge, Nottingham PA UK news in pictures 3 August 2021 Great Britain's Laura Kenny and Jason Kenny with their silver medals for the Women's Team Pursuit and Mens Team Sprint during the Track Cycling at the Izu Velodrome on the eleventh day of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games in Japan PA UK news in pictures 2 August 2021 Great Britains Charlotte Worthington competes during the Womens BMX Freestyle Final at the Tokyo Olympics PA UK news in pictures 1 August 2021 EPA UK news in pictures 31 July 2021 James Guy, Adam Peaty and Kathleen Dawson celebrate winning the gold medal in the mixed 4x100m medley relay final at the Tokyo Olympics AP UK news in pictures 30 July 2021 Great Britain's Bethany Shriever and Kye Whyte celebrate their Gold and Silver medals respectively for the Cycling BMX Racing at the Ariake Urban Sports Park on the seventh day of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games in Japan PA UK news in pictures 29 July 2021 Team GB's Mallory Franklin during the Womens Canoe Slalom Final on day six of the Tokyo Olympic Games. She went on to win the silver medal Getty UK news in pictures 28 July 2021 Canoers on Llyn Padarn lake in Snowdonia, Gwynedd. It was announced that the north-west Wales slate landscape has been granted UNESCO World Heritage Status PA UK news in pictures 27 July 2021 A view of one of two areas now being used at a warehouse facility in Dover, Kent, for boats used by people thought to be migrants. PA UK news in pictures 26 July 2021 A woman is helped by Border Force officers as a group of people thought to be migrants are brought in to Dover, Kent, onboard a Border Force vessel, following a small boat incident in the Channel PA UK news in pictures 25 July 2021 Vehicles drive through deep water on a flooded road in Nine Elms, London AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 24 July 2021 Utilities workers inspect a 15x20ft sinkhole on Green Lane, Liverpool, which is suspected to have been caused by ruptured water main PA UK news in pictures 23 July 2021 Children interact with Mega Please Draw Freely by artist Ei Arakawa inside the Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern in London, part of UNIQLO Tate Play the gallery's new free programme of art-inspired activities for families PA Those accused in such cases are in a particularly vulnerable position because it is difficult to disprove a fantasy, particularly if the accusation is lurid and disgusting. Those targeted know that even the most convincing denial will simply give the story legs and further damage their reputations. The Oxfam sex scandal is the product of much the same script that has produced fake or exaggerated scandals in the past. The media has been lapping it up because it has all the elements of the classic British scandal, including the claim that high moral issue is involved. There is a strong defence for Oxfam which is that the offences of which a small number of their staff accused are relatively trivial and have, as far as I can tell, not increased the sum of human misery in Haiti or anywhere else. Prostitution in the island is the result of the terrible poverty, not the availability of aid workers as clients. Most of the media revelations about Oxfams failings in Haiti come in any case from the aid agencys own report, but critics have used this copiously as a stick to beat Oxfam, then turn round and accuse it of a cover-up, though most of the contents of the report were published by the BBC in 2011. The hypocrisy is breathtaking: had Oxfam not reacted so quickly to allegation of bad behaviour by its staff in Haiti, there would have been no report and probably no scandal. Instead, it sent an expert investigation team, identified those responsible for misbehaviour and dismissed them. It did all this in the middle of a cholera epidemic which was to kill 7,500 and which Oxfam was trying to stem. Had it not done so, and had there been no report, it would not be in such trouble now. Senior Oxfam figures tried briefly to defend themselves on the rational grounds that they had done little wrong and much right, but such a defence is not acceptable when the public mood is one of undiluted self-righteousness. They rightly concluded that they were much better off firing off volleys of apologies and showing extreme contrition for their over-exaggerated failings. One day the Oxfam scandal, along with those that denigrated Hillary Clinton, Edward Heath and Bishop Bell, will be recognised as the fake that it is. Syria continues to mass its armed forces around the east Ghouta enclave of Damascus, including army units commanded by President Bashar al-Assads brother Maher and by Colonel Soheil Hassan, the Tiger whose military victories across the country have made him legendary among Assads supporters. Instead of moving by night - the traditional tactic adopted by the army in the war - vast quantities of Syrian armour have been humming along the highways to the capital in broad daylight from Aleppo and Homs in the north, from Deraa in the south, and from the countryside of Damascus itself. The Syrian authorities want them to be seen, to show the Islamist rebels of Ghouta know how their battle will end. Despite Russias veto at the UN on Thursday night, however, negotiations have continued between three rebel groups and the Syrian army - under the direct mediation of the Russians - to establish humanitarian corridors and escape routes for the tens of thousands of civilians trapped inside Ghouta, the vast area of suburban slums and farmland held by Islamist and other rebel groups since 2013. Almost identical talks took place between Islamists and the government over eastern Aleppo before its fall in December 2016. Bloodshed and negotiations have long been a feature of the Syrian war. But despite all the Wests rhetoric - and the UNs constant refrain that the civilians of eastern Ghouta are experiencing hell on earth - the massive Syrian and Russian bombardment is going to continue. The Islamist Nusrah faction, the child of al-Qaeda of 9/11 infamy, appears to be more reluctant to surrender to the Syrians - even if allowed to leave with its light weapons - than Saudi Arabias favourite militia, the Jaish al-Islam, or Qatars proxy Rahman Legion. There are even suggestions that the Saudi and Qatari supported factions are arguing with each other - even now, inside Ghouta - about the Gulf dispute between the Saudis and Qataris. Scenes of devastation in Syria after deadly shelling and airstrikes and eastern Ghouta There appears to be no such disunity among their enemies. The Presidential Guard is on the edge of Ghouta, and the Syrians have brought their 14th Division (Special Forces) to the suburbs. Maher Assads 4th Armoured Division, based in Damascus, is positioned on the perimeter, as is the militarys 7th Division, and troops belonging to units commanded by Colonel Tiger Soheil Hassan. Given the multitude of army regiments around Ghouta, Hassan cannot be the overall commander, a post which remains diplomatically undefined. But the convoys of tanks, armoured vehicles, field guns and trucks pouring in daylight towards Damascus and enthusiastically captured on film by government photographers is meant to be seen. Ghouta will fall. That is the message. From within the Syrian military, there are attempts to explain the ruthlessness of the assault. Thousands of soldiers have been killed in the battles around Ghouta since 2013; vast military resources the word the army uses have been poured into this battle over the years. Most of the car bomb attacks in Damascus and the constant shelling across the centre of the capital for the past four years have come from Islamist forces in Ghouta, especially from the Douma district. Of course, there are the usual explanations from artillery officers: of surgical strikes, of rebels hiding in hospitals and using civilians as human shields; but these are words the world has heard before from the Americans about Mosul and Afghanistan, from the Israelis about Gaza, and the Russians about Chechnya. And pictures, as usual, speak louder than words. While the footage from eastern Ghouta pointedly fails to show the armed Islamists who are fighting in the enclave, there is no reason to doubt the suffering of the civilians. And some of these civilians, it should be remembered, will inevitably be relatives of the very Syrian soldiers who are planning to storm Ghouta; there were many Syrian military personnel who captured eastern Aleppo in 2016 whose own families also lived there. Eastern Ghouta bombings: Syrian war in pictures Show all 14 1 /14 Eastern Ghouta bombings: Syrian war in pictures Eastern Ghouta bombings: Syrian war in pictures A Syrian woman and children run for cover amid the rubble of buildings. AFP/Getty Eastern Ghouta bombings: Syrian war in pictures Smoke rises from buildings following the attack on the village of Mesraba in the rebel-held besieged Eastern Ghouta region on the outskirts of the capital Damascu. AFP/Getty Eastern Ghouta bombings: Syrian war in pictures Injured children receive medical treatment. EPA Eastern Ghouta bombings: Syrian war in pictures A Syrian man carries a child injured. AFP/Getty Eastern Ghouta bombings: Syrian war in pictures An injured child receives treatment following bombings on several areas of eastern Ghouta. EPA Eastern Ghouta bombings: Syrian war in pictures A child reacts inside a hospital after relatives were injured in the bombing. EPA Eastern Ghouta bombings: Syrian war in pictures Syrian children cry at a make-shift hospital in Douma following air strikes on the Syrian village of Mesraba. AFP/Getty Eastern Ghouta bombings: Syrian war in pictures Syrian Civil Defense group extinguishing a store during airstrikes and shelling by Syrian government forces. AP Eastern Ghouta bombings: Syrian war in pictures A wounded 12-year-old Syrian boy, cries as he receives treatment at a make-shift hospital. AFP/Getty Eastern Ghouta bombings: Syrian war in pictures Syrians carry a wounded man. AFP/Getty Eastern Ghouta bombings: Syrian war in pictures An injured man covered with blood at a medical point. Reuters Eastern Ghouta bombings: Syrian war in pictures People sit a medical point in the besieged town of Douma, Eastern Ghouta. Reuters Eastern Ghouta bombings: Syrian war in pictures Syrian Civil Defense running to help survivors. AP Eastern Ghouta bombings: Syrian war in pictures Injured children receive medical treatment. EPA But Ghouta is experiencing a different sort of siege, one that has no precedent in size during this war. Shock and awe or shock and terror is what Syrias enemies are supposed to experience. The Russian and Syrian air attacks are proof of that. Even if maps look simple on television screens, wars are infinitely more chaotic. Think of the effect of a brick hitting the windscreen of a car, of the dozens of fractures across the glass; that is what Syrian military maps look like. It is now being said that if the first Syrian advance into Ghouta moves against areas controlled by al-Nusrah, it means that the al-Qaeda fighters are being more stubborn in the negotiations than the other two major groups. They will suffer first, along with the civilians of course. This is the inevitable lesson of this terrifying war. The Syrians, along with Iraqi militias and Hezbollah, do indeed have plans for the overrunning of rebel-held Ghouta. And after this demonstration of firepower, how could the Syrians and Russians stop now? If they did, who would believe the message of the next siege? In northwestern Idlib, for example. Or in the towns around it. And so, when Ghouta falls, Idlib must surely be next. And then the Syrians must decide how to break the US-Kurdish hold on Raqqa perhaps that is one reason why pro-Syrian forces have now gone to the rescue of the Kurds in the northern province of Afrin, to drive a further wedge between the Turks and the Americans, and force Washington to abandon its Kurdish allies on the Euphrates. It is painful to remember how these huge landscapes of river and desert and mountainside lived in peace for a century their societies straitjacketed, of course, and without justice before the bloodbath. Ghouta receives the waters of five rivers, and the 1912 French edition of Baedekers travel handbook to Syria and Palestine describes how the tributaries flowing into the sands to the east conferred upon Ghouta the name of Lakes of the Prairies. But that was the old Syria. The North Kingston School Committee showed support for the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Subcommittee and board member Jen Lima amid debate regarding a proposal to recall Lima at their regularly-scheduled meeting Tuesday night. Debate regarding the DEI sub-committee dominated the majority of citizens comments during the meeting as some citizens expressed concern for the work the subcommittee is doing and the agenda proposed by its mission statement. The school committee voiced support for the subcommittees work and for Lima, who has become the focus of those opposing it. Lima is far from the only local or state politician facing backlash from constituents who have called for, or initiated, a recall less than a year after the 2020 election. Also Tuesday, California Governor Gavin Newsom easily defeated a recall effort that cost taxpayers an estimated $300 million or more. Do you believe it should be more difficult for citizens to recall an elected official after an election? Why or why not? Let us know below and cast your vote in this week's poll. You voted: Janice Bryant Howroyd, 65, is founder and chief executive of Act 1 Group, an employment agency that also provides consulting and business services, including background checks and screening. Shes the first African-American woman to operate a company that generates more than $1 billion in annual revenue, according to Black Enterprise Magazine. Act 1, which includes other brands such as Agile 1, A-Check Global and AppleOne, has contracts with 17,000 clients in 19 countries. If you visit any of our offices, Howroyd said, youll see that we live by the mantra that the applicant is the center of our universe. Its always been our belief that if you get that applicant in the right job, then they will be the best representation of who we are as a company. Early lessons Growing up in Tarboro, N.C., as one of 11 children, Howroyd had early lessons in team building. Each sibling was assigned an older one who acted as a mentor. My sister Sandy was my appointed guardian angel, Howroyd said, so it was up to her to see that Id gotten my homework done, my hair was done, and my thoughts and process were in line with what the family wanted. We were very organized. Big move After studying humanities and English at North Carolina A&T, Howroyd faced culture shock when she moved to Los Angeles in 1976 with just $900. Her older sister again provided welcome advice to settle myself into knowing who I was, learning the power of that and understanding it. Brother-in-law Tom provided a temporary job at Billboard and saw entrepreneurial talents in the way Howroyd interacted with clients. Even when she was ill at ease, I would revert to what I do well, which is strategize. I love to look at a problem, break it apart, find the better potential, knowing when to eliminate what doesnt need to be there. Word of mouth Howroyd, who didnt even own a fax machine, opened Act 1 in a small office in Beverly Hills in 1978. She started out by making full-time job placements for companies needing workers, then shifting to temporary placements. Pleased clients were her best advertisements. It still matters in business more what someone else says about you than what you say about yourself, Howroyd said. You can have the best advertising, but unless someone else certifies what they are saying, you wont last long. Word of mouth has always been my best referral system. She added, Never compromise who you are personally to become who you wish to be professionally. Standing out Early on, Howroyd employed a strategy that allowed her to compete against bigger companies, preparing her prospective hires by training them in what their employers were looking for in new workers. It always works best when you can tailor a hire to fit into a companys philosophy, Howroyd said. They walk in better prepared and its more likely to be a very good fit for your client. Standing up Whether it was dealing with racist students and teachers in her youth or business people who uttered the most stunningly insensitive remarks, Howroyd said there were times when she was forced to bite her tongue and muddle through and other times when it was clear a stand had to be made, as frightening as that might clearly be. In order to be outstanding, sometimes, youre just going to have to stand out and not hide, Howroyd said. My personal business protocol, my life mantra: Never compromise who you are personally to become what you wish to be professionally. Adding niches Theres a reason why its called the Act 1 Group; the company kept adding new divisions to fill new employer needs, sometimes unexpectedly. Once a client called on Howroyd and a small team to come and help with an emergency without even being able to explain it over the telephone. The company then wanted to buy the technology that Act 1 developed to solve the problem. My brother encouraged me, Howroyd said. Dont sell the technology. Sell them the service. Make them keep you in it. Thats why you see the evolution of our different brands. Security conscious Everyone, these days, is a little more concerned about avoiding problem employees, especially when it turns out they were poorly vetted. When companies began demanding that we screen and do background checks on the people we were sending them, we felt, wow, this is a service to the community. Its also really important for us to get it right, Howroyd said, so thats how we got into that business. Hostile climate Many young women have grown up with the perspective of the denigration of women, Howroyd said, by what they heard in music, in social activity. So they started to face this before they faced the reality of it in an employment relationship. While they cant accept that this is right, they can accept this as common and believe then that they have a need to figure out how to navigate that. Advice Howroyd suggests that young people sample potential careers and employers through internships. Figure out not only if you like the work but also if you like the company, she said. Explore all of your opportunities before you dedicate yourself to one because you may surprise yourself. Personal Howroyd has been married to her husband, Bernard, for nearly 40 years. Hes a fantastic husband; make sure you quote me on that, she said. They have two grown children, a son and a daughter. Even now, theres not a lot of downtime. Howroyd remains a sought-after speaker and a huge supporter of her alma mater. She also devotes considerable time to philanthropy. In 2017, for the second consecutive year, Forbes magazine listed her among the nations wealthiest self-made women, with a family net worth of $420 million. Representatives from the Office of Education Innovation (OEI) will meet with parents and families of students from Indiana College Preparatory School at 6:30 p.m. today to answer questions about the schools impending closing. The closing comes after OEI revoked the schools seven-year charter after the school continually failed to meet academic, financial and governance standards. Within Indiana College Preparatory Schools first year, OEI officials noticed several problems including turnover of leadership, discipline and academics and took steps to meet with the board to rectify the issues. However, an official audit revealed serious financial struggles. We had some sustainability concerns, said Brian Dickey, the director of Charter Schools Office of Education and Innovation. We raised those concerns to the school and the board of directors in the spring of 2017 and put the school on probation. As part of the probation requirements, OEI required the governing board to provide a sustainability plan as well as add more board members with financial expertise. ICAN Schools, a charter management organization based out of Cleveland, Ohio, operates Indiana College Preparatory School and reports to a local school board. The board doesnt fire, the board doesnt hire, former board president Jamyce Curtis Banks said. Its oversight, but not control. Curtis Banks became board president in January 2018, after the previous board president resigned. She, too, resigned on Feb. 19 after fellow board members resigned, leaving her standing alone. I was the single person on the board, Curtis Banks said. You cant have a board with only one person. Curtis Banks tenure with the board began in January 2016. She didnt know OEI found red flags with the schools operations until the probation notification. To her understanding, the board complied with OEIs requirements. She cant speak for ICAN Schools. Many of the answers that you seek have to come from ICAN Schools Indiana, she said. Officials from ICAN Schools and Indiana College Preparatory School didnt return emails or phone calls. When a school closes, any school, that limits options and choices for parents, Curtis Banks said. I would be frustrated as a parent that I chose a school for my child that I thought would help my child and now I have to choose another school for my child. The OEI is sensitive to parents concerns and wants to make the transition as easy as possible for students. Officials also dont want to disrupt ISTEP+ testing, which begins next week. We almost feel a moral obligation to get the school to June 8 its last day of instruction, Dickey said. In addition to tonights meeting, three school enrollment fairs will be held within the next week: 10 a.m.-2 p.m. Saturday, 3:30-7 p.m. Tuesday and 3:30-7 p.m. March 1. All three fairs will be held at Indiana College Preparatory School, 4050 E. 38th St. Our hearts pour out to the parents and the children, Deputy Mayor David Hampton said. We want to make it as smooth a transition as possible. I dont remember my grandparents assisting me with homework beyond holding up flash cards for me to recite. They could have, I just dont remember. I do remember Lil Bow Wows release of Beware of Dog in 2000 followed by my incessant pleading to hang his poster on my bedroom wall. I also remember hearing my mothers inevitable no as she repeated her no posters on these walls policy. In a fast-paced, tech-obsessed world, assisting your child with homework can prove a daunting task. New teaching methods are adopted every day. Even professionals with advanced degrees are not necessarily equipped to help children with homework. However, all parents should feel empowered to teach their children social and emotional development. Social and emotional competence yields similar academic gains as strictly educational interventions. Parents, churches, and communities bear the brunt of the responsibility for socializing children. This is where we, as a community, have an opportunity to shine. A report from the Brookings Institution, published in May 2015, called for the prioritization of social and emotional development as the U.S. Congress worked on the bill that would become the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) that was signed into law by President Barack Obama in December 2015. The report, titled Social and Emotional Development: The Next School Reform Frontier, claims social and emotional competence directly correlates to a childs ability to learn and achieve in school. The report cited the findings of a study of more than 200,000 students from kindergarten to high school who participated in social and emotional development learning (SEL) programs at school. The study found that students who completed SEL programs demonstrated greater social skills, less emotional stress, better attitudes, fewer conduct problems, and more frequent positive behaviors, such as cooperation and help for other studentsbenefits that translate to the workplace. In November 2017, after all 50 states and the District of Columbia submitted their state ESSA plans, Lauren Poteat reported that states were ignoring opportunities to address social competency in the new national education law. Social and emotional development is a childs ability to understand and control his/her feelings, acknowledge and respect the feelings of others, and to form meaningful relationships. In laymans terms, social/emotional development is the authoritative, waving finger of your mother, father, grandma, grandpa, aunt or uncle saying: Remember who you representin, when you walk out this door. Or, for those of us familiar with Christianity, social and emotional development echoes Proverbs 22:6: Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it. So, what can Black parents do to supplement the lack of school-based SEL programs? Here are a few things my grandparents did. 1. Respect Your Childs Voice If there was a rule I didnt agree with, my grandma always took the time to hear my perspective. She didnt listen just waiting to reply; she listened intently, to understand. Most times I didnt change her mind, but a few times I did. Those experiences taught me that my voice was valid, that you didnt have to agree with someone to understand their perspective, and that simply acknowledging someone elses perspective can create an environment for enlightenment. 2. Give Your Child Tangible Heroes There was a no posters on these walls policy in my house. I am almost certain my grandma didnt want posters of celebrities on her wall for respectability devotions. However, the unintended outcome was an elevated perception of self-worth. Since, my grandma never provided me the opportunity to idolize my favorite pop stars, I learned to look to the people around me for role models and guidance. Ultimately, I learned that whatever tools I needed to succeed were already within me. I learned how to control my behavior. I held the sole responsibility for my choices and whenever I felt confused, the first people I looked to for help were in my immediate support system. 3. Encourage Your Children I never received a reward for expected behavior. I didnt get taken out for pizza or ice cream for good grades or behavior. Nevertheless, my grandpa never missed an opportunity to show his appreciation for a job well done, either through a big bear hug or a cheesy smile. My grandpa showed his love for me regardless of any accolades I obtained. He made it clear that he loved me; just for me. He told me I was beautiful before anyone else ever got the chance to. On bad days, I still here his voice saying, Thats a pretty dress there. Twirl around, let me see it all the way around. In that moment I would feel as if I was the only girl in the world. I felt we had similar interest in pretty dresses and that made him more than just my father figure; that made him my confidant. I credit this experience for my ability to form meaningful relationships. Neither of my grandparents graduated high school, however they were able to have a profound impact on my academic progress by simply validating my voice, providing a strong support system, and encouraging me regardless of accolades from the outside world. Learn more about social and emotional development and the Every Student Succeeds Act at nnpa.org/essa. Lynette Monroe is the program assistant for the NNPAs Every Student Succeeds Act Public Awareness Campaign and a masters student at Howard University. Her research areas are public policy and national development. Follow Lynette on Twitter @_monroedoctrine. After six weeks of controversy, unethical actions and ineffective leadership, Democrat Stephen Clay is no longer president of the Indianapolis City County Council. My preliminary research shows that Clay is the shortest serving president in the councils history and for good reason. His disruptive and divisive style has left the public distrustful and council Democrats more vulnerable than they have been in recent years. But that is all in the past. The future is bright now. Councilor Vop Osili was unanimously supported by the full council to replace Clay. Osili garnered a statewide following in 2010 during his bid for Indiana Secretary of State. Though he didnt win, he did break new ground as the first African American candidate for that office. Osili was elected to the Indianapolis City-County Council in 2011 with more than 80 percent of the vote. Osili has the intellect, decorum and ability to work across both sides of the aisle to move Indianapolis forward. Such characteristics are needed following Clays presidency. It is important to note that Maggie Lewis, the longtime council president before Clay aligned himself with Republicans and a few Democrats, was a great leader and a history maker in her own right by being the first woman to lead the Indianapolis City-County Council. She served her constituents and greater Indianapolis with grace, compassion and dignity. Indianapolis is better because of Lewis efforts during her reign. With Osili, Indianapolis is in good hands once again. I am confident the Nigerian native can restore the credibility of the Council. He will also work to reinstate the trust of local residents by assuring them that this new council has the publics best interests at heart and are committed to doing the work of the people. Since Clay was so inept as president people will pay extra close attention to Osili and his efforts. Anything that looks questionable is surely to spur a reaction from the public, so Osili will have to lead responsibly and with integrity. From what I know of him, that wont be difficult. Though Clays six weeks as president were painful, good did come out of it. The Democratic caucus set aside whatever bickering existed previously to address the Clay debacle. In addition, the public came together to voice their concerns with Clay and the Republicans for the unjustified firings of three city workers and side deals that were made. Taxpayers have the right to express their opinions and hold elected officials accountable. That happened throughout the past month-and-a-half and it was gratifying to see such strong activism. Another good thing that occurred during Clays presidency is the superior work that journalists throughout Indianapolis did to thoroughly investigate Clay himself and even claims he made. The latter, which proved Clays claims of improper procedures were invalid, was probably one of the strongest nails in his presidencys coffin. A few weeks ago I wrote how it was sad and truly unfortunate that Clay played so dirty in his quest to become president. I also expressed my disappointment with some of his antics against city workers and minority members of his caucus particularly during Black History Month when not only the country should recognize Blacks and our contributions to society, but we should also recognize, honor and respect one another. These last six weeks have been long and darkmy heart was heavy every time I learned of some mean-spirited, unethical and outright devious thing Clay either said or did; most of which I never wrote about or shared publically. However, as I mentioned before, hope is hereand just in time to wrap up Black History Month with the dignity that we know we all so desperately want restored. I offer Osili a sincere congratulations. To Maggie Lewis, I say thank you for so effectively doing the work of a great leader. In regards to Clay, I hope his heart is softened, he takes a long look at the man in the mirror and his approach toward future quests are done significantly different than his latest efforts. The iodine industry in Chile ended 2017 with the court-ordered closure of seven wells used by SQM, the worlds largest iodine producer, in the Salar de Llamara. The temporary closures were ordered by the Environmental Court of Antofagasta, and have raised questions about the ability of SQM to increase... The big brother naija 3 housemates had an interesting show tonight. Biggie asked them to put up a show concerning all theyve learnt about parenting following their previous task. Miracle, the head of house opened the show, announcing that their show is based on creating an awareness concerning safe sex. In the show, Alex, Ifu Ennada and Leo gave a short captivating poem about the ABC of sex which they explained as Abstinence, Being faithful and Condom Use. Housemate Ahneeka presented the talk session brilliantly, with Anto, Tobi, Lolu, Angel, and Miracle as members of the panel, discussing about their sexual experiences and exposure. , Anto mentioned that she had sex the first time, without protection and got pregnant at 18, but had a miscarriage. Tobi mentioned that he had contracted an STD once and had infected one of his partners, he had to go to a doctor who happened to be a quack and he explained the challenges he faced which taught him a lesson. According to Lolu, the environment and society doesnt help with Abstinence. Housemate Angel believes in having one partner, so as to avoid sexually transmitted diseases. Miracle advised the use of condom and he even advertised the flex condom. The last group in the show, Teddy A, Rico, Cee C, Bambam and Nina rendered a song titled plan am well enlightening about the use of condoms. Rico who had found it hard to learn the rap he personally composed still he couldnt perform the rap during the presentation. The housemates also fumbles, forgetting their lyrics. Biggie who wasnt so pleased with tge housemates mistakes, asked Miracle the head of house to pick an housemate to explain the poem rendered and Miracle chose Ifu Ennada. She explained that the poem is based on the need to stay safe and have safe sex. Tobi was chosen to summarize the talk show and Teddy A summarized the song. Biggie asked Miracle to explain the input of each housemate in the presentations and he did. Biggie however explained that the housemates did not show enough zest and could have done better in the ptesentations. Biggie explained that the song wasnt well planned and Rico obviously forgot his lyrics. Biggie also asked housemates Teddy A, Cee C and Rico to explain what they could have done better, which they did. Biggie however said he was pleased with Ahneeka and Bambams attention to the task. Biggie later announced that the housemates had won their wager. Leave a Comment Nollywood actress, Lizzy Anjorin, known for her role in Yoruba movies has revealed details about the family of Big Brother Naija housemate, Tobi. The actress in a lengthy post on her Instagram page revealed that Tobis parents are very rich and that Tobi is not a Yoruba demon as perceived by viewers. According to her, she owes everything she has today to God and Tobis mum, Mrs Bakre. Heres what she wrote: Hey. Egbami ke!!! Allow me to expose Tobi Bakre of BBNG. He is a banker, he acquired Bsc @ age 19. When am talking, he hardly raise his head to look into my eyes,Very humble and respectful. I swear, Tobi will be the last person I could ever imagine to see on screen. Pardon me, hustle neva gree me enjoy most of the nice screened programs. I was scrolling through my IG handle and I saw my own Tobi Bakre in BBNG HOUSE. The most evil thing you can do is to be praising the good deed of your Godsent,after they have died. Allow me to tell you who Tobi is. Tobis mum was my account manager years back, she entrusted millions in my hand for business and she also introduced me to nice customers that would purchase it. Tobis daddy gave me his multi-million naira mansion for film shooting for good 4 months to shoot without collecting a dime instead he gave me more money. Apart from that,Anytime i visit Ago-iwoye tobi will vacate his room and stay downstairs. During my Owo Nairabet movie premiere, I swear to God, Tobis mum came with 30 powerful dignitaries that blessed me with..it is only Tobis dad that celebrate my birthday twice in a year. Dad yaff double stored my BD date. There is no way I will write my success story without mentioning Mrs Bakre, she treated me like her 1st child and her husband will call and say Lizzy Anjorin, its been long I settle you. Check your account and manage that token for the weekend. Funny enough, Mr & Mrs Bakre always treat me like a diamond in the sky. I am saying it boldly that what I have become today in business is through the help of God and Mrs Bakre. Irony of life, when Tobis parents met me. They fell in love with me..Who would have thought any of their children would be on screen? Mr & Mrs Bakre each time you put smile on my face, I say to youyour children will be celebrated all over the world. Tobi win, win or the other way round. I know one day you will rule this country cos you are born to rule. For the sake of thousands of people your parents feeds every week in AGO -IWOYE, your parents good deeds will always pave ways for you where ever you go. please, lets make Tobi Bakre win on BBNG.. Tobi Bakre is a complete undiluted yoruba angel. Concerning the complaints about Tobi and CeeC having sex as well as Tobis flirtatious nature before the BB Naija house( Tobi has just revealed that he started having sex at 12 and got gonorrhea) she had this to say: People have being complaining about tobi and cee cee trust me tobi cannot hurt,i think we should all appreciate tobi for being a Yoruba Angel not Yoruba demon Tobi emulate a wonderful caring spirit from his father..people saying Tobis parent are rich he doesnt need money .i think we should not allow hate and jealousy to ruin our lifewe are to love people that deserve love ..we should embrace people that render help to the society.. Tobis parent good deed has paved way for him already so lets support the right person for the right price, let him win so that tobi can emulate spirit of giving from his parent.when we talk about bad economy ..our hate towards successful people ruin our economy all over the world not govt we should learn to Appreciate Good deed,to serve as a lesson to othersif i can swallow my Pride and do dis you too can quench hate and support the successful ones so that you can be one We all should understand that the poor ones will definitely climb success ladder through successful people in the society. Leave a Comment According to reports, residents say the only mission of the Boko Haram gunmen that invaded Dapchi, the Yobe community on Monday, was to abduct the female students of Government Girls Science and Technical College, Dapchi. The grieving parents, relatives and residents of Dapchi, a dusty agrarian community, informed PREMIUM TIMES that the gunmen that invaded their community were strangers who had to force some of the residents to show them way around the town. The Yobe state Government, had earlier shared a misleading statement claiming some of the abducted school girls at Government Girls College Dapchi had been rescued. Abdullahi Bego, Director-General, Press Affairs to Yobe state Governor, gave the apology over the statement, which turned out to be untrue. However, on Thursday, they apologised for the misinformation. Here things to note from the apology letter. We issued the statement on the basis of information provided by one of the security agencies that is involved in the fight against Boko Haram and which we had no reason to doubt. We have now established that the information we relied on to make the statement was not credible. The Yobe State Government apologises for that. Dapchi, a town 101km from Damaturu, the Yobe State capital, is one of the oldest communities in Yobe State. A newly wedded woman in Tanzania has just caused a buzz across social media after she sent a congratulatory message to her husband for marrying a new wife, just seven months after they got married. Zainab Abdallah, who works as a District Commissioner in Tanzania took to Instagram on to the send the message to her husband, Abdul Mohamed Khoulan, who is the CEO of Azam Club in Dar es Salaam. Sharing photos of her husband and his new wife, Zainab said she gave full support to her hubby to marry another wife due to the nature of her job, which forces her to travel away from home most of the time and in the process depriving her husband of the basic needs of marriage. In the statement, the politician also welcomed the new wife on board, who will now be assisting her in taking care of their husband. And she hopes that her coming into their home will bring peace. Read what she wrote below. Let me take this opportunity to congratulate my husband @vanmohamed for marrying a second wife. Because my Islamic religious practice allows such an arrangement. I advised him to marry another woman. My decision to get a co-wife was triggered by the nature of my job, which forces me to travel away from home often, consequently depriving my husband of basic needs in a marriage. I thank him for understanding me and heeding to my request. I am glad to welcome on board @only_chibeb as a co-wife, who will help me in a big way to look after our husband, a responsibility which is very demanding. Self acclaimed biggest actor in Nollywood, Uche Maduagwu has yet again slammed Nigerian cross-dresser Bobrisky for being in his own words a nuisance. The controversial actor in his latest post on Instagram asked Bobrisky stop acting like a girl because in a million years, he would never be one. He wrote on IG: Stop being a Public nuisance, you can never become a girl with this your Masquerade & fearful look @bobrisky222 Whats your problem sef? Today you are asking @davidoofficial out, tomorrow is @wizkidayo now i heard youve graduated into asking @iam_kcee to come and pay your BRIDE price, as what? are you mad? As in, is there a long term business contract between you and madness that you are hiding from us? If i talk now @bobrisky222 will open that his/her komkom mouth to say Im stupid, but is it not better to be stupid than being exceedingly and abundantly mad unnecessarily? I know of a couple living in Enugu who have been looking for a male child for the past 6 years now, and Im sure so many families in Nigeria pray and fast seriously just to have a Male child, and here we have @bobrisky222 trying all manner of experiments with female bend down select Yaba clothes, and doing all his possible best just to look like a girl, is that not organic or home grown madness? @bobrisky222 even if people are deceiving you that youre gradually evolving into a pretty girl, cant you talk some common sense into your destiny to stop allowing your imagination grow unnecessary wings?my dear, you look like a local masquerade with a coat of many colors, and not a girl. #repost #pics #quote #instapic #beautiful #love #nollywood #actor #blogger #instagram #share #Mua #smile #pretty #body #tgif #fashion #lagos #blog #event #model #film #abuja #Uk #London #Nigeria #follow #picture #bride #cool source: Instagram Vanguard ONE woman, who gave her name as Mrs. Patricia Okpako, has said she escaped being raped by herdsmen by throwing her menstrual pad at them. Punch President Muhammadu Buhari on Thursday evening told state governors elected on the platform of the ruling All Progressives Congress to give him more time to decide whether or not he would seek re-election in 2019. The Sun Eight All Progressives Congress (APC) governors told President Muhammadu Buhari, at a meeting convened at the Presidential Villa, yesterday, to throw his hat in the ring for a second term in 2019. Thisday President Muhammadu Buhari Thursday night met with the All Progressives Congress (APC) governors in the Presidential Villa, Abuja and demanded more time to make up his mind on his next move. Daily Times Tragedy stroke on Wednesday night when a five man gang of cultist attacked and brutally murdered a personnel of the Lagos State Neighborhood Safety Corps at Mallam Isah close, Aguda-Surulere. Guardian The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) yesterday told a Federal High Court, Lagos, that it had rejected the out-of-court settlement proposed by the former Minister of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Jumoke Akinjide, and others, who are standing trial over alleged N650 million fraud, not minding that they have refunded the money. Daily Trust National Chairman of the PDP, Prince Uche Secondus, yesterday, reiterated their stand that the INEC is doing everything possible to rig the 2019 general elections in favour of the ruling APC. Leadership The purported release of 48 of the 94 schoolgirls who went missing on Monday after Boko Haram terrorists attacked Government Girls Science Technical College, Dapchi, Yobe State, is now enmeshed in controversy. The Nation Controversy over the reordering of next years general elections by the National Assembly was on the front-burner yesterday. This content is from: Indonesia The Philippines is set to implement corporate tax cuts in its drive to become a leading tech hub in Southeast Asia. The Philippine government hopes its bid to overhaul the tax regime will attract more businesses in the long-term. February 23, 2018 (Investorideas.com Newswire) Bancolombia released 4Q17 results. Net profits for the quarter reached COP 902 bn, equivalent to a 20.3% y/y decline, but well above our forecast and the consensus estimate (COP 432 bn & COP 660 bn). Profitability, measured in terms of ROAE, came in at 16.0%, compared to our estimate of 7.8%. Revenues showed a 8.1% positive surprise compared to our forecast; NIM from investments was particularly high at 2.6% compared to 0.9% in 3Q17. Meanwhile, the bank recorded a non-recurring event of COP 86 bn in other operating income related to a tax benefit. Other fees also had an unusual positive performance (+COP 36.3 bn vs LTM average). On the other hand, provision expenses were in line with expectations; however, Bancolombia reported a net provision recovery in Panama of COP 7.6 bn compared to a net provision expense of COP 69.1 bn in 3Q17. Finally, the biggest surprise came in OPEX; the bank reported very unusual figures, including a positive effect of COP 60.4 bn in bonuses compared to an average expense of COP 152.5 bn during LTM. Despite positive results compared to our forecast, we believe that the efficiency and profitability levels observed in 4Q17 are not sustainable under current conditions. That said, we expect to provide a new update on Bancolombia including the 4Q17 financials in the upcoming weeks. In terms of the stock, we are adding a positive bias to our current HOLD rating based on a higher loan growth expectation and a potential improvement in asset quality in 2018 compared to full year 2017. A cost to income ratio of 41.9% in 4Q17 led us to conclude that results had extraordinary effects and might not be sustainable. The efficiency indicator in 4Q17 contrasts with an average of 51.8% during 9M17. Loan growth still weak. Gross loans increased 5.7% y/y compared to 6.5% y/y reported in 3Q17. Despite this performance, we highlight a 15.2% y/y growth in the consumer segment. For 2018, we anticipate that annual loan growth will be 8.0% y/y, mainly driven by the consumer portfolio. Some positive trends on cost of funds and initial positive signs on asset quality. Cost of funds declined 10 and 47 bps compared to 3Q17 and 4Q16. A reduction in long term obligations explained this performance. PDL declined for the first time since 4Q16, while new PDLs declined to COP 622 bn in 4Q17 compared to an average of COP 919 bn over the past two quarters. We expect the better macro outlook in 2018, along with much lower provisions of Electricaribe, to have a positive effect on cost of credit during 2018. In fact, we currently see a 20 bps reduction in this indicator vs 2017. For charts, tables and the full report, see the pdf file Contact: Steffania Mosquera +(571) 3394400 Ext. 1025 smosquera@credicorpcapital.com Juan Camilo Dauder +(574) 2042525 Ext. 4155 jdauder@credicorpcapital.com More Info: This news is published on the Investorideas.com Newswire - a global digital news source for investors and business leaders Disclaimer/Disclosure: Investorideas.com is a digital publisher of third party sourced news, articles and equity research as well as creates original content, including video, interviews and articles. Original content created by investorideas is protected by copyright laws other than syndication rights. Our site does not make recommendations for purchases or sale of stocks, services or products. Nothing on our sites should be construed as an offer or solicitation to buy or sell products or securities. All investing involves risk and possible losses. This site is currently compensated for news publication and distribution, social media and marketing, content creation and more. Disclosure is posted for each compensated news release, content published /created if required but otherwise the news was not compensated for and was published for the sole interest of our readers and followers. Contact management and IR of each company directly regarding specific questions. More disclaimer info: https://www.investorideas.com/About/Disclaimer.asp Learn more about publishing your news release and our other news services on the Investorideas.com newswire https://www.investorideas.com/News-Upload/ and tickertagstocknews.com Global investors must adhere to regulations of each country. Please read Investorideas.com privacy policy: https://www.investorideas.com/About/Private_Policy.asp Vancouver, British Columbia - February 23, 2018 (Newsfile Corp.) (Investorideas.com Newswire) Spearmint Resources Inc. (TSXV: SRJ) (OTCBB: SPMTF) (FSE: A2AHL5) ("SRJ" or the "Company") wishes to announce that the first drill hole has been completed, reverse circulation hole, SMR-1. The hole was TD'ed at 340 feet and penetrated a thick section, approximately 250 feet, of the targeted clay. Samples from SMR-1 were rushed to Reno for immediate assaying. Drilling now continues on hole 2. Spearmints Lithium Project drilling calls for 3 wells testing the green clay formation and 1 deep well testing the deep brine target located less than 1/2 mile east of a Pure Energy Minerals exploration hole that was completed as a production well. James Nelson, President of Spearmint states, "We are pleased that the first hole has intersected the targeted lithium bearing clays. We look forward to what the assay results will return and look forward to next 3 holes." Clayton Valley Ownership Map Spearmint's current projects include a portfolio of lithium prospects. The 'Clayton Valley Lithium Prospects' in Nevada comprise of two claim blocks totalling 800-acres bordering Pure Energy Minerals & Cypress Development Corp. Spearmint also has three lithium projects in Quebec, including the 4,485-acre 'Pressiac Lithium Prospect', the 524-acre 'Whabouchi Lakes Lithium Prospect', and the 2,636-acre 'Whabouchi Lakes West Lithium Prospect' in the vicinity of Nemaska Lithium Inc. & Critical Elements Corp. Spearmint's 'Chibougamau Vanadium Prospects' comprise of five separate claim blocks totalling 9,735-acres bordering, or in the direct vicinity of, the vanadium deposit of BlackRock Metal's (private) Ilmenite vanadium project, Vanadiumcorp Resource Inc. and Vanadium One Energy Corp. Spearmint's current projects also include three areas of focus on gold in British Columbia; the 'Golden Triangle Gold Prospects' comprising of four separate claim blocks totaling 4,095-acres bordering GT Gold Corp, the 'Gold Mountain Prospects' comprising of three separate claim blocks totaling 1,245-acres bordering Barkerville Gold Mines, and the 3,052 acre 'Neba Prospect' bordering Aben Resources Ltd. Spearmint's 8,482 acre 'EL North' Nickel-Copper Prospect is a contiguous land package that includes the 'EL North, EL North 2 and the BUDDY claims' in the Eskay Creek Camp bordering Garibaldi Resources Corp. Spearmint's 1,500 acre 'WHY WEST' Magnesium project near Rossland, BC directly borders West High Yield Resources. Frank Bain, PGeo and qualified technical person has reviewed this news release and approved the content. If you would like to be added to Spearmint's news distribution list, please send your email address to info@spearmintresources.ca. Contact Information Tel: 1604646-6903 www.spearmintresources.ca "James Nelson" President Spearmint Resources Inc. Neither the TSX Venture Exchange Inc. nor its Regulation Service Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange Inc.) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this press release. More Info: This news is published on the Investorideas.com Newswire - a global digital news source for investors and business leaders Disclaimer/Disclosure: Investorideas.com is a digital publisher of third party sourced news, articles and equity research as well as creates original content, including video, interviews and articles. Original content created by investorideas is protected by copyright laws other than syndication rights. Our site does not make recommendations for purchases or sale of stocks, services or products. Nothing on our sites should be construed as an offer or solicitation to buy or sell products or securities. All investing involves risk and possible losses. This site is currently compensated for news publication and distribution, social media and marketing, content creation and more. Disclosure is posted for each compensated news release, content published /created if required but otherwise the news was not compensated for and was published for the sole interest of our readers and followers. Contact management and IR of each company directly regarding specific questions. More disclaimer info: https://www.investorideas.com/About/Disclaimer.asp Learn more about publishing your news release and our other news services on the Investorideas.com newswire https://www.investorideas.com/News-Upload/ and tickertagstocknews.com Global investors must adhere to regulations of each country. Please read Investorideas.com privacy policy: https://www.investorideas.com/About/Private_Policy.asp Natalia Olson-Urtecho is a city planner by education, a technologist by lifelong learning, and a visionary strategist in the brave new world of connected, smart cities. Like many extremely successful leaders in technology and business, she started young, working since she was 15, and driven to lead a full and fantastic life, with a loving family, the insights only worldtraveling can provide, and opportunities to make a difference on a big scale. This includes her contributions to US government programs. As an appointee of President Barack Obama, Olson-Urtecho ran the Small Business Administrations MidAtlantic region, responsible for small business programs, financial assistance, and business development initiatives, managing 34 billion dollars in government contracting. She effortlessly spans public and private sector work, and as a citizen of the world, has held senior management positions in Central Europe, Asia and Latin America. OlsonUrtecho has been honored with many prestigious awards, including Latina Powerhouse by the Maryland Hispanic Business Conference, Most Influential Latino in Delaware Valley, and Philadelphia Business Journals 2010 Minority Business Leader award. She is not only a powerful and successful woman in technology, but a minority leader and inspiration to women and girls around the world. Most recently, she has joined the board of Smart City Works, a nonprofit organization bringing together entrepreneurs innovating Smart City solutions, while also standing up her own new initiative, InfraTech21, designed to help inform the public what Smart Infrastructure means and how we can apply modern technologies to improve 21st century standards. With a background in infrastructure planning and design, bringing together everything from transportation and energy to resource conservation and public safety, I am passionate about the possibilities when we add sensors to infrastructure to help manage it more efficiently, Olson-Urtecho said. A nature lover, Olson-Urtecho has trekked Machu Picchu, Mount Everest and the Kilimanjaro in East Africa. She has crossed the Sahara Desert and went backpacking in the Amazon for ten days during the government shutdown. But it is her extraordinary passion for the built world that has ignited her new initiative. In fact, technology can help us live more naturally healthy lives, she said. Smart City technology can help keep our green spaces greener, our water supplies cleaner, our food systems safer, and our cities and towns more efficiently run. By sensing the world around us, and gathering data embedded into the infrastructure, we know more about how much energy we are using, how much pollution we are creating, and we can then act on that data. Olson-Urtecho also sees a tremendous economic upside in supporting the development of smart city infrastructure implementations. Were seeing the most exciting innovations coming out of startups, and through Smart City Works, weve been able to connect small and large companies to move ideas into reality. Often, large enterprises and governments are unable to innovate at the rate nextgeneration inventors work and are risk averse when it comes to disruptive solutions. Everybody wins when we support innovation early on, then scale that with larger distribution systems and growth capital. Born in Honduras and raised in Mexico and Venezuela, Olson-Urtecho's father was a U.S. born architect who met her mother, an attorney, in Honduras. Her parents encouraged Olson-Urtecho and her siblings to learn about other counties, cultures and languages. She sees the Internet of Things as a perfect area in which women in technology can lead. After all, women have an intuitive way of connecting with others, and we understand the power of a global village, she said. She finds balance through other interests, including cooking and hosting dinner parties, bringing her guests delicious meals using spices she has gathered while traveling the globe. As committed as I am to making a lasting contribution to urban and city planning, I am also committed to ensuring the experience of living in these highly populated areas is joyful and natural, Olson-Urtecho said. There is nothing more refreshing than stepping out of my home office and going for a walk in the woods. My dream is that every child, every woman and man who live in cities and towns can live more peacefully and healthfully, whether they are protected from harm through smarter public safety solutions, have access to clean water, have green spaces to walk in, or simply are able to get to and from work faster, on smarter public transportation and less congested highways. Smart infrastructure makes this more possible than we could have imagined, even ten years ago. Olson-Urtecho was the Regional Administrator for the U.S. Small Business Administration, served as a Presidential Appointee from 2012-2017, she was responsible for delivery and management of small business programs, financial assistance, and business development initiatives throughout the mid-Atlantic region. She served a population of nearly 30 million in 7 district offices though out Pennsylvania; Delaware; Maryland.; West Virginia; Virginia, and Washington, D.C. Olson-Urtecho oversaw more than 180 SBA offices; SCORE chapters; Business Development Centers and other resources while managing a field staff of more than 100 loan, business, community outreach specialists and support personnel. She worked with local lenders and successful firms across the region, overseeing more than $34.2 billion in federal government contracts for goods and services purchased from local entrepreneurs. She has more than 18 years of experience working with international, regional and local entities in Latin America, Central Europe and Asia. She has professional experience in finance, government contracting, international collaboration, commercialization of clean technologies, environmental planning, sustainable building, zoning, land use, transportation, public engagement and infrastructure policies and development. She was appointed by the U.S. Secretary of Commerce to the U.S. Innovation Advisory Board and by Philadelphias Mayor to the Philadelphia City Planning Commission and Zoning Code Commission boards. Edited by Ken Briodagh Iowa State President Wendy Wintersteen speaks to the board about the new and different things Iowa State has begun to implement to make the school function better and more economically during the Board of Regents meeting Feb. 22. The Ames Main Street Farmers Market is a local market that has been a staple of downtown Ames for the past eight years. The market This collection features the arguments in favor of and against the renaming of Catt Hall on Iowa State's campus, which was named in When Apple released iOS 11, it did so with a new built-in SOS feature, which would allow an iPhone owner to quickly get in touch with 911 if the situation were to arise. That feature is apparently leading to a lot of accidental 911 calls in one area of California. A Sacramento news site is reporting that repair technicians working out of the Elk Grove repair center are sending a lot of unintended calls to 911, and have been doing so since October of last year. That would line up with the launch of iOS 11, and that new SOS feature. Weve been seeing these calls for the last four months from Apple, said police dispatcher Jamie Hudson. Dispatchers say the calls started back in October of 2017, and typically theres no one on the other line. The dispatcher, Hudson, pointed out that they are able to pinpoint where the call is coming from, which is making it obvious to determine that the Elk Grove repair center is at the center of all these calls. As far as how many have been received, its about 20 per day, and which means around 1,600 calls in total since October. At this point in time, its not exactly clear which Apple devices are making the SOS calls. On the iPhone 8, and on the iPhone X, the owner needs to just hold the Power button on the right, and the two volume keys on the other side of the phone. Owners can also rapidly press the Power button rapidly five times to activate the SOS feature. Meanwhile, on an Apple Watch, the owner needs to press the side button to activate it. The report also indicates that the Sacramento County Sheriffs Department Communication Center has also picked up 47 accidental calls to 911 dispatch since the first of January. In some of those cases, the 911 dispatcher can actually hear the technician working in the background of the call. Our Take The SOS feature in iOS 11 and on the Apple Watch is a great feature to have, but there have certainly been questions regarding its implementation since its debut. Its hard to argue that a feature like that should be easy to activate. Otherwise, what would be the point? But if its easy enough that a technician can activate it during the repair process, thats not great, either. Especially if 911 dispatchers have to deal with an unintended call while there are actual emergencies coming in. [via CBS Back in December, Apple officially rolled out Apple Pay Cash the peer-to-peer payment option within iOS 11.2. And in February of this year, Tim Cook confirmed that Apple Pay proper, the companys mobile payment option, would be rolling out to Brazil at some point in the near future. Now, according to a report from 9to5Mac, it looks like soon might be now, as Apple Pay Cash is starting to pop up in some international markets, including Brazil. Based on the original report, Apple Pay Cash first started showing signs of a rollout in places like Spain and in Ireland, as noted by folks on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ironcatan/status/967097079687450624 The Apple Pay Cash option was also showing up in the United Kingdom as well. When Apple Pay Cash initially launched, it was only available in the United States. Now, it looks like Apple is ready to start offering the service in international markets. It should be noted, at least at the time of publication, that it doesnt look like Apple Pay Cash supports sending money to a friend or loved one internationally. In addition, an update to the original article indicates that Apple Pay Cash is also rolling out in Brazil: Our Take Apple Pay is a great feature in and of itself, but the inclusion of Apple Pay Cash, which opens up peer-to-peer payment transfers in a quick and easy manner, is definitely a nice bonus. The fact that it lives within the Messages app, too, makes it super simple to use. Have you tried out Apple Pay Cash yet? [via 9to5Mac Earlier this year, it was reported that Apple was moving forward in an effort to try and block some protestors from doing their thing at, in front of, or around some Apple Stores. Specifically, Apple was trying to block the French activist group known as Attac. This group has been targeting Apple for many years, and their primary goal is to bring attention to Apples tax habits, which they deem to be less-than-stellar. Apples goal was to stop Attac from protesting at their physical retail stores located in Paris. However, that wont be happening, as reported today by MacGeneration. The High Court of Paris officials ruled in favor of the activist group, and has officially denied Apples request to block their protests at Apple stores. According to the ruling, Attac has stayed within distinct guidelines, and has stayed within the accordance set by the European Unions Statutes of the Association. Moreover, the court also decided to place the protests a a matter of public interest. As long as Attac continues to not display any signs of violence, vandalism, and allows customers to walk in and exit the stores, then they are not breaking any rules that would get them kicked off site. Apple, for its part, lobbied that the activist group did indeed pose a threat to Apple retail store employees and guests, and has accused Attac of vandalizing some shops. Now that the court has ruled, Apple will be required to pay 2,000 euros to cover the legal fees racked up by Attac. For now, it appears this particular matter has been settled. Our Take The reasons Apple doesnt want giant words like, Apple, pay your taxes! painted on its retail store windows isnt a big surprise, nor is why the company wouldnt want activists planted for extended periods of time in front of their retail sites. Of course, as long as Attac doesnt break the rules in place, then it looks like they arent going anywhere any time soon, so Apple may just have to get used to it. [via MacGeneration To start 2018, Intel (and other CPU manufacturers) were faced with a sweeping critical issue in the form of Spectre and Meltdown hardware vulnerabilities. Apple, for its part, was on top of issuing software updates that fixed as much as they could from a software point of view, and Intel was boasting about its own efforts earlier this year as well. But the impact was surely felt, especially by the companies and the publics trust. That last bit wont be helped now, in light of a new report from Reuters. According to the publication, Intel did not inform the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) about Meltdown or Spectre until January 3. Keeping track of the timeline reveals that the confirmation on Intels part wasnt provided until after the hardware vulnerabilities were public knowledge. As far as when Intel was aware of the situation? That dates back to June of 2017, which was revealed in documentation. Alphabet says it disclosed the vulnerabilities to chipmakers Intel, Advanced Micro Devices Inc and SoftBank Group Corp-owned ARM Holdings dating back to June of last year. From that point, of that initial disclosure to the chip manufacturers, Alphabet (and other companies) had to give 90 days for a patch to be created. After that 90 days, though, the vulnerabilities could be made public. Meanwhile, Intel and the other companies had the ball in their court regarding letting the necessary U.S. government officials know about the vulnerabilities. Which they did not appear to do in a timely manner. Now, Intel has a defense for its decision, stating that there was no indication that any of these vulnerabilities had been exploited by malicious actors. Which apparently meant they didnt need to inform US-CERT or any other officials, for that matter. Our Take This situation with Intel isnt all that similar to Apples slowing down older iPhones situation, at least not on the micro level, but certainly on the macro. When we look at these companies going out of their way to keep information from the public, and even regulatory bodies, one has to wonder if they realize theyre going to get caught eventually. Thats the through line here. Even with the best intentions in place, the information is going to get out to the public at some point. [via Reuters ABC/Randy HolmesBishop Briggs' full-length debut album has a title and a release date. The 10-track effort is called Church of Scars, and it'll arrive on April 20. Church of Scars features the previously released singles "River," "Wild Horses" and "Dream," as well as a new track called "White Flag," which is now available for digital download. "'White Flag' is about pushing till there is sweat stinging your eyes, blood under your nails and never giving up, no matter what the circumstances are," Bishop says. Bishop Briggs will kick off a North American headlining tour in support of Church of Scars April 27 in Vancouver. Copyright 2018, ABC Radio. All rights reserved. You have permission to edit this article. Edit Close Emily Mieure covers criminal justice and emergency news. She also leads the News&Guides investigative efforts. She has reported for WDRB TV in Louisville, Ky., WFIE TV in Evansville, Ind., and WEIU TV in Charleston, Ill. Mike has reported on the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem's wildlife, wildlands and the agencies that manage them since 2012. A native Minnesotan, he arrived in the West to study environmental journalism at the University of Colorado. Today Cloudy this evening with showers after midnight. Low 66F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 40%. Tonight Cloudy this evening with showers after midnight. Low 66F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 40%. Tomorrow A few showers early with mostly cloudy conditions later in the day. High near 80F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 40%. Amnesty International (AI) launched its 2017 Report [text, PDF] Thursday, highlighting human rights issues in 159 countries and territories across the world. The report recognizes conflict, poverty, refugee crises and discrimination. In a foreword, AI Secretary General Salil Shetty called attention to the millions across the world experiencing what he refers to as the bitter fruits of a rising politics of demonization. As we enter the year in which the Universal Declaration of Human Rights turns 70, it is abundantly clear that none of us can take our human rights for granted. Shetty called out the military campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya people in Myanmar and the 655,000 refugees resulting. 2017 also demonstrated the enduring willingness of people to stand up for their rights and for the values they want to see in the world. New and severe threats gave fresh oxygen to the spirit of protest, said Shetty. The report highlights the election of Donald Trump, and his campaign comments that were discriminatory or otherwise contradicted international human rights principles. It then points to a number of executive orders signed by Trump, as well as the administrations policies regarding refugees and migrants, womens rights, counter-terror and security, excessive use of force, gun violence, and the death penalty, including his call for a wall along the US-Mexico border, allowing for forcible return, and the increased detention of asylum-seekers and their families, prioritized deportation of migrants, and canceled funding for sanctuary cities that did not co-operate with federal authorities. [JURIST] A large group of law firms and prominent law professors, led by David Boies [offical profile] of Boies Schiller Flexner, LLP, alongside the Leauge of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) [websites] has filed four lawsuits [press release] challenging the winner-take-all approach to the electoral college. Under the Constitution, the electoral college [National Archives backgrounder] provides that the electors of the college are the individuals who choose the president and vice president. However, the states are permitted to determine how these electors are selected. Currently, 48 states and Washington, DC, have winner-take-all systems through which the leading candidates political party selects all electors. Only Maine and Nebraska have a form of proportional representation. The winner-take-all approach, critics note, is what enables a candidate to win the election even when losing the popular vote. The lawsuits challenging these practices were filed in federal courts in Massachusetts, California, Texas and South Carolina [complaints, PDF]. All of the lawsuits advance an argument claiming that this system violates a constitutional right to an equal vote in elections and First Amendment rights of expression and association. The lawsuits also claim a violation of the one-person, one-vote rule, articulated by the Supreme Court in Reynolds v. Sims [opinion] as: The rule that, under the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution, legislative voting districts must be the same in population size. The idea behind the rule is that one persons voting power ought to be roughly equivalent to another persons within the state. In the press release, Boies states: Under the winner-take-all system, U.S. citizens have been denied their constitutional right to an equal vote in Presidential elections. This is a clear violation of the principle of one person, one vote. We filed these cases in order to uphold the rights of every citizen. [A]ll Americans deserve to have their votes count. In the last election, a majority of the popular vote in Massachusetts and California went to Hilary Clinton. A majority of the vote in Texas and South Carolina went to President Donald Trump. Myanmar officials have been bulldozing [HRW report] depopulated Rohingya villages that were previously the targets of arson by the government, Human Rights Watch (HRW) [advocacy website] reported Friday. Satellite images have shown that at least 55 villages were cleared since late 2017. HRW has called on Myanmar to preserve the villages until they can be investigated by UN experts in order to document human rights violations. Although many of the villages were among the 362 villages that were partially or completely destroyed by security force attacks, at least two of the villages were completely intact before the bulldozing. HRW was not able to determine if the villages were still inhabited prior to demolition. Myanmar has previously stated that areas of the Rakhine state would be cleared as part of a plan to rebuild the villages to a higher standard. The areas will also include a processing center for refugees once they start returning to the area. HRW has called the demolition of the villages an attempt to destroy evidence and is obstruction of justice. The Burmese government has refused to grant visas for a UN fact-finding mission and has blocked independent access to the Northern Rakhine state. A Burmese investigation that concluded in November found no violations or abuses by the security forces. Many groups have condemned Myanmar for the attacks in the Rakhine state against the Rohingya people. The U.S. House of Representatives passed [JURIST report] a bill in December condemning the ethnic cleansing. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees has called the attacks [JURIST report] on the Rohingya amount to ethnic cleansing in November 2016. A pricey new margarita helps raise money for Florida students. A child is rescued and it's all caught on surveillance video. An innovative new bionic arm has some unique controls. First up, a New York City restaurant celebrated National Margarita Day by adding what they call "the most expensive margarita in America" to its menu. The $2,500 drink is made with Clase Azul Ultra Anejo Tequila, which costs over a thousand dollars a bottle. It's rimmed with a blend of exclusive Mexican salts and garnished with a fresh-cut lime and spiral jalapeno. The restaurant's owner says all proceeds from the margarita will go to benefit victims of the Florida school shooting. Video from Egypt shows three policemen guarding a bank and standing on a sidewalk. They look up and apparently see a child dangling from the balcony before rushing to catch him as he falls. Egypt's Interior Ministry said in a statement that the child was unharmed, but one of the policemen was injured and was sent to a nearby hospital for treatment. A double amputee has a new arm thanks to a medial breakthrough in New Hampshire. It's the first fully integrated powered shoulder, elbow, wrist, hand prosthesis and it's called the LUKE arm. Believe it or not, the arm is controlled by foot. The President of Next Step Bionics says to think of it like a joystick. If the foot moves forward, the prosthesis comes out. If it moves back, the prosthesis follows suit. TALENT, Ore. During a routine traffic stop near Talent, a suspect dragged a State trooper with his car before trying to dump a bag containing a large brick of cocaine, according to Oregon State Police. A statement from State trooper Travis Peterson described a traffic stop that began under relatively normal conditions. On Tuesday, February 20, the trooper witnessed a white Nissan Altima, driven by 24 year-old Giovanni White of Lynnwood, Wash., going 73 mph in a 65 mph zone on Interstate 5. The trooper also said that White changed lanes abruptly, without signaling for the proper distance. Peterson pulled White over and approached the Nissan. Peterson noticed the distinctive smell of marijuana wafting from inside White's vehicle, and began to suspect that White might be in possession of illegal quantities of the substance. The trooper called for backup after asking that White sit on the hood of the patrol car. White would not consent to a search of his vehicle, and the trooper called for backupincluding a drug-sniffing canine unit. White, says the trooper, was shaking with nervousness. Before backup could arrive, according to Peterson, White ran and jumped into his car. The trooper pursued, and was able to reach in through White's driver-side window in an attempt to take the keys or put the vehicle into park. The two of them exchanged blows before White began to drive away, with Peterson still hanging out of the Nissan's window. Peterson was forced to jump from the window before White could accelerate. Peterson said that he was able to run back to his patrol car and pursue the fleeing suspect. A bystander in another vehicle directed the trooper towards Exit 27, onto Barnett Road. After sighting evidence of a crash near the intersection with Ellendale Road, Peterson saw the white Nissan parked behind a AAA office, the trunk open. The trooper parked and was again aided by a bystander, who said that the suspect was headed down towards a creek. After running after the suspect, Peterson saw White toss a black bag into the creek before the trooper was able to wrestle White to the ground and make an arrest. Peterson said that a MADGE detective tested the substances recovered from the bag which had been thrown into the creek. One package tested positive for cocaine, and is believed to be about 2.2 pounds. There were other non-descript packages which could not be tested at that time without disturbing the evidence. MEDFORD, Ore.- Dozens of school districts in Jackson and Josephine County called for snow days today. Our team talked with local school districts to see what today's day off means for the school year. Medford School District says it's adding another day to the school calendar this June. Other district superintendents across the region say they won't have a decision on if more school days will be added for another week. Here are the responses from school districts around the region of the possibilities of another snow day tomorrow. Eagle Point School District: At this time, we will follow our regular procedures which means we will have folks checking roads very early in the morning to make our determination. However, since weather is ever changing, we will be monitoring tonight including watching you folks for your forecasts and updates! It is possible, as you point out, that frozen ice covered roads tonight along with temperatures staying below freezing, could warrant a decision sooner than tomorrow morning. Thats as specific as I can be at this time! Grants Pass School District: The determination will be made early in the morning. Medford School District: We usually always make the call the morning of the weather event. If it looks to be really bad tomorrow by this evening, we will call it tonight, but thats unlikely. Phoenix-Talent School District: That is a concern for us, but at this time we will make the call to delay or cancel in the morning as we did today. Logos Public Charter School: No decision has been made yet. Grants Pass Adventist School: We normally follow what the Grants Pass Public School District #7 does when it comes to school closures or delays. On Fridays, our normal dismissal time is 12:00 pm. Treading lightly on Tanna We go on a new ecotourism adventure tour in North Tanna A man walks in front of the Trump tower in Mumbai, India, Thursday, Feb. 22, 2018. Donald Trump Jr. said any talk of his family profiting from his father's presidency is "nonsense" during a trip to India that has raised ethical concerns about using the name of the American president to promote international business ventures. (AP Photo/Rajanish Kakade) From left, Grand Chief Jerry Daniels, Southern Chiefs' Organization, Chief Arlen Dumas, Chief Sheila North, and Chief Kevin Hart speak to media outside the law courts in Winnipeg after the jury delivered a not-guilty verdict in the second degree murder trial of Raymond Cormier, Thursday, February 22, 2018. THE CANADIAN PRESS/John Woods Prime Minister Justin Trudeau visits the Jama Masjid Mosque in New Delhi, India on Thursday, Feb. 22, 2018. Trudeau's turbulent trip to India is drawing domestic political criticism and raising eyebrows internationally as the Prime Minister's Office deals with the fallout of its botched party invitation to a convicted attempted murderer. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick FILE - In this file photo dated Friday, Dec. 1, 2017, Britain's Prince Harry and his fiancee Meghan Markle, in Nottingham, England. The Metropolitan Police force said "a package containing a substance" was delivered to St. James's Palace on Feb. 12, sent to Prince Harry and his fiancee Meghan Markle, and is now being investigated as a racist hate crime, Scotland Yard said Thursday Feb. 22, 2018. (AP Photo/Frank Augstein, FILE) Mourners attend the funeral service for Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School assistant football coach, Aaron Feis. at the Church by the Glades in Coral Springs, Fla., Thursday, Feb. 22. 2018. Football players wearing Stoneman Douglas jerseys carried Feis' casket into the service at the church where family and friends gathered to remember him as loyal and caring. (Mike Stocker/South Florida Sun-Sentinel via AP) EUGENE, Ore. -- A former Eugene 4J school psychologist is being investigated after police said they found hundreds of child porn photos on his work computer. No formal charges have been filed against Michael Odle. Police started investigating Odle in October 2017. They said he had requested a "routing ticket" that contained an odd phrase on Oct. 20. Routing tickets are used by the Eugene 4J School District to schedule meetings with school teachers and administrators about student needs. A porn website was listed on the ticket, according to a search warrant affidavit, instead of a student ID number. A school employee went to the website and found children and teenage girls in what she described as "compromising positions." Court records said the employee reported it to the director of the 4J technology department, who then checked Odle's previous web history. He found that Odle had visited more than 50 pornographic websites in the span of one week, according to the documents. Another employee in the district saw the routing ticket and told Odle he might have a virus on his computer, the documents state. The following week, Odle told the same employee that he had the issue fixed. Police said the district seized Odle's work computer and found hundreds of photos of nude children, some younger than 10 years old. They said the images were of teenage and preteen girls in sexual poses, and they saved the incriminating evidence onto a hard drive. The technology support manager for the district said he was "disgusted by what he has seen," according to court documents. The laptop and the hard driver were turned over to police. The district also gave police a list of 22 adult websites that Odle had visited on the computer. The district said the laptop was purchased in 2015 and was exclusively assigned to Odle. Police executed a search warrant for the laptop and the hard drive on Jan. 8. The affidavit shows police found numerous photos depicting sexual activity involving children. Police said they believe Odle should be charged with encouraging child sex abuse in the second degree. Kerry Delf, a spokesperson with 4J, said he is no longer employed by the school district. She said he worked for the district from September 2004 to November 2017. Delf said schools where Odle worked in recent years are notifying parents. She said they have no information indicated Odle had any inappropriate contact with students. EUGENE, Ore. -- The 80th annual Oregon Logging Conference kicked off in Eugene on Feb.22. Its the largest indoor, outdoor logging equipment show west of the Mississippi. The three day event features lots of opportunities for forestry professionals to network and learn more about the trade. There will be seminars, hands-on workshops and panel discussions all about the logging industry. Ponsse, was one of the companies to feature equipment. They showcased a training simulator. The simulator is like a video game, but it allows people to train in a safe and controlled enviroment. The company said they'd like to someday create a virtual reality training simulator. The OLC runs from Feb. 22 to Feb. 24. CORVALLIS, Ore A student at a Corvallis middle school was arrested for allegedly making a threat on Snapchat. The Corvallis School District called police to report a threat made towards a student at Linus Pauling Middle School on Feb. 21. SafeOregon: A free tip line created for students, parents, and community members to report any safety threats made to public or private schools. The report originally came in as a potential act of violence and did not indicate a particular school in the 509J School District. As a precaution, officers provided extra security at Linus Pauling Middle School and other schools during the investigation. Police discovered that the same girl who reported the threat was also the source of the threat. They said the 14-year-old student claimed she received a threat via Snapchat but police discovered that she actually made the threat, posting it on social media. She was arrested on Feb. 22 and taken to the Linn-Benton Juvenile Detention Center. She was charged with disorderly conduct and initiating a false report. The Corvallis Police Department ask that the public report any potential threats immediately. A free tip line was created in Oregon for students, parents, and community members to report any safety threats made to public or private schools. For more information or to report a threat click here. COQUILLE, Ore. Authorities are searching for a Coquille businessman accused of sexually abusing a child relative for more than three years. Coos County District Attorney Paul Frasier said theyve been looking for Paul Jackson, 71, since Tuesday. He has been charged with five counts of sodomy, sex abuse and incest. Frasier said Jackson told a family member he was going to Idaho, but another family member said he was in California. Jackson owns Figaros Pizza in Coquille. Anyone with information on his whereabouts is asked to contact the Bandon Police Department. EUGENE, Ore. - In its second day, the Oregon Logging Conference held it's first ever "Future Forestry Workers Career Day." At this event, high school students attended activities and exhibits designed to show them the positives of a career in forestry. Staff with the conference said the event came about because of a desperate need for younger workers in the industry. They said there are many positives to this career, including working outdoors, the logging community, and even the compensation. "It just depends on what your forte is. If you like jumping down and just working hard all day and getting paid for it, heck, we've got lots of that," said Rick Kriege, the OLC president. More than 600 students from 22 different Oregon high schools signed up to attend the event. Many of them said they were feeling inspired to get involved in forestry after attending the event. "Forestry is such a personal industry. And you can work as hard as you want and gain your way up by working hard," said Mallory Stokes, a senior at Philomath High School. Staff at the conference said the turnout blew them away, and because so many students were excited to be a part of the event. They plan on making it an annual event. FILLMORE COUNTY, Minn. Flames damaged an apartment building Wednesday night. The Fillmore County Sheriffs Office says it was notified around 11:11 pm by the Winneshiek County Sheriffs Office of a fire at 11048 Highway 52, the address of an apartment building known as the Old State Line Motel or Prosper Apartments. The Sheriffs Office, Harmony Ambulance, and the fire departments from Mabel and Canton responded to the blaze. Officials say the flames were contained to apartment #5 but there was heavy smoke damage to adjacent units. There are no known injuries. The Minnesota State Fire Marshal has been contacted and will be conducting an investigation. The American Red Cross is assisting the victims of this fire. Fillmore County Sheriff Tom Kaase says he would like to remind people of the importance of smoke detectors and carbon monoxide detectors in their homes and businesses, whether they own or rent. He also says people need to regularly test such alarms to make sure they are working. BETTENDORF, Iowa (AP) A Bettendorf counselor accused of kissing and touching a patient against the woman's wishes has pleaded guilty. Court records say Aracely Schutters' plea was filed Tuesday to misdemeanor sexual exploitation by a counselor or therapist. The original charge was a felony. A plea agreement says Schutters will pay a fine of $625 and be sentenced to two years of probation. Schutters' sentencing has been scheduled for March 23. An arrest affidavit says the incident happened Dec. 4 when Schutters invited the patient to her home to talk about the patient's problems. The patient reported getting into Schutters' hot tub, where the counselor reportedly kissed and touched the patient. The patient then got out of the hot tub and left Schutters' home. The patient reported the incident two days later. MINNEAPOLIS (AP) - Prosecutors in Minneapolis have filed child neglect charges against the mother of mentally disabled twin daughters who were allegedly raped, beaten and held captive by their father for years. Police are still trying to find the 48-year-old mother, who was charged Thursday with three child neglect counts. The 51-year-old father was charged Tuesday with several felonies in a case that authorities have described as torture. He allegedly fathered two children with one twin. Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman told reporters Thursday the case is as horrifying as anything he's seen as the county's top prosecutor. The alleged abuse continued until last May, when one twin escaped and alerted authorities. The Associated Press is not naming the parents to avoid identifying the daughters, who are now in their early 20s. Editor's Note:Gold and silver has been, at best, a frustrating trade. Exclusive to Kitco News, expert trader, Todd "Bubba" Horwitz, chief market strategist and founder of 'Bubba Trading provides a strategy investors can use in a range-bound gold price environment. Sign up before March 10 for the Kitco News Weekly Rundown newsletter to receive Horwitz's exclusive report and trading strategy. (Kitco News) - Canadas mining industry has something to brag about it has walked away with the title of the most attractive mining region in the world when it comes to investment, beating Australia in 2017, according to the Fraser Institutes annual global survey of mining executives. Canadas rankings are based on the combined score of all Canadian provinces and territories. The top ten regions in the Investment Attractiveness Index were: Finland, Saskatchewan, Nevada, Ireland, Western Australia, Quebec, Ontario, Chile, Arizona, and Alaska. But a closer look at Canadas provinces reveals that some of them actually fell down in the ranking, including Saskatchewan, which was in a first place in 2016 and dropped to the second place in 2017. Also, Manitoba, dropped out of the top ten list, while Ontario actually rose from the 18th to the seventh place. When considering how Canadian jurisdictions rank on the Investment Attractiveness Index, Canada continues to perform well; it surpassed Australia in 2017 to become the most attractive region in the world for investment. Three Canadian jurisdictionsSaskatchewan (2nd), Quebec (6th), and Ontario (7th) are all in the top 10 in terms of investment attractiveness, the survey said. Fraser Institutes survey, which was published on Thursday, is based on the sample of 360 responses from 91 jurisdictions. The survey is an attempt to assess how mineral endowments and public policy factors such as taxation and regulatory uncertainty affect exploration investment, the research stated. The survey also pointed out that overall investment attractiveness edged down in 2017 in comparison to the previous year. For example, all the jurisdictions in Australia ranked lower due to increasing tensions around government regulations. On the other hand, South America did better in 2017, with Chile back on the top ten list after falling to 39th place in 2016. In addition, Peru rose to the 19th from the 28th spot. The worst mining regions based on the index were: Guatemala, Kenya, Mendoza, Chubut, Mozambique, Bolivia, Venezuela, Romania, China, and Nicaragua. SHANGHAI, Feb 23 (Reuters) - China's Ministry of Finance auctioned 10 billion yuan ($1.58 billion) of 3-month bills in the interbank market on Friday at an average yield of 3.1299 percent, traders said. The auction yield was below Thursday's benchmark secondary market yield of 3.2154 percent for 3-month government bonds . For stories on Chinese debt issues, click on . ($1 = 6.3374 Chinese yuan) (Reporting by the Shanghai Newsroom; Editing by Sunil Nair) SHANGHAI, Feb 23 (Reuters) - China's insurance regulator said on Friday it will take over control of Anbang Insurance Group Co Ltd from Feb. 23 for one year. The move was announced in a post on the official website of the China Insurance Regulatory Commission. (Reporting by Judy Hua in Beijing and Engen Tham in Shanghai) 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. BEIJING, Feb 23 (Reuters) - China's trade with North Korea fell to $215.97 million in January, the lowest since at least June 2014, final trade numbers from the General Administration of Customs showed on Friday. China's exports to North Korea totaled $168.88 million in January compared with $257.73 million in December, while imports from North Korea were $47.09 million versus $54.68 million in December. (Reporting by Beijing Monitoring Desk; Editing by Christian Schmollinger) 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. By Lee Shin-hyung SEJONG, South Korea, Feb 23 (Reuters) - South Korea will resume the sale of 50-year treasury bonds this year after a cancelled plan late last year and expects to hold an auction next month, a vice finance minister told Reuters on Friday. South Korea launched the country's longest-maturity treasury bond in 2016 and planned to hold several more auctions last year. But the finance ministry scrapped the plan later in 2017 after an auction in March failed to draw sufficient demand. "The ministry has decided to issue 50-year treasury bonds this year, given high demand for long-term bonds in the market and the need for the government to secure a long-term financing tool," said Second Vice Finance Minister Kim Yong-jin in a written interview with Reuters. The ministry expects to hold an auction in the middle of March to sell the bonds, he said. The exact date and amount to be put up for sale would be decided closer to the date and based on a market survey, he added. (Writing by Choonsik Yoo; Editing by Biju Dwarakanath) HANOI, Feb 23 (Reuters) - Here's a snapshot of Vietnamese dong exchange rates in the official and unofficial markets, indicative SJC gold prices in Hanoi and interbank offered rates at 0409 GMT. February 23 USD/VND mid-point 22,443 USD/VND interbank 22,740/22,741 USD/VND unofficial 22,740/22,760 SJC gold (mln dong/tael) 36.89/37.04 Interbank offered rates Overnight 1.8-2.5 1 week 2.2-3.0 1 month 3.2-3.6 3 months 3.5-4.5 NOTE: The State Bank of Vietnam has begun setting the mid-point rate on daily basis as of Jan. 4, 2016, allowing dollar/dong transactions to move in a band of +/- 3 percent around the mid point. The dong's exchange rate against other currencies is not restricted by a band. Interbank offered rates are the latest indicative bid/ask prices, quoted from market sources. One tael is equivalent to 37.5 grams or 1.21 troy ounces. SJC gold prices are quoted by state-owned Saigon Jewelry Co. For more interbank rate fixings released at 0400 GMT, click on . For Vietnam market overview click on: Vietnam's bonds market auctions: Bonds auction results: (Reporting by Mai Nguyen) (Adds final pricing and deal size) By Jennifer Hughes HONG KONG/JAKARTA, Feb 23 (Reuters) - Indonesia has become the first Asian country to sell "green" bonds internationally in a $1.25 billion deal as one of the world's worst greenhouse gas emitters tapped into investor interest in climate-friendly investments. Globally, $155.5 billion of so-called green bonds were sold last year, according to the London-based Climate Bonds Initiative. But only a handful of governments have themselves sold such deals, where the proceeds are earmarked for investment in environmentally friendly projects. Indonesia on Friday sold $1.25 billion in five-year green Sukuk bonds - which means the deal conforms to Islamic finance norms as well. The deal carried a coupon of 3.75 percent compared with the 4.05 percent rate that bankers initially used as guidance for investors. Indonesia is considered one of the world's top emitters of greenhouse gases, particularly due to its regular devastating forest fires blamed on clearing land for agriculture. President Joko Widodo has committed to cut emissions by at least 29 percent by 2030 and approved a two-year extension to a moratorium on issuing new licences to use land designated as primary forest. Indonesia has also set targets to cut the use of dirty coal in energy and aims for renewables to make up nearly one-quarter of its energy mix by 2025 from around 12 percent at present, with around 1,800 MW of wind projects targeted for completion. But despite such commitments environmentalists say more needs to be done to meet its targets and prevent repeats of the massive forest fires in 2015, often blamed on the draining of peatland forests and land clearance for crops such as palm oil. Documentation for the new bonds said Indonesia had confirmed no financing would go to fossil-fuel based infrastructure, nor projects involving the burning of peat. But it did warn that some projects may still include "an element of deforestation." Global green bond issuance hit a record for the fifth consecutive year in 2017 and bankers expect further growth in the market this year. In Asia, Chinese and Indian companies have led the way in tapping the green market to finance environmentally friendly projects but governments had until now stayed away. Worldwide, countries to have sold sizeable amounts of green bonds include Poland - the first-ever - and France. Luky Alfirman, head of the Budget Financing and Risk Management office at Indonesia's Finance Ministry told reporters on Friday the proceeds from its green bonds would be used to finance projects such as renewable energy, green tourism and waste management. The government has also said it will take up more projects to address climate change mitigation and adaptation, which requires alternative financing. CIMB , Citigroup , Dubai Islamic Bank PJSC , HSBC and Abu Dhabi Islamic Bank were bookrunners on the deal. Indonesia also on Friday raised $1.75 billion selling a 10-year sukuk bond at the same time as the green deal. The longer-dated paper sold with a coupon of 4.4 percent, down from initial guidance of 4.7 percent. (Additional reporting by Fransiska Nangoy and Maikel Jefriando; Editing by Jacqueline Wong & Shri Navaratnam) (New throughout, adds chairman's comments on M&A, growth from investor presentation) By Susan Taylor TORONTO, Feb 22 (Reuters) - Barrick Gold on Thursday predicted lower gold production over the next decade, risking its rank as the world's biggest bullion producer, but executives insisted they will not make acquisitions simply to sate a call for growth. The Toronto-based company, whose output could be eclipsed this year by rival Newmont Mining Corp , considered a number of deals over the past year that offered growth, but passed on them all, said Chairman John Thornton. While growth is a "conundrum" which Barrick has failed to deliver, "we will not yield to the pressure to 'just find something' in order to 'grow'," he said at the outset of a three-hour webcast presentation. Barrick forecasts annual production of more than 4 million ounces of gold between 2023 and 2027, a steady view that contrasts with last week's market-rattling outlook for lower output and higher costs in the near term. For 2018, Barrick cut its forecast output to 4.5-5 million ounces of gold and predicted annual production of 4.2-4.6 million ounces from 2019 to 2022. Newmont expects to exceed that forecast, projecting 2018 production of 4.9-5.4 million ounces of gold and 4.6-5.1 million ounces annually through 2022. Still, Barrick flagged four projects that could add more than 1 million ounces to annual output starting in 2021, including three Nevada developments approved to proceed. Notably, the $300-$325 million Turquoise Ridge project will nearly double annual output, to more than 500,000 ounces, said Barrick, which owns 75 percent of the mine. Newmont owns the remaining 25 percent. The long-range forecast reflects potential gains from the Cortez Deep South, Goldrush and Turquoise Ridge mines and Robertson property in Nevada; Lagunas Norte in Peru; and Pueblo Viejo in the Dominican Republic. It does not include contribution from large-scale 'greenfield' projects: Alturas, Donlin Gold, a Norte Abierto joint venture, or Pascua-Lama. The long-stalled Pascua-Lama project does not currently meet Barrick's investment criteria and the company said it plans to seek a partner. Shandong Gold , which owns half of Barrick's Veladero mine in Argentina, has formed a working group with Barrick to study a potential partnership. Barrick also said Chief Operating Officer Richard Williams is stepping down to take on a new role focused on talks with Tanzania for the company's troubled Acacia Mining unit. Senior Vice President Greg Walker will be responsible for operations, Barrick said. The Toronto-based miner told Reuters the COO title does not exist at this time. (Reporting by Susan Taylor; Editing by Bernadette Baum, Paul Simao and David Gregorio) HONG KONG, Feb 23 (IFR) - Asian credits were firmer on Friday as the spike in U.S. Treasury yields took a breather after St Louis Fed President James Bullard warned that a "bunch of hikes" could turn Fed policy restrictive. Investment-grade credits in general tightened by 1bp-2bp, with long-dated bonds from the financial leasing and TMT sectors seeing strong buying interest, a Hong Kong-based trader said. Long-dated bonds from ICBC Leasing and CCB Leasing, which were heavily sold off in the weeks preceding Lunar New Year, have tightened 8bp-9bp since the start of this week. "The stabilisation of US Treasury yields, at least in the short-term, has boosted market sentiment," the trader said. The iTraxx Asia ex-Japan investment-grade index tightened marginally at 69.7bp/70.8bp. New issues priced overnight generally traded well. Indonesia's US$1.25bn 3.75% 5-year Green sukuk and US$1.75bn 10-year 4.40% sukuk, both priced at par, were quoted slightly above par at 100.10. The Green sukuk is the world's first Islamic Green bond from a sovereign issuer. Redco Properties' US$300m 364-day notes, priced at par to yield 6.375%, traded up to 100.30/100.35. Far East Horizon's 4.375% US$200m 5-year dollar bonds, priced at 99.827 to yield 4.414%, or Treasuries plus 175bp, were hovering at reoffer. Its Rmb630m (US$99.4m) 3-year Dim Sum bonds, priced at par to yield 4.90%, were quoted at 100.10/100.15. Bank of East Asia's bonds traded up slightly after the Hong Kong-based lender reported significantly improved 2017 annual results. Nomura said BEA's strong results demonstrated that much of its China-related woes are now behind it and that it would overweigh the bank's 5.5% AT1s and maintain a small overweight position on its 4% T2s. (Reporting by Carol Chan; Editing by Vincent Baby) Keywords: MARKETS ASIA DEBT/ SHANGHAI, Feb 23 (Reuters) - China has suspended publishing its volatility index following the recent stock market rout, as regulators step up efforts to curb speculative trading and shore up investor confidence. Publication of the SSE 50 ETF Volatility Index, the Chinese version of Wall Street's so-called fear gauge VIX , was suspended on Thursday due to a technical upgrade, a representative of the publisher, China Securities Index Co (CSI), said. There is no timetable for when the service will be resumed, she added. The index, which was based on SSE 50 ETF option, was also taken off the official website of the Shanghai Stock Exchange, a main shareholder of CSI. An exchange official said the bourse has increased scrutiny on those option traders who change hands frequently in an effort to curb speculation. The officials declined to be named as they are not authorized to talk to the media. China's blue-chip index CSI300 tumbled 12 percent over 10 sessions from on Jan. 29, suffering heavier losses than major U.S. stock indexes, whose sudden and sharp declines triggered the global equities rout. On Feb. 12, an affiliate of China's securities regulator encouraged major shareholders of domestically-listed firms to increase their holdings. And the official Shanghai Securities News reported on Friday that China's five state-backed mutual funds boosted their equity holdings during the latest slump, which saw volatility levels surge to one-year high. The reports of government backed intervention recalled memories of China's 2015 market crash and a subsequent massive state rescue, and come as more foreign investors are expected to buy into mainland stocks and bonds this year. Although overseas investors betting against a spike in volatility via VIX-linked derivatives were wiped out during the recent turmoil, China has no volatility-based derivative products. Nevertheless, investors have been embracing hedging instruments in the face of rising uncertainty. The trading volume of options on 50ETF totaled 28.4 million contracts in January, more than double the 13.5 million last September. The CSI300 index futures , which can be used by traders for risk-hedging or speculative purposes, saw its trading volume surge in recent weeks. (Reporting by Samuel Shen and John Ruwitch; Editing by Kim Coghill) PARIS, Feb 23 (Reuters) - Credit Agricole will inject 1.2 billion euros ($1.48 billion) in its French retail unit LCL after the European Central Bank required it to recapitalise the business, French newspaper Le Monde said on Friday, citing an internal message. LCL declined to immediately respond to a request for comment and Credit Agricole was not immediately available for comment. ($1 = 0.8133 euros) (Reporting by Yann Le Guernigou and Maya Nikolaeva, Editing by Dominique Vidalon) 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. BERLIN, Feb 23 (Reuters) - A group of high-ranking experts will next week discuss the possibility of introducing regulation of crypto-currencies, European Commission Vice-President Valdis Dombrovskis said on Friday. Speaking during a visit to Berlin, Dombrovskis also said he did not see any threat to Latvia's creditworthiness in view of a probe into whether its central bank chief accepted a bribe, allegations Ilmars Rimsevics has denied as his lawyers fight for him to keep his job. "It is more a question of damage to the reputation," he said, adding that the European Union was looking at the issue. (Reporting by Tom Koerkemeier; Writing by Michelle Martin; Editing by Paul Carrel) HELSINKI, Feb 23 (Reuters) - Finnish sauna heater maker Harvia has what it takes to become a listed company, its chief executive said on Friday, adding that sales grew and profitability improved last year. "Listing is a real option for us, eventually ... in terms of operation, reporting and so forth, we are ready," CEO Tapio Pajuharju told Reuters by telephone. "But there's no timetable for that, and the owners might have other options in mind as well." Pajuharju denied local media reports that Harvia, one of the leading companies in the global sauna market, was due to present a flotation plan on Friday. Private equity firm Capman , which bought a 72 percent stake in the company in 2014, was not available for a comment. Harvia had sales of 50 million euros ($61.5 million) and earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation of about 12 million euros in 2016. Pajuharju declined to disclose 2017 figures, but said sales grew and profitability improved. Finnish alcoholic drinks company Altia said on Friday it planned to list on the Helsinki bourse next month. ($1 = 0.8128 euros) (Reporting by Jussi Rosendahl, editing by David Evans) ATHENS, Feb 23 (Reuters) - Greece will sell 875 million euros ($1.08 billion) of six-month treasury bills on February 28 to refinance a maturing issue, debt agency PDMA said on Friday. Athens rolled over six-month T-bills last month, with the paper priced to yield 1.13 percent. In a rollover, T-bill holders renew their positions instead of getting paid on the maturing paper they hold. The settlement date of the new T-bills will be March 2. Only primary dealers will be allowed to participate and no commission is to be paid. Primary dealers can submit non-competitive bids for up to an additional 30 percent of the auctioned amount until March 1, PDMA said. ($1 = 0.8121 euros) (Reporting by George Georgiopoulos) MILAN, Feb 23 (Reuters) - Carel, an Italian company manufacturing air conditioning and refrigeration control systems, plans to list its shares on the Milan bourse by the end of June, its co-chief executive told Reuters on Friday. Co-CEO Francesco Nalini said that the family-owned company had picked the banks to lead the initial public offering (IPO) but was still discussing details of the offer. "We aim to list in the first half of this year" Nalini said in a phone interview with Reuters. Carel, based in the north-eastern city of Padua, had 2016 revenues of 231 million euros, of which around 80 percent from outside of Italy. Core profit stood at 43 million euros. (Reporting by Elisa Anzolin, writing by Giulio Piovaccari, editing by Valentina Za) RIGA, Feb 23 (Reuters) - The Latvian central bank said on Friday it had loaned 297.2 million euros ($365.62 million) in emergency assistance this week to troubled lender ABLV. U.S. authorities have accused ABLV of engaging in large-scale money laundering for Russian clients, which the bank denies. Fearing U.S. sanctions, depositors have withdrawn around 600 million euros from the bank, forcing the European Central Bank to halt all payments to prevent a collapse of the lender. ($1 = 0.8129 euros) (Reporting by Gederts Gelzis; Editing by Gareth Jones) 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. JOHANNESBURG, Feb 23 (Reuters) - More than 500 workers will embark on a strike on Monday at Koornfontein Mine, which is owned by the Gupta family, over concerns of nonpayment of salaries, South Africa's National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) said on Friday. Workers this week downed tools at Optimum Coal, another Gupta-owned mine, concerned over the non payment of their salaries. India's Bank of Baroda, which counts the family's operations as clients, is leaving South Africa. The NUM said the workers had not been paid, likely due to the Baroda pullout. (Reporting by Tanisha Heiberg; Editing by James Macharia) 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. ZURICH, Feb 23(Reuters) - The Swiss blue-chip SMI was seen opening barely changed at 8,965 points on Friday, according to premarket indications by bank Julius Baer . Here are some of the main factors that may affect Swiss stocks: SWISS RE The world's second-biggest reinsurer reported better-than-expected annual net income despite huge claims during a disaster-heavy 2017 and said it was "carefully assessing" an investment approach from Japan's Softbank . Shares indicated up 1.4 percent. For more news see SIKA Sika reported better-than-expected 2017 net profit as France's Saint-Gobain said it remained confident it would win its protracted takeover battle for the Swiss construction chemicals maker. TEMENOS Temenos's planned 1.4 billion pound ($1.95 billion)takeover of financial software peer Fidessa Group will enable faster sales growth at the British company, Temenos Chief Executive David Arnott told Reuters. TEZOS The president of a Swiss foundation that conducted a $232 million online fundraiser for the embattled Tezos cryptocurrency project has stepped down, the foundation said in a statement on Thursday. COMPANY STATEMENTS * Liechtensteinische Landesbank AG to acquire 100 percent of shares of LB (Swiss) Investment Ltd * Implenia AG is developing and building "rue du temple" project in Rolle worth around 80 million francs * Basilea Pharmaceutica AG reports clinical phase 3 study start with antibiotic Ceftobiprole in skin infections * Wisekey International Holding AG sees 2018 revenue up 38 percent * Vontobel completes sale of Liechtenstein subsidiary to Kaiser Partner Privatbank * The Swiss Takeover Commission ruled that a bank consortium's financing package including pledging of shares in Schmolz + Bickenbach AG did not trigger a mandatory takeover offer. ECONOMY (Reporting by Zurich newsroom) Daily Swiss stock market report in German................ All SMI constituent stocks............................ News on major Swiss stock price moves.................. FTSE Eurotop 300 index................................ DJ STOXX index........................................ Top 10 STOXX sectors............................. Top 10 EUROSTOXX sectors........................ Top 10 Eurotop 300 sectors....................... Top 25 European pct gainers... , losers... Swiss mid-cap index SMI futures Swiss all-share index Market statistics Swiss market digest Sector overview All Swiss news Swiss research news All equity news INTERNET ADDRESSES: Swiss Exchange / Eurex STOXX Ltd SPEED GUIDES: )) Keywords: MARKETS SWISS STOCKS/ JOHANNESBURG, Feb 23 (Reuters) - South Africa sold 1.8 billion rand ($155 million) worth of three-month Treasury bills on Friday, at an average yield of 7.17 percent compared with 7.21 percent last week, central bank data showed. The bid-to-cover ratio rose to 3.4 from 2.9. Auction date: 23/02/2018 Settlement date: 28/02/2018 Days 91 182 273 364 Amount received (R'bln) 6.108 4.928 7.985 5.875 Amount on offer (R'bln) 1.800 2.000 2.100 2.300 Amount allotted (R'bln) 1.800 2.000 2.100 2.300 Bid-to-cover ratio 3.4 2.5 3.8 2.6 Avg discount rate (pct) 7.04 7.05 6.93 6.78 Average yield (pct) 7.17 7.3 7.3 7.27 ($1 = 11.5981 rand) (Reporting by Vuyani Ndaba; Editing by James Macharia) 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. Feb 23 (Reuters) - British housebuilder Persimmon has scaled back potential rewards under its management bonus plan following widespread criticism of a scheme that could have netted bosses more than 200 million pounds ($279 million) from share options. The company's chairman and the head of its pay committee quit last year, under fire from British media and some investors for failing to reform the scheme. Excessive corporate pay has attracted public anger since the financial crisis and Prime Minister Theresa May has denounced as irrational and unhealthy the yawning gap between the amounts paid to bosses and average workers. Persimmon, Britain's second-biggest housebuilder, introduced a long-term incentive plan in 2012 that gave share options to management which they are able to sell once the company has returned a set level of cash and dividends to investors. The company said on Friday it had made changes to the 2012 plan's entitlements for chief executive Jeff Fairburn, finance chief Mike Killoran and managing director Dave Jenkinson. It said they would get a reduced number of shares and the date at which they could sell some of the stock had been pushed out. All three executives had also agreed to cap the value of any future exercise of the remaining entitlement to a maximum value equal to 29 pounds per share, it added. "It is clear that the absence of a cap ... has given rise to the potential for pay-outs which, when triggered in full, will be significantly larger and paid earlier than might reasonably have been expected at the time the scheme was originally put to shareholders," Persimmon said. Persimmon shares have risen 524 percent since the beginning of 2012 and were last up 0.7 percent at 24.72 pounds. "Even after this reduction, in our view the scale of the remuneration on offer under this plan is still extremely generous given the government's support for the sector through the 'Help To Buy' scheme," Ashley Hamilton Claxton, head of responsible investment at Royal London Asset Management, said in an email. "We hope the company and shareholders can now draw a line under this issue, allowing management to devote their focus solely to the running of the company," he added. Fairburn said last week he would set up a charitable trust after criticism of the plan that could have seen him receive share options worth over 100 million pounds. ($1 = 0.7171 pounds) <^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Persimmon shares soar, bringing bumper rewards ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^> (Reporting by Noor Zainab Hussain in Bengaluru; Additional reporting by Ben Martin in London; Editing by Mark Potter) LONDON, Feb 23 (Reuters) - Prime Minister Theresa May had a positive meeting about Brexit with her ministers, where they agreed upon the basis of her forthcoming speech on the UK's future relationship with the European Union, her spokesman said on Friday. "It was a very positive meeting and a step forward, agreeing the basis of the Prime Minister's speech on our future relationship," the spokesman said, following the Thursday meeting aimed at resolving differences over strategy in her government. "Discussions will now take place at full cabinet and you can expect the Prime Minister to deliver her speech next Friday," he added. (Reporting by Paul Sandle,; Writing by Alistair Smout; editing by Stephen Addison) (Adds details, background) By Stefano Bernabei ROME, Feb 23 (Reuters) - Banks in the European Union will have eight years to write down bad debts backed by collateral under proposals from the European Commission designed to tackle their 759 billion euros ($933.19 billion) in soured loans, a source familiar with the matter said on Friday. The source, confirming a press report in Italian daily Il Messaggero, said the percentage of writedowns required every year once a loan is classed as impaired would rise gradually over time. High levels of bad debts, a legacy of the euro zone's debt crisis, are blamed for holding back lending in the EU and for keeping the cost of capital high for banks, slowing their recovery and depressing profitability. The Commission, which is expected to publish its proposal on the new bad loan criteria on March 13, declined to comment. "In March, we will present a whole package of further proposals to help banks reduce non-performing loans and prevent their accumulation in future," the Commission's Vice-President Valdis Dombrovskis told a conference in Berlin on Friday. For unsecured loans, banks would be required to write them down by 35 percent in the first year and for the remaining 65 percent of their face value in the second, the source said. According to the draft, when a loan is only partly covered by the value of its collateral it would be considered as secured for that part and as unsecured for the rest, the source also said. The European Central Bank is also working on a new set of rules over banks' bad debts to complement guidelines issued last year. The ECB's guidelines, unlike the Commission's, are not mandatory but bank supervisors will expect banks to comply and reserve the right to enforce compliance if a bank does not justify any deviation. The ECB's proposed new rules, which would apply to new bank loans turning sour, require banks to write down bad loans backed by collateral in seven years and unsecured loans in two years with writedowns split equally over the years. The ECB proposal, which was heavily criticised, particularly in Italy, is expected to be published on March 14. ($1 = 0.8133 euros) (Additional reporting by Francesco Guarascio in Brussels, Huw Jones in London. Writing by Giulio Piovaccari. Editing by Giselda Vagnoni and Jane Merriman) (Adds detail, quotes, context) MOSCOW, Feb 23 (Reuters) - The board of En+ Group on Friday accepted the resignation of Oleg Deripaska as president and said the company, which manages the Russian billionaire' s aluminium and hydropower operations, had no plan for an equity offering in 2018. En+ said it had accepted Deripaska's resignation as president and appointed him as a non-executive director. CEO Maxim Sokov will become president and be replaced by Vladislav Soloviev, CEO of aluminium producer Rusal . Part of the management shuffle was disclosed by Rusal, which said Soloviev would move to president of Rusal and be replaced as CEO by Chief Financial Officer Alexandra Bouriko. En+ owns a 48 percent stake in Rusal. "The changes to the group's management team are aimed at increasing En+ Group's efficiency and will provide for improved synergy between the Energy and Metals Segments of the Group," En+ said in a statement. Deripaska was one of dozens of billionaires placed on a U.S. government list of Russian oligarchs last month. While it is not a sanctions list, Western banks may be reluctant to deal with Russian companies whose owners are on the list. It also said it had no plans this year for a shares offering. Three sources told Reuters in mid February that En+ had invited international banks to pitch for the sale of $1 billion worth of shares. "In response to recent speculation in the media regarding a possible follow-on offering of securities by En+ Group, the board of directors of the group resolved that the company has no plan or intention to pursue an equity offering to the market in 2018," it said. (Reporting by Polina Devitt; Editing by Robin Pomeroy) (Adds comments, background) HELSINKI, Feb 23 (Reuters) - Finland's state-owned alcoholic drinks company Altia said on Friday it was preparing to list its shares on the Helsinki bourse in March to boost growth. Known for its Koskenkorva vodka brand, Altia generated sales of 359 million euros ($442 million) and reported an operating margin of 7.3 percent last year. It has recently acquired cognac brands Larsen, Renault and Xante. "We have turned the company towards profitable growth ... This is a stable market and we have a strong position in it. We also plan to pay good dividends," CEO Pekka Tennila told a news conference. The flotation is part of the centre-right coalition's plan to sell shares in state-owned companies. The government said it would retain a stake of 34 percent after the listing, but declined to give any estimate on valuation. Privatisation is a sensitive topic in Finland and pressure from labour unions has limited sales in recent years. The state owns stakes in 14 of the Helsinki market's listed firms, as well as 55 other companies. The Altia plan follows parliament's decision in 2014 to scrap a clause obliging the state to hold a majority stake in the firm. ($1 = 0.8129 euros) (Reporting by Jussi Rosendahl; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman and Edmund Blair) * HKEX CEO wants to ease restrictions on secondary listings in city * HKEX to also allow some firms to list with weighted voting rights (Adds comments by HKEX CEO, background) HONG KONG, Feb 23 (Reuters) - Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing (HKEX) , the city's exchange operator, said on Friday it plans to offer concessions to U.S. and UK-listed companies considering a secondary listing in Hong Kong. The plans are part of the exchange's efforts to woo blockbuster Chinese companies to its market, including home tech giants such as Alibaba Group Holding and Baidu that are listed in New York. "We still have a lot of restrictions on companies that are listed in other jurisdictions (for secondary listing in Hong Kong) and we want to make changes to that," said Charles Li, chief executive of HKEX. On Friday, the exchange published details of the proposed rule changes which are part of a package that will also allow some companies to list with weighted voting rights that give greater power to founding shareholders. So-called dual-class shares have been a contentious topic in Hong Kong since the city's strict adherence to a one-share-one-vote principle was deemed to be the factor that lost it the $25 billion float of Alibaba, which instead listed in New York in 2014. (Reporting by Sumeet Chatterjee and Jennifer Hughes; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman) (Adds detail) RIGA, Feb 23 (Reuters) - Latvia's central bank provided an emergency loan to troubled lender ABLV on Friday, offering it a potential lifeline as a European Central Bank deadline approaches for the bank to present a credible survival plan. Latvia, a member of the euro zone that borders Russia, has come under increasing scrutiny recently over allegations that it is a conduit for illicit financial activities involving Russia, Ukraine and even North Korea. ABLV, the nation's third-biggest lender, has in effect been shut since the beginning of the week, when the ECB ordered a payment moratorium to prevent an exodus of deposits and the lender's collapse. The Bank of Latvia said it has agreed to lend ABLV 297.2 million euros ($366 million) in emergency liquidity assistance, which includes a 97.5 million euro loan it provided earlier this week. This relatively expensive form of funding may help ABLV stabilise its operations and eventually reopen. ABLV's troubles began last week when U.S. authorities accused it of engaging in large-scale money laundering for Russian clients, which the bank denies. Fearing U.S. sanctions, depositors have withdrawn around 600 million euros from the bank. The ECB has given the bank until Friday to provide it with details of how it plans to survive if the payment moratorium is lifted. ABLV said it has plenty of collateral to fund its operations and some of its clients have committed to maintaining their deposits. But its deputy chief executive admitted that winding down the bank was a possible outcome. Latvian Finance Minister Dana Reizniece-Ozola said the state would not step in to rescue ABLV if it were about to collapse as it is not critical to the country's economy. "ABLV is not regarded as a systemic bank, which means the government would not rescue it because its exposure to the Latvian economy is low," Reizniece-Ozola said. "There is some systemic importance (but) ... it is not crucial or critical." The bank, like many others in Latvia, has sizable deposits from foreign clients, many from Russia and Ukraine. Indeed, around 40 percent of all bank deposits in Latvia are from non-residents, official data shows. ($1 = 0.8129 euros) (Reporting by Gederts Gelzis; Writing by Balazs Koranyi; Editing by Hugh Lawson) (Adds union to strike at Koornfontein Mine Monday) JOHANNESBURG, Feb 23 (Reuters) - South Africa's National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) said on Friday its members had not been paid on time at the Optimum coal mine, owned by the Gupta family, and would not return to work at the operation which has started business rescue proceedings. Separately, the union said more than 500 workers will strike on Monday at Koornfontein Mine, which is also owned by the Guptas, over concerns of nonpayment of salaries. India's Bank of Baroda, which counts the Gupta family's operations as clients, has pulled the plug on its South African business. South Africa's main commercial banks have cut all ties with the Guptas, citing reputational risk. NUM spokesman Livhuwani Mammburu said the union's members were concerned the nonpayment of salaries was linked to the Baroda pullout as it was the last bank to service Gupta companies. "The guys were not paid and they want a meeting with the CEO because they are concerned about the business rescue proceedings which they were not informed about," he said, referring to workers at Optimum Coal. He added that the workers would remain on strike until they are paid and they get clarity on the mine's future. Sbusiso Mahlangu, NUM Branch Secretary at Koornfontein, said: "We will down tools this coming Monday and we will not go back to work until our salaries are paid." The Guptas, who are Zuma's business associates, have been accused of using their political connections to win state contracts and influence cabinet appointments. Zuma and the Gupta brothers deny wrongdoing. The Optimum Coal mine east of Johannesburg supplies the fossil fuel to the Hendrina power station, part of the network of state-run utility Eskom which provides virtually all of the electricity for Africa's most industrialised economy. Eskom said on Thursday that coal had been diverted from other mines to supply the power station. Koornfontein is an underground mine located south east of Johannesburg in the Mpumalanga province, which also provides coal to Eskom's Komati power station. (Reporting by Ed Stoddard and Tanisha Heiberg; Editing by James Macharia and David Evans) WASHINGTON, Feb 23 (Reuters) - The White House said on Friday that President Donald Trump had not yet made a final decision about whether to impose steep global tariffs on steel imports. "No final decisions have been made. As with every decision he makes, the security of the American people and the American economy will be the president's primary concerns while he considers his potential options," White House spokesman Raj Shah said. "President Trump is committed to achieving fair and reciprocal trade relationships that protect the American worker and grow our economy," he said. The Commerce Department on Feb. 16 recommended that Trump impose stiff curbs on steel imports from China and other countries and offered the three options to the president. (Reporting by Jeff Mason; Editing by Sandra Maler) By Yoon Ja-young The government plans to appeal to the World Trade Organization (WTO) following its loss in a dispute over Korea's import restriction on fisheries from Fukushima, Japan. "The government determined we should appeal (the WTO's ruling) to protect public health and safety," the trade ministry noted in a press release Friday. "The imports restriction will be in place regardless of the WTO ruling, and the government will make its utmost efforts for food security, preventing radiation-contaminated foods from being placed on our tables." The Switzerland-based organization disclosed its panel ruling on Thursday, regarding Japan's complaints over Korea's imposition of import bans and additional testing and certification requirements for radionuclide content following the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant accident on Japan's northeastern coast in March 2011. The import ban applied to 50 kinds of fishery products from eight prefectures of Japan: Aomori, Chiba, Fukushima, Gunma, Ibaraki, Iwate, Miyagi and Tochigi. Back then, China and Taiwan stopped all food imports from prefectures around Fukushima. Following the 2013 announcement by Tokyo Electric Power that radiation-contaminated water was leaked as well as growing public voices that Korea should expand its import ban like other countries, the 2013-17 Park Geun-hye administration imposed a blanket import ban on all Japanese fishery products from the eight prefectures. Japan, however, challenged Korea's import ban and additional testing requirements as being inconsistent with provisions of the Agreement on the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures (SPS Agreement). The WTO panel found Korea's 2011 additional testing requirements and product-specific import bans in the following year were "neither discriminatory nor more trade-restrictive than required when adopted." However, it ruled the maintenance of these measures as well as the adoption and maintenance of the 2013 additional testing requirements was inconsistent with the SPS Agreement, failing to comply with transparency obligations, being discriminatory and restricting trade more than required. Both Korea and Japan can appeal to an appellate body regarding the panel decision within 60 days. The WTO should come up with a ruling on the appeal within three months. The government said the import restrictions will be maintained until the completion of the WTO dispute settlement procedure. If Korea loses the appeal, it gets up to 15 months to execute the WTO's ruling. This means fish from Fukushima may be on Korean tables as early as 2020. Korea Radiation Watch, a local NGO, strongly opposed the WTO ruling. "The Japanese government, which illegally discharged the radiation-contaminated water, is responsible for the import restriction," it noted in a media release. "It is related with public health. The government should actively confront the ruling." Ivanka Trump, daughter of the U.S. President Donald Trump / Yonhap By Kim Bo-eun, Choi Ha-young Ivanka Trump, daughter and adviser to U.S. President Donald Trump, reiterated a maximum pressure campaign against North Korea, in a meeting with South Korean President Moon Jae-in, Friday. She said Washington and Seoul "reaffirmed commitment to a maximum pressure campaign to ensure that the Korean Peninsula is denuclearized," ahead of a dinner hosted by Moon at Cheong Wa Dae. "We continue to reaffirm our joint values and strategic cooperation as partners and allies," she said. Ivanka leads the U.S. delegation which arrived in Seoul earlier in the day, to attend the Games' closing ceremony on Sunday. The delegation includes Senator James Risch, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Allison Hooker, a National Security Council (NSC) official specializing in Korean affairs. Cheong Wa Dae accommodated the dinner for Ivanka, who is known to observe dietary laws of the Jewish faith. Adherents do not eat shellfish or pork and keep dairy and meat products separate. Ivanka is set to spend the remainder of her four-day visit in PyeongChang, where she will watch events involving Americans, cheer on athletes and attend Sunday's closing ceremony. Meanwhile, there are expectations of possible contact between Washington and Pyongyang on the sidelines of the Olympics. North Korea's Kim Yong-chol, head of the Workers' Party of Korea's United Front Department and Ri Son-gwon, chairman of the Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of the Fatherland, will attend the ceremony. They will arrive on Sunday for a three-day visit. Although the Trump and Moon administrations claim there are no plans for meetings between U.S. and North Korean delegates, attention is focusing on possible contact. U.S. President Donald Trump / Reuters By Kim Jae-kyoung Is U.S. President Donald Trump retaliating against South Korean President Moon Jae-in for pursuing pro-China and North Korea policies? Or is it simply part of Trump's "America First" strategy to protect American manufacturers, including its own steelmakers? Following a series of U.S. government trade attacks on Korean companies, policymakers here as well as the Korean public are scratching their heads over why the Trump administration is taking a harsher stance on South Korea, a long-time ally. Market analysts said that what's happening is the result of a mixture of three factors Trump's "America First" policy, South Korea's vulnerable position in trade, and Moon's ambivalent attitude toward the U.S. "This (Moon's ambivalent attitude) may be a reason, but I think more broadly Trump wants to show that he is being tough on trading partners that enjoy a surplus with the U.S.," Mauro, Guillen, director of the Lauder Institute at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, told The Korea Times. In his view, why the U.S. is targeting South Korean firms is because the country is an easier target to attack. "Unlike China, Germany and Japan, Korea is a more vulnerable country," he said. "Trump does not want to upset China any more, Germany is pivotal in Europe, and he gets along very well with Japan's Prime Minister." Guillen thinks that Trump is also trying to cater to his voters and supporters. "Remember that there are two audiences for his actions. One is Korea and Asia, and the other is his domestic base of support in the U.S.," he said. Independent economist Andy Xie based in Shanghai echoed the view. "Trump has no strategy. It is just to impress his voters." "South Korea is vulnerable because it doesn't have much room for retaliation. It is just an easy target," he added. In a report released a week ago, the U.S. Department of Commerce outlined an array of recommendations Trump could take to protect American steel producers, which includes a 53 percent tariff on all steel products from 12 countries, including South Korea. Korea was the only traditional ally to be included on the list of 12 countries. Canada, which is the biggest steel exporter to the U.S., as well as Japan and Germany were excluded. The move came after Trump recently signed safeguard measures against Korean firms slapping 50 percent tariffs on washers exceeding a 1.2 million quota per year. Antonio Fatas, a professor of economics at INSEAD's Singapore Campus, said that Trump has started translating his protectionist speech into actions by picking on a few goods and on a few countries. Asked why those goods and countries are being singled out, he said, "I guess it serves a certain purpose to the interest groups _ whether this is someone inside the administration or someone outside." "Is he hitting South Korea more because of its stance with North Korea? I doubt it but I must admit I cannot rule it out either." Around the PyeongChang Winter Olympics, there are concerns that Moon is too keen to improve inter-Korean ties even at the risk of jeopardizing relations with the U.S. Fatas called on the Moon administration to be realistic about the Trump administration to come up with proper measures. "This is the reality of the Trump administration chaotic policies that might not have a clear strategic goal but are just the outcome of some poorly designed process," he said. US steel industry uncompetitive' Describing Trump's tariff measures as "foolish," some experts said that such actions will be negative for the U.S. economy and consumers in the long run. "I think the consequences of these proposed measures will be more damaging to the U.S. than the status quo," said James Rooney, professor of international finance at Sogong University. "Therefore I view them as either foolish or misguided. Or they are simply negotiation postures and bluster for political purposes," he said. Rooney has had long experience and knowledge of the steel industries of various countries, particularly the U.S., Japan, Korea and China. "Basically at a fundamental level these tariff actions can only hurt the U.S. industries and consumers by raising the prices of these raw materials and finished goods and reducing their availability on their domestic market," he said. From Rooney's perspective, the U.S. steel industry is fundamentally uncompetitive and has been now for many decades, even before POSCO was ever created. "It has failed to modernize and reach the production economies of scale that are vital to competitiveness in such a high fixed-cost industry," he said. He pointed out that if the concern is strategic supply, then it is better to focus on developing and supporting industrial competitiveness rather than protecting and thus promoting inefficiency. "Putting tariffs on imported raw materials and finished goods only worsens the situation for the consumers in the target market whilst doing nothing to foster efficiency so that vital industries will be there in a time of strategic need," he said. Any solutions? President Moon has few options to fight back against Trump's protectionist measures. He can either enrich communication with the U.S. or take Trump's tariff actions to the World Trade Organization (WTO). "South Korean officials should continue to talk to their U.S. counterparts and explain why protectionism is not a good option in the long run," Guillen said. "I see no other way of dealing with this problem." Troy Stangarone, senior director at the Korea Economic Institute (KEI), said that Moon needs to raise these issues with the WTO even if it takes time to reach a final decision. "The case will be important in setting the rules of the road going forward since the Trump administration is expanding its definition of national security," he said. By Kim Jae-heun A lower court in Seoul made a not-guilty ruling Thursday on behalf of a former soldier charged for sexual contact with another male colleague, the first such ruling on gay sex. The Seoul Northern District Court judged a reserve lieutenant innocent. The soldier had been indicted by army prosecutors for engaging in sexual activity with another serviceman, saying it took place under mutual consent. Military law stipulates homosexual activity can be punished despite consensus, upon which the military prosecution indicted the lieutenant last June. According to the prosecution, the former officer had consensual sexual relations six times with another lieutenant from a different unit from September 2016 to February last year. Under military law, those found guilty can be subject to up to two years of imprisonment. However, the civilian court said the military criminal law banning and punishing any type of consensual sex is an infringement of individual privacy and freedom as well as a soldier's self-determination. Furthermore, the court added the sexual relationship was mutual and it saw no violation of what the army argues is an act against "healthy life and military discipline." The court particularly pointed out such an act that has been conducted privately has no danger of directly damaging military discipline or compromising fighting power. "It is appropriate to interpret that the article of military criminal law only applies when one soldier abuses his power to force anal sex or any kind of molestation on another soldier," the court judged. The Center for Military Human Rights Korea welcomed the court's ruling, saying it is the first time in 70 years that a defendant charged with consensual homosexual activity received a verdict of not guilty. The military law punishing homosexual activity between soldiers was enacted in 1948. The lieutenant's case came to light during a military crackdown on gay soldiers last April. The controversial investigation accused 22 soldiers of homosexuality and investigated them. The lieutenant was discharged from the military during the prosecution's investigation and has been on trial in a civilian court. In total, the military court found seven soldiers guilty of homosexual activity last year as a result of the investigation. The National Assemly buidling where legislators are debating a constitutional amendment. / Korea Times file By Kim Ji-soo When the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympic Games wind down soon, Koreans can anticipate another sports-like political drama to unfurl, over a possible constitutional amendment. The current Constitution, established in 1987 amid the culmination of the democratic movement, stands out above all for enabling the people to select the president. It also limits the presidential tenure to a single term. At the time, the amendment was a big step forward, as massive democratic street protests pushed the authoritarian regime to finally allow free presidential elections. The recent calls for another constitutional amendment have been compelling. The candlelit protests that culminated in the impeachment of former President Park Geun-hye drove home the point that presidential powers should be more fiercely checked. In last May's presidential election, candidates including the eventual winner President Moon Jae-in pledged to amend the Constitution in June. The President further advocated it in his New Year's address. The major political parties are debating the revision and promoting their stances at the National Assembly in Seoul and across the nation. The Democratic Party of Korea has released its amendment draft, which includes, among others, two four-year presidential terms and memorializing the candlelit protests. The opposition Liberty Korea Party (LKP) is still mulling over their draft, but word is they are proposing a presidential system with more separation of powers or even a dual-executive system. "We ask the LKP to put forth their amendment bill so we can work on it together with both versions on the table," said Baek Hae-ryun, spokeswoman of the Democratic Party of Korea. Joo Kwang-deok, a legislator with the LKP, agreed with the need to amend the Constitution but not its timing. "The legislators are one in the idea that the Constitution needs to be revised toward restricting the "imperialistic" power of the president that had promoted all the ills last year. This issue of revising the Constitution is important, and we should therefore take our time on it," Joo said. LKP floor leader Kim Seong-tae on Thursday put a more definitive date on the table, telling Yonhap News Agency the party prefers a referendum in October. The political and public consensus for the revision of the Constitution is at an all-time high. The Feb. 12-13 survey conducted by the vernacular Kyunghyang Shinmun and the polling company Hankook Research showed 71.6 percent of 1,000 respondents agree the amendment is required. Also the majority favored a presidential system. This result comes as a mild surprise, as the constituents have witnessed through contemporary Korean history that constitutional amendments often resulted in an extension of autocratic rule. Most notable was the Yushin Constitution of 1972, which installed then-President Park Chung-hee, father to the impeached former President Park Geun-hye, as president for life. According to Chung Jin-min, professor of political science at Myongji University in Seoul, constituents no longer harbor such negative perceptions of constitutional amendments. Chung however remained skeptical as to whether a referendum could be held in June together with the local elections. "It's hard to say, at this point, but it may well be difficult to meet the deadline of doing it simultaneously with the June local elections," Chung said. Within the National Assembly's special committee, there is a consensus on amending the Constitution. "But there are differences in just how broad or deep the amendment should be and when an amendment plan can be put forth for a referendum," a National Assembly official familiar with the special committee said without giving his name. To further push the Assembly toward constitutional reform, the Moon Jae-in administration has created a special advisory council under the Presidential Commission on Policy Planning to collect public opinions on the issue. On Monday, it opened a website asking for views on various issues, such as giving legislative power to local governments and enhancing people's basic rights. After collecting the people's opinions, the council will report its proposed revision bill to President Moon, who is expected to move it to the National Assembly for a vote on March 20. "Since 1987, Korea has neither held a public discussion nor set a timeline for a constitutional amendment, so I think this holds significance," said Ha Seung-soo, chief of the Coalition for Proportional Democracy and a deputy on the presidential special advisory council. "Although the council's stint will be short, the process is public, in contrast with previous amendments that political heavyweights discussed behind the scenes." Chung of Myongji University suggested Korea can take an incremental approach to amending the Constitution such as changing not so necessarily the government structure but for example increasing the quota of proportional representative legislators within the current presidential system. "All types of government structure have merits and demerits. We need to choose what befits Korean society," Chung said. What is clear is the National Assembly needs the approval of two-thirds of the registered legislators of any constitutional revision bill before presenting it for national referendum, regardless of whether the bill is pushed by the President or the Assembly. The opposition Liberal Korea Party holds 116 seats, more than one-third of the 293-seat National Assembly. By Lee Min-hyung President Moon Jae-in will touch on the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula during a scheduled meeting with Pyongyang's highest-ranking delegation at the Olympic closing ceremony, Sunday, Moon's aides said Friday. Marking the closing of the PyeongChang Winter Olympics, the delegation led by Kim Yong-chol, vice chairman of the regime's Central Committee of the Workers' Party of Korea, will visit Seoul and the Olympic host city for three days. This marks the second time President Moon will holds talk with North Korean delegates during the Olympics. Two weeks ago, Kim Yo-jong, the younger sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, delivered her brother's hope for an inter-Korean summit in Pyongyang, during a luncheon meeting with Moon. Neither side discussed sensitive issues - such as the North's missile launches and nuclear provocations - at the gathering. For the upcoming meeting, however, Moon is expected to deliver his demand for the regime to engage in dialogue with the United States concerning his ultimate goal of building a "nuclear-free" peninsula. "The goal of the South Korean government is to pave the way for Washington and Pyongyang to have talks on denuclearization," a Cheong Wa Dae official said. "Toward that end, we need to contact the North more frequently and persuade the regime to open dialogue with the U.S. This will also allow us to discuss the details of the North's nuclear issues." The presidential office hopes to take advantage of this rare peace momentum, seeking to extend the ongoing reconciliatory inter-Korean relations for a longer time even after the Olympics. In recent weeks, the North has shown no sign of provoking the South with military or missile threats, which the regime said was aimed at helping the South host a peaceful Winter Olympics. President Moon also welcomed the thaw in bilateral relations, paying special attention to the North Korean delegations. Moon participated in a series of inter-Korean engagements, including a concert by the North's musical performance team. The main opposition Liberty Korea Party stepped up its criticism of the government's decision to accept the delegation, as Kim Yong-chol is known as the mastermind of the sinking of the South Korean Navy's Cheonan corvette in 2010. "It is unacceptable for the government to invite such a war criminal for the closing event of the peaceful Olympics," said Rep. Kim Sung-tae, the party's floor leader, while holding a press conference in front of Cheong Wa Dae. By Javier Solana MUNICH Multi-polarity is back, and with it strategic rivalry among the great powers. The re-emergence of China and the return of Russia to the forefront of global politics are two of the most salient international dynamics of the century thus far. During Donald Trump's first year in the White House, the tension between the United States and these two countries increased markedly. As the U.S. domestic political environment has deteriorated, so, too, have America's relations with those that are perceived as its principal adversaries. When China's President Xi Jinping rose to power just over five years ago, he presented the idea of a "new type of great power relations" based on cooperation and dialogue, as well as respect for one another's national interests. But China does not always live by what it preaches as far as cooperation is concerned, as its unilateralism in the South China Sea indicates. Likewise, the relative loss of influence of the Chinese diplomatic corps contrasts with the emerging symbiosis between Xi and the People's Liberation Army. Xi has even shown a surprising predisposition to wear a military uniform. Russia, for its part, has invaded two former Soviet republics in the last decade, and its military spending as a share of GDP has been increasing almost exponentially. On top of this, the U.S. and Russia have accused each other of violating the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, the only Cold War-era agreement on armaments between the two countries that remains in force. While it makes sense to recognize the current challenges, we should refrain from exaggerating them. In the past few months, the U.S. administration has published three important documents: the National Security Strategy, the National Defense Strategy, and the Nuclear Posture Review. In all of them, China and Russia are explicitly identified as serious threats to the international order. But the principal threat to the U.S. today does not come from China or Russia; it comes from the confusion that is characterizing its own policies, owing to Trump's rejection of the very international order that the U.S. helped forge and defend for decades. It is worth remembering that when Trump tries to intimidate North Korean leader Kim Jong-un by boasting of U.S. military power, the facts are for once on his side. U.S. military spending is by far the world's highest, almost three times that of second-place China, and almost nine times that of third-place Russia. Indeed, the U.S. spends more on defense than the following eight countries combined, and possesses the world's most sophisticated nuclear arsenal. But, despite the Trump administration's frequent (and often ungraceful) declarations of military superiority, its actions imply that this superiority is not enough. The Nuclear Posture Review is the best example of this cognitive dissonance. The new U.S. doctrine stipulates an increase in the number of tactical nuclear arms with relatively small explosive potential. The objective of this measure is to neutralize Russian capacities in this field, thus "denying potential adversaries any mistaken confidence that limited nuclear employment can provide a useful advantage over the United States and its allies." But if the confidence is indeed mistaken, why respond as if it were not? In contrast to the Pentagon's view, the costly development of more tactical arms would in fact lower the threshold for nuclear conflict. And, as Brookings expert Robert Einhorn explains, the Nuclear Posture Review includes another doctrinal provision with a similar effect: the statement that the U.S. could use nuclear arms in response to "non-nuclear strategic attacks" that are only ambiguously defined. To lower the nuclear threshold increases the risk of a global catastrophe, a risk that the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists currently places at its highest level since 1953. Even in the highly improbable event that an uncontrolled escalation could be avoided after "a limited nuclear employment," one tactical weapon alone could generate an explosion comparable to those that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Nine years after Barack Obama's famous speech in Prague, in which he committed to seeking a world free of nuclear weapons, disarmament has ceased to be a strategic priority for the U.S. (which, as the world's biggest power, should lead efforts in this area). Obama's Nobel Peace Prize now seems a relic from the past, and the one awarded to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons last year has a sad, anachronistic ring to it. A new arms race, for which Trump has expressed his support, appears to be underway, though for now it may focus more on perfecting arsenals than on increasing their total size. Moreover, the Trump administration has just presented a budget proposal that would increase military spending, while cutting funds for the State Department by 25 percent. Although congressional support for the proposal is weak, Trump's budget is yet another symptom of his aversion to diplomatic channels. This is one of the causes of the notable degradation of America's international image, a trend that doesn't seem to trouble the current administration much. What really worries the Trump administration aside from Iran and North Korea is the strategic competition represented by Russia and, above all, by China. But, given mounting Russian and Chinese militarization, it is critical to avoid adding fuel to the fire. A great-power conflict is not inevitable unless these powers act as if it were. What should alarm the U.S. most is not the multipolarity that has been evolving throughout this century. Rather, the greatest risk to the U.S. is that it could forget the principles and institutions that have shored up its global leadership. If the Trump administration continues emphasizing a narrative of confrontation, it could end up creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. ). Javier Solana was EU high representative for foreign and security policy, secretary-general of NATO, and foreign minister of Spain. He is currently president of the ESADE Center for Global Economy and Geopolitics and distinguished fellow at the Brookings Institution. Copyright belongs to Project Syndicate ( www.project-syndicate.org By Ramesh Ponnuru In the effort to reduce gun violence, or gun massacres, should we go big or go small? Should we concentrate on steps that have a consensus behind them, at the risk of not making much difference? Or should we seek to transform American law and culture, even if success looks pitifully unlikely? The movement to regulate gun ownership has pursued both strategies at once, fighting for incremental progress toward the goal of much tighter restrictions. But the tensions between these strategies are inescapable. The people who advocate a ban on handguns are a useful foil for the people who don't want any restrictions at all. Yet centering the debate on small changes can demoralize advocates who want to end a bloody status quo. New York Times columnist Bret Stephens has been arguing that we should be ambitious, and set our sights on the Second Amendment. Working within the constraints of the amendment leads to policies such as banning assault weapons and instituting background checks for private gun sales. These regulations will, he thinks, have "negligible" effects on homicide rates. He urges us to "do something more than tinker at the margins of a legal regime that most of the developed world rightly considers nuts." Only after repealing the Second Amendment, Stephens says, will we be able to have rational gun laws. What those laws would be, he is consistently evasive in describing. He acknowledges that a repeal campaign looks quixotic today, but cites the struggle for same-sex marriage as an example of an unlikely triumph. It is a terrible analogy, for two main reasons. First, same-sex marriage never went through a five-decade period of sharply declining popularity. A ban on the civilian ownership of handguns has. Second, same-sex marriage was able to prevail even though a large minority of Americans opposed it. Even now about a third of the country opposes it. What Stephens is proposing is a constitutional amendment, and the normal amendment process requires the support of two-thirds of both chambers of Congress and three-quarters of the states. The first step of the Stephens plan is, in other words, to get nearly everyone in the country to agree that the Constitution should not protect gun rights. He offers no explanation of how this would be accomplished. His columns amount to wishing away the disagreement he seeks to overcome. And he has the gall to say that conservatives who reject his idea are the ones who don't "offer anything except false bromides and empty prayers." I'm tempted to respond that offering thoughtless clickbait is no great service. But the impulse to go big is understandable, especially when you consider the tinkering alternatives that are usually suggested. A ban on assault weapons looks like the worst of both worlds. It would be very hard to achieve a Democratic Senate mustered only 40 votes for it after the Sandy Hook massacre and have almost no effect even if it succeeded. Stephens is right about that. That doesn't mean we should just accept current levels of gun violence and mass murder. The fact that gun violence has been declining for decades should counsel against fatalism. John Cornyn of Texas, the number-two Republican in the Senate, and Connecticut Democrat Chris Murphy, the chamber's leading proponent of gun regulation, have a bill to address deficiencies in the background-check system. Several states have considered gun violence restraining orders that would enable the disarming of people who give evidence of posing a danger to others. Governments could also create duties to report such dangers, and impose liability on people who give others they know pose a danger access to guns (or bombs). These ideas are consistent with the Second Amendment. They can earn support from people who favor gun rights. And they might save some lives. None of them, it is true, would "solve" the problem of gun violence or eliminate the incidence of massacres. They acknowledge the reality that our country has hundreds of millions of guns and deep divisions over them. They are small, practical steps, useless for providing inspiration or generating invective. But we should not miss the opportunity for modest improvements because we prefer the comforts of fantasy. Ramesh Ponnuru is a Bloomberg View columnist. He is a senior editor at National Review, visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and contributor to CBS News. The above article was distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC. Consumers left with few options apart from expensive plans Consumer advocacy groups' efforts to ease the financial burden of phone users by introducing a universal billing system have gone down the drain. At a consultative policy meeting to discuss how to lower household telecom expenses, all three mobile carriers refused to introduce the simplified billing system. These telecom companies even denied the need to reduce mobile fees. That put things back to mid-2017 when the newly inaugurated Moon Jae-in government began a tug-of-war with the telecom industry over how to reduce mobile expenses by, for instance, doing away with basic monthly fees. If the administration turns its back on the unruly sector again, one of President Moon's campaign pledges will go up in smoke. We are appalled by the industry's allegations that telecom fees in Korea are lower than in foreign countries. The domestic carriers adopt a minimum charge system, in which all three companies provide only 300 megabytes of data at 32,800 won ($30.20) in what appears to be a price cartel. Their Italian counterparts offer 10 gigabytes at a similar price, and Dutch companies allow subscribers to use 4 gigabytes at a lower rate. With data use becoming the core of telecom service, Korean carriers have designed a billing system so cleverly that it leaves consumers with few other options but to subscribe to expensive plans. Nothing shows this better than the fact that more than 40 percent of consumers subscribing to data-oriented fee plans pay 60,000 won or more a month. The government's proposal calls for carriers to agree to 200 minutes of voice and 1 gigabyte of data at 20,000 won a month. This is only half the level of the U.K., where carriers provide 2 gigabytes at a similar rate. Korean carriers' tenacity reflects their expectations of obtaining more favorable rates in the course of legislation. The government must not allow this to happen by coming up with a more elaborate payment scheme. Consumers also should put more pressure on their representatives. Korea ranked below Asian rivals on global index A recent index showed Korea has made little progress in tackling the widespread corruption in society. Korea was ranked 51st among 180 countries with a score of 54 on the 2017 Corruption Perception Index (CPI) released by Transparency International earlier this week. The list looks at the level of corruption in the public sector and politics and uses a scale of 0 to 100, where 0 is highly corrupt. Korea climbed just one place from 2016 when it ranked 52nd, the lowest for the nation since the list began being compiled. Korea's mediocre performance on the CPI is not surprising given the endless corruption scandals that have rattled government, business and beyond. Former President Park Geun-hye's corruption scandal was one of the biggest reasons for Korea's low CPI ranking last year. The consistently low CPI ranking does not match Korea's economic stature. It shows the nation has much work to do to eradicate corrupt practices in various sectors that have hindered Korea from entering the ranks of a truly advanced country. In particular, it should be noted that Korea fared much worse than economic rivals in the Asia-Pacific region. Japan was ranked 20th and Hong Kong took 13th place. Singapore was ranked the highest among Asian countries at sixth place. Given that the level of corruption has a profound impact on national competitiveness and global standing, making a corruption-free society is a critical task for the Moon Jae-in administration. The corruption scandal involving Park and some of the nation's largest businesses like Samsung have tarnished the country's global reputation. For a corruption-free society, one thing Korea needs the most is responsible people in politics. There is a tendency in Korea to not take the problem of corruption seriously, particularly among political leaders. Park has claimed the corruption trial she has been undergoing since being removed early from office is the result of political revenge. Former President Lee Myung-bak, who is likely to face a corruption probe after the PyeongChang Winter Olympic Games, has also accused the current administration of targeting him. Politicians' misuse of power and privileges has led to all kinds of irregularities. The Moon administration was launched on a pledge for a new, cleaner Korea after the devastating Park scandal. The government looks to increase its rank to the 20s. New Zealand was first on the CPI, followed by Denmark. Finland, Norway and Switzerland jointly took third place. The government should study and benchmark their practices for eradicating corruption. By Jun Ji-hye Samsung Electronics' board of directors recommended a foreigner and a woman as the firm's outside directors, Friday, in a rare move construed as intending to secure diversity and international competiveness. The recommendation was made at a board meeting at which various issues were discussed, including the stock split and the limit of wages as well as the appointment of new directors. The members of the board recommended Kim Jeong-hoon, a Korean-born U.S. technology entrepreneur who currently serves as executive chairman of Kiswe Mobile, and Kim Sun-wook, a law professor at Ewha Womans University, as non-executive directors. Park Byung-gook, a professor of electrical engineering at Seoul National University, was also recommended as one of the three new outside directors. The final decision will be made at a general meeting of shareholders scheduled for March 23. Once the three new figures join in, the total number of Samsung Electronics' independent directors will increase to six from the current five. It is rare that a foreigner and a woman are included in the firm's board of directors. "It is not the first time for the company to have foreign and female board members, but it has been rare," an industry official said. "We understand the latest move is intended secure diversity and competitive power in the global market." Born in 1960 in Seoul, Kim moved to the United States in 1975 and acquired U.S. citizenship. Kim earned his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering and computer science at Johns Hopkins University. He received a master's degree in technical management from the same university during his seven-year stint in the U.S. Navy. After returning to civilian life, he earned a Ph.D. in reliability engineering from the University of Maryland. He then served as president of Bell Labs from 2005 to 2013. The Park Geun-hye government nominated Kim to head the Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning, the predecessor of the Ministry of Science and ICT, but he stepped down due to a controversy at the time over his dual citizenship. Kim Sun-wook was the nation's first female government legislation minister who served under the Roh Moo-hyun government. She also served as president of Ewha Womans University. Park is cited as an authority on semiconductors. Eyes were on whether Samsung Electronics Vice Chairman Lee Jae-yong would attend the board meeting, as it would have marked his first official appearance since being released from prison earlier this month after an appeals court reduced his prison sentence to a suspended term. But he did not appear. Lee was given a five-year jail term Aug. 25 and in detention for about a year after being found guilty on five charges, including bribery, embezzlement and hiding assets overseas. The case was part of former President Park's massive corruption and influence-peddling scandal that led to her impeachment. Observers say Lee is probably maintaining a wait-and-see attitude amid the still ongoing controversy and questions related to political issues surrounding the world's largest chipmaker. By Park Jae-hyuk A plunge in Hanmi Pharmaceutical shares this week has caused another "price bubble" controversy with domestic pharmaceuticals and biotech companies. A day before the beginning of the Lunar New Year holiday last week, Hanmi Pharmaceutical announced it had stopped testing HM71224, which was initially expected to be exported to Eli Lilly and Company, a U.S.-based global pharmaceutical company. After the four-day holiday, its shares dropped by 8.5 percent from 541,000 won to 495,000 won. This was the first time Hanmi Pharmaceutical shares have fallen below 500,000 won since last November. Although the shares slightly rebounded Tuesday, it ended at 486,000 won Friday. The announcement also led brokerages to lower the target stock prices of Hanmi Pharmaceutical. Since then, some observers pointed out Korean pharmaceuticals are overvalued, saying they lack any specific achievements in R&D and performance. In Korea, individual investors have suffered from the instability of the stock prices of pharmaceutical and biotech firms. Given that it is hard to measure the value of experimental technologies, observers regard the boom of drug companies as a bubble. They even worry the recent unfavorable factor of Hanmi Pharmaceutical may negatively affect the overall industry. The Korea Exchange's latest data support their opinions. According to the securities exchange operator, healthcare stocks in this country have been deemed the most overvalued, because the price-to-earnings ratio (PER) of the healthcare sector was the highest among major sectors at an average of 91.78 as of the end of December last year. The ratio measures a company's current share price relative to its earnings. A company with a higher PER than the average suggests the stock may be overvalued. For example, Celltrion's market capitalization reached 38 trillion won ($35 billion), but it only posted 517.3 billion won in operating profit last year. On the contrary, Hyundai Motor with a 34 trillion won market capitalization posted 4.57 trillion won in operating profit last year. Korean drug makers' PER also exceeded such global pharmaceuticals as Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer and Merck. Earlier this year, the KOSDAQ's No. 3 biotech company SillaJen was also embroiled in controversy, after its largest shareholders offloaded significant portions of their shares. Its stock price fluctuated at that time, while questions rose whether its price was a bubble or not. However, analysts still maintain their positive views on domestic drug makers, saying the case of Hanmi Pharmaceutical will have limited impact on other companies. "Investors have already realized the suspension of clinical trials during the development of the new drug is not surprising," Mirae Asset Daewoo analyst Kim Tae-hee said. HI Investment & Securities analyst Huh Hye-min also said Korean investors have enough previous experience regarding the halt in clinical tests. As they said, individual investors intensively bought Hanmi Pharmaceutical shares later in the week. According to the Korea Exchange, their purchase amounted to 43.5 billion won a day after the steep decrease, while foreigners and institutions sold Hanmi Pharmaceutical shares worth 44.8 billion won. The Louis Vuitton NeoNoe Monogram handbag / Courtesy of Louis Vuitton By Park Jae-hyuk Louis Vuitton has yet again drawn criticism from Korean consumers, as the international fashion house recently raised the price of one of its handbags, following a massive price hike last November. Critics point out the French luxury brand is cashing in on the growing demand for the product during the forthcoming "wedding season," given that handbags are regularly given as a wedding gift here. According to industry officials, Tuesday, Louis Vuitton increased the price of the NeoNoe Monogram handbag by 10 percent from 1.75 million won ($1,636) to 1.92 million won Previously, the company raised the product's price by 4.8 percent from 1.67 million won to 1.75 million won last November, when it hiked the price of the Cluny BB Monogram handbag from 2.24 million won to 2.38 million won and the Pochette Metis Monogram handbag from 2.14 million won to 2.20 million won. Whenever Louis Vuitton carries out a price hike, the Korean subsidiary says its global headquarters made the decision. Its reluctance in revealing sales and donations are also attributed to the global headquarters, according to Louis Vuitton Korea. Over the past few years, Louis Vuitton Korea has been accused of not revealing how much it gives in donations. Because it became a limited liability company in late 2012, it does not have to disclose its income statement and balance sheet. Although a regulatory change last year will soon prompt the company to disclose all the data, there has yet to be a way of verifying whether the firm has donated a substantial amount here as it says. Louis Vuitton's closed management policy has enraged Korean consumers who complain about poor after-sales service and pricing policies as well. According to industry officials, Koreans can contact the global headquarters only by mail, while customers in other countries can communicate with the headquarters without difficulty. Some even say the company seems to look down on Koreans, due to its ongoing popularity here. Data compiled by Exane BNP Paribas, a French-based finance group, showed Korea ranked second in the cost of luxury goods relative to the global average last year, following China. Luxury goods in Korea were 14 percent costlier than the global average. In addition to Louis Vuitton, international luxury brands are carrying out price hikes one after another. Hermes, which has raised product prices at the beginning of every year, increased the price of its Lindy 30 bag from 9.9 million won to 9.95 million won and the Lindy 26 bag from 9.08 million won to 9.15 million won last month. Chanel, which is one of big three luxury brands along with Louis Vuitton and Hermes, hiked product prices in May, September and November last year. Gucci and Balenciaga steeply raised product prices in the second half of last year as well. Greitens is another one of those fake Democrats the DCCC and DSCC love so much but who found his true calling when, like so many Blue Dog types, he officially became a Republican (in 2015). A much-decorated former Navy Seal, now 43, he was elected governor of Missouri in 2017. He was a Rhodes scholar who earned a doctorate from Oxford University. When he switched parties and decided to run for governor, he wrote a scathing OpEd for Fox , denouncing Democrats as "world-class hypocrites." In 2016 he beat Missouri Attorney General Chris Koster 1,424,730 (51.29%) to 1,261,110 (45.40%). Today he was indicted by a St. Louis grand jury on a felony charge of invasion of privacy involved in an extramarital affair in 2015 to which he has already admitted. His is a case of #MeToo ugliness on steroids. Where is Kirsten Gillibrand when someone actually needs her? Greitens seems his military service entitled him to break the law at will. During the campaign, he was constantly getting into financial trouble for the unethical ways he ran his very sleazy political operation. . But Missourians weren't ready for the scandal that started when he threatened to release a nude photograph of the woman he had being boinking, taken while she was blindfolded and her hands were bound, if she ever spoke publicly about the affair. St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner launched a criminal investigation of the allegations last month shortly after they become public. The indictment accuses Greitens of not only knowingly photographing the women with whom he had an affair, but also transmitting the image in a manner that allowed access to that image via a computer. ...The allegations against Greitens surfaced shortly after he delivered his annual State of the State address last month. The ex-husband of the woman with whom Greitens had an affair gave St. Louis TV station KMOV an audio recording of her confessing the affair and accusing Greitens of threatening to blackmail her. ...The investigators, both of whom have FBI experience, were back in Jefferson City this week interviewing more lawmakers. According to lawmakers who were interviewed, the questions focused on the conversations and interactions legislators had with the governor about the affair and alleged blackmail before and after the story went public. The allegations facing Greitens have hung over the Capitol for weeks. A handful of Republican lawmakers quickly called on Greitens to resign. And earlier this week, while debating a bill that would outlaw revenge porn, Republicans overwhelming supported amending the bill to make it a felony to threaten someone with releasing a sexually explicit photo. Greitens has bucked calls for his resignation, but the indictment could lead lawmakers to begin impeachment proceedings and potentially force him out of office. Sen. Rob Schaaf, a St. Joseph Republican, said that the Missouri House should move quickly to resolve the issue. They should investigate and let the process work They should act quickly. Rep. Nate Walker, a Kirksville Republican, called news of the indictment tragic for the state of Missouri. I think its tragic for Gov. Greitens and his family, Walker said. I find no joy in it, but sometimes people have to be held accountable for their actions. Walker, an early Greitens supporter, called for him to resign in the days after the allegations surfaced. He renewed those calls Thursday when asked whether the House should pursue impeachment. I called for him to step down three weeks ago because I thought this was going to happen My understanding was he was led off in handcuffs and thats not a good sign for our executive of the state of Missouri, Walker said. He should resign. To welcome the Year of the dog, an exhibition showcasing the culture of dogs is currently underway at Heilongjiang Provincial Museum in Harbin. The exhibition, co-organized by more than 20 museums in the country, displays hundreds of pictures and cultural relics on the theme of dog that symbolizes loyalty. It also provides a cultural feast to visitors during the holiday of the Spring Festival. A piece of relic in the shape of dog is on display at the Heilongjiang Provincial Museum in Harbin, Heilongjiang province. [Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn] A piece of relic in the shape of dog is on display at the Heilongjiang Provincial Museum in Harbin, Heilongjiang province. [Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn] A dog-themed painting is on display at the Heilongjiang Provincial Museum in Harbin, Heilongjiang province. [Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn] A dog-themed painting is on display at the Heilongjiang Provincial Museum in Harbin, Heilongjiang province. [Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn] Visitors enjoy the dog-themed items at the Heilongjiang Provincial Museum in Harbin, Heilongjiang province. [Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn] A dog skeleton is on display at the Heilongjiang Provincial Museum in Harbin, Heilongjiang province. [Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn] Dog-themed paper-cuttings are on display at the Heilongjiang Provincial Museum in Harbin, Heilongjiang province. [Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn] A dog-themed relic is on display at the Heilongjiang Provincial Museum in Harbin, Heilongjiang province. [Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn] Istanbul, February 23 - An ENI drilling ship blocked by the Turkish navy off the southern coast of Cyprus for two weeks is leaving to carry out "other activities" for the Italian energy giant, Cypriot Energy Minister Giorgos Lakkotrypis said Friday. The Saipem 12000 ship leased by ENI is now off the Cypriot port of Limassol for refuelling and will shortly leave for other drilling work, he told a local TV station. On Tuesday the Turkish navy extended through March 10 its Navtex notice of military activity off Cyprus in the eastern Mediterranean, which has been blocking passage of the Saipem 12000, Cypriot media said. The block has been preventing the ship from reaching the area planned for exploration through a license granted by the government in Nicosia. Nicosia has denounced the presence of the Turkish Navy in its "exclusive economic zone" as a violation of international law. Turkey, however, does not recognise the exclusive sovereignty of Cyprus and insists on the right of the Turkish-Cypriot community to divide the island's natural resources. In recent days, government sources in Nicosia said the Saipem 12000 wouldn't be able to remain waiting in the area if the Turkish naval block were to be extended, because it is committed to other activities planned off the coast of Morocco in the month of March. Based on estimates by industry professionals, costs to rent the drilling ship can reach a half-million euros per day. Brussels, February 23 - Slovakia said Friday it had not used any State aid to help Embraco delocalise from Italy. A Slovakian diplomat told ANSA "we will respond to the European Commission's letter with the documentation that proves we did not furnish any direct or indirect aid for Embraco's decision to delocalise its production". The diplomat said "it was a purely industrial decision" by the company. Italy has appealed to the EC over Embraco's moving almost 500 jobs from its plant near Turin to Slovakia, and Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager has promised to be "intransigent" on the case. Embraco is a Brazilian company that makes fridge compressors for its parent, US multinational Whirlpool. COLUMN: Recent streak of crime, rancor, complicity spell doom for decency What in the hell is going on? Granted, in the last 18 months with the pandemic as a reason or an excuse, depending on your perspective life has taken... This Sept. 11, will revisiting the past reset our present? Two decades after the Sept. 11 terror attacks, there are distinct perspectives for those looking back on a day that stopped a nation in its tracks. Many of those who... Chinese manufacturer Zhejiang Geely Holding Group Co. has acquired an approximately $9-billion stake in Daimler AG to become the largest investor in the German automaker. Daimler confirmed the holding in a regulatory filing, shortly after Bloomberg News reported that Geely has been building up a stake of just under 10% through purchases in the stock market in recent weeks. The German company said it welcomes another major investor. Buying a stake in the parent of Mercedes-Benz furthers Geelys foray into the European premium automotive market and ends months of speculation. The company, controlled by billionaire Li Shufu, already owns Volvo Cars AB, whose refreshed lineup of vehicles has made it a popular alternative to the German luxury stalwarts. A Geely stake in Daimler would underscore their push for cooperation thatll help them get more expertise, like electric cars, said Frank Biller, a Landesbank Baden-Wuerttemberg analyst based in Stuttgart, Germany. At the same time, this opens another path into China for Daimler. Advertisement Daimler has been on an upward trajectory, reclaiming the No. 1 crown in luxury cars from BMW AG and broadening its offerings to include more SUVs and overhaul its lineup with sportier designs. Daimler is looking forward to another long-term investor recognizing the companys innovative strengths, spokesman Joerg Howe said by phone. Li Shufu is a Chinese entrepreneur Daimler knows well and regards highly in terms of his competency and focus on future developments, Howe said. Daimler already has a strong footing in China. We have a very strong partner with our existing cooperation with BAIC Motor. Representatives at Geely couldnt immediately be reached outside business hours in Asia. Chinese companies have been more active in buying into German companies in recent years. HNA Group Co. has a stake of about 8.8% in Deutsche Bank, and a few years ago industrial-robot maker Kuka was bought by Midea, the worlds largest appliance maker. Expansion ambitions In December, Li became the biggest shareholder in Swedens Volvo AB, the worlds second-largest maker of trucks, after a $3.9-billion deal with activist investor Cevian Capital AB. In 2010, he acquired Volvo Cars from Ford Motor Co., and last year he won control of British sports-car maker Lotus Cars Ltd. The Chinese firm, which controls Hong Kong-listed Geely Automobile Holdings Ltd., has ambitious expansion plans for both its home market and overseas as it takes on global car majors. Geely plans to start selling a compact five-seat SUV, currently marketed under the Lynk & Co. brand, outside China from mid-2019. Its likely to look first at Europe. Eventual split? As Geely has made an unprecedented foray into Europe, Daimler is also undergoing significant change. The carmaker plans its biggest corporate overhaul in a decade to break up its conglomerate structure to create a holding company. Daimler firmed up plans toward the end of 2017 to break up its rigid conglomerate structure, instead creating a holding company with three separate units: Mercedes-Benz Cars & Vans, Daimler Trucks & Buses and the financial services division. Although Daimler said the move isnt a prelude to a spinoff of any of the businesses, some investors have called on the company to consider an eventual split on the back of the clearer delineation between the units. Advertisement Kuwaits sovereign wealth fund, which has been an investor in Daimler for decades, was the largest stakeholder in the automaker as of the end of December, with a 6.8% holding. Daimler isnt the only German automaker to have a big anchor investor: Volkswagen AG is essentially controlled by the Porsche-Piech billionaire clan, and it also counts the government of Qatar as a major stakeholder. BMW is controlled by the Quandt-Klatten family, whose billionaire siblings boosted their personal holdings in the second-largest luxury carmaker this year after equally dividing their late mothers stake. Chinas government is taking over Anbang Insurance Group Co., owner of New Yorks famed Waldorf Astoria, and will prosecute founder Wu Xiaohui, cementing the downfall of a politically connected deal-maker whose aggressive global expansion came to symbolize the financial overreach of Chinas debt-laden conglomerates. Regulators announced they would take over Anbang for a year, remove Wu and charge him with economic crimes. Wu, who was the companys chairman, was detained by authorities in June. Under Wu, Anbang came to epitomize the voracious Chinese appetite for overseas acquisitions that saw trophy assets snapped up around the world sometimes at prices that left observers scratching their heads. The full cost of that headlong spree started becoming clear last year as Chinese authorities, alarmed by mounting financial risks, slammed the brakes on Anbang and peers such as HNA Group. Wus links to the Chinese political elite became fodder for media scrutiny as his ambitions grew, with acquisitions including San Franciscos Westin St. Francis and insurers in Korea and the Netherlands. Wu established ties with the family of reform leader Deng Xiaoping after marrying Dengs granddaughter Zhuo Ran. Advertisement A team led by the China Insurance Regulatory Commission, along with members from the central bank, banking, securities and foreign-exchange regulators, is taking over the company starting Feb. 23, according to the statement Friday, which added that Anbangs external liabilities wont be affected and the insurers business will continue. Illegal operations at Anbang may seriously endanger the companys solvency, prompting the government to take control, regulators said. Regulators want to solve Anbangs problems without triggering systemic risks, said Zhou Hao, an economist at Commerzbank in Singapore. After weighing pros and cons, its the best way. The Beijing companys operations remain stable, the statement said. China will introduce private capital to restructure Anbang, which will remain private, the China Insurance Regulatory Commission said. President Xi Jinping and his top economic deputies have vowed to make controlling financial risks their priority, a pledge renewed at the Communist Partys twice-a-decade leadership congress last year. Chinas insurance regulator, along with the main banking watchdog, have announced a flurry of rules since last year to contain financial risks in the system. Anbang has almost 2 trillion yuan ($316 billion) in assets and owns businesses spanning life and non-life insurance, asset management, financial leasing and banking, according to its website. For more than 60 years, the U.S. Navy has relied on steam power to catapult planes off the decks of aircraft carriers, leaving behind a telltale trail of steam rising from the track. A new generation of carriers will rely on something far more technologically complex: an electromagnetic system that could potentially launch more aircraft off the deck and at a faster rate than traditional steam methods. But development of this cutting-edge technology, built by San Diego defense firm General Atomics, has not been without growing pains. And the systems readiness, along with that of other new systems on the USS Gerald R. Ford, the first of a new class of carriers, is at the center of a debate between the U.S. Navy and Senate leaders. The Ford was commissioned last summer and entered active service, but it must undergo additional testing before being able to deploy for operations. Its certainly true that any time youre introducing something new ... youre going to have issues, said Andrew Hunter, director of the defense-industrial initiatives group at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. There will probably continue to be kinks to work out. Advertisement But, he said, its too late to go back to steam catapult systems, at least for the next two carriers in this class. (President Trump advocated a return to steam in an interview with Time last year, in which he described the electromagnetic launch system as no good.) China also is reportedly planning to use an electromagnetic aircraft launch system on one of its domestically designed carriers. The die is cast on that, Hunter said. General Atomics, best known for making the Predator drone, referred all questions about the electromagnetic launch system to the Navy, citing the companys contract. Known in industry jargon as EMALS, the electromagnetic aircraft launch system hinges on an electrically generated moving magnetic field that pulls a mechanism attached to the aircraft. The technology is similar to the one that powers a railgun that General Atomics has tested for several years. Traditional steam-powered catapults release built-up pressure all at once, flinging aircraft off the deck and into the sky, but placing enormous strain on their airframes. With the electromagnetic system, a pulse of electricity creates a steadier, more gradual acceleration, which can be adjusted for the aircrafts size and weight. You just have better control, said Bob Hebner, director of the Center for Electromechanics at the University of Texas at Austin. That should extend the lifetime of airframes, saving money on repairs and replacements. The new system also is capable of launching a wider variety of aircraft, he said. Hebner and his team at the Texas university worked with General Atomics on a generator concept for the electromagnetic catapult system for about five years during the early stages of the companys research. They devised a generator that was about 10 feet long to show that the power system could fit in small spaces aboard a packed carrier. That generator was about one-fourth the size of the eventual power system General Atomics built and used for the catapult system, he said. Advertisement But developing such new technology and integrating it onto the new nuclear carrier has been difficult. A January report from the Office of the Director of Operational Test and Evaluation, which advises the secretary of Defense, singled out the poor or unknown reliability of the newly designed catapults and other cutting-edge systems such as the advanced aircraft arresting gear to stop planes when they land also built by General Atomics a dual-band radar system, and a new type of elevator that moves weapons. While the Navy had corrected issues with the aircraft catapult system that had led to excessive airframe stress during test launches of the Fords mainstay jet, the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet, and the EA-18G Growler, the report found that the system in its current design was unlikely to support high-intensity operations expected in combat. In addition to reliability concerns, the report also said it was difficult to isolate components of the electrical system of the launch and landing systems. That would force flight operations to shut down while conducting some types of maintenance. Advertisement The poor or unknown reliability of these critical subsystems is the most significant risk to CVN 78, the report said, referring to the Fords designation. The Navy had intended to start the first phase of operational testing in 2021 and complete a second phase during the next year, according to the report. The Fords home port is in Norfolk, Va. In early February, leaders of the Senate Armed Services Committee sent a letter to Defense Secretary James N. Mattis, expressing concern about reliability issues with the carriers subsystems. Noting issues with unproven new technologies, including the catapult system, Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Jack Reed (D-R.I.) called for the carrier to maintain its planned full ship-shock trials. Thats where the Navy detonates large explosives underwater near a ship to assess its survivability in ways that cant be modeled on a computer. The Navy wanted to put off the tests so it could speed the Ford into the fleet. We understand Navy leadership may be requesting a waiver from you that would delay full ship shock trials until after the first deployment of the USS Gerald R. Ford, the letter states. Conducting full ship shock trials on CVN-78 will not only improve the design of future carriers, but also reduce the costs associated with retrofitting engineering changes. Advertisement The carriers cost now stands at $12.9 billion, almost $2.4 billion more than the cap originally set in the 2007 National Defense Authorization Act. Its critical technologies, largely the electromagnetic launch system, aircraft arresting gear and radar, drove about 40% of the cost increases, according to a report released in June by the U.S. Government Accountability Office. Navy spokesman Capt. Danny Hernandez said internal discussions within the Department of Defense on the full ship-shock trials for the carrier were ongoing. He said the Ford had completed more than 700 catapult launches and aircraft stops with Navy jets, including more than 100 launches and recoveries in one day on two separate occasions. The service continued to see progress in the testing of the aircraft launch system and other new components of the Ford-class carrier, Hernandez said. Hunter, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said he saw no indication that there was something dramatically unexpected going on with the electromagnetic aircraft launch systems development, though it is still early in the process. Advertisement Despite the hurdles, he said, electromagnetic catapults are likely the way of the future. Theres just a whole range of shipboard applications where theyve been looking at using electromagnetics, Hunter said. You cant rule out the idea that some of this might not work out as planned but the technology is definitely moving in that direction. samantha.masunaga@latimes.com Twitter: @smasunaga Ed Bagdasarian is chief executive of Intrepid Investment Bankers, a Brentwood firm that specializes in helping sell or find financing for mid-sized companies. Bagdasarian and his partners founded the company in 2010, opting to start their own investment bank again after their last one Barrington Associates was acquired by Wells Fargo. The firm has continued to grow and recently closed two of its biggest deals to date, each valued at $1 billion or more. Bagdasarian, a wiry, energetic 53-year-old, said starting over and staying independent was the natural choice. I come from a long line of scrappy survivors, he said. Armenian roots Bagdasarian is Armenian but was born and raised in Romania. His grandparents fled the Armenian genocide and settled in Romania during World War I. His family started over again after World War II, when the Soviet Union occupied Romania and seized private property and again when he and his parents immigrated to the United States. We arrived here on Feb. 1, 1979. My dad turned 50 the day we landed in L.A. He had no savings, he didnt know the language he jumped without a parachute because he felt the U.S. would be a better place for us. He was a giant Bagdasarians father, Nazaret, was a jeweler and goldsmith. He worked for a friends jewelry business for a month before quitting to start his own shop a risky move that his sons advised against. I was 14, my brother was 20, and we said, Dad, you dont know the language, you have no money, you have no customers. Its a bad business plan. But his father pushed ahead and started making jewelry for local retailers, a business that proved good enough to support a family. Nazaret Bagdasarian died last month, a few days shy of his 89th birthday. He was a giant in my mind. I dont think theres anybody who said less to me, or who taught me more by saying less. He did it all by example. Into business Bagdasarian graduated from Fairfax High School, then studied business and economics at UCLA. When he was a sophomore, he read a Forbes story about First Wilshire Securities Management, a local wealth management firm, and approached one of the firms partners, Noble Trenham, to ask for a job. After a polite refusal, Bagdasarian made him an offer. I said, Id like to work for you for free for six months, and if after six months you dont think Im productive, Ill leave. It turned into a paying gig two months later, and Bagdasarian stayed on through college as research analyst. After graduating in 1987, he joined a spin-off firm and worked on a contentious corporate takeover his first taste of the mergers-and-acquisitions business. He was hooked and, in 1989, joined Barrington Associates, a local firm focused exclusively on M&A. Run by partners Jim Freedman and Mike Rosenberg, it helped find buyers for local middle-market companies ones with tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue but that are privately held and often run by their founders. For company founders, the vast majority of their net worth may be tied up in their business. Bagdasarian said his first deal at Barrington hammered that point home. The owner burst into tears and explained that his life savings were tied into this company. Starting over, again Barrington became a powerhouse firm, which drew the attention of Wells Fargo. The giant San Francisco bank bought Barrington in 2006 in a deal that preserved the L.A. outfits autonomy. But when Wells Fargo acquired Wachovia, a Charlotte, N.C., bank that had a big investment banking operation of its own, things changed. Bagdasarian said Barrington became more of a regional hub for Wachovia. If youre not charged up every morning, its time to do something else. It started becoming like that. So in 2010, Bagdasarian, Freedman, Rosenberg and four other Barrington partners left to start Intrepid, which focuses on a handful of industries and works with firms across the country and in Canada. Its specialties include beauty and personal care it recently advised San Francisco deodorant company Native on its acquisition by conglomerate Procter & Gamble as well as consumer technology, retail, apparel and healthcare. Last year, it advised Aliso Viejo genetic testing firm Ambry Genetics on a $1-billion acquisition by Japanese manufacturer Konica Minolta. Changing market Specialization, Bagdasarian said, was driven by necessity. Years ago, Barrington got most of its business through referrals from local lawyers and accountants. Now, business owners are more likely to look for an investment bank on their own and want bankers who have represented similar companies. If youre a genetic sequencing lab in Connecticut, and you see we represented Ambry, youre probably going to call us, he said. One constant through the years has been the partnership between Bagdasarian, Rosenberg and Freedman, Intrepids CEO, president and chairman, respectively. When we started Intrepid, one thing people asked me was, Why would you be partners again after all this time? Bagdasarian said. I said, Obviously you must not have had great partners. Household merger Bagdasarian and his wife, Iman, live in Beverly Hills. Shes a UCLA professor who specializes in corporate law, including mergers and acquisitions. Their daughter, Lara, is studying at Stanford. Their son, Tammer, is in high school. Bagdasarian is an avid runner. Starting at 4:30 a.m., he covers 4 miles several days a week, usually wearing Vibram FiveFingers, a minimalist shoe meant to mimic running barefoot. Jim, Mike and I used to run in the old days at Barrington. Wed go running, then on the way back buy a bunch of chocolate doughnuts. james.koren@latimes.com Twitter: @jrkoren U.S. companies are taking a closer look at investments, co-branding deals and other ties to the gun industry and its public face, the National Rifle Assn., after the latest school massacre. Petitions are circulating online targeting companies that offer discounts to NRA members on its website. #BoycottNRA is trending on Twitter. NRA members have access to special offers from partner companies on the groups website, including deals on life insurance and wine clubs. For a second consecutive day companies listed on the site have cut ties to the NRA as it aggressively resists calls for stricter gun control in the wake of the mass shooting last week at a Florida high school that left 17 people dead. The insurance company MetLife Inc. announced Friday that it was ending its discount program with the NRA. So did software company Symantec Corp., which makes Norton Antivirus technology, and car rental company Hertz. Advertisement Insurance company Chubb Ltd. said Friday it is ending participation in the NRAs gun-owner insurance program, but it provided notice three months ago. The program that provided coverage for people involved in gun-related incidents or accidents had been under scrutiny by regulators over marketing issues. Those defections arrived a day after the car rental company Enterprise Holdings, which also owns Alamo and National, said it was cutting off discounts for NRA members. First National Bank of Omaha, one of the nations largest privately held banks, announced that it would not renew a Visa credit card co-branded with the NRA. NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre said this week at the Conservative Political Action Conference that those advocating for stricter gun control are exploiting last weeks deadly shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. Evil walks among us and God help us if we dont harden our schools and protect our kids, LaPierre said Thursday. The whole idea from some of our opponents that armed security makes us less safe is completely ridiculous. President Trump has aligned himself with the NRA, suggesting some teachers could be armed so that they could fire on any attacker. U.S. corporations are moving in the other direction. On Friday, a large Wall Street money management firm said that it wants to engage with major weapons manufacturers about what comes next. Blackrock Inc., which manages $6 trillion in assets, has become one of the largest stakeholders in gun manufacturers such as Sturm Ruger & Co., American Outdoor Brands Corp. and Vista Outdoor Inc. through indirect investments. The money is placed in index funds, so Blackrock cannot sell shares of individual companies within the index. Its fund clients invest in indexes that might contain companies like Ruger. Advertisement On Friday, spokesman Ed Sweeney said Blackrock will be engaging with weapons manufacturers and distributors to understand their response to recent events. Blackrock, through indirect investments, holds a 16.18% stake in Sturm Ruger, an 11.91% stake in Vista and a 10.5% stake in American Outdoor, according to the data firm FactSet. Shares of gun companies mostly fell in trading Friday. The Department of Justice has accused a Florida pharmacy and the Los Angeles private equity firm that owns it of bilking a military healthcare program out of millions of dollars by pushing unneeded vitamins and creams. In a filing in federal court in Miami, federal prosecutors said compounding pharmacy Patient Care America billed military healthcare program Tricare for more than $68 million in prescriptions over an eight-month period in 2014 and 2015. Those payments, prosecutors allege, were tainted because PCA paid kickbacks to marketers who pushed unnecessary prescriptions, worked with doctors who wrote prescriptions without examining patients and illegally paid patients copays to encourage them to fill unneeded prescriptions. The complaint alleges that two PCA executives and private equity firm Riordan Lewis & Haden knowingly submitted fraudulent claims to Tricare, which provides healthcare to members of the military and their families. Advertisement PCA, based near Fort Lauderdale, is owned by Riordan Lewis & Haden, a Westwood firm founded by former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan. Though the firm still bears the former mayors name, he has long been retired and, according to public filings, no longer has a financial interest in the firm. Managing director J. Christopher Lewis said the firm has cooperated with federal investigators but disputes the basis of the lawsuit and did not violate any law. Federal prosecutors filed the complaint last week, joining a lawsuit filed in 2015 by two former PCA employees who first alleged the kickback scheme. When Riordan Lewis acquired a majority stake in PCA, then known as Diabetic Care Rx or DCRX Infusion, in 2012, it specialized in making treatments for patients with kidney disease. After the acquisition, though, the company expanded into making pain creams because they were dramatically more profitable, according to last weeks complaint. Prosecutors are suing under the federal False Claims Act, a law that allows the government to seek payment of three times its actual damages. If prosecutors prevail and show PCA and Riordan Lewis improperly billed for $68 million in bogus prescriptions, it could lead to a payout of more than $200 million. james.koren@latimes.com Advertisement Follow me: @jrkoren UPDATES: 2 p.m.: This article was updated with a comment from J. Christopher Lewis, managing director of Riordan Lewis & Haden, and with more details from the complaint. This article was originally published at 12:05 p.m. A federal district court judge ruled the other day that its constitutional for Montana to ban political robocalls, even though political consultants who had sued the state claimed their right to free speech had been violated. U.S. District Court Senior Judge Charles Lovell said Montanas law limiting political robocalls still leaves ample means of communication for individuals and organizations. He also said the law prevents the annoyance and harassment of Montanans in their households. That got me thinking, Wow, why doesnt California have a cool law like that? So I looked into it. And you know what? We do. Advertisement Trouble is, its a law thats ignored by just about every state candidate and political campaign. Politicians are deliberately evading the law to get their robocalls out, said Christine Mailloux, who heads the San Diego office of the Utility Reform Network, a statewide advocacy group. That should really make you wonder if these are the people we want representing us, she said. It goes without saying that Californians are bombarded with political robocalls any time an election season rolls around. In virtually all cases, the robocall starts playing as soon as you answer the phone. However, sections 2873 and 2874 of the California Public Utilities Code say all robocalls must begin with a live operator stating the nature of the call, as well as the name, address and phone number of the entity behind the robocall. Ill bet you didnt know that. I didnt until I started rooting around the utilities code. Moreover, the live operator must request your permission to play the robocall. Then and only then can the recording legally start. Needless to say, I cant think of a single robocall to my home, political or otherwise, that met these criteria. Not one. Ever. Advertisement And theres a good reason: Most robocalls get around Californias tough rules by originating from other states, beyond the reach of state officials. Terrie Prosper, a spokeswoman for the Public Utilities Commission, said political robocalls originating within the state, and without a live operator, are permissible only when a consumer has consented to receiving robocalls from a candidate or political party. A call originating outside of California, she said, does not have to meet Californias law. In that case, federal law applies. But thats not much help. Advertisement The Federal Communications Commission says political robocalls cant be made to cellphones, but are permissible when made to landline telephones, even without prior express consent. Many households no longer have landlines. But millions still do. Thats how California politicians can break the states own rules, Mailloux said. This is, of course, about as sleazy a political practice as youll find, especially when you consider that nearly all these robocalls are from people who say they want to uphold state law. Advertisement According to the PUC, the only entities that can legally leap right into a robocall without the introduction of a live operator are schools, banks, cable companies (only for scheduling appointments), utilities, police and fire departments, or agencies making public safety or emergency warnings. Robocalls also can skip the live intro if theyre from a known party, business party, customer or any other person the call recipient has a relationship or understanding with. Although the PUC says political robocalls must follow relevant state and federal laws, this is obviously a sham. Politicians can easily choose not to follow state laws by using an out-of-state call center, and federal laws say they can robocall you with impunity, as long as its to a landline. Advertisement Whats the solution? It would be for Sacramento to pass an amendment requiring all political robocalls for state campaigns to originate within California, thus keeping them under state rules. The likelihood of that happening? Press 1 for fat chance. Press 2 for when hell freezes over. David Lazarus column runs Tuesdays and Fridays. He also can be seen daily on KTLA-TV Channel 5 and followed on Twitter @Davidlaz. Send your tips or feedback to david.lazarus@latimes.com. Though surrounded by sweeping views atop a sunny cul-de-sac, the 6,000-square-foot Tudor in Mandeville Canyon purchased by George Jordan and Agustin Rodriguez was dark and dated. We recognized the potential the house had, said Jordan, whose company, ANR Development Co., bought the home in 2015. It had all the elements to be a nice estate property. After a two-year, multimillion-dollar renovation that brought the home to its studs, the estate reemerged from a dreary Tudor into a warm, 9,393-square-foot contemporary farmhouse featuring clean, modern design, an open floor plan and extended panoramic views. The exterior architectural transformation was paramount for Jordan and Rodriguez, who envisioned a sophisticated and expansive facade to replace the cloistered Tudor. Advertisement One of the biggest challenges can be juxtaposing the old with the new and making it blend, Rodriguez said. Fortunately, the previous high-pitched tudor roofline meshed well with the new standing-seam metal roof without requiring major modifications. Then, with the help of architect Bobby Rees and interior designer Kishani Perera, the property was extended by more than 3,000 square feet. The added space was used to accommodate an expanded, dual-island kitchen and additions including the adjacent family room, upstairs master suite, home theater and a private guest suite over the garage. Additionally, the ground-floor bedroom was reconfigured to allow room for the temperature-controlled wine cellar and downstairs laundry room (the estate has a second one upstairs). Another major goal was to maximize views by opening up the space and connecting it to the outside, which Jordan and Rodriguez achieved by installing four sets of floor-to-ceiling pocketed Fleetwood doors on the first floor. Upstairs, the master suite was expanded out toward the backyard, gaining an impressive window line with ample views of the ocean and even Santa Catalina on a clear day. Thats the standout feature of the home, the wow moment, Jordan said. Its almost cathedral-like. Warm earth tones are now found throughout the seven-bedroom, eight-bathroom estate, including the wide-plank French oak floors and neutral-colored walls and surfaces. Advertisement We intentionally chose finishes that have natural elements and feel very comfortable and accommodating, Jordan said. We want people to hang out and dont want our homes to feel like museums. Major design investments include the custom cabinetry and Miele appliances found in the chefs kitchen, along with unusual finishes in the bathrooms. One of the things we do in our homes is make each bathroom a little bit different, even the secondary bathrooms. We dont want to just replicate the cabinetry and the surfaces, Jordan said. Backyard additions include a wood deck surrounded by a canopy of trees and a kitchen and barbecue area by the remodeled pool. Advertisement 2184 Mandeville Canyon Road in Brentwood is priced at $12.495 million with the Agencys Santiago Arana. hotproperty@latimes.com MORE FROM HOT PROPERTY True Religion co-founder Kym Gold sizes up the Encino housing market Advertisement Leeza Gibbons seeks $18.5 million for East Coast-vibe mansion in Beverly Hills Beverly Hills estate of Desmonds department stores owner seeks $8.495 million Five years ago. Nicco Mele warned that technology particularly social media was taking power from big institutions and giving it to individuals. When used for good, he said in his 2013 book The End of Big: How the Internet Makes David the New Goliath, new technologies could empower individuals, give smaller players a fighting chance and challenge incumbents. But there was also a dark side to the power shift, warned Mele, the director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. In light of last weeks indictment accusing Russian groups and individuals of using social media to sow discord in America and the growing consensus that technology companies further the spread of misinformation, we spoke with Mele, who previously served as Los Angeles Times deputy publisher, to ask him how we got here and what comes next. The following interview has been condensed and edited for clarity. When you wrote The End of Big in 2013, you seemed largely optimistic about the effect the internet and technology were having on society. Five years on, has that changed? My publisher said the first draft of the book I turned in was too dark, that I had to find a way to make it more hopeful. So I tried to make it more hopeful in a way that had integrity, that I could stand by. I dont want to be the one whos always saying the sky is falling. Im a genuinely optimistic person. And I do see cause for optimism. I grew up with the internet, and it was a powerful force for good in my life. Thats the internet I want to preserve and encourage. Nicco Mele is director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. Supplied The thesis of the book is that technology pushes power from institutions to individuals, and sometimes thats good. Its good when the institution is corrupt and needs reform and wont change itself. Its good when the institution has acquired too much power. Its good when youre giving individuals the power to do beautiful things in the world. But its bad when the institutions are performing a vital role and youre allowing any individual to disrupt it. Its bad when youre talking about terrorism. Its bad when youre talking about the integrity of information in our communities. Looking at the spread of misinformation in recent years, would you say weve entered bad territory? Theres no doubt in my mind that the ones that have been harmed most by it are news organizations, political parties and government. It was pretty clear to me five years ago they had already lost their power. Right now, theyre grappling with the reality of that and trying to understand what that means. The problem is new changes will be upon us, and Im worried that by the time they come to terms with it, theyll miss the current growing crisis. Which is? The unintended consequences of AI and algorithms. Go on... Algorithms feed our worst selves in their current design in terms of information. Its debilitating. So should the technology companies designing these algorithms be held responsible for the divisions theyre creating? I profoundly think they should. Heres a story: Henry Luce was the publisher of Time and Life magazines, and he was arguably the most influential human being in the U.S. in the late 1940s because his publications were in most American homes. He hated FDR (Franklin D. Roosevelt). He was an old-fashioned conservative, and he thought FDR was a commie pinko liberal. He wanted to go to war with FDR in his publications. But something held him back. So he gave a bunch of money to his good friend Robert Hutchins, who was president of the University of Chicago, and he asked Hutchins to answer the question: What are the responsibilities for someone like me who owns and controls media to the institutions of democracy? Hutchins started this thing called the Hutchins Commission. After a few years, he published his findings, and Henry Luce hated it because, what did it say? It said, You do have special responsibilities to democracy because of your power to shape and sway public opinion. This was following World War II, and there was a real sense that media shaping the public was a very dangerous thing. It carried special responsibility. And that view is wholly absent from people like Rupert Murdoch and Mark Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg appears to give it some lip service, but its not clear to me theres a deep understanding of what that means. How can technology companies be held accountable? Ultimately, the only thing that will matter is political action. Its not a satisfying answer, I know. At the same time, youve said you dont believe technology should take all the blame. Theres something deeper happening culturally. I reject the argument that its technologys fault that were more shallow. My general view is technology is not inherently good or bad. It boils down to two things: the values our culture carries, and the quality of our leaders. Theyre interrelated. So is this a moral decay issue? I dont want to sound like a ninny, but I do think theres something in our culture that has become less substantive. I dont fully understand that, but I want to. As we approach the midterm election, have Americans at least gotten better at managing false and viral information? Theres now orders of magnitude more discussion about it, and maybe weve raised awareness a bit, but I dont think weve made any progress. Look at the school shooting and how it has been covered and the idea that these children are paid actors. Im pretty grim about where this is all headed. I think the fundamental nature of justice in American democracy is at stake in a really profound way, and its happening in slow motion. Whats the silver lining? The good news is that climate change will render a lot of this irrelevant as it totally dismantles modern society. I thought you were an optimist! Well, OK, I believe in human ingenuity and American innovation. Im not going to count us out just yet. But as I said in my book, if America persists in my lifetime, Ill be stunned. Where were at right now is grim and we have to imagine a better future. Support our journalism Please consider subscribing today to support stories like this one. Get full access to our signature journalism for just 99 cents for the first four weeks. Already a subscriber? Your support makes our work possible. Thank you. tracey.lien@latimes.com UPDATES: 8:30 a.m.: This article was updated to note the Mele previously served as Los Angeles Times deputy publisher. This article was originally published at 6 a.m. Three plays written from hard-won experience and another with a talking rooster. Its going to be an interesting weekend at L.A.s small theaters with Rogue Machines El Nino, An Illegal Start at the Santa Monica Pier carousel, Wicked Pagan Gays at Zephyr Theatre and Year of the Rooster at Theatre of NOTE. El Nino by Rogue Machine The essentials: Closing in on 50, a woman contemplates the dark clouds gathered around her. Her science fiction writing is modestly successful, at best; her boyfriend has tossed her out; and shes in excruciating physical pain. So she heads to her parents home in Highland Park and plants her miserable self on their couch. Did I mention this is a comedy and a love story? Why this? Dysfunction never seems quite so appealing as when Justin Tanner delivers it. A prolific contributor to L.A.s small-theater scene with such hits as Teen Girl and Pot Mom, hes been MIA since 2011s Day Drinkers, but hes returned with a script that figures significantly in his recent history. He lived with virtually immobilizing foot and back pain, much like his central characters, for a couple of months in late 2015, with lesser pain over about a year. He also was burned out from two decades of writing a play a year. But he realized that perhaps one was an answer to the other. I wrote myself out of my depression, Tanner, 53, says, and found amusement along the way. He instilled his almost-fame into his character, the sense that some people know who you are, most people dont. Its a little bit like writing for theater in Los Angeles. By the way, his time away from theater has been by no means fallow. Google the web series Ave 43 and the band the Roswell Sisters. Details: Rogue Machine at the Met Theatre, 1089 N. Oxford Ave., L.A. Opens 8:30 p.m. Saturday and runs 8:30 p.m. Saturdays and Mondays, 3 p.m. Sundays; ends April 2. $40. (855) 585-5185, www.roguemachinetheatre.com SIGN UP for the free Essential Arts & Culture newsletter An Illegal Start at the carousel The essentials: In 1980s Colorado, a pickup smashes into a telephone pole during a rainstorm and its two 18-year-old occupants take refuge at a merry-go-round in an abandoned amusement park. Performed in the Merry-Go-Round Building at Santa Monica Pier with the carousel as the set, this story spins forward through 18 years of an unexpected friendship that helps sustain the men on their very different paths in life. Why this? Any opportunity to hang out at the Santa Monica carousel is a good one, and this is a new way to do so: the first time in the buildings 101-year history that it is being used for live theater. The play was written by James Harris, a 52-year-old Santa Monican who as a high schooler was involved in the same kind of wreck with a passenger he knew, though not well. As a result of the accident, though, he became my lifelong best friend, Harris says. We had so few similarities in our lives before the accident, but the bond that was formed during that moment has never dissipated. The play is a production of Santa Monica Public Theatre, which Harris helped actor Paul Sand (a 1971 Tony Award featured actor winner and frequent TV guest star) to found in 2016. Sand directs. Details: Merry-Go-Round Building at the Santa Monica Pier, Colorado Avenue at Ocean Avenue, Santa Monica. 8 p.m. Friday, Saturday and March 2, 9 and 10. $24-$30. lat.ms/illegalstarttickets Cameron Tagge, left, and Irish Giron in "An Illegal Start." Agnes Magyari Wicked Pagan Gays at Zephyr The essentials: Friends can agree to disagree. The two here are Jeff and Greg, former acquaintances who meet up again when Jeff moves to Los Angeles. Greg, a 45-year-old with a spiritual bent, insists that cosmic forces are at work in their friendship; Jeff, a 35-year-old rationalist, is having none of it. But this is L.A., where life seems to unfold in one bewildering happenstance after another, so perhaps anything is possible. Why this? The story riffs on the friendship of writer-actor Jeff Dinnell and journalist Greg Archer. Theres a funny, gay, odd-couple dynamic in our relationship, says Dinnell, who wrote the script and blurs distinctions between life and stage by performing as the character who bears his name. Archer doesnt appear in the show but is credited as co-creator. As the play tumbles along, the fictional Jeff has to wonder whether there isnt some cosmic force at work, but the real Jeff, Dinnell says, is scientific and skeptical. The self-produced show is directed by Kiff Scholl, a familiar hand at such companies as Sacred Fools and Theatre of NOTE. Details: Zephyr Theatre, 7456 Melrose Ave., L.A. Opens 8 p.m. Friday and continues 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays, 7 p.m. Sundays; ends March 31. $25. www.plays411.com/wicked Jeff Dinnell, left, Nathan Tylutki and Ian Dick in "Wicked Pagan Gays." Stephen Todt Year of the Rooster at Theatre of NOTE The essentials: Gather at ringside as a scrappy contender fights for glory. Portentously named Odysseus Rex, he is a strutting, talking rooster pitted against the neighborhoods undefeated champion. His owner, desperate for things to start going right in his life, is Gil, an invisible guy who works at McDonalds and lives with his ailing mother. Winning this fight isnt really about winning this fight. Why this? A philosophizing rooster engaged in a nerve-rattling cockfight: Surely, this is the weekends only opportunity to see that. The comic originality of Olivia Dufaults writing was highly praised during the plays introduction in New Yorks nonprofit scene in 2013, when Dufault was in her mid-20s and known as Eric Dufault. Recipient of all manner of awards, fellowships and residencies, the New York-based Dufault also wrote for the first two seasons of AMCs Preacher. The L.A. premiere is by a particularly feisty intimate-theater company with a penchant for new and unusual plays. Details: Theatre of NOTE, 1517 N. Cahuenga Blvd., Hollywood. 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 7 p.m. Sundays; ends March 24. $20 and $25. (323) 856-8611, www.theatreofnote.com Greg Nussen, left, and Travis Moscinski in "Year of the Rooster." Darrett Sanders The 99-Seat Beat appears every Friday. Our team of reviewers people with more than 75 years of combined experience tracking local theater shortlists offerings with an emphasis on 99-seat theaters and other smaller venues. Some (but not all) recommendations are shows we've seen; others have caught our attention because of the track record of the company, playwright, director or cast. You can find more comprehensive theater listings posted every Sunday at latimes.com/arts. See all of our latest arts news and reviews at latimes.com/arts. daryl.miller@latimes.com Twitter: @darylhmiller Princess dresses are not the sole purview of little girls. At the first preview of Disney Theatricals new Broadway musical Frozen on Thursday night, the royal gowns were an equal-opportunity proposition for grown women, teenagers, toddlers and a marvelous little boy. At a quarter till 8, a giddy crowd wound down 44th Street and into the St. James Theatre. Many fans had purchased tickets nearly four months ago. Yuki Kunishi, an accountant who lives in the city, arrived in an Elsa dress accompanied by her boyfriend, Charlie Omacer. The pair had been waiting since August for Disney to announce the sale of tickets. We loved it. We didnt expect to cry, but we did. Natalie Brady, who saw the show with her sister Advertisement Kunishi has lost count of how many times she has seen the Oscar-winning 2013 film about a queen who accidentally plunges her kingdom into eternal winter and the sister who braves a perilous, icy mountain to save her. Its all magical, fantastical, Kunishi said, adding that her own first name means snow in Japanese. Omacer said hes always liked the Disney stuff, but after he started dating Kunishi three years ago, it became mandatory. Larissa McKay and her mum stood a few paces up in line. They were from the frozen north (Ottawa, Canada) and were on a Broadway tear. They had seen Hamilton the night before and The Band before that, but they were ecstatic to have scored Frozen tickets for Thursday night. Larissa relates to Anna, Mum to Elsa. Shes quirky and she makes mistakes too, Larissa said, pointedly shrugging her shoulders at her mother. Megan and Jason Donahue of Long Island won a lottery for tickets to see Frozen on the first night of previews. (Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times ) Inside the packed lobby, two young women navigated the crowd while recording video of their trek on a phone. Claudia Lam, a 19-year-old from Hong Kong, emphasized that she has been a Frozen fan for five years from the beginning. Advertisement Lam watched as many behind-the-scenes videos of the musicals making as she could on YouTube. She wanted to attend the first preview because a premiere can change the script if something doesnt work, and I wanted to be a part of that. That was an interview, she told her camera. Among the notable arrivals: Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez, the couple who wrote the music and lyrics for the show. But this day was all about the fans. Songwriters Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez arrive for the first preview of Frozen. (Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times ) Advertisement Inside the theater, Brian and Sharon Smith and their 13-year-old daughter Samantha sat close to the stage. Theyre locals lucky to have recently nabbed tickets through Ticketmaster after watching closely for their release. We thought it would be a Lion King situation where we were waiting years and years to see it, Brian said. Sharon describes her daughter as a huge, huge princess fan. Shes also a huge Olaf fan, and when the rotund snowman appears onstage for the first time she grabs for her mothers hand in excitement. After the sold-out audience has taken in the shivery spectacle the glistening fjords, the ice crystals on skirts and in hair and on fireplaces and crisscrossing windowpanes after it has leapt to its feet and applauded while snowy paper fell from the ceiling during the curtain call, a voice in the crowd implored, Can that start all over again? Advertisement Disney does such a good job, Brian Smith said as his family filed out. That was spectacular, Sharon said as Samantha did a happy little hop. The theater lighting crew gets into the spirit before the first preview of Frozen. (Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times ) Many veered to the merch booth on the way to the lobby doors. Vendors sell Elsa, Anna and Olaf plush dolls, coronation bracelets, orb jewelry boxes, and logo gloves, magnets and keychains. Advertisement Six-year-old Brie Edwards and her mother, Terell, were among them. I just liked the whole thing, Brie said, adding that she has doesnt have one favorite character. She has four, she said. Sven, Olaf, Elsa, Anna and Kristoff, she said. So make that five. At this moment, Jelani Alladin, the actor who plays Kristoff, emerged from a backstage door to hug a few waiting friends. A girl in a cape and a sky-blue Elsa dress, clutching a $45 Olaf plush doll, stared with mouth agape. Advertisement Kristoff, she stammered. As Alladin began to amble off, sisters Kathleen Sanderson and Natalie Brady from Utah and Ohio, respectively, who are in New York for a sisters weekend, asked for a selfie with the actor. We loved it, Brady said. We didnt expect to cry, but we did. Brady is the Elsa in the family, they added. Sanderson is the Anna. Advertisement Curtain call at the first preview: From left, Andrew Pirozzi in the Sven costume, Caissie Levy as Elsa, Patti Murin as Anna, Brooklyn Nelson as Young Elsa, Mattea Conforti as Young Anna, Greg Hildreth in the Olaf costume and Jelani Alladin as Kristoff. (Disney Theatrical ) jessica.gelt@latimes.com @jessicagelt ALSO Advertisement Frozen songwriters are Oscar nominees for Coco Frozens Jennifer Lee on being a female director Why TV loves playwrights UPDATES: Advertisement 11:30 a.m. This article was updated with additional photos. Chocolate Babies Stephen Winters 1997 political satire centers on a group of LGBTQ black and Asian performers and activists, most of whom are HIV-positive, as they target local politicians who oppose an AIDS hospice in their neighborhood. Part of The Black Book series. A discussion will follow the film. Hammer Museum, Billy Wilder Theatre, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, (310) 443-7000. Feb. 25, 7:30 p.m. Free. www.hammer.ucla.edu Concert for George David Lelands 2003 documentary of the legendary tribute concert to George Harrison at the Royal Albert Hall, held one year after Harrisons death, is being re-released for one day in honor of the former Beatles 75th birthday. The all-star performers include Eric Clapton, Jeff Lynne, Paul McCartney and the late Tom Petty. Royal, West L.A.; NoHo 7, North Hollywood; Playhouse 7, Pasadena; Claremont 5, Claremont; (310) 478-3836. Feb. 25, 7:30 p.m. www.laemmle.com Films of Wes Anderson The Texas-born directors second feature, the delightfully deadpan 1998 comedy-drama Rushmore, starring Jason Schwartzman as an academically underachieving prep school teen who strikes up an unlikely friendship with a middle-aged industrialist (Bill Murray), starts the monthlong series. With Olivia Williams as the lovely Mrs. Cross. Also, The Royal Tenenbaums, March 8; Bottle Rocket, March 15; The Darjeeling Limited, March 22; Fantastic Mr. Fox, March 29. Laemmle NoHo 7, 5240 Throwback Thursdays, Lankershim Blvd., North Hollywood, (310) 478-3836. March 1, 7:30 p.m. $12; $9 ages 62+. www.laemmle.com Working Girls: Americas Career Women on Screen Theresa Randle stars as the nameless aspiring actress who becomes a phone sex operator at an agency run by women in Spike Lees 1996 Girl 6. Written by playwright Suzan-Lori Parks. With The Best of Everything (1959). Hope Lange, Suzy Parker and Diane Baker are the girls in the typing pool of a New York publishing house but Joan Crawford steals the show as their demanding Type-A boss. UCLA Film & Television Archive and Women in Film Los Angeles, Billy Wilder Theater, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, (310) 206-8013. March 2, 7:30 p.m. $8-$10. www.cinema.ucla.edu/events Advertisement The Wizard of Oz Oh, Toto! A chance to see Dorothy, Scarecrow, Tin Man and the Cowardly Lion in the 1939 classic on the big screen in 35 mm, oh my! 35mm Movie Club at the Vista Theatre, 4473 Sunset Drive, Hollywood, (323) 660-6639. March 3, 10:30 a.m. $11. Tickets available at: www.eventbrite.com ------------ See the most-read stories in Entertainment this hour Movie Trailers calendar@latimes.com @LATimesMovies Late in the World War II drama Darkest Hour, Winston Churchill played, in case you hadnt heard, by Gary Oldman delivers his famous We shall fight on the beaches speech in the House of Commons, a piece of oration so rousing that it brings his listeners to their feet. For a moment ripped from the pages of history, the scene feels curiously prophetic: less a blast from the past than a dress rehearsal for Oscar night. If he wins the Academy Award for lead actor on March 4, as he is widely expected to do, Oldman will likely earn another standing ovation, this time while wearing a tuxedo rather than a fat suit and prosthetics. An upset might still be brewing as last years epic envelope snafu reminds us, anything can happen but any other outcome would have to be reckoned a major surprise. The same goes for Frances McDormand, Sam Rockwell and Allison Janney, heavily favored to win the Oscars for lead actress, supporting actor and supporting actress, respectively. All four have already triumphed at the Critics Choice Awards, the Golden Globes, the Screen Actors Guild Awards and the British Academy Film Awards, a rare confluence of press and industry opinion that is almost certain to repeat itself once more at the Oscars, to much applause if also a wearying sense of anticlimax. Advertisement Not everyone will find it wearying, of course. Those who believe that the years most indelible feats of big-screen acting can be found in Darkest Hour, I, Tonya and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri will join the applause without hesitation. And even those who dont might be heartened by the recognition of veterans as respected as Oldman, McDormand, Rockwell and Janney (even if by this point they are starting to sound like partners at the worlds most boringly successful law firm). Is it petty, then, to long for an upset or two? To wish that those prior awards ceremonies had supplied a less unanimous, more interesting set of responses? Was there not a voting body that felt inclined to shed some well-deserved light on, say, Sally Hawkins for The Shape of Water, Mary J. Blige for Mudbound or Willem Dafoe for The Florida Project? Was it ageism that kept them from bestowing a prize on either of the two most exciting discoveries of the year, Timothee Chalamet in Call Me by Your Name and Daniel Kaluuya in Get Out? Every awards season tends to converge toward predictable outcomes. Even still, the near-unprecedented degree to which the same four actors have steamrolled their competition strikes me as an unusually misguided example of the consensus machine working overtime. Its not that the performances given by Oldman, McDormand, Rockwell and Janney wonderful actors all, it scarcely needs mentioning are without their individual merits. But lauded together, over and over again, they amount to a skewed, lazy and finally unrepresentative sampling of what was an exceptionally rich and varied year in movie acting. Allison Janney in a scene from the movie I, Tonya. (Neon via AP ) Is it pure coincidence that McDormand, Janney, Oldman and Rockwell all played such fierce, stubborn, self-isolating characters? Fictional or fact-based, these men and women always seem at war with the world around them none more literally than Oldmans Churchill, bickering with his allies, seething at his rivals and ultimately defying Adolf Hitler himself, all while giving a master class in scenery chewing to make the Blitz look restrained by comparison. The stakes may be less world-shattering in I, Tonya, but Janneys LaVona Golden the perpetual devil on the shoulder of her celebrity daughter, Tonya Harding seems to inhabit her own zone of angry solitude. Shes a self-styled truth teller in a world overrun by bullies and phonies. Something similar could be said of McDormands Mildred Hayes and Rockwells Officer Dixon in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, two unfriendly small-town outcasts and staunch adversaries who reluctantly join forces in their bitter pursuit of justice. The cumulative ferocity of these performances is worth noting, in part, because it plays into the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences long-standing tendency to mistake aggressiveness for depth, to equate the showiest, most arresting and physically transformative acting with the best. And sometimes, of course, the equation is accurate. The academys honor roll, to say nothing of cinema history, would be significantly poorer if Robert De Niro hadnt bulked up to play Jake LaMotta, or if Natalie Portman had never strapped on a pair of toe shoes. But to their credit, academy voters have also proved admirably willing to resist those more-is-more impulses, especially in recent years. Think of Mahershala Ali winning the supporting actor Oscar for his quietly transcendent performance in Moonlight, or Patricia Arquette earning best supporting actress for her moving, flash-free work in Boyhood. The academy will always love its dazzling star turns and its disease-of-the-week histrionics, but it clearly also has voters who are willing to appreciate nuance and avoid the obvious. Advertisement This year there seems to be no avoiding Janney, whose acidly funny performance might be the best thing about I, Tonya but is far from the best thing nominated for best supporting actress. Janney makes a memorable Gorgon, to be sure, but she also reduces LaVona to a cardboard grotesque, the kind of sideshow that cant hold a candle to Laurie Metcalfs infinitely more layered portrait of a tough-loving mom in Lady Bird. There also seems to be no avoiding the Three Billboards duo of McDormand and Rockwell, whose joint winning streak over the last few months is an unmistakable if excessive salute to the actors rough-hewn chemistry. It also shows just how little the industry seems to care about the critical sentiment that has built up against Martin McDonaghs film in recent months, much of it directed specifically at Rockwells Dixon, an ill-tempered white police officer with a fondness for beating up black suspects. As someone who admires the movie with a few billboard-sized reservations, Id say the open-ended question of whether the racist cop is ultimately redeemed makes the story more provocative and thornily human rather than less. If anything, the most glaring flaw in McDonaghs screenplay the callousness with which it reduces its black characters suffering to a mere plot point is productively complicated by Rockwells idiot-bad-boy swagger. He makes Dixon both a repellent moron and an insidious charmer; if hes someone you love to hate, hes also someone you hate to love. In some ways Im more persuaded by Dixons struggle to turn over a new leaf than I am by the fiery crusade of Mildred Hayes, a grieving mother whom McDormand invests with the kind of scene-stealing ferocity that will doubtless pummel more than a few academy members into submission: Vote for me, bitches! Making like a 21st century Rosie the Riveter in her badass bandanna and jumpsuit, Mildred may be an avenging dark angel, but shes really a consummate tell-off artist, someone with a custom-tailored diatribe for anyone who dares stand in her way. Advertisement Sam Rockwell and Frances McDormand in a scene from Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. (Merrick Morton / AP ) To these ears, though, even McDormands nastiest zingers too often come off as strained, self-satisfied shtick not something you could say about her marvelous comic performance in Fargo, which won her a lead actress Oscar 21 years ago. By far her best moments in Three Billboards are those in which Mildreds steely composure erodes, when shes suddenly overwhelmed by a spasm of grief, regret, compassion or fear. (Tellingly, many of those moments take place opposite Woody Harrelson, whose turn as a cancer-stricken police chief is easily the movies best.) But these humanizing blips dont always well up persuasively from beneath Mildreds rage; they feel programmed, tonally and emotionally at odds with that trash-talking surface. Perhaps most of all this year, there seems to be no avoiding Oldman and the admittedly remarkable metamorphosis he undergoes in Darkest Hour. Its astonishing to see the actor who once played the thin, gangly Sid Vicious now fully inhabiting Churchills portly figure, outsized persona and heroic legacy. Oldman doesnt give a bad performance; he gives a grandiose one, impeccably scaled to the ham-fisted proportions of the dramatic vehicle at hand. He mobilized the English language and sent it into battle, one of Churchills rivals says with grudging admiration after that aforementioned speech. Its an unwittingly apt summary of a performance type that tends to excite awards voters, in which words are all but marshaled into action, pressed in service of grandstanding speeches and lump-in-the-throat line readings. Advertisement Its probably telling that I cant recall much of Oldmans dialogue from Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (2011), in which he played John le Carres memorable antihero George Smiley a fictional creation, to be sure, but no less determined a steward of his nations place in history than Churchill. It wasnt the kind of performance that bellowed its brilliance to the rafters. Oldman worked at his own seductively measured pace, drawing the viewer in a little more with every cryptic gaze. The effect of it was hypnotic; by the end he had all but seeped into your bloodstream. The result was too subtle a showcase to earn Oldman the kinds of accolades that are now falling almost carelessly into his lap. But it remains the richer of his two Oscar-nominated turns by far, and I suspect it will serve as a useful reminder: The best performances often defy consensus as well as convention, especially when an actors darkest hour is too easily mistaken for his finest. justin.chang@latimes.com Its rare to see a double nominee in the craft categories at the Oscars, but this year there are three: costume designer Jacqueline Durran, production designer Sarah Greenwood and set decorator Katie Spencer. They have all earned the double honor for their work on two very different movies, Darkest Hour and Beauty and the Beast. Durran is up twice for costume design, while Greenwood and Spencer are doubly nominated for production design. The connecting point is not the films, which couldnt be more aesthetically distinct, but the three women themselves, who have developed an important working relationship over the past decade. The trio first partnered with director Joe Wright on an adaptation of Pride & Prejudice in 2005 and have continued working with him since, including on Atonement and Anna Karenina. The director tapped all three to come onboard Darkest Hour, a moody interpretation of Winston Churchills rise to power during World War II. Its a very kind of relaxed shorthand thats built up between us, Greenwood says, sitting with Spencer and Durran in the members club of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts in London a week before the BAFTA Film Awards, for which the trio are also twice nominated. Its not always intentional were not always knowing that were going to work on the same films but its something thats grown. Thats what makes it really fun and exciting, and thats come out of the films weve done with Joe and the way Joe works and his approach. We then, I think, have taken it to other films. Advertisement Disney shows Dan Stevens as The Beast, left, and Emma Watson as Belle in a live-action adaptation of Beauty and the Beast. (Disney ) None of the three had ever worked with Bill Condon, the director of Beauty and the Beast, Disneys live-action version of the 1991 animated film. But when Condon hired Greenwood, Durran and Spencer soon followed, making six of the seven department heads on the film female. The process of creating a reimagined Beauty and the Beast was long and arduous. The three met with Condon and producer Greg Yolen for a few hours every day for more than a month to go through the script word by word ahead of production. It was just to crash out things that were a bit loose and decide how to do things a bit better, Greenwood says. Like, What can we do visually to tell the story better? That was a fantastic coming together on all levels. This is what we do with Joe all the time anyway. Its almost like osmosis and because weve been at it for so long it works really well. I think its really interesting with Beauty and the Beast how the three of us connected on that more than any other project, Spencer adds. It goes through the characters the clock, the candlestick, the teapot which then goes through to the set, which comes to the props, which comes to the costumes. I dont think its ever been so interconnected as that. The team made a decision to set the film in France in the 18th century, looking to the original story as well as the 1964 Jean Cocteau film for inspiration. The sets were built from scratch on a soundstage in London and Durrans challenge was to pay homage to the animation without making an exact replica of it. People want to see a recognizable Belle, Durran says. To play around too much with those components would potentially be a disappointment to the viewer. We knew that Belle had to have a yellow dress. She had to have a blue pinafore. So I had to have the animation, the historical period and everyones point of view in there. Greenwood and Spencer were able to take more liberties, particularly when it came to designing the castle interiors and the enchanted characters. Advertisement Even though quite a few reviews said we were a slavish re-creation of the animation, its absolutely not true, Greenwood notes. If you take the thing scene by scene or moment by moment, the animation and the songs and the characters were fantastic. But with the look of it there was a lot of filling in the gaps. The candlestick its got three heads and thats it. Thats all you know. So when it came to doing all the characters, which was something Katie and I started on very early, it was about mixing what the historic artifacts were like, what were the characters like, who were the actors playing them, what did the costumes do. You had to think about the materials they were made out of that turned into their characters and how they turned into clothes. Gary Oldman in Darkest Hour. (Focus Features ) Surprisingly, Darkest Hour allowed for an even greater use of imagination in the production design and costumes. Durran felt a need to stay close to historical reality when designing Churchills clothing since hes such an iconic figure, but otherwise the trio worked with Wright to create a unique interpretation of the period and mood. The budgets on Darkest Hour were significantly less than those on Beauty and the Beast (Greenwood notes that her specific budget on the Disney epic was likely more than the total budget for Darkest Hour). Greenwood and Spencer used empty, run-down buildings to create original sets for Buckingham Palace and Downing Street, both of which are neither exact replicas nor based on historical record. Instead, they wanted to infuse every scene with a worn-out pallor that matched the state of Britain at the time, which felt right for the films specific narrative tone. That was the feeling we especially brought into Buckingham Palace the fact that it felt as tawdry as everything else did, Greenwood says. Im not sure that it actually did, but in our film that was the feel we wanted to get across. The bulbs were on their lowest wattage, the walls werent painted. When Katie got all the furniture reupholstered instead of five-star bling we went for two-star and slightly muted. And thats what Jacqueline brought to all the costumes. We all knew the level we were going for. Its much more about an interpretation of the time and the period and the character and the way Joe shoots. Advertisement It was the same when building the War Rooms from scratch, Spencer adds. In the Nazi bunkers everything was immaculate. In the War Rooms here theyd literally say Has anyone got any spare chairs at home? Have you got a map? The maps were sometimes out of date because that was a map that somebody had. It was extraordinary how ad hoc we were in winning the war. Durran was able to use the aesthetic of the sets to inform her costume design as well, which is something she often does when working with Greenwood and Spencer. Its all about the atmosphere, so then I can interpret the environment and make decisions based on that interpretation about what people will be wearing rather than something more literal, she says. You want to make something for the people who live in that building. If I find a picture that I really think resonates with what Im hoping to achieve in the film and I show it to Sarah and Katie then they can extrapolate from a costume what that would mean in the environment. And I can do the same back. So if Katie shows me a picture of a chipped, dirty skirting board then I try and indirectly reabsorb that into the costumes. One of the most striking moments of collaboration in the film is the pink dressing gown Churchill wears. Theres no historical record of his dressing gown being pink and all existing photos of him wearing it are in black and white. The historians Durran consulted with werent sure either, so the team had to take their own position on the dressing gown. Advertisement In cooperation we talked about the color of the set and what Joe wanted to bring out in those scenes and how Gary [Oldman] wanted it to be, and we came to the conclusion that it was going to be pink, Durran explains. So then I had to find a fabric in the correct shade of pink, which we couldnt find. We decided to have it woven and dyed, and we had slightly different shades of pink and couldnt decide, so we made two different dressing gowns in two different shades of pink, and we chose one. Joes got the other one at home. Pink is a really challenging color, Greenwood adds. Churchill referred to himself as a baby, which he does in the film, and a pig. So we painted the walls of his bedroom at Downing Street pink and Katie found this amazing crying baby sculpture. Its subliminal, which is great. Hes quite fleshy. In the first scene when he hoists his legs out of bed he flashes Ms. Layton, its all a bit pink. An important thing about Joe is that when weve created something between us he will then use it to the maximum, Durran continues. Other people may not have played on that fleshy pinkness, but he does. He wants to create the whole picture of what this fleshy color means in the room. When working on two vastly different films, its hard for the trio to determine which deserves the recognition of an Oscar. Advertisement Personally you know which you think you did your hardest work for, Spencer says. But that doesnt necessarily translate into which is the best film, especially when theyre so different. These two movies are so opposite and thats lovely. Both of them are deeply lovely and deeply flawed, Greenwood adds, and neither do I love more than the other. calendar@latimes.com UNDERRATED Chris Rocks Tamborine on Netflix: Maybe its a result of the streaming services habit of flooding the field with stand-up comedy, but more attention should be given to the first special in 10 years by an undisputed master of the form. Rock sounds energized with material on police brutality, race and his own divorce, which comes with a mix of self-lacerating honesty and raw truth. Not all his lines land, and some reveal shadows of sexism still to be explored, but at least Rock is still stretching, which isnt something that can always be said for comics at his level. Letitia Wright: Previously best known for portraying a roadside museum-goer/agent of righteous vengeance in the most recent season of Black Mirror, this Guyanese actress stole almost every scene she shared in the revolutionary blockbuster Black Panther. Portraying TChallas younger sister Shuri, Wright is a cross between James Bonds Q and the smartest, funniest person in your physics class, inventing a new style of shoe one moment, greeting Martin Freemans CIA agent as a colonizer the next. Of the many things Black Panther did right, giving Wright some of the best lines was high among them. Advertisement OVERRATED Derren Browns The Push: Because the biggest problem in 2018 has been believing in the worst in human nature, next week Netflix will be releasing this series looking at whether an average person can be pressured into killing someone. Orchestrated by Brown, a so-called psychological illusionist, some 70 actors will construct an elaborate ruse to manipulate a person into (apparent) murder. While Brown insisted his unsuspecting star of this horrifying stunt was fine once the hidden cameras stopped, lets just shift their lives to the next season of Black Mirror and be done with it. Technologys war on reality: Our world is evolving so fast that nearly every day brings a moment ripe for a voice-over prologue in a post-apocalyptic movie (We had no idea what was coming ...), and while Boston Dynamics robot dog executioners of the future come close, the increasing possibilities of digitally placing words in peoples mouths on video are the stuff of dystopian nightmares. While companies like Pinscreen refine their avatar-crafting abilities for future exploitation, the rest of us will be doomed to debate what is real on social media sort of like we do now, but worse. See the most-read stories in Entertainment this hour chris.barton@latimes.com Follow me over here @chrisbarton. ALSO: Advertisement Overrated/Underrated: Somebody Feed Phil, and the how long is long enough for a farewell tour? Sunday Conversation: NBCs curling reporter Trenni Kusnierek on the sports cult appeal Review: Black Mirror returns with more grim looks at the future Of the many words to describe Guillermo del Toro director, producer, screenwriter and special effects makeup artist colleagues have lately settled on just one: collaborator. His cooperative approach appears to be the secret to success now that his film The Shape of Water leads the 90th Academy Awards race with 13 nominations, including three for Del Toro best picture, director and original screenplay. About two weeks before the Oscar ceremony on March 4, Del Toro was recognized for a working style that honors below-the-line talents when the Costume Designers Guild named him the years Distinguished Collaborator. As he presented the trophy, actor Doug Jones, who has played 11 of Del Toros monsters, compared the director to other film visionaries such as Walt Disney and George Lucas. Many of the directors admirers also call him a visionary, but describe a man who is a deeply practical leader with a proven system that enables his cast and crew to meet and exceed his uncommon vision. As a director who started his career in Mexico as a special effects makeup artist, Del Toro developed insight across disciplines. Advertisement The Shape of Water actor Doug Jones, from left, director Guillermo del Toro, recipient of the Distinguished Collaborator Award at the Costume Designers Guild Awards, and costume designer Luis Sequeira attend the Costume Designers Guild Awards on Tuesday. (Christopher Polk / Getty Images for JumpLine ) He understands the dialogue of design, said Luis Sequeira, the Oscar-nominated costume designer for The Shape of Water as well as costume designer for TV series The Strain. He comes prepared and complete with a vision in his head that he is able to communicate. As important, Del Toro guides the look and feel of each departments contribution with detailed production books. My first job is color-coding the movie. I do it to try and unify them in a single purpose and I explain to them what the colors mean in the story, he said. Then they go onto their mood board and gather images from everywhere magazines, other movies, paintings. We go through and discard those not conducive to storytelling. As an experienced screenwriter, Del Toro also provides another rich source of direction. I do a biography for every character of four to eight pages. In that bio, I do talk about how they like to be dressed, he said. And I share these biographies with every department. Even if I didnt mention wardrobe, you have an eight-page bio and know that character is shy, is bold. Then you support those with choices. As a result, hes present as costumes are developed from sketch to final fittings and weighs in on fabric choices. A fabric is not a fabric until it is on the body of the actor, Del Toro said. When you get a sample or swatch, you have no idea how it is going to fall on the actors body, how it is going to catch light. As the costume designer on Crimson Peak and Pacific Rim, Kate Hawley came to appreciate his breadth of experience. Any of us who have worked with Guillermo as part of his team realize very quickly that we are working not just with him as a director, but also as a highly skilled artist, designer and craftsman, Hawley said. Guillermo started out designing and making his creatures many years ago from the prosthetics and sculpting right down to the clothes his characters wore, she said. So he understands all the disciplines and technicalities involved in creating a costume, and that you are reflecting not just the character, but also their physicality and movement. And that it is always, always in relation to the environment he creates and builds around them. Advertisement Although Hawley has teasingly called the director a benevolent dictator, he also appears to appreciate boundaries. At a recent Shape of Water costume exhibit, Sequeira said the fabric for a ballgown that Elisa (Sally Hawkins) wears in a dream sequence cost nearly $10,000 an amount that required special dispensation from the director. I have no idea how to do that dress. I give credit completely to Luis, Del Toro said. I would have gone for every wrong choice because it is not in my wheelhouse. Advertisement The director also allows, and even encourages, his visual crew to indulge their quest for perfection. Sequeira came to set with aging kits, ready for instant adjustments. Wed look at the shot and go into beautifying. It really was like painting each scene, he said. Sequeira, a self-described detail freak, described a working environment where cast and crew alike were encouraged to push a step beyond. I think that is what he pulls out of everybody, he said. Everyone can see the passion that he brings to the project. It becomes like an infection, and we all catch it. Advertisement image@latimes.com For fashion news, follow us at @latimesimage on Twitter. The red carpet as we know it has rolled out far beyond the 50-foot stretch of crimson flooring where stars stride from their chauffeured SUVs to the steps of any given event. This awards season, the red carpet has become a place where politics calls to celebrate diversity as well as gender equality have joined the dresses, clutches, tuxes and jewelry. However, the red carpet really is where fashion moments are made. Its also where gowns and accessories from household-name fashion brands such as Prada, Valentino, Jimmy Choo and Oscar de la Renta are now mixing with a rising class of newer designers, many of whom celebrate the individuality of the star they are dressing and are becoming bold standouts because of their playful, forward-thinking and sometimes, political approach to how they are creating red-carpet looks. These young and burgeoning labels are managing to compete for the attention of celebrities some of whom have lucrative contracts with major fashion houses and their stylists despite the fact that in many cases these newbies have little to no resources to engage in the pay-to-play practices that can occur within the red-carpet machine. Creativity is currency, said Steven Kolb, president and chief executive of the Council of Fashion Designers of America about newer labels landing on the red carpet. I truly believe that a standout design can compete among established brands. This month, the CFDA, joined by Womens Wear Daily and Variety, had its first event focused solely on the red carpet. It was a panel discussion with designer Vera Wang and stylists Cristina Ehrlich, Elizabeth Stewart, Karla Welch and Law Roach. The fascination with celebrity style on the red carpet is universal, Kolb said. With social channels, the impact can be immediate and global. That makes the red carpet even more relevant. Such potential doesnt go unnoticed by new, emerging designers. While plenty of newer or up-and-coming brands are proving their ability to appeal to the worlds biggest stars and stylists, heres our list of those labels a rising new class of designers poised to become the next household names within Hollywood and around the globe that recently have had a serious influence on the red carpet. Rosie Assoulin Rosie Assoulin, center, stands with models during her spring/summer 2016 show. Rosie Assoulin The Brooklyn, N.Y., native honed her skills working for Oscar de la Renta as well as Alber Elbaz at Lanvin. Assoulin launched her eponymous collection in 2014, proving that a light, feminine and whimsical aesthetic could still be a red-carpet heavyweight. Why she matters: Assoulin has become one of the most-talked-about and sought-after lines among fashion insiders because of the designers bold use of color and standout voluminous silhouettes. Her fall 2018 collection, which she presented during New York Fashion Week this month, included marbled textiles, tiered ruffles and exaggerated bell-bottom pants. I just love that Rosie is really someone who thinks outside the paradigm of regular red-carpet fashion, says stylist Karla Welch, who dresses Tracee Ellis Ross, Justin Bieber, Karlie Kloss, Sarah Paulson and a slew of other A-listers. She disregards traditional sparkle and shapes and makes dresses with love. Its never an easy choice and its never obvious. But every time Ive ever placed a Rosie [piece], my clients have loved wearing it. Assoulins red-carpet hits include: Mandy Moore in a black halter gown with wide red sash for the Golden Globes this year. Issa Rae in a white dress with pleated gold detail for the Los Angeles premiere of Black Panther this year. Tessa Thompson in a rainbow-hued halter neck gown for the 2017 Emmy Awards. Tracee Ellis Ross in a color-blocked wrap dress for the 2017 MTV Movie Awards. Mandy Moore in Rosie Assoulin at the 2018 Golden Globe Awards in Beverly Hills. Frazer Harrison / Getty Images Christos Costarellos Designer Christos Costarellos Costarellos Born into fashion his parents worked in the industry designer Christos Costarellos launched his fashion label of ready-to-wear clothing in Greece in 1998. Now with global distribution, Costarellos is known for his flowing Grecian goddess-inspired silhouettes, use of lace and applique and ultra-feminine designs. Why he matters: A Costarellos dress is essentially unmistakable for the feminine-yet-modern take on a dress. His bridal line has gained tons of traction for its twist on traditional bridal gowns (think high necklines and blouson sleeves). Meghan Markle has sung the lines praises in interviews, saying she is a big fan. Some fashion insiders are speculating that Markle may choose the designer to create her wedding dress for the upcoming royal nuptials. Costarellos red-carpet hits include: Chrissy Teigen in an off-the-shoulder red tulle gown at the Baby2Baby Gala in 2017. Rachel Platten wearing a white dress with red outlined lace pattern at the MusicCares Person of the Year event this year. Jurnee Smollett-Bell in a blush lace gown with a high neck to the NAACP Image Awards this year. Jurnee Smollett-Bell at the 49th NAACP Image Awards this year. Paras Griffin / Getty Images for NAACP Josep Font Josep Font, creative director of Delpozo. Delpozo The Spanish label Delpozo launched in 2012 and is helmed by creative director Josep Font. Its known for its quirky use of color, exaggerated details (think shoulder ruffles and peplums) and architectural silhouettes. Font refers to the brand as pret-a-couture, which results in an effortless balance between traditional dressy frocks and daytime looks. Why Font matters: The brand provides a veritable buffet for stars who are looking to step outside the traditional sartorial box of red-carpet dressing. Color combinations are sometimes baffling at first blush and the shapes and details on a dress totally unexpected. (For example, consider the crisp white midi-dress with a capelet that Michelle Obama wore as host of the Let Girls Learn conference in Madrid in 2016.) However, Delpozo dresses appear to be the ones that are the most eye-catching and telling of the woman wearing it. The styles are not for wallflowers or wannabes but for risk takers and those looking to blaze their own trail on the red carpet. Delpozos red-carpet hits include: Ruth Negga in a midi-dress with exaggerated sleeves and floral skirt to the 2017 Film Independent Spirit Awards. Mary Elizabeth Winstead in a blush, light blue and yellow tulle gown to the Critics Choice Awards this year. Kiernan Shipka in a sequin and tulle top with pink bow detail and metallic trousers to the Critics Choice Awards this year. Ruth Negga in Delpozo at the 2017 Film Independent Spirit Awards. C Flanigan / FilmMagic Thai Nguyen Designer Thai Nguyen Thai Nguyen The South Vietnam-born-and-raised, Orange County-based designer creates a collection of gowns that nod to his Eastern upbringing. The designers parents owned a sewing school in Vietnam, where as a child Nguyen learned the craft. After immigrating to the United States, he enrolled in the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising in downtown Los Angeles. Nguyen then designed for the now-defunct L.A. label BCBG until opening his eponymous brand Thai Nguyen Atelier in 2008. Why Nguyen matters: Nguyen isnt trying to reinvent the wheel of what makes a gorgeous, timeless and standout design. Armed with undeniable technical skills, hes able to masterfully execute daring shapes, low-cut details and sheer styles to look as rich and tasteful as designs that are demure. Nguyens red-carpet hits include: Kelly Marie Tran in a custom red, strapless gown with a train for Star Wars: The Last Jedi premiere in December 2017. This was the actress first major film premiere. Madeline Brewer in an embellished black dress with sheer mesh skirt to the 2017 Television Critics Awards. Jennifer Lopez in a semi-sheer, beaded black lace dress on American Idol in 2016. Kelly Marie Tran at "Star Wars: The Last Jedi" premiere in December 2017. Jesse Grant / Getty Images for Disney Olga Djanguirov Olga Djanguirov, designer of Olgana Paris. Olgana Paris The Paris-based, made-in-Italy shoe label Olgana Paris was started in 2014. Creative director Olga Djanguirov studied medicine and then contemporary art, parlaying her love of couture techniques to footwear. Her shoes have some unexpected flourishes such as fur trim, floral applique detail and pleated satin folds, which makes sense to pair with eveningwear and real red-carpet-ready looks. Why Djanguirov matters: There are plenty of options for chic-and-sleek black pumps, standout platform shoes and sky-high stilettos in every shade imaginable, but what Djanguirov has created are sexy, unexpected and out-of-the-box shoes that on paper may not even make sense. (Consider the thick fur-strap pumps Rihanna paired with ripped baggy jeans and a menswear-inspired blazer or the poppy red and black slingbacks with flower applique that Tracee Ellis Ross wore with a matching red and black dress.) Elisabeth Moss wore Djanguirovs blush-colored satin ankle-tie heels to the 2017 Emmy Awards. Djanguirovs red-carpet hits include: Elisabeth Moss wearing blush-colored satin heels at the 2017 Emmy Awards. Lupita Nyongo in black satin asymmetrical strap sandals during the Black Panther in Seoul, South Korea, in February. Kristen Wiig in crystal-embellished gold sandals to the 2017 Governors Awards. Lupita Nyong'o in Olgana Paris sandals arrives at the red carpet of the Seoul premiere of "Black Panther" on Feb. 5 in Seoul, South Korea. Han Myung-Gu / Getty Images for Disney Mary Alice Malone and Roy Luwolt Roy Luwolt and Mary Alice Malone, designers of Malone Souliers. Malone Souliers Malone Souliers, the New York-based luxury shoe brand, was founded by Mary Alice Malone and Roy Luwolt in 2014. Three years later, the duo was awarded with the Vivian Infantino Emerging Talent Award from Footwear News. The label has collaborated with Adam Lippes, David Koma, Roksanda and most recently, Emanuel Ungaro. (The latter collaboration launches with pre-fall, and will continue through the fall/winter 2018 season.) Why Luwolt and Malone matter: The labels designs transition from day to night, making them regular red-carpet accessories for casual premieres as well as dressier grand events. Their corset lace top Montana pump and the triple-strap Maureen pump are almost instantly recognizable the second they become visible from beneath a long dress. Luwolt and Malones red-carpet hits include: Ava DuVernay wearing the black leather lace-up Montana pump to the Teen Vogue L.A. Summit keynote address in 2017 and the Imogen pump to the Producers Guild Awards in January. Rachel Brosnahan wore the triple strap Robyn pump to the BAFTA Los Angeles Tea Party in January. Lake Bell in embellished pink Zia pumps during Paris Fashion Week in Paris this year. Ava DuVernay at the Producers Guild Awards in Beverly Hills this year. Frazer Harrison / Getty Images Sophia Webster Designer Sophia Webster Sophia Webster The British accessories designer founded her eponymous label in 2012. Websters shoes are unmistakable because of details such as crystallized angel wings, bright shades of glitter and boldly colored pom-pom tassels. Webster has grown her brand to include children, bridal and handbag ranges that carry out the same whimsical aesthetic as her shoes. Why Webster matters: Webster has managed to maintain a sense of covetable quirkiness in luxury accessories. When celebrities wore black to the 75th Golden Globes this year, many opted to wear Websters shoes to add extra embellishment to the all-black ensembles. When Oprah Winfrey received her Cecil B. DeMille Award during the Golden Globes, she paired Websters Coco crystal pumps with her off-the-shoulder black Atelier Versace dress. Like Olgana Paris, Sophia Webster shoes are not for wallflowers, but they remain chic, sophisticated and hard to miss all in a good way. Websters red-carpet hits include: Beyonce in multi-colored slingback sandals with the words Queen and Bee printed across the top of each shoe in 2014. Zoe Kravitz in triple-strap satin sandals to the 2017 premiere of HBOs Big Little Lies. Rose Byrne wearing Lilico crystal pumps to the 2018 G'Day USA Gala in Los Angeles. Rose Byrne wearing Sophia Webster pumps at the 2018 G'Day USA Los Angeles Gala. Richard Shotwell / Invision/AP Lee Savage Designer Lee Savage Lee Savage The former interior designer started her eponymous bag label in 2014. Inspired by the minimalist movement of the 1960s and the artistic philosophies of conceptual artists such as Sol LeWitt and Donald Judd, Lee Savage first reimagined the clutch as an art object. In 2014, WWD named Savage one of its 10 of Tomorrow. Why Savage matters: The clean lines and architectural influence seen in Savages bags appeal to celebrities or everyday people who like a statement accessory that doesnt scream. The designer treats her creations more like sculptures that just happen to hold lip gloss and an iPhone, and they have caught the eye of stylists who see the benefit of a metallic statement bag that wont compete with a dress, jewelry or the star for that matter. Savages red-carpet hits include: Beyonce holding a gold rectangle clutch to Rihannas Diamond Ball in 2017. Diane Kruger with a white engraved box clutch to 2017 UNICEF Gala dinner. Janelle Monae carrying a printed box clutch to the Los Angeles movie premiere of Annihilation this month. Janelle Monae attends the Los Angeles movie premiere of "Annihilaton." Rachel Murray / Getty Images for Paramount Pictures Beladora Kendrick Lamar and Rihanna, wearing vintage Cartier earrings and a ring, attend the 60th Grammy Awards at Madison Square Garden on Jan. 28 in New York. Christopher Polk / Getty Images for NARAS Beladora, the Beverly Hills-based online estate jewelry firm, was established in 2007. Created by Russell Fogarty, a former vice president of Christies Auction House, Beladora authenticates each piece that comes through the Rodeo Drive office and has gained a reputation as a trusted source for buying and selling with Los Angeles elite. Why Beladora matters: The brand, which carries fine jewelry from major brands, including Cartier, Tiffany & Co., Van Cleef & Arpels, David Webb and Bulgari, has become a go-to source for stylists and industry insiders who often need everything from a hard-to-find singular spectacular piece to trays of jewelry options, usually at the last minute. Beladora sells jewelry online at www.beladora.com but accommodates stylist and celebrity pulls for red-carpet events around the globe. Beladoras red-carpet hits include: Jennifer Lawrence wearing diamond flower drop earrings at the Washington premiere of Red Sparrow this month. Rihanna wearing vintage Cartier earrings and a ring at the 2018 Grammys. Angelina Jolie wearing a mid-20th-century diamond brooch to the 2017 Los Angeles premiere of The Bread Winner. Jennifer Lawrence attends the premiere of "Red Sparrow" at the Newseum on Feb. 15 in Washington. Brent N. Clarke / Invision/AP Nikos Koulis Designer Nikos Koulis Nikos Koulis The Greek designer comes from a family of jewelry designers. In 2006, he launched his own brand. Last year, Koulis won the International Jewelry Designer Award at the VicenzaOro exhibition in Italy, and has landed on the radar of several prominent stylists who have consistently been placing the jewelry on their clients. Why Koulis matters: When it comes to jewelry, its oftentimes the largest or flashiest pieces that pull the most attention. Koulis has managed to cut through the long list of red-carpet-worthy jewelry brands with distinct designs, sharp angles, a bold use of black enamel and, yes, plenty of dazzling diamonds, emeralds, sapphires and rubies. Koulis red-carpet hits include: Oprah Winfrey wearing diamond, emerald and enamel earrings to the 2017 Emmys Awards. Saoirse Ronan wearing a white diamond lariat at this years Directors Guild Awards. Greta Gerwig wearing an emerald, diamond and enamel necklace and ring to this years Producers Guild Awards. Greta Gerwig wearing Nikos Koulis jewelry at the Producers Guild Awards this year. Frazer Harrison / Getty Images Support our journalism Please consider subscribing today to support stories like this one. Get full access to our signature journalism for just 99 cents for the first four weeks. Already a subscriber? Your support makes our work possible. Thank you. image@latimes.com For fashion news, follow us at @latimesimage on Twitter. UPDATES: For the record 11:47 a.m. Feb. 26: This story incorrectly reported that luxury shoe brand Malone Souliers was based in New York. It is based in London. The new Cronut could it be the avocado toast at the new Dominique Ansel bakery, a trompe loeil confection of avocado ice cream, frozen ricotta and shortbread that looks more like the real thing than the actual avocado toast on offer? The ice cream-stuffed marshmallow blow-torched to order so that it resembles a cross between a campfire smore and a baked Alaska on a stick? Or even the milk bread at the restaurant 189 by Dominique Ansel upstairs a construction of soft bread cubes dusted with cotija cheese and filled with pureed corn that somehow tastes like the best street corner elote in East L.A.? If you glance at food magazines, you know about Dominique Ansel. Hes the guy who started the kouign-amann fad a few years ago, the one that obligated every ambitious pastry chef in America to learn how to make the intricately folded Breton pastry. He served terms at Fauchon in Paris and with Daniel Boulud before he moved into his eponymous New York pastry shop, probably the most famous in Manhattan, then spinoffs in London and Tokyo, then a new store in the Grove. More to the point, he is the inventor of the Cronut, the Frankensteinian love child of a croissant and a doughnut whose limited daily run inspires endless early morning queues, a New York tradition he has imported here. A Cronut is an easy thing to make fun of. Ive done it myself. Im still not sure Id wake up before dawn to get one his croissants, eclairs and kouign-amann are reason enough to visit but my first taste at an event a few weeks ago was pretty mind-bending, a buttery pastry crunch punctuated by a pop of flowery jam. 189 by Dominique Ansel is the first full-service restaurant from the chef, a big, airy second-floor space looking out over the Groves main street. One of the dining areas, dominated by the glassed-in open kitchen, features dining alcoves decorated with what looks like giant croissant interiors rendered in gold leaf. Another dining area is crowded with bush-size swirls of babys breath, like a tableau from the Rodarte Paris show in 2016. The music leans to the milder forms of EDM. The wine list tends toward biodynamic things that drink like beer. If you are there much before 8, there probably will be happy children darting around the widely spaced tables, which makes sense given the restaurants Disneyland-like setting. Advertisement The migration of pastry chefs to the savory kitchen is not common, but there is precedent. Careme, possibly the first great French chef, thought of himself primarily as a pastry-maker. Locally, former pastry chef Michel Richard opened Citrus, one of the emblematic Los Angeles restaurants of the 1980s, and, of course, Nancy Silverton of the Mozza restaurants worked for decades in the pastry kitchens of Spago and Campanile. Rotisserie baby chicken with black garlic rice stuffing, chilled spicy scallion salad, and served with a shot of chicken jus, at 189 by Dominique Ansel at The Grove in Los Angeles. (Christina House / Los Angeles Times ) Pastry chefs bring a chemists precision to the savory kitchen exacting ratios and techniques are vital when you work with dough but also a willingness to experiment with form. The look of a plate becomes important former pastry chefs do not brag about making ugly food. Texture becomes as vital as flavor. There is a realization that tiny variations in measurements can cause huge variations in food. So it is not a surprise that at 189 very little is quite what it seems. There is that milk bread masquerading as street corn, which may rely on many, many steps or may be as simple as injecting rolls with puree. There are paper-thin slices of tomato moistened with balsamic, laminated onto sliced honeydew melon and sprinkled with herbs. The smack of salty and sweet, the contrast between chewiness and lusciousness, is not unlike what you might expect from a plate of prosciutto and melon, although the dish tastes nothing like it. Cabbage soup turns out to be almost exactly what you are hoping for when you order a tureen of French onion soup, down to the sweetness, the soaked bread, and the boatload of melted cheese. Charred radicchio has the bitterness and aroma of honey without the sweetness. It has been tossed with bits of honeycomb. When you order pasta carbonara, the plate is the sunny yellow of egg yolk, and the fettuccine is tweaked with roasted sunchokes and toasted sunflower seed puree. Ansel calls the plate Triple Sun. Duck gizzards, simmered in duck fat, are sliced and heaped over what amounts to a potato latke, and I am almost sure that to most of the 189 customers, Hanukkah dinner comes to mind. Some of Ansels dishes read better than they sound. Salt and pepper spare ribs, crisp on the outside and sous-vide soft within, are both too bland and over-rich, although the squeeze of fresh pineapple juice at the end does make them resemble something you may have eaten at Trader Vics after a cousins bar mitzvah. A Chinese New Year special of split and fried Dungeness crab was acrid and overcooked. A plate of squash gnocchi is notable mostly for a garnish of braised breakfast radishes with frizzled deep-fried tops. Advertisement But it is easy enough to be happy here, gnawing on the massive prawn cracker that comes with the fried shrimp or tearing into a spoon-soft lamb shoulder roasted with persimmons; nibbling roast carrots with shaved chestnuts; or diving into a bowl of garlicky mussels. A roasted game hen is served with garlic-infused sticky rice and a bowl of marinated scallion slivers, as if it were a rotisserie-cooked take on the Korean soup samgye tang right on cue, the waiter shows up with shot glasses of strong chicken broth to sip along with the bird. As you might expect from a pastry chef expanding his range, the least sybaritic course at 189 may be his desserts, which are all abstracted takes on aspects of chefly technique: an apple dessert demonstrating knife skills; sliced cake made to resemble the snacks banquet chefs often make for themselves by stuffing cake trimmings into a jar; and a composition of ice cream-stuffed charcoal briquettes and little cakes stuffed into exploded chestnut shells. :: 189 by Dominique Ansel Advertisement The pastry chef opens his first full service restaurant at the Grove. LOCATION 189 the Grove Drive, Los Angeles; (323) 602-0096, dominiqueansella.com. PRICES Advertisement Small plates $8-$18; larger plates $26-$45; desserts $12. DETAILS Dinner 5-10 p.m. Monday through Thursday; 5-11 p.m. Friday; 5:30-11 p.m. Saturday; 5:30-10 p.m. Sunday. Weekend brunch 11 a.m.-3 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays. Credit cards accepted. Full bar. Validated mall lot parking. RECOMMENDED DISHES Advertisement Elotes milk bread; roasted radicchio with honeycomb and hazelnuts; cabbage soup; rotisserie baby chicken; knife skills dessert. jonathan.gold@latimes.com @thejgold From the Beaux Arts grand dame Biltmore Hotel to the 1970s futurist vision of the Bonaventure, downtown L.A. hotels have always offered different versions of escapist fantasies. And yet all of these spaces remain firmly rooted in a sense of place. The areas current hotel boom is a further boon for design lovers and hotel geeks. The new arrivals are visually dominated by the height, size and flash of the InterContinental Los Angeles Downtown in the Wilshire Grand building, but theres also plenty to excite those who dig adaptive reuse projects of historic buildings. The Hotel Figueroa and Mayfair Hotel are in the process of makeovers that merge modern amenities with 1920s character and soul. Newly arrived in DTLA is the NoMad hotel in the 1923 Bank of Italy building at the corner of 7th and Olive streets. And hospitality entrepreneur Dustin Lancaster of the Hotel Covell in Los Feliz is currently transforming a former firehouse in the Arts District with design by Sally Breer. These venues are more than just spots to crash. Each creates a distinct mood and immersive environment within a quickly evolving cityscape. Advertisement Here are some of our favorite boutique hotels in DTLA, and the design choices that make them stand out: The eclectic hang At Freehand L.A., earthy tones are mixed with handmade goods (think: eclectic pottery, custom macrame pieces) for a groovy vibe that seamlessly integrates with the 1924 Commercial Exchange Buildings traditional classicism. The scheme continues throughout the hotel, including at the Exchange restaurant and Broken Shaker, the rooftop bar. Freehand L.A. is a place to meet people and feel a certain creativity, said designer Robin Standefer. She and partner Stephen Alesch of the prominent Manhattan-based firm Roman and Williams oversaw design duties for the brands third uber-hip hybrid hostel/hotel founded by Ron Burkle and Andrew Zoblers Sydell Group. (The other two Freehand locations are in Miami and Chicago.) Its supposed to be bohemian and lighthearted, Alesch explained. Dont miss: Designer Sean Knibb also has a presence with another location of his Flowerboy Project boutique. Info: Freehand L.A., 416 W. 8th St., freehandhotels.com The lobby of the Freehand Hotel (Adrian Gaut ) :: Advertisement An arty, intimate retreat A map wall by Michael Kalish, Davis Factor photographs, and original pieces by artists Jesse Draxler and Walter Mazzarella contrast with polished concrete floors and walls to reflect owner Juan Torres contemporary, edgy sensibility at the Tuck. (Folks who like soft, plush surfaces at every turn should stay elsewhere.) The Tuck offers the intimacy of a small hotel with a residential feel that also offers full amenities. Its three-story building (a former brothel), near where Spring and Main streets intersect in the Fashion District, houses a library lounge bar area and restaurant that straddle both streets at ground level. Dont miss: Torre, a veteran of both the hotel and restaurant industries, also oversees the Spanish-influenced menu at Delicat restaurant. Advertisement Info: The Tuck, 820 S. Spring St., tuckhotel.com Tuck Hotel (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times ) :: The retro-future tower Advertisement Within the Hotel Indigos newly constructed glass-clad tower that rises over the 110 Freeway, we were able to explore the history of downtown L.A., said Valeria Lassalle, senior project designer from Hirsch Bedner Associates. (The Santa Monica-based company is the worlds largest hospitality design firm.) We wanted to create something that tells a story without feeling that youre walking into a museum, Lassalle noted. This approach translated into elements such as restrained yet visually arresting jewel tones, large-scale graphics reproduced from vintage photographs and newspaper clippings. Lasalle used the story of trailblazing Asian American actress Anna May Wong, along with the citys erstwhile Fiesta de las Flores parade and other historical narratives, to inform the color palettes and decor details. Dont miss: Banquette niches in the Metropole Kitchen lobby restaurant evoke Prohibition-era smuggling tunnels. Info: Hotel Indigo, 899 Francisco St., ihg.com/hotelindigo Advertisement Indigo Hotel (Matt Walla ) :: Old world meets new deluxe The gleaming marble, silken tassels, embroidered textiles, leathers and other materials used throughout NoMad Los Angeles would have impressed banker Amadeo Giannini, after whom the 1923 Giannini Place building is named. Noted French architect and designer Jacques Garcias reinterpretation of the building, which sat vacant for many years, has resulted in different environments where visitors can meet and linger, starting at the lobby and continuing up to the rooftop lounge and pool. Advertisement Observe the lobby action unfolding beneath the restored coffered ceiling from the comfort of a flamingo pink-hued velvet seat, from the vantage point of a quieter table in the moody Giannini Bar or the relatively more formal Mezzanine restaurant upstairs. Dont miss: The downstairs restrooms are accessed by a telltale reminder of the buildings original function as the Bank of Italy headquarters: a massive vault, complete with a 50-ton door and 12,000 safety deposit boxes. Info: NoMad Hotel, 649 S. Olive St.; thenomadhotel.com Coolest restrooms in L.A.? (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times ) Advertisement Home@latimes.com For an easy way to follow the L.A. scene, bookmark L.A. at Home and join us on our Facebook page for home and garden design, Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest. ALSO: Advertisement This loft remodel in DTLAs Toy Factory building made these empty nesters go Wow An open, industrial loft in DTLA gets a cozy makeover More Southern California home tours For years, Ukraine was a lucrative source of income for Paul Manafort and Richard Gates, two high-powered American political consultants who made tens of millions of dollars wielding their talents on behalf of the pro-Moscow government in Kiev. But the cash dried up when political unrest forced their patron, President Viktor Yanukovych, to flee to Russia in 2014. So, according to a 32-count federal indictment filed Thursday by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, Manafort and Gates turned to fraud. The indictment dramatically expands the legal jeopardy that Manafort, President Trumps former campaign manager, and Gates, Manaforts longtime business partner and Trumps former deputy campaign manager, now face in court. They were previously charged with 12 counts of fraud, conspiracy and money laundering on Oct. 30, and they pleaded not guilty. The new indictment includes 16 counts related to false individual income tax returns, seven counts of failure to file reports of foreign bank and financial accounts, five counts of bank fraud conspiracy and four counts of bank fraud. Advertisement The alleged scheme began in 2006 and continued through the present, the indictment says. It does not mention their work in 2016 helping to run Trumps campaign or any collusion with Russians attempting to influence the U.S. presidential race, the impetus for Muellers investigation. But the 37-page document describes an intricate scheme intended to evade U.S. taxes and finance luxury lifestyles. When Manafort and Gates were working for Yanukovych, money was funneled into offshore accounts and used to buy U.S. real estate, the indictment says. Manafort is charged with not reporting more than $13.7 million in accounts hidden offshore. After Yanukovych was ousted, Manafort and Gates obtained more than $20 million in loans secured by the properties, the indictment says, allowing Manafort to have the benefits of liquid income without paying taxes on it. Manafort and Gates defrauded the lenders in various ways, by submitting phony income statements, lying about their debt and lying about Manaforts use of the property and the loan proceeds, the indictment says. Prosecutors say Manaforts real estate dealings sometimes included multiple frauds for a single property. In 2012, for example, Manafort bought a condominium in the SoHo neighborhood of Manhattan with $2.85 million in cash, sent through accounts in Cyprus, a banking secrecy haven. He used it as an investment property, generating thousands in payments from Airbnb, the indictment said. In late 2015, applying for a mortgage, he claimed that his daughter and son-in-law were living there and told his son-in-law to lie to the bank appraiser. He also concealed his debts and filed a false insurance statement, the indictment says. Advertisement Not every attempt at fraud worked, according to the indictment. When Manafort wanted to buy a property in Bridgehampton, N.Y., Gates offered the bank a phony invoice for a democratic development consulting project worth $2.4 million, the indictment says. The loan was denied. Jason Maloni, a spokesman for Manafort, said his client is innocent of the allegations set out in the newly filed indictments and he is confident that he will be acquitted of all charges. The new charges come as Gates legal strategy and defense team are in flux. His three lawyers have asked to leave the case, a request that Gates is not opposing. The details of those discussions remain sealed beyond a court filing that said they involve highly sensitive matters that would potentially be prejudicial to [Gates] as well as embarrassing. Advertisement Another lawyer, Thomas Green, notified the court on Thursday that he would be representing Gates. The Times reported Sunday that Gates was planning to plead guilty and testify against Manafort. Green did not respond to a request for comment about the new charges, and neither did Manaforts spokesman. The new indictment follows a guilty plea on Tuesday from Alex van der Zwaan, a former lawyer at a premier law firm that also worked on behalf of Yanukovychs government. Van der Zwaan admitted to lying to investigators about his contacts with Gates. Michael Cohen Former Trump lawyer CHARGES Lying to Congress Tax evasion Bank fraud Campaign finance violations Cohen admitted to lying to Congress about Trump's push for a Moscow real estate deal during the campaign. He's cooperating with special counsels office. In a separate investigation by the U.S. attorney's office in Manhattan, Cohen pleaded guilty to several charges including campaign finance violations for arranging hush money to two women who said they had affairs with Trump. SENTENCE Sentenced on Dec. 12 to three years in prison Accelerating controversial plans, the Trump administration will open a small U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem in May to coincide with the 70th anniversary of Israels declaration of independence, a State Department official said Friday. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson approved preliminary security plans for a limited contingent, including the ambassador, David Friedman, and a skeleton staff, to move into a section of the American Consulate in the Arnona neighborhood of Jerusalem, said Steven Goldstein, the under-secretary for public diplomacy and public affairs. For the record: This article states that the U.S. Embassy has always been in Tel Aviv, along with the rest of the worlds diplomatic missions. However, a small number of countries had embassies in Jerusalem at various points in the past. The goal is to open a small footprint in May, and, over time, open a more full embassy by the end of 2019, Goldstein said in an interview. The May 14 date the date Israel originally declared independence significantly accelerates the schedule for transferring the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv, where it always existed along with the rest of the worlds diplomatic missions, to the disputed holy city of Jerusalem. (According to the Hebrew calendar, Independence Day this year will be celebrated on April 18.) Advertisement President Trump in December announced he was recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and ordering the embassy transfer, reversing decades of U.S. and international policy and enraging the Arab world and many allies. While Israel claims Jerusalem as its eternal and undivided capital, Palestinians also claim the eastern part of the city as their capital in a future independent state. The status of Jerusalem was to be decided in final peace talks. The Palestinians now contend that the U.S., once the broker of such talks, has disqualified itself as a mediator by taking Israels side. The move has been celebrated in Israel, which has long had its ministries, parliament and government offices in Jerusalem. But it generated a wave of furious, weekly protests in Palestinian territories. Vice President Mike Pence, visiting Jerusalem last month, gave the first sign that the embassy transfer was being accelerated, when he announced to the Israeli Knesset, or parliament, that the move would take place by the end of 2019. U.S. officials say the 2019 deadline would see a substantial annex of the consulate in Jerusalem becoming the embassy. A new building to house a full embassy, however, will still take several years to establish, the officials said. Israel Katz, the Israeli minister of intelligence, congratulated the Trump administration in a tweet Friday. There is no greater gift than that! he said. The most just and correct move. Majdi Khaldi, diplomatic advisor to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, decried the unfortunate announcement that he described as illegal, irresponsible and unacceptable to Palestinians. Advertisement Trumps move, Khaldi said in an interview, gave the Israelis a pretext to say that Jerusalem is unified under Israeli rule, contravenes international law and will impede peace efforts. It cancels any peace offer, Khaldi said. Trump, speaking at the White House on Friday alongside visiting Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, reiterated a claim he has made that his administration is making great progress on promoting peace in the Middle East. Several former ambassadors to Israel say, in fact, peace has never been further away. Jerusalem, a 6,000-year-old city, was divided for 19 years, from the date of Israels 1948 founding until the war of 1967, when Israel seized the eastern half of the city from Jordan. Advertisement The embassy move is scheduled to take place on the date marking Israels Declaration of Independence in 1948, which Palestinians call Naqba Day, or the day of the catastrophe. State Department lawyers, meanwhile, were examining whether it is legal to accept private donations to fund a diplomatic mission, following a proposal by Las Vegas casino magnate and pro-Israel hawk Sheldon Adelson to pay for the new embassy. Adelson is a major contributor to the Republican Party, a loyal supporter of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and owner of a popular tabloid in Israel. Trumps Jerusalem decision was seen in part as a gesture to Adelson as well as to evangelical Christians, a key component of the presidents base of political support. However, Goldstein said there were no formal talks between the State Department and any private citizen for financing the embassy, and no formal requests made to the State Department for such an arrangement. Advertisement Trump has promised the ultimate deal, a final agreement on Israeli-Palestinian peace, and placed the negotiations under the direction of his 37-year-old son-in-law, Jared Kushner. None of the parties to possible future negotiations, however, has seen any part of the plan that the Trump administration periodically declares is imminent, and the Palestinian Authority cut off all contact with the United States following Trumps Jerusalem announcement. Daniel Shapiro, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel under President Obama, agrees that the embassy belongs in Jerusalem but that the Trump administration has failed to give the proper assurances especially to the Palestinians. Before May 14, the administration should do what it failed to do in December: describe this decision in the context of a broader, credible plan for two states, including a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem, Shapiro said. Advertisement Staff writer Wilkinson reported from Washington and special correspondent Tarnopolsky from Jerusalem. tracy.wilkinson@latimes.com UPDATES: 1:31 p.m.: This article was updated with staff reporting and comments from Steven Goldenstein and Majdi Khaldi. Advertisement This article was originally published at 8:25 a.m. California is headed to a dry finish to February, historically one of the states wettest months. The state has been getting cold storms in recent days, which have been responsible for plunging temperatures, but the systems have been dry because theyve been coming inland, from Canada, instead of over the Pacific Ocean, where they can soak up moisture. The West Coast is under what we call the Arctic Express and so its cold, but its dry, climatologist Bill Patzert said. Whether its warm or cold, the rain story is the same, and here in Southern California, theres been scattered showers, but downtown L.A. hasnt seen more than a trace. We dont see any white horse charging on the horizon to change whats been a pretty disappointing rain year, Patzert said. Advertisement In fact, this month could be one for the record books as far as the driest February, or one of the driest, on record. Sacramento has received no rain at all this month; its record for driest February was in 1899, when the states capital recorded 0.04 inch of rain. After most sites had above average rainfall in January, February has turned bone dry. Despite the chance of spotty showers from a couple of weather systems for the rest of this month, rainfall for the month of February looks as if it will end up to be (well) below normal. pic.twitter.com/v2wxfzZIaV NWS Sacramento (@NWSSacramento) February 18, 2018 San Francisco recorded its first measurable rain of the month on Thursday, but the city got only 0.01 inch; it typically gets about 4 inches in February. The last time L.A. had no rain in February was in 1933, Patzert said; Los Angeles, however, has recorded 0.01 inch of rain so far this month. If downtown L.A. gets no more rain this month, this years January-February period could be among the top three driest in the record books. What weve been having recently are these showers here and there. Theres just not much moisture, said Jayme Laber, hydrologist with the National Weather Services Oxnard office. The conditions in the Sierra Nevada, Californias greatest mountain range, have been dismal. The water content of the Lake Tahoe basin snowpack is just 20% of average for this time of year. At one station at Fallen Leaf, at elevation 6,242 feet, the land is dry and the snowpack is at 0% of normal. Farther up, at Heavenly Valley at 8,534 feet above sea level, the snowpack is at 47% of normal, said meteorologist Scott McGuire of the National Weather Service office in Reno. Even the cold storms that have come through the Sierra recently have all been fairly insignificant, McGuire said. They have not been major contributors to the snowpack at all. The snowpack stored in the Sierra Nevada over the winter is an important source for Californias water supply. Advertisement Yosemite Ski & Snowboard Area announced it will not open this winter. Unfortunately, there is not enough snow right now, or in the near forecast to open, the area said in a statement Wednesday. We are contacting all season pass holders via email to offer the option of a season pass roll over to the 2018-19 season or a refund. The recent weather pattern is a flip to the weather pattern that has seen California basking in a hot winter and the Midwest and East Coast shivering from frigid air. Now, a mass of high pressure is no longer affecting California and is instead now in place to the East, which is now seeing record high temperatures. If yesterday's list of record highs across the Eastern US was impressive, today's listing is just incredible. 24 of these locations broke or tied their record high for the entire month of February. pic.twitter.com/Fh7U5dWj1v NWS Eastern Region (@NWSEastern) February 21, 2018 On Wednesday, it was 78 degrees at New York Citys Central Park and 82 at Washingtons Reagan National Airport. Records for the day fell again on Thursday in the southeast, with Charlotte, N.C., hitting 80, and Roanoke, Va., topping out at 84. Advertisement Many more high temperature records broken today across the southern mid Atlantic region. Two more record highs for the entire month of February fell at Roanoke and Blacksburg VA. pic.twitter.com/EBiKPGCqxb NWS Eastern Region (@NWSEastern) February 22, 2018 Record low temperatures for the date have been seen in the Bay Area, with Gilroy dipping to 30 on Wednesday and 27 in Napa a day earlier. Farmers earlier this week feared that freezing temperatures could possibly endanger Californias almond and other lucrative Central Valley crops. Advertisement This winters lackluster rain season demonstrates how in some respects, it may have been premature for Californians to celebrate the end of the drought. Patzert said a look at the last 20 years of rainfall in downtown L.A. shows that, counting this year, 14 of them have been below average. (Thomas Suh Lauder / Los Angeles Times ) Last winter was a temporary respite, Patzert said. People are too quick to call an end to the drought. Droughts dont come and go in one year...When you call an end to the drought after one wet year, thats false hope. At the moment, another cold storm is expected to come into California on Monday and Tuesday, although at the moment it doesnt look like that system will produce much rain. Advertisement A more promising bet comes about a week from now, on March 1, when some forecast models predict the arrival of a storm that could be a decent rainmaker. But few are holding out hope that even a March miracle could bring California to the average annual precipitation level. Its virtually impossible to end up at average snowpack by April 1, McGuire said. ron.lin@latimes.com Advertisement @ronlin The second phase of the Metropolitan Transportation Authoritys Purple Line extension is officially underway, following a groundbreaking ceremony with local, state and federal officials. in Century City on Friday. Mayor Eric Garcetti and others dug their shovels into the soft sand off Constellation Boulevard to commemorate the subways next 2.59-mile extension, bringing it closer to its final destination the Veterans Affairs West L.A. campus. Todays groundbreaking is a clear indication that this project to link Downtown L.A. to our regions second-largest job center is on time and on budget, Garcetti, who serves as Metro Board Chair, said in a statement. Angelenos deserve a world-class transportation system that takes the burden off their commutes, connects people with our countless sights and attractions, and makes Los Angeles a more accessible and sustainable city. The extensions second phase has a $2.53-billion budget, including $1.5 billion from a federal grant and loan, and is expected to be completed by 2025. It will run west from Wilshire Boulevard and La Cienega Avenue to Century City, passing underneath Beverly Hills High School along the way. Advertisement Years of legal challenges to the projects route by the Beverly Hills school district were put to rest by a federal judge in 2016. Officials break ground on the Purple Lines Phase 2 extension Friday. (Dave Sotero / Metro ) The contractors building the extension, Tutor Perini and O&G, are expected to begin major work in the spring, Metro officials said. Tutor Perinis last subway project with Los Angeles led to a protracted legal battle that ended with a jury awarding Metro $29 million. The companys chief executive, Ronald Tutor, reassured city officials last year when the project was awarded that his bid and timeline were feasible. The first phase of the extension between Wilshire Boulevard/Western Avenue and Wilshire/La Cienega is 30% completed and expected to open in 2023. The third and final section from Century City to the VA campus is expected to break ground in 2019 and open in 2026, two years before the Summer Olympics arrive. Los Angeles laid out a bold vision for its future, and todays groundbreaking marks a significant step in making that a reality, said Sen. Dianne Feinstein in a statement. As we begin construction on the second phase, I remain committed to working with our local leaders and the federal government to complete the Purple Line Extension on time. Im confident that by 2028, Los Angeles will have a world-class subway system when we welcome the world for the Summer Olympics. The Purple Line extension project is the most ambitious transportation project Los Angeles has undergone in at least a generation and is expected to cost about $6.3 billion. Much of that funding will come through a pair of tax measures voters approved in 2008 and 2016. When finished, the Purple Line will have seven more stops, which officials estimate will generate 49,300 daily weekday boardings and 78,000 new daily trips on the entire rail system. joseph.serna@latimes.com Advertisement For breaking California news, follow @JosephSerna on Twitter. UCOM prolongs the unlimited internet offer for the level up 4700 and level up 5500 subscribers Ucom employees received recognition for their services to the homeland Karen Vardanyan has allocated 105 million AMD to rescue the Yerevan Botanical Garden. 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Artak Hanesyan UCOMS LEVEL UP 1700 REGIONAL TARIFF PLAN USERS TO RECEIVE MORE THAN THOSE IN YEREVAN Joint statement Statement by the Co-Chairs of the OSCE Minsk Group Covid-19: 163 new cases in Armenia Armenia: Remarks by Commissioner Oliver Varhelyi at the press point with Acting Deputy Prime Minister Mher Grigoryan The United States Welcomes Azerbaijans Release of Armenian Detainees and Armenias Actions to Facilitate Demining Google Ad The Coronavirus-Related Situation in Armenia International aviation: Council greenlights signing of major agreements with four countries With UCOMs level up tariff plans subscribers have unlimited access to Netflix, Duolingo and Zoom Armenia: Statement by the Spokesperson on the early parliamentary elections Armenias Parliamentary Elections PRESS STATEMENT COVID19:77 new cases Armenias early parliamentary elections were competitive and well run, but polarized and marred by aggressive rhetoric, international observers say International election observers to Armenias early parliamentary elections held press conference Drop Charges Against Rights Defender Sashik Sultanyan The Coronavirus-Related Situation in Armenia The European Union in Armenia calls all parties to contribute to a peaceful Election Day to celebrate democracy 22 ventilators to Armenia PACE to observe the early parliamentary elections in Armenia Former NFL player and Harvard-Westlake alumnus Jonathan Martin was taken into custody Friday in connection with an Instagram post that displayed a shotgun and referenced the school by name, a source told the Los Angeles Times. A picture of the weapon with the words Harvard Westlake written across the barrel triggered the schools closure on Friday, according to three sources. The image, which referenced revenge and suicide as the only options for a victim of bullying, was posted to a verified Instagram account belonging to Martin, the former Miami Dolphins offensive lineman who accused teammates of bullying in 2013. The post on Martins page led Harvard-Westlake officials to close the schools campuses in Studio City and Beverly Crest, the sources said. Advertisement The sources spoke to The Times on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the case with the media. A Los Angeles police spokesman declined to comment on the specific post that triggered the incident. In a message sent to students Friday morning, school officials said they were made aware of a disturbing social media post that mentioned Harvard-Westlake by name late Thursday night. The safety of our students, faculty, and staff is always our primary concern. So, out of an abundance of caution, we made the decision to close school today, the email read. The schools private security team is working with the Los Angeles Police Department, which is present on both campuses. With these precautions in place, we believe there is no imminent threat to our campuses or our school community. A school spokesman did not respond to a request for comment. Earlier on Friday, an LAPD spokesman said the post that triggered the closure did not make a direct threat against the school. Students received an message through the school's Emergency Notificiation System at 7:14 a.m. There are police on campus. Aaron Park (@aaronpark000) February 23, 2018 Martin graduated from Harvard-Westlake in 2008 and joined the Dolphins in 2012. But during his second year in the NFL, he became the center of a scandal alleging harassment and bullying on the part of his teammates, including offensive linemen Richie Incognito and Mike Pouncey. Both players verified Instagram accounts were tagged in the post. When youre a bully victim & a coward, your options are suicide, or revenge, read the text of an Instagram story posted to Martins verified account. Martin retired from the NFL in 2015 following a back injury, after stints with the San Francisco 49ers and Carolina Panthers. That same year, he detailed his struggles growing up in Los Angeles and said in a series of Facebook and Twitter posts that he had attempted suicide while playing in the NFL. He also said he had been uncomfortable at Harvard-Westlake as one of just a handful of minorities on the campus. Advertisement You learn to tone down your size & blackness by becoming shy, introverted, friendly, so you wont scare the little rich white kids or their parents, he wrote in 2015. Neither black nor white people accept you because they dont understand you. It takes away from your self-confidence, your self-worth, your sanity. Matt Yam, one of the sports editors at the schools student newspaper, said there were roughly 100 students on campus when the alert went out, but few, if any, panicked. Honestly, its not bad. Everybody is calm. A lot of people are leaving now. Everything is under control, said Yam, 18. People dont seem too worried. The incident comes on the heels of a series of threats that have sparked police responses at Southern California schools in the days after a gunman killed 17 people at a Parkland, Fla., high school. Advertisement Last week, Los Angeles County sheriffs deputies arrested a 17-year-old student and his older brother after a school resource deputy says he overheard the student threatening to shoot up El Camino High School in Whittier. Deputies recovered several rifles, handguns and high-capacity magazines at the students home. We cannot afford to not act on any threat, Los Angeles County Sheriff Jim McDonnell said in an interview with The Times on Friday about the rash of school threats. You have to be hyper-vigilant on them because God forbid, if one of them is an actual someone willing to do something, you cannot take that chance. Earlier this week, a 27-year-old Norco man was arrested after police said he posted on Facebook that he intended to shoot people at a local community college. A search at Jacob Ryan McBains home turned up two loaded AR-15 rifles, two loaded handguns and a large amount of ammunition in his bedroom, authorities said. Long Beach Police arrested two teenagers this week on suspicion of making criminal threats to harm students, and a 14-year-old student at Torrey Pines High School in San Diego was detained Thursday, suspected of making verbal and written threats. Advertisement Mike Dorn, executive director of Safe Havens International and a schools safety expert, said schools across the country are dealing with a surge of reports about threats as parents and students become more vigilant about safety issues. Kids who saw or heard something before and ignored it are now reporting what classmates say, he said. james.queally@latimes.com Advertisement Follow @JamesQueallyLAT for crime and police news in California. UPDATES: 2:25 p.m.: This article was updated with new comments from Los Angeles County Sheriff Jim McDonnell and a schools safety expert. 12:55 p.m.: This article was updated with information about Martin being taken into custody. Advertisement 11:55 a.m.: This article was updated with information about the origins of the threat. 9:05 a.m.: This article was updated with more details about other related incidents. 8:30 a.m.: This article was updated with comments from a student on campus. This article was originally published at 8:15 a.m. Allegations by a doctor at L.A. County-USC Medical Center that a fellow physician sexually assaulted her in the hospital have become the subject of a months-long criminal investigation. Dr. Meena Zareh, a graduate of USCs medical school who was then in a residency program at the hospital, told detectives that in 2015, a cardiovascular disease fellow cornered her in a windowless room, reached under her scrubs and violated her. Shortly afterward, Zareh shared details about the alleged assault with friends and family, she asserted in a civil lawsuit, but did not report it to administrators in her residency program until three months later. In May, she made a report to the Sheriffs Department about Dr. Guillermo A. Cortes, who denies any wrongdoing. The case was presented in December to the Los Angeles County district attorneys office, but prosecutors declined to file a felony charge of penetration by force. A deputy district attorney said the case lacked enough evidence at this time, according to a memo obtained by The Times. Advertisement Lt. Robert Peacock in the Sheriffs Special Victims Bureau said Tuesday that detectives still have an open and active investigation into the incident and are also looking for other potential victims. Zareh detailed the alleged sexual assault in a civil lawsuit she filed in 2016 against L.A. County and USC. In the lawsuit, Zareh alleges that Cortes assaulted her once, and that county and USC administrators mishandled her complaint once she came forward. She contends that county and USC administrators failed to properly investigate the incident and ultimately retaliated against her by pressuring her to delay her career and keep quiet. A building on the campus of Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center. (Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times ) Cortes, 34, declined to speak about the case and referred The Times to his attorney. Unfortunately we do not comment on active pending litigation matters beyond the fact that Dr. Cortes vehemently denies all of Dr. Zarehs allegations, the lawyer, Tomas Guterres, said in an email. Zareh said the incident occurred the afternoon of Nov. 17, 2015, when Cortes summoned her to a private doctors call room on the hospitals fourth floor to discuss a patients care. When the discussion ended, she tried to leave, but he stood in the doorway and pushed her arms to her sides, she said. Cortes overpowered her, she alleged in the lawsuit. Zareh added that she could still recall the feeling of his fingernail scratching inside her. Advertisement She told a co-worker about the incident that day, she said, and the co-worker later submitted to county investigators a sworn affidavit reviewed by The Times that supports Zarehs account. The doctor said she feared telling police and her bosses, worrying that it could jeopardize her career prospects. In an interview with The Times, Zareh, 33, said she hesitated to come forward but ultimately it was too traumatic to ignore. About three months after the alleged assault, she said, she notified Dr. Eric Hsieh, a USC faculty member who ran the residency program. She wanted administrators to investigate her complaint and, at a minimum, Cortes to be assigned separate shifts. A USC spokesman said Hsieh followed procedure by forwarding the complaint to the county. Although USCs faculty helps run the 600-bed public hospital and the residency program, Cortes and Zareh were county employees. Advertisement The county said it took immediate and appropriate actions and referred the matter to human resources, prompting an inquiry, according to a statement from the countys health department. Cortes was put on paid leave. An investigation by county officials into the allegations followed, and Zarehs attorney, Leslie Levy, said her client submitted an affidavit about what she experienced. Before the countys inquiry ended, officials sent Cortes a letter letting him know he could return to work in late May 2016. The letter barred him from unsupervised contact with Zareh. Its unclear if Cortes faced any discipline. Zareh said reprisals began after she came forward. She said one of her mentors dismissed the incident, saying, You knew what you were doing. Advertisement Zareh took a few weeks off and returned. She said another supervisor suggested she take more time off or delay her fellowship, the next phase of her training, by working as an attending physician, according to court papers. He later floated the idea of her moving to programs outside California, and offered to make calls on her behalf, according to court papers. She viewed any delay as a punishment and an effort by administrators to prioritize Cortes training over her own. When Cortes returned to work in June 2016, Zareh said in court papers, she twice was scheduled to work alongside him. Advertisement She said she had repeatedly told administrators her fears of being attacked by Cortes. Her schedules up until April of 2017 had sometimes listed him as her backup physician or working in the same space, she said in court papers. Encounters with him were sometimes unavoidable. Every time, I would say, I dont want to work with this guy. Keep him away from me, she said. Zareh decided to file the civil lawsuit. A trial is scheduled for 2019. Advertisement In June, Cortes left the hospital. He began working in July as a resident physician at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center. A UCLA spokesman said the university learned about the allegations in late 2017, the same day a Times reporter inquired about the case. The spokesman said it followed proper procedures in hiring him and had no knowledge of the alleged incident. Administrators were seeking to understand the facts about the case, the spokesman added. Zareh remains at the county hospital in Boyle Heights, where she is in the second year of a cardiology fellowship. matt.hamilton@latimes.com Advertisement Twitter: @MattHjourno sarah.parvini@latimes.com Twitter: @sarahparvini An apartment fire in Pico Rivera that displaced about 300 residents appears to have been sparked by some type of plumbing work, authorities said Friday. The fire broke out about 3:30 p.m. Thursday in the three-story building in the 9000 block of Burke Street, said Los Angeles County fire spokesman Marvin Lim. Flames quickly spread from a vacant room to an attic, eventually tearing across units and burning through the roof. At one point, firefighters had to flee because battling the blaze inside the building was too dangerous, Lim said. Dozens of units were burned. Arson investigators with the Los Angeles County sheriffs department were at the scene Friday morning. Advertisement All indications are that the fire was most likely caused by plumbing work, sheriffs officials told City News Service. Kenneth Thompson, who has lived in the building with his family for the past 22 years, said he was driving home from work Thursday when he looked up and saw the complex on fire. I saw this big cloud of black smoke just billowing up in the sky, he said. I could see my apartment fully engulfed and the whole third floor is just done. Period. Thompson said his wife and their two sons were working and were not home at the time. But he said his two dogs were inside their apartment and he was still waiting Friday to find out if they survived. When I come home, the first ones to greet me are my dogs, he said. So Im kind of heart broken over that. Im not worried about the material stuff. The dogs were family. The American Red Cross set up a shelter for displaced residents at Rivera Park Auditorium at 9530 Shade Lane. Firefighters face heavy smoke as they battle an apartment blaze in Pico Rivera. (KTLA ) More than 70 firefighters responded to the blaze. Live TV footage showed firefighters in an aerial ladder facing heavy smoke as they sprayed water from above. Advertisement After the fire is extinguished, investigators will work to determine how it started. alene.tchekmedyian@latimes.com Twitter: @AleneTchek irfan.khan@latimes.com Advertisement UPDATES: 11:45 p.m., Friday, Feb. 23: This article was updated with new information from fire officials and a comment from a resident of the apartment complex. 6 p.m., Thursday, Feb. 22: This article was updated with more information about displaced residents and injuries. This article was originally published at 5:10 p.m. A 14-year-old San Diego high school student suspended earlier this week for making verbal and written threats was arrested Thursday, police said. The teen, who is a freshman at Torrey Pines High School, was taken to Juvenile Hall after investigators determined that he had made criminal threats, Officer Joshua Hodge said in a statement. Currently, there are no further threats, Hodge said. He did not specify what the teen had threatened to do, and declined to say if the individual may have been in a position to carry out any threatened action, citing the still-active investigation. Advertisement Police were made aware of the matter Wednesday night when they were asked to make a threat assessment regarding the high school, Hodge said. The student was suspended on Tuesday for making the threats, authorities said. Officers went to the campus Thursday morning, and then went to the teens Carmel Valley home to question him, Hodge said. The teen, who was not identified because the individual is a juvenile, was subsequently taken into custody. A request for comment left for the principal of Torrey Pines High was not immediately returned. Kucher and Figueroa write for the San Diego Union-Tribune. karen.kucher@sduniontribune.com teri.figueroa@sduniontribune.com The developer of a controversial $72-million apartment project was charged Friday with making illegal campaign contributions to local politicians while seeking a change to the zoning of his property in L.A.s Harbor Gateway neighborhood. Prosecutors with L.A. County Dist. Atty. Jackie Laceys office charged Samuel Leung, developer of the 352-unit Sea Breeze project, with one felony count of conspiracy to commit campaign money laundering and one felony count of offering to bribe a legislator. Leung made tens of thousands of dollars in illegal donations, the office announced. Deputy Dist. Atty. Eugene Hanrahan declined to name the target of the alleged bribe. Sofia David, identified by prosecutors as Leungs secretary, was also charged with one felony count of conspiracy to commit campaign money laundering. MORE: A web of campaign contributors Advertisement The filing comes more than a year after a Los Angeles Times investigation showed that more than 100 donors who were directly or indirectly connected to Leung had made donations totaling more than $600,000 to L.A.-area politicians while his Sea Breeze project was being reviewed. Of those who donated, 11 denied making contributions or said they didnt remember doing so when contacted by The Times. One told The Times that she had been reimbursed for at least one donation. Leungs arraignment is set for April 11. Leung and his attorney, Daniel V. Nixon, had no comment when approached by The Times at Fridays hearing. Prosecutors said Leung, 67, and David, 58, recruited employees, family members and others to act as straw donors to funnel money to local politicians in an effort to have his property, an empty lot on Sepulveda Boulevard, rezoned so that homes could be built. Residential complexes under development at the Sea Breeze project on Friday. (Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times ) Mayor Eric Garcetti and the City Council backed the project in 2015, changing the zoning so that it was no longer designated for manufacturing. State law prohibits anyone from making a political contribution using someone elses name. According to the criminal complaint, Leung and David made multiple contributions without disclosing that money either originated from, or was reimbursed by, Leung and others acting at his direction. The district attorneys complaint highlighted donations from Leung and his associates to political committees that supported Garcetti and seven other politicians: City Council members Joe Buscaino, Mitchell Englander, Jose Huizar, Gil Cedillo and Nury Martinez; former state Assemblyman Warren Furutani, who lost a bid for council in 2012, and Los Angeles County Supervisor Janice Hahn. Advertisement Donors linked to Leung provided $60,000 in 2013 to an independent expenditure committee, Committee for a Safer Los Angeles, which backed Garcetti for mayor in 2013. Yusef Robb, a political advisor to the mayor, said that if the allegations are true, Leung and David should pay the price. He said the committee that received the money was completely separate from Garcettis 2013 mayoral campaign. Its important to note that these funds went to an entirely independent committee of which we were barely aware and had nothing to do with, he said. Hahn, in a statement, said she hoped the charges would send a message to donors about the consequences of violating campaign donation laws. Advertisement If they broke the law, they should be prosecuted and found guilty. I appreciate the seriousness with which the District Attorneys office is treating this case, she said. Read the complaint Hahn was a councilwoman representing Harbor Gateway when Leung first proposed his project in 2009. While she was in office, donors connected to Leung, either directly or indirectly, made contributions to her campaigns for council, lieutenant governor and Congress, as well as her office holder account. After Hahn went to Washington, D.C., she was replaced on the council by Buscaino, who endorsed the project despite opposition from residents in Harbor City. Buscaino received at least $94,700 in donations from contributors connected to Leung, according to a Times review of contributions. Advertisement In 2015, shortly before the council vote on Sea Breeze, Buscaino co-hosted a fundraiser for Martinez, who represents part of the San Fernando Valley. Martinez took in at least $7,700 from donors connected to Leung, according to a Times review of records. The Times investigation on Sea Breeze raised major questions about whether someone else was the source of the money a practice that is not permitted under campaign finance laws. And it offered a case study on the many ways money flows to City Hall when developers want changes to local planning rules. In the case of Sea Breeze, politicians received donations from the handymen who fixed Leungs buildings, a landscaper who tended his gardens and a chef who prepared meals in a hotel run by his company. Many of the contributions were reported on the same day, in the same amounts, for the same politician, contribution records show. One donor, a repairman from El Salvador, was listed as giving $20,300 to an array of politicians between 2008 and 2015 more than half of it to Hahn. Yet in an interview, the repairman said he could not remember why he gave her so much money. Advertisement Another contributor, a construction worker living in North Hills, denied giving donations to Hahn and other elected officials. He and a family member are listed as giving more than $12,000 to politicians who represented, or were campaigning to represent, Harbor Gateway. Leung and his representatives declined requests from The Times to discuss his campaign contributions in 2016. Approached at the time by reporters at the Department of Building and Safety, Leung said he did not reimburse any donors but refused further comment. If convicted, Leung faces up to four years and eight months in state prison. At a Friday court appearance, Nixon, Leungs lawyer, argued that his client should be released without bail, describing him as a longtime resident of the area with no criminal record. Superior Court Judge Teresa Sullivan declined a request from prosecutors to impose bail, releasing Leung on his own recognizance. However, she said Leung must surrender his passport, stay within Southern California and use only his true name in financial transactions. Advertisement An arrest warrant has been issued for David, who faces up to three years in prison if convicted. She could not be reached for comment. The case remains under investigation, prosecutors said. david.zahniser@latimes.com Twitter: @DavidZahniser Advertisement emily.alpert@latimes.com Twitter: @AlpertReyes UPDATES: 4:25 p.m.: This article was updated with additional details from the charging document, and Leungs court appearance. Advertisement This article was originally published at 2:10 p.m. In March 2017, just after her mother died, Monica Ochoa said she was sitting in her office when Lynwood City Councilman Edwin Hernandez walked in to give her his condolences or so she thought. He said, So when are we going to dinner? Ochoa recalled. I was shocked. Then he said, How about we have breakfast in bed? Standing in front of reporters Thursday with one of her attorneys by her side, Ochoa spoke publicly for the first time about her allegations against the councilman. Mr. Hernandez often made me feel very uncomfortable and disgusted in the workplace by making sexually inappropriate comments, Ochoa said. He would text me inappropriate messages of him wanting to kiss my pink lips that included kissy-face emojis. Advertisement An employee of the city since 2001 and a senior accounting technician, Ochoa said she filed a complaint with the city in December but she said nothing was immediately done to address her grievances. I am disappointed that the city of Lynwood has known for two months that I was sexually harassed by Mr. Hernandez and has not taken appropriate action to investigate the matter, she said. Lisa Bloom, one of three attorneys representing Ochoa, said the city has been more concerned about finding the person who leaked the complaint to the media than addressing her clients allegations. Monica made the brave decision to break her silence today in the hope that shining a light on this will spur the city to take the action it should have taken months ago, Bloom said. It is now late February. I have personally reached out to the citys attorneys and have received only excuses as to why nothing is happening with Monicas complaint. The city issued a statement on Feb. 18, saying that the allegations were serious and troubling and that an investigation would be conducted by a third party. Hernandez, who relinquished his duties as mayor pro tem but did not resign, could not be reached for comment. Ochoa, who is eight months pregnant, said she was forced to go on paid leave because of stress. Ever since my story was made public in the media, I have been harassed and intimidated by public officials, city employees and members of the community, she said. Advertisement Bloom and Ochoa did not provide details about those allegations. Bloom said she has advised Ochoa to file a discrimination complaint with the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing, the agency that enforces the states civil rights laws. She said the move is a first step before filing a lawsuit. At the news conference, Ochoa and Bloom said they hope more women will come forward to attest to their own harassment. Although it is difficult for me to come forward and speak out, Im glad I am because I dont want this to happen to anyone else, Ochoa said. Advertisement ruben.vives@latimes.com For more Southern California news, follow @latvives on Twitter. A San Diego County sheriffs deputy who was accused of sexual misconduct by more than a dozen women over recent months turned himself in to law enforcement officials Thursday and was quickly arraigned on 14 criminal counts. Deputy Richard Fischer, 31, pleaded not guilty to eight felonies and a half dozen misdemeanors related to allegations that first surfaced last fall. He appeared in a Vista courtroom barely three hours after the district attorneys office announced the proceeding. Mr. Fischer has a strong desire to go through this process to clear his name, defense attorney Richard Pinckard said during the arraignment. In all, Fischer was charged with one count of sexual battery and 12 counts of assault and battery by an officer and one count of false imprisonment. The charges could put him in prison for up to 14 years if he is convicted. Judge David J. Danielsen also issued protective orders for the 12 victims cited by prosecutors. Advertisement Pinckard issued a statement after the hearing saying, Richard Fischer has dedicated his entire adult life to public service. He has served his country as a decorated United States Marine and he has served his communities as a police officer and a deputy sheriff. These allegations are wholly inconsistent with who Mr Fischer is. He categorically denies each of the allegations and looks forward to clearing his name. He has the full support of his family and everyone else who knows and loves him. Fourteen women filed legal claims and lawsuits against San Diego County in recent months. It was not immediately clear which of the women who filed civil claims against the county were counted as criminal victims by the district attorneys office. The arraignment Thursday afternoon is the result of a months-long investigation that began in November, when the first allegations of sexual misconduct were lodged by an attorney representing Fischers alleged victims and reported by the San Diego Union-Tribune. Some of the charges accuse Fischer of committing crimes while the victims were detained or in custody; others allege he returned to victims homes after responding to calls for help and assaulted them. Accusations against Fischer began piling up within days of the first news stories. The deputy was placed on desk duty, then administrative leave. The sheriffs department launched a criminal probe and an internal investigation as more women came forward with more allegations. Sheriffs investigators referred their case to prosecutors Jan. 19, about the same time Fischer stopped being paid by the department. According to Dist. Atty. Summer Stephan, who hosted a news briefing immediately following the arraignment, Fischer took advantage of his authority as a sworn law enforcement officer. When crimes involve those who are in positions of trust, no stone will go unturned, Stephan told reporters at the North County Regional Center minutes after the proceeding. This causes tremendous harm to the trust in the community and the confidence of those that we serve. Advertisement Stephan, who said the felony charges generally involve a pattern of touching victims intimate parts over their clothing, urged any other victims to contact her office at (619) 531-3965. Sheriff Bill Gore said there is probably no investigation more serious than that involving a law enforcement officer. When any deputy conducts himself in an inappropriate manner, it impacts not only every sheriffs deputy but every peace officer in this county and across the country, he said. In response to questions about why the case took months to result in criminal charges, Gore said, We dedicated every possible resource to this investigation, and will continue to do that. Advertisement Fischer did not speak during the arraignment, except to assert his innocence when asked for his plea. He wore a business suit and handcuffs. The former deputy was allowed to remain free on $100,000 bail. Prosecutors asked for a $180,000 bond; Pinckard sought a reduced bail amount, saying his client had no income but a family and strong ties to the community. A trial readiness conference was scheduled March 26 and a preliminary hearing was set May 2. The Fischer case roiled the sheriffs department for months, as the number of legal claims and lawsuits against the county exploded. Advertisement By Thanksgiving, a half-dozen women leveled sexual misconduct allegations against Fischer, many with similar stories about him asking for a hug or improperly touching them. By Christmas, the number of alleged victims had climbed past 10 -- and the accusations were more serious. Fischer was being accused of pushing womens hands onto his genitals and groping womens breasts. Many of the women also reported this disquieting behavior: Fischer made implied threats, reminding them that he knew where they lived and alerting them that he would be checking up on them. Upon arriving at the home of a San Marcos woman who called 911 for a health emergency in 2016, Fischer removed his jacket as if he planned to stay for some time, one claim states. Advertisement Fischer told the woman she was hot and that she needed a hug. Without her consent, he then hugged [her] with a full embrace that included fondling of her buttocks with his hands and inappropriate massaging of her breasts with his own chest, the claim states. The legal claims also turned up another unsettling allegation: One woman who encountered Fischer warned the sheriffs department about the alleged sexual misconduct in a handwritten letter in May 2016. Hes a predator, not an officer, that alleged victim wrote. The sheriffs department insisted it has no record of the letter. Officials said they surely would have acted on the information if they received the nearly two-year-old warning. Advertisement In December, as the sheriffs investigation dragged on and the department declined to discuss its progress in the case, three of Fischers alleged victims came forward to tell the Union-Tribune they were afraid that Gore and Stephan were protecting Fischer because he was a deputy. They should already have dealt with it, Alpine resident Liza Russell told the Union-Tribune late last year. They should have finished this case. My biggest fear is I have kids. I dont want something like this to happen to my daughter. According to Russell, Fischer arrested her after finding prescription pills during a traffic stop. She and her husband were returning from an out-of-state trip and the medicine was in a baggie rather than a pharmacy bottle. The claim alleges that Fischer groped Russell repeatedly before taking her to jail. A nurse refused to book Russell into custody because her blood pressure was dangerously high and directed her to an emergency room. Advertisement Russell said Fischer volunteered to take her to a hospital but instead groped her again before letting her go near where she had been pulled over. I took my shoes off and ran all the way home, she said. Attorney Dan Gilleon, who represents the 14 women who filed legal claims or lawsuits against San Diego County, said his clients have been on edge for months wondering why criminal charges had not been filed. Its about time, he said by email. Advertisement Gilleon also expressed worry that prosecutors may accept a guilty plea to less serious charges, like former Dist. Atty. Bonnie Dumanis did with San Diego police Officer Christopher Hays, who was accused of sexual assault but allowed to plea to simple battery. Lets hope Ms. Stephan doesnt give another bad cop preferential treatment because she needs law enforcement support for political reasons, he wrote. The civil claims have been consolidated for the purpose of mediation, a process that aims to resolve civil disputes out of court. Gilleon said a daylong mediation session Feb. 16 did not produce a settlement. Each of the claims is seeking up to $6 million in damages. Advertisement McDonald and Jones write for the San Diego Union-Tribune. President Trump on Thursday accused California law enforcement of being soft on street gangs and suggested he might pull immigration agents out of the state, prompting a strong rebuke from local officials who said the president doesnt understand their war on gangs. Trumps remarks are an escalation of a yearlong battle between his administration and California on a variety of topics including illegal immigration and law enforcement. Trump has criticized California for being a sanctuary for those here illegally, and federal officials have vowed immigration crackdowns in the state. On Thursday, Trump stepped up the war, predicting that gang members would wreak havoc if federal authorities withdrew from Los Angeles and other parts of the state. I mean, frankly, if I wanted to pull our people from California, you would have a crime mess like youve never seen in California, Trump said. Youd be inundated. You would see crime like no ones ever seen crime in this country. And yet we get no help from the state of California. Theyre doing a lousy management job, they have the highest taxes in the nation, and they dont know whats happening out there. Advertisement Los Angeles officials expressed puzzlement and concern over Trumps comments, saying local police have made significant strides against gang violence in recent years. Nobody takes gang enforcement more seriously than I do or the Los Angeles Police Department does, LAPD Chief Charlie Beck said in an interview Thursday. I believe that were better at it than anybody in the nation. Los Angeles was the birthplace of infamous gangs like the Crips and the Bloods, inspiring countless movie renditions. Today, it is far safer than it was during the height of the gang wars. Street gangs are still active, with more than 60% of the citys homicides classified as gang-related last year. But gang members are no longer a fixture on street corners and in city parks due in part to the efforts of the LAPD and other local agencies, who sometimes partner with federal officials but handle much of day-to-day gang enforcement on their own. LAPD officers chat up gang members to obtain inside information. Older men who have left the gang lifestyle work with police detectives to prevent disputes from escalating into killings. Homicides in Los Angeles have declined nearly fourfold in the last few decades, with 282 people killed last year, compared with 1,094 in 1992. The tactics of the LAPD and other law enforcement agencies to crack down on gangs notably gang injunctions that restrict where and when gang members can congregate have prompted criticism from some community groups and civil libertarians. Advertisement I think they do too much, said Alex Alonso, a gang expert and adjunct professor at Cal State Long Beach. They cast a large net over the quote-unquote gang problem and criminalize a lot of youth who shouldnt get involved in the criminal justice system. Last year, the L.A. city attorneys office announced that thousands of Angelenos whose movements, clothing and even relationships were tightly restricted had been freed from the gang injunctions. The move came after an audit found that many on those lists were no longer active gang members and no longer posed a threat to the community. Over the last two decades, Los Angeles had enforced injunctions against 79 separate gang sets, encompassing roughly 8,900 people. In his remarks Thursday, Trump singled out the Mara Salvatrucha gang, also called MS-13, as well as the role of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers in combating gang violence. Gang members come in, theyre smart, they actually have franchises going to Los Angeles. No help from the state of California, Trump said. Advertisement In the past, Trump has seized on crimes allegedly committed by MS-13 members as evidence that deportation efforts should be stepped up. ICE officers focus on deporting immigrants who are in the country illegally and do not usually work on criminal matters. After federal officials arrested over 200 MS-13 members around the country last November, Trump called for police and immigration officials to be rough with suspected gang members to get rid of animals he described as terrorizing communities. The MS-13 gang, which has ties to El Salvador, was formed in Los Angeles decades ago. Advertisement Last May, a task force led by LAPD and FBI officials arrested 21 MS-13 members for crimes including murder and racketeering. The lead defendant, Jose Porky Balmore Romero, oversaw the gangs drug trafficking activities, collecting taxes through extortion and splitting the proceeds with the Mexican Mafia, the federal indictment alleged. But in Los Angeles, MS-13 is not the force it once was. It does not crack the top five of the citys most active gangs, Beck said. Connecting MS-13 to immigration enforcement is a false narrative, he said. At one point, authorities tried to tamp down MS-13 by deporting members to El Salvador. But the deportees joined forces with anti-government rebels and sneaked back into the U.S., creating a much stronger, more deadly gang, Beck said earlier this month. Sending them to prison for the rest of their lives in the U.S. is a more effective strategy, he said. Advertisement There are 700 to 800 MS-13 members in Los Angeles, compared with more than 1,000 in 2011, according to Beck. The chief stressed that he still considers gang violence a serious problem and that there is still important work to do. That doesnt mean that we cant get betterit just means that we have been experiencing this on the front line for literally 100 years in the city of Los Angeles, he said. And because of that, we have developed some strategies that I think are very effective, and one of those strategies is not mass civil deportation. Alex Sanchez is a former MS-13 member who left the gang nearly two decades ago. He credits the drop in violence in Los Angeles to enforcement by local police as well as efforts to steer youth away from gangs. Advertisement Sanchez, 45, who is an anti-gang activist and executive director of Homies Unidos, added most young gang members are U.S. born. Sal LaBarbera, a longtime LAPD detective who retired in 2015, said he often worked with federal officials, citing a joint operation with the FBI that helped solve 32 homicides. But if federal agencies were to leave California, the LAPD could pick up the slack I dont think it would be the end of the world, he said. Local agencies like the LAPD and the Sheriffs Department have their finger on the button of gang activity, he said, pointing to a decrease in crime in the MacArthur Park area over the past 15 years. Advertisement Look at it, now we can walk our dogs, he said. Mather and Chang reported from Los Angeles, Parsons from Washington. Times staff writers Nicole Santa Cruz and Joel Rubin contributed to this report from Los Angeles. Staff writer Cindy Carcamo contributed from Santa Ana. kate.mather@latimes.com cindy.chang@latimes.com Advertisement christi.parsons@latimes.com As teachers returned Friday to the Florida high school where a shooter killed 17 students and instructors, the states governor announced sweeping plans to tighten gun laws and bar anyone younger than 21 from purchasing a firearm. The proposal marked a dramatic break with the National Rifle Assn. and comes after emotional appeals from students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland. Scott, a Republican and an NRA member, said his $500-million plan would raise the states minimum age to buy firearms, bar violent or mentally ill people from purchasing weapons and prohibit the purchase or sale of bump stocks. We all have a difficult task in front of us balancing our individual rights with our obvious need for public safety, he said. Advertisement But I will not accept the old, tired political notion that we dont have enough time to get anything done. Let me be clear there is nothing more important than the safety of our children. While Scott backed raising the minimum age to buy any firearm to 21 a limit that already applies to handguns he drew the line at introducing an all-out ban on assault weapons, such as the AR-15-style rifle used in last weeks school attack. Banning specific weapons and punishing law-abiding citizens is not going to fix this, Scott said. The NRA has long opposed any changes to the minimum age to buy a firearm. Yet Scott, who began his speech listing the names of those who died in the school massacre, said he had spent the last week listening to students who urged lawmakers in Tallahassee to push for stricter gun control. My message to them has been very simple: You are not alone, he said. Change is coming and it will come fast. This is a time when I believe we must all come together, and even cross party lines. Some Stoneman Douglas students who have been vocal advocates for stricter gun control suggested that Scott, who is currently mulling a U.S. Senate bid, is politically motivated. Its just a ploy to get reelected for Senate, said David Hogg, a 17-year-old student who survived the school shooting and has spoken out in the last week for tighter gun laws. I absolutely respect him and I love that hes taking actions on this, but his motivations are not in the right place. As teachers returned to Stoneman Douglas on Friday for the first time since the attack, some voiced skepticism about whether legislators in Floridas Republican-controlled House and Senate would actually introduce sweeping change on gun control. Advertisement I will believe it when it happens, said James Gard, a math teacher who locked himself and several students inside his classroom during the rampage. Lets see if its more rhetoric. It sounds great, but they have promised so much before and then it didnt pass through. How hard will they really try? After the 2016 shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Democratic lawmakers made several unsuccessful attempts to ban assault weapons. Yet with a new groundswell of public outrage, there is a chance lawmakers could pass new gun restrictions before they wrap up their legislative session March 9. On Friday, Republican leaders of the Florida Senate and House gathered at the Tallahassee statehouse to announce they would file companion bills to increase the minimum age for purchasing firearms to 21 and ban bump stocks. They also proposed imposing a three-day waiting period for all gun purchases in the state. Scotts plan calls for a new program, the Violent Threat Restraining Order, which would allow a court to ban a violent or mentally ill person from purchasing or possessing a firearm if a family member, community expert or law enforcement officer presented evidence of a threat of violence. Advertisement It also would prohibit a person from possessing or purchasing a firearm if they are the subject of an injunction for protection against stalking or sexual or domestic violence. I want to make it virtually impossible for anyone who has mental issues to use a gun, Scott said. Scott also proposed a sweeping range of new school security measures, providing funds to install metal detectors, bulletproof glass, steel doors and upgraded locks, and assigning a law enforcement officer in every public school. He also planned to funnel $50 million into mental health initiatives, such as counseling and crisis management, for students and young adults who show signs of mental illness. Advertisement The governors announcement came a day after President Trump suggested that arming teachers would make schools a much harder target. A teacher wouldve shot the hell out of him, Trump said of the accused shooter, Nikolas Cruz, a 19-year-old former student at Stoneman Douglas. Scott said teachers should not be expected to wield guns. My focus is on bringing in law enforcement, he told reporters. I think you need to have individuals who are trained, well-trained. Advertisement UPDATES: 12:30 p.m.: This article was updated with additional details. 12:10 p.m.: This article was updated with additional details about Scotts plan. This article was originally published at 10:25 a.m. An armed sheriffs deputy tasked with protecting students at a Florida high school waited outside during last weeks shooting massacre that killed 17 people inside, law enforcement officials said Thursday. Scot Peterson, who was assigned to the school as a resource officer, did not enter Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School during the shooting, but instead decided to take position outside the school as the gunman walked the halls, Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel said at a news conference. He never went in, Israel said. When asked what Peterson should have done, Israel said the deputy should have went in, addressed the killer, killed the killer. Advertisement Israel said that he was devastated by Petersons actions. Sick to my stomach. There are no words, Israel said. These families lost their children. We lost coaches. Ive been to the funerals, Ive been to the homes.... Ive been to the vigils. Its just there are no words. Peterson resigned Thursday after he was suspended by Israel pending an internal investigation into his actions, Israel said. Peterson has been a resource officer at the school since 2009. He began working for the sheriffs office in 1985. His annual salary in 2016 was $75,674, according to the South Florida Sun-Sentinel newspaper. On Thursday, President Trump suggested that teachers should be armed to fend off mass shooters. In a series of tweets, he said that highly trained, gun adept, teachers/coaches would solve the problem instantly, before police arrive. ....History shows that a school shooting lasts, on average, 3 minutes. It takes police & first responders approximately 5 to 8 minutes to get to site of crime. Highly trained, gun adept, teachers/coaches would solve the problem instantly, before police arrive. GREAT DETERRENT! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 22, 2018 ....immediately fire back if a savage sicko came to a school with bad intentions. Highly trained teachers would also serve as a deterrent to the cowards that do this. Far more assets at much less cost than guards. A gun free school is a magnet for bad people. ATTACKS WOULD END! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 22, 2018 Advertisement The FBI has said it failed to properly investigate a tip it received last month about Nikolas Cruz, the suspected gunman in the massacre at the school in Parkland, a suburb of Fort Lauderdale. The agency said proper protocols were not followed in investigating Cruz, who has been charged with 17 counts of premeditated murder and is being held without bond. Last week, Israel said his office had responded to 20 calls for service in recent years about Cruz, who had lived with his mother until her death in November. Israel said Thursday that two sheriffs deputies have been placed on restrictive duty while the sheriffs office investigates their actions during calls to Cruzs home before the shooting. UPDATES: Advertisement 6:05 p.m.: This article was updated with tweets from President Trump and additional comments from the sheriff. This article was originally published at 3:25 p.m. UCOM prolongs the unlimited internet offer for the level up 4700 and level up 5500 subscribers Ucom employees received recognition for their services to the homeland Karen Vardanyan has allocated 105 million AMD to rescue the Yerevan Botanical Garden. 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Artak Hanesyan UCOMS LEVEL UP 1700 REGIONAL TARIFF PLAN USERS TO RECEIVE MORE THAN THOSE IN YEREVAN Joint statement Statement by the Co-Chairs of the OSCE Minsk Group Covid-19: 163 new cases in Armenia Armenia: Remarks by Commissioner Oliver Varhelyi at the press point with Acting Deputy Prime Minister Mher Grigoryan The United States Welcomes Azerbaijans Release of Armenian Detainees and Armenias Actions to Facilitate Demining Google Ad The Coronavirus-Related Situation in Armenia International aviation: Council greenlights signing of major agreements with four countries With UCOMs level up tariff plans subscribers have unlimited access to Netflix, Duolingo and Zoom Armenia: Statement by the Spokesperson on the early parliamentary elections Armenias Parliamentary Elections PRESS STATEMENT COVID19:77 new cases Armenias early parliamentary elections were competitive and well run, but polarized and marred by aggressive rhetoric, international observers say International election observers to Armenias early parliamentary elections held press conference Drop Charges Against Rights Defender Sashik Sultanyan The Coronavirus-Related Situation in Armenia The European Union in Armenia calls all parties to contribute to a peaceful Election Day to celebrate democracy 22 ventilators to Armenia PACE to observe the early parliamentary elections in Armenia The shooting massacre of 17 people this month at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., not only reignited the debate over gun control but also launched a group of teenage activists. Students from the school have given dozens of interviews, gained hundreds of thousands of followers on Twitter and visited the White House and the Florida state Capitol. Theyve challenged senators and congressional representatives on live television and gone viral in videos of their pleas to prevent another slaughter. Here are some key figures in the #NeverAgain movement. Emma Gonzalez addresses a rally about the mass shooting at her high school. Rhona Wise / AFP-Getty Images Emma Gonzalez, 18 Gonzalez, a senior, gave an impassioned speech Saturday at a Ft. Lauderdale rally for gun control. Every single person up here today, all these people should be home grieving, Gonzalez said. But instead we are up here standing together because if all our government and president can do is send thoughts and prayers, then it's time for victims to be the change that we need to see. They say no laws could have prevented the hundreds of senseless tragedies that have occurred, Gonzalez later added. We call b.s. At a CNN town hall Wednesday, Gonzalez pressed National Rifle Assn. spokeswoman Dana Loesch on whether she believed it should be harder to obtain semiautomatic weapons and modifications, like bump stocks, that make them fully automatic. I don't believe that this insane monster should have ever been able to obtain a firearm, ever, Loesch responded. I do not think that he should have gotten his hands on any kind of weapon. Kelsey Friend and David Hogg. Mark Wilson / Getty Images David Hogg, 17 Hogg, a senior who directs the schools television station, interviewed other students about the shooting while they were under lockdown. In a widely seen interview on CNN the day after the shooting, Hogg implored lawmakers and the president to take action. Were children. You guys are the adults, he said. You need to take some action and play a role. Work together, come over your politics and get something done. Hogg, who now has more than 140,00 followers on Twitter, has become a leading face of the student activist movement. Appearing on NBCs Meet the Press on Sunday, he criticized President Trump for asking why Democrats hadnt passed gun control legislation when they controlled both houses of Congress under President Obama. You're the president, he said. You're supposed to bring this nation together, not divide us. How dare you. Sam Zeif during a listening session with President Trump. Mandal Ngan / AFP-Getty Images Sam Zeif, 18 During the shooting, Zeif, a senior, exchanged text messages with his 14-year-old brother, Matthew, who was in a classroom one floor up. Matthews teacher, Scott Beigel, was shot dead after ushering students to safety. Sam later shared the exchange on Twitter, where it was liked more than 150,000 times. I didnt plan for them to go viral, Zeif said at the White House meeting with Trump. I just wanted to share with the world because no brothers, or sisters, or family members or anyone should ever have to share those texts with anyone. Zeif lost Joaquin Oliver, a friend he described as practically a brother. I turned 18 the day after the shooting, Zeif told Trump. Woke up to the news that my best friend was gone. And I dont understand why I could still go in a store and buy a weapon of war. Julia Cordover, the senior class president at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, at the White House. Carolyn Kaster / Associated Press Julia Cordover, 18 Cordover, the senior class president, told Trump at the White House meeting that she hoped a compromise could be reached to prevent further mass shootings. I was lucky enough to come home from school, unlike some of my other classmates and teachers. And its very scary, she said. Cordover called Trumps move to ban bump stocks a step in the right direction, but said there was more work ahead. Im confident that youll do the right thing, she told the president. Cameron Kasky addresses students who rallied after a school walkout in Parkland, Fla. Rhona Wise / AFP-Getty Images Cameron Kasky, 17 Kasky, a junior, was part of a group text that began after the shooting and became a way for friends to support one another and discuss how to respond to the violence. Those students went on to start the "Never Again" movement. Kasky has said the name was his suggestion. He also started a GoFundMe page that has raised nearly $2 million for the March for Our Lives in Washington, D.C., on March 24 and for sister marches across the country. Angry, scared, confused, grieving, and sick of the NRA fostering and promoting this gun culture, says Kaskys Twitter profile, which has grown to have more than 150,000 followers. Cameron Kasky, who survived the school shooting: Sen. Rubio, can you tell me right now that you will not accept a single donation from the NRA? Rubio: People buy into my agenda, and I do support the Second Amendment #StudentsStandUp https://t.co/ucmVB74g1C CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) February 22, 2018 On Wednesday, Kasky got into a heated exchange with Florida Sen. Marco Rubio at the CNN town hall, where he repeatedly asked the Republican if he would refuse donations from the National Rifle Assn. So, Sen. Rubio, can you tell me right now that you will not accept a single donation from the NRA in the future? Kasky asked. The answer to the question is that people buy into my agenda, Rubio replied. And I do support the 2nd Amendment. And I also support the right of you and everyone here to be able to go to school and be safe. Jaclyn Corin, 17 Corin, a junior, hid in a classroom during the shooting. Afterward, she helped organize a bus trip for dozens of classmates to the state Capitol in Tallahassee to rally for gun restrictions. I knew that I wanted to change something, Corin told the Naples Daily News. Im the type of person, when something bad happens to me, I cant just sit back and cry and go in a ball. I like to speak out and I like to act and distract myself from pain. Students teared up as they watched the Florida House of Representatives vote down a motion to consider a bill to ban assault rifles. The vote in the Republican-dominated House was 36 to 71. Kyle Kashuv, 16 A self-described Republican and Trump supporter, Kashuv told CNN after the shooting that he still supported gun rights but believed there should be some restrictions. "We have such a limited government that should not be totally reliant on ... the police. We should be able to defend ourselves as citizens. I still totally believe that, but I think that there should be a limit to who could acquire such weaponry, he said. If you're not of the right mind-set, you're not mentally stable, then you should not be able to acquire that. Kashuv traveled to Tallahassee with his classmates. Something has to be enacted to make sure this never happens again, he said in an interview on the bus. He created his Twitter account, @KyleKashuv, during the trip with a one-word bio that reads #MDSstrong. Ariana Klein meets Trump at the White House. In the middle is shooting survivor Carson Abt. Mandal Ngan / AFP-Getty Images Ariana Klein Klein, a junior, called Trump a great leader at the White House meeting on Wednesday and urged ideological enemies to talk more with one another. I just want to say that everybody right now is so stuck on what they believe, that theyre not even listening to what other people believe. We need to listen to the other points of views, she said. We all need to realize that we all have different points of views and that we need this solution is not going to be a singular thing. Its going to be multifaceted and its going to be created by a collection of different people working together. And we all have to realize that we all have our opinions, and together were going to be able to work to a solution. And this is not just Parkland anymore; this is America. This is every student in every city, everywhere. Its everybody. Its not small. Its everything. Alfonso Calderon at the Florida state Capitol. Colin Abbey / EPA-Shutterstock Alfonso Calderon, 16 Calderon made headlines after giving an impassioned speech during a televised news conference as students rallied in Tallahassee. He defended students against critics who said they were too young to understand politics. We will not be silenced. It has gone on long enough, he said. Just because we are kids we are not allowed to understand but, trust me, I understand. I was in a closet, locked for four hours with people who I would consider almost family crying and weeping on me begging for their lives. I understand what its like to text my parents, Goodbye, I might never ever get to see you again. I love you. I understand what its like to fear for your life. And I dont think we should ever be discredited because of that. I dont think we should ever be silenced because we are just children. Lorenzo Prado at the Florida state Capitol. Don Juan Moore / Getty Images Lorenzo Prado, 17 Prado, a junior, was near tears as he spoke at the same Tallahassee news conference and described hiding in his schools auditorium sound booth and getting pinned down after a SWAT team mistook him for the shooter. SWAT comes in, and I thought they were here to rescue me. But then as I go down the stairs, I find out that I was wrong, he said. I found out that they thought it was me that killed the 17 people. I go down the stairs, they tell me to put my hands up. I, being the fool that I was, tried putting my phone back in my pocket. They demanded again, and I, not trying to be one of those news stories of someone dying wrongfully because they refused to put their hands up, I just dropped my phone at that moment and kept going. When I went out those doors, I had six SWAT members pointing their guns at me. I was tossed to the ground. I was unjustly cuffed and held at gunpoint for the degrading and depreciating action of the disturbed individual Nikolas Cruz. I was then put in a corner with a policewoman guarding me. I knew any move I made would be the end of my life. Throughout the entire event, I only felt two things: I felt fear, as I did not know my future. I did not know if I was going to be let go. I did not know where the terrorist was. The second thing was guilt. Lane Murdock, 15 Murdock doesnt attend Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, but she said the violence there prompted her to call for a national high school walkout on April 20 that has gained hundreds of thousands of followers and supporters on social media and through a Change.org petition. The date marks the 19th anniversary of the Columbine High School shooting in Colorado that left 13 people dead. A sophomore at Ridgefield High School in Connecticut, a 20-minute drive from Sandy Hook Elementary School, Murdock hopes teenagers around the country will take part in the walkout to honor those who have died in school shootings. Were neutral. Some people who are trying to help and support us naturally assume were politically aligned. We want April 20 to be a day of solidarity for the lives lost. Its about paying our respects, Murdock told the Hartford Courant. But we also want it to be a day of discourse. Adults fight on the internet, in the press, in politics. A lot of kids dont, and its because were open to listening. A youth movement of the Womens March called EMPOWER is also pushing for a national school walkout at 10 a.m. March 14 among students, teachers, school administrators, parents and allies. The group is suggesting those who walk out stand in silence for 17 minutes, one for each person who died in the Florida massacre. When Twitter launched in 2006, the youngest students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School were toddlers, the oldest just out of kindergarten. They would be part of the first generation to grow up with social media at their fingertips, and with an innate understanding of how to amplify their voices to reach state, national and even international audiences. I cannot stop hearing the sound of the gun as he walked down my hallway. I cannot unsee my classmates who were shot get carried out by police. I cannot unsee the bodies on the floor. Please keep in mind the horror of what weve gone through today. #prayfordouglas Morgan Williams (@morganw_44) February 15, 2018 Today I woke up excited to go to school in my cute dress and celebrate Valentines Day with my friends. Today I came home nearly terrified and worried about the people I care about the most. Nobody should have to go through that. LYLIAH MARIA (@lyliahmtaylor) February 15, 2018 After a gunman killed 14 of their peers and three school staff members on the grounds of their Parkland, Fla., school last week, the reaction to share facts, questions and outrage on social media was immediate. Advertisement On Twitter and in interviews, the students have pleaded for adults to combat the violence that visited their campus and so many others. Their rally cries quickly gained mainstream attention, and echoed in the halls of schools throughout the nation. In the week that followed the Valentines Day shooting, the teens garnered hundreds of thousands of followers in the process. Twitter even verified their most active accounts, stamping a blue checkmark on their profiles to cement their legitimacy. The students have made it clear that they wont stay quiet. And they arent waiting to be called on, either. These are the Florida students behind the movement to end gun violence Shortly after President Trump tweeted his prayers and condolences to the victims and families, it was a sophomores raw tweet that turned viral. I dont want your condolences you ..., my friends and teachers were shot. Multiple of my fellow classmates are dead. Do something instead of sending prayers. Prayers wont fix this. But Gun control will prevent it from happening again, Sarah Chadwick wrote. Before the tweet became unavailable, it had more than 144,000 retweets. Now, pinned to the top of her Twitter account is an apology for her profanity, and a resolve not to back down. Shes not the only one. About my tweet directed to president trump, I apologize for the profanity and harsh comment I made. I hope you know Im a grieving 16 year old girl who lost friends, teachers, and peers yesterday. I was and am still angry. I am apologizing for my comment but not for my anger. Sarah Chadwick (@Sarahchadwickk) February 15, 2018 Advertisement That evening, Chadwicks peer Cameron Kasky sat at his computer and took to Facebook once again. The 17-year-old had been sharing his emotions throughout the day. As with other mass shootings that proceeded this one, he knew that a standard offering of thoughts and prayers would come from lawmakers. But they werent enough. Please dont pray for me. Your prayers do nothing, he wrote. And addressing voters, he added, Show me you care in the polls. His posts were shared widely. An invitation to write an op-ed for CNN would follow, then an on-camera interview. The following Wednesday, the same day that Trump hosted a listening session with gun shooting survivors and parents at the White House, Kasky addressed one of the lawmakers he criticized Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio. During the CNN town hall, Kasky pressed Rubio about whether he would reject future donations from the National Rifle Assn. in an exchange that gained considerable attention. Advertisement Less than two days after the shooting, Kasky launched the Never Again movement doing so, he said, while wearing his Ghostbusters pajamas. With the help of his peers, the movement includes a website, logo, Facebook page and Twitter handle. The first tweet on the @NeverAgainMSD account shared an initial goal to get the phrase Never Again trending on Twitter. Since then, the group has also set March 24 as date for the March for Our Lives a demonstration against gun violence in Washington, D.C. Today at 3 PM, as many of you know it is our goal to get #NeverAgain trending amongst any and all social media platforms we can. Action starts with us. #TurnoutTuesday (@Turnout_Tuesday) February 16, 2018 #NeverAgain never again will this happen in Parkland. Never again will it happen anywhere. Never again. Join the movement. Be the movement. #TurnoutTuesday (@Turnout_Tuesday) February 16, 2018 The movements organizers include several Stoneman Douglas students, such as David Hogg. The school reporter who interviewed fellow students hiding in a closet during the shooting has become a recent target of conspiracy theorists who have falsely accused him, and other students, of being crisis actors. Advertisement Chadwick is also part of the group. So is Emma Gonzalez, a senior who delivered a speech Saturday criticizing Trump and the NRA. Shared by millions across the globe, her message was resounding: We call b.s. Parkland junior class president Jaclyn Corin is another Never Again member. The 17-year-old organized a bus trip to the Florida state Capitol in Tallahassee in an effort to push for gun law changes. One hundred of my classmates and I will be traveling to Tallahassee this Tuesday and Wednesday to speak with our State Senators and House of Representative members. We are so grateful to have this opportunity to advocate for gun control, mental health, school safety, & more. Jaclyn Corin (@JaclynCorin) February 18, 2018 Advertisement That same day, the state Legislature voted against a motion to take up a bill that would ban assault rifles. But a scroll through the #NeverAgain feed on Twitter reveals that the students of Stoneman Douglas, and their growing supporters, have no intention of quitting. colleen.shalby@latimes.com Twitter: @cshalby ALSO: Advertisement These are the Florida students behind the movement to end gun violence A changing of guard: After unthinkable tragedy, Generation Z emerges loud and clear A spreading movement? How Florida school shooting survivors are inspiring other students to demand gun control In the days since a 19-year-old gunman stormed onto his former high school campus in Parkland, Fla., killing 17 people with an AR-15 assault rifle, the nation has been embroiled in a debate over what to do about school violence: How do you make it stop? Here at Argyle High School, they already have an answer to that question: The teachers are packing handguns. A sign outside campus warns: Please be aware that the staff at Argyle [Independent School District] are armed and may use whatever force is necessary to protect our students. Among those arriving Thursday was teaching assistant Theresa Locastro, who said the school boards decision to allow staff to be armed after the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in 2012 set an example for various schools that we mean business. Advertisement I know theres a lot of controversy, and people who dont want to arm them, said Locastro, 44. But she thinks armed staffers can deter attacks like the Parkland gunman. Hopefully, it will make them think twice, she said. In about two dozen states, including California, schools can allow staff to carry guns on campus, although some require concealed-carry licenses, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Experts say its not clear whether such policies reduce the likelihood of school shootings or the death toll. But President Trump and other lawmakers have voiced support for arming teachers on Thursday the president suggested giving bonuses to school staff members who carry guns. Officials at Argyle and other districts say the policies deter shooters and provide peace of mind, and that other schools should follow their lead. Scores of Texas school districts allow teachers to carry arms. A sign outside campus warns: Please be aware that the staff at Argyle [Independent School District] are armed and may use whatever force is necessary to protect our students. Its essential to keep us safe, said Lizzie Dagg, 18, Argyle senior class president, who spent part of lunch Thursday signing a banner expressing sympathy to Parkland students. Were going to protect our kids at any cost, said U.S. history teacher Sharon Romero, a gun owner who did not volunteer to be armed at school, but is glad co-workers did. Shes disappointed that lawmakers havent done more to enact common-sense regulations, such as expanded background checks. At least were taking action, she said. I feel safer coming to work than a lot of other teachers in this country do. Ari Freilich, a San Francisco-based staff attorney with the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, said studies have shown more permissive concealed-carry laws contribute to gun violence, although he was not aware of studies at schools. Advertisement Freilich said that many teachers are already overwhelmed and that asking them to be first responders too is not in the interest of students. Amy Klinger, co-founder of the Ohio-based Educators School Safety Network, said that rather than arming them, schools should train teams of educators to assess threats. The calls by Trump and others for guns in schools have really taken the focus off things that are more effective, she said. We need to do things that work, not that feel good. Klinger said more guns on campus can lead to more accidental shootings, including two earlier this month in Minnesota and Florida, and its unreasonable to expect even armed staff on large campuses to be able to stop a mass shooter. We need to train our teachers how to identify these people. People dont want to hear that they want a quick fix, she said. Advertisement In Texas, school boards must approve arming teachers. At least 170 districts allow employees and in some cases board members to carry firearms, according to the Texas Assn. of School Boards. About 150 districts have their own police departments, and more than 250 districts without police have school resource officers. That means about 22% of the states public school districts have allowed staff to carry guns, according to Joe McKenna, director of research and education at the Texas School Safety Center at Texas State University in San Marcos. The center works with the Argyle Independent School District and other school systems to improve security and preparedness. McKenna said the center has not studied the effectiveness of arming teachers. You have to weigh whats best for your district, taking into account the district size, mitigation and threats, he said. Advertisement Overwhelmingly Republican, Texas is known for supporting gun rights. The National Rifle Assn. is holding its annual convention in Dallas this May, just a few years after convening in Houston. Texas had more guns registered last year than any other state (588,696), followed by California (344,622) and Florida (343,288). Texas voters have passed several laws in recent years expanding the right to carry guns openly and on college campuses. Government offices and businesses that dont allow people to openly carry must post signs at their entrances. But Texas has also seen support for gun control grow. Protesters rallied to oppose campus-carry rights two years ago, mostly notably at the University of Texas at Austin, where opponents formed the Gun Free UT alliance. Advertisement Some faculty even resigned rather than teach with guns in their classrooms. They worried not only about potential attacks by disturbed shooters, but also about guns firing accidentally or getting lost. Last week some of their fears were borne out when two guns were found left behind in womens restrooms on two different campuses of UT Austin. Argyle officials consulted other schools that had already armed teachers before approving the policy. Supt. Telena Wright called her counterpart at the nearby Harrold Independent School District, among the first in the country to arm teachers. Its a tiny district just 115 students in a county the size of Rhode Island policed by half a dozen sheriffs deputies; response time is a concern. Harrold Supt. David Thweatt had proposed arming teachers after the shooting at West Nickel Mines School in Pennsylvanias Amish country in 2006. School board members initially balked, then changed their minds after the mass shooting that killed 32 that spring at Virginia Tech. Thweatt has since worked with Texas state lawmakers to pass a law providing training for school staff who serve as armed guardians. He tells those who call for advice to keep armed staff anonymous, like air marshals, and to have them carry their weapons at all times. Advertisement You need to be ready, Thweatt said. Thweatt said he spends less than $1,000 on training and arming teachers, and that bigger districts might pay more but have comparably larger budgets. Its very cost-effective, he said. Argyle is a much larger, fast-growing district, with 2,400 students, 850 of them at the high school. Before the school board approved the policy, officials held a town hall that hundreds of residents attended. Many spoke during public comment all in favor of arming, the superintendent said. After that night, I knew the community was going to be solidly behind it, Wright said, and feedback from parents and staff continues to be positive. School officials have fielded calls from districts in Michigan, Oregon and Virginia. Advertisement Argyle High Principal James Hill, who has three children in the school system, was skeptical about the policy when he was hired in 2015, but said, Now Im a believer. The time for us just sitting back and waiting for it to happen is over, he said of school shootings. I want to give our kids a fighting chance. Staff who volunteer to be armed must have their concealed handgun license and pass psychological screening, according to Argyle Schools Police Chief Paul Cairney. Staff who are approved carry handguns, either their own or those provided by the district, which Cairney also screens to ensure they work. Volunteers attend three to five days of training initially, and annual retraining, including active-shooter simulations. Advertisement Our teachers carry the gun on them at all times. Thats because if something happens, its going to be precious seconds and we want them to be able to immediately enter the fight, he said. District officials declined to say how much the program costs, how many staff volunteer, and which are armed, but Cairney said theyre at every school. He said staff havent had any accidents or guns go missing since the program started. He stressed that arming staff is not the districts sole security strategy. They also monitor school-issued student laptops; got a new system to check social media; and lock entrances and electronically screen the identification of all who enter the schools, even parents and former students. On Thursday, walking through the schools halls, Cairney noted that he had passed several armed staff. Since the Florida shooting, more staff have volunteered to carry weapons. Advertisement Lizzie Dagg, 18, a senior at Argyle High School, signs a poster for victims of the deadly Florida shooting.. (Molly Hennessy-Fiske / Los Angeles Times ) molly.hennessy-fiske@latimes.com Twitter: @mollyhf Good morning, and welcome to the Essential California newsletter. Its Friday, Feb. 23, and heres whats happening across California: TOP STORIES Since the housing market took off in 2012, the California median home price has risen to $524,000, a compounded annual growth rate of nearly 10%, according to real estate website Zillow. The median rent for a vacant apartment jumped an annual rate of 6%, to $2,424. As a result, businesses are increasingly struggling to recruit from out of state; a larger share of people are enduring one-way commutes of more than 90 minutes; and more people are leaving California than moving here from elsewhere in the U.S. Los Angeles Times Mendoza resigns Advertisement Tony Mendoza, a former East Los Angeles elementary schoolteacher who moved swiftly from local to state government elected offices, resigned from the California Senate on Thursday as his colleagues moved to formally expel him after a series of sexual misconduct accusations. The resignation was the culmination of an almost three-month saga that saw the Democrat stridently deny any improper conduct, all while accusing his fellow legislators of unfair treatment. He becomes the third state legislator to resign amid allegations that have shaken the state Capitol community. Los Angeles Times Trump vs. California President Trump on Thursday lambasted California officials for how they are dealing with gangs and threatened to pull immigration and border agents out of the state to show just how bad things would be without federal help. The LAPD says he simply doesnt understand gangs. Los Angeles Times Plus: So which is it, punish California with more agents, or fewer? Los Angeles Times L.A. STORIES Hospital sexual assault claim: The Los Angeles County Sheriffs Department has been conducting a criminal investigation of a former doctor at L.A. County-USC Medical Center after another doctor in the hospital said she was sexually assaulted by the physician during one of her shifts. Los Angeles Times Remember that crazy chase? A suspected car thief who led police on a wild pursuit that ended a mile into a Metro Gold Line subway tunnel was charged Thursday with six felonies and could get more than four years in prison if convicted. Los Angeles Times Brick and mortar: In Los Angeles, Amazon has held serious talks with billionaire developer Rick Caruso about bringing a Go store to the Grove, his 600,000-square-foot outdoor shopping Mecca. ReCode Advertisement POLITICS AND GOVERNMENT Coming attraction: Thousands of California Democrats will gather Friday in San Diego for their annual convention, where potential presidential contenders will make appearances and state candidates will battle for endorsements from the party faithful in advance of the June primary. Los Angeles Times Retirement debt: State and local governments face more than $400 billion in unfunded liabilities for public employee retirement benefits, and the situation is getting worse as baby boomers retire and life expectancy increases. CalMatters Battling homelessness: Tiny homes for Sacramentos homeless could get $200 million in subsidies and vacant city land. Sacramento Bee Advertisement CRIME AND COURTS Sexual assault allegation: New Orleans police last year investigated Breaking Bad actor Dean Norris after a woman said he sexually assaulted her, but prosecutors ultimately decided not to file charges, the Orleans Parish district attorneys office has confirmed. Los Angeles Times What?! A Glendale man burned his genitals and legs. The culprit? An e-cigarette battery, new lawsuit claims. Los Angeles Times Following up: A 33-year-old man who drank poison and died while fleeing police on the 101 Freeway in Ventura County on Wednesday was wanted for the sexual assault of a 14-year-old girl at a Los Angeles motel, authorities said. Los Angeles Times Advertisement CALIFORNIA CULTURE Where are the female leads? Women claimed just 24% of leading roles, or protagonists, in the top 100 films last year, down from 29% in 2016, according to a new report from San Diego State Universitys Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film. Los Angeles Times Plus: In this #MeToo era the people behind the Oscar telecast have a message: Our show will be focused on films, not the cultural moment around them. New York Times For sale: Charlie Sheen is ready to call it a wrap in Sherman Oaks, listing his sprawling mansion for sale at $9,999,999. Los Angeles Times Advertisement Big gift: Television producer Marcy Carsey whose hits include The Cosby Show, Roseanne and 3rd Rock From the Sun typically directs charitable donations toward causes like affordable education and womens equality. But now she is donating $20 million of her fortune to the Hammer Museum. New York Times And: L.A. philanthropists Lynda and Stewart Resnick are giving $30 million to help pay for an ambitious renovation and expansion at the Hammer. Los Angeles Times CALIFORNIA ALMANAC Los Angeles area: sunny, 62, Friday; sunny, 63, Saturday. San Diego: partly cloudy, 57, Friday; sunny, 63, Saturday. San Francisco area: sunny, 54, Friday; cloudy, 54, Saturday. Sacramento: sunny, 56, Friday; partly cloudy, 59, Saturday. More weather is here. Advertisement AND FINALLY Todays California memory comes from John Owen: My family from Illinois visited California via the Santa Fe Railroad in 1958. On our way to Disneyland, we pulled into Knotts Berry Farm. We looked out across open fields of black soil as far as you could see. I thought the fields were just like home on the prairies of Illinois. From the Top of the Mark, the same year, I was mesmerized by the San Francisco Bay Bridge. When I returned 15 years later, expecting the same view, it was instead all the skyscrapers of a new San Francisco skyline. If you have a memory or story about the Golden State, share it with us. Send us an email to let us know what you love or fondly remember about our state. (Please keep your story to 100 words.) Advertisement Please let us know what we can do to make this newsletter more useful to you. Send comments, complaints and ideas to Benjamin Oreskes and Shelby Grad. Also follow them on Twitter @boreskes and @shelbygrad. California voters (and the Times Editorial Board) have supported a variety of tax hikes and bond measures in recent years because the new revenue was essential for building vital public infrastructure, from schools to subways to homeless housing. Now Southern California air quality regulators are considering putting a quarter-cent sales tax increase on the 2020 ballot to raise an estimated $700 million a year, much of which would be used to pay truckers and goods movement companies to switch their dirty diesel big-rigs to low-pollution models. Thats a tax too far. Most tax measures are used to pay for public infrastructure and services. Voters are asked to tax themselves to invest in shared resources, like parks and roads, or to finance initiatives that have broad community benefits, such as restoring wetlands, building permanent supportive housing or hiring more schoolteachers. Advertisement This proposal is different. Southern California residents would be asked to tax themselves to pay for privately owned equipment in a for-profit industry. Why should we have to subsidize the international, multibillion-dollar retail and logistics industries to get cleaner trucks? Theres no question that the regions smoggy, soot-filled air is unhealthy. The South Coast Air Quality Management District has an enormously difficult job in cleaning the skies. The agency has the authority to regulate stationary sources of pollution, such as power plants, factories and refineries. But 88% of the regions smog-forming pollution is created by vehicles, which are regulated by the state and federal governments. Despite having limited power to go after the most prolific polluters, regional leaders are facing a 2023 deadline to dramatically cut emissions to meet Clean Air Act standards. The sales tax measure offers one possible solution to this problem: a huge pot of money that could be used to incentivize the trucking industry to switch to cleaner engines. But while the proposed tax-hike scheme would probably cut smog and soot faster than maintaining the current set of policies, it would push the burden of cleaning the air from the polluter onto the taxpayer. It would let trucking companies, retailers and the logistics industry off the hook for the cost of operating in an environmentally responsible fashion. And it would ease the pressure on the Trump administration to tighten the emissions limits for interstate trucks. Goods movement is certainly an important part of the Southern California economy. Roughly 35% of the nations cargo containers arrive at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach and pass through the region en route to warehouses and big-box stores across the country. Retailers, manufacturers and their customers nationwide ought to cover the costs of cleaning up the industry. To foist the expense on Southern Californians simply because the cargo containers full of televisions, clothing and other goods pass through here on the way to Kansas is just unfair. Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion and Facebook Repeat after me: Mass shooters are not disproportionately mentally ill. This is the opening line of a meme thats been circulating in the aftermath of the shooting in Parkland, Fla. But this and other efforts to downplay the role of mental illness in mass shootings are simply misleading. There is a clear relationship between mental illness and mass public shootings. At the broadest level, peer-reviewed research has shown that individuals with major mental disorders (those that substantially interfere with life activities) are more likely to commit violent acts, especially if they abuse drugs. When we focus more narrowly on mass public shootings an extreme and, fortunately, rare form of violence we see a relatively high rate of mental illness. Advertisement According to our research, at least 59% of the 185 public mass shootings that took place in the United States from 1900 through 2017 were carried out by people who had either been diagnosed with a mental disorder or demonstrated signs of serious mental illness prior to the attack. (We define a mass public shooting as any incident in which four or more victims are killed with a gun within a 24-hour period at a public location in the absence of military conflict, collective violence or other criminal activity, such as robberies, drug deals or gang turf wars.) Mother Jones found a similarly high rate of potential mental health problems among perpetrators of mass shootings 61% when the magazine examined 62 cases in 2012. Both rates are considerably higher than those found in the general population more than three times higher than the rate of mental illness found among American adults, and about 15 times higher than the rate of serious mental illness found among American adults. Its possible for mass public shootings to be both a gun problem and a mental health problem. And yet this nuance often gets lost in mainstream news reports. In a story that largely suggested mass murderers are not insane, the New York Times cited research showing that, in fact, mass murderers are nearly 20 times more likely to have a severe mental illness than the general population. According to our research, only one-third of the people who have committed mass shootings in the U.S. since 1900 had sought or received mental health care prior to their attacks, which suggests that most shooters did not seek or receive care they may have needed. This treatment gap is underscored by evidence showing that the U.S. has higher rates of untreated serious mental illness than most other Western countries. Additional research shows that the gap is even larger for males, who have committed 99% of the countrys mass public shootings. Although the link between mass shootings and mental illness has only recently gained widespread recognition, the correlation itself is longstanding. Indeed, we see it in some of the earliest such shootings in the U.S. Gilbert Twigg, who opened fire on a concert crowd in Winfield, Kan., in 1903, killing nine, had displayed signs of paranoia beforehand. Howard Unruh, who shot and killed 13 people in Camden, N.J., in 1949, was later diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. (Both were also Army veterans who had seen combat.) Advertisement One of the primary reasons some are reluctant to establish the link between mass shootings and mental illness is a fear that it will lead to the stigmatization of such disorders. This concern is valid. The vast majority of people with mental disorders are not violent, after all. Conversely, some have insisted wrongly, in our opinion that mass public shootings are strictly a mental health problem rather than a gun problem. They, too, are on the wrong side of the evidence. Its possible for mass public shootings to be both a gun problem and a mental health problem. Increasing access to mental health care may reduce mass public shootings. But while such events are more commonplace than they should be, the reality may be that theyre still too rare to develop and implement policies that reduce their incidence or severity specifically. Policymakers should therefore focus on strategies that have shown promise in reducing gun violence in general, like a federal universal background check. Advertisement Because theres still a lot we dont understand about mass shootings, we need to invest in research to develop evidence-based solutions. In the meantime, the media should stop glorifying this violence. In the midst of our tribal hyperpartisanship, the debate over mass shootings is doomed to continue ignoring facts. We wont make any progress until those on the mental health side and those on the gun side find common ground thats rooted in empirical reality. Grant Duwe is research director for the Minnesota Department of Corrections and the author of Mass Murder in the United States: A History. Michael Rocque is a professor of sociology at Bates College. Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion or Facebook Could it be that hell has frozen over? Republican Florida Gov. Rick Scott as NRA-hugging as the worst of them said Friday morning that he would push gun reforms in his state to raise the minimum age for buying firearms to 21, ban bump stocks, the devices that turn semiautomatic weapons into near-automatic, and bar those deemed a risk to themselves or others from possessing a gun, and other related restrictions. Granted, the moves are pretty limited, and echo some of President Trumps recent policy shifts (though Scott opposes Trumps idea to arm teachers), but its a start for a politician who has long followed the National Rifle Assn.s lead. Advertisement Its unclear how much of his change of heart arose from the striking political activism of students who survived the Valentines Day massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., but they have certainly turned up the heat on the debate (which they need to convert into vote-mobilization). The even better news is that Scott is not alone. Even as Congress refuses to slip off the gun lobbys leash, political leaders in several states say theyll push for more controls. New Jerseys recently installed Democratic governor, Phil Murphy, said he plans to form a coalition of like-minded governors to take a regional state-level approach to try to get a handle on the nations gun-violence problem a tactic loosely patterned after state responses to fight climate change after President Trump decided to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris agreement. He also has said he would sign a menu of gun-control measures that former Gov. Chris Christie vetoed. Has the tide turned on the NRA and the gun lobby? In Vermont, long one of the nations gun-friendliest states, Republican Gov. Phil Scott reversed his prior opposition to tightening gun laws, and called for measures that would increase to 21 the age at which someone can buy a firearm (unless they have passed a training course), ban bump stocks, allow police to temporarily remove firearms from someone deemed dangerous, and said he would consider requiring a background check for private sales of firearms and banning high-capacity magazines. The catalyst: The arrest of an 18-year-old Vermont man who police say was planning a mass shooting at his former high school just days after the slaughter in Parkland. Remarkably, U.S. Rep. Tim Walz (D-Minn.), long a favorite of the NRA, announced that he would seek a ban on semiautomatic rifles in Minnesota, where he is running for governor. That position flip likely has more to do with his political ambitions than a true change of heart, but its still progress. And it needs to continue. Advertisement Another encouraging sign: Over the last couple of days, a number of businesses that work with the NRA have severed their connections. Enterprise Holdings will end a special rate program for NRA members renting cars through Enterprise, Alamo and National. A private Omaha bank said it will end co-branded NRA credit cards. MetLife said it would drop a policy discount for NRA members. And Chubb Ltd. decided three months ago that it would stop underwriting insurance that covered NRA members for legal problems arising from self-defense shootings. Has the tide turned on the NRA and the gun lobby? Its too soon to say, but these are heartening developments. Lets hope the momentum builds. scott.martelle@latimes.com Follow my posts and re-tweets at @smartelle on Twitter. To the editor: Polands new law rewriting its World War II history about not having any involvement in creating concentration camps in their country is a lie. Three million Polish Jews died in these camps, and Poles were involved in helping the occupying Germans. (Israelis slam Polish prime ministers remarks about Jewish perpetrators of Holocaust, Feb. 17) Polish people pointed out Jewish homes, where the Germans took whatever they wanted, and they helped with building and running the concentration camps. After the war, when about 200 Jewish survivors returned to the town of Kielce to claim their homes and businesses, the locals killed up to 42 of them. This was going on in other Polish cities to Jews who dared return to their homes after being liberated. It is unfair for a law to be passed in a country that was deeply involved in killing so many Jews. I know because I was there I am a witness, and I am a survivor. Ella Mandel, Los Angeles Advertisement Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion and Facebook When President Trump floated the possibility of arming select teachers at each school campus with guns to stop shootings like the one that took place Feb. 14 in Parkland, Fla., the reaction from Los Angeles Times letter writers was swift and almost completely one-sided. The consensus opinion was that putting guns into classrooms would only create more problems than it might solve. Particularly dismissive and derisive were the letter writers who stand to benefit from this proposal: teachers. Since the shooting, weve heard from dozens of teachers and parents calling for more gun control, but the teachers criticism of the president grew more pointed after Trump brainstormed the idea of giving guns to educators. Several suggested that serving as armed guards would add too much to their heavy workloads and run counter to a teachers mission. Heidi Lesemann of Los Angeles imagines what a panicked, armed teacher would do: As a former elementary school teacher, I am appalled at the idea that teachers should be trained to carry guns in the classroom. Are we back to the Wild West? Advertisement Even well-trained police officers have been known to shoot and kill an innocent person out of panic. What about a gun-trained teacher in a chaotic, terrifying, life-threatening situation whose goal is to protect his or her students? What are the chances that training will enable a teacher to find the target in a school of screaming, fleeing students? Not all teachers can even keep track of their own cellphones or their students work; imagine if you give them a gun. Lorraine Stein-Wiener, Rancho Palos Verdes There is no one solution. It takes a multifaceted approach and a look at what other democratic countries have done about gun control. Los Angeles resident Louis Fantasia, a gun owner, doesnt think this proposal has been thought through: I have been involved in training classroom teachers for more than 20 years. Many people know this. Few people know that I am also a gun owner. Suppose I decide to go back to classroom teaching and state my gun ownership as one of my qualifications, and because I am adept and talented and, I hope, one of the very best teachers, I am asked to conceal and carry in the classroom. Lets also suppose that one tragic day, someone with an AR-15 walks in and starts shooting. Say I get the call from the principals office and have to join other adept and talented colleagues who are armed. What next? We go in with guns blazing? Has anyone thought this through? How does this not lead to more panic, more shooting and more death? Arming teachers is not only a stupid idea, its also a dangerous one. Advertisement Reece Talley of Santa Clarita calls for hardening school campuses: I am a teacher (more than 30 years) and an National Rifle Assn. life member. Im also a firearms instructor and a military veteran. I know firearms, and I know teachers. It is my opinion that arming teachers is not going to be an effective deterrent to campus shootings. Most of the teachers I know will hesitate before firing. Its the way they are wired. Stand in front of a student and take a bullet? Sure. But take out a shooter? They arent wired like police. However, having trained law enforcement officers at all schools and making all entrances and exits secure will effectively stop school shootings. Expensive? Heck yes, but it is also the only really effective way to safeguard our children. You need to go to Washington to see how well this works, where government buildings are hardened because they are known targets. Advertisement Rather than go after guns, lets do something that really counts, something proven to work: Lets make schools so hardened against violent intruders that they lose their luster as soft targets. Ann Kreile of San Marcos doubts that a teacher would fire at anyone: I was a teacher in the Los Angeles Unified School District for many years. There is no way then (or now) that I could ever hold a gun in my hand and shoot anyone. Teachers have enough to do. How can we possibly expect them to handle guns, especially if their beliefs do not allow them to kill anyone? Advertisement Lorraine Stein-Wiener of Rancho Palos Verdes worries what might be done with a gun even in the absence of an active shooter: As a retired teacher/librarian, I believe that arming educators has to be one of the dumbest ideas ever considered. I am not worried about teachers turning the guns on the students although believe me, teenagers push all of your buttons, and this could happen. Teachers work hard and are under tremendous pressure as it is; giving them a gun will only add to their worries. I dont care if you are in a high-income school or a low-income school that gun will become a prize that the kids will try to steal. Advertisement Not all teachers can even keep track of their own cellphones or their students work; imagine if you give them a gun. Heck, if these kids can hack computers at schools so easily, what would stop them from going after guns? Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion and Facebook. In a statement released on Wednesday, the Ulama said that the youths were forced to flee their home country to escape persecution and to save themselves, their religion, dignity and freedom. (AhlulBayt News Agency) - Bahrains religious scholars or the Ulama blamed the regime in Manama for the deaths of three Bahrainis, who drowned in the waters of the Persian Gulf over the weekend. In a statement released on Wednesday, the Ulama said that the youths were forced to flee their home country to escape persecution and to save themselves, their religion, dignity and freedom. The three were found dead in Iranian territorial waters and a fourth person is still missing after a barrage of gunfire reportedly sank their boat. They were presumably on their way to Iran when they came under attack. Although Manama denied any knowledge of the incident, the four men were wanted by its security apparatus. The martyrdom of our free sons in the sea carries a lot of the injustice that the Bahraini people are subjected to, the Ulama statement reads. The path of our free people to change this intense reality of injustice will never stop. /257 Gavin Newsom releases ad that highlights his push to allow same-sex couples to marry By Phil Willon A new ad from Democratic gubernatorial candidate Gavin Newsom features Phyllis Lyon, who with her partner, Del Martin, received the first marriage license after Newsom vowed to allow same-sex couples to marry when he was mayor of San Francisco in 2004. The current lieutenant governors push for marriage equality thrust him into the national spotlight and he has emphasized that effort to portray himself as a bold, progressive leader. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Failed California housing bill was not a bad idea, Gov. Jerry Brown says By Liam Dillon Gov. Jerry Brown (Rich Pedroncelli / Associated Press) Earlier this month, high-profile housing legislation that would have allowed for four- to five-story apartments and condominiums near transit stops failed to advance in the state Legislature. But had it reached his desk, would Gov. Jerry Brown have signed it? Maybe. I think that was not a bad idea, Brown said of Senate Bill 827 at a meeting with business leaders from the Bay Area Council on Monday afternoon. The bill, written by Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco), attracted national attention and a maelstrom of opposition in part because it would have eliminated single-family zoning near transit stops in favor of apartments or condominiums. Brown said that a relative of his who lives in West Portal, a low-density neighborhood in San Francisco, told the governor he was horrified by the bill. Brown also lamented dramatically rising housing costs. He said he bought his first house in Los Angeles in 1973 for $75,000 at a time when his salary as secretary of state was $35,000. Now, he said, buying a house for a little over twice ones annual salary is virtually impossible anywhere in the state. FOR THE RECORD May 1, 9:32 a.m.: This post originally misstated the year Brown purchased his house as 1970. It was 1973. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print John Cox begins California barnstorm with the delivery of gas tax repeal signatures By Javier Panzar Gubernatorial candidate John Cox, left, and Assembly candidate Bill Essayli load boxes of signatures for the gas tax repeal initiative. (Francine Orr) GOP gubernatorial candidate John Cox strolled up to the stack of 12 boxes in front of the Los Angeles County registrar-recorders offices in Norwalk on Monday and placed his hands on top of his partys hope for success in 2018. The boxes, stacked four across and three high, contained 211,000 signatures for an initiative to repeal recent increases in Californias gas tax and vehicle fees. Cox says the effort has gathered more than 940,000 signatures from registered voters to put the measure on the ballot far more than the 585,407 signatures that are required. The aim: to bring out the partys base to the polls this November and help candidates in tough congressional and legislative races down the ticket. A USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times poll in November found 54.2% of registered voters surveyed said they would repeal the tax and fee hike, but a survey a month earlier by another group said a majority would vote to keep the higher taxes. Cox was flanked by Bill Essayli, a former federal prosecutor who is challenging Democratic Assemblywoman Sabrina Cervantes of Riverside in the June primary. Cervantes voted for the gas tax and Essayli plans to use that vote against her. He even launched his campaign at a 76 gas station in Norco. This is a central issue in my campaign, he said. Cox also submitted signatures in San Diego on Monday and is headed to Bakersfield, Fresno and Sacramento, as well as Shasta and Butte counties in coming days. We are going all across the state, Cox said. The whole state is paying this tax and the whole state wants it gone. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print All Californians would be able to serve on state boards even people in the U.S. illegally under new bill By Jazmine Ulloa Sen. Ricardo Lara (D-Bell Gardens) (Rich Pedroncelli / Associated Press) State lawmakers on Monday introduced legislation that would allow all Californians to serve on state boards and commissions regardless of immigration status. Senate Bill 174, by Sen. Ricardo Lara (D-Bell Gardens) and Assemblywoman Wendy Carrillo (D-Los Angeles), comes as the state is locked in a broader legal battle with the Trump administration over state immigration laws and his call for mass deportations. Lawmakers point to what they say is the states own discriminatory history as their basis for introducing the legislation. The proposal would amend an 1872 provision that was first adopted to exclude Chinese immigrants and other transient aliens from holding appointed civil positions. At the time, antipathy toward the Chinese had been building in California, though, Chinese immigrants opened hundreds of businesses across the state and would play a critical role in building the transcontinental railroad. The Senate bill would delete the phrase transient aliens from the government code and make clear that any person, regardless of citizenship or immigration status, can hold an appointed civil office if they are at least 18 years old and a resident of the state. That would allow any Californian to serve on hundreds of boards and commissions that advice in an array of policy areas, including farm labor, history and employment development. Californias two million undocumented immigrants are a source of energy for our state, Lara said in a statement. It is shocking to read the words of fear and exclusion that are still in California law but belong in historys trash can. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Advertisement Tony Mendozas fundraising dries up after resignation amid harassment inquiry By Patrick McGreevy Former state Sen. Tony Mendoza (D-Artesia). (Steve Yeater / Associated Press) Political contributions to Tony Mendoza, who resigned from the state Senate under pressure amid sexual harassment allegations, have nearly dried up. New documents he filed with the state in his bid to reclaim the seat he once held show that his support has eroded. As a result, five other candidates for the 32nd District senate seat in the June 5 election have raised more than Mendoza so far this year. With the June 5 election approaching, Mendoza has reported raising just $7,750 in cash from six supporters during the nearly four-month period from Jan. 1 to April 21. Mendoza, a Democrat from Artesia, went on a leave of absence from the Senate Jan. 3 and resigned a month later under the threat of expulsion from colleagues. An investigation ordered by the Senate found a pattern of unwanted flirtatious or sexually suggestive behavior based on testimony from six women. Mendoza has denied wrongdoing. Last year, Mendozas reelection campaign raised $412,600, or an average of about $34,000 per month, from more than 350 supporters. Most of Mendozas 2018 total was contributed by the political arm of the Southern California Pipe Trades District Council 16 on Jan. 22, a month before Mendoza resigned. Mendoza also reported that his campaign loaned $125,000 this year to his legal defense fund. That left him with $446,600 in his campaign account at the end of April. Mendoza is running against eight Democrats and two Republicans. Democrat Bob J. Archuleta, a Pico Rivera city councilman, raised the most, $210,000, during the period. On Monday, Mendoza suffered another setback when the State Legislative Womens Caucus endorsed Democrat Vicky Santana, a member of the Rio Hondo College Board. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Newsom and Villaraigosa affairs coming to TV ads in California By Phil Willon An independent political committee backing Republican John Cox for governor released an ad blasting both Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom and former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa for their past sexual affairs. The California Deserves Better ad, which was first reported by Politico, criticizes Newsom for having an affair with a woman on his staff in 2005 while he served as mayor of San Francisco. It also goes after Villaraigosa for having an extramarital affair with a television reporter in 2007 while he was mayor of Los Angeles. The ad, which begins airing on Fox stations in the states top media markets Monday, links Newsom and Villaraigosa to the men accused of sexual impropriety in the #MeToo movement, including movie mogul Harvey Weinstein and disgraced Today show veteran Matt Lauer. Powerful men are finally being held to account, punished for inappropriate sexual conduct with women over whom they exercise power, the ad begins. Newsom and Villaraigosa think the rules shouldnt apply to them. The independent campaign committee, called Restore Our Values, already has raised more than $100,000, said Leigh Teece of Emeryville in Northern California, co-founder of the group. Teece, the CEO of a nonprofit that helps line up students with professional mentors, said the campaign will actively support Cox. She called him a true conservative and noted that he supports cutting taxes and opposes Californias sanctuary state policy. John is a business person who has demonstrated integrity, Teece said. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Was that Cisneros in the voicemail? Dispute is latest espisode of Democratic infighting in crowded primary races By Christine Mai-Duc Gil Cisneros speaks during a forum at Fullerton College in January. (Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times) With less than five weeks to go before Californias primary, insults and accusations are flying with abandon in the most crowded races Democrats hope to ultimately win. The latest example of this is in the 39th Congressional District, where a half dozen Democrats are vying for a chance to replace Rep. Ed Royce, whos retiring. Its one of several California contests where Democratic leaders are already worried that divisions could ultimately split votes and shut Democrats out of key pickup opportunities. In that race, millionaires Gil Cisneros and Andy Thorburn are going negative about going negative. Cisneros was recently elevated to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committees Red to Blue program in hopes it would serve as a signal to Democratic activists and donors that his campaign was the most viable. But both Cisneros and Thorburn have poured millions into the race, which promises to be a knock down, drag out fight through June 5. At the center of the latest controversy is a voicemail, allegedly left by Cisneros on Thorburns home answering machine earlier this month. The recording, which the Thorburn campaign turned over to media outlet The Intercept, lasts less than 10 seconds. Hi Andy, its Gil Cisneros. Im gonna go negative on you, a mans voice is heard saying. Cisneros campaign manager Orrin Evans denied the candidate made the call, posting a cease and desist letter to The Intercept on Twitter. The letter, sent by a Cisneros campaign attorney, called the voicemail fabricated and demanded that the story be taken down, calling it defamatory. It gave the publication until 3 p.m. Friday to take down the story before they pursue all legal rights and remedies. An attorney for The Intercept, in a letter to Cisneros, said the publication confirmed with multiple sources familiar with Mr. Cisneros that his voice was on the recording, and that it stands by its reporting. Thorburns camp says it flatly rejects Cisneros denial, and that the timing of a negative website filled with unflattering background on Thorburn, released three days later, suggests it was him. Track the California races that could flip the House According to The Intercepts report, Cisneros campaign manager did not respond to initial inquiries about the voicemail, calling its questions ridiculous. In a follow-up statement Friday, Evans said called the episode a dirty, desperate trick by the Thorburn campaign and said they are readying to pursue legal action for defamation and false light against both him and the publication. It sounded like him to me! said Thorburns wife, Karen, in a statement released by the campaign. She was the one who first heard the voicemail, they said. Thorburn campaign manager Nancy Leeds called Cisneros threats Trump-like tactics and accused the candidate of trying to harass and intimidate anyone who stands in his way. Its not the first time candidates from the same party have clashed in the lead-up to the June 5 primary, and its all but certain to not be the last. Cisneros sued two of his opponents, Thorburn and Sam Jammal, over their ballot descriptions until they had to change them. Earlier this month, Democrat Bryan Caforio asked his opponent, Katie Hill, to sign a pledge rejecting the use of independent expenditure committees, entities that neither of them can legally coordinate with, in the race to unseat Rep. Steve Knight (R-Lancaster). Hill refused and called the attempt hollow and likened it to political theater, while Caforio accused her of empty campaign promises. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print California Politics Podcast: The money raised in the race for governor hints at a race thats now red hot By John Myers With less than six weeks before election day, the cash raised in the California governors race mirrors the overall dynamics: one major front-runner and a heated race for second place. This weeks podcast episode offers a glimpse into those cash reports and how the Republican field seems more settled in a new statewide poll than the battle between Democrats. We also examine the reasons why a nationally talked-about housing bill in Sacramento was killed by the Democratic authors own allies. Im joined by Times staff writers Melanie Mason and Liam Dillon. You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, SoundCloud and Stitcher. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Advertisement L.A. County politician sexually assaulted woman when she was 16, lawsuit claims By Dakota Smith A woman sued an unnamed politician in Los Angeles County on Friday, alleging the man sexually assaulted her when she was a teenager after he gave her an unusual-tasting drink. The politician, identified as John Doe, was in his early 40s and a public figure at the time of the 2007 assault, according to the lawsuit filed in Los Angeles Superior Court. The man is an elected official today and lives in Los Angeles, said attorney Lisa Bloom, who is representing the woman identified in the lawsuit as Jane Doe. Bloom declined to say what branch of government the man represents. Read More Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Villaraigosa touts his working-class upbringing, accomplishments as mayor in first TV ad By Phil Willon Democrat Antonio Villaraigosa released his first TV ad in the governors race Friday, touting his record and accomplishments as mayor of Los Angeles when up against the economic downturn during the recession. The 30-second television spot opens with a sweeping shot of Los Angeles and cuts to Villaraigosa sitting on a bus. In kindergarten, my sister and I took three buses to get to school. As mayor, I remembered that, Villaraigosa says into the camera. And despite the recession, we built more new schools and rail lines than any city in America, added 200,000 living wage jobs, built 20,000 units of affordable housing and nearly doubled graduation rates. Campaign spokesman Luis Vizcaino said the ad will air statewide over the next week at a cost of approximately $1 million. The commercial will being airing Saturday. Two Democratic rivals in Californias race for governor, Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom and state Treasurer John Chiang, also launched ads this week, signaling the biggest ramp-up of the campaign as the June 5 primary approaches. Newsom is the front-runner, while Villaraigosa is battling for second place with Republican John Cox. One recent poll has Villaraigosa trailing both Cox and Republican Assemblyman Travis Allen of Huntington Beach. Chiang has been stuck in the single digits in almost all polling in the race. Last week, an independent expenditure group called Families and Teachers for Antonio Villaraigosa for Governor, funded largely by a trio of wealthy charter school backers, launched a spot in support of the former mayor of Los Angeles. That ad campaign is focused on increasing Villaraigosas chances of coming in second in the June 5 primary and moving on to the general election. Villaraigosas ad, titled Three Buses, emphasizes the struggles he faced growing up in East Los Angeles and addresses one of his central campaign themes that hes the candidate best suited to help working-class Californians. I know how far a bus can take you, Villaraigosa says in the ad. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Sen. Dianne Feinstein wont participate in pre-primary debate By Sarah D. Wire (Tom Williams / CQ Roll Call) California Sen. Dianne Feinstein will not participate in a proposed pre-primary debate because there are too many candidates in the race, her campaign spokesman said Thursday. Political activists with the group Indivisible Los Angeles said they had a venue and date May 5 reserved for a debate with four of the Senate candidates. But they said if Feinstein does not participate, it will be canceled. Feinstein faces 31 primary opponents in her bid for a fifth full term representing California in the Senate. Feinstein staffers initially said she had a prior commitment on May 5 in San Francisco. When organizers offered to let her campaign pick another date, her campaign said it wasnt fair for the group to invite only some of the candidates when there is such a big field, said Tudor Popescu, volunteer community organizer with Indivisible Los Angeles. The invited candidates, all Democrats, were Feinstein, state Sen. Kevin de Leon, political action committee director Alison Hartson and lawyer Pat Harris. They were selected based on fundraising and poll numbers. There are 11 Republicans, 10 Democrats, nine independents and 2 third-party candidates running for Senate on the June ballot. Indivisible Los Angeles is still hoping Feinstein will pick another date, Popescu said. Feinstein spokesman Jeff Millman pointed to a San Francisco Chronicle endorsement of Feinstein, which indicates that she told the editorial board she would be willing to have a debate ahead of Novembers general election. Senator Feinstein looks forward to debating her opponent in the general election, Millman said in an email. Feinstein holds a substantial lead in both fundraising and in the polls. Front-runners in statewide races have routinely declined to debate their challengers, knowing that its free publicity for candidates who dont have the cash to increase their name recognition on their own. De Leon spokesman Jonathan Underland said the state senator has done candidate forums before, but planned to attend the May 5 debate only if Feinstein did. We basically said well clear his calendar 100%, well clear his calendar if Feinstein shows up, Underland said. Wed love to make it happen, but we want her to be there. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Advertisement NRA, Olympic shooter sue California over its restrictions on ammunition sales By Patrick McGreevy Olympian Kim Rhode is a plaintiff in a lawsuit filed by the NRA and its state affiliate against California. (Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times) The National Rifle Assn. and its state affiliate have filed a fourth lawsuit against California over its gun control laws, this time challenging new restrictions on the sale and transfer of ammunition. The NRA and the California Rifle and Pistol Assn. filed a challenge in federal court to a requirement that ammunition sales and transfers be conducted face to face with California firearms dealers or licensed vendors, ending purchases made directly from out-of-state sellers on the internet. The lawsuit in the United States District Court for the Southern District of California also challenged a requirement starting next year for background checks for people buying ammunition. The lawsuit was filed in the name of Kim Rhode, a six-time Olympic medal-winning shooter, and others. It challenges Californias new ammunition sales restrictions as a violation of the 2nd Amendment and the commerce clause of the United States Constitution. Restrictions on ammunition purchases were included in Proposition 63, approved by voters in 2016, and in bills approved by the Legislature. As a result of these laws, millions of constitutionally protected ammunition transfers are banned in California, Chris W. Cox, executive director of the NRAs Institute for Legislative Action, said in a statement. Californias law-abiding gun owners are sick of being treated like criminals and the NRA is proud to assist in this fight. Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, who is running for governor, defended his initiative and vowed to fight the NRA lawsuit. We wrote Proposition 63 on solid legal ground and principle: If youre a felon banned from possessing guns in California, then you should not be able to purchase the ammunition that makes a firearm deadly, Newsom said in a statement. California voters said loudly and clearly that guns and ammunition do not belong in the hands of dangerous individuals but once again, the NRA has prioritized gun industry profits over the lives of law-abiding Californians. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Republicans hope to ride a gas-tax repeal to victory By Patrick McGreevy In a Central Valley barn decked out in red, white and blue, dairyman and state Senate candidate Johnny Tacherra drew cheers from a crowd of fellow farmers when he said he opposes the California Legislatures hike on gas taxes and vehicle fees. I would not have voted for that. It is not the time to be voting on (raising) the gas tax, said Tacherra, a Republican running against Democratic Assemblywoman Anna Caballero, who voted for the tax increase last year. Three hundred miles away the same week, a campaign mailer arrived at homes in Orange County from an Assembly candidate with a message blaring from the cover in bold type: Republican Greg Haskin tough enough to stand up to Jerry Brown and repeal the gas tax. Read More Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Treasurer John Chiang launches ad in governors race touting his record as a fiscal steward By Seema Mehta In his first television ad in the governors race, state Treasurer John Chiang touts his record on fiscal issues as California faced the recession. Some thought we were done, Chiang says in a voiceover in the 30-second spot he released Thursday, with images of him standing seriously at a lectern and complimentary headlines about his work as controller and treasurer. But I knew better. I made the tough calls. And brought California back from the brink of financial disaster because you trusted me to manage our economy. Chiangs campaign is spending about $500,000 to air the ad in Los Angeles and San Diego in coming days. That buy is dwarfed by seven-figure purchases for ads supporting Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom and former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. Newsom is the front-runner, while Villaraigosa is battling for second place with Republican businessman John Cox. Chiang has been mired in the single digits in almost all polling in the race. His ad, called Quiet Storm, tries to portray Chiang as a progressive who is effective and can move policy in Sacramento. Chiang points to his work challenging Wells Fargo before arguing that he could accomplish what doubters say is impossible to improve the states healthcare, housing and schools. I say, we got this, Chiang concludes. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Advertisement Been ignoring the race for California governor? Thats OK, in some ways its just starting By Mark Z. Barabak On a recent trip to Iowa, Eric Garcetti the mayor of Los Angeles and a possible 2020 White House contestant raised eyebrows with a bit of exuberant outreach. Los Angeles and Iowa, Garcetti insisted, have a ton in common, and he didnt simply mean both are inhabited by carbon-based life forms needing oxygen to survive. Urban or rural, farmer or fashion plate, all of us harbor the same hopes and dreams, the mayor suggested, and if it wasnt a terribly original thought it also wasnt the most egregious sort of political pandering like, say, ordering that every home in Los Angeles be powered by Iowa-produced ethanol. Read More Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print California voters should expect to decide on an $8.9-billion water bond in November By Liam Dillon (Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times) A proposal to borrow $8.9 billion for improvements to Californias water quality systems and watersheds and protection of natural habitats is eligible for the statewide ballot in November, Secretary of State Alex Padilla announced in a press release Wednesday. Padilla said the measure, which is backed by agricultural interests, had exceeded the 365,800 valid signatures it needed to qualify for the general election ballot. The bond measure will appear on the ballot unless proponents withdraw it by June 28, the release said. The bond is one of many voters could decide on in 2018. A $4-billion bond for parks and water infrastructure improvements will appear on the June 5 ballot. State lawmakers approved it last year. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print They came for Darrell Issa. They stayed with their inflatable chicken, blue wall and signs for political therapy By Christine Mai-Duc (John Gibbins / San Diego Union-Tribune) A mother of two turned ringleader of the resistance and more than a hundred of her faithful followers gathered on Tuesday morning outside Rep. Darrell Issas office in a northern San Diego County suburb. Across the street was her foil, a wedding DJ in a red Make American Great Again cap, setting up hefty speakers for an upcoming war of words. For about 65 weeks the deep divide in America played out along this 100-yard stretch of road in Vista. Here, at 10 a.m. every Tuesday, passersby found signs, chants, songs and, if they were lucky, sometimes a 20-foot-tall inflatable chicken with a Trump-esque coif. Theyd also glimpse the state of the body politic in 2018, a time when shock has turned to anger and post-2016 calls for reconciliation have morphed into grudging acceptance that each side might be better off in their respective corners. Or in this case, their sides of the street. On Tuesday, the anti-Issa, anti-Trump contingent fought this particular battle for the last time, declaring it their final protest at the congressmans office. They said they planned to use their energy to knock on doors and get out the vote, with an occasional protest on the side. Their pro-Trump rivals vowed to show up wherever they do. Read More Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Efforts to regulate bail companies have some unlikely allies: bail agents By Jazmine Ulloa Jane Un, chief executive and founder of Abba Bail Bonds, works with a client. ( Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times) In recent years, the seriousness and number of official complaints related to the bail industry in California have significantly increased while bail agents and bounty hunters face limited oversight, putting vulnerable communities at risk of fraud, embezzlement and other forms of victimization. This year, as Gov. Jerry Brown has pledged to work with lawmakers in a push to overhaul how courts assign defendants bail and to better regulate bail agencies, even some who profit from the court practice admit its time for regulation. These bail and bail-recovery agents could become unlikely allies, saying they advocate for change because theyve seen the system abuse the poor. Read More Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Advertisement California voters: Get ready for an onslaught of television ads By Seema Mehta After a sleepy campaign, California voters are now being bombarded with television advertisements in the governors race, an onslaught that is expected to ramp up in coming weeks. The ads most frequently seen on television are those promoting Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, the front-runner in the race, and former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who is trying to secure the second spot in the June primary. Newsoms campaign and an outside group backing Villaraigosa are spending seven figures weekly on these efforts, according to filings with the California secretary of states office and a media buyer who asked not to be identified in order to freely discuss the ads. Other gubernatorial candidates are expected to hit the airwaves soon, the media buyer said. State Treasurer John Chiang has reserved a half-million dollars in the coming days in the Los Angeles and San Diego markets, and Villaraigosas campaign has requested availability in at least five of the states biggest TV markets. The GOP candidates in the race, who will be seeking the state Republican Partys endorsement at its convention next weekend, have been much less active. Businessman John Cox in recent weeks has been spending about $90,000 per week, but doubled that this week in Los Angeles and added small buys on KFI-AM radio and cable in markets including Fresno, Bakersfield and Salinas. State Assemblyman Travis Allen of Huntington Beach, who has been scooping up Republican Party endorsements across the state, has yet to make a notable television or radio buy, though he and Cox have received some attention as commentators on Fox News. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Republicans ready to turn in signatures for ballot measure to repeal California gas-tax increase By Patrick McGreevy A Chevron gas station in Sacramento shows prices last year. (Rich Pedroncelli / Associated Press) Republican activists said Tuesday that they have collected at least 830,000 signatures for an initiative to repeal recent increases in Californias gas tax and vehicle fees, more than enough to qualify the measure for the November ballot. The activists need 585,407 signatures of registered voters to qualify the ballot measure. Because signatures are still being processed and counted by the campaign, backers hope to have 900,000 by the time they begin turning them in to the counties on Friday, according to Carl DeMaio, a former San Diego City Council member and organizer of the drive. The breadth and depth of voter anger over the car and gas tax hikes is just amazing, said DeMaio, who hosts a radio talk show. We are seeing Democrats, independents and Republicans sign the petition and volunteering to carry the petition, people from all walks of life. The initiative targets a law approved in April 2017 by the Legislature and Gov. Jerry Brown that is expected to raise $5.4 billion annually for road and bridge repairs and improvements to mass transit. The money comes from a recent 12-cents-per-gallon increase in the gas tax, a 20-cent increase in the diesel fuel excise tax and a new annual vehicle fee ranging from $25 for cars valued at under $5,000, to $175 for cars worth $60,000 or more. The petition drive raised more than $2 million with significant contributions from the California Republican Party and Republican members of Congress from California, including House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy of Bakersfield and Reps. Ken Calvert of Corona and Mimi Walters of Irvine. Republicans hope the issue will help their candidates for office in this years election and hurt Democrats who support the higher taxes. I think this is going to put Democrats in real bad spot, DeMaio said. A spokesman for Brown declined to comment until the signatures are filed. DeMaio said there were approximately 20,000 volunteer petition circulators who brought in more than 250,000 signatures, with the rest collected by paid circulators who received $1 to $2.50 per signature. Its a pretty comfortable margin [of signatures] that we have been able to hit here, DeMaio said. Opposition will grow, he said, as more Californians get their annual vehicle registration notice. The repeal campaign hopes to raise $5 million for the campaign to pass the constitutional amendment, which would not only repeal the increase in the gas tax and vehicle fees but require future increases to be submitted to voters. We know that Gov. Brown and his cohorts are going to spend an amazing amount of money to mislead voters, DeMaio said. But I feel pretty confident that we will repeal the gas tax. Read More Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Rep. Duncan Hunter sets up trust to raise money for legal expenses amid ongoing criminal investigation By Morgan Cook Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Alpine, has filed paperwork to establish a legal expense fund amid an ongoing federal criminal investigation into misused campaign cash. Hunter filed the required paperwork March 27, seeking a rarely granted Legal Expense Fund through which members of Congress under investigation or being sued in connection with doing their jobs or running for office can raise money for their legal expenses. Such funds are administered by an independent trustee and allow donors to give above the maximum amount they can contribute a candidates campaign. Hunter has spent more than $600,000 of campaign money on lawyers. Read More Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Kamala Harris says she wont take corporate donations anymore By Sarah D. Wire (Jose Luis Magana / Associated Press) California Sen. Kamala Harris says she will no longer accept money from corporate political action committees. In an interview with WWPM-FMs The Breakfast Club, in New York that aired Monday, the senator said she wasnt expecting a question at a town hall this month about whether she would accept money for corporations or corporate lobbyists. At the time, Harris said it depends, but she said on Monday that she had reflected on the matter and changed her mind. Money has had such an outside influence on politics, and especially with the Supreme Court determining Citizens United, which basically means that big corporations can spend unlimited amounts of money influencing a campaign, right? Harris said. Were all supposed to have an equal vote, but money has now really tipped the balance between an individual having equal power in an election to a corporation. So Ive actually made a decision since I had that conversation that Im not going to accept corporate PAC checks. I just Im not. You can watch the video of the interview here. (Harris corporate money comments come about 30 minutes in.) Harris wouldnt be on the ballot for a second Senate term until 2022, though its widely believed that she is planning a presidential bid in 2020. Other potential 2020 presidential candidates, including Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), have also ruled out taking corporate PAC money. Soon after Mondays show aired, Harris campaign sent out a fundraising request noting her new stance. As corporate PACs continue to corrupt our politics and twist Congress priorities at your expense, were going to focus on raising money from small-dollar, individual donors like you, the email says. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Advertisement With money tied up in court, California lawmakers try again with new plan to spend $2 billion on homeless housing By Liam Dillon A man sleeps on the sidewalk in front of the Union Rescue Mission in the skid row neighborhood of Los Angeles. (Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times) A measure to spend $2 billion on housing homeless Californians could be on the November statewide ballot. State Sen. Kevin de Leon (D-Los Angeles) is pushing the idea to deal with what he said was a burgeoning humanitarian crisis whose epicenter is here in California. De Leons new measure is a do-over for a 2016 plan passed by the Legislature to redirect $2 billion toward building homeless housing from a voter-approved 1% income tax surcharge on millionaires that funds mental health services. A Sacramento attorney sued over that decision, arguing that the move violated constitutional rules on approving loans without a public vote and that lawmakers shouldnt take money away from mental health treatment. The case remains active in Sacramento Superior Court and its unclear when, or if, the state will be able to spend the $2 billion. De Leons Senate Bill 1206 would put the $2-billion loan on the ballot in November, freeing up the money if voters approve the measure. De Leon said had he been able to predict the 2016 plan would end up in court, he would have sought a ballot measure at the time. We thought this was like apple pie and baseball and puppies, De Leon said. Who would oppose the idea of repurposing the dollars to build immediate housing as a permanent solution for homelessness? Obviously with a crystal ball, had I anticipated the litigation, I would have worked to place it on the ballot. De Leon noted that the 2016 plan had bipartisan supermajority support in the Legislature, something his new bill also will need to get on the ballot. Sen. John Moorlach (R-Costa Mesa) is a coauthor of the plan. SB 1206 is scheduled for its first hearing in the Legislature on Wednesday. Should De Leons measure be approved, it will join a crowded list of housing issues before voters in November. Californians will decide on a separate $4-billion bond to help finance new low-income housing and home loans for veterans. De Leon said hes not worried those two measures will compete against each other because voters are aware of the scale of the states housing problems and the proposed homeless housing bond redirects existing dollars instead of raising taxes. Once [voters] know that the impact on their pocketbook is not existent, Im confident that theyll join me and my colleague John Moorlach in support of this measure, De Leon said. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print California lawmakers say too many former felons are being denied professional licenses By John Myers Assemblyman David Chiu (D-San Francisco) along with supporters of bills to allow more former felons to receive professional licenses. (John Myers/Los Angeles Times) A trio of California Assembly members urged colleagues on Monday to pass legislation that would prohibit state commissions and agencies from rejecting a professional license for those who were once convicted of less serious crimes. We cant say we want to rehabilitate people, and then block them from getting the jobs that they need when theyre released, said Assemblyman David Chiu (D-San Francisco). That leads to more recidivism and to more crime. The bills, scheduled to be heard in Assembly committees Tuesday, would ban the use of arrest or conviction records as the reason for denying a professional license. The bill would not apply to Californians who served time for any of the offenses on the states list of violent crimes. The authors, all Democrats, said that a government-issued professional license is required for some 30% of all jobs in the state. Their bills would change the licensing process at the California departments of Consumer Affairs and Social Services and agencies that certify emergency medical technicians. The bills would block prior convictions from leading to the delay or denial of a license unless that crime is directly related to the profession the person intends to pursue. Two of the bills also specifically say convictions less than 5 years old could continue to play a role in licensing decisions. Last year, Gov. Jerry Brown signed a law that keeps private sector employers from inquiring about a job applicants conviction history prior to an offer of employment. Advocates joined the lawmakers at a press conference in Sacramento to point out that limits on awarding licenses should focus only on those whose prior criminal activity could pose a threat to consumers. Continuing to hold people back for crimes that are 6, 7, 8, 10, 20 years old does not actually make sense if youre looking at public safety, said Jael Myrick of the East Bay Community Law Center. One of the proposals, Assembly Bill 2293, seeks to make it easier for ex-felons to get a license allowing a job with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection the same agency that often uses prison inmates to battle blazes around the state. If a person is good enough to risk their life fighting fires for the state of California as an inmate, said Assemblywoman Eloise Gomez Reyes (D-Grand Terrace), their previous actions should not prevent from having a job utilizing the skill set that they learned. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Assembly speaker rebukes building trades union after it targets Assemblywoman Cristina Garcia By John Myers ( (Rich Pedroncelli / Associated Press)) The decision by a politically powerful labor group to openly campaign against an embattled Los Angeles-area lawmaker drew a sharp rebuke on Friday from Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon. The Lakewood Democrat lashed out hours after the State Building and Construction Trades Council of California filed paperwork for a political action committee to defeat Assemblywoman Cristina Garcia (D-Bell Gardens). Garcia, whos seeking her fourth term, took an unpaid leave of absence in February following allegations of sexual misconduct. She has denied the reports and an Assembly investigation remains underway. Rendon didnt criticize the labor group by name, insisting instead that the decision was driven by oil and gas industry interests. This is a thinly veiled attempt by Big Oil and polluters to intimidate me and my members. It is an affront to my speakership, Rendon said in a statement. We are proud of the work that the Assembly has done to increase jobs and wages while defending our environment. We will vigorously defend the members of our caucus from any ill-advised political attack. A statement from the labor group, which sparred with Garcia last year on her effort to link new climate change policies with a crackdown on air pollution, said it had decided to reverse past support for her. The Trades have thousands of hard working members in Garcias district, and we look forward to lifting up another Democrat in the 58th Assembly to better represent them and their families, said the statement. The political action committees campaign finance filing on Friday listed nonmonetary in kind contributions from Erin Lehane, a public affairs consultant aligned with the building labor group. Lehane said she had begun researching Garcia in November. In January, a former legislative staffer accused her of groping him in 2014. Lehane, who identified herself as a spokesperson for the labor groups political action committee, said on Friday that she believed Garcias hypocrisy threatened a movement that will dictate how much harassment and abuse my daughter will face in her work life. Garcia, who has been an outspoken advocate for women in the #MeToo movement, has complained that her political opponents helped fan the flames of the accusations. Through a campaign consultant, she declined to comment on Friday. Rendons critique came on the heels of a full-page ad in The Times on Friday, partly paid for by the Trades Council, that criticized well-funded ivory tower elites who push proposals that hurt the oil and gas industry. We are the real jobs that fuel the real California economy, read the advertisement. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Advertisement Legal tiff breaks out over independent committees ad backing Antonio Villaraigosa for governor By Phil Willon An attorney representing Gavin Newsoms campaign for governor is demanding that California television stations cease airing an ad by an independent political committee supporting his Democratic rival Antonio Villaraigosa. Attorney Thomas A. Willis, in a letter to the stations, said the ad is false and misleading and violates California law because it uses snippets of video footage from Villaraigosas own campaign ads. Willis called that illegal coordination between the campaign and PAC. Under California law, advertisements made by entities other than a candidate are presumed to be coordinated and thus not independent expenditures when the advertisement replicates, reproduces or disseminates substantial parts of a communication, including video footage, created and paid for by the candidate, the letter states. A representative for the independent expenditure committee Families & Teachers for Antonio Villaraigosa for Governor fired back. Attorney Brian T. Hildreth says those allegations have no merit and accused the Newsom campaign of being misleading. Hildreth sent a letter to the television stations in response, urging them to ignore the Newsom campaigns accusations. He said the Newsom camp appears to intentionally misrepresent the law and that the video use was permissible. He said only six seconds of video from Villaraigosas campaign ads was used, which is well within the legal limits. The independent committee is sponsored by the group California Charter Schools Assn. Advocates, according to the California secretary of states office. The ad is airing on broadcast and cable stations statewide. The committees ad is focused on Villaraigosas record as Assembly speaker and as mayor of Los Angeles when there was a drop in crime. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Governors race snapshot: Californians are generally upbeat but not focused on the campaign By Mark Z. Barabak Armand Werden, a 29-year-old community college student who works the taps at Dust Bowl Brewery in Turlock, said the state is on the upswing. (Phil Willon / Los Angeles Times) As California chooses a new governor one of just a handful in the last 40 years not named Jerry Brown the state seems to be enjoying something unusual in these tumultuous political times: a feeling of relative contentment. Not to say things are perfect. Still, more than 100 random interviews conducted over the length and breadth of the state from Redding in the north to Santee in the south, from the Pacific coastline to the edge of the Sierra Nevada found most saying things are looking up, at least so far as Californias direction is concerned. Read More Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Advertisement Sierra Club backs Gavin Newsom for California governor By Phil Willon Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom speaks with members of the public following a debate at USC in January. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times) The Sierra Club endorsed Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom in the race for California governor, with officials in the established environmental group praising the Democrats record on climate change and clean energy. He has a proven record for leading on environmental protection, public health and clean energy, Kathryn Phillips, director of Sierra Club California, said in a statement released by the Newsom campaign. He understands that we are feeling the effects of climate change and that California must reduce carbon emissions and reach 100% renewable energy to achieve our climate goals. Phillips said the Sierra Clubs extensive network of volunteers will campaign for Newsom as the June 5 primary approaches. Sierra Club executive director Michael Brune also praised the Democrat, saying he will protect California from Donald Trumps attacks on our clean air and water. The Sierra Club joins a series of other influential groups in California that have backed Newsom. The California Medical Assn., the powerful state doctors lobby, announced its endorsement of Newsom on Thursday. The California Nurses Assn. and the Service Employees International Union, one of the most powerful labor unions in the state, also support Newsom. Newsom is the races front-runner in polls and fundraising. A poll released earlier this month by the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California found that 26% of likely voters backed Newsom. John Cox, a Republican from Rancho Santa Fe, was favored by 15% of likely voters and former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, a Democrat, by 13%. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Californias GOP House members are taking their challengers more seriously and the numbers show it By Christine Mai-Duc For much of last year, consultants and campaign managers for some of Californias most vulnerable Republican incumbents maintained a bullish tone on the prospect that the GOP would hold the House in this years midterms. The National Republican Congressional Committee insisted that longtime Republican incumbents in California had built up reputations as effective champions of local issues that would help them weather a flood of Democratic enthusiasm. Since then Rep. Ed Royce (R-Fullerton) and Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Vista) have decided not to seek reelection and the NRCC has opened a West Coast headquarters in Orange County. Read More Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print California officials say Pentagon has confirmed National Guard funding despite Trump threat By John Myers (Evan Vucci / Associated Press) The awkward dance between Gov. Jerry Brown and the federal government over the National Guard jerked back toward discord on Thursday, when Trump said he would refuse to pay for a new deployment of troops just hours after his administration said otherwise. And a few hours later, California officials said they had received written confirmation from the Pentagon that the mission would indeed be funded. Trump had earlier called Browns decision to approve 400 troops for a mission focused on combating transnational crime and drug smuggling a charade in a tweet. We need border security and action, not words! the president wrote. Governor Jerry Brown announced he will deploy up to 400 National Guard Troops to do nothing. The crime rate in California is high enough, and the Federal Government will not be paying for Governor Browns charade. We need border security and action, not words! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 19, 2018 A spokesman for Brown pointed to a tweet written Wednesday night by Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, thanking the California governor for his efforts. Trump was meeting on Thursday with Nielsen at his Mar-a-Lago estate not long after his tweet was posted. A tweet later posted by the California National Guard said that almost three hours after Trumps comment, the state received written confirmation from the Pentagon to fund the mission as outlined by Brown the day before. In short, nothing has changed today, said a subsequent Guard tweet. Just spoke w @JerryBrownGov about deploying the @USNationalGuard in California. Final details are being worked out but we are looking forward to the support. Thank you Gov Brown! Secretary Kirstjen M. Nielsen (@SecNielsen) April 19, 2018 Brown was the last of the nations border governors to respond to Trumps insistence earlier this month that National Guard troops were needed to assist with immigration-related duties at the U.S.-Mexico border. And he has consistently refused to allow California troops to engage in any mission related to federal immigration law. This will not be a mission to build a new wall, Brown wrote last week to Nielsen and Defense Secretary James N. Mattis. It will not be a mission to round up women and children or detain people escaping violence and seeking a better life. Exactly what the California operations will cost remains unclear, as state officials have said it will depend on decisions made once the mission begins. The funds would not be transferred to the state, but instead would be paid directly by the Department of Defense. Trump has critiqued California several times over the past few days, often writing tweets that embrace the actions by some cities and counties to join his administrations lawsuit against the states sanctuary immigration law. He made similar comments to reporters on Thursday afternoon. If you look at whats happening in California with sanctuary cities people are really going the opposite way, Trump said. They dont want sanctuary cities. Theres a little bit of a revolution going on in California. 2:26 p.m.:This article was updated with additional information from the California National Guard and with remarks from Trump. This article was originally published at 9:51 a.m. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Advertisement Gay conversion therapy services would be banned under measure advancing in California By John Myers (Rich Pedroncelli / Associated Press) The California Assembly voted Thursday to add gay conversion therapy to the states list of deceptive business practices, following a debate that focused on the personal experiences of several lawmakers and hinted at potential lawsuits to come. It is harmful and it is unnecessary, Assemblyman Evan Low (D-Campbell), the bills author and one of the Legislatures most vocal LGBTQ members, said of the practice. Low, who told Assembly members that he explored conversion therapy as a teenager and suffered depression over his sexual orientation, insisted that the bill would be limited to efforts that involve the exchange of money. Theres nothing wrong with me, he said in an emotional speech on the Assembly floor. Theres nothing that needs to be changed. The bill, which now heads to the Senate, has become the focal point of intense debate on social media. Some religious groups have said that such a law would be a violation of their constitutional rights, while advocates insist the provisions are narrow and theres no credible evidence that the services work. One key part of the debate centers on whether Assembly Bill 2943 would stretch beyond businesses that charge for these programs and extend to printed documents, even Bibles. An analysis by the Assembly Judiciary Committee says the bill would apply only to services that purport to change a persons sexual orientation and offered on a commercial basis, as well as the advertising and offering of such services. Lawmakers who spoke in support of AB 2943 also made clear that they believe those kinds of services have been discredited. This is fraudulent, it should not be occurring, said Assemblywoman Susan Eggman (D-Stockton). But you can still try to pray the gay away, if you like. Assemblyman James Gallagher (R-Yuba City), who said the bill addresses a difficult issue, nonetheless said that its important to ensure laws dont tamper with religious freedom. We have to think about the legitimate experience of people who have gone through conversion therapy and said this was a good thing for them, Gallagher told his colleagues. California law already bans the use of conversion therapy by mental health professionals on those under age 18. Lows bill would expand the states efforts beyond minors. It would join a list of commercial activities deemed unfair or deceptive acts or practices and therefore banned under state law. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Gavin Newsom gets backing from doctors group, despite differences over single-payer healthcare By Melanie Mason Gavin Newsom speaks at the California Democrats State Convention in San Diego on Feb. 24. (Kent Nishimura) Californias doctors are siding with Gavin Newsom in the governors race, even though they dont see eye-to-eye on a defining issue of the campaign: single-payer healthcare. The California Medical Assn., the state doctors lobby and a political heavyweight, announced its endorsement of the lieutenant governor on Thursday. Gavin is a lifelong champion for health care in California, and we know he will continue to fight for pragmatic solutions to our most crucial health care challenges, including working to achieve universal access and tackling our states physician shortage, CMA President Theodore M. Mazer said in a statement. Newsom has made his support for state-financed healthcare a centerpiece of his campaign, and he earned the early backing of the most ardent single-payer supporters, the state nurses union. The doctors, meanwhile, oppose the nurses bill, SB 562, which emerged as a flashpoint in the healthcare debate last year. The CMA said the bill would dismantle the healthcare marketplace and destabilize Californias economy. Newsom has said SB 562 should advance in the Legislature, but also said it has open-ended issues that still need to be addressed. The doctors group is also battling with another prominent Newsom endorser, the Service Employees International Union, over a new measure that would impose price caps on an array of medical services paid for by commercial health insurers in the state. The SEIU is a leading sponsor of the proposal; the doctors fiercely oppose it. Newsom and the physicians group have a history of political alignment. Newsom was the first statewide official to support Proposition 56, a 2016 tobacco tax pushed by the CMA that raised revenue in part to increase money for doctors who saw Medi-Cal patients. That year, the association also endorsed two initiatives championed by Newsom: Proposition 63, which imposed new gun control measures, and Proposition 64, which legalized recreational marijuana. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Independent committee backing Antonio Villaraigosa for governor hits the airwaves with first ad By Phil Willon Antonio Villaraigosa speaks at the 2018 California Democratic Party Convention in San Diego in February.. (Denis Poroy / Associated Press) A well-financed independent committee backing Antonio Villaraigosas bid to be Californias next governor released its first television ad Thursday, praising his record for working with Republicans and as a candidate for all of California. The ad, which is to air statewide on broadcast and cable stations, is focused on Villaraigosas record as Assembly speaker and mayor of Los Angeles, including on education and a drop in crime while he was at City Hall. To move California forward, we need to help more Californians get ahead, the ad says. Thats why Antonio Villaraigosa brought both parties together to balance the state budget with record investments in public schools and new career training programs. The independent expenditure committee behind the ad campaign, Families & Teachers for Antonio Villaraigosa for Governor 2018, is sponsored by the California Charter Schools Assn. Advocates, according to the California secretary of states office. The committee is spending seven figures per week on the ad buy, said Josh Pulliam, a political consultant for the committee. As mayor of Los Angeles, Villaraigosa clashed with teachers unions, starting with his failed attempt to take political control of the Los Angeles Unified School District. His fight with those unions continued after he left office in 2013. Money has poured into the committee this month from wealthy charter schools supporters: Reed Hastings, chief executive of Netflix, donated $7 million, and Los Angeles billionaire and philanthropist Eli Broad donated $1.5 million. On Wednesday, former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan donated $1 million. The independent expenditure committee is expected to provide a boost to Villaraigosas campaign. Democratic front-runner Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom has a major advantage in fundraising over all other candidates in the race and has received the backing of the California Teachers Assn. and other education unions. A recent Public Policy Institute of California poll also showed Villaraigosa lagging in third place in the race, trailing Newsom and Republican businessman John Cox. The candidates who finish in the top two in the June 5 primary will advance to the November general election, regardless of their party affiliation. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Gov. Jerry Brown says Trump administration will fund his National Guard mission without immigration duties By John Myers (Alex Wong / Getty Images) Gov. Jerry Brown formally mobilized 400 California National Guard members Wednesday for transnational crime-fighting duties, thus preventing any effort by President Trump to have the troops focus on immigration enforcement on the Mexican border. The governor announced that federal officials have agreed to fund the plan he announced last week a mission to combat criminal gangs, human traffickers and illegal firearm and drug smugglers in locations around California, including near the border. The order Brown signed makes clear that the troops will not be allowed to perform a broader set of duties as envisioned by Trumps recent comments. California National Guard service members shall not engage in any direct law enforcement role nor enforce immigration laws, arrest people for immigration law violations, guard people taken into custody for alleged immigration violations, or support immigration law enforcement activities, the order read. The cost of the mission, a spokesman for Brown said, will be paid directly by the federal government. No initial estimate has been made, as the exact amount will depend on exactly how the troops will be used. Though the duties of California Guard members were outlined last week, the state had been waiting for an agreement by federal officials to pay for the operations. Since that time, the president has taken Brown and the state to task over its decision to avoid any immigration-related duties at the border. On Wednesday morning, Trump tweeted, Jerry Brown is trying to back out of the National Guard at the Border, but the people of the State are not happy. Want Security & Safety NOW! There is a Revolution going on in California. Soooo many Sanctuary areas want OUT of this ridiculous, crime infested & breeding concept. Jerry Brown is trying to back out of the National Guard at the Border, but the people of the State are not happy. Want Security & Safety NOW! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 18, 2018 Looks like Jerry Brown and California are not looking for safety and security along their very porous Border. He cannot come to terms for the National Guard to patrol and protect the Border, Trump tweeted Tuesday. There was no immediate reaction from the White House to Browns announcement. On Tuesday, Brown told reporters in Washington that his plan was consistent with a safer border. That sounds to me like fighting crime, the governor said. Trying to catch some desperate mothers and children, or unaccompanied minors coming from Central America, that sounds like something else. The order Brown issued Wednesday after returning from a brief trip to talk climate change in Toronto and to speak to a national trade union and visit with reporters in Washington is set to expire at the end of September. It specifically says no Guard service member may participate in a mission that would exceed the mission scope and limitations related to transnational crime activity. It also says troops cannot help build any new border barrier. 5:27 p.m.: This article was updated with information related to the cost of the Guard mission and Browns trip to Washington. This article was originally published at 5:13 p.m. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Advertisement California bill aims to end practice that keeps workplace misconduct cases out of court By Melanie Mason A California bill would prohibit employers from requiring workers to use private arbitration to settle disputes, a practice that critics say shields improper workplace conduct from public view. The bill by Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher (D-San Diego) would bar businesses from making employees, when they are hired, waive their future rights to take any harassment, discrimination or other claims to court. Arbitration can be a highly effective dispute resolution method when both parties can choose it freely, when both parties are equal, Gonzalez Fletcher said at a news conference on Wednesday. It is far less successful when the more powerful party forces the other to accept those terms, especially as a condition of employment. Forced arbitration has come under increasing scrutiny since the #MeToo movement, with high-profile figures such as former Fox News anchor Gretchen Carlson pointing to the practice as shielding workplace abusers from public disclosure because arbitration resolutions often include nondisclosure agreements. Last year, a bipartisan bill was introduced in Congress to end mandatory arbitration in employment agreements. Gonzalez Fletcher said she was pursuing an unusual tool to draw attention to the issue a subpoena issued by the Legislature to compel testimony from a worker bound by a nondisclosure agreement as a result of arbitration. The Legislature has subpoena power but it is rarely used. The bills sponsors believe lawmakers last issued a subpoena in 2001 while investigating price manipulation by Enron. Gonzalez Fletcher said she has requested Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon (D-Lakewood) to issue the subpoena to require Tara Zoumer, who sued the company WeWork in 2016 for overtime pay, to testify before the Assembly Judiciary Committee next week. Zoumers suit was moved to arbitration and resolved. She is now subject to a nondisclosure agreement and could face a financial penalty for speaking publicly about her case. A spokesman for Rendon said the subpoena request is under consideration. Business groups oppose the bill, AB 3080. The California Chamber of Commerce has dubbed it a job biller, claiming it would dramatically increase legal costs for businesses. Banning such agreements benefits the trial attorneys, not the employer or employee, the group said. The bill must first advance from the Assembly Labor Committee on Wednesday. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print At least 240 House lawmakers want a vote on immigration. California supporters say they arent ready to force one By Sarah D. Wire Rep. Jeff Denham (R-Turlock), flanked by Rep. Pete Aguilar (D-Redlands) and Rep. Will Hurd (R-Texas) speak about DACA legislation (Bill Clark / CQ Roll Call) Rep. Jeff Denham says at least 240 of the 430 current House members have signed onto his resolution to hold votes on four immigration bills, and he hopes House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) and President Trump are paying attention to the show of support. But, the Republican from Turlock and his allies said Wednesday that they are not yet willing to commit to forcing Ryans hand through a little-used procedural move called a discharge petition; they acknowledged theres no guarantee that all of 47 Republicans and 193 Democrats House co-signers will back them up if they try to force the issue. Im sure that it is something that will be discussed in the coming weeks. You should not need a discharge petition. When you can show the overwhelming majority of the House, the support of it, you should not need a discharge petition, but it is something we would talk about in the future, Denham said. It is far too early to talk about next steps. Ryan said last week that he opposes Denhams effort, saying its a waste of time for the House to vote on bills the president might veto. Denhams resolution would prompt debate and votes on four very different immigration bills: one favored by the Trump administration, one preferred by Democrats, one bipartisan proposal and another immigration bill of Ryans choice. Whichever got the most votes would move forward to the Senate. All four bills would help Dreamers to differing degrees and include varying levels of border security or immigration enforcement. For example, the Trump-backed bill would also dramatically reduce legal immigration, while the Democrats would only deal with legal status for Dreamers. Democrats say they dont expect the show of support will sway Ryan. Congressional Hispanic Caucus Chairwoman Rep. Michelle Lujan Grisham (D-N.M.) said Tuesday night she expects Ryan will have to be forced into allowing a vote. It doesnt matter how many signatures we get. We could have every signature, technically, except his, on the floor of the House and... if he doesnt want to, it doesnt happen, Lujan Grisham (D-N.M.) said. Rep. Pete Aguilar (D-Redlands), who gathered the Democratic co-sponsors for Denham, also wouldnt give a deadline for House leaders to act, but said the co-sponsors are only willing to wait weeks not months. We do want to give them an opportunity to bring up the rule and to use whatever process they want, Aguilar said. They do have options, but I think they need to understand that we have options too. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Billionaire Democratic activist Tom Steyer endorses Kevin de Leon in his insurgent bid against Sen. Dianne Feinstein By Seema Mehta Tom Steyer, left, and California state Sen. Kevin de Leon (D-Los Angeles). (Getty Images; Los Angeles Times) Billionaire Democratic activist Tom Steyer is endorsing state Sen. Kevin de Leon in his insurgent challenge to Sen. Dianne Feinstein, and did not rule out funding an outside effort to boost De Leons chances. I think hes the kind of young progressive that reflects California and would be a very strong advocate for our state nationally, Steyer said in an interview on Tuesday, pointing to De Leons efforts on issues such as immigration, climate change and gun control while he was the state Senate leader. I know him well and hes a friend. We share a lot of values. Steyer, who flirted with running for the Senate seat, did not criticize Feinstein as he has in the past. Sen. Feinstein has been an outstanding public servant who has dedicated the bulk of her adult life to the service of our state and the country, he said. These are two strong, very good Democrats. I just believe Kevin is the true progressive and he reflects something we need representing California going forward. I have nothing bad to say about Dianne Feinstein. I have a lot of good to say about Kevin de Leon. De Leon faces enormous odds as he tries to oust Feinstein, who has served in the Senate for a quarter-century, is well known to the states voters and has daunting leads in polls and fundraising. But De Leon has gained notable endorsements, most recently from the 2.1-million-member California Labor Federation last week. Campaign finance reports released this week show that Feinstein has more than $10 million in the bank, while De Leon has just more than $670,000. Feinstein, a multimillionaire and one of the wealthiest members of the Senate, has already lent her campaign $5 million and could easily write another check. But Steyer, a billionaire former hedge fund manager, could write a larger one. He is among the largest Democratic donors in the nation and has already committed more than $50 million to push for the impeachment of President Trump and to register young voters. He was noncommittal when asked if he would fund an independent expenditure group on behalf of De Leon. I dont have any concrete plans for that, he said. Read More Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Advertisement Californias largest pension fund sends next years invoice to state government: $6.3 billion By John Myers The California Public Employees Retirement System building (Max Whittaker / Getty Images) As part of a shift toward less optimistic expectations for investment returns to pay for government worker pensions, board members of the California Public Employees Retirement System voted Tuesday to require an almost $6.3-billion payment from the state budget in the fiscal year that begins on July 1. The action, which could receive final approval on Wednesday, reflects a gradually higher annual contribution to public employee pensions by the state and from local governments across California. In 2016, CalPERS approved a half-percentage point decrease in its official estimate of the long-term investment return on its $353.3-billion portfolio. That shift was designed to happen over several years, in hopes it would lessen the financial shock of shifting more of the costs onto government employers. The highest costs are also, in part, a reflection of increases in the size of the states payroll. The states CalPERS payment will be about $450 million more than the total paid in the current fiscal year and more than double what it was only a decade ago. CalPERS board members voted on Tuesdays staff proposal with little discussion, save for a question about the increase in contributions also required from workers hired after a pension overhaul that took effect in June. It seems like it will be a ding on peoples salaries, said Theresa Taylor, the chairwoman of CalPERS finance committee and a member of SEIU Local 1000, the union that represents some 96,000 state employees. The $6.299-billion payment required from Californias state government must now be factored into the budget crafted by the Legislature and signed into law by Gov. Jerry Brown in late June. Brown had already assumed a similarly sized payment in his budget proposal unveiled in January. In February, a coalition representing city governments warned about the effects of rising pension costs under the expectations of less money from Wall Street investments. The report issued by the League of California Cities projected an average increase of more than 50% in annual pension payments made by the states largest cities over the next seven years. A CalPERS staff report notes that the net return on all of the funds investments for the fiscal year that ended in July was 11.2%. But expectations on profits over the next 30 years remain significantly more modest, and theres long been a robust debate about how to properly set those future expectations. The lower the rate of projected investment return, the larger the share of pension costs that must be covered by taxpayers and some employees. Overall, CalPERS officials believe the system has assets to cover 71% of its long-term obligations. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print California warns legal pot sellers not to participate in unlicensed 4/20 events By Patrick McGreevy Marijuana on display at a dispensary in Los Angeles. ( (Frederic J. Brown / AFP/Getty Images)) The state issued a warning Tuesday that businesses holding licenses to sell marijuana could face penalties if they participate in unlicensed temporary events away from their stores, including on Friday, April 20, which has become an annual celebration for counterculture groups. The warning was issued ahead of 4/20 by the state Bureau of Cannabis Control. Since Jan. 1, the bureau has issued more than 700 state licenses to sell marijuana for medical or recreational use. The bureau has issued 47 temporary event licenses to groups that are limited to holding the marijuana celebrations on county fairgrounds that have authorized such events with city approval. Any bureau licensee participating in an unlicensed cannabis event may be subject to disciplinary action, the warning said, adding that lawful participation by bureau licensees in any temporary cannabis event that allows sales and/or consumption is dependent upon issuance of the appropriate licenses from the bureau. While many Californians have been issued medical approval to sell or use marijuana, the law does not allow them to participate in unlicensed events, also referred to as Proposition 215 events after the ballot measure that legalized medical pot two decades ago in the state. Participation in such events may lead to civil penalties for unlicensed commercial cannabis activity, the warning said. Meanwhile, a survey of some 1,000 marijuana users that was released Tuesday by the firm LendEDU found that the average 4/20 participant plans to spend $71 on marijuana to celebrate the unofficial holiday, and about 35% of respondents are planning to take off work Friday. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print California police groups shift position on officer discipline records, now consider support for making some of them public By Liam Dillon Los Angeles Police Department recruits at a graduation ceremony in April (Al Seib / Los Angeles Times) Some major law enforcement groups signaled Tuesday they are willing to support making part of police officer disciplinary records public, a dramatic departure from their past positions. Local and national attention on police shootings and misconduct has led law enforcement organizations to reconsider their blanket opposition to proposals that would give public access to some internal disciplinary investigations of officers. Were going to be open to supporting efforts that would allow for some records to be released, said Ryan Sherman, a lobbyist with the Riverside Sheriffs Assn. Debate over secrecy provisions in officer disciplinary files came during a legislative hearing on Senate Bill 1421 from Sen. Nancy Skinner (D-Berkeley). Skinners bill, which advanced out of the Senate Public Safety Committee on Tuesday, would require public disclosure of all internal officer shooting investigations and confirmed cases of sexual assault and lying while on duty. Currently, all police discipline information is confidential outside of a courtroom in California, which has some of the nations strictest standards against public disclosure. Unfortunately, the fact that we have such strict restrictions on any access to public records has affected certain communities trust towards our law enforcement, Skinner said during the hearing. Prior to Skinners effort, other have tried to loosen these rules, some of which date back 40 years. Most recently in 2016, a bid by then-Sen. Mark Leno (D-San Francisco) failed in a Senate committee. In debate two years ago, no major law enforcement groups indicated they would accept changes to state laws that would make individual internal investigations public, saying they were essential to protect officer privacy and safety. But Tuesday, Sherman and other lobbyists including those representing the states largest police labor organization, signaled they might be willing to entertain changes. They said they were negotiating with Skinner on the bills details. Law enforcement groups still have major concerns about SB 1421 as written. Ed Fishman, an attorney for the Police Officers Research Assn., told legislators that the bill would wrongfully expose police officers who acted within departmental policy to invasions of their privacy. It has unintended consequences that are extreme and will hurt the public, Fishman said. Tuesdays hearing featured testimony from many who have had relatives killed by police officers in recent years advocating for the bill. Senators on the Public Safety Committee also gave public rebukes to law enforcement lobbyists, criticizing them for a lack of diversity and insensitivity to concerns raised by communities of color. I think that you are completely and utterly out of touch with the realities of how those you are representing are perceived by major segments of California, said Sen. Holly Mitchell (D-Los Angeles). You are not going to be able to continue to lobby your way out of it. The bill faces at least one more committee hearing in the Senate before reaching the floor. It will have to pass both houses of the Legislature by the end of August. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Newest member of the California Assembly arrives ready to work on criminal justice issues By John Myers Assemblywoman Sydney Kamlager-Dove prepares for the oath of office from Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon with her husband, Austin Dove. (California Assembly Democrats) Two weeks after winning a Los Angeles special election, the newest member of the California Assembly says she hopes to focus on reforms to the states criminal justice system during her time in Sacramento. Assemblywoman Sydney Kamlager-Dove (D-Los Angeles) took the oath of office on Monday, filling one of three vacant seats representing Los Angeles County in the lower house. The Democrat, a former community college trustee and legislative staffer, thanked her mentors in remarks from the Assembly rostrum. So many women, and in my life so many black women, have paid in giving me the kind of morals and integrity and grit that is required to fight on behalf of people that you know, and people that you dont know, she said. Kamlager-Dove won handily on April 3, receiving 70% of the votes cast in the 54th Assembly District which encompasses communities west of downtown Los Angeles, from Crenshaw to Culver City and as far north as Westwood. She will serve the remaining eight months of the term of former Assemblyman Sebastian Ridley-Thomas, who resigned last year citing health concerns. She has said she hopes to focus her attention on poverty issues and on reform of the states criminal justice system. I think we have an opportunity to really push the needle in terms of how we look at rehabilitation, how we look at incarceration, and how we look at changing the lives oftentimes of poor men and women of color, Kamalager-Dove said on Monday in a video released by Assembly Democrats. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Advertisement Survivors of violent crime raise their voices in California to call for a new approach to criminal justice By Jazmine Ulloa Aaliyah Smith marches with her cousins. (Jazmine Ulloa / Los Angeles Times) Her father, uncle, a cousin and two older brothers. Those are some of the family members 16-year-old Aaliyah Smith has lost to gun violence. Then there are her friends. Jermaine Jackson Jr., 27, was shot and killed in 2016 while he painted over graffiti in San Francisco. Toriano Tito Adger, 18, was shot there a year later at a bus stop. He called Smith, who was nearby, and warned her to run. She made it inside a library moments before the crack of gunfire. Last week, Smith was among hundreds who gathered in Sacramento for annual National Crime Victims Rights Week events, where calls were issued for a new approach to criminal justice and public safety in California, one that puts survivors at the center of policy. But a debate is brewing over what that entails. Read More Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print California expects $14 billion in tax payments this month By John Myers State workers handle income tax returns at the California Franchise Tax Board offices. (Laura Morton / For The Times) Gov. Jerry Browns proposed state budget is built on what taxpayers might find an audacious assumption: almost $14 billion in tax payments in the month of April, an average of $83 million collected per hour on every business day of the month. Most of that money will come from the taxes Californians pay in advance of Tuesday nights filing deadline for income tax returns. If history is any guide, the rate of payment could quadruple by weeks end. While tax rules have shifted some of the payment schedules to other months, April remains a vitally important month to the fiscal health of state government. The state controllers office reports more than 15% of all personal income tax revenues in 2017 were collected in April. In the recession years of a decade ago, tax revenue predictions were frequently off the mark by hundreds of millions of dollars. The last two state budgets have seen significant windfalls of personal income tax revenue, thanks in part both to an improving economy and to the continuation of a temporary surcharge on the wealthiest taxpayers extended by voters in 2016. In the budget plan he sent to lawmakers in January, Brown projected a $6.1-billion windfall and proposed using a sizable amount to top off Californias rainy-day fund ahead of schedule. The independent Legislative Analysts Office reports that through the end of last week, the months income tax tally stood at $3 billion, slightly ahead of projections. By the end of the current week, a single days total could be almost that large. Lawmakers began reviewing the governors $190.3-billion spending plan during the winter, but few decisions are made until they get a look at Aprils tax revenues. The governor will release a revised plan based on the new data next month; lawmakers are required to send him a completed budget no later than June 15. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Feinstein war chest tops $10 million while Kevin de Leon struggles to keep pace By Sarah D. Wire Sen. Dianne Feinstein widened her already-massive fundraising advantage in the run-up to Junes primary, raising twice as much in the first quarter than her strongest Senate challenger has sitting in the bank. Feinstein raised $1.3 million between January and March, bringing her war chest to just over $10 million as Californias U.S. Senate race begins in earnest, according Federal Election Commission reports. Former state Senate leader Kevin De Leon, the best known of the more than 30 people who will appear with Feinstein on the June primary ballot, raised just $575,991 in that same period, bringing his cash on hand to $672,331, according to his quarterly FEC report. Read More Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Advertisement Trump has met his match, says Gov. Jerry Brown in promoting climate action on a quick trip to Canada By John Myers (Rich Pedroncelli/Associated Press) Gov. Jerry Brown told a Canadian audience Monday that he believes President Trumps efforts to reverse course on climate change policy are a momentary deviation as others in the United States seek limits on greenhouse gas emissions. Thats very temporary, I can assure you, Brown said at a joint event in Toronto with Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne. The governors quick international trip, announced only late last week, comes as Wynnes Liberal Party faces a stiff challenge in Junes election from the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario and its leader, Doug Ford. Critics of Wynnes party have called for Ontario to pull out of the Western Climate Initiative, a cooperative agreement between three Canadian provinces and California on efforts to limit greenhouse gases. Brown sought to link the efforts of Canadian conservatives with Republicans in the United States who oppose existing climate change programs. In contrast, he told the audience, several GOP lawmakers voted last summer to renew Californias cap-and-trade program. I would say to the conservatives of Canada, wake up and see what your friends in California are doing, he said. The Democrat took particular notice of Trumps efforts to shift away from climate change policies from the administration of former President Obama, as well as a push by the Environmental Protection Agency to cancel Californias strict limits on automobile emissions. If Trump tries to change that, well have litigation well beyond his term in office, Brown said while also noting Chinese government efforts to produce more low-emissions vehicles. Between California and China, Trump has met his match. What hes saying is not going to happen. Many of the governors remarks, though, were aimed at the tough political situation in which Wynne finds herself with seven weeks to go before Ontarios parliamentary elections. Dangers abound, but success is right in our hands, Brown said. So dont blow it! Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print California voters are getting to know the states attorney general through his aggressive stance challenging Trump By Patrick McGreevy Less than two months from his first statewide election, California Atty. Gen. Xavier Becerra has become adept not only at challenging President Trump but at using the bully pulpit of his office to raise his profile with voters. The aggressive effort may help boost the former Los Angeles congressmans chances at winning a full term in office this fall, almost two years after he was appointed to replace Sen. Kamala Harris in 2017. Appointed by Gov. Jerry Brown, Becerra took office as attorney general four days after Trumps inauguration. Thats afforded him an opportunity to get in front of Californians and potential voters on an array of issues including immigration, healthcare and the environment. Read More Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Gov. Jerry Brown forms commission for 2020 census outreach By Melanie Mason In an effort to make sure California has a strong showing in the next national census, Gov. Jerry Brown on Friday established a state commission to prepare outreach for the decennial count. It is vitally important for California to do everything it can to ensure that every Californian is counted in the upcoming census, Brown said in a prepared statement. The commissions formation comes on the heels of a Trump administration plan to ask about citizenship status as a part of the census. State officials fear that such a question, which has not been asked in a census since 1950, could chill participation among California residents. That could result in the state losing billions of dollars in federal funds and a seat in Congress. The 23-member panel, appointed largely by Brown as well as picks by legislative leaders, comes from private- and public-sector backgrounds, including civil rights groups, religious institutions and educational institutions. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Advertisement Garcetti kicks off Iowa visit with 2020 on his mind and a hardhat on his head LA Mayor - and 2020 prospect - Eric Garcetti makes his Iowa debut at the Carpenters Union Training Center. Fearlessly flaunts the never be photographed in head gear/safety glasses rule. pic.twitter.com/14bUOPXMvF Mark Z. Barabak (@markzbarabak) April 13, 2018 Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Asm. Rocky Chavez takes the lead in race to replace Issa, while Doug Applegate slips By Joshua Stewart A new poll shows that Republican Assemblyman Rocky Chavez has taken a clear lead over 15 other candidates running to replace Rep. Darrell Issa in Congress and has overtaken Democrat Doug Applegate, the previous frontrunner. In a SurveyUSA poll by 10News and The San Diego Union-Tribune, Chavez, R-Oceanside, has support of 16 percent of likely voters, putting him ahead of Applegate, a lawyer, who was favored by 12 percent of voters and is in second place. The top two vote-getters in June, regardless of party, will proceed to a November runoff election. Competing with Applegate for the No. 2 spot is Democrat Mike Levin, also a lawyer, with support of 9 percent of voters. Several other candidates were right at his heels. Democratic Businessman Paul Kerr and Board of Equalization Member Diane Harkey, R-Dana Point, were tied for fourth at 8 percent each. Read More Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Pro-Kevin de Leon group launches ad castigating Dianne Feinstein By Seema Mehta A group that is supporting Kevin de Leons bid for the U.S. Senate launched a blistering ad against Sen. Dianne Feinstein on Thursday, questioning her progressive principles and tying her to President Trump. The ad buy from A Progressive California is minuscule $10,000 to air it in Los Angeles for one day on CNN and MSNBC during programming such as The Rachel Maddow Show, Hardball with Chris Matthews and Anderson Cooper 360. The minute-long ad features news clips about Feinstein not getting the California Democratic Party endorsement earlier this year, as well as footage of Feinstein saying that Trump can be a good president and appearing to share a laugh with Trump. That moment actually came during a White House meeting in the aftermath of the Parkland, Fla., school shooting when the president suggested an assault weapons ban should be included in a bipartisan bill to expand gun background checks. It also features extensive clips of de Leons speech at the state partys convention. De Leon, who just ended his final term as leader of the state Senate, announced last year he would run against fellow Democrat Feinstein as she seeks her fifth full term. Feinsteins longtime political advisor dismissed the ad, noting the size of the buy. Its not really a buy, said Bill Carrick. Ten thousand dollars in cable in L.A. Poof, its gone. Still, he said he planned to have the campaigns lawyers review the ad to see if it violates campaign law that limits what outside groups like A Progressive California can do. Such groups cannot coordinate with campaigns or candidates, and are limited in how much their messages can support a candidate. Ann Ravel, the former chair of the Federal Election Commission and the California Fair Political Practices Commission, said if the ad was in a state race, she is certain that the state commission would open an investigation into potential coordination with de Leons campaign because of the messaging and the types of footage in the ad. But the bipartisan federal commission cant agree on how to enforce the federal regulations, she said. The problem is [outside groups] understand that given the lack of very strong enforcement at the federal level, theres the ability to stretch the law, she said. A spokeswoman for the FEC declined to comment. Dave Jacobson, a spokesman for A Progressive California, disputed the suggestion that the ad violated campaign law. This frivolous allegation shows that Sen. Feinstein is afraid of the public seeing an ad which showcases her own words, that Donald Trump can be a good president, he said. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Advertisement Dispute over money emerges in campaign to repeal Californias gas tax increase By Patrick McGreevy A motorist prepares to gas up her vehicle in San Rafael, Calif., in 2015. (Justin Sullivan / Getty Images) A proposed initiative to repeal hikes to Californias gas tax has been caught in the middle of a dispute involving Republican rivals in the governors race. Assemblyman Travis Allen, a Republican candidate for governor, decided in January to drop plans for his own initiative and said he would urge supporters to sign a separate petition being supported by several Republican members of Congress. Then last week, the committee Allen formed to finance his ballot measure reported a $300,000 contribution from PISF Inc., a Novato, Calif., real estate firm. Now, an organizer of the still active Give Voters a Voice committee is urging the Allen committee to immediately donate their funds in support of the ongoing signature gathering efforts. There is only one gas tax repeal measure currently in circulation and that is the measure sponsored by the Give Voters a Voice Committee, said Dave Gilliard, a consultant to the group. PISF Inc., he said, gave to repeal taxes a Allies balk at Trump administration bid to block Chinese firm from cutting-edge telecom markets By David S. Cloud Britain and Germany are balking at the Trump administrations call for a ban on equipment from Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei, threatening a global U.S. campaign to thwart Chinas involvement in future mobile networks. Both countries are expected to limit Huawei and other Chinese companies from providing core components including routers. But other types of Chinese equipment for next-generation, high-speed communications could still be installed on British and German networks, officials and analysts say. The U.S. push to ban Huawei has provoked a global dispute in recent weeks, with senior U.S. officials, including Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo, publicly urging NATO allies in Europe to exclude the company and warning that the United States might limit its military presence in countries that did not do so. Read More Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Confucius Institutes: Do they improve U.S.-China ties or harbor spies? By Don Lee Hanging red lanterns welcome visitors to the University of Marylands Confucius Institute, the oldest of about 100 Chinese language and cultural centers that have popped up over the last 15 years on American campuses, subsidized by millions of dollars from Chinas central government. But last fall, when four U.S. Senate investigators walked into the Confucius offices in Maryland and spent hours questioning staff, they werent looking for an educational exchange. The committee has been seeking detailed information from the university about the program, including contracts, email exchanges and financial arrangements that school administrators have kept under wraps since it started in 2004. American colleges once viewed these jointly funded institutes as an economical way to expand their language offerings one that could also bring warmer ties with China and, importantly, an influx of Chinese international students paying full tuition. Read More Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Watch Live: White House holds surprise news briefing amid government shutdown Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Advertisement U.S. policy toward China shifts from engagement to confrontation By David S. Cloud For decades, China had no closer American friend than Dianne Feinstein. As San Francisco mayor in the 1970s, she forged a sister-city relationship with Shanghai, the first between American and Chinese communities. As U.S. senator, she dined with Chinese leaders at Mao Tse-tungs old Beijing residence. And in the 1990s, she championed a trade policy change that opened a floodgate of Western investment into China. Today the Democratic senator sees China as a growing threat, joining a broad array of Trump administration officials, national security strategists and business executives who once favored engagement with Beijing and now advocate a confrontational approach instead. Read More Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Mnuchins attempt to calm markets backfires as Trump takes another shot at the Federal Reserve By Jim Puzzanghera An attempt by Treasury Secretary Steven T. Mnuchin to calm plunging financial markets backfired Monday, further rattling investors with new fears about whether major U.S. banks have enough cash on top of worries about interest rates, political instability in Washington and a slowing global economy. Adding to the volatile mix was a fresh attack on the Federal Reserve by President Trump, who declared that the central bank was the U.S. economys only problem and that it didnt have a feel for the market. The Fed is like a powerful golfer who cant score because he has no touch -- he cant putt! Trump said on Twitter. Read More Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print He speaks to Democratic hearts. But is Beto ORourke a serious White House contender? By Mark Z. Barabak Hes a failed U.S. Senate candidate with an undistinguished congressional record who, for the moment, is a blazing-hot 2020 presidential prospect despite the fact that he may not run and faces long odds if he does. Beto ORourke suggests the will-he-or-wont-he speculation is something he himself cant quite fathom. I think thats a great question, he responded in a Dallas Morning News interview when asked whether his unsuccessful November Senate bid merited a promotion to the White House. I ask that question myself. Read More Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Russian disinformation teams targeted Robert S. Mueller III, says report prepared for Senate By Craig Timberg, Tony Romm, Elizabeth Dwoskin Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. (Associated Press) Months after President Trump took office, Russias disinformation teams trained their sites on a new target: special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. Having worked to help get Trump into the White House, they now worked to neutralize the biggest threat to his staying there. The Russian operatives unloaded on Mueller through fake accounts on Facebook, Twitter and beyond, falsely claiming that the former FBI director was corrupt and that the allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 election were crackpot conspiracies. One post on Instagram which emerged as an especially potent weapon in the Russian social media arsenal claimed that Mueller had worked in the past with radical Islamic groups. Such tactics exemplified how Russian teams ranged nimbly across social media platforms in a shrewd online influence operation aimed squarely at American voters. The effort started earlier than commonly understood and lasted longer while relying on the strengths of different sites to manipulate distinct slices of the electorate, according to a pair of comprehensive new reports prepared for the Senate Intelligence Committee and released Monday. Read more Timberg, Romm and Dwoskin report for the Washington Post. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Advertisement President Trump announces Mick Mulvaney as acting White House chief of staff By Associated Press President Trump says budget director Mick Mulvaney will serve as acting chief of staff, replacing John F. Kelly in the new year. I am pleased to announce that Mick Mulvaney, Director of the Office of Management & Budget, will be named Acting White House Chief of Staff, replacing General John Kelly, who has served our Country with distinction. Mick has done an outstanding job while in the Administration.... Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 14, 2018 Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print It aint over when its over: In Michigan, Wisconsin and elsewhere, losers seek to undermine election results By Mark Z. Barabak Democrat Gavin Newsom has yet to become California governor, but already a candidate for state Republican Party chairman is promoting a recall effort. In Michigan and Wisconsin, GOP lawmakers have rushed through legislation to thwart their incoming Democratic governors and hamper others in the opposing party from doing the jobs voters chose them to do. In Congress, GOP leaders have echoed President Trump and sought to undermine the legitimacy of Democrats strong midterm performance, raising unsubstantiated allegations of fraud and political malfeasance. Read More Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print New CFPB Director Kathy Kraninger says she wont be a puppet of Mick Mulvaney By Jim Puzzanghera On her first full day leading the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Kathy Kraninger said she wont be a puppet of Mick Mulvaney, the controversial acting director whom she replaced in the powerful regulatory position. To underscore that point, the former White House aide said she would even reconsider a Mulvaney action that critics saw as a gratuitous jab at Democrats who championed the agencys creation: changing its name to the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection. Kraningers declaration during a meeting with reporters Tuesday addressed one of the main criticisms of her selection. She is considered a protege of Mulvaney, her boss at the White House Office of Management and Budget who has executed a dramatic, industry-friendly shift at the watchdog agency. Read More Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Trumps pick for chief of staff, Nick Ayers, out of running By Associated Press Nick Ayers, right, with Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, at the funeral service for George H.W. Bush on Dec. 3. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Associated Press) President Trumps top pick to replace John F. Kelly as chief of staff, Nick Ayers, is no longer expected to fill that role. Thats according to a White House official who is not authorized to discuss the personnel issue by name and spoke on condition of anonymity. Ayers is Vice President Mike Pences chief of staff. The official says that Trump and Ayers could not agree on Ayers length of service. The father of young children, Ayers had agreed to serve in an interim capacity though the spring, but Trump wanted a two-year commitment. The official says that Ayers will instead assist the president from outside the administration. Trump announced Saturday that Kelly would be departing the White House around the end of the year. Thank you @realDonaldTrump, @VP, and my great colleagues for the honor to serve our Nation at The White House. I will be departing at the end of the year but will work with the #MAGA team to advance the cause. #Georgia Nick Ayers (@nick_ayers) December 9, 2018 Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Advertisement U.S. hiring slows to 155,000 jobs, unemployment rate holds at 3.7% By Jim Puzzanghera Job growth slowed significantly in November but still was solid, indicating the economy remains in good shape but not expanding so quickly that it will lead to sharply higher interest rates. U.S. employers added 155,000 jobs last month, well below analyst expectations and a steep decline from Octobers strong 237,000 figure, the Labor Department reported Friday. Still, monthly job gains are averaging 206,000 this year, the best since 2015. Even the slower pace of 170,000 over the last three months is close to last years average of 182,000 and well above the amount needed to keep up with population growth. Read More Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Trump is expected to pick State Department spokeswoman for U.N. ambassador By Associated Press Heather Nauert at a briefing at the State Department on Aug. 9, 2017. (Alex Brandon / Associated Press) President Trump is expected to nominate State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert to be the next U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Two administration officials confirmed Trumps plans. A Republican congressional aide said the president was expected to announce his decision by tweet on Friday morning. The officials were not authorized to speak publicly before Trumps announcement. Trump has previously said Nauert was under serious consideration to replace Nikki Haley, who announced in October that she would step down at the end of this year. Trump has been known to change course on staffing decisions in the past. Nauert was a reporter for Fox News Channel before she became State Department spokeswoman under former Secretary Rex Tillerson. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Senate confirms new consumer financial protection chief: Kathy Kraninger, protege of industry-friendly Mick Mulvaney By Jim Puzzanghera The Senate, in a party-line vote Thursday, confirmed White House aide Kathy Kraninger to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and experts predicted a continuation of the industry-friendly shift it has taken since President Trump installed an acting director last year. Kraninger is a protege of acting director and White House budget chief Mick Mulvaney, an outspoken critic of the agency that was created in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis to prevent predatory lending and other abuses that led to it. Democrats and consumer advocates have denounced him for sharply departing from the aggressive watchdog role the bureau had pursued under its first director, Obama-appointee Richard Cordray, including scaling back enforcement and moving to reassess tough new rules on payday loans and narrow the definition of abusive practices by banks and other firms. Read More Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Advertisement Shutdown postponed by two weeks under plan approved by Congress By Erik Wasson Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), shown at the Capitol on Tuesday, says President Trumps border wall is a waste of money. (J. Scott Applewhite / Associated Press) Congress passed a two-week stopgap spending bill that will delay the chance of a partial government shutdown until Dec. 22 as lawmakers and President Donald Trump negotiate over his demands to pay for a wall on the southern border. The House and Senate passed the measure Thursday without dissent, and Trump has indicated hell sign the bill before the current shutdown deadline of midnight Friday. Negotiations were delayed by memorial services this week for former President George H.W. Bush. The temporary measure gives Democrats and Republicans more time to find a resolution to their biggest hurdle: funding a wall on the U.S. Mexico border wall. Trump says he wants $5 billion for parts of a concrete wall on the southern border and is willing to shut down the government if he doesnt get it. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York has said Democrats will provide no more than $1.6 billion for border security, because the wall is a waste of money. The presidents demands for wall funding from Congress come after he said during the campaign that Mexico would pay for it. This week he said on Twitter that a $25 billion border wall would pay for itself in two months, without providing evidence. Most of the U.S. governments $1.2 trillion discretionary budget has been appropriated already by Congress for the fiscal year that began on Oct. 1. Departments at a risk of a partial shutdown late this month include the departments of State, Interior, Agriculture, Commerce, Justice, Treasury and Homeland Security. Talks to resolve the differences have been on hold since a meeting among Trump, Schumer and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of California originally slated for Dec. 4 was postponed due to Bush memorial events. The three are scheduled to meet on Tuesday, according to a person familiar with the matter. Senate Appropriations Chairman Richard Shelby of Alabama told reporters the rest of the seven-bill spending package being negotiated is basically done. Shelby in recent weeks had tried to broker a compromise in which Trumps $5 billion request would be split over two years, but Schumer has rejected that. Some Democrats have been willing to trade border wall funding for deportation protections for young undocumented immigrants. Pelosi ruled out such a deal in remarks to reporters Thursday. The stopgap government funding measure also would extend the National Flood Insurance Program, which provides subsidized coverage for homes in flood-prone areas, to Dec. 21. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Bipartisan Senate group wants to formally blame Saudi crown prince for journalists killing By Karoun Demirjian Saudi Arabias Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman at the G-20 summit in Buenos Aires. (Associated Press) A bipartisan group of senators filed a resolution Wednesday condemning Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman as responsible for the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, directly challenging President Trump to do the same. This resolution -- without equivocation -- definitively states that the crown prince of Saudi Arabia was complicit in the murder of Mr. [Jamal] Khashoggi and has been a wrecking ball to the region jeopardizing our national security interests on multiple fronts, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said in a statement accompanying the release of the resolution. It will be up to Saudi Arabia as to how to deal with this matter. But it is up to the United States to firmly stand for who we are and what we believe. The resolution put forward by Graham and Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who are expected to lead the Judiciary Committee together next year, comes just one day after CIA Director Gina Haspel briefed leading senators about the details of the agencys assessment that Mohammed ordered and monitored the killing and dismemberment of Khashoggi in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul, Turkey. Senators emerged from that closed-door briefing furious not only with Saudi Arabia, but Trump as well for dismissing the heft of the CIAs findings. You have to be willfully blind not to come to the conclusion that this was orchestrated and organized by people under the command of MBS and that he was intricately involved in the demise of Mr. Khashoggi, Graham said following the briefing, referring to Mohammed by his initials. He added that Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo and Defense Secretary James N. Mattis, who briefed senators last week, were at best being good soldiers and at worst were in the pocket of Saudi Arabia for presenting the evidence of Mohammeds involvement as inconclusive. The release of the resolution condemning Mohammed also comes as the Senate is preparing to move ahead with debate on a resolution to curtail U.S. support for the Saudi-led military campaign in Yemen. Though the Yemen resolution does not directly address Khashoggis murder, its popularity is a sign of how strained the United States patience with Saudi Arabia is on multiple fronts, including its role in worsening the civilian cost of the war in Yemen, cited by the United Nations as the worlds worst humanitarian crisis. Last week, the Senate voted 63 to 37 to advance the Yemen resolution past an opening procedural hurdle. But Graham and Feinsteins resolution on the crown prince has the potential of drawing broader support, especially from Republicans, who are deeply divided about how fiercely to punish Saudi Arabia over Khashoggis killing. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who has been an outspoken advocate for human rights and is seen as one of the more influential foreign policy voices in the GOP, did not vote for the Yemen resolution last week or sign on to a bipartisan measure last month to sanction Saudi officials and cease weapons transfers to the kingdom. But he is an original co-sponsor of the resolution condemning Mohammed over Khashoggis death. So is Sen. Todd Young (R-Ind.), who represents the other end of the GOP spectrum in terms of recent Saudi-related votes and endorsements. Young was an initial co-sponsor of the bill Graham wrote with Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) to sanction Saudi officials deemed responsible for Khashoggis killing and stop the sale of anything but exclusively defensive weapons to the kingdom until it ceased hostilities in Yemen. Young also voted to advance the Yemen resolution something Graham did as well, though Graham has signaled he will not be lending any similar support to the measure, fearing it may establish a precedent of invoking the War Powers Act too broadly. Sens. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) and Chris Coons (D-Del.) are listed as original co-sponsors of the resolution condemning Mohammed, which also urges Saudi Arabia to negotiate with Houthi rebels to end the Yemen war, work out a political solution to its standoff with Qatar and release political prisoners. But how much sway the resolution has probably comes down to how forcefully the administration decides to heed it -- and thus far, Trump has not shown any interest in condemning the crown prince the way the senators hope he will. Demirjian reports for the Washington Post. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Los Angeles County offices and U.S. Postal Service closed Wednesday in honor of George H.W. Bush By Brian Park The Honor Guard carries the casket of former U.S. President George H. W. Bush following his funeral on Dec. 5 in Washington, DC. (Doug Mills - Pool/Getty Images) The U.S. Postal Service will suspend regular mail delivery Wednesday, which President Trump has declared a national day of mourning in honor of former President George H.W. Bush. All retail postal outlets will be closed, and package delivery will be limited. In Los Angeles, all nonessential county departments, offices and libraries will be closed for the day, L.A. County officials said. The Los Angeles County Library said no overdue fines will be assessed for books, and due dates will be moved forward one week. Los Angeles County Department of Public Health offices also are closed Wednesday. The Sheriffs Department, Fire Department, clinics and hospitals will continue to operate, the county said. The Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health clinics are being operated with reduced staffing, and the department asked patients to confirm or reschedule any appointments. All county courts and the disaster recovery centers for the Woolsey fire in Malibu and Agoura Hills will remain open. Larger federal government operations will be closed Wednesday. To honor the life and legacy of President Bush, the Postal Service will observe the National Day of Mourning. Learn how Postal operations will be affected. https://t.co/Mffch7bPCh pic.twitter.com/vG46BsIOpm U.S. Postal Service (@USPS) December 4, 2018 L.A. County offices and libraries will be closed tomorrow (Dec 5) in observance of the #NationalDayOfMourning for President George H. W. Bush. The Countys Disaster Recovery Centers in Malibu & Agoura Hills will remain open from 10 a.m. - 8 p.m. pic.twitter.com/Sv1J7GoJ7T Los Angeles County (@CountyofLA) December 4, 2018 @LAPublicHealth offices will be closed tomorrow December 5 in observance of the national Day of Mourning for President George H. W. Bush. Essential Services including clinics and other services will remain open: https://t.co/tZGoGGHRlg pic.twitter.com/ypXsV6vlYY LA Public Health (@lapublichealth) December 4, 2018 Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick to skip 2020 White House race, sources say By Associated Press Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick speaks during an interview in Boston on Dec. 15, 2014. (Elise Amendola / Associated Press) Former Gov. Deval Patrick of Massachusetts will soon announce he wont launch a 2020 presidential campaign, according to three sources familiar with his plans. They did not say why the Democrat decided against a run. A formal announcement was delayed as the country observed a day of mourning for President George H.W. Bush, one source said. News of Patricks plans was first reported by Politico. Patrick, 62, served two terms as governor, from 2007 to 2015, was assistant attorney general for civil rights in the Clinton administration and since leaving the governors office has been a managing director for Bain Capital. Patrick traveled the country in support of Democratic candidates in the recent midterm election. Earlier this year, some of Patricks supporters and close advisors started the Reason to Believe political action committee, a grassroots organization dedicated to advancing a positive, progressive vision for our nation in 2018 and 2020. Reason to Believe PAC had been holding meetups across the country, including in early presidential primary states. While Patrick is opting against a 2020 run, dozens of Democrats are considering jumping in, including nearly a half-dozen members of the Senate, several House members, and other Massachusetts politicians. On Tuesday, Michael Avenatti, the attorney for adult film star Stormy Daniels and a vocal critic of President Trump, said in a statement that he would run. Patrick had previously expressed some concerns about breaking through if he sought the nomination, telling David Axelrod, a former advisor to President Obama, that he wasnt sure he could stand out in such a large field. Its hard to see how you even get noticed in such a big, broad field without being shrill, sensational or a celebrity, and Im none of those things and Im never going to be any of those things, Patrick said in a September interview with Axelrod. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Advertisement Former Trump adviser Roger Stone invokes 5th Amendment right and wont testify before Senate Judiciary Committee By Associated Press Roger Stone in 2017. (Joe Raedle / Getty Images) Roger Stone, an associate of President Trump, says he wont provide testimony or documents to the Senate Judiciary Committee. An attorney for Stone said in a letter to Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the committees top Democrat, that Stone was invoking his 5th Amendment right against self-incrimination in refusing to produce documents or appear for an interview. Stone has been entangled in investigations by Congress and special counsel Robert S. Mueller III about whether Trump aides had advance knowledge of Democratic emails published by WikiLeaks during the 2016 election. Stone has not been charged and has said he had no knowledge of the timing or specifics of WikiLeaks plans. In the letter to Feinstein, Stone said the committees requests were far too overbroad, far too overreaching and far too wide-ranging. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Watch live: Vice President Pence and lawmakers honor George H.W. Bush at the U.S. Capitol before he lies in state Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Rebuilding crumbling infrastructure has bipartisan support. But who gets to pay for it? By Jim Puzzanghera The grades for major U.S. infrastructure would give any parent indigestion if they were on a childs report card. Roads: D; bridges: C+; dams: D; ports: C+: railways: B; airports: D; schools: D+; public transit: D-. The nations overall grade: D+, which translates to being in fair to poor condition and mostly below standards with significant deterioration and a strong risk of failure, according to an evaluation last year by the American Society of Civil Engineers. Read More Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Advertisement Trump calls former lawyer Michael Cohen a weak person who is lying By Associated Press President Trump says his former lawyer Michael Cohen is lying to get a reduced sentence. The president is reacting to Cohens guilty plea Thursday to lying to Congress about work he did on a Trump real estate project in Russia. During a surprise court hearing, Cohen admitted to lying in testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee about a plan to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. Cohen in his guilty plea said he made the false statements to be consistent with Trumps political message. Cohens lawyer says he continues to cooperate with special counsel Robert S. Mueller IIIs investigation into Russian election interference and possible coordination with Trump associates. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print As California Republicans confront a congressional wipeout, GOP leader Kevin McCarthy faces a reckoning By Mark Z. Barabak When the House voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act, Kevin McCarthy trooped with other Republican lawmakers to a splashy Rose Garden celebration, smiling alongside President Trump as they celebrated the moment. As majority leader, McCarthy had helped round up the votes to narrowly pass the hard-fought legislation, convincing 13 other California Republicans to go along, even though several faced tough reelection fights. Fewer than half will be returning in January. Read More Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print As California Republicans confront a congressional wipeout, GOP leader Kevin McCarthy faces a reckoning By Sarah D. Wire When the House voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act, Kevin McCarthy trooped with other Republican lawmakers to a splashy Rose Garden celebration, smiling alongside President Trump as they celebrated the moment. As majority leader, McCarthy had helped round up the votes to narrowly pass the hard-fought legislation, convincing 13 other California Republicans to go along, even though several faced tough reelection fights. Fewer than half will be returning in January. Read More Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Michael Cohen, President Trumps ex-lawyer, pleads guilty to lying to Congress about Trump real estate project in Russia By Associated Press Michael Cohen, President Trumps former personal lawyer, pursued a Russian real estate project on candidate Trumps behalf well into the 2016 campaign, he said Thursday while pleading guilty to lying to Congress. Cohen had previously said that the project was abandoned in January 2016, but he now admits he continued to pursue a deal and says he updated Trump and members of his family about the negotiations, according to a new court document. Read More Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Advertisement James Comey says acting Atty. Gen. Whitaker may not be the sharpest knife in our drawer By John Wagner Acting Atty. Gen. Matthew Whitaker speaks at the Justice Department in Washington on Nov. 14. (Pablo Martinez Monsivais / Associated Press) Former FBI Director James B. Comey apparently isnt too impressed with the mental prowess of President Trumps acting attorney general. Matthew Whitaker may not be the sharpest knife in our drawer, Comey said during a radio interview on Monday night in which he sized up the man Trump installed this month to replace ousted Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions. Comey was asked by WGBH News in Boston if he thinks Whitaker could derail the investigation of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Whitaker has spoken critically of the probe, and Trump as recently as Tuesday continues to call it a witch hunt. I think its a worry, but to my mind not a serious worry, Comey said. The institution is too strong, and [Whitaker], frankly, is not strong enough to have that kind of impact. He may not be the sharpest knife in our drawer, but he can see his future and knows that if he acted in an extralegal way, he would go down in history for the wrong reasons, and Im sure he doesnt want that, added Comey, who was fired by Trump last year and later wrote a book that portrays the president as an ego-driven congenital liar. Whitaker, a former U.S. attorney in Iowa, was Sessions chief of staff before being picked by Trump to lead the Justice Department. Trump has called Whitaker a very smart man. Earlier this year, Trump called Comey an untruthful slime ball. Wagner writes for the Washington Post. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Interior Department watchdog clears Zinke in investigation of Utah national monument By Juliet Eilperin Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke, third from the left, and Gov. Jerry Brown tour fire damage in Paradise, Calif., on Nov. 14. (Rich Pedroncelli / Associated Press) The Interior Departments Office of Inspector General has cleared Secretary Ryan Zinke in a probe of whether he redrew boundaries of a national monument in Utah to aid the financial interests of a Republican state lawmaker and stalwart supporter of President Trump. In a Nov. 21 letter to Zinkes deputy, David Bernhardt, Deputy Inspector General Mary Kendall wrote that her office found no evidence that the secretary or his aides changed the boundaries of Utahs Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in an effort to help former Utah state representative Mike Noel, who serves as executive director of the Kane County Water Conservancy District. Last December, Trump shrank the monument, first established by President Clinton in 1996, by 46% based on Zinkes recommendation. Noel owns 40 acres that had been surrounded by the monument, but now lies outside its boundaries. The new boundaries also would make it easier to construct the proposed Lake Powell Pipeline, which would deliver water to sites in Kane County that include Noels property. Earlier this year, the Interior Department had proposed selling off 120 acres of federal land from the former monument that lay adjacent to some of Noels land holdings, but later reversed the plan. We found no evidence that Noel influenced the DOIs proposed revisions to the [monuments] boundaries, that Zinke or other DOI staff involved in the project were aware of Noels financial interest in the revised boundaries, or that they gave Noel any preferential treatment in the resulting proposed boundaries, Kendall wrote. Neither the Interior Department nor the inspector generals office would release the actual investigative report. In the letter, Kendall writes that her office will provide the report to Congress no sooner than 31 days from Nov. 21, when it is provided it to Zinkes office. The Associated Press first reported the inspector generals conclusions Monday night, but did not provide details from the report itself. Noel emailed Zinke about the effort to alter Grand Staircase-Escalante, according to emails released by Interior under the Freedom of Informational Act. But those emails do not make references to Noels land holdings. Noel also pushed to rename a Utah highway in honor of Trump, but abandoned that effort in March after some of his fellow Republicans objected to the idea. Noel did not respond to requests for comment Tuesday. The inspector generals office still has at least two ongoing probes of the secretary, including one focused on his real estate dealings in Whitefish, Mont., and another regarding his decision to deny a permit to two Connecticut tribes who were hoping to jointly run a casino after MGM Resorts International lobbied against it. Interior Department spokeswoman Heather Swift welcomed the watchdogs conclusions. The report shows exactly what the secretarys office has known all along that the monument boundaries were adjusted in accordance with all rules, regulations and laws, she said in an email. This report is also the latest example of opponents and special interest groups ginning up fake and misleading stories, only to be proven false after expensive and time consuming inquiries by the IGs office. But Kendalls spokeswoman, Nancy DiPaolo, defended the inquiry, even though she said the report has not been publicly released and we will not be speaking specifically about the matter at this time. The OIG opens investigations based on credible allegations and reports our findings objectively and independently, DiPaolo added. Any time or resources spent investigating conduct or activity that may be a violation of law, regulation or policy is a service to the public, Congress and the Department. Rep. Raul Grijalva of Arizona, the top Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee, said in a statement that he still intended to investigate the way Zinke and his colleague redrew the boundaries for Grand Staircase-Escalante and another Utah national monument, Bears Ears, next year. I have great respect for the inspector general, and I accept these findings, but Secretary Zinke should have known the people he listened to while destroying our national monuments had disqualifying conflicts of interest, he said. Should I chair the Natural Resources Committee in the next Congress, the process he and President Trump used to destroy Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante will be front and center in our oversight and investigations efforts. We need to know why they ignored overwhelming public expressions of support for both Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante, why they ignored Native American tribes throughout their decision-making, and why they removed protections on parcels of land with known mineral deposits. Eilperin and Rein report for the Washington Post. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Trump advisor Larry Kudlow says China must do more to end trade war By Jim Puzzanghera Larry Kudlow, President Trumps top economic advisor, said Tuesday that Chinas response to U.S. efforts to rework the two economic superpowers trade relationship has been extremely disappointing but the planned meeting this weekend between the nations leaders is an opportunity for a breakthrough. They have to do more. They must do more, Larry Kudlow, director of the White House National Economic Council, told reporters ahead of a Saturday dinner between Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping at the Group of 20 Summit in Argentina. I think the president is exactly right to show strong backbone when prior administrations did not, to break through these Chinese walls, Kudlow said. Theyre so resistant to change. We have to protect the country. We have to protect our technology, our inventiveness, our innovation. Read More Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Watch live: White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders holds a media briefing amid tensions at the border By Los Angeles Times Staff Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Advertisement Democrat TJ Cox grabs lead over Republican David Valadao in nations last remaining undecided House race By Maya Sweedler Democrat TJ Cox slipped past Republican incumbent David Valadao on Monday to take the lead in the countrys sole remaining undecided congressional race, positioning Democrats to pick up their seventh House seat in California and 40th nationwide. Cox, who trailed by nearly 4,400 votes on election night, has steadily gained as ballot counting continues nearly three weeks after the Nov. 6 election, a pattern consistent with the states recent voting history. On Monday, he pulled ahead by 438 votes after Kern County updated its results. Read More Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Former CIA director Michael Hayden hospitalized after suffering a stroke By Deanna Paul Then-CIA Director Michael Hayden testifies before a Senate committee in 2008. (Saul Loeb / Getty Images) Former CIA Director and retired Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden has been hospitalized after suffering a stroke, his family said Friday. He is receiving expert medical care for which the family is grateful, according to a statement issued by his namesake organization. The General and his family greatly appreciate the warm wishes and prayers of his friends, colleagues, and supporters. Hayden, 73, served as director of the CIA and National Security Agency during the George W. Bush and Obama administrations. He retired from the CIA in 2009. Hayden has been a vocal critic of Donald Trumps campaign and presidency. Earlier this year, after Trump decided to revoke the security clearance of former CIA director John Brennan, Hayden was one of several former intelligence leaders who signed a statement in opposition. Criticizing the president for crossing a line, he quickly became one of the individuals whose security clearance Trump threatened to review. Deanna Paul writes for the Washington Post. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Trump tells troops hes thankful for what hes done for the U.S. and rails against courts and migrants By Associated Press President Trump talks with troops via teleconference from his estate in Palm Beach, Fla., on Thanksgiving. (Susan Walsh / Associated Press) President Trump used his Thanksgiving Day call to troops deployed overseas to pat himself on the back and air grievances about the courts, trade and migrants heading to the U.S.-Mexico border. Trumps call, made from his opulent private Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Fla., struck an unusually political tone as he spoke with members of all five branches of the military to wish them happy holidays. Its a disgrace, Trump said of judges who have blocked his attempts to overhaul U.S. immigration law, as he linked his efforts to secure the border with military missions overseas. Trump later threatened to close the U.S. border with Mexico for an undisclosed period of time if his administration determines Mexico has lost control on its side. The call was a uniquely Trump blend of boasting, peppered questions and off-the-cuff observations as his comments veered from venting about slights to praising troops You really are our heroes, he said as club waiters worked to set Thanksgiving dinner tables on the outdoor terrace behind him. It was yet another show of how Trump has dramatically transformed the presidency, erasing the traditional divisions between domestic policy and military matters and efforts to keep the troops clear of politics. You probably see over the news whats happening on our southern border, Trump told one Air Force brigadier general stationed at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan, adding: I dont have to even ask you. I know what you want to do, you want to make sure that you know who were letting in. Later, Trump asked a U.S. Coast Guard commander about trade, which he noted was a very big subject for him personally. Weve been taken advantage of for many, many years by bad trade deals, Trump told the commander, who sheepishly replied, Mr. President, from our perspective on the water we dont see any issues in terms of trade right now. And throughout, Trump congratulated himself, telling the officers that the country is doing exceptionally well on his watch. I hope that youll take solace in knowing that all of the American families you hold so close to your heart are all doing well, he said. The nations doing well economically, better than anybody in the world. He later told reporters, Nobodys done more for the military than me. Indeed, asked what he was thankful for this Thanksgiving, Trump cited his great family as well as himself. I made a tremendous difference in this country, he said. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Advertisement Trump contradicts CIA assessment that Saudi crown prince ordered Jamal Khashoggi killing By Josh Dawsey | Washington Post (Susan Walsh / Associated Press) President Trump on Thursday contradicted the CIAs assessment that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had ordered the killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, insisting that the agency had feelings but did not firmly place blame for the death. Trump, in defiant remarks to reporters from his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, defended his continued support for Mohammed in the face of a CIA assessment that the crown prince had ordered the killing. He denies it vehemently, Trump said. He said his own conclusion was that maybe he did, maybe he didnt. I hate the crime .... I hate the cover-up. I will tell you this: The crown prince hates it more than I do, Trump said. Asked who should be held accountable for the death of Khashoggi, who was killed at the Saudi Consulate in Turkey, Trump refused to place blame. Maybe the world should be held accountable because the world is a very, very vicious place, the president said. He also seemed to suggest that all U.S. allies were guilty of the same behavior, declaring that if the others were held to the standard that critics have held Saudi Arabia to in recent days, we wouldnt be able to have anyone for an ally. Trumps remarks came after he held a conference call with U.S. military officers overseas, during which he repeatedly praised his administration and sought to draw the officers into discussions of domestic policy. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Former FBI Director James Comey gets subpoena from House Republicans By Bloomberg Former FBI Director James B. Comey said he has received a subpoena from House Republicans, according to a Twitter post on Thursday. Bloomberg News reported last week that Comey would be receiving a subpoena alongside former Atty. Gen. Loretta Lynch as part of continuing probes into their handling of investigations into Hillary Clinton and Russian election meddling, according to a top House Democrat. Happy Thanksgiving. Got a subpoena from House Republicans. Im still happy to sit in the light and answer all questions. But I will resist a closed door thing because Ive seen enough of their selective leaking and distortion. Lets have a hearing and invite everyone to see. James Comey (@Comey) November 22, 2018 Read More Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Republican David Valadaos lead slips to 447 votes over Democrat TJ Cox in still-undecided Central Valley House race By Mark Z. Barabak Rep. David Valadao (R-Hanford), right, finds himself in an increasingly harrowing cliffhanger against Democrat TJ Cox. (Bill Clark / CQ Roll Call) On election night, it looked like Rep. David Valadao had survived a close shave and was destined to return to Washington for his fourth term. But on Wednesday, when Fresno County announced its latest vote totals, the Hanford Republican found himself in an increasingly harrowing cliffhanger against Democrat TJ Cox, with his lead in the Central Valley district shrunken to 447 votes. Thousands remain to be counted. Valadao, a repeated Democratic target, finished election night with a lead of nearly 4,440 votes. Cox, an engineer and a business owner who unsuccessfully ran for Congress in 2006, has steadily gained ground in the 21st Congressional District ever since. The trend is consistent with historic patterns showing Republicans in California tend to vote early and Democrats later, meaning their mail ballots continue to stream in past election day. Under California law, ballots postmarked up to midnight on Nov. 6 will be counted. Democrats have already picked up six House seats in California. They ousted Reps. Dana Rohrabacher, Mimi Walters, Steve Knight and Jeff Denham and won the seats of retiring Reps. Ed Royce and Darrell Issa. All six represented districts that backed Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump in 2016. Valadao was the seventh California Republican in a district Clinton won, though his previous successes he last won reelection by a 14-point margin suggested his ouster was a longer shot for Democrats. If Cox prevails, it would give Democrats a 40-seat gain nationwide, far more than the 23 seats needed to take control when Congress reconvenes in January. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Advertisement Trump says no new punishments against Saudi Arabia in Jamal Khashoggi murder By Eli Stokols In this Oct. 25 photo, candles are lit in front of a photo of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. (Lefteris Pitarakis) President Trump made it clear on Tuesday that he does not intend to punish Saudi Arabia or Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman for the murder of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi, an American resident killed by Saudi officials in Turkey in October. In a remarkable statement replete with exclamation points, Trump cast doubt on the CIAs reported conclusions that it has a high degree of confidence that the crown prince ordered Khashoggis murder and sent his closest allies to Saudi Arabias consulate in Istanbul to carry it out. Read MoreThis article has been updated with staff. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Sixteen House Democrats vow to oppose Nancy Pelosi as next speaker By Mike DeBonis | Washington Post House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (J. Scott Applewhite / Associated Press) Sixteen House Democrats said Monday that they will vote to deny Rep. Nancy Pelosi another stint as House speaker, a show of defiance that puts her opponents on the cusp of forcing a seismic leadership shake-up as their party prepares to take the majority. Their pledge to oppose Pelosi (D-San Francisco), both in an internal caucus election and a Jan. 3 floor vote, delivered in a letter sent to Democratic colleagues, comes as Pelosi has marshaled a legion of supporters on and off Capitol Hill to make her case. But her opponents said Monday they are convinced it is time to select a new leader. We are thankful to Leader Pelosi for her years of service to our Country and to our Caucus, they wrote. However, we also recognize that in this recent election, Democrats ran on and won on a message of change. Pelosi has expressed complete confidence that she will retake the speakers gavel in January eight years after she lost it following massive Republican gains in the 2010 midterms and 16 years after she was first elevated to the top Democratic leadership post in the House. Come on in, the waters fine, she said Friday about a potential leadership challenge. The signers might not be able to force Pelosi out themselves. The size of the Democratic majority remains in flux, but Democrats have already won 232 seats, according to the Associated Press, with five races still undecided. All those races have Republican incumbents, but the Democratic challenger is ahead in only one of them. If the leads hold in the uncalled races, Democrats would have won 233 seats, a 16-seat majority. That means Pelosi could lose as many as 15 Democratic votes when she stands for election as speaker on Jan. 3. Read More Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Democratic senators sue over Whitakers appointment as acting attorney general By Associated Press Acting U.S. Atty. Gen. Matthew Whitaker (Nicholas Kamm / AFP/Getty Images) Three Senate Democrats filed a lawsuit Monday arguing that Acting Atty. Gen. Matthew Whitakers appointment is unconstitutional and asking a federal judge to remove him. The suit, filed by Sens. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, Mazie Hirono of Hawaii and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, argues that Whitakers appointment violates the Constitution because he has not been confirmed by the Senate. Whitaker was chief of staff to Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions and was elevated to the top job after Sessions was ousted by President Trump on Nov. 7. The Constitutions Appointments Clause requires that the Senate confirm all principal officials before they can serve in their office. The Justice Department released a legal opinion last week that said Whitakers appointment would not violate the clause because he is serving in an acting capacity. The opinion concluded that Whitaker, even without Senate confirmation, may serve in an acting capacity because he has been at the department for more than a year at a sufficiently senior pay level. President Trump is denying senators our constitutional obligation and opportunity to do our job: scrutinizing the nomination of our nations top law enforcement official, Blumenthal said in a statement. The reason is simple: Whitaker would never pass the advice and consent test. In selecting a so-called constitutional nobody and thwarting every senators constitutional duty, Trump leaves us no choice but to seek recourse through the courts. The lawsuit comes days after a Washington lawyer challenged Whitakers appointment in a pending Supreme Court case dealing with gun rights. The attorney, Thomas Goldstein, asked the high court to find that Whitakers appointment is unconstitutional and replace him with Deputy Atty. Gen. Rod Rosenstein. Rosenstein, the second-ranking Justice Department official, has been confirmed by the Senate and had been overseeing special counsel Robert Muellers Russia investigation. Whitaker is now overseeing the investigation. The Justice Department issued a statement Monday defending Whitakers appointment as lawful and said it comports with the Appointments Clause, the Federal Vacancies Reform Act and legal precedent. There are over 160 instances in American history in which non-Senate confirmed persons performed, on a temporary basis, the duties of a Senate-confirmed position, Justice Department spokeswoman Kerri Kupec said. To suggest otherwise is to ignore centuries of practice and precedent. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Advertisement Gov. Rick Scott says Sen. Bill Nelson concedes Florida Senate race By Associated Press Republican Senate candidate Rick Scott speaks with his wife, Ann, by his side at an election watch party in Naples, Fla., on Nov. 7. (Wilfredo Lee / Associated Press) Floridas Republican Gov. Rick Scott says incumbent Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson called him to concede defeat in their extremely tight race. Scott issued a statement Sunday saying Nelson graciously conceded their Senate race shortly after the states recount ended. The final results show Scott defeated Nelson by just over 10,000 votes out of 8 million cast. Nelson is scheduled to release a videotaped statement later Sunday. The defeat ends Nelsons lengthy political career. The three-term incumbent was first elected to the U.S. Senate in 2000. Before that he served six terms in the U.S. House and as state treasurer and insurance commissioner for six years. Scott spent more than $60 million of his own money on ads that portrayed Nelson as out-of-touch and ineffective. Nelson responded by questioning Scotts ethics and saying he would be under the sway of President Trump. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Orange County goes blue, as Democrats complete historic sweep of its seven congressional seats By Michael Finnegan Gil Cisneros defeated Republican Young Kim on Saturday in the last of Orange Countys undecided House races, giving Democrats a clean sweep of the states six most fiercely fought congressional contests and marking an epochal shift in a region long synonymous with political conservatism. With Cisneros victory, Democrats will constitute the entirety of Orange Countys seven-member congressional delegation, the first time since the 1930s that the birthplace of Richard Nixon, home of John Wayne and spiritual center of the Republican Party will have no GOP representative in the House. Sitting back in the 1960s, I would never have believed this would happen, said Stuart K. Spencer, a party strategist who spent more than half a century ushering Republicans, including President Reagan, into office. Read More Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Going, going ... with midterm wipeout, California Republican Party drifts closer to irrelevance By Michael Finnegan For a party in freefall the last two decades, California Republicans learned that its possible to plunge even further. The GOP not only lost every statewide office in the midterm election again, in blowout fashion but Democrats reestablished their supermajority in Sacramento, allowing them to legislate however they see fit After major defeats in Orange County and the Central Valley, two longtime strongholds, Republicans will have a significantly smaller footprint on Capitol Hill. (Democrats hold both Senate seats.) When the vote-counting is finished, the GOP may not even have enough lawmakers in Californias 53-member House delegation to field a nine-person softball team. Read More Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Congresswoman-elect Katie Porter says she will support Rep. Nancy Pelosi for speaker By Maya Sweedler Democratic Rep.-elect Katie Porter is congratulated by volunteers at her campaign headquarters in Irvine. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times) Congresswoman-elect Katie Porter said she plans to support Rep. Nancy Pelosis bid for speaker of the House and will make campaign finance reform her top priority when she enters the chamber in January. Im going to continue to have conversations, but so far I feel like Leader Pelosi is definitely making the things that were a priority to the families that elected me her priorities, including announcing her support for campaign finance reform and anti-corruption as HR1, Porter said in her first public appearance since being declared the winner in Californias 45th Congressional District on Thursday evening. It means a lot to me that she is a Californian. She understands our state, Porter added. When we talk about environmental protections, this is a person who understands as a Californian how fragile our environment is and whats at risk in things like drilling off our coasts. Porter, a law professor at UC Irvine, defeated two-term Republican Rep. Mimi Walters. The 45th District, covering inland Orange County, has never been represented by a Democrat. Porter became the third Democrat to claim a Republican-held seat in Orange County, following the victories of Harley Rouda in the 48th District and Mike Levin in the 49th. A fourth, Gil Cisneros, is running slightly ahead of his Republican opponent in the race for the open seat in the 39th District, which extends into Los Angeles and San Bernardino counties. Porter attributed the massive political shift in the county, for decades a conservative stronghold, to increased levels of political engagement. Folks here care about education, they care about the environment, they believe climate change is real, they want healthcare that protects preexisting conditions, they want a tax system that doesnt punish California, they want our schools and places of worship to be safe from gun violence, she said. Those are the issues we campaigned on, and to the extent that Donald Trump and Mimi Walters were on the wrong side of those issues, the voters have made clear what direction they want us to go. Porter was flying back from the East Coast when her race was called, she said. She turned on her phone to find 167 text messages from friends and supporters. Among them was Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who was one of Porters teachers in law school and with whom she has remained close. The pair spoke via FaceTime this morning, she said. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Advertisement Bitter battle for Senate seat in Florida goes to hand recount By Associated Press Employees look through damaged ballots during a recount Thursday in West Palm Beach, Fla. (Wilfredo Lee / Associated Press) Floridas acrimonious battle for the U.S. Senate headed Thursday to a legally required hand recount after an initial review by ballot-counting machines showed Republican Gov. Rick Scott and Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson separated by less than 13,000 votes. But the highly watched contest for governor between Republican Ron DeSantis and Democrat Andrew Gillum appeared to be over, with a machine recount showing DeSantis with a large enough advantage over Gillum to avoid a hand recount in that race. Gillum, who conceded the contest on election night only to retract his concession later, said in a statement that it is not over until every legally casted vote is counted. The recount so far has been fraught with problems. One large Democratic stronghold in South Florida was unable to finish its machine recount by the Thursday deadline due to machines breaking down. A federal judge rejected a request to extend the recount deadline. We gave a heroic effort, said Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections Susan Bucher. If the county had three or four more hours, it would have made the deadline to recount ballots in the Senate race, she said. Meanwhile, election officials in another urban county in the Tampa Bay area decided against turning in the results of their machine recount, which came up with 846 fewer votes than originally counted. Media in South Florida reported that Broward County finished its machine recount but missed the deadline by a few minutes. Counties were ordered last weekend to do a machine recount of three statewide races because the margins were so tight. The next stage is a manual review of ballots that were not counted by machines to see whether there is a way to figure out voter intent. Scott called on Nelson to end the recount battle. Its time for Nelson to respect the will of the voters and graciously bring this process to an end rather than proceed with yet another count of the votes which will yield the same result and bring more embarrassment to the state that we both love and have served, the governor said in a statement. The recount has triggered multiple lawsuits, many of them filed by Nelson and Democrats. The legal battles drew the ire of U.S. District Judge Mark E. Walker, who slammed the state for repeatedly failing to anticipate election problems. He also said the state law on recounts appears to violate the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that decided the presidency in 2000. We have been the laughingstock of the world, election after election, and we chose not to fix this, Walker said during a morning hearing. Walker vented his anger at state lawmakers and Palm Beach County officials, saying they should have made sure they had enough equipment in place to handle this kind of a recount. But he said he could not extend the recount deadline because he did not know when Palm Beach County would finish its work. This court must be able to craft a remedy with knowledge that it will not prove futile, Walker wrote in his ruling turning down the request from Democrats. It cannot do so on this record. This court does not and will not fashion a remedy in the dark. The overarching problem was created by the Florida Legislature, which Walker said passed a recount law that appears to run afoul of the 2000 Bush vs. Gore decision by locking in procedures that do not allow for potential problems. A total of six election-related lawsuits are pending in federal court in Tallahassee as well at least one lawsuit filed in state court. Walker also ordered that voters be given until 5 p.m. Saturday to show a valid identification and fix their ballots if they have not been counted due to mismatched signatures. Republicans appealed the ruling, but an appeals court turned down the request. State officials testified that nearly 4,000 mailed-in ballots were set aside because local officials decided the signatures on the envelopes did not match the signatures on file. If those voters can prove their identity, their votes will be counted and included in final official returns due from each county by noon Sunday. Walker was asked by Democrats to require local officials to provide a list of people whose ballots were rejected. But the judge appointed by President Obama refused the request, calling it inappropriate. Under state law, a hand review is required with races that have a margin of 0.25 percentage points or less. A state website put the unofficial results showing Scott ahead of Nelson by 0.15 percentage points. The margin between DeSantis and Gillum was at 0.41 points. The margin between Scott and Nelson had not changed much in the last few days, conceded Marc Elias, an attorney working for Nelsons campaign. But he said that he expected the vote tally to shrink due to the hand recount and the ruling on signatures. The developments fueled frustrations among Democrats and Republicans alike. Democrats want state officials to do whatever it takes to make sure every eligible vote is counted. Republicans, including President Trump, have argued without evidence that voter fraud threatens to steal races from the GOP. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Democrat Gil Cisneros pulls ahead of Republican Young Kim as more votes are tallied in Orange and San Bernardino counties By Michael Finnegan Congressional candidate Gil Cisneros (Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times) Democrat Gil Cisneros pulled ahead of Republican Young Kim in one of Californias undecided congressional races Thursday, an ominous sign for a GOP already reeling from its loss of four House seats in the state. In updated vote counts released by the registrars for Orange and San Bernardino counties, Kim fell 941 votes behind Cisneros in the contest to succeed Republican Rep. Ed Royce in Californias 39th Congressional District. The 39th straddles Los Angeles, San Bernardino and Orange counties. In another unresolved House race, Democrat Katie Porter pulled further ahead of Republican incumbent Mimi Walters in the 45th District, which includes Mission Viejo, Tustin, Irvine, Rancho Santa Margarita and Laguna Hills. Porter, a consumer attorney and UC Irvine law professor, is now 6,203 votes ahead. The Nov. 6 midterm election has been devastating to Republicans in California. If Cisneros and Porter win, the party will have lost six of its 14 House seats in the state, essentially a wipeout in every contest that both parties spent heavily to win. The three Republicans already bounced from Congress are Reps. Dana Rohrabacher of Costa Mesa, Steve Knight of Palmdale and Jeff Denham of Turlock in the San Joaquin Valley. Democrat Mike Levin won the seat of retiring GOP Rep. Darrell Issa of Vista in the fourth district flipped so far. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Florida Senate race likely headed to second recount By Associated Press A Palm Beach County Sheriffs deputy walks past boxes of ballots before a recount on Nov. 15 in West Palm Beach, Fla. (Wilfredo Lee) Unofficial Florida election results show that the governors race seems to be settled after a machine recount but the U.S. Senate race is likely headed to a hand recount. Republican Ron DeSantis is virtually assured of winning the nationally watched governors race over Democrat Andrew Gillum. Florida finished a machine recount Thursday that showed Gillum without enough votes to force a manual recount. Unofficial results posted on a state website show the margin between U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson and Gov. Rick Scott is still thin enough to trigger a second review. State law requires a hand recount of races with a margin of 0.25 percentage point or less. Counties have until Sunday to inspect the ballots that did not record a vote when put through the machines. Those ballots are re-examined to see whether the voter skipped the race or marked the ballot in a way that the machines cannot read but can be deciphered. The election will be certified Tuesday. Read More Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Pelosi says she has the votes to become the next House speaker By John Wagner Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi speaks during a news conference in Washington on Nov. 14. (Susan Walsh) House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi insisted Thursday that she has the votes to become the chambers speaker despite solid opposition from more than a dozen Democrats who want fresh leadership when the party takes control next year. I have overwhelming support in my caucus to be speaker of the House, the San Francisco lawmaker told reporters. I happen to think at this point, Im the best person for that. A vote within the Democratic caucus is scheduled for Nov. 28. The full House votes on Jan. 3 to elect a new speaker. During her remarks, Pelosi touted the size of the Democratic victory in the midterms, which she called almost a tsunami. With a few races still to be decided, Democrats are poised to pick up close to 40 seats in the chamber. Pelosi called that the biggest victory for the Democrats since 1974, when the Watergate babies came in. Pelosis comments come as she faces solid opposition from at least 17 Democrats, setting the stage for a battle over who will ascend to one of the most powerful positions in Washington. After a campaign in which some Democrats prevailed in competitive districts by promising to oppose her, a coalition of incumbents and newly elected members has denied her a smooth path to the speakership. The defections, if they stand, would leave Pelosi, who has led the Democrats for more than 15 years, several votes short of the 218 she would need when the full House votes for speaker Jan. 3. However, no Democrat has stepped forward to run against her for a job she held from 2007 through 2010. Rep. Marcia Fudge (D-Ohio) told reporters Wednesday that shes being encouraged to stand for speaker if Pelosi doesnt have the votes. In an interview with the Washington Post on Thursday, she said she has been overwhelmed by the support from many of her colleagues for her possible entry into the race for House speaker. Over the last 12 hours, Ive been overwhelmed by the amount of support Ive received, Fudge said, adding that there are probably closer to 30" Democrats who have privately signaled that they are willing to oppose Pelosi. Things could change rapidly, Fudge said. Fudge, 66, a former chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, said she is building a diverse coalition as she mulls a speaker run, talking with allies in the caucus, moderate Democrats and newly elected members. To this point, Pelosi has enjoyed the strong backing of the Congressional Black Caucus. On Thursday, Rep. Bobby Rush (D-Ill.), one of its members, wrote a letter to colleagues praising her insight, fortitude and strategic thinking and urging support for her speakership bid. Former Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr., an African American who is contemplating a 2020 presidential bid, also voiced support for Pelosi, praising her in a tweet as an architect of the recent midterm success. Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.), a leader of the resistance to Pelosi, said during an interview on CNN on Thursday that Fudge is the kind of new leader that we need in this party. Shes in touch with middle America. She understands what the American people want. Shes a next-generation leader that people will look to and say, Thats the future of our party, thats the future of our country, and thats exactly the kind of leader that I want to see as our next speaker. Wagner reports for the Washington Post. The Posts Robert Costa, Erica Werner, Mike DeBonis, Paul Kane and Elise Viebeck contributed to this report. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Advertisement GOP Rep. Jeff Denham concedes to Democrat Josh Harder in Central Valley race By Maya Sweedler Rep. Jeff Denham (Bill Clark / CQ Roll Call) Republican Rep. Jeff Denham has conceded to Democrat Josh Harder in the race to represent Californias 10th Congressional District in the San Joaquin Valley. It has been an absolute honor to serve our community and represent the Central Valley in Congress over the past eight years, the 51-year-old congressman said. The enormity of the responsibility was never lost on me. My wife Sonia and I look forward to starting the next chapter of our lives. Harder said he had spoken with Denham and the two were committed to a productive transition. Denham, an Air Force veteran, previously represented the region in the state Senate for eight years and founded a company specializing in plastic packaging used in agriculture. While a member of Congress, he sat on the Transportation and Infrastructure, Veterans Affairs and Agriculture committees. First-time candidate Harder was born and raised in the district. After graduating from Stanford University, he served as vice president of a Silicon Valley venture capital firm. Since moving back, he has been teaching at Modesto Junior College. Denhams House seat is one of four in California that Republicans lost in the Nov. 6 election, with two contests in Orange County still undecided as of Thursday morning. Jeff Denham called me this morning and we had a very productive conversation. I'm honored that I've been chosen to serve our community in Congress, and we're both looking forward to a productive transition that best serves the people of District 10. Josh Harder (@JoshHarder) November 14, 2018 Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Democrat Katie Porter now nearly 3,800 votes ahead of GOP Rep. Mimi Walters By Maya Sweedler Rep. Mimi Walters thanks all of her supporters as she watches election results in Irvine on Nov. 7, 2018. (Alex Gallardo / Associated Press) Democrat Katie Porter opened a 3,797-vote lead Wednesday over Republican Rep. Mimi Walters in Orange Countys 45th Congressional District. In the neighboring 39th, Democrat Gil Cisneros has nearly tied the race against Republican Young Kim. Cisneros now trails Kim by a razor-thin margin of 122 votes. The 39th District straddles Los Angeles, Orange and San Bernardino counties; Wednesdays updated ballot counts came from the latter two. There are more than 202,000 ballots left to count in Orange County, which includes parts of seven congressional districts. The 45th is entirely in inland Orange County. In California, the ballots counted first tend to lean Republican and those tallied later skew Democratic. In the Central Valleys 21st Congressional District, Democratic challenger TJ Cox has pulled within 2 percentage points of Rep. David Valadao, who is serving his third term. The Associated Press had projected a win for Valadao on election night, but his 4,839-vote advantage has shrunk to 2,090. Back in CA-21, Valadao (R) wins a batch of ballots from his stronghold in Kings Co., but by a considerably smaller margin (14 points) than his previous ~30-point margin in the county. We're moving to Lean R from Likely R; today a bit scary for Valadao.https://t.co/WqJVUVkqGW Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) November 15, 2018 A spokesman for Valadao told the Fresno Bee that the changes were expected and that [s]tatistically, David Valadao has won this race. Democrats in California have already flipped four House seats, defeating three Republican incumbents and claiming an open seat previously held by the GOP. Reps. Steve Knight of Palmdale, Dana Rohrabacher of Costa Mesa and Jeff Denham of Turlock have already lost their races, and retiring Rep. Darrell Issas San Diego County seat was claimed by Democrat Mike Levin. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Trump aide departs West Wing after rebuke from Melania Trump By Associated Press First Lady Melania Trump. (Alain Jocard / AFP-Getty Images) Deputy national security advisor Mira Ricardel is leaving the White House, one day after First Lady Melania Trumps office issued an extraordinary statement calling for her dismissal. No replacement was named. Aides said Ricardel clashed with the first ladys staff over her visit to Africa last month. Yet it is highly unusual for a first lady or her office to weigh in on personnel matters, especially the presidents national security staff. White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Ricardel would have a new role in the administration. On Tuesday, Stephanie Grisham, the first ladys spokeswoman, released a statement saying, It is the position of the Office of the First Lady that she no longer deserves the honor of serving in this White House. President Trumps White House has set records for administration turnover. Ricardel was the third person to hold the post under Trump. An ally of national security advisor John Bolton, Ricardel began her service in the Trump administration as associate director in the White House Office of Presidential Personnel, then moved to the Commerce Department last year. Bolton brought her into the West Wing shortly after taking the job in April. He is traveling in Asia this week alongside Vice President Mike Pence. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Race for House Minority Leader is Kevin McCarthys to lose By Associated Press (Bill Clark / CQ Roll Call) House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy is running to take over next years shrunken caucus in closed-door elections that will set the tone for the new Congress. The race for minority leader is McCarthys to lose Wednesday. But the California Republican, who is an ally of President Trump, must fend off a challenge from conservative Jim Jordan of Ohio. Jordan is a leader of the House Freedom Caucus. The two encountered questions and finger-pointing during a private meeting with lawmakers Tuesday night as the GOP sorted through the midterm defeat that put Democrats in the majority next year. Elections Wednesday will also determine party leadership in the Senate. Voting for the biggest race, Nancy Pelosis bid to return as the Democrats nominee for speaker, is later this month. Read More Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Advertisement Melania Trump calls for the firing of deputy national security advisor By Justin Sink First Lady Melania Trump arrives at the Chateau de Versailles outside Paris on Nov. 11. (Alain Jocard / AFP/Getty Images ) First Lady Melania Trumps office said she wants Mira Ricardel, the deputy national security advisor, ousted from the White House. It is the position of the Office of the First Lady that she no longer deserves the honor of serving in this White House, Trumps spokeswoman, Stephanie Grisham, said in a statement in response to a question about reports the first lady had sought Ricardels removal. Ricardel is the top deputy to national security advisor John Bolton. She drew the first ladys wrath after threatening to withhold National Security Council resources during Melania Trumps trip to Africa last month unless Ricardel was included in her entourage, one person familiar with the matter said. Grishams statement comes as several media outlets have reported that President Trump is considering a broader shakeup of his administration, including ousting Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen. Sink and Jacobs report for Bloomberg. Read More Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print CNN sues Trump over the suspension of Jim Acostas White House press credentials By Jim Puzzanghera CNN said Tuesday that it is suing President Trump and other administration officials over the decision to suspend the White House press credentials of correspondent Jim Acosta after a conflict at a news conference last week. The suit, to be filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, escalates an ongoing battle between Trump and the cable news outlet that he frequently accuses of disseminating fake news for its aggressive coverage of him and his administration. The wrongful revocation of these credentials violates CNN and Acostas 1st Amendment rights of freedom of the press, and their 5th Amendment rights to due process, CNN said in a written statement. If left unchallenged, the actions of the White House would create a dangerous chilling effect for any journalist who covers our elected officials. Read More Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Maxine Waters to take aim at Wells Fargo and Deutsche Bank as new head of House Financial Services Committee By Jim Puzzanghera Rep. Maxine Waters plans to zero in on two big banks Wells Fargo & Co. and Deutsche Bank when she becomes head of the powerful House Financial Services Committee. The Los Angeles congresswoman, now the committees top Democrat, is widely expected to gain the gavel after her party won control of the House in last weeks elections. While Waters has outlined a wide-ranging agenda, she said her focus on bank oversight will target two large institutions she has been tangling with for a while including one, Deutsche Bank, that spills into her bitter feud with President Trump. With Trump in the White House, I know that our fight for Americas consumers and investors will continue to be challenging. But I am more than up to that fight, Waters wrote in a letter last week to her Democratic colleagues on the committee that was obtained by The Times. Read More Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Advertisement Heres how a controversial voting system will decide a congressional race in Maine By Kurtis Lee For the first time in U.S. history, a controversial voting system known as ranked choice is being used to decide a federal election. Its happening in Maine, which adopted the system in 2016. Rather than marking a single candidate, each voter ranks them all, assigning a first-place vote, a second-place vote and so on down the ballot. Read More Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print ACLU files suit to stop Trumps new asylum limits By Associated Press A group of Central American migrants march to the office of the U.N.'s humans rights body in Mexico City on Nov. 8. (Rebecca Blackwell / Associated Press) The American Civil Liberties Union has filed a legal challenge to President Trumps order denying asylum to migrants if they cross the U.S.-Mexico border illegally. The lawsuit was filed Friday in federal court in San Francisco and argues the new rules are against the law. Attorney Lee Gelernt said the regulations will put families in danger. The suit seeks to declare the regulations invalid and wants a judge to stop the rules from going into effect while the litigation is pending. The new rules were spurred in part by caravans of Central American migrants slowly moving north on foot, but officials say they will apply to anyone caught crossing illegally. Officials say about 70,000 people who enter the country illegally claim asylum. The order invoked the same national security powers Trump used to push through his travel ban. Read More Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Trump on new acting AG: I dont know Matt Whitaker By Associated Press President Trump talks with reporters before departing for France on the South Lawn of the White House on Nov. 9. (Evan Vucci / Associated Press) President Trump is moving to distance himself from Matthew Whitaker as he faces criticism over his choice for acting attorney general. Trump told reporters Friday that I dont know Matt Whitaker and said he didnt speak with Whitaker about special counsel Robert Muellers Russia investigation. Whitaker has made public comments critical of Muellers investigation, and critics have called on Whitaker to recuse himself from oversight of the inquiry. Under former Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions, the investigation was overseen by Deputy Atty. Gen. Rod Rosenstein. Of the scrutiny Whitaker is facing, Trump said: Its a shame that no matter who I put in they go after. He also called Whitaker a very highly respected man. Whitaker was Sessions chief of staff before Trump made him Sessions interim replacement. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Advertisement Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg out of hospital after fall By Associated Press The Supreme Court says 85-year-old Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is home after being released from the hospital. She had been admitted for treatment and observation after fracturing three ribs in a fall. The court said Ginsburg was released Friday. Supreme Court spokeswoman Kathy Arberg says she is doing well and working from home. The court had previously said the justice fell in her office at the court on Wednesday evening and went to George Washington University Hospital in Washington early Thursday after experiencing discomfort overnight. Ginsburg broke two ribs in a fall in 2012. She had two prior bouts with cancer and had a stent implanted to open a blocked artery in 2014. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Gun-control activist Lucy McBath defeats GOP Rep. Karen Handel in Georgia By Associated Press Lucy McBath speaks during a rally for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams on Nov. 2 at Morehouse College in Atlanta. (Alyssa Pointer / Atlanta Journal-Constitution via AP) Democratic gun-control activist Lucy McBath has defeated Republican Rep. Karen Handel of Georgia in a suburban congressional district long considered safe for the GOP. Handel had to seek reelection after winning her seat last year in a close special election race against Democrat Jon Ossoff. McBath became an advocate for stricter gun laws after her son, Jordan Davis, was fatally shot at a Florida gas station in 2012 by a man angry over loud music the teenager and his friends were playing in a car. McBaths margin of victory was narrow enough for Handel to have requested a recount. The Associated Press declared McBath the winner Thursday after Handel conceded. Handel conceded in a statement Thursday morning, stating that after reviewing all of the election data, its clear she came up a bit short in Tuesdays vote. Handel congratulated McBath, offering good thoughts and much prayer for the journey that lies ahead for her. McBath, who is African American, declared victory Wednesday. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg hospitalized after fracturing 3 ribs in fall By Associated Press Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (Jacquelyn Martin / Associated Press) The Supreme Court says 85-year-old Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg fractured three ribs in a fall in her office at the court and is in the hospital. The court says the justice went to George Washington University Hospital in Washington early Thursday after experiencing discomfort overnight. The court says the fall occurred Wednesday evening. Ginsburg was admitted to the hospital for treatment and observation after tests showed she fractured three ribs. Ginsburg broke two ribs in a fall in 2012. She has had two prior bouts with cancer and had a stent implanted to open a blocked artery in 2014. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print White House suspends press pass of CNNs Jim Acosta after heated exchange with Trump By Associated Press The White House on Wednesday suspended the press pass of CNN correspondent Jim Acosta after he and President Trump had a heated confrontation during a news conference. They began sparring after Acosta asked Trump about the caravan of migrants heading from Latin America to the southern U.S. border. When Acosta tried to follow up with another question, Trump said, Thats enough! and a female White House aide unsuccessfully tried to grab the microphone from Acosta. White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders released a statement accusing Acosta of placing his hands on a young woman just trying to do her job as a White House intern, calling it absolutely unacceptable. The interaction between Acosta and the intern was brief, and Acosta appeared to brush her arm as she reached for the microphone and he tried to hold onto it. Pardon me, maam, he told her. Acosta tweeted that Sanders statement that he put his hands on the aide was a lie. CNN said in a statement that the White House revoked Acostas press pass in retaliation for his challenging questions Wednesday, and the network accused Sanders of lying about Acostas actions. This conduct is absolutely unacceptable. It is also completely disrespectful to the reporters colleagues not to allow them an opportunity to ask a question. President Trump has given the press more access than any President in history. Stephanie Grisham (@PressSec) November 8, 2018 Contrary to CNNs assertions there is no greater demonstration of the Presidents support for a free press than the event he held today. Only they would attack the President for not supporting a free press in the midst of him taking 68 questions from 35 different reporters... Stephanie Grisham (@PressSec) November 8, 2018 As a result of todays incident, the White House is suspending the hard pass of the reporter involved until further notice. Stephanie Grisham (@PressSec) November 8, 2018 Sanders provided fraudulent accusations and cited an incident that never happened. This unprecedented decision is a threat to our democracy and the country deserves better, CNN said. Jim Acosta has our full support. Journalists assigned to cover the White House apply for passes that allow them daily access to press areas in the West Wing. White House staffers decide whether journalists are eligible, though the Secret Service determines whether their applications are approved. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Advertisement Trump spars with reporters at post-election news briefing, ordering several to sit down By Associated Press President Trump assails CNNs Jim Acosta at a White House news conference. President Trump sparred with reporters at his post-election news conference, ordering several to sit down and telling another hes a rude, terrible person. He told another reporter hes not a fan of yours, either. The presidents mood turned sour Wednesday after reporters pressed him on why he referred to a migrant caravan making its way to the U.S. on foot through Mexico as an invasion. Trump ramped up his anti-immigrant rhetoric against the caravan in the final days of the midterm elections. Trump was also pressed on why his campaign aired an ad featuring a Mexican immigrant convicted of killing American police officers and linking the mans actions to the caravan. Several television networks pulled the ad after airing it or declined to air it at all. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Im living one hour at a time at this point By Christine Mai-Duc Republican congressional candidate Young Kim and gubernatorial candidate John Cox campaign in Rowland Heights. (Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times) Republican congressional candidate Young Kim greeted gubernatorial candidate John Coxs giant campaign bus, the words HELP IS ON THE WAY emblazoned across it, as it rolled into the parking lot outside her Rowland Heights field office. Standing beside Cox on Saturday, Kim predicted that a string of GOP victories Tuesday would start with voters repealing the gas tax hike. Can you imagine Gavin Newsom being our governor? Can you imagine Gil Cisneros being your representative? Kim asked the crowd, to loud boos and cries of Nooo! The former state assemblywoman who worked for retiring Rep. Ed Royce (R-Fullerton) is vying for his seat with Democrat Gil Cisneros. She led the crowd in chants of Enough is enough! and, though short-lived, Drain the swamp! Ive served you in Sacramento and Ive seen dysfunction personally, Kim continued. We cannot continue that route. She urged her supporters to stay and help make phone calls or walk neighborhoods. Lets get out there the 72 hours is really critical. Its all going to come down to a few votes, it could be your vote, she said pointing to her left, then pivoting right, it could be your vote. So dont sit back and do nothing. Every night I go to sleep thinking, OK, how many more votes can I get or how many more people can I call tomorrow? Kim said. It can be physically exhausting but Im mentally, emotionally very energized. She listed off her events so far that day and the next one she was heading to. Thats just what I can remember, she said. Im living one hour at a time at this point. Kims campaign invited press to two of her events on Saturday. After she was whisked away to her next event a high tea fundraiser in Walnut, a couple dozen volunteers remained. John Freeman, a statewide field manager for the state Republican Party, tried to pump them up. This is the Super Bowl. Were not in an NFL stadium, were not getting paid millions of dollars, but you know what? Freeman said. Were walking on the field right now. This is that high-stakes-level game. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Copy Link URL Copied! Print Advertisement Its going to be tough out there Democratic candidate Katie Porter speaks to volunteers in Mission Viejo. Jon Bauman, Bowzer from the band Sha Na Na, is in the background. (Victoria Kim / Los Angeles Times ) Judging from the cheers in the crowd, about half those assembled at Katie Porters campaign headquarters in Mission Viejo Sunday morning were old enough to remember 70s rock n roll star Bowzer from the band Sha Na Na. Jon Bauman, as Bowzer is known off stage, said it was her position on senior issues including retirement and social security that has him out supporting Porter over her opponent, incumbent Rep. Mimi Walters. I want you to make sure every phone is called and every door is knocked, he told the crowd of about 80 volunteers. There has never been a more important election. Both Bauman and his nephew, California Democratic Party Chairman Eric Bauman, were interrupted by yells from Trump supporters coming from an adjoining hillside. We love Trump, the voice cried out. We love him too, he makes great fodder, the younger Bauman retorted, before introducing Porter. Porter, a UC Irvine law professor and first-time candidate, acknowledged the uphill battle some of her canvassers might face in this more conservative end of the long-red Orange County district. I know its going to be tough out there, she said, motioning to the hillside. But she said the attacks meant the other side viewed her campaign as a significant threat. This election is going to be close, she said. If we dont fight all the way to the finish line, until 8 oclock on Tuesday, this could slip away. Bowzer then took to a keyboard piano to lead the crowd in a reworded rendition of the song Good Night Sweetheart: Good night, Mimi Walters, he crooned. A woman in a black tank top, jeans and flip flops holding a cup of coffee later joined the crowd with her two sons, 17 and 14, the younger one wearing a Trump 2016 T-shirt. She declined to give her name, saying she was concerned about being attacked, but said she lived up the hill and said she had been the one yelling. She said she was encouraging her sons to talk to people on both sides and make up their own minds. We need to have a government that runs the way government teachers are telling kids its supposed to be run, said the woman, a retired registered dental assistant who voted early for Mimi Walters. Referring to Democrats, she said: Theyve had control over all these years and Californias gone to crap. Among those canvassing was Stacie Campbell, 37, who was at the launch with her husband Jerome and three children, the youngest of whom was 2 months old. Campbell, a Mission Viejo resident who runs a business, had never canvassed or volunteered for campaigns before, and her husband is a French citizen and unable to vote. She said they had been talking to their children the older ones are 5 and 2 about the presidency and the government since Trumps election. Together, they worked on homemade Katie Porter lawn signs and put them up around town. This is the first time its felt like a big deal and there isnt a president up for election, she said. Because her city is a mix of conservatives and liberals her next-door neighbor is an NRA-supporting Republican she the race felt m Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti is not well known in this rural Southern town of 2,882 residents. So there were lots of questions when the dapper 47-year-old Democrat, who presides over a city of nearly 4 million, strolled into a local health and fitness center Wednesday evening, grinning broadly as a crowd of more than 100 seniors finished their dinner of fried chicken and mac and cheese. Whats his name? whispered Patricia Randolph, 63, a retired school teacher, as she eyed the trim politician in the sleek, dark gray suit. I wonder what hes doing here? said James Lewis, 67, a rental property owner who teaches yoga at the center. Advertisement Garcetti, who is mulling a bid for the White House in 2020, was tight-lipped about his national aspirations as he traveled more than 2,000 miles from California to South Carolina, a pivotal election state that typically hosts the Souths first presidential primary. Im just being mayor of L.A., he said with a chuckle after stepping off a bus tour of Columbia, S.C., on Wednesday with his counterpart there, Steve Benjamin. Garcetti billed his trip to South Carolina as a meeting of Accelerator for America, a nonprofit group he set up to encourage local leaders to share successful policies to generate jobs and build infrastructure. It was also an opportunity for political networking. He attended a Democratic Party fundraiser in Columbia, spoke at a Democratic town hall meeting in Hopkins, visited Clemson Universitys automotive research center and toured both Columbia and Greenville. While the 2020 political calendar has not been set, South Carolina is expected to resume its customary place as the fourth contest in the Democratic nominating process, after the Iowa caucuses, New Hampshire primary and Nevada caucuses. Garcetti, who has been criticized in Los Angeles for frequent trips to raise money and campaign for other Democrats, has already visited New Hampshire and Nevada. Its time to test the waters, said Charles Bierbauer, a professor of journalism at the University of South Carolina and a former White House reporter for CNN. Hes got to make connections here. Garcetti, a Jewish Latino who easily won reelection last year with 81% of the vote, would probably face steep odds in a presidential election. No mayor in American history has gone directly from City Hall to the White House. (Three presidents Andrew Johnson, Grover Cleveland and Calvin Coolidge had been mayors, but they served as governors in between.) And while some political observers say the 2016 election of President Trump proves anything is possible, others question whether Garcettis talents in presiding over one of the nations largest and most left-leaning cities will resonate with swing voters in purple states. Advertisement Number one, hes extraordinary liberal, and number two, hes Hollywood chic, said Richard Harpootlian, a South Carolina attorney and former chairman of the state Democratic Party, who favors Joe Biden. Look, hes got that Beverly Hills haircut. Folks here dont pay $200 for a haircut! In Hopkins, which sits about 10 miles southeast of Columbia, Garcetti urged local Democrats to reject the idea that America was a nation divided between east and west, rural and urban, Democrat and Republican, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. Yes, its true. I come from Los Angeles, and we have a few more Kardashians than you do, Garcetti told the crowd of mostly African American seniors. But we are mostly nurses and firefighters and factory workers and janitors and people who have dreams and hopes and are frustrated as you are about the direction of this country. He repeatedly emphasized seizing control at the local, grass-roots level: Washington is broken, but American cities are not. Advertisement We cant await a savior in 2020, he said to loud cheers. This is not about whos in the White House although we need to kick that guy out whos there. This is about the statehouse, this is about the school board, this is about mayors and the city council. Asked how he would tackle income inequality, Garcetti acknowledged severe challenges. Los Angeles voters, he said, had taken a major step in passing Measure M, the plan to raise sales taxes to generate $120 billion and hundreds of thousands of U.S. jobs over 40 years to fund a major overhaul of the citys road and rail transportation. Yet he noted that as he looked to build 15 rail lines across his city, he found there was not a single American company that builds trains. Today we need to put assembly lines together to build those trains and that port equipment and to build those tunnels and to fix those bridges, he said. That is an example of middle-class jobs that will deal with income inequality. Advertisement It was Garcettis personal story of his familys humble beginnings as immigrants his paternal grandfather was carried across the Mexico-U.S. border as a 1-year-old and his maternal grandfather, a Jew, fled Russia in the early 20th century that resonated with many in the crowd. He dont talk like he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. He can connect. I love it! said Debra Finch, 66, a retired property manager, as she left the town hall. We need somebody who has experience, and its the right kind of experience because its local and its grass-roots. Finch was not sure she would vote for Garcetti if he ran for president Biden, she said, was so likable but she said he was definitely an option and she was inspired by his words. I feel alive again, she said. Everything on TV is Democrats dont have a message. But he has a message and he reminded us of who we are and what we represent. We care and were fine. Advertisement Hes real people, said Bernice G. Scott, 73, a former Richland County councilwoman, adding that any Democrat would be better than Trump. When you got a real bad toothache, you dont care if they pull it out or fix it, she said. We just need to stop hurting. The European Union encouraged all parties in Bahrain to contribute to resume dialogue with a view to relaunch a process of national reconciliation in a peaceful and constructive manner. (AhlulBayt News Agency) - The European Union called for the release of Bahraini human rights activist Nabeel Rajab, commenting on a new Bahraini court ruling sentencing him to an additional five five years in prison, issued on Wednesday morning (February 21, 2018). The European Union encouraged all parties in Bahrain to contribute to resume dialogue with a view to relaunch a process of national reconciliation in a peaceful and constructive manner. The statement issued by the Spokesperson for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy further highlighted that the case of Mr. Rajab has become a symbol for human rights defenders and respect of freedom of speech, in Bahrain and beyond, stressing that "this new sentence, as well as the open cases against Mr Rajab, run counter to the Government of Bahrain's own commitments as the country prepares itself for new parliamentary elections." The European Union once again reiterated its call to grant Mr Rajab's release, including on humanitarian grounds due to his deteriorating health condition. /257 Richard W. Gates III, who helped manage Donald Trumps presidential campaign after making millions of dollars advising Ukraines pro-Kremlin government, pleaded guilty Friday to conspiracy against the United States and lying to federal agents, becoming the latest former Trump aide to cooperate with prosecutors in the sprawling Russia investigation. The guilty plea is unusual because court papers reveal that Gates lied to special counsel Robert S. Mueller III and the FBI as recently as Feb. 1, when he already was negotiating with prosecutors about the raft of criminal charges he was facing. Gates original three lawyers applied to withdraw from the case the same day, a hint of a behind-the-scenes personal drama that preceded Fridays denouement. Gates, 45, looked haggard, with dark circles under his eyes, when he appeared in court before U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson. Gates is the fifth person to plead guilty to charges stemming from the Mueller probe, and the first to confess to more than one criminal charge. While Gates could face more than five years in prison on the two charges, he is expected to be sentenced to about 18 months, according to a person familiar with the plea negotiations. Advertisement Mueller has proven adept at securing cooperation from Trumps former associates as he investigates Russian meddling in the 2016 election, and whether anyone in the Trump campaign assisted in that operation or committed other potential crimes, including obstruction of justice while in the White House. Gates plea poses the biggest immediate risk to Paul Manafort, who was Trumps campaign manager and Gates longtime business partner. Prosecutors had filed several dozen charges against Manafort and Gates, including tax evasion, bank fraud and conspiracy, mostly stemming from their alleged attempts to hide more than $30 million from their consulting and lobbying work for the Kremlin-backed government in Ukraine. They both pleaded not guilty when the first indictment was unveiled on Oct. 30. Gates now is expected to testify against Manafort, who said Friday that he is innocent of the charges. Notwithstanding that Rick Gates pled today, I continue to maintain my innocence, Manafort said in a statement. I had hoped and expected my business colleague would have had the strength to continue the battle to prove our innocence. For reasons yet to surface he chose to do otherwise. This does not alter my commitment to defend myself against the untrue piled up charges contained in the indictments against me. Several hours later, the special counsels office unveiled a superseding indictment against Manafort that also accused him of secretly paying former European politicians to advocate for Ukraine, part of an undisclosed effort to lobby members of Congress and the Obama administration. None of the charges against Gates and Manafort cite Russian meddling in the presidential election, which was the impetus for Muellers investigation. But the allegations extended through 2017 and thus overlapped with the pairs work in the top ranks of the Trump campaign, according to court documents. Its unknown whether Gates has more to offer beyond testimony against Manafort. He served as a senior advisor to the Trump campaign after Manafort stepped down as campaign manager in August 2016, helped organize Trumps inauguration in January 2017, and had access to the White House as an outside advisor in the early weeks of the administration. Advertisement Gates guilty plea marks an emphatic fall for the married father of four. The son of a career Army officer, Gates had maintained an appearance of wealthy prestige while living in an upscale neighborhood of Richmond, Va. After breaking with his original three lawyers, Gates was represented by Thomas C. Green, who negotiated the plea deal with two prosecutors, Andrew Weissmann and Greg D. Andres, from Muellers team. The Times first reported an expected deal on Sunday. Gates is scheduled to return to court on May 14 for a status hearing. Gates guilty plea for lying to investigators stems from his account of a dinner discussion on March 19, 2013, between Manafort and Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Costa Mesa), who has been a strong advocate for better U.S. relations with Russia. Advertisement Three weeks ago, as he was negotiating his plea deal, Gates told the FBI that Manafort and an unnamed lobbyist had told him they didnt talk to Rohrabacher about Ukraine. But, according to a court filing Friday, Gates had helped Manafort prepare a report that memorialized for Ukraine leadership the pertinent Ukraine discussions that Manafort represented had taken place at the meeting. Last year, Manafort and Vin Weber, a former Minnesota congressman and a partner in the Mercury Public Affairs firm in Washington, filed belated reports to the Department of Justice under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, listing the Rohrabacher meeting as part of their lobbying work on behalf of Ukraine government interests. Rohrabacher acknowledged to The Times in an interview last year that he had discussed Russian and regional issues at what he called a nice little dinner at the Capitol Hill Club. Three days after the meeting, Manafort contributed $1,000 to Rohrabachers reelection campaign. Advertisement Rohrabacher declined to comment when contacted by a reporter on Friday, saying, I cant do any interviews off the cuff before hanging up. Weber did not immediately respond to requests for comment. A statement from Mercury said Gates lied to the firm about the Ukraine effort, adding that its cooperating with prosecutors and confident [they] have acted appropriately throughout. Rohrabacher spokesman Ken Grubbs said Friday that Ukraine only came up in passing because the men reminisced and talked mostly about politics. As the congressman has acknowledged before, the meeting was a dinner with two longtime acquaintances Manafort and Weber from back in his White House and early congressional days, Grubbs said in an email. It is no secret that Manafort represented [then-Ukrainian President] Viktor Yanukovychs interests, but as chairman of the relevant European subcommittee, the congressman has listened to all points of view on Ukraine. We may only speculate that Manafort needed to report back to his client that Ukraine was discussed. Advertisement The Podesta Group, a firm with high-level Democratic connections, also last year reported doing lobbying work for the Ukraine interests under Manaforts direction. Tony Podesta, whose brother John Podesta was the chairman of Hillary Clintons 2016 presidential campaign, left the firm after the initial indictment of Manafort and Gates last year. The firm disbanded soon after. A spokesman for Tony Podesta declined to comment. Follow live coverage of the Trump administration on Essential Washington In two major indictments, prosecutors painted a detailed picture of how Manafort and Gates used offshore accounts to illegally funnel tens of millions of dollars into the United States to purchase real estate and finance luxury lifestyles. Their income dried up after political unrest forced Yanukovych to flee to Russia in 2014, and the indictment says they turned to fraud to obtain more than $20 million in loans. Advertisement Mueller was appointed last May and has already scored several notable successes. Former White House national security advisor Michael Flynn pleaded guilty on Dec. 1 to lying to investigators about his communications with a Russian diplomat during the presidential transition. He admitted to discussing sanctions that former President Obama had implemented to punish Moscow for meddling in the campaign. George Papadopoulos, a former campaign foreign policy advisor, also pleaded guilty to lying last year. He had falsely denied contacts with Russians who claimed to have thousands of emails on Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Alex van der Zwaan, a former attorney at a prominent U.S. law firm who worked on a report on behalf of Ukraines pro-Russia government, pleaded guilty on Tuesday. He had lied to investigators about his communications with Gates. Advertisement A separate indictment from Muellers team last week charged 13 Russians and three Russian companies with illegally using social media, stolen IDs and other tactics in an effort to sway U.S. voters to support Trump and vote against Clinton. Richard Pinedo, a California resident, pleaded guilty to identity theft as part of that investigation. Times correspondent Sarah D. Wire contributed to this report. chris.megerian@latimes.com Advertisement Twitter: @chrismegerian david.willman@latimes.com Twitter: @DWillmanNews joseph.tanfani@latimes.com Advertisement Twitter: @jtanfani ALSO For Trumps national security team, addressing the threats means ignoring the tweets Russia investigation leads to guilty plea for lawyer linked to Trumps former campaign aides Advertisement UPDATES: 4:30 p.m.: This article was updated with details from the court hearing. 1:35 p.m.: This article was updated with details about Gates lying to the FBI. Advertisement 12:05 p.m.: This article was updated with a statement from Manafort. 11:45 a.m.: This article was updated with Gates pleading guilty. This article was originally published at 9:35 a.m. President Trump revived some favorite campaign staples in a highly partisan speech to conservative activists Friday including an anti-immigrant song and a lock her up chant unleashing himself after tense weeks that saw a school massacre, more White House turmoil and fresh indictments against campaign associates. Speaking for well over an hour, clearly energized by the adulation of his audience, Trump nearly forgot to announce new sanctions against North Korea, which his staff had promoted as the major news of the event. After a couple lines about the penalties against 56 entities, he walked off the stage to the strains of You Cant Always Get What You Want, the Rolling Stones song that closed his 2016 rallies. Though his week had included emotional meetings with survivors and families of victims of the Parkland, Fla., shooting and past school massacres, Trump appeared buoyant before the Conservative Political Action Conference, a group he credits with launching his political career. He began by playfully reveling in his image on the convention centers giant screens, pointing at his oversized projection and engaging in rare self-deprecating mockery of a bald spot. I try like hell to hide that bald spot, folks. I work hard at it! Trump said. Doesnt look bad. Hey, were hanging in! Together, were hanging in. Advertisement Then he indulged his crowd further, asking to their audible delight, You dont mind if I go off script a little bit, because its sort of boring? Trump did not ignore the 17 shooting victims. Despite their shared zeal for gun rights, the president gently prodded the hard-right audience to accept some modest and still unspecific changes to gun laws that he has talked about in recent days. CPAC attendees applaud President Trump. (Chris Kleponis / Pool/EPA-EFE/REX ) Those proposals modest enough to get some buy-in from his allies at the National Rifle Assn., a sponsor of the annual CPAC event include enhanced background checks for gun purchasers and restrictions on gun ownership for people suffering from mental illness. Trump made an extensive pitch for his controversial, NRA-backed proposal to allow teachers and other trained school employees to carry guns. Id rather have somebody that loves their students and wants to protect their students, than somebody who stands outside, Trump said, a rebuke of the sheriffs deputy assigned to the Parkland high school who stayed outside during the shooting. The president combined those gun policy suggestions with hyperbolic warnings that Democrats, if they recapture Congress, will try to abolish the 2nd Amendment. Guns were hardly Trumps only topic in his rambling performance. He also blasted immigrants in the U.S. illegally, linked them to the epidemic of gun violence, and insisted he would build a southern border wall despite doubts from within his own administration. Again berating Democrats, this time as advocates of illegal immigration, he said that they are always fighting for the criminal. Theyre not fighting for law-abiding citizens. Advertisement As an allegory on immigrants, Trump repeated the lyrics of a song called The Snake as he frequently did on the campaign trail about a woman who cares for a wounded snake only to get killed when he attacks her. You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in, the snake proclaimed to the dying woman, in Trumps telling. Though immigration advocates and many others find the passage offensive, for Trumps most loyal supporters, it is among his greatest hits. The crowd broke into a chant of Lock her up, another staple of Trump campaign rallies, after Trump invoked Hillary Clinton the crooked candidate, he called her, more than 15 months after voters cast their ballots. Advertisement He added of Democrats generally, Boy, have they committed a lot of atrocities when you look. Trump offered no evidence, nor has he on other occasions lately when hes called on the Justice Department to investigate Democrats, as the criminal probe into his campaigns and administrations ties to Russias election interference has intensified. The president spoke a day after special counsel Robert S. Mueller III announced additional charges against Paul W. Manafort Jr., Trumps former campaign manager, and Richard J. Gates III, Manaforts partner and a former Trump advisor. Advertisement Trump seemed happiest recounting his increasingly distant campaign. Yet again he boasted of his Electoral College vote count and mocked Clintons campaign strategy. I said, Whats she doing? Why does she keep going back to California? Crazy, he said. They spent a lot of money in North Carolina, he went on, adding, We did very well there. We hit a chord, he said, and the crowd cheered on. noah.bierman@latimes.com Advertisement Twitter: @noahbierman More than half of U.S. gun owners store at least one firearm without any locks or other measures to prevent its theft or use by an unauthorized person, according to the first study in more than two decades to ask owners about weapons storage. The remaining 46% of gun owners who responded to the survey said they kept all their weapons locked in a gun safe, case or cabinet, or inactivated their weapon with a trigger lock. Among gun owners with children younger than 18 living at home, rates of safe storage were a bit higher. But 45% of these gun owners said they keep at least one firearm in an unsecured state, and 10% said they store all their guns in unlocked locations without trigger locks. The study, published Thursday in the American Journal of Public Health, revealed that 7% of survey takers keep all their guns and their ammunition together in an unlocked location. Advertisement In a country estimated to have 55 million gun owners, the findings suggest that at least 5.5 million households have at least one firearm that could be stolen by a thief, borrowed by a despondent or homicidal family member, or played with by a curious child. A welter of previous research has found that such scenarios take a very real toll on the lives and health of Americans, contributing to criminal violence, suicide and accidents. About 500,000 firearms are estimated to be stolen each year, and they quickly become part of the vast ocean of illegally owned firearms in the U.S. An analysis of gun-related crimes committed in Pittsburgh in 2008 found that 79% were carried out with a firearm not legally owned by the perpetrator. If that figure were nationally representative, it would suggest that gun theft played a role in close to 9,000 gun-related killings committed in 2015, as well as untold assaults, rapes and robberies. The survey comes on the heels of other research revealing that gun-owning families whose children have psychiatric illnesses are no more likely than other families to store their firearms safely. That study, published Monday in the journal Pediatrics, found that gun ownership rates among parents about 42% were similar in homes with and without a child or children who suffered from depression, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder or other mental health conditions. The American Academy of Pediatrics considers such children at greater risk of self-harm. Yet just 35% of gun-owning parents who live with children with mental health conditions reported that they keep their weapons unloaded and locked away. When children without cognitive or emotional issues were present in the home, 32% of gun-owning parents or caregivers unloaded their guns and locked them up. The difference between the two groups of families was too small to be statistically significant, according to the study. Advertisement For a depressed or impulsive adolescent, access to an unsecured gun is a potent risk factor for suicide. In 2014, suicide was the second-leading cause of death among youths ages 13 to 17 years, with 1,297 suicides reported, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A rearm was used in 42% of those fatalities. A 2005 study that examined two years of firearm suicides among youths found that 82% used a firearm belonging to a family member, usually a parent. Meanwhile, a study published last summer estimated that about 78 children and adolescents die each year by unintentional injury involving a firearm. These accidents involving loaded, unsecured guns occurred mostly at home. Advertisement The new research comes amid a clamorous debate over guns, childrens safety and mental health that was sparked by a Feb. 14 shooting rampage in Parkland, Fla. That mass shooting claimed the lives of 14 students and three school officials at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. The updates on gun storage practices suggest that safety advocates are making mixed progress persuading Americans to secure their firearms. In a 1994 survey of gun owners, researchers found that just 30% stored all their firearms unloaded and locked up. An additional 21.5% kept at least one gun loaded and unlocked in the home, and 48.5% kept their firearms in various states in between. The new poll was taken by 1,444 gun owners who were members of a large, nationally representative community willing to take online surveys. It asked respondents which sources they would trust for advice on securing their guns. Advertisement More than three-quarters said law enforcement professionals would be good or excellent messengers for teaching safe firearms storage. Close behind were hunting and outdoor groups, military personnel and veterans, and the National Rifle Assn. At the bottom of the list were physicians and celebrities. Only 19% and 11%, respectively, said they would be a good or excellent source of advice on safe gun storage. Study leader Cassandra K. Crifasi, a professor of public health and researcher at Johns Hopkins Universitys Center for Gun Policy and Research, touted these as some of the surveys most actionable findings. We often hear about physicians being a point of contact on the subject of guns in the home, Crifasi said. But as dispensers of safe storage advice, they didnt do well, unfortunately. Advertisement That police groups were widely respected on the issue aligns neatly with their incentives, Crifasi said: Every day, law enforcers face and respond to the fallout from unsecured guns. Its a public safety issue, Crifasi said. So theres a nice synergy to enlisting them for the task. The new findings reflect a continuing shift in the reasons for gun ownership in America. For decades, hunting and sport were the primary motivations for owning a firearm. But a recent study found that almost two-thirds of U.S. gun owners and three-quarters of those who own handguns cite protection against people as a primary reason for owning a gun. Gun owners intent on self-defense are generally less willing than hunters, sport shooters or gun collectors to keep firearms locked away. On the contrary, these people tend to want their firearms at the ready. Advertisement Gun owners care about protecting their family, and many keep guns at home unlocked for ready access, said Cathy Barber, who directs the Harvard School of Public Healths Means Matter campaign, a suicide prevention effort. What many dont realize is that, unless theyre a drug dealer or criminally involved, the odds that theyre going to be killed in a homicide especially by a stranger are tiny. Suicides far outnumber homicides in the United States, and firearms are the leading method. Thats what gun owners should think about when making storage decisions, said Barber, who was not involved with either study published this week. Locking household guns protects against youth suicide, she said. Storing guns away from home when the gun owner or another family member is struggling with a mental health issue or a painful life crisis also reduces the risk that a suicidal crisis will prove deadly, she added. Advertisement Barber praised Crifasis group for asking which messengers work best in spreading the word on matters of gun safety. She pointed to the rise of a new movement in which public health experts and respected members of the gun community, including firearm instructors and gun shop owners, have joined forces to reduce gun suicides. This study underscores the importance of that work, Barber said. melissa.healy@latimes.com @LATMelissaHealy Advertisement MORE IN SCIENCE Case closed: Oldest known cave art proves Neanderthals were just as sophisticated as humans An amateur astronomer testing a new camera happens to catch a supernova as its being born Instead of nagging your spouse to lose weight, try going on a diet yourself Re: Another bridge exists for bikes, Mailbag, Feb. 17. There is no bridge dedicated to cyclists. By mislabeling the segment of Riverside Drive where it crosses over the L.A. River and 134 Freeway as the cyclists own, newly constructed bridge crossing dedicated to just cyclists. Letter writer Lisa Dyson may endanger new cyclists, perhaps even children, by implying that this is a safe route for inexperienced cyclists. If there is more than light traffic, it is not. This is a location that many experienced cyclists would sometimes avoid if there was a safer route. The recent improvements simply widened a portion of the bridge. Riding north is not so bad, but going south past the freeway onramp, especially as a solo rider, can be difficult. Even though drivers need to slow down to make the turn onto the freeway, they often wont make space (nose to tail) to allow cyclists to merge left and continue south. Worse yet are the drivers that floor it at the last instant and make a hard right turn directly in front of cyclists when they could have just passed on the right because the cyclist had already moved left. This is not a bridge used only by cyclists, it is not dedicated to cyclists, and none of the recent changes make it so. The recent improvements didnt address the safety issues. Currently, there is no dedicated bridge west of the Mariposa Street bridge either. Dyson states though Apparently, this isnt enough. Shes right. It isnt. Rhonda Levine Burbank -- In her letter, Lisa Dyson states incorrectly that cyclists have a newly constructed, dedicated bridge crossing. In reality, cyclists who wish to cross the L.A. River must use the recently renovated Riverside bridge. This requires sharing the road with cars and crossing a freeway onramp and offramp. This is risky, especially during heavy traffic hours. Ive been yelled at and have had a car slide sideways in front of me as the driver desperately tried to beat me to the onramp. Dysons statement is misleading to young or inexperienced people seeking a safe place to ride their bikes. The bridge renovation includes a new continuation of the L.A. River bike path under the bridge to connect with the paved road west of the bridge, next to the river. There is a new entrance to the path on the west side of the bridge, and signs and pavement markings indicating the proper areas for cyclists to use. The paved road continues west almost to the Mariposa Street bridge and is suitable for motor vehicles and bicycles under the codes referenced by Dyson. However, the paved road has been fenced off a few yards west of the Riverside bridge at the urging of equestrians who refuse to share the segment between the two bridges. This prevents cyclists from using the paved path to get to Forest Lawn Drive or simply to enjoy the scenery and open space. Its a shame we cant emulate the example of Malibu Creek State Park, where bicyclists and equestrians share and enjoy the space peacefully. Paul Nicholas Burbank -- Re: Longtime horse stable at equestrian center closing, Feb. 17. The article shows local horse stable folks at each others throats with lawsuits, business divorce, hard feelings and nasty statements in the media flying fast and furious. Its not enough, I guess, that the equestrians are warring against bicyclists in Burbank. Now theyre apparently turning on each other, and Im not surprised at all to see mention of a competing horse rental business near the Mariposa Street bridge as possibly being involved in the nastiness. Doug Weiskopf Burbank Before theater director Jerzy Grotowski became a UC Irvine professor, he made an unusual request. I said, I can hire you full-time with perks, said Robert Cohen, the founding chair of the schools drama department, recounting the conversation. He said, Well, what I really want is a barn. Cohen wracked his brain, trying to produce a solution to the odd request. Luckily, the schools campus was built on a cattle range and there was a barn being used as a storehouse. Grotowski got his barn. He had taught in barns since his days in Poland. Eventually, the unconventional director also had a wooden yurt built nearby. These two buildings, seemingly at odds with the rest of the developed UC Irvine campus, were used by Grotowski when he taught at the school from 1983 to 1986. Today, the buildings are considered theatrical landmarks. Grotowski, who died in 1999 at age 65, was once considered the greatest theater director in the world, with his shows attracting people from all corners of Europe. In 1982, the Polish native found his way to New York, though his country was controlled by the Soviet Union and navigating across borders would have been difficult. During the Soviet occupation of Poland, he couldnt leave the country nor could anybody else, said Cohen, 79, of Laguna Beach. We suddenly found out he was in New York. He had, I guess, escaped. Cohen, an admirer of Grotowski, was notified by a friend that the director was looking to come to California. Cohen naturally thought it would be desirable to lure the director to a position at the school. Grotowski would eventually agree to the role following an all-night party at Cohens home, though he had that one curious stipulation regarding the barn. Jerzy Grotowski, who died in 1999 at age 65, taught at UC Irvine from 1983 to 1986 in a barn and yurt that are still used today. (Associated Press ) While teaching at the school, Grotowskis unusual disposition endeared him to his students and the faculty. He was an odd person, said Cohen, while pointing out that Grotowski had a tendency to allow only a handful of people into his plays in Europe. People would say, I have tickets, and he would say, Too bad, Cohen said. Grotowski held his classes at erratic times, generally having his students dance through the night. His students limited their schedules to his class so they could sleep during the day, usually being informed of the class time only a day beforehand. I dont think we could allow this to happen today, but it was wild enough in those days, Cohen said. Grotowskis teaching methods also were atypical. Cohen, while sitting in on one of the classes, said Grotowski had students perform a variety of physical exercises like freezing in a half-squat position for 15 minutes. When asked what benefits these techniques provided for theater students, Cohen responded, God can tell me. I have no idea. The yurt used by famed theater director Jerzy Grotowski on the UC Irvine campus. (Scott Smeltzer / Staff Photographer ) Grotowski, always the innovator, experimented with physical forms of theater while working on a research project called Objective Drama, which analyzed how ancient rituals affect participants. Grotowski had the yurt built to provide respite for his tired students amid the midnight ventures. A yurt is a round tent-like building traditionally used by Central Asian nomads. The structures attracted the interest of the countercultural movement in the 1970s. Cohen said both of these buildings are considered historical landmarks. They also serve as physical markers in the winding down of the life of the great director. Grotowski was dying of cancer when he made his pilgrimage to UCI. He knew he was dying when he came here, Cohen said. I was the only one who knew. Periodically, Grotowski would fly to France to see his physician. One day he called Cohen and said he was going back to Europe. He settled in Pontedera, Italy, where he eventually died. UCI is the only American school Grotowski taught at, Cohen said. He had come here after retiring as a director in Poland with the intent of passing on his knowledge. I dont know if his cancer diagnosis had anything to do with it, Cohen said. I mean, everything does. The Grotowski Barn on the UCI campus is named after the famous Polish drama theorist and director Jerzy Grotowski. (Scott Smeltzer / Staff Photographer ) Currently, Grotowskis yurt is controlled by the drama department and professor Annie Loui uses the barn as her studio space to develop physical theater productions, which are characterized by a combination of traditional theater with spoken dialogue and a reliance on physical movement to tell a story. Loui, 63, of Silverado took control of the barn when she was hired by the school in 1992 after learning that it was previously used by Grotowski, with whom she briefly studied in France. As an admirer of Grotowski and practitioner of experimental theater, Loui has sought to uphold some of the same principles with which the famed theater director governed his teaching space, like taking shoes off when entering the building and treating it as a temple. The barn was treated reverently by Grotowski and his students, Loui said. That was part of his whole ethos that the space was sacred and you always keep it clean. I am very clear about this with students every year, that we are working in Grotowskis legacy, so its a place we need to respect and take care of. The Grotowski Barn on the UCI campus is named after the famous Polish drama theorist and director Jerzy Grotowski. (Scott Smeltzer / Staff Photographer ) benjamin.brazil@latimes.com Twitter:@benbrazilpilot Jim Rileys love affair with the Baja peninsula began as a teenage surfer, driving down from his Orange County haunts to catch the famed waves along the lower portion of what was once greater Mexican California. Rileys appreciation for the peninsula which extends from the U.S. border at Tijuana 1,000 miles south to Cabo San Lucas only grew during his south-of-the-border trips to race off-road vehicles. While continuing to pursue both hobbies as an adult, Riley, a veteran of the tequila business, became keenly aware of the Baja peninsulas booming wine region. What people dont know about Baja, even Southern Californians, is that the wine-growing region is only an hour south of our border, Riley said by phone from his office at the Costa Mesa-based Baja United Group, which brings Mexican wines into the U.S. for distribution. So if you live in San Diego, youre in [Mexicos] wine country within an hour. Indeed, Southern Californians have enjoyed a glut of wine-producing real estate thanks to Temecula and Santa Ynez, but Riley believes that the future of viticulture lies below San Ysidro a future that in fact began with the history of Spanish colonization. If you chase the roots of grapes being grown in Baja, you have to think about the Catholic Church bringing grapes over to Mexico to produce wine for Communion during the 16th century, Riley said. Today Valle de Guadalupe the grape-growing region near Ensenada is host to dozens of wineries, including Monte Xanic, one of Mexicos national wine brands. The arid climate combined with cool breezes blowing in off All Saints Bay makes the region ideal for growing grapes. Riley first caught wind of the vineyards while still focusing on the spirits industry, where he worked with Ketel One vodka and formed his own tequila brand, Azunia. Ive been in this business for a very long time, so it wasnt uncommon for people to tell me about the Valle de Guadalupe; I just never went, he said. But after leaving the tequila sector, Riley said that within two weeks his friend Eric Morley, owner of Blue C Advertising also based in Costa Mesa convinced him to make the trip to visit some of the premier Ensenada wineries like Santo Tomas, El Cielo and Monte Xanic. These names [may] mean nothing to you today [but] these are big places, Riley said. It was over a glass at El Cielo that Morley first proposed bringing Valle de Guadalupe vintages north into Alta California. He said, Jim, Ive got this vision, and I know with your tequila company, you know how to import from Mexico, Riley recalled. I said, OK, let me think about it. Riley wanted to give back to the peninsula that had been so good to him both as a tequila importer and as an off-road driver and surfing enthusiast. He told Morley that they needed to create a sustainable business to donate to the orphanages since they had longstanding histories of helping the peninsulas orphans long before they started to work with vintners. The challenge for us as [off-road] racers is we only go down there once or twice a year to race, and were only supporting the orphanages at those specific times, Riley said. That support might last a couple of months, but we get emails throughout the year of things they need and challenges they [face], and I thought this could be an opportunity for us to give them a sustainable income on a monthly basis. Riley said the mission resonated well with the wineries, which were happy to support a worthy cause while simultaneously getting their bottles north of the border. However, breaking into the U.S. market would be no easy task particularly in the Golden State, which has been the vanguard for American oenophiles since Napas renaissance in the 1970s. But as with selling any other product, Riley believed, it all came down to marketing. One of the things I spoke to [the vintners] about, because I had the opportunity to build a couple brands like Ketel One [in the U.S.], is its all about having a strategy, he said. If you want to be in the United States, what does that look like to you? How much are you willing to send up? Lets present that up north. Riley reached out to marketing colleagues to help spread the gospel of Mexican wines. The Mexican government too has joined the crusade, with a Vinos de Mexico promotional push to commence in 2019. Its slow, difficult work, but getting some key yeses is helping the cause, Riley said. Riley now retails Mexican wines in Hi-Time in Costa Mesa, as well as Orange County outlets such as Javiers, Vons and Pavilions, and in Costco in San Diego County. Napas French Laundry, one of the countrys most prestigious restaurants, now carries a Monte Xanic Vina Kristel Sauvignon Blanc. While that particular bottle isnt one that Rileys company sells in the U.S., its proof, he says, that Valle de Guadalupe wines are getting serious recognition here. When you see the infrastructure of the wineries, were talking about hundreds of acres of grape hills, Riley said of the Baja vineyards. You tell the story of Baja and educate [consumers] in terms of whats happening down there. Riley said SoCal residents curious to sample Valle de Guadalupe wines should make the two-hour drive to Ensenada to see the magic for themselves his company also offers VIP tours to the region. Ive always believed in the motto of just saying, Yes, not only to life and family, but also in business, Riley said, adding that his decision to join forces with Morley, now his chief marketing officer, is paying off not only for the vintners and for Baja United, but also for the Mexican orphans he wished to assist. Baja wines are on the rise, Riley said, and eventually everybody is going to need [them] on their menus. Eric Althoff is a contributor to Times Community News. The Westin South Coast Plaza hotel in Costa Mesa will host a Yappy Hour on Friday in celebration of the lunar Year of the Dog. From 4 to 6 p.m., humans can partake of free appetizers and drink specials while their dogs can enjoy bacon- and chicken-infused water and treats. Dogs also can make use of miniature fire hydrants and artificial turf. The first 10 dogs will receive a gift bag. The Westin is at 686 Anton Blvd. H.B. to flush hydrants through summer The Huntington Beach public works utilities division will be flushing hydrants throughout the city in July. City officials said the process is a routine maintenance program to ensure quality drinking water and good water distribution for fighting fires. Ratepayers near a flushing operation may experience a temporary discoloration of their water ... a result of harmless silt, mineral sediment and air, which do not affect the safety of the water, according to a news release. For more information and a flushing calendar, visit huntingtonbeachca.gov/hbwater or call (714) 536-5921. Businesswoman receives Costa Mesa Mayors Award Costa Mesa Mayor Sandy Genis presented businesswoman Janet Krochman with the Mayors Award on Tuesday. Krochman was recognized for her volunteer work and involvement in local schools and youth sports. Hopefully, I will have another 40 years in the city and continue to do good things, Krochman said in a city news release. SchoolPower raises $320,000 for Laguna Beach schools SchoolPower, which raises money for Laguna Beach schools, recently collected more than $320,000 during its 33rd annual dinner dance. The event was held at the Ritz-Carlton Laguna Niguel. Some of the money will go toward hiring a districtwide digital library specialist. Junior League children visit Heroes Hall veterans museum The Junior League Juniors group from Newport Beach-based Junior League of Orange County recently visited Heroes Hall, a veterans museum in Costa Mesa. The group learned about branches of the military and area history and made colored postcards for veterans and care packages that will be sent to troops overseas. Center Club to host former ambassador The Center Club in Costa Mesa will host a World Affairs Council presentation March 1 featuring Cameron Munter, former U.S. ambassador to Serbia and Pakistan. Registration starts at 5:30 p.m. Ticket prices start at $50. For more information, visit worldaffairscouncil.org. Ensure Justice conference coming to Vanguard Vanguard Universitys annual Ensure Justice conference will be held March 2-3 at the Costa Mesa campus. The theme is substance abuse and human trafficking. Katherine Chon, director of the Office on Trafficking in Persons, will be the keynote speaker. For more information, visit ensurejustice.com. Tattoo shop to hold Down syndrome benefit Gold Rush Tattoo in Costa Mesa will host a benefit for the Down Syndrome Assn. of Orange County on March 3. It will feature a special tattoo design and a raffle. Tattoos start at $40. Gold Rush is at 1779 Newport Blvd. For more information, call (714) 540-5794. Youth ministries director named at Laguna church Jen Kucera Rothman, a Laguna Beach resident, was recently named director of children and youth ministries at Laguna Beach United Methodist Church. The graduate of Southern Methodist University has a secondary teaching credential and masters degrees from National University. Literary Luncheon to benefit American Assn. of University Women The Surf & Sand Resort in Laguna Beach will host the 31st annual Literary Luncheon on March 10. The event raises money for the American Assn. of University Women, which advances equity for women and girls through advocacy, education and research. Money will benefit Laguna Beach High School graduating seniors, middle school girls attending a summer science camp and returning female students at area colleges. For more information, contact susan.kent@cox.net or call (949) 494-5789. Crystal Cove group schedules Prop. 68 awareness event The Crystal Cove Conservancy will hold an informational and fundraising event March 12 about Proposition 68 and how it may affect the community. The measure on the state ballot in June proposes a $4-billion parks and water bond, including money for state parks like Crystal Cove. The event will be from 5:30 to 7 p.m. at the Oasis Senior Center, 801 Narcissus Ave., Corona del Mar. RSVPs are being accepted through March 8 at crystalcove.org/event/yeson68. Jack Tyler is a cat detective. He considers himself the worlds first. For years, hes stalked the streets with his trusty search dog, Daphne, patrolling for the forlorn felines. While finding cats that have abandoned their masters for the feral world is not an exact science, Tyler said hes usually been successful in returning the runaways to their homes. Hes also compiled an extensive research portfolio and even invented a device to aid those searching for lost cats. All of my stuff is cutting-edge, Tyler said. Tyler, 56, of Huntington Beach had been working as a Hollywood extra in 2007 when a woman walked into a Huntington Beach coffee shop where he was working and posted a flier for a missing cat with a reward of $1,000. That became Tylers first mission. He began to take several cases a week, usually at no cost to the client. Tyler said there was an abundance of people who turned to him. He had a very particular set of skills that nobody else was offering. Tyler said he can find lost indoor cats 100% of the time. Along the way Tyler learned a few things, one of the first being that the cats he found were usually hiding in the same general area where they went missing. For an indoor cat with no outdoor experience, they will hide for eight days within a three-house radius underneath something, Tyler said. To help owners better locate their hidden cats, Tyler invented the Cat Flasher Robot Locator a device worn by a feline that strobes when the temperature drops low enough. Tyler said he also discovered that coyotes are not primary predators of house cats; he contends they tend to attack kittens and health-compromised elderly cats but leave healthy grown ones alone. Cat owners have more to fear in that ultimate suburban predator: cars. Verification of Tylers statements is difficult, as a Google search of cat naturalist affords little information. Tylers name is the first to show up. A search of cat detective results in a slew of crime-fighting cats. Tyler envisions his role in a similar vein as that of a scientist, probing the suburban world and uncovering its unique ecosystem with its own interacting animal and plant life. Suburbia has an amazing ecosystem, Tyler said. Right outside your door all sorts of crazy things are happening with animals interacting. Its wild. This untamed environment was in full display during a recent case. Two cats took over a neighborhood, Ive never seen that happen, Tyler said. It was ugly. Tyler said two tough cats working together moved into a neighborhood and caused havoc, with three cats perishing as a result. Two of the cats were hit by cars after being vanquished, or chased from their homes, and anothers dismembered carcass was found strewn about. I dont care how tough a cat is, it doesnt stand a chance against two tough cats, he said. For all Tyler knows, those two cats are still tyrannically ruling over that neighborhood like feline Caesars, though he hasnt heard of any more deaths. Cat detective Jack Tyler and his search dog, Daphne, outside his office, the Sit Stop Cafe, in Huntington Beach on Tuesday. (Don Leach / Staff Photographer ) Another memorable case for Tyler was featured in a 2012 documentary, If Only Cats Could Talk, which details the taxing search for a cat named Frankie. Signe Veje, the films director, said through email that she remembers meeting Tyler and being skeptical of his motives. Jack was incredibly pleasant and professional but since he quite early into the conversation mentioned his interest in acting and previous work as an extra in Hollywood, I was at first unsure if I was meeting with someone just putting on an act as a cat detective, Veje said. Adding to that, my still very much from European eyes were seeing the exact stereotype of what an American private detective would look like had this been a fictional scenario in a soap opera. Everything about him his mannerisms, his speech said private detective specializing in cats to a T. Veje said she was won over by Tylers expansive knowledge on the subject of cat detection. He would later become the hero of her film. After Frankie was found, Tyler quite literally walked off into the sunset at the films conclusion. Jack is truly stranger than fiction and I mean that in the best possible way, Veje said. Currently, Tyler takes very few cases, typically unusual ones that can further aid his study. Research is his primary domain now, the fruits of which are available on his website as articles and videos delineating how to prevent a cat from getting lost and what to do if it happens. Almost all this information is offered for free educational purposes. Tyler, who has two rescue cats, Twilight and Genie, is really just a cat lover at heart. I rescued them from death row, he said. An extension of that same drive to save cats from doomed fates is what fuels Tyler as he wanders through the wilds of suburbia with his faithful dog, Daphne. benjamin.brazil@latimes.com Twitter:@benbrazilpilot Scott Struthers saw his first wild elephant at age 15 during a trip to Africa with his parents. As a biologist, his father knew the only way his son could truly appreciate elephants majesty was to see them in their natural habitat. Since then, the San Clemente resident has been captivated by the animals especially how loving and caring they are with their young and is committed to seeing the species survive. This is an uphill battle considering that studies show African elephants could become extinct in the wild within a decade unless the illegal ivory trade is stopped. Ive had people say there is a cause for everything, Struthers said. The only thing different about our cause is if we dont take care of the elephants now they simply wont be here for my grandchildren. Struthers, a manufacturer of luxury home audio systems and car accessories, founded the nonprofit Elephant Cooperation not only to protect elephants but also to help people across the African continent build stronger communities. You cant only help the elephants, you have to help the people as well, Struthers said. British daily newspaper the Guardian reported last year that elephant poaching has a measurable negative impact on African countries economies. Researchers studying poachings effects across 25 African countries estimated tourism revenue lost because of the killings at $25 million per year. As a proponent of entrepreneurial philanthropy, Struthers said developing businesses to support nonprofit operations provides a stable revenue stream in case donations drop off. A prime example is Elephant Cooperations partnership with Shoes for Crews to sell 400,000 donated pairs of shoes at reduced prices in South Africa. The proceeds provided two years of funding for the Lindbergh Foundations anti-poaching drone program called Air Shepherd. The unmanned aerial vehicles allow conservationists in Botswana to report poachers faster and allow rangers to cover more ground. The organization also has campaigned to prevent potentially deadly conflicts between elephants and people. One of these projects is a campaign to drill water wells for elephants who might otherwise risk venturing into villages during droughts. Another is a fundraising effort to help African farmers build greenhouses that protect their crops from hungry elephants. A lot of the people killing animals are killing to eat or killing because the elephants are destroying their property, Struthers said. A central component of Elephant Cooperations operation is coordinating philanthropic and voluntary missions for Americans to visit African sites where the organization is making an impact and sanctuaries for baby elephants. Since Elephant Cooperation was awarded nonprofit status in 2016, its fundraising efforts have ramped up. In 2016, the organization reported an income of $283,884, according to guidestar.org. The nonprofit also reported in November 2017 that George Argyros Jr. spearheaded a fundraising gala at the Resort at Pelican Hill which raised more than $900,000 for its operations. Argyros Jr. said he, his wife and their foundation strongly support Elephant Cooperations efforts to save elephants through education and supporting African communities. I first got involved by witnessing one of its portfolio projects on the ground that utilizes drones that fly at night when poachers operate, Argyros Jr. wrote in a statement. As a pilot and lover of anything that flies, and because of my passion for saving all animals, I felt compelled to lend my time and support. When asked whether he believes conservationists are winning the fight to save elephants, Struthers said the war is being won in certain areas. African Parks are doing an amazing job of taking a park that has been neglected for years and has almost been poached out and turning it into something that looks more like Yellowstone National Park, he said. For more information, visit elephantcooperation.com. Daniel Langhorne is a contributor to Times Community News. Showing up on Election Day and putting on the I voted sticker offer a feeling of pride and participation that make us thankful to play a part in government. Recent legislation, however, created an opportunity for campaign operatives to interfere with our elections. That changes the feeling of thankfulness to a feeling of skepticism that the election was conducted fairly. Last year, a law went into effect allowing anyone to collect absentee ballots. Before this law, only family members were able to do that. The change led campaign operatives and special interest groups to engage in ballot harvesting, going door-to-door collecting ballots from their targeted supporters. During the first election where ballot harvesting was allowed, Californians experienced voter intimidation and coercion. According to an op-ed piece in the Los Angeles Daily News, when a paid canvasser arrived at the home of one voter, they relentlessly asked which candidate the voter was supporting. After the citizen refused to share their political opinions, the paid canvasser asked the voter for their ballot. Another problem with legalized ballot harvesting is that there is no way to ensure every vote will be counted. Voters who hand their ballots to campaign operatives have no way to tell if the collector actually turned in the ballot to be counted. Under the new system, there are no accountability measures to ensure canvassers dont tamper with or destroy ballots. In response to these problems, the Los Angeles Times Editorial Board urged lawmakers to enact voter protections, writing, Dont allow voter coercion and corruption to take hold in California. The editorial specifically urged us to reconsider the wisdom of allowing unknown third parties to collect ballots from voters. Legislation introduced this year would require absentee ballot collectors to drop off completed ballots within two days of collection, or by Election Day. This bill however, does not guarantee canvassers will deliver them. Shortening the time-frame for canvassers to turn in absentee ballots will not give voters peace of mind that their ballots will be turned in without interference. Law enforcement will still struggle to track down people who fail to turn in ballots. As vice chairman of the Assembly Committee on Elections and Redistricting, I want to guarantee every California citizens constitutional right to vote is protected. I have warned about ballot harvesting and the problems I predicted have materialized. To ensure election integrity, I have introduced the Vote-By-Mail Protection Act that would require people who collect absentee ballots to give voters a receipt. This receipt identifies the canvasser and records the date and time they took possession of the ballot. Voters will feel more secure when handing over their ballot because they will have a written record when they voted. This added accountability would discourage election fraud and allow authorities to identify anyone who interferes with an absentee ballot. Every vote matters. No one should be concerned that their vote will be wasted by a voter fraud scheme. By giving voters a receipt for their ballot, California will give them the confidence that their ballot counts. Assemblyman MATTHEW HARPER (R-Huntington Beach) represents the 74th Assembly District in the state Legislature. Authorities hope the public can help identify a trio of burglary suspects who reportedly smashed the window of a vehicle parked at the Crescenta Valley Family YMCA and stole a purse last month. The smash-and-grab occurred on Jan. 16 around 11:15 a.m. when a vehicle entered the YMCA and cruised around the parking lot before stopping next to a vehicle, according to Tahnee Lightfoot, a spokeswoman for the Glendale Police Department. For the record: The YMCA where the alleged smash-and-grab occurred is the Crescenta Valley Family YMCA, not the Glendale YMCA. She said the cars driver then smashed the other vehicles front passenger window and took a purse that was inside. Credit cards from the purse were then used at a Target in Eagle Rock. The driver of the vehicle is described as white or Latino, 25 to 35 years old and around 5 feet 10. He is said to have a thin build, a receding hairline and to wear glasses. His vehicle is described as a 1999 to 2003 black Volkswagen Jetta with black rims. Lightfoot said two other people who accompanied the driver at Target are also wanted in connection with the burglary. The vehicle is described as a 1999 to 2003 black Volkswagen Jetta. (Courtesy of the Glendale Police Department ) One is described as a Latino man, 50 to 60 years old, around 5 feet 6. Lightfoot said he has a shaved head, mustache and possible tattoos on his hands. The other suspect is said to be a Latina woman, between 27 to 35 years old with dark hair and an average build. Anyone with information can contact Glendale police at (818) 548-4911. andy.nguyen@latimes.com Twitter: @Andy_Truc I imagine a moment when an announcement over the P.A. system declares: This is a lockdown, not a drill. Immediately I close the classroom door, lock it, turn off the lights, hunker down under the tables with my students, and stifle their cries. Should this scenario be part of teacher training courses? Apparently so, because already teachers in America go through these lockdown or active-shooter drills each year. I have experienced two real lockdowns at Hoover High School, though no actual threat materialized. As if the demands of the job arent already stretched to incredible lengths, now teachers have to absorb the remote yet real possibility that one day a nightmare may appear in their classroom. And those educators need to run through in their minds how they will actually handle a situation they dont ever want to face. If the perpetrator shoots into the room, do I barricade the door and, if so, can my students help me move heavy items to do it, do we pray under the tables that he wont see us, do I physically try to take the shooter down, knowing my life and the lives of my students are at risk, or do I actively ignore the current lockdown procedures and make a run for it? On Wednesday night, CNN held a televised town hall meeting at the BB&T Center in Sunrise, Fla., a 20-minute drive from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, where the Valentines Day massacre of 17 students and teachers occurred. The arena holds more than 20,000 people; the high school has more than 3,000 students. No one was harmed in the arena due to security measures in place. Those measures should be replicated at every single school in the United States. It would be easier to secure schools than pass stronger gun laws. President Trump should hold an emergency meeting with his advisers and develop a plan that can be implemented immediately. Unfortunately, we have a president who needs to have a cheat sheet I hear you on how to show empathy for grieving parents, and who believes arming teachers is the way to go. We are all tired of the cellphone footage of students crouched under desks in terror, the anguish in the parents faces upon awaiting the news of their childrens safety, the candlelight vigils, the funerals, the signs, the pleas, the demands to do something, do something, please, please, do something. Students who study the dangers of driving under the influence are aware that every 15 minutes in the United States a person dies from a car crash. However, during that same time, a person dies in a gun-related incident. While cars are regulated for safety seat belts and airbags are credited with lowering the auto fatality rate guns are not. The number of deaths, 26, and the young age of the children, 6 to 7 years old, at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. along with President Obamas tearful statement led many to believe that that would be the watershed moment, the turning point when politicians would finally act to stop the rampant gun disease; 200 shootings and 400 deaths later, nothing has happened. What number of deaths will it take to get everyones attention: 50? 100? 500? Maybe the death of a prominent politicians child or grandchild? Yet Congress has no problem passing legislation to expand the rights of gun owners. Last December, the House passed HR 38, Concealed Carry Reciprocity, allowing those with guns to travel from state to state and legally carry their weapons. I pray that I never hear again this is a lockdown and that anyone I love ever hears that. Children should not attend school even with the remotest possibility that they may not return home. Yet in todays climate, the first sound of an administrator speaking on the P.A. makes everyone jittery. It is not about blue states versus red states, Democrats versus Republicans, pro-gun versus anti-gun. It is about having a country where the safety of its children is paramount, a priority superseding a citizens right to own a gun. BRIAN CROSBY is a teacher in the Glendale Unified School District and the author of Smart Kids, Bad Schools and The $100,000 Teacher. He can be reached at www.brian-crosby.com. Gregory Lewis Jr. and Vaughn Felix, the duo accused of two killings, are also charged with several robberies, most involving cellphone stores in late 2016 and early 2017 in the region. On Thursday, both were charged with yet another crime -- the Jan. 5, 2017, robbery of an AT&T store in Bethlehem Township. The robbery was reported at 8:08 p.m. at the 3859 Nazareth Pike store, which is in a strip mall on the western side of the road near the former Kmart. Lewis, of Wilson Borough, and Felix, of Easton, wore black ski masks and all black, tactical-style clothing, according to township police. The two men came in as the store was closing at 8 p.m. and assaulted two employees, township police said at the time. One of two displayed a silver handgun, police said. The employees were forced into a back room, and Lewis and Felix took everything from a safe plus the cash on hand, police said. Charges of robbery, conspiracy to commit robbery, kidnapping (two counts), conspiracy to kidnap (two counts), theft, receiving stolen property and a firearms violation were filed Thursday against Lewis in District Judge Patricia Broscius' court. Felix's charges were mostly the same, except for one fewer kidnapping charge and no firearms violation, records show. Neither of the 27-year-olds had been arraigned as of Friday morning. Both remain jailed on charges tied to the killings of 25-year-old Michael Davis on Nov. 21, 2016, in Palmer Township and 21-year-old Dominic Colona on Dec. 2, 2016, in Reading. Lewis and Felix also been charged in several other cellphone store robberies as well as an Easton jewelry store robbery. Tony Rhodin may be reached at arhodin@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow him on Twitter @TonyRhodin. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook. Stock Market News Commodities: DoE data boosts WTI futures, net oil imports lowest since 1992 22-02-2018 15:09 Stock News headlines are gathered from financial news sources around the web. Views and opinions on each item are from their respective authors and website. They are not opinions of LiveCharts.co.uk Stock Market News ECR Minerals' subsidiary secures renewal for Blue Moon and Black Cat 23-02-2018 08:49 Stock News headlines are gathered from financial news sources around the web. Views and opinions on each item are from their respective authors and website. They are not opinions of LiveCharts.co.uk Stock Market News Stanley Gibbons to get 19.5m investment from Phoenix UK Fund 23-02-2018 09:21 Stock News headlines are gathered from financial news sources around the web. Views and opinions on each item are from their respective authors and website. They are not opinions of LiveCharts.co.uk Home > Archives (2006 on) > 2018 > Asma, a Votary of Peace Asma Jahangir, who kicked the bucket last week, was a popular human rights lawyer and social activist. Although her work was confined to Pakistan, her example was followed through-out the subcontinent. The place from where she announced the foundation of the Human Rights Commission, an organisation to protect individual rights, also became the venue for meetings to normalise relations between India and Pakistan. Asma would get girls and boys from India and Pakistan together at the house which was allotted to me as a Member of Parliament. I watched Asma putting in all efforts to change the religious influence on the society. The bane of problems was because of the mixing of religion with politics. Only a few days ago did she ring me up from Lahore to say that she would now have more time to work for the normalisation of relations between India and Pakistan after marrying off her daughter. Maybe, this was her way of telling that she had miles to go to change a religious-oriented society into a secular one. Asma can have the satisfaction of having India and Pakistan on the same page even though their reluctance to come nearer to each other was apparent. Asma made Islamabad and New Delhi realise that they had no alternative except to sit across the table and discuss the reasons why the two could not bury the hatchet. Although New Delhi had decided that it would have no talks with Pakistan until it stopped giving shelter to the terrorists, Asma believed that there was still some room for a patch-up. However, Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj was unequivocal in her statement that New Delhi would have no discussion with Islamabad until it realised that terrorism and talks did not go together. Asma felt that Islamabad faced certain problems with the military which had to be sorted out before any meaningful meeting could take place. She was very positive about the possibility of such a meeting and she could somehow persuade the powers-that-be to see reason. But my disappointment is that there was little response in India on the death of Asma even though she had dared her countrys military, the sworn enemy of India. It was heartening to see her devotion to the cause of improving relations between India and Pakistan. I always supported her efforts. I was allotted a bungalow as a Member of the Rajya Sabha in Lodhi Estate where Asma would bring girls and boys from Pakistan to meet their counterparts in India. Asma named that place the Pakistan House. The boys and girls from Pakistan would shed tears as they would bid farewell to the boys and girls in India. Categorising them as Pakistanis would be unfair because they looked very much a part of the secular society in India. She would also take the Indian youth to Pakistan to learn from the society which was tilting towards a particular religion. Asma, a symbol of Pakistans human rights and resistance, was also a fierce opponent of military dictators for over four decades. Moreover, she was a strong advocate of India-Pakistan peace and was part of several Track-II delegations to India. Not only that, she also had a prominent career both as a lawyer after beginning her career as an advocate in the judiciary. She was the chief of the Supreme Court Bar Association of Pakistan which indicated her popularity. Even today the Pakistani judiciary remembers her when she fought for the restoration of the honour of Iftikhar Chaudhry, who was the Chief Justice of Pakistan. The lawyers movement ultimately achieved its goal and even led to the downfall of the President, Gen. Pervez Musharraf. That unpreceded movement, which saw the lawyers marching in 2007, had given a glimmer of hope that Pakistan was indeed understanding the importance and restoration of democracy. But then every ruler in Pakistan always looked over the shoulders to the military and that is true even today. I remember Asma taking on the might of the Martial Law administrator, Zia-ul-Haq, in the early eighties when she was in the thick of the movement to restore democracy. She was imprisoned for leading the protest movement but Asma had become a champion activist soon after. There were occasions when her lift was on the block but undeterred she braved those threats and continued to stand up against dictators. In the process, she helped establish the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, which she also chaired lataer. She would often say that it was the Commissions duty to defend all religious minorities. The Commission, during her chairmanship, also tackled successfully highly-charged blasphemy accusations along with cases of honour killings. Asma pioneered the womens rights move-ment in her country as well at a time when human rights were not considered an issue in Pakistan. Thanks to Asma, today people, particularly women, talk about their rights and even the political parties, including religious parties, realise the importance of womens rights. The credit for this goes to Asma. One particular issue that Asma stoutly defended related to Christians charged with blasphemy. Several people from the minority community faced death penalty as blasphemy is an offence that attracts the severest punishment. She was also instrumental in fighting cases relating to the recovery of missing persons free of cost. A kind-hearted person that Asma was, she would not yield to any kind of pressure, including threats from fanatic groups. Asma, who was a popular activist around the world, had won several awards including the Roman Magsaysay and the Peace Prize from United Nations Development Fund. But for Asma the awards hardly meant anything. Her sole aim was to restore democracy in the country because of her unwavering belief in it. Similarly, Asma not just fought for the people of Pakistan but also for people from all over the world, including those from Palestine, and the struggles that people faced elsewhere. No doubt, she made a lot of enemies at home because of the battles she chose but she viewed the challenges as something that could not be ignored. That speaks volumes of Asma. The author is a veteran journalist renowned not only in this country but also in our neighbouring states of Pakistan and Bangladesh where his columns are widely read. His website is www.kuldipnayar.com Home > Archives (2006 on) > 2018 > Are NDA-II Governments Budgets Farmer-focused and Rural-centric (...) by D. M. Diwakar A Budget for a government is a tool of resource generation for public expenditure and reflection of an indicative direction for fiscal and development policies. During the last four budgets of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA-II) regime, the government has made a few significant changes in the Budget structure, such as, abolition of Plan and non-Plan heads of the Budget, merging the Rail Budget into the main Budget, realignments of heads of expenditures, pre-scheduling the timing of the Budget, etc. This Budget might be a final full budget of this NDA-II Government; hence, it was expected that this Budget should have been generally a populist generous budget for attracting Indian voters for the next Parliamentary Election on or before the expiry of the 16th Lok Sabha on May 25, 2019. At the same time it might be the last opportunity of this government to put in place possible strengthening measures to bring the economy on the right track of development. The latest Indian Economic Survey for the year 2017-18, presented in Parliament, expresses concerns of a sliding economy in terms of the growth rate of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP)/Gross Value Added (GVA) in general and of major sectors, that is, manufacturing, agriculture, impact on employment, export, rising crude oil prices having fiscal deficit, in particular. The Central Statistical Organisation (CSO) has recently released advance estimates about the growth rate for the current year 2017-18. As quarterly growth rates were slowing down, the annual growth rate of the Indian economy is bound to slow down. The GDP at constant prices 2011-12, which was 7.1 per cent for the last financial year (2016-17), has come down to 6.5, that is, 0.6 per cent less for the current year (2017-18). It is still more alarming that the growth rate of agriculture has come down sharply from 4.9 per cent of last year to 2.1 per cent for the current year, that is, 2.7 per cent less, and manufacturing has come down from 7.9 per cent of last year to merely 4.6 per cent in the current financial year, that is, 3.3 per cent less. Growth rates for Public Administration, Defence and other services have slowed down from 11.3 per cent to 9.4 per cent, that is, 1.9 per cent less. (CSO, 30.11.2017) These three sectors have greater implications on slowing down of employment of the economy. Although the income distribution gap has already been increasing, still decline in the per capita GDP growth rate is much sharper from 5.8 per cent of last financial year to 5.1 per cent in the current financial year, that is, 0.7 per cent less. As a result of declining income, the per capita private final consumption expenditure has sharply declined from 7.4 per cent to five per cent, that is, by 2.4 per cent (CSO, 30.11.2017), which has serious negative implications on the economy, employment, income, consumption and poverty. Even the growth rate of net tax for the government has come down from 12.8 per cent last year to 10.9 per cent in the current financial year, that is, 1.9 per cent less, despite tall claims and expectations from demonetisation followed by the Goods and Services Tax (GST). It means less resource at the disposal of the government for expenditure. This further implies that the government will cover the expenditure through cess, fiscal deficits, disinvestment and privatisation. The Government of India has already accepted and implemented the recommendations of the 7th Central Pay Commission, which needs more resources to maintain even the status quo of employment in the public sector. Hence, the percentage curtailment of public expenditure on development and new employment will be a compulsion. Latest estimates of the CSO indicated, however, far worse. The growth rate of the GVA, which was 7.9 per cent for the year 2015-16, went down to 6.6 in 2016-17. There is indication of a further decline in the first half of 2017-18 to 5.8 per cent, which is much lower than 7.2 per cent in the first half of 2016-17. (CSO, 30.11.2017) The Economic Survey 2017-18 records concerns of uncertainty and fluctuations in the year-to-year growth rates of agriculture because more than 50 per cent of agriculture is dependent on the vagaries of monsoon and hence this sector suffers from uncertainty. (GOI, 2018:99-100) The Finance Minister has acknowledged financial constraints in terms of shortfalls in tax compliances, rising international prices of crude petroleum, rising wage bills on account of the 7th CPC, etc. In order to address the concerns, the Finance Minister has claimed that this Budget is farmer-focused and rural-centric. If we rely on his statement, besides many innovative proposals for development of agriculture and rural areas, it should be reflected in terms of higher percentage of allocation of the total Budget to agriculture and rural development with reflected priorities. This paper is an attempt to understand whether this Budget is intended to be farmer-focused and rural-centric. Needless to emphasise that a majority of the population still survives on agriculture with their declining income. Uncertainty of monsoon and inadequate arrangements of assured irrigation and other inputs, vulnerability of market imper-fections, absence of remunerative prices, sensitive policies, ineffectiveness of minimum support prices, and indebtedness, tragic deaths of farmers, etc., have made agriculture a non-viable proposition even for subsistence and survival. (Diwakar, 2017) As a result, a series of protests of farmers in Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and other States for loan waiving, remunerative prices, procurement of produce, fifty per cent cash payment, etc. culminated in police firing at Mandsaur which led to all-India protests followed by the All-India Kisan Mukti Sansad, this had created pressure for redressal of farmers and farms concerns in this Budget. In the Budget speech the Finance Minister records: Budget 2018-19 reflects the Governments firm commitment to substantially boost investment in Agriculture. Continuity of Green, White and Blue Revolution, Dairy Development Fund, Long Term Irrigation Funds, PM Agriculture Irrigation Scheme, Crop Insurance Scheme, Interest Subsidy for Short Term Credit to Farmers, Crop Science and Agriculture Universities and Institutions, and announcement of Operation Green, National Bamboo Mission, increased provision of farm loan, etc. may sound soothing, provided the investment promise is backed by substantive budgetary allocations. In absolute terms, the proposed expenditure for agriculture and allied sectors for the financial year 2018-19 is Rs 63,836 crores, which was Rs 56,589 crores for the financial year 2017-18, according to the Revised Estimates (RE). Thus, absolute increment is of Rs 7247 crores only for the entire nation, which our Finance Minister may consider sufficient for his prioritised and focused agriculture. This increment is about 12.81 per cent from last years absolute amount. If we deduct the consumer price index (CPI) rate of 2.9 per cent, it turns out less than 10 per cent (to be precise 9.91 per cent) only. If we consider this amount as percentage of the proposed expenditure on agriculture and allied sectors (including research and education, earth science, animal husbandry and forest) to total expenditure, it is less than in the current financial year. In 2017-18, the Budget estimate for agriculture was 2.46 per cent, which has declined to 2.43 per cent in the Budget estimates of 2018-19. If we take the aggregate of the four Budgets of NDA-II, this percentage gets further reduced to 2.03 per cent to the aggregate expenditure of the Budgets. So far as the percentage expenditure on fertiliser to the total expenditure is concerned, it was 4.27 per cent in 2014-15, which was reduced to 4.08 per cent in 2015-16, and further reduced to 3.29 per cent in 2016-17, 3.26 per cent in 2017-18 (BE), 2.92 per cent in 2017-18 (RE), and has further been reduced to 2.87 in the proposed 2018-19 BE. If this is the scenario of public investment, it will have serious implications on the sentiments of private investment in agriculture. Still, it is claimed as an agriculture-centric Budget. The Finance Minister of India in his Budget speech reported to Parliament and the people of the country that his government has implemented the recommendations of the Swaminathan Commission Report on Minimum Support Price (MSP) for Rabi Crops (cost + 50 per cent) for the first time and agrees in principle to other crops as well. However, this is far from the truth. It may be recalled that during the last year of the UPA Government, the MSP of rabi crop was above the simple cost (C2). Let us examine the fact. For instance, the Rabi Crop Report of the Commission for Agriculture Costs and Prices (CACP) suggests that the cost of wheat per quintal is Rs 1256 and 50 per cent over the cost amount is Rs 1884. The Minimum Support Price announced for wheat is Rs 1735 per quintal, which is Rs 149 less (that is, 1884-1735= Rs 149) than cost + 50 per cent, forget aboutthe economic cost, which is much higher than this simple cost. The announcement by the Finance Minister in Parliament stands nowhere. Now I leave it to the readers to judge whether he has not misled Parliament and the people of India. The proposed Budget expenditure for rural development for the financial year 2018-19 is Rs 138,097 crores whereas the revised estimates for the year 2017-18 is Rs 135,604 crores. This Budget has an increased provision of Rs 2493 crores, that is, 1.84 per cent. If we consider consumer price index of 2.9 per cent, in real terms the expenditure on rural development has been reduced by 1.06 per cent. Even to maintain at the level of 2017-18, the proposed expenditure on rural develop-ment should have been Rs 139,536.52 crores. Still it is being claimed by the government and Finance Minister that the Budget is rural-centric. If one takes the percentage of proposed expenditure on rural development to the total expenditure of the proposed Budget 2018-19, it comes to 4.6 per cent. This proportion was 4.9 in 2017-18 (RE) and 4.91 in 2017-18 (BE). Thus, proportionate allocation has declined from the previous years Budget. Rather, expenditure on the rural development head in 2017-18 was higher than that of the year 2016-17 (4.81), which was still higher than 2015-16 (4.32) and 2014-15 (4.04 per cent). If one aggregates four years budgetary allocations for rural development as the percentage to the total expenditure still it turns to be merely 4.57 per cent. The Finance Minister proposed to create 22,000 Rural Haats to facilitate market infrastructure in the rural areas with a provision of Rs 2000 crores for farmers and people of the rural areas. Even if we spend the total amount of money without having any administrative expenditure on line department, every haat will have on an average only Rs 9,09,090. I wonder whether a boundary wall can be constructed for the haat, forget about platform, roofs and other basic facilities, such as an office, toilets, drinking water, canteen, and salary for staff to look after the arrangement. Education is one of the important segments for rural development. The proposed expenditure on education for the year 2018-19 is Rs 85,010 crores, whereas the revised estimates for the current financial year came to Rs 81,869 crores. Thus, an increment of Rs 3141 crores, that is, merely an increase of 3.83 per cent. If we deduct the consumer price index increase 2.9 per cent, it comes to a mere 0.93 per cent, that is, less than one per cent addition in the last years spending in absolute terms to make a Kushal Bharat. If one examines the percentage of expenditure on education to total budgetary expenditure, it has declined. The expenditure on education to total budget in 2014-15 was 4.13 per cent, which was reduced to 3.75 per cent in 2015-16 and 3.65 in 2016-17. In 2017-18 (BE) there was a nominal improvement to 3.71 per cent, which was actually reduced to 3.68 per cent in 2017-18 (RE) and further reduced to 3.48 per cent in the proposed expenditure in 2018-19 (BE). If one probes further, the Budget for school education and literacy witnesses a similar declining nature. This percentage was 2.74 in 2014-15, which was reduced to 2.33 in 2015-16, 2.18 in 2016-17. It was further reduced to 2.16 in the Budget estimates of 2017-18 (BE) and further aggravated to 2.11 per cent in 2017-18 (RE). The percentage of the proposed estimates has still been kept lower at 2.04 per cent in the 2018-19 (BE). The situation of higher education has also not been much different. Although, the percentage of expenditure on higher education witnessed a nominal increment from 1.39 in 2014-15 to 1.42 in 2015-16, 1.47 in 2016-17 and 1.55 in 2017-18 (BE) and 1.57 in 2017-18 (RE). However, the percentage of expenditure to higher education proposed in 2018-19 (BE) is worse (that is, 1.43 per cent only). Moreover, this will influence the commitment to the Right to Education Act and the 7th Pay Commissions recommendations too. It has an implicit imperative to keep public education at a low key and promote the privatisation drive in the education market, away from the subsidised state-owned education to loan-based education. Needless to mention that a majority of rural children are in the public sector education, which may face financial crises and closure of schools and higher education in the name of rationalisation. This will have a direct impact on the children and youth of the country. Our leadership is still reiterating the commitment of Kushal Bharat, and encouraging youths to become employers. This raises a set of questions as to whether this government is serious for creating a skilled new India, as the policy prescription does not appear to be addressing the same. We are all aware of the diversity and segmen-tation of the Indian labour market. A majority of the workforce is still surviving in the informal sector in a vulnerable condition of employment. Very little has been done by the present government for generating employment. The Labour Bureaus Fifth Annual Employment-Unemployment Survey 2015-16 reveals that about 85 per cent of the workforce survive with less than Rs 10,000 a month and a majority of them (54 per cent) has only one earning member. Only 31 per cent working households have two members. On the front of generation of new employment, this government has been disappointing the youth and workforce in general. Demonetisation followed by GST has further aggravated the declining employment situation. The backlog of unemploy-ment, which was 17.7 million in 2016, is likely to increase to 18.3 million in 2017, 18.6 million in 2018 and 18.9 million in 2019. (ILO, 2018:21) The proposed percentage of allocation for labour and employment in 2017-18 (BE) was merely 0.33, which was reduced to 0.30 per cent in 2017-18 (RE). Again now the proposed percentage of allocation for 2018-19 (BE) is lower (0.32 per cent) than 2017-18 (BE). If one takes the percentage of aggregate expenditure on labour and employment to aggregate the budgetary expenditure in four years of NDA-II, it comes to a mere 0.28 per cent. This shows the seriousness of this government on labour and employment. The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MNREGA) is a flagship pro-gramme of the right to work and it is binding on the government to provide job in the informal sector if demanded. The revised estimate of expenditure on the MGNREGA account for the year 2017-18 was Rs 55,000 crores. The proposal for this year is to spend the same amount, that is, Rs 55,000 crores. It implies that the Budget has been reduced at least by 2.9 per cent in real terms from last year to this year if one takes the consumer price index into account. So far the data on generation of employment on the website of the Ministry is concerned, it is available till 2017-18. The data available about the tenure of the NDA Government suggests that on an average 32 lakh households got 100 days employment. On an average in 2014-15, 24.93 lakh days, in 2015-16, 48.48 lakh days, in 2016-17 39.91 lakh days and in 2017-18 only 14.93 lakh days of employment were generated. Thus, the rural employment flagship programme touched the rock bottom in 2017-18 during the NDA-II regime. Per household 40 days in 2014-15, 49 days in 2015-16, 46 days in 2016-17, and in 2017-18, 40 days of employment were generated. This shows as to what extent the government of the NDA-II is serious about rural employment. The Railways is one of the employment-centric sectors of the country, the budget for which has been reduced to an insignificant amount. The percentage of rail expenditure has been reduced from 2.56 per cent of the total expenditure for the current year (2017-18 BE) to 2.26 per cent proposed for 2018-19. The budget for heavy industry has been reduced from 3585.94 crores in 2016-17 to Rs 2600 crores in 2017-18 (BE), Rs 1107.28 crores in 2017-18 (RE), and Rs 11.25.73 crores in 2018-19. Another striking point is the declining percentage of the establishment expenditure to the total expenditure in this proposed Budget despite the provisions of the 7th CPC. This implies that there is no priority for further employment generation in the public sector in India. Needless to mention that this NDA-II Government promised two crores of new employment generation every year, which has been proved to be unrealistic. The proposed expenditure on the Deen Dayal Upadhyay Gram Vidyutikaran Yojana in the financial year 2018-19 was reduced to Rs 3800 crores from Rs 5400 crores. And the expenditure on the Sahaj Vijali Har Ghar Yojana was increased from Rs 1550 crores in 2017-18 RE to Rs 2750 crores in 2018-19. Thus, the total expenditure for electrification of poor households was Rs 6950 crores in 2018-19, which was reduced to Rs 6550 crores, a reduction of Rs 400 crores. The proposed allocation for Solar Power-Off-Grid/Distributed (and Decentralised) Renewable Power has been reduced in 2018-19, that is, from Rs 985 crores to Rs 849 crores. Still the Budget is claimed to bring light to poor households! Drinking water and sanitation is another sector, which may have a significant bearing on the development and quality of life of the rural people. Percentage expenditure on this sector was proposed to be 0.93 per cent in 2017-18 (BE), which was increased to 1.08 per cent in 2017-18 (RE). However, in this proposed Budget the allocation for this percentage has been reduced to 0.92 per cent in 2018-19 (BE), which is even lower than 2017-18 (BE). Thus, it is a clear indication that drinking water and sanitation, although claimed to be one of the flagship programmes, does not match the promise when it comes to allocation. Swachh Bharat Mission was launched with a big hype by this government. However, the proposed expenditure for the Swachh Bharat Mission for the financial year 2018-19 (BE) has been reduced to Rs 17,843 crores from Rs 19,248 crores in 2017-18 (RE). Thus, a significant reduction of Rs 1405 crores. The Finance Minister has announced two crore new toilets to be constructed. If this money is spent only for toilets, and no adminis-trative expenditure is involved, per toilet allocation comes to Rs 8921.5. We can imagine as to how serious the government is to its announcement in Parliament and before the people of the nation! One may welcome the proposal of mega health insurance in the public sector, if what the Finance Minister has said is true. In the Budget speech the Finance Minister has said that 10 crore families will be given five lakh insurance cover each. This means the government has proposed Rs 50 lakh crores on health insurance. If we look into the overall sectoral provisions of health in Budget 2018-19, it amounts to Rs 54,667 crores only, which was just Rs 53,198 crores in 2017-18 RE. Meaning thereby the Central Government has increased merely Rs 1469 crores more than the last revised estimates, that is, 2.76 per cent, which may not be enough to maintain even last years status in this sector. Obviously, no provision for premium has been made for this mega scheme. The expenditure on Social Welfare in the financial year 2018-19 is proposed to the tune of Rs 44,220 crores, whereas allocation for this sector in the last Budget 2017-18 was Rs 39,383 crores, that is, an increment of Rs 4837 crores, an increase of 12.28 per cent. Adjusting to the consumer price index 2.9 per cent, the real increase is 9.38 per cent, which includes departmental non-Plan expendi-ture on account of salary to the tune of the 7th CPC. Thus, we need to segregate the non-Plan parts of salary and maintenance expenditure. In fact, little is left for development expenditure. The proposed expenditure on pension scheme 1995 was Rs 5111 crores in 2017-18 (RE) which has declined to Rs 4900 crores in 2018-19 (BE). If one considers the percentage allocations of resources through different major heads, the highest percentage of total expenditure goes to payment of interest, which is to the tune of 23.58 per cent. In 2014-15 this share was 24.65 per cent, in 2016-17 it was 24.34 per cent and in 2017-18 (BE) this share was 24.37 per cent. Thus, in the last four Budgets interest payment was on the top of the priority to the tune of 24.24 per cent. The second highest expenditure is 16.56 per cent for Defence. The third big-ticket is food and public distribution with 7.1 per cent in 2014-15, 7.84 per cent in 2015-16. This expenditure percentage was reduced to 5.83 per cent in 2016-17. This share was restored in 2017-18 (BE) to 7.01 per cent but revised estimates suggest reduced share at 6.55 per cent of the total expenditure. In this proposed Budget 7.13 per cent of the spending is for food and public distribution, which is the third highest expenditure so far of the total Budget. Transfer to States comes fourth in the order of spending (5.85 per cent). The percentage of transfer to the States has also been reduced significantly in comparison with the last Budget 2017-18 (BE). In 2015-16 the transfer to States was 6.41 per cent of the total Budget, which increased marginally in 2016-17 to 6.72 and thereafter this percentage has been reduced to 6.39 in 2017-18 (BE) which further got reduced to merely 5.4 per cent in 2017-18 (RE). Thus, the transfers to the State are going to be significantly less than in the previous year. It is evident from the allocation of resources that interest payment comes on the top of the spending to the tune of 20.09 per cent of the total aggregate funds followed by Defence to the tune of 16.91 per cent. In terms of allocation of resources, it appears that neither agriculture, nor rural development, nor employment, social sector, is in the priority of this Budget. If one takes aggregates of all four Budgets the NDA-II has presented so far before the nation, the situation does not change any way. Thus, this Budget appears to be neither farmer-focused nor rural-centric as claimed by the Central Government. Reference Diwakar, D.M., (2017): Challenges of Deepening Agrarian Crises in India, the 41st Indian Social Science Congress, Volume XLI, pp. 375-393. Government of India (2017): Central Statistical Organisation Press Release, 30.11.2017, Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementations, www.pib.nic.in accessed on 01.12.2017. Government of India (2018): Economic Survey, 2017-18, Ministry of Finance, Tabled in the Parliament 29.01.2018, www.finmin.nic.in accessed on 29.01.2018. Government of India (2018): Union Budget 2018-19, Ministry of Finance, Tabled in Parliament on 01.02.2018, www.finmin.nic.in accessed on 01.02.2018. ILO (2018): World Employment Social Outlook Trends, 2018, Geneva. The author is a Professor of Economics and former Director, A.N. Sinha Institute of Social Studies, Patna. Home > Archives (2006 on) > 2018 > China: Close to Superpowerdom, but . . . IMPRESSIONS Confidence, authoritativeness and clear warning signals echoed from Chinas published statements on the Maldives crisis. Keep off, it tells the UN. Any military intervention will be strongly resisted, it tells India. This is the new China rising to world leadership at a speed that is both remarkable and worrying. Usually China does this quietly with no grand-standing. This was seen recently with deep-sea spying equipment in the Pacific Ocean. Powerful acoustic censors were planted in two strategic spots, one in the deepest point on earth at 10,916 meters beneath the sea level. Both spots are near Guam, the largest American military base in Asia. With listening range of more than 1000 km, the censors can track submarine movements and intercept under-water signals. A leading US strategic expert underplayed it by saying that such things were standard practice. But he admitted: China has become a great power and is acting like one. Two months ago China revealed a new intercontinental missile system that was to be deployed in the first half of this year. Able to carry upto ten warheads that can be manoeuvred separately and with a range of upto 15,000 km, the missile can hit every corner of the earth, according to a Chinese military expert. All targets in the continental United States, clarified an Australian strategic expert. China is also into building its third aircraft carrier with a new aircraft-launching technology. What deserves special attention is that China is developing its soft-power superiority with the same diligence it bestows on its military prowess. In 2013 it launched its ambitious One Belt One Road project. The visionary zeal that prompted it was seen again in 2016 when the Asian Infrastructure Bank was launched, reducing the importance of the US-influenced World Bank and the status of the US dollar as an international currency. Add to this the success it has registered on the business front. Alibaba is now a household name around the world, and not because of the forty thieves. Xiaomis 2017 growth was higher than that of Apple, Samsung and Huawei combined. Oppo (as new as 2004) and Vivo (2009) are shaking up the leadership ranks in the mobile world. As many as 19 Chinese phone manufacturing companies dominate India, unmindful of Jio. America loves to talk of China being a copy-cat economy. Donald Trump has launched an investigation into Chinese theft of US intellectual property. In 2013 there were reports that China had successfully hacked 24 major weapons systems in the US. There may be truth in all these. But the ultimate truth is Success. And China is a Success. The political-business success China has already scored is prompting it to look into brave new frontiers of science. The Beijing Government is putting more money into the Artificial Intelligence industry than any other government. By 2030 it wants an AI industry worth $ 150 billion. Intelligent video and smart cameras are being developed without the privacy concerns of democratic countries. The development of electric-car technology is going on at a hurried pace. Beijing is also moving to end the American leadership in the computer-chip industry. As much as $ 22 billion is already pledged to develop advanced memory chips. President Xi Jinpings timeline for Chinas superpower status is 2049. He seems well on his way despite Chinas notorious weaknesses pollution, the internal contradiction between the free-market economy and communist controls, political tensions in the border provinces, even overpopulation. It is the governments no-nonsense approach to social control that keeps the problems under the lid. What worries the outside world is the brusqueness with which Beijing enforces its will over the weak. South China Sea is the most disturbing example of this. China used its military force to get control of islands off the Vietnamese and Philippine coasts. Some shoals in the sea have been developed into military bases. The International Courts ruling against Chinese claims has been ignored. American warships testing freedom-of-navigation routes have been warned against entering the Chinese Waters. Indian vessels en route to Vietnams ports have also been cautioned. Wheres India in all this? Delhi did make a show of friendship to ASEAN countries on the Republic Day. But these are countries unnerved by Chinese assertiveness. Delhis alliance with the US and Japan has come unstuck with the US virtually giving up on Asia and Japan turning into an active negotiating partner with Beijing. India in fact looks blissfully out of the picture. Perhaps it will get back into it after achieving its priority objective of getting Hindi recognised in the UN. Home > Archives (2006 on) > 2018 > Indias Income Inequality Woes are Compounded by its Black Economy True income disparity cannot be captured by the World Inequality Report because the impact of the black economy is not taken into account. The World Inequality Report (WIR) released last week shows that Indias top one per cent earners received 22 per cent of the national income in 2014. Simultaneously, the latest data on direct taxes released by the Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT) shows that 9690 individuals paid tax exceeding Rs 1 crore. Only one individual paid tax exceeding Rs 100 crores about Rs 238 crores. According to the WIR report, the top 0.01 per cent of the earners numbered at about 78,000 people with an average income of about Rs 5.5 crores. At a 30 per cent tax rate, they should have paid a tax of about Rs 1.56 crore each. The two facts juxtaposed against each other suggest that while the top income-earners in the economy are earning a large part of the national income, they are not paying commensurate taxes. This is, at the very least, one indication of the large amount of black incomes that are earned by the rich in India. While this is an indication, it does not come anywhere close to the reality of the situation. The database of the WIR does not take into account the black economy and is based on the white economy data alone. The difficulty with trying to understand income distribution is that the Government of India does not carry out income surveys. Some private surveys have been carried out from time to time but they have a rather small sample size and are not particularly reliable. These have been used in the WIR. Surveys in India have often proved to be rather unreliable. For instance, in 1976 when the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER) carried out an income survey based on a rather large sample, the total national income obtained from the survey was 45 per cent less than the national income total for that year. This could only be because not only did people not report their black incomes, they also understated their white incomes. Surveys are also unreliable because respon-dents have various motives for giving incorrect replies, or the surveyors do not take the trouble of doing a proper job or the government expects an immediate response which results in shortcuts. While surveying the sugarcane-growing areas of Maharashtra, this author found that the farmers under-reported incomes believing that I was a government official and if they reported lower incomes they could get some government aid. In another instance, one official who regularly did data work for the Rajasthan Government in the 1990s told this author that very often they had to produce data on certain variables within a week. So, they simply marked up the previous years data by a certain percentage and sent it to the government. Error in data becomes evident when it shows that people with very low incomes buy consumer durables that they should not be able to afford. The obvious answer to this puzzle is that such apparently poor people are not poor but under-report their incomes. They hide their white incomes and naturally do not reveal their black incomes. According to this authors estimate, the black economy was 62 per cent of the GDP in 2012-13. Assume that this statistic has remained unchanged since then, this black income is earned largely by the top income-earners. While some small fish also earn a little bit of black incomes, the bulk is concentrated in the hands of three per cent of the top income-earners. They are the ones with high incomes and want to hide their incomes either because of the illegality involved in their activity or because of the desire to pay lower taxes. Usually, it is a mix of both. The database of the World Inequality Report does not take into account the black economy and is based on the white economy data alone. Credit: Reuters The implication is that if the government declares national income to be 100, it is actually 162. Based on data in the WIR, the top three per cent would earn about 40 per cent of the national income. This is from white incomes. The black incomes are on top of this; so that on the actual national income of 162, these people have an income of 102. In other words, these three per cent have an income share of 62.5 per cent of the actual incomes. The WIR also shows that the bottom 50 per cent of earners have roughly a 15 per cent income-share. This is only on the white incomes. Since they do not have any black incomes, their share of the true national income becomes 9.4 per cent. Thus, the ratio of average incomes of the top three per cent earners and the bottom 50 per cent would be 44 in the white economy but when the black economy is taken into account it becomes 113. So, the black economy accentuates the inequality in society. The above also explains why the data on income tax collected is not of much use to calculate the true income disparities in India. The detailed data on income tax shows that in 2014-15, six crore people were in the tax net either as filing returns or paying tax or both. Of this, a vast majority declare a very low income so that they either pay no tax or very little tax. Effectively only about 17 million pay most of the income taxes, that is, about 1.4 per cent of the Indian population. This percentage has not changed much since 1997. What has happened because of various changes in the laws is that the number of people in the tax net has increased several fold from around 10 million to about 60 million, but the number of effective taxpayers has not shown a corresponding increase. This is an indication of the growing share of black incomes in the economy and rising inequality. If the black economy could be brought into the tax net, at least four per cent of the income-earners in India would be in the tax net. Currently the government collects 16.5 per cent of the GDP as taxes. But of the actual income (black and white) it is about 10 per centone of the lowest in the world. If the black economy could be brought into the tax net (that is, eliminated) the ratio would rise to about 25.6 per cent which would be a respectable amount. This would end the shortage of resources for public education, public health, power, roads and so on. As a result, the rate of growth of the economy would rise substantially. Currently, the black economy results in massive waste of resources and that lowers the rate of growth further. Thus, tackling the black economy is necessary to raise the rate of growth of the economy. In brief, in India because data on income distribution is officially not collected and the impact of the black economy is not taken into account, the true income disparity is not captured in the WIR. Tax data cannot be used to proxy for income distribution because the tax base is not only very narrow but it does not even capture the income distribution of the well-off sections since they generate large black incomes. So, not only is the income distribution skewed, it is far more skewed than what the WIR suggests. The author is the Malcolm Adiseshiah Chair Professor at the Institute of Social Sciences, New Delhi. His latest book, Demonetisation and the Black Economy, has just been published by Penguin (India). Home > Archives (2006 on) > 2018 > Temples, Politics and Leaders: From Jawaharlal Nehru to Rahul (...) by Ram Puniyani What should be the attitude of the leaders visits to places of worship? The matter is very complex in a society like that of India where the hold of religion on the society has been strong and is becoming stronger. In many Western countries where Christianity is the religion of the majority, the visits to churches by most of the people have been declining and one does not hear much about this being a political issue at all. The matter has come to the fore once again as Rahul Gandhi (RG), the President of the Congress party, has been visiting temples with great frequency be it in Gujarat or now in UP. In Gujarat, where the Congress put up a remarkable show despite failing to win the majority, many factors must have played a role for its ascendance, the major being the inclusive approach of the Congress where the issues of the marginalised communities, economically or caste-wise, were taken up in a forthright manner, as exhibited by allying with leaders like Hardik Patel, Alpesh Thakor and Jignesh Mewani. In addition RG sort of went on a spree of visiting temples. This time around the secular writers and intellectuals were not much disturbed by these visits; the people who got disturbed and criticised these visits were primarily from the RSS combine, like UP Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, who called it a hypocrisy and sham. A couple of controversies was associated with his Somanth temple visit; here someone advertised via a photograph that RG signed in a register for non-Hindus while visiting the temple. Later it turned out that there is only one visitors register which he had signed. His partys spokespersons made it clear that he is a Shiv Bhakt, a janeudhari Hindu (sacred thread- wearing Hindu). Our Prime Minster, disturbed by his visit to Somnath, spoke a blatant lie: Today some people are remembering Somnath. I have to ask them: have you forgotten your history? Your family members, our first Prime Minister, were not happy with the idea of a temple being built there, he stated at a rally. The truth is that Mahatma Gandhi and Nehru both had opposed the renovation of the temple at the states expense and not the temple renovation as such. While RGs visits are coming to the focus now, most of the leaders of the BJP are very explicit about their visits to holy places and make a great din about it. When we begin from Nehru, he was an agnostic and very critical of blind faith, a great promoter of scientific temper, a value which finds place in our Constitution as well. The major visits to temples by top leaders as such began with Indira Gandhi in the late seventies and early eighties. She probably was shaken by Ayatollah Khomeini, a cleric coming to power in Iran and the rising influence of the RSS here in India. She must have seen that the impact of religion over social life was increasing, and so she took to such visits. During the decades of the eighties as such religion did not remain a private matter as envisaged by our Constitution, by people like Gandhi and Nehru; and a blatant use of religion in political arena began with the BJP, dumping its original agenda of Gandhian socialism and picking up the Ram temple as its central political plank. This paid the BJP rich electoral dividends in times to come. The centrality of places of worship in our political space got intensified and the Rightward shift of Indian politics, ascendance of the religious Right in the form of the BJP-RSS started going up. The attitude of different political formations was diverse. Apart from temple visits, the social aspect of Ramadan, the Iftar was organised by many politicians. Now competitive religiosity took over the political parties, led by the BJP, for whose leaders carrying religion on their sleeves was most important. Some religio-social programmes like Karva Chauth were overtly celebrated by the likes of Sushma Swaraj, while Laloo Yadav ardently organised the Chhat puja. Now these rituals are dime a dozen to be recounted here. In the era where religion is being overtly used for the political agenda, the visits to temples is a subject of actions being resorted to by even those who do not primarily indulge in politics in the name of religion. The BJP-ruled State governments have gone further with the likes of Yeddyyurappa making huge donations to temples when he was the CM and the MP Government printing and publishing Hanuman Chalisa through its Publications Department. The need is to distinguish between social aspects of religion and religion as a cover of political agenda. The change from the times of Nehru where the practice of secularism by the state was regarded as not secular enough, we have come to a time where the word secularism is being called the biggest lie of India by BJP leaders like Yogi Adityanath. In the campaign, which is picking up in Karnataka as a prelude to the Assembly elections, the BJP leadership is presenting the Congress as an anti-Hindu party. Most of the election campaigns are being carried out on the terrain of religion as witnessed in Gujarat, where the famed Vikas gave way to Mughalia Sultan, Allauddin Khilji and the like. The issues of people related to bread, butter, shelter, education and employment are being aggressively substituted by emotive issues related to religion. Its a tragic sign of the times where the political terrain has been mixed up with religion. Its a terrible time that leaders of a national party like the Congress have to visit temples to wash off the anti-Hindu tag from their foreheads. The temple visits are not soft Hindutva in any way. The populariser of the word Hindutva, Savarkar himself was an atheist, focusing on politics in the name of Hinduism rather than religiosity. Nehru had said that his biggest challenge is to uphold the secular Constitution so as to weaken the grip of religiosity. With religiosity dominating the social space today, what would he have said at present? The author, a retired Professor at the IIT-Bombay, is currently associated with the Centre for the Study of Secularism and Society, Mumbai. Home > Archives (2006 on) > 2018 > Revival of Religious Fundamentalism: Secularism under Threat (...) by Monaem Sarker Contemporary global phenomenon has engulfed many corners of the globe resulting in a state of uncertainty for the innocent masses who are victims of extremist violence and radical religious fundamentalism particularly exploited by religious bigotry and blood-thirsty politics. The latter half of the 20th century has been relatively calm since the end of the Second World War and more so by the demise of the Cold War era. As a writer and observant political worker, one has been alert in witnessing 9/11 when the Twin Towers were hit by terrorists disguised as passengers in two aircraft that subsequently killed about 3000 innocent people caught in the catastrophe; history shall forever remember this event. As a writer and member of the civil society, one has a point to make. Presumably the world has not taken conscious precaution in spite of experiencing first hand the fall of the twin towers more noticeably known as the World Trade Center, a stones throw from the United Nations building. This was one of the most tragic incidents of our time. In the beginning I have to highlight one issue. My mind, heart and soul are geared towards the belief that secularism accords to our national interests, presently at odds with divided contem-plation of the masses. This great principle is under attack by terrorists and fundamentalists in Bangladesh and other countries of the world. Secularism is nothing but a way of life which is one of the proud pillars of our nation. In a recent book of mine there are collections of studied excerpts from different sources depicting the history of the religions and spiritual traditions of the world. There is ready reference to be distributed to you here for your understanding and positive outlook on this serious subject. Regarding references you shall discover the collection of background information compiled in a book of my work now in progress on revival of Religious Fundamentalism, rise of Extremism and clash of humanity. Over the first decade of the 21st century Christianity grew from 2 billion to 2.2 billion, Islam from 1.2 billion to 1.6 billion, Hinduism from 0.8 billion to 1.0 billion and Buddhism from 0.36 billion to 0.5 billion. This demographic statistics certainly shows that Christianity and Islam have been fast spreading all over the world; while India and Nepal remain the home to Hinduism, and South, South-East and East Asia have remained the home to Buddhism. Revival of Religious Fundamentalism The synonyms of the word revival are bringing back, re-establishment, reintroduction, restoration, reappearance, resurrection and so on and so forth. Religious fundamentalism is back with a bang. Past historians, anthropologists, sociologists and political scientists examined 75 movements in several continents. A book called Strong Religion has recently unearthed family resemblances on fundamentalism among the self-proclaimed within the major religious groups in most parts of the world. Let me mention here the paradox of funda-mentalism of the past and present with reference to Reverend Jerry Farwell, founder of the Moral Majority movement in the US in 1979, while in the same year considering the context of Islam, Iranian students took 52 American citizens hostage within the US embassy in Tehran. Recently followers of Bin Laden and the Taliban of Afghanistan as well as Pakistan are branded as fundamentalists. Elsewhere in India and Nepal Hindu fundamentalism is prevalent while very recently Bangladesh is besieged by Rohingyas after being persecuted by the Burmese Buddhist fundamentalist monks in collaboration with the government there causing massive genocide; this is history revisited from Sri Lanka in the past. In assessing the theory and practice of fundamen-talism, some questions need to be asked: who are these people, what religious and political sentiments motivate them to commit such atrocities? In other words can it be clearly stated that family resemblances, discerned in differing varieties of religious revivalism, are a fundamen-talist phenomenon? Not much to ponder as it is quite clear to many that it is more useful to understand fundamen-talism from the context of family resemblance. What is family resemblance? As mentioned earlier, this indeed represents differing varieties of religious revivalism also described as a fundamentalist phenomenon. As stated earlier, fundamentalists have been referred to as offsprings of enclave culture meaning the movements see themselves as beleaguered minorities in a hostile world. The so-called Islamic State or IS and its splinter groups in Iraq and Syria immediately strike us in present times. It is hard to understand from the sociological narrative whether fundamentalism is religious, political or simply out there to uphold the fascist ideology. We do not have to look for the Myanmar regime aiding the Buddhist fundamentalist monks to carry out genocide against Muslim Rohingyas and throw them out of their homeland on the pretext of some Rohingya militants publicised killing of eight police and border guards in Myanmar to announce their presence in the region and express their indignation over the atrocities of Myanmars quasi-civilian government. Secularism Out of all the isms, capitalism, communism (Marxism, Leninism, Maoism), socialism, funda-mentalism and so on, Secularism does relate to a way of life. What is it? Indeed, there is a vast literature on this topic. In view of space sustraints let me provide a brief overall meaning of secularism. Secularism seeks to defend the absolute freedom of religious and other beliefs, and protect the right to religious practice insofar as it does not disproportionately affect the rights and freedoms of others. Secularism ensures that the right of individuals to freedom of religion is always balanced by the right to be free from religion. In a secular democracy all citizens are equal before the law and parliament. No religious or political affiliation gives advantages or disadvan-tages and religious believers are citizens with the same rights and obligations as anyone else. Secularism champions human rights above discri-minatory religious demands. It upholds equality of laws that protect women, LGBT people and minorities. These ensure that non-believers have the same rights as those who identify with a religious or philosophical belief. It is essential that the public services such as hospitals, schools, transport etc. are secular insofar as none is disadvantaged or denied access on grounds of religious belief or non-belief. In sum, secularism is simply a framework for ensuring equality throughout societyin politics, education and lawfor both believers and non-believers alike. Secularism protects free speech and expression. Religious people have the right to express their beliefs publicly but so do those who oppose or question those beliefs. Religious beliefs, ideas and organisations must not enjoy privileged protection from the right to freedom of expression. In a democracy, all ideas and beliefs must be open to discussion. Having defined the term secularism, let us see now how the fundamentalist attacks the principles of secularism and how they are a major threat. True, religious fundamentalism or movements become militant and highly focused antagonists of secularisation. Most of the fundamentalist movements are undoubtedly hostile to much of modernity, and in turn hostile towards secularism and a major threat to it. The global upsurge of religion unfortunately did not help to rein in these and counter this threat. Politics Global politics at this moment has unfortu-nately reached such a point that, in my view, it has become far worse than what it was in the Cold War period before the disappearance of the Berlin Wall leading to the unification of Germany in 1992. Presently, however, the Korean peninsula next door in particular has reached dangerously close to another threat of a great conflict between the US and allies in East Asia and Oceania, and North Korea and its allies. Under this condition if a Third World War breaks out, secularism is going to be the first casualty. Economics How would the present economic order contribute to threat to secularism? This indeed is a major question. The economic order, that existed over the last half-a-century in Europe with the formation of the European Union (EU), has entered a period of great disturbance with Brexit, Britains exit from the EU. The NAFTA between the US, Canada and Mexico is also facing destabilisation under the Trump Administration. It is hard to say how this trade integration in the region would unfold with Trump being an anti-integration President. An extreme Right movement in the US against the minorities on several fronts is emerging now. This is obviously a major threat to secularism in the region. ASEAN in South-East Asia has lost its momentum due to the actions of some of its member-countries particularly in Myanmar with the Rohingya crisis escalating since last year. The powerful ASEAN members, like Indonesia and Malaysia, are unhappy over Myanmars ethnic- cleansing plan and wiping out Rohingyas from the Rakhine state over the years. In the process we are forced to provide shelter to almost a million refugees from Myanmar. In our region, SAARC is not going anywhere. The present relations between India and Pakistan have been worsening every day. That means the political environment is not conducive to keeping secularism in a healthy state in South Asia. In view of the above, the global picture is grim. At the least, there is a great crisis on the economic front alongside the rise of the political crisis as mentioned earlier. Corruption and Values Coruption is indeed a major problem in the sub-continent particularly in Bangladesh. After two hundred years of British rule the three large nations of Bangladesh, India and Pakistan are now home to more than 1.5 billion people representing one-fifth of the world population. This huge population together with diminishing moral values is a matter of serious concern in this region. On the pretext of terrorism and insurgency in some parts of the subcontinent the nation-states have been reviving a culture of religious extremism. In India, the revival of Hindu extremism-led politics is resulting in the nation treading a path towards abandonment of secularism. In Pakistan, the Taliban and other Islamic extremists have become a threat not only to the integrity of Pakistan but also to the whole region. In Bangladesh although Islamic extremism is under control due to the governments zero tolerance to terrorism, there is indeed the emergence of a byproduct, that is, corruption gripping all walks of life. This cannot be ignored. Corruption is not only in monetary terms thriving in this nation, moral values are also taking a toll. Why? This is a subject which needs very close scrutiny; however, I have no scope or time now to touch this in a meaningful way. Having said that, I am convinced that the present environment in the political arena is not conducive to rein in corruption, and in turn secularism is likely to be a major casualty of political developments in the years to come. Conclusions I would like to make five observations out of my assessment of the present threat to secularism. The threat is unavoidable unless the pro-gressive political governments of the world show commitment and resolve in strengthening secularism and its practice in the era of the new world order. Religious fundamentalism needs to be addressed in a meaningful way instead of nation-states encouraging it directly or indirectly. There is no room for state-sponsored terro-rism or spread of weapons of mass destruction. The world expects the latter to diminish. The Right-wing governments of the world must come to terms with arresting rampant corruption gripping some emerging nations especially in our region. The twentieth century was not a replica of the nineteenth century and the twentyfirst century will be quite different from the twentieth. In the twentyfirst century the people will look forward to a more humane world order in all respects. The author is a politician, columnist and presently the Director General, Bangladesh Foundation for Development Research, Dhaka. Home > Archives (2006 on) > 2018 > Putin prefers Aramco to Trumps sword dance Hardly Ten Months after Honouring the Visiting US President, the Saudis are open to a Russian-Chinese Consortium Investing in the upcoming Aramco IPO In the slideshow that is Middle Eastern politics, the series of still images seldom add up to make an enduring narrative. And the probability is high that when an indelible image appears, it might go unnoticedsuch as Russia and Saudi Arabia wrapping up huge energy deals on Wednesday (February 14) underscoring a new narrative in regional and international security. The ebb and flow of events in Syria Turkeys campaign in Afrin and its threat to administer an Ottoman slap to the United States, and the shooting down of an Israeli F-16 jethogged the attention. But something of far greater importance was unfolding in Riyadh, as Saudi and Russian officials met to seal major deals marking a historic challenge to the US dominance in the Persian Gulf region. The big news is the Russian offer to the Saudi authorities to invest directly in the upcoming Aramco initial public offeringand the Saudis acknowledging the offer. An even bigger news, surely, is that Moscow is putting together a Russian-Chinese consortium of joint investment funds plus several major Russian banks to be part of the Aramco IPO. Chinese state oil companies were interested in becoming cornerstone investors in the IPO, but the participation of a Russia-China joint investment fund takes matters to an entirely different realm. Clearly, the Chinese side is willing to hand over tens of billions of dollars. Yet the Aramco IPO was a prime motive for US President Donald Trump to choose Saudi Arabia for his first foreign trip. The Saudi hosts extended the ultimate honour to Trumpa ceremonial sword dance outside the Murabba Palace in Riyadh. Hardly 10 months later, they are open to a Russian-Chinese consortium investing in the Aramco IPO. Riyadh plans to sell five per cent of Saudi Aramco in what is billed as the largest IPO in world history. In the Saudi estimation, Aramco is worth US$ 2 trillion; a five per cent stake sale could fetch as much as $ 100 billion. The IPO is a crucial segment of Vision 2030, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salmans ambitious plan to diversify the kingdoms economy. Aramco signs MoU with Novatek Also on Wednesday (February 14), Saudi Aramco signed a memorandum of understanding with Novatek, Russias largest non-state natural-gas producer, regarding Saudi investment in the latters LNG (liquefied natural gas) projects specifically, in the $ 20 billion Arctic LNG-2, which is expected to be on stream in 2023 and has a capacity of 18 million metric tonnes annually. Saudi Minister of Energy, Industry and Mineral Resources Khalid Al-Falih told the media in Riyadh: This is a big project. It will become part of Aramcos gas strategy. The agreement will be showcased as the centerpiece at the St Petersburg International Economic Forum in May. (Novatek is also interested in building a regasification terminal in Saudi Arabia.) Other Saudi-Russian energy deals in the making include investment by Aramco and the Saudi sovereign wealth fund (Public Investment Fund, or PIF) in the Russian company Eurasia Driller, a major independent driller, which has been seeking entry to onshore and offshore projects in Saudi Arabia. The Saudi and Russian officials also disclosed that Russia had made a formal proposal to build two nuclear reactors in Saudi Arabia and that the contract was expected to be awarded by next year. Indeed, these deals must be seen in the back-drop of the Saudi-Russian alliance to sustain the oil price through production cuts until the end of 2018. In 2015, the Russian Direct Investment Fund and Saudi Arabias PIF joined hands to make investments in projects in Russia. Last year, RDIF and PIF announced the creation of a Russia-Saudi Investment Fund with a total committed capital of $ 6 billion to pursue invest-ment opportunities, primarily in Russia, and in joint ventures that can help Saudi Arabias economic diversification. Tectonic Shift Historically, Saudi Arabia has been seen as a pivotal country in the United States Middle East energy strategies, which formed a core template of the Cold War-era politics to keep the former Soviet Union out of the region. The past weeks developments signify that the tectonic plates are shifting. And history might repeat. Reminiscent of the so-called Quincy Agreement of February 1945 between US President Franklin Roosevelt and King Abdul-Rahman bin Abdulaziz, the founder of Saudi Arabia, the emerging Saudi-Russian energy alliance will most certainly trigger an overall expansion of relations between Russia and Saudi Arabia, including in defence and security fields. Russian President Vladimir Putin telephoned King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud on Wednesday (February 14), when they discussed a wide range of bilateral cooperation, primarily in trade and defense technology and expressed readiness to boost meaningful coordination in global hydrocarbon markets, according to Moscow. The Kremlin read-out highlighted that Putin and King Salman discussed Syria and Saudi Arabias standoff with Qatarand, possibly, Iran too. Interestingly, the Kremlin statement cited Putin as regretting that the current crisis by no means contributed to the consolidation of joint efforts in the struggle against a terrorist threat or the stabilisation of the Middle East in general. Indeed, it cannot be lost on the Saudis that what distinguishes Russian diplomacy is that unlike the traditional US tactic of exploiting regional tensions and divisions, Moscow focuses on beneficial cooperation. Quite obviously, the Russian military bases in Syria or Russias axis with Iran do not impede a full-bodied Saudi-Russian strategic relationship. Suffice to say, Russia is positioning itself, in geopolitical terms, to shape outcomes in the Middle East and to enhance its standing as a great power, while also advancing its economic, political and security interests. The contrast with the US couldnt be sharper. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reported last week that while addressing a closed-door meeting of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, a prominent group of industrialists and business tycoons, in Moscow on February 9, Putin predicted that those who are doing this [imposing sanctions] will themselves tire of it soon. The news from Riyadh signals that Putins prediction is well grounded. When Russia teams up with China and Saudi Arabia in making such massive investments in the energy field, the US sanctions aimed at denying Western capital and technology to stymie Russias oil industry have been rendered meaningless. Ambassador M.K. Bhadrakumar served as a career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service for over 29 years, with postings including Indias ambassador to Uzbekistan (1995-1998) and to Turkey (1998-2001). Home > Archives (2006 on) > 2018 > Beyond the Delhi Declaration: China, India and the competition for (...) by Bhartendu Kumar Singh When India welcomed the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) heads for this years Republic Day parade, it also sought to re-invent the Look East Policy (LEP) commissioned 25 years ago, amply reflected in the Delhi Declaration signed along with the ASEAN states. However, the China factor looms large with an unassailable lead in building-up relations with the ASEAN group. This factor, somehow missing in the Delhi Declaration, could derail Indias efforts to establish itself as a significant player into the region. In its geopolitical calculations, China has for long treated the ASEAN region as its backyard or its own Caribbean. Chinas rising economic, military and political profile have enhanced its involvement into the region along with aggressive posturing on the South China Sea dispute. Chinas deep economic integration with the region, supplemented with mega initiatives like the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) branches have also fuelled Chinas Asian dreams of a regional order, often apprehended in the West as a Sino-centric world order. Today, as Robert Blackwill says, China is openly playing geoeconomics by imposing costs on countries with territorial disputes, disrupting the US system of alliances, and keeping old friends like Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar happy. India, on the other hand, is still on the margins of the ASEAN great game. This despite the fact that it accorded priority to ASEAN as the first regional outreach manifested in the LEP of 1992. Despite a reasonable progress of relations with the ASEAN group collectively and with individual member-states, India is simply no match to China. Whether it is trade, tourism, communication linkages and political interface (despite territorial disputes), China is way ahead. For example, the China-ASEAN trade ($ 453 billion) is many times more than the India-ASEAN figure of $ 71 billion. China is ASEANs largest trading partner (accounting for 24 per cent of ASEANs total extra-regional trade) whereas India is placed at the ninth position (with 2.6 per cent). India has, therefore, a challenge in managing Chinas growing influence in the region and establishing its own presence. The balance-of- power game is being played most fiercely in and around ASEAN. The South China Sea, involving China and many ASEAN countries, is fast turning into a major conflict zone that could, at the minimum, increase and complicate Asian insecurities and, at the maximum, lead to a war between China and the US. India cannot be a mute spectator since the deterio-rating regional security environment would affect its growth and development. Also, Chinas increasing presence in the ASEAN countries is adding to the fragile and asymmetrical balance of power between China and India that could lead to a possible conflict over oceanic platforms. Few books already stand published on the growing Sino-Indian rivalry in the Indo-Pacific. India can work on the utilitarian potential of ASEAN against China in many ways. First, as aptly hypothesised in a recent book (The China Questions: Critical Insights Into A Rising Power, Harvard University Press, 2018), there is increasing suspicion amongst Chinas ASEAN neighbours that Beijing wants to dominate and control them, while forcing solutions to regional issues through economic influence and military power. Chinas aggressive posture on the South China Sea, including rejection of international arbi-tration in favour of the Philippines confirm such trends. Second, ASEAN has been working on the cooperative security model, aimed at securing the region against Chinese bullying tactics and avoid a Sino-American contest for regional supremacy. India adds weight to the collective voice of ASEAN towards the larger objective of securing Asia, being the largest democracy with a rising military profile and a benign image amongst its neighbours. Third, while the US is playing an open turf war to contain China as a regional power, ASEAN is more interested in playing a succinct role in restraining China. The series of dialogues under the aegis of ASEAN are meant as checkers on Chinese ambitions through leveraging other important regional and extra- regional powers. Indirectly, a strong ASEAN can act as a firewall in containing Chinese advance towards South Asia. Fourth, in an anarchical world order that is in disarray, India needs friends in the immediate neighbourhood. ASEAN is undoub-tedly a potential support pillar for Indias power-games with China. However, in reaching out to ASEAN, India has to be mindful of certain ground realities. First, except for Singapore, most ASEAN countries suffer from internal political instabilities and do not have strong political-governing structures. China has taken advantage of such murky situations in the past as revealed from Myanmars historical experiences. India should be willing to do business with soft authoritarian regimes following the Chinese example. Second, Singapore and Vietnam apart, other ASEAN countries are either under the Chinese sphere of influence (like Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia) or have their own regional ambitions (like Indonesia and Malaysia). India has to reach out to this group as well. Third, India also has the challenge of not portraying itself as an open counterweight to China since this will complicate the fragile security situation around Indias own periphery through increased counterproductive reactions and coalitions from China. Despite an early start, the LEP of 1992 is yet to evolve into a grand strategy towards ASEAN that would serve Indias desirable foreign policy objectives like neutralising China in ASEAN. The minimum India needs to do is a systematic treatment of the subject through a well-thought-out strategy. Probably, the Delhi Declaration will herald that phase. The author is in the Indian Defence Accounts Service. The views expressed here are his personal opinions. Home > Archives (2006 on) > 2018 > UP CM, Communal Riots, Fate of Kasganj DM MUSINGS When Yogi Adityanath was appointed the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, Id commented it would drag along disasters to such an extent that even the basic level of survival would get impossible. Doomsday! See whats been unfolding. Hundreds of children and even new- borns dying in hospitals. Encounter killings. Communal clashes under all possible garbs. Hounding of the minority communities in the most blatant of ways. Build-up for another round of partitioning with the Right-wing brigades unleashing poison in the air. Civil strife wrecking havoc in Uttar Pradesh. Kasganj, its residents, are the latest victims. Double-standards in the very governance. None of the communal characters in the very governance have been arrested and jailed. I realise, its naive to even expect any of the Vinay Katiyars or Niranjan Jyotis to be booked. Arent they the leaders of the day! And nobody dares to ask the Yogi why hes been nurturing his own brigadeHindu Yuva Vahini (HYV)! This, when he has the entire police machinery in his direct control. And lets not bypass the various Hindutva brigades, at his beck and call! Also, all those vahinis getting extensive training to kill the enemymen with skull caps! Also, he can summon the Army and the paramilitary! Above all, he can use any possible ploy to arrest and destroy and kill! Tell me, why are we shutting ourselves from the realities of the daythat is, killings and hounding and arrests and bullying of hundreds of innocents is on, yet we decide to keep shut. And when one brave and upright civil servant dares to speak out and tells us the basic truth, he is made to apologise and even his Facebook post is removed! Yes, Im referring to the District Magistrate of BareillyRaghavendra Vikram Singhwho, soon after the clashes broke out in Kasganj, wrote on Facebook: Ajab riwaz ban gaya hai. Muslim mohallo main julus le jao aur Pakistan murdabad ke nare lagao. Kyun bhai, woh Pakistani hain kya? (a strange tradition has come up. To visit the Muslim areas and raise slogans against Pakistan. Why, are they (Muslims) Pakistanis?) Tell me whats amiss if, as a civil servant, he has spoken out, in the backdrop of the communal violence in Kasganj...he has come out with the stark truth, along the strain that there is a growing trend of people taking out processions in areas where Muslims live, raising provocative slogans. Im told that last year Singh had written a similar post, along this stark reality of the day ...he had hit out, when in Khelam area of Bareilly, a group of kanwariyas went through a Muslim-dominated village and had raised slogans against Pakistan. In fact, at least two officers posted in Kasganj were heard and seen on the television screen saying that the boys /young men of the Muslim dominated locality of Kasganj were readying to unfurl the National Flag when the men on bikes said to be affiliated to the VHP and other Hindutva brigadeshalted and not just disrupted the about-to-begin flag-hoisting function but raised provocative slogans. In fact, several local residents, who were present there, say that the hooligans were carrying the BJPs saffron flags and provoking and compelling the Muslims gathered to chant Hindutva slogans! It seems more than apparent that in Yogi Adityanaths rule there is some sort dictatorship ...build-up for a complete halt of free and honest views. Dont overlook the fact that the Yogi Adityanath Government transferred District Chief of Police Sunil Kumar Singh after the communal rioting in Kasganj, because he had also bared out another of those dark truths to the communal madness! Dont know whats in store for the District Magistrate of Kasganj as he too has been honest about the ground realities prevailing in todays Uttar Pradesh. To quote him from a news report, fringe groups coming up in every part of the State, taking the same ugly route to instigate people of the minority community by forcefully entering their locality in the name of nationa-lism. Its not just a strange situation thats building up but a very dangerous one. Where the state can kill, under any of the garbs at its command. And if an officer opposes killings he too will be hit! I want to bring into focus my immediate concerns. Why should upright officers be hounded? They are out with their deep concern for their country and for their countrymen. They are civil servants and as administrators its their job to reach out to the masses and talk aloud their concerns. It wouldnt be amiss to write that its about time these officers should resign and get moving far from the political mafia out to kill their very souls, if not their careers or forms! Why do we overlook the fact that the Hindutva brigades are holding training campstraining recruits to attack. One of those ongoing activities! In fact, in 2016 news reports and photographs splashed in national dailies focused on the VHP and Bajrang Dal holding arms training camps in and around Greater Noida, Varanasi, Ayodhya. The shots were enough to portray that young men and women getting training to attack the enemydummies of skull-capped men! Why dont we, the citizens of this country, demand a public telecast of not just the video of the exact situation that sparked off the riots in Kasganj but also the list of the injured and also that of the arrested. It is important and crucial to know whether Hindutva characters from the VHP and Bajrang Dal and also from the Yogis brigade have been arrested or not. If not, we got to cry outwhy not! Why has there been no public announcement of the names of those politicians who are behind the latest round of maar-kaat-dhaars? Why are the injured in the Kasganj riots not compensated? At least till date there is no announcement of any relief or compensation for the injured. Why arent the commissions and various Ministries set up for the welfare of the people of this country not taking on the new forms of rioting-cum-provocations? Why is there no halt to demonise a particular minority community? No one wants to lag behind on this front. Though I have not seen Sanjay Leela Bhansalis Padmaavat (nor I do wish to) but those who did have told me that Alauddin Khilji is portrayed in the darkest possible shades. True, he was a conqueror, so he did kill but he killed on the battlefield. Not like todays rulers who kill like a bunch of cowards, with camouflages and ploys! And this afternoon as I sit re-reading, Jyotirmaya Sharmas volume, Terrifying VisionM.S. Golwalkar, the RSS and India (Penguin), Im more than concerned of the build-ups. To quote Sharma from his bookThe Ram Janmabhoomi movement, the demolition of the Babri Masjid and the Gujarat riots of 2002 are just a few examples of the impact Golwalkars legacy has had on the move towards a certain brand of radical Hindu nationalism... In Golwalkars mental universe, there are two permanent enemies, the Muslims and politics. These two are the greatest impediments in the way of the Hindu Rashtra regaining its power and glory. After detailing an entire format of the Right-wing mind-set, Jyotirmaya Sharma has also managed to relay that communal poisoning doesnt get unleashed in a short span but efforts in that direction have been on for the last several decades, with a specific target... Its a known fact that Golwalkar had come up with anti-Muslim comments to make the Muslims stand out as the dangerous enemy, as a potential terror threat or as a terror-striking community... Sharmas book carries this particular quote of GolwalkarWithin the country there are so many Muslim pockets, i.e., so many miniature Pakistans ...such pockets have verily become centres of a widespread network of pro-Pakistani elements in this land. ...The conclusion is that, in practically every place there are Muslims who are in constant touch with Pakistan over the transmitter... Right from Delhi to Rampur to Lucknow, the Muslims are busy hatching a dangerous plot, piling up arms and mobilising their men and probably biding their time to strike from within when Pakistan decides upon an armed conflict with our country. Watch Alan Woods (editor of marxist.com) discussing the explosive events in the USA. The appalling murder of George Floyd has unleashed a mighty wave of pent-up fury across the cities of the USA. A wave of indignation has brought thousands of people onto the streets. SPRINGFIELD -- Big Y Foods Inc. plans a major expansion of its Roosevelt Avenue distribution center, according to a news release from Springfield City Hall. Big Y has a 181,000-square foot facility at the 34-acre site built in 1995. Big Y President and Chief operating officer Charles L. D'Amour and Vice President of Corporate Communications Claire D'Amour-Daley will detail the company's plans Friday morning at an event attended by Mayor Domenic J. Sarno and Chief Development Officer Kevin Kennedy. Big Y is one of the largest independently owned supermarket chains in New England with 80 locations in Massachusetts and Connecticut. Those locations include 70 supermarkets, 39 pharmacies, Fresh Acres Market, Table & Vine Fine Wines and Liquors and five Big Y Express gas and convenience locations. The D'Amour family predicts Big Y could grow to 150 stores over the next two decades. The company has 11,000 employees. Brothers Paul and Gerald D'Amour founded Big Y in 1936 in Chicopee and named the store after a nearby intersection where two roads converge to form a "Y." Friday's announcement caps a string of good corporate news for Springfield. Earlier this month, MassMutual announced plans to spend $50 million on its State Street campus and grow its workforce here by approximately 50 percent. The insurer will add 1,500 jobs there over the next four years, bringing the total number of employees in Springfield to approximately 4,500 by 2021. CRRC MA is getting ready to start making subway cars for the MBTA Red and Orange lines at its new factory on Page Boulevard in East Springfield. And MGM Resorts International will open its $960 million MGM Springfield resort casino project on the South End in September. The Massachusetts State Police will set up a sobriety checkpoint somewhere in Suffolk County Saturday, March 3, into Sunday, March 4, State Police Superintendent Col. Kerry Gilpin said Thursday in a press release. The checkpoint, essentially a large roadblock designed to stop all traffic on a given roadway, gives trained troopers the opportunity to meet with and converse with drivers, the release said. Those found to be operating motor vehicles while under the influence of alcohol or drugs will be arrested. The checkpoints also serve to educate the motoring public and to increase the public's awareness of the perils of driving under the influence of perception altering substances. They are designed to make sure the selection of vehicles checked is not arbitrary, but that all vehicles operating on that roadway are stopped, police said. The time and place for the checkpoint are kept confidential to preserve the effectiveness of the operation, police said. WILBRAHAM -- As Wilbraham mulls whether to join a long list of Massachusetts municipalities that wear the "Green Community" label -- a designation born from the 2008 Green Communities Act -- a local farm is promoting a petition to get the issue onto the annual town meeting warrant. "We took it upon ourselves to do the petition," said Brian Cunningham, co-owner of Stony Hill Farm at 899 Stony Hill Road, where the petition is available to sign. "Let's just continue the dialogue," said Cunningham, who attended last week's public presentation on how Wilbraham can become a designated Green Community. Cunningham said he hopes to submit the petition to Town Clerk Beverly J. Litchfield before March 1. The Green Communities Division of the state Department of Energy Resources provides grants, technical assistance, and regional coordinators to help municipalities reduce energy use and costs through various green initiatives. For the Town of Wilbraham, the Green Communities Designation & Grant Program would provide financial and technical support if the town pledges to cut municipal energy use by 20 percent over a five-year period. Here are some other requirements for the town: Wilbraham must approve zoning for designated areas for energy-generating facilities powered by renewable or alternative energy sources, research and development facilities, or manufacturing facilities; adopt an expedited application and permitting process for facilities interested in building or renovating within a designated renewable zone; establish an "energy use baseline inventory" for all municipal vehicles, street lights, traffic lights, buildings and facilities, including schools, wastewater plants and pumping stations, among other facilities; purchase fuel-efficient vehicles for municipal use, whenever such vehicles are commercially available and practicable; and adopt the Massachusetts Board of Building Regulations and Standards Stretch Energy Code, which produces buildings that use significantly less energy than structures built by current and previous building code standards. The Stretch Code applies to newly constructed homes and buildings and requires contractors to hire certified Home Energy Rating System inspectors to ensure energy efficiency. Some state builders have complained about the extra expense, saying the money comes out of their pockets. The wording of the Wilbraham petition, crafted by Cunningham and Stony Hill Farm co-owner Alice Colman, is as follows: To see if the Town will vote to enact Chapter TBD (to be determined) of the Town of Wilbraham General Bylaws, entitled "Stretch Energy Code" for the purpose of regulating the design and construction of buildings for the effective use of energy, pursuant to Appendix 115.AA of the Massachusetts Building Code, 780 CMR, the Stretch Energy Code, including future editions, amendments or modifications thereto, with an effective date of TBD, a copy of which is on file with the Town Clerk, or take any other action relative thereto. Many local communities have already joined the over 200 Massachusetts cities and towns with Green Community designations, including Agawam and West Springfield. In West Side, Mayor Will Reichelt said his city has used the incentive programs offered by the Green Communities Division. "These energy efficiency improvements did not affect the city's operating budget," he told The Republican last year. Last month, the Agawam City Council voted to accept $207,970 in funding from the Green Community Designation & Grants Program. The money will be used for energy improvements, including upgrading heating units, replacing old lights with LED lights, and other measures to save energy and cut costs. SPRINGFIELD - A stabbing that occurred in the Indian Orchard neighborhood Friday morning has claimed the life of its victim, a spokesman for the Hampden District Attorney's office said. DA spokesman James Leydon had no additional information on the stabbing early Friday afternoon. Ryan Walsh, spokesman for Springfield police, said the stabbing occurred at a Beaudry Street home at about 8:15 a.m. Yellow police tape could be seen cordoning off two vehicles in the driveway of 29 Beaudry St. This is a developing story, Additional information will be posted as soon as it is available. Several Massachusetts colleges and universities are pledging not to rescind the acceptance of any high school student who may be punished for protesting gun violence. The call to end gun violence, and in its place create stricter and effective gun control, has resonated with students across the United States. Since students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida launched a "Never Again" movement following the devastating school shooting last week, students everywhere are heeding the call to plan localized protests. Several nationwide rallies are in the works, including the "Student Walkout Against Gun Violence" and the "National School Walkout" slated for March 14. Colleges across the state -- including Worcester Polytechnic Institute, The University of Massachusetts Amherst, Smith College the Massachusetts Institute of Technology -- shared public messages this week to express their support for students who may be disciplined for protesting gun violence during school hours. The announcements were motivated by news of a superintendent in Needville, a town southwest of Houston, Texas, who said students who protested during school hours would be suspended for three days, according to a Washington Post report. Needville Superintendent Curtis Rhodes issued a written warning that has since gone viral and sparked a discussion of students' first amendment rights. In the warning, Rhodes tells students and parents, "Life is all about choices and every choice has a consequence whether it be positive or negative. We will discipline no matter if it is one, fifty, or five hundred students involved." Typically, colleges can rescind student acceptances if the applicant shows a decline in character or academics. A suspension, say, or a failing grade will result in some colleges taking back an acceptance offer. Massachusetts schools wanted to make it clear that any student punished for participating in the nationwide movement to demand better gun control will not be impacted by poor conduct. Agreed. I cant believe I even have to clarify this: students applying to WPI will not be penalized for exercising their 1st Amendment rights to speak out against gun violence. Thanks @JonBoeckenstedt, @akilbello & others for spreading this movement of support for our students. https://t.co/z2BtVpc7yu Andrew B. Palumbo (@InsideAdmission) February 22, 2018 To students worried about disciplinary action for getting suspended for standing up for your beliefs: weve got you on this side. #Smith2022 #ParklandStudentsSpeak Deanna Dixon (@DeanDeannaD) February 22, 2018 "We always encourage students to undertake whatever course of action in life is most meaningful to, and consistent with, their own principles, and not prioritize how it might impact their college applications," Stu Schmill, MIT's dean of admissions and student financial services, wrote in a blog post published Thursday. BOSTON -- The Massachusetts Senate has registered its opposition to reopening any oil and gas exploration or drilling off the coast of New England. A resolution passed by the Senate Thursday states that federal initiatives to reopen offshore drilling "threaten to jeopardize the environmental well-being of the Commonwealth, and more particularly, its coastal communities and waters." The measure asks the U.S. Department of the Interior to "take all possible action to protect the waters off the coast of the Commonwealth and New England, in particular Georges Bank, Stellwagen Bank, and Jeffreys Ledge, and to exempt these areas from oil exploration initiatives." The statement, co-authored by Sen. Mike Barrett, D-Lexington, and Sen. Bruce Tarr, R-Gloucester, comes days before the Bureau of Ocean Management plans a Feb. 27 public open house in Boston regarding its proposed National Outer Continental Shelf Oil and Gas Leasing Program. The Bureau of Ocean Management will soon seek environmental permits for its Jan. 9 draft plan to reopen fossil fuel exploration in nearly all ocean areas along the continental United States and Alaska. March 9 is the deadline for submitting public comments on the draft leasing document. "Our coastal marine environment contains precious resources that support employment, commerce, research and our quality of life," said Tarr in a statement. "The well-being of our communities must be protected and defended." "The country currently has projected surpluses of oil and natural gas for as far as the eye can see," said Barrett. "This threat of environmental and economic devastation to our part of the nation could not be more pointless, nor more disrespectful to the traditions of the region." In January, every senator and U.S. representative from the coastal New England states co-sponsored a bill to ban offshore drilling in the region, saying the plan threatens communities, fisheries and the economy. In the Bay State, those who have registered opposition include Gov. Charlie Baker, Attorney General Maura Healey and the state's Coastal Zone Management Office. Baker told the Bureau of Ocean Management that he supports its wind energy leasing program on the Outer Continental Shelf. President Donald Trump issued an executive order on April 28, 2017 to implement an "America First Offshore Energy Strategy." The order directed the U.S. Department of the Interior to encourage offshore oil and gas exploration and production. Under the current lease arrangement, areas of the Atlantic and Alaska coasts are excluded from drilling and exploration. The Bureau of Ocean Management wishes to lift those restrictions. The draft federal plan includes four areas up and down the Atlantic coast, including a "North Atlantic" section, where the Bureau of Ocean Management proposes two potential lease sales to energy companies through 2024. According to the Bureau of Ocean Management, between 1976 and 1984, 43 exploratory wells were drilled off New England with no commercial discoveries. The Feb. 27 public scoping session, where participants are encouraged to "ask questions, share information, and talk" with Bureau of Ocean Management representatives, will be held at the Sheraton Boston Hotel at 39 Dalton St. from 3-7 p.m. A Massachusetts tipster alerted authorities that Nikolas Cruz "could be a school shooter in the making" last November - three months before the 19-year-old was charged with the school shooting that killed 17 people in Parkland, Florida. A document released by the Broward County Sheriff's Office shows that a caller from Massachusetts warned authorities in November 2017 that Cruz was collecting guns and knives and was concerned that he would kill himself. The caller believed that Cruz "could be a school shooter in the making," according to the document. A Florida deputy contacted the caller, but the documents says that no report was initiated. The deputy said he referred the caller to the Palm Beach Sheriff's Office, as Cruz had moved to Lake Worth, Florida. Cruz was charged with 17 counts of murder after opening fire at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, on Valentine's Day. The document released by the Sheriff's Office does not say how the Massachusetts caller knew Cruz. The call and response remain under review. The call from Massachusetts was one of nearly two dozen calls received by authorities concerning Cruz over the past decade -- many of which had to do with his behavior. The document shows that authorities received information in February 2016 that Cruz indicated in an Instagram post that he planned to shoot up a school. That information was forwarded to the Stoneman Douglas School Resource Officer, according to the document, which also stated that the specific high school was unknown. In another call from September 2016, a peer counselor reported that Cruz allegedly drank gasoline the week prior in an attempt to kill himself and had been cutting himself. The report says that Cruz said he wanted to buy a gun for hunting and was in possession of hate-related symbols. A school resource deputy assisted, according to the document, and the high school said it would conduct a threat assessment on Cruz. LUDLOW- With less than a month until St. Patrick's Day, Iron Duke Brewing and the Springfield St. Patrick's Day Parade Committee joined forces this week for a party to celebrate a new beer. At the brewing company's current spot in The Ludlow Mills, a crowd gathered on Thursday to indulge in the newly released Murph's Irish Ale. "The parade committee is beyond excited to partner with a great local business like Iron Duke in Ludlow, which is part of the Springfield contingent" Springfield St. Patrick's Committee President Kerri Sullivan previously said. Iron Duke Brewing, embroiled in a years-long dispute with its landlord, the Westmass Development Corp., plans to buy a building in neighboring Wilbraham, move there and expand. Iron Duke is set to come back before the Wilbraham Zoning Board of Appeals March 29 at 5:30 p.m. in Town Hall. Charges against one of two teens arrested last week after allegedly calling in a threat against their high school to a Boston television news station have been dropped. The two male freshmen, ages 14 and 15, were arrested for allegedly threatening to commit acts of violence at Rockland High School. Both were charged with making terroristic threats and disturbing a school assembly. During an investigation into the incident, authorities determined that charges against the 14-year-old will be dropped. Police found that the 15-year-old student used the 14-year-old's cell phone to call the Boston TV station and threaten to harm people at their school, Rockland Police Chief John R. Llewellyn said in a statement. The investigation found that the 14-year-old was unaware of the 15-year-old's intentions when the call was made. Llewellyn said the threat was made last Friday afternoon inside the Rockland High School cafeteria. The town's public schools temporarily sheltered in place while police found and arrested the two students. The teens' names are not being released due to their ages. SOUTH HADLEY -- A Pioneer Valley Performing Arts Charter Public School's Board of Trustees subcommittee recommended the board formally terminate ex-head of school George Simpson during a closed door meeting Thursday with legal counsel. Simpson, who was arraigned Jan. 29 at Woburn District Court on charges of possession of heroin and methamphetamine, abruptly resigned Feb. 9. The subcommittee issued a brief statement following the meeting to announce its recommendation. The recommendation now goes before the trustees, who are scheduled to convene a special meeting Monday. If adopted by the PVPA trustees at the Feb. 26 meeting, that would mean Simpson, 45, of Springfield, will receive no more money from the school. Trustees had initially offered to buy out the remainder of Simpson's contract in exchange for him resigning. But prior to the board actually voting to approve, the school's legal counsel discovered Simpson was arrested on Jan. 26 in Reading. Simpson had not disclosed to the trustees that he was facing criminal prosecution. The board's lawyer discovered Simpson had legal issues four days after his resignation. Although invited, neither Simpson nor his lawyer, David Perry, attended Thursday's meeting. The men have been invited to Monday's meeting. Trustees are also expected to provide an update at the meeting on how they plan to find a new head of school. That discussion is expected to include how to improve the vetting process that will be used to hire the next school chief. SPRINGFIELD -- City Councilor Justin Hurst has scheduled a meeting Tuesday with Police Commissioner John Barbieri and the public to respond to a story in The Republican about police officers with troubled pasts included among candidates vying for promotion. The council's Public Safety Committee, chaired by Hurst, is meeting Tuesday at 5:30 p.m., at City Hall in the Council Chambers. At 6 p.m., Hurst will invite residents in attendance to express any concerns they may have regarding the upcoming promotions. Police spokesman Ryan Walsh said Barbieri will attend the meeting, but must leave when the public comment session begins. Barbieri will be able to speak about the promotional process with the committee, but "cannot speak about any individuals or any specific circumstances," Walsh said. Otherwise, if Barbieri stayed for the public forum and individuals were discussed, it "could give the appearance that any future appointments or potential by-passes were influenced politically or by public opinion," Walsh said. The state Civil Service law states in part that promotions must be based on "basic merit principals" and ensure fair treatment of all applicants, "protecting employees from arbitrary and capricious actions," Walsh said, citing portions of the law. Given some of those up for promotion have histories of disciplinary issues including high-profile cases, Hurst said it is imperative that Barbieri "be as transparent as possible in his selection process, and this sub-committee meeting will afford him that opportunity." Committee member Councilor Adam Gomez agreed that public concerns about the promotions need to be heard. "The perception that is being portrayed is 'Crime Does Pay,'" Gomez said. According to a ranking of civil service scores obtained recently by The Republican, the 12 officers who are vying for promotion to five open sergeant positions include Officer Gregg A. Bigda, whose interrogation of two juveniles in 2016 led to a 60-day suspension and some public outcries that he be terminated. "It is extremely important for the public to know the role that Civil Service plays in the promotional process," Hurst said. "Additionally, I'm hopeful that Commissioner Barbieri will provide some insight into the criteria he uses when promoting officers." Hurst said he has been inundated with phone calls from residents who question why the Police Department allows officers with disciplinary issues to take the Civil Service promotional test. A handful of demonstrators protested in front of the police station on Feb. 14, to raise concerns about the promotion list having candidates with questionable histories of misconduct. "There are some who see this round of promotions as an opportunity to right the ship and ensure that police officers who ascend to leadership positions within the department are an example for other officers to follow and others who are fearful that the department will not address the elephant in the room at all, which has historically been common practice," Hurst said. "Everyone makes mistakes, but in the City of Springfield, our constituents' concerns should be heard and documented," Gomez said. "I'm all about second chances, but there has to be a teachable lesson learned here and citizens need to be able to trust those individuals who are charged with protecting them." Gomez and a third committee member, Councilor Timothy Ryan, are expected to attend. Bigda, who was a narcotics detective, was captured on camera at the Palmer police station interrogating two teenagers suspected of steeling an unmarked Springfield police cruiser. The video includes threats of beating and planting evidence. Barbieri plans to convene his three deputies to assist in interviewing the candidates for promotion. According to Walsh, the civil service process allows any police officer who has worked for a minimum of three years to take an exam to be eligible for promotion. HOLYOKE -- Everyone wants to be remembered after they are gone. Robert Charland says if he is remembered for helping other people, then he is OK with that. "I know my life is short-term because of what I have, so I'm making the best effort I can to outfit local police departments," Charland said. "I want to leave a legacy behind. I want to help as many officers as I can." Charland, a Springfield resident and a deputy with the Hampden County Sheriff's Department, has in the last few years at his own expense fixed junked bicycles that are then given to disadvantaged children in Chicopee, Holyoke and Springfield. Known as "Bob the Bike Guy," Charland's effort has expanded to a nonprofit organization known as Pedal Thru Youth, which last year distributed 426 bikes. Seven different schools are on the waiting list for bikes this year. Charland last fall also launched another volunteer effort, this one to supply police departments with "necessities bags" for the backs of police cruisers. This is done with some donations from people and local businesses, but also with his own money. Between the bicycle and the bag programs, he estimates he has spent more than $10,000. He says this matter-of-factly, the way someone else would talk about donating the cost of a postage stamp. "This is my money. I can't take it with me," he said. "That's how I look at it." When Charland talks about not taking it with him and of having only a limited time left on Earth, he is not just being philosophical. A year ago, he was diagnosed with a neurodegenerative brain disease. The condition is considered terminal. The necessities bags, containing emergency blankets, hats and gloves, socks, hand and foot warmers, nutritional supplements, toothbrushes and toothpaste, and other toiletries, are intended to be handed out to any people living on the street that officers encounter. Charland was on hand at the Holyoke Police Department on Thursday to present the department with 50 bags. The simple idea of giving police tools to provide some comfort to those in need has expanded to where he provides the emergency bags to the Connecticut and Massachusetts state police, the Sheriff's Department, and the Springfield and Holyoke police. The running total so far, including the Holyoke donation, is around 240 bags, with more to come. The bags, containing such items as hand warmers, blankets, socks, toothbrushes and toiletries, are intended to be in the back of police cruisers, and are there for officers to provide to any homeless people they encounter on the streets. Rather than turning to despair or anger about his diagnosis, Charland said he chooses to spend whatever time he has left in service of others. This attitude has led to his being noticed in the media far beyond the Springfield area. He has been the focus of articles in People magazine, WBUR in Boston, and on FOX News. "Bob has gone out of his way to make a difference in people's lives," said Holyoke Police Chief James Neiswanger. "The police department does more than chasing bad guys and arresting people," Neiswanger said. "We're out there trying to help the community." Holyoke police, through its officers and its crisis intervention team, actively seeks to help homeless people encountered in the city. The bags will aid officers in providing short-term comfort for people truly in need, he said. Charland said the bags themselves are just a means for people to reach out and start a connection people in the community. "This is not just about a cop handing out a bag. It's about having a conversation," he said. And through conversations come connections between police and people in the community, he said. Charland said he is interested in extending the program to as many police departments in the area that are open to it. He spoke recently at the National Police Chiefs Convention, and found there were many departments that were interested. He said he intends to keep making the bags for as long as he can and for any department that wants them. "When the chief (Neiswanger) runs low, someone will contact me and we will replenish them," he said. "I don't feel that I have a limit. We're going to make it work." Note: Charland said anyone wishing to donate to his bag program may contact him through his Facebook page. HOLYOKE -- Five months after the state said it was reviewing how cases of residents falling on Holyoke Soldiers' Home property are handled, a new report says the facility is still working on improving safety. "The Home will hire and work with a consultant to support management in implementing a systematic, comprehensive, and data-driven approach to maintaining and improving patient safety and quality. In progress," said the report obtained by The Republican. (see below) "The Home will review falls protocols with a falls expert to ensure a comprehensive and systematic approach to falls prevention. In progress," the report said. The report was dated Dec. 20, 2017 and titled "Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Department of Veterans' Services, Soldiers' Home in Holyoke, Committed to Continuous Improvement." The Holyoke Soldiers' Home provides residential beds, inpatient care and outpatient services for military veterans at 110 Cherry St. It was founded in 1952. The facility employs 339 people and has over 230 military veterans in long-term care and 25 living in dorms, officials said. The Republican reported on Sept. 25 that a team led by Alice Bonner, secretary of the Massachusetts Executive Office of Elder Affairs, who is a registered nurse specializing in falls prevention, met with staff at the facility. That came after The Republican reported on Sept. 10 that three employees and a resident raised concerns about treatment of residents and staff, including increases in incidents of residents falling down inside or outdoors on facility property. Bonner and her team prepared the Dec. 20 report. The reason for the report is that the Holyoke Soldiers' Home's has an ongoing commitment to provide "the highest level of care" to residents and to support staff who provide the round-the-clock care, said Eric Donovan, spokesman for the Massachusetts Department of Veterans Services. "The Home, like any health care facility, is constantly seeking to improve the care, experience and environment for veterans, families and employees. The experts from other Commonwealth agencies were brought in to review initiatives already underway, to share best practices and make recommendations for continued improvement in a long term care facility," Donovan said in an email. The report was shared with Holyoke Soldiers' Home staff through "town hall" meetings held in December and also was provided to members of the facility's board of trustees, legislators and families, he said. Staff and relatives of residents at the Holyoke Soldiers' Home have said inadequate numbers of staff and poor use of existing staff have resulted in lack of attention to residents. That often leads to those who are unable to walk on their own trying to walk, such as to the rest room, and falling down, they said. The Republican reported Nov. 2 that, between January 2014 and August 2017, the Soldiers' Home recorded 2,074 cases of residents falling on the property. In 594 of those falls, veteran suffered injuries including bone fractures, joint dislocations, altered consciousness or loss of consciousness and skin tears, along with scrapes or soreness. State officials have said residents at the Holyoke Soldiers' Home were already getting top quality care and were safe. In relation to the report saying the state will hire a consultant to help the facility on "improving patient safety and quality," they were asked, given statements provided since September, why there was a need to improve safety. "The Soldiers' Home in Holyoke is always looking for ways to evolve and improve the quality of care we provide to veterans," Donovan said. "In order to keep pace with the changing landscape of health care and our veteran population, it is important that the home be continuously engaged in best practices and veteran care improvements. Working with a consultant is just one way it is fulfilling its mission of providing care with honor and dignity." Besides working to curtail the numbers of falls, the report said the Holyoke Soldiers' Home will work to "improve and expedite the hiring process," work with labor union officials to address the high rate of absenteeism and will improve and broaden employee recruitment. Holyoke Soldiers' Home employees said last year that 176 staff members signed onto an effort called Employees Unite 4 Change. It was described as "a collective staff effort to identify and problem solve a myriad of issues greatly impacting veteran care and the facility as a whole." To "improve the care for veterans," the new report said, five areas that need improvement have been identified: communication and transparency, teamwork, quality assurance performance improvement, the complaint process and family engagement. "As part of Superintendent Walsh's commitment to continued improvement to provide the best care to the Home's residents, over the next 12 months, he and his senior leadership team will work collaboratively with staff to implement the recommendations of the expert group," the report said, referring to facility head Bennett W. Walsh. Numerous bulletin boards will be installed at the facility "to keep employees, veterans and families apprised of key events, information, and upcoming meetings," the report said. The cost of establishing the changes outlined in the report is being determined, Donovan said. New report about Holyoke Soldiers' Home: by Mike Plaisance on Scribd Two people have been injured in a shooting at Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond. School spokesman Erin Cowser told the Associated Press that the shooting happened Friday at 3 a.m. near an assembly hall where sporting events are held. Cowser said it is unclear whether the two people injured were students at the university, but said it appears that students were involved. The two people were taken to a local hospital with non-life threatening injuries, the university said in a statement posted to Facebook. The University Police Department confirmed in the post that gunshots were fired overnight on the North Campus, but said there is no present threat to the university. ALERT: There is no present threat to the campus community. The University Police Department has confirmed an incident... Posted by Southeastern Louisiana University on Friday, February 23, 2018 Police are continuing to investigate the shooting, according to the university's statement. Southeastern Louisiana University is located about 56 miles northwest of New Orleans. An employee of a South Yarmouth waste management company is facing a felony charge of making a terroristic threat after allegedly threatening "extreme violence" against his coworkers, Yarmouth police said Friday. Rogelio Lopez Jr., 51, was suspended from his job at Republic Waste Services last week after allegedly making phone calls threatening to harm other employees in the workplace. He has since been fired. On Thursday, Yarmouth police met with the company's management, heard details about the threats and obtained an arrest warrant for Lopez, a longtime employee with no criminal record or license to carry firearms, police said. "With the arrest warrant in hand, Yarmouth Police Detectives [Christopher] VanNess and Michael Wells, along with Proactive Anti-Crime Unit Officer Nicholas Ambrosini, travelled to the Wareham Police Department and subsequently teamed up with Wareham Police Department Police Officers to Lopez's residence in Wareham," Yarmouth police said. "At 7:00PM Lopez was found in the home and placed under arrest. Lopez was transported to Yarmouth Police Department Headquarters for booking." Lopez provided a statement to police, warned to stay away from the business and was released on his personal recognizance. He is scheduled for arraignment in Barnstable District Court today. Republic Waste Services has hired a police detail to provide security until further notice, police said. Police did not release details of the specific threats allegedly made by Lopez. MassLive has reached out to the department and the Cape and Islands District Attorney's Office for more information. Who knew that Bernie Sanders was as insecure as Donald Trump? How else to explain Sanders' dismissive comments about Russian meddling in our nation's 2016 presidential campaign? How else to explain his efforts to turn the spotlight away from himself and focus it instead on Hillary Clinton, who bested him in the race for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination? In a recent interview with Vermont Public Radio, Sanders, responding to a question regarding Russian interference in our electoral process "including by supporting your campaign," said: "Well, ha. 'Supporting my campaign?' No, they were attacking Hillary Clinton's campaign using my supporters against them." Not exactly. According to special counsel Robert S. Mueller III's indictment of 13 Russian nationals and three Russian entities for their efforts to undermine the very core of our democratic process, in part by adopting false personas on various social media sites, those taking part were instructed to "use any opportunity to criticize Hillary and the rest (except for Sanders and Trump -- we support them)." Seems fairly straightforward, no? Those who back Sanders like to think of their man as standing apart, as being above it all, removed from the typical political rough and tumble. But he's got more in common with Trump than he'd like to admit. Each ran for president as a populist outsider. And each held up Clinton not only as out of touch, but also as corrupt. Clinton's connection to the Wall Street set made her anathema to Sanders; Trump's unrelenting critique of Clinton was more general. Sanders, of course, is an independent U.S. senator from Vermont. The self-described socialist sought the Democratic Party's nomination without even being a Democrat. Trump, who was a registered Democrat for most of his life, ran for president as a Republican, securing the nomination of a party into which his politics weren't exactly a natural fit. In his radio interview, Sanders, who said that the Clinton campaign "had more information about [Russian interference] than we did," told the tale of a certain suspicious Facebook page. "A guy who was on my staff ... checked it out and he went to the Clinton campaign, and he said, 'You know what? I think these guys are Russians.'" Makes a good story, doesn't it? Deflect attention. Blame Clinton. Trouble is, it may not be exactly true. According to former Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver, the 76-year-old senator based his story on a recent news account. Pick and choose and spin and call it fact. It's a move ripped directly from Trump's playbook. And what's Sanders' game here? That's an easy one. There's every reason to believe that the onetime mayor of Burlington, Vermont, intends to be a player in the Democratic Party's presidential nominating contest in 2020. As such, the last thing he wants is to be thought of as one of Russian President Vladimir Putin's favored candidates. Thus, his efforts to put as much distance as possible between his campaign and Russian meddling. By Jim Shaer For the last twelve months Eversource Energy defended its demand for an increase in electric rates of $400 million dollars over five years, with Western Massachusetts on the hook for $180 million or $36 million annually. That meant a $180 million dollar hike in electric bills for home owners, hospitals, nursing homes and small businesses. It also meant a 10.5 percent increase in shareholder profits despite the fact that Massachusetts has the highest residential electric rates in the country. Between 2010 and 2015 Eversource shareholders common stock received a cumulative total return of 89 percent followed by even higher rates that went into effect this past December. Ratepayers found a Christmas present of a 30 percent increase from the prior year when they opened their electric bill. It's no wonder why many Western Mass consumers are thinking they are stuck holding the bag. Our region has been hit particularly hard by Eversource Energy's long neglected upgrades and modernization to the power grid. And Eversource, with hat in hand, was seeking one of the biggest electric rate increases in state history. Eversource's justification? They need to upgrade the power grid. But something good happened. Ratepayers in Western Massachusetts used their collective voice to oppose this outlandish rate increase. Citizens from all walks of life got involved, testified at regional Massachusetts Department of Public Utility (Mass DPU) hearings and lobbied their elected representatives who heard them. Attorney General Maura Healey, who represents utility rate payers before state regulators, played a key role in the DPU's rejection of the Eversource money grab. Local officials led the way as well. State Representative Smitty Pignatelli (D-Lenox) has underscored just how unfair Eversource's higher rates are in Western Massachusetts. In Berkshire County workers are paid less than the rest of the state - "We are smaller, we are older, we are sicker and we are poorer." Because of this unrelenting public effort, the Mass DPU cut the Eversource request by 60 percent to $36.4 million. But again, Western Mass was targeted to pay the brunt of the costs at $24 million annually. With the passage of federal tax legislation, Attorney General Healey pointed out that Eversource would pay even less in federal taxes under the new law. Healey, was the first Attorney General in the country to call for lower rates. The company has tacitly acknowledged Healey's point and now claims it will in fact reduce rates to a $16.5 million increase in Western Mass. It's not only with utility rates where Eversource behaves in a heavy handed fashion. The most recent example is its Northern Pass plan. As one of 46 separate bidders seeking to fulfill the Massachusetts Department of Energy's Request for Proposals (RFP) to provide renewable energy they were able to do something no other competitor was able to do. Eversource was able to bid against itself. How is that possible? Because Eversource was able to place company officials on the selection committee making the decision on the RFP. It's no surprise when competitive bidders felt that the process was seriously flawed. Former Berkshire State Senator Ben Downing, an energy expert during his time in the legislature, expressed his misgivings about the process when he said - "It was and remains a troubling aspect of the entire arrangement." Regulators can have the courage to say no to Eversource as they did with the Massachusetts electric rate increase and as New Hampshire did two weeks ago. The New Hampshire Site Evaluation Committee unanimously rejected Eversource Energy's $1.6 billion Northern Pass project. While hydro power from Quebec would have been transmitted through New Hampshire to Massachusetts, the project infrastructure would have decimated the New Hampshire country-side and especially areas near the White Mountain National Park. Eversource is crying foul. But the utility never secured permits and rights of way from local property owners. And brushed off public comments which ran against the project by a 2 - 1 margin. Frankly, Eversource expected they had greased the skid with the New Hampshire citing process. Well they didn't. As the Massachusetts RFP moves forward it is important to remember that the process can be fair, transparent and accountable. As in New Hampshire, no bidder should be able to game the process and Eversource personnel should not be allowed to help decide who is awarded the license. Because of the rejection of Eversource and Northern Pass by New Hampshire, Massachusetts regulators are forced to revisit the RFP. Western Mass ratepayers should expect state regulators to ensure their interests are served and not have to rely on a citing process from a neighboring state. Just as public officials were vigilant in turning back the outrageous Eversource rate hike, they need to be equally vigilant as state regulators weigh the future of the Northern Pass and the delivering of renewable energy to the Commonwealth. Jim Shaer is a native of Western Mass and former Assistant State Director for US Senator John Kerry SpaceX hit another orbital milestone on Wednesday: It launched a pair of experimental broadband satellites on a Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. The test satellites are another step forward for chief executive Elon Musk, who dreams of building a worldwide network of thousands of orbiting devices that can beam Internet signals down to Earth from low orbit. While much of the project is aimed at connecting developing countries to the Web, many people in wealthy nations are likely to benefit, too, experts say, thanks to the increased broadband competition it may prompt. By Brian Fung https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/02/22/spacexs-internet-satellites-are-part-of-a-wave-of-new-tech-that-could-give-you-more-choice-in-broadband-providers/?utm_term=.ed99060763cc Two Montana public schools have been awarded state match funds to pay for special construction charges for broadband upgrades, increasing Internet access for their students. The Broadband for Montana Schools program has approved funding for Belfry K-12 Schools and West Valley Elementary. Kalispells West Valley Elementary has already completed its project to construct a lit fiber network, increasing Internet speeds to 100 megabits per second. Thanks to $2 million in funding made possible through House Bill 390, and assistance from the nonprofit EducationSuperHighway, improved broadband connectivity is now a reality for more Montana schools. Broadband for Montana Schools provides a state match to leverage broadband funds available through the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) E-rate program for Montanas public K-12 schools. "It couldnt have worked out any better for us," said West Valley Technology Director Mark Wilson. "All of the support was there, our E-rate consultant assisted in filing the E-rate paperwork, EducationSuperHighway kept us coordinated on next steps, and the state matching fund helped pay for the cost of the upgrade." http://commerce.mt.gov/News/PressReleases/broadband-for-montana-schools-awards-2-grants-additional-funding-available The African Development Bank has urged the continents nations to stay the course on climate action, after a marathon session of talks at the twenty-fifth Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP 25) in Madrid. The conference was scheduled to run from 2 to 13 December, but only concluded business on Sunday, two days after the official programme ended. Meanwhile, back home, Africans were reminded of the all-too-real consequences if these talks fail to deliver results. Thousands of East Africans have been displaced in the wake of heavy rains that have battered the region since October, and more wet weather is expected due to an Indian Ocean Dipole attributed to the warming of the ocean. Such extreme weather events should galvanise Africans; their governments are spending 2% of GDP on climate related disasters, said Anthony Nyong, Director for Climate Change and Green Growth at the African Development Bank. He encouraged the global community to remain steadfast in finding effective solutions to climate change. The annual negotiations are now in their 25th year. The global community, and in particular Africa has a lot to offer in terms of solutions; what is evidently lacking is the global political will to turn potential into wealth to serve humanity and the planet, said Nyong, who led the Banks delegation to the UN conference. At the conference, African delegates pushed for support for climate finance to build resilience against the impact of climate change and for special consideration for Africa around targets contained in the treaties under discussion. The discussions at COP 25 centred around the landmark 2015 Paris Agreement, which calls on countries to cut carbon emissions to ensure that global temperatures do not rise by more than 2C by the end of this century, while attempting to contain it within 1.5C. The conference ended with a declaration on the urgent need to close the gap between existing emissions pledges and the temperature goals of the Paris agreement. The African Development Bank attended the conference to lend strategic support to its regional member countries in the negotiations. Nyong pointed out that Africa is committed; 51 of the 54 African countries have already ratified their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) under the Paris Agreement signed at the landmark COP21 in Paris. The NDCs are specific climate change targets that each country must set. Support for the Bank-funded Desert to Power project highlighted Africas determination to strive for a climate-friendly world, especially for its local populations, said Nyong. Desert to Power is a $20 billion initiative to deploy solar energy solutions across the entire Sahel region, generating 10,000 MW to provide 250 million people with clean electricity. The African Development Bank stands ready as ever to assist its regional member countries to build resilience against climate change, as indicated by the Banks decision to join the Alliance for Hydromet Development, announced at COP 25 (https://bit.ly/35sye5S). The Alliance will assist developing countries to build resilience against the impact of natural disasters caused by extreme weather, Nyong said. The Bank will also continue to drive initiatives to strengthen the ability of regional member countries to advocate robustly at global forums such as COP 25, Nyong added. One example was the Banks participation at the annual African Ministerial Conference on the Environment (AMCEN) and support for the Africa Group of Negotiations (AGN). We look forward to engaging further with regional member countries and other parties to ensure that the continents development agenda remains on track, Nyong added. Leaders and institutions from 196 nations plus the European Union, who have signed up to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, attended the conference in Madrid. Partager et informez vous aussi...... 0 shares Share Tweet LinkedIn Les membres du Cabinet ont pris note des noms des membres de la Commission dEnquete sur laffaire Betamax et les termes de reference le la dit enquete, de lextension de la phase trois du Confinement au 31 aout 2021, de la promulgation du Copyright (Fees) (Amendment) Regulations 2021, de la visite prochaine des membres de la Financial Action Task Force (FATF) Africa/Middle East Joint Group au 13 au 15 septembre entre autres. 1. Cabinet has taken note that the President of the Republic has appointed a Commission of Inquiry to inquire and report on, inter alia, the circumstances in which the contract for transport of petroleum products to Mauritius (Contract of Affreightment) was awarded to Betamax Ltd and the circumstances which subsequently led to the termination of the said contract. The Commission of Inquiry has been constituted as follows: (a) Hon Mrs Carol Green-Jokhoo, Puisne Judge as Chairperson; and (b) Dr Pushpawant Boodhun, former Permanent Secretary and Mr Kodados Mosafeer, former Director, Procurement and Supply, as Commissioners. 2. Cabinet has agreed to the extension of the quarantine period up to 31 August 2021. The COVID-19 (Closing Down of Premises and Restriction of Activities) Regulations 2021, as subsequently amended, would continue to apply. 3. Cabinet has taken note that the Immigration (Advance Passenger Information and Passenger Name Record Data) Regulations 2021 and the Civil Aviation (Collection of Data from Operators of Private Flights Landing in, or Departing from, Mauritius) Regulations 2021 would be promulgated to facilitate the introduction of a Passenger Information System for the enhancement of Border Control Management in Mauritius. The Immigration (Advance Passenger Information and Passenger Name Record Data) Regulations 2021 would provide the regulatory framework for carriers serving Mauritius to send booking and check-in data in a timely manner to the Passport and Immigration Office (PIO). It would allow Border Control Agencies to carry out profiling of passengers in advance and to respond appropriately. The Immigration (Advance Passenger Information and Passenger Name Record Data) Regulations 2021 would require commercial air transport operators to submit passenger data to the PIO within a specified time. As regards operators of private flights, once the Civil Aviation (Collection of Data from Operators of Private Flights Landing in, or Departing from, Mauritius) Regulations 2021 would be promulgated, they would have to submit the required data on passengers and crew to the Director of Civil Aviation. 4. Cabinet has agreed to the promulgation of the Mauritius Standards Bureau (National Management Systems Certification Scheme) (Amendment) Regulations 2021 and the Mauritius Standards Bureau (Certification Mark) (Amendment) Regulations 2021. The MSB (National Management Systems Certification Scheme) Regulations provide the legal framework for the effective operation of various Schemes. The rationale for the amendment of the MSB (National Management Systems Certification Scheme) Regulations is to: (a) include the amended logo for Sustainable Tourism with the wording Blue Oasis; (b) remove MauriGAP Certification as the latter shall be operated under the MSB Certification Mark Scheme; and (c) cater for a new logo that has been launched. Under the MSB Certification Mark Scheme, the MSB grants licences to companies to use the MSB Certification Mark for the products/processes which meet all the requirements of the relevant standard. The Scheme also caters for certification based on Ecolabel Standards. It is proposed that the validity of licences issued under the MSB Certification Mark Scheme be reviewed from two to three years. The period of three years would ensure consistency for both Management System Certification Schemes and MSB Certification Mark Scheme. 5. Cabinet has agreed to the promulgation of the Copyright (Fees) (Amendment) Regulations 2021 following the impact of the prevailing COVID-19 pandemic on businesses. Regulation 4 of the Copyright (Fees) Regulations 2020 would be repealed and replaced by a fresh regulation to exempt certain class of businesses from payment of copyright fee to the Mauritius Society of Authors for the time being. The copyright fees to be paid by tourist operators, hotels and restaurants would come into operation on 01 July 2022. This exemption would not apply to Rodrigues. Fees to be paid by aircrafts of Air Mauritius and in respect of live performances in hotels and restaurants would also come into operation on 01 July 2022. 6. Cabinet has agreed to the re-engineering of the Cooperatives Division of the Ministry of Industrial Development, SMEs and Cooperatives, in line with the recommendations made by the Office of the Public Sector Governance. The re-engineering exercise would be implemented in three phases. The intended outcomes of the re-engineering exercise are: (a) improved, integrated and centralised services to reduce the number of defaulting societies. A newly created Enforcement Unit would, inter alia: (i) ensure compliance to the Co-operatives Act by all Cooperative Societies; (ii) carry out visits to societies and submit recommendations; and (iii) ensure compliance to the provisions of the Anti-Money Laundering and Combatting the Financing of Terrorism (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act regarding financial and non-financial transactions. (b) the Registration Unit would be consolidated to carry out due diligence to ensure registration of societies with bona fide objectives and aspiration of promoters. Moreover, efforts would be put to reactivate dormant societies by ensuring regular visits and support with existing schemes; (c) a Research and Innovation Committee would be set up to ensure high quality research in cooperative matters; and (d) the cooperative societies would be provided with appropriate support schemes to make their activities robust and sustainable. 7. Cabinet has agreed to the Ministry of Arts and Cultural Heritage engaging in discussions with the private sector through the setting up of a Committee comprising representatives of both the public and private sectors to advise on the restoration, preservation, promotion and management of selected National Heritage Sites. The Committee would be chaired by the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Arts and Cultural Heritage. The terms of reference of the Committee would be to, inter alia, advise the Ministry of Arts and Cultural Heritage on the following: (a) selection of the most appropriate national heritage sites to be restored and preserved in the short, medium and long term; (b) elaboration of an appropriate concept for the development of selected national heritage sites; (c) development of an appropriate mechanism for the management of the national heritage sites after restoration; (d) elaboration of an aggressive marketing strategy to promote the national heritage sites after restoration; (e) development of an appropriate public-private partnership model to look after specific national heritage sites; and (f) identification of sources of funding from the public and private sectors. 8. Cabinet has taken note that an on-site visit would be conducted by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) Africa/Middle East Joint Group (AME JG) delegation from 13 to 15 September 2021 in Mauritius. The objective of the on-site visit is to confirm that the technical aspects of the Action Plan have been completed and that there is the institutional capacity and high-level political commitment to implement the reforms over the medium to long term. The FATF AME JG delegation would meet the relevant representatives of Ministries and authorities concerned and visit the premises of certain institutions. 9. Cabinet has taken note of the setting up of a Project Monitoring Committee by the Land Drainage Authority to monitor and evaluate the implementation of drain projects across the island under the National Flood Management Programme. The objects of the Project Monitoring Committee would be to: (a) closely monitor and coordinate the implementation of drain projects by the National Development Unit, Road Development Authority, Local Authorities and other relevant stakeholders; (b) iron out any bottleneck that may occur for the timely implementation of the projects; and (c) report on progress and impediment, if any, related to the implementation of the projects. 10. Cabinet has taken note of the outcome of the last Meeting of the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council. The main issues discussed were: (a) the setting up of a Sub-Committee on Flooding and Life-Threatening Sites; (b) the School Emergency Response Plan; (c) the Emergency Response Plans for Residential Care Homes; (d) the National Multi-Hazard Emergency Alert System Project; (e) the Proposed Construction of a New Building for the Mauritius Meteorological Services and the National Coast Guard in St Brandon; (f) the Dr A.G. Jeetoo Hospital Flood Emergency Response Plan; (g) Implementation of the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Policy, Strategic Framework and Action Plan and CADRI Report; and (h) the Review of the Protocol on Heavy Rainfall for the Private Sector. 11. Cabinet has taken note of the Flagship Report on Productivity Mauritius Productivity Study and Report, prepared by the World Bank for the National Productivity and Competitiveness Council (NPCC). The Report is the result of a survey of some 732 Mauritian enterprises undertaken by a diverse team of experts from the World Bank and Mauritius. It aims at supporting the NPCC in achieving its mandate for the promotion of productivity and quality in Mauritius. Focus has been laid on three main areas relating to productivity namely: (a) Productivity trends; (b) Enabling business environment; and (c) Skills gaps and other labour market determinants. The NPCC proposes to disseminate the Report and to consult stakeholders to develop an Action Plan to address the recommendations made. 12. Cabinet has taken note of the situation of the COVID-19 pandemic prevailing across the world. Some 192.7 million cases have been reported globally, of which 175.3 million persons have been successfully treated. With regard to Mauritius, as from March 2020 to 23 July 2021, 3,594 cases (including imported cases) of COVID-19 had been registered. There were 1,533 active cases of COVID-19 in Mauritius, out of which 1,529 were local cases and four imported cases. Contact tracing exercises and random testing are being carried out in accordance with the established protocol. Cabinet has also taken note that following the detection of positive COVID-19 cases among foreign workers in dormitories, some dormitories have been converted into Treatment Centres and Quarantine Centres. The situation was being closely monitored by the Ministry of Health and Wellness. Cabinet has further taken note of progress in the COVID-19 Vaccination Programme. As at 22 July 2021, 626,284 persons had received a first dose of vaccine (representing 50 percent of the population and 65 percent of the adult population). 517,643 persons had received a second dose of vaccine (representing 41 percent of the population and 54 percent of the adult population). 13. Cabinet has taken note of the activities being organised by the Civil Status Division to mark the African Civil Registration and Vital Statistics Day observed on 10 August. The Civil Status Division would organise public sensitisation programmes on MBC and private radio channels in different languages, on current issues such as tardy declaration, timely registration of Muslim religious marriages with the Muslim Family Council, the rectification of civil documents, notification to the Civil Status Division of births occurring in public and private health institutions as well as the notification of death of a Mauritian national abroad, among others. A video clip would be prepared to show the services that the Civil Status Division provides through the Civil Status Offices around the island, and its evolution over the past years. 14. Cabinet has taken note that the Ministry of Health and Wellness would commemorate the World Hepatitis Day 2021 on 28 July 2021 at Dr A. G. Jeetoo Hospital. During the official ceremony, a television spot would be officially launched. The Ministry of Health and Wellness embarked on a micro-elimination programme to eliminate Hepatitis C Virus in 2018. To-date, 400 Mauritian patients have already benefited from the treatment. Some 300 additional patients were currently on treatment. 15. Cabinet has taken note of the pronouncement of the UN Human Rights Committee on the storage of biometric data on national identity cards of Mauritius. 16. Cabinet has taken note of outcome of the 112th Session of the Council of Ministers of the Organisation of African, Caribbean and Pacific States (OACPS) which was held virtually. Discussions focussed on the re-structuring of the Secretariat of the OACPS. One of the decisions of the OACPS Council was to mandate the Committee of Ambassadors to support all actions for a coordinated, integrated approach to implementing the priority issues of all the OACPS SIDS, including debt distress and debt sustainability, access to concessional finance, and advocacy for a universal/multidimensional vulnerability index. The Committee of Ambassadors would urgently engage the relevant Institutions of the EU including the Directorate-General for International Partnerships and the European External Action Service, to ensure that in the allocation of resources under the Neighbourhood Development and International Cooperation Instrument, priority be given to countries in need, including SIDS, in order to effectively address their multiple inherent constraints and specificities. The new structure of the Secretariat was approved. 17. Cabinet has taken note of the outcome of the virtual meeting of the World Trade Organization (WTO) Trade Negotiations Committee on Fisheries Subsidies held recently at Ministerial Level. The objective of the meeting was to explore options to reach an agreement on fisheries subsidies. The Minister of Land Transport and Light Rail, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Regional Integration and International Trade made a statement in his capacity as Coordinator of the African Group to the WTO and confirmed the commitment of the African Group to remain constructively engaged in the process to find a balanced outcome on fisheries subsidies. He highlighted that significant gaps on core issues of interest to the African Group still remain. The African Group has always underscored the essential contribution of artisanal fishing to food security and livelihoods, especially in coastal communities. Hence, there was the need to exclude artisanal fishing from the scope of the agreement. 18. Cabinet has taken note of the constitution of the Executive Council of the Arabic Speaking Union with Mr Goolam Mohammud as President of the Executive Council. Partager et informez vous aussi...... 0 shares Share Tweet LinkedIn 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 Advertisement In its adult form, Still's disease affects about 1 in 100,000 people each year, with its infantile form being ten times more common. This rare condition can take different forms: monocyclic, polycyclic or chronic, leading to attacks on several organs that may threaten the quality of life - or even life - of those affected.While the cause is still unknown, genetic factors have been identified in other, similar syndromes. Cem Gabay, a professor at UNIGE's Faculty of Medicine and Head of the HUG Rheumatology Department, is one of the world's leading specialists in these complex diseases and part of a European consortium whose aim is to better understand the causes and pathology of these inflammatory conditions.Cytokines are small proteins involved in cell-to-cell interactions, whose role in triggering certain diseases is now becoming clear. One of them, interleukin-18 (IL-18), specializes in immune and inflammatory responses."Recently, we successfully demonstrated the key role of IL-18 in Still's disease", says Professor Gabay. Patients with the condition have a very high level of this protein, correlating with the acute phases of the disease, and this rate fluctuates according to the inflammatory activity specific to this disease."Our idea was therefore to block the harmful action. It is also worth pointing out that the treatments currently offered to patients are very empirical, so our goal was to finally give them a safe and approved treatment", he explains.While IL-18 is useful for protecting the body against external pathogens, too much of this protein leads to a harmful over activation of the immune system, resulting in the various symptoms presented in patients.There is a naturally occurring inhibitor ("IL-18 binding protein"), whose function is to bind to IL-18 to form an inactive complex, but people with Still's disease produce more IL-18 than its inhibitor, which triggers their symptoms.A few years ago, a pharmaceutical company developed an injectable form of the IL-18 inhibitor, with the idea of offering treatment to combat rheumatoid arthritis and psoriasis. The tests proved inconclusive and the formula abandoned. "So we bought the rights to the drug and started working with Professor Gabay to assess its safety and efficacy in a clinical trial," explains Andrew Sleight, CEO of AB2 Bio Ltd., the Lake Geneva startup that has the World Wide license of the drug.The main objective of this study was to verify the safety of the drug and to confirm its efficacy on the clinical manifestations of the disease. Twenty-three patients, mostly suffering from forms of the condition that is particularly refractory to the usual treatments, were enrolled and divided into two groups: one receiving 80 mg, and the other 160 mg, via three subcutaneous injections per week for 12 weeks.Professor Gabay summarizes the results: "We were initially reassured by the safety profile: there were very few serious side effects, only one of which was possibly related to the drug itself. In addition, 50% of patients in both treatment groups showed a positive response to the drug after three weeks of treatment, and their symptoms decreased over the entire 12 weeks of follow-up. In contrast, patients who didn't have a positive 80 mg response did not have one with 160 mg either. These first results are extremely encouraging and mean we can plan a phase 3 trial to better evaluate the effectiveness of the drug."Researchers are currently in phase 2, which aims to ensure the safety of the product and to determine the optimal dose. Phase 3, the next step envisaged by Professor Gabay's team together with AB2 Bio Ltd., will aim to assess the actual efficacy of the drug.Patients with other orphan diseases associated with the dys-regulated production of IL-18 and its inhibitor, for which there is no effective treatment protocol, could also benefit from these results. In 2015, the life of a three-month-old girl was saved.Professor Gabay tells us what happened: "This child, who lives in the United States, had a rare inflammatory disease that was resistant to all treatment; she was in intensive care and was going to die. Alerted by our American colleagues, we worked with AB2 Bio Ltd. to determine what dose she should be given. The Food and Drug Administration granted permission to use the drug in a last-ditch attempt to halt the disease. She rapidly responded to treatment and is now 3 years old, well and can lead a normal life with IL-18 inhibitor therapy. A glimmer of hope for other patients!"Source: Eurekalert Advertisement Yong Yu, Kolja Schleich, Bin Yue,et.al. Targeting the Senescence-Overriding Cooperative Activity of Structurally Unrelated H3K9 Demethylases in Melanoma, Cancer Cell (2018) .DOI: https:doi.org/10.1016/j.ccell.2018.01.002 An international team of researchers led by Professor Clemens A. Schmitt from Charite - Universitatsmedizin Berlin, the Max Delbruck Center for Molecular Medicine (MDC), and the Berlin Institute of Health (BIH) has now demonstrated that, in cancer cells, these important epigenetic marks are often erased by demethylase enzymes.Genetic or pharmacological inhibition of these enzymes restarts the protective mechanism, explains the research team.The research team conducted its study on almost 500 tissue samples taken from patients with black skin cancer, also known as melanoma. In roughly a third of the samples, researchers found a significant increase in the production of the demethylase enzymes able to stop the protective mechanism.In melanoma cell cultures as well as mice and zebrafish with malignant melanoma, the researchers genetically modified the activity of these enzymes. They also used chemical agents to target and blocked them, which caused the cells to fall into the sleep-like state of senescence, thus stopping them to divide further. The experiment was even successful in mice with implanted human melanoma tissue, which is important information for future applications in patients. One of the agents used is currently explored in clinical trials for the treatment of lung and blood cancer.In their investigation of melanoma samples from mice, the researchers observed that immune cells migrated into the tumor tissue once the senescence process had been reactivated by drugs. These and other important findings would not have been possible without using animal models.Together with programmed cell death, cellular senescence is one of the body's most important lines of defense against cancer. This protective mechanism epigenetically silences genes that regulate cell division.Methyltransferase enzymes mark histone proteins - the "spools" around which DNA is wrapped. These marks deactivate the section of DNA that is next to the histone. Clemens Schmitt and his team investigated two different demethylase enzymes that are able to counteract this process. Their ability to "erase" these histone marks makes the enzymes crucial for controlling and disabling senescence.Cellular senescence is an important and welcome avenue for cancer therapies due to its ability to prevent the further growth of tumors. But its functions are not limited to blocking cancer, as Schmitt's research team recently reported in the scientific journal Nature.Clemens Schmitt believes the immigration of immune cells into the tumor that was observed in the senescence mechanism holds great potential for a new type of combination therapy. "We think the combined use of demethylase blockers and targeted immunotherapy might be extremely effective," reports the clinical oncologist and researcher, who is Vice Director of the Division of Hematology, Oncology and Tumor Immunology in Charite's Medical Department.These findings are particularly promising for the treatment of melanoma, as this cancer responds poorly to chemotherapy and is better combated with the help of new immunotherapies. Schmitt and his colleagues now want to see how well immunotherapy and senescence-inducing therapy can be combined in clinical trials.Source: Eurekalert A new study published in Ultrasound in Obstetrics & Gynecology provides evidence that pregnant women are monitoring themselves for high blood pressure. This reduces the number of hospital visits without compromising their health of the health of their babies. The study included 108 women who were taught how to measure and record their blood pressure using a validated machine at home. A control group of 58 women was monitored in a clinic. There were no differences in adverse maternal, fetal, or neonatal outcomes. Pregnant women with hypertension (high blood pressure) can safely monitor their blood pressure at home instead of going into a hospital or clinic Home Monitoring of Hypertension in Pregnancy has been selected to join the NHS Innovation Accelerator programme, which is supported by NHS England, Academic Health Science Networks, and University College London Partners. Source: Eurekalert Advertisement "It is time to use existing technology in order to improve the way we look after pregnant women. Supported by both quantitative and qualitative research data, Home Monitoring of Hypertension in Pregnancy has proven very popular and is likely to be safe and cost saving," said senior author Prof. Asma Khalil, of St. George's University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, in London. "It is important to acknowledge that more studies are needed to establish safety for rare pregnancy complications and various aspects of its implementation in different healthcare settings." Advertisement Loud mysterious noises followed by a hearing loss and ear ringing have led the investigators to suspect some kind of "Sonic attacks." U.S government says that 24 of its government officials and their spouses started feeling ill last year. Doctors, FBI investigators, and U.S intelligence services are trying to figure out this mysterious puzzle.These attacks are speculated to be specific in nature, and it seems that government officials are clueless about who is behind these health attacks. Few Canadian diplomats were also attacked.According to Elisa Konofagou, a biomedical engineering professor at Columbia University - acoustic waves are not known to alter brain's white matter tracts.On the other hand, the Cuban government has denied involvement in these health attacks and is, therefore, asking the Trump administration to present evidence. Though the medical details may help the U.S counter Havana's claims of non-involvement, the government still has no clue of who is or what is causing the attacks.It was reported in August that U.S workers heard sounds in some parts of the rooms and more regional, these sounds were nothing like normal sounds, which usually disperses in all directions.Some doctors have now come up with a name for such symptoms; it is called "directional acoustic phenomena."Most of the diplomats have fully recovered, some of them are in rehabilitation, explained the officials. About of, one-quarter of them had a few symptoms that persisted for long or even remains to this day.Physicians who were examining these diplomats found that they have also suffered from concussions, generally known to be caused by mild traumatic brain injury.In order to limit the damage to its reputation, the Cuban government has urged the U.S to release information to what they have unexpectedly found. Cuban experts have also concluded that the American allegations are scientifically impossible.U.S government have officially reported that: Most of them heard a high-pitched chirp or grating metal, and even fewer of them recalled a low pitched hum.Some of them have awakened by the sounds, while other sleeping in the same room heard nothing.As vibrations accompany the sounds. The victims told the investigators that they felt a rapid flutter of air when windows of their car were partially rolled down and those worst off, knew then that something was going wrong in the body.Some of them even developed visual symptoms after 24 hours, as they had trouble focusing on a computer screen.Leading doctors are still clueless about the long-term medical consequences of this phenomenon and are now expecting the epidemiologists to make some headway by monitoring victims.Source: Medindia WWE star John Cena has filed a motion to dismiss charges against him levied by Ford Motor Co. concerning the resale of the highly-coveted 2017 Ford GT supercar. Back in November 2017, the Dearborn, Michigan-based automaker sued Cena for breaching his contract in selling his Ford GT before maintaining ownership for at least 24 months. Now Cena is claiming that the automaker failed to restrict him from selling the 2017 Ford GT in the "final, governing contract containing all terms for the sale." "Ford and Cena agreed that any resale restriction would be in the selling dealer's sales agreement," court documents read. "Ford failed to cause its selling dealer to include any resale restriction, so Ford has no claim." Cena was selected from thousands of applicants for the chance to purchase the Ford GT as the vehicles are made on a limited basis. The automaker claimed that Cena made a large profit off the resale, and that they "lost almost two years of ambassadorship and brand value." Ford added in previous court documents that because of this, "it lost the ability to control the reputation of its brand, the integrity of the program and selection process." Cena also filed to dismiss the automaker's request for attorney's fees and damage except for a $1. Late last year, Ford said in court documents that it has suffered damages amounting to more than $75,000. Cena is being sued for breach of contract, fraud, silent fraud, innocent misrepresentation and unjust enrichment. The automaker said Cena admitted to the resale of the supercar when asked directly on Oct. 25 over the phone. The Ford representative making contact told Cena that he had violated the specific contract while pointing out the potential legal consequences. "I completely understand and as stated am willing to work with you and Ford to make it right," Cena responded, according to court documents, at the time. "My sincerest apologies." After this conversation, Ford notified the 16-time WWE world champion that he breached his contact and that they would be filing suit. Representatives with the automaker told Cena that they were interested in facilitating a buyback of the vehicle at the price Cena bought it for before figuring out how to address the difference in profit from the "improper" resale. "Ford's action rests entirely on an alleged resale restriction that Ford failed to have its dealer incorporate in the dealer's sales agreement," court documents read. "Ford agreed that the dealer's sales agreement would be the final governing contract setting. "Ford's selling dealer included no resale restriction in the sales agreement, and Ford, therefore, cannot state any cause of action against Cena arising from Cena's resale of the subject vehicle." Ford is manufacturing the cars at a low-volume facility in Markham, Ontario. The 2017 Ford GTs were first unveiled at the North American International Auto Show in 2015. The automaker said it will only produce 250 of the Ford GTs each year, so only a fraction of the reported 6,000-plus applicants received one of the $400,000-plus cars. The Ford GT comes equipped with a new, twin-turbo, 3.5L EcoBoost V6 that will produce more than 600 horsepower. As many as eight exterior colors are available with seven different striped colors. See below for a gallery of collected screenshots from Ford's original lawsuit: ANN ARBOR, MI - A committee that reviews liquor licensing in the city of Ann Arbor is not supporting a police department recommendation to deny the renewal of a license for Scorekeepers bar. The business at 310 Maynard St. may still face a state hearing related to five pending claims of liquor control violations. Ann Arbor's Liquor License Review Committee met Feb. 16 to discuss the alleged violations and the license renewal for Scorekeepers, a bar popular with University of Michigan students. A Feb. 2 memo submitted by police detailed 156 service calls from Jan. 1, 2017 to Dec. 11, 2017, and violation complaints forwarded to the Michigan Liquor Control Commission. The police department recommended Scorekeepers be denied renewal of its Class C liquor license, which expires April 30. Kirk Westphal, Ward 2 councilman and member of the committee, said the motion to recommend non-renewal of the liquor license failed at the Feb. 16 meeting attended by the owners of Scorekeepers. During an earlier meeting, Assistant City Attorney Kristen Larcom said the City Attorney's Office was not supporting the police department's recommendation because Scorekeepers agreed to participate in training through the University of Michigan's Sexual Assault Prevention and Awareness Center last summer. "It was noted that all of the incidents highlighted in the Police Department memorandum had occurred prior to the training and improvements had been made since the training," said meeting documents said. "It was suggested that perhaps the bar should be monitored for improvement over the coming year." Service calls are an important metric for determining the use of city resources, Westphal said, but are not indicative of bad actions on the part of the business. "What we learned in further discussions with Ann Arbor Police Department was that many of these calls for service were unrelated to Scorekeepers as a business and others were a result of Scorekeepers management calling because they were finding a lot of minors were attempting to get in," Westphal said. "When we looked at documented cases of underage drinking in the bar, we saw that they dropped off significantly, even completely, after the bar went through this intervention in the middle of the year." The committee has recommended non-renewal of liquor licenses in the past, Westphal said, noting the closure of Ann Arbor's Dream Nite Club in 2012 amid bankruptcy proceedings and allegations of liquor law violations. As the Liquor License Review Committee is an advisory body, made up of four members from the Ann Arbor City Council, Westphal said the state has the ultimate authority to renew or deny a liquor license renewal. Because the non-renewal of a liquor license would severely impact a bar, Westphal said the committee has a responsibility to make sure recommendations for non-renewal are well-documented and made with the best intention. Public safety also is important, he said. "We're committed to protecting everyone's safety," Westphal said. "This includes making sure alcohol doesn't get into the hands of minors and lead to other crimes like drunk driving and sexual assault." David Harns, public information officer for Michigan's Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs, said five pending violations from April 15 and June 9 are currently being reviewed by the state. "If a complaint is drafted, the licensee will go through the violation hearing process," Harns wrote in an email to The Ann Arbor News. There is no set timeline for violation hearings, Harns added, with scheduling based on workload and priority cases. Licensees can request an appeal to refute alleged violations during the preliminary hearing by the commission, per MLCC's Code and Rules. The commission can then decide to affirm, modify, rescind or remand the order. Management at Scorekeepers couldn't be reached for comment. Orlando Whitfield, 29 YPSILANTI, MI - A suspect in the January killing of Marissa Edmunds is headed toward trial as police search for a second person who may have been involved in the slaying. Orlando L. Whitfield, 29, of Ypsilanti Township was arraigned Jan. 26 in connection with the Jan. 11 homicide at University Green Apartments in Ypsilanti, court records show. He was bound over to circuit court after a preliminary examination Thursday, Feb. 15 and is scheduled for a March 27 pretrial in Washtenaw County Trial Court. Police continue to investigate leads on a second suspect, Ypsilanti police Lt. Deric Gress said Wednesday, Feb. 21, when he announced the arrest. Police were called shortly before midnight Jan. 11 to a robbery and shooting at the complex at 725 Green Road. Edmunds, 25, was found dead of a gunshot wound to the head inside an apartment. Her boyfriend, a 29-year-old man, was critically injured in the shooting. Whitfield is charged with one count of open murder, four counts of armed robbery and one count of using a firearm in the commission of a felony, court records show. He's accused of robbing four people, including Edmunds and her boyfriend, of money, court records show. Whitfield also was arraigned Jan. 20 with failing to comply with reporting duties as a sex offender, though that charge was later dismissed. He was convicted in 2008 of criminal sexual conduct and assault with intent to commit sexual penetration in relation to an incident in Washtenaw County, according to the Michigan Public Sex Offender Registry. Whitfield was discharged from the Michigan Department of Corrections two months before the fatal shooting, MDOC records show. Prior to the sex assault case, Whitfield served probationary sentences for fleeing police and operating with an invalid license or allowing person with a suspended license to drive, in Wayne County, corrections records show. He was being held without bond. ANN ARBOR, MI - A bomb threat caused Lincoln High School to temporarily evacuate on Friday, Feb. 23. It was one of several unfounded threats reported at schools across Southeast Michigan on Friday. Police were called about 12:10 p.m. Friday for a report of a threat at Lincoln High School, 7425 Willis Road in Augusta Township, Washtenaw County Sheriff's Sgt. H. Eugene Rush said. A bomb threat was found on a bathroom wall and, under the direction of the sheriff's office, students were evacuated next door to Lincoln Middle School, Lincoln Consolidated Schools Superintendent Sean McNatt said. The school was searched, the report was deemed unfounded, and the building was cleared for reentry, Rush said about 2:15 p.m. He said the matter remained under investigation. McNatt said he was proud of how well school staff, especially teachers, responded and assisted students during the incident. The ordeal caused alarm for parents, such as Carrie Craiger of Ypsilanti, who found out about the evacuation from her daughter and two nieces, who are juniors and seniors at Lincoln High School. "It was nerve-racking for us as parents," she said. "We don't know if (the threat) is true or not. ... All the kids were scared, and my daughter was panicked. I think the school did the best they could." Threats were also reported in Van Buren Public Schools and Plymouth-Canton Educational Park. Van Buren school officials received a call from local police at 3:15 a.m. Friday saying an anonymous caller had contacted a tip line to report he or she overheard someone possibly reference a shooting at Belleville High School on Friday, according to a message from Superintendent Peter Kudlak shared on the school district website. "In conjunction with the police, we felt like this is extremely vague and may not even be credible," Kudlak wrote. "We are holding school today. We will have an increase (sic) police presence throughout the day as a precautionary measure." Some parents posted on the school's Facebook page that they planned to keep their children home from school on Friday. Plymouth-Canton Educational Park also was placed under a "soft lockdown" Friday after a rumor circulated about a possible weapon at the school, WDIV reported. A message was left for a district spokesperson. No gun had been found Friday afternoon and the lockdown was lifted, according to the WDIV report. The schools now join several across the state to have reported threats of violence in the wake of the Feb. 14 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Bomb threat sends Ypsilanti area school into lockdown Staff writer Lauren Slagter contributed to this report. YPSILANTI, MI - A year after losing her husband, Ypsilanti-area resident Kiersten Gawrowski said she also lost the opportunity to invest $20,000 in funds from his Chrysler pension plan. Turns out, the documents were lost in the Ypsilanti mail system, Gawrowski said. Ongoing mail delivery issues prompted U.S. Rep. Debbie Dingell to organize a town hall Thursday, Feb. 22 and Gawrowski to stand in front of a crowd of more than 300 people to recount her experience. A teacher with Saline Area Schools, Gawrowski said she mailed the documents about eight weeks ahead of the Nov. 1 deadline in order to qualify for a program that would invest the pension so she could use it to retire one day. "When I didn't hear back, I would call but I didn't think much of it," Gawrowski said. "When it rolled around to December, I got concerned." A phone call left her with more questions than answers: Gawrowski was unable to prove she had sent the documents ahead of the deadline to ensure the pension would be invested and instead will now receive a monthly lump sum once she turns 62. "I didn't lose it but I lost out on the investment," Gawrowski said. She says she continues to have mail delivered to the wrong address, delayed mail and packages left out in the rain or snow, and the culmination of these issues has resulted in a loss of trust in the local post office system. "I just don't call anymore," Gawrowski said after speaking at the town hall meeting, adding she takes her mail to the UPS location in Saline to be delivered. "Since the incident with the pension, I don't even bother." Over the course of more than two hours, residents shared their own experiences with the Ypsilanti post office and heard from U.S. Post Office representatives about possible solutions to the ongoing issues. One solution is route adjustments for the Ypsilanti post office, a process that could start as early as Saturday and involve both city and rural routes but not be implemented until April or May, post office representatives said. Many residents voiced their concerns about issues not easily addressed by a route change, like mail or parcel theft and customer service at the Ypsilanti post office locations. One resident said managers refused to take her complaint and the Ypsilanti post office was the worst she had encountered in the United States, while another said a post office employee laughed at her over the phone when she told him of her plans to make a formal complaint. The issues have meant late fees for utility bills, impacted temperature-sensitive medication, damaged engagement rings and affected high school and college students to retirees waiting for disability checks that sometimes don't appear in the mailbox until after 9 p.m., citizens said. While at the microphone, Gawrowski asked those in attendance to raise their hands if they had mail delivered to the wrong address or delayed delivery. "I wanted them to have the visuals," she said, as a majority of the hands were raised into the air and remained through numerous issues they had encountered. "There's not an easy solution but something has to change." At least one resident addressed an announcement made earlier Thursday that post office representatives would not be attending the meeting and called it "terrible public service." Postal Service representatives were at the meeting. Another brought a thumb-drive with a video showing a mail carrier hitting her mailbox with the delivery vehicle and leaving it in the middle of the road, filmed by her neighbor, before handing it to the post office officials at the front of the room. Mitty McMaster has lived in Ypsilanti Township for 69 years and said she has never experienced problems with the mail service like she has seen in the past two years. She asked officials where her mail carrier has been; McMaster hasn't seen her since November. "I want to give her her Christmas gift," McMaster said, after telling officials they should be ashamed by the amount of people in attendance at the town hall with complaints. "I'm very embarrassed and you should be embarrassed." Some residents brought a bit of humor to their complaints; one pointed out she didn't know which January post office employees were talking about when it came to delivery. There are plans to hold monthly community meetings at the post office location on Adams Street "so it won't get to this level," said Ypsilanti Postmaster Alicia Brown, Ypsilanti postmaster. "I am committed to making the changes in Ypsilanti," Brown said, prompting some laughs from residents in the crowd around 8:40 p.m., after the town hall was scheduled to end. Lee A. Thompson, district manager of USPS Detroit, encouraged residents to continue communicating issues with mail delivery and to contact her at 313-226-8607, and to also contact the Ypsilanti postmaster with complaints. "You have my commitment, your mail will be delivered each and every day," Thompson said. BAY CITY, MI -- Bay City and Bay County officials have submitted a formal proposal to the Michigan Department of Transportation for the state to connect M-15 to I-75 and take over ownership of Independence Bridge in the process. Those officials were in Lansing Thursday, Feb. 22, for a meeting with MDOT Director Kirk Steudle to learn more about the state's willingness to connect the two state-owned roads that are separated by about five miles. They say a state takeover of the bridge is the best solution for the city's bridge crisis. While there have been talks over the past couple decades about the state connecting M-15 and I-75 and taking over Independence Bridge, this is the first time a formal proposal has been submitted, said Bay City Commission Vice President Kerice Basmadjian, 7th Ward, who attended Thursday's meeting. "Overall, I felt it was a very productive meeting," she said. Bay County Executive Jim Barcia said Steudle brought three chunks of crumbling concrete from state highways to the meeting with him and told the group that his department's budget is tight as they grapple with fixing those roads. "I wasn't too encouraged by MDOT's willingness to connect M-15 to I-75, but I could be wrong," Barcia said. "I did feel we had a productive meeting." Bay City Commission President Andrew Niedzinski, 3rd Ward, said the director gave no indication at Thursday's meeting to how the state was leaning on the issue. He said Steudle suggested possible grant opportunities that could buy the city some time while coming up with a long-term solution for the bridges. "Grant dollars will certainly alleviate some of the pressure, but it's still the goal of this commission to come up with a long-term solution," Niedzinski said. About $9 million in repairs are needed for Liberty and Independence bridges over the next five years and city officials argue they don't have the funds to foot the bill. They proposed to sell both bridges to a private firm for $1 million. The firm would then build a new Independence Bridge and make critical repairs to Liberty, but charge motorists a toll to cross both ways. That proposal was tabled following public outcry. Officials haven't ruled out privatizing the bridges, but they're now looking at other options, including going after a countywide millage or possibly closing a bridge. The formal proposal, signed by Bay City Manager Dana Muscott, Bay County Executive Jim Barcia and Bay County Road Commission Engineer-Manager Jim Lillo, requests that the state assumes jurisdictional transfer of Trumbull Street, Independence Bridge and Wilder Road from Center Avenue in Bay City to I-75 in Monitor Township. A key part of the proposal is reconstructing Trumbull Street to meet MDOT standards, which means building it out to four lanes. Today, it operates as a two-lane road in a residential part of town. City officials have plans to reconstruct the street this year using a mix of state and federal grant funds and local dollars, but the project remains in a design phase. The problem is that the road is too narrow by about 6 inches, Muscott said. If the city were to reconstruct the road out to four lanes, it would likely encroach of resident's property. "That's the last thing we would ever want to do is encroach on someone's home," Muscott said. "We do not want to do that." She admitted it could be a tough sell, but the city and county officials would look to compromise with MDOT on a road design. One option could be making Trumbull a three-lane road. Muscott said she hopes to hear a response from MDOT next month. BAY CITY, MI -- An Essexville man initially accused of drunkenly breaking into his ex's house and trying to rape her has received jail time. Bay County Circuit Judge Harry P. Gill on Tuesday, Feb. 20, sentenced Joseph J. Wilcox, 50, to 270 days in jail, with credit for three days already served. Upon release, Wilcox is to serve three years probation, during which he is to attend two Alcoholics Anonymous meetings per week. The judge held an additional 95 days in jail in abeyance, meaning Wilcox will only have to serve them if he violates probation. Gill also ordered Wilcox to pay $258 in court fines and costs. Wilcox in January pleaded guilty to third-offense domestic violence, a five-year felony. In exchange, the prosecution dismissed charges of assault with intent to commit sexual penetration and assault with intent to cause great bodily harm less than murder, both of which are 10-year felonies. The case against Wilcox dates to July 31, when police responded to a Hampton Township apartment after a 28-year-old woman called 911 for an assault complaint. The woman told the responding officer she had been sleeping, only to be awakened by banging on her door. Wearing her bra and underwear, the woman saw Wilcox, her ex, standing at the door. Wilcox entered the house, grabbed the woman by her throat, and pushed her against a wall, she said. The woman tried pushing him off, but he managed to get her to her bedroom. He proceeded to shed his clothes and remove her underwear, then pinned her under his knees, immobilizing her, she told the officer. The woman repeatedly told Wilcox to stop and that she did not want to have sex with him, she said. Wilcox slapped her face with his penis, she added. She eventually managed to get free and Wilcox left, she said. She told police he was intoxicated. At the officer's suggestion, the woman called and texted Wilcox to come back to her place. A while later, Wilcox drove up in a white Jeep and police arrested him. BANGOR TWP, MI -- Take a drive down Wilder Road and you might notice green crosses popping up on buildings: The medical marijuana industry is officially open for business in Bay County. As the state continues to process hundreds of applications required for its Medical Marihuana Facilities Act -- a new law that aims to regulate what's believed to be an $837 million industry in the state -- some retailers in Bay County have opened provisioning centers, also known as dispensaries, early under the state's emergency rules and are serving a growing number of patients. A dispensary called Hydra Elevated Wellness opened at 4373 Wilder Road after the new year. And then husband-and-wife duo Jason and Angie Dabrowski opened their first location of Roots Dispensaries at 3557 Wilder Road on Jan. 19. Inside the spacious location, display cases feature jars of marijuana flowers, inhalers, cannabis oil, ointments, and medibles, such as brownies and suckers. From day one, business has been booming. "It was exciting," said Angie Dabrowski of their first day. "We had people from Traverse City, Flint, the Thumb, Sebewaing." Patronage has only increased since then, with her husband estimating 90 to 120 people visit the shop each day. "Forty percent of them I would say are new customers -- first-time visits," Jason said. The shop opened under the state's emergency rules that allow dispensaries to open early while their license is still being processed. During that period, they can only obtain their medical marijuana from various state-licensed growers. Dispensaries can start purchasing product from large commercial growing operations after the state approves those permits. Bangor Township Supervisor Glenn Rowley, who has been a proponent of municipalities opening their doors for the medical marijuana industry, said he had concerns with the emergency rules because the product isn't being regulated as outlined in the new state law. "They are essentially moving product that hasn't been tested," he said. "But I do understand that there are people out there who have the cards and they need to get their prescription filled. That's why the state did it." Rowley added it was a relief to see that the Dabrowskis are running a business that looks professional and legitimate. "The last thing you want is some business opening up early with a card table and a cash register," he said. "Luckily, these people did it right and that makes me feel really good." The Dabrowskis, both Essexville natives who have lived in Bangor Township for 10 years, said they got into the medical marijuana industry in part as a response to the nation's ongoing opioid epidemic. They say medical marijuana is a safer alternative to prescription opiate medication that can lead users to addictions and overdoses. Police and health officials have attributed the rise in heroin use and overdose deaths to people gravitating from prescription painkillers such as OxyContin or Vicodin. Heroin is cheaper than those substances and easier to ingest since pharmaceutical manufacturers changed their pills' composition so they can no longer be snorted or melted down and injected. "The medical marijuana industry is kind of taking the place of those prescription medications," Angie Dabrowski said. "We thought it would be helpful to society." The state Supreme Court in 2013 ruled dispensaries were illegal under the Michigan Medical Marihuana Act, but lawmakers in 2016 passed legislation to legalize and regulate them. The state's Medical Marihuana Licensing Board began accepting applications for medical marijuana facilities on Dec. 15. Since then, several municipalities across Bay County have opted in, including Bay City, Pinconning Township, and Kawkawlin Township. Prior to the change, the law mandated all patients had to grow their own marijuana or acquire it from a primary caregiver. Caregivers could assist no more than five patients, who could compensate them with donations. Dispensaries like Roots, though, can now set prices for their product. Roots offers a 10 percent discount for veterans and have a customer loyalty program, whereby patrons earn 6 cents for every dollar they spend. When customers visit Roots, they're greeted by a receptionist, who inspects their medical marijuana card and matches it with a state ID. If customers' credentials are valid, they proceed to one-on-one consultations with the staff, or patient care representatives. The customers share their symptoms -- be it pain, nausea or epilepsy -- and their needs with the staff, who help them select the best product for them. "We have specific medications -- (some) with no psychoactive effects," Jason Dabrowski said. The Dabrowskis have plans to expand their business with a second dispensary location on Marquette Street in Bay City, which would be attached to a 1,500-plant growing operation that they would also own and operate. Roots currently has 10 employees. The Dabrowskis anticipate hiring up to 40 more once they expand. Rowley said the township has awarded all 15 of its provisioning center permits, which allow recipients to then apply for a state license. There is a waiting list of eight or nine applicants beyond those 15, Rowley said. Each of those permits require an annual, nonrefundable $5,000 fee paid to the governing municipality. In Pinconning Township, they've maxed out their 10 available licenses for dispensaries and are offering unlimited grower licenses. In Detroit, potholes aren't just a nuisance, they're a public safety issue. So many vehicles became disabled by unavoidable tire-hungry road craters along Interstate 75 in the area of McNichols in Detroit on Thursday, that Detroit Police Chief James Craig ordered a section of the highway shut down. Per the order of Police Chief James Craig, I-75 South Bound Freeway will be shut-down from McNichols to Caniff due to public safety hazards. Other assessments in the city will be made. #Detroit Detroit Police Dept. (@detroitpolice) February 23, 2018 The highway was reopened Friday after some overnight patchwork, but road crews working for the Michigan Department of Transportation, the agency that manages Michigan highways, were still out on Friday afternoon in orange dump trucks and pickups, rolling along I-75 with rakes and shovels while filling and refilling the more treacherous divots. A fatal crash near McGraw Avenue and Martin Road in Detroit on Tuesday, which killed a 22-year-old man, was initially blamed on a pothole. Detroit police later said there was no evidence the driver struck a pothole before crashing. Potholes, which are caused by the expansion and retraction of moisture in the road, usually appear when the roadways first thaw each year. While the spotlight is on highways in Detroit this week, the problem with potholes on long-neglected side streets and service drives in Detroit, and the metro area, is easily as bad, if not worse. LOOK OUT FOR THIS POTHOLE!! - NB Dequindre at 13 1/2 mile in Warren. @WWJ950 @FOX2News pic.twitter.com/mWUwSOnZwQ Charlie Langton (@charlielangton) February 22, 2018 Vehicles on Friday wove back and forth along Oakland Avenue -- a side street that runs parallel to I-75 in Detroit -- like Olympians competing in giant slalom as they avoided deep, wide potholes better suited for ducklings than car tires. "This is the worst I've ever seen it," said Sam Savaya, who manages Holbrook Tire Auto and Glass, a shop at 5 W. McNichols in Highland Park, less than a mile from the section of road police shut down Thursday. All of the bays were occupied Friday, with several cars waiting their turn to enter, as employee bounced wheels freshly fitted with replacement tires to the elevated vehicles. Savaya picked up two large, silver rims from beneath a storage rack and said they came from a Cadillac. "Look at this," he said, pointing to nearly 6-inch sections of rim that snapped off after striking a pothole. "These cost $300 used, $600 new." Savaya estimates between 15 and 20 customers a day have been coming in due to pothole damage in recent days. Savaya repairs bent or cracked rims for about $60. A used replacement tire goes for about $42, and a lot of people are blowing two tires and bending two rims at a time, depending on the speed they are going when they hit a pothole, Savaya said. While an unexpected repair bill of $100 to $200 for many people may not be financially devastating, it often is for Detroiters "This is not a rich area," Savaya said. "This is a poor area, and people work paycheck to paycheck ... They don't have any money saved up ... and it takes time, it takes effort, and I'm not kidding, I have not seen such a devastating thing in my life. "These are not potholes. These are manholes." Detroit's household median income in 2016 was about $26,000, according to the U.S. Census. Frequency map of Twitter complaints using hashtag #pothole. Source: Gearheads.org In 2016, AAA estimated nearly $3 billion in auto repairs were caused by pothole damage. While it's possible to file pothole damage claims against the county, city or state agency responsible for road repairs, they rarely pay. Gearheads.org, a website that describes itself as a destination for "auto nerds," created a map based on more than 100,000 pothole complaints made my Twitter users using "#pothole." It found Michigan to be one fo the top five states in the U.S., over the last 30 days, where complaints originated. According to the Lansing State Journal, Michigan only reimbursed about 3 percent of 267 potholes claims filed in fiscal year 2017. LOOK OUT FOR THIS POTHOLE!! - NB Dequindre at 13 1/2 mile in Warren. @WWJ950 @FOX2News pic.twitter.com/mWUwSOnZwQ Charlie Langton (@charlielangton) February 22, 2018 Potholes in Michigan are unbelievable LOL pic.twitter.com/1u1msxl99Z nat (@NataliaGomez__) February 20, 2018 People of Miao ethnic group perform dance with music played by lusheng, a reed-pipe wind instrument, during a traditional folk fair in Rongjiang County, southwest China's Guizhou Province, Feb. 22, 2018, to celebrate the Spring Festival. (Xinhua/Wang Bingzhen) 8 1 [ Editor: meng ] [February 23, 2018] Tennessee Taxpayers Need To Know The Truth About Proposed Small Cell Legislation According To CNX NASHVILLE, Tenn., Feb. 23, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- CNX, a leader in providing broadband master planning and program management services to municipalities across the country, wants Tennessee residents to understand the impact that the recent House Bill 2279, if passed will have on their communities. On February 2, 2018 House Bill 2279 and its companion SB 2504 were introduced. The bill has been presented by AT&T and if passed, will impact municipalities' ability to manage their public right-of-way and generate on-going revenue from city-owned assets, like light poles located in the public rights-of way. In order to meet growing demand for wireless services, it is estimated carriers, like AT&T, will seek to deploy hundreds of thousands of small cells in densely populated areas like Nashville. These small cells can be installed on existing city owned infrastructure like light poles. The bill would require that carriers be allowed access to all municipal owned infrastructure in the right-of-way while at the same time removing the city's right to develop and enforce design guidelines or aesthetic standards. The proposed legislation would permit a carrier to place a 28 cubic feet equipment cabinet on the ground next to a pole or up to within 50' of a pole. Angela Stacy, Vice President of Marketing and Communications at CNX is also a member of the Federal Communications Commission's Broadband Deployment Advisory Committee and a resident of Tennessee has expressed grave concern with the proposed legislation. "As recently as today, I have seen an email campaign sent by AT&T to its customers in Tennessee claiming they need to support small cell legislation because it will make it 'easier and more efficient' for them to enhance their networks. AT&T isn't giving them the whole truth. This bill, if passed, will not only diminish a city's ability to manage their public rights-of-way, it will also drastically reduce the revenues cities earn today by leasing their assets to carriers. To the tune of billions of dollars." The bill moved this week from the House Business and Utilities Subcommittee at the Tennessee General Assembly and is scheduled to be discussed at the February 28th Tennessee House Business and Utilities Committee meeting. About CNX: As technology evolves we have strategically partnered with communities across the county to develop broadband masterplans to drive the cities of tomorrow forward. CNX is transforming the broadband delivery model by bringing simplicity, speed, and transparency to outdated processes that hinder collaboration between cities and service providers. CNX offers your city a roadmap to long-term connectivity, growth, and sustainability for your ?ber and wireless broadband needs. More information at www.cnx.io If you would like more information about this topic, please contact Angela Stacy at 615-351-7555 or email at aes@cnx.io. Contact Angela Stacy Telephone 615-351-7555 Cell 615-351-7555 Email aes@cnx.io Website www.cnx.io View original content with multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/tennessee-taxpayers-need-to-know-the-truth-about-proposed-small-cell-legislation-according-to-cnx-300603516.html SOURCE CNX [ Back To www.mobilitytechzone.com\broadband-stimulus's Homepage ] [February 23, 2018] Four New Mobile-Focused Application Partners Join Telestax(R) RestcommONE Marketplace(TM) floLIVE, Gintel, Joors and Sompopo provide MNOs (Mobile Network Operators) quick and easy access to RestcommONE Marketplace Applications AUSTIN, Texas, Feb. 23, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Telestax, the Restcomm company, today announced that four new partners have joined the RestcommONE Marketplace ecosystem. FloLIVE of the UK, Gintel of Norway, Joors of Sweden and Sompopo of Honduras offer Marketplace applications that focus specifically on Mobile Network Operators (MNO) and their customers. RestcommONE Marketplace mobile application partners leverage Telestax's industry leading real-time communications platform in the cloud, RestcommONE, for its next generation networking protocols. MNOs, through a single connection to Telestax can access the Marketplace applications and in the process become CPaaS (Communications Platform as a Service) enabled. The RestcommONE Marketplace is a CPaaS ecosystem that blends traditional telecommunications and APIs (applications programming interfaces) with new, ready-to-deploy real-time voice, video and messaging applications. RestcommONE Marketplace partners offer participating service providers new business opportunities by providing real-time applications and solutions that are certified and integrated into the RestcommONE Platform. Until now, MNOs were unable to participate in and leverage the fast growing CPaaS Market. Today, with RestcommONE Marketplace and its four new mobile focused application partners, the opportunity for MNOs stretches beyond CPaaS enablement to include the ability to deliver in-demand real-time communications business solutions that scale seamlessly and efficiently. "Traditionally, CPaaS models have been focused on VoIP Service Providers, leaving MNOs to sit on the sidelines," said Michael Brandenburg of Frost and Sullivan. "Telestax's ability to extend the CPaaS opportunity directly to MNOs creates a unique ecosystem that will broaden the adoption of real-time communications while increasing a new pathway to revenue for this unique set of service providers." RestcommONE Marketplace New Mobile Partners: floLIVE - An immediate revenue opportunity for MNOs/MVNOs looking to acquire mobile data capacity and IMSI access for supporting IoT customers and devices that require network access throughout the world. floLIVE operates a self-developed core network and offers a secure, cloud-based IoT ecosystem designed and built especially for IoT; and encompasses a wide range of services to market verticals - all provided as-a-service via their global cloud. Gintel - MNOs are increasingly looking for innovative business services they can offer to their SME customers, who are abandoning traditional landline and legacy PBX services. Gintel provides the world's leading mobile PBX capability, allowing MNOs to provide true business level features via a mobile device. Joors - Mobile advertising continues to be a fast growing but difficult opportunity for MNOs to leverage. Using RestcommONE's geolocation capabilities and Joors' expertise in data sponsoring, MNOs/MVNOs can generate significant recurring incremental revenues from mobile marketing. Joors is also the key component behind the JoorsChain consortium that proposes to integrate Block Chain based hi-tech solutions to benefit MNOs. Sompopo - Mobile e-Commerce is still an issue with many carriers and application providers alike. Sompopo's mobile commerce platform integrates different applications to meet the needs of specific markets. Its point of sale (PoS) application also supports cash payment transactions to help deliver products and services. Included is a wholesaler panel that front-ends company specific virtual warehouses and a delivery agent app that supports certified PoS. "RestcommONE Marketplace brings a global collection of best of breed partners together to create a very unique opportunity for MNOs," said Kevin Nethercott, Telestax VP worldwide business development for CPaaS Enablement. "The instant an MNO connects to our RestcommONE cloud platform, and become CPaaS enabled, they are generating revenue through our partners that are buying mobile capacity or terminating traffic onto their network." Resources Ovum Research Report On the Radar: Telestax RestcommONE Marketplace enables delivery of integrated apps. On the Radar: Telestax RestcommONE Marketplace enables delivery of integrated apps. 451 Research Report - Impact Report: Telestax launches RestcommONE Marketplace for CPaaS enablement About Telestax Telestax is quickly becoming the catalyst for bringing real-time communications into the mainstream. Our RestcommONE platform is scalable, highly available and is the only WebRTC platform that supports cloud, on premise and hybrid deployment configurations. RestcommONE is fast becoming the platform of choice for rapidly building enterprise class real-time messaging, voice and video applications. RestcommONE Marketplace connects these new Omnichannel applications with RestcommOne CPaaS-enabled (Communications Platform as a Service) service providers and increases the revenue opportunity for both. The RestcommONE Marketplace is generating a positive disruption in the real-time communications market by changing the way organizations acquire and utilize their business software. Telestax is a privately held global company with headquarters in Austin, TX. Media Contact: Nancy Colwell nancy.colwell@telestax.com SOURCE Telestax, Inc. [ Back To www.mobilitytechzone.com/wimax's Homepage ] live bse live nse live Volume Todays L/H More NBCC has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Department of Economic Affairs, Ministry of Finance, Government of India for construction of housing project fore India Economic Services (IES) officers at Deen Dayal Upadhaya Marg, New Delhi, wherein NBCC will work as project management consultant at 7 percent fees. Source : BSE Read More live bse live nse live Volume Todays L/H More Bio-pharmaceuticals firm Biocon will soon start an R&D lab of its subsidiary Syngene in Genome Valley in Telangana, which is expected to generate 1,000 high-tech jobs, the state government said today. The company will also be expanding its current presence in Hyderabad on APIs (Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients/ Intermediates) to add 500 new jobs, it added. Biocon MD Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw met Telangana IT and Industries Minister K T Rama Rao on the sidelines of BioAsia 2018 and informed the minister about Biocon's decision to expand their operations in Telangana, the statement said. A business delegation headed by Chutima Bunyapraphasara, Deputy Minister of Commerce, Thailand, also met Rao on the sidelines of BioAsia 2018. Further, Italian Consul General in Mumbai, Stefania Costanza, informed Rao that a delegation of the Italian Chamber of Commerce will soon visit Telangana to explore business opportunities, the statement added. The minister also met Terri Bresenham, CEO & President, Sustainable Healthcare Division, GE. The GE team expressed interest in collaborating with the Telangana Academy of Skill & Knowledge (TASK) in healthcare skilling, the release added. business Here's what InGovern has to say about Fortis In an interview to CNBC-TV18, Shriram Subramanian, Founder & MD of InGovern spoke at length about their report on Fortis. BRASILIA, Feb. 22 (Xinhua) -- The Brazilian minister of health, Ricardo Barros, proposed on Thursday to vaccinate the entire country against yellow fever, after the disease emerged in new areas. The recommendation will now be discussed with international organizations, such as the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO). At the start of February, vaccination efforts began in states of Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Bahia, seeking to immunize 19.7 million people against yellow fever, for which cases have been rising since last year. According to Barros, if the government approves the idea, separate programs will take place in each state of the country. Barros added that the vaccination campaign should be rolled out gradually, according to the capacity of each state. Certain northeastern and southern regions of the country have not seen campaigns so far, as there have been no outbreaks of yellow fever there. 34 million need to be vaccinated there, with 23 million in the northeast and 11 million in the south of the country. A plant belonging to Libbs Farmaceutica in Sao Paulo is currently about to begin production of 4 million doses of vaccine a month. From July 1, 2017 to Feb. 20, 2018, Brazil has confirmed 545 cases of yellow fever, with 164 deaths. A further 1,773 suspected cases have been noted, with 685 having been eliminated and 422 still under investigation. [ Editor: WPY ] No .6 | Bank: Punjab National Bank: Annual rate of interest: 6 percent | What Rs 1 lakh grows to in three year: Rs 1,19,562 Sunil Mehta, the Chief Executive Officer of Punjab National Bank may be a man caught in the midst of a financial storm. But on any normal day, he would much rather prefer spending time with his favourite book -- biography of Swami Paramahansa Yogananda -- than deal with diamonds and diamantaires. In January this year, the Chief of India's second largest government lender, got struck by disaster. A mega fraud worth over Rs 11,400 crore led by billionaire diamond and jewellery businessman Nirav Modi had just been unearthed at the bank. A seasoned banker, Mehta, took charge as the Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director of PNB in May 2017, at a time when banks were reeling under intense pressure from non-performing assets (NPAs). With no end in sight to the NPA woes, and just few months short of celebrating his first anniversary at the Delhi-based bank, Mehta is now faced with another crisis -- the wrath of the government, investigative agencies, and the media, something he would have never dreamed of having to go through this close to the end of his over 35-year career in banking. On the morning of February 14, when the world was busy celebrating Valentines day, PNB informed the stock exchanges, as they opened for trading, that it had detected a fraud worth USD 1.7 billion (around Rs 11,400 crore). By the end of the day PNB had eroded nearly Rs 4,000 crore of market cap. Over the next five days another Rs 12,700 crore of investors wealth got wiped out. A day after the scam was unearthed, Mehta called it a cancer that was going on since 2011. We have brought it out and we are resolving it," he said patiently addressing a packed news conference in Delhi. A soft spoken Mehta said if the investigation process says it is our liability, then we will accept it." Putting up a brave front two days later while addressing analysts through a teleconference, Mehta acknowledged the banks NPAs will rise because of these loans. However, he tried to assuage investors by pointing out that his core Tier I ratio was still at 8.2 percent, higher than the minimum 7 percent required, which means the bank is adequately capitalised. Mehta still has a tough task of cleaning the books. PNB has gross bad loans or NPAs worth Rs 57,519 crore, of which 25 percent are on account of borrowers who are wilful defaulters. PNBs net NPAs were at Rs 34,076 crore as on December end 2017. Since taking over at the helm, Mehta has also tried to consolidate by identifying 200 to 300 loss-making branches, initiating the process of either merging or closing them down. Following the scam, PNB has also transferred around 1,415 employees including 721 officers, 437 clerks and 257 sub-staff. From field to corner room Born in Sambhar, Rajasthan, Mehta has spent a large part of 35-year career in Allahabad Bank starting in 1982. He joined Corporation bank two years ago in January 2016 as the Executive Director after serving at the position of a General Manager at Allahabad Bank. He is a Post Graduate in Agriculture, MBA in Finance and a Certified Associate of Indian Institute of Bankers (CAIIB) with over 35 years of rich experience in various administrative and functional capacities at Branches, Zonal Offices, and also at the Head Office level. He started his banking career as an Agriculture Field Officer at Allahabad Bank in 1982. A bike lover, Mehta would indeed know the risks of life and one of the critical lessons learnt from one of his teachers, what you are doing is not important, but how it is perceived will definitely hold true during these testing times. For now, Mehta would be needing more lessons from his favourite book The Autobiography of a Yogi by Swamy Paramahansa Yogananda, which might come handy as he is set to deal with tougher times in the next few months. The income tax (I-T) department has initiated prosecution against industrialist Vikram Kothari, promoter of Rotomac Global Pvt Ltd, in connection with charges of alleged tax evasion, a senior government official said. Prosecution has already been initiated. Tax demand worth Rs 106 crore raised has also been raised against the company, the official told Moneycontrol. Kanpur-based Kothari allegedly owes nearly Rs 3,700 crore to seven public sector banks including Bank of Baroda, Bank of Maharashtra, Union Bank of India, Allahabad Bank, Bank of India, Oriental bank of Commerce and Indian Overseas Bank. On Wednesday, the income tax department also provisionally attached four immovable propertiesthree in Kanpur and one in Ahmedabadof the Rotomac group, the official said, adding that tax authorities began its search in this case four years ago. The assessment was concluded by the end of 2017, the official said. Besides, earlier this week, the department also attached 15 bank accounts that were in various branches across Uttar Pradesh. On Thursday, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) arrested Vikram Kothari and his son Rahul Kothari in New Delhi for violation of foreign exchange rules as well as misappropriation and diversion of funds. The EDthe prevention of money laundering arm of finance ministryhas also registered a money laundering case against Kothari. In 2008, Rotomac Global was given loans worth Rs 2,919 crore by a consortium of banks led by Bank of India. The amount has now ballooned up to Rs 3,695 crore including accrued interest as the company continued to default on payments. CBI registered a case against the Vikram Kothari, wife Sadhna and son Rahul on February 18 based on the complaint by state-owned Bank of India that the group has been defaulting on loans for several years now. While Kothari is the Chairman and Managing Director of Rotomac, the wife and sons are the directors of the company. Kothari was allegedly taking loans for certain export orders that were not being executed and carried on with his stationery and pen enterprise through fake suppliers. The Rotomac case is the second major alleged corporate and banking fraud after the revelation of a Rs 11,400 crore fraud involving countrys second largest public sector lender Punjab National Bank and a celebrity diamond merchant Nirav Modi and his uncle Mehul Choksi. CNBC-TV18s Ekta Batra is in conversation with KT Rama Rao, Commerce Minister of Telangana from the sidelines of the 15th Bioasia Summit currently underway in Hyderabad. We are focused on ensuring that Hyderabad retains and sustains its leadership position in pharmaceuticals, bulk drugs and biotech, he said. We are focused on learning more from people across the world, he added. It is a very special event for us and it is the largest of its kind in Asia, said Rao. We are looking at doubling the business in next ten years and we also want to expand and innovate more, we also want the industry to collaborate more with us, he further mentioned. Below is the verbatim transcript of the interview. Q: It is the 15th edition of BioAsia Summit in Hyderabad. Tell us what the theme is this year? A: Like every year and the last fifteen years, we have focused on ensuring that Hyderabad retains and sustains its leadership position in the pharmaceuticals, bulk drugs and biotech. The fact that you maybe knowing that we are the worlds largest single cluster which produces vaccine and in fact if you look at the vaccine production world over, more than one-third of global vaccines are produced here. So we are focused on ensuring that BioAsia once again gives us that opportunity to understand what are the emerging trends across the world, what are the new regulatory restrictions or regulatory guidelines that have come up which will also once again give us direction on the way forward. So we have been focused this year on learning more from people across the world and we have more than 2,000 people coming in, visitors and delegates included and we have a more than 45 countries participating and great learnings in the last 14 years and just to give you a perspective of what we have achieved in BioAsia, more than Rs 150,000 crore of investment in the last 15 years have come through the front the MoUs that have been signed and this has helped us build our ecosystem. Genome valley is extremely special, it is the largest biotech cluster in Asia and this is the centre where we manufacture all our vaccines and in fact, a lot of engagements with governments from across the world and also from within the governments in India and also government of India - we have been able to get multiple breakthroughs through BioAsia. So it is a very special event for us and it is the largest of its kind in Asia, so excited. Q: You have a couple of tie-up this year, your international partner is Ireland and Holland as well and on the state side, you have Gujarat as a tie-up. Tell us what these tie-ups mean and why Ireland, why Gujarat? A: Gujarat is not a bad state to tie-up with. It is Prime Ministers home state and also the second-largest pharma cluster in India is Ahmedabad. So Gujarat is a great partner to have so is Ireland because Ireland is where again single largest concentrations of pharma bulk drug companies in the world and they have some amazing biotech companies as well and as a very small country with a very small land area, they have done exceptionally well on this side. So these are great partnerships and also as I have said, Hyderabad on this continuum of entire life sciences spectrum if you look at, we have a couple of things happening one it is a bulk drug capital of India right now, we have a single largest cluster of pharma production in India, more than 35 percent of pharma in India is produced in Hyderabad, manufactured in Hyderabad and we also export quite a bit to the US. In fact, our size of the industry here in Hyderabad today is about USD 50 billion if you look at it. So our aim is to double this in the next 10 years to USD 100 billion and in that journey, we have decided that we will also create more focus, more impetus is given to not only policy and fiscal support from the government, in the way of creation of infrastructure but we also want to expand and innovate more, we also want the industry to collaborate more with us. So we have come out with three-four things which could be of interest to you. Hyderabad Pharma City would be the single-largest pharma cluster in the world, in 19,000 acres of space very close to Hyderabad airport. The second thing we are going to be setting up, which is already underway is the largest medical device park, the Med Tech Park in India in about 250 acres, very close to Hyderabad and that gives us a very unique opportunity for large number of med devices manufacturers from across the world because the large Indian market in itself is a huge opportunity, 1.32 billion people importing 70 percent of medical devices right now and with make in India campaign, make in Telangana campaign, we want to manufacture more and more, we want to get more and more of these guys into Hyderabad. The third thing I will talk about is Genome Valley 2.0. We created Genome valley 1.0 about 20 years ago. Now 2.0 will also start looking at newer trends, biosimilar, bio pharma production that is happening across the world even in Ireland, Japan, even in China and many other countries in Europe we are looking at more and more manufacturing of these to come to India. We are also looking at setting up an incubator which would focus on nanosciences, immunotherapy, in fact we had announced at last night that we would be setting this up in Genome Valley. So Genome Valley 2.0, Med Tech Park and Hyderabad Pharma City is how we look at doubling the USD 50 billion business to USD 100 billion in the next 10 years. We see all of this in a very synergistic fashion working with each other these three clusters together will propel Hyderabad. Q: I am going to ask you more about Pharma City as well as the Medical Devices Park in just a bit but before that holding BioAsia at a time when it is a difficult scenario to the entire pharmaceutical space, we are talking about generic pricing pressure in the US, you are talking about NPPA back home etc it goes on, in this context - and you have mentioned before that the government should be an enabler how important is government support at this time and do you think that theme of these challenges is playing up in BioAsia this time? A: Government support is critical especially if you are looking to compete globally, the Indian industry needs a great deal of support like you said NPPA on one side, the prices with respect to generics, exclusivity of - there are bunch of things which we can talk about. As a federal government, government of India in fact is doing its bit but I think as the state which has got the single-largest concentration of pharma companies, what government of Telangana is going to do through BioAsia I will be discussing this with Suresh Prabhu tomorrow morning as well we want the Indian industry to understand that the state government of Telangana is going to be their advocate, the champion of their cost with government of India and with the regulatory bodies across the world as well. We want to take it upon ourselves. I know the industry can talk for itself but when a state government decides to collaborate and champion their cause, it would lend that much more credibility, that much more authenticity because we dont have a vested interest other than creating employment, other than creating more wealth for our citizens. Therefore, when an industry body talks, when an industry representative talks, it would be looked at as a bit of a it should be taken with a pinch of salt but when the government talks, when the government becomes their partner, which is what we are wanting to do, it will be taken a lot more seriously. Having said that, not only championing the cost but I think even the industry needs to understand that they need to start diversifying a bit, they need to start focusing on specialty products a bit, we as a country also dont spend enough on research and development (R&D), I think we spend less than one percent on research and development. I think even government needs to encourage private sector collaboration on R&D, we need to give them more incentives to basically ensure that they spend more on R&D because generics and India being the pharmacy of the world, while it continues to remain the main stay of what we do, I think going forward, if you are talking 2.0, if you are talking innovation, talking future then we as an industry, we as a governments also have to get our act together, incentivise industry to do more because government is unable to spend more on R&D and we are still a third world country, which has to get its basic infra right, the basic welfare programmes, the vulnerable sections, the BPL families, so if we really want the industry to step up because there is capital, they have access to capital, they can spend that on R&D provided we give them the helping hand, support by way of incentivisation. Q: Genome Valley 2.0 is that going to be focused merely on R&D and when you talk about R&D, what are the kind of initiatives we can expect because when we talk about the biosimilars and biotechnology, the world is ahead of us at this point, that is probably the next phase. A: Let me tell you two-three things about Genome Valley 2.0, one thing we are looking at is innovation in a big way. Innovation in India is something that has not been focused on by the government, it has largely come from the private sector, largely private sector has led it and they have championed it and they have completely done it by themselves so far but we have already created Indias largest tech incubator in Hyderabad called T-Hub. Now T-Hub in the last two years has worked as a catalyst and creating about 35 incubators in the city of Hyderabad. Many of them again has been focused on healthcare and life sciences. The reason being Hyderabad has this amazing ecosystem, which I mentioned about life sciences and healthcare. A convergence of technology, convergence of healthcare, convergence of all of these is going to result in lot of digital health innovations, digital life sciences innovations also happen and we want to leverage that. The second thing is Genome Valley 2.0 itself will have an incubator focused on immunotherapy and all the emerging fields in this area. So that would also help again with the support of industry and participation of the industry that will also help achieve a bit of a scale in innovations going forward. The third thing which I think is important is the fact that India still does not have good animal testing lab which is again being set up in Hyderabad, the Indias largest would be in Hyderabad, clinical trials again is an issue, which again we are going to work with government of India and ensuring that we will come out with something extremely organic at the same time extremely conducive for business houses and for industry to work on further research and further on the way forward. So combination of all this combined with the main stay has always been manufacturing, the main stay has always been focused on the generics, which will continue to remain at least for one decade or so. Q: Would there be a focus in terms of API and medical devices specifically? I know you spoke about the park but to reduce the kind of dependence that we have on import. A: API, in fact is the focus for Hyderabad pharma city, Hyderabad pharma city would start looking at more APIs manufacturing there and that has been the focus in fact, we have team driving that, we have the team which is visiting different parts of the world trying to promote more and more manufacturing happening in India. So yes, absolutely, reduction of import duties, high barriers etc while the domain of government of India, the focus of states such as ourselves which want to position our parks, create more employment should be on local manufacturing on APIs and other assessments. Q: And medical devices park? A: Medical Devices Park is coming up very well. In fact we already have signed about 13 MoUs and most of these are home grown companies. I am looking at multiple opportunities. In fact I was in Minnesota last year trying to pitch to large multinationals and large US companies as well to come in to India. In fact, one of the things you should now where Hyderabad enjoys a bit of advantages if you look at the overall USFDA approved entities in India - out of the 160 odd USFDA approved entities we have more than 60 here in Hyderabad. So there is a very conducive environment in Hyderabad and there is a good image that Hyderabad enjoys especially in US. So, hopefully Medical Devices Park will also be able to leverage that image that Hyderabad enjoys. We will be able to attract large number of these multinationals set up their manufacturing facilities and then there is also the Make in India campaign, which incentivizes you to manufacture in India, doesnt necessarily talk about making in any particular state so I hope we will be that gateway to India for these companies looking at us. Stakes for Essar Steel have increased with both of its bidders - Numetal and ArcelorMittal - promising a well-planned resolution for the troubled steelmaker. While Lakshmi Mittal, Chairman and CEO of ArcelorMittal, met Finance Minister Arun Jaitely, Numetal released a detailed statement on its intent for Essar Steel. Numetal Ltd, the consortium led by Russia's VTB Bank and includes Rewant Ruia of the Ruia family, said that it has submitted a detailed turnaround plan for the debt laden Essar Steel. The company in a statement said that the plan "address technological, operational and financial issues in both the short and long term." It added, "Numetals shareholders bring together a wealth of experience in technical and operational capabilities, banking and finance, commodity and regional expertise..." While Russia's VTB Bank holds 40 per cent stake in Numetal, Indo International Trading and Aurora Enterprises hold 25 per cent each. Tyazhpromexport (TPE), a leading Russian engineering firm, holds rest of the 10 per cent. VTB is claimed to be among the largest emerging banking groups with assets worth $215 billion. TPE, on the other hand, has played an instrumental role in setting up of most of India's public sector-owned steel plants, including Bokaro and Bhilai based facilities of Steel Authority of India. Indo International Trading is linked to the Somani Group, which is owned by the Kanpur-based family by the same name. The Somani Group is at present headed by Tarun Somani. "In order to ensure a smooth transition and provide a catalyst for change in operational management at Essar Steel, Numetal has assembled a team of senior professionals with significant experience and background," the company said. The professionals include CS Verma, the former Chairman of SAIL. Verma is the CEO of Numetal. Mittal's charge Meanwhile Lakshmi Mittal, Chairman and CEO of ArcelorMittal, met Finance Minister Arun Jaitley. We have put in a well-planned bid for Essar Steel. I think we can that we can create value in Essar Steel, he told reporters after meeting the minister. He also said that neither of the bids - ArcelorMittal's or Numetal's - has been rejected by the resolution professional overseeing the auction of Essar Steel. IT major HCL Technologies today said it will invest about Rs 160 crore as part of its corporate social responsibility activity in the field of education, health and power. The company will also be recruiting about 5,000 people in the years to come, Sanjay Gupta, Senior Vice President and Programme Director New Vistas, HCL Technologies, said, adding in the next 12 months, the IT major will be creating 2,000 jobs. "We will spend an amount of Rs 160 crore as part of our CSR activity, we are also helping the villagers with cleanliness," he said on the sidelines of UP Investors' Summit. The company has adopted 700 villages in Uttar Pradesh where it is providing medical facility, power, agricultural tools and technology to the villagers, he said. At the summit, he described UP as "karmabhoomi" (the land where one works) for HCL Technologies. "HCL began in UP from Noida from a small garage with four people with our chairman Shiv Nadar. At a company which started in 1976 with 4 people. 1.2 lakh people work now and it is a 7.5 billion dollar company. It all started in UP," Gupta said. He further said that working and expanding business in UP is not a challenge today. "This was 3 years back it was a myth. When we decided to set up an IT campus in Lucknow, questions were raised. In 2016, we started operations to develop talent in Lucknow and trained and skilling freshers. We have given about 2,000 technical and non-technical jobs. In next 12 months, we will recruit another 2,000 local talent," he said. Expansion of companies and businesses to tier 2 and 3 cities is very important to retain the talent and stop migration. The investors summit shows positive signs for the industry particularly the IT. UP meets all requirements to do business such as single window clearance, infra and connectivity. People relied on blocks of ice for cooling food, storing food in a simple wooden crate containing pieces of wood and insulation materials. This explains the origin of the term _____ which we still use today to refer to refrigerators. What is it? (Image Courtesy: Pixabay) Answer: Ice-Box. (Image Courtesy: Pixabay) Identify the person in the middle. Answer: Lord Karan Billimoria. Identify the advertiser. Answer: Vivel soap. Where's Herb? was an advertising campaign for the fast food chain X in 1985 and 1986. The television commercials featured a fictional character named Herb, who was described as never having eaten a X burger in his life. They called on fans to visit their local X in the hope of finding Herb and winning a prize. The campaign also included an "I'm not Herb" promotion, in which customers could get a discounted Whopper by including the phrase in their order? Identify the brand which came out with this marketing campaign? Answer: Burger King. (Image Courtesy: Reuters) Which company is proposing to build a super-fast transportation system in India that would connect the city of Pune with the planned new airport in Mumbai in 25 minutes, saving about three hours? Answer: Virgin Hyperloop. Identify the voice-assistant from the logo. Answer: Bixby. In 1973, 239 banks from 15 countries got together to solve a common problem: how to communicate about cross-border payments. The banks formed a cooperative utility, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, headquartered in Belgium. It went live with its messaging services in 1977, replacing the Telex technology that was then in widespread use, and rapidly became the reliable, trusted global partner for institutions all around the world. How is this utility known to us? Answer: SWIFT. (Image Courtesy: Reuters) Which organization has released this poster as a part of their tourism promotion? Answer: NASA. (Image Courtesy: Pixabay) The bust belongs to Francis Ravenscroft. Ede & Ravenscroft is thought to be the oldest firm of tailors in the world. They have provided tailoring and robes to the church, state, legal profession and academia. Who has been their most esteemed customer? Answer: Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II and robe makers for both His Royal Highness The Duke of Edinburgh and His Royal Highness The Prince of Wales. (Image Courtesy: Reuters) The man in the picture is Vikram Kothari who is being investigated by the CBI for defaulting on more than Rs. 3,700 crore in loans from government banks. Identify the company he owns? Answer: Rotomac Pens. (Image Courtesy: Official website) Tianmen Mountain Road in the Hunan Province of China incorporates a dizzying 99 hairpin turns along the 7 miles of mountainside road. At the summit, this road leads toward 999 steps, all of which lead to Heavens Gate, a natural rock arch in the mountainside, mythically thought to be a link between the mortal world and the world of the gods. Reaching the top requires a vehicle with performance and capability in equal measure, and what better place than the epic Tianman Mountain Road to demonstrate the power of the New ____Sport. Fill in the blanks? (Image Courtesy: Reuters) Answer: Range Rover. A hallmark of the work to empower women is The X Program, which celebrated inspirational women. The program recognized women in local communities who embodied the spirit of X through their attributes of selflessness, generosity and leadership. Identify the brand which was earlier known as Draps after its founding father? Answer: Lady Godiva. (Image Courtesy: Reuters) Identify the group from its logo. Answer: Beecham. To which league do these Heroes belong? Answer: Justice League. Kevin Systrom had no formal training in computer science, but while working at Nextstop, he learned to code at nights and on weekends, and he built an HTML5 prototype called Burbn, inspired by his taste for fine whiskeys and bourbons. Burbn was a multi-faceted app that allowed users to check in, post plans and share photos. Although at the time location-based check-in apps were all the rage, photo sharing was the most popular feature. How is Burbn known to us? Answer: Instagram. Identify the advertiser. Answer: Desperados beer. In the winter of 1925, a Topical Press Film cameraman made a silent record of the Companys operations in Persia. The 35mm film, entitled The Persian Oil Industry, was 45 minutes long and shown to specialised audiences in technical institutions. Later, a 15 minute film was produced and shown in public cinemas under the title of In the Land of the Shah and a 20 minute version bearing the same title was made for distribution by Pathescope Limited. The film, in its various forms, was seen by nearly a million people between 1926 and 1938. The approximate cost of the film was 1,600.00. Which company is being discussed here? Answer: BP. Identify the advertiser. Answer: Carlsberg. This was an interactive project launched by a brand to deliver common sentences in the form of dance moves instead of words. There are 11 basic phrases, in which words in italics can be replaced by other options, allowing fans to convert over 10,000 different sentences. Once encrypted using the dancing code, they can be shared with friends on Twitter, Facebook and via e-mail. Identify the brand? Answer: Puma. Identify the advertiser. The auditor also stepped down from the same position vis-a-vis construction and infrastructure company Atlanta Ltd on 29 May last year after it refused to share details of an ongoing tax investigation, lack of disclosures about significant observations by tax authorities and the resignation of an independent director. live bse live nse live Volume Todays L/H More Punjab National Bank (PNB), which is reeling under a major financial fraud, has appointed auditor PwC to conduct an investigation into the alleged Rs 11,300-crore fraud involving luxury jewellers Nirav Modi, Mehul Choksi and their companies. A report in The Economic Times stated quoting sources that the auditing company has been asked to gather evidence against Nirav Modi and his associates so that it can be presented in court. Follow LIVE updates on PNB fraud case here. PNB, in a 15-point scope of work document finalised on February 21, had asked PwC to identify how the letter of undertaking (LoU) mechanism was misused by Modi. The bank instructed the audit firm to track the money and check on the end use of the funds raised. As per the document, the auditor will also seek to trace Modi's assets that were not disclosed in his company's balance sheets so that they could be seized for recovery of dues. Also Read: PNB transfers 1,415 employees post scam Delhi-based Dinesh Anand is heading PwCs fraud investigation unit, the report said. Both PwC and PNB declined to comment on the development. According to the report, the auditor will conduct a probe into the accounts of five Modi group entities Firestar Diamonds, Firestar International, Solar Export, Stellar Diamonds and Diamond R Us. The auditor has also been asked to look at "concentrating transactions" where large sales were made to the same customer or large purchases from the same supplier. Along with this, examining of stocks, inventory and purchase transactions, particularly with related parties and group concerns, are listed out in the auditor's duties. Also Read Nearly 10,000 PNB credit, debit card holders affected by data breach: Report Over Rs 11,400 crore was siphoned off from PNB through issuance of LoUs to top jeweller Nirav Modi. Bank officials and major diamond merchant Nirav Modi and his accomplices were involved in this case. The bank officials issued the letters to the concerned persons who approached them. live bse live nse live Volume Todays L/H More Hit by a global rout in equities post Budget, the S&P BSE Sensex plunged over 2500 points or little over 7 percent from its peak of 36,443 recorded last month. With such sharp fall in the index, many stocks have corrected 20-30 percent in the same period but are displaying strong growth in earnings. After a period of flat earnings over FY14-17, we see a semblance of a recovery, with earnings growth estimated at 22 percent for 2HFY18 and 25 percent for FY19, Motilal Oswal said in a report. However, earnings from SBI, Tata Motors, Lupin and ONGC dented sentiment. Earnings downgrade/upgrade ratio moderated QoQ in which 65 companies saw earnings cut of over 3 percent (58 in 2QFY18) and 43 companies saw earnings upgrades of over 3 percent (49 in 2QFY18). The upgrade/downgrade ratio weakened from 0.84x to 0.66x, said the report. Markets will continue to give a premium valuation to businesses with high growth visibility, strong return on equity (ROE) and complemented by high standards of corporate governance, suggest experts. Investors should look at stocks which high earnings visibility in the next 1-2 years. Future potential of the company is more important than past performance. However, an investor must first judge the capability of the management to en-cash on opportunities which lies ahead of them and projected by them, Saurabh S Jain, MD, SSJ Finance & Securities told Moneycontrol. Companies which are projected over a reasonably long period of time to generate above-average earnings growth and cash flows, supported by high ROEs, will naturally command higher earnings multiples, he said. Return on Equity indicates profitability of a company by measuring how much the shareholders earned for their investment in the company. The higher the percentage, the more efficiently equity base has been utilized, indicating better return to investor. A recent report by domestic brokerage firm highlighted 10 stocks which are displaying high ROE for FY18. The list includes stocks like Oberoi Realty, Rain Industries, Quess Corp, Hindalco, Tata Motors, Vedanta, Delta Corp, M&M Financial, Escorts, and Avenue Supermarts. Motilal Oswal expects Hindalco to hit a target of Rs344 in the next one year which translates in to an upside of 40 percent, followed by Quess Corp which should give a return of over 30 percent, and Tata Motors which was a laggard in the last one year could see a rally of about 37 percent in the next 12 months. The important differentiator which makes these stocks stand out is the EPS CAGR which has been growing at a healthy rate of 40-60 percent. The brokerage firm expects the rate to continue for the period starting from FY17-FY20. EPS CAGR is an important driver to predict the future direction of the company. Companies with high EPS CAGR is considered as a good combination for predicting the future prices and movements of the company for valuation aspect. Some of Such companies are Oberoi Realty, Tata Motor, Hindalco and Quess Corp, Ritesh Ashar Chief Strategy Officer, KIFS Trade Capital told Moneycontrol. When you compare the EPS history with the stock price history, it helps you determine the most likely future direction of the stock price. CAGR is a much bigger factor which will add to a spike in prices. Growth is all we need. A company with great growth potential (CAGR) is considered as one step ahead of the company with High EPS, he said. What should investors do? Investors who are looking for value at current levels even if the stock has corrected in double digits should go for companies which are showing higher earnings growth. Apart from looking at ROE and PE multiple of the company one can adopt PEG (forward PE to Growth rate) ratio to arrive at a common metric for measuring company valuations to their projected growth rates, suggest experts. As a simple illustration, a company whose PE ratio is 25 and projected earnings growth is 30%, would give a PEG ratio of 0.83 which would imply that the company is being valued at 0.8x its future growth rate. Companies with high growth rates, merely applying the PE ratio alone may not be appropriate and the PEG ratio acts as a good common barometer. As a thumb rule, businesses with growth visibility and having PEG ratio of less than 1, would be considered to be reasonably valued and may be bought with a long-term perspective, said Jain of SSJ Finance & Securities. Companies with good management like Super Avenues Ltd. (DMart) and Titan Ltd. which demonstrate high visibility of future earnings growth and cash flows over a long period of time are seen to have higher PEG ratios, he said. However, some analysts say that too much excel sheet projections/forward earnings multiples are harmful for investors and a periodic review of investments is necessary. Many times when current valuations are stretched, analysts try to justify them by quoting forward multiples which on the face of it suggests that current valuations are rich enough for one to be cautious, Jimeet Modi, CEO, Samco Securities told Moneycontrol. Looking at one year forward multiple is still ok but going beyond that is an exercise of prediction in which majority fail, he said. Bull's Eye, CNBC-TV18's popular game show, where market experts come together to dish out trading strategies for you to make your week more exciting and compete with each other to see whose portfolio is the strongest. Remember these are midcap ideas not just for the day, but stocks that look attractive in the medium-term as well. This week, Ruchit Jain, Rakesh Bansal and Vishal Malkan battle it out for top honours. Below their top stock picks and analysis: Ruchit Jain of Angel Broking Buy Ipca Laboratories with a stoploss at Rs 641 and target of Rs 700 Buy Mindtree with a stoploss at Rs 721 and target of Rs 775 Buy HCL Infosystems with a stoploss at Rs 59.80 and target of Rs 68 Sell UPL with a stoploss at Rs 688 and target of Rs 652 Rakesh Bansal of RK Global Buy Interglobe Aviation with a stoploss at Rs 1249 and target of Rs 1330 Buy Bharat Forge with a stoploss at Rs 733.8 and target of Rs 789 Buy Apollo Hospital with a stoploss at Rs 1175 and target of Rs 1322 Buy Britannia Industries with a stoploss at Rs 4690 and target of Rs 4940 Vishal Malkan of malkansview.com Buy Syndicate Bank with a stoploss at Rs 58 and target of Rs 64 Buy Ashok Leyland with a stoploss at Rs 128 and target of Rs 142 live bse live nse live Volume Todays L/H More Share price of Genus Paper & Boards locked at 5 percent upper circuit as the company has signed 2 MoU with Government of Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh. There were pending buy orders of 98,206 shares, with no sellers available. The company has signed a non-binding MoU with the government of Maharashtra to invest Rs 1050 crore for setting up kraft paper manufacturing plant. Also, the company has signed a non-binding MoU with the government of Uttar Pradesh to invest Rs 600 crore for expansion of current manufacturing facility. The company will incur the investing amount within a period of 5 years from the date of application to the directorate of industries / relevant authorities after completion of all effective steps. At 09:50 hrs Genus Paper & Boards was quoting at Rs 14.60, up Rs 0.65, or 4.66 percent. Posted by Rakesh Patil live bse live nse live Volume Todays L/H More Shares of Merck, KSB Pumps and ITD Cementation India added 3-5 percent intraday Friday on the back of strong third quarter numbers. Merck has posted 42 percent increase in its Q3FY18 net profit at Rs 27 crore and revenue was up 22 percent at Rs 304 crore. The operating profit (EBITDA) was up 30 percent at Rs 30.5 crore and margin was up at 10 percent. The company has recommended payment of dividend at the rate of Rs 15 per equity share of Rs 10 each for the year ended December 31, 2017. ITD Cementation recorded net profit at Rs 17 crore against Rs 12 crore despite exceptional loss of Rs 22 crore. Revenue was down 16 percent at Rs 575 crore and margin was up 580 bps at 13.7 percent. It has recommended payment of dividend of 40 paise per equity share of Re 1 each (40 percent) for the financial year ended December 31, 2017. KSB Pumps' Q3FY18 revenue was up 31 percent at Rs 328 crore and profit was up 21 percent at Rs 27 crore. EBITDA was up 12 percent at Rs 42 crore and margin was down 200 bps at 13 percent. The company at its meeting held on February 22, have recommended dividend of Rs 6 per share (60 percent) for the year ended December 31, 2017. In the last one year, KSB Pumps gained 26 percent, ITD Cementation was up 24 percent and Merck rose 38 percent. At 10:33 hrs KSB Pumps was quoting at Rs 800, up 2.51 percent, ITD Cementation India was quoting at Rs 187.10, up 1.88 percent and Merck was quoting at Rs 1,505, up 4.23 percent on the BSE. Posted by Rakesh Patil live bse live nse live Volume Todays L/H More Moneycontrol News The US FDA inspection of Sun Pharma's crucial Halol site in Gujarat that was widely expected to end on Friday, could possible extend by a day or two, said sources. The facility is under US FDA warning letter since December 2015. The drug maker declined to comment. Dilip Shanghvi, who is attending the India Pharmaceutical Forum, said the company as a policy will not talk on ongoing regulatory inspections. The current US FDA inspection began on February 12. Halol is critical for Sun Pharma as most of the complex pipeline that includes injectables, topical solutions and inhalation products are filed from this facility. Sun Pharma is banking on complex products to beat the pricing pressure it faces in the US market. The current inspection was triggered after US FDA re-inspected the Halol facility from November 17, 2016 through December 1, 2016 and issued nine Form 483 observations. The observations were related to data reporting standards, testing procedures, and lab controls. Halol is an important plant for the company and contributed 12-15 percent to its US sales before the factory received a warning letter from the US FDA for violation of manufacturing norms in December 2015. The warning letter blocked new product approval from that facility impacting the companys US business. Prior to warning letter, Halol was contributing about USD 400 million to topline or nearly 12-15 percent of sales. Now the facility's contribution has fallen to about 250 million. Sun Pharma's profit fell 75.2 percent to Rs 365.4 crore in the quarter ended December hit by plunging US sales and one-time deferred tax adjustment. Revenues from operations declined 16 percent to Rs 6,653.23 "The resolution of the facility is important if the company has to maintain USD 1.5 billion topline in US market," said Amey Chalke, Research Analyst at HDFC Securities. CLSA forecasts increemental revenue from the clearance of Halol is expected to be at least USD 100 million and USD 150 million in years ending March 2019 and 2020, and even possibly go up to USD 200 million and USD 300 million, increasing its earnings per share by 4 and 10 percent. Dilip Shanghvi | Founder and MD, Sun Pharmaceuticals | Net worth: Rs 89,700 (Image: Reuters) Sun Pharma, India's largest drug maker on Friday said US FDA has issued three Form 483 observations for its Halol site in Gujarat. The company didn't disclose the nature of these observations. A Form 483 is issued by the US FDA inspectors at the end of the inspection outlining any deviations from GMP. The US FDA conducted Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP) inspection of Sun Pharma's Halol facility from February 12 - 23. "The company is preparing the response to the observations, which will be submitted to the US FDA within 15 business days. The company is committed to addressing these observations promptly," said Sun Pharma in a statement to stock exchanges. "The company remains committed to working closely with the US FDA and continues to enhance its GMP compliance on an ongoing basis," the statement added. The company's founder and managing director Dilip Shanghvi expressed confidence about resolving the three issues pointed out by the American drug regulator. Halol is critical for Sun Pharma as most of the complex pipeline that includes injectables, topical solutions and inhalation products are filed from this facility. Sun Pharma is banking on complex products to beat the pricing pressure it faces in the US market. The current inspection was triggered after US FDA re-inspected the Halol facility from November 17, 2016 through December 1, 2016 and issued nine Form 483 observations. The observations were related to data reporting standards, testing procedures, and lab controls. Halol is an important plant for the company and contributed 10-15 percent to its US sales before the factory received a warning letter from the US FDA for violation of manufacturing norms in December 2015. The warning letter blocked new product approval from that facility impacting the companys US business. Prior to the warning letter, Halol was contributing about USD 400 million to the companys topline or nearly 12-15 percent of sales. Now the facilitys contribution has fallen to about USD 250 million. Sun Pharma's profit fell 75.2 percent to Rs 365.4 crore in the quarter ended December hit by plunging US sales and one-time deferred tax adjustment. Revenues from operations declined 16 percent to Rs 6,653.23 "The resolution of the facility is important if the company has to maintain USD 1.5 billion topline in US market," said Amey Chalke, Research Analyst at HDFC Securities. CLSA forecasts that incremental revenue from the clearance of Halol is expected to be at least USD 100 million and USD 150 million in years ending March 2019 and 2020, respectively, and even possibly go up to USD 200 million and USD 300 million, increasing its earnings per share by 4 and 10 percent. Share of Sun Pharma rose 3.54 percent and were trading at Rs 561.35 on BSE at 2.44 pm, the benchmark index gained 0.98 percent to 34,145.43 points. A minister in the Delhi government and several MLAs of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) were detained by the police today when they were trying to stage a demonstration in front of Union Home Minister, Rajnath Singh's residence at Akbar Road here, in protest against the arrest of the party's Dalit MLA, Prakash Jarwal. The detained AAP leaders and workers were taken to the Tughlaq Road and Parliament Street police stations, from where they were released subsequently. "Our Dalit MLAs were whisked away by the police as they were attempting to stage a protest in front of Rajnath Singh's residence, while no action was taken against the BJP workers who demonstrated in front of Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia's residence," senior AAP leader Ashutosh told reporters. The AAP MLAs and workers had given a call to gherao the Home Minister's Akbar Road residence. As many as 89 persons were detained around 12 noon, Delhi Police PRO, DCP Madhur Verma said. Fourteen women and 75 men, including Delhi minister, RP Gautam, five other MLAs and six councillors of the AAP, were among those detained, he added. Two AAP legislators, including Jarwal and Okhla MLA Amantullah Khan, were arrested by the police yesterday in connection with an alleged assault on Delhi Chief Secretary Anshu Prakash during a meeting at Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal's residence on Monday night. BJP Delhi BJP workers and leaders today staged protests across the city, including at Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia's residence, against the AAP government. The demonstrations were held to protest against the "autocratic, anarchic and corrupt" Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), a statement by the Delhi BJP said. Kuljeet Singh Chahal, general secretary of the Delhi unit, led the protest at Sisodia's residence. "People of Delhi are dejected to see the Arvind Kejriwal government violating the constitutional provisions laid by Baba Saheb Ambedkar," Chahal said. BJP workers of the New Delhi Assembly segment, represented by Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, held a prayer meeting outside the Birla Mandir. They said the prayer was held so that Kejriwal opened an office in his constituency to help the local people. Rahul Gandhi Congress chief Rahul Gandhi today met Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and discussed a range of issues concerning the two countries. "I had a warm and cordial meeting with the Canadian Prime Minister in Delhi this evening. We had a fruitful discussion on a range of issues concerning our two countries. I look forward to continuing the dialogue and building a lasting friendship with him,"Gandhi tweeted after the meeting. According to sources, the two shared their commitment towards liberal values. Issues pertaining to economic development and new technologies were also discussed during the around 40-minute meeting, they said. The sources said the two leaders talked about bridging the gap of inequalities in society and how important pluralistic values were and how destructive divisive politics can become and hurt society. The two leaders also talked about how important are inclusive democracies, besides jobs creation. Gandhi's meeting was rescheduled after the Canadian prime minister had to call on President Ram Nath Kovind after bilateral talks with Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Besides Gandhi, former union minister and senior Congress leader Anand Sharma was also present during the meeting with Trudeau. Gandhi also met Trudeau's wife and children during his meeting. Representative Image. India today successfully test-fired the nuclear-capable 'Dhanush' ballistic missile with a strike range of 350 kms from a naval ship off Odisha coast, defence officials said. The surface-to-surface missile, a naval variant of the indigenously-developed 'Prithvi' missile, was test-fired from the ship positioned near Paradip in the Bay of Bengal at around 10.52 am, the officials said. 'Dhanush' missile is capable of carrying a payload of 500 kg and hitting both land and sea-based targets, the sources said, adding that its trial was carried out by the Strategic Force Command (SFC) of the defence forces. ''The missile launch was part of training exercise by the SFC of Indian Navy,'' one official said. Describing the test launch as ''a complete success'', the officials said all mission objectives were met during the trial. ''The missile launch and its flight performance were monitored from DRDO telemetry and radar facilities in the Odisha coast,'' they said. The single-stage, liquid-propelled 'Dhanush', has already been inducted into the defence services. It is one of the five missiles developed by the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) under the Integrated Guided Missile Development Programme (IGMDP). The last trial was successfully tested on April 9, 2015, the sources added. Representative Image The security forces are on high-alert along the borders to foil any BAT attacks by Pakistani troops, a senior BSF official said today. "Alertness is on the high-level always, but because of the inputs we have received, we have increased our alertness and all the forces are on high-alert to stop any ceasefire violation, BAT action or sniper-fire," Inspector General of BSF, Kashmir Frontier, Sonali Mishra told reporters on the sidelines of a wreath-laying ceremony of BSF jawan, S K Murmu in Humhama area on the outskirts of the city. Murmu was injured in sniper fire by Pakistani troops in the Tangdhar sector along the Line of Control in Jammu and Kashmir on Tuesday, and later succumbed to injuries. Mishra said Pakistan was regularly targeting Indian posts along the borders as it does not want a peaceful atmosphere. "They do not want peace and calm on the borders and so they continue such actions like ceasefire violations, sniper-fire, BAT action. There was a ceasefire violation yesterday too. The BSF and the Army gave a befitting reply and according to our reliable sources, there are two casualties on their side," she added. Mishra said at least 175 militants were waiting at the launching pads to infiltrate into the Valley. "Their launching pads are always active and they leave no opportunity to infiltrate. As the snow is less this time, that could be a reason that they are trying to infiltrate. But, the BSF is ready to tackle any challenge and give a befitting response to them," she said. Actor-politician, Kamal Haasan today opposed "saffronisation," saying all sections of people should be given space and respect. Using the national flag as a symbol to convey his political message, the actor rejected suggestions that he was denigrating the Hindu right wing ideology. Haasan, who launched his political party Makkal Neethi Mayyam yesterday, has said his politics will be free of caste and religion. In November last year, the actor had faced flak for his "Hindu extremists" remark from the BJP and other right wing outfits. However, he had clarified then that he was not anti-Hindu. "Some say that Kamal Haasan is denigrating saffron. It is wrong. Saffron has been given its rightful place for its sacrifice, what is more, even the national flag has a place for it," he said in his column in Tamil weekly Ananda Vikatan. Hassan said, "I say that saffron should, however, not spread to the entire flag. Let us give space and respect to others. It is the pledge we have taken and that is what has been mentioned in the Constitution too." He did not name a party or organisation. He also did not refer to any specific incident or give a context or the trigger for raising the matter immediately after launching his party. Claiming that a video had appeared on YouTube where some people were shown taking a pledge to remove the word secular from the Constitution, he asked how such a change came through in about 50 years. "Can sacrifice (of pluralistic values) to such an extent be made for the sake of votes," Haasan said, and asked if such a thing was not worse than a war. He said in ancient times even warfare had its own set of dharmic values. Without such values "politics that involves bloodshed all the time should be changed and that is my desire", he said. Great leaders like Mahatma Gandhi and B Ambedkar had worked for the country despite differences among them and such lessons should not be lost, Haasan said. "I am beginning my journey as a postman making you remember it (working for the nation despite differences)," he said. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, his wife Sophie Gregoire, daughter Ella Grace and son Xavier pose for photographers during their visit to the holy Sikh shrine of Golden temple in Amritsar, India February 21, 2018. REUTERS/Adnan Abidi - RC175DD58590 External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj and her Canadian counterpart, Chrystia Freeland today discussed issues of "bilateral interest" during a strategic dialogue, held in the backdrop of the Khalistan controversy shrouding Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau's visit. Asked if the two leaders discussed the issue of Canadian government's soft approach towards the Khalistan issue, external affairs ministry spokesperson Raveesh Kumar did not give a direct answer and said, "all matters of bilateral interest came up for discussion." He said it was a "good meeting", during which they had wide-ranging discussions on strengthening relations in trade and investment, security and cyber security, energy, people to people contacts and other relevant bilateral and regional issues. About the meeting, Kumar also tweeted, "the two plural democracies are keen to build upon the strong complementarities of our existing strategic partnership." Today's meeting comes a day ahead of Trudeau's meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The German government in March 2018 could issue a permit to build Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, CEO of national joint-stock company Naftogaz Ukrainy Andriy Kobolev has said. "According to our information, in March the German government plans to issue the final permit to build Nord Stream 2," he said. Kobolev also said that the work to attract a western partner to the management of the Ukrainian gas transport system (GTS) should be speeded up due to this fact. 20:44 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. Minister of Petroleum and Natural Gas Dharmendra Pradhan said A terms of reference was exchanged between the Petroleum ministries of both countries in the presence of the Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, to establish greater collaboration on mutual energy priorities and enhance bilateral energy relationship between the two countries. 16:36 PM Modi stated that the talks with PM Justin Trudeau were fruitful. The discussions focussed on closer India-Canada cooperation in various sectors including investment, trade, energy and stronger people-to-people relations. 15:46 Prime Ministers Narendra Modi and Justin Trudeau at the CEO's Roundtable featuring some of the top business leaders from India and Canada. They are listening to business leader talk about catalysing bilateral trade and investment, as tweeted by India's India's High Commissioner to Canada Vikas Swarup. 14:11 Look forward to allow Canada to double India investments: PM Modi Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Canadian counterpart Justin Trudeau held extensive talks on key issues of counter-terrorism as well as ways to boost trade ties on Friday. (Reuters) The Canadian PM and his family were accorded ceremonial welcome at the Rashtrapati Bhawan. (Reuters) PM Modi welcomed and interacted with Trudeau and his family. (Reuters) Earlier, PM Modi had expressed on social media that he was looking forward to meet Trudeau and his children. I hope PM @JustinTrudeau and his family had a very enjoyable stay so far. I particularly look forward to meeting his children Xavier, Ella-Grace, and Hadrien. (Reuters) Justin Trudeau inspected a guard of honor during his ceremonial reception at Rashtrapati Bhawan in New Delhi on Friday. (PTI) The Canadian PM and his family also paid tribute at Mahatma Gandhi's memorial Rajghat in New Delhi during the day. (PTI) PM Modi and the Canadian PM held extensive talks on key issues of counter-terrorism and extremism as well as ways to boost trade ties, after which the two sides inked six MoUs. (Reuters) Congress today urged upon the electoral college to stand in this election for secularism, god fearing and corruption-free government to salvage Nagaland society from being transformed into Hindutva. Nagaland Congress President K Therie also mocked at Prime Minister's promise of a corruption free government when his party was in alliance with "most corrupt leaders" of the previous government in the state. Congress is seriously concerned for Nagaland must install a god-fearing and secular-minded government to salvage Nagalands society from transforming into Hindutva, stated a release issued by Therie. Further maintaining that it will be foolish to expect change from NDPP and BJP who have completely ruined Nagalands culture, infrastructure and systems, Therie said Prime Minister Narendra Modi promises a corruption free government, however he is in alliance with the most corrupt leaders of previous government in the state. His (PM) promises of development will not fool the people of Nagaland, for the people have not forgotten the empty promises he has been making since 2014. Perhaps the change BJP-NDPP will bring will only be to collectively loot the state for another five years and leave a legacy of debt," he said. Asserting that Congress is committed to stand for the said virtues, Therie said We (Congress) stand by our commitment and will act as a deterrent in the new state assembly. Nagaland is going to polls on February 27 while counting of votes would be done on March 3. Congress has fielded 18 candidates out of a total of 60 constituencies in the state. NPCC President K Therie while expressing that Nagalands electorate has truly changed said that the democratic process of electing representatives through conscious voting has now changed to that of who can pay more. We have lost inherent values of honesty, decency and Christian principles, he pointed while adding that accepting and demanding cash and vehicles have become the new trend. Attributing such phenomena to the two elections of 2008 and 2013, he said corrupt governance have transformed the people into a culture of fulfilling their aspirations before the election itself as they do not believe they will see their MLAs after election. In other nations, people elect their representatives based on their standings on issues and prospects of the future but in our context, 80 per cent or more voters consider corruption as a normal system, he said. They do not believe in issues or think of the future. They only think of getting some quick cash or material benefit. This is most unfortunate for Nagaland, he said. It will also be foolish to vote for the Hindutva mission. Your prayer is to stop and protect persecution of Christians and therefore, your vote should not be cast for the persecutors of Christians and other minorities, he said. Congress believes in freedom of religion, culture and customs while the BJP believes in the Uniform Civil Code - One nation, one religion, one law and one tax, the NPCC president added. Expressing that the verdict of 2018 State General Election will be either for secularism or communalism, Therie urged upon people to educate the innocent voters for this elections verdict will change the course of our society and the present way of life may become history. Some 10,000 credit and debit card holders have been affected by a data breach said to be reported by Punjab National Bank (PNB), which is already reeling under a multi-crore rupee financial fraud by two fugitive luxury jewellers. Security experts believe sensitive information on the cards has been available for purchase through a website for at least three months, the Asia Times reported quoting sources. Follow LIVE updates on PNB fraud case here. Punjab National Bank (PNB) is in the midst of one of the biggest scams in banking history, opening a can of worms worth over Rs 11,300 crore (USD 1,771.69 million) for the banking sector. The fraudulent transactions likely to have been going on for last seven years were unearthed by PNB at one of its Mumbai branches. Also read: PNB transfers 1,415 employees post scam According to the report, the bank was unaware of the data breach until a Singapore-registered information security company, CloudSek Information Security, tipped it off on Wednesday night. We have a crawler that is deployed in the dark/deep web. These are sites on the internet which are not indexed by Google or other major search engines. They are used to buy and sell sensitive data illegally, Chief Technical Officer Rahul Sasi told the paper. Our crawler detects any such data and sends it to a Machine Learning software that we have created. If this detects anything that is suspicious, and of interest to our clients, we immediately take action, Sasi added. Also read Nirav Modi fraud case could trigger PCA on PNB: Kotak report Sasi added the company has to pass the details through a government agency as they were unable to contact PNB after detecting the breach as it is not a customer at the bank. The PNBs Chief Information Security Officer TD Virwani has confirmed that it was working with the government to contain fallout from the release of the data, which was offered through a website. Government officials who are aware of the breach told the paper that they have been trying to establish the extent of the problem. As of now, they have discovered sensitive information from as many as 10,000 credit cards issued by the bank. The sensitive information includes names, expiry dates, Personal Identification Numbers and Card Verification Values. The last updated data had a time stamp of January 29, 2018 indicating that they were current deatils of customers. Also read SWIFT and Tripping: How Punjab National Bank's Rs 11,000 cr scam was operated We believe, on preliminary analysis, that the data has been available for at least three months. While this is yet to be firmly established, we are carrying out our forensic investigation, a government official familiar with the case told the paper. The PNBs Chief Information Security Officer did not comment on the breach. Currently, both the private and government sectors are investigating how the breach has occurred. They are assuming the data could have come from a laptop or mobile phone carried by a bank customer that was infected with a malicious code, or from a third party. Also read COMMENT-The PNB scam: Questions for the bank, the auditors, the RBI and the government Payment gateways are also being checked, however, an investigator told the paper that chances are higher that the banks security was compromised, as a large amount of data came from a single source. Usually these sites on the deep/dark web build up reputations on the authenticity of the data they sell illegally. This particular site has a very good reputation. They offer a sample size to buyers to establish their credentials before the sale is made. In this case they were offering to sell the data at US$4.90 per card, the investigator told the paper. Sasi stated that all these were possible options, but there wasnt enough information yet to be certain how the leak had taken place. Punjab National Bank offers customers 4.5 percent interest on deposits less than Rs 2 crore. Senior citizens earn 5.25 percent. Those depositing between Rs 2 crore to Rs 10 crore earn an interest of 3.25 percent. live bse live nse live Volume Todays L/H More Punjab National Bank (PNB) tops the list in a data report which shows that gems and diamond traders have cost banks over Rs 5,000 crore through 90 defaults. The Federation of Bank of India Staff Unions (FBISU) compiled data, accessed by The Times of India, shows that PNB, due to nine defaulters, has lost Rs 1,790 crore. Even though the data shows that State Bank of India (SBI) has the most number of defaulters - 15 - the loss incurred by them was Rs 410 crore, still lower than PNB. PNB saga: Track all the latest updates and news here. Among other banks, Union Bank of India and Oriental Bank of Commerce also come on top of the list, with nine and eight defaults, respectively. According to the data, the total number of wilful defaulters is more than 5,000 and costing a total of around Rs 49,000 crore to all the banks. The latest Reserve Bank of India (RBI) data, however, shows that the defaulters have increased to 8,915 and the cost has jumped to Rs 92,376 crore. Experts the newspaper spoke to said that the recent PNB fraud case can jump up the bank's cost and defaulters. "Given that this data doesnt include the recent PNB scam, the final number could point to one of the worst frauds the sector has seen," a banker said. Many loans - small or big - have not been repaid. In some cases, the banks are still under investigation. Firms such as Jatin Mehta's Winsome, among others, have defaulted many banks. One of the reasons for how easily the jewel firms could trick banks, was by changing the names of their companies and borrowing. The data shows that Beautiful Diamonds, another defaulter, was earlier called Splendour Gems. Another firm, Ghanshyandas Gems and Jewels, later became "Ghanshyamdas". Since diamond trade is highly cash dependent, it leads to be a source of major money laundering cases. "It may be conceivable that diamond merchants resorted to higher borrowing through Nostro accounts overseas to deal with the setbacks caused by constriction of the cash economy," experts told the newspaper. February 23, 2018 / 10:36 PM IST 21:52 PM Modi promises 'strict action' against PNB fraudsters Breaking his silence over the Rs 11,400-crore fraud at India's second-biggest public sector bank data-scayt-word="PNB" data-scayt-lang="en_US">PNB, Prime Minister Narendra Modi today said his government will take stringent action against financial irregularities and not tolerate loot of public money. Days after the fraud allegedly masterminded by diamantaire Nirav Modi came to light, the prime minister asked the management of financial institutions as well as the supervisory bodies to do their job diligently to check such frauds. "I want to make it clear that this government has been taking strict action against financial irregularities and will continue to take strict action," he said at Global Business Summit. "System will not tolerate loot of public money," Modi said. (PTI) 21:24 NCLT grants MCA interim relief, allows freezing properties of 64 respondents Moneycontrols Tarun Sharma has reported that the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) has granted interim relief to the Ministry of Corporate Affairs for freezing properties of 64 respondents in the Nirav Modi fraud case, including individual and those of his companies, as per section 222 of the Company's Act, Freezing of Securities. Meaning, there will be freezing of selling or purchasing of securities including shares, debenture, bonds or mutual fund. Punjab National Bank had mentioned 64 individuals in its complaint to the Ministry of Corporate Affairs (MCA). The 64 respondent are Directors of Companies, former directors, key management personnel and the Company Secretary. The order gives MCA the permission to attach movable and immovable assets of 114 companies owned or controlled by Mehul Choksi and Nirav Modi, including personal properties of Mehul Choksi, Nirav Modi, Ami Modi and Neeshal Modi. The next date of hearing has been set to February 27. 20:08 Government didn't act on complaints of Nirav Modi, Mehul Chowki duping common people, alleges Congress In a fresh attack, the Congress today accused the NDA Government of complicity in not acting on complaints against PNB fraud accused Nirav Modi and Mehul Choksi filed by people who have been duped in Gujarat and elsewhere by the duo, and alleged that they were provided "protection at the highest level". Congress spokesperson Shaktisinh Gohil alleged that Nirav Modi and Choksi have not only siphoned off crore of rupees from India's banks, but have also duped India's middle class and common people of Rs 5,000 crore or more, by floating various schemes. He said a new "'Jan Dhan Loot Yojna has unravelled - where Gitanjali Gems promoters floated jewellery investment schemes like Shagun, 'Swarna Mangal Labh' (SML) and 'Swarna Mangal Kalash' (SMK) taking an estimated Rs 5,000 crore of public money". (PTI) 19:36 Punjab National Bank (PNB) has reiterate that it has capacity and capability to handle the situation. PNB has also denied reports that it has asked PwC to conduct a probe into alleged fraud, according to CNBC TV18. PNB has also denied report that Indian cricketer Virat Kohli will discontinue as the brand ambassador. The bank has also called a report that the Reserve Bank of India/ the government has asked them to pay fraudulent amount to other banks, as incorrect. PNB has said that no restrictions on the withdrawals have been imposed by the bank and that reports on withdrawal limit of Rs 3,000 for a customer are absolutely incorrect. 19:10 Gitanjali Gems continues to lose sheen, shares plunge 60.5% in 8 days Shares of Gitanjali Gems remained weak for the eighth straight session today and have plunged 60.5 percent, eroding its market capitalisation by Rs 450.83 crore, since the Rs 11,400 crore PNB scam came to light. The stock declined by 4.98 percent to end at Rs 24.80 its lowest trading permissible limit for the day today on BSE. On NSE, the stock slipped 4.99 percent to hit its lower price band of Rs 24.75. (PTI) 18:36 Moneycontrols Tarun Sharma has reported that the Ministry of Corporate Affairs (MCA) has approached National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) to freeze and attach all movable and immovable assets of Mehul Choksi and Nirav Modi. The government has sought attachment of 114 companies and their movable and immovable assets. The government is also looking to attach foreign assets of Mehul Choksi and Nirav Modi companies. The government is also seeking to attach all the personal assets of Nirav Modi, Ami Modi, Nischal Modi and Mehul Choksi and has sought exparte order in this case. 17:56 Need to revisit surveillance system to plug loopholes: Former PNB chief Admitting that failure of linkage of SWIFT to core banking system (CBS) could have led to Rs 11,400 crore fraud at Punjab National Bank, the former head of the scam-hit lender today said there was an urgent need for banks to revisit their surveillance system and plug the loopholes. Usha Ananthasubramanian, who is now managing director and CEO of Allahabad Bank, said at her bank also SWFIT is not linked to CBS, and the process of linking both the systems is currently on. The country's second largest PSU bank has detected USD 1.77 billion scam where billionaire jeweller Nirav Modi allegedly acquired fraudulent letters of undertaking (LoU) from its Brady House branch in Mumbai to secure overseas credit from other Indian lenders. The fraud allegedly started in 2011 at PNB. (PTI) 14:50 Sources have told CNBC TV18 that any decision on PSB management rejig will be made by the government and that the Bank Board Bureau has no role to play in the PNB fraud matter. The report has also said that the PSB management rejig would only happen after 'responsibility is fixed' by the agencies. Banks have been given 180 days after March 1 under the new NPA framework for bad assets. PSBs will report back with a 'certificate' on LoU reconciliation. PSBs have been asked to check on their LoUs as a General Sanitisation Advisory. 12:33 Government may ask bank to pay liabilities RBI is likely to set April 30 as the deadline for banks to link core operations and SWIFT, news agencies have reported. In addition to this, the government may also ask PNB to pay for the liabilities arising out of the fraud case. It is believed that the government will ask PNB and its peers to determine the liability of the fraud and review their foreign accounts. Allahabad Bank has sent memos to all their branches to link the bank's core operations to SWIFT. 11:34 ED hopes to recover Rs 3,000-4,000 cr by attaching properties of Nirav Modi, Mehul Choksi The Enforcement Directorate (ED) hopes to recover Rs 3,000-4,000 crore from properties of Nirav Modi and Mehul Choksi, sources told Moneycontrol. This is in addition to the diamonds and precious stones seized by ED, valued at Rs 5,816 crore by Gitanjali Gems. As per the assessment of income tax paid, ED believes Choksi and Modi collectively own properties worth up to Rs 4,000 crore. The ED has sent all seized diamonds to a laboratory for assessing their value. Along with that, ED has sought a report from income tax department detailing Nirav Modis properties. Finance Ministry writes to four Hong Kong banks that received LoUs from PNB. Finance Ministry sources told ANI that they will write to SBI, Axis Bank, Allahabad Bank and Bank of India asking them to reconcile accounts and check for irregularities. The sources added that several regulatory measures are put in place - all banks are to reconcile LoUs given by them, PSU banks are to appoint special representative or agency to monitor status for all loans above Rs 250 crore, and a consortium can not exceed 7 banks. 09:12 ED has refused to accept Nirav Modi's reply and has issued fresh summons to Nirav Modi, Mehul Choksi and Ami Modi, reports CNN-News18. They were supposed to appear on February 22. However, since no one showed up, ED has told them to appear by Feb 26. The Financial Planning Standards Board India (FPSB) and Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Lucknow have released the Navigator of Responsible Lending- India a first of its kind report on the state of Indian consumer lending sector with respect to responsible lending practices. Focusing on small ticket (up to Rs 15,000) personal and consumer durable loans across both banks and NBFCs, the first-of-its-kind research aims to introduce the Indian consumers especially first time borrowers to the concept of responsible lending practices, a press statement said. Conducted from July 2017- December 2017, it evaluates the performance of industry along five selected parameters of loan application process, lenders public information, fees & charges, loan servicing and financial inclusion on the basis of information that a consumer would be able to access in public domain, through his loan journey. Read full story here 08:09 Nirav Modi fraud case could trigger PCA on PNB: Kotak report The Rs 11,400 crore fraud detected at Punjab National Bank (PNB) could trigger prompt corrective action (PCA) by Reserve Bank, leading to stoppage in lending by it for sometime, says a report. The state-run lender had detected fraudulent transactions worth USD 1.77 billion (Rs 11,400 crore) at one of its branches in Mumbai. The transactions were carried out by diamond jeweller Nirav Modi by acquiring fraudulent letters of undertaking (LoU) from the lender's Brady House branch in Mumbai to secure overseas credit from other Indian lenders. The lender had said it would honour all 'bonafide' contracts suggesting that some of the claims may be disallowed while the other public banks are suggesting that this may not be the case. 08:05 10,000 bank customers hit by debit and credit card data breach, says report Some 10,000 credit or debit card holders have been affected by a data breach reported by Punjab National Bank (PNB), which is already reeling under a multi-crore rupee financial fraud by two fugitive luxury jewellers, according to an Asia Times report. The report stated that security experts believe sensitive information has been available for purchase through a website for at least three months. This comes in the time when the second largest lender is amid a major fraudulent activity. Punjab National Bank (PNB) is witnessing probably one of the biggest scams in banking history, opening a can of worms worth over Rs 11,300 crore (USD 1,771.69 million) for the banking sector. The fraudulent transactions likely to have been going on for last seven years were unearthed by PNB at one of its Mumbai branches. According to the report, the bank was unware of the data breach until a Singapore-registered information security company, CloudSek Information Security, tipped off on Wednesday night. 08:00 Recap of the case What happened? Over Rs 11,400 crore was siphoned off from Punjab National Bank (PNB) through issuance of LoUs to top jeweller Nirav Modi. Bank officials and major diamond merchant Nirav Modi and his accomplices were involved in this case. The bank officials issued the letters to the concerned persons who approached them. The fraud started in 2010, and was detected on 25 January 2018, according to PNB's MD and CEO Sunil Mehta. What is the latest? - Mehul Choksi did not respond of summon issued by the Enforcement Directorate on February 15, reports Moneycontrols Tarun Sharma.- Moneycontrols Tarun Sharma has reported that Niten Shahi and Kapil Khandelwal have been sent to police custody till March 5, according to CBI. Eleven were arrested earlier, some are PNB officials and some are directly linked to Nirav Modi's firm.- Nirav Modi has refused to appear before the Enforcement Directorate after summons were issued to him on February 15, Moneycontrol's Tarun Sharma has reported.- ED seizes Rs 100 crore deposits, luxury cars of Nirav Modi, Mehul Choksi- There are certain legal processes which need to be completed in time. Following advises by the agencies we did suspend the passports of Nirav Modi & Mehul Choksi. They are supposed to reply within a stipulated time, if they don't we will take further action: Raveesh Kumar, MEA (ANI tweeted)- PNB asks Nirav Modi to come up with concrete and implementable plan to repay dues.-Nirav Modi wrote to PNB where he said they should not have gone public with the case and that it could have been solved between the two parties.He also wrote to his employees saying that he will not be able to recover their dues.- Supreme Court has deferred the hearing to March 16 because the Centre opposed the petition. The PIL was filed by Vineet Dhanda which seeks for deportation of Nirav Modi for three years and an investigation of the case.- The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) will set up an expert committee to address the rising incidences of frauds and divergences in the classification of bad loans.- On the case, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley blames the banks, the auditors and other authorities. The Slovak company Nafta intends to take part in the development of Yuzivska deposit (Kharkiv and Donetsk regions), the press service of the Association of Gas Producers of Ukraine has said, with reference to the head of the Nafta exploration and production department, Jozef Levoca. "The representatives of Nafta [at a meeting with the association] told about their plans to participate in the project on implementing the production sharing agreement and readiness to drill at least 15 new wells on Yuzivska site and invest up to $200 million in exploration in the first five years," the association said. As reported, the leading Slovak oil and gas company Nafta and Cub Energy (the United States) intend to drill their first well on Uzhgorod gas deposit in 2018. Nafta acquired 50% in Uzhgorod gas area from Cub Energy in summer 2016. Nitin Gadkari Union minister and BJP leader Nitin Gadkari today said the perpetrators of the PNB bank fraud will be brought to book and asserted the NDA government has never protected scam-tainted people. Gadkari was replying to questions related to the alleged Rs 11,400-crore fraud at Punjab National Bank (PNB) and its fallout. "The perpetrators will be brought to book. Our government has never protected such people and has done every bit possible to put the nation on top," he said.He was speaking at a programme, 'Chaupal', organised by a news channel at a hotel in suburban Bandra. Asked about Prime Minister Narendra Modi's silence over the mega fraud, he said, "The people wanting the PM to say something on it should be little mindful before asking such questions. They should know who is responsible for this scam." On his possible return to the state politics, the minister, who handles a slew of key portfolios like the Road Transport and Highways, Shipping, Water resources, River Development and Ganga Rejuvenation, said he is now "settled" in New Delhi and has no intention to come back to his home state of Maharashtra. "Let me clarify I am not coming back to Mumbai and Maharashtra in any circumstances. Yes, earlier I was not willing to leave Mumbai and Maharashtra. "But, now I am very much settled in Delhi and satisfied with whatever I have been entrusted to deliver at the national level. I am now emotionally attached with Delhi. I have lots of work to do," he said. Gadkari's assertion comes in the backdrop of speculation that he may be sent back to Maharashtra as Chief Minister, replacing incumbent Devendra Fadnavis. In the past too, he has junked such a possibility. In August last year, Gadkari was quoted as saying that Fadnavis was doing a good job in the state. "There is a lot of pollution in Delhi - air pollution as well as political pollution. But now I have got accustomed to it," the Union minister said. Gadkari said Finance Minister Arun Jaitley has alloted sufficient funds for the portfolios he is handling and maintained he is also getting good support from the Prime Minister in discharging his duties. Gadkari said getting a driving licence in India is one of the easiest tasks in the world and maintained 30 percent of such documents in the country are bogus. "A whopping five lakh road accidents take place in the country in which 1.5 lakh people die every year. Efforts are being undertaken to make the road travel safer and bring down the number of accidents substantially." To check the menace of bogus driving licences, such documents will now be electronically registered under the government's umbrella e-governance programme, he said. Also, 2,000 motor training centres are going to be opened in the country, the senior minister said. It will be made mandatory for the Regional Transport Office (RTO) to issue a licence within three days of a person clearing the driving test, Gadkari said. Gadkari said technology will be used to curb traffic offences. The Supreme Court on Friday refused to stay a summon order issued by the Enforcement Directorate against Karti Chidambaram in the INX Media money laundering case, after the CBI said he was "not a common criminal" but his plea for quashing the notice was a guise for an anticipatory bail plea. However, the top court asked Karti to request the competent authority for postponement of ED summons seeking his appearance on March 1. A bench of Chief Justice Dipak Misra, and Justices Amitava Roy and DY Chandrachud said it will hear the matter on March 6 after senior advocate Kapil Sibal, appearing for Karti Chidambaram, sought time to file a proper application to challenge the ED proceedings. During the brief hearing, Sibal said Karti was not a common criminal that he was being called by the ED "month after month" and made to sit for "hours and hours". Additional Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, appearing for CBI, said that ED was not a party before the apex court and the respondent (Karti) should file a proper application challenging the proceedings in the money laundering case. "I agree that he (Karti) is not a common criminal. But has the court allowed a common criminal to move such an application? This is sheer abuse of the process of law," Mehta said and added that his plea for stay of the summon was "a guise of anticipatory bail application." Sibal said Karti had appeared twice before the ED on January 18 and February 15 and was made to sit for hours. "They have details of my bank accounts and property. They have all my details. I am not running away but still they issued summon for appearance on March 1. I will be returning to India on February 28 and then on March 1, I have to appear before the agency. What is this going on," he asked. The senior advocate said the ED case emanated from the same CBI case but there was no predicate offence as there was no proceeds of crime. Mehta again objected to the submission saying that without the ED being a party before the court, there can be no arguments in the case. When Sibal asked "So, are you planning to arrest him," Mehta responded saying "I not saying that he will be arrested". "This is CBI's case which is listed today. There can be no argument on the ED matter. He just wants a pre-emptive order to prevent the Enforcement Directorate from moving ahead," Mehta told the court. Sibal then told the court that the summon should be postponed till the time a proper application is filed to challenge the ED proceedings. The ASG then intervened urging the court not to make any observations but simply adjourn the matter. To this, the court asked Mehta whether the summons can be postponed or not. Mehta replied that if Karti makes a formal request, then the agency may look into it. The court then told Sibal that Karti has to make a request to the competent authority to defer the summons and then posted the matter for further hearing on March 6. The ED had registered a case against him and others in May last year. It had registered an Enforcement Case Information Report (ECIR), the ED's equivalent of a police FIR, against the accused named in a CBI complaint, including Karti Chidambaram, INX Media and its directors Peter and Indrani Mukerjea. In a bid to bring out the rich cultural heritage of Varanasi on to the global level, the Uttar Pradesh government is planning to start a dedicated website featuring at least 150 temples, according to a report by the Economic Times. Varanasi the parliamentary constituency of Prime Minister Narendra Modi - is said to be one of the oldest existing cities of the world, and home to hundreds of temples spread, which help keep its rich heritage intact. However, very few of them like Sankat Mochan dedicated to Lord Hanuman, Kashi Vishwanath dedicated to Lord Shiva and Kal Bhairav are famous outside the city. To popularize other lesser-known temples, the Yogi Adityanath-led government has proposed to bring their details online. For this, it is planning to start a website tentatively tagged as Varanasi Ke Pawan Path (The Divine Route of Varanasi). Nearly 150 such temples have been identified to go online. The proposed website will carry information on all these small temples, including their Googlemapped locations, contact numbers of their priests and 360 degree videos compatible with VR Headsets. The step will also work to boost tourism in the city as it will help domestic and international tourists heading to the city to get information about these ancient temples. The proposal mentioned in the ET report stated that the foremost of attractions in this sacred city are its impressive temples, which are true edifices of a great and ancient culture vibrant and lively even today. The holy city is an important pilgrimage centre in India and for those visiting from outside the country as it reflects authentic India. The website will reportedly have user generated content such as YouTube videos, 360 degree videos, 3D animations of temples and should equally be discoverable through web, Google, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and other popular search engines. Chief Minister of India's desert state of Rajasthan, Vasundhara Raje speaks during an interview with Reuters at her office in Jaipur September 24, 2014. The desert state of Rajasthan, derided as a poverty-stricken laggard, has taken the lead on structural reforms that, their backers argue, could also help Asia's No.3 economy as a whole to attract business and employ a fast-growing workforce. Raje has shaken up labor, land and welfare policies with such verve Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a party ally, has even poached her chief of staff and put him in charge of the federal finance ministry. Picture taken September 24, 2014. To match Insight INDIA-RAJASTHAN/ REUTERS/Stringer (INDIA - Tags: POLITICS BUSINESS) - GM1EABP0ZFC01 After 'haunting' Bihar, the 'ghost' story now seems to be making the rounds in Rajasthan. A day after former Bihar Health Minister Tej Pratap Yadav claimed Chief Minister Nitish Kumar and his deputy Sushil Kumar Modi had sent ghosts to a bungalow he had been occupying, the Rajasthan assembly faced with a similar moment on Thursday. Legislators are demanding a yagna be performed to rid the House of the influence of so-called evil spirits. The death of two sitting MLAs in a short span of time has triggered panic among legislators, who now fear the Assembly building, which is built on a cremation ground, could be haunted. A ruling BJP MLA has asked Rajasthan CM Vasundhara Raje to perform a "yagna" to rid the House of the influence of "spirits". Nagaur MLA, Habibur Rahman, said that the ritual should be conducted at the Assembly building to free it from the influence of "bad spirits". Party Chief Whip Kalulal Gurjar confirmed that the members of the House were not at easy since the deaths of the two MLAs. It is said that the Assembly was built on a cremation ground and that there could be spirits roaming around, Gurjar told PTI and added that he himself feared there might be a "ghost" troubling the place. Nathdwara MLA Kalyan Singh Chauhan died this week while undergoing treatment at a private hospital in Udaipur, while BJP MLA from Mandalgarh Kirti Kumari died due to swine flu in August last year. After Kumaris death, bypolls were held in January 2018 and Vivek Dhakad of the Congress emerged victorious on February 1. The Rajasthan Assembly building is considered one of the most modern legislature buildings in the country. It is spread across a sprawling campus measuring 16.96 acres in Jyoti Nagar. The Lal Kothi cremation ground is located adjacent to the Assembly. (With inputs from PTI) Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister, Yogi Adityanath, today said the law-and order situation in the state was excellent and assured the investors that UP was the best possible investment destination in the country. "I assure the investors that UP is the best possible investment destination. The law-and-order situation is excellent," he said, while addressing the valedictory function of the UP Investors' Summit. The BJP leader added that the single-window portal, which Prime Minister Narendra Modi had launched yesterday, was the first portal for obtaining digital approval. "Under this, a person can avail of the benefits, without going through red-tapism. The state has jumped to new heights in terms of ease of doing business," he said. "In the two-day summit, representatives from 10 countries, more than 6,000 participants and over 110 companies took part. As many as 32 parallel sessions took place at the summit," Adityanath said. During the summit, the state government had signed 1,045 memorandums of understanding (MoUs), worth Rs 4.28 lakh crore, he said, adding that these would generate more than 33 lakh jobs in the state. The Chief Minister also thanked the partner countries of the summit - the Netherlands, Japan, Czech Republic, Finland, Slovania, Mauritius and Thailand. He said the prime minister had gifted a defence industrial corridor to Uttar Pradesh. Abdulla Yameen The Maldives has warned India against taking "any actions" that could hinder resolving the political crisis in the country, as New Delhi expressed its deep dismay over the extension of emergency in the island nation. The Maldivis' Foreign Ministry in a statement late last night said President Abdulla Yameen's government takes note of the public statements issued by the Indian Government that "ignore the facts and ground realities" with regard to the ongoing political developments in the Maldives. It said that India's assertion that the extension of the state of emergency for 30 days was unconstitutional is a clear "distortion of facts, which ignore the constitution and laws of the Maldives." "There is no doubt that the Maldives is experiencing one of the most difficult periods in the history of the nation. It is therefore important that friends and partners in the international community, including India, refrain from any actions that could hinder resolving the situation facing the country," it said. "The Government of Maldives reiterates its firm commitment to work closely with the international community, including India, to address the concerns they might have," the statement said. Persisting with its displeasure over the extension of emergency in the Maldives, India yesterday said it does not see a valid reason for the Maldivian parliament to do so and maintained that it continues to watch the situation in the island nation. India has expressed "deep dismay" over the Maldivian parliament accepting President Abdulla Yameen's recommendation to extend the state of emergency by another 30 days in a manner New Delhi dubbed as a "matter of concern". On Tuesday, the Maldives' Parliament extended the state of emergency by another 30 days, bolstering President Yameen's grip on power in the troubled Indian Ocean island nation. President Yameen had first declared emergency on February 5 after the Supreme Court ordered the release of a group of Opposition leaders, who had been convicted in widely criticised trials. Among them was exiled ex-President Mohamed Nasheed. The court said his 2015 trial had been unconstitutional. The state of emergency will now end on March 22. There has been international condemnation of the Maldivian government's moves, including the imposition of the emergency. The US has also expressed disappointment over the development in the Maldives and asked President Yameen to uphold the rule of law in the troubled Indian Ocean island nation. President Yameen has rejected an offer of mediation by UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres. Neil Harbisson, a British man who has an antenna protruding from his head, claims to be the worlds first official cyborg and the first of many such non-humans. (Reuters) A cyborg (short for "cybernetic organism") is a being with both organic and biomechatronic body parts. (Reuters) Harbisson, who is colour blind, claimed that since his British passport photos show him with his antenna, that implies the government considers the antenna as part of him and recognises him as a cyborg. Harbisson had implanted the antenna in 2004 to cure his colour blindness. The sensor in the antenna dangling over the top of his head translates light waves into vibrations that he his brain has learned to decode. (Reuters) "I have an antenna that is implanted inside my head, which allows me to extend my perception of reality beyond the visual spectrum. I can sense infrared and ultraviolet, and I also have internet connection in my head that allows me to receive colours from other parts of the world or connect to satellite so I can send colours from space," Harbisson said at the forum which is held annually. (Reuters) Speaking at the World Government Summit at Dubai, Harbisson said that he is just first of many, and in future, the world needs to start accepting people with technological body part than organic ones. "I see this as a body part, not a device, but as an organ," Mirror.co.uk quoted him. "And I don't wear an antenna, I have an antenna. So I see this as part of me." (Reuters) GE Transportation and PJSC Ukrzaliznytsia have signed a 15-year framework agreement worth about $1 billion on partnership in the renewal and modernization of traction rolling stock. "Its first stage envisages the delivery in the end of 2018 and the first quarter of 2019 of 30 GE TE33A diesel locomotives with a localization level of 10%," reads a press release of Ukrzaliznytsia. Production of locomotives will start in early 2018 in the United States, and first deliveries are scheduled for this fall. GE and Ukreximbank also signed a purchase and sale agreement estimated at $140 million (including VAT) for the delivery of the first 30 diesel locomotives. The state bank will then transfer diesel locomotives to Ukrzaliznytsia under the terms of financial leasing. Ukreximbank board chairman Oleksandr Hrytsenko explained that the contract was signed under the guarantees of Citigroup. The framework agreement stipulates that with time the localization level will be brought up to 40%, the volume of GE locomotives of the specified Evolution series until 2034 will reach 225. As part of the agreement, Ukraine should create a base for the long-term maintenance of GE diesel locomotives and modernize 75 locomotives from the current park of Ukrzaliznytsia. "This is a very important day for us, for the development of business and transport infrastructure," Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, who was present during the signing of the documents, said. Prime Minister Theresa May will make a keynote speech next Friday on Britain's relationship with the EU after Brexit following a "very positive" meeting of her senior ministers, her spokesman said. "The prime minister will be setting out more detail of the government's position on Friday," he said. Confirmation of the much-anticipated speech comes after May gathered around a dozen of her senior ministers for an "away day" at her country retreat in Chequers yesterday. Their discussions lasted eight hours as they sought to thrash out their considerable differences on how closely aligned Britain should stay with the EU once it leaves the single market and customs union. "It was a very positive meeting and a step forward, agreeing on a basis of the prime minister's speech on our future relationship," the spokesman said. The full cabinet will discuss the plans at their regular weekly meeting on Tuesday. The prime minister's speech is expected to take place somewhere in Britain, after May chose Florence, Italy for her last big Brexit address in September. On Friday, February 23, at 12.00, the press center of the Interfax-Ukraine news agency will host a press conference titled "February: Politics." The participants will include Director of the Institute of Global Strategies Vadym Karasiov; expert of the Gardarika strategic consulting corporation Konstiantyn Matviyenko; director of the "Ukrainian Barometer" sociological service Viktor Nebozhenko (8/5a Reitarska Street). Registration of journalists requires press accreditation. February 23, 2018 Syria - The Two East-Ghouta Campaigns - One Is For Liberation, The Other To Save Terrorists Daily mortar and missile attacks against the Syrian capital Damascus have been ongoing for years but intensified in recent months. The often quoted Syrian Observatory notes: ... raising to 116 persons at least including 18 children and 14 citizen women, who were killed as a result of the fall of these shells since the beginning of escalation on the capital Damascus and its suburbs on the 16th of November, and the SOHR documented the injury of more than 563 persons who were injured in these daily targeting during 3 consecutive months. Other accounts report higher casualty numbers. Some of the attacks on Damascus city hit well designated targets. The Russian embassy in Damascus has been mortared several times. Earlier this month more well targeted projectiles hit other Russian interests: Maxim A. Suchkov @MSuchkov_ALM - 4:03 AM - 7 Feb 2018 #Russia's trade mission in #Damascus got hit by 120-mm bomb & is badly damaged. Earlier Rus aid delivery point in the city came under fire killing two local Syrians, Rus non-gov delegation (Christian & Muslim leaders who brought collected aid) had to be evacuated. All these mortars and missiles were fired from east-Ghouta, a Takfiri held area consisting partly of densely urban blocks and partly of agricultural villages. Some 400,000 people originally lived in the area but the number of people living there now is likely less than half of that. The area is occupied by Takfiris from three groups. Jaish al-Islam is under control of the Salafi Alloush clan and is financed through Wahhabi "donations" from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Al-Qaeda in Syria (aka Nusra Front) and its allied group Faylaq al-Rahman also have significant contingents in east-Ghouta. In 2015 these terrorists published video which showed their attempts to shoot down a large airliner which had just taken off from was landing at Damascus airport. They drove caged civilians of Alawite belief around town to protect themselves from bombing. The three groups have fought each other again and again and the people in east-Ghouta are the ones who have suffered most from them. There have been several ceasefire agreements between the government and the terrorist groups but each of them was broken by one or the other group on the terrorist side. Last week another aid convoy by the Syrian Arab Red Crescent entered the area and distributed food and other humanitarian goods. But like elsewhere the militant groups will surely take control of such supplies, hoard them and use them primarily for themselves. The Syrian government and its allies decided to finally liberate east-Ghouta from the grip of the Takfiri terrorists. Some 25,000 government troops are assembling now and preparatory artillery fire and aerial bombing has begun. The Syrian air force dropped leaflets to point anyone who wants to leave the area to designated humanitarian crossing points. The western propaganda is repeating its "save Aleppo" campaign to save the terrorists in Ghouta. In the process the western aligned countries are making a joke (vid) out of the UN Security Council. There is no mention in this campaign of any Takfiri and no picture of any of the sectarian militants who daily kill random people in Damascus. This rings hollow writes Robert Fisk. During the siege and the liberation of east-Aleppo the seven year old Bana, a girl who did not (vid) understand or know any English, was tweeting her genuine feelings in best prosaic English to the world. She called for war against Russia. Her father turned out to be a henchman for al-Qaeda's sharia court in east-Aleppo. But the media just loved that story. CNN now found itself a new "Bana": The 15-year-old documenting Eastern Ghouta massacre with selfie videos. But this time the lucrative position of a tearful media darling attracted competition: Ruth Sherlock @Rsherlock - 2:00 PM - 22 Feb 2018 We spoke with a mother, a former english schoolteacher in #Eastern #Ghouta. Now she teaches her daughter to make video appeals in English - the world has ignored this siege for so long, she said. She hopes people might listen to a desperate child. There are also Noor and Alaa - a Twitter account which claims to be of two young girls in east-Ghouta who in their videos read out English language propaganda shown to them off camera to "save Ghouta". These two girls seem to be run by the same guy, Mr Alhmado, who organized the Bana scam in east-Aleppo. During the 2016 Aleppo campaign the terrorist supporters ran an "Aleppo Media Center" which distributed propaganda products to the "western" media. Together with the "White Helmets" al-Qaeda support gang it created the "boy in the ambulance" picture that many "western" newspaper printed on their front pages. The AMC was financed by the French government. The same organization that ran the AMC is now running the Ghouta Media Center GMC. The English language twitter account of the AMC sent its last tweet on July 5 2017. The first tweet of the new GMC was sent on July 9 2017. Both use a similar logo design: There are an estimated 15,000 men under arms in east-Ghouta. Despite that, not one armed person can be seen in any of dozens of "White Helmets" propaganda videos of pictures of allegedly rescued, wounded or killed persons in east-Ghouta. During the east-Aleppo campaign between June 10 2016 and November 19 2016 the "last hospital of Aleppo" was reported as being destroyed "just now" for at least 21 times (vid). The "last hospital of east-Ghouta" will soon follow a similar path to fame. The Syrian government has offered to evacuate all militants and their families from east-Ghouta to Idleb governorate. They declined. With the help of Egypt negotiations are ongoing with the Takfiri sponsors in Saudi Arabia. But as there are several terrorist groups involved it is doubtful that much will come from these talks. The real assault on east-Ghouta has not even started and the "western" governments and media are already waging a full fledged campaign against it. But neither Syria nor its allies will allow the further existence of this al-Qaeda enclave. Two UN Security Council resolutions, 2249 and 2254, literary "demand" "to eradicate the safe haven [al-Qaeda and ISIS] have established over significant parts of Syria". While others try to protect those terrorists, Syria, Russia and Iran will fulfill this demand. Obama acolytes call for U.S. attacks on Russian forces to "convince" Putin" that the terrorists in Ghouta must be "saved". But Russia has flown ten additional fighter planes to Syria, including two of its brand new Su-57s (vid), and further upped its air defenses to prevent any surprises from the U.S. or any other side. While the preliminary shelling is ongoing no starting date and no operational plans for the ground campaign to liberate east-Ghouta have been revealed. Those may depend on the situation on other fronts in Syria, especially the situation in Afrin where Kurdish forces and other Syrian groups are fighting off a Turkish invasion. A follow-up piece will look into that campaign. Posted by b on February 23, 2018 at 13:35 UTC | Permalink Comments Grab our rova app and stay tuned to More! We love our family of listeners, and we want to make sure you've got the easiest way to listen to us when you are on the go, wherever you are! A second suspect surrendered to police in relation to a shooting that took place near Tennant Station in Morgan Hill Feb. 21, according to authorities. About 8pm Feb. 21, Morgan Hill Police were dispatched to the intersection of Tennant Avenue and Church Street, in response to multiple reports that a person had been shot. When officers arrived, they found an 18-year-old man from San Jose suffering from a gunshot wound in his upper leg, police said. The victim was transported to San Jose Regional Medical Center with non-life threatening injuries. Witnesses at the scene told police that two subjects were involved in the shooting, according to Morgan Hill Police. Officers located one of the suspects who was still in the area, and ordered him to stop. The suspectlater identified as a 17-year-old malefled on foot, but police caught up to him and arrested him after a short pursuit. Witnesses also told police that the second suspect was seen running northbound on Church Street before officers arrived. Police were able to identify the outstanding suspect as a 17-year-old male, according to police. MHPD officers were joined by Santa Clara County deputiesplus K9 dogs and a police helicopterin searching the surrounding neighborhood the evening of Feb. 21. Authorities also searched the suspects residence, but were unable to immediately locate him or the weapon used in the shooting. The second suspect later turned himself in at Santa Clara County Juvenile Hall, according to police. He was booked on suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon. Police are not releasing the names of the suspects because they are juveniles. The police investigation revealed that the two suspects approached the victim at the intersection of Tennant and Church, and a verbal argument immediately began, police said. One of the suspects pulled out a black semiautomatic handgun and fired two rounds, one of which struck the victim in the leg. The victim was treated and released from the hospital by the following evening, police said. Anyone with information about this incident can call MHPD at (408) 779-2101. Foreclosures, Inventories Move Higher as Hurricane Moratorium Ends The effects of last summer's hurricanes, while fading from their early impact on loan performance stats, are still being felt. Black Knight reports, in its "First Look" at January data, that past due mortgages nationwide declined by 8.6 percent or 210,000 loans when compared to December but are still 1.3 percent higher than in January 2017. The U.S. delinquency rate in January was 4.41 percent including all past due loans not yet in foreclosure. Hurricanes Harvey and Irma are blamed for 146,000 loans that remain delinquent in Texas and Florida. Of those, 132,000 are now seriously delinquent, that is 90 or more days past due Puerto Rico is not usually included in national delinquency statistics, but Black Knight says 57,000 loans remain delinquent in the territory because of Hurricane Maria. Forty-nine thousand of them are seriously so. Nationwide there were 2,2 million loans that were 30 or more days past due but not in foreclosure, with 707,000 of them considered seriously delinquent. The year-over-year decline was 40,000. The number of seriously delinquent loans was19,000 fewer than in December and represented a drop of 43,000 from a year earlier. Active foreclosures predating the hurricanes, but put on hold after the storms, have begun to revert to that status as post-hurricane foreclosure moratoria become set to expire. As a result, foreclosure starts rose sharply in January, hitting a 12-month high at 62,300 for the month. This also caused a surge in the foreclosure inventory of 6,000 loans, only the second month-over-month increase in the last five years. That brought the number of loans in the foreclosure inventory to 337,000 or 0.66 percent of active loans. Despite the influx, there are still 144,000 fewer loans in the process of foreclosure than in the previous January. Foreclosures themselves rose during the month by 42.25 percent to 1.74 percent of seriously overdue loans. The year-over-year changes was -21.75 percent. The two states most impacted by the hurricanes also sustained the largest deterioration in the non-current percentage of loan. Florida's rate was up by nearly 60 percent and Texas's rose 22 percent. Two other states that received glancing blows from the storms, Louisiana and Georgia, also saw their delinquency rates increase by 6.55 percent and 5.85 percent respectively. The state with the fifth highest rate of deterioration was Alaska where delinquency rates have been increasing steadily. Non-current loan rates remain highest in Mississippi and Louisiana at 10.95 and 9.34 percent respectively. Florida was third at 8.34 percent followed by Alabama (7.47 percent) and West Virginia (7.17 percent.) The company also reports that the mortgage prepayment rate, an indication of refinancing activity, declined by 14.73 percent from December and was down 16.80 percent from the previous January. The January rate was 0.79 percent. The company will provide a more in-depth review of this data in its monthly Mortgage Monitor report. It will be published March 5, 2018. Lawyers for the leader of the Movement of New Forces party, former Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, have filed a statement with the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) requesting the opening of criminal proceedings against Head of the State Border Guard Service Petro Tsyhykal, Head of the State Migration Service of Maksym Sokoliuk and Head of the National Police Serhiy Kniazev due to abuse of power during Saakashvili's expulsion from Ukraine on February 12. The defense team filed a respective statement with NABU on Thursday, February 22, lawyer Ruslan Chornolutsky told Interfax-Ukraine. "In our opinion, on February 12, these individuals committed a criminal offense. We ask for information to be included in the single register of pre-trial investigation regarding the commission of such a criminal offense, namely abuse of power, that is, intentional, with the aim of obtaining undue benefit for themselves and other persons, as well as the use of power by officials contrary to the interests of service that caused significant damage to the rights, freedoms and interests of individual citizens protected by law. These individuals adopted and implemented an illegal decision on Mikheil Saakashvili's transfer through the state border of Ukraine," reads a statement by lawyers. Earlier on February 22, Chornolutsky said that Pechersky District Court of Kyiv had ordered the police to initiate an investigation on an application filed by Saakashvili's lawyers about his abduction and illegal expulsion from Ukraine. In July 2017, Ukraine's President Petro Poroshenko stripped Saakashvili of Ukrainian citizenship while the latter was in the United States. On September 10, Saakashvili, surrounded by his supporters, crossed from Poland into Ukraine, breaking across the border. On February 12, 2018, Saakashvili was detained in Kyiv and sent back to Poland in line with the readmission procedure. In accordance with the published law on ensuring state sovereignty in Donbas, the Anti-Terrorist Operation (ATO) is terminated by the decision of the first deputy head of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), and measures to ensure national security are introduced by the president's decision, Ivan Vinnyk, the Secretary of the Verkhovna Rada Committee for National Security and Defense (Petro Poroshenko Bloc faction) has said. On the air of the 112.Ukraine TV channel, answering the question of the presenter, when the ATO changes to the Operation of Joint Forces, and what their main differences are, Vinnyk replied: "Here, two actions are not interconnected, because ATO and measures to ensure national security can occur simultaneously. The Anti-Terrorism Center carries out Anti-Terrorist Operation on the basis of the law on combating terrorism, therefore, in order to quit the ATO, an appropriate decision of the first deputy head of the Security Service, who is responsible for the fight against terrorism, is needed." "In order to announce measures to ensure national security - that's the name of the new regime for the use of troops provided for by the published law ... - we need an appropriate decision of the president," Vinnyk explained. As reported, on February 23 the law "On the peculiarities of the state policy on securing the state sovereignty of Ukraine in the temporarily occupied territories in Donetsk and Luhansk regions" was published he parliamentary newspaper Holos Ukrayiny on Friday. The law comes into force on the day after publication. The Verkhovna Rada passed the document on January 18, 2018. The law states that "Russia's temporary occupation of the Ukrainian territories is illegal irrespective of its duration and does not create any territorial rights of Russia." The law designates as the 'temporarily occupied territories' of Donetsk and Luhansk region the parts of Ukraine where "armed units and the occupation authority of Russia have established and exercise general control over the land and internal waters within the limits of particular districts, cities, settlements, and villages of Donetsk and Luhansk regions, the sea waters adjoining those territories, the subsoil of those territories, and the airspace above them." There is a special procedure for observing civil rights and freedoms in the 'temporarily occupied territories' of Donetsk and Luhansk regions, the law said. Ukraine last year met its European integration commitments by 41%, Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister for European and Euro-Atlantic Integration Ivanna Klympush-Tsintsadze has said. "The Verkhovna Rada Ukraine met its integration obligations by 30%, the Cabinet of Ministers - by 42%, other executive authorities - by 50%. This means that Ukraine as in general has advanced by 41%," she said, opening the conference entitled "Results of the Implementation of the Association Agreement between Ukraine and the European Union in 2017 and Future Plans" in Kyiv on Friday. At the same time, she named the transport sector, customs and health care systems among the key tasks of Ukraine on European integration in 2018. In particular, in the customs sphere she pointed out the need to establish an authorized economic operator this year. "In 2018, we will approve updated amendments to the [Association] Agreement," Klympush-Tsintsadze said, adding that this year Ukraine intends to approve "road maps" with the EU with regard to the harmonization of legislation in the services sector. The Donbas contact line will become a new Ukrainian border should the UN peacekeeping mission be deployed along it, the second Ukrainian President and representative to the Trilateral Contact Group on Ukraine, Leonid Kuchma, said in Kyiv on Friday. "The Trilateral Contact Group has a unanimous opinion, which coincides with the president's one, that the peacekeepers should be stationed throughout the territory, primarily on the Ukrainian-Russian border. The proposals that the Blue Helmets first be deployed on the contact line to protect the OSCE mission imply the drawing of a new border for Ukraine," Kuchma said at the 4th Baltic and Black Sea forum on the joint security of the region as a consensual strategy for a greater Europe. European politicians "have forgotten history lessons," so Ukraine should rely on the U.S. assistance, Kuchma said. "Peace in Ukraine 90% depends on the United States," he said. In Focus with Allison Walker is a 30-minute public affairs program, featuring a roundtable of newsmakers representing a range of perspectives, including local officials and expert analysts as they tackle topical issues of importance to Floridians. In Focus airs Sundays at 11:30 a.m. and 8:30 p.m., right after Political Connections. A Flagler County school is celebrating African-American literature this Black History Month to serve as a reminder of the contributions African-Americans made to reading and education. Belle Terre Elementary hosts 'read-in' Goal of read-in was to teach kids African-American history, writing School wants to give African-American books to all students RELATED: Black History Month coverage The African-American Read-In was the vision for Dr. Terence Culvers Belle Terre Elementary school. Now for the second year, he said its clear why this is needed every Black History Month. Its about the students and the exposure to reading, said Dr. Terence culver, principal of Belle Terre Elementary School. About 100 members from the Flagler, Volusia and Putnam County communities spread out to classrooms to read stories about African-Americans. The school strategically chose 15 different books like these to emphasize the art and culture of black history. Culver said the more than 1,500 students in his school arent exposed to it enough. Probably 90 percent of our books are not written by African Americans, Culver said. That is a one-dimensional story he said this event helps change as students from all racial makeups get to hear black authors' books and learn about the history. I want them to see a future for themselves. I want them to be inspired by the people that came here to see that all the different people in the community. black and white. that have come out for them, said author Barbara Solomon. Fourth-grader Paityn Lawrence told Spectrum News 13 she loved the stories and is grateful the volunteers care about her learning about her culture. That was very nice of them. I think it was very nice, because theyre reading to all these people, teaching them and reading books to them, Lawrence said. The read-in gave the students lasting exposure. Were going to do everything in our power to make sure students are exposed to all types of literature, Culver said. The school has set a goal to provide African-American literature books to all students. People from the community are making donations to help. In Floridas deadliest-ever tornado outbreak on Feb. 23, 1998, a dozen of the victims died when tornadoes tore through Seminole County. Patty Webb vividly remembers when the storm hit her home near the Sanford airport. Sanford local remembers when deadliest tornado hit her home Memorial created in a park along Lake Jesup listing victims RELATED: Osceola residents recall the night of Central Floridas deadliest tornadoes I felt the floor lift up, and that was scary; so I asked God to save us, Webb said. A tornado with 250 mile-per-hour winds flipped her home upside down. After it hit, Webb ran to her mothers house nearby -- leaving her husband behind. I knew from the time we woke up on top of that pile that he didnt make it through the storm, Webb said. Youre in shock of course, but you dont have time to think, just react, said Ollie Forbes, Webbs mother. My first thought was to get clothes for them, get towels for them and get them dried off. Webb said she hardly recognized the area around her destroyed home. Youre very disoriented, because you know how this place is supposed to look, but it doesnt look like that, so youre not sure you are where you are, said Webb. Webb said the only thing standing on her property was a mangled tree with a limb extending upward. And my daughter said her dad left us a note so wed know where he was, because it points right up to heaven, Webb said. Just days before the 20th anniversary of the deadly tornado outbreak, Webb visited a memorial in a park along Lake Jesup that lists her husbands name and the names of 11 other victims. These are lives forever linked to hers through tragedy. Each one of these people has a story, Webb said. "Life is like a book it has a beginning, a middle and an end. And like a good book, we always hate to see it end. And everybodys life is like that some are shorter, some are longer. "There are many more people who have survived and had a hard time surviving since then, she added. PLAINVILLE Participants in Wheeler YMCAs 10th annual O Mazing Race will be searching for more than a pot of gold next month as they compete in a St. Patricks Day themed scavenger hunt. It should be a little bit crazier than usual, said Mary Perlini, business manager at the YMCA and event participant. Its a lot of fun. The two-hour O Mazing Race Scavenger Hunt will start Saturday, March 10, at the Plainville VFW at Northwest Drive at 5 p.m. From 7 p.m. to 10 p.m teams will meet back at the VFW for awards and an after party. Teams of three or four will be provided of a list of items to collect and/or tasks to complete in Plainville and surrounding towns. Participants can walk, run and drive to any location to find clues and accomplish the scavenger hunt. Perlini said the best part is that the list is up to interpretation by each team. For instance, a task to take a picture in a tree was done several different ways last year with teams actually climbing in a tree and other using a tree-shaped playscape. You cant take it too literally, Perlini said. Last year there were 20 teams with nearly 200 people at the after party. Proceeds from the event go toward sending kids to summer camp. Perlini said one team of four members can send one kid to camp through the fundraiser. The average cost of a week at camp is $260. Plenty of sponsors join in the fun to make the event a success year after year. The Petit Family Foundation of Plainville has been a longtime supporter. A part of the mission of the Petit Family Foundation is to help with the education of young people, and part of that includes physical education. We are proud to partner with the Wheeler YMCA in Plainville and setting an example for young people, said Dr. William Petit, Jr., president of the Foundation. Local businesses in Plainville and Southington often participate by allowing teams to use their stores for challenges. The list of places and tasks is not known to teams until the day of the scavenger hunt. Its a mix of residents, Perlini said. We also get a lot of returning people. The after party is for people 21-years old and older. A separate kids party will be held at the YMCA from 4:30 p.m. to 10:30 p.m. More information can be found at wheelerymca.org akus@record-journal.com 203-317-2448 Twitter: @KusReporter SOUTHINGTON Discussion of school safety measures and possible student walkouts dominated much of the Board of Education meeting Thursday night, the first since a school shooting in Parkland, Florida last week. School Superintendent Tim Connellan outlined safety efforts, including drills and communication with police. He suggested the board consider redesigning the entryways of some schools to better prevent intruders. Connellan said there are frequent drills and plans for a variety of emergency situations. We do practice this. We do the very, very best that we can to keep our students safe, he said. Following a killing spree that left 17 dead at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida, some students have planned to walk out of their schools in a call for, among other things, a ban on the AR-15, a type of semi-automatic rifle used in the shooting. Walkouts have taken place and are being planned nationally. Some board members expressed support. We are raising a generation of children who are afraid to go to school, said board member Zaya Oshana Jr., a Democrat. This is not acceptable. Fellow Democrat and board member Patricia Queen said she was glad to see students advocating for change. I support their message. I applaud them, she said. These kids show that public education in our society is doing a good job teaching our kids to stand up for whats right. Chairman Brian Goralski, a Republican, wanted students to coordinate any protests with school leaders. Anything thats from a student level shouldnt disrupt education, Goralski said. If you hear of such a movement, I ask that you would encourage this advice with them We can probably better help them spread their message. Work with us. Connellan said hes asked school administrators to contact students thinking about holding walkouts so that any action would be safe and done so that no one gets in trouble. If students want to have voice, we can help them have voice, he said. Board member Bob Brown, a Democrat, said there are a number of causes for school shootings, including mental illness. He asked how the district identified students with mental illnesses. jbuchanan@record-journal.com 203-317-2230 Twitter: @JBuchananRJ Even if UN peacekeepers fail to solve Donbas conflict, they'll pave the way Kravchuk Ukraine's first President Leonid Kravchuk has said that introducing a United Nations peacekeeping contingent in Donbas will help stop Russian aggression in eastern Ukraine. "I don't think that there will be a UN peacekeeping mission, but this step must be taken. Even if peacekeepers cannot fully stop the conflict, they will pave the way," Kravchuk said. The former Ukrainian head of state was speaking at the Fourth Baltic-Black Sea Forum "Solidifying Safety of Baltic-Black Sea Region Countries as a Consensus Strategy for Big Europe" in Kyiv on Friday. "Everyone knows the Minsk peace accords are not working. It is necessary to expand the format. I think it is time to raise this issue openly, or change it, by adding Poland, the United States or other countries," Kravchuk said, adding that it is pointless to hope for the situation to improve after so-called Russian presidential elections scheduled for March 18. "It's their nature. Russia has been fighting for 150 years. A political war elite has been created there," Kravchuk said. Three local elementary schools were recognized for academic growth in an annual statewide evaluation of schools by the state Department of Education. Chapman Elementary School in Cheshire, Thomas Hooker Elementary School in Meriden and Thalberg Elementary School in Southington were among the 124 Schools of Distinction named in the Next Generation Accountability Report, which was released on Jan. 9. The designation signifies that they are in the top 10% of schools for academic growth in the 2016-17 school year. To see the success Chapman had is a testament to the hard work of our staff and students, said Cheshire Superintendent of Schools Jeffrey Solan. Solan said he is glad to see the state incorporating more than just standardized test scores in its evaluation of schools. Wallingford Assistant Superintendent of Schools Carrie LaTorre called the reports results one indicator of our success as a district. Our teachers are working very hard at ensuring that theyre employing different instructional strategies based on the results of the report and other data the district collects, LaTorre said. The accountability index examined a dozen aspects of schools, such as standardized test scores, absentee rates, physical fitness scores and college readiness, and used them to form an accountability index. The third year the data was collected, Cheshire and Wallingford saw a 2 percent decrease in their indexes, while Meriden slid 3.4 percent from the previous year. The index for the Southington school system increased by 1.8 percent. The report showed that the statewide rate of students reaching goal on college placement readiness exams, such as the SAT, rose to 43.5 percent in the 2016-17 academic year from 40.7 percent in the year prior. That increase was mirrored by local towns; the Cheshire school system rose by 8.1 percent, Meriden by 7.4 percent, Southington by 12.2 percent and Wallingford by 0.6 percent. Southington Superintendent Timothy Connellan cautioned against putting too much stock in the state evaluations, saying that he prefers to rely on statistics collected by the district. It really doesnt help us, we have other tools we use, he said. Connellan said he prefers to use more timely and accurate indicators of how students are improving. He mentioned that the number of local students scoring as qualified on Advanced Placement tests is at a high and a greater share of students are advancing through grades. Department of Education Commissioner Dianna R. Wentzell said improving the yearly report requires the collective effort of local officials and the state. We are achieving this by operationalizing the State Board of Educations Comprehensive Plan across the agency and by partnering closely with districts, she said. While Im pleased to see that some indicators are showing improvements, we have more work to do to achieve even greater improvement on all indicators. The Foreign Affairs Ministry of Ukraine has sent a note to the Foreign Ministry of Russia stating that it will be impossible to organize the Russian presidential elections in the diplomatic mission of this country on the territory of Ukraine in case of holding these elections in the territory of the occupied Crimea. "We've sent a note to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation: 1. A resolute protest against the presidential elections in the occupied Crimea. 2. A warning against the attempts to organize elections in the occupied Donbas. 3. They noted that there cannot be any election in the diplomatic mission of the Russian Federation on the territory of Ukraine without the full compliance with the first two conditions," Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin wrote on Twitter on Friday evening. At the same time, he added that the Ukrainian side will work to ensure that all those involved in the organization of the presidential elections in Crimea be put under sanctions. "We will work to ensure that all those involved in the presidential elections in the occupied territory of Crimea are put under appropriate sanctions," Klimkin wrote By ANI NEW DELHI: Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Friday held a warm meeting with External Affairs Minister (EAM) Sushma Swaraj in the national capital. MEA Spokesperson Raveesh Kumar informed that the two sides discussed ways to strengthen and deepen the bilateral India-Canada partnership. Kumar tweeted: Picture speaks for itself! EAM @SushmaSwaraj had a warm meeting with the Prime Minister of Canada @JustinTrudeau and discussed ways to strengthen and deepen our partnership. pic.twitter.com/4nB1QmwgQT Raveesh Kumar (@MEAIndia) February 23, 2018 Earlier in the morning, Trudeau inspected a guard of honour at the Rashtrapati Bhawan, after which, the Canadian Prime Minister along with his family paid tribute to Father of the Nation Mahatma Gandhi at the Rajghat. Prime Minister Narendra Modi received Trudeau, along with his wife Sophie and children Xavier, Ella-Grace, and Hadrien. The two leaders will hold talks later in the day on further strengthening India-Canada bilateral relations. The bilateral talks will focus on trade, defence, civil nuclear cooperation, space, climate change and education. Delegation level talks will also be held, with a number of agreements expected to be signed in several areas. The Canadian Prime Minister, who is on a week-long State visit, arrived in Delhi on Thursday. Trudeau attended a reception dinner at Canadian High Commission in the national capital, wherein he expressed that it's an absolute pleasure for him to be here in India. Sharing his experiences about his trip so far, Trudeau said this trip for him, on a personal level, has been about discovering India, sharing it, learning about it and sharing it with his kids. Longtime reporter Jim Gillis to enter RI Journalism Hall of Fame It's an amazing honor, Gillis said. It's not something you even think of when you enter the business." BEIJING, Feb. 22 -- Senior leaders of the Communist Party of China (CPC) on Thursday stressed efforts to build Xiongan New Area into a "high-quality modern socialist city." Xi Jinping, general secretary of the CPC Central Committee, presided over the meeting attended by members of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee. The area, established in April 2017, is a new economic zone about 100 kilometers southwest of Beijing in Hebei Province. It is the third new area of national significance after the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone and the Shanghai Pudong New Area. CPC leaders agreed that building the new area is a "historic project" after hearing a report about the progress on a development plan for Xiongan. The new area is significant for helping phase out some non-capital functions from Beijing, exploring a new model of development in densely populated areas, restructuring the layout of the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, promoting high-quality development, and creating a new engine for the modernized economy, according to a statement released after the meeting. Designing of the new area plan has made important progress on the basis of thorough investigation, feedback from different parties, and revisions and improvements, said the statement. The planning and building of Xiongan New Area should feature a global perspective and an international standard with Chinese characteristics, making it a national model in promoting high-quality development, it said. The meeting also stressed a reasonable layout for the city, with innovation in accordance with the regional culture and landscape. Efforts should be made to build a digital and intelligent city, with an emphasis on green development, according to the statement. A string of national innovative platforms and efficient transportation networks should be created in the area, it said. Measures should be taken to support Xiongan in accelerating reform and opening up, while a number of major projects should be launched at an appropriate time, it said. Success! An email has been sent to with a link to confirm list signup. Reporter Mary Schenk is a reporter covering police, courts and breaking news at The News-Gazette. Her email is mschenk@news-gazette.com, and you can follow her on Twitter (@schenk). Columnist Tom Kacich is a columnist and the author of Tom's Mailbag at The News-Gazette. His column appears Sundays. His email is tkacich@news-gazette.com, and you can follow him on Twitter (@tkacich). People of Miao ethnic group dance with music played by lusheng, a reed-pipe wind instrument, during a traditional folk fair in Rongjiang County, southwest China's Guizhou Province, Feb. 22, 2018, to celebrate the Spring Festival. (Xinhua/Yang Chengli) Frankfurt: German high-end carmaker BMW has admitted to authorities that it built software that misleads regulatory emissions tests into some models, potentially staining the auto giant's clean image, Der Spiegel magazine reported Friday. BMW "admitted to the (vehicle licensing authority) KBA that it built software that manipulates the exhaust system into two models" from its flagship 7-series and mid-range 5-series, the magazine wrote. Around 11,000 of the latest diesel models, supposed to meet the latest European Union "Euro 6" emissions standards introduced in late 2015, were affected in Germany alone, it added. BMW is checking whether the software was built into cars for export. A BMW spokesman told Spiegel that the software had mistakenly been loaded into the engine control systems of vehicles fitted with six-cylinder engines, whose exhaust system "does not function optimally" in conjunction with the programme. "We do not consider the software to be a 'defeat device'," he added. So-called "defeat devices" are deliberately designed to make cars appear less polluting in laboratory tests than in real on-road driving. Volkswagen -- parent company of BMW competitor Audi -- admitted in 2015 to building such software into 11 million vehicles around the world, and has since paid over 20 billion euros in fines, buybacks and compensation. Unlike Volkswagen, BMW has so far managed to uphold a reputation for emissions honesty. After the KBA recently found no issues with a 3-series car that environmental activists had suggested might include a defeat device, development chief Klaus Froehlich stated baldly that "vehicles from the BMW group were not manipulated." "Our diesel engines are clean. The public, politicians and above all our customers and employees can count on that," he added at the time. The technology company Continental announced the construction of a new manufacturing plant in Hungary to expand its automotive electronics production footprint. Continental currently has six plants and a tire sales and logistic centre in Hungary. By choosing Debrecen as the seventh Hungarian location, Continental is increasing the production of electronic components for European markets. The ceremony is scheduled for the third quarter of 2018. Continental plans to invest a total of 100 million and will create 450 new jobs. Jose Avila, Member of the Executive Board of Continental and Head of the Powertrain division said: With this strategic decision of a new manufacturing plant in Debrecen, Continental is continuing to expand its European presence in order to better satisfy the customers growing demand for automotive electronics. To expand our European presence with our new plant in Debrecen is an important pillar in order to diversify our manufacturing plants for state-of-the-art automotive electronics internationally. Together with the Hungarian government, we are able to significantly expand our capacity and further drive our technology development", added Dr Hans-Jurgen Braun, head of the 30 Continental central electronics plants. Having earned the trust of our customers on account of the best-in-class quality of our products and services, we are also able to expand our operations in the field of the production of sensors & actuators and transmission control units. The investment in Debrecen proves that Continental considers Hungary to be a strategic partner and a reliable country to cooperate for future success. Hungary remains a strategic investment area for Continental, said Daniel Rabai, Head of Focus Country, Continental Hungary. As the second largest city in Hungary and also a regional centre with an outstanding infrastructure and highly qualified workforce, Debrecen is the ideal location for our next expansion. The decision reflects the trust in and strong positive feedback about the performance of the existing Continental organization in Hungary, said Dr. Robert Keszte, Managing Director at Continental Automotive Ltd. The Hungarian government and the local municipality were providing an excellent support to prepare the investment, so we can progress quickly and complete the construction by the middle of 2019." The establishment of Continentals new manufacturing plant is yet another proof that Hungary is one of the most attractive countries for automotive investments in Europe. Relying on Hungarian expertise, productivity and creativity, the strategic geographical location and favourable manufacturing costs, the automotive companies in Hungary are continuously expanding their footprints and developing their products, thus making long-term commitments in the country. Continentals new facility will further improve the competitiveness of Hungary and strengthen its position as the regional hub within the automotive industry, said Robert Esik, president of the Hungarian Investment Promotion Agency (HIPA). Products of Continentals Transmission and Sensors & Actuators business units are the first to be manufactured on a production site of 7,000 square meters and assigned to EU markets. Continental develops pioneering technologies and services for sustainable and connected mobility of people and their goods. Founded in 1871, the technology company offers safe, efficient, intelligent and affordable solutions for vehicles, machines, traffic and transportation. In 2017, Continental generated preliminary sales of around 44 billion and currently employs more than 2,33,000 people in 56 countries. MINI India has announced its participation at India Design 2018, the countrys most renowned design and home decor week. MINI India will present MINI in Design and Creative Solutions from 22nd to 25th February 2018 at National Small Industries Corporation (NSIC) Grounds in Okhla, New Delhi. Vikram Pawah, President, BMW Group India, said, Since its inception, MINI has stood for inspiring design combining intelligence with creativity, delivering substance while committing to the clever use of space and resources. Iconic design philosophy and creative use of space continue to be the core essence of the MINI to this day. The MINI installation at India Design 2018 truly demonstrates this principle and its extension to urban living spaces. India Design 2018 has been a renowned platform for an exchange of multidisciplinary ideas in the design space and we are delighted to present concepts of MINI in Design and Creative Solutions at the largest congregation of the best in design fraternity. The MINI design is the evolutionary continuation of the formal language that defined the legendary classic MINI of 1959. Todays models carry over the iconic cues: the extremely short overhangs, circular lights, the large hexagonal radiator grille and elliptically shaped chromed door handles pay homage to their predecessors found in the very first MINI. MINI designs open-minded products that adapt to the needs, wants and aspirations of their owners. Offering many details in the cars that can be customized by owners and a wide range of accessories, typical elements include racing stripes, mirror caps and side scuttles. Also Watch: Luxury car maker Rolls-Royce has introduced the eighth generation Phantom priced at Rs 9.50 crore, as part of plans to widen the product portfolio in the country. "We have a great partner (KUN Exclusive).. business is booming in South and Chennai is a big automotive hub from Indian perspective," Rolls-Royce Motor Cars, Asia Pacific, Regional Director, Paul Harris told reporter here to a query on choosing the city for the launch. KUN Exclusive is the authorised Rolls-Royce Motor Cars dealer for Chennai and Hyderabad. Rolls-Royce Motor Cars have five outlets in the Southern region. To a question on the company's business performance last year, he said, India was bit of a strange market last year because of so many changes in "duties, GST and demonetisation." "From the automotive perspective, definitely there was lack of stability last year. It has to stabilise somehow. You cannot keep tinkering a business area. It needs stability. Well mostly it is on various taxation issues, GST, demonetisation and many many things had an impact," he noted. "The car pricing involves 214 percent of import duty plus Goods and Service Tax.. We have seen most changes in shortest period of time and that is definitely not good (for our business)," he said. To another query on the product line up, he said, "Cullinan will be coming later this year. Then we have Phantom, and Ghost extendable base, Wreath and then Dawn. By the end of the year there will be five model launches plus BlackBadge." The Phantom VIII is equipped with 6.75-litre twin-turbocharged V12 engine that delivers 563hp and 900Nm of torque. It can reach 0-100km/hr in just 5.4 seconds. The new Phantom series is 30 percent lighter than its predecessors and has a laser light technology providing 600-metre range of light at night for enhanced safety. The Phantom Standard Wheelbase variant is priced at Rs 9.50 crore while the Phantom Extended Wheelbase from Rs 11.35 crore. The pricing also includes a four-year service package and regional warranty. Also Watch: Interview - Vikram Pawah, President, BMW Group India at Auto Expo 2018 | Cars18 South Korea said that it plans to quickly conduct due diligence on the South Korean unit of General Motors Co and discuss a turnaround plan for the financially strapped subsidiary. The Detroit automaker announced last week it would shut a plant in the city of Gunsan, southwest of Seoul, by May and decide the future of its remaining three plants in the country within weeks. GM has asked for financial support for its South Korean unit. GM's head of international operations, Barry Engle, flew to Seoul this week and held a series of meetings with senior officials from state-run Korea Development Bank (KDB), the finance ministry and trade ministry, as well as lawmakers and union leaders. The government said in a statement that GM had acknowledged there had been a progress in the talks. "We will continue discussions with stakeholders to make our business viable and profitable," a GM Korea spokesman said. The government "will quickly discuss GM Korea's turnaround plan, including whether to offer government support based on three principles," the finance ministry, trade ministry and KDB said in a joint statement. It said the principles included "a responsible role" by GM in normalising its South Korean operations and a sustainable turnaround plan. Also, KDB, which holds a 17-percent stake in GM Korea, and GM's local labour union should "share the pain", it said. It did not give details. GM said the three principles are "reasonable," and pledged to hand in its turnaround plan as soon as possible, the statement said. The GM Korea spokesman did not specifically comment on the principles or the turnaround plan. South Korean Finance Minister Kim Dong-Yeon said the government will take action after the due diligence is over. When asked the Gunsan plant will be closed as planned, Kim declined to comment. GM's South Korean labour union on Thursday decided not to go on a strike, for the time being, a union source told Reuters. Instead, it will step up calls on the government and parliament to come up with measures to prevent plant shutdowns. The union will also ask the government to allow GM's union to participate in the due diligence of GM Korea, the source added. Also Watch: New Delhi: Sebi, on Friday, asked HDFC Bank to identify individuals, including bank officials responsible for leakage of its financial results, as the markets regulator has found inadequate controls at the lender as 'prima facie' reason for the leak. In the high-profile leakage case where sensitive financial details of various companies, including HDFC Bank, got leaked on WhatsApp before their formal announcement, Sebi virtually censured the top private sector lender and asked it to strengthen the systems and controls to check any such leak in future. In an order, the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) said it can prima facie be inferred that the unpublished price sensitive information (UPSI) relating to financials of HDFC Bank was leaked. "Such leakage is prima facie attributable to the inadequacy of the processes/ controls/ systems that HDFC Bank as a listed company had put in place," the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) said. Last year in December, the regulator had, in a similar ruling, ordered Axis Bank to strengthen its systems and conduct an internal probe after finding that the company's results for the June 2017 quarter were "either identical or matched closely with the figures" that were in circulation on WhatsApp prior to an official announcement. "HDFC Bank shall strengthen its processes/ systems/ controls forthwith to ensure that such instances of leakage of unpublished price sensitive information do not recur in future," Sebi said in its latest order. Sebi has also directed the bank to submit a report on the present systems and controls and how they have been strengthened, who are the persons responsible for monitoring such systems and the periodicity of monitoring. "HDFC Bank shall conduct an internal inquiry into the leakage of unpublished price sensitive information relating to its financial figures including NPA (non-performing asset) results and take appropriate action against those responsible for the same, in accordance with law," Sebi said. As per the order, the scope of inquiry should not be limited to role of persons, including members of committees involved in generation of the original data for the purpose of determination of key figures pertaining to financial figures including gross non-performing assets (GNPA). Sebi said the purview of inquiry should also go beyond those involved in the consolidation of the figures for the financial results, preparation of board notes and presentations as well as dissemination of information relating to financial results in the public domain. HDFC Bank has to complete the inquiry within three months and file a report to Sebi within seven days thereafter, the regulator said. Sebi had initiated a preliminary examination in the matter of circulation of UPSI through WhatsApp groups. During the course of preliminary examination, it was observed that in respect of HDFC Bank, the messages circulated on WhatsApp closely matched the quarterly financial results of HDFC Bank for June 2017, which were published subsequently. Lucknow: The charred body of an 18-year-old girl was found in Unnaos Bara Sagwar on Friday. Police said she was attacked by unidentified miscreants who set her on fire. Sexual assault has not been ruled out. It appears to be a murder. The girl had left her home to buy vegetables around 4.30 pm. Her burnt body was recovered in the village. The news of her death spread and her family rushed to the spot. They identified her cycle and slippers, said Sujit Pandey, Inspector General of Police, Lucknow. An empty cannister and a bundle of matchsticks were also found on the spot. A case of murder has been registered while sexual assault will be confirmed only after post-mortem report, a senior officer said. However, the police still have no clue about the attackers. Also, the circumstances under which the girl was burnt could not be established yet. As per the data of National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), Uttar Pradesh accounted for 9.5 per cent of total crimes reported in the country in 2016. UP reported 14.5 per cent (49,262 out of 3,38,954 cases) of total cases of crimes against women. Diamond Harbour (WB): A Sashastra Seema Bal (SSB) commandant, arrested in connection with a murder case, was "freed" from the police custody by the force's armed personnel by holding the policemen at gunpoint at the Diamond Harbour police station this morning, the police said. However, the officer, one of the prime accused in the case, was handed over to the police soon after, following instructions from highly-placed SSB officials. One of the police personnel was also allegedly assaulted by the SSB men. The incident drew sharp reaction from Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee who said that law-and-order was a state subject and that nobody should meddle with it. SSB Commandant Deepak Kumar Singh, Havildar Amitabha Pramanik and Mozammal Mondal, a cable TV business owner from Sarisha Haat in South 24 Parganas district, were arrested on Thursday in connection with the killing of a cable TV company worker, Altaf Jamadar, another police officer said. Jamadar's body was recovered from the cable TV office and after initial investigations, the two SSB personnel and Mondal were arrested. "Several armed SSB personnel went to the Diamond Harbour police station this morning on the pretext of talking to the two accused and then, snatched the commandant by holding the police personnel at gunpoint, before fleeing in a vehicle of the force," Superintendent of Police (SP), Diamond Harbour Police District, Koteswara Rao told PTI. The SSB is a paramilitary force under the Ministry of Home Affairs, which is entrusted with the task of guarding India's border with Nepal and Bhutan. Senior police officers from the district, including Rao, led a large team of police personnel to the SSB camp located nearby, where the officer was allegedly given shelter. State Additional Director General of Police (Law and Order) Anuj Sharma spoke to West Bengal Inspector General (IG), SSB, Shrikumar Bandopadhyay, following which the officer was "immediately" handed over to the police, a police official said. When contacted, Bandopadhyay told PTI that strict action would be taken against the SSB personnel involved in helping the commandant escape from police custody. "I have already ordered an inquiry into the matter. Those found involved in the incident will be suspended and we will take strict action against them. My officers have already started the inquiry. I have sought a full report from them," he said. The SSB also sought a report from the ADG (Law and Order) and the SP of the district in this connection. "We have also sought reports from the ADG (Law and Order) and the SP on whether they can identify anyone who went to the police station and helped the prime accused SSB commandant come out of the police custody," Bandopadhyay said, adding, "Law will take its own course and the force has nothing to hide or save anyone." Asked if any action would be taken against the personnel of the Diamond Harbour police station on the ground of laxity, Sharma said, "We are looking into it. Nothing has been decided and a detailed report has been sought in connection with the incident." The injured police personnel, who was allegedly assaulted by the SSB men, was undergoing treatment at a nearby medical facility, Rao said. Meanwhile, the chief minister expressed her displeasure over the incident. Banerjee, who is currently on a visit to north Bengal, said law-and-order was a state subject and that nobody should interfere in it. When produced at the Diamond Harbour Court, the two SSB personnel were remanded to a 14-day judicial custody, while the other accused was sent to a five-day police custody, Rao said. New Delhi: Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal's adviser V K Jain has given contradictory statements about the alleged attack on Delhi Chief Secretary Anshu Prakash by AAP legislators, the Delhi Police on Thursday told a court. It has said that "new facts" have emerged after the interrogation of Jain, who disclosed that MLAs Prakash Jarwal and Amanutullah Khan surrounded Chief Secretary Prakash and he saw them assaulting the senior bureaucrat, additional public prosecutor Atul Shrivastava told Metropolitan Magistrate Shefali Barnala Tondon. Jain had previously said he had not seen anything as he had gone to the washroom at the time of the incident on Monday night. "New facts have emerged in the case. The advisor to the CM is being interrogated and his statement under Section 164 of the CrPC has been recorded. He has given us four names. The police custody of both the MLAs is required to unearth the whole conspiracy," the prosecutor said moving a fresh plea for their custody. Khan and Jarwal were on Thursday sent to a 14-day judicial custody in Tihar Jail by the court, which reserved its order on their bail pleas for Friday. During the hearing on Thursday, Shrivastava told the court that Jain had called the chief secretary for a meeting at 08:45 pm on Monday, and at 10:00pm the officer confirmed to him that he would attend the meeting. Advocate Rajiv Mohan, appearing for Prakash, also supported the plea for police custody, saying the alleged attack on the officer was pre-meditated and was witnessed by the CM's adviser. In his statement, Jain said when the meeting started, Kejriwal said that MLAs wanted to discuss certain issues but randomly all of them started questioning the chief secretary about the delay in the release of funds for AAP government's media publicity on its achievement in education and fighting corruption. Jain was picked up by the Delhi Police on Wednesday morning from his residence at Maharani Bagh in connection with the case. The chief secretary has alleged in his complaint that he was sitting on a sofa flanked by Khan and another AAP MLA during the meeting. "Khan and the other MLA, without provocation from my side started hitting and assaulting me with blows on my head and temple," he alleged in his complaint. Musicians perform in front of a giant lantern in the shape of Temple of Heaven at the Grand Place in Brussels, Belgium, on Feb. 22, 2018. The exhibition Light the Heart of Europe with gigantic Chinese lanterns was held in Brussels on Thursday to celebrate the Chinese Lunar New Year and the year of tourism between the European Union and China. The exhibition will last until Feb. 28. (Xinhua/Ye Pingfan) Chinese lanterns and the tower of City Hall are illuminated at the Grand Place in Brussels, Belgium, on Feb. 22, 2018. Visitors take selfies with Chinese lanterns at the Grand Place in Brussels, Belgium, on Feb. 22, 2018. Guests attend an illuminating ceremony of Chinese lanterns at the Grand Place in Brussels, Belgium, on Feb. 22, 2018. Kolkata: The Special Task Force (STF) of Kolkata Police on Friday arrested an active member of terror outfit Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen of Bangladesh for his alleged role in the Bodh Gaya blast on January 19. A low-intensity explosion took place at a time when Dalai Lama along with several foreign Buddhist pilgrims were camping to participate in a month-long Kalachakra puja. The suspected JMB terrorist has been identified as Nur Alam, a resident of Khulna in Bangladesh. He was arrested on Friday morning from his hideout at Dhulian in Bengals Murshidabad district and will be produced before Bankshall Court in Kolkata. Probe revealed that a woman in Murshidabad, who is reportedly absconding, has provided for his accommodation, food and transport. We have seized several instigating religious leaflets, cash and contact numbers of his associates in India. Preliminary probe revealed that he was planning to push fake currency into India along the border. He is an explosive expert, a senior police officer said. In February, two of Nur's associates Paigamber Sheikh (24) and Jamirul Sheikh (31) were arrested and on interrogation, revealed his name. While Paigamber Sheikh (a resident of Murshidabad) was arrested from Kankuria Gram in Murshidabad, Jamirul (a resident of Ratanpur in Murshidabad) was picked up from Phansideva in Darjeeling. In February, Ahmed Ali alias Kalu, another Bodh Gaya blast accused was arrested from Samserganj in Murshidabad. So far, four JMB terrorists have been arrested. A team of National Investigating Agency (NIA), which is primarily investigating the Bodh Gaya blast case, will interrogate them on Friday. New Delhi: In the backdrop of the Khalistan controversy surrounding Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeaus visit, India has successfully managed to bring Canada to address the issue. The two sides agreed on a Framework for Cooperation on Countering Terrorism and Violent Extremism and issued a joint statement after the bilateral talks at the Hyderabad House on Friday afternoon. The statement said that the Framework was based on fundamental respect for the sovereignty, unity and territorial integrity of India and Canada. The two countries also committed to work together to neutralise the threats emanating from terrorist groups Al Qaida, Islamic State, Haqqani Network, Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Mohammad, Babbar Khalsa International and the International Sikh Youth Federation. It is important that we work together to fight terrorism. Those who challenge our sovereignty and territorial integrity cannot be tolerated There should be no place for those who misuse religion for political goals, PM Modi said during his joint statement with Trudeau on Friday. Trudeau came under fire on Thursday after Jaspal Atwal, a convicted former member of a Sikh separatist group, was invited to dine with the Canadian PM by Canada's High Commissioner to India. Atwal was photographed with Sophie Gregoire Trudeau at an event in Mumbai this week. Atwal is a convicted former member of International Sikh Youth Federation. He was convicted of ambushing and firing at minister Malkiat Singh Sindhu in Vancouver Island in 1986. The National Security Advisors of the two countries who met in New Delhi a few days ahead of Trudeaus India visit, will now continue to be in contact through regular exchanges and coordination as has been agreed in the Framework. Last year, Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh had refused to meet Canadian Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan, calling him a Khalistani sympathiser, a charge Canada had vehemently refuted. The Punjab Chief Minister, however, met both Trudeau and Sajjan on Wednesday and raised the Khalistan issue upfront. He extracted an assurance from Trudeau that his government supports a united India and will not allow violent extremist forces to take shape in Canada. In continuation of that stand, on Friday, both India and Canada emphasised the need to deny operating space to terrorist and violent extremist groups. Details of the Framework added that India and Canada recognised the urgent imperative to disrupt recruitment, terrorist movements and the flow of foreign terrorist fighters, address the threat posed by cross-border and state-sponsored terrorism, stop sources of terrorist financing, dismantle terrorist infrastructure and prevent supply of arms to terrorists and counter violent extremism and radicalisation to violence. New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Friday ruled that an accused cannot be released on bail as a matter of right even though he was not arrested during the investigation. The top court interpreted Section 88 of the Criminal Procedure Code (CrPC) to elucidate whether it is obligatory for a court to release the accused by accepting the bond under Section 88 on the ground that he was not arrested during investigation. Section 88 holds that when any person for whose appearance or arrest the judge is empowered to issue a summons or warrant, is present in such court, such judge may require such person to execute a bond, with or without sureties, for his appearance in the court concerned. A bench of Justices AK Sikri and Ashok Bhushan maintained that the word may did not cast a duty upon the judicial officer to release the accused on bail after accepting the bond but the term may in fact give a discretion to the judge to decide for or against the release. Discretion given under Section 88 to the court does not confer any right on a person, who is present in the court, rather it is the power given to the court to facilitate his appearance, which clearly indicates that use of word may is discretionary and it is for the court to exercise its discretion when situation so demands, held the bench. It rejected an argument by senior lawyer Mukul Rohatgi that it was imperative for a judge to release on bail an accused, who has not been arrested during investigation when he appears before court. He contended that although Section 88 uses the word may but the word may has to be read as shall causing an obligation on the court to release on bond, those, who appeared on their own volition in the court. But the bench did not accept Rohatgis submissions. Section 88 of the CrPC does not confer any right on any person, who is present in a court. Discretionary power given to the court is for the purpose and object of ensuring appearance of such person in that court or to any other court into which the case may be transferred for trial, it said. The Court order came as it upheld orders by a CBI judge and Allahabad High Court in dismissing the bail application of Pankaj Jain, partner in a construction firm who is a co-accused in a corruption case involving former Chief Engineer of Noida, Yadav Singh. The bench said that the subordinate courts have rightly exercised their discretion in rejecting Jains bail, against whom non-bailable warrant of arrest as well as proceeding to declare him as a proclaimed offender had been initiated for not appearing in the trial court. It noted that Jain could not be considered as a free agent who had discretion to appear before the court. As Jains lawyer Rohatgi pointed out that his client is a person with 60 per cent disability, the bench said that he should revive his application before the trial court and that the Supreme Court was not inclined to release him on bail at this stage. New Delhi: A team of Delhi Police officers reached chief minister Arvind Kejriwal's home to review CCTV footage and question staff, including personal secretary Bibha Kumar, in the chief secretary assault case. The CM, on Twitter, has confirmed that a council of ministers has sought an appointment to meet Lieutenant Governor, Anil Baijal and said, "They've sent a bunch of police personnel to my house. They are conducting a search in my house. It's a very good thing. But when will they question Amit Shah about Judge Loya's death?" This comes a day after Kejriwal's advisor VK Jain gave contradictory statements about the alleged attack on Delhi Chief Secretary Anshu Prakash by AAP legislators, the Delhi Police on Thursday told a court. The police said that "new facts" have emerged after the interrogation of Jain, who disclosed that MLAs Prakash Jarwal and Amanatullah Khan surrounded Chief Secretary Prakash and he saw them assaulting the senior bureaucrat, additional public prosecutor Atul Shrivastava told Metropolitan Magistrate Shefali Barnala Tondon. Jain had previously said he had not seen anything as he had gone to the washroom at the time of the incident on Monday night. "New facts have emerged in the case. The advisor to the CM is being interrogated and his statement under Section 164 of the CrPC has been recorded. He has given us four names. The police custody of both the MLAs is required to unearth the whole conspiracy," the prosecutor said moving a fresh plea for their custody. Khan and Jarwal were on Thursday sent to a 14-day judicial custody in Tihar Jail by the court, which reserved its order on their bail pleas for Friday. During the hearing on Thursday, Shrivastava told the court that Jain had called the chief secretary for a meeting at 08:45 pm on Monday, and at 10:00 pm the officer confirmed to him that he would attend the meeting. Advocate Rajiv Mohan, appearing for Prakash, also supported the plea for police custody, saying the alleged attack on the officer was pre-meditated and was witnessed by the CM's adviser. In his statement, Jain said when the meeting started, Kejriwal said that MLAs wanted to discuss certain issues but randomly all of them started questioning the chief secretary about the delay in the release of funds for AAP government's media publicity on its achievement in education and fighting corruption. Jain was picked up by the Delhi Police on Wednesday morning from his residence at Maharani Bagh in connection with the case. The chief secretary has alleged in his complaint that he was sitting on a sofa flanked by Khan and another AAP MLA during the meeting. "Khan and the other MLA, without provocation from my side started hitting and assaulting me with blows on my head and temple," he alleged in his complaint. New Delhi: A slight yet perceptible inflection in the handling of its delicate relationship with Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) chief Mayawati is indicative of the Congress growing restlessness in cobbling together a credible opposition alliance against Prime Minister Narendra Modi ahead of the 2019 General Elections. For the time being, the Congress has openly put the blame for the failure to build a Bihar like mahagathbandhan for UP Assembly polls squarely on the BSP chief. Speaking to reporters, while inducting former Mayawati close aide Naseemuddin Siddique on Thursday, Ghulam Nabi Azad did not mince words on pointing fingers at Mayawati for the inability to form a credible opposition to stall BJPs march in UP. Ahead of Assembly elections, we had told Mayawati Ji, and I had personally gone to meet her to say that all three of us (SP, BSP, and Congress) should join hands to defeat the BJP. But she did not agree, said Azad who is also general secretary in-charge of UP. The BSP is the crucial cog in the wheel for the opposition to build a credible nationwide alternative alliance against the NDA. But Behenji despite protracted back-channel talks has responded with a loud silence on any such overtures. In the recently concluded Budget session of Parliament, BSP MPs did not join opposition ranks in marching to the President House seeking independent probe in the Justice Loya case. Its leaders were missing when the opposition, in a rare show of unity, walked out of the Rajya Sabha alleging they were not being allowed to raise issues of public importance in the House. But the tipping point perhaps has been BSPs decision to align with Deve Gowda in Karnataka where the Congress is engaged in a pitched battle with the BJP. Politically also, the BSPs decision to play minor partner to the JD(S) in the southern stateif anythingis being seen as an attempt to undercut Congress Dalit vote base. A strong JD(S) tends to indirectly help the BJP. This is the first time the BSP has struck a pre-poll alliance after Kanshi Ram and Narasimha Rao joined hands for UP state Assembly polls two decades. The Congress altered tactical line on the BSP is indicative of fact that the grand old party may push the BSP in the days ahead to take a clear and a categorical line for the 2019 General Electionswhether the BSP stands with the larger opposition unity or not. The attempt would be to put the onus of floundering efforts at mahagathbandhan on the BSP. In doing that, Congress in the process is also affixing a political cost to BSPs reluctance to join hands by sending a subtle message to the minorities. BSP has thus far indicated that efforts to forge a grand alliance have not borne fruits since the Congress has been insisting on a UP-centric agreement which fails to accommodate the BSPs political interest outside of the state. Mayawati, time and again, has displayed remarkable independence in choosing her own political path. In 1999, she reversed her decision on the floor of the House to script the fall of 13-month-old Vajpayee government by just one vote. In 2018, though considerably weakened, the BSP remains a key player in the opposition ranks. Behenji for that reason is keeping her cards close to the chest. And she might take that final call on alliances much closer to the elections. New Delhi: At a time when personalities like Nirav Modi and Mehul Chowksi have hit the headlines for fleeing India to escape clutches of law, the Supreme Court asked an accused in a criminal case if he has also joined the 'Quit India Movement' since he has shifted to Finland. A bench of Justices J Chelameswar and Sanjay K Kaul was hearing an anticipatory bail plea of the techie from Bengaluru when the remarks were made. "Where are you currently?" the bench asked the techie's lawyer, seeking protection from arrest for his client who was booked under rape charge for allegedly reneging from his promise to marry the complainant girl. "He is in Finland my lords," replied the lawyer. "Oh! Have you also joined the Quit India Movement?" shot back the bench, in an apparent reference to the raging Nirav Modi-PNB scam wherein the prime accused have run away from the country after defaulting to repay massive loans. At this, the lawyer said that his client is ready to come down and cooperate with the police. The counsel also said the rape case was lodged in 2016 by the girl for the offence allegedly committed in 2012. He said the FIR lodged by the Koramangala police station in Bengaluru in 2016 was abuse and misuse of the rape laws. Satisfied that the techie did not require to be arrested at this stage, the bench allowed his plea and issued a notice to the state police on the appeal filed against a rejection of his anticipatory bail plea by the high court in July last year. In the meanwhile, there shall be a stay on the arrest of the petitioner but he shall cooperate with the investigation, ordered the Court. The 'Quit India Movement' was launched by Mahatma Gandhi in 1942 to end the British rule in the country. New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday said that terrorism is a threat to both India and Canada and those who challenge territorial integrity won't be tolerated. It is important that we work together to fight terrorism. Those who challenge our sovereignty and territorial integrity cannot be tolerated There should be no place for those who misuse religion for political goals, PM Modi said during his joint statement with Canadian PM Justin Trudeau. India and Canada inked six pacts, including one on energy cooperation on Friday. Earlier, the PM had tweeted, I look forward to meeting PM @JustinTrudeau and holding talks on further strengthening India-Canada relations in all spheres. I appreciate his deep commitment to ties between our two countries. I look forward to meeting PM @JustinTrudeau tomorrow and holding talks on further strengthening India-Canada relations in all spheres. I appreciate his deep commitment to ties between our two countries. Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) February 22, 2018 PM Modi not receiving Trudeau at the airport, a courtesy he extended to some world leaders in the past, had triggered speculation in Canada that it was a snub to him for the rising Sikh radicalism in that country. However, Indian government sources had strongly rejected the speculation, insisting normal diplomatic protocol has been extended to Trudeau. I hope PM @JustinTrudeau and his family had a very enjoyable stay so far. I particularly look forward to meeting his children Xavier, Ella-Grace, and Hadrien. Here is a picture from my 2015 Canada visit, when I'd met PM Trudeau and Ella-Grace. pic.twitter.com/Ox0M8EL46x Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) February 22, 2018 I hope PM @JustinTrudeau and his family had a very enjoyable stay so far. I particularly look forward to meeting his children Xavier, Ella-Grace, and Hadrien, the PM said in another tweet. He also posted a picture from his 2015 Canada visit when he had met Trudeau and Ella-Grace. Trudeau came under fire on Thursday after Jaspal Atwal, a convicted former member of a Sikh separatist group, was invited to dine with the the Canadian PM Canada's High Commissioner to India. Trudeau later said that the person should never have received the invitation. Obviously, we take this extremely seriously. He should never have received an invitation. As soon as we received the information we rescinded it, a member of Parliament had included this individual, he said. Atwal was convicted of cabinet minister Malkait Singh Sidhu's murder in 1986 on Vancouver Island. During the time of the crime, he was a member of the International Sikh Federation which has been banned in several countries, including India and Canada, as a terrorist organization. He was one of the four men who shot at Sidhu's car. Reacting to the controversy, India said it will find out how Atwal managed to get the visa. invite to Atwal "Canadian side has already clarified that the invitation has been withdrawn. About the Visa I don't know how it happened. We will ascertain information from our Commission," said Raveesh Kumar, Spokesperson, MEA. The trouble began when pictures of Atwal with Trudeau's wife Sophie and Liberal cabinet minister Amarjeet Sohi in Mumbai emerged a day before Trudeau was to meet PM Modi. Atwal at Trudeau's event could have led to trouble for Canadian PM with the talk of his alleged acceptance of Sikh separatist groups in the background. The Canadian PM has tried time and again to assure India that he had no such inclination towards the groups. On Wednesday, during a meeting with Punjab Chief Minister Captain Amarinder Singh, Trudeau had said that his country stands for a united India and does not support any separatist movement, in India or elsewhere. Trudeau's categorical assurance came when Singh raised the Khalistan issue and sought his cooperation to crack down on elements in Canada that are working to destabilise Punjab for the creation of a separate Sikh state. New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Friday favoured definite timelines for making appointments of judges a time-bound process, and said that enormous delay in appointment of judges belies the hope and trust of the litigants. At a time when one-third of the total posts of high court judges are vacant, a bench of Justices AK Sikri and Ashok Bhushan expressed regret over the inordinate delays at the levels of the high court collegium and then by the executive in processing the appointments while urging the stakeholders to rectify the situation. Enormous delay in appointment of Judges of the high courts not only frustrate the purpose and object for which Article 224(1) was brought into the Constitution but belies the hope and trust of litigants who come to the high courts seeking justice and early disposal of their cases, said the Court. The bench cited its 1993-Constitution Bench judgment in Supreme Court Advocates-on-Record Association and Others Vs Union of India wherein the apex court maintained that the process of appointment must be initiated at least one month prior to the date of an anticipated vacancy. It was done to achieve an ideal situation, namely, to ensure that the post is filled up immediately after the occurrence of the vacancy so that no time is lost. Unfortunately, it still remains a far cry, it lamented. The Court noticed that in the first instance, names are not forwarded by the High Court for months even after the vacancy has arisen. It is also seen that once the names are forwarded, they remain pending at the Executive level for an undue long time before they are sent to the Collegium of the Supreme Court for approval along with the inputs of the Executive. Even after the clearance of the names by the Collegium, these remain pending at the level of the Executive, said the bench, mentioning how the government also sits on the names for various reasons. The Court said that there have been instances when the entire process takes more than a year to complete after the names have been forwarded to the government by the Collegium. All this results in inordinate delayIt is, therefore, in the interest of all the stakeholders, including the judiciary, that definite timelines are drawn for each stage of the process so that process of appointment is accomplished within a time-bound manner, it held. The Court stated that all this leads to unpleasant situations which can be avoided. We need not say more. It is more so, to keep hope and aspiration of litigants alive and to fulfil the commitment of providing a speedy justice, the process of appointment of Judges of the High Court needs more expedition at the hands of all who have to discharge the constitutional obligation entrusted by the Constitution of India, it added. The Court said this while upholding the appointment of two Additional Judges in the Rajasthan High Court, whose appointments were challenged by advocate Sunil Samdaria. Samdaria had contended that the appointments ought to be quashed because they were appointed after they had retired as judicial officers and further their appointments could not have been made for less than two years under Article 224. The bench relied upon a Constitution Bench judgment in SP Gupta case to hold that the tenure of appointment of Additional Judges who have less than two years to retire is not contrary to Article 224. About Samdarias argument on their retirement, the Court said that the requirement under Article 224 for appointment as an Additional Judge was that a person has for at least 10 years held a judicial office. Use of word 'held' in this Article does not indicate that qualification is also meant that apart from holding 10 years a judicial office, the incumbent should also be holding the judicial office at the time notification under Article 224 is issued, ruled the bench. New Delhi: A man forcibly kissed a 21-year-old woman on railway station platform in Mumbai on Thursday. The accused has been arrested after the incident was caught on a CCTV camera. It was noticed by a police officer examining the footage who sent two officials to probe the incident, ANI reported. They managed to locate the woman on the platform who told them the man approached her as she was waiting for a local train to Ghansoli for her job and forcibly kissed her. Based on the womans complaint and the CCTV footage, the police registered a case and arrested the accused, identified as 43-year old Naresh Kurnashankar Joshi, a resident of Ghansoli. He was then handed over the railway police who have registered a case. Jaipur: The death of two Rajasthan lawmakers has triggered tensions among the state's MLAs, who fear that the secretariat building has "negative energies and evil souls", demanding a 'havan' and other religious ceremonies here to get rid of them. BJP MLA Habibur Rehman from Nagaur, told media that he has suggested to Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje to conduct havan in the building which will help in purifying the surroundings. The land on which secretariat stands had once accommodated a burial ground and crematorium and hence the evil souls are dominating here, he added. Kalulal Gurjar, the chief whip, also confirmed fears among members in the matter of untimely death of BJP MLAs one after the other to the fact that the secretariat building is haunted. Nathdwara MLA Kalyan Singh passed away on Wednesday while Kirti Kumari from Mandalgarh passed away last year after suffering from swine flu. The secretariat building was constructed in 2001 and accommodates a crematorium in its vicinity. Gurjar said that he too has requested the Chief Minister for performing 'yagya' and religious ceremony in the building to ensure that it gets rid of evil spirits and when it will be performed depends on the Chief Minister and the Assembly Speaker. London (People's Daily) - Net EU migration to the UK continues to fall, down to its lowest level in a decade, according to a recent report from the Office for National Statistics (ONS). The study found that fewer EU citizens are relocating to Britain, while the number of those leaving has gone up, especially among those in search of employment. The report found that the number of EU citizens leaving the UK hit 130,000, a number that hasnt been seen since 2007. Brexit could well be a factor in peoples decision to move to or from the UK, but peoples decision to migrate is complicated and can be influenced by lots of different reasons, said Nicola White, Head of International Migration Statistics at ONS. There were 244,000 more arrivals to the UK than those exiting, while non-EU net migration surpassed its EU counterpart. As the UK has taken a more serious stance on various citizenship for EU arrivals, especially post-Brexit, many believe that Brexit is the main reason behind EU migrant departure. ONS figures also found the UK granted asylum to almost 15,000 people, and numbers released from Home Office revealed the majority of the 10,500 people granted refuge were Syrian. Patiala: A notorious gangster and key accused in the sensational Nabha jailbreak of 2016, Ramanjit Singh Romi, has been arrested in Hong Kong, police in Patiala said on Friday. A senior police officer confirmed the development and said Romi has been arrested in Hong Kong in connection with a robbery. He said the state police have already taken up the matter with the Ministry for External Affairs to initiate his extradition process. Romi was previously arrested in 2016, but was later released on bail. He allegedly jumped bail and escaped to Hong Kong. A Red Corner Notice was issued against Romi since his disappearance. His role is also suspected in targeted killings of 2016-17 in Jalandhar and Ludhiana, the police officer said. Punjab police said that he remained in touch with gangster Gurpreet Singh Sekhon, another key plotter and one of the six people to escape Nabha prison in November 2016. Sekhon and some of his associates were arrested in February 2017. Romi is believed to have supplied the escapees with money for their jailbreak, police said. Romi also faces charges of theft and forgery after police found a stolen car from him in Nabha in 2016. He was also charged with cheating after he was found in possession of several Chinese credit cards. New Delhi: National Award-winning filmmaker Ujjwal Chatterjee is set to make a film on the suspicious deaths of Hindu nationalist leaders. The film will cover the deaths of Hindu stalwarts Syama Prasad Mookerjee, Deendayal Upadhyaya and Raghu Vira, former president of Jana Sangh and father of the scholar Lokesh Chandra, which have been deemed as suspicious. The film will cover the sudden death of former prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri as well. Chatterjee won the National Award in 1992 for Bengali feature film 'Gondi'. Calling them political murders, Chatterjee told News18, From the year 1948, after the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi Jawaharlal Nehru arrested all the Sangh leaders. All those who retaliated to him were removed from the picture. This was done in connivance with the Russian agency KGB. KGB stands for Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti in Russian, translates as Committee for State Security in English. It was the main security agency for the Soviet Union from 1954. The director is planning to release this film within the year and is in talks with A-list mainstream actors, which he expects will shoot up the budget of the film. It will start with Mookerjees death, then move on to Shastri, Vira and finally to Upadhyayas mysterious death. The script is being written by Atul Gangwar who is researching on the circumstances and evidence of their deaths to bring to the the forgotten stories to a new generation. There were conspiracies created to remove people from a particular ideology. There were many people who were part of national movement but today they are not seen in the mainstream. They are not taught so through this film we will bring their story, Gangwar said. When asked why Shastri was included considering he was part of the Congress, he said, Shastri, who came between Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi, was a leader who was entrenched in Indian pathos and a firm believer of Indian-ness. That is why he did not fall into the trap laid by the KGB. This is why he was eliminated. He added that Upadhyaya was murdered but the official reason given, he was killed by dacoits, was suspicious. That is suspicious because nothing from him went missing except his bed, which had the blood stains. His money, watch all was intact. Similarly, Vira and Mookerjees deaths are suspicious. We need to revisit their death and bring that perspective, he said. Upadhyaya died on 11 February 1968 at Mughalsarai in UP while he was travelling in a train. Mookerjee died in custody, which the film makers say is suspicion across the country and demands for an independent enquiry. Vira died in an accident in Kanpur. Finally, Shastri died in Tashkent in 1966, a day after signing the Tashkent Agreement between India and Pakistan, formally ending the 1965 war. Official reason given was a heart attack but there have been claims that he was murdered. The team working on the film believes they were political murders and want to bring the Sanghs version on their deaths in mainstream cinema. Recently, RSSs Bharatiya Chitra Sadhna organized Chitra Bharati Film Festival, "to show the Indian ness in Indian films. New Delhi: China downplayed reports of it upgrading air defense along Indian border, adding that both nations must work to maintaining peace and tranquility. An official media report recently quoted a military expert saying that China was upgrading air defence of its Western Theatre Command along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) to "confront threat from India." Addressing the report, Foreign Affairs spokesperson Geng Shuang said, "I am not aware of the specifics." He added that he hoped "India could work with us to maintain peace and stability in the border areas, which serves the common interests of the two sides." There has been no comment so far from the Chinese Defence Ministry. The Chinese military has released photographs of a J-10 fighter jet - a lightweight multi-role fighter aircraft - along with J-11 - a single-seat, twin-engine fighter jet - flying over the high-altitude plateau in western China during the current Chinese New Year and Spring Festival holiday, state-run Global Times reported on Tuesday. The jets are attached to an aviation brigade of the air force under the PLA Western Theatre Command, the website of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) said. China has also recently commissioned its stealth fighter, the J-20, which is first in the region. India and China have been trying to reset their ties after last year's 73-day standoff between the two sides at Doklam in Sikkim section of boundary. New Delhi: None of the accused in the Punjab National Bank scam have appeared before Enforcement Directorate despite summons. Diamond merchants Nirav Modi and Mehul Choksi had been summoned by ED for their role in the Rs 11,000 crore PNB scam. ED has issued fresh summons under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA). They have to appear on February 26. Modi on Thursday made it clear that he can't appear and depose before the ED. He has been summoned under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA). In an emailed reply to the EDs investigating officer, he cited the temporary suspension of his passport and pending business issues as reasons for his non-appearance before the probe agency. Liquor baron Vijay Mallya, who is also wanted for a fraud worth Rs 9,000 crore and money laundering, had cited the same reasons for not appearing before the ED a few years ago. The agency had asked him to approach the nearest Indian embassy and get a travel document issued in order to return to the country. The agency on Thursday seized shares, mutual funds and luxury cars, worth over Rs 100 crore, of the group companies of Modi and Choksi. The ED raids against the duo were launched on February 15. Modi, Choksi and others are being investigated by multiple probe agencies, including the CBI and the Income Tax department, after it recently came to light, following a complaint from the PNB, that they allegedly cheated the state-run bank to the tune of Rs 11,400 crore, with the purported involvement of a few employees of the bank. The CBI and the ED have registered two FIRs each in the case. Both Modi and Choksi left the country before the cases were lodged against them. New Delhi: At the just-concluded Uttar Pradesh Investors Summit in Lucknow, the states repaired, reformed law and order apparatus was featured as the Yogi Adityanath-led governments tour de force before the corporate and political elite. The chief minister, in his inaugural speech, placed law and order over other imperatives such as infrastructure, power supply, and roads as a priority requirement to facilitate ease of doing business. We have restored the rule of law and brought in order, claimed Yogi, while adding that all necessary were being taken. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who spoke after the CM, also talked about the same. Citizens of the state earlier lived in fear and insecurity. It was impossible for even the common man to live normally, let alone industrialists. Nobody dared to dream of things like middle-class aspirations or the ambition of youths as the ambiance was filled with negativity. Yogiji has transformed negativity into positivity and ushered in new hope, he said. Home minister Rajnath Singh minced no words and straightaway stressed that there was zero tolerance for corruption and criminalisation in the Yogi regime. As a political strategy, projecting a strong anti-criminal stance might yield results with certain sections that felt squeamish after the previous Samajwadi Party regime leaders gave no thought to thrashing a law-abiding police officer. The upper-middle-class and middle-class sections of the society are happy with the current governments crackdown on Goondas, extortionists and browbeaters, who made lives miserable during the SP rule. In the prelude to the 2017 assembly polls, BJP successfully played up palayan or the alleged forced migration of Hindus from parts of western UP by communal gangs patronised by the then powerful minister from Rampur Azam Khan. The BJP is now offering anecdotal evidence to prove that those who left for Uttarakhand or Haryana are back in business in their hometowns, thanks to effective policing. When Yogi justified the killing of 30 gangsters and criminals during a record 1000+ encounters carried out since he came to power, his supporters found no merit in the objections raised by human rights watchers. He candidly spoke of how the administration and police were licensed to use a gun to answer the language of the gun. In his latest avatar, Yogis enlarged worldview and growing ambitions transcend the limited needs of the traders from Bijnor and Saharanpur. He dreams of mega-bucks to be pulled in from outside UP while the investors from the south and west, used to attending investment jamborees in Akhilesh Yadavs time, want bang for their buck. During his speech, Yogi talked of Memorandum of Understandings (MoU) worth Rs 4,28,000 crore being signed at the Lucknow meet and added that it was exactly the sum earmarked for UPs annual budget this year. Rhymes, alliterations and word-play may work in an election speech but surely investors need more persuasive arguments to be nudged into a state that bears the unfortunate moniker of Ulta (upside-down) Pradesh? Take the power sector, a domain which the Centre looks to seriously revamp. The states power sector regulator, the UP Electricity Regulatory Commission, has approved steps that can enhance the financial position of state utilities while also increasing opportunities for private companies in transmission, distribution, engineering, and procurement and construction business. In transmission, the regulator approved a capital expenditure of Rs 20,000 crore for fiscal years 2018 and 2020 (FY 18-20), twice the amount invested in FY 15-16. Of this, 81 percent or Rs 16,200 crore has been set aside for new projects. While notionally new measures can give a leg-up to UPs depressed power sector, their success will depend on effective follow-on. Right now, power sector initiatives smack of populism rather than long-term recalibration. These include hugely subsidised connections for BPL card-holders, online connections within seven days, trust billing to be filed by the consumers (subject to penalty for wrongdoing), special police stations to fix accountability for power pilferage and installing meters in all government homes to stem the misuse arising from unmetered connections. On the other hand, the Rs 30,000 crore Poorvanchal Expressway, intended to connect eastern UP roads, is critical to the development of the east and Bundelkhand as the new industrial hubs. The east and Bundelkhand are bereft of a dedicated freight corridor, power, and water. The Yogi government is still struggling to get a fix over UPs tricky bureaucracy, which has over the years has got segregated into caste blocks with the rise of Dalits as a powerful administrative entity. New Delhi: To tap the new generation, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh is going to hold Rashtrodaya Sammelan in Meerut on Sunday which will be attended by organisations chief Mohan Bhagwat. The organisers are expecting over a lakh participants in the programme with 2.5 lakh people already registering as volunteers, and are terming it as their largest gathering in the country so far. RSS holds such large scale gatherings in a decade or so in different regions this is done to reach out to the new generation as they are curious about Sangh. It is a one day gathering in uniform, and we are expecting a large turnout of over a lakh, Manmohan Vaidya, RSS's akhil bharat prachar pramukh told News18. Bhagwat recently headed a large gathering in Assam, the RSS first big gathering in that region. The tribal, regional heads were also invited and leaders of the BJP were also present. Two years ago, a similar programme took place in west Maharashtra. The last time RSS organised gatherings at such a scale was in the 1980s. According to Sangh, the purpose is to expand the reach of the organization, and attract more people to the Sangh so that it increases enrollment in Sangh. The mammoth gathering is expected to instill confidence in the karyakarta working in remote regions, they said. New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Friday sought a response from the Delhi Police on a plea by BJP leader Subramanian Swamy for a court-monitored SIT probe into the death of Congress MP Shashi Tharoors wife Sunanda Pushkar. A bench led by Justice Arun Mishra agreed to hear Swamy's PIL, and issued a notice to the Delhi Police. The court, however, made it clear that the issue of maintainability of Swamy's petition is being kept open. The caveat was added since the bench had on the last date pointed out that Swamy will have to satisfy the court how, as a third party, could seek orders into a criminal case. The BJP MP has come to the apex court in an appeal against the Delhi High Court order, which had dismissed his petition. Terming his PIL as a textbook example of a political interest litigation, the HC had in October last year chastised the BJP leader and his lawyer for making sweeping allegations in the petition against Tharoor and the Delhi Police, without giving any basis for these accusations. While dismissing the plea, the court said in future it expected Swamy to act with circumspection required from PIL petitioners. Pushkar was found dead under mysterious circumstances in a suite of a five-star hotel in Delhi on the night of January 17, 2014. Swamy, in his plea, had alleged that the police had botched up the probe and accused the Congress leader of interfering in the investigation now and even earlier when he was a minister in the UPA regime. New Delhi: There was a massive twist in the assault case on Delhi Chief Secretary Anshu Prakash on Thursday. During a hearing on the case, Delhi Police told the court that it had found clinching testimony that proved the Chief Secretary was, indeed, assaulted. The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) on the other hand, said the testimony was obtained by the police under duress. The AAP's claim rests on the fact that both testimonies, one under Section 161 of the CrPC and the other under 164, by a top aide of CM Arvind Kejriwal say two completely different things. According to the testimony, delivered by Kejriwal aide and retired civil servant Vinod Kumar Jain on Wednesday, he never saw Prakash actually being assaulted. "MLAs started asking the CS questions about doorstep delivery of rations, advertisement fund release and slow processing of files," the first testimony claims. It adds, "During this time, I got up and went to the washroom. When I came out, I saw that the CS was leaving and the CM said to me that the meeting was over and I, too, could go home. I then went home." During this round of questions, the police asked Jain, "Did you see the CS being misbehaved with or assaulted?". To this, Jain replied, "I went to the washroom for a bit during the meeting. I cannot say what happened in that time." On Thursday, however, Delhi Police said he had said he saw the actual assault, which the AAP claimed was an attempt to destabilise the government. AAP MLAs Amanatullah Khan and Prakash Jarwal, arrested for allegedly assaulting Delhi chief secretary Anshu Prakash, were on Thursday sent in 14-day judicial custody in Tihar Jail by a Delhi court which reserved its order on their bail pleas for Friday. "New facts have emerged in the case. The advisor to the CM is being interrogated and his statement under Section 164 of the CrPC has been recorded. He has given us four names. The police custody of both the MLAs is required to unearth the whole conspiracy," the public prosecutor said on Thursday, moving a fresh plea for their custody. During the hearing on Thursday, the public prosecutor told the court that Jain had called the chief secretary for a meeting at 8:45 pm on Monday, and at 10:00 pm the officer confirmed to him that he would attend the meeting. Advocate Rajiv Mohan, appearing for Prakash, also supported the plea for police custody, saying the alleged attack on the officer was pre-meditated and was witnessed by the CM's adviser. In his statement, Jain said when the meeting started, Kejriwal said that MLAs wanted to discuss certain issues but randomly all of them started questioning the chief secretary about the delay in the release of funds for AAP government's media publicity on its achievement in education and fighting corruption. (File photo: Xinhua) Tourists from across China tread 68 countries and regions during the week-long Spring Festival Holiday, and Southeast Asia has the lions share among them. The tourism industry revenue hit the 475-billion-yuan mark ($75 billion), an increase of 12.6 percent from last year. About 386 million trips were consummated by tourists during the week-long break, up 12.1 percent from last years figure, according to the China National Tourism Administration (CNTA). The list of most popular tourist attractions among the provincial regions includes Guangdong, Sichuan, Hunan, Jiangsu, Henan, Anhui, Shandong, Guangxi, Hubei, and Zhejiang. The typical tourists expenditure averaged approximately 6000 yuan ($156), according to LY.com, one of Chinas leading travel websites. Mumbai: Coming out of his PadMan avatar, actor Akshay Kumar is enjoying shooting with a group of children from Afghanistan for his next film Kesari. "Innocent smiles galore on set today. Shooting with these lovely children playing Afghani kids in 'Kesari' based on the Battle of Saragarhi, one of the bravest battles fought in India," Akshay tweeted on Thursday without revealing the location. Innocent smiles galore on set today. Shooting with these lovely children playing Afghani kids in #Kesari based on the Battle Of Saragarhi, one of the bravest battles fought in India. pic.twitter.com/OqFjXg6BpJ Akshay Kumar (@akshaykumar) February 22, 2018 Akshay has teamed up with filmmaker Karan Johar's Dharma Productions for the movie, being directed by Anurag Singh. The actor also shared an image in which he is seen posing with the children. He is sporting a saffron turban and a beard in the photograph. Kesari, which is slated for 2019 Holi release, will also feature Parineeti Chopra. Mumbai: Riding high on the success of her film Secret Superstar, producer Kiran Rao says that she never expected the amazing love and support for the film that it received in China. The Zaira Wasim and Aamir Khan starrer has managed to achieve a staggering figure of Rs 759 crore and counting in the neighbouring country. Rao was attending the film's success party along with husband Aamir Khan, Advait Chandan and Zaira on Wednesday here when she expressed her surprise. Rao said: "We are so thrilled and happy. We made this film with a lot of love and effort and it connected with the audience, that was a big thing for us. "But the kind of amazing love and support the film is receiving especially in China, I don't think any of us expected that. "I saw Chinese audience emotionally connecting with the film when I saw their pictures sent by Aamir and Advait. That is something we are really touched by. We loved our film and we are so happy that the audience has loved it as well." Talking about overall success of Secret Superstar, Aamir said: "We are really happy that 'Secret Superstar' has been so successful all around the world, so all credit goes to Advait (Chandan) for wonderful writing and direction that he has done." Aamir was really glad that the film has been successful in China. "I have said this earlier as well that Chinese audience has emotional connect with Indian stories. "They relate to culture and family values shown in Indian films, so there is a lot of similarity between our counties in that spectrum. I feel whenever we will watch Chinese films, we will also appreciate their movies." Asked about his look in his upcoming film Thugs of Hindostaan Aamir said: "I am still hiding my look... I have long hair... But we are still trying to hide it from the media and people as much as possible. Once the poster of the movie was out, Aamir said: "People will be able to see my look for 'Thugs of Hindostaan'." The film's shoot has almost been completed, the actor was going aboard for a few days. "So after returning, we will shoot the climax in Rajasthan and complete it by March end." The film stars Amitabh Bachchan, Katrina Kaif, Fatima Sana Shaikh and Jackie Shroff besides Aamir. It is directed by Vijay Krishna Acharya and produced by Yashraj Films and is scheduled to release on November 7. Los Angeles: Hollywood veteran Meryl Streep does not appreciate being part of disgraced film mogul Harvey Weinstein's legal defense and says it is a pathetic move. On Wednesday, the actress released a statement, via her representative Hannah Donohue, that Weinstein's inclusion of her words in a legal filing was "pathetic and exploitive", reports usatoday.com. "Harvey Weinstein's attorneys' use of my (true) statement -- that he was not sexually transgressive or physically abusive in our business relationship -- as evidence that he was not abusive with many other women is pathetic and exploitive," Streep said. She added: "The criminal actions he is accused of conducting on the bodies of these women are his responsibility, and if there is any justice left in the system he will pay for them -- regardless of how many good movies, made by many good people, Harvey was lucky enough to have acquired or financed." Weinstein's lawyers on Tuesday said in federal court in New York that the proposed class-action lawsuit filed by six women should be rejected. The lawyers said that the alleged assaults took place too long ago. The defense also cited comments made by Streep -- that Weinstein was not abusive toward her during their business relationship -- in support of Weinstein. Weinstein's filing also included mentions of Jennifer Lawrence and Gwyneth Paltrow, who have said they felt "petrified" and "sick" about Weinstein, respectively, since allegations about him surfaced, reports usatoday.com. On the work front, Streep is looking forward to the 90th Oscars. She is nominated in the category -- Actress in a Leading Role for The Post. Hosted by Jimmy Kimmel, the award ceremony will be held on March 4 at the Dolby Theatre here. It will be aired in India live on Star Movies and Star Movies Select on March 5. Megan Milan, a popular model in New York, is currently breaking the Internet with her uncanny resemblance to actor Priyanka Chopra. Milan looks eerily similar to the Bollywood star in a recent bunch of pictures posted by her on social media. Priyanka's fans were quick to notice the similarities between the features of the two divas as they flooded Twitter with pictures of Milan where she was looking like PeeCee. Sharing Milan's photo alongside Priyanka's picture, one user wrote, "You literally look like @priyankachopra btw you're looking absolutely gorgeous. (sic)" While another person tweeted, "Dude, You look very much alike @priyankachopra." Here are some of the pictures and tweets: @sakinaxox I thought this was Priyanka for a few seconds.. Mitali Thakrar (@MitaliThakrar19) February 20, 2018 you literally look like @priyankachopra btw you're looking absolutely gorgeous. pic.twitter.com/0TrYVjPX71 yasemin | padmaavat (@ysmnly) February 20, 2018 Mumbai: The BJP was ready to fight polls with or without the Shiv Sena, Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis today said. He, however, added that the BJP desired that the two parties fought polls together. "I do not read or listen to anybody in the party (Sena) because there is just one person who takes all its decisions. And I have good relations with Uddhav ji (Sena chief Thackeray). I keep meeting him on and off," Fadnavis said. He was speaking at a programme organised by a news channel here in suburban Bandra. Fadnavis further said, "I think we will fight the polls together. However, we are ready to fight it this way or that way." To a query regarding the spate of suicides at Mantralaya despite the government's farm loan waiver, Fadnavis said these incidents had no connection with the present government. "One person who committed suicide had complaints pertaining to the MPSC (Maharashtra Public Services Commission) paper he had answered in 2013. The other was a convict who had a written a letter to the Chief Justice to have his sentence reduced," he said. "Dharma Patil (a farmer who consumed poison and later died in hospital) had received a compensation of Rs 3 lakh from the previous government but then said he wanted a higher compensation. According to the law, once the compensation is accepted, it cannot be changed," he added. Replying to a query on former Congress leader Narayan Rane's induction into the NDA despite his alleged criminal records, Fadnavis said that Rane, as per his knowledge, had no case against him. Fadnavis added that Rane would be given a ministerial berth or an appropriate position at the right time. In reply to another query on NCP chief Sharad Pawar's praise of Rahul Gandhi, Fadnavis said that there couldn't be worse days for Pawar if he had to praise the Congress leader. Bhopal: There was much drama in Madhya Pradesh as campaigning ended for Kolaras and Mungaoli by-elections with the Congress alleging their candidate was injured in police action. According to the Congress, a BJP MLA distributed money to buy voters and assaulting party workers who tried to stop them with police, in which their candidate was injured at Kolaras. The BJP responded by releasing a picture of the Congress candidate distributing money to voters in Mungaoli constituency. A Congress delegation complained to Chief Electoral Officer Salina Singh in Bhopal, party seniors Kamal Nath and Jyotiraditya Scindia met Chief Election Commissioner OP Rawat and lodged a complaint on Kolaras incident. Trouble started in Khatora village in Kolaras late on Thursday night when Congress workers stopped an SUV belonging to Bhind MLA Narayan Singh Kushwah, alleging that the vehicle was filled with cash to be distributed along voters. Police reached the spot and used lathicharge to disperse the mob. In the action, Congress candidate Mahendra Singh Yadav and some of his supporters were also injured. Mahendra alleged that Kushwah violated the model code of conduct. His car had cash but the police helped his driver flee the spot with the money and instead beat us, he said. Police, however, said that the MLA has been booked under section 188 while adding if Congress comes up with any complaint, a case would be registered in their favour also. Soon after MP, Congress leaders reached CEO Salina Singhs office with the complaint. Congress workers accusing Bhind MLA of distributing cash among voters scuffled with him and police had to intervene. We have summoned a report from district administration, Singh said. Scindia and others met CEC OP Rawat in New Delhi and demanded removal of Shivpuri collector and SP while briefing him about the incident. Congress workers also staged dharna outside Shivpuri collector Tarun Rathis residence. BJP responded by issuing a picture of Mungaoli Congress candidate Brijedra Pratap Yadav meeting voters while one of his aides handed cash to them. The picture of Congress candidate was morphed. It is BJPs desperation and fear of loss that they resorted to distributing cash and also got our men assaulted in Kolaras, Congress spokesperson Pankaj Chaturvedi said. He even claimed that the party has received pictures and videos of BJP MP from Sagar, Shailendra Jain, roaming in Mungaoli late at night after the campaigning ended and all outsiders were required to leave the constituency. BJP spokesperson Rajnish Agrawal termed Kolaras incident as well-planned drama from Congress leaders. How come this was possible that several senior leaders reached New Delhi with the complaint barely hours after the campaigning ended, he said. Chennai: Tamil 'superstar' Rajinikanth on Friday said efforts were on to build a strong foundation for his proposed political party and asked his fans to keep quiet and "make noise at the right time." "It is being said others are making (political) noise and they (his fans and supporters) are keeping quiet. Let the others make noise, let us make the noise at the right time," he said to thunderous applause by his supporters. While Rajinikanth did not take any names on those making the apparent political noise, it is being seen as a veiled reference to his contemporary and one-time co-star Kamal Haasan, who has launched his political party "Makkal Needhi Maiam" (MNM) in Madurai two days ago. Addressing his fans and supporters from Tirunelveli district here, the superstar said if a political party in the state had the 'guarantee of a votebank,' it was due to the "foundation" it had created. "We need (such) a strong foundation," he said adding efforts were on in this regard. Even to run a family "the head should be" proper, Rajinikanth said, adding right now the focus was on to create a foundation to support a strong structure -- the political party. Rajinikanth had on December 31 last announced that he will launch his political party and contest from all 234 seats in the next Tamil Nadu Assembly elections. Haasan had met Rajinikanth and leaders of various political parties ahead of launching his political party. Rajinikanth had then said he prayed for "divine blessings" to be bestowed on his 'friend' Haasan and wished him success in his political endeavours. He also said he and Hassan had different styles in cinema, a possible indication that they may go separate ways in politics too. Hyderabad: Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu publicly demanded Special Category status for the state while hitting out at the Centre for not granting a special financial package. "Special status is our right and now I am demanding special status," Naidu said at a public meeting in Anantapur district on Thursday. At the meeting, Naidu questioned why the central government was denying special status to Andhra Pradesh. "Our government agreed to special package because Centre cited the 14th Finance Commissions stand that special status was no longer being given to any State. But special status continued in other states. This means what we were told is not true. If others are given, then why Andhra Pradesh is being denied the same?" Naidu asked. Naidu also hit out at BJP led Central government for not fulfilling the promises made in Andhra Pradesh Reorganisation Act. "We went with BJP for the sake of doing justice to Andhra Pradesh. All the promises and assurances given in Rajya Sabha must be honoured. There cannot be any compromise," he said. The main opposition YSR Congress has been mounting pressure on the ruling TDP government and BJP-led central government with their slogan "Special Status is our right, do not get cheated by Special package". YSR Congress has also announced agitation programs from March 5th in Delhi, when the budget session resumes. The party has also announced moving a no-confidence motion against the BJP government and also threatened to resign on April 6th, if state is not granted special status. New Delhi: Arvind Kejriwal, the National Convener of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and Chief Minister of Delhi, was seen, after almost a year, on the offensive. In a blistering speech in Bindapur, Kejriwal took on the Centre, the Lieutenant Governor and the bureaucrats all of whom, he claimed, were hindering his government's "good work". This came shortly after a Delhi Police team swept the Chief Minister's residence on Flagstaff Road to search for evidence and question his staff over the alleged assault on Chief Secretary Anshu Prakash. But the political messaging of an angry Kejriwal saying, "I fight for you, the people", was not lost on political observers. "If we say anything to officers, they get offended. I will fight the Centre and their officers for you. Sometimes the Lieutenant Governor, sometimes officers, sometimes the Centre stops our files. I fight a lot but only for all of you and your children. I have never done anything for my own children. Rich didnt vote for me, the poor did," Kejriwal said. Political analyst Yashwant Deshmukh of C-Voter said this was a return of the angry Kejriwal, who has been muted since the Punjab Assembly election dealt a massive blow to his party in 2017. "We have seen a very muted Kejriwal over the last year. Sometime after losing Punjab and MCD elections, he took a conscious decision to not attack Narendra Modi directly. Earlier, there was hardly a day when Kejriwal wouldn't attack Modi. But for the last 11 months, he has not even mentioned Modi once in his tweets," said Deshmukh. This Kejriwal 2.0, which yielded some political gains with a bypoll win in outer Delhi's Bawana, was out of character with the older Kejriwal, who had once called the Prime Minister a "coward" and a "psychopath" after a raid at the CM's office. The raid on the CMO was back in December 2015. Over two years later, on Friday, there was another raid. This time on the CM's residence. Once again, the old Kejriwal seems to have stirred. Deshmukh said, "For the first time in months, we saw a very angry Kejriwal. He blasted the Centre like he hasn't done for very long time. But what's interesting to note here is that he has still stayed off Modi. He chose, instead, to target Amit Shah. This, I think, is by design." "Khoob Police mere ghar bheji hai. Mere ghar ki chaanbeen chal rahi hai. Bahut Achchi baat hai. Par Judge Loya ke katl ke maamle mein Amit Shah se poochtaach kab hogi? (A large Police force has been sent to my house. My house is being searched. That is all well and good. But when will Amit Shah be questioned in the murder case of Judge Loya?)," Kejriwal tweeted. In another tweet, he said, "Do thappad ke aarop ki jaanch ke liye CM ke poroe ghar ki talashi. Judge Loya ke katl par poochtach toh banti hai. Nahi? (The CM's house is being searched over two slaps. Judge Loya's murder calls at least for an interrogation. No?)." One AAP MLA, on condition of anonymity, said, "Arvind knows that he is not unpopular by himself. But his attacks on Modi were backfiring. The middle class was getting alienated. But we still need to attack the BJP and make sure they don't get away with murder. So the best way is to target Shah, rather than Modi." Deshmukh said, "Kejriwal knows that Amit Shah is not Modi. Shah does not have that kind of pan-India popularity. So in the future, we will see Kejriwal attack Shah and Rahul Gandhi, but not Modi." During his Bandipura speech, Kejriwal also reached out to his core constituency the urban poor. "The rich didn't vote for me, the poor did," he said, adding, Our party is also poor, we don't even have money in our bank account. We did not take any money from contractors. AAP is not Kejriwals party, this is your party." This, too, Deshmukh believes, is loaded with political messaging. "The people who propelled AAP to power were the urban poor. Think about how Amanatullah Khan looked when he surrendered. He was wearing so called traditional "Muslim" attire. And then Kejriwal talks about the poor in Delhi. This is because Kejriwal knows that the Delhi Congress is catching up. Ajay Maken is becoming the de-facto opposition leader. Our C-Voter poll shows that even though AAP is still the strongest party in Delhi with a strong chance of returning to power, the BJP is stagnant and the Congress is gaining. This means the Congress is gaining at AAP's expense. Kejriwal wants to stop the Congress by keeping that constituency firmly in the AAP's corner." Chennai: When Karunanidhi and Jayalalithaa ruled Tamil Nadu, the relationship between DMK and AIADMK was different from now. There was a sense of unease and tension between the two leaders who didn't come face-to-face even once. It was a known fact that one of them would always leave the Assembly when the other entered. But things have changed, now with Edapadi K Palaniswami and MK Stalin meeting each other and also participating in all-party meetings. In the aftermath of the recent Supreme Court verdict on Cauvery water distribution, the DMK had sought an all-party meeting and said it will invite the ruling AIADMK. A day after, the Palaniswami government called for an all-party meeting and DMK accepted the invitation. In 2002, when J Jayalalithaa, the then Chief Minister called for an all-party meeting to discuss the Cauvery issue, DMK chief Karunanidhi sent a party representatives to the meeting. In 2007, when it was his turn to call for an all-party meeting, Jayalalithaa sent O Panneerselvam to represent the AIADMK, who in turn read out a statement issued by Jayalalithaa at the meet. The two leaders never physically participated in any of the all-party meetings on Cauvery. Cauvery has always been an electoral issue and when either party was in power, the Opposition demanded an all-party meeting. Interestingly, when MGR was in power and called for one of these meetings, Karunanidhi personally attended the meet. However, that climate of the 2000s do not exist in this day. Both the AIADMK government and opposition DMK continue take on each other on various issues, but the kind of uneasy relationship between Karunanidhi and Jayaalalithaa do not exist any longer. Given the political uncertainty in Tamil Nadu, two of its main political parties continue to be at loggerheads and as analysts say, the DMK never stops trying to bring down the leaderless AIADMK government. So, have the things finally changed after the Jayalalithaa-Karunanidhi era? Political observer T. Ramakrishnan says, Ever since Jayalalithaas death in December 2016, the nature of the relationship between the states two principal political parties, DMK and AIADMK has undergone a qualitative change. Indications of such a change were evident even during the days when Jayalalithaa was in hospital. When M Karunanidhi and Jayalaltihaa were in charge of their parties respectively, there existed an uneasy relationship between the two parties. There was hardly any social interaction between leaders of the two parties. Now, the palpable tension between the two parties ceases to exist and this could be evident either in the submission of a memorandum by Leader of Opposition M K Stalin to CM Palaniswami on the issue of revamping state transport corporations, or in the way Palaniswami receives Stalin in his chamber or at the all-party meeting being organised by the state government on the Cauvery row. All of these point to the changed equations." N. Sathiya Moorthy, political analyst, admits that the Dravidian parties' style of functioning has changed since 2016. He says, Both sides have changed their style of functioning, not only to avoid being seen as sticking to competitive politics and providing a great political platform to others, but also for not knowing how to hurt each other. However, others say things continue to be the same. S Ramesh, political observer, said, Given the sensitive nature of the Cauvery issue, these parties are in compulsion to be united. They do not want to stay away from the all-party meeting as that will send wrong signals to the people of Tamil Nadu. However, on other issues, they continue to attack each other personally, there is no decency and they are playing to the gallery. The same old culture continues on other matters. Just because the DMK Working President is attending the all-party meeting, it does not mean things have changed. BEIJING, Feb. 22 (Xinhua) -- China can achieve more inclusive and sustainable development with coordinated reforms that maximize development impact and address its development challenges, according to a report from the World Bank Group. China's growth has been slowing to a "new normal" and economic rebalancing is underway. Managing this transition in a sustainable manner will be critical to achieving the country's development goals, the report "Towards a More Inclusive and Sustainable Development" said. Policy to increase productivity-led growth through innovation, market competition and the private sector will support these goals, said the report. "China's remarkable progress in reducing extreme poverty has significantly contributed to the decline in global poverty," noted Hoon S. Soh, World Bank Program Leader for economic policy for China. The official said the World Bank Group will continue to support China's goals to eliminate extreme poverty and ensure inclusive and sustainable growth. Despite the rapid reduction of extreme poverty, China's remaining poor population remains large. The report projected continued progress towards eliminating extreme poverty with the extreme poverty rate to fall below one percent in 2018, based on the international poverty line of PPP 1.90 U.S. dollars per day. The challenge for China will be to target assistance to the remaining poor while paying attention to those who are vulnerable to falling into poverty, the report said, adding further improvements to the social security net would help. Although inequality has been steadily declining since 2008, more can be done to address inequality, the report said, suggesting reforms of the intergovernmental fiscal system and the household registration system. Other recommendations for China include a greater reliance on market mechanisms and mobilizing more private financing to boost green innovation and reduce environmental costs and waste. The World Bank Group undertakes a Systematic Country Diagnostic for all its client countries to identify key challenges and opportunities in ending poverty and boosting shared prosperity. The Diagnostic forms the basis for the Country Partnership Framework, which determines the World Bank Group's activities in a country over a four to six year period. Bengaluru: When Congress president Rahul Gandhi visits Bagalkote on Sunday, it will be some sort of repayment of the debt his grandmother Indira Gandhi had owed the locals 40 years ago. Rahul, who has just recently toured the six districts in Hyderabad-Karnataka region, will be touring neighbouring Mumbai-Karnataka region from Saturday. The Congress president is expected to pay a visit to a settlement area in Bagalkote town. After losing the Parliament elections in 1977, Indira Gandhi had come to Bagalkote for an Assembly by-poll campaign in 1978. The people were still angry with the excesses committed by her government during Emergency and nobody was ready to give her some space to hold a public meeting. Finally, 34-year-old Shivaji Chauhan came to her rescue. He asked Indira Gandhi to hold the meeting at his colony and even built a stage for her. When the police refused to give her security, the local youth formed a security ring around her carrying sticks in their hand to save her from any attack. In that election, the Congress candidate won and Indira Gandhi had invited Chauhan's family to Delhi for a meal. They had travelled to Delhi and had a lunch with her. He claims that Indira Gandhi had also arranged for their sightseeing in the capital. Grandson Rahul's visit exactly after 40 years to the same place has created some excitement in Bagalkote. Buoyed by the public response to his Hyderabad-Karnataka tour, the state Congress is planning to make his Mumbai-Karnataka tour also a big success. The top leaders of the state Congress have already asked local leaders to give him a grand welcome at all the places. After landing at Sambra airport in Belgaum, Rahul will take a helicopter ride to Athani in northern part of Belgaum district. After addressing a public meeting there, he will cross over to neighbouring Bagalkote and Bijapura districts. On the third and last day, Rahul Gandhi will be touring HubliDharwad areas. However he is skipping Uttara Kannada and Haveri districts which are also part of Mumbai Karnataka region. The region bordering Goa and Maharashtra with seven Lok Sabha seats and 56 Assembly seats has been a BJP stronghold and the Lingayats are a dominant caste here. Mahadayi water dispute with Goa is also a big issue here. The BJP's mishandling of the Mahadayi issue has come as a boon to the ruling Congress and Rahul Gandhi is likely to mention it. The BJP leaders, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi, are avoiding the issue fearing a backlash. The open backing of the Congress to separate religion tag for Lingayats may also help Rahul in galvanising their support in the region. Chief Minister Siddaramaiah will accompany him during the tour and his Kuruba (shepherds) caste also has a large presence in the region. MumbaiKarnataka was under the erstwhile Bombay presidency during the British rule and became a part of Karnataka on November 1, 1956. Even though the region has over three dozen big and small rivers, except Uttara Kannada other parts often face the brunt of drought. Sugar cane, fruits, vegetables, jawar, maize, sunflower, areca nut, coconut are grown here in a large scale. Unlike his previous tour, Rahul is not scheduled to visit any temples this time. KPCC president Dr. G Parameshwara told News18 that he might visit some temples and other places of worship if he passes through them during the tour. In 2013 Assembly polls, the Congress did well in this region. Basaveshwara or Basavannam, the founder of Lingayat religion was born at Basavana Bagewadi in the same region. Rahul Gandhi's three visits coincide with BJP president Amit Shah's tour of neighbouring Hyderabad-Karnataka region. Shah will land at Bidar on Saturday evening and will tour the region for the next three days. Two weeks ago Rahul Gandhi had travelled 700km by road from Bellary to Bidar. Shah will be travelling in the reverse direction from Bidar to southern parts of the region taking the same route. For the next three days the Congress and the BJP would be shifting their base to north Karnataka following their respective leaders. Whoever wins these regions will certainly rule from state capital Bengaluru for the next five years. Googles voice-activated assistant is branching out to Nests deluxe security camera in an expansion that may amplify the privacy concerns surrounding internet-connected microphones. The virtual assistant is being offered to owners of the Nest Cam IQ in a free update rolling out Wednesday. The move comes just two weeks after Nest moved back under Googles direct control after spending nearly 2 1/2 years as a separate company owned by the same parent, Alphabet. The $300 Nest Cam will give Google another potentially valuable earhole in its battle with Amazon and Apple to build digital command centers in peoples home. Also read: Xiaomi Redmi Note 5 Review: Playing it Safe in 2018 That ambition has already spurred warnings from privacy watchdogs about the potential for internet-connected devices being used as surveillance tools. Googles assistant already can be used to control Nests cameras and internet-connected thermostat through its internet-connected speaker, Home, and smartphones running on its Android software. This will be the first time that people will be able to interact with the digital concierge through a security camera. The assistant is only supposed to be activated with keywords such as OK, Google, although there have been instances when the Home speaker has been caught listening when it was supposed to be turned off. Even if Googles assistant doesnt eavesdrop, its presence on an indoor security camera is likely to focus more attention on the handling and protection of the data collected through internet-connected devices. Also read: Walmart to Launch New Online Home Shopping Experience Privacy watchdogs are particularly worried that Google eventually may use some of the information collected from devices inside homes to get a better understanding of a persons specific interests so it can sell ads for products that the targeted individual might like. Google already has used the data that it collects through its ubiquitous search engine and other free services such as maps and email to build the internets most lucrative internet marketing network. Since Google bought it for $3.2 billion, Nest has steadfastly maintained that it doesnt share its customers personal information with Googles ad network. Watch: Tech and Auto Show Ep 31 | Auto Expo 2018 Special | Unveilings & Launches Mumbai: US President Donald Trump's son Donald Trump Jr. on Thursday cut a ribbon to mark the completion of construction of the city's first and only 78-storey ultra-luxury Trump Tower Mumbai, which will perhaps be the first in India to offer the facility of a 'private jet' service to its residents. Built by Mumbai's Lodha Group, the Trump Tower Mumbai rises a majestic 800 feet above the city, adjacent to the Arabian Sea in the posh Worli area. Trump Jr. also unveiled the newly fashioned show residence of the tower, designed by renowned interior designer Hirsch Bedner Associated (HBA), and got a glimpse of Mumbai from the 78th floor of the building. The Trump Tower Mumbai has been constructed under the Lodha Group's Lodha Luxury Collection, marking an amalgamation of the exclusive lifestyles of the two partners, and will be the first in the country to offer a private jet service at the disposal of its residents. However, details of the private jet service were not immediately available. "We are proud to announce that Trump Tower Mumbai has reached its highest level of construction. "Mumbai has emerged as one of the preferable destinations for luxury real estate and we are honoured to have a place within the city," said Trump Jr., who is Executive Vice President, Trump Organisation, as he recalled his association with the project from inception. Located on a seven-acre property, The Park, the gold-hued Trump Tower Mumbai has 400 flats starting from Rs 9 crore for a 3-BHK and Rs 12 crore for a 4-BHK flat. Its construction started in 2014 and it will be ready for occupation in around a year or so. Lodha Group Managing Director Abhishek Lodha said that the completion of the Trump Tower Mumbai "is a significant milestone for the luxury housing market and the overall real estate sector". "It is perhaps one of the very few international standard luxury developments which is coming alive and nearing completion," Lodha said at the unveiling attended by select customers and other invitees. Apart from the private jet service, the Trump Tower Mumbai will offer other facilities like white-glove service, a spa, a private pool, a lounge, gymnasium, central air conditioning, penthouses on the upper floors, Trump Card privilege programme, a seven-tier security system and other world-class amenities, designed by WOHA. The 37-year-old Lodha Group is ranked the largest in India by sales, having clocked over Rs 8,200 crore last year from 7,200 units across various projects. Besides Trump Tower Mumbai, it is developing LODHA Altamount, The World Towers, One Grosvenor Square, Palava and others in various Indian cities and London. Sydney: Australian Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce said on Friday he will resign as leader of his party and will move to the backbench after weeks of pressure over an extra-marital affair with his former media secretary. Joyce said he will step down on Monday as leader of the National party, the junior partner in Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull's centre-right coalition. He will remain in parliament, safeguarding Turnbull's shaky one-seat majority. Joyce, a practising Catholic, has been married for 24 years and has campaigned on "family values". The renewed possibility of his resignation comes after a falling out with Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, who is in the United States for meetings with President Donald Trump and who declined to leave him in charge while he is out of the country. His decision to call a media conference for later on Friday, confirmed by his party, came after a new allegation of sexual harassment was made by an unidentified individual. National Party federal director Ben Hindmarsh confirmed earlier on Friday the party had received the sexual harassment allegation but declined to give any details. A spokesman said Joyce had been made aware of the claims indirectly and believed they were "spurious and defamatory". Two-thirds of Australian voters want Joyce to resign, The Australian newspaper's Newspoll showed earlier this week and discontent has been growing within his rural-focused party, with at least one senior member calling for his resignation. Washington: US President Donald Trump on Friday cast doubt on the character of an armed deputy who failed to intervene during last week's school shooting in Florida, saying he froze or was a "coward." "They're trained, they didn't react properly under pressure or they were a coward," Trump said, calling out the school resource officer Scot Peterson by name. "When it came time to get in there and do something he didn't have the courage or something happened," Trump said. "But he certainly did a poor job. There's no question about that." The Broward County sheriff said Thursday that Peterson was present during the Valentine's Day rampage that left 14 students and three teachers dead at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, but did not act to stop it. Peterson resigned after being suspended without pay. Trump has indicated he is weighing calls for a toughening of gun regulations in the wake of the Parkland shooting, unleashed by a 19-year-old former student armed with a semi-automatic rifle, but has also responded with a deeply controversial call to arm teachers. On Thursday he doubled down on the National Rifle Association's longstanding position that armed Americans were the first line of defense in confronting deadly attacks, saying: "To stop a bad guy with a gun, it takes a good guy with a gun." The US Congress has long been deadlocked on the gun debate, accomplishing nothing despite a spate of mass shootings and polls showing that Americans support stricter gun laws by a two-to-one margin. Washington: Rick Gates, a top adviser to the 2016 Trump campaign and close aide of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, is expected to plead guilty in the ongoing Russia probe being led by special counsel Robert Mueller, according to a person close to Gates. The person said Gates is expected to enter the plea as early as Friday. The person, who spoke on condition of anonymity in order to discuss private conversations, said Gates had informed family and friends in a letter about his decision. A plea could signal that he's planning to cooperate. It would mark the fifth publicly known guilty plea in the probe into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin during the 2016 campaign. The Gates plea would come a day after a federal grand jury in Virginia returned a 32-count indictment against him and Manafort accusing them of tax evasion and bank fraud. It was the second round of charges against the two men. The plea also comes quickly on the heels of a stunning indictment last week that laid out a broad operation of election meddling by Russia, which began in 2014, and employed fake social media accounts and on-the-ground politicking to promote the campaign of Donald Trump, disparage Hillary Clinton and sow division and discord widely among the US electorate. Gates initially pleaded not guilty and has been facing up to 12.5 years in jail based on a 12-count indictment handed up in October accusing him and Manafort of acting as unregistered foreign agents and conspiring to launder millions of dollars they earned while working on behalf of a pro-Russian Ukrainian political party. His guilty plea will almost certainly reduce the prison sentence he could have faced if convicted at trial of all counts. A sealed charge in the case this week, as well as closed-door discussions in recent weeks, had brought speculation that a plea deal for Gates or some other development might be near. Gates' lawyers had filed a motion this month indicating that they had reached "irreconcilable differences" with their client. His new lawyer, veteran Washington white-collar attorney Thomas Green, formally took over Thursday. Green did not respond to a request for comment Friday. As he was kept on house arrest, Gates frequently pleaded with US District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson for leniency to attend sporting events with his four children. He recently brought on Green a high-powered defense attorney, who won a plea deal for former House Speaker Dennis Hastert after he was charged with concealing nearly $1 million of $1.7 million in secret payments to hide allegations of sexual abuse. If Gates agrees to become a cooperating witness as part of a plea deal, he could give Mueller a closer look into Manafort's years of political consulting work in Ukraine, as well as other events that have sparked the interest of federal investigators. Gates had access at the highest levels of the campaign at the same time that Manafort, Donald Trump Jr. and Jared Kushner met with a team of Russians in Trump Tower in June 2016. He was also in the top ranks of the campaign when then-Sen. Jeff Sessions held a pair of undisclosed meetings with Russian ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak. For a few months in 2016, Gates was indispensable to Trump, leading the ground effort to help Trump win the Republican nomination and flying from state to state to secure Republican delegates in a scramble that lasted all the way until the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. But his power and influence waned once Trump fired Manafort in August 2016 after The Associated Press disclosed how Gates and Manafort covertly directed a Washington lobbying campaign on behalf of Ukrainian interests. Gates survived his mentor's ouster and worked through the election on Trump's inaugural committee but among Trump aides he earned the nickname "the walking dead." Gates also worked briefly with the outside political groups supporting Trump's agenda, America First Policies and America First Action, but was pushed out of that job last year. Gates was working for Tom Barrack, a close friend of Trump's, when he was indicted last October. KIGALI: At least five refugees were killed and 20 injured at a camp in Rwanda when a protest over a cut in food rations turned violent, Rwandan police said on Friday. Seven policemen were also injured. Around 3,000 refugees had camped outside United Nations offices at the camp since Tuesday. On Thursday police tried to disperse them using teargas, police spokesman Theos Badege told state radio. "We used force ... yesterday afternoon after warning that security forces would be used," he said. "They started pelting stones, pieces of metal and in that 20 refugees were injured and seven police officers. Five of the refugees died." Fifteen refugees were arrested, the police said on their Twitter account. They said there were about 500 protesters, while UNHCR put the figure at about 700. The refugees from neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo had left their camp in Kiziba and walked 15 km (10 miles) to Karongi, in western Rwanda, to protest against a 25 percent cut implemented last month in rations provided by the U.N. refugee agency (UNHCR). The camp houses 17,000 Congolese. "We regret that our continued appeals for maintaining calm and restraint were not considered. This tragedy should have been avoided, and disproportionate use of force against desperate refugees is not acceptable," Cecile Pouilly, UNHCR spokeswoman, said in a statement. "UNHCR calls on authorities to refrain from further use of force and to investigate the circumstances of this tragic incident." Rwanda hosts about 174,000 refugees, including 57,000 people from neighbouring Burundi who fled violence in 2015. Most of the rest fled the Democratic Republic of Congo during bouts of instability there over the past 20 years. In January, UNHCR said it was cutting rations due to funding shortages. It said on Thursday that its funding appeal of 2018 for Rwanda of $98.8 million was only 2 percent funded, and the World Food Programme had warned of more cuts if its monthly requirements of $2.5 million were not met. Port-au-Prince: Haiti has temporarily revoked Oxfam Great Britain's right to operate in the Caribbean country after allegations of sexual misconduct by some of the charity's staff there, Planning and External Cooperation Minister Aviol Fleurant said on Thursday. The British aid organization has been rocked by allegations that staff, including a former Haiti country director, used prostitutes during a relief mission after a devastating earthquake hit the island nation in 2010. Fleurant said the suspension was ordered due to "serious failings" by Oxfam Great Britain between 2010 and 2011, and that a definitive decision on its ability to operate in Haiti would be made in two months following a review of the evidence. "If during the two month-long investigation I find out there is a link between the aid funds that Oxfam received on behalf of Haiti and the crime that has been committed, we will ... declare Oxfam Great Britain persona non grata and they would have to leave the country without further delay," Fleurant said. Alain Lemithe, a lawyer representing Oxfam Great Britain, called the decision to suspend the charity "hasty and political", saying that it was not based on clear evidence of wrongdoing. "For example, they accused the organization of sexual abuse and use of minors," Lemithe said. "Those are very serious allegations which until now have never been proven." In a separate statement, Fleurant accused Oxfam staff of committing acts of "sexual abuse" and exploitation. The minister said Oxfam Great Britain had "deliberately omitted" to alert Haitian authorities about the alleged misconduct, thereby allowing perpetrators to escape justice. Allegations of misconduct surfaced through media investigations and an internal Oxfam report. Fleurant said the revelations had besmirched the "honor and dignity" of Haiti's people. The suspension of the charity's right to operate did not apply to Oxfam Canada, he said. New Delhi: Amid its domestic crisis, the Election Commission of Maldives has announced the first round of Presidential elections in early September, a move which has been welcomed by the current government under Abdul Yameen. In a statement, the government said that it warmly welcomed the announcement of the poll panel to begin preparations for the presidential elections. The government encouraged all relevant stakeholders to offer the Commission their full, unreserved support for the conduct of their work, the statement read. It further said that the free, fair and credible elections were the foundation of our democracy and that it is essential for continuity for our nations growth, stability and prosperity. The government also invited all international stakeholders to observe the process and also urged the international community to provide support and assistance in bringing back normalcy in the island nation and that they should also refrain from any actions that could hinder resolving the situation the country is facing. The statement comes just hours after the island nation hit back at India for raising concerns over the extension of Emergency. Maldives said that India was far from facts and ground reality. In a statement issued by Maldivian Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Thursday it said that "the assertion by the Government of India that the extension of the State of Emergency by the People's Majlis was unconstitutional is a clear distortion of facts, which ignore the Constitution and Laws of the Maldives." A "deeply dismayed" India had, on Wednesday, reacted strongly over the extension of Emergency in Maldives saying the manner in which the 30-day extension was approved by the Majlis in contravention of the Maldivian Constitution is a "matter of concern". Accepting President Abdulla Yameen's recommendation, the Maldivian Parliament (Majlis) on Tuesday extended the state of Emergency by another 30 days, hours after India had asserted that it was important that the island nation quickly returns to the path of democracy and the rule of law, expecting that there will be no extension. New Delhi: The Financial Action Task Force (FATF) in its latest meeting in Paris has decided to put Pakistan on a grey list for not taking adequate action against proscribed terrorist entities and individuals. The motion, brought forth by the United States, was supported by countries like UK, France, and India. The FATF voted 36 to 1 to grey list Pakistan. The only country that voted in favour of Pakistan was Turkey. Not even traditional friends and allies like China and Turkey voted in favour of Pakistan. This will make it difficult for international financial institutions and banks to do business in Pakistan. Conversely, it will also make it difficult for Pakistani businesses to raise money overseas. Pakistan will also find it hard to service its debt obligations. Pakistan has about 300 billion dollars of sovereign debt which it needs to service by the end of June, failing which it could be in for a sovereign ratings downgrade by international rating agencies like S& P Moodys and Fitch. Domestically, opposition parties the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) and Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) are expected to use this development to attack the ruling PML(N)and its failure to convince the international body. It could also have a negative effect on the PML (N) in the upcoming general elections. There was a report on Friday that China, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, three close allies of Pakistan, have joined hands to block a move by the Trump administration to place Islamabad on an international terror-financing watch list. While Pakistan has claimed a victory of sorts, the US was working behind the scenes during the ongoing Paris meeting of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) to take action against the country which it believes has not acted against terrorist financing and the implementation of the UN Security Council resolutions. Image result for Mexico border Los Angeles (People's Daily) - According to officials at the Chinese embassy in Mexico, the number of Chinese nationals who have been stopped and interrogated upon arrival at Mexico City International Airport has increased. Meanwhile, reports have emerged of Mexican immigration officers asking for "tips" from Chinese travellers during their arrival verification process. As Mexico borders the US, immigration policies are stringent. Mexican authorities said it would improve workflow and provide greater convenience to Chinese visitors. At the same time, it will strengthen supervisory efforts on immigration officers and conduct investigations into alleged bribery incidents. We hope Chinese citizens report bribery on time and assist Mexico in enforcing the law, said by Mexican authorities. The Chinese embassy in Mexico reminded Chinese travellers that according to international law, countries have the right to refuse entry, regardless of visa status, and can do so without reason. The Chinese embassy suggested that all Chinese who will travel to or through Mexico, they should make adequate preparations before arriving. Chinese travellers should carefully study Mexicos entry and exit requirements, be able to prepare related materials upon request, answer questions from Mexican immigration officers upon entry verification, and complete necessary arrival questionnaires. Mexican authorities stated that if entering and leaving the border is rejected, it is recommended to remain calm and avoid unruly behaviour, strengthen communication efforts, and truthfully explain the situation to provide sufficient material for release. If a Mexican immigration officer asks for money, do not oblige the request and record the incident and then promptly report it. In cases of emergency, unjust treatment or disputes, contact Mexican authorities, collect and keep any evidence for future settlements through legal channels. "We will continue to pay close attention to such cases and provide necessary assistance to Chinese nationals in need of help," stated by Mexican authorities. Manila: The Philippine government summoned the US ambassador over an American intelligence report that listed President Rodrigo Duterte and his deadly war on drugs as a "regional threat", Manila said on Friday. US envoy Sung Kim met Duterte's chief aide on Thursday to discuss the US "Worldwide Threat Assessment" released last week, the two nations said. Under a section headed "regional threats", the report listed Cambodian leader Hun Sen's crackdown on dissent, Duterte's war on crime and corruption as well as the flight of the Rohingya minority from Myanmar to Bangladesh. Duterte's spokesman Harry Roque said in a statement that Executive Secretary Salvador Medialdea summoned Kim over the report, which has drawn sharp criticism from the president's camp. "Duterte is no autocrat or has autocratic tendencies. He adheres to the rule of law and remains loyal to the constitution," Roque said this week in response to the report. Duterte was elected in 2016 in part on a vow to kill tens of thousands of criminals in a bid to rid the country of narcotics. The International Criminal Court this month launched a preliminary examination into allegations of thousands of extrajudicial killings committed during the president's narcotics crackdown. A US embassy statement said its ambassador met Medialdea to explain the nature of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence report, which the statement said was "based on widely available information". "Their discussion focused on the references to the Philippines in the report, including clarifying that the information about the Philippines had been previously reported by media sources," the embassy said. "The United States will continue to collaborate with the government of the Philippines," it added. Ties between Washington and its former colony had suffered under previous US president Barack Obama following his criticism of Manila's drug war, with the fiery Duterte calling him a "son of a whore". The two governments say relations have improved since the election in 2016 of US leader Donald Trump. Washington: The Trump administration has announced a new policy that makes very tough the procedure of issuing H-1B visas to those to be employed at one or more third-party worksites, a move that will hugely impact Indian IT companies and their employees. Under the new policy, the company would have to go an extra length to prove that its H-1B employee at a third-party worksite has specific and non-qualifying speculative assignments in speciality occupation. The H-1B programme offers temporary US visas that allow companies to hire highly skilled foreign professionals working in areas with shortages of qualified American workers. Indian IT companies, which are among the major beneficiaries of H-1B visas, has a significant number of its employees deployed at third-party worksites. A significant number of American banking, travel and commercial services depend on on-site IT workers from India to get their job done. The new move announced yesterday through a seven-page policy empowers the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to issue H-1B visas to an employee only for the period for which he/she has work at a third-party worksite. As such the issuing of H-1B visas could be of less than three years. This would reverse the tradition of issuing the H-1B visas for three years at a time. Effective immediately, the new guidance comes weeks ahead of the beginning of the H-1B visas filing season, which is expected to be April 2, for the fiscal year 2019 beginning October 1, 2018. The guidance says in order for an H-1B petition involving a third-party worksite to be approved, the petitioner must show by a preponderance of the evidence that the beneficiary will be employed in a specialty occupation and the employer will maintain an employer-employee relationship with the beneficiary for the duration of the requested validity period. When H-1B beneficiaries are placed at third-party worksites, the companies must demonstrate that they have specific and non-speculative qualifying assignments in a speciality occupation for that beneficiary for the entire time requested on the petition. While an H-1B petition may be approved for up to three years, the USCIS will, in its discretion, generally limit the approval period to the length of time demonstrated that the beneficiary will be placed in non-speculative work and during which the petitioner will maintain the requisite employer-employee relationship, an official statement said. Extensions of H-1B visas have become even tougher, in particular, if the employee has been on a bench for any part of their previous duration. Sometimes American companies abruptly end the contract of an employee, as a result, the workers temporarily do not have any work, which in IT parlance is called on the bench. During this period, while they maintain their H-1B visas status, official investigations have revealed that foreign IT workers on H-1B visas do not get paid, which the USCIS says is illegal and abuse of the system. "If an H-1B petitioner is applying to extend H-1B employment for a beneficiary who was placed at one or more third-party worksites during the course of past employment with the same petitioner, that petitioner should also establish that the H-1B requirements have been met for the entire prior approval period," the USCIS said. And if these conditions are not met, and if the petitioner did not comply with the terms and conditions of the original petition and did not file an amended petition on time, USCIS may have eligibility concerns about a subsequent petition filed to extend the beneficiary's employment, the policy memorandum said. The latest policy memorandum is part of President Donald Trump's 'Buy American and Hire American Executive Order' and the directive to protect the interests of US workers, it said. Employment-based petitioners who circumvent the worker protections outlined in the nations immigration laws not only injure US workers (eg their wages and job opportunities), but also the foreign workers for whom they are petitioning, it said. Companies seeking H-1B visas for their employees working at a third-party site, would now have an intensive paper work to file before submitting their applications. This includes evidence of actual work assignments, which may include technical documentation, milestone tables, marketing analysis, cost-benefit analysis, brochures, and funding documents. The letter should provide information, such as a detailed description of the specialised duties the beneficiary will perform, the qualifications required to perform those duties, the duration of the job, salary or wages paid, hours worked, benefits, a detailed description of who will supervise the beneficiary and the beneficiarys duties, and any other related evidence, the USCIS said. Washington: Longstanding friction between US President Donald Trump and two top aides, the National Security Adviser and the Chief of Staff, has grown to a point that either or both might quit soon, four senior administration officials said. Both HR McMaster and John Kelly are military men considered by US political observers as moderating influences on the president by imposing a routine on the White House. They have also convinced Trump of the importance of international alliances, particularly NATO, which he has criticised as not equally sharing its burdens with the United States. However, all the officials were quick to add that the tensions could blow over, at least for now, as have previous episodes of discord between the president and other top officials who have fallen out of favor, including Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Asked about sources saying that either National Security Adviser McMaster or Chief of Staff Kelly, or both, might be leaving, White House spokesman Raj Shah on Thursday did not address the possibility. He said, "the president has full confidence in each member of the team." Press secretary Sarah Sanders said on Tuesday that Trump "still has confidence in General McMaster." Neither Kelly nor McMaster responded to requests for comment on whether they would remain in the administration. Trump swatted McMaster in a Twitter post after his comments at a European conference last weekend that he was certain Russia meddled in the 2016 U.S. election campaign, which Trump has been reluctant to acknowledge. Kelly and McMaster have chafed at Trump's treatment of them in public and in private, which both at times have considered insulting, said all four officials, speaking on condition of anonymity. The current and most potent irritant, they said, is Kelly's effort, supported by McMaster, to prevent administration officials who have been unable to obtain permanent high-level security clearances from having access to the government's most closely held secrets. Under pressure to act last week, Kelly strengthened the security clearance process in response to a scandal involving Rob Porter, a former official accused of domestic abuse by two ex-wives. Staffers whose interim clearances have been pending since June would have them revoked on Friday. That would bar Trump's son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner from reading the president's daily intelligence brief, which often contains information on covert operations and intelligence collected from spy satellites, spies, and close US allies. "There have been running battles between Trump and his generals," said one of the officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity. Kelly is a retired Marine general and McMaster an Army lieutenant general. "But the clearance business is personal, and if Trump sets special rules for family members, I'm not sure if Kelly and McMaster would salute," the official said. White House officials were working to find a compromise that would allow Kushner to continue his work as a senior adviser to Trump, another source familiar with the situation said, also speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal White House matters. Under current law and regulation, the president has authority to grant any level of clearance to anyone he chooses, but officials wanted to avoid that option, this official said. There was no sense that Kushner would be leaving his job. Kelly declined to comment on anybody's specific security clearance. He said in a statement that he had told Kushner days ago that he had "full confidence in his ability to continue performing his duties in his foreign policy portfolio." Kelly said those duties include overseeing the Israeli-Palestinian peace effort and serving as an integral part of the US relationship with Mexico. McMaster's support for Kelly on the security clearance issue is only his latest difference with Trump. Officials in the Defense Department said there have been discussions about him returning to the Army, possibly as head of the Forces Command at Fort Bragg, in North Carolina. McMaster, 55, previously served as deputy commander there. Although he has been supportive of Trump on many issues, including threatening North Korea with military action, McMaster has taken a harder stance on Russia than his boss. After US Special Counsel Robert Mueller charged 13 Russians, a Russian propaganda arm and two other firms on February 16 with tampering in the election to boost Trump, McMaster said the evidence of Moscow's meddling was "incontrovertible." Trump publicly chastised McMaster in a Twitter post, saying McMaster "forgot to say that the results of the 2016 election were not impacted by the Russians." Geneva: The deputy head of UNAIDS, accused of sexually assaulting a female colleague but cleared of wrongdoing by an internal United Nations probe, announced his decision to step down on Friday. Luiz Loures "has communicated his wish to the UNAIDS executive director not to seek the renewal of his position," the agency said in a statement. Loures, a Brazilian national, "will end his term as deputy executive director at the end of March 2018," it added. UNAIDS spokesman Mahesh Mahalingam told reporters in Geneva that Loures's decision had no connection to the allegations against him, noting the findings of the internal UN probe. A junior female colleague filed a formal complaint alleging that Loures sexually harassed her beginning in 2011 and sexually assaulted her in a lift at a Bangkok hotel in 2015, where UNAIDS was hosting a major conference. The internal probe conducted by the World Health Organization's Office of Internal Oversight Services (IOS) said there was insufficient evidence to support the allegations. But activists and a legal expert have questioned the credibility of the investigation, insisting that important circumstantial evidence was not taken into account. UNAIDS chief Michel Sidibe was faulted by the IOS for trying to settle the dispute quietly even as an official probe was underway. Loures's decision to step down comes a day after UNICEF's deputy director Justin Forsyth resigned from the UN children's agency following complaints of inappropriate behaviour towards female staff in his previous post as head of British charity Save The Children. Washington: The United States is expected to open its embassy to Israel in Jerusalem in May, a US official told Reuters on Friday, a move from Tel Aviv that reverses decades of U.S. policy. U.S. President Donald Trump announced last year that the United States recognized Jerusalem as Israel's capital, infuriating even Washington's Arab allies and dismaying Palestinians who want the eastern part of the city as their capital. A May opening appears to represent an earlier time frame than what had been expected. While speaking in the Israeli parliament last month, U.S. Vice President Mike Pence said the move would take place by the end of 2019. The opening will coincide with the 70th anniversary of Israel's founding, said the U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity. Washington: The head of the National Rifle Association lashed out at gun control advocates on Thursday, saying Democratic elites are politicizing the latest mass school shooting in the United States to try to erode constitutionally guaranteed gun rights. NRA chief executive Wayne LaPierre echoed President Donald Trump's call to arm teachers to prevent school shootings and weighed in on a long-running political and cultural divide over access to weapons that have been inflamed by last week's massacre at a Florida high school that killed 17 students and staff. "The elites don't care not one whit about America's school system and school children," LaPierre told a friendly audience of conservatives outside Washington. "Their goal is to eliminate the Second Amendment and our firearms freedoms so they can eradicate all individual freedoms." The US Constitution's Second Amendment protects the right to bear arms. At the White House, Trump told local and state school officials he had discussed his ideas to stem gun violence in schools with the NRA, the politically influential gun lobby that backed him in the 2016 campaign. He called the group "Great American Patriots." "There's a tremendous feeling that we want to get something done," he said. "The NRA wants to do the right thing." Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer condemned LaPierre's comments and said the NRA was "once again spewing pathetic, out of touch ideas, blaming everything but guns." The Feb. 14 rampage at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida was the latest in a series of deadly shootings at U.S. schools and has spurred unprecedented youth-led protests in cities across the country. Many of the teenagers and their parents taking part have called for more curbs on guns. LaPierre, speaking at the annual gathering of the Conservative Political Action Conference, portrayed the NRA as the true protector of the country's schoolchildren and offered free training to those who want to bear arms to protect schools. "We must immediately harden our schools," he said. "Every day, young children are being dropped off at schools that are virtually wide open, soft targets for anyone bent on mass murder." It should not be easier to shoot up a school than a bank or a jewelry store, he added. The NRA set up a booth at the conference to sign up new members and recruit campaign field workers for the November mid-term elections in which Democrats are trying to take over control of Congress from Trump's fellow Republicans. ARMED TEACHERS "I'm strongly for concealed carry, strongly for arming the teachers like Trump said," said Nick Fuentes, 19, from Chicago, as he stood outside the booth. "Teachers who are adept at firearms should be armed." LaPierre attacked Democrats by name including Senators Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren and Christopher Murphy and also took a swipe at the FBI for failing to follow up on a tip about the alleged shooter in the Parkland massacre. The FBI has said it failed to act on the tip. Florida Governor Rick Scott also criticized the FBI for failing so far to provide details about why it did not respond to the tip. "Family members and loved ones of the victims deserve answers today," Scott said in a statement. Trump reiterated his idea, first raised on Wednesday during an emotional discussion with people affected by the shooting, to arm teachers, a notion raised by some politicians in the past but dismissed by critics as fraught with danger. "Anyone who pushes arming teachers doesn't understand teachers and doesn't understand our schools. Adding more guns to schools may create an illusion of safet, , but in reality it would make our classrooms less safe," said Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers union. At an hourlong meeting on school safety with 10 state and local officials, Trump said armed teachers with an aptitude for guns would deter would-be shooters. "A gun-free zone to a killer, or somebody that wants to be a killer, that's like going in for the ice cream," Trump said. "They're not going to walk into a school if 20 percent of the teachers have guns." Trump repeated his support for tightening background checks for gun buyers, with an emphasis on mental health, and lifting the age limit to buy some kinds of guns. He also said he would push for an end to the sale of bump stocks, which allow rifles to shoot hundreds of rounds a minute. The White House said Trump does not want to ban sales of an entire class of firearms despite mounting pressure to put assault weapons such as the one used in the Florida shooting out of civilian reach. While gun laws vary widely by state, most federal gun control measures would require Congress to act. A 19-year-old former student at Stoneman Douglas, Nikolas Cruz, has been charged with carrying out the Parkland shooting. Authorities say he was armed with a semiautomatic AR-15 assault-style rifle that he had purchased legally last year. Police seal off part of Belgian capital in search of possible gunman Belgium police and helicopters are surrounding the area. (Reuters/RTL/Sky) Brussels (People's Daily) - Belgium police Thursday sealed off part of a Brussels suburb, where the mayor said a suspected gunman could be at large. Images from the scene showed heavily armed police hiding behind buildings and scouting the rooftop of a building in the Forest district of the Belgian capital. A police helicopter could be heard overhead. The police response began at around lunchtime. A Belgian police officer prepares his gun while taking a position on a roof. (Reuters) Forest Mayor Marc-Jean Ghyssels told local broadcaster RTL that police "suspect the presence of an armed man, or several men." "There is nothing to indicate it has anything to do with terrorism, Ghyssels said. A spokeswoman for Belgian police said that "special units of the federal police" had been deployed after a man reported that someone had been murdered on Thursday morning. They are searching the buildings but we can say there has not been any terrorist attack. Photo via AP live streaming videos Forest made international headlines in November 2015 after Salah Abdeslam, a suspect in the deadly Paris attacks, hid there and became involved in a gun battle with police. Brussels has been on high alert since suicide bombers killed 32 people at the city airport and on the metro in March 2016. Last month, Prime Minister Charles Michel announced that Belgium's terrorism threat level had been reduced from three to two, stating that there was "little likelihood" of an attack. Ambassador Wu Peng, addressing his audience Ambassador of the Peoples Republic of China to Sierra Leone, Wu Peng has assured Sierra Leoneans of his government commitment to support the strengthening of the West African countrys industrialization process. Addressing a graduation ceremony at the E4 Impact Foundation in Lunsar, northern Sierra Leone the Chinese Ambassador pointed out that said developing industry sector is key to the progress of any nation across the globe. Ambassador Wu who promised to donate sewing machines, Television set and other equipment together with cash support, revealed that his Embassy has already requested for a team of experts from his country to come to Sierra Leone to train specifically those in the industry sector, and assured that the team will soon arrive and will be based in Lunsar to train mostly young people. Industry development is very important for any nation. We will continue to support the sector in Sierra Leone, he said, noting that people should treat their education with all seriousness. E4 Impact Foundation was pioneered by the current Minister of Social Welfare, Gender and Childrens Affairs, Hon. Isata Kabia. The Foundation presented certificates to 38 Trainees that have successfully completed a comprehensive training, and they now have the opportunity to become self-employed and tap the local market to sell their products. They now have the skills to use organic materials to manufacture soap, oil, shoes, bags, cosmetics like shampoos; cleaners like antiseptic etc. Speaking at the ceremony, Hon. Isata Kabia pointed out that leadership by example is key to the success of any institution or environment. Leaders, she said should feel part of any form of good development. The Grandaunts, she said are now good leaders that should effect positive changes in their lives and communities. The Minister admonished Trade Unionists to come onboard to create a good market for the products that will be manufactured, which are of quality standards. This is a comprehensive capacity building package and jobs have been created already for the 38 first intakes since the institution started operation in July last year, she said. Dignitaries commending Chinas development support to Sierra Leone The All Peoples Congress Party Running Mate, Hon. Chernor Maju Bah in his keynote address described the project as very impressive, noting that it is resonating with Skills and Enterprise Development package as contained in the Partys Grassroots manifesto. APC is marching forward to development. We will continue in building new ideas that enhance progress in the country, he assured. He thanked the Peoples Republic of China for its support over the years to the countrys development, Hon. Bah said he reiterated the fact that the Chinese have peoples development as their greatest interest. He called on all to support the project at all times so that more people will benefit from it. Pledges were made by other eminent personalities for the development of the Foundation. Other speakers include the Minister of Works, Housing and Infrastructure, Hon. Ibrahim Kemoh Sesay. The event was chaired by the Secretary-General of the APC, Ambassador Osman Foday Yansanneh. HANOI, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- China overpassed the United States to become Vietnam's biggest export market in January, the General Department of Vietnam Customs said on Friday. Vietnam exported roughly 3.7 billion U.S. dollars worth of goods to China last month, up 106 percent against January 2017, said the department. Specifically, Vietnam exported nearly 895 million U.S. dollars worth of phones and their components to China, a 19-fold increase from January 2017; some 691 million U.S. dollars worth of computers, electronic appliances and components, up 80.1 percent; and 296.3 million U.S. dollars worth of vegetables and fruits, up 68.6 percent. Last month, Vietnam spent nearly 5.8 billion U.S. dollars importing products from China, said the department. POLICE in Mutare busted a smuggling syndicate involving two Chinese and two Zimbabweans after they smuggled goods worth thousands of dollars into the country from Mozambique. The four Lin Ruming (23), Charles Bruce (43), Francis Taivavashe (24) and Ariston Chipenzi (38) were on Tuesday arraigned before Mutare provincial magistrate, Mr Tendai Mahwe for contravening Section 1 (b) (2) of the Customs and Excise Act Chapter 23: 02. They denied the charges and were remanded to February 27, 2018 on $100 bail each. The quartet was ordered to report at their nearest police stations once every Friday and not to interfere with State witnesses. Mr Fletcher Karombe represented the State. The court heard that on December 15, 2017, Bruce approached Tamiyara Logistics that his consignment be cleared at Forbes Border Post. The consignment, which belonged to ZimCN Investment was supposed to have been made up of pipes, angle steel, channel steel, jack hammers, steel wire rope, fibre cables, brake motor and helical-lobe compressors. The consignment arrived at the border post in a haulage truck which was being driven by Taivavashe. Chipenzi, who is an employee of Tamiyana Logistics handled the Zimbabwe Revenue Authority clearance and was given the release order. The consignment was however, moved to ZIMRA GMS for final clearance which was scheduled for February 1, 2018. Police, however received information to the effect that Taivavashe had smuggled goods and a physical examination was then conducted leading to the discovery of the smuggled goods inside the trucks containers, said Mr Karombe. Tirivashe is alleged to have implicated Chipenzi , who then implicated Bruce as the owner of the consignment. Bruce is further alleged to have implicated Ruming, who is said to represent ZimCN, which owns the consignment. The smuggled goods includes a huge volumes of generators, compressors, electric cable bundles, wheel barrows, roofing sheets, drilling tool boxes, meter boxes and others were worth thousands of dollars. Manica Post AT LEAST one person was killed and two others were seriously injured yesterday evening in Harare when police clashed with the commuting public in the Central Business District. Two vehicles were reduced to ashes while the Harare Central Police Station was stoned and heavily damaged by a rowdy mob. Windows at the entrance of Zimbabwe Republic police charge office were shattered by missiles as people protested the death of a yet to be identified man under unclear circumstances. The mayhem followed a directive by Harare City Council banning commuter omnibus operators and on-street vendors from coming to the CBD in an Operation dubbed Clean up CBD. There were running battles last night as the crowd threw missiles at the police while the cops fired tear gas canisters. This resulted in the death of one person. People who to The Herald said trouble started when the police approached a Chitungwiza bound kombi that was dropping passengers at Seke road flyover. The driver is said to have resisted instructions by the police not to drop passengers at the undesignated point. Police fired tear gas canisters to wade off the marauding crowd. The police fired warning shots to try to disperse the swelling crowd who were already jeering at them, said Mr Marvellous Vhiriri. The crowd later regrouped and pitched up at ZRP charge office in central Harare where they threw missiles leaving a trail of destruction. The regrouping of the crowd seemed to have caught the police ill-prepared. They withdrew and called for reinforcement. When The Herald arrived at charge office around 2000HRS missiles were strewn all over in the charge office while the body of the deceased still lay on the floor. Police details could also be seen pushing vehicles that were parked adjacent to charge office in a bid to save them from catching fire. The bus terminus had been cordoned off. Police details could be seen patrolling the area around the terminus while intermittently firing tear gas canisters. Police spokesperson Senior Assistant Commissioner Charity Charambas mobile phone was unreachable last night while her deputy Chief Superintendent Paul Nyathi was not picking calls. Harare city council had announced that it was relocating commuter omnibuses and on-street vendors from CBD. Government has since reversed the council decision to allow for further consultation. Herald Raza Rabbani ISLAMABAD: Chairman of the Senate of Pakistan Raza Rabbani has said that the Pakistan-China relationship is a wall against western designs in the region. Speaking as the chief guest at the launch of a report, CPEC: Facts versus Fiction, he said the western designs in the region included destabilisation through regime change. Rabbani said that Unites States was currently trying to impose India as a regional policeman. The programme was organised by the Pakistan-China Institute, a think-tank devoted to promoting people-to-people relations between Pakistan and China, in collaboration with JS Group. The report has been prepared with an aim to clear misconception about the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). At the programme the institute`s project of establishing Chinese language classes in various cities of Pakistan was also inaugurated. The Senate chairman said that the Pakistan-China friendship was the demonstration of the Asian Dream. He said initiatives like the CPEC and One Belt One Road have added further impetus to bilateral relations between Pakistan and China. Mr Rabbani lambasted western countries for their imperialist past, colonialism and their current political philosophies that included designs to politically destabilise various countries of the world. "West has finally realised that the people of Asia would shape the destiny of their region and would take a lead in making the Asian dream come true by controlling its own resources," he said. Chinese Ambassador to Pakistan Yao Jing said that the Pakistan-China relations were achieving new heights and that the CPEC was the manifestation of the bond between the two countries. He said China had always stood by Pakistan just as Pakistan stood by China. This is all weather friendship between the two "iron brothers," he added. The founder of Pakistan-China Institute, Senator Mushahid Hussain Saiyed, said that there had been deliberate attempts to create misconceptions about the CPEC in which India and its western patrons played a prominent part. The reason behind creating such misconceptions was geo-political because there was an attempt to build up India as a counterweight to China with baseless propaganda about the China threats. Gabby Petito's Mom: The Last Text She Sent Me Was Odd (Newser) A witness called 911 on Oct. 6 after seeing Tron Gorbonosenko allegedly crash his Ford Mustang into a parked car and utility pole, confronting him after he left the vehicle, and smelling alcohol on his breath. Three police officers came to the Indiana scene, and the witness told them it appeared Gorbonosenko's car had also been driven into a ditch. Little more than an hour and a half after that 911 call, police were again dispatchedthis time to the scene of a fatal crash. Gorbonosenko's Mustang had crashed into a minivan driven by Donald and Angela Kaczmarek. (The Mustang crossed the centerline, according to a report at the time.) The couple was killed in the crash; 40-year-old Gorbonosenko, an off-duty paramedic, was critically injured but survived. Now, a tort claim filed by the law office representing the Kaczmarek family says police were negligent in letting Gorbonosenko go when they initially encountered him. story continues below According to the claim, which estimates $700,000 in damages is due to the Kaczmareks' estate and indicates a civil lawsuit may be coming, the officers did not ask to see Gorbonosenko's license, did not conduct field sobriety tests, and did not take his keys or his car. It also alleges the officers opened the doors of the car to inspect it, and notes that empty alcohol bottles were later found on the vehicle's floor. The Herald-Argus, upon learning of the claim, requested a copy of the police report related to the officers' initial interaction with Gorbonosenkoand was told there wasn't one. Gorbonosenko, who was allegedly found to have a blood alcohol content of more than twice the legal limit at 0.17 after the fatal crash, faces multiple felony charges that could lead to as many as 36 years behind bars and fines of as much as $40,000. (Read more drunk driving stories.) (Newser) Special counsel Robert Mueller unveiled 32 new criminal charges against former Trump advisers Paul Manafort and Rick Gates on Thursday, the Wall Street Journal reports. The charges are laid out in an indictment from a federal grand jury in Virginia. According to ABC News, there are 16 counts related to false individual income tax returns, seven counts for failure to report foreign bank and financial accounts, five counts for bank fraud conspiracy, and four counts for bank fraud. The charges are similar to those filed against Manafort in October in a federal court in Washington DC, the New York Times reports. Manafort is a former Trump campaign chairman, and Gates was his campaign deputy. story continues below In the new indictment, Gates is charged with helping Manafort avoid taxes on his income. They're both accused of getting over $20 million in loans by "falsely inflating" Manafort's income. Manafort is charged with giving false information to banks when he applied for mortgages. Gates and Manafort had already faced charges out of Washington DC for failing to file tax and lobbying reports, and Manafort was accused of laundering millions of dollars and secretly lobbying for the pro-Russia government in Ukraine. While the charges are unrelated to President Trump, the Times state they "paint an unflattering portrait of the man who ran the Trump campaign." Mueller said he was prepared to bring all charges in Washington DC, but either Manafort or Gates chose to keep the new charges in Virginia, NBC News reports. (Read more Paul Manafort stories.) (Newser) Quincy Jones is sorry he said Marlon Brando and Richard Pryor had sex in the 70s. The 84-year-old music producer is also sorry he said The Beatles were terrible musicians, President Trump is a terrible person, Michael Jackson stole songs, and he dated Ivanka Trump. Jones apologized Thursday for stunning interviews he gave to Vulture and GQ last month, according to the Hollywood Reporter. In a statement, Jones blamed his fuzzy memory from quitting alcohol a few years ago and "word vomit." "I am sorry to anyone whom my words offended, and I am especially sorry to my friends who are still here with me and those who aren't," Jones said. He said he decided to apologize after his six daughters held a "surprise 'family intervention.'" The AV Club notes Jones didn't retract any of his statements, which is good news because his Vulture interview "will live forever in the hearts of celebrity news connoisseurs." (Read more Quincy Jones stories.) (Newser) I am devastated, the Miami Herald quotes Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel as saying. Sick to my stomach. He never went in. Israel suspended Scot Petersonthe school resource officer assigned to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parklandpending an investigation into his actions during the Feb. 14 shooting that left 17 dead. Peterson, 54, resigned and retired shortly after his suspension was announced Thursday, the Sun Sentinel reports. He had been the school resource officer at Stoneman Douglas since 2009 and with the sheriff's office since 1985. He was named School Resource Officer of the Year for the City of Parkland District in 2014. But a review of witness statements and security footage from the Feb. 14 shooting called Peterson's actions into question, according to NBC Miami story continues below Israel says Peterson was armed and "absolutely on campus" when the shooting started. He says Peterson took up a position outside the school and stayed there for over four minutes as the shooting went on. The sheriff says Peterson should have "went in, addressed the killer, killed the killer." "There are no words," he says. "These families lost their children." The investigation into Peterson will continue. Israel also admits to other possible failures in the months and years before the shooting. A tip to the sheriff's office in November that Nikolas Cruz "could be a school shooter in the making" didn't get written up. A relative had called the sheriff's office and asked it to seize Cruz's weapons weeks before the tip. And two years earlier a deputy investigated a report that Cruz "planned to shoot up the school" with nothing coming of the investigation. (Read more Parkland school shooting stories.) (Newser) Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has accepted the state parole board's recommendation and is sparing the life of convicted killer Thomas "Bart" Whitaker, the AP reports. The 38-year-old Whitaker was set for execution Thursday evening for masterminding a murder plot that took the lives of his mother and younger brother at the family home in suburban Houston in 2003. His father, also wounded in the shootings, has long favored clemency for his son, saying he's forgiven him. The seven-member parole board Tuesday unanimously recommended Whitaker's death sentence be reduced. Prosecutors who convinced a jury to send him to death row said the parole board's decision was wrong and negated the jurors' verdict. It's the first time in more than a decade that a Texas governor has halted an imminent execution. story continues below Whitaker says he's "thankful" for Abbott's decision because of what it means for his dad. Whitaker said in a statement to prison officials: "I'm thankful not for me but for my dad." He went on to say, "Any punishment that I would have or will receive is just, but my dad did nothing wrong." Texas prison officials had described Whitaker as nearly stoic after his move from death row to a holding cell steps from the death chamber. Asked if he planned to make a final statement, he told officials he would but had no plans to "do anything self-aggrandizing." Whitaker will instead serve life in prison. (Read more death penalty stories.) (Newser) Chased by Chevy: Police say actor Chevy Chase pursued a driver across a bridge over the Hudson River before being kicked in an apparent road rage incident earlier this month. New York State Police say the 74-year-old actor has told them he followed another vehicle across the Gov. Mario M. Cuomo Bridge into Rockland County after he was cut off and thought his Mercedes had been damaged by a Dodge Ram, the Journal News reports. Chase and the other driver, 22-year-old Michael Landrio, exchanged angry words after pulling over at an exit, police say. Landrio, who allegedly kicked the actor in the shoulder, was charged with second-degree harassment. story continues below Landrio has told police he kicked Chase in self-defense. He tells Page Six that he was driving upstate to go snowmobiling with his girlfriend and another couple when the chase began. "It was an old guy yellingsomething we couldn't hearsuper pissed-off," he says. "We just tried to get the heck away from him. He followed us the whole length of the bridge, driving crazy." Landrio says after they pulled over, Chase started swearing and screaming that he would "ruin their lives." He says he kicked the actor after Chase yanked open his car door and started trying to attack him inside his vehicle. Landrio says he didn't know who the man was. "I looked him up on Google and I still didn't know who he was," he says. "He didn't look like he looked when he made his movies." (Read more Chevy Chase stories.) (Newser) Investigators in Tennessee say nude photos recovered from a former police officer's phone could be evidence of two crimesor possibly three, since Nashville Mayor Megan Barry says if the photos are of her, they were taken without her consent. In an affidavit, the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation says photos from former Sgt. Rob Forrest's phone show that an extramarital affair he had with the mayor happened while he was on duty as her bodyguard, the Tennessean reports. The photos were allegedly taken during times Forrest claimed overtime pay on two trips to Washington, DC, with Barry. The affidavit cites possible misconduct of public officials and "theft of property," which legal experts believe refers to the overtime pay Forrest claimed. Barry, who is married, admitted the affair last month but said she wouldn't step down. story continues below The TBI says Forrest's phone has also yielded evidence of 260 deleted chats between him and the mayor. Records show the TBI has seized the mayor's phone, but she has refused to unlock it. Barry tells WSMV that she was "furious" when she learned about the photos. "If they exist, they were taken without my knowledge and without my consent. It didnt show that I have done anything wrong or criminal and, in fact, if anything was wrongly done, it was done to me personally," she says. The mayor says she told the TBI they could look at anything from her phone that related to the investigation, but they wanted everything between "me and my mom and my husband and my son and my attorney and that just didn't feel right." (The governor of Missouri was indicted Thursday over an alleged compromising photo.) (Newser) Defense Secretary James Mattis earlier this month called "perplexing" the fighting in Syria between US troops and their allies against supposed Russian mercenaries. Now, US intelligence reports may shed some light on the Kremlin's ties to it all, with fingers pointing to a Russian oligarch thought to be in charge of the mercenaries and said to have been in contact with both the Russian and Syrian governments shortly before the assault. The Washington Post identifies Yevgeny Prigozhin as that oligarch, and his name may ring a bell: He was one of 13 Russian nationals indicted last week by Robert Mueller for funding and managing an "information warfare" troll farm that targeted the US presidential election. Prigozhin's alleged communications with Syria and Russia raises eyebrows, as the Kremlin had insisted the Russians fighting the US troops and their allies weren't Russian soldiers. story continues below Intercepted communications reveal Prigozhin told a top-level Syrian official he'd "secured permission" from an un-IDed Russian minister to go ahead with a "fast and strong" action set for early February. A few days later, he noted he had a "good surprise" in store on behalf of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, set to take place "between 6 and 9 February" (the US and Syrian opposition forces were attacked on the night of Feb. 7). The mercenaries involved in the attack are said to be a mix of military vets and "ultra-nationalist" Russians employed by a firm called Wagner. Russia keeps changing its story, and US intelligence officials aren't commenting, but a senior US administration official calls the attack "worrisome." The New York Times, which offers Prigozhin's nickname as "Putin's cook," details the oligarch's rise from hot dog vendor to "one of Russia's richest men," one with close ties to Putin himself. (Read more Syria stories.) ABC/Image Group LACanadian duo High Valley officially has their biggest U.S. hit so far, as Shes with Me is just one spot away from countrys top ten. Last March, brothers Brad and Curtis Rempel made it to #16 with Make You Mine, the first release from their Dear Life album. But Shes with Me has always been a fan favorite. Picking a single is tough, Curtis explains, because we're proud of all the music that we've recorded. And we don't record music unless we are proud of it, you know. We did see a lot of reaction to 'She's with Me' before we released it as a single, and we could definitely tell that people were fired up about it ahead of time. Brad, on the other hand, says High Valley's goals go beyond just having hit songs. For us, singles [are] just one way of getting people to come and see the live show or buy the record he tells ABC Radio. We never started a band saying, 'I really hope we have one song that people like,' you know. But you have to pick what song is gonna do the best job of convincing people to want to know more about the band. And whether they love 'Make You Mine' and 'She's with Me' or not, Brad continues, that's not gonna be what they go home talking about is one song or two songs. We'll have to give 'em a show, and we're pumped at the challenge, and we're up for it. Next month, High Valley extends their fan base even farther, as they take their live show to Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and Australia -- all within less than a ten-day stretch. Copyright 2018, ABC Radio. All rights reserved. Chinese President Xi Jinping and German Chancellor Angela Merkel attend a signing ceremony after their talks in Berlin, capital of Germany, July 5, 2017. (Xinhua/Ma Zhancheng) Chinas investment in the western Balkans has once again stirred controversy among European leaders, with German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Wednesday warning that China must not link its investment to political demands, a remark that was criticized by experts as Cold War mentality. During a joint press conference in Berlin with Macedonian Prime Minister Zoran Zaev, Merkel noted that free trade must be reciprocal and not just from one side but from all sides. The Chancellor later claimed that she has no objections to the fact that China wants to trade and invest. The question isare the economic relations being linked with political questions? she was quoted as saying by AFP. Merkels remarks are in line with a recently rising tide of China threat rhetoric in Europe. Such remarks show European countries distrust in a rising China, a Cold War mentality caused by their misinterpretation of Chinas development and political system, Sun Chenghao, an assistant research fellow of China Institute of Contemporary International Relation, told Peoples Daily Online. As a major supporter and impeller of the European Integration, Germany has been querying Chinas Belt and Road Initiative and 16+1 cooperation, fearing that such projects may undermine the integration and development of Europe, which, of course is not correct, added Sun. Merkel is not the first European leader that slashed China for its investment in Europe. During the three-day Munich Security Conference wrapped up on Feb. 18, German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel accused China of constantly trying to test and undermine the unity of the European Union, while French President Emmanuel Marcon on a recent China visit warned that some European countries are much more open to Chinese interests, sometimes at the expense of a European interest, according to AFP. [File photo] Following Chinas increasing global influence, China threat rhetoric has once again gained popularity in western countries, as the latter can either accept Chinas rise as a totally different political and ideological entity or admit the fact that they are losing edge in their traditional sphere of influence, Sun noted. Despite Germanys accusation, Chinese authorities have been reiterating its stance on supporting the European integration. Hua Chunying, spokesperson of Chinas Ministry of Foreign Affairs, noted in August 2017 that German should stop making irresponsible remarks that will not help enhance mutual trust and cooperation. When the EU faces many internal problems, I believe that China's firm support to the European integration is ever more precious and valuable and should be cherished by the European side, said Hua. As EUs biggest source of imports and second-biggest export market, China trades with EU on average over 1 billion euros a day, making it an irreplaceable partner for the steadily economic growth of Europe, according to European Commission. (Newser) The nation's largest privately owned bank holding company and a major car rental chain are stopping promotions aimed at National Rifle Association members. The Nebraska-based First National Bank of Omaha will not renew its contract to issue the group's NRA Visa card, spokesman Kevin Langin said in a statement Thursday. "Customer feedback has caused us to review our relationship with the NRA," Langin said. He declined to say when the contract would expire and wouldn't elaborate on what sort of feedback the company had received, the AP reports. Separately, car rental company Enterprise said its three brands would end a discount program for NRA members. story continues below Both companies released their statements dozens of times on Twitter in response to calls for them to sever ties with the NRA. Some Twitter users who identified themselves as customers pledged to take their business elsewhere. On Thursday, the First National Bank webpage that advertised the NRA card had been disabled. A cached version of the site touted the card as "the official credit card of the NRA" and noted the benefits of membership. Twitter accounts for Enterprise and its two other brands, Alamo and National, tweeted late Thursday: "All three of our brands have ended the discount for NRA members. This change will be effective March 26." The NRA has faced intense criticism following the school shooting in Parkland, Fla., that left 17 people dead. (Read more National Rifle Association stories.) (Newser) The capture of two ISIS fighters who may know the whereabouts of Kayla Mueller's body has raised hope that her parents might finally be able to put their daughter to rest. ISIS said the aid worker kidnapped in Syria in 2013 was killed in 2015 when a Jordanian airstrike hit the building housing her in Raqqa, and while her death was confirmed, her body was never recovered. Marsha and Carl Mueller hope El Shafee Elsheikh and Alexanda Amon Koteytwo of four British jihadists dubbed "The Beatles"will now lead authorities to her remains, and perhaps to the remains of other Americans, reports the Arizona Republic. The men have been described as guards under Mohammed Emwazi, or Jihadi John, who carried out the executions of James Foley, Steven Sotloff, and Peter Kassig before his reported death in 2016. story continues below Since their capture in eastern Syria early last month, the two fighters held by Syrian Kurdish forces have been pointing out burial locations, the Muellers say they've been told. Early last week, a counterterrorism official told ABC News that ground searches had begun. "I am grateful for all these efforts but bringing these two jihadists to justice gives us more hope and solace than the return of Jim's remains," said Diane Foley, Foley's mother. The parents of Foley and Mueller joined the parents of Sotloff and Kassig in calling for life in prison for the captives in a New York Times op-ed a week ago. "Execution could be misconstrued as martyrdom, perpetuating violence and diminishing America's stature as a defender of human rights," they wrote, requesting a trial in the US or an international court. (Read more Kayla Mueller stories.) (Newser) Centuries ago, bulls, rams, and other animals led into an ancient cave for religious ceremonies died of seemingly mystical causes, while the priests accompanying them suffered no such fate. Scientists say they've now figured out the secret behind this "Gate to Hell" in the ancient city of Hierapolis, per Bloomberg, and it has nothing to do with gods of the underworld. Instead: carbon dioxide. A study in Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences reveals that the cave located in modern Turkey, which was rediscovered in 2013, sits over a fissure that releases the gas. Volcanologist Hardy Pfanz and his team used a portable gas analyzer to figure out the phenomenon. So how did the priests survive? Because carbon dioxide is heavier than oxygen, it sinksmeaning animals closer to the ground succumbed, while the humans were OK. story continues below Or mostly OK: Ancient accounts depict the priests sometimes emerging and struggling for breath as spectators watched from a nearby site. IFLScience explains that the old-time priests likely understood that concentrations were diluted during the daytime by sunlight and windand so they held sacrifices before dawn for a quicker killand were also smart enough to climb up on stones around the doomed animals to show off their supposed powers. "At this height they could stand for 20 [to] 40 minutes without being endangered," Pfanz says. Without the stones, he adds, "nobody could enter the Gate to Hell without getting asphyxiated." (An incredibly old human fossil was recently found in a cave in Israel.) (Newser) Canadian-Iranian environmentalist Kavous Seyed Emami urged Iranians to push for the change they wanted, rather than accept the way things were. His liberal message resonated, but now his sons must take up the cause. Seyed Emami, a Canadian-Iranian, died in a high-security prison on Feb. 9, weeks after he was arrested on accusations of spying for the US and Israel. After receiving a call to present himself to the prosecutor's office in Chalous on Jan. 24, Seyed Emami was grabbed by 15 people who emerged from cars, his sons tell the New York Times. He was handcuffed, hooded, driven around, and eventually landed at Evin Prison. A prosecutor would later show his sons a video of Seyed Emami entering a prison bathroom with a shirt around his neck, seven hours before his lifeless body was brought out. story continues below Prosecutors say it was a suicide by hanging, but Ramin and Mehran Seyed Emami can't believe their father killed himself. The truth may never be known because, in what Amnesty International says "smacks of a deliberately orchestrated attempt to cover up any evidence of torture and possible murder," authorities did not allow an independent autopsy. In an op-ed published Thursday, the Washington Post editorial board argues Seyed Emami was just the latest victim of "Iran's repressive regime," which shows only "xenophobia" and "cruelty" in using "dual citizens as pawns in international diplomacy." Though spying charges against Seyed Emami referenced cameras set up "to monitor Iran's missile activities," his sons say they were part of his work with the Persian Wildlife Heritage Foundation and only recorded endangered animals in the wild. (Read more Iran stories.) (Newser) Hopes are fading for more than 100 girls who remain missing four days after Boko Haram extremists attacked their village in northern Nigeria. New eyewitness accounts indicate that the fighters targeted the girls' school, and some students were seen being taken away at gunpoint, per the AP. The Dapchi attack presents Nigeria's government with its most wrenching challenge since the Chibok mass abduction of 276 schoolgirls in 2014 that shocked the world. story continues below Information Minister Lai Muhammed, who visited the town on Thursday, says authorities still need more time to figure out what has happened. However, parents of the missing children already have compiled a list of 101 girls who remain unaccounted for following the Monday night ambush. Some witnesses said the gunmen specifically asked where the girls' school was located. The government initially said that 76 girls had been rescued, but have since said they remain missing, reports Reuters. (Read more Boko Haram stories.) (Newser) The Trump administration is hitting more than 50 vessels, shipping companies, and trade businesses with sanctions in the latest bid to turn up the pressure on North Korea over its nuclear program, a senior administration official said Friday. President Trump was set to announce the action at the Conservative Political Action Conference in a Friday morning speech, followed by a public announcement from the Treasury Department, reports the AP. Today I am announcing that we are launching the largest ever set of new sanctions on the North Korean regime, Trump said in advance excerpts of his speech provided by the White House, per the Washington Post. story continues below The 56 vessels and related businesses have conducted trade banned under UN sanctions, according to the White House. The announcement comes as South Korea hosts the Winter Olympics, an occasion the two Koreas have used as an opportunity to ease tensions and restart talks, though the move is not a huge surprise: It comes two weeks after Vice President Mike Pence, who attended the Olympics opening, promised the "toughest and most aggressive" economic sanctions against North Korea. (Will this complicate Ivanka Trump's visit?) (Newser) May 14th is the 70th anniversary of Israel's independence, and it appears it will serve as another big day: the moving of the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Per the Jerusalem Post, Minister of Transportation and Intelligence Israel Katz made the surprise announcement on Twitter Friday, tweeting: "I would like to congratulate Donald Trump on his decision to transfer the US Embassy to our capital on Israel's 70th Independence Day. There is no greater gift than that! The most just and correct move. Thanks friend!" story continues below Although the White House hasn't yet confirmed this, an anonymous US official had told Reuters Friday that the Jerusalem embassy would open sometime in May. Meanwhile, Trump touched on the transition at the Conservative Political Action Conference, where he spoke on Friday. He called the move "the right thing to do" and called the pushback against his decision "incredible," with other countries allegedly imploring him, "Don't do it, don't do it," per the AP. (Read more Jerusalem stories.) (Newser) "It does like the peak is behind us now," CBS News quotes Dr. Dan Jernigan as saying. But the director of the CDC's Influenza Division says that doesn't mean we're out of the woods yet, warning there's still "a fair amount of influenza to go." Jernigan says this flu season, which has been the worst in a decade, could continue until mid-April. And despite signs the flu is finally letting up, it's still doing plenty of damage. story continues below The share of doctor's visits related to the flu dropped from 7.5% last to week to 6.4% this week, USA Today reports. And the number of states with high patient traffic related to the flu dropped from 43 to 39. Another 13 children were reported dead from the flu this weekbringing the total this flu season to 97but that's down from the 22 child deaths reported last week. While this year's flu vaccine is only 36% effective overall, it's 59% effective in children. Most the of children reported killed by the flu this week had not been vaccinated, and experts say parents should still be getting their children vaccinated even this far into the flu season. Meanwhile, NBC News looks at why experts believe next year's flu vaccine will be mediocre at best. (Read more flu stories.) (Newser) A former top adviser to President Trump's election campaign pleaded guilty Friday to federal conspiracy and false-statements charges in the special counsel's Russia investigation, the AP reports. The plea by Rick Gates was a strong indication that he is planning to cooperate with Robert Mueller's investigation as it continues to probe the Trump campaign, Russian election interference, and Gates' longtime business associate, Paul Manafort. A court filing shows Gates admitted to charges accusing him of conspiring against the US government related to fraud and unregistered foreign lobbying as well as lying to federal authorities in a recent interview. Gates' decision marks the fifth publicly known guilty plea in the special counsel probe. story continues below Meanwhile, the AP reports Mueller is accusing Manafort, Trump's former campaign chairman, of secretly paying former European politicians to lobby on behalf of Ukraine. The new allegation against Manafort comes in a newly unsealed indictment made public Friday. The indictment accuses Manafort of paying the former politicians, informally known as the "Hapsburg group," to appear to be "independent" analysts when in fact they were paid lobbyists. Some of the covert lobbying took place in the US. The indictment says the group was managed by a former European chancellor. Court papers accuse Manafort of using offshore accounts to pay the group more than 2 million euros. The new charges are separate from Thursday's 32-count indictment against Manafort and Gates in Virginia. (Read more Rick Gates stories.) Sorry! This content is not available in your region The worlds first full-size replica of the doomed luxury Titanic ocean liner, with an investment of 1 billion yuan, is under construction in southwest Chinas Sichuan Province, and the ship body has been built. The replica, 269 meters long and 28 meters wide, which will be permanently docked at a reservoir in Daying County of Sichuan, is a fixed tourist attraction as opposed to a moveable ship. As there is not much water in the reservoir, the replica will also be giving the slogan Titanic that will really never sink. Despite some doubts about the project, and criticisms such as it is only a cheap copy of the original, the project manager explained that the replica is being built to reproduce the elements of luxury found in the original Titanic, including a ballroom, theater, swimming pool and premium first class rooms. In addition, the manager disclosed that they selected Sichuan as the project site because it was hard to obtain usage rights for such a large area of land in one of Chinas big cities such as Shanghai. Let us know what you're seeing and hearing around the community. Submit here A juvenile female snowy owl is seen in January 2014 in Ontario, Canada. Snowy owls are one of the 35 Alaska birds that Audubon Alaska put on its 2017 Red List of vulnerable species. Some Chinese airlines were recently blasted for significantly raising ticket prices for flights departing from Hainan, Chinas southernmost island province, which is also a hot tourist destination during the Spring Festival holiday. Ticket prices for some flights departing from Haikou and Sanya, two airports in Hainan, reached 10,000 to 20,000 RMB on the last days of Spring Festival holidays, Beijing Youth Daily reported. Such high price tickets do exist, said staff members from Southern Airlines and Hainan Airlines. However, they are full price tickets for first class or business class. The staff denied a sudden fare rise in a phone interview with Peoples Daily Online. Generally, discount tickets of economy class are easy to buy during the off season. For the peak seasons like the Spring Festival holiday, economy class tickets have already been sold out, while the small amount available at present are all first or business class tickets with no discounts, said an airline company. The full fare tickets of all airlines are priced by the National Development and Reform Commission and shall not be increased by any company, an airline told Beijing Youth Daily. Another reason for high ticket fares lies in the absence of direct flights. For example, a passenger may spend 1,430 RMB for a full price economic seat on a plane from Haikou, capital of Hainan province to Guangzhou. Owing to short supply, passengers travel between the two cities may have to spend more than 10,000 yuan on luxurious flights and transit through a third city. As of press time, there are no direct flight tickets available from Haikou to Beijing until Feb. 27, and all the tickets in a recent week from Sanya to Beijing have been sold out. To ease the traffic pressure, more flights have been arranged to take stranded passengers back home, said a staff from Southern Airlines, adding that the company also provides services to help book tickets from its cooperative airlines. Hainan Airlines has replaced three common planes with wide-body aircraft Friday to provide another 300 seats. Airlines suggested that the stranded tourists take other means of transportation, such as ferry service, to leave the island. Its reported that ferry services disrupted by a heavy fog have resumed Thursday morning, but still there are a large number of cars and passengers queuing for a ship. The 40-foot cryogenic container is one of two the Alaska Railroad will be using to transport liquefied natural gas from Southcentral Alaska to Fairbanks as part of a demostration project this month. Patrick Dale Burton-Hill, center, listens to opening testimony in Judge Lyle's courtroom at the Rabinowitz Courthouse Thursday afternoon, February 8, 2018. Burton-Hill is charged with murder in the May 2015 shooting death of John Kavairlook Jr. outside the Rock-N-Rodeo Bar. The 999 prisoners in China approved of family visits during the Spring Festival have all returned to prison, according to the Ministry of Justice, thepaper.cn reported on Feb. 22. An employee at the ministry disclosed that 1,300 persons serving sentences in about 300 prisons in China were approved to leave prison and make family visits during the festival. The number dropped to 999 as some postponed the time they would like to visit or because they failed to complete relevant formalities. Prisoners on good behavior were approved to return home to visit their families during the holiday, which manifests humanization as well as effectivity in Chinas judicial and correctional system as it also helps prepare them for re-entry to society by staying in touch with society. The Daily News-Miner encourages residents to make themselves heard through the Opinion pages. Readers' letters and columns also appear online at newsminer.com. Contact the editor with questions at letters@newsminer.com or call 459-7574. Community Perspective Send Community Perspective submissions by mail (P.O. Box 70710, Fairbanks AK 99707) or via email (letters@newsminer.com). Submissions must be 500 to 750 words. Columns are welcome on a wide range of issues and should be well-written and well-researched with attribution of sources. Include a full name, email address, daytime telephone number and headshot photograph suitable for publication (email jpg or tiff files at 150 dpi.) You may also schedule a photo to be taken at the News-Miner office. The News-Miner reserves the right to edit submissions or to reject those of poor quality or taste without consulting the writer. Letters to the editor Send letters to the editor by mail (P.O. Box 70710, Fairbanks AK 99707), by fax (907-452-7917) or via email (letters@newsminer.com). Writers are limited to one letter every two weeks (14 days.) All letters must contain no more than 350 words and include a full name (no abbreviation), daytime and evening phone numbers and physical address. (If no phone, then provide a mailing address or email address.) The Daily News-Miner reserves the right to edit or reject letters without consulting the writer. Chennai: Luxury car maker Rolls-Royce has introduced the 8th generation Phantom which is priced at Rs 9.5 crore. The event was held in Chennai with the sole authorised dealership of KUN Exclusive in the city of Chennai and Hyderabad. KUN Exclusive is the authorised Rolls-Royce Motor Cars dealer in the city of Chennai and Hyderabad. Phantom VIII is a 6.75-litre twin turbocharged V12 engine with 563hp and ca produce 900Nm of torque and 1700 rpm. It can achieve 0-100 kmph in just 5.4 seconds with the help of 8-speed Satellite-aided transmission. The luxury car is equipped with laser light technology headlamps which can provide 600-metre range of light for safer travel. Talking about some of the special features, Phantom VIII comes with Active Cruise System, Pedestrian and cross-traffic warning, visible assistance which includes panoramic view, helicopter view, night vision and all-around visibility. Phantom VIII comes with sound-proof technology which makes the cabin of the car extremely silent. The Phantom Standard Wheelbase version is priced at Rs 9.5 crore while the Extended Wheelbase is available at 11.35 crore and includes 4-year service package and regional warranty. Vasanthi Bhupati, MD of Rolls Royce Motor Cars Chennai and KUN Exclusive said, "PhantomA has always been a sign of success and a symbol of authority inA India.A NewA PhantomA is the latest iteration of the revered flagship of theA Rolls-RoyceA brand, with a bold yet elegant design underpinned by engineering attention to detail. It is a moving showcase of luxury, world-class technology and handcrafted qualityaa. Paul Harris, Asia Pacific Regional Director of Rolls Royce Motor Cars said, "For well over a century,A Rolls-RoyceA has been a global icon for luxury manufacturing excellence, withA IndiaA an important part of the brand's history. NewA PhantomA has again been reinstated as 'The Best Car in the World,' setting the new benchmark inA IndiaA for authentic, bespoke luxury. It is yet another original masterpiece discerning Indians have come to admireaa. A A A A New Delhi: Actress Priyanka Chopra, who was the brand ambassador of Nirav Modi's designer product series, has officially confirmed the news of terminating her contract with the jeweller. "In light of recent allegations, Priyanka Chopra has chosen to terminate her contract with the Nirav Modi brand," Priyanka's spokesperson told news agency ANI. Nirav Modi, the 48-year-old celebrity designer got into trouble after state-owned Punjab National Bank detected a USD 1.77 billion (about Rs 11,400 crore) scam on February 14. The billionaire jeweller is said to be the centre of this massive bank fraud and allegedly acquired fraudulent letters of undertaking from a branch in Mumbai to secure overseas credit from other Indian lenders. Nirav Modi left the country along with his family before the scam came into light. While his lawyer declined to indicate if and when the billionaire would return to India, some government sources suspect that the designer is currently hiding in Dubai. Last week, PNB had lodged a complaint with the CBI stating that fraudulent LoUs worth Rs 280.7 crore were first issued on January 16. At the time, PNB had said it was digging into records to examine the magnitude of the fraud. The Enforcement Directorate conducted multiple searches in connection with a Rs 280 crore money laundering case against the designer and others following a complaint by PNB. Also Read: Move over Priya Prakash Varrier, Priyanka Chopra's latest look-alike is making fans go crazy (see pics) Modi, who had figured in the Forbes' list of richest Indians, was booked by the CBI for cheating after PNB sent a complaint to it alleging that the jewellery firm owner, his wife, his brother and business partner Mehul Choksi entered into a criminal conspiracy with the officials of the bank and cheated it, causing a 'wrongful loss'. According to the CBI, Modi had left the country on January 1 much before they received the complaint. In light of recent allegations, Priyanka Chopra has chosen to terminate her contract with the #NiravModi brand: Priyanka Chopra's spokesperson (File Pic) pic.twitter.com/NnXYBeYc0Q ANI (@ANI) February 23, 2018 On the other hand, actor Sidharth Malhotra, who too featured in one of Nirav Modi's advertisement campaigns, said that since his contract is already over with the brand he is not planning any legal action. Actor Bipasha Basu, who featured in Gitanjali Gems advertisement, has claimed that the brand, owned by Modi's uncle Mehul Choksi, continued to use her pictures even after her contract expired. Her spokesperson, however, has clarified that she was not seeking any legal action against the company. After the scandal broke out, Priyanka, who had been roped as company's brand ambassador in January last year, asked her lawyers to come up with a way which can end all the official contracts with the Nirav Modi brand. Also Read: ED seizes Rs 100 cr deposits, luxury cars of Nirav Modi,Choksi groups; IT attaches more property However, Ministry of External Affairs on Thursday claimed to establish contact with the 'absconding' diamond jeweller and will take further action against him anytime soon. Moreover, Nirav Modi need to return the Rs. 11,400 crore his companies have borrowed without following proper procedures. For all the Latest Entertainment News, Bollywood News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. New Delhi: Army Chief General Bipin Rawat on Friday said that the Indian army will give Pakistan a reply sooner rather than later for the February 10 terrorist attack on a military camp in Jammu. Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) terrorists barged into the Sunjuwan military station in Jammu and killed six soldiers and a civilian in a deadly fidayeen attack. Soon after the incident, defence minister Nirmala Sitharaman had said that Pakistan, which she accused of backing the attackers, would pay for its misadventure. Pakistan thinks it is fighting a war that is paying them dividends but we have several options, including surgical strikes, the army chief said in an interview on Wednesday, without giving details that would compromise Indias tactical and strategic response. Rawat said that he would order a ceasefire at the Line of Control (LoC) as soon as Pakistan stops sending terrorists to India. The Indian Army will honor the ceasefire and de-escalate tensions the day Pakistan stops sending terrorists across the line of control, Rawat said, referring to the 2003 agreement put in place as a confidence-building measure. Ceasefire violations at the LoC have spiked over the last year. There were 860 such violations recorded in 2017 from either side, as compared to 271 the previous year, according to government data. For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. New Delhi: Joint security forces on Friday claimed to have nabbed nine Maoist cadres from different location in Chhattisgarh, while a police personnel was injured in an encounter with Maoists in Jharkhand. Chhattisgarh Police said, In a joint operation carried out by Central Reserve Police Force and state police carried out raids at different locations and nabbed nine Maoist rebels. A senior CRPF officer said the joint teams on intelligence inputs raided at Maoist hideouts in Chintagufa forest, Kukanar forest and Dornapal forest. Three rebels each were arrested from the raided locations, said CRPF officer. Police said the arrested people were active members of Maoists militia, village committees and Dandakaranya Adivasi Kisan Mazdor Sangthan. The arrested were wanted by the state police for various incidents, said a senior police officer. For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. New Delhi: A female Class XI student was hacked to death in Madhya Pradesh's Anuppur on Thursday, said media reports. The assailant had attacked the girl with a sword outside her school. The student was beheaded by an assailant who had been stalking her for years and was rebuffed by the victim. The accused was arrested later in the day. The victim, Pooja Panika, had her biology practicals at 1 pm. She was on her way to school around 12.30pm when the accused ran up to her and attacked her, said a retired teacher, so far the only eyewitness. He hacked her neck thrice with a sword, severing it. Pooja died on the spot while the killer dropped the sword and fled. The teacher raised an alarm and police were summoned. None of the students witnessed the murder as they were inside the school. Teachers kept students away from the gory crime scene until police removed the body, sword and all traces of blood. Soon after the incident, cops arrested a suspect Dilip Sahu from his residence on the basis of statements given by Poojas family. For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. New Delhi: AAP leaders on Friday accused the Delhi Police of acting like a bully by searching the Chief Ministers residence for more than two hours. Party members claimed that the sleuths did not question them on CCTV but inquired about the painting. The Delhi Government spokesperson claimed that around 60-70 policemen searched the chief ministers residence. AAP party leader Ashutosh said, The Delhi Police visit to chief ministers residence was only to humiliate and insult him (Arvind Kejriwal. He further claimed, The Delhi Police did not ask questions on CCTV footages but were asking about the painting of the residence. They are responsible for the CCTV cameras in CMs house and not Arvind Kejriwal. However, a senior officer of Delhi Police claimed that they went to the chief ministers residence after several requests for CCTV footage was turned down. The request for the CCTV footage was made to examine for clues what happened on Monday night at the meeting in which Chief Secretary Anshi Prakash was attacked by two lawmakers, said the officer. We have seized hard drives of 21 CCTV cameras and found that seven of them were non-functional and no CCTV was placed in the room were the incident took place, he added. The Delhi chief secretary has alleged that he was slapped by AAP lawmakers in presence of Kejriwal. Police have arrested AAP MLA Prakash Jarwal and Amantullah Khan in the connection to the incident. Also read | Delhi Chief Secretary assault case: Anshu Prakash lodges complaint against 11 AAP MLAs, FIR filed against Okhla lawmaker Soon after the search operation the Delhi chief minister tweeted, To investigate two slaps, the police search a Chief Minister's house. Doesn't Judge Loya's murder merit an interrogation?." While talking to reporters he said, The police show the same dedication in questioning Amit Shah in the Judge Loya case, the country will appreciate them. For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. Chennai: The Madras High Court has dismissed a petition filed by an accused in a money laundering case involving sand mining baron Shekhar Reddy, seeking the return of his passport to travel aboard. The accused, Premkumar, had filed an appeal against the order of a CBI court here, refusing to return his passport. In his order on Wednesday, Justice G Jayachandran said a person accused of a grave crime could not seek return of passport as a matter of right claiming that holding it was an infringement on his fundamental right. A person like the petitioner, who had wide contacts, if allowed to possess the passport, there was every possibility of his flying away from the criminal judicial system, the judge said. Premkumar had sought the return of his passport, which was surrendered before the CBI court at the time of his securing bail on May 12, 2017. The petitioner had submitted that he had to travel abroad to make arrangements for the higher studies of his daughter. The trial court had, however, declined his plea, following which he moved the high court. The court was fully satisfied that the petitioner was not really intending to go abroad for the purpose of what he had stated in the petition, the judge said, dismissing the petition. In December, 2016, the Income Tax department had seized Rs 99 crore in demonetised bank notes and another Rs 34 crore in new currencies, besides a 127-kg gold bar, from properties owned by Reddy and his associates. Subsequently, Reddy and his associates -- K Srinivaslu and Premkumar -- were arrested. For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi received Canadian Prime Minister Justin andA his family at Rashtrapati BhawanA on Friday. PM Modi toA hold talks with his Canadian counterpart to further strengthen relations between the two nations.A On Thursday, PM Modi took to twitter and said, "I look forward to meeting PM @JustinTrudeau tomorrow and holding talks on further strengthening India-Canada relations in all spheres. I appreciate his deep commitment to ties between our two countries."A I hope PM @JustinTrudeau and his family had a very enjoyable stay so far. I particularly look forward to meeting his children Xavier, Ella-Grace, and Hadrien. Here is a picture from my 2015 Canada visit, when I'd met PM Trudeau and Ella-Grace. a Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) February 22, 2018 Followed by another tweet, Prime Minister Modi said, "I hope PM @Justin Trudeau and his family had a very enjoyable stay so far. I particularly look forward to meeting his children Xavier, Ella-Grace, and Hadrien. Here is a picture from my 2015 Canada visit, when I'd met PM Trudeau and Ella-Grace." (sic) I look forward to meeting PM @JustinTrudeau tomorrow and holding talks on further strengthening India-Canada relations in all spheres. I appreciate his deep commitment to ties between our two countries. a Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) February 22, 2018 Prime Minister Modi not receiving Trudeau at the airport, a courtesy he extended to some world leaders in the past, had triggered speculation in Canada that it was a snub to him for the rising Sikh radicalism in that country.A A A A A However, government sources here had strongly rejected the speculation, insisting normal diplomatic protocol has been extended to Trudeau. "I hope PM @JustinTrudeau and his family had a very enjoyable stay so far. I particularly look forward to meeting his children Xavier, Ella-Grace, and Hadrien," the PM said in another tweet.A Here are the LIVE updates: # 02:08 PM: As Canada looks to diversify its own economy and looks for new opportunities to do business beyond its boundaries, India is a natural partner and a trusted friend for commercial cooperation: Justin Trudeau # 02:04 PM:A We share not only rich a history but a set of values that encourage a natural friendship between our two countries: Canadian PM # 02:04 PM:A There should be no space for those who misuse religion for political motives and promote separatism. We will not tolerate those who challenge unity and integrity of our countries: PM Modi # 02:01 PM: CanadaA is a energy super-power, it can fulfill our increasing energy demands: PM Modi in Delhi # 01:55 PM:A We discussed many issues including deference operation. Terrorism & extremism are a threat to countries like ours and to fight these elements it is important for us to come together: PM Modi # 01:53 PM:A Your visit awaited since long, we are happy that you visited along with your family :PM Modi to Canadian PM # 01:15 PM:A PM Modi and Canadian PMA witness exchange MoUs between India and CanadaA # 11:10A AM: a ANI (@ANI) February 23, 2018 # 11:03 AM:A Canadian Prime Minister meets EAM Sushma SwarajA # 10:47 AM: Canadian PMA & his family pay tribute to Mahatma Gandhi at Rajghat.A # 10:39 AM:A A At the ceremonial welcomeA a PMO India (@PMOIndia) February 23, 2018 # 09:18 AM: WATCH: PM Narendra Modi receives Canadian Prime MinisterA # 09:17 AM:A Canadian PM and family welcomed by PM Modi. # 09:08 AM: Canadian Prime Minister inspects guard of honour at Rashtrapati Bhawan.A For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. New Delhi: A Congress delegation on Thursday approached the Election Commission (EC) to shift out the Shivpuri district collector and superintendent of police and claimed that Mahendra Singh Yadav, its candidate for the Kolaras Assembly bypoll in Madhya Pradesh, was attacked. The delegation comprising Jyotiraditya Scindia, the chief whip of the party in the Lok Sabha, Kantilal Bhuria and Kamal Nath, met Chief Election Commissioner O P Rawat and demanded that an FIR be registered in this regard. Scindia claimed that Congress workers had apprehended a car belonging to Narendra Kushwaha, the Bhind MLA of the BJP. They had also approached the police in this regard, but instead of seizing the car and arresting Kushwaha, the police colluded with him, he alleged. Scindia further claimed that the police lathi-charged the Congress workers, in which Yadav suffered injuries to one of his eyes. The police entered the residence of Yadav and started investigation. So, those who nabbed the criminals are being harassed. We have demanded that the district collector and SP be shifted out of Shivpuri and an FIR be registered, Scindia told reporters. Nath claimed that the BJP was resorting to such tactics as it was sure of its drubbing in the upcoming bypolls to two Assembly seats. The bypoll to the constituencies will be held on Saturday. The Congress has fielded Mahendra Singh Yadav from Kolaras and Brijendra Singh Yadav from Mungaoli, while the BJP has fielded Baisahab Yadav from Mungaoli and Devendra Jain from Kolaras. For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Canadian counterpart Justin Trudeau on Friday held extensive talks on key issues of counter-terrorism and extremism as well as ways to boost trade ties, after which the two sides inked six pacts, including on energy cooperation. After their nearly two-hour long meeting, Modi, while addressing a joint media event with the Canadian prime minister, said they discussed the entire gamut of the bilateral partnership. Asserting that it is important that the two countries work together to fight terrorism, Modi said there should be no place for those who misuse religion for political goals. Also Read: Justin Trudeau in Delhi Live: India, Canada sign six pacts, energy cooperation between nations major take away The prime minister also made it clear that those who challenge India's sovereignty and unity will not be tolerated. Modi's remarks come amidst criticism of the Trudeau government's soft approach towards the Khalistan issue. Observing that Trudeau has visited various parts of India in last few days, Modi said the Canadian leader must have experienced the diversity of the country. On his part, Trudeau described India as a natural partner for commercial cooperation. Earlier, External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj called on the Canadian prime minister and discussed various issues of mutual interest. Swaraj had a warm meeting with Trudeau and discussed ways to strengthen and deepen the partnership between the two countries, Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) Spokesperson Raveesh Kumar tweeted. For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. Lucknow: Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath on Thursday said the law-and order situation in the state was excellent and assured the investors that UP was the best possible investment destination in the country. I assure the investors that UP is the best possible investment destination. The law-and-order situation is excellent, he said, while addressing the valedictory function of the UP Investors Summit. The BJP leader added that the single-window portal, which Prime Minister Narendra Modi had launched on Wednesday, was the first portal for obtaining digital approval. Under this, a person can avail of the benefits, without going through red-tapism. The state has jumped to new heights in terms of ease of doing business, he said. In the two-day summit, representatives from 10 countries, more than 6,000 participants and over 110 companies took part. As many as 32 parallel sessions took place at the summit, Adityanath said. During the summit, the state government had signed 1,045 memorandums of understanding (MoUs), worth Rs 4.28 lakh crore, he said, adding that these would generate more than 33 lakh jobs in the state. The chief minister also thanked the partner countries of the summitthe Netherlands, Japan, Czech Republic, Finland, Slovania, Mauritius and Thailand. He said the prime minister had gifted a defence industrial corridor to Uttar Pradesh. For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. New Delhi: 'Gate to Hell' is one of those blood-curdling places, which has been scaring the hell out of many for long. There are several places across the world, which have acquired a legendary reputation for being entrances to the underworld and are named as the 'Gates of Hell'. An ancient Greek site, located in modern Turkey's western Denizli province is one of those horror-stricken places, which killed a few, who got closed to its gate. Legends of 'Hades Gate' is named after the Greek God of death. Speculations had been rife that an angry God's breath is responsible for those deadliest happenings over the years, but the latest study led by a group of scientists from Germany's University of Duisburg-Essen threw cold waters to all those rumours. The study, appeared in the journal of Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences shows that carbon dioxide gas coming from the BabadaAY fault line is the reason behind those dramatic deaths at 'Hades Gate'. "In a grotto below the temple of Pluto, CO2 was found to be at deadly concentrations of up to 91 percent," the study, led by professor Hardy Pfanz of the University of Duisberg-Essen, Germany revealed. Also Read: SPOOKY VACATIONS! 7 most haunted places in India "Astonishingly, these vapours are still emitted in concentrations that nowadays kill insects, birds and mammals," the research added. "Now to those who approach anywhere around the enclosure the air is harmless, since the outside is free from that vapor in calm weather but any animal that passes inside meets instant death," Greek geographer Strabo wrote. Strabo witnessed a few animals who became victims of those noxious gas and vapour in the cave. "At any rate, bulls that are led into it fall and are dragged out dead," he added. However, this kind of places are generally located in regions of unusual geological activity, particularly volcanic areas, or sometimes at lakes, caves or mountains. Legends from both ancient Greece and Rome record stories of mortals who entered or were abducted into the netherworld through such gates. Aeneas visited the underworld, entering through a cave at the edge of Lake Avernus on the Bay of Naples. Hercules entered the Underworld from this same spot. Also Read: NASA releases compilation of creepy space sounds to make you shiver this Halloween, click here to enjoy This year-long rumour has made it a popular spot for millions. The ruins of Hierapolis, the place known as Pamukkale in modern Turkey is open for visitors to explore as well as the artifact-rich Hierapolis Archaeology Museum. Moreover, the site, used as a healing spa since the second century B.C. under the Greek Seleucid Empire is also well-known for its bright turquoise pools and travellers can enjoy walking and taking baths in the therapeutic hot spring waters. For all the Latest Science News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. New Delhi: Financial Action Task Force (FATF) on Friday decided to place Pakistan on its terrorist-financing Grey lest after a move initiated by the United States of America. The final announcement of the development will be made on Friday by the task force. According to reliable sources in MEA, only China, Turkey and Saudi Arabia remained silent and Western powers lobbied the US move. FATFs move will now enhance the level of scrutiny applied to the financial transactions that countrys banking sector carries out with rest of the world. The resolution to place Islamabad on the grey list went through after China and other Gulf Cooperation Council countries dropped their opposition. During the resolution the three countries remained silent. Also read: China, Saudi Arabia, Turkey join hands to block US's move to place Pakistan on global terror-financing watch list Britain, France and Germany also backed the resolution. China, Saudi Arabia and Turkey closed allies of Pakistan had earlier joined hands to block the resolution to place Islamabad on the grey list. For all the Latest World News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. Washington: Texas Governor Greg Abbott issued a last-minute reprieve for a death row prisoner who hired a gunman to kill his family after his father, whom he sought to murder, pleaded for his sons life. Thomas Bartlett Bart Whitaker, 38, had been one of three men awaiting execution Thursday in three different US states. Mr Whitaker must spend the remainder of his life behind bars as punishment for this heinous crime, Abbott wrote in a proclamation explaining his decision, shortly before the scheduled execution. Abbott said he had taken into consideration the fact that the person who fired the gun that killed the victims did not receive the death penalty, but Mr Whitaker, who did not fire the gun, did get the death penalty. He added: Mr Whitakers father, who survived the attempt on his life, passionately opposes the execution of his son. Mr Whitakers father insists that he would be victimized again if the state put to death his last remaining immediate family member. Kent Whitaker had moved heaven and earth for years to try to get mercy for his son, whom he forgave from his hospital bed. Bart Whitaker was sentenced to death for hiring the hitman who killed his mother and brother, and wounded his father in 2003. The gunman also shot him in the arm to provide a cover story for the family slaying. Police had originally assumed the shooting was a botched robbery, although the fact that only Barts cell phone had been taken raised suspicions. Bart returned to live with his wounded father for seven months before the truth emerged that it was the son who hired the gunman. Kent, a devout Christian, said he had initially been mad at God after being shot in the thorax by the masked assailant who took the lives of his wife Tricia, 51, and his 19-year-old son Kevin. I was wrestling with my faith, he said. But God met me in the hospital room on the night of the shootings and helped me arrive at a miracle forgiveness for everyone involved, he said. Long before I ever even suspected that that forgiveness might extend to my own son. I live with the extent of the loss every day and am aware of how much it has cost meand am completely aware that all of that loss was the result of decisions made by my son, he said. But God helped me reach that complete forgiveness and I think He did that to help me rebuild my relationship with my son. Meanwhile, in Alabama, Doyle Hamm is facing execution after spending three decades on death row. He was condemned to death in 1987 for the murder of a motel employee during an armed robbery. Hamm is already dying of cranial and lymphatic cancer, and his lawyers fear execution by lethal injection would be torture, as he no longer has suitable veins. However, after a bitter legal battle, a court finally ruled on Tuesday that Hamms execution will go ahead, on condition that he is injected in his legs or feet instead of his arms or hands, as would usually be the case. Finally, Florida is scheduled to execute Eric Branch, handed a death sentence for murdering a student in 1993. For all the Latest World News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps. A World Trade Organization panel has ruled in Japan's favor in a dispute over South Korea's ban on seafood imports from 8 Japanese prefectures. South Korea imposed the restriction in September 2013, citing concern over seawater contamination due to the 2011 nuclear accident at the Fukushima Daiichi power station. The Japanese government filed a complaint with the WTO in 2015, demanding the restriction be lifted. It said the ban violates international trade rules. The WTO panel upheld Japan's complaint on Thursday, urging South Korea to take corrective action. The panel says the ban amounts to "arbitrary or unjustifiable discrimination" and constitutes a "disguised restriction of international trade." The Japanese government says it welcomes the panel's decision, which supports all of Japan's claims in the main points of contention. South Korea can appeal to a higher panel and maintain the restriction while waiting for a final ruling. Japan's Crown Prince Naruhito turned 58 on Friday. He held a news conference ahead of his birthday at his residence in central Tokyo. He will ascend the throne on May 1st of next year, one day after Emperor Akihito abdicates. The Crown Prince said he feels deeply moved and has a sense of respect for the Emperor and Empress when he reflects again on the paths they have taken. The Crown Prince said he will keep the figures of the Emperor and Empress firmly in his heart and will always remember them when engaging in activities. He added he will also perform his duties while working hard to improve himself. The Crown Prince talked about what an Emperor in the coming new era should be like. He said it is important to maintain the long tradition of the Imperial Family and steadfastly fulfill the Emperor's role as the symbol of the state, as stipulated in the Constitution. He added that he believes another role of the Imperial Family is to think about duties in light of changes in society and act. The Crown Prince expressed condolences to people who were affected by natural disasters in the past year. The phenomena include heavy rain in northern areas of the Kyushu region in July, the eruption of Mount Kusatsu-Shirane in January, and the heavy snow this winter. The Crown Prince also referred to Japanese athletes at the PyeongChang Winter Olympics. He said he saw gold medalists Yuzuru Hanyu and Nao Kodaira congratulate foreign rivals they have known for a long time. The Crown Prince said he sensed deep, cross-border friendships and the presence of Japanese athletes in the world. Japanese automaker Honda has announced that its HondaJet won the most delivered jet title in its category last year. The small business jet has been developed, manufactured and sold by Honda to the US and other markets since 2015. The company says it delivered 43 units in 2017, about double the figure for the previous year, putting it in top place in the small business-jet segment. The aircraft's engines are mounted above each wing to maximize cabin space. It is faster than most rivals and sales are growing in the US and European markets. This month, a record 16 units were ordered from a French company. Honda's strong run is in stark contrast to Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, which is struggling with delays in the development of its MRJ passenger jet. Demand for small business jets is rising among corporate executives. Honda says it will boost efforts to sell its aircraft in the growth markets of China and Southeast Asia. Egypt's military prosecution ordered on Tuesday the detention for 15 days of former head of the Egyptian Central Auditing Organization Hisham Geneina pending investigations into his claims that former military chief-of-staff Sami Anan possesses documents containing state secrets, state news agency MENA reported. Geneina was a leading figure in the short-lived election campaign for Anan before the military officer was barred from running in the March presidential elections. Anan was detained by authorities last month over accusations of committing a series of violations and crimes, including inciting against the military and forgery. Geneina was arrested on Tuesday at his home in a Cairo suburb, his lawyer Ali Taha told Ahram Online, one day after the Egyptian army said it would take legal action against the two men. In an interview with HuffPost Arabia published on Sunday, Geneina claimed that Anan possessed documents and evidence relating to major deadly incidents and "political crimes" since the 2011 revolution and following the 2013 ouster of Islamist president Mohamed Morsi that could implicate many Egyptian officials if they were made public. He said the documents were kept abroad and would surface if authorities tried to assassinate Anan. The army has responded by saying the matter would be referred to investigators to take the necessary legal action against both former officials and that it would "use all constitutional and legal powers to preserve national security." It added that Geneina's claims "amount to crimes and aim to raise doubts about the state and its institutions" at a time when the armed forces are waging a battle to uproot terrorism from the Sinai region. An hour after the army's statement, Anan's lawyer Nasser Amin distanced his client from Geneina's controversial remarks. In a statement on Facebook, he described Geneina's claims as "unfounded, untrue and bearing no relation to reality." The lawyer pledged to take legal action against anyone who has given or will give statements to the media "attributing any words or acts to Anan that would undermine [Anan's] legal status or expose him to the danger of legal or social liability." "Any statements not made by Sami Annan in person are attributed to their owners and do not in any way express him," he said. Anan was detained by authorities last month, a week after announcing his presidential bid. The army accused him of inciting against the military and breaking the law by running for office without its permission while still a reserve officer. Geneina was attacked and severely wounded two weeks ago while on his way to lodge an appeal against an electoral commission's decision to disqualify Anan from running in the presidential vote, scheduled for 26-28 March. He said in media interviews that Egyptian authorities were behind his assault. The interior ministry said at the time of the attack that Geneina hit a man with his car and that his doorman, wife and daughter assaulted what Geneina said were the attackers and tore off their clothes. Short link: For people living in crowded cities in Japan, nothing tugs at the heartstrings more than a picturesque image of a tiny train station in the middle of the countryside. When it comes with an unmanned wooden building and a single-carriage train that quietly shuttles people back and forth, the wave of nostalgia becomes so intense that itas almost too beautiful to bear. One such train station has come to everyoneas attention in Japan recently, thanks to updates on social media, like this tweet from Twitter user @enuenuenubi. The beautiful images show a day in the life of Chiwa Station, which sits on the Inbi Line in Okayama Prefecture. Surrounded by nature and wildlife, the station building itself is filled with remnants from yesteryear, charming everybody who lays eyes on it. Dating back to 1931, when the station first opened, the wooden building still stands as it did so many decades ago, like a museum dedicated to preserving a sense of travel during the Showa Period (1926-1989). In an exclusive interview with Al-Ahram Daily newspaper published on Friday, General Joseph Votel, the head of US Central Command (CENTCOM), discussed US military relations with Egypt, the ongoing anti-terrorism Operation Sinai 2018, as well as terrorist activity in the region. Votel, who met with President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi in Cairo on Thursday during his current visit to Egypt, said that he tries to visit the country on a regular basis to ensure that strong bilateral ties are maintained. "My current visit comes at a very important time, especially after the [recent] visits by US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Vice President Mike Pence, and Secretary of Defense James Mattis," said the four-star General, who has been CENTCOM commander since March 2016. "I believe that such consecutive visits should be looked at as a meaningful reflection of the importance of our relationship with Egypt," Votel told Al-Ahram. He described military cooperation between the two countries especially in the field of counterterrorism as "very good." "I think we have always maintained good military relations. We share fears over terrorism, so it is natural for us to continue cooperation in this area on a permanent basis, Votel said. Al-Ahram asked the general if US-Egyptian military cooperation has been negatively affected by last year's US decision to partially cut military aid to Egypt. "My mission is to ensure that cooperation between us is not affected by such decisions, and that they advance in a positive way," answered Votel. In August 2017, the US announced it would be holding back $195 million out of its annual $1.3 billion in military aid to Cairo pending hoped-for improvements in Egypt's performance on "democracy". Egypt described the US move as a misjudgement about the nature of strategic relations that have bound the two countries for decades." "I see that we are moving forward, especially in the field of exchanging information," Votel told Al-Ahram. Shortly following the US August 2017 decision on aid, US President Donald Trump assured President El-Sisi that he is keen to overcome any obstacles to good bilateral ties between the two countries. Votel explained to Al-Ahram that he has discussed with President El-Sisi "the necessity for strong cooperation between us, especially since we need a long-term military alliance in Syria and an operational alliance in Afghanistan to fight terrorism, because it is an international problem that worries us all." Votel also spoke to Al-Ahram about the newly launched Operation Sinai 2018, describing it as very important. "I think the Egyptian forces are carrying out their duties in preserving the safety of the Egyptian people and their interests, and we always wish them success," he said. On the war against the terrorist group Daesh, Votel said that despite their recent defeats in Iraq's Mosul and Syria's Raqqa, the group still has a presence in parts of Syria, where the US continues to fight them in cooperation with its allies on the ground. He added that Daesh members have moved to other areas in attempt to take them over or use them as a launching pad to return to Mosul. "Our mission is to stop them from doing this, and to isolate them," he stressed. Votel also slammed reports by some media outlets suggesting that the US cooperates with Daesh or provides them with arms. "I think this is absurd. Anyone who believes that the US government or army supports [Daesh] is speaking nonsense," Votel tol Al-Ahram. "We are exerting major efforts in Syria and Iraq to fight and eliminate [Daesh]," he said, adding that he believes that this is proven by the facts on the ground. Votel also said that Daesh members must be prevented from moving operations to other countries in the region. Short link: Hours after news that Deniz Yucel, German-Turkish correspondent for Die Welt, was released last Friday, the Istanbul 26th Heavy Penal Court concluded the fifth and final hearing of the coup attempt media trial, ruling to punish six imprisoned defendants including journalists Nazli Ilicak (73) and Ahmet (67) and Mehmet (65) Altan with life sentences for attempting to disrupt constitutional order. The Altan brothers and Ilicak were in pre-trial detention since 2016. The Altans and Ilicak were initially arrested for sending subliminal messages through television appearances a day before the July coup. The same three were then accused of making statements that are evocative of a coup. All were held at Silivri Prison, a high security state correctional institution in Istanbul. Established in 2008, the prison is considered the countrys most modern, and Europes largest, penal facility. The verdict was a dark moment for the rule of law and media freedom in Turkey. The case against them and the other defendants was politically motivated from the very start, London-based Deputy Director of the Human Rights Watch (HRW) Europe and Central Asia Division, Benjamin Ward, told Al-Ahram Weekly in interview. Ward added that the evidence presented largely consisted of their journalistic work, none of which espoused violence. He also added that, The trial was marred by procedural problems, including removal of defence lawyers from the case simply for doing their jobs. Perhaps most egregious of all was the fact that the convictions followed a 11 January ruling by the Turkish Constitutional Court that the pre-trial detention of Mehmet Altan for over a year violated his rights and was not supported by any substantial evidence, ordering his immediate release. The lower courts refused to carry out this decision, in violation of Article 153 of the Turkish Constitution, a move supported by the Turkish government, Ward told the Weekly. Last month, a Turkish court obliged Altan to pay 7,000 Turkish Liras as a fine for insulting President Erdogan, in writings the journalist considered criticism and not insult. Washington-based Ahvalnews senior editor Ilhan Tanir says that the court decision was very political. The Turkish government wanted to punish these dissident voices just because they were the loudest critical voices before the coup. I think that the Turkish government wanted to make a lesson with these heavy punishments for the rest. So, it is not a judicial decision but a political one. Ahmet Altan is one of Turkeys most significant authors and journalists. His case is important for many reasons, including the fact that he, Mehmet Altan and Nazli Ilicak are the first journalists to be convicted on politically motivated charges in connection with the attempted coup. We are deeply concerned that the verdict sets a terrible precedent that could lead to similar outcomes against the many other journalists in pre-trial detention and being tried on related charges. It is also evidence of the deepening crackdown against critical voices that has intensified since the attempted coup, which Human Rights Watch and others have documented, Ward said. Born in 1950, Mehmet Altan graduated from the Department of Economics of Istanbul University. At the age of 24 he became a journalist and worked as a reporter in several newspapers, becoming editor-in-chief of the liberal paper Taraf, which he also founded. He has written nine novels, including three bestsellers, winning several literary prizes plus awards for championing press freedom. One of his novels, entitled Endgame, has been published in English. Altans father was a communist and leftist writer and for that reason he was jailed. One of the articles Mehmet wrote in Milliyet newspaper was entitled AtaKurd, meaning father of Kurds. In the article Ahmet asked Turks a simple question: What would you do if someone does to you what youve done to Kurds or others? In a radio interview with Georgina Godwin broadcast on the British Monocle24 internet station in 2016, Altan told his interviewer that he was fired dozens of times during his career for his writings. According to Altan in the same interview, he is facing 200 court cases. My father had more cases; he had 300. We do not have democracy in Turkey. We have never had one day of democracy in our history. Turks do not know what democracy is. We know the word, we can describe it, but we did not experience it before. I am not shocked. I used to see my father passing by the court every morning before going to the newspaper, Altan told Godwin. In March 2010, Ahmet Altan wrote an article in Taraf entitled Genocide in which he called for recognition of the Armenian Genocide. In the article, Altan asked why the Armenian Genocide could be a subject of discussion in US, French and Swiss parliaments and not in Turkey. If you cannot discuss your own problems, you deserve to be humiliated. If you keep silent in a matter that you find so important, you deserve to be humiliated. If you try to shut others up, you are humiliated even more. The whole world interprets the killing of so many Armenians a number we cannot even estimate properly as genocide, Altan wrote. The newspaper was described by Julien Assange as the bravest newspaper in Turkey. Tanir thinks that Ahmet Altan made some mistakes in his journalistic career, like many journalists do. Some of his editorial policies at Taraf newspaper, especially during the so-called Ergenekon case, were wrong-headed and many of the columnists and reporters he accommodated there turned out to have hurt Turkish democracy with their secret agenda. However, Tanir thinks the public and the readers are the only ones who can punish a journalist, not political authorities. Altan got in trouble not because he made some mistakes as Tarafs editor years ago, but due to his brave criticism of the Erdogan government after 2013, becoming one of the strongest critical voices against the Erdogan government His troubles started here, Tanir told the Weekly in interview. From his prison, a few days before the court ruled to punish the Altan brothers and others with life imprisonment, Ahmet made a court defence statement entitled The Justice of Stupidity. His powerful words concluded as follows: History has taught us a certain fact. The despots who punished their opponents in unjust ways have been eventually punished in the same manner. He who sent people to the guillotine has ended up on the guillotine, he who imprisoned people has been sent to prison, the one who exiled others has been sent into exile himself. The types of punishment they imposed on others have been marked as a port of call in the maps of the despots own destiny. Now you want to kill me in prison. I have told you all the truth about this case and now this is what I say to you: I am prepared to die in prison. And I ask you: What about you? Are you prepared to die in prison, too? Because whatever punishment you will give us will be marked as a port of call on the map of your own destiny as well. The other three who were given life sentences are Yakup Simsek, former marketing manager for Zaman newspaper, Zaman layout designer Fevzi Yazici and police academy instructor Sukru Tugrul Ozsengul. Since the failed coup attempt in July 2016, the crackdown on media and freedom of expression in Turkey has had a negative impact on Turkish citizens, too. The criminal prosecution, jailing and punishment of journalists for doing their work undermines media freedom in the country. That matters to everyone in Turkey. As the European Court of Human Rights said (in Handyside v the UK), freedom of expression and media freedom constitutes one of the essential foundations of a democratic society, one of the basic conditions for its progress and for the development of every man, Ward commented. The Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and the United Nations (UN) made a joint statement the day the court ruling was issued. We call on Turkey to reverse todays decision and release the journalists. Imprisonment for journalism not only silences the journalists, but it also deprives Turkish citizens of their right to access pluralistic views on issues that can directly affect their lives, said Harlem Desir, OSCE representative on freedom of the media, and David Kaye, UN special rapporteur on the right to freedom of opinion and expression, in the joint statement. But will such statements and condemnations made by international human rights and press freedom organisations pave the way to a more democratic Turkey? Will President Erdogan and his government listen and react positively? They are making difference, I think, said Tanir. But at the end of the day Turkey has one strongman and with the state of emergency powers, he has absolute power. Checks and balances collapsed. Therefore, the international organisations do not have the influence on Turkey they used to have in the past. Human rights activists are demonised in Turkey and they have been vilified by the AKP media. Quoting a recent HRW World Report chapter on Turkey, Ward states that Turkey is the world leader in jailing journalists and media workers, with around 150 behind bars at time of writing. Most newspapers and television channels lack independence and promote the governments political line. Ward insists his organisation will continue to seek to engage with Turkish authorities on media freedom and other human rights issues. It is important that Turkeys international partners raise the issue of media freedom and the curbs on judicial independence, that together with overbroad definitions of terrorism make these politically motivated prosecutions possible. In doing so they should focus on the structural problems as well as problematic individual cases, he said. In the meantime, Turkish police arrested 786 people over the past week for protesting against Operation Olive Branch in the Kurdish-controlled town of Afrin in northern Syria. Thats pretty devastating, said Tanir. Today, the latest reports show there are over 100 people getting arrested every day for opposing the operation. Obviously, this makes it impossible for the public in Turkey to discuss the advantages or disadvantages of the operation. At the end, when you oppress people, critical voices that help the government to make healthy decisions, it leads to limited discussions and narrow-minded decisions, Tanir told the Weekly. Erdogan, like the Ottomans of the past, remains free of sanction as world governments remain silent. Every Western or Eastern country has its own national interests. Erdogan also, just like Russian President Putin, knows very well how to play Western countries against each other, and how to punish or award them according to their behaviour by inviting them to some of the largest projects in Turkey or giving them big arms orders. Erdogan has been ruling Turkey for 15 years. He gained experience nobody has. Turkey is also on very valuable territory, and for many countries its hard for them to stay away from it. For Westerners to be more influential in the region, they want to be friends with Erdogan. Yet despite that Turkey is, perhaps, sitting on the most valuable real estate in the world, it is still much more isolated than many countries due to Erdogans policies, Tanir told the Weekly. * This story was first published in Al-Ahram Weekly Short link: Nigeria's Boko Haram Islamist militants have killed five civilians and two soldiers in fresh attacks in Cameroon and Chad, local sources said Thursday. "A group of Boko Haram fighters made an incursion during (Tuesday) night in Assigashia," a source close to administrative authorities in the northern Cameroon border area said, asking not be named. "The attackers killed five people and wounded five more." The raid was confirmed along with the casualty toll by an official in the Cameroon security services. Assigashia is a border town which gives direct access to Nigeria and has seen many Boko Haram incursions in the past. The Nigerian Islamist militants are blamed for killing another civilian in the town in January. In Chad, meanwhile, two Chadian soldiers, including a captain, were killed in a Boko Haram ambush on Wednesday, a senior military official said Thursday. The attack took place in the west of the country in the Lake Chad region near the Nigerian frontier as the troops were returning from a border patrol. "The Boko Haram attackers disappeared into the islands" on the lake, the source said. Since 2014, the year Cameroon began to fight Boko Haram, the group has killed 2,000 civilians and soldiers and kidnapped about 1,000 people in the region, according to an analysis by the International Crisis Group (ICG) think tank. Boko Haram, a militant movement opposed to Western influence and seeking an Islamic state based on Sharia law, has caused the deaths of at least 20,000 people since it took up arms in 2009. Cameroon, Chad and Niger have all joined the military effort by Nigeria to crush Boko Haram. Wednesday's attack in Chad was the first known assault on Chadian territory by Boko Haram since May 2017, when nine soldiers were killed. Short link: A day after attacking Dapchi Girls School in Yobe, Nigeria, Boko Haram terrorists killed five civilians and two soldiers in Cameroon and Chad.A group of Boko Haram fighters made an incursion during Tuesday night in Assigashia, the AFP reported, quoting an anonymous source close to administrative authorities in the northern Cameroon border area.The attackers killed five people and wounded five more.The raid was confirmed along with the casualty toll by an official in the Cameroon security services.Assigashia is a border town which gives direct access to Nigeria and has seen many Boko Haram incursions in the past.The Boko Haram militants are blamed for killing another civilian in the town in January.In Chad, two soldiers, including a captain, were killed in a Boko Haram ambush on Wednesday, a senior military official said Thursday.The attack took place in the west of the country in the Lake Chad region near the Nigerian frontier as the troops were returning from a border patrol.The Boko Haram attackers disappeared into the islands on the lake, the source said.Since 2014, the year Cameroon began to fight Boko Haram, the group has killed 2,000 civilians and soldiers and kidnapped about 1,000 people in the region, according to an analysis by the International Crisis Group (ICG) think tank.Boko Haram, a militant movement opposed to Western influence and seeking an Islamic state based on Sharia law, has caused the deaths of at least 20,000 people since it took up arms in 2009.Cameroon, Chad and Niger have all joined the military effort by Nigeria to crush Boko Haram.Wednesdays attack in Chad was the first known assault on Chadian territory by Boko Haram since May 2017, when nine soldiers were killed. President Muhammadu Buhari on Friday assured people of Niger Delta that his administration would work towards rapid development of the reg... President Muhammadu Buhari on Friday assured people of Niger Delta that his administration would work towards rapid development of the region. Buhari said his administration will ensure development in the region by consolidating on all ongoing projects and initiating new ones to create more economic opportunities and jobs for the people. Speaking when he received the Olu of Warri, His Royal Majesty Ogiame Ikenwoli at the Presidential Villa, Abuja, Buhari also reiterated his governments commitment to maintaining peace and security in the Niger Delta which will allow economic and social activities to thrive. He stated that developing the region remains a priority for his administration, adding that under his watch every region in the country would witness increased investments in critical infrastructure. The President appealed to the people of Niger Delta to complement ongoing efforts by the Federal government to bring more development in the region by maintaining peace, security and harmony. Buhari promised to look into some of the concerns raised by the delegation including the dredging of Escravos bar for Warri and Koko ports, the gas revolution industrial park and EPZ project in Ogidigben, the ecological challenges in Ode-Itsekiri, Ugborodo, Orere/Yanagho and Ogheye-Eghoroke, among others. Buhari also used the visit by the Royal Majesty to commend Itsekiri people for producing men of strong convictions like Prof Itse Sagay, the Chairman of the Presidential Advisory Committee on Anti-corruption (PACAC). A statement signed by Buharis media aide, Femi Adesina quoted the president as saying, Thanks for producing a man like Prof. Itse Sagay, who is defending us robustly and stepping on many toes in the process. If hes not a man of conviction, he couldnt have done that. What he is doing is exceptional. Despite coming from a minority area, hes showing overwhelming influence at the centre. The National Council of State on Thursday endorsed the appointments of 23 members of the National Population Commission (NPC) and a Nation... The National Council of State on Thursday endorsed the appointments of 23 members of the National Population Commission (NPC) and a National Electoral Commissioner for the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC). According to the News Agency of Nigeria, NAN, Gov. Willie Obiano of Anambra disclosed this to State House correspondents alongside Gov. Ibikunle Amosun of Ogun, when they spoke on the outcome of the Council of State meeting on Thursday. The meeting was presided over by President Muhammadu Buhari at the Council Chamber of the Presidential Villa, Abuja. Obiano also revealed that the appointment of two non-legal practitioners in the Federal Judicial Service Commission was also endorsed by the Council. He said Council was consulted today and the Council deliberated and endorsed the Presidents appointments of the following vacant positions; the two non-legal practitioners to the Federal Judicial Service Commission, a National Electoral Commissioner for INEC and 23 members of the National Population Commission The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) has rejected an offer for an out-of-court settlement by a former Minister of the Feder... The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) has rejected an offer for an out-of-court settlement by a former Minister of the Federal Capital Territory, Jumoke Akinjide, who was accused of money laundering. Akinjide was charged alongside former Minister of Petroleum Resources, Mrs. Diezani Alison-Madueke (who is said to be at large), a former Senator Ayo Adeseun and a Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) stalwart, Chief Olarenwaju Otiti. They were accused of conspiring to directly take possession of N650 million, which they reasonably ought to have known forms part of the proceeds of an unlawful act and without going through a financial institution. Justice Muslim Hassan had adjourned to enable parties conclude the settlement talks after Akinjides lawyer Chief Bolaji Ayorinde (SAN) reported that the N650 million had been returned. Yesterday, EFCCs lawyer Nnaemeka Omenwa, who stood in for Rotimi Oyedepo, said he was instructed to turn down the proposal. I have instruction to reject the proposal as its not in line with the provisions of the Administration of Criminal Justice Act (ACJA). Based on that, were ready to go on with the trial, subject to your Lordships overriding convenience, he said. But defence counsel Ayorinde and Michael Lana (for second defendant) accused Oyedepo of a breach of agreement. Ayorinde said the defendants made a proposal to the prosecution in line with Section 14 of the EFCC Act. For the purposes of your Lordships record and because of the public interest that this case seems to unnecessarily attract, our proposal was made in accordance with established laws and there is no fixation on Section 270 of the ACJA. Were very confident that this case is a sham and well defend it vigorously. Its political and well show that its unnecessary and a waste of time and resources of the court, Ayorinde said. Lana accused EFCC of breaching an agreement reached by parties with regards to the settlement, saying it amounted to a betrayal. Their refusal to consider the terms of settlement is to say the least a betrayal of trust by a lawyer. A representation was made to us that we should withdraw a civil suit we filed. Oyedepo is the first defendant in the suit. He made a proposal to us which we believed. On the day of the first arraignment in Ibadan, Oyedepo and Chief Ayorinde informed the court that they had agreed to settle. But the judge decided that the defendants should be arraigned while the talks continued. We withdrew the suit and the money they requested was paid. Thats why we were surprised when we received a hearing notice. A lawyers words should be sacrosanct. Thats an abuse of office. Oyedepo was the initiator of the settlement. Thats like 419. Were highly disappointed with Oyedepo, Lana said. But, Omenwa denied that the case was politically motivated, adding that there was no proof to support the claims against Oyedepo. The EFCC is not a political party. Were an independent organisation and are not out to witch-hunt anybody. There is no documentary evidence that they had any such agreement with Oyedepo that they should withdraw their suit. Theres no evidence before my Lord, he said. Three people were killed, including a child and an elderly woman, and 18 others were injured after two building collapsed in Cairos Manshiyet Nasser area on Thursday evening, the operation room of Cairo governorate told Ahram Online on Friday. Relief teams from the Armed Forces and Cairos Civil Protection Authority are still searching the rubble for survivors or bodies, the source at Cairo governorate added. Sixteen of the injured have been released from hospital after they were treated for minor injuries, while two patients are still being treated for a broken pelvis and a nervous breakdown, the source added. A Cairo prosecution ordered on Friday the formation of an engineering committee to investigate the incident. Manshiyet Nasser is a densely-populated, working-class district in the eastern part of the city. The governor of Cairo ordered officials to provide housing to the residents of the collapsed building. Meanwhile, the Ministry of Social Solidarity has formed a relief committee to temporarily place affected residents in a youth center three day. The ministry also alloted EGP 100 to each resident for daily living expenses. Short link: President Muhammadu Buhari on Thursday joked with some governors before the commencement of the Council of State meeting. President Muhammadu Buhari on Thursday joked with some governors before the commencement of the Council of State meeting. The meeting held at the Council Chambers of the Presidential Villa, Abuja. In attendance were former heads of state Olusegun Obasanjo, Abdusalami Abubakar, Yakubu Gowon, Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo and many state chief executives. As is the tradition, the president observed protocol by personally greeting everyone that is in attendance. However, the significance about yesterdays welcome of his guest was what Buhari told his guests as he shook hands with them. Greeting Benue State Governor, Samuel Ortom, he said, How are your cattle rearers? For Lagos state governor, Akinwunmi Ambode, the President asked How is the lagoon? Shaking hands with the Kebbi state governor, Atiku Bagudu, Buhari asked about shinkafa (rice) in his state. When he got to the Kaduna governor, Nasir El-Rufai, Buhari quipped Ya tuka bulldozer, meaning Did you drive a bulldozer? The Kogi State Governor, Alhaji Yahaya Bello, has said that state governors elected on the platform of the ruling All Progressives Congress and the majority of the party members have confidence in the partys National Chairman, Chief John Odigie-Oyegun.Bello said this in an interview with State House correspondents on Thursday evening after a meeting the governors had with President Muhammadu Buhari at the Presidential Villa, Abuja.He was reacting to a letter written by a national leader of the party, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, in which he accused Odigie-Oyegun of sabotaging his efforts aimed at reconciling aggrieved party members as directed by Buhari.Tinubu had among other allegations accused the party chairman of unilaterally constituting a parallel party executive council in Kogi State.But Bello insisted that the governors have confidence in Odigie-Oyegun.Although he also supported Tinubus reconciliation efforts, the governor warned against what he described as one size fits all method for all the affected states.He insisted that some errant party members must be disciplined despite the reconciliation efforts.Bello said, We the governors and the majority of APC members have confidence in our National Chairman, Chief John Oyegun.We also believe in the President by appointing Bola Tinubu, our leader to reconcile some aggrieved members of our party.However, one size fits all will not work in all the states where some erring members need to be disciplined.He also said the APC governors had been calling on Buhari to seek re-election because of his unblemished record.For instance, he said said state governors had shunned corrupt practices because the President remained incorruptible.The governor said, One, the President has done excellently well. Secondly, on fighting corruption. Even we, among the governors are competing among ourselves to ensure that the little resources available, we utilise for the people. So, corruption is reduced to the barest minimum.Next is the revival of the economy, job creation and making sure that average Nigerians are comfortable. Based on this performance, we are urging Mr. President to please run and fly in 2019.So, there is nothing more to that. And if you look at it critically, the governors themselves who naturally have immunity, we are very careful because you know that Mr. President is incorruptible.If you do, you are going to face the consequences. So, we are careful about that and we are utilising it.You see among ourselves, we are competing among the states to see who does more unlike the previous regime.So, we want such Mr. President to continue to lead the way so that we can follow and Nigerians will have the dividend of democracy.He said Buhari was still consulting with Nigerians and would love to hear from citizens before taking a decision on the 2019 presidential election.The President is still consulting and he wants more Nigerians to speak before he can make up his mind. But I am very comfortable that Nigerians will speak loud, Bello added. A deli worker from Hackensack was arrested Friday on sexual assault and child endangerment charges for alleged acts involving six children at the Hackensack YMCA, where he was living, police said. Timothy Smith, 42, who's employed at ShopRite in Paramus, is charged with multiple crimes for the alleged assaults, which occurred on Feb. 16. The Hackensack Police Department was contacted via 911 to report that children at an indoor pool at the YMCA of Greater Bergen County, on Morris Avenue, had been touched on their intimate parts by Smith during a public swim program. "Upon learning of the allegation against Mr. Smith the YMCA immediately suspended his membership and he no longer has access to the membership area of the YMCA," said Richard Gorab, president and CEO of the Metropolitan YMCA of the Oranges. "We have and will continue to cooperate with the authorites in their investigation," Gorab said. The six victims were interviewed along with witnesses with the assistance of the Bergen County Prosecutor's Office. The victims are ages 6 to 9, police said. Then members of the Hackensack Police Juvenile Justice Division charged Smith with a sex assault and child endangerment felony for each victim. Hackensack Police Capt. Peter Busciglio said, "criminal sexual contact is upgraded to sexual assault when the victims are under the age of 13." Smith did not have a prior record for sex crimes, Busciglio said. Allison Pries may be reached at apries@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @AllisonPries. Find NJ.com on Facebook. The woman who died after she was struck twice by an SUV backing out of a driveway has been identified as a 38-year-old Oakland resident, police said Friday. Nora Kohlash was one of two people struck by a 2014 Jeep Grand Cherokee backing out of a driveway on Thackeray Road about 9:44 a.m. on Wednesday, according to Lt. Christian Eldridge of the Oakland Police Department. After striking Kohlash and her acquaintance, the driver pulled forward into the driveway. The Jeep then rolled backward and struck Kohlash a second time, pinning her under the vehicle, police said. Kohlash was pronounced dead at the scene. The driver, whose name was not released, was ticketed for careless driving, Eldridge said. Police did not release the name of the other person hit. A woman who answered the phone Friday at the home on Thackeray Road declined to comment. Anthony G. Attrino may be reached at tattrino@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @TonyAttrino. Find NJ.com on Facebook. Struggling New Jersey-based toy retailer Toys "R" us plans to close an additional 200 stores, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal. About a month after disclosing plans to shutter 182 stores, including 12 in New Jersey, more locations are on the chopping block following a lower than expected holiday sales, the Wall Street Journal said. The closures include Toys "R" Us and Babies "R" Us locations. Before filing for bankruptcy last year, Toys "R" Us had 11,150 full-time employees and 21,300 part-time workers, the report said. Company officials declined to comment to NJ Advance Media about the report. "As we have shared publicly our focus is on the reinvention of our business and emergence from Chapter 11," the company said in a statement Friday. "Decisions about our future store footprint and organizational structure will be based on needs of the new business model. It is therefore premature for us to comment on that. Everything that you may have seen in the news is based on pure speculation." The company has about 32 stores in New Jersey and more than 1,600 stores worldwide. Like most brick-and-mortar stores, the Toys "R" Us had been hurt by online competition from Amazon and Walmart In February 2017, Toys "R" Us laid off 250 workers at its corporate headquarters in Wayne. The company also had a reported debt of $5 billion. Staff writer Noah Cohen contributed to this report. Jeff Goldman may be reached at jeff_goldman@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @JeffSGoldman. Find NJ.com on Facebook. A 12-year-old boy was charged Wednesday in Vineland with making threats about his school, authorities said. The student, who attends Anthony Rossi Intermediate School, was charged with creating a false public alarm, Vineland police said. The boy told other students he was going to bring a gun to school and start shooting, according to a report on DailyJournal.com. Students told administrators what the boy said and police were called to the school around 9:20 a.m. The boy then claimed he was joking about the threat, the report said. Police searched his locker but didn't find a weapon. Wednesday's incident was another in a growing list of threats against schools across New Jersey following a shooting at a school in Parkland, Florida earlier this month that killed 17. Jeff Goldman may be reached at jeff_goldman@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @JeffSGoldman. Find NJ.com on Facebook. The rest of Kevin Montone's life likely hinges on the ruling of one New Jersey medical examiner. And now, that ruling is being called into question. Montone, 37, of Jersey City, has spent the last three and half years awaiting trial on homicide charges in connection with the August 2014 death of his wife, Monica. He was arrested after a pathologist for the state's northern regional medical examiner office determined his wife was strangled. But with jury selection expected to begin Monday, two pathologists who reviewed the case are raising fresh questions about that cause of death and, in turn, the role of Montone. Zhonghue Hua, the acting Bergen County Medical Examiner who was hired by Montone's public defender, said the autopsy report filed by Di Wang was flawed, the death was the result of drugs and there was no hard evidence to support the strangulation findings. "Monica's death was due to her acute intoxication from the combined effects of cocaine, heroin and Xanax," wrote Hua wrote in a report filed with the court. "The available autopsy photographs and microscopic slides showed no evidence of alleged neck compression, scalp contusions or brain subarachnoid hemorrhage." A second pathologist, Claus Speth, a private medical examiner unassociated with the case, reviewed the evidence at the request of NJ Advance Media and said, based on the records he was provided, it was difficult to support the medical examiner's finding. "It looks like a canned report, which doesn't surprise me because I know things were pretty bad at the northern office in 2014," Speth said. "I don't know that there's any valid evidence for strangulation." The Hudson County Prosecutor's Office contends that all evidence points to Montone. He was home with the couple's 2-year-old son at the time his wife was found, according to court records. Another man, Christian Cardone, was in the home overnight and told authorities that when he left between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m., Montone was asleep on the kitchen floor and Monica was asleep with their son on the couch, the records state. When police arrived, neighbors said he was laughing uncontrollably and seemed incoherent, though he can be heard clearly, if distraught, calling 9-1-1 minutes earlier. Both had drug problems, and prosecutors noted in a court hearing that heroin was "strewn about the house." While he was initially arrested only on drug offenses, Montone was later charged with murder in December 2014 after Wang concluded Monica died of strangulation. In his autopsy report, Wang noted a several inch area of irregular, pink-purple skin discoloration on the right side of Monica's neck and multiple intramuscular hemorrhages in her neck muscles. He also noted contusions on her scalp, abrasions on her lip and burst blood vessels on her neck and around her eyes. But Hua, in his supplemental opinion prepared for the defense, said there was no documented evidence of many of the injuries listed in the report, while others could have been the result of fatal levels of cocaine, heroin and Xanex found in her bloodstream and urine. "The absence of any neck skin muscle and neck muscle microscopic slides make a required establishment of terminal neck trauma by Dr. Wang's presumption of neck compression realistically impossible," Hua wrote. Montone's attorney, Stephen Walsh, declined comment. The Hudson County Prosecutor's Office did not return a request for comment. A lot can hinge on the work and determinations of medical examiners. In Montone's case, if convicted, he could face life in prison. But after 40 years of neglect and poor oversight, the system for death investigations in New Jersey is facing major reforms. In December, an NJ Advance Media investigation revealed the system was mired in dysfunction, leading to bungled cases and ruined lives. Gov. Phil Murphy has called for "wholesale reform," and lawmakers have since introduced and advanced a bill to overhaul the Office of the State Medical Examiner. They are seeking final passage within 60 days. Currently in New Jersey, two state-run offices in the north and south handle death investigations in seven counties. Five counties maintain their own independent offices, and the remaining nine are split among three county-run regional offices. The state's northern regional office, the one under scrutiny in the Montone case, is the busiest and worst-performing in the state, data shows. Stephen Stirling may be reached at sstirling@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @sstirling. Find him on Facebook. Arming teachers with guns would make schools less safe and convert them to "armed fortresses of fear," the state's largest teachers union said Thursday, adding that teachers "cannot shoot our way to safety." In a statement, The New Jersey Education Association sharply rejected President Donald Trump's assertion that schools could be safer if some teachers were allowed to carried concealed guns. Instead, the union called on lawmakers to make guns harder to obtain, easier to track and less likely to get into the hands of individuals who will use them to harm others. "For years, the gun lobby has argued that the solution to gun violence is to have more guns," NJEA President Marie Blistan said. "For years, the United States has suffered levels of gun violence unknown almost anywhere else in the world. We must reject the failed ideology of guns as a solution when, in truth, they are the problem." School security has been in the national spotlight since 17 people were killed last week in a school shooting in Parkland, Florida. Trump on Wednesday suggested allowing some teachers with special training to carry guns as an added safety measure. The president also suggested pay bonuses for teachers trained to carry weapons and tweeted Thursday that "a 'gun free' school is a magnet for bad people." Blistan rejected that notion. "Quite simply, we must get guns out of our schools and keep them out," she said. Scott Bach, executive director of the Association of New Jersey Rifle & Pistol Clubs, warned that people intent on harming students in schools won't be stopped by gun bans. "In a school emergency, the only thing that stops an attack is law enforcement or armed personnel," Bach said. "The NJEA needs to wake up to this fact if it wants to keep our children safe." Adam Clark may be reached at adam_clark@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on twitter at @realAdamClark. Find NJ.com on Facebook. Come March 24, the Macy's at Ocean County Mall will have 17,200 square feet of deals on a variety of products for shoppers when their Backstage store opens. Backstage, which will be a retail space on the second level of the full-line Macy's in the Toms River mall, is a store-within-a-store shopping experience "featuring significant savings on fabulous finds," according to a press release. "Macy's Backstage Ocean County was designed to bring great deals and the fun of the hunt into our existing Toms River location," Michelle Israel, Macy's Senior Vice President of Off Price, said in the release release. "If you're looking for a fashion update, a last-minute gift, or a special treat for yourself, your home, or your pet, we have you covered." The Backstage store will offer a a variety of apparel for men, women and children, as well as home decor, jewelry, designer handbags, and other typical department store items at 20 to 80 percent off traditional prices, the release said. "Backstage's focus on value and newness guarantees that with each visit, shoppers will find an amazingly-priced assortment of recognizable brands and trends," Israel said. The outlet store has their own buyers, and will carry apparel and accessory brands not currently available at full-line Macy's, according to the release, and the store will specifically cater to the Ocean County market. The Asbury Park Press first reported the opening of the store. There are also Macy's Backstage stores in Paramus, Rockaway, West Orange and Woodbridge. There are 52 locations nationwide and 45 of them are the "store-within-a-store" model. Joe Atmonavage may be reached at jatmonavage@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @jatmonavageNJ. Find NJ.com on Facebook A former convict was sentenced Thursday to 55 years in prison for shooting a man to death in front of his family outside his home, authorities said. Luis Mangual (Essex County jail) Luis Mangual, 33 of Newark, was convicted last year of gunning down Jose Alfaro on the 700 block of Mount Prospect Avenue in December 2013. The shooting followed a verbal dispute in the North Ward neighborhood. "This was a tragic case where the victim was murdered outside his home in front of his friends and family members," Essex County Assistant Prosecutor Carlo Fioranelli said in a statement. "I hope the sentence imposed today gives his loved ones a sense of closure." Mangual has been convicted four times since 2003, officials said. That year he was convicted of arson in San Juan, Puerto Rico. In later years, he was separately convicted of obstruction of justice, trespassing, and drug possession. The murder of Alfaro, 39, took place while Mangual was on parole. Jeff Goldman may be reached at jeff_goldman@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @JeffSGoldman. Find NJ.com on Facebook. Brick City, a hardcore nickname for Newark, means everything to Ron Muhammad. "It's the story of my life,'' he said. "Everything I do is Brick City." The longtime vendor said he believes he was the first to have placed the scrappy label on T-shirts in 1992, while Newark rappers such as Redman, the Artifacts and Lords of the Underground popularized the logo in lyrics, giving status to the city's hip-hop culture. After 25 years, Muhammad is still part of the brand, which gets its name from the city's cobblestone and red brick streets and demolished public housing high-rises. "Who would of thought that?" he asked. "I wasn't thinking about Brick City lasting 25 years." MORE: Recent Barry Carter columns Muhammad is 80 years old now. Surprised me, too. Until Monday, I hadn't seen him since 1997, when he was part of a story I wrote about the Brick City name, one that signifies resilience and toughness. Just about every day, more so in the summers, the Newark native catches the bus to his son's store on Market Street to help make and sell the T-shirts that people still want. The name is on hats, jeans and hoodie sweatshirts, too. "He can't do anything else but this," said Kareem Hunter, his son. "He lives, breathes and eats Brick City. That's his thing." Living in another state couldn't stop Muhammad from representing his roots. He went to Clearwater, Florida, in 2008 to relax and visit his daughter and grandson. He wound up staying seven years, but found a gig in which he did embroidery, sending Brick City items back to his son. He returned three years ago and stays busy, not allowing age to dictate his steps. He walks a little slower these days, using a cane for balance, dealing with arthritis in his hip. "When you get up there, everything starts cracking up," said Muhammad, who doesn't let it stop him from riding the train to New York to check out potential merchandise for the logo. Sid Battle, a Newark vendor who has known Muhammad for 30 years, said he's not surprised by Muhammad's get-up-and-go attitude, which many vendors admire. "He's the founding father of this," Battle said, speaking about the Brick City brand. "Why shouldn't he be doing this? Ralph Lauren is still doing it. He (Muhammad) should keep doing it." Muhammad has always been involved in clothing. He owned a high-end store on Bergen Street in 1967 that sold leather jackets, pants and coats. Old-timers in this city should remember its name: the Mark III. It was also the name of a popular car at the time, which is the reason he selected it. Muhammad owned several other stores in Newark neighborhoods, but business never picked back up after the riots and he had to close. Forever the entrepreneur, Muhammad headed to downtown Newark in 1985 to work as a vendor and sell clothing and accessories from a table in front of Bamberger's. He'd be there every day, including Sundays, when the stores on Broad and Market streets were closed. Among the many items he sold, Muhammad started to market T-shirts with just "Newark" printed on them, a response to an out-of-town customer who had asked if he sold that type of clothing. "You couldn't find nothing with Newark on it," he said. Later, Muhammad changed the design to say, "Newark Brick City" and then "Brick City" by itself. It's difficult to pinpoint when the name started, but it could be heard locally in 1988. Newark rapper Lakim Allah, formerly Lakim Shabazz , told me in 1997 that he used the name in his rhymes after hearing Mr. Magic, a New York rap DJ, say it on his WBLS radio show in 1983. With Muhammad, though, the name was a hit on the T-shirts, which were also configured to feature Newark streets and schools. Joseph Hedgepath, a former Newark vendor for 30 years, said the timing was right. "People wanted to identify with something," he said. "Ron is a genius." Jeff Billingsley, chief executive officer of Cobblestone Media in Newark, said Muhammad inspired a generation of young entrepreneurs to follow his lead and represent the city through merchandise. "He started a trend," said Billingsley, who was surprised that Muhammad was still grinding. "God bless him." Over the years, the name has been used in business, sport leagues, cultural events, government and film. "Brick City," the documentary, premiered in 2009. There was the Brick City Development Corp., until the city renamed it the Newark Community Economic Development Corp. in 2014. Now there's Brick City Tires; Brick City Live, a blog about Newark; Brick City Emigree, a blogger who documents personal observations of the city; and Brick City Supper Club. Downtown, a store on Market Street uses the name. A restaurant, Ono Grinds Poke' has a menu item called Brick City Bowl. MORE CARTER: Blind Divas gear up for empowerment pageant | Carter In my 1997 story, the essence of the name was captured in an accompanying photo of Muhammad standing on Prince Street, its cobblestones exposed underneath the blacktop. Stella Wright, a public housing high-rise, was the backdrop, as Muhammad, 59 then, leaned against a telephone pole. His outstretched arms were draped with Brick City T-shirts. The high-rises are gone, but a few red cobblestone streets are left. It peers through broken asphalt in certain spots on East Runyon Street. But on Concord and Clifton, the entire red brick streets are untouched by time. It is as solid as Muhammad. "I'm thankful and grateful to be involved with the name, and hopefully people in the city keep embracing it." Barry Carter: (973) 836-4925 or bcarter@starledger.com or nj.com/carter or follow him on Twitter @BarryCarterSL Hours after a student made a social media threat against two South Jersey high schools, a different teenager in a neighboring town was arrested for allegedly threatening a shooting in West Deptford. The 15-year-old was taken into custody at his home Friday morning after he shared a Snapchat post with threats of "shooting up West Deptford," township police said in a statement. The teen, who does not attend West Deptford High School, is charged with creating a false public alarm, police Chief Sam DiSimone said Friday. Police learned of the threat around 10 a.m. and quickly identified the teen, DiSimone said. There is no threat to West Deptford schools, police said. In a Facebook post, police said they won't tolerate threats and encouraged parents to talk to their children about the importance of notifying authorities of social media activity that can be construed as threatening. Earlier Friday, Deptford police said a student who threatened Deptford High School and Gloucester County Institute of Technology has been identified. Acting Deptford Superintendent Charles Blachford said the student has been removed from school. Police departments throughout New Jersey have investigated numerous school threats in the days after 17 students and faculty members at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida were fatally shot. Jeff Goldman may be reached at jeff_goldman@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @JeffSGoldman. Find NJ.com on Facebook. Robert Sciarrino | NJ Advance Media By: Caitlin Mota | The Jersey Journal HOBOKEN -- Five popular downtown bars won't be participating in this year's annual LepreCon bar crawl after receiving liquor violations and suspensions from the city. LepreCon, the booze filled day often associated with public intoxication and public nuisances, is scheduled for March 3. But after a SantaCon bar crawl grew excessively violent in December, the city has kept its promise at working to ban these events. Hoboken announced Friday morning it has suspended liquor licenses at 1Republik, Hoboken Bar and Grill, Green Rock Tap and Grill, Mill's Tavern, and The Shannon. While their suspensions vary, all of these bars are required to remain closed during this year's pub crawl. Don't Edit Google Maps image 1Republik, which has a location in North Arlington and another set to open in Jersey City, will be forced to close its doors for good. A 30-day suspension of the Washington Street bar's liquor license is set to begin May 21 but the bar will then be forced to close permanently, pending the sale or transfer of its liquor license, officials said. The city cited a Sept. 4 bar fight when a woman was struck in the head with a plate and a Dec. 4 incident in which an employee assaulted a patron of the bar and left him with life-threatening injuries. Kyle P. Tinsley was charged with aggravated assault and endangering an injured victim for the vicious attack in December. Additionally, Hoboken says the bar, located at 221 Washington St., was not properly staffed with security personnel. A message left at the bar seeking comment was not immediately returned. Don't Edit Journal file photo Hoboken Bar and Grill was issued an immediate 30-day suspension beginning Friday. A call to the bar went unanswered. Two police officers were injured and four people were arrested during an early morning brawl outside the Washington Street bar in November. As many as 40 people were involved in the 4 a.m. incident near the bar at 230 Washington St., Hoboken Police Chief Ken Ferrante said at the time. Don't Edit Google Maps image Green Rock Tap & Grill, located at 70 Hudson St., was issued an immediate 30-day suspension beginning Friday. A call to the bar went unanswered. Don't Edit Google Maps image Mills Tavern at 125 Washington St. was issued a 24-day suspension and The Shannon, around the corner at 106 First St., will be closed on March 3 and March 4. Calls to those bars were not returned. Six other bars were also issued complaints, but settled those violations with the city and will not face suspensions. Don't Edit Don't Edit Michael Dempsey | The Jersey Journal Mayor Ravi Bhalla has been an open critic of holiday bar crawls in Hoboken since being elected in November. He vowed during his inauguration day speech to address the growing problem. "The vast majority of bar owners are responsible license holders, but a very small number of establishments have failed to adequately control their patrons and the activities within their premises, leading to severe public safety issues," Bhalla said in a statement. "The discipline agreed to by the owners is appropriate and I hope will lead to an understanding that public safety is a top priority and that the ABC board will not hesitate to enforce the liquor license regulations." Councilman Peter Cunningham told The Jersey Journal he thinks the license suspensions are "draconian." "I am not happy with LepreCon, or SantaCon, but in my opinion, this is not a method to get things done in a collaborative fashion that serves everyones interest," he said. In efforts to keep next weekend's bar crawl orderly, the New Jersey Attorney General's Division of Alcohol Beverage Control will be sending at least a dozen officers to Hoboken to assist local police. A message to the bar crawl's organizers was not immediately returned. Don't Edit Caitlin Mota may be reached at cmota@jjournal.com. Follow her on Twitter @caitlin_mota. Find The Jersey Journal on Facebook. Jersey City's long-delayed property revaluation is going so swimmingly, Mayor Steve Fulop wants to do it all again next year. Fulop said tonight he plans to put a measure before the council in the upcoming weeks that would pave the way for a second reval in 2019, one the mayor said would readjust assessments in the wake of an expected dip in home values caused by the current reval. "We are doing our best to make this difficult time as manageable as possible for residents because we don't want any resident to have to struggle," he said. The mayor made the comments tonight during his annual state of the city address, the fifth of his tenure as mayor and the first of his second term. He delivered the roughly 20-minute speech in front of hundreds of people inside City Hall's council chambers. Fulop spent some time touting what he sees as his administration's past achievements, as he did in his Jan. 1 inaugural address, and he made a few pledges for the future, like a second City Hall annex at the Hub shopping center. But his comments on the reval are sure to resonate with most Jersey City residents. New property assessments calculated for the reval began going out last month to homeowners, some of whom were told to expect massive increases in their 2018 tax bills as a result. Many of the residents facing hefty tax hikes live in the city's affluent Downtown neighborhoods. The mayor has attended community meetings in recent weeks where residents have told him the proposed tax increases will drive longtime residents out of the city and cause home values to drop, making the new assessments meaningless. A second reval in 2019 would correct that, Fulop said tonight. Revals are intended to square the assessment of every property its value on the tax rolls with its true market value. New Jersey requires towns to conduct revals when their total ratio of assessed-to-true value dips below 85 percent. In Jersey City, that ratio is now at 22 percent. The city has not seen a reval since 1988. Fulop canceled a reval underway in 2013 and delayed moving forward again until the state in 2016 ordered the city to conduct one. The delay angered property owners in parts of the city like Greenville who have been told they will see dramatic tax cuts as a result of the reval. Fulop defended his actions tonight, saying past mayors who also delayed the reval put him in a bind. "In our case here in Jersey City, 25 years went by before the topic was even discussed. When that happens, it creates a situation where there is no good choice between doing a reval and not doing a reval," he said. Fulop said a new reval would cost a fraction of the $4.4 million cost of the current one. Ward E Councilman James Solomon, who represents much of the Downtown, said he supports the idea of a new reval as a first step to help homeowners. Solomon won election to the council in November in part by criticizing the mayor for delaying the reval. "What I think has to come next is a fundamental change in the way we do revals, where we have a regular system so we're not just doing it in 2017, 2018 and then that's it," he said. Terrence T. McDonald may be reached at tmcdonald@jjournal.com. Follow him on Twitter @terrencemcd. Find The Jersey Journal on Facebook. JERSEY CITY Honk if you want a ticket! Motorists driving by teacher protests outside School 4 in Downtown Jersey City have been getting a little present from City Hall if they honk their car horns in support: a $54 ticket. At least one teacher received a ticket and, according to one source, a police officer was chided by his superiors for blaring his horn while driving by a protest. The city, which placed electronic signs in front of Schools 4 and 37 on Wednesday warning drivers not to honk, said resident complaints about the early-morning horn blares led to the tickets, which began yesterday. Residents have complained about the honking on the city's Facebook page. The teachers union, involved in an increasingly nasty contract dispute with the public-school district, said Mayor Steve Fulop is full of baloney. "The mayor is resorting to scare tactics rather than pick up the phone and see where he can assist," Ron Greco, president of the Jersey City Education Association, told The Jersey Journal. A city spokeswoman said five have been issued total. The JCEA says any motorists who received tickets can bring them to its office at 1600 Kennedy Blvd. The union's roughly 4,000 teachers have worked under an expired contract since the start of the school year and have been negotiating a new pact with the school board and district administration. It is not going well, with teachers seeking to pay a smaller share of the $98.9 million the district pays for health benefits (workers pay $19.9 million). For weeks small groups of teachers have led protests outside schools citywide before classes begin. "The communities in the areas asked the city to stop that specific action," she said. "If someone drives by the teachers and just honks their horn in support and moves on then of course the city doesn't issue tickets." Courts in Washington and Michigan have ruled honking can be protected free speech. Fulop has no legal control over the school district but union officials believe he has sway over at least two board members involved in negotiations. A sign outside the JCEA's office has urged Fulop to help settle the contract dispute. A special school board meeting is scheduled for today at 3 p.m. to discuss the issue. A Jersey City police officer issuing a ticket to a motorist near School 4. Terrence T. McDonald may be reached at tmcdonald@jjournal.com. Follow him on Twitter @terrencemcd. Find The Jersey Journal on Facebook. JERSEY CITY -- A Union City man who tossed lit matches on a sleeping man, causing a devastating fire that killed his own 1-year-old son, was sentenced to five years in prison today. "Your greatest duty in life is to protect your children," Hudson County Assistant Prosecutor Leo Hernandez said at the sentencing of Eddie Gonzalez Sr. today. "Your life is no longer about yourself. Your child should eat before you eat, sleep before you sleep." "Instead of protecting the child that day, the defendant's choice was about partying, drinking, smoking, engaging in egregious, reckless conduct and senseless death," the prosecutor continued. "Perhaps Father's Day will have a special meaning for this man for the rest of his life." On Nov. 7, Gonzalez Sr., 27, pleaded guilty to the reckless manslaughter of Eddie Gonzalez Jr., who died in the March 4, 2017 fire that started a couch in the family's apartment at 1404 Summit Ave. The fire also left 20 surrounding apartments damaged or destroyed, and damaged or destroyed a number of vehicles and 119-year-old Saints Joseph and Michael Church a block away. Today, Gonzalez spoke of having a drug problem and making the irresponsible decision to drink and use drugs while on medication. He said the night went from laughter to tragedy and a desperate attempt to save his family and neighbors. "I will never be the same person I was again," said Gonzalez who rocked back and forth at the defense table and at times seemed to tremble as he fought back tears. "Today, I would just like to apologize to everyone present. I would not only like to ask for forgiveness from you all, but from God as well." Edwin Diaz, 21, was also charged in the incident. He pleaded guilty to reckless manslaughter and faces up to three years in prison when sentenced by Young on March 2. When Diaz pleaded guilty, he admitted that on March 4 he was in Gonzalez's apartment while Gonzalez was lighting matches and tossing them on a relative as the man slept on a couch. Diaz said he also lit a match and ignited a piece of paper on the man, who would wake and flick off the burning items. In the next room, Eddie Gonzalez Jr., slept with his mother. "After that, we went into the bathroom to smoke (more) marijuana and that's when all this happened," Diaz said while pleading guilty. The boy's mother grabbed his 5-month-old sister and used the fire escape to flee the building unharmed. Gonzalez Sr. suffered burns and was hospitalized in critical condition, but he was released in time for his son's wake. Diaz also admitted that while Gonzalez was hospitalized they hatched a plan to lie about what happened. Diaz said he stuck to the bogus story when interviewed by investigators, but told the truth during a second interview. Young told Gonzalez he chose marijuana over his son's life and was childishly playing with matches. He noted that Gonzalez climbed a fire escape and attempted to save his son but said he never should have had to do that in the first place. "The longer I sit here, the less I understand human nature and somehow have any idea that a human being in some way could think this was a good way to have fun," Young told Gonzalez. "I'm never going to get it sir." But Young noted that the child's death had not been intentional. The state was seeking a seven-year sentence under the plea deal. Young sentenced Gonzalez to five. JERSEY CITY Homeless families in Hudson County will now be able to stay together while they search for permanent housing. Family Promise of Hudson County opened its doors at the Fountain of Salvation Church on Communipaw Avenue on Thursday afternoon. The top floor of the building will serve as the nonprofit's "drop-in center" where families will receive services to help them regain sustainable independence. With the help of Family Promise, congregations across Jersey City and Hoboken will open their doors for families to stay together at night. At other shelters in Hudson County, a father raising his young children or a mother caring for an adult son could be forced to separate. "There are a number of organizations and programs that provide incredible support for the homeless in Hudson County," executive director Tiffany Kane said. "However, there are few offerings for homeless families that allow the entire family to find shelter and services together. "Through Family Promise's unique shelter model, children will be able to remain in schools, parents can remain at their jobs, and entire families will be able to receive services through our case management and support system." A national nonprofit founded in 1986, Family Promise has more than 200 affiliates across the United States. Since it's inception, the organization has served 750,000 people. The local congregations that will operate as "host locations" for families are: Christ United Methodist (Jersey City), Cityline Church (Jersey City), Fountain of Salvation (Jersey City), Old Bergen Church (Jersey City), St. Ann Church (Hoboken), St. John's Lutheran Church (Jersey City), St. Paul's Church in Bergen (Jersey City), Temple Beth-El (Jersey City) and Temple B'nai Jacob (Jersey City). Last year's point-in-time count -- a tally of Hudson County's homeless population -- found that 822 people were homeless as of Jan. 24, 2017. The survey also reported that 87 families were counted as being homeless. For the purpose of the count, a family comprises at least one adult and one child under 18 years old. Family Promise celebrated its Hudson County launch a ribbon cutting ceremony attended by politicians from across the county. Proclamations were presented to the nonprofit from the Board of Chosen Freeholders and from U.S. Sen. Cory Booker's office. Also on hand were representatives from CarePoint Health, which will provide health services to clients who seek help from the nonprofit. Counseling and housing assistance will also be offered through Family Promise of Hudson County. Caitlin Mota may be reached at cmota@jjournal.com. Follow her on Twitter @caitlin_mota. Find The Jersey Journal on Facebook. Nothing personal, Mayor Sacco, but the kids at McKinley School in North Bergen have spoken and they want Ellen DeGeneres to read to them during Read Across America Week. And they are going great lengths to coax the television talk show host and comedian into making the cross country trip. There is a social media campaign and a Youtube video that they sent to DeGeneres' show via Twitter. "It was a collaboration between students, myself and other teachers" at the K-8 school, said technology teacher Maria Morgana, who created the short video. "We were trying to figure out which guest readers to expose our students to. They read a story about how Ellen helped a school and I thought to ask her." The message in the video is simple request and the school is banking heavily on its cuteness factor, with plenty of students begging "pleeeeeeeease!" The video was sent to the show and now school officials and students are hoping media attention helps persuades the star. Students are optimistic "now that we are starting to gain some traction with this campaign," Morgana said. "It's incredible how excited everyone is." Morgana said the initiative is part of the technology curriculum to show students the positive things that can be done with social media outlets such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. The school will celebrate Read Across America Monday through Friday next week with a series of events and guest speakers reading Dr. Seuss books to the younger students. Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi told students at the countrys Police Academy on Friday morning that combating "evil forces" was not only limited to Sinai. President El-Sisi said that fighting off "evil forces" requires readiness to preemt attempts to undermine the nations security, adding that in the field of combating terrorism, the country has achieved good results. He also asked students during the early morning visit to the academy, accompanied by Interior Minister Magdy Abdel Ghaffar, to display ethical and noble military values. The President also saluted families of the academy's students for allowing their sons to act as a shield to protect the country. The president's visit with police cadets comes few days after he visited the military academy with Defence Minister Sedki Sobhi, where he met the academy's students and discussed the future army officers training. Short link: Egypt's National Elections Authority (NEA) approved on Friday President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi and Moussa Mostafa Moussa, the head of the Ghad Party, as the final candidates in the upcoming presidential elections, which are set for 26-28 March 2018. The Authority has also approved the electoral symbols requested by the candidates; a star for El-Sisi and an airplane for Moussa, according to an NEA statement. According to the NEA-set timetable for the upcoming presidential polls, the elections are set to be held abroad on 16-18, and inside Egypt on 26-28 of March, while in case of a second round, the elections will take place on 19-21 for Egyptians abroad, and on 24-26 of April for Egyptians inside Egypt . The NEA final list will be published in the state-owned Al-Ahram and Akhbar newspapers, as well as the state official gazette. President El-Sisi, whose current term will end in June, won the 2014 presidential elections in a two-man race with nearly 97 percent of the vote over leftist politician Hamdeen Sabahi. The two presidential candidates have chosen from 15 symbols published by the NEA in the state's official gazette. Egypt uses symbols for candidates in its elections to help illiterate voters make their choice on the ballot. Short link: A man was formally charged Thursday (Feb. 22) with first-degree murder after Orleans Parish prosecutors say he killed his accomplice in a New Orleans East burglary to prevent her from testifying against him. The charge is non-capital, or not punishable by death, according to the Orleans Parish DA's office. The indictment charges Eric Youngblood, 30, with the June 2014 shooting death of 29-year-old Ashley Smith, whose partially burned remains were found along Michoud Boulevard, the DA's office said. The three-count indictment, handed up by an Orleans Parish grand jury, also accuses Youngblood of aggravated burglary and being a felon in possession of a firearm. According to DA Leon Cannizzaro's office, Youngblood is suspected of leading a group of six people in burglarizing a home at gunpoint in the 7100 block of Restgate Drive. The burglary occurred the night of June 28, 2014. Smith's body was found two days later, hidden in shrubbery along Michoud Boulevard. Youngblood was previously charged with armed robbery and attempted first-degree murder. However, Thursday's superseding indictment amended a charge to aggravated burglary, while adding the first-degree murder charge and illegal gun possession count. After the indictment was read, Orleans Criminal District Judge Keva Landrum-Johnson set Youngblood's bond at $2 million, according to Cannizzaro's office. The case was presented by Assistant DA Michael Trummel. Two other men, Aranton Johnson and Brandon Tucker, were arrested in early July 2014 in connection with the New Orleans East crimes. Johnson pleaded guilty in October to several charges, including aggravated burglary and being a felon in possession of a firearm, and was sentenced to 15 years in prison, according to Orleans Parish court records. Tucker awaits trial, with a pre-trial conference set for March 15. Top stories in New Orleans in your inbox Twice daily we'll send you the day's biggest headlines. Sign up today. e-mail address * Sign Up Youngblood also has an open second-degree murder charge in an unrelated case, also stemming from a 2014 crime. In that case, which is awaiting trial, Youngblood is accused of fatally shooting 31-year-old David Scott on Aug. 5, 2014 in Treme. Within nine days of the killing, police had identified Youngblood as a suspect, but he was not arrested until March 2015, when he was captured as part of a sweep by the U.S. Marshals Service. Though Young blood was caught in New Orleans, investigators had tracked him across several states, including Florida, Minnesota and Texas, authorities said in 2015. Youngblood is currently imprisoned, serving a 15-year sentence for an August 2017 conviction of conspiracy to introduce contraband into a correctional facility. A lengthier penalty could be imposed if the court determines that Youngblood is a habitual offender at a multiple-bill hearing set for March 15, according to the DA's office. In an unrelated case, an Orleans Parish grand jury also handed up a murder indictment Thursday in an October shooting on a 7th Ward street. Phillip Dominick III, 29, was charged with the second-degree murder of 40-year-old Brannon Wilkins, as well as with obstruction of justice and two counts of felon in possession of a firearm. Dominick was arrested Dec. 1 on suspicion of murdering the 40-year-old Wilkins, found fatally shot in the 1600 block of North Villere Street the night of Oct. 30. Dominick was convicted in 2016 of being an accessory after the fact to a separate murder, leading to his weapons charges. Proescutors allege Dominick illegally possessed a gun both on the day Wilkins was killed and on the day Dominick was arrested, when New Orleans police recovered two guns in Dominick's home, the DA's office said. Criminal District Judge Keva Landrum-Johnson set Dominick's bond amount at $2 million after Thursday's indictment was read. Assistant DA Abigail MacDonald presented the case to the grand jury. Update: Brad Smothers was arrested Feb. 24 by NOPD and booked on a charge of second-degree murder, court records show. -- A little over a week since 33-year-old Aaron Anderson died of his injuries after he was shot while getting out of a car, New Orleans police named a man they believe was responsible for the Lower 9th Ward slaying. Brad Smothers, 23, is wanted on a charge of second-degree murder, NOPD said in a news release on Friday (Feb. 23). The shooting occurred about 2:30 a.m. Feb. 11 -- the Sunday before Mardi Gras -- in the 2300 block of Caffin Avenue. A preliminary New Orleans Police Department report about the shooting states the victim, now identified as Anderson, was inside a vehicle with another person just before the shooting. When Anderson got out the vehicle, the report states, "the subject inside the vehicle shot him." He received gunshot wounds to the arm and upper thigh, NOPD spokesman Aaron Looney said. Top stories in New Orleans in your inbox Twice daily we'll send you the day's biggest headlines. Sign up today. e-mail address * Sign Up It was not immediately clear when Anderson died. The coroner's office listed his date of death as Feb. 11, but an obituary that ran in Wednesday's edition of The Times-Picayune says he died Feb. 12 -- one day after he was shot. NOPD said Friday Anderson died on Feb. 15. The obituary for Anderson, which lists his nickname as "BUTTA B.," says he is survived by two children, three brothers and a sister. Court records show Smothers pleaded guilty in May 2017 in Orleans Parish to one count of illegal carrying of a weapon in connection to a January 2017 arrest. He was sentenced to six months, suspended, at the Orleans Justice Center jail, and six months of inactive probation, plus court costs and fines. Anyone with information about the case is asked to contact NOPD's Homicide Unit at 504-658-5300 or Crimestoppers at 504-822-1111. The New Orleans Police Department is searching for two men involved in an aggravated battery incident involving a pistol in the Seventh Ward. Early Tuesday morning (Feb. 20) around 4:16 a.m., a man wearing a blue shirt walked up to the window of Triangle Deli at 1904 North Broad Street, police said. He asked if his friend was at work. The attendant told him that his friend no longer worked at the deli, at which point the man became angry. Police said he pulled out a semi-automatic pistol three times during the encounter, and yelled at the attendant and threatened to shoot him. Eventually, the man in the blue shirt and another man fled the scene. Police said they are seeking both men. It was not clear what role the other man played in the incident. NOPD asks that anyone with information regarding the incident or the subjects should contact 504-658-6050. A doctor in unincorporated Gretna surrendered his medical license after federal and state authorities accused him of running a pill mill, illegally and unethically handing out prescriptions for addictive painkillers. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration on Thursday (Feb. 22) raided Integrity Pain Management Clinic at 525 Commerce St. in unincorporated Gretna, a business owned and operated by Dr. Wayne Celestine, according to Special Agent Debora Webber, spokeswoman for the agency's New Orleans Field Office. Agents seized $1.5 million in assets, including bank accounts and vehicles from the location and three homes connected to Celestine in English Turn, Marrero and Covington. The DEA took action after a four-year investigation into the practices at Integrity Pain Management, according to Webber. Agents worked with investigators from the Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office, the New Orleans Police Department, the Internal Revenue Service, the Westwego Police Department, the Harahan Police Department, the St. Bernard Parish Sheriff's Office, the State Police and the U.S. Attorney's Office. Celestine could not be reached for comment Friday. The probe began in November 2013 after state and local authorities received complaints from citizens about Celestine and his clinic, Webber said. The doctor was accused of prescribing and distributing dangerous drugs, including opioids. Top stories in New Orleans in your inbox Twice daily we'll send you the day's biggest headlines. Sign up today. e-mail address * Sign Up Investigators learned that Celestine was the only prescribing physician at the clinic where large amounts of controlled substances were being doled out to patients, according to Webber. Integrity took only cash payments until recently, according to Webber. Between January and November 2012, Celestine deposited $414,292 in cash in a way that suggested he was trying to get around federal reporting requirements. Agents then began using confidential sources to make undercover buys from the clinic between December 2013 and August 2016, Webber said. Celestine wrote drug prescriptions to some sources even when there was no medical reason, authorities said. Investigators saw patients line up outside the clinic and watched some sell or buy prescriptions obtained from the doctor in either the parking lot or the waiting room. Some patients traveled more than three hours to visit Celestine's clinic. The DEA estimates Celestine has earned about "$13.8 million from his pill mill operation" since 2008, Webber said. Celestine has not been arrested, neither have any other staffers at the clinic, according to Webber. The case is still under investigation. Russian forces suffered their highest casualties thus far in Syria this week, causing some in the countrys media to question the Russian intervention in the Syrian conflict and its benefits for Russia in the short and medium term. There were calls for the return of Russian soldiers from Syria and an end to the Russian intervention in a conflict that these voices said was of no clear strategic significance. On 7 February, armed convoys accompanied by T-72 and T-55 tanks approached the Conoco oil field north of the city of Deir Al-Zor in eastern Syria and bombed militia positions belonging to the US-backed Kurdish Peoples Protection Units that control the area. This area is in the de-escalation zone east of the Euphrates River agreed in a deal between Washington and Moscow. The US apparently contacted Russia to ask about the approaching forces, but Moscow denied there were any Russians among them, claiming that they were Syrian regime and Iran-backed militias. The US then obliterated the convoys in a ferocious military operation that did not give time for the targets to retreat. Less than one hour into the attack, Russia asked the US to stop the bombing and to allow the regime forces to withdraw. However, Washington refused, destroying some 20 vehicles, including nine tanks, using firepower that included the use of F-15 and F-22 aircraft, Apache helicopters and Marine Corps artillery. Washington declared it had killed 500 fighters loyal to the regime led by Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad when these had attacked an oil field where US military personnel were present, but did not mention the presence of any Russians among the dead. Some days later, the Russian media and opposition parties revealed that 644 soldiers had been killed, including 215 Russians. The US leadership contacted its Russian counterpart on the ground to avoid further escalation, US Secretary of Defence James Mattis said. The Russians told us they did not have any soldiers there. We know they were pro-regime forces, but I could not say if they were Iranians or Russians or mercenaries, Mattis said. The Russian Defence Ministry continues to deny that any of its soldiers were killed, with spokeswoman Maria Zakharova only admitting that five soldiers who are believed to be Russians were killed. They may not be enlisted in the Russian army, she said, indicating that the soldiers involved could have been enlisted by private contractors providing mercenaries to support Al-Assad regime troops. Russias denial and its disregard for the fate of Russian mercenaries in Syria upset many. Russian presidential elections candidate Grigory Yavlinsky, leader of the Yabloko United Democratic Party, demanded that Russian President Vladimir Putin provide an account of the mass murder of Russians in Syria. Reports said that those killed were Russian mercenaries hired by the Wagner Group, a private company, and others. Some Russian officials said the Russian government was not responsible for Russian nationals who sign up to fight with private military contractors. However, Yavlinsky said that the Wagner Group fighters had been trained at Russian bases, had received war medals from the Kremlin, and were in fact private units belonging to the Russian Defence Ministry. The Wagner Group is a private Russian military contractor linked to the Kremlin. Critics say that Moscow is using Wagner Group mercenaries to limit its official military losses in Syria. This is the first direct clash between the two major powers in Syria and the first fatal engagement between the US and Russia since the end of the Cold War. The US carried out the operation with deadly accuracy using extensive intelligence. Several military experts have said it is almost certain the Americans knew that more than 200 Russians were in the convoys. The US operation sends clear messages to Moscow, Tehran and Damascus and reveals that US-Russian coordination in Syria is now at an all-time low, with tensions high. Some believe disputes between Washington and Moscow could now escalate, though they also say that the attacks mostly indicate the sensitivity of Deir Al-Zor to both the Russians and the Americans since the city neighbours Syrias oil and gas reserves. The area also intersects the passage between Iraq and Syria, blocking Iran from completing its so-called Shia Crescent to the Mediterranean via Iraq and Lebanon. It is also home to US military bases in eastern and southern Syria. For the Russians, the region allows them to impose regime control over most of Syria and opens the border with Iraq for Iran-backed combatants to come to Syria should they be needed in battles on the ground. Russia, Iran and the Syrian regime still believe in a military option over a political solution to the conflict, seeing war as a means to impose a settlement that serves the interests of these players. This explains why battles erupted after the Russian-sponsored Sochi Conference on Syria failed when it was boycotted by the Syrian opposition and western countries. Russia then launched a military campaign against the city of Idlib in northern Syria, and the regime destroyed eastern Ghouta outside Damascus. Russia tried to take control of the Conoco gas field, and Iran shot down an Israeli military jet. These incidents indicate tensions among the players involved in the Syrian crisis since they neither further their interests directly nor force the Syrian opposition to submit to Russian, Iranian and regime demands. Russian soldiers were massacred, Israel destroyed 50 per cent of the regimes anti-aircraft positions, and the battles at Idlib and Ghouta triggered further anger against the regime. The Russian forces in Syria, supported by air, land and naval bases including the Hamim Airbase and the Tartus Naval Base, have not succeeded politically. Russia has been ensnared at Deir Al-Zor and the Hamim Airbase, where several jets have been damaged, and Irans military influence on the ground has been growing on the ground. Russia cannot impose a political solution in Syria, as has been shown by the failure of the Moscow, Astana and Sochi Conferences. Its alliance with Turkey remains fragile, and the western sanctions against it have increased. Meanwhile, the armed opposition forces are ready to work with the US if the goal is to destroy the power of the regime, Iran and Russia in Syria. The US could now expand its punitive military operations if red lines are crossed by Iran and the regime, including by bombing high-value Iranian targets and sensitive locations for regime forces. The other players will need to remain within the margins outlined by the US, until it is time to solve the crisis based on US criteria. They include Russia, which was dealt a severe blow near Deir Al-Zor. * This story was first published in Al-Ahram Weekly Short link: Amid a surge in reports of school-related threats, Jefferson Parish Interim Sheriff Joe Lopinto issued a fervent plea Thursday (Feb. 22) for students to continue reporting those threats but not by sharing them on social media. Lopinto has joined other law-enforcement agencies in urging students to notify police directly of any threats against schools instead of spreading the information and possibly spreading undue panic via Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook and other social media. "I want you to report what you hear. I want us to know. But the proper way to do that is to call 911," Lopinto said during a news conference in Metairie. "Call 911 so we have the opportunity to see if it's credible or not credible. Alarming 432,000 residents of Jefferson Parish over things that may be idle or not idle is not the proper way." In the wake of last week's mass shooting at a Parkland, Fla., school -- one of the deadliest in modern history -- local schools and law-enforcement agencies have contended with an influx of reported threats, some of which have led to arrests, suspensions or other penalties for students. Thursday's news conference capped a day in which JPSO deputies responded to four incidents involving possible threats at or toward the parish's schools, Lopinto said. The fourth of the incidents occurred just 10 minutes before the news conference, when JPSO received yet another Snapchat post regarding a threat of a school shooting, he said. "We're investigating that one too. We're not going to stop," Lopinto said. "Do we have any credible source that that's going to happen? Nope. We don't. We don't at all." Despite a lack of credibility, the threat has circulated on social media, he said, before pleading with students to avoid spreading such threats. "Pick up the phone and call 911. Don't hit 'post,' don't hit 'share.' That's not the proper way," Lopinto said. "I want you to call us to give us the opportunity to try to determine whether it's real or not real... give us a second to react to it instead of making the problem a lot larger than what it really needs to be." Lopinto did not name the school, but said if any threat is determined credible, the public would be made aware. Earlier Thursday, JPSO detectives were sent to Helen Cox High School in Harvey to look into a possible threat reported Wednesday night via Crimestoppers. The threat turned out to be an incident that had already been resolved Tuesday, in which a student made a threatening hand gesture, Lopinto said. The Helen Cox's resource officer spoke with the student and determined the threat wasn't credible. The student was charged with being a child in need of supervision, which Rivarde explained was not a criminal charge. The teen was then released to his parents. Still, the threat began circulating on social media, prompting about 100 parents to rush to the school Thursday morning to pick up their children, according to Jefferson Parish Public School System officials. However, the Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office spoke with the student who allegedly made the threat on Tuesday and determined it was not credible, JPSO spokesman Lt. Jason Rivarde said earlier Thursday. At John H. Martyn Community School in Jefferson, a 16-year-old student told a bus driver that he wants to be a school shooter when he grows up, Lopinto said. At Grace King High School in Metairie, two male students were booked with terrorizing after their whiteboard portrait captioned "future school shooter" was shared on social media, according to authorities. Top stories in New Orleans in your inbox Twice daily we'll send you the day's biggest headlines. Sign up today. e-mail address * Sign Up According to state police, terrorizing is a felony under Louisiana law and can be punishable by up to $15,000 in fines and up to 15 years in prison "We take that very seriously," Lopinto said. "Once you end up posting it out on social media, we have additional problems." None of the students who allegedly made threats had access to firearms, and the threats were found not credible, he said. "The good news is we have 50,000 students in the Jefferson Parish school systemand 50,000 students went home safely today," Lopinto said at the start of the conference. Jefferson Parish is among places throughout Louisiana and the country dealing with "copycat type threats" following the Parkland, Fla., mass shooting, according to Louisiana State Police. The threats often circulate on social media. Thursday morning, an Orleans Parish school briefly went on lockdown due to a "bogus threat" that investigators believe originated in Ohio and was shared nationwide on social media, the NOPD said. The majority of recent threats have been found to pose no credible danger to public safety, said state police, which released a guide this week to reporting suspicious activity. Like Lopinto, troopers advise against posting possible threats to social media. "The sharing of unsubstantiated threats through social media could add chaos and panic to our school systems and further burden the facility, staff, and student body," state police said. State police advise students and others to assess whether a threat is time-sensitive and poses an imminent danger and if so, to immediately call 911. If someone notices suspicious activity that could warrant further investigation or something that just doesn't seem right, troopers suggest reporting the information to local law enforcement through a non-emergency number. Suspicious activity can also be reported to law enforcement via a free app for smartphones: the See Send app by My Mobile Witness." Though the Florida shooting has sparked more complaints, Lopinto said, the tragedy has not heightened the urgency of JPSO's response to possible threats. The interim sheriff said the JPSO regularly holds active shooter drills and has done so for more than a decade, training often for such an attack. "Our urgency has been consistent for years," he said. "We respond to every one of these." NOLA.com|The Times-Picayune's Michelle Hunter contributed to this report. The Orleans Parish School Board on Thursday (Feb. 22) threw its support behind calls for Gov. John Bel Edwards or the Louisiana Legislature to create a task force to address the state's shortage of certified teachers. The school board unanimously voted to approve a resolution that draws attention to an effort led by the Louisiana State Association of School Personnel Administrators. The group is asking lawmakers to create a task force of teachers, postsecondary institutions, and other school personnel to develop strategies to recruit and train certified teachers. The OPSB resolution included data the group has gathered on teacher certifications in Louisiana during the four-year period from the 2012-13 to the 2016-17 school year. During that period, the organization found the number of people with a bachelor's degree in education who earned teacher certification statewide fell from 1,638 to 1,378. Among that group, more than 80 percent obtained certification in physical education, elementary education and pre-kindergarten through 3rd-grade education. For three consecutive years, fewer than 20 percent of teachers were certified in other academic areas, including middle- and high-school education as well as core subjects like math, science and English. Recently, Louisiana has deployed a special "alternative certification" program to help get more people certified to teach. The program seeks to fast-track professionals interested in teaching in their respective fields, for example, recruiting a novelist to teach English or a physicist to teach science. Even so, the number of teachers with alternative certifications decreased from 518 to 366 statewide over the period examined by the Louisiana State Association of School Personnel Administrators. Meanwhile, more teachers are being OK'd to enter classrooms before they earn their certification. The state has issued 1,517 temporary teaching authorizations since September 2014 to people who want to be in a classroom, but have not yet completed their certification, according to the data. That accounted for 4.3 percent of all teaching certificates issued from Sept. 1, 2014, through Nov. 13, 2017. In its resolution, the Orleans school board specified it wants to include retired and veteran teachers in the dialogue, noting they "could help to alleviate the teacher shortage, provide high-quality and effective instruction to students, and serve as experienced mentors for novice teachers." The Louisiana Department of Education has acknowledged the gap in certified teachers. The department on Wednesday (Feb. 21) launched a statewide "Be a Teacher LA" campaign to target high school juniors and seniors as well as college freshmen and sophomores. The campaign encourages students to go enroll into a college to pursue teaching careers by using marketing materials developed by the department in partnership with Zehnder Communications, a New Orleans-based advertising firm. Participants will view a series of documentary-style videos filmed at Benjamin Franklin High School and Samuel J. Green Charter School aimed at introducing them to the possibility of a career in education and emphasizing the importance of teachers. Several Louisiana universities and nonprofits have also committed to graduating 900 more teachers statewide by 2020. Xavier University and Loyola University recieved a $13 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education to collaborate with Teach For America Greater New Orleans, TeachNOLA, Relay Graduate School of Education, and New Schools for New Orleans to address teacher pipeline challenges in the city. As of last November, New Schools CEO Patrick Dobard said New Orleans needs to fill about 800 teacher vacancies annually. Top stories in New Orleans in your inbox Twice daily we'll send you the day's biggest headlines. Sign up today. e-mail address * Sign Up The teacher shortage is a thorny subject in New Orleans in particular. Calls for help come nearly a decade after OPSB laid off more than 4,300 teachers after Hurricane Katrina. A study released last year by Tulane University's Education Research Alliance for New Orleans stated most of those teachers never returned to the city's public schools. The city's decentralized hiring system may also be affecting the teacher pipeline. A 2015 study from Tulane found the city's charter schools "vary considerably in the types of teachers they are looking for." The rate of teachers leaving New Orleans or education has been as high as 25 percent since 2015, according to the study. Nationally, not everyone is convinced a teacher shortage exists. Critics note there is limited nationwide data available on teacher staffing nationwide, therefore few ways to tell what a shortage would look like. Last October, Kate Walsh, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, pointed out that recent U.S. Education Department data shows the teacher workforce is growing, though some districts are struggling to hire. Walsh suggested pay is a major hurdle in hiring teachers in New Orleans, calling starting pay for teachers in the city "unacceptable." A National Council on Teacher Quality report found a local teacher in New Orleans can comfortably afford rent for a single-bedroom apartment, but the burden of living here is greater when teachers try to save money to buy a home or pay down monthly housing expenses, such as mortgage payments and utilities. Even so, Walsh said the city's decentralized system of public charter schools, typically deemed more flexible and experimental than traditional public school systems, may be in a better position to find solutions to close the teacher pay gap. . . . . . . . Wilborn P. Nobles III is an education reporter based in New Orleans. He can be reached at wnobles@nola.com or on Twitter at @WilNobles. Local foodies will soon be able to get a first-hand taste of Chef Kevin Belton's forthcoming WYES cooking show -- literally. To celebrate the April debut of "Kevin Belton's New Orleans Kitchen," WYES has scheduled a tasting and meet-and-greet at which guests will be able to chat with Belton and sample some of the recipes from the series. The event is scheduled for 2 p.m. Saturday, April 7, at the WYES studios at 916 Navarre Ave. Those in attendance will be treated to samples of Citrus Roasted Chicken with Lemon Mashed Potatoes and Lemon Blueberry Pound Cake, both of which are featured in an episode of the show that focuses on Plaquemines Parish citrus. Tickets are required and cost $35 for the tasting and meet-and-greet only, and $50 for those who would also like an autographed copy of the series' 192-page companion cookbook. Additional cookbooks will be available for $25 each. Because only a limited number of cookbooks will be available, the station advises purchasing them in advance. "Kevin Belton's New Orleans Kitchen," which started production in May 2017, will air Saturdays at 9:30 a.m. starting April 7, with rebroadcasts scheduled for 1 p.m. Sundays. Shot on a set inspired by a Creole cottage, the show will see Belton exploring "the wide mix of cultures that contribute to the distinctive food of New Orleans, including the city's diverse culinary influences from Cuban and Vietnamese cuisine," a WYES news release says. The show will feature an emphasis on locally sourced ingredients, from yams to pecans to mirlitons to okra. Other episodes will focus on such topics as tailgating, the Croatian influence on local cuisine, and St. Joseph's Day. "I'm so excited about this new series and can't wait to get back in the kitchen," Belton said at the time the show was announced. "This time around I'm looking forward to working with ingredients from our local pantry ... in fresh, exciting ways. I think viewers are going to enjoy the variety of dishes we have planned." The show marks Belton's second WYES cooking show, following his 2016 series "New Orleans Cooking with Kevin Belton." That show also featured 26 episodes and aired on PBS stations in 44 states and in 174 markets, including in Canada. For more about "Kevin Belton's New Orleans Kitchen," visit the WYES website. A New Orleans man is accused of trying to kill a Slidell police officer Wednesday (Feb. 21) by running over him with a stolen U-Haul truck. Ricky Cooper, 32, was booked with attempted murder of a peace officer, resisting an officer and possession of a stolen vehicle, the Slidell Police Department reported. Aliyah Sharrieff, 19, a passenger in the truck with Cooper, was booked with resisting an officer and possession of a stolen vehicle. The officer, who fired two shots at the U-Haul in an attempt to stop the vehicle, has been placed on administrative duty pending the outcome of the investigation, the police department said. The incident unfolded shortly before 5 p.m. when a Slidell Police officer tried to stop the U-Haul - which had been reported stolen by the New Orleans Police Department - at the Murphy Oil station at 39100 Natchez Drive. As the officer was ordering the occupants out of the cab of the truck, Sharrieff exited the passenger side and Cooper drove off, police said. Cooper then circled around the parking lot of the station and accelerated back towards the officer in an attempt to run him over, police said. Fearing his life, the officer fired two rounds into the front of the truck. Undaunted, Cooper continued to drive toward the officer, narrowly missing him and Sharrieff, police reported in a news release. Cooper then fled again, driving the truck to the back of a nearby Walmart store at 39142 Natchez Drive. The U-Haul was blocked in by other responding officers, at which time Cooper jumped out and ran. After a brief chase, he was taken into custody without incident, police said. Cooper was treated for minor injuries he sustained when the truck's windshield was shattered. When arrested, the suspect also had an outstanding warrant from the New Orleans Police Department for unauthorized use of a motor vehicle. "Every day a police officer puts on their uniform, they put their life on the line," Police Chief Randy Fandal said. "Our officer nearly lost his life trying to protect and serve the citizens of this community. This was a senseless act of violence over a stolen U-Haul truck." It is becoming clearer just how big a problem Louisiana state government has with sexual harassment and discrimination. Records released to reporters Feb. 15 show that government agencies have paid at least $3.9 million to state employees since 2004 in legal settlements for sexual harassment, gender discrimination and retaliation for reporting harassers. There were three professors, three judges, three doctors, a former state legislator, a prison warden, a prison medical director and the former commissioner of the state Office of Alcohol and Tobacco Control among the accused. That likely isn't all of the harassment claims during that period. The list only includes the 66 payments made by the state Office of Risk Management, not settlements paid directly by state agencies and universities. The latest case is a lawsuit filed Thursday (Feb. 22) accusing Secretary of State Tom Schedler of propositioning a woman in his department and describing a "sexually hostile and abusive working environment." Mr. Schedler says he had a consensual relationship with the woman, but her lawyer disputes that. The governor's office and the Legislature already are looking at how to strengthen harassment policies. Gov. John Bel Edwards appointed a task force to review state policies after Deputy Chief of Staff Johnny Anderson resigned in November following sexual harassment allegations against him. Mr. Anderson had a history of allegations involving him that dated back to 2006, when he worked for then-Gov. Kathleen Blanco. He denied he harassed anyone. However, U.S. District Judge Ralph Tyson ruled in a case from his tenure with Gov. Blanco that Mr. Anderson had violated sexual harassment laws. That history didn't come up when he was being vetted to join the Edwards administration, Mr. Anderson said. That omission raised questions about the thoroughness of the hiring process and how seriously the state takes harassment. The Legislature is holding hearings on the issue, and lawmakers are preparing proposed changes to state law. Sen. Regina Barrow, a Baton Rouge Republican, said she is worried about the lack of consistency across state agencies. "There seems to be no continuity," she said during a hearing Feb. 16. Most state agencies also have policies on sexual harassment complaints, but they vary. The state's civil service agency provides an online training session on preventing and reporting sexual harassment, but agencies aren't required to use it. Employees are encouraged to go through training, but don't have to do so. The Legislature approved a resolution in 2012 providing for a "minimum of one hour of education and training on sexual harassment during each year." But that isn't binding, as a law would be. As of mid-December, only about 23 percent of employees had viewed the hour-long video on sexual harassment prevention during the year. Even if there were 100 percent compliance, would that training be sufficient? Legislators should look at the most effective ways to prevent harassment. There are inconsistencies in the Legislature, too. Senate policy prohibits sexual harassment, but House policies are silent on it. State and federal laws forbidding gender discrimination and sexual harassment apply to legislative employees. But there are part-time workers, lobbyists, journalists and others who work in and around the Legislature. It is unclear how or whether those people would be protected from harassment. The governor's task force has discussed mandatory training and other possible changes, but the group's work is confined to agencies under the governor's supervision. That leaves out a large portion of state government. The Legislature, the courts, and the Justice, Agriculture and Forestry, Treasury and Insurance departments are outside the governor's jurisdiction. The Secretary of State's office, the lieutenant governor's office, state parks and tourism also are independent offices. Those other agencies also should examine their harassment policies to make sure they are well defined and consistently enforced, as the Legislature is doing. The judiciary generally polices itself, but lawmakers should include as many agencies as possible under harassment legislation. A patchwork system with varying policies is no way to protect employees. Coming off a six weeks of rain, and coming into what appears to be the beginning of the dog days, its time to change your fishing strategy if you plan to catch fish the rest of the summer. How can we be sure that a terrorist group has been destroyed when not all of its fighters have been brought to justice and some may even be able to make their way to new arenas? The answer to this question will determine the future of global counter-terrorism strategies in view of conflicting national priorities in the aftermath of the military successes to drive the Islamic State (IS) terrorist group, from key cities in Iraq and Syria. When reports surfaced last month that two French women awaiting trial in Iraq over accusations of joining IS could be facing the death penalty, French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian flew to Baghdad to express Frances opposition to any execution. As happens every time a French person is potentially condemned, we act very strongly to make our position known, Le Drian told reporters during the trip. Last week, a French court acquitted a man charged with harbouring the killers who had carried out the attacks in Paris in 2015 that left 130 people dead and dozens injured. The presiding judge said the court had found Jawad Bendaoud not guilty of providing lodging to two of the attackers and helping them to hide from police when they were the most-wanted criminals in France. While the courts ruling brought a surprising end to the first criminal trial linked to Frances deadliest extremist violence in decades, the French governments response to the trial of the French women in Iraq left more questions about Frances legal and practical considerations vis-a-vis anti-terrorism unanswered. Moreover, it will definitely impact the future of the global war against terrorism, which is already being hampered by national political and security calculations and interests. Some 30,000 to 40,000 foreign fighters joined IS before the groups self-proclaimed caliphate began to crumble last year. Around 6,000 of these are believed to have come from Western nations, and there have been concerns that these individuals could now return home or move elsewhere and carry out further attacks. Last week, representatives from countries in the US-led Coalition fighting IS met in Rome to discuss the fate of group detainees in Syria, but delegates were sharply divided on what to do with them. One dispute between the United States and Britain centred around the fate of two British nationals accused of being IS militants who have been held by Coalition-backed Kurdish forces in Syria since mid-January. Washington wants London to bring the two men to justice in the United Kingdom, but the British Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson says the men have turned their backs on Britain and should not set foot in the country again. Thousands of IS fighters have already returned to their home countries amid confusion over whether they have been jailed or are being tracked. Many have disappeared from the view of the security services, which have often not disclosed information on such fighters legal status for joining a terrorist organisation. Turkish police have routinely been reporting the detention of foreign citizens crossing the countrys borders with Iraq and Syria over suspected links to IS, but little is known about whether these are now facing prosecution. Thousands are believed to have surrendered to Kurdistan Regional authorities in northern Iraq, but there has been little news about plans to prosecute them or send them for trial in Baghdad. While the fate of the detainees or returnees underscores a serious problem, the controversy could go beyond tackling the challenge of terrorists captured in the war to those who managed to run away from the battlefield. In November, a BBC report disclosed that the US-led Coalition had allowed some 4,400 suspected terrorists to leave the besieged Syrian city of Raqqa with their families in a convoy going towards the Iraqi border. In June 2016, some 1,000 militants, including senior IS leaders and some foreign fighters and their families, succeeded in making their way out of the besieged Iraqi city of Fallujah, escaping the aerial bombardement of their convoys by the US-led Coalition. The US-led Coalition is not the only party to suspicious deals that have allowed thousands of IS fighters to escape arrest or prosecution. In August 2017, some 300 IS fighters and family members were transferred from the Lebanon-Syria border to new locations in IS-controlled territories under a deal with the Lebanese Shia group Hizbullah. This shocking revelation was not unprecedented. Hundreds of terrorists were also allowed to go free during the battle to retake Mosul and other cities in Iraq last summer. Kurdish Peshmergas forces said they had arrested some of the escapees who were trying to make their way to Syria and Turkey. The controversy over the IS fighters has triggered concerns that parties to the international war against IS lack a coherent strategy to track returning militants and bring them to justice. The United Nations and human rights groups have criticised Iraqs execution of prisoners charged with affiliation with IS, accusing the Iraqi government of displaying disregard for human life and dignity. Their criticism centres around either flaws in the Iraqi justice system or a lack of credible evidence that the death penalty deters crime more than a term of imprisonment. The UN and the rights groups have also charged the Iraqi authorities with abuses against prisoners accused of terrorism offences and demanded guarantees of fair trials. While such criticism is based on moral grounds and attempts to ensure the protection of human rights, it falls short of providing concrete and practical proposals for punishments that reflect the seriousness of the crimes perpetrated by the terrorists. With the parties differing on how to deal with such challenges, including whether suspected militants should face trial in the countries where they committed their crimes or be sent home for prosecution, the United Nations now needs to come up with a tangible legal strategy for global counter-terrorism. Under several UN resolutions, member states are required to bring terrorists to justice through effective criminalisation, but nothing has been offered to establish well-defined guidelines on the prosecution of foreign terrorists, for example. The latest flash point about the two British terrorists and the debate over whether they should be returned to their country of origin for trial or tried in the countries where they operated highlights the need for an international mechanism for such trials. It is evident that some countries are reluctant to take responsibility for their nationals who joined IS and participated in atrocities against foreign nations for selfish reasons or national priorities, such as the fear of a backlash at home or retaliation by terrorist groups. While the complexities arising from bringing foreign terrorists to justice pose new challenges, the bigger dilemma that the world could witness if no action is taken dictates the need to address the problem and determine where such individuals should face trial. In September, the United Nations Security Council approved the creation of a UN investigative team to collect, preserve and store evidence in Iraq of acts by IS that may be war crimes, crimes against humanity or genocide. Although the UN Resolution puts a cap on the inquiry, its scope could be expanded to provide a legal framework for concrete action to face up to the threat that returning foreign fighters could present to the wider world. Under UN Security Council Resolution 2379 (2017) evidence of crimes collected and stored by the investigation team in Iraq should be for eventual use in fair and independent criminal proceedings conducted by competent national-level courts. Ironically, the Iraqi diplomacy which under British pressure requested the resolution, has thus far failed to make the Security Council act to develop international capacity to try IS combatants and provide justice to their victims. As long as Western nations continue to show hypocrisy and incompetence in confronting this challenge and refuse to accept the return of their nationals to face trial, the world will face the real danger that the terrorists will travel to other countries to carry out more attacks. * This story was first published in Al-Ahram Weekly Short link: The state will soon be pushing the locally elected officials of Powhatan out of the way to administer the finances of the northwest Louisiana village that in mid-July had only $105 in its general fund and is hiring a cop to drum up some money from The people of Louisiana should know that when the Zombie apocalypse comes, Baton Rouge offers the best chance of survival in this state, according to an analysis of a report by the federal Centers of Disease Control and Prevention. Thomas Morstead might be harder to recognize under his New Orleans Saints helmet next season. Soon, the punter will be losing his luscious locks, but for a good reason. Morstead announced on social media on Thursday that he plans to donate his hair next month to the St. Baldrick's Foundation, which funds research for pediatric cancer. Morstead said he'll shave his head at an event on March 24 at Finn McCool's in Mid-City. He also invites people to join his team, noting that anyone can buzz his or her head for the event and not just people with hair beyond their shoulders like Morstead. In the announcement, Morstead said he last chopped off all his hair five years ago. Since then, he's gotten married and had three children. This donation is continuing an offseason of giving for Morstead, who presented a check for more than $221,000 to Children's Minnesota hospital in Minneapolis earlier this month after Vikings fans began donating to his charity, What You Give Will Grow, because of the courage and sportsmanship he showed in the divisional-round playoff loss. Morstead has also started raising money for Louisiana Child's Life, which supports kids who are hospitalized in this state. Find information on that fundraiser here. Click here for more information on joining Morstead's team of hair donors. He's offering drinks for anyone who joins at the event next month. Workers at NASA's Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans East on Thursday (Feb. 22) rolled out the latest piece of hardware for the nation's new deep-space rocket. Watch the video above to see the piece being shipped out. The piece, a structural test version of the intertank that will eventually be housed in NASA's Space Launch System, was loaded Thursday morning onto the agency's Pegasus barge. The barge, first used during the Space Shuttle program, will carry the intertank to the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama for testing. The test piece is the second major core stage component built for the Space Launch System at Michoud, dubbed NASA's "rocket factory" for its decades-long role putting together the equipment that has carried astronauts to space. The engine section was delivered in May 2017. The long-term vision for the 321-foot-tall Space Launch System, or SLS, is a manned mission to Mars, but the goal is to get it and its crew to the Moon first. The SLS will carry astronauts into deep space aboard NASA's Orion spacecraft, which was also built at Michoud and will sit atop the rocket. At 48 feet high and and 27.6 feet in diameter, the intertank will connect the two giant fuel tanks on the 200-foot-tall core stage and serve as a connection point for the rocket's twin solid rocket boosters. It also houses the avionics and electronics NASA describes as the "brains" of the rocket. The delivery of the intertank marks "significant progress toward the rocket's first flight," according to a news release. The Space Launch System's first flight is scheduled for 2019. Turkish officialdom and media sustained an increasingly strident and often bellicose campaign against the US for most of the past year. Orchestrated from the White Palace in Ankara, it began some weeks after Donald Trump was sworn in, when Erdogan realised that the new occupant of the White House in Washington was not going to hand over the alleged mastermind of the so-called coup attempt, Islamic preacher Fethullah Gulen, and moreover that the US was going to continue to support the predominantly Kurdish forces that have been fighting the Islamic State (IS) group in Syria. To hear Turkish officials in recent days and weeks, one would have thought that Ankara and Washington would finally part ways. "Relations between the two NATO allies are on the verge of rupture or being put on ice until further notice," one Turkish columnist wrote. Some observers expected that Ankara would time this crucial decision to coincide with US Secretary of State Rex Tillersons two-day visit to the Turkish capital last week. As he was air-bound for Turkey last Thursday, his Turkish counterpart Mevlut Cavusoglu, in a press statement, said that relations between the two countries had reached such a critical point that they would either have to be repaired or severed. But much to the surprise of anyone unfamiliar with Erdogans demagoguery and cynical flip-flopping, nothing of the sort occurred. In fact, all Ankaras threats and ultimatums melted into thin air, even as the Trump administrations representative, Tillerson, explicitly reiterated the following points from the very heart of the Turkish capital: firstly, US will not withdraw from strategically important Mambij in Syria; secondly, it will not cease support for the Syrian Democratic Forces (which Ankara claims is an extension of the Turkish-based PKK); and thirdly, that Washington will not hand over Gulen unless Turkey submits tangible and substantiated evidence. On top of the foregoing Nos, Tillerson reiterated his governments grave concerns over the deterioration in human rights, freedom of expression, judicial autonomy and rule of law in Turkey. Nor did he omit a reference to Turkeys contract to purchase Russian S-400 missiles which, if it goes through, will not have positive repercussions for Turkey. In the aftermath of that visit, the very media organs that, for a year, snapped and growled at the very mention of the word Washington have been put to the difficult task of coming up with face-saving formulas for the diplomatic defeat. Eventually, one stealthily emerged in a government communique following the talks: the two countries had agreed to normalise relations between them. With some relief, the government-controlled press seized upon it and blazoned it across their headlines with no allusion to the USs unaltered stances on Manbij, Syrian Kurds and Gulen. In the process, the regularly broadcast opinion polls highlighting the Turkish peoples rejection of the USs anti-Turkish policy of supporting the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) were forgotten, as were the appeals from Turkish business and entrepreneurial quarters to Ankara to burn bridges with the West and turn eastward towards Asia and the Pacific. Naturally, opposition forces did not miss the opportunity to express their views on this humiliating development. Social media abounded with satirical quips about how the mighty Erdogan, in pseudo-Ottoman warrior garb, was forced into retreat by the power that, if it wished, could get Turkey booted out of NATO. As Erdogan knows this very well, his bombast was, as always, pitched for the gallery and geared to attain his political ends at home. As for that Ottoman slap that Erdogan had promised to deliver, neither Tillerson nor anyone else in Washington appears to be feeling the sting. In fact, if anyones face is smarting at the moment, it is Turkeys thanks to Erdogans bluster and bravado style of brinksmanship. One of the most widely circulated video clips among opposition quarters at present is that in which US State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert, in a press briefing, describes the Turkish presidents threat as "funny". In response a reporters question as to whether "the US has experienced the Ottoman slap," Nauert smiled, took a moment to collect herself as journalists laughed, and said As funny is it was Im not going to respond to every foreign leaders comment. It was, perhaps, no coincidence that just the day after Tillerson's visit, SDP forces carried out a strike near the Kirikhan district of the Turkish Hatay province, which borders Syria. It was reported that the target was a military base where the invasion attacks against Afrin are coordinated. It was the first time that the SDF, an alliance of Kurdish and Arab fighters, has claimed a cross-border attack on Turkish forces. It is unlikely that this action could have taken place without a level of support from the Syrian regime. Damascus has allowed hundreds of SDF reinforcements to pass through parts of regime-controlled areas in order to reach Afrin and contribute to the defence of that canton against the Turkish invasion. Contrary to Turkish propaganda, Turkish forces on the ground in Afrin are encountering stiff resistance, which is prolonging an operation that had been billed as a blitz campaign that would achieve immediate victory. Observers suggest that, because of the growing complexity of the situation in Afrin, especially with the increasing involvement of the Russian-backed Syrian regime, Turkish forces are at risk of becoming inextricably bogged down. Adding weight to this possibility, Kurdish fighters, as natives of the area, are fighting on home ground and determined to defend their families, homes and villages, unlike the invading Turkish forces and their jihadist allies. * This story was first published in Al-Ahram Weekly Short link: The United Nations Special Envoy Staffan de Mistura renewed his urgent call on Friday for a ceasefire to stop both the "horrific" bombing of besieged eastern Ghouta and indiscriminate mortar shelling on Damascus. The ceasefire needs to be followed by immediate, unhindered humanitarian access to eastern Ghouta and evacuation of sick and injured, de Mistura said in a statement read out by U.N. spokeswoman Alessandra Vellucci to a Geneva briefing. The three guarantors of the Astana process - Russia, Iran and Turkey - must meet urgently to re-install the de-escalation zones in Syria, he said, speaking hours before a U.N. Security Council vote on a resolution on a 30-day truce Short link: US President Donald Trumps attacks on the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) hit a new low this week, when he suggested in a tweet on Saturday that it had failed to prevent last weeks shooting at a Florida high school because of its ongoing investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential elections. Trumps tweet came one day after the office of US Special Counsel Robert Mueller alleged that a Russian propaganda arm had overseen a criminal and espionage conspiracy to tamper in the 2016 US presidential campaigns to support Trump and disparage his Democratic Party rival Hillary Clinton. The indictment released by Mueller on Friday revealed more details than had been previously known about Moscows purported efforts to interfere in the elections. Mueller charged 13 Russians and three Russian companies, including the St Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency known for its trolling on social media, of taking part in the conspiracy. The official who oversees Muellers work said the investigation was not finished. Court documents said those accused had a strategic goal to sow discord in the US political system, including the 2016 US presidential elections. The indictment said the Russians had adopted false online personas to push divisive messages, travelled to the United States to collect intelligence, visiting 10 states, and staged political rallies while posing as Americans. In one case, it said, the Russians had paid an unidentified person to build a cage aboard a flatbed truck and another to wear a costume portraying Clinton in a prison uniform. The surprise 37-page indictment could alter the divisive US domestic debate over Russias alleged meddling in the elections, undercutting some Republicans who, along with Trump, have attacked Muellers investigation. These Russians engaged in a sinister and systematic attack on our political system. It was a conspiracy to subvert the process and take aim at democracy itself, said Paul Ryan, the Republican Party speaker of the House of Representatives. The indictment is silent on the question of whether the Trump campaign colluded with the Kremlin, which Mueller is investigating. In a tweet on Friday, Trump gave his most direct acknowledgement yet that Russia had meddled in the elections, which he has frequently disputed. Russia started their anti-US campaign in 2014, long before I announced that I would run for president. The results of the election were not impacted. The Trump campaign did nothing wrong no collusion, Trump wrote. Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova denounced the allegations as absurd and ridiculed the notion that so few Russian nationals could undermine US democracy. 13 against the billions [spent on the] budgets of the secret services, she asked in a Facebook post. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov declined to comment on Saturday on the US indictments, telling a security conference in Munich that US Vice President Mike Pence and others had raised questions about the investigation. You may publish anything you want to. Until we see the facts, everything else is just blather, Lavrov said. The accused Russians are unlikely to be arrested or appear in a US court on the charges, which include conspiracy to defraud the United States, wire fraud, bank fraud and identity theft, as there is no extradition treaty between the United States and Russia. The indictment broadly echoes the conclusions of a January 2017 US intelligence assessment, which found Russia had meddled in the elections, and that its goals had eventually included aiding Trump. In November 2016, Trump won a surprise victory over Democratic Party candidate Clinton. Muellers indictment did not tie the meddling efforts to the Russian government. But the earlier US intelligence assessment said that Russian President Vladimir Putin had ordered a campaign to influence the US elections. Trump has never unequivocally accepted the US intelligence report and has denounced Muellers probe as a witch hunt. Some of those charged, posing as Americans, had communicated with unwitting individuals associated with the Trump campaign, the indictment said. Last year, Mueller charged Trumps former campaign manager and his deputy with money-laundering and other crimes, and accepted guilty pleas from two former foreign policy aides for lying to the FBI. Fridays indictment of the Russians, coupled with the FBI disclosure that it had failed to heed a warning about the Florida high school shooter, were blows to the White House, still reeling from the fallout of a scandal involving a former aide accused of domestic abuse by two ex-wives. US Deputy Attorney-General Rod Rosenstein told a press conference that the defendants had allegedly conducted what they called information warfare against the United States, with the stated goal of spreading distrust toward the candidates and the political system in general. The indictment describes a sophisticated and well-funded multi-year operation, dubbed Project Lakhta, by Russian entities to influence the elections, beginning as early as May 2014. The Russians had unlawfully used stolen social security numbers and the birth dates of Americans to open accounts on the PayPal digital payment platform and to post on social media using fake identities, the indictment said. The Russians had sought to measure the impact of their online social media operations, tracking the size of US audiences reached through posts and other types of engagement, such as likes, comments and reposts, according to the indictment. Facebook said in a statement that it had previously disclosed the Internet Research Agencys activity on its platform. We know we have more to do to prevent future attacks, said Joel Kaplan, Facebooks vice president of global policy. Twitter, whose platform was also used, echoed that view, saying in a statement that any activity of this kind is intolerable, and we all must do more to prevent it. However, for Trump the indictment issued by Mueller provided an opportunity to renew his attacks on the FBI, which he has long accused of siding with the Democrats. While it is true that the FBI had been alerted about Nikolas Cruz, the 19-year-old who killed 17 people at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, last Wednesday, there is no evidence that it missed anything because of its investigation into the Trump teams possible collusion with Russia. Very sad that the FBI missed all of the many signals sent out by the Florida school shooter. This is not acceptable, Trump wrote. They are spending too much time trying to prove Russian collusion with the Trump campaign there is no collusion. Get back to the basics and make us all proud, he wrote. The FBI acknowledged on Friday that a person close to Cruz had contacted its tip-off line on 5 January a month before the shooting to provide information about his gun ownership, desire to kill people and disturbing behaviour. FBI Director Christopher Wray said in a statement that he was investigating what had happened. Trump has reportedly considered ending Special Counsel Muellers assignment, but has been warned against it by White House lawyers. The confrontation between the two is likely to escalate after CNN reported on Tuesday that Mueller was expanding his investigation into the presidents son-in-law Jared Kushners contacts with Russia, and that it would now include Kushners efforts to secure financing for his company from foreign investors during the presidential transition, according to people familiar with the inquiry. This is the first indication that Mueller is exploring Kushners discussions with potential non-Russian foreign investors, including in China. US officials briefed on the probe told CNN in May that points of focus related to Kushner, a White House senior adviser and son-in-law of President Donald Trump, and included the Trump campaigns 2016 data analytics operation, Kushners relationship with former national security adviser Michael Flynn, and his contacts with the Russians. Muellers investigators have been asking questions, including during interviews in January and February, about Kushners conversations during the transition to shore up financing for 666 Fifth Avenue, a Kushner Companies-backed New York City office building reeling from financial troubles, according to people familiar with the special counsel investigation. During the presidential transition, Kushner was a lead contact for foreign governments, speaking to over fifty contacts with people from over fifteen countries, according to a statement he gave to congressional investigators. Before joining the administration, Kushner was also working to divest his interests in Kushner Companies, the family company founded by his father. In early 2017, Kushner divested from the 666 Fifth Avenue property that his familys company had purchased in 2007 for $1.8 billion. The interests were sold to a family trust that Kushner does not benefit from, a spokesperson said at the time. One line of questioning from Muellers team involves discussions Kushner had with Chinese investors during the transition, according to sources familiar with the inquiry. A week after Trumps election, Kushner met with the chairman and other executives of Anbang Insurance, a Chinese conglomerate that also owns the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York, according to the New York Times. At the time, Kushner and Anbang Chairman Wu Xiaohui were close to finishing a deal for the Chinese insurer to invest in the flagship Kushner Companies property. Talks between the two companies collapsed in March, according to the Times. Muellers team has also asked about Kushners dealings with a Qatari investor regarding the same property, according to one of the sources. Kushner and his company were negotiating for financing from prominent Qatari investor former prime minister Hamad bin Jassim Al Thani. But as with Anbang, these efforts stalled, the source said. *This story was first published in Al-Ahram Weekly Short link: The head of the Ministry of Cultures Egyptian Centre for Foreign Cultural Relations Hisham Mourad has met with the ambassador of Thailand as well as cultural counsellors from the Ethiopian and Kazakh embassies to discuss reinforcing cultural relations between Egypt and the three countries. Mourad met with Thai Ambassador Chainarong Keratiyutwong and the cultural counsellor at the Thai embassy Guthakert Montapaniot, where they agreed to hold two concerts on 12 and 13 April at the Cairo Opera House, and another one at Alexandria Opera House (Sayed Darwish Theatre) for three musicians from Thailand. The Thai officials expressed their desire to participate in events and festivals held by the Ministry of Culture in Egypt and that they would like to invite Egyptian troupes to participate in festivals held in Thailand. They also praised the recent performances by the Egyptian National Folklore Ensemble in several Thai cities, which have received audience acclaim. The Egyptian delegation also obtained the shield for best delegation at a Thai festival as well as the Gold Award for best troupe and the best dancer award. Mourad also met with Yelaman Zholdassov, the cultural counsellor of the Kazakh Embassy in Cairo, where they talked about organising a Kazakh cultural week in Egypt, including a photo exhibition on Kazakhstan and a film week with translation from Kazakh to Arabic. This is in addition to presenting concerts at the Cairo Opera House and the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, which will feature a Kazakh Symphony Orchestra, led by the famous maestro Ayman Moshadzev. Mourad then met with Zerihun Megersa, the cultural attache at the Embassy of Ethiopia in Egypt. Their meeting was held following the participation of Ethiopia in the sixth round of the Aswan International Festival for Culture and Arts, which was held during the annual solar illumination of the statue of Ramses II from 17 to 22 February. With the participation of Ethiopia with its National Dance troupe as a guest of honour, Magarsa requested that an additional show to be performed by the Ethiopian troupe in Cairo on 25 February. Short link: What would happen if the artists Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg had retained 10 percent equity in the artwork sold in the start-up phase of their careers? This question is the focus of a new study from Amy Whitaker, NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development in partnership with Roman Kraussl, University of Luxembourg introducing a novel investment framework to reflect the artists role as an early stage investor in their own work. The study finds that artists can reap significant financial rewards from holding an equity stake in their artworkcompared with investing the equivalent dollar amount in the S&P 500and is among the first to quantitatively test a retained equity model using first-sale prices alongside auction results. The fractional equity model represents a necessary structural correction to how we view artists. Art is currently priced and not valued; the market doesnt account for initial economic risk or investment by the artist. Artists, like any early investor, should have exposure to the upside they helped to create, said Amy Whitaker, an assistant professor of visual arts management at NYU Steinhardt and the studys lead author. The study combines publically available auction data with private sales information to analyze the returns on retained equity for ten Rauschenberg works and nine Johns works sold via the Leo Castelli Gallery between 1958 and 1963. The data show that Rauschenbergs portfolio would have generated returns 2.8 to 140.8 times greater than an equivalent investment in the S&P 500, with Johns portfolio outperforming the market by a factor of 24.9 to 986.8. For instance, a 10% equity stake in Rauschenbergs work Statesold in 1959 for $300would have become $44,000 in the art market. The same $30 investment in the S&P 500 would have returned $2,417 over the same time period. Whitaker acknowledges the results are buoyed by the meteoric success of the artists in the study, but indicated the outsize returns show why shared value matters. Its necessary to have a conversation about artists being modeled as investors, whether they become as successful as Johns and Rauschenberg or not. This study shows you the maximum possible return to the artist and therefore articulates why structural intervention in markets for creative work deserves serious consideration, Whitaker said. The study extrapolates that modeling equity portfolios for artists will also introduce a secondary market for sharesindependent of the sale of the artwork itselfand facilitate a system of fractional ownership. Fractional ownership allows for more democratic investment in art markets, as collectors can diversify their portfolios without the need to purchase whole works, and artists can sell shares to fund future projects. Whitaker advocates the use of blockchain technologyan open and distributed ledger securely recording and verifying transaction datafor the management of fractional shares. The whole idea of fractional ownership is really one about shared creation of value. Artists equity shares remind uscontrary to the myths of creative genius and the related archetype of the starving artistof how many different actors there are in the creation of value in art markets, including gallery owners, collectors, and artists. It makes sense that were exploring this now because the technology is really there. Specifically, the blockchain, but there are also other technologies that would allow us to manage fractional equity in ways that dont have onerously high transaction costs, said Whitaker. The current system of resale royaltieswhere artists are paid a percentage of the increase in value when a work is soldare often criticized for bureaucracy, costliness, and poor enforcement, but Whitaker says emergent technologies can mitigate these issues. The study also offers wider implications for other creative fields in which early-stage work is difficult to value. The system can generalize the ways we compensate early stage creative work in any field. This is good for individual workers and reorients the way we look at growth in the economy overall, said Whitaker. In addition to Whitaker, the study Democratizing Art Markets: Fractional Ownership and the Securitization of Art was co-authored with Roman Kraussl from the Luxembourg School of Finance at the University of Luxembourg. About the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development Located in the heart of Greenwich Village, NYUs Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development prepares students for careers in the arts, education, health, media, and psychology. Since its founding in 1890, the Steinhardt School's mission has been to expand human capacity through public service, global collaboration, research, scholarship, and practice. To learn more about NYU Steinhardt, visit steinhardt.nyu.edu. Related Kiss Me Not on the Eyes screened at Cervantes Institute Written and directed by Ahmed Amer, the feature film Kiss Me Not (Balash Tebusni) will have its Egyptian premiere at the Aswan International Women Film Festival (AIWFF), which takes place between 20 and 26 February. Kiss Me Not will be the festival's closing film, to be screened on 26 February. "This comes after the film's teaser trailer received almost half a million views on Facebook. The trailer shows audience reactions to the film during a secret screening showing mixed feelings of tension and hysterical laughter," the film's distributor MAD Solutions writes in the press release. The world premiere of Kiss Me Not was screened in the Arabian Nights programme at the 14th Dubai International Film Festival (DIFF) in December 2017. Kiss Me Not follows a young and ambitious Egyptian director who faces challenges while shooting a kissing scene in his new film because the lead actress, Fajr, decides to pursue a more religious personal path. The film stars Yasmin Raeis, Mohamed Mahran, and Salwa Mohamed Ali, and guest starring actress Sawsan Badr, late director Mohamed Khan, and director Khairy Beshara. 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 Short link: The infighting within the National Resistance Movement (NRM) leadership has attracted 15 district chairpersons and regional coordinators to call on party chairman President Yoweri Museveni to take action against Tanga Odoi, their electoral commission chairperson. The district leaders under their umbrella body, NRM district chairpersons forum told a news conference at Kati-Kati restaurant that Tangas disrespectful character is unbecoming and intolerable among party cadres, requiring immediate replacement. Tanga Odoi (L) with Kasule Lumumba It all started early this week when NRM secretary general Justine Lumumba announced a restructuring process, where over 400 employees would be relieved over their duties over salary payment challenges. Tanga however blamed Lumumbas failure to have the workers at the secretariat paid for close to nine months on poor administration, inexperience and maintaining ghost workers. He also described Lumumba as a "good dancer" and "field mobilizer" who lacks administrative and managerial skills. Lumumba unfortunately did not go to high institutions like me; where you could go to Makerere University and see how administration flows. She was a district education officer then a parliamentarian. I pity her, Tanga said. This verbal attack on Lumumba has since attracted criticism, with some cadres within NRM accusing him of bad manners. We as chairpersons also have issues but we cannot call you the media to bring out our dirty linen in the public. This is the time President Museveni, our party chairman should remove Tanga, Twaha Kiggundu the forum chairperson said. He added: For us as chairpersons we use our money to do party work because we love it. But the practice of belittling others the way we do mobilization to ensure the president comes back to power is the same way we are going to mobilize to ensure his discipline. This is the time the NRM disciplinary committee should work. Wakiso NRM youth leader Joseph Sewava said the youth had already written to the president over Tangas indiscipline. Tanga is not a cadre, we hired him to help us. We thought he would organize elections but he has failed to recognize protocol. The secretary general is the principal soul of the party, Sewava said. Koboko district Madinah Naham argued that when Tanga accused Lumumba of employing up to 70 people in her office, some of them for handling her bags and others for manicure it was a sexist attack on women for holding powerful positions. This, she said cant go unpunished and Tango should immediately be replaced. Lumumba in retaliation said Tanga should stop talking about her "beautiful booty" and "lipstick" and instead "grow up and start minding his own business." The NRM leaders also hinted at Tangas comments as promoting divisionism, sectarianism and tribalism in their party. Lumumba and Tangas clashes are not new in the media, the secretariat under the supervision of Lumumba appointed district registrars and other staff during the NRM primaries in 2015 which did not go down well with Tanga Odoi. Tanga reacted by also appointing another set of district and sub-county registrars, who he said would oversee the partys internal elections and in 2016, the duo were at it again with Tanga accusing Lumumba of selectively increasing pay for her favourite secretariat staff, leaving out others. namuloki16@gmail.com Ten-year-old David Kabanda is living testimony that cancer, especially in children, can be cured if diagnosed early. It took five years of pain, doubt and hope. But eventually, Kabandas mother, Mary Nakagumu of Masaka, is thankful that she had the fortitude to see him through against very difficult odds. Dr Fadhil Gerega checks the pulse of David Kabanda The child was born largely normal; so, it was puzzling to his family when he began to suffer unexplained fainting fits. Then his belly began to bulge and the joints in his limbs became painful. He also lost weight. Initially, doctors said Kabanda was fainting because he was losing a lot of blood but could not immediately say why. We used to go to Kitovu hospital in Masaka for blood transfusion almost daily since he could get transfusion today and the following day he has no blood, Nakagamu told The Observer. When the doctor checked him thoroughly to find out exactly why he was losing blood daily, he told me [Kabanda] had leukemia and they referred me to Mulago national referral hospital, she said. This terrible reality dawned on the family in February 2012. Nakagumu didnt come to Mulago immediately because she didnt have the means. But in the process of looking for money, Kabandas condition grew worse; he collapsed and they rushed back to Kitovu hospital. They gave him only one unit of blood for emergency and they told me to go to Mulago hospital immediately. I borrowed money and reached Mulago hospitals emergency ward where Kabanda was transfused with many units of blood, she said. The following day, doctors referred us to ward 16, where we spent almost a month. During this time, several tests were carried out on Kabanda, since he was still fainting and in a lot of pain. The final results confirmed that Kabanda had leukemia. He was referred to Uganda Cancer Institute to start treatment. The treatment was free but sometimes some prescribed drugs were not available, so we had to buy them since Kabanda couldnt live without them, Nakagumu said. For a simple rural woman, the cost of some of these drugs was prohibitive. For instance, she remembers the 6-MP tablets, each cost Shs 10,000, yet Kabanda needed it daily. Mercaptopurine is the medication abbreviated as 6-MP, which is used for treating cancer and autoimmune diseases. Web sources say that specifically it is used to treat acute lymphocytic and chronic myeloid leukemia. Leukemia is cancer of the blood or bone marrow, where blood cells are produced. It is known to start in blood-forming tissue, usually the bone marrow, leading to the over-production of abnormal white blood cells, the part of the immune system, which defends the body against infection. This leaves the body vulnerable to infection and very weak. Doctors told me to be strong and support Kabanda to start his five-year treatment at UCI, Nakagumu remembers. The little boy first slept on the floor but later doctors gave me a bed, she says. Over the first two years, he underwent chemotherapy and radiotherapy, combined with the 6-MP tablets. Its now three years since we completed the treatment and Kabanda has never got any problem. We return to hospital for some checkups, and the doctors tell us that Kabanda is okay, a teary Nakagumu says. She attributes the cure to the quick treatment and her strict following of doctors instructions. These, however, were five lonely years marked by several challenges. Many people and relatives, including my husband, used to tell me daily that I should remove his child from UCI because I was wasting time there since the boy was bewitched and possessed by spirits which take his blood daily, Nakagumu said. Nakagumu refused to remove Kabanda from the doctors care. I thank God for giving me a strong devotion because if I didnt believe in Him, and took Kabanda to witchdoctors, he would have lost all his blood and died, she said. Dr Joyce Kambugu Balagadde, the paediatric oncologist at ICU, said the cause of childhood leukemia isnt known, but it could be genetically transmitted. A great deal of research is being done in this area, she says. For 95 percent of children with leukemia, the cause is unknown. But children who are HIV-positive can easily get these cancers because their immunities are low, she said. Kabanda is one of the success stories realised through timely treatment. Balagadde spoke to an ongoing campaign to raise public awareness about the high chances of curing cancer in children. Kabanda is now in P6. The days when people used to mock his mother about his incurable illness are mercifully behind him. They are all quiet now after seeing Kabanda going to school. I thank Kabanda for accepting to take drugs and the doctors who cared about us, she said. Dr Jackson Orem, the executive director of the Uganda Cancer Institute, says cancer in children is unique from adult cancer. Eighty percent of children with cancer are cured at the UCI, currently the only dedicated treatment centre for children with cancer, Orem said. In Uganda, 55 per cent of children are alive at one year after being diagnosed with cancer and most of them are ultimately cured; however, this cure rate still lags behind that in developed countries. These improvements in cure of children with cancer in Uganda are being achieved because of our highly specialised oncologists, paediatric surgeons, radiation oncologists, radiologists and pathologists, Orem added. As Uganda joined the rest of the world to mark International Childhood Cancer day last week, Orem observed: Currently in Uganda, about 3,000 children are diagnosed with HIV every year, 7,000 children are estimated to develop cancer every year whereas 512 referrals of children were received with cancer in 2017, up from 476 in 2016. Orem asked parents and guardians to get children checked. zurah@observer.ug Sally Dawly is a woman on a mission. Over the last three and a half years, the anti-littering activist has spent most of her free time picking up cigarette butts from the streets of her home city of Auburn, in California, and on this years Valentines Day she picked up her millionth butt. Dubbed the Butt Lady by her local community, Dawly began her quest to rid the streets of Auburn of cigarette butts in October 2014. Armed with a broom, dustpan and a pair of tongs, the woman started scouring the streets of her town in search of discarded cigarette butts, picking them up and throwing them in the trash, where they belong. To keep a tab on how many butts she picks up, the Butt Lady has been using a clicker, and earlier this month, she hit a historic milestone one million cigarette butts. Photo: CBS Philly video screengrab I got tired of going on my walks and seeing cigarette butts everywhere, Sally Dawly told KTXL-TV. Im just overwhelmed and shocked that I had to pick up this many. I keep track on a daily basis of how many I pick up and I just keep going. One million discarded cigarette butts picked up by just one person in 3 and a half years might sound impressive, and it is, but its not all that surprising, considering that one some days, the Butt Lady picks up thousands of them from the streets. Ive had days where Ive picked up 3,000 butts, in one day, and its like, come on people, she said. Dont throw your butts, better yet, stop smoking. With so many cigarette butts littering the streets, can one persons efforts really make a difference? Surprisingly, the answer seems to be yes. Soon after the Butt Lady of Auburn started her mission and word of her efforts spread, cigarette receptacles started popping up around bars and restaurants in the city. Members of the local community have also been very supportive, even coming out to cheer her on as she approached her 1 million butt milestone. Dawly knows her citys cigarette butt littering problem wont be solved anytime soon, but she hopes her work will inspire people to at least think twice before discarding cigarette butts on the streets. She has vowed to continue cleaning up after irresponsible smokers, and already has a new milestone in her sights 2 million cigarette butts. Word of the Butt Ladys efforts to keep the streets cigarette butt-free has reached neighboring communities as well, and CBS Sacramento reports that other cities have started seeking her help as well. A couple in Volvograd, Russia, were recently reunited with the child they had though had died seven years ago, right after birth. Whats even more astonishing is that the startling revelation was the result of a completely accidental administrative error. In 2011, a young girl gave birth at a hospital in Volgograd, but was soon told that her child was not viable and that it would not survive a week. Advised to give up the child, the depressed mother agreed to sign a waiver leaving the newborn in the care of the state and went home. Five days later, guilt overwhelmed the two parents, so they returned to the hospital to retrieve their baby and look after it for as little as it had to live. They were told that they were too late, that the baby had died. After grieving their terrible loss, the parents went on with their lives, but last year, they were shocked to discover that the child had been alive all this time. Photo: Volgograd Administration of the Federal Bailiff If not for a random administrative error, the two parents would most likely never have known that the child they though had died was actually alive in a Volgograd orphanage. Last year, the Federal Bailiff Service (FSKP) received an executive document stating that the couple owed the state 230,000 rubles ($4,100) in unpaid bills for the boarding of a minor at a local orphanage. As per standard procedure, bailiffs were dispatched to the address on record to inform the couple about the unpaid fees. They were no longer living there, though, so the FSKP had no choice but tho freeze their bank accounts. When the woman tried to withdraw money from her bank, she was informed that her account had been blocked by the Federal Bailiff Service. She visited the local FSKP office for an explanation, and after seeing the documents from the orphanage, she reportedly fainted. It became clear that the married couple had been assured for all this time that the child was dead, a spokesperson for the FSKP told RG.ru. The parents, so unexpectedly aware of the resurrection of their baby, immediately appealed to the court for the restoration of parental rights. In November of 2017, a judge granted full custody of the minor to its biological parents, and the family was finally reunited earlier this year. Its nice to know that this bizarre story has a happy end, but the parents are still left with unanswered questions, like why the hospital told them that their child had died seven years ago, why they were billed for its boarding at the orphanage and why they didnt receive these bills earlier. It is not known if the family plans to take legal action against the hospital. According to the Guinness Book of World Records, a Sitka Spruce growing on New Zealands southernmost subarctic island, is the loneliest and most remote tree on Earth. Not only is it the only tree on Campbell Island, but the nearest other tree can be found over 200 kilometers away, on the Auckland Islands. Located about 700 km south of Bluff, Campbell Island is one of the harshest places in the world. With strong winds blowing almost all year round, less than 600 hours of sunshine and only 40 days per year without rain, its not exactly an ideal place to live, which is probably why, except for occasional visits by research scientists, it has remained deserted for over half a century. Trees arent supposed to be growing here either, a fact made evident by the wind-tolerant shrubs and grasses covering the island, which only makes the thriving loneliest tree on Earth so much more impressive. Photo: YouTube screengrab It is believed that the Sitka Spruce thriving on Campbell Island was planted by the eccentric Lord Ranfurly, a former governor of New Zealand, sometime between 1901 and 1907. Its not clear why he decided to plant here of all places, but according to some sources, he lamented that the island was not in productive use, and took the first step to cover it in productive forestry. His idea was never going to work due to the harsh climate of the area, but somehow the Sitka Spruce not only survived for more than a century, but actually thrived. Apart from its reputation as the loneliest tree on Earth, the Sitka Spruce of Campbell Island has a series of other particularities. First of all its shape makes it look more like a giant cauliflower than a tree. This is believed to have been caused by the repeated chopping of its trunk every year, for decades. You see, before 1958, when the remote meteorologic station on Campbell Island became fully automated, the staff stationed here would cut the top of the Sitka Spruce every Christams and haul it back to the station to use as a Christmas tree. But it somehow survived this yearly maiming, adapting its shape in the process. Luckily, no one has been cutting the tree down over the last six decades and it has grown to a height of over 10 meters. Another fascinating thing about the worlds loneliest tree is that, despite being over 100 years old, it has never produced cones, which scientists claim suggests the tree has remained in a permanently juvenile state. The Sitka Spruce of Campbell Island was recently in the news for helping researchers confirm that the Earth has entered an entirely new geological epoch, the Anthropocene. They found a radiocarbon spike, also known as a golden spike, in a sample collected from the core of the tree, which they say confirms our world has entered a whole new epoch. Who knew a lonely tree growing 200 km away from its nearest cousins could be so interesting? Sources: Noted, Radio NZ, Sub-Antarctic Stories, Phys.org JeffreyGroup has been chosen by Samsung to be its corporate communication and public relations agency in Mexico. The agency will design and execute communication strategies that contribute to Samsungs positioning in the country. Since its arrival in Mexico in 1995, Samsung has consolidated its leadership position in the market. " Our goal is to build strategies, generate ideas and stories, as well as establish valuable relationships focused on the needs of Samsung, and be the most effective communications representatives of the brand in Mexico," said Mauricio Gutierrez, Managing Director of JeffreyGroup Mexico. Founded in 1993, JeffreyGroup is exclusively focused on working with multinational companies and brands in Latin America. Carolyn Izzo Integrated Communications has been named agency of record for Bohlsen Restaurant Group. CIIC will work to create a dynamic communications campaign to help generate media interest and awareness of the group and its collection of restaurants. Owned and operated by Michael & Kurt Bohlsen, BRG owns and operates eight restaurants and an exclusive events venue in Long Island, as well as a steak and sushi restaurant on the Stamford, CT waterfront. Interpublic Group agency DeVries Global has been chosen to lead U.S. communications for ionized alkaline bottled water Essentia. DeVries will be charged with communications strategy and activation aimed at driving broad awareness across earned channels as well as supporting Essentias fully integrated marketing efforts. Headquartered in Bothell, WA, Essentia Water pioneered ionized alkaline water in 1998 and the brand is now distributed widely across the United States. Weve found the perfect PR partner in DeVries with the right blend of team talent, creativity and breadth of expertise to help us take the Essentia brand to the next level, said Essential senior director of corporate communications Kazumi Mechling. The Brandman Agency has added Uncle Nearest 1856 Premium Whiskey to its worldwide luxury travel and lifestyle portfolio. Brandman will support the brands launch in the California market. Named after Nathan Nearest Greenwho taught Jack Daniel how to make Tennessee whiskeythe line of whiskey products honors Greens unique story as the first African-American master distiller on record in the U.S. Originating in Lynchburg, TN, the brand won a gold medal at the New York World Wine & Spirits Competition and the top Tennessee Whiskey in the 2017 World Spirits Competition by Cigar & SpiritsMagazine. Diamond Public Relations has added Hyatt Centric South Beach Miami to its roster of hotel, resort, and destination clients. The agency will manage North American PR efforts to increase consumer awareness for the property, which opened in 2015, in key markets. Situated in the heart of South Beach, the hotel has 105 guest rooms as well as DECK Sixteen, a restaurant/bar on the hotels third floor. Hyatt Centric South Beach Miami general manager Eyal Goldberger says that Diamonds ability to be on the forefront of whats trending was a key factor in selecting the agency. Grayling has been chosen to handle North American communications for cyber security company Anomali. The agency has been tasked with helping the company cement its reputation as a leader in the emerging threat intelligence-sharing sector. Graylings San Francisco team is utilizing funds from Anomali's $40 million Series D round of financing to reinforce the companys value proposition and vision for the space. The agency has already secured coverage of the company in such media outlets as TechCrunch, eWeek, Fortune and the Wall Street Journal. Brian Ballard The Indian Ocean island nation of Maldives has hired Ballard Partners for a one-year $600K program to build support from US policymakers. Maldives is in the grip of a crisis following its declaration of a state of emergency and a crackdown on political opponents, media and its judiciary. The United Nations on Feb. 7 urged Maldives president Abdulla Yameen to end the state of emergency and criticized his actions as "tantamount to an all-out assault on democracy." The Maldives Marketing and PR Corp., which is funded by the government, is looking for Ballard Partners to provide strategic consulting and advocacy services with the US government. Brian Ballard, a Republican fundraiser, chaired the Trump Victory organization in Florida during the 2016 presidential campaign. Opalesque Industry Update - Pantheon has announced the appointments of two senior professionals, Justin Mallis and Michael Hutten, as Principals within its Europe and the U.S. teams. Justin Mallis joins as Global Head of Project Management in the Client Service team, based in London, where he will centralize and coordinate fundraising for our institutional strategies. This is a new function, and it reflects the continued global expansion and growth of our business across investment strategies and clients. "Justin brings valuable external experience from a similar role at a global placement agent, alongside deep experience from working at various U.S. pension consultants, specializing in alternatives. Given this background, Justin will undoubtedly contribute to enhancing how we position our strategies in a differentiated and compelling way," commented Susan Long McAndrews, Partner. We are also announcing the appointment of Michael Hutten who has joined as Principal to market our U.S. Private Wealth initiative, and who will be based in Raleigh, North Carolina. Michael has worked in senior sales and sales management roles for alternative investment firms for the last 23 years. Most recently, Michael was the President of Distribution for Hatteras Funds, a boutique alternative investment firm that caters to Financial Advisors. "We are excited to welcome Michael to our U.S. team," said Doug Keller, Head of Private Wealth. "Michael brings substantial, relevant and successful experience of marketing to U.S. Private Wealth clients." Opalesque Industry Update - The Sohn Conference Foundation today announced the launch date of its Investment Idea Contest ahead of the 23rd Annual Sohn Investment Conference, in partnership with CNBC. The contest supports the Foundation's mission to treat and cure pediatric cancer. The winner will present his or her idea to more than 3,000 attendees from across the globe at the conference on April 23, 2018 at Lincoln Center in New York City. Sponsored by GLG (Gerson Lehrman Group), the world's leading professional membership for on-demand, one-on-one learning, the contest will kick off on March 13, 2018 and is open to any individual with an investment idea for a marketable security (long or short) with a market capitalization above $1 billion. The submission deadline is 12 p.m. EST on April 5, 2018. A panel of the world's most elite investors, chaired by Larry Robbins and including William Ackman, Joel Greenblatt, David Einhorn and Seth Klarman will select the winner based on the judges' determination of the most compelling investment thesis with a one-year horizon. "The Sohn Investment Idea Contest is the only platform of its kind," said Lance Laifer, co-founder of the Sohn Conference Foundation. "It's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for both professionals and students, regardless of industry, to present their idea on the Sohn stage alongside the most esteemed investors. We look forward to receiving this year's submissions and reviewing these fresh perspectives on the market." The conference is famous for featuring a number of prominent investors, including Larry Robbins, Founder, Portfolio Manager and CEO, Glenview Capital Management LLC. Robbins is a longtime speaker at the conference. At the 2017 Sohn Conference, Robbins surprised attendees by announcing on stage that he was donating $1 million to the Foundation in his father's memory. His generous donation funded The Sheldon Robbins Adolescent and Young Adult Clinical Trials Initiative, which will provide unprecedented access to innovative precision medicine by linking pediatric patients at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center to new drug therapies. "The Sohn Investment Idea Contest winner's presentation always brings an exciting new perspective to the conference's elite roster of speakers," said Larry Robbins. "The contest not only provides an unparalleled opportunity for anyone with an investment idea, but also supports the Foundation's mission to treat and cure pediatric cancer, which our firm is proud to have supported for the past 15 years." "GLG has been committed to accelerating medical breakthroughs by connecting professionals to expertise since our very first projects nearly 20 years ago," said GLG CEO Alexander Saint-Amand. "We are long-time supporters of Sohn, and we are proud to continue to support the Sohn Investment Idea Contest and the Sohn Conference Foundation's lifesaving efforts in the fight against cancer." Dylan Adelman, an undergraduate student at the University of Pennsylvania - The Wharton School, won last year's idea contest in New York, beating hundreds of others, including professionals. Adelman pitched a long bet on eBay, stating the stock is undervalued due to a misunderstood relationship between eBay and its merchant of record, PayPal. For more details or to enter the contest, please visit www.sohnconference.org/contest. Follow the contest on Twitter at @SohnIdeaContest @SohnConf With Covid restrictions easing, there is a growing sense that. while we will be dealing with the impact of the pandemic for a long time to come, the worst is behind us. Pennsylvania Business Central had been chronicling the many dedicated individuals and institutions in healthcare who have been on... While it appears that now more than ever women are moving to the forefront of music, there's still a lot of work to do, and DJ Cuppy is leading the charge. Daughter of Nigerian fuel financier Femi Otedola, 25-year-old Florence Ifeoluwa Otedola has been dominating the African music scene for a scorching hot minute, and introducing the rest of the world to "Neo-Afrobeats." Though breaking into the industry wasn't always smooth-rolling for the heiress. As popular and highly-paid DJ Paris Hilton herself said recently, "There's so many women DJs that are just killing it," but many are overlooked as a result of the rampant discrimination against women hoping to make it in DJing. Related | Paris Hilton Doesn't Want to Hear You Say 'Female DJ' Cuppy, who attained her masters in music business from NYU last year and was later honored with Alumni Artistic Achievement Award, has also had to contend with racism and ageism. She was blackballed early in her career for her proclivity to insert afrocentric tunes in her sets, but pushed on to become the go-to spinner for high-profile parties tapped by everyone from Elton John to Mark Zuckerberg. PAPER caught up with Cuppy to find out how she broke down barriers and made her own rules. I don't know much about the music scene in Nigeria, but I can't imagine it's the easiest place to launch a DJ career from. How did you build up your profile? I definitely always felt like a true creative. Growing up in Lagos, one of the most colorful, cultural and dynamic environments in the world, really inspired me to express myself in different ways. There's a lot of male dominants [in the Nigerian industry], and a lot of quantity over quality. So it's hard to push through as a female DJ. We also come from a society that is quite ageist, so being young and DJing as a teenager, a lot of doors were closed. But through hard-work, passion and determination, here I am today proudly dominating as one of not only the country's, but the continent's leading female DJs. Was there ever a real "a-ha" moment when you really knew you were really taking off? That's a tough question because there have been so many times in my life I have seen [that] hard work really does deliver success. Probably DJing for the Nigerian presidential inauguration; that was an absolute honor. I mean, there's DJing for crowds, but no feeling like DJing for your country. What has the fame been like for you? Can you still live normally when you return to Nigeria? Fame has been interesting. I have never considered myself someone that cares about it. I feel like it's a byproduct of being talented and in the public eye. I have grown up under the shadow of a successful father, so I always had a certain amount of pressure and attention on me. That definitely has helped me cope well. But yes, it is weird when I am in traffic in Lagos and I see myself on a billboard or I walk into a coffee shop and they are playing my song. It is always very exciting. Life in Lagos is very different from everywhere else Lagos is so big yet so small. It's nice feeling that African warmth. You've spun for everyone from Elton John to Mark Zuckerberg. Tell me about a particularly memorable event for you. When we look at moments in my life and landmarks as far as where deejaying has taken me, winning New York University's 2017 Alumni Artistic Achievement Award is a moment I will never forget. There is nothing better than your passion, something I would do anyway, becoming a skill, profession, and reason to be awarded for. It was a beautiful moment. How did you link with Charlemagne? Charlemagne I met when I was interning at Roc Nation. We instantly clicked. He's so curious about Nigeria and Africa, and I love how open-minded he is. He asked me to be a DJ on his MTV 2 show. Charlemagne has been a dear friend; he is someone I love as an older brother. He is smart, daring and very inspiring. One thing I have learned from Charlemagne is to always push the envelope and definitely believe in yourself. The Afrobeat movement is gaining real traction in hip-hop, and I'm sure is soon set to dominate pop music. Can you see your footprint in that? It is an exciting time to be an African creative, seeing collaborations and music growing. It is fantastic and gratifying to feel represented. But I also see a lot of value in authenticity, so want to make sure we all do what we can to preserve the roots. Did you have to fight to be taken seriously as a female DJ when you began? Yes, nothing comes easy when you are a young, Black female DJ from the African continent. I have learned to use my uniqueness as my strength, and I think it is fantastic how suddenly the world seems to be celebrating uniqueness and diversity. There will be prejudice and assumptions made, but I always let my work speak for itself. Were there any real setbacks in your career that you felt like giving up? Definitely. I went through a phase where I was a bit lost in my sound. This was before Afro beats was appreciated and recognized on a global level. I used to play it and my clients would hate it, and I struggled. Now Afrobeat is getting the attention it deserves; I couldn't be more proud to be associated with the genre. You're putting out singles and DJing the hottest events. Is there anything you feel you still have left to accomplish? 100 percent, I feel there's a lot I need to accomplish. My talent is a platform for more things to come. I am on an experimental path to figure it out. I just turned 25. Regardless of what I do, I hope that I inspire and change the rules. Photo Courtesy of DJ Cuppy As trite as it might be to claim a song is universally understood despite language in this case, it's Spanish, and while around 43 million people (Latinx or not) are fluent, maybe you aren't one of them but this new track from Young Tender clearly presents an intense case of the sads. The tristeza on "Lo Que Quieras" is very real so much that it reflects the relief in beginning to move past the melancholy, too. The Monterrey band has dubbed their genre "sad disco," and there's truly no more fitting a descriptor. Glistening guitar tones roll in to brighten a shadowy landscape of downcast keys, like the relief of finally letting the tears gush out after getting a stress headache while trying to hold them back. The subject at hand here, it seems, is a toxic relationship; something too many of us can unfortunately relate to. "Lo Que Quieras" is that specific moment when you realize just how harmful it's all been, that you're losing yourself but in that painful awareness, you find the guts and strength to get out. Marking the fourth clip from their 2016 EP, Necios, they dropped the corresponding video for this particular slice of sorrow just last week on Valentine's Day, of course. We talked with Young Tender's Chris (he didn't provide surnames, and there's no evidence of 'em online, either so mysterious, and we are here for it) about how the brooding bunch of buds got together, when we can expect to be dancing-slash-crying along to their much anticipated full-length collection, and more. I love the video for "Lo Que Quieras," it's really sleek and stylish, modern but retro like your sound, in my opinion. Can you tell me a little about the concept? How does it relate to the song lyrics, and how did you end up collaborating with Panama Studio? The guys from Panama/Linda Vista are good friends of ours, they listened to the song just as we were finishing it and they told us they would love to make a video, so they started working on the concept. They are visual artists more focused on design, and we wanted to see what results could come from working with them; we always trust their good taste. Can you tell me more about the formation of the band, the members, and the inspirations behind the sound? We are great friends above all else; the band was born out of being together when there was nothing to do in Monterrey. We are Abel on the guitar, Jamaica on the vocals, Sixto on the drums, Dani on the bass and me, Chris, on the keyboards. We always knew the main idea behind the band was to do pop stuff stuff that made us feel things, whether it was sadness or happiness, songs that made us want to sing and almost always dance, too. The EP, Necios, is so good, seriously. I can't wait to hear the full-length album you're working on. How is that going? It's going very well; we've already spent time working on new tracks. We also have a concept already developing. We are polishing off the forthcoming singles that we'll release ahead of the album so that you can get an idea of what it's like. Can you give us the names of some fellow bands in Monterrey or in Mexico's booming independent music scene that we should check out? There's important things developing in Monterrey, from Juniors del Gueto, DRIMS, Clubz, Era de Oro and Villa Lobos, who are good friends, and even comrades in the national scene like Wet Baes, Policias y Ladrones, all the Finesse [Records] crew, and the Blenders, we think, are the most relevant acts. This interview has been translated from Spanish to English and lightly edited for clarity. We tend to explain helicopter parents, or, as I labelled them previously, tight-leash parents, with respect to their tendency to drive their kids everywhere, or insist on accompanying them on any venture outside the front door, as the outcome of a fear of kidnapping that set in with the have you seen me? milk cartons of the 1980s, convincing a generation of parents that, however safe it might have been for them to roam the neighborhood or the city by themselves, in their own childhoods, the world had now changed and children were at grave risk of an attack by a Man in a White Van the moment they left ones sight. In prior blog posts, I suggested that theres a bit of a chicken-and-egg issue here: the rise of suburbanization made keeping kids at home easier (a backyard to play in) and sending them out harder (fewer pedestrian/bike-friendly streets and fewer places to go to). Id also add that the decline of neighborhood schools and the rise of specialized extracurriculars means that kids are more likely to have friends who live across town than a block or two over. I also observed that, with respect to the helicopter aspect of supervising tightly their in-school and extracurricular achievement, the growth in tuition and the increased importance of merit scholarships, raising the stakes of high school achievement might also play a role. But Achtung Baby, which I wrote about yesterday, makes a further point: the Germans are more confident with sending their kids out in the world because they have trust that, by and large, the world around them will help them. She cites as an example a young girl who regularly went off to play at the playground across the street from her apartment, then asked strangers to help her cross the street. Parents in general expect, she says, that if a kid has trouble finding their way home, they can rely on the adults around them to help in contrast to the American approach of inculcating in children a fear of unknown adults. And by happy coincidence, Megan McArdles Bloomberg View column builds on this, though her topic is Denmark, not Germany, where, she writes, high levels of social welfare provision, social cohesion, and economic success go hand-in-hand with high levels of trust in the government, in businesses, and in each other. And trust is the first ingredient, not the result of the others; if you dont have trust, you cant achieve the successes that places like Denmark have. (Oddly, though, Germany, despite the authors observations, only scores at the middle of the pack, among European countries, in terms of Germans trust in other people, whereas Denmark ranks at the top.) Really, its quite a good article; you should read the whole thing, though its long. And its got a bit of a tone of valedictory to it, perhaps due to her impending move to the Washington Post, as she concludes: Danish business regulations and its welfare state cant be successfully imported without first learning to trust one another, and to be trustworthy. And thats something were all going to have to do together. Which means that whatever Danish-style institutions you like, you cant get them by angrily vilifying the half of the country that disagrees with you. These institutions, it turns out, cant be built with policy papers or political activism. They can only be built through better interactions with each other, one neighbor at a time. Of course, theres no clear way to get from here to there, and, for all that politicians like to babble on about diversity is our strength, it seems to me that homogeneous places have greater levels of trust, and we cant easily replicate that. And its entirely possible that in Germany itself, levels of trust and parents confidence in their childrens safety have gone down subsequent to the mass migration of Muslims in the last couple years. By the way, Megan tells the story of having her phone/phone-case wallet stolen, receiving a significant amount of assistance from Danes in coping with her situation, and then ultimately receiving the case, drivers license, and credit cards in the mail from the police when it was recovered (absent the phone itself) a couple weeks later. I also have a lost-wallet story, though I left mine behind at the local grocery store here in my middle-class Chicago suburb, and, before I had even noticed it was gone, a stranger rang the doorbell to return it to me, having found my address via the drivers license. So thats something, anyway. Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ANyhavn_copenhagen.jpg; By GuoJunjun (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons Minister for Communications, Mrs. Ursula Owusu-Ekuful has disclosed that telecom companies Expresso and Glo, may lose their licenses if they fail to meet a 30 day ultimatum given by the ministry to answer questions on their poor operations. According to her, the telcos have consistently operated below standards sets by the National Communications Authority (NCA). Speaking to Umaru Sanda Amadu on the Point Blank section of Citi Eyewitness News yesterday[2,21,2018], Mrs. Owusu-Ekuful hinted that she is convinced the NCA will soon revoke the license of Expresso. For Expresso, I think the 30 days will end by next week. The letters have gone out. I have just seen a response that they have sent which doesnt quite address the issues, so I have no doubt that the NCA will proceed to revoke that license and clean out that space. If that happens, those frequencies will be available for either interested Ghanaians, or other entrants to also come into the market, she said. She stated that the ministry is embarking on an exercise to sanitize the telecommunications industry to protect consumers and also rake in the needed revenue for government for national development. She maintained that, the regulator the NCA -, will not allow any telcos to break the rules and ignore the regulations governing the industry. By this, Mrs. Owusu-Ekuful stated that Expresso and Glo are required to present tangible explanations why the NCA should not revoke their licenses. We are moving against telcos who are also flouting the license conditions and we have actually issued notices of intention to revoke the licenses of Expresso and Glo if within 30 days, they do not live up to their obligations because they are in breach of almost all the regulatory and license obligations as at the end of January, she warned. Touching on the operations of Glo in Ghana, Mrs. Owusu-Ekuful expressed surprise why the telco is doing well in Nigeria but performing poorly in Ghana. She stated that the ministry has on several occasions contacted the telco to improve its services or risk losing its license, but to no avail. It is a valuable national resource and no one should be allowed to just sit on it without using it for the purpose for which it is intended, she said. Meanwhile, Mrs. Owusu-Ekuful announced that government will soon auction the remaining 4G spectrum for telcos in June this year. Source: citibusinessnews.com Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video The Attorney General, Gloria Akuffo, has backed calls for an enquiry into the recent mass failure of students at the Bar exams. Her comments follow a 30-day ultimatum issued to the Independent Examination Board (IEB) by the SRC of the Ghana School of Law to re-mark the scripts of students who failed the exams. Only 91 out of the 474 students who sat the bar exams written in May and September last year passed. The students have since been protesting the results and have planned to petition the Chief Justice. Speaking on Metro TVs Good Evening Ghana, Gloria Akuffo said an investigation would help unravel the true cause of the mass failure. Let us investigate what is the real cause of this large numbers. Is it because lecturers are not good enough? Is it because they do not have good material? Is it because the students themselves are not applying themselves efficiently and begin to find solutions to these. Parliamentary inquiry Her suggestion comes a day after a lawyer, Kwaku Asare, also called on Parliament to investigate the mass failure. Mr. Asare also made a number of calls including asking Parliament to summon the Director of the Ghana School of Law to explain why they unlawfully denied access to about 3,000 students who under the laws of Ghana are qualified to have professional legal education. The lawyer also called for the setting up of a committee of legal examiners by Parliament to review the examination, the marking scheme and the exams scripts to find out what has gone terribly wrong with these examinations. The massive failure comes at a time when Parliament is debating an LI brought before it by the General Legal Council (GLC); the body that oversees the legal profession and legal education in Ghana. The LI, if endorsed by Parliament, will see the legalization of entrance examination and interview processes by the GLC for prospective law students. Re-mark exam scrips, scrap exam board In the wake of this development, the Students Representative Council (SRC) of the Ghana School of Law, has also called for the examination scripts of the Ghana Law School students to be re-marked. Speaking on Eyewitness News, the President of the schools SRC, Sammy Gyamfi, said the results did not accurately reflect the performance of the students who sat for the exams. He stated that in order to ensure the integrity of the exams and the results which were released, the scripts have to be re-marked by a credible and independent body. Clearly this is a sad day for professional legal education for Ghana. The published results are very dispiriting and discouraging, very disappointing and clearly unacceptable. The results as we have now dont reflect the true performance of the students. We cant vouch for the integrity of these results, the integrity of the results is questionable, he said. Source: citifmonline.com Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video The national chairman of the main opposition party in Cameroon, Ni John Fru Ndii, has declared that he will not be presenting his candidature for the 2018 presidential elections. The veteran politician founded the Social Democratic Front (SDF) in 1990 and has led the party since then. Speaking at the special congress of the party held in Bamenda, 77 year old Ndii reportedly said he was leaving the stage for the younger generation. I will not present my candidature for the Presidential election, i want you to chose who is best to be the flag bearer, Ndii tells the congress Ndii has recently been embroiled in a war of words with secessionists in the Anglophone region who wanted the SDF congress moved from Bamenda to Yaounde. Ndii maintains that he is an Anglophone citizen who is not pro-secession. Analysts will now watch whether 49 year old Joshua Osih, who is currently the deputy of the party, will now seek to be nominated as the partys presidential flag bearer. Electoral activities ahead of the presidential election , have already started, and the opposition party recently met in the restive Bamenda region and declared that it would participate in the March 25 senatorial polls. Source: africanews.com Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video The Ghana Integrity Initiative (GII), has acknowledged that digitalisation is changing the ways we communicate, and how we do business and as a result reduced the corruption rate in Ghana. In a press release issued to the Ghana News Agency, on Thursday, the Transparency International (TI), noted that, the 2017 Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) had ranked Ghana, 81 out of 180 countries and territories included in this years CPI, to fight against corruption. The Alliance for Integrity also posited that advanced technology is enabling new risk management tools to monitor and detect fraud automatically. The GII acknowledged the fact that some of the new initiatives started by government such as the Paperless Port Clearing System, E-Procurement and the Digital Addressing System had improved business integrity and ultimately reduced corruption in the public sector. The GII said, another area requiring digitalisation was the implementation of the Infrastructure for Poverty Eradication Programme (IPEP), in addition to putting in place clear policy guidelines among others to reduce red tape and eliminate opportunities for people entrusted with power to misuse it for private gain. It however recommended that Government should demonstrate more practical commitment to fighting corruption by enacting key legislation such as the Right to Information (RTI), Witness Protection, and the Conduct of Public Officers Bill. The GII also stated that, the newly created Office of the Special Prosecutor, together with anti-corruption institutions such as the Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ) should be adequately resourced. It suggested that Government and businesses must do more to encourage an open and engaged civil society to see the need to fight against corruption. It encouraged civil society to hold political and institutional leadership accountable and enthused citizens to report issues related to corruption when they become victims and witnesses of some, as prescribed by the National Anti-Corruption Action Plan (NACAP). However, using nine out of the 13 data sources of independent institutions with high level of credibility, the 2017 CPI score indicates that, in spite of Ghanas numerous efforts to fight corruption, the canker is still a serious problem. While comparing Ghanas performance to other sub-Saharan African countries, the press release said, although Ghana performed better than 36 other Sub-Saharan African countries, including Benin 39, Swaziland 38, Zambia 37, and Tanzania 36, Ghana nonetheless performed below 11 other Sub-Saharan African countries. The GII urged Ghanaians to prioritise the mainstreaming of anti-corruption measures into the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals in order to achieve the target of substantially reducing bribery and corruption by 2030. Source: GNA Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video Ghana and Burkina Faso have agreed to engage the services of a Transaction Advisor to assist in the implementation of the Railway Interconnectivity Project. In a communique issued by the Joint Committee of Experts (JCE) on the Railway Connectivity Project, read by Mr Andy Kwame Appiah-Kubi, Co-Chairperson of the Committee, at the end of a four-day deliberation in Accra, on Thursday, said Ghana would select the Transaction Advisor. Mr Joe Ghartey, the Minister of Railways Development, signed the communique on behalf of Ghana, while Mr Vincent Dabilgou, the Minister of Transport, Urban Mobility and Road Safety, initialed on behalf of Burkina Faso. The communique said the Transaction Advisor would assist the Governments of the two countries to review and undertake various studies, including survey works and procurement processes in line with applicable laws of the two countries. It said the terms of reference for the Transaction Advisory services was drafted by the Ghanaian side and presented to the Burkinabe team at the meeting, which the latter agreed to in principle. It said the Advisor would engage a private sector investor to develop a railway interconnectivity project between the Port of Tema and Ouagadougou on a Build, Operate and Transfer (BOT) basis. The Committee reviewed the draft Terms of Reference for engaging the private sector partner extensively and adopted it for implementation. The communique said the Burkinabe side notified members of the JCE that, two private sector partners, including Dubai Touch and African Global Development SARL, had shown interest, but strongly recommended the latter as a preferred choice for the project. It said the Burkinabe side recommended African Global Development SARL because it had already conducted feasibility study on the proposed line, including drawings on the route. The communique said the Burkinabe side said the recommended partner also wants to undertake the project on a BOT model, and in position to arrange funding for the project. In view of the size and nature of the project, the committee saw the need for the development of a Treaty between the two countries. In this regard, it said, two legal officers from Ghana and Burkina Faso had been tasked to review a draft treaty for discussion in the next meeting in Ouagadougou on March 12, 2018. The JCE would meet again on March 12, this year, in the Burkinabe Capital, Ouagadougou, for further deliberations, and among other things, receive a presentation from the potential Transaction Advisor, review and adopt the Terms of Reference for the Transaction Advisor, as well as review a draft Treaty between the two countries. The meeting would also outline the timelines for selecting the Transaction Advisor and private sector partner and preparation of the final report. Source: GNA Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo has asserted that the recent publication of Ghanas score in the 2017 Corruption Perception Index, - the lowest in the history of the countrys performance since the inception of the CPI in 2012 -, pertained to the era of the erstwhile Mahama-led National Democratic Congress (NDC) government. Notwithstanding this, the president said, his administration will do and is doing all it can, to curb corruption, eventhough the task ahead is enormous. "The recent publication of Ghanas score in the 2017 Corruption Perception Index, organised by Transparency International, showing a further drop in our standing, a result largely based on the plethora of corruption allegations/exposes before the onset of this administration, indicates the enormity of the task ahead," the president said. He was speaking at an event at the Flagstaff House to swear-in the recently vetted and approved Martin Amidu as Special Prosecutor. The CPI report, released by the local chapter of Transparency International, the Ghana Integrity Initiative (GII), indicated that Ghana had recorded the worst corruption perception score in the last six years after it was ranked 81 out of the 180 countries assessed in the 2017 Global CPI. It scored Ghana 40 out of 100, the lowest in Ghanas CPI scores since 2012 when CPI scores became comparable. Some critics have argued it signifies a loss in the fight against corruption. Minutes after the report went viral, the Minority in Parliament had a field day with it saying it was a reflection of the current state of corruption in the country and an indictment on a government which came to power on the back of promises to fight corruption. Whiles calling on all to actively co-operate for a successful fight against corruption since "the Special Prosecutor cannot do it all by himself", President Akufo-Addo pledged his administration's support to enable Mr Amidu "discharge his high duties effectively." "The Special Prosecutor cannot do it all by himself. He requires the active co-operation of all the institutions of our state, as well as that of the general public, if he is to be successful in the fight against corruption....I want to assure him that not only will the Executive, including the Attorney General, respect scrupulously the independence of his Office, but will also provide him with whatever assistance is required to enable him discharge his high duties effectively, in the interest of the Ghanaian people," he added. The President further entreated Ghanas first Special Prosecutor to guard against using his office to settle personal scores since his (Amidu's) office is a non-partisan one leading the fight against corruption and holding public officials past and present accountable for their stewardship of public finances. We expect the Special Prosecutor to discharge his duties vigorously, with courage, without fear or favour, ill-will or malice, in accordance with the rule of law. The establishment of this Office is for a high purpose, and must not, under any circumstances, be used as an avenue for persecution or vengeance, he said. Speaking at his swearing-in ceremony, Mr Amidu stressed that he will prosecute crime without fear or favour, adding that no amount of witch-hunting propaganda will stop him in his quest to try anyone found to have engaged in corrupt acts in court. He also revealed that he has not been served with a writ challenging his position as the SP. Mr President, I wish to assure you that the propaganda about witch hunting will not daunt me from prosecuting all corruption crimes without reference to political considerations...I want the public to know that nobody has served me personally with any writ or statement of case or injunction challenging my nomination, approval and appointment so as to restrain me from accepting this appointment, the Special Prosecutor said. Below is a reproduction of the speech delivered by the President at the swearing-in ceremony Let me first welcome you all warmly to the seat of our nations presidency. On the second day of this year, I assented to the enactment of the Office of Special Prosecutor Act, 2017, (Act 959). Pursuant thereto, the Attorney-General, Ms Gloria Akuffo, in compliance with the provisions of s.13(3) of the Act, wrote to me, on 11th January, 2018, to nominate Mr. Martin Alamisi Burns Kaiser Amidu for appointment as Special Prosecutor. I readily accepted the Attorney Generals nomination, and, on the same day, announced his nomination to the country, and, subsequently, on 11th January, 2018, I sought the approval of Parliament for the appointment. After a spirited and revealing vetting of the nominee, Parliament, on 20th February, 2018, notified me, by letter under the hand of the Speaker, the Rt. Hon. Michael Aaron Oquaye, of its decision to approve, by consensus, the nomination of Mr.Amidu for appointment as Special Prosecutor. By the swearing-in of Mr.Amidu this afternoon, the process of appointment of the Special Prosecutor, set forth in s.13 of the Act, has been completed. The enactment of Act 959, and the successful appointment of a Special Prosecutor, are historic events in our modern history. The Ghanaian people have, in overwhelming numbers, denounced the canker of corruption that has, in recent years, engulfed the public life of our nation to the detriment of our progress. The response of the New Patriotic Party to this strong, popular sentiment, was to pledge, inter alia, in its Manifesto for the 2016 general elections, the establishment of the Office of Special Prosecutor, an independent, non-partisan body, with the relevant professional capability, to lead the fight against corruption, and hold public officials, past and present, accountable for their stewardship of public finances. The Ghanaian people expect the Office of the Special Prosecutor to rise to the occasion, and collaborate with other existing law enforcement agencies, to fight relentlessly, and help eliminate corruption in our public life. We expect the Special Prosecutor to discharge his duties vigorously, with courage, without fear or favour, ill-will or malice, in accordance with the rule of law. The establishment of this Office is for a high purpose, and must not, under any circumstances, be used as an avenue for persecution or vengeance. The Office will be required to do justice to all manner of persons. In his book, Practice and Procedure In The Trial Courts and Tribunals of Ghana (2011, Second Edition), the respected, former member of the Supreme Court, Brobbey JSC, reiterated the overriding duty of a Prosecutor in the following words: Always the principle holds that (the prosecutor) is concerned with justice first, justice second and conviction a very bad third. The overwhelming, popular acceptance by the good people of Ghana, and the strong consensus approval by Parliament, of Mr. Amidus nomination justify the confidence I repose in him. Indeed, his eloquence and grasp of issues, displayed to the public during his recent vetting, is further testimony of the soundness of his appointment. I want to assure him that not only will the Executive, including the Attorney General, respect scrupulously the independence of his Office, but will also provide him with whatever assistance is required to enable him discharge his high duties effectively, in the interest of the Ghanaian people. The recent publication of Ghanas score in the 2017 Corruption Perception Index, organised by Transparency International, showing a further drop in our standing, a result largely based on the plethora of corruption allegations/exposes before the onset of this administration, indicates the enormity of the task ahead. It is noteworthy that its local chapter, Ghana Integrity Initiative, in commenting on the report, has acknowledged that digitisation is changing the ways we communicate and how we do business, and as a result reduced the corruption rate in Ghana. The Special Prosecutor cannot do it all by himself. He requires the active co-operation of all the institutions of our state, as well as that of the general public, if he is to be successful in the fight against corruption. I have known Martin Amidu for several years. Indeed, I was his opposing counsel in many of the landmark constitutional cases in the early years of the 4th Republic in the 1990s, and can personally testify to the tenacity with which he holds onto his views. That tenacity has now to be exercised in favour of the Ghanaian people in his new office. I congratulate him on his deserved appointment, and wish him Gods guidance in the effort he will undoubtedly be making to try to instil integrity and accountability in the governance of our country. The ultimate beneficiaries of his actions, indeed, of the actions of all of us in public office, will be the Ghanaian people. Thank you, and may God bless us all and our homeland Ghana, and make her great and strong. Source: Peacefmonline.com/Ghana Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video Former National Democratic Congress (NDC) Member of Parliament (MP) for the La Dadekotopon constituency, Nii Amasah Namoale has emphatically stated that telling lies has become a daily norm of no offence in Ghana. To him, he is liable to make such comments because the Special Prosecutor nominee upon his frequent allegations made against high profiles over the years in his articles could not justify himself during his vetting, claiming his allegations were his perception. Telling lies has now become part of Ghanaians and has no legal implication, rather it becomes a crime when it is stated under oath, he said. In an interview on Kasapa FMs morning show, Namoale advised the office of the Special Prosecutor not to work with perceptions as he noted before the Appointments Committee, but with hard core evidences. Members of the NPP should not think that the appointment of the Special Prosecutor will automatically put a stop to protocol dealings, they are still in existence and cannot stop. Their numerous hypes will not make any difference to the old system, he stated. According to him between the Special Prosecutor and Minister of State in charge of prosecutions (Attorney General), there is no difference as they have just wasted our time. I say so because Martin Amidu cannot have a final say on any findings or prosecution he makes, every final say with respect to any prosecution remains in the pocket of Gloria Akuffo, the Attorney General of the republic of Ghana, he added. Source: Elizabeth Semiheva Bedi/Peacefmonline.com/Ghana Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video This Sep. 9, 2005, photo provided by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention shows the then newly constructed 11-story Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratory located at the CDC's Roybal campus in Atlanta. Thirteen years after building the state-of-the-art lab for the worldAos most dangerous germs, the nation's top public health agency is asking for more than $400 million to build a new one. CDC is asking Congress for the money. Its officials say the current lab building in Atlanta is quickly wearing down, and cannot be upgraded without shutting down the facility for years. (Center for Disease Control and Prevention via AP) Penticton woman Larraine Paquette is one of 101 authors featured in the latest edition of Chicken Soup for the Soul, the theme of which is divine intervention. Skanda Navaratnam is shown in an undated police handout image. Toronto police have laid a new murder charge against alleged serial killer Bruce McArthur, bringing the total number of men he's accused of killing to six. Det. Sgt. Hank Idsinga says investigators have identified a set of remains recovered from a property linked to McArthur as that of 40-year-old Skanda Navaratnam, who went missing in 2010.THE CANADIAN PRESS/HO-Toronto Police Service, *MANDATORY CREDIT* Prime Minister Justin Trudeau meets with Prime Minister of India Narendra Modi at Hyderabad House in New Delhi, India on Friday, Feb. 23, 2018. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi says he and Justin Trudeau agreed to fight terrorism and those who misuse religion to divide people following a bilateral meeting between the two in New Delhi this morning.THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick FILE - This Aug. 28, 2014, file photo shows San Francisco 49ers' Jonathan Martin on the bench during an NFL football preseason game against the Houston Texans in Houston. A law enforcement official says ex-football player Martin was taken into Los Angeles police custody after a threatening Instagram post that spoke of bullying. The official says Martin was being questioned and was not under arrest. The official was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity. (AP Photo/David J. Phillip, File) FILE - In this May 5, 2017, file photo, St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner poses for a photo in St. Louis. Gardner made the announcement Thursday, Feb. 22, 2018, that a grand jury had indicted Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens following an investigation launched in January 2018, a day after Greitens admitted having an affair with his St. Louis hairdresser that began in March 2015. The indictment accuses him of taking a compromising photo of the woman without her consent during a sexual encounter at his home. (AP Photo/Jeff Roberson, File) FILE--In this Sept. 5, 2017, file photo, actress Jennifer Lawrence signs autographs at the premiere of the film "mother!" at the 74th edition of the Venice Film Festival in Venice, Italy. Harvey Weinstein has asked a judge to toss out a federal sexual misconduct lawsuit filed against him and he's invoking the words of Lawrence and other A-list actresses in his defense. (AP Photo/Domenico Stinellis) Perryville football coach Brent Roth is already trying to erase the game from his memory. It is probably for a good reason, too.Perryville struggled to do anything well as Park Hills Central handed The Pirates finally put together what Perryville softball coach Lilly Pecaut called a complete game.Everything came together as Perryville got the offense and pitching to come away with The Perryville boys soccer team was able to show its resiliency in multiple ways as it got back into the win column. The Pirates bounced back from a lopsided loss to Notre Dame the week before, to St. Vincent makes Valle Catholic play in loss St. Vincent football coach Tim Schumer didnt want his team to look at the scoreboard following the game. The score may have said that the Valle Catholic Warriors won in a lopsided game, but Indians take advantage of miscues to claim first victory St. Vincent found itself down two scores midway through the third quarter, and despite the deficit, coach Tim Schumer was calm.The game was not over at that point, you have to play four Rushing attack leads Pirates to win over Owls The Perryville football team is quickly turning into a M.A.S.H. unit. With several players already nursing injuries from the previous week, they also threw in other players who were in quarantine. Click Here For Our Local Sports Page Lopsided Exxon-Guyana deal underscores need for all PSAs to go through Parliament Ram By Kaieter News GEORGETOWN Petroleumworld 02 23 2018 Given the damning flaws contained in the oil deal Guyana signed with ExxonMobil, local commentators believe that Parliament needs to have increased oversight of the oil and gas sector and related contracts. Specifically making this comment recently was Chartered Accountant, Chris Ram. During an interview with this newspaper, Ram noted that the ExxonMobil agreement should have been tabled and approved in the National Assembly. The anticorruption advocate said that this should have been the way forward for all Production Sharing Agreements (PSAs). Ram said, These contracts have long term effects. So what you have is a Minister binding a Parliament or a country for decades. The practice of having Production Sharing Agreements go through the Parliamentary process can be seen in places like Tanzania, Ghana and Nigeria. That is how it should be done, because there are long term effects with these contracts The Chartered Accountant said, What we have before us is proof that this is what should be done. But in addition, I think even the scheme in which the Executive negotiates should be revised Also in agreement with the need for the role of Parliament to increase in the oil sector is Executive Member of the Working People's Alliance (WPA), Dr. David Hinds. The political commentator said that the Parliament should always have an important role in these mattersit is the only elected branch of government. Dr. Hinds noted that the oil and gas sector is a defining one and as such, he would recommend that Parliament set up a standing committee on energy. He said that such oversight is necessary, given how much is at stake. Perhaps as a start, the University Professor said, there should be a select committee to look at what has transpired thus far in relation to the contract and other related issues. He emphasized that such a committee should hold hearings, so that it gets to hear from government operatives and other expert witnesses. UNFAIR DEAL Local commentators have also expressed concern over the lopsided deal Guyana signed with ExxonMobil, especially when it is compared with the agreement Exxon Mobil signed onto with the African country, Ghana. The glaring disparities between the two contracts also underscores the need for the Guyana-ExxonMobil contract to be scrutinized by Parliament, critics say. According to Ghana's oil agreement, ExxonMobil is not allowed to recover pre-contract costs. Yet, the oil company managed to entrap Guyana with a US$460M bill which dates back to 1999. In Ghana, ExxonMobil agreed that there would be no limit to the audit to be conducted by the Government and its authorities. But in Guyana's oil contract, the APNU+AFC Administration is limited to conducting one audit per calendar year. Additionally, the African country made it very clear that all records in relation to the oil operations there must be kept at a specific location in the country. The Government of Ghana said that this sort of arrangement was necessary to ensure that there is a smooth flow of the audit process which can be initiated at any time. Guyana, on the other hand, opted to give up its right to access ExxonMobil's records in relation to operations here, when such records are held in nations with nondisclosure laws. The Ghana oil deal also features a 10 percent royalty, while ensuring that ExxonMobil would be subject to paying all taxes, duties, fees, and other imposts that shall be imposed by the State or any entity or any political subdivision of the State in respect of any of its operations. In the case of Guyana, ExxonMobil gets off with paying a mere two percent royalty while enjoying tax exemptions galore. ExxonMobil has also agreed to give Ghana quarterly and annual financial statements and summaries of petroleum costs incurred under that agreement. In the Guyana contract, ExxonMobil is not obligated to do this. The Ghanaian contract has an entire section dedicated to procurement laws which ExxonMobil must follow at all times. Those provisions are in place to ensure that a significant number of the local companies are able to benefit from the nation's oil sector. On the other hand, Guyana's contract mentions nothing about procurement laws. Story from Kaieter News Kaieteurnewsonline.com 02 23 2018 Copyright 1999-2018 Petroleumworld or respective author or news agency. All rights reserved. We welcome the use of Petroleumworld (PW) stories by anyone provided it mentions Petroleumworld.com as the source. Other stories you have to get authorization by its authors. Internet web links to http://www.petroleumworld.com are appreciated. Petroleumworld welcomes your feedback and comments, share your thoughts on this article, your feedback is important to us! We invite all our readers to share with us their views and comments about this article. Write to editor@petroleumworld.com By using this link, you agree to allow PW to publish your comments on our letters page. Any question or suggestions, please write to: editor@petroleumworld.com Best Viewed with IE 5.01+ Windows NT 4.0, '95, '98,ME,XP, Vista, Windows 7,8,10 +/ 800x600 pixels All Guyana's oil contracts bear similar ugly features as one with Exxon Govt. promises to do different going forward By Abena Rockcliffe-Campbell GEORGETOWN Petroleumworld 02 23 2018 The Production Sharing Agreement (PSA) that the Government of Guyana signed with ExxonMobil is definitely not the only one of its kind in Guyana. Kaieteur News has been told that all of the oil contracts which have been signed by APNU+AFC government as well as the PPP/C government are similar. In fact, this newspaper understands that the model that was being used over the years dates back to the 1970s. Guyana has just about 10 existing contracts with various oil companies including ExxonMobil. These have all been modeled from a contract that the country had with Mobil, a company that had a presence in Guyana during the time of former President, the late Linden Forbes Sampson Burnham. It was that same template that was reportedly used to formulate the ExxonMobil 1999 PSA. However, when ExxonMobil announced that it found oil in commercial quantities offshore Guyana in 2015, and the APNU+AFC government took another look at the contract, a decision was taken by government to review and renegotiate the contract. In fact, this newspaper carried an article back in 2016 that quoted Trotman, expressing government's desire to do same. That article can be read here: https://www.kaieteurnewsonline.com/2016/06/29/govt-reviews-17-year-old-contract-with-exxon-mobil-but-agrees-it-provides-relative-protection-as-constituted-2 /. However, Kaieteur News has been told that ExxonMobil, knowing the advantageous provisions of the 1999 contract, took a firm stance that it was not willing to renegotiate the contract. Apparently, the company had grounds for that position. And government respects the sanctity of agreements. Nevertheless, the government maneuvered a one percent increase in royalty, which in ExxonMobil's view, was negligible; it does not hurt the company in anyway. But, that meagre increase and the inclusion of a signature bonus, which is also negligible in the grand scheme of things, were predicated on an agreement to extend the life of the contract beyond 2018. ExxonMobil's contract would have ended in June and another would have had to be negotiated. The government opted to extend. With the extension, ExxonMobil managed to slip in a few more oppressive provisions as those contained in the Stability Clause. MOVING FORWARD No one from the Government has publicly admitted that the ExxonMobil contract is oppressive. In fact, senior government officials have been in high praise of the company and the contract. Minister of Natural Resources, Raphael Trotman, was the one who signed the ExxonMobil contract on government's behalf. He said that Guyana has been able to get a good deal. Minister of State, Joseph Harmon; Minister of Finance, Winston Jordan; Minister of Public Infrastructure, David Patterson and Minister of Foreign Affairs, Carl Greenidge have all said that the contract is a good one especially Greenidge. However, despite the songs of praise that have been sung, government has identified that better needs to be done. Yesterday, Harmon said that the government, in going forward, will be looking to secure contracts that are not so similar to those already signed. Going forward, we are basically looking at all these things in these additional contracts. We recognized, and the world has seen it, that there is a striking similarity between the contract signed with CGX and the ExxonMobil contract. These are contracts negotiated and signed by the previous administration. I am not going there as to who signed what. We have to deal with what is it we have now and we are going to deal with the issues as they come forward. Story by Abena Rockcliffe-Campbell from Kaieter News Kaieteurnewsonline.com 02 23 2018 Copyright 1999-2018 Petroleumworld or respective author or news agency. All rights reserved. We welcome the use of Petroleumworld (PW) stories by anyone provided it mentions Petroleumworld.com as the source. Other stories you have to get authorization by its authors. Internet web links to http://www.petroleumworld.com are appreciated. Petroleumworld welcomes your feedback and comments, share your thoughts on this article, your feedback is important to us! We invite all our readers to share with us their views and comments about this article. Write to editor@petroleumworld.com By using this link, you agree to allow PW to publish your comments on our letters page. Any question or suggestions, please write to: editor@petroleumworld.com Best Viewed with IE 5.01+ Windows NT 4.0, '95, '98,ME,XP, Vista, Windows 7,8,10 +/ 800x600 pixels The Venezuela - Trinidad gas gambit By Mariano Browne PORT SPAIN Petroleumworld 02 23 2018 It has been reported that our gas shortages and the resulting energy crisis is over. This is not true. LNG, the petrochemical and power generation plants need a production volume of four billion standard cubic feet a day (scf/d) to satisfy all contracts (including the plants currently closed). However, even with the Juniper field operating at full capacity, the Pt Lisas estate is still short by 200 to 300 million cubic scf/d and Atlantic, though running at its highest rate in three years, is still short. A target of 4.4 billion cubic scf/d, T&T's highest production volume, satisfies the daily contracted quantity and some. But that leaves no room for new plants and would mean that we would have come to the maximum installed production capacity. This in part explains the ongoing discussion between GORTT and Venezuela about accessing the gas fields in which we have a mutual interest. In broad terms, there are cross border gas fields or gas which straddles our common marine border with Venezuela and gas which lies across the border in Venezuelan waters. The Loran Manatee field is an example of a cross border field (it is the largest of three fields), whilst the Dragon field is an example of across the border gas. Given our gas shortages we clearly have an interest. These discussions have been ongoing for more than 15 years at governmental level and several agreements have been signed by Kamla Persad-Bissesar and Keith Rowley in their capacity as Prime Minister. The GORTT has said that we will soon be seeing gas from Dragon, but significantly, the new Minister of Oil and head of PDVSA, in one of his earliest public statements, mentioned 2022 as the likely year in which this gas can be expected. More concrete steps are needed to settle the many technical and business issues if any field is to be monetised. What will be the price and the basis for its calculation? Where and who will process the gas? More importantly who will make the required investments? How are the proceeds to be shared? What are the mechanisms for dispute resolution or for investor substitution and exit? With the economic risk there is also significant political and geopolitical risk in the form of US sanctions on Venezuela. How will these be mitigated? These are difficult questions in the best of circumstances and the current economic climate of depressed energy prices is not the best. Neither the NGC nor Petrotrin has the capacity (financial, technical, managerial) to take on these offshore developments on their own. Neither does the Venezuelan state oil company, Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), described in Forbes (March 6, 2017) as the worst oil company in the world. Production volumes have diminished considerably since 1997, so much so that it is exploiting reserves so slowly as to render them, on average, worthless. If that's not bad enough, PDVSA is generating negative cash flows and piling up a mountain of debt. That leaves only one optionthe oil major, Shell, with Chevron in the case of Loran Manatee. But the current political climate in Venezuela is not conducive to investment. Several private sector companies have been nationalised; national income has fallen in the process. This is a warning to any investor, T&T included. Conoco's experience in the joint venture with PDVSA, Petrozuata, in the Orinoco delta is instructive. The national interest overruled the agreements on which the joint venture was founded. To illustrate, Venezuela carries a country risk rating by Global Edge of E, signifying the highest political and economic risk and the most difficult business environment with an unreliable legal system. It is rated 151 out of 159 countries. And the political situation in Venezuela will not be settled in the short run; Venezuela is also close to default. Financing from the international financial sector is therefore highly unlikely. Venezuela increasingly relies on oil sales to Russia and China. This raises the geopolitical stakes considerably; the Munroe doctrine is not dead! At the OAS, most of Latin American countries have been critical of the political situation and have uninvited Venezuela from the April 2018 Summit of the Americas. In contrast, T&T positions have supported Venezuela, an altogether unwise development. Rex Tillerson, US Secretary of state visited four Latin American countries and Jamaica in his Union and Dignity tour earlier this month. Contemporaneously, Venezuelan officials, including the Foreign Minister, were visiting T&T. These delegations did not include technical personnel and are likely to be related to Venezuela's growing isolation. T&T take note. Our priorities in the energy sector remain. And that means a more intelligent approach to developing T&T-based resources. Venezuela may be important in the long run but may not be a feasible alternative now. We need to manage our resources better and create credible alternatives. As ever, astute, informed leadership and management remain critical. Mariano Browne U.S. adds more import duties on biodiesel from Argentina, Indonesia By Reuters WASHINGTON Petroleumworld 02 23 2018 The U.S. Commerce Department on Wednesday piled on more import duties on biodiesel from Argentina and Indonesia, adding anti-dumping duties of 60.44 percent to 276.65 percent to already steep anti-subsidy duties on the fuels. The final determination is subject to a second ruling by the U.S. International Trade Commission on April 6 on whether U.S. biodiesel producers were injured by dumped imports from the two countries. But the independent panel has already found in the subsidy cases that the imports caused such injuries. The latest duties make it virtually certain that biodiesel from Argentina and Indonesia will not be sold in the U.S. market, with combined rates of up to 159 percent on the Argentine fuel and up to 341 percent on Indonesian variety. The Commerce Department set final dumping duties for Argentine biodiesel at 60.44 percent to 86.41 percent, and for Indonesian biodiesel at 92.52 percent to 276.65 percent. Today's decision allows U.S. producers of biodiesel to receive relief from the market-distorting effects of foreign producers dumping into the domestic market, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said in a statement. While the United States values its relationship with Argentina and Indonesia, even our closest friends must play by the rules. The latest duties come just two weeks after a budget deal in the U.S. Congress reinstated a $1 per gallon biodiesel tax credit, which is expected to improve profitability for domestic producers. The trade case was filed by the National Biodiesel Board and 15 member companies that alleged a flood of subsidized imports sold below fair market value was preventing U.S. producers from earning an adequate return. Today's decision provides room for the domestic biodiesel industry to flourish and produce more volumes of this American-made fuel which provides so many economic and environmental benefits, Kurt Kovarik, the trade group's president, said in a statement. A Commerce Department fact sheet on the determination can be seen at bit.ly/2EEJfU7 . Aruba government begins talks with U.S. over Aruba's PDVSA CITGO refinery work pause By Reuters JACKSONVILLE, Fla. Petroleumworld 02 23 2018 The Aruba government said on Thursday it started talks with the United States after Houston-based firm Citgo Petroleum slowed work on an overhaul of the Caribbean island's 235,000-barrel-per-day refinery due to a lack of credit. Sanctions imposed last year by President Donald Trump's administration on Venezuela and its state-run oil company, PDVSA, limit their access to long-term credit, affecting oil projects in the OPEC-member country and in the Caribbean islands where PDVSA operates. Citgo, the U.S. refining unit of PDVSA, had selected a consortia of firms to handle the overhaul and hired some 600 local workers. But the lack of financing had delayed work to restart the idled refinery this year and to convert it into an oil upgrader, Citgo said earlier this week. The Aruba government has contacted American authorities to understand what is going on. The Dutch ambassador in Washington and lawyers in New York are also addressing issues related to the contract with Citgo, Aruba's Prime Minister Evelyn Wever-Croes said. Citgo in 2016 signed a 25-year lease contract with Aruba to refurbish and operate the idled refinery as part of a $685 million project. Sanctions (against Venezuela) are very firm. That is not something we can change. We are in the middle of this situation between the United States and Venezuela, and I don't think that can be solved soon, she added. The facilities are open, but the refinery modernization project has been paused, she said. Even Saudi Arabia wants in on the U.S. oil boom U.S. oil boom tempts Saudis to consider american crude sale. Aramco said to have mulled Feb. sale via Motiva unit to Asia.State-run Saudi firm decided sale was unviable for the month. Watch Video - U.S. Oil Supplies Hit OPEC Curbs By Serene Cheong SINGAPORE Petroleumworld 02 23 2018 The kingdom's state oil firm considered the possibility of sending American crude to Asia in February via a U.S. unit before determining it wasn't economically viable, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. It also asked potential buyers in Asia if they would be interested in U.S. supply, according to officials at two regional refiners. The people asked not to be identified because the information is confidential. The fact that the Saudis decided against moving a cargo to the world's biggest oil consuming region this month doesn't mean they won't consider it again. Such a sale would be unprecedented, and a potential strategy by the Middle East nation in the face of rising U.S. production . American supplies are proving a threat to efforts by the OPEC producer and its allies to clear a global glut and prop up prices. State-run Saudi Arabian Oil Co. , known as Aramco, considered shipping the U.S. crude to Asia via its Houston-based Motiva Enterprises unit, which operates North America's largest refinery in Port Arthur, Texas, with a crude capacity of more than 600,000 barrels a day. Aramco didn't respond to an email seeking comment. Relatively cheap U.S. crude has increasingly been making its way to major consuming nations such as China, India and South Korea over the past year and eating into the market share of traditional suppliers like Saudi Arabia. While American oil is still a fledgling in Asia, Aramco is attempting to take advantage of the opportunities presented by the U.S. shale boom that has transformed the flow of cargoes in the global market. This week, the price of the benchmark U.S. oil went above the Middle East marker Dubai for the first time in more than a year. This recent rising strength in West Texas Intermediate may have played a role in scuppering the potential shipment from the Gulf Coast. At current levels, the strength in WTI relative to Dubai prices doesn't justify arbitrage flows of U.S. crude into Asia, said Nevyn Nah, an analyst at industry consultant Energy Aspects Ltd. WTI in New York traded at $61.27 a barrel at 6:50 p.m. Singapore time. Prices have risen more than 40 percent since June. The Suezmax tanker AST Sunshine, provisionally sought to transport crude from the U.S. to Asia, failed to be finalized for the journey, according to shipping data compiled by Bloomberg. The vessel was meant to transport 130,000 metric tons of crude loading in late February from the U.S. Gulf Coast, bound for Singapore and Ningbo in China. As Aramco prepares for what could be a record initial public offering , it's announced plans to expand its trading business by buying and selling non-Saudi crude . The IPO is the centerpiece of the kingdom's plan to wean its economy off oil. The government has estimated the share sale could value the company at $2 trillion, though analysts make lower estimates. Marijuana grows in a warehouse facility at Garden State Dispensary in Woodbridge, N.J.. New Jersey is considering legalizing all forms of cannabis in 2018 for adult recreational use, including the smokable flower. Read more The Rothman Institute at Jefferson, one of the nation's largest orthopedic practices, announced Thursday it would collaborate on a study to investigate the benefits of medical marijuana for patients suffering from chronic and acute pain. Rothman will work with Franklin BioScience, a Colorado-based cannabis grower and retailer. Franklin BioScience expects to open a medical marijuana dispensary in late-March called Beyond Hello in Bristol Township, Bucks County. "There's a link between access to cannabis and reduced opioid overdoses," said physician Ari Greis, a Rothman pain management specialist who will oversee the research. "We're all being cautiously optimistic that it could be helpful to some of our patients. Because we're leaders in orthopedic medicine, we feel this is an opportunity we can't pass up." The announcement comes just after the state's medical marijuana program officially launched last week with the first legal sales of cannabis occurring at six dispensaries. Dozens more which only will sell concentrates, vape pens, tinctures, and pills are expected to open within the next several months. More than 17,000 patients have registered to participate in Pennsylvania's marijuana program. About 4,000 of those have been certified by a physician. The agency says about 380 physicians are approved to write recommendations. The Rothman project will explore whether medical marijuana can be an effective alternative to opioids for pain management. Researchers plan to enroll patients with lower back and leg pain brought on by sciatica, or compression of spinal nerves. Greis said he received approval for the observational study two weeks ago from Jefferson's Institutional Review Board. The research will be funded by Franklin Bioscience. "Sciatica is an unbelievably common problem and people try to avoid surgery for it," Greis said. Opioids are a common treatment. Until the study design is complete, it's unclear how long the study will be conducted or how many patients will be involved. "We have an obvious opioid crisis that is affecting our communities, and despite everyone's awareness of the problem there hasn't been a really obvious way to deal with it," Greis said. "A lot of patients have tried so many things various medications, physical therapies, injections, and surgeries with little relief. Now we have a new option. And it warrants looking into." Some physicians at Rothman are so convinced of the potential of cannabis to supplant or complement opioids that they have invested in Franklin Bioscience, Greis said. For the moment, Greis is the only Rothman physician approved by the state Department of Health to certify patients to participate in the state medical marijuana program. Because he can certify patients, Greis is barred by the state from investing in any cannabis business. Bob Pease is the president of Pennsylvania operations for Franklin BioScience. He said the company and the national marijuana industry is bullish on the Keystone State. "Pennsylvania could be the center of medical cannabis research for the country, given the way the state program is setting up," Pease said. "Because of the resources around Big Pharma, biotech, the medical and the scientific communities, we think that it's created an interesting dynamic for marijuana research. That's why we're having a big push there." Rothman isn't the first medical center in the region to set out to research marijuana. Children's Hospital of Philadelphia announced in December it would pair with an Australian biopharmaceutical company to study the effects of cannabis on children with autism. Franklin BioScience has the option to open two additional dispensaries in the state. Pease said the company has "a good lead" on a Philadelphia location. In December, it announced it would pair with the University of the Sciences in West Philadelphia to develop a cannabis education program for pharmacists, physicians, and students planning on entering the health professions. A federal appeals court in Philadelphia has thrown out a motion to suppress evidence filed by a Bensalem man who claimed his computer had been illegally hacked by the U.S. government in an investigation that the FBI described as "unprecedented in its scope and reach." Gabriel Werdene, 53, was snared in a child-porn sting carried out in 2015. That year, the federal government was tipped off to the location of a computer server that hosted the world's largest collection of virulent child pornography on the "dark web." According to the FBI, more than 150,000 members on the Playpen website uploaded and viewed tens of thousands of postings of children, indexed by age, sex, and the type of sexual activity involved. The FBI seized the Playpen server, which had been housed in North Carolina, moved it to Virginia, and obtained a single search warrant to monitor all communications on the device. Investigators did not immediately shut the website down. Instead, the feds acted as the website administrators and effectively distributed child porn. They loaded government-created malware onto the server and operated Playpen for 13 days. Anytime a user went to Playpen, the code infected their electronic devices and relayed the unsuspecting owners' real IP addresses to the FBI. Playpen members, who had been using the TOR browser to access the images anonymously, were subsequently identified using the IP addresses and other information generated by the malware. Werdene, who logged into Playpen under the username "thepervert," was one of 350 Americans and 580 foreign nationals arrested in the sting. Agents seized a USB drive and a DVD containing child porn from Werdene's Bucks County home. Charged in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, Werdene filed a motion to suppress the evidence seized during the search of his computer, including information revealed by the malware. Werdene pleaded guilty in June 2016 and was sentenced to two years in federal prison, but his plea agreement allowed him to reserve his right to appeal. Werdene and lawyers from the Electronic Frontier Foundation argued that the search warrant issued for the government hacking effort had been "too broad" and, as a result, violated his Fourth Amendment rights. The EFF claimed that the thousands of searches and seizures enabled by the malware were not legal. In an opinion filed Feb. 21 in the Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in Philadelphia, Circuit Judge Joseph A. Greenaway wrote that the FBI had acted in good faith and that there was no evidence that it had exceeded the scope of the warrant. Ellie Devyatkin, the commercial corridor manager at the Frankford Community Development Corp., on Frankfort Avenue in front of the Transportation Center. Read more The empty, barrel-shaped building at the northern end of the Market-Frankford Line looks like an aircraft hangar long past its useful life. "Art is in the eye of the beholder," said City Councilwoman Maria Quinones-Sanchez, who represents the community. "I'm not necessarily the best one, but that is ugly." Where she sees an eyesore, others see an architectural gem. The building, opened in 1955 as a Penn Fruit supermarket, is one of the last well-preserved examples in the region of a once ubiquitous style meant to complement America's post-war prosperity and growing car culture. "It's remarkably intact," said Paul Steinke, executive director for the Preservation Alliance of Greater Philadelphia, which successfully petitioned in 2016 for the midcentury modernist building to be added to the city's register of historic places. When the glass is unveiled and the lights are on, Steinke said, "it virtually glows." What all parties agree on, though, is that the old supermarket is at an enviable location. It has easy access to transit and major roadways, and is near a parcel owned by SEPTA that the transit agency wants to develop. "That hub is one of the most transit rich and regionally accessible locations in the entire region," said Greg Krykewycz, assistant director of planning at the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission. "The right big project can be a catalyst for a lot of different development." The market, vacant since the Holiday Thriftway closed two years ago, stands catty-corner from the Frankford Transportation Center, which moves about 41,000 people a day through the Market-Frankford Line and 17 bus and trackless trolley lines. It's within easy driving distance of Roosevelt Boulevard and I-95. People trying to revitalize the neighborhood say the historic designation that protects the 73,090-square-foot building from demolition or significant alteration may have rendered it unusable. "People are interested in the location," said Kimberly Washington, who heads the Frankford Community Development Corp. "There's zero interest in the historic designation." Advocates for preservation, however, say Frankford should find a use for the building, which evokes a time when cars had tail fins and Leave It to Beaver was broadcast in black and white. "I just feel people are too quick to want to throw this building away," Steinke said. "It doesn't look good right now because it's vacant. It had a 60-year run as a grocery store. I don't see why it couldn't continue." Frankford Avenue has been an artery for Philadelphia since Pennsylvania was one of the original colonies. Washington's army and the authors of the Declaration of Independence used it, according to the Historical Society of Frankford. Today, the Market-Frankford Line's long blue spine looms over the corridor. One Frankford beautification project at the Arrott station, a small corner park painted bright pink, is named Pause Park because conversation has to either wait or be drowned out whenever a train passes. The line is noisy, but it keeps the corridor vital. Population growth along the rail line is three times greater than the city's rate from 2010 to 2014, SEPTA officials said. Other neighborhoods along the line, such as Fishtown and Kensington, are booming, and in January, Quinones-Sanchez introduced a bill that would facilitate elderly and affordable housing near the 46th Street, Erie-Torresdale, Allegheny, York-Dauphin Station, and Berks stops. The area around the vacant supermarket, though, has lagged. A third of the 66,000 people in 19124 zip code live below the poverty line, according to U.S. Census statistics. Unemployment rates are higher and median incomes lower than in the city overall. "This isn't a part of Philadelphia that's seen a ton of investment yet compared to some of the other neighborhoods," Krykewycz said. SEPTA opened the current brick and glass Frankford Transportation Center in 2003, and with it diverted the tracks away from the road. The hope was that getting the street out from under the tracks' shadow might help businesses bloom. Instead, riders who used to walk through the streets could go from trains to a parking garage or waiting buses without ever leaving the station, members of the Frankford CDC said. People now come and go without ever interacting with the neighborhood. "A lot of the businesses that didn't survive just closed and didn't come back," Washington said. The businesses that remain include discount clothing retailers, dollar stores, and a pawn shop where people bring back the same items each month for short-term loans to pay the bills. The arrangement is "they have six months to buy it back," said Feliciano Vega, 49, one of the owners of Gold-555. "That's collateral on a loan." The community has big houses, but they have been subdivided into apartments that, in some cases, are leased on a weekly basis. There are drug rehab and treatment centers on the corridor. The community has violent, property, and drug crime rates higher than the city average, according to recent police data. The number of homicide and shooting victims has increased since 2013, though robberies have declined. Residents are working toward change, though. The Frankford CDC and State Rep. Jason Dawkins, a Democrat who represents the area, have partnered to renovate and locate offices on nearby Paul Street and have helped local businesses get grants for facade improvements. The CDC encouraged the police to bar parking on Frankford Avenue opposite the Frankford Transportation Center, which eliminated a place for drug dealers to hide their wares. Over the next two years, the city plans to spend $4 million to improve lighting and add cameras from the transportation center to Girard Avenue. SEPTA, meanwhile is investing $40 million to rehab the El's nearby Arrott stop. The CDC also has stimulated dormant community activism, with residents and business owners now discussing how the neighborhood can improve. "Small investments that aren't the most sexy investments maybe in the aggregate, that stuff ends up being more impactful than a signature investment," Krykewycz said. The closing of Holiday Thriftway in 2016 was a blow to the neighborhood. The store was a source of fresh food for residents and reliable foot traffic for neighboring businesses. Business owners near the market all said they lost customers when the store closed. "This area needs a supermarket," said Mohammad Farooq, owner of Nothing over Budget, a discount store about a block from the property. "Every neighborhood needs a supermarket." The blocks around the supermarket were described as having good food access before the Holiday Thriftway closed, according to data maintained by the city. Now, some of those blocks are considered food deserts. Rite Aid of Pennsylvania bought the property for $3.7 million in 2007, according to city property records. "We have been and will continue to work with city and community officials to explore options for the property," a Rite Aid spokeswoman wrote in a statement. The high ceiling makes it expensive to heat, and the glass facade is difficult to maintain, making the property unappealing to a new tenant, argue members of the Frankford CDC. And Quinones-Sanchez said she thought that the city's soda tax has made the grocery business less appealing. Steinke, though, said he knew of at least one city grocer interested in the property, and Rite Aid has never returned calls he made to try to connect the company with a potential tenant. Rite-Aid and Walgreens engaged in a partial merger last year, and Steinke speculates that Rite Aid's apparent disinterest in filling the space may be related to a Walgreen's a block away. Albertsons Cos., the company that owns Acme, has an agreement to buy Rite Aid. Rite Aid did not reply to questions about Steinke's efforts to find a new tenant. Rite Aid could petition the city's Historical Commission to have the building's historic designation rescinded, but has not done so, city officials said. While other former Penn Fruit buildings are still standing around the country, including a CVS on Passyunk and Oregon Avenues, almost all have been modified from their original appearance. The building on Frankford Avenue is one of the few that preserves the once familiar space-age style. "The existing building could be adapted into a new use," Steinke said, "that could contribute to the quality of life and vitality of the Frankford neighborhood." A board covers up the "Wynn" name at Wynn Commons on the University of Pennsylvania campus. The area outside Houston Hall is being renamed Penn Commons. Read more The University of Pennsylvania is moving forward with relabeling a central part of its campus named for a former trustee who is in the midst of a sexual-misconduct scandal. The school's "current plan" is to rename "Wynn Commons," named after hotel and casino mogul Steve Wynn, to "Penn Commons," university spokesman Ron Ozio confirmed Friday. The Daily Pennsylvanian first reported the decision. The university removed Wynn's name from the plaza outside of Houston Hall, Penn's student union building, in early February after a Wall Street Journal report described a decades-long pattern of sexual misconduct from Wynn. Ozio did not comment on whether "Penn Commons" would be a temporary or permanent name for the public area, and said he did not know the timeline for when new signage would be installed. Wynn stepped down as head of Wynn Resorts and resigned as finance chairman for the Republican National Committee following the Journal's report. Penn's commons was named for Wynn after he donated $7.5 million to the Ivy League school in 1995. "It has been a century since the University of Pennsylvania last revoked an honorary degree, and we do not take that decision or the decision to remove Mr. Wynn's name from the Commons and from the scholarship fund he created lightly," Penn president Amy Gutmann and David L. Cohen, chairman of the board of trustees, said in a statement at the time. "We view these as extraordinary and essentially unique circumstances that call for an immediate, decisive, and clearly ethical response." In addition to removing his name from the plaza, Penn revoked an honorary degree given to Wynn and stripped his name from a scholarship fund. The university also revoked an honorary degree given to actor and comedian Bill Cosby, who has been accused of sexual assault by dozens of women. A criminal trial for Cosby in Montgomery County ended in a hung jury and mistrial last year. The School Reform Commission Thursday night approved a single new charter school for Philadelphia, another outpost for the successful MaST network in Northeast Philadelphia and adding 1,300 students to the city's charter rolls. But perhaps more significantly, it denied six others, citing significant flaws in applications, including those from well-known operators Mastery Charter Schools and Aspira of Pennsylvania. MaST III had applied to operate a K-12 school serving 2,600 students, opening this fall in the city's Somerton section. As a result of conditions imposed on the school, it will be limited to 1,300 students and will not open until 2019. "We're excited to have another charter, and serve more kids," John Swoyer, MaST's CEO, said after the meeting. "We'll work it out." There is enormous demand for MaST's two existing schools, Swoyer said: They received 15,000 applications for just 250 seats. The SRC did air some concerns about MaST, which "does not have a very diverse population," Chair Joyce Wilkerson said. Swoyer promised the school would better reflect the city's diversity: MaST III will reserve 50 percent of its seats for students from certain North Philadelphia zip codes, and projects that more than half of its students will come from families living below the poverty line. MaST, as a condition of the new charter, will have to provide some form of transportation assistance to kindergarten students in that specified attendance zone. (Pennsylvania state law does not require districts to pay for transportation for kindergarten students, and Philadelphia does not do so.) Would-be charters that had their proposals denied are: Antonia Pantoja Preparatory Charter School, APM Community Charter School, Eugenio Maria Preparatory Charter School, Franklin Towne Charter Middle School, Mastery Charter School Elementary, and Philadelphia Hebrew Public Charter. The six denials come amid a time of particular tension for the Philadelphia School District and its charter community. Seventeen charter schools have refused to sign their operating agreements, saying the school system is demanding conditions that would jeopardize their existence. And charter operators are complaining bitterly about a proposed charter amendment policy, which they say would be too burdensome. Nevertheless, charters are a very popular option in Philadelphia: About 130,000 students attend district schools while 67,000 are enrolled in the city's 84 charter schools. Jeffrey Stacey, a lawyer representing Franklin Towne, said the commission's 3-2 vote to deny the charter's application was "not surprising. This is the temperature." "It's a shame," Stacey said, "we have to be seen as competing with each other." Stacey said Franklin Towne would be "exploring all of our options" to open the proposed grade 6 through grade 8 school, "up to and including appeal" to the state Charter School Appeal Board. Schools may also fix problems in their application and resubmit them to the SRC. Franklin Towne was one of several votes that was not unanimous. Commissioners Bill Green and Farah Jimenez, who are generally seen as warmer to charters, voted to approve APM, Franklin Towne, Mastery Elementary and Philadelphia Hebrew. Both indicated they saw more merit to the quartet of applications than flaws. Green and Jimenez were outvoted by Wilkerson, Christopher McGinley and Estelle Richman. That Mastery the city's largest charter operator with 14 schools, and an organization with a national profile was denied surprised some. But the school district's evaluation report identified a number of problems with Mastery's proposal to open a K-8 school in the Yorktown section of North Philadelphia. Mastery, which proposed to open the school in 2019-20 and enroll up to 756 students, "failed to present any specific or compelling evidence that the Charter School would be able to meet its proposed enrollment targets," the evaluators said in the report. They called it "particularly concerning" that Mastery did not provide evidence of stated intent by families to send students to the new school. Mastery also said it would open in a building the former Wakisha Charter School that could not hold all of its students. Joe Ferguson, Mastery's Chief Operations Officer, said the organization was "extremely disappointed" by the commission's denial, "but determined." He said leaders would "regroup and decide" on next steps. He declared the SRC's concern about demand for a Mastery Elementary to be "nonsensical." Ferguson wouldn't comment on whether he expected the commission's denial. "I don't think we take anything for granted," he said. He declined to say whether he thought Mastery's refusal to sign agreements with the district for some of its charter schools in the city affected how the commission voted. Rachel Mazza (left) and Alyssa Hansen pet Lacy during a puppy yoga session at Amrita Yoga and Wellness in Fishtown. The session was cohosted with Morris Animal Refuge to promote the adoption of homeless dogs housed at the refuge. Read more Yoga has been scientifically shown to reduce both stress and feelings of depression. Now picture striking a downward dog as a real and really adorable dog nuzzles your nose from the edge of your mat. Unless you're allergic to pups, it's doubtful you won't react with a smile. This takes yoga to the next level, with young pooches that stroll the floor as a teacher walks you through a session of poses for 45 minutes or longer. It's part of a wider trend popping up across Philadelphia and beyond where animals, such as dogs, cats, and even goats(!), are incorporated into yoga classes to elevate the level of lighthearted fun and de-stressing powers of the practice. "For a lot of people, being around pets automatically puts them at ease," says Stacia Nero, a yoga instructor at Fishtown's Amrita Yoga and Wellness and Queen Village's Three Queens studios. "Incorporating pets into yoga adds an extra playfulness element that can help make people feel comfortable, whether they've done yoga before or not." Amrita is holding a puppy yoga class on Saturday but, alas, it's already sold out. Recently, Nero began donating her time to lead cat yoga classes at PSPCA Fishtown, where experience levels span the spectrum. In February's class, Nero recalls several new-to-yoga participants who said they showed up primarily for the interchange with the kitties. "It's great because people come to see the cats, but then they also discover what yoga can do for your mind and body," says Nero. "They get to see how the two work hand in hand." When a friendly feline would wander toward an individual student's mat, Nero says she would see the student's face light up with added excitement and joy. The insuppressible elation that stems from cuddly creatures is natural. Numerous studies show that human-animal interaction can reduce stress-related variables such as cortisol, heart rate, and blood pressure levels. But it's not just humans reaping the benefits from the yoga classes. "The dogs love it," says Sophie Samul, the event coordinator at Morris Animal Refuge. "They get to get out of the shelter for a handful of hours, run around, and interact with other people." The Morris Animal Refuge currently hosts monthly puppy yoga classes at various locations throughout the city. Typically around three dogs are brought in for each studio class, and five volunteers oversee the program to make sure everything runs smoothly. "Yes, bathroom issues do happen it's just part of being a dog," says Samul. "But we try to walk them a number of times before and after the classes, and we clean up accidents right away when they occur." Dogs are chosen based off of personality traits, meaning only behaviorally sound pups are invited to attend the classes. The hope of Morris Animal Refuge, as with many of the animal shelters that partner with yoga studios, is that the classes might inspire adoptions and also build awareness around animal rescue. "Some folks, however, aren't necessarily in a position to adopt, but they want to give back," says Samul. "This allows them to do so in a capacity in which they're able." All of the proceeds from the $25-per-person classes go to the Morris Animal Refuge. Samul points out that the events help to build name recognition, noting that while participants might not adopt right away, the memories can remind people to return to the shelter if and when they do become ready for a pet. Samul also notes that students often tell their friends about the classes, which can inspire others to adopt. Gillian Kocher, director of public relations and marketing of the Pennsylvania SPCA, says the classes at PSPCA Fishtown have significantly affected the rates in which its cats find homes. "We always see a spike in adoptions after each class, which might be partially attributed to the social media surrounding them," says Kocher. "The cats don't typically get adopted the day of the class, but usually they will all be adopted within the week that follows." In the PSPCA Fishtown classes, three to five kitties roam around during each session. Sometimes they'll walk beneath participants as they're arching into their first cat-cow pose of the morning. Other times, a cat will snuggle up on the corner of a student's mat and lend a soothing purr for the entirety of a session. Participants are given treats, pipe cleaners, and other luring items. However, it's hard to predict how the free-spirited animals will behave during any given class. "You never really know how it will go, but that's kind of the fun part," says Kocher. "We can count on the instructor to lead a great yoga class, but the cats are the X factor they might run around and stretch out aside students or they might plop down and nap between mats." Cat lovers that are lucky will get to attend a class with kittens, which Kocher says is more probable during warmer months when the little ones show up in greater numbers at the shelter. "There's just something about a kitten coming up to you and brushing against your arm or leg when you're in a pose, or when a cat lets out a 'meow' while the whole group is meditating, that makes the experience that much more enjoyable," says Steven Pessagno, a regular attendee of the PSPCA Fishtown classes and owner to Nabi, a 15-pound gray tuxedo cat. "There's a novelty in it, and the cats provide these moments of cuteness you can't get when you practice elsewhere." Want to give animal yoga a try? Classes are often seasonal, and tend to ramp up toward the spring. However, below are a few spots that are currently hosting regular sessions. Reservations are typically required in advance. Cat yoga PSPCA Fishtown: Select Sundays, once per month; 1546 Frankford Ave.; $15; 215-309-6851; pspca.org Le Cat Cafe: 7-8 p.m. every Monday; 2713 W. Girard Ave.; $15; 267-800-7877; lecatcafe.org Camden County Animal Shelter: Monthly, dates vary; 125 County House Rd., Blackwood, N.J.; $20; 856-401-1300; ccasnj.org Philly PAWS: Select dates, including Saturday, April 7 at The Twisted Monkey, 501 Huntingdon Pike, Rockledge, Pa.; price TBA closer to date; phillypaws.org Dog yoga Morris Animal Refuge: Dates vary; $25; Locations vary per event; 215-735-9570; morrisanimalrefuge.org Philly PAWS: Monthly class expected to return in late spring; Xfinity Live!, 1100 Pattison Ave; Dates and price TBA New Jersey's attorney general will create a new office aimed at combating the opioid crisis, with "opioid response teams" of police and recovery specialists and a database to share opioid statistics among state agencies, among other initiatives. More than 2,200 people died of overdoses in New Jersey in 2016, most from opioids. Attorney General Gurbir S. Grewal announced the new office at a press conference in Newark Thursday morning. The office the New Jersey Coordinator of Addiction Response and Enforcement Strategies, or NJ CARES will institute round-the-clock opioid response teams that police or paramedics can call to help people in addiction. The teams will include health providers, substance abuse recovery and mental health advocates, police and medics, the attorney general's office said in a press release, and will provide people in addiction with "support, information and referrals to treatment programs." An $850,000 federal grant will support the program. Other initiatives include the database for state agencies, also partially funded by a $600,000 federal grant, which will collect information on opioid-related arrests, Narcan administration, drug overdoses and pill mills, in order to "provide a clearer picture of the opioid epidemic ranging from street drug activities to prescribing abuse." The attorney general's office is also planning to ramp up its prescription monitoring program and will launch a website for the public, nj.gov/oag/njcares, to provide weekly updates on the crisis. Sharon M. Joyce, the attorney general's acting director of the Division of Consumer Affairs and a 38-year veteran of the office, will head the new initiative. Christine Riddick, mother of Eric Riddick, demonstrates outside the District Attorneys Office in Center City. She, her son, and others contend he has been imprisoned for a murder he did not commit. Read more For more than 26 years, Eric Riddick has been locked up for a Southwest Philadelphia murder. He's been trying to persuade judges that he didn't commit the crime. But Riddick offered his petitions too late under the rules for criminal appeals. In fact, accompanying the December opinion denying his latest appeal was a judge's blunt assessment that Riddick may not be a killer, but a victim of a flawed system. "It is clear to all," Superior Court Judge John T. Bender wrote, "that it is likely that an innocent man sits behind bars for no better reason than a poorly conceived statute." Then-Senior Judge James J. Fitzgerald III joined in Bender's statement. Under the state's Post Conviction Relief Act, a defendant must file a petition for relief within a year of the judgment becoming final. There are a few exceptions, one of which is if the defendant obtains new evidence. But even then, a petition must be filed within 60 days of when the claim could have been presented. Twenty-eight states place no time limit on appeals based on newly discovered evidence, according to Michelle Feldman, a legislative strategist with the Innocence Project in New York. But she noted the standard of review in some of those states is high. Since 2011, state Sen. Stewart Greenleaf (R., Montgomery), chairman of the Judiciary Committee, has regularly introduced legislation to increase Pennsylvania's 60-day deadline to one year. But there has been "a lot of resistance to it," said spokesman Aaron Zappia. Zappia said Greenleaf, who will not seek reelection this year, is expected to reintroduce his legislation in Harrisburg soon. Greenleaf's argument is simple: It "often takes years to determine whether fragments of new evidence, added together, are enough to construct a solid case," he has written. "And, given that the persons involved are often incarcerated with no attorney actively working on their case, it makes complying with the rule next to impossible." The Pennsylvania District Attorneys Association in the past opposed Greenleaf's efforts to extend the deadline, arguing that it opens the window to frivolous claims. But Executive Director Richard Long said his group "would be in a better position to not oppose" the bill if safeguards were put in place to help determine if claims are legitimate. On Wednesday night, Riddick's mother, Christine, 69, attended a community meeting with new District Attorney Larry Krasner at a Powelton church. She lined up at a microphone and asked Krasner about her son's case and whether his office has the authority to expedite the release of someone wrongfully convicted. Krasner said he couldn't speak about individual cases. He said if his office agrees with the defense argument, someone who was wrongfully convicted could be released "in the interest of justice," according to a Facebook video of their interaction. He highlighted the hiring of Patricia Cummings, an expert on innocence issues who moved from Texas to head his office's Conviction Integrity Unit (formerly the Conviction Review Unit). But he said the unit needs more staff. Spokesman Ben Waxman said last week that Krasner regards issues of innocence seriously. In general, Krasner would favor changing legislation on measures that would allow for previously unknown evidence claims to be reviewed, Waxman said. Waxman said Riddick's case is still being reviewed by the Conviction Integrity Unit. Riddick, now 47, is serving a life sentence for first-degree murder and possession of an instrument of crime in the Nov. 6, 1991, shooting death of William Catlett, 20, at 58th and Belmar Streets. After his direct appeal was denied in 1995, Riddick filed a Post Conviction Relief Act petition on March 31, 2003, saying he had only recently learned that the lone witness, Shawn Stevenson, who had identified him at his trial as shooting at Catlett, had recanted. Stevenson, in a July 1999 affidavit, wrote that he had lied against Riddick because he was pressured to do so by Catlett's friend. Riddick, in his petition, wrote that he had heard from his family in early 1999 that Stevenson wanted to recant and that his family then hired a private investigator to obtain Stevenson's affidavit. But Riddick says he believes the investigator never turned the affidavit over to him because of a financial dispute. It wasn't until a Jan. 28, 2003, letter from another source that Riddick learned the affidavit actually existed, and it was a few days later when he received it. Common Pleas Judge Amanda Cooperman denied Riddick's petition as untimely. In her ruling, she didn't specifically address the recantation, but cited the state's filing deadlines. State courts by law do not have the power to address an exception claim if it is filed beyond the 60-day deadline. Later, attorney Barnaby Wittels, court-appointed to represent Riddick in 2012, hired a ballistics expert, William E. Conrad, to examine crime-scene, autopsy, and trial documents. Conrad submitted an Oct. 31, 2012, report concluding that Riddick did not fire the shots that killed Catlett. Cooperman granted an evidentiary hearing on the ballistics evidence. In June 2016, during a hearing before Common Pleas Judge Jeffrey Minehart, Conrad testified that it didn't make sense for a person on a balcony as Stevenson had described Riddick's location to have fired at and killed Catlett on the sidewalk. Conrad said that four of the five bullets that wounded Catlett traveled in his body in an upward trajectory and the fifth traveled in a level direction with no vertical deviation. Minehart that October denied Riddick's latest petition, finding that it was filed beyond the one-year deadline and that the exceptions didn't apply. In a December 2016 opinion, he wrote that everything the ballistics expert based his report on was available at the time of Riddick's 1992 trial. Thus, the evidence was not new. Minehart also wrote that Riddick did not meet his burden of proving that Stevenson's recantation was newly discovered evidence. And he wrote in a footnote that he found Conrad "to be lacking in credibility." Riddick, acting as his own attorney, appealed to Superior Court. The Superior Court panel, in its Dec. 26 decision, affirmed Minehart's ruling. Still, Fitzgerald wrote in a 15-page memorandum, Riddick's case "is deeply troubling, since Conrad's report points out that the case against [Riddick] is difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile with the ballistics evidence. Unfortunately, it is clear that all information used by Conrad was in the public domain at the time of trial in 1992." Riddick on Jan. 24 appealed to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. For Christine Riddick, the last 26 years have been "110 percent agony," she said. Last month, she demonstrated with her daughter-in-law, Dana Baker-Riddick who married Riddick while he was in prison as well as Black Lives Matter Pennsylvania activist Asa Khalif, and others outside the District Attorney's Office calling for Riddick to be exonerated and released. "I'm asking," the mother said, "I'm praying that the new DA looks at my son's case." When Gianna Lozzi Wolf was an undergraduate theater student at Arcadia University, her reputation preceded her, and she didn't have much choice in the matter. "I was always the girl from South Philly," says Wolf, who grew up bouncing among 20th and Packer, 16th and Moyamensing, and 15th and Hicks. "It's the accent." Such paesan pigeonholing annoyed her at first, but it didn't take too long for Wolf to realize she could and should bend the conversation her way. "Eventually, I was like, 'Hell yeah, I'm the girl from South Philly! Let me run with that,' " she says. "Why can't South Philly do theater?" The actor and playwright, 28, along with a tight-knit crew of family, friends, and artistic associates, has been working for the past year to put this plan into action, making South Philly a destination for original, independent stagecraft. The proof of concept: Raw Street Productions, a new theater company that will stage its inaugural 2018 season out of Connie's Ric Rac (1132 S. Ninth St.), the bar and performance space that's been a familiar fixture in the Italian Market since opening in 2006. This weekend, the company will host its first-ever cabaret fund-raiser. While there are other active South Philly theater troupes, like 11th Hour and Theatre Exile, Raw Street stands out by dint of its home base. While it's always been a venue for punk shows and stand-up comedy (check out the circa-2011 flier promoting a set by the now-huge Hannibal Buress pasted up in one of the restrooms), you don't think of plays when you think of Connie's. But that changed in the fall of 2016, when Wolf, who works at the nearby Square Pie and bartends at Connie's part-time, tricked out the existing stage to host the debut of Right Behind, a one-act comedy about the zany travails of restaurant industry employees. Right Behind proved to be a big hit, selling out its two runs; they eventually added a third and final run, at the Center Theater in Norristown, in the spring of 2017. "We even surprised ourselves with how smoothly it went," says Wolf. "After that run, all our wheels started turning. We could do this here." The "we" in question a self-described pack of "South Philly misfits" encompasses Wolf; her younger brother Freddie Lozzi, 24, who handles directorial and technical duties; and Ron Bauman, a partner at Connie's who also runs the local digital marketing agency Milk Street. But it's not just those three partners contributing. Costume designer Rachel Segal is Wolf's childhood best friend; Kat Stein, Connie's bar manager and booker, holds a piano degree from the University of the Arts and will help with the musical aspects of their productions. Bauman, a longtime friend and bandmate of Connie's other owners, Frank Tartaglia and Pete Pelullo, has watched the Connie's space improve incrementally since it opened. It was BYOB before adding a liquor license about three years in; in 2013, when Bauman came on as an owner, they completely overhauled and upgraded the sound system. More recently, they added draft lines, started taking credit cards and covered the north wall in murals from local artists. Now, with Raw Street claiming Connie's as its home field, Bauman "look[s] at what's going on now as the next significant upgrade," he says. With around 80 seats for stage shows (plus standing room and bar space for anyone who can pack in), "It's a more interactive theater experience that, say, going to the Kimmel Center or Walnut Street Theatre," adds Bauman. They're even adding a curtain to the stage that was more likely to host punks than actors. The program the troupe has pieced together for its first season reflects this alternative approach, as well. The last weekend of April will see them putting on their first post-Right Behind show, Dog Sees God: Confessions of a Teenage Blockhead. An edgy comedy that lampoons characters from a famous comic strip (it shares a name with one of the main ingredients in a Snickers bar), the parody is "very different from Right Behind," says Wolf. "It's funny, but it's also super-dark." Later in the year, Raw Street will present title of show, a one-act with a postmodern, Adaptation-esque bent (creators Jeff Brown and Hunter Bell essentially wrote the musical about the process of writing the musical). After a summer break, the company will return with an original work, The Eight Fish of Christmas, a comedy Wolf is currently penning that centers around a recently divorced Italian American woman who brings her new Jewish boyfriend to her family's raucous Christmas Eve dinner. As Raw Street is a fully self-funded pursuit, Wolf says she has no issues doing whatever she needs to do to secure the money necessary to make the company a success. "If we have to do a car wash, we'll do a car wash. We do what we have to do," says Wolf, who hopes to raise roughly $5,000 to offset production costs, including the price of securing the rights to outside works like Dog Sees God and title of show. But before they start soaping down trucks, Raw Street will stick to what it knows a free-admission, donation-based cabaret at Connie's that they hope will inch their coffers closer to their goal. Expect Raw Street talent to perform numbers from musicals both classic and contemporary (Waitress, Heathers), as well as selections from Johnny Cash and other non-thespian artists. They encourage all comers to don Roaring-'20s-era garb to sync with the cabaret vibe. "All we have is the talent, the passion, and the audience that shows up," says Wolf, "and what they think us running with this crazy dream is worth to them." Chef Townsend "Tod" Wentz is in a dark and daring mood as he and his kitchen crew take their wood-fired Spanish journey at Oloroso. Calasparra rice is turned jet black with squid ink, then bumped with the unlikely touch of aged Manchego. The sheep's milk cheese has a nutty richness that somehow magnifies the light sea funk of the silky rice enriched with shrimp stock, topped off with the squid-on-squid crunch of fried calamares that sparkle with espelette pepper. A stunning Iberian riff on shrimp toast brought a crisped rectangle of black brioche (inked again!) with dual toppings of crustacean one hot, one cold and a translucent sheet of Mangalica lardo that melted over each warm bite like delicious pig-flavored shrink wrap. And then there is the darkly roasted eggplant "tagine," a nod to the Moorish influence on Spain whose North African spices of cumin, ginger, and coriander get singed to peak aromatics over cast iron inside the restaurant's giant wood hearth. Drizzled with gingered honey and topped with a crunchy nest of shaved raw scallions, it's a fabulous take on the nightshade, whose inner flesh is lusciously moist and smoky. It was a perfect suite of exotic flavors and eye-catching compositions served on locally crafted ceramics and washed down with an impressive array of sherries and tastefully obscure Spanish vinos while we waited for the main event: a crispy pig's head. But we needed to pace ourselves at Oloroso, where an adventurous parade of big flavors is so magnetic it made me wonder why our Spanish scene red-hot a decade ago, thanks to Jose Garces has since been in a long and quiet lull. That world got a welcome jolt last fall from lively Barcelona Wine Bar on East Passyunk, which reflects a more classic tapas-style destination. There's a bit more finesse to the cooking at Oloroso, though the dishes evoke more impressionistic flavors of Spain than strict homages to traditional templates. That might seem off character for Wentz, whom I consider a modern French traditionalist at Townsend, his destination on East Passyunk, and perhaps only slightly less so at the Italian-themed A Mano in Fairmount, where the pastas are among the city's best. Spanish food has been more of a long infatuation than a prime career focus for Wentz, who dabbled in peppers Basquaise and sherry-splashed shrimp back in his early days at the Four Seasons, but who has always harbored an unexplored love of the rustic flavors of Spain. Life has been busy for the Lacroix alum, now on his third restaurant opening in four years. But he has a pilgrimage to the peninsula scheduled this spring that I'm sure will continue to inform and shape his vision in exciting ways. In the meantime, the culinary instincts of one of the city's best cooks has already served his menu at Oloroso well. That's clear you when taste a stunner like the escabeche of big U-10 scallops, whose sweet ivory flesh is lightly pickled in citrus and garlic oil, set over a refreshing honeydew-cucumber gazpacho, and then draped with sheer ribbons of hand-sliced jamon. The ham adds a welcome salty note, but also a surprisingly silky textural contrast and a lingering savory resonance. Wentz and his wife, sommelier and general manager Gordana Kostovski, have found a promising location to launch the latest stop on their Euro tour, tapping a rising sense of revival around Market East and Washington Square West. The wood hearth left by the former Petruce et al. lends the food an earthy, smoky edge, including the crusty boules of fresh sourdough drizzled with olive oil to start the meal. The space's long chain of rooms has smartly been opened up for better flow and warmed by a new mahogany bar and Persian rugs that cover the floor and banquettes. There's also a glass-enclosed room for Kostovski's cellar to grow in new directions. This is the first time since Twenty21 that the pair have been able to work together. And it's hard to understate what a talented sommelier like Kostovski, who previously ran the beverage program at Volver, can bring to the overall experience. There are some fun cocktails with savory flourishes and Spanish twists to start the meal (try the salt-and-peppered In Effect). The bar also has 25 sherries in every shade (I loved the electric crispness of a cask-style "en rama" Manzanilla). Kostovski also assembled 100 quality wines, including 22 by the glass, with some rare indie surprises, like the dry white Pedro Ximenez blend from Malaga (La Ola del Milellero), and the pleasantly funky natural rosado from Finca Parera (we ended up drinking the last bottle in Pennsylvania). More important, Oloroso's staff is so well trained that our server effortlessly talked a guest through three tempranillo options by homing in on specific ingredients in each of his various dishes. We settled on the tobacco-y berry notes of La Hazana, which hit both the richness of the smoked short rib croquettes, and the gaminess of a pheasant special wrapped in the salty crisp of Serrano. There can be so many flavors on the table at any given time, the flexibility of beverages and a sense of adventure in diners' appetites is key. To be sure, there are plenty of dishes that should appeal to conservative eaters, from the crunchy-fluff of patatas bravas with saffron aioli to one of the best chickens I've had in recent memory, a juicy breast scented with the wood oven over root vegetables. Everyone would have loved the braised lamb shank in Rioja sauce had it not been a little bland, one of Oloroso's very few disappointments. (Another small letdown: The smoked lamb shoulder over farro had plenty of flavor but was dry.) The seafood paella, though not bad by any measure, was not my favorite dish, either. The rice was too tomatoey and wet, and because it was oven-roasted instead of grilled, it lacked the crusty socarrat bottom I covet. If Wentz learns anything on his coming trip to Spain, a paella lesson would be nice. But there were many other things to love, especially with seafood. A silvery fillet of mild branzino hid the intrigue of pickled mussels escabeche mingling with sweet oranges. A thick hunk of cod wrapped in a band of crisped ham was all delicacy as it flaked into roasted red Basquaise peppers. The salt-cod fritters are so good because Wentz cures his own fish for more suppleness than you can get from rehydrating the usual bacalao planks. His steamed littlenecks may be my favorite new clam dish, because their mop of sherry-soaked onions and the crunchy bits of ripped bread croutons evoked a wonderful seafood riff on French onion soup. Is grilled octopus even considered edgy anymore? I doubt it. But Oloroso's rendition is on point, the tender morsels tossed with chickpeas and chorizo in a spicy Middle Eastern muhammara of peppers, nuts, and pomegranate molasses that glowed with sweet, tart heat. Oloroso is truly at its best, however, for those willing to indulge the chef's passion for nose-to-tail cooking. The ribbons of tripe braised deep in a bed of vinegar-tanged spicy peppers is destination offal. Chocolaty nuggets of blood sausage, along with lardons and chorizo, add charcuterie oomph to the gigante beans. The roasted bone marrow, which rises dramatically above its pan like a gruesome chimney, adds an emulsifying richness to Madeira-braised mushrooms destined for sourdough toast. But nothing drew this noisy dining room to a momentary hush quite like one of those split hog's heads, which finally arrived on a big wooden platter at our table like a medieval feast in primal glory, its floppy ear and noble snout slow-cooked half a day, then roasted to a cracker crisp beneath a mahogany shine of Pedro Ximenez sherry caramel. This sharing endeavor, at $38 a person, is not for the squeamish. But our server expertly removed all the meat, crispy skin, and other bits from the skull and tidily portioned them into glossy piles alongside green olive tapenade, potatoes, and blistered shishito peppers. I forked through them slowly, closed my eyes, and simply let the incredibly unctuous flavor morsels melt away on my tongue, knowing opportunities to appreciate a pig are rarely this complete, or intense, or as expertly rendered. Dessert, anyone? That was my first thought when I opened my eyes from that porcine reverie. And this restaurant delivered, from deeply grooved churros fritters with smoked cinnamon chocolate for dipping to orange-scented creme Catalan and an admirable lineup of sweet sherries for full effect. Oloroso's Spanish journey clearly is just beginning. But it's already off to a very sweet start. The churros with smoked cinnamon chocolate at Oloroso. As the debate regarding gun control begins anew; I'd like to renew the debate on toxic masculinity. I too want to advocate for our right to bear arms. Teachers, parents, social workers, administrators, and peers, must be armed with proper coping skills. Schools and communities must be armed with qualified mental health professionals. Parents must be armed with people and places to go to for help. You must be armed with the desire and skill to be meaningfully involved in the lives of youth. Arm our young men (and women) with a ridiculous amount of resources to cope with whatever life brings. I challenge the United States of America to bear those arms. Moreover, I challenge the president to bear those arms. I, like many of you, am outraged at the recent school shooting in Parkland, Fla. It is the same outrage that we feel with all of these; be it Columbine, Newtown, and countless others. We are tired of being outraged at all the violence perpetrated by young men. We are simply out of rage and tears. It has long been time for action. That is why the brave students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School who have shown us how to turn rage into activism with their "lie-in" and voices are to be more than commended. Although, I am not opposed to gun law reform, I think it is an inadequate solution at best. Just like anything else that is illegal, people will find a way to create and access a market for banned guns and accessories. The type of reform that I am talking about involves reforming how we think about and support mental health. This most recent shooting is part of a much broader problem: our failure to guide and support young men. Given all of the research on the emotional fragility of boys and the hyper-masculine culture in which boys must develop, another disturbed male shooter should come as no surprise. I do not presume to know all of the details surrounding the shooter, however; chances are he fits the following profile: emotionally disturbed, socially awkward, relationally isolated, and teased or bullied. Many of you will not be impressed with the above characteristics and probably said "duh" after reading each one. Perhaps what is more profound is that schools, parents, communities, and you (yes, you) do nothing with this knowledge. That is, the population of boys (and their parents) that we need to support is clearly identifiable, however; they are not adequately supported. What we also know is that being in meaningful relationships matters. That is, when responsible adults are in caring relationships with boys; boys are better able to deal with stress and cope in more acceptable and productive ways. Study after study demonstrates that relationships matter. Moreover, violence perpetrated by males is often a form of overcompensating for vulnerability. Relationships not only buffer stress, but they also serve as a means of connection to resources. I also speak from experience. As an adolescent growing up in North Philadelphia, drug dealing and gun violence had its appeal. However, because of meaningful relationships and exposure to alternatives; I wanted more. Because of meaningful relationships, I was exposed to more, challenged to be more, and supported to meet the challenge. If you want to see the outcomes for boys (and men) change in society expose, challenge, and support. Expose boys to healthy representations of masculinity. Challenge boys to cope and respond to stress adaptively. Provide the emotional support that we all need to be better. And if need be, connect youth with professional help. In the absence of these three things; there will undoubtedly be more of the same. I dare parents, businesses, community organizations, religious organizations; institutions of higher education to become more involved in the lives of youth, in particular boys. If you want to move beyond the emotional roller coaster of apathy, outrage and sorrow, become a mentor, volunteer in a local classroom, join Big Brothers/Big Sisters. The truth is there is no safe place. No community is immune. This is not a black, Hispanic, white, Asian, or poor people problem. Mental health maintenance is an American problem. And until we move beyond outrage and sorrow into meaningful relationships and supports, boys (and men) will continue to cry out for attention in the most disastrous of ways. In this instant age of tweets and Facebook friends, I am calling for old-school engagement. For some, this approach may seem too simplistic. The power of the idea is its simplicity get involved wherever you can. And for others, it may appear too overwhelming. I am not asking you to get a degree in counseling. Become involved in ways that make sense for you. You have options and control. Many programs provide training and many opportunities require little to no training. It will not solve all of our problems, but it will undoubtedly make a difference in the lives of many just as it did for me and countless others. Chad Dion Lassiter, MSW, is the president of Black Men at Penn School of Social Work, Inc. @chadlassiter Councilwoman Maria Quinones-Sanchez (top right) and School Reform Commission member Bill Green (bottom right) are rumored to be thinking about challenging U.S. Rep. Brendan Boyle (left). Read more When Philadelphia Democrats win a seat in the U.S. House, they can usually bank on keeping it for life. Incumbents rarely face primary challengers in this one-party town. One of the few exceptions to that rule is politicians who are under the cloud of criminal investigations. Think that's an exaggeration? Consider the case of decades-long U.S. Rep. Bob Brady: He never had a serious opponent until the FBI began eyeing his campaign finances last year. Then four candidates launched bids against him, and he announced his retirement. Until a few days ago, it looked like the city's two congressmen running for reelection Brendan Boyle and Dwight Evans would face nada competition per usual. Zero Democrats had declared campaigns in their districts. But then the Pennsylvania Supreme Court imposed a new congressional district map for the 2018 elections. Thanks to that defibrillator to the city's fatigued political system, we're now hearing that several boldface names are thinking about challenging Boyle and Evans. Boyle appears to have the most people looking at his seat. There may be a couple reasons for that: For one thing, he isn't allied with some of the ward leaders in the new Second District, where he's running for reelection. The Second District is also home to only half of Boyle's constituents under the previous congressional district map. Compare that to the Third District, where Evans lives. It has 80 percent of the same constituents. Bill Green, a School Reform Commission member and former city councilman, is rumored to be considering a run against Boyle. On Wednesday, he changed his party registration from independent to Democrat, according a source in the city's voter registration office. Councilwoman Maria Quinones-Sanchez appears to be thinking about it, too. A source close to Sanchez said the new Second District "lends itself to a viable female candidate with her profile." Two other potential Boyle challengers, both of whom share the congressman's political base in Northeast Philly, are being whispered about: State Sen. John Sabatina Jr. and State Rep. Michael Driscoll. Prepare for things to get ugly if Sabatina jumps in: The Sabatinas and Boyles have a longtime family feud. Boyle's brother, a state lawmaker, unsuccessfully challenged Sabatina in 2016. Meanwhile, Michele Lawrence, a former senior vice president at Wells Fargo, officially leaped into the race against Boyle on Thursday. It won't be easy for challengers to take on Boyle, though: He said this week that he had nearly $1 million in the bank. Evans, who is running in the new Third District, isn't safe from formidable foes, either. A source close to Nina Ahmad, Philadelphia's former deputy mayor for public engagement, said she was mulling a bid against Evans or Boyle. Another possibility, the insider said, is that she'll go for the new Fifth District, a wide-open congressional seat based in Delaware County, but with a chunk of South Philly. We can't help but notice that Ahmad, who previously ran against Brady, has more campaign funding on hand than Evans: At the end of 2017, she had $564,000. He reported only $103,000. When Clout pointed that out to Ahmad, she not-so-subtly replied, "I know." Is Philly 3.0s Ali Perelman running for ward leader? Ali Perelman, a member of one of Philadelphia's most prominent families, has already waged war against the city's Democratic machine. At least, that's how many old-school Democrats see things: Her political organization, Philadelphia 3.0, is training millennials across the city to run for ward committee posts in 2018. They are the foot soldiers of the local Democratic Party and elect the city's ward leaders. Now, political insiders say Perelman is planning to move the battle line forward in her crusade to transform the local party: Rumor is she's running for Democratic leader of South Philly's Second Ward. On Thursday, Perelman denied claims that she is eyeing the Second Ward's top spot. She said that political observers are likely just confused: She lives in the Second Ward, and is in charge of Philadelphia 3.0's efforts there to teach candidates to run for committee person. "We have ward and regional captains who are organizing committee people prospects," she said. "I am leading that process in the Second Ward. So I can see how people would confuse that organizing role with a bid for ward leader." Perhaps that's true. Or perhaps Perelman is waiting until she sees how many 3.0-trained candidates win their bids for committee posts. If she took over the Second Ward, that would put her in a good position to run for City Council in 2019 another rumor that's been floating around. Democrats snub incumbent State Rep. Vazquez, endorse his opponent Councilwoman Maria Quinones-Sanchez and the ward leaders in her district might all be Democrats. But that doesn't mean they're friends. In 2011, things got so nasty between Sanchez and the Democratic machine that Carlos Matos, leader of the 19th Ward, reportedly tried to recruit a woman named Maria Sanchez to run against her. (He denied this at the time.) Four years later, he backed a no-name challenger to Sanchez who had compared gay men to flatworms. All this infighting has potentially deleterious effects on the political power of Latino Democrats in the area. Something happened this month, though, that indicated that the cold war might be thawing. Democratic ward leaders voted to support Danilo Burgos, a former aide to Sanchez, in the primary for state representative in North Philly's 197th District. It was an unexpected choice: Burgos isn't the incumbent. That title belongs to Emilio Vazquez, whom ward leaders had backed just last year. We asked Sanchez if the endorsement indicated a peace treaty in her district. She said that some Democrats had recently "put their weapons down" and come together to support Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane Maria. Burgos, meanwhile, said he won the ward leaders' support because "the party wants to go in a different direction." But Matos swiftly put an end to the kumbaya vibes we were feeling. He said that he threw his weight behind Burgos so that he and his constituents don't have to rely on Sanchez to obtain city services. Matos has long claimed that Sanchez does a poor job of providing services; Sanchez has long denied that. "The biggest problem we have in our community is the lack of services by the councilwoman," Matos said. "What I like about [Burgos] being in the House is not only would he be able to deliver state services, but he could deliver city services as well, since he's worked for Council people. He has access to people at City Hall." Staff writer Chris Brennan contributed to this column. Ben Carson, the secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, at Vaux Big Picture High School in Philadelphia in September. Read more All presidential budgets are viewed only as a guideline one that, historically, Congress ignores. Yet President Trump's fiscal 2019 budget is even further complicated by a two-year spending deal enacted by Congress on Feb. 9 to avoid a long-term government shutdown. Trump's budget, released just three days after he signed Congress' deal, largely fails to align with the budget caps that lawmakers approved. And when lawmakers proceed with appropriating that money in the weeks ahead, they will proceed with November elections in mind. Still, analysts say, Trump's budget remains important because it illustrates the administration's priorities and fiscal views. Presidential budgets can influence discussions, spark debates, and lay the groundwork for future policy making, meaning their content cannot be overlooked. Which is why, when Trump's budget was released this month, analysts, proponents and critics immediately waded in, trying to determine which programs are on the chopping block and which are getting plumped. According to city housing officials, some of the news wasn't good for Philadelphia. In general, Trump's budget aims to expand defense funds, while curtailing social programs. Among his reductions: a $6.8 billion cut to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, representing a 14.2 percent drop from 2017 funding. If passed, HUD would receive $41.2 billion for 2019. In tweets this month, HUD Secretary Ben Carson said Trump's budget represents "a commitment to fiscal restraint," one focused "on moving more people toward self-sufficiency." But what exactly could the budget, if legitimately considered, mean for HUD and where would it leave Philadelphia, which, in 2017, received more than $400 million from the agency? Trump's proposed HUD cuts largely center on the idea that states, cities, and private developers should share more of the affordable-housing cost. At the same time, his budget also maintains funding and kicks in cash for a handful of programs. According to budget details, the administration proposed maintaining funds for programs that reduce homelessness, while boosting spending for the Rental Assistance Demonstration program, which provides resources to convert public housing into public-private ownership. Trump's budget proposal also requests funding for programs that provide employment and social services for tenants, including for the establishment of "EnVision Centers" a new Carson initiative that seeks to graduate HUD tenants into the private market. Yet much of the proposed HUD budget focuses, instead, on eliminating programs that the administration claims are "duplicative or have failed to demonstrate effectiveness," with specific programs pinpointed in particular: the Community Development Block Grant program, the Choice Neighborhoods Initiative, the HOME Investment Partnership, and the Self-Help Homeownership Opportunity Program. Those programs are focused, HUD says, on transforming neighborhoods, either through infrastructure development, housing rehabilitation, new housing, and more. Beyond those cuts, Trump's budget reduces funding for rental assistance programs and does not request any resources for the Public Housing Capital Fund, a $1.9 billion program that provides money to develop and modernize public housing developments. His budget also requests that HUD-assisted tenants, excluding the elderly and disabled, shoulder more of their rent and proposes legislative changes that "encourage work" among HUD recipients. Philadelphia housing officials said they are troubled by Trump's proposals, especially at a time that rents and home prices are rising locally amid widespread poverty. "It would have catastrophic consequences," said Nichole Tillman, a Philadelphia Housing Authority spokeswoman. If passed, "it will result in a huge increase in homelessness, while turning back the clock and reversing the dramatic progress PHA has made in recent years to streamline operations, revitalize neighborhoods, and preserve and expand affordable housing options for the city's most vulnerable and needy citizens." PHA receives 93 percent of its $350 million budget from HUD. The agency projects that Trump's budget would "result in more than $90 million in annual funding cuts to PHA," including a potential $80 million reduction to the public housing program alone. More specifically, Tillman said, the cuts would trickle across individual communities. Under Trump's budget, the housing authority would have to shut down "a substantial number" of developments possibly thousands of units due to insufficient maintenance, utilities, and security funds, Tillman said. PHA would also have to stop work on $300 million of ongoing and future construction and improvement projects. Even further, she said, PHA predicts that it would have to terminate half of its workforce. HUD funding in Philadelphia extends beyond the housing authority. In addition to PHA funding, Philadelphia received $91.5 million funds from HUD in 2017, which was spread across numerous departments. That allotment funded dozens of initiatives, officials said, including emergency shelter services, home repair funds, foreclosure prevention programs, and the Community Development Block Grant program. Though Trump seeks to eliminate that program specifically, it remains unclear how other local housing programs would be affected. Anne Fadullon, director of planning development, said in a statement that she was "extremely concerned" by the proposal. "We are hopeful that our partners in the U.S. House and Senate will see fit to turn their backs on such a draconian plan." Philadelphia has sentenced more teens to life in prison with no chance of parole than any other jurisdiction in the world and that meant it had the largest number to resentence after the U.S. Supreme Court two years ago ruled that its 2012 ban on mandatory life-without-parole sentences for minors must be applied retroactively. As of this week, 127 out of approximately 315 juvenile lifers from Philadelphia have been resentenced. For those whose cases are still in process, the election of District Attorney Larry Krasner appears to have immediately and dramatically changed the outlook. It means new deals are already on the table for 17 who had rejected offers made under the previous District Attorney's Office, which mostly stuck close to current state sentencing guidelines that set minimums at 35 years to life for first-degree murder and 30 to life for second-degree murder. The latest offers make all but two of the lifers eligible for parole right away; it would also keep them all on parole for life. Some set minimums as low as 21 years for first-degree murder. As for the remaining resentencings, Krasner said he intends to consider each case individually. Rather than relying on the sentencing guidelines, he said he would look to the historical, national and international context that has made Pennsylvania second in the nation in imposing life-without-parole sentences. "We are being consistent as we do our duty, which is to consider all these unique factors in resentencing," he said. "It's worth bearing in mind that Pennsylvania is an extreme outlier in excessive sentencing, and the United States is an extreme outlier in excessive sentencing." What's unclear, however, is whether a Philadelphia judge will sign off on those agreements. At a recent status hearing, Common Pleas Judge Kathryn Streeter-Lewis, who is in charge of approving agreements in juvenile-lifer cases, asked the district attorney to submit briefs defending the deals' legality in light of precedent-setting rulings by Pennsylvania's appellate courts in the case of Qu'eed Batts, an Easton man who was 14 when he participated in a gang-related execution. In his case, the court acknowledged each judge has discretion to craft individualized minimum sentences, but said "sentencing courts should be guided" by current state law. "I understand that there is a different administration," she said, but added, "Some of these [offers] are very much below the guidelines the decision required. I'm going to need some reasons." One such case involved Avery Talmadge, who's been locked up 22 years and was offered a time-served deal that in a departure from past practice for the District Attorney's Office contemplates whether the original conviction was even appropriate. "The case was a street fight that turned into a shooting," Assistant District Attorney Chesley Lightsey told Streeter-Lewis. "The [DAO's internal resentencing] committee believes this is closer to a third-degree, though it was a first-degree conviction." She said he also had an excellent prison record, reflecting the Supreme Court's underlying rationale that kids, while impulsive and immature, also have a great capacity for rehabilitation. Bradley Bridge of the Defender Association, which represents many of the lifers, believes the new offers will withstand judicial scrutiny and that of the public. Krasner, he said, "sees the dangers of overincarceration and has come up with a meaningful solution. He has reevaluated offers and, consistent with the protection of the public, has recognized that new offers can take into account to a more significant degree the juvenile's growth while in prison." Among those who rejected offers last year, only to receive new and more favorable ones in the past two months, were: Julius Jenkins, the 17-year-old triggerman in a botched 1993 robbery that left store clerk Francisco Azcona dead; Atil Finney, one of Jenkins' codefendants; Asim Mack, who was 17 in 1995 when he participated in a grocery-store robbery in which a codefendant shot and killed 25-year-old shop clerk Reuben Sweeney; and Phillip Pratt, who was 17 when he shot and killed 17-year-old Dwayne Allen in the street, "because he didn't respond when Pratt gestured at him to come here," according to a 1996 news report. The new stance from the DA's Office meant that two cases scheduled for contested hearings Tuesday in front of Common Pleas judges were instead quietly resolved with agreements. One involved Michael Gibbs who was 16 on April 25, 1993, when he and 17-year-old Harry Williams went into the Moon Deli in West Philadelphia, intending to rob it. Williams, fearful that the deli owner, Su Y. Jin, was reaching for a gun, panicked and shot him. Although Gibbs was not the gunman, he was sentenced to life under Pennsylvania's felony-murder law. Last fall, Gibbs rejected the DA's offer of 30 years to life. But this week he was in court to take a deal that would make him eligible for parole right away. "We thank God for this DA, because this is a long time coming," said Marie Jordan, one of Gibbs' cousins, fighting back tears. Also present were Jacinta Stanfield, Gibbs wife, and his 24-year-old daughter, Kareema Bruce, who waited in the hallway outside with Gibbs' grandchildren. For Stanfield, the reality that her husband was coming home was just sinking in. She was 15 and pregnant when Gibbs was locked up. "I thought he was going to die in there," she said. The only note of protest in the courtroom came from Jung Jin, the victim's sister, describing the devastation the crime had caused her extended family. "This resentencing doesn't seem fair," she wrote in the letter, read aloud by Lightsey. "There is no new opportunity for my brother, or for us." Still, Judge Jeffrey Minehart signed off on the 24-to-life deal, which is six years shorter than the minimum sentence a 17-year-old convicted of second-degree murder would face today. And, that same morning, Judge Barbara McDermott approved a 26-to-life sentence for another juvenile lifer, Theodore Burns, who had been an accomplice in the 1991 robbery of a Dunkin' Donuts, in which a man named Stephen Rivel was shot and killed. Like Gibbs, Burns was not the gunman and by all accounts did not intend to participate in a murder. McDermott told Burns she factored his prior record and role in the crime in approving the sentence. She did not express the same reservations as Streeter-Lewis. "I think the law is pretty clear, the Commonwealth thinks the law is pretty clear, and your attorneys think the law is pretty clear: I do not have to give you a mandatory minimum." The resentencing process began two years ago with prisoners who'd been in the longest, meaning virtually all lifers resentenced so far have already served at least 20 years. But many in the pipeline have been in just 10 or 15 years so far. A handful of older cases also remain; some of those involve multiple victims or reflect particularly heinous crimes. Included in that group is Kevin Hughes, a reported paranoid schizophrenic who in 1989 raped and killed a 9-year-old girl; according to court records, it appears Hughes now suffers from dementia, making his competency for resentencing an open question. Krasner said offers he's approved so far have included minimums ranging between 40 years and just under 20 years. He declined to specify a floor for minimum sentences. "I see no arbitrary number. We are approaching this the way the Anglo-American court system has approached these for centuries: on a case-by-case basis." A statue of Johannes Gutenberg, the father of printing in Europe, looks over Place Gutenberg in Strasbourg. Read more The crypt at Strasbourg Cathedral isn't how I'd imagined it. I'd expected something richly atmospheric, sepulchral, a space stuffed with the accumulated religious ephemera of more than eight centuries. It's actually quite tidy; almost cozy, in fact. There are simple wooden chairs in neat rows, a humble altar with a beautiful, blue-and-green, stained-glass window above it, an elegant wooden statue of the Virgin of Strasbourg (Mary, arms stretched, with Jesus, clutching a fleur-de-lis, on her lap), and a stone memorial etched with the names of the archbishops buried under the cathedral's main altar. All very charming, but I'm looking for something more personal. I'm hoping to unravel an old family story: my great-great grandfather George Giesner left France to seek work in Manchester, England, in the mid-19th century. He had a relative a brother, perhaps? who apparently was commemorated in the cathedral. This vague tale was embroidered by an elderly aunt who told my mom at a family funeral in the 1970s that said brother Henri Giesner was buried in the crypt. If he ever was, he's not now. Michel Bocci, the chef des sacristans (chief janitor) who opened up the crypt especially for me, can't help with Henri. Oh well. I wasn't really expecting to find him here and, anyway, it's not my final option; I've arranged a meeting with Sabine Bengel, who works for the Fondation de l'Oeuvre Notre-Dame, the organization that built the cathedral and still looks after its stonework. If anyone will know about an old memorial tucked away, perhaps it will be them. In the meantime, there's a day-and-a-half to enjoy Strasbourg, which is about 250 miles east of Paris (about two hours by train) and 150 miles southwest of Frankfurt, Germany. The city seems quiet, I tell Bocci as we climb the steps out of the crypt. "This is the best time to visit," he says, meaning before the Christmas market begins in late November. "We have 5 million visitors to the cathedral each year, but not many right now. It's very tranquil." It's true; there are perhaps a dozen people in the cathedral and most of them are waiting patiently in front of the astronomical clock to the right of the altar. This 59-foot-tall clock, built in the 16th century and renovated in the 19th century, is ornate and richly decorated with antique moving parts. At 10 a.m. the crowd is rewarded when 32 feet up a little automated model youth, arrow in hand, shuffles across in front of a bony, barely clad depiction of death. Smartphone cameras flash and click. On the wall opposite, there's Sylvie Lander's modern work "Ex Tempore," but a name amateurishly etched into the stone below catches my eye: "George Koehler Zimmer Dresden 1666." I approach the man running the nearby souvenir stall. Is it really from 1666? He lowers his glasses to get a good look. "Possibly," he says. "But he wasn't a very good draughtsman!" No, and he wasn't Henri Giesner, either, who is nowhere to be found. But there's plenty more to see: stained-glass windows featuring long-dead kings, a plaque commemorating the visit of Pope John Paul II in 1988, a handful of shrines where offerings can be made to saints. Lunchtime restaurants are often already full at noon in France is fast approaching, so I step outside heading along the north side of the red-stone cathedral. Rainwater thuds on cobblestones as it races from the building's guttering system; outside a shop across the way, Alsatian-costumed dolls and soft gingerbread toys are sheltered under plastic sheeting. My heart is set on Choucroute garnie, the hearty, afternoon-be-damned Alsatian classic dish; it's on the lunch menu at Le Clou, a wine lounge on the nearby Rue de Chaudron. Pushing open the heavy wooden door, I step through deep-red curtains into a wave of warmth and happy conversation. I'm just in time; there's only one table left. With its dark wood furniture, floral tablecloths, wine served from gray-blue ceramic jugs and plates also used as decorations, Le Clou is fitted-out in typically rustic Alsatian style. One blue-rimmed plate on the wall shows two men in traditional Alsatian garb squaring up awkwardly ahead of a wrestle: "Une Affaire d'Honneur," or matter of honor, reads the legend. "I don't think I could eat all that," the elderly man at the next table says, chuckling, when my Choucroute garnie arrives. "I'm not sure I'll be able to," I lie. It's very good: a mixture of knack sausages (smoked and country-style), thick, smoked bacon, and pork neck served on a huge mound of rich, delicately tangy sauerkraut, plus an unnecessary boiled potato (a third of which I leave, not wishing to appear greedy). A quarter-bottle jug of Riesling eases it down. The afternoon and evening pass in a gentle blur. I stride around to the east and north of the cathedral, taking in Place Gutenberg where a pair of handsome old restaurants, boasting neon signage for defunct breweries, overlook Gutenberg's statue and Place Kleber, the city's central square, where bicycles seem constantly on the verge of colliding with pedestrians. The next morning, I head back to the cathedral through Petite France, perhaps the most chocolate-box part of this wonderfully preserved city. A tour guide is entertaining his American guests with well-practiced jokes. He points to a tower on the Ponts Couverts, a bridge connecting three islands on the River Ill: "It was built in 1250." Pause. "I can see you are disappointed madam, it is not old enough!" Laughter. "It was a jail for a special type of woman." More laughter. "Witches!" I'm going to the Musee de l'Oeuvre-Notre-Dame, in the shadow of the cathedral's 465-feet-high spire, before my meeting. Inside, a boisterous group of small children is squatting in front of a 12th-century lintel decorated with animals, but I have the rest of the museum virtually to myself. There isn't enough time to do it justice. There are too many marvelous stained-glass windows, statues, fragments of stonework, paintings and more besides. A 15th-century painting called "Les Amants Trepasses," a grotesque depiction of deceased, partially decomposed lovers complete with a crotch-covering frog, sticks in the memory if only for its shock value. I meet Sabine afterward, at the Fondation's base behind the museum. It is an exciting time for the Fondation, she tells me; it has recently been added to the French national inventory of intangible cultural heritage with a view to applying for UNESCO "intangible heritage" status. That would really raise awareness of this remarkable cathedral workshop, the only one of its kind in France. "The first mention of the Fondation is in the 1220s," she says. "Despite the reformation, despite the French Revolution, despite the city's changes in nationality, it has persisted since then." At the moment, she says, they're restoring the southern facade of the cathedral's transept, where original Romanesque work combines with 12th-century Gothic sculpture. She shows me a diagram detailing which parts are to be repaired. "These are the first Gothic sculptures in Strasbourg and they're very, very good quality," she says. Fascinating stuff, but I have one more question as we finish up the tour in the top-floor workshop. Has she heard of Henri Giesner? "I don't know about anyone of that name," she says, before thinking. "I have a big book called Biographies Alsaciens; I will have a look for you." It's a kind offer, but I'm not holding out much hope. Unlike Strasbourg's historic charm, Henri Giesner if he ever existed appears to have been lost to the vagaries of time. Visiting Strasbourg Strasbourg Cathedral Place de la Cathedrale; 011-33-3-88-21-43-34; cathedrale-strasbourg.fr Entrance to the main cathedral is free, although access to the crypt is unavailable; check the website for further details. Open from 9:30 to 11:15 a.m. and 2 to 5:45 p.m. A platform, located 332 steps up, offers sweeping views of the city and surrounding countryside. Admission (converted from euros): Adults, $6; children (5-18), $3. Free entry on the first Sunday of each month. Musee de l'Oeuvre-Notre-Dame 3 Place du Chateau; 011-33-3-68-98-51-60; en.musees.strasbourg.eu This is an essential accompaniment to the cathedral, offering centuries of priceless art and decoration from Strasbourg and Alsace. Admission (converted from euros): Adults (18), $8; children, free. Information: otstrasbourg.fr/en/ Ray Chavous and his wife, Gieniene, run Ray-Gien Farm, an 18-acre horse farm in Kutztown, Berks County. They are two of only 140 African American farm operators working on 122 farms in Pennsylvania, according to the USDAs 2012 Census of Agriculture. Read more A slinking winter sun made Ray Chavous' chestnut and sandy mares glow in the fields of his Berks County farm, and he fished a pinch of tobacco from his flannel shirt, rolled a smoke, and stepped into a weather-worn shed. Long, thin strips of leather dangled from hooks; one with "God is Here, Amen" embossed on it hung like a banner from the rafters. A raspy little radio played gospel, and dusty pictures of black cowboys were framed beside tools and saddles stacked shoulder-high. "There's too many saddles in here. Most of them are mine," Chavous, 63, said in his tack shop. "I don't build saddles, I repair them. I rode English saddle for most of my life. My dad didn't believe in letting us ride in a western saddle." Chavous and wife, Gieniene, a barrel racer, run Ray-Gien Farm, an 18-acre horse farm in rural Kutztown, Berks County. Their property blends into all the others in the rolling hills beyond its fences. There are barns, trailers, friendly dogs with muddy paws and two cats to catch the mice that eat the feed, but it's the Chavouses themselves who stand out from other farmers in Pennsylvania Dutch country. Ray and Gieniene are black, two of only 140 African American farm operators working on 122 farms in Pennsylvania, according to the USDA's 2012 Census of Agriculture. A farm operator, by the USDA's definition, could be an owner, hired manager or tenant, and for blacks, those numbers have been steadily rising since the 1990s, increasing 23 percent nationwide between the 2002 and 2012 agriculture censuses. Colonialism, slavery, and systematic racism were among the barriers that kept them from owning and managing farms when the United States was young. White settlers had a long head start, claiming and cultivating land for centuries before the Civil War while pushing out Native Americans. Southern states where blacks sought out their own land after the abolition of slavery, including Mississippi, Georgia, South Carolina and Louisiana, still have the highest percentage of black principal operators today. States such as Pennsylvania were home to strong abolitionist movements, but black-owned farms have always been scarce. According to the USDA, 90,248 white operators work on 59,167 farms in the state. "Many black folks came North not to continue their jobs as a farmer, but to move into the rust belt and fill the factories," said Monica M. White, an assistant professor of environmental justice at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of the forthcoming book Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement. "There are pockets of places where black folks have access to land, but obviously, there were all kinds of ways folks were disenfranchised." A class-action lawsuit against the USDA, filed by black farmers in 1997, attempted to rectify the disparity, alleging the agency discriminated against them by increasing land taxes, and both delaying and denying loans. It was named the "Pigford" case after Timothy Pigford, a black farmer from North Carolina who was an original plaintiff, and its $1.25 billion payout was one of the nation's largest civil rights settlements. One of those rare, black-owned farms in Pennsylvania belonged to Prince Perkins, a free man who moved from Connecticut to the Endless Mountains of Susquehanna County in 1793. Perkins' 153-acre property became known as Dennis Farm, and it has stayed in the family almost continuously to this day. While it hasn't been a working farm since 1918, Perkins' descendants are raising money to transform Dennis Farm into an educational center. "Young black children who come here will have something more to connect to than the slavery story," said Denise Dennis, president and CEO of the Dennis Farm Charitable Land Trust. "This place was owned by black people, who were free." Dennis, Perkins' great-great-great-great-granddaughter, said the farm produced just about everything, from barley and potatoes to cattle and swine. Her ancestors had been part of the landscape for so long in Northeastern Pennsylvania, where she also grew up, that neighbors simply treated them as fellow farmers and part of the community. "They weren't up there on that hillside hiding from people," Dennis said. Chavous' father, James O. Chavous, grew up working on farms in South Carolina and moved north to Bucks County in 1930 and became a produce farmer. "He usually rented the land," Chavous said. "My father grew tomatoes and sweet corn. He sold tomatoes to Campbell's Soup in Camden." Chavous, the youngest of nine children, couldn't recall his father experiencing any blatant racism as a black farmer among white landowners. Mostly, he said, they respected his work ethic. "Everyone and everything worked on my dad's farm, even the dogs. If it didn't work, it had to go. He was tough," he said. "The woman my dad rented land from, he paid her a year's worth of rent up front. She wasn't concerned about the color of the person. She wanted someone who could pay." Chavous said he had wanted to be a "horseshoer" but fell off a hay wagon when he was 14 and hurt his back. He retired from IBEW Local 98 but always farmed with his father. Chavous had a carriage business, led by his favorite horse, Poncho, and Gieniene's family also rode. They moved from Perkasie to Kutztown in 2003 to start Ray-Gien, where they board horses and give riding lessons. "She pretty much runs the show here," he said of his wife. "I'm just a laborer." Kefeni Kejela, a soil conservationist with the USDA in Pennsylvania, has reached out to the state's black farmers as part of the agency's civil rights program to offer financial and technical advice. Admittedly, it hasn't been easy. "Actually, when I started doing this in 2014, we didn't even have a single farmer that we knew of in the entire state," he said. Kejela has visited the Chavous farm but others, he said, are shy. A black hog farmer in Centre County said he didn't want the attention when contacted by the Inquirer and Daily News. The National Black Farmers Association, founded in 1995, did not return numerous requests for comment. White said it's necessary to reimagine what a farmer is when discussing black farming in America. For many, it has meant reclaiming land in urban settings, not pulling on overalls to roll over a thousand acres on a tractor. "A lot of us black farmers are returning generations of farmers," said Kirtrina Baxter, manager of the North Philly farm run by the community organizing group Urban Creators. "This is part of our heritage." Baxter, 48, said the best crop at the farm isn't produce. "We boast about growing people," she said. "We don't just grow food, we grow people, children and teens leaning how to grow food." Inside a big barn at the Chavous farm, Gieniene was brushing her horse, Chamberlain, while Ray filled water troughs. She leads all the classes, teaching their neighbors' children and her own granddaughter to ride. "When we moved here, almost all the neighbors didn't speak to each other," Ray Chavous said as horses ran toward the trough. "They didn't have anything good to say about each other, but we just loved them all, unconditionally." Larry Krasner supporters shortly after Krasner won the primary for District Attorney. The Campaign Workers Guild seeks to unionize teams running campaigns, like Krasners primary run. Read more Every time she worked on a campaign, often pulling more than 80 hours a week for little pay, Julia Ackerly told herself she'd never do it again. And as soon as the campaign ended, sure enough, she'd suffer from a sort of willful amnesia. "OK," she'd ask herself, "what's the next campaign I'm going to work on?" The last one was different. After a three-month local campaign many considered a long shot, Ackerly's slate of candidates won. But the victory party was bittersweet, tainted by what she called a toxic culture in which her manager had guilted staffers into working long hours, saying that if they didn't, they must not truly care. On top of that, Ackerly was broke. No win bonus, no gas reimbursement, no pay through the end of the month. The checks they got two weeks before Election Day, it turned out, were their last. No one had prepared the team for that. The experience was a wake-up call for Ackerly, 27, who declined to identify the campaign in question. It wasn't just about the money but also the message: that campaign workers weren't valued; that once they finished the job, they were disposable. Political veterans may be thinking: Yup. Welcome to the business. But Ackerly and a growing chorus of millennial campaign workers are refusing to accept the status quo. She is one of 17 campaign staffers running a new nationwide union called the Campaign Workers Guild, which aims to combat what they describe as the exploitative nature of the work. The movement, which went public just ahead of the midterm elections, intersects with the current cultural and economic moment: the way millennials are leading the growth in unionization, the fight for worker rights in the gig economy, and #MeToo. "We want to set a precedent for what campaign culture can be," said Ackerly, of West Philadelphia, who has worked on several Democratic campaigns, including District Attorney Larry Krasner's primary race. The point, she said, is to build a more sustainable career path for those who go into this industry. Instead of working young campaign staffers to the bone, only to have them burn out in a few years, why not develop practices that will support them and encourage them to stay in the political arena? The union's goal is a collective-bargaining agreement that covers all Democratic campaign workers the party that already leans pro-labor but right now, the group is proceeding campaign by campaign. So far, three staffs have reached such agreements with their employers, including two Democratic congressional candidates: the eight-member team running the campaign for Randy Bryce, the pro-union challenger to Speaker of the House Paul Ryan in Wisconsin's First District, and the three-member team behind Jess King in Lancaster, who is running in Pennsylvania's 16th District. More are in the works, according to guild spokeswoman Meg Reilly, though she declined to identify them until the deals are finalized. "I believe all work has value and all workers have rights," candidate King said. "So I was excited that we could embody that in our campaign." The agreements include a salary floor ($2,500/month for King's, $3,000/month for Bryce's), health-care reimbursement, and a sexual harassment policy particularly important, Ackerly said, in a workplace that often lacks a formal HR policy, where the next gig relies heavily on networking and connections, and where it's drilled into staffers that they must not do anything to jeopardize the campaign, which can lead to sexual harassment and discrimination going unreported. Lauren Hitt, who left her post as Mayor Kenney's communications director to join Bryce's campaign in January and is now a member of the Guild, said a union contract with salary floors could help diversify campaign staff. If the industry is peopled only by those without student debt or who can afford low pay, "then we're really going to have a divide in how campaigns are run," she said, adding that she might not have considered campaign work right out of school if she had college loans to repay. This is also the first year that Hitt, 26, cannot be on her parents' health insurance. So the health-care reimbursement in the agreement is "a huge relief." Democratic political consultant Aren Platt says the philosophical reasons for working on a campaign can create an environment ripe for exploitation. "When I was doing it, everyone was doing it for the greater good," Platt said. "It's very hard to separate out the work that you do from this place of emotion, from trying to change the world." If you're sitting down the hall from the candidate who's spending all day fund-raising, he said, it can be hard to ask for more money. You know it could be spent on mailers or granola bars for volunteers. Political consultant Dan Fee says he agrees with the union's insistence on living wages, but he thinks salary floors could do campaigns more harm than good. "It'll chase true grassroots candidates out of the races because they simply can't raise enough money," Fee said. "It'll make the impact of big money even more outsized." He also warns against salary ceilings, contending that they could make campaigns less competitive. But Jessica Cosme, a political consultant and former Democratic staffer, pointed out that the salary floor on Bryce's campaign is "very obtainable" and pretty much the going rate. "Money is always important in every race, and every cycle, more is required to compete," she said. "This wouldn't have much of an impact." The organizing effort has left some local veteran politicians scratching their heads. They point out that campaigns are short-term positions without many of the benefits of more traditional jobs, and that's explained upfront. "The hours these people work are crazy, but that's what the business is," said former State Sen. Vince Fumo, who was incredulous that such a union would exist. "That's just what it's been forever." He added, "Unions have their place. I don't think this is one of them." Former Gov. Ed Rendell said it would be difficult to negotiate a contract covering all workers because of the variables involved: the size and length of a campaign, but especially the money behind it, given the unpredictability of fund-raising. "You're talking to someone who's been pro-union all his life," Rendell said. "But it doesn't lend itself to commonsense negotiation because the biggest variable is missing: the resources." His suggestion to campaign workers who feel they're being exploited? "Move carefully at the beginning," he advised, "and if the conditions are lousy, then don't sign up." Besides, he said, most people don't get into this for the money. On that, the Campaign Workers Guild agrees. A living wage is important, Ackerly said, but it's not the sole issue in the fight. The union leaders want training and reporting procedures around sexual harassment. They want open dialogue between management and staff. They want that elusive concept, one that might sound a touch too millennial to old-school ears: respect. That kind of work environment, they say, would only benefit candidates. "The stakes have never been higher to elect progressive candidates," Ackerly said. "Now is the time to lay the groundwork. This is our moment." Darrick Hall, 47, a Philadelphia man who received the death penalty for a 1993 murder, has been in a windowless solitary-confinement cell for 24 years conditions that continued even after his sentence was vacated in October 2014. Now, a federal judge has found the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections violated his 14th Amendment due-process rights by denying him a meaningful opportunity to move into the general population, and has issued a preliminary injunction. "We believe that there has been a sufficient showing that he will suffer irreparable harm if he is not granted immediate preliminary relief," U.S. District Judge Curtis Joyner, of Pennsylvania's Eastern District, wrote in the order published Friday. The Department of Corrections is reviewing the decision, a spokeswoman said. Meanwhile, the prisoner convicted of the robbery and fatal shooting of Donald Johnson, a Coatesville laundry manager, remains in solitary. In a Jan. 30 hearing, Hall described a life circumscribed by his 7-foot-by-12-foot cell at Graterford state prison. Even when allowed out to shower or spend an hour or two in an exercise cage, he generally chose not to participate because of the procedure required, which he found humiliating: Each time he left his cell, he would be strip searched, handcuffed and walked on a "dog leash" to his destination. Hall said his isolation led to anxiety, depression, anger issues, and memory problems. He began experiencing panic attacks in 2013. Hall also described extreme sleep deprivation, because the hallway lights stay on 24 hours a day and guards check in every half hour, frequently shining their flashlights through the bars and onto his face. He said he hadn't slept more than four hours a night in decades. When he sought therapy, he said, "I was given the same answer every time: These things are not available to me because I'm in solitary confinement." The injunction follows a February 2017 decision in the cases of death row inmates Craig Williams and Shawn Walker. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit ruled that Pennsylvania cannot keep inmates in death-row solitary after their sentences are vacated without offering meaningful review. "The Third Circuit ruling, I read it over and over. I really believed it applied to me," Hall said. But his requests went unanswered. He was represented by the Amistad Law Project and the Abolitionist Law Center. The ALC, along with the Pennsylvania American Civil Liberties Union and three law firms filed a federal class-action suit against the DOC in January, argued that death-row solitary confinement violates not only the 14th Amendment but also the 8th Amendment prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. "The holding is a ratification of the Williams decision, and contributes to the growing jurisprudential shift around the issue of solitary confinement," ALC's Bret Grote said. Hall's conviction for the Dec. 18, 1993 murder stands. His death sentence was vacated after a federal judge found the lawyer representing him in his sentencing was ineffective. The case was placed in indefinite civil suspense after Gov. Wolf in 2015 instituted a moratorium on executions. There are 154 death-sentenced inmates in Pennsylvania, all housed in solitary. No one has been executed in the Commonwealth since 1999. According to a recent report published on the website In Justice Today, 115 more are in indefinite solitary confinement. One Philadelphia man in such long-term solitary was released into general population under a federal judge's order last year. As for Hall, the reasons for keeping him in solitary were not entirely clear. According to the judge's fact findings, Hall's prison record shows six misconducts in 24 years, none for violent behavior. His last one was in 2014, when he argued with a guard who had cut short his 15-minute Christmas Day phone call home after about five minutes. Joe Fulginiti, a lawyer for the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections, asked Hall if it was true that he had told the guard "next time you had the chance you would get him?" Hall said he had not. Fulginiti also asked questions that appeared to explore the theory that death-row inmates are too dangerous for the general population, because they are men with nothing to lose. "I want programming and treatment," Hall responded. "I have a lot to lose." The new congressional districts in southeastern Pennsylvania under the map imposed by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. Read more HARRISBURG Republican efforts to block Pennsylvania's new map of congressional districts suffered a setback Friday, as a federal three-judge panel declined to issue an emergency order to prevent it from taking effect. Instead, they scheduled a hearing for March 9 here to consider arguments on whether they should block the maps from being used in the looming primary and general elections. The judges, in a three-page filing issued late Friday, said they favored "an opportunity for all parties to be heard" and intend to "proceed on an expedited basis." The case was filed Thursday by two state senators and eight congressmen from Pennsylvania, all of whom are Republicans. Together, they argued that the Democrat-controlled state Supreme Court, when it ruled the prior map unconstitutional and imposed a new one, violated the elections clause of the U.S. Constitution, which gives power to state legislatures to run elections for U.S. House. On the panel are Kent Jordan, who serves on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals; Christopher Conner, chief judge in the U.S. District Court in the Middle District of Pennsylvania; and Jerome Simandle, a semi-retired federal judge based in New Jersey. All three were appointed by Republican presidents. The claims by the GOP plaintiffs were "not so exigent as to justify" immediately blocking the maps, the judges wrote. A similar legal challenge, filed by two other prominent Republicans in the state legislature, is pending in the U.S. Supreme Court. Meanwhile, state officials are continuing to plan for the May 15 congressional primary using the new map imposed Monday by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. Candidates for U.S. House can begin circulating nominating petitions next week, and they are due March 20 unless a court orders otherwise. JERUSALEM When students, parents and teachers pleaded with President Trump this week to act against school shootings, they cited Israel, a place where guns are a familiar sight but where school shootings are virtually unheard of. During a meeting at the White House on Wednesday, one parent correctly noted, for instance, that it is difficult for outsiders to enter an Israeli school. Most schools maintain only one unlocked entrance that is typically staffed by an armed guard. But the schools have escaped American-style violence in large part because of measures to confront Israel's unique security challenge and not because of efforts to deter troubled youths and lone madmen. "The guards are there for other reasons, mainly terrorism," said Amos Shavit, spokesman for the Ministry of Education. He said the guards stationed at schools are under the authority of the police. In large cities, he said, the police and the local authority carry out security patrols around the educational institutions throughout the school day. There are no metal detectors or special door locks on classrooms. And, by policy, teachers are not armed. "Professionals deal with the security," Shavit said. "Not the teachers." Israeli security experts also say that gun violence is rare in Israel because privately held guns are so rare. According to data from Israel's Ministry of Internal Security, which registers all gun owners, about 260,000 Israelis, or about 3.5 percent of the population, have permits to carry firearms. Half of the permit holders are private citizens, and the others work for security firms. At the White House meeting, Cary Gruber, whose son hid in a closet during last week's shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., correctly pointed out that Israel has tight age restrictions on private gun ownership. According to an Israeli government website, civilians must be over 27 years old to obtain a gun license, although those recently released from military service are also eligible. Israelis serve in the military from age 18 to 21. Simon Perry, a criminologist at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, said there is little opportunity in Israel for someone to carry out a gun attack inside a school. While security guards keep an eye on all those entering schools, Perry said, they do not check students' bags mainly because gun culture in Israel is different. "Most people in Israel go to the military. Even if they are not combat soldiers, they are given some weapons training. They are taught how to handle a weapon and how to respect a weapon," Perry said. And, he said, "it is very, very hard to obtain a weapon in Israel." To outsiders, Israel can seem like a heavily armed country. That is in large part because soldiers are a frequent sight on the streets and combat troops, as well as those who serve in what are termed combat areas, carry their weapons with them at all times. But once an Israeli finishes military service, it becomes difficult to obtain a gun. Applicants must submit extensive paperwork, provide their military records and medical reports. They also must justify their need to be armed. Residents of Tel Aviv, for example, are unlikely to receive gun licenses, whereas Israelis living in border areas or in the Jewish settlements in the West Bank, places where they could be targets for Palestinian militants, are more likely to be approved for gun licenses. In addition, retired army officers above a certain rank, former police officers, firefighters, ambulance technicians, special forces veterans, and licensed public transportation drivers can also qualify for permits. The requirements after permits are approved also are strict. Owners are subjected to an array of restrictions on the types of guns they can own, on the amount of ammunition they can possess, as well as guidelines on where to keep their guns in locked safes and a process of checking weapons in with police if leaving the country for more than a week. Janet Rosenbaum, an assistant professor of epidemiology at the School of Public Health at the State University of New York Downstate in Brooklyn, examined the difference in homicide rates between Israel and the United States. Writing in the New York Post, she said her research showed that Israel ranks 81st in the world for per capita firearm ownership, with fewer than 1 in 10 Israelis owning firearms. The United States, with one firearm for every person, ranks first. The new Second Congressional District is located in Northeast Philadelphia and the river wards. Read more Supporters of Pennsylvania's new congressional district map can breathe easier today: Common Cause and the state NAACP have decided not to challenge it. Common Cause announced Thursday night that it had completed a "further analysis" of the state's new districts, and that they do not violate the 1965 Voting Rights Act. On Friday, NAACP Pennsylvania State Conference president Joan Evelyn Duvall-Flynn said her group reached the same conclusion. Micah Sims, executive director of Common Cause Pennsylvania, had said earlier this week that his organization and the state NAACP were thinking about filing suit to contest the map on the grounds that it may disenfranchise minority voters. The state's former congressional map, which the Pennsylvania Supreme Court struck down last month as unconstitutionally gerrymandered, includes two Philadelphia-based districts in which nonwhites comprise a majority of residents. The new map appears to have only one such district, Sims said previously. Sims stressed at the time that his group was "not moving hastily" and needed to look at more data to determine the exact demographic makeup of the new congressional districts. On Thursday, Sims said in a statement that the new map advances "democracy and representation for the 12.8 million residents of our state. No map is ever perfect, but now, Pennsylvania voters finally have fair maps that allow the people to hold our elected officials accountable. These maps should provide an opportunity for education, empowerment, and engagement across Pennsylvania." Duvall-Flynn added that the national association's legal experts, who reviewed the map this week, "found no concerns" in the map. Common Cause and the NAACP did not immediately release their analyses. Republican U.S. Rep. Ryan Costello, who has called the new map "racist," lambasted Common Cause's decision: "Of course Common Cause would reverse course. They're a Democratic front group pretending to be nonpartisan. Reversing course just proves they had no ethics to begin with." Sims said in response that Common Cause is a "fiercely nonpartisan organization" and that it is "wrong and disingenuous" to call it a Democratic front group. "Maybe Congressman Costello doesn't know, but we are part of the Benisek case before the United States Supreme Court. Yes, the case fighting gerrymandering done by Democrats in Maryland. And it was a Common Cause member who originally stated that case." Earlier Thursday, Costello was the target of criticism from state Sen. Vincent Hughes. The Democratic lawmaker, who had urged Gov. Wolf to push to retain two majority-minority districts in the city, said Costello "seems to have a fleeting and convenient interest in African American voters in Philadelphia" and "to my knowledge, he has never been a strong advocate for my community or the citizens of Philadelphia." Costello shot back that he respects Hughes and doesn't question his sincerity, but said that if Republicans had eliminated a minority-majority district, Hughes would have raised serious concerns "unless the issue is creating more Democratic districts." The state Supreme Court, which imposed the new map, is controlled by Democrats. The nominating committee for Philadelphia's new school board is scheduled Monday to recommend a list of its first members to Mayor Kenney. The board will replace the state-appointed School Reform Commission. Unfortunately, that may come with Kenney and City Council President Darrell L. Clarke engaged in an argument that could affect how much independence school board members will have. At the urging of Kenney, Clarke, and countless others, the SRC voted in November to dissolve. Only the SRC had the authority to abolish itself, under the state law creating it in 2001. It will continue to exist until the new board officially takes over. That's scheduled to happen July 1, after the new board becomes operational. Several loose ends remain to be tied; including changing the city's Home Rule Charter in a referendum that is planned to coincide with the May 15 primary election. The needed legislation for the referendum has been sitting in limbo ever since it was passed by a Council committee two months ago. That delay may grow even longer if Kenney and Clarke don't end their argument over how to dismiss bad school board members. The school board legislation says it will be appointed by the mayor with the "advice and consent" of Council. Clarke also wants Council to play a role in any board member's dismissal by requiring their removal only for cause, not merely at the pleasure of the mayor. But Kenney says sharing dismissal authority would deprive the public of the direct accountability he promised in asking the SRC to end its life. The debate seems to take for granted that a school board member will have to be fired. Maybe that's a given in Philadelphia. But that view does get to the root of the Kenney-Clarke argument, which is politics. They are vying over how much control the mayor and Council will have over each school board member. The mayor and the Council president have been working so well together that this tiff comes somewhat unexpected. But no matter the outcome, the big loser will be Philadelphia's children if school board members have to constantly look over their shoulders to see what someone in City Hall wants. Anyone willing to work under those circumstances shouldn't be on the board. That's why the nominating committee's choices must be closely scrutinized. Kenney shouldn't appoint anyone who would be afraid to oppose him, or Clark, to protect the best interests of schoolchildren. In retrospect, perhaps it would have been good to limit members of the new board to one six-year term; they now can serve up to three four-year terms. That might alleviate implied or real political pressure on board members. This complicated issue is a preview of what the new school board will have to grapple with constantly, and sometimes resolve imperfectly all the while continuing to work together. That's a good lesson for Kenney and Clarke to heed. This is an important moment for Philadelphia. After years of derision by legislators from other counties who scoffed at the city's ability to manage its schools, the city is getting a chance to prove them wrong. The next step is for Kenney and Clarke to settle their differences and finish the process for a charter change. Pennsylvania Republicans, furious that the state Supreme Court threw out the existing congressional map and imposed one that stripped much of their partisan advantage, have been talking about a stark response: impeaching the justices who ruled against them. After a rank-and-file lawmaker, state Rep. Cris Dush of Jefferson County, raised the idea a few weeks ago, the rhetoric has intensified. This week, U.S. Rep. Ryan Costello of Chester County said the justices "should be impeached" and U.S. Sen. Pat Toomey said the idea is worth discussing. A call to impeach judges isn't unprecedented, and amid an ever-polarized country has at times become a clarion call sounded by Republicans against what they claim are overreaching "activist" judges. But only once has a Pennsylvania Supreme Court justice been impeached and removed from office Justice Rolf Larsen after being convicted in 1994 of criminal conspiracy. Dush's proposal calls for impeaching five at the same time, an act that would almost certainly throw the state judicial system into a tailspin. Constitutional law scholars disagree on whether there may be grounds for impeachment the first step in removing the elected justices from office. Dush and his supporters say the Democratic justices who voted 5-2 to invalidate the 2011 congressional map passed by the GOP-led legislature violated the U.S. Constitution by trampling over the redistricting rights that by law belong to the General Assembly. But all experts said the legislature should refrain from the attack on the judiciary. Judges are usually impeached for criminal or corrupt behavior, they said, and none could recall a time when a Pennsylvania judge at any level had been impeached for a controversial ruling. Republicans are "flirting with an idea at odds with American history and dangerous to the rule of law," said Seth Kreimer, a professor of state constitutional law at the University of Pennsylvania. "A system in which a judge may be impeached and convicted because the legislators disagree with her vote in a particular case may appeal to unabashed and unrestrained populists. But it is not the system under which America has lived and thrived." As of Thursday, no impeachment bill had been introduced. But in the memo he circulated to fellow lawmakers, Dush contended the high court's ruling redrawing the congressional map "blatantly and clearly contradicts the plain language of the Pennsylvania Constitution." At issue: The state constitution lays out the amount of time the governor has to consider a bill before vetoing it, and the state legislature then has the power to override the veto. When the state court overturned the congressional map as an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander, it gave the legislature less than three weeks to draw a new map and Gov. Wolf, a Democrat, six days to approve or veto it not the 10 provided under the constitution before the court drew its own. "They have absolutely no authority to say that if the governor vetoes, that it does not come back to the legislature. That is specific under the constitution. I am protecting the rule of law," Dush said when confronted by protesters earlier this month. "This is not about gerrymandering." Republicans have also broadly argued that the court usurped the authority of the legislative and executive branches. The state constitution does not say very much about impeachment, which is essentially the legislative process of formally accusing an official with wrongdoing. The constitution says, in part: "The governor and all other civil officers shall be liable to impeachment for any misbehavior in office." But the constitution does not define the term misbehavior, leaving state lawmakers to decide what conduct should trigger removal from office. "Nobody knows what it means," says Bruce Ledewitz, an expert on state constitutional law at Duquesne University. Ledewitz, who said he's "as partisan a Democrat as you can get" and agrees that the old map was gerrymandered, believes legislators should not move ahead with impeachment because it could create chaos in state government, even though he sees valid legal grounds. The justices, he said in an interview, "trampled every judicial process norm you can imagine." If state lawmakers "believe judicial norms were trampled, they get to say if that's an impeachable offense," he said. "No one can second-guess them." Republicans control both houses of the legislature. Impeachment would require a majority vote in the House; a conviction would require a two-thirds majority in the Senate. The Democratic justices, each elected to a 10-year-term, are Max Baer, Kevin Dougherty, Debra McCloskey Todd, Christine Donohue, and David Wecht. None is up for retention until 2023. Republicans have argued that the five-judge majority seemed intent from the start on throwing out the congressional map and drawing its own. A lower court had stayed the gerrymandering case, but the Pennsylvania Supreme Court took over the case in November, fast-tracking it as involving "issues of immediate public importance." In part, the court said the map should be redrawn in time for voters in the May primary election. Ledewitz has argued that the justices improperly ignored the lower court's stay; didn't provide the legislature enough time to draw a new map "in the normal course of legislation, under the guidance of a real opinion;" waited too long to actually issue its opinion; and rushed for a redrawn map for the 2018 elections, instead of 2020. Other experts disagreed the court has done anything inappropriate. "The gerrymandering cases they're difficult cases, they involve a lot of difficult legal issues and courts have been struggling with them for some time," said Robert Reinstein, a constitutional law professor and former dean at Temple University's law school. Impeaching a justice over a legal ruling would be unprecedented, the experts said. Larsen had been convicted of criminal charges conspiring to obtain prescription drugs and had already been removed from office when lawmakers convicted him of corrupt self-dealing. Similarly, judges in lower state courts and federal court have been impeached for criminal activity or corruption, Reinstein said. The only other reason he has seen cited has been incompetence, such as being mentally unfit. "Unless there's some evidence of criminal activity or some corrupt intent on the part of the justices, I don't see any basis for impeachment," Reinstein said. Kreimer, the Penn professor, agreed that history supports the idea that judges can be impeached for corruption and that the Supreme Court justices do not appear to have overstepped in this case. "I know of no similar precedent suggesting that it includes the 'crime' of voting to dispatch Goofy kicking Donald Duck in disregard of the wishes of a majority of the legislature," he said, using a popular description for the contorted Seventh Congressional District under the previous map. If the state legislature disagrees with the state court's interpretation of the law, there's a process that doesn't involve attacking the individual justices, said Justin Levitt, a law professor and associate dean at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. "If the Supreme Court interprets a statute wrong, the legislature can pass a new statue saying, 'No, what we meant was X,'" he said. If the issue is the state constitution, he said, the legislature could propose a new constitutional amendment, "and the people can vote on it." Carl A. Hornung, 96, of Bala Cynwyd, a firefighter and the second of a three-generation family whose lives have been steeped in soot, sweat, and the call of the fire alarm, died Tuesday, Feb. 20, of advanced age at home. For Mr. Hornung, responding to fires was not just a public service he enjoyed the camaraderie of his colleagues. "His greatest enjoyment was working side-by-side with his fellow firefighters whom he called good friends," his family said. "He was definitely about doing things with other people, not on his own." The pattern was set in 1918 when Mr. Hornung's father, William L. Hornung, joined the Union Fire Association on Montgomery Avenue in Bala Cynwyd. In 1928, he became the fire chief and held the job until he died of a stroke in 1943 at age 56. Mr. Hornung's father mentored him in the ways of the firehouse, and in 1943, at 21, Mr. Hornung joined the fire association, fighting blazes, driving the fire engines, and mopping up at the station, just as his father had done. In 1958, at age 36, Mr. Hornung became the association's chief fire officer. He kept the job for 30 years because he loved it. When he stepped down in 1988, Lower Merion Township honored him at a board of commissioners meeting. Sixty volunteer firefighters showed up to pay their respects to him and another retiring chief. "He always said he could never do it without the cooperation of the men," said his son, Jim. But Mr. Hornung was not yet done. He sat on the fire association's board of directors from 1988 until his death. "He came to the last meeting in January," his son said. After Mr. Hornung stepped down, there were three chiefs in eight years. In 1996, though, Jim Hornung became chief, and the third generation of his family to accept the job. One of Mr. Hornung's tasks was to release information about what had happened at each blaze. His accounts of fires, such as one at the Township Cleaner's Co. plant two days before Christmas 1958, were business-like. "Fire Chief Carl Hornung said the fire started in the basement and spread upward, causing damage to the first floor," the Inquirer reported. "He said a clerk discovered the fire and in the excitement sounded a burglar alarm. This was heard by the police in a red car who summoned firefighters. Firemen fought the blaze for two hours in the 24-degree weather." Born in Bala Cynwyd, Mr. Hornung attended Lower Merion High School. He enlisted in the Coast Guard in 1942 during World War II and was honorably discharged in 1945 with the rank of electrician's mate, second class. In 1944, he married Jeanette Schwartz. They had six children. After the war, he returned home and took over his family's electrical contracting business in Bala Cynwyd which dated to 1911. His father had started out riding from job to job on a bicycle with a cart attached. "My dad, Carl A. Hornung, grew up working with his dad where he learned to be an electrician," said Mr. Hornung's son, William C. Hornung. "I suppose it was only natural that I would follow in their footsteps. By the age of five, I was helping them at work and running to fires with my dad. In all those years of working with them, I learned there is nothing than can't be done. There is always a way to accomplish any task." When not working or fighting fires, Mr. Hornung was a community volunteer. He was a 32nd degree mason, and had recently received his 70-year Masonic service pin from Lodge Cassia Mt. Horeb #273, Ardmore. He served as lodge trustee until 2017. To honor his volunteerism, the lodge created and gave him the Carl Hornung Service Award in 2017. Mr. Hornung was named 2003 Citizen of the Year by the Bala Cynwyd Neighborhood Club. He was a member of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, St. John's Episcopal Church, and the American Legion. Mr. Hornung's wife died in 1997. Besides his sons, Jim and William C., he is survived by daughters Chick Hornung, Susan Davit, Linda Ferguson, and Patti Reilly; 11 grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren. Four brothers and two sisters died earlier. A visitation will be from 6 to 8 p.m. Friday, Feb. 23, with a Masonic service at 6, both at the Chadwick & McKinney Funeral Home, 30 E. Athens Ave., Ardmore. A funeral will be at 11 a.m. Saturday, Feb. 24, at St. John's Episcopal Church, 404 Levering Mill Rd., Bala Cynwyd. Interment will follow in Westminster Cemetery, Bala Cynwyd. Memorial donations may be made to the Cassia Mt. Horeb Lodge #273 F&AM, P.O. Box 444, Ardmore, Pa. 19003, or St. John's Episcopal Church at the address above. Deciphering what is a trustworthy source of news is not always easy. Read more If you are reading this online right now, the machines have done their job. The algorithms served you this piece because you probably already know and believe in the ideas I'm about to put forth. This story bounced into your feed because what I am about to say might not be dramatically new to you. But it will likely reinforce that you are an intelligent person, whose ideas are well-thought-out and compatible with society. Or, more precisely, with the society you wish we were. Because that's the world we live in these days. We know what we know and we only reluctantly venture into the world of the unknown. We (and the machines) have identified who we are and we feel pretty good about it. Why change? Sure, every once in a while, we'll peek under the curtain to see what others are doing or saying but that's only to find fodder to ridicule those who disagree with us. The reality is that we are not much of a society today. We are a nation of individuals. There is a cable network for every interest, a website for every topic, a news organization for every political party, a social media feed for any ideology, and message boards for everyone else. It's easy to stay in your lane, even without the machines dictating what we see on Twitter, Facebook, or Google. How do you combat that hyper-fragmentation? How are we supposed to teach people to care about the world when most people only care about their worlds? For the past decade, I taught a class at Temple University called Journalism & Society. I always asked the students to raise their hands if they trusted what they learned from the internet. Every year, fewer and fewer hands went up. We discussed situations, like the guy who drove to a Washington D.C. pizza shop with a knife, AR-15 rifle, and a revolver because he read online that the Democrats were holding child sex slave parties in the basement. Everyone laughed about that. It was too ridiculous. Yet earlier that year, I saw that multiple students had retweeted or posted on Facebook a meme that said we could end poverty by dividing the $1.3 billion Powerball prize by the 300 million Americans. Every person would get $4.3 million each, the meme read. When I asked them about it, the students seemed confused about my point. The laws of math would have everyone taking home $4.33, not $4.3 million, I explained. The lesson for those students and for all people is that we need to be critical consumers of information. In an age when there is a meme for every occasion, we can't blindly believe everything we find, whether it feeds into our belief system or not. It's sad, and deciphering what is a trustworthy source of information is not always easy. The onus these days is on the audience to go beyond that meme, that random video, or that single story. Here's how you can do it: Look at the other content presented by that source. If it's nothing but conspiracy theories, be skeptical. Do a Google search to see if more traditional news organizations covered the stories with similar information. Verify everything. Don't ignore the site's advertising. If there are ads from known brands and retailers, it's likely real. Actual businesses would not advertise on websites that could damage their reputation. If a site only has ads for DVDs espousing conspiracy theories or for health products branded by the organization, run away. Know the difference between facts and assertions. The critical consumer will recognize whether a story presents facts or simply makes assertions. Even that can be difficult, as facts are malleable and everyone has learned to buttress their beliefs in data. Follow the data. Go to the original source and see if the data is reliable. Who did the research and who funded it? It's annoying and time consuming but the trolls, propagandists, and Russian bots are so good at manipulating us that we have to be ultra-careful. Legitimate news organizations need to do their part as well. We need to be as precise as possible and present information without interpretation. We need to label stories as news, analysis, or opinion so that the audience knows what exactly it is absorbing. And when we provide opinion, we need to be absolutely transparent about our backgrounds, beliefs, and agenda. We need to build back trust. The great American experiment only works if we appreciate our differences and learn to live amongst each other. Communication is key. We can't let the machines win. G.W. Miller III is an associate professor and the assistant chair of the Journalism Department at the Klein College of Media and Communication at Temple University. He also publishes JUMP, an all-local music magazine.gwm3@temple.edu We are now two for two. President Obama, a Democrat, addressed the need to help inmates acclimate to society after their release. President Trump, a Republican, spoke in his State of the Union address about the need to help formerly incarcerated people get a second chance. We can take momentary solace in having one issue that even the people we don't like can agree on we need a better plan to help inmates become more productive members of society upon their release. The costs of not doing so are profound and well documented. With the largest prison population in the world and the second highest rate of incarceration, the United States spends $80 billion on public corrections agencies annually. Some 2.2 million people (equal to the combined populations of Hawaii and Alaska) are incarcerated, and more than 90 percent of them will be released at some point. This data does not account for the human suffering of inmates and their victims. Although there have been many proposals to help inmates, not enough is getting done, and the rate of recidivism continues to be unacceptably high. About two-thirds of released state prisoners are rearrested within three years of re-entering society. Three out of four are rearrested within five years of release, according to the most recent data. Some people of good intention have proposed that we need better drug treatment programs for inmates who suffer from substance abuse. Others have proposed that we need better job training to give inmates more enhanced skills. Finally, there are some who propose that inmates need better skills with simple life tasks, such as reading, writing and managing money. The data on these efforts is conflicting, but, under any of these approaches, even if properly executed, we are left with the elephant in the room widespread discrimination against people who have been formerly incarcerated. So, for example, if inmates get trained in certain jobs, they may develop the skills they need, but it may not lead to a higher rate of employment because employers routinely discriminate against those who have been incarcerated. But, in a way, we don't need a study to tell us what's obvious if I drop a hammer on my head, it will probably hurt. Employers take great risks in hiring anyone for their companies. They have the cost to train people. They have the uncertainty of knowing whether people will perform jobs adequately. They have the additional scrutiny of human resources regulations. So, can you really blame employers for not hiring inmates who at the least have a record that objectively increases the risk of hiring them? I don't think so. I think pointing our fingers at employers is not only wrong; worse, it accomplishes nothing. So this leaves us with what to do, and I look to the history of America to provide guidance on how all underprivileged classes have been able to work their way up the social strata. That is through entrepreneurship. If you look carefully at the history of the United States, you find that every underprivileged group was able to improve its position through education or entrepreneurship. We know that inmates do not typically have the blessing of a good education, so we have to rule that out. That leaves us with entrepreneurship. If somebody has a business and comes to my front door and asks to cut my lawn, I don't ask them whether or not they've been in prison. I also don't need to know if they can run a computer or even read. I don't care I just want my lawn cut. However, if I run a lawn-cutting service myself, and someone wants to work for my company, I may ask questions about that person's background. So the answer is to help inmates start low-capital (less than $500) businesses that they can bootstrap to make a livable income and be productive and proud members of society. Various organizations in the country have recognized this deficit and are addressing it. The government can and should also get more involved, starting with the U.S. Small Business Administration. The SBA already has free resources to help other groups specifically (women, minorities, veterans) start and operate businesses. Why not help the millions of former inmates who also need help? And, remember, an ex-offender is more likely to hire an inmate than a person who has not been incarcerated, so the compound interest effect of helping people start businesses is overwhelming. Until we become realistic about the discrimination that inmates face and the impact that has, I do not believe that significant progress will be made. We are just wasting time talking about things and not doing anything. We can try to lower discrimination against inmates, which is an honorable endeavor, but this has all the positive attributes except the one negative, which is that it is unlikely to happen anytime soon. Or, we can go around the system as it exists (as every disenfranchised group in our country's history has done) and help these people start businesses. Brian Hamilton is the founder of Inmates to Entrepreneurs and the co-founder of Sageworks. Mary Ellen Biery, Research Specialist at Sageworks, also contributed to this article. Annual Forages A Producers Perspective March 8 in Kimball Nebraska Extension will be hosting area producers in a roundtable discussion on the use of annual forages in crop and cattle production systems. Topics will include: Dryland and irrigated annual forage production Integrating annual forages into grain rotations Species, mixes and expected yields Seeding rates and fertility needs Harvesting and grazing methods Value of forage production versus input costs The program will held in Kimball on March 8 from 6-9 pm at the 4-H Building, located at 5th and High School St. The program is free; however pre-registration is requested to ensure enough handouts are available. Please call the Nebraska Extension office in Kimball at 308-235-3122 to register or for more information. Contact: Aaron Berger, Nebraska Extension Educator; 308-235-3122; [email protected] Michael G. Heath grew up in the Gainsville, Florida area. He graduate from high school in 1973. College was on his mind to become a veterinary technician. Upon being accepted into a pre-vet program at Auburn, he discovered the cost of college was quite high. Considering his options, a veterinarian he was working for suggested to enter the military and get his schooling through the military. Although his father had been a navy frogman during the Korean War era, it had not been his first choice. After much research and what the criteria for each branch of service, Heath decided upon the United State Air Force. Heath entered the Air Force as an airman. He would find himself doing veterinary technician, and food service sanitation. His four year term would start him off at Langley Air Force Base, and then he would head overseas to Athens, Greece where he was stationed at Helleenikon AFB. Upon his return to the states, he applied to the academy in Colorado Springs and was picked up. "I did this on a dare," says Heath, "and it was a good thing for me." From the academy, his first duty station as an officer was Ellsworth Air Force Base in South Dakota. After being stationed at Ellsworth, Heath found himself westbound for Fairchild Air Force Base in Spokane, Washington. "I entered a technology program there, and gained a degree." Heath stated. Heath would find himself transferred again, and this time he would land in Cheyenne, Wyoming at F. E. Warren Air Force Base. "This was a great duty stationed." he admitted. "I enjoyed Wyoming, and I was not ready for the next transfer when it came." Heath said. His next duty station would take him to Shepard Air Force Base, Texas. He would serve out his enlistment and retire from Shepard. During Heath's enlistment, he would go from enlisted to officer and earn the rank of captain. It was during his time as an officer he would receive several awards. He would receive an award for the Jr. Heathcare Administrator of the year - 1993; the Medical Readiness Officer of the Year; and the prestigious Arthur S. White award for the top DOD in the 1993 as well. Pine Bluffs Post Files Heath preparing to play taps for the Donald Eisenhauer American Legion Post 60. The year prior - 1992 would leave a lasting impression on this officer. It was during the refinery fire from an explosion in Cheyenne, when the 911 phone lines went down. "With burn victims and one burn victim we lost, I ran the operation entirely from the base medical hospital." Heath said. "Our flight surgeon performed surgery in the air, saving one of the burn victim's life. I will never forget that." He added. Heath is married to Linda Heath, Laramie County Commissioner. They have three children, Chad, Chris and Sarah. His son Chad, also served time in the Air Force. Giving advice to the young whom might be contemplating joining the military, Heath has some strong heartfelt words. "If you are going to serve, you will be doing this for others. This is bigger than yourself, and just know, you will be doing something good and for your country." Thanks Heath for serving. Pine Bluffs may get a new internet provider. During the town councils regularly scheduled meeting Tuesday, council members heard a proposal that Visionary Broadband utilize space on the town-owned communications tower. Pine Bluffs Town Attorney Alex Davison said Visionary provides services in Albin and Burns currently. He called it a great service for Pine Bluffs area residents. The council took approved the potential deal with the stipulation that Visionary reach an agreement with the towns public works department. If the deal is approved, Visionary would have to install a... An estimated 669,100 law enforcement officers were treated in emergency departments across the nation for nonfatal injuries between 2003 and 2014, according to a study by researchers at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH). Law enforcement officers have historically high rates of fatal and nonfatal injuries. The new research shows that officers are three times more likely to sustain a nonfatal injury than all other U.S. workers, Insurance Journal reports. The study, Nonfatal Injuries to Law Enforcement Officers: A Rise in Assaults, which is the first to examine nonfatal injuries among officers on a national scale, was published online this month in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine. It is also the first to capture nonfatal injuries sustained from assaults and unintentional injuries such as accidental falls or motor vehicle crashes. The study researchers, whose aim was to provide national estimates and trends of nonfatal injuries to law enforcement officers from 2003 2014, found the following: * The law enforcement officer nonfatal injury trend increased across the 12-year period studied; this is in contrast with the trend for all other U.S. workers which significantly decreased. * Assault-related injury rates significantly increased almost 10 percent annually from 2003 to 2011. * The three leading reasons for on-duty injuries were assaults and violent acts (36%), bodily reactions and exertion from running or other repetitive motions (15%), and transportation incidents (14%). Embed from Getty Images The Broward County (FL) Sheriff's deputy assigned to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School resigned Thursday, under investigation for failing to enter the building as a gunman opened fire and killed 17 people. Sheriff Scott Israel said Deputy Scot Peterson should have went in. Addressed the killer. Killed the killer. Peterson has been a school resource officer at Stoneman Douglas since 2009. He began working for the sheriffs office in 1985. The Sheriffs Office released documents Thursday showing that Peterson was put under an internal investigation the day before. Israel said that Peterson was suspended without pay. The agency also announced that it was placing two officers on a restricted assignment while a separate internal investigation took place, the Sun Sentinel reports. A Rhode Island man was caught illegally operating an ATV, police say, when he crashed into a cement potted plant on a sidewalk after hollering to police, youll never catch me or stop me. (Photo: Providence Police Department) Marauding ATV drivers about a dozen of them were terrorizing the streets of Providence, R.I., Wednesday night, police said. Until a potted plant stopped one of them. The 10 to 15 drivers riding recreational vehicles were illegally on city streets, weaving in and out of traffic, speeding and moving recklessly, police said. They forced cars to stop abruptly. They blew through red lights, leaving police in the dust, the Herald reports. One of the ATV drivers, 25-year-old Ruddy Rodriguez, even pulled up right next to the officers and laughed at them, police said. Youll never catch me or stop me! Rodriguez shouted, according to police. But thats where Rodriguez was wrong, police said. After Rodriguez sped away from the police he had just taunted, he flew through a red light and drove onto the sidewalk, forcing pedestrians in his path to flee, police said. Then he slammed into a cement planter. Last night, I wrote about Taiwan and the growing Chinese threat. The threat I discussed was the military one. In the modern world, ideological warfare goes hand-in-hand with military threats. Thus, though few Americans know about it, we shouldnt be surprised that China is waging ideological warfare on American college and university campuses. Whats surprising, perhaps, is the complicity of our colleges and universities. China fights its ideological battle on American campuses through Confucius Institutes. Since 2004, the Chinese government has planted Institutes that offer Chinese language and culture courses at colleges and universities around the world, including more than 100 in the United States. As the National Association of Scholars (NAS) documented in this report, the Confucius Institutes avoid Chinese political history and human rights abuses, portray Taiwan and Tibet as undisputed territories of China, and educate a generation of American students to know nothing more of China than the regimes official history. Heres how deep the whitewash goes. The Chinese director of one Institute said that if a student asked about Tiananmen Square, she would show a picture and point out the beautiful architecture. How does China induce colleges and universities to cooperate in its propaganda war? According to the NAS report, it does so not just by providing funding, free textbooks, and teachers, but also by attracting full-tuition paying Chinese students, funding scholarships for Americans to study abroad, and serving as a conduit through which college presidents and administrators enjoy trips to and state dinners in China. Sen. Marco Rubio raised the matter of Confucius Institutes during an Intelligence Committee briefing last week. You can watch the video here. Rubio prefaces his comments on the Confucius Institute with an excellent short summary of the overall Chinese threat. In response to Rubio, FBI Direction Christopher Wray acknowledged the problem of the Institutes, but suggested that Chinas enthusiasm for them may be diminishing. Perhaps. But I think its more likely that China, usually at least one step ahead of us, is giving the Confucius Institutes a makeover in order to sustain and enhance their efficacy as a propaganda tool. Rachelle Peterson makes that case in an article for American Greatness. It seems that the decision to make over the Institutes comes from the highest level of the Chinese government. Peterson cites a Global Times report that President Xi Jinping presided over a meeting of the Leading Group for Deepening Overall Reform of the 19th Communist Party of China Central Committee, where adoption of the Confucian Institutes reform plan took place. What is the nature of the reforms? Peterson writes: Ma Jianfei [a deputy executive of the Institutes] calls for providing strengthened support from China to all local faculty the American professors who also have roles at their universitys Confucius Institute. That amounts to a warning: We are watching you. China already sends everything from the textbooks and course maps to the logo decals for the front door and office decorations. The Chinese government regulates every aspect of each Confucius Institute. American universities do not need more support from China. They need freedom. [In addition], Ma intends that going forward, More Chinese deans and teachers will be employed overseas. There is nothing wrong with American colleges hosting guest professors and participating in educational exchanges, to be sure. But Confucius Institutes are already staffed almost entirely by teachers selected by the Chinese government. Every Confucius Institute also has a Chinese co-director, a high-ranking professor or administrator from a Chinese university who helps oversee all operations and reports back to China. If Chinas only interest is in promoting the study of Chinese language and culture, why not send strings-free funds to American universities and let them select promising American scholars of Chinese to employ? There is nothing illegal about Confucius Institutes. How, then, should we respond to them? Peterson takes up this question in an article for The Hill. She proposes the following: First, make colleges choose between Chinas gifts and federal funding. When a college receives Confucius Institute funding, its eligibility for federal Chinese-language grants should decrease proportionately. Second, require financial transparency. The Higher Education Act requires colleges and universities to disclose gifts from a foreign entity totaling $250,000 or more in a calendar year. That threshold should be lowered to $50,000 about the cost of hiring a full-time instructor at a four-year public university and it should include the fair market value of in-kind gifts. Third, enforce existing law. The Justice Department has authority to investigate and sue institutions that fail to disclose gifts properly. According to Peterson, most Confucius Institutes fail to meet reporting obligations. In addition, Confucius Institutes should be investigated for potential violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) and held accountable for employment discrimination, including national origin and religious discrimination. In 2012, one Confucius Institute in Canada closed after a teacher filed a human rights complaint documenting the discrimination she faced for practicing Falun Gong, which is banned in China. Fourth, hold more hearings. We need to shine as much light as possible shine on Confucius Institutes. They are an affront to intellectual freedom and American interests. The New York Times reports that China has been ratcheting up pressure on Taiwan, the nation whose independent existence China aspires to end. In recent months, Chinese strategic bombers have been conducting island encirclement flights, escorted by fighter jets. The Chinese government has discouraged tourism to Taiwan and imports of goods like fish over the past year and a half, hurting its economy. And China persuaded the islands most important remaining diplomatic ally, Panama, to switch diplomatic recognition last summer from Taipei to Beijing. President Trump had hoped for Chinese cooperation in dealing with North Korea and in reducing Americas trade deficit with China. It was probably worth a try. From all that appears, however, China has not cooperated. North Korea has, if anything, ramped up its nuclear weapons program and the trade deficit has increased. Accordingly, the administration has recently moved to reinforce its ties to Taiwan, which the Times accurately describes as a vigorous democracy facing an increasingly authoritarian government in Beijing. For example, Trump signed legislation in December, bitterly opposed by Beijing, that included a provision encouraging mutual port calls by naval vessels from Taiwan and the United States. Trump is on the right track. China is our adversary. It isnt going to help us deal with North Korea and isnt going to play fair on trade and currency issues. Taiwan is an ally and a counterweight to China. We need all the counterweights we can find. Reihan Salam cites a Military Balance report released by the Institute of Strategic Studies that should make our defense planners very nervous. Heres why. Chinas military budget has been growing at 6 to 7 percent a year. In no more than two years, China will have its own stealth combat aircraft, which will end the United States monopoly on the technology. China is also upgrading its air-to-air missiles, to the point that it will soon be comparable to the best missiles in the West. And firms in China are working to develop quantum computing to better crunch big data and secure its communications. China launched its first quantum satellite in 2016. What does this mean? The Military Balance report explains: Since the end of the Cold War, the air domain has been one of assured superiority for the United States and its allies. This dominance, however, rests on weapons and technologies that China and Russia are increasingly attaining as part of a broader effort to counter U.S. capabilities, and to deny US and allied forces unimpeded control of the air. For the U.S.-led alliance to regain air dominance, it will have to commit funding on a level not required since the end of the Cold War. And it will have to maintain that level of funding and investment over the long haul. Salam points out an additional problem. When Chinese Premier Xi Jinping asks the Chinese public and private sectors to work on advanced military projects, its an offer that cant be refused. In the U.S., however, Silicon Valley can simply say no. Thus, the only way the U.S. can keep up is to spend, which means increasing the deficit, raising taxes, or both. The nations attention is focused now on Russia, and not without reason. We should be concerned about Putins authoritarian state, though not primarily for the reasons being touted by the anti-Trump resistance. I see China as a bigger threat than Russia, though. Steven Mosher makes that case here, in an address to the Heritage Foundation, and in his book, Bully of Asia: Why Chinas Dream is the New Threat to World Order. In response, we need, among other things, to back Taiwan and to increase our military spending. In his Wall Street Journal column two weeks ago today, Jeryl Bier reported that Minnesota Fifth District Rep./Democratic National Committee Vice Chairman Keith Ellison and Nation of Islam Supreme Leader Louis Farrakhan had a reunion of sorts in September 2013 with a follow-up meeting in Farrakhans hotel room when Farrakhan visited Washington in 2015. I noted Ellisons responses in Ellison speaksa little and Ellison speaksa little more. Yesterday Ellison appeared as a guest of Wolf Blitzer on CNN. Blitzer asked him about the Farrakhan meetings. Ellison avoided any explanation of what he was doing with Farrakhan. He responded in his accustomed style, turning the question into an attack on his critics. Among other things, Ellison asserts: I have always been a fierce opponent of anti-Semitism. This is whats the word? a lie. Blitzer lets him rattle on and close out the segment with a classic Ellison routine. Via David Rutz/Washington Free Beacon. 2020 was a year marked by hardships and challenges, but the Prince William community has proven resilient. The Prince William Times is honored to serve as your community companion. To say thank you for your continued support, wed like to offer all our subscribers -- new or returning -- 4 WEEKS FREE DIGITAL AND PRINT ACCESS. We understand the importance of working to keep our community strong and connected. As we move forward together into 2021, it will take commitment, communication, creativity, and a strong connection with those who are most affected by the stories we cover. We are dedicated to providing the reliable, local journalism you have come to expect. We are committed to serving you with renewed energy and growing resources. Let the Prince William Times be your community companion throughout 2021, and for many years to come. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160303/792302 ) Browse 78 Market Data Tables and 45 Figures spread through 141 Pages and in-depth TOC on "Aquatic Herbicides Market - Global Forecast to 2022" https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/aquatic-herbicide-market-182444792.html Early buyers will receive 10% customization on this report The rising demand for aquatic herbicides due to in the growing adoption of integrated weed control and advantages of over other treatment methods such as manual and mechanical methods are expected to drive the demand for aquatic herbicides in various applications. Aquatic herbicides are used to control a broad spectrum of weeds; selective aquatic herbicides can be used in case of infestation of specific weed types. The activity of herbicides is quick; it is effective for a longer duration, compared to the mechanical and manual hand removal of weeds. In case of new weed infestation, aquatic herbicides can be used for spot treatment of the specific areas before they spread. Thus, the use of aquatic herbicides is more in the foliar segment as compared to the submerged segment. Download PDF Brochure: https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/pdfdownload.asp?id=182444792 The foliar segment expected to dominate the Aquatic Herbicides Market through 2022. In 2017, the foliar segment accounted for a larger share, by application method, in the Aquatic Herbicides Market, in terms of value; foliar application takes less time and ensures better weed cover as compared to the submerged application. More herbicides are registered for foliar application, which is projected to drive the foliar segment in the Aquatic Herbicides Market. Selective aquatic herbicide is projected to be the faster-growing market during the forecast period. The natural segment is projected to grow at a higher CAGR from 2017 to 2022. Selective herbicides kill specific target plants/weeds, while leaving the preferred crop relatively unharmed. Its action is very specific to the target crop/plant and there is a low chance of indiscriminate and excessive use, subsequently driving the market for selective aquatic herbicides. Make an Inquiry: https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Enquiry_Before_Buying.asp?id=182444792 The 2,4-D segment is projected to be the fastest-growing, in terms of value and volume, in the Aquatic Herbicides Market from 2017 to 2022. The demand for 2,4-D type of aquatic herbicides is increasing across the globe, especially in developing countries such as China, India, and Brazil. Among selective herbicides, 2,4-D is the most preferred as it has a simple mode of action and easy application. 2,4-D functions by simulating the hormone, auxin, which leads to uncontrollable cell proliferation and plant growth. This ultimately leads to plant death. It is one of the earliest registered aquatic herbicides in the US. It is primarily used for controlling weeds in food crops, non-crops, turf crops, and aquatic bodies. The 2,4-D segment is hence projected to be the fastest-growing in the Aquatic Herbicides Market from 2017 to 2022. The Asia Pacific is projected to be the fastest-growing regional market for aquatic herbicides. The Asia Pacific region is projected to be the fastest-growing market for aquatic herbicides over the next five years, owing to an increase in overall economic growth, the use of glyphosate to control emergent, free-floating, and floating-leaf weeds, and the fact that the use of aquatic herbicides is more effective and economical than other mechanical methods. In this region, countries such as Australia and New Zealand hold a major share of more than 60% of the Asia Pacific Aquatic Herbicides Market. India is one of the fastest-growing markets for aquatic herbicides in the Asia Pacific region, due to varied agricultural climate and relatively inexpensive labor. This report studies the marketing and development strategies, along with the product portfolios of leading companies such as Dow Chemical (US), BASF (Germany), Monsanto (US), Syngenta (Switzerland), and Nufarm (Australia). Other significant players include Lonza (Switzerland), Land O'Lakes (US), UPL (India), Platform Specialty Products (US), SePRO Corporation (US), Albaugh (US), Valent (US), and SANCO INDUSTRIES (US). Browse Related Reports Biopesticides Market by Type (Bioinsecticides, Biofungicides, Bioherbicides, Bionematicides), Source (Microbes, Biochemicals, Beneficial Insects), Mode of Application, Formulation, Crop Type, and Region - Global Forecast to 2022 https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/biopesticides-267.html Herbicides Market by Type (Glyphosate, 2, 4-D, Diquat), Crop Type (Cereals & Grains, Oilseeds & Pulses, Fruits & Vegetables), Mode of Action (Non-selective, Selective), and Region - Global Forecast to 2022 https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/herbicides-357.html About MarketsandMarkets MarketsandMarkets provides quantified B2B research on 30,000 high growth niche opportunities/threats which will impact 70% to 80% of worldwide companies' revenues. Currently servicing 5000 customers worldwide including 80% of global Fortune 1000 companies as clients. Almost 75,000 top officers across eight industries worldwide approach MarketsandMarkets for their painpoints around revenues decisions. Our 850 fulltime analyst and SMEs at MarketsandMarkets are tracking global high growth markets following the "Growth Engagement Model - GEM". The GEM aims at proactive collaboration with the clients to identify new opportunities, identify most important customers, write "Attack, avoid and defend" strategies, identify sources of incremental revenues for both the company and its competitors. MarketsandMarkets now coming up with 1,500 MicroQuadrants (Positioning top players across leaders, emerging companies, innovators, strategic players) annually in high growth emerging segments. MarketsandMarkets is determined to benefit more than 10,000 companies this year for their revenue planning and help them take their innovations/disruptions early to the market by providing them research ahead of the curve. MarketsandMarkets's flagship competitive intelligence and market research platform, "RT" connects over 200,000 markets and entire value chains for deeper understanding of the unmet insights along with market sizing and forecasts of niche markets. Contact: Mr. Salgarkar MarketsandMarkets INC. 630 Dundee Road Suite 430 Northbrook, IL 60062 USA: +1-888-600-6441 Email: [email protected] Visit Our Blog: http://www.marketsandmarketsblog.com/market-reports/agriculture-industry Connect with us on LinkedIn @ http://www.linkedin.com/company/marketsandmarkets SOURCE MarketsandMarkets The report "Automotive Battery Thermal Management System Market by Propulsion (BEV, HEV, PHEV, & FCV), Technology (Active and Passive), Vehicle Type (Passenger & Commercial), Battery Type (Conventional & Solid-State), Battery Capacity, and Region - Forecast to 2025 " , published by MarketsandMarkets, the market is projected to grow at a CAGR of 16.05% during the forecast period, from USD 1.29 Billion in 2017 to USD 4.24 Billion by 2025. Factors such as improved battery performance and efficiency, integration of Automotive Battery Thermal Management System with other electric thermal management systems, and stringent emission regulations by governments have forced the manufacturers to move towards the adoption of hybrid and electric vehicle technology. (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160303/792302 ) Browse 90 tables and 53 figures spread through 153 pages and in-depth TOC on "Automotive Battery Thermal Management System Market - Global Forecast to 2025" https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/automotive-battery-thermal-management-system-market-184479896.html Early buyers will receive 10% customization on this report "BEVs are estimated to showcase the largest demand for Automotive Battery Thermal Management System" The BEV segment is estimated to hold the largest share of the Automotive Battery Thermal Management System Market. The demand for Automotive Battery Thermal Management System in BEVs is influenced by the total sales of BEVs. According to MarketsandMarkets analysis, the BEV sales are projected to grow from 431.3 thousand units in 2017 to 7.2 million units by 2025. Download PDF Brochure: https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/pdfdownload.asp?id=184479896 "Active technology to be the fastest growing segment of the Automotive Battery Thermal Management System Market" The active technology segment is projected to witness the fastest growth during the forecast period. The growth of this segment can be attributed to the increased efficiency, improved battery performance, and long life from active technology battery thermal management system. The growth can also be attributed to the high growth projections of BEVs in countries such as China and Japan. For instance, China has an ambitious plan of going all electric by 2025. Hence, this system is expected to experience the highest growth during the forecast period. Make an Inquiry: https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Enquiry_Before_Buying.asp?id=184479896 "Asia Pacific is expected to be the largest market for Automotive Battery Thermal Management System" The Automotive Battery Thermal Management System Market for the Asia Pacific is estimated to be the largest, owing to the presence of key countries such as China, Japan, India, and South Korea, which constitute the highest sales of electric and hybrid vehicles globally. According to MarketsandMarkets analysis, China and Japan constitute 50-55% share of the total electric vehicles sold globally. Hence, the Asia Pacific region is estimated to be the largest market for Automotive Battery Thermal Management System. The Automotive Battery Thermal Management Systems market is dominated by a few global players. Some of the key manufacturers operating in the market are LG Chem (South Korea), Continental (Germany), Gentherm (US), Valeo (France), Calsonic Kansei (Japan), DANA (US), Hanon Systems (Korea), Samsung SDI (Korea), Mahle (Germany), VOSS Automotive (Germany), and CapTherm Systems (Canada). There are certain key innovators gaining attention in the Automotive Battery Thermal Management System Market including LG Chem (South Korea), Tesla (US), and Robert Bosch (Germany). Browse Related Reports Electric Vehicle Market by EV battery Cost, EV Components (Battery, On-Board Charger), Propulsion (BEV, PHEV, HEV, FCEV), Recharging Station (Normal & Super Charging), Govt. Regulation (EV Subsidies, EV Tax Rebates) and Region - Global Forecast to 2021 https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/ev-component-and-infrastructure-market-209371461.html Wireless EV Charging Market by Application, Component, Market (Aftermarket/Retrofit and OE Market), Power Supply Range (3-<11 kW, 11-50 kW, and > 50 kW), Charging Type (Stationary and Dynamic), Vehicle Type, and Region - Global Forecast to 2025 https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/wireless-ev-charging-market-170963517.html About MarketsandMarkets MarketsandMarkets provides quantified B2B research on 30,000 high growth niche opportunities/threats which will impact 70% to 80% of worldwide companies' revenues. Currently servicing 5000 customers worldwide including 80% of global Fortune 1000 companies as clients. Almost 75,000 top officers across eight industries worldwide approach MarketsandMarkets for their painpoints around revenues decisions. Our 850 fulltime analyst and SMEs at MarketsandMarkets are tracking global high growth markets following the "Growth Engagement Model - GEM". The GEM aims at proactive collaboration with the clients to identify new opportunities, identify most important customers, write "Attack, avoid and defend" strategies, identify sources of incremental revenues for both the company and its competitors. MarketsandMarkets now coming up with 1,500 MicroQuadrants (Positioning top players across leaders, emerging companies, innovators, strategic players) annually in high growth emerging segments. MarketsandMarkets is determined to benefit more than 10,000 companies this year for their revenue planning and help them take their innovations/disruptions early to the market by providing them research ahead of the curve. MarketsandMarkets's flagship competitive intelligence and market research platform, "RT" connects over 200,000 markets and entire value chains for deeper understanding of the unmet insights along with market sizing and forecasts of niche markets. Contact: Mr. Salgarkar MarketsandMarkets INC. 630 Dundee Road Suite 430 Northbrook, IL 60062 USA: +1-888-600-6441 Email: [email protected] Visit Our Blog @ http://mnmblog.org/market-research/automotive-transportation Connect with us on LinkedIn @ http://www.linkedin.com/company/marketsandmarkets SOURCE MarketsandMarkets (Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160303/792302 ) Browse 81 tables and 45 figures spread through 130 pages and in-depth TOC on "Automotive Hydraulics System Market- Global Forecast to 2025" https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/automotive-hydraulics-system-market-116790631.html Early buyers will receive 10% customization on this report The combination of higher disposable income and increasing awareness of active as well as the passive safety of a vehicle among vehicle users, increase in vehicle sales and infrastructural development in developing economies are driving the market for Automotive Hydraulics System Market. A key driver for the increase in vehicle sales in recent years is the changing taste of vehicle types and lifestyle of the young population. Infrastructural development in developing economies is forcing construction companies to use construction vehicles equipped with advanced prime mover technologies. Whereas, modern agricultural vehicles are used extensively by farmers in countries like China, India, Japan, South Africa. All these factors are driving the market for Automotive Hydraulics System Market. Download PDF Brochure: https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/pdfdownload.asp?id=116790631 Asia Pacific: Largest market for Automotive Hydraulics System The Asia Pacific is projected to be the largest market for Automotive Hydraulics System Market from 2017 to 2025. The market growth in the region can be attributed to numerous factors such as improving road infrastructure, infrastructural development, and government regulations regarding vehicle's active and passive safety. Hydraulic brake is estimated to hold the largest market share during the forecast period The market size for hydraulic brake in Automotive Hydraulics System Market is estimated to be the highest in 2017 and is projected to remain predominant during the forecast period. The market share of hydraulic brakes automotive hydraulics systems is estimated to be the highest followed by hydraulic tappets, hydraulic suspension, and hydraulic clutch. Developing countries such as China and India have witnessed significant sales in a modern vehicle and economic growth, which in turn, is increasing the demand for hydraulic brake in automotive hydraulics systems. Make an Inquiry: https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Enquiry_Before_Buying.asp?id=116790631 Slave cylinder segment for Automotive Hydraulics System Market is estimated to be the largest segment by component from 2017 to 2025 The market size for automotive hydraulics systems with Slave cylinder is expected to be the largest, as slave cylinder finds great application in automotive hydraulics systems such as brake and clutch. The market size of this segment is estimated to remain predominant during the forecast period. One of the major factor driving the growth of the slave cylinder segment is increasing production of passenger and commercial vehicles. The Automotive Hydraulics System Market is dominated by a few globally established players, such as Aisin Seiki (Japan), Robert Bosch (Germany), ZF (Germany), BorgWarner (US), JTEKT (Japan). Browse Related Reports Tappet Market for Automotive by Type (Flat, and Roller), End User (Economic, Mid-priced, and Luxury passenger cars), Engine Capacity (<4 cylinders, 4-6 cylinders, and >6 cylinders), Vehicle Type, and Region - Global Forecast to 2025 https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/automotive-tappet-market-180545199.html Automotive Valves Market by Product (Solenoid, EGR Valve, Brake Combination Valve, AT Control Valve, Engine Valve), Vehicle (PC, LCV, HCV, EV), Application (Engine, Brake, HVAC), Function (Hydraulic, Pneumatic, Electric), and Region - Global Forecast to 2022 " https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/automotive-valve-market-139192093.html About MarketsandMarkets MarketsandMarkets provides quantified B2B research on 30,000 high growth niche opportunities/threats which will impact 70% to 80% of worldwide companies' revenues. Currently servicing 5000 customers worldwide including 80% of global Fortune 1000 companies as clients. Almost 75,000 top officers across eight industries worldwide approach MarketsandMarkets for their painpoints around revenues decisions. Our 850 fulltime analyst and SMEs at MarketsandMarkets are tracking global high growth markets following the "Growth Engagement Model - GEM". The GEM aims at proactive collaboration with the clients to identify new opportunities, identify most important customers, write "Attack, avoid and defend" strategies, identify sources of incremental revenues for both the company and its competitors. MarketsandMarkets now coming up with 1,500 MicroQuadrants (Positioning top players across leaders, emerging companies, innovators, strategic players) annually in high growth emerging segments. MarketsandMarkets is determined to benefit more than 10,000 companies this year for their revenue planning and help them take their innovations/disruptions early to the market by providing them research ahead of the curve. MarketsandMarkets's flagship competitive intelligence and market research platform, "RT" connects over 200,000 markets and entire value chains for deeper understanding of the unmet insights along with market sizing and forecasts of niche markets. Contact: Mr. Salgarkar MarketsandMarkets INC. 630 Dundee Road Suite 430 Northbrook, IL 60062 USA: +1-888-600-6441 Email: [email protected] Visit Our Blog @ http://mnmblog.org/market-research/automotive-transportation Connect with us on LinkedIn @ http://www.linkedin.com/company/marketsandmarkets SOURCE MarketsandMarkets The RestcommONE Marketplace is a CPaaS ecosystem that blends traditional telecommunications and APIs (applications programming interfaces) with new, ready-to-deploy real-time voice, video and messaging applications. RestcommONE Marketplace partners offer participating service providers new business opportunities by providing real-time applications and solutions that are certified and integrated into the RestcommONE Platform. Until now, MNOs were unable to participate in and leverage the fast growing CPaaS Market. Today, with RestcommONE Marketplace and its four new mobile focused application partners, the opportunity for MNOs stretches beyond CPaaS enablement to include the ability to deliver in-demand real-time communications business solutions that scale seamlessly and efficiently. "Traditionally, CPaaS models have been focused on VoIP Service Providers, leaving MNOs to sit on the sidelines," said Michael Brandenburg of Frost and Sullivan. "Telestax's ability to extend the CPaaS opportunity directly to MNOs creates a unique ecosystem that will broaden the adoption of real-time communications while increasing a new pathway to revenue for this unique set of service providers." RestcommONE Marketplace New Mobile Partners: floLIVE - An immediate revenue opportunity for MNOs/MVNOs looking to acquire mobile data capacity and IMSI access for supporting IoT customers and devices that require network access throughout the world. floLIVE operates a self-developed core network and offers a secure, cloud-based IoT ecosystem designed and built especially for IoT; and encompasses a wide range of services to market verticals - all provided as-a-service via their global cloud. Gintel - MNOs are increasingly looking for innovative business services they can offer to their SME customers, who are abandoning traditional landline and legacy PBX services. Gintel provides the world's leading mobile PBX capability, allowing MNOs to provide true business level features via a mobile device. Joors - Mobile advertising continues to be a fast growing but difficult opportunity for MNOs to leverage. Using RestcommONE's geolocation capabilities and Joors' expertise in data sponsoring, MNOs/MVNOs can generate significant recurring incremental revenues from mobile marketing. Joors is also the key component behind the JoorsChain consortium that proposes to integrate Block Chain based hi-tech solutions to benefit MNOs. Sompopo - Mobile e-Commerce is still an issue with many carriers and application providers alike. Sompopo's mobile commerce platform integrates different applications to meet the needs of specific markets. Its point of sale (PoS) application also supports cash payment transactions to help deliver products and services. Included is a wholesaler panel that front-ends company specific virtual warehouses and a delivery agent app that supports certified PoS. "RestcommONE Marketplace brings a global collection of best of breed partners together to create a very unique opportunity for MNOs," said Kevin Nethercott, Telestax VP worldwide business development for CPaaS Enablement. "The instant an MNO connects to our RestcommONE cloud platform, and become CPaaS enabled, they are generating revenue through our partners that are buying mobile capacity or terminating traffic onto their network." Resources About Telestax Telestax is quickly becoming the catalyst for bringing real-time communications into the mainstream. Our RestcommONE platform is scalable, highly available and is the only WebRTC platform that supports cloud, on premise and hybrid deployment configurations. RestcommONE is fast becoming the platform of choice for rapidly building enterprise class real-time messaging, voice and video applications. RestcommONE Marketplace connects these new Omnichannel applications with RestcommOne CPaaS-enabled (Communications Platform as a Service) service providers and increases the revenue opportunity for both. The RestcommONE Marketplace is generating a positive disruption in the real-time communications market by changing the way organizations acquire and utilize their business software. Telestax is a privately held global company with headquarters in Austin, TX. Media Contact: Nancy Colwell [email protected] Related Links http://www.telestax.com SOURCE Telestax, Inc. PORTLAND, Oregon and PUNE, India, February 23, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- According to a new report published by Allied Market Research, titled, Air Compressor by Type, Technology, Lubrication Method, Power Rating and End-user Industry: Global Opportunity Analysis and Industry Forecast, 2014-2023, the air compressor market was valued at $19,798.56 million in 2016, and is projected to reach at $26,850.35 million by 2023, growing at a CAGR of 4.47% from 2014 to 2023. Asia-Pacific is expected to be the leading contributor to the global air compressor market, followed by Europe and North America. (Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/636519/Allied_Market_Research_Logo.jpg ) The increase in adoption of energy efficient and robust air compressors across different industry verticals is expected to drive the demand for the air compressor market during the forecast period. Also, the increase in demand from the end-user industries such as food & beverage, oil & gas, manufacturing, and power generation is also expected to drive the market growth in the coming years. However, the utilization of high technical expertise, R&D, and accessories for enhancing the efficiency of compression in the equipment results in high installation and maintenance cost, which is expected to hinder the growth of the market. Request for Sample Report at: https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/request-sample/536 In 2016, the rotary-based air compressors, accounted for the maximum revenue share in the overall air compressor market by technology owing to their lower cost of operations and large production capabilities. However, the centrifugal-based air compressors is expected to provide profitable opportunities to the manufacturers owing to their superior technology resulting in efficient continuous flow rate with variable compression capabilities. The oil-free segment is expected to grow at a fastest CAGR of 4.77% owing to increase in demand for reducing the cost of operation by eliminating lubrication. Moreover, the medical and power generation end users in the air compressor market is also expected to generate attractive business opportunities during the forecast period (20172023). Asia-Pacific accounted for the major share of the global air compressor market in 2016 owing to the increase in demand from food & beverage, manufacturing and oil & gas industries. However, Asia-Pacific is estimated to grow at the highest rate followed by Europe due to rise in demand from end-user industries. For Purchase Enquiry: https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/purchase-enquiry/536 Key Findings of the Air Compressor Market: In 2016, the rotary technology type accounted for the maximum revenue and is projected to grow at a notable CAGR of 4.50% during the forecast period. The centrifugal segment accounted for around 24.19% in the air compressor market in 2016. Germany and France are the major shareholder in the market, accounting for more than half of the market share in 2016. The key players profiled in the air compressor market include Atlas Copco AB, Kobe Steel Ltd., Elgi Equipments Limited, Ingersoll-Rand PLC, Kirloskar Pneumatic Company Limited, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd., Suzler Ltd., Ebara Corporations, Porter Cable, and VMAC Global Technology Inc. Market players have adopted various strategies such as product launch, collaboration & partnership, and acquisition to expand their foothold in the market. Ask for discount before buying: https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/get-discount/536 About Us: Allied Market Research (AMR) is a full-service market research and business-consulting wing of Allied Analytics LLP based in Portland, Oregon. Allied Market Research provides global enterprises as well as medium and small businesses with unmatched quality of "Market Research Reports" and "Business Intelligence Solutions." AMR has a targeted view to provide business insights and consulting to assist its clients to make strategic business decisions and achieve sustainable growth in their respective market domain. We are in professional corporate relations with various companies and this helps us in digging out market data that helps us generate accurate research data tables and confirms utmost accuracy in our market forecasting. Each and every data presented in the reports published by us is extracted through primary interviews with top officials from leading companies of domain concerned. Our secondary data procurement methodology includes deep online and offline research and discussion with knowledgeable professionals and analysts in the industry. Contact: Shriram Dighe 5933 NE Win Sivers Drive #205, Portland, OR 97220 United States Toll Free: +1-800-792-5285 UK: +44-845-528-1300 Hong Kong: +852-301-84916 India (Pune): +91-20-66346060 Fax: +1855550-5975 [email protected] Web: https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com SOURCE Allied Market Research NEW DELHI, February 23, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- India 5000 presented the Best MSME Award 2017 to Interactive Bees, a Delhi-based full-service brand communication agency. Interactive Bees won one of the biggest business awards for its outstanding contribution in quality and excellence, in the realm of customer satisfaction, impact on society through service and management to boost up all. (Logo: http://mma.prnewswire.com/media/482210/Interactive_Bees_Logo.jpg ) India 5000 is known for hosting nation's first privately organised and biggest business awards' ceremony, which takes place every year now. Here the most promising and upcoming businesses of India receive national level recognition for exceptional performances in various fields. This ceremony provides an opportunity to businesses for not only networking with highly skilled and well-acquainted entities, but also to participate in events organised by this prestigious growth group. According to the India 5000 Group, "Knowledge, Exposure and Networking are the key factors of success in today's world." Adding to this ideology, it strives to serve entrepreneurs and organisations in their professional growth by the help of research and recognition approach. Who qualifies as MSME? a) Enterprise engaged in production with an investment in plan or machinery, which is: Not more than 25 lakhs, then it is a micro enterprise More than 25 lakhs but less than 5 crores , then it is a small enterprise , then it is a small enterprise More than 5 crore but less than 10 crores , then it is a medium enterprise b) If the enterprise deals in services, and the investment is: Less than 10 lakhs, then it is a micro enterprise Between 10 lakhs and 2 crores , then it is a small enterprise c) Between 2 crore and 5 crores, then it is a medium enterprise. About Interactive Bees: Interactive Bees is a complete brand communication agency providing solutions for offline and online including web development, digital solutions, social media, online advertising, print media, video production, application development, search engine marketing, online reputation management, media planning and media buying and hosting solutions. Media Contact: Manan Malik [email protected] +91-9821166090 Interactive Bees Pvt. Ltd. SOURCE Interactive Bees Pvt Ltd RIYADH, Saudi Arabia, February 23, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Transparency International has launched its latest 2017 Corruption Perception Index (CPI), where Saudi Arabia's ranking continued to improve, moving up by five places from previous year's rank of 62 to a rank this year of 57. While the Index reflects on last year, the news comes in the wake of recent efforts by Saudi Arabia to fight corruption in the country, which has seen the country make bold moves including establishing a National Anti-Corruption Commission in November 2017. According to data released by the global anti-corruption organization on Tuesday, Saudi Arabia's overall score is 49 out of a 100. Among Arab countries, Saudi Arabia improved its ranking to third in the region and with a higher score than the regional average of 33. The recognition comes at a time of rapid development for Saudi Arabia, as it vigorously pursues its ambitious Vision 2030 agenda. Top Saudi officials hailed the report, saying that, "it marks a tangible result of Saudi Arabia's Vision 2030 plan and its commitment to accountability and continual improvement." The formation of the National Anti-Corruption Commission is just the latest move to increase transparency in the country, which involves several government agencies. These include Adaa, The National Center for Performance Measurement. "We are dedicated to achieving the objectives in the Vision 2030 plan, which includes improving transparency and accountability in every facet of our government, and this report shows we're making progress," said Minister of Economy and Planning Mohamed Altwaijri. "Saudi Arabia's use of The National Center for Performance Measurement (Adaa) to independently benchmark the performance of our public entities is one of many tools we can credit with improving our global standing." Husameddin AlMandani, Director General of Adaa, The National Center for Performance Measurement said: "Enabling transparency in government is one of the key reasons Adaa was created, and we are pleased that our efforts, and the full efforts in support of achieving Vision 2030, are showing true progression. It is important for global leaders to establish organizations that help to improve government efficiency and transparency." The Corruption Perceptions Index report analyzes public sector corruption perceptions in 180 countries annually and determines how each country scores against one another using a scale of 0 to 100, with 0 indicating highly corrupt and 100 as very clean. The 2017 report found that the global average corruption score is 43, unchanged from 2016. While the report generally showed little progress in eroding perceptions of corruption, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia's score increased to 49 from 46 since 2016. The drive for greater transparency and improved performance measurement is a key part of Vision 2030, and emblematic of Saudi Arabia's desire to work alongside multiple international partners to establish and consolidate best practice across a spectrum of public and private entities. Contact: Dur Kattan, PR & Communications Executive Director - The National Center for Performance Measurement (Adaa). [email protected], +966-920001156. SOURCE The National Center for Performance Measurement (Adaa) CHENNAI, February 23, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- A three-year initiative comes to a fruitful close - with better care for over 100,000 pregnant mothers and newborns across the Indian State Healthcare leaders and specialists across Tamil Nadu and Singapore marked the successful conclusion of a three-year collaboration between the two countries on antenatal and child healthcare in Tamil Nadu. To conclude the programme, both sides came together for a Leader's Dialogue to share their experiences and learnings over the past three years, at the Tamil Nadu Government Multi Super Specialty Hospital. The Enhancing Maternal and Child Health Services (EMCH) Programme is a three-year specialist programme implemented by the Singapore International Foundation (SIF) in partnership with the Department of Health and Family Welfare (DH&FW), Government of Tamil Nadu, Temasek Foundation International (TFI) and SingHealth. (Photo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/645445/Enhancing_Maternal_and_Child_Health_Services_Programme.jpg ) Since 2015, healthcare professionals from Singapore have worked with their counterparts in three districts in Tamil Nadu - Tiruchirappalli, Kanchipuram, and Pudukkottai - to train local healthcare professionals in government healthcare institutions in Tamil Nadu to reduce infant mortality rates (IMR) and maternity mortality rates (MMR). Tamil Nadu is one of the leading states in India with an IMR of 17 against the national average of 34 and an MMR of 67 per 100,000 births. The EMCH Programme has helped augment the government's efforts to tackle preventable causes of both infant and maternal deaths, with the aim of attaining a single digit IMR and ensuring safer pregnancies for more women. These efforts also contribute towards achieving the larger UN Sustainable Development Goal 3 of Good Health and Well-Being. "Having a baby is a significant phase in a woman's life and this State Government is committed to ensure that every mother should have access to quality Antenatal Services and safe confinement on par with international standards," said Dr C. Vijayabasker, Honourable Minister for Health and Family Welfare, Tamil Nadu. More than 1,000 doctors, nurses and public health leaders and officials from Tamil Nadu have participated in the three-year EMCH Programme. Through pedagogy workshops, management training, dialogue sessions, symposia and a study visit to Singapore just last week, the participants had the chance to share their knowledge and experience with their counterparts from Singapore, with all parties gaining valuable insights and perspectives from the learning exchange. Among the trained pool of healthcare practitioners, 50 Master Trainers were identified and received additional training on how to cascade their knowledge to their peers in the industry. As part of the EMCH Programme, a multi-disciplinary team of 26 healthcare professionals, including obstetricians, gynaecologists, midwives, emergency paediatricians, neonatologists and allied healthcare professionals from KK Women's and Children's Hospital (KKH) in Singapore, shared their expertise on CORE (Combined Obstetric Resuscitations and Emergencies Training) for better management of high risk pregnancies arising from postpartum haemorrhage, eclampsia and sepsis. Mr Jaryll Chan, SIF's Director of Programmes said, "At the SIF, we believe in leveraging our strengths and learning from one another to enhance the effectiveness of our programmes that enrich lives and effect positive change. I am heartened that this collaboration between the Singapore and Tamil Nadu medical communities has contributed to safer pregnancies for women and healthier babies, setting the stage for stronger friendships to grow not just between governments, but between our institutions and our people." Mr Benedict Cheong, TFI's Chief Executive, said, "Good health care is an essential pillar of the economic and social development of any community. We are pleased to know that this capability-building programme has facilitated a good learning exchange between healthcare professionals from Singapore and Tamil Nadu, leading to good outcomes such as improved nursing processes and practices in the area of antenatal and postnatal care. In the long run, we hope that this will bring about better healthcare support for the community and enhance the networks of cooperation between Tamil Nadu and Singapore." Professor Ivy Ng, SingHealth's Group Chief Executive Officer, said, "SingHealth is privileged to have partnered the DH&FW, Government of Tamil Nadu to share expertise in the management of high-risk pregnancies, obstetric and neonatal emergencies. This mutually beneficial collaboration has enabled both organisations to nurture a strong and sustainable pipeline of healthcare professionals to provide quality antenatal and maternal care." Dr Shephali Tagore, Director, O&G International Medical Programme, and Senior Consultant, Department of Maternal Fetal Medicine, KKH, who is also SIF Specialist Team Leader in the EMCH Programme said, "The past three years have been a great opportunity for us as healthcare providers to share our experiences - through these shared resources and expertise, we believe that we have helped play a small part in enabling safer pregnancies and deliveries in Tamil Nadu. Learning happens both ways - we too have definitely taken away insights and learnings from our Indian counterparts on their approach to maternity care and how they overcome challenges." The EMCH Programme is yet another collaborative project in India in healthcare - one of the key focus areas of the SIF's work - and joins the ranks of similar maternity and child health programmes in Tamil Nadu (2009 - 2013) and Karnataka (2015 - present). It also marks another milestone in the 23-year friendship between the SIF and India to uplift lives and build enduring friendships between our people. About Singapore International Foundation The Singapore International Foundation makes friends for a better world. We build enduring relationships between Singaporeans and world communities and harness these friendships to enrich lives and effect positive change. Our work is anchored in the belief that cross-cultural interactions provide insights that strengthen understanding. These exchanges inspire action and enable collaborations for good. Our programmes bring people together to share ideas, skills and experiences in areas such as healthcare, education, the environment, arts and culture, as well as livelihood and business. We do this because we believe we all can, and should, do our part to build a better world, one we envision as peaceful, inclusive and offering opportunities for all. Find out more at http://www.sif.org.sg About Temasek Foundation International Temasek Foundation International is a Singapore-based non-profit philanthropic organisation that funds and supports programmes, which aim to build capabilities with programme partners in Asia and beyond. These programmes enable human and social capital development, contributing towards a more vibrant and connected global community, with positive networks of cooperation. The programmes also aim to enhance capabilities in the areas of healthcare, education, public administration, urban management and disaster-response. Temasek Foundation International is a member of the Temasek family of foundations. For more information on Temasek Foundation International, visit: http://www.temasekfoundation-international.org.sg About Singapore Health Services (SingHealth) The SingHealth Duke-NUS Academic Medical Centre draws on the collective strengths of SingHealth and Duke-NUS Medical School to drive the transformation of healthcare and provide affordable, accessible, quality healthcare. With over 40 clinical specialties, a network of acute hospitals, national specialty centres, polyclinics and community hospitals, it delivers comprehensive, multi-disciplinary and integrated care. In 2018, the Sengkang General Hospital and Sengkang Community Hospital will be completed to serve the community in the north-east of Singapore. To enhance community care, the new Outram Community Hospital on SGH Campus will be completed in 2020. For more information, please visit: http://www.singhealth.com.sg Members of the SingHealth group: Hospitals (Tertiary Specialty Care): Singapore General Hospital, Changi General Hospital, KK Women's and Children's Hospital, Sengkang General Hospital (expected completion: 2018) National Specialty Centres (Tertiary Specialty Care): National Cancer Centre Singapore, National Dental Centre Singapore, National Heart Centre Singapore, National Neuroscience Institute, and Singapore National Eye Centre SingHealth Polyclinics (Primary Care): Bedok, Bukit Merah, Marine Parade, Outram, Pasir Ris, Punggol, Sengkang, and Tampines SingHealth Community Hospitals (Intermediate and Long-term Care): Bright Vision Hospital, Sengkang Community Hospital (expected completion: 2018), Outram Community Hospital (expected completion: 2020) About KK Women's and Children's Hospital KK Women's and Children's Hospital (KKH) is a recognised leader and Singapore's largest tertiary referral centre for Obstetrics, Gynaecology, Paediatrics and Neonatology. Founded in 1858, the 160-year-old academic medical institution leads in patient-centred management of high risk conditions in women and children. More than 500 specialists adopt a compassionate, multi-disciplinary and holistic approach to treatment, and harness medical innovations and technology to deliver the best medical care possible. Accredited as an Academic Medical Centre, KKH is a major teaching hospital for all three medical schools in Singapore, Duke-NUS Medical School, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine and Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine. The 830-bed hospital also runs the largest specialist training programme for Obstetrics and Gynaecology and Paediatrics in the country. Both programmes are accredited by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education International (ACGME-I), and are highly rated for the high quality of clinical teaching and the commitment to translational research. For more information, please visit: http://www.kkh.com.sg Media Contact: Prakruti Jani [email protected] +91-9867868976 GolinOpinion SOURCE Singapore International Foundation (SIF) MUMBAI, February 23, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Vector Consulting Group, the largest and fastest growing management consulting company in the space of Theory of Constraints (TOC) in India, has recruited from premier institutes like XLRI, IIMs and ISB in the recently concluded placement season for the financial year 2018. The company has recruited a total of 10 candidates from the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad (IIMA), Indian Institute of Management Calcutta (IIMC), Xavier School of Management (XLRI) and Indian School of Business (ISB) campuses. Mr. Satyashri Mohanty, Founding Director, Vector Consulting Group, said, "The purpose of the drive was to attract fresh talents for the organization with the skills to meet today's challenges. We believe in creating and offering the best opportunities for the next generations to make an impact whilst working on exciting projects." About Vector Consulting Group Vector Consulting Group is the leading management consulting firm in the space of Theory of Constraints (TOC) consulting in India. It engages with organizations to help them gain market share by building unique supply chain capabilities that provide a competitive edge in the market. Vector Consulting Group is engaged with India's most renowned industrial houses such as Tata, Godrej, Bajaj Electricals, Cummins Group, Raymond, and Kirloskar Oil Engines, etc. For more information, visit our website - https://www.vectorconsulting.in/ Media Contact: Chitra Krishnan [email protected] +91-22-62308806 Vector Management Consulting Pvt. Ltd SOURCE Vector Management Consulting Pvt Ltd The Baccarat Hotel is owned by Sunshine Insurance Group, a comprehensive insurance financial group based in China that ranks among the country's most successful insurance and investment firms. Sunshine Insurance Group purchased the property from Starwood Capital Group in 2015. "When we created Baccarat Hotel New York we sought to reimagine the elegance and perfection of the legendary French crystal maker into a luxury lifestyle hospitality brand," said Barry Sternlicht, Chairman and CEO of Starwood Capital Group, Baccarat Hotel New York parent company. "We are thrilled to receive the Forbes Travel Guide Five-Star rating, its most prestigious and highest honor. It is a tribute to our team's hard work and dedication, providing our guests with an unparalleled level of luxury." About Baccarat Hotel New York: Baccarat Hotel New York is the first hotel and global flagship for the 254-year-old Baccarat crystal brand. Across the street from the Museum of Modern Art and steps from Fifth Avenue's legendary shopping, the 114 guest rooms & suites designed by Paris-based, luxury design team Gilles & Boissier delight the senses with lavish finishes and artisanal attention to detail. Amenities include stunning salon-style spaces where guests enjoy breakfast, cocktails, afternoon tea and fare; a beautiful barrel-vaulted bar featuring Baccarat crystal stemware; Spa de La Mer, the first of its kind in the world, and a 55-foot marble swimming pool reminiscent of La Cote d'Azur. For more information, visit www.baccarathotels.com. About SH Group: SH Group, an affiliate of Starwood Capital Group, is a global hotel brand management company that provides Starwood with significant proprietary investment opportunities and maximizes returns on hotel investments in the firm's dedicated hotel funds. SH Group owns the environmentally-focused 1 Hotels & Resorts brand and holds the Baccarat Hotel license, as well as other potential future hotel brands. Under the direction of President, Arash Azarbarzin, SH Group plans to continually expand, which will include bringing 1 Hotels to Los Angeles, Cabo and Haitang Bay. Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/645326/SH_Group_Baccarat_Hotel_New_York_Grand_Salon.jpg Related Links http://www.baccarathotels.com SOURCE SH Group INDIANAPOLIS, February 23, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Eli Lilly and Company (NYSE / Euronext Paris / SIX: LLY) today informs its shareholders that it is holding the 2018 Annual General Meeting of stockholders of Lilly on May 7, 2018 at 11 a.m. EDT at Eli Lilly and Company headquarters. The close of business on March 12, 2018 was the record date for determining the registered shareholders entitled to attend, vote or grant proxies to vote at the meeting or any adjournments or postponements of the meeting. Lilly makes available free of charge on its website, its Annual Report on Form 10-K, Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q, Current Reports on Form 8-K, reports filed pursuant to Section 16 of the U.S. Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and amendments to those reports filed with or furnished to the SEC as soon as reasonably practicable after Lilly electronically files these documents with, or furnishes them to, the SEC. These documents are posted on Lilly's website at www.lilly.com - under "Investors." The SEC maintains a website that contains reports, proxy statements and other information regarding issuers that file electronically with the SEC. These materials may be obtained electronically by accessing the SEC's home page at www.sec.gov. To obtain copies of Lilly's preliminary proxy statement for its 2018 Annual General Meeting, and the necessary documents to vote your shares, please consult Lilly's website at www.lilly.com Eli Lilly and Company Investor Relations Lilly Corporate Center Indianapolis, Indiana 46285, U.S.A. This is a disclosure announcement from PR Newswire. SOURCE Eli Lilly and Company If you were looking for the Charlestown Democratic Town Committee website and ended up here, try this Got news tips, gossip, suggestions, complaints?E-mail us: progressivecharlestown@gmail.com We strive to avoid errors in our articles. Our correction policy can be found here Agartala, Feb 19 : Over 92 per cent of Tripura's 2,536,589 voters cast their votes in Sunday's peaceful elections in 59 of the 60 Assembly seats, setting a new record in the electoral history of India, an official said here on Monday. In the 2013 and 2008 Assembly polls, Tripura registered 92 per cent and 91 per cent voting respectively. "The final vote tally is around 90 per cent (89.8) but taking into account the postal ballots, the total percentage is a little over 92 per cent," an Election Department official said. He said around 50,000 polling and security personnel on election duty cast their votes through postal ballot. The official said a huge number of voters were still queued up at 10 p.m. on Sunday at around 100 of the 3,174 polling stations set up across the state. "At the Malay Sardar Para polling station in Kalyanpur constituency in western Tripura's Khowai district, people cast their ballots till 12.45 a.m.," the official added. He said had scores of VVPATs (Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trails) and EVMs (Electronic Voting Machines) not faced technical hitches, the polling percentage would have been more. Chief Electoral Officer Sriram Taranikanti late Sunday night said that 191 (6 per cent) VVPATs and 89 (5 per cent) EVMs malfunctioned across the state. Ruling Left Front convenor Bijan Dhar said EVMs faced technical glitches in around 520 polling stations and demanded a probe. "The Election Commission put up specially modified EVMs attached with VVPATs at all 3,174 polling stations. We replaced or rectified faulty EVMs-VVPATs and voting resumed in those polling stations afterwards," the Election Department official added. A total of 292 candidates, including 23 women and many independents, are in the fray. Counting of votes will take place on March 3. Balloting was held in 59 of the 60 Assembly constituencies. Polling was deferred to March 12 in Charilam (Reserved-Tribal) seat due to the death of sitting MLA and Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) candidate Ramendra Narayan Debbarma. Washington, Feb 21 : An attorney accused of masking abuses by the former president of Ukraine in cooperation with the former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, pleaded guilty on Tuesday of lying to the special counsel investigating Russian election interference. Attorney Alex Van Der Zwaan pleaded guilty of lying to the FBI about the contacts he had with members of the electoral campaign of the US President Donald Trump, about a report he prepared on former Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko. Van Der Zwaan, 33, of Dutch nationality, appeared before Judge Amy Berman Jackson in the US District Court for the District of Columbia and pleaded guilty to the only charge presented against him by special counsel Robert Mueller, Efe reported. The defendant admitted lying to the FBI about his contacts with Rick Gates, who was the "number two" in the Trump campaign, and who worked together with Trump's former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, on behalf of former Ukrainian President Victor Yanukovych, who had ties to Russia and was the political rival of Tymoshenko. According to Mueller, the defendant prepared for the Ukrainian Justice Ministry in 2012 under the Yanukovych government, a report on the "legitimacy" of the legal cases against Tymoshenko, who was sentenced in 2011 to seven years in prison for abuse of power and corruption, though she was released in February 2014. The document was prepared to deal with the serious concerns of Western governments, includng the US, about Tymoshenko's trial, which she has always called a case of political persecution. According to the court document, Van Der Zwaan "willfully and knowingly make materially false, fictitious, and fraudulent statements," both to the FBI and to the office of special counsel Mueller, when he was interrogated on November 3, 2017 about his contacts with Gates about the Tymoshenko report. He is accused of one crime, lying to the FBI, which carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison. Since May 2018, Robert Mueller as special counsel has investigated possible ties between members of the Trump presidential campaign and the Russian government, which US intelligence agencies accuse of interfering with the 2016 US elections. Up to now, Mueller has accused 13 Russians and three Russian companies of meddling in the 2016 elections. He has also filed charges against individuals with ties to the current US president: Gates, Manafort, former security adviser Michael Flynn, and another former adviser, George Papadopoulos, who worked for the magnate during the elections. United Nations, Feb 21 : UN employees have no immunity in cases involving crimes including sexual abuse, according to UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres' spokesperson Stephane Dujarric. His remarks came after a contractor for the UN Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA) in Bihar, accused the organisation's senior staff in India of "harassment". "Sexual abuse is a crime and immunity is not there to protect people who commit crimes," the UN chief's spokesperson said on Tuesday when asked about the status of UNFPA staff in India against whom allegations were made. "The vast majority of UN staff have functional immunity ... to cover what they do for work," Dujarric said, clarifying their protected status. "If you commit a crime, that is, by definition, not part of your function and, therefore, not covered by immunity." Prashanti Tiwari, a contractor for UNFPA, had complained to Indian External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj about the alleged harassment by UNFPA staff and asked for her intervention to have their legal immunity waived. Tiwari had accused a senior staff member of UNFPA of "harassing" her and also said that two other UNFPA staffers subjected her to "mental and verbal abuse". Attempt to get a response from UNFPA in New Delhi was not successful. On being asked about the issue, Nadeem Noor, head of UNFPA in Bihar, told IANS that as he was on leave for last 15 days due to which he was not aware of any such development. "We will look into the report if there is any such issue," he said. Tiwari is the architect of Bandhan Tod -- a campaign against the rampant social evil of child marriage in Bihar to save the future of young girls. She is also the manager of Gender Alliance, a collective of over 270 charities which attracted international attention on empowerment of young girls through the Bandhan Tod strategy. She wrote in her letter to Sushma Swaraj that she was harassed after she provided "evidence" of "religious intolerance" and "sexual harassment" during a deposition before a UNFPA human resources mission last year, reports said. Tiwari reportedly asserted that it was difficult to take legal action because UN officials enjoyed legal immunity. "Her claims will, like any others, be looked into according to UNFPA policies and procedures," said the UN chief's spokesperson. Dujarric declined to get into the specifics of the case as he said he did not have enough details about it. UNFPA have an online "Investigation Hotline" for reporting cases of harassment, sexual harassment or abuse of authority, apart from reporting about fraud, or embezzlement. (Arul Louis can be reached at arul.l@ians.in) Ahmedabad, Feb 21 : A special CBI court here on Wednesday discharged former Gujarat DGP incharge P.P. Pandey, a key accused in the 2004 Ishrat Jahan shootout case. Allowing Pandey's discharge application, court presiding officer J.K. Pandya said that the investigating agency had not been able to provide evidence against the police officer relating to kidnapping and murder of Ishrat Jahan and three others on the city outskirts in 2004. With this development, Pandey has become the first accused to be discharged in the case. The court ruled that evidence given by witnesses in the case was contradictory and that they gave different versions to different investigating agencies. The court pointed out that according to Section 197 of the Criminal Procedure Code (CrPC), in case of a government servant, the Investigating Officer was required to take permission from the state to prosecute him and file the charge sheet. This was not the case with Pandey, it added. The Ahmedabad Police Crime Branch officials had gunned down 19-year-old college student Ishrat Jahan hailing from Mumbra in Maharashtra, her friend Javed Sheikh alias Pranesh, Zeeshan Johar and Amzad Rana in an alleged shootout on June 15, 2004, on Ahmedabad's outskirts, claiming they had come to carry out terror activities in the state, including an attack on then Chief Minister Narendra Modi. Pandey was head of the Crime Branch at that time. The CBI, that investigated the case, had in its first charge sheet filed in 2013, accused seven police and Indian Police Service officials, including Pandey, ADG D.G. Vanzara and G.L. Singhal, of kidnapping, murder and conspiracy. The CBI had also named four Intelligence Bureau officials, including Special Director Rajinder Kumar and officer M.S. Sinha, in its supplementary charge sheet, which still awaits the Centre's sanction. Pandey spent 19 months in jail till February 2015. He was later reinstated as Additional Director General of Police (Law and Order) and later as DGP in-charge of the state. He, however, was forced to resign as head of the state police in April 2017 after his promotion was challenged in the Supreme Court by former top cop Julio F. Ribeiro. Fighting the case, Pandey claimed that none of the 105 witnesses examined by the court had named him and that he had no direct or indirect involvement in the case. "At times, it appears that there is a delay in delivery of justice in our country but eventually the truth does come out. This is good for Gujarat Police... it also shows that the courts are neutral and can take firm decisions," Pandey told reporters after the judgment. Shamshad Pathan, the lawyer representing the next of kin of those killed in the shootout, said: "Definitely this is a disappointing verdict. The victims' side will surely challenge the decision in a higher court." He said: "He (Pandey) has the main role in the conspiracy and the court has not taken (into consideration) evidences before it on the basis of which this verdict can be challenged." United Nations, Feb 22 : The immunity against prosecution for the UN Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA) staff accused of harassment in India can only be lifted by Secretary-General Antonio Guterres as the allegations do not involve sexual abuse, his Spokesperson Stephane Dujarric clarified on Wednesday. Explaining his statement on Tuesday that UN employees have no immunity in cases involving crimes including sexual abuse, Dujarric said he had "stated the general UN principle about the immunity of its staff around the world". Regarding the allegations against the UNFPA staff, he said: "What is important to remember (is that) this case does not involve allegations of sexual abuse, sexual harassment. It is different issue. So it does not involve issues we discussed yesterday." In this particular case, Dujarric said: "The UNFPA India has already responded to the Ministry of External Affairs that the immunity of UN staff can be waived only by the UN Secretary-General." His remarks on Tuesday were a response to a question about a contractor for the UNFPA in Bihar accusing the organisation's senior staff in India of "harassment". UN staff charged with crimes and sexual abuse do not have UN immunity, Dujarric had said. "Sexual abuse is a crime and immunity is not there to protect people who commit crimes. The allegations against the UNFPA staff do not involve sexual abuse but are only of "harassment" and "mental and verbal abuse", which may not of themselves be considered criminal offences. Prashanti Tiwary, a contractor for UNFPA, had complained to External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj about the alleged harassment by UNFPA staff and asked for her intervention to have their legal immunity waived so she could sue them. Tiwary had accused a senior staff member of the UNFPA of "harassing" her and also said that two other UNFPA staffers subjected her to "mental and verbal abuse", according to media reports. "The UNFPA has also informed the Ministry that, although the claimant has never been employed by the UNFPA, she is welcome to make her claim of misconduct to the the UNFPA Office of Audit and Investigation, which will investigate the matter," Dujarric said. "The facilities for filing claims with the office are publicly available on the UNFPA website." Attempts to get a response from the UNFPA in New Delhi was not successful. But Nadeem Noor, the head of UNFPA in Bihar, told IANS on Wednesday that he had been on leave for last 15 days and, therefore, was not aware of any such development. "We will look into the report if there is any such issue," he said. Tiwary wrote in her letter to Swaraj that she was harassed after she provided "evidence" of "religious intolerance" and "sexual harassment" during a deposition before a UNFPA human resource mission in 2017, reports said. Tiwary is the architect of Bandhan Tod -- a campaign against child marriage in Bihar to save the future of young girls. She is also the manager of Gender Alliance, a collective of over 270 charities which attracted international attention for its efforts to empower young girls through the Bandhan Tod strategy. (Arul Louis can be reached at arul.l@ians.in) Manila, Feb 22 : President Rodrigo Duterte on Thursday accused the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of funding a local news website critical of the Philippines government, after the US intelligence agency said he posed a threat to democracy in Asia. In a televised press conference from Iloilo -- a city located 460 km south of Manila -- Duterte said Philippines-based Rappler was "sponsored" by the CIA as "it takes every chance to undermine" his administration in order to destabilize it. "That is the history of America's CIA. They take care of the political dissenters because eventually they will choose a candidate that they can manipulate like this," the leader said. Duterte's remarks came days after an intelligence report by the US suggested Duterte was a "threat to democracy" in Asia and compared him to autocratic heads of state in the region, including Cambodia's Hun Sen. The document referred mainly to Duterte's "war on drugs", which has led to over 7,000 deaths in the Philippines, according to estimates, as well as other controversial proposals of the President, Efe news reported. According to the report, "Duterte has suggested that he could suspend the Constitution, declare a "revolutionary government", and impose nationwide martial law". Duterte did not offer further details or proof to back his accusations against the site. In mid-January, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) revoked Rappler's license to operate, which international organisations, including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, described as an attempt by the government to silence critical voices. Although SEC's decision is not final and Rappler continues to operate legally, Duterte this week banned Rappler reporters from the presidential palace, a move that has sparked fresh condemnation from local press unions and international organisations. Dubai, Feb 22 : The United Arab Emirates (UAE) expressed on Thursday its "deep concern" over the escalating violence and the worsening humanitarian situation in the eastern region of Ghouta in Syria. "The UAE calls for an immediate ceasefire to protect the safety of the civilians," said the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation in a statement. "Syria has suffered enough through severe conflict and the systematic targeting of civilians and cannot bear more bloodshed," it said. The Gulf Arab state also stressed the need to allow access for humanitarian aid to reach the wounded to offer medical treatment and food. The UAE reiterated that the only solution to the Syrian crisis was the Geneva-based political solution and appealed to all parties to activate this political process. It also expressed its deep concern over foreign interference on the ground, "which violates Syrian sovereignty and aggravates the crisis", renewing its calls for "an end to the bloodshed that has torn the country, its social fabric and institutions and threatening its unity". On Sunday, the Syrian forces started the prelude to a massive ground offensive with heavy fire cover and airstrikes, while the rebels started bombing the capital with mortar shells, almost paralysing life in eastern neighbourhoods close to Eastern Ghouta. The military campaign aims to end the presence of the rebels in eastern Ghouta, pro-government media outlets said, but it is no easy task as the rebels have been entrenched there for years. Athens, Feb 23 : The Greek Finance Ministry has welcomed the new upgrade of Greece's credit rating by Moody's as one more sign that Greek economy is recovering from the debt crisis. The credit ratings agency upgraded Greece's rating by two notches late on Wednesday to B3 from Caa2, noting that the country is heading towards a successful completion of its third bailout this summer and return to international markets. The new upgrade which comes after similar upgrades by other ratings agencies lately show that there are positive expectations for the Greek economy in following months and years, commented the Finance Ministry in a statement on Thursday, Xinhua news agency reported. "The government continues to work steadily and intensively, committed to the country's final exit from the programme in August 2018," the ministry said. Brasilia, Feb 23 : Brazilian Health Minister Ricardo Barros has proposed to vaccinate the entire country against yellow fever, after the disease emerged in new areas. The recommendation will now be discussed with international organisations, such as the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO). At the start of February, vaccination efforts began in states of Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Bahia, seeking to immunize 19.7 million people against yellow fever, for which cases have been rising since last year, Xinhua news agency reported. According to Barros on Thursday, if the government approves the idea, separate programs will take place in each state of the country. Barros added that the vaccination campaign should be rolled out gradually, according to the capacity of each state. Certain northeastern and southern regions of the country have not seen campaigns so far, as there have been no outbreaks of yellow fever there. Thirty four million people need to be vaccinated there, with 23 million in the northeast and 11 million in the south of the country. A plant belonging to Libbs Farmaceutica in Sao Paulo is currently about to begin production of 4 million doses of vaccine a month. From July 1, 2017 to February 20, 2018, Brazil has confirmed 545 cases of yellow fever, with 164 deaths. A further 1,773 suspected cases have been noted, with 685 having been eliminated and 422 still under investigation. Berlin, Feb 23 : German Chancellor Angela Merkel has made a renewed pledge for a more even redistribution of refugees across the European Union (EU). The Chancellor on Thursday said she wanted to see a European asylum system that was "stable and finally reflected principles of solidarity, especially with regards to the fair distribution of refugees in the EU", Xinhua news agency reported. Merkel made the comments during a speech in the German Federal Parliament (Bundestag), before she is scheduled to attend a special EU summit in Brussels. The veteran stateswoman suggested linking the transfer of EU subsidies to economically-weaker regions should be based on their engagement in EU asylum policy, so as to prevent free-riding issues. "When we redistribute the money from the structural funds, we need to make sure that the criteria for obtaining such aid include the engagement of many regional and communal governments in accepting and integrating migrants," she argued. EU interior ministers are trying to reach a final agreement on the shape of a "Dublin IV" system. Critics of the current rules have repeatedly highlighted that EU asylum policy puts member states at the Schengen Area's external borders at a disadvantage. Such countries include Italy and Greece, as they are legally responsible for the bulk of refugees. Following the temporary collapse of "Dublin III" in 2015, more than one million asylum seekers arrived in Germany. Together with Austria and Sweden, Germany has thus found itself in a situation in which it must shoulder a disproportionate share of the financial and logistical burden of the "refugee crisis". In order to ensure greater cohesion and effectiveness in EU asylum and immigration policy in the future, Merkel also demanded an expansion of joint efforts to secure the external border of the Schengen Area. The Chancellor emphasised that a "strong" and "confident" Europe would be an overriding objective for a prospective new "grand coalition" between Merkel's CDU/CSU conservative alliance and the Social Democrats (SPD). "Europe has never been more prominent in a coalition agreement," she noted. Merkel warned that Europe faced significant political and economic challenges which it could only overcome through close cooperation. She highlighted the impending exit of Britain from the bloc in 2019 as one such change. New York, Feb 23 : The US states of Connecticut, New York, New Jersey and Rhode Island have formed a coalition to combat gun violence in the wake of the Florida high school massacre last week. The coalition, "States for Gun Safety", was launched here on Thursday, reports Xinhua news agency. "Rather than wait for the federal government to come to its senses and pass responsible gun safety legislation, New York is joining with New Jersey, Connecticut and Rhode Island to take matters into our own hands," New York Governor Andrew M. Cuomo said. Cuomo and his Democratic counterparts -- Connecticut's Dan Malloy, New Jersey's Phil Murphy and Rhode Island's Gina Raimondo -- said the coalition was necessary because of the inability of the federal government and Congress to effectively deal with the issue of gun violence. "Not only will this ground-breaking partnership take new steps to prevent illegal guns from crossing state lines, but by forming the nation's first Regional Gun Violence Research Consortium, we will be able to better inform policymakers nationwide on how to keep their communities safe," Cuomo said. The coalition will create a cross-state task force of law enforcement officials that will trace and intercept illegal guns, form a Regional Gun Violence Research Consortium and step up intelligence and information sharing among the states, according to the release. Building on these efforts, the group will also call on the federal government to swiftly enact universal background checks, an assault weapons ban and a federal waiting period between the purchase and delivery of guns. According to Everytown for Gun Safety, a US non-profit organisation advocating gun control, the Florida attack has been the 18th school shooting in 2018. Students from across the country are rising up against gun violence in the aftermath of the Florida shooting where Nikolas Cruz, 19, opened fire at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, and killed 17 people. From California to Florida, teenagers walked out of classes, stopped traffic and made speeches calling for government officials and lawmakers to take actions to ensure school safety. London, Feb 23 : Justin Forsyth has resigned as Deputy Executive Director of Unicef following accusations of inappropriate behaviour toward female staff while he was Chief Executive of Save the Children. He announced on Thursday that he was tendering his resignation to Unicef with a heavy heart, reports the Guardian. Forsyth said he was not resigning because of the mistakes he had made while at the charity, but because of attempts to damage aid organisations and the humanitarian sector. "I want to make clear I am not resigning from Unicef because of the mistakes I made at Save the Children. They were dealt with through a proper process many years ago. I apologised unreservedly at the time and face to face. I apologise again," Forsyth wrote. "There is no doubt in my mind that some of the coverage around me is not just to (rightly) hold me to account, but also to attempt to do serious damage to our cause and the case for aid. I am resigning because of the danger of damaging both Unicef and Save the Children and our wider cause. Two organisations I truly love and cherish. I can't let this happen." It emerged this week that Forsyth was accused of sending inappropriate texts and making comments to female staff about their appearance on separate occasions in 2011 and 2015 while he was the head of Save the Children. After the allegations came to light, the former Labour party special adviser said he had issued an unreserved apology to the women involved at the time, and considered the matter closed. Unicef said it had accepted Forsyth's resignation and thanked him for his work over the past two years, the Guardian reported. Save the Children apologised on Tuesday to female employees who had previously complained about Forsyth's behaviour, admitting the allegations were not properly dealt with at the time. After inquiries into both allegations of inappropriate behaviour toward female staff, which were held in conjunction with an independent trustee, Forsyth apologised to the women concerned. Forsyth's resignation came after Brendan Cox, the widower of the murdered Labour MP Jo Cox, resigned from roles at charities he helped to set up in his wife's memory following sexual harassment allegations while working at Save the Children. After stepping down from his posts at More in Common and the Jo Cox Foundation, Cox said he made mistakes while working for Save the Children, and had behaved in a way that caused some women hurt and offence. Cox and Forsyth worked together at 10 Downing Street under Gordon Brown before they both joined Save the Children. Bhubaneswar, Feb 23 : Odisha Labour Minister Susanta Singh's brother and three of his associates were attacked by a group of unidentified men in Bargarh district, police said on Friday. The attack took place in Banabira village late on Thursday, the police said. They suspect that the attack on the Minister's brother and others might be related to the Bijepur assembly bypoll scheduled on February 24. Banabira village is in Bhatli assembly constituency, represented by Susanta Singh. It is 20 km from Bijepur. Police said Subrat Singh was on his way with the other persons when unidentified miscreants intercepted their four-wheeler and attacked them and fled the spot. The injured were initially taken to community health centre at Sohela and later shifted to VSS Institute of Medical Sciences and Research, Sambalpur. Biju Janata Dal spokesperson Pratap Keshari Deb alleged that the Bharatiya Janata Party orchestrated the attack on Singh as they fear losing the Bijepur bypoll. The BJP has rubbished the allegations. "BJP doesn't believe in violence. The ruling party's allegations are baseless and politically motivated," said BJP state General Secretary Bhrugu Baxipatra. Manila, Feb 23 : Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has said that he would not allow Philippine troops to participate in any armed conflicts involving the US. In a speech in Iloilo province late Thursday, Duterte said that he does not want the Philippines to be dragged into a war that has nothing to do with Manila, reports Xinhua news agency. "This time I will tell them, no more, I will not allow the deployment of (troops of my country)," Duterte said, adding that most of the US-led wars have nothing to do with the country's security. Duterte recalled the Iraq war. "I don't know exactly how many Philippine troops were deployed in that conflict. But as far as I can remember, the invasion was done and it turned out there was no weapons of mass destruction." The President also mentioned other wars that involved the United States. The Philippines is a treaty ally of the US. However, their relations have been strained in recent years. In a report issued this month, US intelligence community has tagged Duterte as a threat to democracy and human rights in Southeast Asia. London, Feb 23 : An LED waterfall, a digital lake, an indoor "mountain" and a "DreamSpace" for teaching the next generation about technology: This is what Microsoft's new office "One Microsoft Place" in Dublin houses. Now officially open, the 34,000 square metre campus has cost the company 1$165 million and would house nearly 2,000 staff -- with data scientists, AI bot builders and mixed reality game developers sitting alongside sales and marketing staff -- in Leopardstown, Irishtimes reported late on Thursday. It was officially opened by the Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, Peggy Johnson, Microsoft Executive Vice President, Cathriona Hallahan, Managing Director of Microsoft Ireland and IDA Ireland Chief Executive Martin Shanahan. "The building is the physical manifestation of the cultural transformation we've been going through. It's about pulling together the skills and talent and passion of staff to enable the mission of Microsoft," Hallahan was quoted as saying. The campus has 3,000 seats spread across open-plan floors and smaller private areas where meetings or phone calls can be conducted. The building bears a lot of Dublin's influence -- the digital lake and "mountain" represent the bay and hills that border the building. Each area is decorated differently, intended to reflect the 71 nationalities that are working in the Dublin office. The "neighbourhoods" created by the different areas are intended to encourage a new way of working for Microsoft employees. There are no official offices; executives sit in the same space as interns. It also has an on-site gym -- where even the weights bear Microsoft Windows logos, treatment rooms for massages, a studio where yoga classes are run alongside mindfulness sessions, a music room and a podcast room. Microsoft does not offer free meals but subsidises the food. It has its own pizza kitchen, own coffee blend roasted on site and an in-house bakery. The rainwater collected from the roof is used throughout the building, while spices and other food items are also grown here. "DreamSpace" is the heart of the campus, an innovation and education hub that aims to host 100,000 primary and transition year students over the next four years and the tech giant intends to open it to the public in April. Mumbai, Feb 23 : Actor Arjun Kapoor has welcomed his sister-in-law Antara Motiwala to the family. He says he will make sure that her husband and his brother Mohit Marwah will keep her happy. Mohit got married to Motiwala in UAE earlier this week. "Welcome to the family Antara Motiwala! First, you were my friend then stylist and now you are officially part of La Familia! Mohit Marwah will make sure you stay smiling just like in this picture and you can always rely on me to make sure he makes sure," Arjun captioned an image from the wedding. The grand wedding was attended by Bollywood celebrities like Sonam Kapoor, Sanjay Kapoor, Sridevi, Karan Johar and Abhishek Bachchan. On the work front, Arjun will next be seen with actress Parineeti Chopra in the film "Namastey England". Panaji, Feb 23 : With an aim to creating a pool of highly-skilled workforce in the country, Google on Friday announced a three-day 'Developer Students Club' (DSC) summit in Goa. The summit -- from February 23 to 25 -- is aimed at giving the Indian student community a head-start on Machine Learning (ML), Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Mobile and Web Development technologies. "To broaden access to world-class technology curricula for students, we are delighted to launch the 'Developer Students Club' summit that would make it easy for students and developers to gain the skills they need to be successful in the changing technology landscape," William Florance, Developer Products Group and Skilling Lead, Google, said in a statement. The inaugural batch will see 200 student ambassadors from 98 cities across 170 colleges in India attend the three-day event. The students would learn about various emerging technologies through a series of engaging sessions from experts from Google and industry and hands-on one-to-one mentoring activities. The summit will also have a 'Design Thinking' workshop by university innovation fellows from across the country. Mumbai, Feb 23 : Superstar Salman Khan, who is busy shooting for his upcoming film "Race 3", says he cant afford the luxury of being depressed or emotional. Apart from giving a number of blockbusters, Salman is also known for launching new faces in the film industry and doing charity work through his 'Being Human Foundation'. What makes him so selfless and keeps him going? "When I was 15-16 (years old), I started partying and stuff like that because that's the age when everyone parties. When I was in college, I used to assist in films and then I started working as a model too," Salman said at the TiE Global Summit (TGS) 2018 here on Thursday. Going down memory lane, he said: "One day, Mr. Kailash Surendranath (advertising filmmaker) made me face the camera for the first time. It was for his Campa Cola advertisement, so, he used to take me out for parties." "One day, he kept his arm around me and said 'Salman, I don't think you should waste your time by spending your father's money'. Though he said that jokingly, I didn't take that as a joke. Straight after that, I started working and till today, I don't take holidays." If he is not doing films or not feeling well then also he keeps himself busy. "I see a lot of people going on vacations, but I cannot afford that luxury of taking a vacation. I see a lot of people getting depressed and emotional, but I can't afford that luxury of being depressed or sad or emotional because no matter what I am going through, it works against me," he said. The "Tiger Zinda Hai" star said an actor's life does not have any "sub-titles" to show what he is going through at any stage of his life. "My profession is such that I have to look good, dress up well, do stylised action sequences and romance. My articles come on affairs, me working with beautiful heroines and then suddenly a court date comes up... people see me on 'Bigg Boss' in which I am laughing and joking," said the reality show's host. "So, people think that he doesn't give a damn about things. That is the most difficult part about our journey as actors. No matter what you are going through at your home or your personal life, you can't have sub-titles there. You have to be that character, no matter what you are going through, you have to forget that and you have to focus on your craft," he added. Ranchi, Feb 23 : Opposition parties in Jharkhand on Friday demanded the arrest of a BJP legislator on the charge of thrashing a land acquisition official over compensation. Bharatiya Janata Party legislator Sadhu Charan Mahto had on Thursday allegedly thrashed Saraikela Land Acquisition Officer Deepu Kumar at Raghunathpur village in Neemdih block, where compensation was being distributed for land acquisition for the National Highway-32 project. The legislator was said to have entered into an altercation with the officer and later manhandled him and even broke the windowpanes of his vehicle. The district administration was instructed by the state government to speed up distribution of compensation while the MLA was accused of opposing it. He had earlier asked the officer not to distribute the compensation. "The BJP government in Jharkhand, like what happened in Delhi, should immediately arrest the legislator. We condemn the BJP legislator's action in creating hurdles in official work and beating the official," Congress leader Kishore Sahdeo told IANS. The main opposition party, Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM), also condemned the incident and demanded action against the legislator. Jharkhand Administrative Service Association President Daniyal Kundulana said: "We condemn the incident and will chalk out our strategy to protest at our meeting." Ghaziabad, Feb 23 : First, the Brahmin Mahasabha took objection to Baba Ramdev's show on Discovery JEET, which it said spoke against the Brahmins, portraying them in poor light. The Mahasabha asked for criminal action against the show "Swami Ramdev: Ek Sangharsh". Then the Ghaziabad unit of All India Yadava Mahasabha got into the action and demanded action against the Brahmin Mahasabha for protesting against Ramdev. Produced by Ajay Devgn FFilms and Watergate Production, the Discovery JEET project is a scripted biopic series tracing Baba Ramdev's journey from a life of anonymity to a renowned yoga guru and business leader. K.P. Yadav, Vice President of UP Yadava Mahasabha, said the Brahmins had been "dividing the society since ages" and Ramdev had said the right things about Brahmins' role. He praised the yoga guru for having "courage to expose" Brahmins in the show that premiered on February 12. The All India Yadava Mahasabha has summoned a meeting on February 25, to discuss the issue in detail. The Yadava Mahasabha, in turn, has asked for action against Brahmin Mahasabha. According to sources, the makers of the show have, meanwhile, asked for the security to be stepped up for them. Palakkad ( Kerala) : Palakkad ( Kerala) Feb 23 (IANS) The Kerala Police on Friday arrested two of the seven suspects in the killing of a "mentally unfit" tribal youth a day ago, Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan said. The 27-year-old Adivasi youth, who was said to be "not of sound mind", was beaten to death here by a lynch mob which had accused him of theft, according to the victim's mother. The turn of events on Thursday elicited strong response from across the state and country on Friday after a perpetrator of the beating posted a selfie taken just minutes before the crime. Highlighting the police action, Vijayan in his Facebook post said: "I have instructed the state DGP to speed up the probe and take strict action in the case." "This heinous act is a blot on Kerala's progressive society. But I want to assure you that strict action will be taken at the earliest against all the culprits to ensure that such crimes, especially against people from communities that were long marginalised, are not repeated. "Kerala as a whole should stay extremely vigilant to ensure that we continue to remain and progress as a caring, cosmopolitan society," added Vijayan. The Chief Minister's response was also prompted by a large number of twitter followers putting up messages like: "@CMOKerala... please take urgent action on this matter and bring the culprits in front of Justice." Speaking to the media here on Friday, Malli, mother of the slain youth Madhu, said: "It was yesterday (Thursday) evening that my son was beaten up by a group of people in the forest (near Attapadi-Agali) saying that he was a thief. "Then he was handed over to the police and soon he developed complications. He was taken to a hospital, where he died. He is not a thief, instead he was not of sound mind," said the grieving mother. The entire episode was shot on a mobile and posted on social media. Superstar Mammootty in his Facebook post said that none should address Madhu as a tribal. "I will say that people killed my brother, as if one thinks as a human, Madhu is either a son or an younger or elder brother. None should call anyone a thief, if he does it to eat, as poverty is the creation of society," said Mammootty. State BJP spokesperson M.S. Kumar told the media that the state government should announce an ex-gratia payment of Rs 2.5 million as compensation. "It's very strange that the concerned minister (Minister for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes A.K. Balan) who hails from the same district failed to turn up at the tribal village to pacify them," said Kumar. It was only after actor-director Joy Mathew had posted the visuals on social media that various political leaders, including Vijayan, condemned the incident, early on Friday. "This is some sort of a fascist Malayali psyche which has developed recently and has to be tackled. If the police wish to arrest me for sharing this video on social media, let them do that," said Mathew. The local tribal community are up in arms and have demanded that if the people behind the incident were not arrested, they would launch a protest and commenced the first round by staging a march in the locality. State Minister Balan told the media: "Those who did it claim that this youth was a thief, but that's their allegation. "The state government will act very strongly and none who have done this would be spared. A magisterial probe will also be launched," said Balan. State Police chief Loknath Behra said that he has handed over the case to Thrissur Inspector General of Police and "everyone who had done this would be brought to book, as people have no right to take law into their hands". Madhu's body has been taken for an autopsy to the Thrissur Medical College hospital and would then be brought to the village. New Delhi, Feb 23 : With Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau by his side, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday said there is no place for misuse of religion for political and divisive purposes, sending a clear message at a time Canada is perceived as having been soft on Khalistani separatists. "Terrorism and extremism are threats to our democratic and pluralistic societies," Modi told the media along with Trudeau following one-on-one and delegation-level talks between between the two countries here. "It is very important for us to come together to fight these forces," he said. "There should be no space for those who misuse religion for political purposes and divisive politics." Modi's candid remarks came during the last leg of Trudeau's week-long visit, which was marked by a certain cold attitude from New Delhi towards the visiting dignitary because of Canada's perceived support to Khalistani elements. In a major embarrassment to Trudeau, on Thursday his country's High Commission here had to rescind an invitation to a convicted Khalistani separatist, Jaspal Atwal, for a reception that was hosted in honour of Trudeau. After Trudeau's arrival on Saturday, it was only on Thursday evening that Modi tweeted his welcome message before greeting the visiting dignitary with a hug ahead of the ceremonial reception at Rashtrapati Bhavan on Friday. In his remarks, Trudeau avoided any reference to separatists or terrorism. "We share respect for democratic traditions and pluralism," he said adding the two leaders discussed ways to strengthen people-to-people ties between the two countries. Modi said the National Security Advisors (NSAs) of the two countries were giving finishing touches to the Framework for Cooperation and Countering Terrorism and Violent Extremism between the two countries. Modi said that during Friday's talks, both sides also discussed means to further deepen economic relations. "We have asked our negotiators to double their efforts to finalise the Bilateral Investment and Promotion Agreement and the Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement," he said. Bilateral trade between India and Canada stood at a C$8.02 billion (around $6 billion), which does not reflect the true potential. Following the talks, the two sides signed a joint declaration of intent for cooperation in the field of ICT and electronics, terms of reference for the India-Canada ministerial energy dialogue, and memorandums of understanding (MoUs) for cooperation in the areas of sports, intellectual property rights (IPRs), higher education, and science, technology and innovation. Stating that there are over 120,000 Indian students in Canada, Modi said that the renewal of the MoU on higher education would benefit students and teachers in both countries. He also called for increased exchange of skilled professionals and said that there are immense possibilities in the technology partnership. Describing Canada as an energy superpower, the Prime Minister said the North American country can help India meets its increasing energy needs. "Today we decided to expand our energy dialogue and chalk out the future of our energy partnership," he said. Stating that regional and global issues also came up for discussion, Modi said that the two sides assessed the situation in Afghanistan, the challenges of cross-border terrorism it faces, and the efforts being undertaken for a secure, prosperous and democratic Afghanistan. "We share similar views on marine transport and freedom of navigation in the Indo-Pacific region, the threat to the two Koreas from North Korea's proliferation efforts, and restoration of the freedom of democratic institutions in the Maldives," he stated. With Canada being home to around 1.2 million people of Indian origin, Modi said that people-to-people contacts formed an important foundation for the strategic partnership between the two countries. "We are committed to maintaining friendship and amity with the Indian community in Canada and seek their active participation in India's progress and development," he said. On his part, Trudeau said that both India and Canada share a set of values that make them natural allies. "As Canada looks to diversify its own economy and looks for new opportunities to do business beyond its boundaries, India is a natural partner and trusted friend for commercial cooperation," he said. The visit of Trudeau, who assumed office in November 2015, comes after Modi's visit to Canada in April that year, which was the first prime ministerial visit from India to that country in 42 years. New Delhi, Feb 23 : India and Canada on Friday pledged to combat terrorism in all its forms and manifestations while declaring that no country should allow its territory to be used for terrorist and violent extremist activities. The assertion by the two countries came in a joint statement issued after talks between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Canadian counterpart Justin Trudeau and assumes significance in the context of perceived softness on the part of Canada towards Khalistani separatists operating on its soil. "Recognising that terrorism, violent extremism and radicalisation to violence present acute challenges to global peace, stability and prosperity, the leaders resolved to combat terrorism and violent extremism in all their forms and manifestations," the joint statement said. "They called for bringing terrorists to justice and holding accountable state sponsors of terrorism, including cross-border terrorism. They further emphasised that no country should allow its territory to be used for terrorist and violent extremist activities." Modi and Trudeau also welcomed the agreement on a bilateral Framework for Cooperation on Countering Terrorism and Violent Extremism that was signed between the two countries. The Framework recognised the urgent imperative to disrupt recruitment, terrorist movements and the flow of foreign terrorist fighters, address the threat posed by cross-border and state-sponsored terrorism, stop sources of terrorist financing, dismantle terrorist infrastructure and prevent supply of arms to terrorists and counter violent extremism and radicalisation to violence. The two sides emphasised the need to deny operating space to terrorist and violent extremist groups. Under the Framework, both sides committed to further develop exchanges and facilitate effective cooperation in the fields of security, finance, justice, and law enforcement, including, where appropriate, at the operational level. It consists of institutionalised cooperation between the National Security Council Secretariat of India and the office of Canada's National Security and Intelligence Advisor, and regular exchanges and coordination between India and Canada, which will be guided by the joint National Security Advisors' Dialogue. The joint statement further said that to reaffirm the importance of lawful commerce and the freedom of navigation and over-flight throughout the Indo-Pacific region, in accordance with international law, including the rights and jurisdiction of states under UN Convention for Law of the Sea (Unclos), the two leaders supported bolstering regional connectivity through transparent development of infrastructure and use of responsible debt financing practices, while ensuring respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity, the rule of law and environment. Modi and Trudeau also expressed "strong concern" over the prevailing security situation in Afghanistan and the recent political developments in the Maldives and their implications for free society. On the economic side, both leaders agreed to realise the full potential of bilateral trade and investment and both sides will renew efforts to expand and diversify bilateral economic and commercial relations. "They will also intensify negotiations to finalise a Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement and a Bilateral Foreign Investment Promotion and Protection Agreement," the statement said. Modi and Trudeau also agreed to strengthen bilateral and international cooperation to address climate change and secure a clean energy future, and committed to promoting the implementation of the Paris Agreement. "The leaders welcomed the initiative to establish the (India-initiated) International Solar Alliance to promote renewable energy for sustainable development," the statement said. "They urged research institutions and industry in both countries to collaborate to promote greater use of solar technology." It stated that the two leaders "underscored the importance of accelerating the global transition to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy sources and acknowledged that renewable energy is a pathway to a low-carbon and more sustainable energy system". "Recognising the dynamic role of people-to-people ties in the India-Canada partnership, the leaders reaffirmed their commitment to address consular issues of mutual concern through discussion between the concerned officials," the statement said. "They welcomed the expansion of direct air connectivity between Indian and Canadian cities." Mumbai, Feb 23 : Filmmaker Rajkumar Hirani, who is busy shooting for a biopic on actor Sanjay Dutt, says fiction cant beat facts. Hirani attended a special screening of the documentary titled "Raising The Bar", hosted by filmmaker Onir and producer Mitu Bhowmick Lange in association with Australian Consulate General Mumbai on Thursday. Asked about the importance of making documentaries, Hirani said: "I feel why should we see only fiction? We should watch documentaries because they can be very interesting as well." "Earlier, they never used to get platforms but I think they should get a platform so that more and more people can come forward to make documentaries. I think documentaries are really engaging as they are real, and fiction can't beat facts." The "3 Idiots" director said documentary filmmakers make films that are close to their heart. "Documentary filmmakers choose subjects which they feel about, which they are affected by or which they have seen around them. So, I feel it's nice that people come to know about these things," he said. "People make fictional stories to entertain the audience but a documentary filmmaker makes documentary which is closer to his or her heart." Will he ever make a documentary? Hirani said: "I am really fond of it. I want to make it and I will definitely make it. I have many subjects to tell and when the time will be right, I will speak more about it." "Raising The Bar" is a poignant tale which follows awe-inspiring stories of six young individuals with Down syndrome from two different continents who all meet at the World Down Syndrome Congress in Chennai. The documentary aims to create awareness and emotionally engage the audience with the universal message of inclusion and diversity, celebrating the differences that make us all unique. Helmed by National Award-winning director Onir, "Raising The Bar" is a 70-minute documentary which has won several awards internationally. New Delhi, Feb 23 : A day after the Cellular Operators' Association of India (COAI) said it is likely to drag the telecom regulator to the court following its recent Telecom Tariff Order (TTO), Reliance Jio has sent a letter to the telecom body to publicly apologise within 48 hours for its "defamatory statements". "COAI and Rajan Mathews (Director General, COAI) are hereby called upon to issue a public apology and issue appropriate clarification expressly regretting their callous and defamatory statements through a separate press release issued no later than 48 hours from receipt of this notice," Jio said on Thursday in a letter addressed to Mathews. A copy of the letter is available with IANS. The letter was also sent to incumbent players like Bharti Airtel, Vodafone India, Idea Cellular and Telecom Regulatory Authority of India's (TRAI) Chairman and Secretary. Earlier Mathews had said through a statement: "We will speak to all our members and look for a consensus on the next steps to be taken. There has to be a public debate first and we have started that. The stakeholders including the DoT (Department of Telecommunications), PMO (Prime Minister's Office) and the courts need to look at this and take a stand on whether it is even-handed or not." The COAI said TRAI's telecom order favours Reliance Jio. Condemning COAI's statement, Jio said: "Reliance Jio condemns and highly regrets COAI's reckless, wilful and flagrant act of making slanderous and libellous accusations patently against Reliance Jio in the press release, which are ex-facie defamatory and veiled under the garb of criticising the orders of the sectoral regulator." Jio said it is a core member of the COAI and "has constantly displayed, acted and promoted in a manner second to none, through its services and policies". "However, it is highly regrettable and appalling to see that a body which had once emerged as the official voice of the Indian Telecom industry, is now reduced to becoming an instrument and mouthpiece of Bharti Airtel, Vodafone and Idea," Jio said in the letter. Chennai, Feb 23 : Tamil Nadu Chief Minister K. Palaniswami on Friday appealed to the Jain community for industrial investments in the state that offers several advantages. Speaking at the Jain International Trade Organisation (JITO) Connect 2018 here, Palaniswami said the state offers advantages like single window clearance, peaceful law and order situation, uninterrupted power supply and human resource amongst others. He said the state will be organising the second Global Investors Meet in January next year. The first investors meet held in 2015 had more than 8,000 industrialists participating and Memoranda of Understanding (MoU) for an investment of around Rs 2,42,000 crore were signed. New Delhi, Feb 23 : President Ram Nath Kovind on Friday said that India and Canada faced common challenges of terrorism and extremism and both the countries should stand united in the fight against these forces. The President's remarks came during his interaction with visiting Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, when he called on him at Rashtrapati Bhavan. "The democratic and pluralistic societies like India and Canada face common challenges from forces of terrorism and extremism. As strategic partners, we should stand united in the fight against terrorism, separatism and extremism," Kovind said in a statement issued by Rashtrapati Bhavan. Welcoming the Canadian Prime Minister, the President said that India attaches high priority to its partnership with Canada. "Our shared values of democracy, pluralism and the rule of law bind us together. In recent times, India and Canada have made significant progress in our cooperation in the areas of investment, education energy and connectivity," he said. The President said the India-Canada economic partnership holds immense potential. "The Indian economy is growing at a fast pace. It opens new opportunities for Canadian investments. India invites Canadian companies to partner its initiatives such as Make in India, Digital India, Start-up India, Smart Cities, infrastructure development and Skill India," he said. The President also emphasised that the two countries should look at ways to enhance and diversify their bilateral trade. New Delhi, Feb 23 : Delhi government officers were not attending meetings for past three days due to an alleged assault on Chief Secretary Anshu Prakash by two AAP MLAs, Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal said here on Friday, adding that Lt. Governor Anil Baijal has promised to talk to officers and resolve issues. Kejriwal made the statement after he met the Lt. Governor along with his council of ministers. "Officers not attending meetings for last 3 days. Governance suffering. I'm very concerned. LG assured he will take all steps to ensure officers started functioning normally. Council of ministers assured him all cooperation. All of us need to work together for betterment of Delhi," Kejriwal said in a tweet. Meanwhile Baijal said that there was "no place for violence in democracy". "Strongly condemn the recent unfortunate incidents. Advised elected government to take steps to remove mistrust with govt. employees so that development of Delhi is not affected," he tweeted. On Tuesday, the Chief Secretary had alleged that he was beaten up by two AAP MLAs Amanatullah Khan and Prakash Jarwal, in the presence of Kejriwal, on Monday night at the Chief Minister's residence where he had been called for an emergency meeting. Following this, bureaucrats had declared that they would not meet or talk over phone to the Chief Minister, his ministers or MLAs till Kejriwal apologises for the alleged assault. For the past two days, Delhi government employees across the city have also been observing a five-minute silence outside their respective offices every day as a mark of protest. Addressing media after the meeting on Friday, Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia said that the Lt. Governor has ensured that he would talk to government officers to resolve the issues. "Told him (Baijal) how for two-three days, officers did not come to meeting and did not attend phone calls. Many meetings were cancelled. LG said he will ensure that officers will be there in meetings and work together with ministers," he said. "CM said that he will also talk to officers to ease out things," Sisodia said. Asked whether the Chief Minister will apologise for the alleged assault, he only said that "police investigation was going on and the matter was pending before the court". Kolkata, Feb 23 : India Kawasaki Motors Pvt Ltd, which remained bullish on the country's premium motorcycles market, is looking to increase local procurement to reduce cost and increase sales, an official said here on Friday. After its split from Bajaj Auto in April 2017, the Japanese motorcycle-maker has sold 1,500 units till date and expects to end the current financial year with sales of around 1,800 units. "We are targeting to double our sales in the next year," the company's Managing Director Yutaka Yamashita told reporters here. He said it sold 1,300 pieces through its partnership with Bajaj in 2016-17. The motorcycle-maker, operating in the segment ranging from 250cc to 1,400cc, has been importing components from Japan, Thailand and Indonesia and assembling here but it has since started local procurement, he said. "We have established a new (assembling) factory and a new development centre in Pune. We have started local procurements. We will expand local procurements to reduce cost," he said adding that manufacturing bikes totally in India is "not yet finalised". The installed capacity of the new plant is currently around 10,000 units a year, he said on the sidelines of opening an exclusive brand outlet here. Yamashita said the market for premium segment in India has been growing and the company has 22 exclusive brand outlets in India. "We plan to open 10 more such outlets by March," he added. New Delhi, Feb 23 : Condemning the ruckus created by a group of students during a seminar on Thursday, Delhi University's Satywati College (Morning) on Friday said it has suspended two students till the time the proctorial committee submits its report on the incident. "The Staff Council in its meeting held on February 22 unanimously condemns the unfortunate incident of misbehave, abuse and assault with a teaching faculty during a programme in Satya auditorium in strong words and unequivocal terms," said the letter issued by the college principal after the incident. "The staff Council also unanimously recommends the suspension of two involved students namely Kunal Yadav and Aman Awana from the college with immediate effect pending the recommendations of report inquiry...," it said. The incident happened on Thursday when a group of students tried to sabotage a programme on women safety when law faculty student Kawalpreet Kaur, who is also head of All India Students' Association, the student arm of Communist Party of India-Marxist Leninist at the Delhi University, was giving her speech. Both the suspended students are from the RSS-affiliated Akhil Bhartiya Vidyarthi Parishad. The students started with shouting slogans against AISA and Kawalpreet Kaur and also allegedly snatch and threw her phone on the ground when she tried to videograph their obstructionist activities. A police complaint has also been filed by the AISA leader at the local police station in this issue. Kolkata, Feb 23 : Kolkata Police's Special Task Force (STF) on Friday arrested a member of Islamist terrorist outfit Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB) from West Bengal's Murshidabad district in connection with the bomb blast case in Bihar's Bodh Gaya on January 19, a senior officer said. Police have already arrested three more JMB suspects from various parts of the state in relation to the case earlier this month. "Nur Alam Momin alias Alam, 24, a resident of Murshidabad's Dhuliyan was arrested on Friday morning from infront of a health centre in the district's Samshergunj area. He participated in a meeting with JMB leaders in Hyderabad, where the Bodh Gaya blast was planned," Murlidhar Sharma, Deputy Commissioner, Special Task Force of Kolkata Police said in a release. Alam was produced to Bankshall Court in Kolkata and has been sent to 10 days of police custody, he said. Alam, a trader of scarves and Islamic books, went to Hyderabad with five others in November last year for 15 days and met some important JMB leaders where they planned the Bodh Gaya blast. "Whether he went to Bodh Gaya or not is a matter of investigation," Sharma said. He also revealed that raids would be conducted at he various places where the accused had been hiding so far. Earlier this month, three more JMB suspects - Paigamber Sheikh, 24, Jamirul Sheikh, 31 and Ahmed Ali alias Kalu were arrested from Bengal's Murshidabad and Darjeeling districts. According to police sources, they revealed the name of Alam during interrogation. A low intensity bomb blast took place near Kalchakra ground in Bodh GayaA on January 19 when the Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama was present in town. A couple of crude bombs and large quantity of explosives were also recovered from the place. National Investigating Agency (NIA) is primarily probing the blast case. New Delhi, Feb 23 : Amnesty International India on Friday said that dozens of rape victims in Kashmir were still awaiting justice, 27 years after security forces allegedly molested women during a counter-insurgency operation in the twin villages of Kunan and Poshpora in 1991. "For 27 years, the lack of accountability for the crimes committed in Kunan and Poshpora has been a festering injustice, and a chilling example of the impunity that surrounds human rights violations in Jammu and Kashmir," Asmita Basu, Programmes Director at Amnesty International India, said in a statement. She said attempts at seeking justice and compensation for the rape survivors were blocked by the government and the Indian Army even as "five of the victims waiting for justice". "Authorities must ensure a thorough, impartial and effective investigation into the allegations. All suspects, including those with command responsibility, must be prosecuted in a civilian court." She said previous investigations into the allegations have been ineffective as the J&K Police declared that the case was "untraceable" and stopped probing. In October 2011, the J&K State Human Rights Commission directed the state government to compensate victims and re-investigate the allegations. In June 2013, a court in Kupwara district directed J&K Police to investigate the long-standing allegations within three months but to no avail. Bikaner, Feb 23 : Bollywood's "Queen" Kangana Ranaut is busy breathing life into the story of Rani Laxmibai through "Manikarnika: The Queen of Jhansi" at the Junagarh Fort here. Many images have come out in the past showing Kangana in a powerful position. But the new set of images show that the film will not only be about how she fought with bravery but also put the spotlight on her personal life. Dressed in a simple orange sari with elegant pearl jewellery, Kangana, who essays the role of the queen of Jhansi in the film, is seen walking around the set with her team. With her hair tied neatly in a bun, Kangana is looking down in the images. Actor Sonu Sood has joined her to shoot his portion for the film. It seems he had an all black outfit dress code. He is seen strolling around the set alone dressed in a black ethnic ensemble with hints of golden. He completed the look with a chain. While the main actors seem to be on a break in the images, the supporting cast is ready to shoot. A group of foreign actors -- essaying the role of soldiers from the British Army -- posing together for the camera, and then other actors lending their support as villagers in the film -- the images capture the moments before the shoot begins. From Kangana launching the poster in style by doing Ganga Aarti to Kangana getting injured with a sword to being criticised by a group of people who claimed it distorts historical facts -- the film, which is being helmed by Krish, has grabbed headlines since its inception. The release date is yet to be announced. New Delhi, Feb 23 : India and Canada on Friday resolved to combat terrorism and violent extremism in all forms and manifestations and agreed that no country should allow its territory to be used for such activities, an agreement that came during the weeklong visit by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau that was marked by controversies over the perceived softness of Canada towards Khalistani separatists on its soil. The two countries also signed a framework for cooperation in which they named Sikh extremist groups Babbar Khalsa International and International Sikh Youth Federation along with terror groups such as Al Qaeda, the Islamic State, the Haqqani Network, Lashkar-e-Toiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed and committed themselves to work together to neutralise their threats. After one-on-one and delegation-level talks and with Trudeau by his side, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said there is no place for misuse of religion for political and divisive purposes. "Terrorism and extremism are threats to our democratic and pluralistic societies," Modi told the media along with Trudeau following one-on-one and delegation-level talks between between the two countries here. "It is very important for us to come together to fight these forces," he said. "There should be no space for those who misuse religion for political purposes and divisive politics." He said those who challenge the sovereignty, unity and integrity of the two countries will not be tolerated. Modi's candid remarks came during the last leg of Trudeau's week-long visit, which was earlier marked by a certain cold attitude from New Delhi towards the visiting dignitary because of Canada's perceived support to Khalistani elements. In a major embarrassment to Trudeau, on Thursday his country's High Commission here had to rescind an invitation to a convicted Khalistani separatist, Jaspal Atwal, for a reception that was hosted in honour of Trudeau. After Trudeau's arrival on Saturday, it was only on Thursday evening that Modi tweeted his welcome message before greeting the visiting dignitary with a warm hug ahead of the ceremonial reception at Rashtrapati Bhavan on Friday. In his remarks, Trudeau avoided any reference to separatists or terrorism. "We share respect for democratic traditions and pluralism," he said adding the two leaders discussed ways to strengthen people-to-people ties between the two countries. In a joint statement issued after the talks, the two countries pledged to combat terrorism in all its forms and manifestations while declaring that no country should allow its territory to be used for terrorist and violent extremist activities. "Recognising that terrorism, violent extremism and radicalisation to violence present acute challenges to global peace, stability and prosperity, the leaders resolved to combat terrorism and violent extremism in all their forms and manifestations," the joint statement said. "They called for bringing terrorists to justice and holding accountable state sponsors of terrorism, including cross-border terrorism. They further emphasised that no country should allow its territory to be used for terrorist and violent extremist activities." Modi and Trudeau also welcomed the agreement on a bilateral Framework for Cooperation on Countering Terrorism and Violent Extremism that was signed between the two countries. The Framework recognised the urgent imperative to disrupt recruitment, terrorist movements and the flow of foreign terrorist fighters, address the threat posed by cross-border and state-sponsored terrorism, stop sources of terrorist financing, dismantle terrorist infrastructure and prevent supply of arms to terrorists and counter violent extremism and radicalisation to violence. The two sides emphasised the need to deny operating space to terrorist and violent extremist groups. Modi said that during Friday's talks, both sides also discussed means to further deepen economic relations. "We have asked our negotiators to double their efforts to finalise the Bilateral Investment and Promotion Agreement and the Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement," he said. Bilateral trade between India and Canada stood at a C$8.02 billion (around $6 billion), which does not reflect the true potential. Following the talks, the two sides signed a joint declaration of intent for cooperation in the field of ICT and electronics, terms of reference for the India-Canada ministerial energy dialogue, and memorandums of understanding (MoUs) for cooperation in the areas of sports, intellectual property rights (IPRs), higher education, and science, technology and innovation. Stating that there are over 120,000 Indian students in Canada, Modi said that the renewal of the MoU on higher education would benefit students and teachers in both countries. He also called for increased exchange of skilled professionals and said that there are immense possibilities in the technology partnership. Describing Canada as an energy superpower, the Prime Minister said the North American country can help India meet its increasing energy needs. "Today we decided to expand our energy dialogue and chalk out the future of our energy partnership," he said. Stating that regional and global issues also came up for discussion, Modi said that the two sides assessed the situation in Afghanistan, the challenges of cross-border terrorism it faces, and the efforts being undertaken for a secure, prosperous and democratic Afghanistan. "We share similar views on marine transport and freedom of navigation in the Indo-Pacific region, the threat to the two Koreas from North Korea's proliferation efforts, and restoration of the freedom of democratic institutions in the Maldives," he stated. With Canada being home to around 1.2 million people of Indian origin, Modi said that people-to-people contacts formed an important foundation for the strategic partnership between the two countries. "We are committed to maintaining friendship and amity with the Indian community in Canada and seek their active participation in India's progress and development," he said. On his part, Trudeau said that both India and Canada share a set of values that make them natural allies. "As Canada looks to diversify its own economy and looks for new opportunities to do business beyond its boundaries, India is a natural partner and trusted friend for commercial cooperation," he said. He recalled that earlier this week he had announced $1 billion in two-way investment that will create 5,800 jobs in Canada. Modi and Trudeau also expressed "strong concern" over the prevailing security situation in Afghanistan and the recent political developments in the Maldives and their implications for free society. On the economic side, both leaders agreed to realise the full potential of bilateral trade and investment and both sides will renew efforts to expand and diversify bilateral economic and commercial relations. "They will also intensify negotiations to finalise a Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement and a Bilateral Foreign Investment Promotion and Protection Agreement," the statement said. New Delhi, Feb 23 : A retiring Supreme Court Judge on Friday stressed the need for projecting a united face of the higher judiciary in India, cautioning that a fractured face would only dent its credibility and paramountcy. Justice Amitava Roy expressed his views in a farewell address at a function organised by the Supreme Court Bar Association on his last working day in the court. Justice Roy will actually retire on February 28, but Friday was the last working day for the top court before it goed into a weeklong Holi vacation. Going by the strong indication given both by the Chief Justice Dipak Misra and Attorney General K.K. Venugopal, Justice Roy is tipped to head an important tribunal and his appointment is likely to be made in early March. Sources said that Justice Roy is likely to head National Green tribunal - a position lying vacant since the retirement of Justice Swatantra Kumar - its first Chairman. "We can't in any way project a fractured face to anyone. If that happens, we lose credibility. If we lose credibility, we lose paramountcy of the judicial process. It is important to be together," Justice Roy said in an apparent reference to the press conference held by four Supreme Court Judges over their grievance vis-a-vis functioning of the top court. Each of the top court Judges is "excellent" but what is important is to be together as we share a common goal, he said. Comparing each Judge to a musical note, Justice Roy said these musical notes translate into a melody only when they come together. "It is only when we integrate that the melody will come," he said while cautioning that any cracks would be taken advantage of by "elements who have no faith in law and institutions". He said only a united judiciary can be independent, fearless, and resolutely pursue its mission. "We have to be proud of our institution, and pride in the institution comes from love for the institution, and that generates a different kind of attachment for the institution." Justice Roy urged the young to be positive and become good human beings. Telling the legal fraternity to shun negativity, he said: "Always be good human beings that reflects in your thoughts, words and reflections." Chief Justice Misra, speaking on the occasion, appreciated Justice Roy's contribution and recalled they sat on the same bench that sat till early hours to hear the last-ditch plea of 1993 Mumbai bomb blast convict Tiger Memon. Venugopal described Justice Roy as Judge of "great integrity" who was part of the bench that pronounced judgments of far-reaching consequences. He regretted that Judges in the Supreme Court were retiring at the age of 65 -- a practice not seen anywhere else in the world and urged the government to give a fresh look to the issue of top court Judges' retirement age. "It is pity that Judges of the Supreme Court retire at the age of 65, which is loss of talent." New Delhi, Feb 23 : Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, an Iranian-American entrepreneur, on Friday said restrictions on immigration were "bruising brand America". Speaking at an event of a confluence of world and industry leaders, policy makers, academicians and corporate heads, Khosrowshahi, 49, recalled that he could migrate to the US and chase his American dream without hindrance. His family is said to have migrated to the US from Iran in 1978, when the Islamic republic was battling a revolution. "I was extremely lucky to immigrate to the US when it was welcoming. And there are still groups of people who want to come ouf their houses and come and chase the great American dream. It is the single most incredible brand in the world. The American brand is that if you work hard, if you abide by the law, get good education then you can also succeed like anybody else," he said. "But the attitude like immigration is bad and restrictions on immigration is bruising brand America." Khosrowshahi said Uber would like to be in India not just for market but also for the tech talent and that would take his business to next level. New Delhi, Feb 23 : Indian Petroleum Minister Dharmendra Pradhan on Friday invited Saudi Arabia to participate in the Indian Strategic Petroleum Reserve Programme, an official statement said. Under the programme, the government has set up around five million tonnes of strategic crude oil storages at Visakhapatnam in Andhra Pradesh and Mangaluru and Padur (near Udupi) in Karnataka. and plans to construct additional strategic reserves in the second phase. In a meeting here with visiting Saudi Energy Minister Khalid A. Al-Falih, "Pradhan shared details of various investment opportunities in India in downstream and upstream sectors", the statement said. The Saudi Arabian minister also provided details of investment opportunities for Indian companies in his country, it said, further adding that "both sides agreed to conclude discussions regarding concrete investment proposals in a time-bound manner"." Al Falih is on an official visit to India from February 22-26. Chennai, Feb 23 : As the Tamil Nadu's ruling AIADMK geared up to celebrate late Chief Minister J.Jayalalithaa's 70th birth anniversary on Saturday, a party legislator gave the party's top brass a shock, expressing his support to sidelined leader T.T.V. Dinakaran. A. Prabhu, who represents Kallakurichi constituency, met Dinakaran on Friday and expressed his support to him. Dinakaran later told reporters that barring six AIADMK leaders, all other party legislators and members support him. Asked why he switched allegiance, Prabhu said that he was not able to do his duty as a lawmaker properly and that Dinakaran has the people's support. Responding to media queries on the matter, Tamil Nadu Fisheries Minister D.Jayakumar said there is no set back for the government or the party. Jammu, Feb 23 : India's Border Security Force (BSF) and the Pakistan Rangers on Friday agreed to maintain peace and tranquility on the international border in Jammu and Kashmir, an official statement said. The decision was taken at Sector Commander Level Flag meeting held on the border in Suchetgarh area of Jammu, a BSF statement said. "The BSF delegation comprising of nine officers was led by P.S. Dhiman, DIG BSF Jammu Sector, while Brigadier Amjad Hussain, Sector Commander, Sialkot, Punjab led the Pakistan delegation which comprised of 11 officers. "During the meeting, general day to day border management issues were discussed. While reiterating BSF's commitment towards maintaining peace and tranquility on the International border, BSF officials sought Paki stan Rangers' cooperation for the same which was agreed by them," the statement said, adding that the meeting concluded "in a cordial atmosphere". Ranchi, Feb 23 : A 15-year-old girl, who had gone to answer nature's call, was gang-raped in Jharkhand's Chatra district and later burnt to death, police said on Friday. According to the police, when the teenager of Humajang village of the district had gone to answer nature's call on Thursday night, three youths of the same village caught hold of her, took her away at an isolated place and raped her. After raping the girl, the youths allegedly poured kerosene oil over her and set her on fire. The accused have been identified as Ishrar, Saddam and Sahid Aalam, according to locals. The severely burnt girl somehow managed to reach her home and inform about the incident. She also revealed the names of the culprits. She was admitted to a local hospital, but later succumbed to the burn injuries. The police have arrested two accused while one managed to escape. Bajrang Dal workers on Friday blocked the highway demanding arrest of the third accused and death penalty for all the three. New Delhi, Feb 23 : A CBI court on Friday sent Rotomac owner Vikram Kothari and his son Rahul to one-day transit remand while the Income Tax department seized 12 bank accounts of the group and issued six prosecution against the businessman in connection with the Rs 3,695 crore loan default. Additional Chief Metropolitan Magistrate Samar Vishal at the Patiala House courts passed an order for a day's remand after the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) sought a two-day transit remand to take the father and son to Lucknow. The duo will be produced before the court concerned in Lucknow on Saturday. Kothari and his son were arrested on Thursday for alleged default on loan repayment after their four-day consecutive questioning since the CBI filed the case against them and raided their residential and office premises in Uttar Pradesh's Kanpur. Defence advocate Pramod Kumar Dubey had raised objections to the jurisdiction of the court, saying the accused should be produced before a sessions court and not before a magisterial court. The court then reserved its order till 2 p.m. on the issue of jurisdiction. Meanwhile, an Income Tax department official said over 12 more bank accounts of the Rotomac Group Pvt Ltd have been attached in addition to the 14 bank accounts attached earlier and that six prosecutions have been sanctioned against Kothari. The agency filed the FIR on Sunday night after getting a complaint against Kothari, his wife Sadhana and son Rahul, from the Bank of Baroda. Kothari is the Chairman and Managing Director of Rotomac while his wife and son are Directors. Kothari had obtained Rs 2,919 crore from Bank of India (Rs 754.77 crore), Bank of Baroda (Rs 456.63 crore), Indian Overseas Bank (Rs 771.07 crore), Union Bank of India (Rs 458.95 crore), Allahabad Bank (Rs 330.68 crore), Bank of Maharashtra (Rs 49.82 crore) and Oriental Bank of Commerce (Rs 97.47 crore), the FIR said. Kothari, his wife, son, firm Rotomac, some unidentified bank officials and private persons were booked on charges of criminal conspiracy, cheating and forgery under the Indian Penal Code and Prevention of Corruption Act. The Bank of Baroda complaint said that the banks had extended credit to the Kanpur-based firm and its related companies from 2008 onwards. The CBI had earlier confiscated several belongings of Kothari and his family, including laptops and mobile phones. New Delhi, Feb 23 : Biennial election for 58 seats of Rajya Sabha from 16 states will be held on March 23, the Election Commission announced on Friday. While the last date of nomination is March 12, counting of votes for all seats will be held on March 23, it said in a statement. The term of 58 Rajya Sabha members is due to expire in April and May this year. The retiring members include 10 from Uttar Pradesh, six each from Bihar and Maharashtra, five each Madhya Pradesh and West Bengal, four members from Gujarat and Karnataka while the number is three each for Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Odisha and Rajasthan. Two members will retire from Jharkhand while Chhattisgarh, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand have one retiring member each. Also, bye-poll for a seat from Kerala will be held on March 23 due to resignation of M.P. Veerendra Kumar. New Delhi, Feb 23 : The Congress on Friday alleged that jeweller Nirav Modi and his uncle Mehul Choksi have not only siphoned Indias banks of Rs 21,306 crore, but have also duped Indias middle class and common people of Rs 5,000 crore in jewellery investment schemes. The party also asked why Prime Minister Narendra Modi was fighting shy of admitting his connection with the duo. "A complicit Modi government has even refused to publicly acknowledge this loot of Rs 5,000 crore and duping of common man's money - a 'Jan Dhan Loot'," Congress spokesperson Shaktisinh Gohil told reporters. The party alleged that Gitanjali Gems Ltd had floated three jewellery investment schemes - Shagun, Swarna Mangal Labh (SML) and Swarna Mangal Kalash (SMK), under which an ordinary person, seeking to buy jewellery, was required to pay 11 installments of a specified amount. "In return, Gitanjali group offered to pay the 12th installment as free. Tenure of these installments could be 12 months, 24 months or 36 months. At the end of the tenure, the amount so accumulated could be redeemed for jewellery with additional bonus of up to 50 per cent," he added. "Like in the case of banks, common man was also duped by way of these schemes. In most number of cases, neither was the installment paid nor the jewellery given or amount returned. "Consequently, a large number of police complaints were filed in Gujarat by way of affidavits in September, 2015," he added. The party alleged that on October 10, 2017, a large number of persons filed complaints against the patent fraud being played upon common men by Gitanjali Group. "Instead of registering an FIR and arresting Nirav Modi and Mehul Choksi and others, Bhavnagar police kept the matter pending and finally referred it by recording that it should be investigated by CID Crime, Gandhinagar," said Gohil. He said that the Gujarat Police waited up to January 25 by when Nirav Modi and Mehul Choksi had run away from the country along with their families and in the state, there are thousands of such cases, thus indicating "complicity and protection at the highest level". The party also said despite huge number of complaints of fraud and duping of common men pending, the BJP government projected Gitanjali Group as the Collaborator for Vibrant Gujarat Summit 2017. "Was Mehul Choksi not invited in the small gathering when Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated the Gold Monetization Scheme in the year 2015? Was Nirav Modi not part of the gathering of Indian CEOs photographed with Prime Minister in Davos," asked Gohil. New Delhi, Feb 23 : Police on Friday searched the residence of the Delhi Chief Minister for CCTV footage of an alleged assault on Chief Secretary Anshu Prakash by two AAP MLAs, sparking an angry reaction from Arvind Kejriwal who hit out at the central government daring it if a similar raid would be conducted at BJP President Amit Shah's house in Judge B.H. Loya's death case. Delhi Police said it had given prior information to the Chief Minister about the searches. The AAP denied it, terming the action as "police raj" and "police ki dadagiri" after over 45 policemen and women surrounded Kejriwal's residence. Additional Deputy Commissioner of Police Harendra Kumar Singh said police found no cameras in the drawing room where the Chief Secretary was allegedly assaulted. Seven out of the 21 CCTV cameras in the house, he said, were not functioning. He said police will study the movement of people before and after the incident by analysing footage from CCTV cameras outside the drawing room and in the corridor. "The timing on cameras in the house was running behind by 40 minutes 43 seconds," Singh said, adding those responsible for maintenance of the CCTV cameras were questioned. A forensic team was also present to collect evidence of the alleged assault. They will examine why seven cameras were non-functional. Police officials said they would decide if they needed to question the Chief Minister and his deputy Manish Sisodia who were present on Monday night when the top bureaucrat was allegedly slapped by legislators Amanatullah Khan and Prakash Jarwal -- who have been arrested and are in Tihar Jail. Singh said CCTV footage was sought a day after the incident but there was no response from the Chief Minister's house forcing police to conduct the search operation. Kejriwal told reporters outside his residence that he was "happy that the investigation is taking place" but dared the central government if probe agencies can muster the "courage to question Amit Shah" in the Judge Loya death case. "To investigate two alleged slaps, the police search a Chief Minister's house. Doesn't Judge Loya's murder merit an interrogation," Kejriwal tweeted, referring to the judge who died of a heart attack in December 2014 at a time he was handling the Sohrabuddin case in which Shah was an accused. Addressing a rally here later, Kejriwal alleged that the central government was hampering the development work and files related to electricity and water supply in the city were stuck with bureaucrats. In the same rally, AAP MLA Naresh Balyan justified the assault on the Chief Secretary, saying anyone obstructing the work for the common man deserved a beating. Meanwhile, a Delhi court dismissed the bail pleas of Khan and Jarwal. Metropolitan Magistrate Shefali Barnala Tondon also refused to give their custody to Police saying there was no new ground for custodial interrogation. AAP leader Sanjay Singh said the party would hold protests against the "dictatorship" of the Narendra Modi-led BJP government at the centre. Hitting back at the AAP, the BJP said "anarchist" Kejriwal had created a "Constitutional crisis" in the capital. Kejriwal also met Lt Governor Anil Baijal and asked for his intervention as bureaucrats had stopped meeting or talking to the Chief Minister, his ministers or MLAs. "Officers not attending meetings for the last three days. Governance suffering...LG assured he will take all steps to ensure officers start functioning normally... All of us need to work together for betterment of Delhi," Kejriwal said. Meanwhile, Baijal "strongly" condemned the incident and advised the "elected government to take steps to remove mistrust with government employees so that development of Delhi is not affected". Earlier in the day, the IAS association met Minister of State in the Prime Minister's Office Jitendra Singh, demanding clear guidelines for functioning of the administration. "We should give them a work-friendly environment. We should be able to get the best out of our officers and we must enable them to perform to the best of their performance in the interest of the nation," Jitendra Singh said after meeting the IAS delegation. Shillong, Feb 23 : Charging the Narendra Modi government with promoting a narrow-minded idea of India based on Hindutva, senior Congress leader Shashi Tharoor on Friday appealed to voters in Meghalaya not to vote for the BJP in the February 27 Assembly polls. "This is a government with no tangible achievements. What it has been trying to do is to change the very nature of what India is all about. For 70 years, we have been trying to build India. Even the first NDA government did not dare to tamper with the idea of India as a country of all people," he told journalists here. "They (BJP) come to Meghalaya and they talked about being kind to Christians in BJP-ruled states. I am sorry to say -- we have seen horrendous incidents involving Christians," Tharoor said. Questioning the real face of the Bharatiya Janata Party-led governments, the two-time Congress MP said: "This is a two-faced government. In Meghalaya, they are opening their arms to all, and in Delhi they are denying visa to a pastor who wishes to come to India to celebrate 150 years of Christianity in the Garo Hills. They come here and say you can eat whatever you like. In the rest of India, they beat and even kill people on suspicion of eating beef." Attacking the National People's Party and other regional outfits in Meghalaya, the former Minister of State for External Affairs said: "I have been somebody who is interested in national vision, and not regional one, but in this particular case, the NPP sadly is trying to have it both ways." The NPP, founded by former Lok Sabha Speaker Purno A. Sangma to champion the cause of the people of the northeast, is supporting the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance government at the Centre, Rajasthan and Manipur. Tharoor also praised the state's Congress government headed by Mukul Sangma for improvement in education and health sectors. The Congress leader said Meghalaya had gone ahead of Kerala in the female literacy rate due to the state government's commitment to the Right to Education Act. New Delhi, Feb 23 : Communist Party of India (Marxist) leader Nilotpal Basu on Friday said the present crisis in the banking sector is part of a larger crisis the country is facing on multiple fronts. "Corruption today is not moral degeneration but a systemic loot. It results in huge accumulation and inequity," Basu said speaking at a meeting here that focussed on the topic -- "Crisis in the banking sector: Who stole? Who pays?". Speakers at the meeting -- organised in the wake of a $1.8 billion fraud unearthed at the Punjab National Bank (PNB) -- accused the Narendra Modi government of knowingly allowing wilful loan defaulters to leave the country. According to a government data, 1,146 fraud cases in public sector banks (PSBs) were registered where employees were involved, and 568 in private sector banks during 2014-2017. The same data also showed that while 70 per cent of market share is held by the PSBs, fraud cases are more in the private banks compared to their public sector counterparts. "India is becoming a nation of defaulters. Why do defaulters get to buy new companies and new deals?" said policy analyst Mohan Guruswamy, adding that by their overt and covert support to these defaulters, the governments in power send a message to banks not to act against them. "There are a number of Nirav Modis and Mallyas committing wilful default, but the government is not taking action," said senior journalist M.K. Venu. The country's second largest state-run bank PNB on February 14 unearthed a fraud of Rs 11,300 crore involving diamantaire Nirav Modi. The fraud, which included money-laundering, among others, is related to the Firestar Diamonds group. The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has booked Modi, his wife Ami, brother Nishal Modi and uncle and business partner Mehul Choksi -- the promoter of luxury jewellery brand Gitanjali Gems. The speakers demanded punishment for both the officers involved in frauds and the wilful defaulters. They also called upon the authorities to change the lending policy of banks to have one with more checks and balances, especially for large lendings, and more importantly, end crony capitalism. The public meeting was jointly organised by Act Now for Harmony and Democracy (ANHAD), All India Bank Officers Confederation (AIBOC), Centre for Financial Accountability (CFA), Delhi Solidarity Group (DSG), National Alliance of People's Movements (NAPM), and New Trade Union Initiative (NTUI). New Delhi, Feb 23 : Breaking his silence over the massive PNB scam, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday said that the government will take strong action against those indulging in financial irregularities and asked supervisory agencies responsible to do their job to prevent such frauds. He also warned that his government will not tolerate embezzlement of public money. "Those entrusted with the responsibility of ensuring rules and ethics in various financial institutions, should work with full dedication - especially those who are responsible for supervising and monitoring," Modi said while addressing a gathering at Economic Times Global Business Summit. He made it clear that the government would take strict action against irregularities in financial matters. "The illegal accumulation of people"s money is unacceptable, and this is the basic mantra of New Economy-New Rules," he said. Noting that the Union Government is going to complete four years of assuming office in a few months, he said that a definite change is now visible. "This change in the economic and social content, represents the essence of the New Rules for the New India and the New Economy," the Prime Minister said. He said that in the last four years, the discourse has changed from India being a 'fragile five' economy to the target of India becoming a 'five trillion dollar' economy. Presenting figures to indicate how India is playing a key role in the entire world's growth, he said that in nominal terms, India's share of the world GDP has risen from 2.4 per cent in 2013, to 3.1 per cent in 2017. "India is performing better on various macro-economic parameters," he said. Modi said that this change has come about due to a new approach and a new work culture. "India's competitiveness is being validated by the entire world today." Recalling that when he had last attended this Global Business Summit, GST was still just a possibility, he said: "Today it is a reality, which has delivered a better tax compliance system and a better revenue system." He also mentioned other major reforms such as the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code. Giving examples of the increase in pace in the various projects in infrastructure sector, he said that speed, scale and sensitivity are important to ensure the success of the government's initiatives. "There is unprecedented investment being made today in infrastructure, agriculture, technology, health sector and education sector," he said mentioning the initiatives taken in the health sector, such as Mission Indradhanush, Jan Aushadhi Stores, and the Ayushman Bharat scheme. About the Digital India Mission, Modi said that the trinity of 100 crore bank accounts, 100 crore Aadhaar cards and 100 crore mobile phones, would create a unique ecosystem, not seen anywhere else in the world. Recalling that in his last address at the Economic Times Global Business Summit, he had spoken of Housing for All, Power for All, Clean Cooking for All, Health for All,and Insurance for All, he now outlined the steps that have been taken in regard to house construction, Ssaubhagya yojana, Ujjwala Yojana, and insurance. Saying that the government's initiatives are aimed at empowering the poor, the Prime Minister also mentioned the construction of toilets, distribution of loans through the Mudra Yojana and distribution of soil health cards. New Delhi/Chennai, Feb 23 : Pakistani intelligence officer Amir Zubair Siddiqui while working in Pakistan's High Commission in Sri Lanka as Visa Counsellor engaged people to indulge in espionage and terror activities in India, said an NIA supplementary chargesheet filed in a Chennai court in a 2014 case. The chargesheet was filed on Thursday by Special Public Prosecutor C.S.S. Pillai before judge P. Cheenthoorpandian of the Special Court for the National Investigation Agency (NIA) in Chennai, an official said on Friday. Now declared a persona non grata and cited as absconding by the NIA, Siddiqui during his employment in the Pakistan High Commission in Colombo from 2009 to 2016 plotted a terror attack along with two Chennai residents -- Balasubramanian and Noorudeen, the official said quoting from the chargesheet. Siddiqui and the two Chennai residents have also been chargesheeted in this case for circulating high quality counterfeit Indian currency, causing damage to the economic security of India. The original case was registered on April 28, 2014 by Tamil Nadu Police following arrest of a Sri Lankan national Mohd. Sakir Hussain in Chennai, who had arrived in India as per the instructions from Siddiqui to carry out subversive activities here. Siddiqui had planned to attack the US consulate in Chennai, Israeli Consulate in Bengaluru, Electronic City in Bangaluru, Eastern Naval Command headquarters in Visakhapatnam, various places of public congregations in south India and ports in India with the help of spies, said the chargesheet. Subsequently, a consignment of fake Indian currency with face value of Rs 2.5 lakh was seized from another accused Mohammad Saleem on May 1, 2014. The case was taken over by the NIA on June 21 on the orders of central government and a chargesheet was submitted against a Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agent Hussain, who was arrested by the CBI in 2013 on charges of indulging in spying activities, and one Saleem and one Sivabalan on October 23, 2014. Apart from Hussain and Sivabalan, Siddiqui had reportedly also sent several persons including one Arun Selvaraj to India to carry out attacks. During interrogation, ISI agent Hussain revealed that he used his counterparts Sivabalan, Salim and another person Rafeeque to circulate fake currency in Tamil Nadu. NIA sources said they did not mentioned Siddiqui in the first chargesheet because they were yet to collect proper evidence against him. "Now, we have strong evidence to prove his involvement in the terror plot." United Nations, Feb 23 : Members of the UN Security Council were engaged in hectic negotiations on Friday morning to come up with a veto-proof resolution calling for a 30-day ceasefire in war-torn Syria and to allow humanitarian aid to reach besieged areas, according to diplomats. The vote on the resolution, scheduled for Friday morning was postponed twice and is expected to take place in the afternoon, Anatolio Ndong Mba, the permanent representative of Equatorial Guineau, an elected member of the Council, told reporters. He said that because it was a humanitarian issue, they wanted to come up with an effective resolution. The resolution proposed by Kuwait and Sweden did not come up as originally planned for a vote at a Council session on Thursday on the situation in Syria because of opposition from veto-wielding Russia. Earlier on Thursday, the Council heard the situation in East Ghouta, a suburb of Damascus described as "hell on earth" by Mark Lowcock, Under-Secretary-General and Emergency Relief Coordinator. Thousands of civilians have been trapped in the rebel-held area that has been under constant bombardment and they need humanitarian relief and medical evacuations, he said by a video link from Geneva. Russia's Permanent Representative Vassily Nebenzia dismissed the descriptions of the dire situation in East Ghouta as one-sided and said that several thousands of terrorists from organisations like the Al-Nusra Front were holding civilians as hostages. He later told reporters that Russia had proposed amendments to the resolution. The draft of the resolution calling for the 30-day ceasefire would have allowed military action against the Islamic State (IS), Al Qaeda and Al Nusra Front. It was not clear as of Thursday night if the amendments had been accepted or a compromise reached to avoid a veto by Moscow, an ally of Syrian President Bashar Al Assad, whch had vetoed about 10 recent resolutions on Syria. Kelley Eckels-Currie, a senior diplomat at the US Mission, accused Assad of wanting to bomb or starve the people into submission with Russian support and Moscow was blocking a solution. She called for an immediate vote on the ceasefire resolution regardless of whether Russia would veto it. Kuwait's Deputy Prime Minister Sabah Khalid Al Hamad Al Sabah, who presided over the session, said that more than 1,200 civilians had been killed in East Ghouta since the beginning of the month while the international community remained silent. He said the resolution was a straight-forward text demanding a cessation of hostilities across Syria for 30 days to allow the UN and its partners to deliver aid and provide critical medical evacuation to the sick and wounded and asked all members to "rise above our political differences" and vote for it. (Arul Louis can be reached at arul.l@ians.in) Brussels, Feb 23 : An international summit on the Sahel held here on Friday was "a very important moment" for Europe's commitment to the "fragile" African region, Italy's Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni said. "I believe the EU and African Union conference to support the G5 Sahel is a very important moment to confirm Europe' commitment in Africa, especially the Sahel region. This is due to its infiltration by terrorists, climate change, economic vulnerability and migration flows," he said, adding it was "an especially fragile and crucial area". At Friday's high-level meeting, the EU announced an extra 50 million euros for the G5 Sahel force tackling jihadists in the region at talks with heads of state from Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania and Niger, who set up the "G5 Sahel" in 2014. The extra funds came on top of some 280 million euros already pledged by international donors. The summit was also attended by France's President Emmanuel Macron and Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel and other top European leaders and came after two soldiers from France's counter-terror force in West Africa were killed on Wednesday in northeastern Mali when their vehicle hit a mine. "We expressed solidarity with France for the two soldiers who were killed in recent days, " Gentiloni said. "We confirmed our commitment to the fundamental role of the EU. "For a country like Italy, this means a long-term commitment to counter the risks of terrorism and the underlying causes of migration," he said. As well as EU leaders and the United Nations, around a dozen other countries' Foreign Ministers were at Friday's summit including Saudi Arabia - the biggest donor to the G5 Sahel, Norway, Morocco and Tunisia. Gentiloni also said that his country and other European Union nations are working to help Sahel countries develop as a crucial part of the joint fight against terrorism and human trafficking in the region. "Terrorism and migration can only be tackled through cooperation with the Sahel countries and through their development," he said. Results are being achieved also through efforts to stabilise Libya and cut the numbers of migrants landing in Italy, he added. "This all shows how Europe is working together and it is the best way of countering populism and anti-Europeanism," Gentiloni said as he headed into an informal meeting in Brussels of European Union heads of state and government after attending a conference on the Sahel. Washington, Feb 24 : US President Donald Trump announced the "heaviest" set of US sanctions against North Korea on Friday as his administration redoubled its efforts to starve Pyongyang of resources and force the isolated regime to abandon its nuclear ambitions. "We imposed today the heaviest sanctions ever imposed on a country before," Trump said at the close of a wide-ranging address to a conservative political conference, The Washington Post reported. The new measures target 56 vessels, shipping companies and other entities that Trump administration officials believe are used by North Korea to conduct trade prohibited under previous sanctions. Significant advances in its missile and nuclear weapons programs have made North Korea the most pressing foreign threat facing the Trump administration. The punitive measures, which follow multiple rounds of earlier sanctions, signal US officials' determination to use financial pressure to prompt North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un to relinquish nuclear weapons, and their concern that under-the-radar fossil fuel trade undermines their ability to do so. Trump made the announcement in the final moments of a more than hour-long address at the Conservative Political Action Conference outside Washington. "I love you, I respect you, I appreciate everything you have done for the country," the President said, pausing as the crowd applauded and a few chanted "U-S-A! U-S-A!" "I do want to say, because people have asked: North Korea," he said before briefly mentioning the sanctions. "Hopefully, something positive can happen. We will see." Senior US officials described elaborate steps that North Korea has taken to conceal its illicit shipping activities, including conducting prohibited ship-to-ship transfers, falsifying ship names and disabling vessels' automatic identification systems "to try to intentionally mask their movements." "We are determined through these efforts to increase the pressure and show Kim Jong Un that there is no other path to take but denuclearization," one official, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity, told reporters ahead of Trump's remarks. Shiner Law Group attorney and Palm Beach County Republican Party chairman Michael A. Barnett, Esq. was recently invited to visit the White House this past Tuesday, February 13, 2018. Mr. Barnett was honored with an invitation from President Donald J. Trump and First Lady Melania Trump to participate in this years African American History Month festivities. The pre-event social hour invited guests to access many rooms of the White House, observe the many presidential portraits and artwork, and mix and mingle with Vice President Pence, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, Energy Secretary Rick Perry, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, and HHS Secretary Ben Carson. Other nationally known African American conservatives in attendance included, among many others, Former Presidential Candidate Herman Cain and Alveda King, the niece of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. It was an honor to be with the President and represent my family, friends, the Republican Party, and our law firm on this historic occasion, stated Michael Barnett. President Trump, the First Lady, and newly installed Surgeon General Jerome Adams honored the sacrifices of African American men and women who served in our nations armed forces. Mr. Barnett currently serves as the Chairman of the Republican Party of Palm Beach County and the Vice Chairman of the Republican Party of Florida. He was involved in grassroots activism and the Republican Party early on as a member of the College Republicans and Young Republicans. In 2010, Mr. Barnett became a committeeman on the Republican Executive Committee, or REC of Palm Beach County, which is the governing body of the Republican Party of Palm Beach County. As a committeeman, Mr. Barnett represented and served as the Republican Partys liaison to registered Republicans who lived in his precinct, where he engaged in grassroots organizing and informed registered voters of events and other happenings in the local Republican Party. Michael Barnetts leadership experience and legal skills are an asset to the Shiner Law Group. He truly cares about his clients, and he will always take the time to listen to you, to learn about your situation, and to understand your needs, whether youve been seriously injured in an accident or you require assistance with a commercial or business matter. Mr. Barnett is a dedicated and knowledgeable attorney, and he will work hard to achieve the best results possible for every client. About Shiner Law Group Founded on the principles of dedicated service, honest communications and competent and aggressive representation, Shiner Law Group, based in Boca Raton, serves individuals and business in civil cases throughout Florida including Palm Beach, Broward, Martin, and St. Lucie counties. If you have suffered unnecessary physical or financial harm, you have the fundamental right in the State of Florida to choose an attorney. Call Shiner Law Group at 561-777-7700 for a free consultation, 24/7. Your best interests are the Shiner Law Groups foremost interest. https://shinerlawgroup.com/ Paul Huwiler, a former associate professor of communications at a state university, and Loramel Shurtleff, an attorney specializing in criminal and domestic law, have completed their book Maelstrom: a fast-paced drama of high-level crime in a sleepy New England town. Ordinarily, the small Connecticut town of Stonefield offers few law enforcement challenges to Sheriff Ian Henderson. Now, however, when local lowlife Rudy Cox is found with two .22 caliber bullets in his head, Ian is convinced the killing is connected to the ancient Native American artifacts that Rudy recently discovered at a site he never talked about. Soon after Rudys death, Soaring Eagle, a self-professed tribal representative, appears in town looking for Rudy. He claims his tribe is going to build a museum honoring all the Native American tribes of New England. Perhaps Rudy will help acquire more artifacts for the museum. Henderson is correctly suspicious, because Soaring Eagle is Michael Cassidy, a smooth-talking con man sent to Stonefield by mobster Frank DAmato to find counterfeit bills stolen from DAmato. When Cassidy learns that Rudy is dead, he sees that the artifact trail is cold and decides to work on his own. He cons two respected town citizens into creating a foundation and trust fund for the recognition of New England Native American tribes. Because of the status of the two citizens, money rolls in, and Cassidy sees it as his golden nest egg. Ian knows this is a scam, but no one listens to his warnings. Ians problems worsen when Giovanni Morelli comes to town. Rumored to be connected to organized crime figures, Morelli denies it, but Ian wonders if the mob is planning to move into town. As the days pass with no arrests, Ian grows more frustrated and angry. When Carla Simone, a good-looking FBI agent, comes into his office she smiles and says she wont interfere with him but warns hed better not get in her way. By the time Henderson, State Police Sergeant George Pulio, and FBI Agent Carla Simone wrap up their intertwining cases, they will know theyve been caught in a Maelstrom of crime. Published by New York City-based Page Publishing, Paul Huwiler and Loramel Shurtleffs engrossing drama is a perfect storm of criminal conspiracies and the law enforcement officers determined to stop them. Readers who wish to experience this gripping and potent work can purchaseMaelstrom at bookstores everywhere, or online at the Apple iTunes store, Amazon, Google Play, or Barnes and Noble. For additional information or media inquiries, contact Page Publishing at 866-315-2708. About Page Publishing: Page Publishing is a traditional New York-based full-service publishing house that handles all the intricacies involved in publishing its authors books, including distribution in the worlds largest retail outlets and royalty generation. Page Publishing knows that authors need to be free to create - not bogged down with logistics like eBook conversion, establishing wholesale accounts, insurance, shipping, taxes, and the like. Its roster of accomplished authors and publishing professionals allows writers to leave behind these complex and time-consuming issues to focus on their passion: writing and creating. Learn more at http://www.pagepublishing.com. The Georgia Minority Supplier Development Council announced a landmark partnership with NOW Corp at its 4th annual Financial Summit on February 21st. The GMSDC, the state of Georgias leading advocacy organization for small business development and supplier diversity, brings together small businesses and corporations in Georgia for mutually beneficial business partnerships. The Summit which focuses on access to capital and financial acumen for small business is the perfect venue for the announcement of the GMSDC NOWaccount program, a partnership that will allow the GMSDCs Minority Business Enterprise constituents to practically eliminate Accounts Receivable by receiving timely payment of invoices. The program, which offers special rates to GMSDC certified MBEs, is a first-of-its-kind initiative that will be a game changer for small business in Georgia. Stacey Key, the President and CEO of the GMSDC, understands that the GMSDC NOWaccount program will change how business is done in Georgia. Our constituents are feeling the pinch of extended payment terms and other cash flow obstacles in supply chains across the board, she says. This partnership is critical to our primary mission to meet the needs of Georgias small business community and assist them in doing business with corporate America. This program is going to change the landscape significantly for our constituents, enabling them to navigate the peaks and valleys of todays marketplace more effectively. We are excited about the potential of this much-needed initiative. There is a natural synergy in our relationship with the GMSDC, says Archie Jones, the Chief Financial Officer of NOW Corp. The GMSDC is a recognized leader in supplier diversity, serving a constituency that is a perfect fit for the NOW Corp and its NOWaccount Payment System, says Jones. With all of the financial impacts that global supply chains can have on a small business, managing the scope and scale these clients require can be quite a challenge. Our program is designed to relieve that pressure by smoothing out the cash flow process for these companies. This partnership is a win for small business. NOW Corp, a B2B payments company headquartered in Atlanta, offers multiple tiers of service and speeds of payment, to give options to the small business owner based on individual cash flow requirements. The annual Financial Summit Access to Capital was held at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta on February 21ST. Presented by the GMSDC in partnership with the small business community, lenders, and industry experts, the event brings together the finance community and small business owners for a full day of workshops and activities focused on financial acumen and access to capital. About the GMSDC The Georgia Minority Supplier Development Council, Inc. (GMSDC) is a not-for-profit organization that fosters value-driven partnerships that may otherwise not be possible between corporate entities, ethnic minority-owned businesses and governmental entities in the state of Georgia. With over 400 national and local corporate members and more than 700 certified minority business enterprises, the GMSDC has served for more than 40 years as a leader in supplier diversity and minority business development. The GMSDC is headquartered in Atlanta and is an affiliate of National Minority Supplier Development Council. For more information on GMSDC NOWaccount call 404-589-4929 or visit GMSDC.nowaccount.com About NOW Corp NOW Corp is a payments company headquartered in Atlanta, GA that is redefining how B2B businesses get paid. NOW Corps mission is to enable businesses to Grow Fearlessly and to stop being a free bank to their customers. The NOWaccount payment system enables businesses to get paid immediately in a way that feels like accepting a credit card for payment even when their customer does not offer a card and requires an invoice that lets them pay later. Businesses that use the NOWaccount payment system are able to grow exponentially and reach larger customers and contracts without the stress that comes from waiting to get paid or the risk associated with using loans, factoring or financing programs. Media sales, growth strategy and client relations expert Rachel Miller-Garcia has signed on with Avani Media, an established media company representing global publishers and marketing solutions. The move comes as part of a larger restructuring effort as the company expands its B2B service offerings. In addition to adding Miller-Garcias expertise, Avani will be joining forces with an outside investor, enabling them to continue to represent and connect their clients to the leading technology, online and print media from around the world, now with more resources and support. A graduate of University of California, Berkeley with a degree in Economics, Miller-Garcia has over 20 years of experience in advertising, media, and integrated marketing. Working with digital and traditional agencies, publishing firms and in consulting roles, shes launched new service offerings and revenue streams for companies like Time Inc., Hearst Integrated Media, Mediasmith, Dentsu Aegis, and the digital transformation practice for SolomonEdwards. Miller-Garcias background and skill set building successful strategic partnerships, expanding global media and brand relationships and cross platform ROI programs for clients like Cisco, HP, Salesforce, SAP, Citrix and VCE makes her particularly suited to drive Avani Medias expansion and developing business model. She is focused on customer success--helping clients implement retention practices that build audience engagement across business units. Throughout my career, Ive focused on maximizing strategic growth opportunities and customer success for my clients and partners, says Miller-Garcia. My move to Avani is an opportunity to continue to build upon the existing work of an established brand. The recent restructuring has opened the door for Avani to be powered by technology--adding elements of customer service, ultimately serving our clients while becoming more competitive within the space. Im excited to join this smart and forward thinking team, and look forward to sharing our expertise. __________________________________ About Avani Media, LLC: Avani Media is a Bay Area-based international media sales and marketing solutions company that specializes in connecting global brands and media partners with growth opportunities. Their customer-focused B2B media services include a range of marketing solutions and demand and lead generation services for Technology, Electronics, Healthcare, Lifestyle, and Retail brands. Follow the herds in the shadow of Mount Kilimanjaro. The itinerary begins at Kilimanjaro Airport before flying to Tarangire National Park, the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, and Serengeti National Park, site of the famous Great Migration. Goway is offering 50% off its exclusive Tanzania Sky Safari to passengers accompanied by a full paying companion on departures in late April and May 2018. An African safari remains one of the most popular ways to visit the continent, and a dream trip for many. A sky safari however offers a unique way to move between the best parks and game reserves quickly and comfortably. The itinerary begins at Kilimanjaro Airport before flying to Tarangire National Park, the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, and Serengeti National Park, site of the famous Great Migration. Of these, it is perhaps Tarangire that needs the most introduction, though it is one of Africas best places to see baobab trees and elephants, whetting the safari appetite before the flight to Ngorongoro. Focused on its namesake crater, Ngorongoro is one of Africas wildlife treasure troves, protected by its geography. The Serengeti, meanwhile, is one of Africas most instantly recognizable names, synonymous with majestic herds moving across the plains as part of the Great Migration at the end of each year. Travellers visiting in spring shouldnt worry, however. The Serengeti offers magnificent wildlife spotting year round. Included in the Tanzania Sky Safari package are 7 nights accommodation, executive domestic flights with Sky Safari, all meals, drinks, laundry, scheduled game drives and activities, and airport/airstrip transfers. The Tanzania Sky Safari departs every other day. However, specific departures eligible for this 50% off offer are April 30, May 10, May 26, and May 28. Globetrotters must book by March 31 to be eligible for this offer. Since 1970, Goway has been providing unforgettable travel experiences to Africa, Asia, Australia, New Zealand, Central & South America, Idyllic Island destinations and Europe. Today Goway is recognized as one of North America's leading travel companies for individuals, families and groups to select exotic destinations around the globe. Goway has offices in Toronto, Vancouver, Los Angeles, Manila, and Sydney, Australia. For reservations and information, visit http://www.goway.com, or call 1-800-387-8850. The Largest Retail Energy Conference in the Country "The 2018 Houston Energy Marketing Conference promises to be our biggest and best event ever." --- Jack Doueck, Co-Founder Energy Marketing Conferences, LLC announced today the nominees for the 2017 Retail Energy Provider of the Year Award as well as the 2017 Most Innovative Marketer Award that will be presented at its ninth semi-annual Retail Energy Marketing Conference being held at the Houston Doubletree Hotel in Houston, Texas on March 14th 2018. Also announced was a keynote address by Mike Storch, CEO of Enernoc. The theme of the Energy Marketing Conference will be Collaborate, Innovate and Differentiate and it will feature 25 sponsors, a sold-out exhibit hall packed with 47 of the best exhibitors, more than 40 well-known industry professionals on five interactive panels, 11 executive workshops, a networking breakfast, luncheon and reception with live music. More than 550 attendees from all over the country are looking forward to hearing over 40 panelists and speakers. The conference will be the largest gathering of retail energy professionals in the country. The panels include: International Expansion; Successful Channel Partnerships; Implementing the Future Grid; The State of Mergers and Acquisitions and the famous CEO Round Table focusing on growth, expansion and overcoming obstacles that are in the way. The breakfast, luncheon, breaks and cocktail reception have all been designed to allow participants to maximize their learning and networking opportunities. Sponsored by Vantage Commodities, the nominees for the 2017 Most Innovative Marketer Award are: 4 Change Energy, Clearview Energy, Griddy Energy, Inspire Energy, Just Energy, and Stream Energy. Sponsored by Stephens, the nominees for the 2017 REP of the Year Award are: Ambit Energy, Clearview Energy, Crius Energy, Discount Power of Texas, Eligo Energy, Inspire Energy, and Rushmore Energy. The nominees for the Most Innovative Marketer Award have all created new programs, differentiated products offerings, bundled services, and overall improved customer experience, said Larry Leikin, Co-Founder of EMC and CEO of TrustedTPV. The nominees for the REP of the Year Award are eight companies that are leaders in the industry. They have executed on their business plans so well that the voting this year will be extremely difficult. This will probably be a close race. Congratulations to all the nominees on a great 2017, said Jack Doueck, Co-Founder of Advanced Energy Capital, LED Plus and Energy Marketing Conferences, LLC. This promises to be an event that cant be missed for professionals in the retail energy space. To view the full day (7:00am - 7:00pm) agenda - click here: https://energymarketingconferences.com/march-2018/ To register for the Energy Marketing Conference visit: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/energy-marketing-conference-houston-tx-tickets-37967081563 To watch the video from a previous Energy Marketing Conference in New York click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDQTi2lhXek To watch the video from a previous Energy Marketing Conference in Houston, click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UaPRmzrpM3o Brain Sentinel's SeizureLink Monitor Brain Sentinels goal is to enable the shortest possible time between when a seizure happens and help arriving. Brain Sentinel Consumer Systems, LLC (herein Brain Sentinel) announces the global launch of its new SeizureLink Alerting System at the Epilepsy Foundations 2018 Epilepsy Pipeline Conference, currently being held in San Francisco, CA. Pre-ordering for the U.S. will begin in March 2018, with shipments planned to begin by mid-summer via SeizureLink.com. The launch of the SeizureLink Alerting System gives people with generalized tonic-clonic seizures and their caregivers another tool to fight and protect themselves against the most dangerous epileptic seizures, said Mike Girouard, President of Brain Sentinel Consumer Systems, LLC. Girouard continued, Brain Sentinels goal is to enable the shortest possible time between when a seizure happens and help arriving. With the SeizureLink product, we believe we have the best non-prescription product available in the consumer market. Surface electromyography (sEMG) is different from other body signals being used by wearable alerting systems because it comes directly from the part of the brain where the generalized seizure occurs the primary motor cerebral cortex. Generalized tonic-clonic seizures are among the most dangerous type of epileptic seizure, said Dr. Jacqueline French, Professor of Neurology at NYU School of Medicine and Chief Science Officer of the Epilepsy Foundation. There is a great need for better ways to get help to people suffering these seizures in the home setting as quickly as possible. In January 2018, a prospective study on the SeizureLink detection algorithm was published in the journal, Neurology, by Dr. Sandor Beniczky, Dr. Isa Conradsen and colleagues. They found that the detection rate was 94% for generalized tonic-clonic seizures (GTCS). The study also found that the false alarm rate was 0.67 per day. And, the median time to detect was 9 seconds. sEMG is valuable for detecting GTCS because it allows us to monitor for the start of the tonic phase of the seizure, said Dr. Sandor Benickzy, Head of the Clinical Neurophysiology department at the Danish Epilepsy Center and Professor of Clinical Neurophysiology at Aarhus University in Denmark. Benickzy continued, This is an important part of the sEMG biomarker because it corresponds to the muscle activation of the patients muscles tensing up, before jerking motion begins. Studies on accelerometry and electrodermal signals have consistently shown a detection latency of 30 seconds or more. When a GTCS strikes, this extra time matters. Girouard continued, Not only is sEMG an effective body signal clinically, it allows us to create new product designs that are mobile, discrete, and accurate. Our patented algorithm monitors peoples sEMG at a rate of 1024 Hz. Within seconds of the sEMG signal changing from normal to the start of the tonic phase of a GTCS, SeizureLink alerts. Girouard summed up Brain Sentinels progress to date, The Brain Sentinel journey began simply by trying to help a mother who couldnt sleep at night because she was worried about her sons nocturnal seizures. Now, we have a chance to help a whole category of patients suffering from uncontrolled generalized convulsive seizures. Weve moved sEMG from artifact to biomarker. About Epilepsy Epilepsy affects over 3.4M people in the U.S. and 65M people worldwide. One in twenty six Americans will develop epilepsy in their lifetime according to the CDC. It is the fourth-most prevalent neurological disease affecting more people than Multiple Sclerosis, Cerebral Palsy, and Parkinsons combined. Unfortunately, 55,000 people die from complications from epilepsy each year (Fisher, 2010; Britton, 2002; Sander, Bell, 2004). Approximately one-third of people with epilepsy do not have control over their seizures and another third can only partially control their seizures (Baker, 1997). Studies have shown that about 50% of seizures happen at night (Herman, 2001) and 86% of nocturnal seizures are not documented (Hoppe, 2001). About Brain Sentinel Brain Sentinel Consumer Systems, LLC is a privately held, medical-device, start-up company based in San Antonio, Texas pioneering the use of sEMG consumer devices for seizure alerting. On December 2, 2017, Brain Sentinel announced the purchase of the assets of IctalCare A/S, a Danish Company with its intention to make an sEMG-based alerting system available without a prescription. Brain Sentinel invested in this technology because it is committed to helping people gain better control over their seizures. MessageGears Named a 2018 TAG Top 40 Innovative Technology Company Innovation is the lifeblood of MessageGears and is a core part of our culture, Barnette said. Its an honor to be recognized by TAG for our hard work and achievements but, honestly, were just doing what we love. I can't think of a better place to build an innovation-centric company than Atlanta. The Technology Association of Georgia (TAG), the states leading association dedicated to the promotion and economic advancement of Georgias technology industry, today announced MessageGears as one of its Top 40 Innovative Technology Companies in Georgia. TAGS Top 40 Awards recognize Georgia-based technology companies for their innovation, financial impact, and their efforts at spreading awareness of Georgias technology initiatives throughout the U.S. and globally. MessageGears was honored for its unique approach to providing enterprise companies with unprecedented access to their customer data for email marketing, something that isnt possible with traditional software-as-a-service email service providers. MessageGears was also named a TAG Top 40 Innovative Technology Company in 2014. The 2018 Top 40 finalists are an elite group of innovators who represent the very best of Georgias Technology community, said Larry Williams, president and CEO of TAG. The 2018 Top 40 finalists are shining examples of what makes our state such a hotbed for technology and we applaud them for standing out as leaders in Georgias technology community. This years Top 40 were selected from among more than 100 applications submitted by companies from across Georgia. Companies selected for the Top 40 will be showcased in an exhibition at The Summit 2018 March 20-21 at the Cobb Galleria Centre. This years Top 40 was more competitive than ever, said Dennis Zakas, managing partner of Zakas & Leonard, LLP, and chairperson of the Top 40 Selection Committee. In our quest to showcase the most innovative companies in Georgia, we had to make hard decisions, resulting in the exclusion of numerous deserving companies, many of which had been recognized as a Top 10 company in the past. The companies that we selected this year are truly outstanding. MessageGears CEO Roger Barnette said the honor recognizes the companys drive to push email marketing technology forward, and help their clients succeed. Innovation is the lifeblood of MessageGears and is a core part of our culture, Barnette said. Its an honor to be recognized by TAG for our hard work and achievements but, honestly, were just doing what we love. I can't think of a better place to build an innovation-centric company than Atlanta. The Summit 2018 is expected to draw a crowd of more than 1,500 C-level executives, entrepreneurs, technology professionals and academia to celebrate and recognize Georgias technology community. In addition to presentations from some of the top technology influencers in the nation, the newest member of the Technology Hall of Fame of Georgia will be inducted. For more information about TAG and The Summit and to register for the event, visit http://www.tagsummit.com/. Follow the conversation on Twitter through #TAGSUMMIT. About MessageGears MessageGears is the only email service provider that enables the worlds top brands to send dynamic, high-volume marketing messages with speed and precision by providing a platform that overcomes the inherent limitations of marketing cloud email systems. MessageGears works almost exclusively with large business-to-consumer (B2C) companies, including Expedia, Orbitz Worldwide, Chick-fil-A, AmTrust, and Ebates. Founded in 2010, MessageGears is based in Atlanta, Georgia. For more information, please visit http://www.messagegears.com. About The Technology Association of Georgia (TAG) TAG is the leading technology industry association in the state, serving more than 30,000 members through regional chapters in Metro Atlanta, Athens, Augusta, Columbus, Macon/Middle Georgia, and Savannah. TAGs mission is to educate, promote, and unite Georgias technology community to foster an innovative and connected marketplace that stimulates and enhances a tech-based economy. Additionally, the TAG Education Collaborative (TAGs charitable arm) focuses on helping science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education initiatives thrive. For more information visit the TAG website at http://www.tagonline.org or TAGs community website at http://www.hubga.com. To learn about the TAG-Ed Collaborative visit http://www.tagedonline.org/. San Diegos premier massage establishment once again is holding a massage drawing giving participants the opportunity to win a massage every month for 12 months. The giveaway will end on April 1, 2018 and the drawing will be held on April 2, 2018. There are several ways that participants may enter the contest and no purchase is necessary. The easiest way to enter the contest is to complete the entry form on Happy Head's Website. No purchase is necessary and participants only need to join once. This is the perfect chance to cure that massage addiction by just getting more massages. Chances of winning the grand prizes can be increased by telling more people about the giveaway. Just for entering the contest participants will get one entry for their chance to win massages for an entire year. Participants can get 3 more entries by just referring their friends to join in on the contest as well. The more people they get to join in on the contest, the more entries they get thus increasing their chance of winning. The giveaway ends on April 1, 2018 at 5pm. Two winners will be announced on April 2nd and the prizes will be awarded shortly thereafter. The prize will consist of one free one hour Swedish or Deep Tissue Massage per month for 12 months valid at any Happy Head Massage location in San Diego. To learn more about the Happy Head, visit them at http://www.happyheadmassage.com/services/. Besides the chance to get massages for an entire year, Happy Head Foot Reflexology and Massage also holds a monthly drawing that gives their subscribers a chance to win a free one hour Swedish or Deep Tissue massage. Contestants are automatically entered into the drawing when they follow the Happy Head on Twitter, Facebook, or are on their mailing list. The winner of this drawing is announced on their Twitter page the last Monday of every month. For those that just cant wait to find out if they won, the prices at the Happy Head are very affordable. A one hour Asian style body and foot massage is only $39. They also offer many other massage styles at their spa at very affordable prices. A full list of services and prices can be found at http://www.happyheadmassage.com/services/. The Happy Head currently has 8 locations throughout Southern California. By offering great massages without the spa price they have become the premiere go-to place in San Diego to get a great massage.They are continually expanding to bring more affordable massage to more areas. Customers can book online, enter the contest, and much more at http://www.HappyHeadMassage.com. DrBicuspid.com, a daily clinical and industry news website covering the dental field, will honor the best new products in dentistry by presenting the Dental Excellence Awards on Friday, February 23, at the 2018 Chicago Dental Society Midwinter Meeting. The award winners were chosen exclusively by DrBicuspid.com readers and honor new dental products in 10 different categories, from Best New CAD/CAM Product to Best New/Updated Software/Service. DrBicuspid.com Editor-in-Chief Tony Edwards and National Sales Manager David Hurlbrink will honor the winners with exclusive presentations of trophies at each company's booth on the exhibit floor at Chicago's McCormick Place. Each presentation will be featured on DrBicuspid.com's social media channels, and an article honoring the winners will appear on the website. "One of the highlights of the Chicago Midwinter Meeting is the chance to honor the best new products in dentistry," Edwards stated. The winners in each of the 10 categories include products from industry leaders such as Dentsply Sirona, Biolase, Hu-Friedy, 3Shape, and more. About DrBicuspid.com DrBicuspid.com is a division of IMV, Ltd. IMV Publishing operates websites targeted at vertical markets within the healthcare industry. DrBicuspid.com offers original feature articles, daily news, and educational information designed for today's dental professional and dental team members. The company's AuntMinnie.com site is the premier online information, transaction, and education site for the medical imaging industry. You can also connect with us via Facebook and Twitter. A proposed amendment to the Florida Constitution banning possession of assault weapons by anyone else than a well-regulated militia is being filed with the Secretary State. The amendment designates the Florida National Guard and organized police forces as the states militia, and allows that militia to possess assault rifles, automatic weapons, large magazine weapons, sniper rifles and all other weapons necessary to defend the state. The language goes on to ban the possession of such weapons by anyone other than the militia. The amendment was developed and is being filed by a Boynton Beach resident. Donald Cleveland is the acting chairman of the Stop The Killing Committee and author of the amendment language. Cleveland said, Its time for the people to speak directly, because representative government through the state and federal legislative branches has broken down. Instead of representing the vast majority of the Americans who favor weapon control, the elected legislative officials do the bidding of the monied gun interests. Those who oppose regulation based on the U.S. Constitutions Second Amendment need to go back to school and study the English language, he said. He went on to point out, that they also need to remember that the Assault Weapons ban passed in 1994 was not struck down by the courts, but remained in effect until it expired ten years later. Further, Private ownership of machine guns made after 1986 is banned by federal law. All pre-1986 automatic weapons must be registered with the ATF and require extensive background checks before private citizens may own them. The National Firearms Act, first enacted in 1934, regulates fully automatic weapons, suppressors, short-barreled rifles and shotguns, and destructive devices such as bombs or grenades. The NFA was subsequently modified in 1968 by the Gun Control Act and in 1986 by the Firearm Owners Protection Act. "Sportsmen dont need assault rifles or large clip guns to hunt or compete in marksmanship events," Cleveland stated. Cleveland started hunting with his dad when he was ten years old and won numerous marksmanship awards including the Distinguished Marksmanship medal from the National Rifle Association. He served in U.S. Army reserve and active duty for a total of ten years, served on a legislative research staff, and is the author of a book on the U.S. Constitution. He lobbied at the federal, state and local level for a period of ten years where he successfully wrote and passed hundreds of laws and a state constitutional amendment. Mass shootings have been increasing over the past 20 years, and they wouldnt be possible if the murderers didnt have military grade weapons in their hands, Cleveland added. We must have the courage to STOP THE KILLING! -30- "We cleared the path and set the direction revolutionizing the corporate wellness industry with our SAFA program by providing the most value for our clients in the shortest period of time " Jon Gallo, Now I'm Fit President Now Im Fit LLC (NIF) introduces a revolutionary approach for corporate wellness solutions using a proprietary signature program called Stretch and Flex Advantage (SAFA). Our SAFA program is a unique 15 minute wellness program for employees that focuses on relieving common workplace stress and tension. Using specific stretch therapy protocols, which systematically position, stabilize, isolate and manipulate muscles resulting in instant gratification. On a weekly basis, Now I'm Fit provides employees an increased level of productivity while lowering health-care costs, providing a healthier work environment and enhancing the corporate image. The SAFA program has contributed to the successful completion of iconic locations like the Freedom Tower (New York City), The Met Life Stadium (Rutherford, NJ), the construction of the 2nd Avenue Subway (NYC) and is currently in hospitals like New York Presbyterian and many more. We currently service the NY and NJ market. With increasing demand for our services, we have created a CEU certification course to empower fitness and wellness professionals to grow their business and provide the SAFA program nationwide. The foundation of NIFs philosophy is that we strive to be so effective in what we achieve, that corporations will not be able to ignore the increasing demand for our services. Your employees world will be changed by the corporations example, not just their opinion. For many years, our success has been a direct reflection of our clients satisfaction with the SAFA program, says Jon Gallo, Now I'm Fit President. In an interview by News Correspondent Brian Weber, Gallo explained how he challenged the corporate blind spot of managing health in the workplace. He stated, Our passion is helping companies and their employees create real breakthroughs in their workplace and their home life by offering our SAFA program. Not accepting the norm is the secret to really big success and changing the culture in the workplace. We know change is hard, usually what we most fear doing is what we most need to do. As a company, we have learned that what you get will never make you happy but what you contribute and who you become will. At Now Im Fit, we believe in doing more for our clients than anyone else does. Its not about being good; its about being great in anything and everything we do. The Now-Im-Fit staff is professional and reliable, have seasoned expertise, and provide an extension of care and partnership that leads to a more productive and collaborative organization. We will be offering FREE SAFA sessions the entire month of March to the first 50 companies who inquire within. Learn more about Now Im Fit at: http://www.NowImFit.com More about Jon Gallo, (President) of Now Im Fit: http://www.JonGalloFitness.com Contact: Jon Gallo, Now Im Fit LLC, 128 N. Main Street, Milltown, NJ 08850 Phone: 347.926.3410 E-mail: Info(at)nowimfit(dot)com InfoMC, a national healthcare technology company providing behavioral health care management and patient centric care coordination solutions, is pleased to announce that its Chairman and CEO, JJ Farook, will participate in the second annual Tour of Jaffna bike ride for charity. The purpose of the bike ride is to aid the Friends of Manipay Hospital (FoMH) charity in the reconstruction of the Green Memorial Hospital in Manipay, Jaffna, Northern Sri Lanka. The hospital, founded by American medical missionary Samuel Fiske Green in 1847, was once the premier medical institution in northern Sri Lanka before being ravaged by war and economic hardship. The Green Memorial Hospital is the second oldest teaching medical institution in Asia and serves all communities in Northern Sri Lanka. The hospital is a fully charity funded not-for-profit institution where 50 percent of patient care is subsidized by the FoMH charity. The hospital is in need of funding, equipment, and the goodwill of specialist doctors, nurses and other medical professionals, so it can be better equipped to serve the healthcare needs of its patients from all communities in the region. I am honored to be participating in this inspiring event in support of the historical Green Memorial Hospital and the people of Sri Lanka, said Mr. Farook. This cause is particularly meaningful to me as a Sri Lankan native, and Im grateful for the opportunity to have a direct impact on the quality of healthcare received by thousands of individuals, Farook said. The charity ride will take place from February 28th to March 3rd, covering approximately 400km over 4 stages/days, with overnight stops in Puttalam, Vavuniya and Killinochchi, before arriving in Jaffna. Through the generosity of corporate sponsorships and donations, the 2nd Annual Tour of Jaffna can cover the operating budget of the event, raise needed funds cost-effectively, underwrite future events, expand fundraising programs and help rural communities. For more information, please visit http://ridersforcharity.com/. Whatever business the client is in, and whatever the item being shipped, Purolators ultimate objective is to deliver goods quickly, accurately, and with the flexibility required to remain competitive in todays environment," said Costanzo. Purolator International, a leading provider of North American logistics, is proud to announce that John Costanzo has been named a 2018 Pro to Know by Supply & Demand Chain Executive magazine. This is the fourth consecutive year that Costanzo has been honored with this award, recognizing his leadership in helping organizations to prepare their companies supply chains for the rapidly evolving needs of todays customer. Supply & Demand Chain Executive congratulates the 2018 Supply & Demand Chain Executive Pros to Know recipients. The Pros to Know is a listing of exceptional executives who are leading initiatives to help prepare supply chains for the significant challenges in the year ahead, says John Yuva, editor of Supply & Demand Chain Executive. We commend this years recipients for their achievements and for paving the way for the next generation of exceptional supply chain leaders. This years recipients embody the commitment to transformative supply chain tools and processes, earning these individuals a rightful place in this years Pros to Know listing. 2018 marks Purolator Internationals 20th anniversary of operations in the United States. John Costanzo has driven the companys success with a commitment to innovation and customer service, consistently introducing new products and services to improve clients supply chain efficiency. While traditionally known for northbound service to Canada, Purolator International recently introduced an intra-U.S. expedited forwarding service, offering complete coverage throughout the U.S. via a connected distribution network comprised of hubs, airports, and qualified transportation partners. Another exciting innovation recently introduced was PuroPost Plus. Purolator International recognized a need among U.S. e-commerce companies for faster service to the Canadian market, and responded by expanding its existing PuroPost service to create PuroPost Plus with guaranteed 2-5 day delivery to all residential addresses in Canada. A vital component of these new services and in every Purolator International offering is an emphasis on personal service. In fact, Purolator International is so committed to going the extra mile for its customers, that it has given its approach to customer service a name -- the PuroTouch. Through PuroTouch, every customer is assigned a dedicated client relationship representative (CRR) who is intricately involved with every aspect of a customers shipping needs and logistics solution. Customers benefit from the flexibility of convenient scheduling including later pickup times and customized handling, and from the seamless management that ensures shipments arrive on time and safely. Thanks to Purolators high levels of service and attention to detail, the company has a loss and damage claims rate of less than one percent. Every one of Purolator Internationals clients has the same underlying goal: to create an exceptional customer experience. Supply chain excellence is an integral part of the customer experience, said John Costanzo, President, Purolator International. Whatever business the client is in, and whatever the item being shipped, Purolators ultimate objective is to deliver goods quickly, accurately, and with the flexibility required to remain competitive in todays environment. The 2018 Provider Pros to Know are individuals from software firms and service providers, consultancies or academia, who helped their supply chain clients or the supply chain community at large prepare to meet these challenges. Supply & Demand Chain Executive received more than 300 entries for the 2018 Pros to Know Awards. Check out Supply & Demand Chain Executives website at http://www.sdcexec.com for the full list of all of the 2018 Pros to Know and Practitioner Pros winners. About Supply & Demand Chain Executive Supply & Demand Chain Executive is the executive's user manual for successful supply and demand chain transformation, utilizing hard-hitting analysis, viewpoints and unbiased case studies to steer executives and supply management professionals through the complicated, yet critical, world of supply and demand chain enablement to gain competitive advantage. Visit us on the web at http://www.SDCExec.com. About Purolator International Purolator International is a subsidiary of Purolator Inc., a leading integrated freight, package and logistics solutions provider in Canada. Purolator International specializes in the air and surface forwarding of Express, Freight and Parcel shipments, customs brokerage, and fulfillment and delivery services to, from and within North America. Purolator International has received numerous industry awards for its superior service and innovative solutions, including 100 Great Supply Chain Projects by Supply & Demand Chain Executive magazine, Top 100 Great Supply Chain Partners by Supply Chain Brain magazine, Top 100 3PL Providers by Inbound Logistics, and Logistics Managements Quest for Quality Award. In addition to facilities throughout New York, Purolator International has locations in key U.S. markets including Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston, Buffalo, Charlotte, Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Denver, Dallas-Fort Worth, Detroit, Nashville, Newark, Houston, Indianapolis, New York, Los Angeles, Kansas City, Memphis, Miami, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Pittsburgh, Raleigh-Durham, San Diego, Seattle, San Francisco, Salt Lake City, and St. Louis. For more information about Purolator International, visit http://www.purolatorinternational.com. # # # Modern Acupuncture We are thrilled to have StrawberryFrog join the Modern Acupuncture family to define our brand strategy and steward our growth nationally in 2018. Modern Acupuncture, the nations fastest growing health and wellness franchise, has partnered with the movement marketing firm, StrawberryFrog, to build a powerful brand through creative marketing opportunities. Modern Acupuncture is the first franchise to make the natural health and cosmetic benefits of acupuncture available to people in an accessible and affordable delivery. Combining a healing form that has been validated by thousands of years of practice with a modern, clean and spa-like environment, Modern Acupuncture provides guests with a peaceful sanctuary that they can make part of their regular routine. The cosmetic acupuncture offering is a true differentiator that has become increasingly popular at each location, providing a safer and more natural alternative to reduce and prevent fine lines and wrinkles. We are thrilled to have StrawberryFrog join the Modern Acupuncture family to define our brand strategy and steward our growth nationally in 2018, said Matt Hale, co-founder and CEO of Modern Acupuncture. As StrawberryFrog specializes in brand movements, we are confident that this unique approach will not only build a powerful brand, but will grow passionate fans and make Modern Acupuncture one of the most known brands in the country. StrawberryFrog is a New York-based Cultural Movement firm. Since 1999, the company has built some of the worlds most iconic brands such as Google, Jim Beam, Heineken, SunTrust and Emirates Airline and Asics. Founded by Scott Goodson, the firm brought the idea of Movement Marketing to the world. We selected StrawberryFrog because of their track record building movements for some of the worlds most iconic brands like IKEA, Smart Car and Jim Beam, said Chad Everts, Chief Development Officer of Modern Acupuncture. We hand-picked the StrawberryFrog team that led and built the European Wax Center brand into one of the most successful franchises in the U.S. StrawberryFrog Founder, Chairman Scott Goodson said, My team and I are very proud to be working with Matt, Chad and the leadership team of Modern Acupuncture. They have an extraordinary experience. Our ambition is to define a meaningful brand movement for a modern version of a three thousand year old, proven medicine. Creative opportunities do not come bigger or better in the beauty and wellness space. Modern Acupuncture is on track to have 60 stores open by year end, with a total of 500 licenses sold to date among 32 states. For more information about franchising opportunities, please visit modernacupuncturefranchise.com. About Modern Acupuncture Modern Acupuncture is a franchise concept transforming the alternative medicine market and acupuncture industry. Offering an approachable, natural pathway, validated by thousands of years of practice to better health and wellbeing, Modern Acupuncture is the first franchise to deliver the natural health and cosmetic benefits of acupuncture in a retreat-like setting in highly accessible neighborhood locations across the country. Founded in 2016 and based in Scottsdale, Ariz., Modern Acupuncture currently offers area developer and franchisee opportunities to qualifying entrepreneurs. ACU Development, LLC is the franchisor of MA Modern Acupuncture franchise locations and an operator in some states. In California, Florida, Kansas, New Jersey, Nevada, Oregon, Tennessee, and Washington, ACU Development, LLC and its franchisees provide management services to affiliated professional acupuncture practices. For more information, please visit http://www.modacu.com or call (480) 999-5505. Our growth continues to be driven by our passion for serving the needs of B2C marketers worldwide with product and service innovation. Liveclicker, Inc. (http://www.liveclicker.com), a global provider of real-time email personalization solutions, today announced a record close to 2017. Highlights include: 80 percent increase in year-over-year subscription revenue 113 new clients, doubling the client base 39th consecutive profitable quarter 265 percent increase in live content impressions A roster of market-first product innovations Client Focused, Growth Fueled Liveclicker strengthened existing client partnerships in 2017, with more than nine out of ten clients renewing their commitments with the company on a revenue basis. Clients also increasingly realized the importance of integrating real-time personalization technologies in consumer-facing email marketing programs. In total, Liveclicker saw a 145 percent increase in year-over-year real-time content implementation in triggered or automated messages. On the new business front, 113 organizations joined the Liveclicker client roster for the first time, including top-shelf brands such as BBC, Costco, Hyatt, Marks & Spencer, Pier 1 Imports, Pizza Hut, TNT Europe, and Ulta Beauty. Industry partnerships also grew significantly, with 11 new marketing agency partners and three new Email Service Provider (ESP) partners teaming with Liveclicker to extend the power of real-time email personalization to their own clients. Additionally, the industry at large rallied in support of the companys successful Future of Email tour, which attracted more than 2,500 attendees from 500 brands in 18 cities across the U.S. and Europe last year. Email marketing industry leaders, including Adestra, Adobe Campaign, BriteVerify, Brightwave, Cheetah Digital, Cordial, eDataSource, Email Aptitude, Fluent, Return Path, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Shaw+Scott, SmarterHQ, Webbula, and WhatCounts, were among the partners and technology providers moving the industry forward at this event. Product Innovation Our ongoing commitment to product innovation and excellence is the fuel behind our continued growth, said Xavier Casanova, co-founder and CEO of Liveclicker. 2017 was a year with many industry firsts in this category. Among them: RealTime Behavioral Profiles: Combines behavioral data collected from a marketers website or mobile app with email open-time data to power recommendations and other successful behavioral messaging, such as cart abandonment or win-back campaigns ESP LiveConnect: Feeds email open-time data to ESPs so marketers can implement more powerful and effective segmentation strategies Predictive Geotargeting: A machine-learning powered solution that tracks a consumers past email-open locations in order to predict the location of the next open, even when open-time data is unavailable LiveCalendar: Uses live open-time and click-time data to open device-native calendar applications from within email, then pre-populates calendar event fields with personalized content provided the brand LiveData: Enables marketers to collect performance data on all email campaigns, even those not utilizing real-time personalization, for consistent campaign and comparison data Product Integrations: Integrations with Olapic (curated social content), stensul (email content creation), and additional weather, product recommendation, shipping providers, online reviews, and third-party pricing engines extends the ability to source reams of critical data for email marketers at open time Kinetic Services: Increased adoption of Liveclickers Kinetic Design Services further augments native product capabilities. Scalability and Security Security and scaling were also major initiatives in 2017 as Liveclicker continued to invest in its best-in-class infrastructure and processes during its tenth consecutive year without a security incident. Among the achievements: Achieved General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliance, including implementation of new systems and tools for the GDPR right to be forgotten mandate along with important changes to data processing and retention capabilities Achieved full redundancy across the entire product infrastructure in support of the companys 2.65X increase in year-over-year live content impressions and system uptime greater than 99.99 percent for the fourth consecutive year Significantly hardened all areas of information security and established a relationship with Deloitte as a security partner As we progress through Q1 2018, our growth continues to be driven by our passion for serving the needs of B2C marketers worldwide with product and service innovation, continued Casanova. "The momentum we have gathered in 2017 by helping our clients solve critical email personalization challenges at-scale and strategically guiding them to maximize results is a constant motivating factor. About Liveclicker Founded in 2008, Liveclicker is a global provider of real-time email personalization solutions for B2C marketers. Since the release of its VideoEmail platform in 2009, marketers have used Liveclicker to captivate consumers and drive program performance. Today, top brands such as 1-800-FLOWERS, AT&T, Best Buy, MasterCard, Lowe's, Nintendo and Samsung rely on the companys market-leading RealTime Email solution to deliver engaging, personalized messages, simply and at scale. For more information, visit: http://www.liveclicker.com, phone: 888-727-8130 or email: sales(at)liveclicker(dot)com. After a recent article appeared in WorldFinance.comTop 5 most popular ways to finance retirementit caught the attention of Jim Hitt, the CEO of American IRA. As the leader of a Self-Directed IRA Administration firm in North Carolina, Jim Hitt was in a unique position to evaluate the recommendations in this article and weigh in on the popularity of some of the nations most popular retirement investment strategies. In the response, posted at http://www.AmericanIRA.com, Jim Hitt noted that what is most popular is not always the most effective. While the WorldFinance.com article highlighted basic strategies like retirement account investing and real estate investments, Jim Hitt thought that the article needed to go a step further to give investors a complete picture of their options. Im a big believer in retirement accounts and in growing wealth through smart real estate investments, said Jim Hitt. But I also think that people deserve to know that there are plenty of ways to go about these strategies. For example, a Self-Directed IRA means investors can put money in real estate with a retirement account, which in turn allows them to enjoy a range of tax benefits and protections as allowed by the IRS. For example, Jim Hitt notes, growing an investment within a tax-protected account such as a Roth IRA can mean tax-free growth. A piece of real estate held in a Roth IRA can grow substantially in value. In a Roth IRA, qualified distributions are then tax-free in retirement. Jim Hitt allowed that the article served as an interesting introduction to the world of retirementespecially to those who might not be familiar with retirement investing. The most important thing is that people get investing early and often, said JimHitt. If a person is only 25, they need to know that the compounding effect can lead to a sizeable portion of wealth in retirement even if they do not always know what they are doing. But it is also important to learn these things so that an investor can optimize their chances for success. According to Jim Hitt, alternatives like investing in real estate, precious metals, and even private companies can make great decisions for those investors that want to diversify their portfolio out of the stock market. A Self-Directed IRA is a tax-protected vehicle with broad leeway for these types of investments, provided that owners know how to adhere to regulations. For more information on American IRA, visit http://www.AmericanIRA.com or call 866-7500-IRA. About: American IRA, LLC was established in 2004 by James C. Hitt in Asheville, NC. The mission of American IRA is to provide the highest level of customer service in the self-directed retirement industry. Mr. Hitt and his team have grown the company to over $250 million in assets under administration by educating the public that their self-directed IRA account can invest in a variety of assets such as real estate, private lending, limited liability companies, precious metals and much more. As a self-directed IRA administrator they are a neutral third party. They do not make any recommendations to any person or entity associated with investments of any type (including financial representatives, investment promoters or companies, or employees, agents or representatives associated with these firms). They are not responsible for and are not bound by any statements, representations, warranties or agreements made by any such person or entity and do not provide any recommendation on the quality profitability or reputability of any investment, individual or company. The term "they" refers to American IRA, located in Asheville, NC. Jon Henschen In his latest Intellectual Takeout blog post, Tech Exec Doomsday Preppers: Protecting Themselves from the Automation Monster They Created, independent channel broker-dealer recruiter Jon Henschen takes a look at the world of doomsday preppers and finds that the latest practitioners, tech executives, are protecting themselves from the very automation they created. Henschens exploration of the prepper phenomenon begins by recalling Doomsday Preppers, an American reality series that ran on the National Geographic channel from 2011 to 2014. The series explored the lives of otherwise ordinary Americans who are preparing for the end of the world as we know it. A more recent documentary, Silicon Valleys Doomsday: Prepping for An Economic Apocalypse, shows how tech preppers are readying themselves and their families to live out a technological apocalypse in style, complete with bunkers, off-grid homes and guns. These executives are spending anywhere from $200K-400K on the low end to millions on the high end for so-called billionaire bunkers. Henschen observes that unlike earlier preppers, this group fears social unrest, believing that the automation they build to increase productivity is creating massive job loss that will destroy the very economy it created. According to Henschen, Name any job or profession, and there is likely a startup tech company working on how to automate it. The next logical question is, What professions should be avoided because they are likely to be replaced by robots or software automation? To answer, Henschen points to Michael Grothaus article, Bet You Didnt See This Coming: 10 Jobs That Will Be Replaced by Robots. Grothaus list of jobs he thinks will be hit the hardest includes construction workers, taxi drivers, manufacturing workers and movie stars and journalists. The list also includes insurance underwriters and claims reps and bank tellers. Also likely to be hard hit are financial analysts. For those in the financial services arena, Henschen observes that the industry is already experiencing robo advisor options, with some wondering if Alexa will soon create clients financial plans. An area rarely discussed in broker-dealer circles is what effect will be seen in broker-dealer back-office-operations departments, compliance and other touch points for advisors, according to Henschen. In 10 years, will much of the broker-dealers back office be automated? Henschen also points to Aric Jenkins March 24, 2017 article in Fortune, Robots Could Steal 40% of US Jobs by 2030, which cites this vision of the future, Nearly 40% of US jobs could soon be given to robots, according to a new report from PriceWaterhouse Coopers (PwC). PwC researchers suggested that automated bots could take nearly 4 in 10 (38%) jobs in the U.S., 30% of jobs in the United Kingdom, 35% in Germany, and 21% in Japan. Concluding, Henschen expresses his concern with the tech preppers, questioning, If the executives who create this automation are so worried that they are preparing for massive civil unrest by prepping with shelters, food stocks and guns, lots of guns, perhaps these job loss estimates are too conservative. What do they know that we dont? Read the full post and get more perspectives here: Jon Henschen is President of Henschen & Associates, an independent broker-dealer recruiting firm located in Marine on St. Croix, Minnesota. With more than 20 years of industry experience, Jon is a staunch advocate for independent financial advisors, and is widely sought after by both reps and broker dealers for his expertise and advice on independent broker dealer topics. He is frequently published and quoted in a variety of industry publications, including ThinkAdvisor, Investment Advisor Magazine, Wealth Management Magazine, Financial Advisor IQ, Financial Advisor Magazine, Investment News and others. FLOW-3D CAST v5 Released The release of FLOW-3D CAST v5 puts the power of the industrys most accurate casting simulation tool into the hands of everyday users. - John Ditter, VP of Software Engineering. Flow Science, Inc. has announced a major release of their metal casting simulation software, FLOW-3D CAST version 5.0. FLOW-3D CASTs new tools for predicting casting defects provide insights that shorten design cycles and reduce cost. Featured developments include thermal modulus and hot spot identification output for solidification simulations, filling defect tools for identifying trapped gases and predicting venting efficiency, and faster and more robust pressure and stress solvers. The ALL NEW FLOW-3D CAST v5 comes in Suites, including Permanent Mold, High Pressure Die Casting, Low Pressure Sand Casting and Lost Foam. Within each Suite, FLOW-3D CASTs process-based workspaces substantially simplify simulation setup by allowing metal casters to choose the process they want to simulate. The software will then provide the appropriate process parameters, geometry types, and industry defaults. The release of FLOW-3D CAST v5 puts the power of the industrys most accurate casting simulation tool into the hands of everyday users. Our new defect prediction tools, coupled with a more robust simulation engine, a redesigned What-You-See-Is-What-You-Need (WYSIWYN) interface, and porosity analysis tool, make simulation a reality for every casting project, said John Ditter, VP of Software Engineering. A live webinar will present the new models, features and design workflows of FLOW-3D CAST v5. The webinar will take place on March 14 at 1:00 pm EST. Register online > Go here for an extensive description of the v5 release improvements > About Flow Science Flow Science, Inc. is a privately-held software company specializing in transient, free-surface CFD flow modeling software for industrial and scientific applications worldwide. Flow Science has distributors for FLOW-3D sales and support in nations throughout the Americas, Europe, and Asia. Flow Sciences headquarters is located in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Flow Science can be found online at https://www.flow3d.com/. FLOW-3D is a registered trademark in the USA and other countries. Auction House Japan (AHJ) has time and again proved to be the pacesetter in the used vehicle export industry with the mission to excel in provision of all-inclusive vehicle export services. For this purpose, Auction House Japan has taken steps to ensure convenience of customers in Mauritius by providing Auction Sheet Authenticity Certification services from Japan Used Motor Vehicle Export Association (JUMVEA). This decision was made in response to a requirement made effective by the regulatory authorities of Mauritius on 22nd January 2018. This directed that all used vehicles purchased from Japanese Auction Houses and imported to Mauritius must have verified and authentic Auction Sheets. The new policy was announced in order to subjugate the import of used vehicles with falsified or altered auction sheets, an issue which was resulting in damage to consumer trust and confidence. Auction House Japan has taken the necessary steps to make sure that all vehicles exported by the company fulfil the certification requirements. Mauritius regulatory bodies have authorized JUMVEA, a notable inspection agency, to issue Authenticity Certificate of Untampered Auction Sheet for all used Japanese cars imported to Mauritius. This certification also involves verifying other specifications such as authentic auction house, correct mileage, chassis number, manufacturing date and registration year. Auction House Japan has complied with this requirement by commencing the certification of auction sheets for all cars exported to Mauritius through JUMVEA for the facilitation of its customers. This service will allow customers to ensue importation of vehicles to Mauritius with ease and save them from making additional efforts to attain JUMVEA certification on their own for customs clearance. About Auction House Japan Auction House Japan is one of the leading used Japanese automobile exporters, catering to customers from over 120 countries across 5 continents. Auction House Japan, with its extensive network of 140+ auction houses in Japan, is renowned for the sale and export of thousands of superior quality used cars weekly. Customers are provided with a number of additional services including auction support, premium shipment, vehicle inspections and documentation at Auction House Japan. "Assorted Colors," the new CD by Spin Cycle. One of our aims was to develop the songs not by adding sections but by building on the form itself via solos or concepts. ... We wrote things that got to the heart of the matter, but also were vehicles that allowed us to stretch. One of the freshest sounding bands to emerge on the jazz scene in this or any decade, Spin Cycle follows up its critically acclaimed eponymous debut from 2016 with the release on April 6 of "Assorted Colors" (Sound Footing Records). The new recording, coming after two years of intensive touring that further refined their distinctive take on jazz, sustains the praise bestowed by DownBeats Ed Enright in his rave review of their first album that hailed the band as a cohesive unit that commands an exceptional stylistic range and exhibits a go-for-broke attitude. On their sophomore release, the pianoless quartet delivers more of the bright melodic lines, deep-seated grooves, catchy rhythmic devices and sophisticated harmony cited by Enright, who praised them for improvisations run wild, as soloists embrace aggressive and daring ideas from the realms of modal jazz, free-jazz, second-line and soul, not to mention good old-fashioned swing. Founded in 2014 and co-led by drummer Scott Neumann and saxophonist Tom Christensen, who have known and played with each other in various settings for well over 25 years, Spin Cycle is rounded out by guitarist Pete McCann and bassist Phil Palombi. The four musicians are mainstays of the New York jazz scene. The title "Assorted Colors" alludes in part to the broad and eclectic stylistic palettes Christensen and Neumann each draw upon while crafting the compositions that define Spin Cycles musical direction. (Christensen contributed six tunes to the session, Neumann five.) One of our aims was to develop the songs not by adding sections but by building on the form itself via solos or concepts, Neumann says. We wrote things that got to the heart of the matter, but also were vehicles that allowed us to stretch, Christensen adds. Spin Cycles decision to use a guitar rather than a piano in the band enables the creation of unusual blends of airy textures that are a trademark of the bands tonal tapestries. Guitar chords are more sparse than piano chords, theyre more open sounding, says Christensen. Among the Christensen tunes on "Assorted Colors" are the arresting minor-key Possum Dark, in his words a swaggering bad ass blues named after the enforcer in the post-apocalyptic novella "Ginny Sweethips Flying Circus," and the stripped-down, minimalism-streaked Two Pan Man, on which he lets it rip on tenor while guitarist McCann, according to the composer, sounds almost like a second wind player. Neumanns compositions include the sharp-angled, Monk-inspired Break Tune, whose infectious swing and sense of fun provide a spirited introduction to the album. Neumann, who spent a week in Cuba in 2017 studying with Cuban drummers, also composed To the Puente, an intriguing blend of the son montuno and modern mambo accents a la Chick Corea. Affirmation has a cool, rolling vibe recalling some of Pat Methenys classic recordings. Tom Christensen (b. 1961, Ventura, California) studied classical music and jazz at both undergraduate and graduate levels at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, NY, and moved to New York in 1989. For eight years, he was a member of the Toshiko Akiyoshi Jazz Orchestra, appearing on five of their albums. He also has played on such notable recordings as Joe Lovanos "Celebrating Sinatra," Rufus Reids "Quiet Pride," and the David Liebman Big Bands "Tribute to Wayne Shorter." His 2000 debut, "Gualala," and 2002 effort, "Paths," team him with multi-reedist Charles Pillow. His other recordings include "Americana" (2003) and "Kailash" (2007), on which he joins the Kailash Trio. Scott Neumann (b. 1962, Bartlesville, Oklahoma) attended North Texas State and, before moving to New York in 1988, played with the Woody Herman Orchestra for a year. On his 2006 album, "Osage County," he led a quartet including pianist David Berkman and saxophonist Sam Newsome; he recorded "Blessed" in 2014 as part of the Neu3 Trio, with Michael Blake and Mark Helias. A busy player on the New York scene who has collaborated with such luminaries as Kenny Barron and Ben Allison, Neumann has also accrued impressive credits as a vocal accompanist, a Broadway musician, and educator (he directs the drum studies program at Lehigh University). Spin Cycle will be performing a CD release show at Smalls, NYC, on Friday 4/13. Theyve also scheduled several appearances in Ohio, including a concert and master class at Youngstown State (Bliss Hall), in Youngstown, 1-4pm on 4/5; concert at Andrews House, Delaware, OH 4/6; concert with Denison University Jazz Band, Granville, 8pm on 4/7; and the Bop Stop in Cleveland, 4/7. The 203-unit, 17-story KODA Condominiums will be built at 450 South Main Street at the gateway to Seattle's historic International District. Da-Li International, LLC, a Taiwanbased real estate development company and Realogics Sothebys International Realty (RSIR) will host a reservation event for the much-anticipated KODA Condominiums at the New Developments Preview Center at 2715 1st Avenue in downtown Seattle on February 24th beginning at 11am. The 203-unit, 17-story condominium project will be built at 450 South Main Street at the gateway to Seattles historic International District offering efficiently-scaled homes ranging in size from below 400-sq. ft. to more than 1,100-sq. ft. with introductory pricing from below $400,000 to more than $1.3 million. The homes are being offered for individual unit reservations, which identifies a specific condominium referencing its preliminary floor plan, design specifications and price range in advance of official presales, which are anticipated to commence in the summer 2018 commensurate with the opening of the KODA Sales Center and the groundbreaking of the development. This is effectively the presale of a presale, said Dean Jones, President & CEO of RSIR. Prospective buyers are invited to identify and reserve their future home for purchase ahead of the public sales debut and secure a structured price range without concern about multiple offers, escalation clauses or missing out on whats inherently a limited opportunity. The Reservation Agreement is a first right of opportunity offered to consumers in exchange for a fully-refundable $5,000 deposit that will be held in escrow. Reservation holders will be provided notice when the final product offering is released by the seller including the final floor plan, confirmed specifications and a fixed price within the quoted price range just as soon as that information is a validated by the architect, contractor and members of the development team. Reservations holders must be prequalified by the preferred lender, Caliber Home Loans, in order to maintain a reservation. The seller will accept multiple positions for reservations in the event a prospective buyers first choice is already reserved. Our view is this reservation approach with its first-come, first-served policy is the best way to offer our homes within a highly competitive market, said Kevin Hsieh, Vice President of Development for Da-Li International, LLC. We are excited to move forward with this phase of the development sharing preliminary information with homebuyers weve assembled a world-class team to deliver the next generation condominium in Seattle. Hsieh notes that the cost of development is rising alongside the cost of housing, making it more difficult to set pricing during presales. To be sure, downtown Seattle is the fastest-growing large city in the US with record numbers of developments taking shape, resulting in construction hard costs rising between 6-8-percent per year. The median home prices of resale condominiums rose 19-percent in 2017, according to NWMLS records. KODA Condominiums is one of the few, new for-sale developments being offered in downtown Seattle as most developers have preferred to build apartments for rent. According to RSIR research, more than 27,000 housing units will be delivered downtown in the current decade but more than 94-percent of this supply is planned as apartments. The Urban Land Institute cited Seattle as the top market for investment in their 2018 Emerging Trends in Real Estate report. Downtown Seattle has added 65,000 jobs since 2010, according to the Downtown Seattle Association, and its estimated that 1,100 new residents are moving into the Seattle metro area. Seattle moved up to No. 7 from No. 10 in Redfins rankings of the best US cities for public transit in 2018. In their media release Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan called Seattle one of the most transit-friendly cities. Da-Li International is playing a critical role introducing attainably-priced homeownership opportunities in whats otherwise been a very anemic market especially at price points below $700,000 within conforming loan limits as buyers can qualify with as little as 3.5 to 5-percent down payment and monthly mortgages are similar to prevailing rents, adds Jones. When purchasing during presales, prospective buyers can plan ahead and fix their housing costs by mid-2020 within this rising market. Not having the expense of owning a car will help many afford to buy a home. In order to offer a higher volume of more affordable units, Da-Li International borrowed several design and development principals from their 30-years of experience building condominiums in Taiwan. The units include in-line kitchens with optional (flexible) islands providing additional storage and eating areas. Access to the traditional bedrooms are located along the window wall reducing single-purpose corridors in the home and opening up light and views. The building is designed as a vertical neighborhood offering a robust collection of amenities including a grand lobby with co-working spaces, a 7th floor fitness center, yoga room, library and conference room as well as the 17th floor KODA Club a voluminous lifestyle center complete with a screening room, billiards room, fireside lounge, a catering kitchen, a private dining room and access to the rooftop terrace offering BBQs, fire pits and outdoor seating areas with expansive views of Mt. Rainier, the Stadium District, Pioneer Square, Elliott Bay and Seattles dramatic skyline. All homes will be offered without parking treating the automobile as an option as opposed to an obligation reducing the average purchase price by an estimated $75,000, according to Jones. He notes KODA is just a block away from the King Street Station and the terminus of the planned Sound Transit 3 initiative a $50+ billion regional transit plan that will bring 116 miles of track to in-city neighborhoods and exurban locations. At KODA, homeowners will live in their individual homes and throughout the buildings impressive amenities and the surrounding community, adds Hsieh. This hiving concept combined with numerous transportation options at your doorstep will provide a return on lifestyle instead of being burdened with higher costs of housing or commuting with an automobile. I believe this is the future of Seattle. Located in the heart of Japantown, or Nihonmachi as its also known, KODA is poised to be an iconic landmark that will become a centralized gateway to the historic Chinatown-International District to the south, to Pioneer Square and the revitalized waterfront to the west, to the redevelopment of Yesler Terrace to the east, and to hundreds of thousands of jobs in the Central Business District to the north. The immediate neighborhood is experiencing an urban renaissance of development given its availability of land, overlay of high-rise zoning and close proximity to job centers, residential services, attractions and transportation options. KODA Condominium is designed by KMD Architects with pre-construction services offered by PCL Construction. Caliber Home Loans is the preferred mortgage lender. Marketing and sales are being provided by Realogics, Inc. and Realogics Sothebys International Realty, respectively. Title and escrow services are provided by First American Title and Escrow. Da-Li International, LLC was introduced by Becky Lee of RSIR and Taiwan Sothebys International Realty. For more information, visit http://www.ownKODA.com. ### About Da-Li Development Taiwan-based Da-Li Development is a publicly-traded company principally engaged in the development, construction, leasing and sales of properties. The Companys principal businesses include the development of residential buildings and mixed-use buildings, such as condominiums, commercial retail shops, villas, private clubs, and parking spaces. DAL-LI formed DA-LI Development USA LLC in 2015 and purchased two commercial retail shopping centers in Washington and is developing the KODA Condominiums in downtown Seattle. About Realogics Sothebys International Realty (http://www.RSIR.com) - Realogics Sothebys International Realty is a leading global sales and marketing brokerage firm in the Pacific Northwest that specializes in new condominiums. Recognized by the Puget Sound Business Journal amongst the fastest-growing private companies in Washington State during the past five years, the boutique real estate firm of 220+ brokers consistently rank among the top producing firms within the markets that it serves with branches in downtown Seattle, Bainbridge Island, Kirkland, Issaquah and Madison Park. EDITORS NOTES: For high-resolution photography, video, floor plans and new renderings of KODA Condominiums contact Krista Dunn at 206.448.5752 or email Krista(dot)Dunn(at)RSIR.com. "The unprecedented number of college students attending this years event is a direct reflection of the countrys largest generation speaking up for continued and consistent U.S. engagement at the UN. - UNA-USA Executive Director Chris Whatley A historic number of Americans will show their support for the United Nations today at the United Nations Association of the United States of Americas (UNA-USA) Global Engagement Summit (previously known as Members Day) at UN Headquarters in New York City. With over 1,800 attendees expected from 42 states (as well as D.C. and the Virgin Islands), including a record number of college students from 103 schools, the Global Engagement Summit will be the largest-ever assembly of Americans gathered in support of the UN. If there is one thing Americans from all age groups and both major political parties agree on, it is the value of the United Nations, said UNA-USA Executive Director Chris Whatley. Specifically, the unprecedented number of college students attending this years event is a direct reflection of the countrys largest generation speaking up for continued and consistent U.S. engagement at the UN. The convening takes place during a pivotal moment for the world and the U.S.-UN relationship. The planet is currently facing numerous humanitarian emergencies and the largest refugee crisis since World War II. Meanwhile, several key UN priorities and agencies are under threat both on Capitol Hill and at the White House, with proposed sharp cuts to the international affairs budget, which would significantly impact the UNs ability to help the U.S. achieve critical foreign policy and national security goals. Yet despite the division in Washington, research shows that American voters registered in both major parties and across all age groups agree that sustained U.S. leadership at the UN is vital. A nationwide poll released in October 2017 by the Better World Campaign, UNA-USAs sister organization, found that a vast majority of Americans 88 percent believe it is important for the U.S. to maintain an active role at the UN, with support for the UN among millennials even stronger at 92 percent. In an increasingly complex world, we need organizations like the United Nations to help the U.S. respond to global challenges that we shouldnt have to handle alone, said UNA-USA National Council Chair Teta Banks. Today UNA-USA members are coming together to harness our collective voice in support of a strong U.S.-UN partnership. During the summit, UN advocates will participate in a series of dynamic and informative discussions on the critical issues facing the UN and the world, like refugees, human rights, and climate change. Event attendees will also contact U.S. leaders, including their Members of Congress, in support of full funding for the UN and strong U.S.-UN relations. Speakers at the event include: Her Excellency Amina J. Mohammed, Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations; Ambassador Kelley Eckels Currie, U.S. Representative for Economic and Social Affairs, U.S. Mission to the United Nations; His Excellency Miroslav Lajcak, President of the UN General Assembly; Jeffrey Sachs, Director, UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network; and Munira Khalif, U.S. Youth Observer to the United Nations. The complete agenda with a list of all speakers and their biographies can be found online at: unausa.org/GES2018. ### About UNA-USA: The United Nations Association of the United States of America (UNA-USA) is a 50-state grassroots organization dedicated to inform, inspire, and mobilize the American people to support the ideals and vital work of the United Nations. For 70 years UNA-USA has worked to accomplish its mission through its national network of Chapters, youth engagement, advocacy efforts, education programs, and public events. UNA-USA is a program of the United Nations Foundation. Once people discover that this is their best opportunity to score great deals, they keep coming back year after year. 4 Wheel Parts, the global leader in off-road performance product sales and installation, is kicking off its Nationwide Truck & Jeep Fest Tour this weekend, February 24 -25 in San Mateo, California. The 15th annual event will be held over two days at the San Mateo Expo Center showcasing truck, Jeep and UTV displays with factory-direct pricing, aftermarket product giveaways for off-road enthusiasts and product demonstrations by representatives from many of the industrys most popular brands. The show is the first of ten Truck & Jeep Fest events 4 Wheel Parts will be hosting in 2018. Additional destinations held throughout the year include Honolulu, Hawaii, Puyallup, Washington; Dallas, Texas; Ontario, California; Houston, Texas, Denver, Colorado; Long Beach, California; Atlanta, Georgia and Orlando, Florida. Truck & Jeep Fest is the premier happening for truck and Jeep enthusiasts to check out the latest products and visit with some of the leading off-road product experts all while being able to take advantage of special, factory direct pricing, said 4 Wheel Parts Director of Advertising and Events, Brent Goegebuer. This is our first show of the year and were excited to kick things off in San Mateo! Attendees will be treated with to up to $500,000 of on-site, aftermarket inventory on hand for sale and admission to the event is free. Americas premier off-road enthusiast aftermarket sales event and show will be at the San Mateo Expo Center at 2495 South Delaware Street, San Mateo, CA 94403, approximately 20 miles south of San Francisco and 30 miles north of San Jose. The Expo Center is 10 minutes from the San Francisco International Airport and a brief walk from Hillsdale Caltrain station. Doors open to the public from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturday, February 18, and from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Sunday. The show affords unique access to manufacturers representatives who will be onsite sharing their expertise on popular products including the latest tire, wheel and suspension offerings for trucks, Jeeps and SUVs. On Saturday and Sunday, Truck & Jeep Fest attendees will have a chance to win $500 4 Wheel Parts shopping spree certificates Each year the show and the crowd keeps getting bigger and bigger, says Goegebuer Once people discover that this is their best opportunity to score great deals, they keep coming back year after year. We have lots of great manufactures coming out and many of them will be bringing their great builds from SEMA along with many new, 2018 parts and accessories. Its going to be a great weekend! What: San Mateo Truck & Jeep Fest Free Admission Where: San Mateo Expo Center 2495 South Delaware Street San Mateo, CA 94403 When: Saturday, February 24, 2018 10 a.m. - 4 p.m. Sunday, February 25, 2018 11 a.m. - 4 p.m. About 4 Wheel Parts 4 Wheel Parts is the global leader in off-road truck, Jeep and aftermarket performance products. With 87 locations across the U.S. and Canada and growing, 4 Wheel Parts Service Centers install all the products they sell. Maintaining the nations largest inventory of off-road tires, wheels, lift kits and accessories, 4 Wheel Parts serves customers across the country and around the globe. Life is Better Off-Road. Visit them at 4wheelparts.com or call toll-free 877-474-4821. "We are confident Carolyn's experience has positioned her well to lead the advancement team at Robert Morris." - RMU President Mablene Krueger Robert Morris University Illinois is pleased to announce the appointment of Carolyn L. Branton as the new Executive Director of Institutional Advancement. Ms. Branton is an experienced fund raising professional who most recently served as director of development for the Black Ensemble Theater in Chicago. She spent several years as the Manager of Strategic Partnerships and Communications for Chicago Commons, as an account executive with Carol Fox and Associates, and as assistant director of development for the Chicago Sinfonietta. A graduate of Columbia College Chicago where she obtained her Master of Arts in Management, she completed her undergraduate work in communications at Millikin University. She is currently a fellow in Chicago Urban League's 2018 IMPACT Leadership Development Program in partnership with University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Robert Morris University is looking to expand its relationships with business, civic and cultural leaders and institutions in the greater Chicago area and throughout Illinois, said RMU President Mablene Krueger. We are confident Carolyns experience has positioned her well to lead the advancement team at Robert Morris in achieving those goals. Robert Morris University Illinois is a not-for-profit, baccalaureate and graduate degree granting institution, accredited by the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools.* The University serves students interested in getting an education in business, graphic arts, nursing and health care, culinary and computer studies at its main campus in Chicago, as well as at locations in Arlington Heights, DuPage, Elgin, Orland Park, Springfield, Peoria, Schaumburg and Lake County. In all communications, please refer to the university by its full name, Robert Morris University Illinois. For more information, call 800-762-5960 or visit the web site at http://www.robertmorris.edu *Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools, 30 N. LaSalle Street, Chicago, IL 60602, 312-263-0456. Shortly before midnight on February 6, a 6.4-magnitude earthquake tore through the city of Hualien, Taiwan. Buildings shook, roads ripped up, and many people escaped onto the streets. All told, 17 people died and 285 were injured. A major hotel collapsed and rescue workers spent more than 100 hours searching for bodies in the rubble. As expected, condolences and offers to help with the rescue efforts poured in from the international community. But it was then that Taiwan made a seemingly small, yet telling, decision it accepted rescue help from Japan, after it turned down a similar offer from China, a country with which it has a complex and fraught history. Yet it's not unusual for diplomatic ties to define emergency responses. In times of crises, politicians and diplomats regularly reinforce alliances and enmity based on their existing ideology, culture, values, and politics, says Ilan Kelman, author of "Disaster Diplomacy: How Disasters Affect Peace and Conflict." This field of study is called "disaster diplomacy" and academics have yet to find any instances where diplomatic relations have changed long-term after a disaster. "Dealing with disasters typically pushes diplomatic relations along the pathway which it was on before," Kelman told Business Insider. "If diplomatic relations are improving, then dealing with disasters can support this improvement temporarily. If diplomatic relations are deteriorating, then dealing with disasters can give excuses to continue moving farther apart." And nowhere was this more evident in the last month than in the Asia Pacific. Taiwan rebuffed Chinas help, like it rebuffs Chinas influence Taiwan's political situation is nothing short of complicated. The democratic island, officially known as the Republic of China, is self-ruled. A pro-independence party has been in power since 2016.But Beijing considers Taiwan a province of China that will eventually be reunified under "one China." In the wake of the February 6 earthquake, China offered to send rescue teams, but Taipei's Mainland Affairs Council said it didn't need external help. "At the moment, we have adequate manpower and facilities in support of the rescue operation," Chiu Chui-cheng, vice-chairman of The Mainland Affairs Council, told South China Morning Post. When asked if this was dismissing an olive branch from China, Chiu added, "It is a natural disaster and the rescue involves humanitarian efforts. They shouldnt be used as [a bridge] for political connection." But a day later, Japanese rescuers arrived in Taiwan. The Taiwanese government said it only accepted the offer because Japan could provide specialized body-heat detection equipment it did not have. But the message from Taiwan's President Tsai Ing-wen, who has refused to endorse the "one China" policy, seemed clear to China. "The Japanese side openly attempted to create 'one China, one Taiwan' under the pretext of disaster relief and condolences," China's Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said. The Maldives is split between China and India Meanwhile, India has been closely watching an unfolding emergency in the Maldives. The Maldives, an Indian Ocean archipelago near some crucial shipping lanes, has historically been closely tied to India but in recent years turned towards China. Tensions rose when, the day before Taiwan's earthquake, the Maldives' President Yameen Abdul Gayoom declared a state of emergency. Former President Mohamed Nasheed, the country's only ever democratically-elected leader who now lives in exile in Sri Lanka, quickly asked India on Twitter to send troops to address the situation. "Maldivians see Indias role positively: in 88 they came, resolved the crisis, and left. They were not occupiers but liberators. This is why Maldivians look to India now," Nasheed also tweeted, referencing Indian soldiers who helped the government foil a coup in 1988. But President Yameen instead sent envoys to "friendly nations," including China, which is thought to be investing in the Maldives as part of its "string of pearls" that effectively encircle India. In response, the Chinese state-run newspaper, Global Times, ran an op-ed that said, "Perhaps New Delhi has been seeking an opportunity to showcase its military again in its 'backyard.'" "If India one-sidedly sends troops to the Maldives, China will take action to stop New Delhi," the column read. The situation has yet to be resolved, with the state of emergency this week extended for another 30 days. But none of it surprises Kelman. Speaking on Metro TV, Gloria Akuffo said a probe would bring out the true cause of the mass failure. Let us investigate what is the real cause of this large numbers. Is it because lecturers are not good enough? Is it because they do not have good material? Is it because the students themselves are not applying themselves efficiently and begin to find solutions to these? Her comments follow a 30-day ultimatum issued to the Independent Examination Board (IEB) by the SRC of the Ghana School of Law to re-mark the scripts of students who failed the exams. Out of the 474 students who took part in the bar exams in May and September 2017, only 91 of the students passed. The students who took part in the exams have since protested and mentioned that they will petition the Chief Justice soon. Other lawyers and some parliamentarians have called for a remarking or probe. Some have even suggested that the students go to court over the development. Meanwhile, a lawyer has also called on Parliament to investigate the mass failure. READ ALSO: Law students have to pay GHc3000 per script for remarking failed papers Kwaku Asare said Parliament must summon the Director of the Ghana School of Law to explain why they unlawfully denied access to about 3,000 students who under the laws of Ghana are qualified to have a professional legal education. The schools SRC president, Sammy Gyamfi, said the scripts should be given to a credible and independent body for remarking. The said landlord identified as Idemudia Obamonyi took the draconian action leaving owners of about 20 shops being housed by his building helpless and heartbroken. The incident happened at Iwebo lane behind Oba Market in Benin City, Edo State and one of the affected tenant is quoted as saying, If they are having family issues, they should go and solve it. It is not for them to put us in trouble. READ MORE: Trader remanded for refusing to pay prostitute for extra rounds of sex A resident in the area who witnessed the trailblazing eviction is also quoted as having said, We saw people holding him and he was saying let the house burn, I dont get any money from it. Reports say Kelvin Duru took the sex worker to a popular hotel to have sex with her upon agreement to pay her N500, but he lasted on the woman for 2 hours, for which reason the woman requested for an extra N200 in compensation. According to P.M. EPRESS, during the sexual intercourse when Blessing Isi asked for the extra payment, Kelvin did not object to it due to an obvious reason. After easing himself, he gave the woman N1000 and requested for a change and Blessing gave him N700 as agreed, but Kelvin insisted on taking the N200 extra charge back. This resulted in a brawl and Kelvin allegedly beat up Blessing and caused injury to her mouth. When the matter was reported to the police, Kelvin was given the chance to pay back Blessing who had accused him of stealing her N76,000 in the course of the struggle, but he remained adamant. He was then put behind bars and charged with assault. China welcomes the momentum on the Korean Peninsula and hopes relevant parties not to provoke each other, the foreign ministry said Thursday. "South Korea and North Korea have made a series of interactions and friendly cooperation centered on the Winter Olympics, which as a close neighbor, China welcomes and supports," ministry spokesman Geng Shuang told a daily briefing on Thursday. "We have stressed that dialogue is the only way to resolve the deadlock on the Korean Peninsula and break the vicious circle. The two Koreas have taken the precious first step and we hope all relevant parties could work together to keep the momentum and promote the interactions, especially possible dialogue between North Korea and the US, in an effort to open dialogue channels for resolving the Korean Peninsula issue," Geng said. Geng said that China hoped all parties would not make moves that provoke each other or intensify conflict. They should work together to maintain the stability of the Korean Peninsula and create a good atmosphere for possible dialogue. "We hope the US and North Korea can seize the opportunity to show their sincerity and work together. The international community should also promote and cheer them for doing so," Geng said. Geng's remarks came after news on North Korea's plan to send a high-ranking delegation to the closing ceremony of Winter Olympic Games. The high-ranking North Korean delegation, led by Kim Yong-chol, vice chairman of the Central Committee of the ruling Workers' Party of Korea, will make a three-day visit to South Korea beginning Sunday when the closing ceremony is scheduled to be held in South Korea's eastern county of Pyeongchang, the Xinhua News Agency reported. Ri Son-gwon, chairman of the Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of the Fatherland, will accompany Kim as a delegate together with six support staff, according to the notification delivered by North Korea earlier in the day. Unification Minister Cho Myoung-gyon said that it is too early to predict such a possible contact, "but the government will make efforts to lead the US and North Korea to open dialogue," Cho said, Yonhap News Agency reported. An official at South Korea's presidential office said earlier in the day that there is a low chance of direct contact between the North Koreans and the US delegation, Yonhap reported. The minister also said that the government needs to take into account many factors, including the impact on inter-Korean ties and possible talks between the US and the North. Ivanka Trump, the first daughter and senior adviser to US President Donald Trump, will lead the US delegation to the closing ceremonies on Sunday, ABC News reported on Thursday. The White House did not say if Ivanka Trump planned to meet with the North's delegation as a part of her visit. The visit was to learn at firsthand, the structure, operations and training regime of the GIS and to tap into the Services wealth of experience to reposition the KDIS. It is expected that a Kenya Migration Institute would be created as a fall out of the visit. The visit took the officers of the KDIS to the Immigration Service Academy and Training School (ISATS) in Assin Foso, Aflao Sector Command and to the GIS Headquarters where they were taken through operations and command structure of the service. The Comptroller-General of Immigration (CGI), Mr. Kwame Asuah Takyi expressed excitement for hosting the Kenyan delegation and assured them of the Services readiness to give them the necessary support and guidance in their quest of establishing a Kenya Migration Institute. He, however, noted that the success of their study tour and the implementation of standards and best practices in managing migration in their country largely hinged on the will of the Kenyan government and the institution itself. He, however, noted that the success of their study tour and the implementation of standards and best practices in managing migration in their country largely hinged on the will of the Kenyan government and the institution itself. Ghana Immigration Service has come a long way. It has taken both the political and institutional will and commitment of the institution and several governments to effect the desired changes he indicated. He said the visit should be the beginning of effective collaborative efforts at strengthening migration management within the African Region. The Kenyan delegation was led by Deputy Director of KDIS, Mr. Joseph Munywoki. Cases of teenage pregnancies have skyrocketed in the region in the last few years despite efforts from stakeholders to have it reduced. READ ALSO: Zoomlion welcomes review of YEA sanitation moduleZoomlion welcomes review of YEA sanitation module Data from the Ghana Health Service (GHS) indicates that over 25,000 cases of teenage pregnancies were recorded in the Eastern region between 2015 and 2017. Out of that number, 669 of these teenage mothers were aged between 10 and 14 years, with the number continuing to rise year after year. The Akyemansa District has been hit hardest, with the district alone recording 445 teenage pregnancy cases a figure which represents 18% of all pregnancy cases recorded in the region during the year under review. District Chief Executive for Akyemansa, Paul Asamoah, described the situation as a burden, insisting the futures of many young girls were being destroyed. He urged parents to see such cases as criminal and to report the men behind the pregnancies to the Police. During our previous assembly meeting we realized that we have to stamp our foot down and push some of these things into our bye-laws so that we can enforce it to stop some of these things. Some of the parents when their children below 16 years are impregnated, they will go and sit with the person to settle such criminal matter amicably in the house so we want to stop all these things, Mr. Asamoah said. The Akyemansa District Health Director, Madam Gifty Sunu, also called on stakeholders and other traditional authorities to help in the fight against teenage pregnancy in the district. According to her, by-laws must be instituted to ensure that men who impregnate teenage girls are made to face the law. The two have been accused of playing various roles in an alleged fraudulent activities at GYEEDA leading to the state losing GH4.1 million. Abuga Pele has been alleged to have recommended payment of the said amount to Assibit, when Assibit had not performed any work to merit payment. READ MORE: Judge threatens to close GYEEDA case On June 19, 2015, the High Court ordered Assibit and Abuga Pele to open their defence in respect of a GH4.1 million malfeasance case against them. The order came after the Court had ruled that the State had established a prima facie case against Pele and Assibit in respect of 19 counts of defrauding by false pretences, abetment of crime, dishonesty and intentionally misapplying public funds and willfully causing financial loss to the State. On the grounds of Appeal, the applicant said the trial judge erred in failing to recognise that the existing outstanding contradictions in the evidence of the Prosecution witnesses made it unjustified to call the accused to open his defence. The counsel for the accused person also said the Judge erred when she applied wrong particulars of facts, in coming to her decision, as regard count seven. Abuga Pele has pleaded not guilty to two counts of abetment of crime, intentionally misapplying public property, and five counts of wilfully causing financial loss to the state. While Assibit has also pleaded not guilty to six counts of defrauding by false pretences and five counts of dishonestly causing loss to public property. Audit report cites EOCO for financial irregularities The Economic and Organised Crime Office (EOCO) has been cited for financial irregularities in the 2014 Auditor General's report. Welcome to the Pulse Community! We will now be sending you a daily newsletter on news, entertainment and more. Also join us across all of our other channels - we love to be connected! This honours comes in line with the upcoming Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in April where the Queen as the head of the Commonwealth is honouring selfless individuals across the 52 Commonwealth countries. READ ALSO: Queen Elizabeth II The mobile library, which is active in more than 30 communities across the country, imparts more than 18,000 children a year via the vans computers, tablets, and e-readers. Expressing his joy for this honour, Siaw: "I am deeply honoured and hope this will inspire many people around the commonwealth to be focused and diligent in delivering change in their communities. There is always someone out there watching and reading about your work. Presenting the honour certificate, the British High Commission to Ghana, Lain Walker praised the efforts of Siaw. He said, "In a short time, Hayford has shown how sheer determination allied with a passion for volunteering can make a lasting difference across communities. I am delighted that he is educating the next generation of young people." The company has been in the spotlight since it emerged that sanitation staff are paid just 20 percent of the amount they deserve as salaries. CEO of Youth Employment Agency, Justin Koduah Frimpong, told the media on Wednesday that Zoomlion charges GH500 per head, but pays a beneficiary just GH100 a month. He referred to the situation as an affront to beneficiaries since a whopping GH400 goes to Zoomlion in the name of agent fees. The review established that each Beneficiary is paid GHC 100.00 whiles GHC 400.00 goes to the service provider as management fees. This practice we consider an affront to Beneficiaries on the programme, Mr. Koduah Frimpong said. However, in a statement, the management of Zoomlion has refuted such claims, insisting they have not cheated any sanitation staff. The decision to pay beneficiaries GH100 per month out of the GH500 Management fee was not the initiative of Zoomlion Ghana limited. In fact, at the inception of the module in 2006, beneficiaries were receiving GH50 per month, it was the management of Zoomlion that initiated the move for the allowance to be increased to GH100. So the same Agency which set the initial amount is the only one that has the authority to change it, sections of the statement read. The company added that it is the YEA that is responsible for reviewing the salaries of beneficiaries and, as such, they cannot be blamed for that. Read the full statement from Zoomlion below: ZOOMLION IS HAPPY WITH ANY RESTRUCTURING OR REVIEW OF SANITATION MODULE OF YEA The Management of Zoomlion Ghana Limited wish to commend the Management of the Youth Employment Agency for its plans to restructure the Sanitation Module of the Youth Employment Programme to serve as a blueprint for other modules going forward. Without preempting any further discussion on the review or restructuring of the module, management however feels compelled to make some clarification on the following issues raised at the YEA press briefing yesterday. 1. Disparities in reported beneficiary numbers versus physical count-That 38,884 beneficiaries turned up for the counting exercise by YEA as against the 45,320 recorded by managers of Zoomlion Ghana Limited. Zoomlion wish to state that the companys number is captured in an album with the names, pictures and other details of beneficiaries for verification purposes. The shortfall however occurred as a result of a mixture of reasons, which the CEO of YEA, Mr Justin Kodua Frimpong has himself alluded to in a couple of media interviews. i. Beneficiary Apathy: Prior to the Agencys exercise, there had been series of headcount exercises conducted by 1) the Agencys regional and district representatives together with Zoomlion Ghana Limited, 2) District Assembly Common Fund (DACF) directorate, 3) the various Metropolitan, Municipal and District Assemblies (MMDAs) and Zoomlion Ghana Limited within a period of two (2) months with the objective of ascertaining the true numbers of the beneficiaries. In all these exercises, the beneficiaries had to commute back and forth from their communities to the district capitals and this may have led to the comparatively low turnout as compared to the numbers of beneficiaries in the album provided. ii. Late arrival or no show of the Head count team from the Agency to some of the centers. This situation led to most of the beneficiaries leaving the centers out of frustration. A situation which seriously accounted for the team not meeting all beneficiaries to get them to be counted. iii. Short notice to the beneficiaries by the Agency upon the teams arrival in the district caused beneficiaries in the hinterlands to miss the headcount. An example of this happened in Ejura Sekyere-Dumase District Nana Addo is expected to continue his mediation in the Togolese political impasse between President Faure Gnassingbe and opposition parties. Nana Addo has already started the process earlier this week when he met with both factions in dispute. READ ALSO: Nana Addo expresses concern on recent spate of road accidents He will also take part in the World Leaders Forum programme, organised by the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). In Europe, President Akufo-Addo will deliver the keynote address at the 5th German-African Economic Forum, in Dortmund, being held under the auspices of the Minister-President of North Rhine-Westphalia, Herr Armin Laschet. Akufo-Addo left after swearing in Martin Amidu as the first ever Special Prosecutor of Ghana. In his stead, Vice President Dr. Mahamadu Bawumia is expected to act. The former Member of Parliament for Chiana-Paga was convicted on 2 counts of abetted crime of defrauding by false pretence and was sentenced to six years in prison. Abuga Pele has been alleged to have recommended payment of the said amount to Assibit, CEO of Goodwill International Group when Assibit had not performed any work to merit payment. Pele not pleaded not guilty to the charges. Assibit was charged with five counts of defrauding by false pretence. He was also sentenced to twelve years in prison. PC, who has been at the forefront on corruption over the years deems an opportunity to serve Ghana as always welcoming. Speaking on Abusua FM on the prospect of helping Amidu fight corruption, he said: "I am really willing to work with him. In everything Ghana first; therefore if the need arises for me to help him retrieve stolen state money why not, I will go with happiness." He described Martin Amidu as a man of integrity who will do a very good job as the Special Prosecutor. READ ALSO: Martin Amidu approved as Special Prosecutor "He is not someone you can influence. He said even the President himself cant influence him. I thank God for his approval by parliament. Thousands of protesters, led by survivors of last week's shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, congregated at the Florida State Capitol building Wednesday. Their message: Never again. Never again will a murderer purchase a gun easily. Never again will a school be riddled by a mass shooting. The movement, identified on social media through the hashtag #neveragain, has also galvanized students around the US. The shooting rampage on February 14, in which a 19-year-old gunman killed 17 students and educators with an AR-15 rifle, has revived the urgency of a perennial question: Why can't the country establish sensible gun control? If we look back in history, the US was founded on the use of firearms. The right to gun ownership is regulated by the Second Amendment to the Constitution. Opponents of gun control argue that the Constitution guarantees them the absolute right to own guns. However, the situation of the US now is different from that of more than 200 years ago when protection of gun ownership was written into the law. There is an urgent need for the US to impose harsh restrictions on gun purchases nowadays. The US has witnessed mad proliferation of guns and rampant gun violence. It's estimated that civilians in the US own about 300 million guns, enough for every adult in the US. There are more mass shootings in the US than in any other country in the world. According to CNN, a 2016 study looked at 292 incidents in which four or more people were killed, finding 90 of them occurred in the US. The US has no other choice but to adopt gun control. The right of life is the most fundamental human rights. The right to bear arms cannot overpower the individual's right to live. Washington has been pointing an accusing finger at other countries over human rights issue. However, more Americans have been killed by gunfire in the country than American soldiers being killed in all US wars. It's inhumane for the US, which boasts about its human rights record, to turn a blind eye to gun violence, snub increasing calls for gun control and risk more innocent lives. The US will have to adopt gun control in the future. It's better to decide sooner rather than later. Gun ownership in China is strictly regulated, which helps reduce gun-related crimes and deaths. The US should learn from China and genuinely protect human rights. If the US does not control its guns, problems caused by firearms in the foreseeable future will continue plaguing US society. This happened at a short ceremony at the seat of the Presidency, the Flagstaff House. Nana Addo praised Amidu's virtues and charged him to do his work without fear or favor. He tasked him to rid the public service of corruption. Martin Amidu said, "I wish to assure you that the propaganda about witch-hunting will not dampen me" The Office is also expected to help reduce the workload on existing investigative agencies and, thereby, enhance their effectiveness. Parliament passed the Special Prosecutor Bill making it an Act of Parliament on November 14, 2017. This is after his nomination was unanimously approved by Parliament on Tuesday following a gruelling vetting which took hours. Parliament passed the Special Prosecutor Bill making it an Act of Parliament on November 14, 2017. READ ALSO: This MP nearly committed suicide after impregnating his girlfriend The Special Prosecutor after he sworn in is expected to help the government handle corruption-related issues among state officials in a nonpartisan manner. The Office is also expected to help reduce the workload on existing investigative agencies and, thereby, enhance their effectiveness. In Ghana, it is difficult to fight corruption due to the much-politicised society we find ourselves in. Often it is government officials who are accused of corruption and other illegal practices thereby causing their respective political parties to cry foul. This also makes it impossible for a party in power to try their members if they are fingered for any corrupt act. "What is happening is unacceptable. Getting registered (to vote) is a civil right, and a right that one can choose to exercise or not," said Tatien Sibomana, one of a handful of opposition leaders who have chosen not to go into exile. A coalition of opposition parties in exile, CNARED, also denounced the "enrolment by force" with spokesman Pancrace Cimpaye accusing the authorities of trying "to counter the (population's) low enthusiasm" for the referendum. Former rebel leader Nkurunziza, 54, has ruled the small, densely populated central African nation for 12 years and critics have accused him of being a dictator who refuses to give up power. Opposition parties are against the constitutional changes on grounds they could deal a death blow to the Arusha peace accords which are credited with ending the 1993-2006 civil war when more than 300,000 people died. The Arusha accords clearly stipulate that no president can govern the country for more than 10 years. Threats, intimidation Witnesses from several cities told AFP the authorities were using a number of different tactics. "All passersby were obliged to stop at roadblocks where they had the Imbonerakure and the police," said one high school teacher in the northwestern city of Bubanza, who wished to remain anonymous. "People could not pass without showing their enrolment papers." An 18-year-old student from southeastern Makamba province said pupils who had not registered on the electoral lists were being ordered to do so and show proof. And residents of two communes in central Gitega province said the local authorities had threatened not to validate their health insurance or provide fertiliser unless they registered. In response, first vice president Gaston Sindimwo acknowledged that some Imbonerakure may have gone over the top. "There may be some of them who abuse the association's power and make mistakes but within the government, we are putting forward the reasons for enrolment," he said. In power since 2005, Nkurunziza ran for a controversial third term in 2015 which he went on to win, plunging Burundi into crisis. The current constitution sets a limit of two five-year presidential terms. His decision to run again sparked violence that has left at least 1,200 dead and sent more than 400,000 Burundians fleeing across borders, mostly to Tanzania. 'Flagrant double standards' In October, the government adopted a plan to revise the constitution which, if approved in the referendum, would enable Nkurunziza to serve another two seven-year terms from 2020. Two months ago, the government launched a campaign to promote the referendum. But it also banned any public partisan campaigning, either for or against the changes, until two weeks before the vote. Opposition parties have accused the government of "flagrant double standards" after ministers called for the changes to be voted through. At least 50 opposition activists, mostly former National Liberation Forces rebels, have been arrested for calling for a "no" vote. And earlier this week, four students and a teacher were detained for the same reasons, with one of the students arrested in class. Her Harry Potter novels have sold over 450 million copies since the first was published in 1997, spawning an empire that now encompasses movies, the spinoff Fantastic Beasts films, Harry Potter Wizarding World theme parks, and detective novels (written under a pseudonym) that have been made into a television series. Like much else she touches, her first theatrical venture has been a smash. It earned rave reviews and sold-out houses in London, going on to win in a record-breaking nine categories at last years Olivier Awards, the British equivalent of the Tonys. And yet Rowling, who started out as a struggling single mother, writing her first Harry Potter novel in Edinburgh cafes, seemed despite an armor of smart wrap dress and high heels determined to take absolutely nothing for granted. We see this as a new challenge, she said, looking at John Tiffany, the shows cheerful director, and Jack Thorne, its tall and gangly writer, who were seated with her backstage at the Palace Theater in the West End here. Broadway is a scary place. Broadway is a scary place, with new productions even those based on beloved titles routinely failing to live up to their producers hopes and dreams. And Cursed Child confronts challenges in New York that it didnt face when it opened here in July 2016 amid more mystery, excitement and anticipation than attends most presidential elections. (And what felt like just about as much media coverage.) Secrecy about the story line, collectively developed by Rowling, Thorne and Tiffany, fed a growing obsession with what the play would reveal about Harry and Company, and a #keepthesecret campaign encouraged a clublike camaraderie among the preview audiences. But now that script has been published, reviews have been written and tweets have been tweeted, the plot a coming-of-age trajectory for Harrys second son, Albus is out there. (According to Scholastic, the Potter publisher, the book version of Cursed Child has sold over 5 million copies in the United States.) Unlike most family-oriented Broadway offerings, Cursed Child is a play, not a musical, and it will compete in the spring with Disneys musical adaptation of the animated blockbuster Frozen. It is unusual to take such a large brand franchise and not musicalize it, said Sonia Friedman, who, with Colin Callender, has produced the play in London and New York. (It also heads to Melbourne, Australia, next year.) People still occasionally made the mistake, she added: In every place possible, we say, A new play by ...' Although seven original cast members are coming with the show including Jamie Parker as Harry, Noma Dumezweni as Hermione, Sam Clemmett as Albus, and Anthony Boyle as Scorpius not one is a marquee name. One other thing: Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, which officially opens on April 22, has a running time of 5 hours 15 minutes, and is staged in two parts (either seen on one day or on different nights). Will the magic apparate across the ocean? A circus was hurried out the door to help make sure. Something More Reflective The play begins where the books end. We are at Kings Cross station as Harry, married to Ginny Weasley and a father of three, sees his middle child, Albus, off to Hogwarts. The ensuing story encompasses Harrys difficult relationship with Albus, who develops an intense friendship with Scorpius Malfoy (son of Harrys school-era enemy, Draco Malfoy), and it suggests that the weight of the past is a continual influence on the present. It was Friedman and Callender who, six years ago, brought the idea of a play to Rowling, even though she had consistently rebuffed proposals to create stage versions of her novels. Most of the ideas were about musicals, which I dont love, Rowling said, or redoing the books onstage. I wasnt interested in doing Harry in every medium. Their proposition was different. They suggested extending the story and creating a new work, which intrigued Rowling. We talked about loss, fear, bereavement, what its like to try to make a family when your own is poor or nonexistent, she said. I was really interested in making something more reflective than had been possible in the films. I dont think we ever deviated from those themes. Rowling said that she had been clear that she would commit to the project if she could work with a playwright she felt was right. After Friedman approached Tiffany (a Tony winner for Once) to direct, he suggested Thorne, a self-professed Harry Potter nerd with whom he had collaborated on the teenage vampire play Let the Right One In. When I met John and Jack, I think we knew pretty quickly that the play would center around Albus, Rowling said, adding that she had always been interested in Albus Severus. He was the one I thought about. Imagine going to Hogwarts with those two names which of course I gave him! Thorne interjected, It takes Harry a while to see why those names are a burden, which, from a dramatists point of view, is amazing. Just as Rowling has meticulously controlled her public appearances, she has also maintained a tight lock on the Potterverse empire. Her willingness to put her characters in other hands is surprising, but Rowling said she had loved the entire process of co-creating Cursed Child, and hadnt been prepared for the emotional punch the play delivered when she saw its final version. She and her collaborators are also proud to have brought new audiences to the West End. Callender said that market research in the first year of the London production showed that 60 percent of ticket buyers were first-time theatergoers, and that 15 percent had subsequently bought tickets for other shows. The Magic of Playacting How to stage a Harry Potter tale without the whiz-bang special effects movies can deploy? Tiffany approached the assignment with one guiding principle. The idea that the magic we put onstage could be a version of playacting stories in your bedroom,' he explained. There was something about the aesthetic Jo had created, with cloaks and suitcases, that I wanted to harness directly and simply. Thorne predicted that even those loyal fans whove digested the best-selling script will be in for a surprise. The stagecraft is such a massive part of the story that you still dont know what will happen when you come into the theater, he said. Although the play will essentially remain the same on Broadway, the creative team is not taking anything for granted. If we see audiences arent getting anything, well obviously adjust, Tiffany said. Were always working on the show, and there are certain things about the architecture of the Lyric which means some things will change. Its a theater with different kinds of possibilities, and I want to exploit them all. Rowling laughed. Never leave a possibility unexploited, she said. Callender and Friedman decided on the Lyric after looking at numerous Broadway theaters, all keen to lure the potential Potter gold mine. All the theater owners were fantastically generous, Friedman said. But the British-based Ambassador Theater Group (ATG), which owns the Lyric, she said, made a proposition which was irresistible to the creative team and to us: They would invest in a space which we could create exactly as we wanted. Clearly anticipating an extremely lengthy and profitable run, ATG not only paid for the Lyrics renovation, but made it financially worthwhile for the Cirque du Soleil show Paramour, which had cost $25 million, to move out. (ATG did not respond to questions about the rebuilding cost.) ) An eight-month renovation has resulted in a dramatic conversion of the cavernous theater, once home to the ill-fated musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark. According to Friedman, the first balcony has been brought forward and certain side walls knocked down, so that its narrower and shallower. This, she said, reduced the seating to 1,500 from around 1,900. (The Palace in London seats 1,300.) The main entrance has been moved from a clotted 42nd Street to the less crowded, almost discreet, atmosphere of 43rd Street, where elaborate signage has been installed. (Outside the more grandly placed Palace an oversize owls nest greeted theatergoers.) We learned a lot from the London show about the community feeling that happens when people watch two parts in succession, she said. Part of the experience is what happens at the intervals, between the shows. Splitting the narrative in two was Callenders idea, Thorne said. The stage needs time, breadth, Tiffany added. When we thought of the nature of the story and talked about what became the end of Part 1, we just couldnt get there in an hour. Callender said they had realized it was important that viewers kept the same seats for both parts of the play, and recognized their seatmates. (Most people see it in one day, or succeeding nights.) Then you are on a journey together, he said. Callender added that although they could have made the house smaller, they were committed to making 20 percent of the seats available at $40 or less per part. Those seats are all over the house, and there isnt one bad one, Callender said. Keeping 1,500 seats is how we could afford to do that. (Tickets range from $20 to $299 per part, a bit less during previews.) Asked whether they had encountered any resistance from parents to a costly, 5-hour-plus commitment, Rowling gave a firm no. For kids under 9, she said, it might be stretching it. Friedman pointed out that the majority of the fan base was the generation that had grown up reading Harry Potter, and was now between 25 and 35. The fans, she said, would like Part 3. Exclusion and Acceptance After years of peace in the Potterverse, Cursed Child deals with the forces of darkness and authoritarian power rising themes that might be read as echoes of the real world, in Europe and the United States. But Rowling said she did not feel it was a political piece, even as over the years she has come to more full-throatedly espouse her own viewpoints, especially on Twitter. Im mouthy, she said. I feel like the rest of the world; Im just venting. Yet the themes of exclusion and acceptance that Thorne picked up from the books were important, Tiffany asserted. Rowling nodded emphatically. Voldemort, she said, was someone who had been excluded and isolated, and we continue to explore that. What in Thornes writing had surprised her? Rowling pointed to the way he had imagined Scorpius Malfoy. He is such a beautiful character, and in many ways the emotional heart of the play, she said. And such an amazing foil for Albus, who is tortured and self-involved. The last Harry Potter novel came out in 2007, the final film in 2011. At one point, it looked as if that would be that. But with Cursed Child and the Fantastic Beasts films, the Potterverse lives. Asked if she ever worried about her fans reactions to extending a universe they treasure, Rowling sat up straighter. I think, she said calmly, that its up to me what I do with the world I created. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. The indictment said Greitens then transmitted the photo in a way that allowed it to be viewed on a computer, which prosecutors said made the crime a felony rather than a misdemeanor. The charge comes weeks after Greitens acknowledged having an extramarital affair in 2015, but denied reports that he blackmailed the woman or took a nude photo of her without permission. A St. Louis television station had aired a report with claims that Greitens, a married father of two, took a compromising photograph of a woman with whom he was having an affair and then threatened her with retribution if she revealed the relationship. Greitens, a former Navy SEAL and Rhodes scholar who has been governor for just over a year, has resisted calls to resign, insisting that he did nothing illegal. He has been touring the state touting his tax cut plans. Greitens, who was booked into a St. Louis jail Thursday afternoon and released on his own recognizance, defended himself in a statement posted to social media accounts, saying he made a personal mistake but did not commit a crime. With todays disappointing and misguided political decision, my confidence in our prosecutorial system is shaken, but not broken, Greitens, 43, wrote on Facebook. He suggested that the charges were the work of a reckless liberal prosecutor who uses her office to score political points, an apparent reference to Kimberly M. Gardner, the St. Louis prosecutor whose office presented the case to the grand jury and who is a Democrat. A lawyer for Greitens, Edward L. Dowd Jr., said in a statement that the charge was baseless and that he would be filing a motion to dismiss the case. Greitens showed no immediate signs of quitting, but he was certain to face pressure to leave, and some lawmakers said they were pushing for an investigation, which could be a first step to seek impeachment. Though his fellow Republicans hold large majorities in the state legislature, the governor has frequently clashed with members of his own party. State Sen. Robert Schaaf, a Republican, said lawmakers should move swiftly to bring this to a resolution and possibly impeachment if the governor did not resign. Republican leaders in the state House raised their own doubts about Greitens future. We will carefully examine the facts contained in the indictment and answer the question as to whether or not the governor can lead our state while a felony case moves forward, a joint statement from the Republican leaders, including Todd Richardson, the speaker of the House; Elijah Haahr, speaker pro tem; and Rob Vescovo, the majority floor leader, said. The people of Missouri deserve no less. We will begin the process of tasking a group of legislators to investigate these serious charges. Gardner said the statute of limitations for charges to be filed would have expired next month. As I have stated before, it is essential for residents of the city of St. Louis and our state to have confidence in their leaders, Gardner said Thursday in a statement. They must know that the Office of the Circuit Attorney will hold public officials accountable in the same manner as any other resident of our city. Both parties and the people of St. Louis deserve a thorough investigation of these allegations. Dowd said the governor had offered to meet with Gardner, but that she refused and proceeded to file an indictment that has no facts. Dowd said his client would cooperate if a legislative committee investigates. Last month, after the claims against Greitens became public, Greitens acknowledged an affair and asked for forgiveness. This was a deeply personal mistake, Greitens and his wife, Sheena, said in a joint statement. Eric took responsibility, and we dealt with this together honestly and privately. The tawdry political drama is taking place in a state where Sen. Claire McCaskill, a Democrat, is locked in what is expected to be one of the most hard-fought Senate races in the country. Greitens was widely believed to have aspirations for higher office, perhaps even the presidency, and had appeared in Iowa, Michigan and Virginia in recent months in an apparent effort to burnish his national brand. He had been well known within military circles. In 2007, after coming home from Iraq, Greitens started what became known as the veterans empowerment movement when he founded The Mission Continues, a nonprofit that sought to encourage veterans to take on new missions of service in their communities. In 2013, Time magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world. By Thursday night, lawmakers were raising pointed questions about Greitens future. Ryan Silvey, a former Republican state senator whom Greitens appointed to the states Public Service Commission last month, said it would be difficult for the governor to survive. He doesnt really have a lot of deep relationships in the legislature to begin with, Silvey said. I dont see how he can effectively govern in the current situation. I think that it would probably be best for the party and for the state if he were to resign. It was hard to see the prosecution as political, he said, given the fact that the indictment came from a grand jury. With it being a grand jury, that tells me evidence was presented to other people who saw that an indictment would be reasonable, he said. Under Missouri law, a member of the state House can file a resolution seeking an investigation of the governor, which would then be referred to a committee. That committee could then advance articles of impeachment to the full House for a vote. And if a majority of House members supported impeachment, the state Senate would select seven judges to conduct a trial. No Missouri governor has ever been removed from office through impeachment. T.J. Berry, a state representative from Kansas City, said he hoped the states General Assembly would open its own investigation to remove the question of political taint in Gardners prosecution. While Berry, a Republican, said that the allegations still needed to be proven, the charges were not a good sign for the governor. If you get a grand jury to indict you, theres probably some proof, Berry said. State Sen. Jamilah Nasheed, a Democrat, said theres a very dark cloud over the state of Missouri and I truly believe that the governor cannot lead while under felony indictment. If Greitens does not resign, the people here in the state of Missouri need to rise up and call for his impeachment, Nasheed said. This is a big embarrassment to the state. Greitens, who was permitted to travel throughout the United States as a provision of his release, is scheduled to appear in court March 16. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. Bachelors, spinsters, hopeful parents-to-be and couple seeking or planning to raise kids or start a family in the world should know about these seven corrupt free and ideal countries. Though there are several fit international territories in which one can have children and raise a family, these seven countries rate high for less corrupt practices, good education and quality of life. Starting a family or raising kids are dependent on some determinants that have to be critically considered before taking the step. In determining which country or countries that are the most fit for bringing up children in, intending parents or couples should take into serious consideration the overall safety, crime rate, healthcare systems, and the quality of education. According to the U.S. News & World Report's annual "Best Countries" rankings, these seven countries arent only fit but have been judged the seven of the best countries to raise kids or start a family. In the same vein, the current corruption perception index by the Transparency International shows that this seven countries rated anti-corrupt nations on the table. Here are the eight attributes, which researchers carefully looked at in selecting and releasing the best countries to raise kids and start a family in the world. Before you make that decision to start a family or raise kids, here are the 7 best countries in the world where you can raise kids or starting a family. Denmark Denmark ranks the most suitable country in the world to raise kids or family because of the importance the Danish system has placed on the lives of parents. The Danish parental leave system is the most generous and flexible in the entirety of the European Union. Mothers are entitled to four weeks of maternity leave before the expected due date while both parents are entitled to 23 weeks of parental leave in a year. Education: Top 10 globally (#10) Quality of life: Top 10 globally (#2) Most business-friendly: Top 10 globally (#4) Transparency: Top 10 globally Corruption Level: 88 (Very Clean) Sweden In Sweden, each parent is allowed 240 days of the 480 days of paid parental leave. The Swedish government noted that each parents has two months designated for him or her, though days can be transferred to a partner. Sweden was ranked by Universitas 21 (U21) as having the second best school system in the world. In the same vein, Save The Child International ranked the country fifth for best places for kids to live in. Crime and violence are considered to be very rare in this country while the people are considered to be warming and accommodating. Education: Top 10 globally (#9) Quality of life: Top 10 globally (#3) Most business-friendly: Top 10 globally (#5) Transparency: Top 10 globally (#5) Corruption Level: 84 (Very Clean) Norway Norway has been ranked as one of the international countries that specially provides kid-friendly environment. Before the kids birth, this country provides a generous parental leave policies with mothers getting 35 weeks with full pay or 45 weeks with 80 percent pay. Fathers arent left out as they can take between 0 and 10 weeks depending on the salary of their wives. As intending parents, it will be worthy to know that Norway ranks ninth in Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development rankings for reading, math, and science. In that regards, the country is five spots ahead of the United States of America and the children are also entitled to full child care in numerous day-care centers. Education: Globally (#14) Quality of life: Top 10 globally (#4) Most business-friendly: Top 10 globally (#8) Transparency: Top 10 globally (#1) Corruption Level: 85 (Very Clean) Finland For the government of Finland, the child is of highest priority. Expecting mothers in Finland can begin their maternity leave seven weeks before their estimated due date. In addition, the government provides 16 additional weeks of paid leave through a maternity grant and also offers eight weeks of paid paternity leave. And this is also evident in the countrys school system, which is top notch. In the Finnish constitution, every kid under the age of seven has the right to child care. Finland ranked second in reading, math, and science Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development scores. Education: Globally (#16) Quality of life: Top 10 globally (#7) Most business-friendly: Top 10 globally (#6) Transparency: Top 10 globally (#4) Corruption Level: 85 (Very Clean) Canada The Canadian government has high regard for the schooling of the kids and children in the country. And this is evident as the country ranks third on the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development scores. From a bevy of safety programs provided by Child Safe Canada to self esteem programs to avoiding danger, Canada does its part to ensure kids remain safe. Meanwhile the Canadian Labour code provides employee with up to 17 weeks of maternity leave. Aside this, parents are eligible for employment insurance if they meet certain requirements. Education: Top 10 globally (#3) Quality of life: Top 10 globally (#1) Most business-friendly: Top 10 globally (#7) Transparency: Top 10 globally (#2) Corruption Level: 82 (Very Clean) Netherlands The plan for parents and intending parents in Netherlands is enough reason for anyone to relocate and start a family in the country. For a parent working or studying in the Netherlands, you are entitled to childcare allowance for kids under the age of 12. The attention given to the kids in Netherlands is so pure that the European Child Safety Alliance Steering Committee represents the Netherlands providing aid to child safety in homes, schools, roads, and the development of comprehension. Education: Globally (#11) Quality of life: Top 10 globally (#8) Most business-friendly: Top 10 globally (#9) Transparency: Top 10 globally (#8) Corruption Level: 82 (Very Clean) Switzerland With an education system that has been tagged a pride of the country, Switzerland is considered to have one of the best systems. Ranked sixth in terms of good governance, the country provides so much security for the lives of citizens across the states. Zurich, a city in Switzerland, in second place in terms of safety. Education: Top 10 globally (#7) Quality of life: Top 10 globally (#6) Most business-friendly: Top 10 globally (#2) Transparency: Top 10 globally (#3) The impacts of these corruption cases are grave and may erode popular support of the current government. This is because many people have started questioning its seriousness to really fight the malice in Nigeria. The newly released 2017 corruption perception index by Transparency International also confirmed this fear. Nigeria dropped 12 places from 136 to 148 in the latest CPI ranking. A situation adduced to administrations protective posture towards officials accused of corruption in the government. Looking at 2017, here are 5 corruptions cases that put Buharis government in a really bad light. 1. Employment scandals in Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) and Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS) The first major scandal of 2017 was the illegal recruitment of personnel by two major agencies of government - Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) and Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS). The lists of new personnel for these agencies were filled with sons, daughters and relatives of major government officials. Considering the anti-corruption posture of the government, the citizens had thought the process would be reversed and civil service rule adhered, but the government graciously ignored it. More so, the news broke at a time President Buhari just stated that his administration wont be recruiting for the year. 2. Grass Cutting scandal of ex-secretary to the Federal Government The grass cutting contract scam was noted as legendary. This is because the contract sum was far above allocation for needed amenities on these camps. The government is allocating N200 million to cut down bushes around the camp. The main culprit in this case is the Babachir Lawal, who was the Secretary to the Federal Government as at then. Government reluctance to either sack, suspend or investigate the scam made many Nigerians to conclude that there are sacred cows in the government. President Buhari was not bugged despite repeated threat from the Senate and Civil Society organisation (CSOs). However, Babachir was later suspended and sacked seven months after an investigative committee headed by the countrys vice president, Prof. Yemi Osinbajo, recommended his sack. To many, this is an indication that the government may just be playing with its corruption fight. 3. $24 billion NNPC contract scam The graveyard silence on the alleged $24 billion contract scam in the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) by the government shows all is not well with the anti-corruption campaign in Nigeria. This accusation was made by the Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, Dr Ibe Kachikwu, in a letter to the president. Both Group Managing Director of NNPC, Maikanti Baru, and the Chief of Staff to the President, Mr Abba Kyari, were accused in this letter. An internal dispute settlement was done between the parties and the scandal was made non-mentioned. 4. Illegal Recall and promotion of Mr Abdulrasheed Maina Nigerians were shocked to learn that the fugitive ex-police pension task force boss and civil servant, Mr Abdulrasheed Maina, has been reinstated and subsequently promoted to the position of an acting director in the federal civil service. The trio of Minister of Interior, Mr Abdulrahman Dambazau, the Attorney General, Abubakar Malami and the COS to the president were accused of crafting this plot. However, none of these officials has been sacked, told to resign or punished for violating the Civil Service Act in the country. 5. Privatization of Nigerian Police Force by IGP Idris Ibrahim Nigerias Inspector General of Police, Mr Ibrahim Idris, was accused by a serving senator of embezzling police funds to the tune of N10billion monthly. The fund was said to be the money income from security services provided by force to private companies and citizens. This resolution was adopted by the house on Thursday, February 22, 2018. The parliament stated that this audit is important to ascertain the airworthiness of these aircraft. More so, to ensure all aviation safety standards are duly followed by airlines. The resolution was titled: Need to Establish the Technical and Operational Status of Nigerian Registered Commercial/Private Aircraft to Boost the Safety, Protection and Confidence of Passengers Flying the Nigerian Airspace. According to Hon. Abubakar Amuda-Kannike who moved the motion, aviation safety procedures are more proactive measures to mitigate air mishaps. Also, they are to enhance smooth operations and comfort of passengers. However, recent cases of air mishaps bring to question the quality of planes used by airlines in Nigeria. Recently, incidents in the aviation subsector are indicative that a holistic review and assessment of the level of compliance and adherence to safety standards are pertinent. Ideally, there must be periodic aircraft maintenance which includes overhaul, repair, inspection or modification of an aircraft or aircraft component and maintenance which incorporates such tasks as ensuring compliance with airworthiness directives. There exists a high degree of complicity between airline operators in Nigeria and the regulatory bodies charged with the safety of airspace and passengers; particularly, the Directorate of Quality Assurance of the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority, he said. Too many air mishaps and Aviation crisis in 2018 There has been a widespread concern about the quality aircraft being used by airlines in the country. Asides delays and illogical cancelling of flights, quality of aircraft in the fleets of airlines in Nigeria have been a concern to many air travellers. In February alone, Dana Air has been involved in two cases of air mishaps. The first was the issue of the faulty plane door and most recently, one of its planes missed the runway. Endangering the lives of passengers on board. Also, an aircraft of the Africa World Airline (AWA) was reported to have been attacked by burglars at the International wing of the Murtala Mohammed International Airport (MMIA), Lagos. Tiwa Savage had posted some really raunchy photos on her Instagram on Thursday, February 22, 2018, which got a lot of people talking including Banky W who commented on the photo "Eez like we haff toh ask for permission toh like dis one ohhh Sis," he wrote. This was followed by a very considerate reply by his wife, Adesua Etomi "@bankywellington carry go. I totally understand." Don't we all just love these guys? They keep showing us the different ways to be romantic, tolerant and funny side while married. ALSO READ: Just in case you missed it, Adesua Etomi turned 30 on Thursday, February 22, 2018, and as usual, Banky W sent her a very emotional and cute message via his Instagram page to celebrate her on her special day "Today is #BaeDay... Susu.. on the inside and out, you are UNQUESTIONABLY the most beautiful person I know. Thank you for making me the luckiest man on earth. Thank you for loving me, and being my backbone. Thank you for going on this journey with me and making the past few months, the absolute best of my life. "You mean the world to me and I love you more than words could ever properly express. As the whole world celebrates you today, I pray that God will bless, protect and guide you. May He enlarge your coasts, grant your heart's desires, and overwhelm you with His Grace and Favour. Happy birthday Mrs. W. You were worth the wait," he wrote. He however failed in his aim having mistakenly employed the service of an undercover detective who pretended to be a contract killer expected to receive a sum of 38,000, for a job well done. According to Metro News UK, the suspect had planned to murder relations including mother, father, and 10-year-old sister. Reports gathered revealed that the unnamed man provided vital information to the hitman in order to ensure a speedy and hitch-free process. His parents who cooperated with law enforcement officers who suggested that death be faked were devastated after learning about the intention of their son. A police source revealed that the suspect "wanted to get rid of parents because they were not giving him money." "Before looking for a killer he tried to get of his relatives twice. He looking on the internet to find out how to carry out the murders. "The criminal wanted to put pills in the kettle to poison his parents but his father found out something was wrong. "Then the son planned to break a thermometer in his parents car so that they were poisoned with mercury vapours. But he got cold feet," says a police spokesperson. ALSO READ: Bloated corpse of woman murdered by husband float on Lagos Lagoon The Metro News reported that the suspect had planned the murder months prior to the day of his arrest. It was gathered that he had second thoughts about executing his intention until he met the undercover cop who was expected to get the job done for him. A branch of the People's Liberation Army Ground Force has been equipped with an integrated individual soldier combat system to "adapt to future informatized warfare," which has been hailed as the strongest individual firepower in the world, media reported on Thursday. The Sky Wolf Commandos, a branch of PLA Special Operations Forces from the Western Theater Command, have been equipped with the QTS-11 system in their training, Weihutang, a column affiliated with China Central Television (CCTV), reported on Thursday. The QTS-11 system not only includes firearms but also a full digitalized integrated individual soldier combat system, including detection and communications, said Song Zhongping, a Chinese military expert and TV commentator. The system, which includes an assault rifle and 20-millimeter grenade launcher, is capable of destroying antipersonnel targets. Each soldier equipped with the system is armed with a thermal imager and optoelectronic and positioning systems, Science and Technology Daily reported. News site airforceworld.com reported that the QTS-11 system weighs up to 7 kilograms. "The individual soldier combat system is only part of the digitalized army, something countries are attempting to do. Developing the integrated individual soldier combat system adapts to informatized warfare in the future," Song told the Global Times on Thursday. The systems of the US and China are similar but not comparable. The system's capability depends on how it is used, Song added. The QTS-11 system was also incorporated in a surveillance and reconnaissance brigade of the Central Theater Command, Science and Technology Daily reported. Special operations forces are the first to have a taste of the QTS-11 system before the system would be widely equipped into other forces. The system is also very expensive in cost, Song said. The integrated combat system was firstly developed by the US but they have dropped the research of Objective Individual Combat Weaponry system due to weight problems. The QTS-11 system can be said as the strongest individual firepower in the world, the CCTV report said. Military fans hail the system as a "strategic rifle." The incident which occurred on Wednesday, February 21, 2018, saw neighbours of the deceased try unsuccessfully to put out a raging inferno which rendered by bodies badly burnt. This was confirmed in a tweet by a Twitter user, Dan-Borno who added gory images of showing the victims in the dead state. "VIEWER DESCRETION: Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhin raji'un. FAMILY BURNT TO DEATH. "Mother and her four kids burnt to death following midnight fire out- break from a burning mosquito coil in #Maiduguri. "People should be sensitized on how to make use of mosquitor coils," Dan-Bornu expressed on the day of the event. Family suffer severe burns from gas explosion caused by phone vibration A vibration from a phone has caused a gas explosion which caused severe burns to family members of a Facebook user, Funmi Adewola in Lagos. According to reports, the incident occurred on Sunday, January 20, 2018, but no death was recorded. Relatives of the narrator, such as a younger lady and her daughter, were reportedly burnt while trying to fix a burner on a gas cylinder. ALSO READ: Bloated corpse of woman murdered by husband float on Lagos Lagoon The procedure had ensured the invasion of the air with inflammable substances which facilitated an explosion when a text message was received on a phone. Images showed intense burns on the body of the victims. According to Punch, the arrest was made by men of the Lagos State Neighbourhood Safety Corps. The suspects allegedly forced the 3 girls to follow them to their hideout, to be initiated into the Eiye Confraternity. One of the victims, Maryam, said Dare came to meet me in school with a gun that I should follow him to Agarawu. He said his members were going to initiate me or else he would kill me. When we got there, they formed a circle and asked me to kneel down in their midst. They tied my face and sprinkled some things on my body. They asked me to undress and raped me countless times for four days. Suspects confess Punch identified the 6 suspects as: Laguda Kamal, Muyideen Aigoro, Kayode Damilare, Quadri Ajayi, Idoogun Yinusa and Yinka Adewuyi. Kamal and Quadri reportedly confessed to having fun with the girls, but denied raping them. Meanwhile, their friend, Damilare denied raping the girls, but said that he witnessed when Wakilu and Yinka gang-raped Maryam. Cultists graduate to kidnappers Speaking on the arrest, the Chairman of the Neighbourhood Corps, Israel Ajao said One of the victims was held for four days. The cat was let out of the bag by a neighbour who reported the matter to the operatives after an alarm by the victims mother. The corps has been working tirelessly in conjunction with the police, adopting both overt and covert strategies, to ensure that criminals do not have a place in Lagos State. From cultism they graduate to kidnapping, rape and other heinous crimes, and that is why we have changed our strategy to focus on cultism. We will begin to visit schools to sensitise principals to the need to be conscious of the activities of their pupils, he added. The teenager who moved from Zaria to Abuja with her family in the year 2017, expressed a sore eyes for old friends who often teach her the English alphabet when they return from school. Her thoughts were shared on a Facebook discussion platform, The Humans of Abuja. In a post published on Wednesday, February 7, 2018, the narrator displayed an interest to return to her former city which offered her an opportunity to learn. "My family just moved to Abuja November last year. My brothers were very happy when we relocated, except me. I really don't like it here because I miss my friends in Zaria. "My brothers are the only ones my father enrolled In school. He said school isn't important for girls. But my friends in Zaria who are girls are in school. "I would always go to their houses once they were back from school, so they could teach me everything they learnt. They taught me how to recite the alphabet, 36 states and capital and also taught me how to read and write. "I do not have any friend here yet who would teach me things. Sometimes when i think of my friends Ada and Bola I become sad. I really wish to go back to Zaria," the teenage girl expressed. Orphans rescued from HIV-positive grandmother who blames them for disease In Cross-River State, Nigeria, a child protection agency has rescued three female orphans who have endured harsh treatment from their grandmother who blamed them for contracting the HIV disease. The victims who were accused of witchcraft are aged 13, 5, and 3 years old respectively have reportedly lost their parents. They suffered streaks of torture from their guardian who reportedly invited their uncle to beat them. Scars displayed on their backs appear indelible signs of their troubled past. The gang had killed two policemen and injured one during the robbery. The suspect identified as Chinonso Gift Onwuegbuchulam, popularly known as Ogolo, is the last member of the gang to be nabbed. One of the robbers was shot dead during the operation. The state Commissioner of Police, Chris Ezike, paraded Ogolo in Owerri on Friday, February 23, 2018. He said, "I am delighted to announce to you that the remaining member of the gang, one Chinonso Gift Onwuegbuchulam, aka, Ogolo, male, 29 of age, hails from Obazu Mbieri in the Mbaitoli LGA of Imo State, was arrested on February 21, 2018. "The suspect, who claimed to hold a Bachelor of Science honours degree in Government and Public Administration from Imo State University in 2008, was arrested in his hideout at Close 7, Mgbuakara Eleparawan, Port Harcourt, Rivers State." ALSO READ: Police immortalize officers who died in Zenith bank raid Ezike said the suspect confessed to the crime and revealed that out of the N2.8 million his gang stole from their target, he got a share of N400,000. In June 2017, a video of the robbery had gone viral, particularly because of one the late policemen who displayed rare gallantry by confronting the robbers in a fierce gun battle. The brave cop later died from the gunshot injuries he sustained. Read the full story below: I am what you might call a little hair obsessed. You can't tell by looking at me thoughIve worn the same style for a decade. But when it comes to thinking about, talking about and marveling at what hair means, I can go on forever. In the pre-social media days, hair obsessed people like me had to peer into beauty salon windows to see a parade of styles, from braids parted like geometric mazes to updos that defied every law of physics. Now, though, you can be a hair voyeur online. There are millions of braids on Instagram and YouTube, and discussion threads all over the Internet. Long before the digital boom, I met a woman named Lori Tharps. She was as hair obsessed as I am, and after we found each other as freelancers in the fact-checking department at Vibe, we wrote a book called Hair Story: Untangling the Roots of Black Hair in America. Its 227 pages on the aesthetic, economic and political meaning of African-American hairand its significance for Black people, white people, all people throughout American history, the business world and popular culture. Braids get a lot of mentions on those pages. Thats because the styleso simple, just three strands of hair interlocked around each othertells a really complicated story. Women in cornrows did not appear in fashion magazines for most of the last century. The first time a cornrowed style was seen on television was 1962, worn by actress and How to Get Away with Murder star Cicely Tyson in the CBS series, East Side, West Side. And when Black women with braids werent being ignored, they were being discriminated against. Women have sued after being fired from tourism and customer service jobs because their cornrowed styles were said to be unkempt or unprofessional and in violation of appearance codes. There was Renee Rogers (fired from American Airlines, Pamela Mitchell (Marriott Hotels), Cheryl Tatum (Hyatt Hotel), and so many others that the Hotel and Restaurant Union declared cornrows on the job a workers rights issue. Then, suddenlyBo Derek. As a new actress, she landed a 10-minute role in the movie 10. Derek wanted her screen time to be unforgettable, so she got her hair cornrowed to look like the Black women she saw at her Los Angeles supermarket. In 1979, 10 was released and theimage of Dereks blond, beaded cornrows hanging down her back became iconic. Suddenly, braids werent only cool, they were Beverly Hills, with salons opening in the neighborhood and charging white women 500 dollars for Bo Braids. Then, suddenlyBo Derek. As a new actress, she landed a 10-minute role in the movie 10. Derek wanted her screen time to be unforgettable, so she got her hair cornrowed to look like the Black women she saw at her Los Angeles supermarket. In 1979, 10 was released and the of Dereks blond, beaded cornrows hanging down her back became iconic. Suddenly, braids werent only cool, they were Beverly Hills, with salons opening in the neighborhood and charging white women 500 dollars for Bo Braids. Like many Black women in America, Amandla Stenberg was deeply troubled by the whitewashing. So in 2015, the then-15-year-old actress made a video as a school project titled, Don't Cash Crop my Cornrows. It should be required viewing for anyone who has ever un-ironically uttered the phrase boxer braids. In it, Stenberg breaks down the history of cornrows and the styles usurping by the white pop culture machine. She says, The line between cultural appropriation and cultural exchange is always going to be blurred, but heres the thing: Appropriation occurs when a style leads to racist generalization or stereotypes where it originated but is deemed as high fashion, cool or funny when the privileged take it for themselves. Yet, focusing on braids only to talk about appropriation diminishes their beauty and centers white privilege. It also makes it easy to forget how stunning they can be. Two famous images remind us: Beyonce with thigh-length cornrows fanning out behind her as she leans backwards out of a pickup truck in the Formation video. Solange, platinum-dyed cornrows arranged into a halo over her headno gravity, all drama. "Majestic" often feels hyperbolic unless youre discussing Queen Elizabeth, but there is something undeniably majesticand arrestingabout these powerful women and their braids. Ayana Byrd is the co-author of Hair Story: Untangling the Roots of Black Hair. She is currently working on her first novel. Special thanks to , , , and , for providing travel and accommodations for this project. Our African heritage is a representation of our origin, our culture and symbolism as Africans which is why in our fifth anniversary, Africa Fashion Week Nigeria 2018 will be celebrating the essence of Africanism in fashion. Our theme this year African Heritage Arise will embody these distinguished characteristics on the runway and in the various exhibitions in July. Enjoy Africa is the leading Pan-African discount house providing incentives that enable customers explore Africas greatest cities. They aim at stimulating the local economy while offering attractive discounts to shoppers, tourists and visitors to Lagos state. Our partnership with Enjoy Africa will provide participants and attendees of the event with lucrative discounts and offers to have a great time during AFWN2018 and in Lagos City which is powered by its subsidiary - Enjoy Lagos. Enjoy Lagos has a discount coupon book and Mobile Application which is location enabled to tell users where the best deals are around them. The Enjoy Lagos benefits help startups and existing businesses by taking their brand to the customers and bringing the customers to their doorstep."The Enjoy Africa project is set up to strengthen the countrys economy, to showcase the beauty of Africa and that is why i founded Enjoy Africa Discounts and Tours Limited. To give businesses the platform to easily grow. I believe all businesses should be on this platform, every business has a little bit of art in it and we want the world to see this. Which is why we are excited to partner with AFWN this year". Iyad Grizi - CEO/Founder, Enjoy Africa. We are also calling on designers and exhibitors who are interested in showcasing in this year's edition to send an email to - curator@africafashionweeknigeria.com Designers who sign up early stand to enjoy lots of benefits from Enjoy Lagos and discounts from Africa Fashion Week 2018 For more information, please visit - africafashionweeknigeria.com There are a variety of seemingly odd sexual practices that go on around the world and we have put together a list of some of the best. 1. Boys & girls of the Sambian tribe have to drink semen The Sambian Tribe of New Guinea have a tradition of separating their boys from the girls at the age of 7 for 10 years. During this period, they undergo piercings, nose bleeds and have to drink the semen of the tribes mightiest warriors. 2. Girls of the Trobriander Tribe engage in sexual acts from age 6 The Trobriander Tribe from Papua, New Guinea embrace sexuality from an astonishingly young age. Boys start engaging in sexual activity from the age of 10-12, while the girls start from 6 years! The legalities of such a practice is unclear by their law but it would certainly be considered illegally my most countries. 3. In Mangaia, older women have sex with young boys In Mangaia, an island in the South Pacific Ocean, boys around the age of 13 have sex with older women who teach them the intricacies of the act and how best to please their partners. These rituals are supposed to turn a boy into a man through sexual exploration. 4. The Kreung Tribe builds love huts where teenaged girls can have sex with different men till they find the one With the Kreung Tribe in Cambodia, the elders build a love-hut for their teenage daughters. Different boys spend the night here day after day, until she finds a suitable partner, who is then with her for life. ALSO READ:A brief walk into the lives of one of the world's most ancient people 5. In Ancient Greece, men took young boys as lovers For Ancient Greeks, sexual identity didn't depend on gender and preference but on who was the active penetrator and who was on the receiving end. The active role was associated with higher social status, while the passive role meant youth and femininity, or 'boy love' in other words. 6. In certain Nepali tribes, brothers share one woman Some Nepali tribes in the Himalayas practise polyandry. Basically, all the brothers share one woman, so that they don't have too many children for their limited farmland. 7. The Wodaabe Tribe holds a wife-stealing festival every year In the Wodaabe Tribe of Niger in West Africa, children are married in their infancy. However, at the yearly Gerewol Festival, Wodaabe men wear elaborate makeup and costumes and try to covertly steal another's wife. If they go undetected, their union becomes recognised. ALSO READ:History and culture of the Itsekiri people 8. Adolescents of the Muria Tribe, Chattisgarh, can 'practise' sex without emotional attachment The Muria Tribe from Chattisgarh have a very sexually liberated culture. They have mixed-sex dormitories where adolescents are sent to practice premarital sex, sometimes with a single partner and sometimes serially. They are discouraged from becoming emotionally attached to their partners. 9. Women of the Guajiro tribe must make a man 'fall' to make love Colombia's Guajiro people have a ceremonial dance. If a woman trips a man during the dance, they must have sex. 10. In Indonesia, you can have sex outside marriage during Pon celebration Before its releae, Black Panther wa heralded as a manifesto of black and african identity as the first Marvel feature film to be set in Africa. It also features the first African superhero, T'Challa who takes the role of the Black Panther. ALSO READ: 10 things you should know about the Black Panther movie Since its release, the most attentive viewers have highlighted references to African culture and history, such as the Dora Milaje, the female guards of the King, inspired by the Amazons of Benin. Among these many allusions, gay rights activist and commentator, Bisi Alimi has put a very interesting case forward. He believes that the Kingdom of Wakanda, which T'Challa rules over and most of the movie is set in, shares similarities with the famed ancient Bini Kingdom. Two great African kingdoms In a lenghtily-captioned post on his Instagram account, the vocal commentator related the greatness of Bini to the imposing and technologically advanced Wakanda. He wrote, "The image you can see above is the Benin Empire in mid-western Nigeria. It was one of the many powerful advanced kingdoms that dotted the western region of the country that is now known as Nigeria.""Another of such advanced kingdom is the Oyo empire. I am sure that we all know the concept of an empire and a kingdom will not be called an empire unless it is powerful, advanced in technology, has a system of government that is well respected and an economic policy." undefined"Why am I writing about Benin Empire this morning?", he asked. "Well, it is the fact that we have been told "Wakanda" is imaginary. We were told that it only exists in the world of our imagination but when I saw this picture I realised it is not so."The Bini Empire was one of the greatest in African history. It's capital was Edo, the area which is now known as Beniin City in Edo State. At its height, it was one of the oldest and most highly developed states in the coastal hinterland of West Africa, dating perhaps to the eleventh century CE, until it was annexed by the British Empire in 1897. Despite the popular perceptions of African civilisations at the time, Bini was well advanced in trade, government and structure. Like Erediauwa, Like T'Challa It is here that some of the similarities with Wakanda may lie. The Empire was ruled by the Oba, a position which was handed down by inheritance. ALSO READ: Black Panther is a spectacular celebration of cinematic elegance The Oba enjoyed a reputation close to T'Challa's. He was the spiritual and political head of the Empire and when trouble beckoned, the people looked to him to save them. Much like Wakanda, the Bini Empire, especially the capital, was a structural phenomenon. While Wakanda had cities lying along cliff edges, Benin was surrounded by a great wall that has been described as the largest man-made wall in human history. The city itself was a labyrinth of streets that was a testament to the planning and order that we now associate with the world's most advanced cities. Is this enough to say the Kingdom of Wakanda was inspired by Benin? Perhaps, not. Across Africa, many ancient civilsation left their footprints in the sand and the annals of history. The Black Panther movie did well to draw inspiration from these many sources and incorporate them into one seamless story. It is more likely that Wakanda was created in this form, as an amalgam of influences drawn from different cities and empires. Regardless, the sentiment shared by many who have seen the movie remains valid. Wakanda is a black story. In a world where the media has more power than any other single force (save, nuclear bombs and religion), it is important that we celebrate these victories, where the African identity is portrayed with pizzazz, verve, strength and depth. Their identity seems to be shrouded in the shadows of major ethnic groups within the region they occupy. And their history, like most ethnic groups in Nigeria, was not documented; thus it is characterized by conflicting accounts. Where one account claims that the Etches originated and migrated from the great Benin Kingdom, another says that their ancestors were among the earliest Igbos that moved to the different areas they now inhabit after the Igbos migrated and settled in what is now known as Nigeria. According to Achonwa (1980), the Etche people left Benin kingdom about the 7th century. They moved up to Aboh, and the Orashi Rivers through Ndoni Creek, setting for a brief while at the present-day OmokuThey moved eastwards up to Abua. They crossed Abua to Ndele on land Stopping finally at Igbodo, the first Etches settlement. And as suggested by Onyema (2000), Etches is the first settler or founder of Etches land. One tradition has it that he is a man called Etcheful who was corruptly named Etches. Be it ETCHE, ECHEFU, ECHIE, ECHE or OCHIE, what is accepted among the peoples of Etche is that he is the forebearer or ancestor of all Etche people for East, West, North, south and ethnic nationality that is spread across Rivers, Abia and Imo States. Specifically, Etche (Echie) is an ethnic group in Rivers state, southern Nigeria. They inhabit two Local Government Areas, namely Etche Local Government Area and Omuma LGA. And as earlier stated, their settlements can also be found in the neighboring states of Abia and Imo. Their communities include Akwu/Obuor, Chokocho, Chokota, Egwi, Afara, Mba, Ikwerengwo, Okehi, Okomoko, Ulakwo, Umuakonu, Umuebulu, Umuechem, egbeke, Igbodo. Economy As at almost two decades ago, in 1999 to be precise, there were about 600,000 Etche people, forming the fourth largest ethnic group in Rivers State and they were mostly engaged in agriculture. And among the cultivated crops, cassava and yam are very important. However, the use of tractors for farming these crops has dropped slightly in the 19862004 period. The Shell Petroleum Development Company has funded a cassava processing mill at Umuebulu, and in 2000 provided training to local women in operation and management of the mill. Palm oil production by smallholders is a significant part of the economy. PYONGYANG, Feb. 22 (Xinhua) -- The Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) Thursday condemned the ongoing U.S.-Japan joint war drills as a dangerous provocation. A spokesman for the Korean National Peace Committee said in a statement that the United States and Japan have been staging "combined air-defense and missile-shielding drill" from Feb. 16 under the pretext of tackling "threats" from the DPRK's ballistic missiles and fighter jets, according to Korean Central News Agency (KCNA). The exercise, which will end Friday, reportedly included the inspection of the system of joint detection, tracking and interception of the DPRK's ballistic missiles and fighter jets through coordinated operation of the air-defense network of the United States and Japan, said the spokesman of the official body in charge of dealing with inter-Korean peace work. The drills also included the interception drill of Patriot missiles under the Japan Air's "Self-Defense Force (SDF)" and the emergency sortie drills of its fighter jets, said the spokesman. "The recent drill assumes greater bellicosity and danger as its scope has been expanded as never before with the involvement of the Japan Air SDF and U.S. Marines and Air Force units as well as the Japan Maritime SDF and units of the U.S. navy," the spokesman said. The spokesman also accused the United States and Japan of trying to tarnish the "improving atmosphere" of the inter-Korean ties and peace efforts on the Korean Peninsula. A Texas man is reportedly about to have some of his fingers and toes amputated as a result of complications from the flu. According to WFAA, 33-year-old Joei Smith was a healthy, self-proclaimed gym head when he contracted the flu in December 2017. He said he started to feel sick and dizzy while at work, so he decided to go home. Days later, on December 29, he was feeling bad enough that he went to the doctor. "I got there at 12 a.m., and by 3 a.m., they were telling me I only had 24 hours to live," Smith told WFAA. READ ALSO: How to Know When a Child's Flu Turns Serious Smith had developed an extremely dangerous complication from the flu sepsis and pneumonia. Sepsis can cause organs to shut down in the body, and that's exactly what was happening to Smith. Sepsis can be fatal if not treated quickly enough, regardless of gender, age or health. A 21-year-old bodybuilder recently died from sepsis that developed from the flu. Fortunately for Smith, doctors were able to save his life, but his fingers and toes are a different story. Smith told WFAA that while he was in the hospital being treated for kidney failure, pneumonia and sepsis, doctors gave him drugs to help with his blood pressure. As a result of the drugs from the high blood pressure that they gave me, it left me with compromised limbs, he said. Now most of his fingers are black and blue, his hands surrounded by bandages. While he cant speak to this particular case, Daniel P. Eiras, MD, MPH, assistant professor, Department of Medicine, Division of Infectious Diseases & Immunology at NYU Langone Health, explained that although very rare, its entirely possible for the flu to cause these effects. READ ALSO: Second Child in New York City Dies of Flu-Related Illness When you get the flu, your bodys immune system is fighting off a severe infection, Eiras told Mens Health. Your blood pressure drops, and it makes it difficult for your body to get blood to places like certain organs and the tips of your fingers and toes. Eiras explained that this loss of blood can cause necrosis, which is essentially the dying of tissue. This would cause the limbs to become gangrenous, which is why an amputation would have to happen, he said. Developing sepsis from flu complications is rare, especially for people outside of the vulnerable populations (the elderly and the very young). Its even more rare for sepsis to lead to necrosing limbs. In the event that you do get the flu, there are steps you can take to make sure it doesn't become something worse. Cold and flu symptoms can be very similar, especially in the beginning, Eiras said. If you feel something come on and you think it might be the flu, go into your doctor and get tested. If you have the flu, there are medications your doctor can give you. These medications are more effective in earlier stages, so the sooner you go in, the better. As far as preventing yourself from getting the flu in the first place, Erias said theres one thing everyone must do. Get your flu shot. If youre over 6 months in age, you should have your flu shot, he said. If you havent gotten it yet, its not too late. Go get it. It could save lives. Smith told WFAA that he'd gotten his flu shot, but still got the flu. However, that isnt an excuse to not get one. Theres a chance you could still get the flu even if you get your flu shot, Eiras said, But getting the shot is still the best preventative measure you can take. Heres all you need to know about the missing Dapchi schoolgirls: 1. On Monday, February 19, 2018, terrorists scavenging for food and money, stormed the Government Girls Science Technical College, Dapchi, Yobe State; as students and teachers scampered into the surrounding bushes. 2. The terrorists sauntered into Dapchi, firing guns and letting off explosives. Eyewitnesses say soldiers backed by military jets, initially repelled them. 3. First reports suggested that close to a hundred students had gone missing following a head count conducted in the aftermath of the terrorist raid. 4. Local reports put the number of missing schoolgirls at 94. Directive 5. On Wednesday, February 21, 2018, President Buhari directed police and military personnel to move to the scene of the incident. I have directed the military and police to mobilize immediately to ensure that all the missing girls of Government Girls Secondary School, Dapchi, are found, Buhari said. The president added that;The Minister of Defence will also lead a federal government delegation to Yobe tomorrow, to ascertain the situation. I share the anguish of all the parents and guardians of the girls that remain unaccounted for. I would like to assure them that we are doing all in our power to ensure the safe return of all the girls. 6. Later that Wednesday, news filtered in that the abducted girls have been rescued by the military. It turns out news bordering on the rescue of the girls came from the Yobe State government which relied on information passed on to it by the military. Delegation 8. A delegation from the presidency comprising ministers, lands in Yobe for a firsthand assessment of the situation. 9. Nigerians jubilate thereafter, thanking the president, soldiers and God for rescuing the girls and sparing everyone another ordeal. 10. Yobe State Governor Ibrahim Gaidam says contrary to earlier reports from his desk, the girls havent really been found. Says he was misinformed by the military, begs for forgivenessfrom Nigerians for handing them fake news. Gaidam also shows up before grieving parents, breaks the bad news to them and asks them to keep praying. 11. Minister of Information Lai Mohammedwho leads federal government delegation to Yobe, says theres no information concerning the kidnapped girls Mohammed adds that Boko Haram is only trying to embarrass government with the kidnap. On the issue of the number of missing girls, we cannot give what we are not sure of, until we hear from their parents, we cannot say this is the number. Give us a few more time please, Mohammed tells Premium Times. Stones 12. Convoy of Governor Gaidam is pelted with stones and sachet water by angry Yobe residents. Residents are angry over being lied to by the Governor in the first instance. A journalist in the Governors convoy told The Punch, "We were in fear as the residents continued to throw stones to protest against government's handling of the girls' abduction. "The angry residents ignored the tear gas as they vandalised seven vehicles in our convoy. "From the little information that we got, they were angry that the Yobe State Government deceived Nigerians that the schoolgirls had been rescued when nobody was rescued. "Some of them told the Governor to present the girls that were rescued." The Managing Director of NIGROMA, Mr Umar Sani, disclosed this in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Minna on Friday. He said that the cost of maintenance for the roads in 2016 was N500 million and the cost was higher in 2017 by 24 per cent.Sanni said that the agency maintained and rehabilitated nine roads with a success of 95 per cent. Of the nine roads repaired and maintained, seven had 100 per cent completion, while two of the roads have been done up to 50 per cent and the work is still ongoing. The longest maintenance we did was a 20 km road from Paiko junction to Kakaki Village along MinnaSuleja Road. Others include maintenance and repairs of Suleja Road from Maje junction to Suleja town, we also constructed erosion control measures in Bida, he said. According to Sanni, the agency constructed various collapsed box culverts at Sabon Orehi, along Lapai Gulu road in addition to maintaining and repairing of failed sections of Kpakungu Round About through City Gate up to Chachanga bridge in Minna. The denial is a reaction to media reports that alleged that troops of Operation Deep Punch II, under Operation Lafiya Dole, stopped operations to allow the wanted Shekau escape. In a statement signed by the Deputy Director Public Relations, Theatre Command Operation LAFIYA DOLE, Colonel Onyema Nwachukwu, the report is a psychological warfare on troops fighting the terrorist group. Branding the report as "laughable", Colonel Nwachukwu said the claim is mischievous because operations are sometimes halted for a number of reasons. The statement read, "The attention of Theatre Command, Operation LAFIYA DOLE has been drawn to unfortunate mainstream and social media reports and insinuations that troops advance at the ongoing Operation DEEP PUNCH II was deliberately halted to allow the escape of the purported factional Boko Haram terrorists group leader, Abubakar Shekau in Sambisa forest. This is not true. "Though the Theatre Command considers this misinformation as very laughable, it is quite disheartening and capable of dampening the morale of troops who are working round the clock to fight the terrorists in north eastern Nigeria. It is therefore expedient to respond to these insinuations. "Contrary to these mischievous allegations, no such order or directive was given by anybody to any of the units and formations on that operation. "This spurious allegation is most unfortunate and wake up call for the public to be very wary of agents of destabilization that are determined to thwart our efforts of clearing the remnants of Boko Haram terrorists hibernating in nooks and crannies of Sambisa forest and the Lake Chad islands. "Contrary to the insinuations being touted and for a better understanding of military operations by the authors of this misinformation, it is crucial to point out, that there are several factors that influence the planning and conduct of military operations, whether kinetic or otherwise. "The ongoing Operation DEEP PUNCH II, which is aimed at clearing Boko Haram insurgents from the Sambisa forest and the northern fringes of Lake Chad region, was planned to be executed in phases. "It is a phased operation and therefore requires that at a predetermined point or stage, troops will be halted either preparatory to transiting to another phase or outrightly transiting depending on the threat situation. "Secondly, during the operations, troops advance could be halted when vehicles or other mobile equipment are bugged down due to the difficulty of the terrain and for recovery purposes. "More also and very importantly too, in military operations avenues are deliberately provided for troops to habour, where they rest and carry out refitting of weapons and other equipment before resuming the operations. "Additionally, booby traps and land mines could also compel an advancing troop to halt to enable some specialized squad, scout and assess the situation before movement resumes. "These and several other factors could precipitate the halting of troops during operations. "It is therefore very appalling and unimaginable that a fundamental operational procedure could be misinterpreted and be mischievously used as a psychological weapon to indirectly dampen the morale of our troops. "The Theatre Command is seriously taken aback by this phony publication and considers it a psychological warfare on troops of Operation LAFIYA DOLE. "Consequently, members of the public are please enjoined to discountenance this misinformation as it is untenable and does not reflect the strong character and courageous disposition of troops of Operation LAFIYA DOLE." Army ready to end 'romance' with Shekau Theatre Commander of Operation Lafiya Dole, Major-General Rogers Nicholas, recently declared that the army is ready to put an end to its 'romance' with Shekau. When questioned over a recent video where Shekau declared that he was ready to die than bear the calamity that has befallen his terrorist group, Maj-Gen Nicholas said the army will do anything to apprehend him. He said, "That is the statement of somebody who has already been defeated. He has seen what he has never seen before. We've romanced Shekau enough, so enough of the romance. We want him anyhow, dead or alive." Boko Haram menace Since the insurgency of the terrorist group escalated after a 2009 crackdown by the military, Boko Haram, chiefly under Shekau's leadership, has been responsible for the death of over 20,000 people and the displacement of more than 2.5 million scattered across Internally Displaced Person (IDP) camps across the country and its neighbours. Mr Ernest Ebi, the banks Chairman, stated this in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Lagos on the sidelines of CGRS certification ceremony by the Nigerian Stock Exchange (NSE) and the Convention on Business Integrity (CBI). Ebi said that the bank would leverage on the gains of the certification to strengthen business opportunities to ensure maximum returns to its stakeholders. According to him, the CGRS will open a lot of business opportunities for the bank. He said the bank would not rest on its oars. You know the beautiful thing about this certification is that it boosts investors confidence in the bank, because when they know that you have been through this process, there is a lot to gain. Going through the test itself brings out a lot of issues about corporate governance, investor relations, among others. So, for eleven directors to go through this process, it is going to be a great morale booster for us and will encourage a lot of investors to look to our direction, Ebi said. He said that the bank would maximise all available business opportunities by engaging investors for desired growth and development. The chairman said that capital, risk management and corporate governance are three things upper most in the minds of the banks board and management. He explained that the bank would remain committed to good corporate governance practices for competitiveness. NAN reports that Fidelity Bank and its directors were among 35 companies and 437 directors that made over the 70 per cent threshold for CGRS process. Some of the banks directors that were honoured with Fiduciary Awareness Certification Test (FACT) which is a key component of the CGRS are: Mr Adeyeye Adepegba, Mohammed Balarabe, Robert Nnana-Kalu and Mr Alex Ojukwu. The state's Commissioner for Education, Jonathan Obuebite, made this disclosure after Governor Seriake Dickson signed the Compulsory Primary and Secondary Education Law into law during the State Executive Council meeting on Thursday, February 22, 2018. According to Obuebite, parents are expected to take advantage of the government's dedication towards education in the state and ensure that their children get the chance at a proper education. He warned that the parents or guardians of any child, of school age, seen loitering or hawking during school hours would be dealt with in accordance with the new law. He said, "Today, we have quality infrastructure and facilities across our schools in every local government area. We feel it is important to have this law to protect that investment. "The law will be fully implemented. We want to thank Governor Dickson for his assent and members of the State Assembly for passing it into law. Clearly the law is to demonstrate our commitment to education in the state." Nigeria has 10.7 million children out of school Nigeria has 10.5 million out-of-school children, the highest in the world. How are your cattle rearers?, the president asked Ortom in jest, before moving on to the next man on the queue. In another of those clips, Governor Elrufai of Kaduna State who allegedly demolished the home of a political opponent in Kaduna this week appears to get a ringing endorsement of some sort from the president. Allah gafarta mallam ya kake tuka bulldozer (Mallam, why are you riding bulldozers?), Buhari says, as laughter permeates the room. But it is the presidents attempt at humour while addressing Ortom, that this piece is all about. Poor joke The presidents aides love to tell everyone who doesnt want to listen that the sense of humour of their principal is top notch and often on point. They love to infer that he cracks better jokes than Alibaba and I go Dye combined. However, that attempt at a joke with the Benue State Governor should be called what it isit wasnt just dry, it was insensitive, tasteless, cruel and ill timed. This particular joke landed with a thud. For context, Governor Ortom has taken on the Buhari presidency for not doing enough to quell herdsmen killings in Benue. Like everyone else who has a conscience, Ortom has also asked aloud why Buhari hasnt deemed it necessary to visit Benue after 73 persons allegedly killed by terrorists, were buried in that State in one day. Buhari should be asking about the safety and security of the good people of Benue and not how the herders who have been accused of killing people, are faring. To now make a joke out of the killings was darn cruel and insensitive from the nations Commander-in-Chief. The timing, atrocious. Heck, Buhari didnt even visit Benue when floods submerged the State in 2017. You dont make jokes out of a crisis or some misfortune. Elrufais bulldozer jibe wasnt funny as well. The one to Ortom wasnt even remotely so. Buhari has often been accused of aloofness and being emotionally detached. Hes been accused of not showing up when he should; of not leading from the front like he promised he was going to do. The jury is still out on whether those claims are right on the money or not. The president apologised for the occurrence and assured the missing girls' families that the Federal Government will do everything possible to rescue them. Buhari was quoted to have said this in a statement issued on Friday, February 23, by his Senior Special Assistant on Media and Publicity, Garba Shehu. The President said upon hearing the sad news, he immediately ordered security agencies to deploy in full and ensure that all the girls are returned safely. The statement said, "The entire country stands as one with the girls families, the government and the people of Yobe State. "This is a national disaster. We are sorry that this could have happened and share your pain. We pray that our gallant armed forces will locate and safely return your missing family members." He added that more troops and surveillance aircraft will be sent out to shadow all movements in the entire territory on a 24-hour basis. On Monday, February 19, the terrorists stormed the school on kidnapped some girls while others were said to have fled into the bush. However, there have been conflicting reported number of the abducted girls - some reports said 94 girls were abducted while others put the number at 111. False Rescue On Wednesday, the Yobe state government 'confirmed' that the Nigerian Army was able to rescue all the girls, only to make a U-turn in another statement on Thursday. Abdullahi Bego, the spokesman for the state Governor,Ibrahim Gaidam, said they were misinformed by an unreliable source. He affirmed that the girls are still missing. ALSO READ: Dapchi residents attack Yobe Governor for lying about girls' rescue In April 2014, Boko Haram stormed the Government Secondary School in the town of Chibok, Borno State and abducted 276 female students. The index ranks 180 countries and territories by their perceived levels of public sector corruption in the opinion of experts and business people and uses a scale of 0 to 100, where 0 is highly corrupt and 100 is very clean. In the new index that was published on Wednesday, February 21, 2018, Nigeria dropped 12 places from its position of 136th least corrupt country in 2016 to 148th with 27 CPI points, one less than it scored in the previous ranking. Why Nigeria is struggling with corruption According to the Civil Society Legislative Advocacy Centre (CISLAC), which is Transparency International's national contact, the new index is worrying as it reflects the inability of President Buhari's administration to combat corruption like he promised. Its statement read, "On the African continent, Nigeria ranks 32nd position in Africa out of 52 assessed countries in 2017. While Botswana leads the continent with the record of competent and largely corruption-free public administration, Nigeria hopelessly falls behind with 27 points. In West Africa, Nigeria is the second worst country out of 17 countries leaving only Guinea Bissau behind. "This fresh setback in the fight against corruption confirms that grand-corruption, political corruption, nepotism, favoritism and bribery persist in Nigeria at all levels. "It is CISLAC's view that the negative perception is mainly a consequence of the inability to combat grand corruption and astronomical plundering of public coffers costing the Nigerian tax payers around 25% of annual GDP. "Since the current administration has come to power on the anti-corruption ticket, no significant politically exposed person has been duly sentenced on anti-corruption charges." Botswana is least corrupt African country While Nigeria is jointly ranked 148th alongside Guinea and Comoros, African countries ranked higher than Nigeria include: Botswana (34th), Rwanda (48th), Namibia (53rd), and Kenya (143rd). Wike is seeking an order of injunction restraining the Police IG, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) and the Department of State Service (DSS) from searching any of his houses. Justice Ahmed Mohammed fixed the date for judgement after listening to the adoption of final addresses by counsel. Mr Sylva Ogwemoh (SAN), counsel to Wike told the court that what the suit sought was the interpretation of a section of the constitution. The focal point of our summons is the interpretation of Section 308 of the Constitution as it relates to search warrant. A search warrant is undoubtedly a process of court and if that is the case, there is a breach of the absolute immunity that Section 308 confers on the plaintiff (Wike). Ogwemoh argued that the section provided that a search warrant required the appearance of the plaintiff who had immunity at the property to be searched. He said that the submission by the counsel to the Police that it had the discretion to search his house in his absence was against the law. The senior lawyer added that since they were only seeking an interpretation to the law, there was no need to attach a warrant to the application. Mr David Igbodo, counsel to the I-G, in opposing the application, prayed the court to dismiss it on the grounds that it was mere speculations. The application is speculative because in the first instance, there is no search warrant attached to it. The only exhibit attached is the interview granted by Wike himself in which he made allegations that the police wants to search his house in Abuja. He made the allegation but he did not attach the search warrant to prove it. Assuming without conceding that the police obtained a search warrant to search the Rivers governors house in Abuja, the question is, can the police execute the search warrant without requiring his presence? The question has been answered by the Supreme Court and the answer is yes, the police can effectively do that without requiring his presence. So the Government House of Rivers in Abuja can be searched without the governors presence as there are security men there, that can witness the search. Igbodo further submitted that the law allowed the police to gather evidence and investigate officials who had immunity, adding that a search warrant was a process of obtaining evidence during investigation. According to him, the governor enjoys immunity which was not in dispute, noting that while he enjoys immunity, he could be investigated and during the process of investigation, evidence could be gathered against him. Counsel to the DSS, Mr O. Atoyebi also urged the court to dismiss the application on the grounds that it was an attempt by the governor to prevent the service from performing its statutory functions. ALSO READ: Mrs Elizabeth Alabi, counsel to the EFCC also opposed the application and prayed the court to dismiss it, saying that the commission had no business in the suit and was wrongfully joined. She also asked the court to award N100,000 cost against the governor. Justice Mohammed reserved judgment in the matter to May 9. The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the suit was filed in June 2017 by Ogwemoh on behalf of Wike. DAMASCUS, Feb. 22 (Xinhua) -- Syrian military on Thursday urged civilians in Eastern Ghouta in east of Damascus to leave ahead of an imminent military offensive. Syrian military helicopters dropped leaflets over the rebel-held areas, reported the War Media, the media wing of the Syrian army. The civilians were requested to move to areas under the Syrian army control, as the leaflet included instructions on how to take safe exits illustrated on a small map. The instructions also warned the civilians against cooperating with the anti-government rebels. "Brother citizens in Eastern Ghouta, the area is surrounded by the Syrian army... Everyone is tired of this war that has brought nothing to the Syrians but death and destruction of the homes, hospitals, and schools," the leaflet said. Because of the armed rebels, thousands of children, mothers, fathers, and brothers have lost their lives or ended up in shelters and camps, it continued. "Our families in Eastern Ghouta, we hope you don't cooperate with the armed men to protect your lives and we call on you to leave the area as we guarantee your safety," it said. The military also pledged to offer security and food to the people once they left Eastern Ghouta, promising them a safe return to their homes "after the elimination of terrorism." This development came as massive military reinforcements have reached the outskirts of Eastern Ghouta as part of the preparations for a military campaign to defeat the rebels in that sprawling area, including the al-Qaida-linked ones. Eastern Ghouta has seen intense bombardment in recent days, as a prelude to the anticipated military campaign. The recent violence in eastern Damascus was triggered a couple of months ago when al-Qaida-linked groups launched an offensive against a key military base in the city of Harasta in the rebel-held Eastern Ghouta region, prompting a counter military offensive in that area. The attacks at that time were coupled with rebels' shelling of the capital Damascus, against which Syrian government troops retaliated by launching airstrikes targeting the rebel positions in Eastern Ghouta. But the situation has dramatically worsened in recent days, creating a humanitarian crisis that has attracted the international attention. The rebels' mortar shells have rained down on Damascus so heavily that the life in the Damascus' eastern neighborhoods near Eastern Ghouta has been largely paralyzed with people cowering in their homes, not daring to leave for safety reasons. The hospitals in Damascus, mainly those close to the east, have been jam-packed with wounded people and children. Moreover, residents in eastern Damascus have refrained from sending their kids to the schools, as three children were killed on Tuesday when a mortar shell struck their school in central Damascus. Late last Sunday, the Syrian army amassed forces on the outskirts of Eastern Ghouta and started heavily shelling the rebel positions. Eastern Ghouta, where around 350,000 civilians are still living, has for long been the major threat to the capital Damascus, with rebels keep launching attacks at the capital. Four key rebel groups are positioned inside Eastern Ghouta, including the Islam Army, Failaq al-Rahman, Ahrar al-Sham and the Levant Liberation Committee (LLC), otherwise known as the al-Qaida-linked Nusra Front. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said that 400 people have been killed and hundreds of others wounded by the bombardment of Eastern Ghouta since Sunday. The Syrian Arab Red Crescent (SARC) said Thursday that two of its subbranches in Eastern Ghouta had been damaged, adding that several of its workers were wounded. It urged the conflicting parties to separate its centers from the military targets. The UN has urged for a one-month long cessation of hostilities to enable its teams on the ground to deliver relief aid to the affected civilians inside Eastern Ghouta. On Thursday, the UN Security Council held an emergency session to discuss the situation in Eastern Ghouta. Mark Lowcock, UN undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator, on Thursday called on the Security Council to take "urgent and concrete action" as violence escalates in Syria. The international community must take "urgent and concrete action," Lowcock told the council. Meanwhile, Kuwait and Sweden put forward a draft resolution on reaching a month-long ceasefire and sending humanitarian relief to Eastern Ghouta. But the Russian envoy to the UN Vassily Nebenzia said that Russia would not support the resolution put forward by Sweden and Kuwait in its present form, calling it unrealistic. Later on, news was circulated that voting on the resolution is postponed till Friday amid information about Russian amendments to the draft. For his part, Bashar al-Jaafari, the Syrian envoy to the UN, told the UN Security Council session that the draft resolution submitted by Kuwait and Sweden was not coordinated with the Syrian delegation. The Syrian diplomat noted that groups in Eastern Ghouta designated as terror organizations by the UN Security Council have been targeting Damascus with hundreds of rockets and mortar shells on a daily basis, causing the death and injury of dozens of civilians. The remarks by al-Jaafari and the Russian envoy indicate that there will be no tolerance with the rebels in Eastern Ghouta as the decision has apparently been made to eliminate the rebels. This was contained in a statement issued by Mr Ayo Oyewole, the Head of Public Affairs, Ibadan Zonal Office of EFCC, and made available to the News Agency of Nigeria(NAN) in Ibadan on Thursday. Oyewole said that the suspects had volunteered useful information to the operatives of the commission in their quest to unravel the extent of their illegal activities. He said that investigations revealed that the operators were arrested for operating illegal financial institutions. Oyewole said the operators allegedly gave loans to innocent and unsuspecting members of the public who register with them after 10 percent deposit of the total loans sum and charge 15 to 20 percent interest on all the loans granted. He said that the commission also gathered that these companies had branches with thousands of customers spread across Oyo, Lagos, Ogun, Ondo, Kwara States. ALSO READ: EFCC seizes houses from UBEC contractor involved in N8b fraud Oyewole said several copies of hand flyers for advertisement of their activities and laptops were recovered from them at the point of arrest. Mrs Funmi Ajila-Ladipo, the National President of FADAN, made the call in an interview with News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) on Friday in Abuja. There is the need for the establishment of fashion production hubs in the six-geopolitical zones of the country to boost fashion designers activities and popularise made in Nigeria designs. Such hubs will also create employment for some Nigerians. The hub will be a large place with machines that people can take their clothes to for sewing. There is content already and people know what they want. Many people went to the school of fashion and are doing their little things in their own little way with two, three or four machines. But if hubs are created, equipped with designer machines, then more people will be employed, thus helping to address the unemployment problem. We need the federal government to help make this possible by initiating policies in this regard. For any society to really strive, the government has to create an enabling environment through policy and direct involvement, Ajila-Ladipo said. She said the fashion industry was filled with people who were doing whatever they know how to do on their own, because they must survive. She admitted the inability of fashion designers to improve the sector due to the absence of production hubs. He added that designers were individually doing their best in their little ways. However, the major issue is funding; if we have genuine investors, government or people who can support the establishment of production hubs across the country, the sector will strive. This is because people wear clothes; it is a service that is needed by the people. When the hubs are established, the `half-baked designers and unprofessionalism in the sector will be checkmated, she said. On February 20, 2018, Dana aircraft 9J0363 overshot the runway of the Port Harcourt airport before ending up in the surrounding bush. The Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria (FAAN) blamed heavy rainfall and a slippery tarmac for the incident. A Sahara Reporters investigation put the age of the Dana airline that crash landed in Port Harcourt at 27 years. A string of mishaps On February 7, 2018, passengers onboard a local Dana airline relayed how the door of the aircraft made uncomfortable noise throughout the flight, before giving way upon landing. Dana denied that its door had fallen apart, but passengers onboard demurred. The airline insisted someone must have tampered with the door when the aircraft touched down. And just before midnight of Tuesday, February 13, 2018, Delta Flight 55 which was bound for Atlanta US, taxied on the runway of the Murtala Muhammed International Airport in Lagos in a huff as everyone on board held their breaths. One of the airlines engines had developed a fault midair. Minister of State for Aviation, Sen Hadi Sirika told journalists that Dana and other airlines operating in the countrys airspace are being closely monitored in the wake of the near mishaps Oversight We have increased our oversight on all the airlines in the country with particular attention to Dana Air, having been in the news for bad reasons lately, Sirika was quoted as saying by Punch. So, we are taking it seriously; and since the first incident, the NCAA (Nigeria Civil Aviation Authority) has been on the matter regarding Dana and other airlines. Sirika added that contrary to widespread insinuations, All the standards and the recommended practices are regulated worldwide the same way; and Nigeria recently has done very well in aviation. We scored 96.4 per cent in security when ICAO did the safety audit of the country. Two airports were certified by ICAO; the two airports are in Lagos and Abuja. We are doing everything we can to certify all airports. Nigeria scored over 67 per cent last year on safety. According to Punch, the IPMANs Western Zonal chairman, Mr. Debo Ahmed, laid the blame at the door of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC). Ahmed said that NNPC does not have the capacity to meet the fuel needs of Nigerians. He also said that it is not right for NNPC to be the sole importer and distributor of petrol, adding that it is killing Nigerias economy. Ahmed said The fuel scarcity will definitely continue; there is no product in the system. The NNPC has no capacity to do the job they are doing now, that is importing petroleum products. Because of subsidy, they disallowed marketers from importing and as such the importation cannot meet the demand. The GMD of the NNPC said marketers were supposed to sell petrol at N145 per litre but where is the product to sell at N145? The product is not there. The little they have, the distribution system, which they are using now, has actually derailed the whole system of distribution in the country. ALSO READ: They (NNPC) import 100 per cent; they will distribute 100 per cent; they will start selling at 50 per cent. According to them, they import the whole petrol we need in this country; they will now distribute it to both private and government depots that are working. They have their mega stations. Out of this allocation, they will give them 50 per cent and their mega stations all over the country are less than 700. Charly Boy fights for the masses again The groups recommendation followed statement by the Yobe Police command that 111 girls ofGovernment Girls Secondary School, Dapchi, were unaccounted for following an attack by insurgents on the school on Monday evening. It would be recalled that in 2014, Boko Haram insurgents abducted 276 girls from their school in Chibok, Borno State, and some of the girls were still being held captive. Dr Joe Okei-Odumakin, the President of WA, told NAN that there was need for proper and adequate protection for women and girls in the country. According to her, women and girls in the country should be given special protectionbecause of the rate at which they are being molested on daily basis. She said even the most vulnerable ones living in Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) camps were not exempted from terrible experiences. It is therefore an issue of urgent importance that should be squarely addressed; there has to be a way to protect women and girls. Government should set up special security network that will mainly focus on protection of every school attended by girls in insurgency ravaged parts of the country. Okei-Odumakin said attacks were clearly not just on schools but targeted at the future ofyoung girls, their education and the future of the country. She said it was sad that at a time that the nation still await the release of the remaining Chibok school girls abducted since 2014, such a terrible situation could once again be experienced. The WA president further recommended punitive measures on perpetrators of attacks and all forms of violence against women and girls. In the same vein, Mrs Betty Abah, the Executive Director of CEE-HOPE, said children, both boys and girls, deserved to be adequately protected. She said government must ensure the protection of girls. It is sad indeed that we are witnessing a replay of the Chibok girls abduction saga. A statement issued by the state government on Thursday, February, 22, said it was misled by a false information that the girls have rescued by the Nigerian Army. It said it was on the basis of this information that the government issued a statement on Wednesday that the girls had been rescued. Abdullahi Bego, the Director-General, Press Affairs to the State Governor Ibrahim Gaidam, had in the statement announced that the abducted girls were in safe hands of the Nigerian military. The statement had said: "The Yobe State Government hereby informs the public that some of the girls at Government Girls Science Technical College (GGSTC) whose school was attacked by Boko Haram terrorists last Monday have been rescued by gallant officers and men of the Nigerian Army from the terrorists who abducted them. "The rescued girls are now in the custody of the Nigerian Army. We will provide more details about their number and condition in due course. "His Excellency, Governor Ibrahim Gaidam, who is very grateful for the gallantry and hard work of the officers and men of the Nigerian Army involved in the operation, is monitoring the situation closely and will make a statement in due course." The girls were kidnapped on Monday, February 19, 2018, by suspected Boko Haram terrorists who reportedly invaded their school. The terrorists were said to have made away with 94 of the girls. In the new statement, Bego apologised for misleading the general public, adding that the State Governor visited Dapchi town on Thursday, where he met with the community leaders and the girls' parents. He assured them that their children would be brought back home safely. President Muhammadu Buhari had on Wednesday directed the military and police to do everything possible to secure the girls' release. ALSO READ: This is what happened when abducted Yobe schoolgirls returned home In April 2014, Boko Haram stormed the Government Secondary School in the town of Chibok, Borno State and abducted 276 female students. Chief Magistrate Alhassan Husaini of Lokoja Chief Magistrate Court 11, who jailed Baba on Friday, said he found him guilty of reckless driving and causing the death of Prof. Festus Iyayi in a car crash in November, 2013. I have no option than to sentence you, Danladi baba, to seven years without option of fine, the chief magistrate declared. The chief magistrate cautioned government drivers against recklessness driving especially while on convoys, and accused the drivers of abusing the privilege of driving VIPs. These siren-blaring convoys force on-coming and other categories of vehicles off the roads in a manner that exposes law abiding road users to hazards, he fumed. The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that Baba had been arraigned on a one-count charge of causing death by dangerous driving, an offence punishable under section 5 of the Federal Highway Act CAP F. 13 of 2004. According to the prosecution, Baba, while driving a Toyota Hilux pick-up van on the convoy of then Kogi governor Idris Wada, drove dangerously without regard to other roads users. It said that the action led to a near head-on collision with a bus belonging to the University of Benin chapter of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), which was traveling to Kano. The bus, in an attempt to swerve and avoid the collision, skidded and rolled over several times, leading to the death of Iyayi, while two others Mrs. Ngozi Iloh and Dr. Enchanted Anthony were injured, it said. The Chief of Air Staff, Air Marshal, Sadiq Abubakar , disclosed this at the graduation of 150 special forces at the Regiment Training Centre, Kaduna. NAN reports that Abubakar was represented by AVM Nurudeen Balogun, the Chief of Training and Operation at the NAF headquarters. He said between 2015 and 2016, NAF trained 30 regiment personnel on counter terrorism in Pakistan and another 30 officers on Aircraft Anti-Hijack in China respectively. The CAS said that the regiment training Centre had graduated 300 Nigerian Air Force Special Forces personnel in 2017 in two batches. Along with todays graduation, the NAF has trained well over 500 special forces personnel since assumption of office. The Air chief said the force had initiated the progressive training of special forces which would add to the defence architecture to enable the projection of air power. Imbibed the attributes of absolute discipline, honestly intelligence, motivation , Judgement, decisiveness teamwork aggressiveness and courage, among other values. I want to you to note that it is the possession of this virtue that binds all ranks in the service. The current leadership of the NAF is committed to enthroning professionalism and as such, the rigorous combat training you received is designed to enhance your professional performance, he said. He said that NAF would continue to build a highly sustainable and functional air force that would be responsive and decisive. In this regard, several air and ground related capacity building initiative have been conducted in recent time,he said. He said this would enable NAF to have depth flexibibility and capability to operate either alone or in conjunction with other sister services. You will be deployed to various locations where your expertise will be required in resolving numerous security challenges across the country. Earlier, the acting Commandant, Regiment Training Centre, Group. Capt. Issac Subi, said that the 150 graduating students received training for eight weeks. Subi said the curriculum of the Special Forces course was structured to make it effective and efficient to meet the ever changing complexities of military operations. The Head of Israeli Military Training, Mr Roy Zechut, said the trainees in adapting the new skills acquired during the course, would enhance operational success in combating the current terrorists and criminal threats. Obiano said this during the 40th anniversary celebration of the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) in Awka on Friday. The governor, who was represented by the Head of Service, Mr Harry Uduh, said the promises he made during his 2017 governorship campaign would be fulfilled during his second term in office. Earlier, the state Chairman of NLC, Mr Jerry Nnubia, said the congress was poised to enhance the take home pay, working condition and welfare package of workers. Nnubia commended the cordial relationship between the labour and the state government as well as the positive disposition of the state government toward workers. He, however, appealed to the state government to do more in the areas of contributory pension scheme and disparity in salary, among others. In a lecture entitled NLC Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, former Vice-President of NLC Mr Fidelis Ede, said the political class was yet to understand the whole struggle of union over the years. Ede said the minimum wage had been misinterpreted and misrepresented as salary increase. In Nigeria, without minimum wage, there wont be salary increase, but these are two different things. He advised civil servants to engage in business, especially agriculture, to complement their current jobs. High point of the occasion was the presentation of awards to five retirees for their contributions toward the struggle and welfare of workers in the state. The Force spokesman, CSP Jimoh Moshood on Thursday said in a statement in Abuja, said that the categories of the prohibited are: Artillery, apparatus for the discharge of any explosives of gas diffusing projectile, Rocket weapons, Bombs and Grenades. Others are: Machine-Guns and Machine-Pistols, Military rifles, those of calibers 7.62mm, 9mm, .300 inches, Revolvers and Pistols whether rifled or unrifled (including flint-lock pistols and cap pistols), Pump action gun of all categories and any other firearms/lethal weapons fabricated to kill. Moshood said that a police Joint Task Enforcement Team has been constituted at the Force Headquarters to coordinate the order. He said that the commissioners of Police and the Assistant Inspectors-General of Police in the States and Zonal Commands have been mandated to also set-up similar teams. The operation will equally include Cordon and Search and Raid, Seizure from any premises, hideouts, dwelling houses or buildings or sites (completed or under construction),he said. He said that all categories of people bearing arms in the name of vigilante group, neighborhood watch among others have been given 21 days from today to surrender them to commissioners of police in their states. This Operation which among other purposes, is aimed at the full enforcement of the Firearms Act, mopping-up and recovery of all prohibited firearms and illegally acquired,he said. He said that this action would enable the Nigeria Police Force deal decisively with herders and farmers clashes, kidnappings, armed robbery, cattle rustling, militancy and terrorism. The Commissioners of Police in charge of State Commands are under strict instruction of the Inspector General of Police to enforce and carry out these directives in totality. They have also been directed to convene a security stakeholders meeting immediately to sensitize and educate the members of the general public. No licence will be given or recognized in respect of prohibited firearms and ammunition except granted by the President and Commander-In-Chief of the Federal Republic of Nigeria upon the recommendation of the Inspector General of Police,he said. He warned that anyone found with prohibited firearms after the expiration of the 21days would be arrested, investigated and prosecuted. The Police will not hesitate to apply the full weight of the law on any individual or group under any guise whose conduct runs contrary to the law of the land. The renewed commitment of the Nigeria Police Force to guarantee protection of Lives and Property across the country remains unequivocal and unwavering,he said. Chief of Field Office, UNICEFKatsina, Padmavathi Yedla, restated the commitment at the closing of a four-day Engagement Planning Meeting in Kaduna. The meeting was organised for stakeholders from the two states to develop a five-year Work Plan (2018 2022) for the promotion of child survival and development. Yedla said that the UN body resolved to continue supporting the two states due to huge successes recorded on child survival in the states over the years. UNICEF decided to renew its commitment for another five years such that together we can all protect the interest of the child and ensure their survival and uninterrupted development to adulthood. The recent Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS 2017) showed disturbing indices of issues affecting children in the two states. Our desire is to ensure that more children are in school, more are immunised, more have access to safe water and the number of severe acute malnourished children in the states reduced, she said. Yedla also said that the two states would not achieve sustainable development goals if their children lagged behind in education, nutrition, immunisation and other basic child rights. She said that the work plan would be the first in the current UNICEF country programme for 2018, covering states partners on health, nutrition, education, water, sanitation and hygiene as well the media. According to her, the five-year plan is expected to reduce out-of-school-children through sustained enrolment campaign. It is also expected to boost routine immunisation against child killer diseases, improve nutrition, hygiene and sanitation practices. The plan would equally help reduce high levels of stunting, ensure treatment of severe acute malnourished of children. It will also discourage attitudes, practices and beliefs that foster gender discrimination, and reduce child marriage and violence against children, she said. The Secretary to the Kano State Government, Alhaji Usman Alhaji, assured UNICEF of the states readiness to give needed attention for proper implementation of interventions in the next five years and beyond. Alhaji noted the need for government to take the issue of funding seriously and give the programme the deserved attention. Data collection is equally important, and so is the needed synergy among government agencies and development partners, he said. A statement by the NAF Director of Public Relations and Information, AVM Olatokunbo Adesanya, said the Vice- Chancellor of the university, Prof. Oluwatoyin Ogundipe, stated this during a visit to the Chief of Air Staff (CAS), Air Marshal Sadique Abubakar in Abuja on Friday. Adesanya said the vice-chancellor was represented by Prof. Folasade Ogunsola, the Deputy Vice-Chancellor in charge of Development Services. Ogundipe in the statement that the university also possessed the required competencies and would partner with the NAF to achieve the desired technological development in Nigeria. He appealed to NAF to encourage its personnel to make use of the universitys various certification programmes to validate their skills, to make them relevant both in active service and on retirement. He congratulated NAF on the recent induction of its first indigenous operational Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). Abubakar noted in the statement that the university had staff familiar with the technological challenges of NAF and who also had the skills to resolve such challenges. He also announced plans by NAF to hold a Research and Development event during which the technological feats of its partnering academic and other institutions would be celebrated. NAF has been at the forefront of R&D in Nigeria, especially in aerospace technology and has in the process, signed MoU with several Nigerian universities and other tertiary institutions, research agencies as well as strategic industries. According to reports, thegirls were abducted by the dreaded terror sect, Boko Haram. The girls went missing after sect members attacked Dapchi town in Bursari local government area. SaharaReporters claims that the school authorities revealed that at least 94 students were missing after a head count conducted on Tuesday, February 20, 2018. The Spokesperson of the US Department of State, Ms Heather Nauert, at a press briefing on Thursday, said We are still trying to get all the details about that but we wanted to mention that we condemn in the strongest possible terms the terror attack on a school earlier this week in north-eastern Nigeria. The choice of targets including schools, markets and places of worship reflect the brutality of terror organisations. The victims in the attacks were girls who were simply seeking an education. We continue to support Nigerias efforts to counter the terror group. ALSO READ: Schoolgirl narrates how Boko Haram kidnapped students in Yobe We also support Nigerias efforts to enable more than two million displaced in the Lake Chad region to return home safely. United States continues to provide humanitarian assistance to those who were affected by the violence, Nauert added. 111 Yobe school girls unaccounted for The Police Commissioner in Yobe, Abdulmaliki Sumonu, on Wednesday, confirmed that 111 girls were still unaccounted for following Mondays attack by Boko Haram insurgents. Okorocha stated this when he briefed State House correspondents after a closed-door meeting between the President and the APC governors held on Thursday night at the Presidential Villa, Abuja. He said the president would also address the caucus of the APC on the matter. We discussed so many issues that affect the nation, our party and Mr Presidents ambition to run for 2019 elections. Anyhow, Mr President in his usual manner has requested that we give him time and that he will address the nation and the caucus of the party very soon. So we should be full of expectations that Mr President will make officially known to Nigerians his intentions. But we hope that his response will be in line with what the governors are thinking, he said. According to the governor, it is the desire of the governors that the President seek re-election in view of his tremendous performances in the last two and half years. Alhaji Yabagi Sani, the National Chairman of ADP, who made the call at a news briefing in Abuja on Thursday, frowned at the intolerance of Governors Nasir El-Rufai of Kaduna state and Yahaya Bello of Kogi toward opposition. The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) that Yabagi was reacting to the alleged destruction of the partys bill boards in Kogi and the demolition of APC factional secretariat in Kaduna. Shockingly and most unfortunately, the governor of Kaduna State in an action difficult to explain demolished the house of a Senator opposed to his style of governance. If El-Rufai could do this to his party men, what will be the faith of the real opposition parties like the ADP," he asked. Sani noted that the worst intolerant regime never went to the extent of demolishing buildings belonging to members of the opposition. He alleged that the two governors were becoming despotic such that the people now enjoy limited rights and lived with palpable fear. According to Sani, the actions of the two governors are capable of truncating democracy, as there is the need to assure opposition parties of a level playing ground ahead of the 2019 general elections. We know that President Muhamadu Buhari has promised to play by the rules and will not do anything to truncate democracy or present him as authoritarian. We need the assurance that politicians do not have to go under in the journey towards 2019. The president must allay our fears. We at the ADP are worried and afraid that unless Nigerians speak up against the present intolerance, we may all quietly be signing off 2019 to democracy terrorists," he stressed. According to him, some state governors are despots pretending to be democrats. He said that Gov. El-Rufai had apparently began mobilisation against his 2019 return bid. Sani called on the President to speak up against the new political trend and to come out clearly to denounce Gov. El-Rufai and order the reconstruction of the demolished house. He said the action threatens the independence of INEC and subverts its power as provided in the constitution. Jega stated this on Thursday, February 22, 2018, at an event organised by the Youth Initiative for Advocacy Growth and Development, in Abuja. In the amendment, as it pertains to the election timetable, the national assembly election will come first, followed by governorship and state house of assembly while the presidential election will come last. According to Jega, the altered timetable would result to more cost of conducting elections. "We should not do anything to undermine the democratic process, thus we need to keep on adding value to the process," he said. The ex-INEC boss said there is need for the mobilisation of Nigerians in towns and villages to be part of the electoral process for the nations democratic process to remain intact. He called on civil society organisations (CSOs) to reinforce their commitment to mobilise voters to come out to vote during elections. He added: "Whatever we do, we should remember where we are coming from which is as a result of sweat and blood of our compatriots. "Our challenges are difficult but not impossible to address. Its imperative that we find ways to contain the excesses of our politicians come 2019 elections, otherwise their excesses will keep undermining the electoral processes." Jega is a former Vice-Chancellor of Bayero University, Kano. On 8 June 2010, he was nominated by former president Goodluck Jonathan as the new Chairman of INEC, subject to Senate confirmation. He replaced Professor Maurice Iwu, who vacated the post on 28 April 2010. He was accused of "a shocking error of judgement" by Turnbull, with Joyce, who has four daughters, hitting back by calling the prime minister "inept". Now the 50-year-old is facing a sexual harassment allegation, with his party confirming a complaint had been lodged, reportedly by a West Australian woman. Joyce was cited by local media as describing the claim as "spurious and defamatory" and was expected to hold a press conference later Friday to address the issue. He was due to be the acting prime minister this week with Turnbull meeting US President Donald Trump in Washington, but opted to take leave. With Foreign Minister Julie Bishop also out of the country, the role has been assumed by Senate leader Mathias Cormann, who said any harassment claim must be taken seriously. "Any allegation of sexual harassment is a very serious allegation," he told reporters Friday. "I understand that a formal complaint has been made, and that that complaint is being investigated. I mean, at this point, that is really all that I have to say about it." Colleagues of Joyce are reportedly growing increasingly frustrated with his handling of the love-child scandal. He has opted to give several media interviews this week, at a time when he was expected to be on vacation and out of the spotlight. A party meeting on Monday could decide his fate, with one of Joyce's party's backbenchers already publicly calling on him to quit. A furious Turnbull, who relies on the smaller National Party to govern, has slapped a formal ban on sex between cabinet members and their staff in the wake of the Joyce affair. He twice declined to offer support for his deputy when asked by reporters in Washington on Thursday, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation said. The daily media headlines on the scandal have riveted the Australian public and sparked debate about workplace culture amid the global #MeToo movement against sexual harassment. The plant is Hungary's only nuclear facility and supplies around 40 percent of its electricity needs. "For our nature, our environment and our unique landscape, we must take up this David and Goliath struggle," sustainability minister Elisabeth Koestinger said in a statement, confirming the launching of the complaint at the Court of Justice of the European Union. "Nuclear energy must have no place in Europe. We will not budge one centimetre from this position!" she added. In its decision the European Commission judged that the project met EU rules on state aid, but Austria disputes this. Austrian environmental campaigners praised the new centre-right government for pursuing a legal action that had been planned by the Social Democrat voted out of power late last year. The Paks plant was built with Soviet-era technology in the 1980s during Hungary's communist period. The construction of two new reactors at the site is part of a 2014 deal struck between Hungary's right-wing Prime Minister Victor Orban and ally Russian President Vladimir Putin. The work, to be carried out by Moscow's state-owned nuclear agency Rosatom, is set to more than double the plant's capacity. Hungary's opposition has criticised the awarding of the contract to Rosatom without holding an open tender. In 2015, the Hungarian parliament voted to keep the details of the deal secret for 30 years, something Orban's Fidesz party said was necessary for "national security reasons" but which critics said could conceal corruption. Since the late 1970s, Austria has been fiercely anti-nuclear, starting with an unprecedented vote by its population that prevented the country's only plant from providing a watt of power. "The battle against corruption cannot be allowed to hide anti-constitutional, illegal and defamatory behaviour towards officials in public institutions," Toader told a news conference. As chief prosecutor in the DNA anti-corruption body, Kovesi has helped bring a raft of corrupt officials to justice in recent years in one of the EU's most graft-ridden countries. This has won the 44-year-old Kovesi plaudits abroad but also enemies in high places in Romania, with many of those convicted members of or close to the ruling party. The announcement late Thursday brought around 2,000 supporters of Kovesi out onto the streets of Bucharest and other cities, media reports said, as opposition parties cried foul. Three nos suggests that the door has been triple locked. In this instance, the topic was pretty much guaranteed to elicit denial, diversion or evasion from Jackson, who spent 23 uninterrupted years away from the stage and screen while working in government. That would be the embarrassing fact (or, as she would have it, nonexistence) of her celebrity. It was a January morning at the cafe of the National Gallery, and I had made the mistake of asserting that Jackson was one of the reigning movie goddesses of the early 1970s, given her status as a two-time Oscar winner for Best Actress and, more surprisingly, something of a box-office draw. No, oh no. I persisted, foolishly. Hadnt someone in those days described her as the thinking mans Brigitte Bardot? She stared witheringly at the tablecloth. Well, she said evenly, well let that one lie where it is. Whoever came up with that was an idiot. Door slammed, subject closed. But it seemed unlikely to remain so once she arrived in the United States a week later to begin rehearsals for Three Tall Women, the 1994 Pulitzer Prize winning drama only now making its Broadway debut, at the Golden Theater, with Laurie Metcalf (a current Oscar nominee) and Alison Pill her co-stars. A month earlier, when the 81-year-old Jackson accepted the Evening Standard Award for King Lear at the Old Vic, the crowd roared its approval. This had been, after all, her first theater gig after 23 years in Parliament for the Labor Party, and it had been nothing less than the title role of the most daunting play in the canon. Jackson with a helmet of cropped coppery hair, no visible makeup and a black and white dress from Marks & Spencer roared right back at her audience. Oh, cmon, she said, in the manner of a popular but stern school head on games day. We dont do standing ovations in England. For once, though, a standing ovation seemed warranted. Although Jackson holds a special place in the hearts of film and theater cognoscenti, she hadnt exercised her acting muscles or even attended the theater during her years in Parliament. Yet critics had waxed ecstatic over her portrait of a despot suddenly betrayed by age a man, as Jackson described him, to whom no one had said no in his entire life. She appeared naked in a sense from her first entrance, said Matthew Warchus, the Old Vics artistic director, who had facilitated Jacksons return to her former profession. We hadnt seen her in so long, so it was an incredible thing to hear her voice again. Thats a neat trick, to make your first entrance after 20 years of silence. The Anti-Social Socialist In person, Jackson is formidable but hardly as forbidding as her reputation would have it. She answers questions with a conscientious courtesy, only slightly underscored by impatience. Her face remains the face she was born with, scored with the lines you would expect a lifelong smoker to accumulate but untouched by the masklike distortions of plastic surgery. On the morning I met her in London, she arrived at the cafe, straight from bloody public transport, in a sharp and purposeful blur, like a blade flung by a circus thrower seeking its target. She was again sans makeup and wearing drop pearl earrings (a gift from her son) and a wardrobe red coat, black pants, buffalo check flannel shirt, running shoes largely acquired from her trusty Marks & Spencer. (A good thing about Marks & Spencer, they dont hound you when youre going round.) She was conscious of the time, since she was on grandson patrol that day and would be needing to pick up her sons 11-year-old from school. At a certain point, she realized it might be a good idea if she had something to eat. We both ordered the soup, which came with bread. How big is the bread? she asked the server. Its half a loaf isnt it? One of those should do. One to share. Save money and save food. Two-thirds of the world go to bed hungry every night, and we stuff ourselves. Jackson did not check her cellphone. She doesnt have one. No, I have no piece of information technology equipment at all, she said, and she is thankful to have no access to social media. But as a star of long standing, surely she must have to deal with certain incursions into her privacy. Does she read what is written about her? Well, no, because nobody writes about me, she says. Theres nothing to write about. I lead a very dull, ordinary life which is the kind of life that I wish to lead. As for what she does when shes not working, Well, you have to keep your place clean, you have to pay your bills, you have to do the shopping. Such comments seem a matter less of false modesty than of existential necessity, and jibe with her definition of herself: Im a pretty anti-social Socialist. The Force Set Loose Glenda Jackson was born in 1936 in the Cheshire region of Northern England, the daughter of working-class parents. (Her father was a bricklayer; her mother cleaned houses and worked in shops.) Being the oldest of four girls, she has said, instilled in her an overdeveloped sense of responsibility. She started appearing in amateur theater productions in the area when she was working behind the counter in a Boots pharmacy. Someone said to me that you should do this professionally, she recalls matter-of-factly. So I wrote to the only drama school I had ever heard of. It was a big one, the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London; she was accepted, with scholarships. When she began to audition professionally, she was told she could expect only character parts. She found work, usually in supporting roles, in repertory companies, which was how she met Roy Hodges, a fellow actor and stage manager, to whom she was married from 1958 to 1976. (Their son, Dan, would grow up to become a political columnist; Jackson now lives in the basement flat of the house he shares with his wife and son.) In 1963, she was invited to audition for a Royal Shakespeare Company season devoted to the Theater of Cruelty. Helming the project was the fabled Peter Brook. Oh my God, it was an oasis in the desert, she said of her experience with Brook, describing challenges that included morphing from Christine Keeler into Jackie Kennedy, while naked in a bathtub. Those kinds of requests had never been made, not of me. It was just calling on so many things that I hadnt realized were possible in acting. Brook cast her as one of the inmates in Peter Weiss The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade. Her character, a narcoleptic who would suddenly erupt into violent life, had the role of Charlotte Corday in the play-within-the-play. Everyone I talked to who saw that performance remembered it as if it had just happened, especially the scene in which Corday whipped the bare back of De Sade (Patrick Magee) with her hair. The show became the succes destime and de scandale of the London season, and in 1965 moved from the West End to Broadway. Not long after, iconoclastic film director Ken Russell invited her to portray the conflicted, temperamental young artist Gudrun Brangwen in his film of D.H. Lawrences Women in Love, in which she stared down and danced with a herd of highland cattle. And thus the singularly focused force that is Glenda Jackson on screen was set loose upon the world. It is hard now to convey how startling and how thrilling Jacksons ascension was to many of us who came of age in the 1970s. It was, in its way, as unexpected as that of Barbra Streisand. For starters, she looked like no movie star who had come before, her face a collision of sharp angles that, on camera, read harshly and hypnotically beautiful. Then there was the uncompromising, defiant strength she exuded in every role, whether it was the Virgin Queen of Elizabeth R, a hugely popular BBC series (for which she won two Emmys), or the nymphomaniacal Nina, wife to Richard Chamberlains Tchaikovsky in Russells notorious fever dream of a biopic The Music Lovers. She radiated a power that seemed to level her leading men. Hollywood acknowledged this arresting newcomer with two Oscars in four years, for Women in Love and the romantic comedy A Touch of Class, which established her as an artful wielder of one-liners who could glam up with the best of them. She did not show up to accept either and remains disdainful of all prizes. (Check out the YouTube video of her priceless Evening Standard Award acceptance speech, which concludes, Im left wondering what I did wrong, so thank you very much indeed.) She became a bankable star, who worked in both offbeat masterpieces (Sunday Bloody Sunday) and bloated costume duds (The Incredible Sarah, as Sarah Bernhardt). She appeared on stage, in London and New York, in productions that included a Macbeth (1988), opposite Christopher Plummer, with which she made her last previous appearance on Broadway. It was not a success. There were great difficulties over the kind of production it was going to be, Jackson remembered. Very ruthless, Broadway. People do devour people. I think we had about three or four directors. Jackson perceived a different kind of ruthlessness at work in her native Britain, then under the leadership of Margaret Thatcher. What shed done to my country, I didnt believe it, she said. She recalled reading a Thatcher quote that said theres no such thing as a society, and I was so incensed by that, I walked into my closed French windows and almost broke my nose. She had been asked before if shed be willing to stand for a Labor Party seat. And then, suddenly out of the blue, Hampstead and Highgate came up. And I thought, Oh, go for it, just do it.' When she won, she didnt think twice about saying goodbye to acting. Theres no way you could do both, she said. She held minor ministry posts under Tony Blair, with whom she publicly broke over the war in Iraq. She made some memorable, resonant speeches remember that voice on the floor of Parliament, including a scathing counter-tribute to Margaret Thatcher after the former prime ministers death. Overtures about acting again had been made to her while she was still in Parliament, from, among others, Warchus and Three Tall Women producer Scott Rudin (who as a theater-crazy kid had seen her on Broadway in Marat/Sade and wanted her for the part Judi Dench played in the film Notes on a Scandal). But it was only after she stepped down from her Parliament seat in 2015 that acting once again seemed like a possibility. Warchus recalled his first meeting with her about Lear: I met her at the stage door and she was smoking, and she seemed to be in some sort of irascible state. After they talked in his office, he took her onto to the Old Vic stage. And I could see her sort of unfurl, he said. We stood there looking out, and her eyes became a bit watery and she was reminiscing about the different shows that shed done. It may seem an obvious and sentimental thing to say, but it was a homecoming for her. I had seen the great rigorousness; then I also got to see the emotion. When I repeated Warchus recollection of that homecoming moment to Jackson, she almost snorted. Oh no, she said. No, no. Oh no. It was a theater I worked in more than once. And theyd maintained it beautifully. We Torment Ourselves As you might suspect, Jacksons approach to acting appears to be unclouded by mysticism or sentimentality. She sees performing as a collaborative effort, above all. (I was taught to leave my ego outside the stage door, she said to me several times.) In discussing Lear, she kept insisting that the play is not only about its title monarch. Theres not a bad part in it. The fact that she was a woman playing a man turned out to be a nonissue. What interested me, she said, was that as we age, those seemingly unbreakable barriers that define us, our gender, they begin to crack, to blur; theyre not absolutes anymore. As for how she shapes her character, Its all in the text, she said. She does little if any research on a part beyond reading the script again and again and again. When she showed up for the first day of rehearsals of Lear, she had already memorized her lines. Appearing before a live audience again, she says, she felt no more nervous than she had before any performance from decades earlier which is to say, she was terrified. You can go onto that stage every night, and its always the equivalent of going onto the topmost diving board, and you dont know if theres any water in the pool. Every time I say, Yes, Ill do it, I think, My God I dont know how to do it. I cant do it. We are sadomasochists as well as being brave, actors, and we torment ourselves. She was reluctant to talk much about her role as a tyrannical old woman, modeled on Albees mother, in Three Tall Women. (That drama initiated a fruitful late chapter in its creators career when it opened in New York in 1994.) She had worked with the playwright himself, on a 1989 production he directed of Whos Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in Los Angeles, co-starring John Lithgow. And how was that experience? Awful. I mean we just didnt get on. He was a terrible director. In the copy of the play that Ive got, hes put kind of directorial things inside; its very hard to ignore, but one tries. In the meantime, she was thinking with horror about packing for the trip to New York, a place she hadnt visited in so long she couldnt recall the last time she was there. I hate traveling, she said, sounding almost nervous, for once. I hate luggage. Not Quite a Swan Song? The next time I saw Jackson was in a Broadway rehearsal room on West 42nd Street, where she was embodying the frail but fierce old woman identified simply as A in Albees script, under the soft-spoken direction of Joe Mantello. Her co-stars, Metcalf and Pill, were on hand as B and C, women of different generations tending to the demanding A in the plays first scene. It was kind of distressing to see Jackson looking and sounding so feeble, and a relief when she became her trenchant self again during breaks. She interrupted the proceedings to suggest that the tone of the scene should alter more palpably after A says something particularly arrogant to Pills character. (I mean, its so rude, isnt it? I dont care how old you are. Theres no excuse for it.) And then without a beat, she became Albees insufferably rude woman once again. Pill said she had expected to be intimidated by Jackson, and she was right, although theres not an element of diva in the slightest. The intimidation factor, she said, comes from her being potentially the smartest person in the room. Later that day, in a lounge at the hotel where she is staying, Jacksons voice was softer than during our first encounter, and she spoke more slowly. I had the impression of someone carefully husbanding her energy. She was pleased, she said, to be working with other actresses for a change. It has been, really, everything one could hope for. Because, as Ive said, most plays have only one decent womans part in them, and if youve got it, there arent any other actresses to work with. She said she still hadnt entirely found her way into her role in Three Tall Women and astutely elaborated on some questions of character she was trying to resolve. (Was Cs fear of theft motivated by experience or paranoia?) And what about other roles to come, perhaps in film? Oh, I think thats highly unlikely. I mean, I think parts for women of my years are well and truly finished. And theater? That depends. Again, where are the contemporary playwrights? Warchus, however, said that in watching her performing Lear, not for a second did you think that this is someones swan song. It was the opposite. And she said to me, Whats next Matthew? Find me another play.' In her 30s, Jackson had said she was looking forward to old age, because it seems the only irresponsible time of your life. When she decided she would not stand for Parliament again three years ago, she said she thought, 'Oh, Im going to be so irresponsible. Therell be nothing to be responsible for. The reality was, perhaps inevitably, quite the opposite. In truth, you are even more responsible, she said, not sounding remotely regretful. What gets you out of bed in the morning, if not you? For the moment, Jacksons sense of responsibility is trained almost entirely on her current role. Her nights are spent with the script, she said, and it is all she has been reading. And although she loves to walk in New York, she had been outside only rarely since she arrived, because it had been cold, which had forced her to cut down on smoking. (Im well below 10 a day. I dont know how good or bad that is.) Did she find she was recognized on the streets? No. Im not recognized in London. What would people recognize? Well, she is inimitably herself, I said. Her response: Oh no, come on, good God. No. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. DARFUR, SUDAN, Feb. 23 (ChinaMil) -- The 14th Chinese peacekeeping engineer detachment to Sudans Darfur passed its first equipment inspection conducted by the African Union-United Nations Hybrid Operation in Darfur (UNAMID) in late February. The equipment inspection is a comprehensive assessment of the United Nations (UN) on the availability of equipment of troop-contributing countries, which is designed to examine whether the equipment can meet peacekeeping requirements. The inspection is also an important basis for the UN to provide economic compensation to its troop-contributing countries, which is known as a "zero tolerance" inspection due to its strict and critical procedures. The inspection team sent by the UNAMID conducted comprehensive inspection of 4 types of UN assets and 179 vehicles, over 10,000 pieces (sets) of self-sustaining supplies and equipment of 46 types in 13 categories. The 14th Chinese peacekeeping engineer detachment has completed tasks including road repair in Ed Daein City in southwestern Sudan and a cross-sector road survey since its deployment in late December, 2017. Soon after the inspection, the detachment will send a construction team to Nertiti City, where the situation is also very serious, to make renovation and facelift of the roads. According to the legislator, chances of the Former Prime Minister working with the Jubilee regime are high compared to the rest of his his co-principals. He added that the 1997 history is about to repeat itself going by the way events are unfolding in the National Super Alliance Camp. Keep this post for future reference. On a balance of probabilities the chances of Raila Odinga working with Jubilee between now and 2022 are much higher than those of Kalonzo, Wetangula and Musalia combined. 1997 is about to repeat itself. I have been in these trenches for far too long. Wrote Moses Kuria. In the recent past, the MP has been poking holes at the former Prime Minister especially after taking the mock oath on January 30th at Uhuru Park. Earlier this week Odinga explained why he took the oath as the People's President at the historic Uhuru Park. ALSO READ: Mudavadi now accuses Raila of lying to Kenyans Speaking before thousands of mourners at Harare, Zimbabwe during the funeral of opposition leader Morgan Tsavingirai, Odinga affirmed that rigged elections would not help Africa. "Rigged elections will not help Africa. They are held to perpetuate dictatorship and mediocrity in our continent. That is why recently i decided to take an oath clearly to say 'this far we go we will not go further down. We must stand for proper elections that are held transparently and the results confirm how the people voted," Odinga declared. Transparent elections He likened his struggles to that of the late Tsvangirai. The NASA leader told thousands of mourners that Tsvangirai's election victory was stolen a year after his was stolen in Kenya that resulted in the 2007/2008 post election violence. State Supreme Court wants suspension to run through adjudication of DWI charge, investigation TUCUMCARI - The New Mexico Supreme Court on Thursday suspended Tucumcari Municipal Judge Joe Dominguez without pay pending the criminal proceeding of his recent arrest and driving while intoxicated charge. Dominguez, 71, was arrested Feb. 4 by the... Opinion Ryan Bridge: The Govt's COVID-19 messaging is all over the shop - do lockdowns stop when enough Kiwis are vaccinated? On February 12 CEN, CENELEC and the European Union Agency for Railways signed a renewed agreement for co-operation in the provision of technical documents covering safety and interoperability. UKRAINE: A US$1bn framework agreement to support the modernisation of the rail network in 2018-34 was signed by Ukrainian Railways and GE Transportation on February 23. A US think tank report which envisions surprise attacks from China and Russia in "the return of great power competition" shows that some US elites have miscalculated China's strategic intentions, analysts said. The report of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) was released on Tuesday. It covers multiple possible "surprises" launched by Beijing and Moscow in strategic, diplomatic, military and technologic areas, such as an attack by Beijing on Taiwan; "China attacks Vietnam"; "Panama declares neutrality in US-China conflict," and even includes "decapitation of US leadership." This kind of simulation or analysis is nothing new at all for US think tanks or intelligence agencies, but it usually won't go public, said Diao Daming, an associate professor at the Renmin University of China in Beijing, told the Global Times on Thursday. "Since the CSIS made it public, it shows that US elites accept 'the return of great power competition,' and also reflects Western anxiety over the global power transition." The Trump administration said in its National Security Strategy released in December 2017 that "great power competition has returned" and clearly identified China and Russia as its "competitors." Unfortunately, it also shows that some US elites and scholars can only use the "Cold War mentality" to analyze China's national intentions and get the wrong answer, due to the lack of understanding of China's characteristics and culture, Diao said. The title of the report is "Coping with Surprise in Great Power Conflicts" written by Mark Cancian, a senior adviser at the CSIS International Security Program. The report's cover page shows the sinking of US vessels at Pearl Harbor after the Japanese attack during the World War II. Taiwan has become a hot-button issue for US think tanks on Asia-Pacific security. Aside from the CSIS report, US Congressman Ted Yoho said at a workshop held by a Washington-based think tank Project 2049 Institute on February 14 that "[US] Congress will never allow Taiwan to be used as a 'bargaining chip' in some grand geopolitical arrangement." "This is ridiculous and hilarious. The US is the country which has always wanted to use Taiwan as a 'bargaining chip' when dealing with the Chinese mainland, and the Taiwan Question is related to sovereignty, which is totally nonnegotiable for China," said Li Haidong, a professor at China Foreign Affairs University, told the Global Times on Thursday. 'Detached from reality' Cancian said in the report that "It is not an attempt to project the future. Rather, it seeks to do the opposite: explore the range of possible future conflicts to see where surprises might lurk." US think tanks like the CSIS and the RAND Corporation have always conducted research or analysis which touches on the most extreme phenomenon, so it is not very surprising for us, but making it public is meant to deter its rivals, said An Gang, a member of the academic committee at the Pangoal Institution, a Beijing-based think tank. "CSIS probably wants to use shocking cases to show its presence in the US strategic circle and attract attention. However, its imagination is extreme and detached from reality, so it might have a negative impact on its reputation and credibility," Li added. China should not be affected by how the US thinks, Diao said. "A great power needs to act accordingly. We need to firmly stick to the right track of our development and not care too much about what the US elites fear or worry about." "At the same time, China needs to try its best to avoid other countries' concerns and miscalculations. When other countries stop worrying and the US remains the only country which miscalculates China, then it would be the US' problem," Diao said. Property details: 7000 HGVC POINTS PER YEAR HILTON SEAWORLD ANNUAL ORLANDO FLORIDA TIMESHARE Description presenting a Hilton Grand Vacations Club Seaworld Orlando Florida Discover Orlando's best dining, shopping and world-renowned attractions while visiting the fabulous *Hilton Grand Vacations Club at SeaWorld International Center* located next to SeaWorld of Florida! Spacious, spectacular, condominium-style accommodations await you at this preferred vacation destination. Each Hilton Grand Vacations C... 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Price: $ 13 Seller State of Residence: Florida Property Address: 5000 Avenue of the Stars State/Province: Florida City: Kissimmee Zip/Postal Code: 34746 Type: Attractions Number of Bedrooms: 3 Number of Bathrooms: 2 Location: 331**, Miami, Florida You will be redirected to eBay Nearby 2 Find a great selection of commercial real estate, manufactured homes, timeshares and more for Sale Buy real estate. Find a great selection of commercial real estate, manufactured homes, timeshares and more for Sale in US and Canada. Search Real Estate Farrah Abraham is suing MTV's parent company, Viacom, after being fired from "Teen Mom OG." ADVERTISEMENT The 26-year-old has filed a $5 million lawsuit against Viacom, along with Eleventh Street Productions, Anxious Eleven and Teen Mom producer Morgan J. Freeman, according to Variety. Abraham accused the parties of harassment and wrongful termination in a complaint filed in federal court in Texas. The allegations stem from a meeting Abraham had with Freeman and the production crew at her home Oct. 30. Abraham said Freeman and the crew "harassed, humiliated and discriminated against, disrespected, ridiculed and sex-shamed" her during the meeting due to her decision to continue her career in pornography. "Threats were made against Ms. Abraham by Freeman about ending her career with MTV and sabotaging future deals Ms. Abraham had in place with MTV, and defaming her," the complaint reads. In the complaint, Abraham claimed she was fired from Teen Mom OG as a "direct result" of the confrontation. She also said a "lucrative deal" with MTV fell through because of the conflict. Abraham had said in a Facebook post Oct. 30 that she was fired because she partakes in "adult promotions and activities." FOLLOW REALITY TV WORLD ON THE ALL-NEW GOOGLE NEWS! Reality TV World is now available on the all-new Google News app and website. Click here to visit our Google News page, and then click FOLLOW to add us as a news source! She was seen confronting MTV producers in a Season 7 promo for the show released in November. , We're sorry, this article is not currently available Reality TV World is now available on the all-new Google News app and website. Click here to visit our Google News page, and then click FOLLOW to add us as a news source! It appears multiple large businesses have laid out plans to end deals with the National Rifle Association (NRA) as a result of backlash from both sides of the gun control debate. Twitter is awash with tweets attacking companies that have worked out special deals with the NRA, many of them with the hashtag #BoycottNRA. The first to announce plans to sever business ties with the NRA is the largest privately held US bank, First National Bank of Omaha. First National Bank stated on Twitter that they would not be renewing the contract to issue the NRA branded credit cards. If the NRA can't find a new bank issue the card, the NRA Visa card could be coming to an end. Customer feedback has caused us to review our relationship with the NRA. As a result, First National Bank of Omaha will not renew its contract with the National Rifle Association to issue the NRA Visa Card. FNBO (@fnbo) February 22, 2018 While it isn't clear precisely how much revenue this is going to cost the NRA, First National Bank of Omaha brought in $714 million in revenue from credit card interest alone based on their 2017 income statement. Previously, First National Bank was the issuer of the official NRA credit card that offered a $40 bonus after the initial purchase is made to offset the cost of a yearly NRA membership but now has removed the signup page from their website. (Click here for a cached version of the page) First National Bank did state in the Twitter post the decision came as a result of customer feedback but did not release a date when the contract with NRA will come to an end. First National Bank of Omaha did not release any information beyond their Twitter statement. They also did not return requests for comment at the time that this article's publication. RECOIL also reached out to the NRA for comment, but they did not return the request for comment. ENTERPRISE RENT-A-CAR, ALAMO RENTAL CAR, AND NATIONAL CAR RENTAL It appears that Enterprise Rent-A-Car has also decided to no longer offer a discount on rental rates across their three brands. As of March 26th, Enterprise, Alamo, and National Car Rental will no longer honor NRA member discounts. RECOIL also reached out to all three rental companies but did not receive a response. Thank you for contacting us, TJ! All three of our brands have ended the discount for NRA members. This change will be effective March 26. Thank you again for reaching out. Kind regards, Michael EnterpriseRentACar (@enterprisecares) February 23, 2018 There are still several other companies under immense pressure from social media users to cut ties with the NRA in the wake of the shooting in Parkland, Florida. Even though the requests for comment were sent to all involved companies rather late, we will update this post if the companies respond. The government issued a statement saying, "These reprehensible acts, alleged crimes, acknowledged by the perpetrators as well as the NGO [non-governmental organization], are a serious violation of the dignity of the Haitian people." Planning and External Cooperation Minister Aviol Fleurant said the charity committed a "serious error" when it failed to inform Haitian authorities about the alleged misconduct. Fleurant said a decision about when or if Oxfam will resume operations in Haiti will be made in about two months. The Haitian government Thursday suspended the operations of the British charity Oxfam in the country pending the outcome of an investigation into employees' alleged sexual exploitation of Haitians after the country's devastating 2010 earthquake. The suspension comes two days after Oxfam Chief Executive Officer Mark Goldring said the organization was investigating 26 new cases of sexual misconduct involving the charity's international operation. Goldring's revelation was made as legislators questioned him over the alleged use of prostitutes in Haiti after the earthquake. An Oxfam report released Monday into the behavior of aid workers sent to Haiti revealed seven of them were accused of using prostitutes at an Oxfam-funded home and three of them physically threatened a witness in the investigation. Four staff members were fired for gross misconduct and Oxfam's director for Haiti, Roland Van Hauwermeiren, and two others were allowed to resign. Goldring apologized to the lawmakers on behalf of Oxfam and said the charity would launch its own investigation into abuses in the foreign aid sector. Last week, the charity formally apologized to Haiti and announced a plan to combat sexual abuse, including a new vetting system for potential employees. Allegations of sexual misconduct have rattled the aid sector, prompting Britain and the European Union to review funding for Oxfam, one of the world's largest disaster relief charities. Haitian President Jovenel Moise has called for investigations of other charitable organizations as well. London police say they are investigating a suspicious package that was sent to Prince Harry and his fiancee Meghan Markle. The Metropolitan Police force says "a package containing a substance" was delivered to St. James's Palace, where Harry has his office, on Feb. 12. It says the substance "was tested and confirmed as non-suspicious." Videos Sorry, there are no recent results for popular videos. Without the handsome receipts from the sale of government equity in PSUs and sharp increases in excise revenues from oil, Jaitleys fiscal consolidation drive would have become even more arduous, says A K Bhattacharya. Looking back at the five Budgets that Finance Minister Arun Jaitley has presented so far, it would be fair to conclude that divestment and oil prices were the major tailwinds that hugely helped his budget-making. Without the handsome receipts from the sale of government equity in public sector undertakings and sharp increases in excise revenues from oil, Jaitleys fiscal consolidation drive would have become even more arduous and the journey from a fiscal deficit of 4.4 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2013-14 (the last year of the Manmohan Singh government) to the budgeted 3.3 per cent in 2018-19 a little slower. The Budget Jaitley presented on February 1 was no exception. It was a lacklustre Budget, containing many grand schemes without the backing of sufficient financial allocation. Complicating it further was a strong dose of protectionism that resulted in higher customs duty on over 40 categories of goods, accounting for about a fourth of Indias total imports. Unsurprisingly, both the initiatives have given rise to macroeconomic worries. But in spite of all this and in keeping with the past trend, the finance minister has continued to press ahead with selling government stakes in PSUs and reap rich dividends from the oil sector by way of excise collections. Indeed, the fiscal correction he proposed to achieve by the end of March 2019 would have been a bigger challenge if Jaitley had not budgeted for Rs 80,000 crore from divestment and Rs 1.3 lakh crore of excise duty collection from petrol and diesel. With the gains from a revival in tax buoyancy somewhat neutralised by slow growth in non-tax revenues, divestment proceeds and excise on oil are expected to help the finance minister just as they did in his previous four Budgets as well. To be sure, Jaitleys track record in divestment is quite enviable. Of the total Rs 3.5 lakh crore of divestment proceeds between 1991-92 and 2017-18, Jaitleys mobilisation at about Rs 1.9 lakh crore accounts for about 55 per cent. And that amount came in just four years and more than what the United Progressive Alliance achieved in a decade. During the 10-year rule of the Manmohan Singh government, the Chidambaram-Mukherjee duo could raise about Rs 1.08 lakh crore and the Vajpayee governments Yashwant-Jaswant combination could mobilise only Rs 33,655 crore through divestment in a span of six years. Similarly, five years of the Narasimha Rao government managed only Rs 9,961 crore and the United Front government had to show a divestment of only Rs 1,289 crore in two years. Jaitley was also ahead of the rest in meeting the Budget targets on divestment. He achieved about 80 per cent of his target of Rs 2.42 lakh crore in four years, while the achievement of targets for others was lower at 70 per cent under the Manmohan Singh government, 53 per cent for the Vajpayee government, 51 per cent for the Rao government and a low 13 per cent for the United Front government. Where Jaitley could have done better is with respect to the quality of disinvestment. The bulk of his divestments (like those of the other governments) was through the sale of minority shareholding in PSUs and only Rs 51,847 crore was effected through what is described as strategic divestment. But these are not really cases of privatisation, but a different name for the government handing over its majority control to another PSU. The Vajpayee government towers above all on this count. It privatised several PSUs by handing over their management to private owners and fetched an estimated Rs 63.44 billion through privatisation. Jaitley scores with numbers on divestment, but these are used mainly to meet the governments fiscal deficit and not for providing management autonomy to the PSUs through ownership change or by distancing them from the government. Thus, divestment for him has remained an instrument for raising resources and not undertaking genuine public-sector reforms. Air Indias privatisation will, hopefully, set a healthy trend towards genuine reforms of the public sector. The fear is that the aviation behemoths privatisation should not be allowed to meet the same fate as befell the IDBI Bank, whose privatisation was announced more than a year ago, but action on that is yet to be taken. On oil, Jaitley has moved far more decisively than on PSU privatisation. Even as crude oil prices began falling from $107 a barrel in May 2014 to $28 a barrel by January 2016, the finance minister began raising excise duty on petrol and diesel to mop up the gains for the central exchequer. Crude oil prices rose to $55 a barrel by September 2017, but during this period of three and a half years, Jaitley raised excise duty on petrol and diesel on as many as 11 occasions and raised it from Rs 9.48 and Rs 3.56 per litre to Rs 17.33 and Rs 21.48 per litre, respectively. These were brought down only once, by Rs 2 a litre in November 2017, after there were some protests. Jaitleys finances benefitted hugely from this exercise. From excise revenues of Rs 99,184 crore from the oil sector in 2014-15, they rose to Rs 1.78 lakh crore in 2015-16 and Rs 2.43 lakh crore in 2016-17. In the current year, they are estimated at Rs 2.4 lakh crore. Next year, they are likely to decline to Rs 1.3 lakh crore and if international crude oil prices keep rising, the pressure to cut excise duty will increase and the governments finances can come under increased stress. Divestments and subdued oil prices were favourable tailwinds for Jaitley. But it is unlikely they would continue to remain so. The sooner this realisation dawns on the government, the better it would be for its finances. Photograph: James Lawler Duggan/Reuters The spotlight is back on the hawala trade in diamonds. IMAGE: India exports polished diamonds worth around $35 billion a year. It is the biggest processor of rough diamonds. Finished diamonds, like this masterpiece at Sotheby's auction house, could well have come from India. Photograph: Hannah McKay/Reuters. With the diamond industry going through a rough patch and two of its big names -- Mehul Choksi and Nirav Modi -- accused of fraudulent activities, the issue of illegitimate channels such as hawala and round tripping of diamonds are again gaining prominence. India exports polished diamonds worth around $35 billion a year. It is the biggest processor of rough diamonds. When imports of polished diamonds and exports of rough diamonds take place, there are issues of round-tripping. According to the Gem & Jewellery Export Promotion Council data, in 2017-18 till January, India exported rough diamonds worth $1.175 billion against $1.5 billion in the full year 2016-17. India imported polished diamonds worth $1.88 billion in the first 10 months this year. IMAGE: India imported polished diamonds worth $1.88 billion in the first 10 months this year. This 709-carat diamond (above) found in Sierra Leone and known as the Peace Diamond was sold to Graff Diamonds. Specialists there will determine the best way to turn this rough diamond into a polished gem and it very well might come to India for polishing since India polishes some of the finest diamonds in the world. Photograph: Nir Elias/Reuters. When diamonds are sent abroad as consignment sales (such sales are treated as export if they are sold), some unsold ones return. Even the proportion of return consignments has doubled over the past two years, according to an industry executive. An industry source said: The diamond trade continues to be a conduit for laundering money. With the government increasing the import duty on polished diamonds, first to 2.5 per cent and then to 5 per cent, the modus operandi keep changing and non-standardisation of prices has introduced distortions into the trade. Some players use coloured gem stones to launder money because they are difficult to value. In the case of rough diamonds, on which there is no import duty, the customs department is not concerned with IMAGE: When diamonds are sent abroad as consignment sales (such sales are treated as export if they are sold), some unsold ones return. Even the proportion of return consignments has doubled over the past two years, according to an industry executive. An industry source said: The diamond trade continues to be a conduit for laundering money. Photograph: Arko Datta/Reuters. what comes in.The GJEPC, which is under the commerce ministry, and compiles data and oversees exports, says the round tripping of diamonds has become history after the import duty was increased to 2.5 per cent.In 2012, the council suggested imposing a duty of 2.5 per cent on polished diamond imports, and that stopped round tripping, said the councils spokesperson. He said: Imports of polished diamonds import are nothing but goods returned and are up to 10 per cent of the purchases. This is a normal operational hazard and our industry is no exception. However, a source said, Part of export orders may face rejection but in the name of rejection, costlier diamonds are entering India and excess payments are made using hawala channels. The magnitude of this is difficult to establish but that has always been a grey area for the diamond trade. In 2015-16, return consignments accounted for 10 per cent of what was exported. In 2017-18 till January they reached 23 per cent. Silver jewellery exports rose from $2 billion in 2014-15 to more than $4 billion in 2016-17. An industry insider said: Silver jewellery is studded with diamonds. IMAGE: According to the Gem & Jewellery Export Promotion Council data, in 2017-2018 till January, India exported rough diamonds worth $1.175 billion against $1.5 billion in the full year 2016-2017. In the picture: A Christie's member of staff displays 'The Orange', the world biggest orange diamond, which weighs 14.82 carats. Photograph: Denis Balibouse/Reuters. Because of difficulties in valuing such studded jewellery, this kind of diamond-studded jewellery is exported to Dubai or Hong Kong and then melting silver and taking out diamonds have been common practice. This route is often used for hawala transfers. Surendra Mehta, national secretary to the Indian Bullion and Jewellers Association, said When you continue to nourish any industry with zero import duties and zero indirect tax for so long in spite of huge profit margins, there is bound to be fraudulence. The GoM will meet on Saturday to finalise single-stage, simplified, return filing under the GST; report will be placed before GST Council on March 10. The model proposed by Infosys chairman Nandan Nilekani for invoice matching to plug tax evasion under the goods and services tax may be tweaked, ensuring a smooth flow of input tax credit to assessees. The group of ministers headed by Bihar Deputy Chief Minister Sushil Modi will meet on Saturday to finalise single-stage, simplified, return filing under the GST, and the report will be placed before the GST Council in its meeting on March 10. The onus of matching invoices to claim input tax credit will fall on taxpayers instead of the IT backbone, the GST Network (GSTN). Most states are in favour of the proposal and it is much simpler. There will be a single-stage filing process. The GoM will take the final decision on the matter on Saturday. There will be no filing of returns but only uploading of invoices, said a government official. The move, if approved, will require taxpayers to file a single GST return, replacing three returns -- GSTR 1, 2, 3 and the summarised return GSTR 3B. Invoice matching will be at the seller-purchaser level offline. According to the proposal, the seller will upload invoices, which will be acknowledged by the purchaser. The system will put the onus on the seller. In a shift from Nilekanis proposal for blocking credit in the case of mismatch in invoices, the GoM may decide to allow releasing input tax credit provisionally to the buyer. In the offline system, the invoice a seller uploads will be visible to the purchaser. The buyer will only have to upload those invoices missed by the seller. The notification will go to the seller about the missing invoices, the official said. According to the Nilekani model, input tax credit will be available only after uploading invoices. Nilekani returned last year to Infosys, which is the tech-enabler for the GST Network. The Council in its November meeting deferred invoice matching till March to ease the compliance burden of taxpayers. Nilekani to help with IT infra for Modicare Tech billionaire Nandan Nilekani will assist the government in developing Information technology infrastructure for the mega National Health Protection Scheme, which seeks to cover 100 million families, a senior NITI Aayog official has said. The IT infrastructure for the healthcare scheme will be of a huge scale as was required for Aadhaar and will have to be scaled up gradually in view of the massive range of the programme. Former Unique Identification Authority of India chairman Nilekani -- the brain behind Aadhaar -- is also a member of the goods and services tax return simplification committee. We have consulted Nilekani, we want to build Aadhaar-like model for the scheme (NHPS)... He has agreed to help us, the official said. Under the earlier system, returns filed under forms such as GSTR-1 (sales) and GSTR-2 (purchase) were automatically matched with GSTR-3 to ensure that the claims made by the taxpayer were correct. Currently, taxpayers are filing GSTR 3B and GSTR 1 and claiming input tax credit. The government has been working to bring back the suspended invoice-matching system after the fall in GST revenues raised concerns over tax evasion. GST revenue collections fell to Rs 808.08 billion in November, the lowest since the roll-out of the indirect tax in July last year, but recovered to Rs 880 billion in December. If the buyer uploads the invoices missed by the seller, input tax credit will be issued to the purchaser on a provisional basis, said a government official. Eventually, the buyer will get an alert from the seller on uploading invoices. Input tax credit will be reversed if the seller fails to upload the missing invoices in time. The department will automatically treat it as a complaint and start probe. That will be interpreted to mean that either the purchaser has uploaded fake invoices or the seller has not uploaded the invoice. A probe will be carried out, said the official. Experts say the proposal is much simpler than the current mechanism but it requires to be in-built into the system and the industry should be given sufficient time to grasp it. Photograph: Reuters. Indian-American Raj Nair, executive vice president and president of Ford North America, has been asked to leave the Detroit-based motor company following allegations of misconduct at work place, has been replaced by another Indian-American, Kumar Galhotra. IMAGE:.Kumar Galhotra at the 2017 New York International Auto Show in New York City, US, on April 12, 2017. Photograph: Brendan Mcdermid/Reuters. Indian-American Raj Nair, executive vice president and president of Ford North America, has been asked to leave the Detroit-based motor company following allegations of misconduct at work place, has been replaced by another Indian-American, Kumar Galhotra. Mr Galbotra has been running marketing and the Lincoln brand, a once-dominant U.S. luxury brand that has gained momentum in China, and takes the helm of the Fords core business unit as profits are under increasing pressure, reports the Wall Street Journal, pointing out that his appointment leads a series of top personnel changes being implemented by CEO Jim Hackett, who has held the job for less than a year. Nair, 54, "is departing" from Ford effective immediately, the company said on Thursday, noting that the decision follows a recent internal investigation into reports of inappropriate behaviour. The review determined certain behaviour by Nair was inconsistent with the company's code of conduct, the statement said. "We made this decision after a thorough review and careful consideration," said Ford President and CEO Jim Hackett. "Ford is deeply committed to providing and nurturing a safe and respectful culture and we expect our leaders to fully uphold these values," he said. In an accompanying statement Nair regretted the incident. "I sincerely regret that there have been instances where I have not exhibited leadership behaviours consistent with the principles that the Company and I have always espoused. I continue to have the utmost faith in the people of Ford Motor Company and wish them continued success in the future," Nair said. Nair has been president of Ford North America since June 1, 2017. Prior to that, he served as Fords head of global product development and chief technical officer. Having served Ford in various capacities, Nair was its vice president, Operations, Asia Pacific. In this position for three years, he was responsible for product development, manufacturing, purchasing, quality and information technology within the Asia Pacific region. IMAGE: Raj Nair speaks at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit, Michigan, US, on January 9, 2017. Photograph: Rebecca Cook/Reuters. Nair joined Ford Motor Company in 1987 as a body and assembly operations launch engineer and held various positions on more than 11 vehicle programmes in 13 assembly plants. On assignment to Europe, Nair was the vehicle operations launch manager for the 1996 European Fiesta. He then became responsible for all Ford of Europe launches including the Focus, Transit and Mondeo. Born in 1964, Nair holds a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering with an automotive speciality from KetteringUniversity in Flint, Mich, and was named the recipient of the 2012 Kettering Alumni Award for Management Achievement. According to the Wall Street Journal, Nair received a retention bonus less than a year ago, which would have paid out about USD5 million if he had stayed until the end of the decade. He was one of a number of senior leaders given special incentives shortly before arrival of Ford's chief executive Jim Hackett. The ouster hits as Ford is working to soothe investor concern about slipping profits in a flat US auto market, the daily said, adding that the departure of Mr. Nair removes a rising star and respected car-engineering expert from Mr. Hacketts management bench. A top task Ford needs to accelerate is entering the electric-vehicle market with a more compelling answer to Tesla Incs products and GMs Chevrolet Bolt. With additional inputs The Trump administration has announced a new policy that makes very tough the procedure of issuing H-1B visas to those to be employed at one or more third-party worksites, a move that will hugely impact Indian IT companies and their employees. Under the new policy, the company would have to go an extra length to prove that its H-1B employee at a third-party worksite has specific and non-qualifying speculative assignments in speciality occupation. The H-1B programme offers temporary United States visas that allow companies to hire highly skilled foreign professionals working in areas with shortages of qualified American workers. Indian IT companies, which are among the major beneficiaries of H-1B visas, has a significant number of its employees deployed at third-party worksites. A significant number of American banking, travel and commercial services depend on on-site IT workers from India to get their job done. The new move announced on Thursday through a seven-page policy empowers the US Citizenship and Immigration Services to issue H-1B visas to an employee only for the period for which he/she has work at a third-party worksite. As such the issuing of H-1B visas could be of less than three years. This would reverse the tradition of issuing the H-1B visas for three years at a time. Effective immediately, the new guidance comes weeks ahead of the beginning of the H-1B visas filing season, which is expected to be April 2, for the fiscal year 2019 beginning October 1, 2018. The guidance says in order for an H-1B petition involving a third-party worksite to be approved, the petitioner must show by a preponderance of evidence that the beneficiary will be employed in a speciality occupation and the employer will maintain an employer-employee relationship with the beneficiary for the duration of the requested validity period. When H-1B beneficiaries are placed at third-party worksites, the companies must demonstrate that they have specific and non-speculative qualifying assignments in a speciality occupation for that beneficiary for the entire time requested on the petition. While an H-1B petition may be approved for up to three years, the USCIS will, in its discretion, generally limit the approval period to the length of time demonstrated that the beneficiary will be placed in non-speculative work and during which the petitioner will maintain the requisite employer-employee relationship, an official statement said. Extensions of H-1B visas have become even tougher, in particular if the employee has been on a bench for any part of their previous duration. Sometimes American companies abruptly end the contract of an employee as a result the workers temporarily do not have any work, which in IT parlance is called on bench. During this period, while they maintain their H-1B visas status, official investigations have revealed that foreign IT workers on H-1B visas do not get paid, which the USCIS says is illegal and abuse of the system. "If an H-1B petitioner is applying to extend H-1B employment for a beneficiary who was placed at one or more third-party worksites during the course of past employment with the same petitioner, that petitioner should also establish that the H-1B requirements have been met for the entire prior approval period," the USCIS said. And if these conditions are not met, and if the petitioner did not comply with the terms and conditions of the original petition and did not file an amended petition on time, USCIS may have eligibility concerns about a subsequent petition filed to extend the beneficiary's employment, the policy memorandum said. The latest policy memorandum is part of President Donald Trump's 'Buy American and Hire American Executive Order' and the directive to protect the interests of US workers, it said. Employment-based petitioners who circumvent the worker protections outlined in the nationas immigration laws not only injure US workers (eg their wages and job opportunities), but also the foreign workers for whom they are petitioning, it said. Companies seeking H-1B visas for their employees working at a third-party site, would now have an intensive paper work to file before submitting their applications. This includes evidence of actual work assignments, which may include technical documentation, milestone tables, marketing analysis, cost-benefit analysis, brochures, and funding documents. The letter should provide information, such as a detailed description of the specialised duties the beneficiary will perform, the qualifications required to perform those duties, the duration of the job, salary or wages paid, hours worked, benefits, a detailed description of who will supervise the beneficiary and the beneficiary's duties, and any other related evidence, the USCIS said. Kim will be accompanied by Ri Son-gwon, the chairman of the Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of the Fatherland, and six others. Ri also attended the opening ceremony on Feb. 9. As the former chief of the General Bureau of Reconnaissance, he masterminded a series of provocations against South Korea, including the sinking of the Cheonan and shelling of Yeonpyeong Island in 2010. The North on Thursday said Kim Yong-chol, a vice chairman of the Workers Party Central Committee, will head a high-level delegation to the ceremony on Sunday. But Kim has been blacklisted by the U.S. and is concurrently the head of the United Front Department in charge of the regime's agitation against South Korea. North Korea plans to send the mastermind of the 2010 sinking of the South Korean Navy corvette Cheonan to the closing ceremony of the Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang. Opposition parties and the families of the victims of the Cheonan are furious that the South is to roll out the red carpet for a man they blame for the death of 46 South Korean soldiers. Cheong Wa Dae says no mastermind behind the torpedo attack was positively identified by an international investigation at the time. "Kim Yong-chol is on a U.S. sanctions blacklist and our own financial sanctions blacklist," a senior presidential official told reporters. "But we're going to welcome him because he's coming to attend the closing ceremony for a successful Olympics. We told Washington about this matter and are now discussing it with U.S. officials." President Moon Jae-in is expected to meet the North Korean delegation at Cheong Wa Dae on Monday after the Olympics close. The official said Moon will meet the North Korean delegation "under natural circumstances." But Cheong Wa Dae said Kim is unlikely to come in contact with U.S. President Donald Trump's daughter Ivanka, who also attends the closing ceremony. Meanwhile, Cheong Wa Dae admitted that National Intelligence Service Director Suh Hoon played a key role in the latest inter-Korean contacts. "It's inevitable for the NIS to play a part in unofficial contacts with the North," another presidential official said. "Suh will be the counterpart" of North Korean spymaster Kim Yong-chol. Also in Thursday, it emerged that Cheong Wa Dae had arranged a meeting between U.S. Vice President Mike Pence and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un's sister Yo-jong on Feb. 10, but the North pulled out at the last minute. While there's tax arbitrage advantage in ULIPs now, experts say investors should prefer mutual funds for long-term savings. Joydeep Ghosh and Tinesh Bhasin report. From April 1, a seller of unit-linked insurance plans (ULIPs) will be able to make a stronger pitch to the potential customer -- no long-term capital gains (LTCG) tax on investing. The Union Budget 2018 has imposed an LTCG tax of 10 per cent on investors in stock markets who sell their shares after one year. However, it has kept insurance products out of the ambit of this tax. And this could lead to more mis-selling in ULIPs. At present, ULIPs have three things going for them. One, a robust stock market. Two, there are more insurance than mutual fund agents who can push ULIPs, and now, the tax arbitrage. And given that insurance agents are paid significantly higher commissions, there could be a rush to push these products. "Once you bring the comparison down to ULIPs versus mutual funds, the reality is that a purchaser will look at both, and there are a large number of people at our companies who are selling it may also be highlighting only the savings (investment) element rather than the core protection element. I think it is the wrong way to look at it," Arijit Basu, MD and CEO, SBI Life Insurance, said at the recent Business Standard Insurance Round Table. According to him, ULIPs are an alternative avenue to channelise savings. So a person chooses ULIPs from the perspective that he will get a very good return, but there is also an insurance element to it. It's easy for an investor to get swayed in favour of ULIPs with these advantages. But investment managers believe that mutual funds are still the best vehicles for long-term wealth creation. "We are still not confident of recommending ULIPs to our clients due to the five-year lock-in and opacity in costs. Also, if a ULIP fund is not doing well, an investor has no option but to stay with the company," says Prateek Pant, head of products and solutions at Sanctum Wealth. Tax arbitrage The introduction of capital gains tax on long-term equity investment directly takes 10 per cent from the gains an investor has made. Of late, insurers have also started launching low-cost ULIPs that are sold online. If you only consider charges, these are comparable to direct plans of mutual funds. "In the new ULIPs, insurers are also adding back a certain portion of charges into investors' funds," says Santosh Agarwal, head of life insurance, Policybazaar.com. If a 30 year old invests Rs 100,000 a year for 10 years in, say, Edelweiss Tokio's Wealth Plus (an online ULIP), he will get Rs 1.44 million at the end of the policy term if the returns are at 8 per cent, according to data from Policybazaar.com. If a mutual fund gives the same returns, the investor stands to get Rs 1.37 million on redemption after 10 years after paying capital gains tax. However, only 10 per cent of policyholders use the online route. "While this may look attractive, the return from a ULIP will start dropping as the age of the investor increases due to higher mortality charges," says Dhaval Kapadia, director -- portfolio specialist, Morningstar Investment Adviser (India). The return will be even lower if the individual is a smoker or suffers from a chronic disease. In mutual funds, none of these will matter. There is another important difference. When a person buys a ULIP offline, several costs like premium allocation charge and others kick in. The numbers, then, look dramatically different. Regulatory arbitrage For many years, there has been a significant regulatory arbitrage between Sebi and the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India (Irdai) when it comes to their respective products. The former has been aggressively pushing for cutting commissions to mutual fund distributors. Last week, it barred closed-end funds from charging 20 basis points extra in lieu of exit load. It has also changed the definition from B15 to B30 for charging an extra 30 basis points. Both these changes will mean lower expense ratios for investors. In its March 2016 guidelines, Sebi clearly said that MFs have to declare the amount of actual commission paid by asset management companies (AMCs) to distributors (in absolute terms) in its half-yearly report against the investor's total investment in each MF scheme. 'The term 'commission' here refers to all direct monetary payments and other payments made in the form of gifts/rewards, trips, event sponsorships, etc, by AMCs/MFs to distributors,' said the Sebi note. On the other hand, Irdai increased the commissions for agents from April 1, 2017. Called Payment of Commission or Remuneration or Reward to Insurance Agents and Insurance Intermediaries Regulations, 2016, the new rules have raised overall payments in the insurance sector to agents and intermediaries. In addition, the regulations allowed rewards for agents and intermediaries. Rewards will include sales promotion, gift and other such items. Higher commissions lead to more push There is a good reason for bank relationship managers to promote ULIPs vis-a-vis mutual funds. The first-year commission for agents and intermediaries is as high as 35 to 40 per cent of premium. Even the renewal commission is a good 7.5 per cent a year. Compare this with a MF, and there is a huge arbitrage. MF distributors get around 1.5 to 2.5 per cent commission for the first year in equity schemes. For an exchange-traded fund, it would be lower at 0.5 to 1 per cent. For debt funds, it can be as low as 0.2 to 0.8 per cent. And the trail commission is around 0.5 to 1.5 per cent for equity funds. Mutual funds still score over ULIPs Investment managers say that while ULIPs have been improving drastically, they still prefer mutual funds for long-term savings. "A fund house's core competency is investment. The primary function of an insurance company is managing risk. An investor is, therefore, better off with MFs for investments," says Amar Pandit, founder of HappynessFactory.in. He adds that if an investor only chases returns or is obsessed with costs, s/he will end up making expensive mistakes. When an investor is doing his portfolio review, s/he can redeem her/his investments from a scheme and shift it to another from a different fund house. In ULIPs, you have to stick to the same company for at least five years. The only option is to switch from one fund to another of the same insurer. Wealth managers also say that ULIPs are not as transparent as mutual funds. "We are still not confident about the cost structure of ULIPs. In some products, there's still opacity in charges," says Pant. He adds that the five-year lock-in is another aspect of ULIPs that makes them less attractive. An investor can exit mutual funds anytime with a small exit load. While ULIPs do enjoy a tax advantage now, there's no certainty they will continue to do so. "There could be a similar tax on this product category, too, in the future. Then, the investor will find himself in a soup because s/he can't get out of it. Investors should continue to separate their investments and insurance," says Arnav Pandya, a certified financial planner. Illustration: Dominic Xavier/Rediff.com The stars of Brahmastra have been training under Movement Culture pioneer Ido Portal. (From left) Ranbir Kapoor, Ido Portal and Alia Bhatt in Bulgaria. Ido Portal captioned the picture: 'harddd working, dedicated, talented people. So much heart in these two - it's an honor to call you friends and students guys [sic].' Photographs: @portal.ido/Instagram. The shooting for Ayan Mukherjee's fantasy-action film Brahmastra is underway in Bulgaria, and judging by the pictures on Instagram, Movement Culture will have a massive role in the film. The filmmaker has roped in Ido Portal, the pioneer of the fitness trend, who has been training the film's stars -- Alia Bhatt and Ranbir Kapoor -- since 2016, when the film was still called Dragon. Ido Portal had travelled to Mumbai earlier to train Bhatt and Kapoor and is now on the sets with them guiding them on movement and scene design. Who is Ido Portal? Ido Portal's journey began at an early age with traditional martial arts. 'I was always obsessed with the physical,' he says in the introduction on his web site. But at age 15 he came across Capoeira, the Afro-Brazilian martial art that combines dance, acrobatics and music -- a meeting that, Ido Portal says, sent him 'on a lifetime journey leading to the realization that I don't just love martial arts or strength or this or that, but I am actually obsessed with... movement.' He adds, 'That epiphany got me to embark on a journey to study from "Movement Teachers". After countless searches, I could not find anyone who HONESTLY could represent that title, and believe me, I've searched -- around the world. 'All those Movement Teachers were talking about a SPECIFIC discipline -- either dance or the martial or fitness, but none were actually interested in the bigger picture of movement. They also lacked some basic tools that were not available within their own disciplines to deal with movement in the highest level. 'So, I decided to become that person.' In the years since then, Ido Portal has traveled the world to study from osteopaths, manual therapists, MDs, professional dancers, yogis, athletes, circus performers and fighters. He has tried not to neglect any angle 'from the nutritional approaches to movement and health to functional anatomy and physiology to methodology of the training process to mental aspects of movement practice and more.' What is Movement Culture? On his website Ido Portal describes Movement Culture as 'a contemporary paradigm shift' in physicality and fitness that moves us away from the separation between health, aesthetics, performance and art. The goal behind Movement Culture, he adds, is 'first and foremost, to create a dialogue and a cross disciplinary exchange of information between various types of movers. Information that was isolated in specific isolated practices can be extremely useful for other types of movers, but in the past this information was not shared. 'Second, the intention is to provide tools and support the development of Movers and specialists -- practitioners of both isolated movement practices as well as wider spectrum ones.' Ido Portal defines a mover as someone who sees beyond the technicalities of each movement pursuit or discipline -- 'someone who... wishes to understand the body, health, performance and physical artistic expression.' Urging people to 'MOVE', he adds, 'We are designed to do so -- hence we are in this amazing body. I don't mean "training" for 45 minutes three times a week. I mean A LOT. Heck, 100 years ago just to have a drink of water was a workout.' How Movement Culture grew As Ido Portal's body of knowledge on movement education, development, and cultivation grew, his workshops began to grow in popularity and he found himself traveling all over the world to teach. Against isolation of technique or knowledge in any form, Ido Portal also started an annual 'Movement Camp' to bring movers -- ranging from fighters and dancers to anatomists and even rock climbers -- from around the world together. He says, 'A small community and a culture started to develop around my ideas, but more importantly around movement.' How to master Movement Culture Ido Portal cautions against any 'Masters of Movement' and doesn't wear the title either, because 'anyone presenting himself as such is delusional at best. No one can be a master of all movement pursuits.' He still moves, researches and explores more than his students, even the most advanced ones. Drama ensued as the AAP accused the cops of acting as a bully at the behest of the Centre. IMAGE: Delhi Police conduct an investigation in the case of the alleged assault on Chief Secretary Anshu Prakash by Aam Aadmi Party MLAs, at Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal's residence.Photograph: Arun Sharma/PTI Photo In an unprecedented move, a Delhi Police team on Friday swooped down on the residence of Arvind Kejriwal and seized a hard disk containing CCTV footage in connection with the chief secretary assault incident even as the chief minister knocked the Lt Governors doors to ensure government work is not hit due to the boycott by bureaucrats. A total of 21 CCTV cameras and a hard disk were examined by the police. The hard disk was seized and any possibility of tampering with the system could be ascertained only after forensic examination, Additional Deputy Commissioner of Police (North) Harendra Singh said. WATCH: Cops attempt to retrieve CCTV footage from Kejriwal's residence Fourteen CCTV cameras were running while seven were not working. Also, there was a time lag of 40-43 minutes with respect to the time of the alleged incident, the official said. Reacting to the search, the AAP chief Kejriwal said, A huge posse of policemen was sent to my residence. The entire CM residence is being searched over allegations of two slaps. But when will Amit Shah be questioned in connection with Judge Loyas death, he asked on Twitter. Miffed by the move, the Aam Aadmi Party accused the Delhi Police of acting like a bully at the behest of the Centre by entering the chief ministers house illegally and said the action was aimed at insulting and humiliating him. IMAGE: After the search, cops said that of the 21 cameras found, 14 of them were working with a time lag of 40-43 minutes. Photograph: Arun Sharma/PTI Photo Without taking the name of Bharatiya Janata Party and its leaders, AAP MP Sanjay Singh said it is unfortunate that some dictators and people with a mentality of hooligans have captured power, be it Gujarat, Haryana, Maharashtra, Rajasthan or Madhya Pradesh. The dadagiri by the Delhi Police at Arvind Kejriwals residence is being done at the behest of the BJP. The Delhi Police is a mere puppet but the Centre is resorting to such dadagiri to dismiss the Delhi government, Singh said. In a press conference, the AAP also showed a two-and-half-minute clip where senior police officials are seen inside the residence of the chief minister, purportedly asking questions about the wall paint of the room. Police claimed that its action (of dispatching a posse to Kejriwals house to collect evidence) came after its request for CCTV footage from the chief ministers residence was not met. WATCH: Seized footage of 21 CCTV cameras: ADGP North Delhi Several policemen went to Kejriwals official residence in the Civil Lines area where Chief Secretary Anshu Prakash was allegedly assaulted in the presence of the chief minister on Monday night. Both Kejriwal and Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia met Anil Baijal and said the Lt Governor assured them that he will take all steps to ensure officers start functioning normally. IMAGE: Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal and Deputy CM Manish Sisodia come out after meeting Lt Governor Anil Baijal at his residence. Kejriwal tweeted that the officers not attending meeting was a cause of concern and affecting governance. Photograph: Arun Sharma/PTI Photo Bureaucrats of the Delhi government had earlier decided to boycott all meetings called by the ministers. Officers not attending meetings for last 3 days. Governance suffering. I m v concerned. LG assured he will take all steps to ensure officers started functioning normally. Council of ministers assured him all cooperation. All of us need to work together for betterment of Delhi, Kejriwal tweeted after the meeting. Sisodia said Baijal assured them that he will speak to the bureaucrats. However, the LG sent out a very strong statement after the meeting. The Lt Governor strongly condemned the incidents and termed them as most unfortunate. The Lt Governor noted that no government can fulfil its promises to the people if the employees feel demoralised and insecure. There is no place for violence in a democratic and civilised society. Steps need to be taken to remove the mistrust between the government employees and the elected government, so that the development of Delhi and public interest do not get adversely affected, an official statement from the LGs office said. Meanwhile, a delegation of IAS officers working under the Delhi government also met Union minister Jitendra Singh and put forward their grievances following the alleged attack on Prakash. After the meeting, Singh said, We have heard the members of the delegation. We took cognisance of all the grievances and concerns raised by them and necessary steps would be taken on it. The officers have submitted a memorandum mentioning some of their demands and necessary action will be taken on it, he said Singh. The BJP launched an attack against Kejriwal and said his decision to call the states chief secretary at his residence and the alleged physical assault on him was a case of bullying and thuggery. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau met with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday morning -- the only high-level engagement of his week-long trip to India. Issuing a joint statement following high-delegation talks, PM Modi said, There should not be space for those who misuse religion for political motives and promote separatism. Highlights from Trudeaus visit to India: Trudeaus first visit to India has been clouded by talk of a frosty reception on account of the Canadian governments perceived soft approach to Sikh extremists demanding Khalistan. Here are snapshots from Day 6 of Trudeau's visit. Justin Trudeau was embraced by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi outside the Presidential Palace in New Delhi on Friday morning. Photograph: Press Information Bureau The intimate moment between the two men came after Modi failed to welcome Trudeau to India when he arrived on Saturday in a move widely regarded as a snub. At the ceremonial welcome, Modi speaks with Ella-Grace, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's daughter as his family members looks on. Photograph: Atul Yadav/PTI Photo While Justin wore a suit, we cant help notice Sophie Gregoire Trudeaus sharp fitting floral suit. We must say after some of the tacky Indian wear Trudeau has been criticised for, this is a welcome change. Photograph: Atul Yadav/PTI Photo Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau inspects guard of honour during his ceremonial reception at Rashtrapati Bhawan. Photograph: Atul Yadav/PTI Photo Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau with his family members pay tribute at Mahatma Gandhis memorial Rajghat in New Delhi. Earlier, the Canadian premier and his family had visited Gandhis ashram in Sabarmati, Gujarat. Photograph: Manvender Vashist/PTI Photo Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's daughter Ella-Grace signs the visitors book as his sons Xavier and Hadrien (playfully lying on the floor) look on, at Mahatma Gandhi's memorial Rajghat. Photograph: Manvender Vashist/PTI Photo Modi and Trudeau held extensive talks at Hyderabad House. The two sides inked six pacts, including on energy cooperation. Photograph: Press Information Bureau Modi, following his nearly two-hour long meeting with Trudeau, said during a joint media event with the Canadian prime minister, that it is important that the two countries work together to fight terrorism. Observing that Trudeau has visited various parts of India in last few days, Modi said the Canadian leader must have experienced the diversity of the country. On his part, Trudeau described India as a natural partner for commercial cooperation. Modi said they have also asked the officials of their countries to re-double their efforts to finalise the bilateral free trade agreement. Photograph: Press Information Bureau External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj called on the Canadian prime minister and discussed various issues of mutual interest. Swaraj had a warm meeting with Trudeau and discussed ways to strengthen and deepen the partnership between the two countries. The MEA tweeted, Picture speaks for itself! EAM @SushmaSwaraj had a warm meeting with the Prime Minister of Canada @JustinTrudeau. Photograph: @MEAIndia/Twitter Congress chief Rahul Gandhi met Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and discussed a range of issues concerning the two countries. According to sources, the two shared their commitment towards liberal values. Issues pertaining to economic development and new technologies were also discussed during the around 40-minute meeting, they said. Sources said the two leaders talked about bridging the gap of inequalities in society and how important pluralistic values were and how destructive divisive politics can become and hurt society. The two leaders also talked about how important are inclusive democracies, besides jobs creation. Photograph: Manvender Vashist/PTI Photo IMAGE: Prime Minister Narendra Modi shakes hands with his Canadian counterpart Justin Trudeau before their meeting at Hyderabad House in New Delhi on Friday. Photograph: Manvender Vashist/PTI Photo Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Canadian counterpart Justin Trudeau on Friday held extensive talks, exploring ways to boost ties in several key areas, including trade and energy. Trudeau was accorded a ceremonial welcome at the Rashtrapati Bhavan. After holding talks with his Canadian counterpart, Modi made it clear that those challenging India's sovereignty, unity and integrity cannot be tolerated, seen as a veiled reference to the Canadian government's soft approach towards the Khalistan issue. Modi also asserted that there cannot be any place for those who misuse religion for political motives and promote separatism. "We discussed the entire gamut of bilateral partnership, and identified concrete steps to boost cooperation. We agreed to strengthen our defence cooperation," Modi said, while noting that terrorism and extremism were threats for democratic countries such as India and Canada. Trudeau's 'pro-Khalistan' approach is being criticised by many including Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh, who raised the issue with the Canadian prime minister during a meeting. On his part, Trudeau had assured Singh that his country does not support separatism in India or elsewhere. Modi made it clear that those who challenge India's sovereignty, unity and integrity cannot be tolerated. After extensive talks between Modi and Trudeau, the two sides inked six pacts, including on energy cooperation. Modi, following his nearly two-hour long meeting with Trudeau, said during a joint media event with the Canadian prime minister, that it is important that the two countries work together to fight terrorism. Observing that Trudeau has visited various parts of India in last few days, Modi said the Canadian leader must have experienced the diversity of the country. On his part, Trudeau described India as a natural partner for commercial cooperation. Modi said they have also asked the officials of their countries to re-double their efforts to finalise the bilateral free trade agreement. Earlier, External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj called on the Canadian prime minister and discussed various issues of mutual interest. 'Picture speaks for itself! EAM @SushmaSwaraj had a warm meeting with the Prime Minister of Canada @JustinTrudeau and discussed ways to strengthen and deepen our partnership,' Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) spokesperson Raveesh Kumar tweeted and posted a picture of the two leaders. Heres a fresh collection of offbeat, quirky stories from around the world. >> I avocaDO! People are using avocados to propose Millennials have moved on from avocado toast and are on to their latest bizarre trend of Avocado proposals where people are actually shoving diamond rings into the center of the fruit. Couples are taking their love for the green superfood to a whole new level and instead of classic ring boxes people are carving the pit out of the avocado and replacing it with an engagement ring to pop the question to their partners. While some people are completely repulsed by the idea others are totally on board and avocado proposals are popping up all over social media with people shoving a diamond ring into the gooey core of the fruit. >> Plane passenger uses overhead vent to dry underwear A surprised passenger on an international flight captured video of a woman using the overhead air conditioning vent to dry a pair of underwear. The video, recorded Feb. 14 aboard a Ural Airlines flight from Antalya, Turkey, to Moscow, shows the woman holding the pair of panties over her head to dry under the air vent. A witness told Russian media other passengers were watching the woman as she held the underwear over her head for about 20 minutes, but no one confronted her or complained to the flight crew. People looked with surprise and bewilderment, but all were silent, a witness told Russias 1 Tula TV. >> The cat with two faces This adorable cat was born with a flawless split of grey and black fur divided almost perfectly down the middle of her face. The rare markings on the feline pictured at her home in France, are thought to be the result of two embryos fusing together. She has both light grey and black fur on her face, separated evenly in a remarkably straight line. While the exact cause of this pets striking appearance is not known, other felines with this mysterious look are known as chimera cats, which are the result of the merging of two fertilised eggs, or two early embryos in the mothers womb. >> Norwegian skier wins Mustache Games for magnificent facial hair Robert Johansson soared through sub-zero winds to win ski-jumping bronze at the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics but most of the talk afterwards focused on his magnificent ginger mustache. The 27-year-olds eye-catching facial hair quivered as he flew into third place in the normal hill event, where spectators and even competitors shivered in temperatures of -12 C but felt much colder with a fierce wind gusting off the mountain. The blustery conditions caused numerous delays when the jumpers finally finished well beyond midnight on Saturday night. Johansson however was warmed by the rabid attention on his handlebar mustache. I started it two years ago and its been good for me, he told reporters, smiling, after grabbing the first Olympic medal of his career. I started getting compliments for it and just went with it. In contrast to the bare-bones price of $115 million for each Rafale fighter, the F-35A cost $94.6 million, reports Ajai Shukla. In what would be a huge capability jump, the Indian Air Force is increasingly interested in procuring the American F-35 Lightning II for its depleting fighter fleet. The IAF top brass is formally requesting a classified briefing by the F-35's prime builder, Lockheed Martin, on the capabilities of the sophisticated, fifth-generation fighter developed under the United States Joint Strike Fighter programme. The US government has not formally offered the F-35 to India. A classified briefing would require formal clearance from the US department of defence (the Pentagon) and the state department. The grant of such a clearance would be an important first step towards permitting the sale of F-35s to India. It is learnt the IAF wants to procure 126 of the variant called F-35A -- the air force version of the fighter that incorporates 'conventional take-off and landing'. Another variant, the F-35B, incorporating 'short take-off and vertical landing', has been developed for the US Marine Corps. A third version, developed for the US Navy, incorporates 'catapult assisted take-off but arrested recovery.' The Indian Navy, which has never ruled out operating the F-35 off Indian aircraft carriers, received a briefing on the F-35 as far back as 2010, Lockheed Martin official Orville Prins told this correspondent. However, at that stage, the F-35 was still grappling with serious development challenges. The F-35's affordability is also attractive for New Delhi. In contrast to the bare-bones price of $115 million for each Rafale fighter (with India-specific enhancements, spares, logistics and weapons all extra), the F-35A cost customers $94.6 million last February. Lockheed Martin says it will reduce the cost to $80 million by 2020. A fifth-generation fighter is characterised by a 'stealth design', making it far more difficult for radar to detect; 'supercruise', or the ability to fly at supersonic speeds without engaging engine afterburners; and highly networked avionics that detect and engage enemy aircraft using a range of sensors and weapons across the battle-space. The only true fifth-generation fighters in service are the US Air Force's F-22 Raptor and the F-35 Lightning II. China is developing two stealth fighters -- the J-20 Chengdu and the J-31 Shenyang. Russia is developing its own fifth-generation fighter, the PAK-FA, and has offered India a partnership role in developing the PAK-FA into the eponymous Fifth Generation Fighter Aircraft -- FGFA -- for the IAF. Negotiations on roles and costing are over, but the Indian defence ministry is yet to accept. The United Progressive Alliance's defence minister A K Antony had ruled out buying the F-35, stating that India would meet its short-term requirement of fifth-generation fighters with the FGFA. For the IAF's long term needs, the Defence Research and Development Organisation is developing the advanced medium combat aircraft. Sources close to the Pentagon say India would not be sold the F-35 as long as it is partnering Russia in the FGFA co-development project. That is because Washington would guard against the leakage of F-35 technology into the FGFA. Senior officers say the IAF is not enthused about the FGFA project. They point out the F-35 is further advanced in development and has already entered service with the USAF and six or seven air forces of American allies. For Lockheed Martin, an Indian request for the F-35 would create a dilemma. The US company would rather have the IAF buy the F-16 Block 70, which it has offered to build in India in partnership with Tata Advanced Systems Ltd. For Lockheed Martin, that would keep alive the F-16 assembly line, which has long functioned from Fort Worth, Texas, and has now moved temporarily to Greenville, South Carolina, where it is building a $2.8 billion order from Bahrain for 19 F-16V fighters. The Fort Worth facility has been made over to building the F-35, of which over 3,000 are already on order. Meanwhile, the assembly line in India would build new F-16s for the IAF, as well as for orders that Lockheed Martin expects from southeast Asian and central European countries. It would also provide overhaul and upgrade facilities for the estimated 3,000 F-16 fighters in service worldwide, in some 25 air forces. Lockheed Martin calculates that an Indian line would benefit, in the medium term, from new fighter orders worth $16 billion, and $6.5 billion in upgrading old F-16s. Simultaneously, American jobs would get a lease of life, as F-16 suppliers in the US would continue feeding into the integration line in India. At least 50 per cent of the F-16s by value would continue to be made in America. For all these reasons, Lockheed Martin is painting the F-16 Block 70 sale to the IAF as a stepping stone to eventually obtaining the F-35. While the US has supplied the F-35 only to close allies, Washington insiders say India's recent designation as a major defence partner, and a groundswell of goodwill towards New Delhi, make conditions propitious for an Indian request. An indicator is the recent permission granted for the sale to India of the Sea Guardian unmanned aerial vehicle -- so far sold only to close allies. In 2011, the influential US Senate Armed Services Committee requested the Pentagon to study the feasibility of an F-35 sale to India. Senators John Cornyn (co-chair of the Senate India Caucus) and Joseph Lieberman spearheaded the proposal. But US officials in Washington also complain about fatigue at New Delhi's tardiness in following up discussions with formal requests. The mood in the Pentagon, say these officials, is: 'Let New Delhi ask for the F-35. Then we'll take things forward.' The defence ministry and the IAF have not responded to an e-mailed request for comments. Photograph: Kind Courtesy www.f35.com Why did Kamal Haasan name the leaders he did? IMAGE: Kamal Haasan at the House of Kalam in Rameswaram, Tamil Nadu, February 21, 2018. Photograph: Diamond Babu Tamil movie superstar Kamal Haasan launched his long-awaited political party, the Makkal Needhi Maiam, on Wednesday, February 21, in Madurai, during the course of which he was asked who were the leaders he admired and took inspiration from. Hassan promptly named them. 'I like Gandhi, Ambedkar, Nehru, Kejriwal, Naidu, Pinarayi and even Obama. All those who work (for the people).' Surprisingly, or maybe not, there was no Tamil leader in his list. No Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam supremo M Karunanidhi, who Haasan has often spoken of highly in the past, no poet Subramaniya Bharati, whose revolutionary songs he has mouthed on screen, no E V R Ramaswamy Naicker, whose Dravida movement is the fount of the rational thought Haasan espouses. No A P J Abdul Kalam either, considering that the former President's home was his first halt on Wednesday morning. Incidentally, there were no women either in the list. But why did Kamal Haasan name the leaders he did? Here's a quick ready reckoner. Mahatma Gandhi Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images. What many may not know is that, at least sartorially, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi transformed into the beloved Gandhiji in Tamil Nadu. In Madurai, to be precise, the temple town where Kamal Haasan transformed from an actor to politician on Wednesday. 'On 22nd September 1921, Gandhi made a momentous decision to change his attire. From the elaborate Gujarati attire, he decided on a simple dhoti and shawl. This epoch-making decision was taken by Gandhiji in Madurai after he decided that he has to work for and with the with the poor people of India and how can he identify with them if he wears different clothes from them,' Chennai-based journalist S Balakrishnan writes on the Press Information Bureau Web site (external link). 'He stuck to this dress code even on his trip abroad and until his very last moment! And he never regretted his decision.' B R Ambedkar The father of the Constitution has a special resonance in Tamil Nadu, with its almost 20 per cent Dalit population. With the Dravida movement empowering the intermediate and other backward castes, the lot of the Dalits has been left to organisations like the Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi and Puthiya Thamilagam, which have not really made much headway. Clashes between the dominant Thevars and Dalits are quite common, and in many villages the community is still discriminated against. The landscape is dotted with Ambedkar statues, but sadly, most of them are encaged -- to guard against desecration. Jawaharlal Nehru Photograph: Baron/Getty Images The first prime minister of independent India may not score highly with the current dispensation, but there are millions who revere the man for what he was. A visionary and a democrat. Arvind Kejriwal Photograph: Vijay Verma/PTI Photo The Aam Aadmi Party is a case study for anyone who aims to form a political party in a region that is dominated by giants. Arvind Kejriwal's vanquishing of both the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Congress in Delhi remains an inspiration for many newbies. Facing a similar situation in Tamil Nadu, where the polity is divided between the two Dravida giants -- the AIADMK and the DMK -- Kamal Haasan did right in having the Delhi CM on the dais. Nara Chandrababu Naidu Photograph: Reuters On Wednesday, while addressing the media in Rameswaram after visiting the House of Kalam, Kamal Haasan said the Andhra Pradesh chief minister had called him the previous night to offer advice on the needs of the people. In an interview in November, Haasan had said he was a fan of the CM. The Deccan Chronicle newspaper quotes a senior Andhra bureaucrat as saying, 'Mr Kamal Haasan has been following the functioning of our leader since a long time and he has always admired the style of functioning and commitment of Mr Naidu.' Naidu's unhappiness with the BJP, the senior partner in the National Democratic Alliance, is well known. So could the mutual admiration and respect transform into something concrete as elections approach? Pinarayi Vijayan Photograph: Sreeram Selvaraj When Kamal Hassan first let it be known that politics was an option with him last year, Kerala's Marxist chief minister was the first political leader he called on, in September 2017. But their fondness for each other went beyond that. When the actor had won France's Chevalier award in 2016, Vijayan had waxed eloquent about the actor on Facebook, leading him to respond that the Marxist was not just the chief minister of another state, but 'my chief minister'. 'Ask any cinema-going Malayali which state I belong to,' Kamal Haasan had said. No wonder Vijayan sent a video message congratulating him on the launch of the Makkal Needhi Maiam on Wednesday. Barack Obama Photograph: Dennis Brack-Pool/Getty Images The former US president has a legion of fans, especially among the liberal, progressive set. And by including Obama in his list, Kamal Haasan leaves no one in any doubt over his brand of politics. U.S. President Donald Trump's daughter Ivanka will not after all meet female North Korean defectors when she visits South Korea for the closing ceremony of the Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang. Ivanka had wanted to meet female defectors in their teens and 20s, according to a campaigner for human rights in the North. She was to visit a school for North Korean defectors in Seoul but canceled at the last minute. U.S. officials said reports that Ivanka will meet defectors are "incorrect" and it would have been too difficult to schedule the meeting. The campaigner said the school, which is subsidized by the government, "told the U.S. side that a meeting between students and Ivanka would be problematic." The government and GM began a tug of war on Thursday to keep the U.S. automaker in Korea. Seoul hopes to keep the ailing Korean subsidiary open to save jobs, and GM wants to squeeze as much money as possible out of the government in return. GM has reportedly asked for a bailout of up to US$1 billion, but the government insists that it clear up its opaque management practices first and guarantee future investment. Finance Minister Kim Dong-yeon told reporters GM must behave responsibly and come up with a sustainable management plan, and the GM union, shareholders and creditors must share responsibility. There are two variables facing in the negotiations -- how much money GM intends to put into the Korean subsidiary and the results of the government's due diligence, which Kim said will take less than the usual three months. GM's head of overseas operations, Barry Engle, met with government officials Thursday to convey the automaker's demands. He called on state-run Korea Development Bank to invest W650 billion into GM Korea in exchange for the U.S. automaker swapping $2.7 billion in loans to the Korean unit into equity (US$1=W1,086). GM also asked KDB to buy its shares as it will invest $2.8 billion over the next 10 years. Another request was to turn Bupyeong in Incheon, where GM's main Korean plant is, into a foreign investment zone offering more benefits. The total amount GM is demanding surpasses W1.6 trillion. But the government is not open to having KDB make new investments in GM. "The decision depends on whether a company's headquarters is sincerely interested in reviving a subsidiary," a government official said. "GM says it will invest $2.8 billion over the next 10 years, but we'll see just how credible that offer is." The government and KDB insist that the owners of Korean businesses in restructuring put up their own money first before asking for government bailouts, extended debt-repayment deadlines and other aid. But the government is skeptical after GM decided to shut down one of its three plants here and lay off more than 2,100 workers. Some industry watchers believe a realistic option would be to have GM headquarters guarantee any new investments or loans KDB provides for the Korean unit. Jordan: Ease Travel for Gaza Palestinians Publisher Human Rights Watch Publication Date 16 May 2016 Cite as Human Rights Watch, Jordan: Ease Travel for Gaza Palestinians, 16 May 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5a8fe1164.html [accessed 17 September 2021] 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. 16 May 2016 Jordan: Ease Travel for Gaza Palestinians Restrictions Block Educational, Economic Opportunity (Amman) - Jordan should facilitate travel for Palestinians seeking to travel from Gaza to third countries, Human Rights Watch said in a letter released today to Prime Minister Abdullah Ensour. A recent apparent tightening of criteria for transit has blocked access to professional and educational opportunities abroad, including for Gaza's young people struggling with the effects of an Israeli-imposed closure. A sign is seen at the Erez border crossing between Israel and northern Gaza Strip. Israel limits travel via the Erez Crossing to "exceptional humanitarian cases." 2014 Reuters "Jordan has gone to great lengths to accept and meet the needs of large numbers of refugees from across the region," said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director. "Since last August, however, Palestinians from Gaza have found it increasingly difficult to get permission to transit through Jordan to travel abroad, without any explanation for the change." For at least the last decade, the Gaza Strip has been mostly closed. Israel does not allow Gaza authorities to operate an airport or seaport and limits travel via the Erez Crossing between Gaza and Israel to "exceptional humanitarian cases." Egypt, which controls the Gaza Strip's other land border, opens the Rafah Crossing just a few times per year, allowing for only 9 percent of Palestinians' travel needs, as measured in the first half of 2013, when Rafah was open regularly. As a result, Palestinians in Gaza are virtually barred from traveling abroad. Human Rights Watch has documented how these restrictions violate Israel's obligations under international humanitarian law and human rights law, including the right of Palestinians in Gaza to freedom of movement, and that Egypt's measures have unjustifiably increased the restrictions on freedom of movement. As an exception to its no-travel rules, Israel allows up to 100 Palestinians from Gaza to travel abroad each week by crossing from Gaza to Israel and then the West Bank and Jordan, including students and professionals seeking opportunities abroad. Most have visas to a third country and/or foreign residence or citizenship. Until recently, Jordan played a helpful role in facilitating this travel. Subject to a security screening, Jordan's Interior Ministry routinely issued "no-objection" letters that permitted Palestinians from Gaza to transit from the West Bank to foreign countries via Jordan. However, since August 2015, individuals, lawyers, and human rights organizations have found that such request have largely been refused by Jordan or received no response. Before August, said the human rights group Gisha, which assists residents of Gaza seeking Israeli permission to travel, it was hearing of virtually no refusals. From August through January 2016, however, 58 people contacted Gisha for help, saying their requests for Jordanian permission to transit had been rejected or that they had received no answer. For these students, professionals, and family members, the refusal meant they could not travel. Palestinian and foreign educational institutions told Human Rights Watch that they too were unable to get Jordanian permission for students and faculty to transit through Jordan. Even senior businesspersons reported being unable to receive permission. In one case that Human Rights Watch documented, a young woman missed an opportunity to attend a computer application competition in Qatar because her request for transit via Jordan went unanswered for months. In another case involving a research assistant employed by Human Rights Watch, the request was refused with no explanation. Two weeks later, following Human Rights Watch's intervention, the Jordanian authorities approved the request, which was helpful but raises questions about why she was refused in the first place. Human Rights Watch asked Jordan to facilitate transit for Gaza residents. The Jordanian authorities should also ensure that their decisions are transparent, are not arbitrary, and take into consideration the human rights of those affected, Human Rights Watch said. In cases of refusal, it said, the authorities should give reasons and give applicants a chance to request reconsideration. "Those seeking transit from Gaza are seeking just that - transit," Whitson said. "Jordan certainly should control its borders but it should continue to recognize the special duties it has toward those whose freedom of movement from Gaza it has facilitated until now." The Jordanian Authorities have not responded to the Human Rights Watch letter. Copyright notice: Copyright, Human Rights Watch Israel: Record-Low in Gaza Medical Permits Publisher Human Rights Watch Publication Date 13 February 2018 Cite as Human Rights Watch, Israel: Record-Low in Gaza Medical Permits, 13 February 2018, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/5a8fe5604.html [accessed 17 September 2021] 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. 13 February 2018 Israel: Record-Low in Gaza Medical Permits 54 Died in 2017 Awaiting Israeli Permit A staff member at the Erez Crossing between Israel and Gaza waits during the transfer of a 6-day-old baby from Gaza to a hospital in the city of Nablus in the occupied West Bank for medical treatment. Israeli authorities approved permits for medical appointments for only 54 percent of Palestinians seeking vital medical treatment outside of Gaza in 2017. 2015 Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP) (Jerusalem) - The record-low rate of permits issued by Israel for Palestinians seeking vital medical treatment outside Gaza underlines the urgent need for Israel to end its decade-long closure of the Gaza Strip, Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP), and Physicians for Human Rights Israel (PHRI) said today in a joint statement. Record-high delays by the Palestinian Authority (PA) in 2017 in issuing required approvals and Egypt's continued closure of the Rafah border crossing with Gaza have further restricted movement and caused additional suffering. Israeli authorities approved permits for medical appointments for only 54 percent of those who applied in 2017, the lowest rate since the World Health Organization (WHO) began collecting figures in 2008. WHO reported that 54 Palestinians, 46 of whom had cancer, died in 2017 following denial or delay of their permits. "We're seeing Israel increasingly deny or delay access to potentially life-saving cancer and other treatment outside Gaza, with shockingly high numbers of Palestinian patients subsequently dying, while Gaza's healthcare system - subjected to half a century of occupation and a decade of blockade - is decreasingly able to meet the needs of its population," said Aimee Shalan, CEO of MAP. Israel should lift the unlawful sweeping restrictions on the freedom of movement of people from Gaza, most critically those with significant health problems, the organizations said. For the last two decades, and especially since 2007 when Israel imposed a land, air, and sea blockade on Gaza, Israel has kept Gaza mostly closed, unlawfully depriving its population of basic rights. The United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), among others, have declared this policy "collective punishment" and called for Israel to lift its closure. Israel controls all Gaza access, with the exception of the Rafah crossing via the Egyptian border, and all crossings between Gaza and the West Bank, including the border between the West Bank and Jordan. The Israeli authorities do not allow Palestinians in Gaza to reopen their airport or build a seaport, leaving Palestinians dependent on foreign ports for travel abroad. Travel through the Erez Crossing, Gaza's passenger crossing to Israel, the West Bank, and the outside world, is limited to what the Israeli military calls "exceptional humanitarian cases," meaning mainly those with significant health issues and their companions, and prominent businesspeople. The gradual decline in Israel's issuance of medical permits, from 92 percent approval of applications in 2012 to 88.7 percent in 2013, 82.4 percent in 2014, 77.5 percent in 2015, 62.07 percent in 2016, and 54 percent in 2017 according to the WHO, indicates that Israel has increasingly restricted travel even for "exceptional humanitarian cases." In 2017, travel via Erez was less than 1 percent of the travel recorded in September 2000. Palestinians from Gaza missed at least 11,000 scheduled medical appointments in 2017 after Israeli authorities denied or failed to respond in time to applications for permits. Research by Al Mezan, supported by MAP, into the cases of 20 Palestinians who died after missing hospital appointments due to denied or delayed travel permits found that 14 had cancer, nine of whom were women. PHRI has highlighted how women in Gaza with cancer have faced heightened obstacles to accessing medical care and consequently spent energy fighting bureaucracy rather than their illness. The significant decline runs counter to the ever-increasing health needs in Gaza. Gaza's 2 million people endure what the UN labels "a protracted humanitarian crisis." Amid widespread poverty and unemployment, at least 10 percent of young children are stunted by chronic malnutrition, up to half of all medicines and medical items in Gaza are completely depleted or below one month's supply, and chronic electricity shortages have caused officials to cut health and other essential services. The three Israeli military offensives on Gaza since 2008 have also taken a heavy toll on essential infrastructure and further debilitated Gaza's health system and economy. In light of the control Israel effectively exercises over the lives and welfare of the people of Gaza, Israel continues to maintain ultimate responsibility to ensure their well-being under the law of occupation, as the ICRC and UN, among others, have recognized. "It's unconscionable that Israel prevented so many critically ill people from accessing care that might have saved their lives," said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. "Israel's continued control over movement into and out of Gaza creates obligations to facilitate - not thwart - humanitarian access." Palestinians in Gaza require referral permits to access the more advanced health care in East Jerusalem and elsewhere in the West Bank, as well as in Israel. The health services most commonly requiring referral out of Gaza are for oncology, paediatrics, cardiology and heart problems, and haematology. The Israeli authorities state that they can process priority permits in one day, although the typical waiting time averages two weeks, while "regular" cases require 23 days, and often fail to meet this timetable. WHO has deemed the ensuing process "neither transparent nor timely," and the UN coordinator for humanitarian aid and development activities in the occupied Palestinian territory has stated that a "minefield of interviews, paperwork, opaque procedures, and logistical hurdles stand between a cancer patient and his or her urgent treatment." The Palestinian Authority's financial approval of referrals for those in need of essential medical treatment in Gaza also fell in 2017, with at least one subsequent death reported. While the PA approved about 2,000 applications in each of the first three months, this fell to under 500 in June, before increasing to more than 2,000 later in the year amid efforts at Fatah-Hamas reconciliation, according to WHO. Additionally, the Palestinian authorities' reduction of essential services to the Gaza Strip between July and December 2017 - including electricity and medical supplies - also undermined Palestinians' right to health. Egypt has kept the Rafah crossing mostly closed for the population in Gaza since 2013, which contributed to restricting access to health care. Before July 2013, more than 4,000 Palestinians traveled monthly via Rafah crossing for health-related reasons. As a state bordering a territory with a protracted humanitarian crisis, Egypt should facilitate humanitarian access for the population. Nevertheless, ultimate responsibility remains with Israel, the occupying power. "The Israeli government's restrictions on movement are directly connected to patient deaths and compounded suffering as ill patients seek permits. These practices form part of the closure and permit regime that prevents patients from a life of dignity, and violates the right to life," Issam Younis, director of Al Mezan, said. "The closure system must be abolished so that patients have safe access to healthcare in Palestinian hospitals in the occupied Palestinian territories and elsewhere. The victims and their families must have their right to justice and redress upheld." Copyright notice: Copyright, Human Rights Watch 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. As festivals near, govt stresses on vaccination, following Covid protocols, responsible festivities Noting that there is an overall stabilisation in COVID-19 cases, India govt urged people to be careful in the coming two-three months to retain the gains achieved in the pandemic management so far. Daleville, VA -- (ReleaseWire) -- 02/23/2018 --Executive Security Guards has been synonymous with trusted, reliable private investigation services for 12 years. Today, they provide international expertise in all forms of corporate investigations that take place inside and outside one's company. Whether it is policy violations or Ponzi schemes, industrial espionage or embezzle, policy violations or blackmail, the experts can handle any cases with personalized care and attention. Over the years, they have been able to form a dream team that delivers results before long. 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Lucy Tao, a senior at Narragansett High School, recently organized a shoe drive benefiting orphaned children in the Dominican Republic as part of her senior project. Taos efforts resulted in 620 pairs of shoes being donated to the cause, with the majority coming from the Saint Thomas More parish. A Place for All Conservatives to Speak Their Mind. COUNCIL repairs company Fortem revealed it aims to create more than 30 new jobs in Rotherham as union leaders prepared to hold a vote on strike action over plans to make nearly 20 staff redundant. Fortem, which is also planning to open a training academy in the town, said it would be hiring 34 later in the year as its Rotherham office is transformed into a northern operational hub. But the news came just days after trade union Unite said it was preparing to ballot members for industrial action after the decision by Fortem, which carried out maintenance and repairs on Rotherham council housing, to derecognise the union. Angry workers contacted the Advertiser last month to raise the alarm after learning jobs at Fortems Parkgate call centre were under threat. They said between 16 and 19 were at risk, but Fortem said the redundancies amounted to 13-and-a-half full-time roles. Fortem said this week that its Dodds Close base would be upgraded to help the company fulfil contracts in Rotherham, Sheffield, Doncaster, Barnsley and Hull and the move would open up jobs in commercial, operations and supply chain roles, as well as spots for six new apprentices and six management trainees. Its 4Life Training Academy at premises in Dinnington, due to open in the spring, is expected to create another six jobs. Fortem managing director Mick Williamson said: Turning Rotherham into a regional hub for our activities in the north and investing in a new academy that thousands will use to learn lifelong skills underlines our long-term aim to drive growth across South Yorkshire. Fortem said moving back office functions, including call centre operations and supervisory positions, to a new smart hub in Hitchin, Hertfordshire, would improve service and reliability. But the resulting axing of jobs in Rotherham was angrily attacked by Unite, which said it would lobby Rotherham Borough Council to reverse the decision. Regional officer Shane Sweeting called the unions derecognition an outrageous attack on union rights. He said the union had been seeking to find alternatives to redundancy and to extend the pool from which workers could seek voluntary redundancy in order to avoid compulsory redundancies. Mr Sweeting added: Unite will be using all avenues open to it, whether that is industrial or legal, to get this decision overturned. Fortem is supplying services on behalf of Rotherham Council and it is completely unacceptable that council taxpayers money is being used to derecognise the union rather than repair tenants homes. Unite will be lobbying the council to apply pressure on Fortem to reverse this decision. If industrial action does go ahead, tenants will be denied vital repairs and maintenance projects will be delayed, purely as a result of Fortems misguided and ill-judged attack on Unite. Mr Sweeting said Unite would hold a mass meeting of its members at Fortem and begin the process of balloting for industrial action. He said Fortem had refused to enter into any meaningful consultation with Unite over the redundancies and, when challenged, the firm had replied that the union had been derecognised. A Fortem spokesman said this week that a full consultation process was underway to find alternatives to confirming roles as redundant, including identifying redeployment opportunities. The Antwerp World Diamond Centre (AWDC), the industry organization representing the interests of 1,600 diamond companies in Antwerp, has elected Nishit (Bali) Parikh as its new President, replacing outgoing President Stephane Fischler. This was announced in a press release distributed by the AWDC on Thursday. The Board of Directors also elected Freddy Inzlicht and Samir Mehta as Vice Presidents, respectively representing the bourses and the trade. Stephane Fischler has been a steady and guiding presence at AWDC for the past eleven years, serving first as its Vice President and then, since 2012, as its President. His commitment to the organization has been unwavering, and he has been a major part of its success as the leading trade organization in the diamond industry. After more than five years as President, Fischler will now hand the torch back to Nishit (Bali) Parikh, former AWDC President (2010-2012) and CEO of one of the world's leading diamond companies, Diarough. Stephane Fischlers engagement in the global diamond trade extends far beyond the AWDC. In addition to being a partner in the international company Fischler Diamonds, he is currently an officer in multiple industry organizations. Due to his recent election as President of the World Diamond Council, an organization of which he is a founding member, he believes the time has come to hand over the reins. His successor, Nishit Parikh, has presided over the exponential growth of the business started by his father in Antwerp back in 1975, and is widely respected by the Antwerp diamond community. The Board of Directors also elected Freddy Inzlicht and Samir Mehta as Vice-Presidents, respectively representing the Bourses and the trade. On behalf of the AWDC, its Board of Directors and management, I would like to thank Stephane for his leadership at AWDC and his dedication to the Antwerp diamond trade, says AWDC CEO Ari Epstein. His steadfast commitment to safeguarding the sustainability of the diamond industry as a whole, and in particular the Antwerp trade, its manufacturing infrastructure and its participants both large and small, has contributed in maintaining Antwerps leading position. He leaves a strong legacy for the AWDC. Welcoming Nishit Parikh as the new President of AWDC, Epstein commented, Continuity, stability and a formidable personality are all essential elements in the diamond trade, and Bali (Parikh) embodies all these qualities. We are very pleased to welcome him back as President of the AWDC, and have every confidence he will be a strong leader in the important years ahead, backed by the support of the incoming Vice Presidents and Board veterans Freddy Inzlicht and Samir Mehta. Alex Shishlo, Editor in Chief of the European Bureau, Rough&Polished Berlin will host BlockShow Europe 2018 on May 28 and 29. One of the biggest international conferences of blockchain , it will discuss Governmental Initiatives, insights from Central Banks, latest updates on worldwide Blockchain regulations and innovations in both European and Global Blockchain scenes. Described as "Window to the Global Blockchain World," the conference will address the most pressing questions of the Blockchain community. Organized by Cointelegraph, the conference will also present cases of utilizing the Blockchain technology in the most trending global sectors. Experts will share their ideas about how Blockchain transforms and enhances the major industries of 2018. The speakers include Llew Claasen, Venture Capitalist and Executive Director at Bitcoin Foundation; Milan Sallaba, Partner at Deloitte Consulting; and Ahmed Syed, Lead, Innovation Office at SAP, besides representatives of Central Banks and governments. Organizers said more than 3,000 delegates will attend BlockShow Europe 2018 and over 150 companies will exhibit their projects. BlockShow CEO Addy Crezee said the gathering will provide opportunities for startups to get valuable connections they need among Blockchain celebrities and Investors, so they can establish partnerships. Blockchain projects can present themselves and and raise funds. "Those who want to make announcement to the world are absolutely welcome to make it from the stage of BlockShow." Anna Sergius, head of Product & Operations of the BlockShow conference, said the German city was chosen because Berlin is the European capital of Blockchain. Top Blockchain experts claim 2018 will be the year of global Blockchain regulations. For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com Business News Canadian stocks were flat again Thursday, as rising oil prics failed to spur gains in the broader market. The TSX Composite Index was down 15 points to 15,508, unable to extend comeback from recent 4-month lows. CIBC (CM.TO) reported a solid quarterly profit that beat expectations, and hiked its dividend. This is a good sign for the rest of the ?five majors banks. Shares rose fractionally. Grocery chain Loblaw (L.TO) is warnings of serious headwinds in the wake of its bread scandal. The company posted a decent quarterly profit but booked a $107 million charge related to the price fixing scandal. Auto parts maker Magna beat profit estimates thanks to higher sales in Europe. Gildan (GIL.TO) said quarterly earnings fell, while SNC Lavelin (SNC.TO) profit rose. Barrick Gold (ABX.TO) said it remained the world's top gold producer. Oil futures were lower despite some bullish US inventories data. For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com Market Analysis The Islamic Republic of Iran is set to become the second U.S.-sanctions hit country to have its own state-backed cryptocurrency. The move follows Venezuela's launch of its own oil-backed cryptocurrency named Petro earlier in the week. Iran's Information and Communications Technology (ICT) Minister MJ Azari Jahromi made the announcement on Twitter following a meeting with the board of directors of state-owned Post Bank of Iran. Jahromi wrote on Twitter, "In a meeting of the board of directors of the post-bank on digital currency-based blockchains, it set out the necessary measures for the pilot implementation of the country's first digital currency, using the country's elite." "A pilot model for review and approval will be presented to the banking system of the country," he added. According to a report by Iran Front Page news, following Jahromi's public announcement on a state-backed digital currency, The Central Bank of Iran highlighted the "highly unreliable and risky" nature of cryptocurrency . It warned that Iranians may lose their financial assets in a space marked by extreme volatility and pyramid scheme-like businesses. The Central Bank of Iran is set to join a list of a few other countries such as Singapore, China, Russia, and the U.K., whose central banks are making moves to launch a state-backed digital currency. Like Venezuela, Iran has also been the target of U.S. financial and economic sanctions. The launch of the cryptocurrency by Iran is seen as a plan to ease the country's economic crisis, and circumvent U.S.-led sanctions. Meanwhile, Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro claimed its cryptocurrency Petro evoked overwhelming response on the first day on Tuesday and $735 million was raised within 20 hours of pre-sale. He hopes the introduction of Petro would help to ease the country's economic crisis, and circumvent sanctions. Venezuela's has been reeling under pressure of the US sanctions, falling oil revenue and the plunging value of its currency, the bolivar. For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com Business News Bitcoin is back below $10,000 after the market sentiment was hurt by the news that the US securities watchdog has charged a former crypto trading platform and its founder with fraud. In Switzerland, a project that attracted one of the biggest amount in an ICO in July has finally decided to launch its blockchain network and coin that were long delayed due to infighting. Here are some main news from the cryptocurrency market over the last 24 hours. Bitcoin Below $10,000 The biggest cryptocurrency Bitcoin continued to loose its shine for the second day, dropping below $10,000 again, reaching the lowest value in a week. All other major digital currencies also are in the downtrend. Bitcoin was priced at $9,802.04, down 9.9 percent, with a market cap of $165 billion. On Thursday, bitcoin had declined to $9,796.57, its lowest level in a week. The negative sentiments followed the SEC's charging of BitFunder, a former bitcoin-denominated platform, and its founder Jon Montroll with fraud. SEC Charges Former Bitcoin Exchange BitFunder, Founder With Fraud The Securities and Exchange Commission has charged BitFunder, a former bitcoin-denominated platform, and its founder Jon Montroll with fraud. The SEC's complaint, filed in federal district court in Manhattan, charges BitFunder and Montroll with violations of the anti-fraud and registration provisions of the federal securities laws. The complaint seeks permanent injunctions and disgorgement plus interest and penalties. The site reportedly shut down just one year after its 2012 launch. Read more... Tezos Foundation Aims For Coin Launch After Board Reogranisation The Zug, Swtizerland-based Tezos Foundation, which raised over $232 million in a crowdfunding initiative in July to develop a cryptocurrency and blockchain network, has reorganized its board which it hopes would help in the launch of its Tezos network and tezos coins. The launch had been delayed due to infighting between its three founders - Kathleen and Arthur Breitman, founders of the US-based Dynamic Ledger Solutions, and Johann Gevers, one of the founders of the Cryptovalley ecosystem in Zug and the CEO of Monetas, a digital payments company. The feud was apparently over the management of the funds raised. Readmore... Cryptocurrencies Fuel Cybercrime: Study Cryptocurrency is one of the key factors that fuel cybercrime, which cost the global $600 billion in 2017, or 0.8 percent of global GDP, a new report says. The report, based on a study conducted jointly by computer security giant McAfee and the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), points to the alarming magnitude of the global economic impact of cybercrime. The report, titled "The Economic Impact of Cybercrime: No Slowing Down" found that theft of intellectual property represents about one-fourth of the cost of cybercrime last year. The cost of cybercrime in the worldwide Internet economy is estimated at $4.2 trillion in 2016. Read more... Coinbase, Bitfinex Adopt New SegWit Protocol For Bitcoin Two of the leading cryptocurrency exchanges Coinbase and Bitfinex announced the adoption of support for Segregated Witness (SegWit) protocols for bitcoin (BTC) transactions on their platforms. The support for SegWit will see users of both the exchanges benefit from lower BTC fees and faster processing times. Coinbase and Bitfinex are among the largest trading platforms for bitcoin by volume. The Bitcoin community may be relieved by this news as they have complaining of high transaction fees and lower processing speed. Currently, not more than seven Bitcoin transactions per second can be processed globally, while major credit card operators process nearly 50,000 transactions per second. Read more... Four Arrested In Taiwan's First Bitcoin Robbery Police in Taiwan arrested four men charged with stealing bitcoin worth $170,000 or 5 million Taiwanese dollars, in what is described as the first robbery involving the cryptocurrency in the country. The incident happened in the central city of Taichung earlier this month, when a man was lured by three men in their early twenties, pretending to be interested in buying bitcoins. The robbers snatched the phone from the man and transferred 18 bitcoins worth 5 million Taiwanese dollar from the account in the phone. Read more... Current Prices As of 6.23 am ET on Friday, Bitcoin was down 1 percent at $10,100.09 and Ethereum was up 5.01 percent at $863.54 on Coinbase. For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com Business News Mobile trading app Robinhood on Thursday launched Bitcoin and Ethereum trading for the first set of customers of its Crypto platform. In a blog post, the company said all the investments will be free of commission. Robinhood plans to gradually give access to Robinhood customers residing in the US states of California, Massachusetts, Missouri, Montana, and New Hampshire. The company intends to launch crypto trading functionality in many more states later. Robinhood said its investors can monitor and track market data for 16 cryptocurrencies, which also include bitcoin cash, litecoin, and ripple, among others. It was on January 25 that the company announced Robinhood Crypto, its digital currency platform, which allows customers to monitor and invest in cryptocurrencies, options, stocks, and ETFs, all on the same platform. The US stocks brokerage app said it has 4 million users and well over $100 billion in transaction volume on brokerage platform, leading to over $1 billion in commissions saved in equity trades. This is higher than the 3 million users reported in November 2017. Palo Alto -based Robinhood, which offers a wide range of stock brokerage services, also introduced Robinhood Feed for its customers to discuss cryptocurrencies, news, and market swings, in real-time. The service is available to a limited number of people on the platform. Robinhood co-founder Vlad Tenev reportedly told earlier that the company was not offering exchange services, rather it would existing exchanges to facilitate trades, listing them in aggregate through the Robinhood app. For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com Business News Taiwanese police arrested four men charged with stealing Bitcoins worth $170,000 or 5 million Taiwanese dollars, in what is described as the first robbery involving the cryptocurrency in the country. The incident happened in a residential area in the central city of Taichung on February 10, when two men were lured by four men in their early twenties, pretending to be interested in buying bitcoins, local media reported. The two men showed the images of bitcoins on the phone. Robbers assaulted the duo asking them to transfer 18 bitcoins worth 5 million Taiwanese dollars to their account. Victims were forced to drink the strong liquor Kaoliang to give the impression to the police that it was only a drunken dispute between the men. Police made arrested the four men on different dates and at different locations. Physical violence in robberies involving cryptocurrencies are being reported across the world after the prices of these currencies surged, making them attractive for thieves. In January, a Russian couple was held up by assailants at their apartment in the beach resort of Phuket, Thailand. They were detained for six hours until they transferred nearly $100,000 worth of Bitcoin into the criminals' online wallet. Thai police said the assailants apparently were a gang of Russian criminals and the stolen mobile phone was tracked to Malaysia after which the trail went cold. Similar incidents involving people being held hostage until they provide Bitcoin or other digital currency, have been reported in the UK and Ukraine. For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com Business News Turkey is also planning to launch a state-backed cryptocurrency to be named "Turkcoin" as several central banks make moves to launch a state-backed digital currency, according to a report by the Al-Monitor news agency. The report said Ahmet Kenan Tanrikulu, Deputy Chairman of the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) and former Industry minister, has drafted a detailed proposal for a state-controlled release of a "national bitcoin" called "Turkcoin." The MHP is an alliance partner of Turkey's ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). In the proposal, Tanrikulu provides for a state cryptocurrency in the form of "asset-backed security", which is secured by state assets in the form of company shares of Turkish Airlines, the Istanbul Stock Exchange, Turk Telekom etc. Tanrikulu insists that missing out on blockchain, the underlying of bitcoin, would be a serious mistake. "The world is advancing toward a new digital system. Turkey should create its own digital system and currency before it's too late," he told Al-Monitor. The proposal comes a few weeks after Turkey's Deputy Prime Minister Mehmet Simsek said during an interview with CNN Turkey that his government would seek to launch a national cryptocurrency. He added that the use of cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin remains illegal and risky in Turkey at present. The Turkish government has been unwelcoming towards cryptocurrencies and has likened it to a pyramid scheme and warned citizens to stay away. However, Tanrikulu argues that instead of dismissing cryptocurrencies, they should draw up legislation to regulate and control the market. Turkey's proposal for a state-backed cryptocurrency comes close on the heels of Iran also announcing similar plans as well as Venezuela launching its oil-backed cryptocurrency named Petro earlier in the week. However, unlike Turkey, both Iran and Venezuela are targets of U.S. financial and economic sanctions. The launch of the cryptocurrency by these two countries is seen as a plan to ease the country's economic crisis, and circumvent U.S.-led sanctions. Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro claimed its cryptocurrency Petro evoked overwhelming response on the first day on Tuesday and $735 million was raised within 20 hours of the pre-sale. For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com Business News (Agencia CMA Latam) - Brazilian state-owned companies Petrobras and Eletrobras relaunched the negotiations over a R$ 20 billion (US$ 6.14 billion) debt from the power company regarding gas supply from Petrobras. A source said that talks are underway, but that a possible agreement is still far from being reached, primarily due to the Eletrobras' cash situation and the payment method. According to that source, Petrobras wants a deal as soon as possible, as long as the agreement meets its demands. Eletrobras has already acknowledged part of the debt to the oil company - about R$ 10 billion which are being paid in installments. Eletrobras must negotiate a portion of the debt and another amount, of about R$ 3 billion, relating to administrative and legal proceedings. by Agencia CMA Latam For comments and feedback: editorial@rttnews.com Economic News What parts of the world are seeing the best (and worst) economic performances lately? Click here to check out our Econ Scorecard and find out! See up-to-the-moment rankings for the best and worst performers in GDP, unemployment rate, inflation and much more. A seven-year-old girl who has been missing since Wednesday has been found. This has just been confirmed by the Police in a statement. The Samoa Police Service would like to inform the general public that the 7 year old that was missing from her family since Wednesday is now being found and reunited with her family today, the 23rd of February 2018, the statement said. The S.P.S. would like to acknowledge the family who look after the young girl in the past couple of days. She is now being taken for a medical check to ensure she is fine as a precautionary measure. In the meantime, an investigation is underway as to why she left her family. A large part of the $10million bill Cyclone Gita has slapped the Electric Power Corporation (E.P.C.) with is really unnecessary. That much is undeniable. Its money that could have been easily saved had people used their common sense. That said, the responsibility goes both ways. Members of the public have an obligation to do their part to protect public assets. On the other hand, the Government through the E.P.C. has a role to ensure they monitor the laws they introduce so that they dont just become nice policies that end up collecting dust on the shelves. We are referring to a story titled Gita slaps E.P.C. with $10m bill published on the Thursday edition of the Samoa Observer this week. According to E.P.C. General Manager, Tologata Tile Tuimalealiifano, the cost covers the damage inflicted by the category 2 cyclone. The cost of the electricity lines affected by trees is between $5 and $6 million, he said. The low voltage wires were damaged badly because the trees fell on the electricity lines and that is why the E.P.C. is calling on families and villages not to plant any trees near the electricity poles and lines. If that advice was heeded there would actually be very minimal damages. $6million? Now we couldnt agree more with the point made by the General Manager. But lets pause here for a second. Who is responsible for ensuring those trees are cut as soon as they infringe on the power lines? Is it the Government or members of the public? If its members of the public, is there no fine for such things? If its the Government, are there no contractors out there whose job is to primarily monitor these trees? We say this for the simple reason that Cyclone Gita is not the first one to have struck this country. And yet every time a cyclone comes, one of the biggest challenges for E.P.C. is always dealing with these trees that fall on power lines. Which means whatever law exists out there if any - with regards to trees next to power lines, it is not existent in as far as monitoring goes. Now who should be blamed for that? These are questions we need to address now. Folks, $6million tala is not a small amount of money. That is a huge expenditure. Imagine if that was used to connect many of the families on the Village Voice to governments electricity supply? Yet according to the E.P.Cs General Manager, that money will now again be wasted to fix someones negligence and failure to do their job. This is unacceptable and it needs to change. We cannot continue down this path. Today, General Manager Tologata is calling for help from members of the public. This is where we need the assistance of the Village Councils on this specific issue, he said. And to be quite honest, the village that does heed this initiative will have no problems with electricity when natural disasters strike. In moving forward, the E.P.C. has asked the Attorney Generals Office to consider drafting a Bill to ban planting of trees next to electricity poles and lines. This law is mainly for the safety of the public because there are cases where families cut down a tree and it falls on a line, they will eventually call us, he said. Members of the public need to know that there is a huge impact of trees falling on electricity poles, in some cases, there is a possibility that this one tree will eliminate the power for the whole district. Yet families dont really consider the impact until something goes wrong. Well let Cyclone Gita be the last warning. We know when it comes to cyclones and natural disasters, trees will always affect power lines and thats a given. But we are talking about minimizing the damage and saving such an expense so that the money could be spent somewhere else where the need is more pressing. Everybody needs to be doing their part. Or do we need more laws to force us to use our brains? Have a restful weekend Samoa, God bless! The crew of a fishing vessel from Samoa are safe and well in American Samoa. The vessel owned by Luafutu Faamoana, of Poutasi, Falealili, was discovered at the Pago Pago dock area behind the Taoa building. Samoa News reported that the the alia with its three-member crew aboard drifted away from Samoa last Friday after they lost their way home. American Samoa Police Commissioner, Lei Sonny Thompson, confirmed the discovery in response to questions from Samoa News. D.P.S. officers who responded to the call searched the vessel for any contraband or illegal drugs and nothing was found inside, he is quoted as saying. The three fishermen who were aboard the vessel are in good health and are staying with a family in Laulii to await their travel documents before traveling home to Samoa. The Police Commissioner said that the owner of the fishing vessel has been contacted, and hes expected to arrive in American Samoa sometime this week to take his boat back to Samoa. D.P.S. also contacted the Immigration Office in regards to the three individuals who were on the vessel, and they are working together with the Samoa Consulate Generals Office in preparing travel document for the crew. According to the Police report, the crew stated that the vessel embarked from Poutasi Falealili to fish last Friday. However, when they prepared to return, they could not see any lights or land and realized they were lost. The operator of the vessel then let the boat drift on its own because they had little gas left and he hoped to reach land. It was when they observed lights nearby and discovered that they were heading to Tutuila island that they used the last of their gas to reach Pago Pago harbor. As soon as they docked, they approached an individual named Tuiasea of Pago Pago and requested help. The D.P.S. officers, the Marine Patrol Unit, and the Vice and Narcotics Unit responded to the call. The Immigration Office was contacted for assistance in documenting the crew, who had no identification on them. The fishing vessel belongs to Samoa a businessman. It was not possible to get a comment from the Owner of the fishing boat yesterday. The Japanese Embassy donated 46 variety of dental equipment to the Dental Clinic at Tupua Tamasese Meaole Hospital yesterday. The equipment included dental chairs, dental surgery unit, dental lab equipment, dental x-ray machines and many more sourced directly from Japan. Japans Ambassador to Samoa, Maugaoleatuolo Shinya Aoki, donated the equipment to the Minister of Health, Tuitama Leao Dr. Talalelei Tuitama, at the National Hospital of Samoa. Maugaoleatuolo said there would be a dental mobile vehicle arriving in August this year, which is also part of the donation. The donated equipment was requested by the Government of Samoa in the financial year 2015, in a cooperation agreement supported by the Japanese Supplementary Budget, said the Ambassador. He added that there was an exchange of notes signed in April 2016, between the Prime Minister Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi and former Ambassador of Japan to Samoa, Tuimaugaoalii Kazumasa Shibuta. This agreement promised a grant of $2 million Japanese Yen (US$1.9m, T$4.83m) under the Japans grant assistance aid for the Economic and Social Development program that was divided equally among the two projects requested at the time - the Samoa Fire and Emergency Services and Dental Care services. Maugaoleatuolo told the Samoa Observer that Japans standard of dental service is very high compared with the other regions and he hopes to see Samoa become the hub of dental services in the South Pacific. He added the Government of Japan looks forward to inviting medical doctors and dentists to study in Japan. I would like to see dentists come into this country and I would like to see many young Samoans come to visit not only in New Zealand and Australia, but in Japan too so they can study. He believes dental care is very important for our health. This year we aim to have mobile dentist services so that they can visit villages in rural areas, both in Upolu and Savaii, so that it can be convenient for villagers who cant make it to Apia, so we have committed to having mobile dental unit to arrive in August. Japans new strategy is open and free throughout the Oceania region because Asia/Pacific is a vital economic development area and we should mobilise and enhance the economic and social development of this country, so Japan has the responsibility of this area. He emphasized on the importance of a countrys social stability development, which requires economic and social development, hence their commitment to Samoa. The Minister of Health was thankful to the Japanese Government. We wish to express our appreciation to the Government of Japan for this much needed assistance, to note as of today, the Government of Japan has been assisting Samoas dental service for many years through its volunteer service program that includes dental specialists and dental technicians, Tuitama said. He was excited to announce that the first client to use the equipment provided by the Japanese Government was Prime Minister Tuilaepa. The Stanford professor who sued energy researchers who disputed his paper claiming the U.S. could switch to 100 percent renewable energy sources by 2050 has withdrawn his lawsuit. After weighing the pros and cons, I find that I have no more reason to fight this battle, Mark Z. Jacobson said in a 28-page statement linked to a message from his Twitter account Thursday afternoon. Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering, wrote a paper in 2015 that garnered attention and praise from environmental activists, saying a full transition of the countrys energy system to wind, hydropower and solar power by mid-century is technically and economically feasible with little downside. But an evaluation from 21 academics refuted the findings, saying Jacobsons analysis used invalid modeling tools, contained modeling errors, and made implausible and inadequately supported assumptions. Advertisement Jacobson countered by saying the competing analysis made its own mistakes and demanded a retraction. Then Jacobson made headlines in the scientific community by filing a $10 million lawsuit last year in Washington D.C. Superior Court, saying the critique damaged his reputation. The suit was filed against one of the papers authors Christopher Clack, a mathematician who is the chief executive of the grid modeling firm Vibrant Clean Energy and the prestigious National Academy of Sciences, which published Clacks paper. Oddly enough, the academy had published Jacobsons study as well. Both papers were peer-reviewed. Jacobson came under harsh criticism from some quarters who said the courts are not the proper venue to debate scientific and academic issues. Attorneys for the National Academy of Sciences argued in a filing last November that Jacobson was trying to silence those who disagree with him and his lawsuit amounted to little more than an unvarnished attempt to muzzle speech and end-run the First Amendment. In his statement Thursday, Jacobson defended filing the suit, saying Clack and the co-authors knowingly and/or recklessly published false statements of fact. In a brief interview with the Union-Tribune in December, Jacobson said Clack and others claim this is an issue of science and not of fact, and thats where we disagree. This is not a scientific debate. Its a factual debate. Advertisement Clack referred comments to his lawyers, who filed a motion Tuesday calling on the court to throw the case out. We note that Dr. Jacobson saw the light and made the tactical decision to dismiss the lawsuit, Drew Marrocco and Clinton Vince said in a statement. No doubt Dr. Jacobson based his decision on the high probability that his lawsuit would be dismissed. One of the 21 co-authors of the Clack paper is David Victor, a professor of international relations and co-director of the Laboratory on International Law and Regulation at UC San Diego. Victor was not named in the lawsuit but on Friday morning said he actually wanted to see Jacobson bring his case before a judge. Advertisement I think the scientific community needed a very clear signal from the legal system that this kind of behavior is totally inappropriate, Victor said. This is not how you resolve scientific disputes. At the end of his statement, Jacobson seemed to offer an olive branch, saying he appreciated the efforts of his supporters as well as his critics and hoped we can all move forward to solve the important problems we face. I particularly wish Dr. Clack well in his future endeavors. But the good feelings appeared short-lived. Ken Caldiera of the Carnegie Institution for Science, who was one of co-authors of the Clack paper, tweeted to Jacobson: Advertisement What about offering to reimburse legal expenses you have caused people to incur? Your lawsuit has caused real injury, costing people money and wasting their time. Jacobson responded: Ken, you still dont get it. It is YOU and your 20 coauthors who recklessly published false facts in three areas and refused to correct them. You have no-one to blame but yourself. Take responsibility and stop blaming others for your own actions. This story has been updated to include a quote on Friday from David Victor. Advertisement Advertisement Business rob.nikolewski@sduniontribune.com (619) 293-1251 Twitter: @robnikolewski ALSO Advertisement National Academy of Scienes want $10M lawsuit thrown out Stanford professor sues critics of his 100% renewable energy paper For the third time in three years, California energy officials are working to expand governance of the electric power grid to become a regional function covering as many as 14 states. Opponents of the plan, which would fundamentally rewrite how electricity is managed across most of the West, are once again steeling for a fight. Gov. Jerry Brown and key lawmakers are meeting with utility interests, labor groups and other stakeholders to build support for whats called a regional transmission organization, or RTO. Promoters of the expanded-grid concept say a multi-state system would allow California to sell excess renewable power like solar or wind to other states that rely on electricity generated by heavier polluters like coal and natural gas. They also say it will save money, create jobs and protect the environment. Advertisement Integrating clean, renewable energy on a coordinated Western grid more effectively uses resources and will reduce greenhouse gas emissions, said Kellie Smith, chief consultant to the Utilities and Energy Committee, chaired by Assemblyman Chris Holden, D-Pasadena. This also allows for a broader mix of renewables across the western region and provides tangible economic benefits by allowing for the export of unused renewable power, like solar, throughout the region, Smith said in an email. Holden has been circulating draft language for a bill that would create a regional grid to supplant the work of the California Independent System Operator, or CAISO, the Folsom-based nonprofit that now controls most of the states power grid. Members of the CAISO board of directors are appointed by the governor. The RTO would be overseen by a board that answers to the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Consumer advocates worry that marrying California to a regional system would cede state oversight of the transmission network to federal political appointees who do not always agree with California energy policies. After Minnesota banned the import of coal-generated electricity, for example, federal judges ruled that the Midwest Independent System Operator had jurisdiction over how power is created not state officials and reversed the ban. Based on the evidence presented so far, we dont see that turning the CAISO into a regional entity would produce compelling benefits for California ratepayers or the environment, said Matthew Freedman, a staff attorney at the Utility Reform Network or TURN. We remain deeply concerned about the potential risks to Californias sovereignty. The idea of a multi-state grid was first proposed as part of the 1990s legislation that deregulated the California energy market. It was suspended after electricity rates skyrocketed due to price manipulation by some traders and cost consumers tens of billions of dollars. Advertisement Loretta Lynch, who served as the California Public Utilities Commission president during the state energy crisis of the early 2000s, said an expanded grid could again damage ratepayers by eroding their rights to participate in public hearings and access public records. The new Holden bill amendments are designed to make it look like California will retain some power over the new RTO board and also that some public participation will be mandated, she said. Talk about putting a finger on the scale of transparency this is more like an iron fist for secrecy. The regional grid plan was reintroduced in a 2015 bill that requires California to produce at least half of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030. The effort stalled in 2016 amid concerns that it would take away Californias ability to dictate what sources of electricity it generates and consumes. Other states in the proposed RTO rely more heavily on power generated by coal and other fossil fuels. Advertisement Last September, in the final days of the 2017 session, the proposal was inserted into legislation on a Friday night without public deliberations. Holden withdrew the bill days later, after the proposal received media attention and consumer advocates and other groups protested. The latest effort says it would protect and preserve a states authority over matters regulated by the state, including procurement policy, resource planning and resource or transmission siting within the state. It also would delegate authority of grid operations to an RTO board, a structure that includes representatives of utility interests in other regions. What would change is the governing board, which would not be solely directed by California, Smith said. Advertisement Holdens answer to preserving some governance authority for California is creating a committee to advise the RTO board with three members appointed by the governor. His draft bill also would limit conflicts of interest by prohibiting any member of the governing board from directly owning any interest in energy related assets. Lynch and other critics say that language does not go far enough to prevent abuses. Why put California at risk? Lynch asked. Why turn the clock back and embed in California law less transparency, no outright prohibitions against personally profiting from being on an RTO board and enabling those same people to make rules that profit their former employers? Jan Smutny-Jones is the chief executive at the Independent Energy Producers Association, a Sacramento trade association that supports a multi-state power grid. He called the Holden plan a big win and said it will not affect the role of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission or Californias clean-energy laws. Advertisement All other (regional operators) have less state involvement. All are subject to FERC tariff approval, he said. It is important to stress that the FERC has expressed no interest in restricting Californias RPS (renewable power rules), GHG (greenhouse gas) goals or energy efficiency standards. The regional grid plan would require approval from governors and lawmakers in the other participating states support that was not immediately forthcoming when the idea was brought forward in 2016. Regions that rely on fossil fuels to create most of their electricity worry that under a multi-state grid California could impose its environmental policies on them or seek to dictate what sources they could use to generate power. In a Feb. 9 letter to a Utah lawmaker, attorneys in Salt Lake City offered to challenge Californias existing restrictions on coal-fired power for $2 million. Advertisement California carbon emission offsets currently result in a $28/ton adder for every ton of Utah coal used to generate electricity for export to California, the confidential sales pitch from the Snell & Wilmer law firm states. After 2027, California entirely bans the import of coal-fired generation. No decision on the expanded grid proposal is imminent. Comments on the draft legislation being circulated by Holden are due Wednesday. Advertisement Watchdog Videos On Now Sexual misconduct accusers worry deputy is being protected 6:16 On Now City funded $2-million waterfront bathroom 1:26 On Now Public water district charges customer for legal work, response to records request On Now Video: Tiny homes won't be reused amid housing, homeless crisis On Now Attorney General seeks documentation for Miss Middle East On Now Rep. Hunter probe covers possible fraud On Now Video: SDG&E delaying solar credit for some low-income housing tenants On Now Video: Former San Diego Junior Theatre teacher sentenced for sex with teen girl 0:24 On Now Video: Shelter volunteers believe they were fired for finding a dog a home 0:49 On Now McKamey Manor is leaving San Diego 3:35 jeff.mcdonald@sduniontribune.com (619) 293-1708 @sdutMcDonald Sixth-Grade Camp has been a rite of passage for 11- and 12-year-olds in San Diego County for more than 70 years, but the rising price to send kids to the great outdoors for a few nights has made it challenging for some school districts. The La Mesa-Spring Valley School District is one of those districts that found the cost prohibitive, cutting participation in the Cuyamaca Outdoor School from the budget in 2009. But it is looking to bring back the experience of studying stars, streams and science while hiking and doing hands-on crafts in the backcountry. The districts board on Feb. 20 heard a presentation by Bob Mueller, executive director of Outdoor Education and Student Support Services for the San Diego County Office of Education. Mueller and several other associated with the Outdoor School gave an overview of the camp and talked about fees, scholarships and funding opportunities. Mueller said the county works with districts to help with discounts and contracts. As the economy has improved, a number of districts have reinstated Sixth-Grade Camp, including the Lemon Grove School District, which returned to the Outdoor School in 2017 after a nine-year absence. Advertisement Several speakers said they wanted the district to bring the program back. Superintendent Brian Marshall and the governing board made no hard promises, but they said they were aware of the interest and would bring it back for further discussion. The County Office of Education runs the program at the 25,000-acre Cuyamaca Rancho State Park, hosting more than 11,000 kids every year. It typically costs $320 per student to attend the five-day, four-night camp located off Highway 79 in the mountains of East County. The program seeks to connect students to science and nature, offering lessons in astronomy, biology, botany, geology, meteorology, outdoor skills and Native American lore. There are campfires and even a talent show. The school recently added archery, geocaching, and rock climbing. The largest and oldest of Californias 23 outdoor schools, operating since 1946, the campus has educated about 1 million sixth-graders. For 2017-18, it is expected to host 11,739 students. Currently, 23 districts from San Diego County participate including Lemon Grove, Alpine, Cajon Valley, Jamul-Dulzura, Lakeside, Mountain Empire and Santee plus four from outside the county as well as 18 private and charter schools. When the La Mesa-Spring Valley district eliminated the program, area parents jumped into action, volunteering to work so that that kids in the district could attend camp as a non-school group during their school breaks. But that was supposed to be a temporary remedy, not a permanent solution, they say. School districts take priority when scheduling camp dates, with non-school groups, receiving a lesser priority when scheduling camp dates. Mueller said that right now, the group has room for about 1,400 more kids just about the amount in La Mesa-Spring Valleys district. Parent Stella Zimmerman said both her daughters attend Lemon Avenue Elementary, with her oldest attending Sixth-Grade Camp last fall and having a life-changing experience and that she hoped every student in the district would have the same opportunity. Advertisement She returned not only with a newfound enthusiasm for the outdoors and the environment, but also with a stronger sense of self, independence and confidence, Zimmerman said. Zimmerman said she collected a petition with 245 signatures of people who were looking to the board to reinstate the camp as part of the districts curriculum. I believe that encouraging our children to step outside of themselves and forge stronger connections, with nature, with community and with each other, can be valuable in helping them evolve as people, as students, and as global citizens, she said. Advertisement karen.pearlman@sduniontribune.com A dispute over who should get the contract to book acts for a new live music venue at the Del Mar Fairgrounds has prompted fair officials to tackle the task themselves. The management of the Belly Up Tavern in Solana Beach initially got the nod for the contract, which would yield a percentage of the revenue of as many as 60 events a year. The 1,869-seat venue is expected to open next spring after a $13 million renovation of the fairgrounds Race Place off-track betting facility. However, another contender for the contract, the operator of the fairgrounds annual three-day KAABOO music festival in September, filed a a formal protest of the decision. KAABOO alleged that fairgrounds officials had negotiated with an unfair advantage to Belly Up. As a result, last week the fair board decided to withdraw the offer to Belly Up and award the contract to nobody. Instead, the fairgrounds will use the same in-house staff members that book hundreds of acts for the annual month-long San Diego County Fair. Advertisement We were caught a little by surprise, Belly Up representative Chris Goldsmith said Wednesday. We are aware of their decision. We are reviewing it and considering a response. Both the Belly Up and KAABOO scored high in the fair boards scoring system for bids on the contract. Music Box of San Diego also submitted a bid, but did not score as high. Fairgrounds officials stated in an earlier response to the protest that their evaluation of the contract bids was fair, consistent, objective, unbiased and impartial, but KAABOO continued to pursue the matter. The Belly Up opened in 1974 and remains one of the top year-round live music venues in San Diego County, with a maximum capacity of 600 people. The KAABOO festival, held for the third time last year, had a peak crowd of 45,000 people. The fairgrounds is run by nine members appointed by the state governor to the 22nd District Agricultural Association Board of Directors. The board announced its decision last week after a closed-session meeting. This facility is going to be a great addition to the Fairgrounds and our community, and were looking forward to bringing excellent shows to our residents while working with concert promoters to help us in this endeavor, Tim Fennell, CEO of the Del Mar Fairgrounds, said in a written announcement of the boards decision. Del Mars off-track betting facility was built in the 1990s to serve as many as 5,000 people a day. However, attendance has steadily declined as the popularity of online gaming and tribal casinos has increased. Last years largest crowd was about 2,500 people who attended on the day of the Kentucky Derby. Advertisement All the planned renovations would be inside the existing Race Place building, with no expansion and little change to the exterior of the structure. The off-track betting business would continue, but in a smaller area. In addition to the concert venue, the renovated facility would include a craft beer-tasting room and a permanent 7,000-square-foot display on the history of beer. Advertisement philip.diehl@sduniontribune.com Twitter: @phildiehl The mysterious flamingo that flew into Imperial Beach last week is here to stay. At least for now. Nobody has claimed ownership of the bird that appeared in the South Bay National Wildlife Refuge. Park Ranger Brian Collins hopes it stays that way. The pink flamingo is just a special visitor, he said. Id prefer not to find out where it came from because we arent going to chase it down and capture it. Its perfectly healthy as far as we can tell. On Wednesday, Collins led a group of about 20 people visiting San Diego to a tour of the refuge. The flamingo was their main attraction. Advertisement It took him just a couple of minutes to spot the bird in Pond 10A, a salt marsh next to Silver Strand Boulevard. When he did, he quickly turned to the group and gave them a thumbs up. The group, armed with binoculars and bird guides, flocked to the edge of the marsh to catch a glimpse of the rare sight as it ate lunch most likely plankton or small crustaceans, according to rangers. People have been visiting Imperial Beach to look at the flamingo all week, said Mayor Serge Dedina. I walked out what I call the Flamingo Trail, and there were a lot of people there, he said. People come specifically to see the flamingo and I am really proud that IB is home to it. Zoos and hotels that keep flamingos usually clip their wings so they dont fly away, according to park rangers. Since the Imperial Beach flamingo has been seen flying from one pond to another, rangers dont believe it came from a zoo, Collins said. The bird has a tag, which couldve been given to it by a biologist researching wild birds. The search took an international turn this week when Collins reached out to a colleague in La Paz, Mexico, to ask if it belongs to anyone in Baja California. Flamingos spotted in the wild are considered to be possible escapees from aviaries or zoos, according to the Audubon Society. However, some flamingos from The Caribbean or Mexico have been known to winter to Florida and Texas. Flamingos spotted in San Diego are usually in Escondidos San Diego Zoo Safari Park, the San Diego Zoo, or hotels like the Marriott in Coronado. Advertisement Capturing the Imperial Beach flamingo could cause undo harm or stress, Collins said. Given the fact that it seems healthy and active, rangers dont plan to get near the flamingo. Therefore, it is staying in the marshes until it decides to fly away or its owner comes forward. We hope everyone gets to enjoy a glimpse of the beautiful bird while its still here, said Ranger Lisa Cox. After all, this national wildlife refuge was established to provide habitat for migratory birds so it seems to be serving the flamingo well. Contact Gustavo Solis via Email or Twitter Its true that Beachtown, the audience-interactive work that has its world premiere at San Diego Rep next month, is what could be called an immersive work of theater. That doesnt mean there will be actual water on the stage. And there definitely will be no waves. But that hasnt stopped Jason Heil, who portrays the mayor of the shows titular town, from attempting to embrace his characters surf-loving ways as he preps for his part in the play. What Heil is embracing at the moment, on a dazzling winter morning at La Jolla Shores, is a hulking foamie surfboard, which he lugs down to the water for the start of a surf lesson. Advertisement Heil has tried surfing once before, on his honeymoon in Kauai some 16 years ago. But this is the Ohio natives first attempt at it in San Diego his first time, in fact, wearing a wetsuit. His rookie status, though, doesnt faze Jessica Ryder, the instructor from Izzy Tihanyis esteemed Surf Diva Surf School who will be trying to get Heil on his feet today. Ryder herself a diehard surfer and aquatic athlete sometimes works with people who not only cant surf, but cant actually swim. Thats not an issue with Heil, who looks pretty at home on the beach. But given that his character in Beachtown, Steve Novak, wont be on the sand but leading a meeting at City Hall, why does he need to take up surfing anyway? 1 / 12 Actor Jason Heil who plays Mayor Steve Novak in the San Diego Repertory Theatre production of Beachtown rides a wave during a surf lesson from Surf Diva surf instructor Jessica Ryder at La Jolla Shores. The play runs March 22-April 15. (Howard Lipin / The San Diego-Union-Tribune) 2 / 12 Actor Jason Heil, who plays Mayor Steve Novak in the San Diego Repertory Theatre production of Beachtown, falls off his board during a surf lesson at La Jolla Shores. (Howard Lipin / The San Diego-Union-Tribune) 3 / 12 Actor Jason Heil, who plays Mayor Steve Novak in the San Diego Repertory Theatre production of Beachtown, falls off his board during a surf lesson at La Jolla Shores. (Howard Lipin / The San Diego-Union-Tribune) 4 / 12 Actor Jason Heil, who plays Mayor Steve Novak in the San Diego Repertory Theatre production of Beachtown, stands up on his surfboard during a surf lesson from Surf Diva surf instructor Jessica Ryder at La Jolla Shores. (Howard Lipin / The San Diego-Union-Tribune) 5 / 12 Surf Diva surf instructor Jessica Ryder watches actor Jason Heil who plays Mayor Steve Novak in the San Diego Repertory Theatre production of Beachtown, during a surfing lesson at La Jolla Shores. The play runs March 22-April 15. (Howard Lipin / The San Diego-Union-Tribune) 6 / 12 Surf Diva surf instructor Jessica Ryder gives actor Jason Heil who plays Mayor Steve Novak in the San Diego Repertory Theatre production of Beachtown, a surfing lesson at La Jolla Shores. (Howard Lipin / The San Diego-Union-Tribune) 7 / 12 Actor Jason Heil who plays Mayor Steve Novak in the San Diego Repertory Theatre production of Beachtown heads to the water during a surf lesson with Surf Diva surf instructor Jessica Ryder at La Jolla Shores. The play runs March 22-April 15. (Howard Lipin / The San Diego-Union-Tribune) 8 / 12 Actor Jason Heil who plays Mayor Steve Novak in the San Diego Repertory Theatre production of Beachtown gets a surfing lesson from Surf Diva surf instructor Jessica Ryder at La Jolla Shores. The play runs March 22-April 15. (Howard Lipin / The San Diego-Union-Tribune) 9 / 12 Surf Diva surf instructor Jessica Ryder gives actor Jason Heil who plays Mayor Steve Novak in the San Diego Repertory Theatre production of Beachtown, a surfing lesson at La Jolla Shores. The play runs March 22-April 15. (Howard Lipin / The San Diego-Union-Tribune) 10 / 12 Actor Jason Heil, who plays Mayor Steve Novak in the San Diego Repertory Theatre production of Beachtown, is all smiles during a surf lesson at La Jolla Shores. (Howard Lipin / The San Diego-Union-Tribune) 11 / 12 Actor Jason Heil who plays Mayor Steve Novak in the San Diego Repertory Theatre production of Beachtown, gets a surfing lesson from Surf Diva surf instructor Jessica Ryder at La Jolla Shores. (Howard Lipin / The San Diego-Union-Tribune) 12 / 12 SAN DIEGO, CA 1/24/2018: Actor Jason Heil who plays Mayor Steve Novak in the San Diego Repertory Theatre production of Beachtown gets a surfing lesson from Surf Diva surf instructor Jessica Ryder at La Jolla Shores. (Howard Lipin / The San Diego-Union-Tribune) It turns out that, like a lot of dedicated actors, Heil is just determined to get into the head space of the character hell be playing, even if it involves exploring things that will never explicitly appear on the page or the stage. Its nothing that you ever have to do, he says. But I always think its good if you have a chance to walk around in the characters shoes. (Or booties.) My character in the show is the mayor of Beachtown, which is a close correlation to San Diego. And he has been an avid surfer for decades. During the course of the show, he talks about what surfing means to him, what its like to be out on the water, and why thats something thats important to the community. One of the themes of the play is, what does Beachtown value? Some people think surfing is frivolous, and he really talks about why its meaningful to be out there. Advertisement So since I live here, I thought I would try to come out here and catch a wave, and see if I could commune a little. Jason Heil gets to his feet as Surf Diva instructor Jessica Ryder cheers him on. (Howard Lipin / The San Diego-Union-Tribune ) The central conceit of Beachtown written by Rep resident playwright Herbert Siguenza and the plays associate director, Rachel Grossman of the East Coast troupe dog and pony dc is that Beachtonians (represented by both the actors and audience) have gathered for the communitys 100th anniversary. Their task: To reach some agreement on what to place in a time capsule. (Among the items involved is a surfboard fin.) Advertisement Audience members actually will get to vote during the show, and, if they so desire, to speak out about their ideas. Beachtown, directed by Rep artistic chief Sam Woodhouse, is designed to incorporate a lot of improv, and its feel will vary enormously from performance to performance. Thats a fact Heil finds himself pondering between gulps at salt water at the Shores, because the experience of trying to surf winds up reminding him of improvs incremental, unpredictable, figure-it-out-on-the-fly feel. As Ryder nudges him into one wave, Heil paddles furiously, windmilling through the whitewater as he tries to get the board up to speed. Advertisement Then, with hands planted on the deck, he pops up. For a moment, hes surfing at least until, as momentum slows, the boards rail digs into the fading wave and Heil is catapulted sideways into the shallows. Trying to maintain his momentum on the board reminded Jason Heil of the tricky flow of improv acting. (Howard Lipin / The San Diego-Union-Tribune ) Those humbling episodes also remind Heil that, in surfing as in improv, once you master one maneuver or moment youve got to move right on to the next. That, or get pitched. Advertisement I would liken it to: Im a beginner at this, so I only got up a few times, and I face-planted most of the time, Heil says. And hopefully the more I do this, I would face-plant less and be up on the board more. But even then, when I got up, you cant just be done. Youre then riding it and adjusting it. Youre like, OK, Im up now what do I do? And thats when you get a fun improv going. You get an audience member who plays with you. Not to press the metaphor too much, but in both pursuits youve also gotta go with the flow and get ready for the unexpected. Advertisement It can be tempting in a show like this to go, Oh, Im going to do this improv, Heil says of Beachtown. Youve preplanned it, and you kind of think, If they say that, Ill say this. And then it starts turning into a script. You need to keep forcing yourself: Nope, Im just going to go out there and be in the situation, and play. Learning the lingo This wont be Heils first try at going above and beyond in the service of getting into a character. Advertisement For one show a few years ago, he recalls, he not only learned elements of American Sign Language but consulted with people in the deaf community to find out more about the underpinnings of the language, because thats something that doesnt correlate word for word. Its concepts and ideas. If hes trying to learn a specific dialect, sometimes Ill just call information of a town and talk to a local. Just so I can hear someone in the local community talk with a dialect. RELATED The Acting Olympics: What local stage stars do to get into roles The dialect of the Beachtown native hell be playing is a mishmash of a lot of things, Heil adds. There are a lot of different cultures at play in a place like San Diego. And a lot of people have come here from other parts of the country. Advertisement That includes Heil and his wife, Kim, who moved here in 2004 after stints in New York and L.A. Since then, the University of California Irvine grad has become a mainstay at the Rep and such other San Diego companies as Cygnet, Lambs Players and Ion. He also has credits at the Old Globe and La Jolla Playhouse. (Kim Heil, who grew up in Jakarta, Indonesia, is now associate producer and casting director at the Rep.) Once Heil has had a chance to dry off and grab coffee after the hourlong surf lesson, he pauses to consider what it all has taught him. (Beyond the necessity of a wetsuit here in winter, even on a 72-degree day.) Advertisement I think the lesson will inform the role a lot, he says. Especially once I dig into the monologue theres a monologue my character has where he talks about the relationship to the ocean. And you know, theres nothing like catching a mouthful of salt water, being in San Diego on a gorgeous day thats not too hot, not too cold. Feeling how cold the water really is. I think all of that stuff will be underneath while Im building the character. And now I just want to get a little expertise get better at it. So, one word for the experience? Advertisement Tiring. And for a few brief seconds, really exhilarating. I did manage to get up a few times, and that was amazing. I would rate it a 10 for experience and a seven for proficiency, because I wish Id gotten up more on the board. But the experience of it was great. I feel like I understand the mechanics now, so I just need to come out and do it (again). Ten more times. Advertisement Beachtown When: Previews begin March 22. Opens March 28. 7 p.m. Tuesdays-Wednesdays; 8 p.m. Thursdays-Fridays; 2 and 8 p.m. Saturdays; 2 and 7 p.m. Sundays. (Some exceptions; check with theater.) Through April 15. Where: San Diego Reps Lyceum Space, 79 Horton Plaza, downtown. Tickets: $20-$65 (discounts available) Phone: (619) 544-1000 Advertisement Online: sdrep.org Advertisement jim.hebert@sduniontribune.com Twitter: @jimhebert The San Diego Theatre Critics Circle has been presenting the Craig Noel Awards honoring the best in local theater for 16 years now. As a voting member of the group, Ive been participating in the event for about a decade. In that time, Ive seen a lot of moving and funny and poignant moments, as award-winners take the stage to accept their awards many of them still reeling from surprise, and some of whom have never been recognized for their work in this way before. (The awards are named for the late founding director of the Old Globe Theatre.) And yet its hard to remember an acceptance speech that landed with quite so much impact as that given last week by Intrepid Theatres Christy Yael-Cox when the latest Noel Awards were presented before more than 600 people at the Jacobs Center for Neighborhood Innovation. Heres the video (shot by volunteer Jonathan Hammond) of her full remarks: Advertisement Yael-Cox, who is Intrepids producing artistic chief, won for directing Suzan-Lori Parks Father Comes Home From the Wars, Parts 1, 2 and 3, a play that looks at our countrys racial divides through the prism of the Civil War. (Heres my review of the production.) She actually wound up in a tie for the award with Yolanda Franklin and Claudio Raygoza, directors of Ion Theatres The Ballad of Emmett Till, another local premiere of a play about the legacy of racial tragedy. We have to look for ways to tell the stories that lend themselves to healing, Yael-Cox said, in talking about her own sense of responsibility as a person who has benefited from white privilege to hear, acknowledge and help raise up those who have not had the same advantages. The play itself was a potent reminder of the roots of Americas racial agonies, and it was brought to life by a multiracial cast (including assistant director Antonio T.J. Johnson, a San Diego acting treasure) who did justice to its poetry but also didnt flinch from its often difficult moments. Yael-Coxs perspective helps translate the potency of Parks art into a real-life resolve to make a difference; its well worth considering, and taking to heart. Advertisement jim.hebert@sduniontribune.com Twitter: @jimhebert For Ingrid Jackel, the remodel of her Palm Springs weekend home was all about joy, emotion and color. I have an intense job, said Jackel, chief executive of the natural beauty brand Yes To. So I went looking for an oasis where I can feel at peace. As a fan of Midcentury Modern architecture, Jackel didnt have to go far from her Pasadena home to find a weekend pied-a-terre. Your breathing changes when you are in Palm Springs, Jackel said of the deserts allure. Its an hour and a half away from L.A. and yet it feels like another world. I like that its charged with Old Hollywood glamour. I wanted to bring a home back to that time. Advertisement After touring a four-bedroom, three-bath 1960 home designed by Glendale architect Clair Earl, she knew she had found her escape. Despite being neglected for years, the bank-owned home had the classic midcentury touches that Jackel admired: A tall, pitched roof, tongue-and-groove ceilings and floor-to-ceiling windows. The home also featured decorative-patterned concrete blocks and a larger scale than most of the homes she had toured. Ultimately there were 19 bids on the house. She describes the preservation project that followed as deeply personal. I wanted it to be mine inside, Jackel said. I didnt want to return it to a museum state. I wanted my friends and their kids and dogs to be able to come here and celebrate with me. Working with Kevin Kemper and Howard Hawkes of H3K, a Palm Springs interior design and restoration firm, Jackel transformed the house over 18 months. (The designers will offer remodeling tips, followed by a guided tour of the house, on Feb. 17 as part of Modernism Week.) This house is so different from other midcentury homes in that its one-of-a kind, Kemper said. It has a Jetsons, Space-Age feel. The architect built three homes in a row [on the street] as show homes. In an effort to balance that feel with modern living, the designers kept it simple. They retained the homes 2,200-square-foot layout and updated the plumbing, electrical, HVAC and roof. Low ceilings were raised to open up the interiors and clerestory windows were added to bring in more light and mountain views. Because of extensive termite damage something of a surprise in the desert they were forced to remove the drywall and plaster. And in an effort to provide better insulation, many of the original windows were replaced with period-appropriate dual-pane, low-e aluminum framed windows In a move that opened up the main living area, the designers removed the wall between the kitchen and living room and ripped out the entire kitchen. New IKEA cabinets and a vibrant orange Silestone island are both functional and fun. It was the most vibrant color of orange we could find, Kemper said. White porcelain tile floors, Wow ceramic kitchen tile and Dunn Edwards Whisper paint set a neutral palette that helps to accentuate Jackels obsession with the color orange, which explains why the house, which will also be open for tours during Modernism Week, is affectionately called Maison a lOrange. Advertisement Its a happy color and makes me feel good, Jackel said. I love the sun. Im originally from the South of France. It appeals to my passionate side. Indeed, its an uplifting place with bold pinks, oranges and aqua tones courtesy of the poolside umbrellas and chaise lounges, custom furnishings, wallcoverings and Trina Turk textiles. And in a move that might explain why youll find people snapping pictures from the curb, the home features bright orange double doors, painted a custom Dunn Edwards color to match the kitchen island. The house really struggled with its identity before, Hawkes said. Advertisement No longer. Its a happy home, Jackel said. I wanted to be able to enter the house and have a big smile on my face. Now, when we come,we dont want to leave. What: Modernism Week Where: Palm Springs Advertisement When: Feb. 15-25 Admission: Individual events range from free to $150. Some events are sold out. Info: modernismweek.com For an easy way to follow the L.A. scene, bookmark L.A. at Home and join us on our Facebook page for home design, Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest. Advertisement lisa.boone@latimes.com Twitter: @lisaboone19 ALSO: MORE ON PALM SPRINGS: Advertisement Restoring a neglected tract home to Midcentury glory in Palm Springs Photos: An Indian Wells adobe In Palm Springs, a renovation to meld midcentury, modern, light and art Sleek Donald Wexler home in Palm Springs revealed beneath its remodels Advertisement Photos: Inside our favorite desert homes and retreats The Navys hospital ship Mercy sailed out of San Diego Bay on Friday, its white bow pointed toward Hawaii but dragging in its wake concerns about the future of its unique fleet of vessels. The Mercy will act as the flagship for the annual Pacific Partnership mission, a five-month goodwill tour thats slated to unite the hospital ship with its sidekick, the Singapore-based fast transport Falls River plus more than 800 military and civilian personnel from the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, France, Peru and Japan and nongovernmental organizations like Project Hope, Hope Worldwide and Project Handclasp. The mission came as a response to the tsunami that ravaged large parts of south and southeast Asia, triggering calls across the region to build stronger partnerships with the United States and other powers. For this tour, the Mercy plans to dock in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Vietnam while the Fall River will break away to visit Thailand and the Pacific islands of Yap and Palau. Advertisement The ships medical, engineering and veterinary teams plan to help the countries they visit but the key mission is to conduct disaster relief exercises and hold medical symposiums designed to mitigate future humanitarian crises. On the American side, the mission is drawing civilian mariners to sail the ship along with Navy medical teams, Coast Guard rescue swimmers and Army veterinarians. Unfortunately, its not if, its when theres the next natural disaster, so we want our allies and partners and everyone in the region to be prepared, said Capt. David Bretz, a career surface warfare officer who skippers Destroyer Squadron 31 and will act as the overall mission leader during Mercys tour. Bretzs deputy commander is British Capt. Peter Olive, the former commander of the minesweeper Ledbury and the frigate Argyll. Hes slated to join the Fall River later in the tour while Bretz stays aboard the Mercy. Its the first time in the initiatives 13-year history that a British commander has been asked to lead a task group, which comes as no surprise to maritime strategists watching the increased role the United Kingdom is playing in the region. During a Feb. 12 address in Australia, British defense secretary Gavin Williamson announced that the frigate Sutherland would return from its tour through the South China Sea, making it clear our navy has a right to do that, a direct challenge to Chinese military leaders who continue to arm and expand islands in the ocean in an effort to assert territorial claims challenged by Vietnam, Malaysia and other nations. The Pacific region is really important to the U.S., obviously, but its also important to all the partners participating in this, Olive said. U.S. Navy Capt. Peter Roberts, a cardiothoracic surgeon, will command the Mercy itself. Although its primary mission is humanitarian, its stops in Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam continue an American legacy of strong cooperation and defense ties with these nations, according to the Mercys press materials. Advertisement Mercys visit to Vietnam will follow the planned March port call of the San Diego-based Carl Vinson carrier strike group there. The Point Loma-headquartered Third Fleets carrier will be the first one back in Vietnam since the end of the war in 1975. Americas interests are worldwide and many people view the Pacific Ocean as something that divides us from the world, Bretz said. From my perspective, its something that unites us. Were united with the countries of the Western Pacific. China hasnt been sleeping when it comes to medical diplomacy. Beijing launched the 866 Daishan Da also known as the Peace Ark in 2007. It can expand to 600 beds during wartime or disaster relief and it provided medical care to the people of Gabon in October and the Philippines after of 2013s Typhoon Haiyan. Advertisement Fridays departure of the Mercy comes at an important time in an ongoing debate over its future and that of its only counterpart in the Navy, the Virginia-based Comfort. Theyre getting old. They began their lives in 1976 as San Clemente-class supertankers launched by the National Steel and Shipbuilding Company NASSCO and were converted eight years later into mammoth floating hospitals. In the Navy, only the aircraft carriers are larger but its the guts inside the hull the surgical theaters and medical wards that make it unique. If the skipper parked the Mercy on land, its 1,000 beds would make it as the 5th largest hospital in California, bigger than Cedars Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles and twice the size of Scripps Mercy Hospital here. A 2013 report prepared by the Navys Center for Innovation in Ship Design proposed a new class of hospital vessels that offered modular medical facilities and increased amphibious support to hike ship-to-shore patient transfers and make better use of the militarys clinics ashore. Advertisement It built on a study drafted two years earlier that identified faults in the Mercy-class ships, including excessive draft that limited where it could sail, limited oxygen and potable water production and the inability to switch around medical spaces. The second study projected half as many bed spaces but also a medical crew nearly two-thirds smaller than that staffing the Mercy. It would be built on a hull already used for the Navys San Antonio-class amphibious warships, but wouldnt need to meet combat specifications. The report predicted that the new design would make the flow of patients through the ship more efficient, cutting the need for so many beds. Helicopters, tilt-rotor Ospreys and hovercraft boats would act like ambulances, speeding patients from damaged warships to the floating hospitals. In 2017, a Navy service life extension program for the Mercy postponed its demise until 2035, commanders say, but the Comfort is slated for mothballing in 2021. Advertisement Bretz said that the Navy has placed no restrictions on the Mercys current mission due to its age and declined to speculate on its long-term future in the fleet. Im not aware of any limitations because of age, said the missions leader, Bretz. We have a very complex mission this year going to Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Vietnam and Japan and theres been no indication of any restrictions on where we anchor or anything. Advertisement Military Videos On Now D-Day paratrooper from Coronado jumps again in France at age 96 On Now Remembering war's fallen, one name at a time On Now In Ramona, an airplane and an aviator provide living lessons on World War II 1:43 On Now Video: Navy's newest vessel sails into San Diego and a new future in surface warfare On Now Video: U.S. Navy files homicide charges over warship collisions On Now Stopping Marine hazing On Now Video: U.S. Navy Air Crew Grounded After Creating Vulgar Sky Drawing On Now Navy says Asia Pacific ship collisions were avoidable On Now Hundreds of recruits get sick at Marine boot camp On Now Cutler Dawson Talks Navy Federal cprine@sduniontribune.com A suspected car thief who led police on a wild pursuit that ended a mile into a Metro Gold Line subway tunnel was charged Thursday with six felonies and could get more than four years in prison if convicted. Rafael Lopez Jr., 27, was apprehended Tuesday night after police said he drove a stolen truck into the Gold Line tunnel and jumped out halfway into the 2-mile light rail passage. Police officers found Lopez hiding in a storage closet, but a female passenger was able to get away. Prosecutors charged Lopez with fleeing a pursuing officer while driving recklessly, fleeing a pursuing officer and driving against traffic, taking a vehicle without the owners consent, receiving a stolen vehicle, hit-and-run driving resulting in injury and hit-and-run resulting in property damage. They are seeking to hold him in lieu of $150,000 bail. If convicted of all the charges, Lopez faces up to four years and four months in prison. Huntington Park police spotted Lopez in the stolen truck near Gage and Salt Lake avenues Tuesday night, according to prosecutors, and when officers attempted to pull him over, he sped off. Advertisement Pursuing officers reported that Lopez reached speeds exceeding 80 mph, ran red lights, traveled on the wrong side of city streets and struck a taxi, injuring two people. With officers on his tail, the driver veered his truck off the road and into a Metro subway tunnel in Boyle Heights, disappearing from the view of helicopters broadcasting the chase. Metro officials shut down the Gold Line as officers went into the tunnel and checked the subway station at Soto Street. At that moment, authorities worried the truck could hit a train. Metro quickly shut off service, and it turned out there were no trains in the short tunnel, which runs through a portion of Boyle Heights. The tunnel it was a first for us in a pursuit, said Huntington Park Police Lt. Al Martinez. We dont like firsts. Televised car chases have long been a source of fascination in Southern California, even though the vast majority end the same way, with drivers eventually being stopped and arrested. Sometimes, drivers simply give up or run out of gas. Other times, police use spike strips or the PIT maneuver to spin the vehicle and stop it. Yet watching these chases involves a certain faith that maybe, just maybe, the driver will outrun the cops. Against the odds, some do get away. A Los Angeles Times analysis found that the Los Angeles Police Department reported making arrests in 82% of chases from 2006 to 2014, well above the state average of 68%. More recent data were not immediately available. People are always going to try and get away, but it is pretty hard to escape, said Greg Meyer, a retired Los Angeles police captain and pursuit training expert. Advertisement In November, three suspects thought to be involved in the armed robbery of a Laguna Niguel wireless store managed to escape police after a lengthy pursuit from Orange County to Pasadena, where they jumped out of their vehicle at the Paseo Colorado mall. They have yet to be caught. A Los Angeles County civil grand jury studied 421 police pursuits in the county that were reported to the California Highway Patrol in a 12-month period beginning October 2015. The grand jurys report found that suspects were immediately apprehended in 67% of the chases, leaving 139 pursuits that did not end in an arrest. Fifty-nine involved vehicles that escaped, and 47 ended because police abandoned the pursuit, usually for safety reasons. The others included suspects who fled on foot vehicles that crashed. The report concluded that some pursuits caused unnecessary bystander injuries and deaths and that law enforcement officers need better training to reduce the risk of crashes during high-speed pursuits. The Times analysis showed that LAPD pursuits injure bystanders at more than twice the rate of police chases in the rest of California. From 2006 to 2014, 334 bystanders were injured 1 for every 10 LAPD pursuits, according to the review of pursuit data reported to the CHP. Advertisement richard.winton@latimes.com Twitter: @lacrimes Once she expected it, even sought it out. Two other times, it may have come as a surprise. Sen. Dianne Feinstein probably is hoping she wont get booed again by fellow Democrats this weekend as the state party congregates at the San Diego Convention Center. The senator has long had an uneasy relationship with activists at the core of the California Democratic Party, who have chaffed at her centrist views on some issues, but credited her for leadership on liberal approaches to other matters. Feinstein has rarely faced much of a re-election threat, but this year she has one not from Republicans but from within her own party. Her challenge from California Senate President Pro Tempore Kevin de Leon is a microcosm of the national split in the Democratic Party between longtime establishment deal-makers and a younger generation of aggressive progressives. Advertisement Feinstein usually had the luxury of looking beyond the liberal-leaning Democratic base that dominated primary elections and playing to the broader electorate. This dynamic crystallized in 1990 when she emphasized her support for the death penalty during a speech at the state Democratic convention. It seemed calculated to elicit boos from the liberal crowd and her campaign used a video clip of that moment in a television ad. At the time, she was running for governor and won the primary handily but in November lost to another centrist, Republican Pete Wilson. She won a U.S. Senate seat two years later and never looked back. Last April, she didnt seem intent on antagonizing a town-hall-meeting crowd by saying she did not favor a single-payer health care system, but the comment triggered boos in her hometown of San Francisco. In August, she faced some jeers from a Commonwealth Club audience, again in San Francisco, when she said this about Donald Trump: I just hope he has the ability to learn and to change, and if he does, he can be a good president. That drew a rebuke from de Leon, among others, and she sought to clarify her remarks, noting that she has opposed Trump on several fronts. Feinstein is on a rocky election road, the likes of which she hasnt traveled in a generation. Still, at 84, shes an icon among Democrats, including many of those who think it may be time for her to go. Shes a national figure with gravitas and policy expertise on intelligence and national security issues few can match. Advertisement Even in this political climate, she can burnish liberal bonafides. The shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., has reignited widespread calls for gun control Feinsteins signature issue. Months before the tragedy, she introduced legislation to revive her nationwide assault weapons ban, which she got passed in 1994 but Congress let expire 10 years later. She has pursued numerous other gun control bills. In October, Feinstein sponsored legislation to outlaw the infamous bump stocks, which can turn semi-automatic guns, essentially, into automatic weapons. The device was used by the gunman in Las Vegas who just days earlier killed 58 people at a country music concert. She had introduced a version of that bill after 20 children and six adults were killed in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012. Advertisement Feinstein dismissed Trumps recent call for his administration to ban them. She said the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives had said repeatedly it lacked the authority to do that and making such an attempt now invited lawsuits and legal delays which would allow continued sale of bump stocks. Words are one thing, Mr. President, but we need meaningful action, she said in a statement. If you want these devices off the street, call congressional Republicans and tell them to stop blocking our bill. Its that kind of talk, along with underscoring her leadership on gun control, that could soften some intraparty opposition. Thats the territory on which shes a liberal champion, said Thad Kousser,a political science professor at UC San Diego. Advertisement ...It gives her the chance to make her case. At stake this weekend is the partys endorsement. It would be a setback for Feinstein if she doesnt get it, but not a complete surprise. An endorsement brings with it institutional party backing and money. If no candidate gets 60 percent of the delegates votes, the party does not endorse. De Leon, 51, has picked up momentum with endorsements from big unions and influential lawmakers, including Senate president-elect Toni Atkins of San Diego. But the notion that hes an insurgent progressive candidate is tempered by his years as part of Sacramentos ruling Democratic establishment. Not only that, but theres a couple of little-known progressive candidates Alison Hartson and Pat Harris running to his left. Feinstein has a lot more money in her campaign account including an infusion of millions from her own pocket and endorsements across the Democratic political spectrum, including one from fellow California Sen. Kamala Harris, a favorite of progressives. Advertisement Feinstein led de Leon by nearly 30 points in a poll released two weeks ago by the Public Policy Institute of California. She likely will be aided by Californias primary system, where the two candidates with the most votes advance to November, regardless of party affiliation. Shes attracted independents and Republicans in the past, two groups that might be even more inclined to vote Democratic in this primary. No big-name Republican has entered the race. Feinstein and de Leon seem destined to face off again in the fall, as Democrats Harris and then-Rep. Loretta Sanchez did in 2016. But that doesnt mean the primary is a mere warm up. Sen. Feinstein would be so politically damaged if she finished in second place in the primary, Kousser said. She needs to win this in June. Advertisement Her more aggressive posture toward Trump can only help with core Democrats. Feinstein, the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, caused an uproar among Republicans last month when she released the full transcript of the panels interview with a principal of GPS Fusion, the firm that researched potential ties between Trump and Russia. The tweeter-in-chief lashed out at Sneaky Dianne Feinstein. Under normal circumstances, nobody would want to be called that. But these are unique times. Becoming a Trump Twitter target is prized currency among Democrats. Getting a nickname think Sen. Elizabeth Pocahontas Warren may be the gold standard. Advertisement De Leon doesnt have one of those. High schools in Escondido, Santee and El Cajon have the highest number of weapon-related expulsions in the county, according to state data. Local schools have responded to a rash of threats this week following the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. in which 17 people were killed. The incident last week, and in past years at schools in Connecticut and Colorado, have prompted a renewed call for stronger gun control. According to data from the California Department of Education, there were 61 weapon-related incidents in San Diego County schools last year that resulted in an expulsion. The total represents all incidents in which a student possessed, sold or furnished a firearm, knife, explosive or other dangerous object. Escondido High School, which serves 2,500 in grades nine through 12, had 5 weapon-related expulsions during the 2016-2017 school year the highest in the county. Advertisement At Escondido we were always fairly aggressive and wanted to err on the side of caution, and keep the students safe as well as those around them, said Rich Watkins, director of pupil services and interventions for Escondido Union High. Our discipline policy is more strict. Watkins said he is not aware of any instance of a student bringing a gun on campus, adding that most of the weapons in question were knives. Escondido High is followed by three schools in Grossmont Union School District. West Hills High School in Santee, Grossmont High School in El Cajon and Monte Vista High School in Spring Valley all reported three incidents involving some kind of weapons. West Hills and Monte Vista serve about 1,900 students, while Grossmont High has about 2,400 students. If the map is not displaying on your device, click here We take all safety concerns seriously and rigorously enforce the Ed Code as it relates to safety, said Grossmont Union High Superintendent Tim Glover. While we employ restorative/trauma-informed practices and positive behavioral interventions and supports that are producing a decrease in the number of suspensions and expulsions, student safety is paramount and therefore, weapons will never be acceptable on campus. Advertisement Security was increased at four schools on Thursday after threats of violence were spotted on different social media platforms. On Tuesday, social media rumors about a possible shooting at San Marcos High School prompted the San Diego County Sheriffs Department to send extra deputies to patrol school campuses. San Marcos Unified School District superintendent Melissa Hunt said district schools do a variety of drills and active-shooter training throughout the school year to prepare students and staff for the worst. Were starting to think about things differently now in the wake of incidents like Florida, Hunt said. Theyre teaching us how to respond, to always be looking for more that we could be doing. Advertisement Hunt said she wishes none of it was necessary. It grieves me more than I can possibly say, and yet, it is the most solemn responsibility we have, she said. We have to do everything in our power to make sure students get to go home each day. When it comes to weapons-related suspensions, data show Woodland Park Middle School, in San Marcos Unified, had the highest among all county schools 14 weapon-related suspensions in the 2016-17 school year. Fallbrook High School in Fallbrook and Roosevelt Middle School in Oceanside both had 13 incidents. Theyre followed by Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Math Academy at La Presa, which serves about 1,000 students in La Mesa-Spring Valley School District. Advertisement Hunt said none of the suspensions at Woodland Park Middle involved a firearm, and some incidents involved multiple students at once. One suspension was due to a student having an X-ACTO knife on campus. Officials from Vista Unified School District and Fallbrook Union High School District did not respond to emails seeking comment. The number of weapon-related suspensions and expulsions in state data include the possession, sale or furnishing of a firearm, knife, explosive or other dangerous object a total of five education code violations. Records show federal officials have started tracking more specific firearm-related incidents on a national level. Advertisement The U.S. Department of Educations Office for Civil Rights required all schools to provide a count of firearm suspensions or expulsions in its Civil Rights Data Collection Survey for the 2015-2016 school year. The field was optional in previous years. Schools are mapped using the latitude and longitude coordinates provided in state data. Thirteen schools lacked proper coordinates and are mapped using the location of their parent districts main office. Eighteen schools labeled as nonpublic and nonsectarian did not have data for enrollment, suspensions or expulsions in state records and are excluded from the map and analysis. Some students may be expelled or suspended multiple times, which is why state officials count the number of offenses that resulted in a suspension or expulsion, as well as the number of students who were disciplined. State officials use the unduplicated count of students who were disciplined to calculate expulsion and suspension rates for each school. Advertisement Data Watch Videos On Now Data Point: Media Mergers 2:58 On Now Jaywalking infractions in San Diego 1:24 On Now Video: Finding the recipe for the perfect burrito 2:09 On Now Video: Where marijuana is legal in the United States 0:53 On Now Report: Correctional system fails women 1:22 On Now San Diego students have larger classes On Now Hierarchy of cuisine prices On Now Pay phones: Is that still a thing? On Now 2016 border apprehensions On Now STD trends, San Diego County Contact Lauryn Schroeder via Twitter or Email. One of the worlds richest troves of Triassic-period fossils has been discovered in an area of Bears Ears National Monument that just lost its protected status, scientists announced Thursday. President Donald Trump signed a proclamation in December that shrank the national monument by 85 percent. The discovery of intact remains of crocodile-like animals called phytosaurs came to light this week when researchers announced it at the Western Association of Vertebrate Paleontologists conference at Dixie State University in St. George, Utah. Based on an initial excavation, the 70-yard site may be the densest area of Triassic period fossils in the nation, maybe the world, Rob Gay, a paleontology contractor at the University of Western Colorado, said in a statement. In an interview, Gay - who led a team of researchers on last years expedition - called it the largest and most complete bone bed in the state of Utah, and one of, if not the largest, anywhere in the United States. He called the discovery of three intact toothy, long-snouted fossils from the period extremely rare, adding that the density of bone is as high or greater than all the other Triassic sites in the country. The fossil bed is part of the Chinle Formation, ancient river and flood plain deposits that run through the center of the original monument President Barack Obama designated in December 2016. But that sedimentary rock also contains uranium, which made it more commercially attractive than other parts of Bears Ears. Advertisement In December, The Washington Post reported that the firm Energy Fuels Resources lobbied Interior Department officials to shrink the boundaries of the monument, in part to allow the company greater access to areas where it held uranium mining rights. Trumps Bears Ears proclamation, which took effect Feb. 2, cut more than 1 million acres from its original 1.35 million-acre expanse. A separate proclamation reduced another national monument in Utah, Grand Staircase-Escalante, by about 800,000 acres. Other large Triassic-period fossil discoveries have been made in Texas, Arizona and New Mexico, so a find as far north as Utah is significant, Gay said. The Triassic period took place immediately after the first mass extinction on Earth, between 251 million and 199 million years ago, and phytosaurs evolved alongside other species that emerged after roughly 95 percent of the previous species had perished. Phytosaurs are not considered dinosaurs, Gay said, but seeing how these animals were able to live in northern parts of the continent might give us some idea of how dinosaurs were able to survive ... and take over the world. The new find at Bears Ears underscores the fact that Utah is home to key paleontological deposits, and changes in national monuments there could effect the course of future scientific research. David Polly, president of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, said in an interview that 14 paleontologists are working on sites that used to be within Bears Ears boundaries but no longer have protection; twice as many are conducting research on sites that had lain within Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument until earlier this month. One of the reasons Grand Staircase-Escalante was first designated in 1996, for example, was because of its value as a paleontological site. Its Kaiparowits Plateau ranks as one of the most important examples of the Mesozoic Era, and Polly noted that it has yielded 27 new species never been known to science before. But now nearly half of the Kaiparowits Plateau falls outside the new boundaries, Polly noted - including nearly all of the Tropic Shale, a roughly 94 million-year-old swath of rock that Trumps monument proclamation identifies as a protected object. More broadly, Polly has identified 472 known scientifically important sites that now lie outside Grand Staircase-Escalantes boundaries. Polly said he is most worried about the Tropic Shale, because it contains commercially viable shale gas deposits and is accessible by road. If shale gas development took place there, you would also be splintering all the fossils in it and erasing all the geochemical signals that tell us about the extinction, the chemistry of the time. Gay said he worked with conservationists and other groups on the bid to designate Bears Ears as a national monument because of its fossil deposits. He searched for Triassic-era fossils for three years before he came across the recent find in June 2016. Advertisement We decided to stop at some exposures we found promising and found the fossils right away, he said. Exposures are parts of cracked rock that can reveal fossils. While the monument survived, the change in designation has an immediate effect on Gays work, he said, because he could no longer use part of a $25,000 Bureau of Land Management grant he was awarded to continue excavating the site. We were all really upset. We didnt want to believe it at first, Gay said, describing the teams mood as Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke toured Bears Ears before recommending that it be reduced. The Bureau of Land Management did not respond to requests for comment on Thursday. Advertisement Gays team has been nervous, in part, because it determined during the course of the research that the site had been looted. The team found plaster that had been made to encase a portion of a skull. Gay alerted the BLMs district paleontologist to the problem, and a bureau official told him that its Arizona office had a fragment of fossil that was surrendered in 2008 by a collector who lacked a permit. The team matched the fossil to the recent Bears Ears findings, proving that it came from the same site. This may be one of the only times a recovered fossil has been traced all the way back to the location where it was looted, Gay said. They broke off the skull, Gay said of the amateurs who robbed the site. They didnt even take the whole skull. Also they missed the entire rest of the animal and several other animals laying on top of it and hundreds and hundreds of bones laying across the slope. The No. 2 FBI official said Thursday that he personally visited the FBIs call center this week as part of a review of how it fumbled a tip on the teen accused of carrying out a massacre at a high school in Parkland, Florida, as he addressed, in some detail, the mounting criticism the bureau is facing over its handling of the matter. Acting Deputy Director David Bowdich, appearing at a Justice Department news conference about fraud perpetrated against the elderly, said that while he could not address specific people or organizations criticizing the bureau, he was deeply concerned about his agencys public standing. The night before, National Rifle Association spokeswoman Dana Loesch had asserted during a CNN Town Hall on gun violence that she was focusing her condemnation on the FBI officials who did not respond appropriately to warnings about the Parkland shooter. And soon before Bowdich spoke Thursday, NRA chief executive Wayne LaPierre had called the FBIs leadership rogue. Look, I dont want to get into who says what, but I do want to project out to the public, is when I look through the prism of risk for our organization, I find the number one risk for our organization is losing the faith and confidence of the American people. Number one, Bowdich said when asked about the criticism from the NRA and others. Advertisement The FBI had previously conceded protocols were not followed when, in January, someone close to a teen named Nikolas Cruz called a bureau tip line to warn of Cruzs gun ownership, desire to kill people, erratic behavior and disturbing social media posts, as well as the potential of him conducting a school shooting. The tip was reported to a supervisor in the bureaus West Virginia call center, but it was never referred to agents in the field for further investigation as it should have been, officials have said. Cruz is accused of shooting and killing 17 people at Parklands Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School last week. Separately, a Mississippi bail bondsman had tipped the FBI in September about a YouTube user with the screen name nikolas cruz who had commented on a video, Im going to be a professional school shooter. In that instance, the bureau said it could not connect the account to a person. In the wake of the bureaus admission about the January tip, Florida Gov. Rick Scott, a Republican, called for FBI Director Chrisopher Wray to resign, and President Donald Trump said the bureaus handling of the matter was not acceptable. They are spending too much time trying to prove Russian collusion with the Trump campaign - there is no collusion. Get back to the basics and make us all proud! Trump wrote on Twitter. Bowdich said Thursday that he had visited the call center Monday with a team and sat in on some calls. He called the center a professional operation but added quickly: Now let me be clear that there was a mistake made. We know that. But it is our job to make sure that we do everything in our power to ensure that does not happen again. Bowdich did not directly address a question about why, specifically, the tip on Cruz was not passed to agents in the field, though he hinted that those in the call center might have made a judgment error. People make judgments out on the streets every day. Every now and then, those judgments may not have been the best judgment based on the information they had at the time, Bowdich said. Last year, Bowdich said, the FBI took in about 765,000 calls - in addition to about 750,000 Internet tips - and 9 out of 10 did not produce leads that could be followed. He said the bureau was going back through its holdings to make sure it did not have any tips similar to the one on Cruz. Advertisement Asked about the idea the bureau was spending too much time on other cases - as Trump has suggested - Bowdich said, There is always work out there that were trying our best to get to, but there are certain investigations that we have to immediately address because there is an immediate threat to the public. The Washington Posts Mark Berman contributed to this report. Rep. Scott Peters, D-San Diego, has endorsed Jamul-Dulzura Union School District trustee and retired Navy SEAL Josh Butner for Congress, the first local congressional endorsement in that East County race. Josh Butners 23 years of service in the SEAL teams embodies the type of service-driven leadership that will always put our country first, Peters said in a statement. Butner, Peters said, will fight for the needs of the communities in the district. Butner, 49, a Democrat from Jamul, is running for a seat held by Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Alpine. The district includes inland San Diego County and Temecula and is one of the most conservative in California. Hunter, however, has been entangled in an FBI investigation related to spending campaign money for personal use, including jewelry, food, and home improvements. Hunter said the purchases were honest mistakes and he has repaid his campaign. Advertisement Besides Hunter, Butner is running against one other Democratic frontrunner, Ammar Campa-Najjar, a former spokesman at the Department of Labor. Running his first campaign, Campa-Najjar, also from Jamul, has raised a little over $520,000 since launching his campaign last year, more than any of the other candidates. Hunter has raised just over $461,000 and Butner raised nearly $432,000. Across the aisle, Republican Shamus Sayed, businessman, has raised $185,539, including a $100,000 loan. El Cajon Mayor Bill Wells announced his own campaign earlier this week. Former San Diego City Council member Carl DeMaio is also positioning himself to run. Ten candidates have at least filed preliminary paperwork to run, and the top-two finishers in Junes open primary will advance to the general election regardless of their partisan registration. Twitter: @jptstewart joshua.stewart@sduniontribune.com Advertisement (619) 293-1841 San Diego may create a home buying incentive for police officers. The goal is helping reduce a rash of officer vacancies. Local banks and other lenders could fulfill some federal obligations by participating. San Diego officials are exploring a new way to help solve a rash of police officer vacancies: financial incentives for officers who buy homes within the city. Officers could receive as much as $50,000 toward a down payment or closing costs when they buy a home and agree to stay on the San Diego force for a certain number of years. The proposed incentive, still in the early planning stages, could help San Diego get closer to its goal of 2,040 officers a goal that has become steadily more elusive in recent years. The latest data from the Police Department show the city has 1,787 officers, down from 1,820 last summer. That leaves the city 253 officers short of its goal. Advertisement The housing incentive, in addition to helping the Police Department recruit and retain more officers, could help the city achieve a longtime goal of more community-based policing by encouraging officers to live in city neighborhoods. A recent analysis by the police officers labor union found that only about 30 percent of SDPD officers live in the city, with many opting for the East County, South Bay and southwest Riverside County. A big part of retaining police officers is having them actually live in the city and not make an hours-long commute every day, said Councilman Chris Cate of Mira Mesa, who is partnering on the program with Councilwoman Barbara Bry of La Jolla. Its a recruiting tool, its a retention tool and it makes neighborhoods safer by helping with community policing, Bry said in an interview this week. Theyre shopping at the neighborhood store, eating at the neighborhood restaurant and their kids are going to the neighborhood school. The incentive could also help the city meet the goals of its ambitious climate action plan by reducing commuting miles for many city police officers. Bry said the program might be limited to certain ZIP codes within the city where incomes are low, crime is high or both. But even if the program isnt restricted that way, the high cost of housing in San Diego makes it likely officers will only be able to afford homes in the citys low-income or middle-income neighborhoods. Bry and Cate said they both expect there to be some sort of cap on the price of homes officers could buy and remain eligible for the incentive. Advertisement Were not doing this for million-dollar homes, Cate said. San Francisco and Stockton have offered similar incentives for several years with varying success. San Diegos incentive would be the first of its kind in the county, Cate said. The federal government operates Officer Next Door and Teacher Next Door, which provide half-price houses to police officers and teachers. But those programs were more robust during the foreclosure crisis, when federal lending agencies were acquiring thousands of homes. Much of the money for the program, if not all, would come from local banks and other financial institutions that are required by federal law to participate in programs that boost lending in low-income and middle-income areas. Advertisement Bry and Cate met recently with the National Asian American Coalition and several financial institutions First Republic Bank, The Capital Corps and CIT Bank to discuss their potential participation in the incentive program. Weve had some really great initial discussions, said Cate, adding that he envisions the city kick-starting the program with a significant financial contribution. He requested $500,000 for the program in a budget memo submitted in January to Mayor Kevin Faulconer, and said by phone that he expects local lenders to more than match that. In contrast, Bry said shes optimistic the program could be launched with no money from the city, which is facing steep deficits in coming years primarily because of rising employee salaries and pension costs. Advertisement My thought is we can do this without any city money, she said. My goal is for this to be private sector money and for the program to be run separately from the city. Bry co-chairs the San Diego City-County Reinvestment Task Force and said she plans to make the police officer housing incentive program that panels No. 1 priority. Bry, a successful high-tech entrepreneur before joining the council last year, said she expects local financial institutions to provide a few million dollars to the program. She called it a revolving loan fund or silent second mortgage where the officers would eventually pay the incentive back when they sell the home. Advertisement If the program can secure $5 million a year in lending capital, Bry said 100 officers a year could receive $50,000 each in incentives for down payments or closing costs. That could quickly help the city make a dent in the officer vacancy problem, which could grow worse in coming years with about 600 of the departments nearly 1,800 officers eligible to retire soon. While details of the program are still in the discussion stages, Bry and Cate said it will be essential that officers who use the incentive agree to stay both in the home and on the police force for multiple years. Its like a little handcuff that will keep them here, Bry said. Advertisement david.garrick@sduniontribune.com (619) 269-8906 Twitter:@UTDavidGarrick A state lobbyist from San Diego who spoke against sexual harassment in Sacramento has received an award for her work. On Thursday the California Womens Museum honored Adama Iwu for her ongoing efforts to end sexual misconduct in politics. Iwu, a lobbyist for Visa, was also recently featured on the cover of Time. She and other silence breakers were named the publications Person of the Year for addressing and working to end sexual misconduct against women in the workplace. Im incredibly honored to receive this award, particularly from the Womens Museum of California in my hometown of San Diego, Iwu said in a statement released by the museum. Now more than ever, its vital that womens voices are heard, and the Womens Museum is an important part of educating young girls on those who have come before them and paved paths for them. Iwu also recently founded We Said Enough, an organization that works to end sexual harassment and misconduct. She was also an author of an open letter of the same name that condemned inappropriate behavior. It had 140 original signatories. Advertisement Its time for women to speak up and share their stories. We also need the good men, and there are many, to believe us, have our backs and speak up. Until more women hold positions of power, our future is literally dependent on men. Its time to promote women into elected oce, in positions of leadership and onto corporate boards, the letter says. Phil Blair and Mel Katz, executives at staffing company Manpower West, were also honored for promoting women leaders in work. The event at Mister As was organized by museum board members Shawn VanDiver and Kate Hoit. VanDiver said that over $65,000 was raised for the museum and the money will pay for education programming, exhibits and operations. Twitter: @jptstewart joshua.stewart@sduniontribune.com Advertisement (619) 293-1841 During a busy one-day visit to San Diego, the Rev. Al Sharpton took aim at shootings by local law enforcement officers. After meeting with several family members of men who had been killed during encounters with police or sheriffs deputies, Sharpton urged an end to the practice of local prosecutors investigating local law enforcement shootings. For a city of this size to have so many recurring incidents means this city has a problem it has not dealt with, said Sharpton, 63, head of the New York-based National Action Network. These stories are absolutely appalling. While he applauded California attorney general Xavier Becerras opposition to President Trumps border wall, he faulted that same official for not opposing U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions discontinuing Obama-era advocacy of civilian review boards. Advertisement Thats a conflict of interest, Sharpton said of local authorities investigating local police. Mr. Becerra, you cannot have such a lopsided sense of justice. Invited here by the Rev. Shane Harris, head of the National Action Networks San Diego chapter, Sharpton spent a whirlwind day here Wednesday. He met with the Black Contractors Association of San Diego, spoke at a luncheon, then addressed an evening crowd of about 200 inside the Jacobs Center for Neighborhood Innovation. He also met privately with family members of Alfred Olango, who was killed by El Cajon police in 2016; Jonathon Coronel, shot dead by sheriffs deputies in 2017; and James Lacey, killed last summer when deputies tried to evict him from a downtown apartment. He also met with Raymond Wiley, who was jailed last July after police stopped him during an early morning walk. The 66-year-old man was carrying his car key, gloves and a short cane. Police suspected he was a potential car thief; he insisted he was just out for his usual morning walk. It is very important that these cases get more exposure, Sharpton said, explaining why he had come to San Diego. Until you first get exposure, you will never get change. The Olango, Coronel and Lacey shootings were all ruled justified by local prosecutors. Olango had been acting erratically and, when El Cajon police approached him, pointed a metal object in their direction. That object was later found to be a vaping device. Sheriffs deputies said that Coronel was reaching for his waist when officers opened fire. He was found to be unarmed. A cousin, Rocio Zamora, said he had been lifting his shirt to show he was not carrying a weapon. Lacey had grabbed a replica handgun when he was fatally shot by two deputies. Advertisement While NAN does not endorse political candidates, the organization will issue report cards assessing candidates positions on issues ranging from homelessness to criminal justice reform. If you dont have a plan around police reform and criminal justice reform, well note that, Harris said. NAN may be officially nonpartisan, but its national leader blasted Trump and his Republican allies during his keynote speech at Wednesday nights Revival of the Movement. What is most disturbing to me, why I wanted to be here tonight, Sharpton told his audience, is he is being used to reverse all the human rights, the civil rights, the womens rights that have been built up. Advertisement We have the chance to stop them in their tracks by taking them out of power. Urging a strong turnout in midterm elections, Sharpton cautioned against tribalism within the civil rights movement. You cannot fight for civil rights for anybody unless you fight for everybody, he said. Weve got to fight for blacks and Latinos and gays and women for everybody. A 91-year-old woman was killed late Friday morning after her car collided with another car in a busy Clairemont intersection, then slammed into a light pole, San Diego police said. The Medical Examiners Office later identified her as Doris Lucille Guffin of San Diego. Just before 11:15 a.m, she was headed south on Mount Alifan when her gray Toyota Camry collided with a small vehicle headed east on Balboa Avenue, Officer Tony Martinez said. The Camry then struck the light pole. Guffin died at the scene. A 32-year-old woman driving the other car sustained scratches and bruises, Martinez said. Advertisement Police initially said only one car had been involved in the crash. Balboa Avenue was closed between Genesee Avenue and Cannington Drive for the investigation. Police issued a traffic alert for the area. teri.figueroa@sduniontribune.com (760) 529-4945 Twitter: @TeriFigueroaUT Advertisement UPDATES: 1:45 p.m.: This story was updated with additional details. It was originally posted at 12:30 p.m. U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers at the San Ysidro Port of Entry arrested two fugitives wanted for attempted homicides in Escondido and Contra Costa County this week. On Monday, U.S. citizen Juan Javier was taken into custody at about 2:15 p.m. after an officer at the pedestrian facility at the port of entry reportedly found some discrepancies during an inspection. During a further inspection, a CBP officer confirmed Javiers identify through a fingerprint database and discovered he was the subject of an outstanding felony warrant for attempted homicide issued by the Escondido Police Department, with bail set at $2 million. He was turned over to the custody of Escondido police. Advertisement The next day at about 3 p.m., an officer working the vehicle inspection lanes at the same port of entry discovered that one of six people in a Honda Odyssey 23-year-old U.S. citizen Omar Fierro-Ordaz had a warrant for his arrest. The officer referred him to secondary inspection. An officer discovered that Fierro-Ordaz was the subject of an outstanding felony warrant for attempted homicide issued by the Contra Costa County Sheriffs Office, with bail set at $2 million. Fierro-Ordaz was turned over to the custody of the U.S. Marshals Service. Homeless Playlist On Now San Diego hepatitis outbreak continues to grow: 481 cases On Now Homeless entrenched in booming tent city along Santa Ana River On Now San Diego mayor agreed to homeless hub, then delayed, advocates say On Now Homeless outreach in San Diego On Now Video: Street Art: Portraits of San Diego's Homeless #8 On Now In poverty himself, 'Water Man Dave,' is the fearless saint of San Diego's homeless 5:41 On Now Video: Homeless living in cars find safe havens 2:21 On Now Street Art: Portraits of San Diego's Homeless #7 On Now Pitching a tent plan for San Diego's homeless On Now Homeless efforts get $80M boost for various services Advertisement gary.warth@sduniontribune.com Twitter: @GaryWarthUT 760-529-4939 A man threatened a North Park convenience store clerk with a metal bar early Friday and stole money from the cash register, San Diego police said. The incident happened shortly before 5 a.m. at a 7-Eleven on University Avenue near Iowa Street, according to Officer Tony Martinez. The robber fled immediately after demanding money from the clerk, who complied by pulling cash from the register. He was last seen heading north on Iowa. Police said the robber was described as a white or Hispanic man in his late 20s or early 30s, about 5 feet 10 inches tall, with a thin build. His face was covered with a black mask. Advertisement The robber was wearing a light blue San Diego Chargers hooded sweatshirt, jeans and orange shoes. The San Diego Police Departments robbery detectives are handling the investigation. Anyone with information is encouraged to call the police department or Crime Stoppers at (888) 580-8477. dana.littlefield@sduniontribune.com Twitter: @danalittlefield As schools in the region and across the country are grapple with fears of campus shootings, a sheriffs official said Friday that a threat written on a bathroom wall at a Spring Valley school was not credible. Authorities were notified just before 9 a.m. of the scrawled threat of a shooting at Steam Academy at La Presa on Leland Street, just south of Jamacha Road, Lt. Tom Seiver said in a news release. The message indicated that the academy for middle schoolers would be targeted for a shooting on Friday, Seiver said. He said the threat was not credible and classes would be dismissed on a normal schedule. These are tense times for schools, Seiver said in the news release. The Sheriffs Department and local school district take every threat seriously and nothing can be dismissed or ignored. Advertisement On Thursday, San Diego police arrested a 14-year-old Torrey Pines High freshman who had been suspended from school earlier this week for making what authorities said were written and verbal threats. Seiver said that students can report threats of violence to school resource deputies or anonymously at Crime Stoppers tip line at (888) 580-8477. teri.figueroa@sduniontribune.com (760) 529-4945 Twitter: @TeriFigueroaUT A 14-year-old freshman who was suspended from Torrey Pines High School on Tuesday for making verbal and written threats was arrested by San Diego police Thursday. The teen was taken to Juvenile Hall after investigators determined that he had made criminal threats, Officer Joshua Hodge said in a statement. Currently, there are no further threats, Hodge said. He did not specify what the teen had threatened to do, and declined to say if the teen may have been in a position to carry out any threatened action, citing the still-active investigation. Advertisement Police were made aware of the matter Wednesday night when they were asked to make a threat assessment regarding the high school, Hodge said. Officers went to the campus Thursday morning, and then went to the teens Carmel Valley to question him around noon. He was subsequently taken into custody. A request for comment left for the principal of Torrey Pines High was not immediately returned. Witnesses or tipsters with information regarding the case can call Crime Stoppers at (888) 580-8477, and remain anonymous. Texts and email can be sent via the website, www.sdcrimestoppers.org. Advertisement karen.kucher@sduniontribune.com UPDATES: 5:40 p.m.: This story was updated with information that the teen had been arrested. Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens is blaming his felony invasion of privacy indictment on a reckless liberal prosecutor, holding fast to the assertion that any case stemming from his admitted extramarital affair is politically driven. The Republican governor and St. Louis Democratic circuit attorney, both just a little more than a year into their offices, certainly are political opposites. But a growing number of GOP lawmakers on Friday were questioning whether Greitens can continue to effectively lead while facing the indictment. The indictment handed down by a grand jury and stemming from an investigation launched by Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner alleges that Greitens took a compromising photo of a woman without her consent and transmitted the image to a computer. Greitens has admitted being unfaithful to his wife before he won election as governor but has denied criminal wrongdoing and has insisted that the affair with his former hairdresser was consensual. His attorney filed a motion to dismiss the indictment. Greitens claims the criminal case is politically motivated. Advertisement The people of Missouri deserve better than a reckless liberal prosecutor who uses her office to score political points, Greitens said in a statement Thursday. Gardner didnt respond, but her spokeswoman Susan Ryan said the prosecutor will not be playing political games during this process. These personal attacks, while disappointing, will not distract her from her duty to serve justice and the citizens of this community, Ryan said Friday. While the state Republican Party was still supporting Greitens, some lawmakers, including some Republicans, were calling on him to resign or face legislative impeachment proceedings. Heres our full statement on the recent news re: Governor Greitens pic.twitter.com/QlsRmlgEiv Missouri GOP (@MissouriGOP) February 23, 2018 In the wake of the grand jury criminal indictment, and with legal proceedings to come, I cannot see how he could effectively perform the duties of his office, let alone to lead with the kind of moral authority needed to make a positive impact, said Sen. Kevin Corlew, of Kansas City, one of at least four Republicans who were newly calling for Greitens resignation. Senate Majority Leader Mike Kehoe, a Republican from Jefferson City, said the indictment causes me to question whether the governor has the ability to effectively lead the state going forward, but he stopped short of calling for Greitens resignation. Other Republicans remained reserved in their judgment but expressed support for a legislative investigation into Greitens announced Thursday by GOP House leaders. An investigation is a necessary first step before an impeachment proceeding but does not necessarily lead to one. Advertisement Former Missouri Supreme Court Chief Justice Mike Wolff said its up to the House to decide whether a state official can be impeached for conduct that occurred before he took office. The only statewide Missouri official to be convicted, impeached and ousted from office was Democratic Secretary of State Judy Moriarty in 1994. She was convicted of a misdemeanor for backdating her sons candidacy paperwork for a state House seat, then later impeached by the House and removed by the state Supreme Court. The prosecutor pursing the case against Greitens was once a Missouri House member herself, serving two terms starting in 2012. Gardner came to politics after serving as a prosecutor in the circuit attorneys office under her predecessor, Jennifer Joyce, from 2005 to 2010. Missouri Republican Party executive director Sam Cooper called the indictment of Greitens a political hit job. Advertisement But Democratic Rep. Alan Green of St. Louis County, chairman of the Missouri Legislative Black Caucus, defended Gardner, nothing that it was an independent grand jury that found probable cause to indict the governor. The circuit attorney is an elected official. Gardner, who grew up in St. Louis and earned a law degree from St. Louis University, decided to run for the job leading an office of about 60 prosecutors when Joyce opted not to seek a fifth term in 2016. With unrest in nearby Ferguson still on the minds of people in St. Louis, where black residents slightly outnumber whites, Gardner, who is black, pledged to restore trust in the criminal justice system. Gardner, 42, defeated three other Democrats in the August primary, aided by $200,000 in late donations from a national super PAC partly funded by liberal billionaire George Soros. Her career path has some precedent: Democratic U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill also began as an assistant prosecutor before winning election to the Missouri House and later being elected the Jackson County prosecutor. Advertisement The indictment has Greitens at a standstill. He canceled plans to go to Washington this weekend for a National Governors Association meeting, and the Republican Governors Association said Greitens no longer intends to serve on its executive committee. The indictment states that on March 21, 2015, Greitens photographed a woman identified only by her initials in a state of full or partial nudity without her knowledge or consent. The indictment said Greitens transmitted the image contained in the photograph in a manner that allowed access to that image via a computer. Soon after the affair began, the womans husband secretly recorded a conversation in which she described the alleged incident. She said on the tape that Greitens invited her downstairs at his home because he wanted to show her how to do a proper pull-up. She said Greitens taped my hands to these rings and then put a blindfold on me, took a photo of her partially nude, then warned her to remain silent. Advertisement I saw a flash through the blindfold and he said, Youre never going to mention my name, she said. Greitens, a married father of two young boys, has repeatedly denied blackmailing the woman. He has declined to say whether he took a photo. According to the Missouri Office of State Courts Administrator, 274 felony invasion of privacy charges have been filed in the state since 2004. But the data lists only one case in St. Louis city apparently Greitens. Greitens is a Rhodes Scholar and former Navy SEAL who entered the 2016 race as a brash outsider. He won an expensive primary, then defeated Democratic Attorney General Chris Koster in the general election. Advertisement He has faced questions about dark money campaign contributions. His use of a secretive app that deletes messages is under investigation by Republican Attorney General Josh Hawley. Lieb and Nelson reported from Jefferson City, Missouri. AP reporter John Hanna contributed from Topeka, Kansas. Paul Manafort was using fraudulently obtained loans and tax-cheating tricks to prop up his personal finances as he became chairman of the Trump campaign in 2016, according to a new 32-count indictment filed against him and his business partner Thursday. The indictment ratchets up pressure on Manafort and his deputy, Rick Gates, who were already preparing for a trial in the District that could come later this year on fraud and money-laundering charges. The additional charges had been expected in Special Counsel Robert Muellers prosecution of Manafort and Gates. Manafort joined the Trump campaign in March 2016 and was campaign chairman from June to August of that year. Gates also served as a top official on Trumps campaign. Mueller accused the men of lying on their income-tax returns and conspiring to commit bank fraud to get loans. The indictment was filed in federal court in Virginia - a technical requirement because that was where the accused filed their tax returns. Advertisement A court filing indicates that prosecutors initially sought to combine the new charges with the preexisting indictment in federal court in Washington, but Manafort declined to agree, leading to the possibility of separate trials in neighboring jurisdictions. The new indictment offers a more detailed portrait of what prosecutors say was a multiyear scheme by Manafort and Gates to use their income from working for a Ukrainian political party to buy properties, evade taxes and support a lavish lifestyle even after their business connections in Kiev evaporated. Manafort and Gates generated tens of millions of dollars in income as a result of their Ukraine work. From approximately 2006 through the present, Manafort and Gates engaged in a scheme to hide income from United States authorities, while enjoying the use of the money, the indictment charges. Manafort is innocent of the new charges, his spokesman Jason Maloni said in a statement Thursday. The new allegations against Mr. Manafort, once again, have nothing to do with Russia and 2016 election interference/collusion, the statement said. Mr. Manafort is confident that he will be acquitted and violations of his constitutional rights will be remedied. A lawyer for Gates did not comment on the indictment. This is pretty raw criminality,' said Patrick Cotter, a former federal prosecutor now in private practice in Chicago. According to the indictment, these are two fellows on a multiyear tear of lying to every bank they could find about their income. To a federal prosecutor, its fairly crude. Its extensive and bold and greedy with a capital G, but its not all that sophisticated. Cotter said there was one hero in the special counsels tale - a bookkeeper who refused an alleged request by Gates to falsely inflate a revenue claim. Advertisement Cotter added that the indictment suggests serious risk for the defendants - if convicted at trial, given their ages and the millions of dollars in alleged fraud, they could be facing de facto life prison sentences. The indictment says that from 2006 to 2015, Manafort, with help from Gates, avoided paying taxes on income from Ukraine by disguising it as loans from offshore corporate entities, and by using foreign bank accounts to make payments to businesses in the United States on Manaforts behalf. According to the indictment, Manaforts Ukraine income dwindled in 2015, and the scheme took on a new form - getting $20 million in loans based on Manaforts real estate properties in the United States. But to do that, the grand jury charged, he and Gates made false claims to banks about their companys income and existing debts. The indictment describes one bank employee conspiring with Manafort in the fraud. In spring 2016, the indictment says, that unidentified co-conspirator wrote that a document looked doctored and asked them to do a clean excel doc and send that instead. Advertisement When Manafort joined the Trump campaign as an adviser in early 2016, he agreed to work with no pay, pitching his ability to work free as a point of particular appeal for Trump, who was notoriously stingy and also valued people who appeared to be wealthy. In fact, prosecutors alleged Manafort was taking out multimillion-dollar loans in those same months, including $5.5 million that he sought in the same month he joined the campaign. Another detail in the indictment suggests that Manafort was under significant financial pressure even as he ascended to the top of the Trump campaign in mid-2016. One bank lender questioned Manafort about a $300,000 delinquency on his American Express card, which was more than 90 days past due. The delinquency significantly affected Manaforts credit rating score. In response, according to the indictment, Manafort got Gates to write a letter falsely claiming that he, not Manafort, had borrowed the card to make the purchases and would pay him back. Advertisement The new charges also claim both men continued the conspiracy even as FBI agents and federal prosecutors were breathing down their necks. Manafort and Gates were hit with a 12-count indictment in October - the first criminal charges in Muellers probe of Russian interference with the 2016 election. That indictment focused not on events in the 2016 race but financial transactions involving work by Manafort and Gates for the Ukrainian political party, and their failure to notify U.S. authorities that they were acting as lobbyists for a foreign government. On Oct. 25, 2017 - just days before the first indictment was revealed - Gates submitted a false tax document for the 2013 tax year, according to the new charges. And both men were charged with a bank fraud conspiracy involving a $9.5 million loan that investigators said continued even after that indictment was unsealed. The filing Thursday comes at a time of significant uncertainty about when a trial might happen in the first case, or even who the defense lawyers will be. Last week, U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson criticized both sides for what she called unacceptable delays in the case, which still does not have a trial date. Advertisement Gatess legal strategy and defense team are still unclear. Three of his lawyers had asked to leave the case, a request the judge granted Thursday. The details of his issues with his lawyers have not been described publicly, beyond a court filing that said they involve highly sensitive matters that would potentially be prejudicial to [Gates] as well as embarrassing. Shortly after Thursdays indictment was filed, a new lawyer, Thomas Green, filed notice with the court that he is now representing Gates. Green is an experienced white-collar attorney with a reputation for cutting plea deals on behalf of his clients. On Tuesday, an associate of Gates pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI in the course of the Russia investigation. Alex van der Zwaan, a lawyer, admitted to lying about his contacts with Gates and is awaiting sentencing. The debate among Californias top four Democratic candidates for governor Thursday night was unlike most of their recent match-ups, with long stretches of broad agreement and few, if any, fireworks. The gubernatorial contenders may have been on their best behavior because the gathering took place the night before the California Democratic Party meets and its delegates decide whether to endorse a candidate in the governors race and other contests. At one point in the debate, which was moderated by state Sen. Holly Mitchell (D-Los Angeles), Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom and former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, front-runners in the race who have clashed bitterly and personally, shook hands after agreeing on the need to reform the states tax policies. The two men, along with state Treasurer John Chiang and former state schools chief Delaine Eastin, also aligned when discussing the importance of early childhood education, gun control, addressing climate change, affordable housing and other policies. Advertisement Meeting hours after President Trump criticized California law enforcements handling of gangs and threatened to pull federal immigration officers out of the state, the candidates united in pledging to push back against his administrations policies, and spoke of invoking states rights. Well use the 10th Amendment, well use everything we can, said Villaraigosa, who called on federal officials to halt sweeping searches for illegal immigrants to stop terrorizing communities in the way Donald Trump has done. Newsom agreed, ridiculing Trumps proposed border wall as a monument to idiocy and vowing that the state would resist the presidents immigration policy. We are not going to be part of the deportation arm of the Trump administration, he said. Lets stand tall, Democrats! California Democrats to decide endorsements and hear from potential presidential candidates at annual convention >> Chiang, the son of Taiwanese immigrants, spoke of being treated like a second-class citizen as a child before calling for protecting those in the country illegally. We have to stand together at this Democratic convention, because you have people who are coming across, who want to be here, but they are scared of being on the border of San Diego, he said in front of several hundred people at the forum, which was organized by the San Diego County Democratic Party, the Sycuan Band of the Kumeyaay Nation and the Rancho Santa Fe Democratic Club. So when they get there, we have to give them a hug and say, were going to protect you while youre here and were going to protect you going forward at every time and everywhere. The candidates sole disagreement of the evening came over single-payer healthcare, an issue they have been split on. Advertisement As in previous debates, Villaraigosa and Chiang both said they agree with the concept of universal healthcare but were concerned about how the state would pay for it. I want to push California aggressively to create what we can today, Chiang said, adding that we have to finance this correctly. Newsom and Eastin vocally support such a system. Newsom accused Villaraigosa and Chiang of being defeatist Democrats who spoke of supporting the issue but then found ways to undermine it. Eastin added that healthcare should be a right, not a privilege. Advertisement Every other first-world country has figured this out, she said. Why cant we? Follow California politics by signing up for our email newsletter seema.mehta@latimes.com phil.willon@latimes.com Advertisement For the latest on national and California politics, follow @LATSeema on Twitter. Theres a famous saying in journalism: If your mother says she loves you, check it out. Especially, it should be added, if her expression of affection can be traced to the Kremlin. On Sundays Meet the Press, Sen. Bernie Sanders said it was old news that the Russian attempt to spoil the 2016 election included an effort to pump up his progressive candidacy while jaundicing views of Hillary Clinton. At the end of my campaign, Sanders said, when it appeared that Clinton was going to win (the primary), and certainly after she won the nomination, what the Russians were doing was flocking to Bernie Sanders Facebook sites and they were saying to Sanders supporters, as they were to Black Lives Matter supporters, people fighting for social justice, and they were saying to the Muslim community, If you vote for Hillary Clinton, you have to understand shes crazy, shes a murderer, all kinds of horrible things. And it turns out that one of our social-media guys in San Diego actually went to the Clinton campaign in September (2016) and said, Something weird is going on. Bernie is not in the campaign and hundreds of these people are coming on to his Facebook sites. Advertisement Those people, as alleged in Special Counsel Robert Muellers indictment of 13 Russians, were in fact Kremlin-directed bots trolling Clinton while pumping poison into the shark-infested well of American politics. The local social-media guy was John Mattes, a San Diego investigative reporter with a trained nose for the stink of fraud. A year ago, Mattes started speaking publicly about his investigation into the Russian cyber-invasion as it applied to the Sanders campaign. His conclusion, which he reviewed for me on Tuesday, is that a critical mass of Sanders supporters may have been persuaded by a flood of lurid anti-Clinton posts to vote third party, write in Sanders, or sit out the election. Swing states like Michigan and Wisconsin, which Trump won by whiskers, could have been turned by the unusual defections, Mattes speculates. I know what you Trump loyalists are thinking right now. Fake news about fake news. To a degree, I agree. Advertisement There is no way to know how many, if any, Sanders voters were influenced by tabloid-style posts. From my seat, the 2016 campaign offered plenty of rational reasons to cotton to sure losers like Sanders on the left or John Kasich on the right. But the nominated candidates? Declaring a pox on both dynastic houses struck me as reasonable. One voter I know well, the news junkie Ive lived with for 43 years, didnt need a Russian bot to persuade her that both Clinton and Trump carried equally monstrous baggage. Her protest vote for Libertarian Gary Johnson was decades, not days, in the forming. Advertisement Looking ahead, it will be one of historys most fascinating judgments when, after Mueller settles the dust, the Russian invasion is determined to be an elaborate dirty political trick with ephemeral effect or a 21st century Pearl Harbor, a devastating attack that changed history. Its San Diegos piece of the puzzle that a local journalist, removed from Washington intelligence circles, appears to have gotten an early whiff of the Cyrillic asterisk on the Trump presidency that will, for better or worse, change political perceptions on the Internet. In this years midterms, bellwether elections that could determine whether Trump is impeached, the B.S. detectors are going to be on overdrive. In the long run, if Americans are more apt to check out what they hear and read, Putin, the master KGB Machiavellian, might wind up having done American democracy a favor. Advertisement No elections in our history will be so rigorously checked out as the next one -- and the one after that. Granted, so long as lobbyists run Washington, the swamp of American politics will never be drained. Our best hope is to be on guard not just for morphing Mother Russia but also for the mutating American beasts in the bog. A veteran sheriffs deputy was charged Thursday with eight felonies and six misdemeanors after a months-long investigation into sexual misconduct allegations by women he encountered on patrol. The criminal charges come after 14 women filed claims accusing Fischer of groping and other misconduct. A preliminary hearing was scheduled for May 2. A San Diego County sheriffs deputy who was accused of sexual misconduct by more than a dozen women over recent months turned himself in to law enforcement officials Thursday and was quickly arraigned on 14 criminal counts. Deputy Richard Fischer, 31, pleaded not guilty to eight felonies and a half dozen misdemeanors related to allegations that first surfaced last fall. He appeared in a Vista courtroom barely three hours after the District Attorneys Office announced the proceeding. Mr. Fischer has a strong desire to go through this process to clear his name, defense attorney Richard Pinckard said during the arraignment. Advertisement In all, Fischer was charged with one count of sexual battery and 12 counts of assault and battery by an officer and one count of false imprisonment. The charges could put him in prison for up to 14 years. Judge David J. Danielsen also issued protective orders for the 12 victims cited by prosecutors. Pinckard issued a statement after the hearing saying, Richard Fischer has dedicated his entire adult life to public service. He has served his country as a decorated United States Marine and he has served his communities as a police officer and a deputy sheriff. These allegations are wholly inconsistent with who Mr Fischer is. He categorically denies each of the allegations and looks forward to clearing his name. He has the full support of his family and everyone else who knows and loves him. Fourteen women filed legal claims and lawsuits against San Diego County in recent months. It was not immediately clear which of the women who filed civil claims against the county were counted as criminal victims by the District Attorneys Office. The arraignment Thursday afternoon is the result of a months-long investigation that began in November, when the first allegations of sexual misconduct were lodged by an attorney representing Fischers alleged victims and reported by The San Diego Union-Tribune. Some of the charges accuse Fischer of committing crimes while the victims were detained or in custody; others allege he returned to victims homes after responding to calls for help and assaulted them. Accusations against Fischer began piling up within days of the first news stories. The deputy was placed on desk duty, then administrative leave. The Sheriffs Department launched a criminal probe and an internal investigation as more women came forward with more allegations. Sheriffs investigators referred their case to prosecutors Jan. 19, about the same time Fischer stopped being paid by the department. According to District Attorney Summer Stephan, who hosted a news briefing immediately following the arraignment, Fischer took advantage of his authority as a sworn law enforcement officer. Advertisement When crimes involve those who are in positions of trust, no stone will go unturned, Stephan told reporters at the North County Regional Center minutes after the proceeding. This causes tremendous harm to the trust in the community and the confidence of those that we serve. Stephan, who said the felony charges generally involve a pattern of touching victims intimate parts over their clothing, urged any other victims to contact her office at (619) 531-3965. Sheriff Bill Gore said there is probably no investigation more serious than that involving a law enforcement officer. When any deputy conducts himself in an inappropriate manner, it impacts not only every sheriffs deputy but every peace officer in this county and across the country, he said. Advertisement In response to questions about why the case took months to result in criminal charges, Gore said, We dedicated every possible resource to this investigation, and will continue to do that. Fischer did not speak during the arraignment, except to assert his innocence when asked for his plea. He wore a business suit and handcuffs. The former deputy was allowed to remain free on $100,000 bail. Prosecutors asked for a $180,000 bond; Pinckard sought a reduced bail amount, saying his client had no income but a family and strong ties to the community. A trial readiness conference was scheduled March 26 and a preliminary hearing was set May 2. Advertisement The Fischer case roiled the Sheriffs Department for months, as the number of legal claims and lawsuits against the county exploded. By Thanksgiving, a half-dozen women leveled sexual misconduct allegations against Fischer, many with similar stories about him asking for a hug or improperly touching them. By Christmas, the number of alleged victims had climbed past 10 -- and the accusations were more serious. Fischer was being accused of pushing womens hands onto his genitals and groping womens breasts. Many of the women also reported this disquieting behavior: Fischer made implied threats, reminding them that he knew where they lived and alerting them that he would be checking up on them. Advertisement Upon arriving at the home of a San Marcos woman who called 911 for a health emergency in 2016, Fischer removed his jacket as if he planned to stay for some time, one claim states. Fischer told the woman she was hot and that she needed a hug. Without her consent, he then hugged (her) with a full embrace that included fondling of her buttocks with his hands and inappropriate massaging of her breasts with his own chest, the claim states. The legal claims also turned up another unsettling allegation: One woman who encountered Fischer warned the Sheriffs Department about the sexual misconduct in a handwritten letter in May 2016. Hes a predator, not an officer, that victim wrote. Advertisement The Sheriffs Department insisted it has no record of the letter. Officials said they surely would have acted upon the information if they received the nearly two-year-old warning. In December, as the sheriffs investigation dragged on and the department declined to discuss its progress in the case, three of Fischers alleged victims came forward to tell the Union-Tribune they were afraid that Gore and Stephan were protecting Fischer because he was a deputy. They should already have dealt with it, Alpine resident Liza Russell told the Union-Tribune late last year. They should have finished this case. My biggest fear is I have kids. I dont want something like this to happen to my daughter. According to Russell, Fischer arrested her after finding prescription pills during a traffic stop. She and her husband were returning from an out-of-state trip and the medicine was in a baggie rather than a pharmacy bottle. Advertisement The claim alleges that Fischer groped Russell repeatedly before taking her to jail. A nurse refused to book Russell into custody because her blood pressure was dangerously high and directed her to an emergency room. Russell said Fischer volunteered to take her to a hospital but instead groped her again before letting her go near where she had been pulled over. I took my shoes off and ran all the way home, she said. Attorney Dan Gilleon, who represents the 14 women who filed legal claims or lawsuits against San Diego County, said his clients have been on edge for months wondering why criminal charges had not been filed. Advertisement Its about time, he said by email. Gilleon also expressed worry that prosecutors may accept a guilty plea to less serious charges, like former District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis did with a San Diego police officer Christopher Hays who was accused of sexual assault but allowed to plea to simple battery. Lets hope Ms. Stephan doesnt give another bad cop preferential treatment because she needs law enforcement support for political reasons, he wrote. The civil claims have been consolidated for the purpose of mediation, a process that aims to resolve civil disputes out of court. Gilleon said a daylong mediation session last Friday did not produce a settlement. Advertisement Each of the claims is seeking up to $6 million in damages. Background Advertisement Watchdog Videos On Now Sexual misconduct accusers worry deputy is being protected 6:16 On Now City funded $2-million waterfront bathroom 1:26 On Now Public water district charges customer for legal work, response to records request On Now Video: Tiny homes won't be reused amid housing, homeless crisis On Now Attorney General seeks documentation for Miss Middle East On Now Rep. Hunter probe covers possible fraud On Now Video: SDG&E delaying solar credit for some low-income housing tenants On Now Video: Former San Diego Junior Theatre teacher sentenced for sex with teen girl 0:24 On Now Video: Shelter volunteers believe they were fired for finding a dog a home 0:49 On Now McKamey Manor is leaving San Diego 3:35 jeff.mcdonald@sduniontribune.com (619) 293-1708 @sdutMcDonald Rev. Billy Graham prayed for this day, every day, especially in recent years as his health faltered. He knew where he was headed and what the price of admission was to be. His wife, Ruth, had died in 2007 and he missed her terribly. He had given his life to the Lord as a Bible college student where he accepted the Lords promise of eternal life. He was ready for Heaven. The Rev. Graham, 99, died Wednesday at his home in Montreat, North Carolina. The legacy of Rev. Billy Grahams ministry is absolutely overpowering. Millions around the world have found peace and direction through his message that spanned 70 years, six continents, more than 185 countries. And today it all is instantaneously digitalized and available through the miracle of the Internet. Rev. Graham circled the globe, preaching in the name of his Savior Jesus Christ. Millions attended one or more of his 415 international crusades. Millions more have heard his compelling message on radio and television. No place, no matter how remote, was beyond the reach of Billys preaching that began in 1949 in a tent in Los Angeles where his crusades were born. Many in San Diego will recall Billy Grahams crusades here, including one in 1976 and his last one here in 2003. Advertisement In recent years Billy lived in a simple log home in the mountains of western North Carolina. He read The Word and prayed every day. Though his hearing and sight had weakened, his spirits were high. Often, he would say, I am ready to go home. It was like a six-word sermon that had the inspiring effect of reminding others of Gods promise of eternal life. Over the years, I was often asked what it was like to have been an associate of Billy, whom I first met in 1969 when I was an assistant to the U.S. secretary of defense. As relaxed as any personal conversation with Billy could be, this incredible man of God was bigger than life. Yet he was down to earth and absolutely self-effacing. To visit Billy in his modest surroundings defies ones ability to appreciate fully that you were in the presence of one of the most powerful, influential leaders of our time. I was associated with Billys ministry for close to 50 years, many of those as a member of his board. Throughout, Billy was there for encouragement and prayer. During my various publishing and public service careers, he sought advice on foreign policy as he worked to preach behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War. He especially wanted help in gaining a better understanding of how to deal with the media. We remained close and, in 1992, he participated in my swearing-in ceremony as ambassador to Spain. With Billy Graham to bless my diplomatic mission, how could I fail? We first met in early 1969 when he was asked to dedicate a new chapel built in the concourse of the Pentagon. He was there to comfort families of our POWs and missing men during the Vietnam War. Today, members of Billys family carry on their own unique ministries, all inspired by the legacy of Billy Graham. Under the umbrella of AnGel Ministries Billys daughter, Anne Graham Lotz, projects her own inspiring message of faith shared with the tone and uplifting delivery so akin to that of her father. Billys son, Franklin, heads up the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and Samaritans Purse. Both ministries have funded important relief efforts around the world for victims of poverty, hurricanes, war, earthquakes, floods, violence, disease and famine. Much of Billys compelling legacy has been preserved and housed at the Billy Graham Library in Charlotte, North Carolina. Nearby is a modest family plot where Billy will be buried next to his wife. Legacies, no matter how profound or unique, are meant to be passed along as lessons for future generations. In that spirit, Billy Grahams passing is a time to remind ourselves that his Biblical-based message remains timeless and unwavering centered on faith, prayer, integrity, humble service and trust. Advertisement As Billy Graham has said repeatedly, All the glory belongs to God I am just a spectator for His good works. And, so are we. Capen, a La Jolla resident, is a former U.S. ambassador to Spain, former publisher of The Miami Herald and retired director, Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. The U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments Monday in an Illinois case challenging compulsory union dues (Janus v. American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees). Mark Janus, a state employee, is challenging the system used in 23 states that requires employees to pay agency or fair share fees in lieu of union dues even if they decide to leave the union. Janus argues that the First Amendment prohibits the state from compelling individuals to financially support the unions speech on their behalf. Janus case could have a big effect in California, which requires teachers like me to continue to foot the unions bills with mandatory agency fees even if we strongly disagree with the unions political and educational agenda. We are forced to fund the unions efforts supposedly undertaken on our behalf even when we disagree with those efforts and would not support them. Related: Why Supreme Court case critical to future health of California When I began my teaching career in Virginia, I appreciated that the Virginia teachers unions made the effort to persuade me to join. In California, I was frustrated to learn that if I didnt join the teachers union I still had to pay full dues, but could apply to get a portion of those dues refunded. This refund, which varies from year to year, but typically is 25 percent to 35 percent of my dues, supposedly equals the amount the union spends on overt political activities. Advertisement That means the union usually keeps nearly $700 from my paycheck annually certainly more than it costs to negotiate and administer my local contract. Because this opt-out is not publicized and its rules are strict to follow, I work each year to inform new teachers at my school of this option. Why am I concerned about how the union represents teachers views? For starters, teachers unions take positions on many issues having nothing to do with education or schools. Prior to teaching, I was a legislative aide for a member of Congress. My job included meeting with union lobbyists. The Nation at Risk report had just come out and we were shocked to learn just how far behind American education had fallen, yet I was surprised that the union representatives who came to our office were often not there to talk about how to fix our schools. Instead, they came to lobby for things like foreign aid and a nuclear freeze. Though they owed their jobs to thousands of dues-paying classroom teachers, they were promoting policies that were unrelated to classroom education. Another problem with this system of compulsory dues is that it assumes that the only area of disagreement is the unions politics. Many teachers actually disagree with the unions approach to collective bargaining. Teachers should not have to fund efforts to negotiate contractual terms which undermine our profession and hinder needed educational reforms and innovations necessary to improving classroom performance, especially for children in disadvantaged areas. The unions emphasis on tenure and seniority is a case in point. Schools are forced to compensate solely on the basis of seniority rather than a teachers competence in the classroom. During my first years teaching, Fairfax County, Virginia, piloted a merit pay program that showed promise for encouraging excellent teaching, but it was opposed by unions because it was expensive and threatened to undermine teacher collegiality. No merit program is perfect, but enticing strong candidates to enter the profession and encouraging good teaching in the classroom are important reforms that many teachers support but unions seem to oppose. Not long ago in Washington, D.C., the superintendent proposed ending tenure protections in return for a significant raise in teacher salaries. Attracting skilled teachers and weeding out poor ones seemed a worthy goal, but the unions, seeking to protect all teachers rather than promote learning, fought hard against this. Many teachers, myself included, feel such tenure, pay and seniority innovations are worth trying in order to improve Americas schools and serve our students with a high-quality education. Sadly, our views are opposed during contract negotiations by the very unions we are forced to support with our agency fees. This compulsion is simply not right. The unions have enjoyed an unjustified exception to the First Amendment for too long. While teachers who agree with the union should be free to contribute, teachers who have fundamental disagreements with the union should not be forced by state law to support the unions politics with their hard-earned money. I hope Mr. Janus wins his case. Aster teaches government at Carlsbad High School. He is a plaintiff in Yohn v. CTA, another case challenging compulsory dues. Thirty-two dead in 2007 at Virginia Tech. Twenty-seven dead including 20 6- and 7-year-olds! in 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. Forty-nine dead in 2016 at a nightclub in Orlando. Fifty-eight dead in October on the Las Vegas Strip. Twenty-six dead including an unborn child! in November at a small church in Sutherland Springs, Texas. After all of the five deadliest mass shootings in modern American history and too many others Congress has refused to respond with any meaningful legislation, and has gone nowhere near renewing the 1994 ban on military-style rifles that lapsed in 2004. The argument that stricter gun laws would undermine the Second Amendment and its gun-ownership protections has resonated among conservatives who have blocked any consquential action in the House and Senate in part by making guns a central part of the culture wars between Republicans and Democrats. To many, it seemed this intransigence was permanent. Then the students in Parkland, Florida, who survived a Valentines Day massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School that left 17 people dead, responded by demanding that gun laws change and refusing to stop. Children who never knew a world where two Colorado teenagers hadnt killed 12 fellow students and a teacher at Columbine High School flatly decided enough was enough. Wednesday their activism from Twitter to live TV led thousands of students who rightly worry their schools are next to walk out of classes from Alaska to Maine, according to the Associated Press. These walkouts came the same day that some 100 Parkland students traveled 400 miles to the Florida Legislature in Tallahassee to plead for tougher gun laws. Their hope for a ban on assault-style rifles was rebuffed before they arrived. But legislative leaders are reportedly open to increasing the age limit to purchase a rifle from 18 to 21; to adding a three-day waiting period for such purchases; and to allowing for gun violence restraining orders against individuals with scary behavior. As Politico noted, this would have seemed unthinkable before Feb. 14. Also on Wednesday, President Donald Trump met with a group of concerned Americans including survivors from Parkland and other shootings at an emotional White House event carried live on television. Trump has stood with the National Rifle Association in opposing tougher gun laws. But his remarks to his guests were gracious and reflected a genuine concern with school carnage. He has already used his executive authority to ban all devices that turn legal weapons into machine guns, such as the bump stocks used in the Las Vegas slaughter, and to increase the minimum age for rifle purchases from 18 to 21. Trump also wants to improve background checks on prospective gun owners. Advertisement Its a start, but its not enough, and one Trump proposal allowing teachers with firearm experience to carry concealed weapons in schools goes too far. Also, significant changes in federal gun policies must be codified in congressional legislation. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, for example, has said repeatedly that only specific congressional action can ban bump stocks. A new poll from Quinnipiac University, which is based just 30 miles from Sandy Hook Elementary School, found U.S. support for gun control is at its highest level ever with more than 2-to-1 support and that 97 percent of respondents support universal background checks. For Congress to finally act, Americans should hope that high school students keep speaking up. If not them, who? If not now, when? Little is likely to give Second Amendment purists as much pause as teenagers describing their dread that their high school will be a killing field. Twitter: @sdutIdeas Facebook: San Diego Union-Tribune Ideas & Opinion Re Trump urged to take action (Feb. 22): The president proposes teachers carry guns. Teachers are not even given adequate school supplies, they mostly have to purchase necessary supplies themselves. In many schools, nurses and counselors have been cut, so teachers have to act as medical aids and therapists. They get paid very little for wearing so many hats. So now you want teachers to act as security guards, taking their lives and the students lives into their own hands, which makes them accountable for any shooting deaths of their students. This proposal only helps the NRA to sell more guns, which has nothing to do with the Second Amendment, the NRA is only interested in power and greed. How much is a life worth? Val Gilhooly Pt. Loma Advertisement Although I am an advocate of Second Amendment rights, I am opposed to arming teachers. I recall a scene from a film, The Shootist, that explains why. In that scene the character played by John Wayne says, Friend, theres nobody up there shooting back at you. It isnt always being fast or accurate that counts. Its being willing. I found out early that most men ... arent willing. Theyll blink an eye or draw a breath before pulling the trigger. I wont. Im afraid that most teachers will, and that strikes me as a recipe for disaster. David Fetchina San Diego Donald Trump suggests arming our teachers. Isnt it hard enough to get teachers? How many young people do you think will start teacher training in college if the course includes How to shoot your students 101? Yes, if required to carry a gun that teacher could be forced to shoot a student s/he has fought to teach and help. And all because our President and the Congress will not face up to the NRA before this next or any election. So sad. I weep for our country. Kathleen ONeil Advertisement La Mesa We heard how our president would prevent or deal with incidents such as happened at Parkland High School. But I like the solution he proposed, which is to arm Ms. Bowen or Mr. Schmidt and have them return some serious fire if someone invades their classroom with a gun. A revolver is too inaccurate (especially if youre being fired upon) so lets give them some real firepower. An M-16 or an Uzi would be optimal. I mean what could possibly go wrong? And, silly me, I was ready to write this off as totally irrational like most of his bizarre tweets. Robert Bridge Advertisement Carlsbad How can we possibly expect that teachers are going to charge into a massacre when an armed sheriffs deputy couldnt bring himself to do it? Dont read that I fault the deputy! Look inside to your own soul, would you, the reader of this letter, do what he didnt? Now, look at a person who has the compassion to commit themselves to the betterment of humanity and tell them that they must also be prepared to bring themselves down to the lowest level of hell. It is a sick and perverse person that would suggest such a thing, and that person is especially sick if already having shied away from doing just that. Advertisement Gregg Ferry Carlsbad The presidents notion that arming teachers will keep kids safe is a flawed concept. If an attacker believes that teachers are armed, he will shoot them first. This plan makes teachers a principal target. Advertisement Whats next? The president will suggest they wear body armor? Also, what person dedicated to the teaching profession would aim a pistol at another human and quickly pull the trigger? David Matson Rancho Bernardo Related Advertisement Letters and commentary policy The U-T welcomes and encourages community dialogue on important public matters. Please visit this page for more details on our letters and commentaries policy. You can email letters@sduniontribune.com or leave a comment below. Follow @UTLetters on Twitter and UTOpinion on Facebook. Trumps penchant for Russia now apparent Re 13 Russians charged with elaborate plot to interfere in 2016 presidential election (Feb. 16): Every day there is some new scandal in the Trump organization. All someone has to do is listen to the news any news other than Fox apparently or read a newspaper to know that there are problems with the Trump White House. Six or so meetings with Russians that were hidden or lied about. Russians invited into the White House, phone calls between Trump and Vladimir Putin, advisers indicted. Advertisement So unless one has his head in sand, it doesnt take a genius to see there is plenty wrong with this presidency. Barbara Mitchell Oceanside Russian meddling was likely inconsequential Regarding numerous articles on Russian meddling: I, for one, have no doubt the Russians were meddling in our election. We meddled in other nations elections, too, but we wont talk about that, will we? I am dying to see just five specific examples of Russian meddling, each accompanied with solid, understandable and believable evidence of how such meddling changed any persons mind to vote for Donald Trump; as well as any believable numbers of how many peoples minds were actually changed. Jim Kuriger Advertisement San Marcos Failure to enforce the sanctions is collusion Re Trump lashes out over Russia probe in angry and error-laden tweetstorm (Feb. 18): I think Donald Trump is colluding with the Russian government right now, every time he puts down the FBI and each time he doesnt address sanctioning Russia. He also colluded by not holding an emergency Cabinet meeting to solve this invasion (cyber warfare) into our elections. Advertisement He is colluding with Vladimir Putin, right now, right before our eyes. Mari Barosay Escondido Should another country be added to travel ban? Advertisement In view of alleged meddling in U.S. elections, maybe President Trump needs to amend his travel ban to include Russians. Mark Stephens El Cajon Letters and commentary policy The U-T welcomes and encourages community dialogue on important public matters. Please visit this page for more details on our letters and commentaries policy. You can email letters@sduniontribune.com or leave a comment below. Follow @UTLetters on Twitter and UTOpinion on Facebook. Thousands of Democratic party faithful are descending on San Diego. A group that includes most of the biggest blue states biggest political names will be in town this weekend for the Democratic Partys annual state convention, a gathering in which Democrats will discuss their platform and make endorsements (or not) in major political races, including a U.S. Senate campaign and the governors race. Well ratify candidate endorsements, endorse candidates for statewide office and map out how we can continue to lead the national resistance, define the progressive agenda for America and remain the Big Blue Beacon of Hope, said a statement about the convention posted on the California Democratic Partys Facebook page. Why are so many Democrats coming to San Diego? What will they do here? We have the answers to those questions and more for you below. What is the California Democrats State Convention? The Democratic Party and Republican Party both hold annual conventions across the state. This year, Republicans will also hold their annual convention in San Diego, from May 4 to May 6. The functions are about what you would expect of any major convention, with speakers, presentations and networking events, except that many of the participants just happen to be running for office in California, working on statewide policy issues or raising money for candidates in the 2018 elections. When is it? Events begin Friday and run through Sunday. Where is it? The main events will be at the San Diego Convention Center, located downtown at 111 W. Harbor Dr. Related events are being held around the Gaslamp District and other areas near the convention center. Gubernatorial candidate Antonio Villaraigosa, the former mayor of Los Angeles, is hosting a frozen yogurt party in a hotel next door, by way of one example. What will Democrats do at the convention? Political conventions like this are a chance for party members to meet candidates, network and attend a bevy of meetings and receptions. Two workshops on the agenda will address how to motivate and activate young people. Another will discuss how candidates can talk about reproductive freedom. The party will consider adopting a new platform, which you can read here. A platform is an established list of beliefs and legislative priorities to be accepted among all members of a party. The Democrats will also make decisions about which local and statewide candidates to endorse. An endorsement from the party has rarely been more coveted than it is this year, the San Francisco Chronicles Joe Garofoli wrote this week, because candidates are running for office in record numbers and looking for some way to stand out. Garofoli, the Chronicles senior political reporter, expects that none of the candidates running for governor will get enough votes to win an endorsement because the party is too divided over the four major Democratic candidates to give 60 percent of its endorsement votes to one candidate. Who will be there? Democrats from across the state will travel to San Diego to attend, but must be registered. Some of the bigger political names who are confirmed to speak or attend include: Sen. Kamala Harris Sen. Diane Feinstein, who is seeking re-election this year Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de Leon, who is challenging Feinstein House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi Rep. Maxine Waters Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Oregon Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti Gubernatorial candidates: state Treasurer John Chiang, former state schools chief Delaine Eastin, Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom and former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. Gov. Jerry Brown will not attend. For more information on the convention, visit the partys website here. Email: abby.hamblin@sduniontribune.com Twitter: @abbyhamblin ALSO COLUMN: Will Feinstein get booed by Democrats again? The Pride of Vista Lions Clubs leadership has a simple request: they want your leftover Lincolns. A million of em. The local chapter of the international service group hopes to collect and cash in one million pennies to help Vista American Little League rebuild its ballpark, which has been closed for cleanup for more than a decade because it sits atop a decades-old dump. The Pride of Vista Lions Club hopes to collect one million pennies $10,000 to help Vista American Little League restore French Field this year. (courtesy photo) Well save you from math: a million pennies is $10,000. Advertisement The fundraising approach make cents, er, sense, organizers said. Its a lot easier to ask folks to donate pennies than any other amount, said Eleanor Hutchins, the clubs past president and current secretary. We dont want your money. We want your pennies, she said. It will probably take months to collect a million pennies, although club President Eric Hutchins, Eleanors son, hopes to have it done before his term ends in July. The collection campaign was his idea, inspired by Lions Club chapter in Massachusetts that raised a million pennies in about seven months. Soon after hearing about that clubs success, Eric Hutchins learned that the cleanup at Vista Americans home, French Field, was finally complete. The cleanup had taken 11 years and $2.6 million in settlement funds from old landfill operators. The fields have been restored base paths, grass, backstop but the site is still without basics such as dugouts, lights and bathrooms. On its Facebook page in January, the league started asking for volunteers skilled laborers to help rebuild dugouts. I dont know how to do that, but I wanted to help, said Eric Hutchins, 47, who had played for Vista American in the late 1970s and early 80s. When I saw that post, something clicked in the back of my head. This (campaign) is something I feel I can do. The Hutchins family contacted Vista American board member Hollie Aguilera, who is running the French Field project, to pitch the pennies idea. Advertisement I just think it is a testament to the community spirit in Vista, Aguilera said. Everyone is always willing to help each other. The club hopes to soon distribute canisters at shops around town where people can drop their coins. The money will be deposited and Vista Village branch of US Bank, which will donate special bags that each hold $35 in pennies. Eleanor Hutchins said she and her helpers will hand-count that first $35 in pennies and weigh it on the precision scale at Kings Stationers, the shop her daughter owns on East Vista Way. Once the weight is determined, subsequent bags of pennies will also be weighed, rather than hand-counted. Advertisement To donate pennies, visit Kings Stationers, Shadowridge Family Vision Center, the dentist office of Ginger Hansen, or the Vista American Legion Post 365. More businesses may be added to the list. For more information, email the Pride of Vista Lions club at info@povlions.org. Thank you for reading! On your next view you will be asked to log in to your subscriber account or create an account and subscribepurchase a subscription to continue reading. 150 years ago, Andrew Johnson was impeached by the House of Representatives. What led Congress to try to remove Abraham Lincolns successor? Weekly Newsletter The best of The Saturday Evening Post in your inbox! Join Considering how often it is demanded by political opponents in recent years, impeachment of the president has rarely been used, and its never resulted in a presidents removal from office. Only two presidents have been impeached: Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton. Many are familiar with the events surrounding the Clinton spectacle, but fewer know what led to President Johnsons impeachment in the tumultuous months after Lincolns assassination and the end of the Civil War. Andrew Johnsons impeachment and trial shows how difficult indicting a president can be even when it has the support of the Senates majority. This timeline walks you through the contentious details from 150 years ago. (For more on how impeachment works, read our Quick Guide to Impeachment.) Subscribe and get unlimited access to our online magazine archive. Subscribe Today April 15, 1865 In the hours following the death of President Lincoln, Vice President Andrew Johnson, a Democrat, is sworn into office. When the Civil War had started, hed been the governor of Tennessee and a valuable union supporter in a border state. In 1864, after he was elected vice president, he repeatedly promised to hang all the leaders of the Confederacy when the war was over. Now, as president, and with the southern leaders powerless, he would have that chance. But Lincoln died before detailing how he planned to reunify the country. Johnson only knows Lincoln wanted to extend clemency and bring the seceded states back into the union as quickly as possible. May 29, 1865 Johnson offers amnesty to all ex-rebels who hold property valued at less than $20,000, which excludes propertied men of the South who had been leaders of the secession. However, many of these leaders come to Washington to ask for clemency, which Johnson usually gives. 1865-1866 Johnson faces a growing opposition in Congress from legislators who are concerned that the former Confederate states are rebuilding their old status quo, electing their old leaders, and denying civil rights to emancipated slaves. They learn that Southern states are passing laws against vagrancy. These Black Codes require many African-Americans to sign year-long work contracts or face the risk of fine or imprisonment, in effect forcing them back onto plantations. Not wanting to lose what the North had fought for, these legislators, who are now termed Republican Radicals, mount increasing opposition to Johnson. 1866 Bypassing Congress, Johnson tours northern states to build public support for his lenient plans for reconstruction, but fails to win followers in any appreciable numbers. During his tour, President Johnson promises to eject members of the Cabinet he has inherited from Lincoln who are now opposing his policies toward the South. He says Edwin Stanton, secretary of war and one of the leading radicals, is one of the first he will dismiss. January 1867 Congressman Thaddeus Stevens is strongly opposed to Johnsons conciliatory approach to the South. To prevent the Old South from returning to power, Stevens introduces a new Reconstruction Act. It would dismantle the Southern state governments and establish five military districts with military governors. They would govern the states until new constitutions that ensure suffrage for all voters are written. March 2, 1867 Congress, led by Stevens, responds to Johnsons threat to dismiss Stanton by passing the Tenure of Office Act. It would prohibit the president from removing any government official whod been approved by the Senate without first obtaining the Senates permission. Johnson vetoes the act. The following day, Congress overrides a presidential veto for the first time to make the Tenure of Office Act law. February 21, 1868 Believing the Tenure of Office Act to be unconstitutional, Johnson tells Congress he is unilaterally ordering Stanton to leave the office of secretary of war. February 24, 1868 Stevens demands that Johnson be impeached. The House of Representatives votes to impeach Johnson, with 128 Republicans voting for the measure and 47 Democrats opposing it. February 29, 1868 Eleven articles of impeachment are agreed upon. Most are based on Johnsons action of dismissing Stanton. March 30, 1868 The trial in the Senate begins. May 16, 1868 The Senate votes on one of the 11 articles of impeachment. It has been chosen for the first vote because it has the greatest support in the Senate. The vote, 35 to 19, falls one vote short of the two-thirds majority needed for conviction. May 26, 1868 The Republicans arent prepared for defeat. They come back on this day to vote on other articles of impeachment, but again fail to gain a two-thirds majority. Johnson remains president. Aftermath Stanton leaves his position as secretary of war. Johnson finishes his term the following year and returns to Tennessee. In 1875, he becomes the only former president to be elected to the senate, but dies a few months later. The vote that prevented conviction of Johnson, a Democrat, was cast by a Republican who voted against his partys leaders. He was Kansas senator Edmund Ross. He said he changed his mind at the last minute and voted not guilty because, upon reflection, he voted from his conscience. He believed the charges didnt warrant conviction. Yet his motives might not have been entirely driven by his principles. The next month, he asked President Johnson for, and received, six political appointments for his friends, reminding Johnson of the supporting vote he cast in the impeachment trial. Featured image: Harpers Weekly, May 30, 1868 Mark SurridgeNow that we've determined that Ed Sheeran isn't secretly married, as has been rumored, let's tackle that other Ed Sheeran rumor that just won't go away: that he's performing at the Royal Wedding. Here's a news flash for you: not only is he not performing, nobody's even invited him to. Prince Harry and his fiancee, Meghan Markle, are tying the knot on Saturday, May 19. And as Ed explained to the BBC on the red carpet at the BRIT Awards earlier this week, this conflicts with something else he has to do on that day, which is perform a massive concert at Phoenix Park Stadium in Dublin, Ireland. "They said, 'If you were asked, would you say yes? And I was like, 'Of course,'" a frustrated Ed told the BBC on Wednesday night. "But journalists...[and] everyone's like, 'Oh, he's playing it,' but nobody's looked at my tour dates! I'm in Ireland...I can't do it!" "I haven't been asked, either," he added, shooting down in an instant all those claims that he'd been invited to sing. He then repeated, firmly, "I haven't been asked." Copyright 2018, ABC Radio. All rights reserved. In summer 2015, the four ships converged in Bergen and later this year the fleet will meet in a Captains in Cadiz celebration on September 10, 2018. Fred. Olsens third fleet get-together in spring 2020 on Madeira will feature celebrations and festivities, on four specially-themed cruise itineraries. Mike Rodwell, md of Fred. Olsen Cruise Lines, said in July 2015, we brought our four ships together for the very first time in Bergen, Norway, and it was one of the most celebrated events that we have held at Fred. Olsen since our inception in 1848. To mark our milestone 170th anniversary in 2018, we will be celebrating our Captains in Cadiz event in the historic Spanish city of Cadiz so-called because the ships Captains will be leading on many of the days activities. Talking about the Four Fred.s in Funchal gathering Rodwell said, we will be visiting a port that constantly rates as one of the most popular with our guests, and we know that our four ships berthed together will be a truly amazing sight to behold! The four Fred. Olsen ships will be deployed on four different itineraries and will converge in Funchal in April: Black Watch on a 14-night Azores & Madeira cruise (adult-only), ex Liverpool; Braemars 12-night Closer Spain & Portugal with Madeira cruise, departs Southampton on March 28, 2020; Boudiccas 19-night Cape Verde Islands cruise (adult-only), ex Dover on March 29, 2020 and Balmorals 16-night Canary Islands cruise (adult-only), leaves from Newcastle also on March 29. The complementary partnership, which will see PSA International taking over the shares of Singapore Telecommunications and Civil Aviation Authority of Singapore to boost its stake to 45% from 15% previously, will expand and develop innovative solutions with the fusion of domain presence in port operations, trade facilitation and logistics execution, the two companies said in a joint press release. The enhanced relationship and fusion of domain know-how of PSA in port operations and CrimsonLogic in trade facilitation will enable them to collaborate on new innovations and trade solutions that can facilitate global trade flow and improve processes in the supply chain. The remaining 55% held by Singapore government international trade arm will help with access at the governmental level. CrimsonLogic developed Singapores ground-breaking TradeNet system in 1989, then the world's first single window trading portal and has since gone on to implement close to 20 other similar large-scale projects globally, including eGovernment portals. Its subsidiary Global eTrade Services (GeTS), launched in 2017, offers a comprehensive suite of services to help traders meet regulatory and compliance requirements from government agencies and trade associations around the world, and is currently connected to 23 Customs nodes globally. PSA meanwhile is one of the world's largest port operators with over 40 terminals in 16 countries across Asia, Europe and the Americas and flagship operations in Singapore and Antwerp. "We are pleased to establish a closer relationship with CrimsonLogic. Their strong domain in eGovernment and GeTS complements PSA's global portfolio of port and logistics assets and technology systems. Together with IE Singapore as a crucial government-business partner that has access to an integrated network of overseas markets, PSA and CrimsonLogic will partner to co-create the next-generation of B2B2G global platform solutions that can integrate processes, improve efficiencies and deliver added value to global shippers and other stakeholders within the supply chain. We look forward to working closely alongside CrimsonLogic to nurture its growth as a world class company," said PSA group ceo Tan Chong Meng. "With this change in our shareholders, we see more opportunities to work closer together and drive synergies and innovation in streamlining trade processes with PSA in Singapore, increase efficiency and enhance trade competitiveness in both emerging and mature markets around the world where trade is the natural starting point for growth and development. We are also able to continue to leverage on IE Singapore, where they continue to help us open new market opportunities and drive the Singapore brand overseas. As we move towards celebrating our 30th anniversary this year and looking at our achievements, we are driving forward with our transformation to anticipate new challenges, and continuing to partner our customers on their journey of digital transformation," said CrimsonLogic chairman Eugene Wong. TMS Cardiff Gas fleet. The maintenance agreement signed in December 2017, uses Wartsila unit Enirams data collection platform and advanced data analytics to help TMS Cardiff Gas to achieve optimal fleet operations, resulting in reduced fuel costs and emissions. The agreement expands on the earlier technical management deal between the two in 2014. With the new agreement, the scope of Wartsilas services include, among others, Enirams data collection platform and advanced data analytics that enables TMS Cardiff Gas to save costs and maximise overall profitability while cutting its emissions. Wartsilas Dynamic Maintenance planning, in combination with Enirams vessel digital performance management system, provides TMS Cardiff Gas with a comprehensive view of each vessels performance, efficiency, and improvement possibilities. Wartsila will provide all necessary spare parts for the maintenance of the vessels as well as field service resources for scheduled maintenance that has been planned according to the actual running hours of the engines. Our vision is to be one of the worlds leading LNG and LPG operators with the highest standards of excellence in terms of performance, reliability, and safety. The maintenance and upgrade service needs of the tri-fuel Main Generator Engines on our LNG Carriers are technically advanced and require detailed planning with a professional partner to ensure the engines reliable performance and the vessels operability. Through our five-year partnership with Wartsila and Eniram, we are confident that our fleet will continue to be our customers premium choice, said TMS Cardiff Gas gm George Kourelis. Students in the EASEL program learn outdoors at Bow in the Clouds articipants at a birding event for visually-challenged folks using their sense of touch to experience the nature playscape at Bow in the Clouds Creating universal, barrier-free access to Bow in the Clouds Preserve in Kalamazoo will be possible this spring now that $40,000 has been raised for the project. Donations from the Kalamazoo Community Foundation, a number of funding partners, many Southwest Michigan Land Conservancy, and others, the goal for creating access was not only reached but exceeded. Phase One of the access will be constructed this spring and a grand opening is anticipated this fall. Phase 1 of the plan will include: a barrier-free loop trail that will be smooth and level in the upland area of the preserve that people with wheelchairs or walkers, or those with visual challenges can navigate a new trailhead that will be oriented so that it can be experienced from a standing or sitting position; a platform with a ramp at the wetland overlook which will accommodate wheelchairs and classroom lessons; and several new benches where people can sit down to rest or just enjoy the preserve. Bow in the Clouds was donated to the Southwest Michigan Land Conservancy by the Sisters of St. Joseph in 2007. The 60-acre preserve includes one-mile of moderate trails and boardwalk from the parking area through a wetland and forest. The land behind the Nazareth Center off Gull Road is open to the public. Plans to make the preserve barrier-free were developed in cooperation with the Disability Network Southwest Michigan and the Southwest Michigan Land Conservancy. As a person with vision loss, being able to listen to the nature that surrounds us, touching and smelling the various flowers, feeling the fallen logs, and just sitting and feeling the breezes made visiting Bow in the Clouds so enjoyable, says Denise S. Davies, a participant in a Disability Network field trip to Bow in the Clouds led by SWMLCs Conservation Stewardship Director Nate Fuller. According to the Disability Network Southwest Michigan, more than 50,000 or 20 percent of Kalamazoo Countys residents have a disability. Too often, barriers in the physical environment create segregated communities and feelings of isolation," says the Disability Network's CEO and President Joel Cooper. "Having access to recreational activities and the means of being able to share that experience with others aids in creating a healthy and inclusive community. The barrier-free, universal access improvements at Bow in the Clouds will not only create a natural haven for people who are mobility-challenged, they will also provide the foundation for nature-based education programs serving children in Kalamazoos Eastside Neighborhood, says Southwest Michigan Land Conservancy's Fuller. The SWMLC will continue the Eastside Arts and Sciences Experiential Learning (EASEL) program with Eastside Youth Strong at Bow in the Clouds, and has been working with the Spring Valley Center for Exploration to learn how Bow in the Clouds can be integrated into their K-5 Communities in Schools curriculum. SWMLC is planning further universal barrier-free access improvements in a second phase of the project which could begin as early as 2019 if fundraising is successful. Source: Southwest Michigan Land Conservancy Press Release February 23, 2018 Ahead of BBL passage, ANGARA CALLS FOR FULL IMPLEMENTATION OF MUSLIM, IP HISTORY LAW Senator Sonny Angara has called for the full implementation of the Integrated History Law that mandates the teaching of Filipino-Muslim and indigenous peoples' (IPs) history in both basic and higher education in the country. "As both houses of Congress are working on the proposed Bangsamoro Basic Law (BBL), we should endeavor to have a better understanding of the history of our Muslim brothers and sisters. This would make the people appreciate more the need for an enhanced autonomy in the Bangsamoro region," said Angara, chairman of the local government committee. Under Republic Act 10908, which Angara authored, the history, culture and identity studies of Filipino-Muslims and IPs should be integrated in the formulation of the curriculum for the study of Philippine history, including the writing, printing and publication of textbooks and other reading materials. According to the Department of Education, the law is currently being implemented only in select schools, mostly in Mindanao. Angara urged the DepEd to fast-track the implementation of the Integrated History Law, which was enacted in 2016, in all schools nationwide in order to create "a truly inclusive history that accounts for all Filipinos." Meanwhile, Senator Juan Miguel Zubiri, chairman of the BBL sub-committee that was created under the local government committee, said the target date for the sponsorship of the Senate version of the BBL is on February 28. "BBL is a product of nearly two decades of peace negotiations, and education is crucial to the peace process. Ang kamulatan sa kasaysayan at kultura ang magsisilbing pundasyon upang tuluyan nating makamit ang tunay na pagkakaisa, respeto, kapayapaan at pag-unlad," said Angara, who is also set to co-sponsor the measure. Press Release February 23, 2018 Sen. Bam invites returning OFWs to Negosyo Centers Sen. Bam Aquino encouraged returning overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) and those affected by the deployment ban to visit the nearest Negosyo Center in their area to get the necessary assistance in starting their own business. "May maaasahan kayong libreng tulong upang makabuo ng kabuhayan at negosyo. Inaanyayahan namin ang kayo na bumisita sa pinakamalapit na Negosyo Center," said Sen. Bam, principal author and sponsor of the Negosyo Center law or Republic Act No. 10644, the Go Negosyo Act. "Sa tulong ng ating Negosyo Centers, makakapagtayo ang ating OFWs ng sariling negosyo na maaari nilang pagkunan ng ikabubuhay para hindi nila kailangang iwan pa ang pamilya para mangibang-bansa," added Sen. Bam. As of last count, there are around 800 Negosyo Centers in different parts of the country, ready to cater to the needs of those who want to start or expand their own business. The senator said that while this is not the ultimate solution to the issue, every agency and every Filipino with the opportunity to support our returning OFWs must do their part and lend a helping hand. The Negosyo Center provides access to markets and financing for businesses, training programs, and a simplified business registration process, thus helping ease of doing business and fast-track government processes in putting up a business. The law mandates the establishment of Negosyo Centers in all municipalities, cities and provinces that will assist micro, small and medium enterprises in the country. The Go Negosyo Act was passed during Sen. Bam's term as chairman of the Committee on Trade, Commerce and Entrepreneurship. It was the first of 19 laws passed by Sen. Bam in the 16th and 17th Congress. In the 17th Congress, Sen. Bam filed Senate Bill No. 648 or the Migrant Workers and Overseas Filipino Assistance Act to boost support for the OFW community and the families they leave back home. If enacted into law, the measure will integrate programs on livelihood, entrepreneurship, savings, investments and financial literacy to the existing efforts of embassies to equip OFWs with knowledge to start their own business. In a survey conducted by the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) last September 2015, only 38.2 pecrcent of the 563 household-respondents said that a portion of the money from OFWs are set aside for savings. Aside from the livelihood aspect, Sen. Bam's measure mandates the Public Attorney's Office to establish a help desk in every international port of exit in the Philippines to offer legal service, assistance and advice to departing migrant workers. Press Release February 23, 2018 Unjust detention only strengthened my resolve - De Lima A day before her first year of illegal arrest, Opposition Senator Leila M. de Lima has asserted that her continued unjust detention strengthened her resolve instead of dampening her spirit. In her message read by former Rep. Erin Tanada during the gathering dubbed as "Leila is Free! Free Leila!" for "Buwan Ni Leila," De Lima said she found it ironic how the vile plans of President Duterte and his minions backfired. "One year after having me illegally detained, they not only failed to suppress my spirit, they made it burn brighter and hotter," she said. "My calls, which once echoed in the halls of the Senate, are now heard all over the world - all because everyone here continued to support me in my time of personal need, and kept our collective campaign for human rights alive," she added. The gathering, which kicked off with the Novena Mass for De Lima's intentions and followed by a poetry reading led by Karina Jimenez-David, was held at the Bulwagang Ka Pepe (Ka Pepe Hall) at the Commission on Human Rights (CHR), in Quezon City today, Feb. 23. The Novena Mass was co-celebrated by Fr. Atilano Fajardo and Fr. Jerome Secillano and was attended by her friends, family members, supporters, staff members and fellow human rights advocates. During the gathering, several personalities also conveyed their solidarity to De Lima. Among them were Tanada, Senator Risa Hontiveros, and CHR Chairperson Chito Gascon. De Lima, the first prominent political prisoner under the Duterte regime, said Duterte and his allies are "gravely mistaken" if they think that her incarceration will silence her and prevent her from fulfilling her public duties. "Sa darating pong Sabado, isang taon na po buhat nang maipakulong ako sa ilalim ng mapaniil na rehimeng Duterte. Isang taon ng paglimita sa aking kilos, sa aking tinig, at sa kakayahang tuparin ang aking tungkulin bilang Senador. "Isang taon ng pagyurak sa aking pagkababae at pagkatao, gamit ang mga inimbentong kaso. Subalit sa kabila ng lahat ng ito, isang taon ito ng patuloy na paglaban, patuloy na pagtatrabaho at paglilingkod sa bayan," she said. Despite the legal battle she is facing for obviously trumped-up illegal drug charges, she continues to fulfill her electoral mandate as a Senator having filed 41 bills and 58 resolutions in the Senate, as of this writing. The Senator from Bicol maintained that contrary to what many may think, she is honored to be jailed and is prepared for the long-haul. "Malinaw po: Matagumpay man nila akong naipakulong, bigo naman silang tuluyang patahimikin ako. Sa ginawa nila sa akin, lalo lang nila akong ginawang mas pursigido, mas buo ang loob na panindigan ang aking mga prinsipyo, lalo na sa usapin ng hustisya, demokrasya at karapatang-pantao," she said. "Leila is Free! Free Leila!" coincided with the launch of De Lima's first electronic book entitled "Dispatches from Crame I," which contains a selection of more than 100 of the Senator's handwritten statements from her detention. The topics include personal reflections and political views about extrajudicial killings and the war on drugs, governance and social justice, among others. De Lima personally designed the artwork on the cover of the book, which shows a bird called "pipit." She said the inspiration behind her sketch is the Filipino folk song "Ang Pipit" by National Artist Levi Celerio, which speaks of a man's cruelty to a defenseless bird. De Lima remains detained inside the national police headquarters in Camp Crame, Quezon City since Feb. 24, 2017 over bogus illegal drug trade charges based on fabricated testimonies by convicted felons. Press Release February 23, 2018 Villanueva wants probe on Boracay's environmental woes Senator Joel Villanueva filed a resolution seeking to inquire and review the approval and monitoring process of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) for the applications of Environmental Compliance Certificates (ECCs). The senator sought the inquiry in relation to the recent issue surrounding Boracay Island wherein some establishments in the area were found non-compliant to environmental laws. The DENR disclosed that 300 establishments in Boracay Island would be served notices of violation and be subjected under the review of the DENR's regional office. These establishments were given a window of two months to install their own wastewater treatment facilities or to connect to the Boracay Island Water Company sewage treatment plant. The DENR had also given notices of violation (NOV) to 51 unnamed establishments found violating one of the provisions of the Clean Water Act of 2004 which mandates all commercial and residential establishments dispose septic waste through a treatment facility. Furthermore, the DENR is set to serve 174 show-cause orders to illegal forest occupants who have encroached on the Island's timberland areas; The said initiatives of the DENR are the Department's response to the President's directive after likening the island to a "cesspool" and warned that the government would shut the island down due to pollution. According to the Boracay Foundation, Inc., the threatened closure would result in the loss of jobs of an estimated 90,000 workers. Under Resolution No. 646 filed by Villanueva, the senator cited the need to review the conduct of environmental impact assessment and the approval process of the DENR with regard to applications for ECCs. The senator's recommendation seeks to ensure that the ECCs being issued to any undertaking or project would guarantee that it would not cause environmental damage or aggravate the impact of climate change. The senator further called on the DENR to upgrade the process of environmental assessment and issuance of ECC. "Businesses and industries should account for the possible impact of their operations in aggravating the impact of climate change. Our regulatory agencies should also improve their capacity in monitoring compliance and enforcement of environmental policies," Villanueva said. "The proliferation of private establishments in the Boracay Island and the poor monitoring and enforcement of environmental laws have resulted in massive environmental damage in the Island which threatens the viability of the Island as a prime tourist destination," the senator stressed. I have always liked Brendan Fraser, and I am sorry that he was assaulted by someone who sounds like an absolute nightmare. I take up space in solidarity with Fraser, and I'm grateful for his honesty about what surviving assault cost him. Port of Tauranga chief executive Mark Cairns says the 9.4 percent growth in export volumes from New Zealand's biggest port suggests the economy "is in not too bad a shape" as log and dairy shipments rise alongside an increase in farm inputs. Cargo volume growth drove a 13 percent gain in the port's first-half profit to $47 million and the company raised its full-year profit guidance to a range of $92-$96 million from an earlier forecast of $88-$92 million. That would be an increase of as much as 15 percent from 2017's $83.4 million. The port company's shares jumped 3.8 percent to $5.18 and have gained 17 percent in the past 12 months. Total trade rose 13 percent including a 16 percent increase in container volumes to 590,803 TEUs (twenty foot equivalent units) and Cairns today forecast full-year volume to reach 1.2 million. Import volumes rose 21 percent, led by increases in grain and dairy feed supplements, while exports rose 9.4 percent, led by a 13 percent gain in log volumes. Strong demand for logs in China and record prices drove volumes up 3.3 million tonnes in the first half. Other forestry-related exports gained 2.6 percent to 1.1 million tonnes. Imports of grain and feed supplements jumped 35 percent, which Cairns said is an indication the dairy sector "is in stronger health." Fertiliser imports were up 3.1 percent and Cairns said that more modest growth may reflect higher rainfall or seasonal fluctuations in use. The company also said it had an increase in imports of cars and other vehicles, including some which are then railed to Auckland. Ports of Auckland, which is hemmed in at its CBD site and has long-term options including being relocated to Whangarei, operates its own imported car handling facility. Cairns said he is reluctant to comment further on the Auckland rival "because ports have suddenly become political again". However, he did comment on transhipments of containers - where Port of Tauranga is increasingly the main export-import facility where smaller ports around the country send their containerised trade flows. Transhipped containers jumped about 48 percent. "That's the real acid test - Tauranga is New Zealand's international hub," Cairns said. Almost all of the North Island's dairy production now exits via Tauranga thanks to the tie-up with Kotahi, the logistics company owned by Fonterra Cooperative Group and Silver Fern Farms. The partners expanded their relationship through Coda, a freight-hubbing, warehousing, and transport business. Coda Group was a black spot, with a 24 percent drop in profit that Port of Tauranga says reflects the loss of a large customer at an empty container depot. Cairns declined to identify the customer but said that business "is very transactional, the customers are very mobile." He expects Coda will win new customers in that business, which includes cleaning and preparation of containers, known as pre-tripping. Cairns repeated concerns his chairman David Pilkington expressed last year that it didn't make sense for smaller port companies to invest in dredging, as Tauranga has done, to accommodate bigger ships that are likely to want fewer, bigger port visits - the company's hub and spokes plan. "The Ports Company Act section 5 requires ports and their boards to price and invest to get a cost of capital return," Cairns told BusinessDesk. "I've no problems with other ports getting ambitious but they have to ask, is their cargo big enough to justify a $100 million investment that needs to be able to wash its own face." The results also included MetroPort Auckland, which had an 8.4 percent increase in TEUs in the first half, while the number of trains between MetroPort and the Tauranga Container Terminal has been increased from 78 to 86 per week to handle the growing volumes. Cairns said there was still room to increase capacity on the critical Auckland-Hamilton-Tauranga railway route. The line is double tracked between Auckland and Hamilton but only single-tracked on the Hamilton to Tauranga leg. While there was a case to complete the double tracking, it wasn't likely to happen fast. "KiwiRail has very much got a mandate if there's a commercial case. We're regularly in strategic planning meetings with Rail - like the port, KiwiRail is in long-run infrastructure," he said. Cairns said the port expects to handle 1.2 million TEUs this year, having broken through 1 million for the first time last year. We can handle up to three million TEUs annually without any further reclamation," he said, citing Ernst & Young's Port Future Study. The company will pay an interim dividend of 5.7 cents a share, up 14 percent from a year earlier. (BusinessDesk) Comments from our readers No comments yet Add your comment: Your name: Your email: Not displayed to the public Comment: Comments to Sharechat go through an approval process. Comments which are defamatory, abusive or in some way deemed inappropriate will not be approved. It is allowable to use some form of non-de-plume for your name, however we recommend real email addresses are used. Comments from free email addresses such as Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc may not be approved. Anti-spam verification: Type the text you see in the image into the field below. You are asked to do this in order to verify that this enquiry is not being performed by an automated process. Related News: 17th September 2021 Morning Report NZ Automotive Investments Limited (NZX: NZA) Proposed Sell Down by NZA Founder to Improve Liquidity 16th September 2021 Morning Report 15th September 2021 Morning Report Seeka Limited (NZX: SEK) Announces Further Kiwifruit Acquisition Briscoe Group Limited (NZX: BGP) Half Year Results Announcement 14th September 2021 Morning Report Stride Property Ltd & Stride Investment Management Ltd (NZX: SPG) Office Fund Established and Conditional Acquisition Third Age Health Services Limited (NZX: TAH) Announces Acquisition of Belmont Medical 13th September 2021 Morning Report Marsden Point-based Northport has welcomed the government's plans to invest in roading and infrastructure projects in Northland and to investigate the viability of a rail link to Northport as it looks to support economic growth across the upper North Island. Among today's raft of announcements in the Provincial Growth Fund launch today, Regional Economic Development Minister Shane Jones committed $17 million for Northland upgrading a section of State Highway 10, support for two cultural centres and a tourism hub, and a forestry pilot. He also announced a programme of work to develop a comprehensive Upper North Island Supply Chain Strategy, which will investigate the feasibility of moving the Ports of Auckland operations to Northport, and look at a rail line between Auckland and Northport to take pressure off the region's roads. In the lead-up to last year's general election, New Zealand First leader Winston Peters campaigned on moving container operations from Auckland to Northport as part of his party's bid to revitalise Northland's economy. Its coalition deal with the Labour Party saw an agreement to commission a feasibility study on the options for moving the Ports of Auckland, including giving Northport serious consideration. "We look forward to working with KiwiRail, existing and potential customers, and other stakeholders such as local government, to explore the potential and to assess how it might complement the vision we have of how our port might grow in the future," Northport said in a statement. Northport outlined its vision for growth last November, seeking public feedback on a proposal to expand the port's wharf east and west, extending its linear berth to as much as 1390 metres from its existing 570 metre berth, and grow the area of the port to 75 hectares from 48 hectares. The port has also said it has more space at its disposal than any other port in New Zealand and has easy access to the entire upper North Island through the State Highway network. The government's announcement came as NZX-listed Marsden Maritime Holdings, which owns half of Northport, reported a 5.4 percent lift in net profit on modest cargo growth at Northport as well as improving contributions from its other commercial operations, including its marina and commercial unit. Net profit rose to $5.3 million, or 12.83 cents per share, in the six months ended Dec. 31, from $5 million, or 12.17 cents, a year earlier, the Whangarei-based company said in a statement. Revenue gained 8.7 percent to $7.4 million, of which the majority came from its Northport stake. Overall cargo throughput at Northport was up 3 percent to 1.91 million tonnes, with log volumes increasing by 2 percent. The board declared an interim dividend of 6.75 cents per share, payable on March 23, up from 6.25 cents in the prior year. Looking ahead, cargo volumes at Northport for the 12 months ending June 30 are expected to be at a similar level to last year, when 3.6 million tonnes were handled. "Coupled with continued improvement in returns from our commercial activities, this is expected to provide a further improved full-year trading result for the group," said chair John Goulter. Marsden and Port of Tauranga each own 50 percent of Northport, and Marsden also owns 100 percent of Marsden Cove and Marina. The company itself is about 54 percent owned by Northland Regional Council and 19.9 percent by Ports of Auckland. The shares rose 1.9 percent to $5.35. Earlier today Port of Tauranga, New Zealand's biggest port company, raised its full-year earnings guidance after posting a 13 percent gain in first-half profit that was driven by growth in cargo volumes. Net profit rose to $47 million in the six months ended Dec. 31 from $41.9 million a year earlier, the company said in a statement. Sales rose to $141 million from $125 million. (BusinessDesk) Comments from our readers No comments yet Add your comment: Your name: Your email: Not displayed to the public Comment: Comments to Sharechat go through an approval process. Comments which are defamatory, abusive or in some way deemed inappropriate will not be approved. It is allowable to use some form of non-de-plume for your name, however we recommend real email addresses are used. Comments from free email addresses such as Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc may not be approved. Anti-spam verification: Type the text you see in the image into the field below. You are asked to do this in order to verify that this enquiry is not being performed by an automated process. Related News: 17th September 2021 Morning Report NZ Automotive Investments Limited (NZX: NZA) Proposed Sell Down by NZA Founder to Improve Liquidity 16th September 2021 Morning Report 15th September 2021 Morning Report Seeka Limited (NZX: SEK) Announces Further Kiwifruit Acquisition Briscoe Group Limited (NZX: BGP) Half Year Results Announcement 14th September 2021 Morning Report Stride Property Ltd & Stride Investment Management Ltd (NZX: SPG) Office Fund Established and Conditional Acquisition Third Age Health Services Limited (NZX: TAH) Announces Acquisition of Belmont Medical 13th September 2021 Morning Report Presidents Day brought a couple dozen people to the wall in Shepherdstown to help raise awareness for the Black Lives Matter movement. Two years ago, rally organizer Frances Brolle felt she needed to do something to help combat racism and injustice toward people of color. To Brolle, Presidents Day, which is during Black History Month, was the perfect timing to hold such a rally. Im incredibly upset about the increased racism in our country, Brolle said. In conversations with Jefferson County educators, Im told there is an increase in bullying and racial comments by white students this past year. She referenced other violent racist attacks in the nation within the past year and mentioned the hotly debated plaque on the county courthouse in Charles Town that has come under fire in recent months. In our own county, the commissioners refuse to remove a plaque from the Charles Town courthouse that honored Confederate soldiers after complaints from some people of color. Brolle said the BLM movement wants police to be trained more and rely less on use of force, in addition to the use of body cameras and independent investigations. Brolle also mentioned the fact that people of color are disproportionately incarcerated; according to the NAACP, 56 percent of inmates are black or Hispanic, while those two minority groups only make up 32 percent of the U.S. population. According to the Washington Posts database of police-involved shootings, about 40.7 percent of the people killed by police were black or Hispanic in 2017. Statistics from the ACLU say black students are suspended or expelled three times more often than whites, and the median wealth of white households is 20 times that of black households. Arthena Roper, a Jefferson County school board candidate, said shes thrilled to see this conversation taking place. The rally really touches my heart, because in raising two young black males that are teenagers, we have to have a conversation about how some things arent fair, Roper said. She recounted a story about her son being detained and falsely accused of having drugs in his car. After an hour-and-a-half search, the police came up empty and let him go. When we allow things to happen only to certain people, injustice just spreads, Roper said. A good beginning would be genuine seats at the table If people say they want something different, if you genuinely want to hear someones voice on an issue, then invite them to the table. Polls in 2017 indicated that the majority of Americans had a negative view of the BLM movement but Roper feels that that could be due to a misunderstanding of the terminology. When someone says black lives matter, then they say blue lives matter, then all lives matter-thats true, Roper said. But look at it a different way. If I say, today we are focusing on breast cancer-this march is for breast cancer, this fundraiser is for breast cancer, all the money we raise is for that focus, that doesnt mean that all cancer is not bad. Its just that right now, were focusing on this one. So when someone says black lives matter, give it that time and space. Brolle plans to continue holding the rally each year. Some people try to demonize this movement and compare it to the KKK, calling it a terrorist movement, Brolle said. I disagree. I believe that the organization is attempting to educate us about continued systemic racism toward black people and people of color. An intense two days of presentations ended last Friday evening as the director of the Jefferson County Emergency Services Agency closed out the budget request interviews for this budget season. Commissioners had heard from departments and other entities seeking a portion of the county budget dollars all day Feb. 12 and throughout the day last Friday. The final request came from Denise Pouget, director of the countys Emergency Services Agency, who represented not only her department but the volunteer fire companies as well. Public safety is generally a high priority for elected officials, and funding all avenues of said safety adequately has brought yearly challenges. Fiscal Year 2019 will likely be no exception. Earlier in the sessions, the commissioners heard from the Sheriff, who came in with a slight savings over last years budget. Pete Dougherty asked for no increase; instead, he offered some savings by rearranging positions. The fire and EMS budgets are seeing slight increases in requests, something Pouget spent time justifying to commissioners. In last years budget, the ESA received an allocation of $2,848,808 according to a chart presented by Michelle Gordon, the countys finance director. This year, that agency is seeking an increase to $3,103,648, just under 9 percent. Pouget explained that those extra dollars would be used to implement a career ladder, which will offer incentive for employees to remain in Jefferson County rather than relocating to high-paying neighboring states as well as to Berkeley County. The extra funding would also go toward providing suppression training, to provide a 457 match, to increase peak time staffing hours at Station 4 (Independent Fire Company) and to hire an administrative staffer for the JCESA. Pouget, who also announced at the Friday meeting that shell be leaving her position to take a job with the Metropolitan Airport Authority, said she feels much has been accomplished during her tenure. In the two-and-a-half year period that she has been director, the countys Emergency Services Agency has obtained fire prevention unit status with dual service hours offered between paid and volunteer service; has improved records management systems; has conducted a class and compensation study aimed at retention of employees and has placed 27 staff into fire stations to improve service to the county. Pouget said that the main thing the county must do is retain good people. On the volunteer fire department side of her presentation, Pouget said the seven companies are working well with the ESA, as well as with one another, to provide the most cost-effective service. The request from the companies is for an increase from last fiscal years allocation of $665,000 to $857,686, according to Gordons budget chart. These funds would be split among the seven companies. Theyre seeking increased funding because of the continued increase in operating expenses for everything from training to fuel to equipment and utilities. Added to the public safety realm of this years budget requests is an increase in the 911 Centers request from last years $1,977,650 to $2,298,383. This increase would secure six additional positions within that department. Topping off the budget projects for safety and law enforcement is a projected increase of regional jail fees, which are expected to jump from last years $1,320,000 to $1,850,000. Much of that increase is being targeted at the opioid epidemic in the area. The county commissioners will begin deliberations in earnest this week to determine which requests will be funded and to what extent. With current revenue projections, the governing body is seeing a shortfall of approximately $2.1 million compared to the requests it has received. The final budget numbers are due to the state by the last week of March. The Commission plans to have a balanced budget before that time to present to the residents of the county in a public hearing session. No specific date has been set for that hearing at this time. STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- After changing hands multiple times in its 40 years of operation, the cellar of Edgewater Hall has been providing Staten Islanders with good food and live music, no matter what name it went under. With such a long and decorated history, how would the historic all-ages venue many still affectionately call "Dock Street" celebrate such a milestone? By putting on a marathon of concerts! How else? Starting Thursday, Feb. 22, the bar and restaurant now known Amendment 18 -- in the cellar of the Edgewater Hall -- on the corner of Bay and Dock street (specifically 691 Bay St. in Stapleton) will be hosting a whopping 12 major shows through to the end of March, featuring returning bands and new arrivals. These include the Ed Jackson Band, Reasons Enough, Terrible Tim (don't get so down on yourself, man!), and many many more. Some shows feature a little something special like the Enrage/Dead Men Dreaming show having free admission, the 10th anniversary of Rich Russo's "Anything Anything" radio show, and a punk/ska night featuring the reunion of Avon Junkies. Bonus: Amendment 18 is rolling out a new menu for the occasion, as well as debuting online delivery service with the help of Seamless and GrubHub. Visit this link to claim your spot for the opening night show, and click here to sign up for the free Enrage/Dead Men Dreaming concert. CELEBRATING THE HISTORY: During this series of special events, event organizers will commemorate past owners: Oddsbodkins, Dock of the Bay, Bay Street Blues, 13th Hour and, of course, Dock Street. Jerry and Barbara Underhill opened Oddsbodkins in the cellar of Edgewater Hall towards the end of 1980. After several years of hosting live music, comedy and variety shows, they sold the business to Lou Rizzo and Bill and Marta Wolf and they opened Dock of the Bay, which operated until 1996. Then came Bay Street Blues and Dock Street. Today, the cellar of Edgewater Hall is home to Ettore Mazzei's "prohibition-themed" Amendment 18 and live music is still being performed there. Check out the full band schedule below. Doors open at 7 p.m. For more information, call 718-720-0004 or visit Amendment18.NYC. Thursday, Feb. 22: Midnight Foolishness, Jackknife Stiletto, Rule of 9, Friday at Midnight. $10 cover for opening night. Friday, Feb. 23: Adissa's Cellar Jazz & Reggae After Party Saturday, Feb. 24: American Beauty (Grateful Dead Tribute), All Hands on Deck Thursday, March 1: The Cat & the King Snake Friday, March 2: Ed Jackson Band Saturday, March 3: Grand Pepper Reality, Your Bird Friday, March 9: Reasons Enough, Jigsaw Youth, Process of Fusion Saturday, March 10: Five Myles Utopia Thursday, March 15: Grand Pepper Reality Friday, March 16: Curious Volume, Avon Junkies, The Best of the Worst Saturday, March 17: Rich Russo's "Anything Anything: 10th Anniversary Show" featuring Burnt Youth, Plastiq Passion, The Seconds, Terrible Tim Friday, March 23: Enrage, Dead Men Dreaming, & More Saturday, March 24: The HYE *Have vintage pics of Dock Street? Feel free to share in the comments or email them to bailey@siadvance.com to join in the nostalgic gallery above.* STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- The good news is that the prestigious Michelin Guide for diners recognized a handful of Staten Island restaurants in its 2018 online guide. The not-so-good news: More than 10 locations were dropped from any recognition status over the last two years. (Carol's Cuisine was omitted as it closed when its chef/owner Carol Frazzetta retired.) But that's in part due to nuances in Michelin's review process this year, says Michelin spokeswoman Lauren Hilderbran: "Every year our Inspectors thoroughly review the selection list. This past year, we introduced a new symbol, the Plate, which signifies that a restaurant is of good value and great food. "Our intention was to more deliberately recognize the additional restaurants that our Inspectors uncovered -- even if they did not receive a star or a Bib Gourmand," explains Hilderbran. "This new symbol required a more thorough examination of the restaurants --- similar to the way our Inspectors examine the other categories. We found that, across all Guides, the ranks were reduced but what remains are truly the best restaurants in their category." Keep scrolling to find out the six eateries that did make the list. And at the very end of the discussion, find out how to land your favorite restaurant on Michelin's radar. Don't Edit (Staten Island Advance/Bill Lyons) ENOTECA MARIA 27 Hyatt St., St. George 718-447-2777 EnotecaMaria.com Michelin critics are happy to see the restaurant so close to the Ferry. The review for 2018 gives kudos to owner Jody Scaravella's cookbook, "Nonna's House: Cooking and Reminiscing with the Italian Grandmothers of Enoteca Maria." The Michelin review touts, "Lasagna de Adelina arrives as an inspired layering of zucchini, basil pesto and cream cheese, all topped with parmesan. And for a bit of sweet, try the torta di vaniglia di Melissa served with whipped cream." Enoteca is cash only. The restaurant will soon unveil its new vegan menu. Don't Edit Enoteca is a huge success. It's marketing and great story behind each Nonna has captured audiences well beyond St. George. Here is an illustration by Advance photographer Bill Lyons. Don't Edit From Enoteca Maria's Facebook Owner Jody Scaravella launched the 'Nonna's of the World' concept. From Nonna Maria from Avelino, shown in this image with Jody, to Nonna Alla from Ukraine to the female cooks from literally all over the globe, the nuances of food from around the world truly has landed on Staten Island. Don't Edit Enoteca Maria also received top honors from the Food Network. Don't Edit Don't Edit (Staten Island Advance/Pamela Silvestri) VIDA 381 Van Duzer St., Stapleton 718-720-1501 VidaNY.com Boast Michelin "inspectors": "All the locals love Vida, where popular chef/owner Silva Popaz has created a cozy little restaurant with a firm commitment to simple, but well-executed dishes." The reviewers love the art, bright colors of the restaurant, and the long table down the middle of the restaurant for large parties. They credit Silva's travels to her eclectic eats and recommend "Mexican Duo"on the menu with "pulled pork- and chicken-stuffed tortillas, topped with a vibrant Chimayo chile and tangy cheese sauce, and paired with tender stewed beans sporting bright green onion." Compliments also come for Silva's bread pudding. Don't Edit Mushroom banh mi with cottage fries at Vida Restaurant, Stapleton (Staten Island Advance/Pamela Silvestri) Silva says... "I'm incredibly honored to be mentioned by Michelin for nine years in a row. When i feel like I want to throw in the apron, it makes it all worth it that people appreciate what you do." Don't Edit Food is eclectic. The eats typically follow the seasons. Silva often features guest chefs to keep things exciting for the regulars. Don't Edit (Staten Island Advance File Photo) LAKRUWANA 668 Bay St., Stapleton 347-857-6619 Lakruwana.com In 2016, the decor at this Sri Lankan restaurant prompted reviewers to rave about "the bright kaleidoscope of textures and colors" in the midst of this section of Stapleton and considered "a welcome sight in an otherwise downtrodden part of the borough." Those words haven't changed for 2018 including compliments for proprietor Lakruwana Wijesinghe and his food which is likened to Indian fare. And there's an encore to prior praised dishes: Kuttu Roti, Deviled Chicken plus Salty-and-Sour Lassi and the Chili Lunu Miris Chutney. Don't Edit (Staten Island Advance File Photo) ... and Saturday and Sunday feature all-you-can-eat brunch. The cost is $13.95 per guest. Don't Edit Don't Edit The authentic Sri-Lankan dishes are always prettily arranged. Don't Edit Lakruwana also is a perennial winner in the Best of Staten Island Awards. Don't Edit (Courtesy of Bin 5) BIN 5 1233 Bay St., Rosebank 718-448-7275 Bin5NYC.com Since 2016, Michelin has thought of Bin 5 as"intimate bistro" with "that fantastic panorama!" (Hmm, the yard when it's in full bloom, maybe?) Anyway, the critics say Bin features a "playful menu-complete with solid daily specials" and, to finish, enjoy "a tall wedge of pistachio-walnut cake dusted with powdered sugar." But with the drinks rolled out by owner/bartender Danny Ippolito and carefully sourced foods by kitchen cohort Stephen Lee, the sweet restaurant can enjoy some well-deserved attention for its efforts. Don't Edit Aged veal chop over polenta with roasted tomatoes and fennel served with carrots and asparagus. Bin 5, Rosebank (Staten Island Advance/Pamela Silvestri) Bin 5 recently started brunch. Brunch runs on Saturdays and Sundays. It includes a $25, two-hour booze package. Don't Edit (Courtesy of Danny Ippolito) Lunch is served daily. Burgers are custom blended by Travis butcher shop Hook & Rail. Don't Edit Don't Edit Owner Danny Ippolito's craft cocktails also earn high marks in the Best of Staten Island Awards. Don't Edit (Photo for PhilAmKusina.com by Katherina Gaccione) PHIL-AM KUSINA 556 Tompkins Ave., Rosebank 718-727-3663 PhilAmKusina.com Walk into Phil-Am Kusina and you'll find a handwash sink placed prominently in the dining room. That's not just for patrons who forgo the fork for saucy Pinoy pork ribs -- it's also for Kamayan Nights, a family-style meal presented on banana leaves and spread across the table. That Kamayan arrangement comes by reservation only at 4 p.m. Tuesdays and Thursdays, and is intended for parties of six or more, says owner Manny Imperial. Michelin says, "The menu offers a wide range of Filipino specialties including fried delights, noodle preparations, and simmered specialties like humba-a lusciously tender and fatty pork shank slow-simmered with soy sauce and pineapple." And reviewers recommend the garlic rice paired with such a dish. Don't Edit (Courtesy of Manny Imperial) Phil-Am features Kamayan Night. This entails a family-style feast spread across banana leaves on a table for a group of six or more to enjoy. Don't Edit (Photo by Katherina Gaccione) Phil-Am Kusina serves Filipino food on Staten Island Don't Edit (Staten Island Advance/Pamela Silvestri) SANRASA 226 Bay St., Tompkinsville 718-682-1653 (disconnected) Sporadically open, this Sri Lankan place has been lauded by Michelin for a few years. It has moved (to Corson Avenue) and landed back to this address after another Sri Lankan eatery, Sigiri, bowed out of business. Nonetheless, says Michelin, "Dinner may begin with a starter of string hoppers or crispy little pancakes laced in a rich fish curry carrying hints of clove, fennel, and cardamom." Reviewers advise eating the lamprie, a package of selected proteins, eggplant, cashews and rice cooked in a banana leaf. Don't Edit Don't Edit Pasta from Brioso (Staten Island Advance/Pamela Silvestri) So, how does a Staten Islander get recognition for a local restaurant? Michelin's spokeswoman says, "Restaurants who wish to be considered by our Michelin inspection team can actually directly tweet to us: @MichelinGuideNY. The Inspectors themselves are heavily active on Twitter and always following along for new restaurant recommendations." STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- A total of 82,510 summons were issued by speed cameras on Staten Island in 2017, according to the Department of Transportation (DOT). Of the 82,510 summonses, 26,193 were issued by a mobile camera -- a vehicle with a camera on the top of it -- and 53,317 by a fixed camera. The summonses raked in over $4 million dollars in 2017 alone. Since the speed camera program was established in 2013, opponents have argued that it's a scheme to make the city money, often referring to them as "scam cams." Proponents say the cameras reduce speeding and traffic accidents, ultimately saving lives. Citing the state Vehicle and Traffic Law, section 1180-b, Imbesi Law P.C. has filed a class action lawsuit against the city, alleging the program is scamming New York City residents. On behalf of Queens resident Abram Muladzhanov, the filing alleges the city -- specifically DOT Commissioner Polly Trottenberg and Department of Finance (DOF) Commissioner Jacques Jiha and Deputy Commissioner Jeffrey Shear -- has been issuing invalid speed camera tickets. The complaint claims that from April 20, 2013 through the present, the named city agencies were aware that Notices of Liability were not signed to or affirmed by a technician employed by the city, as stated in sections 1180-b(d) and 1180-b(g)(2). "The city is penalizing its citizens for allegedly violating the same law it chooses to ignore," said Muladzhanov's attorney, Israel Klein, Esq., in a statement. The class action suit aims to recover damages on behalf of all city residents who received a speed camera summons between August 30, 2013 and the present day. DOT SAYS THEY ARE 'FULLY COMPLAINT WITH THE LAW' When asked about the class action suit, a DOT spokesman said the Notice of Liability (NOL) is fully compliant with the law, because it contains all of the required components - the certificate charging the liability. "Though the technician certificate is not required in the NOL, it is available upon request and at the hearing," the spokesman said. However, the complaint states that the NOL should be mailed with the summons when it is issued, not upon request. Section 1180-b specifies that a "certificate charging the liability" - a sworn statement from a city technician verifying the videotape/photographs - be included in the "notice of liability" (the ticket), sent to the driver. "We don't know if this suit has any merit. We'll review the complaint and respond accordingly," said a spokesman for the DOT and DOF's Law Department. ISLANDER WHO BEAT TICKET SAYS IT'S A SLAM DUNK CASE In March 2017, Staten Islander Christopher Altieri fought two speed camera tickets in court for friends and initially lost; he won by appealing the administrative law judge's decision with a three-judge panel. His defense? Section 1180-b of the state Vehicle and Traffic Law. "When an officer signs a violation, they sign something stating that they saw what they saw, so I wondered how the state and city feel they can get away with a camera being the complainant," Altieri said when asked what made him question the summons he received. "In regard to the [class action lawsuit], the summonses are defective and fail to include the certificate charging the liability," he said. Altieri called it a "slam dunk case" and believes the plaintiff will prevail. DECLINE IN DAILY SPEED VIOLATIONS The DOT maintains that deterring speeders is a key priority for Vision Zero and the proof is in the numbers. "We have found a 63 percent decline in the average daily speed violations issued in Staten Island schools zones with fixed speed cameras, which is an expected and welcome result because the goal of the program is to reduce speeding," the DOT spokesman said. The DOT measured this decline by looking at the daily average from the first month of each camera, going back to 2014, and comparing it with the daily average for the latest month up until January 2018. Additionally, there was a decline in total speed camera summonses in 2017 from the previous year. 2014: 45,333; 28,914 mobile and 12,419 fixed 2015: 2016: 2017: "Drivers who are speeding are less likely to be able to avoid crashes, and crashes which they cause are more likely to be fatal," the spokesman said. NEW YORK CITY -- Cuomo aide Andrew Ball, who was abruptly bumped from his preferred office in the governor's chamber, testified today about the "rough and tumble" atmosphere. Ball said he was "quite surprised" and angry to learn in 2014 that he would be moved from his prestigious desk nearby Gov. Andrew Cuomo's office down two floors within the executive chamber in New York City. "I believed that I deserved an office on the 39th floor," Ball said. He testified he made his disappointment known to Percoco. "I was known to poke at him," Ball said. "I was unhappy. I made it clear." Ball said the decision to move him was Percoco's "and it was final." Ball said he often found places to sit on the 39th floor instead of at his designated desk on the 37th floor, as a kind of protest. Ball's sudden desk change is part of the prosecution's case in a bribery and corruption trial against former Cuomo aide Joseph Percoco and three businessmen, including Syracuse-based Cor Development executives Steven Aiello and Joseph Gerardi. Prosecutors said Cor paid bribes to Percoco through a "shell company" set up by lobbyist Todd Howe, in exchange for favors in state government. Those included favors for Aeillo's son Steve Jr. who worked with Ball and Percoco in the chamber, prosecutors said. Ball described working in the Cuomo administration as hard, high-pressure and demanding. He agreed with a lawyer's characterization that working in the chamber is a "rough and tumble" atmosphere. Evidence presented at trial has shown that Aiello contacted Howe about issues his son was having with Ball, and Howe in turn reached out to Percoco. Percoco responded to Aiello in an email: "I have this covered." Ball was not asked directly whether he was given a reason why he was moved. Defense lawyers hinted at other theories independent of Aiello Jr., including changes to Ball's job responsibilities and ongoing conversations about where his permanent desk would be. Ball said at one point, Percoco suggested moving his desk closer to Aiello Jr. Ball said all of these conversations took place over about a four-month period. An FBI agent previously testified that Aiello Sr. told her in an interview that Ball around this time had been putting "excess pressure" on his son and that Ball was a "difficult personality." Ball's personality took center stage at the trial this morning. Percoco defense lawyer Barry Bohrer described Ball as a "take-charge kind of guy." He testified about his close but often verbally combative relationship with Percoco, and described a duty of his to send out thousands of holiday cards on behalf of the governor as "the bane of my existence." Read our continuing coverage of the trial Ball said he considered Percoco a mentor. He said the two were known to yell at each other, but Ball thought of Percoco like a brother. "He was my person," Ball said at one point. In discussing the layout of his desk and the governor's chamber, Ball, unprompted, drew directly on the screen where exhibits were displayed. Asked about who was responsible for a promotion he received from Percoco, Ball replied, "I believe I was responsible for the promotion," eliciting laughs from the jury and gallery. Steve Aiello Jr., who was present at the trial, laughed at Ball's jokes. According to Ball, they were roommates for about two years. Aiello Jr. no longer works in state government. He previously declined to comment on the dispute with Ball. Ball, who now works as Cuomo's deputy secretary, declined to comment after his testimony. He referred questions to a Cuomo spokesman. He was accompanied in and out of court by lawyer Judith Mogul, who has represented a few other witnesses who also work in the chamber, including Cuomo's Chief-of-Staff Linda Lacewell. Public Affairs Reporter Julie McMahon covers courts, government and other issues affecting taxpayers. She can be reached anytime: Email | Twitter | 315-412-1992 STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- A New Brighton resident whose wayward bullet fired in a playground in his community last summer grazed an Italian tourist, rudely introducing the victim to the borough, has pleaded guilty to a weapon charge. Henry DeGroat, then 19, was busted on Aug. 23, days after he allegedly nicked Marino Stocco's shoulder with a 9 mm bullet as the victim rested near Mahoney Playground on Jersey Street at about 1 p.m. on Aug. 20, said police. Stocco, 57, had taken a wrong turn on exiting the Staten Island Ferry and walked about a mile. His intended destination was the Garibaldi-Meucci Museum in Rosebank. In an exclusive interview, Stocco told the Advance he saw kids running from the park, then heard gunshots and was hit. Cops said Stocco was an unintended target caught in the crossfire at Mahoney Playground. The frightened Stocco said he walked around the corner to Crescent Street where a neighborhood resident said she saw him bleeding. Cops and emergency officials responded; Stocco was taken to Richmond University Medical Center in West Brighton. DeGroat was free on $3,000 bond when the shooting occurred. He had been arrested previously and charged with menacing and harassment, stemming from a July 21 incident, online state court records show. DeGroat pleaded guilty on Thursday in state Supreme Court, St. George, to attempted second-degree criminal weapon possession to satisfy the charges against him. In exchange, he'll be sentenced on March 9 to a year in jail. Attorney Yan Katsnelson stood in for DeGroat's lawyer, Anthony Katchen, at the plea hearing. "We're happy to resolve this case and bring closure to this matter," said Katsnelson, when reached by phone on Friday. Assistant District Attorney Kate Malloy is prosecuting the case. CITY HALL -- Starting next month, all New York City public schools will hold shelter in place lockdown drills and every middle and high school in will undergo random metal detector screenings, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced Thursday. The mayor said that the city's latest school safety enhancements were the result of recent discussions with the New York City Police Department and the Department of Education following the mass shooting last week at a high school in Parkland, Florida that killed 17. "It's tragic that our young people have to go through these drills," the mayor told reporters at a press conference at City Hall. "If ever there's an indication that there's something wrong it's that we have to teach our young people to get ready for a mass shooting." But the president of Staten Island's Community Education Council 31, Michael Reilly, a retired New York City Police Department officer, thinks the city's additional school safety measures simply are not enough and doing a "disservice" to students. The mayor said that the screenings will be unannounced and take place at schools all over the city on an "individualized basis" at some point in the year for at least a day. He said other schools would have the screenings on an ongoing basis. "That is an important deterrent, it could happen at any school at any time and that's a measure you'll see play out right away," de Blasio said. Currently, some city schools have screenings weekly, while others have the detectors regularly but only activate them at some point during the week, the mayor said. The mayor said the lockdown drills were part of a citywide mandate the city had recently "amplified" that would be part of an ongoing series of drills. But ultimately, de Blasio said the NYPD would be the responsible for determining whether a school "needs something more." ISLAND ADVOCATE REACTS Following the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut that claimed the lives of 20 children, Reilly has been calling for the city's public schools to implement tougher security measures to keep students safe. In 2013, CEC 31 passed a safety and security proposal and submitted it to the DOE, the state legislature and the NYPD which suggested several security enhancements for the city's public schools. Some of those recommendation included installing buzzer entries and video capture technology at the main entrances of school buildings; improving school building response team training; and having retired police officers as special patrol officers to supplement school security. A year later, the state legislature put some of CEC 31's plan into law and created grant funding for schools to improve safety, which included cameras and buzzer entry systems. "There's only so much equipment [schools] have, so they can only do a certain amount of [screenings at] schools each day ... that's fine and I appreciate that, I want more of that," Reilly said. "I think they're doing a disservice by not hardening our doors on main entrances, by creating an atmosphere where there's an extra layer of security to get into the building." Reilly said he fears it will take a tragedy to get the city to enact tougher security policies in schools. "I think New York City is not going to do anything until unfortunately, something happens," he said. ISLAND COUNCILMEN CALL FOR ACTION The mass shooting in Florida has sparked calls from politicians from Staten Island and around the country asking for schools to beef up security measures. Earlier this week, Councilmen Steven Matteo (R-Mid Island) and Joe Borelli (R-South Shore) and Staten Island Borough President James Oddo sent a letter the mayor calling for officers to be placed in the city's 1,700 public schools during operating hours and whenever they are open for school-related activities after this week's winter break. The Island lawmakers acknowledged de Blasio's opposition to having police officers in every public school, but cited the Florida mass shooting in hopes of changing de Blasio's mind. Hundreds of protesters also gathered outside of Rep. Daniel Donovan's district office in New Dorp Monday, and called on him to take action on gun control. On March 14, students in New York city and around the country will hold a walkout to call on Congress to pass gun control legislation. De Blasio said he had "respect" for those students choosing to take part in the walkout, but said they would still face "modest" disciplinary measures if they participate. "We're certainly ready for that and we respect it, I respect it," the mayor said. If I was a high school student today I would be walking out." STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- Rapper Tekashi 6ix9ine's performance at Eve Ultra Lounge in Rossville has been called off, the club's manager told the Advance Thursday evening. The manager, who wished only to be identified as Brian, said the lounge was canceling the rapper's performance after the Advance published an article Thursday afternoon about the artist's criminal sex record. "What he did was disrespectful to women," Brian said. 6ix9ine, who also uses the names Teka$hi69 and Tekashi69, was booked to do a 10-minute performance at the Rossville club March 2. While the event, billed online by its promoter, The Trap Club, as the "hottest teen party in the US," is still allowed to go on, it's unclear if that will happen, the manager said. The promoter could be out thousands of dollars, including paying the rapper. "He's upset because he's out a lot of money," Brian said. The rapper, 21, whose given name is Daniel Hernandez, admitted to posting social media videos of him and another man participating in sex acts with an underage girl three years ago. The girl was 13 years old at the time, according to a source with knowledge of the investigation. According to a spokesman for the Manhattan district attorney's office, Hernandez pleaded guilty to use of a child in a sexual performance in October 2015. STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- Teachers across the nation are using the hashtag #ArmMeWith to send a strong message -- they want mental health resources and better school supplies, not weapons in their schools. President Donald Trump suggested in tweets Thursday that more teachers should carry firearms. He tweeted about arming a percentage of highly trained teachers and said doing so would prevent mass shootings. "ATTACKS WOULD END!" he tweeted. However, scores of teachers disagree. Two teachers from Kansas went so far as to create the #ArmMeWith hashtag campaign to call attention to other educators' needs and the movement has gained momentum. As of Thursday, more than 5,000 #ArmMeWith posts have appeared on Instagram alone. The National Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers and the teachers' union in Florida's Broward County, where last week's deadly rampage took place, have publicly denounced the idea of arming teachers. "Bringing more guns into our schools does nothing to protect our students and educators from gun violence," said NEA President Lily Eskelsen Garcia on the union's website. Olivia Bertels (@missbertels) and Brittany Wheaton (@thesuperheroteacher) started #ArmMeWith to combat the "absurd notion being espoused by largely NRA-funded politicians" that arming teachers will keep schools safe, according to USA Today. "Arm me with the resources and funding needed to help students experiencing mental health issues, not guns," the #ArmMeWith movement urges. Page Content As part of World Bank process to approve funding, a critical requirement is that the proposed projects meet world bank's bidding or procurement requirements. World Bank representatives have confirmed that the tender process for the new general hospital of Sint Maarten is consistent with the Bank procurement framework. We see this as a validation that the project was executed with transparency, accountability and integrity. Emil Lee, Minister VSA Formal approval to the request for funding by the World Bank is now pending. Minister Lee is very confident in the process. The funding requested by the World Bank will ensure that all the original concept of the new general hospital will be met. With the change of specifications post-Irma, this left that a new wing for the hospital would be omitted in the initial construction phase. When the World Bank funding is realized, there will no longer be a need to cut-off from the wish-list. Sint Maarten is promised a high quality general hospital with all that is required to take care of the medical needs of the population, with extension the neighboring islands and visiting tourist Page Content In what can be considered a very productive day in Brussels, Prime Minister Leona Romeo Marlin successfully addressed the OCTA Ministerial Conference on Post 2020 relations with the EU. While Carol Voges was re-elected for a second 1 year term as President of the OCTA Executive Committee. The OCTA Executive Committee consists of 9 members, as President of the OCTA Executive Committee Ms. Voges, who works fulltime at the Sint Maarten House in The Hague, is responsible for the management of the daily operations. Every year during the EU-OCTA Conference the President is also tasked with delivering the annual report. Due to a great performance during the past year 2017 Carol Voges was unanimously re-elected to the Presidency of the Executive Committee. During the morning session Prime Minister Leona Romeo-Marlin when given the floor made an address/intervention on behalf of the Government of St. Maarten; here is an excerpt from that address to the OCTA Ministerial meeting. Madame Chair, todays discussions mark an important juncture in EU - OCT relations. I say this because we are finally moving passed the preliminary stage of What will the post 2020 framework entail and have now entered the critical stage of How. This involves giving substance to the post 2020 discussion by sharing our positions regarding the post 2020 proposed options with our colleagues here today, as well as with the European Commission at the EU-OCT Forum tomorrow. This experience has highlighted certain aspects of our associated status to the European Union as OCTs which need to be addressed. The majority of citizens in OCTs are by law European citizens and belong to the EU family. However, as OCTs are not an integral part of the EU, Sint Maarten, similar to other OCTs were not able to access certain funding put in place to support EU countries in times of crisis, such as in the case of a natural disaster. Notwithstanding, Sint Maarten is of the opinion that many of the priorities outlined in the proposed EU-Caribbean compact are in line with our own future regional cooperation aspirations. Therefore, we would appreciate the opportunity for OCTs to be included in the process and heard during the ongoing negotiations between the European Commission and the ACP group. The importance of regional cooperation for Sint Maarten becomes even more evident given our shared border with Saint Martin, an Overseas Region of France. During our discussions on developing a joint project with our direct neighbor, it has been apparent that for cooperation to be successful in an EU context, attention must be given to simplifying procedures and regulatory issues. This applies to programming primarily as regional cooperation between countries that are required to follow contrasting EU programming regulations often leads to lengthy and cumbersome processes with risk of disengagement of funds or worse, unsuccessful actions. Madame Chair, it is Sint Maartens position that the time has arrived for OCTs to let their voices be heard with a view to redefine their relationship with the EU to that of one that better takes into account their distinct needs and challenges in the ongoing dynamic global framework. Following the presentation of the address many of the Caribbean OCT leaders present congratulated Prime Minster Romeo-Marlin on her delivery and even requested copies the speech. Photo caption Prime Minister Leona Romeo Marlin & re-elected President of OCTA Executive Committee Carol Voges Page Content UNESCO has approved $50,000 for the purchasing of learning materials for Public Education that were damaged by Hurricane Irma and Hurricane Maria. The learning materials that are being referred to are: textbooks, workbooks, and physical education materials. The learning materials are from the different subject areas from the national curriculum such as: English and Dutch language arts, science, and physical education. The reasons why the texts books are needed was that the damaged books and materials were in used for over a 12-year period. This grant will now facilitate the process of obtaining learning materials in line with the 21st century skills. These skills are namely: collaboration and team work, creativity and imagination, critical thinking and problem solving. It was decided to look at different texts from two publishing companies that the Division Public Education has been working with. A comparison was made between the former editions and the newly developed programs. Besides ensuring that the content in each text offered a clear understanding of the skills and concepts to be taught, the text books selected also had to meet the criteria of developing the 21st century skills of the students. Each text book emphasis the integration of technology to enrich the learning of the students. The Macmillan Caribbean texts was selected for both English language and Science. In addition, the Dutch program, Netherlands onder the zon was selected for students age groups, 8-12 years. The program is specifically to teach Dutch as a foreign language. This approach is needed on St. Maarten as Dutch is not commonly heard, seen or spoken. The Dutch language used in the program is focused on the daily life experiences of the students in the Caribbean and should intrinsically motivate the children to speak, read, write and listen to the Dutch language. Since 2017, Public School teachers have been participating in a training for teaching Dutch as a foreign language. The teachers expressed great interest with the program and were eagerly looking forward to the continuation of these training which unfortunately had to be halted due to the passing of the hurricane and the delay in the receipt of the ordered program. It should be noted that other schools on the island have already started to use this new program. Minister of Education, Culture, Youth and Sport, Jorien Wuite, and the Division Public Education would like to thank UNESCO for this generous donation, which will enable the Division to purchase these learning materials for Dutch and the other subjects. Although this substantial grant from UNESCO allows Public Education to acquire much needed learning materials, more funds will still be needed in order for the Division Public Education to continue its efforts of providing quality education and instruction to the students entrusted to its care. Best Canadian Blog 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007 About Kate Why this blog? Until this moment I have been forced to listen while media and politicians alike have told me "what Canadians think". In all that time they never once asked. This is just the voice of an ordinary Canadian yelling back at the radio - "You don't speak for me." (goes to a private mailserver in Europe) I can't answer or use every tip, but all are appreciated! Katewerk Art Support SDA I am not a registered charity. I cannot issue tax receipts. Want lies? Hire a regular consultant. Want truth? Hire an asshole. The Proper Procedure Poor Richard's Retirement Polar Bear Facts & Myths Polar Bears: Outstanding Survivors of Climate Change. Pilgrim's Progress Trump The Establishment Dow Jones What They Say About SDA "Smalldeadanimals doesn't speak for the people of Saskatchewan" Former Sask Premier Lorne Calvert "I got so much traffic after your post my web host asked me to buy a larger traffic allowance." Dr.Ross McKitrick Holy hell, woman. When you send someone traffic, you send someone TRAFFIC. My hosting provider thought I was being DDoSed. - Sean McCormick "The New York Times link to me yesterday [...] generated one-fifth of the traffic I normally get from a link from Small Dead Animals." Kathy Shaidle "Thank you for your link. A wave of your Canadian readers came to my blog! Really impressive." Juan Giner - INNOVATION International Media Consulting Group I got links from the Weekly Standard, Hot Air and Instapundit yesterday - but SDA was running at least equal to those in visitors clicking through to my blog. Jeff Dobbs "You may be a nasty right winger, but you're not nasty all the time!" Warren Kinsella "Go back to collecting your welfare livelihood."Michael E. Zilkowsky Intelliweather Seismic Map Comments Policy Read this Best Of SDA Hide The Decline The Bottle Genie (ClimateGate links) You Might Be A Liberal Uncrossing The Line Bob Fife: Knuckledragger A Modest Proposal (NP) Settled Science Series Y2Kyoto Series SDA: Reader Occupation Survey Brett Lamb Sheltered Workshop Flakes On A Plane All Your Weather Are Belong To Us Song Of The Sled The Raise A Flag Debacle (Now on Youtube!) (.mwv Video) Abuse Ruins Life Of Girl Trudeaupiate Kleptocrat Jeans Child Labour I Concede Small Dead Feminist Protein Hoser: THK Interview The Werewolf Extinction Dear Laura (VRWC) We Wait Blogging The Oscars Jackson Converts To Islam Just Shut The HELL Up Manipulating Condi Gay Equality Rights Authorities will not be able to formally identify the bodies of three people pulled from a Bonner house fire until at least next week. It is understood the bodies were so badly damaged by the blaze that the authorities require DNA material to formally confirm the identity of the victims. Tributes of soft toys and flowers at the site of the triple death and house fire in Bonner. Credit:karleen minney Neighbours said a mother and two children lived at the Peter Coppin Street house. Police said the post mortem examinations had been completed but completion of the final autopsy report awaited various test results. A Canberra man has been jailed for the rape of the mother of his two children. Justice Hilary Penfold on Friday sentenced the 31-year-old to more than five years behind bars on charges of rape, sexual assault, an act of indecency, and stalking. The man had to be steadied by guards and sat down as the judge pronounced the jail sentence in the ACT Supreme Court. The man had pleaded not guilty to the charges, but a Supreme Court jury had found him guilty of the crimes in September last year. At trial, the court heard the pair started to have casual sex in 2010 and went on to have two children before their rocky relationship broke down. She had shown up at his house after he called her late one night, when their relationship was still casual, in 2011. A Canberra man has waited more than nine years for a court to find he was falsely imprisoned. But in a decision handed down last week, Steven James Lewis will receive just $1 in damages after the judge also found his detention was inevitable. It was January 5, 2009, when Mr Lewis was arrested at Capital Car Detailing in Fyshwick, his workplace at the time. Six or seven police officers arrived and Mr Lewis - who had failed on several occasions to turn up to weekend detention - suspected why they were there, and hid under a bed. But police coaxed Mr Lewis out, put him in handcuffs and marched him from the shop in front of his colleagues. It was, by Mr Lewis' own account, a shameful and humiliating experience. Labor's deputy leader Tanya Plibersek is opening the new exhibition in Tuggeranong on Friday featuring work by executed Bali Nine member Myuran Sukumaran. Sukumaran was executed by firing squad in 2015 after being convicted in Indonesia of drug smuggling. Myuran Sukumaran was executed in 2015. Throughout March and April, Tuggeranong Arts Centre will present Another Day in Paradise, featuring the works of Sukumaran and other artists whose work relates to the death penalty and profile human rights. Curated by Ben Quilty and Michael Dagostino, Another Day in Paradise was developed by the Campbelltown Arts Centre and first presented as part of Sydney Festival. There really is just something about Basil. We told you earlier this week about the hero rottweiler who alerted his owner to an eight-year-old girl who had fallen off the boardwalk into Lake Burley Griffin at the Kingston Foreshore. Jarrad Houghton, of Gordon, with his hero dog Basil. Credit:Dion Georgopoulos No one had noticed her go in and it was only the insistence of Basil, that Jarrad went to investigate and pulled the shaken girl out. Basil was showered with love by the online community. And that's what Jarrad wanted - a positive take on rottweilers, a breed he has loved since he was six. There is a split in opinion over whether the boardwalk at the Kingston Foreshore should be fenced following the dramatic rescue of an eight-year-old girl who fell into the waters of Lake Burley Griffin last weekend. The ACT Government says safety reviews of the boardwalk have found a fence is "not warranted". Anne O'Donoghue of Macgregor with son Liam, 2, at the Kingston Foreshore on Friday. She thinks a fence along the boardwalk would be a good idea. Credit:Megan Doherty Basil the rottweiler was praised as a hero for hearing the girl splash into the lake and then insisting his owner, Jarrad Houghton, go down to the water's edge to investigate. The girl slipped off the boardwalk into the water last Friday evening and no one had noticed her go in - only Basil. The audit detailed a series of weaknesses and failures in the tender process to sell a block of land to the club as part of the deal , failures in record-keeping and significant concessions given to the club that meant the government failed to complete an open, transparent and contestable sale. The Assembly's public accounts committee also held what some described as an 'emergency meeting' on Thursday night to discuss establishing an inquiry into the issues raised, which is expected to be announced next week. Greens leader Shane Rattenbury says the Dickson land swap deal was a 'prime candidate' for referral to an anti-corruption commission. Credit:Dion Georgopoulos Revelations about the Tradies Club's Dickson land swap deal with the territory government are 'prime candidates' for referral to the ACT's proposed anti-corruption commission, the ACT Greens leader says. It also comes as the Legislative Assembly awaits the government's response to a tripartite committee report urging an ACT anti-corruption commission be set up and operating by the end of this year. Greens leader and former chairman of that committee Shane Rattenbury said on Friday that he believed that some of the matters exposed in the auditor's report "would be prime candidates for that sort of consideration". While he said the minor party would consider taking such action, he expected he would be "beaten to the punch" by the Opposition, in officially referring the report to the proposed commission. Opposition leader Alistair Coe also said he believed it could be worthy of such a referral, while the only Labor MLA to front any questions on the issue, planning minister Mick Gentleman, instead said it "puts the matter to bed". The audit also highlighted a government solicitor's office warning to two senior public servants involved that going ahead with the concessions risked being "so divergent from the request for tender that it was a direct sale". In BHP's case they included Australian asset manager BT Investment Management, part-owned by Westpac Bank with $98 billion in funds under management, and big European asset managers Deutsche and Nordea. Also voting yes were a clutch of industry super funds from Australia, and the US$300 billion-plus Californian pension fund CalPERS. And then there was Schroders - the London asset manager that, according to Bloomberg data, ranks among BHP's top 10 shareholders. And as for Elliott and its stake? It hasn't disclosed how it voted, and declined to tell Fairfax Media when asked. The good oil Oil Search faced a resolution from Melbourne NGO Market Forces in May, calling for the disclosure of risks posed to the oil and gas explorer and producer's operations from climate change. In a rare move, proxy advisors ISS and CGI Glass Lewis recommended their clients vote in favour - "to reinforce shareholders' interests in receiving climate change disclosure, accompanied by the fact that the Board is willingly providing and improving its disclosure on this matter," ISS wrote. Indeed, at the AGM in Port Moresby, chairman Rick Lee was at pains to set out Oil Search's climate credentials, including its commitments on transparency, saying the company was "passionately interested" in the issue. Proxy Insight's research shows that the asset management arms of Norges Bank - a top 20 shareholder, according to Bloomberg - HSBC, Aviva, BMO Global, BNY Mellon, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo all voted with Market Forces. As did Australian industry funds Local Government Super, Hesta, TWU Super and Club Super; and giant North American pension funds CalPERS, CalSTRS, and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board. Market Forces, after considering the action taken by the company, agreed at the meeting to withdraw the resolution - but not before a screen revealed the agenda item had attracted the support of 20 per cent of stock voted - a significant bloody nose for a board. These sorts of shareholder resolutions, targeting environmental and social issues, have in the past attracted little support in Australia - on occasion getting less than 1 per cent of the vote. But the Oil Search and BHP votes, along with the voting disclosures compiled by Proxy Insight, show how support for them is spreading beyond the ethical investment and activist realms to the mainstream. There are more resolutions being filed and, investors say, the tiny NGOs coordinating them are getting better at drafting resolutions that investors will actually vote for. Which is important when those NGOs will often have different priorities to the globe-striding institutions whose support they seek. "We are not returns-driven, but I think there is a growing recognition in the mainstream investment world of the power of this method," says Australasian Centre for Corporate Responsibility executive director Brynn O'Brien. It was the ACCR that homed in on BHP and its peak body memberships, bringing into focus an issue that was being discussed among companies and investors world-wide. Others have focused on the disclosure of climate risks - a pressing issue for many investors. New chairman Ken MacKenzie speaks at BHP's AGM in November. Credit:Bloomberg But it is a trend that is sparking headaches for boards, with some directors arguing the resolutions are time-consuming and costly, and at times demand information that companies have already agreed to provide. The Australasian Investor Relations Association has called for a tightening of the rules on who can lodge resolutions, amid concerns that the use of them "could get out of control" - greatly increasing the workload on boards and management in the process. But the groups coordinating the resolutions say their work is getting results, and some in the investment community agree. "Anecdotal comments from the director community suggest that responding to shareholder resolutions is massively time-consuming and potentially distracting for boards," says Dan Smith, general manager of proxy advisor CGI Glass Lewis. "But it forces them to confront issues important to some shareholders that had previously been given low priority." Packed agenda Market Forces is considering potential resolutions for several upcoming AGMs, including QBE and Santos. The ACCR was this week searching for the required 100 shareholders needed to lodge a peak-body focused resolution as the deadline looms ahead of Rio Tinto's AGM in May. "We have met with the ACCR and are having a constructive dialogue with them around climate change policy issues and the role of industry associations," a Rio Tinto spokesman said. For its part, Market Forces does not regard double-digit tallies as successes. "We need to focus on the 80 per cent who, for some reason, don't think disclosure of climate risk is worth voting for," says executive director Julien Vincent. BlackRock is the world's biggest asset manager, and its voting decisions are closely watched. Credit:Bloomberg The number of investors supporting such resolutions is still dwarfed by those who vote against them. Some resolutions in 2017 were certainly fizzers, with motions at CBA and Downer EDI securing only about 3 per cent support - athough the likes of Deutsche and pension giant ABP backed the CBA vote. Last month, the corporate regulator reported the average vote on such resolutions in 2017 was just 6 per cent. However, the votes on several of the best-supported resolutions were not included because, for various reasons, they did not proceed to a formal vote at the AGMs - even though institutions' proxy votes had already been lodged. The picture behind the scenes is more complex than the headline numbers suggest, Smith says. "To be clear, the nominal low votes in favour of resolutions dont mean that action isnt happening behind the scenes, or that companies arent listening," he says. "Just look at BHP with the MCA membership." In the Europe and the US, environmental and social issue-focused shareholder resolutions are more common, and - as seen with oil giants ExxonMobil and Occidental last year - sometimes even get up. But Australian investors have traditionally been wary. A key issue is that, unlike in other jurisdictions, shareholders in Australia can't put forward advisory resolutions on issues deemed to relate to the management of the company. To get around this, groups first put forward resolutions to change the company's constitution to allow advisory resolutions - a "clunky and unhelpful" system, says Ed John from the Australian Council of Superannuation Investors, which wants reform of the laws. Constitutional change is considered a step too far for many Australian investors, who refuse to back such motions (this was not an issue at Oil Search, with PNG corporate law allowing shareholder proposals). And because these first resolutions never succeed, the subsequent resolutions do not formally proceed, even though most investors have already directed their proxies. But there's also the fact that Australian investors, unlike those in the US, have good access to boards and directors, and can often raise concerns in face-to-face meetings - a less adversarial and, it is argued, more constructive form of engagement. So what has changed? First, Paris. Investors, as they seek to price risk in their own portfolios, want companies to start using a landmark set of reporting rules nailed down by the G20's Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) last year, anchored on the Paris agreement's pledge to keep global warming to "well below" 2 degrees. The resolutions at Santos, Oil Search and Origin called for disclosure in line with the TCFD rules. Regulators have also put financial institutions on notice over the need to consider climate risks. And institutions world-wide, keen to burnish their responsible investor credentials, are becoming more willing to flex their muscles on so-called "ESG" - environment, social and governance - issues. Decision points At the Origin AGM in October, a resolution based on climate disclosure won almost 14 per cent of the vote (Origin and BHP published the votes on all their shareholder resolutions, including those that did not formally proceed). And at Woolworths the following month, big industry funds including Australian Super, CBUS and HESTA joined Deutsche in voting for an ACCR resolution on human rights reporting. The final tally on that vote was not known, as the ACCR withdrew the resolution before the AGM after commitments from the company. Investors were selective about which resolutions they backed. Australia's biggest industry fund, Australian Super, voted for the human rights resolution at Woolworths and the climate resolution at Origin, but against those at Oil Search and Santos. It declined to comment. BT Investment Management voted for the resolution at BHP, but against others including those at Woolworths and CBA. It says it keeps its reasons for voting on specific resolutions confidential, but its preference remains to "engage directly with the company and advocate for change privately". Colonial First State Global Asset Management, whose shares were voted in support of a Santos resolution on climate change reporting, says the group does not "see a shareholder resolution as the end point for any issue and instead incorporate the concerns expressed into our ongoing engagement program". And AMP Capital's Karin Halliday has said publicly that the investment manager abstained from voting on some shareholder resolutions last year, a move she said had led to more dialogue with companies. AMP is yet to release its proxy voting record for last year's main AGM season. MLC Investments and Macquarie Investment Management Global both voted against the climate resolutions at Santos and Oil Search (they have also not yet disclosed for the later AGMs). And among Australia's other industry funds, Local Government Super, VicSuper, HESTA and MTAA backed multiple resolutions while opposing others, and CBUS voted against all the climate resolutions while supporting the human rights resolution at Woolworths. Kristian Fok, chief investment officer at CBUS - which is active in investor groups targeting climate change risk - says the fund considers each resolution on a case by case basis, but cites the constitutional change issue as a factor in its decision-making. CBUS supports ACSI's push to give shareholders the power to lodge non-binding advisory motions at AGMs. "Shareholders have successfully used this mechanism in other jurisdictions to make improvements on important issues such as climate change and human rights," Fok says. Among offshore institutions, Deutsche Asset Management - the arm of Germany's Deutsche Bank with US$875 billion funds under management - backed multiple resolutions including those at Woolworths, BHP and Commonwealth Bank. It has made measuring climate change risk a priority. Deutsche Asset Management voted for multiple shareholder resolutions in Australia. Credit:AP "If a company has good governance in place, then usually environmental and social issues are also covered and taken care of," says the group's head of corporate governance, Nicolas Huber, who says Deutsche "strives" to support shareholder proposals. "We take a close look at each proposal, and if it is transparency related, and helps reduce environmental and social risks, then we support it." The US's biggest pension fund, the US$300 billion CalPERS, was also an enthusiastic supporter, backing all but the climate change resolution at Commonwealth Bank. It declined to comment. Dozens of other pension funds from North America and Europe - including the US$400 billion Netherlands giant ABP, the Ontario Teachers Pension Fund and CalSTRS - also threw their support behind multiple proposals. Then there were the passive investment behemoths Blackrock, Vanguard and State Street, whose voting decisions are closely watched - mainly because of their sheer market power. They have been selective in their support for climate resolutions in the US. In Australia, State Street Global Advisors chose to abstain at Commonwealth Bank and Santos. State Street's head of ESG investments and asset stewardship, Rakhi Kumar, says the group will vote against management on resolutions if "company disclosure, practice and board governance structure were found to be inadequate, or did not meet market practice". "We abstain on resolutions if companies have demonstrated progress or are receptive to our feedback during the course of engagement." Voting records released to date for Vanguard show it did not support the resolutions at Santos and Oil Search. At BlackRock, its head of investment stewardship in Asia Pacific, Pru Bennett says it did not support any Australian resolutions last year. "If we thought issues raised in a shareholder proposal were valid and we had a refusal from the company to address the issue or to engage... we may in those cases support the shareholder proposal," she says. Fair game? When it comes to shareholder resolutions on environmental or social issues, Bennett is sympathetic to some of the complaints coming from companies. "It's very frustrating when there's a shareholder proposal requesting greater disclosure, or that is critical of the company, and when we review [what] that company is doing on the subject [it] has been very transparent and the shareholder proposal is based on disclosure of up to two years ago," she says. "These things can be very distracting to management." This was a key argument of Santos, in responding to a Market Forces climate resolution last year. "The company... already factors in climate change related risks and opportunities into its strategic and planning processes, and reports comprehensively on relevant climate change metrics," it said. Oil Search says it was already "on track" to adopt the TCFD rules before Market Forces' 2017 resolution landed. (Market Forces says it closely examines companies' public disclosures before deciding whether to proceed with resolutions.) Some companies take a sanguine view, with one describing the resolution process as "fair game". "If the resolution has merit, then you deal with it." But the AIRA, whose members liaise between companies and investors, says there is potential for the number being put forward to get out of control, unreasonably increasing the workload on board and management in the process - especially if the laws were changed to make it easier to lodge advisory motions. AIRA chief executive Ian Matheson proposes scrapping the rule that allows a resolution to be placed on an agenda with the support of 100 shareholders - leaving in place the requirement for 5 per cent of issued capital. It's a measure, he says, that would acknowledge the amount of time it takes companies to deal with the proposals. "One hundred shareholders these days is such a minuscule number for most companies," Matheson says. Some of the climate resolutions had been constructive and led to "enhanced disclosure" by companies, Matheson says. But on the ACCR's human rights-focused resolution at Oil Search, he says that "what they were asserting was complete rubbish", pointing to the work the company had done for the PNG community. O'Brien strongly rejects Matheson's criticism of the ACCR's Oil Search resolution, saying they showed a lack of understanding and that the proposal had highlighted "serious risks" to the company. (Oil Search has said its current approach "adequately addresses" potential human rights risks). "It is not a straightforward task to recruit 100 individual shareholders in any company," O'Brien adds. "The process usually takes several months, and long conversations with many groups, including large Australian investors, about the need for the resolution, the research basis for it, and the likelihood that it will improve a companys performance against key risk indicators." Full disclosure The Proxy Insight research is based on disclosures from investors around the world. But it only shows part of the picture, because the extent to which investors are transparent about how they vote, and when they choose to release this information, varies wildly. Members of Australia's Financial Services Council - such as AMP and BTIM - are required to disclose their voting records on their websites within three months of the end of their financial year, which is why there is more information on the Oil Search and Santos votes, whose AGMs were held in the second half of 2016-17, than those whose AGMs were in November. Others disclose more frequently, and some don't disclose much at all. Government-owned institutions the Future Fund and the Victorian Funds Management Corporation, for example, just publish an aggregate of their voting decisions and their proxy voting policies, with the Future Fund saying it "engages privately" with companies on governance matters. O'Brien, among others, points to a "disconnect" between institutions calling for increased disclosure on some issues, while practicing less than full transparency on their own governance matters. Orocobre remains bullish about the long-term demand for lithium, a key ingredient in electric batteries used in the fast-growing electric vehicle segment. Lithium producer Orocobre predicts it will be paid about 25 per cent more for lithium in the June half than in the December half as the demand for electric vehicles accelerates. The company, whose Olaroz facility in Argentina is considered one of the lowest cost producers of lithium carbonate in the world, also reported a significant jump on the prices it received per tonne in the December half, revealing an average price of $US11,145 per tonne, up 24.3 per cent on the first half of fiscal 2017. The company, which recently signed a deal with the Toyota groups trading arm Toyota Tsusho Corporation, hopes to cash in on the global rise of electric vehicles. Under a deal announced in January, Toyota Tsusho will take a 15 per cent stake in the Orocobre business. The agreement will help Orocobre pursue plans to more than double the production capacity of Olaroz, to more than 42,000 tonnes per year. Orocobres managing director, Richard Seville, said Orocobre was expecting to receive prices about 25 per cent higher this half than in the December half. Theres a shortage of supply at the moment and security of supply is more important than price. And weve actually seen strong price rises over these last two to three years. So this is a continuation of that, he said. Investors looking office space, without the high level of rent in the Sydney central business district are heading over the Harbour Bridge to North Sydney. The area has been dominated by residential conversions in recent years, which has led to a lack of supply of office space. But as demand rises from people to work and live in the same suburb, demand is again rising for offices. Latest data from Savills Australias North Shore report, shows this increase in demand has helped to drive vacancy rates down and rents up, with A Grade and B Grade net effective rents increasing by 18 per cent and 25 per cent respectively over 2017. 75 Miller Street, North Sydney sold for $52 million to an investor from Hong Kong Credit:Mark Merton According to Shrabastee Mallik, senior analyst capital strategy at Savills Australia, incentives in North Sydneys office market have fallen to historically low levels across both Prime and Secondary grade buildings. Net A Grade incentives fell 500 basis points in 2017 to 25 per cent, while net B Grade fell a 1000 basis points to 20 per cent. Former MasterChef contestant Tom Rutledge from HelloFresh loves that his business has a food focus. When Tom Rutledge finished his stint on the third season of MasterChef, he came out with one clear realisation. It occurred to me Id always been more interested in the creative aspects of cooking, and the joy people get from coming together around a table, says the founder and CEO of HelloFresh Australia. Rutledge was frustrated that when he cooked it involved trekking to all corners of town to get all the best bits. He thought there must be a better solution. Couldnt someone do that for him and put them all in a box, so people could simply do the fun bits? He could simply give up, perhaps with some grand gesture of sacrifice on the altar of some pretended principle. He could sit helplessly waiting to be knocked off, whether by a party rival or the electorate. Or he could simply plod along within the existing harness, doing the best he can with what he has and what he can get away with, hoping that time, circumstance and perhaps the misfortunes of his enemies (whether before or behind him) will one day allow him to do more. Perhaps even O frabjous day! to be himself, if he can remember what that was. And perhaps even with some respect, whether for his humility in his trials, his patience and steadiness under the whip, and his realism and pragmatism. It might even have been character-forming, given that many of his supporters once feared he might be too headstrong, too given to insisting on his way or the highway, too little inclined to listen and to attend. The Liberals and the Nationals have generally worked together comfortably enough, even if the alliance has prospered only when they have had clear goals beyond individual and group survival. It's not a marriage, and the players (apart from Malcolm Fraser, Peter Nixon and Sinclair 40 years ago) have not even been political bedmates or personal friends. But the parties' partnership has usually been profitable to both. They can squabble, particularly about the distribution of the goodies and patronage that come from being in power, but each must ultimately compromise. A full-blown split causes loss of office, which is, in political terms, death. The Nationals (and their predecessor, the Country Party) have, historically, focused more crudely on the plunder of government than on the principles by which public goods are rationed out. The Liberals have long had a tendency to look away in embarrassment at the greed and the corruption of spirit displayed when Nationals exercise power. Yet the Nationals have generally seemed steadier, more disciplined, more socially conservative and less likely to fragment than the ever-fractious Liberals. Turnbull must pretend to enjoy the shit sandwich he is eating; indeed, to have chosen it of his own accord. The Nationals' addiction to trinkets and a transactional relationship with electors once had it described as a prostitute. In 1974, Billy Snedden showed a characteristic lack of feel, as he watched parties flirting with the Democratic Labour Party, when he asked: "Who's churching the old whore now?" It swiftly proved that the "old whore" of the metaphor was the then Country Party, not the DLP. Last week, I remarked that Joyce should be made to resign not for his private indiscretions but for his performance as a member, minister and party leader. I found this quoted by a conservative commentator, who described it as an urban view. This cut me to the quick, since I think of myself as a rural lad at heart, and of sound National, or Country Party, stock. An ancestor attended one of the party's founding meetings about 100 years ago and remained loyal to his death, even if he occasionally bewailed its having become (in NSW) a party for rural toffs of the Protestant persuasion, rather than the alliance of townsfolk, rural workers and cockies he had romantically expected. Still, as he once remarked, the Prots in those sectarian days would allow the Catholics a right of veto over who misrepresented them in Parliament. About 80 years ago, for example the (Protestant) manager of a nearby rural property ran off with the station owner's wife. He married her, and they settled several hundred kilometres away, forgotten by all but a few locals. About 30 years, an intervening war and the end of the wool boom later, the man developed aspirations to be a Country Party candidate. We Catholics had large families, and my ancestor put out a three-line whip and used every tie of blood to have them oppose the attempt in Country Party branches. The candidate failed to win preselection. I was young and naive at the time, and very bemused. Surely a man was not unfitted for public office simply because he was divorced, I asked? Surely, pious Catholics (as my grandfather assuredly was) would follow Jesus' advice not to judge? My ancestor insisted he was not visiting his morals on the poor chap. Heaven forbid, he said (if unconvincingly to me). But he feared that, if others found out about the man's "murky" past, they might judge him adversely; not be as understanding as they themselves would be. Their desire was to see a Country Party man (in those days it was always a man) elected; the best way of ensuring this would be to make sure that he wasn't the sort of candidate of whose character some voters would have doubts. That's been Joyce's problem, right from the start. And not only in his own electorate, but in typical National constituencies. We understand, of course, because we are broad-minded and tolerant and know that everyone is human. But will everyone else? Joyce had some success at attracting votes, and Queenslanders in particular seem to like his incoherence, incapacity to finish sentences and pretence that he is just one of the boys down at the pub. And they have loved the exuberance with which he threw other people's money at pet ideas and local projects. Some owed him, personally and professionally, and that involved some appreciation of his virtues as well as his faults. Actually, the evidence (for example, during the same-sex marriage referendum) suggests that rural electorates are only slightly more socially conservative than most urban ones. We may be all sinners, in spite of our high aspirations, but Joyce was deeply vulnerable to hypocrisy charges, because he had foisted his moral views on others. That's not a charge one could make against, say, Warren Truss, John Anderson, Charles Blunt, Sinclair, Doug Anthony or even Jack McEwen, even if most of them were a little more straight-laced than average. Any look back at the party's history suggests that the idea of tight and instinctive loyalty to leaders is largely invention. The party, first, is very state-based, and its fundamental character differs in each area. (The first Catholic National from NSW, incidentally, was Tim Fischer in 1971 into state parliament and he sneaked in, as it were, by representing a constituency close to Victoria, where Catholics in the Nationals were not uncommon.) Most Victorian Nationals have no great affinity with their siblings in NSW or Queensland, or, for that matter, tradition of capacity to form partnerships with Liberals. The Queensland party, at state and federal level, is deeply divided (the more so after a fusion of sorts with the Liberals). No one does backstabbing and disloyalty like the Country Liberal Party in the Northern Territory. The West Australians, when they can get candidates up, are almost from another planet, and are humoured, at best, if only because their presence suggests the National Party is actually national. In South Australia and Tasmania, all National Party seedlings have died. It will not be precedent or mere unthinking loyalty that settles the Nationals leadership. It should be a cool calculation of personal self-interest, party interests and Coalition interests. That may, of course, involve some assessment of the damage Joyce could cause if he throws a tantrum at the result. The only Joyce I'm talking about today is Alan Joyce, said Scott Morrison, almost pleading for oxygen on Friday morning. Flanked by the Qantas boss as well as acting Prime Minister Mathias Cormann, and Small Business Minister Craig Laundy, Morrison had neatly captured the government's dilemma - caught between Barnaby Joyce's intransigence and the clear political case for his removal - between the internal politeness required of the Coalition arrangement, and the harsher external politics of public opinion. The ministers were in a Qantas hangar to push their case for big business tax cuts, but instead faced a fusillade of questions about "Barnaby's" troubles, which had inconveniently multiplied overnight to include an as-yet untested allegation of sexual harassment lodged with the WA Nationals. Hat's all folks: Barnaby Joyce has gone bush. Such was the power of the Joyce distraction that it travelled too, swamping Malcolm Turnbull's message in Washington DC even as he insisted he would not elaborate on his pre-departure comments. In this months Inside the Story, investigations editor Michael Bachelard shares exclusive behind-the-scenes insights on how his recent expose into nursing homes came about. Sometimes, investigative reporting is a slow burn. But my recent series on nursing homes was slower than most. In fact, for long periods, the fire was in danger of going out entirely. I was first approached to write about a nursing home in 2010 by a Catholic priest who was being kicked out of his job at an Italian facility in Rosanna, Melbourne. The home was run by a former Labor aged care minister, Peter Staples. And it had its share of problems - resident complaints, an unfair dismissal case, people on stress leave, odd financial dealings. Auditor-General Maxine Cooper: The land swap lacks probity and transprency. Credit:Stuart Walmsley Former director ... The reality was that the Tradies were close allies of the government and the Labor Party... the head of the Tradies, was very confident that he had the government on side. Audit office ... Which minister was in at that particular stage? Dean Hall, who is stepping down as CFMEU boss to work for the union's Tradies club. Credit:Rohan Thomson Former director I think it was the Minister for Economic Development, and and he was Treasurer. And the and Minister for Planning. There's no document to find which says there's political influence. But the I think it was common knowledge that the Tradies, the union running the Tradies, were allies of the government and that they hoped they'd win. The official told the auditor that while he was not aware of direct government pressure to make the deal with the Tradies, it was "a belief" based on "what is understood to be the political climate": "The government had allies and it had enemies. Woolworths were certainly no friend of the government." In publishing this exchange in her report, the auditor notes that she uncovered no evidence of government interference and Chief Minister Andrew Barr the treasurer and economic development minister referred to in the exchange - denied signalling any preference for the Tradies to win the tender. The auditor uses titles rather than names, so the identity of the "former director, sustainable land strategy" quoted in this extraordinary piece of evidence is not clear. But the import of the words can hardly escape notice. This is a senior official negotiating a deal to sell prime government land telling the auditor that he was working on the basis that the government - Barr wanted the CFMEU-run Tradies to win. The government had allies and it had enemies, the bureaucrat tells us. The former director's characterisation of the Labor government as a coterie with friends and enemies, prepared to do deals that favoured its friends and set up what amounted to a sham request for tender "they only knocked back the direct sale because of the optics of it" is bewildering and shocking. If Gentleman believes he can dismiss this as a report that "puts the matter to bed", he needs a remedial course in probity and process. To recap, the Tradies originally put a bid to government to buy the carpark outside their club in Dickson directly in 2010. That was knocked back by the Gallagher cabinet in 2011, which opted instead to go out to a competitive tender. The tenders went out late in 2012, with bids from Woolworths and the Tradies (the auditor questions the last-minute decision not to advertise nationally). The Tradies bid was ranked higher by a process the auditor found went largely without justification, and the bureaucrats went into direct negotiations with the club. Things went still more awry. The auditor found that through those protracted negotiations, the government ended up arguably right back where it began with a sale deal and land swap that looked very much like the original proposal put by the Tradies before the competitive tender. And very little like the criteria set out in the request for tender to which Woolworths had responded. The government made a long list of concessions to the Tradies including deleting time constraints on getting the work done, cutting the deposit to 5 per cent, removing pedestrian access, cutting the needs for a hotel, and eliminating restrictions on what was allowed on the ground floor. The government solicitor warned in September and October 2014 that the deal differed so substantially from the tender that it would need to go back to the government for approval. Nevertheless, the sale went ahead, signed off in mid-December, settling within a few days, with the government giving the Tradies $3.9 million for their block off Antill Street where the CFMEU remains headquartered. In return the Tradies will, at a date yet to be determined, pay the government, $3.2 million (plus GST) for the Dickson carpark. The former director general of economic development is David Dawes, who left a year ago in the wake of a damning audit report on the Land Development Agency's land purchases at Glebe Park and the lakeside. In the CFMEU case, he told the auditor he had been unaware that the government solicitor had such grave concerns. The question of the legality of the deal is just one of the auditor's damning findings. She also calculates that the taxpayer could be out of pocket between $2.4 million and $2.65 million, money the government has handed unnecessarily to the Tradies. The Tradies, recall, are run by the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union, the organisation described by former chief minister Jon Stanhope as "the most powerful and influential organ of the party". The power of the union was on display when deputy chief minister Simon Corbell was effectively ousted at the 2016 election, withdrawing after losing the union's support in preselection (CFMEU boss Dean Hall, who departed the role last week, rejects this version of events). Instead, the left supported Bec Cody, with Dean Hall on her campaign team. Who would blame Malcolm Turnbull if he had felt relieved as the wheels of his jet rose from the tarmac en route for Washington? The prospect of meeting even the mercurial Donald Trump would have seemed far preferable far easier to manage than another weekend amid the unseemly brawling of his colleagues and Coalition partners. As things have turned out, what started as a storm in Barnaby Joyce's teacup has grown into a whirlwind powerful enough to blow him out of office, and to create a little turbulence even as far away as Washington. Mr Joyce has now stepped down in the interests, he says, of "the people in the weatherboard 'n' iron". The interests of those regional Australian voters were being ignored because his private affairs had become a distraction. Leaks and leakers, according to Mr Joyce, were to blame. New allegations of sexual harassment, made by a member of the West Australian party, suddenly added more pressure although they have not been tested and it has been reported that the complainant did not even want them made public. Mr Joyce has denied the allegations. What started as a storm in Barnaby Joyce's teacup has grown into a whirlwind powerful enough to blow him out of office. Credit:AAP Certainly his private life had made trouble for the National Party, whose more moralist MPs, like the member for Mallee, Andrew Broad, had consulted their branches and were told he should go. His resignation therefore will probably be good for his party. In removing a large distraction which has been obscuring for more than a fortnight any effort the government has made to get on with its program, it will be good for the government as well. Whether it will be good for the nation, and specifically for its political culture, is another matter. With Mr Joyce's resignation, Mr Turnbull has achieved what his forceful but ill-thought-out intervention in the affair last week aimed to do. But the cost has been high. His so-called bonking ban makes investigating ministers' private lives now a matter of legitimate public interest. As an aside, it will be interesting to see how Gladys Berejiklian manages the revelation that one of her ministers has been propositioning a fellow MP. Let us hope she is more adroit than the Prime Minister. John Fitzgerald, Crows Nest Teachers: stand up to be shot down What a great idea - train teachers and have them carry concealed weapons! ("'I hear you": Trump talks of arming teachers", February 23). So first thing a gunman does is take out teachers! I'm sure I wouldn't be volunteering. Kris McKeon, Cowra The photograph said it all ... there was Donald Trump, gesticulating as he harangued a group of teachers, parents and students about how arming teachers was a great idea. Look at their faces - to say they were not impressed would be an understatement. Perhaps they were thinking that more guns in the classroom might mean more accidental deaths. Whatever, this absurd idea is about what we would expect from this (pardon me, Mr Keating) nincompoop. Peter Paige, Woolwich If the social media impact on the presidential election can be repeated by students protesting against gun laws, major reform will follow, provided the students maintain the rage. John Donnellan, Berala Restricting access has worked in Australia and would work in America. It appears that criminals do not commit mass shootings but the mentally deranged. People could still own semi-automatic rifles but would need to justify their use and ownership e.g. hunting. I am a gun owner and am opposed to any further restriction in Australia but the problem in the US with easy access to semi-automatic rifles needs to be addressed. Brendan Manning, Frenchs Forest A few years ago on a study tour in Israel we stopped for fuel beside a bus full of children on a school excursion. The young teacher carried a holstered pistol visible beneath her sweater. She stated that firearm training was a component of teacher education and that it was compulsory to be armed in this way when travelling with groups of children. David Grover, Chatswood Billy Graham: rapture and revulsion Billy Graham was by all accounts a good man; and yet he is almost a perfect harbinger of everything wrong with America today ("Billy Graham, Queen's adviser and pastor to presidents, dies", February 23). As Richard Nixon's close religious adviser, he regularly spruiked Nixon's goodness, and in a very real sense became an enabler for the political crimes of (until now) America's most notorious president. This paved the way for what was perhaps the most notable feature of the 2016 presidential election the manifest moral void at the heart of modern American evangelism. Bo Vilan, Potts Point The secret of Graham's success was that he stuck to the simple core of the Christian message. Unlike much of the modern church he did not swing to the political left or the hard-hearted bigotry of the religious right. He was humble, friendly, encouraging and caring. I met him in 1959 in Sydney one of his most successful "crusades". His legacy will last for a long time. Geoff Hinds, Merrylands I saw Graham in Brisbane in the '60s and came away thinking I had just witnessed Hitler's star pupil in stadium hysteria. Very creepy, and scary for a kid. I was an atheist from that day forward. Ken Manley, Stanmore Graham resolved early in his ministry that he would not be alone with any woman other than his wife. Perhaps that's the lesson most in Canberra need to heed. Donald Howard, Elderslie Graham's best education, to the world, which doesn't seem to be remembered, was that Jesus was brown skin and wasn't for whites only. Mukul Desai, Hunters Hill Hat fails to obscure the phew. So long, Barnaby To submit a letter to The Sydney Morning Herald, email letters@smh.com.au And still the Akubra remains, but what a day! ("Barnaby resigns", smh.com.au, February 23). Janice Creenaune, Austinmer So Mr Joyce will be departing to the backbench. This then would be a good time for one of the politicians who have continually spruiked Mr Joyce's retail salesmanship for regional Australia to detail his alleged achievements. Sadly, I can only recall his disastersdual citizenship, climate change denial while championing coal, the Murray/Darling basin crisis, support of Adani, moving the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority to his electorate and his hypocrisy over the Gardasil vaccine and the SSM debate. Rhonda Seymour, Castle Hill The Joyce affair has much in common with some other events which have bombarded the public in recent times. These include the date of Australia Day, the republic and, dare I say it, same-sex marriage. These topics receive enormous media coverage, are highly entertaining and carry on for week after week. However, they do not contribute to the good of the nation but rather are a distraction from the important issues that confront our leaders. I refer to things like the economy, wage growth, infrastructure and many others. Please, can we move on from these peripheral issues and deal with more relevant matters. Frank Payne, Killara One of the concerns with the Barnaby Joyce affair is that it is distracting the government from dealing with important issues facing the country. However, I am all in favour of anything that distracts politicians from tackling crucial problems, since, given the intellectual calibre of most of them, they are more likely to worsen things than make them better. Let us recall that Belgium went for 18 months without any government at all and suffered no ill-effects, so we can certainly bear a few weeks of governmental inattention without great concern. Patriotic citizens, perhaps, should be looking for an emerging "news" story to take up the slack, as interest in Joyce wanes and we face the potential problem of politicians actually wanting to govern. Bruce Hyland, Woy Woy Few of us recognise the Joyce affair for what it is: the regular cleansing ritual celebrated from time to time by our parliamentary community. As in days of old, the elected leader chooses a goat from the herds of the community. All members then heap on it their sins perpetrated since the last ritual. Overladen, the goat is driven to the outer darkness. The ritual is called scapegoating. That goat today is Barnaby. After the ceremony the remaining self-righteous community members experience the same feeling of redemption as practising Catholics of old after confession. As with other penitents it takes but a moment to return to old habits obfuscation, selective dishonesty, deeply entrenched self-interest, inhumanity. But the ritual does little to persuade politicians to work for the future of Australian people. Frank Burrows, North Sydney With Abbott and Joyce on the backbench, it seems Canberra will have its own feral pest problem to address. Wayne Duncombe, Glebe "The band is back together"? Geez, that was a short tour. Bill Young, Greenwich Barnacamp baby you are totally worth it. Please tell your parents to focus on your arrival and to get out of our lives and to get into your life. All the best to you, Barnacamp baby. Josine Reid, Mona Vale Heartfelt hypocrisy Yesterday morning I watched with dismay as Malcolm Turnbull laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington Cemetery. Dismay because, at this moving ceremony, the Prime Minister placed his right arm across his chest and put his hand over his heart. When did this Americanism become part of Australian culture? My father, a decorated WWII POW, would have been turning in his grave along with many of his mates. Ian Taylor, Elizabeth Bay River realities Ross Gittins writes that city-dwellers earn their living in ways that don't damage the environment ("Self-interest blocking water fix", February 21). Surely these same people consume food and fibre, much of it grown on land cleared of native vegetation and grown with the assistance of irrigation. Therefore, they impact on the ecosystem just as surely as those who grow their food and fibre. This simplistic approach is extended to discussions of the "mighty Darling River", apparently destroyed by irrigation. However, the first European to reach the Darling River was Charles Sturt on February 2, 1829. He found the river to be nothing more than some small ponds and noted in his journal that "I found it extremely salt, being apparently a mixture of sea and fresh water". Who was irrigating in 1829? The Murray-Darling Basin Plan is an attempt to balance the environmental, social and economic requirements for water use and is based on the best available science and evidence. It should be given a chance to succeed, free from the sniping of Ross Gittins and opportunistic political voting by the Greens and Labor in the Senate. Neil Fettell, Condobolin With parts of the Darling looking more like fire trails I question why the press is not following up with investigations into the ongoing water theft in our water systems? Why are governments and the controllers of our various media organisations looking the other way? Do the large irrigators, growing completely inappropriate crops for Australia like rice and cotton, have that much sway? Nothing to see here, move on. Graham Hansen, Denistone Stand up, Qantas Qantas has just made record profits. Many early Qantas pilots were WWII RAAF Bomber Command pilots who set the high standards that Qantas has built its reputation on. Qantas should fly these WWII RAAF Bomber Command pilots to England, first class, for the opening of the International Bomber Command Centre in Lincoln (Letters, February 22). Come on Qantas, come on. Bob Ashby, Cronulla Music scene still rocking Bede Kennedy infers the Sydney live music scene is dead and buried ("Now it's musicians who need live aid", February 22).I have seen five acts already in 2018. I've got Underground Lovers tickets and am catching Lowride, both in March. Sydney live music dead? Hardly. John Payne, Dulwich Hill Kimberley under threat The proliferation of cruise ships isn't just threatening Venice (Letters, February 22). They are affecting the Kimberley coast. There at least 12 vessels now cruising one of Australia's most fragile, and largely unspoilt, remote areas, putting around 1700 boots on the ground several times a season. Most operators stop in the same locations. It's important that Kimberley cruising is controlled before his largely pristine coast and near hinterland is damaged beyond repair. Allen Clark, Mount Kembla Lifted by the damning So Clive Hamilton, on the book launch trail, offers an extract on the problem of Chinese money in the Labor Party and is immediately set upon by Paul Keating and Bob Carr. I'm thinking Clive's editor is busy adding their comments to the back cover? Phil Bradshaw, Naremburn Barely watchable Peter Beattie declares that rugby league must expand or die ("Bears back in hunt for NRL return" February 23). I would have thought the first priority would be to make it watchable. Max McKinnon, Forresters Beach Postscript "Turnbull puts in rules to stop relationships that will encourage the media to uncover more of them, Joyce goes public in order to keep his private life private, Trump wants to give more guns to more people to stop people being shot," observed Robert McHugh, of Medowie. "What planet did these people come from?" It was that kind of week. Most of the correspondents who broached the Barnaby Joyce matter would have hailed his resignation announcement on Friday afternoon, but there was a feeling among some that a regrettable "pile-on" had taken place. Barbara Bedford, 91, of Wauchope, contrasted the treatment of Joyce with that of Bob Hawke in the ABC documentary. "What a disgrace our media is, to slander a person who did a first-class job as a Nationals leader." "I wonder if Joyce's great mistake was to leave his family for a woman," posed Ian Porter, of North Wahroonga. "If he'd left them for a man, the howls of indignation may well have been drowned out by those applauding his 'courage', 'integrity' and 'self-fulfilment'. Or, perhaps, a very awkward silence." "What exactly is a retail politician?" asked Don Squires, of Lake Cathie. "How is this MP different from a 'wholesale' politician? Is there some test that I can apply to discover whether my local representative is wholesale or retail? Which category is likely to yield the best margin to me as a constituent?" All that and for nothing, apart from all the destruction to the Nationals, to the Coalition, to the Prime Minister, and of course, to everyone close to Barnaby Joyce, one of them yet unborn. The Barnaby saga came to an end for only one real reason. His Nationals colleagues were deserting him. He and his people - those who remained - counted numbers on Friday. Barnaby Joyce had made it clear across the phone lines from his Tamworth bunker. He was going to front a media conference at 2pm and declare his future. Washington: Donald Trumps top military commander is planning to ramp up the number of US Marines at a key base in Australia after talks with Malcolm Turnbull to prepare a new show of force in the Pacific. The US will expand its operations in Darwin on a faster timetable than previously planned, sending a new signal of its military commitment to the region amid growing concerns about the rise of China. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Marine Corps general Joe Dunford, discussed the plans with Mr Turnbull in long session at the Pentagon on Friday during the Prime Ministers visit to the US capital. US Marines embark an aircraft at RAAF Base Darwin for their return home. The US deployment has been highly sensitive since Julia Gillard agreed to it as prime minister in 2011, making it a key element of Barack Obamas pivot to Asia during his presidency. One of the worlds peak refugee groups is calling on Malcolm Turnbull and Donald Trump to extend their agreement to resettle refugees in the United States while warning of the unconscionable treatment of those who may be left behind. As Mr Turnbull prepares to meet the US president in the White House, refugee advocates are lobbying for a bigger intake by the Trump administration to resettle people from Manus Island and Nauru. The president of Refugees International, Eric Schwartz, warned that Australia could lead a race to the bottom on the treatment of refugees unless it found a new solution for those left on Manus and Nauru after the US completes its intake. Advocates are calling for Donald Trump and Malcolm Turnbull to resolve the cases of hundreds of refugees on Manus Island and Nauru. Credit:Mick Tsikas We dont want Australia to be leading the race to the bottom on refugee protection, he told this newspaper. Mr Trump said Australia and the US were very different countries with very different sets of problems". But I think were well on the way toward solving that terrible problem that happens far too often in the United States," he said. Mr Trump lent more weight to the idea of giving teachers the right to carry weapons, saying the gun free zones in American schools only attracted those who wanted to launch attacks. Youre not going to solve it with gun-free spaces, he said of the problem. Malcolm Turnbull spoke of "one hundred years of mateship" ahead of a meeting with Donald Trump. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen Mr Trump talked of stronger background checks on gun buyers, a ban on bump stocks that increase firing rates as well as the right for staff members to carry guns in schools. He cited the Valentine's Day shootings in Florida, where an armed guard avoided going in to protect students during the crucial opening minutes of the attack, to argue that teachers should have weapons because they cared more about the students. The joint press conference came after Mr Trump welcomed Malcolm Turnbull and his wife Lucy to the White House and said he wants to come to Australia to cement the countrys terrific relationship. President Donald Trump walked through the White House grounds with Malcolm Turnbull after an honour guard welcome. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen We will be there, he said when asked if he would like to visit Australia. Mr Trump gave Mr Turnbull a ceremonial welcome to the White House with an honour guard for the Prime Minister and his wife, Lucy. They then walked along a colonnade with the first lady, Melania. The two leaders then spoke in the Oval Office before having a working lunch with top advisers covering action on trade and military deals. Earlier, Mr Turnbull met with US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin backed tough new US sanctions against North Korea. Loading The Trump administration announced its biggest sanctions ever on Friday, aimed at punishing companies that do business with the rogue regime of Kim Jong-un. It came after North Korea refused to meet Vice President Mike Pence on the sidelines of the Winter Olympics in South Korea. In a press briefing at the White House, Mr Mnuchin said Mr Turnbull was very supportive of the new actions after they discussed the issue at their meeting ahead of the formal announcement. Australia already imposes sanctions on North Korea under the auspices of the United Nations but it may have to consider whether to join the latest US actions. Mr Mnuchin, who has known Mr Turnbull for years because they were both partners at Goldman Sachs, said he had "a very, very productive discussion" with Mr Turnbull. We had a very productive discussion on North Korea, hes very supportive and weve encouraged him to work with us on sanctions, Mr Mnuchin said. Loading As he sat with Mr Turnbull in the Oval Office, Mr Trump said: The relationship we have with Australia is a terrific relationship and probably stronger now than ever before." Were working on trade deals, were working on military and protection and all of the things that you would think we would be discussing today. We have a big meeting set up in a little while and we have a luncheon set up also and we have all of our representatives surrounding us and a lot of good things will come out of this visit. So Mr Prime Minister, we very much appreciate you being here. Greens candidate for Batman Alex Bhathal, flanked by leader Richard DiNatale and Melboune MP, Adam Bandt. Credit:Darrian Traynor The Australian Electoral Commission announced a confirmed field of 10 candidates on Friday. The landline phone poll of 693 voters was conducted by market research company Lonergan Research on Monday and Tuesday nights this week. It found the Liberal Partys choice not to field a candidate had given the Greens a 1 per cent lift, but less than it needed to get over the line. Although many consider the Greens to be the front-runners for this byelection, we believe the ALP hold the lead at this stage of the race, pollster Chris Lonergan said. This may be due to differences in the popularity of the Labor candidates, or it may be due to the focus on broader, national issues. The Greens campaign has centred on Adanis massive proposed coal mine in north Queensland. The party has exploited Labors ambivalence towards the project. The Greens say the project will damage the Great Barrier Reef and release billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide. Labor leaders have not opposed the project, although Mr Shorten said on Friday he did not believe it would proceed. The poll found Batman voters were much more likely to vote for a party that opposed the Adani mine: 76 per cent said they would be less likely to vote for a party that supported it, while 24 per cent said they would be more likely. There was also justifiable confusion about Labors position. Forty-four per cent said they believed Labor supported the proposed mine, 28 per cent believed they opposed it and 27 per cent didn't know. Mr Lonergan said it was important for Labors chances that it clarified its position on the proposed mine. If voters believe the ALP will oppose the Adani mine, the ALP has a very good chance of winning this seat, he said. If voters remain unsure as to where the ALP stands, I would expect the Greens to continue to press their advantage in what is clearly a very important issue to voters. Labor strategists in Victoria are not optimistic about holding on to Batman following the partys recent rout in Northcote, which sits entirely within Batman's electoral boundary. But they believe the seat is winnable if the Northcote result is replicated in the gentrified southern half of the seat, and there is no swing to the Greens north of Bell Street. Labor lost Northcote with an 11.6 per cent swing to the Greens from the 2014 state result, but still performed better there than it did in the 2016 federal election. Analysis for Inside Story by former Age economics editor Tim Colebatch shows 5.3 per cent of voters swung back to Labor at Novembers state byelection. On Friday it reheated its 2016 promise to extend tram route 11 north from Preston into Reservoir, which held firm as Labor heartland at the last federal election, but where the Greens have been doorknocking to garner support in recent days. The poll suggests the votes of those who dislike Labor and the Greens will be influential once again: 16 per cent said they would vote for another party, two-thirds of whom said they would preference Labor ahead of the Greens. South Australian senator Cory Bernardis Australian Conservatives party will run in a bid to claim to right-leaning vote and has preselected David Bailey, a former SAS soldier. The poll provided few insights into the voting intentions of younger people, as respondents skewed heavily towards people aged 35 and older. It also included significantly more women than men. Since 2010, Australia has had five prime ministers. If the polls are right - and because of compulsory voting in Australia, they are still usually bang on, Bill Shorten will become the sixth PM in this decade and replace Malcolm Turnbull some time during the next 15 months. Not since the war time years of the 1940s (six PMs) have so many people occupied the nation's top political post in one decade. But that statistic is less reassuring than it looks: Frank Forde (seven days as interim PM after Curtin died) and Arthur Fadden (41 days after Robert Menzies's unstable coalition fell apart) blow out the averages. Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott are among those to have been leader in the past decade. Credit:Stefan Postles The first decade after federation is a better comparison. It recorded the highest number of PMs (seven) in ten years but again, its not a good comparison: Alfred Deakin served three times in those first ten years, so only five people occupied the post (and then, too, political parties were still forming and re-forming rapidly). Which means that, if the leadership merry-go-round continues and Shorten takes the keys to the Lodge from Turnbull and becomes the fifth person to occupy the post this decade, Australians by one measure will have endured the most unstable period in Canberra politics since we became a nation. What began in a moment of national optimism has collapsed into an era of mediocrity. For ten years an increasingly combative politics - framed by partisan sections of the media, and an increasingly frenzied social media that digests (and I use the word loosely) new policy initiatives and spits out withering, one-sided analysis in four seconds flat - has shaped debate, much for the worse. The days when, for example, John Howard backed in the big, early economic reforms of the Hawke-Keating age, or when the Business Council of Australia and the Australian Council of Trade Unions could get around a table, look each other in the eye and agree on anything much seem a very long time ago. Former Prime Ministers Bob Hawke and John Howard. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen But the fish rots from the head. What we have witnessed has ultimately been the failure of Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard, Tony Abbott, and Malcolm Turnbull to both clearly articulate their vision for the national project and then - crucially - take people with them. The break point came in the last month of 2009 and first month of 2010 when Abbott, newly installed as opposition leader resolved to oppose Rudd's carbon pollution reduction scheme. The Greens, more pure than the driven snow, joined the Coalition in voting down the CPRS, for diametrically opposite reasons. To this day, they cannot concede that opposing the CPRS was a mistake. The result was a first term prime minister cut down, Australia's first female PM handed a minority parliament and no mandate for big reforms, and a green light for Abbott to wreck the joint - which he promptly did, riding a wave of populist opportunism all the way to the Lodge. But consider the alternative: if the Greens had voted for the CPRS, Rudd would have had a stay of execution - though so poorly did he treat his caucus, his early exit was inevitable - Gillard could have been installed in the Lodge without the millstone of having to resolve and legislate climate policy around her neck, and Australia would have had a price on carbon since 2009. Then Prime Minister Julia Gillard hugs and kisses foreign minister Kevin Rudd after the carbon tax legislation was passed in the House of Representatives. Credit:Reuters Gillard - to her credit - launched big reforms in climate policy and the National Disability Insurance Scheme; but she also gave in too much to an ever-shrinking union movement, compromised the elegant simplicity of needs-based school funding in the Gonski plan with side deals, and booby-trapped the budget with unfunded big spending promises. To this day, climate policy bedevils Australian politics (as Turnbull and Josh Frydenberg have discovered); Abbott successfully repealed the carbon tax - a policy he had taken to the people - but was himself cut down for breaking a slew of pre-election promises, which further eroded voters' trust in Canberra. Tony Abbott's decision to award Prince Philip a Knighthood proved unpopular. Credit:Sam Bennett Japes such as the knighting of Prince Phillip aside, Abbott failed to prepare the ground for the swinging cuts enumerated in the 2014 budget and paid the ultimate price. Which brings us to Malcolm Turnbull, who came to power - like Rudd - with sky high popularity and voters hoping the circus would end. Turnbull, like Rudd, squibbed it; fearful of doing anything that could dent those early approval ratings, he blinked and dumped a proposal to raise the GST, backing up the decision with selectively released Treasury modelling to back up the decision. His reward was a one-seat majority, a diminished mandate and an increasingly assertive right wing of his party that has damaged his authority. That the Coalition would have lost seats at the 2016 poll by promising to raise the GST is without question, but the result could not have been much worse than a one-seat majority (though Gillard might disagree) and may actually have been better - if you believe voters reward courage. Indeed, after a decade of deficits and being told the budget is broken, voters may have rewarded Turnbull for bravery. Bill Shorten with his deputy Tanya Plibersek. Credit:AAP Which brings us to Shorten. The current Labor leader gets a pass mark, at best, after five years in the job. Shorten has largely borrowed from the Abbott play book of oppositional politics; his hypocrisy on the company tax cuts he once supported is breath taking; his refusal to support an across-the-board rise in the Medicare levy to pay for the NDIS is base politics at its worst. He gets a tick, though, for backing his treasury spokesman, Chris Bowen, and backing changes to curb tax breaks for negative gearing and capital gains tax which most major, non-partisan economists have advocated as a salve to increasingly unaffordable house prices. Indeed Bowen - a man who knows company tax cuts can deliver economic growth and wages dividends - could prove to be the hope of the side for a Shorten Labor government. Chris Bowen at his home in Smithfield. Credit:James Brickwood No less a person than Martin Parkinson, then the head of the Treasury and now head of Turnbull's Prime Minister and Cabinet - once told your correspondent Bowen had the potential to be a truly great Treasurer, in the style of Keating and Costello. And if Shorten stumbles, make no mistake: Anthony Albanese, a man who oozes authenticity - that key characteristic the Opposition Leader lacks, and who already enjoys deep support in the caucus - will be ready to pick up the baton. On the Coalition side, Peter Dutton and Scott Morrison are the men most likely to lead the Liberal Party, though the accomplished Julie Bishop cannot and should not be discounted if Turnbull stumbles fatally. The whip-smart Frydenberg - who Liberal MPs jokingly describe as the best press secretary in the government - should also not be discounted as a clean skin future leader. But here's the rub. Switching leaders - Barnaby Joyce was the latest victim on Friday afternoon - or changing governments will not, necessarily, "fix" the stalled reform project in federal politics. After more than two decades of uninterrupted growth, Australians have it good. Loading But to ensure that continues, the era of disposable leaders and "I'm for it, until I'm against it" politics must end. In one of his final columns for The Age, the late, much-loved Michael Gordon lamented the rise of "blah-blah politics" and predicted "Things, I suspect, will get worse before they get better". It's hard to avoid the conclusion that Micky was right. Illustration: Dionne Gain Credit: Florida teen Emma Gonzales wore a buzz-cut and a Beatles t-shirt to make her clarion call to fix American politics. Youre either funding the killers or youre standing with the children, she said, calling BS on how the blood money of vested interests destroys lives. Closer to home, Jacinda Ardern is a similar clarion voice for the resistance. Vested interests are destroying our cities and our country from the inside. Time to call BS. Ardern had 60 seconds to rattle off her governments first hundred days achievements. Okay here we go, she began, with her signature frankness and toothy ear-to-ear grin. We started KiwiBuild, we banned the sale of state houses, we introduced the Healthy Homes Bill, the winter energy payment, we extended paid parental leave, we banned microbeads, set up the Pike River Agency, started the work on the climate change commission, increased the minimum wage, committed to equal pay, we introduced child poverty legislation Thats less than half, but you get the picture. I felt the stab of envy. How is this even fair? The Kiwis get Ardern. Canada gets Trudeau. Somehow they get to elect actual human beings who fight for real things. We get Mr Hollow and Mr Beetroot, a sham and a vegetable. I know, I know. Leader-envy is unbecoming and futile. But it is grotesquely unjust. Abstract paintings with huge stylistic variations. Our take In the German-speaking world, Hubert Scheibl is a celebrated painter, recently honoured with a solo show at Vienna's Belvedere Museum. He's now having his first exhibition here. Those who've enjoyed Katharina Grosse's installation at Carriageworks in Sydney, or Gerhard Richter's recent show at Brisbane's Gallery of Modern Art, should find much to like. He explores all the aspects of abstract art that connect with the senses and emotions: varying the texture of his surfaces, creating a sense of imaginary space within the picture, using colour to suggest gradations of light. Some paintings are densely layered, others simple. They can be dark and melancholy, or luminous. His background. Scheibl graduated from the Akademie der Bildenden Kunste in Vienna in 1981, as a wave of neo-expressionism was sweeping across Europe. His abstract paintings showed that one could be just as expressive without all those garish, clumsy figures. Michael and Peter Spierig, 41, grew up in Brisbane, where they started making short films featuring zombies and blown-up teddy bears. Since then the identical twins have hit the Hollywood big time. MICHAEL: We were born in Germany and moved to Australia when we were four. Dad worked in shipping, which meant we moved around a lot. We spent time in Canberra, even went to high school in the United States for a couple of years and are now based in Los Angeles, but Brisbane is home. That's where we spent the most formative years growing up. Directors Michael and Peter Spierig at the Griffith Film School in Brisbane. Credit:Paul Harris Peter and I fell in love with computer games really early on. We used to play on Atari together I distinctly remember Pong. There was a lot of time spent in video-game arcades or at the local roller-skating rink. We also became fascinated early on with movie-making. Our first films together were pretty basic, backyard affairs. We'd blow up a teddy bear and film it using stop-animation. Peter was more the filmmaker, and I tended to be the one who was in charge of props and operating the puppets. Our parents never restricted the movies we could and couldn't watch. By the time we were 10 or 11 we had already seen The Exorcist, The Shining and Jaws. One of the first movies I remember seeing was Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. I vividly recall that scene where the guy gets his heart pulled out, and thinking that was the greatest thing ever. Yellowknife is not a foodie destination. It doesn't have chic hotels with rooftop bars serving craft beers. There is no vibrant hipster scene dominating gentrified industrial neighbourhoods haunted by the ghosts of a displaced working class. That said, it wears its bounteous ethnic diversity like a favourite jumper, and is the friendliest city I know. The capital of Northwest Territories, Yellowknife lies 400 kilometres south of the Arctic Circle beside Canada's deepest lake, Great Slave. It supports about 20,000 people in a territory of just over double that, with Indigenous peoples the Dene, Inuvialit and Metis constituting a quarter of the city's population and half of the Territories'. The aurora borealis, or northern lights, is a common sight in Yellowknife, especially in winter. Credit:? copyright 2011 Sharleen Chao Flying in, the lake-riddled landscape could be the age-worn hide of a lone wolf or rogue bear. Miners rushed to the area from the 1930s and, though gold has given way to diamonds, individuals continue to prospect for flakes and nuggets and "The Knife" still fancies itself a place of mercenaries, missionaries and misfits. I visit Yellowknife in late June, when daytime temperatures are in the mid-20s and night lasts only four hours. A free bus takes me to Folk on the Rocks festival for a sunny evening that includes throat singing, a Montreal blueswoman and some food-truck cuisine. Christian Dior dress, $10,500, and boots, $2390. Credit:Bec Parsons She grew up in the Perth inner-city suburb of Mount Lawley, the youngest of four daughters to Greek parents. Her Cypriot-born father, Costas, worked as a teacher and translator, while her mum, Athena, staffed the canteen at a Greek language school. The Demetriades are a close-knit family: Andrea gets on well with her sisters (who call her the favourite), describes her dad as "a big softie" and regularly refers to her mother in conversation. But she says the girls were brought up to be tough. Sir The Label Emelie shirt, $220. Ellery Milky Way skirt, $750. Credit:Bec Parsons "You'd get 99 per cent for something and Dad would say, 'But where's the one per cent?' And you'd go, 'Oh God!' " Andrea groans with mock exasperation. "But they're very warm. I had a beautiful upbringing. I can't complain about anything." Dance was Andrea's original passion she still carries her delicate frame with a dancer's poise and she attended classes four days a week, learning ballet, jazz and tap. Even though she won the drama prize and scored full marks in the subject at Chisholm Catholic College, it didn't occur to her to pursue acting. Instead she auditioned successfully for the dance stream at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, aged 17. She took an acting unit, and only then realised where her true abilities lay. "I liked that you could tell stories through using your voice as opposed to dancing," she says, "and I felt I was probably never good enough to be the best at that." She switched to a communications degree at Curtin University and joined student productions. To her surprise, she was accepted into NIDA at 19 and moved to Sydney. Although she was initially overwhelmed by its big-city pace, she adapted quickly. "I love Sydney," she enthuses. "It's gorgeous, it's sparkly, it's a real magical place expensive, but magical." Andrea's proper start in the industry came when John Bell cast her in Bell Shakespeare productions of Shakespeare's Pericles and Twelfth Night. Her compelling role in Crownies ensured widespread recognition of her talent and she has been a fixture of the Australian acting scene since, starring both on television and on stage in plays such as Pygmalion and Antigone. But she still struggles with self-belief. "You know, I probably haven't had the best confidence," she says slowly. "I'm constantly judging myself. I'm very lucky that I've had directors like John Bell and Peter Andrikidis who have believed in me. They empowered me and armoured me to go, 'No, you can tell this story.' " It's clear that nobody is harder on Andrea than herself. Although she's wonderfully engaging, and comfortably jokes around with the crew during her fashion shoot for Sunday Life, she's reluctant to look at the pictures being taken and confesses that she doesn't like watching her performances on screen, either. There isn't a trace of diva about her; she is solicitous about everyone's well-being, very tactile and rare for a performer is as interested in hearing other people's stories as she is talking about herself. "I've always had to work a bit harder," she insists. "I don't know if I've ever been naturally good at anything." Andrea is resolute that professionalism and hard work are required to be a successful actor. "You've got to give it your all because this industry is so cutthroat," she says bluntly. "It doesn't have to be about talent. It's about perseverance and luck. You've got to be a good person to work with. You have to be professional, you have to rock up on time, you have to have your lines learnt." She says her strong work ethic stems from her migrant heritage. Andrea was reared on her maternal Greek grandmother's stories of the sacrifices her family made to build a new life in Australia. Although she always considered herself an Aussie growing up "My Greek's really bad!" as a well-known actor she now feels a responsibility to model diversity on screen and on stage. "You've got to be there for the generation below," she says earnestly. "I'd hope that young boys and girls who have a diverse background can go, 'I identify as Australian and I see her on television; hey, I am Australian.' "I guess if you see yourself on TV, you belong to the community. I think Australia is doing very fing well at [accepting its multiculturalism] and I'm very proud to be a part of it." Andrea is also proud that her industry has led the way in the fight against sexual harassment and assault in the workplace with the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements. But she believes the effort should be focused on underprivileged women who can't speak up, rather than powerful actors who can "afford therapy" and legal teams. She says she's lucky not to have experienced sexual harassment herself, but reveals that she has had moments of racial harassment at work. Andrea remains close with some of her original Crownies co-stars, especially Marta Dusseldorp and Ella Scott-Lynch, whom she admires for combining successful careers with having children. "Any woman in this industry who can do it with kids, I find that so inspiring," she says passionately. "I'd love to have kids myself, one day." Andrea is currently in a long-term relationship with actor Joseph del Re, who she calls "the love of my life". Set up by a mutual friend a few years ago, the pair live together in inner-city Sydney and have worked together in productions, including Antigone. But for now she has her sights set on America. Despite its unforgiving nature, she really likes LA. "You feel like everything's possible and nothing's possible," she says of the city's duality. "You go, 'I've got the world in my hands' and then you go, 'I don't even know who I am.' It's a real glamour damage kind of situation." Andrea is adamant she couldn't have tried her luck there earlier in her career, conscious she needs her wits about her in a town crammed with actors on the make. "You gotta go quite tough or naive," she laughs. "You have to be fearless when you go there, you have to take it on the chin, but it's great because there is so much work." And Andrea is prepared to persevere until she lands that coveted American role. "I feel excited," she says, her brown eyes shining. "A phone call can change your life. That's what I love about acting." Model Victoria Lee wears a dress by Camilla and Marc from their current collection at the David Jones show on February 7. Credit:Dominic Lorrimer From princelings, the brother-and-sister duo have risen to create a modest empire spanning most Australian states, the United States, where their brand is stocked at Neiman Marcus, and an online wholesale network. "We were pretty young. We worked so hard towards that first show. The excitement and the unknown was really what drove us," Marc Freeman, now 38, told Fairfax Media. Marc Freeman and Camilla Freeman-Topper, of Camilla and Marc, will open Fashion Week Australia as the Mercedes Benz Presents designer. Credit:Steven Siewert Fifteen years ago, when Camilla and Marc were two "green" designers showing in the New Generation Show at Fashion Week Australia, Collette Dinnigan, Akira Isogawa and Wayne Cooper were the undisputable monarchs of the local indsutry. Asked to name the designers he and sister Camilla, 36, admired in their early days, Freeman runs off the aforementioned veterans but hastens to add: "Weve always had a global view of fashion. It is a global stage today. So many of the great brands domestically and internationally we never had our sights on brands in Australia." And yet, on May 13, the pair will take centre stage as the reigning monarchs of Australian fashion when they open Fashion Week Australia, as the Mercedes Benz Presents designer. The start of the pair's 12-month partnership with the car brand - last year's designer was Dion Lee - will take place against a dramatic, yet-to-be-revealed location in Sydney. Although he's keeping the details close for now, Freeman promises it will be spectacular. One of Camilla and Marc's earliest shows at Fashion Week Australia, in 2004. Credit:Edwina Pickles "The emotion of showing in Sydney is very real to us. This is where we started our business," he said. "The best way to articulate our vision for the collection is on the runway, in a fully immersive show environment." Just one of the Gold Coast high school students affected by a suspected drug overdose remains in hospital, two days after the dramatic incident. Gold Coast Heath confirmed on Friday that a further three students had been discharged, leaving just one of the seven teenagers in the care of staff at Gold Coast University Hospital. More students have been released from hospital after ingesting drugs at St Stephen's College on the Gold Coast. Credit:AAP Police are continuing to investigate the incident, which left the grade 10 students from St Stephen's College in varying states. St Stephen's headmaster Jamie Dorrington used a letter to parents on Thursday to inform them the school was co-operating fully with the police investigation. Tasmanian Premier Will Hodgman is emphasising the state's healthy economy and its own economic management credentials in the lead-up to the election. Credit:Janie Barrett The Farrell family, which currently has a monopoly over every machine in every pub and club in the state, as well as in both of Tasmania's casinos, realised it would have to cede some ground. It proposed a system in which its monopoly would be broken up, and pubs and clubs would take over the licences for the machines already installed in their venues. This was a particularly generous scheme to the Sydney-based family because it had already bought the 12 most lucrative pokies pubs in the state. It closely resembles the one the Liberal Party adopted. The Club Hotel in Glenorchy, a lower socio-economic area on the outskirts of Hobart, where poker machines are more concentrated than in the affluent areas of the city, displays its political signage. Credit:Janie Barrett The Farrells were used to getting their way in Tasmania. Over 50-odd years of running Tasmania's gaming industry they had built a fortune estimated at around $500 million, and no party had dared challenge them yet. What the Farrells had not detected, what the Tasmanian Liberals had not detected, is that White's elevation to Labor's leadership was not the only change in the political climate. With David Walsh, the founder of Mona, wanting to establish a pokies-free high-roller casino on the site of his famed gallery, the Liberal government established a parliamentary inquiry. Observers say the Farrell family seemed unconcerned by this development after all, Labor was represented on the inquiry by shadow treasurer Scott Bacon. Bacon is well known around Tasmania not only as a bloke not afraid of a flutter of his own he prefers the nags but as the son of former premier Jim Bacon, who in his time had backed the Farrells' business operations. Scott himself had been no enemy of the gaming industry when he served as tourism minister in a previous government. In the inquiry, Bacon heard compelling evidence from outside experts about how the machines manipulated players' perceptions of their odds of winning. He heard that they generated little employment and sucked money out of communities. He heard compelling testimony from Robert Kreshl, a recovering pokie addict who once lived in a drainage ditch while working full-time to sustain his habit. There was something else the Farrells didn't know. Before White began her political career as a staffer for a Labor MP, she had carried a tray at the faded jewel in their crown, the Wrest Point Casino. "I had to work in the gaming rooms around the pokie machines and I saw people who were lonely," she explains. "I saw people who were so exhausted from sitting at the machine for so long without taking a break that they fell off their chair and had to be taken to hospital. I saw people wet themselves at the machines because they did not want to leave because they thought their next spin was going to be their lucky spin. I saw people who peed in the coin cups because they did not want to leave. So I saw how addictive the machines are." White and Bacon began to kick around potential policies in response. According to observers there were some in Labor that wanted to take a more moderate stance. They could run with harm-minimisation measures of the sort proposed by the industry, they could impose lower maximum bets. But evidence had been presented at the inquiry that suggested none of these measures would make much difference. White decided to go all-in. Pokies would be removed from all the state's pubs and clubs and hunted back to the two casinos. Representatives of the Farrell family were summoned to a meeting before the public announcement was made. One of them was so shocked he began to "twitch", says one observer. The public announcement stunned the state. Recalling the day it happened, as he drinks a beer in a Hobart pub where he is welcomed warmly despite the pokies out the back Bacon says that the fact there was not a single leak is evidence of the broad support for the policy. It is also clear that the policy has served another purpose for Labor and for White. It draws a dividing line not only between Labor and Liberal, but between new and old Labor, new and old Tasmania. It casts White as a tough leader, one with the principles to take political heat for a policy she believes in. And the pain has been significant. At one level, the campaign in Tasmania is being fought over familiar ground: Labor talking up its credentials in social services and backing up White's campaign with a roster of visiting federal heavyweights, including Bill Shorten, Tanya Plibersek and Katherine King; Will Hodgman's Liberal Party emphasising the state's healthy economy and its own economic management credentials and chucking a twist of law and order into the mix, with a proposal to toughen laws against protesters. But because of the amount of money coming in from groups supporting and opposing Labor's pokie policy including a campaign called "Love your Local" backed by the Federal Group and its allies in the Tasmanian Hospitality Association the pokies issue is dominating the campaign. Many of the state's pubs are draped in banners urging a Liberal vote and social media and airwaves are jammed with advertising on the issue. White insists the attention is to Labor's benefit and is fracturing the Liberal Party. "I think internally the Liberals are in quite a lot of pain over this issue. You've got an interesting make-up of Liberal Party members on this issue, some of whom are are close to religious organisations. Religious organisations in Tasmania have been very vocal in their opposition to poker machines in pubs and clubs and they have been lobbying very heavily those Liberal members who have religious affiliations. "Even after we announced our policy, some of those faith leaders were still sure that the Liberals would change their position, they thought that the Liberals would adopt Labor's position, so there would be tension in the Liberal Party between those who would have a political perspective and think that this is good for the Liberal Party, and others who would be getting a lot of pressure from their constituency to remove pokies." Tasmanian Premier Will Hodgman dismisses this. In an interview he graciously endured during a jet-boat ride in the middle of a campaign-stop showcasing the government's tourism policy, Hodgman says the Liberal Party room is united in supporting not only the party's pokie policy but its support of the Farrell family, which runs not only casinos and pubs but high-end resorts. He backs people's freedom of choice to play pokies, and says they provide not only critical employment but important leisure activity. "The businesses we are talking about are small pubs and clubs spread across the state, they are at threat. It may be a matter that the Labor Party cares less about, but for us, a party that strongly supports jobs across the state, it is something worth fighting for." The Farrells, he says, are very generous contributors to the Tasmanian community. For Labor, the heady days of December are long gone. No public polling has recently been conducted but there is a sense that the deluge of pro-Liberal advertising is taking its toll. Labor insiders believe the party has been swamped by mainland pokies interests determined to kill the policy lest it spread. Clubs NSW and Clubs Australia say they might have been approached for advice, but say they have not funded the anti-Labor campaign. Either way, the industry on the island itself is big enough to do its own damage, and with Tasmania's donation transparency laws the weakest in the country, we might never know how much they spent. Internal Liberal polling suggests the party is now enjoying a substantial lead with a week to go. Though political analysts doubt the reliability of that data, there is a strong sense that Hodgman has the wind at his back. There is a perception that White's Labor has not only been outspent, but out-organised and out-campaigned. When you talk to Labor insiders now you learn that most have accepted that a win even a win taken with the support of the Greens - is out of reach. The Liberals hold 15 seats and Labor seven in a 25-seat house. If White can take four seats, she considers herself and her pokies policy safe. If she takes five, she will force the Liberals into minority government, historically a poisoned chalice in Tasmanian politics. NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian has given one of her ministers a dressing down over an awkward love triangle involving members of the NSW Liberals' party room and the Prime Minister's staff, but she says that his job is not at risk over a "personal matter". Ms Berejiklian is in the US at the National Governors' Association meeting, and was forced to answer questions about an alleged affair between NSW Innovation Minister Matt Kean, a close political ally, and party colleague Eleni Petinos, the member for Miranda. Hornsby MP and Minister for Innovation Matt Kean pictured in a post uploaded to his Instagram page for Valentine's Day 2018. Credit:Instragam/Matt Kean The incident was revealed on Thursday night when Mr Kean's ex-girlfriend, Caitlin Keage, a media adviser for Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, posted screen shots to social media app Instagram of an alleged text message exchange between the MPs after Christmas. The screenshots were posted with the accompanying text: "When your boyfriend cheats on you when you're away with family @matt_keanmp." People would object, they said. Tourists had been beaten up at the market in the capital just for walking around with a camera. We were warned when we went to South Sudan to be very careful taking photographs. At the United Nations POC (Protection of Civilians) camp in remote Bentiu, we needed to seek permission from the big boss to even use photographic equipment. She gave it. Then we were dressed down by her underling because we hadn't sought permission from him as well. Capturing images here, it seemed would be a fraught enterprise. Except that it wasn't. In fact, whenever war-wise Fairfax photographer Kate Geraghty pulled out one of her mighty Nikons, she was swamped by children demanding their place in her frame. This is not uncommon in the developing world. I lost count of how many pictures of Iraqi soldiers Geraghty snapped as we stumbled around the rubble in Mosul earlier this year. And in three years as Indonesia correspondent, my family and I racked up several hundred poses with random families in picturesque places. Salim Mehajer has been convicted of assault occasioning actual bodily harm after slamming a car door on Channel Seven reporter Laura Banks outside a police station on April 2 last year. Mehajer had been arrested after allegedly assaulting a taxi driver earlier that morning and was trying to leave the police station when he was followed by a group of journalists including Banks. As he jumped into the car, he closed the door on Banks, leaving her hand bruised. In a scathing judgment at Downing Centre Local Court on Friday, magistrate Joanne Keogh said the 31-year-old property developer was "hunted" by a "frenzied media pack" who showed "appalling and predatory behaviour". A Matraville mother-of-six who was found dead at Maroubra Beach has been remembered as a loving woman with a heart of gold. A passer-by found the body of Vanessa Travers, 46, a long-time eastern suburbs resident and carer, at the northern end of the beach soon after midnight. Barry ORourke, a friend of Ms Travers who said she was like an aunt to him, said she would have done anything for her family and friends. He said it was a tough time for us all. She had a heart of gold and would do anything for anyone, especially her children. From shooting London Fashion Week and working for the same agency as supermodel Kate Moss to taking a look at Queensland masculinity through the lens of a regional rodeo. Brisbane film director Nick Waterman started off producing music videos and filming fashion shows, but for his most recent project he spent four days documenting the "surreal kingdom" of the Mount Isa rodeo. After The Smoke, one of the locally-produced short films featuring at Flickerfest in Brisbane. He began filmmaking at school before moving to London and working for the same agency representing Kate Moss and other supermodels. This led to Waterman, 31, shooting London Fashion Week before moving to Sydney and continuing his fashion film interests. A father-of-three acquitted of manslaughter but convicted of Queensland's tough new one-punch law is set to become a test case for the high-profile legislation. Tamate Heke was found guilty of unlawful striking causing death in the Brisbane Supreme Court on Thursday but it appears he could serve more jail time on that charge than he would if convicted for manslaughter. Tamate Heke outside the Brisbane Supreme Court. Credit:AAP Image The New Zealander punched Shane Merrigan during an altercation on the Gateway Motorway on December 1, 2015, causing him to fall onto the road and into the path of a 13.7-tonne garbage truck. The jury found Heke not guilty of manslaughter because it did not agree with the prosecution he foresaw his actions would lead to the 50-year-old's death. A jury in the trial of a Brisbane man accused of murdering his wealthy uncle almost two decades ago has been discharged after he sacked his legal team. Robert James Wagner went to trial at Brisbane Supreme Court on Tuesday over allegations he killed Gerhard Wagner, who disappeared on January 7, 1999. A jury in the trial of a Brisbane man accused of murdering his wealthy uncle almost two decades ago has been discharged. Wagner had pleaded not guilty and was fighting the charge but on Thursday he axed his defence lawyers provided by Legal Aid Queensland. On Friday morning Justice Helen Bowskill thanked the jury for their time and service and sent them home. Year after year, the Australian honours lists are rolled out, and year after year, they are overwhelmingly male. Since the mid-1970s, the percentage of female recipients of the Australia Day and Queen's Birthday honours has not exceeded 36 per cent. Women have been consistently missed out on honours awards over the years. A Fairfax Media analysis of the 2018 Australia Day awards reveals the most common names were John, David and Peter, and there was only one female name in the top 10 - Margaret. Women made up 31 per cent of the order of Australia general division nominations on Australia Day, and 33 per cent of recipients. The three darkest personalities are said to be psychopaths, narcissists and Machiavellians. Theyre responsible for much of the torture inflicted on employees, whether thats bullying and exploitation, hyper-criticism or deceitfulness. But what elements do these sinister behaviours have in common? There must surely be something, or some things, that unite them. When someones both callous and manipulative, thats when theyre positioned to force others into harmful outcomes. Credit:Katarzyna Bialasiewicz Thats the question researchers have answered in research due to be published in Aprils edition of the Journal of Research in Personality, although the scholars have added two more behaviours to the mix: spitefulness and aggressiveness. Health authorities are urging anyone with flu-like symptoms who visited the CBD recently to see a doctor, after a possible outbreak of Legionnaires disease in a CBD cooling tower. Three cases of Legionnaires' have been linked to an area south of Bourke Street, between Queen and Spring Steets. Two of the victims visited Flinders Street Station. My message to people who have visited the CBD between late January and earlier this month and who may be suffering from pneumonia or flu-like symptoms is to visit their GP who will assess the need for testing for Legionnaires disease, Victorias Deputy Chief Health Officer, Dr Brett Sutton, said in a statement released Friday. Legionnaires' disease is caused by bacteria that often grow in and spread from airconditioning towers. Symptoms include headache, fever, chills, and muscle aches and pains. If untreated, the disease can cause respiratory problems and pneumonia. The three victims, all men aged between 52 and 74, fell ill between February 6 and 14, days after visiting the CBD. All were hospitalised, but are now recovering. There has been a rare hepatitis A death in Victoria as the state experiences a spreading outbreak of the very infectious disease. Victorians deputy health officer Dr Brett Sutton confirmed a man recently died from locally acquired case of hepatitis A, a viral infection of the liver. There have been 42 confirmed cases of the disease in the past two months in Victoria, with another 23 still being confirmed. The health department said all those affected so far are men, many who are gay or bisexual, or injecting drug users. Dr Sutton has urged those at risk of infection to get a free vaccine A young man who took 10 people for a spin in the tray of his ute and crashed, killing a teenager, has been jailed for three years. Alexander Wells, 21, was driving around in a paddock at an 18th birthday party in country Victoria in 2017 when his ute rolled, killing William Grace, 16. Others were also injured at the scene at Gladysdale, east of Melbourne. Judge Paul Higham said the case was a tragedy and hoped it would serve as a warning to other young men. "Do not act in this risky way because if you do, there will be tragic consequences," he added. A woman has been robbed of two handbags and her car keys in Hampton Park as part of a series of robberies in Melbournes south-east. The woman was attempting to buy a phone for $1000 organised through Facebooks Marketplace when the ambush occured, a Victoria Police spokeswoman has confirmed. The victim had agreed to meet the online seller in a residential court in Hampton Park, where at least two locals witnessed the crime. She had a baby and a toddler with her at the time of the incident. Three men allegedly arrived at the court and grabbed the woman's and her sisters handbags out of the car, running away through nearby wetlands. A 25-year-old Perth driver accused of causing a fatal crash moments after texting her boyfriend has had her trial in Perth District Court aborted. Aine McGrath will likely face a retrial in relation to her dangerous driving occasioning death charge after Judge Christopher Stevenson discharged the jury on Friday, around five hours into their deliberations. A Perth trial has been aborted after the jury did not understand the issues it needed to consider. Credit:Louie Douvis Following the three-day trial, Nine News Perth reported the jury handed Judge Stevenson two questions around 11am and shortly afterwards, they were dismissed. He would not comment on the nature of the questions but said the jurors had a "fundamental misunderstanding of the burden of proof and the issues that they are required to decide on" and it was in the interest of justice to discharge them. The chopper was called in, a police car was wrecked and officers were forced to go off-roading in three separate car chases throughout Perth's eastern suburbs overnight. The first incident occurred on Thursday evening at around 7pm. The end of the car chase in Caversham. Credit:Graeme Powell Brookdale pursuit Police were on patrol on Harber Drive in Brookdale when they saw a vehicle believed to match the description of a car involved in a number of other recent car chases around Perth. The Hague: The Dutch parliament on Thursday passed a motion recognising as genocide the massacre of as many as 1.5 million Armenians in 1915, although the government said it would not become official policy of the Netherlands. The motion, which was opposed by just three lawmakers out of 150, risks further straining relations between The Hague and Ankara, which have been tense since the Dutch barred a Turkish minister from campaigning in the Netherlands last year. Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has attacked the Netherlands amid a row about allowing a Turkish minister to campaign there. Credit:AP Turkey denies that the killings, which took place at the height of World War One, constitute genocide. Its foreign ministry strongly condemned the Dutch parliament's approval of the motion and noted the Dutch government's response to it. "The government will not follow the judgment of the parliament," Foreign Minister Sigrid Kaag told Dutch television before the vote. Manvendra Singh Gohil, the first Indian member of a royal family to come out as gay. The arranged marriage service is not just another dating app or website. These are not conducive to meeting a life partner, Gohil says. "Among gays, many are into multiple-partner sex. These dating apps are fine for casual sex and one night stands but they do not work for someone who is looking for serious commitment and an emotional investment. Thats why Gay Arranged Marriages provides an important service." Since the bureau opened, 42 couples have got "married" and a further 48 are living together. Over 1500 people are registered with Shah, who not only matches couples but also helps them find a priest to perform the ceremony - not an easy task. The bureau also offers counselling to the horrified parents of young gay men and women who have just come out. "Its traumatic for everyone. I talk to parents and show them videos of parents who have accepted their gay child to make them realise they are not alone. In some cases there has been a reconciliation," says Shah. However, her counselling failed with Amar Kumars parents. Orthodox Brahmins who live in Bangalore, they disowned 37 year old Kumar, who runs a successful transport business in the city. The last time he saw his parents was 10 months ago. But despite the pain of this abandonment, he is a happy man these days, having found Jatin "the love of my life" - and got married four months ago. "I know the marriage isnt legally valid yet in India but who knows? The law may change one day. And until it does, the ceremony has bound us together for life," Kumar says. Maitree Basu in Calcutta struggled to make her mother accept her sexual orientation. It took a long time but its happened. Like many Indian mothers, her concern was that Basu should "settle down". Basu tried dating sites but was put off by fake profiles. After registering with Gay Arranged Marriages, she has moved in with a woman she thinks is "the one". Those registered with her bureau praise Shahs unstinting support, but even Shah's own family has been hostile to her. While her parents have grudgingly accepted her work, relatives have denounced her support for "unnatural activities", labelled her "rebellious," and openly wondered if Shah, who is heterosexual, might be a lesbian. "My parents main anxiety is whether I will find a husband who accepts me despite what I do," she says. She has received death threats over the phone. Other callers have threatened to throw acid on her. She wont stop because she finds the work satisfying. Her most recent success was with a 30-something gay man who suffered from paralysis. Wheelchair-bound, he despaired of finding someone to love. Last December, Shah happened to be in a jewellery shop in Bombay next to another customer who was there with her son, who was deaf. The pair got chatting. The mother told Shah that her deaf son was gay and she was desperate for him to find a partner so that he would not be alone when she died. Shah thought of one of her clients, who was in a wheelchair, and immediately put them in touch. They met and fell in love. "The day I saw them together, they made me feel like a goddess. They garlanded me and praised me for bringing so much happiness into their lives," she says. Gay activists tend to be divided on the issue of marriage with some supporting it and others criticizing the desire for an institution that belongs to a society that has rejected them. The former say that, in a odd kind of way, gay marriage might end up being more socially acceptable in conservative India (whenever homosexuality is legalised, of course) than in more liberal countries. Mumbai: Indian surgeons have removed a 1.87-kilogram brain tumour from a 31-year-old man, and are claiming it's the biggest in the world. Doctors in India who have removed a 1.8kg brain tumour from a 31-year-old man say it could be the largest in the world. Credit:BBC The surgery, which lasted for seven hours, took place last week at Mumbai's Nair Hospital. News of the procedure was made public recently after the hospital ensured the surgery was successful and that the patient, Santlal Pal, had recovered, doctors said. "The tumour was so big, it appeared there was another head mounted on top of the patient's head," Srikanth Balasubramaniam, a senior surgeon who was part of the operating team said by phone from Mumbai. Longstanding friction between US President Donald Trump and two top aides has grown to a point at which either or both might quit soon, four senior administration officials said. Friction with Trump: National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, left, and Chief of Staff John Kelly. Credit:AP, Bloomberg Both National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster and Chief of Staff John Kelly are military men considered by US political observers as moderating influences on the President by imposing a routine on the White House. They have also convinced Trump of the importance of international alliances, particularly NATO, which he has criticised as not equally sharing its burdens with the United States. However, all the officials were quick to add that the tensions could blow over, at least for now, as have previous episodes of discord between the President and other top officials who have fallen out of favour, including Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Attorney-General Jeff Sessions. PHILIPSBURG:--- Minister of Education, Culture, Youth and Sport Jorien Wuite invites all teachers, administrative and management staff desirous of exploring the possibility of owning their own home to an information session organized in collaboration with the General Pension Fund (APS) on Thursday, March 1st from 3-4: 30 pm at the Belair Community Center. APS will make a presentation on their latest housing development project aimed specifically for civil servants. The session, organized by the Ministers cabinet, is a follow-up to a recent meeting held between the Minister, President of the Windward Island Teachers Union President Claire Elshot-Aventurin and representatives of APS in which the need for affordable housing solutions was discussed. Also discussed was the possibility of supplemental pensions options for teachers that may need to boost their contributions. As I continue to meet with school boards and teachers one of the recurring grievances I hear is the high cost of rent. Teachers, management and administrators have the profound responsibility of training and guiding our children; our nations next generation. Minister Wuite expressed. Their psycho-social well-being is of utmost importance; this initiative attempts to address this need. I, therefore, urge all teachers desirous of owning their own homes to come to the information session to explore this opportunity. Invitation letters have been dispatched to all school boards to disseminate to their respective teachers and staff. As seating is limited interested persons are asked to rsvp to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. PHILIPSBURG:--- The Minister of Education, Culture, Youth and Sport, Jorien Wuite, has announced that the ministry will be hosting a Creative Industries Interactive Exchange Forum, CIIEF, on March 21st, 2018 with an aim to encourage and fuel sensitization of the arts as a valuable contributor to the socio-economic sphere as well as to recognize and stimulate the role of the arts in the healing process of the island- especially amongst its young people. The forum, consisting of workshops, presentations, as well as a panel discussion, targets key stakeholders in the field to facilitate open communication between the involved ministries and those directly executing and involved in the creative industries. Through workshops, stakeholders will be given a platform to share their insights on the creative needs, the formation of an artists guild, and the establishment of a cultural prize on St. Maarten. The input and findings of the creative community will be presented to a representative of the ministry as a proposed channel in achieving the goals of the Ministry Resiliency Plan; to support artists as entrepreneurs, to develop the creative industries as a successful economic sector, and to recharge life-long contribution to the arts. The Creative Industries Interactive Exchange Forum is the first project designed by the Intern Desk of MECYS, which began as a practical concept to the cabinet in January. Two interns, Iris Hakkens and Dwayne Griffith, were selected with an assignment of Producing a proposal for and the planning and execution of an Entrepreneurial Creative Industries conference and panel discussion. Both students devote ten hours a week to the project; Dwayne, a local student currently studying Entrepreneurship at Watson University in Colorado, USA works remotely while Iris, who is pursuing a propaedeutic degree in International Public Management at The Hague University of Applied Sciences is currently on island and works out of the Cabinet office. The project/assignment-based internship provides students pursuing tertiary education in areas of public administration and/or management or political studies an opportunity to acquire work experience and gain insight into the workings of the government organization. The Intern Desk is a complement to the Business Outreach and Placement Program- BOPP- of the Department of Youth with a specific focus on the functions of the cabinet. I believe in horizontal and vertical mobility within government organization, providing the space for young professionals and the opportunity for their professional growth. In other words, facilitating ministerial Brain Gain. I champion the enablement of young people entering the work force through the provision of a training venue, Minister Wuite said of the Intern Desk. I thank both Iris and Dwayne for the commitment and hard work they have displayed. With their success I look forward to further facilitating the Intern Desk concept. PHILIPSBURG:---The St. Maarten Guyanese Association (SMGA) would like to express warm wishes and congratulations to all Guyanese living in our adopted homeland a Happy Republic Day, which is celebrated each year on February 23. It has been 48 years since our country attained the status of a "Republic" and despite the fact that we are living away from our homeland and have established new lives on the 'Friendly Island' of St. Maarten, let us not forget from whence we came - for a people who know where they came from, would always be appreciative of where they are today and what they have to offer. Guyanese who have chosen St. Maarten as their home understand this and will continue to build this fledgling island-nation, as it is now our home. But in all of this, let us take time to reflect on what led us to leave our homeland and wish those left behind strength and wisdom to fulfill the dreams our political forefathers had when they fought for colonial independence from Britain. As we reflect on the underpinning principles of our republican status, it is important that we continue in the spirit of cooperation upon which our country was founded. We have a lot to offer our St. Maarten counterparts and together we can build a successful nation here as we pool our myriad of skills, whether in the fields of education, health, construction engineering, or entrepreneurship. We, the St. Maarten Guyanese community, believe that as St. Maarten prepares for a new political future this coming week, it is imperative that we become one people, one nation, striving for one destiny, in order to realize the island's motto, "Semper pro grediens" (Always for progressing). POND ISLAND:--- Acting Minister of Tourism, Economic Affairs, Transportation and Telecommunications (Ministry TEATT) Cornelius de Weever, says he welcomes the news about an agreement that has been signed this week between the Netherlands and Winair that would establish a direct air link between Bonaire and the Windward Islands of Saba, St. Eustatius and Sint Maarten. The first flight under the banner CN-Express is scheduled for February 26. Air transportation links between the Caribbean Netherlands islands of Saba, St. Eustatius, Bonaire and country Sint Maarten are essential when it comes to economic development (tourists), air transportation for family and friends, health (medical care/referrals) etc. and is in line with the important hub function that Sint Maarten performs. The Princess Juliana International Airport remains a hub for the North Eastern Caribbean. SXM Airport in January started off with a series of meetings, the first one with our sister island of Anguilla to share information about current rebuilding efforts. This is all part of our countrys hub function for the surrounding islands. It is the intention of SXM Airport to meet with hub partners such as St. Martin (French), Saba, St. Eustatius, Nevis, St. Kitts and Dominica. The relations with our neighbors to the North (St. Martin) and the surrounding islands are all part of the efforts of to make sure that our country while in the recovery mode meets the demands of our hub partners going forward, Acting Minister of TEATT Cornelius de Weever said on Thursday. Signing the agreement on behalf of the Netherlands was the Ministry of Interior and Kingdom Relations and the Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management. The flights will take place every Monday and Friday for a period of three months. After six weeks, the CN-Express will be evaluated whether it meets the needs of the islands. An ATR42 aircraft from Air Antilles will be used to fly the new route. This 48-seat aircraft will fly between Sint Maarten, St. Eustatius and Bonaire. A Winair Twin Otter feeder is then used to connect Saba with St. Eustatius. BRUSSELS:--- In what can be considered a very productive day in Brussels, Prime Minister Leona Romeo Marlin successfully addressed the OCTA Ministerial Conference on Post 2020 relations with the EU. While Carol Voges was re-elected for a second 1-year term as President of the OCTA Executive Committee. The OCTA Executive Committee consists of 9 members, as President of the OCTA Executive Committee Ms. Voges, who works fulltime at the Sint Maarten House in The Hague, is responsible for the management of the daily operations. Every year during the EU-OCTA Conference the President is also tasked with delivering the annual report. Due to a great performance during the past year 2017 Carol Voges was unanimously re-elected to the Presidency of the Executive Committee. During the morning session Prime Minister Leona Romeo-Marlin when given the floor made an address/intervention on behalf of the Government of St. Maarten; here is an excerpt from that address to the OCTA Ministerial meeting. Madame Chair, todays discussions mark an important juncture in EU - OCT relations. I say this because we are finally moving passed the preliminary stage of What will the post-2020 framework entail and have now entered the critical stage of How. This involves giving substance to the post-2020 discussion by sharing our positions regarding the post-2020 proposed options with our colleagues here today, as well as with the European Commission at the EU-OCT Forum tomorrow. This experience has highlighted certain aspects of our associated status to the European Union as OCTs which need to be addressed. The majority of citizens in OCTs are by law European citizens and belong to the EU family. However, as OCTs are not an integral part of the EU, Sint Maarten, similar to other OCTs were not able to access certain funding put in place to support EU countries in times of crisis, such as in the case of a natural disaster. Notwithstanding, Sint Maarten is of the opinion that many of the priorities outlined in the proposed EU-Caribbean compact are in line with our own future regional cooperation aspirations. Therefore, we would appreciate the opportunity for OCTs to be included in the process and heard during the ongoing negotiations between the European Commission and the ACP group. The importance of regional cooperation for Sint Maarten becomes even more evident given our shared border with Saint Martin, an Overseas Region of France. During our discussions on developing a joint project with our direct neighbor, it has been apparent that for cooperation to be successful in an EU context, attention must be given to simplifying procedures and regulatory issues. This applies to programming primarily as regional cooperation between countries that are required to follow contrasting EU programming regulations often leads to lengthy and cumbersome processes with risk of disengagement of funds or worse, unsuccessful actions. Madame Chair, it is Sint Maartens position that the time has arrived for OCTs to let their voices be heard with a view to redefine their relationship with the EU to that of one that better takes into account their distinct needs and challenges in the ongoing dynamic global framework. Following the presentation of the address many of the Caribbean OCT leaders present congratulated Prime Minster Romeo-Marlin on her delivery and even requested copies the speech. PHILIPSBURG:--- Member of Parliament Frans Richardson has been released from pretrial detention today Friday, February 23rd, 2018/ Richardson has spent 10 days behind bars as the TBO team investigates his role in the Squid and Emerald Investigation. Suspect F.G.R. (1968) was released from pre-trial detention today but still remains a suspect in the Squid and Emerald investigations. F.G.R., was arrested on St. Maarten on Wednesday, February 14th, 2018, by the National Detectives of St. Maarten, as suspect in 2 investigations. Investigation Squid, concerns an accusation of vote buying during the 2016 Parliamentary Elections and in the Emerald investigation, F.G.R. is accused of accepting $370,000 in bribes and is accused of tax evasion. In both investigations, the home of F.G.R. was searched on Wednesday, February 14th, 2018. F.G.R., who is a member of parliament has not made a statement about any of these allegations. In the Squid and Emerald investigations, a number of suspects and witnesses will be interrogated by the investigating team and investigating judge. In the Emerald investigation several individual cases will be heard in court. The Public Prosecutors Office of St. Maarten will be extra vigilant throughout the upcoming election on Monday, February 26th, 2018, for signs of vote buying and selling. Persons with information on these activities are asked to contact the National Detective Agency (Landsrecherche Sint Maarten) - if preferably anonymously at telephone number: +1721-522-5810. Today is the day that the confinement of MP Frans Richardson has ended. The detention of people is considered as an ultimatum remedium (last resort). It must be strictly necessary. Knowing that the situation in the Point Blanche prison is far from optimal and that other means are available, the detention of MP Frans Richardson was not necessary in the viewpoint of the defense, there were other means other than the imprisonment of Mr. Richardson. In short, the reason for this is that the investigation has been running since 2016 and the co-suspects are already free. There was never any need for the Public Prosecutor to hold on to my client. Not in 2016 and not in 2017. Suddenly 12 days before the election this was necessary?! The Public Prosecutor has decided to release Mr. Richardson today, because they also know that if they wish to retain Mr. Richardson for a longer period, they must first have an order of persecution from the Court of Appeal under Article 2 of the National Ordinance on Persecution of Political Authorities. The Appeal Court will first look at the case and then decide whether there is any need to give this order. The public prosecutor already saw that it would never get that far and decided to release my client today. However, the same prosecutor also stated last Friday that he did not had the intention to keep Mr. Richardson for further custody after the 8 days that has been given to him. The defense then must ask itself why was there any reason and necessity to keep my client in detention for those few days? This seems, according to my client, to purely influence of the upcoming elections that is only three days away. By holding Mr. Richardson for 10 days, it seems that an attempt has been made to undermine his campaign. The investigation for which Mr. Richardson was arrested concern investigations from 2016. What was the need to hold Mr. Richardson up for two years later?! It seems that everyone here on Sint Maarten can be arrested, detained whether it is necessary or not? Frans Richardson is a member of parliament and a party leader. This situation has brought a lot of negative publicity for the island of SXM. While this was never necessary. Mr. Richardson could also be called upon, as is done more often. If the authorities needed my client, he would have volunteered for possible interrogations, while retaining his rights. Holding a representative of the people in an investigation that has been running for more than 1 year, should not be taken lightly. A detention will always have negative shadow effects. Detention should only follow if it is strictly necessary, as an ultimum remedium (last resort). The European Court of Human Rights has already spoken about this on several occasions. The Public Prosecutior will not be able to convince anyone that it could not have acted differently concerning the detention of a party leader, just before the elections, in a crowded prison that is about to collapse! The defense can only hope that the objective of the Public Prosecutor is not to improperly influence the forthcoming elections on February 26th 2018. The Public Prosecutor could have also chosen to wait until after the election, because now they have the appearance of being against it. Again, the investigation has been going on for quite some time! Whatever may be true, Mr. Richardson is now more than ever convinced that SXM must regain control of the autonomous powers, including justice, as quickly as possible, so that the SXM population can monitor the exercising of these powers. Because with the current consensus laws of the Kingdom, SXM has no control over the exercising of judicial powers. On behalf of my client Mr. Richardson, Sjamira Roseburg (Sulvaran & Peterson Lawfirm) Lawyer Frans Richarson There is no denying this simple fact. While life in Samoa is not exactly problem free, it must be said that it is better than most places - near and far. We dont have to look far. Following the recent devastation of Cyclone Gita, when we look across to the plight of our brothers, sisters and families in the Kingdom of Tonga, we can only be grateful. Their suffering could have easily been ours. But with the disaster coordination response in Samoa working extremely well, the longest many of our people went without electricity was possibly seven days. For many who have access to Samoa Water Authority, water connection was almost as quickly restored a few days later. Many people who needed help including people who were evacuated have already received help. There are stories on the pages of your newspaper every day where organisations, groups and individuals have gone out to provide help where it is most needed. These and more are wonderful to see. And today, its safe to say that we are blessed to be living in Samoa. Yes despite all the challenges, petty squabbles and problems here and there, we still enjoy a very peaceful existence, something many people around the world can only dream of. Which is why we should be deeply grateful every day we wake up to smell the fresh flowers and the aroma of life. Indeed, there is plenty of life in Samoa for us to enjoy. We also know that we are a mighty, resilient people. That is, regardless of what challenges we face, we always do our best to appear unfazed by it, so we try to make the most of any sad situation. You only have to look at the front page of your newspaper for the past few days to see that despite living without water and some people decent homes they struggle through and they keep on keeping on. But their struggles should be a timely reminder to us all that there is a lot more work to be done. It should be a reminder to Prime Minister Tuilaepa and his administration that out there in the villages, people are yearning for help. There is much to be done in terms of sorting out these perennial problems. One of them in our humble opinion is in our faces every day. We are referring to the growing number of beggars and street vendors on the streets. It doesnt matter where we are. We could be sitting at a very flash restaurant eating the most exotic food and suddenly they pop up out of nowhere. You could be walking down the streets and they will hassle you. You might be sitting in your car and they will knock on the window. These people are the face of deteriorating poverty and hardship in paradise. Yes poverty. Its ironic because for all the wonderful things Samoa has achieved and weve achieved a lot this unfortunately is the impression visitors to this country will take back with them. For sure, its nice to be praised; its equally wonderful to know that we are blessed but there is no doubt in this writers mind the leaders of this country need to pay attention. Apart from dealing with poverty, street vendors and finding jobs for the jobless, they also need to look at sorting out serious problems such as child labour, rape, incest, drugs, abuse of women and children, thefts, robberies and so forth. When we peel away the top layers of life in paradise, you will find that these problems are getting worse and they demand that we pay some serious attention to them. The question of whether poverty exists in Samoa is not new. A lot of people say that this does not exist here because we have plenty of food. Fair enough. Yet, if you look at the number of beggars on the streets and those street vendors, would they be out there if there was no poverty? If they had a choice apart from getting poorer would they be so willing to brave the elements just to sell something for a tala? These people dont have a choice. They are so poor and are stuck in a rut called poverty that they are forced to do the unthinkable. Now think of the many families who still dont have electricity in Samoa. Think of the families whose plight about housing, water and food are featured on the pages of the Samoa Observer every day? These are real stories. They are not fake news. We are not in the business of fake news. Wed like to think that this country has not deliberately forgotten some of the less fortunate in the community. Speaking of which, we must never forget the words of Sociologist Pei Tauiliili Reupena who once upon a time cautioned that poverty, depression and hardships are killing people in Samoa. Pei said far too many people are struggling to make ends meet. He estimates that about 90 per cent of families in Samoa are struggling with the cost of living, low incomes with many of them living in poverty. What is happening right now is the gap between the rich and poor in Samoa is getting wide, he said. Only between five to seven families in Samoa are enjoying this economic success. They call it economic success, I call it a disaster. Well, what do you think? Have a great Friday Samoa, God bless! Singapore to impose carbon tax from 2019 Singapore, Feb 19 (AFP) Feb 19, 2018 Singapore said Monday it would impose a carbon tax from next year to cut its greenhouse gas emissions and make companies more competitive as global agreements on climate change take effect. Finance Minister Heng Swee Keat said the tax would be levied on all facilities producing 25,000 tonnes or more of greenhouse gas emissions a year. The tax, to be applied to all sectors, will be Sg$5.0 ($3.8) per tonne of greenhouse gas emissions from 2019 to 2023, after which the levy will be reviewed and possibly raised to between Sg$10 and Sg$15 per tonne by 2030. "Singapore produces less carbon emissions per dollar of GDP than most countries," he said, as he unveiled the measure as part of the city-state's 2018 budget. "We intend to further reduce our emissions intensity to make a bigger effort to combat climate change." Major economies have been scrambling to cut greenhouse gas emissions amid warnings from scientists about the potentially devastating impacts of climate change. The most notable step has been the 197-nation Paris Agreement, inked in 2015, which calls for limiting global warming to "well under" 2 degrees Celsius, and "pursuing efforts" to cap warming at 1.5 degrees C. The levy will affect about 30-40 companies, mainly from the petroleum refining, chemicals and semiconductor sectors, the Straits Times reported. Singapore ranks 26th out of 142 countries in terms of emissions per capita based on the latest International Energy Agency data largely due to its small size and dense population, according to the government. Heng said the new carbon tax would encourage businesses to take measures to reduce emissions, making them more competitive as tighter limits are imposed by more countries when international deals come into force. The government would provide support to companies to help them become energy-efficient, he added. Singapore expects to collect carbon tax revenues of nearly Sg$1.0 billion in the first five years, but the government is willing to spend more than that to help companies, he said. Coming decades vital for future sea level rise: study Paris, Feb 20 (AFP) Feb 20, 2018 How quickly humanity draws down the greenhouse gases driving global warming will determine whether sea levels rise half-a-metre or six times that, even if Paris climate pact goals are fully met, researchers reported Tuesday in a study. "The trajectory of emissions in the next few decades will shape our coastlines in the centuries to come," lead author Matthias Mengel, a scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, told AFP. Every five years that elapse before carbon pollution peaks will add 20 centimetres to sea level rise in 2300, the study found. "This is the same amount we have experienced so far since the beginning of the fossil fuel economy," Mengel said by email. The world collectively spews about 40 billion tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere every year. After stalling for three years, emissions rose by two percent in 2017, dashing hopes they had peaked. On current trends, emissions could increase for at least another decade. The 197-nation Paris Agreement calls for capping global warming at "well below" two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), and pursuing efforts to hold the line at 1.5 C. Average global temperatures have already gone up by 1 C since the industrial revolution began. The treaty also sets a less talked about but equally crucial goal: ensuring that, by the end of this century, our species stops adding CO2 to the atmosphere, a threshold known as "net zero emissions". Mengel and colleagues asked a deceptively simple question: by how much will the world's oceans rise over the next two centuries if both these targets are achieved? The most likely outcome, they found, was an increase of 70 to 120 centimetres (27.5 to 47 inches) by 2300, depending on when CO2 pollution peaks, how quickly it drops, and the date net zero emissions is achieved. That's probably enough to doom some low-lying island states and wreak havoc in the populated mega-deltas of Bangladesh, Vietnam, India and Egypt, but would at least leave more time to adapt. - Redrawing coastlines - Currently, some 100 million people live within a metre (three feet) of the high-tide level, leaving them vulnerable not only to sea level rise but evermore powerful storm surges. The study also showed, however, that fulfilling the Paris mandate does not necessarily avert catastrophic change. If carbon emissions don't peak until 2035 and CO2 continues to leech into the atmosphere until 2090, for example, the ocean watermark could go up three metres by 2300, rendering continental coastlines unrecognisable. And if the Paris temperature goal is not met, there is a small chance oceans would rise five metres. The biggest wild card in predicting future sea levels is the Antarctic ice sheet, which contains enough frozen water to lift oceans several dozen metres. Its western peninsula is especially sensitive to climate change. "Large ice loss seems possible even under modest warming in line with the Paris agreement," said Mengel. "A sea level rise of up to three meters by 2300 cannot be ruled out." Ocean uplift is also driven by the expansion of water as it warms, and runoff from melting glaciers. Earth's atmosphere responds far more quickly to cuts in greenhouse gas emissions than oceans. Indeed, scientists estimate that there is at least half-a-metre of "committed" sea level rise already in the pipeline, perhaps more. "Even if we stop emitting today, the effects of our past emissions will be felt for centuries to come," said Pete Strutton, an oceanographer at the University of Tasmania. "Every year that we delay action has consequences for the future." Matthias Mengel acknowledged that the best-case projections in the study are "really optimistic". Despite voluntary, carbon-cutting pledges by virtually all the world's nations, global temperatures are on track to rise 3 C above pre-industrial levels by 2100. "In the end, the Paris Agreement will not be evaluated on what it promised or aspires to do, but on the change it managed to catalyse and the emissions reductions achieved in the real world," said co-author Joeri Rogelj, a climate modeller at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria. Russia jails four for embezzling millions from cosmodrome project Moscow, Feb 21 (AFP) Feb 21, 2018 Russia on Wednesday jailed three men and a woman for up to 8 years for embezzling state funding worth millions of dollars while working as contractors on the construction of the country's showpiece Vostochny cosmodrome. The four, who controlled or worked for construction companies, were together found guilty of embezzling 1.3 billion rubles ($23 million) from the national prestige project, in the latest blow to Russia's troubled space industry. Moscow's Simonovsky district court handed a sentence of 8 years to Sergei Degtyarev, who controlled construction companies involved in building infrastructure at the launch pad in the far eastern Amur region, RIA Novosti state news agency reported. His daughter, the former general director of a construction firm, was also sentenced to four-and-a-half years in jail. Two senior staff members at her company were jailed for six and five-and-a-half years. Russia's Vostochny, or eastern, cosmodrome was built to relieve Moscow's dependence on Baikonur launch pad which it rents from ex-Soviet Kazakhstan. It symbolises the country's aspirations to excel in space exploration but its construction saw a litany of problems with delays and unpaid wages. It has also experienced technical problems since going on line. Its first launch of an unmanned rocket in 2016 was delayed, leading President Vladimir Putin to deliver a public scolding to space officials. The second launch ended in losing contact with a string of satellites. The budget for Vostochny's construction was estimated at 300-400 billion rubles ($5.3 billion to $7.1 billion at the current exchange rate). The cosmodrome has a launch pad for Soyuz rockets, meaning it can be used for manned flights in the future. The latest trial is just one of a number involving financial wrongdoing over the project. Last year an associate of Degtyarev was jailed for four years and other cases are ongoing. Space-X lobs Spanish military satellite into orbit Washington, Feb 22 (AFP) Feb 22, 2018 Elon Musk's Space-X sent a Spanish military satellite into orbit Thursday in a hitch-less liftoff from California, extending the private space company's record of successful launches. Space-X, which proved the utility of its massive Falcon Heavy rocket earlier this month, put up the Paz imaging satellite and two of the company's own test internet communications satellites on a smaller Falcon 9 rocket. "Successful deployment of PAZ satellite to low-Earth orbit confirmed," Space-X said about nine minutes after liftoff at 6:17 AM (1417 GMT) from Vandenberg Air Force Base on the central California coast. The Paz satellite, from the Spanish government-controlled Hisdesat satellite operator, was sent into a low-earth orbit vertically circling the north and south poles, giving it a constant sunlit view of the earth's surface below. The launch took place a day later than planned; liftoff was scrubbed Wednesday due to high winds in the upper atmosphere. Besides the Paz satellite, the rocket carried two prototype satellites, dubbed Tintin A and Tintin B. The two were to help test Musk's plan to place thousands of low-cost satellites in orbit to provide global broadband internet service, including to poorly served low-income countries. In Thursday's launch, Space-X did not attempt to land the first stage of the rocket on a sea-anchored barge as it had with the February 6 Falcon Heavy launch. Instead it tested the ability to catch one of the rocket nose cone's two falling fairings on a small ship mounted with a massive trampoline like those set up as safety nets under circus aerialists. The faring descended with a guided para-foil to slow its speed and carry it toward the ship. The catch failed, however, with the faring landing in the sea just a few hundred meters away from the vessel, Musk said. The faring was intact, however, he said on Twitter, and in the future they "should be able catch it with slightly bigger chutes to slow down descent." Catching the farings, like retrieving the boosters, could generate significant savings for Space-X by allowing the company to recycle equipment. The nose cone alone costs about $6 million. Japan welcomes WTO ruling on South Korea Fukushima food row Tokyo, Feb 23 (AFP) Feb 23, 2018 Japan on Friday welcomed a World Trade Organization ruling that called for South Korea to lift an import ban on Japanese seafood, imposed after the Fukushima nuclear disaster. However, the issue is expected to continue after South Korea said it would appeal the WTO's decision and had no plans to repeal the restrictions. The WTO ruled Thursday on Tokyo's complaint against Seoul filed in 2015, concluding that South Korea's restrictions were inconsistent with the rules of the global trade watchdog. "Japan welcomes the WTO's panel report, which reflected our position," top government spokesman Yoshihide Suga told reporters. "We request South Korea to correct swiftly and with sincerity its import restriction measures that were recognised as violating the WTO rules," Suga said. He added that the government would work to reverse similar restrictions put in place by other countries on the import of Japanese food after the nuclear disaster. Japan took its food row with Seoul to the WTO in May 2015 and requested consultations, in the first step under the global body's dispute settlement system. But talks broke down between the Asian neighbours, leading Japan to seek a WTO ruling in August the same year. Following Friday's announcement South Korea's trade ministry said in a statement: "The government has decided to appeal against the WTO's ruling in order to protect the people's health and safety. "Despite this ruling, the current import ban will remain in force, and the government will make its utmost efforts to ensure radiation-contaminated food does not reach the dinner table." Suga called Seoul's decision to appeal "extremely regrettable as the ruling was issued after two and a half years of process". China, Singapore, Macau, Russia, Taiwan all have partial import bans on fishery products from Japan, according to the fisheries agency. The European Union, Indonesia, the Philippines, Hong Kong and some other countries require certificates of pre-export testing for radiation. But the United States, Canada, Malaysia and Thailand, among others, have lifted restrictions and special requirements for imports of fish products from Japan. The European Parliament last year warned against easing checks imposed on food products imported from the Fukushima region in Japan in the wake of the 2011 disaster. Two injured in Louisiana university shooting Washington, Feb 23 (AFP) Feb 23, 2018 Two people were injured in a shooting early Friday at Southeastern Louisiana University, the university said, nine days after a massacre at a Florida high school sparked a national uproar over US gun violence. "University Police confirmed incident occurred on North Campus involving several individuals. Gunshots fired, 2 individuals suffered non-life threatening injuries," the university said in a statement on Twitter. Students were warned by the school's emergency alert system at 4:01 am, it said. "No present threat to campus community," it said, adding that university police were investigating the incident. The incident at the university in Hammond, Louisiana, came amid a national debate over gun control sparked by the killing of 17 students and adults at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida on February 14. President Donald Trump is under pressure to tighten US gun laws which allowed the Parkland shooter, Nikolas Cruz, to purchase an AR-15 assault rifle last year when he had turned 18, enter his former school and shoot dead 14 students and three adults. Trump was to make a speech Friday morning at the Conservative Political Action Conference near Washington in which he is expected to detail his ideas for gun control, including the controversial proposal to arm teachers in schools. Brazilian police, army pour into troubled Rio favelas Rio de Janeiro, Feb 23 (AFP) Feb 23, 2018 More than 3,000 soldiers supported Rio de Janeiro police Friday in a sweep of three violence-plagued favelas in the west of the Brazilian city, officials said. Troops took control of the perimeters of Vila Kennedy and two adjacent favelas, and helped police entering the impoverished neighborhoods, where drug gangs flourish. An army sergeant and a police officer were reported murdered in the area earlier this week. Police officers showed off pistols, ammunition, drugs and explosives they said had been confiscated during Friday's operation, AFP journalists said. Despite sporadic outbreaks of gunfire, no one was hurt, a police spokesman said. Similar operations take place regularly in Rio de Janeiro, where police have only loose control over large areas. Citing a breakdown in law and order, President Michel Temer ordered the army to take over the command of security in the whole of Rio state a week ago. It remains unclear how policies will change now that they are under control of generals, rather than civilian officials. US asks UN to blacklist North Korean entities for smuggling United Nations, United States, Feb 23 (AFP) Feb 23, 2018 The United States asked the United Nations Security Council on Friday to blacklist a number of North Korean entities involved in smuggling oil and coal in violation of sanctions resolutions. The US request came after President Donald Trump announced new sanctions against North Korea-linked shipping assets in a package he described as the "heaviest" ever against Pyongyang. The US mission said it had submitted a list to the council's sanctions committee "aimed at shutting down North Korea's illicit maritime smuggling activities to obtain oil and sell coal." The mission did not provide details but said the action coincided with one taken by the US Treasury Department, which is expected to target "56 vessels, shipping companies and trade businesses," according to the White House. Imposing sanctions on North Korean entities requires the approval of all 15 council members, including the North's ally China. It was not immediately known when a decision on the request would be made. "Today's unprecedented actions make it clear that the United States will not let up on North Korea," US Ambassador Nikki Haley said in a statement. "We are ramping up the pressure on the North Korean regime, and we're going to use every tool at our disposal, including working with our allies and through the UN, to increase the pressure until North Korea reverses course." The Security Council last year adopted a series of resolutions to tighten and expand export bans aimed at cutting off revenue to North Korea's military programs. The measures ban coal exports and severely restrict deliveries of oil and refined petroleum products, but a recent report by a UN panel of experts found that North Korea had succeeded in circumventing sanctions. North Korea earned $200 million in revenue last year from exports of coal, iron, steel and other banned commodities, the report said. #stock trading Stock trading soars 70.5 pct in 2020 amid investment craze Stock transactions in South Korea spiked more than 70 percent in 2020 amid an investment craze among retail investors, data showed Friday. The value of stock trading in Asia's f... Turkey navy forces back Italian drillship: Cyprus Nicosia, Feb 23 (AFP) Feb 23, 2018 Five Turkish warships threatened to engage an Italian drillship Friday and forced it to turn back after it tried to break a two-week blockade off Cyprus, Cypriot officials said. The drillship from Italy's energy giant Eni has been halted in the island's politically sensitive waters since February 9 when Turkish warships stopped it from heading to explore in a contentious area, claiming they were conducting manoeuvres. Government spokesman Victoras Papadopoulos told the Cyprus News Agency that as the rig tried to make progress again Friday "it was blocked by five Turkish warships, and after threats to use force and engage with the drillship...it was forced to turn back". Eni chief Claudio Descalzi played down the two-week standoff, telling journalists in Italy that his company would not abandon its exploration off Cyprus but await a diplomatic solution to start operations. "We are used to the possibility of disputes. We didn't leave Libya or other countries where there had been complex situations," he said. "This is the last of my worries. We are completely calm," said the Eni chief executive. "It is very probable that in the next few days we will have to move" the ship to another country as originally planned, Descalzi said. "And then we will return (to Cyprus) to await a solution from international diplomacy." However, Cypriot Energy Minister George Lakkotrypis said that diplomatic efforts, notably by the European Union, had so far failed to break the standoff. "We left room for diplomacy, hoping that a solution could be found... Today we made one last effort... but that was not possible because of Turkey's stance," he told the private television station Sigma. The drillship has now headed to the Cypriot port of Limassol and will likely spend several days there before sailing to fulfil contractual obligations in Morocco, Lakkotrypis told the Cyprus News Agency. On Wednesday, Cyprus President Nicos Anastasiades, the Greek Cypriot leader, said Nicosia would continue its energy exploration regardless of Turkish threats. But Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has warned foreign energy companies not to "overstep the mark" in disputed waters off the coast of the divided island. Ankara has been stringent in defending the claims of Turkish Cypriots for a share of energy resources, despite Greek Cypriot assurances that they would benefit both communities. The standoff over energy resources risks further complicating stalled efforts to reunify Cyprus following the collapse of UN-brokered talks last year. Cyprus has been divided since 1974 when Turkish troops invaded and occupied the northern third of the island in response to a Greek military junta-sponsored coup. While the Greek-majority Republic of Cyprus is an EU member and internationally recognised, the breakaway Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus is recognised only by Ankara. cc-cco/hc/del Strikes pound Syria's Eastern Ghouta as world fumbles for response Douma, Syria, Feb 23 (AFP) Feb 23, 2018 Syrian regime air strikes and artillery fire hit the rebel-held enclave of Eastern Ghouta for a sixth straight day Friday killing 38 civilians, as world powers struggled to reach a UN deal to stop the carnage. More than 460 civilians, including over 100 children, have been killed in nearly a week of bombardment that has been one of the seven-year Syrian conflict's bloodiest episodes -- and rescuers were searching for more bodies buried in the rubble. Frantic diplomatic haggling delayed a vote at the United Nations Security Council on a 30-day truce as the leaders of France and Germany pleaded with Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose jets are also bombing the enclave, not to veto the plan. Regime-backer Moscow has demanded "guarantees" that the truce would be respected by rebel fighters, and Kuwait's Ambassador Mansour al-Otaibi, who holds the council presidency this month, insisted diplomats "were almost there". Amid the wrangling US President Donald Trump slammed the actions of the Syrian government and its Russian and Iranian supporters as a "humanitarian disgrace". Few of Eastern Ghouta's nearly 400,000 residents -- mostly living in a scattering of towns across the semi-rural area east of the capital -- ventured out on Friday. An AFP correspondent in Douma, the enclave's main town, saw a handful of people stealthily crossing rubble-strewn streets to assess damage to their property or look for food and water. He said rescuers carried a young boy wounded in the eye, blood trickling down his face, to one of the town's hospitals. "Will I see again?" he asked a doctor. Death has fallen from the sky relentlessly since government and allied forces intensified their bombardment on Sunday and rocket fire soon forced everybody to run for cover. Exhausted and famished families cowered in cramped and damp basements, exchanging information on the latest casualties of the government's blitz. Some of the only people braving the threat of more bombardment were medical staff in those hospitals still standing and rescuers sifting through the wreckage of levelled buildings. - Trapped bodies - Fresh strikes on Friday, by the Syria regime and its Russian ally, killed at least 38 civilians, including 11 children, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said. Rami Abdel Rahman, head of the Britain-based war monitor, said the strikes targeted different areas of Eastern Ghouta. The latest deaths brought to 468 the number of people killed -- including 108 children -- since the regime and Russia intensified their bombardment of the besieged area on February 18. More than 2,000 people have been wounded. Rebels have been firing back into the capital Damascus, where on Friday a hospital was hit, the official Syrian news agency SANA said. Diplomats at the United Nations failed to clinch Russian approval late Thursday on a resolution calling for a 30-day truce to allow for humanitarian aid and medical evacuations. They then announced that a vote would take place on Friday, but it was delayed twice amid staunch Russian resistance. Negotiations were continuing to avoid a Russia veto of the text that would establish a truce to allow humanitarian aid deliveries and medical evacuations. German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron wrote to Putin to ask him to back the ceasefire. The latest text softens language in a key provision to say that the council "demands" a ceasefire instead of "decides". It also specifies that the ceasefire will not apply to "individuals, groups, undertakings and entities associated" with Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State group. A previous version simply mentioned the two groups. World leaders have expressed outrage at the plight of civilians in Eastern Ghouta, which UN chief Antonio Guterres called "hell on earth", but have so far been powerless to halt the bloodshed. "The UN says it is concerned and calls for a ceasefire, France condemns, but they have given us nothing," said Abu Mustafa, one of the few civilians on the streets of Douma Friday morning. "Every day we have strikes, destruction. This would draw tears from a rock," said the 50-year-old, who was escorting a wounded person to hospital. - Toothless response - The enclave has been controlled by Islamist and jihadist groups since 2012. The main rebel groups in Eastern Ghouta rejected in a statement released Friday any deal that would see them or other residents relocated. "We categorically reject any initiative providing for inhabitants to leave their homes and be transferred towards any other location," they said in a letter addressed to Guterres. The area is completely surrounded by government-controlled territory and residents are unwilling or unable to flee the deadly siege. The dire images of civilian victims bleeding to death in understaffed hospitals and the scope of the urban destruction have shocked the world and drawn comparisons with the devastating 2016 battle for Aleppo. The aid community has voiced its frustration at being prevented from assisting civilians in Eastern Ghouta, which has been under government siege since 2013. "The blocking of this resolution is another failure to end human suffering in Syria, with the UN Security Council rendered impotent as this senseless war rages on," Thomas White, Syria director at the Norwegian Refugee Council, told AFP. Government forces have this month reinforced their deployment around the enclave in preparation for a ground offensive. Trump announces 'heaviest ever' sanctions on North Korea Washington, Feb 23 (AFP) Feb 23, 2018 US President Donald Trump rolled out sanctions against North Korea-linked shipping assets Friday, hailing the package as the "heaviest sanctions ever" levied on the Pyongyang regime. Trump used a speech to conservatives just outside Washington to step up his campaign of "maximum pressure" designed to force North Korea to roll back its weapons programs. "We imposed today the heaviest sanctions ever imposed on a country before," Trump claimed at the end of a lengthy campaign-style address. In light of past US embargoes, that is likely an overstatement, but Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin confirmed the sanctions covered "virtually all the ships" North Korea is "using at this moment in time." Trump had been expected to provide details of measures that target "56 vessels, shipping companies, and trade businesses," but skipped that part of his prepared remarks. "Frankly hopefully something positive can happen," he said instead. During a joint press conference with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, Trump said that sanctions were only the first action. "If the sanctions don't work, we'll have to go to phase two. Phase two may be a very rough thing," he said, without elaborating. Trump's administration is locked in a nuclear standoff with North Korea, which is trying to develop missiles that could deliver an atomic weapon to major US cities. The latest sanctions are designed to put the squeeze on North Korea's already precarious economy and fuel supply. Mnuchin said there were signs that the punitive measures were starting to have an impact, but did not elaborate. The North Korean military and broader economy depend heavily on imports of coal and oil from China and Russia. China, Pyongyang's only major ally, has steadfastly rebuffed Washington's calls for a full oil embargo -- fearing the chaotic collapse of the Pyongyang regime -- but has agreed to caps agreed at the United Nations. - Reaffirming ties with Seoul - The timing of the new measures coincides with the arrival in South Korea of Trump's daughter Ivanka. She is attending the closing ceremony of the Winter Olympics, which have taken place against the backdrop of the crisis. The 36-year-old businesswoman and now top aide to her father has been tasked with reaffirming US ties with South Korea, which have been strained over how to deal with the North. She was hosted in Seoul by President Moon Jae-in, who has long advocated talks rather than confrontation with North Korea. "Mrs. Trump delivered a personal message to President Moon from President Trump about today's North Korea related sanctions announcement at a small meeting at the Blue House," the White House said. "They also discussed the continued effort on the joint maximum pressure campaign against North Korea." South Korean officials, who sit in a capital well within range of conventional North Korea artillery, have been spooked by Trump's easy talk of military confrontation. US officials worry meanwhile that North Korea is luring Moon into talks that are designed to go nowhere. Ivanka Trump is not expected to meet North Korean officials on her trip. Optimization Are you frustrated with a slow pc or a hard disk not performing as it should? Try SLOW-PCfighter to speed up boot time on a slow PC, or try a free scan of FULL-DISKfighter to recover space on a full disk. The latest offering is DRIVERfighter to update your driver updater. Get complete PC optimization and extend the life of your PC with these must-have software tools. Cursed Fruits The Palm Oil Problem Everyone wants sustainably produced palm oil, but few are willing to pay for it. A multimedia story about greed, avarice and hope. Crisis Diplomacy The Long Road to Freedom for German Journalist Yucel Journalist Deniz Yucel was held without charges in a Turkish prison for 367 days. This is the inside story of how he survived his time in jail, tested the patience of German negotiators and ultimately forced President Erdogan to bend. London, Feb 23, 2018 (SPS) - The Moroccan authorities used, in 2017, unnecessary and excessive force against the population of Western Sahara who claimed their right to self-determination and justice, affirmed the latest annual report of Amnesty International (AI) on the situation of human rights in the world, published on Thursday. The authorities routinely used excessive and unnecessary force to disperse peaceful protests in Western Saharan cities, including Laayoune, Smara, Boujdour and Dakhla, said teh report. The document underlined that those demanding Sahrawi self-determination and calling for the release of Sahrawi prisoners were all targeted by this practice. Pointing out that in April, UN Security Council extended the mandate of the UN Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara (MINURSO) for another year without human rights monitoring. The report cites the example of Sahrawi blogger Walid El Batal who served a 10-month sentence and received a fine on trumped-up charges and that of Sahrawi activist Hamza El Ansari found guilty and sentenced to one year of prison on the basis of false accusations. (SPS) 062/SPS/APS Bir Lehlu, February 23, 2018 (SPS) - The government of the Saharawi Republic (the SADR) notes the successful conclusion of civil litigation proceedings in the High Court of South Africa to recover ownership of a cargo of phosphate rock illegally exported from the occupied area of Western Sahara. On May 1, 2017, the 55,000 tonne cargo was detained aboard the Marshall Islands registered bulk carrier NM Cherry Blossom when the ship entered South Africas Port Elizabeth. On June 15, the High Court concluded that the SADR had a prima facie claim to ownership of the cargo and directed that the claim could proceed to a trial on the merits. In July, the two companies which had mined and purported to own the cargo during its shipment to a would-be purchaser in New Zealand, Ballance Agri-Nutrients Ltd., withdrew from defending the case. A lengthy period of how the vessel charterer would recover its losses for the detention of the cargo and therefore the NM Cherry Blossom as its carrying ship then followed. In an order issued on February 23, the High Court concluded that: (1) The SADR is the owner of the whole of the cargo of phosphate presently laden on the motor vessel NM Cherry Blossom and (2) ownership in the phosphate has never lawfully vested in the Moroccan state owned companies OCP SA and Phosphates de Boucraa SA and they were, and are, not entitled to sell the phosphate to Ballance Agri-Nutrients Ltd. While it remains the policy position of the SADR government to insist upon and endeavour to have returned natural resources plundered from Western Sahara to that territory pending the completion of the Saharawi peoples right to exercise self-determination, the fact of Western Sahara being under armed occupation makes such a result impractical. With clear, and uninterrupted title to the commodity aboard the NM Cherry Blossom now assured, it is anticipated a sale of it will now take place. Emhamed Khadad, member of the leadership of Polisario stated that, The South Africa case is a part of the Saharawi peoples efforts to use international law to arrive at a just end to a vicious, illegal occupation and safeguard the right of our people to the most fundamental of human rights, self-determination. We will continue to pursue those people and corporate interests who directly plunder Western Saharas resources, and who are the knowing recipients of pillaged commodities. The Saharawi Republic is committed to the rule of law, and to successful trading relationships involving the resources of Western Sahara, both now and in the future. The result in South Africa is the part culmination of dual civil legal proceedings undertaken in May 2017. A parallel case in Panama resulted in a court-ordered detention of the Panamanian flag Ultra Innovation with a cargo of phosphate rock for Agrium Inc. in Vancouver. (In early 2018, that Canadian company merged with Potash Corporation of Saskatchewan Ltd. to create a new publicly-traded entity, Nutrien Ltd.) On 25 January 2018, Chuck Magro, Nutrien's President and CEO, affirmed that the company has an intention to end its trade in phosphate rock from Western Sahara. Nutrien is a newly formed Canadian company following the merger in January this year between PotashCorp and Agrium. Mr. Magro confirmed that notice has been given to end imports to Canada, by a stopping of the contract previously in place with Agrium, at the end of this year. The Saharawi government notes the abundant legal and reputational risks for those few purchasers of phosphate rock from occupied Western Sahara, namely the New Zealand companies Ballance Agri-Nutrients Ltd. and Ravensdown Fertiliser Co-operative Ltd., and Indias Paradeep Phosphates Ltd., the latter company in a joint venture with OCP SA. The Saharawi government further observes the operational and legal risks for vessel interests ship owners, charterers and managers in trading in and carrying natural resources from occupied Western Sahara. The complexities, cost and loss of trading opportunity resulting in the NM Cherry Blossom case, after 299 days of its cargo being under detention, are instructive in this regard. Once again, the SADR government cautions shipping interests, including time charterers, to insulate themselves and their ships from such prospective liability and compensation-attachment proceedings. It is understood that voyage charterers and managing enterprises will not always disclose such risks. Therefore, the SADR government suggests contracts between Ship Interests prohibit the carriage of resources (or any commodity) from Western Sahara. An indicated charterparty term could something like the following: Charterers are not permitted to trade this vessel to El Aauin (also known as Laayoune) and Dakhla in Western Sahara. For more than four decades, the former Spanish colony of Western Sahara has been partly occupied under armed force with its original inhabitants, the Saharawi people, denied the opportunity to exercise their right of self-determination. This period has seen the continuing large-scale plunder of natural resources including phosphate mineral rock, the fishery of the Canary Current Large Marine Ecosystem, and sand aggregates. The illegal sale and export of such resources, confirmed as such most recently by the High Court of South Africa, is contrary to the fundamental principle of international law which assures the Saharawi people permanent sovereignty to their natural resources, and is a violation of international humanitarian law defined in the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 and the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. The would-be purchase of such resources has no certainty of right or enforceable title to them. # # # For additional information and media contact: Mr. Kamal Fadel Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic representative for Australia and New Zealand Senior Executive, SADR Petroleum and Mining Authority T: + 61 416335197 E: kfadel@sadroilandgas.com (SPS) 062/SPS The visit, which involves members of the European Council of Young Farmers (CEJA), will see young farmers from Europe and the UK meet to debate and establish the next generations position on Brexit. The two-day event, supported by Defra, Massey Fergusson and the Crop Protection Association, will involve workshops, a tour of Squab Hall an AHDB monitor farm in Warwickshire and conclude with a crucial seminar called Brexit and Beyond. NFYFC and the NFU share joint-membership of CEJA, and with policy and trade changes imminent, opportunities and collaboration for next generation farmers both at home and in Europe are rife for discussion. CEJA s President Jannes Maes said: In these times of change, it is of paramount importance that we keep an open dialogue among young and future farmers across Europe. British young farmers have been longstanding and valued members of CEJA and we look forward to continuing this fruitful collaboration, regardless of what Brexit might bring. The bid to host the event was approved by the NFYFC Council, the NFU and CEJA last year and NFYFC Chairman Lynsey Martin said it was essential to get young farmers talking. Collaboration and forward-thinking discussions with European young farmers are important during this time of change. Our CEJA membership has stood the next generation in good stead for Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) considerations and we relish mutual support during the consultation and implementation of a British agricultural policy. Brexit is as much of a concern for European young farmers as it is for us, so this is a great opportunity for scene-setting, debate and discussion. John Wynne Davies, Ian Atkinson, Richard Barrow and William Alexander were all recognised for completing Certificates of Higher Education in Professional Studies for Livestock Market Operations and Management, after spending four years working towards the qualification while in full-time employment. Mr Davies, 30, who lives on the family farm with his wife and daughter in Cilcain, North East Wales, celebrated double success as he topped the class again and secured the award for the highest scoring final year student. Wynne, who has been with Mold and Llanrwst based J Bradburne Price & Co for eight years, matched last years achievement, and in doing so picked up the LAA Golden Gavel, awarded to the top graduating student. Commenting on the award success, Wynne said; The course provides an excellent opportunity to understand the wider management of livestock markets, and really considers where markets fit within the ever-complex food supply chain. It made me consider the challenges of the future and how markets can try and adapt to deal with considerable changes likely to happen in the industry. Echoing Wynnes comments, Ian Atkinson of North West Auctions said, Its a very interesting course, it gives a really thorough insight into both the managerial and animal welfare side of the auctioneering industry. Like Wynne and Ian, fellow graduate Richard Barrow, auctioneer with Voyce Pullin in Cirencester, comes from a farming background. Richard is a local farmer and livestock hauliers son, and the course and his aptitude has enabled him to gain a tremendous amount of practical knowledge of the livestock auctioneering industry. An exception to the rule, Will Alexander of R. Turner & Sons, operating out of Bentham Auction Mart, is not from a farming background, but has always sought a career in the industry. Following the successful completion of a four-year BSc degree in agriculture at Harper Adams, he progressed from fieldsman to auctioneer before taking the market operations and management course. Harper Adams and the LAA have developed a strong course covering all aspects of livestock auctioneering, said Will. The course has not only taught me specifics within the industry, but has also introduced me to other young auctioneers from throughout the UK, from which valuable friendships and working relationships have been formed. Wynne Davies agreed with these sentiments, stating, The course provides an excellent platform to network and build friendships with like-minded individuals within the profession, from across the country. This enables us to contact and help each other when faced with different challenges and opportunities. Concluding, Will Alexander said, The LAA is great at supporting new auctioneers and I would thoroughly recommend the course to anyone starting in the industry. Daniel Slade of Thame Farmers Market was also recognised on the day, as he was awarded the Dick Harrison Trust plaque for the top first year student. Alessandro Maritano, New Holland Vice President EMEA, received the award at a ceremony at the FIMA exhibition in Zaragoza, Spain: It is an honour for us to receive this award, especially because it reflects the recognition of both industry experts and farmers for the new T7 tractor, which introduces new features developed to ease the operators life. King Philip VI of Spain visits the New Holland stand New Holland also received the visit of King Philip VI of Spain, who was welcomed on the stand by Carlo Lambro, New Holland Brand President, Alessandro Maritano, and Riccardo Angelini, New Holland Business Director, Spain. The Spanish monarch took the time to view the brands extensive display, showing an interest for the wide range of products on show, and in particular the Dynamic Command transmission technology featured on the T6 DC. Carlo Lambro described to King Philip New Hollands activities and the role the brand has played in the mechanisation of Spains agriculture in its long history with this country. He explained the advantages of belonging to CNH Industrial, a global leader in the capital goods sector that puts its considerable resources to the service of its brands, investing in research and development, cutting-edge manufacturing technologies and processes, and advanced logistics. He also mentioned the wider presence of the Group in Spain, with its manufacturing plants and R&D facilities in Madrid and Valladolid. The T7.225 Tractor de Espana 2018 takes control and comfort to a new level The award-winning model is the biggest of five models making up New Hollands new T7 standard wheel base range. It features the exclusive Auto Command continuously variable transmission that combines ease of use and smooth operation with the highest productivity in the market. The unique new CustomSteer feature introduces variable ratio steering concept to the T7, which results in effortless manoeuvring. These features come with ECOBlue HI-eSCR Nef engines that are fully compliant with the even more stringent Tier 4B emission standards and develop between 175-315hp(CV) whilst maintaining the outstanding fuel economy that is a hallmark of the T7 range. The T7.225 is the ideal tractor for the Hay and Forage professional. Shares is the leading weekly publication for retail investors. It is packed with investment ideas, news and educational material to help build and run portfolios and get more from your money. Shares puts on free Investor Events throughout the year across the country. They provide an opportunity for investors to learn more about companies on the stock market and hear from a range of investment experts including fund managers and Shares journalists. A project which aims to make downtown Sidney more attractive and drive downtown business was reviewed by members of the Cheyenne County Chamber of Commerce Tuesday. Sidney's city council chambers were filled to capacity by local residents wanting to hear more about the idea behind the Hickory Square project, which would develop a park-like area on 10th Avenue from the mid-block alley north to Hickory Street. Under the plan, both the alley and Hickory St. would remain open unless an event requires the temporary closure of the alley. Hickory Square has been a concept in the making since 2005. A part of that concept, a string of historical markers, a flag pole, and a string of evergreen trees, has been in place for several years along the north side of Hickory St. As hardscape plans have been formed, uses for the area have been demonstrated through a series of outdoor concerts, a farmer's market, plus Halloween and Christmas celebrations. The area was also central to Sidney's Sesquicentennial Celebration last summer. But as plans for more permanent hardscape features have come forth, particularly over the past year, so have questions about the project, its features, costs, and the wisdom of building it. Tuesday's meeting, the first where organizers could focus on emerging details without being part of another board meeting, allowed project details to be explained and questioned without worry of time. The plan calls for a central "grass" area, with a gas fire pit at the south end by the alley, a splash pad, and on the north end a stage area that will also house a unisex bathroom. Picnic tables will also be scattered across the area. Greg Huck, Chamber board member, told those gathered the idea was born out of a question: "how can we keep our community thriving and growing?" He outlined the success of similar projects, such as Lincoln's Haymarket Square, where businesses came and grew with the developed downtown project. As part of the discussion, Huck and Andrew Sherman, another board member, said such development is something companies look for in communities. "They look for areas that draw people," Sherman said. "It's about quality of life." As Huck outlined organizers' belief of the project's benefit to business, he said there is already evidence of success. He said during last summer's Downtown Sounds concerts, businesses that were open "were full" with customers from the event. And that, Huck said, shows how downtown businesses will directly benefit. He also said that is the answer to one recent question on the downtown location. Some have suggested improvements to the park, but said while the project could work in the park, "the idea is to draw people downtown and to businesses there." He said while people might enjoy park activities, there is a smaller likelihood they would go downtown afterward. With Hickory Square activities, customers are already in the vicinity of businesses. He also addressed another often-heard question that of "why now?" for the project's timing. "I say, why not now" Huck answered. He said more than ever Sidney businesses need to work to get an advantage, "and this is the time to build and grow." Above all concerns addressed, Huck and other committee members spent time focusing on project finances. He told those gathered the project, with costs estimated between $650,000 and $750,000, will be built using grant funds and donations. None of the building costs would be financed through city or county coffers. "We pay enough taxes," Huck said. "We don't need any more." Huck said there are grant funds available that are directly dedicated to civic improvements such as Hickory Square. Most, he said, are available through private companies, leaving tax dollars of any kind, even state and federal, out of the mix. Examples are grants from Union Pacific Railroad, Great Western Bank and State Farm, "and they are for just this type of thing." There also local funds available for use LB840 funds from a sales tax approved by Sidney voters a portion of which is earmarked for downtown and civic improvement. One resident made a query about costs that could be incurred for maintenance and repairs. Ensuing discussion brought out the possibility of money being set aside from the fundraising process for those needs. Along those lines, Jack Baker from Baker and Associates, which designed the project, said for the "grass" area, there are artificial grass options that would eliminate the cost of mowing. He said artificial grasses do have to be cooled in the summer to prevent it from melting, but that can be accomplished with the area's water features and reclaimed water on site. While the project is Chamber driven, President Denise Wilkinson said it will still need to be accomplished in cooperation with the city, which owns the property. She reiterated no city funds will go toward the project, although the project may benefit from electrical work the city will soon be doing in the area. The city is removing power poles in the alleys and if the timing works right, Hickory Square's needs can be fulfilled without having to come back and re-do access work. Huck and Wilkinson said area uses will likely still be similar for some events, which see the entire block closed off. They believe the facilities will likely be available for other groups, similar to other city facilities like the shelter house and other areas. Funerals are taking place of students caught in the aim of another gunman. The location is Florida. The suspect is a recent student who was expelled for behavior issues, a 19-year-old who by news reports had an assortment of firearms. The sober reality is we are not living in our parents and grandparents time when if two boys had an issue a school yard fight ensued, then ended. In recent years, we have young people with access to guns who created havoc and destruction that shouldn't have happened; not because we are the United States but because some people have apparently lost the value of human life. The public debate quickly escalates to guns are too readily available, specifically those labeled as assault rifles. Debate includes the need for the Second Amendment in the 21st century, does the Second Amendment need tighter restrictions and some have asked if schools should allow all or specific staff members to conceal carry. The critics there question why a school district would buy guns when it won't fully fund a teacher's classroom supplies. Schools and many places of public interaction such as shopping centers, churches, sporting complexes, are still what strategists would call soft targets. They are places virtually unprotected, almost comfortable in their complacency. There are exceptions, but for the number of schools and colleges where assaults have occurred, and how easily the assailants have gained entry, the definition fits. The reality is curing our ills, that is stopping the number of mass shootings will not be done in a day. We didn't get here in a day and it is foolish to think we can correct course in a day. In the meantime, we need to consider our public places and make them less soft and vulnerable. Staff and students at schools and universities need to recognize who belongs and who may not, and how to react if a stranger is present. Schools need to have training and plans in place for prevention and reaction to an incident. Taking away guns by itself is not the answer. People have already proven when death and destruction is the focus, they will find a way. It is a sober wakeup call we get too often. We are responsible for our own security individually and as a society. Sidney and Cheyenne County is blessed with a level of quiet safety many communities have never experienced. However, if we sit on our laurels believing nothing can happen, then we become a soft target of our own design. The argument is right: there is no reason communities should be burying children because of an angry gunman. The lingering question is how do we prevent it without turning society into a penal colony of sorts. Likely the best course of action is threefold, constantly monitored building security, reviewing the reporting agencies and researching what causes a person to seek credit for high body count, and how to correct it. Trip Report Play by the rules. Follow the laws. Getting screwed in Nepal by by johnkelley Friday February 23, 2018 6:36am It started out ok. An 8 hour bus ride to Aaraghut. Started going south first thing next morning. The guide was a complete joke. He was supposed to carry around 10 kilos like we had agreeded on before we left Kathmandu. After spending a day on the bus he changed his mind. He made it clear he wasnt carrying anything. Credit: johnkelley Ramesh and I laughed and told him wed pack it all. I told the so called guide no f*#king way when he tried to give his tiny 5kg load to Ramesh. Up the trail we went. The guide decided to run ahead to get us some rooms at this friends lodge. The place was nothing special. Pretty much like every other lodge/tea house in Nepal. I was shocked at the bill the next morning. Talk about paying 1st world prices for 3rd world accommodations. It was almost x4 what Ive ever paid anywhere else.. That was the last time the guide decided where we stayed. The next four days passed by quick enough. We reached the last checkpoint after 5 long days of trekking. Even though the guide was supposed to accompany me to base camp he decided we really didnt need him anymore. I didnt argue and was glad to see him leave the next morning. Ramesh and I headed up to the village of Chhule. The locals in Chhule, in upper Tsum Valley, were not happy to see us. We were denied access to the peak. The village leader told us there was going to be a meeting that evening to decide if we could continue to base camp or not. The meeting was a f*#king joke. Ramesh and I sat there quietly while everyone else there got drunk on Roxy. After about 3 hours they decided we could not go any further. They didnt care about my permits. We spent the night in some guys house. He was an aggressive drunk. Eventually he blacked out. Neither of us slept that night. The next morning we walked across the bridge to the neighboring village of Nili to make some phone calls. The Ministry of Tourism passed the problem off onto the Manaslu Conservation Area Project. MCAP. Some MCAP official talked to the village leader on the phone for awhile trying to plead our case for us but the village leaders answer was still a no. We were informed that they would use the knife if we went against their decision. We headed back to Kathmandu right after that. Credit: johnkelley All in all with permit fees, guide wages, porter wages, lodging accommodations, and bus tickets it was a waste of about $2,800 and 2 weeks of my time. Id recommend avoiding the entire Manaslu area and especially Tsum Valley The title pretty much says it all. I had a permit for Mt. Pashwou in Tsum Valley from the ministry of Tourism in Kathmandu. I followed all of their ridiculous rules. I employed a licensed guide who was a complete joke but is required by law in certain restricted areas. I also had Ramesh with me to porter as usual. Ramesh is always awesome btw. Im really glad he was around.It started out ok. An 8 hour bus ride to Aaraghut. Started going south first thing next morning. The guide was a complete joke. He was supposed to carry around 10 kilos like we had agreeded on before we left Kathmandu. After spending a day on the bus he changed his mind. He made it clear he wasnt carrying anything.(The guides pack, Rameshs pack, and my pack)Ramesh and I laughed and told him wed pack it all. I told the so called guide no f*#king way when he tried to give his tiny 5kg load to Ramesh. Up the trail we went. The guide decided to run ahead to get us some rooms at this friends lodge. The place was nothing special. Pretty much like every other lodge/tea house in Nepal. I was shocked at the bill the next morning. Talk about paying 1st world prices for 3rd world accommodations. It was almost x4 what Ive ever paid anywhere else.. That was the last time the guide decided where we stayed.The next four days passed by quick enough. We reached the last checkpoint after 5 long days of trekking. Even though the guide was supposed to accompany me to base camp he decided we really didnt need him anymore. I didnt argue and was glad to see him leave the next morning.Ramesh and I headed up to the village of Chhule. The locals in Chhule, in upper Tsum Valley, were not happy to see us. We were denied access to the peak. The village leader told us there was going to be a meeting that evening to decide if we could continue to base camp or not. The meeting was a f*#king joke. Ramesh and I sat there quietly while everyone else there got drunk on Roxy. After about 3 hours they decided we could not go any further. They didnt care about my permits.We spent the night in some guys house. He was an aggressive drunk. Eventually he blacked out. Neither of us slept that night. The next morning we walked across the bridge to the neighboring village of Nili to make some phone calls. The Ministry of Tourism passed the problem off onto the Manaslu Conservation Area Project. MCAP. Some MCAP official talked to the village leader on the phone for awhile trying to plead our case for us but the village leaders answer was still a no. We were informed that they would use the knife if we went against their decision. We headed back to Kathmandu right after that.(The village meeting)All in all with permit fees, guide wages, porter wages, lodging accommodations, and bus tickets it was a waste of about $2,800 and 2 weeks of my time.Id recommend avoiding the entire Manaslu area and especially Tsum Valley Trip Report Views: 2,405 johnkelley About the Author johnkelley is a climber from Anchorage Alaska. Comments Stewart Johnson Gym climber top lake Feb 23, 2018 - 06:45am PT im sure they would let u climb if you coughed up 500$ more johnkelley climber Anchorage Alaska Author's Reply Feb 23, 2018 - 06:49am PT Seemed pretty unlikely johnkelley climber Anchorage Alaska Author's Reply Feb 23, 2018 - 06:56am PT The thing that pissed me off the most is that an MCAP official in the Filim office told me, on the way back down, that Chhule was a very dangerous place. That there had been some recent problems there. Mostly people being robbed. Nepal has done a good job of keeping this quiet. They sure didnt mention it on the way there micronut Trad climber Fresno/Clovis, ca Feb 23, 2018 - 08:34am PT John what a bummer man. I love Nepal and I've been there many times and look back fondly on my time there. I can't imagine what that must of been like spending all the time and effort to get over there which is not easy in itself, let alone spend the time walking that deep in the mountains only to get turned around. Super bummed for you. Corruption, bureaucracy and idiocy like this really chaps my hide. Thanks so much for sharing. I always love hearing about your travels and your adventures. Stay strong. Stay frosty out there. Scott Reilly Mountain climber The Other Monrovia- CA Feb 23, 2018 - 08:35am PT Guess the Tsum Valley powers-that-be didnt get the memo about tourism being the answer. Texplorer Trad climber Sacramento Feb 23, 2018 - 08:38am PT I remember talking to Mica Dash (RIP) years ago about making trips like this to the region. He said that they planned on the guide not doing anything AND requiring food to be made. So, that had to hire extra porters to carry the guide's stuff and a cook to prepare meals for him. Sounded like they had learned the way you make things happen there is to really plan on greasing the skids. Success required knowing that this was just part of the expense like your gear and plane ticket. COT climber Door Number 3 Feb 23, 2018 - 09:49am PT Bummer! I have been in the same position in a number of countries in Asia. One time in Western China I saw poster on the wall of guest house promoting the local "Mountaineering Association" (the official organization the sells permits and such). It was an image of mine that they had "stolen" from my website of a peak I had previously poached in China. Not sure where the Karma was being directed in that incident :) Don Paul Social climber Washington DC Feb 23, 2018 - 01:06pm PT super bummer - try Pakistan next time divad Trad climber wmass Feb 23, 2018 - 01:20pm PT I wouldn't pay $2,800 anywhere to get screwed. Sorry to hear of your bad experience, but tfpu. norm larson climber wilson, wyoming Feb 23, 2018 - 03:41pm PT Sorry to hear this John. I was looking forward to your next trip report. I know its lame but sometimes things happen the way they were meant to. The waste of the money is one thing, having a bad experience in Nepal sucks though, usually so much positive energy. I had it happen there one one time too and I still cant make sense of it. Life goes on. thebravecowboy climber The Good Places Feb 23, 2018 - 03:47pm PT a furtherance of the proof for bandit style. Thanks for sharing with us in the armchairs, John norm larson climber wilson, wyoming Feb 23, 2018 - 04:04pm PT I agree with ya cowboy. Underground has its merits. Maybe not if the locals dont approve though. Its their home and the peaks are just peaks. You can always find another one. Mike. climber Feb 23, 2018 - 04:13pm PT What a pisser. Sorry to hear the good guys came in last. TFPU. neebee Social climber calif/texas Feb 23, 2018 - 04:19pm PT hey there say, johnkelly... whewww... thanks for sharing and warning others... :) johnkelley climber Anchorage Alaska Author's Reply Feb 24, 2018 - 01:31am PT Norm and Cowboy I agree underground isnt a bad way to go but it wouldnt work here. The locals knew we were coming thanks to cell phones. The villagers to the south called to let them know we were headed up. They were sitting on the trail a little south of the village waiting for us to arrive. We didnt tell anyone there I was planning to climb but the size of the packs kinda gave it away. People would ask and we would tell them just trekking. They would look at the packs, laugh, and say yeah right. The village of Chhule is right at the base of the approach to base camp too. No way to avoid it really. Maybe one day, when I decide not to return to Nepal, ill do a dozen or so TRs of undocumented FAs... donini Trad climber Ouray, Colorado Feb 24, 2018 - 03:10am PT What a clusterf*#k....time to move on to the Karakoram. johnkelley climber Anchorage Alaska Author's Reply Feb 24, 2018 - 04:34am PT Looks like you may be right. Whats accessible in the Karakoram from December-February? Since I live in Alaska I HAVE to work all summer.... jgfox Trad climber Long Beach, CA Feb 25, 2018 - 06:11pm PT You almost had me hooked to go there when you posted the trip costs in your other thread. Next time, why don't you say you are one of the Whittakers and you are scouting a possible RMI trip. Sula Trad climber Pennsylvania Feb 25, 2018 - 07:15pm PT ... underground isnt a bad way to go but it wouldnt work here. The locals knew we were coming thanks to cell phones. A technological trend likely to accelerate, making the future (sadly) a hard place for bandit climbers to prosper. phylp Trad climber Upland, CA Feb 25, 2018 - 08:39pm PT Sorry to hear this. Were the villagers waiting for you to make a monetary offering to climb the peak, or did it have some religious significance to them? They probably resent the powers back in Kat getting money for their mountain and they get none of it. johnkelley climber Anchorage Alaska Author's Reply Feb 25, 2018 - 09:27pm PT It was because of religious reasons. We were told that around 25 years ago some non Buddhist sciencest showed up to look into building a hydro plant for the village. They hiked into the upper valley to check out the hydro potential. After the foreigners left there was an earthquake generated landslide. The village of Chhule believes it was caused because people who followed a different religion were there and it upset their god. And the village of Chhule does get money from The Manaslu Area Conservation Project. MCAP is funded directly from tourist dollars through the Ministry of Tourism. In the photo of their meeting above you can see the money being split up among them justthemaid climber Jim Henson's Basement Feb 26, 2018 - 05:56am PT Such a downer to hear about stuff like this. So sorry the trip got screwed. It is very frustrating when you try to do the right thing to no avail. I guess the only thing you can really do is post on social media and try to keep others from ending up in the same situation. Time and money are obviously going to be better spent visiting regions that aren't so adverse to tourists. phylp Trad climber Upland, CA Feb 26, 2018 - 08:10am PT Thank you for the explanation, John Kelley. My husband is headed back there for his third trip next week. He loves the country and the people. He has only had good experiences, is always with the same guide. But he only goes for trekking, not alpinism. johnkelley climber Anchorage Alaska Author's Reply Feb 26, 2018 - 08:22am PT King Tut - Is Alaska as good? scotty vincik climber up north, these days Feb 26, 2018 - 09:15am PT That sucks, John. The Karakoram is amazing, as are the people of Pakistan. Well, most of them, there are definitely places to avoid. Hunza Valley is particularily appealing, with a lot of cool sh#t to climb. The Hushe Valley as well. It is pretty much a summer place, though. I am looking forward to flying paragliders there soon, I hope. You're becoming one of the more accomplished Himalayan climbers. Psyched for you.Sorry you got f*#ked. The Gibraltar government has just introduced a Lasting Powers of Attorney and Capacity Bill to give people the confidence of knowing that their wishes will be respected and protected if they lose the mental capacity to make decisions for themselves in the future. The Bill was passed unanimously by Parliament. Once the law comes into force, individuals in Gibraltar who are over the age of 18, while they have mental capacity, will be able to record a statement of their wishes regarding financial and health matters, and this will be registered at the Supreme Court Registry. Under this Bill, they can grant a Lasting Power of Attorney to a specific person whom they trust, who will then have the authority to act on their behalf if they lose mental capacity in future. It means the attorney can make decisions about everything from everyday matters to serious life-changing decisions such as whether to move into a care home or have major surgery. People can also register their preference regarding medical treatment, for example by stipulating their refusal to undergo certain types of treatment in the future, in case when the time comes they are unable to express that refusal themselves. The new law carries safeguards to prevent it being abused, and new criminal offences have been created to deter people who have been appointed as attorneys from intentionally or recklessly ill-treating or neglecting the person they are empowered to represent. Talking about the new Bill this week, the Minister for Health, Care and Justice, Neil Costa, said: Persons living, amongst other things, with mental disorders, who no longer have the mental capacity to express their wishes, should be able to receive such care and treatment as they need and want. It is this second part which is so crucial. A person has the right to choose what may be done with their body or their mind in the event that they lose their mental capacity in the future. The Act is recognition of a person's autonomy and their right to make choices and be protected. The Junta de Andalucia, responsible for healthcare across the region, has given its backing to proposals for a new public hospital in Malaga. Regional Health minister Marina Alvarez announced on Monday that the Junta would push ahead with the project after meetings with healthcare experts who have spent the past year assessing the area's needs and considering possible sites for new facilities. The project which they have settled on is an 800-bed hospital in Malaga, on the land behind the existing maternity and children's hospital, where the La Noria social centre, the nursery school run by the provincial government, the Casa Ronald McDonald centre for family members of sick children and the Virgen de la Esperanza centre for the physically disabled currently stand. Alvarez described the project, which is expected to cost 230 million euros, as innovative and good as it would be at the cutting edge of healthcare provision, with the latest technology and capacities to train new staff and carry out research. She also said that it would be given top priority given the current needs of the city and its projected growth. This is the hospital that Malaga needs - of a high level, with the latest technology, so that we can go into the future with certain guarantees as we're faced with a growing and ageing population, said healthcare sources consulted by SUR. Ready by 2024 Marina Alvarez said on Monday that the hospital could be completed by 2024. It is expected that the contract to draw up the plans for the construction will be put out to tender before the end of the year and that construction could start in 2019, with a timescale of five years. However, the provincial government (Diputacion, headed by the conservative PP party) owns the land where the new hospital will be built and the Health Department (part of the Junta, run by the social PSOE) is yet to negotiate its use. Meanwhile other improvements would be made the existing health facilities, explained Alvarez, including the opening of a stroke unit and the expansion and improvement of the A&E department at Carlos Haya hospital (works will go out to tender next month), the purchase of five new MRI scanners and improvements to primary care. Cutting waiting times is also a priority, said Alvarez, who recognised that many healthcare professionals says that the current infrastructure is insufficient. Reasonable stipulations Sources from the Diputacion reported on Monday that they had not yet received an official request from the Junta, but provincial president Elias Bendodo formally responded on Tuesday, saying he would be willing to give up the land, offering his complete collaboration in the project. He also went as far as offering a vote of confidence to regional Health minister Marina Alvarez. Bendodo, however, insisted that permission for use of the land would only be given should the Diputacion's conditions be met. He called for an urgent action plan to be implemented as soon as possible to attend to Malaga's current healthcare shortfalls; the construction of a CHARE high-resolution hospital on the eastern side of the city in the El Palo district; and that the current services on the planned site are relocated elsewhere in the province and not scrapped. The provincial chief said that these conditions were not unreasonable. We're not asking for anything that is out of this world, he said, and insisted that the stance over the CHARE would not alter. He said that they could not accept a small change to the health centre in El Palo, with reference to Alvarez's proposal the previous day. She insisted that a CHARE was not necessary but that improvements could be made to the existing building, by adding emergency and specialist departments and facilities to carry out diagnostic tests. Bendodo insisted that rejection of this was not a matter of politics: It's not the PP or the Diputacion saying this, health professionals and the College of Physicians all say that it is crucial to have another centre in this area. The Cultural Commission of the Spanish Senate has approved a move to push for the inclusion of the famous 'espeto' (sardines threaded onto a skewer) onto the Unesco list of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. We want to protect and improve awareness of this element which forms a part of our cultural identity and unites the people of Malaga. It is vital that we get the espeto included in the Unesco list, explained senator Manuel Marmolejo. As Marmolejo explains, the espeto is a typical dish along the Malaga coast, associated with the towns with seafaring traditions, although it's fair to say that Malaga can lay claim to it. The recipe for an espeto is just fish, salt, cane and fire and its inclusion in the Unesco list would recognise it internationally as a unifying project that is part of the cultural identity of Malaga and that unites all Malaga. It is vital that we achieve it, said the senator. The espeto would join a long list of arts and traditions such as flamenco, the 'castells' (human towers), the 'silbo gomera' (a way of communicating by whistles used by inhabitants of La Gomera in the Canaries) and many other cultural elements unique to Spain. Jimera de Libar is in the Guadiaro Valley in the Serrania de Ronda; it may be small, with only 400 inhabitants, but the surrounding countryside is spectacular, not least because it is home to 20 different types of wild orchid. Until now, very few people other than local residents have been able to enjoy them, but the council has recently set up seven walking routes to make it easier to see these beautiful treasures of nature, which have existed for 20 or 30 million years. ORCHID WALKS Species. Principal species in the spring: Ophrys apifera, Ophrys bombyliflora, Ophrys speculum, Ophrys scolopax, Ophrys lutea, Serapias parviflora, Anacamptis pyramidalis, Limodorum abortivum, Neotinea maculata, Orchis italica... Starting point. The routes can be joined from the village. Length. Between 500 metres and two kilometres. Orchids are normally associated with exotic countries, but nobody from this region needs to go to Madagascar, Thailand or Peru to discover them. Manuel Becerra, the author of a guide to the wild orchids of Andalucia ('Guia de campo de las orquideas silvestres de Andalucia') says this area contains 45 per cent of all the species catalogued in Spain and 60 per cent of all those in Andalucia. Orchids belong to the Orchidaceae family, which contains 850 genera and about 20,000 species, although different experts put the figure between 17,000 to 30,000. Orchids have spread over most of the planet, apart from the Poles and deserts. In our region you can see as many as 20 species at different times, says the mayor of Jimera, Francisco Javier Lobo. None of the orchid routes are more than two kilometres long. They are accessible and unchallenging, have been officially approved and make it easy to photograph these beautiful, highly protected orchids. You can join the routes from the village, because they are all in the surrounding area, he explains. The routes are called: La Vereda del Tesoro, La Trocha, La Canada del Olivar, La Cuesta de la Barca, La Dehesa, El Camino de Atajate and La Vereda de las Huertas. If someone is doing the Great Trail of Malaga (Gran Senda) or the Fray Leopoldo route, they could make a diversion and see our wild orchids, says the mayor. The idea of creating the orchid walks came from a local resident, Pedro Sanchez, and the Saepo Association of nearby Cortes de la Frontera. Pedro is very interested in wild orchids and has studied them. He and the Saepo Association suggested that we make it easier for people to see them. So we set to work, he says. Attracting tourism Jimera de Libar lies within the Sierra de Grazalema natural park, but is in Malaga province. The council is interested in attracting more tourism to boost the local economy. There are no other orchid routes like ours in Malaga province, so we are sure they will bring many more people to Jimera, says Francisco Javier Lobo. A leading member of a radical separatist party in Catalonia failed to appear before a judge at Madrid's Supreme Court on Wednesday, where she is being investigated for alleged offences including sedition and rebellion in last autumn's declaration of independence by secessionist Catalan politicians. Anna Gabriel, of the left-wing CUP party, had moved to Switzerland some days before her expected court appearance in an attempt to avoid possible detention in a move that mirrors ex-president of Catalonia, Carles Puigdemont, who is still in Belgium. As with Belgium, Switzerland doesn't recognise the same crime of rebellion as Spain does so extradition will not be possible, say experts on the law there. In response to Gabriel's move and the Swiss response, the Supreme Court's investigating judge, Pedro Llarena, has issued a detention order which is only valid if the former regional MP returns to Spain. Speaking from Geneva this week with her lawyer, Gabriel said she realised that she couldn't return and that it was a big change in her life. Amnesty International Meanwhile Amnesty International has criticised Spain for what it calls excessive force in trying to prevent the illegal independence referendum in Catalonia on 1 October last year. The inevitable has finally occurred. On Monday, after months of machinations within the EU's most obscure institutions, Spain's economy minister Luis de Guindos was named as the next Vice President of the European Central Bank (ECB). The perpetually tired-looking De Guindos was long-tipped as the favourite for the position and ascended when his only rival, Ireland's Philip Lane, stepped aside. In May, he will relinquish his role in the Spanish government and step into the shoes of Portugal's Vitor Constancio, thus taking one of the most important monetary roles in the European Union. You might well wonder how he got the job. The outgoing Spanish economy minister will take second place to Italian president Mariano Draghi on the six-member Executive Board, who are chosen from among persons of recognised standing and professional experience in monetary or banking matters by common accord of the Member States, according to the ECB statute. What the statute doesn't mention is the role played by favours in the selection process; certainly, in De Guindos' case, these were at least as important as his experience in monetary or banking matters. The Spanish economy minister gained Germany's vote on one condition: that Spain back the German candidate for the presidency of the ECB, which becomes vacant when Draghi's term expires late next year. France also backed De Guindos, saying that he possesses the relevant experience and personal merits for the role. Anything else? Oh, yes: Spain will vote for Paris as the next base of the European Banking Authority. De Guindos - who worked for Lehman Brothers and BMN before moving into politics - also received Portugal's blessing, in return for Spain having backed Mario Centeno as president of the eurozone's finance ministers, a role the Portuguese duly took up last month. Italy was one of the few countries to oppose the Spaniard, thus taking sweet revenge for Spain not endorsing Milan's bid to be the new base for the European Medicine Agency. It's all politics at the ECB. The Spanish minister clearly can't wait to leave his current role. In the spring, De Guindos will move from his office in Madrid to one in the ECB's glinting skyscraper in Frankfurt - the EU equivalent of a book-lined study in an ancient English university. He recently said in an interview that his six years as economy minister in Mariano Rajoy's conservative government have felt like 60. His successor will take up a challenging portfolio. This year, Spain maintained 8th place in Bloomberg's ranking of the world's most miserable economies, in part based on an unemployment rate of 17%. And Rajoy's minority government is hamstrung in congress, unable to do anything without the support of hostile parties. Whoever replaces De Guindos is in for a hell of a sixty years. Following the success of last year's edition, Torremolinos is gearing up for its spectacular Drag Queen Gala, which will take place on Saturday 3 March. The flamboyant extravaganza will be held in Plaza La Nogalera from 8.30pm until midnight and will present more than 20 outrageously attired drag artistes. The drag queens, which will come from all over Spain, will be competing in three different categories and the winner of each will be invited to participate in the town's Gay Pride parade in June. There is a cash incentive also, with prizes of between 250 and 1,200 euros. The jury, composed of professionals related to the fashion industry in Torremolinos, will select the winners based on originality, imagination and the ease and grace with which the drag queen is able to walk in their outfit. Last year's event, which attracted over 4,000 people, presented some of the gaudiest costumes imaginable and this year promises to be equally as spectacular. Lacquered wigs, shocking make-up, ostentatious costumes and fast-fire, brazen humour is certain to make this a night to remember. The event, which is organised by the Gay Traders Association of Torremolinos (ACOGAT) and the town hall, will be hosted by the outrageous drag artiste, Kelly Rollers. Anthony Saccone TOWN OF ONONDAGA, N.Y. -- Baylie Rose picked up her boyfriend early Friday from his overnight shift at FedEx, troopers said. Then, Rose and her boyfriend headed to Onondaga Community College to drop off a friend, troopers said. But they did not make it to the college. An SUV drove into the Onondaga Road and Onondaga Boulevard intersection around 3:40 a.m. and T-boned Rose's Chevrolet Impala, said Trooper Jack Keller, of the New York State Police. The car rolled over, coming to a stop on its roof on the side of the tree-lined road. Rose and her two passengers, Michael S. Walker and Samra Osmanovic, died at the scene. They were only 5 minutes away from OCC. The driver of the GMC Arcadia, Anthony Saccone, 30, of 235 Gulf Road, was drunk at the time of the crash, Keller said. Witnesses saw him running away from the crumpled vehicles, he said. The three people who died had ties to OCC, said Roger Mirabito, a college spokesman: Osmanovic, 20, was majoring in human services. Walker, 18, was studying business administration. Rose, 19, was a former OCC student. Samra Osmanovic There is no evidence that the three had been drinking, Keller said. "We have a tragedy here of three young lives that were taken," he said. The SUV -- which appears to be a rental car -- caught on fire after the crash, Keller said. Investigators are working to determine how Saccone got the vehicle or where he was before the accident. Troopers and K-9s searched in the dark for Saccone. The dogs tracked him less than a quarter a mile away to his his mother's home on Onondaga Boulevard , Keller said. Saccone was arrested and charged with leaving the scene of a fatal crash and driving while intoxicated. Depending on what toxicology tests reveal, Saccone could face more serious charges, said Onondaga County District Attorney William Fitzpatrick. A stretch of Onondaga Boulevard was shut down for nine hours while troopers investigated the crash. A fence of yellow crime scene tape roped off the intersection and one nearby driveway. Onondaga, N.Y. -- The director of the Onondaga Community College residence hall where car crash victim Samra Osmanovic lived described her Friday as a "very energetic" person who was always trying to help her fellow students. Samra Osmanovic "I knew her quite a bit," residence hall director O.J. Shepard said. "She was very kind, very energetic. There wasn't a time when Samra wasn't smiling." Osmanovic, 20, was one of three people killed early Friday morning when their car was struck by an SUV that police said was driven by a drunk driver. The two other victims were OCC freshman Michael Walker, 18, and the car's driver, Baylie Rose, 19, a former OCC student. State police have charged the driver of the SUV, Anthony Saccone, 30, of 235 Gulf Road, Camillus, with driving while intoxicated and leaving the scene of a fatal accident. Officials said more serious charges may be filed. Shepard said Osmanovic, who lived in Residence Hall B on the college's campus, was active in a program that encourages students to become engaged with the campus community. She was studying human services, he said. "She was always helping people," he said. "We are all grieving right now, and it will take some time. We really do become a family here. We're a very tight-knit community." College officials said Osmanovic came to the United States from Bosnia with her family. They said she got around in a wheelchair, but they were not able to provide any information regarding her disability. Walker, who did not live at the college, was studying business administration. He graduated from Corcoran High School in June, the college said. Rose, who was his girlfriend, attended OCC in the fall but was not currently enrolled in the college, OCC officials said. Rebecca Hoda-Kearse, associate vice president of student engagement at OCC, said counselors went to the school's residence halls Friday to support grieving students. Contact Rick Moriarty anytime: Email | Twitter | Facebook | 315-470-3148 American astronaut Mark Vande Hei spoke with students at the MOST in Syracuse. At precisely 9:08 a.m. Friday morning, the Museum of Science & Technology in Syracuse made contact with an astronaut aboard the International Space Station. For roughly nine minutes, radio technology allowed communication between children at the museum and Mark Vande Hei, an American NASA astronaut. As the ISS traveled above Kansas, line of sight opened up and antennas on rotors pointed toward the space station, allowing for radio frequency transmission. By the end of the nine-minute Q&A, the ISS, traveling about 17,000 miles per hour, was above Newfoundland. Young students from the Boys and Girls Club stood in front of an audience of about 300 guests (over 150 of them children) and spoke directly with Vande Hei. Staff at the MOST operated the ham radio as the students spoke. To make the most of the short window for connection, the kids asked Vande Hei their questions through the dispatch in rapid succession. "How do you go to the bathroom? Over," said one student. "What experiments are you working on? Over," another asked. Quickly, though in good detail, the astronaut answered each question. Vande Hei, a retired U.S. Army colonel and member of NASA's Expedition 53/54, has been in space since Sep. 13, 2017. He described to students the incredible view from the station, the food he eats, what he misses most about Earth (his wife's cooking) and what inspired him to become an astronaut. Though Vande Hei's voice was muffled and a bit buried underneath radio static, his message to the students was loud and clear: people are in space, and exploration will expand in the years to come. By pursuing the right science degrees and "doing some fun things," the children in attendance may become astronauts themselves. Angel Mendez, a Boys and Girls Club member, questioned the astronaut about space capsules. "It's a once in a life time type of thing," Mendez said about getting to ask Van Hei his question. "It's great to talk to him. His answer was good." Mendez added that he would want to be an astronaut someday so he can "get on zero gravity." He didn't show it, but Mendez said he was a little nervous for today. To help the kids get ready for this "once in a lifetime" chance to contact someone in space, Mark Girard, youth development specialist at the Boys and Girls Club, prepared the students with a learning day about space and protocols when contacting the ISS as well as a dry-run rehearsal for the Q&A. Tyra Wren arrived at the museum with her question ready to go. She stepped up to the microphone and into the museum's spotlight. Her voice was heard from over 200 miles into space. "I practiced it. I went home and I practiced it with my mom. You only get one opportunity to do this," she said. Save WASHINGTON -- U.S. Rep. Claudia Tenney said Thursday her comment that "many" mass murderers are Democrats was taken out of context. Let's go to the audio to see. Tenney was being interviewed Wednesday by Fred Dicker on an Albany radio station. He turned his attention to the Florida school shootings. Dicker asked if "the horrendous shooting in Parkland, and now the Democrats' efforts to exploit it" had changed the political dynamic for pro-Second Amendment members of Congress such as herself. Tenney, R-New Hartford, explained that she represents a district that strongly supports gun rights, and said she believes President Donald Trump was trying to make some "reasonable accommodations on this issue." When Dicker asked if Congress or the president would address the issue about people with mental illness gaining access to guns, Tenney said part of the problem is a lack of respect among young people and online bullying. But she quickly pivoted to make a point about illegal guns. "Think about something else," Tenney said. "Even though our background check system on the national side is flawed, tens of thousands of people are denied guns every single year, and then we have tens of thousands of people under (former Democratic Attorney General) Eric Holder's administration who had illegal guns and were never prosecuted." "And that's the standard in a lot of these communities. They always throw out the gun charge. We have many more crimes that are committed by people with illegal guns, and so our answer is always to go back to the legal gun owners." Tenney went on to talk about Nikolas Cruz, the 19-year-old charged in the Florida shooting. "Now this kid had legal guns," Tenney said. "How did a kid like this, with what we're finding out about him now, he bought like 10 guns in the year before the incident? And we know that he had a lot of problems in school, he was expelled from school, he talked about violence, he put it on social media..." Dicker jumped in, blaming law enforcement. "Look this kid was a walking case study of a person who should not have a gun, and the government, the feds, the locals, should have been all over him. I mean it's unbelievable what happened. Read about his foster mother and what she thought of him. I mean it's unbelievable that this tragedy was allowed to happen." Tenney said she agreed, and expressed her fear that the mass shooting will result in a backlash against legal gun owners. "I think the government really made a mistake in this area. And I think that what scares me most is a lot of these legal gun owners are going to be targeted now. In their demographic they have the least amount of crime of virtually any other demographic." Dicker interrupted and brought up politics. "Yeah, but they tend to vote Republican. They tend to be white. Most gun crimes are occurring in what's euphemistically called the inner cities, involving minorities, and they're the ones the Democrats generally are going to bend over backwards to protect. So you don't hear about mandatory prison sentences for people involved in gun crimes, say in Albany, New York, or downtown Utica." That's when Tenney made her comment that went viral, making international news. "Yeah, well, obviously there is a lot of politics in it, and it's interesting that so many of these people that commit the mass murders end up being Democrats. But the media doesn't talk about that either." Dicker had no response, and turned the conversation to Tenney's bid for re-election this year against Democrat Anthony Brindisi. Tenney and her staff did not back up her claim, and instead issued a statement. "I am fed up with the media and liberals attempting to politicize tragedies and demonize law-abiding gun owners and conservative Americans every time there is a horrible tragedy," the statement said. It was Tenney and Dicker, who is part of the news media but conservative, that both raised party politics: Dicker saying legal gun owners tend to be Republicans and Tenney volunteering that many mass killers are Democrats. While she didn't apologize, Tenney's statement appeared to retreat from her original comment. "While we know the perpetrators of these atrocities have a wide variety of political views, my comments are in response to a question about the failure to prosecute illegal gun crime," Tenney said in her statement. It's possible Tenney made her original comments based on a debunked online list that has been shared on social media, claiming that assassins and mass shooters are more likely to be Democrats. The fact-checking website Snopes found the list is filled with errors and inaccuracies and rated the claims "mostly false." An image archived from Facebook shows a debunked meme on mass killers. Former rocker Ted Nugent shared a similar list on his Facebook page in 2015. Tenney offered no evidence Thursday to support her claim, and she refused to answer questions about her comments at an unrelated news conference in Cortland County. As Tenney brushed off questions Thursday at the Cortland County event, one reporter asked if she had any regrets about her comments. "I don't regret it, no," Tenney said. "Of course not." Contact Mark Weiner anytime: Twitter | Facebook | 571-970-3751 ST. LOUIS (AP) -- A St. Louis grand jury on Thursday indicted Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens on a felony invasion of privacy charge for allegedly taking a compromising photo of a woman with whom he had an affair in 2015. The Republican governor responded that he made a mistake but committed no crime. St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner launched an investigation in January after Greitens admitted to an affair with his St. Louis hairdresser that began in March 2015. He was elected governor in November 2016. Thursday's indictment was followed with an announcement by House Republican leaders that they were forming a group of lawmakers to investigate the charges "and answer the question as to whether or not the governor can lead our state while a felony case moves forward." In a statement following the indictment , the Republican governor was defiant and attacked the prosecutor who brought the charge. "As I have said before, I made a personal mistake before I was Governor," he said. "I did not commit a crime. With today's disappointing and misguided political decision, my confidence in our prosecutorial system is shaken, but not broken. I know this will be righted soon. The people of Missouri deserve better than a reckless liberal prosecutor who uses her office to score political points." Greitens' attorney, in a separate statement, called the indictment "baseless and unfounded." "In 40 years of public and private practice, I have never seen anything like this," attorney Edward L. Dowd Jr. said. Greitens' legal team immediately filed a motion to dismiss the indictment on the grounds that any relationship with the woman was consensual. Gardner, a Democrat, declined comment beyond a brief news release. Some lawmakers renewed suggestions that Greitens should consider resigning, as they had done when the affair first become public last month. Democratic state Sen. Jamilah Nasheed of St. Louis called for an impeachment process to begin immediately. "Gov. Greitens has to go," Nasheed said. "Missourians thought they voted for a person of character and integrity, and instead they got a liar and alleged criminal." Any impeachment process must begin in the House with an investigation. The joint statement from House Speaker Todd Richardson, Speaker Pro Tem Elijah Haahr and Majority Leader Rob Vescovo did not specifically mention impeachment while noting that they were initiating an investigation. The indictment states that on March 21, 2015, Greitens photographed a woman identified only by her initials "in a state of full or partial nudity" without her knowledge or consent. The indictment said Greitens "transmitted the image contained in the photograph in a manner that allowed access to that image via a computer." In 2015, the woman told her husband, who was secretly taping the conversation, that Greitens took the compromising photo of her at his home and threatened to use it as blackmail if she spoke about the affair. The penalty for first-degree invasion of privacy in Missouri is up to four years in prison. Greitens was taken into custody in St. Louis and released on his own recognizance, said Susan Ryan, a spokeswoman for Gardner. He is due in court for his first hearing on March 16, before Circuit Judge Rex Burlison. Greitens has repeatedly denied blackmailing the woman, but has repeatedly refused to answer questions about whether he took a photo. The indictment came about a month before the statute of limitations would have run out. The statute of limitations for invasion of privacy in Missouri is three years. Ryan, asked if additional charges could be filed, said the matter is still under investigation. Several lawmakers were questioned last week by investigators from Gardner's office. Greitens, 43, is a brash outsider whose resume as a Rhodes Scholar and Navy SEAL officer made him a rising star in Republican politics. He admitted to the affair on the night of Jan. 10, shortly after he delivered the State of the State address to lawmakers. Greitens emerged the winner in a crowded and expensive GOP primary before defeating the state's attorney general, Democrat Chris Koster, in the November 2016 election to give Republicans control of the governor's mansion for the first time in eight years. Despite the party's strengthened clout in Jefferson City, there have been frequent clashes between lawmakers and Greitens, who compared them to third-graders and labeled them "career politicians." He has also faced criticism from some educators and And Greitens' was investigated by for his use of a secretive app that deletes messages. A former boxer and martial arts expert, Greitens portrayed himself as a maverick during the campaign. He responded to a Democratic attack ad with one of his own in which he fired more than 100 rounds from a machine gun as an announcer declared he'd bring out "the big guns" to fight Democratic policies championed by then-President Barack Obama. He joined the Navy in 2001 and as a SEAL officer was wounded in Iraq six years later. He also served as a White House fellow, founded a nonprofit organization for veterans and authored a best-selling book. His charity, The Mission Continues, faced scrutiny during the campaign when Democrats accused him of insider politics for accessing the donor list to raise about $2 million through its top contributors. Greitens and his wife, Sheena, have two sons, Joshua and Jacob. TULLY, NY - On Jan. 10, a student at Tully Junior Senior High School made "threatening comments" during the school day, according to Tully School Superintendent Rob Hughes. The district investigated the situation internally, determined the student did not pose a threat, and imposed "disciplinary consequences," Hughes said. More than a month later - after the school shooting in Parkland, Fla. - the district decided to contact New York State police about the January incident. District officials notified police Feb. 15 and then posted a letter on the schools' web site about the incident on Feb. 16. Tully Jr. Sr. High School In that letter, the district said state police also had concluded the student who made the comments did not pose a threat. However, some Tully parents are questioning why the district delayed in notifying both police and the community. Hughes, who was unavailable until Thursday due to the school break, told Syracuse.com the district decided to call police "just to be cautious,'' he said. The community was informed after that, he said. "It was a normal student discipline issue,' Hughes said. "We don't inform the community about everything kids say." The Valentine's Day school shooting in Florida heightened the district's sense of concern, Hughes said. Hughes would not say what the "threatening comments" were. Todd Howe was included in a group of high-ranking state officials brainstorming how to keep a key employee of Gov. Andrew Cuomo from resigning in August 2014. But Howe was not a high-ranking state official. He was not a state employee. Howe was an unregistered lobbyist whose clients had hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer-funded state contracts. Despite Howe's private interests and his felony record, for a 2010 bank fraud, he was trusted at the highest levels of state government to intervene in sensitive personnel matters. Emails made public Thursday in the corruption trial of Joseph Percoco, formerly Cuomo's most trusted aide, show in explicit detail how Percoco called upon Howe to help keep key Cuomo aides from leaving for private sector jobs. At one point Howe emailed Percoco about making staff changes that would create a "dream team'' on Cuomo's staff. The emails are "shocking,'' said Blair Horner, executive director of the New York Public Interest Research Group. "It's simply not right for outside interests to be involved in the staffing decisions of the governor's office.'' In the case of Peter Cutler, who expressed a desire to leave in August 2014, Howe had a direct business interest in keeping Cutler on the state payroll. Howe worked for LP Ciminelli, a developer selected earlier that year for a $750 million construction project at the Riverbend site in Buffalo. In Howe, Ciminelli had a politically powerful insider who could guard against state personnel changes that might hurt its project. Howe told Percoco in an email that Cutler's departure would cause "serious problems'' for the Riverbend project. Cutler handled public relations for the project, even though his official job was at the Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Services. "Peter took care of all the day to day politics with the city and the Buffalo press,'' Howe told Percoco in an email. "This is serious. The reason no one knew Peter was deeply involved other than Howard (Glaser, Cuomo's state operations director) was because over 3 years nothing went off track.'' In an email the next morning, Percoco asked for a conference call to deal with the issue. His email went to Howe, Glaser, and Jim Malatras, another senior Cuomo aide. "Why don't we all discuss as a team and let's come up with a solution if possible asap before it's too late,'' Percoco wrote. The call was set for 10 a.m. Howe and the others indicated they were all available. Cutler eventually stayed in his state job. He later left in 2016 for a job with Erie County Medical Center. In September, a month after the Cutler crisis, Percoco asked Howe for help keeping another high-ranking Cuomo staffer from leaving. Joseph Rabito, then executive deputy commissioner at the Office of General Services, told Percoco he intended to seek higher paying, private-sector work after the November election. Percoco emailed Howe and Glaser for help. "I need you two to get Rabito on the phone and tell him to get his act together and get off his ass and come see me,'' Percoco wrote. "We need to nail him down. I took care of Cutler, I took care of (Cuomo aide Andrew) Kennedy, now please help with Rabito.'' "Of course,'' Howe replied. "Call you in the morning.'' By October, Rabito was still intent on leaving. Percoco again asked Howe for help, in an email message ending with "arghhhh.'' Howe wrote back one minute later, suggesting that Rabito would stay if he got a better job. "Let's discuss upon arrival,'' Howe wrote. "I know he will stay if you give him specific title and portfolio, but has to be soon.'' In January 2015, Cuomo made Rabito deputy director of state operations for programs. In March 2017, he was promoted to deputy secretary for intergovernmental affairs. Not only was Howe involved as a private citizen, but so was Percoco. Although he had been Cuomo's executive deputy secretary until March 2014, and was widely understood to have unparalleled clout with the governor, Percoco was technically off the state payroll managing Cuomo's re-election campaign. In the emails, Percoco used his private email address, as did Glaser. Malatras used his official state email. Percoco returned to his state job in December 2014, after the election. Now Percoco is on trial in Manhattan federal court, with Howe testifying against him. Howe pleaded guilty in late 2016 to eight felonies, including conspiring with Percoco to elicit bribes from Syracuse business executives Steven Aiello and Joseph Gerardi, and a Hudson Valley power plant developer. All the defendants have pleaded not guilty. Cuomo has not been accused of wrongdoing. Horner, of NYPIRG, said the email evidence appears to show a private lobbyist doing favors for the governor's office, raising questions about what favors the lobbyist could expect in return. He noted that the Percoco trial is ongoing, and that some evidence may emerge to cast a different light on the emails. But the documents appear to reveal "inappropriate'' communications with Howe. The governor's office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. "If there is an explanation, it's really the governor's responsibility to make it," Horner said. "These are his people. I mean, the public doesn't vote for Joe Percoco.'' Contact reporter Tim Knauss | email | Twitter | 315-470-3023 Tallahassee, Florida -- The Florida House this week passed a bill requiring all public schools in the state to display "in a conspicuous place" the state motto, "In God We Trust." The bill passed the House 97 to 10, according to NPR. An identical bill was introduced in the state Senate last month, but it's unclear what will happen there. Rep. Kimberly Daniels, a Democrat from Jacksonville, sponsored the House bill. She also runs a ministry, NPR said. "It is not a secret that we have some gun issues that need to be addressed, but the real thing that needs to be addressed are issues of the heart," Daniels said in a speech from the House floor. She also said she had a vision earlier in the week. "I believe it was God and I heard a voice say, 'Do not politicize what has happened in Florida and do not make this a thing of division,' " she said, according to NPR. The vote comes the week after 17 people died in a school shooting in Parkland, Florida. After the shooting, students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School traveled to Tallahassee to advocate for new gun laws. The students pushed for a ban on weapons like the one used in the Parkland shooting, which the Florida House declined to take up, according to The Washington Post. Daniels mentioned video games in her floor speech, stating that children are being trained to become virtual assassins, according to the Tampa Bay Times. And she talked about the need for God in life. "He is not a Republican or a Democrat," she said, according to the Times. "He is not black or white. He is the light and our schools need light in them like never before." "In God We Trust" is also the national motto. Contact Kevin Tampone anytime: Email | Twitter | Google + | 315-454-2112 An extremely rare cardinal has birders and biologists flocking to Shelby County, Alabama this week, as images of a yellow cardinal have circulated around social media. Auburn University biology professor Geoffrey Hill said the cardinal in the photos is an adult male in the same species as the common red cardinal, but carries a genetic mutation that causes what would normally be brilliant red feathers to be bright yellow instead. Alabaster resident Charlie Stephenson first noticed the unusual bird at her backyard feeder in late January and posted about it on Facebook. She said she's been birding for decades but it took her some time to figure out what she was seeing. "I thought 'well there's a bird I've never seen before'," Stephenson said. "Then I realized it was a cardinal, and it was a yellow cardinal." Stephenson said she would not give out her address or specific location due to fears that people would flock in to get a look at the bird, but said she lives near the new Thompson High School in Alabaster. She shot some video of the bird, embedded below. The yellow cardinal is still around, she said. "Every time I watch the bird feeder, I can see him," she said. "The cardinals in my back yard typically come in the morning and again in the evening and I can only bird-watch on weekends until the time changes, but on weekends, I'll sit there and watch for him. "Every time we've looked for him, he'll show up at least once that day." Jeremy Black, a professional photographer who is friends with Stephenson, saw the posting and asked if he could come to her backyard and try to photograph the bird. On Feb. 19, after about five hours of quiet waiting, Black was able to capture the images he provided here to AL.com. "As soon as I saw it on her social media, I was kind of curious and I wanted to go explore and see if I could find it," Black said. "I finally saw it after about five hours. "I started out sitting in her backyard hoping that maybe I would see it. A lot of cardinals came by and none of them were yellow, so I decided to be a little bit more evasive and hide on her screened-in porch. About two or three hours after I moved to the porch, it finally showed up." 'One in a million mutation' Hill -- who has literally written books on bird coloration -- said the mutation is rare enough that even he, as a bird curator and researcher has never seen one in person. "I've been birdwatching in the range of cardinals for 40 years and I've never seen a yellow bird in the wild," Hill said. "I would estimate that in any given year there are two or three yellow cardinals at backyard feeding stations somewhere in the U.S. or Canada. "There are probably a million bird feeding stations in that area so very very roughly, yellow cardinals are a one in a million mutation." Photo of a yellow cardinal on a fence post in Alabama, Ala. The bird has a genetic mutation that causes its feathers to be yellow instead of red. Hill said that cardinals and other songbirds need to consume substances called carotenoids (found in sweet potatoes and carrots) from the environment around them to achieve their bright colors. "Songbirds like cardinals almost never consume red pigments; rather they consume abundant yellow pigments," Hill said. "So, to be red, cardinals have to biochemically convert yellow pigments to red." Hill was part of the research team that identified the enzyme -- called CYP2J19 -- that, for most cardinals, converts all that yellow pigment into red feathers. Hill is on sabbatical in Australia this semester -- he responded to AL.com's questions via email -- but said he would love to get some DNA from the yellow cardinal (via feathers) to perform more tests and pinpoint the mutation that changed the bird's color. Stephenson said she hadn't realized how rare the bird was when she saw it back in January. "I'm used to being a birder and you see some leukocytic ones, you see some albino ones," she said. "But I thought this was something else and then I learned how rare it is." Black, meanwhile, is hoping to capture more images of the bird while it's in Shelby County. He's a full-time photographer who does some wildlife work amongst portraits and weddings. "I'm trying to get a unique photograph and that is the yellow cardinal next to a traditional North American red cardinal," Black said. "My current goal is to try and visit her backyard or neighborhood as frequently as possible and see if I can get that shot with both birds together." In the wake of a Florida school shooting that left 17 dead, multiple schools in other states are seeing similar threats. NEW YORK The Tribune reports two juveniles were arrested Thursday for alleged threats to the Port Jervis High School in Hudson Valley. The principal said "an alarming note" was found in a classroom last week, along with three bullets and shells outside the school; a bullet was also discovered in the boys' locker room on Tuesday. According to WCAX, a 14-year-old boy was arrested Tuesday for threats to the St. Regis Falls Central School in Franklin County. Police say there was no danger to the school. NYPD arrested a 15-year-old boy in the Bronx who allegedly made violent overtures on the messaging app Kik in December, according to the New York Post. Police say they found a bulletproof vest at his home and discovered he unsuccessfully attempted to buy guns several times online. Similar threats were reported last week in Upstate New York, including at Chittenango Middle School, the Port Byron Central School District, Carthage Central School District, Spencerport High School and the Chatauqua Lake School and Randolph Academy Union Free School District. Gov. Andrew Cuomo has ordered state police to increase patrols around schools to protect against copycat shooting threats. PENNSYLVANIA According to WTAE, the Greater Latrobe School District in Pennsylvania canceled classes Friday after a threat was written on a school bathroom wall and shared on social media. "Don't come to school February 23. Bang bang," the message said. The district, located 40 miles outside of Pittsburgh, said it does not believe the threat is credible, but canceled school as a precaution while officials investigate. MINNESOTA The Minneapolis Star-Tribune reports the Hill City School near Grand Rapids, Minnesota, closed on Thursday while law enforcement investigated anonymous threats made on Snapchat and Facebook. The threats were related to an incident involving a student last week, Hill City Superintendent Pat Rendle said, but he did not elaborate, citing privacy restrictions. Messages of "revenge" threatened to shoot some specific students who were interviewed about the incident, Rendle said. A day earlier, another Minnesota school in Orono, near Minneapolis, was placed on lockdown when posts on social media threatened a school shooting. A student was arrested, and classes resumed Thursday. IOWA Multiple schools in Iowa have seen similar threats this past week. The Globe Gazette reports Riceville Schools canceled classes Thursday due to an unspecified threat. A former student has been identified as a suspect and arrested; an investigation is ongoing. Dubuque Community School District and Holy Family Catholic Schools closed Friday due to "an alleged threat of a possible shooting," according to the Telegraph Herald. Police are investigating, but have not yet determined the credibility of the threat. Another five Iowa schools saw threats, including a bomb threat, between Feb. 12 and Feb. 19, according to the Des Moines Register. No injures have been reported. WISCONSIN WBAY reports police in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, arrested two people related to two separate threats against local schools Thursday. Authorities say they investigated the threats and determined they weren't credible -- but they may be criminal. "Although these threats did not represent any real danger to our community, a large number of people suffered needless anxiety because of them," the police department said in a statement. CALIFORNIA The Associated Press reports a 17-year-old student at El Camino High School in Whittier, Calif., was arrested Wednesday after a security officer allegedly overheard a student threaten to open fire at the school. The teen was arrested on suspicion of making a criminal threat, and his adult brother was arrested on five weapons charges after two assault rifles, 90 high-capacity magazines and other handguns were found in their home. School officials and law enforcement are on high alert after Nikolas Cruz, 19, opened fire with an AR-15 assault-style rifle at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., last week. Seventeen students and teachers were killed. WASHINGTON (AP) -- The nation should keep assault rifles out of the hands of anyone under 21, President Donald Trump says, defying his loyal supporters in the National Rifle Association amid America's public reckoning over gun violence. He also pushed hard for arming security guards and many teachers in U.S. schools. "There's nothing more important than protecting our children," Trump said, adding that he'd spoken with many members of Congress and NRA officials and insisting they would go along with his plans in the wake of last week's school shooting in Parkland, Florida, that left 17 people dead. But there were no words of support from the NRA for his minimum-age proposal -- and outright opposition from organizations of teachers and school security guards for the idea of arming schools to deal with intruders. "The NRA will back it and so will Congress," Trump contended as he called for raising the legal age of purchase for "all" guns from 18 to 21. A spokesman later said Trump was speaking specifically about semi-automatic weapons. The president's proposal came just hours after the NRA affirmed its opposition, calling such a restriction an infringement on gun owners' rights. Trump has spent the past two days listening to ideas about how to stem gun violence at schools after last week's shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. On Wednesday, he heard from students and family members of those killed in recent shootings and on Thursday from local and state officials. In Florida, meanwhile, funerals continued. And a sheriff's deputy who had been on duty at the school but never went inside to confront the shooter resigned after being suspended without pay. Trump has been proposing a growing list of ideas, including more stringent background checks for gun buyers, reopening some mental institutions to hold potential killers and banning "bump stock" devices that allow semi-automatic rifles to mimic machine guns. He said Thursday that many teachers have military experience and suggested they be paid bonuses for the added responsibility of carrying weapons. He also appeared open to other proposals to "harden" schools, such as fortifying walls and limiting entry points. One idea he didn't like: the "active shooter" drills that some schools hold. He called that "a very negative thing" and said he wouldn't want his own son participating. Spokesman Raj Shah later said Trump was concerned about the name and would prefer calling them safety drills. In Florida, Republican Sen. Marco Rubio said he now is open to raising age requirements for long-gun purchases. That was the day after he was confronted at a CNN town hall by Parkland students and parents over his pro-gun votes and support from the NRA. Kansas Sen. Pat Roberts, another Republican, told reporters during a visit to the Kansas Statehouse that he supported raising age requirements, saying, "Certainly, nobody under 21 should have an AR-15." NRA leaders emerged in unannounced appearances at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, blaming the FBI and local reporting failures for the Florida shooting. "Evil walks among us and God help us if we don't harden our schools and protect our kids," said Executive Vice President and CEO Wayne LaPierre. "The whole idea from some of our opponents that armed security makes us less safe is completely ridiculous." The NRA was an early supporter of Trump's campaign, and it remains unclear how far the president will go to cross them. Shortly before LaPierre took the stage, Trump offered a rallying cry on Twitter, calling NRA leaders "Great People and Great American Patriots. They love our Country and will do the right thing." "I don't think I'll be going up against them," he said of the politically influential group. "I really think the NRA wants to do what's right." In Congress, a bill being drafted by Sens. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., would apply more broadly than just to assault rifles such as the AR-15 used in the Florida shootings. It would raise the age requirements for all rifles. In the end, Trump did not stray too far from conservative Republican orthodoxy. His focus when it comes to background checks is on mental health concerns and not loopholes that permit loose private gun sales on the internet and at gun shows. And he remains opposed to a full ban on assault rifles, Shah said. Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer said he was skeptical the president would follow though. "The last time he showed support for sensible gun reform -- no fly, no buy -- he quickly dropped his support once the NRA opposed it. I hope this time will be different," Schumer said in a statement, referring to a measure backed by Democrats to prevent people on a terrorism-related "no fly" list from buying guns. Indeed, it is not clear that the GOP-controlled Congress, which is in recess, will take up or act on a variety of legislative proposals that have been made to address gun violence. Those include measures to expand federal background checks, allow authorities to issue emergency orders to take guns from people identified as a threat to themselves or others, and raise the minimum age for rifle purchases to 21. Polls show growing support for gun control measures, including 97-percent backing for universal background checks in a Quinnipiac University survey released Tuesday. But recent mass shootings, including the 2012 mass murder of elementary school children in Newtown, Connecticut, and the killing of 58 people in Las Vegas last fall, have not resulted in significant legislation. In fact, a bill passed by the House in December would make it easier for gun owners to carry concealed weapons across state lines. STC musical to be featured at Iowa Thespian Festival Into the woods, its time, and so I must begin my journey. Into The Woods by Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine. And so, the STC Music ... Contaminated chemical cargo warning The UK P&I Club has issued a warning about contaminated chemical cargoes. In a case study, issued by the clubs loss prevention team, a tanker was fixed to load three liquid chemical parcels, each consigned for discharge at different ports. No problems were experienced during loading or the sea passage and the parcel consigned for the first discharge port was delivered without incident. Upon arrival at the second discharge port, the vessel was instructed to anchor due to congestion at the terminal. The crew took this opportunity to carry out fresh water pre-washing of the five empty cargo tanks that had been discharged at the previous port and connected the designated hoses between the deck fresh water pipeline and the individual tank washing machines. After the commencement of tank cleaning, the duty officer noticed that one of the hoses was incorrectly connected to a tank loaded with cargo consigned for the third port of discharge, thus allowing a large quantity of water to enter before the valve was shut. As a result, the high value chemical cargo in the tank was contaminated with water far in excess of specification limits and was rejected by the original consignee. Dealing with the contaminated cargo required a very expensive process of separate storage, refining at an alternative port and on-carriage on board another vessel. The incident would not have occurred had the crew properly checked and double checked that the correct connections were made and the appropriate system valves properly set up before commencing tank cleaning. These precautions are particularly critical when tank cleaning is conducted with the vessel in a partially laden condition. Apart from the financial impact of potentially very large contamination claims, erroneously admitting water and tank cleaning additives into the wrong tank may potentially result in a dangerous chemical reaction. The P&I club advised - Tank cleaning operations should always be carried out in strict compliance with documented shipboard procedures and guidelines, with which responsible officers should be fully familiar. Prior to commencement of cargo, ballast, tank cleaning or any other transfer operations, the correct setting up of pipelines, valves and blanks should be clearly stated in the operational plan and reviewed during the pre-work briefing of all officers and crew involved. Tank cleaning checklists must be diligently completed prior to commencement of operations. The setting up of lines and valves should be double checked by a responsible officer. First laden VLCC leaves LOOP Louisiana Offshore Oil Port (LOOP) has completed its first VLCC crude oil loading operation at its deepwater offshore facility, located 18 miles off Port Fourchon (La). Houston-based Shell Trading Co US (STUSCO) was the shipper of the cargo. We are pleased to offer the enhanced capability to safely and efficiently load the largest cargo vessels in the world with crude oil for export, said Tom Shaw, LOOP president. There could not be a better time to offer this service as domestic production surpasses 10 mill barrels per day in the ever dynamic global crude oil market. LOOP is the only US port capable of fully loading a VLCC, which helps optimise the US energy supply chain by enabling vessels to deliver foreign crude oil and to sail with US crude oil, rather than sail in ballast, the terminal operator said. The new onloading configuration was accomplished with only minor modifications to existing facilities and is scalable to meet the changing needs of the industry, Shaw added. LOOP, which has offloaded more than 10,200 crude oil vessels since commencing operations in 1981, is currently preparing its 2018 shipping schedule. On 24th July, 2017, LOOP announced it intended to seek oil cargo owner interest in vessel loading services to complement its long standing offloading services. Connections are provided from LOOPs Clovelly Hub in Galliano (La), to its deepwater port. The new terminal configuration enables both VLCC loading and offloading without multiple shuttle tanker movements. The offshore terminal consists of three single-point mooring buoys, which can accommodate VLCCs/ULCCs, MR Jones Act tankers and FPSO deepwater facility shuttle tankers. LOOP is also pipeline connected and has 72 mill barrels of crude oil storage capacity at its Clovelly Hub. According to Bloomberg, the vessel which handled the first export cargo was Bahris VLCC Shaden, which left LOOP for Rizhao, China under a Unipec charter with a cargo of medium sour crude. Oslo-based software company, Arundo Analytics, has introduced a pumping system condition & performance monitoring application (CPM). Arundo Analytics co-founder and vice president of business development, Mogens Mathiesen, told Tanker Operator; Arundo was founded to transform heavy industries with data-driven insights. Today we are streaming real-time insights from ocean-going vessels with flexible, easy-to-use software. Our CPM application is designed by and for industrial users in sectors, such as maritime and meets their actual needs with software and data science, he said. Arundo works with shipping services companies and shipowners to provide advanced analytics and machine learning applications, including for remote or disconnected vessels, he explained. The software is a configurable machine learning application, built and delivered via the Arundo enterprise platform. It is based on the latest advances in sensor technology, edge computing, cloud software and machine learning. CPM application features and technologies include the Arundos Edge Agent software, which is designed for field-installed industrial equipment, intelligently streaming sensor data for real-time analysis. For a smart pumping system on an oil tanker, this would include - streaming measurement data directly from the equipment, such as flow rate, differential pressure, temperature, speed and power. Suezmaxes to bounce back? Crude tanker earnings across all sectors were challenged in 2017, not least the Suezmax sector, which saw a net fleet growth of 45 units during the year. Heavy ordering activity between 2014 and 2015 saw 57 newbuilds enter the market, making 2017 a record year for Suezmax deliveries. It was therefore unsurprising to see earnings fall lower to average $14,000 per day, down from $27,000 per day in 2016, Gibson Shipbrokers said in a report. However, despite bearish developments on the supply side, developments on the demand side were overall - positive. Indeed, AIS tracking data indicated that tonne/mile demand for this sector rebounded in 2017, driven by shifting global oil flows. A key growth driver was higher crude flows from West to East, as OPEC production cuts took effect, in particular increased CPC blend exports from the Black Sea to Asia. According to tracking data, Suezmax CPC blend volumes grew from 1.5 mill tonnes in 2016 to 7 mill tonnes last year, which was particularly beneficial for Suezmax demand given the distances involved, Gibson said. Further growth was seen out of the Mediterranean. However, this picture was somewhat mixed, depending on the countries involved. Declines were seen in Algeria, but Suezmax flows from Libya increased by 5 mill tonnes, which accounted for the majority of growth from this area. Significant growth was also observed from the Americas, with total Suezmax loadings in the region growing by 30 mill tonnes. The key here was higher exports from the US and Brazil. Exports from Brazil accounted for a third of the increase, whilst the US accounted for more than 20 mill tonnes. However, over half of the Suezmax volumes were traded within the region, thus limiting the tonne/mile effect. In the Middle East, despite OPECs product cuts, Suezmax exports saw continued growth in 2017, rising by over 13 mill tonnes, with almost all the increase originating from Iran. Not all regions saw growth. For example, Suezmax exports from West Africa fell to below 100 mill tonnes in 2017 (down 12 mill tonnes year-on-year). Looking ahead, whilst 49 Suezmaxes are scheduled to be delivered this year, demand growth can be expected in some of the key loading regions. Strong expectations for US production, as well as anticipated higher Brazilian output, will support volumes loading in the Americas, even as Venezuelan volumes continue to slide. Export growth from Libya is never certain but remains a possibility, whilst high Kashagan production this year (despite Kazahkstans involvement in the OPEC pact) is expected to translate into higher CPC exports from the Black Sea. In theory, exports from the Middle East should flatten out, given OPECs pact. However, volumes from West Africa could rise year-on-year, if Nigeria is able to hold its production stable at its OPEC ceiling of 1.8 mill barrels per day. On balance, 2018 will be tough, whilst the excess vessel supply seen last year and deliveries scheduled for this year, are absorbed. However, tangible demand growth means it is only a matter of time before earnings return to more sustainable levels, Gibson concluded. Trelleborg highlights fender quality Trelleborgs marine systems operation has published a white paper, highlighting the impact of the manufacturing process on the performance, safety, and longevity of pneumatic fenders. Entitled Pneumatic Fenders: Manufacturing Methods Matter, the white paper explores the difference in fenders manufactured using the airbag method without employing a mould, and fenders manufactured conventionally using a mould. Mishra Kumar, global technical director for marine fenders at Trelleborgs marine systems operation, said: "Pneumatic fenders are extensively used for ship-to-ship transfers mid-sea, double banking operations, and as vessel-to-berth at dock/jetties. Therefore, it is vital that they are not only of high quality, but are extremely reliable, to guarantee effective performance in even the harshest environmental conditions. Each and every pneumatic fender must comply with the ISO 17357-1:2014 standard to ensure they follow the correct manufacturing process. The major concern for the industry is that there is an influx of manufacturers employing airbag production methods resulting in fenders that dont usually comply with all of the recommended manufacturing process guidelines, or compound properties as specified under the ISO 17357-1:2014 standard. By using the conventional method, whereby the entire fender is built inside a mould and vulcanised with it in an autoclave, a clear positive impact is seen on the appearance, dimensional stability and the bonding between layers, leading to a more reliable and long lasting fender, he said. Two SCF LNG-fuelled Aframaxes fixed to Shell The SCF Group has signed timecharter contracts with Shell for two dual-fuelled newbuilding Aframaxes for up to 10 years per vessel with a minimum commitment of five years. This so called Green Funnel series of Ice Class, 114,000 dwt, LNG-powered Aframaxes will operate within Shells global freight trading network. The vessels will also use Shells specialist LNG bunker vessels, such as the Cardissa, for fuelling in Northwest Europe. Shell will provide further supply points across Northwest Europe and the Baltic, as it expands its LNG fuelling infrastructure. These contracts represent the next step in collaboration between SCF and Shell over the last three years regarding the reduction in the environmental footprint of the tanker industry, in particular, by fuelling tankers with LNG, SCF said. The new charters follow the LNG fuel supply agreement concluded between Shell and Sovcomflot last year, which pioneered the expansion of marine LNG fuelling into the tanker industry and, in general, for vessels not tied to fixed routes or set timetables. Each tanker will be built to Ice Class 1A hull notation, enabling year-round export operations from the Baltic. The technical specifications for these new vessels were developed by SCFs engineering centre, with the close involvement of Hyundai Heavy Industries and Russian shipbuilders (Zvezda shipbuilding complex, Primorsk region). The vessels main engines, auxiliaries, and boilers will be dual fuel, capable of using LNG, and the vessels will also be fitted with selective catalytic reduction (SCR) technology to comply with Tier III regulations governing NOx emissions when in gasoil fuel mode. Commenting on the charters, Evgeny Ambrosov, senior executive vice president of SCF Group, said: Together, SCF Group and Shell are leading the development and adoption of LNG as a fuel within the tanker industry, committed to significantly reducing the environmental footprint of energy shipping. After proper experience of operating LNG-fuelled vessels, SCF Group will share its feedback on their performance with Zvezda shipbuilding complex, a Russian facility that is envisaged to commence the domestic construction of such large-capacity LNG-fuelled tankers by 2021. Mark Quartermain, Shell Crude Tradings vice president, added: LNG fuel will play a fundamental role in the future energy mix. Chartering and fuelling these vessels highlights Shells commitment to LNG as emissions standards tighten. We look forward to continuing to build upon our strong relationship with SCF to support our trading operations in key areas. Courtesy: Metyx After discussions with the Hungarian Investment Promotion Agency (HIPA), METYX Group has got a 50 per cent incentive package to support an investment project to expand METYX Hungary Kft. HIPA works closely with the Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs to attract inward investment from overseas companies into Hungary to create new jobs and build its economy.The combined investment funds will be used to significantly expand the existing facilities at the Kaposvar site over the next five years, to increase production capacity for knitting glass and carbon fibre textiles and to expand its fabric and core kitting service. METYX Hungary has 15,000 square metres of covered factory space and 67,000 square metres open space currently operational, which is only 35 per cent of the 230,000 square metres former North American Bus Industries (NABI) production site acquired by METYX in 2013, so the site has plenty of space for this planned expansion and further growth in the future.The formal announcement of this investment agreement was made by Peter Szijjarto, the Hungarian minister of Foreign Affairs and Attila Gelencser, Kaposvars parliamentary representative in Budapest. Ugur Ustunel, co-director of METYX Group stated: We are delighted with this significant investment support package from the Hungarian government to help us expand our facilities and increase staff numbers. We look forward to working closely with HIPA and other Hungarian government agencies going forward to make our expansion plans a reality. Being located in central Europe, METYX Hungary is strategically very important to enable us to continue business growth across the EU market and meet customer demands. Such positive support provided from both local and central government in Hungary has motivated the METYX board to commit further capital investments in production technologies and infrastructure at our Kaposvar site.Ustunel went on to say: In May 2015 we started production in Kaposvar with only 15 people. Today, METYX Hungary employs 155 people and delivers across Europe. The site currently operates four production lines, with three additional lines being installed in 2018. With the new investments, the total annual capacity at METYX Hungary will increase from 3000 to 8000 tonnes for technical fabrics alone, along with an expanded glass and core kit cutting service. We expect the numbers of employees in Hungary to reach 200 by the end of this year, with additional people needed by the end of 2020. As a result of this major incentive programme, we are committed to making multimillion Euro investments over the next five years which will secure more than 200 long term jobs in Kaposvar.The fabrics and kits manufactured by METYX Hungary are aimed at producers of composite parts used in major industrial market sectors including building and construction, boatbuilding, automotive, transportation and wind energy. (SV) Fibre2Fashion News Desk India Smart home company Nest, which was recently reunited with Google to better compete with rivals Amazon and Apple, released a Nest Cam IQ update that adds Google Assistant support to the indoor security camera. Nest promised to integrate Google Assistant into the Nest Cam IQ back in September, supposedly alongside the launch of the security camera's outdoor version. Nest missed its own deadline for the update, but it is now rolling out for the indoor version of the Nest Cam IQ. How Will Nest Cam IQ Use Google Assistant? The top-of-the-line Nest Cam IQ indoor security camera features a 4K sensor and a six-core processor, which is very powerful for a camera. The device also comes with a speaker and microphone for remote communication, but it will now be using these components to work with Google Assistant. The Nest Cam IQ update will allow the indoor security camera to understand the usual OK Google voice commands, with the blue ring around the device to light up to signal that it is listening to the user. Things that users can make the Nest Cam IQ do with voice commands for Google Assistant include controlling other smart home devices and adding Google Calendar appointments, among others. However, the Nest Cam IQ will understandably have missing features compared to the Google Assistant-powered Google Home smart speaker. For example, it will not be able to play music or podcasts, and it will not be able to make phone calls. It should be noted that, after the installation of the Nest Cam IQ update, the Google Assistant function will be off by default. To activate the feature, users will have to go into the settings of the Nest app and choose the "connect Google Assistant" option to activate it. Other Nest Cam Updates Google Assistant support is not the only thing that Nest added to its cameras. Nest also rolled out a $5 monthly plan for its Nest Aware subscription service, which allows users to store videos on the cloud in case the footage needs to be reviewed. The $5 plan will offer users with five days of history, and is now the cheapest option alongside the previous $10 plan for 10 days of history and $30 plan for 30 days of history. Nest cameras will also now be able to distinguish between human beings and objects in Activity Zones, which are areas where users suspect motion may happen. In the future though, there will be more Google Assistant integration in Nest devices, such as voice commands for arming the Nest Secure home alarm. 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. An ex-employee of Google is suing the company for wrongful termination, discrimination, retaliation, and harassment, claiming that Google fired him over his liberal views. Tim Chevalier is a software developer who worked for nearly two years at Google as a site-reliability engineer. When the whole James Damore manifesto scandal broke loose, Chevalier responded with various memes and internal posts to counter sexist, racist, and discriminatory views. Google Diversity And The James Damore Manifesto For those unfamiliar with the matter, James Damore wrote an infamous internal memo last year condemning diversity and arguing that men are biologically more suitable to work in the tech industry. The 10-page manifesto stirred a great deal of controversy and Google fired Damore who sued the company last month for discriminating against conservative white men. Damore also mentioned Chevalier in his lawsuit, referring to his posts and memes as an example of how Google allowed liberals to speak out without facing any consequences. Damore's case reportedly prompted Google to more closely moderate internal conversations and crack down on workers who voice their opinions about diversity. Google reportedly moved to a moderate speech by both conservative and liberal employees. Google Sued For Firing Employee Over Liberal Views Chevalier, who is also transgender and disabled, made pro-diversity posts defending marginalized people and women of color. In his lawsuit, Chevalier now argues that his pro-diversity posts prompted Google to fire him back in November 2017. "It is a cruel irony that Google attempted to justify firing me by claiming that my social networking posts showed bias against my harassers," says Chevalier. According to the lawsuit, Chevalier has made forum posts to counter online bullying that targeted the LGBT community or people of color. One post also called Damore's memo "misogynistic." The lawsuit argues that Chevalier's termination served as punishment for speaking out. "The anti-discrimination laws are meant to protect marginalized and underrepresented groups -- not those who attack them," adds Chevalier. Eliminating Harmful Stereotypes Google, on its part, says that employees should be communicated in a manner that complies with the company's policies. Otherwise, it will take action regardless of the employee's political views. Simply put, Google says that it's just aiming to eliminate harmful stereotypes. "An important part of our culture is lively debate," says a Google spokesperson. "But like any workplace, that doesn't mean anything goes. All employees acknowledge our code of conduct and other workplace policies, under which promoting harmful stereotypes based on race or gender is prohibited." Chevalier, who was a Google employee from December 2015 up until his termination in November 2017, is now seeking damages for emotional distress and lost wages, as well as punitive damages. At the same time, Chevalier's lawsuit contradicts the claims that Damore previously made in his lawsuit, that Google does not reprimand liberals. 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. A teenage boy in Indonesia claims to have been laying eggs since 2015. There's also a video of him laying an egg in front of doctors. Medical experts don't know why the boy is laying eggs. Human Hen At 14 years old, Akmal Rusli claims that he has been laying eggs since 2015. A quick search online seems to corroborate the story with a video of him laying an egg in front of the camera. Akmal says that he has laid 20 eggs in the last two years. Akmal lives in Kabupaten Gowa, in South Sulawesi province. He was hospitalized for his unusual ability. He had been complaining of stomach pain. Doctors haven't been able to determine what is happening to Akmal. X-rays were taken of his lower abdomen, showing he had two eggs still inside his body. Once the x-rays showed that the eggs were still lodged inside of his body, the eggs were removed after some difficulty. Both eggs were removed with the shells still intact. Doctors don't seem to believe Akmal's story about the eggs developing inside of his body. They think this isn't happening naturally. "Our suspicion is that the eggs were deliberately shoved [into Akmal's rectum]. But we did not see it directly," said Muhammad Taslim, spokesman for Syech Yusuf Sungguminasa hospital. "Scientifically [chicken] eggs cannot form inside the human body. It's impossible, especially in the digestive system." Akmal is being placed into quarantine to figure out what is happening to him. Medical personnel want to see if it's possible that Akmal may be putting the eggs up his rectum. Doctors at the facility previously examined Akmal two years ago when he claimed to be laying eggs. Akmal's father denies the claim by giving a response that shows that he doesn't understand the situation. "He never swallowed eggs whole, why would he do that?" said Akmal's father. He is still hopeful that doctors will get to the bottom of his son's situation. Not The First Time This isn't the first time that a person has claimed to be laying eggs. This isn't even the first time that it's happened in Indonesia. A man in Jakarta had also claimed to be laying eggs, and when examined by a veterinarian, it was found that they were just chicken eggs. The veterinarian said that the eggs couldn't have possibly come out of the man. The eggs that were examined were two weeks old and were close to hatching. 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. There is good news or bad news about medical marijuana, perhaps depending on which side you stand on. Two new studies just debunked two common myths about the social effects of medical marijuana. The studies revealed that there is little evidence to show medical marijuana legalization as a gateway to increase recreational marijuana use, or as a viable solution to the opioid epidemic in the country. 2 New Studies California was the first state in the country to legalize marijuana for medical use in 1996. Since then, the debate regarding the effects of medical marijuana or even the legalization of it has ensued. A common belief among those opposed to medical marijuana legalization is that it could increase the incidence of recreational marijuana use among adolescents. Conversely, advocates claim that medical marijuana could help combat the opioid crisis. Two new studies, both published in the journal Addiction, puts a stop to both claims as they found that neither has enough evidence to back either claim. Legalization Does Not Lead To Ramp Up In Recreational Use To study the effects of medical marijuana legalization on marijuana use prevalence among adolescents, researchers reviewed 11 studies which came from large, long-term national surveys dating back from 1991. The studies they reviewed were the ones that passed their screening which began with 2,999 papers. In all 11 studies, researchers found no significant changes in marijuana use prevalence among adolescents from pre- to post- medical marijuana legalization in the states that legalized up to the year 2014 compared to the states that did not legalize in the same period. Basically, the current evidence does not support the hypothesis that medical marijuana legalization leads to increases in recreational marijuana use among adolescents. Not A Solution For The Opioid Epidemic The supposed relationship between marijuana legalization and the opioid epidemic is fairly simple. According to some advocates and researchers, an increase in access to medical marijuana has reduced the opioid overdose deaths in the country. The idea behind this is that as cannabinoids have been shown to reduce pain and pose a significantly lower risk for an overdose, they could be a viable replacement for opioids. However, researchers of the second study believe that the correlation between the two is as weak as the correlation between ice cream sales and drowning rates. That is, there is no proof that one causes the other. Though some studies have shown a correlation between medical marijuana legalization and a reduction in opioid deaths, there is no evidence to show that the increased access to marijuana was the cause of the death reduction. In fact, they state that the evidence to prove the positive correlation is quite weak and therefore it is still too early to tell whether marijuana legalization leads to fewer opioid deaths. Essentially, with regard to both studies, further review and analysis is needed before making any claims about the effects of medical marijuana legalization or of any drug for that matter. 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. SpaceX may have successfully launched the PAZ mission into the low Earth orbit last Thursday morning, but it fell short of its other goal, catching the $6 million nose cone from the Falcon 9 with a giant mitt. Besides the obvious fact that it costs a fortune, retrieving the rocket fairing plays a significant part in the company's effort to develop affordable yet fully reusable booster systems. By cutting the cost of building a spacecraft, SpaceX hopes to lower the price tag on space travel, making it possible for humans to establish future colonies on other planets. To recover the nose cone, a speedboat known as Mr. Steven has been put under commission just for this special role. Owned by SeaTran, the 62-meter vessel is capable of traveling on water for up to 59 kilometers per hour. Despite these impressive specifications, however, it missed catching the fairing by "a few hundred meters" as SpaceX founder and chief executive Elon Musk announced on Twitter. After falling back into the Earth's surface at a speed eight times faster than sound, the fairing plunged straight into the ocean and fortunately managed to remain completely intact. With this failed landing, Musk believes that developing the nose cones with "slightly bigger chutes" would slow the descent down, allowing Mr. Steven to finally make a catch. Falcon 9 Payload: PAZ Satellite And SpaceX Experimental Orbiting Devices Aboard the Falcon 9 on Thursday's launch was a Spanish satellite simply called as PAZ. It features a radar technology designed by Hisdesat and a capability of taking more than a hundred clear images regardless of weather conditions and time of day. It orbits the Earth 15 times daily at a speed of 7 kilometers per second, covering a total area of more than 300,000 square kilometers to acquire visual data for various purposes including security, intelligence, border control, environmental protection, climate monitoring, and much more. The rocket's payload also included two other experimental satellites by SpaceX, namely, Microsat-2a and Microsat-2b. Both are components of a long-term plan envisioned by Musk to send a fleet of such devices into LEO to make wireless broadband connectivity cheaper, faster, and more accessible. Ultimately, the company intends to launch around 12,000 of these broadband satellites, and the recent payload is the first step into turning this vision into reality. The first of these devices are expected to go online by 2019. More Rocket Launches For SpaceX, Fate Of Falcon 9's Nose Cone SpaceX has yet to release any news regarding the nose cone's fate. Musk has only shared photos of it floating in water but none of it being recovered. Considering its multimillion dollar cost, it is unlikely to wash off at some random shore. It could have been fished out of the water and examined for further damage. The company has another launch scheduled on Sunday. This next mission will send the Hispasat 30W-6 communications satellite into the LEO from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. Android-running smartphones can only send text messages. Google plans to change that by introducing multimedia-rich messages with its RCS platform. Most industry insiders agree that when it comes to interactive and multimedia-friendly communication, Apple's iMessage is comfortably on top of the list. New reports reveal that Google intends to offer a similar experience via its default Android Messages platform. Sources confirm that it is possible with the help of its Rich Communication Services or RCS, which is currently scheduled for testing. Reports likewise acknowledge that users from the United States and Mexico will be the first ones to try out this feature. Business Focus For now, it looks like the enhanced messaging platform will be most relevant to Google's business partners who are looking for an effective way to communicate with consumers. Instead of the usual promotional SMS from companies, users will receive interactive messages with pictures, map directions, and more. The search firm intends to partner with manufacturers and network service providers worldwide to implement a new system for future compatibility with RCS services. Network Ready Technology Reports confirm that Google's RCS platform is already compatible with the existing wireless infrastructure provided by most carrier networks. RCS is dependent on the Universal Profile 2 standard that allows communication between the company's platform, network providers, and the businesses that have signed up for the program. "This means, for example, that a retailer can send beautiful images of their products, rather than a text message, and even let the customer select and buy something, all without leaving the messaging app," as stated by Google. "Best of all, customers who have already opted in to SMS messages from a business get this upgraded experience automatically in Android Messages," the company added. A Demonstration This Weekend Attendees of this year's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain will be able to catch a demonstration of Google's RCS platform. Several mobile phone companies will be there to showcase their latest and upcoming models. Most of which will reportedly support the new service when it launches globally. Manufacturers that have signed up to support the company's push for an upgraded messaging service include Alcatel, Intex, Huawei, ZTE, LG, Lenovo, Lava, HMD Global (Nokia), Blu, Multilaser, Mobiwire, Lanix, Kyocera, Samsung, Sony Mobile, HTC, and Pixel. Twilio, a leading cloud communication platform confirmed its support for RCS as well. "By making rich interactive messaging features available to consumers in their default messaging app, RCS has the potential to be ubiquitous as SMS is today," said Patrick Malatack, Twilio's vice president of product and general manager of messaging. 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. EU's Tusk warns Poland against 'anti-semitic excesses' Brussels, Feb 23 (AFP) Feb 23, 2018 EU President Donald Tusk warned Poland on Friday against "anti-semitic excesses" and other behaviour that risked ruining Warsaw's global standing. Tusk, a former Polish premier, said he had told Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki on the sidelines of an EU summit in Brussels that negative opinions about Warsaw were turning into a "tsunami". "I told Mr Morowiecki that the situation is very serious, it directly affects Polish interests, the reputation of Poland and Poland's standing in the world," Tusk said when a Polish journalist asked him about tensions with the EU. Tusk said there was a "wave that must be stopped... of very unjudicious anti-semitic excesses in statements being made in Poland." Poland's right-wing government has faced an international row over a law making it illegal to attribute Nazi crimes to the Polish state. Morawiecki then fanned the flames by saying there were "Jewish perpetrators" as well as Polish ones in the Holocaust. Brussels has also taken Poland's Law and Justice (PiS) government to task in recent years over controversial justice reforms, breaches of environmental law and its failure to take in refugees. Speaking in Polish through an interpreter, Tusk told Warsaw to "stop the wave of bad opinions about Poland... This wave is taking on the proportion of a tsunami." "The government has the wherewithal to stop both of these waves if it has the will," Tusk said, recalling all what ex-communist Poland has achieved since joining the European Union in 2004. LIVINGSTON An information meeting Thursday about the benefits of mosquito control turned a bit testy when some Parish Council members and residents in the audience peppered three experts with questions about the safety and effectiveness of the programs. But some Livingston Parish councilmen say in order to get the insects under control, the parish needs to revive the mosquito control program, which died three years ago after voters rejected paying for it. Also on Thursday, the parish president announced he is considering filing suit over the Laurel Ridge Levee extension in Ascension Parish that he and some residents fear will worsen flooding in lower Livingston Parish. Three experts on mosquito abatement spoke to the council about the methods they use to kill mosquitoes and the risk of West Nile Virus and other diseases presented by the insects. They were peppered with questions from parish council members who are wary of bringing a tax proposal back to the voters and skeptical of whether the mosquito programs are effective. The experts also came under fire from critics in the crowd, including a woman who claims prior mosquito spraying caused her to become disabled. Livingston Parish Council votes to form mosquito abatement board The Livingston Parish Council has decided to go forward with forming a mosquito abatement board. Kyle Moppert, a medical entomologist with the Louisiana Department of Health, said mosquito abatement would be good for Livingston, because the ecology is such that the parish has West Nile Virus-carrying mosquitoes. Since 2002, there have been 51 cases, with at least one case in all but three years, of West Nile Virus that caused neurological effects in Livingston Parish, according to figures Moppert provided. "On a per population basis, youre kind of at the top," Moppert said. Randy Vaeth, assistant director of East Baton Rouge Parish Mosquito and Rodent Control, said they use an "integrated mosquito management" program across the Amite River. That involves spraying adult mosquitoes with two kinds of chemicals, organophosphates and pyrethroids, treating septic ditches for larvae, and conducting educational programs for residents, with tips such as dumping bird baths. Walker-area Parish Councilman Tracy Girlinghouse questioned Vaeth about whether there have been recent advancements in the mosquito-killing chemicals. He has said he won't support a new program unless it is substantially different from what residents have already rejected twice. Top stories in Baton Rouge in your inbox Twice daily we'll send you the day's biggest headlines. Sign up today. e-mail address * Sign Up Vaeth said the chemicals used have been around a long time, with the newest one dating about 15 years. In response to the safety concerns, he said the chemicals, which are approved by the Environmental Protection Agency, are sprayed in very small droplets and are engineered to break down quickly. "The dose makes the poison," he said. Herff Jones, executive director of Iberia Parish Mosquito Control, said his parish, like Livingston, has a mix of urban and rural areas. He said they spend $1.2 million to $1.4 million annually and focus on killing larvae in rural areas and reserve spraying for the more populated areas. Jones acknowledged that mosquito abatement will not kill every biting mosquito in the parish. However, he said that the program has reduced the risk of disease. "If we were not there with the control efforts, we would have so much more mortality and individuals with cases of encephalitis (a severe consequence of West Nile Virus) they have to live with for the rest of their life," Jones said. Also Thursday night, Parish President Layton Ricks addressed the controversial Laurel Ridge Levee Extension, a project in Ascension Parish he fears will worsen flooding on areas along the Amite River and Lake Maurepas in the southern part of Livingston. +6 A pledge of regional cooperation after the 2016 flood gets tested with Ascension levee plan With some fanfare last year, the parish executives of Ascension, Livingston, East Baton Rouge, Iberville and St. James parishes gathered for a Ricks said he is consulting with Chris Moody, attorney for the parish council, and 21st Judicial District Attorney Scott Perrilloux about a possible lawsuit over adverse effects from the levee on Livingston Parish. Ricks said the parish's engineers are reviewing copies of studies provided by Ascension Parish to determine whether there is a significant effect on lower Livingston. A hydrologist for Ascension has estimated the levee could cause water levels to rise three-quarters of an inch in a 100-year flood, but he said that rise shouldn't affect people living in French Settlement, which is across the river from the levee. Moody said the target and legal arguments are still under review, but one cause of action would be a state law that prohibits doing drainage projects that have an adverse affect on nearby parishes. Penalties covering residential chickens are harsher than hazing laws, Stephen Gruver said, calling for stiffer penalties in an appearance on "Good Morning America" Friday morning. Stephen Gruver joined his wife, Rae Ann, to discuss the current climate of hazing on college campuses months after their son, Max, died on LSU's campus. "It's not a deterrent as the laws are right now," Stephen Gruver said. Can't see the video below? Click here. Parents who lost their children in hazing tragedies speak out, sitting down with @michaelstrahan - how their friendship is helping them cope, and what they're doing to make sure if never happens to another family: https://t.co/VRPyzTeEP9 pic.twitter.com/Ff9CzXI97D Good Morning America (@GMA) February 23, 2018 The Gruver family pointed to LSU's announcement of changes coming for LSU fraternities including a possible ban on hard alcohol and adult supervision as woefully inadequate. "The end result here is a report consisting of a lot of words aimed at crafting only the appearance of reform," read a statement from the family on Thursday. "In reality, it proffers no real meaningful changes to Greek Life that would have prevented the death of our son, any other injuries, or sexual assaults that have plagued LSUs fraternities. +6 Max Gruver's parents: LSU's plan to curb fraternity hazing, drinking contains no meaningful reform Responding to the death of a fraternity pledge last fall, LSU unveiled its highly anticipated corrective action plan on Wednesday a list of The Gruvers joined the family of Tim Piazza, who died in a hazing incident just months before Max on the campus of Penn State. Top stories in Baton Rouge in your inbox Twice daily we'll send you the day's biggest headlines. Sign up today. e-mail address * Sign Up Rae Ann Gruver said support from another family has been helpful in coping with her son's death. "You just keep getting by and going day-by-day. We have two other kids and we're trying to get back to some sort of normal with them. Max's birthday was just a couple weeks ago and that was really hard on all of us," she said. "It really helped us through a lot of pain. To understand some of it. That's someone actually gone through and shared our experience." The families said they are looking to form a group of families to offer support for those touched by similar tragedies, as well as push for stiffer legislation. They support increased penalties, including a felony status for hazing charges. +2 In wake of Max Gruver death, legislator will file bill to dramatically increase criminal penalties for hazing In Louisiana, the maximum criminal penalty for hazing is softer than the penalty for shoplifting candy. A hazing conviction comes with a small Rae AnnGruver also offered advice for any students falling victim to or witnessing hazing practices: "If it doesn't feel right, it's not right. And strength in numbers with them is what's going to help each one of them. They need to take care of each other." For the full post from Good Morning America, click here. A Shoppers Value store on Old Hammond Highway in Baton Rouge was converted from a former Winn-Dixie. The grocery store chain on Thursday announced an acquisition of seven Winn-Dixie locations in New Orleans and Mississippi for conversion to its brand. Four teenagers are under indictment on second-degree murder counts in the October shooting death of a man during an armed robbery on Rhoda Drive. Darius Clark, 18, of Tampa, Florida, and Jerrin Spencer, 18, Kyriel Spencer, 17, and Eric Johnson, 18, all of Baton Rouge, were charged Wednesday by an East Baton Rouge Parish grand jury in the death of 33-year-old Elmer Ochoa. Ochoa was shot Oct. 18 and died 10 days later. His pants pockets were pulled out when a bystander found him on the sidewalk in the 4300 block of Rhoda Drive about 11:25 p.m., the East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff's Office said. Baton Rouge man dies after being shot in attempted armed robbery, new warrants show Four teenagers who are accused of stalking residents in the south Park Drive neighborhood in mid October, looking for a someone to rob were bo Clark is the alleged shooter, authorities have said. Kyriel Spencer and Jerrin Spencer are cousins. The case is assigned to state District Judge Bonnie Jackson. Veteran New Orleans defense attorney Mike Fawer told a Baton Rouge judge Friday he will represent jailed contractor Matthew Morris, who is accused in East Baton Rouge and several other parishes of defrauding victims of the catastrophic 2016 flooding. Fawer's announcement in state District Judge Tony Marabella's courtroom came two weeks after the judge ruled Morris, 40, of Baton Rouge, is competent to stand trial in East Baton Rouge and could represent himself. Morris did not want to be represented by the East Baton Rouge Parish Public Defenders Office. Judge appoints doctors to determine if jailed Baton Rouge contractor Matthew Morris is competent to represent himself A jailed Baton Rouge contractor accused of defrauding scores of victims of the unprecedented 2016 flooding in south Louisiana will be examined Fawer, whose track record includes the 1986 acquittal of former Gov. Edwin Edwards on federal racketeering and mail fraud charges, told Marabella that lawyer Al Robert Jr. will be his co-counsel. Morris is charged in East Baton Rouge with four counts of residential contractor fraud and one count of filing or maintaining false public records. He also is charged in dozens of counts in Ascension, Livingston and other parishes. Fawer said outside Marabella's courtroom that he will represent Morris in each of the parishes where he is charged. Morris, owner of Complete Construction Contractors, remains in custody and maintains his innocence. +2 Contractor accused of flood-related fraud in 3 parishes pleads not guilty in EBR A Baton Rouge contractor accused of defrauding victims of the August flooding in three parishes pleaded not guilty Monday in East Baton Rouge Top stories in Baton Rouge in your inbox Twice daily we'll send you the day's biggest headlines. Sign up today. e-mail address * Sign Up In November, Marabella ordered doctors to examine Morris to determine whether he is competent to stand trial and represent himself. The doctors found him competent. Marabella then ruled earlier this month that Morris could proceed to trial on what the judge called "complex" charges and said Morris intelligently and knowingly waived his right to counsel. "This court has repeatedly warned the defendant against self-representation's dangers and disadvantages," the judge wrote. Marabella, in that ruling, relieved the local public defenders office from representing Morris but appointed the office to act as stand-by counsel for him to help him understand the "ground rules." +2 'My voice hasn't been heard': BR contractor accused of flood-related fraud emotional in court A jailed Baton Rouge contractor accused in East Baton Rouge and several other parishes of defrauding victims of last summer's catastrophic flo The judge on Friday allowed the public defenders office to withdraw from that appointment. Authorities have said Morris charged homeowners whose houses flooded in August 2016 for work he did not perform, taking most of their insurance proceeds and presenting them with a large final bill to finish the job on their gutted homes. When clients questioned the big bills and terminated their contracts, authorities said, Morris filed liens against their homes for fees and charges the victims had challenged. Morris claimed the disputed fees and charges were legitimate or called for in the contract, law enforcement agencies said. The liens hindered homeowners' ability to finish restoring their homes. Morris has said he ultimately agreed to lift the property liens he placed against his customers. While an air conditioning problem at LSU came to light Thursday, a school spokeswoman said Friday the impact is limited. Air conditioning units are operating normally in classrooms and dormitories and at 76 degrees elsewhere, said LSU spokeswoman Rachel Spangenthal. The comments came one day after the school said in a "Dear LSU Community" email that air conditioner problems across campus could take weeks to repair. Many LSU buildings experiencing air-conditioner problems that could last days, or weeks Many buildings on LSU's campus are experiencing air-conditioning problems, and a fix could take anywhere from a few days to a couple of weeks. The announcement set off alarms, especially with Baton Rouge experiencing unusually high temperatures for February. Spangenthal said classes are operating normally. That includes classes set for Saturday to make up for classroom cancellations when snow and ice struck the city. Spangenthal said thermostats have been set at 76 degrees rather than the normal 72 degrees in buildings affected by the problem. LSU officials Friday declined to make available officials most familiar with the issue. In addition, some of the concerns described in the school's announcement Thursday appear at odds with what officials said Friday. Ernie Ballard, another spokesman for the school, said in an email that Thursday's message was not a press release but a message to students who had been experiencing air conditioning issues. Ballard said that was mostly in buildings near the Quadrangle on campus, including Middleton Library and Coates Hall. Top stories in Baton Rouge in your inbox Twice daily we'll send you the day's biggest headlines. Sign up today. e-mail address * Sign Up The source of the problem is an aging water cooler system that could take weeks to repair. The age of the system is unclear. Spangenthal said the chilled water system and its cooling towers are on the school's $500 million list of deferred maintenance. +9 Maintenance at LSU severely lacks after years of budget slashing; 'deterioration' labeled 'disgusting' When it rains outside Middleton Library on LSUs campus, it rains inside, too.A group of employees with offices in the basement know to bring Leaders of LSU and other colleges and universities have long complained about the lack of state assistance addressing long overdue repairs. State lawmakers have blamed recurring state financial problems for their inability to address the shortcomings. Temperatures are expected to drop slightly next week, with lows in the 50's several nights and highs in the 70's. Portable air conditioners are also being brought to campus to address problem spots, according to state Rep. Franklin Foil, R-Baton Rouge, whose district includes a small part of the campus. Unnamed officials of the Emergency Operations Center said in their Thursday memo that the chilled water system was operating at 32 percent of its normal capacity. The deficit, they said, is the equivalent of losing about 2,800 residential air-conditioning units. The announcement also said air conditioning had been turned off in some buildings, including Thomas Boyd and Efferson halls and individual faculty and administrative offices in academic buildings. Sites never affected, according to the school, include the Student Union; LSU Recreation, called UREC; Barnes & Noble Bookstore; 5 Dining Hall, 459 Dining Hall; African American Cultural Center, Women's Center and Veterans Center. In an opinion piece in The Advocate recently, Daniel Erspamer tried to argue that net neutrality is one of the more complex issues of our tim Gov. John Bel Edwards, left, shakes hands with his designee on the Louisiana Justice Reinvestment Task Force, Flozell Daniels, Jr., right, President and CEO of Foundation For Louisiana, Thursday, March 16, 2017, during a press conference following a meeting in which the task force detailed its plan for criminal justice reform. The Rev. Gene Mills, President of Louisiana Family Forum, is at center, and Lafourche Parish Sheriff Craig Webre is at left, background. Our Views: After Southern Law Center fires professor, house cleaning also in order at Council on Aging FILE - in this Feb. 14, 2018, file photo, Rick Gates departs Federal District Court in Washington. In a dramatic escalation of pressure and stakes, special counsel Robert Mueller filed additional criminal charges Thursday against President Donald Trump's former campaign chairman Paul Manafort and his business associate, Gates. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File) A former narcotics officer pleaded guilty Thursday to federal drug charges, admitting he stole cash and cocaine while serving on a New Orleans-based U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration task force. The officer, Johnny J. Domingue, a former Tangipahoa Parish Sheriff's Office deputy, has emerged as a key witness in a misconduct investigation that has roiled the DEA's New Orleans field division and affected dozens of state and local drug cases. The U.S. Justice Department has accused several members of the DEA task force of shaking down witnesses, dealing drugs and swiping cash during federal raids. Four former members of the group, which operated largely along the Interstate 12 corridor, face federal charges. Domingue, 28, has been in custody for more than two years and is being held in Houston because of concern for his safety. He has implicated at least two of his former colleagues, including Chad Scott, the task force leader who before his indictment last year had been among the DEA's most active drug agents. "Johnny wants to move on with his life," defense attorney Sherman Mack said outside of U.S. District Judge Eldon Fallon's courtroom. "He is ready to have this behind him." Fallon set a June 21 sentencing date, but Domingue likely will not be sentenced until federal prosecutors have wrapped up the case against Scott. Karl Newman, another former Tangipahoa Parish deputy who served alongside Domingue on the DEA task force, pleaded guilty last summer to conspiracy and firearms charges and also is cooperating with the probe. Top stories in New Orleans in your inbox Twice daily we'll send you the day's biggest headlines. Sign up today. e-mail address * Sign Up Scott has pleaded not guilty to a raft of federal charges, including perjury and stealing thousands of dollars in drug money. He is scheduled to stand trial in October. The first of the lawmen to be arrested, Domingue had been selected by Scott to join the DEA task force, joining the group as a young and inexperienced deputy. He told investigators that misconduct was rampant on the task force when he joined it, according to court records. Domingue had not even been properly credentialed when he began investigating drug cases on Scott's team, according to federal law enforcement officials, and he also exploited lax DEA policies since changed that allowed evidence to be transferred to local agencies with minimal oversight. On Thursday, he pleaded guilty to stealing cocaine that had been seized by the DEA and that was supposed to be transferred to a local agency for state prosecution. Those drugs were instead distributed for profit, prosecutors said. He also admitted to stealing about $3,000 a sum he split with Newman during an October 2015 drug search. Domingue previously pleaded guilty to a four-count state indictment in which he admitted using his badge to acquire cocaine, methamphetamine, prescription pills and marijuana. He withdrew his guilty plea in that case earlier this week. Federal agents raided a Gretna pain clinic Thursday and seized about $1.5 million in assets from a local doctor suspected of running a "pill mill" that accepted only cash for years and doled out prescription pills to patients who traveled from hours away. The doctor, Wayne J. Celestine, has not been arrested but surrendered his license to distribute controlled substances, said Special Agent Debbie Webber, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration's New Orleans field division. Celestine made nearly $14 million from the "pill mill operation" between 2008 and 2018, the DEA said in a news release, serving as the owner and sole practitioner of the Integrity Pain Management Clinic. The DEA began investigating Celestine in late 2013 after receiving information that the doctor had been "structuring" his cash deposits to avoid federal reporting requirements. Agents learned that Celesinte took only cash for clinic visits, and that his business prescribed "large quantities" of controlled substances. The DEA conducted undercover purchases from the business and also noted that patients would travel from hours away and line up outside the clinic, where they were seen "selling or obtaining prescriptions" in the clinic's parking lot and waiting room. Agents raided the Commerce Street clinic on Thursday and searched three local residences associated with Celestine. "To have a medical professional who is bound by an oath to adhere to the highest moral, ethical and legal principles and fully aware of the power of these controlled substances abusing his privileges is a total betrayal of his profession," said Stephen Azzam, special agent in the charge of the DEA's New Orleans field division. "The teamwork at all levels of law enforcement local, state and federal was instrumental in this investigation." St. Charles Parish President Larry Cochran on Thursday began participating in a substance-abuse treatment program in an effort to avoid prosecution on a charge of driving while intoxicated last year, Jefferson Parish District Attorney Paul Connick's office said. Office spokesman Paul Purpura said Cochran enrolled in a six-month "diversion" program. Cochran was eligible for the program, which he must complete to avoid facing trial, because it was the first time he was cited for DWI when police pulled him over in the early morning hours of Sept. 2. Enrolling in the diversion program requires participants to accept responsibility for the offenses they are accused of, though it does not constitute a guilty plea. Cochran's attorney, Wiley Beevers, maintains his client was not impaired on the night he was pulled over. But the law prohibits drivers from having any trace of a controlled dangerous substance such as a painkiller in their system, Beevers said. Cochran, 55, tested positive for a combination of prescription painkillers but had no detectable alcohol in his system after he was pulled over. "We were very happy the district attorney afforded us this opportunity," Beevers said about the diversion program. "And we are availing ourselves of it." Top stories in New Orleans in your inbox Twice daily we'll send you the day's biggest headlines. Sign up today. e-mail address * Sign Up Cochran was pulled over after police received a call about his Chevy Tahoe weaving over the roadway and even going onto the neutral ground on Joe Yenni Boulevard in north Kenner. An officer pulled the car over, and Cochran performed poorly on a field sobriety test while displaying bloodshot eyes and slow speech, police said. Police said Cochran made unusual remarks to officers, telling them, "I guess this means I should fill out my resignation papers," and also bit off the mouthpiece of an alcohol testing device. They suspected he was impaired by drugs and jailed him on counts of driving under the influence as well as reckless driving. A blood test showed the presence of oxycodone, hydrocodone and oxymorphone. Beevers said Cochran had been prescribed the first two drugs, commonly sold as Oxycontin and Vicodin, because of surgeries. Oxymorphone is a byproduct of oxycodone and not a separate drug, he said. Beevers said his client had not taken the medications for several days before he was pulled over and denied he was driving recklessly. "He was not impaired," he said. Participants in the Jefferson diversion program are required to blow into a device preventing anyone intoxicated from starting a car. They also must undergo counseling, take drug and alcohol tests, and meet with a Mothers Against Drunk Driving panel. You know when it's 1:00 a.m. and you're craving a spicy chorizo taco? You go on your computer or your phone to one of the various food apps and find the best late-night taco delivery in town. Technology saves the day. But how about when it's 1:00 a.m. and you're in need of a friend -- maybe someone who is just like you, living with HIV, and understanding of the unique physical and emotional challenges experienced by a person living with HIV? Where's the site/app for that? MyHIVTeam.com is a free website and app (available on iTunes and Google Play) where people with HIV can connect with others living in their area, across the U.S., or in one of eight English-speaking countries around the world. MyHIVTeam.com is user-friendly, and members can share as little or as much personal information as they wish on their profiles and in conversations. It's a free, members-only site with password protection for each member, so personal information isn't available on Google or other search engines. MyHIVTeam's privacy policy states that they will "NEVER share your Personal Information with anyone, except in cases involving authorized technical service providers, subpoenas, or illegal activity." Other resources are available on the site, such as a provider directory with names of businesses, doctors (although they do not endorse any specific provider or treatment), and other specialists who understand HIV; blog posts to help users get the most out of the site; Q&A boards; and even a page of encouraging and inspiring quotes. Related: Social Connectedness and HIV: Strategies for Better Health MyHIVTeam cofounder and COO Mary Ray MyHIVTeam.com The site was founded by Mary Ray and Eric Peacock as part of a larger site, MyHealthTeams.com, bringing together people who are living with chronic conditions. "The hypothesis was, if there was a place where you could connect with other people who are in your shoes, you're more likely to stay on top of your condition, learn about what the best evidence-based treatments are, and who the best providers are in your area could be," Mary said. After interviewing many folks with various conditions, Mary and Eric discovered a common experience among people living with chronic ailments: once diagnosed with an illness, a person's life is dramatically changed. Finding a compassionate person to talk to and a community is key to improving one's quality of life and reclaiming a sense of normalcy. Their goal was to create a social network offering a way for people to connect. In 2012, with the help of venture capital investors, they launched the first of what now are 28 different MyHealthTeam sites, and in 2016, MyHIVTeam became one of them. Mary said that being on a social network like MyHIVTeam can change the perspective of people who are struggling with their diagnosis when they discover that they are not alone. "[This site] offers social proof from other people who have been in your shoes and who are living normal lives, and who offer multiple dimensions of who they are," Mary said. "They're not just HIV positive, but they are people who go to work [and] have jobs; who have performances; who are athletes; who are uncles, aunts and moms; and [who have] all these other facets." People might even be inspired and see new possibilities for their own future by learning about someone else's experience. MyHIVTeam.com A Kiwi contestant competing in the US Bachelor Winter Games has been kicked off the show in the most cringeworthy fashion. The pressure became too much for Ally Thompson when she was put in front of a panel of special guest judges for a kissing competition. "I think I'm going to vomit right now," she said as other contestants made out with each other. She was right. "I think I'm going to be sick," she said when it came to her turn to kiss fellow contestant Josiah Graham, before turning and sprinting to the toilets. A cameraman filmed her as she vomited, before telling Graham it is was all nerves - not the thought of her mouth touching his. "I'm sorry. I'm so embarrassed," Thompson said. She then returned to the kissing competition, insisting she brushed her teeth - but any romance appeared to have left... along with the contents of her stomach. During her exit interview, Thompson tearfully admitted there wasn't "that spark" with her partner anyway. The Bachelor NZ season three favourite Lily McManus and season two's Bachelor himself, Jordan Mauger, are still on the show. - Newshub. Lil Nas X opens up about his anxiety about becoming famous after Old Town Road blew up Lil Nas X went through the "worst anxiety period" where he was convinced he was going to die. Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin EDITORIAL (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Fri, February 23, 2018 08:11 1302 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9c6db032 4 Editorial #Editorial,state-budget,finance-ministry,finance-minister,Sri-Mulyani-Indrawati,#budget,#SriMulyaniIndrawati Free That Finance Minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati publicly expressed her outrage on Wednesday upon learning that ministries and government agencies made revisions to 52,400 budget authorization documents or spending warrants last year, reflects her great concern over the urgent need to speed up the budget implementation. We fully support her threat that starting next year ministries and other central government agencies that are found to be the worst performers in budget planning and execution would be subject to heavy penalties or even liable to cuts in budget appropriations. The revision of budget spending warrants not only reflects slipshod planning, but also slows down budget execution, thereby delaying the injection of liquidity into the economy. The trend is more worrisome because the revisions to budget spending were requested by ministries and other central government agencies whose budget planning capacity should be better than the regional administrations. Yet more damaging is that delayed budget spending also causes losses to the government and wastes taxpayers money, because about 20 percent of the state budget is financed by government bonds. Any delays in spending means wasting taxpayers money because the government has to pay the interest on the bonds even when the proceeds of the bond issuance sit idly in the central bank. Since government funds in the central bank are derived from tax collection, dividends from state companies and the sale of government bonds, the idle cash reserves cause monetary contraction or decreased liquidity in the economy, consequently slowing economic growth. Given the vital need for smooth budget implementation, Sri Mulyani made budget preparation her top priority when she took over the Finance Ministry in 2005. Her determination led to significant progress when the government for the first time was able to deliver in the third week of December 2011 budget spending documents to ministries and regional administrations for the 2012 fiscal year. Previously, budget authorization documents were delivered only at the beginning of the fiscal year in January, two months after the state budget was approved by the House of Representatives. Before 2012, the cycle of budget spending for investment and procurement started slowly in March, then accelerated toward the end of the year, thereby causing an adverse cycle at the expense of the quality of public spending. A difference of three to four weeks may seem insignificant, but that could mean a great deal, at least psychologically, because such a move reflects the Presidents sense of urgency in speeding up the implementation of public-sector investment projects. For the current fiscal year, for example, budget spending warrants were delivered in the first week of last December, thereby allowing ministries and agencies to immediately prepare auctions for the procurement of goods or services early in January. Quick and efficient budget disbursement is imperative and more urgent now, not only because we must speed up infrastructure development, but also because the economy relies significantly on public sector investment. All the world's wild horses have gone extinct, according to a study Thursday that unexpectedly rewrites the horse family tree based on a new DNA analysis of their ancestry. What most people thought were the last remaining wild horses on Earth -- known as Przewalski's horses -- were actually domesticated horses that escaped their owners, said the report in the journal Science. "This was a big surprise," said co-author Sandra Olsen, curator-in-charge of the archeology division of the Biodiversity Institute and Natural History Museum at the University of Kansas. "This means there are no living wild horses on Earth -- that's the sad part," said Olsen. The study is based on archaeological work at two sites in northern Kazakhstan, called Botai and Krasnyi Yar, where scientists have found the earliest proof of horse domestication, going back more than 5,000 years. To further dig into these roots, international researchers sequenced the genomes of 20 horses from the Botai -- based on teeth and bones unearthed from the sites -- and 22 horses from across Eurasia. Then, they compared these ancient horse genomes with already published genomes of 18 ancient and 28 modern horses. They discovered that Przewalski's horses descended from the earliest-known domesticated horses, kept by the Botai people of northern Kazakhstan some 5,500 years ago. That means what people thought were wild horses were actually feral, meaning they had escaped from domestication but were not originally wild. Read also: From doom to bloom: The bright side to extinction - A new quest - According to Beth Shapiro, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California Santa Cruz, the findings are "super interesting." "Certainly, it is surprising to see that Przewalski's horses are descended from early domestic horses, as this is not what people tended to believe," Shapiro, who was not involved in the study, told AFP. "Swapping the word 'wild' for 'feral' is a semantic change that may better reflect their evolutionary history but should not change their status. We should continue to protect Przewalski's horses as a population of wild horses." Przewalski's horses are considered an endangered species by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. The round-bellied, short legged, reddish brown to beige horses roamed Central Asia, Europe and China in prehistoric times. They were listed as extinct in the wild in the 1960s, but a number of breeding programs and reintroductions have helped bolster their numbers. The findings have also sparked a new quest -- to uncover the true origins of today's domestic horses. "Current models suggest that all modern domesticated horses living now descend from those first tamed in Botai, in the north of present-day Kazakhstan," said a statement from the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) scientist Ludovic Orlando. "Yet this genomic analysis yielded unexpected results." Since the Botai horses did not give rise to today's domesticated horses, "the origin of modern domestic horses must be sought elsewhere." The journey of life, in all its many manifestations, can be expressed in various forms. The form chosen by Effendy Setyohandoyo, an artist from Malang, East Java, is painting. Effendys interpretations of life were on display at his solo exhibition, Belum Selesai Tumbuh (Still Growing) at the Malang Art Council building from Jan. 20 to 30. The exhibition displayed 20 of his paintings. The title represents that the events of life are forever underway, said Effendy, who is also a senior high school art teacher. Effendy said he began his journey in visual arts in 1985. Since then, his works have been displayed in Malang, Yogyakarta and Bali, as well as other regions around the country. This is my first solo exhibition. The previous ones were joint exhibitions, said Effendy, whose works are signed with his nickname, Goweng. His observations of political, social and environmental issues are reflected in his works, which he has created over the last 17 years. One artwork, Hello Caleg (Hello Legislative Candidates), is an acrylic painting on canvas featuring the face of former United States president Barack Obama in a pop-art style. This painting, he said, commented on the legislative election in Indonesia in 2009. I used the image of Barack Obama to symbolize the democratic process, The painting also features random figures placed in a circle, which, according to Effendy, created a language of creation the way colors did. Such figures are also found in paintings like Catatan (Records), which depicts a buffalo with a necktie in its mouth to symbolize corruption, as, after enjoying their illicit gains, embezzlers become stupid like buffalos. Voting won't make a difference: Effendy Setyohandoyo captures the apathy many people feel toward general elections through a subversive recreation of the famous photo of US soldier hoisting the national flag at Iwo Jima during World War II. In Effendy's version the Star-Spangled Banner is replaced by a white flag. (JP/Nedi Putra AW) Effendy also took note of many peoples apathy toward general elections in Merayakan Golput (Celebrating Non-voting), by recreating the famous photo of US soldiers hoisting the national flag at Iwo Jima during World War II. However, in Effendys recreation, the flag is white. In Merayakan Golput, he also includes various symbols, such as a picture of one of the flag hoisters treading on a ballot box with a dog beside them. Some abstainers only talked bombastically, he said. In another painting, Effendy criticizes the public craze of illegal lotteries, called togel. In addition to paintings, the exhibition also included some of Effendys installation works. In one installation, Effendy put the spotlight on consumerism by using the visual symbol of donuts getting in a chamber pot, while in another, titled Pengumuman (Announcement), Effendy used a provisional identity card to signify his protest against delayed public services. Its the provisional ID card of my son, who has applied for an electronic ID card but so far hasnt received one because, among other reasons, the unavailability of materials, said the father of two, who said this was a common experience for people across Indonesia. Some of Effendys installation works also touch upon the subject of religion and the spiritual world. In a work called Pulang (Returning Home), Effendy uses an illustration of a set of stairs and the image of a person to serve as a reminder that in the hereafter we bring only our good and bad deeds. Effendy also promotes introspection by depicting a figure resembling Jesus, seated and in deep thought on human behavior. For Effendy, the dynamics of human life could be artistically captured and he wanted the public to see and interpret his works with total freedom. However, he said he realized that the public still had a low interest in and appreciation of works of art. Today, the younger generations education is geared toward subjects that lead to employment, so theres a less focus on art and social matters, he said, referring to the common assumption that it was difficult to earn a living from art. Everything happening around us is a process that is not yet finished, said Effendy, adding that he lived by the adapt-or-die principle to avoid becoming stagnant or sidelined in the present-day art world. As Chinas shoppers power growth for European luxury brands, Chinese companies want to bring home some of the profits along with their Prada loafers. Fosun International Ltd. acquired a majority stake in French fashion house Lanvin for an undisclosed sum, the Shanghai-based group said Thursday. Its the latest in a series of moves by Chinese companies to snap up iconic European names, ranging from Bally handbags to Baccarat Champagne flutes. Theyre betting on European names where they know they can charge a premium, said Olivier Abtan, managing director for luxury at Boston Consulting Group in Paris. They can put their know-how in the Chinese market in service of these very recognizable names. Luxury sales in China grew 20 percent last year, according to consultancy Bain & Co., and Chinese consumers accounted for about one-third of sales worldwide. Much of that spending, including splurges during tourists grand tours of Europe, has gone to the French conglomerates that dominate the luxury industry -- Louis Vuitton owner LVMH and Gucci parent Kering. Earlier this week, Jining, China-based apparel group Shandong Ruyi said its ambition was to develop into the LVMH group of China. The bold statement of intent came as the company denied a report that it was in talks to buy Arcadia Group, the British owner of fashion chain Topshop. But Shandong Ruyi has already bought or invested in a series of brands, including Frances Sandro, Maje and Claudie Pierlot, as well as Aquascutum and Gieves & Hawkes in the U.K. Earlier this month it added Swiss leather-goods label Bally. Shandong Ruyi plans to continue to look for suitable acquisition targets, favoring recognizable brands with room for rapid growth, the company said. Jeanne Lanvin SAS, founded in 1889, is Frances oldest fashion house in continuous operation. It grew into a global brand under designer Alber Elbaz after its acquisition by the Taiwanese publishing magnate Shaw-Lan Wang in 2001, but has struggled to regain its footing since the designers departure in 2015. His successor, Bouchra Jarrar, left the house last summer after only two seasons. Read also: Victoria's Secret to charm China with fashion gala 70 Brands The Chinese groups have a long way to go to catch up with LVMH, which has a portfolio of 70 prestigious brands, including Christian Dior fashion, Bulgari jewelry and Dom Perignon Champagne. But as top luxury labels have pushed prices higher -- a basic cocktail dress can cost $2,500 or more -- theyve left an avenue for their Chinese competitors to grow by targeting a more accessible range.Shandong Ruyi-controlled SMCP SA -- which owns Sandro, Maje and Claudie Pierlot -- grew 17.5 percent last year at constant currency, selling some of its dresses and handbags for around 250 euros ($307). The French brand Iro, which Fosun acquired in 2016, competes in a similar space with biker jackets priced at just under 500 euros. Other recent forays by Fosun include a deal for Italian menswear brand Caruso and an investment in U.S. knitwear brand St. John, while Shandong Ruyi has snapped up Savile Row suitmaker Gieves & Hawkes. Last summer, Fortune Fountain Capital Ltd., which manages money for wealthy Chinese families, said it would buy a majority stake in French crystal-maker Baccarat. As China becomes the main growth driver of the global luxury market, we are confident that Fosun can bring great incremental value to Lanvin, Joann Cheng, executive president of Fosun Fashion Group, said in a statement. The world's oldest known cave art was crafted by Neanderthals more than 20,000 years before modern humans arrived in Europe, showing that our extinct cousins were capable of symbolic thinking just like us, international researchers said Thursday. The report in the journal Science is based on new technology that reveals the most accurate age yet of ancient cave paintings at three different archeological sites in Spain. "This is an incredibly exciting discovery which suggests Neanderthals were much more sophisticated than is popularly believed," said co-lead author Chris Standish, an archaeologist at the University of Southampton. "Our results show that the paintings we dated are, by far, the oldest known cave art in the world." Since they were created some 64,000 years ago -- at least 20,000 years before modern humans arrived in Europe from Africa -- "they must have been painted by Neanderthals," he added. Using mainly red pigments and sometimes black, groups of animals, hand stencils, engravings, dots, discs and geometric designs are depicted in the cave paintings at La Pasiega in the northeast, Maltravieso in the west and Ardales in the south of Spain. These symbolic renderings point to an intelligence that was previously thought to be uniquely the realm of modern humans. "The emergence of symbolic material culture represents a fundamental threshold in the evolution of humankind," said co-lead author Dirk Hoffmann of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. "It is one of the main pillars of what makes us human." Read also: DNA shows first modern Briton had dark skin, blue eyes - New technology - Plenty of evidence already exists to debunk the myth that Neanderthals were knuckle-dragging brutes, and instead were capable of decorative impulses and rituals, like burying their dead. But cave paintings were one of the last bastions that appeared to differentiate anatomically modern humans from Neanderthals, who died out some 35,000 years ago. "Recent years have seen studies that show Neanderthals made extensive use of ornamental objects, potentially built structures, and on the whole, appear far more capable of symbolic cognitive processes than has historically been regarded," Adam Van Arsdale, associate professor of anthropology at Wellesley College, told AFP. "These results suggest that cave painting, also, fails to distinguish Neanderthals and modern humans," said Van Arsdale, who was not involved in the study. He said the findings reflect "some impressive technical developments in dating techniques in cave contexts, issues that have always posed a challenge for our understanding the timing of key events in human evolution." He added: "As a new and technically challenging method, it will be good to see these results replicated by others." Read also: Essay: The human condition - To date but not destroy - Until now, figuring out the age of cave drawings without destroying them has been difficult. The new approach is based on obtaining a minimum age for cave art "using Uranium-Thorium (U-Th) dating of carbonate crusts overlying the pigments," explained Hoffman. The technique of U-Th dating is based on the radioactive decay of uranium isotopes into thorium. It can determine the age of calcium carbonate formations going back as far as 500,000 years, much further than the widely used radiocarbon method, said the report. More than 60 tiny samples, less than 10 milligrams each, were analyzed from the three caves. A second study, also published this week by Hoffmann and colleagues, determined the age of an archaeological deposit located at the Cueva de los Aviones, a sea cave in southeast Spain. "This cave contained perforated sea shells, red and yellow colorants and shell containers including complex mixes of pigments," said the report. U-Th dating found the flowstone covering the deposit to about 115,000 years, older than similar finds in south and north Africa associated with Homo sapiens. The dating shows they came from a time when Neanderthals lived in western Europe. "According to our new data Neanderthals and modern humans shared symbolic thinking and must have been cognitively indistinguishable," said Joao Zilhao, a researcher from the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies in Barcelona who was involved in both studies. Future studies could reveal many more caves where art was likely done by Neanderthals, said study co-author Paul Pettitt of Durham University. "We have examples in three caves 700 kilometers apart, and evidence that it was a long-lived tradition. It is quite possible that similar cave art in other caves in Western Europe is of Neanderthal origin as well," he said. "Neanderthals created meaningful symbols in meaningful places. The art is not a one-off accident." Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin (Agence France-Presse) Buenos Aires, ARGENTINA Fri, February 23, 2018 09:22 1302 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9c6dc87e 2 World Russian-ambassador,Argentina,drug-abuse Free Police have seized nearly 400 kilos of cocaine from the Russian embassy in Buenos Aires and arrested several members of a drug trafficking gang, Argentina's security minister announced Thursday. Patricia Bullrich told a press conference that the drugs discovered in an annex of the embassy had a street value of around 50 million euros (about $62 million). "A gang of narco-criminals was trying to use the diplomatic courier service of the Russian embassy" to ship the drugs to Europe, she said. She told reporters that Russian and Argentine police had decided to mount a sting operation after the Russian ambassador informed them of the drugs find in December 2016. "The cocaine was replaced by flour and monitoring devices were placed to monitor delivery" of the 16 bags of the drug, Bullrich said. She said the sting had resulted in the arrest of five suspects -- two in Argentina and three in Russia. The drug, of "very high purity," was destined for Russia and probably also Germany, where the suspected mastermind lives. "We believe the German police will arrest this fugitive," Bullrich said. The minister said Russian security service agents "came to Argentina on three occasions to assist in the investigation", which took more than a year. One of the two people arrested in Argentina is a naturalized Russian who was a member of the police force in Buenos Aires, said Bullrich. Investigators believe the cocaine likely originated in Colombia or Peru. Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin Ivany Atina Arbi (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Fri, February 23, 2018 17:47 1301 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9c6ffb65 1 City #TanahAbang,anies-baswedan,police Free Jakarta Governor Anies Baswedan has declined to comment on a community organizations police report against his decision to allow hundreds of street vendors to occupy Jl. Jatibaru Raya near Tanah Abang textile market in Central Jakarta. Anies responded to reporters' questions with a smile and a succinct, I dont have any comments [on the report]. The governor implemented the road closure in December, but has yet to discuss the move at length with the media or the public; nor has he answered questions and suggestions. The Jakarta Polices traffic division has asked him to reconsider the regulation and open the road once more to motorists. Anies, has yet to respond to the request, saying only that the recommendation has been received, but we have yet to follow up on it. Jakarta Police Traffic Management director Sr. Comr. Halim Pagarra has even urged reporters to keep reminding the governor about the issue. Halim reminded the governor about Law No.22/2009 on traffic and land transportation, which stipulates that the police must be involved in any decision about the use of roads. Basically, according to the law, permission on road utilization must come from the police, Halim said. On Thursday night, community organization Cyber Indonesia reported Anies to the Jakarta Police over the road closure, saying that the move violated Law No. 38/2004 on roads. Violating the law could lead to 18 months imprisonment and a Rp 1.5 billion (US$105,000) fine. Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Fri, February 23, 2018 20:18 1301 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9c7098c7 1 National customs-and-excise,smuggling,lobsters Free Soekarno Hatta International Airport customs officials have seized four suitcases containing baby lobsters on a plane departing for Singapore on Thursday. The officials seized more than 71,000 baby lobsters in 193 packages inside the suitcases that were already inside the baggage hold of a Lion Air aircraft. Finance Minister Sri Mulyani said five people were named suspects in the case. The police arrested a group of smugglers comprising one supervisor and four carriers, she said in a press conference on Friday. Sri Mulyani said the officials became suspicious when one of the suspects made odd gestures at the customs gate. The officials immediately opened the suspect's checked in baggage but found nothing suspicious. The officials then decided to check all of the passengers cabin bags as well as the bags loaded in the aircrafts baggage hold, where the packages were eventually found. The total potential loss from this case could have exceeded Rp 30 billion [US$2.19 million], according to bu Susi, Sri said, referring to Maritime Affairs and Fisheries Minister Susi Pudjiastuti. Sri said the suspects were facing multiple charges under the law on animal quarantine and seafood shipping, as well as Law No. 17/2007 on smuggling, which carries a maximum punishment of 10 years imprisonment and a Rp 5 billion fine. As of February, the Maritime Affairs and Fisheries Ministry has arrested 20 people for attempting to smuggle baby lobsters from airports in Jakarta, Bali, Jambi, and Lombok. The ministry dealt with 77 similar cases in 2017 with a potential loss of more than Rp 300 billion. (gis/swd) Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Fri, February 23, 2018 16:31 1301 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9c6f9454 1 City Bekasi,hoax,police,PKI Free Police in Bekasi, West Java, have arrested a suspect for spreading fake news about an attack on an ustadz (Muslim teacher) by people related to the defunct Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) in North Tambun. "Were questioning one alleged hoax spreader who caused public uproar," said the police chief Sr. Comr. Candra Sukma Kumara, as quoted by kompas.com on Friday He added that the man reportedly spread the news in the WhatsApp group of his community unit (RW), describing it as a bloody attack using sharp weapons and also linking it to the PKI. Candra stressed that the news was not true. Two men had indeed visited the ustadz but no sharp weapons were carried by the visitors. According to the police the so-called attackers were beggars who moved from one mosque to another. They were angry at the ustadz because he refused to give them money. The police hoped people would exercise caution when using social media. To prevent similar incidents in the future the police asked residents to inform them if there was a threat or suspicious activities in their neighborhood, instead of spreading it on social media. (wnd) Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin Margareth Aritonang (The Jakarta Post) Denpasar Fri, February 23, 2018 16:30 1301 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9c6f8832 1 Politics Jokowi,PDI-P,election Free The Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) has named President Joko Jokowi Widodo its presidential candidate in 2019, less than six months before the national poll body opens registration for next years election. The party made the declaration on Friday during a closed-door national meeting of party executives in Denpasar, Bali. The meeting was held to discuss strategies ahead of the upcoming regional elections as well as the 2019 legislative and presidential elections. I declare Joko Widodo the presidential candidate from the PDI-P, party chairwoman Megawati Soekarnoputri told the partys rank and file in a video shared by the party to journalists covering the event. Are you ready to win? Megawati said, showing the partys sign with her fingers. Four political parties have already officially declared support for Jokowi's re-election bid, namely the Golkar Party, the National Awakening Party (PKB), the United Development Party (PPP) and the NasDem Party. The PDI-P's decision came amid speculation over who will be appointed Jokowi's running mate in 2019, with Vice President Jusuf Kalla potentially barred from running again. Kalla, who served as VP between 2004 and 2009, has served as VP for two periods. (ahw) Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin Karin Matussek (Bloomberg) Berlin Fri, February 23, 2018 21:09 1301 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9c70adc2 2 Business Deutsche-Bank,traders,banking Free Four traders charged in the U.K. for rigging interest-rate benchmarks at Deutsche Bank AG will escape prosecution after German officials refused requests to send them to London to face trial. Frankfurt prosecutors decided not to turn the men over almost two years after the U.K.s Serious Fraud Office first sought extradition. The final decision on the former traders was made Wednesday after a court issued rulings that the alleged crimes had taken place too long ago to be tried, said Alexander Badle, a spokesman for the Frankfurt General Prosecutor. The decision means that only six of 11 traders from Deutsche Bank, Barclays Plc and Societe Generale SA charged with rigging Euribor will go on trial in April. A French court last year decided not to extradite the SocGen trader caught up in the case. The SFO charged the group in November 2015 with conspiring to procure or make submissions to manipulate the euro interbank offered rate, or Euribor, between 2005 and 2009. The scheme was investigated as part of a wider probe into benchmark rates, the most famous of which was Libor, a counterpart of Euribor. The SFO obtained European arrest warrants in March 2016 against five of the men who didnt appear at a London court to face the charges. The German prosecutors made a final decision on three of the traders this week, but had previously ruled out extraditing the fourth man last year. The SFO declined to comment Friday. The four men, Andreas H., Joerg V., Ardalan G., and Kai-Uwe K., cant be fully identified under German law. Lawyers for the former traders couldnt be immediately reached to comment. Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Fri, February 23, 2018 14:23 1301 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9c6f1d99 4 Business odd-even-license-traffic-policy,cikampek,toll-road Free The Transportation Ministry has said it is preparing 60 buses to be operated from Bekasi to Jakarta ahead of the enforcement of the odd-even license plate policy along the Jakarta-Cikampek toll road starting on March 12. Head of the Transportation Ministrys Greater Jakarta Transportation Management Agency (BPTJ) Bambang Prihartono said in Jakarta on Thursday that the buses would serve motorists who usually drove their cars via the West Bekasi and East Bekasi toll gates to their workplaces in Jakarta. So, this (bus deployment) will change the mindsets of people so they will want to shift to mass public transportation. The buses will depart from Mega Mall Bekasi, Bambang said as reported by kompas.com, adding that a single trip bus fare was Rp 20,000 (US$1.4). Meanwhile, state-owned toll road operator PT Jasa Marga announced that the odd-even policy would be implemented from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. from Monday to Friday only for vehicles that entered the toll road via the West and East Bekasi toll gates. BPTJ traffic and transportation director Karlo Manik said the agency would also provide motorists with four parking lots at Mega Mall Bekasi, the Mal Metropolitan Bekasi, the Bekasi Cyber Park and the Patriot Bekasi Stadium. The parking tariff is a flat fee of Rp 10,000. Commuters are required to show their Transjabodetabek tickets [to parking officers], he said, adding that about 4,400 vehicles usually passed through the West and East Bekasi toll roads from 6 a.m. to 9.p.m., meaning that approximately 2,200 vehicles would be affected by the odd-even policy. (bbn) Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin (Agence France-Presse) New Delhi, India Fri, February 23, 2018 19:50 1301 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9c7088ca 2 World India,Pakistan,justin-trudeau,Narendra-Modi Free Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke out against separatism Friday in an apparent warning to his Canadian counterpart, whose week-long visit to India has been marred by claims his administration is soft on Sikh extremists. Standing next to visiting Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Modi said India would not tolerate those who sought to challenge its integrity. "There should be no place for those who misuse religion for political motives and promote separatism," Modi said. "We will not tolerate those who challenge the unity, integrity and harmony of our countries." Although he did not mention Sikhs by name his words were seen as a clear reference to demands from some in the community for a separate homeland to be carved out of India. Trudeau has been at pains during his visit to quash long-simmering perceptions in India that his Canada is a safe haven for Sikh extremists. But on Thursday he was forced to admit that a Sikh found guilty of trying to assassinate an Indian minister in 1986 had been invited to dine with him in New Delhi. Here is the official invitation sent to Jaspal Atwal, inviting him to join Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in India. Trudeau is denying his sympathies for Sikh extremists, while also wining and dining them. pic.twitter.com/NEhNIQ0PWA Candice Malcolm (@CandiceMalcolm) February 22, 2018 It was just one in a series of embarrassments that began the moment Trudeau and his family touched down on Indian soil. Indian newspapers were quick to point out that only a junior minister was deputed to meet the Canadian leader, interpreting that as a snub from Modi. During his visit Canada's telegenic premier, who is more used to global adoration than approbation, has also faced criticism for his decision to dress in colourful Indian outfits. Trudeaus love of the spotlight turns against him in disastrous India trip /via @globeandmail https://t.co/YPheqSQZee Don Martin (@DonMartinCTV) February 22, 2018 In Mumbai earlier this week he even out-blinged Bollywood when he opted for a gold sherwani, traditional men's wedding attire, at a movie event attended by top Indian actors, all of whom wore western clothing. "What's catching everyone's attention is the Trudeau family's fascinating wardrobe choice -- too Indian even for an Indian," said weekly news magazine Outlook. Canada is home to roughly half a million Sikhs and Trudeau's administration has been accused of being too cosy with those who appear to back independence. Trudeau particularly riled New Delhi last year when he attended a parade in Canada at which Sikh militants were feted as heroes. Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin Ivany Atina Arbi (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Fri, February 23, 2018 19:30 1301 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9c7070be 1 City #TanahAbang,anies-baswedan,road-closure,violation Free The Jakarta Police have said it will consider launching an investigation to determine whether Jakarta Governor Anies Baswedans decision to close Jl. Jatibaru Raya in Tanah Abang, Central Jakarta, to accommodate street vendors violates the law. Jakarta Police spokesperson Sr. Comr. Argo Yuwono said his institution had yet to make a decision on the matter. We will make an announcement later, as we will have a discussion first, Argo said on Friday. He said representatives of the Cyber Indonesia organization, arguing that the governor had violated the law, reported Anies on Thursday night over the road closure. The organization was established in January last year and comprises advocates, entrepreneurs and students interested in the supervision of social issues. The organization claimed the governor had violated Law No. 38/2004 on roads, which prohibits activities that interfere with the functions of the road. Those violating the law could face 18 months in prison and a fine of Rp 1.5 billion (US$105,000). Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin Margareth S. Aritonang (The Jakarta Post) Denpasar, Bali Fri, February 23, 2018 13:50 1301 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9c6ee72e 1 Politics PDI-P,bali,political-party Free The ruling Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) has kicked off a three-day national meeting in Denpasar, Bali, to discuss strategies ahead of the upcoming general elections as well as the 2019 legislative and presidential elections. The closed-door national meeting brought together all leaders in charge of PDI-Ps offices throughout the country, including chairwomen Megawati Soekarnoputri and President Joko Jokowi Widodo, to design strategies to secure the ruling party's leadership in the countrys political arena after 2019. We want all party cadres to have one vision. We will develop strategies [to win the upcoming elections], head of the steering committee Sukur Nababan said Friday. He elaborated that the discussions would focus on PDI-Ps preparation to endorse its presidential and vice presidential candidates as well as necessary measures to maintain its support throughout the country and attract new voters. PDI-P is all also expected to announce its endorsement of Jokowi in his campaign to win a second presidential term. The announcement will likely come at the end of the three-day gathering on Sunday. We will reveal our political stance [in regard to the presidential and vice presidential tickets] during the closing of the meeting, said PDI-P secretary-general Hasto Kristiyanto. Hasto refused to discuss details when asked for further comment, saying that the authority to determine the fate of the matter was fully in the hands of Megawati. Four political parties have already officially declared support for Jokowi's campaign including the Golkar Party, the National Awakening Party (PKB), the United Development Party (PPP) and the NasDem Party. (dmr) Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin (Agence France-Presse) Moscow Fri, February 23, 2018 07:24 1302 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9c6dacd3 2 World Russia,Syria,arms-race Free Russia has tested over 200 new types of arms in Syria during its campaign in support of President Bashar al-Assad, a senior lawmaker said Thursday, as Moscow was accused of taking part in air strikes against rebel-held Eastern Ghouta. "As we helped the brotherly Syrian people, we tested over 200 new types of weapons," said Vladimir Shamanov, a former commander of Russia's airborne troops who now serves as head of the Russian Duma's defence committee. "It's not an accident that today they are coming to us from many directions to purchase our weapons, including countries that are not our allies," he said. "Today our military-industrial complex made our army look in a way we can be proud of," he said. Russia, a close ally of the Syrian government in the protracted multi-front war, has been accused of indiscriminate bombing throughout the conflict causing massive casualties. The latest criticism focuses on the air strikes against the enclave of Eastern Ghouta, where more than 350 civilians have been killed in five days, but the Kremlin denied involvement in the regime-led assault. Shamanov's remarks also come amid reports that Russia has deployed its Su-57 stealth fighter prototype in Syria, where two such planes were reportedly spotted Wednesday. Photos of the fifth generation jet, allegedly over Syria, were re-posted by various state media Thursday. A source in the defence ministry confirmed to RBK news agency that the two planes were sent to the Hmeimim base "for a test in real conditions." Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov declined to comment on the reported deployment of Su-57 Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin Moses Ompusunggu (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Fri, February 23, 2018 18:32 1301 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9c7049ca 1 National marine-plastic-debris,LIPI,research Free A top Indonesian marine scientist has said that Indonesia is planning to conduct a large-scale research study aimed at challenging international findings that the worlds largest archipelago nation is the worlds second-largest marine polluter. "Many parties have said Indonesia's seas have been polluted by plastic and other [materials]. We want to determine whether this is accurate," said Dirhamsyah, who heads the Center of Oceanography Research at the government-sanctioned Indonesian Science Institute (LIPI). Various studies indicate Indonesia is the second-biggest polluter of marine plastic debris worldwide after China. International parties like the United Nations have also pressured Indonesia to take stern action to deal with the plastic littering its seas on the back of its effect on sea ecosystems like coral reefs. Indonesia's status as one of the biggest marine polluters on Earth was also highlighted in the UN's maiden Ocean Conference in New York last June. A study published in the journal Science in January estimates that there were more than 11 billion pieces of plastic debris in coral reefs across the Asia-Pacific region. Surveying more than 150 coral reefs in Indonesia, Thailand, Myanmar and Australia between 2011 and 2014, the study found reefs near Indonesia were littered with the most plastic, while the lowest concentration was found in Australia. Polluted: Plastic trash and non-organic waste cover coral in Nusa Dua waters, Bali, threatening the marine ecosystem in the area. (Courtesy of Nusa Dua Reef Foundation/File) "People can say they accept or reject the results. But I personally don't really believe [the findings]," Dirhamsyah said, referring to the January study. Reza Cordova, a LIPI marine scientist and lead researcher of the institution's upcoming study, said LIPI was trying to fill in the gaps in the data on marine debris in Indonesia's seas. The Indonesian government has yet to record official data on the matter. Most of the data, he said, came from outside parties like NGOs. LIPI will begin gathering data for the study at the end of this month. It has identified around 20 locations in the country where sampling will take place. Eight universities across Indonesia and relevant agencies will help the institution conduct the study. Researchers will focus on at least one seashore area in each of the 20 sampling sites, which are located in 16 provinces. In each seashore, researchers will use 50-100 m2 transects in three different locations to calculate the weight of and amount of debris in each transect. The sampling will be conducted once a month, especially during full moons when high tides are expected to bring in more debris from the sea to the seashore. Reza said the results from the 20 locations could be used to calculate a nationwide estimate. The method had never been used before, Reza claimed, adding that the institute was open to collaborating with NGOs to verify the sampling process. Reza said it would take at least 12 months for his team to conclude the study, which he expected to be the basis for the country's effort to combat the problem of marine debris. "From the study, we can give suggestions to the government on regions in Indonesia that need specific attention, said Reza. This March 2016 photo released by The Ocean Agency/XL Catlin Seaview Survey shows coral bleached white by heat stress in New Caledonia. Coral reefs, unique underwater ecosystems that sustain a quarter of the world's marine species and half a billion people, are dying on an unprecedented scale. Scientists are racing to prevent a complete wipeout within decades. (The Ocean Agency/XL Catlin Seaview Survey via AP/File) Globally, plastic debris is a major threat to coral reef ecosystems, apart from blast fishing by fisherfolk and coral bleaching caused by rising sea temperatures due to global warming. Coral reefs are important for coastal communities because they help boost tourism and provide protection from waves and storms. More importantly, they also act as key spawning and nurturing grounds for fish and other sea creatures. Plastics entering the sea carry pollutants and can be a magnet for harmful bacterial, which could lead to diseases in coral reefs entangled in the debris. "Plastic is a silent killer for sea creatures," Reza said. Andi Rusandi, director of marine conservation and biodiversity at the Maritime Affairs and Fisheries Ministry, welcomed LIPI's initiative, saying it could help the government in its sea conservation efforts. "As the study will calculate the amount of marine debris in Indonesia, it will help the government to take a step forward," Andi said. (ahw) As most of you already know, people often do not buy a premade PC, they create their own configuration. Pre-made still sells though, some people just dont want to go through all that trouble and simply ask for an opinion on what is in store, Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta, Indonesia Fri, February 23 2018 Raffles Jakarta hotels Arts Cafe has just marked Valentines Day by presenting a special dinner menu specially prepared by Paul Walsh, a Michelin starred chef who came to Jakarta straight from London, the United Kingdom, especially for the event. Walsh works as an executive chef for Londons City Social restaurant. The cafe presented a special dinner menu from Feb. 12 to 14, comprising five-courses prepared by Walsh. Each of the dishes presented was paired with wine. To add more fun to the Valentines Day celebration, the hotel included the set menu in a stay package, which also offered a one-night stay in its artist suite and an aromatic couple massage, among other things. Walsh helped City Social restaurant win Best New Restaurant at the 2014 BMW Squa... Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin Ivany Atina Arbi (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Fri, February 23, 2018 17:15 1301 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9c6fe57e 1 City #TanahAbang,anies-baswedan,Councilors,criticism Free The chairman of the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) faction at the City Council, Gembong Warsono, has urged Jakarta Governor Anies Baswedan to evaluate his decision to close Jl. Jatibaru Raya in Tanah Abang, Central Jakarta, to vehicles to accommodate street vendors. It was a unilateral, one-man show policy, said Gembong on Friday. The governor should have first coordinated with the Jakarta Police traffic division before implementing the policy. Previously, the Jakarta Police traffic division sent a recommendation letter to the governor requesting that he return the road to its previous state. The police also said the former education and culture minister should have discussed the regulation before passing it. The PDI-P faction reminded the governor a long time ago about potential law violations. At least two bylaws on spatial planning and public order, as well as one law on traffic, have been violated by closing the road, Gembong said. The politician, who backed former governor Basuki Ahok Tjahaja Purnama during last years gubernatorial election, said he appreciated Cyber Indonesias decision to report Anies over the alleged law violation. I think it is a positive move, he said. On Thursday night, community organization Cyber Indonesia reported Anies to the Jakarta Police over the road closure, saying the move violated Law No. 38/2004 on roads. Violators of the law could face 18 months in prison and a Rp 1.5 billion (US$105,000) fine. Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin Winda A. Charmila (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Fri, February 23, 2018 19:45 1301 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9c707cb3 1 City Jl-Thamrin,bombing,shooting Free A victim of the 2016 Thamrin terror attack, Second Insp. Denny Mahieu, took the witness stand on Friday to testify against the deadly incidents alleged mastermind, Aman Abdurrahman. Denny said he had been inspecting a traffic police post when the first of several explosions rocked the Central Jakarta area on Jan. 14, 2016. The attack on Jl. MH Thamrin, which also included a shoot-out between the assailants and police, killed eight people and injured some 20 others, including Denny. Five of the eight fatalities were terrorists. Denny told the South Jakarta District Court that he had been patrolling the area on his motorcycle when he noticed the door to the traffic police post was open and stopped to investigate. I decided to check [the post] and I found a bag, two pieces of cake, two boxes and two bottles of water, Denny said during the hearing, which was led by presiding judge Akhmat Zaini. About five seconds later, a blast tore through a Starbucks cafe located across the road, and 30 seconds after that, another bomb exploded from inside the post as Denny was attempting to call for back-up. Denny sustained severe injuries to the right side of his body and was hospitalized for a month after the attack. During the same hearing, Amans lawyer, Asludin Hatjani, argued that the officers testimony was still unable to prove Amans alleged involvement in the bombings. Aman is a Muslim cleric and a known supporter of the Islamic State (IS). We still cannot see the connection of his testimony to the defendant, but he is the first witness. During the bombing, Aman was still in Nusa Kambangan prison [in Cilacap, Central Java], Asludin said. During the cases first hearing on Feb.15, prosecutor Anita Dewayani claimed one of Amans followers, Saiful Munthohir, visited the cleric in prison in November 2015. Saiful allegedly told Aman that a caliphate leader in Syria had ordered him to carry out an attack similar to the one in Paris, which had taken place that same month. Aman, she added, told Saiful to recruit a field coordinator to execute the plan. Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin (Agence France-Presse) Nicosia, Cyprus Fri, February 23, 2018 19:51 1301 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9c708e85 2 World Turkey,Cyprus Free Five Turkish warships threatened to engage an Italian drillship Friday as it tried to break a blockade and explore for gas off the coast of Cyprus, Cypriot officials said. Deputy government spokesman Victoras Papadopoulos said the drillship of Italy's energy giant Eni was trying to explore block 3 off the island's south coast, following a Turkish blockade since February 9. "On its course toward block 3 it was blocked by five Turkish warships, and after threats to use force and engage with the drillship, despite the courageous efforts of the captain, it was forced to turn back," Papadopoulos told the Cyprus News Agency. Eni chief Claudio Descalzi played down the two-week standoff, telling journalists in Italy that his company would not abandon its exploration off Cyprus but await a diplomatic solution to start operations. "We are used to the possibility of disputes. We didn't leave Libya or other countries where there had been complex situations," he said. "This is the last of my worries. We are completely calm," said the Eni chief executive. "It is very probable that in the next few days we will have to move" the ship to another country as originally planned, Descalzi said. "And then we will return (to Cyprus) to await a solution from international diplomacy." However, Cypriot Energy Minister George Lakkotrypis said that diplomatic efforts, notably by the European Union, had so far failed to break the standoff. "We left room for diplomacy, hoping that a solution could be found... Today we made one last effort... but that was not possible because of Turkey's stance," he told the private television station Sigma. On Wednesday, Cyprus President Nicos Anastasiades, the Greek Cypriot leader, said Nicosia would continue its energy exploration regardless of Turkish threats. But Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has warned foreign energy companies not to "overstep the mark" in the politically sensitive waters off the coast of the divided island. Ankara has been stringent in defending the claims of Turkish Cypriots for a share of energy resources, despite Greek Cypriot assurances that they would benefit both communities. The standoff over energy resources risks further complicating stalled efforts to reunify Cyprus following the collapse of UN-brokered talks last year. Cyprus has been divided since 1974 when Turkish troops invaded and occupied the northern third of the island in response to a Greek military junta-sponsored coup. While the Greek-majority Republic of Cyprus is an EU member and internationally recognised, the breakaway Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus is recognised only by Ankara. Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin (Agence France-Presse) Washington, United States Fri, February 23, 2018 22:21 1301 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9c70c656 2 World US,shooting,Louisiana Free Two people were injured in a shooting early Friday at Southeastern Louisiana University, the university said, nine days after a massacre at a Florida high school sparked a national uproar over US gun violence. "University Police confirmed incident occurred on North Campus involving several individuals. Gunshots fired, 2 individuals suffered non-life threatening injuries," the university said in a statement on Twitter. Students were warned by the school's emergency alert system at 4:01 am, it said. "No present threat to campus community," it said, adding that university police were investigating the incident. The incident at the university in Hammond, Louisiana, came amid a national debate over gun control sparked by the killing of 17 students and adults at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida on February 14. President Donald Trump is under pressure to tighten US gun laws which allowed the Parkland shooter, Nikolas Cruz, to purchase an AR-15 assault rifle last year when he had turned 18, enter his former school and shoot dead 14 students and three adults. Trump was to make a speech Friday morning at the Conservative Political Action Conference near Washington in which he is expected to detail his ideas for gun control, including the controversial proposal to arm teachers in schools After two years during which Paris was scarred by terror attacks, tourists returned to the French capital in record numbers in 2017, hotel booking figures showed Thursday. Hotels in the Paris area received 2.9 million more foreign and French visitors compared to 2016, an increase of 9.5 percent that added 1.6 billion euros ($2 billion) to the sector's coffers, the tourism committee for the Paris region said. "Tourism rebounded in spectacular fashion," the committee said in its annual report. Read also: Five not-so-touristy artsy spots to discover in Paris The recovery was particularly significant among overseas visitors, whose numbers rose 13.7 percent over the year, compared to 5.9 percent for French tourists. Chinese, Japanese, American and German tourists all returned in large numbers to the City of Light, showing the effects of the attacks of November 2015 had largely worn off, the committee said. The US continues to account for the largest share of foreign tourists in Paris, with 2.4 million visitors, ahead of China's 1.1 million. Mr. Ciruli is the Director of the Crossley Center for Public Opinion Research at the University of Denvers Josef Korbel School of International Studies. He is an adjunct professor teaching public opinion and foreign policy. The Crossley Center conducts research and presents live and virtual programs on foreign policy, politics, public policy and public opinion. Mr. Ciruli holds a law degree from Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. and a bachelors degree cum laude in political science from UCLA. He is a member of the American Association of Public Opinion Research (AAPOR), and is the past-president of the Pacific Chapter of AAPOR (PAPOR). Mr. Ciruli is a board member of the Social Science Foundation of the University of Denver Josef Korbel School of International Studies and past-president of the Georgetown Law Alumni Board and the Denver Athletic Club. Told in an immersive format in which the audience is given black medical masks and ushered around the room by three cheeky Furies, we follow Persephone on her journey. Being moved around the space in this way gives the whole performance much more oomph and excitement. You will never know where the next amazing trick is going to come from. An all-female cast, the show is all about female empowerment and watching the strength of those women is awe-inspiring. The aerial silk work is nothing short of amazing. As is their fire-breathing skills. The three furies, Jessica Pearce, Rosie Bartley and Isobel Midnight keep the audience entertained throughout the performance. They keep the show moving and engaging and are incredibly talented. Moreover, Rebecca Rennisons Persephone is show-stealing. Her elegance while performing is jaw-dropping, every move she makes is obviously done with precision and effort and yet gives the impression of flawless ease. The performance is intimate and epic in equal measure, each moment lasting the perfect amount of time before the audience is moved on to the next. Yet, while the talent of the cast is undeniable at times the story is lost. It's easy to imagine that if you are not already familiar with the Greek tale the show will at times confuse you. Special mention must be given to the vocals of the night, from Becks Johnston. The live music is a delicious added element that contributes to the overall eerie factor of the night. A circus unlike any other, this is one show that is not to be missed. Becoming Shades is on at The Vaults until 18 March. Click here for more information and tickets. Foreign language film is often neglected by English speaking audiences - so here's a list of ten Spanish films to add to your to-watch list! 1. The Orphanage (El Orfanato), 2007 This intriguing horror film, directed by Juan Antonio Bayona, is one of the most successful Spanish movies ever. Starring Belen Rueda and Geraldine Chaplin, the story follows Laura, who buys the orphanage where she grew up to turn it into a residence for disabled children. But when her son, after claiming to have invisible friends, mysterously disappears, Laura starts a frantic search that involves learning to believe the impossible. 2. Thesis (Tesis), 1996 The first ever film by Alejandro Amenabar, made while he was still studying at university, Thesis was shot during the summer in the faculty. The movie tells the story of Angela, a student thats planning to write her thesis about audiovisual violence. A series of mysterious and scary events will turn her academic investigation into a crime one. This low budget horror movie has become a Spanish classic. 3. Cell 211 (Celda 211), 2009 While visiting his future workplace in a jail, a newly appointed prison officer gets trapped inside by an accident at the same time that the prisoners start a mutiny. When he wakes up, he has to pass himself off as another prisoner in order to survive. This movie, directed by Daniel Monzon, is considered one of the best in the history of Spanish cinema. 4. Shrew's Nest (Musaranas), 2014 Produced by Alex de la Iglesia and directed by Esteban Roel y Juanfer Andres, this psychological horror film left no one indifferent. The movie follows a woman that suffers from agoraphobia and that works in her own home as a dressmaker while taking care of her sister. When her neighbour falls down the stairs and knocks on her door asking for help, he gets trapped in the shrew's nest, a place he might never be able to leave. 5. Carmina or Blow Up (Carmina o Revienta), 2012 Written and directed by Paco Leon and starring his mother and his sister, Carmina or Blow Up follows the story of Carmina, a 58-year-old woman that comes up with a plan to trick her insurance company after being robbed several times. The movie is one of the most original and daring in Spanish film history, and it perfectly (and comically) portrays the reality of many lower-class people from the south of the country. 6. Holy Camp! (La Llamada), 2017 This hilarious film directed by Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo tells the story of Maria and Susana, two teenagers spending the summer in a Catholic camp that they have attended since they were little. While Susana keeps trying to make their dream of becoming a music duo happen, God starts appearing to Maria to sing her Whitney Houstons songs, which makes her very confused about what she really wants to do with her life. 7. Spanish Affair (Ocho Apellidos Vascos), 2014 This film brilliantly portrays the cultural differences that exist in Spain between the north and the south. In it, Rafa, a guy from Andalusia, falls head over heels in love with Amaia, a girl from the Basque Country, and travels all the way north to find her. There, he tries to win her heart while helping her convince her dad that he is her Basque fiance. 8. Witching & Bitching (Las Brujas de Zugarramurdi), 2013 Based on the Basque legends about the Zugarramurdi witches, this comedy directed by Alex de La Iglesia is a very crazy story of a group of men trying to escape a bunch of mental witches that want to eat them. 9. The Apostle (O Apostolo), 2012 This stop-motion movie tells the story of a fugitive prisoner who finds shelter in a small village in Galicia. A few days there is enough to discover the evil plot that has been going on and the reason why people keep disappearing. Also starring Geraldine Chaplin, the movie features the Galician legend of the Holy Company, and is a beautifully made horror film that will keep you at the edge of your seat. 10. Welcome Mr. Marshall! (Bienvenido Mr. Marshall!), 1953 Directed by Luis Garcia Berlanga in 1953, this hilarious film tells the story of a small village whose population is warned that the Americans are going to pay them a visit. Excited, the turn the village into a paradise of Spanish stereotypes and dress up as flamenco dancers to impress the Americans, in hopes of getting some benefits from the Marshall Plan. It is one of the best known classics in the history of Spanish cinema! There have been four mass shootings in the seven months that I have been living in the USA. This country has a complicated relationship with guns. Whilst my views on gun ownership havent changed, my understanding of the system in which guns exist in America has. I came here with the opinion that guns should be banned, I couldnt understand why there werent laws implemented the moment there was the first mass shooting. Now, I would still prefer a complete ban on guns - but I understand why it isn't necessarily possible for the US. Last week, 17 people were killed in the Parkland mass shooting in Florida. The students involved shared their expeirences on social media and the entire world watched and listened in horror. People rose up to demand stricter gun control or a complete ban. Others defended their own gun ownership, blaming it on the mentally ill. Whilst everyone feels horror and disgust everytime there's a mass shooting here, the ownership of guns creates divisions. Over the course of the last seven months Ive had several conversations with my friends about gun ownership. It begins with shock on both sides, theyre incredulous that I have never seen in a gun in my life, and sometimes even more so that I dont understand the appeal in owning one. In return I am shocked that they dont see the problem with gun ownership, and even aspire to potentially own a gun in the future. Their reason for gun ownership is always the same: they need a gun for defence. They need a weapon to protect themselves, to protect their family, and to protect their property. I cant help but think how this sort of thinking doesnt belong in 2018. Is America that dangerous that everyone needs a gun to feel safe? Americans dont need guns for protection against the government anymore, but they do think they need them to protect themselves from each other. This doesnt mean they dont want stricter gun control. My friends have all expressed a desire to have military weapons taken off the streets. AR-15s were designed for mass killing, and not for protection. Guns are ingrained in the culture of the USA. My friends family all own guns so they have been a part of her life for 21 years. Another friend said shed own one for the fear factor, she wouldnt consider using it but would have it to use as a threat if she was ever attacked. Im not sure how theyd feel if laws were made that restricted their access to guns if they wanted one. Ive been taught guns are dangerous, but my American friends have been taught they are needed for defence and safety. Its literally written into their constitution. Its ideological so its natural that everyone would have the same perspective. This effects both sides of the argument regarding gun control. Gun culture is the biggest culture shock Ive experienced whilst living in the US. When guns come into conversation its sometimes uncomfortable and tense, with completely different views depending on who Im talking to. Its easy to laugh about how a zucchini is called a courgette in the UK, but its harder to use comedy when your friends tell you their entire family owns guns and that they will too someday. Its makes me nauseous to hear them say this, I can't quite understand why they would need a gun, but I'm also concerned for their future safety. On Sunday 18th February, a gun control rally was held in downtown Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania. Organised by Action Together North Eastern PA, it was held to remember the victims of the Parkland shooting, but also rally for stricter gun controls and to encourage more people to vote in elections. People came with signs. Several people held placards with the names of the recent victims of the Parkland shooting, others had signs that read Thoughts and Prayers dont stop the killing, Kids have the right to feel safe, and When will it end? Lets make a better America. Roger Lerner, a Rabbi from Temple Bnai Brith of Kingston, PA, encouraged children to be the change America needs. I dont think we adults can do it. I dont think our politicians can do it at this point. I dont think they have the moral courage to stand up and talk about the violence of the guns that are in our midst and do something about it. Im pleading to the children, I think you have to. A key message that many of the speakers emphasised was the fact that people need to go to the polls to see a change; there was even a table where people could register to vote. Chloe Poorman, a student from Wyoming Valley West High School, delivered a speech at the rally about how gun control would make her and her friends safer at school. Were losing innocent victims because of some law a couple of old dudes made in the 1700s. If this is what makes America great I can no longer be proud of my country", Poorman told the crowd. Gun violence is out of control and my classmates and I shouldnt be nervous to go out and get an education. My generation is the generation that has been scarred by gun violence the most, and we will be voting a lot sooner than politicians are ready for. Not even 18, Poorman was the strongest speaker there, proving the point that Lerner was trying to make - Americas children are needed to make a change. Orlanda Carter, a mother of a son who was killed by gun violence, asked for electoral action. Carter told the crowd: Its time to call out those we elect to represent us, and its time for them to stop siding with NRA. Our children are dying. We know we have the right to bear arms - but what citizen needs an assault rifle?" Martha Hart, who was married to a Vietnam War veteran, shared her story of assault from her own husband. She told the crowd of how she was threatened and raped by her husband with his own guns, until she called the mental health services when law enforcement forced her to remain with her husband after a failed attempt to run away with her two young children. Call your representatives today, and every day until they listen, because I want to live in a country where people love their kids more than their guns, Hart told the crowd. State Representative for Luzerne County in Pennsylvania, Eddie Day Pashinski, also spoke at the event and encouraged people to vote. It is our responsibility to try to protect our children and to make sure everybody is safe in this magnificent country that allows us the freedom to gather, freedom to speak, freedom to vote, Pashinski said. When the people come out and vote that is the most effective and guaranteed way that every legislature stays honest, stays honest to you. Without your involvement, without your courage, without you, I fear for our democracy and I fear for the future of our children. Lorraine Smith told me she was there because she has two daughters and two grandchildren: We have to stop this violence - there is so much hatred; it has to end." The biggest demand Ive seen is for assault rifles to be banned - but two days after the rally Florida legislators voted down a motion that would have banned assault rifles whilst students involved in the Parkland shooting watched. The event in Wilkes Barre was small and inspiring, but a rally in the middle of Pennsylvania with no real connections isnt going to have a nationwide impact. The message to vote is clearly something that needs to be promoted nationally. 42% of voters didnt vote in the 2016 presidential election and the local election turnout is even less. Gun ownership is a tough subject for America. Things wont change overnight and Im starting to believe guns will always have a place in this society. Ill never approve gun ownership, but I think Ill just have to accept the fact that one day some of my closest friends here will own at least a handgun. However, assault rifles have no reason to be on the streets of America. They were created for the military - they are the weapons of death not protection. I hope Parkland is a changing point. I hope more people will go out and vote to change the system. I hope anyone who owns a gun in America uses it responsibly. I hope for a safer future for this country that has been my home for seven months. Yesterday afternoon, Goldsmiths management called the police to deal with students and lecturers protesting outside the Warden's office in Deptford Town Hall. As part of the protest, students wrote letters expressing their displeasure at their Warden's response to the ongoing UCU strike, which began earlier on Thursday. Speaking to TNS, Robert Munton, a second year Education student present at the protest told us: "It's a building students are entitled to be in, one I've had lots of seminars in personally. The Warden refused to come out and address students publicly as he has done throughout this process so we decided to stick it out and wait. The protest was entirely peaceful." Munton claimed that a police officer informed protestors they had been called in response to an alleged case of assault. Students were told that charges would not be pressed. Police at the scene prevented students and lecturers from entering the building to deliver the letters. Im on #USSstrike at both @GoldsmithsUoL & @KingsCollegeLon over #pensions, despite not being paid enough at both jobs to cover each months rent. For many of us on casual contracts, and working many unpaid hours, this is more than about pensions - the whole system isnt working. James W Morland (@jameswmorland) February 22, 2018 Munton reported that the Warden had claimed he was scared of an occupation, and that one person was eventually allowed to deliver the letters. Many protesters left after the letters were delivered. The Warden was evacuated from the building. Students outside Deptford Town Hall, trying to deliver letters to @GoldsmithsUoL warden Patrick Loughrey in solidarity with @ucu https://t.co/A91jBzd9z6 told Loughrey left building due to "security risk". Ridiculous - warden should not be afraid to meet students & hear concerns! pic.twitter.com/4HXx0exilj Jonathan Karstadt (@jonokars) February 22, 2018 A spokesperson for Goldsmiths said: "Police were briefly on campus following a report of an assault on a member of Goldsmiths' security team. The allegation was not pursued." Featured image courtesy of Local Correspondent Matthew Ramsey Four weeks of strike action by university academics and staff has offically begun. It may be having an impact on you with cancelled lectures or delayed marking of assignments. But what is this strike about and why is it happening? We've complied a handy guide to help you understand more. A post shared by Oxford SU (@oxfordstudents) on Feb 22, 2018 at 5:09am PST What is the University and College Union? The University and College Union (UCU) is a trade union that has around 120,000 members. Like all unions, it campaigns on behalf of its members, who in this instance are further and higher educational staff. It is this union which has organised the strike action in order to protest the changes being made to the Universities Superannuation Scheme. What is the Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS)? This is the university workers pension scheme. Workplace pensions involve a percentage of your wages being taken each month to be placed in investments in preparation for when you will need them. Alongside this, your employer contributes too the specific percentages for the employee and employer vary according to the particular pension. What exactly is the issue here? Until now, the USS has operated under a defined benefit scheme which ultimately provides workers with a guaranteed retirement income. This means that year-on-year an employee can see what their pension will be upon retirement, making planning for the future that little bit easier. It's the equivalent of you receiving a salary for work you do - you know what's coming each month and can plan accordingly. However there are plans for the USS to move from a defined benefit scheme to a defined contribution scheme. Under the new scheme, any money the university workers can expect to receive will be dependent upon the stock market and how well investments have performed. Essentially, this would be like your employer telling you that your wages each month are dependent on how well the company does - and that you can do absolutely nothing to change that. The UCU has estimated that employees could lose up to 10,000 a year from their pensions, with younger lecturers standing to lose much more - possibly up to half their pensions. Why is the pension scheme being changed in the first place? Universities UK (UUK), the representative body for universities, says that the pension fund is currently 6 billion in deficit, meaning that they need to alter the scheme in order to make it affordable. Remaining on a defined benefit scheme, they argue, will require greater employer contributions, preventing university spending in other areas. Why cant they just talk about it? The UCU has been in talks with UUK for some time over the changes, but these broke down in January. This strike action is the UCUs way of trying to reopen negotiations and get UUK to properly recognise university workers and pay them accordingly. When ballotted, 88% of UCU members who voted supported the strike, providing the union with a sufficient mandate to organise one. photo: flickr/secretlondon123 When are the strikes scheduled to take place? Fourteen days of strikes are currently planned, starting on February 22nd. At the present time, strikes are scheduled for the following dates: Week 1: Thursday 22nd- Friday 23rd February (2 days) Week 2: Monday 26th Wednesday 28th February (3 days) Week 3: Monday 5th- Thursday 8th March (4 days) Week 4: Monday 12th-Friday 16th March (5 days) Whether all of these strikes will eventually go ahead will depend upon the response from UUK, as it is possible that talks could start again following the first wave of action. UCU have said, however, that they are committed to following through on all fourteen days if there is no response from UUK. Who is taking part? Only workers who are members of the UCU can take strike action. This is part of the reason why out of 130 universities in the UK only staff at 64 are taking part in the strike. 57 universities are involved in strike action during Week 1, with four more joining in Week 2, and a further three coming out on strike in Week 3. The full list is available on the UCU website Staff at universities which were founded after 1992 are usually members of the Teachers' Pension Scheme, which is unaffected by this dispute. A post shared by Martin Watts (@partymarty93) on Feb 22, 2018 at 10:36am PST How will I know if my class is cancelled? Striking staff do not have to inform their university beforehand, so your lecturers will not necessarily tell you that they will not be attending your classes. What does striking really mean? Striking is a withdrawal of labour. Those on strike will not be doing any work relating to their university commitments. This includes teaching, planning, assessments or supervisions. Staff attendance at conferences on behalf of the university they work for is also cancelled and they are not obliged to answer any emails they receive. Will striking staff still be paid? Ordinarily, taking strike action means you do not receive any payment for those days. However, the UCU has agreed to pay striking members up to 50 per day of strike action. Taking strike action can, on occasions, have an impact upon further benefits members receive - such as maternity pay. With this in mind, strike action is always a last resort. What is action short of a strike? Alongside the scheduled strikes, the UCU is calling on its members to take what is known as action short of a strike. This means that even on those days when they are not on strike, UCU members are being told they should only work to contract and refuse to take on any additional work. This includes not covering for absent colleagues, rescheduling any classes missed due to strike action or doing any voluntary activities. Essentially, UCU members taking part in the strikes need to follow their contract to the letter. This could have an impact on students as, for instance, if staff only work their contracted hours, assignments may take longer to be marked. Making an impact is all part of the reasoning behind the strikes, as UCU are trying to show just how valuable university staff are and the lengths they go to with supporting their students. Rally in solidarity with striking staff. #ucustrike A post shared by julia (@armageddonmusic) on Feb 22, 2018 at 4:31am PST What is a picket line and what does crossing it mean? Some striking staff may choose to join a peaceful picket line. This will involve protesting outside an entrance or exit to a university building. They may carry signs to explain their reasons for picketing, and they may ask you not to go into the building. However, they cannot physically prevent you from doing so if you wish. The UCU, who are being backed by the NUS, are encouraging students not to walk past members on strike and to instead join the picket lines. However, the UCU cannot protect anybody who joins or refuses to cross a picket line if they are not a member of the union, and they cannot be held responsible for any repercussions if you miss any of your scheduled classes. Is there anything I can do? UCU are being backed by the NUS and are encouraging students to join picket lines, complain to their Vice-Chancellors and join student demonstrations. Postgraduate students can join the UCU for free to further support the movement. The University and College Union website was invaluable in compiling this article. For more information about the strikes, visit: www.ucu.org.uk/uss-action-faqs Its still difficult for those who worked with Wyandotte Detective Jay Sharpes to process his death and come to the realization that he is no longer among them. The Police Department halls were often filled with Jays jokes and his cheerful whistling, these ambient sounds will be forever missed, Deputy Police Chief Archie Hamilton said. The Wyandotte Police Department and entire community suffered a great loss with his passing. Detective Sharpes died Feb. 20, 2018, at the age of 49, after being diagnosed with leukemia just a few weeks ago. Born July 29, 1968, Jay Dean Sharpes grew up in Wyandotte, where he attended Roosevelt High School. The Riverview resident served four years in the U.S. Navy during the Gulf War where he earned a Sea Service Deployment Ribbon, Meritorious Unit Commendation and Good Conduct Medal. After serving his country, he earned a bachelors degree in criminal justice from Eastern Michigan University. He began his law enforcement career with the Wayne County Sheriffs Office, where he worked for two years. On Dec. 3, 2001, he joined the Wyandotte Police Department. During his tenure, he served as an investigator for the Down River Area Narcotics Organization, commonly known as DRANO. In addition, he was a member of the departments motor unit (motorcycle) and served as the vice president of the police union. Over his 16-year career, he earned numerous awards for outstanding service, but two incidents stand out as particularly notable. On Sept. 29, 2007, Officer Sharpes responded to a call regarding a 19-year-old woman who wasnt breathing. Upon his arrival, he recognized her heart had stopped beating so he diligently began administering CPR to the unresponsive teenager. As a result of his efforts, her heart began beating again and her life was saved. In a second incident, one that occurred on May 15, 2017, Officer Sharpes responded to a vehicle that crashed into a canal. He discovered the vehicle had fully submerged in the water and the elderly driver was trapped inside. According to police, Officer Sharpes ignored his own personal safety by diving into the murky water and freeing the woman from the vehicle. He pulled her out of the water and is credited with saving her life. Coincidentally, on the very same day of the water rescue he was promoted to the rank of detective. He was well-suited to detective work due to his acute attention to detail, a new position that Hamilton said allowed Detective Sharpes to apply his law enforcement skills to crime investigations. What came as a shock to so many of his friends and coworkers was how rapidly his health declined. According to Hamilton, Detective Sharpes was perfectly healthy until Jan. 30, when he thought he was getting the flu. He went to the hospital to get checked out, and thats when he learned he had leukemia. His health quickly diminished before his passing on Feb. 20, Hamilton said. Tim Worpell, vice president of Warthogs MC Downriver Chapter, organized an April 28 fundraiser that originally was scheduled when his friend was still battling leukemia. Detective Sharpes was a chapter member. We are still planning on having the event to assist Jays family, even with his passing, Worpell said. Detective Sharpes is survived by his wife, Karen Sharpes, and their 8-year-old daughter, Miranda. He also leaves behind sons Paul Rossi and Billy Abraham; his father, Lloyd Sharpes; and his brothers and sisters. He was preceded in death by his mother, Diane Baber. Memorial fund set up for daughter of deceased Wyandotte detective Funeral arrangements are being handled by Molnar Funeral Homes Nixon Chapel, 2544 Biddle Ave., Wyandotte. Visitation will take place from noon to 8 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 25. A funeral service will be held at 11 a.m. Monday, Feb. 26, at Christ the King Lutheran Church, 15600 Trenton Road, Southgate. Burial will be at Michigan Memorial Park in Huron Township. Detective Sharpes good-natured sense of humor that Hamilton spoke about was remembered by other officers, as well, as described in a Facebook message posted by the Wyandotte Police Department. The officer who posted the message on behalf of his fellow officers recalled Detective Sharpes penchant for singing. The dude would regularly break out into song and dance at any time and he didnt care who was around when he did it, the post states. God, what I would give to hear him sing Boyz II Men one more time. The post concludes by calling Detective Sharpes a kind and compassionate human being, with the writer stating he shares the same feelings as every other of Jays coworkers when he says it was a pleasure to work with him and an absolute honor to be his friend. I can personally tell you that not a day will go by that I wont think about my dear friend Jay Sharpes, the tribute states. Heaven just got one of the goofiest most fun-loving people that ever walked this earth. I just wish heaven hadnt got him so soon. Highlights include Babyteeth #11, Dark Ark #6, and Brilliant Trash #6. Source: Aftershock Comics BABYTEETH #11 / $3.99 / 32 pages / Color / on sale 05.23.18 writer: Donny Cates artist: Garry Brown color: Mark Englert letterer: Taylor Esposito cover: Garry Brown The story of the Antichrist and the people who love him continues as we enter into the most terrifying chapter of our journey so far: THE TERRIBLE TWOS! Plus, who is our mysterious new storyteller!? And what secrets about the fate of Clark do they hold?! Find out here, as a bold new direction in BABYTEETH begins! From Donny Cates, the writer of Thanos, Dr. Strange, Buzzkill, Paybacks, Redneck and the breakout hit God Country, comes a pulse-pounding new series with art from THE REVISIONIST's Garry Brown! "This book is going to be the most sought after title of 2017" Rick Shea of Famous Faces & Funnies comic shop BETROTHED #3 / $3.99 / 32 pages / Color / on sale 05.09.18 writer: Sean Lewis artist: Steve Uy letters: Simon Bowland cover: Steve Uy The Betrothed's earth-bound guardians get involved as all hell breaks loose for Kieron and Tamara. After battling Barbarians and having their friends discover the truth about the pair, how can they find a way to cope? Enter an all-night keg party, filled with flirtation, jealousy and a few pranks along the way. Funny, fantastical and full violenceissue #3 arrives with a bang! From writer Sean Lewis (The Few) and artist Steve Uy (Uncanny X-Men, Avengers Initiative, Grumpy Cat) comes a sci-fi series, with a fun mix of Archie and Saga, that HAD to be told at AfterShock! BRILLIANT TRASH #6 / $3.99 / 32 pages / Color / on sale 05.30.18 writers: Tim Seeley & Steve Seeley artist: Priscilla Petraites color: Marco Lesko letters: Marshall Dillon cover: Mike Norton & Addison Duke Now that the Didi Virus has swept the globe, every one on earth has superhuman powers. But using the superpowers slowly kill the user, and each person must decide whether to use them for good or evil, and whether to burn bright and fast or not at all. A sci-fi superhuman epic from Tim Seeley, the writer of Revival and Grayson, and breakout art sensation Priscilla Petraites! "It's the story of the 'word of tomorrow,' torn directly from the headlines, about an America that might be waiting for us. It's cautionary, but it's also action packed and fun!" Tim Seeley BROTHERS DRACUL #2 / $3.99 / 32 pages / Color / on sale 05.23.18 writer: Cullen Bunn artist: Mirko Colak color: Maria Santaolalla letterer: Simon Bowland cover A: Mirko Colak w/ Maria Santaolalla cover B: Szymon Kudranski Vlad Dracul and his brother Radu are prisoners of the Ottoman Empire. As royalty, though, they are treated with great respect. They are trained in art, music, archery, horseback riding...even vampire hunting! Herein the sorrow-filled truth of Vlad's descent to the role of the Impaler is revealed! From writer Cullen Bunn (DARK ARK, UNHOLY GRAIL, X-Men Blue, Deadpool, Venom) and artist Mirko Colak (UNHOLY GRAIL,The Punisher) comes a tale of brothers and blood that HAD to be told at AfterShock Comics. COLD WAR #4 / $3.99 / 32 pages / Color / on sale 05.16.18 writer: Chris Sebela artist: Hayden Sherman colors: Hayden Sherman letters: Hayden Sherman cover: Hayden Sherman With no safe havens left, the splintered sides of the surviving Cryonauts are spinning wildly out of control. On the ground, the least useful members of their ranks lovesick couple Tikk and Sath have stepped up to save their fellow soldiers. While deep behind the scenes, LQ's semi-suicide mission to uncover who's pulling the strings has hit bloody paydirt. From Chris Sebela, writer of Blue Beetle, Kiss/Vampirella and Evolution, and Hayden Sherman, artist of The Few and John Carter The End, comes the story that HAD to be told at AfterShock! "Sebela managed to balance a number of genres, giving us a plate that offers something for just about everyone...Hayden Sherman's art is a big plus and evokes early Frank Miller. 9 out of 10." -Stephen Gustafson of 411mania.com DARK ARK #6 / $3.99 / 32 pages / Color / on sale 05.02.18 writer: Cullen Bunn artist: Juan Doe letterer: Ryane Hill cover "A": Juan Doe cover "B": Nat Jones Two arks sail the flooded world. On one, Noah tends the animals of the natural world. On the other, the sorcerer Shrae stands watch over the monsters that haunt the night. But in order for Shrae's charges to thrive in the World That Waits, Noah's Ark must also survive. And when Noah's vessel encounters trouble, Shrae's monsters must work in secrecy to ensure that their would-be prey lives to find land. From writer Cullen Bunn (X-Men Blue, Deadpool, Venom) and artist Juan Doe (AMERICAN MONSTER, WORLD READER) comes a sinister tale of biblical proportions that HAD to be told at AfterShock Comics. HER INFERNAL DESCENT #2 / $3.99 / 32 pages / Color / on sale 05.23.18 Writers: Lonnie Nadler & Zac Thompson Artist: Kyle Charles Colorist: Jordan Boyd Letterer: Ryan Ferrier Cover: Kyle Charles w/ Jordan Boyd Lynn and William Blake confront the anxiety-ridden mad judge of hell, Franz Kafka. Lynn descends further down the fiery depths into the circle of gluttony, where Cerberus awaits with a hunger of his own. Plus, a guest appearance by the world's most beloved author of suspense and mystery! From the writers of the break-out hit The Dregs and Marvel's Cable, and the artist of Roche Limit, this is HELL like you've never seen before. PESTILENCE: A STORY OF SATAN #1 / $3.99 / 32 pages / Color / on sale 05.30.17 writer: Frank Tieri artist: Oleg Okunev colors: Rob Schwager letters: Marshall Dillon cover "A": Tim Bradstreet cover "B": Mike Rooth The second volume of this hit AfterShock series starts here! The year is 1353. The fugitive Roderick Helms has retreated to a life of hidden seclusion after failing to expose the Church's role in the Black Death. But something threatens to bring him back into action. Something that has risen which will threaten to transform the waning plague into a far more darker and sinister crisis. And that something is none other than Satan himself! Written by the master of violence, gore, and mayhem, Frank Tieri (Harley Quinn, Marvel vs Capcom, Wolverine, Deadpool), with spectacular art from illustrator Oleg Okunev, and covers by Eisner Award-nominated artist Tim Bradstreet (The Punisher, Hellblazer)! "Pestilence is a refreshing new take on the zombie genre. It really drives home the claustrophobic onslaught of the undead." -James Ferguson of horrortalk.com ROUGH RIDERS: RIDE OR DIE #4 / $3.99 / 32 pages / Color / on sale 05.09.18 writer: Adam Glass artist: Patrick Olliffe color: Gabe Eltaeb letterer: Sal Cipriano cover: Patrick Olliffe w/ Gabe Eltaeb Volume Three of the hit AfterShock Series! In their final mission together, the Rough Riders are pushed to the brink of their own destruction. Houdini tries to outsmart death one more time while Jack Johnson attempts to save his dear friend. Meanwhile, Teddy Roosevelt must face not only his own sins, but those of his familial line. And in order to save the world from the end of days, Roosevelt must kill his daughter, Alice, who has been possessed by an ancient evil! Don't miss "The Long Goodbye", the stunning conclusion of America's first team of super heroes. Created and written by Adam Glass (executive producer of Supernatural and writer of Suicide Squad) with artwork by Patrick Olliffe (Untold Tales of Spider-Man). "The story is exciting and fun, with the characters being faithful and fanciful, and the visuals are epic and thrilling. This is what comic books are all about!" Patrick Hayes of scifipulse.net A WALK THROUGH HELL #1 / $3.99 / 32 pages / Color / on sale 05.16.18 writer: Garth Ennis artist: Goran Sudzuka colors: Ive Svorcina letters: Rob Steen cover "A": Andy Clarke & Jose Villarrubia cover "B": SOLID BLACK VARIANT NEW SERIES! So these two FBI agents walk into a warehouse... Special Agents Shaw and McGregor handle the routine cases nowadays, which is just the way Shaw likes it. She's pushing 40, a borderline burnout, the ghastly memories of her last investigation still clinging like shadows. McGregor is younger, more dedicated, hanging onto some measure of idealism whatever the world might throw at him. When two fellow agents go missing inside a Long Beach warehouse, Shaw and McGregor are sent to investigate. But what they find waiting is far from routine, as the local police have already discovered to their cost. Before the night is out, our heroes will encounter terror beyond their most appalling nightmaresin a place where the night may never end at all. A new kind of horror story for modern America, written by Garth Ennis (Preacher, The Boys, Crossed) and drawn by Goran Sudzuka (Y: The Last Man, Hellblazer) ANIMOSITY EVOLUTION VOL 1 TP / $14.99 / 128 Pages / on sale 05.16.18 writer: Marguerite Bennett artist: Eric Gapstur color: Rob Schwager letters: Marshall Dillon cover: Eric Gapstur One day, the animals woke up. They started thinking. They started talking. They started taking revenge. Now, they've started building. In a city by the sea, a new power is on the rise...and they're making an animal kingdom all their own. Collecting the first five issue of this captivating ANIMOSITY spin-off series! From the brilliant mind of creator/writer Marguerite Bennett (INSEXTS, Bombshells and Batwoman) with artwork by Eric GapsturANIMOSITY: EVOLUTION is an exciting new series that expands upon this already amazing world! "AfterShock has earned their reputation for putting out some of the most diverse and entertaining comics in the industry. Animosity is a prime example of this." Steve Gustafson of 411mania.com THE ART OF JIM STARLIN: A LIFE IN WORDS AND PICTURES HC / $49.99 / 328 pages / 912 size / on sale 05.02.18 FIRST AFTERSHOCK PRINTING! There are few creative names in comics whose influence is felt more in pop culture than Jim Starlin, with his creations Thanos, Gamora, and Drax the Destroyer occupying such prominent roles in Marvel's cinematic universe. The "father of the cosmic soap opera," Jim Starlin's name is synonymous with the larger-than-life epic, which is why AfterShock is proud to bring back into print, this epic 328-page retrospective on the career of one of the most popular and prolific comic book artists of the last 40 years! Covering everything from his humble beginnings to his rise as one of the industry's top creative talents, this oversized volume includes glimpses into Starlin's files and sketchbooks, as well as images of his personal favorites with insights into his life and creative process. The first edition of this volume sold out instantly. Don't be caught short this time! Just in time for the release of Marvel's Avengers: Infinity War movie! SHIPWRECK VOL 1 TP / 136 Pages / $17.99 / on sale 05.30.18 writer: Warren Ellis artist: Phil Hester color: Mike Spicer cover: Phil Hester Dr Jonathan Shipwright, sole survivor of a very unusual and very secret shipwreck, doesn't know where he is. Seemingly trapped on an endless road, in pursuit of a saboteur who holds the key to his salvation or doom. Industry legend WARREN ELLIS joins AfterShock comics with this mysterious and captivating tale full of shock, secrets and surprises. From the co-creator and writer of AUTHORITY, TRANSMETROPOLITAN and PLANETARY. "SHIPWRECK might not be the first title readers think of when they think of new Ellis works, but...I have a feeling that that could (and should) change!" Justin Partridge of newsarama.com Highlights include Flavor #1, Deadly Class #34, and Monstress #17. Source: Image Comics BARRIER #1 (OF 5) COLLECTORS ED (MR) (W) Brian K. Vaughan (A/CA) Marcos Martin, Muntsa Vicente From the Eisner Award-winning team behind THE PRIVATE EYE, BARRIER is an unconventional drama about violence, language, and illegal immigration...with a shocking sci-fi twist. After debuting on PanelSyndicate.com, this critically acclaimed five-part miniseries finally comes to print, exclusively from Image Comics. After making the massive, 50-plus-page first issue available to mature readers for FREE on Free Comic Day, this special collector's edition of the first issue is being released in a larger size to match the next four issues being released WEEKLY throughout the rest of May! Printed in its original "landscape" format (side-stapled for convenient shelving!) and graced with gorgeous cardstock covers, each comic is meant to be a durable work of art, and there are no plans for these print issues to ever be collected, so the only way to own your own copies of this groundbreaking story is by supporting your friendly neighborhood comic shop! (STL080879) MATURE THEMES 117, 56pgs, FC (1 of 5) SRP: $4.99 BARRIER #2 (OF 5) (MR) (W) Brian K. Vaughan (A/CA) Marcos Martin, Muntsa Vicente This small-town crime story becomes an interstellar adventure! Featuring over 30 pages of story and breathtaking art. (STL080880) MATURE THEMES 117, 32pgs, FC (2 of 5) SRP: $3.99 BARRIER #3 (OF 5) (MR) (W) Brian K. Vaughan (A/CA) Marcos Martin, Muntsa Vicente A very special "silent" issue! This is the first wordless comic ever from either BRIAN K. VAUGHAN or MARCOS MARTIN. (STL080882) MATURE THEMES 117, 32pgs, FC (3 of 5) SRP: $3.99 BARRIER #4 (OF 5) (MR) (W) Brian K. Vaughan (A/CA) Marcos Martin, Muntsa Vicente Though they can't understand a word the other is saying, Oscar and Liddy must learn to communicate if they stand any chance of surviving their otherworldly captors. (STL080883) MATURE THEMES 117, 32pgs, FC (4 of 5) SRP: $3.99 BARRIER #5 (OF 5) (MR) (W) Brian K. Vaughan (A/CA) Marcos Martin, Muntsa Vicente This massive, 50-page finale brings our multilingual epic to its shocking conclusion. (STL080884) MATURE THEMES 117, 56pgs, FC (5 of 5) SRP: $4.99 DEATH OR GLORY #1 CVR A (MR) (W) Rick Remender (A/CA) Bengal SERIES PREMIERE! Meet Glory, raised off the grid in a convoy amid truckersthe last men and women fighting for true freedom on the American open road. Now, in order to pay for her beloved dying Father's surgery, Glory has three days to pull off four dangerous cross-country heists with mob killers, crooked cops, and a psycho ex-husband all out to bring her in or die trying. The new ongoing series by New York Times bestselling author RICK REMENDER and legendary French superstar BENGAL brings you a high-speed chase across the American West that examines our dwindling freedoms and the price paid by those who fight for an untethered life, in this special double-sized first issue with 40 pages of story! (STL080888) MATURE THEMES 48pgs, FC SRP: $4.99 FLAVOR #1 (W) Joseph Keatinge (A/CA) Wook Jin Clark & Various SERIES PREMIERE! Within a strange walled city, an unlicensed chef discovers a mystery that threatens to end it all. Join JOSEPH KEATINGE (GLORY, SHUTTER) and WOOK JIN CLARK (Adventure Time: The Flip Side) on this culinary epic adventureFLAVORwhere chefs are the ultimate celebrity and food is the most valued commodity. The high-stakes competition of Hunger Games collides with the lush, MIYAZAKI-esque worldbuilding in this delectable new ongoing series featuring culinary consulting and bonus content by ALI BOUZARI, renowned food scientist and author of the IACP Award-winning cookbook Ingredient: Unveiling the Essential Elements of Food. (STL080891) 32pgs, FC SRP: $3.99 MEDIEVAL SPAWN WITCHBLADE #1 (OF 4) (W) Brian Holguin, Brian Haberlin (A/CA) Brian Haberlin MINISERIES PREMIERE! AN ALL-NEW CROSSOVER WITH 32 PAGES OF STORY AND ART, PLUS SPECIAL AUGMENTED REALITY COVER FOR ONLY $2.99 DON'T MISS OUT ON THIS DEAL! Fan-favorites Spawn and Witchblade team together for the first time in TWO DECADES! In this issue: A village is besieged by a dark force then Spawn emerges from out of the shadows to save them all. Is he their savior... or their destroyer? (STL080899) 32pgs, FC (1 of 4) SRP: $2.99 WHERE WE LIVE LAS VEGAS SHOOTING BENEFIT ANTHOLOGY TP (W) Mike Allred & Various (A) Rafael Albuquerque & Various (CA) J. H. Williams "On October 1, 2017, Las Vegas, Nevada suffered the worst mass shooting in modern American history, resulting in 58 deaths and over 500 injured. It broke my heart. Las Vegas is my home. I felt like something needed to be done to help in a unique way."JH WILLIAMS III, Artist & Curating Editor This "unique way" was the genesis of the WHERE WE LIVE anthology a riveting collection of both fictional stories and actual eye-witness accounts told by an all-star lineup of the top talent working in comics today. All the creators have graciously volunteered their time and talent to help bring some sense to this senseless act and, in the process, raise money for the survivors and their families. The book will include a variety of perspectives with key themes exploring gun violence, common sense gun control, value of a compassionate society, mental health stigmatization, aftermath of tragedy and how individuals and communities persevere, and an appreciation of Las Vegas as a vibrant community. WHERE WE LIVE also features stories from local writers and artists as they relate their personal experiences and reactions to this tragedy. One hundred percent of the proceeds for the WHERE WE LIVE anthology will be donated to an existing GoFundMe campaign for the survivors in Las Vegas. (STL080900) SC, 256pgs, FC SRP: $19.99 ANGELIC TP VOL 01 HEIRS & GRACES (W) Simon Spurrier (A/CA) Jan Wijngaard Centuries after humanity disappeared, the Earth belongs to our leftovers: the animals, genetically modified for a war they don't remember, guarding a world they don't understand. But for one young winged monkey, the repressive tribal routines are unbearable. Her name is QORA. She yearns to explore, to discover... to fly free. Eisner nominee SIMON SPURRIER (CRY HAVOC, The Spire, X-Men Legacy) and star artist CASPAR WIJNGAARD (LIMBO, Dark Souls, Assassin's Creed) unite for an all-ages-friendly fable about teenage rebellion and animal antics amidst the ruins of civilization. Collects ANGELIC #1-6. (STL070956) SC, 168pgs, FC SRP: $12.99 BONEHEAD TP VOL 01 (W) Bryan Hill (A/CA) Rhoald Marcellius In a near future, a sprawling megalopolis sees the rise of "Boneheads," parkour gangs that use neuro-linked helmets to augment their abilities and live for the thrill of physical risk. As a gang war threatens to tear the city apart, a mysterious Bonehead risesa man with no past that might be the key to saving the city's future. From writer BRYAN HILL (POSTAL) and artist RHOALD MARCELLIUS (Marvel: Contest of Champions) comes a story about technological and human revolution. Collects BONEHEAD #1-4. (STL070957) SC, 128pgs, FC SRP: $9.99 IT WILL ALL HURT TP (W/A/CA) Farel Dalrymple ADVANCE SOLICIT! A weird, sad, silly, sketchy, and dreamy watercolor fantasy-action quest in which Alemendra Clementine and her crew of anti-social adventurers all come together on a psych-apocalyptic world to take down an evil wizard. This Eisner Award-nominated webcomic began as a loose stream-of-consciousness exercise and exploration of the comic book medium and takes place in the same world as FAREL DALRYMPLE's The Wrenchies. Collects IT WILL ALL HURT #1-3, plus all six chapters of the webcomic. (STL074456) SC, 176pgs, FC SRP: $18.99 NO 1 WITH A BULLET TP (W) Jacob Semahn (A/CA) Jorge Corona ADVANCE SOLICIT! Her social media, strong. Her variety show segments, a hit. Nash Huang is at the top of her game. But when the iRis Shutter contact lens hits the market, Nash's life is personally invaded. The latest leap forward in "technological progress," these contacts not only play video or augment reality... but also record with the blink of an eye. Fighting to keep her life together after a leaked sex tape goes viral, a clingy super-fan is the last thing on Nash's mind...but that's exactly when the bodies pile up and the terror begins. (STL074463) SC, 152pgs, FC SRP: $16.99 SON OF HITLER HC (MR) (W) Anthony Del Col, Geoff Moore (A/CA) Jeff McComsey A story so wild it could only be true... maybe... The never-before-told tale of Adolf Hitler's secret child and how this son was the key to ending World War II is now revealed in this audacious graphic novel based upon one of history's most intriguing rumors. In 1944 Occupied France a rogue British agent reveals to a young baker's assistant the true identity of his father, thus recruiting him for a dangerous mission that will end the greatest threat of World War II. Out of respect to the innocent and the dead all the names in this story have been changed... Except for one. This action-packed ride in the vein of Inglourious Basterds and The Boys from Brazil is brought to life by acclaimed writer ANTHONY DEL COL (Assassin's Creed, Kill Shakespeare), New York Times bestselling cartoonist JEFF McCOMSEY (FUBAR, Flutter) and newcomer GEOFF MOORE. (STL080902) MATURE THEMES HC, 192pgs, FC SRP: $24.99 STRAY BULLETS SUNSHINE & ROSES TP VOL 01 (MR) (W/A/CA) David Lapham Dark and twisted, funny and heartbreaking, intimate and epicSUNSHINE & ROSES tells the story of a boy and a girl, how they fell in love and hatched a scheme to blow up the Baltimore underworld. There is no crime book remotely like STRAY BULLETS, and with SUNSHINE & ROSES, the uncompromising EISNER AWARD-WINNING team of DAVID & MARIA LAPHAM take the series to a new high. Collects STRAY BULLETS: SUNSHINE & ROSES #1-8. (STL080903) MATURE THEMES SC, 248pgs, B&W SRP: $19.99 STREET ANGEL GOES TO JUVIE HC (W) Brian Maruca, Jim Rugg (A/CA) Jim Rugg Busted! Jesse "Street Angel" Sanchez, aka Shiraz Thunderbird, gets pinched and must do a stretch in Angel City's infamous juvenile corrections center, Alcatraz, Jr. For the Deadliest Girl Alive, three squares a day and a warm, dry bed ain't all bad. Jesse meets a girl gang, besties a superhero sidekick, pushes the lunch lady to the limit, and watches Harriet the Spy! Will juvie break our hero, or will "Shiraz Thunderbird" break OUT of Alcatraz, Jr.? STREET ANGEL GOES TO JUVIE releases alongside the Free Comic Book Day title: STREET ANGEL'S DOG! (STL080906) HC, 912, 40pgs, FC SRP: $19.99 VOID TRIP TP (MR) (W) Ryan O'Sullivan (A/CA) Plaid Klaus From writer RYAN O'SULLIVAN (Turncoat, The Evil Within, Warhammer 40,000) and illustrator PLAID KLAUS (Turncoat) comes the story of Ana and Gabe, the last two humans left alive in the galaxy. They're low on fuel, they're low on food, and they're low on psychedelic space froot, but they're still determined to make it to the promised land: hippy-paradise super-planet Euphoria. This is the story of their journey, the friends and enemies they made along the way, and how the universe responded to those who dared to live freely within it. Collects VOID TRIP #1-5. (STL074414) MATURE THEMES SC, 144pgs, FC SRP: $16.99 ANALOG #2 (MR) (W) Gerry Duggan (A/CA) David O'Sullivan, Jordie Bellaire CHAPTER TWOIt's 2024, and we still don't have flying cars, but good news: we're introducing Jack's sniper-toting, fascist-punching girlfriend, and a mysterious new nemesis from the NSA wants to hack back into the world's secrets by leaning hard on human punching-bag Jack McGinnis and his fellow paper jockeys. Order heavy on Image's new hit series if you like fun comics with shootouts, intrigue, a few jokes, and a nice, old-timey cliffhanger. (STL080975) MATURE THEMES 32pgs, FC SRP: $3.99 BEAUTY TP VOL 04 (MR) (W) Jeremy Haun, Jason A. Hurley (A) Matthew Dow Smith, Thomas Nachlik (CA) Jeremy Haun, Nick Filardi ADVANCE SOLICIT! Corporate espionage, government secrets, and private military contracts are uncovered as an investigative journalist looks deep into Abericorp, the most powerful pharmaceutical company in the world. Collects THE BEAUTY #17-21. (STL070974) MATURE THEMES SC, 128pgs, FC SRP: $16.99 MAR180641 BEEF #4 (OF 5) (MR) (W) Richard Starkings, Tyler Shainline (A) Shaky Kane (CA) Shaky Kane, Ross Hell Vodino and the twins have Mary Lynn, and Mary Lynn's milkshake brings The Beef to the meatpacking yard. Don't have a cow, man. (STL080976) MATURE THEMES 32pgs, FC (4 of 5) SRP: $3.99 BLACK MAGICK TP VOL 02 AWAKENINGS PART TWO (MR) (W) Greg Rucka (A/CA) Nicola Scott The trap around Rowan Black continues to close, with the Hammer closing in on one side and the Ascension now in motion on the other. But the ultimate wound may not be wielded by magick, but instead delivered via the heart. New York Times bestselling creators GREG RUCKA and NICOLA SCOTT bring you the second volume of the critically acclaimed series. Collects BLACK MAGICK #6-11. (STL062268) MATURE THEMES SC, 136pgs, FC SRP: $16.99 BLACK SCIENCE #35 CVR A SCALERA & DINISIO (MR) (W) Rick Remender (A/CA) Matteo Scalera, Moreno DiNisio "LATER THAN YOU THINK": Part OneTrying to come to terms with her husband's legacy, Sara McKay wanders through countless realities looking for answers to one question: what are the choices that define her, and can she help right the infinite wrongs her husband set in motion? A new chapter in BLACK SCIENCE beings here! (STL081043) MATURE THEMES 32pgs, FC SRP: $3.99 COPPERHEAD #19 (MR) (W) Jay Faerber, Scott Godlewski (A/CA) Scott Godlewski, Ron Riley NEW STORY ARC! Co-creator SCOTT GODLEWSKI returns! The natives are getting restless.... (STL081040) MATURE THEMES 32pgs, FC SRP: $3.99 CRUDE #2 (MR) (W) Steve Orlando (A/CA) Garry Brown, Lee Loughridge The refinery city of Blackstone is the new Russian frontier, stinking of oil, but offering money and sexual freedom to those brave enough to live there. Piotr Petrovich has come for revenge, to hunt his son's killer. But what he finds is the most brutal fight of his life. (STL080977) MATURE THEMES 32pgs, FC SRP: $3.99 CURSE WORDS #14 CVR A BROWNE (MR) (W) Charles Soule (A/CA) Ryan Browne "THE HOLE DAMNED WORLD," Part Four WAR! Battle erupts in the Hole World as we see the fearsome capabilities of the fearsome warriors of the fearsome Tiger Tribe. Sizzajee's crew of evil wizards is down to only four memberswill they be able to successfully defend his realm? ALSO: Wizord and Ruby Stitch continue their search for Margaret, and Jacques Zacques goes batty. (STL080978) MATURE THEMES 32pgs, FC SRP: $3.99 CYBER FORCE #3 (MR) (W) Matt Hawkins, Bryan Hill (A/CA) Atilio Rojo Who is the mother of artificial intelligence? The reimagining of CYBER FORCE continues as the origins of the "Aphrodite Project" are revealed...along with the dark intentions of the group that helped create her. (STL080980) MATURE THEMES 32pgs, FC SRP: $3.99 MAR180662 DAYS OF HATE #5 (OF 12) (MR) (W) Ales Kot (A) Danijel Zezelj (CA) Danijel Zezelj, Tom Muller This country was always at war. (STL080981) MATURE THEMES 32pgs, FC (5 of 12) SRP: $3.99 MAR180663 DEAD HAND #2 (MR) (W) Kyle Higgins (A/CA) Stephen Mooney, Jordie Bellaire "COLD WAR RELICS," Part Two Mountain View's secrets continue to unspool, even as Carter and Renae fight to protect Roger from the outside world...with deadly consequences. (STL080982) MATURE THEMES 32pgs, FC SRP: $3.99 MAR180664 DEADLY CLASS #34 CVR A CRAIG (MR) (W) Rick Remender (A/CA) Wesley Craig "LOVE LIKE BLOOD," Part Three Death gets its fill in Mexico, as Marcus and Victor finally square off. Who will get the revenge they thirst for, and what will be left of the other when they do? (STL080983) MATURE THEMES 32pgs, FC SRP: $3.99 MAR180666 DEATH OF LOVE #4 (OF 5) (MR) (W) Justin Jordan (A/CA) Donal Delay, Omar Estevez Philo, Bob, and Zoe are on the run from the Cupidae. They have a plan, kind of, but the solution might be way worse than the problem. (STL080985) MATURE THEMES 32pgs, FC (4 of 5) SRP: $3.99 MAR180667 DESCENDER #30 CVR A NGUYEN (W) Jeff Lemire (A/CA) Dustin Nguyen "THE END OF THE UNIVERSE," Part Two Is this really the end? Tim-21 is delivered to the enemy and betrayed by one of his closest allies. But nothing can prepare the universe for what comes next as King S'Lok returns and does the unthinkable. Meanwhile, Queen Between and Andy face a betrayal of their own, with Bandit hanging in the balance. (STL080986) 32pgs, FC SRP: $3.99 MAR180669 DRY COUNTY #3 (MR) (W/A/CA) Rich Tommaso PART THREELou employs a new gag-writing technique and a teenage groupie to try and track down Janet. (STL080988) MATURE THEMES 32pgs, FC SRP: $3.99 MAR180670 ELSEWHERE #7 (W) Jay Faerber (A/CA) Sumeyye Kesgin, Ron Riley After suffering a massive setback, Amelia Earhart and D.B. Cooper push forward in their quest to reach the portal that will take them back to Earth. (STL080989) 32pgs, FC SRP: $3.99 MAR180671 ETERNAL EMPIRE #9 (W) Jonathan Luna, Sarah Vaughn (A/CA) Jonathan Luna In this penultimate issue, Rion and Tair find themselves separated, trapped, and without hope just as the Suns begin to align. (STL081035) 32pgs, FC SRP: $3.99 MAR180672 EXTREMITY TP VOL 02 WARRIOR (W) Daniel Warren Johnson (A/CA) Daniel Warren Johnson, Mike Spicer The Paznina take desperate measures to finish their war against the Roto... a war that will draw Thea and Rollo back into it no matter how much death and heartbreak it promises. Collects EXTREMITY #7-12. (STL070962) SC, 144pgs, FC SRP: $16.99 FURTHER ADV OF NICK WILSON #5 (OF 5) CVR A WOODS (MR) (W) Eddie Gorodetsky, Marc Andreyko (A) Steve Sadowski (CA) Pete Woods MINISERIES FINALE! The big day is finally here: the grand opening of the Nick Wilson Experience! But where is Nick? Will Clive get his greatest victory? Will Jane find love? Will Nick find Coco? Will Xavier knock that smug grin off Darryl's face? So many questions! ALL, and more, are answered in the final issue of this acclaimed miniseries! (STL080990) MATURE THEMES 32pgs, FC (5 of 5) SRP: $3.99 GASOLINA #8 (MR) (W) Sean Mackiewicz (A/CA) Niko Walter, Mat Lopes "AUTODEFENSAS" Amalia defends her home against intruders while Los Queridos' monsters leave nothing but death and destruction throughout Veracruz. (STL080992) MATURE THEMES 32pgs, FC SRP: $3.99 MAR180678 GIDEON FALLS #3 CVR A SORRENTINO (MR) (W) Jeff Lemire (A/CA) Andrea Sorrentino The bestselling team of JEFF LEMIRE & ANDREA SORRENTINO (Old Man Logan, Green Arrow) unleash their most ambitious story to date with this complex and mesmerizing new supernatural mystery series. Norton gets closer to the secrets of the Black Barn as Fred discovers a grizzly new crime in Gideon Falls. (STL080993) MATURE THEMES 32pgs, FC SRP: $3.99 MAR180680 GRAVEDIGGERS UNION #6 CVR A CRAIG (MR) (W) Wes Craig (A) Toby Cypress & Various (CA) Wes Craig NEW STORY ARC! SECRETS OF THE SPACE-MONKEY REVEALED!!! Left on this planet millions of years ago by a long-vanished group of aliens, the Space-monkey is the key to the apocalypse. The only thing that can kill it is Morgan's ancient blade, left on earth by a rival alien species. Now the Gravediggers are in a race against time to rescue the Space-monkey before the Black Temple can kill it, unleashing the Dark Gods and bringing about the end of mankind! Variant cover by MATT FORSYTHE (Adventure Time). Pinup by FAREL DALRYMPLE (POP GUN WAR). (STL081036) MATURE THEMES 32pgs, FC SRP: $3.99 OFFERED AGAIN MAR180682 O/A GRAVEDIGGERS UNION #1 (MR) (W) Wes Craig (A) Toby Cypress (CA) Wes Craig DEADLY CLASS co-creator WES CRAIG launches a new series with art by rising star TOBY CYPRESS (Omega Men)! The supernatural world has gone crazy! The apocalypse is coming, and only the Gravediggers Union can stop it! How? Well, first their leader Cole has to find his estranged daughter. But is she the one behind the apocalypse? Wild comedic horror with steroid zombies, monster gods, swamp vampires, ghost storms, and space monkeys! OVERSIZED FIRST ISSUE! (STL064174) MATURE THEMES 40pgs, FC SRP: $3.99 MAR180683 O/A GRAVEDIGGERS UNION #2 (MR) (W) Wes Craig (A) Toby Cypress, Wes Craig (CA) Wes Craig Cole and the boys have to go ask the witch Morphea to help them find the mysterious cult behind the coming apocalypse. One problem: witches and gravediggers do NOT get along. And we're introduced to Morgan: prophet of the apocalyptic Black Temple cult, and Cole's estranged daughter! (STL066895) MATURE THEMES 32pgs, FC SRP: $3.99 MAR180684 HACK SLASH RESURRECTION #7 CVR A SEELEY (MR) (W) Tini Howard (A) Celor, K. Michael Russell (CA) Tim Seeley "CAT AND DOG INVESTIGATIONS" Cat Curio and Pooch need Cassie and Vlad's help with a case, and it's fun to catch up with friends! The epic return a lot of you begged for. Enjoy it. This one's a one-shot. (STL081037) MATURE THEMES 32pgs, FC SRP: $3.99 MAR180686 HIT-GIRL #4 CVR A REEDER (MR) (W) Mark Millar (A) Ricardo Lopez Ortiz (CA) Amy Reeder IT'S THE COLOMBIAN SHOWDOWN. In the bloody climax to her Colombian adventure, Hit-Girl makes her last stand against Palmira's gang lords. She's enslaved Mano as a sidekick, but will he finally crack and turn weapons on his own people? HIT-GIRL #4 is an action-packed gorefest the bloodbath before Mindy sets off to her next destination. (STL080995) MATURE THEMES 32pgs, FC SRP: $3.99 MAR180689 IMAGE PLUS #9 (WYTCHES THE BAD EGG PT 9) (Net) (W) Scott Snyder (A) Jock, Matt Hollingsworth The latest issue of IMAGE+ magazine invites you to the vanguard of creator-owned comics, where sequential art's most passionate voices dive into their latest masterworks. Discover DEATH OR GLORY, RICK REMENDER (SEVEN TO ETERNITY, DEADLY CLASS) and BENGAL's new ongoing series about a vice-filled road trip through the backroads of America. JOSEPH KEATINGE (SHUTTER) prepares FLAVOR, a delicious mystery about a walled city where food is scarce and chefs fierce, illustrated with dreamy finesse by WOOK JIN CLARK. BRIAN K. VAUGHAN and MARCOS MARTIN also reveal the secrets behind BARRIER, their harrowing sci-fi exploration of immigration. IMAGE+ overflows with exclusive interviews, art features, previews, and more, including another chapter of SCOTT SNYDER and JOCK's horror reinvention, WYTCHES: BAD EGG. IMAGE+ is free with any purchase of Diamond's Previews. (STL080974) Magazine, 80pgs, FC SRP: $1.99 MAR180690 INFIDEL #3 (OF 5) CVR A CAMPBELL & VILLARRUBIA (MR) (W) Pornsak Pichetshote (A/CA) Aaron Campbell, Jose Villarrubia Following last issue's devastating events, the mysterious entities haunting Aisha's home escalate their attacks. As the nightmare spreads to her friends and neighbors, the creatures expose their true natures and long-buried hatreds. (STL080997) MATURE THEMES 32pgs, FC (3 of 5) SRP: $3.99 MAR180692 INVINCIBLE HC VOL 12 ULTIMATE COLL (W) Robert Kirkman (A/CA) Ryan Ottley, Nathan Fairbairn THE END OF ALL THINGS the final INVINCIBLE story is collected in one incredible volume. This mega story touches every corner of the Invincible Universe, and when it's over... MARK GRAYSON'S STORY IS OVER. Every single story for the past 13 years has been leading up to this! Collects INVINCIBLE #133-144. (STL070965) HC, 336pgs, FC SRP: $39.99 ISOLA #2 (W) Brenden Fletcher, Karl Kerschl (A) Karl Kerschl, Msassyk (CA) Karl Kerschl With the hunting clans closing in, Captain Rook leads the Queen to a city in ruins on a desperate mission to resupply. Unbeknownst to them, however, a new danger awaits within the broken walls someone with a connection to Rook's past! (STL080999) 32pgs, FC SRP: $3.99 KICK-ASS #4 CVR A ROMITA JR (MR) (W) Mark Millar (A/CA) John Romita KICK-ASS IS BACK! Patience is trapped while trying to bust a local gang operation and save an innocent man from torture. Surrounded by gangsters, armed with only her wits and combat training, she must fight her way out and get back to her family. With Violencia now hunting her, desperate for revenge, how long before the villains find out who's under the mask? (STL081000) MATURE THEMES 32pgs, FC SRP: $3.99 KILL OR BE KILLED #19 (MR) (W) Ed Brubaker (A) Sean Phillips, Elizabeth Breitweiser (CA) Sean Phillips The fourth arc ends with a bang! If Dylan can't get to the trouble, well...it'll just come to him. Trapped in an insane asylum, Dylan fights for his life and whatever future he may have! And don't forget, every issue of KILL OR BE KILLED contains extra back pages, articles, and art! (STL081002) MATURE THEMES 40pgs, FC SRP: $3.99 MAR180709 LAZARUS #28 (MR) (W) Greg Rucka (A/CA) Michael Lark "FRACTURE: PRELUDE," CONCLUSIONJonah Carlyle is dead, and Jonah Ker has made a new life for himself on the edges of Bittner Territory. But as much as Jonah may have escaped his Family, he cannot escape the world his Family has made. (STL081003) MATURE THEMES 32pgs, FC SRP: $3.99 MAR180710 MAGE TP VOL 04 HERO DEFINED BOOK TWO (W/A/CA) Matt Wagner The fourth of six volumes collecting MATT WAGNER's epic, modern-day fantasy trilogy, MAGE, BOOK TWO: THE HERO DEFINED continues the saga of the reborn Pendragon, Kevin Matchstick. Pursuing their common goal of confronting and defeating the world's hidden supernatural threats, Kevin and his companions Joe Phat and Kirby Hero find themselves drawn northward by mystical forces they don't understand. Trailed by the persistent but befuddled Wally Ut, Kevin finds himself tested by his assumptions of leadership and clarity of purpose. Still hidden from our heroes, dark and familiar forces conspire to drain Kevin's own power...and turn it against him! MATT WAGNER's classic epic of comics fantasy was at the vanguard of the independent comics scene and continues to be an inspiration for many contemporary creators, longtime fans, and new readers alike. An essential part of any comics library, the final part of the trilogy returns in June with MAGE: THE HERO DENIED #9. (STL070967) SC, 208pgs, FC SRP: $19.99 MONSTRESS #17 (MR) (W) Marjorie M. Liu (A/CA) Sana Takeda The Known World is at the brink of war, and Pontus is being threatened by invasion. While her allies work to save the city, Maika battles old enemiesand the dark truths they bear. (STL081004) MATURE THEMES 32pgs, FC SRP: $3.99 MOONSHINE #10 CVR A RISSO (MR) (W) Brian Azzarello (A/CA) Eduardo Risso "MISERY TRAIN," Part Four Lou Pirlo seems to have survived his brush with death...or maybe werewolves just CAN'T die...but the fellow convicts on Lou's chain gang probably won't be so lucky. (STL081005) MATURE THEMES 32pgs, FC SRP: $3.99 MOONSTRUCK #7 (W) Grace Ellis (A/CA) Shae Beagle With one of their friends trapped in the fraternity house (darn fairies!), the mythical friends put aside their fear and seek the only person who can help them, at the scariest place in all of Blitheton: the mall. Meanwhile, Julie tries to work up the courage to let Selena into her heart. (STL081007) 32pgs, FC SRP: $3.99 MAR180718 MOTOR CRUSH TP VOL 02 (W) Brenden Fletcher & Various (A) Babs Tarr, Cameron Stewart (CA) Babs Tarr The acclaimed sci-fi action-adventure series MOTOR CRUSH is back for another heat! Two years have passed in Nova Honda, the racing capital of the world, and for Domino Swift, everything has turned upside down. How does she fit in a world without Crush? Collects MOTOR CRUSH #6-11. (STL062283) SC, 160pgs, FC SRP: $16.99 OBLIVION SONG BY KIRKMAN & DE FELICI #3 (MR) (W) Robert Kirkman (A) Lorenzo De Felici, Annalisa Leoni (CA) Lorenzo De Felici Nathan Cole finds out that some of the people stranded in Oblivion don't want to leave and will fight to the death in order to stay. (STL081008) MATURE THEMES 32pgs, FC SRP: $3.99 PORT OF EARTH #5 (W) Zack Kaplan (A/CA) Andrea Mutti NEW STORY ARC! The rogue alien visitor who broke Port protocols now lies dead, and the Port of Earth is open again for business. As our Consortium business partners arrive on Earth for a secretive meeting, Earth Security Agent Rice and partner McIntyre, traumatized and broken, discover there's an unresolved threat at the ESA HQ. (STL081032) 32pgs, FC SRP: $3.99 PRISM STALKER #3 (W/A) Sloane Leong (CA) Sloane Leong, Darius Ou Vep enters the world of pneumatic martial arts: combat focused on dismantling the resolve of an opponent, commanding their will, and dissolving their effect through your own volition. Vep soon realizes that power is artifice. Now, how to control it...? (STL081009) 24pgs, FC SRP: $3.99 MAR180727 RAT QUEENS #10 CVR A GIENI (MR) (W) Kurtis J. Wiebe (A/CA) Owen Gieni "THE COLOSSAL MAGIC NOTHING," Part Five With all of her friends gone, Betty must confront the reality wizard alone. The past, present, and future collide in a magic maelstrom, and in the battered ruins, a shocking truth is uncovered! (STL081010) MATURE THEMES 32pgs, FC SRP: $3.99 MAR180729 REALM #6 CVR A HAUN & FILARDI (MR) (W) Seth Peck (A) Jeremy Haun (CA) Jeremy Haun, Nick Filardi NEW STORY ARC! After the traumatic events of last issue, Rook and Ben embark on a desperate hunt for their enemies, unaware that something else is hunting them as well. (STL081041) MATURE THEMES 32pgs, FC SRP: $3.99 MAR180731 REALM #1 2ND PTG (MR) (W) Seth Peck (A/CA) Jeremy Haun NEW SERIES! Fifteen years ago, our world was overrun by creatures of myth; orcs, dragons, and other nameless horrors threw the entire planet into total chaos. Today, the shattered remnants of civilization must fight just to survive in a deadly new era of violence and mayhem. While a powerful sorcerer marshals his forces, a group of warriors embark on a journey to reclaim our world from the growing darkness. An all new post-apocalyptic high-fantasy adventure series from co-creators SETH M. PECK (X-Men) and JEREMY HAUN (THE BEAUTY) featuring colors by NICK FILARDI and letters by THOMAS MAUER. (STL068164) MATURE THEMES 32pgs, FC SRP: $3.99 REALM #2 2ND PTG (MR) (W) Seth Peck (A/CA) Jeremy Haun Molly and company hit the road, Ben kills stuff, and Johnny Eldritch has a conference call with the Destroyer of Worlds. (STL071597) MATURE THEMES 32pgs, FC SRP: $3.99 REBORN TP (MR) (W) Mark Millar (A/CA) Greg Capullo & Various NOW AVAILABLE AS A SOFTCOVER! The MILLAR-CAPULLO smash-hit sellout REBORN is here. Where do you go when you die? Not heaven or hell; somewhere else. Somewhere you have to fight to survive. Somewhere the people from the past are waiting for you the good and the bad. Collects REBORN #1-6. (STL070970) MATURE THEMES SC, 176pgs, FC SRP: $16.99 REDNECK TP VOL 02 EYES UPON YOU (MR) (W) Donny Cates (A) Lisandro Estherren, Dee Cunniffe (CA) Nick Pitarra After leaving Sulphur Springs behind in a bloody hurry, the Bowmans are lying low from the law with a new member of the family in tow. But there are rules to being a vampire... and when the rules are broken, the family will surely suffer... Collects REDNECK #7-12. (STL070971) MATURE THEMES SC, 128pgs, FC SRP: $16.99 REGRESSION #10 (MR) (W) Cullen Bunn (A) Danny Luckert, Marie Enger (CA) Danny Luckert Time is an illusion, and the walls constructed by our own perceptions are starting to crumble. Molly and Anton have learned the shocking truth of their own past lives, and these truths may lead them to Adrian's captors. But Adrian might be beyond help. As his reality begins to crumble, the fiendish Gregory Sutter lives once more. Could salvation lie not in a past-life regression, but in a future-life PROgression? (STL081012) MATURE THEMES 32pgs, FC SRP: $3.99 MAR180740 ROSE #11 CVR A GUARA (W) Meredith Finch (A/CA) Ig Guara "ROSE," Part FiveIla, Felix, and Artus have escaped Drucilla's dungeons and are desperately searching for our young heroine to warn her of Thorne's capture. With a deeper understanding of her powers, Rose embarks on her most dangerous quest yet her inevitable confrontation with Drucilla! And the life of Thorne, her khat, is on the line! The fate of Ttereve and its people depends on her success in the next exciting chapter of ROSE. (STL081013) 32pgs, FC SRP: $3.99 MAR180743 MAR180744 ROYAL CITY #11 (MR) (W/A/CA) Jeff Lemire "WE ALL FLOAT ON," Part One A brand-new storyline of JEFF LEMIRE's acclaimed series kicks off as the Pike family rallies around their newest surprise member, but Richie sets off on a dark path that can only end in tragedy. (STL081033) MATURE THEMES 32pgs, FC SRP: $3.99 SAGA #52 (MR) (W) Brian K. Vaughan (A/CA) Fiona Staples Danger approaches. (STL081016) MATURE THEMES 32pgs, FC SRP: $2.99 SAVAGE DRAGON #234 (MR) (W/A/CA) Erik Larsen "GHOSTS FROM THE PAST" Malcolm Dragon heads into Dimension-X on a rescue mission to save Angel Murphy, and he comes face to face with an evil alternate-reality version of his own mother: Rapture! Another outstanding achievement from award-winning writer/artist ERIK LARSEN! (STL081017) MATURE THEMES 32pgs, FC SRP: $3.99 MAR180754 SCALES & SCOUNDRELS #9 (W) Sebastian Girner (A/CA) Galaad A very special issue of SCALES & SCOUNDRELS about longing, loneliness, and a song from the sea. (STL081018) 32pgs, FC SRP: $3.99 MAR180755 SKYWARD #2 (W) Joe Henderson (A) Lee Garbett, Antonio Fabela (CA) Lee Garbett "MY LOW-G LIFE," Part Two Willa's Dad claims he knows how to fix the world. Willa thinks he's a crazy old man. The truth lies down on the Streets, where the rich live, staying as far away from the deadly sky as possible. There they use the latest technology to pretend G-day never happened. And Willa quickly discovers they aren't friendly to outsiders... (STL081019) 32pgs, FC SRP: $3.99 MAR180756 SLEEPLESS #6 (W) Sarah Vaughn (A/CA) Leila del Duca, Alissa Sallah After Poppy's hopes are dashed, Cyrenic makes a drastic decision that changes everything. (STL081020) 32pgs, FC SRP: $3.99 MAR180757 SNOTGIRL TP VOL 02 CALIFORNIA SCREAMING (W) Bryan Lee O'Malley, Leslie Hung (A/CA) Leslie Hung FROM THE CREATOR OF SCOTT PILGRIM! Lottie Person is a glamorous fashion blogger living her best life in L.A. at least that's what she wants you to think. CALIFORNIA SCREAMING finds Lottie putting the past behind her and trying to make the best of a bad situation her life! Lottie's new bestie is an emotional roller coaster: first she died, and then she killed someone. Who will Caroline hurt next, and what is her brother Virgil doing here? What secret is Detective John Cho seeking in the desert? Why did Cutegirl ghost her sister? Is Normgirl really going to marry Ashley? And what in god's name did Sunny ever see in Charlene? These questions and many others may possibly be answered in SNOTGIRL, VOL. 2: CALIFORNIA SCREAMING! Collects SNOTGIRL #6-10. (STL070973) SC, 136pgs, FC SRP: $15.99 OFFERED AGAIN MAR180758 O/A IMAGE FIRSTS SNOTGIRL #1 (W) Bryan Lee O'Malley (A/CA) Leslie Hung Image Comics is pleased to offer Image Firsts editions, printings of the first issues of some of the hottest, bestselling creator-owned series that only cost $1. Perfect for readers interested in trying out a variety of new titles without feeling the effects on their wallet, these new releases are available for order now. (STL044503) 32pgs, FC SRP: $1.00 SPAWN #286 CVR A GIANG & MCFARLANE (W) Todd McFarlane (A) Jason Shawn Alexander (CA) John Giang, Todd McFarlane On the trail to find his wife's killer, Spawn plants the seeds that will lead him to the mysterious murderer! (STL081022) 32pgs, FC SRP: $2.99 THROWAWAYS TP VOL 03 (MR) (W) Caitlin Kittredge (A/CA) Steven Sanders As ULTRA's election machinations enter their final phase, Dean and Abby couldn't be further from stopping them Dean is in a psych ward, Abby is on the run, and Kimiko can't help either of them. But after months of Ostrander and ULTRA being one step ahead, Dean finally gets an ace up his sleeve against Ostrander's brainwashed Alpha subjects... but playing it will destroy Abby's life as she knows it. Collects THROWAWAYS #10-14. (STL070976) MATURE THEMES SC, 136pgs, FC SRP: $16.99 VS #4 CVR A RIBIC (MR) (W) Ivan Brandon (A/CA) Esad Ribic Satta Flynn's refusal to lay down and die drives the omnipotent systems that rule humanity to make a drastic decision. The nail that sticks out gets hammered down, but what if the hammer breaks the whole world at the same time? (STL081024) MATURE THEMES 32pgs, FC SRP: $3.99 WALKING DEAD #179 CVR A ADLARD & STEWART (MR) (W) Robert Kirkman (A) Charlie Adlard & Various (CA) Charlie Adlard, Dave Stewart "NEW WORLD ORDER," Part Five The journey home. There's nothing worse than returning with fewer people than you left with. (STL081026) MATURE THEMES 32pgs, B&W SRP: $3.99 MAR180769 WICKED & DIVINE #36 CVR A MCKELVIE & WILSON (MR) (W) Kieron Gillen (A) Jamie McKelvie (CA) Jamie McKelvie, Matt Wilson "MOTHERING INVENTION," Part Three One day we'll reveal a happy secret, like a Secret Santa, but not today. (STL081027) MATURE THEMES 32pgs, FC SRP: $3.99 MAR180771 WITCHBLADE #6 (MR) (W) Caitlin Kittredge (A/CA) Roberta Ingranata "LIFE AFTER," Part Six Alex Underwood has survived dying, demons, and the perils of hosting the Witchblade, but as she finally confronts the true extent of the demonic forces influencing the NYPD, her enemies, and even those closest to her, she knows this may be a battle she won't survive. (STL081029) MATURE THEMES 32pgs, FC SRP: $3.99 MAR180772 YOUNGBLOOD #12 CVR A TOWE (W) Chad Bowers (A/CA) Jim Towe "REINFORCEMENTS," Part One When a forgotten small town suddenly reappears in Middle America, the man responsible for its return demands an audience with Youngbloods past, present...and FUTURE? (STL081030) 32pgs, FC SRP: $3.99 MAR180774 YOUNGBLOOD TP VOL 02 REBRANDED (W) Chad Bowers (A) Jim Towe, Juan Rodriguez (CA) Jim Towe Gear up for the next electrifying chapter in the rebirth of ROB LIEFELD's Extreme Universe! Mission accomplished. Now what? Following the events of "REBORN," the new Youngblood team relocates to Japan in search of a fresh start and a sense of purpose. Meanwhile, personal and political ideologies collide back in the states, as President Diehard risks everything to spin America's renewed interest in all things Youngblood to his advantage. Find out why fans and critics alike are calling YOUNGBLOOD "the best new team book around!" Collects YOUNGBLOOD #7-11. (STL080944) SC, 112pgs, FC SRP: $14.99 STAR OF THE MONTH MAR180775 YOUNGBLOOD TP VOL 01 REBORN (W) Chad Bowers (A/CA) Jim Towe THE 'BLOOD IS BACK! 25 years ago, YOUNGBLOOD launched the Image Comics revolution. Now, ROB LIEFELD's blockbuster creation returns with an all new cast and a bold new mission! An uber popular self-protection app called HELP! is changing how we stay safe "HELP! lets you decide who saves you." But when a high-rated young hero on the app goes missing, his best friend's search for answers gains the attention of some unexpected allies, and together, they'll do whatever it takes to find him... even if it means resurrecting the world's most infamous super-team, Youngblood. Gear up, strap in, and get ready to rediscover comics' most Extreme universe with creators CHAD BOWERS (X-Men '92, Deadpool: Bad Blood) and newcomer JIM TOWE! Collects YOUNGBLOOD #1-6 (STL052321) (SEP170699) SC, 136pgs, FC SRP: $9.99 Southern Pines, NC (28387) Today Mostly cloudy skies. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. High near 85F. Winds NNE at 5 to 10 mph.. Tonight A few clouds. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low 69F. Winds light and variable. 592 public comments so far for DOE ahead of South Dakota's social studies hearing The majority of comments are in opposition to the proposed standards, in which the DOE removed more than a dozen references to the Oceti Sakowin. This week, Im evaluating a few of the most contested Oscar races. Heres my prediction of the winners, as well as thoughts on the most deserving nominees. While most cinephiles frown upon awards shows, I love them. The Academy Awards are my Superbowl. My Stanley Cup. My NASCAR race thing. Best Picture Nominees: Call Me by Your Name, Darkest Hour, Dunkirk, Get Out, Lady Bird, Phantom Thread, The Post, The Shape of Water and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri Unfortunately, I think Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri will pull out a win this year. The storytelling is definitely not without problems, such as the Sam Rockwell characters seemingly unprovoked revelation two-thirds of the way through the film, hence my frustration at this films continual critical praise. If the Oscars are attempting to distance themselves from the critiques of the films mishandling of race, then theyll go with Phantom Thread or The Post. Phantom Thread is worth a watch, but The Post is a bit of a bore. Historically, the Academy hasnt taken chances with this category, and tends to choose the safe option, even if that safe option is an inferior film. For example, how could the film Chicago have won a Best Picture Oscar? Or Gladiator? Much more deserving prospects include Greta Gerwigs Lady Bird, Jordan Peeles Get Out and Luca Guadagninos Call Me by Your Name. If youre evaluating this category in terms of storytelling, as I do, then any of these three offer necessary characters, with clean and tight scenes that serve the overall narrative. All three of these films are near perfect and definitely worth your time if youre trying to get caught up before the Oscars on March 5. Best Director Nominees: Dunkirk, Christopher Nolan; Get Out, Jordan Peele; Lady Bird, Greta Gerwig; Phantom Thread, Paul Thomas Anderson; The Shape of Water, Guillermo del Toro I expect Guillermo del Toro will win, keeping with the Golden Globes outcomes. While the The Shape of Water was stylistically singular and intensely personal to the filmmaker, Jordan Peele really should win this one, hands down. Even though the category of directing is difficult to evaluate by nature of its expansive scope, Peele stands out for his well-coordinated vision and ability to bring that into fruition. Get Out contained my favorite scene from all of film in 2017: when Allison Williams character drinks milk through a straw while eating Froot Loops one by one and listening to generic pop music, a description which admittedly does not do it justice. Through scenes like this, Peele creates such a specific tone which has questioned my preconceived notions of the genres of horror and art house. Needless to say, Peele has my vote. Best Cinematography Blade Runner 2049, Roger Deakins; Darkest Hour, Bruno Delbonnel; Dunkirk, Hoyte van Hoytema; Mudbound, Rachel Morrison; The Shape of Water, Dan Laustsen Being overly concerned with the semantics of film, I must admit that cinematography is my favorite category. This years winner will probably be Dan Laustsen for The Shape of Water, which is totally justified. From the greenish-blue coloration of each individual shot to the dedication to an early 1960s feel that somehow manages to be both cold and warm at the same time, Laustsen has improved since his impressive first collaboration with Guillermo del Toro, 2015s Crimson Peak. On the other hand, the Academy may fall down on the side of Deakins work on Blade Runner 2049, which is similarly understandable. Deakins marriage of intentional silhouettes with pop art color schemes makes Blade Runner 2049 worth a watch, even at a near-three hour running time. Its impossible to talk about this category without mentioning the great Rachel Morrison, the first woman ever to be nominated in the category of cinematography. While itd be great for Rachel Morrison to win, I dont think Mudbound did anything visually risk-taking, especially compared to Blade Runner 2049 or The Shape of Water, or even Phantom Thread which didnt even earn a nomination. This is not to criticize her or director Dee Rees, but historical drama doesnt lend itself to pushing visual boundaries. Nevertheless, Im sure that Morrison will be nominated again in the coming years, and as the cinematographer of Black Panther, she wont be out of work anytime soon. Martha Beliveau 21 By Zoe Fruchter fruchter@grinnell.edu Although the urban education systems of cities may seem far removed from rural Grinnell, last Thursday, Feb. 22, the Urban Education symposium covered just that. In reality, though, urban education is not as far removed from the Iowa corn fields as one might think. Its important to know that education was the second most common immediate career field for the Colleges class of 2016, wrote Dan Covino, director of the Education Professions Career Community within the Center for Careers, Life, and Service and the Rosenfield Program, in an email to The S&B. Covino also noted that of the alumni that go into teaching work, many teach in urban areas. Although urban education might seem far removed from Grinnell, it is a common career destination for our graduates. I hope the symposium provides students who are considering teaching in cities with some idea of the policy questions urban districts confront and the realities urban teachers face, Covino wrote. Beyond post-college career choices, the topic of urban education holds relevance for various members of both the College and local communities. Many of the issues (e.g. school choice, segregation, unequal access to educational opportunities) that our speakers will discuss affect education across the United States, not just American cities. Since these issues affect education across locations, I hope many community members from Grinnell and surrounding communities will benefit from the symposium events as well, Covino wrote. The Symposium consisted of three events: School Segregation in the 21st Century: Conflicts over Education Equality and Community Control presented by Rachel Moskowitz 06, assistant professor of public policy and law at Trinity College in Connecticut; Inside the Urban Classroom, a panel discussion between alumni urban educators Emily Kugisaki 09, Anna Taylor 06 and Erin Whalen 12; and a keynote speech by New York Times investigative journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, followed by a discussion with Stephanie Jones, professor of education. When designing the symposium, I sought to include events that would cater to the interests of different audiences. For example, I know from advising appointments with students that many are interested in education policy. [Dr. Rachel Moskowitz] is a professor whose research focuses on the politics of urban education reform. Her talk will provide insight for all attendees, but especially for those who are primarily interested in education policy reform. Likewise, since I know many students in the Ed Pros community are interested in teaching, I wanted to include a space to hear current teachers voices. I was lucky enough to add the alumni panel of teachers, Covino wrote. The keynote address was delivered by Hannah-Jones, whose invitation was the impetus for the Symposiums topic. Shortly after starting in my position as the Director of the Education Professions Career Community, in mid-July, I knew I would be planning a symposium for this spring but I hadnt chosen a topic, Covino wrote. I asked Education Department faculty members for ideas about topics and speakers they would be interested in bringing to campus. Professor Stephanie Jones (Education) suggested that [Hannah-Jones] would make a great keynote speaker. Since much of Nikoles work is about the re-segregation of American urban schools the theme of urban education grew from there. Hannah-Jones presented a keynote entitled Focusing on the Role of Inequality and Segregation in Public Education. This keynote address speaks to Hannah-Jones expertise within the field of racial segregation. She was awarded the MacArthur Genius Grant in 2017 for her reporting on school segregation and reports on this topic for The New York Times Magazine. Hannah-Jones is currently writing a book about school segregation entitled The Problem We All Live With. Hannah-Jones also helped found the Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting, an organization that aims to increase the amount of investigative reporters of color. The Symposium is mainly sponsored by Grinnell College Education Professions Career Community, with help from the education Department, the gender, womens and sexuality studies department and the political science department. The symposiums underlying themes are multidisciplinary, which is one reason why several departments co-sponsored this event. I hope that the symposium provides insights for students across the campus, not just future educators, Covino wrote. By Kelly Page pagekell@grinnell.edu This Sunday, Feb. 25 at 2 p.m., Bucksbaum 152 will host a panel discussion entitled Where Does Our Water Come From & Where Does It Go? A Look at Water in Grinnell and Poweshiek County. Coming shortly after the passage of a $282 million water quality bill in the Iowa legislature in late January, which aims to reduce nitrogen and phosphorous in Iowa water, this discussion is extremely timely and will offer a chance for Grinnellians to ask experts on local water about how state wide water-related patterns play out on a local level. There are many issues with water in Grinnell that may provide discussion points on Sunday. In Iowa, runoff from farming cause chemicals like nitrates to seep into water supplies. Additionally, in 2016 the Iowa Department of Natural Resources found that upwards of 6,000 Iowans may have been exposed to unsafe levels of lead in their drinking water. Although Grinnell was not one of the affected communities, many Grinnellians probably want to know for sure just how safe the towns drinking water is. The water quality report on the City of Grinnells website has not been updated since 2016, when Grinnells drinking water did not violate federal contamination limits. Professor Peter Jacobson, biology, who will moderate the discussion, said, At the national level people hear about Flint, Michigan and other areas where water quality is a significant issue, so folks may want to know how safe Grinnells tap water is. Interestingly, some water taste judges say Grinnells water is some of the best-tasting in the country: it was a finalist in the National Rural Water Associations Great American Water Taste Test, so that, according to the Center for Prairie Studies email about the event, [it] is a point of local pride that the Poweshiek Water Association is providing its customers with some of the best tasting water in the country. Additionally, Grinnells current wastewater treatment plant is outdated and its emissions are not in compliance with federal guidelines, so the City is in the process of updating their current facilities, which may be another issue attendees will want the panel to address. On the panel, which was assembled by Professor Jonathan Andelson, anthropology and prairie studies, will be Jan Anderson, water resources director; Chad Coburn, executive director of Poweshiek Water Association; Mindy Siek, watershed coordinator with the Poweshiek Soil and Water Conservation District (SWCD); and Matt Tapken, the Poweshiek Water Associations chief operations officer. Each member of the panel will give a ten-minute presentation, and afterwards there will be a chance for audience members to ask questions. Anderson has worked closely with Grinnells water treatment facilities since 1979, after he recieved a Masters in geology from the University of Iowa. He has overseen upgrades to the wastewater treatment plant and the water treatment plant, and helped the community construct a deep water well in 2000. Coburn has worked in rural water for 17 years, collaborating with state and national government and several Iowa communities. Mindy Sieks focus since 2008 has been improving the quality of water and soil in Iowa and Kansas. Finally, Tapken is an expert in water treatment and groundwater, as well as making water taste good. This dream team of local water experts are a perfect set of people to field questions about what comes out of Grinnells taps. Do Grinnellians need to Brita filter tap water and buy fancy bottles of water at Walmart? Or should they savor the local waters supposedly top-tier flavor? This Sunday in Bucksbaum is the perfect time to find out. By Seth Taylor taylorse@grinnell.edu The final days of 2017 saw Washington in a furor of activity, as President Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress passed a sweeping federal tax overhaul, temporarily lowering rates for all manner of individuals and entities. Despite controversy surrounding the bills passage, according to Governor Kim Reynolds, it is now Iowas turn to follow suit. In a Feb. 13 press release, Reynolds made the case that tax reform in Iowa is imperative now more than ever because of a provision in the Iowa tax code that allows Iowans to deduct their federal taxes from their state taxes. While Republicans at the federal level intended their legislation to lower taxes, this peculiarity of the Iowa code may lead to an actual tax rise for many Iowans, according to Reynolds. Tax reform has been a goal for the Governor since she replaced Terry Branstad, now U. S. Ambassador to China, on May 24. Our tax rates are some of the highest in the nation, and our code books are filled with a patchwork of exemptions, deductions and credits. Our tax code should be simple. It should be fair. And it should inspire not inhibit growth, Reynolds said in her inaugural speech. The Governors office recently released more details on Reynolds vision for tax reform, which her office has dubbed the Reynolds Reform Plan. The offices press release calls the plan the most significant tax reform package in decades, and claims that it will provide immediate relief to middle class workers, small business owners, farmers, families and teachers across Iowa. In her first Condition of the State Address, Governor Reynolds specified that to fully revamp taxes in Iowa would take a multi-year effort, especially due to Iowas current budget woes. She expressed a desire to lower uncompetitive corporate taxes but acknowledged that, due to budget considerations, this is not the year. If Governor Reynolds, who is up for reelection in 2018, maintains her position as Governor, she will likely push for a more complete reform package in the years to come. For now, Reynolds plan will cut tax rates by up to 23 percent, resulting in $1.7 billion in tax savings through 2023, according to her office. Of those cuts, the middle class will receive a significant portion. Small business will be able to deduct more from the federal Qualified Business Income Deduction and online sales will face increased taxation, a boon to businesses in Iowa that struggle to compete with Internet behemoths like Amazon. The press release also stipulates that state budget priorities [will be] protected and that this reform will, in the end, simplify the Iowa tax code. These are only the preliminary details of Governor Reynolds plan, and the full bill will change as it is introduced and debated in the Iowa House and Senate. Democrats, who are in the minority, say they are willing to work with Governor Reynolds and Republicans, but they are wary of the impact such tax cuts would have on the state budget. While no official plan has been submitted by Democrats, Senator Pam Jochum of Dubuque, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Ways and Means Committee, sent a letter to Governor Reynolds in June 2017, outlining her own requirements for tax reform. We must avoid changes that would make our tax system less transparent, make low-income and middle-class Iowans pay more taxes, and prevent us from addressing the budget priorities of our constituents, Jochum wrote in the letter. She also requested that legislators look into the corporate tax in Iowa. In an email to The S&B, Grinnells Representative Dave Maxwell said that he would be unable to make any commitments until a full tax plan was released in the House and Senate, but that he would be open to working with Republicans and Democrats alike to create an acceptable plan. The potential impacts of the tax plan on Grinnell College are likewise difficult to gauge, given the current sparseness of detail on the plan. Whatever the result of Governor Reynolds reform effort, Republicans in Iowa have placed the issue front and center in this years legislative session, and it is sure to shape Statehouse races, not to mention Governor Reynolds own reelection campaign, in 2018, and may very well might affect Iowans taxes for years to come. By Michael Sundby sundbymi@grinnell.edu For many of us here at Grinnell, going home is a trek. It may involve travelling several hours in a packed car with a dresser in your lap. It may involve long delays at the Des Moines airport, courtesy of our Iowan climate. For some students, though, home is just a few blocks away. Chris Sharpe 18 and Steven Sharpe 21, sons of Professor Leslie Lyons and Professor Lee Sharpe, both chemistry, and Patrick Armstrong 18, son of Professor Todd Armstrong, Russian, are among a few Grinnellians attending the college where their parents teach and work. Both Patrick and the Sharpe brothers have lived in Grinnell since they were born. But none of them knew while growing up that they would attend their parents place of employment. I desperately wanted to get out, Patrick said. But ultimately, Grinnell was the best option. Id taken classes here and I liked it. Im glad I came, but it sort of changed the way I experienced it. For Steven, the college search was a little different. I was using Grinnell as a reference point for what I wanted from a college, he said. And then I realized, nothing is going to be as Grinnell as Grinnell. For both the Sharpe brothers, our state-of-the-art swimming pool also played a significant role in their decisions. Some students attending a college just minutes from their parents might worry about their independence. That was not an issue, however, for any of these students. That first semester, we sort of pretended not to see each other, Professor Armstrong said. You just make separation, Chris agreed. Many college students might think that taking a class from their parent would be an odd, if not horrifying, experience. It is one that Chris, Steven and Patrick have all witnessed. Professor Sharpe likes to tell stories about his kids in class, according to Chris, who said it was a bit funny when he was the subject of one. The way that they present themselves in class is different than the way they present themselves out of the class, Steven said. It was familiar, yet strange, he added. I think we can keep our professional hats on, Patrick said. I was a little apprehensive at first, because Id never done it, Professor Armstrong said. But overall its turned out to be pretty normal. Professor Lyons and Professor Sharpe agreed. Both submit their sons tests to colleagues for grading, just to be safe. Professor Lyons also recalled a time when she sent Chris out of the house so she could draft the test for a chemistry class in which he was enrolled. While going to college within a mile of their parents has had its quirks, each student acknowledges how nice it is to grab a home-cooked meal every now and then. And through this new lens, each has grown to respect their parents in new ways. Hes my ultimate tutorial prof, you know, Patrick said of his father. He taught me how to live. By Lauren Miller millerma@grinnell.edu Jasmeen Patheja is the founder and facilitator of Blank Noise, a community of activists, termed Action Heroes, who are fighting to make collective change against gender-based and sexual violence in India and around the world, according to the Blank Noise site. Patheja visited campus this past week to talk about her work with Blank Noise. Since the first time she experienced street harassment outside Srishti, a university in Bangalore, India in 2003, Jasmeen Patheja was determined to make a change in the way women are treated in public spaces. Patheja began by taking photos of men who had harassed her and posting them online. That is where the first community started getting built, she said. After receiving support through her blogging community, Patheja described a snowball effect as one step led to the next, the community expanded and others helped to spread the word. This project was not launched without pushback, however. Patheja explained that at first, some classmates brushed off street harassment as not a big deal, saying that boys are like that, or even that she should focus on more serious issues in response to her discomfort at being stalked, groped, stared at and nudged in public spaces. Still, Patheja had a large group of support within the Blank Noise community, as well as university faculty who helped her get the project up and running. The Blank Noise community has launched a number of projects encouraging women to not be afraid in public spaces. Some of the projects have been Being Idle, in which Action Heroes stood in public and were encouraged to make eye contact and not be afraid of the consequences, as well as Meet to Sleep, in which Action Heroes slept in a public park. Through collective action [the goal of these projects] is really about unlearning fear, Patheja said. Traditionally, women are taught to walk as fast as they can and avoid eye contact in public spaces. Blank Noise has been revolutionary in challenging those norms. Patheja acknowledges that these actions do not come without possible dangers, which make them so boundary-pushing in the first place. To combat potential harm, Patheja said that with all Blank Noise projects, participants negotiate fear in their own way, and that people can take action at their own pace. We cant assume everyone is in the same place. What we can assume is that there is something still connecting us Patheja said. While they do not offer crisis intervention, Patheja stresses that the community does offer a network of support between one another. Blank Noise gained even more ground after a tragic incident in December of 2012, when a female medical student was gang raped and murdered on her way home from the movies in Delhi. Patheja said that the incident forced and enabled a lot of conversation, which marked a significant shift in public conscience and in the conversation on harassment. Regarding the evolution of her own beliefs, Patheja said that while at first her experiences with harassment seemed personal, she has contextualized them through her work at Blank Noise. Im experiencing it, which is valid, but Im also learning to see it as something that is systemic. Blank Noise itself is also becoming more intersectional, as women across all identities experience harassment. As a question to students at Grinnell, Patheja asked, How can you contribute to a safe space? Argued that while it is easy to believe it is someone elses responsibility, each person has a role in building a safe campus. On a broader scope, on June 16, Blank Noise is facilitating a Meet to Sleep event where anyone can participate in taking naps in public parks across the world. An advertisement for the event read: Sleep. Alone. Together. We sleep to fight fear, through trust and belonging. In sleep we assert our right to be defenseless. In sleep we protest. Pathejas visit serves as a reminder of the fact that everyone can take steps to better our campus environment. As Patheja said, Everyone has the ability to influence public space. remaining of Thank you for reading! On your next view you will be asked to log in to your subscriber account or create an account and subscribepurchase a subscription to continue reading. Things to do in the Attleboro area and beyond If anything happens to me, please tell my story. This was... On January 23, 1948, Winston Churchill, then a member of the opposition in the House of Commons, said: For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history. Churchill meant it. The six volumes of The Second World War, which Churchill got published in his name between 1948 and 1953, influenced the western perspective. While much praise (and a Nobel Prize) was heaped on Churchill, MP Michael Foot was one of his few critics. He called the work Churchill's Mein Kampf". Later analyses of evidence proved Foot had a point and exposed how far Churchill (or his ghost writers) willfully distorted history to show himself in good light. To make the defeat of the Allied Forces at Crete seem less disgraceful, Churchill exaggerated the number of German casualties. His book said well over fifteen thousand, whereas British official records claim it was only 6,000. Let us look at the ancient Romans. We have all heard about how the people of Carthage, Romes traditional rival, were evil. They would sacrifice children to the gods and so on. We dont know if that is real because Romans destroyed the libraries [of Carthage]. It was very deliberate so that it would seem the only civilisation in the west was Rome But, what if we had never found those accounts. What if it had been burnt, like so many other texts through the course of history. This is one of the many, many examples that show the power of the penChurchill used it to manipulate an entire generation, but he was also ultimately exposed by it. When we think about instances like these, we cannot help but appreciate the importance of preserving books and libraries. In this regard, artist and writer Shubigi Rao is the messiah of the written word. She is now working on a ten-year, five-volume project about the history of censorship, destruction of books, and the book as a tool of activism and resistance. Shubigi was in Kochi recently and gave a talk about her project, Pulp: A Short Biography of the Banished Book (a film, book and visual art project), the first volume of which was released in January 2016. She is planning to release one volume every two years. The second volume will be released later this year. For the project, she has been visiting public and private collections, libraries and archives globally since 2013. She films people and places that have served as flashpoints in history, gathering anecdotes and buried secrets. When we lose a library, it is not just about the content, said Shubigi. It is also about the journey of those ideas across time, place and ethnicities. To elucidate the purpose of her project, she uses the example of holy texts. When people talk about holy texts, the assumption is that they belong to a certain religion, she said. Again and again, I find stories where librarians, irrespective of their beliefs, have saved books, under life threatening situations. A Muslim librarian, for example, saved a Jewish holy text when his library was destroyed. Why do it? That is the question at the heart of this project. Shubigi Rao | Vipin Das P. Each word in the project's name has been chosen for a particular reason. Short, because it is only a ten-year project; "Ten years are not enough for something like this." Biography, because it is the book personified. I do not valorise the book as an object. While you can have exquisite books, and the book can be really beautiful thing, it is an object. What it holds is of greater value. The way the ideals in it have survived dictatorships, proscription, atrocities and genocide is of greater importance. Apart from the written word, she also highlighted the importance of oral history. "Oral histories are very often the words of women or marginalised communitiespeople whose texts do not exist in libraries. They are not a part of any curriculum," she said. During her talk, she also gave a presentation about Written in the Margins, a documentation of material in progress from Pulp.... It is written in conjunction with her solo eponymous exhibition held in Berlin in April and May 2017. Shubhigi had an explanation for the name Written in the Margins as well. It is about the people whose narratives remain in the margins, she said. The story of the margins is also interesting because, in Europe, before the invention of the printing press, books were laboriously written. Sacred texts, for example, were reproduced by the youthful monks; they hated the job. But, in the margins of the document, they could do what they wanted. For instance, I have seen a doodle, by a young monk, of an abbot having sex with a dog. And you could do it, it was okay. According to her, they would write little notations that would go, "my eyes, my eyes, I am so glad this book is finished, I now need some wine". Those are voices of the people who actually laboured over the exquisite books, she said. The living, breathing backdrop. The truth behind every objective looking text is actually a very messy, subjective human being. She said religion and the idea of state were the two main culprits behind the banishment and destruction of many books. Let us look at the ancient Romans. We have all heard about how the people of Carthage, Romes traditional rival, were evil. They would sacrifice children to the gods and so on. We dont know if that is real because Romans destroyed the libraries [of Carthage]. It was very deliberate so that it would seem the only civilisation in the west was Rome. She said there was an unholy alliance between religion and state. We all know about Nazi book burnings, she said. When the allies liberated Berlin, one of the first things they did was to empty the German libraries of every book that had Nazi ideology and burn it. No problem. No one likes the Nazi ideology. Except, it came from the folklore and stories of German people. So, all books of German poetry and literature were destroyed. She said the need felt to burn books was much more interesting. Did the Allied Forces really believe that by burning books, they were eradicating Nazi ideas? No. If they did, they would have taken greater care with the books they selected [to burn], she said. It was the military might flexing its muscles. Both the Nazis and the Allied Forces burning books was symbolic, just macho posturing. The Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI), a state-controlled regulator for the sector, has said it is probing whether auditors played a role in perpetrating the alleged $1.77 billion fraud that Punjab National Bank unearthed last week. The ICAI said on Thursday it has asked the Securities and Exchange Board of India, Punjab National Bank (PNB) and federal investigating agencies to share their findings about the alleged fraud, including anything related to the involvement of any chartered accountants. The ICAI, which functions under the administrative control of Indias Ministry of Corporate Affairs, said it has set up a committee to study the systemic lapses that contributed to the fraud and to suggest remedial measures and improvement. Separately, the Economic Times newspaper reported that PNB has tapped PwC to conduct a probe into the alleged fraud that would help the bank build a case against jewellers Nirav Modi and Mehul Choksi. PNB officials were not immediately available for comment, while PwC declined to comment on the matter. Modi, his companies, and firms with links to his uncle Choksi, are at the centre of the alleged fraud that involved illegally issued letters of undertaking (LoU) from PNB which were used to get credit from overseas branches of other, mostly Indian banks. The alleged fraud went undetected as the SWIFT interbank messaging system used to transmit the LoU was not integrated with PNBs core banking system (CBS), thus allowing the LoU to go unnoticed for years. In what has been dubbed the biggest loan fraud in Indias banking history, police have so far arrested at least a dozen people six from the bank and six more from Modis and Choksis companies. A lawyer for Modi has denied his client was involved in any fraud. Choksi has not commented but his firm, Gitanjali Gems, has also denied involvement in the alleged fraud. Banks Scramble The Reserve Bank of India, has asked other Indian banks with similar vulnerabilities as PNB to fix these issues by April 30, said Allahabad Banks Chief Executive Usha Ananthasubramanian. Allahabad Bank, a state-run lender, said on Thursday that it is working on linking its core banking system with the SWIFT messaging service. Responding to a question on whether the RBI had directed all banks to link their main banking systems with SWIFT by April 30, Ananthasubramanian said: Correct. That is an outer limit, but today the urgency is such that may be Ill shelve one project aside and step into this and tell my vendor to fast track this, she told media on the sidelines of an industry event. Shares in PNB, which have lost nearly 30 per cent of their market capitalization since the fraud was made public, were down nearly 1 per cent in afternoon trading on Friday. Reuters The Kerala Police on Friday arrested two of the seven suspects in the killing of a "mentally unfit" tribal youth a day ago, Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan said. The 27-year-old Adivasi youth, who was said to be "not of sound mind", was beaten to death in Palakkad by a lynch mob which had accused him of theft, according to the victim's mother. The turn of events on Thursday elicited strong response from across the state and country on Friday after a perpetrator of the beating posted a selfie taken just minutes before the crime. Highlighting the police action, Vijayan in his Facebook post said, "I have instructed the state DGP to speed up the probe and take strict action in the case." "This heinous act is a blot on Kerala's progressive society. But I want to assure you that strict action will be taken at the earliest against all the culprits to ensure that such crimes, especially against people from communities that were long marginalised, are not repeated. "Kerala as a whole should stay extremely vigilant to ensure that we continue to remain and progress as a caring, cosmopolitan society," added Vijayan. The chief minister's response was also prompted by a large number of twitter followers putting up messages like: "@CMOKerala... please take urgent action on this matter and bring the culprits in front of Justice." Speaking to the media here on Friday, Malli, mother of the slain youth Madhu, said, "It was yesterday (Thursday) evening that my son was beaten up by a group of people in the forest (near Attapadi-Agali) saying that he was a thief. "Then he was handed over to the police and soon he developed complications. He was taken to a hospital, where he died. He is not a thief, he was not of sound mind," said the grieving mother. The entire episode was shot on a mobile and posted on social media. Malayalam actor Mammootty, in his Facebook post, said that none should address Madhu as a tribal. "I will say that people killed my brother, as if one thinks as a human, Madhu is either a son or an younger or elder brother. None should call anyone a thief, if he does it to eat, as poverty is the creation of society," said Mammootty. State BJP spokesperson M.S. Kumar told the media that the state government should announce an ex-gratia payment of Rs 2.5 million as compensation. "It's very strange that the concerned minister (Minister for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes A.K. Balan), who hails from the same district, failed to turn up at the tribal village to pacify them," said Kumar. It was only after actor-director Joy Mathew had posted the visuals on social media that various political leaders, including Vijayan, condemned the incident, early on Friday. "This is some sort of a fascist Malayali psyche which has developed recently and has to be tackled. If the police wish to arrest me for sharing this video on social media, let them do that," said Mathew. The local tribal community are up in arms and have demanded that if the people behind the incident were not arrested, they would launch a protest and commenced the first round by staging a march in the locality. Minister Balan told the media, "Those who did it claim that this youth was a thief, but that's their allegation. "The state government will act very strongly and none who have done this would be spared. A magisterial probe will also be launched," said Balan. State Police chief Loknath Behra said he has handed over the case to Thrissur Inspector General of Police and "everyone who had done this would be brought to book, as people have no right to take law into their hands". Madhu's body has been taken for an autopsy to the Thrissur Medical College hospital and would then be brought to the village. Prime Minister Narendra Modi will launch the Tamil Nadu government's ambitious scheme of providing 50 per cent subsidy to working women to buy two-wheelers in Chennai on Saturday. The scheme was one of the pet projects of late chief minister J. Jayalalithaa, in AIADMK's 2016 election manifesto. Saturday is Jayalalithaa's 70th birth anniversary. The state government had, in January, modified the scheme and hiked the subsidy limit to Rs 25,000 as against Rs 20,000 announced earlier. ''One lakh working women will be covered under the scheme every year and it will be implemented at a cost of Rs 200 crore," Chief Minister Edappady K. Palaniswamy had said. Modi's visit assumes political significance as it comes in the backdrop of Deputy Chief Minister O. Panneerselvam's remarks that he joined hands with Palaniswamy at the behest of the prime minister. The two warring factions of the AIADMK had buried the hatchet after then party chief V.K. Sasikala was expelled from the party. Political observers believe that Panneerselvam's latest revelations are the outcome of his cold war with Palaniswamy over restructuring of the party and appointments to the key posts. Our Chennai correspondent reports that Panneerselvam's statement is also being looked at the backdrop of a case relating to the disqualification of 18 MLAs, which is pending in the Madras High Court. Verdict in this case is likely to be out anytime soon. It is believed that the chief minister's faction has been negotiating with the Sasikala camp to save the government if anything adverse happens in the MLAs' disqualification case. It is not clear whether the prime minister will hold talks with Palaniswamy or Panneerselvam during his Chennai visit. However, it is pointed out that a prime minister launching a state government's welfare scheme is something rare. From Chennai, Modi will travel to Puducherry on Sunday, where he will visit Shri Aurobindo Ashram and interact with students of Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education. He will also visit Auroville and release a commemorative a postage stamp on the golden jubilee celebrations of Auroville. India and Canada have signed as many as six pacts, including one on energy cooperation during the visit of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Later, at a joint press conference, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said it is important that India and Canada work together to fight terrorism. He further said those who challenge our sovereignty and territorial integrity cannot be tolerated. There should no place for those who misuse religion for political goals, he added. Trudeau said India and Canada shared similar democratic and cultural principles. PM Modi and his Canadian counterpart held talks on a wide range of topics, including terrorism and strengthening ties in defence and education. Earlier on Friday, Trudeau was accorded a ceremonial welcome at Rashtrapati Bhavan where Modi greeted him with a hug, putting to rest speculations about the government cold-shouldering the visiting dignitary ever since his arrival in India on Saturday on an eight-day visit, according to IANS. External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj also called on the visiting dignitary during the course of which the two leaders "discussed ways to strengthen and deepen our partnership. The visit by Trudeau, who assumed office in November 2015, comes after Modi's visit to Canada in April earlier that year. Since arriving in India, Trudeau, his wife and three children have visited Agra, Ahmedabad, Mumbai and Amritsar. (With inputs from agencies) The Supreme Court on Friday called for "time bound" appointment of judges of the High Court in an expeditious manner by of all those who have to discharge the constitutional obligation in this regard. "It is,..., in the interest of all the stakeholders, including the judiciary, that definite timelines are drawn for each stage of the process, so that process of appointment is accomplished within a time-bound manner," said the bench of Justice A.K.Sikri and Justice Ashok Bhushan. Saying that the time-bound appointment of judges to high courts was necessary to keep alive the hope and aspiration of litigants and commitment to speedy justice, the bench said that the process "needs more expedition at the hands of all who have to discharge the constitutional obligation entrusted by the Constitution ..." The court said this as it dismissed the petition by a Rajasthan-based lawyer Sunil Samdaria challenging the appointment of two retired district judges as additional judges of the Rajasthan High Court in May 2017. Referring to 1993 judgment of the top court which had said that the appointment process should commence one month before the vacancy was to occur, Justice Sikri, speaking for the bench, rued: "Unfortunately, it still remains a far cry." Initiating the process of filling the vacancy oner month before it was to actually occur was done to achieve an "ideal situation" to ensure that the posts are filled up immediately, the court said: "In the first instance, names are not forwarded by the High Court in time." "What to talk of sending the names one month before the occurrence of an anticipated vacancy, names are not forwarded even much after the vacancy has occurred. .... once the names are forwarded, they remain pending at the executive level for unduly long time, before they are sent to the Collegium of the Supreme Court for approval... Even after the clearance by Collegium, these remain pending at the level of the executive," said the judgment. "All this results in inordinate delay," the court said. Equally, the court said that the "members of the Bar, whose names are recommended for elevation to the High Court, undergo hardships of a different kind. It is unjust that the fate of such persons remains in limbo for indefinite periods and gives rise to unnecessary conjectural debates. It leads to unpleasant situations which can be avoided." The judgment said that the Additional Judges were appointed in the high court to cope with the increased work load of cases in different high courts on account of temporary increase in work load or arrears of cases. Lenzer Achieng, the mother of six-month-old Samantha Pendo who died during an August 2017 police crackdown on opposition supporters, holds her daughter's picture inside her home, in the western city of Kisumu, Kenya | Reuters She was christened Samantha, but her delighted Kenyan parents quickly nicknamed their tiny daughter Pendo, which in KiSwahili means Love. Six months later, in August 2017, Pendo was lying in her mothers arms at their one-room home in the western city of Kisumu when Kenyan police burst in. The riot officers were rounding up suspected troublemakers after opponents of the government had disputed the election result that month. The police fired teargas and repeatedly clubbed Pendos father, and in the melee an officer struck the baby on the head, said Lenzer Achieng, her mother. The police left without arresting anyone; days later, Pendo died from her injuries. She was the joy of my heart. Nothing can fill the hole, Achieng told Reuters as she wept at her home last month. The babys death outraged a nation long hardened to police brutality. Even the national police chief, who has often publicly rejected allegations of police abuse, vowed to investigate. Yet three months later, the Independent Policing Oversight Authority (IPOA), a body created to hold the police to account, said it could not identify any policeman suspected of killing Pendo. Instead, it recommended to the public prosecutors office that it open an inquest to investigate who was responsible. The inquest began on February 19 in a Kisumu court. Prosecutors have the power to summon witnesses, and after the hearings a judge will order a criminal trial if a suspect is identified or end proceedings. The case underscores how IPOA is struggling to fulfil its remit to hold police to account. IPOA has secured convictions of police officers for committing crimes in only two cases, despite having received more than 9,200 complaints. The first judgment involved two police officers found guilty of shooting dead a 14-year-old girl in her own home. The second conviction came this month when a court found a policeman guilty of murdering a suspected thief in 2013. Sentencing in that case is due on Feb. 27. Now a Reuters examination of 18 active case files relating to alleged crimes by officers dating back to 2012 has exposed some of the problems the watchdog faces: lack of police cooperation and court delays that drag on for years. The case files show police frequently refuse to give evidence to investigators and repeatedly fail to show up to court. IPOAs lack of success fuels anger beyond the families of individual victims. The government of President Uhuru Kenyatta has arrested some political opponents and clamped down on the media. Opposition politicians frequently rail against state brutality at their supporters rallies. In November, after at least five of his supporters were killed during clashes with the police in Nairobi, opposition leader Raila Odinga condemned what he called an unnecessary war by security forces and militia against innocent and law-abiding citizens. Macharia Njeru, chairman of IPOA, said the watchdog is making progress. He said it has enough cash and more than 50 investigators to pursue cases. Ministry of Finance documents show the agency had a $5.1 million budget for 2017 and a projected $5.3 million budget for 2018. Njeru blames dysfunction in the Kenyan justice system for the slow progress in securing convictions against culpable police. The delays in conclusion of cases in court, that is a major problem, but that is outside our control, he said. Police Inspector General Joseph Boinnet, his spokesman, the interior ministry, and the presidency did not respond to requests for comment. Some top Kenyan officials and foreign ambassadors have cited IPOAs work as the answer to complaints of police brutality. They are seeking to ensure police officers who do wrong are held to account, said US Ambassador Bob Godec, saying his government had provided major support to IPOA, millions of dollars worth in assistance, and training and equipment. But the Reuters study raises questions about whether IPOA represents an effective check on the police. It also reflects a broader, global issue: Whether Western nations can encourage better accountability of police forces in countries where the West wants the military to combat threats such as terrorism. One of the main donors to police reform in Kenya is the United States, which has given $8 million to IPOA since 2011. It has also provided at least $316 million in assistance to Kenyas military over the same period, according to Lauren Ploch Blanchard, Africa specialist at the Congressional Research Service in Washington. Globally the United States prioritises providing military assistance over furthering police reform, Blanchard said. Flawed files Kenyan police often dismiss complaints of brutality, saying violent crime demands a violent response. In April last year, a video of plainclothes police shooting dead an unarmed man went viral. The police did not deny the shooting, but justified it by saying the victim was suspected of killing an officer. In comments to Kenyan media after the killing, Nairobi police commander Japheth Koome was quoted as saying when gangsters kill police officers, they will get it from him. Koome did not respond to requests for comment for this article. IPOA was set up in 2011 after police killed hundreds of Kenyans during violence that followed disputed elections in 2007. The agency can investigate police on its own initiative or after receiving a complaint from the public, and it has the power to order any serving or retired officer to appear before it and to produce documents. IPOA submits the findings of its investigations to prosecutors, who decide whether to pursue a criminal trial or order an inquest. While Njeru, the head of IPOA, blames the courts glacial pace for failures to convict police who commit crimes, documents reviewed by Reuters show that IPOA has its own administrative problems despite receiving $5.7 million from the US government for an electronic case management system. In August last year, when Reuters asked for details of current cases, the watchdog said 47 cases were active, either as prosecutions or inquests. However, a list it supplied contained only 38 cases. Five had no case number, making them impossible to trace. In February, IPOA gave Reuters a new list containing 45 cases it said were active in court. Five had no court case number. IPOA did not respond to a request for clarification on the missing file numbers. Reuters obtained records for 18 of the cases on the two lists supplied by IPOA; 15 of them involve deaths. Many of these records show police refusing to give evidence to IPOA or failing to appear in court with the case file. Without the file, which contains records of witnesses, evidence, and previous hearings, the case cannot proceed. Anything that we want to produce in court is held by the police, said Esther Kimani, a prosecutor in Kisumu. Its the polices responsibility to make sure the file is available in court. Police officers may not appear in court because they dont have transport, are unaware of the date or simply refuse to go, she said. One Nairobi inquest into the death of a man at the hands of the police was dismissed by the judge in 2016 after six failed hearings, according to court documents reviewed by Reuters. In four hearings, police did not produce the case file, and twice the investigating police officer, who was not identified in the court files, did not show up. There is no evidence presented and thus no evidence to be evaluated. Inquest is hereby dismissed, the ruling read. Magistrate Christine Njagi, who issued the ruling, told Reuters she had inherited the inquest from another magistrate and could not proceed because she did not have the full facts to hand. Its for the prosecution to secure the police file, she said. We work with what is presented to us. The court records reviewed by Reuters do not indicate any action was taken against police who did not cooperate. The government and police did not respond to requests for comment. Katoo Wambua, a prosecutor who handles communications for the director of public prosecutions, said there is a bit of lack of cooperation by police. He said the public prosecutors office had organised meetings between IPOA, prosecutors and the police to iron it out. We try to sort out these problems slowly, in house. Not all delays are the fault of the police. In 2016, an inquest was opened on IPOAs recommendation into the death of a university student found hanging in a Nairobi police station cell in 2013. Sixteen months and six court hearings later, no witnesses have testified. Half the adjournments were because police failed to appear with the case file. But two other adjournments were due to prosecutors failing to show up and to produce a witness, according to court documents reviewed by Reuters. Police obstruction In August, Njeru, the head of IPOA, said police cooperation with his investigations had initially been poor but has improved. Previously there has been non-cooperation from police officers but that was largely in our formative stages, he told Reuters at IPOAs plush new offices. In a statement to Reuters in February, IPOA gave a different view. Non-cooperation on the part of the police in some cases with the Authority remains a great challenge in the actualisation of some of our investigations, the statement read. An IPOA employee and two foreign policing specialists based in Nairobi who work on Kenyan police reform and have direct knowledge of IPOAs operations also told Reuters that police cooperation continues to be poor, and that evidence and witnesses have often disappeared by the time IPOA investigators reach a crime scene. The police often flout a 2011 law requiring them to notify the watchdog in writing of any deaths or serious injuries caused by police officers, the IPOA employee said. Instead, investigators sometimes hear about potential cases through media reports. It can take days, even months, for them to get to the scene, a problem Njeru confirmed. One case that IPOA heard about through the media involved three police who allegedly killed two men in Kisumu. IPOA investigators learned of the case from news reports two days after the killings and did not visit the scene until six weeks later, according to an IPOA report, reviewed by Reuters, that was filed to the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions. Asked why it took their investigators so long to reach the crime scene, IPOA said in a statement, We cannot discuss matters that can compromise ongoing court trials. The family of one of the victims gave a bullet fragment to the top police official in the city, the report said. The police official subsequently told IPOA he had lost it. The officers are on trial for murder and deny the charges. Two lawyers representing the three policemen on trial said they could not comment because the trial is ongoing. In addition, police sometimes refuse to hand over evidence such as duty rosters or weapons registers, the IPOA employee told Reuters. Most of the case files reviewed by Reuters lacked such documents - which could help establish who fired a lethal bullet, for example - and other details needed to secure convictions. Only one case in Kisumu had a weapons register supplied by the police in the investigation file. Fear of retribution Nicholas Mutuku, deputy director of public prosecutions, said that when IPOA files make it to court, many cases lack key components, such as post-mortem reports, complete witness statements or the names of suspects. IPOA investigates crimes committed by the police. Yet they rely on the same police to assist them, Mutuku said, sorting through towering piles of files that nearly buried his desk. He has received 84 files from IPOA since January 2015. Mutuku said some were dismissed due to lack of evidence, but declined to give details. When police obfuscation fails to thwart an investigation, officers may turn to brute force, the two foreign policing specialists said. They cited a widely reported 2016 case where the commanding officer at a Nairobi police station locked up an IPOA investigator trying to serve him a summons. Kenyas chief prosecutor had to intervene to free him. The IPOA investigator was not named in the news reports. Reuters could not reach the police commander. In another case, human rights lawyer Willie Kimani sued police on behalf of a motorcycle driver who alleged a policeman had shot and wounded him in 2015. The bodies of Kimani, his client, and their taxi driver were dumped in a river in July 2016. Four police were charged with the murders. They deny the charges and their trial is ongoing. IPOA said it could not comment on the Kimani case because the trial is ongoing. The police did not respond. Even after arrest warrants are issued, some police still escape justice. The Nairobi High Court ordered two policemen to be arrested in May 2016 for the murder of a civilian. The officers fled and are still at large. Top police officials ignored multiple court summons asking for an explanation of why the two were not arrested, according to court documents reviewed by Reuters. The last hearing was nearly a year ago. No more are scheduled. The police did not respond to a request for comment. A spokeswoman for Kenyas judiciary, Catherine Wambui, said a judge would dismiss a case when he saw it was heading nowhere. She said: The onus is on the prosecution to produce witnesses and bring evidence. If they dont, the judge has no choice but to dismiss. Despairing mothers As baby Pendos parents also face an inquest, they are losing hope. The police have not handed over critical information, such as the roster detailing police deployments in the city on the night the six-month-old was assaulted, according to the two foreign specialists with knowledge of the watchdogs investigation into Pendos death. Pendos mother, Achieng, said: If they only interrogated the police who were here, they would know who did this terrible thing. The police cannot say they dont know the officers who were sent to our place. Another of IPOAs unresolved cases is the very first one it took on. It concerns the death of Alexander Monson, a 28-year-old son of a British aristocrat, who was found dead in his cell in 2012 after he was detained during a night out in the coastal town of Diani. Monsons mother, Hillary, said the watchdog promised the family that this would be their showcase investigation. But there has been no resolution: An inquest was not opened until 2015 and is still ongoing. IPOAs investigation concluded Monson died from a drug overdose which was the account given by police officers present the night he died. But two reports by government pathologists, seen by Reuters, concluded Monson died from blunt force trauma to his head. IPOA is a rubber stamp for police brutality ... They just dont want to pin [the death] on anybody, Hillary Monson said. IPOA said the account Monson provided to Reuters contained inaccuracies. It declined to give details, saying it could not respond to questions about ongoing cases. -Reuters The US on Friday accused Syrian President Bashar al-Assad of committing "war crimes" with Russian support in the strife-torn country where over 400 civilians have been killed in air strikes and bombardments in rebel strongholds in a week. White House Deputy Press Secretary Raj Shah said the US is monitoring the situation and has put the Assad regime as well as Russia "on notice". His remarks come as more than 400 civilians were killed over the last five days in the Syrian government's Russia-backed air strikes and bombardments in rebel strongholds. Bashar al-Assad has already committed war crimes. He has already gassed his own people with sarin, he has already committed unthinkable acts, Shah told reporters at a news conference, when asked if President Donald Trump believes that Assad is committing "war crimes". Assad has been committing war crimes with support of the Russians, he claimed. We don't want that to continue, he said, adding the US is monitoring the situation. (We) don't want to get ahead of anything that may or may not be announced on that front. But you know the Assad regime and Russia's actions on this front are on notice, he said when asked what more can Trump do to stop the killings. At a separate news conference the State Department Spokesperson Heather Nauert said more than 400 civilians have been "horrifically" killed by the Syrian regime. As we all know, they are backed by not only Russia but also Iran. It is a good reminder that Russia bears a unique responsibility for what is taking place there. Without Russia backing Syria, the devastation and the deaths would certainly not be occurring, she said. During a UN Security Council meeting on Syria in New York, the US urged the 15-member body to move forward with this ceasefire and humanitarian resolution immediately. It expressed concern over the situation in Eastern Ghouta, where fresh bombardments by Syrian government yesterday killed dozens. The pictures and videos are everywhere. Screaming parents digging through rubble to find their children. Doctors working frantically with no medicine and no equipment in underground hospitals to save whoever they can," said Kelley Currie, US Representative for Economic and Social Affairs. "These are not terrorists showing up in these makeshift emergency rooms. These are civilians. They are ordinary people under attack by a barbaric Assad regime that is bent on leaving eastern Ghouta levelled to the ground, with no regard for the 400,000 men, women, and children who live there, she added. No one needs to use their imagination to know what the Assad regime is planning, she said. It is exactly what we saw in Aleppo in 2016 and in Hama and Homs before that. The Assad regime wants to bomb or starve all of their opponents into submission. That is why, except for two small deliveries of aid, the regime has not allowed any medical convoys or deliveries of food into eastern Ghouta since November. And the bombing attacks have been relentless, Currie said. She alleged that the regime wants "to keep bombing and gassing" these 400,000 people and is counting on Russia to make sure the Security Council is unable to stop their suffering. 'The Shriek': Sanatander chairman Shriti Vaderaserved as business minister On Whitehall they called her 'The Shriek'. As Gordon Brown's most trusted adviser, hot-breathed Shriti Vadera's volcanic eruptions were legendary. The power-dressing former business minister stands barely 5 ft 2 in her Louboutins, but don't let her diminutive frame nor gentle, dowager-like tones fool you. During her ten years in government, Shriti, 55, terrified junior staff, reduced experienced civil servants to nervous wrecks and even tore strips off a quivering Tony Blair. True, she could be a handful. But speak to any of the senior figures involved in the banking crisis, and they'll tell you the bawling Baroness was one the few people in government who actually got things done. Asked how he kept nuisance bankers in line, former chancellor Alistair Darling explained: 'You put them in a room with Shriti and lock the doors for a couple of hours.' Her stewardship during this period was rewarded with the chairmanship of Santander UK. Her 650,000-a-year role is under scrutiny after her chief executive Nathan Bostock was recently revealed to have overseen Royal Bank of Scotland's Global Restructuring Group, an odious business support unit said to have driven numerous small businesses into the ground. Some feel Shriti should give him the heave-ho. For now, she insists Bostock is the right man for the job, though I dare say a few terse words have been handed down in private. Her steeliness was forged during her first career at UBS Warburg. Ploughing a furrow through in the City during the 1980s amidst all the red braces and old school ties required thick skin. She thrived, thanks to sharp elbows and an exhaustive work ethic. Her parents were wealthy. Born in Uganda, where her grandfather arrived from India in 1910 and became a successful entrepreneur, the Vaderas owned a tea plantation until Idi Amin's expulsion of Asians forced them to flee when she was just ten. She was sent to an English private school before winning a place at Oxford. Contemporaries recall her hanging around with a rather bitchy crowd 'which enjoyed rubbishing everything'. It is said well-to-do Shriti would loftily boast she only wore silk undergarments. After 14 years in the sink-or-swim world of investment banking, Gordon Brown lured her to the Treasury where she took on a number of high-profile assignments, including handling the partial privatisation of London Underground. Terror: During her ten years in government, Shriti, 55, terrified junior staff, reduced experienced civil servants to nervous wrecks and even tore strips off a quivering Tony Blair When Brown entered Downing Street, it was assumed Shriti would follow him there, but cabinet secretary Gus O'Donnell wouldn't have it. Word was the Sir Humphrys were, by then, too rattled to work with her. Instead she was ennobled Baroness Vadera of Holland Park and sent to be a minister at International Development. She was moved to Peter Mandelson's Business Department six months later before taking a key position in the Cabinet Office during the financial crisis. After a tumultuous year cracking skulls and drafting the banking industry's rescue package, she departed for a job at the G20. As well as her Santander berth, she has beefy directorships with BHP Billiton and Astrazeneca. Bit of a workaholic is Shriti. She's said to have once rolled up at Downing Street at 5am demanding to discuss a pressing economic matter with Gordon Brown when the PM was still in his pyjamas. As such, there's not much to report on the personal front. Her brother Rupin, 58, is boss of City firm First International Investments. She has never married. She prefers to avoid the limelight, which is just as well. A say-it-as-she-sees it type of person, she's a bit of a public relations nightmare. During a rare TV interview during the 2009 recession, a tactless observation that she was seeing 'some green shoots of recovery' sent Labour's hitherto well-oiled press machine into meltdown. Formidable, forthright, tough-as-boot leather. All of the above. But perhaps it is also worth noting former Transport Minister Stephen Byers once observed: 'She can be forceful but sometimes she can be a real sweetie.' Shares in the owner of the Jet2 holiday brand, Dart Group Plc took off this week after the AIM-listed firm raised its full-year profit expectations on the back of continued growth in its leisure travel business and reduced levels of discounting in the market. In a brief trading update on Monday, Dart said it now expects underlying profit before tax for the year to the end of March 2018 to be 'materially ahead' of market forecasts. Tough competition in the travel sector had led to heavy discounting by businesses but Dart said it has seen a more normalised pricing environment over the past year. Taking off: Shares in the owner of the Jet2 holiday brand, Dart Group Plc took off this week after the AIM-listed firm raised its full-year profit expectations Investors responded positively, with its shares jumping 22 per cent higher over the week to 795.5p. There was a big boost this week for Collagen Solutions Plc after it revealed it is to make an initial submission for a European CE certification mark after positive results from a clinical study of ChondroMimetic implants. The developer and manufacturer of medical grade collagen and tissue components for use in regenerative medicine on Wednesday announced successful results from an eight-year extension clinical study of 15 patients who received ChondroMimetic implants as a bone and cartilage scaffold for the repair of cartilage defects in the knee. The eight-year study found there was an improvement in patients' clinical symptoms, including alleviation of pain; improved function; and increased activity level. Collagen shares shot higher on the news, gaining over 37 per cent on the week to 16.128p. Plant Impact Plc was the weeks biggest riser again, advancing another 72 per cent to 10p following news the previous week that the Europe subsidiary of Croda International Plc has agreed to buy the crop enhancement technology firm for 10million. Shareholders in Plant Impact will receive 10.57p in cash for each ordinary share, representing a 79.9 per cent premium to the closing price on February 15, the day before the bid was unveiled. Elsewhere, Xpediator Plc shares gained over 18 per cent to 44.37p after the UK provider of freight management services said 2017 revenues are expected to rise 59 per cent, boosted by acquisitions, with trading profit expected to be 'significantly ahead of the previous year'. The group delivered strong trading across all three of its divisions and results included a 10m revenue contribution from three acquisitions completed during 2017. Welcome uplift: Collagen Solutions Plc revealed it is to make an initial submission for a European CE certification mark after positive results from a clinical study of ChondroMimetic implants Xpediator, which listed on AIM last August, acquired EMT Logistics, Benfleet Forwarding, and Regional Express during 2017. Baron Oil Plc was also a strong gainer this week, jumping 63 per cent higher to 0.42p on news it has entered into a North Sea-based exploration venture and also detailed its plans over in Peru. It said it wants to drill a well in Peru but the project is in 'force majeure' amid disagreement with local government. But Baron still said it believes the Peru well could be drilled in the next six months. Shares in UK onshore explorer UK Oil & Gas Investments Plc, however, went the opposite way, shedding almost 40 per cent over the week as investors reacted unfavourably to the latest well results from southern England. Power boost: Baron Oil Plc was also a strong gainer this week, jumping 63 per cent higher to 0.42p on news it has entered into a North Sea-based exploration venture and also detailed its plans over in Peru On Tuesday, the company revealed that the Broadford Bridge well - which is testing the Kimmeridge play within the Weald basin - flowed between 10 and 72 barrels per day via pumping of the KL5 zone. UKOG chief executive Stephen Sanderson described it as 'positive and encouraging' though the share trading trends looked to disagree. Residential gas and electricity services specialist Flowgroup Plc was the weeks biggest loser, plunging by 52 per cent to 0.14p after it revealed on Wednesday that while current trading is in line with management expectations, its market is becoming more competitive and it is considering long-term financing options. Flowgroup said it has agreed to 5m funding facility, provided by its loan note holders Palm Ventures and Lombard Odier Asset Management, with a 2m tranche to be drawn down immediately. The company also said: 'The board continues to work with its advisers, and in consultation with its loan note providers, to closely evaluate the company's strategic positioning including its longer-term financing requirements.' Also on the downside, Milestone Group Plc shares dropped over 51 per cent to 0.10p after the digital media and technology company reported a wider loss and drop in profits for 2017. The group posted a net loss for the year of 2.2m, up from 1.6m a year ago, and revenues of 29,395, down from 71,359. Tech crash: Milestone Group Plc shares dropped over 51 per cent to 0.10p after the digital media and technology company reported a wider loss and drop in profits for 2017 Anthony Sanders, who became Milestones interim chief executive after Deborah White resigned in September, said it had been a 'challenging year' that saw a shift in the companys management and its strategic focus. Starcom Plc was also under the cosh this week, dropping 36 per cent in value to 2.56p after saying it expects to report a 2017 loss. The company, which makes wireless trackers, said it is likely to report a consolidated net loss after taxation 'materially higher' than the breakeven to small loss previously indicated. 'The major variances relate to share-based payment costs, unrealised exchange differences and certain holding company costs,' it said. Overall a topsy-turvy trading week saw the FTSE 100 index lose around 0.9 per cent to 7,229, while the FTSE AIM All-Share index managed to tick very fractionally higher to 1,040. HSBC chairman Mark Tucker is reportedly axing three non executive director roles BOARD SHAKE-UP The chairman of banking group HSBC is plotting a drastic shake-up of his boardroom, it is claimed. Mark Tucker, who took the job last year, is reportedly axing three non executive director roles to leave a 14-strong board. Those not standing for re-election are said to include Joachim Faber, chairman of German stock exchange Deutsche Boerse. BIG DEALS There were 443.4million of deals for City offices last month up 50 per cent on a year earlier, according to estate agent Savills. Six agreements were struck in January, three involving British investors and three with Asian ones. Around 2.7billion of space is currently under offer. SOLAR BOOST Investment titan Blackrock has snapped up 13.5 megawatts of UK solar panels in a 15million deal alongside partner Lightsource BP. The firm bought the panels, enough to supply 13,500 homes, from Chinese company CTF Solar. It means Blackrock backs more than 40 solar plants in Britain, generating about 350 megawatts. SPANISH SELL-OFF The last Spanish operation has been sold for 178million by insurer Aviva as it seeks to focus on its most profitable businesses. Bosses flogged their stake in life insurance and pensions joint ventures Cajamurcia Vida and Caja Granada Vida to Spanish banking group Bankia. SWISS MISS Bosses at beleaguered bank Credit Suisse have vowed to fight on after losing a 251million court case over a failed Las Vegas resort. A US appeals court found the lender had fraudulently lured investors, including Texas-based Highland Capital Management, to back the scheme, only for it to collapse into bankruptcy in 2008. But Credit Suisse yesterday said it will continue to fight the judgement in the courts. British Airways has launched a war on low-cost long-haul airlines by offering its own cheaper deals to far-flung destinations. The airline's owner IAG has faced increasing pressure from airlines which are offering flights to South America, the US and the Caribbean for a fraction of BA's ticket price. British Airways has also struggled to appeal to business class customers and is overhauling its model to entice travellers to pay a premium with the airline again. Flight fight: British Airways owner IAG has faced increasing pressure from airlines which are offering flights to South America, the US and the Caribbean for a fraction of BA's ticket price Last year IAG launched low-cost long-haul airline Level and it also operates budget long-distance flights through its Irish carrier Aer Lingus. Its increasing efforts come as Norwegian unveiled its first foray into South America with one-way flights from London Gatwick to Buenos Aires starting at 259.90. The upstart firm has already had huge success with cheaper routes to New York. Level runs flights from Paris and Barcelona which have previously been underserved by budget long-haul carriers. Willie Walsh, chief executive of IAG, said the launch of Level has been 'fantastic' for the group, with three new aircraft planned for the airline this year, adding: 'It gives us significant advantages over our competitors.' UK customers are taking advantage of cheaper flights by travelling to Dublin and flying with its budget carrier Aer Lingus, which flies to North America from 149 each way. Ireland abolished air passenger duty in 2014, helping Dublin attract more routes. Serial business-buyer Phoenix Group was the talk of the trading floor yesterday after completing a 3.2billion deal for Standard Life Aberdeen's insurance business. As part of the agreement SLA will get 2.3billion in cash and a 19.9 per cent stake in Phoenix. Over the years, Phoenix has built a business hoovering up closed life books, known as 'zombie funds'. The SLA deal means Phoenix will almost double the number of policyholders on its books to 10.4m, while it will receive an extra 158billion in assets. It also marks the end of a 193-year association with the insurance industry for SLA, which was formed last year through the merger of Standard Life and Aberdeen Asset Management. Buyout boost: Phoenix Group has completed a 3.2bn deal for Standard Life Aberdeen's insurance business Martin Gilbert, co-chief executive of SLA, said: 'Today's announcement represents a logical next step in Standard Life Aberdeen's journey to build a world-class investment company, positioning us strongly for the future and enabling us to meet the evolving needs of our customers and clients.' Phoenix's shares finished up 7.3 per cent, or 55.5p, at 815p. However, Standard Life Aberdeen's price was down 2.5 per cent, or 9.6p, to 376.1p. Just to confuse everyone, the similarly-named Phoenix Asset Management rode to the rescue of troubled stamp collector favourite Stanley Gibbons in a 19.5million deal yesterday. Fund manager Phoenix, which owns three-quarters of toy maker Hornby, has bought a 58 per cent stake in the firm and has agreed to write off 7million of debt. STOCK WATCH - DRIVER GROUP Shares in construction consultants Driver Group soared after it told investors its performance had exceeded expectations. In a trading update yesterday, results in the first four months of the year ending September 30 were significantly ahead of forecasts. It means the company, which was founded in 1978 and floated in 2015, is on track to beat the 1.2million profit it reported for 2017. Shares shot up 14.5 per cent, or 9.5p, to 75p. It will also give the stamp firm 5.4million of working capital for its day-to-day operations and to buy new stock. Jersey-based Stanley Gibbons, founded in 1856, had been struggling under the weight of its debts and there were fears for the future of the company. But the Phoenix deal has calmed investors' nerves and shares shot up 10.3 per cent, or 0.5p, to 5.35p. Meanwhile, the FTSE 100 finished down for the second day in a row, falling 0.11 per cent, or 7.98 points, to 7244.41. The FTSE 250 fared better, ending the day up 0.33 per cent, or 64.99 points, at 19,801.05. Shares in Welsh chipmaker IQE, whose technology is used in Apple's iPhone, continued their recovery after hedge funds accused the firm of deceiving investors earlier this month. Not one for shirking a skirmish, plucky US investment firm Muddy Waters Capital branded the Cardiff-based firm an 'egregious accounting manipulator'. Muddy Waters claimed CSC, a joint venture between IQE and Cardiff University, was nothing more than an 'alter ego' of the Welsh firm and did not have any customers well, apart from IQE itself. It argued IQE, which of course has refuted the claims, was misleading its investors. Drew Nelson, chief executive of IQE, told this column that Thursday's announcement of a new tie up between CSC and tech firm ICS to create components for high-speed broadband was proof that Muddy Waters had been talking a load of old tosh. Investors sided with IQE: at closing yesterday IQE's share price was up 12.5 per cent, or 15.5p, to 139p. Shares in Rightmove inched higher after the firm released a set of stonking results. Its revenue jumped 11 per cent in 2017 while profits were up 10 per cent as the firm managed to persuade a record number of estate agents to list their properties on its site. It now advertises more than 1m properties, the firm said. Shares rose 4 per cent, or 172p, to 4482p. However, rival On The Market struggled yesterday, despite announcing Chancellors Group of Estate Agents had started advertising properties on its website. Shares were down 2.7 per cent, or 4.5p, to 162p. MBABANE It is now official. There are 14 000 Swazis who own shares in Swazi Mobile. These Swazis, who qualified for the companys free share reward programme, have 840 000 shares (60 shares each) set aside if they have submitted all their KYC (Know Your Customer) documents which include proof of residence and Identity Document (ID) among others. This was disclosed by Chief Executive Officer Jeff Penberton. He said these shareholders would receive their official shareholder certificates soon after the company gets listed on the Swaziland Stock Exchange (SSX). Those who are yet to submit their KYC documents have until the end of the month to do so, warned Penberton. The CEO also unveiled a task team that has been entrusted with the responsibility to ensure that Swazi Mobiles stock market floatation is a success. The team comprises of; Swaziland Stock Brokers (Sponsoring Broker), Imbewu Yesive Investments (Pty) Ltd (Financial Advisor), S.V Mdladla (Legal Advisor), Kobla Quashie & Associates (Reporting Accountants), KPMG (Transfer Secretary) and SwaziBank (Payment Receiving). Penberton explained that the mobile telephony company would be listing 30 per cent of the companys shares in the SSX in fulfillment of a condition of the licence they were granted by the Swaziland Communications Commission (SCCOM). He pointed out that a significant portion of the proceeds to be raised from the stock market listing would be used to increase network capacity, extend network coverage and improve network resilience to ensure that Swazi Mobile continues to offer Swazis with an effective alternative communications option. The task team is working around the clock to ensure that all requirements are met and ready for submission to SSX by the end of March, said Penberton. KPMG Managing Partner, Vusi Nkabinde, explained that as transfer secretaries they could be likened to class prefects since they would be managing the companys records across the board. We will also be responsible for preparation of Swazi Mobiles dividend spreadsheets, Nkabinde clarified. Daniel Bediako, from Kobla Quashie & Associates, said as reporting accountants they would see to it that the companys financial records meet the required reporting standards. MBABANE It is now official, Swazi Mobile has a new chairman. The mobile company yesterday confirmed Michelo Shakantu as its new Chairman, following the death of businessman Victor Gamedze. Shakantu is widely known as the Inyatsi Construction Group Holdings Limited Executive Chairman. The confirmation was made in yesterdays media briefing at the Swazi Mobile Head Office by Chief Executive Officer Jeff Penberton. He was responding to questions from the media regarding the position of chairman following the passing away of Gamedze, who was gunned down on January 14, 2017. Since his death, people have been asking themselves the question of who was going to take over the reins as chairman of Swazilands second mobile operator. According to Penberton, the appointment was made by the Swazi Mobile Board of Directors in its meeting late last month. Swazi Mobile, according to a press release issued yesterday, lists its current shareholders as Swaziland National Provident Fund (SNPF), CherryBite (Pty) Ltd, Stage 1 Connections, Swaziland Investment Development Corporation and the share reward recipients. Shakantus appointment will not come as a shock to many as since the inception of Swazi Mobile, he was known as the main co-director in the company together with the late Gamedze. Swazi Mobile was authorised to roll out a national network and provide voice, data and value added services on a national basis in December last year by the Swaziland Communications Commission (SCCOM), which awarded the company an operating licence. The decision confirmed Swazi Mobile Limited to be the third telecommunications service provider in the country, joining Swazi MTN Limited and the Swaziland Post and Telecommunications Corporation (SPTC). Currently, the company boasts of over 150 000 subscribers, some of whom (14 000) have qualified in its share offer reward programme. During yesterdays press briefing, Penberton announced that Swazi Mobile would be listing 30 per cent of the companys shares on the Swaziland Stock Exchange (SSX) in fulfillment of a condition of the licence it was awarded by SCCOM. MBABANE - The alleged Swazi inyanga (traditional healer) who was arrested in connection with the killing of two minors in South Africa, has appeared in court. The suspect has been identified as Thokozani Msibi and appeared on Wednesday at the Witbank Magistrates Court. According to a South African publication, TimesLIVE, Msibi was remanded in custody pending a bail application which is scheduled for Monday. The two children whom he allegedly kidnapped and later murdered are Nkosikhona Ngwenya and Gabisile Shabani, and it has been alleged that the latter was kidnapped because of her albinism condition. Msibi was arrested on Tuesday night and charged in connection with the kidnapping of the two children, who were allegedly taken from their home in Hlalakahle and were later found dead. On Wednesday morning police discovered two bodies in separate locations believed to be those of the missing children. It was reported that the subsequent discovery of the corpses came after the South African Police Service (SAPS) released an identikit of one of the suspects. He was remanded in custody pending a bail application which is scheduled for February 26, 2018. Thokozani Msibi was not asked to plead. The investigation regarding further suspects is underway, Corporate Communications Officer of the Mpumalanga Province, Brigadier Leonard Hlathi was quoted saying in yesterdays TimeLive. When the arrest was made, it was stated that additional charges of murder could be added. The minors had been reported missing on January 28 this year, after three armed gunmen broke into their home and forcibly removed them. MBABANE Its time for aspirant head teachers and deputy head teachers to finally have their wishes come true. This follows that the Teaching Service Commission (TSC) announced a combined 30 promotions. This was confirmed by the TSC Chairman Simanga Mamba yesterday. Mamba said the open vacancies were as a result of those who had retired or passed away. He stated that their first step was employing temporary teachers in a bid to strengthen the education system. He also said in some schools; additional classes had to be constructed as the number of pupils had increased. Mamba shared that there were 11 vacancies for deputy head teachers and 19 for head teachers vacancies available. Most of the former posts are in the Shiselweni Region (five) while only one is in the Lubombo Region. He said the application forms were available at regional education offices and the application deadline was March 2, 2018. The TSC chairman said for one to qualify for the head teacher position they needed to have been a deputy head teacher for at least three years. He said they should also have academic qualifications namely; Bachelors Degree in Secondary Education (Leadership), Bachelors Degree in Education Management, Bachelors Degree in Primary Education and Bachelors Honours Degree. Teachers who have served for at least seven years in the country qualify for the position of deputy head teacher. The two positions require the same academic qualifications. Mamba applauded that there were no reported cases of teachers misbehaving and thanked head teachers for the good working relationship they had with them. He said they submitted declaration forms from as early as last November. Mamba warned against corruption and giving money to people who promised teachers promotions. BUHLENI The sex work industry is fast becoming as dangerous as the drug trade people are being killed. In less than 60 days, a second man has been killed after he was hacked by another in a dispute that is alleged to have started over an alleged sex worker. The attack is said to have happened at a popular bar around Buhleni. The hacked man did not die immediately but was rushed to the Mbabane Government Hospital where he succumbed to his injuries while undergoing treatment. The incident happened last week and a suspect has already been arrested in connection to the incident. The bar is the largest drinking spot around Buhleni as it attracts throngs of imbibers as well as vendors who sell their goods outside the bar. Trouble is said to have started when the alleged killer (also the client) wanted to go with a woman whom he claimed to have paid for sexual pleasure for the night. However, he is said to have been angry after noticing that the sex worker was with another person. He is said to have complained and stated that the woman had to go with him since he had already given her some money as per their deal. The woman is said to have been with her brother at the time who is also known to her alleged client. An argument is then said to have ensued between the client and his rival during which the client demanded a cellphone which he had previously given to the alleged sex workers brother. It was during this heated argument that a scuffle ensued which resulted in the attacker drawing a bush knife and hacking one of the men, who was with the woman, on the head. The injured man who is said to be from Fontotje under Nkamanzi was then rushed to the nearest hospital but was later transferred to the Mbabane Government Hospital where he succumbed to his injuries. [February 22, 2018] Ziyen Inc. files SEC 253G2 Offering Circular Supplement for Technical Evaluation Appraisal Report for Ziyen Energy's Illinois Oil Leases SAN DIEGO, Feb. 22, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Ziyen Inc., a Scottish-American energy company, files a 253G2 update to Ziyens SEC filings for Ziyen Energy Divisions Technical Evaluation Appraisal Report for the Illinois Basin. The report has been drafted by oil and gas consultants appointed by Ziyen Inc. to provide their professional technical expertise in the plans for the development of the five Illinois basin oil leases which span over hundreds of acres and contain oil reserves estimated to be in excess of $70 million. Click the link below to view the Technical Evaluation Appraisal Report. Ziyen Inc 253G2 Offering Circular Technical Evaluation Appraisal Report Under the leadership of Shane Fraser, Ziyen Inc.s Energy Division has appointed Maurice Wright and Andrew Stephen as project managers and oil and gas industry specialists for the redevelopment of Ziyen Energys oil fields in the Illinois Basin. Both seasoned oil and gas engineers, Mr. Wright and Mr. Stephen bring over 50 years of combined experience working for international oil companies such as Dutch Royal Shell, BP, Conocophillips, TOTAL and various mid-sized oil companies project managing the development of oil fields and implementing new approaches to oil production. In addition to bringing a breadth and depth of experience, they also plan to introduce a power regeneration system on Ziyen Energys oil fields allowing for a more sustainable approach to oil production. The Offering Circular Supplement inludes full details of Ziyen Energys plans to bring existing wells online and to utilise the latest technology to ensure maximum oil production uptime. Shane Fraser, Ziyen Energy Director, Our strategy at Ziyen Energy is to work with local companies who have been operating in the Illinois Basin but we intend to bring in new technology to improve efficiency and drive down production costs in order to make the marginal fields and US produced oil highly profitable. For more information visit: https://www.ziyen.com About Ziyen Inc. Founded in 2016, Ziyen Inc. is a Scottish-American company developing cutting edge procurement software to provide clients with industry specific government and private contracts via procurement portals. In 2017, Ziyen diversified, instating the Ziyen Energy Division, with intent to produce oil in the U.S. with advanced extraction methods and technology implemented and guided by career experts in the oil and gas industry. In June 2017, Ziyen acquired the mineral rights to its first oil field in Indiana, and now has five assets. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) recently qualified Ziyen Inc. in November 2017 for our second round of funding, with a pre-IPO share price of $1.50. More information may be found in its Offering Circular filed with the SEC, or on their website www.ziyen.com About Granite PR Founded in 2008, Aberdeen-based Granite PR offers the full spectrum of PR services with an emphasis on the energy, technology, hospitality, food and drink, professional services and healthcare sectors. The company has developed strong links in domestic and overseas markets, particularly the US and Scandinavia, and these have been enhanced by Granite PRs Gateway series of business events which encourage trade between key locations. For more information visit www.granitepr.co.uk Forward Looking Statements Certain statements in this press release including, but not limited to, statements related to anticipated commencement of commercial production, targeted pricing and performance goals, and statements that otherwise relate to future periods are forward-looking statements. These statements involve risks and uncertainties, which are described in more detail in the Companys periodic reports filed with the SEC, specifically the most recent reports which identify important risk factors that could cause actual results to differ from those contained in the forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are made and based on information available to the Company on the date of this press release. Ziyen Inc. assumes no obligation to update the information in this press release. Contact: Brett Jackson Managing Director Granite PR info@granitepr.co.uk [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [February 22, 2018] Team Freedom Lays Keel on Nation's 21st Littoral Combat Ship MARINETTE, Wis., Feb. 22, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- The Lockheed Martin (NYSE: LMT)-led industry team officially laid the keel for the U.S. Navy's 21st Littoral Combat Ship (LCS), the future USS Minneapolis-Saint Paul, in a ceremony held at Fincantieri Marinette Marine in Marinette, Wisconsin. Ship sponsor Jodi Greene completed the time-honored tradition and authenticated the keel by welding her initials onto a steel plate that will be placed in the hull of the ship. "It is a tremendous honor to serve as the sponsor of the future USS Minneapolis-Saint Paul," Greene said. "I look forward to supporting the ship and its crew throughout the building process and the life of the ship. I know the people of Minneapolis and Saint Paul will proudly support her when she is commissioned and officially enters the Navy fleet." The Lockheed Martin and Fincantieri Marinette Marine team is currently in full-rate production of the Freedom-variant of the LCS, and has delivered five ships to the U.S. Navy to date. The future USS Minneapolis-Saint Paul is one of eight ships in various stages of construction at Fincantieri Marinette Marine, with one more in long-lead production. "We are proud to build another proven warship that allows our Navy o carry out their missions around the world," said Joe DePietro, Lockheed Martin vice president of small combatants and ship systems. "We look forward to working with the U.S. Navy to continue building and delivering highly capable and adaptable Freedom-variant Littoral Combat Ships to the fleet." LCS 21 will be the second vessel named for the Twin Cities. SSN-708, a Los Angeles-class submarine, served as the first USS Minneapolis-Saint Paul and was decommissioned in 2008. Her name honors the Twin Cities' patriotic, hard-working citizens for their support of the military. The Freedom-variant LCS team is comprised of Lockheed Martin, shipbuilder Fincantieri Marinette Marine, naval architect Gibbs & Cox and more than 800 suppliers in 42 states. For additional information, visit our website: www.lockheedmartin.com/lcs About Lockheed Martin Headquartered in Bethesda, Maryland, Lockheed Martin is a global security and aerospace company that employs approximately 100,000 people worldwide and is principally engaged in the research, design, development, manufacture, integration and sustainment of advanced technology systems, products and services. About Fincantieri Marinette Marine Founded in 1942, Fincantieri Marinette Marine (FMM) is located on the Menominee River flowage into Green Bay. The largest shipyard in the Midwest, FMM has delivered more than 1,300 vessels to the U.S. Navy, U.S. Coast Guard, and commercial customers, including the technologically advanced Littoral Combat Ship Freedom variant for the U.S. Navy. In 2008, FMM along with several sister shipyards also based in the Great Lakes region, became part of Fincantieri, one of the world's largest shipbuilding groups and number one by diversification and innovation, with more than 19,400 employees, of whom more than 8,200 in Italy, 20 shipyards in 4 continents. Fincantieri operates in the United States through its subsidiary Fincantieri Marine Group, serving both civilian and government customers. Over the past five years, Fincantieri invested more than $100 million in both capital infrastructure and its resources to support FMM's transformation into what is now one of the best shipyards in the United States. Employing approximately 1,500 employees, today FMM is a state-of-the-art, full service new construction shipyard. About Gibbs & Cox Gibbs & Cox, the nation's leading independent maritime solutions firm specializing in naval architecture, marine engineering and design, is headquartered in Arlington, Virginia. The company, founded in 1929, has provided designs for nearly 80 percent of the current U.S. Navy surface combatant fleet; approaching 7,000 naval and commercial ships have been built to Gibbs & Cox designs. View original content with multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/team-freedom-lays-keel-on-nations-21st-littoral-combat-ship-300603174.html SOURCE Lockheed Martin [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [February 22, 2018] Export Compliance Solutions & Consulting (ECS) to Offer "ITAR/EAR Beyond the Basics" Seminar in San Diego March 20-21 Global trade controls training and consulting firm Export Compliance Solutions & Consulting (ECS) of Annapolis, Maryland, renowned for its expertise in deciphering the complexities and nuances of the ITAR and EAR, announced today that CEO Suzanne Palmer and colleague Lisa Bencivenga will lead the firm's cutting edge seminar, "ITAR/EAR Beyond the Basics" March 20-21, 2018 at the Residence Inn San Diego Gaslamp in San Diego. Building from a basic understanding of the ITAR and EAR, this particular seminar is designed to assists participants in two critical compliance areas: 1) How to establish a compliance program-managing foreign persons, business travel, and mandatory records, and 2) How to draft an agreement and review the compliance process through audits and voluntary disclosures. Of note, as an interactive, 2-day learning experience, the seminar is comprised of scenarios and exercises. The fee includes breakfast, lunch, seminar manual, certificate of training, and a current copy of the ITAR. Accreditation is sought in jurisdictions requested by registrants who have continuing education requirements. ECS's Beyond the Basics seminar is part of the firm's highly trusted Training Academy which holds ITAR and EAR seminars every eight weeks in a different location around the country-all focused on export management compliance and technology transfer knowledge-sharing. Considered one of today's premier learning events for new and established export compliance professionals, ITAR/EAR Beyond the Basics provides attendees the wherewithal to actively adapt to change and gain competitive advantage, while learning how to avoid transactional delays, and providing custoer confidence. Registration is available at the firm's website https://www.exportcompliancesolutions.com. About the Seminar Instructors Suzanne Palmer, President, Export Compliance Solutions, a former Licensing Officer at the State Department, Directorate of Defense Trade Controls (DDTC), with 20 years of direct experience in the U.S. defense industry. After leaving the State Department, Ms. Palmer joined Northrop Grumman's Electronic Systems in Baltimore and then went on to work at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab. Ms. Palmer combined this unique experience to found ECS in 2003. The ECS team provides training to help compliance officials successfully apply U.S. export control regulations and establish viable export compliance programs. Ms. Palmer has worked on the Defense Trade Advisory Group (DTAG), was appointed to serve as a Special Compliance Officer (SCO) for a company operating under a Consent Agreement and is an active speaker for various professional organizations. Lisa Bencivenga has over twenty years of varied experience in export/import licensing and compliance issues with major defense contractors with an emphasis on space and satellite systems. Lisa has had the leading role in developing and implementing internal compliance programs, providing regulatory guidance, instituting license databases, training personnel at all corporate levels, conducting audits requested by clients and/or directed by the U.S. Department of State, coordinating investigations and working closely with legal departments while administering the full spectrum of corporate international export/import activities. About Export Compliance Solutions & Consulting (ECS) Founded in 2003, Export Compliance Solutions & Consulting (ECS) is a trade controls training and consulting firm renowned for its expertise in U.S export laws and regulatory requirements. Through an agile, team-based seminar and consulting approach, ECS's staff is comprised of former government and defense industry officials. Experts in helping companies worldwide understand the complexities of the ITAR and EAR, the mission of ECS is to help clients build internal competencies and processes to meet competitive compliance challenges. For more information, visit www.exportcompliancesolutions.com. View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180222006627/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [February 22, 2018] Bruce Lee & Beverly Anderson named as latest Keynote Speakers for March FinTech Innovation Assembly FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla., Feb. 22, 2018 /CNW/ -- There is less than a month to go until the Springtime edition of Agora's FinTech Innovation Assembly gets underway, with the event's limited ticket allocation in high demand. The leading names in FinTech will descend on the Ritz-Carlton, Fort Lauderdale, March 19 21, 2018 for three days of carefully curated workshops, inspirational keynotes, and plentiful networking opportunities. To find out more about who is attending and to enquire about joining them, please contact Megan Ann Shields megan.shields@agoraassemblies.com. We are pleased to announce the most recent addition to our keynote speaker roster, Beverly Anderson, Executive Vice President of Cards and Retail Services at Wells Fargo. Beverly will discuss how winning in today's consumer marketplace means seamlessly connecting with customers and delivering exceptional experiences across every physical, mobile, and digital hannel. With brands like Uber creating new, simple solutions for customer problems ("I need a ride"), the payments industry finds itself facing a new set of challenges and opportunities. Calling upon over thirty years in the industry, Beverly will share her experiences as a change agent, helping leaders shift their mindset to energize innovation across their businesses. Beverly joins Bruce Lee, SEVP Operations & Technology, Fannie Mae, who is set to take to the stage at the Gala Dinner on day one of the event. Bruce will compare today's IT transformation to the old Irish joke: a lost traveler asks for directions, only to receive the answer, "if you want to get there, I wouldn't start from here." IT transformations are similar, requiring us to have a good sense of the destination, but often unclear of our starting point. With twenty years' experience in senior technology roles, Bruce knows how an IT journey can struggle or fail, as well as the traits of the successful transformation. He will discuss how innovation helps CIOs meet the challenges they face today. This event promises to be Agora Assemblies' best yet. For more information on how you can attend the FinTech Innovation Assembly at the Ritz-Carlton, Fort Lauderdale this March, please contact Megan Ann Shields at megan.shields@agoraassemblies.com View original content:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/bruce-lee--beverly-anderson-named-as-latest-keynote-speakers-for-march-fintech-innovation-assembly-300603236.html SOURCE Agora Assemblies LLC [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [February 22, 2018] TUV Rheinland Helps Delta Electronics Secure First Medical-Grade Certification for High-Voltage X-Ray Power Generators in Taiwan TAIPEI, Taiwan, Feb. 23, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Delta Electronics has achieved another breakthrough in the power-supply sector with its latest development -- a high voltage generator for X-ray equipment, which recently received medical device certification by the global testing and certification leader, TUV Rheinland. Achieving compliance with the European Union (EU) MDD 93/42/EEC medical devices directive, and receiving EN ISO 13485 medical quality management system certification is an industry milestone that makes Delta the first power-supply manufacturer in Taiwan capable of manufacturing medical-grade high-voltage generators for X-ray equipment. Medical-grade power generators must comply with more rigorous standards than those used for consumer power supplies. In addition to product safety, they are also assessed on performance, clinical requirements and usability. Taiwan's electrical and electronics industry does not have a solid track record in manufacturing high-end medical devices. High-voltage generators for X-ray equipment are required to provide consistent, high-voltage, high-current output and meet stringent radiation, stability and reliability criteria. To meet these demanding requirements, TUV Rheinland engaged a team of medical device experts from Taiwan, Japan and mainland China to carry out the assessment and certification process based on the EU's harmonized standards and regulations. The complex R&D and certification process, which ended up rivaling that for X-ray equipment, took over six months. Delta built a lead-shielded laboratory accredited by the Atomic Energy Council expressly for this product. Since so few vendor have ventured into the production of high-end medical devices, the recent certifications represent a major breakthrough for Delta. Most of Taiwan's medical device industry is currently concentrated on the home care or small medical devices sectors. "EN ISO 13485, which is based on the ISO 9001 quality management system standard, is considered the basic threshold for medical devices. However, MDD certification is essential for medical devices entering the EU market. It is equivalent to the FDA 510(K) standard in the US, and applies to medical devices of all risk levels. All medical devices, ranging from blood bags and home healthcare products to large pieces of equipment, such as MRI scanners, require MDD certification," explained Brian Huang, Vice General Manager for Medical Devices at TUV Rheinland Taiwan. The MDD directive requires a manufacturer to be assessed by an EU-authorized notified body before the CE marking can be affixed. Only products that bear the CE marking, indicating compliance with essential health and safety requirements, can be offered for sale in the EU. Delta chose TUV Rheinland to be its medical device certification partner because it is one of the few certification bodies authorized by the German government to issue MDD certificates. TUV Rheinland is also one of the few third-party certification bodies in Asia capable of creating a transnational team of medical device experts. For example, Japan is the Asian leader in high-end medical devices and more than half of the country's medical device certification market is held by TUV Rheinland Japan, which has certified a diverse array of products ranging from dental equipment to supportive exoskeletons. Speaking at the certification award ceremony, Mr. Holger Kunz, Executive Vice President, Products for the TUV Rheinland Group, noted that the EU is the world's second-largest medical device market. "Delta's decision to set its sights on the high-end market for its initial foray into the medical device sector represents more than simply adopting the highest standards and ambitious goals. It also makes Delta a role model for the rest of Taiwan's medical device industry, and TUV Rheinland is delighted to be helping to raise standards and ensure excellence in this important area," said Mr. Kunz, who previously worked in Taiwan and is now based in Japan. About TUV Rheinland TUV Rheinland is a global leader in independent inspection services, founded 145 years ago. The group employs 19,700 people around the globe. Annual revenue is more than EUR1.9 billion. The independent experts stand for quality and safety for people, technology and the environment in nearly all industrial sectors and areas of life. TUV Rheinland inspects technical equipment, products and services, and oversees projects, processes and information security for companies. Its experts train people in a wide range of careers and industries. To this end, the company operates a global network of approved labs and testing and education centres. Since 2006, TUV Rheinland has been a member of the United Nations Global Compact to promote sustainability and combat corruption. www.tuv.com SOURCE TUV Rheinland Singapore Pte Ltd [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [February 23, 2018] WISeKey Reports Strong Q4 & FY 2017 Preliminary Financial Results and Announces Initial FY 2018 Revenue Guidance WISeKey Reports Strong Q4 & FY 2017 Preliminary Financial Results and Announces Initial FY 2018 Revenue Guidance Q4 2017 Highlights Q4 2017 revenues increased by 49% to $11.4 million, as compared to $7.7 million in Q4 2016. Growth was driven by higher revenues from the IoT and Semiconductor group for the smart car, pharmaceutical and fintech industries and also IoT chips as WISeKey reached 1 billion chips production milestone. Introduced WISeCoin, a Cryptocurrency platform to enable countries to launch their own Cryptocurrencies Combining National Identities with Crypto Wallet. FY 2017 Highlights FY 2017 preliminary unaudited pro-forma revenue of $43.5 million, up 299% as compared to FY 2016, reflects the successful integration of the IoT and Cybersecurity assets into the Company. WISeKey adopted US GAAP Topic 606 "Revenue from Contracts with Customers" as of January 1, 2017 with the objective of providing enhanced financial transparency ahead of its 2018 ADR II program on the NASDAQ. Growth was driven by higher revenues from the Cybersecurity, IoT and Semiconductor business segments for new sectors requiring strong security on their semiconductors such as smart car, luxury, pharmaceutical and fintech industries. Increased its R&D effort with $10 million invested during the year to develop new products and create business opportunities in cybersecurity, IoT, Microprocessors, Blockchain an AI. Aggregated over 39 patent families (more than 200 patents in total) to its patent portfolio, some of them on critical sectors such as Microchip designs and Cybersecurity algorithms. Achieved strong liquidity and financial position; improved operating performance resulted in cash of $12.2 million at December 31, 2017, up $7.0 million from December 31, 2016. Audited FY 2017 results to be announced on the week of April 16, 2018. Strong Growth Expected to Continue in 2018 Expects revenue of approximately $14 million for Q1 2018. FY 2018 revenue guidance of approximately $60 million, an increase of approximately 38% as compared to FY 2017. * All Q4 2017 and FY 2017 figures in this release are unaudited and estimated due to the preliminary nature of the announcement. ZUG, Switzerland- February 23, 2018 - WISeKey International Holding Ltd ("WISeKey" or the "Company") (SIX: WIHN) a leading Swiss cybersecurity and IoT company announced today unaudited financial results for Q4 2017. 2017 was an important building year for WISeKey. During the year, not only did we significantly increase our revenue and improve our financial position, we also expanded our product offerings, increased our geographical footprint, enlarged our customer base and set the stage for continued growth in 2018 and beyond. 2018 started off on a very strong note due to the new razor and blade cybersecurity business model which is accelerating the commercialization of our semiconductor products with embedded security. WISeKey's razor and blade business model uses a strategy that involves selling highly secure and tamperproof microchips (or "razor" products) at very competitive rates, to enable the inclusion and promotion of the higher margin cybersecurity products and services (or "blade" services) thus bundling a very attractive combination of core security components. Thus, for FY 2018, we expect revenue to continue to increase and reach approximately $60 million (under the new accounting approach), which represents an increase of approximately 38% as compared to FY 2017. Well positioned for the future WISeKey's ability to authenticate, protect and remotely manage millions of networked, automated devices and equipment, using its semiconductors and cybersecurity, is becoming pervasive - from the factory floor, to the hospital operating room, to the residential home - everything, from automobiles to assembly robots, refrigerators to watches and wearables to wine bottles, is connecting and communicating via the Internet. The IoT security landscape is still evolving even as the IoT adoption is likely to pick up. Early movers in this space, such as WISeKey, stand to gain big, since Root of Trust ("RoT") is required for secure communication over IoT. WISeKey is well positioned to generate operational synergies from cross-selling opportunities in the space through its expanded offerings by integrating chips, SAP's HANA and other key technologies. WISeKey's OISTE Root is unique among publicly trusted Roots with its affiliations with Economic and Social Council of the United Nations ("ECOSOC") and the Non-commercial Users Stakeholders Group (NCSG), ensuring geopolitical neutrality and data sovereignty. This is a key differentiator for the company vis-a-vis its competitors. This is especially important as the WISeKey RoT serves as a common trust anchor, which is recognized by operating systems (OS) and IoT applications to ensure the authenticity, confidentiality and integrity of on-line transactions. We believe these features could be vital in creating significant business opportunities with various governments, internaional bodies, industrial companies which are wary of foreign government oversight and centralization of data on servers outside their jurisdiction. Also, multinational corporations that need to comply with International Standards on the deployment of their IoT infrastructure are ideal candidates for WISeKey Trust Model. Amidst the threat of increasingly sophisticated data and online identity thefts, WISeKey's robust solutions should ensure data protection for its customers including individuals, enterprises & their IoT objects and government organizations. Unique Swiss cryptographic Root of Trust for the Internet of Things market RoT is the basis for a global end-to-end security solution. RoT serves as a common trust anchor, which is recognized by the operating system (OS) and applications, to ensure the authenticity, confidentiality and integrity of on-line transactions. With the certificates signed by this cryptographic RoT, embedded in the device, the IoT product manufacturers can use Public Key Infrastructure ("PKI") technologies to secure interaction among objects and between objects and people. Launched a secured Internet of Things The solution, called WISeKeyIoT is a scalable framework, offering digital Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) certificates for connected devices, protected in certified tamper resistant silicon chips, as well as an outsourced or on-premises certificate management system, with device life cycle control functions and security enforcement entities. The digital PKI certificates can be signed by the publicly trusted root, owned by OISTE (https://oiste.org/) and operated by WISeKey. IoT is a very promising new business segment for WISeKey, with an estimated 50 billion devices expected to be connected by 2020, while the world's population is estimated to grow to 6.8 billion; thus, there will be more than 7 devices per person connected to the internet by 2020 (Cisco, n.d.). As a result, a huge and increasing amount of data will be interchanged between connected devices and back-end servers, allowing companies to provide users with new types of exciting applications, which will be designed to offer increased control over the use of resources: improve efficiency in power grids, optimize processing of information in industrial environments, provide better and higher quality healthcare services and personalized experience for shopping or leisure, among others. This is only possible though, if the data can be trusted. The IoT business case will collapse if, over time, hackers get access to devices, change the way they operate, intercept and modify data, or bring down systems by executing Distributed Denial of Service attacks through the devices on a network. It is therefore crucial to implement security features in the system from scratch. Not only in the back-end system, using the PKI technologies proposed by the framework WISeKeyIoT, but as well as in the otherwise vulnerable connected objects in the field, made secure through the tamper resistant chip technology, all part of the WISeKey framework. Customer adoption for IoT Cybersecurity services continued to accelerate in 2017, reaching more than 3,500 customers across all regions at the end of 2017 (more than doubling year-over-year), mainly due to our integrated vertical trusted platform which combines a range of chips with software applications that cater to our customers' security and business needs. Our software application offerings include proprietary technology developed by the Company such as RoT and Public Key Infrastructure ("PKI"), which are offered as standalone products, as well as part of our fully integrated Vertical Trusted Platform that enables WISeKey's clients to manage their digital identity, information, and communications through a seamless process. We enable our clients to easily adapt to a continuously changing landscape of services designed specifically for their needs, without compromising their digital security. The rapid growth and proliferation of internet based devices, as well as people's dependence on them for personal and business needs, precipitated the connectivity of digital devices. However, such connectivity creates numerous opportunities to alter or manipulate digital footprints. We believe that our integrated products provide the most comprehensive solution to fill these gaps in cybersecurity and data protection. The core of WISeKey's Vertical Trusted Platform is based on our Cybersecurity SaaS business, also known as managed PKI services, and on our Semiconductor chips. WISeKey ISTANA PKI platform allowed WISeKey to enter the Connected Car industry in 2017 by offering manufacturers a secure way 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 industry. WISeKey's total identifiable 5-year ISTANA revenues from the car manufacturing industry are expected to be in excess of $30 million, of which approximately $7.0 million are expected to be realized in 2018. WISeKey experienced substantial revenue growth with the combination of IoT and Cybersecurity technology on new markets such as the smart automobile with our Secure Connected car technology. The WISeKey security for connected car solutions allow manufacturers to authenticate legitimate car components and enable owners to securely interact with the car's smart features. WISeKey technology is now used by major players integrating our IoT and Cybersecurity on their platforms with Microsoft and IBM already deploying large scale projects with our company. About WISeKey: WISeKey (SIX Swiss Exchange: WIHN) is a leading global cybersecurity company currently deploying large scale digital identity ecosystems with a patented process. WISeKey's Swiss based cryptographic Root of Trust ("RoT") provides 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 info@wisekey.com WISeKey Investor Relations (US) Contact: Lena Cati The Equity Group Inc. Tel: +1 212 836-9611 lcati@equityny.com 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. [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [February 23, 2018] ALSO Group: Medium-term targets raised Emmen, Switzerland, February 23, 2018 ALSO is reporting record earnings in 2017, which is the seventh year in a row it has achieved this feat. Group net sales improved year-over-year by 11.4 percent to 8.9 billion euros. In the past year, ALSO has thus nearly reached the lower end of its medium-term Group net sales target of nine to twelve billion euros which it announced in 2017. In the same period, Group net profit increased by 11.2 percent to 92.5 million euros. Earnings before taxes (EBT) rose by 9.0 percent to 124.2 million euros. In 2017, EBITDA increased by 7.7 percent to 157.3 million euros. "We have exceeded our goals for 2017. Our MORE strategy is working and we continue to implement it consistently," said Gustavo Moller-Hergt, CEO of ALSO Holding AG (SIX: ALSN). The Board of Directors has proposed a dividend of 2.75 Swiss francs per share, which represents an increase of 22.2 percent compared to the previous year. The transactional Supply business increased by 11.7 percent from 6 232 to 6 964 million euros, comprising 78.3 percent of Group net sales. Solutions revenues in 2017 grew by 5.9 percent from 1 513 to 1 602 million euros, representing 18.0 percent of Group net sales. With "as-a-Service", ALSO increased its revenues by 35.4 percent from 240 to 325 million euros, contributing 3.7 percent to Group net sales. All 15 countries within the ALSO Group emerged stronger from the 2017 financial year and the integration of the acquired companies is proceeding according to plan. "ALSO is successfully transforming into an end-to-end solutions provider. We are pushing forward on our path," said Gustavo Moller-Hergt. In 2017, ALSO consistently worked on its five levers to increase results: In the business model mix, Solutions and as-a-Service were further developed. New Logistics-as-a-Service contracts with Media Markt, Swisscom and Sunrise, as well as the agreement to assume responsibility for all reverse logistics for Fujitsu in Finland, are a good basis for the further expansion of this offer. ALSO is making good progress in the "Consumptional Business" segment. ALSO currently serves 1.3 million seats in the IT-as-a-Service sector. This higher-margin business is being continuously expanded. The vendor mix grew from more than 500 to 525 vendors. As part of the as-a-Service business model, ALSO reached agreements with almost 40 additional independent service vendors to offer over 200 new services on the ALSO Cloud Marketplace. In optimizing the buyer mix, the focus was on increasing the share of wallet (share of a customer's total expenditure for a certain product group at ALSO); for example, sales to small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) were increased by 5.9 percent. In the product mix, the number of products increased from 188 000 to 250 000. In existing product categories, new products such as the HP A3 product range were added to the portfolio. In addition, ALSO has built up new product categories such as 3D printing, Managed Print Services, Internet of Things and Security. Moreover, ALSO has optimized structures and processes across the Group and successfully implemented SAP. "We see the benefits already on a daily basis. Looking forward we will be able to scale our business even better and make it more efficient," said Gustavo Moller-Hergt. Central Europe market Segment In the Central Europe market segment (Germany, France, Austria and Switzerland), ALSO recorded a revenue increase of 8.9 percent to 5 436 million euros (previous year: 4 992 million euros). EBT decreased by 4.4 percent to 86.7 million euros (previous year: 90.7 million euros). The result was impacted most notably by investments in personnel. In France, the team was expanded to increase market share in the SM-segment, to strengthen LAFI (Logiciels Application Formation Information, an ALSO subsidiary), and due to the acquisition of BEIP. In Germany, the Cloud back office capability was expanded and capacity in the area of reverse logistics was strengthened. As part of the SAP implementation in ALSO Switzerland, best practice was adopted in the Group SAP system so that other country-level companies can also improve their efficiency. The central development team was strengthened to further develop the ALSO Cloud Marketplace platform. Northern/Eastern Europe market segment In the Northern/Eastern Europe market segment (Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Sweden and Slovenia), revenues grew by 16.2 percent to 3 878 million euros (previous year: 3 337 million euros). EBT increased by 49.1 percent to 34.6 million euros (previous year: 23.2 million euros). The improvement in Poland in particular was a key driver of the result. At the same time, investments were made to improve our competitiveness in the area of logistics. The Competence Center Supplies in the Netherlands also improved its results. Earnings in Finland also continued to improve. Employees In the past fiscal year 2017, ALSO employed an average of 4 058 people from 44 countries, 266 more employees than in the previous year. Personnel expenses amounted to 219.3 million euros in the reporting period. This represents an increase of 4.7 percent over the previous year. Dividend distribution to shareholders of 2.75 Swiss francs per share proposed For 2018, the Board of Directors proposes a dividend distribution from the reserve from capital contributions in the amount of 2.75 Swiss francs per share (previous year: 2.25 Swiss francs). This represents an increase of 22.2 percent and is the sixth consecutive increase. The proposal will be submitted to shareholders for approval at the Annual General Meeting on March 27, 2018. The Board of Directors continues to pursue a stable dividend policy and aims for a payout ratio of 25 to 35 percent. Outlook ALSO's management is increasing its medium-term goals compared to the previous year: The Group is targeting an increase in net sales to between ten and fourteen billion euros and an EBITDA margin between 2.1 and 2.6 percent. The share of Solutions is expected to be around 30 percent while 10 percent is targeted in the as-a-Service area. These shares will also depend on the weighting of potential acquisitions. ALSO expects future acquisitions to be focused on the areas of Solutions and as-a-Service. In the area of as-a-Service, the focus is on expanding usage-based business models such as Platform-, Infrastructure-, Workplace-, and Software-as-a-Service. In the area of Supply, the aim is to optimize the provider and buyer composition, product categories, and automated processes. Combined with the optimization of the structure of the business models, this will contribute to an increase in profitability. Despite ongoing uncertainties with regard to economic conditions, ALSO is therefore confident that the targeted measures will take full effect and that an attractive return can be generated in the future, too. In 2018, business opportunities will also arise for ALSO as a result of changes in the competitive structure. Net sales increase for the full year is therefore anticipated to be above the market growth of 1.5 percent forecasted by Gartner. With regard to consolidated net profit, the increase is once again expected to be higher than forecasted sales growth. Direct link to the media release: https://also.com/goto/20180223en Direct link to the Annual Report 2017: http://also.com/goto/20180223ar Contact person: Brunswick Group GmbH Simon Hertwig Phone: +49 89 80 99 025 25 E-mail: shertwig@brunswickgroup.com ALSO Holding AG (Emmen/Switzerland) brings providers and buyers of the ICT industry together. The company offers services at all levels of the ICT value chain from a single source. In the European B2B marketplace, ALSO bundles logistics services, financial services, supply services, solution services, digital services, and IT services together into individual service packages. ALSO's portfolio contains more than 250 000 articles from some 525 vendors. The Group has 4 058 employees throughout Europe. In fiscal year 2017 (closing on December 31), the company generated net sales of 8.9 billion euros. The majority shareholder of ALSO Holding AG is the Droege Group, Dusseldorf, Germany. Further information is available at http://www.also.com Droege Group (Major shareholder) Droege Group (founded in 1988) is an independent advisory and investment company entirely family-owned. The company acts as a specialist for tailor-made transformation programs aiming to enhance corporate value. Droege Group combines its corporate family-run structure and capital strength into a family-equity business model. The group carries out direct investments with own equity in corporate subsidiaries and medium-sized companies in "special situations". With the guiding principle "Implementation - following all the rules of art," the group is a pioneer of implementation-oriented corporate development. Droege Group proves its implementation excellence daily within its own portfolio. The entrepreneurial platforms of the Droege Group are aligned to current megatrends (knowledge, connectivity, prevention, demography, shopping 4.0, future work). Enthusiasm for quality, innovation and speed determines the company's development. As a result the Droege Group has successfully positioned itself within the market, both nationally and internationally and operates in 30 countries. More information: https://www.droege-group.com Disclaimer This press release contains forward-looking statements which are based on current assumptions and forecasts of the ALSO management. Known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors could lead to material differences between the forward-looking statements made here and the actual development, in particular the results, financial situation, and performance of our Group. The Group accepts no responsibility for updating these forward-looking statements or adapting them to future events or developments. [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [February 23, 2018] Basilea reports clinical phase 3 study start with antibiotic ceftobiprole in skin infections under BARDA contract Basel, Switzerland, February 23, 2018 Basilea Pharmaceutica Ltd. (SIX: BSLN) announced today that it has commenced enrollment in the first of its two planned clinical phase 3 registration studies of the antibiotic ceftobiprole. The first study evaluates the safety and efficacy of the antibiotic in the treatment of adult patients with acute bacterial skin and skin structure infections (ABSSSI). Basilea expects to begin enrollment in the second phase 3 clinical trial of ceftobiprole in the treatment of adult patients with bacteremia (bloodstream infection) caused by Staphylococcus aureus mid-2018. The two trials are designed to be cross-supportive for a potential U.S. registration and are conducted under a Special Protocol Assessment (SPA) agreement with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Ronald Scott, Chief Executive Officer, said: "We are pleased to have commenced enrollment of the phase 3 ABSSSI program for ceftobiprole with the goal to bring our broad-spectrum anti-MRSA antibiotic to patients in the U.S. Acute bacterial skin and skin structure infections are among the most common bacterial infections encountered in both community and hospital settings. Skin infections caused by resistant bacteria such as MRSA have become a challenging medical problem associated with extended hospitalization, high costs and increased mortality. Ceftobiprole offers a potential treatment option in an area of high medical need." The randomized, double-blind, multicenter study aims to establish the safety and efficacy of intravenously (i.v.) administered ceftobiprole versus i.v. vancomycin (plus aztreonam for Gram-negative infections) in the treatment of ABSSSI. The FDA-agreed primary objective of the study is to demonstrate non-inferiority of ceftobiprole to the comparator regimen with respect to early clinical response based on reduction of lesion size. The study is anticipated to enroll approximately 675 male and female adult patients. Basilea's phase 3 ceftobiprole program is being conducted under a contract with the U.S. Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) which provides funding of up to USD 108 million. About ceftobiprole Ceftobiprole is a cephalosporin antibiotic for intravenous administration with rapid bactericidal activity against a wide range of Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria, includng methicillin-susceptible and resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MSSA, MRSA) and susceptible Pseudomonas spp.1 Ceftobiprole is currently approved for sale in major European countries and several non-European countries for the treatment of adult patients with community-acquired pneumonia (CAP) and hospital-acquired pneumonia (HAP), excluding ventilator-associated pneumonia (VAP).1 It is marketed in major European countries. Basilea has entered into license and distribution agreements for the drug in Europe, Latin America, China, Canada, Israel, and the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. Ceftobiprole has Qualified Infectious Disease Product (QIDP) status in the U.S. for the potential treatment of ABSSSI, Staphylococcus aureus bacteremia (SAB) and CAP, providing priority review and an extension of market exclusivity in the U.S. to ten years after approval. Basilea's clinical phase 3 program aims at the regulatory approval of ceftobiprole in the United States. It includes two cross-supportive phase 3 studies and receives funding from the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response, under contract number HHSO100201600002C. Subject to the successful outcomes of these studies, there may an option to apply for label extensions in Europe and other regions. Ceftobiprole is not currently approved for commercial sale in the U.S. About Basilea Basilea Pharmaceutica Ltd. is a commercial stage biopharmaceutical company developing products that address the medical challenge of increasing resistance and non-response to current treatment options in the therapeutic areas of bacterial infections, fungal infections and cancer. The company is committed to discovering, developing and commercializing innovative pharmaceutical products to meet the medical needs of patients with serious and life-threatening conditions. Basilea Pharmaceutica Ltd. is headquartered in Basel, Switzerland and listed on the SIX Swiss Exchange (SIX: BSLN). Additional information can be found at Basilea's website www.basilea.com . Disclaimer This communication expressly or implicitly contains certain forward-looking statements concerning Basilea Pharmaceutica 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 Basilea Pharmaceutica Ltd. to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Basilea Pharmaceutica 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. For further information, please contact: Peer Nils Schroder, PhD Head of Corporate Communications & Investor Relations +41 61 606 1102 media_relations@basilea.com investor_relations@basilea.com This press release can be downloaded from www.basilea.com . References UK Summary of Product Characteristics (SPC) Zevtera: http://www.mhra.gov.uk/ [Accessed: February 22, 2017] Attachments: //www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/dd2208f9-fdf3-4941-ba49-595141a55fc8 [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [February 23, 2018] Six New Faces Emerge as the Face of Honor; Will Walk the Ramp for Amazon India Fashion Week in Association With Nexa Autumn Winter 2018 NEW DELHI, February 23, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- The winners were shortlisted from 26 finalists at the 'Hunt for the Face of Honor' - an initiative by Honor and Cosmopolitan Honor, Huawei's Smartphone e-brand for digital natives, today announced 6 winners from 26 contestants at 'Hunt for the Face of Honor' campaign - a partnered initiative with Cosmopolitan, one of India's leading fashion and lifestyle magazines. The association witnessed Honor and Cosmopolitan coming together to identify fresh faces and newer talent to walk the ramp in the upcoming Amazon India Fashion Week in association with Nexa Autumn Winter 2018 in New Delhi. An eminent jury comprising Nandini Bhalla, Editor, Honor team, Cosmopolitan, Sunil Sethi, President, Fashion Design Council of India (FDCI) and designer Rina Dhaka judged 26 contestants on different parameters. After a careful evaluation and discussion, six winners were selected who will walk the ramp for Rina Dhaka, one of the leading fashion designers of India in the upcoming Amazon India fashion week. Speaking on the occasion, Nandini Bhalla, Editor, Cosmopolitan India, said, "Cosmopolitan is thrilled to associate with Honor 9 Life for the #FaceofHonor campaign, which gives an opportunity to aspiring models to walk the ramp at Amazon India Fashion Week. The other judges and I were thrilled with the participants who joined us at the auditions today, and we truly had a tough time selecting the three Male and three Female finalists. We are pleased with our selection, which covers differnt 'standards of beauty' to arrive at a final line-up of models that shows tremendous promise." P. Sanjeev, Vice President, Sales, Consumer Business Group, Honor India commented, "We are delighted with our association with an apex fashion magazine like Cosmopolitan. As our tagline suggests, Honor is a brand for the brave and this is one such initiative, where we aim at encouraging the youth to pursue their talent to the fullest. With this journey, we aim to bring to life the dreams of our tech-savvy millennials." Commenting on the association, Sunil Sethi, President, FDCI said, "Face of Honor is a unique initiative undertaken by Honor, reiterating their commitment to be in sync with the pulse of youth. Platforms like these are important to identify, promote & nurture new talent in the modelling industry and give a fresh perspective. I congratulate all the contestants & winners who participated in the campaign and did their best." 'Face of Honor' is an initiative of Honor where the brand collaborated with Cosmopolitan India magazine to encourage youth to showcase their style and fashion stories. The much coveted contest has established itself as a platform for the young aspiring models to showcase their style and fashion game on the digital platform resulting in being featured on the Cosmopolitan 'Wall of Honor'. About Honor: Honor is a leading smartphone e-brand under the Huawei Group. In line with its slogan, 'For the Brave', the brand was created to meet the needs of digital natives through internet-optimized products that offer superior user experiences, inspire action, foster creativity and empower the young to achieve their dreams. In doing this, Honor has set itself apart by showcasing its own bravery to do things differently and to take the steps needed to usher in the latest technologies and innovations for its customers. Honor led the online smartphone market with a global shipment value of 2.5 billion USD to become the number 1 online smartphone brand, as per International Data Corporation (IDC) in Q1 2017. Huawei's Consumer Business Group, comprising of its dual brands Huawei and Honor, shipped 139 million smartphones globally in 2016 and reported an increase of 44% in its annual revenue. About FDCI A non-profit organisation, the Fashion Design Council of India (FDCI), is the apex body of fashion design in India, represented by over 400 members. Founded on the premise of promoting, nurturing, and representing the best of fashion and design talent in the country; its prime objective is to propagate the business of fashion. FDCI stays true to its commitment to promote the 'Make in India' label as handlooms take centre stage, in a country, who's heritage is soaked in the flavours of indigenous crafts. Media Contact : Prateek Sharma prateek.sharma@fleishman.com +91-9971476254 Manager FleishmanHillard [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [February 23, 2018] Four New Mobile-Focused Application Partners Join Telestax(R) RestcommONE Marketplace(TM) floLIVE, Gintel, Joors and Sompopo provide MNOs (Mobile Network Operators) quick and easy access to RestcommONE Marketplace Applications AUSTIN, Texas, Feb. 23, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Telestax, the Restcomm company, today announced that four new partners have joined the RestcommONE Marketplace ecosystem. FloLIVE of the UK, Gintel of Norway, Joors of Sweden and Sompopo of Honduras offer Marketplace applications that focus specifically on Mobile Network Operators (MNO) and their customers. RestcommONE Marketplace mobile application partners leverage Telestax's industry leading real-time communications platform in the cloud, RestcommONE, for its next generation networking protocols. MNOs, through a single connection to Telestax can access the Marketplace applications and in the process become CPaaS (Communications Platform as a Service) enabled. The RestcommONE Marketplace is a CPaaS ecosystem that blends traditional telecommunications and APIs (applications programming interfaces) with new, ready-to-deploy real-time voice, video and messaging applications. RestcommONE Marketplace partners offer participating service providers new business opportunities by providing real-time applications and solutions that are certified and integrated into the RestcommONE Platform. Until now, MNOs were unable to participate in and leverage the fast growing CPaaS Market. Today, with RestcommONE Marketplace and its four new mobile focused application partners, the opportunity for MNOs stretches beyond CPaaS enablement to include the ability to deliver in-demand real-time communications business solutions that scale seamlessly and efficiently. "Traditionally, CPaaS models have been focused on VoIP Service Providers, leaving MNOs to sit on the sidelines," said Michael Brandenburg of Frost and Sullivan. "Telestax's ability to extend the CPaaS opportunity directly to MNOs creates a unique ecosystem that will broaden the adoption of real-time communications while increasing a new pathway to revenue for this unique set of service providers." RestcommONE Marketplace New Mobile Partners: floLIVE - An immediate revenue opportunity for MNOs/MVNOs looking to acquire mobile data capacity and IMSI access for supporting IoT customers and devices that require network access throughout the world. floLIVE operates a self-developed core network and offers a secure, cloud-based IoT ecosystem designed and built especially for IoT; and encompasses a wide range of services to market verticals - all provided as-a-service via their global cloud. Gintel - MNOs are increasingly looking for innovative business services they can offer to their SME customers, who are abandoning traditional landline and legacy PBX services. Gintel provides the world's leading mobile PBX capability, allowing MNOs to provide true business level features via a mobile device. Joors - Mobile advertising continues to be a fast growing but difficult opportunity for MNOs to leverage. Using RestcommONE's geolocation capabilities and Joors' expertise in data sponsoring, MNOs/MVNOs can generate significant recurring incremental revenues from mobile marketing. Joors is also the key component behind the JoorsChain consortium that proposes to integrate Block Chain based hi-tech solutions to benefit MNOs. Sompopo - Mobile e-Commerce is still an issue with many carriers and application providers alike. Sompopo's mobile commerce platform integrates different applications to meet the needs of specific markets. Its point of sale (PoS) application also supports cash payment transactions to help deliver products and services. Included is a wholesaler panel that front-ends company specific virtual warehouses and a delivery agent app that supports certified PoS. "RestcommONE Marketplace brings a global collection of best of breed partners together to create a very unique opportunity for MNOs," said Kevin Nethercott, Telestax VP worldwide business development for CPaaS Enablement. "The instant an MNO connects to our RestcommONE cloud platform, and become CPaaS enabled, they are generating revenue through our partners that are buying mobile capacity or terminating traffic onto their network." Resources Ovum Research Report On the Radar: Telestax RestcommONE Marketplace enables delivery of integrated apps. On the Radar: Telestax RestcommONE Marketplace enables delivery of integrated apps. 451 Research Report - Impact Report: Telestax launches RestcommONE Marketplace for CPaaS enablement About Telestax Telestax is quickly becoming the catalyst for bringing real-time communications into the mainstream. Our RestcommONE platform is scalable, highly available and is the only WebRTC platform that supports cloud, on premise and hybrid deployment configurations. RestcommONE is fast becoming the platform of choice for rapidly building enterprise class real-time messaging, voice and video applications. RestcommONE Marketplace connects these new Omnichannel applications with RestcommOne CPaaS-enabled (Communications Platform as a Service) service providers and increases the revenue opportunity for both. The RestcommONE Marketplace is generating a positive disruption in the real-time communications market by changing the way organizations acquire and utilize their business software. Telestax is a privately held global company with headquarters in Austin, TX. Media Contact: Nancy Colwell nancy.colwell@telestax.com SOURCE Telestax, Inc. [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [February 23, 2018] Letter to Glance Technologies Shareholders from Desmond and Angela Griffin VANCOUVER, B.C., Feb. 23, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Glance Technologies Inc. (CSE:GET:CN) (OTCQB:GLNNF) (FKT:GJT) today provided shareholders with the following letter from both Desmond Griffin, Chief Executive Officer, and Angela Griffin, Chief Technology Officer. Dear Glance Technologies shareholders: We, Desmond and Angela Griffin, are writing to you in our roles as Chief Executive Officer and Chief Technology Officer of Glance Technologies Inc. This letter is about our business that we cherish, and it is also about our family. We are a husband-and-wife team. That gives us, and all shareholders, a valuable edge. Based on our long and successful track record in the technology industry, we strongly believe that shareholders derive significant value from the business opportunities and intellectual property that Glance Technologies is developing under our personal guidance. Because we treasure Glance Technologies, both of us fully supported the companys decision to terminate another member of our family, Penny Green, as President and Chief Operating Officer. We can no longer work with Penny, and Glance Technologies was not functioning properly with Penny in a management role. Subsequent to her termination, Penny requisitioned a meeting to change the board of directors and give her control of Glance Technologies. Penny wants to remove all three of Glance Technologies independent directors and replace them with three nominees of her own choosing. We think Penny will not be successful in taking control of the board, but the matter will ultimately be up to your vote. Let us be clear that we fully support Glance Technologies three independent directors. We will oppose the election of Pennys nominees. In her requisition news release on February 21, 2018, Penny was silent about her ongoing relationship with us. It is therefore up to us to spell it out. First ofall, Penny of course remains family: a sister (to Angela) and a sister-in-law (to Desmond). That will never change. However, in our view Glance Technologies will not prosper if Penny were to return in any management role. We also believe that the company and its shareholders will benefit if Penny ceases to be a member of the Glance Technologies board. We want you, as shareholders, to have full knowledge about where we stand, and that we are absolutely firm in our stand. Should Pennys nominees be elected by the shareholders, we would immediately tender our resignations. Over the coming weeks and months, the reasons for our firm stand will become clear. Before you vote, you need to know. And then you will have to choose. Sincerely, Desmond Griffin Chief Executive Officer Glance Technologies Inc. Angela Griffin Chief Technology Officer Glance Technologies Inc. About Glance Technologies Inc. Glance Technologies owns and operates Glance Pay, a streamlined payment system that revolutionizes how smartphone users choose where to shop, order goods and services, make payments, access digital receipts, redeem digital deals, earn great rewards & interact with merchants. Glance offers targeted in-app marketing, geo targeted digital coupons, customer feedback, in-merchant messaging and custom rewards programs. The Glance Pay mobile payment system consists of proprietary technology, which includes user apps available for free downloads in IOS (Apple) and Android formats, merchant manager apps, a large scale technology hosting environment with sophisticated anti-fraud technology and lightning fast payment processing. Glance has also purchased a blockchain solution for a rewards-based cryptocurrency. For more information about Glance, please go to www.glance.tech. For more information, contact: Investor Relations 1-866-258-1249 investors@glancepay.com Neither the Canadian Securities Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the Canadian Securities Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. Forward-Looking Statements This press release contains forward-looking information or forward-looking statements (collectively "forward-looking information") within the meaning of applicable securities laws. Forward-looking information is typically identified by words such as: may, "believe", think, "will", and similar expressions, or are those, which, by their nature, refer to future events. For additional information with respect to these and other factors and assumptions underlying the forward looking statements in this press release, see the section entitled Risk Factors in the most recent Annual Information Form and Prospectus of Glance, which may be accessed through Glance's profile on SEDAR at www.sedar.com. Glance cautions investors that any forward-looking information provided by Glance is not a guarantee of future results or performance, and that actual results may differ materially from those in forward-looking statements. [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [February 23, 2018] Tektronix Named Finalist in Lightwave Innovation Reviews with DPO7OE1 33GHz Optical Probe BEAVERTON, Ore., Feb. 23, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Tektronix, Inc., a leading worldwide provider of measurement solutions, today announced that its DPO7OE1 optical probe for use with real-time oscilloscopes has been named a Finalist in the Lightwave Innovation Reviews awards program in the Lab/Production Test Equipment category. Now in its fifth year, the Lightwave Innovation Reviews program recognizes technology developers who are demonstrating excellence in serving the optical networking community. The DPO7OE1 is a 33 GHz, low noise, broad wavelength optical probe with optical reference receiver (ORR) performance for use with Tektronix high-performance real-time scopes and is optimized for 28GBaud PAM-4 datacenter applications. The combination of an optical probe with a real-time oscilloscope gives designers working on 100G optical devices advanced debug capabilities that helps them shorten design times and bring products to market in less time. Given the incredible growth in the demand for more bandwidth in the datacenter, innovation is the only wy forward," said Sarah Boen, general manager, Wired Communications, Tektronix. "With the deployment of 100G and transition to PAM4, our customers were looking to us to deliver a more efficient and faster debug solution. Market demands like this are what lead to innovation and we're honored that the DPO70E1 has been selected as a finalist for this important award." The DPO7OE1 can also be used as a conventional Optical-to-Electrical (O/E) converter for wide-bandwidth optical signal acquisition. The DPO7OE1 provides an FC/PC or FC/APC optical connection for Tektronix high performance oscilloscopes for high-speed optical signal verification. It can also be used for legacy NRZ applications. Analysis packages support standard optical measurements including ER, AOP, OMA, eye height and eye width as well as PAM4 IEEE and OIF-CEI standard specific measurements including TDECQ. For more information on the awards program visit https://lightwavereviews.secure-platform.com/a/organizations/main/home. Wondering what else Tektronix is up to? Check out the Tektronix Bandwidth Banter blog and stay up to date on the latest news from Tektronix on Twitter and Facebook. About Tektronix Headquartered in Beaverton, Oregon, Tektronix delivers innovative, precise and easy-to-operate test, measurement and monitoring solutions that solve problems, unlock insights and drive discovery. Tektronix has been at the forefront of the digital age for over 70 years. Join us on the journey of innovation at TEK.COM. Tektronix is a registered trademark of Tektronix, Inc. All other trade names referenced are the service marks, trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies. View original content with multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/tektronix-named-finalist-in-lightwave-innovation-reviews-with-dpo7oe1-33ghz-optical-probe-300603109.html SOURCE Tektronix, Inc. [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [February 23, 2018] Balistreri Real Estate Builds Listing Advertising Automation Program Powered by Adwerx Enterprise DURHAM, N.C., Feb. 23, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Adwerx, the leading provider of localized digital advertising for over 100,000 U.S. real estate agents and brokers has launched online listing advertisements for Balistreri Real Estate. Balistreri Real Estate is based in South Florida and has five offices and nearly 150 associates. Adwerx Enterprise creates individual automated digital advertisements for properties listed for sale by Balistreri Real Estate. Each ad will run for one week with the option for the agent to extend the campaign and ads can be customized and updated by the agent. With this new service, all new listings from Balistreri Real Estate over $300,000 have an instant presence across Facebook, the web and mobile media. "Our agents have an outstanding reputation for marketing distinguished properties," said Jim Balistreri, President of Balistreri Real Estate. "These ads showcase listings beautifully and reach potential buyers in the places they visit most online including social media and news sites." "With people's attention at a premium in today's world, a digital advertising strategy is essential," said Jed Carlson, CEO of Adwerx. "The Balistreri Real Estate ads deploy as soon as the listing is live, taking advantage of the ltest automation technology to deliver a seamless experience for the agents." The Adwerx automated listing program for brokerages launched in 2017 and the Adwerx Enterprise division has seen rapid adoption across the United States and Canada. Agents within the brokerages using the program have reported a high level of satisfaction from their clients and 92 percent reported that they believed that the solution would help them win more listings. For more information on the automated listing program, Adwerx Enterprise, and other programs, please visit www.adwerx.com. About Balistreri Real Estate Balistreri Real Estate is a recognized leader in the real estate market in South Florida and beyond. The firm is a listed broker-member of Leading Real Estate Companies of the World, a global network of the finest independent real estate brokerage firms, and one of the companies comprising Balistreri Family Enterprisesthe other affiliated companies include Integrity Title and Academy Mortgage. For five decades, Balistreri has been providing buyers, sellers and developers of properties with superior real estate services. About Adwerx Adwerx has provided brilliantly simple digital advertising to over 100,000 real estate industry customers and other small businesses across all 50 states, Canada and Australia. All Adwerx engineers, designers, and customer service professionals share a common mission: to make simple and effective online marketing tools that work for everyone. Adwerx was ranked as #173 in the Inc. 5000 list of America's Fastest Growing Private Companies for 2017 and has been an Inman Innovator Award nominee for its advertising technology. For more information, visit www.adwerx.com. View original content:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/balistreri-real-estate-builds-listing-advertising-automation-program-powered-by-adwerx-enterprise-300603412.html SOURCE Adwerx [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [February 23, 2018] AmTrav Corporate Travel Enters the Minnesota Market MINNEAPOLIS, Feb. 23, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- AmTrav Corporate Travel, the only all-in-one alternative in business travel, announced today that TJ Salo has joined the Business Development team. An expert in corporate travel sales, TJ brings years of experience from companies such as Acendas and Sun Country Airlines. TJ will be focused on promoting AmTrav's all-in-one, easy-to-use travel management solution throughout Minnesota. Craig Fichtelberg, President of AmTrav, said, "We're excited that TJ will be exposing Minnesotabusinesses to the idea that there is a better, easier way to manage travel than the status quo." "I'm really fortunate to join the AmTrav team," said TJ. "Too many businesses have no idea there's an easier travel management solution out there. They've been stuck using what they've been using forever 'just because.' I'm excited to shed light on a better way!" For more details about AmTrav Corporate Travel, visit: https://www.amtrav.com. About AmTrav Corporate Travel AmTrav is a global business travel agency committed to eliminating the hassle of corporate travel. With a proprietary web-based booking tool and 24/7 in-house support team, AmTrav simplifies the booking process, reduces costs and solves travel problems. Stuck at the airport? Need to tweak hotel arrangements at the last minute? Whether it's 3 a.m. or 3 p.m., online or offline, AmTrav is there. All AmTrav agents are company employees and based in the US. Over the past 25 years, AmTrav and its sister company CheapAir have helped over three million people travel with ease. For more information, visit: https://www.amtrav.com. Contact: Cassie Sclafani (312) 525-9729 cassies@amtrav.com View original content with multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/amtrav-corporate-travel-enters-the-minnesota-market-300603446.html SOURCE AmTrav Corporate Travel [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [February 23, 2018] Government of Canada Supports Electric and Alternative Fuel Vehicle Infrastructure in B.C. BURNABY, BC, Feb. 23, 2018 /CNW/ - Electric, hybrid and alternative fuel vehicles decrease greenhouse gas emissions and in some cases can significantly reduce fuel costs. Canada continues to make strategic investments to help Canadians make greener choices and to encourage widespread adoption of electric and alternative fuel vehicles. Member of Parliament for Burnaby NorthSeymour, Terry Beech, on behalf of Canada's Minister of Natural Resources, the Honourable Jim Carr, today announced a $4.3-million investment to expand British Columbia's electric vehicle charging and refuelling infrastructure. The Government of Canada will provide funding to three recipients to help Canadians get into zero-emission vehicles and use low-carbon fuels: British Columbia Institute of Technology will demonstrate Level 2 electric vehicle (EV) charging stations in urban areas and commercial parking lots that make better use of the grid's existing electrical capacity. Additionally, it will develop a way to control and monitor electric vehicle chargers from different vendors. Hydrogen Technology & Energy Corporation (HTEC) will install a retail hydrogen fuelling station in the Vancouver area, part of a six-station network it is building in B.C.'s Lower Mainland and Victoria to encourage uptake of more hydrogen-fuelled vehicles. area, part of a six-station network it is building in B.C.'s Lower Mainland and to encourage uptake of more hydrogen-fuelled vehicles. B.C. Hydro will demonstrate an innovative Level 2 EV charger for use in multi-unit residential, commercial and municipal buildings. It will also deploy 21 Level 3 EV fast chargers across the province to further Canada's vision for a coast-to-coast network. This investment builds on the Government's $182.5-million total invetment to grow Canada's electric and alternative fuel vehicle infrastructure so that using electric and alternative fuel vehicles is easier and more convenient for Canadians. In addition, the Province of British Columbia's Clean Energy Vehicle (CEV) Program is providing $1.4 million to support the HTEC and BC Hydro projects. Through Canada's national energy dialogue, Generation Energy, Canadians made it clear that the transition to electric vehicles and lower-carbon fossil fuel alternatives is not a luxury but a necessity for Canada's low-carbon future. Our government continues to support green infrastructure projects that will create jobs, advance Canada's clean future and help us realize our domestic and international climate change goals. Quotes "Building green infrastructure paves the way to a low-carbon future by reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Our government is proud to make investments that will reduce costs and address potential hurdles for the deployment of next-generation electric vehicle charging infrastructure in urban areas." Terry Beech, Member of Parliament for Burnaby NorthSeymour "We appreciate the federal government's continuing support to increase the adoption of electric and hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. Together, we are making zero-emission transportation more accessible and affordable by supporting innovation, deploying infrastructure and helping British Columbians benefit from lower maintenance and fuel costs." Michelle Mungall, B.C. Minister of Energy, Mines and Petroleum Resources "This funding is an important step in the evolution of the British Columbia Institute of Technology Energy OASIS project and an investment in our sustainable transportation future. The BCIT Smart Microgrid Applied Research Team is proud to be leading first-in-Canada applied research solutions that will reduce barriers to the adoption of electric vehicles." Kim Dotto, Dean, Applied Research, British Columbia Institute of Technology "Zero-emission, hydrogen-fuelled fuel cell electric vehicles are entering markets globally and will help Canada meets its clean air and carbon emission reduction targets. HTEC is proud to be working with partners like the Government of Canada to build out B.C.'s retail hydrogen refuelling network and support initial FCEV rollouts." Colin Armstrong, President and CEO, Hydrogen Technology & Energy Corporation Related Links Alternative Fuelling Station Locator map Go Green With Electric Vehicles Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Demonstrations Generation Energy British Columbia Clean Energy Vehicle Program 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 [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [February 23, 2018] Prince George Receives Foreign Trade Zone Designation and Investment in Clean Tech Sector Foreign Trade Zone announcement and clean technology funding will help businesses facilitate exports and create jobs for the middle class PRINCE GEORGE, BC, Feb. 23, 2018 /CNW/ - Small- and medium-sized enterprises in Prince George will benefit from new jobs and business opportunities thanks to two announcements made today designating the city as a Foreign Trade Zone (FTZ) point, as well as an investment supporting the clean technology sector. The FTZ Point designation was announced today by Pamela Goldsmith-Jones, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of International Trade, on behalf of the Honourable Navdeep Bains, Minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development and Minister responsible for Western Economic Diversification Canada, at the Wood Innovation and Design Centre. The FTZ Point will promote northern BC as a hub for international trade and attract new investors by leveraging its location in North America, as well as its direct access to the United States and its solid manufacturing base to attract new investors. Parliamentary Secretary Goldsmith-Jones also announced federal funding of $335,566 for the City of Prince George to develop a clean technology cluster. This funding is being delivered through Western Economic Diversification Canada. Designating Prince George as an FTZ Point and investing in clean technology aligns with the Government of Canada's priorities to help businesses compete in international markets and global value chains, while also supporting the Government's Innovation and Skills Plan to create well-paying jobs for the middle class. Quick Facts With a population of over 70,000, Prince George is the largest city in one of the fastest growing regions in Canada . is the largest city in one of the fastest growing regions in . The city's skilled workforce and diversified businesssectors offers a range of opportunities for new business investment across the expanding economy. Prince George is the supply and service center for business, industry, transportation, healthcare, education and culture for a region of over 320,000 people. is the supply and service center for business, industry, transportation, healthcare, education and culture for a region of over 320,000 people. 70 per cent of all proposed capital investments in BC are expected to occur in northern BC. A cluster is an area of business activity containing large and small companies and other innovation actors that helps attract foreign investment in Canada . They can create supply-chain benefits, increase collaboration, and drive competition and business specialization. Quotes "As a trading nation, Canada recognizes the strong connection between trade and well-paying jobs. We are proud to designate Prince George as a Foreign Trade Zone and to support its clean tech sector because we know a clean environment and a strong economy go hand in hand. Today's announcement demonstrates our government's commitment to creating well-paying middle class jobs, growing the economy while protecting the environment." - Pamela Goldsmith-Jones, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of International Trade "As a critical transportation hub and one of Canada's fastest-growing mid-sized cities, Prince George is well-positioned to diversify and expand its trade relationships to create more good jobs in the north. Through our recent mission to Asia, export development assistance for small and medium-sized businesses and capacity-building through tech accelerators and other programs, your provincial government will continue to support Prince George amid the exciting opportunities coming out of today's announcement." - The Honourable George Chow, Minister of State for Trade "I would like to express Council's gratitude to the Government of Canada for designating Prince George as Canada's western-most Foreign Trade Zone. We also thank the Province of BC for their commitment and support in this achievement. Having a local Foreign Trade Zone gives our businesses access to important trade programs which will help them to compete better internationally. Council also thanks the Government of Canada for investing in the development of clean technology here in Northern BC. Enhancing our clean tech sector will increase Prince George's capacity to develop new, environmentally friendly tech products and services, which are as good for our economy as they are for the environment. As well, Council would like to acknowledge the City's Economic Development Division's excellent work in achieving both of these accomplishments." - His Worship Lyn Hall, Mayor, City of Prince George Additional Links Information on Foreign Trade Zones (Department of Finance Canada) Stay Connected Follow us on Twitter: @WD_Canada, @ISED_CA WD Homepage WD Toll-Free Number: 1-888-338-WEST (9378) TTY (telecommunications device for the hearing impaired): 1-877-303-3388 IF THERE IS A DISCREPANCY BETWEEN ANY PRINTED VERSION AND THE ELECTRONIC VERSION OF THIS NEWS RELEASE, THE ELECTRONIC VERSION WILL PREVAIL SOURCE Western Economic Diversification Canada [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [February 23, 2018] QTS Announces 2018 Annual Meeting of Stockholders OVERLAND PARK, Kan., Feb. 23, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- QTS Realty Trust (NYSE: QTS), a leading provider of software-defined and mega-scale data center solutions, announced today that it will hold its 2018 Annual Meeting of Stockholders at 8:00 a.m. Central Time (9:00 a.m. Eastern Time), on May 3, 2018. The Annual Meeting will be held at QTS' corporate headquarters, located at 12851 Foster Street, Overland Park, Kansas 66213. Stockholders of record as of the close of business on March 9, 2018 will be entitled to notice of, and to vote at, the Annual Meeting. About QTS QTS Realty Trust, Inc (NYSE: QTS) is a leading provider of data center solutions across a diverse footprint spanning more than 6 million square feet of owned mega scale data center space throughout North America. Through its software-defined technology platform, QTS is able to deliver secure, compliant infrastructure solutions, robust connectivity and premium customer service to more than 1,100 leading hyperscale technology companies, enterprises, and government entities. Visit QTS at www.qtsdatacenters.com, call toll-free 877.QTS.DATA or follow on Twitter @DataCenters_QTS. Investor Relations Contact: Stephen Douglas, VP Investor Relations and Strategic Planning QTS Realty Trust ir@qtsdatacenters.com Media Contact: Carter B. Cromley (703) 861-8245 carter.cromley@qtsdatacenters.com View original content with multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/qts-announces-2018-annual-meeting-of-stockholders-300602144.html SOURCE QTS Realty Trust, Inc. [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] [February 23, 2018] ImageWare Showcases Award-Winning Biometric Cybersecurity Solutions at Mobile World Congress SAN DIEGO, Feb. 23, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- ImageWare Systems, Inc. (OTCQB:IWSY), a leader in mobile and cloud-based, multi-modal biometric cybersecurity solutions, announces today that it will demonstrate its award-winning GoVerifyID products at Mobile World Congress 2018 in Barcelona, Spain from February 26 to March 1. Mobile World Congress is the worlds largest gathering for the mobile industry with over 108,000 attendees from 200+ countries, more than 2300 exhibitors, and hundreds of speakers. ImageWare is exhibiting at Mobile World Congress for the third year, expanding its presence with additional strategic partners including presence in the booths of both Fujitsu and SAP this year. As an SAP Technology Partner, ImageWare is showcasing GoVerifyID Enterprise Suite, its biometric user authentication solution, including seamless integration with SAP and other enterprise systems, in SAPs booth, number 3N31 in Hall 3. ImageWare will demonstrate how its technology eliminates the need for passwords, tokens, and PINs with the latest in turnkey biometric user authentication and flexibility for nearly any use case. ImageWare will also present How to Protect Your SAP Systems with Strong Multi-Factor Authentication on Wednesday, February 28th at 10:40 11:00 AM in the SAP Booth. Jim Miller, Chairman and CEO of ImageWare Systems said, ImageWare is pleased to be featuring GoVerifyID, our patented and award-winning multi-modal biometric user authentication technology, with SAP again this year. Customers manage their critical corporate data with SAP and ImageWare provides the ultimate in cybersecurity for SAP systems. Our seamless integration with SAP Cloud, SAP Applications, and SAP Single Sign-On enables enterprises to protect their customers privacy and secure their corporate data. We look forward to providing GoVerifyID to new and existing SAP customers worldwide. ImageWares biometric technology which is integrated as part of Fujitsus Biometric-as-a-Service platform will also be featured by Fujitsu, an ImageWare global strategic partner. The Biometric-as-a-Service offering is a mobile and cloud-based multi-modal biometric as a service platform which allows organizations to conveniently deploy biometric authentication for protection against increasingly complex security risks. Demonstrations of this technology will be provided in Fujitsus booth, number 5A80 in Hall 5. Robert Brown, VP of Global Strategic Partners at ImageWare stated, ImageWares ultra-scalable, multi-odal biometric authentication technology, GoVerifyID, is uniquely qualified to address the cybersecurity requirements for organizations with millions or even hundreds of millions of users, such as Internet Service Providers (ISPs), Managed Security Service Providers (MSSPs), and Internet of Things (IoT) service providers, as well as other organizations in the Telecommunications, Financial Services, Healthcare, Retail, and eCommerce industries. GoVerifyID combines the frictionless ease-of-use required for consumers with government-class security from ImageWares heritage along with versatile, turnkey solutions to meet the needs for workforces and consumers alike. To schedule a meeting with ImageWare executives at Mobile World Congress, or schedule a conference call, go to https://info.iwsinc.com/schedule-meeting-at-mwc2018 . About ImageWare Systems, Inc. ImageWare Systems, Inc. is a leading developer of mobile and cloud-based identity management solutions, providing patented biometric authentication solutions for the enterprise. The company delivers next-generation biometrics as an interactive and scalable cloud-based solution. ImageWare brings together cloud and mobile technology to offer multi-factor authentication for smartphone users, for the enterprise, and across industries. ImageWares products support multi-modal biometric authentication including, but not limited to, face, voice, fingerprint, iris, palm, and more. All the biometrics can be combined with or used as replacements for authentication and access control tools, including tokens, digital certificates, passwords, and PINS, to provide the ultimate level of assurance, accountability, and ease of use for corporate networks, web applications, mobile devices, and PC desktop environments. ImageWare is headquartered in San Diego, California, with offices in Portland, Oregon, Ottawa, Ontario, and Mexico City, Mexico. To learn more about ImageWare, visit iwsinc.com; follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Facebook. Forward Looking Statements Any statements contained in this document that are not historical facts are forward-looking statements as defined in the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Words such as anticipate, believe, estimate, expect, forecast, intend, may, plan, project, predict, if, should and will and similar expressions as they relate to ImageWare Systems, Inc. are intended to identify such forward-looking statements. ImageWare may from time to time update publicly announced projections, but it is not obligated to do so. Any projections of future results of operations should not be construed in any manner as a guarantee that such results will in fact occur. These projections are subject to change and could differ materially from final reported results. For a discussion of such risks and uncertainties, see Risk Factors in ImageWares Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2016 and its other reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the dates on which they are made. Investor Relations Contact: Harvey Bibicoff, CEO Bibicoff + MacInnis, Inc. 818.379.8500 harvey@bibimac.com [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] INVESTOR ALERT: Levi & Korsinsky, LLP Reminds Investors of an Investigation Involving Possible Securities Fraud Violations by the Board of Directors of HSBC Holdings plc Levi & Korsinsky announces it has commenced an investigation of HSBC Holdings plc (NYSE: HSBC) concerning possible violations of federal securities laws. On February 20, 2018, HSBC announced full-year profit that fell below analyst expectations. HSBC's bad loan charges were increased to $1.77 billion for the year, due in part to debt related to Steinhoof International Holdings N.V., which announced significant account irregularities in December 2017 and is restructuring, and Carillion plc, which entered liquidation proceedings in January 2018. HSBC advised investors it would delay a share buyback program while raising additional debt in the first half of 2018. To obtain additional information, go o: http://www.zlkdocs.com/HSBC-Info-Request-Form-6484 or contact Joseph E. Levi, Esq. either via email at jlevi@levikorsinsky.com or by telephone at (212) 363-7500, toll-free: (877) 363-5972. Levi & Korsinsky is a national firm with offices in New York, California, Connecticut and Washington D.C. The firm's attorneys have extensive expertise in prosecuting securities litigation involving financial fraud, representing investors throughout the nation in securities and shareholder lawsuits. Attorney advertising. 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Try visiting our homepage or using the search function in our menu. EK Water Blocks has a habit of supporting every model of graphics card that Nvidia and AMD push out the door, but we can honestly say we didnt see this one coming. EK Water Blocks today revealed a full-cover water block for Nvidias Volta-powered Titan V workhorse. Nvidias Titan V, which debuted in December 2017, is the most powerful GPU made to date. It boasts an incredible 110 teraflops of compute power, which is nine times more powerful than the previous flagship GPU, the Titan Xp, at deep learning tasks. Nvidias Titan lineup was never meant for gamers, but that didnt stop them from snatching up these $1,000+ graphics processing beasts. The Titan V, however, commands a much higher $3,000 price tag, so we dont think many gamers have dropped three stacks for this upgrade. The lack of gamers with Titan V cards didnt stop EK Water Blocks from doing what it does best, though. EKWBs Titan V water block features a full-cover design that makes direct contact with all of the card's heat-generating components, including the GPU die, the voltage regulation modules (VRM), and the 12GB of HBM2 memory. The water block also features EKWBs high-flow central inlet split-flow cooling engine, which directs fluid over these components to keep them cool. EKWB must believe there is a reasonably large audience interested in water cooling Nvidias flagship GPU. The company doesnt always offer color choices for low-volume parts, but the Titan V water block is available in two variants. EKWB offers the block with a black POM acetal top and, for those who prefer to see the fluid pass through their components, a clear acrylic version. Both options feature nickel-plated electrolytic copper bases. The company doesnt offer a bare copper option. Each Titan V water block also includes a single-slot bracket to transform it into a single-slot graphics card. EKWBs Titan V water blocks are available now for $149 through the EK Webshop and the companys partner reseller network. EKWB also offers backplates to complement the water blocks. The backplates are available in black for $38 and nickel-plated for $46. EKWB said the backplates arent ready to ship yet, but the black version should go out on February 27, and the nickel version should ship on March 5. Google revealed that its augmented reality developer kit, ARCore, is no longer in beta. The company released ARCore 1.0, and it opened the door for developers to submit AR apps to the Google Play Store. The company also revealed that it would be bringing machine learning technology to our daily lives in the coming weeks by embedding Google Lens technology into Google Photos. Last summer, Google revealed ARCore, which offered high-fidelity AR experiences on high-end Android smartphones. The ARCore platform enables Tango-like spatial tracking on handheld devices without the need for multiple cameras to infer depth. In August, when Google released the first iteration of ARCore, the company said the platform was strictly experimental, which meant that software authored with the ARCore developer kit would not be eligible for distribution through the Google Play Store. Further, you would have needed a Google Pixel, Google Pixel XL, or Samsung S8 to take advantage of ARCores features. In the months following the original ARCore release, Google doubled down on the platform. In December, the company announced that it would be shutting down Project Tango to put all its attention on ARCore. In December, hardware support for Googles ARCore remained limited to Googles Pixel phones (now with Pixel 2 support) and Samsungs Galaxy S8 lineup. However, the company said that soon more than 100 million smartphones would have access to ARCore. With todays release of ARCore 1.0, Google made good on that promise. ARCore 1.0 supports 13 different Android models, including LGs V30 and V30+, the Asus Zenfone AR, and OnePluss OnePlus 5. The new version also now supports Samsungs older Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge smartphones. Google also said that ARCore would support future flagship phones from all the usual suspects. Developer Support Google launched ARCore with a two-pronged approach. In addition to expanding the list of compatible hardware, the company is also trying to make it easier for developers to build content for the platform. Google said that it improved ARCores environmental understanding, which makes placing virtual assets easier and more reliable than in previous builds. Google also added ARCore support to the Android Studio Beta Emulator, which enables developers to test their AR creations in a test environment. When Google released ARCore, developers could experiment with creating AR experiences, but they could not distribute them. Now that ARCore 1.0 is available, Google has opened the doors for AR app submissions to the Google Play Store. Google is even looking at ways to offer the ARCore platform to developers in China who wouldnt normally have access to Googles infrastructure. The company said that its working with Huawei, Xiaomi, and Samsung to help them distribute AR apps on the platforms available in China. Google Photos With Lens Somewhat lost in this large announcement is the fact that the new version of Google Photos incorporates Google Lens machine learning technology. With Lens in Google Photos, your smartphone will be able to infer information from the photos you take, such as identifying animal breeds and classifying text thats been photographed. Google said that it would push the Google Photos update to all English-speaking users on Android and iOS in the coming weeks. The company also announced that compatible flagship devices would also receive a Lens-enhanced Google Assistant app. In a response to a U.S. government inquiry on the Meltdown/Spectre incident, Intel and other companies agreed that embargoing the disclosure of the vulnerabilities was the correct choice. The Meltdown/Spectre incident brought the tech industrys disclosure process for security issues to the publics attention. As we reported before, the vulnerabilities were discovered by Googles Project Zero research team. A multi-company initiative to fix them began in June 2017. To ensure there was enough time to develop fixes, the companies agreed to a non-disclosure policy that set the official reveal of the vulnerabilities on January 9. However, the story was leaked earlier, which ultimately forced the reveal to occur on January 3. The U.S. government was not among those with advance knowledge of the vulnerabilities--it learned of them when the public did. Congress began an inquiry into the incident and sent letters to companies such as Intel, Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, AMD, and Arm. The letter is published here and contains nine questions. The ones of particular interest are why the companies chose to embargo information about the vulnerabilities and whether the companies analyzed the risk of the vulnerabilities to U.S. infrastructure or the risk of delaying disclosure. The response letters from the companies have been published, and they give an interesting view into the lead up to the Meltdown/Spectre incident. They make it pretty clear that Google began the initiative by disclosing the vulnerabilities to other companies, all of which collectively agreed to its standard policy, which provides a 90-day window for fixes to be developed before it makes a public disclosure. Due to the extent of the problem, the companies and Google agreed to extend the period to reach the originally intended disclosure date of January 9. The focus will of course be on Intels letter. The company said it believes it acted correctly by maintaining, and later extending, the embargo. Its reasoning was that limited disclosure would allow for fixes to be developed, while public disclosure would only have increased the speed with which attackers could develop exploits, potentially outpacing the companies as they scrambled to patch the vulnerabilities. Intel also didnt believe that Meltdown/Spectre was a risk to the U.S. infrastructure. The company said there was no evidence that the vulnerabilities had been exploited and that any exploit code would have to be run locally. Because Intel understood that most U.S. infrastructure uses embedded systems that run embedded code, have no access to the internet, and cannot run multiple programs simultaneously, it did not see Meltdown/Spectre as a threat in that area. Intel did not say why it chose not to disclose the vulnerabilities to the U.S. government, but it did admit to disclosing the issues to some partners, however. In late January, rumors circulated that Intel had discussed the vulnerabilities during the embargo with Chinese firms that are closely connected to the Chinese government, but Intel did not name any specific firms in its letter. The response from Google is also interesting. The company sees its real responsibility as a neutral player that finds and notifies other companies of their vulnerabilities. The 90-day window is a policy that other companies can choose whether or not to follow. The decision on whether or not to disclose with the U.S. government, or any other parties, is left to them. Google is straightforward in its response: they dont analyze the risk from others vulnerabilities. This response is a little different from the other software companies which effectively point fingers at the chipmakers. AMD's and Arms responses are predictable. AMD agreed to Googles deadlines and did not disclose the vulnerabilities to any parties. Its letter makes few references to the Spectre vulnerabilities, which AMD has admitted it is vulnerable to. Arm points out that its business model includes direct IP licensing and architecture IP licensing, but not chipmaking. Hence, the company has partial responsibility for chips that license its designs, but it has no ability to fix them. Arm said it worked with its customers on the issue. Clearly, Intel continues to be the center of attention in the ongoing Meltdown/Spectre issue. Why it chose not to disclose with the U.S. government is up for question. Perhaps it was because the company thought it was useless to do so without having a fix in place. Its easy to place blame on Intel, but lets not forget that AMD and Arm CPUs are both partially involved in this incident too, and neither of them chose to disclose the vulnerabilities either. One day after the FCCs formal repeal of net neutrality regulation was published, a coalition of states has re-filed its lawsuit challenging the order. On February 22, the FCC published its formal action, the Restoring Internet Freedom Order, for repealing Obama-era net neutrality regulations. It follows the FCCs December 14 vote to roll back Title II classification for ISPs. The order will come into effect on April 23 and will effectively remove direct government oversight and regulation of ISPs, allowing them to use unfair tactics in their business. Among the first initiatives to oppose the repeal was a lawsuit filed by a coalition of 22 states and Washington DC. The initial petition was just a first step in the coalition's attempt to appeal the FCCs decision. With the repeal now formalized as the Restoring Internet Freedom Order, the coalition has re-filed its petition to formally commence their lawsuit against the Federal Communications Commissions illegal rollback of net neutrality. The coalition, which includes Attorneys General from New York, California, and Massachusetts, among others, is led by New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman, who was an active opponent of the repeal during the lead up to the December 14 vote. His office published the following statement on the petition: An open internet, and the free exchange of ideas it allows, is critical to our democratic process. Repealing net neutrality will allow internet service providers to put corporate profits over consumers by controlling what we see, do, and say online. Consumers and businesses in New York and across the country have the right to a free and open internet, and our coalition of Attorneys General wont stop fighting to protect that right. The coalitions lawsuit wasnt the only action opposing the FCCs decision. In the wake of the vote, many initiatives were started to preserve net neutrality. Montana was the first to implement state-level net-neutrality regulation by baring non-net-neutral ISPs from government contracts. This was followed by similar actions in New York and New Jersey. The California Senate passed a bill to illegalize non-net-neutral practices among ISPs within the state, but the EFF advised that it will likely be overruled by federal courts. Senate Democrats, meanwhile, have been attempting to assemble the 51 majority they need to pass a repeal of the FCCs order. To go into effect, though, the act would also have to pass in the House of Representatives, where it has a slim chance of doing so. Show-Me Another Lady In The Drink And Rescued By KCFD Kansas City World Music Sympathetic Vibrations | The World is Your Classroom As those who have studied any academic, cultural or musical discipline know well, immersion can be the one of the best teachers in the world. There is perhaps no better local example of that idea than Beau Bledsoe, founder and artistic director of Ensemble Iberica - a group of Kansas City musicians exploring music from Portugal and Spain with a revolving door of international guest musicians. Kansas Prank Crackdown Kansas House passes bill increasing penalties for swatting after fatal shooting TOPEKA, Kan. - On Thursday evening, Kansas lawmakers passed a bill unanimously in the House of Representatives that would increase the penalties on swatting calls. This comes after at least two serious swatting incidents in the state recently. House Bill 2581 clarifies the crime as making an unlawful request for emergency service assistance. Show-Me Tough Talk Unchecked House Speaker: No punishment for Missouri lawmaker who called for a hanging JEFFERSON CITY * The leader of the Missouri House said Thursday he has no plans to penalize a lawmaker who called for a hanging last year after vandals defaced a Confederate monument. House Speaker Todd Richardson, R-Poplar Bluff, told reporters that Rep. Warren Love's comments were inappropriate, but said there would be no further action from his office. Kansas City Highway Death Report KC police urging drivers, pedestrians to be aware on metro highway seeing numerous auto-ped deaths KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- KC police officers have seen more than their fair share of auto-pedestrian crashes, and 71 Highway is a frequent destination for those types of crashes, Sgt. Bill Mahoney said. "I think we're all working on trying to come up with a solution, but I don't think there is just one," Mahoney said. Talking Power Play Local Impact Opinion: Dismantling the Clean Power Plan will cost Missouri, Kansas jobs - Kansas City Business Journal The Clean Power Plan is one of the more important and far-reaching economic growth measures enacted by our federal government in the past several decades. It is also our country's first commitment to reduce the output of carbon emissions. Technically, the Clean Power Plan set the first limits on carbon pollution from U.S. Say Hello To Hipster Italian Michael and Nancy Smith to Open Farina, a Rustic Italian Restaurant in the Crossroads Last year, James Beard Award-winning chef Michael Smith decided the time was right to turn his namesake fine-dining restaurant into a modern Italian concept on its tenth anniversary. Now, Smith and his wife and managing partner, Nancy, are taking things a step further by opening a totally new Italian-inspired concept, Farina by Michael Smith, to accompany their colorful tapas spot, Extra Virgin. Getting Over Glory Days Kansas City Royals fans okay with not giving Eric Hosmer long-term deal Eric Hosmer is going to be the talk of the Kansas City Royals for awhile, even though he's no longer with the team. There were reports that surfaced after he signed with the Padres that the Royals only offered five years for $100 million. It's Friday and that means we remind ourthatand inspires our morning look at the top local news links that areas interesting.Take a peek:is the song of the day and this is thefor right now . . . Kansas City Slip & Fall FAIL Fact vs. fiction: Liability and icy sidewalks KANSAS CITY, Mo. - A slew of ice and sleet left some metro sidewalks a little slippery this week. "That's one of the worst things that I run across, is not being able to see and then having people that are not clearing the sidewalks or not putting any salt down," John Sobaski, who is blind and relies on sidewalks to get around, said. Dead-Tree Gun Crime Rage Alleged crime spree, including two slayings, involved six KC-area people and an AR-15 An alleged crime spree, including two slayings, has led to a federal indictment of seven people, including six from the Kansas City area. The indictment includes two capital murder charges. Shawn Burkhalter, 29, of Kansas City and Joshua Nesbitt, 23, of Crowder, Miss., both face two counts of using a firearm to commit murder in relation to a drug-trafficking crime, according to a release issued Thursday by the U.S. KCMO Get Out Of Jail Card Fugazi KCMO woman sentenced for forging document ordering inmate's release KANSAS CITY, Mo. - A Kansas City, Missouri, woman has been sentenced for forging a court order for the release of another inmate. Margie P. Shephard, 53, was sentenced to three years and five months for obstruction of justice. Shephard admitted to fabricating the document while she was incarcerated on other charges at Federal Prison Camp-Bryan in Bryan, Texas. Brookside Crook In Action Brookside business owner searching for thief caught on camera stealing hundreds of dollars in merchandise KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- A shoplifter swiped hundreds of dollars of clothes and accessories from the shelves of a Brookside business, and it was all caught on camera. "$300 here and $500 there and $600 here and $50 here -- it adds up to a lot of money," said Mindy Diaz, the owner of Design in the City. Local Foodie Profile Novel restaurant moves to Crossroads Arts District, will 'reinvent ourselves' - Kansas City Business Journal Novel's owners are embarking on a new vision for the restaurant and a new space in the Crossroads Arts District. The restaurant outgrew its space at 815 W. 17th St., a quaint, two-story house on Kansas City's Westside, co-owner and chef Ryan Brazeal told the Kansas City Business Journal. Local Hipsters Weekend Agenda Victoria Afternoon Tea & Other Weekend Possibilities The Ainsworth (11563 Ash Street, Leawood, Kansas) hosts The Bumble Games from 8 to 10:30 p.m. Friday night. It's a beer pong tournament with two drinks included ($15). This is the only local outpost for the restaurant and bar, which has locations in New Jersey and New York City, and is known for its macaroni-and-cheese burger. Still Waiting For Bubba Comeback Kansas City Royals Bubba Starling looks to rewrite his story Let's go back to the 2011 MLB Amateur Draft. That year, players like Francisco Lindor, George Springer, Sonny Gray, and the late Jose Fernandez were taken during that draft. Meanwhile, with the fifth overall selection, the Kansas City Royals selected.... Bubba Starling. There was a time when Starling was considered a legitimate top prospect. Tonight we check some of the top local news links along withand her continued party life well into middle-age.Take a look:And this isfor tonight . . . Real talk informed by some of the nicer GOP politicos who read this blog for a laugh: Putting Guv Lite Mike Parson in charge is looking like a very good option or at least easier than war with national media over the sordid topic of alleged revenge porn. Right now there aren't many politicos of any substance rallying to defend embattled Guv Eric Greitens.His support mostly comes from anonymous online trolls and the far, far right wing of the GOP.Fact is, the Republican Party credentials of Guv Greitens have always been suspect and he has consistently challenged and bad-mouthed his GOP colleagues.The problem with an outsider running on good looks and stupid commercials is that there's very little political infrastructure to support an elected official in a time of crisis.And so, the Guv and his paid shills are firing away and losing a social media battle against much more committed critics as most establishment Missouri Republicans seem content to watch the hot mess from the sidelines and let the shining political star burn out.We'll wait and see . . . In the meantime, here are some of the best news links on the topic . . .Developing . . . Since that fateful conflict, JoCo actually came out in full force support for its burgeoning Indian community and a working-class white dude hero emerged from the incident. IS JOCO MORE TOLERANT IN THE AFTERMATH OF ALLEGED HATE CRIME VIOLENCE??? A year ago today Kansas City media was struggling to sort out the deets of a horrific barroom shooting.Info from witnesses eventually implicated a down-on-his-luck barfly espousing hateful talk.And so because some haters are still waiting on the wall that Mexico isn't going to pay for, we ask . . .It's a nice thought now that we understand Russian bots and their unwitting loser friends are responsible for most of the angry, racist online rhetoric that isn't coming directly fromJoking. Check the links . . .Developing . . . The Missouri Catholic Conference (MCC) is asking people to contact their U.S. senators and congressional representatives to pass the DREAM Act. The DREAM Act is a proposal brought up in the past in Congress the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act which would provide a path to citizenship for people brought to the United States as minors without documentation. "It is not the fault of these young people that they were brought to this country by their parents when they were small children," the public policy agency of the state's Catholic bishops said in a statement in its recent Good News publication. "Most have known no other country but the United States. These young people are now contributing to the vibrancy of life here in Missouri and throughout the United States in their professional pursuits and involvement in local communities and churches." The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops announced a "National Catholic Call-In Day to Protect Dreamers" Feb. 26. The Missouri Catholic Conference provides congressional contact information in an action alert on its website, mocatholic.org. One of the largest faith communities in the state is soon to start a push for illegal alien/immigrant amnesty.Take a look:Deets . . .########Developing . . . TEAM SLY WANTS TO TAKEOVER THE 3RD DISTRICT AT-LARGE AND THREATENS A COUNCIL RUN!!! The point here is that a formidable candidate with an impressive resume and family name would do well in this spot . . . And with no clear leader in the contest for mayor, more and more people are pushing Councilman Lucas. While the antics of high-powered and highly paid lawyers might not improve the lot for the 3rd . . . As always it's important to understand that every election contest in KCMO is decided BEFORE a single ballot is cast. UPDATE: Now, some insiders say that Mayor Sly's policy director is running in the 6th At-large which would keep the level of "booshie" in the 3rd District at a reasonable level and also class up the Southland!!! Nevertheless, those wanting Council Dude Quinton to run for mayor continue their crusade. Here's some insider gossip that our blog community thrives on as Kansas City politics is nothing more than a game of musical chairs.Just a bit of fun . . .Our blog community recently intercepted word ofengaged in council ambitions along with all of the enthusiastic politicos celebrating the 1st Anniversary ofHer fangirls are now becoming cheerleaders for a campaign throughout social media . . . Of course we're talking an At-Large run because it might be suicide for socialite buddies to go door-to-door in the rougher parts of this urban council district.But I digress . . .Developing . . . Next year, Greece and Japan will be celebrating a relationship that started 120 years ago. Combined with the 2020 Olympic Games to be held in Tokyo, this is a unique opportunity for Greece to promote itself in the country of the Rising Sun, according to Japanese Ambassador to Greece Yasuhiro Shimizu. "I encourage your government to do more in Japan" he underlines in an interview for Capital.gr and reveals that Japanese companies are looking for investment opportunities in Greece, but underlines that the Greek government will have to resolve a number of issues such as bureaucracy and the tax system in order to convince them. Especially about tourism he notes: "In the 80s and in the 90s the number of Japanese tourists visiting Greece was about 150,000 on a yearly basis. But now this number has dropped to 10,000. One reason could be due to the negative image Japanese people having on the country. The vast majority of Japanese people believe that Greece is a poor country, suffered much by the refugee problem and some believe that amongst the refugees there could be some terrorists coming from the Islamic State. As you understand, it does not reflect the reality of Greece. So the Greek government should correct this image. In 2014, the Greek government shutdown the tourism bureau in Tokyo. If the office was to reopen and tourism was promoted then there would be a good chance for tourism from Japan to be boosted. In contrast to Greece, Croatia for instance is attracting 150,000 Japanese tourists every year. The thing is that Croatia is intensely promoting tourism in Tokyo. Last year Greece attracted around 30 million tourists. So in this context, maybe some Greek businessmen believe that they dont need tourism from Japan. But I believe this is wrong. You have a lot of people coming just in summertime. While Japanese tourists travel all year around and not just in summer. For instance we have a long vacation around New Years period, then around February - March many students visit overseas before their graduation from their schools in March. Then we have the "golden week" end of April beginning of May when they also travel and then theres the "silver week" end of September beginning of October." Read full interview here. RELATED TOPICS: Greece, Greek tourism news, Tourism in Greece, Greek islands, Hotels in Greece, Travel to Greece, Greek destinations , Greek travel market, Greek tourism statistics, Greek tourism report Source: capital.gr This breathtaking region is most famous for its several Byzantine churches with the impressive architecture and the valuable frescoes The Pantanassa Monastery is situated in Mystras, an archaeological site close to Sparti, in the region of Laconia. The Castle Town of Mystras was very powerful in the Byzantine era and in the last decades of the Byzantine period this was said to be the second most important town after Constantinople. This breathtaking region is most famous for its several Byzantine churches with the impressive architecture and the valuable frescoes. Below the Medieval Castle, a new village has been constructed and is now a World Heritage Site, visited by thousands of tourists all year round. When you walk downhill under almond trees to Pantanassa, you witness a domed monastery where the frescos fill the arched spaces with stunning colours. This holy monastery was founded by a chief minister of the late Byzantine Despotate of the Morea, Giannis Frankopoulos, and was dedicated in September 1428. It is the only monastery on the site still permanently inhabited. Today it is inhabited by nuns providing wonderful hospitality to their visitors. Its beautifully ornate stone-carved facade is of particular architectural note. Pantanassa Monastery is also incuded in the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Mystras. The date of the churchs construction, 1428, was recorded in a lost inscription that had been read by the abbot Fourmont in 1730. The church and its bell tower reflect a special combination of Byzantine and gothic styles. As soon as you arrive here you feel a strong spiritual energy, which brings peace and calm to the body, mind and soul. Travel to Mystras by bus: There are daily buses from Athens to Mystras via Sparti. The bus trip is about 3 hours from Athens to Sparti and 15 min from Sparti to Mystras (change of bus). Buses from Athens to Mystras/Sparti depart from Kifissos KTEL Bus Station. Buses from Sparti to Mystras are very frequent and available all day long. Travel to Mystras by car: To go from Athens to Mystras by car, you follow the National Highway Athens-Tripoli and at the junction of Tripoli, you follow the signs to Sparti. After you pass Sparti, you follow the signs to Mystras. The road trip from Athens to Mystras is about 3 hours. Read more here. RELATED TOPICS: Greece, Greek tourism news, Tourism in Greece, Greek islands, Hotels in Greece, Travel to Greece, Greek destinations , Greek travel market, Greek tourism statistics, Greek tourism report Photo Source: Wikimedia Commons Copyright: Ed89 License: CC-BY-SA Source: greekcitytimes.com The GCC Financial Forum, held February 20 and 21 in Manama, Bahrain, put digital transformation in the financial industry in the spotlight and reinforced the significance of pursuing a forward-thinking approach. Euromoney Conferences and the Bahrain Economic Development Board (EDB) welcomed Shaikh Ahmed bin Mohammed Al Khalifa, the Minister of Finance, Zayed R Alzayani, the Minister of Industry, Commerce and Tourism, and Rasheed Mohammed Al Maraj, the Governor of the Central Bank of Bahrain (CBB). Shaikh Ahmed gave an opening keynote interview and spoke about Bahrain's commitment to diversifying the local economy and continuously driving innovation across all key industries on its path towards Vision 2030. An important part of this endeavour has been the creation of a strong infrastructure and ecosystem for economic growth, aiming to maintain global competitiveness and further enhance the quality of life for Bahrainis. He underlined the importance of embracing new technologies to stay relevant, inspired by best practice approaches from around the world. Alzayani highlighted that creating a fertile business environment for investors is crucial to supporting the growth of the financial industry. The commercial registration portal Sijilat, launched in 2016, has already helped the country to achieve a substantial increase in inward FDI flows. He highlighted that this development is set to expedite Bahrains journey towards digital transformation by helping to attract more international companies and best practice approaches from around the world. Al Maraj said: What we have to keep in mind is that FinTech solutions have the potential to optimise cost structures by cutting out the middle man. We encourage all Bahraini financial institutions to take the leap and embrace the new technologies. The Central Bank of Bahrain is committed to not only keep up with the changes, but enable them for the benefit of our local economy and our people. This years agenda included two high-profile global speakers including, Mohamed A El-Erian, chief economic advisor at Allianz, who brought a global perspective to the conference. Lord Mervyn King, economist and Former Governor of the Bank of England, spoke about the global history of transformation in the banking sector, drawing a comparison to the technological innovation drive witnessed currently. Khalid Al Rumaihi, chief executive of the Bahrain EDB, said: It has been a privilege to co-host the GCC Financial Forum with Euromoney in Bahrain for the seventh year, bringing together some of the sectors leading minds to explore the challenges and opportunities ahead. This is a particularly interesting time for the financial services sector, which is on the cusp of significant disruptions and innovations, from AI and blockchain to the evolution and growth of mobile payment solutions and peer-to-peer funding. The conversations and announcements that have taken place over the past two days demonstrate that we have the talent, infrastructure, connectivity and supportive ecosystem in place in Bahrain and the GCC to embrace these opportunities and help shape the future of financial services globally. Mahmood H Alkooheji, chief executive officer of Mumtalakat, talked about the significance of finding new approaches to expanding and continuously reinvigorating their business model through fruitful partnerships and joint ventures for the benefit of the Bahraini economy. Looking back on the rapid development of the company, which saw the number of Mumtalakat portfolio companies more than double over the past years, Alkooheji underlined that despite this successful track record, he still sees significant potential for further growth, particularly in Bahrains thriving financial sector. The conference also featured a series of panels, the first of which focused on Innovation and the shape of the financial system of the future, bringing together speakers from Bank ABC Group, C5 Accelerate, Amazon Web Services and IBM. There was a lively debate on how the financial sector of the future will look in 20 years time, covering topics such as; cryptocurrency, big data, cloud computing, reg tech and artificial intelligence. The second panel focused on the fast-changing payments sector and gathered speakers from Mastercard, PayTabs, TransferWise and Tap who examined the future potential of the sector, looked at what will differentiate the winners from the losers in the payments space and considered the impact of Bitcoin and other digital currencies. The final panel, featuring participants from Finalytix, Trafigura, Beehive, and FinTech Consortium, explored the requirements for the creation of an innovation economy and covered topics such as data, privacy and security law to IoT, infrastructure and financing. Over the course of the past seven years, the GCC Financial Forum by Euromoney Conferences and co-hosted by the Bahrain EDB has developed into the regions leading platform for financial industry professionals to gather, network and debate crucial topics that shape the future of the financial system in the region. In 2018, the two-day event brought together more than 700 regional and international economists, policy makers, financiers and fintech leaders. The GCC Financial Forum 2018 closed with and culminated in the official opening of Bahrain FinTech Bay, which will provide the regions first dedicated ecosystem to nurture and develop new technologies that aim to revolutionise the delivery of financial services. TradeArabia News Service Muscat Bay, a joint venture between Saraya Holdings Oman and Omran, will be showcasing its award-winning residences at Omans leading luxury development, at a special five-day expo to be held in Kuwait starting from February 28. It will be home to 435 exclusive residential units, spacious hilltop palaces, stylish villas and duplexes as well as luxury Residences - all with attractive waterfront and mountainside views. The Muscat Bay activity will run from February 28 to March 4 at The Avenues Mall, Kuwait and will be hosted by a team from Muscat Bay and Al Saltana Real Estate, Muscat Bays premier real estate representative in Kuwait. A key resort village which, once completed, will be home to exclusive residential units in five freehold residential zones alongside two five-star hotels operated by the regions leading operator Jumeirah. Muscat Bays residences will include Zaha Parkland and Waterfront three- and four-bedroom villas, large duplexes and one- and two-bedroom Parkland Residences and Premium Waterfront and Parkland Residences. It is an integrated tourism complex (ITC) that has a freehold benefit open to all nationalities. According to Omani laws, foreign owners are allowed ownership of residential properties in these projects and attain the right to reside in the sultanate, alongside their family, for the entire period that they are in possession of the property. This offers an added value for investment at this leading project of Muscat Bay. Paul Jessup, the vice president of sales and marketing at Muscat Bay said it is a peaceful natural haven with award winning luxury residences that feature the serenity of nature practically at their doorstep. "More importantly, it is one of the only places in the sultanate, and the region as whole, that offers owners an escape from the stresses and strains of daily life alongside easy access to modern life. It is these very qualities that make the homes at Muscat Bay extremely attractive to buyers in Kuwait and the region alike," he added. Scheduled for a grand opening in 2017, the five star Jumeirah hotels form the major leisure components of Muscat Bay, providing their guests with a luxurious and relaxing home away from the day-to-day rigours of life, where the mountains meet the sea. In celebration of the imminent handover of Phase I residences, Muscat Bay will be launching an exclusive payment plan offer on a limited number of its freehold residences - for the Kuwaiti market. "The special payment plan, Your Space to Breathe, offers prospective owners the option of paying for the property in three easy steps; starting with 5 per cent at the time of reservation followed by 45 per cent at the time of handover or in three months, whichever is earlier. The balance payment of 50 per cent can be made, in 12 months from the second payment," explained Jessup. "This offer is valid on selected properties and will be treated on a first-come, first-served basis. Investors have the opportunity to earn rental yield with only 50 per cent of capital employed, which in turn allows them to double their revenue," he added. Jessup said: "We are excited to launch this exclusive promotion for only a limited number of units for our friends in Kuwait." "We already have a number of Kuwaiti buyers as part of our community and look forward to welcoming more to join us at Muscat Bay one of the regions most perfect natural beachfront escapes, which is only a 30-minute drive from the soon-to-be opened new Muscat International Airport," he added.-TradeArabia News Service More than 650 companies in the pharmaceutical industry from 75 countries around the world will participate at the upcoming 23rd edition of Dubai International Pharmaceutical and Technology Conference and Exhibition (Duphat 2018), next week in Dubai, UAE. The event is being held under the patronage of HH Sheikh Hamdan bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Deputy Ruler of Dubai, Minister of Finance and President of Dubai Health Authority, and will take place from February 27 to March 1, at the Dubai International Convention and Exhibition Center. This year, Duphat, which is one of the most important scientific events in the pharmaceutical industry in the Middle East, will occupy a total area of 18,000 sq m with and will is expecting the attendance of 27,500 visitors and participants including university professors, consultants, heads of pharmaceutical associations and specialists in the pharmaceutical industry, said a statement. In conjunction to event, Duphat Tech, a specialised exhibition for pharma technology will be showcasing pharma technology and packaging of pharmaceutical products, dermatological products for pharmacies, and smart storage techniques and solutions in the pharmaceutical industry, it said. Dr Ali Al Sayed, director, Department of Pharmaceutical Services, Dubai Health Authority (DHA), and Duphat Conference chairman, said: Over the last two decades, our event has evolved significantly into becoming a comprehensive and distinguished global pharmaceutical conference and one of the largest events related to the pharmaceutical industry. DHA has played a leading role in making Duphat, a major conference in the region and abroad. Every year, the event looks to attract professionals, researchers, academics, scientists, doctors, students and other health care professionals through its extensive scientific programme, which includes workshops and scientific sessions in the field of pharmacy and pharmaceutical industry, he said. It will also highlight the latest scientific and technological developments in the pharmaceutical industry, he added. Moreover, participants attending Duphat this year will have the opportunity to attend exclusive workshops and highly specialised scientific sessions on various topics in the field of medicine and pharmacy while also getting the chance to learn about new latest research and smart technologies. The event will feature 26 workshops and 520 scientific poster presentations. It is worth mentioning also that the conference this year will also witness a notable participation from GCC delegates in scientific sessions that will be presented by pharmaceutical societies and associations from Saudi, Kuwait, Oman, and Bahrain. Dupaht is organised yearly by Index Conferences and Exhibitions Organisation Est. member of Index Holding, and the conference is accredited by the Ministry of Health & Prevention in the UAE, Dubai Health Authority, and The Society of Hospital Pharmacists, Australia, it stated. TradeArabia News Service Moody's Reports Risk of Bitcoin Futures is Moderate at Current Volumes One ratings agency is looking more closely into bitcoin futures and their effects on exchanges and retail brokers. In a new report by Moodys, Exchanges and Retail Brokers: Risk of Bitcoin futures is moderate at current volumes, the agency writes that CME Group Inc. (CME, Aa3 stable) and Cboe Global Markets, Inc. (Cboe, Baa1 positive) recent launch of Bitcoin Futures contracts is not anticipated to affect the creditworthiness of either entity, owing to strong risk management at central counterparty clearing houses (CCPs), low futures volumes and the futures exchanges conservative approach to managing Bitcoin exposure. The agency added that the price volatility of Bitcoin presents risk management challenges for CCPs which makes it more difficult to close out a defaulting clearing members exposures. To manage this risk, both CME and Cboe set relatively high margins for Bitcoin futures trades to mitigate counterparty exposure, and have increased margin requirements from those they first presented to regulators in October 2017. The report also notes the risk is contained for retail brokers as well. The firms that offer the products, such as TD Ameritrade Holding Corporation (TD Ameritrade, A2 stable) and E*TRADE Financial Corp. (E*TRADE, Baa3 review for upgrade) maintain conservative policies and margining to account for Bitcoins high price volatility. The cautious approach from retail brokers includes pre-qualification for customers to trade Bitcoin futures as well as an adherence to high margins. This risk management tool protects the brokers exposure at the clearing house in a scenario where a customer defaults on a position. The report's executive summary noted the following: Futures exchanges conservatively manage their Bitcoin exposure, but the short history and high volatility of the cryptocurrency is a risk management challenge. Bitcoins price volatility presents particular risk management challenges for CCPs, making it more difficult to close out a defaulting clearing members exposures. To manage this risk, both CME and Cboe set relatively high margins for Bitcoin futures trades to mitigate counterparty exposure, and have since upped margins from those they first presented to regulators. For now low volumes also limit potential losses to a CCP. Retail brokers are carefully monitoring the vulnerability of client accounts to price movements. TD Ameritrade, E*TRADE and other retail brokers providing Bitcoin futures trading also require high margins from their clients to trade the contracts. Their margins are significantly higher than those set by the CCPs, a risk averse approach that will help limit online trading volumes, customer default risk but also commission income. Clearing margins will remain in flux, and may rise rapidly and significantly in response to higher spot Bitcoin price volatility, and brokers will have to adhere to these changes. The underlying price of futures contracts is a function of unseasoned spot exchanges, introducing operational risk. CME and Cboe use different methodologies to determine the reference rate for Bitcoin futures, but they both rely for price discovery on newly established cryptocurrency exchanges (spot exchanges) that have historically lacked meaningful regulatory oversight. These spot exchanges are fast-growing, making them vulnerable to fraud, cyber-attacks, theft and user growth in excess of traffic capacity. Relying on these unseasoned spot exchanges opens CME and Cboe to operational and cybersecurity risks that could cause them reputational harm. Contact Moody's for the full report For more information on related topics, visit the following channels: On Wednesday, a Brevard High School student said something in front of other students that at least one student later considered a possible threat, according to Kevin Smith, the school system's community relations coordinator. On Thursday morning, another unrelated party notified the Brevard High school resource officer of the statement. The student was immediately interviewed at school, and school officials and law enforcement determined the statement did not constitute a credible threat to anyone at the school, Smith said. The student was disciplined, according to the Board of Education's... There are few common questions that are regularly asked when people are planning to organize visa entry for their Vietnam tours. (TRAVPR.COM) VIETNAM - February 23rd, 2018 - For a foreign traveler who is planning to have a trip in Vietnam, it can be necessary to organize a visa entry to Vietnam. If travelers have the basic information about visa policy of Vietnam, the process of applying visa for Vietnam wont be a stressful and time-consuming. There are few common questions that are regularly asked when people are planning to organize visa entry for their Vietnam customized tour. Our article here lists the most typical questions that are frequently asked by travelers and the relevant answers to them. 1. Do I need visa for traveling to Vietnam? In general, most of the tourists go for holidays in Vietnam need to organize an entry visa. However, there is a short list of countries that theirs citizens can receive a short-term visa exemption from the Vietnam Government. The countries that can enjoy the visa-free travel to Vietnam include: Singapore, Malaysia, Cambodia, Indonesia, Thailand, and Laos for a period of up to 30 days; the Philippines for a period of up to 21 days; the UK, Denmark, Sweden, France, Germany, Spain, Norway, Italy, Finland, Russia, South Korea and Japan for a period of up to 15 days; and Myanmar and Brunei for a period of up to 14 days. If citizens from the list of countries above plan to have a stay in Vietnam longer than the agreed visa-free period, it is mandatory to apply for full visa via the Vietnamese Embassy or Consulate, the E-visa or the Visa on Arrival. Obviously, anyone travel to Vietnam from other countries out of the visa exemption list, need to apply for appropriate type of visa to match travel itinerary of their Vietnam customized holidays. 2. Where do I get my visa? For citizens from most countries travel to Vietnam (from Europe, US, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Cananda), there are two common ways to apply for Vietnam visa: - Using the old way and apply for visa directly at Vietnamese Embassies or Consulates abroad. This way is likely to be more expensive and the processing time is usually between 5-7 working days. However, it is possible to apply for visa via Embassy or Consulate up to 06 months before arriving in Vietnam so travelers will have plenty of time to prepare well in advance for the holidays in Vietnam. This kind of applying visa can be done by post, email or in person. The procedure is different with different embassies or consulates so it is suggested to check with each embassy. - Applying visa online using the Vietnam Visa on Arrival method. This way is likely to be cheaper than applying visa via Vietnam Embassy. In order to get the Vietnam visa on arrival, it is necessary to use a third-party visa agent or tour operator based in Vietnam. They can help to issue a Visa Approval Letter which will allow you to board your flight to Vietnam and the visa will be stamped on your passport with separated fee ($25 for single entry visa/$50 for multiple entry visa) at designated international airports in Vietnam (Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, Danang, Nha Trang) The latest way of applying for Vietnam Visa is via E-Visa which was officially launched in February, 2017. It is practical for citizens from 40 countries for the single-entry trip and up to a stay of 30 days. The E-Visa is available for citizens from: Azerbaijan, Japan, Kazakhstan, Brunei, Sweden, Myanmar, Chile, Czech Republic, Philippines, Russia, Denmark, France, Romania, Bulgaria, Norway, Peru, Cuba, Colombia, Timor Leste, Venezuela, Uruguay, Hungary, Luxembourg, Poland, Slovakia, Finland, Belarus, Armenia, Spain, Ireland, Mongolia, South Korea, Panama, Italy, Greece, Germany, Argentina, China, United Kingdom, and United States of America. 3. Do I apply for single-entry visa or multiple-entry visa? The answer for this will depend on the travel itinerary of your Vietnam tours: - Single-entry visa: this visa will be a perfect choice for travelers who plan to visit Vietnam only. If you leave Vietnam at any point while having this visa, you will need to re-apply for a new visa in order to get back in Vietnam. - Multiple-entry visa: this visa will be convenient for travelers who want to make a combined trip in Vietnam and Indochina. You can have the flexibility to enter and leave Vietnam at any time to visit other countries in the same region such as Cambodia, Laos, Thailand or Myanmar. 4. Which kind of document do I need to apply for Vietnam Visa? Vietnam Visa can be easy to apply for and there are few documents requested by local government that travelers need to submit: - For applying visa via Vietnam Embassies or Consulates, travelers will need to submit the following documents: a Visa Application form (downloaded from the embassys official website or pick up directly in person at embassy); valid passport for at least 06 months after return date; 02 recent passport sized photos; and the payment for the cost of visa (vary with different embassies) - For Visa on Arrival: similar documents which include the entry/exit application form (can be downloaded or pick up at airport); 02 passport sized photos, valid passport for at least 06 months after return date; the Visa Approval Letter. Plus the visa stamping fee paid at the airport, $25 or $50 depend on type of visa. This fee must be paid in cash (USD or VND). 5. Is Vietnam Visa on Arrival applied for entering Vietnam via land-borders? The answer is NO. The Vietnam Visa on Arrival is only applied for travelers who are planning to travel to Vietnam via one of the international airports: Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, Nha Trang or Danang. If travelers intend to enter Vietnam via a land-border or seaport, they will need to get Vietnam Visa via Vietnam Embassies or Consulates abroad Or via the E-Visa. 6. Are there any destination in Vietnam can be visited without a visa? Phu Quoc Island is classified as a Special Economic Zone and travelers to this island are eligible for a 30 day visa exemption if they only plan on visiting Phu Quoc and no other destinations in Vietnam. This visa exemption in Phu Quoc Island is practical for all nationalities, but travelers will need to match these requirements: - A valid passport for at least 06 months after the return date. - Round trip air ticket to and from Phu Quoc Island. The onward destination can be any country except Vietnam. - The stay on Phu Quoc Island must be less than 30 days. Read more: How to fill in the Vietnamese Visa Application Form Vietnam Visa Guide ### Search News Archive : Fast Travel News Promotion Via Search, Social Media + Email Follow Us On : RANCH RIDER ROUNDS UP EIGHT OF THE BEST FAMILY FRIENDLY RANCH EXPERIENCES FOR 2018 Industry: Tours A horsey take on adventure travel, riding holidays are becoming more popular with parents, but with so many family-friendly experiences to choose from, tour operator Ranch Rider has reined in its pick of the best for 2018. (TRAVPR.COM) UK - February 23rd, 2018 - A horsey take on adventure travel, riding holidays are becoming more popular with parents, but with so many family-friendly experiences to choose from, tour operator Ranch Rider has reined in its pick of the best for 2018. From award-winning ranch stays offering free child places to historic properties where all ages can enjoy a cattle drive, the specialists list covers the USA, Canada and South Africa. Horizons Triple B Ranch, the cattle farm based in South Africas malaria-free Waterberg region. Ideal for families, the 20,000-acre ranch offers an exciting mix of pursuits including, riding with game, cattle gathering, polocrosse, cross country jumping and swimming with horses - the property only a two and half hour drive from Johannesburg (transfers also available). Even more reason to book, Horizon claimed the title of Best Riding Safari in South Africa, 2018 at the Safari Awards. (SAVE 1,249) Six nights from 1,280pp (two sharing) and from 1,249pp (five to 16 years) including accommodation, meals, ranch activities (including riding), use of ranch facilities and taxes. Excludes gratuities as left to discretion, return transfers from Johannesburg (from 395 for a family of three or 595 for a family of four to eight people) and return flight from 940pp and from 818pp (under 12 years). Offer valid on all 2018 (year-round) departures and open to families of three or more, one child in the party going free. A child is classed as 16 years and under. Book by 31 March. Saving of approximately 1,249 over Easter and summer holiday period. Daily departures. Subject to availability. Big Creek Lodge, the ranch located in a pristine wilderness on the West Coast of Canada at the foot of the Coast Mountains. Cattle work and country trail riding are on offer, the cowboy way of life unchanged here for over 100 years. A ranch thats bound to get the kids excited about the outdoors rather than their Instagram feed - fishing, mountain biking, hiking and gold panning are additional activities. The ultimate mood booster for you and the brood, book the overnight camp out where you can commune with the sights and sounds of nature, the ride to the Anvil Mountain Camp taking you through the Big Creek Provincial Park. (SAVE 80pp) from 1,059pp (two sharing) and from 859pp (seven to 10 years) including accommodation, meals, ranch activities, use of ranch facilities and taxes. Excludes gratuities, car hire from 336 and return flight from 899pp and from 783pp (under 12 years). Offer valid on all 2018 departures, May through October. Book by 28 February. Full ranch stay price before discount 1,139pp. Vee Bar Working Guest Ranch. Nothing beats sleeping in a teepee on campout night campfire games, live music, and roasting smores all part of the evening, the complete list of ranch activities including hiking, hayrides, trap shooting, trout fishing (on the ranch), sheep herding and river tubing. Six nights from 1,930pp (two sharing) and from 1,730pp (six to 18 years) including accommodation, meals, most ranch activities, taxes and gratuities. Excludes car hire and return flight from 859pp and from 748pp (under 12 years). Departures 03 June to 01 September. White Stallion priced from only 1,135pp (two sharing) and from 925pp (four to 11 years), riding holidays at the guest ranch will be a steal for families travelling over the main summer holidays. While temperatures can soar into the late 30s during July and August, the ranch boasts an outdoor pool complete with spectacular mountain views and plenty of shady spots where you can escape the midday heat. The Saguaro National Park was highlighted by Lonely Planet, and families are welcome on the ranchs guided Petroglyph Hike guests visiting the park and learning about ancient forms of communication and the Hohokam Indians, who inhabited the area from 250 through 1450 A.D. New for 2018, now guests can book one of three spectacular helicopter rides. Prices start from USD $79pp, a ten-minute flight taking you over the Saguaro National Park and Old Tucson. Year-round departures. Prices include accommodation, meals, most ranch activities, taxes, transfers and gratuities. Excludes helicopter rides and return flight from 879pp and from 765pp (under 12 years). Majestic Dude Ranch offers a challenge at every turn, horseback riding, world-class mountain biking, ATV off-road adventures, archery, skeet shooting, fly-fishing and hiking on the list of pursuits. Great value for money, white water rafting is also included in the cost of the holiday. To ensure you reach your personal best in the saddle, free horse riding lessons are available and a real confidence booster for the kids, the ranchs younger guests can show off their new found Western skills at the weekly summer rodeos. For the ultimate adventure travel challenge, Ranch Rider suggest visiting the ranchs old Western town, where families can square off as marshals and outlaws in a game of laser tag or paintball. A state thats even easier to reach, United Airlines will launch a new non-stop route from London Heathrow to Denver in March. (SAVE 506pp on all August stays) Six nights from 2,024pp (no single supplement) and from 1,920pp (six to 17 years) including accommodation, meals, most ranch activities, taxes, service charge and transfers. Excludes return flight from 945pp and from 823pp (under 12 years). Full price of adult ranch stay before discount 2,530pp. Western Pleasure, as the guest ranch celebrating its centenary this year. Kids from eight years can help work the cattle archery and trap shooting also on the list of pursuits. If your little ones have always dreamed about having their own pony, this is a great place to go, as younger guests are responsible for caring for their own horse and equipment, and every morning they will help catch and saddle their mount. A horse show, complete with trophies and ribbons completes the weeks activities. Six nights from 1,549pp (no single supplement) and from 1,180pp (six to 12 years) including accommodation, meals, most ranch activities, taxes and gratuities. Excludes car hire from 330 and return flight from 889pp and from 774pp (under 12 years). Departures 28 May to 30 September. Creek Working Ranch, as theyll spend their days traversing some pretty tough terrain and learning the ropes of a genuine cowboy (or cowgirl). Ideal for more adventurous families - add on a seven-night self-drive and take on the new Sandia Mountain Coaster in Albuquerque. Due to open this autumn, thrill seekers who dare will be able to experience the striking Sandia Mountains from an entirely new, adrenaline-fuelled perspective - the proposed, alpine sled-style ride plunging down the mountainside in a total vertical drop of 380 feet. Seven nights from 1,459pp (two sharing) including accommodation, meals, most ranch activities, taxes and gratuities. Excludes transfers from 90pp round trip from Albuquerque and return flight from 889pp. The ranch accepts children from 13 years in July and August. Seven-night self-drive from 595pp (two sharing) including accommodation and car hire. Three Bars Guest Ranch. A great place to start off in the saddle, the horseback riding (including lessons) is complemented by a wide range of activities including hiking, river rafting, mountain biking, fly fishing, and more. Children from six years have the option of joining the kids program, but parents can build as much family bonding time into their riding holiday as they wish. With new flights from Calgary to Cranbrook available through budget carrier Westjet from March, the ranch will be even more accessible for those with kids in tow, and if you book early you might have a shot at spending your summer in the new family cabin! Six nights from 1,619pp (two sharing) and from 1,549pp (13 to 18 years) and from 1,479pp (six to 12 years) including accommodation, meals, most ranch activities, taxes and gratuities. Excludes car hire from 336 and return flight from 899pp. Departing 25 May to 06 October. -ends- All offers are subject to availability. Ranch Rider (01509 618 811) ATOL PROTECTED No 4660 ABTA 96395/V9150. Tucked away between the Banff and Glacier national parks is British Columbias award-winning. A great place to start off in the saddle, the horseback riding (including lessons) is complemented by a wide range of activities including hiking, river rafting, mountain biking, fly fishing, and more. Children from six years have the option of joining the kids program, but parents can build as much family bonding time into their riding holiday as they wish. With new flights from Calgary to Cranbrook available through budget carrier Westjet from March, the ranch will be even more accessible for those with kids in tow, and if you book early you might have a shot at spending your summer in the new family cabin!including accommodation, meals, most ranch activities, taxes and gratuities. Excludes car hire from 336 and return flight from 899pp. Departing 25 May to 06 October.-ends- If your children are equestrian mad teens who already know their way around a horse, try New Mexicos, as theyll spend their days traversing some pretty tough terrain and learning the ropes of a genuine cowboy (or cowgirl). Ideal for more adventurous families - add on a seven-night self-drive and take on the new Sandia Mountain Coaster in Albuquerque. Due to open this autumn, thrill seekers who dare will be able to experience the striking Sandia Mountains from an entirely new, adrenaline-fuelled perspective - the proposed, alpine sled-style ride plunging down the mountainside in a total vertical drop of 380 feet.including accommodation, meals, most ranch activities, taxes and gratuities. Excludes transfers from 90pp round trip from Albuquerque and return flight from 889pp. The ranch accepts children from 13 years in July and August. Seven-night self-drive from 595pp (two sharing) including accommodation and car hire. Book your family riding holiday at Idahos, as thecelebrating its centenary this year. Kids from eight years can help work the cattle archery and trap shooting also on the list of pursuits. If your little ones have always dreamed about having their own pony, this is a great place to go, as younger guests are responsible for caring for their own horse and equipment, and every morning they will help catch and saddle their mount. A horse show, complete with trophies and ribbons completes the weeks activities.including accommodation, meals, most ranch activities, taxes and gratuities. Excludes car hire from 330 and return flight from 889pp and from 774pp (under 12 years). Departures 28 May to 30 September. A new addition to the 2018 Ranch Rider collection, Coloradosoffers a challenge at every turn, horseback riding, world-class mountain biking, ATV off-road adventures, archery, skeet shooting, fly-fishing and hiking on the list of pursuits. Great value for money, white water rafting is also included in the cost of the holiday. To ensure you reach your personal best in the saddle, free horse riding lessons are available and a real confidence booster for the kids, the ranchs younger guests can show off their new found Western skills at the weekly summer rodeos. For the ultimate adventure travel challenge, Ranch Rider suggest visiting the ranchs old Western town, where families can square off as marshals and outlaws in a game of laser tag or paintball. A state thats even easier to reach, United Airlines will launch a new non-stop route from London Heathrow to Denver in March. (SAVE 506pp on all August stays)including accommodation, meals, most ranch activities, taxes, service charge and transfers. Excludes return flight from 945pp and from 823pp (under 12 years). Full price of adult ranch stay before discount 2,530pp. Arizona made Lonely Planets top ten list of best value destinations for 2018 and with seven nights at Tucsonspriced, riding holidays at thewill be a steal for families travelling over the main summer holidays. While temperatures can soar into the late 30s during July and August, the ranch boasts an outdoor pool complete with spectacular mountain views and plenty of shady spots where you can escape the midday heat. The Saguaro National Park was highlighted by Lonely Planet, and families are welcome on the ranchs guided Petroglyph Hike guests visiting the park and learning about ancient forms of communication and the Hohokam Indians, who inhabited the area from 250 through 1450 A.D. New for 2018, now guests can book one of three spectacular helicopter rides. Prices start from USD $79pp, a ten-minute flight taking you over the Saguaro National Park and Old Tucson. Year-round departures. Prices include accommodation, meals, most ranch activities, taxes, transfers and gratuities. Excludes helicopter rides and return flight from 879pp and from 765pp (under 12 years). Bring the brood and enjoy a family cattle drive (from just six years) at Wyomings. Nothing beats sleeping in a teepee on campout night campfire games, live music, and roasting smores all part of the evening, the complete list of ranch activities including hiking, hayrides, trap shooting, trout fishing (on the ranch), sheep herding and river tubing. Six nights from 1,930pp (two sharing) and from 1,730pp (six to 18 years) including accommodation, meals, most ranch activities, taxes and gratuities. Excludes car hire and return flight from 859pp and from 748pp (under 12 years). Departures 03 June to 01 September. Book seven nights of ecotherapy for the whole family and stay at British Columbias, the ranch located in a pristine wilderness on the West Coast of Canada at the foot of the Coast Mountains. Cattle work and country trail riding are on offer, the cowboy way of life unchanged here for over 100 years. A ranch thats bound to get the kids excited about the outdoors rather than their Instagram feed - fishing, mountain biking, hiking and gold panning are additional activities. The ultimate mood booster for you and the brood, book the overnight camp out where you can commune with the sights and sounds of nature, the ride to the Anvil Mountain Camp taking you through the Big Creek Provincial Park.including accommodation, meals, ranch activities, use of ranch facilities and taxes. Excludes gratuities, car hire from 336 and return flight from 899pp and from 783pp (under 12 years). Offer valid on all 2018 departures, May through October. Book by 28 February. Full ranch stay price before discount 1,139pp. Enjoy a FREE child place at, the cattle farm based in South Africas malaria-free Waterberg region. Ideal for families, the 20,000-acre ranch offers an exciting mix of pursuits including, riding with game, cattle gathering, polocrosse, cross country jumping and swimming with horses - the property only a two and half hour drive from Johannesburg (transfers also available). Even more reason to book, Horizon claimed the title of Best Riding Safari in South Africa, 2018 at the Safari Awards.including accommodation, meals, ranch activities (including riding), use of ranch facilities and taxes. Excludes gratuities as left to discretion, return transfers from Johannesburg (from 395 for a family of three or 595 for a family of four to eight people) and return flight from 940pp and from 818pp (under 12 years). Offer valid on all 2018 (year-round) departures and open to families of three or more, one child in the party going free. A child is classed as 16 years and under. Book by 31 March. Saving of approximately 1,249 over Easter and summer holiday period. Daily departures. Subject to availability. ### Please contact the person or company listed above for information regarding the content of this press release. TravPR.com are not the issuers of this press release and are not responsible for the accuracy of the content. Share Release : CONTACT INFORMATION Name: Sam Ward Company: Ranch Rider Phone: 01509 618 811 Email: mseven7studio@gmail.com Web: PRESS RELEASE TAGS editorial@tribune.com Suresh Dharur Tribune News Service Hyderabad, February 23 In the backdrop of growing friction with the Centre over the alleged raw deal in the release of funds, the Andhra Pradesh government is putting up a mega show to attract investments into the state. Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu, who is at loggerheads with his ally BJP over the alleged injustice being meted out to the state, is pulling out all the stops to showcase APs investment potential in myriad areas at the three-day CII Partnership Summit, in the port city of Visakhapatnam tomorrow. To be inaugurated by Vice-President M Venkaiah Naidu, the flagship annual event is expected to see signing of at least 281 Memoranda of Understanding (MoUs), envisaging investments of over Rs 2.56 lakh crore with a potential to create employment for 4.25 lakh people. The officials said estimations of investment potential were based on the interest evinced by the private companies in the run-up to the event to be attended by delegates from over 60 countries and trade ministers from 14 countries. Japan and South Korea have been chosen for the country sessions this year. Nine plenary sessions and eight sectoral sessions would provide platform for the policy makers, and industry leaders to interact. pardeepdhull@gmail.com Serkhetabat (Turkmenistan), February 23 Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India on Friday ceremonially broke ground on the Afghan section of an ambitious, multi-billion dollar gas pipeline expected to help ease energy deficits in South Asia. Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and Turkmen counterpart Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov joined Pakistani premier Shahid Khaqan Abbasi and Indias External Affairs Minister Shri M J Akbar for the ceremony at gas-rich Turkmenistans border with Afghanistan. Dignitaries including diplomats from the foreign missions in Turkmenistan were greeted by Turkmen national songs and traditional nomadic tents serving up food on an overcast day at the border post of Serkhetabat, once the southernmost tip of the Soviet Union. Speaking at the ceremony, Ghani said the pipeline would unite (the) countries in quotes translated into Russian for reporters at the ceremony. There were pessimistic voices, but now we are witnessing the construction of the TAPI gas pipeline, said Ghani, using the acronym for the conduit which takes its name from the four countries. The quartet aims to complete the 1,840-kilometre (1,143-mile) pipeline and begin pumping natural gas from Turkmenistans giant Galkynysh gas field by the beginning of 2020. While the pipeline will traverse war-wracked Afghanistan, raising security concerns, the bulk of the 33 billion cubic metres of gas to be pumped annually through the conduit will be purchased by South Asian rivals Pakistan and India. Turkmen strongman Berdymukhamedov, whose country currently depends heavily on China as a market for its natural gas exports, called diversification of gas deliveries an important part of the politics of the isolated Central Asian country. And he said work on the Turkmen section of the pipeline was still ongoing. Indias commitment to the pipeline has previously been questioned over its relationship with Pakistan and easy-access to liquified natural gas markets seen as potential stumbling blocks. But Indias minister of state for external affairs M J Akbar hailed the project as a symbol of our goals and a new page in cooperation between the four countries in a speech at the ceremony today. The overall funding picture for the mammoth gas pipeline remains unclear, with commercial energy giants such as Frances Total failing to follow up on reported interest in the project. Turkmenistan sits on the worlds fourth-largest gas reserves but lost a major buyer in Russia after Russian energy giant Gazprom wound down imports of Turkmen gas and then ceased purchases completely in 2016. Heavy security will guard the pipeline construction through war-weary Afghanistan, AP quoted Jelani Farhad, spokesman for the Herat provincial governors office as saying. Its a golden day for Afghanistan today, Farhad said. It will help our economy and create thousands of jobs. The United States has advocated the pipeline as a source of much needed gas to all three countries over an alternative pipeline, which is also being negotiated, bringing gas from Iran through Pakistan and into India. Security has been a leading concern leading up to the inauguration but Farhad said Afghanistan has devised a detailed security plan to protect the pipeline construction as well as the pipeline. Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid told the AP in a telephone interview that the religious movement was ready to guarantee the pipelines security. We are ready to protect TAPI. It is good and important and vital for the economy of Afghanistan, he said, noting the pipeline had been under consideration during the Taliban rule that ended in 2001. The pipeline will carry gas from Turkmenistan to Pakistan and India through Afghanistans Herat, Farah, Helmand and Nimroz provinces. Afghan president Ghani said the next big project being readied is the laying of Afghanistans first railway tracks, from the Turkmenistan border to Iran. He added he hoped the pipeline would signal the start of better regional cooperation. AFP/AP rchopra@tribunemail.com Mumbai, February 23 American real estate magnate Donald John Trump Jr has said his fathers presidency is definitely a negative for the familys business, but the senior Trump will be back to the business post-presidency. Trump Organisation has not signed any new projects in India since Donald Trump took over as the president of the US in January 2017. The company had announced last year that it would not enter into any new foreign deals while Trump is in the White House to avoid any conflict of interest. Stressing on how the Indian market is important for his company, Trump Jr, executive vice-president of the Trump Organisation, said, When we get back in business, India will be an important market for us. He was speaking at an event organised by the Lodha Group, the Trump Organisations local partner building the countrys first Trump Tower here, on Thursday evening. (Follow The Tribune on Facebook; and Twitter @thetribunechd) The elder son of Trump said hes been coming to India for the past decade and nurturing relationships. We have been here for over a decade, partnering with the right people, in the right market, he said. According to him, India is lacking in true luxury projects, but its been catching up with the global standards in the past few years. Buyers were paying for X in search for luxury, but were getting X minus a lot more, he said, adding, This is changing now. The US Presidents son is in India on a week-long visit to expand Trump Organisations real estate business in Asias third-largest economy. The New-York based company, since entering the domestic market in 2013, has launched four luxury residential projects with a revenue potential of USD 1.5 billion. On Thursday, Trump Jr announced the structural completion of one of the four projects being built here in association with the Lodha Group. However, the entire 78-storey Trump Tower, Mumbai, is due for completion only in mid-2019. Other than the Mumbai project, the companys portfolio includes residential projects across Pune, Gurugram and Kolkata in association with local real estate developers such as Panchshil Realty, M3M, Tribeca, Unimark and IREO. The fifth one, which is expected to be a commercial office project, is likely to be launched soon. The company has brand-licensing agreements with local developers but has made no equity investments. India is already the USD 9.5-billion Trump Organisation biggest residential real estate market outside the US. PTI editorial@tribune.com Akash Ghai Tribune News Service Mohali, February 22 The Greater Mohali Area Development Authority (GMADA) and the Chandigarh Municipal Corporation had assured Punjab Governor-cum-UT Administrator VP Singh Badnore that an extra 40 MGD water supply would be started through the new Phase V-VI pipeline of the Kajauli waterworks by April 30 this year, but the construction work on the main pumping stations at Sinhpur village is yet to take off. The Chandigarh MC and GMADA have to construct their own pumping stations at the site for the supply of the extra 40 MGD of water to Mohali, Chandigarh, Panchkula and Chandimandir through the new pipeline, having a capacity to supply 80 MGD of water. According to experts, it will take around six months to complete the project. The Chandigarh MC will construct a pumping station of 35 MGD capacity at Sinhpur village in Kharar while GMADA is yet to decide on the capacity of its pumping station and water treatment plant there. Manoj Bansal, Chief Engineer, Chandigarh MC, however, claimed that the pumping station would be ready by April 30. The MC is also constructing an underground reservoir of 4 MG capacity for the new pipeline and work on it is in progress. The MC is yet to lay a 7.5-km pipeline, which will connect the Sector 39 waterworks with the pumping station at Sinhpur village. The MC, however, claimed that 90 per cent work of laying the pipeline had been completed. GMADA is yet to decide the capacity of its pumping station and water treatment plant at Sinhpur village to supply water through the new pipeline (Phase 5-6). It has acquired 35.22 acres for the purpose. SK Kansal, GMADA Chief Engineer, said a decision in this regard was yet to be taken. GMADA is facing difficulty in connecting the new pipeline with the inlet tank at the Kajauli waterworks. The existing pipelines are leaking, making the site slushy. The work of connecting the pipeline at two places under the railway line is also yet to be done. The PSPCL is also yet to set up a grid substation to provide electricity connection to the main pumping station of the Chandigarh MC. The funds for the substation will be provided by GMADA. New pipeline In the first phase, the new pipeline (having a capacity of 80 MGD) will bring 40 MGD of water of which Chandigarh will get 29 MGD, Mohali five MGD and Panchkula and Chandimandir three MGD each. Project cost escalates The Rs 156-crore project was launched in March 2012 with a deadline of August 31, 2013. The deadline was missed. Later, several more deadlines were missed. Now, the cost of the project has escalated to over Rs 200 crore. 1983 arrangement According to the arrangement of sharing water, decided at a meeting chaired by the then Union Home Minister on July 6, 1983, 20 MGD of water from the Bhakra Main Line was to be distributed as under: Chandigarh: 14.5 MGD Punjab (for Mohali): 2.5 MGD Haryana (for Panchkula): 1.5 MGD Chandimandir Cantonment: 1.5 MGD At a meeting held on March 10, 1989, which was chaired by RP Ohja, the then Chief Secretary of Punjab, it was decided that the same pattern of distribution of water would be adopted for the Phase II and III pipeline. Similarly, for the Phase IV pipeline, the same pattern was adopted. Vivek Katju Vivek Katju THE continuing firing on the Indo-Pak border is giving rise to an insistent and uneasy question in a section of Indian public opinion: is the Modi government deliberately or inadvertently moving towards war with Pakistan? Raksha Mantri Nirmala Sitharamans warning to Pakistan, after the Sunjuwan Army camp terrorist attack, that it should expect punishment has also fed apprehensions. Implicit in these comments, queries and anxieties is a criticism of the Modi governments current Pakistan policy and a desire to revert to the earlier and more predictable ways of doing business with Indias hostile western neighbour. In these contentious times and as the country moves closer to the next Lok Sabha election, contentions will only increase there is more than a hint of pro-and-anti Modi politics in many comments. This is unfortunate, for strategic issues should ideally be based on consensus. In any consideration of the governments current Pakistan posture the following factors are relevant: That Pakistan has engaged in cross-border terrorism against India for almost three decades is beyond controversy. The Pakistani strategic community, at least in closed-door interactions with their Indian counterparts, accepts that Pakistan has engaged in non-state actor action against India. However, it asserts that Pakistan is no longer involved in such activity. It is clear that this is not true. Not only India knows so, almost all members of the international community accept it as so. That for almost three decades, successive Indian governments have failed to find an effective response to Pakistans promotion of terror. The paths of bilateral diplomacy and dialogue, of coercive diplomacy such as after the Parliament attack, of raising international opinion against Pakistani terrorism and periodic non-engagement have not yielded results. That Pakistan has since the 1998 nuclear tests openly sought to paralyse Indian conventional defence superiority while going ahead with the promotion of terrorism. It has strongly, and at every opportunity, emphasised that an Indian conventional reaction to an act of terror from its soil has the danger of escalating into nuclear conflict. In advancing this nuclear overhang view it has overlooked the basic lesson of the cold war: that nuclear states do not engage in conflict on the territories of other nuclear states as it is much too dangerous. During the cold war their contestation took place in other countries. Vietnam and Afghanistan were two of its many deadly theatres but acts of sabotage on the territory of a nuclear state were never undertaken. That ironically, as India has acted responsibly in not responding in kind to Pakistani action, the international communitys pressure has been on India to refrain from taking armed action against Pakistan. That some influential Indian strategic thinkers, including those who have held responsible positions in government, have implied that Pakistani terrorism does not constitute a strategic challenge for India. They point to the high rates of growth the country has achieved precisely during the years Pakistan has engaged in terrorism; hence, the implication that it has imposed no real costs on India. And, they obviously feel that the country can absorb the cost in military and civilian lives. The Indian political class also obviously subscribes to these views. Thus, the response to Pakistani terrorism has become a question of political management. That having adopted the political path, all governments have succumbed to the dialogue trap. Since 1998 when the structured dialogue process formally commenced, India-Pakistan relations have gone through cycles: dialogue-terrorist attack-inflamed Indian passions-cooling down of public feelings-resumption of dialogue. Vajpayee, Manmohan Singh and Modi, till the 2016 terrorist attacks, kept to this framework. Indeed, Modi accommodated the Pakistani generals by abandoning the stipulations of the Ufa joint statement. This has led the Pakistan army to the complacent belief that Indias response is predictable. It is unable to impose any costs while Pakistan has succeeded in tying down a large part of the Indian Army in J&K and has preserved its ability to intervene in that state at will. If the propositions stated above are accepted, Pakistani terrorism should be treated as a strategic challenge. As Indias traditional approaches have not worked, others have to be considered. While hardening defences against terrorist attacks and ensuring that security lapses do not occur, it has to be recognised that a purely defensive approach can never succeed. It does not work in maintaining law and order in the domestic context; it cannot do so in inter-state relations. It only whets the appetite of the aggressor. Costs diplomatic, economic, political and social have to be imposed. Also, there cannot be quick fixes. India has refrained from developing options that would enable it to undertake sustained, offensive and low-intensity warfare actions in Pakistan. India has also not taken sustained action to exploit its numerous social and ethnic fault-lines out of a belief that Pakistans stability is in its own interest. The most India has done is to hint that Pakistan has vulnerabilities which it should be aware of. Modis references to Balochistan and PoK in his Red Fort address in 2016 were nothing more than that. Pakistans accusations of India using Afghan territory and disaffected Pakistani elements to sponsor anti-state activity are routine. They have not carried any weight with the international community. As India has refrained from imposing costs through low-intensity actions on Pakistani soil, some Indian strategic thinkers have sought to examine the viability of a response by limited conventional action. The strategic strike of 2016 has to be considered in this light. Its importance lay in eroding Pakistans nuclear overhang doctrine. Clearly, one strike cannot be a panacea. But a doctrine that India will not hesitate to undertake such actions on Pakistani territory may erode Rawalpindis complacency. It will also increase international pressure on that country to act more responsibly. The international communitys interest is in preventing escalation of an India-Pakistan conflict. If a responsible India serves its purpose it only makes proforma appeals to Pakistan. Till now, this has largely been the case. Recent developments in Sino-Pakistan relations will have to be taken into account while crafting fresh approaches. China will have far greater stakes in its great friends stability than it did in the past. Indian actions need to make it clear that it is incumbent on China to seek to eliminate Pakistani terrorism against India. Hopes that its army will realise that a cooperative relationship with India is in Pakistans interest have proven futile. Equally futile have been hope for saner elements taking over the countrys security policies. A shift to calibrated offensive postures and actions, including along the LoC and the IB in J&K, is warranted but without fanfare. After all, Tulsidas taught us, Bhay bin hoye na preet. The writer is a former Secretary, Ministry of External Affairs S Nihal Singh S Nihal Singh Mohan Bhagwat, RSS chief, got more than he bargained for in declaring that the disciplined force of workers in his organisation could raise an army in three days while the Army would take more than six months to get ready. No one in the BJP and the broader Sangh Parivar from the Prime Minister down had the temerity to amend Bhagwat's unwise declaration, which seemingly denigrated the Army, apart from ignoring the technical nature of a modern fighting force. The oracle had spoken and the Parivar had to live with it. Bhagwat's declaration has led to speculation that the RSS is exercising its prerogative of being the top dog in the Parivar and hence in the political scheme of things. Narendra Modi himself was reared in the RSS cradle and any number of cabinet ministers are RSS men, ready to serve the organisation that has moulded them. This primary loyalty to an organisation other than the Constitution of India is a troubling question that needs an urgent answer. Bhagwat has, in effect, pitted his organisation against the state by denigrating the Army. As in the case of cow vigilantes, Modi can only keep quiet once Bhagwat has spoken in contradiction to what he had suggested. Now the RSS chief has gone far beyond his policing duties to take on the Army and the nexus of the state. One has to make allowance for the fact that it is the first time in the country's history that an RSS chief is in a position to command the resources of the country. Perhaps, Bhagwat is seeking to test the limits of his power by broadcasting his nativist belief in the power of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. However, the inherent question of the dual loyalty of the Prime Minister and many of his ministers will not go away. A simple way to test the RSS men in the government is to ask the question: Will you place your faith in the RSS ideology above the Constitution in a crisis situation? One thing is clear. While Modi is doing all he can to muster votes in the state assembly elections, Bhagwat and his organisation are busy laying the ground work for bringing about their concept of Ram rajya. There are bound to be conflicts in administering a multi-ethnic and multi-religious country such as India and the single-minded devotion of the RSS to promote Hindutva as the ultimate goal. Modi has some leeway in cutting corners, but he has to seek permission from Bhagwat to slow the pace of achieving a Hindu India. Here it is time to pause to consider the political career of Yogi Adityanath, pitchforked into the key post of Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh. The grapevine has it that he is being cultivated by the RSS as the alternate national leader if Modi is too tardy in bringing about a Hindu India. The Chief Minister has distinguished himself thus far in a series of encounters in which goons have been killed and the police force has remained largely unharmed. The dual loyalty question, however, will not go away. There are, of course, many contradictions between the Sangh credo and the Constitution. To begin with, the Constitution starts with the premise that all Indian citizens are equal and the majority community does not command special privileges. This is contrary to the central tenet of the Sangh Parivar. It was in another context in the days of the Janata government that the question of the Sangh Parivar's dual loyalty was highlighted and the Janata experiment ended. How Modi can negotiate the minefield of the new challenge posed by Bhagwat remains to be seen. Perhaps, Modi is hoping that his devotion to electioneering in state assembly elections will eventually result in the BJP winning nearly all states and the Parivar will have the votes to change the Constitution. The question arises whether the RSS leader will have the patience to wait for the numbers to change the Constitution. With the 2019 General Election on every party's horizon, the Opposition is still feeling its way towards a joint approach with the usual caveats and reservations. The communists, in particular, seem to have reached the end of the road, with the Marxists split between those who would cooperate with the Congress and the others who would not. But the central figure in the campaign will remain Modi whose ability to sway voters is unquestioned. For one thing, his energy is remarkable and he throws convention to the winds in reaching the lowest depth of politics to make his point. In Modi's dictionary, the prestige of the office he holds can be set aside to make his political thrusts. Meanwhile, Bhagwat oversees the Parivar strategy in reaching the desired end, the institution of a Hindu rashtra. The RSS chief does not reveal his hand, except to a small circle of advisers and seeks regular reports from Modi and his government. In immediate terms, the demands of the approaching General Election will take priority. Indeed, this is the time when the supremacy of the RSS chief is unquestioned because he directs where and how the vast resources of the organisation in terms of hundreds of thousands of volunteers are deployed on poll duty. At the end of the day, the question of dual loyalty will have to be addressed, probably in a post-election conclave. How Modi copes with the pressure while governing the country will be interesting to watch. harinder@tribunemail.com London, February 22 A Sikh environmental activist on a visit to the UK from India has filed a complaint with Scotland Yard after his turban was tugged at by a white man who shouted Muslim go back during a racist attack outside parliament. Ravneet Pal Singh, 37, South Asia Project Manager for EcoSikh, was in the security queue to enter Portcullis House, an extension of the House of Commons complex in Westminster, when a man targeted him yesterday. The white Anglo Saxon man spoke a language other than English but Singh was able to discern the words Muslim and go back before the attacker ran away. (Follow The Tribune on Facebook; and Twitter @thetribunechd) I am not sure why he was shouting and why he attacked my turban. I was able to prevent my turban coming off and he ran away when I shouted back. It was an extremely distressing experience, said Singh. He did not speak English but I could tell he was making racist remarks. I could not make out much of what he said but I did hear him use the words Muslim and go back. The police said the incident has been recorded on CCTV and they will find the attacker, he said. PTI harinder@tribunemail.com There was a time when the entire fauji fraternity used to be vigilantly mindful of the Army Chiefs izzat. The Chief of the Indian Army was deemed and respected as an embodiment of professional elan, poise and calm confidence. Even when the armed forces had reason to disagree with this or that element of civilian supremacy, its leadership had always disdainfully perched itself above the politicians quarrels. The armed forces never allowed themselves to be seen as partial in domestic politics. General Bipin Rawat seems determined to break that mold, and, in the process, he is jeopardising the traditional respect the citizens and the entire political class have had for the Indian Army. Ever since he assumed the leadership of the Indian Army, he has demonstrated a hitherto unsuspected gift of garrulity, speaking on matters pertaining to strategic and foreign policy, issues that better be left to be dealt by the Foreign Office. Now, he has allowed himself to comment, in public, on a purely political subject. It is difficult to divine any justification for an Army Chief expressing views on a political party, the All India United Democratic Front; and, it is equally difficult to fault the AIUDF chief, Badruddin Ajmal, for joining issues with General Rawat. The General invited the retort. It should be a matter of dismay to every constitutional purist that General Rawat has yet not been rapped on the knuckles by the political executive for speaking out of turn. It is possible that General Rawat is betraying the in-house thinking within the government. Even then, as a professional soldier, he should leave the political matters to professional politicians; nor, should he allow himself to be sucked into the political masters controversies. As the Chief, he has the professional obligation as also the weight of tradition to preserve the Indian armed forces as a secular institution. As it is, the Indian polity is passing through a particularly testing time. The last thing our constitutional system needs is for the Indian Army to become a source of acrimony and bad blood in the political arena. The onus is on General Rawat. harinder@tribunemail.com Indias excessive front-loading of security considerations and Canadas matching lack of appreciation combined to bring their bilateral relations to a new low. A Modi hug was put in play when he met Trudeau as a last-ditch effort to provide a veneer of business-as-usual. But too much rancour had spilled out in the public domain for the diplomats to salvage the visit completely. The lack of substantial conversations between the two sides in the run-up to the visit is reflected by the tone and tenor of the agreements and the MoUs agreed upon on Friday. Almost all of them give the impression of both countries taking the first baby steps towards intensifying ties. This turns the clock back on the strides made by both countries since Manmohan Singh and Stephen Harper tried to remove the overhangs of mistrust that have existed from Pokhran-1. Canadas lack of appreciation about India's security sensitivities was partly responsible for Trudeau and his family roaming unattended in choreographed cuteness. Indias National Security Adviser Ajit Doval did hammer out a rudimentary agreement in security but that hardly compensates for the shoddy pre-visit preparation. If the preparations with Canadian counterpart had not led to a meeting of minds, the visiting side should have been advised to opt for a truncated visit. Indias security overseers too need to be faulted for giving an entry permit to a Canadian convicted of terrorism and then trying to pin the blame on the Canadians for penciling him in on a banquet guest list. Punjab Chief Minister Capt Amarinder Singhs interaction with Trudeau did retrieve some lost ground, but the unwanted controversy of Canadas covert support to Khalistani separatists reflects the gulf in the art of diplomacy practised by PM Modi and his predecessor Manmohan Singh. The same concerns were in play six years back, but Dr Singh wisely opted to field the Capts wife, Preneet Kaur, to articulate Indias concerns while South Block resolutely focused on pushing bilateral business. In the end, cussedness on our part and insensitivity on the Canadian side have combined to give the Trudeau visit a finishing touch of inelegant incompleteness. editorial@tribune.com Sushil Manav Tribune News Service Chandigarh, February 23 In a crackdown on agitating farmers for the second day in succession, the police today arrested more than 200 of them when they were on their to Delhi on the call of the Rashtriya Kisan Mahasangh, an umbrella body of about 60 farmers organisations. With this, 367 farmers have been arrested, including 122 arrested yesterday. Bharatiya Kisan Union president Gurnam Singh Charuni today described the police action as Hitlershahi and alleged several farmers had been injured in the lathicharge by the police in Radaur yesterday. More than 500 farmers have been arrested, many of them on the serious charge of attempt to murder, he claimed. If farmers are not released and the cases against them are not withdrawn by February 26, farmers outfits will announce a mega agitation in a mahapanchayat at Kheri Chopta (Hisar) that day, Charuni said. Inspector General of Police Mamta Singh confirmed the police made 324 preventive arrests in the past two days, while 43 others had been arrested under the IPC. Of the 43 farmers, 35 have been arrested in connection with a clash with the police in Radaur (Yamunanagar). The maximum preventive arrests have been made in Kurukshetra. There, 113 farmers have been taken into custody. In all, 80 farmers have been arrested in Jind, 33 in Karnal and 25 in Kaithal, she said. The police have also impounded 76 tractor-trolleys of farmers, she said. She claimed the situation in the state was peaceful and no national highways leading to Delhi was blocked. Sonepat Deputy Commissioner KM Pandurang confirmed eight arrests in his district and said traffic to Delhi from Kundli border was smooth. Farmers tried to block inner roads when they were stopped from going to a national highway leading to Delhi, he said. In Rohtak, about 20 protesting farmers were arrested for violating Section 144 of the CrPC today, DSP Ravinder said. They were produced in a local court and released on bail. editorial@tribune.com Geetanjali Gayatri Tribune News Service Rohtak, February 23 In a district declared open defecation-free (ODF) by the Haryana Government last year, some families in the districts Nindana village still dont have access to toilets, taking the wind out of the sails of the Centres flagship Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM). This is just not an ordinary village. Its claim to fame is on two counts first, the village with four panchayats is the birthplace of Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar. Second, one of its panchayats, Nindana Khas, has been adopted by Railway Minister Suresh Prabhu. In the Mamanpur panchayat of this VIP village which is part of the ODF bandwagon, 30-odd families have no access to toilets. A government survey has brought out the village has 680 households and 598 toilets. In all, 52 toilets were constructed under the SBM. So, 30 households are forced to share toilets. Hence, the ODF status. With the tag clinched, the families without toilets gradually went back to defecating in the open. By his own admission, Nindana Mumanpur sarpanch Jaswant says, Still, there are 30 to 35 families without toilets. We are still an ODF village since we have common toilets at two places in the village for all such families and there is no open defecation. What he does not reveal is that public toilets are merely brick enclosures with no seats. Ask villagers and they say the ODF status was thrust upon them, though the surveyor knew there were some families with no toilets or access to them. They say common toilets have been under construction for long and continue to be non-functional, but Nindana was declared ODF given the pressure to do so under the SBM. Nanhi (55) says she has never used a toilet and doesnt have one in her house. We, all four members of my family, go in the open. The formality of the survey and the paperwork which was done before the village was declared ODF was a managed exercise and the sarpanch is party to it. Everybody knows how it all works, she says. ASHA worker Anita seconds her. In her house, a cramped brick enclosure next to the bathroom has been shown as a toilet in the papers. It only has a bed of hay for a base and wooden planks stored inside to shield them from the vagaries of the weather. The surveyor came, saw this and marked us as having a toilet. Most houses have toilets and it has become all the more embarrassing for the few deprived families to go in the open. We feel ashamed, but where is the option? Our voices remain confined to the village, she says on behalf of others. Aware of the need and urgency of having toilets, Santosh, living in a family of four, maintains politics of the village has deprived them of toilets since the sarpanch favours his chosen few and turns a blind eye to their plight. There are no toilets in homes of a number of families, but nobody is bothered. We are an ODF village and the matter stands closed. Nobody comes to check the ground reality, she says, adding that such schemes end up confined to paper only. Speaking on behalf of a group of women who rue the non-availability of a toilet, Santosh adds common toilets the sarpanch claims to have never been made functional. Of course, the paperwork can be completed in the name of those toilets. If the surveyor had cared to independently check if the toilets were functional, if there was anything close to a toilet at these places, it would have been a different story, she says. The sarpanch claims the families without toilets deliberately refuse to use common toilets. They want government assistance. This is the reason they claim to go in the open. It is all about money they can earn in the process, Jaswant adds. Nevertheless, it remains a mystery how he sees toilets in enclosures of brickwalls stuffed with dry wood or cow dung cakes. editorial@tribune.com Bijendra Ahlawat Tribune News Service Faridabad, February 23 A stand-off situation has developed between the local administration and hundreds of farmers from Madhya Pradesh. The farmers have been stopped by the police from entering New Delhi. They have been stationed at the Sector 16 grain market here. As many as five members of the Rashtriya Kisan Mahasangh (RKM), under whose banner the agitation has been launched, got tonsured in the protest today. Baba Ram Kewal, a local social activist, is among the five persons who also got tonsured. We were moving towards our destination peacefully. The local police approached us on Thursday and asked us to stop at Sector 16 for a dialogue. Since then, over 2,500 farmers have been kept stationed at one place and over hundreds of cops have been deployed, said Shiv Kumar Kakka, president of the RKM, who is also leading the protest march. Hailing from Bhopal in Madhya Pradesh, Kakka said majority of farmers had come from MP and hundreds of other farmers from Karnataka and Kerala too joined them. Describing the administrations action as violation of the basic and democratic rights of farmers, he said the government wanted to crush their voices for justice. A spokesperson of the Police Department said their entry in New Delhi had been banned and they had been asked to return. editorial@tribune.com Sushil Manav Tribune News Service Chandigarh, February 23 Fatehabad district will soon have three community reserves protected areas for wildlife as panchayats of Dhangar, Dhani Majra and Kahalheri villages today offered land to the state government for the purpose. The decision was taken in meetings of gram sabhas in the three villages today. Additional Deputy Commissioner JK Abhir, Chief Ministers Good Governance Associate (CMGGA) Anju Arya, Divisional Wildlife Officer Pawan Grover and several other officials attended the meetings. All three villages are inhabited by members of Bishnoi community, which is known to protest wildlife. The three villages have a fairly good population of blackbucks, black partridges, rabbits, Neelgai and peacocks. The Dhangar panchayat has offered 25 acres, Dhani Majra 12 acres and Kajalheri 5 acres, Arya said. Under Sections 36 (C) and (D) of the Wildlife Protection (Amendment) Act 2002, panchayat land can be declared a community reserve by the state government. Once declared as such, the land ownership remains with the panchayat, but the Wildlife Department provides grants for plantation and other development activities. The maintenance of the community reserve is done by a committee nominated by the panchayat, said Arya. At present, blackbucks in the three villages have been facing danger from stray dogs and poachers. The land inhabited by blackbucks in Dhangar village had earlier been acquired for a residential colony of Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited (NPCIL). It is establishing a nuclear power plant in nearby Gorakhpur village. As several blackbucks died on getting entangled in fencing installed by the NPCIL, a survey by the Wildlife Institute of India, Dehradun, had recommended that land be declared a conservation reserve. Though the NPCIL had to leave this land, but the idea of conservation reserve could not materialise. Now, the state government has agreed to set up three community reserves and panchayats have willingly offered land for the purpose, said Arya. editorial@tribune.com Tribune News Service Shimla, February 23 Peeved over the indifferent attitude of the police, apple growers cheated by commission agents to the tune of Rs 4.20 crore have urged Chief Minister Jai Ram Thakur to handover the case to the CID or crime branch for the recovery of money. In a memorandum submitted to the Chief Minister, the growers said they had sold apple to some commission agents through local businessmen at Parala Subzi Mandi in the Kotkhai area but they did not get the money and even after five months, no tangible result had come out. The agents issued cheques, but these bounced. Two traders Virendra Singh Dhanta and Madan Sharma also lodged a complaint at the Theog Police station and an FIR was registered, but no action was taken. Sources said commission agents who purchased apple and were now refusing to make the payment were from Delhi, Gobindgarh and Chennai mandis. The complaint said one of the accused agents was even nabbed by them from Amritsar and handed over to the police, but no action was taken against him even after five days. The growers urged the Chief Minister to take stringent action for the recovery of their money. editorial@tribune.com Ambika Sharma Tribune News Service Solan, February 23 In an unprecedented move Solan Deputy Commissioner Hansraj Sharma and Baddi Superintendent of Police Gaurav Singh were transferred after issue of mismanagement emerged in the maiden visit of Chief Minister, Jai Ram Thakur, to the district in Nalagarh constituency yesterday. Sharma has been transferred as Director, Women and Child Development Department, while Vinod Kumar, a 2009-IAS officer, has been placed as the new DC, Solan, in the orders issued late last evening. SP, Baddi Gaurav Singh, has been transferred as Commandant 5th IRB, Bassi and Rani Bindu has been placed as the new SP, Baddi as per the orders issued by Principle Secretary, Home. A major mix-up occurred at Chowkiwala where Chief Minister, Jai Ram Thakur, was supposed to kick-start the Clean Nalagarh Green Nalagarh campaign along with the Governor Acharya Devvrat. After reaching the venue he was led to inaugurate a blood donation camp right next to this venue which was not only unscheduled but organised by the family of former MLA HN Saini. This was resented by the local BJP unit led by former district president KL Thakur as the presence of the nephew of Saini had upset his poll prospects. No official from the district administration was there to guide the Chief Minister to the designated venue, revealed former MLA KL Thakur. To make matters worse the Governor was left unattended outside the venue thus creating an unsavoury situation. Lack of proper arrangements at the venue also left much to be desired and the dignitaries were stuck in a traffic jam with scores of trucks lined up along the road making it difficult for the VIP cavalcade to move ahead smoothly. It was learnt that the route plan was changed a day prior to the programme to specially bypass some places and the traffic could not be managed effectively along the road. While the district administration failed to stick to the CMs programme, inclusion of unscheduled programmes added to the delay. The persistent traffic jams leading to the venue of the cleanliness oath programme at Government Degree College, Nalagarh, exposed the shoddy traffic management, further irking the dignitaries. Being the first programme of the Chief Minister in the district, the failure of the Deputy Commissioner to inspect the venue prior to his visit as is the usual practice and the poor traffic regulation exposed their casual approach. SP Gaurav was earlier too transferred from Baddi in the Congress tenure barely after nine months as he had launched a campaign against the mining mafia. The BJP had then condemned his transfer and had termed it as an attempt to appease the mining mafia. Gaurav Singh had again been posted at Baddi about a month ago. The reasons The CM was supposed to kick-start the Clean Nalagarh Green Nalagarh campaign along with the Governor. After reaching the venue he was led to inaugurate a blood donation camp right next to this venue which was not only unscheduled but organised by the family of a former MLA To make matters worse, the Governor was left unattended outside the venue, thus creating an unsavoury situation. Then the dignitaries were stuck in a traffic jam with scores of trucks lined up along the road Immolation threat editorial@tribune.com Tribune News Service Shimla, February 23 Vikramaditya Singh, son of former Chief Minister Virbhadra Singh, defended his fathers decision to open the SDMs office at Janjehli and supported Janjehli Sangharsh Samiti (JSS) for its stir against the Jai Ram Thakur government. Janjehli protest is a trailer and if the present government continues to denotify institutions or offices opened by the previous government, the BJP government will have to face bigger protest , Vikramaditya Singh warned, defending his fathers decision. The CM has talked about reviewing decisions of the Congress taken in six months time. This would set a wrong precedent, said Vikramaditya, who represents Shimla rural constituency. The state government created a new sub-division at Thunag and a new sub-tehsil at Chhatri in Seraj and assured the people of Janjehli that the SDM would sit at Janjehli for four days. But the JSS-led by Jagdish Reddi, a Seraj Congress ticket- seeker, instead started the chain hunger strike in front of the SDM cum-Tehsil office, Thunag. Seraj BJP has come in support of Jai Ram Thakur governments decision to open the SDM office at Thunag, which is a central place in Seraj constituency. The government is proposing to develop Janjehli as a tourist destination as it is a base camp for making beeline for Shikari Devi sanctuary, which is highest tourist spot of the Mandi district. editorial@tribune.com Tribune News Service Srinagar, February 23 The Army on Friday claimed to have foiled a Border Action Team (BAT) attack along the Line of Control in the Tangdhar sector of the frontier Kupwara district The BAT action was foiled a day after Inspector General, BSF, Sonali Mishra said two Pakistani soldiers were killed in Tangdhar on Wednesday in retaliatory fire. The Army said the raid at a forward post in Tangdhar was foiled on Thursday night when alert troops detected the BAT movement, which was supported by the Pakistan army. The Border Action Team comprising terrorists and actively supported by heavy shelling and mortar fire from multiple Pakistan posts tried to raid a forward post in Tangdhar. Alert Indian Army troops detected the movement of the BAT men who were trying to creep towards our post under the cover of heavy fire by enemy posts and effectively repulsed it, causing casualties, an Army statement said The exchange of fire continued for an hour as the frustrated Pakistan army posts tried to cause damage to our posts but failed in their nefarious designs due to the tough and offensive spirit shown by our Army troops, it added. The Army said it was the second day in a row when the Pakistan army had tried such action in the Tangdhar sector. The Tangdhar sector has been tense since Tuesday after BSF Constable Sunil Murmu of 124 Battalion was killed in sniper fire. The BSF IG had yesterday said that Army and BSF were ready to tackle any situation along the LoC. We are ready for infiltration, BAT action, standoff fire, sniping the alertness along the LoC is always high, she had said. editorial@tribune.com Jammu, February 23 The BJP today criticised former Chief Minister Omar Abdullah for politicising the Kathua rape case, in which a minor tribal girl was allegedly raped and brutally murdered. BJP spokesman Brig Anil Gupta (retd) regretted that Omar Abdullah was desperately trying to take political mileage from the monstrous crime. He was reacting to Omar Abdullahs tweet in which he (Omar) had opposed handing over of this case to the CBI. In a tweet, Omar has almost accused the CBI of prejudice. It is rather important to see that the person who is trying to make political ground by fiddling into sensitive matters such as rape, Gupta alleged. He said it was indeed a matter of shame, as the society irrespective of political affiliations must stand univocally against the grave sin and rather demand highly professional attitude in putting the culprits behind the bars. Gupta said it should be welcomed that a premier Central agency was being included into the case to ensure that justice prevails. TNS rchopra@tribunemail.com Srinagar, February 23 The residents of villages close to the Line of Control (LoC) in the Uri sector of Jammu and Kashmir have started moving o safer places, following firing and shelling by Pakistani troops in the area, officials said on Friday. The residents of Silikote, Balkote, Tilawari, Churanda and Batgarh had started fleeing their villages early on Friday morning in view of the ceasefire violation by the Pakistani troops at regular intervals since Monday, the officials said. They said the fleeing border residents had been put up at a makeshift camp established in the Government Girls Higher Secondary School in Uri town. The district administration is registering the migrants and providing basic facilities to them, the officials said. The residents demanded that the government ensure an end to the ceasefire violations or rehabilitate them at safer places where they could live without fear. We would like the governments of India and Pakistan to put an end to ceasefire violations as they have made our lives difficult. In case shelling and firing on the borders continues, the state government should provide us five-marla plots in safer places so that we can live in peace, Ghulam Mohammad Mir, who is putting up at the makeshift migrant camp, said. Earlier on Monday, the residents of Thajal and Soni had also been moved to safer locations by police in view of the ceasefire violations by Pakistan. The Pakistani troops violated ceasefire in the Uri sector on Monday and then repeated it on Wednesday and Thursday. However, the guns along the LoC in the Uri sector have fallen silent since Thursday. PTI editorial@tribune.com Tribune News Service Jammu, February 23 To maintain peace and calm on the International Border, the Border Security Force and Pakistan Rangers today held a sector commander-level meeting at the Suchetgarh area of Jammu district. The BSF delegation comprising nine officers was led by DIG, Jammu sector, PS Dhiman, whereas the Pakistan delegation of 11 officers was led by Sector Commander, Sialkot, Punjab, Brigadier Amjad Hussain. Giving details, the BSF spokesperson said that during the meeting day-to-day border management issues were discussed. While reiterating the BSFs commitment towards maintaining peace and tranquillity on the International Border, BSF officials sought Pakistan Rangers cooperation for the same, which was agreed by them, he said. The meeting concluded in a cordial atmosphere, the spokesperson added. Before this meeting, the BSF and Pakistan Rangers had held a half-hour meeting on January 25 after the exchange of heavy shelling on the International Border. The meeting was held on the request of Pakistan Rangers. These days the situation on the International Border is calm and no firing has been witnessed since January 21. Two BSF men were killed in ceasefire violation by Pakistan from January 17 to 19, whereas on January 3 one BSF man was killed in Pakistan sniper fire. editorial@tribune.com Tribune News Service Jammu, February 23 The initial investigation into the Sunjuwan military station attack in Jammu early this month has concluded that the battle-hardened terrorists were from the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan. This is the latest trend adopted by Pakistan to keep the troubles high on this side of the border. In an interview with The Tribune, Director General of Police (DGP) Shesh Paul Vaid said all terrorists who had mounted the fidayeen attacks beginning with Uri in September 2016 and the recent one on the CRPF camp in Awantipora were from the FATA region and belonged to the Jaish-e-Mohammed terror group. This is part of the latest strategy of Pakistan to select and send all-time battle-hardened men to this side of the border to escalate the level of violence, the DGP said. This, he said, could prove a critical factor in 2018". "Earlier, Pakistan used to send men from Pakistan-occupied Kashmir or some parts of Punjab. It has taken the level of terror violence to a higher level in 2018. And, that explains the inclusion of men from FATA, he said. It is one of the key concerns for us as it could have ripple effect, Vaid said, adding that it could raise the level of violence despite the fact that local militancy this year was showing a declining trend. The infiltration attempts last year were the highest in a decade, the DGP said, quoting data of the Multi Agency Centre. "As many as 124 terrorists were successful in coming to this side of the border, though the Army neutralised many infiltrators by their alertness and vigil on the Line of Control. This dwarfs the achievement of the killing of 218 militants last year -- now only four or five top commanders are left while all others have been neutralised. Pakistan has upped the ante." The police chief said the social media was playing out a lot of distortions. The social media is serving as a bad communicator of distortions against India. For example the Ikhlaq Khan (beef) episode was projected in a highly distorted manner. India was projected in a bad light, while the fact is that this one episode doesn't represent India. Pakistan fanned the flames by propagating that the whole India was like this. Impressionable minds fall prey to such propaganda. One episode is relayed on thousands of phones, fuelling anti-India sentiment in the Valley, he said. This sentiment is more palpable and expressions are far more loud than even in the 1990s -- the period regarded as the topmost point of militancy in Kashmir with thousands of guns and militants spread all across the Valley. The shocking part is when it comes from those who draw their sustenance from the government," he said. "A strong deterrent is needed to curb this trend, he added in a worrying tone. On giving amnesty to over 9,000 stone throwers despite their attempts to disrupt anti-militancy operations, Vaid said such activities had been take note of and action would be taken against the law breakers. "It will not be a free-for-all situation," he stressed. The amnesty granted to first-time offenders doesnt mean that it is not going to be checked, he said. He, however, said no arrests had been made in the latest cases. Explaining the move to grant amnesty to first-time offenders, the police chief said it was essentially for those who because of the propaganda or the situation were lured into stone-throwing but were not habitual stone throwers. They were facing difficulties in getting no-objection certificates for admission to institutes and getting travel documents, he said. Amnesty doesnt mean no checks, free-for-all condition On giving amnesty to over 9,000 stone throwers despite their attempts to disrupt anti-militancy operations, Vaid said such activities had been take note of and action would be taken against the law breakers. It will not be a free-for-all situation, the DGP stressed rajivbhatia82@gmail.com Johnson Thomas Frances (Fargo) McDormand, as Mildred Hayes, a recently divorced mother who lost her daughter, Angela, less than a year ago, to a brutal rape and murder crime, is her angry best in this movie. The case has apparently gone cold because theres no matching DNA. Hayes channelises her anger by hiring three barren billboards on a rarely travelled road to ask pertinent questions of the local police chief Willoughby (Woody Harelson) and his team. And its what happens after, that makes this drama so fertile and intriguing. Local media goes aflutter, the unexpected attention sparks a series of events involving police second-in-command, Dixon (Sam Rockwell), who exhibits his racist, homophobic tendencies in extremes. Hayes is not one to back down though, even though pressure mounts from all sides - including her ex-husband who deserted her and her two teenage children. Writer-director McDonagh doesnt allow his focus to wander back in time to find out what happened to Angela on that fateful day. Instead, his focus is aimed at bringing catharsis to the family and immediate people involved in solving the case. And its not an easy watch because you can feel the raw, lacerative grief that turns into anger at the injustice of it all, in every frame. The path to absolution is never easy and the turn the main characters take along the way makes the takeaway here very impressive indeed. Regular nice guy Sam Rockwell goes out of his skin to make Dixon, the brutish racist, homophobe, look real; Harrelson makes Willoughby look good despite his warts but it is Frances McDormand who makes the biggest impact. Her grief, anger, rage and pain underneath it all, are so stunningly palpable that you just want to cheer her on even when you know she is putting others at risk. This is a film that is passionate about giving hope to those who have little reason to expect it. McDonaghs brilliant scripting and direction combines with Carter Burwells passion fuelled choice of music, while Ben Davis cinematography making the visual experience feel just as trying and turbulent as Hayes emotions. This is one of those rare, fully realised works of cinema and it would be sacrilege if you missed it. gspannu7@gmail.com New Delhi, February 23 A Delhi Police team on Friday descended on Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwals residence and seized a hard disk of the CCTV camera system installed there in connection with an alleged assault on Chief Secretary Anshu Prakash by AAP MLAs. Police claimed that its action came after its request for CCTV footage from the chief ministers residence was not met. (Follow The Tribune on Facebook; and Twitter @thetribunechd) Several policemen today went to Kejriwals official residence in the Civil Lines area where Prakash was allegedly assaulted in the presence of the chief minister on the intervening night of February 19-20. A total of 21 CCTV cameras and a hard disk were examined by the police. The hard disk has been seized and any possibility of tampering with the system could be ascertained only through forensic examination, said Additional DCP (North) Harendra Singh. We had asked for the CCTV camera footage and hard disk on February 20 itself but there was no response. So, we decided to come down and examine it, he said. Singh also said that the in-charge of maintenance at the chief ministers residence had been intimated about the police visit. Fourteen CCTV cameras were running while seven were not working. Also, there was a time lag of 40.43 minutes with respect to the time of the alleged incident, said the police official. There was no CCTV camera in the room where the alleged incident happened during the meeting, and no footage was obtained, he said. We believe the incident occurred between midnight of February 19 and 12.15 am of February 20. Singh did not deny the possibility of questioning Chief Minister Kejriwal and the MLAs who were present during the meeting where Prakash was allegedly assaulted by party legislator Amanatullah Khan and others. It is difficult to say so now. We will work scientifically, Singh said. The police also questioned the maintenance staff of the electronic surveillance system installed at the chief ministers residence. Reacting to it, Kejriwal said, A huge posse of policemen was sent to my residence. The entire CM residence is being searched over allegations of two slaps. But when will Amit Shah be questioned in connection with Judge Loyas death, he asked on Twitter. PTI ? Arvind Kejriwal (@ArvindKejriwal) February 23, 2018 Read: AAP accuses Delhi police of dadagiri rchopra@tribunemail.com Allahabad, February 23 The Allahabad High Court has dismissed a plea seeking an independent probe into an FIR related to the 2007 Gorakhpur riot case in which the Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister and the then Gorakhpur MP, Yogi Adityanath, was one of the accused. A bench of Justices Krishna Murari and Akhilesh Chandra Sharma dismissed the petition filed by Parvez Parwaz and Asad Hayat, saying it did not find any procedural irregularity in the order of refusal to grant sanction to prosecute the accused in the case. Parwaz was the complainant in the FIR registered in connection with the riot case and Hayat a witness. During the pendency of the writ petition, prosecution sanction was denied by the principal secretary (home) on May 3, 2017, which too was challenged by the petitioners. In the writ petition, the petitioners had requested the court to order a probe by an independent agency into the FIR filed in 2008 in Gorakhpur against the then MP Yogi Adityanath and three others in a case of alleged communal violence on January 27, 2007. It was alleged in the FIR that Adityanath; the then mayor of the city, Anju Chaudhri; the then MLA Radha Mohan Agarwal and another person had incited communal violence and riot in Gorakhpur in 2007. Stating that the matter was being investigated by the CB-CID, the petitioner expressed concern that the state police might not act impartially and requested that the investigation be transferred to an independent agency. PTI harinder@tribunemail.com Beijing, February 22 China today downplayed an official media report that its military was upgrading air defence along the Indian border and said both countries should work together to uphold peace and tranquillity along the border. State-run Global Times on February 20 reported that China is upgrading air defence of its Western Theatre Command, which looks after the security along the Line of Actual Control (LAC), to confront any threat from India. (Follow The Tribune on Facebook; and Twitter @thetribunechd) Asked about the report during a media briefing, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said, I am not aware of the information mentioned by you. I may refer you to the military. Geng said, We hope the Indian side can work with China to uphold peace and tranquillity in border areas because this is in common interests of both sides. The Chinese Defence Ministry is yet to comment on the report. In the report, the daily also quoted an expert as saying that the measure was aimed at confronting any threat from India in the light of India acquiring new fighter aircraft, an apparent reference to Indias acquisition of Rafale jets from France. PTI Denies talks with Baloch militants China on Thursday refuted a report that it had been secretly holding talks with Baloch militants in Pak for over five years to protect its $60 billion CPEC project. A British daily had said China was in contact with militants in south-western province rchopra@tribunemail.com New Delhi, February 23 The AAP has alleged that Delhi Police pressed Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwals adviser VK Jain to change his statement about the alleged attack on Chief Secretary Anshu Prakash by the partys MLAs. Senior AAP leaders Ashutosh and Sanjay Singh claimed that this was a ploy to destabilise the partys government in Delhi. Ashutosh also targeted Lt Governor Anil Baijal, calling him an agent of the BJP for not acting on a complaint about the attack on Delhi minister Imran Hussain and Delhi Dialogue Commission vice-chairman Ashish Khetan, despite being provided evidence. Jain was apparently at Kejriwals residence in the Civil Lines area on Monday night, when AAP legislators allegedly attacked Prakash. (Follow The Tribune on Facebook; and Twitter @thetribunechd) Singh said Jain, in his first statement to the police, had stated that when the alleged assault happened he was in the bathroom and did not know what had happened in the room. However, the police state that now Jain is claiming that when he returned from the bathroom, he found Chief Secretary Anshu Prakash searching for his spectacles, indicating the possibility of an assault. Why did Jain change his stand within a day? Under whose pressure was he forced to change his statement? Singh said. He claimed that Jain was picked up by Delhi Police on Thursday morning and pressed to change his statement. How is it that the same Jain who emphatically said that he witnessed no assault during the entire time that he was present there, had now claimed otherwise? he added. Reacting to the allegations, the chief spokesperson of Delhi Police, Special CP Dependra Pathak, said the department was only following rules and procedures. As per due process, a statement was recorded first by the police and then the statement was recorded before the court, Pathak said. Singh alleged that Aam Aadmi Party MLAs were being arrested for an assault for which there was no proof. On the other hand, despite there being video evidence of officials assaulting Delhi cabinet minister Imran Hussain, no action was taken by Delhi Police, he added. The party also named a few Delhi government officials seen in the video purportedly showing the attack on Hussain and Khetan. The Lt Governor is acting like an agent of the BJP and his loyalty is not towards the Constitution, Ashutosh alleged. He said that the Delhi government officials having gone on strike following the alleged attack on Prakash was unfortunate. Ashutosh said the medico-legal case report of Prakash stated that he was assaulted after midnight but the CCTV camera footage showed that he left Kejriwals residence at 11.30 pm. PTI rchopra@tribunemail.com New Delhi, February 23 Prime Minister Narendra Modi met his Canadian counterpart Justin Trudeau on Friday welcoming him with a hug ahead of a ceremonial reception at the Rashtrapati Bhavan, putting to rest speculations about the government cold-shouldering the visiting dignitary. After Trudeau, his wife Sophie, and children Xavier, Ella-Grace and Hadrien, alighted from a car on the forecourt of the Rashtrapati Bhavan, Modi shook hands with Trudeau and then hugged him. On Thursday evening, breaking his silence since the Canadian Prime Ministers arrival in India on February 17, Modi said he looked forward to the bilateral meeting on Friday. I appreciate his (Trudeaus) deep commitment to ties between our two countries, Modi tweeted. (Follow The Tribune on Facebook; and Twitter @thetribunechd) At the Rashtrapati Bhavan, while Modi shook hands with Sophie Trudeau, Xavier and little Hadrien, he had a special hug reserved for Elle-Grace. On Thursday, the Indian leader had posted a picture of him playfully tweaking Elle-Graces ears with Trudeau smilingly looking on during a visit to Canada in 2015. I particularly look forward to meeting his children Xavier, Ella-Grace, and Hadrien, Modi said in his tweet. Hadrien, who will turn four this month, was the cynosure of all eyes at the Rashtrapati Bhavan as he stumbled and struggled to hold on to his hat as Modi playfully stroked his cheeks. The ceremonial reception optics came after much speculation that Modi and his government was cold-shouldering Trudeau during his eight-day state visit to India. The visiting dignitary and his family have since visited Agra, Ahmedabad, Mumbai and Amritsar. While Modi did not accompany Trudeau to Ahmedabad, a meeting with Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh in Amritsar on Wednesday was organised only at the last moment. Ties between New Delhi and Ottawa have been frosty of late as Canada was being seen as offering a platform to separatists demanding an independent Khalistan. On Thursday, fresh storm blew after it came to light that the Canadian High Commission here had extended an invitation to a convicted Khalistan separatist, Jaspa Atwal, for a reception in honour of Trudeau. The High Commission then rescinded the invitation while the Indian External Affairs Ministry said that it was ascertaining how a visa was issued to Atwal who holds a Canadian passport. Trudeau later said the matter was being taken extremely seriously and that Atwal should never have received an invitation. The visit of Trudeau, who assumed office in November 2015, comes after the visit of Modi to Canada in April that year. Following Fridays bilateral summit between the two leaders, a number of agreements were expected to be signed. IANS pardeepdhull@gmail.com Islamabad, February 23 A global money-laundering watchdog has decided to place Pakistan back on its terrorist financing watchlist, a government official and a diplomat said on Friday, in a likely blow to Pakistans economy and its strained relations with the United States. The move is part of a broader US strategy to pressure Pakistan to cut alleged links to Islamist militants unleashing chaos in neighbouring Afghanistan and backing attacks in India. It comes days after reports that Pakistan had been given a three-month reprieve before being placed on the list, which could hamper banking and hurt foreign investment. The United States has spent the past week lobbying member countries of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) to place Pakistan on a so-called 'grey list' of nations that are not doing enough to combat terrorism financing. Pakistan had launched last-minute efforts to avoid being placed on the list, such as taking over charities linked to a powerful Islamist figure. But the campaign proved insufficient and the group decided late on Thursday that Pakistan would be put back on the watchlist, a senior Pakistani official and a diplomat with knowledge of the latest FATF discussions told Reuters. The decision was taken yesterday. The chair (of FATF) is expected to make a statement sometime this afternoon in Paris, the diplomat said. Both officials spoke on condition of anonymity. Pakistan was on the list for three years until 2015. Painful consequences? Earlier in the week China, Turkey, and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) were opposing the US-led move against Pakistan but by late on Thursday, both China and the GCC dropped their opposition, the diplomatic source said. He added that the financial consequences would not kick in until June, which, in theory, could allow Pakistan time to fix financing issues. But the odds of that, particularly in an election year, seem slim, he added. Pakistani officials and analysts fear being on the FATF list could endanger Pakistans handful of remaining banking links to the outside world, causing real financial pain to the economy just as a general election looms. Under FATF rules one countrys opposition is not enough to prevent a motion from being successful. Britain, France and Germany backed the US move. Pakistan has sought to head off its inclusion on the list by amending its anti-terrorism laws and by taking over organisations controlled by Hafiz Saeed, a Pakistan-based Islamist accused by the United States and India of being behind 2008 militant attacks on the Indian city of Mumbai in which 166 people were killed. On Tuesday, Foreign Minister Khawaja Asif tweeted that Pakistan had received a three-month reprieve, adding that it was grateful to friends who helped. US President Donald Trump last month ordered big cuts in security aid to Pakistan over what the United States sees as its failure to crack down on militants. Pakistan rejects accusations that it sponsors Taliban militants fighting US forces in neighbouring Afghanistan and says it is doing all it can to combat militancy. Reuters harinder@tribunemail.com Smita Sharma Tribune News Service New Delhi, February 22 A day prior to formal talks between PM Narendra Modi and his Canadian counterpart Justin Trudeau, India and Canada hastened to damage control after a photograph of Trudeaus wife Sophie with convicted Sikh separatist Jaspal Atwal appeared in the Canadian media. Reports said Atwal had attended an official event hosted in Mumbai for the visiting Trudeaus. Edit: Victory of diplomacy Atwal, a member of the banned International Sikh Youth Federation, was convicted of trying to murder then Punjab minister Malkiat Singh Sidhu in Vancouver in 1986. Sidhu was shot at twice, but survived. He was later killed in India. A Canadian court had then called it an act of terrorism and sentenced Atwal and three others to 20 years in prison. Atwal was invited to a select dinner in Canada House this evening in honour of Trudeau. Following media reports, the invitation was rescinded by the Canadian Mission. The controversy erupted as Trudeau landed back in Delhi after a four-city visit. Asked about the Atwal row on the sideline of a business forum event, the Canadian PM called it unfortunate. We take this very seriously. The Individual in question never should have received an invitation. As soon as we found out we rescinded the invitation immediately. The person and department will take full responsibility, he said. (Follow The Tribune on Facebook; and Twitter @thetribunechd) Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) spokesperson Raveesh Kumar fielded a barrage of questions on the subject with no clear answers. His presence at the event should be addressed to the Canadians. On the visa part, there are different ways people enter india.There are OCI cards, e visas... Later in the day, an MEA spokesperson said Atwals name was not on the immigration blacklist of Sikh extremists. The Union Government time-to-time reviews the blacklist of Sikh extremists, taking into account Intelligence inputs and activities of the persons concerned. He said 150 such names had been removed from the blacklist in the last few years, and in the process Atwals name was removed too. Many an eyebrow was raised last year when Trudeau attended a Khalsa Day parade where Bhindranwale was eulogised. The Khalistan issue was discussed formally at strategic talks between the Foreign Ministers of both countries today ahead of the Friday talks. Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland called her discussions with Sushma Swaraj as constructive and useful. The Canadian foreign policy is to support a strong and united India, she said at an event organised by the Observer Research Foundation. In his talks with Punjab CM Capt Amarinder Singh in Amritsar on Wednesday, Trudeau had assured him that his government did not support separatists. (With PTI inputs) editorial@tribune.com Bijay Sankar Bora Tribune News Service Guwahati, February 22 The All-Indian United Democratic Front (AIUDF) led by Badruddin Ajmal today reacted sharply to Army Chief Bipin Rawats comments on the rise of the party that is believed to be championing the cause of immigrant Muslims in the North-East, especially Assam. The Army Chief, while addressing a seminar on Wednesday, reportedly warned against the influx of people from Bangladesh, calling it proxy war by Pakistan with help from China. He referred to reports of an increase in Muslim population in several districts of Assam and talked about the rise of the AIUDF led by Badruddin Ajmal. There is a party called AIUDF. If you look at it, they have grown in a faster time-frame than the BJP grew over the years, he said, adding that the BJP won only two seats in the 1984 national election. The AIUDF is moving at a faster pace in Assam, he said. Lok Sabha MP from Assam Badaruddin Ajmal today said the comment made by the Army Chief on the rise of AIUDF in the political arena of Assam was not based on ground realities and is motivated. The AIUDF chief on behalf of the party stated: The Constitution of India has entrusted the Chief of Indian Army to lead the great Army. The Army Chief is not expected to keep a close watch on the activities of political parties in the country. Therefore, the comment made by the Army Chief on the rising popularity of the AIUDF in Assam transcends the constitutional responsibility entrusted on him. This is not expected of him. Ajmal said: The AIUDF is a democratic, secular political party that was formed within the ambit of the Indian Constitution... Since its inception, the AIUDF has been advocating identification and deportation of illegal migrants from Assam. In this backdrop, it is hard to understand why General Rawat sounds so concerned over the fast-increasing popularity of the AIUDF. Moving faster than BJP There is a party called AIUDF. If you look at it, they have grown in a faster time-frame than the BJP grew over the years General Bipin Rawat, Army Chief Political remark, shocking He has made a political statement, shocking! Why is it a concern for Army Chief that a party is rising faster than BJP? Badruddin Ajmal, AIUDF chief uttara@tribuneindia.com Berlin, February 23 Police say two people are dead after a shooting in Switzerland's biggest city, Zurich. They say the situation is under control. City police said on Friday they rushed to the scene near the central train station after passers-by reported hearing shots today afternoon. Officers found one person dead and a second with serious injuries, who subsequently died. Police described it as a "violent crime" but gave no further details. They said the situation is under control and there is no danger to the public. AP editorial@tribune.com New Delhi, February 22 The National Investigation Agency (NIA) has arrested a member of a banned Manipur terrorist organisation who was allegedly a part of the team that carried out an attack on an Army convoy in June 2015, in which 18 soldiers were killed and 15 other injured, an official spokesperson said here. The details of the place of arrest were not given out by the NIA and the spokesperson only said 22-year-old Moirangthem Nimaichand Meitei was an active cadre of the Kangleipak Communist Party (Noyon) group. Meitei was part of the team that ambushed the Army convoy near Paraolen village in Chandel district of Manipur on June 4, 2015, he said. The accused was produced before the special judge on February 20 and was remanded in seven days of NIA custody. Sources said the accused was detained by a combined team of the NIA, Gorkha Rifles and Bishnupur police in Manipur on February 3 from Ningthoukhong area. The anti-terror probe agency, which investigated the case, had ascertained that the total number of militants involved in the attack was 23, of whom two were killed in retaliatory action by the Army in Chandel district of Manipur, officials said. Army trucks were attacked with Lathod guns and grenades by suspected terrorists of NSCN (Khaplang) and other groups. The militants had formed three groups to carry out the attack. PTI rchopra@tribunemail.com Our Correspondent Jaipur, February 23 Some unknown bikers have been booked for having tried to snatch a handbag from a British woman in a case that was previously reported as molestation. Two unknown bikers tried to take away the 29-year-old womans bag as she was walking on a street in Makrana Mohalla on Wednesday evening. An attempt to loot a handbag of a British woman was lodged on Friday against two unknown bike runners in Sadar Kotwali area, Sadar Kotwali IO Goverdhan Ram said, dismissing previous reports of molestation. The woman filed a complaint with police on Thursday, and police are currently going through CCTV footages to investigate the case. editorial@tribune.com Raj Sadosh Abohar, February 23 Doctors at government-run hospitals today reportedly kept an assault victim shuttling about three hours, citing staff shortage. Small-time farmer Roop Singh (49) was allegedly assaulted by his neighbours following a dispute over irrigating fields in Bazidpur Bhoma village this morning. The profusely bleeding farmer was taken by his family to the Community Health Centre (25-bed hospital) at Seetogunno village. The staff on duty referred him to the Sub-Divisional Hospital at Abohar without providing preliminary treatment. His son Indraj Singh took him to 100-bed Sub-Divisional Hospital where medicos dressed his wounds to prevent further loss of blood, but did not stitch them, the family said. The staff on duty referred the victim to GGSM College Hospital, Faridkot. When the son requested to issue MLR, the staff reportedly said the same had to be issued by Seetogunno-based mini hospital as per the law. The patient was taken back to Seetogunno in an ambulance, following which further proceedings were initiated after about three hours of the first visit. Seetogunno Additional Senior Medical Officer Dr Ravi Bansal said two doctors Puneet and Sarang had been shifted on deputation to Abohar and Dr Anmol Nagpal was sent to the district hospital in Fazilka few months ago. When doctors are not provided here, how emergencies will be handled? he asked. Abohar Civil Hospital SMO Dr Om Parkash said, Treatment should have been immediately provided at Seetogunno and MLR should also have been issued from there. Shortage of medicos is affecting the routine work here too. How can patients from other segments be treated here, he said. Fazilka-based Civil Surgeon Dr Surinder Kumar said to provide treatment and issue MLR was the responsibility of the Seetogunno centre. I will visit Abohar to resolve the problem, he added. Nar Sewa Narayan Sewa president Raju Charaya said government hospitals in the subdivision had emerged as referral centres only. None was ready to shoulder responsibility. NGOs had approached top officers of the Health Department and drawn attention of the respective ministers also in the past 10 years, but vacancies were not filled, he rued. Doctors cite staff shortage editorial@tribune.com Toronto, February 23 Canadas spy agency had been warned about the repercussions of convicted Khalistani terrorist Jaspal Atwal attending events with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on his tour to India, the Canadian media reported today. Trudeaus first bilateral visit to India was hit by a controversy over the dinner invitation to Atwal by the Canadian High Commissioner in New Delhi. Atwal had been convicted of shooting at visiting Punjab minister Malkiat Singh Sidhu on Vancouver Island in 1986. High Commissioner Nadir Patel cancelled Atwals invite for the dinner, hosted last night for Trudeau, while the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) said it would ascertain how Atwal entered India. The informant, who asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation, confirmed speaking to an agent from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) on February 17, hoping to alert the Canadian Government about Atwals criminal history. The person told the CSIS agent that this is an embarrassment for the Prime Minister, and CSIS should send a note to the PMs office. And they sent a note. The Canadian Security Intelligence Service did not respond to requests for comment, Postmedia reported. A separate source told Postmedia that some members of the Punjabi-language media in Surrey sent news reports about Atwals history to the Canadian High Commission in New Delhi on February 20. PTI pardeepdhull@gmail.com Toronto, February 23 Canadas spy agency had been warned about the repercussions of convicted Khalistani terrorist Jaspal Atwal attending events with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on his tour to India, Canadian media reported on Friday. Trudeaus first bilateral visit to India was hit by a controversy over the dinner invitation to Atwal by the Canadian High Commissioner in New Delhi. Atwal had been convicted of shooting at visiting Punjab Cabinet Minister Malkiat Singh Sidhu on Vancouver Island in 1986. High Commissioner Nadir Patel cancelled Atwals invite for the dinner, hosted on Thursday night for Trudeau, while the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) said it will ascertain how Atwal entered India. The informant, who asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation, confirmed speaking to an agent from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) on February 17, hoping to alert the Canadian government to Atwals criminal history. The person said to the CSIS agent that this is an embarrassment for the prime minister and CSIS should send a note to the Prime Ministers Office. And they sent a note. CSIS did not respond to requests for comment, Postmedia reported. A separate source told Postmedia that some members of the Punjabi-language media in Surrey sent news reports about Atwals history to the Canadian High Commission in New Delhi on February 20. The source said it was widely known that Atwal, a former member of the terrorist International Sikh Youth Federation, was going to India to attend some of the events with Prime Minister Trudeau and the Canadian delegation. Despite the warnings, Atwal attended a reception on February 21 in Mumbai, where he was photographed with Trudeaus wife Sophie Gregoire and Infrastructure Minister Amarjeet Sohi. The outcome has embarrassed Trudeau, who had made efforts in India to insist Canada is not soft on Sikh separatism and believes in a united India, the Vancouver Sun said. Atwal was also once accused of assaulting Indian-origin former British Columbia premier Ujjal Dosanjh. Dosanjh said the Canadian government demonstrated a lack of concern by inviting the man convicted of attempted murder in another case. Dosanjh, also a one-time federal Liberal Cabinet Minister, says he was taken aback when he found out that Atwal was invited to a dinner reception with the Prime Minister after attending another event with the Trudeau family earlier this week, the Globe and Mail reported. He said Atwal attacked him with an iron bar in 1985 over his opposition to Sikh extremism. The assault left Dosanjh with 80 stitches and a broken hand, but Atwal was acquitted of the crime. It left me speechless about the lack of preparation or the depth of unpreparedness with which Mr Trudeaus trip went through, he said. PTI editorial@tribune.com Ruchika M Khanna Tribune News Service Chandigarh, February 23 Three Dalit MLAs of Opposition parties and Congress MP Shamsher Singh Dullo walked out of a meeting of the state-level Vigilance and Monitoring Committee for Scheduled Castes and Tribes here today after Chief Minister Capt Amarinder Singh failed to turn up. They also dubbed the Congress government anti-Dalit. The first to accuse Capt Amarinder of being non-serious on Dalit issues was Dullo, a former PPCC chief. His (CMs) absence from the meeting shows how serious he is about the issues concerning SCs and Backward Classes. The quorum was incomplete without the competent authority the committee chairman. If the CM was indisposed, all MLAs and MPs should have been informed in advance and the meeting postponed, Dullo later told The Tribune. Dullo said it was mandatory that the meeting be convened once in six months, but none had been held ever since the Congress government came to power over 11 months ago. Dalits in Punjab are facing problems, mostly because of the state governments lackadaisical attitude. As an MP, I struggled hard to ensure that Rs 140 crore was released for the post-matric scholarship scheme. The state government could not give its matching grants. As a result, there is a high dropout rate of Dalit students. There is no substantive action in cases of atrocities on Dalits. Rich farmers are getting crop loan waiver, but the Dalit tenant farmers are left out, he added. The meeting of the 16-member committee including the CM and 10 other Congress MLAs was scheduled post lunch today, and 31 agenda items were to be discussed, including the status of police cases concerning atrocities on Dalits, the status of Centrally sponsored SCschemes and the social tension in villages because of Dalits not being given their one-third share in cultivating village common land. As the CM was indisposed, he deputed Forest Minister Sadhu Singh Dharamsot and Finance Minister Manpreet Singh Badal to attend the meeting. However, some members of the committee, including MLAs Pawan Kumar Tinu (SAD), Som Parkash (BJP) and Budh Ram (AAP), accused the government of not being serious about issues concerning Dalits. They are not even concerned that the conviction rate in cases concerning Dalits is just two per cent, mainly because the police are getting compromise done in most cases. We wanted to discuss this and ensure that the chairperson issued necessary directions to the state DGP. The diversion of funds meant for SCs, too, needed the CMs intervention, Tinu told The Tribune. Ministers in damage-control mode Shamsher Dullo and three Opposition MLAs told Sadhu Singh Dharamsot and Manpreet Badal that if the CM was unwell, the meeting should have been postponed. However, the two ministers decided to carry on with the meeting. Later, in a press release, the duo lashed out at the Opposition MLAs: Instead of participating constructively in the deliberations, they chose to walk out. We did not cancel the meeting, which was being held after three years, in the interests of the SC/BC community. The CM would be present at the next meeting. Both, however, did not comment on the outburst of their own partys MP (Dullo). editorial@tribune.com Tribune News Service Chandigarh, February 22 Chief Minister Capt Amarinder Singh handed over a list of 11 Canada-based operatives, allegedly involved in the drug trade in Punjab, to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in Amritsar yesterday. Some of them have been declared proclaimed offenders. The state government wants them extradited. The Canadian Prime Minister was also reportedly given a list of nine category-A operatives said to be involved in financing and supplying weapons for terror activities. Refusing to reveal the names, a senior government functionary said, It is a confidential matter. The information has been exchanged at the diplomatic level. Capt Amarinder had in October last year urged the Centre to take up with Canada the extradition of 10 NRIs declared POs in drug cases in the state. In a letter, the CM had named Sarabjit Singh Sandhar, Ranjit Singh Aujla, Nirankar Singh Dhillon, Gursewak Singh Dhillon, Amarjit Singh Kooner, Lamer Singh Daleh, Pardeep Singh Dhaliwal, Amarinder Singh Chheena, Parminder Singh Deo and Ranjit Kaur Kahlon. Most of the names given to the Canadian PM are the same, a government official said. editorial@tribune.com Tribune News Service Sangrur, February 23 Farmers under the banner of Bhartiya Kisan Union (BKU) Sidhupur from three districts of Malwa today started an indefinite protest at the Cheema grain market in Sangrur district. They also burnt the effigies of the central and state governments. The police had detained them on Thursday at different places while they were going towards New Delhi to start a protest from Friday. The police had refused to allow them to go towards New Delhi, but allowed them to go back to their homes. But the farmers did not return to their homes. Instead, they gathered at Cheema last night, creating a major headache for the police. We were going to New Delhi to participate in a national-level dharna with 66 other organisations. But the police detained the farmers at various places without any valid reason. The Punjab Government has been doing this on the directions of the Centre. This proves that both are anti-farmer governments, said Jagjit Singh Dallewal, state president of BKU Sidhupur. Senior police officers from Sangrur and Mansa are camping at Cheema to convince the farmers to end their protest. We have deployed adequate security in the entire area, said William Jeji, DSP Sunam. Our dharna will continue till the protest of other organisations in New Delhi. We were going to New Delhi to highlight the plight of farmers and raise our demands, including implementation of the Swaminathan report and complete debt waiver, said Ran Singh Chatha, Sangrur district press secretary of BKU Sidhupur. editorial@tribune.com Tribune News Service Moga, February 23 The Bhartiya Kisan Union (Ekta), Kirti Kisan Union and allied farm unions have decided to relaunch a statewide agitation against the state government for having failed to completely waive farm loans. A decision in this regard was taken at a meeting of at least seven farm unions at Naushera Pannua in Tarn Taran district today. Nirbahi Singh Dhudike, president of the Kirti Kisan Union, who presided over the meeting, said protest rallies would be held at Bhawanigarh on March 6, Moga on March 7, Jalandhar on March 8 and Chandigarh on April 3 in support of a total waiver of farm loans. Statewide protests were held by the farm unions from January 22 to 26. In todays meeting, senior activists of farm unions rejected the state governments partial debt waiver scheme and demanded full waiver of farm loans. They said Chief Minister Captain Amarinder Singh had betrayed the farming community by partially waiving the farm loans. Amarinder has failed to fulfil the promises made with the farmers during the 2017 Assembly poll campaign, he said. If Amarinder is serious on the issue of farmers suicides, he must announce a budgetary provision for waiver of farm loans in the annual budget (planned expenditure) for 2018-19 in the coming Budget Session of the state Assembly, said a farm activist. editorial@tribune.com New Delhi: Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) MP Prem Singh Chandumajra on Thursday hit out at Chief Minister Capt Amarinder Singh for raking up non-issue with the visiting Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. He said Amarinder had raised Khalistan with Trudeau which was now a non-issue. He questioned the utility of his demand to deport nine Sikhs from Canada to India with regard alleged charges of their involvement in terrorism. Chandumajra said after many years of efforts the Union Home Ministry has struck down 70 per cent of names of Sikhs from its first blacklist. The names relate to those allegedly involved in militancy in Punjab. Now the Chief Minister is trying to turn back the clock, which will work against the public image of the Sikh community, he alleged. Chandumajra said the CM should have raised substantive issues with Trudeau like borrowing Canadian technologies in the field of agriculture and providing employment to Sikhs in that country. tns uttara@tribuneindia.com Aman Sood Tribune News Service Patiala, February 23 A notorious gangster and key plotter of the 2016 Nabha jailbreak has been arrested in Hong Kong, a special police team said on Friday. Gangster Ramanjit Singh alias Romi, who faces several criminal charges, was arrested in a robbery case by Hong Kong Police. Interpol had issued Red Notice against Singh on Patiala Police's application after he disappeared in 2016. Singh was previously arrested in 2016, and later released on bail, but he jumped bail and escaped to Hong Kong. He kept in touch with gangster Gurpreet Singh Sekhon, a key plotter and one of the six people to escape Nabha prison in November 2016. Singh is believed to have provided financial assistance to the escapees for their jailbreak. Sekhon and some of his associates were arrested in February 2017. Romi was arrested and sent to jail in 2016, but he managed bail and got in touch with one of the three senior cops probing his case. One of them allegedly struck a deal with him and returned his passport, said an officer. His name also appeared in connection with investigations into a recent encounter of gangster Harjinder Singh alias Vicky Gounder, also one of the six people who escaped the prison in November 2016. Gounder, who faced several serious charges such as murder, extortion, prison break and drug smuggling, was being investigated for his possible links to militant organisation and even Pakistans Inter Services Intelligence (ISI), and recently received an automatic assault rifle from Pakistan through Singh. Interestingly, police were believed to be aware of Singhs plans to help some accomplice escape prison. Singh also faces charges of theft and forgery after police found him in possession of a stolen car in Nabha in 2016. He was also charged with cheating after he was found in possession of several Chinese credit cards. Gounder and Prema Lahoria, who was also killed in the shootout, were in touch with Singh, who was providing them logistic and financial support in India. Singh is also being investigated for his suspected involvement in the killings of religious leaders in the state. His link with the Pakistans ISI is also being investigated, as is suspicions that he was acting as a linkman between militant organisations and gangsters in Punjab. Singh is suspected to have come in touch with Jagtar Singh Johal alias Jaggi, a UK national belonging to a militant organisation believed to be behind the murders of Hindu religious leadersamong them Punjab RSS vice-president Jagdish Gagneja, who was killed in August 2016. Police are currently investigating the possible nexus between the Khalistan Liberation Front and ISI in the killings. Police want to investigate Singhs links to well-connected people, among them policemen. editorial@tribune.com Tribune News Service Chandigarh, February 23 The refusal of NITI Aayog to bail out farmers of Punjab has sent wrong signals to the debt-ridden community, which will further escalate suicides in the state. This was stated by Leader of Opposition Sukhpal Khaira in a statement issued here today. Khaira said it was due to the efforts of Punjab farmers that India was self-sufficient in foodgrains. He said although more states have begun to contribute to foodgrain now, but it was Punjab that actually filled the food bowl of the country in its hour of need. Khaira said it was a fact that despite such massive humanitarian contribution, the farmers had always been discriminated against in the pricing of their crops by successive Central governments. He said it was because of this discriminatory policy of Central governments that the farmers of Punjab particularly have landed under a colossal debt of Rs 1 lakh crore. He added that the Modi government had written off lakhs of crores of bad debts of big corporate business houses in order to bail out nationalised banks because of outstanding NPAs. It is a pity that the Aayog or the Modi government is turning a blind eye to the lakhs of farmer families of Punjab, he added. editorial@tribune.com Vishav Bharti Tribune News Service Chandigarh, February 22 When the collection of original Sikh coins is available at half the price in the open market, the Punjab Government has paid lakhs of rupees to a private firm just for minting duplicate coins. These coins will be placed at the upcoming Sikh Coins Museum at Gobindgarh Fort. For building interiors of the museum, the then SAD-BJP government had given a contract for Rs 5.5 crore to a Delhi-based firm. The contract also included Rs 20 lakh for supplying duplicates of around 400 coins related to the Sikh history. The decision has raised eyebrows. According to numismatics, most of the original Sikh coins in copper are available anywhere between Rs 150 and Rs 200 and silver coins between Rs 1,500 and Rs 2,500. Experts say that barring a few rare coins, even if government purchases the entire collection of Sikh coins from the open market it wont cost more than Rs 10 lakh. The Gobindgarh Fort museum will display coins from 1765 onwards, when Sikh misls started issuing their own coins. Besides, a large collection of original Sikh coins is gathering dust in state museums. The number is so high that the department is finding it difficult to find place to display these. One of the largest collections of Sikh coins is at Patialas Sheesh Mahal. The government decision not only indicates towards inappropriate expenditure, but is also against the spirit of museology. A Chandigarh-based eminent numismatist, who has written several books on numismatics, said in the discipline of studies of museums it also amounts to misguiding people. I have seen the museums across the world but nowhere have I come across a museum showcasing duplicate items. Can you really call the place museum if it doesnt showcase original artefacts, he said. Rameshwar Dutt, an archaeologist and president of the Global Numismatics and Philately Society, said it was a known fact that often collectors and numismatists or their families are keen to donate or give their collections to government museums on loans for just acknowledgement of their contribution. It seems that the government has been taken for a ride by unscrupulous elements, he said. Another concern raised by numismatists is that it is a case in which government itself is promoting minting of duplicate coins. Once the suppliers are ready with dies, they will create havoc in the market by supplying fake Sikh coins, said Dutt. Minister for Cultural Affairs and Tourism Navjot Singh Sidhu could not be contacted. editorial@tribune.com Sanjeev Singh Bariana Tribune News Service Chandigarh, February 23 The Department of Local Government has started working out a detailed programme for the rehabilitation of 13,648 families in 119 slums of Punjab under the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana. The state participated in a recent conference in Gandhinagar (Gujarat) to review the national programme. Slum-dwellers will be given professionally constructed houses free of cost. They will be required to vacate their current accommodation for at least two years. The government will be responsible for providing alternative accommodation till the time they get possession of their new houses, a senior officer said. A portion of the land will be retained by the constructor for his commercial ventures. The third share of the land will be given to the government. These residential quarters will come up as part of the in situ slum rehabilitation scheme. The residential quarters here will be largely vertical structures. The department has sought a small portion of the land out of the total that would be left vacant. Confirming the development, Director, Local Government, Karnesh Sharma said, Teams have been constituted to submit project reports on all identified slums in the state under the policy to help us in drafting our tenders for respective dwellings. The process will commence from Amritsar, Ludhiana, Jalandhar, Bathinda and Patiala. Minister for Local Government Navjot Singh Sidhu has issued instructions to his officers that projects will ensure adequate space and quality of work on houses being made for the slum- dwellers. No constructions will be cleared without a certificate of quality at each level, he has communicated to his officers. Reacting to the development, Ram Mehr, an old migrant based in Ludhiana, said, I am not sure what alternative accommodation will the government provide us in two years. We will be apprehensive of leaving our homes because politicians often come up with offers to befool people. A senior officer of the Department of Local Government said, We have witnessed examples of the poor being given houses in Gujarat, Telangana, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh, so there is no reason anyone should have doubts here. Impetus to project The project is part of the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana. The impetus has come following the states participation in a conference to review the national programme at Gandhinagar (Gujarat) recently. Alternative housing Slum-dwellers will have to vacate current accommodation for at least two years. The government will provide alternative accommodation till the time they get possession of their new homes, a senior officer said. rchopra@tribunemail.com London, February 22 A Punjabi Sikh mans turban was ripped by a white man in an apparent racist attack outside the UK parliament, according to a media report. Ravneet Singh, 37, said he was waiting to enter the Portcullis House, part of the British Parliamentary Estate, to meet Sikh Labour MP Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi when the assault took place on Wednesday. Singh said he was waiting in the queue when the man, who shouted Muslim go back, approached him and attempted to remove his turban. I was in the queue outside Portcullis House and this guy ran up to us. Just before we got to the entrance he came up to me and attacked me. (Follow The Tribune on Facebook; and Twitter @thetribunechd) He was pulling at my turban strongly. It half moved and I grabbed it. Before he could do anything else I shouted at him and he ran, he was quoted as saying by The Independent. Singh said the man made a racist comment in another language that he did not recognise. He was a white man, but he didnt sound English. He said something like Muslim go back, he added. Labour MP Dhesi, who was to host Singh, expressed disgust at the incident and sought action against the culprit. Disgusted to discover today that someone filled with hatred tried to pull off the turban of one of my guests standing in line outside @UKParliament. I hope the @metpoliceuk /authorities will take urgent action, Dhesi tweeted. According to the report, the police have confirmed being alerted at 5.20 pm about the assault outside Portcullis House, the building adjacent to the Houses of Parliament, which is home to offices for MPs and their staff. No arrest has been made so far, with the police probing the case. PTI editorial@tribune.com Tribune News Service Ludhiana, February 22 To keep a check on unauthorised constructions and encroachments in the state, the state government will soon sign a pact with the Punjab Remote Sensing Centre, Ludhiana. Local Bodies Minister Navjot Singh Sidhu today claimed that the remote-sensing technology would not only help in mapping all illegal constructions in the state, but it would also generate huge revenue through collection of all types of taxes from such illegal buildings that usually go uncheck in the absence of a strong mechanism. Sidhu was in the city to attend the National Conference on Role of Geospatial Technologies to Bridge the Rural and Urban Divide being organised by the centre and the Indian Society of Geomatics, Ludhiana chapter. Addressing the gathering, the minister said he was committed to make Punjab ahead of others and sought the support of the scientists. He asked the centre officials to send a proposal, which he would discuss with the CMso that an MoU could be signed. editorial@tribune.com GS Paul Tribune News Service Amritsar, February 22 A day after the high-profile visit of Canadian PM Justin Trudeau at the Golden Temple, SGPC members today lodged a protest, alleging that they were ignored on the occasion. As per the MEA protocol, only SGPC chief secretary Dr Roop Singh and information officer Jaswinder Jassi were allowed to accompany Trudeau during his hour-long stay at the shrine. SGPC member Kiranjot Kaur, in her Facebook post, said: What a shame, no SGPC member was allowed to welcome PM Trudeau...Employees took over elected representatives role. In response, Dr Roop Singh submitted his apology for the lapse. Talking to The Tribune, Kiranjot Kaur said it was an important occasion and the SGPC members should have been involved. She claimed that earlier during the visit of dignitaries, all members were involved. At least, the SGPC president Gobind Singh Longowal should have accompanied Trudeau. But government officials were given importance over SGPC members, which is a bad precedent, she said. Echoing similar views, another member Ram Singh said at least the SGPC executive members should have been allowed to welcome Trudeau. Dr Roop Singh said the dignitaries were welcomed by the SGPC president, while the employees just performed the duties assigned to them. We had to follow the Centres protocol. If there is some bitterness among a few SGPC members, I submit my apology, he said. harinder@tribunemail.com Ruchika M Khanna Tribune News Service Chandigarh, February 22 In a snub to a Punjab Government delegation, that included Finance Minister Manpreet Badal, NITI Aayog Vice-Chairman Dr Rajiv Kumar today asked the state to work towards securing the income of its farmers rather than harping on funds on the plea of being instrumental in maintaining the countrys food security. Officials present at the meeting told The Tribune the delegation sought that the state be paid Rs 1,800 crore per annum by the Centre as cost for food procurement. As it asked NITI Aayog to take up the matter of reimbursing actuals, Dr Rajiv Kumar simply said, You can leave the food security of the country to us. To this, Manpreet Badal is learnt to have retorted, If the Centre is unwilling to pay the actuals, the FCI can take over the entire procurement process. (Follow The Tribune on Facebook; and Twitter @thetribunechd) Uttar Pradesh is now the largest producer of wheat, followed by Punjab and Madhya Pradesh. Also, West Bengal, UP, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana produce more rice than Punjab. Punjab pushed for the C2 formula (input cost plus rent of land) for calculating MSP. This too did not get the desired response. Official sources said Dr Kumar asked Punjab to go in for aggressive diversification, asking its farmers to take to dairy farming and growing cash crops. Sources said Punjab was not given any assurance on its demands for change in fund-sharing ratio, Border Area Development Fund, Kandi Area Development Fund or Sarv Shiksha Abhiyan. Manpreet Badal told The Tribune the Centre started schemes but changed the funding pattern, and this often resulted in the schemes coming to a halt since states did not have the resources to fund these. Calling his meeting with the Punjab CM successful, Dr Kumar said he had asked the state delegation to identify four or five key areas in which Niti Aayog could lend help. The Finance Minister said the government had sought help in framing policies for agriculture and job generation and for Shahpur-Kandi project, relining the Sirhind and Rajasthan feeder of the Bhakra mainline and access to canal-based drinking water in the wake of the sharp fall in the water table. editorial@tribune.com Tribune News Service Dehradun, February 23 A two-day annual spring festival - Basant Utsav will commence tomorrow at the lawns of Raj Bhawan. The popular festival dedicated to flowers, vegetables will bring under one roof commercial flower growers, hobbyists and entrepreneurs all participating in different competitions. While addressing a press conference today, Uttarakhand Governor Dr KK Paul said, A special postal cover dedicated to (allium wallichii, kunth) will be released. This is a plant found in the Himalayas and is used in medicines and spices, said Paul. Dr Paul said this year the festival would also become a source of disseminating information about the cultivation of Bulgarian Rose. We have been told that the soil in Uttarakhand is conducive for growing these flowers which are used for manufacturing of oil. We import around 12-13 tonnes of these flowers annually, he said. As of now the state is producing around 2,073 metric tonne lose flowers and around 15 .66 crore cut flowers. The main attraction during the two days festival will be a flower competition in different categories along with events in photography, fresh petal Rangoli competition, hanging pots and painting competition for children. In order to bring in more number of visitors for the event a van decorated with flowers has been doing the rounds of the city informing the residents about the festival. Further, a website www.uttarakhand spring festival has also been developed to provide interface to the people interested in horticulture and floriculture. singhking99@yahoo.com Tribune News Service Dehradun, February 22 Uttarakhand Governor K K Paul has stressed on efforts to bring about qualitative improvement in higher education in the state particularly in the sphere of alternative medicine, yoga and ayurveda. The Governor was addressing the gathering after awarding degrees to students at the first convocation of HNB Uttarakhand Medical University held in Dehradun today. He asserted that Uttarakhand had a great tradition of yoga and ayurveda and the state had a potential to make a great contribution to it. While congratulating the recipients of the degrees, the Governor said there had been great technical advancements in the field of medicine. These advancements were robotics, nano medicine and genetic engineering. He called upon the new generation of doctors to ensure that along with learning these, they must remain sensitive to human values while treating patients. Uttarakhand Chief Minister Trivendra Singh Rawat reiterated his governments commitment to provide better health facilities in remote areas. He said recruitment of nurses and appointments of doctors were being ensured. He also called upon the degree recipients to render their services in the states remote areas. vinaymishra188@gmail.com Washington, February 22 US President Donald Trumps daughter and adviser Ivanka Trump may come face to face with a top North Korean general, as both are set to attend the closing ceremony of the Winter Olympics in South Korea this weekend. Ivanka will be leading a high-profile American delegation to the closing ceremony of the Winter Olympics, being held in Pyeongchang, the White House announced yesterday. Kim Yong-chol, a vice chairman of the ruling Workers Party of Korea (WPK)s central committee, will lead the eight-member North Korean delegation, which will stay in the South for three days, according to Seouls unification ministry. President Trump and North Koreas supreme leader Kim Jong-un have been hurtling insults at each other in the last few months. But the tension mellowed down a bit since the Winter Olympics began on February 9 with North Korea participating in it. US Vice-President Mike Pence had attended the opening ceremony of the mega event where Kims sister Kim Yo Jong was also in attendance. I am honoured to lead the US delegation to the closing ceremonies of the Pyeongchang 2018 Winter Olympics. We look forward to congratulating Team USA and celebrating all that our athletes have achieved. Their talent, drive, grit and spirit embodies American excellence, and inspire us all, Ivanka, 36, said. PTI vinaymishra188@gmail.com Amman, February 22 Warplanes pounded the last rebel enclave near the Syrian capital for a fifth straight day on Thursday as the United Nations pleaded for a ceasefire to halt one of the fiercest air assaults of the seven-year civil war and prevent a massacre. At least 368 people have been killed, including 150 children, in the rural eastern Ghouta district on the outskirts of Damascus since Sunday night, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights war monitor. More than 1,850 people have been wounded in the assault by Syrias military and its allies. There is a need for avoiding massacre, because we will be judged by history, UN Syria envoy Staffan de Mistura said. He called on the United Nations Security Council to declare a ceasefire. President Bashar al-Assads main ally Russia, which wields a veto on the Security Council, said it could support a 30-day truce, but not one that included the Islamist militants it says the eastern Ghouta operation is meant to target. The existing de-escalation zone agreement that has failed to halt fighting does not include the Islamist faction formerly known as Nusra Front, and rebels in Ghouta say it is the presence of a small number of Nusra militants that is constantly used as a pretext for the siege and bombardment of the enclave. Residents of Douma, the biggest town in eastern Ghouta, described plumes of black smoke billowing from residential areas after planes dropped bombs from high altitude. Searches were under way for bodies amid the rubble in the town of Saqba and elsewhere, said rescuers. In Syrias north, where Turkey launched an offensive in the past month against a Kurdish militia, the Kurds said pro-government fighters were now deploying to front lines to help repel the Turkish advance, though assistance would be needed from the Syrian army itself. Reuters pardeepdhull@gmail.com Juba, February 23 A UN rights commission in South Sudan said on Friday there was sufficient evidence to charge at least 41 senior officers and officials with war crimes and crimes against humanity. South Sudans four-year-old civil war has been characterised by extreme brutality and attacks on civilians. But no high-ranking officials have been held to account, despite African Union (AU) promises to establish a special court to try alleged crimes. The court could be set up straight away and the prosecutor could begin working on indictments, said Yasmin Sooka, chairperson of the UN Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan. Under the peace agreement, those indicted can no longer hold or stand for office. Ultimately this is the only way to stop the rampant devastation of millions of human lives by South Sudans leaders, she said. The commission said it had forwarded a confidential list of suspects to the UNs High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Raad Al Hussein. Those named include three state governors, 33 generals and five colonels. The reportbased on 58,000 documents and 230 witness statementsis a litany of horrors and extraordinary cruelty. Some victims were beheaded, burned alive or had their throats cut, others had their eyes gouged out or were tortured. Sexual violence was particularly prevalent with numerous accounts of gang rape and child rape, and in cases reminiscent of Bosnia of people forced to watch or participate in the rape of loved ones. In one instance a 12-year-old boy was forced to have sex with his grandmother or be killed. Men were also attacked, with some castrated and others raped. The Commission believes the prevalence of sexual violence against men in South Sudan is far more extensive than documented; what we see so far is likely just the tip of the iceberg, said Sooka. The UN commission said soldiers and officials loyal to both President Salva Kiir and rebel leader Riek Machar were both responsible for crimes. It dismissed arguments that undisciplined soldiers might be to blame saying both the government and rebel military hierarchies functioned effectively in terms of issuance, transmission, and respect for orders. The commission said its investigations had focussed on incidents where it could make the case for individual command responsibility for widespread or systematic attacks on civilians. The commission also found widespread looting and deliberate ethnic attacks on entire communities and villages with the destruction of dwellings... on an industrial scale. There is a clear pattern of ethnic persecution for the most part by government forces who should be pursued for crimes against humanity, said Andrew Clapham, one of the commissioners. Describing South Sudans justice system as dysfunctional the commission called on the AU to establish the Hybrid Court, modelled on tribunals in Sierra Leone, Cambodia and elsewhere. There is sufficient evidence to conclude that... the parties to the conflict are deliberately targeting civilians on the basis of their ethnic identity and by means of killings, abductions, rape and sexual violence, as well as the destruction of villages and looting. These acts constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity, the commissions report said. AFP pardeepdhull@gmail.com Manila, February 23 Philippine President Rodrigo Dutertes spokesman says the government has summoned the US ambassador to discuss a global threat assessment by American intelligence agencies that mentioned Duterte along with the leaders of Cambodia and Thailand. Spokesman Harry Roque Jr says Executive Secretary Salvador Medialdea discussed the US intelligence communitys Worldwide Threat Assessment report with US Ambassador Sung Kim yesterday. Roque said that Medialdea also asked Philippine diplomats to explain to Washington steps taken by Duterte to promote economic development and ensure security respecting at all times the rule of law. The US report says autocratic tendencies are expected to deepen in some governments in Southeast Asia and mentioned that Duterte has suggested that he could suspend the constitution and declare a revolutionary government. AP The new Mack LR features a performance-oriented design that is focused on refuse fleet details both big and small. Photo: Jack Roberts Refuse is a grueling application for trucks. But, as with just about any other kind of fleet, the pressure is on to do more work with fewer workers and more powerful and capable equipment. And these trends are behind many of the design points on Macks newest refuse truck, the Class 8 LR model. The LR debuted at WasteExpo back in 2015 and got some updates last fall. But for various reasons, no trucking journalist had been given the opportunity to examine the new truck up close and conduct a test drive until now, when Mack graciously offered HDT the opportunity to do just that. The conditions on the ground werent perfect. A fast-moving snowstorm swamped Macks history home in Pennsylvanias LeHigh Valley the day I flew in for my LR test drive. So Id be dealing with snow, ice and temperatures hovering in the low 20s. And while Curtis Dorwart, Macks highly knowledgeable vocational brand manager, noted that these were pretty typical conditions for refuse fleets in northern states and Canada, we still thankfully opted to do our walk-around and familiarization with the LR in a heated garage next to Macks impressive museum at its Customer Center in Macungie. The Mack LR Refuse Truck Up Close First off, Dorwart noted that the LR nomenclature for the truck simply stands for Low Rider, because keeping the vehicle low to the ground was a primary design point when Mack engineers went to work. Even with increasing numbers of partially automated, hydraulic side-boom trucks lifting and dumping trash bins, Dorwart noted that refuse drivers still climb in and out of their trucks multiple times a day during a shift. To that end, he says, the LR features an ultra-low ground clearance of just 15-1/2 inches, which makes it less arduous and safer for drivers to enter and exit the cab. This low vehicle height is combined with an array of different drive configurations, including a right-hand, standup option, with the LRs top speed limited to 20 mph when that station is in use. Overall, the trucks exterior design is remarkably clean, with no exposed wiring and protected hydraulic lines. Dorwart says simplifying wire and hydraulic line routing with an emphasis on easier upfitting for the LR is a big reason for the trucks uncluttered look. Various nods to the tough life refuse trucks live were in evidence as well, including wiper motors that can be serviced or swapped out from a standing position at the front of the truck by simply removing four screws, as well as a front grille and windshield that can be swapped out quickly. Up above the cab, the roofing sheet metal is designed in a way to act much like a storm gutter on a house and route rain or refuse water away from the front and side windows and cab doors. The LR cab features large front windscreen glass areas and channeling overhead to divert rain and wastewater away from windows and doors. Photo: Jack Roberts Both the left- and right-hand operating stations are compact thanks to the massive doghouse that dominates the middle cab section but still comfortable. Visibility to all quarters is outstanding thanks to large window sections to the sides and rear of the cab. Views forward are excellent as well, as Mack engineers enhanced the LRs cab-forward (no hood) design by adding wrap-around front glass sections that extend in an unbroken line all the way back to the B pillars. Standard power, memory-programmable mirrors and an array of cameras covering the sides and rear of the truck complete the LRs visibility emphasis. An array of view screens is positioned in the middle of the cab where operators on both sides of the truck can quickly check live video feeds from the safety cameras around the vehicle. Dorwart also pointed out the LRs automotive style controls, which include a surprisingly small steering wheel and an instrument cluster connected to the tilt steering column. The arrangement is compact, easy to see and ensures clear sightlines to the gauges regardless of where the driver positions the steering wheel. The doghouse top features both the LR engine and a powerful hydraulics system capable of handling the latest side-loading trash receptacle boom arms. Various boom and vehicle controls are located on the top of the doghouse and are within easy reach from both operator stations. Other new automotive features include a highly effective, in-dash HVAC system that easily kept the cab warm during the cold Pennsylvania test drive to come. Taking the Mack LR on the Road Given the massive doghouse sitting immediately to my right, the LR was loud when I finally turned the key and fired up the Mack MP7 diesel lurking underneath. But this is to be expected in a cab-forward truck design like this one. And, it should be noted, Mack engineers did an excellent job at keeping powertrain, hydraulic system and road noises at a minimum. My test trucks MP7 was rated at 355 hp and mated with an Allison 4500 automatic DRS 6-speed transmission. Underneath me were Mack axles and mRide suspension, and air disc brakes, which stopped the truck crisply and quickly with very light application of the brake pedal. The LR can be driven from both the left and right cab positions. Vehicle speed is limited to 20 mph in the right-hand seat, however. Photo: Jack Roberts Views out of the cab are excellent, and the truck is remarkably nimble and easy to drive at the slower speeds it will spend most of its working life running (although the MP7 engine responds beautifully and accelerates the truck nicely if you put your foot down). Dorwart, who grew up in and around Allentown, suggested a nice cruise through a neighborhood and a typical subdivision as we got underway, and the LR proved easy to handle in that environment. Given the expansive views from the cab, it was simple to spot and avoid common obstacles such as parked cars. And while it was too cold for pedestrians, the live video from the cameras around the truck gave me confidence Id be able to pick them up and easily monitor them, as well. A couple of runs into some tight cul de sacs showed off the LRs tight turning radius, courtesy of the trucks 45-degree wheel cuts. The air disc brakes were a nice addition, as well, delivering smooth, safe quiet, stops. All in all, the LR is extremely well-mannered at residential speeds, which is a definite plus for any refuse truck. Of course refuse trucks dont live their entire lives at low speeds. So Dorwart and I took the LR on an interstate run on I-78 over to Allentown and back. The truck was unloaded, so the ride was predictably bumpy. But the LR didnt feel top-heavy at all, and didnt wander around in the lane a trait I notice a lot in cab-forward designs. There werent many opportunities to get out of the right-hand lane and pass over vehicles. But the LR easily held its own at highway speeds, and the Mack MP7 had plenty of reserve power on hand when I did need to get around someone. Mack has a pretty impressive share of the refuse market nationally, and Dorwart says response to the LR has been overwhelmingly positive since its debut. And its not hard to see why. Mack engineers listened to refuse fleets, took note of emerging trends in that market segment and delivered a thoroughly modern, detail-oriented design that will serve both the current, and future needs of those customers well. Tennessee Tech's president has sent a letter to the EPA urging that it not to use the university's glider kit environmental impact study pending an investigation into the validy of its results. Photo: Tom Berg The president of Tennessee Technical University, Philip Oldham, has asked the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to withhold any use or reference to a controversial study the university conducted on the environmental impact of glider kit vehicles until it has fully investigated the validity of the study's results. The study, titled Environmental & Economic Study of Glider Kit Assemblers, came under fire after it was revealed that Fitzgerald Glider Kits funded the research, which was used to counter restrictions on glider kiit mnaufacturing put in plce by the Obama administration. According to a report by The Washington Post, Fitzgerald paid about $70,000 to finance the study and later agreed to build a new academic research center for TTU. In a Feb. 19 letter to EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt obtained by the New York Times, Oldham writes that knowledgeable experts within the University have questioned the methodology and accuracy of the report, and that the university would be pursuing a peer review of the study to assure its validity. He also sent the same letter to Rep. Diane Black (R-TN) and to Tommy Fitzgerald, owner of Fitzgerald Glider Kits. Oldham was under pressure by TTU's faculty to disavow the report and a letter that was sent to Rep. Black who used the information to fight the glider kit restrictions in Congress. The faculty said that the study damaged the universitys reputation and integrity. A memo from the interim dean of TTUs College of Engineering Darrell Hoy further detailed the allegations of misconduct in research pertaining to the glider kit study, which are being subjected to peer review. The memo states that no qualified, credentialed engineering faculty members oversaw the testing, verified data or calculations, or reviewed or took part in the writing of the final report that was submitted to Fitzgerald or to Rep. Black. The results of the study purported to show that glider kits vehicles did not have a significant environmental impact when compared to modern, emissions-compliant trucks and engines. This contradicted a previous EPA study that found that NOx emissions from glider kit vehicles were around 40 times higher than those from compliant vehicles. Fitzgerald used the study to support a petition arguing against EPAs restrictions on glider kit manufacturing, which would have limited the number of glider kits it could produce to 300 per year. The study was also featured in a recent EPA proposal to roll back the restriction before being subjected to public comment. In a statement to The New York Times, EPA downplayed the TTU studys role, saying that it didnt rely on the study or quote directly from it and that its proposal to reopen the glider kit loophole was based on the notion that the Obama-era EPA overstepped its legal authority to regulate them. However, in the EPA's Nov. 16, 2017 proposal to repeal restrictions, the EPA mentions that petitions from the glider kit industry, which made extensive use of the Tennessee Tech study findings support one of its primary claims, had raised significant questions regarding the EPAs authority under the Clean Air Act to regulate gliders. LEVY: Trustee still on leave with pay over "dyke" commentsSue-Ann LevyMore from Sue-Ann LevyPublished:April 4, 2018Updated:April 4, 2018 9:23 PM EDTTDSB Trustee Sheila Cary-MeagherSun filesThe Toronto school trustee whos been on paid leave for two months following her controversial dyke comments told me Wednesday shes not coming back to work until she finishes doing what she set out to do.Toronto District School Board (TDSB) Trustee Sheila Cary-Meagher the subject of a recent integrity report for calling yours truly a dyke and a bitch at an expulsion hearing said she has finished her human rights and prevention of harassment training provided by the board.But the 30-year trustee said shes was still consulting with groups affected by what she said parents, education workers, constituents, colleagues and members of the LGBTQ community.When I suggested she and I meet since I was the one to whom she directed her vitriol and engage in a restorative justice practice pushed by her own board, she said, I think thats interesting.Asked whether shed agree it to it, she told me shed like a little time to think about it.It would depend on when, where and why, she said.Restorative practice, an Aboriginal process proposed to me by one of her trustee colleagues, is apparently being used by the TDSB in some schools to resolve conflict.According to board documents, the benefits include increased mutual respect, inclusiveness, increased empathy of the perpetrator and ability to give (the) victim a voice.Although I was serious about my offer, Im guessing this restorative meet-up wont happen considering Cary-Meagher never resigned over her comments let alone apologized directly to me.Had the same dyke slurs been made so publicly by a right-wing trustee about Premier Kathleen Wynne, for example, that person would have been pressured to resign, just as a former York Region District School Board trustee was forced to do a year ago after using the N word comment to describe a black parent. At the time, Education Minister Mitzie Hunter and a variety of other politicians ganged up on her, leaving her no option. There was no talk of a paid leave, or harassment training or consulting with stakeholders when it came to former trustee Nancy Elgies fate.When integrity commissioner Suzanne Craigs report on Cary-Meagher was presented at a Feb. 7 board meeting, I had no idea the slurs made on Nov. 27 in the presence of four staff and two other trustees were about me.Craig indicated in her report that Cary-Meagher was alternately aggressive, sarcastic and mocking about the individuals (my) sexual orientation and when called on it by a principal in attendance, said she didnt care. She even asked the principal if he hated her (me) too, according to Craigs report.At that meeting, the board agreed to permit Cary-Meagher to be absent with pay for three consecutive board meetings the third meeting is April 18.It was only two weeks after that I learned via a letter to board chairman Robin Pilkey from parent Jackie Davis that the slurs were directed at me.Pilkey said theres no time limit as to how long Cary-Meagher can be off meaning she could extend her leave beyond the April 18 meeting.She said four other trustees have agreed to cover off her work and added that she has no idea what Cary-Meagher is doing at this point.I think Sheila should make some amends to you, she added, a remark that was unsolicited.That notwithstanding, I want to make one thing perfectly clear.I am not as offended by the remarks (doing what I do Ive grown a very thick skin) as I am by what this yet again proves about the existence of that shameless double standard.I know the social justice warriors (SJWs) and assorted members of the Liberal-left would shriek in self-righteous indignation had the remark been about one of their own.All of the politicians who ganged up against Elgie and all the media who covered the integrity report about Cary-Meagher suddenly became silent when they discovered that a right-wing lesbian was the target of her venom.Who knew the SJWs dont practice what they preach? Ministers conclude crunch Brexit talks at Chequers Chequers Brexit menu Cream of sweetcorn soup with a ham hock croquette Guinness short rib of Dexter Beef with onions and parsnip mash Lemon tart with raspberry sorbet and fresh raspberries Cream of sweetcorn soup with a ham hock croquetteGuinness short rib of Dexter Beef with onions and parsnip mashLemon tart with raspberry sorbet and fresh raspberries BBC News23 February 2018Theresa May and 11 senior ministers have been thrashing out the UK's approach to Brexit in an eight-hour discussion at the PM's country retreat.BBC political editor Laura Kuenssberg said everyone is said to have left Chequers happy implying "baby steps forwards not a huge breakthrough".The PM will set out the position in a speech next week, after a discussion by the full cabinet.There have been clear differences between ministers over the way forward.But Laura Kuenssberg said she had been told the prime minister had "played a blinder" and persuaded Brexiteers to shift their position.However, a cabinet Brexiteer source had said "divergence has won the day" with mutual recognition between the UK and EU on goods in future, rather than the UK being forced to stick to EU rules.Conservative Party chairman Brandon Lewis said on BBC Question Time the cabinet would agree on the Brexit position, following the Chequers talks."What I can say to you is the outcome of those discussions will come to cabinet in the next few days, and late next week the prime minister will make a statement, a speech and outline what that position is."Pressed on whether everyone in the cabinet would agree with it, he replied: "Absolutely, yes."The Brexit sub-committee includes key figures such as Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson and Chancellor Philip Hammond, who were on opposite sides of the EU referendum argument in 2016.A Downing Street spokesman said: "The prime minister and cabinet ministers met at Chequers for eight hours."They held discussions including about the automotive sector led by Greg Clark, agrifood led by Michael Gove, digital trade by Liam Fox and a discussion on the overall future economic partnership that was led by the prime minister."Chief Whip Julian Smith and senior UK diplomats Tim Barrow and Ed Llewellyn were among those present, alongside the cabinet's Brexit sub-committee.Mrs May still has to get any agreement through the whole cabinet on Tuesday, through her party - and then through 27 other EU member states.Documents suggest European Commission negotiators will not approve of a UK proposal that seeks to select which EU rules to stick to post-Brexit and which to diverge from.Slides published online by the commission say such an approach would be "not compatible with the principles" set out in the EU's own guidelines and posed a risk to the "proper functioning" of its single market.But an EU diplomat told the BBC "we are hoping for a relationship that is as close as possible to the existing relationship", adding that EU chief negotiator Michel Barnier should be given a mandate "to explore all possibilities".Before the final arrangements with the EU kick in, a temporary transition period is planned - although the details have yet to be negotiated.On Wednesday, the UK set out its plans for how this "status quo" transition phase should work.The document suggests the UK will abide by new EU laws and be involved in talks on future fishing quotas, but will not be able to sign trade deals without the EU's permission.It also says the period should last as long as it takes to "prepare and implement the new processes and new systems".No 10 denied this meant it would be longer than the planned two years.But Sir Bill Cash, chairman of the Commons European Scrutiny Committee, warned that the UK could face an extra 4bn-5bn Brexit "divorce bill" if the post-withdraw transition period extends beyond the EU's preferred end date of 31 December 2020.He said that the current 35-39bn agreement was intended to cover to the end of the current EU budget period at the end of 2020.For Labour, Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell said he would like to see "a customs union" option on the table, which would "solve some of the issues around Northern Ireland" and enable the UK to influence future trade negotiations.Taking questions after a speech in London, he also said Labour would rather have a general election than a second referendum on Britain's EU membership because "there needs to be a wider debate" about the UK's future relationship with Europe.Shadow Foreign Secretary Emily Thornberry also told LBC that while Brexit meant the UK could not be in the customs union, a new agreement was needed: "That we think is likely to be a customs union that will look pretty much like the current customs union."It could mean the PM faces the prospect of a Commons rebellion as Conservative MP Anna Soubry said she had cross-party support for an amendment to the trade bill, calling for the government to form "a" customs union with the EU after Brexit. As prepared for delivery. I would like to acknowledge the Member States in attendance, the Emergency Relief Coordinator, the High Commissioner for Refugees, and all colleagues participating in Geneva this afternoon on this critical issue concerning the Syrian people and the UN-coordinated crisis response. The Syria crisis, soon to enter its eighth year, is a devastating political and humanitarian crisis. And it is a development crisis, with impacts spanning beyond its borders and beyond current generations. The developments of the past weeks inside Syria are deeply alarming in their devastating impact on civilians. I visited Lebanon last week and met communities at the forefront of one of the worst humanitarian crises of our time continuing to show exceptional commitment and solidarity to people displaced by the war in Syria now numbering nearly 1 million in Lebanon alone. I heard from officials at every level, NGOs, UN and donor colleagues how the poorest communities have generously hosted the most vulnerable Syrians and how refugees and hosts alike are being assisted by the international community and through national systems to manage day-to-day issues, such as earning an income, sending children to school, and accessing health services. The pressures on social services, on infrastructure, on jobs, on social cohesion are immense. Yet, with the commitment of the national counterparts and the support of the international community, the country continues to strengthen its resilience in the face of these vulnerabilities. Similar challenges prevail around the crisis-affected sub-region, particularly in Turkey and in Jordan, which together host more than 4.1 million refugees. Iraq and Egypt also host significant numbers of Syrian refugees, which place burdens on host communities, some already under serious strain from other stressors. Since its inception in 2015 with our partner UNHCR, the 3RP has been a pioneer for what is todays New Way of Working even before the Grand Bargain commitments and the World Humanitarian Summit articulated in the spring of 2016. The 3RP has played an important role in recent years in supporting the countries of the region to manage the impact of the Syria crisis. Some highlights from last year include: In Lebanon, partners in the Livelihoods and Social Cohesion sector provided job training to nearly 36,000 Lebanese and Syrian refugees. Supported by UNICEF, 13,000 Syrian teachers have received incentives, such as monthly remuneration, in Turkey to teach Syrian children in schools. An additional 140,000 teachers and education personnel both Syrian and Turkish were trained to develop a variety of relevant skills, such as classroom management, psychosocial support, and how to teach in camps and to children who have witnessed war. Nearly 3,000 Syrian health care providers received additional training so that they can work in Turkish clinics serving refugees. In Jordan and Turkey, UNDP continues to work with highly-impacted municipalities, such as Irbid in Jordan and Gaziantep in Turkey, to improve waste management by providing better facilities and equipment as well as improving working conditions of waste collection. The 2018 3RP covers five countries with a total ask of USD 4.4 billion. 41 percent of that is dedicated to resilience. Of the 8 strategic directions that underpin this years 3RP, I would like to highlight three. The first is strong national leadership. We need to continue to emphasize and support national efforts, without which international assistance, however well intentioned, risks undermining national systems and national capacities. The second is enhancing economic opportunities for all. The London conference solidified a compact between the international community and host countries to enable them to explore policy options that facilitate legal access of refugees to the labor force in their host countries while easing access of goods and trade to European markets. Well underway to fulfill its share of the compact, Jordan has created nearly 90,000 work permits for refugees, in exchange for simplified rules of origin for Jordanian goods in EU markets. More needs to be done and this is a good example of the type of national and international cooperation fostered by the 3RP. The third and final direction is continued outreach and partnerships. In protracted crises, such as in Syria, we cannot allow a sense of fatigue to settle in. We need to continue to ensure we are better able to balance the humanitarian needs with support to the longer-term management of development challenges. Overall funding for the regional appeal has gone down from 71 percent in 2013 to 53 percent last year. Just as concerning is the under-funding of the resilience components of the 3RP, which last year came to only 33 percent of total funding received. Noting the upcoming Brussels Conference in April, we ask member states to redouble their efforts in support of more resilience building and livelihoods creation in host countries so that we do not reach a point of no-return on social stability. A multipronged approach will be essential: expanding economic opportunities, trade, and innovative finance; easing of regulations; well-funded responses that are grounded in national plans, like the Jordan Response Plan and the Lebanon Crisis Response Plan; higher risk management and risk tolerance; and rapid information. We thank the leaders of these countries for their efforts and continue to call upon the international community to make good on commitments, and to maintain momentum on building a more resilient region despite many demands on resources and attention. Ahmed Tarzalakis and his wife Jasmin stand on the balcony of their apartment with their daughter Fatima in Chania, north-west Crete. UNHCR/Christos Tolis CHANIA, Crete Syrian refugee Ahmed Tarzalakis has been in Crete for just a few months but he feels right at home in the Mediterranean island known for its rugged landscape, cuisine and hospitality. At first residents joked aloud that Ahmed, with his bushy moustache, wiry frame and gaunt face could pass for a native of the Greek island. They were stunned when he answered back in the Cretan dialect that he had learned from his parents and grandparents in the Syrian enclave of Al-Hamidiyah, set up for Muslim refugees from Crete about 120 years ago near the border with Lebanon. Ahmed, 42, grew up speaking Greek and Arabic, but he can neither read nor write Arabic, the main language in Syria. Now he has set foot for the first time in a land he knew from stories and songs shared by his elders at family gatherings. This is the land of our ancestors, he says, although he still feels nostalgia for pre-war Syria. A stonemason by trade, he fled to Greece with his family to escape the approaching conflict. They made their way by boat to the island of Lesvos and then to Cretes second largest town, Chania. Ahmed suffers from a back problem and chronic epilepsy, which affect his chances of working. Ahmed, his wife Jasmin, 33, and their four young children moved into an apartment in Chania and receive monthly cash assistance under the European Union-funded ESTIA (Home) programme, which is run by UNHCR and has benefitted thousands of asylum-seekers and refugees in Greece. With help from UNHCRs local partner, he also receives hospital treatment for his health problems. They are a link to the past in Crete. This aid is helping the family to start a new life and they already have an advantage because of their historic connection to Crete. Ahmed was born in Al-Hamidiyah, where his family had been living since the end of the 19th Century. The small town was built by the Ottoman Empire as a refuge for Greek-speaking Muslims on Crete who fled to Syria during the 1897-98 war between Greece and Turkey. Ahmed Tarzalakis and his wife Jasmin in the kitchen of their apartment in Chania. UNHCR/Christos Tolis Ahmed shops for food with two of his children in the city of Chania, north-west Crete. UNHCR/Christos Tolis Ahmed buys groceries in the market in Chania, north-west Crete. Cash assistance allows asylum-seekers to meet basic needs while contributing to the local economy. UNHCR/Christos Tolis Ahmed and Jasmin have started a new life in Crete where they already have an advantage because of their historic connection to the island. UNHCR/Christos Tolis This closely knit small community of farmers, fishermen and traders held on to its Greek roots, especially with regards to language, says Dimitra Kampeli, who manages the accommodation programme in Crete on behalf of the Heraklion Development Agency. They are a link to the past in Crete. There is little trace of the Ottoman and Muslim presence apart from a handful of monuments in the islands main towns. Some of them are now returning, driven back by the war in Syria. In Al-Hamidiyah, it was increasingly difficult for Ahmed to provide for his family when the trade routes into Lebanon were cut off. He decided to sell what he could and risk the sea crossing to Greece with smugglers. In Crete, they found themselves in a place that seemed eerily like home. We probably belong here more than anywhere. They have settled in well. The people here have treated us with kindness and respect, says Ahmed. The family live in a modest apartment in central Chania and have reunited with relatives, including three sisters who had been there for almost two years. They have helped him, Jasmin and the children, who have been enrolled in Greek schools. They face many challenges, including health problems and finding employment. Ahmed is optimistic about the future. I know we can prosper and be happy here, he says. After all, this is the land of our ancestors. We probably belong here more than anywhere in the world. UNHCR, working with the government and local authorities through the Heraklion Development Agency, provides places for more than 600 people and plans to eventually provide housing for about 750 people in 134 apartments on the island. These people have been looking for a place to settle, where one can live peacefully and prosper, says Kampeli. May they find in Crete the safe harbour they are looking for. Refugees from South Sudan tend to saplings at a tree nursery in Uganda's Palabek refugee settlement. UNHCR/Catherine Robinson ADJUMANI, Uganda Under a searing midday sun, Olany Mario wipes his brow as he bends to water a bed of tiny green neem seedlings in the fertile soil of a tree nursery in Palabek refugee settlement, northern Uganda. We are growing these indigenous seedlings to help bring back all the trees that were cut down to make way for us, when we came here," he says. Last spring, the 36-year-old fled fighting in neighbouring South Sudan, with his two wives and eight children. When they crossed the border into Uganda, the family was transferred to Palabek, where they were given their own plot of land. UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, has provided Olany and 11,000 other South Sudanese refugees who live in the settlement with food, mats and household items. They have also received tools to build shelters and seedlings to grow tree borders around their plots. Uganda is now sheltering some 1.4 million refugees, most of them from South Sudan. That number is expected to grow in 2018, and so, too, is concern over the impact such a large number is having on the environment. In the past 20 years, Uganda has lost one third of its forest and green cover due to tree cutting by the local population, for farming and cooking fuel. In the Adjumani district alone, local officials estimate that 11 million trees have been felled since December 2013 to make way for settlements to house refugees. We need an urgent and immediate response." Instead of rehabilitating the environment after refugees return home, we need to prevent the damage being done at the very beginning of the emergency phase, says John Paul Magezi, the Ugandan government's environment officer. The influx of refugees is being viewed as having a negative impact on the environment. But, we believe refugees can be a driving force for environmental protection and conservation if they are involved in the campaign to protect the environment from the moment they arrive. In line with the New York Declaration adopted by 193 UN Member States in September 2016, the Ugandan government is taking a comprehensive approach to the refugee situation in the country. It is working with UNHCR and its partners in the private sector to raise awareness and change energy practices. This means exploring more sustainable use of wood for shelter, cooking and lighting, in settlements and the surrounding host communities which have donated land to refugees. We need an urgent and immediate response to limit the massive destruction of the environment in Uganda, says Mohamed Abdel-Al, UNHCR's senior technical coordinator. We are rolling out a new energy and environment strategy in 2018, where we aim to provide every refugee family with an energy efficient stove to reduce their dependency on wood and charcoal. To help rebuild forests, we are investing in tree planting and tree marking, and creating tree nurseries to provide seedlings to refugees and the host community. UNHCR provides refugees with seedlings to grow trees around their plots. UNHCR/Catherine Robinson In Palabek, UNHCR partner the Lutheran World Federation (LWF) is taking a holistic approach, hiring refugees to plant trees throughout the settlement and mark others with red paint to show they should not be cut down. The LWF is also employing refugees and members of the host community to manage tree nurseries inside and outside the settlement. Inside Palabek, Olany and 10 other refugees have received training in how to plant seedlings to re-establish tree species, such as neem and teak. Once the seedlings are ready for sale, these men will have gained a skill they can make a living from, says Kennedy Orach, LWF livelihood and environment officer. In Palabek and other refugee settlements across Uganda, UNHCR, its partners and local businesses are donating or selling energy-saving stoves to refugees, which can reduce their need for wood by up to 50 per cent. Agnes Alur, 24, who arrived in Palabek last April with her two small sons, received a free energy saving stove. "This stove is better than the traditional three stone stove, as I dont need as much wood and can cook food, like peas, beans and fish, much faster," she says. Because the stoves require less fuel, it also means young girls and women like Agnes are at less risk of sexual and gender-based violence, with less time spent walking through remote areas to find wood. The introduction of solar energy to replace firewood for lighting is also helping to keep girls and women safe. UNHCR, with the help of partners, is providing refugees with solar lamps on arrival. Solar street lights are also being installed on roads and at water collection sites. The main purpose of UNHCRs environment strategy is to meet the needs of refugees, while protecting Ugandas environment in a strategic and sustainable way. In 2018, UNHCR hopes to plant 1.4 million trees to represent each refugee in the country. This depends on overall funding for the refugee response in Uganda, which is critically low at just 37 per cent in 2017. Meanwhile, Olany Mario and his team are making their mark in Palabek, working to rebuild the forests of Uganda. When the day comes when he can return home to South Sudan, he is ready. I will use the skills I learned here to start a tree nursery in my own village, so I can rebuild my life and the life of my family." The first national birth certificates are presented to a Malian refugee family at Mbera camp. UNHCR UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, welcomes the launch of birth certification for thousands of Malian refugee children in Mbera camp, in south-east Mauritania. In a ground-breaking development for refugee protection in the country, the Mauritanian authorities have started issuing birth certificates for some 7,600 Malian children that were born to date in the camp. They have also set up a system allowing for all new-borns in the camp to be directly registered from now on. Birth certificates will help fight early and forced marriages, as proof of age can be crucial in identifying such cases and providing evidence to the referral institutions. In 2017, UNHCR recorded 97 cases in Mbera camp, but we fear that many more may go unreported. Together with partners, our teams are working to identify and assist children at risk. Proof of age will also play a significant role in the eventual voluntary repatriation of the refugees, should security conditions in Mali allow. The birth certification exercise was launched mid-February by the countrys population registrar. UNHCR collaborates with authorities to strengthen their technical capacity for the civil registration of refugees, and to provide life-saving assistance in the camp, such as food and water, education and medical services. We also work to lay the groundwork for establishing a national asylum system. Since 2012, widespread insecurity in northern Mali has triggered displacement into Niger, Burkina Faso, as well as Mauritania which now hosts over 51,000 Malian refugees. Some 1,200 Malians were registered in Mbera in January this year alone. Refugees share accounts of threats, extortion and summary executions by armed groups, along with gruelling living conditions in their areas of origin. We are particularly worried at the lack of funding for our operation in the country. Despite the US$20.1 million required for our operation in Mauritania in 2018, UNHCR has yet to receive any contributions. This means that the living conditions of refugees could further worsen, with food and water shortages, poor sanitary conditions, increased risk of disease and cuts to education programmes in Mbera. For more information on this topic, please contact: UNHCR and its partner LibAid provide assistance to stranded Tawergha people. UNHCR UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, is concerned at the plight of several hundred Libyan families prevented by armed groups from returning to their homes in the city of Tawergha and now stranded in difficult conditions. The Tawergha community been displaced since 2011, when the 40,000 inhabitants of the city were forced to leave. Since then, they have been scattered across the country. After a decree by the Presidency Council allowed for their return from 1 February, these families tried to move back to Tawergha. Some 2,000 people from various locations in Libya, including Bani Walid, Tripoli and Benghazi, headed towards the town but were stopped by armed groups. Pushed back again, many moved to two temporary sites in Qararat al-Qataf, some 40 km from Tawergha, and Harawa, some 60 km east of Sirte. More than 1,200 people, mostly women and children, remain in these locations in dire conditions. For the past three weeks, UNHCR and its partner LibAid have been providing much needed assistance, including handing out tents, blankets and winter clothes since temperatures are extremely low in the area. The most pressing needs are shelter, drinking water, food, medical assistance and specific support for children and babies. In Libya, currently more than 180,000 internally displaced people are in need of assistance as well as 335,000 people who have recently returned to their homes. UNHCR continues to advocate on their behalf and to provide relief until they can find durable solutions, including returning home on a voluntary basis and in conditions of dignity and safety. To respond to the needs of more than half a million Libyans uprooted by the conflict, UNHCR has increased its capacity and resources by 300 percent in recent months. UNHCR is supporting settlements of internally displaced people with humanitarian assistance, including through small-scale community projects, cash assistance and protection activities. Last year, UNHCR distributed core relief items to more than 60,000 internally displaced persons and cash assistance to 14,000 people throughout Libya. More than 200 quick-impact projects across the country will be implemented this year. For more information on this topic, please contact: UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, is urging authorities in Rwanda to ensure safety and protection for refugees after protests led to the tragic deaths of at least five refugees and the injury of many others including the members of the police force on Thursday. We are shocked and disturbed at loss of refugee lives. Around 700 Congolese refugees from Kiziba refugee camp were demonstrating outside the UNHCR field office in Karongi, in western Rwanda. The protests, ongoing since February 20, were related to food ration cuts that have added to the refugees' sense of despair and lack of long-term prospective. Police were reported to have used teargas to disperse the protestors, after attempts to resolve the situation had failed. Clashes were reported before the police fired shots at angry protestors. We regret that our continued appeals for maintaining calm and restraint were not considered. This tragedy should have been avoided and disproportionate use of force against desperate refugees is not acceptable. UNHCR calls on authorities to refrain from further use of force and to investigate the circumstances of this tragic incident. UNHCR appeals to refugee leaders to show a sense of responsibility to avoid further confrontation and again urges them to respect laws and seek solutions to all their grievances through peaceful negotiations. Underfunding has severely affected humanitarian operations in Rwanda, now with deadly consequences. UNHCRs 2018 appeal for US$98.8 million to support refugees in Rwanda is only is 2 per cent funded. Kiziba refugee camp hosts over 17,000 refugees from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Over 173,000 refugees from the DRC and Burundi live in six camps in Rwanda. For more information on this topic, please contact: Afghanistan: UN mission welcomes new penal code United Nations, Feb 23 (UNI) While welcoming the entry to force of a new Penal Code in Afghanistan as a having the potential to trigger real change, the United Nations mission in the country has said that it was concerned by the removal of the chapter penalising violence against women. The Penal Code entered into force last week, placing the country, for the first time, into compliance with international treaty obligations in criminal justice, the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) said on Thursday. Together with international partners and experts from UN agencies, UNAMA supported Afghan authorities in drafting the code, the UN Mission said. Names of all eligible youth should be entered in the voter lists: ADM 17 Sep 2021 | 9:15 AM Hamirpur (HP), Sep 17(UNI) The Additional District Magistrate, Jitendra Sanjata has directed the officers of the Election Department, Heads of Educational Institutions and all the officers associated with the voter registration process to take effective steps at their respective levels to enroll the names of all the eligible people of the district in the voter lists. see more.. Banks should give loans to common people on a priority basis: ADM 17 Sep 2021 | 8:52 AM Hamirpur (HP), Sep 17(UNI) Hamirpur Additional District Magistrate, Jitendra Sanjata has told the bankers of the district to give loans on a priority basis to the common people. He said that by doing so the common people would be able to avail the benefits of the central government and state government schemes. see more.. COVID-19 : Marathwada registers 134 fresh cases, 2 more deaths 17 Sep 2021 | 8:14 AM Aurangabad, Sep 17(UNI) The Marathwada region of Maharashtra recorded 134 fresh cases of COVID-19 while two patients succumbed to the ailment during the past 24 hours, health authorities informed on Friday. see more.. Senior Congress leader Madhavrao Pandagale dies 17 Sep 2021 | 2:38 AM Nanded, Sep 16 (UNI) Former chairman of Kandhar Panchayat Samiti, former vice president of Kalambar division co-operative sugar factory, senior Congress leader Madhavrao Pandagale died of a cardiac arrest, today. He was 74. The body will be cremated on Friday, at his native village Shiradhon in Kandhar tehsil of the district. see more.. Kathmandu, Feb 23 (UNI) In Nepal, the unification process between the CPN-UML and the CPN (Maoist Centre) is one of the most significant events in Nepals recent political history, and certainly the most significant one since the peace process started in 2006, according to a news analysis published in The Kathmandu Post on Friday. According to the analysis by Akhilesh Upadhyay, the unification will firmly put the left alliance in the driving seat in Nepals politics at least for the next five years, and perhaps well beyond. And the two major proponents of the unification processUML leader KP Oli and Maoist supremo Pushpa Kamal Dahal Prachandawill be at the centre-stage of Nepals politics for that period and are set to leave behind strong footprints. Starting with the first phase of local elections that took place last May, through the next two phases over the next few months, and finally the provincial and federal parliamentary elections in two phases late last year, the UML established its electoral dominance. The dominance was near-absolute in the provincial and federal polls after the two parties came together as the left alliance and shared ticketson a 60: 40 ratio, with the larger of the two parties, UML, getting a greater share. STEVEN EDGINTON Im an 18-year-old Brexiteer. So what? Stop making me feel like a racist dinosaur like many others who voted, Im not CommentBy Steven Edginton23rd February 2018,The SunDEATH threats, online abuse and fury in the streets: I'm only 18, but these are the sorts of things I put up with every day.I've not committed a crime or tried to be offensive - in fact, all I've done is express my opinion on the biggest political decision most of us will face in our lifetime.And these days, that's enough to get you into all sorts of trouble.Im a young Brexiteer. So what?The idea of someone voting Leave being automatically a racist is ludicrous.Ive been called an "age-traitor" for not conforming and people like me are often painted as a tiny minority, when actually 45 per cent of young working-class voters ticked that "out" box in June 2016.I grew up in Portsmouth. I have always been interested in the world around me, and this interest turned to politics during the European elections in 2014. Watching people like Dan Hannan and Nigel Farage make impassioned speeches in the European Parliament sparked my interest in the Brexit debate.In the run up to the vote I was 16, so although I couldn't vote, I campaigned on streets of Portsmouth and Chichester, going door to door leafleting and setting up market stalls on the high street.Both areas voted to leave, but the more vocal supporters of remain were out there creating a toxic environment.I was shouted at and called a racist. That's pretty hard to hear when you're not even 17.One of my mates had the Brexit badge he was wearing ripped off his chest.The day after the referendum, I went into school as usual. The friends who knew I'd campaigned for Brexit were furious with me.Not because they were worried about the UK's place in the world, or their freedom of movement.No - my mates were worried about Nando's closing.They'd come across a story on Lad Bible that said the Portuguese restaurant had claimed "every chicken we import will have to have its own passport and a visa".As a result, they worried itd have to shut down across the UK.For my part in this they called me a "fat-nosed c***".I'm at college now and I think I've managed to persuade some of my classmates that we're on the right path.But what really annoys me is the fact that the mainstream media ignore young Brexiteers.There are plenty of Leave voices from my generation yet young people are drowned out of debates and a huge majority on the Left think that everyone under 50 voted to remain.Websites like Lad Bible and UNiDAYS are prime news sites for young people, but they are as reliable as Brietbart or The Canary.The misinformation through viral posts on Facebook about Brexit add to the vitriolic atmosphere in Britain.Remoaner politicians fuel this toxic attitude; repeating the doom mongering creates a self-fulfilling prophecy and a feeling that all leave voters have destroyed their future.I set up the Politics UK YouTube channel to create a platform for young voices and was lucky enough to interview Remainer Alastair Campbell about Brexit.Campbell accused me of being a 'Brextremist', but Im used to insults from school children.My channel has reached millions of young people - over half my audience are under 35 - but having an online platform opens the door to thousands of trolls.One charming Reddit poster said that people like me deserved to have our throats slit.And I've been accused of everything from being a racist to a Jewish and/or Russian spy.My friends are a mixture of Leave and Remain, but we are all Brexiteers now.My generation need to get over the vote and try to make a success of Brexit.Since then we've had to learn to nod, smile and move on: sticks and stones and all that.Everyone else seems to be allowed to express their views - and just because mine happen to be unfashionable among people my age that doesn't mean they shouldn't be heard.I felt, and still do, that the EU was too controlling and that it wasn't accountable enough and the direction the EU was heading in didnt make any sense to me.I thought the time had come for change. Why is that so wrong?Brexit supporters aren't evil xenophobes. And those young people who did vote to leave aren't traitors.Do you really think I'd vote for something that would destroy my future? People will die in CAR due to lack of funding: UN official United Nations, Feb 23 (UNI) A senior United Nations relief official is urging the international community to boost support for humanitarian efforts in crisis-gripped Central African Republic (CAR), where nearly half the population requires assistance. UN Deputy Emergency Relief Coordinator Ursula Mueller made the appeal in the capital, Bangui, on Thursday at the end of a four-day visit to the country. CAR is facing a large-scale humanitarian crisis, she said. Violence is fast spreading across the country while urgent and critical needs are increasing and should be covered. Civilians continue to bear the brunt of violence and insecurity. Popular UW Lecture Series Scheduled in Jackson March 3 The University of Wyomings one-day free public lecture series, featuring diverse topics from UW professors, will be offered in Jackson Saturday, March 3. Saturday U -- the half day of college lectures and discussion -- will be at the National Museum of Wildlife Art. The program begins with coffee and donuts at 8:30 a.m., followed by welcoming remarks at 8:50 a.m. The guest lectures begin at 9 a.m. Participants may attend one, two or all three lectures. A question-and-answer session will follow the program. During the fall and spring terms, Saturday University visits locations throughout Wyoming discussing todays most captivating topics, says Saturday U Coordinator Paul Flesher, a UW religious studies professor. In its 10th year, Saturday U is a collaborative program that connects popular UW and Wyoming community college professors with lifelong learners. Offered nine times a year -- twice each in Jackson, Gillette and Sheridan, and once in Rock Springs, Pinedale and Cody -- Saturday U is sponsored by the university, the UW Foundation and Wyoming Humanities. The program is presented locally by UW, the Wyoming Humanities Council, National Museum of Wildlife Art and Central Wyoming College-Jackson. Enjoy three intriguing lectures delivered by professors from the University of Wyoming, Flesher says. Complimentary lunch is provided, giving participants an opportunity to engage with the speakers during a roundtable discussion following the three lectures. Listed below are program topic descriptions and professors lecturing: -- 9 a.m.: Stories from the Mongolian Taiga, by Todd Surovell, Department of Anthropology chair and archaeology professor. Since 2012, Surovell has researched reindeer herders in Khovsgol Province of northern Mongolia, studying their traditional ways with an eye toward developing comparative interpretations of the archaeological record of similar peoples. After spending seven months in all four seasons, he has learned much about the year-round rhythm of reindeer herders lives. Surovells presentation will bring the audience face to face with some of the more astounding aspects of the herders lives on the taiga through experiences, stories and pictures, illustrating the goals, trepidations and pleasures of their lives. -- 10:15 a.m.: Who Gets to Drink? by Kristi Hansen, UW Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics associate professor. Hansen says water is a limited resource in most of the western United States, yet growing populations and environmental demands increase pressure on existing supplies. Who should be allowed to use it when supplies become scarcer? Hansen asks. She will describe how economists think about water allocation among competing users and different uses, drawing lessons for the drought-stricken Upper Colorado River Basin. -- 11:30 a.m.: Income Inequality: Its Effects on the USAs Economic and Political Future, by Rob Godby, director of UWs Center for Energy Economics and Public Policy, and economics associate professor. We hear almost daily about our countrys political divide, but the United States faces an even more disruptive division, that of increasing income inequality, Godby says. As the economic divide has grown over the past two decades, it has enhanced the perception that America is facing a financial crisis as well as a political one. Godby will explain what income inequality is and examine the dynamics that have led to the current situation, while providing some hope for the future. For more information, call Flesher at (307) 766-2616 or email pflesher@uwyo.edu. For more information about Saturday U, visit the website at www.uwyo.edu/saturdayu/index.html. Popular UW Lecture Series Scheduled in Pinedale March 1 The University of Wyomings one-day free public lecture series, featuring diverse topics from UW professors, will be offered in Pinedale for the second time Thursday, March 1. Saturday U -- the half day of college lectures and discussion -- will be in the Sublette County Librarys Lovatt Room, located at 155 S. Tyler Ave. The program begins with light dinner and snacks at 5:30 p.m., followed by welcoming remarks at 5:50 p.m. The guest lectures begin at 6 p.m. Participants may attend one, two or all three lectures. A question-and-answer session will follow the program. During the fall and spring terms, Saturday University visits locations throughout Wyoming discussing todays most captivating topics, says Saturday U Coordinator Paul Flesher, a UW religious studies professor. In its 10th year, Saturday U is a collaborative program that connects popular UW and Wyoming community college professors with lifelong learners. Offered nine times a year -- twice each in Jackson, Gillette and Sheridan, and once in Rock Springs, Pinedale and Cody -- Saturday U is sponsored by the university, the UW Foundation and Wyoming Humanities. The program is presented locally by UW, Wyoming Humanities, Sublette BOCES and Sublette County Libraries. Enjoy three intriguing lectures delivered by professors from the University of Wyoming, Flesher says. Complimentary dinner and snacks are provided, giving participants an opportunity to engage with the speakers during a roundtable discussion following the three lectures. Listed below are program topic descriptions and professors lecturing: -- 6 p.m.: Who Gets to Drink? by Kristi Hansen, UW Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics associate professor. Hansen says water is a limited resource in most of the western United States, yet growing populations and environmental demands increase pressure on existing supplies. Who should be allowed to use it when supplies become scarcer? Hansen asks. She will describe how economists think about water allocation among competing users and different uses, drawing lessons for the drought-stricken Upper Colorado River Basin. -- 6:50 p.m.: Income Inequality: Its Effects on the USAs Economic and Political Future, by Rob Godby, director of UWs Center for Energy Economics and Public Policy, and economics associate professor. We hear almost daily about our countrys political divide, but the United States faces an even more disruptive division, that of increasing income inequality, Godby says. As the economic divide has grown over the past two decades, it has enhanced the perception that America is facing a financial crisis as well as a political one. Godby will explain what income inequality is and examine the dynamics that have led to the current situation, while providing some hope for the future. -- 7:40 p.m.: Wyomings First Humans at an Ice Age Mammoth Kill Site, by Todd Surovell, Department of Anthropology chair and archaeology professor. The first people to live in Wyoming arrived more than 13,000 years ago after crossing a land bridge from Asia to North America and moving southward through the northern glaciers, Surovell says. Upon arrival, these people encountered many types of large mammals that have since disappeared from New World ecosystems. At the La Prele mammoth site in Converse County, UW archaeologists have discovered evidence of human predation of a Columbian mammoth as well as a campsite that can shed light on the social organization of Wyomings first residents. For more information, call Flesher at (307) 766-2616 or email pflesher@uwyo.edu. For more information about Saturday U, visit the website at www.uwyo.edu/saturdayu/index.html. Sunrise presented by Vancouver Sun Your weekday morning wakeup: Breaking local news, insights, opinion and more to prepare you for your day. Email Address There was an error, please provide a valid email address. Sign Up By clicking on the sign up button you consent to receive the above newsletter from Postmedia Network Inc. You may unsubscribe any time by clicking on the unsubscribe link at the bottom of our emails. Postmedia Network Inc. | 365 Bloor Street East, Toronto, Ontario, M4W 3L4 | 416-383-2300 Thanks for signing up! A welcome email is on its way. If you don't see it, please check your junk folder. The next issue of Sunrise presented by Vancouver Sun will soon be in your inbox. We encountered an issue signing you up. Please try again Striking Air France employees walk past passengers through a terminal of Charles de Gaulle airport in Roissy. (Philippe LOPEZ/AFP) "No cash, no planes," staff chanted as they marched noisily through Terminal 2 of Charles de Gaulle airport, wearing flourescent jackets and waving union flags. Riot police twice used tear gas outside the terminal but the demonstration by hundreds of staff was otherwise peaceful and had finished by mid-afternoon. Managers estimated that 28 per cent of staff took part in the strike, allowing it to maintain 75 per cent of its service but only 50 per cent of long-haul flights out of Paris. The airline had earlier advised travellers to postpone their trips until Feb 27 at no extra cost. "Air France regrets this situation and is making every effort to minimise the inconvenience this strike action may cause to its customers," a statement said. Salaries at Air France have been frozen since 2011, but the airline group reported an operating profit up 42 per cent at 1.49 billion (US$1.84 billion) for last year. After years of job cuts and other cost-cutting measures the staff are demanding a six-percent pay increase. Management has said that such an increase would be "irresponsible" at a time when it is attempting to lower its costs to compete with low-cost carriers such as Ryanair and Easyjet. It is offering a basic increase of one per cent and a top-up for ground staff. 'SMALL CHANGE' "For years management have capped our salaries because of the crisis," said Stephane Perez, a member of the FO union. "Today they've made 1.5 billion in profits and are offering us just a one percent raise." A dozen trade unions representing various categories of workers have dismissed the one-percent raise offer as "small change" and threatened more strikes. The Air France-KLM group, Europe's second-biggest airline which is 17.6 per cent owned by the French state, has been plagued by strikes and labour disputes in its French operations in recent years. Two French company executives had their shirts torn off in 2015 by workers protesting its plans to cut nearly 3,000 jobs. Air France CEO Franck Terner said on Wednesday that despite the improvement, the company's results still paled beside those of British Airways or Lufthansa. Despite the strong operating profits, the Franco-Dutch group made net losses in 2017 of 274 million due to the costs of a new retirement deal with KLM pilots and cabin crew. Terner called for a "realistic balance" between rewarding staff for past sacrifices and setting aside money for ongoing investment. Eleven people are missing and 14 have been injured following a landslide Thursday (Feb 22) that cascaded down the terraced slopes of a rice field on the Indonesian island of Java, officials said. (Photo: Badan Nasional Penanggulangan Bencana/Facebook) The missing people, farmers tending their crops in Brebes district, Central Java, were buried under an avalanche of mud and rock around 8.00am. "The landslide buried the farmers working in their rice fields," disaster mitigation agency spokesman Sutopo Purwo Nugroho said in a statement. The incident followed several days of heavy rain in the mountainous area, which is about seven hours east of the capital Jakarta. Another 14 farmers were injured and have been taken to a nearby medical centre for treatment. Rescuers including the army, police and local volunteers are digging through the debris to search for survivors, the disaster mitigation agency said. Residents have been forbidden from entering the area due to fears of further landslides. "The soil is unstable, if it's raining, it could be dangerous," Apriyanto Sudarmoko, local sub-district head, told national TV station. "We also ask residents living near the site to vacate their homes until it's safe." Landslides are common in Indonesia, especially during wet season between October and April, when rain lashes the country. Eight miners were killed on the slopes of Mount Merapi, an active volcano near the city of Jogjakarta, in December last year. A month earlier at least 11 people died in heavy flooding and landslides in Pacitan, East Java. PM Phuc visits Hoa Lac Hi-tech Park These were the requirments of the Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc in the framework of his visit to Hoa Lac Hi-Tech Park in Hanoi on February 22. According to the PM, during the past numerous years, delays in developing and upgrading the park caused the loss of attractive investment projects. Thus, it is important to promptly remove difficulties and obstacles and continue to complete policies so that hi-tech parks in general and Hoa Lac Hi-Tech Park in particular will develop in a synchronised and faster manner. The PM asked the management board of the park and the authorities to compile specific policies for luring in high-quality human resources to the park. Besides, the PM requested the Hanoi Peoples Committee to provide advanced capital to complete site clearance. At the same time, he asked the Ministry of Planning and Investment to build a plan for collecting capital for site clearance and submit it the National Assembly for approval. During the visit, the PM urged local authorities to accelerate issuing relevant circulars to guide the implementation of Decree No.74/2017/ND-CP on provisions for specific policies for Hoa Lac Hi-Tech Park. After the working session with the management board of the park, PM Phuc visited the Hanwha Aero Engines Vietnam aircraft engines manufacturing complex invested by Hanwha Techwin from South Korea. The first plant of the complex is expected to come into operation in this April. With a total investment capital of $200 million, the project is considered an outstanding high-tech investment in Hoa Lac Hi-Tech Park. According to the Hoa Lac Hi-Tech Park Management Board, as of 2017 the park had sufficient planning, infrastructure, policies, volume of investment projects, and the human resources to develop a successful high-tech park. In order to approach and take advantage of the 4.0 Industrial Revolution, the Hoa Lac Hi-Tech Park Management Board built an information bank on science and technology with nearly 3,500 patents, inventions, utility solutions, and nearly 1,000 enterprises applying technology to support technology transfer and business incubation. Neil MacGregor - Managing director, Savills Vietnam Booming residential, hotel, office market and what else? The market remains healthy going into 2018, with strong demand from owner occupiers as well as a strengthening buy-to-let market, supported by some of the highest rental yields in the region. Savills is also particularly pleased with the performance of the landed property market, which has performed in line with our forecasts made at the end of 2016 with very strong absorption rates that are driven by the completion of new infrastructure and the rapidly growing middle class. The residential market is evolving towards more owner occupiers and less speculation, which are all healthy and positive signs for the market going forward. Although the formation of a significant affluent class is creating opportunities for mid- and high-end products, the mass market is benefiting from the rapid growth of the middle class. In 2017, the number of apartment transactions reached more than 47,000 units, higher than the figure for 2016. The demand for affordable housing continues to increase rapidly in megacities like Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi. The availability of bank finance for the growing middle class, accompanied by a stable mortgage rate, will encourage the continued rise of the affordable segment in 2018 and beyond. In addition to the strength of the residential market, we have seen excellent performance in the office market, with occupancy rates reaching over 95 per cent in Ho Chi Minh City and accelerating rental growth, particularly for Grade A products. The lions share of potential tenants are from the F.I.R.E. (finance, insurance, and real estate-related) sector, followed by manufacturing-related demand. The hotel segment has also performed well, particularly in Hanoi, driven by strong international visitor growth numbers of 26 per cent in 2016 and nearly 30 per cent year-to-date in 2017. In 2018, we are anticipating new excitement around the various integrated resorts that are being developed, notably Hoiana which is located only moments from the historic town of Hoi An and will boast of Vietnams largest casino when it opens in 2019. We are also seeing growing investor interest in the industrial market, not only in direct investment into industrial zones, but also those seeking income-producing industrial assets, build-to-suit opportunities, as well as warehousing opportunities to service logistics. Savills expanded our industrial services team in 2017 to specifically cater to this segment. M&A: Transparency and patience As the Vietnamese economy thrives, whilst other parts of the region are slowing down, the market will continue to see further interest in all real estate segments, with a focus on office and hospitality, driven by the increasing foreign direct investment (FDI) and booming tourism, and more recently, industrial and logistics real estate developments. According to the Ministry of Planning and Investments statistics, Vietnams 2017 newly-registered FDI reached approximately $35.88 billion by December 20, an increase of 44.4 per cent against 2016, while FDI disbursement gained $17.5 billion, increasing 10.8 per cent against 2016. Country-wise, Japan led the list with more than $9.11 billion in newly-registered capital, followed by South Korea and Singapore at $8.49 billion and $5.3 billion, respectively. Sector-wise, real estate has always been among the sectors attracting the most FDI in Vietnam. This has confirmed the interest of foreign investors in investment and business opportunities in the Vietnamese real estate market. With increasing government incentives, better legal framework, and stronger competitive advantages, the Vietnamese real estate market has attracted a significant influx of capital from both local and foreign investors in recent years. South Korea, Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, and Hong Kong have been leading the way in foreign investment and are member economies of the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation (APEC), proving the importance of this forum to Vietnam. They have brought to Vietnam not only capital but also expertise, knowledge, and global experience. Their investment and business expansion has played a key role in helping Vietnam become one of the fastest growing economies in the region. Singaporean investors were among the first to recognise Vietnams market potential. CapitaLand, who has been present in Vietnam for over 20 years with many residential projects, have set up their $500-million fund targeting commercial assets in the country and made disbursement to close one of the most significant deals of the year: the acquisition of a 0.6-hectare site in a prime location within Ho Chi Minh Citys central business districts to build its first Grade A commercial project in Vietnam. Keppel Land, another Singapore-based developer, has been launching many successful projects over the past few years. Japanese investors, with a long presence in Vietnam, have also been very active recently. In 2016, Creed Group entered into a $500-million deal to form a partnership with Phat Dat Real Estate Development Corporation and An Gia Investment to develop River City, a large-scale residential project in District 7. Early last year, together with An Gia Investment, they acquired five apartment blocks of the La Casa project also in District 7 from Van Phat Hung Corporation for approximately $40 million. Nishi Nippon Railroad and Hankyu Realty have joined hands with well-known listed local developer Nam Long Group to develop the 26-ha Mizuki Park, a residential project in Ho Chi Minh City with the total estimated investment size of approximately $350 million. AEON Mall, the renowned Japanese shopping mall developer, is operating four shopping malls in Vietnam and have entered into a joint venture with local partner BIM Group to develop its second mall in Hanoi on a 16.7-ha site. Foreign investors entering Vietnam, it is important that they are able to make clear comparisons between the Vietnamese market and other countries such as Indonesia or more developed markets like Singapore and Hong Kong. To make this comparison, transparent information is essential and becomes a key part of the decision-making process. This is where leading agents like Savills can come in and assist local developers to prepare their projects for marketing to foreign investors in a clear and transparent manner. Through thorough preparation, local developers will achieve far more attractive pricing for their projects and will dramatically increase the chance of successfully closing a deal. Savills experience has shown that Asian investors are much more familiar with the emerging Vietnamese M&A market. For example, many South Korean developers have been through the same evolution in their home market over the last 40 years or so that Vietnam is going through today. Similarly, Japanese investors are attracted by the Vietnamese young population, whilst their population at home is aging fast. More than ever, opportunities are abundant, waiting to be grasped and acted upon strategically, with a stronger legal framework and a rapidly growing economy set to support investors in their decisions. Vietnam should take full advantage of all the international attention that it has seen on the back of the APEC Vietnam 2017 and realise the potential of tourism, as well as socioeconomic development. We hope that the Vietnamese government will support investors by creating a healthy business environment, with clear and transparent investment policies so that the real estate market can grow sustainably over the years to come. Probability of a bubble Vo Huynh Tuan Kiet Since its quick recovery in 2014, the Vietnamese real estate market has witnessed an unparalleled supply of new projects being constantly launched and with good net absorption. Along with the markets traditional segments, new products have been introduced, such as second-home villas, condotels, and officetels. Since 2015, the Vietnamese government loosened its requirements for foreigners to buy and own properties in Vietnam, which helped attract more foreign investors to the market (Figures 1 and 2). Nonetheless, many experts and investors have cast doubts upon this rapid recovery, predicting underlying risks. These risks include an oversupply of high-end projects, the return of speculators, and falling market demand. The biggest concern would be another property bubble akin to the one that shook the market in 2007 and froze the property market until 2013. The market is still paying the cost of this previous bubble. As the market in 2018 will expect more changes and uncertainties, one should be on the lookout for any worrying signs of a property bubble. First and foremost, one should examine the global real estate market to have a thorough understanding of property bubbles. Source: CBRE Vietnam Notable property bubbles in the world Historically, property bubbles were associated with economic crises. The most well-known property bubbles are those occurring in Japan (1992), the US (2006), and China (2011-2012). Japan (1992) In the post-World War II period, the Japanese economy flourished in what is famously referred to as the Japanese economic miracle, especially during the 80s. As a result, a tremendous amount of money was poured into the Japanese property market, pushing housing prices to rise by 50 per cent and commercial prices by 80 per cent each year. In 1991, the property bubble was valued at $18 trillion. In 1992, the property bubble burst. As housing prices went down by more than 60 per cent during 1991-2005, the country suffered from negative economic growth and the number of companies that filed for bankruptcy increased by 600 per cent. The US (2006) A robust economic growth during the 80s and 90s led to soaring housing prices in the US, starting from 1996. In the 1996-2005 period, the price increased by more than 45 per cent. The property bubble in the country was estimated at $5 trillion in 2005. In 2006, the property bubble started showing signs of bursting. The housing market turned worse because of collateral crises, which ultimately led to a financial crisis. Since March 2007, financial institutions which offered secured loans, such as Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, and Morgan Stanley, announced a total bad debt of $150 billion. A series of banks filed for bankruptcy and some went through mergers and acquisitions (M&A). New Century Financial Corporation declared bankruptcy in August 2007. Bear Stearns was bought out by JP Morgan Chase in March 2008. Lehman Brothers went out of business in August 2008. Merrill Lynch (formerly the third largest investment bank in the US) was sold to Bank of America (BoA). China (2011-2012) During Chinas economic boom during 2004-2007, the countrys real estate market became massive with some $147 billion invested in the market. The number grew to $210 billion in 2009. Housing prices in China grew more than ten-fold within only eight years. In 2011, the property bubble exploded after housing prices fell for nine consecutive months. The Vietnamese property market is still recovering from the last bubble The 2007 property bubble in Vietnam During the development of the real estate market in Vietnam, the market witnessed significant changes as the housing fever gripped the nation in 1993, 2001-2002, and 2010. Still, the fever in 2007 was unforgettable as it formed the property bubble that lasted until 2012-2013. The following factors contributed to the formation and burst of the property bubble: The overheating of the Vietnamese economy: in 2007, Vietnams GDP growth rate reached 8.5 per cent, with Ho Chi Minh City reporting a rate of 12.6 per cent, a 10-year record. This benefited enterprises and locals income tremendously. The stock market boom in 2007 achieved a historical record of 1170.67 points (as of March 12, 2007), contributing to the huge amount of capital circulating in the economy. Consequently, a huge amount of capital was poured into real estate as this is still a favoured investment channel among locals. Relaxed credit policies: Subprime loans were a direct cause of the bubble. This is evidenced by the fact that credit growth in 2007 amounted to more than 37 per cent, a large proportion of which was distributed into real estate. Social capital was also added to the market. In addition, the lack of control over credit used for inappropriate purposes created a domino effect when the market fell. Speculative activities and secondary market boom: Periods of overheating price increases were often accompanied with the influx of speculators people who buy-to-flip on the secondary market and a plethora of real estate agents. Lack of government control: The governments failure to provide timely fiscal policies led to the quick formation and development of the property bubble. Assessing the possibility of another property bubble Vietnam is currently one of the fastest growing economies in the region. However, the economy is still recovering. The GDP growth has remained high but stable with no signs of overheating. Particularly, the GDP growth reached 6.68 per cent in 2015 but reduced to 6.21 per cent in 2016, and bounced back to 6.81 per cent in 2017. At this point, in a report published by HSBC, the forecasted GDP growth of Vietnam is 6.4 per cent in 2018. With this reasonable pace of growth, the countrys economy is not on the edge of overheating. After the property bubble in 2007, the Vietnamese government has issued lots of policies to monitor the real estate market in Vietnam. The domestic real estate market made a robust recovery in 2015. In 2016, the State Bank of Vietnam (SBV) issued Circular No.06/2016/TT-NHNN to adjust the loan ratio and increase the credit risk ratio for real estate activities. In summary, we can see that the government has attempted to closely monitor and control capital flows to real estate investments. It is expected that in 2018, regulating the real estate market will still be a priority on the governments agenda. More balanced supply Observing the market in the period of 2015-2017, a notable number of high-end projects introduced by well-known developers have achieved good absorption rates. This trend has caused concerns over a possible supply imbalance, which seems to lean towards the high-end segment. In 2017, the market adjusted to target the mid-end segment more. The mid-end segment accounted for 58 per cent of new launches in Ho Chi Minh City and 62 per cent of new launches in Hanoi. It also accounted for 56 and 53 per cent of sold units in Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi. Growth in supply in the mid-end segment reached 35 per cent, higher than the market average (Figures 3 and 4). This adjustment helps to lessen concerns over the disparity towards high-end products. Source: CBRE Vietnam Fewer speculators: secondary market below expectations One of the main factors contributing to a property bubble is the high participation of speculators. According to CBREs records, during 2007-2008, 50 per cent of total transactions were made by short-term speculators. This drove housing prices out of control on the secondary market as houses were constantly flipped. In 2017, speculator transactions only account for 10-15 per cent of the market total and are mostly focused on certain areas. The limited presence of speculation in recent years has helped to decrease the risk of imprudent price growth. Meanwhile, according to CBREs observations, the secondary market in the condominium sector has not been very active in the 2015-2017 period. In 2017, only a small number of good locations and good projects recorded high price premiums of 15-25 per cent compared to the primary price (Figures 5 and 6). Source: CBRE Vietnam The not-so-active secondary market reduces the risk of a property bubble. To conclude, based on the above analysis and assessment, we can expect that at the moment the Vietnamese real estate market is on a more sustainable growth path compared to the previous cycle. Another property bubble feared by so many is not likely to occur in the short-run. Nevertheless, continuous monitoring is still necessary for suitable policy adjustments. Some products, such as land plots and shophouses, witnessed overheating growth in some areas. Such signals should be paid attention to because if not addressed properly, they can have a significant impact on the market. Cave wall paintings from La Pasiega in northeastern Spain. The ladder shape, composed of red horizontal and vertical lines, dates to older than 64,000 years and must have been made by Neanderthals. Middletown firefighters, FBI, Connecticut State Police and local police investigate an accident after a car drove into the entrance of Middlesex Hospital on Thursday in Middletown, Conn. FILE - In this Dec. 11, 2017, file photo, former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort arrives at federal court in Washington. In a dramatic escalation of pressure and stakes, special counsel Robert Mueller filed additional criminal charges Feb. 22, 2018, against Manafort and his business associate, Rick Gates. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh, File) President Donald Trump speaks during a meeting with state and local officials to discuss school safety in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, Thursday, Feb. 22, 2018, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci) A scan of the back of the human eye, left, and how Googles algorithm sees it. The highlights are the parts the algorithm found most helpful in predicting blood pressure. The supermodel turned exceptional fundraiser is beautiful inside as well as out Natalia Vodianova at home in her Paris apartment wearing an H&M sweater and a Dior skirt with her cat Galileo @SuzyMenkesVogue Natalia Vodianova is curled up, much like her cat Galileo, waiting in a painted Dior skirt for her children to return from school. We look out of the window from her Paris apartment at the whirling snow and I wonder if she is reminded of her Russian childhood - as she is by the embroidered table cloth, handmade by her grandmother, that is spread on the lunch table. I know that her birth country is always in the heart of this feline woman, supermodel and mother of five children, who is opening her heart to me - as she has opened hers to Mother Russia. Our subject is the 'Fabulous Fund Fair', to take place on Tuesday, 20 February at the close of London Fashion Week. The Naked Heart Foundation was founded by 'SuperNova' - hence her Instagram name @natasupernova - in Russia in 2004 to improve the possibilities of playtime for children with special needs - and is now so much more. Inspired originally by the disabled sister she grew up with from age six, the charity has moved from building playgrounds to transforming attitudes to disability in Russia and across the world. "It's been a long time that we've been doing this and sometimes it feels really daunting - a very lonely place, even when it probably doesn't feel so from outside," she says, surrounded in the elegant living room with children's toys and games, from the giant teddy bear with one missing eye for her latest 18-month-old son to cuddle to a chess set for her 18-year-old. The father of her two younger children is her husband Antoine Arnault, from the mighty luxury conglomerate; and the three older children are from her first marriage to English aristocrat Justin Portman. Natalia Vodianova with her children Neva, Viktor and Lucas attend the 'Picasso Mania' Press Preview at the Grand Palais in Paris in October 2015. Getty Images Natalia, her face determinedly stern, continues to explain the problem of asking again and again for support for her projects. "It gets a little difficult because you keep asking the same people - and how long can people say 'yes' and be there for you? But we need support more than ever because we started with something very lighthearted - building play parks, as many as we could, depending on the success of our fundraising activities. But for the past six years now, we're doing something much more serious, real humanitarian work and we have families depending on us." She continues to explain the trajectory of changing the mindset and an entire country's attitude, including its government. "Our activities have changed dramatically," Natalia explains. "We still build play parks - we open approximately 10 to 15 a year, but we added this very important other work with families who raise children with special needs. And that programme has really taken over. We spend 60 per cent of the funds raised on this part of our work. It's not like curing cancer, for example, when you might be able to cure a child and they go on living. It's very different with special needs because it is ongoing work that never stops - you cannot put it away." Natalia Vodianova wears Dior at Paris Couture Fashion Week, July 2017 Getty Images The story is, of course, deeply personal: her sister Oksana, who was still-born, resuscitated and left with permanent brain damage and cerebral palsy, has been part of Natalia's life since she was six years old. She helped her mother struggle through grinding poverty and a sense of helplessness and shame, until Natalia's success as a top model was able to support her family. Natalia Vodianova and her husband, CEO of Berluti, Antoine Arnault at the Berluti Autumn/Winter 2018 show as part of Paris Fashion Week Men's, January 2018 Getty Images "My sister has turned 30 and she lives with my mum in our hometown Nizhny Novgorod. She's well, she goes to a family support group, so my charity work has also benefited my own family - and I didn't expect that when I started," continues Natalia. "My sister didn't know the struggles we were going through, her disability in a way guarded her from the reality. For me, it was very different and I was exposed to all the shame and stigma that goes with it. Oksana wasn't, she was a very happy girl, always laughing and she did bring a lot of joy." Natalia faced the tough trials of her family's situation, when they might not even have enough to eat, and witnessed physical and mental abuse in her neighbourhood, where she developed a gritty courage, shaping the positivity that eventually grew into the concept of building playgrounds as safe havens. But as her knowledge of the situation grew, Natalia's determination hardened. She read a book about institutions for disabled children and learned the fate of a boy born at the same time as her sister, but abandoned by his mother into an institution. With cerebral palsy, he was undamaged mentally, but left from age six in an orphanage for 'imbeciles' and when found could not even identify a Christmas tree. Natalia's voice quavers as she explains that when she realised that 80 per cent of children with special needs in Russia were abandoned by their families, she set out to do more than raise money. She wanted to change attitudes, both of ordinary people and of the official state. Using editors and journalists, before the time of social media, Natalia told of remarkable success stories of families - as with her own mother - who did not give up on their disabled children. The Paralympics in Russia and a cover of Hello! magazine featuring Natalia with her sister were game changers. Natalia Vodianova brought her 'Fabulous Fund Fair' event to New York for Hallowe'en in October 2017 Victor Boyko "The pictures in Hello! spoke how we wanted to portray Oksana as being really part of the family, which of course she is and is very close to me," Natalia says. For people to see me - I guess they consider me very privileged now - and to see how that was a normality with my sister, for them it must have been a bit shocking. Because people are not exposed to mental disability - the stigma comes from the fact that they think that all these people are violent and have no feelings. That was a tipping point. A melting of the ice." Natalia Vodianova (2nd right) with her husband Antoine Arnault (right), CEO of Berluti, and his parents, French pianist Helene Mercier-Arnault (left) and Bernard Arnault (2nd left), CEO of LVMH, in front of the Louvre before a diner for the launch of a Louis Vuitton collection in collaboration with US artist Jeff Koons in April 2017 Getty Images Natalia's intense dedication to her cause is so compelling that it is no wonder that she can entice back her supporters to another round of giving. Surely the intergalactic fun she is putting on next week will raise, once again, the bar in terms of the amount of money promised and of her own dedication to the cause. Natalia Vodianova (2nd left) with fellow models Elena Perminova (left) and Karlie Kloss (2nd right) and guests at The Naked Heart Foundation's 'Fabulous Fund Fair' in London in 2016 Dave Benett for Getty Images But wait - there is something else. A lot more. For Natalia is wrapping her loose H&M sweater around her chest and talking about her recent work, aimed at introducing philanthropy to the millennial generation. While their parents might be donating millions to the Fund Fair, she is hoping that more of her socially conscious peers will be using the micro-donation app Elbi which "democratises" the opportunity to give. The idea is to use the 'love' button to donate money, however little; and to make available a way to give to charities, many involving women, such as one which tackles the stigma attached to periods in underdeveloped areas of India, where there is not even access to sanitary towels. Determined to focus on the upcoming 'Fund Fair', I promise Natalia that I will make another article about the Elbi app. It is surely a safe bet (money to be donated to one of her causes) that Super-Doopa Nova will have, by then, corralled a bunch of fresh issues to support. For tickets to London's Fabulous Fund Fair 2018, organised by the Naked Heart Foundation, click here It takes place Tuesday, 20 February 2018 at 8pm at Roundhouse, Chalk Farm Road, London NW1 8EH. Sponsors include: By Kilian, Dior, Fendi, Givenchy, Guerlain, L'Oreal, Louis Vuitton, Maxx Royal Resorts, Messika and Versace among others. For more information, follow the hashtag #FundFair and @natasupernova and @nakedheartfoundation on Instagram Eleanor Langhoff, age 95, of Villard, formerly of St. Paul, died Monday, September 6, 2021. A memorial service will be held at 11 AM, Wednesday, September 22, 2021 at First Lutheran Church in Alexandria. Visitation will be from 10 to 11 AM Wednesday at the church. Arrangements are with the A The United States has formed a new Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (QSD), which is known as the Quads. This is an anti-Chinese group composed since 2007 of Japan, Australia and India. Following a change in government, Australia had left the group, making Washingtons strategy a failure, returned to it in 2010. The Trump Administration is preparing a project to steal Chinas thunder. The initiative the Chinese have in mind is to create new communication routes along the model of the former Silk route. In 2009, the Chinese Communist Party had chosen General Xi Jinping to create a system of trade communication covering the whole planet. Once Xi became president, he gradually revealed his project, whose routes will cross around 70 countries at an estimated cost of 124 billion dollars. The Quad countries met in November 2017, at the sidelines of the ASEAN Summit. On 23 February 2018, the Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and President Donald Trump will discuss at the White House, the framework of their project aimed at provide an alternative to the Chinese initiative. In December, the Australian government published its 2017 Foreign Policy White Paper in which it advises involving the US to contain China. On 15 February 2018, Admiral Kurt Tidd, Head of SouthCom, had violently denounced the contention that the new Silk Route presented a risk to US influence. Oxford Universitys Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism has published a study on the publication of fake news on the internet in two EU member states: France and Italy. Concerning France, it relied on a list of not trustworthy sites drawn up by Le Monde and excluded Voltairenet.Org from it. Published in about 12 languages, in just 15 years Voltairenet.org has established itself as a source of analysis that is recognized by many Ministers for Foreign Affairs and Defence, which they then republishes in articles published on Voltairenet in their press review. The Reuters Institute study shows that many articles are read much more on Facebook than on the internet sites that published them. However the study does not go much further. In actual fact, you cannot compare the influence of commercial internet sites and non-commercial sites (the latter being sites which are open to the public and without advertising). Some sites take up all sorts of issues, while others focus on only one specific issue; some oblige the readers to visit their websites to read their articles while others, in contrast, encourage their articles to be republished on new platforms, etc. For the first six months of 2018, Bulgaria is presiding over the European Union; yet in this period, a Nazi torch-lit march took place though its capital, Sofia, on 17 February. A member party of the current government participated in this march. Last year, the Vice Minister of Regional Development, Pavel Tenev, had already been forced to resign after a holiday photo was published in which he was posing giving the Nazi salute before wax statues of Gestapo officers. Following this, a high official from the Bulgarian Ministry of Defence, Ivo Antonov, also had to resign following the publication of a photo where he was posing giving the Nazi salute, before a German tank used in the Second World War. Finally, Plamen Ouzounov, Adviser on security issues to the socialist president Roumen Radev, resigned on account of a photo that featured him imitating Adolf Hitler. Continuing the tradition, now 10 years old, the demonstration of 17 February celebrates the memory of General Hristo Lukov. This gentleman promoted anti-semitism and collaborated with the Nazis. The process had the support of the Union of Patriots, a party member of the coalition government. The Bulgarian Prime Minister, Boiko Borissov, is the godfather of one of two leading Mafia clans in the country. He represents Bulgaria in the EU Council and is in fact the President for the first six months of 2018. He has organized an important trafficking of drugs and arms to support Al-Qaeda and Daesh in Syria [1]. The German Government has not reacted to the Nazi demonstration held on 17 February in Sofia. In actual fact, Berlin has known Boiko Borrisov for a long time and is blackmailing him. In the EU Council, Boris is cooperates with Germany and granting its every request. Let us not forget that the Polish Donald Tusk, the High Official chairing the administration of the European Council, is a childhood friend of the German Chancellor Angela Merkel. The European Union is declaring that it was created to fight Nazism and to guarantee peace. Nazi parties are members of the governments in Lithuania [2], Ukraine [3] and Bulgaria. All these parties have been organized by former Nazis recovered by the Stay Behind networks of the CIA and Nato to fight against the USSR. During the Cold War, they benefitted from the protection of the United States and occasionally Germany. Looking for another feeling in their new house Ulrika and Daniel Prytz asked architect Sofia Nyman of firm Skalso to reimagine and expand a 19th-century house perched on the waters edge in the small coastal city of Harnosand, Sweden. After living in a modernist villa with a nearly all-white interior and modern furniture they were in for something different, something pared down that communed with the landscape in a quiet, intimate way. Nyman achieved this through a carefully selected monochrome color palette: the original structures exterior facade, roof, and windows are painted in tonal shades of green, while the interior rooms are a medley of gray tones. The result is at once striking and subtle. By using this color scheme you dont read the rooms as several surfaces, you read it as one, calm space. she explains, how do you like this interior? Photo: Macmillan Childrens Publishing Group This week, a mysterious figure appeared on a 42-foot high billboard on the side of the Madame Tussauds wax museum, down the street from the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Only the top part of her face was visible fierce gray eyes, dark-brown skin, bone-white hair rising into the air like smoke. She seemed to be levitating above Hollywood Boulevard, above the chain stores and the traffic and the celebrity footprints, as though she possessed some magical power, which she does. Unless youre a devoted fan of young-adult literature, you will not have heard of Zelie Adebola, but soon, she will summit the peaks of popular culture like Hermione Granger and Katniss Everdeen before her. Zelie is not the first black heroine of a young-adult fantasy series, but she is on track to become by far the most famous. The book, Children of Blood and Bone, due to come out March 6, has been called a brutal, beautiful tale of revolution, faith, and star-crossed love (Publishers Weekly), and a timely study on race, colorism, and power and injustice (Kirkus). To conjure the fantastical realm in which it is set, a land of spirits and giant snow leopards, its Nigerian-American author, Tomi Adeyemi, drew on West African mythology, which she researched during a recent fellowship in Brazil. She wrote the first draft in one feverish month. Less than a year later, at the age of 23, she sold the manuscript in a seven-figure deal rumored to be among the biggest in YA history. (We paid a spectacular advance for a spectacular novel unlike anything weve read, Tiffany Liao, her editor at Henry Holt Books for Young Readers, told me in an email.) A film deal quickly followed, and since then, Children of Blood and Bone has appeared on dozens of lists of the most-anticipated books of 2018. At New York Comic Con last summer, fans waited in lines for hours for a chance to meet Adeyemi, though none had yet read the book. Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, a professor at the University of Pennsylvanias Graduate School of Education, who focuses on race in childrens and young-adult literature, understood the impulse. A book like this would have been beyond my imagination as a kid, said Thomas, who is 40. She sees the publishing industrys rapturous embrace of Children of Blood and Bone as the result of decades of activism aimed at making the industry more diverse. What I love most about the idea of Children of Blood and Bone is that it moves black protagonists to the center of the fantastic we are no longer in the margins of the mainstream imagination. Many black YA writers my age have lumps in their throats because when we were 24, those doors were glued shut. The book takes place in a country called Orisha 11 years after magic has vanished from the land. The King has slaughtered all the Magi magicians who could draw on the power of gods and goddesses to summon fire, darkness, spirits of the dead. Zelie sets out on quest to restore magic, and to defeat the king, who has murdered her own mother. This week, I caught up with Adeyemi to talk about the inspiration for her work, why shes bored by Lord of the Rings, and what a book like Children of Blood and Bone would have meant to her as a kid. Plus, check out the book trailer below, released exclusively to Vulture. Ive read that your first attempt at writing a novel was inspired by seeing the backlash that the Hunger Games movie got from some viewers who were apparently upset to discover that Rue was black. How did that motivate you to start writing? Its actually hilarious, because it seems like weve come completely full circle. Now, everybody is losing their minds over Black Panther and its opening weekend totally eclipsed the Hunger Games, and A Wrinkle of Time is coming out next month, and it all feels really good. But in that moment it was really I know this might sound dramatic, but theres no other word it was actually just soul-crushing. Especially during that time in my life. What was going on in your life then? It was my freshman year at Harvard. I grew up in a predominantly white community, Hinsdale, Illinois, and given that, I feel blessed because I could still count my experiences with blatant racism on two hands. I thought racism was the substitute teacher picking on you because she assumes that youre a delinquent and she doesnt know you have the highest score in the class. But then I got to college, and thats when the shooting of Trayvon Martin happened, and that was terrifying. I knew racism could emotionally hurt, but up until then, I thought we were past the time when racism could actually kill me. And then we went through the trial, and I saw oh, also, its not only that you can be killed, its that your killer is going to walk free. So college was this big awakening. Then came The Hunger Games those stories were supposed to be my safe spot. Those characters were just supposed to be characters. I thought it wasnt really about the color of their skin. But then I found out that people were bringing their real-world hatred into that fictional world. They said, Oh, yeah, its not sad when a 10-year-old girl gets speared to death because shes black. And theyre saying it in public, too, on the internet. They were so bold and so unashamed. It was both terrifying and heart breaking. If they dont feel anything seeing a fictional black girl die, then our world is in a much worse spot than I thought. I am a lot less safe than I thought. But after the terror comes the, Oh Im going to get you. [Laughs.] At least for me. Im going to get you, because Im going to make something as good as The Hunger Games, and everyone is going to be black, and youre going to have to enjoy this thing with all black people and thats going to suck for you! Thats how I go through things. Something hurts me, I feel that hurt deeply, I shed my tears, and then its like, okay, but now Im going to get you. Not necessarily this month, not necessarily this year, but give it time. I will clap back. And you will eat your words. Its amazing what a difference six years can make, especially in a genre like fantasy, which has been dominated for so long by white people. Weve been told the same story for so long. Weve seen literally 1,000 Lord of the Rings movies. I keep thinking about what it would have been like if I had seen this growing up if Id seen someone even darker than me, someone who doesnt have straight fantasy hair, but a curly magical afro. I know what it would have done that for me, because I know what it did for me when I did see these things for the first time. Like with Kerry Washington on Scandal. I remember being like thats me, Im the main character! Im badass! Im emotionally complex! Im making out with the president! Cool cool cool! You dont realize whats missing until you see it. And then once you do, youre like, why do I feel like I could lift a car right now? So this is why white men feel so great all the time. This is the explanation. Yeah, because theyre always seeing themselves doing amazing things. Right now, I feel like were in this black-girl-magic renaissance. Last week, Dhonielle Claytons book The Belles came out, and in April, Justina Irelands Dread Nation is coming out, and seeing our three books next to each other Ive never seen books like this in my entire life. Its actually incredible. Im this excited as an adult consumer, so I cant even imagine what this specific year is going to do for so many children, especially so many black girls. They are being flooded with, you are amazing, you are beautiful, you are powerful, you can kill zombies, you can do magic, your hair looks amazing. Even though the world is a very scary place, if I just look at that part, I feel like: okay, I could have a daughter right now. Shes not going to have to go through this period of hating her hair and hating her skin. Not to say that these books are going to completely eradicate that, but its going to make a huge difference, because you hate yourself when you think youre different, when you think no one is like you. How old were you when you wrote your first story? My very first story, I was around 5, and I really just wrote myself. When I was 5, I loved myself so much I gave myself a twin named Tomi. Everything started out fine. But then I didnt write another black character until I was 18. I look at that gap, and just the thought of me sitting alone in my room reinforcing the lies the world told us pisses me off. What kind of characters were you writing in those years? The protagonists were either white or biracial, because I thought those were the only people who were allowed to be in stories. It wasnt a conscious decision, which to me is why its scarier. Somewhere in there, Id internalized this idea. Im writing stories alone in my room, and I dont write black characters because I dont think thats allowed. And my senior year, I finally realized how messed up that was. So even before the Hunger Games, I realized I needed to write black characters with really big hair. That was one way I could start teaching myself to love and accept myself and not wish I looked different, or that my skin was lighter, or that my eyes were hazel. It was so easy for me to describe those features in the books I was writing as desirable, but it wasnt easy to write she had really dark skin I didnt have the language for it. So that was the start of my journey. I spent 12 years of my life writing stories without black people. Thats insane to me. Its insane that I could have believed in magical portals and dragons and all that stuff, but to believe a black person could be experiencing those things was unimaginable. So when you started working on Children of Blood and Bone, were you drawing any inspiration from the classics of the fantasy genre the 1,000 different versions of Lord of the Rings, as you say? Heres where Im going to be crucified: I havent actually read Lord of the Rings. I havent watched Game of Thrones. [Whispering.] Im whispering because I know theyre going to be like burn her! Im not saying theyre not great, it just wasnt doing it for me. So I couldnt be influenced by LOTR because I literally couldnt get through it. There are just all these short men running around. Im more influenced by anime. That was my first love. When I think about my childhood, its Harry Potter, but really it was Naruto, it was Bleach, it was Death Note. Those are epic, vicious tales. Right now my inspiration is Attack on Titan. I know I need to make something as effed up and as incredible and as bleak as Attack on Titan. Right now on my bookshelf, I have my only hardcover finished copy of Children of Blood and Bone, and then to the left of it, I have Shadowshaper by Daniel Jose Older and to the right of it, theres An Ember in the Ashes by Sabaa Tahir, and above it is Avatar: The Last Airbender Children of Blood and Bone is the baby of those three. The idea that magic is a thing that has gone away and needs to be recovered is a common theme in fantasy books and older fairy tales, too. Im curious why that theme resonated for you. In the real world, whats the thing that you think has been lost that needs to be recovered? For me, this theme hits home. I think everyone from a marginalized background can relate. Youre young, and the world is full of color and hopes and dreams. And then one day you have an experience that teaches you the world isnt what you thought it was. It teaches you that because of the color of your skin, people will treat you differently. Strangers will hate you. People in power will use their power to further disenfranchise you. People you pay to protect you will use their weapons to systematically hunt you down and kill you. Living through that, its like watching a world full of color fade to hues of gray. To me, theres no more powerful metaphor for that than watching a world that used to be full of magic get that magic violently ripped away. People are talking about this as one of the biggest books of the year, and on top of that, the book carries this political weight one of the first YA epic fantasies written by a black woman, featuring a black woman of color. Lets talk about how youre handling these expectations. At this specific moment in time, I dont feel the pressure of that because the book is done. For the eight months we spent intensely revising the book, absolutely. I knew the importance of this book and its potential impact on readers from all backgrounds, which meant every single word, every plot point, every character action, every element of the world literally everything has been through the ringer. Up until a few days before we had to turn in the final text, we were still editing, still discussing, still analyzing. I put an insane amount of pressure on myself to get this book right. I know that no matter how hard you work you wont be able to stop people from coming at something or trying to pick it apart, but I dont have to feel pressure or worry now because I know that I did everything humanly possible (and then some) to put out the best book possible. I think for me the biggest challenge is to maintain sanity and maintain time for everything. I really destroyed myself for this book. Tell me more. It was mostly all nighters. So many all nighters. Usually when a book is getting published, they make the book deal and then the book will be published a year and a half to two years later. We tried to do this in 11 months. Also the book that Macmillan bought was 400 pages, the advanced copy is 600 pages, it would be one thing if we just added 200 pages, because thats not actually that bad. But we freaking ripped up the pipes. The book is so much better for it, but it was grueling. I want to hear about the your research into the African mythology that inspired the magic in Children of Blood and Bone. So I was in Brazil to research something completely different: how their history of slavery compared to ours and how the formation of an Afro-Brazilian identity compared to African-American identity. But the museum that had been my focal point the whole reason I was able to justify going to Brazil was closed for renovation. So when I realized this, it was raining, and I wandered into a gift shop to stop my hair from getting wet, and the gift-shop owner was kicking people out who were clearly there to not get wet. So I was like, Ive gotta look interested! I started looking around and I picked up this poster of nine different Orisha. I had no idea what it was. Id never seen anything like it. This ties back to what we were talking about earlier You dont realize that youve been surrounded by white Jesus and Zeus until you see black gods and goddesses and youre like, Holy wow! I knew instantly I was going to do something with it, I just didnt know what the story was yet. I was way more moved by just seeing that gift-shop photo than by any of the other slave-trade research I was doing. So I pivoted. And I started looking into the deep history of stories about these gods and goddesses I call them that, because theyre similar to saints or angels. And a few months later, I started to think about what it would be like to do a story with a world based off those gods. I knew then that I had something worth writing that we hadnt seen before. Are there any updates on the movie that you can share? Whats that process been like? How involved are you? The process has been wonderful! Everyone working on this movie is so passionate and excited about this project, and I couldnt have asked for a better team to be behind Children of Blood and Bone. At this moment in time, Ive had a few conversations with the screenwriter [whose identity is still a closely guarded secret], and its been incredible collaborating with him. Ive also met with the team at Fox 2000 and Temple Hill Productions, and were continuing to meet as we get closer to putting all the people and pieces in place to start production. I cant give any concrete dates away, but I will say that having watched Black Panther twice in two days, I am so excited for Children of Blood and Bone to make its way onto the screen! This interview has been edited and condensed. Photo: Michael Laughlin/TNS via Getty Images Proving quality journalism can also bring commercial success, CNNs town hall devoted to the Parkland school shooting scored huge ratings for the cable news channel on Wednesday night. Per Nielsen, the Jake Tapperhosted Stand Up: The Students of Stoneman Douglas Demand Action attracted 2.9 million viewers between 9 and 11 p.m. ET, roughly tripling CNNs typical prime-time audience during those hours while beating everything on Fox News and MSNBC for the night. Although cable news tends to skew old, Stand Up brought in younger eyeballs as well, notching a 0.7 rating among adult under 50, and a 0.45 with millennials under 35. Thats about five times the millennial audience for the Fox News lineup on Wednesday night. Stand Up also did very well online, with CNN saying the program notched a record 1.9 million program starts on various nonlinear platforms, and a peak streaming audience of 350,000 concurrent viewers at 10:45 p.m. While some right-wing commentators slammed CNN for giving too much time to student activists, clearly a lot of Americans are very interested in what the kids have to say. Annihilation. Photo: Paramount Pictures Spoilers for Annihilation below. The specter of Tim Burton loomed over the production of Annihilation. Writer/director Alex Garland and production designer Mark Digby were in the midst of adapting Jeff VanderMeers sci-fi novel about Area X, a plot of land where nature has been perverted, and they were grappling with a particularly tricky visual. About halfway through the film, the films leads come across a series of wooden growths shaped and sized more or less like humans. One of the people comments on how the alien presence that invaded Area X must have given the plant DNA elements of human DNA. Its an arresting image, but Digby was worried about it for a very specific reason. It was really, really hard to make a representation of a human in a plant without thinking Edward Scissorhands, Digby recalls with a laugh. Without being a topiary. It has to give the notion that we wanted: that it was human-esque, but not human. Also, from a different angle, you dont see them. But if you come up the right angle, they become people. He lets out an almost imperceptible sigh. Its quite complicated. Thats the Annihilation design process in microcosm: make something natural, yet distinctly unnatural; make it hard to visually process, yet immediately impactful; and make it all seem like nothing viewers have ever seen before. It was no easy task, and, according to Digby, it took long discussions, diverse sources of influence, and a lot of outre mathematics. The Philosophy of Area X Digby and Garland had previously collaborated on Ex Machina, so they had an existing rapport, but knew this film had to be something sui generis. I think Alex described it as going from suburbia to psychedelia, Digby recalls. The story begins with Lena (Natalie Portman) in an ordinary college town, then moves her and a team of armed scouts to a swampland where the rules of biology and physics no longer apply. In crafting the latter environment, Digby and Garland started by more or less throwing away the visual descriptions from the book upon which the story was based. We went off on our own to the script, Digby recalls. I think we took the rules [of the book], then took our own imagination of what things would be and how they would be. The keyword for everything Lena and her cohort sees is mixing. There are the aforementioned people-growths, there are animals hybridized with one another, there are crystals that have grown like trees, and there are walls that have started living. Digby says they wanted to take the concept of mixing to an extreme conceptual degree. These species are intermixing and they shouldnt, but what if you took that a step further and it wasnt just species, but it was substances or types? he says. What would happen if a plant acted like a sound wave? Or electricity or fire did? A mineral might grow in an organic way. Something organic might grow in a geometric or a crystalline way. They were doing much of what they do, but in the wrong way. As such, Digby and Garland looked at the way cancerous tumors force the body to grow contrary to the natural plans of DNA. The Cave and the Lighthouse The two also looked to an unusual source of inspiration for filmmakers: fractal mathematics. Fractals can get a bit esoteric, but the basic idea is theyre replications of an object based on a given mathematical formula. The results can be gorgeous and unlike anything a human might dream up on their own. Digby and Garland were particularly fond of a fractal-related concept called the Mandelbrot set, and put it to good use. Take, for example, the cave beneath the lighthouse that Lena arrives in at the films conclusion. Its a claustrophobic tunnel area with rounded growths emerging from every inch of the wall, floor, and ceiling. It gives off a vibe almost like an insects hive, but Digby says its all numbers. The cave is a Mandelbrot explosion, he muses. If you start off with a ball or a cube and you put in this formula and you let the computer run and it grows, these three-dimensional shapes grow out in an odd way. Gradually, you get an image that looks like a berry. If you allow this berry, its mutating outwards, then you get a void thats left behind. That is our cave and its structures. Its a repetition of a pattern in three dimensions. The exterior of the lighthouse features a gaping hole where a meteorite struck it, and from that hole creep gross-looking tendrils. Digby says the tendrils werent actually inspired by anything organic, but rather by ice. If you look at a lighthouse in Alaska, frozen lighthouses in Alaska, what happens is, when theres these amazing storms, the water freezes in mid-motion on the lighthouses and you get these tentacles coming off them, he says. Its like a growth thats overtaken these Alaskan lighthouses. That greatly influenced that whole growth on the outside. The Shimmer If designing the cave was a math class, and the hole was fluid dynamics, designing the Shimmer was a lesson in atmospheric phenomena. The Shimmer is the multicolored energy field that surrounds Area X, constantly shifting and warping like an oil-bubble in sunlight. Digby says it was a long while into the film before they had it nailed down. There are some amazing cloud formations around the world, and we looked at several of those, he says. Of course, we looked at the Aurora Borealis. It went back to the fact you have this ether that we live in, and within that, theres electromagnetism, theres radioactivity, and theres the seen and unseen light spectrums. I think we sort of put all of those together and then came up with this living presence, which has light but has matter. The Bear We have to talk about the creatures. Perhaps the most terrifying scene of the film comes when Lena and her group are attacked by a deformed, bear-like animal with a ripped-apart head and a roar that sounds like the horrified screams of a dying human. A key goal, Digby says, was to make it as sad as it was scary. I think the starting point for that was a damaged creature, but we wanted it to be powerful, as well, and threatening, Digby recalls. We didnt want it to be a bear. We wanted it to have that general shape, but then we forged in these other images and that sad-looking physiology, with some of its face disappearing. It had been destroyed and changed. Also, things had grown cancerously. Half its face is missing, as if youd had cancer of the mouth. They also sought to make it look unwell by making it pale something they also did for a shark/alligator hybrid that appears earlier in the film. Another feature we looked at was changes in pigmentation, Digby says. The plants that they first see, a lot of them are white. The alligator-shark is white, its all devoid of its normal pigmentation. When we were [researching], we found some baboons, some other animals where they started to lose their pigment and their fur and they looked pretty ill. The Stomach Another gross-out moment comes when the group finds footage of a previous expedition. In it, one soldier cuts another soldiers stomach open to reveal that his guts have been replaced with slithering tubes that look like eels. Digby says the man hasnt exactly been hybridized with any particular animal its just weird stuff going on inside of his guts. We looked at decaying people and how maggots and other bugs overwhelm your body, he says. We looked at eels, we looked at all of those sort of animals, fish, microscopic worms, and stuff. Its been able to take his DNA and his organs and theyve mutated into something thats a replica of some sort of animal, fish, eel, or bug, at some point. Where that knowledge has come from, I guess Im not quite sure, other than that our genome history is mixed with so much else through evolution. There was discussion of having the growths come out of his stomach or mouth, but they thought itd be far better if its living in there and that its growing from within. The Man-Wall The man with the stomach-growths meets an untimely end, but his body doesnt stop growing. Lena and the crew find that his corpse expanded out into a wall-sized explosion of color and branching lines. That started off as a rock, a crystalline rock thats been cut in half, Digby recalls. If you look at these beautiful minerals, when they slice them, you have these concentric circles of different-colored polished stones. They radiate out and they mimic the growth of trees and the rings of trees. Then we also imagined that it would have some organic growth, which is feathering out afterwards. Thats where Digby encountered another mathematical concept: a Lichtenberg figure. Roughly speaking, Lichtenberg figures are branched lines created by electricity (lightning is an example of a Lichtenberg figure, for instance). Digby and Garland opted for something like an organic Lichtenberg with the dead mans expanded body. It sort of looks like black mold, but growing in a sort of tree- or river-like way, he says. Its very much like those pictures from space of rivers with all their tributaries coming out. We took that as an inspiration as well. Its not an explosion, but its something thats happened that makes it grow further and further away. Things get separated and things grow in odd and fearsome ways. The Humanoid Speaking of fearsome: Lena meets her greatest threat near the films conclusion, when the otherworldly forces of Area X create a humanoid figure that mirrors her every movement. It almost looks like a walking embodiment of the Shimmer in its color and translucence, and its faceless and featureless. It was about replication, but not full and exact replication, Digby says of the humanoid. It was having the feral-feeling similarity of a tumorous humanoid, but not fully. You feel its a physical ghost of humanness. It was always supposed to replicate and mirror what she does and what she is, but always leave in the mind the doubt of what it is, actually. Its in a stage of becoming something else or someone else. There were early discussions about giving it a face, but we threw that out at some stage. We said its far more powerful if it was trying to become the other thing, the other person, but not quite making it. Location, Location, Location And yet, despite all these mind-bending designs, when I ask Digby what his biggest challenge was, he lands on something unexpected: location. Area X was shot in England, but is supposed to look like an American swampland. One part was shot in Windsor Park, which is the Queens grounds, part of her estate, he says, laughing. That whole swamp area where theres the sunken trailer in the marsh, the floating house thats hunkered down and where the shark-alligator attacks them? That was in a quaint little pond in a very British park owned by the queen. If its seamless and you dont really feel like, Yeah, these guys did it in England, then thats the best comment I can get. Jason Lewis. Photo: Patrick McMullan/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images Thats it! The Sarah Jessica Parker and Kim Cattrall feud can be put to bed now that we know the allegiance of Sex and the City actor Jason Lewis. Lewis played Smith, one of Samanthas love interests on SATC, and in a new interview he politely put his support behind Parker in the somewhat ongoing drama. When asked by a KTLA anchor whose team he was on, Lewis said, If you cant say something nice dont say anything at all, before adding, Listen, I have to say that Sarah was always just so lovely and such a consummate professional and I think that people should remember their graciousness and the things that have been given to them. Okay, sure. Parker was lovely, but this is a fight, Lewis, so do you have Parkers back or not? I might just have to say yeah, said Lewis, cagily signifying he might have Team Jessica tattooed on a rib. What a gracious lady. She was always so good to me. So, the anchor asked, does that mean other people werent so kind to him while he worked on Sex? Lewis responded only with a laugh and said, Sarah was amazing. The kerfuffle between Cattrall and Parker started over a disagreement about the future of a Sex and the City 3 movie, which was reported (by a British tabloid) to have been torpedoed by the outrageous demands of Cattrall. The actress told Piers Morgan she made no demands about the film, except for demanding not to be involved, and of her former colleagues, Cattrall said, Weve never been friends. Then things took a dark turn when Parker expressed condolences for the recent death of Cattralls brother, to which Cattrall dismissed her comments and said, You are not my family. You are not my friend, adding that Parker was both cruel and a hypocrite. Third parties started to get involved when Andy Cohen spoke up in defense of Parker, and now Jason Lewis has been asked to weigh in. Not the drama you expected in 2018, but there you have it. James Norton as Alex Godman in McMafia. Photo: Nikola Predovic/Cuba Pictures/CPL Godman/AMC The opening credits of the crime drama McMafia tell you what youre in for. They also tell you whats most compelling about the series: its ability to communicate complex systems in a straightforward manner. Animated spreadsheets, graphs, pie charts, and maps are laid atop images of on-the-ground criminal activities, including the bribery of public officials, car-bombed vehicles burning, and sex-trafficked women being pushed into the back of an unmarked van. Mouse clicks transfer laundered money from point A to B to C to D and beyond, obscuring its origins. A flock of rifle shells turn upright and glom together to form a jigsaw puzzle-like map of the world, and the title of the series appears at the center of the image, translating itself from English into Russian, Israeli, Arabic, and other languages. This is the truer, deeper subject of this show, as described in its source material, Misha Glennys 2008 book McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld: the so-called Global Shadow Economy, which builds international criminal franchises that are as ruthless as any legal corporation and more powerful than all but a handful of national governments. This wouldve made a terrific subject for a documentary feature, or perhaps an episode of a nonfiction anthology series like Netflixs Dirty Money, which covered some of the same subject matter in the episode titled Cartel Bank, about HSBCs willingness to launder drug money. This one is a dramatic series, originally produced for the BBC and premiering on AMC Monday night, about a Russia-originated but now London-based crime family, co-created by Hossein Amini (screewriter of 1997s Wings of the Dove) and James Watkins (director of The Woman in Black and Eden Lake). While it wouldnt be quite right to say that the gangster violence and double-crosses are the spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine go down, it feels that way at times. As an information delivery device, its effective. I learned a lot from watching it. Unfortunately, as a crime drama, McMafia is not hugely different from the bleak gangster epics that followed The Godfather into cinemas and The Sopranos onto TV, and were plainly influenced by how they put ironic or ghastly frames around marriage, parenting, office politics, and other ordinary human activities. Its not terrible, not great, just okay: better acted than directed, better directed than written, and generally a bit cooler and more generic than it needed to be in order to stand out in a medium that already has more violent antiheroes than it can handle. The main cast includes an aging patriarch (Aleksey Serebryakovs Dimitri Godman) who is depressed by his expulsion from his home country and a recent personal catastrophe and withdraws from the world, alienating his loyal wife Oksana (Maria Shukshina) by taking a mistress. Theres a Sonny Corleone type in Dimitris brother Boris (David Dencik), a life-of-the-party macho man who likes to get his hands dirty. Theres a loyal son, Alex Godson (James Norton), who went to an Ivy League school (Harvard no less) but has to abandon any pretense of legitimacy and shore up his fathers wobbly empire. Theres a bitter rival, Merab Ninidzes Moscow-based Vadim Kalyagin, who chased Dimitri out of Russia and wants to kill any competitors that he cant thwart by other means. Theres even a Hyman Roth-like crafty Jew (David Straithairns crooked Israeli businessman, Kleiman) whose outwardly harmless demeanor hides his Machiavellian gifts. (The Godson family is also Jewish, a detail that feels tossed-off at first.) Around these dynamic men orbit an array of women who are mostly shut out of the fists-and-guns-and-daggers-and-bombs part of the action, but who manage to make their influence felt in other ways, including Sofia Lebedeva as Lyudmilla Nikolayeva, a beauty therapist who gets abducted in Egypt and sold off to Kleiman, who uses her not as a sex slave but as a devious platonic social companion for rich men Kleiman wants to manipulate. She plays up her seeming naivete and lack of business knowledge to trick her dates into spilling details that her boss can leverage while negotiating. In the Kay Corleone role of Alexs girlfriend Rebecca, Juliet Rylance makes less of an impression, though to be fair, not even Diane Keaton could save it the first time. The pilot lays out the glass house that is the Godsons hyper-privileged universe, then fastballs a rock through the front window. The rest of the series finds Alex halfheartedly trying to evade his destiny, then embracing it to perpetuate the family and punish those whove wronged it. He keeps getting approached by other international criminal types, starting with Kleiman, and asked to support their power moves against mutual enemies. Alex protests that he has nothing to do with the blood-and-guts part of the family fortune and is just a suit moving money around, but everyone knows its not true because his family was never that legit, and because any man related to Dimitri and Boris must have a least a bit of their killer DNA. The tale moves more or less in the direction that you expect (and probably want, if youre a fan of gangster films). But the background details are consistently more surprising than the characters and situations that illustrate them. You might even find yourself tuning out during the more typical moments, such as a horrifying home invasion that spirals into nightmare territory, and a sequence that cross-cuts between an attempted suicide and a murder thats being disguised as a suicide. Amini and Watkins deserve credit for clarity of expression. There was never a moment where the complex financial shenanigans confused me, despite the array of countries visited and languages spoken, and the scripts somehow pull off the tough trick of verbally explaining things (to make extra-sure everyone in the audience is up to speed) without making McMafia feel like a Wikipedia entry come to life. Theres not a bum performance to be found anywhere in the cast, though Nortons borderline blank-slate approach robs the series of a dynamic center, and might have been a tactical mistake in retrospect. Straithairn wins best-in-show handily, despite his unconvincing accent, because he seems overjoyed by the chance to portray a wily old coot, rather than another of his usual salt-of-the-earth types, and his enthusiasm informs the character, who seems more like an absentminded philosophy professor than a secret Meyer Lansky. The scene where he explains some of the ritualized tells of a negotiation is gangster movie slyness, even though, like so much of McMafia, its ultimately more exciting to think about later than it is to watch. Daniel Day-Lewis and Vicky Krieps in Phantom Thread. Photo: Universal Pictures Near the beginning of Paul Thomas Andersons Phantom Thread, fashion designer Reynolds Woodcock, a man so dickish his name has two phallic puns, is dining at a hotel in the north of England. He spies an attractive waitress, Alma, and decides to challenge her with a breakfast order that seems to go on for at least ten minutes: Welsh rabbit with a poached egg bacon scones, butter, cream, jam a pot of lapsang souchong tea. And some sausages. He makes her repeat it back to him; she does it perfectly the first indication that this is a woman who can go toe-to-toe with our irascible antihero. Anderson cuts away before we can see the actual breakfast, but the idea of it has become one of the many memes sprung up around the film. (The note Alma leaves on the receipt For the hungry boy has proven to be the years most surprisingly versatile catchphrase.) And so, in the interest of taking the internets Phantom Thread fandom to another level, I spent my Presidents Day holiday attempting to recreate Reynoldss breakfast in my own kitchen. Was I gallant enough to get through the whole thing, or would I end up on the floor? Read on below for my account, complete with recipes for you to follow along with yourself. (I recommend turning on Phantom Thread I before you begin.) But remember: Whatever youre going to cook, cook it carefully. Part I: Preparation Scones, butter, cream, jam Photo: Nate Jones Years of watching cooking shows has drilled into me the lesson that nothing can go wrong in quite the way that baked goods can. Accordingly, I decided to use the simplest scone recipe I could find, which turned out to be the one at Curious Cuisiniere. Since I was only cooking for one, I halved all the ingredients and made four scones, which turned out to be a little depressing. If you do not want to feel like a friendless loner, I recommend making more. Ingredients 1 cup flour 1 tablespoon sugar 2 teaspoons baking powder (not soda!) teaspoon salt 1.5 tablespoons butter cup milk, plus 1 tablespoon 1 egg yolk Butter, jam, and clotted cream to serve Steps 1. In a mixing bowl, combine all the dry ingredients. Cut the butter into smaller pieces and mix it in with your hands. Some recipes say to use a food processor for this part, but I didnt learn this until my hands had already gotten real flour-y and if I have to do that, so should you. Photo: Nate Jones 2. Once the butter has been fully mixed and there are no lumps, add the cup of milk, and mix until it turns into something resembling dough. Photo: Nate Jones 3. Spread the dough out on a flat surface until its around 1 inch thick. Use something round I used a cup measuring cup to cut out discs about 2 inches wide. Photo: Nate Jones 4. Preheat the oven to 425, but let the scones rest for a bit before you put them in. This is a good time to make the tea or the sausages. 5. Mix the egg yolk with the 1 tablespoon of milk, then brush it over the scones. Photo: Nate Jones 6. Put the scones on a greased baking sheet, then into the oven. Check them at 12 minutes, then go from there. 7. After the scones are done, let them chill outside the oven some more. This is a good time to make the rest of the breakfast. Photo: Nate Jones 8. When its time to serve, break open the scones and top with buttery, jammy, creamy goodness. You can find clotted cream at fancy grocery stores like Whole Foods, or if youre really up for a challenge you can make it yourself. (I took the lazy way out and bought some.) A pot of lapsang souchong tea Photo: Nate Jones Lapsang souchong is a smoked tea from China thats a little bit higher-end than your usual Earl Greys and English breakfasts. (Only the best for our Reynolds.) I picked up some loose-leaf at McNultys Tea and Coffee Shop in the West Village, but if youre not in New York Twinings sells boxes of teabags. The instructions I found online recommended using a gaiwan, but I had fine results using my normal teapot and infuser. Anyway, you probably dont need me to tell you how to make tea, but heres a recipe for completenesss sake: Ingredients 2 tablespoons lapsang souchong tea leaves Steps 1. Boil a lot of water in a kettle. 2. Put the tea leaves in a metal tea infuser. 3. Put the infuser in your teapot, then pour in the boiling water. 4. Brew until the tea is your preferred strength (around 10 minutes for me). Im not sure if its gauche to add milk, but I did and it was good. Bacon and sausages Photo: Nate Jones In order to get the full Phantom Thread experience, I used British-style bacon and sausages from Myers of Keswick. (I was peer-pressured into buying half a pound of Chipolata after the woman at the counter seemed skeptical of my quarter-pound order: Thats like three sausages.) Many people on the internet have very strong preferences about which kind of bacon is best, but Ive never really been a bacon connoisseur, so you do you. As for the sausages, my standards are pretty low: Thanks to a family tradition of beach barbecuing, all the real British sausages Ive eaten have always had sand in them. Just like the tea, do you really need instructions on how to cook sausages? Apparently I did. They came linked, and when I lazily tried to break them apart with my hands, one slipped out of its condomlike skin. It quickly came apart in the frying pan, leaving the remaining sausages covered in the charred remains of their former comrade. Photo: Nate Jones Ingredients As many sausage links as you want As much bacon as you want Oil or butter Steps 1. Heat the oil or butter in a frying pan over medium heat. (The Sun recommends using butter, which is perhaps the best reason to use oil.) 2. After CAREFULLY SEPARATING the sausages, cook them until theyre brown and crispy. 3. Remove the sausages and add the bacon, cooking until its the right shade of pinkish-grey, but not too tough. Welsh rabbit with a poached egg Photo: Nate Jones This is the big one. Two necessary disclaimers. (1) There is no rabbit in Welsh rabbit. As far as I can tell, the name seems to be a rather mean joke about Welsh people being poor, and also loving cheese. (2) Rabbit is the original name; rarebit came along later, possibly as a way to make it clear to squeamish eaters that there were no actual cottontails in the mix. (The word rarebit does not otherwise appear in the English language.) Like eggs Benedict there are countless local variations of the dish, and in the process of writing this article I discovered the existence of something called a Yorkshire rabbit, which is a Welsh rabbit with poached egg and bacon on top. Since the Phantom Thread scene takes place in Yorkshire, could that be what Reynolds is ordering? (Bacon comes right after poached egg in the list; most of us assume there was a period in between them, but what if it was a comma?) I learned this too late to incorporate it here, but feel free to try it out and report back to me. To make the rabbit, I used Felicity Cloakes recipe at The Guardian as a base, with a couple changes: Since I was going to be serving the dish with poached eggs, I decided to leave out the egg yolks. (I was also worried about running out of eggs.) I also added a bit of paprika, because thats just the kind of crazy guy I am. Ingredients 2 eggs 2 pieces of bread 1 teaspoon mustard powder 3 tablespoons Guinness or any other dark beer 2 tablespoons butter 6 ounces grated Cheddar cheese (about of a block). If you feel like going fancy, spring for a crumbly English cheese like Lancashire or Gloucester. 1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce Paprika, to taste Steps 1. Youre going to have to poach the eggs at some point, so you might as well get it over with. I used J. Kenji Lopez-Alts recipe, which involves swirling your freshest eggs in a fine mesh strainer, then gently plopping them into some barely simmering water. He says 3 minutes, but I played it safe with the heat my water was only slightly steaming and left them in there for around 6 minutes each. Remove once the whites have solidified around the yolk; you can leave them in a bowl of ice water while you make the Welsh rabbit. Photo: Nate Jones 2. In the broiler, lightly toast the bread on one side. This will help it stand up to the piles of gooey cheese youre about to heap onto it. 3. In a saucepan over medium-low heat, mix the mustard powder with the Guinness until it turns into an unappetizing brown paste. Photo: Nate Jones 4. Add the butter, Worcestershire sauce, and paprika. Stir until its all melted. 5. Add the cheese. Its maybe better to do it all in batches, but I accidentally dropped it all it once and it turned out fine, so who knows. Heat and stir until the clumpy yellow vomit-looking thing in the pan turns into a beautiful golden cheese sauce. Photo: Nate Jones Photo: Nate Jones 6. Flip the toast over and put it on a baking sheet. Spoon the sauce onto the untoasted side of the bread. Go crazy with it. In a perfect world, the cheese will overflow the sides of the bread like delicious, gooey lava. 7. Turn the broiler on high and toast at least until the cheese starts to bubble. After that, its up to you. Photo: Nate Jones 8. Serve with a poached egg on top of each slice of toast. Part II: Ingestion Photo: Nate Jones Though being Alma was a long and messy process, I got through it with my dignity intact. But was I cut out to be Reynolds, the hungry boy? Laid out before me was a breakfast feast: Three courses, each very filling on their own. I went for a run beforehand to try to work up an appetite, but to no avail the prospect of filling my stomach with all this food was filling my stomach with dread. My first bite was the Welsh rabbit. It was the right choice. Is there any food experience as satisfying as slicing into a poached egg? Ive messed up the poaching process too many times to count, but this time, the eggs were near perfect. My nerves were calmed, and I allowed myself to float away on a river of golden viscosity cheese and yolks, becoming one. The meats were fine. Sausages could have used a little more char, but both they and the bacon did their job. Did I need to keep eating them? No. Did I want to keep eating them? Yes. I realized I had forgotten the scones. The mistake was soon corrected. They were humble and unshowy, a supporting player that allowed the jam and cream to shine. I tried to save the final bite for them a little private dessert. The tea was good, not least because drinking it gave me a few seconds break from shoving food in my mouth. All together, they formed a breakfast that was almost impossibly decadent, which is of course the point. This is a meal of carbs, dairy, more carbs, and grease. There wasnt a vegetable in sight. Around the halfway point, I started to slow down. The problem, it turned out, was the Welsh rabbit. Lacking any knowledge of the dish, I had passed over the recommended serving size of one piece of toast, and had set out to conquer two. In the end, they conquered me. I got roughly 80 percent through the breakfast before I had to tap out. I tried to reassure myself: I coulda finished it, if not for that second slice. Was this the truth, or was it the rationalizations of a weakling? I may never know. Photo: Nate Jones After taking a half-hour break to chill, digest, and listen to a podcast, I returned to the breakfast table and finished the meal out of stubborn determination. I was sweating, and my stomach felt like a bag of cement. I went for a six-mile walk, after which my stomach felt like a slightly smaller bag of cement. On the bright side, I finally had Reynolds Woodcocks ideal shape he loves a little belly. Antoni Porowski seems like a character imagined by Hanya Yanagihara: Hes a beautiful man, with soft, dark eyes that betray a glimmer of turmoil underneath an Instagram-perfect life (see his carefully laid thirst traps, food photos, and equally beautiful boyfriend). Until recently, he was a working actor appearing in smaller parts, but his biggest role so far is playing himself as the food expert in the newly rebooted Queer Eye. Unpredictably, he has become the most controversial member of the five, in the way that the internet likes to take a joke and run with it, because what did this beautiful man really know about cooking if he was teaching people how to make grilled cheese? Theres been a lot of attention and objectification, which I didnt think, as a 33-year-old basically married male, would be the case, but it has been, Porowski tells me. Hes wearing his signature Queer Eye look: a band T-shirt (Arcade Fire this time), a black leather jacket, and a smile that curls at the edges. Hes also carrying a tote bag that lists the major streets from Yanagiharas contemporary tome of male friendship and love, A Little Life. Its companion swag to two T-shirts he has worn on the show that read Jude & JB & Willem & Malcolm the four main characters from A Little Life that suggested something twisted and knotty beneath the surface of a teary but optimistic makeover show. A Little Life, published in 2015, has a power that only accrues with each passing dinner party and cocktail conversation. The novel, which describes harrowing sexual and emotional abuse, has been described as everything from tragedy porn to the greatest gay novel of our time. If the shirts werent enough of an indication, Porowski loves the book, identifying as a mix of Jude and Willem the broken protagonist and the caregiver. This interview, which took place in an extremely loud Joe & the Juice, is about that love, and the funny, unexpected places talking about a book you love can take you. Okay, so I have something very specific I want to talk about, but I need to address the stuff that other people are talking about first. [Laughs] What-ever do you want to bring up? People are having fun with this piece asking if you can cook or not. Did you read it? The best advice that was given to me during this whole insanity storm since the show came out is that Im not allowed to read good or bad press, which Im starting to understand now. I maintain a healthy amount of ignorance. My boyfriend reads a lot of stuff, he relays a bit of information, and I have friends who feel the need to send me screenshots of certain things that get written. So I am aware, but Im not engaging or indulging in them too much. I mean, what am I going to do, cry about it? I have to laugh! It just goes with the territory. I signed up for this. Its like buying a hot dog in Central Park. Its consensual: You know its made with some pretty disgusting stuff, youve just got to be okay with it. I just dont want it to detract from the fact that its a show about helping people, and its not about my skill set. Its not about me trying to show the world what an amazing home cook I am, but about how we can come in and, in a short time, better their lives, because it is a service job. I know theres a lot of fluff around it, and color, and the chemistry between all of us, and the car rides, humor, heart, and crying, but its a service job. From my vantage point, its mostly lighthearted. But is it strange to be talked about not so much as a person as much as a character. Is that a weird mind-fuck? Yes! Thats actually a good word for it. I have to sort of detach myself. When the whole thing first came out on Netflix, the first show to ever drop in 190 countries, it was big. Instagram has been blowing up. One thing is, my boyfriend reads me little parts of the Vulture recaps of every episode. The first time I heard about it, I was in utter shock. But then when he started reading more of them, theyre actually hilarious and so funny! We have to take it for what it is, because it is entertaining. One week, theres a piece that literally doesnt address any of my cooking but just talks about my physical appearance. Thanks, Mom and Dad, but I had nothing to do with that! [Laughs.] So yes, theres vanity and maybe I go to the gym and am a little bit more of a narcissist than most people in taking care of my physical appearance, but at the same time, if Im not going to indulge and really take on that BuzzFeed article that objectified me if Im not going to get excited about that, I cant get as excited about and Im using this in quotes negative, because I dont even see it as that negative. Its just people being bitchy, catty, looking for fodder and trying to get attention. I kind of feel like Im back in kindergarten with a bunch of people who have university degrees. Maybe Im giving them too much credit, but theyre people who have very strong opinions and expect you to indulge. So Im staying in my lane and Im just focusing on the next thing, working on my recipes. Now were going to get to the part that I really want to get to. Are all the T-shirts yours? Im so glad that you asked me that! [Laughs.] So have you heard of A Little Life? [He holds up his tote bag.] This is literally the only thing I want to talk about. Well, were going to talk about it right now! [Looks at his manager] I dont care if Im going off topic, this is important. So picture it: I come back from L.A. after our premiere. The show came out on a Wednesday, I wake up on Saturday morning and Joey, my boyfriend, is looking up at his phone. Hes like, Holy shit, get on Instagram, go to Hanyas account right now. I look and she posted a photo of me wearing the T-shirt, and then I go to the Little Life page and I see the photo there. I sent her a DM and we just start chatting. What did you say? I probably tried to stay cooler than I was actually feeling because I burst into tears immediately. Her book has such an important place in my life. I thanked her and said, I dont really know what to say except Im crying and thank you for posting about it and taking notice, and I hope you know that I wore the T-shirt with pride. And she wrote back saying, The boys would be really proud of the work that you do on the show. I know theyre characters, but I think we all have a little bit of Jude and Willem inside of us. When I met with stylists, the show creators were like, Youre NYC. Youre jeans and T-shirts. Were keeping it simple for you. I was like, Great, T-shirts are all I fucking wear anyway. So whats my favorite band? The Strokes and the National. Netflix contacted the Strokes, who have been my favorite band, to see if they could use the T-shirts for the artwork. Its one thing to use the T-shirt, but sometimes you have to contact the original artist, so its a two-step thing. So the Strokes manager was like, We showed it to the band, they approve of it, but the shirts you bought are fakes so the band would like to send you a bunch of free T-shirts. I already owned a couple, but they sent over even more. So that was one of my first snot cries before production even started on the show, the fact that the Strokes even knew what we were doing. Then I was like, Okay, were busting out the Hanya T-shirts. Hanya and I were sending each other these messages and she said, Would you like me to send over a couple of totes? and I was like, Yeah, of course, send them over! The next morning a courier from the New York Times brought over a little box with totes and a handwritten note from Hanya thats on my fridge, so that was my second cry in 48 hours! What did it say? Something like, Thank you for carrying the message of the book. That book is so important to me, and I am someone who definitely indulges in melancholia and the happy-sad of life. I think both of those exist on the same continuum, and if you have one, you have to have the other. At the end of the day, its a story about showing up for somebody who doesnt even believe in themselves, which is exactly what we do on the show. Its just a story about kindness, when you dont even believe in yourself, to have someone endlessly show up for you. The story doesnt work out the way I thought it would; there are lots of surprises along the way, and that pain can be really insurmountable sometimes, and its just ongoing. But there are still moments of beauty within that as well. I think if you have had a life of pain and I can relate to a lot of the story it really makes you appreciate the good that you have in life as well. When did you first read A Little Life? My dear friend recommended the book. Before that Id read My Struggle, so you have a bit of an idea of the type of stuff I like. I mentioned to him that I loved the book and he said, Now you have to read A Little Life. This was right when it came out. When I showed up at Three Lives, my favorite bookstore, and said, I need another book to read, I kind of want A Little Life, the person who helped came back with it said, Hang on. Hanya was here. She signed some of them and this one is special because theres a happy face she signed with her initials, so Ill let you have this one. I immediately fell in love with the book. It took me a while to read it because I put it down a lot. Where would you read it? Im a subway reader. I dont really sit when Im at home. We live in a studio and I really spend time with my boyfriend Joey there. I dont get to do quiet time. Its really just when Im on the train or in a car, mostly on subways. It took me a few months to read, and I kept on putting it down because it would bring up a lot in me. It forced me to look at some aspects of growing up that I chose to put away, but it was done so beautifully that it made it okay to start thinking about it again. Can I ask what? Basically it deals with addiction and some of the emotional abuse in there as well. Those were things I could relate to on a pretty personal level. It just brought it up in this way where, yes, Jude was alone in his struggle and a lot of the stuff he experienced, but what makes the book so special is the interaction that he has with these people, particularly with Willem. I constantly find myself jumping between, Am I Jude or am I a Willem? I was an actor so all actors are like, Of course I was a waiter, and I love to talk about food, and theres so many amazing food references with the gougere in the book! Its so beautiful! So I just find myself vacillating between the two characters. It made a lot of this stuff less lonely. Im going to keep it a little general and leave it at that. I read it in, like, five days. How? I could not put the book down. You masochist! I mean, I kind of am too. No judgment. Well, I did feel like my relationship with the book was masochistic. Did you feel that way at all? I think so. There were some days, depending on what my mood was, where I had to put it down, like when he was in the bathroom and when the self-harm scenes came up, there were some days where I found myself so uncomfortable but I still had to watch, kind of like an eclipse. Then there were other days where I just had to put it down and go watch reruns of 30 Rock or The Office to get my mind off it. But it was written in such an intimate way, sometimes I felt like I was violating somebodys privacy by reading it, and Ive never felt that way with a book before. Before that, it was always a lot of Milan Kundera existentialism, and I love reading about alcoholics. Im a big Hemingway and Salinger fan. So this was different. It changed the way I look at the types of books I want to read, where you feel like youre coming into someones space, the way you feel with British comedy for example. On the original British Office, it feels uncomfortable to watch because its so inappropriate. It felt like that, but on a more emotional, heartstring level. Did you cry on the subway? Oh, yeah. I mean, its not a challenge for me to cry if youve seen the show. I call the moments where were in our confessionals Kardashian Moments, where you can really see a wet streak and my voice starts to tremble. My boyfriend can detect it when he watches it and so can his mom, and he was like, Oh, you definitely snot-cried right before that scene. I can tell youre puffy and makeup was trying to cover it up! Im a highly sensitive, very emotional person, and the book, like the show, gave me plenty of opportunities to cry. I was in a gay book club, and we read The Group, by Mary McCarthy, but it just turned into a conversation about A Little Life! [Laughs.] The book comes up constantly in my life. Have you had those moments where random people talk to you about the book? People get very passionate about it. Yes. Ive sent it to my father, my boyfriends mom, who indulges in my sensibility. She was really uncomfortable with the book and I thought shed dislike it, but I wanted her to read it anyway and she ended up loving it. Maybe Im wrong, but I feel like she was almost embarrassed to admit, Yeah, it was really difficult, but you know what? Its really beautiful, and its a really important story. Is there a scene that you think about? Near the opening of the book when theyre all stuck on the roof. Thats the nostalgia I get of going to a Black Rebel Motorcycle Club concert, drinking a bunch of whiskey, and just being free in my 20s, and when I used to smoke, the smell of cigarettes, and a life of no consequences. And when Willem finally gets his big part, I kind of feel like Im experiencing that right now. Its an emotional time, a very positive time, but its also very weird. Its very bizarre. Its like the giving up of anonymity for a life thats public and wanting sometimes to complain about it and be like, Oh, this is hard, but then again, Woe is me. You said you feel like part Willem and part Jude. How so? When I think about the person I want to be, its a bit of Willem, where he has this unconditional love for Jude, and theres a humility and a kindness thats there in the way he shows up for him, first as a friend and then as his partner. And then with Jude, I understand the ambition, and trying to compensate for what you think are your defects, or what I think are my defects of character, and thinking I have to be successful to prove the people who wronged me, that the best revenge is success. And I want to be like Jude in that I definitely want to be better at baking. I cant bake. I may be mistaken, but I didnt get the impression from reading the book that there was clarity on what place and time the story is set. Its kind of out of time. I feel like its actually in an idealized future because of the fluidity of their sexual path as well, especially with Willem. [Editors note: At the start of the novel, Willem dates women and later is in a romantic relationship with Jude.] Theres a certain flow to it where its less judged. The references are all dealt with in a very casual way, which is natural and how Ive always felt about my own sexuality. I really related to that part on a personal level because, although it felt idealized, it also felt like the way that I see things. How do you see your sexuality? Since puberty, Ive always known there was a possibility of me being with a man. It wasnt anything I felt the need to explore until the time came to explore it. I had much more encounters with women than I had with men. Ive only had two meaningful relationships with men. I dated one guy, and then I saw women for several years. Now Ive been with my boyfriend for seven years. Each relationship I was in suited the person I was at the time. When I was struggling with my family, I had a very complicated relationship with them, I was with a woman who was very maternal, who took care of me and taught me that family was what you made of it, that it was logical vs. biological. When I started exploring my own vanity and going to the gym and working out and paying attention to my body, it was when I started dating a guy and seeing a naked man for the first time, and that comparison and this brotherhood it all happened exactly when it was supposed to happen. And then when I didnt feel like I was really being myself and I didnt know the type of gay man I wanted to be, I went out and dated women again. Some of it was really good and some of it was really destructive. But I feel like it all made sense at the time. I wouldnt go and change anything. The way they deal with that in the book as well is similar, because with Willem, its a nonissue that hes dating Jude. I dont think anyone protests or is shocked by it. They treat it like anything else, which is the world I want to live in. Thats how I feel, and its why I dont often talk about sexuality. Thats why its funny I ended up on the gayest show that ever existed in the history of the world! It was something that felt so personal. But maybe thats what being gay, or queer, is, right? I dont know what word you want to use. When I was first allowed to talk about the show and people would ask what I was on, Id say, Oh, Im on Queer Eye. [whispers Queer]. Like, I was too ashamed to say the word because it felt like a dirty, terrible word! But spending more time with gay men and Ive lived a pretty sheltered life spending time with people like Jonathan, the hair/grooming guy on the show whos super comfortable in his own skin, you cant help but have that energy rub off on you and have comfort with you being you. My boyfriend joked in a kind, sweet way, You definitely got gayer over the summer! and I was like, Yeah, I guess I did! And Im totally okay with that! When Im around Jonathan or Tan, we behave like children and were so free and its like boys at camp. Is this the first time youve been surrounded by a gay cohort or community? Yes. Ive had friends in the past, but for the most part, I get along with women very well, better than I think I do with men. Actually, thats not true anymore. The older that I get, the more I feel Im the same person with everybody. In one of the episodes with Neal Reddy, we were talking about how when I was only out to some but not to everybody, I was a different person based on who I was hanging out with an employer, my father, my boyfriend, or my best friend. Now I feel like Im more the same person with everybody, so Im not drawn to a specific type. Whats been the most emotional moment for you doing this show? The most emotional moment was, I think, when I met AJs mom, in the coming-out episode. This didnt make it to the final cut, but when he was asking her, Are you okay with this? she said, Youre AJ. She just loves him unconditionally, and thats a choice she makes to love him. There is no judgment there. Shes a really religious person with crosses all over her house. I was actually really worried about how she was going to react. She had no idea. And for her to make that choice and still love him just as much, if not more, because hes finally being honest with her, that was something that I wish I had a little more of in my life growing up, in certain stages. Im glad we got to show that. Thats what a parental figure can be like. Its the whole idea of how your parents are an accident of birth. Bob Dylan was big about that; he changed his name because he felt like he never really connected to his parents. We get to create that for ourselves. Theres a universality there that I feel a lot of people, gay people in particular, because obviously, coming out is such a huge part of our development, but I think for anybody. And just dealing with unconditional love, losing a parent, and sharing the bond of that pain together and of course, Im drawn to pain we all relate to that. Have you talked about the show with your parents? I dont have a relationship with my mother, so I dont know whether shes seen it or not. My father has seen it and hes very quiet about it. Hes like, I think its very cool what youre doing. Hes not a man of too many words. Hes very cerebral, very Dostoevsky. He hosted a big viewing party with 40 family members and they all watched it. He had no idea before he watched it what it was about! He had no clue. But he loves it when I talk about food, and hes always loved when I talk about food. I think hes proud. (CNN) -- Surveillance footage from the Florida high school where 17 people were gunned down was not live, as responding officers initially thought -- it was actually on tape delay, the Sun Sentinel newspaper reported. The video images were "delayed 20 minutes, and nobody told us that," Coral Springs police Chief Tony Pustizzi told the Sun Sentinel. But Coral Springs police Capt. Brad McKeone, one of the responding officers, said the tape delay did not hinder the police response to the victims. "It had no delay. It didn't slow us down to getting us to anybody," McKeone told CNN. The main difference, McKeone said, was that officers thought they were going to confront the gunman. In reality, the shooter had already left Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland. "I expected to be in a gunbattle," McKeone said. Broward County Public Schools has not responded to CNN's request for comment Thursday about the school surveillance system. The Broward County Sheriff's Office, which is now leading the shooting investigation, also has not explained why the video was on tape delay. Gunman was already at Walmart While the tape delay might not have increased the number of casualties, it did hamper efforts in locating the gunman. McKeone told CNN about 20 to 25 officers were on the first, second and third floors of the school when they thought the shooter was still inside. "Somebody would say, 'He's on the second floor,' and we had guys on the second floor saying, 'We're on the second floor, we don't see him.' That's when we figured out there's a tape delay," Pustizzi told the Sun Sentinel. Police scanner traffic from the streaming website Broadcastify detailed what police thought was happening at 2:54 p.m. on February 14: "They are monitoring the subject right now," one person says. "He went from the third floor to the second floor. He may have a gas mask on now. Stand by for further. They're monitoring him on camera." But according to a timeline provided by the Broward County Sheriff's Office, the suspect purchased a drink at a Subway restaurant inside a Walmart store at 2:50 p.m. -- four minutes before the scanner traffic said the gunman was still on the second floor of the school. The-CNN-Wire & 2018 Cable News Network, Inc., a Time Warner Company. All rights reserved. U.S. Senator Doug Jones has been traveling across Alabama during his first week-long State Work Period. Jones stopped in Huntsville Thursday and met with FBI Terrorist Explosive Device Analytical Center, the Missile Defense Agency, and NASA. Ralph Alswang Ralph Alswang After Jones met with the different agencies, he took a stance on gun control. "Putting guns in the hands of teachers right now and doing that is just a dumb idea. I've said that. It doesn't matter if it's a bill in the Alabama legislature, or coming out of the white house. Our teachers have enough responsibilities on them." Students involved in the Parkland shooting are calling on law makers to ban the AR-15. Jones said, "I know there is a call right now to ban certain kinds of weapons. At this point everything ought to be on the table." WAAY 31 talked with people in the community about their stance. Steve Soto who is a gun owner said, "I have no desire to own a weapon like that, but other people do and I guess everybody's rights need to be considered, but something has to be done." Senator Jones told WAAY 31, getting something done may not be as fast and easy as people want it to be. "Right now when we have a tragedy like this people tend to go into their corners and they talk to each other and they stake out their positions. This is not the way to solve he problem," Jones said. North Carolina (WGHP) -- Barbara Lester was living a great life until her father butted in -- OK, not her father, per se, but his genetics -- specifically, a gene that gave Lester polycystic kidney disease. Shed lived with it most of her adult life until one of the cysts burst, in 2015 and it became clear shed need a new kidney soon. Lesters wife of 20 years, Pam Stanley, had a plan for that moment. I always held out hope that I would be the one that could come save the day -- I would come riding to the rescue: here's my kidney, you can have it, I don't need it, Stanley said. But Stanley wasnt a match and there was one thing Lester had determined, watching her father deal with the illness. I did not want dialysis, Lester said sternly. My dad was on that for 10 years. I did not want to go down that path if I could avoid it. That meant finding a donor and they thought they had one fairly quickly. It came down to the last tube of blood and the antibodies didn't match -- they didn't play well, together, Lester said. Because we'd already arranged to get her here from Colorado, it was heartbreaking. Oh, my gosh, we both just sobbed over that one, Stanley said. A friend put out a request on Facebook about what Lester needed. That friend was a professional acquaintance of Donna Baily, who lived about 100 miles away in Southern Pines. I did it kind of thinking, Well, what are the chances of me matching this complete stranger that I've never met before? Baily said. Good enough -- Lester had finally found her donor. And, for somebody to take that leap and give you that, that chance of life, I mean, how do you ever say thank you? Lester said. See the only thing Baily asked for in return in this edition of the Buckley Report. Please note: This content carries a strict local market embargo. If you share the same market as the contributor of this article, you may not use it on any platform. The-CNN-Wire & 2018 Cable News Network, Inc., a Time Warner Company. All rights reserved. Warner Music NashvilleAshley Monroe will release her fourth album, Sparrow, on April 20 -- the sultry first single, Hands on You, is available now. Miranda Lamberts bandmate in Pistol Annies made the record in Nashvilles historic RCA Studio A with producer Dave Cobb, whos known for his work with Chris Stapleton. I knew I wanted to work with Dave, Ashley says. All of his records are consistently awesome and classic, timeless, old and new all in one. The East Tennessee native wrote and recorded Sparrow while she was expecting her first child, Dalton, who was born last August. I felt powerful, she reveals. I wasnt puffing, I wasnt drinking wine, I was just singing. Ashleys most recent album, 2015s The Blade, followed her #1 with Blake Shelton on Lonely Tonight, and was also nominated for a Grammy. You can check out the music video for Hands on You on YouTube now. Copyright 2018, ABC Radio. All rights reserved. The Harlem Globetrotters recently teamed up with Georgia Tech's College Of Industrial Design to build this gigantic trick-shot making Rube Goldberg machine. That looks like it would have been a fun project to be a part of. I don't remember doing anything even half as fun in college. "Do you even remember college?" Unfortunately, just like the snapshot of my ass I tried taking with one of the disposable cameras they'd placed on everyone's tables at the last wedding reception I attended, it's all a blur. Keep going for the video, complete with soundtrack created by Georgia Tech's College of Music. Thanks to Linby, for making me realize my life is like a Rube Goldberg machine: way more complicated than it needs to be and probably isn't going to work. John McGrath's former lieutenant, Geoff Lucas, has returned to take the helm of embattled real estate company McGrath Ltd. Mr Lucas was chief operating officer for eight years from 2008, helping drive the company's growth along the eastern seaboard and its transition from a private to public company. Geoff Lucas has been appointed CEO of McGrath. "I am delighted to welcome Geoff back to the company, as he was instrumental in building McGrath over eight years to 2016," founder and executive director John McGrath said in a statement on Friday. "Geoff has an intimate knowledge of property and the McGrath business, as well as a strong rapport with our agents, franchise partners and many industry participants." The world's coral reefs, already enduring multiple threats from bleaching to nutrient run-off from farming, also face another challenge - this time from below. New research, published in the journal Science on Friday, has found the sediments on which many reefs are built are 10 times more sensitive to the acidifying oceans than the living corals themselves. Some reef bases are already dissolving. Not loving it enough: coral reefs face multiple threats from climate change, including as it turns out, from below. The study used underwater chambers at four sites in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, including Heron Island in the Great Barrier Reef, and applied modelling to extrapolate results for 22 reefs in three ocean basins. As oceans turn more acidic, the corals themselves produce less of the calcium carbonate that forms their base. Instead of growing, the reef bases start to dissolve. Malcolm Turnbull has dismissed the idea China presents a "threat" and has assured American workers they have no better mate than Australia as he prepares for a meeting with Donald Trump by talking up economic deals that support US jobs. The Prime Minister warned against a "Cold War" view of China and sought to emphasise its role in preventing a nuclear crisis with North Korea, which he described as the "first" priority in dealing with strategic threats to Australia. "A threat, technically, is a combination of capability and intent. China has enormous capability of course, it's growing as the country becomes more prosperous and economically stronger. But we do not see any hostile intent from China," Mr Turnbull told Sky News shortly before his visit to Washington DC. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and Lucy Turnbull arrive at Andrews Air Force Base for their visit to Washington DC. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen "We don't see the region through what is frankly an out-of-date Cold War prism. Neither, by the way, does Donald Trump. President Trump has a long experience in this part of the world as a businessman. He understands the significance, the economic significance of China's rise and its opportunity." Rachael and Jonathan Casella, with baby Mackenzie. Credit:Gabrielle Byrnes When Rachael Casella was pregnant with her daughter Mackenzie, she chose to undertake myriad tests to optimise the chances of a healthy baby and pregnancy. But at no stage was she offered a straightforward saliva or blood test to see if she was carrying the Spinal Muscular Atrophy Type 1 gene. The couple, who featured in a report on 7.30 on the ABC on Thursday night, lost Mackenzie to the disease when she was just seven months old. They had to endure the slow devastation of watching their daughter lose her muscle strength, her movement, her ability to feed, to swallow and finally to breathe before her first birthday. Yet such tragedy could have been prevented if they had known about a simple genetic test they could have taken before or when Rachael was pregnant. The test for the SMA Type 1 gene has been available for some time through a pathology company that also screens for cystic fibrosis and Fragile X. Unfortunately it costs about $400 and parents do not receive a rebate through Medicare. And as Rachael and her husband, Jonathan, discovered, most GPs are not even aware of its existence. I discussed this with your Minister of Foreign Affairs, Julie Bishop, whos visiting Britain this week. It was great to see her, and your Australia House team, which represents your country so well here. We discussed, among other things, some of the questionable activities in which Russia was engaging in our country and China in yours. Its clear that one of the most profound yet insidious threats to democracy now comes from authoritarian states engaging in subversive activities in and against our nations. When Australias Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said late last year that foreign intelligence services are engaged in covert influence and interference on an unprecedented scale, he was speaking not only for Australia but also for allies such as Britain. Authoritarian states subverting democracy is a global problem. It needs a global response. Not only governments but also our parliamentarians should be co-operating to defend our shared values. First, lets be clear that states such as China and Russia have the right to take their place in the world - thats not up for dispute - and we should be wary of lecturing others. We need to find shared interests and values, where possible. However, what is unacceptable is when authoritarian states co-opt and corrupt individuals and attack our values. In Australia, you are confronting Chinese interference as recent political scandals have shown, which is why your government and Parliament have been taking action. In Britain and Europe, our major threat is Russia. After the collapse of the USSR, Russia sadly failed to integrate with the West. Theres fault on both sides, but the Kremlin now sees the West as a rival and potential enemy. It has redeveloped a highly complex form of malign influence using many levers of state power to subvert democracy and test the NATO military alliance. In earlier generations, some of this covert activity may have been spying, pure and simple. Now, it blurs a line between overt and covert influence, espionage, subversion, divisive information campaigns and disinformation, social media activism, cyberattacks as well as theft of intellectual property. During the Cold War these sorts of techniques, pioneered by the old USSR, were called Active Measures. Some people in the West now call it "hybrid war". Either way, Vladimir Putin, the former KGB operative-turned-Russian President, is once again using these tools against us. The Secretary General of the World Customs Organization (WCO), Dr. Kunio Mikuriya, met the Japanese Ambassador to Belgium, H.E. Mr. Hajime Hayashi, at WCO Headquarters in Brussels, Belgium, on Tuesday 20 February 2018 to exchange a Note Verbale on the contribution of the Government of Japan to fund the implementation of the WCO Security Project in the West and Central Africa region. Global terrorism poses a variety of threats, not only to the security and safety of people, but also to economic development and political stability, making it imperative for Customs administrations to further strengthen their efforts to secure borders and protect international supply chains. Our new Customs counter-terrorism initiative demonstrates the collective determination of the international Customs community to effectively fight against global terrorism and its adverse impact on international trade, particularly in the West and Central Africa (WCA) region, said WCO Secretary General Mikuriya. This initiative enables us to actively support Customs administrations and other stakeholders in WCA in taking the necessary measures to further secure the supply chain and combat terrorism, he added. H.E. the Japanese Ambassador to Belgium, Mr. Hajime Hayashi, stressed that Japan highly appreciated the WCOs activities to address emerging issues faced by WCO Member Customs administrations, such as counter-terrorism activities, under the leadership of Secretary General Mikuriya. He further emphasized that the project being funded would bring about much deeper and stronger cooperation and mutual trust not only with the WCO but also between WCA Members. In conclusion, he wished the WCO every success with the project. At the G7 Summit held in Ise-Shima, Japan, on 26 and 27 May 2016, the G7 Leaders adopted the G7 Action Plan on Countering Terrorism and Violent Extremism, which makes specific reference to the WCO Security Programme as a means of enhancing border security and assisting WCO Members to counter the threat posed by terrorists and other criminal organizations. Furthermore, the WCO Security Programme is also mentioned in the G20 Action Plan on Countering Terrorism adopted in July 2017. In line with the G7 and G20 Action Plans, and in order to further expand the reach of the WCO Security Programme, the WCO, with financial support from the Government of Japan totalling over three million US dollars, has decided to launch a new initiative for Customs administrations in WCA, specifically focusing on border security-related challenges in the region, by means of strengthening Programme Global Shield (PGS)*. The UN Security Councils Analytical Support and Sanctions Monitoring Team encouraged United Nations (UN) Member States to participate in PGS in accordance with the measures set out in UNSC Resolutions 1526(2004), 2253(2015) and 2368(2017) in its report issued on 26 January 2018 (S/2018/14). Several items monitored by PGS are listed among prohibited items in UNSC Resolution 2375, adopted on 11 September 2017. The strengthening of PGS will directly support the effective implementation of the relevant UNSC Resolutions. -------- *PGS is the first security-related initiative of the WCO that has been devised to monitor the cross-border movement of dual-use explosive precursor chemicals and improvised explosive device (IED) components, and to eradicate their illegal diversion. At the invitation of the UN Security Councils Counter-Terrorism Committee, WCO Secretary General Kunio Mikuriya addressed the 15 Members of the Committee at United Nations (UN) Headquarters in New York, United States, on Thursday 22 February 2018. The UN Counter-Terrorism Committee was established following the adoption of Resolution 1373 (2001) concerning counter-terrorism. In partnership with the WCO, the Committee aims to assist Member States in implementing a range of Security Council resolutions with respect to, inter alia, denying terrorists access to weapons and improvised explosive device (IED) components, arms trafficking, countering the financing of terrorism, and introducing advance passenger information (API) and passenger name record (PNR) data. Secretary General Mikuriya briefed the Committee on the WCO Security Programme, the impact of Council resolutions adopted by the WCO with respect to counter-terrorism, and ways to further strengthen cooperation between the WCO and the Counter-Terrorism Committee. He made particular reference to the WCOs Punta Cana Resolution (2015), which recognizes that Customs authorities are the first line of defence against many criminal and violent extremist and terrorist organizations. He highlighted the central role of Customs in border security through management and oversight of the movement of goods, money, people and means of transport across borders. The Secretary General went on to inform the Committee that the WCO has adopted a wide range of tools, instruments and programmes including the SAFE Framework of Standards, Programme Global Shield (PGS) and the Strategic Control Enforcement Programme (STCE). Emphasizing the potential of API/PNR , he invited those present to encourage their governments to recognize the role of Customs and contribute to the fight against terrorism by putting in place an adequate legal basis for Customs to operate effectively, and through the provision of donor funding for capacity building. Following his intervention, many Members of the Committee pledged to convey the Secretary Generals request to their governments and confirmed their support for continuing cooperation. While at UN Headquarters, Secretary General Mikuriya also met with senior UN staff including Ms. Maria Luiza Ribeiro Viotti, Chef de Cabinet to UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, and Ms. Michele Coninsx, Executive Director of the Counter-Terrorism Executive Directorate (CTED), to discuss synergies and complementarities between the work of various UN bodies and the WCO. Embed from Getty Images Just when you thought he couldnt possibly get anymore insufferable, Alan Pardew has opted to adopt a pious position over West Broms recent warm weather training excursion-gone-awry. If you recall, the Baggies morale-boosting trip to Barcelona last week ended with four of their senior players drunkenly stealing a taxi in the early hours of the morning and joy-riding to McDonalds before dumping it outside their team hotel. The quartet Gareth Barry (36), Jonny Evans (30), Boaz Myhill (35) and Jake Livermore (28) were all fined two weeks wages for breaking the midnight curfew, though both Barry and Evans returned to the first team for the very next game: a 2-1 home defeat against Southampton in the FA Cup. However, being a virtuous man of endless faith, Pards has followed the lead of God himself by absolving his errant foursome of their sins, even reinstating Evans as his club captain less than a week after the 5:30am taxi tour o doom. Speaking at his weekly sermon press conference, the West Brom boss addressed the congregation: He (Evans) has paid a heavy price for [his conduct]. Trust me. Its like all things in life, if you make a mistake does that mean you are going to have to pay for it for the rest of your life? I dont think so. I think God teaches us to forgive. On this occasion I wouldnt say hes been forgiven. But hes paid a price and hes still paying a price with you guys [the media], so hell learn that that was an event he deeply regrets as he lives on. West Bromwich Albion are currently bottom of the Premier League, seven points adrift with 11 games remaining. Good job their manager has a direct line to the big man. TORONTO, Feb. 22, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Alexandria Minerals Corporation (TSX-V:AZX) (OTCQB:ALXDF) (Frankfurt:A9D) (AZX or the Company) is today setting the record straight about events leading to the termination for cause of its former Chief Executive Officer, Eric Owens, on February 13, 2018. As previously announced, on December 15, 2017, the Board of Directors of the Company (the "Board") appointed a special committee of independent directors (Special Committee or Committee) to, among other things, undertake a comprehensive review of strategic alternatives involving the Company. Among the alternatives being considered by the Special Committee are financing transactions and transactions that may result in the sale of the Company or substantially all of its operating assets, subject to necessary shareholder approvals. If a sale of the Company or substantially all of its assets was to proceed through to implementation, the current Board and senior management team would likely not continue with the Company or its successor post-transaction. After the Special Committee began its work, the Committee became concerned that Owens was not properly supporting the Committees efforts, and was pursuing an alternative financing initiative independent of the work of the Special Committee. Notwithstanding written direction that he cease such activities, Owens continued to pursue initiatives to thwart the strategic review undertaken by the Special Committee. After the Special Committee learned that Owens was engaging in such conduct, at the Boards request, the Committee engaged external investigators to conduct an investigation into Owens conduct. The investigation revealed the following: Owens oversaw unauthorized efforts to solicit investors in an alternative financing proposed by management without proper approval of the Board to do so. This proposed financing was considered and rejected by the Board, following receipt of advice from its financial and legal advisors and advice from the financial advisors to the Special Committee. Owens solicited investments and received funds from prospective investors through his personal legal counsel, Norton Rose Fulbright Canada LLP, without advising prospective investors that the financing was not authorized by the Board. Owens pursuit of the financing and communications with investors continued after the Board expressly instructed Owens to stop soliciting subscriptions, an instruction that Owens defied. After Owens was instructed not to proceed with the proposed financing and to stop soliciting subscriptions, Owens directed members of management to use the trust account of his personal legal counsel to receive closing funds for the unapproved financing, purportedly on behalf of AZX. Despite repeated requests directed at Owens and his personal legal counsel, Owens has refused to provide an accounting of, or information regarding, the funds received, including the identity of all of the prospective investors and disclosure of the representations made to them when funds were solicited and received. Notwithstanding Owens failure to cooperate and account, the Company understands that approximately $5 million continues to be held by Owens personal legal counsel on account of the unauthorized investment. While the investigation focused on Owens unauthorized financing activities, the investigation also uncovered conduct on the part of Owens that may be contrary to insider trading rules under applicable Canadian securities laws. Owens refused to honour the Boards direction to cooperate with the Board-authorized investigation. Owens refused to provide information requested by the Board and by the Special Committees investigators. Owens refused to meet with the Special Committees investigators, despite repeated requests. The Company has reported Owens unauthorized financing activities and the uncovered trading activity to staff of the Ontario Securities Commission. Given the findings arising from the review of Owens conduct, on February 13, 2018, the Board voted to terminate Owens for cause. As a director of AZX, Owens was present when the Board heard a report on his misconduct, including the reasons why the Special Committee recommended that Owens be terminated for cause. Immediately after he was terminated for cause, Owens issued a pre-prepared public statement in which he invented explanations for his termination that are wholly divorced from the actual facts that are known to him. It was not until well after Owens had been placed on administrative suspension pending the review of his misconduct, the investigation was well underway, and his termination for cause was imminent, that Owens expressed the sentiments that he now relies upon to rationalize his misconduct and dismissal. Under his contract with AZX, Owens agreed that, if he ceased to be President and CEO of the Company, he would resign as a member of the Board. Notwithstanding a request at AZXs February 13, 2018 Board meeting, later confirmed in writing, Owens has refused to resign as a director of the Company. The Company reserves all of its legal rights in relation to Owens, and will take such measures as are appropriate to address his misconduct, including through the courts if necessary. The Special Committees investigators are continuing to examine the conduct of other Company personnel who worked closely with Owens in connection with the unauthorized financing. The Special Committees principal focus continues to be on the pursuit of the Companys strategic options. The Special Committee is committed to acting in the best interest of the Company and its shareholders in undertaking these activities. Further Information Further information about the Company is also available on the Companys website, www.azx.ca, or our social media sites listed below: About Alexandria Minerals Corporation Alexandria Minerals Corporation is a Toronto-based junior gold exploration and development company with strategic properties located in the world-class mining districts of Val dOr, Quebec, Red Lake, Ontario and Snow Lake-Flin Flon, Manitoba. Alexandrias focus is on its flagship property, the large Cadillac Break Property package in Val dOr, which hosts important, near-surface, gold resources along the prolific, gold-producing Cadillac Break, all of which have significant growth potential. WARNING: This News Release may contain forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements address future events and conditions and therefore involve inherent risks and uncertainties. Actual results may differ materially from those currently anticipated in such statements. Alexandria Minerals Corporation relies upon litigation protection for forward-looking statements. 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. For More Information: Kingsdale Advisors Ian Robertson Executive Vice President, Communication Strategy Direct: 416-867-2333 Cell: 647-621-2646 irobertson@kingsdaleadvisors.com WEST JORDAN, Utah, Feb. 22, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Mountain America Credit Union is proud to announce the total amount raised in its 2017 annual charity drive benefiting Ronald McDonald House Charities (RMDC) and Leukemia & Lymphoma Society (LLS). Employees of Mountain America donated a total of $30,028 through candy sales, employee dress down days, lunch fundraisers, and more. The mission of LLS is to cure leukemia, lymphoma, Hodgkin's disease and myeloma, and improve the quality of life of patients and their families. Mountain America employees participated in Light The Night walk in Salt Lake City on October 14, 2017. Light The Night raises funds in support of The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society (LLS). Employees also teamed up for the second year in a row to help prepare meals at Ronald McDonald House chapters in Utah, Idaho, Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico. Ronald McDonald House provides a place for family members to stay while their children receive medical treatment. We are humbled by the stories of the families impacted by the work of these charities to support them through what may be unimaginable trials, says Sterling Nielsen, chief executive officer for Mountain America. The employees at Mountain America are proud to help make a difference by giving back to great organizations who are doing so many amazing things to help others. Mountain America and its employees hold internal company-wide charity fundraisers each year. Two charities are selected to receive the donations. About Mountain America Credit Union With more than 730,000 members and $7 billion in assets, Mountain America Credit Union assists members on the right path to help them identify and achieve their financial dreams. Mountain America provides consumers and businesses with a variety of convenient, flexible products and services, as well as sound, timely advice. Members enjoy access to secure, cutting-edge mobile banking technology, 89 branches across five states, thousands of shared-branching locations nationwide and more than 50,000 surcharge-free ATMs. Mountain Americasafely guiding you forward along your financial journey. Learn more at macu.com. Photos accompanying this announcement are available at http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/fbdba25a-4dab-4624-95f3-de8588e34ce2 http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/fc625c8b-f8c8-474c-9ae5-28a5b4a87c19 Close Get email notifications on Mike Holloway daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. Whenever Mike Holloway posts new content, you'll get an email delivered to your inbox with a link. Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. TORONTO, Feb. 22, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- (TSX-V:AEX) Alopex Gold Inc. (the "Corporation" or "Alopex") announces today that, as a result of a review by staff of the Ontario Securities Commission ("OSC"), the Corporation is issuing the following news release to clarify its disclosure made with respect to its Nalunaq Project in Greenland. Specifically, the Corporation wishes to clarify that in its autumn 2017 corporate presentation, made available on the Corporations website, certain disclosure was made with respect to the bankable feasibility study prepared by the previous operator of the Nalunaq Project, with information brought forward to the current date. The Corporation does not have a technical report prepared in accordance with National Instrument 43-101 Standards of Disclosure of Mineral Projects ("NI 43-101") to support the economic analysis disclosure. As a result, the identified presentation has been removed from the Corporations website. The Corporation retracts the economic analysis disclosure contained therein and cautions investors that it should not be relied on. In addition, in its November 30, 2017 press release, the Corporation reported historical production costs of US$530/oz gold with respect to the 350,000 ounces previously produced at an average grade of 15g/t between 2004 and 2009. While the Corporation was referring only to historical production costs, there is no basis on which the Corporation could support achieving comparable costs today. Similar disclosure was included on the cover page of the Corporation's website, in an October 2017 Fact Sheet and in other website disclosure. The Corporation has removed all references to such disclosure from its website. Finally, in the Corporation's August 11, 2017 and November 30, 2017 press releases, reference was made to the Corporation's intentions to 'de-risk' and 'further investigate' the exploration target on the Nalunaq Project which was not reported in compliance with paragraph 2.3(2) of NI 43-101. The Corporation should have disclosed that there is an Exploration Target of 80 Koz gold to 1.2 Moz gold contained within 1 Mt to 2 Mt grading between 2.5 to 19.0 g/t gold. The potential tonnages and grades are conceptual in nature and are based on previous drill and grab sample results that defined the approximate length, thickness, and grade of the Main Vein away from the mine area. There has been insufficient exploration to define a Mineral Resource in this region and the Corporation cautions that there is a risk that further exploration will not result in the delineation of a Mineral Resource. About Alopex Alopex's principal business objectives are the identification, acquisition, exploration and development of gold properties in Greenland. The Corporation's principal asset is a 100% interest in the Nalunaq Project, an advanced exploration stage property with an exploitation licence including the previously operating Nalunaq gold mine. Alopex is incorporated under the Canada Business Corporations Act and wholly owns Nalunaq A/S, incorporated under the Greenland Public Companies Act. The technical information presented in this press release has been approved by James Gilbertson C Geol, who is a full time employee and Managing Director of SRK Exploration Services Limited and a Chartered Geologist with the Geological Society of London, and as such a Qualified Person as defined by NI 43-101. Forward-Looking Information This press release includes certain "forward-looking statements". All statements other than statements of historical fact included in this press release, including without limitation statements regarding the future plans and objectives of the Corporation, are forward-looking statements that involve various risks and uncertainties. These forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to, statements with respect to pursuing successful production and exploration programs, and other information that is based on forecasts of future operational or financial results, estimates of amounts not yet determinable and assumptions of management. Any statements that express or involve discussions with respect to predictions, expectations, beliefs, plans, projections, objectives, assumptions or future events or performance (often, but not always, using words or phrases such as "expects" or "does not expect", "is expected", "anticipates" or "does not anticipate", "plans", "estimates" or "intends" or stating that certain actions, events or results "may", "could", "would", "might" or "will" be taken, occur or be achieved) are not statements of historical fact and may be "forward-looking statements". Forward-looking statements are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual events or results to differ from those reflected in the forward-looking statements. There can be no assurance that forward-looking statements will prove to be accurate and actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from the Corporation's expectations include, among others, risks related to the ability to raise additional capital proposed expenditure for exploration work and general and administrative expenses, international operations, the actual results of current exploration activities, conclusions of economic evaluations and changes in project parameters as plans continue to be refined as well as future prices of gold and other precious and non-precious metals. Although the Corporation has attempted to identify important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially, there may be other factors that cause results not to be as anticipated, estimated or intended. There can be no assurance that such statements will prove to be accurate as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. Any forward-looking information included in this press release is based only on information currently available to the Corporation and speaks only as of the date on which it is made. Except as required by applicable securities laws, the Corporation assumes no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking information to reflect new circumstances or events. No securities regulatory authority has either approved or disapproved of the contents of this press release. Neither TSXV nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSXV) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. CONTACT INFORMATION George Fowlie Director of Corporate Development 1-416-587-9801 gfowlie@grfcapital.com Close Get email notifications on Lisa Neff daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. Whenever Lisa Neff posts new content, you'll get an email delivered to your inbox with a link. Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. WiGBits Headline News Would you like to receive our WiGBits? Signup today! WiG Entertainment News Would you like to receive our WiG Entertainment News? Signup today! Digital Issue Would you like to receive our Digital Issue? Signup today! Close Get email notifications on Louis Weisberg daily! Your notification has been saved. There was a problem saving your notification. Whenever Louis Weisberg posts new content, you'll get an email delivered to your inbox with a link. Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items. English German Record results for sales, operating profit (EBIT) and net profit Sales reaching CHF 6,248.3 million (+9.0% in local currencies) EBIT increased to CHF 896.3 million (+12.7%) Net profit grew to CHF 649.0 million (+14.5%) Growth in all regions 9 new factories opened, 3 national subsidiaries established, 7 acquisitions Strategic targets for 2020 confirmed The Sika success story continued in 2017 with another record year. In local currencies, sales increased by 9.0% to CHF 6,248.3 million. Strong growth momentum and disciplined cost management led to new record figures of CHF 896.3 million (+CHF 101.0 million, +12.7%) for operating profit and CHF 649.0 million (+14.5%) for net profit. In the reporting year, 19 key investments were realized with a view to driving future growth. The strategic targets for 2020 were confirmed, and the growth target for 2018 raised to more than 10%. Paul Schuler, CEO: "In the business year 2017 we continued our growth trajectory and not only reached sales of more than CHF 6 billion for the first time, but also achieved record figures for operating profit and net profit. With nine new factories, three further national subsidiaries, and seven acquisitions, we continued to invest in our international expansion at a high level. My thanks go to our more than 18,400 employees worldwide and the management team. Their loyalty, commitment and great efforts are responsible for us achieving record results once again." All regions reported higher sales and were able to further increase market share. Particularly high growth rates were achieved in the USA, Mexico, Argentina, China, Southeast Asia, the Pacific area, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and Africa, as well as in the automotive area. In cumulative terms, sales were up 9.0% in local currencies. The strength of the franc led to conversion effects of -0.3%, and thus to an 8.7% increase in sales in Swiss franc terms to CHF 6,248.3 million. RECORD PROFIT The high growth momentum produced above-average increases in the operating result and profit. Raw material price increases and volatility posed a challenge, with access to raw materials in China, for example, being limited by environmental constraints introduced by the government. Thanks to persistent cost management, margins were boosted further, while record figures were recorded for both EBIT (CHF 896.3 million, +12.7%) and net profit (CHF 649.0 million, +14.5%). GROWTH IN ALL REGIONS Sales in the EMEA region (Europe, Middle East, Africa) increased by 7.5% in local currencies (previous year: 4.6%). The major EU countries, with the core markets of France, Italy, and the United Kingdom, recorded strong growth rates. The Middle East, Eastern Europe, and Africa all delivered double-digit growth. At 18.4%, it was the North America region that posted the strongest growth (previous year: 7.8%), of which 8.5% was through acquisitions. Sika reported a significant increase in its business volume in the USA, growing much more rapidly than the local construction market in the reporting year. The positive development of the North American business was attributable in particular to the targeted investment in this region over the last few years. The Latin America region increased sales by 3.3% (previous year: 5.1%). Both Mexico and Argentina generated above-average growth. By contrast, construction activity continued to develop modestly in the countries that are more dependent on the raw material sector, such as Brazil, Peru, and Chile. Sales in the Asia/Pacific region rose by 5.2% (previous year: 3.6%). High growth rates were recorded in China, while double-digit growth was achieved in Australia, New Zealand, and Thailand. CONTINUITY IN THE MANAGEMENT Following the departure of Jan Jenisch, the Board of Directors appointed Paul Schuler as new CEO of the Group with effect from July 1, 2017. Paul Schuler has worked for Sika for some 30 years, and has been a Member of Group Management since 2007. His responsibilities have included the build-up of the industry business as well as management of the North America and EMEA regions. 19 KEY INVESTMENTS AND 74 NEW PATENTS The Group's accelerated expansion into growth markets continued under Paul Schuler's leadership in 2017, with a total of 19 key investments in nine new factories, three additional national subsidiaries, and seven acquisitions. More than 900 employees working on basic research and the development of new products at 20 regional technology centers are the key drivers of our innovative strength. 74 new patent applications were filed in the 2017 business year, and numerous new products were launched in all target markets. DIVIDEND INCREASE OF 15.6% PROPOSED For the Annual General Meeting of April 17, 2018, the Board of Directors is proposing to shareholders a 15.6% increase in the gross dividend to CHF 111.00 per bearer share (2016: CHF 96.00) and CHF 18.50 per registered share (2016: CHF 16.00). OUTLOOK FOR 2018: GROWTH OF MORE THAN 10% AND HIGHER PROFIT The foundations for future growth were laid in 2017 with the opening of nine new factories, the establishment of three further national subsidiaries, and the acquisition of seven companies. The strong sales organization, the well-filled product pipeline, and these 19 key investments give the Group reason to look to the future with optimism. For the 2018 business year Sika is anticipating an increase in sales of more than 10%. Raw material price increases and volatility remain a challenge in the current year. Operating profit (EBIT) should continue to grow at a disproportionately high rate in 2018. The unknown outcome of Saint-Gobain's hostile takeover attempt remains an element of uncertainty for the future. KEY FIGURES 2017 In CHF mn as % of net sales 2016 as % of net sales 2017 VAR. in % Net sales 5,747.7 6,248.3 +8.7 Gross result 55.3 3,181.1 54.4 3,399.1 +6.9 Operating profit before depreciation (EBITDA) 16.8 965.7 17.1 1,068.5 +10.6 Operating profit (EBIT) 13.8 795.3 14.3 896.3 +12.7 Net profit 9.9 566.6 10.4 649.0 +14.5 Net profit per share (EPS) in CHF 221.81 253.52 +14.3 Operating free cash flow 10.2 586.5 8.0 496.8 -15.3 Balance sheet total 5,099.2 5,792.2 +13.6 Shareholders' equity 2,947.7 3,411.1 Equity ratio in % 57.8 58.9 Net working capital 18.4 1,056.9 19.0 1,186.7 ROCE in % 28.7 29.8 Number of employees 17,419 18,484 +6.1 The Annual Report and the presentation given at fiscal year conference 2017 can be downloaded from www.sika.com . Link to Annual Report: https://www.sika.com/en/group/Publications/annual_reports01.html Link to presentation/webcast of the fiscal year conference on February 23, 2018, 10.00 a.m.: www.sika.com/presentations FINANCIAL CALENDAR Net sales first quarter 2018 Tuesday, April 17, 2018 50th Annual General Meeting Tuesday, April 17, 2018 Dividend payment Monday, April 23, 2018 Half-year report 2018 Thursday, July 26, 2018 Result first nine months 2018 Thursday, October 25, 2018 Net sales 2018 Tuesday, January 8, 2019 Media conference/analyst presentation on full-year result 2018 Friday, February 22, 2019 CONTACT Dominik Slappnig Corporate Communications & Investor Relations +41 58 436 68 21 slappnig.dominik@ch.sika.com SIKA CORPORATE PROFILE Sika is a specialty chemicals company with a leading position in the development and production of systems and products for bonding, sealing, damping, reinforcing and protecting in the building sector and motor vehicle industry. Sika has subsidiaries in 100 countries around the world and manufactures in over 200 factories. Its more than 18,000 employees generated annual sales of CHF 6.25 billion in 2017. The media release can be downloaded from the following link: FORM 8.3 PUBLIC OPENING POSITION DISCLOSURE/DEALING DISCLOSURE BY A PERSON WITH INTERESTS IN RELEVANT SECURITIES REPRESENTING 1% OR MORE Rule 8.3 of the Takeover Code (the "Code") 1. KEY INFORMATION (a) Full name of discloser: Jupiter Asset Management Ltd (b) Owner or controller of interests and short positions disclosed, if different from 1(a): The naming of nominee or vehicle companies is insufficient. For a trust, the trustee(s), settlor and beneficiaries must be named. (c) Name of offeror/ offeree in relation to whose relevant securities this form relates: Use a separate form for each offeror/offeree Tesco PLC (d) If an exempt fund manager connected with an offeror/offeree, state this and specify identity of offeror/offeree: (e) Date position held /dealing undertaken: For an opening position disclosure, state the latest practicable date prior to the disclosure 22nd February 2018 (f) In addition to the company in 1(c) above, is the discloser making disclosures in respect of any other party to the offer? If it is a cash offer or possible cash offer, state "N/A" YES Booker Group PLC 2. POSITIONS OF THE PERSON MAKING THE DISCLOSURE If there are positions or rights to subscribe to disclose in more than one class of relevant securities of the offeror or offeree named in 1(c), copy table 2(a) or (b) (as appropriate) for each additional class of relevant security. (a) Interests and short positions in the relevant securities of the offeror or offeree to which the disclosure relates following the dealing (if any) Class of relevant security: Ordinary 5p Interests Short positions Number % Number % (1) Relevant securities owned and/or controlled: 129,717,260* 1.58 (2) Cash-settled derivatives: 48,500 0.00 (3) Stock-settled derivatives (including options) and agreements to purchase/sell: TOTAL: 129,717,260* 1.58 48,500 0.00 *The change in the holding of 2,250,000 shares since the last disclosure on the 7th February 2018 is due to the transfer out of a discretionary holding. All interests and all short positions should be disclosed. Details of any open stock-settled derivative positions (including traded options), or agreements to purchase or sell relevant securities, should be given on a Supplemental Form 8 (Open Positions). (b) Rights to subscribe for new securities (including directors' and other employee options) Class of relevant security in relation to which subscription right exists: None Details, including nature of the rights concerned and relevant percentages: None 3. DEALINGS (IF ANY) BY THE PERSON MAKING THE DISCLOSURE Where there have been dealings in more than one class of relevant securities of the offeror or offeree named in 1(c), copy table 3(a), (b), (c) or (d) (as appropriate) for each additional class of relevant security dealt in. The currency of all prices and other monetary amounts should be stated. (a) Purchases and sales Class of relevant security Purchase/sale Number of securities Price per unit Ordinary 5p Sell 102,873 2.067404 (b) Cash-settled derivative transactions Class of relevant security Product description e.g. CFD Nature of dealing e.g. opening/closing a long/short position, increasing/reducing a long/short position Number of reference securities Price per unit NONE (c) Stock-settled derivative transactions (including options) (i) Writing, selling, purchasing or varying Class of relevant security Product description e.g. call option Writing, purchasing, selling, varying etc. Number of securities to which option relates Exercise price per unit Type e.g. American, European etc. Expiry date Option money paid/ received per unit NONE (ii) Exercise Class of relevant security Product description e.g. call option Exercising/ exercised against Number of securities Exercise price per unit NONE (d) Other dealings (including subscribing for new securities) Class of relevant security Nature of dealing e.g. subscription, conversion Details Price per unit (if applicable) NONE 4. OTHER INFORMATION (a) Indemnity and other dealing arrangements Details of any indemnity or option arrangement, or any agreement or understanding, formal or informal, relating to relevant securities which may be an inducement to deal or refrain from dealing entered into by the person making the disclosure and any party to the offer or any person acting in concert with a party to the offer: Irrevocable commitments and letters of intent should not be included. If there are no such agreements, arrangements or understandings, state "none" NONE (b) Agreements, arrangements or understandings relating to options or derivatives Details of any agreement, arrangement or understanding, formal or informal, between the person making the disclosure and any other person relating to: (i) the voting rights of any relevant securities under any option; or (ii) the voting rights or future acquisition or disposal of any relevant securities to which any derivative is referenced: If there are no such agreements, arrangements or understandings, state "none" NONE (c) Attachments Is a Supplemental Form 8 (Open Positions) attached? NO Date of disclosure: 23rd February 2018 Contact name: Nabeel Ashraf Telephone number: 0203 817 1407 Public disclosures under Rule 8 of the Code must be made to a Regulatory Information Service. The Panel's Market Surveillance Unit is available for consultation in relation to the Code's disclosure requirements on +44 (0)20 7638 0129. The Code can be viewed on the Panel's website at www.thetakeoverpanel.org.uk. From their leadership in securing the recent peace accord in Colombia to their contributions to the 1998 agreement ending 20-plus years of conflict in Northern Ireland, to Liberia and to the Philippines, women have largely been the architects of peace -- the kind that at first seemed impossible to find but was still somehow built to last. If women could make it happen in these other parts of the world, why not try it in Syria? Why are women still not represented at the negotiating table? We have studied women's contributions to stability around the world, and a new interactive report includes in-depth case studies and an index tracking women's participation in formal roles in peace processes from 1990 to the present. This and other research suggests that women's participation in peace negotiations makes the resulting agreement 64% less likely to fail and 35% more likely to last at least 15 years. The case studies explore how women participate in peace processes and why their inclusion advances security. Yet despite the overwhelming evidence and urgent need, Syrian women have still been underrepresented throughout the peace process. Earlier this week marked the deadliest days in the rebel-held areas of Syria in three years. Two-hundred-fifty civilians, including scores of women and children, were killed in two days in government airstrikes and rocket bombardments in Eastern Ghouta, outside Damascus. The attacks follow a recent escalation of violence as Russia and the Syrian government have pushed offensive operations into the suburbs of the besieged capital city; more than 700 people have been killed in the last three months. The UN special envoy to Syria, Staffan de Mistura, estimates the war has ended the lives of over 400,000 people and displaced more than 11 million from their homes. The uptick in brutal violence underscores the dire need for diplomatic efforts to bring an end to the conflict. Yet the latest round of peace talks, held in the Russian city of Sochi, crumbled earlier this month, following unsuccessful United Nations-led talks held in January. As the UN, Russia, the United States and other nations pursue a political solution to end the Syrian war, they should invest in a proven strategy to make a deal more likely and more likely to last: the inclusion of women. Why Syrian women should be at the table Although UN-led talks began in 2012, it was not until 2016 that de Mistura appointed an advisory board of 12 female leaders to participate as third-party observers in the Geneva peace talks. Notably, the parallel Russian-led talks have mostly blocked women's participation. Women are also dramatically outnumbered in official roles in UN-led negotiations, comprising only 15% (four out of 26) of the opposition and government delegations at the December 2017 talks in Geneva. The newly launched Syrian Women's Political Movement is aiming for a 30% quota for women's participation to ensure an inclusive conflict-resolution process that delivers justice for all Syrian war victims. Women's participation: It works, period Although women have been underrepresented in formal peace processes in Syria, women have still made valuable contributions to securing peace in local communities across the country. Here are five ways in which women have made a difference in Syrian peace efforts. They broadened the agenda. Women at the negotiating table and in civil society have raised a number of issues critical to long-term peace and recovery, including delivery of aid and food, the release of detainees, inquiries into disappearances, and the effects of economic sanctions. In addition, the Syrian Civil Society Platform -- a peace movement of nearly 200 organizations based in Syria and in neighboring refugee communities -- includes 50% women at the national level and works through local networks to advise negotiators on the situation on the ground. They worked across divides. With members drawn from across the political spectrum, the women's advisory board has set an example for finding consensus on controversial issues that have stalled formal talks, including aid delivery and the release of detainees. They have negotiated local ceasefires. Syrian women have successfully negotiated cessation of hostilities between armed actors in several areas to allow the passage of aid. In the Damascus suburb of Zabadani, for example, a group of local women pressured a militia to accept a 20-day ceasefire with regime forces. In Banias, the government heeded the demands of 2,000 women and children who blocked a highway, resulting in the release of hundreds of men from neighboring villages who had been illegally rounded up. In another area, one activist recounted that when a group of armed fighters entered their village, "the men couldn't go outside because they would have been shot or abducted. In the end, it was the women who surrounded the fighters and drove them out of the village." They have done the work local governments should do. Women in civil society groups have also worked in field hospitals and schools, distributed food and medicine, and organized nonviolent protests. In one opposition-held city, women formed an all-female police brigade that has access to areas that their male counterparts do not, and provides families with critical services. They have documented human rights violations. A number of women and women's groups report kidnappings, detentions, disappearances and other human rights violations by armed actors in Syria. These activists include the founders of the Violation Documentation Center, which was one of the first organizations to report attacks involving chemical weapons. These groups are providing critical data and analysis to international watchdogs and parties to formal negotiations. Substantial evidence confirms that women's participation in peace and security processes increases the likelihood and sustainability of peace. The United Nations, United States and other stakeholders in Syria should ensure that Syrian women have a seat at the table and an opportunity to help bring an end to Syria's war. ONONDAGA, N.Y. (AP) - Police say a fiery early morning crash in central New York killed three current and former community college students. State police tell Syracuse.com that an SUV and a car collided early Friday in the town of Onondaga, outside of Syracuse. The car flipped onto its roof, and the SUV briefly caught fire. State police say one man and two women riding in the car died. Two of the unidentified victims were Onondaga Community College students and one victim attended the school last semester. Police say one of the drivers ran from the scene but was later captured. The driver is being interviewed by police and has not been charged. (Copyright 2018 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.) SOUTH NYACK, N.Y. (AP) - New York State Police say actor and comedian Chevy Chase was kicked in the shoulder during an altercation with another driver. Police say the 74-year-old Chase was driving in South Nyack on Feb. 9 when he was cut off in traffic by a 22-year-old Long Island man. Authorities say the former "Saturday Night Live" star chased the other driver across the Gov. Mario M. Cuomo Bridge, before both pulled over. Authorities say the driver and Chase got into a verbal argument, which led to a passenger in the car cursing at Chase and kicking him in the shoulder. The driver contends the kick was self-defense because Chase threw a punch first. The passenger faces harassment charges. (Copyright 2018 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.) WASHINGTON (AP) - The Latest on the Russia investigation (all times local): 12:30 p.m. Special counsel Robert Mueller has filed two charges in advance of a scheduled guilty plea by a former top adviser to President Donald Trump's campaign. Rick Gates is set to appear at 2 p.m. Friday at the federal courthouse in Washington for a plea agreement hearing. A court filing shows Gates has agreed to plea to charges accusing him of conspiring against the U.S. government related to fraud and unregistered foreign lobbying as well as lying to federal authorities. The plea could indicate he is planning to cooperate with special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation. Gates' scheduled guilty plea comes a day after a federal grand jury in Virginia returned an indictment against him and former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort accusing them of tax evasion and bank fraud. ___ 11:05 a.m. A former top adviser to the Trump campaign is expected to plead guilty in special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation. A person close to Rick Gates say he is expected to enter the plea as early as Friday. The person spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss details. A plea could signal that he's planning to cooperate with Mueller. The plea comes a day after a federal grand jury in Virginia returned an indictment against him and former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort accusing them of tax evasion and bank fraud. It was the second round of charges against the two men. They were charged last October with unregistered lobbying and conspiring to launder millions of dollars they earned while working on behalf of a pro-Russian Ukrainian political party. ___ 12:10 a.m. Special counsel Robert Mueller has filed additional criminal charges against President Donald Trump's former campaign chairman and his business associate. The Thursday filing adds allegations of tax evasion and bank fraud and significantly increases the legal jeopardy facing Paul Manafort, who managed Trump's campaign for several months in 2016, and longtime associate Rick Gates. Both had already faced the prospect of at least a decade in prison if convicted at trial. The two men were initially charged in a 12-count indictment in October that accused them of a multimillion-dollar money-laundering conspiracy tied to lobbying work for a Russia-friendly Ukrainian political party. Manafort and Gates, who also worked on Trump's campaign, both pleaded not guilty after that indictment. (Copyright 2018 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.) WKTV Back to Work Job Orders for February 26 March 2, 2018 Monday, February 26, 2018 Job Title: Restaurant Manager City: Utica, NY Summary: ensures that the restaurant operates smoothly and in a high state of cleanliness and provides strong leadership and supervision to the staff. He or she manages and trains the staff to ensure they provide exceptional service to customers in a timely, courteous, efficient, and accurate manner and that they follow proper sanitation standards and keep all areas clean and sanitary at all times. Pay: Not specified Job Order # DE4411523 ___________________________________________________________________________________ Monday, February 26, 2018 Job Title: Apprentice Carpenters City: Utica, NY NEW PROCEDURE: Apply in person at Utica Working Solutions, 207 Genesee St. 2nd floor, Monday through Friday between the hours of 8:30 am and 3:30 pm. You will be provided with a screening sheet, an application and a study guide for the required apprenticeship math test. If your application is accepted, you will be contacted with a date and time for your test and interview. Applications are only available at Utica Working Solutions. Pay: Not specified Job Order # NY1239551 ____________________________________________________________________________________ Tuesday, February 27, 2018 Job Title: Utica Recruitment Day City: Utica, NY Utica Recruitment Day will be on Wednesday, February 28th from 10am-12pm at the Utica Working Solutions office, 207 Genesee St. 2nd floor room 205. Twenty businesses with immediate openings from multiple sectors will be onsite, recruiting and interviewing for over 300 various positions. Free or paid training is available with many of the openings. Bring a valid ID for building entry. Pay: Varies Job Order # NY1242157 _________________________________________________________________________ Tuesday, February 27, 2018 Job Title: Lumber Handler City: Boonville, NY Interested candidates should be able to lift up to 75 lbs consistently and be willing to work in all weather conditions. Duties: Identify the sort numbers for the carts you are responsible for, pull boards into the correct carts according to the sort numbers on the boards, pile the boards based on required criteria. Requirements: High school diploma/GED preferred,not required. Ability to lift up to 75lbs consistently. Pay: $10.40/hour Job Order # NY1242190 ______________________________________________________________________ Wednesday, February 28, 2018 Job Title: School Bus Drivers/Trainees City: Rome/Utica, NY Summary: responsible for operating a school bus and transporting school-aged children and other authorized personnel safely and efficiently over specified routes to and from schools and various activities. Position conducts pre-trip inspections; observes safety regulations and policies; enforces student discipline on the bus; and performs related work. Minimum Qualifications: must possess a high school diploma (GED) or any equivalent combination of education and experience. Pay: Not specified Job Order # NY1242151 ___________________________________________________________________________________ Wednesday, February 28, 2018 Job Title: Open Interview Hiring Event City: Kirkville, NY A machining manufacturer will be hosting an Open Interview Hiring Event on Thursday, March 1st from 10am-2pm at their location,1120 Fyler Rd Kirkville, NY 13082. Openings include Machine Operators/Trainees, Parts Inspectors, CNC Machine Operators, and Maintenance. Interested applicants may apply online ahead of time at http://manth.com/employment-opportunities/ Walk-ins will still be accepted. Pay: Varies Job Order # NY1241868 ____________________________________________________________________________________ Thursday, March 1, 2018 Job Title: Office Administrator City: Mohawk, NY Summary: Coordinate office activities to assure efficiency and compliance with policies. Manage agendas. Manage phone calls and correspondence. Support budgeting and bookkeeping procedures. Create and update records and databases. Track stocks of office supplies and order when necessary. Prepare proposals as assigned. Requirements: high school diploma/equivalent and 6 months of relevant experience. Pay: $30-$35k/year Job Order # NY1242107 ____________________________________________________________________________________ Thursday, March 1, 2018 Job Title: Automotive Store Manager City: Oneida, NY Career opportunity for a results-oriented, self-starter to drive the success of one of our high-tech automotive service centers. The ideal candidate will have previous automotive and/or tire service, sales and management experience. This position offers a highly competitive base salary plus incentives, one of the industry's top benefits packages, and tremendous opportunity for advancement. Benefits include medical/dental/vision, 401k with matching, paid vacation, disability, stock options for top performers. Pay: $65k/year+ Job Order # DE4408121 ____________________________________________________________________________________ Friday, March 2, 2018 Job Title: Apprentice Aircraft Technicians City: Rome, NY Summary: Get paid to learn and begin a great career in aircraft maintenance! Under the supervision and guidance of an experienced Lead or Technician (mentor), performs routine maintenance to prevent failures of aircraft mechanical systems and components. With the assistance of an experienced Lead or Technician (mentor), determines when a component should be repaired or replaced. Pay: Not specified Job Order # NY1237445 ____________________________________________________________________________________ Friday, March 2, 2018 Job Title: Recruitment Events City: Rome, NY A local human services agency will be recruiting for multiple openings each Monday during the month of March 2018 from 10am-12pm at the Rome Working Solutions Office, 300 W. Dominick St. They will be hiring for a variety of Direct Support Professional positions including RN's and LPN's, Residence Counselors, Residence Managers, and more. Interested applicants should bring a resume and be prepared to interview. Dates include March 5th, 12th, 19th, 26th. Pay: Varies Job Order # NY1242257 The New York State Sheriffs Association is calling for armed resource officers to be added to all schools throughout New York State, and theyre asking state legislators to set aside the necessary funding for it. The Sheriffs Association is asking the New York State Legislature to include funding in the 2018 state budget for resource officers at every grade school and high school throughout the state. According to the association, there are about 4,750 public schools and nearly 2,000 private schools for students in grades K-12 in New York. This will be an expensive undertaking, said Wayne County Sheriff Barry Virts, President of the New York State Sheriffs Association, but we owe it to our children, and their parents, to provide a safe place for education to take place. According to the association, the number of school resource officers has dropped in recent years due to the lack of local funding. The association estimates that the cost to hire a school resource officer is about the same as adding a teacher to the school. Locally in August 2017, a school resource officer was implemented in the Herkimer Central School District with the district paying for half of her salary and the village of Herkimer paying for the other half. But the Sheriffs Association says thats not always an option for schools and municipalities. The only way to assure that every student has the protection of an armed officer in close proximity is for the state to provide a reliable funding stream for SROs, Sheriff Virts said in the news release. Many school districts and local governments are unable to do it due to tax caps and limited funding sources. The association says each school district and its local law enforcement agency would have to figure out what works best for the district, such as an armed security officer at a single entry point or using retired law enforcement officers as a more economical option to protect students. Herkimer County Sheriff Christopher Farber serves on the executive committee for the Sheriffs Association and Oneida County Sheriff Robert Maciol serves as first vice president. Hamilton, Bermuda, February 23, 2018 Dear Sirs, In the autumn of 2017, we advised you of our time charter activities/contracts with oil companies such as Shell, BP, ExxonMobil and other major oil companies in the West and in the East. The contract with ExxonMobil has expired but we do work for them on a regular basis. From time to time we also have shorter contracts (typically up to 90 days) for ships serving as storage space for major companies and large oil traders. In our message to investors of January 16, 2018 we informed you of the one year term charter with the major Spanish oil company Cepsa. The ship in question is the Nordic Castor (2004). The contract has now started and is fixed and firm. The fact that NAT has only one million barrel suezmax ships allows us to achieve economies of scale. The agreed rate secures a good cash flow. There are now 33 one million barrel ships in the NAT fleet. Three are newbuildings to be delivered in the second half of 2018. 5 of our 33 ships are employed on long term time charters with major oil companies. CAUTIONARY STATEMENT REGARDING FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS Matters discussed in this press release may constitute forward-looking statements. The Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 provides safe harbor protections for forward-looking statements in order to encourage companies to provide prospective information about their business. Forward-looking statements include statements concerning plans, objectives, goals, strategies, future events or performance, and underlying assumptions and other statements, which are other than statements of historical facts. The Company desires to take advantage of the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and is including this cautionary statement in connection with this safe harbor legislation. The words "believe," "anticipate," "intend," "estimate," "forecast," "project," "plan," "potential," "will," "may," "should," "expect," "pending" and similar expressions identify forward-looking statements. The forward-looking statements in this press release are based upon various assumptions, many of which are based, in turn, upon further assumptions, including without limitation, our management's examination of historical operating trends, data contained in our records and other data available from third parties. Although we believe that these assumptions were reasonable when made, because these assumptions are inherently subject to significant uncertainties and contingencies which are difficult or impossible to predict and are beyond our control, we cannot assure you that we will achieve or accomplish these expectations, beliefs or projections. We undertake no obligation to update any forward-looking statement, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. Important factors that, in our view, could cause actual results to differ materially from those discussed in the forward-looking statements include the strength of world economies and currencies, general market conditions, including fluctuations in charter rates and vessel values, changes in demand in the tanker market, as a result of changes in OPEC's petroleum production levels and worldwide oil consumption and storage, changes in our operating expenses, including bunker prices, drydocking and insurance costs, the market for our vessels, availability of financing and refinancing, changes in governmental rules and regulations or actions taken by regulatory authorities, potential liability from pending or future litigation, general domestic and international political conditions, potential disruption of shipping routes due to accidents or political events, vessels breakdowns and instances of off-hires and other important factors described from time to time in the reports filed by the Company with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including the prospectus and related prospectus supplement, our Annual Report on Form 20-F, and our reports on Form 6-K. Contacts: Gary J. Wolfe Seward & Kissel LLP, New York, USA Tel: +1 212 574 1223 President Donald Trump announced Friday that the US Treasury Department is imposing new sanctions against North Korea specifically targeting the country's shipping and trading companies and vessels in an effort to further isolate the rogue regime. Senior administration officials told reporters on Friday that Trump would discuss new sanctions on North Korea during his speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference and touted the sanctions as the headline of the of the speech. But it took the President nearly 80 minutes to mention the sanctions -- which he did only briefly -- at the end of his free-wheeling speech. "North Korea, we imposed today the heaviest sanctions ever imposed by our country before. And frankly, hopefully something positive can happen. We will see, but hopefully something positive can happen," Trump said. "That just was announced and I wanted to let you know." In its latest step to heighten its economic warfare against North Korea, the US government imposed sanctions against 27 entities and 28 vessels either registered or flagged in several countries, including North Korea, China and Singapore. In a statement on Friday, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said the US is "aggressively targeting all illicit avenues used by North Korea to evade sanctions, including taking decisive action to block vessels, shipping companies, and entities across the globe that work on North Korea's behalf." Sixteen North Korean shipping companies were sanctioned including Chonmyong Shipping Company Limited, Hapjanggang Shipping and Korea Achim Shipping Co. Nine international shipping companies and nine vessels were also added to the US sanctions list: Asia Bridge 1, Hao Fan 2 and Xin Guang Hai. Along with international companies such as Shandong, China-based Weihai World-Shipping Freight and Shanghai, China-based Shangahi Dongfeng Shipping Co. Ltd. The US government also labeled a Taiwanese citizen, Tsang Yung Yuan, who has coordinated North Korea coal exports with a Russia-based North Korean broker. Tsang has a record of sanctions evasion activities, according to Treasury. Treasury, along with the State Department and US Coast Guard, also warned the public of significant sanctions they could face if they help to enable any shipments to goods to and from North Korea in an advisory. The agencies also alerted those industries of North Korea's deceptive shipping practices. "The President has made it clear to companies worldwide that if they choose to help fund North Korea's nuclear ambitions, they will not do business with the United States," Mnuchin said. North Korea has been known to falsify and conceal information displayed on North Korean vessels and conduct ship-to-ship transfers, currently prohibited by the United Nations. While these sanctions solely focus on "elicit maritime activity," administration officials made it clear that they are part of the maximum pressure campaign aimed at denuclearization. The point of these sanctions, an official said, is not just to punish the rouge nation, but to raise "the cost of doing business with North Korea" for other countries. "The President is clearly frustrated, and rightly so, over efforts that have failed in the past and also over the uptick in testing and the advancements we have seen in the North Korean program in the recent period of time and over the last couple of decades," an official said. The announcement comes while the President's daughter and senior adviser Ivanka Trump is in South Korea for the closing days of the 2018 Winter Olympics. According to Mnuchin, she briefed South Korean President Moon Jae-in about the new North Korea sanctions. "Ivanka Trump has been briefed on this," Mnuchin said. "She has been part of the team. She had dinner with President Moon and had a private discussion in advance about this occurring and this has been an interagency process." Asked if she had the appropriate security clearance, Mnuchin said, "She has the appropriate access to brief the president." During a pre-dinner briefing with Moon, Ivanka said her visit was to "reaffirm our commitment to our maximum pressure campaign to ensure that the Korean Peninsula is denuclearized." She added that discussions with South Korea would touch on "joint values and strategic cooperation as partners and allies." During the dinner, President Moon said that the denuclearization dialogue and the inter-Korean dialogue on the Korean Peninsula cannot go separately, and this process should progress hand-in-hand, according to Yoon Young-chan, a spokesperson for the presidential Blue House in Seoul. Moon also said it is important for South Korea and the US to cooperate closely, the spokesperson said. Moon said North Korea's participation in the Olympics was an "opportunity" for inter-Korean dialogue, which had "led to lowering of tensions on the peninsula and an improvement in inter-Korean relations." He also thanked "President Trump's strong support for inter-Korean dialogue." Where theres smoke, theres flooding: W&M team studies geology of wildfires Historic fire: The Fourmile Canyon fire was most destructive wildfire in Colorados history. Here it is seen burning just a few miles outside Boulder in September, 2010. Photo by Bo Insogna/Striking Photography Digging in: William & Mary geology major Edward Abrahams '15 (right) conducts fieldwork at Fourmile Canyon in the summer after the wildfire. Photo courtesy James Kaste Path of destruction: The burn area of the Fourmile Canyon fire was roughly 10 square miles. Pictured is damage at Upper Emerson Gulch in Boulder County. Photo by John G. Elliott/U.S. Geological Survey After fire came floods: The small mountain town of Jamestown, Colorado, experienced severe damage during the Boulder County flood of 2013. FEMA teams were deployed to the region to aid in search and rescue operations. Photo by Steve Zumwalt/FEMA Photo - of - Hide Caption The most destructive wildfire in Colorados history began on Sept. 6, 2010. For four days, it burned an area roughly 10 square miles around Fourmile Canyon. It destroyed 168 homes, more than any previous fire in Colorados history. Insurance claims totaled an estimated $217 million, making it the states most expensive wildfire. But it wasnt the fire that made James Kaste, associate professor of geology at William & Mary, want to study Fourmile Canyon. It was the heavy rains that followed it. There was this intense wildfire, Kaste said. But following it was years of increased rainfall. They had strong thunderstorms in 2011 and 2012 and then there was a massive flood in 2013. So several scientists began to try to understand how the soils responded to that one-two punch. The summer after the flood, Kaste and undergraduate geology major Edward Abrahams '15 traveled to Fourmile Canyon to collect soil samples. The study of soil at the site later became Abrahams senior thesis project. The William & Mary team was joined by researchers from Williams College and the University of Connecticut. Supported by the Keck Geology Consortium, a multi-college undergraduate research initiative, the project was aimed at understanding the geomorphic effects of extreme wildfires followed by catastrophic floods. Abrahams and Kastes research will be published in Earth Surface Processes & Landforms, the journal of the British Society for Geomorphology, later this year. Our focus was to describe the soil erosion after this fire-flood scenario, Kaste said. Precipitation hit the landscape relatively evenly in our study area, so all of the soil had been hit by strong rains, but not all of the soil had been hit by the fire. We analyzed soils from the non-burned and burned areas and used isotopic signatures of erosion to measure how much soil was lost. What they found was a relationship between fire and flooding that has the potential to substantially change future erosion rates in the region, they later wrote in the study. Their research showed areas that burned hottest experienced an erosion rate around a hundred times higher than the regions longer-term natural erosion rate. The fires change the soil properties, Kaste explained. Areas with dense vegetation, such as the north-facing slopes of Fourmile Canyon, provide more fuel for wildfires, making the fires burn hotter and faster. An intense, fast-moving fire will burn the organic layer at the soil surface, Kaste said, which effectively makes the soil water repellent. Instead of water soaking the ground, it cuts into it. The soils become hydrophobic, Kaste said. So the water does not seep into the ground. When the rains followed that fire, the soils were not able to absorb the water and so it ran off into rivers and roads. Houses were destroyed, property was damaged and cars became part of the sediment load of the rivers. Both wildfires and heavy rainstorms are expected to increase in frequency and severity with changing climate conditions, Kaste said. Since 1970, the regions wildfires have increased fourfold in both frequency and magnitude, while the area burned has increased more than sixfold. This is going to be happening a lot more and with a lot more intensity, Abrahams said. Thats one of the bigger takeaways I got from this whole experience. Its important research in terms of looking forward to the future and knowing what the effects will be and how that can help us prevent, or in the very least, mitigate them. Kaste says those looking to build homes in the area should keep in mind their proximity to dense forest and running water. If you were going to construct a house there, Kaste said. You wouldnt want a forest around you and you would want to be well above the stream valley. If not, the homeowner is at risk of experiencing flooding even if their property survives a wildfire, he said. It definitely left me with an appreciation for the effects that fire can have and what the implications are for people living in those places, Abrahams said. It gives you an appreciation of the cost of living in such a beautiful place. ADVISORY, Feb. 23, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Stratford announced that it is dismissing its proposed class action against Trinity Industries Inc., Trinity Highway Products, LLC, and Trinity Industries Canada LLP. The claim was commenced by Stratford in 2015 and related to the ET Plus guardrail end terminal system. A recent decision of the United States Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals noted that the Federal Highway Administration has consistently reaffirmed the ET-Plus end terminal system meets all applicable safety performance standards and has maintained an unbroken chain of governmental approval from 2005 to the present. The dismissal was approved by the Ontario Superior Court of Justice. CALGARY, Alberta, Feb. 23, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Founders Advantage Capital Corp. (TSX-V:FCF) (the Corporation) is pleased to announce that its investee partner Dominion Lending Centres Group (DLC) was Canadas top mortgage brokerage firm in Canada in 2017 based on total mortgage volumes. Gary Mauris, President of DLC commented: We are very proud of our entire broker network for their efforts in 2017. With the changing mortgage marketplace in Canada, we believe more Canadians are recognizing the benefits of using a DLC mortgage broker to buy a home or refinance their existing home. As getting a mortgage becomes more difficult, more and more Canadians are turning to DLC for support in financing what is likely the largest and most important purchase of their lives. About Founders Advantage Capital Corp. The Corporation is listed on the TSX Venture Exchange as an Investment Issuer (Tier 1) and employs a long-term investment approach. The Corporation has developed an investment approach to create long-term value for its shareholders and partner entrepreneurs (investees) by pursuing controlling interest acquisitions of cash flow positive, premium middle-market privately-held entities. The Corporation seeks to win mandates by appealing to the segment of the market which is not aligned with traditional private equity control, royalty monetizations or related structures. The Corporation's innovative platform offers incentives (contractually) for growth in favour of our partner entrepreneurs. This unique platform is designed to appeal to entrepreneurs who believe in the growth of their businesses and who want the added ability to continue to manage the business with a long-term partner. The Corporation's common shares are listed on the TSX Venture Exchange under the symbol FCF. For further information please refer to the Corporation's website at www.advantagecapital.ca. Contact information for the Corporation is as follows: Stephen Reid Chief Executive Officer 403-540-5411 sreid@advantagecapital.ca Amar Leekha Senior Vice-President 403-455-6671 aleekha@advantagecapital.ca James Bell Chief Operating Officer 403-455-2218 jbell@advantagecapital.ca 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. China News on Women Sorry, the page you requested was not found. If you're having trouble locating a destination on Womenofchina.cn, try visiting the Womenofchina Home page Austria takes EC to court over Paks decision 23 February 2018 Share Austria has launched a lawsuit against the European Commission for its approval of Hungarian state subsidies for the construction of two new reactors at the Paks nuclear power plant. The new units would be adjacent to the four existing Paks reactors (Image: Paks NPP) The Paks plant, which is 100 km south of Budapest, currently comprises four Russian-supplied VVER-440 pressurised water reactors, which started up between 1982 and 1987. An inter-governmental agreement signed in early 2014 would see Russian enterprises and their international sub-contractors supply two new units at Paks - VVER-1200 reactors - as well as a Russian state loan of up to 10.0 billion ($11.2 billion) to finance 80% of the project. Hungary received the go-ahead to start construction of new nuclear power units at Paks this year as planned, following the Commission's approval last March of commitments the country had made to limit distortions in competition. The Commission concluded that Hungary's financial support for the Paks II project involves state aid, but it could approve this support under EU state aid rules on the basis of these commitments. Austrian Sustainability Minister Elisabeth Kostinger announced on 22 January that Austria intended to file a lawsuit against the EC. The deadline for filing a suit to challenge the Commission's decision at the European Court of Justice was 25 February. Kostinger said yesterday, "We announced this lawsuit a few weeks ago and now we are bringing it in." The case will now be considered by the European Court of Justice and a notice will be published in the Official Journal of the European Union within the next few months. Project company MVM Paks II received an environmental licence in September 2016 and in October that year submitted a site licence application for the two new units. The Hungarian National Atomic Energy Office issued the site licence in March last year. The first unit is to be completed in 2025 and the second in 2026. Austria, which shares a border with Hungary, has no nuclear power plants. It launched a similar legal action against the Commission in 2015 over its approval of the UK's support for the Hinkley Point C nuclear power plant project in Somerset, England. Researched and written by World Nuclear News Related topics Australian filmmaker and jazz vocalist Emma Franzs almost two-hour documentary takes viewers into the musical life and work of virtuoso guitarist and composer Bill Frisell. Spending time with this talented, but humble and quietly spoken musician, is an enjoyable and stimulating experience. Frisell, a multi-Grammy award winner and regular recipient of DownBeats Guitarist of the Year prize, is regarded by his peers as the most innovative and influential American jazz guitarist of the past four decades. Bill Frisell at home in Seattle - Photo courtesy Emma Franz His recorded work covers an astounding range of musical genresfrom jazz, blues, country, pop and avant-garde, through to film scores, chamber music and classical symphonic works. Frisell, in fact, has recorded 46 albums in his own name since 1983, and played on more than 200, with a startlingly diverse range of musicians. Franz personally shot, edited, and directed the film over several years (see interview). She has produced an intelligent and intimate work and one that rejects the usual fast-moving made-for television templates and cliches. It has a relaxed tempo, which perfectly suits Frisells laidback personality and musical approach. The documentary does not use voice-over narration, but weaves together live performance, rehearsal and in-the-studio footage of Frisell, interspersed with insightful observations from his closest collaborators and interviews with Frisell himself. Those commenting on his skills and artistry include Paul Simon, Bonnie Raitt, Ron Carter, Jack DeJohnette, Jim Hall, John Zorn, Joey Baron and others. Nels Cline, guitarist for the indie rock band Wilco, says Frisells impact on the landscape of creative guitar musicnot just jazzis incalculable. Whether on acoustic or electric guitar, and irrespective of the genre or with whom he is playing, the Frisell sound is subtle, multi-layered, delicately phrased and often ethereal. His interpretations of other compositionsfrom jazz standards to American country/folk traditions or popreveal his uncanny ability to get inside the basic melodic structure of the piece and enrich it in unexpected and beautiful new ways. Joey Baron & Bill Frisell with the BBC Symphony Orchestra - Photo courtesy Emma Franz The film opens with the BBC Symphony Orchestra rehearsing one of the guitarists new compositions at Londons Maida Vale Studio, and ends with its performance at the Barbican Centre in November 2009. The piece is conducted by Frisells former lecturer, Michael Gibbs, and features Frisell and drummer Joey Barron. The documentary points to a connection between Frisells musical approach and influences, and the visual arts. Early in the film, the guitarist recounts an unusual dream, in which he is shown brilliant colours and asked to musically replicate their appearance and intensity. His wife, Carole dInverno, is an artist, as is Jim Woodring, a close friend and collaborator. Frisell has recorded and performed music for some of Woodrings animations, while Woodring has produced a number of album covers for the guitarist. The documentary also features the 858 Quartet group, who play a fascinating hybrid of jazz and classical music. Along with Frisell, other band members are Jenny Scheinman (violin), Eyvind Kang (viola) and Hank Roberts (cello). Richter 858, the groups first album, was released in 2005 as part of a limited-edition volume of paintings by contemporary German artist Gerhard Richter. Frisells Disfarmer (2009) album was to accompany a retrospective exhibition by the reclusive Depression-era Arkansas photographer Mike Disfarmer. Frisell playing with Richter 858 - Photo courtesy Emma Franz Born in Baltimore in 1951, Frisell initially played clarinet, but then switched to the guitar, studying music at the University of Northern Colorado and the Berklee College of Music in Boston. Early teachers included guitarists Johnny Smith and Jim Hall. In the late 1970s, Frisell travelled to Europe, where he met Manfred Eicher, founder of the prestigious ECM Records, and became the labels in-house guitarist. There he recorded with Paul Motian, Jan Garbarek and other leading contemporary jazz musicians. He later settled in New York, playing in John Zorns Naked City, and with other avant-garde jazz groups, and in 1989 moved to Seattle. He now lives in New York. Frisells unpretentious temperamentthe antithesis of a so-called guitar celebrityhis wry humour and almost childlike joy over each creative discovery, are infectious. Behind his apparently relaxed demeanour, however, Frisell remains forever the student, constantly challenging himself and exploring new musical avenues. It seems like some of the best things I do are those done before I figure out what they actually are, he explains in the documentary. The creative process, he insists, must be about resisting the temptation to try and repeat something from previous performances that was creatively satisfying at the time. Frisells artistic curiosity is also manifest in his opposition to any rigid musical categorisations. Towards the end of the documentary, he admits to an earlier prejudice against country music and a preoccupation with trying to be what he thought would be cool and fashionable in jazz circles. No one should be afraid to admit or recognise the music that moves you. People just have to listen to [the music] and forget about what its called, he says. As well as being a fascinating overview of Frisells extensive body of work and his creative spirit, Franzs film is a valuable historical document. The documentary features, for example, the final concert of the Paul Motian Trio at the Village Vanguard in New York. Frisell and saxophonist Joe Lovano were long-time members of the highly influential, 25-year-old group. Motian, a brilliant drummer and composer, died in 2011. Paul Motian & Joe Lovano (in background) - Photo courtesy Emma Franz Sadly, two other important musiciansJim Hall, Frisells principal mentor, and John Abercrombieboth of whom offer insightful and generous assessments of Frisells skills, died in 2013 and 2017 respectively, before the film was released. * * * Bill Frisell: A Portrait premiered in the US in 2017 and was screened in Australia at last years Melbourne Jazz Festival. The largely self-funded documentary will be shown at a special Sydney screening organised by Birdland Records at 7 p.m. on February 28 at Events Cinema in George Street. It is also available on Blu-ray and DVD and can be purchased at the documentarys website. The World Socialist Web Site invites workers and other readers to contribute to this regular feature. Europe Ukrainian miners strike over unpaid wages Some 10,000 Ukrainian coal miners began strike action last week over unpaid wages. They work for the state-owned Selydove Coal at four mines around the town of Novogrodika, just outside of an area controlled by Russia-backed separatists. Hundreds of pickets were at the gates of the mines to ensure only necessary maintenance workers entered the pit. The workers said they have not been paid since December. Around 25 percent of the arrears were paid following the intervention of the Ukrainian finance ministry. However, money for 2018 has not been paid, amounting to some US$18.5 million. We were given part of our money, but it's just throwing dust in our eyes, one miner told Agence France-Presse. A delegation of miners travelled to Kiev hoping to meet Igor Nassalyk, minister for energy and coal mining. There are some 150 coalmines in Ukraine, mostly located in the Donbass region in the east. Two thirds of the mines are in areas controlled by separatists. Portuguese postal workers strike Thousands of postal workers employed by the recently privatized postal service CTT came out on strike Thursday. Around 4,000 took part in a demonstration in the Portuguese capital Lisbon. Organised in four unions, the workers are protesting against CTTs plans to close 22 post offices and cut jobs while increasing workloads. Greek kindergarten staff strike in Athens Greek kindergarten staff went on strike Tuesday and took part in a protest rally in Athens. They were protesting pay cuts, staff shortages and a downgrading of their role due to austerity attacks by the Syriza government. Dockland light railway staff in London strike Staff at the outsourcing contractor ISS providing cleaning, security and information services on the Docklands Light Railway system, which serves the financial district in London, began a 48-hour strike at 5:30 a.m. on Thursday. The long-running dispute is over ISSs refusal to honour the current contract, grant a pay increase and treat workers in a respectful manner. The Rail, Maritime and Transport (RMT) union members recently revealed the company was offering cash bribes to scabs to break the strike. Further strikes at UK building supply company Workers at Tarmac Building Products in Essex took strike action on Tuesday and Thursday. The company manufactures breezeblocks for the construction industry. Further strikes are planned in March against plans by the company to put new starters on lower pay and inferior conditions, creating a two-tier workforce. Members of the Unite union voted by a huge majority for the strike and held two one-day strikes two weeks ago. Finnish public welfare sector strike threat Workers at the University of Helsinki have threatened a one-day strike. Private kindergarten workers, many on zero-hours contracts, are threatening to strike March 7-8. Workers in several Southern Finnish private educational institutions are also threatening to strike from March 5 to 9. The members of JHL, Finlands largest public welfare sector union, are seeking pay rises in line with other collective agreements. Irish psychiatric nurses in Waterford and Kilkenny protest action Psychiatric nurses in Waterford and Kilkenny began a campaign against understaffing, use of agency staff and overcrowding of patient facilities by refusing to carry out non-nursing dutiesincluding non-essential meetings and answering phones. The action by members of the Psychiatric Nurses Association affected the Psychiatric Department at University Hospital, the Grangemore, St Aidans and Ard na Deise residential units in Waterford, as well as St Lukes hospital in Kilkenny. Middle East Tunisian city Redeyef hit by general strike Workers held a general strike Tuesday in the city of Redeyef in the mining area of the country. Protesters marched through the city demanding more jobs and increased security. Many local traders are reluctant to set up businesses because of the lack of security. Strike by teachers in Algeria Teachers belonging to five unions in Algiers came out on strike this week for a pay rise and improved conditions. They have joined hundreds of teachers in the provinces of Bejaia, Blida and Tizi Ouzouon strike for the past three months against public spending cuts. Lebanese hospital workers end strike Hospital workers throughout Lebanon ended their open-ended strike Monday, following discussions between union representatives and the Lebanese health minister. Africa South Africas Durban University strike continues South Africas Durban University of Technology (DUT) is into its sixth week of strike action. DUT staff are demanding, under the aegis of the DUT Crisis Committee, an 8 percent pay increase, a R350 (US$30) increase in housing allowance, and a one-off bonus of R9 000 (US $770). The administration offered 6.5 percent wage increase, suspended lecturers and paid striking workers unexplained low wages without pay slips. The strike has delayed the start of the academic year at DUTs four campuses, affecting around 21,000 students who are nevertheless sympathetic to their lecturers. News 24 quotes a student saying, We understand that the staff is frustrated and we plead with management to start taking their concerns seriously. South Africa student funding agency in Johannesburg strike Members of the National Education Health and Allied Workers Union (NEHAWU) went out on strike Tuesday at South Africas National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS) in Johannesburg. Two hundred eighty NEHAWU members came out, supported by casual workers who want a contract. The workers other demands are a wage increase and medical provision for employees families. Strikers demonstrated outside the offices of NSFAS Tuesday, threatening to bring other branches out if they dont get a response by today. Miners strike over threat to jobs and wages in Mpumalanga, South Africa South African miners went on strike and demonstrated at the Optimum Coal Mine in Mpumalanga Wednesday morning. Members of the National Union of Miners marched to the mine demanding information on the future of the company, which supplies coal to the Eskom power generating company. The mine is owned by one of the Gupta brothers, who has disappeared fearing prosecution for corruption, leaving the workers concerned about jobs and wages. Suppliers to the mine are rumoured to have not been paid for months. The bank that pays Optimums wages, the Bank of Baroda, is about to close down. Kenyan lecturers strike looms Kenyan lecturers may resume their strike over a 2017-2021 collective bargaining agreement (CBA). The government and the university employers body, the Inter Public Universities Council Consultative Forum (IPUCCF), refuse to negotiate. The previous 2013-2017 CBA did not get signed until it had all but expired in December 2017. Members of the Kenyan University Staff Union have now given the government and employers an ultimatum. Sudanese teachers and medical workers strike over unpaid wages Sudanese medical assistants went out on strike early last week over unpaid wages and allowances, followed by medical specialists on Thursday who walked out in support. Other workers havent received their bonuses and are expected to join the escalating strike movement. Teachers in Khartoum state struck over unpaid wages Wednesday. Secondary school teachers responded to the strike call. Four teachers involved in the strike are still detained without charge by the security forces, while the leader of the teachers union has been summoned by the National Security and Intelligence Service on two occasions and held for several hours. Families of the detained teachers have protested outside the Khartoum Human Rights office and appealed to the UN. Zambian lecturers in Nkana strike over unpaid wages and for better conditions Zambian lecturers from the College of Education in Nkana began strike action this week demanding their salaries be brought up to date. They have not been paid for nine months. They are also demanding improved working conditions. The lecturers held a demonstration in the city square. Liberian construction strike in Congo town for unpaid overtime Construction workers in Congo town blocked the Tubman Boulevard to demand their employer pay between eight months to a years overtime owed to them. Their employer, the Jiangsu Provincial Construction Group Company, is building a $40 million Chinese funded ministerial compound. The workers were hired to assist the Chinese engineers at $6 a day plus $2.50 overtime. The International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) hosted a well-attended meeting Wednesday at the University of Michigan-Flint campus on the global water crisis. The meeting had online participation from workers in Puerto Rico and Martin County, Kentucky. The meeting reviewed the depth and scope of the water crisis and what it reveals about the state of the global capitalist system in the 21st century. Workers and youth from each area made powerful contributions. The class analysis of the water crisis and the call for an independent movement of the working class to defend the rights of workers received a powerful response from those in attendance. A group of students from the university joined the IYSSE and are taking steps to organize an official chapter of the club on the campus. The WSWS spoke to several of those who attended the meeting. Anthony, a second-year computer science student who grew up in Flint, said: I was in the Navy for eight years. I flew all over the world, to the Philippines, Thailand, Djibouti and Africa. I went to a lot of Third World countries. I really didnt expect to come home to the same conditions. I came back right in the middle of the water crisis in 2015, he continued. It was a couple years after, but nothing had changed. I was stationed in Florida, and you didnt hear anything on the news about Flint. I knew from my family. The cat they had for a while died, and they found out it was riddled with tumors. They had a dog that died. They quit drinking out of the faucet. The shower made a terrible smell. Ive seen cleaner water out of the faucet in Third World countries. Anthony Anthony spoke to us about his experiences and how they have shaped his political views. It made me want to do something different. I started going to school. I wanted to be a voice, and I wanted to speak on things. Ive seen the effects of climate change all over the world. Ive seen the devastation and poverty. Ive seen events like what happened in Puerto Rico. Increasingly they are occurring, and it seems like every time it happens, it takes longer to rebuild. It takes more people who are dying. We have the means to live an awesome, sustainable life, with renewable energy. But the people, politicians in power like money. With that kind of money backing, its almost like votes dont matter. Anthony agreed with our assessment of the social crisis and its relationship to the enormous sums of money spent on the military each year. Its about to go to $700 billion on wars. Its outrageous. For a fraction of that, you can create something Were spending so much on stuff we dont need: weapons and bombs. They take all of our money so they can break other countries thumbs. Look at Gaddafi Then the weapons of mass destruction [in Iraq]. It was bogus. It was all about oil. Rashard, a University of Michigan Flint alumnus, said that he attended the meeting because he is interested in what we can do as a body to help mobilize and gather a coalition of people to fight against the corruption in the powers-that-be as a result of the entire system of capitalism. He added that he agreed with the presentation at the meeting that the basic divide in society is class, not race. Its definitely an issue of class. When one is informed about the dynamics of capitalism and how the system really operates, one can understand whats really going onthat capitalism benefits those who are able to take resources from the working class. Rashard continued, Those who are in or affiliated with the ruling class are able to take, take, and take, while the masses of people that make up the working class do not have the opportunity to enjoy the fruits of their labor. Maria is a graduate student in anthropology who is originally from Finland. I came here because I am studying the water crisis, Maria said. I found out about Flint from my professor in Finland, but unfortunately it is not something that is widely known or understood in Finland. That is why I think this meeting is so important. Maria spoke strongly in support of the call for an international movement. I liked that the perspective was so global. Thats a good thing because I know that this is not just Flint, it is bigger than that. I didnt know anything about what was going on in eastern Kentucky or Puerto Rico either. I think the emphasis that all the water crises are bound up with capitalism is a good one. And its one I havent really heard much of, to be honest. Ill have to look into it more. One Flint worker, Florlisa Fowler, who has been active in the fight to expose the poisoning of the water in Flint, was so moved by the response to the meeting that she made a passionate appeal to workers everywhere on Facebook afterward. In her post she writes, Attention, all members of the working class... We are being beat down, we struggle for a living for our families... not 40 hours any more, but 80+ hours. She went on to list some of those affected by the crisis of capitalism, Our teachers, our nurses, our factory workers -- auto, coal, steel -- our truck drivers, farmers, sales persons as well as our mail carriers, lawn care workers... all religions, races and creeds! Florlisa also drove home the fact that this is a crisis that affects the working class as a whole. We can't many times come home and trust our water -- not just here in Michigan, but also across our nation. From Kentucky, Ohio, Missouri, California, to New York.... Even Puerto Rico! This affects EVERY ASPECT OF OUR LIVES! Every day... from our food and cooking to our overall health. Water is LIFE. Look at the bigger picture, ask questions...Why are the officials that we have elected into their seats not doing their jobs? You will find the truth - FOLLOW THE MONEY. There truly is an agenda against us, the Working Class. Unless we come together and stand up, this will continue and get worse! Quit letting them divide us our lives.. our children and grandchildrens lives... [Our children and grandchildren] all depend on us standing up, together in unity. Its time! A recent report from the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA) shows that homelessness in Los Angeles is growing at a much higher rate than was previously thought, outstripping the already limited funding allocated to programs aimed at aiding the homeless. Existing shelter programs are trailing their housing targets by about 20 percent, as set in 2015 when several ballot initiativesMeasure H and Proposition HHH, purporting to reduce homelessness were passed. The 2015 targets behind the measures were calculated to keep pace as more people fell into homelessness, but rather than decreasing homelessness by the planned 14 percent annually, the Los Angeles homeless population has grown from 44,000 in 2015 to 59,000 in 2017. The programs existing funding gaps are being further strained by this surge in homelessness. The LAHSA report looks at different forms of subsidized housing, ranging from the more temporary to the permanent. In nearly every category, there is a gap between the 2015 target and what was actually met. Permanent supportive housing is by far the largest category in the report and constitutes the bulk of the deficit. While 19,000 units in this category were created since 2015, the recommendation by LAHSA is that this figure needs to be raised to at least 41,000 to meet demand. The report further recommends the creation of 11,000 new units for rapid re-housing, for those who are relatively financially stable but facing imminent homelessness, 3,000 new emergency shelter units, and 5,000 for diversion/prevention, for those at high risk of becoming homeless. Significantly, the only category of housing showing a surplus is that of Transitional Housing, which is aimed at providing homeless youth with temporary housing so they can financially stabilize. The longest one can stay in transitional housing is 24 months, though there are other restrictions that can make tenants subject to eviction sooner. This excess of transitional housing may conceal an even greater number of people experiencing homelessness over the year than is counted in the report. The LAHSA report collected its data through a Point-in-Time count that was carried out in January. This means while LAHSA was able to accurately report the number of homeless people on a single day, the report says less about how many people were homeless for part of the year and doesnt say much about the rate that people enter and exit homeless. The report also reveals that while it is still much more common for individuals to fall into homelessness, families with children are experiencing homelessness at a growing rate. The gap between what affordable housing was planned for families in 2015 and what was actually funded for them in 2017 has roughly doubled. According to reports from California schools, collected from 2016-2017, the average statewide homelessness rate for students is 3 percent. However, there are several schools in the state with well over 40 percent of their students experiencing homelessness. In hotspots like the city of Norwalk, a suburb of Los Angeles, the average is about 20 percent across schools. The number of minors experiencing homelessness in the state has grown over 20 percent since 2014. In sum, to end homelessness in the county the LAHSA report recommends some 35,000 more units for individuals and 5,000 more units for families. While there may be debate over the nuances of what housing type and population should receive particular resources, the report concludes, such debate exists within the general assumption that substantial progress will not be achieved without a significant increase in the countys housing stock Fortunately, the financial resources of Measure H, Proposition HHH, and other local efforts, coupled with the demonstrated commitment of local leaders and community members to prevent and end homelessness, will make it possible to address the considerable gaps outlined in this report. A more realistic comment on the severity of the situation came from Michael Weinstein, the president of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, which in recent weeks has called for more serious measures, with particular attention to the health crises that homelessness inevitably begets. Referring to a recent pledge by city council members to ensure the creation of 222 units of permanent housing in the next two yearsa figure far beneath the deficit in the LAHSA reporthe said: Its not even a drop in the bucket. If [City Council President] Herb Wesson and [Mayor] Eric Garcetti are serious, they should declare a state of emergency. They should back a right to shelter. And they should come up with an emergency plan to offer a roof over everyones head this year. The LAHSA reports optimistic conclusion is belied by the everyday reality workers confront across America. In the spheres of education, health care, retirement, and so on, the working class standard of living has been consistently cut down over the last four decades. It is in no small part due to these conditions that homelessness is on the rise in the first place. So why would the descent into homelessness by the most vulnerable layers of the working class demand any special attention? As indicated by the funding shortfall, the existing measures were half-hearted to begin with. This is not to say that the money to eradicate homelessness does not exist. Using the least conservative estimates, and ignoring existing funding, it would take about $20 billion to end homelessness in the US. This price tag is just under 2 percent of the $1.2 trillion which is to be spent modernizing the US nuclear program. There are ample resources to provide basic housing for everyone. The issue is that those resources are controlled by a tiny financial oligarchy, and are put towards their own enrichment, and towards the militarization of society in preparation for war. A study conducted by scientists at the University of Bergen in Norway found that the regular use of cleaning sprays that contain common chemicals such as bleach, hydrogen peroxide, and quaternary ammonium (quats) causes severe damage to lung capacity over extended periods of time. The study was conducted over 20 years to measure the effects of the inhalation of cleaning chemicals over long periods of time. Lung function was measured by the amount of air that participants could forcefully breathe out after breathing in. The extraordinary findings of the study revealed that for some participants, lung capacity was so damaged after long-term exposure to cleaning chemicals that it resembled that of a habitual pack-per-day cigarette smoker. The study controlled for variables such as smoking that could also cause damage lung capacity. A total of 3,298 of the participants were women and 2,932 were men. The findings showed that the damage was more prevalent in female participants, but could be due to the fact that more women participated in the study. Occupational cleaners showed the highest amount of lung damage in the study, including cases of asthma. However, participants who used cleaning sprays containing common chemicals to clean their homes at least once per week showed a marked increase of damage to their lung function compared to those who did not. The results of the Norway study are similar to those of a September 2017 study among nurses in France who used common industrial chemical cleaners to sanitize surfaces at least once per week. The French study was authored by pulmonologist Orianne Dumas at the French Institute of Health and Medical Research. It followed 55,185 registered nurses over eight years who had no prior history of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). The results of the study showed that nurses who used disinfectants to clean surfaces at least once per week showed a 24 to 32 percent increased risk of developing COPD than those who did not use them as frequently. The similar findings from both studies, which examined participants in two different countries and across different occupations, suggest that similar studies conducted in other countries and among a diverse participation of workers will yield similar results. The cleaning chemicals that were found to cause the damage are used in many occupations, such as health care, maintenance and janitorial work, retail, food service and hospitality, the sciences, and education. They are also very commonly used in household cleaning, regardless of occupation. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) in the United States provides bare minimal protection to workers who are required to clean with chemicals that can cause harm. OSHA only provides requirements to employerswhich are not lawson how to protect workers from harsh chemicals. This includes the use of Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDS) on all chemicals used by workers, which provide information on the proper dilution, protective equipment, and risks associated with the chemical being used, and also the requirement that all workers are trained on how to use the chemicals prior to cleaning with them. OSHAs Hazard Communication Standard is the closest to a real regulation on the books regarding cleaning chemicals. However, this standard is not law and only provides suggestions to employers on how to communicate to workers about the potential health risks of using a chemical and how to properly handle chemicals to reduce the risk of injury when using them. It is likely that these standards are violated countless times each year, as OSHA remains woefully understaffed after decades of budget cuts since its inception in 1970. In 2015, under the Obama administration, OSHA had only 1,840 state and federal inspectors, that is, only one inspector for every 74,760 workers, making regular inspections impossible. The Trump administration has vowed to cut funding to OSHA even further. Already understaffed, the agency requires the funding of the federal government to operate, and is tied to the profit interests of the corporations. Slap-on-the-wrist fines are the norm for workers deaths caused by the cost-cutting practices of businesses of all sizes, and inspectors rarely go out to a site when workers complain of violations, instead addressing issues by calling the company to offer suggestions for improvement with no threat of a penalty if they do not comply. Both the French and the Norwegian study suggested that the chemicals proven to cause lung damage not be used at all for cleaning, with the Norwegian study suggesting the use of water and microfiber cloths instead of cleaning sprays to remove dirt and bacteria from surfaces. In the US, OSHA also suggests the use of microfiber cloths in place of chemicals. In 2014, Newsweek published a story on Pureti, a product manufactured from titanium dioxide, which was tested with success as a treatment on American stadium surfaces for its potential to act as a self-cleaning agent when sprayed onto a surface and allowed to react with light and air. The compound was shown to be successful as a self-cleaning agent that could last up to five years and is able to absorb toxins from the air itself. The treatment has also been used to clean mold from the crevices of La Pedrera, a Gaudi-designed building in Barcelona, Spain and in hotels around the world. It is used as an alternative to common methods of cleaning and disinfecting such as bleach, ammonia, and power washing of surfaces. Despite this alternative, the profit interests of the chemical industry prevent the further development and distribution of safe cleaning treatments from being used and regulated worldwide. Clorox, the worlds leading manufacturer of bleach, has seen profits soar as its stock price climbed from under $18 in 1993 to $127.30 this month. Clorox CEO, millionaire Benno Dorer, sits on the board of the American Cleaning Institute, which works in liaison with the government and academia to advance public understanding of the safety and benefits of cleaning products. Powerful chemical giants like Clorox do all that they can to prevent any threat to their skyrocketing profits, even at the risk of the health of millions around the world. Even though safer alternatives exist, the vast majority of corporations that control the use of cleaning products in their operations will always opt to purchase cheaper options that are of immediate benefit to their bottom line, regardless of the health risks to workers, no matter how serious. The elimination of the profit system and establishment of worker control over production and distribution of the goods of society are necessary to eliminate the vast harm that is caused by these cleaning chemicals worldwide. The vast profits of the corporations should be expropriated by the working class for the research and development of sanitation methods that will benefit the health of global society. Government agencies such as OSHA, tied to the profit interests of the corporations, do nothing to penalize companies that put workers in harms way, and must be replaced by health and safety committees under the democratic control of the working class. The ongoing political crisis in the Maldives has thrown into sharp relief that the strategically-located Indian Ocean archipelago has become a focal point of the increasingly explosive geopolitical competition between India and the US on one side, and China on the other. This competition extends across South and South-East Asia, and is increasingly being played out in Central Asia, the Middle East and Africa. However, the Indian Oceanthe worlds most important commercial waterwayis very much at its heart. On Tuesday, Maldives President Abdulla Yameen got the countrys parliament to extend for a further 30 days the 15-day state of emergency he had declared on February 5. Yameen said the extension was needed because of threats to national security and the constitutional crisis. With this anti-democratic move, Yameen is seeking to strengthen his hand against his political opponents within the Maldive elite, principally former President Mohamed Nasheed, who from exile has been denouncing Yameen for selling-off the Maldives to China and imperilling the security of the Indian Ocean. Within hours of Yameens initial suspension of core democratic rights, Nasheed publicly appealed for India to invade the archipelago. He has since issued a flurry of statements spelling out that were he to return to power, he would curtail ties with China and align Maldives with India, the US and other western powers. India has long viewed the Maldives as part of its backyard. In 1988 it deployed military forces to the Maldives to thwart an attempted coup against Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, who for three decades, ending in 2008, ruled the tiny 1,000-plus island state as an autocrat. India has let it be known that its armed forces are ready for any eventuality. But thus far, New Delhi has publicly confined itself to demands Yameen end the state of emergency and allow the opposition to contest elections, slated for later this year, unimpeded. Sections of Indias military-security establishment and corporate media, however, are becoming increasingly impatient and have issued warnings that if New Delhi does not demonstratively take matters in hand, its claims to be a net security provider for, or policeman of, the Indian Ocean will be undermined. Make no mistake, wrote Indian strategic commentator Brahma Chellaney in Tuesdays Hindustan Times, Indias rapidly eroding influence in its strategic backyard holds far-reaching implications for its security, underscoring the imperative for a more dynamic, forward-looking strategy. Reflecting both the anxiety over, and depth of the hostility toward, China within broad sections of Indias elite, this week also saw a barrage of alarmed media reports about Chinese naval manoeuvres in the easternmost reaches of the Indian Ocean. Many of these drew a direct connection between these manoeuvres and the events on the Maldives well over 1,500 kilometres away. The current crisis erupted on February 1 when the Maldives Supreme Court, which had hitherto been supportive of Yameens increasing authoritarian moves, vacated the convictions of Nasheed and eight other opposition politicians and ordered that twelve parliamentarians who had defected to the opposition be allowed allow to take up their seats. Both rulings represented a grave threat to Yameens presidency, since the first would allow Nasheed to return to the country and contest the coming elections, and the second would deprive Yameen of majority support in parliament. In response, Yameen declared the state of emergency, ordered the arrest of two Supreme Court judges, including the Chief Justice, on the charges of corruption, and then bullied the three remaining judges into reversing their February 1 rulings. In extending the state of emergency, Yameen once again ran roughshod over basic democratic norms. The government declared parliament had extended the emergency, although fewer legislators than required when adopting a matter of public compliance were present. Speaker Abdullah Maseeh, nevertheless, declared the vote valid, saying the constitutionally-mandated quorum was irrelevant when extending a state of emergency. Tuesdays extension of the state of emergency was carried out in defiance of India, which less than 24 hours before had issued a statement saying it hoped the emergency would be allowed to lapse, so that the political process in Maldives can resume with immediate effect. After the emergency was extended, Indias Ministry of External Affairs quickly issued a statement that expressed deep dismay and said it was important that all democratic institutions [in the Maldives be] allowed to function in a fair and transparent manner in accordance with the Constitution. The US soon followed suit, with State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert demanding Yameen end the state of emergency and Maldives respect its international human rights obligations and commitments. The real concerns of New Delhi, as exemplified by its decades-long support for the autocrat Gayoom, and of Washington, which has armed and sponsored bloody dictatorial regimes the world over, have nothing to do with the democratic rights of the people of the Maldives. Their keen interest in the political crisis in the Maldives is motivated rather by their determination to ensure that unbridled control over the Indian Oceanthe principal conduit for the oil that fuels Chinas economy and for its exports to Europe, the Middle East, and Africaremains in the hands of powers hostile to China. The Maldives are situated near key Indian Ocean sea lanes. In fact, shortly before Yameen came to power the US was attempting to prevail on Maldives government to sign agreements that would have allowed US warships to routinely use its harbours and paved the way for the establishment of one or more US bases. There is no question that India, egged on by Washington, is determined to be rid of Yameen, who in pursuit of investment (and no doubt healthy returns for the faction of the elite with which he is aligned) has accepted Chinese offers to incorporate Maldives into its One Belt One Road transport infrastructure scheme. But for the moment, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his BJP government are proceeding cautiously, calculating that there may be less risky options than an outright invasion to bring about regime-change in Malle. Thus far Maldive security forces have remained loyal to Yameen. A second and much bigger concern for India is the impact a military intervention in the Maldives would have on its already deeply fraught relations with China. Since the Maldive political crisis erupted, Beijing has repeatedly warned against any foreignread Indianintervention in the archipelagos internal affairs, and said it doesnt want the Maldives to become a fresh flashpoint in Sino-Indian relations. The state-owned Global Times went further, threatening New Delhi with unspecified retaliation, if India one-sidedly sends troops to the Maldives. Last summer, India and China came to the brink of war as the result of a 10-week military stand-off on a Himalayan Ridge, the Doklam Plateau, jointly claimed by China and Bhutan. The Modi government is also aware of the explosive impact an Indian military intervention in the Maldivessupported, if not actively assisted, by the US, and patently aimed at countering Chinawould have on popular consciousness in India. Among Indias workers and toilers there is no enthusiasm for the Indian bourgeoisies plans to serve as a satrap for US imperialism. That said all sorts of intrigues, including no doubt active planning for an Indian assault on the Maldives, are underway. On Sunday, Nasheed met Indian Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on the side-lines of a media event sponsored by the Hindu in the South Indian city of Bengalaru (Bangalaore). New Delhi apparently hoped to keep the meeting secret, but Nasheed tweeted a photo of himself with Sitharaman: Pleasure to meet and brief Indian Minister of Defence Nirmala Sitharaman on the situation in the Maldives. An Indian government spokesman responded with the implausible claim the meeting had been unscheduled and no discussion on the situation in the Maldives had transpired. In a subsequent interview with the Hindu, Nasheed repeated his call for India to mobilize its military to pressure the Maldives government, but tried to distinguish this from an invasion. Gunboat diplomacy, he said, doesnt mean an attack; it means a show of strength. I feel we are at a defining moment in the Indian Ocean We have always seen India as a net provider of security and safety in the region, for the past 600 years. So, we mustnt lose the moment. Tasmanians are due to vote on March 3 in the first of a series of state elections this year that will underscore the intensifying disaffection with the long-established parties of rule in Australia. The island state of Tasmania, although the smallest, with a population of about 520,000, has become one of the sharpest expressions of the political impasse facing the entire working class. At the last state election in March 2014, echoing the federal Rudd-Gillard Labor governments landslide defeat six months earlier, the Labor Partys primary vote plunged to 27 percentan historic low. The Greens, who had formed a coalition government with Labor in the state for four years, fared even worse, losing a third of their vote, which dropped to 13.5 percent. Businessman Clive Palmers Palmer United Party (PUP), which had won a federal Senate seat in Tasmania in 2013 by peddling right-wing populism, did not win a single state seat. Labors 16 years in office from 1998 left the working class suffering Australias highest level of unemploymentofficially 7.4 percentand the deepest public spending cuts per capita, involving hundreds of job losses, school closures and public health cutbacks. From 2010 to 2014, Greens state leader Nick McKim, since installed as a federal Greens senator, was a key minister in a minority state Labor government. As education minister he showed the Greens true class colours, provoking public outrage by leading a drive to shut down public schools in order to satisfy the demands of the financial markets for deep budget cuts. As a consequence, the Liberal Party picked up 15 of the 25 seats in the state parliaments lower house, allowing it to form a government in its own right for the first time since 1996. Labor and the Greens were decimated: the Greens lost two of their five seats, and Labor lost three of its 10. Four years on, the situation confronting the working class continues to worsen. Although the official jobless rate has dropped to 5.9 percent, that is due to a fall in the participation rate and the replacement of full-time jobs with lower-paid part-time and casual employment. More than 4,500 full-time jobs have disappeared in the past 10 months alone. Poverty levels remain the worst in the country, with estimates that in 2016 nearly 75,000 people, or more than 14 percent, were living in poverty. In that year, the average Tasmanian household income was $43,600, which was 32 percent below the national average. Entrepreneurs, including Green industry proprietors, have touted growth in property development, tourism and hospitality, but manufacturing industry has continued to be wound down. In 2015, the US mining equipment giant Caterpillar announced the elimination of another 280 jobs in Burnie, on the north coast. The Liberal government axed 1,200 public sector jobs, in addition to 1,000 job losses announced by the previous Labor-Green government. In total, these retrenchments cut the public sector workforce by nearly 10 percent. Such is the discontent that media polls suggest another hung parliament is likely, with neither the Liberals, led by Premier Will Hodgman, nor Labor, headed by a recently-installed leader, Rebecca White, likely to secure the 13 seats required for a majority in the House of Assembly. Aware of the discrediting of the Greens, who previously propped up a minority Liberal government from 1996 to 1998, both Hodgman and White have ruled out governing in minority, but such pledges have been broken in the past. Hodgman, the son and grandson of Liberal Party politicians, personifies the drive by the ruling establishment to slash social spending in order to make the working class keep paying for the deteriorating economic situation. In August 2016, global credit ratings agency Moodys cut the states ranking to Aa2, predicting widening budget deficits. Hodgman responded by vowing to do more to cut the deficit. In launching his partys campaign, Hodgman pledged multi-million dollar increases in health spending over the six years, matching Labors equally cynical promises. At the same time, the Liberals have mounted a law and order campaign to further boost police numbers and powers, and declared they will reintroduce draconian anti-protest laws to prevent demonstrators from disrupting business activity. The High Court ruled the original legislation unconstitutional. Labor made White its leader in March last year in an attempt to put on a fresh face. But she typifies Labor Party careerism, serving as a parliamentary staff advisor or member of parliament since her graduation from university in 2004. At Labors official campaign launch last weekend, flanked by federal Labor leader Bill Shorten, White sought to win votes by promising to relieve the chronic-underfunding of hospitals, abolish government school fees and remove poker machines from hotels and clubs by 2023 to stem the heavy losses incurred on the machines by impoverished households. Unions Tasmania, the states peak trade union body, and its affiliates are pouring resources into campaigning for Labor. They are again promoting illusions that a Labor government will be less vicious than the Liberals, but the record of the previous Labor governments speaks otherwise. Likewise, the Greens are promising to champion integrity, decency and fairness. They remain handicapped, however, by the record of state party leader Cassy OConnor. She was minister for Human Services, Community Development, Climate Change and Aboriginal Affairs in Labors cabinets from 2011 until 2014. At the beginning of the election campaign, media polls and pundits promoted the prospect that another right-wing populist outfit, the Jacqui Lambie Network (JLN), could win several seats, enabling it to determine who formed the next government. Lambie, the networks creator, initially won a federal Senate seat in Tasmania in 2013 as a PUP candidate before breaking with Palmer without any clear political differences. Lambie, an ex-soldier and military police officer, espouses xenophobic, bigoted and authoritarian views as a means of diverting the discontent over job losses, falling living standards and budget cuts in reactionary directions. Her policies include barring foreign workers, banning Islamic headwear, blocking Chinese investment, restoring the death penalty and cutting off welfare payments. Among her main proposals are compulsory national service and greater military spending, effectively aligning with the US-led preparations for war. Polls now predict that Lambies JLN will fail to win any seats. It has been hit by defections and ructions, underlining the instability and opportunist character of such formations. This month, Lambie expelled Devonport mayor Steve Martin from JLN after he was sworn into the federal Senate to replace her. She had been forced to quit the Senate late last year, after discovering she was a dual citizen, as part of the ongoing witch hunt against members of parliament lacking sole loyalty to Australia. Martin refused to stand aside to let her resume her seat. Lambie has now vowed to stand for the Senate at the next opportunity, ruling out standing as a candidate in the state election. Reactionary formations such as Palmers and Lambies have been able to emerge and posture as defenders of working people only as a result of the endless betrayals carried out by the Labor Party and the unions, which have enforced declining working and living conditions since the Hawke-Keating federal Labor governments of the 1980s and 1990s. This highlights the political crisis confronting working people. The offensive demanded by the financial and corporate elite is deepening, as is the danger of war, despite immense public hostility. The hostility and disgust must be translated into a conscious struggle for a socialist program to totally reorganise economic life on the basis of human need, not the insatiable profit appetites of the wealthy. The United States Border Patrol (USBP) federal law enforcement agency has stepped up its anti-immigrant initiatives by expanding the use of checkpoints up to 100 miles away from the border or the coastline and using private property without warrants or permission from the owners to carry out surveillance. At first glance, these measures very clearly violate the Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable searches and seizures. However, the USBP and the Trump administration have justified them under a little-known federal law that allows immigration officials to engage in warrantless searches. Under the existing law adopted by the US Department of Justice in 1953, the government does not need to obtain a warrant for searching people and their property at ports of entry. Beyond the land and maritime border, however, the Justice Department has defined a reasonable distance of 100 miles, within which immigration officers can operate without warrants against those suspected of smuggling drugs or immigration violations. Additionally, the law entitles officers to enter onto private property within 25 miles of the border, without requiring the permission of the owner or a warrant. While the law has been in use for decades, its use has been ramped up under the Trump administration. USBP agents have been boarding Greyhound buses and Amtrak trains in Florida, New York and Washington state and demanding that passengers show proof of citizenship. In January of this year, a video that went viral on social media showed USBP agents boarding a Greyhound bus that was going from Orlando to Miami and terrorizing passengers by demanding proof of their status. Near the middle of the bus, the agents are shown checking a womans papers, asking her where her luggage was, proceeding to pull a suitcase from an overhead bin, and instructing the woman to exit. USBP later released a statement announcing that agents arrested a Jamaican woman at the Fort Lauderdale bus station. Officials said the woman had overstayed her visa and was transported to the Dania Beach Border Patrol station; she was then turned over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement for deportation proceedings. The USBP has also used the law to set up checkpoints in New Hampshire at a major interstate that is about 90 miles from the Canadian border, and arrested 33 people on suspected immigration offenses, with an additional 44 charged with drug possession. As reported by the New York Times, the drugs seized amounted to around two pounds of marijuana and lesser amounts of cocaine and other drugs. In a case that has now become a legal dispute, Ricardo D. Palacios, who owns the Juan Salinas Ranch near the town of Encinal, Texas, claimed that the Border Patrol officials had been roaming freely about for years in his property without any warrant and had also stopped members of his family at various checkpoints. For Palacios, the last straw came when he found a camera hidden in a tree on his property last November. He removed the camera and kept it as evidence of federal officers violating his Fourth Amendment rights. The camera has been claimed by both BP and the Texas Department of Public Safety, with state officials demanding that either Palacios return the camera or face being charged with theft. He has now sued both agencies. As Palacioss lawyer Raul Casso pointed out to the New York Times, the Juan Salinas Ranch was more than 30 miles away from the US-Mexico border, and thus outside the scope of even the existing federal law: [The USBP agents] either acted on purpose or incompetently. Either way they are outside the scope of their authority. Unsurprisingly, the Trump administration is attempting to justify these searches as necessary to protect national security from all kinds of dangers that are supposedly associated with undocumented migrants, including cross-border smuggling of humans, drugs and weapons. However, even the limited data released by the Department of Homeland Security (of which the USBP is a part) shows that less than 3 percent of immigrants entering without documents were caught at these checkpoints far away from the border. Beyond that, the dangers of the 100-mile extra-constitutional zone affect more than just a handful of people or cities. The reality, as an American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) statement on constitutional rights points out, is that Border Patrols interior enforcement operations encroach deep into and across the United States, affecting the majority of Americans. Roughly two-thirds of the United States population, about 200 million people, live inside the zone within 100 miles of the coast (Atlantic Ocean, Gulf of Mexico, Pacific Ocean, and Great Lakes) or 100 miles from the US border with Canada or Mexico. Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Hawaii, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island and Vermont lie entirely or almost entirely within this area. Nine of the 10 largest US metropolitan areas, as determined by the 2010 census, also fall within this zone: New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Antonio, San Diego and San Jose. When the Justice Department implemented the now oft-cited law providing USBP agents with extra-constitutional powers in this vast area, it was done so without public debate, and at a time when the whole of the agency employed 1,100 agents. Today, there are more than 21,000 USBP agents operating across the US. In addition to manning the ports of entry, it is believed that the agency operates more than 170 interior checkpoints. In theory, the law insists that there be a reasonable suspicion of an immigration violation or crime, and that USBP agents have probable cause or a warrant to search vehicles in the 100-mile zone. In practice, the ACLU has found that agents routinely ignore or misunderstand the limits of their legal authority in the course of individual stops, resulting in violations of the constitutional rights of innocent people. These problems are compounded by inadequate training for Border Patrol agents, a lack of oversight by [the Customs and Border Protection Agency] CBP and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and the consistent failure of CBP to hold agents accountable for abuse. The violations of the Fourth Amendment inherent in the current anti-immigrant drive are not restricted to the flexible interpretation of the 100-mile internal zone law. In recent months, the trend of searching electronic devices of visitors, residents and citizenswhich was first seen during the last days of the Bush administration and escalated relentlessly during the Obama administrationhas picked up even more steam. Within the first full month after the inauguration of Donald Trump, warrantless searches of electronic devices by U.S. Customs and Border Protection reached a record high of 5,000, more than in all of 2015 and well on pace to double the numbers in 2016. While there have been several legislative proposals to place some limits on the powers of the CBPincluding insisting on the need for warrants to search electronic devices and also reduce the extra-constitutional zone from 100 miles to 25 miles from the bordernone of them have passed. Such proposals are mere window dressing from Democrats who are fearful of their constituency catching on to the bipartisan attack on immigrants. The CBP itself remains committed to its 2009 directive, which claimed, In the course of a border search, with or without individualized suspicion, an Officer may examine electronic devices and may review and analyze the information encountered at the border. In 2016, the National Border Patrol Councilwhich counts nearly 17,000 agents among its memberstook the unprecedented step of endorsing a presidential candidate, Donald Trump, during the primaries. In announcing its support for Trump, Brandon Judd, the president of the Council stated that its membership supported the candidate because he had promised to take [the] handcuffs off the agency. Based on the administration-mandated activities of the USBP, that campaign promise is being fulfilled. The Gestapo-like agency has been granted full authority and impunity by both the Democratic and Republican parties to act increasingly as a law unto itself, all the while stripping away constitutionally guaranteed rights from the working class as a whole as it peddles the lie of the criminal immigrant. On Wednesday evening, the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE), the youth movement of the Socialist Equality Party, held an in-person and online meeting drawing participants from Flint, Puerto Rico and Kentucky to discuss the water crisis and a socialist perspective upon which the working class can fight to defend its social rights. The well-attended meeting was held at the University of MichiganFlint, with online participation from workers and youth in Puerto Rico and Martin County, Kentucky. The residents of all three areas, like those in many other cities in America and around the world, face a water crisis of disastrous proportions. In Flint, Michigan, the health of an unknown number of residents, including children, has been irreparably damaged by lead poisoning due to a conspiracy hatched by corporations, banks and local and state officials, Democratic and Republican, to switch the citys water supply to the polluted Flint river in April, 2014. In Martin County, Kentucky, residents struggle to survive with a water supply that is sporadic and unreliable, and which delivers a colored, foul-smelling liquidthe outcome of decades of infrastructure neglect by the government and pollution by the mining corporations. In Puerto Rico, hundreds of thousands are still without running water nearly six months after Hurricane Irma battered the island. The Socialist Equality Party meeting provided a unique forum where workers and youth could come together to discuss the root causes of the disasters they face and the broader social and political issues raised by these conditions, as well as a socialist perspective for a unified struggle. Present in the meeting hall in Flint were workers, residents and student youth. A number of Flint workers who have been in the forefront of the struggle against the poisoning of the citys water supply attended and contributed to the discussion. When SEP and IYSSE member Genevieve Leigh noted at the beginning of her opening report that the meeting would hear contributions from workers and youth in Puerto Rico and Kentucky, the Flint audience responded with spontaneous applause. This reflected the sense of class solidarity and determination that animated the entire event, bolstered by confirmation of the commonality of the problems faced by working people across the country and internationally. Leighs report reviewed the situation in all three regions. She noted the international character of the water crisis, referring to the fact that the population in Cape Town, South Africa is facing a cut-off of running water within a matter of months. What this demonstrates, she said, is that the fundamental division in society is not race, gender or ethnicity, but class. Highlighting the indifference and hostility of both big business parties in the US to the working class population, Leigh played video clips of Obama telling Flint residents to drink the water and Trump contemptuously tossing paper towel rolls to Puerto Rican residents. A common theme emerged from the contributions of speakers in the different locations: In each case, workers faced media indifference and corporate-government efforts to shut them up. BarbiAnn Maynard spoke from Martin County, once labelled the billion-dollar coal field in Appalachia. She read out a notice that has been included in her water bill for more than 10 years: If you have a severely compromised immune system, have an infant, are pregnant or are elderly, you may be at an increased risk and should seek advice from your health care provider before drinking this water. BarbiAnn Maynard protesting coal industry in 2000 She noted, Our water company, when they report on the complaints, they either say that we're crazy or we don't know what we're talking about. She explained that there was a growing incidence of cancer and dementia throughout the region, which had taken the life of her own mother. What they are putting in our water that they're giving us is killing us, she said. Gary Michael Hunt, a former Kentucky coal miner who was shown on a video last month being strangled by a local sheriff as he protested the towns water crisis, also addressed the meeting. Referring to multi-millionaire coal magnate James Booth, Hunt noted that one guy owns everything here. He continued, And what he doesnt own is what he doesnt want It seems like the more the worker works, the less he gets. From Puerto Rico, IYSSE member and WSWS correspondent Anthony Castro provided details on the horrific conditions on the island and the indifference of the Trump administration. He noted that many thousands of people have been forced to resort to washboards to wash their clothes in rivers and streams, prompting retailers to jack up the price of such items. In Flint, residents discussed their own experiences. A student asked the speakers for an explanation of the SEPs plan for getting into office and making real change. World Socialist Web Site Labor Editor Jerry White responded by explaining that the water crisis could be understood only in the context of a situation where workers throughout the United States, in South Africa and internationally are facing, in the 21st century, the greatest levels of social inequality in world history. He pointed out that five billionaires own the same amount of wealth as half the human race. The water crisis was not a case of bad weather, but the outcome of a deliberate policy of social counterrevolution pursued over four decades. Jerry White Reviewing the great class battles of Kentucky miners and Flint autoworkers in the 1920s and 1930s, White explained that the working class has never achieved a single thing through appeals to the powers-that-be, who have a vested interest in looting society, in impoverishing the working class, and, in fact, lowering the life expectancy of workers. The lesson of the previous struggles, he stressed, was the need for a revolutionary leadership and socialist perspective, uniting the working class of all ethnicities and countries in a common struggle. We are seeking to establish genuine democracy, in which we, the working class, organize ourselves politically, independently of the two big business parties, and seize political power into our own hands. This, he continued, was necessary to redistribute societys wealth and reorganize the economy on a socialist and rationally planned basis. Workers in the audience spoke powerfully on the need to base the fight against toxic or inadequate water supplies on a struggle for social equality, directed against capitalism. Gladyes, a 64-year-old retired General Motors worker and Flint resident, said, I watched my grandparents, who worked at GM, I watched capitalism take their life, sweat, money. I watched it take my mum and dads generation. Capitalism does nothing but feed the rich. It robs the working man of his life sustenance. They move on from one generation to the next generation, promising lies. Ive never seen, in three generations, a generation come out to the good with capitalism... Gladyes They exploited the worlds waters, and now, here we are, the whole world, with no water. She then turned and made a direct appeal to the younger generation in the audience. I really hope that this new generation thats coming up through these colleges, that have good heads on their shoulders, that they see the mistakes that have been made by the working man, who has bought into capitalism, who has nothing to show for it! Another Flint resident, Florlisa, told the audience: What weve seen is that this is not just about Flint Just last night I saw a video of Ohio, where it looks like chocolate milk coming out of the faucet. This is about the haves and the have-nots. The rich are eating the poor. Theyre burying the poor. Its time to eat the rich. Barry Grey, the US national editor of the World Socialist Web Site, spoke from the floor on the connection between these issues and the 20th anniversary of the first publication, in 1998, of the WSWS. This website is your instrument, to organize, to educate, to mobilize, and to build a world movement of the working class to actually put an end to capitalism, Grey said. We have a tradition: the Marxist tradition. We base ourselves on the historical legacy of the great leaders of the working class. The leaders of the Russian Revolution: Trotsky, who led the fight against Stalin and the perversion of that revolution This year we are celebrating 20 years of the WSWS. We are going to use it for the building of a mass, socialist movement in this country and all over the world. Join us. The meeting concluded with an appeal for all those present to join and build the IYSSE and the Socialist Equality Party as the revolutionary leadership of the working class. The perspective advanced by the speakers met with a powerful response among those present. Student attendees signed up to form a new IYSSE club at University of MichiganFlint. Audience members in Flint remained behind after the meeting for further discussion and spoke to WSWS reporters. The German parliamentary armed forces commissioners annual report has triggered a wave of hysteria in the media and political parties. The report, made public on Tuesday, deliberately paints a picture of a ramshackle, dysfunctional army. The report complained about an enormous personnel shortage and material shortcomings: Ongoing armaments projects all too often suffered from delivery delays, purchased equipment was too often not ready for use, replacement parts were missing everywhere. This was the situation for aircraft and helicopters, ships and submarines, tanks and vehicles in the year under review. At the end of the year under review, the report stated that none of the 14 A400M transport aircraft in service had been operational for some time. Not even one of the six German submarines was operational by the end of the year. Some progress was made in the area of personal equipment, but the supply of important items like protective vests was insufficient, the report added. A wave of outrage swept through the media. The soldiers are obviously extremely annoyed, wrote the daily Tagesspiegel. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung warned that the army has a right to be equipped for the operations assigned to it in such a way that it can fulfil its mission. The Leipziger Volkszeitung asked whether there is any willingness in Germany to provide the soldiers with sufficient resources. The Badische Zeitung declared that the armed forces are regarded by many in this country as a militarist work of the devil. One consequence of this: wilful neglect. Politicians from all parties, from the Alternative for Germany (AfD) to the Left Party, demanded immediate steps be taken. Georg Pazderski, deputy AfD parliamentary group leader and a former army officer, accused the Defence Minister of causing the ruin of her army. The Free Democratic Party fraction demanded a reform of the procurement system, declaring, The annual report shows in a frightening way how bad the state of our armed forces is after years of cutting spending to the bone. Green Party security policy spokesman Tobias Lindner complained, Despite many announcements and a change of course, nothing measurable has happened. His colleague from the Left Party parliamentary group, Matthias Hohn, demanded: The army has to refocus its mission as enshrined in the Basic Law: the defence of the nation. Left Party deputy Christine Buchholz complained, Obviously the army does not focus on its people. The parliamentary armed forces commissioner has the official task as the soldiers attorney of monitoring the protection of their fundamental rights and ensuring, as an auxiliary body of parliament, parliamentary control over the armed forces. However, the current incumbent, the Social Democrats (SPD) deputy Hans-Peter Bartels, sees himself as an auxiliary organ of the armed forces, which holds a gun to the head of parliament. Large passages of his report read as if they had been prepared by military generals or by defence industry lobbyists. The report cites the armys expanding tasks, which it presents with obvious pride, as the main reason for these shortcomings: While foreign deployments outside of Alliance territory, out of area, in Africa, Afghanistan, the Balkans, the Mediterranean and elsewhere have so far been the focus of the challenges to be overcome, since 2014 the capacity to participate in collective defence within Alliance territory has become equally important. The army has a key role with its advanced presence on NATOs eastern flank. Personnel, equipment, weapons and ammunitions must be readily available. An initiative to speed this up is needed. In addition, Bartels mentioned a third operational area for the army which also requires considerable resources: domestic operations. The deployment of the armed forces to defend against terrorism, which was discussed in the year under review and tested by an exercise conducted under the direction of the police, represents another potential task for which, as is the case for the militarys core business in collective defence and out of area missions, a fully equipped and fully staffed force is required, according to his report. Bartels knows full well that Germanys Basic Law strictly prohibits the domestic deployment of the armed forces. The reason for this is the devastating role played by the military under the Nazis and in the century before. As early as 1849, when Prussian troops crushed the democratic revolution throughout Germany, the Prussian king Friedrich Wilhelm IV declared: Soldiers are the only cure against democrats. In 1919 Minister of Defence Gustav Noske (SPD) ordered troops to suppress workers protests and the Spartacus rebellion. Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were murdered by soldiers. And at the end of the Weimar Republic, the officers caste, functioning as a state within the state, played a decisive role in paving the way for Hitler to take power. The fact that Bartels nonetheless calls for a fully equipped and fully staffed army for domestic use reveals the actual purpose of the rearmament hysteria. The international military interventions and military build-up against Russia, for which the army is being rearmed, find no support among the population. In addition, there is the enormous cost of rearmament, which will inevitably entail further social cuts. The armed forces commissioners annual report gives an indication of the vast sums involved. Significantly increased defence expenditure is required for the planned trend reversals in personnel (an additional 12,000 military and 5,400 civilian posts by 2024) and equipment (defence investments amounting to 130 billion by 2030, calculated from 2017 onwards), the report states. This means, for example, that in the next 12 years, an average of at least 10 billion per year will have to be earmarked for the development and procurement of new defence equipment alone. In the 2017 budget, it was 5.9 billion. But that is far from enough to meet the demands of the military. According to the Bartels report, the financial plan of the outgoing government, which provides for increased defence expenditure from 37 billion in 2017 to 42.4 billion in 2021, is expected to compensate for expected cost increases in salaries, material maintenance and operating costs, but leaves little room for substantial improvements in military investment. The share of gross domestic product spent on defence would thus remain around 1.2 percent. In order to reach the NATO target of 2 percent, additional efforts are necessary. This massive rearmament programme cannot be imposed by democratic means. It will inevitably meet with resistance. Bartels therefore calls for a fully equipped army to be deployed domestically. The armed forces commissioners annual report is part of the incoming grand coalitions future plans. It confirms that the return to militarism and great power politics is the central focus for the SPD and conservative parties. Bartels, who has been a member of the SPD for 39 years and a member of parliament for 20 years, is one of the key figures in the defence policy establishment as chairman of the defence committee and as parliamentary commissioner for the armed forces. He also has close ties with the SPD leadership. In the first West Virginia teachers strike in nearly three decades, over 20,000 teachers, school bus drivers and other school employees began a two-day state-wide walkout on Thursday. West Virginia teachers, who are among the lowest paid in the nation, are demanding improved wages and an end to rising health care costs imposed by the state-run Public Employees Insurance Agency (PEIA). Teachers and other school employees are defying the states anti-democratic ban on public employee strikes, which carries the threat of fines, mass firings and even jailing. On the eve of the walkout, Attorney General Patrick Morrisey declared that a work stoppage of any length on any ground is illegal. Morrisey said he would back county school boards and school superintendents seeking back-to-work injunctions. Teachers in West Virginia are legally prohibited from collective bargaining for wages and benefits, which are left to the whim of a state government notorious for being the pockets of the coal and energy companies. On Wednesday, Republican Governor Jim Justice, a billionaire coal magnate, signed a bill giving teachers an insulting two percent raise in July, followed by annual one percent increase over the next two years. The bill was backed by Republicans and a significant section of Democrats, who have cynically postured as supporters of the teachers. While state legislators hypocritically denounced striking teachers for hurting their students, the walkout has the support of working-class parents and students, who joined teachers on picket lines across all 55 state counties. Large contingents of workers and young people participated alongside thousands of teachers in mass protests at the state capital of Charleston. An estimated 5,000 workers and youth descended on the capitol building, chanting Enough is enough and Fed up, fired up. Legislators, who have steadfastly opposed teachers wage and health care demands, cancelled debate on funding for PEIA and public education. Kay Shirey, a guidance counselor at Eastern Greenbrier Middle School, told the World Socialist Web Site, We were here 30-years ago fighting the same battles. They keep saying, Wait, we will fix this. We are tired of waiting. (See: West Virginia teachers demand quality pay, health care) The strike has exposed the chasm between rank-and-file teachers and the two unions, the West Virginia Education Association (WVEA) and the smaller American Federation of Teachers-West Virginia (AFT-WV), which have long collaborated with the same Democratic and Republican politicians who have starved the public schools of funding. Both unions endorsed Justice, who ran as a Democrat before switching parties. They also backed his predecessor, the current Democratic US Senator Joe Manchin, who also promised and delivered nothing to teachers. After failing to mollify teachers anger with one-day strikes in a limited number of counties earlier this month, the unions called the statewide action for Thursday and Friday. While the unions have floated the idea of resuming rolling strikes on a county-by-county basis, AFT-WV President Christine Campbell signaled Friday that the unions might shut down further action or simply ride things out until the legislature recesses on March 10. We are assessing the situation, Campbell said, according to a report in the Washington Post. We are going to make a determination some time [Friday] on whether or not its necessary to take additional action and what that action might be. The unions are seeking to smother the strike as soon as possible. This was made clear by the presence in West Virginia of national AFT president Randi Weingarten. A fixture in the Democratic Party establishment, Weingarten spent the eight years of the Obama administration shutting down teacher opposition to the presidents school reform agenda of promoting charter schools and for-profit educational schemes, while the AFT took money from Bill Gates and other enemies of public education. On Thursday, Weingarten said the first step to ending the walkout by March 10 would be to not do what the Senate did, which was actually to lower the House proposal. In other words, the AFT bureaucrat (who has a personal income of $500,000 a year) is in discussions with state Democrats on a plan to restore the lower state houses equally insulting proposal of a five percent wage increase over four years. The unions would then point to this as movement and shut the struggle down. Rank-and-file teachers are pressing for an indefinite statewide strike to win their demands. I want us to just stay on strike, a teacher from Glen Fork Elementary school who was protesting at the state capitol told the WSWS. Last time we were out for one day, and they didn't do anything. Now two days. What are they going to do next, three days? We should just stay out until our health care is fixed. If their struggle is not to be defeated, teachers must take conduct of the strike out of the hands of the unions, by electing rank-and-file strike committees in every school and community. Mass meetings should be called to broaden support for the struggle and mobilize the widest sections of the working class, including all public employees, coal miners, factory workers, and college and high school students. Workers must reject the lie, peddled by the unions, that their demands can be won by appealing to Democratic and Republican politicians who all have a vested interest in defending the wealth and power of the corporate and financial elite. The West Virginia strike is a part of a resurgence of the class struggle internationally. After more than a decade of stagnant and declining wages, increased health care costs and soaring inequality, the US is on the eve of a social explosion. Educators are particularly determined to recoup lost wages and defend public education against new attacks being prepared by the Trump administration and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. Teachers in Pittsburgh, Arizona, New Jersey, Florida, Oklahoma and other areas are pressing for strike action. The threats of injunctions, fines and firings, and the opposition of both Democrats and Republicans to the demands of teachers, exposes the fact that teachers are engaged in a political struggle. The entire state apparatus is an instrument of the corporate and financial elite, which is determined to make teachers and the entire working class pay to funnel money into Wall Street and the military. The revival of working class struggle must be linked to the building of a mass political movement of the working class, independent of both big business parties, fighting for a socialist program to meet human needs, not corporate profit. Thousands of teachers, students, public employees and their supporters participated in a demonstration in Charleston, West Virginia on Thursday, the first day of a two-day teacher walkout throughout the state. Those participating in the rally expressed great determination to oppose a derisory pay increase passed by the West Virginia legislature and the starving of the Public Employees Insurance Agency (PEIA). The WSWS spoke to many of those participating in the rally. Kay Shirey, a guidance counselor at Eastern Greenbrier Middle School, said, We were here 30-years ago fighting the same battles. They keep saying, wait we will fix this. We are tired of waiting. Teachers from Eastern Greenbrier Middle School, including Breanna, Kay and Ty I am fighting for the future of West Virginia. I want the kids to have qualified teachers. We cant get qualified teachers now. We have over 700 unfilled positions now, and we will have more next year. Their solution is to dumb down the standards, and that is hurting the students. For years they have been saying, We have to hold the kids to high standards. Now they just want to dumb everything down. Ty Braenwich has just started as an 8th grade Social Studies teacher also at Eastern Greenbrier Middle School. I went to West Virginia University. Out of my class, most of the graduates took jobs in Ohio, Pennsylvania or Virginia. I am the only one who stayed in West Virginia. We work hard. Its not just in the classroom. We are preparing lesson plans, grading papers, getting ready for our day. Yesterday, I worked from 7 am to 6 pm and still took work home with me. We are living paycheck to paycheck. Over the summer, I work another job to supplement my income just to get by. I love what I do for all the 125 kids. We should be treated as first class citizens. Breanna, who has taught Spanish for two years. I am here for that, she said, pointing to a sign being held by her coworker that read, 700+ Vacancies, 48th in pay, cant afford to stay. The pay is so low that teachers cant afford to stay in the state. Everyone moves somewhere else. It is so hard for the schools to find teachers because nobody wants to work here or stay here. What is the future if there are no teachers for the children? Traci Evans, who has been an English teacher at Calhoun Gilmer Career Center for 14 years, explained that she was out to support all state workers. Im here because teachers and all state employees have been treated poorly for too long a time. We all are taking a stand and saying enough is enough. Traci Evans (right) We are in a job because we are training the people for all the other jobs, and we dont get the respect and wages that we deserve. What pay raises we do get are being gobbled up by the increased cost of health care. Every year we really get a pay cut. It is making it very difficult to make a living. We are fighting for all public employees, not just the teachers, but the 200,000 state employees who are all having their health insurance cut. You just have the upper class, and the rest of us are in the lower class. There is not really a middle class any more. One of our politicians even said that teachers could get second jobs or cut off their internet at their homes. How can you be a teacher without the internet? A teacher from Glen Fork Elementary school spoke about the future of the struggle. I want us to just stay on strike. Last time we were out for one day, and they didnt do anything. Now two days. What are they going to do next, three days? We should just stay out until our health care is fixed. Many teachers are not going to the doctor now because of the cost. It costs $40 to see a specialist. I know teachers that are telling their kids that they cant go to a doctor unless it is really bad. Chris, a physical education teacher, said the biggest issue is the underfunding of the PEIA (the Public Employees Insurance Agency), which affects 20,000 people. The big issue is the premiums and deductibles. If this isnt fixed, we will be back here in the same spot. The 2 percent raise is not worth it, because they raise your insurance rate. I figure that I will get a $30 weekly raise, but I will be paying an additional $200 in premiums. Its a joke. Amy, a first grade teacher, said, Im here to support the students because it is not just about a pay raise for us. There are over 700 vacancies. The legislatures solution is to lower the requirement for the teachers. That is not the solution. Kelly (left) and Amy I want to support the students and fill these vacancies. Its not fair to the students. And even they understand that everywhere around us the pay is so much higher. Logically, people are going to leave. We dont want to have any more vacancies. We need to fill them with qualified people. Kelly is a school bus driver for Putnam County. Im here for the PEIA insurance to be reformed. Kelly said she wanted to give a voice to the overwhelming support for the strike from state workers. I wanted them to see that there are other workers who are affected. There are first responders, EMS drivers, people all over the state are affected. I spoke to people in the Department of Highways and the Department of Transportation who were forbidden to strike. Kelly said the students she drives also support the strike. Theres a program our county called backpack sacks, and kids were provided with a lot of provisions since school will be closed for the next two days. Paul and Jane, with their granddaughter Isabelle, a bus driver, said a strike was not something they wanted to do. However, it is the only way to show we do not agree, because they dont listen to us. They pushed us to do this. Jane, a teacher, said, My issue is PEIA. My husband had a brain tumor and two hip replacements. Insurance is important to us. I was involved in the 1990 strike. The issue then was PEIA. They agreed to fund the insurance but didnt follow through. We went back too soon. Since 2014, they havent paid anything to the insurance. Paul said everything in the state is about cutting taxes. Cut taxes, cut taxes, and after a certain point there are no resources to keep the lower people propped up. And trickle down doesnt work. TERRE HAUTE, Ind. (WTHI)- At least 17 people were killed when police say Nikolas Cruz opened fire at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. The shooting left an impact on the nation and a painful conversation about how to prevent children from losing their lives. The Sheriff leading the investigation says Cruz fired into five classrooms on two floors before dropping the weapon and taking off. It led to the question of where the school resource officer was at the time of the shooting. The Sheriff confirmed the school resource officer was at the school during the shooting, but he never came across Cruz. But, it does leaves concerns about safety in schools even when there is protection. Brenda Simmons has been school resource officer for West Vigo Middle School for about one year. "I go home at night and I'm smiling... I'm happy," Simmons said. She says she does it all for the kids. "I've always loved working with kids," she said. She spend two days at Honey Creek Middle School and three days with the kids at West Vigo. "We are not just here to scare the kids," she said. "We are here to help." Simmons says she serves as a mentor and someone to talk to. "You have that one-on-one and they get to know you," she said. The students are her kids she never had. Simmons was devastated when she heard about the mass shooting at a Florida high school. "It broke my heart, Simmons said. "Yet, another school shooting." The shooting killed nearly 17 students and left several injured. "God-forbid it ever happens here," Simmons said. "We just try to do the best we can." Simmons says she checks nearly 15 doors numerous times in a day. And, she keeps a close eye on more than 30 security cameras inside and around the building. "A lot of these kids just want to be heard," she said. Simmons will tell you it's not about the security measures. "People give warnings and we have to take heed to those warnings," she said. She says it all comes down to listening to the children. It is all about having a healthy relationship. "Let's keep that open communication with us and the kids and the family," Simmons said. There is one resource officer for each of the West Vigo schools. Simmons says the officers are there to listen. But, police ask if you do ever see or hear of any unusual activity to call them immediately. VERMILLION COUNTY, Ind. (WTHI) - Due to heavy rain locally and in northern Indiana, some are now feeling the impact in the Wabash Valley. In particular, parts of northern Vermillion County is getting hit hard. We told you Wednesday night that certain locations near Eugene had closed roads. At that time the Vermillion County Sheriff told News 10 that County Road 600 North at Eugene Bridge and then northwest of the bridge were closed. The Sheriff also said Meridian Road and State Road 234 in that area had been closed. Then Thursday morning, News 10's Kiley Thomas spoke with several residents along the Vermillion River who were being forced out of their homes. One homeowner said he stayed up all night watching the water inch closer to his house. Our crew also rode along during a water rescue with an Indiana Conservation Officer who was helping residents get items from their home. Officials are saying that flooding hasn't been this bad in Vermillion County in 30 years. RIVER STAGES | CLICK HERE Unfortunately, residents are still worrying about the river rising as more flood water makes it way south from northern Indiana. Residents could see more flooding going into the weekend as well. Storm Team 10's Brady Harp went back to Eugene Thursday evening and found the water had risen even more. There are some more roads that are now impassible and you can see some outer buildings completely flooded. Storm Team 10 will continue to monitor the situation and keep you updated as information becomes available. CARROLL COUNTY, Ind. (WLFI) Indiana State Police say there are no survivors after a small, Wisconsin-bound plane crashed in central Indiana. According to Carroll County Sheriff Tobe Leazenby, around 8 p.m. Thursday a Cessna plane crashed about three miles north of Rossville. The scene is located near the intersection of county roads 600 South and 500 West. State Police Seargent Tony Slocum tells us neighbors weren't sure what they were hearing when the plane crashed. "We do have some believe they heard something like a race car sound which we believe is related," said Slocum. "There were other witnesses, but we're still trying to verify their statements at this time." The Cessna 441 Conquest Turboprop had taken off from the Eagle Creek Airpark in Indianapolis and was headed to Green Bay, Wisconsin, according to state police. Green Bay CBS affiliate WFRV reported a prominent Wisconsin dairy farmer among the dead. "Kewaunee County and much of Northeast Wisconsin is in shock after learning local businessman John Pagel passed away in a plane crash overnight in Indiana. The Pagel Family has released the following statement: "Many of you heard our family and extended family is grieving the loss of owner, father, person and friend, John T. Pagel, as well as Johns son-in-law, Steven Witcpalek, and pilot Nathan Saari. We appreciate the outpouring of the communities thoughts and prayers and request your respect for the privacy of the family as we wait for additional information. As we know more details we will keep you informed." The crash is in a rural area and communications were being hampered by the remoteness. Investigators used a drone from the Wayne Township Fire Department to help survey the crash debris. The recent heavy rains made the crash site extremely muddy and hard for investigators to navigate. "Getting out to that crash scene is a very difficult task at this time," said Slocum. "Then you add on the fact that it is dark. So, you try to do the best you can, but we're working as a time, we're working the best we can through this particular problem." State police said they expect the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board to show up late Friday morning. According to ISP, the FAA put a three-mile radius no-fly zone on the area of the plane crash. This restriction includes drones and small planes from flying over the scene less than 5,000 feet. This is effective until Saturday, Feb. 24. at 3:20 a.m. EDGAR COUNTY, Ind. (WTHI) - New information has been released out of an Edgar County Court in the case against Justin Hefner. Hefner has officially been charged with three counts of false impersonation. You may recall that Hefner recently showed-up to the Edgar County Sheriff's Office claiming to be a federal officer. Police report he was heavily armed and had a list of people to arrest. His bond is set at $20,000 with 10 percent allowed. Conditions of that bond include Hefner not to possess any weapons and not to have any contact with the sheriff's office. Hefner must also be evaluated by a VA hospital. A preliminary hearing is set for March 15. UPDATE February 22, 11:50 p.m. : Alabama postpones the execution of Doyle Hamm after officials say there is not enough time to prepare him before the death warrant expires. Hamm's execution was originally stayed at 6pm Thursday night, but the U.S. Supreme Court lifted the stay at three hours later. A new date has not been set for Hamm's execution. MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) Alabama stood ready Thursday to execute an inmate who argued that there is an increased risk of a botched execution because of damage to his veins from lymphoma and other illnesses. Doyle Lee Hamm, 61, is scheduled to be put to death by lethal injection at a southwest Alabama prison. Hamm was convicted in the 1987 killing of motel clerk Patrick Cunningham. Cunningham was shot once in the head while working an overnight shift at a Cullman motel. Police said $410 was taken during the robbery. Hamm gave police a confession and he was convicted after two accomplices testified against him in exchange for being allowed to plead guilty to lesser offenses, according to court documents. The state of Hamm's health, and veins, were the subject of court filings as his attorney sought to stop the execution and the state argued it should proceed. The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Thursday denied Hamm's request to stop the execution. Additional appeals are expected. Hamm was diagnosed with B-cell lymphoma in 2014. His attorney argued there was evidence that the blood cancer had progressed, while the state contended he was in remission. His attorney urged the courts to block the execution, citing damage to Hamm's veins from cancer, hepatitis C and former drug use and the state's plans to adjust the lethal injection process. After a medical review ordered by a federal judge found that Hamm had no easily useable veins in his upper extremities, the state told courts last week that it will connect the line to useable veins in his hips, legs or feet. Bernard Harcourt, Hamm's attorney, wrote in a filing to the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that the state previously denied Hamm had venous access problems and the "rush to settle on this creative and novel protocol simply as a means to execute Doyle Hamm as quickly and cheaply as possible shows a deliberate indifference to his well-being that violates the Eighth Amendment prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment." The Alabama attorney general's office argued that the execution should proceed. State lawyers said Hamm's lymphoma has been in remission since 2016 and said dismissed his claims of elevated pain risk as "hyperbole." The prison warden, responding to a request from the 11th Circuit for additional information, submitted an affidavit saying the state was capable of administering the intravenous line though Hamm's veins in his lower extremities. "It has been more than thirty years since Hamm committed his capital murder. Hamm's conviction is valid and a competent state court with jurisdiction over his case set his execution date according to Alabama law," state lawyers wrote. Executions are also scheduled to take place Thursday in Texas and Florida. Thomas "Bart" Whitaker, 38, is on death row for masterminding the fatal shootings of his mother and brother at their suburban Houston home in 2003. Whitaker's father, Kent, says he forgives his son, and the state parole board recommended that Gov. Greg Abbott commute the sentence to life in prison. But Abbott is free to let the death sentence be carried out. In Florida, barring a last-minute stay, 47-year-old Eric Scott Branch will be put to death by lethal injection in the 1993 rape and fatal beating of a college student. Branch was sentenced under Florida's old capital punishment system, which was ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court. However, the Florida Supreme Court ruled that the state's new system of sentencing does not apply to inmates sentenced to death before 2002. ABBEVILLE, Miss. (WTVA) - Many gathered at Springfield Missionary Baptist Church for Sherry Buford's funeral. "Even though she's gone somewhere else, she'll still be in our hearts," added Urshala Joseph. "Oxford, Mississippi, and Lafayette County - this is a sad day for us." There was only standing room inside the church. Family and friends say it was no surprise a large crowd came out. They say Buford touched many lives as an Oxford Intermediate School teacher. "I was a bit overwhelmed," added Shad Buford, Sherry Buford nephew. "It just goes to show her living wasn't in vain." Buford was tragically killed when her vehicle was hit head on, by a suspected drunk driver on Interstate 22. "She was a very infectious teachers," added Patrick Shaw. "She always wanted to help her kids out." Orginal story here LOWNDES COUNTY, Miss. (WTVA) - The deputy director of the Golden Triangle Regional Airport has been selected to attend the 65th National Security Forum. Matt Dowell was nominated by the leadership at the Columbus Air Force Base. The forum, held in Montgomery, Alabama, will share perspectives between key civic leaders, senior military officers, and highly experienced government civilians on current and future topics pertaining to strategic leadership, strategy, national security, and other key topics. JACKSON, Miss. (WTVA) - The Mississippi Supreme Court has denied a request to rehear its ruling in a Grenada County capital murder case. Terry Pitchford, 32, is on death row in the 2004 shooting death of Ruben Britt. Britt was shot multiple times during the robbery of the Crossroads Grocery. I nvestigators say Britt was shot with a gun he kept at the store for protection. The weapon was found in Pitchford's car when he was arrested. Pitchford is claiming he should have received a more thorough competency hearing by the trial court. The hearing had been ordered by the Mississippi Supreme Court. The state's highest court upheld the ruling in October and denied a request to rehear the case today. JACKSON, Miss. (WTVA) - The Mississippi Supreme Court has denied a request to rehear the appeal in a Montgomery County capital murder case. Curtis Flowers, 47, is on death row in the shooting deaths of four people at Tardy Furniture Store in Winona in 1996. Bertha Tardy, Robert Golden, Carmen Rigby and Derrick Stewart were found dead inside the store. All had been shot in the head. Flowers has been tried six times because of hung juries or convictions overturned on appeal. In his latest appeal, he is challenging the jury selection process and why some members of the jury pool were excused from serving. The Mississippi Supreme Court had previously denied his appeal and refused to revisit the case Thursday. WASHINGTON (AP) The White House is on lockdown after a passenger vehicle struck a security barrier. The U.S. Secret Service tweets that the vehicle "did not breach the security barrier of the White House complex." The agency adds that the female driver of the vehicle was "immediately apprehended." Witnesses saw a commotion on the White House grounds as security officers responded. President Donald Trump is hosting Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull at the White House. Turnbull is remaining at the White House as the incident is being investigated. The Secret Service says no law enforcement personnel were injured in the incident. TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (WTXL) - Domi Station has announced that its executive director, Lucas Lindsey, will step down in March. Lindsey has served at Domi Station since the nonprofit first opened almost four years ago. He was hired as the organization's first employee in May 2014, serving as the community manager. In July 2016, Lindsey was named executive director. Without a doubt, Tallahassee is a different, more dynamic city than the one I moved to for grad school six years ago, and Im proud that Domi has played a role in making that happen, Lindsey said in an article he published to Domi Station's website. Our community is in a strong position to double down on the recent momentum toward building a robust entrepreneurial ecosystem. Lindsey plans to relocate this summer to Phoenix, where his wife has accepted a faculty position at Arizona State University. Officials write Lindsey will remain available as team consultant through June. TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (WTXL) - Since the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, law enforcement across the country report several cases of students making threats to schools. These threats are disrupting the surrounding communities and are causing many parents to worry about their children's safety. Most of us, including students, are active on social media, and have seen the countless stories and posts about last week's shooter, and other gunmen. While scrolling through newsfeeds, some children see the recognition that these shooters receive and are looking for similar attention. Making threats toward an individual or school is a serious matter, but one therapist believes most of these students do not mean any harm. "I don't ever truly feel like these children are pure evil," said Beth Hicks, a licensed clinical social worker and family and children therapist. "Yes, they're doing it out of malicious [intent], but it's more about themselves and their inner hatred toward themselves and expelling that in an outward manner. Hicks tells WTXL ABC 27 that it's important to really focus on the mental health needs of middle and high school children, as those years can be very busy, trying, and stressful. If a parent or adult sees that a child has thoughts of killing or harming themselves or others, Hicks asks that you don't waste any time in getting them the help they need from a therapist or other resource in town. TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (WTXL) - School safety is on everyones mind lately due to last weeks shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Wednesday, while hundreds of students were rallying for better gun control in schools, others were being arrested across the country for making threats to schools. Three of these students were Tallahassee teens. Leon County Schools has suspended all three students and is recommending that they all be expelled. But are these students actions punishable by law? Well, according to Florida law, its a second degree felony to write a letter or use electronic communications to threaten bodily harm or death to an individual or their family. With many of these recent threats being geared toward schools and not a specific individual, we'll have to wait and see whether these cases go to court. No matter the punishment, threats like this not only disrupt the school, but also disrupt the entire county. "When threats like this are made, we don't have a choice but to follow up and investigate and try to find out in order to keep our kids safe," Leon County Sheriff's Officer, Lieutenant Grady Jordan said. "If there's one threat that was made that we didn't get followed up on and that person went forward with that threat and did something, then we would be second guessing ourselves forever." PARKLAND, Fla. (WTXL) - The school resource deputy on duty during last week's deadly school shooting in south Florida resigned after it came out that he never went into the building where the shooter was. According to the Broward County Sheriff, Deputy Scot Peterson took a position on the west side of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and waited but never went in and never confronted the shooter. Seventeen people were killed in the shooting, and more than a dozen others wounded. Sheriff Scott Israel describes what he believes Peterson should have done. TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (WTXL)- A 17-year-old who was arrested in connection to several robberies using the mobile app, 'letgo' is now being charged as an adult. The teen was charged with three counts of armed robbery and was transported to the Leon County Detention Center Thursday. The state of Florida motioned to prosecute the teen as an adult on Wednesday and the order was granted by a Leon County judge. His first appearance is set for Friday. The 17-year-old and a co-defendant, Dezmond Barkley, are accused of meeting victims to exchange items via the 'letgo' app and robbing them at gunpoint. The state says the 17-year-old has a history with the Department of Juvenile Justice. Barkley, the co-defendant in this case, has pled not guilty to the charges. TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (WTXL) - Two people have been arrested in connection to several robberies involving victims using the online mobile marketplace, 'letgo.' Dezmond G. Barkley, 19, and a 17-year-old are facing felony charges for the string of robberies. The Tallahassee Police Department says they have been getting calls over the last three days from victims saying they had arranged meetings to sell items using the 'letgo' mobile app. The incidents occurred at: -411 Chapel Drive on Jan. 29th -1700 Joe Louis Street on Jan. 30th -1575 Paul Russell Road on Jan. 31st In each case, the victims reported the two arrived at the locations to exchange items for money. Instead, the victims were robbed at gunpoint and their items were stolen. After an investigation connected the two to the crimes, both were charged with three counts of robbery with a firearm. Additionally, Barkley is a convicted felon in Florida. He has been charged with the possession of a firearm. Barkley was taken to the Leon County Detention Facility. The 17-year-old was taken to the Leon County Juvenile Assessment Center. TPD is now warning people to be safe when buying or selling items from online apps or websites like letgo and Craigslist. They recommend that you follow these tips: DEKALB COUNTY, GA (WGCL/CNN) Police said a father beat his 5-year-old son to death with a shovel Wednesday, and then buried him in a backyard. Neighbors in the Atlanta suburb where it happened are shaken. "Something horrible happened here last night and it just broke my heart. It just destroyed me," said neighbor Hoke Johnson. Johnson knows only what he saw happening in front of his Rocky Pine Drive home near Lithonia. "The little baby is gone now," Johnson said. In frustration, Johnson recalled the chaotic scene Wednesday night, when police said a father killed his 5-year-old son. "I didn't even really want to know how he died, Johnson said. The details of what happened are so gruesome that it was difficult even for first responders. "They located the mother, who was attempting to leave to take the child to an area hospital. But the child was already deceased," said Shiera Campbell of the DeKalb County Police Department. WGCL was told the 5-year-olds mother and grandmother went to run errands. The father 25-year-old Montrais Boyd was with the children at home. The house belongs to the boys grandmother. The other children are Boyds younger siblings. "When they arrived home from running errands, the grandmother entered the house and was told by the younger siblings that the father had killed the five-year-old," Campbell said. According to police, the mother went to look for the child and found him buried in the backyard by his father. "The father had bludgeoned the child with a shovel to the point where the child was partially decapitated," Campbell said. Police said the boy was living with his grandmother, and that his parents are visiting from California. Police also said nobody else in the home was hurt and are calling the killing an isolated incident. Copyright 2018 WGCL via CNN. All rights reserved. LAGOS, Feb. 22 (Xinhua) -- The recent attack by suspected Boko Haram insurgents on a college in restive northeast Nigeria's Yobe and the following confusion with regard to the actual number of missing schoolgirls is bringing back memories of the 2014 Chibok attack. The insurgents on Monday night attacked Government Girls' Science Technical College in Dapchi, Bursari Local Government Area, and abducted some of the students. There have been conflicting reports on the incidence among state and federal institutions and officials. The state government said at least 46 were missing. Other reports put the figure at 13. The governor of Nigeria's northeastern state of Yobe, Ibrahim Gaidam, on Thursday said none of the schoolgirls declared missing after an attack by terror group Boko Haram earlier this week was rescued by the military. Over 94 students were missing at first, and the state government said 28 returned late Tuesday and 20 more came back early Wednesday. This draws dreadful and eerie similarities with the confusion that surrounded official communication following the abduction of Chibok girls on April 14, 2014 who have remained with the Boko Haram terrorists for more than 1,400 days. A total of 276 girls were seized by armed men who stormed their dormitories on the night of April 14, 2014, at the Girls Secondary School in Chibok town of Borno State. Only 107 of the Chibok girls have been rescued or returned amid ongoing government negotiation with Boko Haram. There were speculations that some of the girls had been married off by their abductors, while many had been forced to carry out suicide attacks for Boko Haram. The abduction caused global outrage, with many prominent people across the globe demanding their release, and action by the government in that regard. For the Bring Back Our Girls Group agitating for the release of the abducted Chibok school girls, the latest development was a sad one. Sesugh Akume, a spokesperson for the group, said the limited information so far offered the public on the attack of their school and the girls' rescue clearly raise crucial questions that demand prompt answers. "We call on the federal government, the Yobe state government and the Nigerian military, the Nigeria Police Force, and other relevant authorities to promptly investigate this with utmost sense of urgency, and ensure to communicate factually to avert the tragedy of Chibok Girls abduction," Akume added. Bukar Ibrahim, a Senator from Yobe, insisted that 46 students were still missing and condemned the attack on the school as well as the resurgence of insurgency. According to him, there is a need for the federal government to urgently recover the girls in order not to repeat the Chibok girls' experience. In his remark, the Deputy President, of the Senate, Ike Ekweremadu, said the incident provided a reason for another level of policing. "We are aware that the military and indeed the police are overstretched to their limits at this period of insecurity. "That is what makes a stronger case for another level of policing because if you are now asking the military and the police to provide security in all the schools, they cannot have the number to do so," he said. As expected, President Muhammadu Buhari has directed security agencies to take immediate charge of the situation in Dapchi. Dapchi is 100 kilometers from Damaturu, the Yobe State capital. It is 75 kilometers south of the Nigerian border with Niger Republic. Minister of Information Lai Mohammed told reporters after the Federal Executive Council (FEC) meeting that the President also directed the Minister to Defense Mansur Dan-Ali, Minister of Foreign Affairs Geoffrey Onyeama, and himself to proceed to Yobe State Thursday on a fact-finding mission. BELGRADE, Feb. 22 (Xinhua) -- Russia wishes to see terrorist group Jabhat al-Nusra and its partner groups excluded from the ceasefire in Eastern Ghouta, a suburb of Syrian capital of Damascus, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said at a press conference here on Thursday. Lavrov landed at the Belgrade Airport on Wednesday afternoon to attend the ceremony of the 180th anniversary of diplomatic relations between the two countries. Speaking after meeting his Serbian counterpart Ivica Dacic, Lavrov said that Russia was the initiator of today's discussion at the UN Security Council about the draft resolution on the implementation of a 30-day humanitarian truce in Syria. "We are ready to take the proposed resolution into consideration. We suggested a very clear formulation that the ceasefire will not relate to Jabhat al-Nusra and groups with whom it cooperates which shell residential parts of Damascus with artillery fire," Lavrov said. He reminded that regular artillery fire has been coming from the area of Eastern Ghouta for the past year, terrorizing the civilians in Damascus - as well as that on several occasions they struck territory belonging to the Russian embassy and the building of the trade representation of Russia. "Every time when such terrorist attacks start from the area of Eastern Ghouta, we know that behind them is Jabhat al-Nusra and terrorist organizations that cooperate with it and each time we ask from the Security Council to give a principle-based assessment about these unacceptable terrorist acts. Each time our U.S. and European partners avoided to react," Lavrov said. He noted that "Western partners do not want to go so far to exclude terrorist from the ceasefire, which brings up many questions among Russians", and added that just days ago Jabhat al-Nusra and other organizations rejected the offer of Russian Army to leave Eastern Ghouta free-willingly and without their weapons. "They rejected the offer and continued to open fire towards the city from their positions, keeping the civilians from the Eastern Ghouta as a human shield," Lavrov illustrated. ROME, Feb. 22 (Xinhua) -- Mafia organizations might play an influence on Italy's political elections scheduled on March 4, the interior minister has warned. According to local media on Thursday, Interior Minister Marco Minniti said Italy is "at the height of the electoral race," and mafia groups that might threaten the democratic system is not unusual. The minister made his remarks while presenting an annual report by the parliamentary anti-mafia commission to senators on Wednesday. "We do face the risk of the mafia conditioning the free vote of citizens and the election in some areas," he stressed. The minister warned there was "too much silence" on mafia issues in the current electoral campaign. Yet, mafia groups are able "to influence public institutions and politics," Minniti said. The annual report issued by the parliament's anti-mafia commission chaired by lawmaker Rosy Bindi confirmed the 'Ndrangheta based in the southern Calabria region was more powerful than the other two traditional Italian mobs, namely Sicilian Cosa Nostra and Naples-based Camorra. "(After being) underestimated for a long time, the 'Ndrangheta is today the richest, fiercest, and most powerful crime syndicate -- also at transnational level -- due to its leading the global drug trafficking," the commission wrote. Italy has suffered several cases of mafia vote-buying in its history, and toughened its legislation against the phenomenon in 2014. The new law provided a more detailed definition of the vote-buying conduct, and a wider spectrum of behaviors for which politicians and candidates can be put under investigation. Source: Xinhua| 2018-02-23 00:11:57|Editor: pengying Video Player Close Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras (R) shakes hands with Irish President Michael Higgins during their meeting in Athens, Greece, on Feb. 22, 2018. Greek leaders and visiting Irish President Michael Higgins reiterated on Thursday in Athens the need to end austerity and replace it with social cohesion policies to combat populism and build a better EU. (Xinhua/Marios Lolos) by Maria Spiliopoulou ATHENS, Feb. 22 (Xinhua) -- Greek leaders and visiting Irish President Michael Higgins reiterated on Thursday in Athens the need to end austerity and replace it with social cohesion policies to combat populism and build a better EU. "Populism forces emerge in Europe threatening the European edifice. This is happening because we unfortunately followed- and I hope this will change- austerity policies which led to a dead end widening inequalities," Greek President Prokopis Pavlopoulos said welcoming his counterpart at the Presidential mansion. "It is our duty to change these policies, to support the social welfare state, to eliminate phenomena of Nazism and populism which threaten Europe. We must defend the EU," the Greek leader stressed in statements broadcast on Greek national broadcaster ERT. "Social cohesion, social Europe must be placed at the top of the agenda we all now share on the future of the Union, social cohesion within the countries and social cohesion between the countries of the union," Higgins said on his part. "There has been too much suffering and the Union is a union of the peoples of Europe if it is to be at its best," the Irish president added. The Irish leader's official visit to Greece will end on Friday with a visit to the Acropolis and a ceremony at the University of Athens where Higgins will be awarded the title of Professor Emeritus at the Faculty of English Literature. Source: Xinhua| 2018-02-23 01:42:15|Editor: Mu Xuequan Video Player Close WASHINGTON, Feb. 22 (Xinhua) -- An international team has developed an artificial intelligence (AI) tool to screen patients with blinding eye diseases which are treatable if detected at early stages. The paper, published on Thursday in the journal Cell, showed that researchers used the AI-based convolutional neural network to review more than 200,000 eye scans conducted with optical coherence tomography, a noninvasive technology that bounces light off the retina to create two- and three-dimensional representations of tissue. Researchers then employed a technique called transfer learning in which knowledge gained in solving one problem is stored by a computer and applied to different but related problems. For example, an AI neural network optimized to recognize the discrete anatomical structures of the eye, such as the retina, cornea or optic nerve, can identify and evaluate them when examining images of a whole eye. It is more quickly and efficiently than previous tools which require using millions of images to train an AI system, researcher said. This allows the AI system to learn effectively with a much smaller dataset than traditional methods. The researchers also added the "occlusion testing" in which the computer identifies the areas in each image that are of greatest interest and the basis for its conclusions, the paper's senior author Zhang Kang told Xinhua. "Machine learning is often like a black box where we don't know exactly what is happening," said Zhang, professor of ophthalmology at Shiley Eye Institute and University of California San Diego School of Medicine and Guangzhou Women and Children's Medical Center. "With occlusion testing, the computer can tell us where it is looking in an image to arrive at a diagnosis, so we can figure out why the system got the result it did. This makes the system more transparent and increases our trust in the diagnosis." The study focused on two common causes of irreversible blindness: macular degeneration and diabetic macular edema. Both conditions, however, are treatable if detected early. Also, the AI platform is able to generates a treatment recommendation which is not done in previous studies. According to Zhang, with simple training, the machine performed almost similar to a well-trained ophthalmologist, and could generate a decision on whether or not the patient should be referred for treatment within 30 seconds, with more than 95 percent accuracy. The researchers also tested their tool in diagnosing childhood pneumonia, based on machine analyses of chest X-rays. They found that the computer was able to differentiate between viral and bacterial pneumonia with greater than 90 percent accuracy. "The future is more data, more computational power and more experience of the people using this system so that we can provide the best patient care possible, while still being cost-effective," Zhang said. HARARE, Feb. 22 (Xinhua) -- Zimbabwe has resumed diamond auctions after a one-year beak, with a test sale that closed last week realizing 829,067 U.S. dollars. Mines Minister Winston Chitando refused to disclose the amount of gems sold at the test sale, but indicated that the country had accumulated a stock pile of 1.558 million carats during the break from March to December 2017 which will now go for sale in March and April, 2018. The March sale will run from March 5 to 16, the minister said. He said the test sale was attended by 13 out of 49 invited international buyers drawn from countries including Belgium, Botswana, Dubai, India, and South Africa. "This sale was meant to test the market and to appreciate the economic forces at play in the market environment," Chitando told a press conference. The state-owned Zimbabwe Consolidated Diamond Company, formed by government in 2016 after the consolidation of seven firms that were mining gems in Marange in eastern Zimbabwe, is mining the gems. He said the ZCDC was expected to conduct regular diamond auctions throughout 2018 and that the ZCDC and the Minerals Marketing Corporation of Zimbabwe were working on a sales calendar to enable diamond buyers to plan in advance. "The tenders are and will be conducted on the basis of a reserve price," the minister said. According to the minister, the ZCDC suspended diamond sales in March 2017 to facilitate reorientation and capacitation of downstream value management processes as well as to ensure adequate time to align the country's value addition, marketing, and sales framework to international best practice. Zimbabwe's diamond production has been declining over the years from about 12 million carats in 2012 with miners citing dwindling alluvial diamond deposits. The country said last week it was talking with neighboring Botswana, which has a far more developed diamond industry, to assist it in adding value to its gems which are currently being sold in raw form. ROME, Feb. 22 (Xinhua) -- The populist Five Star Movement sometimes veers to the right, Free and Equal (LeU) leader Pietro Grasso told forum conducted by ANSA news agency on Thursday. Grasso, the former Senate speaker, exited from the center-left Democratic Party of outgoing Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni to found LeU, a left-wing party, along with other defectors. "Sometimes it seems the Five Stars move to the right," ANSA quoted Grasso as saying in answer to a question as to whether he thinks dialogue is possible with the anti-establishment Movement founded by comedian Beppe Grillo in 2009. "We must see what policies they intend to promote, and what alliances they will try to exploit," Grasso said. Italy's parties are in the final stages of their campaign ahead of a national election to be held March 4, with their leaders crisscrossing the country and appearing in forums and talk shows on a daily basis to present their platforms and debate against their opponents. It is likely that the March 4 election will result in a hung parliament, because under the current electoral law no party or coalition of parties appears to have enough support to win a majority of seats. The anti-establishment Five Star Movement is the leading party in opinion polls, although its approval ratings so far are not high enough for it to win a working majority. Until recently it espoused anti-euro, anti-immigrant, and no-vax positions. It also said it will never enter into an alliance with other parties, which it says are all corrupt. However, it frequently changes its stance on key policy points, and has recently been affected by a scandal in which some of its elected officials were caught lying about giving back part of their paychecks. "When the Five Stars have a clear policy and when they begin to espouse our priorities in left-wing politics -- from labor, to housing, to university taxes -- then maybe we could think about a dialogue," Grasso concluded. The former speaker, who was an anti-mafia magistrate before entering politics, also said he condemns violence "no matter who commits it". "Any expression of violence in connection with political ideology must be repressed at birth," Grasso said. Italy has been marred in recent days with episodes of violence between extreme right- and left-wing groups, including beatings and stabbings. Source: Xinhua| 2018-02-23 06:28:30|Editor: pengying Video Player Close Photo taken on Feb. 22, 2018 shows a general view of aUnited NationsSecurity Council meeting on the situation inSyriaat the UN headquarters in New York. The United Nations Security Council held discussions Thursday on the situation in Syria's conflicting enclave of Eastern Ghouta, but failed to agree on a resolution calling for a 30-day ceasfire in the war-torn country. (Xinhua/Li Muzi) UNITED NATIONS, Feb. 22 (Xinhua) -- The United Nations Security Council held discussions Thursday on the situation in Syria's conflicting enclave of Eastern Ghouta, but failed to agree on a resolution calling for a 30-day ceasfire in the war-torn country. The council was considering a resolution, drafted by Kuwait and Sweden, that demands "a cessation of hostilities throughout Syria for all military operations except those directed at the Islamic State ... al Qaeda and al Nusra Front" for 30 days to allow aid deliveries and medical evacuations. Swedish Ambassador to the UN Olof Skoog said he hoped the council could vote on the resolution on Thursday. But Russian UN Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia said he would propose amendments to the text for "it to be realistic." No agreement was reached at the council on the ceasefire "as the conflict deepens in the Arab country due to a sharp rise in terrorist attacks," according to Nebenzia. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Wednesday appealed to the council to approve the ceasefire draft resolution, and especially to help the 400,000 besieged residents of Eastern Ghouta, whom he said, "live in hell on Earth." WASHINGTON, Feb. 22 (Xinhua) -- Special counsel Robert Mueller filed a new indictment on Thursday against U.S. President Donald Trump's former campaign aides, Paul Manafort and Rick Gates. The new indictment, filed in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, state of Virginia, includes new allegations of tax evasion and bank fraud against Manafort, former Trump campaign chief, and Gates, a former campaign aide. The pair were charged last October with money laundering, conspiracy and other offenses in federal court in Washington. They pleaded not guilty to those charges, which were also filed by Mueller. The new indictment came a week after Mueller sought charges against 13 Russian nationals and three Russian entities, accusing them of interfering in the 2016 U.S. presidential elections. Source: Xinhua| 2018-02-23 06:53:34|Editor: pengying Video Player Close BRASILIA, Feb. 22 (Xinhua) -- The Brazilian minister of health, Ricardo Barros, proposed on Thursday to vaccinate the entire country against yellow fever, after the disease emerged in new areas. The recommendation will now be discussed with international organizations, such as the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO). At the start of February, vaccination efforts began in states of Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Bahia, seeking to immunize 19.7 million people against yellow fever, for which cases have been rising since last year. According to Barros, if the government approves the idea, separate programs will take place in each state of the country. Barros added that the vaccination campaign should be rolled out gradually, according to the capacity of each state. Certain northeastern and southern regions of the country have not seen campaigns so far, as there have been no outbreaks of yellow fever there. 34 million need to be vaccinated there, with 23 million in the northeast and 11 million in the south of the country. A plant belonging to Libbs Farmaceutica in Sao Paulo is currently about to begin production of 4 million doses of vaccine a month. From July 1, 2017 to Feb. 20, 2018, Brazil has confirmed 545 cases of yellow fever, with 164 deaths. A further 1,773 suspected cases have been noted, with 685 having been eliminated and 422 still under investigation. Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks at a gala evening held in the Kremlin Palace in Moscow, Russia on February 22, 2018. (KREMLIN PHOTO) MOSCOW, Feb. 22 (Xinhua) -- Russian President Vladimir Putin said here Thursday that Russia's combat efficiency and quality of weapons can be ranked the best in the world, which ensures the country's safety. "Developments of the past years have shown that we are in the top tier in the world in combat readiness and in the quality of armaments and military equipment. Today we can say with full confidence that Russia's security is guaranteed," Putin said at a gala evening held in the Kremlin Palace in honor of the Defender of the Fatherland Day, a major Russian national holiday on February 23. Russia will continue its efforts in enhancing its defense capacity in all its components, including reinforcing the capabilities and resources of strategic nuclear deterrence as well as promoting effective development of special and general-purpose units and formations, Putin said. "We rely on the potential of our defense-industrial complex, its best enterprises and the achievements of research and development centers. They have already proved their worth and global competitiveness," he said. Putin praised Russian servicemen who participated and are participating in military operations in Syria, which showed that they have been well-trained and committed to their duty with dignity, resolution and courage to the end. WASHINGTON, Feb. 22 (Xinhua) -- Special counsel Robert Mueller filed a new indictment on Thursday against U.S. President Donald Trump's former campaign aides, Paul Manafort and Rick Gates. The new indictment, filed in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, state of Virginia, includes new allegations of tax evasion and bank fraud against Manafort, former Trump campaign chief, and Gates, a former campaign aide. The pair were charged last October with money laundering, conspiracy and other offenses in federal court in Washington. They pleaded not guilty to those charges, which were also filed by Mueller. The new indictment comes a week after Mueller sought charges against 13 Russian nationals and three Russian entities, accusing them of interfering in the 2016 U.S. presidential elections. According to the 32-count indictment, prosecutors alleged that Manafort and Gates laundered 30 million U.S. dollars, failed to pay taxes for nearly 10 years and used their real estate to fraudulently secure over 20 million dollars in loan. But neither the October indictment, nor the additional charges, include allegations of collusion with Russia as part of the Trump campaign. Analysts say that Thursday's indictment is part of Mueller's effort to step up pressure on Manafort and Gates to cooperate with the collusion case as they prepare for trial later this year. Trump has repeatedly denied allegations of collusion between his campaign and Russians while describing the Russia probe as a "hoax" or a "witch hunt." Source: Xinhua| 2018-02-23 07:38:40|Editor: Xiang Bo Video Player Close LOS ANGELES, Feb. 22 (Xinhua) -- The San Diego Chinese Historical Museum (SDCHM) unveiled on Thursday a new exhibit, "The Life & Deeds of Dr. Shih-Liang Chien", providing a rare opportunity to view heirlooms and family precepts of a well-respected Chinese family, that has expanded to San Diego, California. This exhibit is on view in Downtown San Diego at SDCHM's Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Memorial Building from Thursday to April 8. It provides a rare glimpse into as far as six generations of renowned scientist Shih-Liang Chien's family. "We are delighted to bring this rare bit of history to share with San Diegans, as it's the only exhibit of its kind and explores family precepts, family portraits and family values," Lilly Cheng, Director of the Confucius Institute at San Diego State University and former Board Chair of SDCHM, was quoted as saying in a news release. The exhibit pays special attention to Chien and his son, Dr. Shu Chien, who are both highly honored for their scientific achievements. Chien, born in 1908 in China's Zhejiang province and died in 1983, served in many prestigious and scholarly positions during his life as a notable Chinese chemist and educator. And Shu Chien is a local San Diegan, serving as the President of the Institute of Engineering in Medicine at University of California, San Diego (UCSD). Shu Chien is an eminent Chinese-American physiologist and engineer. He received the highest honor in his industry, the U.S. National Medal of Science from President Obama in 2011 for "pioneering work in cardiovascular physiology and bioengineering." The exhibit provides an opportunity to view exclusive family artifacts, photographs and rare collections of family precepts in both English and Chinese. According to the museum, visitors will also have a chance to examine an entire collection of Shih-Liang Chien and his son's books and manuscripts on display. Source: Xinhua| 2018-02-23 07:53:42|Editor: Xiang Bo Video Player Close Zhou Libo (2nd L, Front) leaves after a court session at the Nassau County Court, New York, the United States, on Feb. 22, 2018. The Preliminary Hearing of the case of Chinese comedian Zhou Libo, who is facing weapon and drug charges, will be held on March 15, 2018, a judge announced on Thursday. (Xinhua/Wang Ying) NEW YORK, Feb. 22 (Xinhua) -- The Preliminary Hearing of the case of Chinese comedian Zhou Libo, who is facing weapon and drug charges, will be held on March 15, 2018, a judge announced on Thursday. Patricia A. Harrington, the judge in charge of the case, made the announcement on the case's latest court session at the Nassau County Court, New York. Zhou, together with his wife and lawyer, appeared at the court session Thursday, is charged with illegal possession of a handgun, possession of a controlled substance identified as crystal methamphetamine and driving while using a cellphone. If convicted, he may be facing a sentence up to 15 years of jail. On January 19, 2017, Zhou was stopped by the police in the town of Lattingtown, the United States, for his abnormal driving behavior. The police later found a black pistol holster, a loaded pistol, and two transparent plastic bags containing drugs in his vehicle. Zhou was arrested on the spot and was released on bail the next day. Source: Xinhua| 2018-02-23 08:42:57|Editor: Xiang Bo Video Player Close Photo taken on Feb. 22, 2018 shows a giant lantern in the shape of Temple of Heaven during an exhibition at the Grand Place in Brussels, Belgium. The exhibition Light the Heart of Europe with gigantic Chinese lanterns was held in Brussels on Thursday to celebrate the Chinese Lunar New Year and the year of tourism between the European Union and China. The exhibition will last until Feb. 28. (Xinhua/Ye Pingfan) LONDON, Feb. 22 (Xinhua) -- Newly-elected leader of the Irish political party Sinn Fein Mary Lou McDonald said Thursday that talks to reinstate a new government for the province of Northern Ireland had reached a "decisive phase" and called for "positive political momentum." McDonald told a press briefing in London that "The Good Friday Agreement is entering its 20th anniversary and now is a moment to be decisive, and we told British Prime Minister (Theresa) May this." On Wednesday, May held talks with Irish republicans Sinn Fein and unionists the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) in London to try to get a Northern Ireland government, known as the Assembly, reformed. McDonald, who was in London for the talks, held the press conference with London's Foreign Press Association (FPA) to give her verdict on the failure of the talks to reestablish a government for the province. "It is not tenable 14 months on after a draft agreement had been struck and then walked away from by the DUP to say that the answer is a period of reflection," she said. "We need decisive leadership. We need the two governments Dublin and London to work hand in hand, an inter-governmental conference, and a map to resolve the methodology and issues of language, marriage equality and inquests and a positive political dynamic to get the Assembly up and running." Gay marriage, use of the Gaelic language and an examination of deaths caused by paramilitary organizations during the Troubles period from the 1970s to 1998 when the Good Friday Agreement brought peace to Northern Ireland are key points for Sinn Fein in talks to reinstate the government. Northern Ireland has been without a government for months, since the power-sharing government of Sinn Fein and the DUP failed to reform after elections in 2017. A week ago talks in Northern Ireland's capital Belfast on the government reform collapsed, prompting calls from some unionists for a direct rule for the province from the British government. The issue of reforming the Northern Ireland Assembly is now complicated by Brexit, with fears that Britain's exit from the European Union (EU) could see a hard border set up between Northern Ireland and Ireland and weaken the deal brokered between both Ireland and Britain and all the political parties in the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. "The difficulty for us was that we negotiated for 14 months in good faith with people in the room with whom we reached an agreement but they were not able to deliver," said Sinn Fein negotiator Conor Murphy, who is at the center of talks to reinstate the Northern Ireland Assembly. He added that the prospect of getting back to the negotiating table was frustrated because the people carrying out the negotiations were not those making decisions. Source: Xinhua| 2018-02-23 10:39:05|Editor: pengying Video Player Close BANGKOK, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- A grand Spring Festival gala was staged in the southern Thai city of Hat Yai Thursday night for overseas Chinese and Thais to join the Chinese Lunar New Year celebrations. Some 3,000 people watched the "Cultures of China, Festival of Spring," which is jointly presented by the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office of the State Council of China, the Chinese Consulate-General in Songkhla, the Association of Clubs and Foundations in Hat Yai and the Overseas Chinese Service Center in Hat Yai, at the Prince of Songkhla University International Convention Center. The Chinese art troupe performed beautiful dancing, such as the famous Drunken Beauty, and popular Chinese songs. Pairin Sringkaranan, a local Thai Chinese member of the audience, said China has paid much attention to overseas Chinese and she believed there will be more exchanges between Thailand and China. Zhou Haicheng, Chinese consul-general in Songkhla, expressed his gratitude for the Thai Chinese communities and other social organizations to join hands in preparing for the gala while extending his best wishes to people in south Thailand. Zhou praised Thai Chinese living in south Thailand for their contributions to the development of Thailand and friendship between the two countries. "The group of artists bring their best wishes from Chinese people to all in south Thailand by this amazing gala, which shows that our two countries share many in common in terms of culture and the gala is bound to contribute to the friendship and cultural exchange between our two peoples," he said. Governor of Songkhla Province Dondej Pattanarat and Chief Executive of Songkhla Provincial Administration Organization Niphon Boonyamanee also praised Chinese traditional culture and people-to-people exchanges between Thailand and China. They said the gala would help Thais know more about Chinese culture and boost cultural exchanges. SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 22 (Xinhua) -- An increasing number of women are expected to take up leadership positions in startup companies across the world, a leading U.S. bank said in a report Thursday. Although 67 percent of startups surveyed have no women on their boards and 51 percent have no women in executive positions, more startups are rolling out programs to put women in leadership, with the number jumping from 28 percent to 43 percent over the past year, said Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), one of the largest banks in the United States that focus on tech firms and innovation. In its ninth annual Startup Outlook 2018 report, SVB surveyed 1,045 startup executives primarily in the United States, Britain and China, and found that a quarter of startups globally had a female founder or co-founder. SVB compared startups' views of the innovation economy based on the gender of their founders, and discovered that little progress has been made in technology leadership in the United States in the past three years. It said companies with at least one female founder complained that the fundraising environment is more challenging, and those firms tend to rely more heavily on angel and individual investors and less on venture capitalists than startups with no female founders. As to their programs to increase the proportion of women in leadership, the startups said they are adopting various measures to attract more women employees, such as changing the way job descriptions are written to mitigate potential unconscious bias against women candidates and encouraging industry involvement in female-focused organizations. "Our clients are always looking at what's next, how to improve on the status quo, and once they decide to do something they move quickly," said SVB Chief Executive Officer Greg Becker. WASHINGTON, Feb. 22 (Xinhua) -- A canceled high-level meeting between Washington and Pyongyang and the looming U.S.-South Korean annual military drills may have dampened the recently generated positive momentum on the Korean Peninsula, U.S. experts on international relations have said. U.S. Vice President Mike Pence was set to meet with officials from the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) during the Winter Olympics in South Korea but Pyongyang canceled the meeting, U.S. media reported Tuesday, citing Pence's office. For Pyongyang, "it would be a major step for any Kim family member to meet with Pence ... They likely canceled because of Pence's recent comments about sanctions," Troy Stangarone, senior director with the Washington-based Korea Economic Institute, told Xinhua. Pence threatened to slap the "toughest and most aggressive" sanctions on the already weakened DPRK three days before his planned Feb. 10 meeting with Kim Yong Nam, president of the Presidium of the DPRK Supreme People's Assembly, and Kim Yo Jong, the younger sister of DPRK leader Kim Jong Un. "It will be hard to establish mutual talks between the U.S. and North Korea (DPRK) as America increases sanctions and tightens the pressure on North Korea," Brookings Institution Senior Fellow Darrell West told Xinhua, adding that it will aggravate Pyongyang and decrease the odds of talks. The U.S. side might see the meeting as a good opportunity to convince the world that the U.S. position on Pyongyang was "not unreasonable and open to negotiation," yet "the (Trump) administration believes such talks will come only if there is maximum pressure," said Douglas Paal, vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. In fact, on his way home from PyeongChang, Pence told a U.S. reporter that while keeping maximum pressure on the DPRK, the United States and South Korea agreed to further engage with Pyongyang. Recent weeks have seen many examples of goodwill and brotherhood between the two Koreas as Pyongyang focused on its role in the Winter Olympics. The DPRK has sent its athletes, cheerleaders and a high-ranking delegation to PyeongChang, showing its willingness to improve inter-Korean relations and ease tensions on the Korean Peninsula. South Korean President Moon Jae-in also received Kim Jong Un's invitation letter, asking him to visit Pyongyang at a convenient time, which opened a possibility for the third inter-Korean summit meeting. However, the schedule for the annual South Korea-U.S. war games, temporarily delayed due to the 23rd Winter Olympics and Paralympic Games, will be unveiled in mid-March, South Korea's defense chief said Tuesday. The DPRK has condemned the resumption of the war games as a move that will escalate tension and threatened that it may cause "irrevocable consequences." "We have to wait and see what the exercises look like. Some exercises can be very provocative and offensive," said Paal. The DPRK will tell the world that they had reached out for peace yet the United States and South Korea turned them away, said Stangarone. KATHMANDU, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- Nepal will be holding an election to choose the country's new president on March 13, the Election Commission (EC) said. The election body set the date for holding the presidential election after the EC officials held separate meetings with political party leaders including Prime Minister K.P. Sharma Oli on Thursday, according to the EC Spokesman Navaraj Dhakal. The new president and vice-president should be elected through a voting by Electoral College comprising parliamentarians of the Federal Parliament and Provincial Assemblies a month after the formation of Federal Parliament as per the constitutional provisions. "There will be a separate election to choose new vice president a week after the presidential election," EC Spokesman Dhakal said. The tenures of current President Bidya Devi Bhandari and Vice President Nanda Bahadur Pun will be over soon, who were elected to the posts in October 2015. The elections to choose new president and vice president are going to take place more than two months after the Himalayan nation held landmark Federal Parliament and Provincial Assembly elections simultaneously in two phases in November and December 2017. These elections were crucial steps to implement the milestone new constitution of Nepal promulgated in September 2015. TRIPOLI, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- The Libyan government has won an international legal case against two Brazilian construction companies that claimed 96 million U.S. dollars in damages due to the suspension of their projects in Libya, local authorities said Thursday. "The efforts of the Department of State Cases Affairs, in coordination with the Audit Bureau, were successful. This cooperation has resulted in the winning of the international case by the chamber of commerce in Paris rejecting the case filed against Libya by the Libyan-Brazilian company and the Brazilian company Odebrecht," the Libyan Audit Bureau said in a statement Thursday. The Libyan Audit Bureau has suspended the compensation payment procedures for the two companies and refused to settle and appeal the case. However, the infrastructure projects of the two companies have been suspended since 2011 due to the deteriorating security condition. In addition, the Libyan department also called for continued mutual coordination of state institutions to "stop those wishing to exploit the circumstances in Libya to seize its funds and assets." Following the 2011 uprising that toppled former leader Muammar Gaddafi's regime, foreign companies left Libya and all projects executed by this kind of companies have been suspended. Source: Xinhua| 2018-02-23 13:06:48|Editor: pengying Video Player Close Participants carry children in traditional custumes on sedan chairs to march around the village as they sing and dance to pray for good fortune and a good harvest year during a performance to celebrate the traditional Dong ethnic group's festival "Tai Guan Ren," in Huanggang Village of Liping County, Qiandongnan Miao and Dong Autonomous Prefecture, southwest China's Guizhou Province, Feb. 22, 2018. "Tai Guan Ren," which means "carry the peace and luck envoy," is an annual Dong people's festival usually celebrated during the beginning of the Chinese Lunar New Year. (Xinhua/Yang Daifu) Massive fire breaks out at chemical factory in southern India Source: Xinhua 2018-02-23 11:34:12 NEW DELHI, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- A massive fire broke out at a chemical factory in an industrial area in the southern Indian city of Hyderabad Friday morning, police said. Editor: Xiang Bo Related News Back to Top WASHINGTON, Feb. 22 (Xinhua) -- Special counsel Robert Mueller filed a new indictment Thursday against U.S. President Donald Trump's former campaign aides, Paul Manafort and Rick Gates. The new indictment, filed in the U.S. District Court in Alexandria, in the state of Virginia, includes new allegations of tax evasion and bank fraud against Manafort, the former Trump campaign chief, and Gates, a former campaign aide. They were among the first to be charged, as part of a Mueller-led investigation into alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and collusion between the Trump campaign and Moscow. The pair were charged last October with money laundering, conspiracy and other offenses in a federal court in Washington. They pleaded not guilty to those charges, which were also filed by Mueller. The new indictment comes a week after Mueller sought charges against 13 Russian nationals and three Russian entities, accusing them of interfering in the 2016 U.S. presidential elections. According to the 32-count indictment, prosecutors alleged that Manafort and Gates laundered 30 million U.S. dollars, failed to pay taxes for nearly 10 years and used their real estate to fraudulently secure over 20 million dollars in loans. They "hid the existence and ownership of the foreign companies and bank accounts," the indictment said. But neither the October indictment, nor the additional charges, include allegations of collusion with Russia as part of the Trump campaign. Those charges are related to money from their lobbying work for pro-Russian politicians in Ukraine. Analysts said that Thursday's indictment is part of Mueller's effort to step up pressure on Manafort and Gates to cooperate with the collusion case as they prepare for trial later this year. Trump has repeatedly denied allegations of collusion between his campaign and Russians while describing the Russia probe as a "hoax" and a "witch hunt." Russia has denied meddling in the U.S. presidential election. Source: Xinhua| 2018-02-23 12:24:20|Editor: Xiang Bo Video Player Close HANOI, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- China overpassed the United States to become Vietnam's biggest export market in January, the General Department of Vietnam Customs said on Friday. Vietnam exported roughly 3.7 billion U.S. dollars worth of goods to China last month, up 106 percent against January 2017, said the department. Specifically, Vietnam exported nearly 895 million U.S. dollars worth of phones and their components to China, a 19-fold increase from January 2017; some 691 million U.S. dollars worth of computers, electronic appliances and components, up 80.1 percent; and 296.3 million U.S. dollars worth of vegetables and fruits, up 68.6 percent. Last month, Vietnam spent nearly 5.8 billion U.S. dollars importing products from China, said the department. BERLIN, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- The number of passengers at German airports reached a record high in 2017, figures released Thursday by the Federal Statistical Office showed. The Wiesbaden-based government statisticians counted 117.6 million passengers in spite of the widely-publicized bankruptcy of Germany's second-largest carrier Air Berlin in August, marking an increase of roughly 5 percent. Since Air Berlin ceased operation entirely in October 2017, rival budget airlines such as Easyjet and Eurowings have expanded their presence in the German market. According to the Federal Statistical Office, the upward trend was driven by a surge in international travel while the number of passengers on domestic flights was largely stagnant. Spain was by far the most popular destination visited by Germans with 14 million passengers, followed by Britain with 7.3 million and Italy 7 million. Both Greece and Portugal experienced a significant increase in air traffic from Germany in 2017, 19.2 percent and 16.4 percent respectively. By contrast, the popularity of Turkey among German visitors continued to decline. The Federal Statistical Office attributed weak demand for connections with Turkey to the country's political instability since the failed military coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in 2016 and related diplomatic tensions between Ankara and Berlin. The official figures also suggest that Germans are developing a growing appetite for long-haul flights, with the number of passengers on such routes rising by 8.4 percent to 21 million. Air traffic with Africa, in particular, experienced a veritable boom in 2017 with 3.2 million passengers, up 35.2 percent, with destinations like Egypt and Morocco being popular. Source: Xinhua| 2018-02-23 13:09:29|Editor: pengying Video Player Close UNITED NATIONS, Feb. 22 (Xinhua) -- The Chinese envoy to the United Nations (UN) on Thursday urged the international community to support the parties involved in the Syrian crisis to resume dialogue, amid the escalating situation in the war-torn country. Ma Zhaoxu, China's permanent representative to the United Nations, said at the UN Security Council briefing on Syria that efforts should be made to seek a solution accepted by all parties through the Syrian-owned and Syrian-led political process. Recently, the security situation in parts of Syria, including its capital Damascus and the Eastern Ghouta region, has escalated, causing large civilian casualties and attracting a lot of attention from the international community, Ma said, adding that China would like to express its profound sympathy to the Syrian people for their sufferings. "We condemn all acts of violence that target civilians and civilian facilities and hurt innocent lives," Ma said. China always insists that there is no military solution to the Syrian issue, he said, adding that political settlement is the only way out. "It is the only way to fundamentally ease the humanitarian situation in Syria and rid the Syrian people of their sufferings at an early date," Ma said. Terrorist organizations are still launching attacks in Syria, which have caused large civilian casualties and impeded the humanitarian relief efforts of the United Nations, he said. The international community should strengthen cooperation on counter-terrorism, adopt unified standards, and resolutely combat all terrorist organizations designated by the Security Council, Ma said. Actions taken by the Security Council on Syria's humanitarian issue should not only help improve the overall humanitarian situation in Syria, but also help consolidate the momentum of ceasefire in Syria, and be conducive to the bigger picture of political settlement of the Syria issue, the Chinese envoy said. China calls upon the Security Council to remain united on the Syrian issue, take a united stance, and create favorable conditions for substantive progress in Syria's political process as soon as possible, Ma said. The Syrian army on Thursday urged civilians in Eastern Ghouta, east of Damascus, to leave their houses, ahead of a military offensive. The civilians were instructed to take safe exits to move to areas under the Syrian army's control. The Syrian army launched operations on the outskirts of Eastern Ghouta and shelled the rebel positions on Sunday. Eastern Ghouta, home to around 350,000 civilians, has long been a major threat to Damascus. It was used by rebels as a base to launch attacks against the capital. Four key rebel groups are positioned inside Eastern Ghouta, namely the Islam Army, Failaq al-Rahman, Ahrar al-Sham and the Levant Liberation Committee, also known as the al-Qaida-linked Nusra Front. MEXICO CITY, Feb. 22 (Xinhua) -- Mexico saw a record revenue from international tourism in 2017, netting 21.3 billion U.S. dollars from the sector and up 8.3 percent from 2016, Tourism Minister Enrique de la Madrid said Thursday. In a press conference, de la Madrid said that 2017 had seen "historical numbers" for tourism. He said Mexico welcomed 39.3 million foreign travelers in 2017, a 12-percent increase from 2016. This makes the sector the third-largest source of income for Mexico, behind the automotive industry and remittance from abroad. The minister said in the last five years, Mexico has pioneered a special strategy for tourism backed by public policies that allowed the Mexican tourism sector to experience "an unprecedented boost to the development of a modern, competitive and environmentally responsible tourism offering." He added that the increase had also been due to landmark events such as the Day of the Dead parade or the Mexico Grand Prix Formula One race. "The tourism sector is one of the pillars of the president's economic project. Today, over 10 million Mexicans live directly or indirectly from tourism, an industry that has grown with our entire economy," said Eduardo Sanchez, a government spokesperson who also attended the press conference. Since 2012, Mexico's gross domestic product has grown by an average of 2.5 percent a year. The tourism sector has outpaced the national economy with growth at 3 percent a year, Sanchez said. CAPE TOWN, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- An elderly British couple were kidnapped in South Africa more than a week ago, police said Thursday, amid reports that they were abducted by extremists suspected to have links to the Islamic State group. The couple, who live in South Africa's second-largest city of Cape Town and have dual British and South African citizenship, were kidnapped on Feb. 12 during their holiday near a popular tourist spot in southern KwaZulu-Natal province. Local reports said the couple's disappearance was linked to the so-called Islamic State group, while police declined to comment on any such link. However, they said the two suspects, Sayfydeen Aslam Del Vecchio, 38, and Fatima Patel, 27, faced a charge of kidnapping as well as offenses that fall under an anti-terrorism act. The United States and Britain warned in 2016 of the possibility of attacks by jihadist extremists in South Africa's major cities. The country has so far been spared the jihadist attacks that have struck several other countries on the continent. Muslims account for just 1.5 percent of South Africa's 54 million people. PHNOM PENH, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- Cambodia reported 45,991 malaria cases last year, a 95-percent rise from the 23,627 cases in a year earlier, a senior health official said on Friday. Huy Rekol, director of the National Center for Parasitology, Entomology and Malaria Control, said the disease killed one person in 2017, the same as that of 2016. He attributed the remarkable increase in malaria cases last year to changing climate and expired insecticide-treated mosquito nets. "Last year, the weather had changed with prolonged rainy season that was conducive to mosquito breeding," Huy Rekol told Xinhua. "Another factor is that insecticide-treated mosquito nets, which had been distributed to people living in malaria-prone areas, had lost its efficiency after being used for three years." According to Rekol, the Southeast Asian country was planning to distribute about 1.6 million insecticide-treated mosquito nets to the vulnerable groups of people this year. Malaria is a mosquito-borne infectious disease, which is often found in a rainy season and mostly happens in forest and mountainous provinces. To prevent the disease, people living in malaria-prone areas need to sleep under insecticide-treated mosquito nets all the time. In 2016, Cambodia launched a 142-million-U.S.-dollars, five-year plan to eliminate the death from malaria by 2020 and set a target to wipe out all malaria cases by 2025. CANBERRA, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- Australia's indigenous affairs minister has called for a comprehensive review of child protection services after the alleged rape of a two-year-old girl. A 24-year old local man has been charged over the incident. The child spent four days in hospital before being released on Wednesday. Minister Nigel Scullion urged the Northern Territory (NT) government to be transparent about the circumstances leading to the alleged rape of the child in Tennant Creek, 500 kilometers north of Alice Springs. "Every child is entitled to live in a safe, happy and healthy home. No child should ever be subject to any sort of abuse, let alone the horrendous sexual assault that we have all heard about," he told reporters in Tennant Creek on Thursday evening. "I have asked the NT government to be as open and transparent as possible about the circumstances leading up to this incident." More than 20 notifications were made to child services about the household where the incident occurred but Territory Families has maintained that there was "no specific concerns." Of the 21 total notifications, Territory Families said only six were substantiated and none were of a "sexual nature." The body said that the reports were related to domestic violence and alcohol and were "not substantial enough to take the child out of this household and away from the mother." The victim's uncle, who cannot be named for legal reasons, said eight notifications were made to child services in the two months prior to the alleged rape. "There were concerns about this little girl and nothing really happened," he said. "Eight notifications in the last two months and they haven't sent one to this office here because they assessed it as not high risk. How do they know? They don't live here. "Failure after failure after failure, how much longer can we put up with this?" The alleged rape was the 714th case of a sexual offence involving a child under the age of 16 in the NT since 2013. MANILA, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has said he would not allow Philippine troops to participate in any armed conflicts involving the Unites States. In a speech in Iloilo province on Thursday, Duterte said that he does not want the Philippines to be dragged into a war that has nothing to do with the Philippines. "This time I will tell them, no more, I will not allow the deployment of (troops of my country)," Duterte said, adding that most of the U.S.-led wars have nothing to do with the country's security. Duterte recalled the Iraq war. "I don't know exactly how many Philippine troops were deployed in that conflict. But as far as I can remember, the invasion was done and it turned out there was no weapons of mass destruction," he said. Duterte also mentioned other wars that involved the United States. The Philippines is a treaty ally of the United States. However, their relations have been strained in recent years. In a report issued this month, U.S. intelligence community tags Duterte as a threat to democracy and human rights in Southeast Asia. Source: Xinhua| 2018-02-23 13:34:33|Editor: Jiaxin Video Player Close DAMASCUS, Feb. 22 (Xinhua) -- Airstrikes continued Thursday on the last rebel enclave near Syria's capital as the United Nations (UN) Security Council considered a resolution demanding a 30-day humanitarian ceasefire across the Mideast country. Meanwhile, the Syrian government forces urged civilians in the besieged Eastern Ghouta region on the outskirts of Damascus to move to areas under its control, and gave instructions on how to take safe exits in leaflets dropped by helicopters, reported the War Media, the media wing of the Syrian army. The Security Council held discussions Thursday on the escalation of violence in Eastern Ghouta, but failed to agree on a draft resolution demanding a ceasefire. The resolution, drafted by Kuwait and Sweden, demanded "a cessation of hostilities throughout Syria for all military operations except those directed at the Islamic State ... al Qaeda and al Nusra Front" for 30 days to allow emergency aid deliveries and medical evacuations. In response to the Swedish call for a council vote Thursday, Russian Ambassador to the United Nations Vassily Nebenzia said that "the conflict deepens in the Arab country due to a sharp rise in terrorist attacks," and proposed amendments to the resolution text for "it to be realistic." Reports of civilian deaths and hospital attacks during the latest escalation of violence in Eastern Ghouta have prompted calls for an immediate halt to the fighting. The Syrian government said the rebels have rained mortar shells down on Damascus while its forces retaliated with intensified airstrikes and shellings. A day earlier, the Syria-based Russian Reconciliation Center said the rebels didn't respond to calls for laying down their weapons and a ceasefire. Nebenzia on Wednesday asked the 15-member Security Council to meet on Thursday to discuss the situation. The latest airstrikes in Eastern Ghouta, for the fifth day in a row Thursday on the rebel stronghold of 400,000, was believed to be the fiercest of its kind in the seven-year civil war in Syria. Heavy shelling and aerial bombardment were reportedly going on over the past 24 hours, killing at least 50 people and wounding at least 200 others, said Mark Lowcock, the UN undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator, on Thursday. Lowcock called on the Security Council to take "urgent and concrete action." "What we need is a sustained cessation of hostilities, and we need it desperately -- a cessation of violence that will enable the immediate, safe, unimpeded and sustained delivery of humanitarian aid and services, the evacuation of the critically sick and wounded and an alleviation of the suffering of the Syrian people," he told the council. Ma Zhaoxu, China's permanent representative to the United Nations, reiterated on Thursday China's stance on the Syria issue that political settlement is the only way out, while noting that the pressing task the international community now faces is supporting the Syrian parties in resuming dialogue and negotiation under UN mediation as soon as possible. "We condemn all acts of violence that target civilians and civilian facilities and hurt innocent lives," Ma said at the council briefing on Syria. Source: Xinhua| 2018-02-23 13:39:34|Editor: pengying Video Player Close BEIJING, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- China's insurance regulator on Friday announced a decision to take over Anbang Insurance Group for a year starting the same day, in light of the company's former chief being prosecuted for economic crimes. The move is taken to maintain normal operations at the company and protect consumers' rights, according to a statement of the China Insurance Regulatory Commission (CIRC). "Illegal business practices by Anbang Insurance Group may seriously threaten the solvency of the company," said the CIRC in the statement. Public prosecutors recently filed a lawsuit against Wu Xiaohui, former chairman of the board and general manager of Anbang, in the Shanghai Municipal No. 1 Intermediate People's Court, accusing him of fundraising fraud and embezzlement by taking advantage of his post, according to sources from the No. 1 Branch of the Shanghai Municipal People's Procuratorate. The CIRC said it has demanded Anbang Insurance Group to "adjust" Wu's positions as the company's chairman and general manager. A special group has been established, with participation of personnel representing departments including the CIRC, the People's Bank of China, the China Banking Regulatory Commission, the China Securities Regulatory Commission and the State Administration of Foreign Exchange, to be responsible for the takeover of the company, the statement said. The rights and liabilities of the company will not be changed after the takeover, it added. "At present, business operations of the group are stable and interests of consumers and stakeholders have been protected," said the statement. During the takeover, Anbang Group will remain as a private insurer, while social capital will be introduced to complete the company's shareholder restructuring, according to the statement. Source: Xinhua| 2018-02-23 14:09:40|Editor: pengying Video Player Close JOHANNESBURG, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- A senior South African government official on Thursday said China is an important partner of his country and that bilateral relations have reached a new high. Manelisi Genge, chief director of East Asia and Oceania in South Africa's Department of International Relations and Cooperation, said this at an event to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the diplomatic relations between the two countries. "The South Africa-China diplomatic relations have reached a milestone. China has become a vibrant and important partner for our country's development. China is now one of the best trading partners," said Genge. "We continue to make strides in political, economic and cultural relations with China," said Genge at the "20 Years of South Africa-China Engagements: Past, Present and Future Dialogue" at the University of the Witwatersrand. Genge said South Africa has realized the need to make China one of its partners barely four years after the country's independence and the country does not regret the move. China and South Africa established diplomatic relations on Jan. 1, 1998. In 2010, the China-South Africa relationship was upgraded to a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership. Trade between the two countries increased from 17 billion U.S. dollars in 2012 to 22.5 billion dollars in 2013. The increase reached 25 billion dollars in 2016, Genge said. "In August 2017, South Africa became the first in the continent to export beef to China. The Chinese government gives scholarships to 30 South Africans every year," he said. People-to-people relations between the two countries got a boost in 2017. Genge said the government wants to continue to strengthen exchanges in all sectors including academia and civil society. "We have hundreds of students in China. Sending these students is an investment for us. We expect them to learn business acumen, the culture of doing business, disciple and competence," he said. He said that the relations with China have enabled the country to better address key priority areas like fighting poverty, unemployment and inequality. Meanwhile, Kobus van der Wath, managing director of The Beijing Axis, an international advisory and procurement firm, said that while relations between the two countries have strengthened in the past years, more still needs to be done to make full use of the potential of the bilateral partnership. "The opportunities are not fully appreciated in South Africa ... South Africa needs to tap the huge and dynamic Chinese market." SEOUL, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- The Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK)'s dispatch of a high-ranking delegation to the closing ceremony of the Winter Olympics will help keep a dialogue mood on the Korean Peninsula, Seoul's unification ministry said Friday. The DPRK notified South Korea of its plan to send an Olympic delegation, led by Kim Yong Chol, vice chairman of the Central Committee of the ruling Workers' Party of Korea, to the closing ceremony of the Winter Olympics slated for Sunday. The delegation, including Ri Son Gwon, chairman of the Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of the Fatherland, will make a three-day visit to South Korea beginning Sunday. The South Korean unification ministry said the DPRK delegation's participation in the closing ceremony will advance the process of making peace on the Korean Peninsula, including improved inter-Korean ties and denuclearization. The ministry said in a separate statement Friday that the participation will bring an opportunity for talks to make peace on the peninsula and enhance inter-Korean relations as Vice Chairman Kim doubles as director of the United Front Department in charge of inter-Korean ties. The statement noted that Kim is a responsible figure of the DPRK, with whom the South Korean side can talk about improved inter-Korean ties and denuclearization. Kim was a chief DPRK negotiator at the inter-Korean contact of the military authorities, which was held on Oct. 15, 2014 at the truce village of Panmunjom to discuss ways to defuse military tension between the two sides, according to the statement. CANBERRA, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- Australia's peak infrastructure body has called on the federal government to ensure that the nation's cities remain among the best in the world. A landmark report released by Infrastructure Australia on Friday warned that the country's major capital cities are facing a decline in the quality of life and economic productivity if governments fail to plan for a population boom over the next 30 years. Rather than recommending that population growth be inhibited, the "Future Cities: Planning for our growing population" report said that governments must plan for another 12 million people in major cities within the next 30 years. Modelling found that Melbourne and Sydney were on track to grow to the current size of New York, London or Hong Kong by 2046, whose growth would cripple the cities without a national reform agenda to address infrastructure needs. In addition to Australia's two biggest cities experiencing growing pains, the report also warned that Perth and Brisbane would be the size of current-day Sydney by 2046. "Australia's cities are the powerhouses of our economy and they need to be a national priority of government," Philip Davies, CEO of Infrastructure Australia, said in a statement. "Asia's global middle class as well as our own rapidly growing population will unlock new economic frontiers for Australia, but we need to position our cities to take advantage of this historic opportunity. "Australia needs to start setting national objectives that allow our cities to realise their full potential and remain globally competitive." Under the Economic Intelligence Unit's Global Liveability Ranking, Australia has three of the world's 10 most liveable cities, including Melbourne which is ranked No. 1. However, Infrastructure Australia said Australian cities would slide down those rankings as traffic and housing affordability got worse with the population boom. The report found that Sydneysiders were spending an average of 200,000 hours stuck in traffic jams in the morning peak hour every day. By 2046, it predicted that would grow to 400,000 hours. Melbourne is confronted by similar problems with an additional 2.8 million people expected to call the city home by 2046. "If Melbourne goes down the low-density path of unplanned development on the fringe of the city, and there is no further investment in social infrastructure, our research found that people will be able to access up to 140,000 fewer jobs in one hour of travel," the report said. The report modelled what all of Australia's major cities would look like in 2046 if they took on a high-density, medium-density or low-density approach to combating population growth. However, Infrastructure Minister Paul Fletcher said that the models "may not be to everyone's taste." "I am not going to predict which if any of these scenarios is likely to materialise - indeed I think the only thing we can confidently predict is that, like all predictions of the future, they are certain to be wrong in a whole number of ways," Fletcher said while launching the report. Infrastructure Australia also found that small local councils were threatening urban liveability, urging the federal government to reward states with money if they can successfully simplify planning processes. "The large number of small local councils in many of our major cities has resulted in cases of fragmented governance, and disjointed infrastructure and service delivery," the report said. Source: Xinhua| 2018-02-23 14:39:46|Editor: Jiaxin Video Player Close KABUL, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- Saudi Arabia Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has expressed support to the Afghan peace process and has called on all parties to the conflict to support the peace process in the conflict-hit Afghanistan, local media reported on Friday. The support, according to Tolo television channel, was expressed during a recent visit to Saudi Arabia by Mohammad Hanif Atmar, the advisor to Afghan president on national security. "Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in his meeting with National Security Advisor Mohammad Hanif Atmar called on all parties involved in the conflict to support the process to get it back on track," Tolo television quoted a statement of Atmar's office as saying. Taliban militants who have always rejected joining the government-backed peace process in the presence of foreign forces in Afghanistan and instead want direct talks with the U.S. government, have yet to make comments. Source: Xinhua| 2018-02-23 15:02:28|Editor: pengying Video Player Close Combo photo taken on Feb. 22, 2018 shows 41-year-old Liu Jun and 32-year-old Liang Yan carrying luggage to leave for their home Hunan with their two children (up) and the food prepared by children's grandma at Liuzhou Railway Station in Liuzhou, south China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. As the week-long Spring Festival holiday draws to an end, those people on journey, either going home or returning to working places, usually have their luggage filled with specialties with hometown taste.(Xinhua/Li Hanchi) PHNOM PENH, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- Cambodia has lashed out at Germany for suspending preferential visas for private travel by Cambodian government officials, following the arrest of opposition leader Kem Sokha and the dissolution of the main opposition party. "We regret that such measures were taken without due consideration of Cambodia's political realities and in total disregard of the legal and judicial independence of the country," said a Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation (MFAIC) statement dated Thursday and released to the media Friday. "The MFAIC considers the unilateral actions as politically motivated and prejudicially bias, which ran counter to the ongoing efforts of the two countries' long-standing ties and bilateral cooperation," the statement said. It added that Cambodia saw Germany's reactions to Cambodia's recent political development as hypocrisy and a double standard, considering its different treatment towards various countries on the similar issue of democracy and respect for human rights. The statement came a day after Germany informed the MFAIC of the suspension of the preferential visa treatment for Cambodia's high-ranking officials. The suspension was made after the Cambodian government arrested Kem Sokha, president of now-defunct opposition Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP), on Sept. 3 last year for allegedly conspiring with a foreign power in an attempt to overthrow the government. Kem Sokha, 64, was charged with treason, a crime facing up to 30 years in prison if convicted. Photo taken on July 8, 2016 shows the exterior of the Kigali Convention Center in Kigali, capital of Rwanda. (Xinhua) KIGALI, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- Rwanda maintained the third position in the fight against corruption in Africa and is ranked first in East Africa, according to Corruption Perception Index 2017 released by Transparency International on Thursday. Among 180 countries, Rwanda was ranked 48th least corrupt country globally, up from 50th place in 2016, said the report released in Rwandan capital Kigali. Tanzania moved from 106th in 2016 to 103rd place in 2017, said the report. Uganda maintained 151th position as in 2016 while Burundi is ranked 157th after improving two places compared to the previous year. Kenya dropped two places to number 143, it said. Botswana emerged first in Africa, ranked 34th globally, while Seychelles is the second in Africa and 36th in globally, report showed. Countries need to build functioning institutions to be able to fight graft, said Albert Kavatiri Rwego, program manager at Transparency International Rwanda, when briefing journalists in Kigali. Rwego said corruption was prevalent in countries ravaged by conflicts and wars. Some of the strategies Rwanda has employed to fight corruption include offering public tenders through online system, as well as common services that locals seek from leaders which reduce contact, according to Clement Musangabatware, Rwanda's deputy Ombudsman in charge of Preventing and Fighting Corruption. JAKARTA, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- Rescuers continued search operation on Friday and recovered 2 corps, bringing death toll to 8 as 13 farmers remain buried as a result of Thursday's landslides in Central Java province, an official said. Heavy machinery equipment still could not enter the scene of the natural disaster in Pasir Panjang village of Brebes district, making the search and rescue for the affected continue to be undertaken in manual way, head of disaster agency in Brebes district Eko Andalas disclosed. "The search operation is underway now, but the rescuers only use their bare-hands and simple devices. Heavy machinery equipment only can open blockades in roads in the village," he told Xinhua by phone from the scene. Those who are participating in the search and rescue operation include soldiers, police, personnel from disaster agency office and search and rescue office as well as volunteers, Andalas added. The natural disaster occurred on Thursday when the victims were cultivating their farmland in a slope of hill, spokesman of national disaster management agency Sutopo Purwo Nugroho told Xinhua in a text message. A total of 14 farmers survived the incident but suffer from injuries, he added. All the wounded have been treated in a nearby health clinic for their wounds, according to him. Source: Xinhua| 2018-02-23 16:30:03|Editor: Mengjie Video Player Close by Xinhua writer Gu Zhenqiu LONDON, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- One hundred and seventy years after the "Communist Manifesto" was first published in February 1848, it is still being recognized today by many people in Britain and other Western countries as a relevant tool to analyze capitalism's shortcomings and human development path. The "Communist Manifesto," originally known as the "Manifesto of the Communist Party," was written by German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. It has been serving as a guiding principle for the Communist movement and has profoundly changed the world. Since it was brought to public notice, the "Communist Manifesto" has been so far the world's most widely read political document. At the same time, it has been long described as "a glorious dawn in human spiritual history" and "a spiritual home for Communists." The German text, first published at 46 Liverpool Street in central London, has been translated into more than 1,000 versions in over 200 languages, including 23 versions in Chinese. A revival of interest in Marx and Marxist thought was recently reported in Britain, the birthplace of Marxism. Waterstones, a British book retailer, sold more than 30,000 copies of the Manifesto within a week in late February 2015. Sales of the "Communist Manifesto" have soared ever since 2008, when the global financial crisis broke out, as have those of "Das Kapital," Marx's masterpiece of political economy, and the "Grundrisse," which in English is the "Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy." Their sales rose as British workers were struggling with debt and job insecurity. In short, the financial crisis undermined many Western voters' faith in capitalism because it exposed the perils of inadequately regulated markets. "The revival of interest in Marxism, especially for young people, comes because it provides tools for analyzing capitalism, and especially capitalist crises such as the one we're in now," said an article published on July 4, 2012, by the British daily the Guardian. "The problem for capitalism is that it doesn't feel like that any more," Marc Stears, chief executive of New Economics Foundation, was quoted as saying by the Guardian. "The capitalist system we know is dominated by huge, unaccountable, global banks and corporations." "So, yes, capitalism is at a crossroads," the newspaper said. "The state of capitalism is in desperate need of reform and modernization." "Capitalism in Britain is broken and needs urgent reform because it is leaving young people worse off than their parents," The Telegraph newspaper said in an article on Sept. 5, 2017. British capitalism is "failing" children who "will grow up into a world where the gap between the richest and poorest parts of the country is significant and destabilizing," said the Financial Times newspaper in September 2017. At first glance, capitalism seems to be doing quite well. Upon closer inspection, however, the picture is more worrying: Capitalism is failing to generate social mobility and even basic welfare for those who need it most. Britain's top business leaders claimed that the capitalist system has been hurt by management greed, corporate tax dodging and investors' short-term outlook. Many in Britain have felt the ravaging effects of the capitalist system: falling wages, rising costs and work insecurity, a strained welfare state, slashed public services, stalled growth, lagging productivity and hollowed-out communities. Britons voted in June 2016 to leave the European Union, a decision nicknamed "Brexit." Brexiters and Remainers are still engaging in endless political squabbles while the European Union has urged the British government to act swiftly to "offer more clarity" about its plans for leaving the regional bloc. The current political landscape in Britain has prompted people to speak out favorably on socialism. A study by online market research and data analytics firm YouGov found in February 2016 that about 36 percent of people said they view socialism favorably as opposed to 32 percent who view it unfavorably. Britain is not alone. According to a new survey, more than 40 percent of millennials in the United States said they would rather live in a socialist society than a capitalist one, the Daily Mail newspaper said on Nov. 2, 2017. Against such a backdrop, voters in Britain want the government to take a more socialist approach to economic policy by renationalizing railways and utilities, while creating a wage cap for top earners. About 83 percent of British voters would prefer public ownership of water companies over privatization, while 77 percent want to renationalize electricity and gas companies and 76 percent want the railways back under state control. A Guardian story on Jan. 21 confirmed this trend, calling for a more socialist approach in conducting political reforms in the world's first industrialized country. Over the past 170 years since the publication of the "Communist Manifesto," the world has seen China transform itself from a weak, underdeveloped country to a prosperous nation, which has adopted its own development model and modernization pattern. The secret behind China's rapid progress is that China has firmly adhered to the guidance of Marxism, including the "Communist Manifesto," while constantly ensuring that it keeps pace with the times and the country's changing needs. In doing so, China offers an example for other developing countries that are struggling to modernize, as well as developed countries troubled by the shortcomings of capitalism. Source: Xinhua| 2018-02-23 16:40:05|Editor: Lu Hui Video Player Close Photo taken on Feb. 22, 2018 shows a general view of a United Nations Security Council meeting on the situation in Syria at the UN headquarters in New York. The United Nations Security Council held discussions Thursday on the situation in Syria's conflicting enclave of Eastern Ghouta, but failed to agree on a resolution calling for a 30-day ceasfire in the war-torn country. (Xinhua/Li Muzi) UNITED NATIONS, Feb. 22 (Xinhua) -- The UN Security Council will vote at 11:00 a.m. local time (1600 GMT) Friday on a draft resolution calling for a 30-day truce in Syria, diplomatic sources said Thursday night. The resolution, drafted by Kuwait and Sweden, demands "a cessation of hostilities throughout Syria for all military operations except those directed at the Islamic State ... al Qaeda and al Nusra Front" for 30 days to allow aid deliveries and evacuations of the critically sick and wounded in besieged areas. The Security Council met Thursday afternoon to discuss the situation in Syria's besieged eastern Ghouta, but failed to reach an agreement on the draft as members were divided over the text. Swedish UN Ambassador Olof Skoog said on Thursday that he hoped the Council could vote on the resolution, while Russian UN Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia said he proposed to amend the text for "it to be realistic." An UN resolution needs nine votes in favor and no vetoes by China, Russia, the United States, Britain or France. KATHMANDU, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- The Nepalese government has decided to limit the number of central ministries to 17 in the new federal set-up, a government minister said here on Friday. A Cabinet meeting held in Kathmandu decided to downsize the number of ministries to comply with the constitutional provision that states that the number of ministries should not exceed 25 at the central level. There are 30 ministries at the Nepalese central administration at present. "The Cabinet has decided to have just 17 ministries at the central level administration to comply with the constitutional provision," Environment Minister Lalbabu Pandit told Xinhua on Friday, adding that the government will push several measures to reform the bureaucracy in coming days. The Nepalese government's decision to downsize the number of ministries at the central level has come nearly three months after the new administrative set-up came into force after holding the landmark Federal and Provincial Assembly elections in November and December across the country. The government was advised by the several expert panels in the past to reduce the number of ministries at the central level in order to make the administrative structure effective, and to avoid duplication of works, imbalanced work division and a lack of coordination among the government agencies. KIGALI, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- Five people were killed and 22 others wounded on Tuesday as protests over reduced food rations by refugees from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) turned violent, Rwandan police said Friday. About 500 refugees left the Kiziba refugee camp in Karongi District and began protesting, police said on their official Twitter account. Though officials from the government, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and local leaders told them to return to the camp as their grievances were being looked into, the protesters, armed with stones, sticks and metal objects, began to assault police officers. Police used "proportional force" to bring the situation under control, the tweet said, adding that 20 rioters and seven police officers were injured in the scuffles. The wounded were rushed to hospital where five protesters succumbed to their injuries. Police said 15 refugees had been arrested for illegal demonstration and inciting violence. The Kiziba camp hosts over 17,000 refugees, around 77 percent of whom are women and children, according to the UNHCR. The UNHCR on Thursday called on the refugees and the Rwandan authorities to keep calm and show restraint. It also said some refugees have indicated their desire to return to the DRC and urged the refugees to make an informed decision and not to listen to misinformation or rumors while they have the right to return to their country. Humanitarian operations in Rwanda remain "severely underfunded," forcing the World Food Programme to cut food rations for refugees by 10 percent in November 2017, and by 25 percent in January 2018, according to the UNHCR. Rwanda hosts over 173,000 refugees in six camps. Source: Xinhua| 2018-02-23 17:00:10|Editor: Mengjie Video Player Close BEIJING, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- China will expand trials of crop rotation and fallow systems to aid the green and sustainable development of agriculture, an agriculture official said Friday. The crop rotation and fallow systems will cover more than 50 million mu (around 8 million hectares) by 2020, said Zeng Yande, an official with the Ministry of Agriculture, at a press conference on Friday. For 2018, the crop rotation and fallow systems will cover 24 million mu, expanding from 12 million mu in 2017 and 6.16 million mu in 2016, Zeng said. China launched crop rotation and fallow systems in 2016 in nine provincial-level regions to relieve the burden on its arable land. The crop rotation system is mainly in use in the country's northeast, where corn and soybeans are grown, while the fallow system mainly covers farmland affected by environmental problems, including heavy metal pollution and desertification. The systems have helped upgrade the agricultural structure and boosted green and sustainable growth, said Zeng. The bottom line of the systems is to ensure China's food security, and subsidies will be given to farmers who join the trials, according to Zeng. ASWAN, Egypt, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- The Sun Festival of Abu Simbel temple in southern Egypt this year has brought Chinese festivity to the ancient land of Nubians, as Chinese puppetry show has joined the international celebration event for the first time. The Sun Festival, which attracted thousands of visitors worldwide to participate in the event on Feb. 22, this year also coincided with the Chinese Spring Festival celebration week. Built by King Ramses II, the statues of the king and the sun god remain in darkness inside the Abu Simbel temple throughout the year except on Feb. 22 and Oct. 22, when the sunlight showers on the statues to commemorate the king's coronation and birthday. This year, the Aswan art festival is joined by folklore performances from Ethiopia, Sudan, Kenya, Algeria, China, India and Thailand besides Egyptian local troupes. Chen Yinghong, head of the Chinese puppetry troupe, told Xinhua that they had staged eight performances in various places in Aswan with three special shows. "I was afraid in the beginning that Egyptian audience might not understand the Chinese puppet show due to cultural differences, but after the warm response from the opening ceremony, I was assured," said Chen. On the closing ceremony in front of the ancient Abu Simbel temples, the Chinese puppetry troupe performed the stunt of changing puppet clothing in less than a second that marveled local audience and tourists. Ahmed Aboabudula, a local audience took video and pictures of the puppet show and said, "everybody laughed and clapped, we like the puppet show, it is very nice." Chen, who came to Egypt in 2001 when he was often recognized as Japanese tourist, said that this time, he met many Egyptians who greeted him with simple Chinese. "This reflects the increasing number of Chinese visitors to Egypt and the expanding tourism exchanges between our two countries," said Chen. In 2017, China has become the 4th largest tourists' source for Egypt and the number of Chinese travellers to Egypt is rising fast. Local tour operator told Xinhua that direct flights from China to Abu Simbel, which started several months ago, bring several hundreds of Chinese tourists every day to southern Egypt. The number of tourists accounts for nearly a quarter thousand visits per day in average. Shi Yuewen, Cultural Councilor of the Chinese Embassy in Cairo, told Xinhua that with growing economic and cultural ties between China and Egypt, he decided to make a change to the traditional Chinese lunar New Year celebrations in Egypt which used to include performances and food and handcraft stalls in the Azhar Park in Cairo. Instead, he sent performance groups from China out of Cairo to Aswan and Egypt's red sea resort town of Sharm el Sheik to add a taste of Chinese festivity to the world-renowned Egyptian attractions and festivals while lighted the Cairo tower in red for the first time on the eve of Chinese Spring Festival. Dragon boat competition on Nile and Chinese martial art competition will also be held in Cairo besides the Chinese food week in luxury hotels as part of the new Chinese Spring Festival celebration program this year, Shi revealed. ANKARA, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- Turkish Foreign Ministry has strongly condemned the Dutch parliament's motion of recognizing Armenian "genocide" under Ottoman Empire in 1915, a term Ankara has all along rejected to describe this controversial event. "We strongly condemn the decision of the Netherlands' House of Representatives today to recognize the 1915 events as genocide," the Turkish Foreign Ministry said in a written statement released late Thursday. Dutch parliament's decision is "baseless," while Turkey's position regarding 1915 events is based on historical facts and principle of law, the statement said. Armenians have long sought international recognition for the large-scale casualties happened during Ottoman era as genocide, which they say left some 1.5 million of their people dead. Turkey denies the alleged Armenian "genocide" but acknowledges that there were casualties on both sides during World War I, describing the event as "a tragedy for both side." The parliament's move came amid strained relations between Turkey and Netherlands. The Dutch Foreign Ministry formally withdrew its ambassador to Turkey on Feb. 5, who has been physically barred from the country for almost a year, since a diplomatic row over Turkey's referendum rally in March 2017. MALE, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- The Maldivian Elections Commission on Friday said the first round of presidential elections would be held early September and preparations for the polls had already begun. The President's Office in a statement said it welcomed the announcement and encouraged all relevant stakeholders to offer the Elections Commission their full, unreserved support for the conduct of their work. "It is noted in the statement that free, fair and credible elections are the foundation of our democracy and that it is essential for continuity of our nation's growth, stability and prosperity," the President's Office said. "The Government of the Maldives extends its invitation to all international stakeholders to observe the electoral process; and at the same time urges the international community to provide support and assistance in bringing back normalcy in the Maldives, and requests the international community to refrain from any actions that could hinder resolving the situation the country is facing," the President's Office added. The statement further said that the government recommends all political parties and politicians alike to work towards, making the upcoming elections free and fair, rather than engage in a battle to topple the government and to destabilize the nation. The Maldivian parliament on Tuesday approved extending the state of emergency in the country by 30 days following a request by President Abdulla Yameen. The President's Office in a statement said the president had requested for an extension as the threat to national security had not diminished following the Supreme Court ruling on Feb. 1 ordering the release of detained opposition leaders, including self-exiled former President Mohamed Nasheed. President Yameen declared a 15-day state of emergency on Feb. 5 after the Supreme Court ruling, which was, however, rescinded shortly after the declaration of the state of emergency. NEW DELHI, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- India and Canada Friday inked six pacts, over sectors including sports, education and energy, as Prime Minister Narendra Modi held delegation-level talks with visiting Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in the capital. Addressing a joint media meet, Modi said: "India and Canada can work together in every sector. We discussed many issues, including defense cooperation. Terrorism and extremism are a threat to countries like ours and to fight these elements, we should come together." Hailing Canada as a energy superpower, the Indian Prime Minister said that it "can help us meet our growing demands for energy." "India and Canada will deepen social and economic ties. Canada Pension Fund is a large investor in India. We look forward to allowing Canada to double its investments in India," the Indian Prime Minister added. "We have the responsibility to set the right parameters to make the economy benefit everyone, and not just the rich. India-Canada partnership must create jobs," Trudeau said. India's External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Raveesh Kumar had tweeted that both the Prime Ministers "discussed strengthening cooperation in trade & investment, energy, education, healthcare, IT, start up, science & technology, defence and security, tourism and people-to-people contacts." The Canadian Prime Minister arrived in India last Saturday on a week-long state visit. Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan addresses members of parliament in Ankara, Turkey, January 9, 2018. (Reuters Photo) ANKARA, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- Turkish Foreign Ministry has strongly condemned the Dutch parliament's motion of recognizing Armenian "genocide" under Ottoman Empire in 1915, a term Ankara has all along rejected to describe this controversial event. "We strongly condemn the decision of the Netherlands' House of Representatives today to recognize the 1915 events as genocide," the Turkish Foreign Ministry said in a written statement released late Thursday. Dutch parliament's decision is "baseless," while Turkey's position regarding 1915 events is based on historical facts and principle of law, the statement said. Armenians have long sought international recognition for the large-scale casualties happened during Ottoman era as genocide, which they say left some 1.5 million of their people dead. Turkey denies the alleged Armenian "genocide" but acknowledges that there were casualties on both sides during World War I, describing the event as "a tragedy for both side." The parliament's move came amid strained relations between Turkey and Netherlands. The Dutch Foreign Ministry formally withdrew its ambassador to Turkey on Feb. 5, who has been physically barred from the country for almost a year, since a diplomatic row over Turkey's referendum rally in March 2017. Source: Xinhua| 2018-02-23 18:00:22|Editor: Zhou Xin Video Player Close A man visits an exhibition at Chinese Culture Center of San Francisco in San Francisco, the United States, on Feb. 22, 2018. Chinese Culture Center of San Francisco celebrated Chinese New Year of the Dog with a dog-themed artwork exhibition. (Xinhua/Wu Xiaoling) SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 22 (Xinhua) -- The Chinese New Year of the Dog has left a mark on San Francisco's art scene with a group of artists and designers on the U.S. West Coast coming up with an innovative and amusing dog-themed exhibition. Titled "Dogs, Dogs, Dogs! A Lunar New Year Art Pop-Up", the exhibition opened Thursday at the Chinese Culture Center (CCC) in downtown Chinatown and will run through March 17, providing a fresh take on dogs and dog-themed art. The pop-up show featuring more than 100 pieces of artwork has been curated by the local Sketchpad Gallery, and two artists -- Leon Sun of Chinese origin and Pamela Ybanez, a Filipino-American. The exhibition is part of the annual events hosted by the CCC during the Spring Festival, Jenny Leung, director of communications at the CCC, told Xinhua. "The pop-ups have a fresh take on Chinese tradition because a lot of our work is about engaging the next generation, who are interested in art and Chinese cultural heritage," she said. Tamiko Wong, the program director, said the exhibits are from both professional and amateur artists, all of whom are interested in the theme. "The exhibition coincides with the Year of the Dog, but I was sort of thinking about the dedication dogs have and the connection between humans and the animal," Ybanez said. "Dogs are friends of humans, and they are almost like children." Sun, who came to the United States as a child, has a painting of his own dog sitting silently beside a man. He said it is meant to reflect the bond between human beings and dogs. He said dogs were also a kind of teacher. "Dogs only know the present moment, and that enlightens me and I learn from it that we should seize the moment and live in the present," Sun said. The exhibition will help people learn about the traditional heritage of China, he added. MANILA, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- The Philippines has summoned U.S. Ambassador to the Philippines to the presidential palace to shed light on the recently released U.S. intelligence report that tags President Rodrigo Duterte as a "regional threat," Philippine and U.S. officials said on Friday. Duterte's office and the U.S. Embassy issued separate statements about the meeting between Executive Secretary Salvador Medialdea and Ambassador Sung Kim on Thursday at the Malacanang presidential palace. The report, titled Worldwide Threat Assessment Report published by the Director of National Intelligence, is an annual assessment on conditions in each of the world's various regions based on widely available information. It placed Duterte's name under the heading "regional threats." The U.S. Embassy said in a statement that Kim met with Medialdea to "explain the nature" of the report. "Their discussion focused on the references to the Philippines in the report, including clarifying that the information about the Philippines had been previously reported by media sources," the embassy said. As a result of the meeting, presidential palace said that Medialdea instructed the Department of Foreign Affairs of the Philippines, through its embassy in Washington, "to coordinate and engage with the U.S. agencies involved in the writing of the assessment." Medialdea further directed the embassy officials and staff in the U.S. "to provide the latter with accurate information on the realities happening on the ground in the Philippines, including the actions taken by (Duterte) and his administration to promote socioeconomic development for the country and provide a safe and secure environment for all Filipinos, respecting at all times the rule of law." The report stirred up the administration of Duterte, who took office in June 2016. He will serve a six-year, single term until 2022. On Wednesday, Presidential Spokesperson Harry Roque slammed the report, dismissing the U.S. intelligence community's assessment "as myopic and speculative at best." Source: Xinhua| 2018-02-23 18:20:25|Editor: Yurou Video Player Close BEIJING, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- China may strengthen criminal punishments to crack down on intellectual property (IP) violations in the seed industry, according to a report submitted to the top legislature on Friday. The report was based on a recent enforcement inspection of the Seed Law by members of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress (NPC) to six provinces and relevant government departments and agencies. Briefing lawmakers, Zhang Baowen, vice chair of the NPC Standing Committee, said despite improvement there is a lack of innovation in producing new seed varieties, and the ability of Chinese seed companies to compete in the global market is not strong. Strengthening IP protection is seen as an important measure to encourage innovation, Zhang said, citing the enforcement report. In the report, lawmakers proposed making it a crime to infringe upon a creator's rights to new seed varieties and expanding criminal punishments for offenders. They also suggested simplifying the procedure to charge people who illegally sell seeds for which they do not hold the rights. It remains a civil offense to counterfeit seed trademarks and certificates or to violate the rights to new seed varieties. Legislation should be considered to build a comprehensive IP system for plants and farming techniques, using patents, trademarks and other rights, the lawmakers said. China has 4,300 certified seed companies, with the top 50 accounting for 35 percent of the domestic market, according to the report. But compared to their counterparts in the West, Chinese seed companies in general spend less on research and development. Zhang said the seed industry is considered a strategic core industry of the state. Chinese companies have been urged to create quality seeds to protect the state's food security. Source: Xinhua| 2018-02-23 18:50:33|Editor: Mengjie Video Player Close SINGAPORE, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- China's leading IT company Huawei announced on Friday it reached an agreement with Singapore's famous educational provider Nanyang Polytechnic (NYP) to establish an information and communications technology (ICT) academy as part of Huawei's global initiative to support ICT skills development. According to a press release from Huawei, the partnership places strong emphasis on addressing the shortage of ICT professionals in Singapore by joint research, education and training programmes. It will also see the two parties set up a platform for technical collaborations between industry and government partners. Aaron Wang Shaotong, Managing Director of Huawei's Enterprise Business Group in Singapore, and Lee Youn Kay, Director of NYP's School of Engineering, signed the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) in Huawei's OpenLab Friday. Under the MOU, the not-for-profit academy, titled Huawei Authorised Information Network Academy (HAINA), allows NYP to deliver Huawei Certification training to their students. Zhou Danjin, President of Southern Pacific Enterprise Business Group, Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd, said that Huawei has a strong focus on helping the next generation develop the skills needed to drive innovations in technology. "We are confident that our partnership with Nanyang Polytechnic will give students the opportunity to learn new and relevant industry skills, enabling them to fulfil their ambitions in science and technology and contribute to Singapore's digital economy," he said. Lee Youn Kay said: "We believe this collaboration will allow our students to be better equipped with industry relevant ICT skills to meet the industry's strong demand for trained expertise. With this edge, they are well-poised to help transform the industry and work towards our vision of a Smart Nation." Source: Xinhua| 2018-02-23 19:05:39|Editor: pengying Video Player Close Volunteers are seen at a stall in Haikou, capital of south China's Hainan Province, Feb. 24, 2018. More than 12,000 vehicles returning home from a week-long break remained stuck in a seemingly endless traffic jam for ferries in Hainan Province as of Friday afternoon. The civil affairs bureau of Haikou has sent water, food and quilts to stranded passengers. (Xinhua/Chen Xi) HAIKOU, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- More than 12,000 vehicles returning home from a week-long break remained stuck in a seemingly endless traffic jam for ferries in Hainan Province as of Friday afternoon. Zhao Xu, a tourist from east China's Shandong Province, was not sure if he would leave the island Friday tonight. His family of three spent their Spring Festival holiday on the island and found heavy traffic jams at three ports in Haikou, capital of Hainan, on Wednesday, so they settled down in a hotel for two more nights. Zhao joined the long queue of waiting cars on Friday. "It's our first time on the island. It's an amazing experience, but we didn't expect the tough trip home," he said. Shipping on the Qiongzhou Strait, between Hainan and Guangdong, was suspended Wednesday night due to heavy fog. Ferries resumed on Thursday morning as visibility improved. More than 21,000 vehicles and 102,000 passengers were shipped to Guangdong across the Qiongzhou Strait from Hainan between Thursday morning to Friday morning. Although the local government issued several warnings on bad weather and traffic at ports, queues continued as more vehicles tried to cross to Guangdong via the strait, the only way for cars to leave the island. Heavy fog, Spring Festival travel rush, and an accident on the shipping route all compounded the situation. "I prefer waiting in line than wandering around. I want to go home as soon as possible," said a passenger surnamed Mo from Sichuan Province. The city's traffic authorities estimated that tens of thousands of vehicles will leave through the ports and the traffic jams will continue for another two days. Liu Dong, head with Haikou's transport and port authority, said that 90,000 vehicles containing over 400,000 tourists had arrived on the island during this year's Spring Festival holiday. Hainan, known for its tropical climate and clean air, is a popular destination for Chinese tourists taking winter holidays. Hainan was among the top 10 domestic destinations during this year's Spring Festival. The island received 5.67 million tourists during the holiday week, up 10 percent over last year. A local government official who declined to be named revealed that the government did not have a plan for such severe traffic jams caused by multiple adverse conditions. Relevant departments had failed to test their capacity to handle such a large number of drivers. The extraordinary gridlock also brought up an old topic that has troubled Hainan for a long time. Whether to build an undersea tunnel or a bridge over the Qiongzhou Strait? Supporters think the link would boost the local economy, while the opponents argue that it will lead to more traffic jams on the island. According to Gu Gang, executive vice mayor of Haikou, the city is considering setting up a ferry waiting area in the suburbs to avoid the gridlock in the future. Many tourists suggested selling ferry tickets in advance online. Those without tickets would not then rush to the ports, and the traffic jams could be alleviated. The civil affairs bureau of Haikou has sent water, food and quilts to stranded passengers to help them get through another night. Source:Xinhua| 2018-02-23 19:14:52|Editor: Mengjie Video Player Close Dancers perform during the "Cultures of China, Festival of Spring" gala to celebrate Chinese Lunar New Year in Auckland, New Zealand, on Feb. 22, 2018. (Xinhua/Li Qiaoqiao) BANGKOK, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- A powerful construction mogul in Thailand accused of poaching in a wildlife sanctuary on Friday was charged with illegal possession of firearms, the tenth charge he has been facing within a month. Thai police filed the charge on Premchai Karnasuta, president of Italian Thai Development Plc, after officials confirmed that six of 43 firearms seized from his house were illegal. According to local reports, the illegal guns, including a homemade one and different kinds of rifles, were unregistered or with unlawful licenses, which were not allowed to be in possession. The construction tycoon and three other men were charged with poaching a leopard, panther and other endangered animals in a national park in western Thailand on Feb. 5. Premchai, 63, were caught with hunting weapons and carcasses including a body of a pheasant, a muntiacini deer, a skinned and salted black panther skull in a camp. Police pressed nine charges relating to poaching and trespassing on the four. They've all denied the charges. The four have been summoned for the first time on Feb. 15, but Premchai failed to turn up. As ordered to show up on Thursday to acknowledge the charges, Premchai declined to meet police again, claiming he was far too busy to attend. Police said they would seek warrants for their arrest if they failed to report to police on March 5. Poaching is punishable by up to 10 years in prison in Thailand. The case has drawn widespread fury in Thai society. Right groups are asking people to apply pressure on this case on social media. Source: Xinhua| 2018-02-23 19:20:42|Editor: Mengjie Video Player Close by Xinhua writers Yuan Quan and Qiu Yi SHANGHAI, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- Chinese scientists are celebrating a breakthrough in the treatment of lung disease that enables patients with damaged respiratory organs to breathe normally. Regenerative medicine specialists at Tongji University and doctors at the university's affiliated Shanghai Oriental Hospital have successfully transplanted adult stem cells to reconstitute a patient's injured lung. The stem cells are taken from the patient's airway and expanded millions of times in vivo before the transplantation. After three to six months, they grow new alveoli and bronchi that improve lung function. The achievement of the research team led by Professor Zuo Wei was published in the latest issue of "Protein and Cell" as cover story. A 67-year-old patient was one of first to have been treated in this way. Two years ago, he was diagnosed with pulmonary fibrosis, a respiratory disease in which scars are formed in the lung tissues, leading to serious shortness of breath. Today his breathing is much improved. Pulmonary fibrosis is characterized by irreversible and progressive damage to lung tissue, said Zuo. "Drugs have little effect and lung transplants used to be the only solution." However, organ transplants are limited by a lack of donors. In 2017, only 299 lung transplants were performed in 20 Chinese hospitals. Lung disease is the third-leading cause of deaths globally and 11 percent of Chinese people over the age of 40 suffer from some lung condition. After two years of experiments on mice, researchers found that stem cells from airway epithelia were more successful than others. Zuo compares the stem cells to "seeds". "We sow the 'seeds' to the injury site, allow them to grow for a few months and gradually to rehabilitate the damaged organs." Over the past two years, more than 80 lung patients across China have had stem cell transplants. "The regenerative technology is amazing and a promising cure for many chronic lung diseases," said Xu Jinfu, chief doctor of Shanghai Pulmonary Hospital. Though it is still in its infancy, Zuo has a lot of confidence in regenerative medicine, saying his team is studying liver, kidney and uterus regeneration. "I am glad to see many patients recovering and returning to normal lives. Millions of patients are in urgent need of a new treatment. Regenerative therapy is likely to be the biggest hope for them." MALE, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- The Maldivian Foreign Ministry on Friday reiterated firm commitment to work closely with the international community to address concerns it may have following the extension of the state of emergency. The ministry said there was no doubt that the Maldives was experiencing one of the most difficult periods in the history of the nation and therefore it was important that the international community, including India, refrain from any actions that could hinder resolving the situation facing the country. "The assertion by the Government of India that the extension of the State of Emergency by the People's Majlis was unconstitutional is a clear distortion of facts, which ignore the Constitution and Laws of the Maldives," the ministry said. It added that in its decision to extend the state of emergency on Tuesday, the Maldives Parliament had provided relief by lifting some of the restrictions imposed on Constitutional Articles under the State of Emergency and by imposing the state of emergency only upon individuals alleged to have carried out illegal activities. The ministry further said that other than implementing the necessary measures stated in the decree imposing the state of emergency, it ensured no other restriction on the daily lives of the people and provided protection to the citizens living in the Maldives, to foreign workers and to those visiting the country. The Maldivian parliament on Tuesday approved extending the state of emergency in the country by 30 days following a request by President Abdulla Yameen. The President's Office in a statement said the president had requested for an extension as the threat to national security had not diminished following the Supreme Court ruling on Feb 1 ordering the release of detained opposition leaders, including self-exiled former President Mohamed Nasheed. President Yameen declared a 15-day state of emergency on Feb. 5 after the Supreme Court ruling, which was, however, rescinded shortly after the declaration of the state of emergency. Source: Xinhua| 2018-02-23 19:30:46|Editor: Zhou Xin Video Player Close BEIRUT, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- The United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) stressed Friday the strategic partnership with the Lebanese Army, slamming the Israeli media reports accusing the peacekeeping forces of failing to carry out their duties. "UNIFIL is aware of these media reports which contain clear inaccuracies. UNIFIL is working around the clock and carrying out some 450 operational activities each day. We have close coordination with the Lebanese Armed Forces, almost 40 percent of our activities are carried out at night," UNIFIL spokesperson Andrea Tenenti was quoted by the National News Agency (NNA) as saying. He emphasized that the UNIFIL highly values its partnership with the Lebanese army, especially in the implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 1701, affirming the role of Lebanese army in preserving calm and stability in UNIFIL operations. Israeli media have accused the UNIFIL of becoming an "excuse for Hezbollah and the Lebanese government to violate UN Resolution 1701." Israel fought a month-long war against Hezbollah in 2006, killing more than 1,200 Lebanese, mostly civilians, and more than 160 Israelis, mostly soldiers. UN Resolution 1701 was adopted to end the war, calling for full respect of the Blue Line. Source: Xinhua| 2018-02-23 19:30:47|Editor: Mengjie Video Player Close NANNING, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- In south China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, Qibainong Township's karst landscape and stony desert make the secluded area one of the most inhospitable places on earth. The name Qibainong means "700 valleys in the mountains" in the local language. About 20,000 residents have lived there in unforgiving conditions for decades, most of them the ethnic Yao people. Today, more than one third of them still live under the national poverty line. Meng Jihui, 35, lives in Qibainong's Baoshang Village. He does construction work for neighbors to support his family of five. The family's annual income is less than 10,000 yuan (1,600 U.S. dollars). "The stony desert makes it difficult to grow crops," Meng said. "I am chronically ill, so I cannot go away to find a better-paying job." But the biggest trouble for locals is a lack of roads, which confines them in the mountains. In the past, few villages in Qibainong had roads connecting with the outside world and transportation mainly depended on horses. "As there were no proper roads, we could not even find enough construction materials to build houses," said Meng Guirong, a Qibainong resident. As a result, many houses remained simple shacks. Villagers could grow nothing but corn in the stony land. "We can harvest about 200 kg of corn each year, but one kilo only sells for 2.4 yuan. It is barely enough to support a family," Meng said. Soon, people like Meng will bid farewell to such a hard life, as roads are built to carry them out of poverty. China plans to build more rural roads in its battle against poverty. The country aims to lift all people out of poverty by 2020 to create a "moderately prosperous society." In the past five years, China has seen 1.28 million km of rural roads built or renovated, with 99.2 percent of townships and 98.3 percent of villages connected by asphalt or cement roads. Work is underway in Qibainong. Tian Jinyang, a local resident, has been helping. Tian worked in cities for more than 20 years. In 2012, he returned to Qibainong to work in the construction businesses. Over the years, he has spent hundreds of thousands of yuan building roads. "According to a Chinese saying, if you want to get rich, you must first build roads," Tian said. "The government has also invested a lot in helping us build roads. People cannot live well without roads." Tian recalled that in 2014 and 2015, there were barely any cars in Qibainong. Now that roads are being built, cars can be seen and some new houses have replaced ramshackle buildings. "People are living better lives," Tian said. "New roads are truly leading people out of poverty here." Meng Jihui also looks forward to a better life. "I hope that with more roads, we can get out of the mountains and life will gradually improve," he said. KABUL, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- Officials as well as analysts in insurgency-plagued Afghanistan have described the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) pipeline project as a "corridor of development" and welcomed it. Work for the project, designed to transfer 33 billion cubic meters of natural gas from Galkynysh natural gas reserve of Turkmenistan annually along an 1,800 km route to Pakistan and India via Afghanistan, was formally inaugurated at a ceremony Friday. The ceremony was attended by hundreds of guests, including presidents of Turkmenistan and Afghanistan, Prime Minister of Pakistan and India's Minister for External Affairs, in Herat, Afghanistan. Afghan President Mohammad Ashraf Ghani in his address to mark the ground-breaking ceremony of the project, said that TAPI increases connectivity among the countries of the region. He also added that South Asia is being connected with Central Asia through Afghanistan. "TAPI is not only a gas project but it has the same importance as an economic corridor," local media quoted Abdul Qadeer Mutfi, the spokesman for Afghan ministry of Mines and Petroleum, as saying. According to Mufti, the TAPI project will provide 500 million U.S. dollars annually in transit duties to Afghanistan. Mufti also said that Afghanistan will get 500 million cubic meters of gas for the first ten years and one billion cubic meters for another 20 years. Feroz Masjidi, deputy minister of policy and planning for Commerce and Industries, believes that the gas provided by TAPI project to Afghanistan would be used for improvement of industries and factories in the conflict-strife country. Political analyst Framurz Tamana in talks with local media asserted that TAPI as an economic corridor could enhance regional cooperation. Another expert Mohibullah Nuri observed that the TAPI project in addition to boosting region cooperation would also strengthen relations among the people of countries located in the region. The major anti-government fighting force in Afghanistan the Taliban outfit has also welcomed inauguration of TAPI project and assured to support it. According to Afghan observers, implementation of TAPI project would also provide job opportunities for more than 10,000 people in Afghanistan. Source: Xinhua| 2018-02-23 20:20:56|Editor: Yurou Video Player Close JAKARTA, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- Wrestling team of Indonesia has set a two gold medal target in the Asian Games this year in the country, manager of Indonesian wrestling team Gusti Randa revealed on Friday. The medals are expected to be secured from men's free style 57kg and the women's free style 53kg, Randa said. "But we still do not know whether any opportunity or not in other numbers," he said. To reach the target, the manager said that the team will undergo practice overseas and have some try-out matches there. Indonesia has picked up Bulgaria for the wrestlers to practice and undergo some friendly matches from April 21 to July 15, said Randa, who is also spokesman at the country's wrestling association. "There are many international wrestlers in Bulgaria and we will have some matches there. After staying for 80 days there we will return to Indonesia," he was quoted by Juara media as saying. Currently, 18 Indonesian wrestlers are undergoing exercise in Sukabumi district of West Java province in preparation for the Asian Games, Gusti added. The 18th Asian Games is scheduled to be held in Indonesian capital of Jakarta and Palembang city, the provincial capital of South Sumatra province from Aug. 18 to Sept. 2. MOGADISHU, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- African Union troops are still needed in Somalia until 2021 to help flush out Al-Shabaab militants and speed up stabilization, an AU envoy has said. Francisco Madeira, Special Representative of the Chairperson of the AU Commission (SRCC) for Somalia, said Somali security forces are not yet adequately capacitated to take over national security. "Given the level of the threat and the status of the political process, the option of ending the surge in uniformed personnel before 2021 could bring about a serious risk of reversals that could derail the gains already made," Madeira said. The AU envoy was speaking late Thursday during a roundtable discussion on the achievements and challenges facing the 11-year-old African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM). In a statement released on Friday, Madeira urged the Somali public to rally behind the AU mission and the government to speed up the stabilization process and restore lasting peace and security in the country. He said although the drawdown of AMISOM troops entails the handover of some Forward Operating Bases to the Somalia National Army (SNA), the local army must be fully capable of taking charge of these bases, otherwise Al-Shabaab will take them. AMISOM is currently implementing the UN Security Council resolution passed in August 2017 that authorized a reduction of troops and transfer of national security responsibilities to the Somali National Security Forces. Madeira said AMISOM will continue working closely with the federal and state governments during the transition period. "We all agree that we must decisively address the threat posed by Al-Shabaab, otherwise they will continue to pose grave danger, not just to Somalia and the region, but to the entire continent," Madeira said. He also defended AMISOM from accusations of inactivity, saying its presence in Somalia had ushered in a period of stability and put the country on the path to one-person one-vote in 2021. Madeira told the roundtable that the AU had formed a group of special envoys to mobilize development partners to support AMISOM and Somalia with predictable funding to enable them to effectively fight Al-Shabaab. MANILA, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- The approval this week of a committee in the House of Representatives of a bill that would allow divorce in the Philippines has stirred up the Catholic country, reviving an old debate on the legalization of divorce. On Wednesday, the House Committee on Population and Family Relations submitted a divorce bill that would legalize divorce in the Philippines and dissolution of marriage for plenary deliberations. The bill, entitled, "An act instituting absolute divorce in the Philippines," was approved with no contention. Under the bill, married couples may end their marriage for several reasons, including abuse, infidelity, and irreconcilable differences. It aims to give "the opportunity to spouses in irremediably failed marriages to secure an absolute divorce decree under limited grounds and well-defined judicial procedures to terminate a continuing dysfunction of a long-broken marriage." Representative Pia Cayetano, one of the bill's authors, said the bill simply provides another legal option for spouses in bad marriages. "Having a divorce (bill) in a country does not make people rush into it," she said, adding that legalizing divorce will fix a bad marriage. "There won't be conflicts over properties. The relationship is better because it ended," Cayetano said. Cayetano, whose own marriage was annulled, said couples tend to stay in broken or abusive marriages because getting an annulment is a long and expensive process. She said divorce law provides a cheaper alternative to couples who wish to separate and annul their marriage. "Under the divorce decree, we recognize specific grounds that could exist before the marriage or during the marriage. It is simply providing closure for a marriage that is already dead," Cayetano said. Like in the past, the Catholic Church slammed the proposed bill, calling it "anti-marriage and anti-family." "The Church is all for the protection of rights especially of the aggrieved parties," said priest Jerome Secillano, executive secretary of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of the Philippines, in a statement on Thursday. "While divorce may indeed vindicate the rights of women, as congressmen believed, it is unfortunately to the detriment of marriage and family as sacred institutions that should otherwise be protected by the State," Secillano said. The Church has long opposed any laws that allow divorce. It also opposes laws on euthanasia, abortion, total population control and homosexual marriages. The Philippines is the only country in the world other than the Vatican that still outlaws divorce. The Family Code of the Philippines currently provides two ways for couples to separate - legal separation and annulment. However, the legal separation will not sever the marital bond and the annulment will take a long time and cost a large amount of money. Lawmakers have been trying to legalize divorce in the Philippines for almost three decades but to no avail. Senator Vicente Sotto said it is not likely that the divorce law will pass in the Senate, adding that he is not aware of any counterpart bill in the Senate. Indeed, the Senate website showed that no senator has filed a divorce bill in the chamber. JUBA, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- A South Sudan court on Friday sentenced to death by hanging a South African national and security advisor to rebel leader Riek Machar. The South Sudan High Court said William John Endley, a retired soldier of the South African army, holds the rank of major general in the main rebel group the Sudan People's Liberation Army-in opposition (SPLA-IO). Endley's charges included illegal entrance, sabotage, conspiracy and terrorism. Judge Ladu Eriminio Sekwat said Endley will subsequently serve a 9-and-half-year jail sentence. Endley has already served one and half year in detention since being arrested in August 2016 in Juba after renewed fighting broke out between Machar's faction and troops loyal to President Salva Kiir. Endley's lawyer Gardit Abel Gar said they would launch an appeal. "It is inconsistent with the just signed Cessation of Hostilities (CoH) which has expressly stated that all political prisoners of war should have been released within 72 hours," Gar said after court rejected his plea for lenient sentence for Endley on medical reasons. The court said evidence got from Endley's confiscated laptop showed he had passed on information aiding the opposition in military engagement against the South Sudan government. The same court on Feb. 12 sentenced to death James Gatdet Dak, Machar's spokesman captured and extradited to Juba from Nairobi in November 2017. "The UN has very firm view that we do not support the death penalty," said the head of the UN Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) David Shearer on Thursday in reference to the trials. South Sudan descended into violence in December 2013, after political dispute between President Kiir and his former deputy Machar led to fighting that pitted Dinka ethnic soldiers loyal to Kiir against Machar's Nuer ethnic group. The 2015 peace agreement to end the violence was again violated in July 2016 when the rival factions resumed fighting in the capital, forcing Machar to flee into exile. The conflict has killed tens of thousands of people and displaced millions that have sought refuge in neighboring countries. KIEV, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- The Ukrainian parliament's newspaper "Golos Ukrainy" published on Friday a controversial law on the return of the conflict-hit Donbas region in eastern Ukraine under Kiev's sovereignty, paving the way for the legislation to come into effect on Feb. 24. Last month, the Ukrainian parliament passed the law on the Donbas re-integration, which defines areas controlled by pro-independence rebels as "temporarily occupied territories." On Feb. 11, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that Ukraine would make a "colossal mistake" and would breach the Minsk agreements if it does pass the law. However, on Feb. 20, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko signed the law, saying it does not violate any international obligations of Ukraine, including the Minsk agreements. The Minsk agreements, reached in September 2014 and February 2015 respectively, envisage a ceasefire, a withdrawal of heavy weaponry from the contact line, a prisoner exchange and local elections, among other measures. The conflict in Ukraine's eastern Donbas region started in April 2014, after government forces launched offensives to regain control of the cities and towns seized by armed groups which declared independence from Kiev. Source: Xinhua| 2018-02-23 21:16:10|Editor: Mengjie Video Player Close Zhang Dejiang (C, rear), chairman of the Standing Committee of China's National People's Congress (NPC), presides over the opening meeting of the 33rd session of the 12th NPC Standing Committee in Beijing, capital of China, Feb. 23, 2018. (Xinhua/Liu Weibing) BEIJING, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- A total of 2,980 deputies to the 13th National People's Congress (NPC), China's national legislature, have been elected and are awaiting final confirmation. A report on the election of new NPC deputies, from 35 electoral units across the country, was submitted to the NPC Standing Committee for confirmation Friday. The deputy name list is scheduled to be published Saturday. "The deputies to the 13th NPC make up a broad cross-section with each region, ethnic group and sector of society having proper representatives," said Xin Chunying, deputy secretary-general of the NPC Standing Committee, elaborating on the report at the meeting. The elections were legal and the qualifications of all deputies are valid, according to a commission of the NPC Standing Committee in charge of checking their validity. Zhang Dejiang, chairman of the NPC Standing Committee, presided over the meeting. Members of the NPC Standing Committee deliberated a report on the work of the 12th NPC Standing Committee, the agenda of the first session of the 13th NPC, the presidium and secretary-general name list, and a name list of non-voting delegates. They also reviewed an amendment to a 2015 decision on pledging allegiance to the Constitution, a report on the implementation of the Seed Law, and a State Council proposal to extend the adjustment to certain provisions of the securities law to allow reforms that will change the listing system of the Shanghai and Shenzhen bourses from approval-based to registration-based. The other documents submitted for reading were a report on the qualifications of some NPC deputies and a motion to add new members to the military's election committee, in addition to appointments and dismissals. Lawmakers agreed that the 12th NPC Standing Committee has performed its duties well during its five-year tenure, with new progress made in theoretical and practical innovations to the system of people's congresses, and in the building of socialist democracy and rule of law, according to a statement issued after panel discussions Friday afternoon. "The NPC Standing Committee has firmly safeguarded the authority and core status of Xi Jinping, general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, and the authority and centralized, unified leadership of the CPC Central Committee with Xi at the core," the statement said. The committee has introduced a number of important and much-needed laws and law revisions, stepped up supervision of law enforcement, served NPC deputies well and helped improve the work of local people's congresses, according to the statement. On Friday afternoon, chairman and vice chairpersons of the NPC Standing Committee also met and heard results of deliberations on the above mentioned documents. The meeting was presided over by Zhang. They agreed that these documents would be subject to further deliberation before they are put to vote by the NPC Standing Committee. KUNDUZ, Afghanistan, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- Five militants affiliated with the Taliban group and two Afghan Local Police (ALP) personnel were killed and four others wounded following a clash in the country's troubled northern Kunduz province, a local official said Friday. The wounded included two insurgents and two local police personnel. A group of armed militants attacked an ALP checkpoint early Friday morning, in Kunjak area of Imam Sahib district, resulting in the death of five militants and two ALP personnel, Mahbobullah Sayedi, the district chief told Xinhua. The gun fight lasted for about an hour. The Taliban militants are yet to make comment. SEOUL, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- South Korean President Moon Jae-in had a closed-door meeting with Ivanka Trump, who came here Friday leading a U.S. delegation to the closing ceremony of the PyeongChang Winter Olympics. Ivanka, daughter of U.S. President Donald Trump, arrived in Incheon International Airport, west of the capital Seoul, earlier in the day, and had a closed-door meeting with President Moon at the presidential compound for about 35 minutes from 7:30 p.m. local time (1030 GMT), according to Yonhap news agency report. The meeting, which was arranged before a dinner between Moon and the U.S. delegation, was not made public to the media at the request of the U.S. side. Yonhap speculated that Moon and Ivanka may have exchanged opinions about talks between the United States and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), and the possible third inter-Korean summit meeting. Kim Yo Jong, the younger sister of top DPRK leader Kim Jong Un, attended the Olympic opening ceremony earlier in the month and met with President Moon at the Blue house, delivering the DPRK leader's invitation to Moon to visit Pyongyang at a convenient time. In response, Moon said the two Koreas should create conditions to make it happen, asking the DPRK side to more actively engage in a dialogue with the United States. Ivanka Trump, also a White House advisor, planned to cheer on U.S. athletes during her stay here, and attend the closing ceremony of the Winter Olympics scheduled for Sunday. JAKARTA, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- Indonesian President Joko Widodo obtained on Friday full support from the ruling party, the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDIP), to run for a second five-year term in the presidential race in 2019. The PDIP's support was announced by its Chairperson Megawati Soekarnoputri in the party's congress held in Bali. "I declare Joko Widodo as the presidential candidate from PDIP," Soekarnoputri said with President Widodo at her side during the event. President Widodo was also nominated by PDIP to win the 2014 election with 53.15 percent of the votes, beating his arch rival, former general Prabowo Subianto, who secured 46.85 percent of the vote. President Widodo now has to find a new running mate as his deputy Jusuf Kalla has stated his reluctance to run in the upcoming election. Kalla would turn 76 next year. Recent local polls showed President Widodo gained higher support rate than other political figures for the next presidential term from 2019 to 2024. No other party has officially announced president candidate for the election so far. The Indonesian Elections Commission has announced 14 political parties eligible to run in legislative and presidential election scheduled on April 17 next year with campaign period to start in October this year. THE HAGUE, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- The Dutch parliament recognized the Armenian genocide by majority on Thursday evening, but the government will not follow this recognition, said caretaking Minister of Foreign Affairs Sigrid Kaag. Last week, the Dutch parliament already announced its intention to recognize the Armenian genocide after ChristenUnie (Christian Union) MP Joel Voordewind had proposed a motion to do so. A large majority of the House of Representatives voted in favor, which was the first time for the Dutch parliament. In 2004, the House of Representatives also supported a similar motion, but at that time it did not vote to call the mass killing of Armenians by Ottoman Turks during World War One the Armenian genocide so explicitly. The three MPs of migrant-party Denk, with a large input of Dutch Turks, were the only opponents of the recognition on Thursday. According to Denk MP Tunahan Kuzu, history is too one-sidedly explained. Kuzu stated that due to the recognition groups of people are being set up against each other and that the tensions will also rise in the Netherlands. As in 2004, the government will not speak out on whether it was a genocide, emphasized Kaag. Although the House of Representatives recognized the Armenian genocide, the government continues to talk about "the issue of the Armenian genocide". She stressed that there is no binding UN Security Council resolution that speaks of the Armenian genocide, nor a verdict by an international court. The exact name of the mass killing of Armenians has been a sensitive subject for years. Turkey denies it was genocide and has strong objections to the use of the term genocide. According to Kaag, the government wants to be cautious about applying the term genocide. "But it remains very clear to the government that a large-scale massacre has taken place," she added. According to the majority of the House of Representatives, recognition is a first step towards reconciliation. "If we do not remove the sorrow from the past, we will never get to the desired reconciliation, and the conflict between Turkey and Armenia will never disappear", said D66 (Democrats) MP Sjoerd Sjoerdsma during the debate on Thursday. Kaag added that she will send a member of the government to the 103rd anniversary commemoration of the Armenian genocide on April 22 this year in the Armenian capital Yerevan. This will be done for the first time and thereafter the plan is to send such a high diplomate every five years. Who will be present at the commemoration is not yet known. Previously, the Netherlands was present at the commemoration with only an ambassador or an MP. "With this presence, the government shows respect for all victims and surviving relatives of all murders of minorities," the minister said during the debate. According to Voordewind, the initiator of the motion, the presence of the cabinet at the commemoration is a big step forward. "We house the capital of international law, and we have to make clear statements about things that really go wrong in the world," he said. The question is what the recognition by the parliament will do to the tensions between the Netherlands and Turkey. These tensions rose to a peak in March last year when the Dutch cabinet refused to let Turkish governors to campaign in the Netherlands for a "yes" in a Turkish constitutional referendum. As a result of the diplomatic tensions with Turkey, the Netherlands has not had an ambassador in the country since that time. "We strongly condemn the decisions of the Dutch House of Representatives recognizing the events of 1915 as genocide," the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs stated in a press release. "The baseless decisions of the House of Representatives ... are neither legally binding nor have any validity." However, the Turkish Ministry also stated to have taken note of the Dutch government's statement that "it will not follow the House in its assessment recognizing the 1915 events as genocide and that being represented at a commemoration ceremony in Yerevan would not imply recognition of the events as genocide". Source: Xinhua| 2018-02-23 21:46:14|Editor: Mengjie Video Player Close Chinese Vice Premier Wang Yang (3rd rear), also a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and head of the State Council Leading Group of Poverty Alleviation and Development, presides over a plenary meeting of the leading group in Beijing, capital of China, Feb. 23, 2018. (Xinhua/Wang Ye) BEIJING, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- The quality and effectiveness of China's battle against poverty should be enhanced, a senior Chinese official said Friday. Wang Yang, a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, made the remarks while presiding over a meeting of the State Council leading group on poverty relief and development. Wang, head of the group, said that despite decisive advances made in the battle against poverty, there were still difficulties ahead. He said poverty relief work must be improved by targeting problems, and stepping up precision on poverty reduction through optimizing tailored policies. "Local authorities are encouraged to innovate pragmatic approaches in targeted policy execution," Wang said. China aims to complete the building of a "moderately prosperous society in all respects" by 2020, which requires the eradication of poverty. To achieve that target, China needs to lift more than 10 million people out of poverty every year. NEW DELHI, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- Indian police Friday seized recording of CCTV camera from residence of Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal's residence in connection with an assault on a capital city's senior most government official, officials said. A police team visited the place to review CCTV visuals to ascertain the facts about the incident. "We have seized recordings of 21 CCTV cameras and a hard disk," a senior police official said. "There are 21 cameras installed at the residence out of which 14 were operational and recording was off in seven." According to police official, no camera was installed in the room where the incident took place. On Tuesday Delhi chief secretary Anshu Prakash alleged he was assaulted by two lawmakers from ruling Aam Aadmi Party -- AAP (common man's party) in presence of Delhi chief minister who had summoned him for talks on the Delhi government's ambitious plan to deliver key services to doorsteps of residents. Kejriwal had summoned the officer Monday night. The Delhi chief minister's office has outrightly rejected the allegations. Police have detained two lawmakers - Amanatullah Khan and Prakash Jarwal, saying they were responsible for carrying out assault on Prakash. A local court in Delhi Friday dismissed the bail pleas of two lawmakers. Meanwhile, Delhi Lieutenant Governor Anil Baijal Friday met Kejriwal in a bid to remove the crisis between lawmakers and government employees. Baijal said he advised government to take steps to remove mistrust with employees so that development of Delhi is not affected. NAIROBI, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- Kenya plans to allocate 38 million U.S. dollars to combat drought for the next three months, a senior official said Friday. Eugene Wamalwa, Cabinet Secretary in the Ministry of Devolution and the Arid and Semi Arid Lands, said in Nairobi that there are 3.4 million people in need of assistance although the number could reduce after the onset of the long rain season in March. He said the bulk of the funding will go to food and cash transfers for the most vulnerable members of society. Wamalwa noted that to find a lasting solution to the recurrent drought, the Kenyan government is investing in a water harvesting program to reduce dependence on rain-fed agriculture and promote irrigation-based agriculture. "Our target is to capture at least a quarter of rainfall that flows through the rivers into the Indian Ocean so that farmers have an adequate supply of water for cultivation of crops," he added. Wamalwa said that Kenya has been responding on a continuous basis since the earliest signs of drought were identified in July 2016. The ministry said that during the phase one of the drought responses between November 2016 to January 2017, a total of 54 million dollars was released to support enhanced water access as well as a cash transfer program. Wamalwa said that phase two and three of the response has so far cost the government 74 million dollars and 42 million dollars respectively. YANGON, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- Myanmar government pledged on Friday to take serious action against Wednesday's bomb attack by some unknown group near private Yoma bank and AYA bank in Lashio, Shan state, according to a statement from the National Reconciliation and Peace Center, chaired by State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyi. The state counselor condemned such bomb blast attacking the public areas and hurting innocent civilians, the statement said. The explosion hit Yoma bank, affecting nearby AYA bank at 04:40 p.m. local time on Wednesday, killing two staff, injuring 21 including 12 women. At present, tight securities measures have been imposed on Lashio and investigation into the incident is underway. PYONGYANG, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- The Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) Friday reaffirmed its determination to develop its nuclear and missile capabilities as a means to deter the United States, in parallel with possible rapprochement with South Korea. The DPRK official daily Rodong Sinmun said in an article that the nuclear force of the DPRK is "the powerful treasured sword for defending peace" as it can decisively tackle the nuclear threats from the United States. "Concession to the imperialists and asking them for aid is a foolish act of inviting self-destruction as their nature is aggression and plunder," said the official daily of the ruling Workers' Party of Korea. The article also rejected the accusation made by the United States that the nuclear force of the DPRK as a "threat to world peace and security." "This is nothing but a miserable scream made by those, who have a premonition of their destruction. It goes to prove that our nuclear force becomes the means meting out a horrible punishment to the aggressors," it said. South Korea said earlier this week that future talks with the DPRK would focus on the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, after Pyongyang and Seoul have embarked on an apparent rapprochement with the PyeongChang Winter Olympics over the past month. Source: Xinhua| 2018-02-23 22:26:23|Editor: Yurou Video Player Close BERLIN, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- The German luxury carmaker BMW will join forces with China's Great Wall Motors Company Limited to shift part of the production of its "Mini" brand to China, the Munich-based company announced on Friday. Under the joint venture, electric Mini vehicles will be manufactured in China from 2019 onwards. While production is initially scheduled to continue at Mini's traditional British factory in Oxford, BMW warned that the future of the plant was uncertain and would ultimately depend on the outcome of Brexit negotiations between the European Union (EU) and United Kingdom. The Chinese automobile, the country's largest producer of Special Utility Vehicles (SUVs), was first reported to be discussing the possibility of a cooperation with BMW in October 2017. Both parties have now signed a memorandum of understanding, although the exact details of the joint-venture, including the exact location for Chinese Mini production and the level of investment, are yet to be determined. Once finalized, BMW's joint-venture with Great Wall Motors, which is based in Baoding, Hebei province in north China, will already be the second such agreement with a Chinese firm after having already teamed up with the local carmaker Brilliance. China is the single largest market for automotive sales in the world. BMW emphasized on Friday that its new partnership was complementary to the one previously entered with Brilliance and the company would hence not attempt to create a parallel Chinese sales operation for electric Mini vehicles. Mini sold a relatively modest 35,000 out of a total of 372,000 cars in China last year. BMW intends to grow the brand's presence in China significantly in the future with the help of local partners such as Great Wall Motors and Brilliance Auto, a Chinese automobile manufacturer headquartered in Shenyang, the capital of northeast China's Liaoning province. MANILA, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- The key suspect in the murder of overseas Filipino worker (OFW) Joanna Demafelis in Kuwait more than a year ago is now in the custody of authorities in Lebanon, the Philippine Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) said on Friday. Philippine Foreign Secretary Alan Peter Cayetano said he has informed Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte about the arrest of Nader Essam Assaf, a Lebanese national and one of the principal suspects in the brutal torture and murder of the 29-year-old domestic helper from Sara, a town in Iloilo province. Cayetano said Duterte welcomed the news, adding "Assaf's arrest is a critical first step in our quest for justice for Joanna and we are thankful to our friends in Kuwait and Lebanon for their assistance." The Philippine embassy in Kuwait reported the arrest of Assaf to Manila on Thursday, the same day Duterte visited the wake of Demafelis and assured her family that he would seek justice for her and other overseas Filipino workers being abused by their employers abroad. Assaf and his wife, Mona, a Syrian national, have been the subject of an Interpol manhunt after Kuwaiti authorities discovered early this month the battered body of Demafelis inside a freezer in the couple's abandoned apartment unit more than a year after her family reported her missing. Kuwaiti authorities said Interpol Lebanon had notified Interpol Kuwait that Assaf is now in custody but his wife is still at large and is believed to be in Syria. Kuwaiti authorities requested the assistance of Interpol in locating and arresting the couple who they believed fled to Lebanon or Syria shortly after the torture and murder of Demafelis. Cayetano said he expects Kuwaiti authorities to request the extradition of Assaf so he could stand trial in Kuwait. Duterte ordered a ban on the deployment of new Philippine workers to Kuwait in the wake of the discovery of Demafelis's body. Around 3,000 distressed OFWs in Kuwait have been repatriated to the Philippines from their employers in Kuwait. Thousands more are still waiting to be repatriated. SEOUL, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- South Korean President Moon Jae-in said on Friday that the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK)'s participation in the Winter Olympics helped ease tensions on the Korean Peninsula and improve inter-Korean relations. Moon made the remarks during his dinner meeting with Ivanka Trump who came here earlier in the day to lead a U.S. delegation to attend the closing ceremony of the Winter Olympics in South Korea's eastern county of PyeongChang, according to a pool report by the Blue House. Ivanka, the daughter of U.S. President Donald Trump and also a White House advisor, allegedly planned to cheer on U.S. athletes during her four-day visit, and attend the Olympic closing ceremony scheduled for Sunday. "North Korea (DPRK)'s Olympic participation leads to active inter-Korean dialogues, which made a big contribution to easing tensions on the Korean Peninsula and enhancing inter-Korean relations," Moon said. During the senior-level inter-Korean dialogue in January, the DPRK agreed to send its athletes and cheerleaders to the PyeongChang Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games. Seoul and Pyongyang also agreed to hold working-level talks next week to discuss the DPRK's participation in the Winter Paralympics. Moon expressed his gratitude to U.S. Vice President Mike Pence, who attended the opening ceremony on Feb. 9, and Ivanka who came here to attend the closing ceremony. Ivanka said the United States reaffirmed its bonds of friendship, cooperation and partnership between the two allies. The United States also reaffirmed its commitment to the maximum pressure campaign to ensure that the Korean Peninsula is denuclearized, said Ivanka. Among the U.S. delegates attending the dinner at the Blue House were White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders, U.S. Senator James Risch, and Allison Hooker, a National Security Council official who specializes in the Korean Peninsula affairs. From the South Korean side, the presidential chief of staff, the top national security advisor for President Moon, the top presidential policy advisor, and the foreign minister attended the dinner meeting. Before the dinner meeting, Moon and Ivanka had a closed-door meeting for about 35 minutes, according to Yonhap news agency report. It was not made public to the media at the request of the U.S. side. Yonhap speculated that Moon and Ivanka may have exchanged opinions about talks between the United States and the DPRK, and the possible third inter-Korean summit meeting. Kim Yo Jong, the younger sister of top DPRK leader Kim Jong Un, attended the Olympic opening ceremony earlier in the month and met with President Moon at the Blue house, delivering the DPRK leader's invitation to Moon to visit Pyongyang at a convenient time. In response, Moon said the two Koreas should create conditions to make it happen, asking the DPRK side to more actively engage in a dialogue with the United States. BRUSSELS, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- The European Union (EU) on Friday announced to increase the funding for the joint security force of the G5 Sahel, which aims to improve regional security and fight terrorism. The international high level conference on the Sahel was held in Brussels Friday, co-chaired by the EU, the United Nations, the African Union and the G5 Sahel group of countries (Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Niger). During the meeting, the international donors approved 414 million euros (509 million U.S. dollars) to support G5 Sahel force whilst reinforcing the development efforts in the region, according to the EU's statement. European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said: "Instability has many factors so our response must be linked and ambitious. Security and development must go hand in hand. To do so, we must continue to mobilize all the instruments we have at our disposal." Juncker said the EU has doubled its support to 100 million euros (123 million U.S. dollars) to reinforce the operation of the G5 Sahel force. "And I am proud that all our friends and partners of the Sahel joined us in these efforts," he added. The statement said that the EU is the biggest donor to the G5 Sahel countries with 8 billion euros (9.9 billion U.S. dollars) in development aid over 2014-2020. In 2014, Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, and Niger set up the "G5 Sahel" group of countries to foster close cooperation in the region and tackle the major challenges that these countries face. Source: Xinhua| 2018-02-23 22:36:28|Editor: pengying Video Player Close DOHA, Feb. 24 (Xinhua) -- Qatar's Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Sultan bin Saad Al Muraikhi has informed the ambassadors in Qatar with the latest developments of the Gulf crisis, Qatar News Agency (QNA) reported. During the three meetings, Muraikhi met separately with ambassadors of African, European and Asian countries, the first of its kind since Qatar was blocked by its Gulf allies, QNA said on Friday. The meetings were also attended by Qatar's Foreign Ministry's Secretary-General Ahmed bin Hassan Al Hammadi. Last June, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Egypt cut diplomatic relations with the tiny but wealthy Gulf Arab state, accusing it of meddling in their domestic affairs and supporting terrorist groups. But Doha vehemently denies all charges. Earlier, Qatari Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad said that countries in the Middle East should put their differences aside and forge a security pact similar to that of the EU. Source: Xinhua| 2018-02-23 22:36:30|Editor: Mu Xuequan Video Player Close HONG KONG, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- The food safety authority of China's Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) announced on Friday the suspension of import and sale of raw oyster harvested in zone 50.14 in Manche in France. A spokesman for the Center for Food Safety (CFS) of the HKSAR government's Food and Environmental Hygiene Department said it received a notification from the Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed (RASFF) of the European Commission that raw oysters harvested in the above-mentioned area were found to be contaminated with norovirus and are under recall. For the sake of prudence, the CFS has immediately suspended the import into and sale within Hong Kong of all raw oysters harvested in the area concerned, the spokesman added. According to information provided by the RASFF, a small quantity of raw oysters harvested in the area concerned were imported into Hong Kong. The CFS is conducting follow-up investigation. The CFS will inform the French authorities of the import suspension and will also notify the local trade. NICOSIA, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- Cyprus confirmed on Friday that Italian ENI energy company has postponed a planned drilling for natural gas after a Turkish warship prevented its drillship from proceeding to its target for a second time in two weeks. "We understand that ENI decided to postpone its planned drilling in Cyprus exclusive economic zone," government spokesman Nicos Christodoulides told Cypriot state television in an interview from Brussels. Cypriot President Nicos Anastasiades is discussing in Brussels with the leaders of other EU member states about Turkey's objection to natural gas exploration by Cyprus and how to formulate a joint EU reaction. State radio reported earlier that a Turkish frigate moved against drillship "Saipem 12000" operating on behalf of ENI in a "threatening manner" and tried to ram it. The incident happened on Friday at 10:00 a.m. local time on the verge of an area between Cyprus and Lebanon, which was reserved by Turkey for military drills. The drillship is sailing into Limassol port where it will stay for two to four days before proceeding to its next target off Morocco, according to the radio. Turkey had prevented the drillship on Feb. 9. The spokesman said that ENI is not dropping its plan for more drillings in Cyprus's exclusive economic zone, after announcing in early January that it discovered a sizable gas field off the southwest shores of the island. "The government is not changing its energy planning either", Christodoulides said. ENI's vice-president in charge of offshore drilling, Claudio Descalzi, said on Thursday that the company will probably have to move its drillship to another target but is not relinquishing its interest in the area. "Then we'll come back, waiting for international, European, Turkish, Greek and Cypriot diplomacy to find a solution," he said. Turkey claims that its action to block ENI from drilling is aimed at the protection of the rights of the Turkish Cypriots, who pulled out of the Cypriot government in 1964. Turkey occupied the northern part of the island in 1974, reacting to a coup by the military rulers of Greece at the time. Source: Xinhua| 2018-02-23 23:01:38|Editor: Mu Xuequan Video Player Close HAIKOU, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- Hainan Airlines said Friday it would deploy wide-body aircrafts and increase flights to help ease traffic jams for ferries in south China's Hainan Province. The airline said it would add 88 flights with nearly 10,000 seats from Feb. 23 to March 2 to help transport stranded passengers on the island. Passengers are heading home after spending their Spring Festival holiday on the island. Hainan, known for its tropical climate and clean air, is a popular destination for Chinese tourists in winter. According to the local government, about 90,000 vehicles containing over 400,000 tourists had arrived on the island during this year's Spring Festival holiday lasting from Feb. 15 to Feb. 21. Shipping on the Qiongzhou Strait, the only way for cars to leave the island for Guangdong, was suspended Wednesday night due to heavy fog. Ferries resumed Thursday morning as visibility improved. More than 21,000 vehicles and 102,000 passengers were shipped to Guangdong across the strait from Hainan between Thursday morning and Friday morning. Although the local government issued several warnings on bad weather and traffic at ports, queues continued as more vehicles tried to cross to Guangdong via the strait. As of 7:30 p.m. Friday, over 12,000 vehicles remained stuck in the seemingly endless traffic jam. "I prefer waiting in line than wandering around. I want to go home as soon as possible," said a passenger surnamed Mo from southwest China's Sichuan Province. The city's traffic authorities said heavy fog, Spring Festival travel rush, and an accident on the shipping route all compounded the situation, and estimated that the traffic jams would continue for another two days. Local authorities said the Spring Festival travel rush would last until March 10. Hainan was among the top 10 domestic destinations during this year's Spring Festival. The island received 5.67 million tourists during the holiday week, up 10 percent on last year. A local government official who declined to be named revealed that the government did not have a plan for such severe traffic jams caused by multiple adverse conditions. Relevant departments had failed to test their capacity to handle such a large number of drivers. The extraordinary gridlock also brought up an old topic that has troubled Hainan for a long time. Whether to build an undersea tunnel or a bridge over the Qiongzhou Strait? Supporters think the link will boost the local economy, while opponents argue it will lead to more traffic. According to Gu Gang, executive vice mayor of Haikou, the city is considering setting up a ferry waiting area in the suburbs to avoid future gridlock. Many tourists have suggested selling ferry tickets online in advance. Those without tickets would not then rush to the ports, and the traffic jams could be alleviated. The civil affairs bureau of Haikou has sent water, food and quilts to stranded passengers to help them get through another night. by Alex Osei-Boateng ACCRA, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- Ghanaian President Nana Akufo-Addo on Friday swore in Martin Amidu as Special Prosecutor, calling for active co-operation of all citizens in the fight against corruption. He said Ghanaians, who had in overwhelming numbers denounced corruption that had engulfed public life in recent years, expected the Office of the Special Prosecutor (OSP) to rise to the occasion. "We expect the Special Prosecutor to discharge his duties vigorously, with courage, without fear or favor, ill-will or malice, in accordance with the rule of law," Akufo-Addo said at the brief ceremony in Accra. He cautioned Amidu, a former running mate to late President John Atta Mills, not to use his office for persecution or vengeance, while assuring him that the executive arm of government would provide whatever assistance is required. Amidu, an anti-corruption crusader and a former Attorney General, was approved by parliament last week. SEOUL, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- South Korean President Moon Jae-in said Friday that talks between South Korea and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) must go hand in hand with talks to denuclearize the Korean Peninsula. Moon made the remarks during a closed-door meeting with Ivanka Trump, the daughter of U.S. President Donald Trump, Yoon Young-chan, Moon's press secretary, told a press briefing. Ivanka arrived in South Korea earlier in the day leading a U.S. delegation to the closing ceremony of the PyeongChang Winter Olympics. The closed-door meeting was arranged before a dinner meeting between Moon and the U.S. delegation at the Blue House in the capital Seoul. Moon said it would be significant for South Korea and the United States to closely cooperate to enable the inter-Korean talks and the denuclearization talks to make progress together. He noted that the joint efforts by Seoul and Washington to denuclearize the DPRK have failed for the past 25 years, saying the two countries must take the opportunity of the current dialogue mood. During a telephone conversation in January, Moon and President Trump shared a possibility for the inter-Korean talks naturally leading to talks between the United States and the DPRK. Ivanka, who serves the position of White House advisor, planned to attend the Olympic closing ceremony scheduled for Sunday. The DPRK will send its high-ranking delegation, led by Kim Yong Chol, vice chairman of the Central Committee of the ruling Workers' Party of Korea, to the closing ceremony. There would be a natural encounter between the DPRK delegation and Ivanka, who reportedly had no plan to meet separately with the DPRK delegation. KIEV, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- The demand for biometric passports in Ukraine hit a record-high in 2017 due to the introduction of the visa-free regime with the European Union (EU), official data showed Friday. The State Migration Service said in a report it has issued about 4.033 million biometric passports last year compared with 1.509 million in 2016. Overall, about 6.7 million of Ukrainians, or 16 percent of the country's population, are now holding biometric passports, which enable them to enter the EU without a visa for 90 days in any 180-day period. The visa-free mechanism between Ukraine and the EU was launched on June 11, 2017. WELLINGTON, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- New Zealand on Friday launched the Provincial Growth Fund in Gisborne, a city in northeastern part of the country, to allocate 1 billion NZ dollars (730 million U.S. dollars) per year to boost regional development. "The Provincial Growth Fund demonstrates how serious we are about providing economic opportunities to all parts of New Zealand," Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Regional Economic Development Fletcher Tabuteau said in a statement. There is huge potential in New Zealand's provinces and this fund will allow the central government to form genuine partnerships with local councils, business owners, community organizations and other private sector entities to unlock this potential, Tabuteau said. "With better resourcing, we are now in a position to create jobs, enable long-term sustainable growth, and enhance social inclusion for all New Zealanders," he said. LISBON, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- Workers employed by Portugal's Postal Service (CTT) went on strike on Friday in protest against deteriorating working conditions, redundancies and post office closures. The strike began at midnight on Thursday and will last for 24 hours. Organizers told Lusa Portuguese News Agency that an initial count suggested 70 percent observance among staff. Many of those taking part in the strike action assembled in Lisbon to protest outside the prime minister's official residence. The dispute relates to a reform plan announced by management in December, which proposes to lay off 800 members of staff and closes up to 22 post office branches. The postal service was privatized in 2014 as a requirement of Portugal's financial bailout package. Portugal received 78 billion euros (95.9 billion U.S. dollars) in rescue funding from the European Union and International Monetary Fund in 2012, on condition that it sold off or privatized a number of state enterprises. On Thursday, the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP), the Greens (PEV) and the Left Bloc (BE) put forth parliamentary motions to return the CTT to public control and to cancel the current private concession. The Socialist Party (PS) government rejected the motions, backed by the center-right Social Democratic Party (PSD) and Central Social Democratic-Popular Party (CDS-PP). Source: Xinhua| 2018-02-23 23:21:43|Editor: Mu Xuequan Video Player Close BEIJING, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- China is willing to work with Japan to improve bilateral ties, State Councilor Yang Jiechi said Friday, as he held talks with Japanese national security advisor Shotaro Yachi. Yang said China had noticed Japan's positive attitude in developing relations with China for some time, and was willing to work with Japan to achieve further improvement and development of bilateral ties. Hailing the four China-Japan political documents, as well as the four-point principled agreement reached in 2014, Yang said the two sides should continuously build up strategic mutual trust, properly handle vital and sensitive issues, and maintain the political foundation of bilateral ties. "We also hope that both sides follow the trend of the times to seek mutual benefit, and make concerted efforts to promote peace, cooperation and development in Asia," Yang said. For his part, Yachi said Japan looked forward to working with China to achieve continuous and steady improvements in bilateral relations. China's Permanent Representative to the United Nations Ma Zhaoxu (C, Front) addresses a United Nations Security Council meeting on the situation in Syria at the UN headquarters in New York, on Feb. 22, 2018. (Xinhua/Li Muzi) UNITED NATIONS, Feb. 22 (Xinhua) -- The Chinese envoy to the United Nations (UN) on Thursday urged the international community to support the parties involved in the Syrian crisis to resume dialogue, amid the escalating situation in the war-torn country. Ma Zhaoxu, China's permanent representative to the United Nations, said at the UN Security Council briefing on Syria that efforts should be made to seek a solution accepted by all parties through the Syrian-owned and Syrian-led political process. Recently, the security situation in parts of Syria, including its capital Damascus and the Eastern Ghouta region, has escalated, causing large civilian casualties and attracting a lot of attention from the international community, Ma said, adding that China would like to express its profound sympathy to the Syrian people for their sufferings. "We condemn all acts of violence that target civilians and civilian facilities and hurt innocent lives," Ma said. China always insists that there is no military solution to the Syrian issue, he said, adding that political settlement is the only way out. "It is the only way to fundamentally ease the humanitarian situation in Syria and rid the Syrian people of their sufferings at an early date," Ma said. Terrorist organizations are still launching attacks in Syria, which have caused large civilian casualties and impeded the humanitarian relief efforts of the United Nations, he said. The international community should strengthen cooperation on counter-terrorism, adopt unified standards, and resolutely combat all terrorist organizations designated by the Security Council, Ma said. Actions taken by the Security Council on Syria's humanitarian issue should not only help improve the overall humanitarian situation in Syria, but also help consolidate the momentum of ceasefire in Syria, and be conducive to the bigger picture of political settlement of the Syria issue, the Chinese envoy said. China calls upon the Security Council to remain united on the Syrian issue, take a united stance, and create favorable conditions for substantive progress in Syria's political process as soon as possible, Ma said. The Syrian army on Thursday urged civilians in Eastern Ghouta, east of Damascus, to leave their houses, ahead of a military offensive. The civilians were instructed to take safe exits to move to areas under the Syrian army's control. The Syrian army launched operations on the outskirts of Eastern Ghouta and shelled the rebel positions on Sunday. Eastern Ghouta, home to around 350,000 civilians, has long been a major threat to Damascus. It was used by rebels as a base to launch attacks against the capital. Four key rebel groups are positioned inside Eastern Ghouta, namely the Islam Army, Failaq al-Rahman, Ahrar al-Sham and the Levant Liberation Committee, also known as the al-Qaida-linked Nusra Front. YANGON, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- Myanmar State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyi on Friday said the deadly bomb attacks at two banks in Lashio, Shan State on Wednesday affected government's efforts for national reconciliation. The explosion hit Yoma bank, affecting nearby AYA bank, killing two female staffs of the former bank, injuring 21 others. The state counselor condemned the bomb attacks targeting public areas and innocent civilians. The authorities are investigating the incident and tight securities measures have been imposed on Lashio. Lashio, a major trading town in northern Myanmar, is the capital city of the country's Shan state where several ethnic armed groups are active. Earlier this month, two more ethnic armed groups -- the New Mon State Party and Lahu Democratic Union joined the government's ceasefire pact, bringing the total number of ethnic groups that have joined the Nationwide Ceasefire Accord to 10. Source: Xinhua| 2018-02-23 23:41:47|Editor: Mu Xuequan Video Player Close TEHRAN, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- Tehran is working closely with Damascus to reduce violence in the rebel-held city of Ghouta in Syria, Iran Daily reported on Friday. "We are trying to see how we can de-escalate this new tension," Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi was quoted as saying. "We want to assist people on the ground who are suffering from this conflict," Araqchi said on Friday. Airstrikes by the Syrian government continued on the Ghouta near Syria's capital on Friday. The United Nations (UN) Security Council will meet on the day to consider a resolution demanding a 30-day humanitarian ceasefire across the Middle East country. Iran, a close ally of Syria, has played a major role in the war against militants in the country. Iranian officials have said that Iran would keep up its advisory assistance to the Syrian government until full elimination of terrorism. GENEVA, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- Two people were killed in a shoot-out near the financial district of Swiss city of Zurich, local police said Friday. Police said they had deployed a large contingent of security forces to respond to a downtown crime scene near the main railway station. One of the victims was still alive when the police arrived at the crime scene, but she succumbed to her injuries shortly after that, said the police. The cause of the incident is under investigation. Source: Xinhua| 2018-02-24 00:11:52|Editor: Mu Xuequan Video Player Close SHIJIAZHUANG, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- Chinese automaker Great Wall Motors announced Friday it had signed a letter of intent with German auto giant BMW to produce electric models of its Mini cars in China. The Chinese carmaker made the remarks in a statement released on the official website of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. According to the statement, the two automakers are in advanced discussions aimed at a new joint venture in China, the world's biggest new energy auto market. BMW and Great Wall have yet to agree on important details like where to build a factory and how much to invest. Industry analysts said the project would be a boost for the two automakers to expand their new energy vehicles market. Headquartered in the northern Chinese city of Baoding, Great Wall is China's biggest SUV maker, selling more than 1 million vehicles annually. Mini sold 35,000 from a total of 372,000 cars in China last year. In 2017, sales of new energy vehicles in China rose 53.5 percent to 777,000, according to the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers. VILNIUS, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- Britain's withdrawal from the EU will pose a significant challenge to the European budget after 2020, Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaite said Friday. "Negotiations on the budget currently are in their initial phase. Obviously, there is a wish to finish them before the European Parliament's election in 2019. However, usually the accord is reached moments before the new financial long-term perspective comes into force," Grybauskaite said in an interview with local radio broadcaster Lietuvos Radijas. Grybauskaite was speaking before attending an informal European Council meeting in Brussels where the political priorities of the EU's new long-term budget are being discussed on Friday. Given the additional needs and challenges facing the EU, such as defense and migration, the negotiations could draw out until spring 2020, said the president. With the United Kingdom out of the EU, the annual budget financing may be short of 13 billion euros (16 billion U.S. dollars), Grybauskaite noted. "EU member states will have to decide how to provide sufficient funding to ongoing programs and to future priority projects," she said. Earlier this month, Grybauskaite presented the Baltic country's expectations for the long-term EU budget to European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, and President of the European Council Donald Tusk, who were on a visit to Lithuania. Source: Xinhua| 2018-02-24 00:26:55|Editor: Jiaxin Video Player Close Photo taken on Feb. 23, 2018 shows copies of the postage stamp "2018 -- Year of the Yellow Dog" in Sofia, Bulgaria. Bulgarian Posts had released the postage stamp "2018 -- Year of the Yellow Dog," its chief executive officer Deyan Daneshki said here Friday. (Xinhua/Zhan Xiaoyi) SOFIA, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- Bulgarian Posts had released the postage stamp "2018 -- Year of the Yellow Dog", its chief executive officer Deyan Daneshki said here Friday. The postage stamp had a circulation of 3,600, and cost 0.65 Bulgarian lev (some 0.41 U.S. dollars), Daneshki said at the validation ceremony attended by hundreds of philatelists eager to buy a copy. A postage stamp dedicated to the Chinese New Year was first issued in Bulgaria in 2017, the Year of the Fire Cock, Daneshki said. Spas Panchev, president of the Union of Bulgarian Philatelists and member of the country's parliament, said in turn that the stamp was very interesting because China and Bulgaria have traditionally maintained good diplomatic, political, economic and people's relations. Meanwhile, the small circulation of only 3,600 copies made it attractive to collectors because its price would grow, Panchev said. He said he hoped that in the coming years, Bulgarian Posts would issue more postage stamps dedicated to the Chinese Spring Festival. ABUJA, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari on Friday said he will be sending more troops and surveillance aircraft to search for schoolgirls who were declared missing after suspected Boko Haram terror group attacked their college in the northeastern state of Yobe last Monday. In a statement, Buhari assured the families of the missing students from the Government Girls Technical College in Dapchi area of Yobe that no effort will be spared to bring succor to them, as troops will be mandated to "keep an eye on all movements in the entire territory on a 24-hour basis, in the hope that all the missing girls will be found." On Thursday, the Nigerian government said it was not yet sure of the number of the missing girls and pleaded for more time to assess the situation. Buhari described the incident as a "national disaster," saying "the entire country stands as one with the girls' families." The tragedy of the missing girls has brought back memories of a similar occurrence four years ago in Africa's most populous country when more than 200 schoolgirls, also from an all-girl college, were abducted by Boko Haram in the northeastern town of Chibok. According to officials, at least 46 students are still unaccounted for following Monday night's attack. Other reports put the figure at 13. Over 94 students were missing at first. But the state government said 28 returned late Tuesday and 20 more came back early Wednesday. Police and local officials said there was no evidence that the girls had been abducted but the Yobe government suspected that some of the students are in Boko Haram's captivity. A local teacher said as Boko Haram outlaws went into students' dormitories, many of the girls jumped over the fence and escaped into the bushes. Some of the girls who had returned told the school authorities that they were rescued by villagers from the bushes. The outlawed Boko Haram group has been trying since 2009 to establish an Islamic state in northeastern Nigeria. They have killed some 20,000 people and displaced millions of others. HARARE, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- Leadership squabbles continue to haunt Zimbabwe's opposition MDC-T party following the death of its leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, last week. Tsvangirai died in South Africa on Feb. 14 after a two-year battle with colon cancer. He was buried in his rural home in Buhera this Tuesday. On Friday, the party convened a consultative meeting to find a solution to the leadership wrangle that has even spawned violence within the party. Acting party leader Nelson Chamisa told a press conference on Friday that two options had been proffered, either to hold a national council meeting or go to an extra ordinary congress to elect a substantive leader. Last Thursday, the National Council appointed Chamisa the party's acting president, hours after the death of founding leader Morgan Tsvangirai. Chamisa's appointment is being contested by the party's two other deputy presidents, Elias Mudzuri and Thokozani Khupe. Khupe is claiming that she is the rightful person to act as president since she was appointed vice president at the last congress in 2014 while Mudzuri and party secretary-general Douglas Mwonzora want the party to take the extra ordinary congress route to elect a new leader. The party's congress, held every five years, is due in 2019. Chamisa and Mudzuri were appointed by Tsvangirai in 2016. Chamisa maintains that his appointment by the National Council, the party's highest decision-making body outside congress, is constitutional. He argued that the power to appoint an acting president was reposed in the National Council. "What we have done is perfectly constitutional. It's 100 percent legal," Chamisa told a press conference during the consultative meeting that was boycotted by Khupe and party national chairman Lovemore Moyo. Khupe has not been attending party meetings for the past eight months. Chamisa explained that the MDC-T president will automatically become the leader of the MDC Alliance, a coalition of seven parties that will challenge the ruling ZANU-PF party in the forthcoming elections set for mid-2018. Chamisa reiterated his apology to Khupe and Mwonzora for the violence they suffered from party youths during Tsvangirai's burial on Tuesday. He said the party will leave no stone unturned to ensure the culprits are brought to book. KIEV, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- The state-run Ukrainian Railways on Friday signed a framework agreement on the partnership with U.S. company General Electric (GE), the Ukrainian government said. The agreement worth about 1 billion U.S. dollars envisages that the two companies will jointly upgrade the rolling stock of the Ukrainian Railways, the government said in a statement. Under the deal, Ukrainian Railways and GE plan to produce up to 225 new diesel locomotives and modernize 75 outdated locomotives within the next 15 years. About 40 percent of the vehicles' components will be produced in Ukraine. At the first stage of the partnership, in 2018-2019, Ukrainian Railways will get 30 locomotives of Evolution type from the GE. While commenting on the deal, Ukrainian Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman described it as an "unprecedented agreement" for the Ukrainian economy. "It will provide a significant impetus for the development of Ukrainian transport infrastructure and domestic machine building," Groysman said. According to the Ukrainian government, in the long-term, the partnership between Ukrainian Railways and GE would help modernize Ukraine's industrial infrastructure, enhance energy security and boost Ukraine's exports and transit capabilities. MOGADISHU, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- Somalia security forces on Friday foiled a terror attack at the presidential palace following twin explosions that rocked the capital city within an interval of about 15 minutes. A police officer, Ahmed Abdulle, told Xinhua that security forces manning the presidential palace repulsed militants who were trying to storm into the palace, killing three of them. "They tried to storm into Villa Somalia but our forces fought them back. The forces were pursuing the vehicle as it headed towards the palace but exploded before reaching the target," Abdulle told Xinhua. The first explosion went off at around 6 p.m. local time, when a vehicle loaded with explosives hit the newly opened Dorbin hotel near the intelligence headquarters. A second expolsion went off shortly after near Villa Somalia. Witnesses recounted of the turn of the events. "We heard a huge explosion followed by a lot of gunfire near the parliament building. We were told Sayidka hotel was being attacked," Yasmin Mohamed said. Militant group al-Shabaab has claimed responsibility for the attack, which came barely a day after Security Minister Mohamed Islow warned of a minivan loaded with explosives in Mogadishu. Security forces have in the past week cordoned off roads and launched major security operations in the city amid reports of an impending attack. RIGA, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- The Bank of Latvia has granted the troubled ABLV Bank's request for further assistance and extended it another loan worth nearly 200 million euros (246 million U.S. dollars), the central bank said on Friday. As a result, the central bank's loans granted to ABLV this week have totaled 297.2 million euros, but still significantly less than the 480 million euros requested by the commercial bank. On Monday, the Bank of Latvia already provided 97.5 million euros to ABLV to make steady its operations after the bank's payments were suspended following a U.S. report implicating ABLV in money laundering schemes and bribery. "Acting within the framework of the Eurosystem's existing regulation and taking into account the findings provided by the supervisory authority, the European Central Bank (ECB), and the national regulator, the Financial and Capital Market Commission, the Bank of Latvia has lent ABLV Bank 297.2 million euros in total this week against a pledge of highly liquid securities," the central bank's spokesman Janis Silakalns said. The Bank of Latvia representative emphasized that the value of the securities ABLV has pledged as collateral is approximately two times higher than the value of the loan granted to the bank. There is no risk of any public funds being lost in the transaction, the representative said. ABLV is expected to repay the loan by August 2018. In a report released last week, the U.S. Department of the Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) said the ABLV management "used bribery to influence Latvian officials when challenging enforcement actions and perceived threats to their high-risk business." FinCEN has proposed sanctioning ABLV by banning the bank from opening or maintaining correspondent accounts in the United States or altogether blocking the bank from the U.S. financial system. When the news of the report broke last Wednesday, clients rushed to withdraw their money from the bank. To curb the outflow of funds and in compliance with the ECB's instructions, the Latvian banking regulator suspended ABLV's client payments in all currencies on Feb. 18. By that time, customers had withdrawn around 600 million euros from the bank. ABLV is the third largest bank in Latvia by assets. (1 euro = 1.23 U.S. dollars) BERLIN, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- Another German citizen imprisoned on political grounds in Turkey has been released from custody by local authorities, the German Foreign Office told press on Friday. The spokesperson for the Foreign Office was unwilling to provide any personal details about the individual and noted that they were still legally-barred from leaving Turkey. The development further underscores the recent improvement in diplomatic relations between Berlin and Ankara. Traditionally close German-Turkish ties had come under severe strain in the wake of failed coup d'etat in Turkey in 2016. Together with the recent and widely-publicized return of the "Welt" journalist Deniz Yuecel to Germany, the release of the unnamed prisoner on Friday means that the number of German citizens in Turkish custody has declined from ten to four within a matter of weeks. by Tian Dongdong BRUSSELS, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- The Communist Manifesto, written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels 170 years ago, still is a powerful tool to decipher the phenomenon of Western countries as well as development in China, according to scholars and experts interviewed by Xinhua. ENORMOUS VALUE "Try to analyze the thing that happens today, these papers are still of use," said Marien van der Heijden, head of collection development of the International Institute of Social History (IISH) in the Netherlands. The institute has stored a large amount of manuscripts of writings by Marx and Engels, including the only existing draft page of the manifesto, the first formal version of which was published in London in late February 1848. "At sometime in the 1990s, people were saying that Marx was not relevant anymore. Then came in Europe and the United States, big financial international crises, the speculation, bubble burst ... and people suddenly thought: 'This happened once before and it was researched. What happens if we read this again? Is it still relevant?' And yes, it appears to be relevant," he noted. For Robert Griffiths, general secretary of the Communist Party of Britain, the manifesto "is still of enormous value". "One of the great values of the Communist manifesto is of course that it provides an overarching sweeping analysis of human history, and how and why societies have changed fundamentally over time. It contains an outline of history and lessons for us today," said Griffiths. "Although much has changed since the 1840s, not least here in Britain, the fundamentals (of the capitalist society) are still the same. We are still in a class-divided society, a society of great inequality, not just in terms of wealth but in terms of power. That means that the manifesto is still relevant today and what it proposes is still relevant," said Griffiths. Raoul Peck, a Haitian filmmaker who directed "The Young Karl Marx", observed that Marx's thoughts remain the perfect instrument to understand today's world. "Marx, what he did with Engels, is to describe and analyze capitalist society from the beginning ... all elements of capitalism are still there today," said Peck. REDISCOVERING MARXISM AMID CRISES With the largest collection of books on communism in Britain, London's Marx Memorial Library has witnessed a surge of membership application from young people in recent years, especially college students. "We have many people at the library. So we know there is a desperate hunger among students here in Britain to find out about these ideas," said Alex Gordon, chair of the Trustee Committee of Marx Memorial Library and Workers' School. "If you look at the curriculum of most British universities now, there is almost nothing taught about the ideas of Marxism. And people understand, young people understand particularly that this intellectual vacuum in the heart of British universities needs to be addressed and they come here in order to find out about those ideas and to seek further reading," said Gordon. Echoing Gordon, Dr. Pepijn Brandon, senior researcher at the IISH, pointed out that "more than the revival of Marx, there is a revival of interest in thinking systemic questions about how capitalism works and what its origins are". The financial and economic crises have rekindled interest in Marxism. "Since the crises and especially the financial crisis of 2008, Marx was on all the covers of the economic newspapers in the West, even The Wall Street Journal, The Economist. Still today, every day there is an article on Marx," said the filmmaker Peck. "The success of a researcher, like Thomas Piketty, is attributed to the fact that he uses the Marxist instrument to analyze the economic situation in the world," Peck said. "He has succeeded in showing the enormous inequalities that exist today, which are more serious than 50 years ago." "Is Marx out of date or not? We realize that Marx is unsurpassable as long as we are in a capitalist society," he added. PROFOUND IMPACT FOR CHINA "The profound impact of Marxism and policies inspired by Marxism, the profound impact they are having in China is absolutely undeniable," said Griffiths, general secretary of the Communist Party of Britain. "What is also true is that Communist Party of China (CPC) is motivated by a desire to serve the interests of the mass of the people," said Griffiths. John Foster, emeritus professor of Social Science at the University of the West of Scotland, said: "The manifesto provided the theoretical basis for socialist parties that over the following seventy years transformed the balance of power across Europe and Asia." Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era, developed by General Secretary of CPC Central Committee Xi Jinping, marks a further stage in the progress of China's revolution and construction, while CPC has inherited and developed Marxist theories with its own social conditions, Foster noted. In an interview with Xinhua, Qu Xing, Chinese Ambassador to Belgium, noted that the "starting point" of Marx and Engels is to give ordinary working people a guaranteed, dignified and equal life. Therefore, the manifesto is the historical and ideological source of socialism with Chinese characteristics, which marks the modern development and stands as the new form of the manifesto, Qu added. (Xinhua correspondents Liu Fang in The Hague, Zhang Dailei in London, Zhang Man in Paris, and Pan Geping in Brussels also contributed to the story) BERLIN, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, the designated new secretary general of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), rejected calls to shift her party's position further to the right-wing spectrum of politics, German media reported on Friday. Speaking to German publication Spiegel, Kramp-Karrenbauer said she was "in strict opposition" to such a move and questioned the accuracy of related claims that the CDU was neglecting its conservative roots. The conservative wing of the CDU surrounding the parliamentarian Wolfgang Bosbach has vocally criticized a perceived shift to the left of the party spectrum on key issues such as the cancellation of mandatory national service and same-sex marriage. Members of this so-called "Berlin circle" have warned the CDU would fail to contain the electoral threat posed by the far-right Alternative for Germany unless it maintained a staunchly conservative profile. However, the news of Kramp-Karrenbauer's nomination as secretary-general has provoked media speculation that the party is now more likely to continue down its centrist path of recent years. Kramp-Karrenbauer, aged 55, has long been tipped as a potential successor to German Chancellor and CDU leader Angela Merkel. Kramp-Karrenbauer told Spiegel the CDU was a party which has traditionally accommodated a diversity of confessional and ideological positions. Nevertheless, she also announced her desire to strengthen the role of the party against the federal government, even if it led to conflict with her close ally Merkel. There would certainly be positions where the CDU leader and the party secretary had "different opinions", Kramp-Karrenbauer said. Following an arduous and still incomplete process of government formation which began after national elections in September 2017, Merkel has reacted to internal criticism of the recent coalition agreement between the CDU, Christian Social Union (CSU) and the Social Democrats (SPD) by making a promise of party renewal. The CDU leadership is scheduled to begin formulating a new basic manifesto at a party conference on Monday, starting with proposals for far-reaching reforms of Germany's current system of social market economy. A first draft cited by media on Friday described the social market economy as having constituted the foundation for Germany's prosperity after World War II by combining "market dynamism with social balance". As a consequence, policymakers faced the urgent task of ensuring the system was adapted in order to weather the macro-structural changes of globalization, digitalization, demographic challenges and a new geo-political landscape. Chinese puppetry troupe brings Chinese New Year celebration to Aswan art festival in southern Egypt. (Xinhua photo/Mao Xiaoxiao) ASWAN, Egypt, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- The Sun Festival of Abu Simbel temple in southern Egypt this year has brought Chinese festivity to the ancient land of Nubians, as Chinese puppetry show has joined the international celebration event for the first time. The Sun Festival, which attracted thousands of visitors worldwide to participate in the event on Feb. 22, this year also coincided with the Chinese Spring Festival celebration week. Built by King Ramses II, the statues of the king and the sun god remain in darkness inside the Abu Simbel temple throughout the year except on Feb. 22 and Oct. 22, when the sunlight showers on the statues to commemorate the king's coronation and birthday. This year, the Aswan art festival is joined by folklore performances from Ethiopia, Sudan, Kenya, Algeria, China, India and Thailand besides Egyptian local troupes. Chen Yinghong, head of the Chinese puppetry troupe, told Xinhua that they had staged eight performances in various places in Aswan with three special shows. "I was afraid in the beginning that Egyptian audience might not understand the Chinese puppet show due to cultural differences, but after the warm response from the opening ceremony, I was assured," said Chen. On the closing ceremony in front of the ancient Abu Simbel temples, the Chinese puppetry troupe performed the stunt of changing puppet clothing in less than a second that marveled local audience and tourists. Ahmed Aboabudula, a local audience took video and pictures of the puppet show and said, "everybody laughed and clapped, we like the puppet show, it is very nice." Chen, who came to Egypt in 2001 when he was often recognized as Japanese tourist, said that this time, he met many Egyptians who greeted him with simple Chinese. "This reflects the increasing number of Chinese visitors to Egypt and the expanding tourism exchanges between our two countries," said Chen. In 2017, China has become the 4th largest tourists' source for Egypt and the number of Chinese travellers to Egypt is rising fast. Local tour operator told Xinhua that direct flights from China to Abu Simbel, which started several months ago, bring several hundreds of Chinese tourists every day to southern Egypt. The number of tourists accounts for nearly a quarter thousand visits per day in average. Shi Yuewen, Cultural Councilor of the Chinese Embassy in Cairo, told Xinhua that with growing economic and cultural ties between China and Egypt, he decided to make a change to the traditional Chinese lunar New Year celebrations in Egypt which used to include performances and food and handcraft stalls in the Azhar Park in Cairo. Instead, he sent performance groups from China out of Cairo to Aswan and Egypt's red sea resort town of Sharm el Sheik to add a taste of Chinese festivity to the world-renowned Egyptian attractions and festivals while lighted the Cairo tower in red for the first time on the eve of Chinese Spring Festival. Dragon boat competition on Nile and Chinese martial art competition will also be held in Cairo besides the Chinese food week in luxury hotels as part of the new Chinese Spring Festival celebration program this year, Shi revealed. Source: Xinhua| 2018-02-24 03:22:33|Editor: Jiaxin Video Player Close A man injured in bombing attacks is carried to Madina Hospital in Mogadishu, capital of Somalia, on Feb. 23, 2018. At least 18 people have been confirmed dead and 20 others injured in twin bombing attacks in Mogadishu on Friday. (Xinhua/Faisal Isse) MOGADISHU, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- At least 18 people have been confirmed dead and 20 others injured in twin bombing attacks in Mogadishu on Friday. Aamin Ambulance Director Abdukadir Abdirahman said 18 people died in the double bombings, one of which targeting the presidential palace. "I can confirm to you that we have recorded 18 bodies. Another 20 were injured and we have transported them to various hospitals in the city," Abdirahman said. Somali security forces managed to thwart an attack at the presidential palace, repulsing militants pushing to enter the compound. A vehicle loaded with explosives exploded near Villa Somalia as security forces pursued it. Earlier, police told Xinhua security forces manning Villa Somalia repulsed militants who were trying to storm into the palace, killing three of them. "They tried to storm into Villa Somalia but our forces fought them back. The forces were pursuing the vehicle as it headed towards the palace but exploded before reaching the target," police officer Ahmed Abdulle told Xinhua. The first explosion went off at around 6 p.m. local time, when a vehicle loaded with explosives hit the newly opened Dorbin hotel, near the intelligence headquarters. A second explosion went off shortly after near Villa Somalia. Witnesses recounted of the turn of the events. "We heard a huge explosion followed by a lot of gunfire near the parliament building. We were told Sayidka hotel was being attacked," Yasmin Mohamed said. Militant group al-Shabaab has claimed responsibility for the attack, which came barely a day after Security Minister Mohamed Islow warned of a minivan loaded with explosives in Mogadishu. Security forces have in the past week cordoned off roads and launched major security operations in the city amid reports of an impending attack. RABAT, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- Moroccan Prime Minister Saad Eddine El Othmani and visiting Ghanian Senior Minister Yaw Osafo-Marfo on Friday reaffirmed the two country's strong will to give new impetus to bilateral cooperation. During the talks, the two officials hailed the good friendship between the two countries, which has been further consolidated since the visit of Morocco's King Mohammed VI to Ghana last year, the Moroccan prime minister's office said in a statement. They also discussed the means to consolidate bilateral ties in various areas of socio-economic development, mainly through mutual visits and expertise sharing, it added. Meanwhile, El Othmani thanked Ghana for supporting Morocco's return to the African Union and its request to join the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). For his part, Osafo-Marfo reaffirmed his country's support for Morocco to recover its membership in various bodies of the African Union, given Morocco's place as one of the founding countries of the Organization of African Unity, the predecessor of the African Union, and its continuous contribution to the economic and social development of Africa. Yaw Osafo Marfo is leading a government delegation on a working visit to Morocco. Source: Xinhua| 2018-02-24 04:07:42|Editor: Mu Xuequan Video Player Close UNITED NATIONS, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- The United Nations on Friday welcomed the resignation of Ethiopian Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn "to allow further political reforms in the country aimed at widening democratic space." "The United Nations takes note of the recent decision by the prime minister of Ethiopia, Hailemariam Desalegn, to resign to allow further political reforms to take place in the country aimed at widening democratic space," said UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric in a statement. "The government of Ethiopia has expressed the intention to continue with implementation of governance reforms and increase participation in the political process. The United Nations welcomes the steps so far undertaken in that direction, including the release of detainees," said the statement. The world organization considers Ethiopia a valued partner in the Horn of Africa and the African continent, and will continue to support the government and people of Ethiopia in implementing reforms that would enhance governance, stability and development, it said. The United Nations also takes note of the recent declaration of a state of emergency and stresses the importance of avoiding actions that would infringe on the human rights and fundamental freedoms of citizens, the peace, security and stability of the country, or impact on the delivery of humanitarian assistance, said the statement. Desalegn offered to resign on Thursday in what he said was an effort to advance reforms aimed at easing the country's political unrest. Source: Xinhua| 2018-02-24 04:22:48|Editor: ZD Video Player Close European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker addresses a press conference after a summit of the 27 EU leaders excluding British prime minister in Brussels, Belgium, on Feb. 23, 2018. (Xinhua/Ye Pingfan) BRUSSELS, Feb.23 (Xinhua) -- Most European leaders were on the same page at an informal summit to claw back their says in picking the successor to Jean-Claude Juncker, incumbent president of the European Commission. As next European Parliament(EP) election slated for May 2019 is drawing closer, the move dealt a blow to political groups in the EP, as well as Juncker, who adamantly backs the so-called "lead candidate" system. Speaking at the press conference following the summit, European Council President Donald Tusk said the leaders of member states agreed that they cannot guarantee in advance they will propose one of the "lead candidates" for next president of the European Commission. "Their no automaticity in this process, " he stressed, referring to the "lead-candidate" system to pick the president of the European Commission. Under the system, each political group in the European Parliament (EP) nominates a candidate for the top-tier post in the run-up to the EP election. The candidate of the party group which scoops the most seats in the EP is to be nominated by the European Council and approved by the EP by a majority of votes. The "lead candidate" system, firstly put into place in the 2014 EP election, is not enshrined in the 2009 Lisbon Treaty, which only ambiguously stipulates that the European Council should propose to the EP a candidate "taking into account the elections to the EP and after having held the appropriate consultations." A number of EU states have raised eyebrows at the "lead candidate" system, worrying that "the pool of potential candidates would become more limited, and the politicization of the Commission," according to a note released by the European Council days ahead of the summit. However, Commission President Juncker, who as the lead candidate of the European People's Party secured the post in 2014, has time and again thrown his weight behind it, arguing that the winner of the candidate has a "double legitimacy" with the endorsement from the European Council and the EP. When it comes to the line-up of EP in the post-Brexit era, Tusk said leaders saw eye to eye on the principle of "fewer members state should mean fewer seats", and gave their nods to a proposal put forward by the EP to cut seats. The EP has proposed that the 27 of the 73 seats currently allocated to Britain be redistributed to 14 member states "to reflect demographic changes." The EP also suggested cutting the number of seats from 751 to 705. But leaders were at odds over the idea of "transnational list", which is backed by French President Emmanuel Macron. "Leaders will come back to the issue in the future," said Tusk, without going into details. According to the note released by the European Council, the idea is put on the back burner as it would "require modification of the Electoral Act, which must be adopted at least one year before the elections." The "transnational list" also requires the unanimity of EU member states, the EP's consent and the approval by all the national parliaments. To Juncker's dismay, again, European leaders also gave their cold shoulders to his proposal of merging the posts of the president of the European Council and European Commission. Tusk said all other leaders "have no appetite to take this forward. above all, because it will substantially reduce the role of member states in the EU." Standing alongside Tusk at the press conference, Juncker conceded that the summit atmosphere was friendly except when leaders touched on this issue. The summit was held in an EU27 format without the participation of Britain, as the issues debated will only come into play after Britain's withdrawal of the bloc. Russian Ambassador to the United Nations Vassily Nebenzia (C, Front) addresses a United Nations Security Council meeting on the situation in Syria at the UN headquarters in New York, on Feb. 22, 2018. (Xinhua/Li Muzi) MOSCOW, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- Russia is ready to vote for a resolution by the United Nations Security Council on humanitarian ceasefire in Syria's eastern Ghouta, but only on the condition of guarantees from all sides, the Russian Foreign Ministry said Friday. "In order for the resolution to be effective, and we are ready to agree on such a text, we propose a principle that will make the ceasefire real and based on guarantees of all those inside and outside Eastern Ghouta," Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told the media following a meeting with his Uzbek counterpart Abdulaziz Kamilov, according to a ministry transcript. On Thursday, the Security Council discussed the situation in Syria's besieged eastern Ghouta, but failed to reach an agreement on the draft as members were divided over the text. Russia proposed to amend the text for "it to be realistic." Lavrov underscored that the ceasefire resolution debated at the UN Security Council gave no guarantees that the militants would adhere to it. "The guarantees, of course, should be backed by guarantees of external players, primarily those who have influence on extremist groups that have settled in this suburb of Damascus," he added. According to Russian Ambassador to the United Nations Vassily Nebenzia, Russia prepared amendments to the ceasefire resolution and offered to the members of the Security Council on Thursday. Source: Xinhua| 2018-02-24 04:47:51|Editor: Mu Xuequan Video Player Close UNITED NATIONS, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- Candidates from Ecuador and Honduras have announced their intentions to run for president of the 73rd UN General Assembly, the spokesman for the current president, Miroslav Lajcak, announced on Friday. Honduras Ambassador to the United Nations Mary Elizabeth Flores Flake and the Foreign Minister of Ecuador, Maria Fernanda Espinosa Garces were the first two candidates, the spokesman for Lajcak, Brenden Varma, told reporters at a daily briefing in UN Headquarters. Following an informal policy of geographical rotation for the one-year post, candidates from Latin America and the Caribbean are eligible for election scheduled for June 5, the spokesman said. This time around women were particularly encouraged to enter the contest, Varma said. Lajcak is foreign minister of Slovakia, representing the Eastern European bloc. "For the first time ever, the assembly will hold informal interactive dialogues with the candidates," Varma said, adding that they will be held in early May. "The goal is to promote transparency and inclusivity." Photo taken on Dec. 24, 2016 shows Ukrainian army's armored vehicles withdrawn from the frontline on the way to the Donetsk city in the Donbas region, Ukraine. (Xinhua/Chen Junfeng) KIEV, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- The Ukrainian parliament's newspaper "Golos Ukrainy" published on Friday a controversial law on the return of the conflict-hit Donbas region in eastern Ukraine under Kiev's sovereignty, paving the way for the legislation to come into effect on Feb. 24. Last month, the Ukrainian parliament passed the law on the Donbas re-integration, which defines areas controlled by pro-independence rebels as "temporarily occupied territories." On Feb. 11, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that Ukraine would make a "colossal mistake" and would breach the Minsk agreements if it does pass the law. However, on Feb. 20, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko signed the law, saying it does not violate any international obligations of Ukraine, including the Minsk agreements. The Minsk agreements, reached in September 2014 and February 2015 respectively, envisage a ceasefire, a withdrawal of heavy weaponry from the contact line, a prisoner exchange and local elections, among other measures. The conflict in Ukraine's eastern Donbas region started in April 2014, after government forces launched offensives to regain control of the cities and towns seized by armed groups which declared independence from Kiev. Source: Xinhua| 2018-02-24 05:23:00|Editor: Mu Xuequan Video Player Close GENEVA, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- A UN statement on Friday described that Syria's Eastern Ghouta is now "a living example of an entirely known, predictable, and preventable humanitarian disaster unfolding before our eyes". Jens Laerke of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said in a statement that according to some sources, the total death toll in the region since Feb. 19 is close to 300 people. He told a Palais des Nations press briefing Friday that at least seven health facilities were reportedly hit on Feb. 21. "Over the past 24 hours, heavy shelling and aerial bombardment on multiple communities in East Ghouta reportedly continued, resulting, it is reported, in the death of at least 50 people and wounding at least 200," he said. According to the UN official, ground-based strikes and mortar shelling from eastern Ghouta also killed or injured scores of civilians in Damascus city. Alessandra Vellucci, head of United Nations Information Service in Geneva, also cited the UN Special Envoy for Syria, Staffan de Mistura, as saying that the humanitarian situation of the civilians in Eastern Ghouta was "appalling". "There was an urgent need for a ceasefire to stop both the horrific heavy bombardment of Eastern Ghouta and the indiscriminate mortar shelling on Damascus," de Mistura was cited as saying. RABAT, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- Moroccan authorities seized on Friday a total of 1.34 tons of cannabis near the northern town of Chefchaouen. The banned substance was packed in 46 packages on board of a car, according to local authorities. The operation led to the arrest of two individuals, who were on the car, the same source said, adding that an investigation is underway to identify possible accomplices. Despite efforts to crack down on cannabis farming in the past decade, Morocco remains the world's largest cannabis resin harvester. According to the 2016 report by the UN's Office on Drugs and Crime, Morocco ranks first among 129 cannabis producing countries throughout the period from 2009 to 2014, followed by Afghanistan, Lebanon and India. A man shouts slogans during a protest against U.S. recognition of Jerusalem, in Tehran, Iran, on Dec. 11, 2017. Thousands of Iranians held a rally to condemn U.S. President Donald Trump's recent decision on Jerusalem. (Xinhua/Ahmad Halabisaz) WASHINGTON, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- The U.S. State Department said on Friday that the United States is planning to open its embassy to Israel in Jerusalem in May, a move that has reversed longtime U.S. policy and triggered global objection. The embassy will initially be located in the Arnona neighborhood in a building that now houses consular operations of U.S. Consulate General Jerusalem, said the State Department Spokesperson Heather Nauert in a statement. A Palestinian protester burns a tire during clashes with Israeli troops after a protest against U.S. President Donald Trump's decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, in the southern Gaza Strip city of Khan Younis on Dec. 7, 2017. (Xinhua/Khaled Omar) A new embassy annex on the Arnona compound is expected to be open by the end of 2019, Nauert added. Meanwhile, the United States has started searching for a site as the permanent U.S. embassy to Israel, a process which Nauert described could be "a longer-term undertaking." The embassy opening in May will coincide with Israel's 70th anniversary, the spokesperson added. U.S. President Donald Trump visits the Western Wall in Jerusalem, May 22, 2017. (Xinhua/Nati Shochat-JINI) Despite global opposition, Trump delivered one of his major campaign promises in December by recognizing Jerusalem as the capital city of Israel and demanded the State Department develop a plan to move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Recently, Palestinian officials announced in many occasions that the U.S. policies in the region threaten security and stability and cannot achieve peace in the Middle East. Source: Xinhua| 2018-02-24 05:53:09|Editor: Mu Xuequan Video Player Close JERUSALEM, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- The U.S. embassy will move from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem by May 14, in honor of the 70th anniversary of Israel's declaration of independence, the Israeli media Friday quoted a top Israeli minister as saying. According to Israeli media, the Minister of Transportation and Intelligence Israel Katz tweeted on Friday saying, "I would like to congratulate Donald Trump, the President of the U.S. on his decision to transfer the U.S. embassy to our capital on Israel's 70th Independence Day." It seems that the opening of the new U.S. embassy in Jerusalem will be earlier than what had been expected. The U.S. Vice President Mike Pence said the move would take place by the end of 2019, when he gave a speech in the Knesset during his visit in Israel last month. Media also quoted two Trump administration officials as saying that the new U.S. embassy in Jerusalem will open in May 2018 to coincide with the 70th anniversary of Israel declaring independence. At first, the embassy will operate out of the U.S.'s current consular premises in Arnona, south Jerusalem, reports said. Waves of violence between Israel and Palestine have took place and the tension has turned worse since the U.S. President Donald Trump's December 6 recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and moving the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. ROME, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- Italian experts have urged the European Union (EU) as a whole to play its role in a global scenario dominated by major powers, according to a 2018 report by an influential think tank the Italian Institute for International Political Studies (ISPI). Currently in the world, China, Russia, and the United States have different views on development, the environment, and trade, how the EU countries choose their stance on those issues will be a challenge, ISPI Director Paolo Magri told participants at the presentation of the report in Rome Thursday. OPEN MARKET For example, China is open to free trade and wants to protect the environment, while the U.S. is raising protectionist barriers and has pulled out of the COP21 global climate change accord, he said. "Clearly Europe is the potential clay pot in the middle of iron pots," said Magri, using an Italian expression to mean fragility in the midst of dominant competitors. "The EU cannot afford to waste any more time on its usual internal torments -- Brexit, elections, migrants," Magri told the seminar. "Do not ask what the EU can do for you, but what you can do for the EU," Magri said. Also at the forum was Licia Mattioli, Vice President for Internationalization at Confindustria, the Italian industrialists association. "Italian companies are mostly small and medium businesses," she said, adding that "we industrialists are very worried about the U.S. raising protectionist trade barriers." This is because the U.S. is Italy's number one export destination outside Europe, accounting for almost half of its overall trade surplus. "When a foreign market opens up to us, Italy can only do more of what it already does best," said Mattioli, adding that foreign investors who come to Italy are "not predators but potential partners who make us stronger." "For us, open markets are a huge advantage (because) we export much more than we import," she added. Open markets mean more gross domestic product (GDP) points for Italy, Mattioli stressed. ENERGY NETWORK Also speaking was Italian energy giant ENEL President Patrizia Grieco, who said the U.S. is returning to fossil fuels and wants to become the number one gas exporter in the world -- a position currently held by Russia, which however, is opening to renewable energy sources (solar, wind, etc). Europe has very few natural resources and imports about 400 billion euros' (about 493 billion U.S. dollars) worth of oil and gas a year, Grieco said. However, this has driven the EU to become a leader in technological innovation and investments in renewables, Grieco said. A big advantage of renewable energy sources is that they are equally distributed, since all countries have at least some sun, wind, and water, she said. "Renewables have become absolutely competitive compared to other energy sources thanks to technological innovation over the past 15 years," Grieco said, adding that renewable energy plants are smaller and provide bigger and faster returns on investment than traditional ones. Right now each European country generates renewables solely for its own domestic consumption. But this energy can be transported between countries if an advanced digital network is in place, Grieco explained. The transition to clean, renewable energy transported along evolved digital networks and coupled with a capacity to stockpile this energy are the pillars of the European strategy, she said. "Europe is guiding the global energetic transition -- from this point of view I am proud to be an Italian and a European," she said. "Europe may be small, but it is not small in terms of its vision," she added. FILE PHOTO: The U.S. national flag flutters at the U.S. Embassy in TelAviv, Israel December 6, 2017. (Reuters photo) JERUSALEM, Feb. 23 (Xinhua) -- The U.S. embassy will move from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem by May 14, in honor of the 70th anniversary of Israel's declaration of independence, the Israeli media Friday quoted a top Israeli minister as saying. According to Israeli media, the Minister of Transportation and Intelligence Israel Katz tweeted on Friday saying, "I would like to congratulate Donald Trump, the President of the U.S. on his decision to transfer the U.S. embassy to our capital on Israel's 70th Independence Day." It seems that the opening of the new U.S. embassy in Jerusalem will be earlier than what had been expected. The U.S. Vice President Mike Pence said the move would take place by the end of 2019, when he gave a speech in the Knesset during his visit in Israel last month. Media also quoted two Trump administration officials as saying that the new U.S. embassy in Jerusalem will open in May 2018 to coincide with the 70th anniversary of Israel declaring independence. At first, the embassy will operate out of the U.S.'s current consular premises in Arnona, south Jerusalem, reports said. Waves of violence between Israel and Palestine have took place and the tension has turned worse since the U.S. President Donald Trump's December 6 recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and moving the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Yuma News Yuma, Arizona - This afternoon at approximately 5:03 p.m., Yuma Police Officers responded to the Family Dollar Store, 2298 West 8th Street, for a reported armed robbery. The initial investigation revealed a male subject entered the store, displayed a weapon and demanded money. The suspect fled the store with an undisclosed amount. The suspect has been identified as 24 year old Joel Lara. He was taken into custody after a foot pursuit by responding officers. There are no reported injuries reference to this case. This case is still under investigation. The Yuma Police Department encourages anyone with any information about this case to please call the Yuma Police Department at (928) 373-4700 or 78-Crime at (928) 782-7463 to remain anonymous. SUA lovesc China cu submarine nucleare oferite Australiei Dupa ce a renuntat la Afganistan, administratia de la Washington se concentreaza acum cu toata energia asupra Chinei, considerata de Casa Alba si Pentagon cel mai mare adversar economic si militar al SUA si unu... [citeste mai departe] April Weilbacher, right, receives the Greater New Braunfels Chamber of Commerce's Chair of the Board award from board Chairman Robin Jeffers. Source: Xinhua| 2018-02-22 22:06:11|Editor: Zhou Xin Video Player Close by Xinhua Writer Zhang Yongxing SUVA, Feb. 22 (Xinhua) -- China's assistance to Fiji showcases the historic responsibility of China as a major country and the sincere aspiration to build a community of shared future for mankind, Chinese Ambassador to Fiji Qian Bo said here on Thursday. In an exclusive interview with Xinhua, the Chinese ambassador said that China and Fiji, both developing countries, have a profound traditional friendship. The two countries are true friends who could share happiness and woe. China's assistance to the South Pacific Island state is selfless and sincere with no political conditions attached, the ambassador noted. "The Chinese government always respects Fiji's developing path of independence and conforming to its own national conditions," Qian said. "China's assistance to Fiji is selfless and sincere with no political conditions attached. China's assistance to Fiji is unswerving and will not be influenced by the changing international and regional landscapes. It targets the wellbeing of the Fijian people." "China's assistance to Fiji upholds justice and pursues shared interests, and has set a good example of mutual support between developing countries under the framework of south-south cooperation," said the ambassador. "China's assistance to Fiji showcases the historic responsibility of China as a major country and the sincere aspiration to build a community of shared future for mankind." Qian stressed that with the request of the Fijian government and full consultations by the two countries, China has provided Fiji with the much needed assistance. Currently, China's assistance to Fiji, which covers various sectors such as infrastructural construction, energy, agriculture, healthcare, sports, emergency humanitarian aid and human resources, has made significant contribution to improving Fijian people's wellbeing, promoting social and economical development, and balancing regional development in the island state. "As the new Chinese ambassador to Fiji, upon my arrival in Fiji, I heard good remarks from Fijian officials and the public regarding the recently-opened Stinson Parade Bridge and Vatuwaqa Bridge," said Qian, who arrived in Fiji about one month ago. "They told me that the China-aid bridges had eased Suva city's traffic and brought convenience to the public's travel." He believes that no one knows better than the people and the government of Fiji on whether China's assistance is productive or not. "I feel proud that China-aid programs are acknowledged by the Fijian government and people. Aside from the vehicle project and bridge project, China has also implemented assistance programs such as Nabouwalu-Dreketi Road, Somosomo Hydropower Station, Juncao Mushroom Demonstration Center, Rice Technical Cooperation Project in recent years. These projects have been playing an important role in helping Fiji improve the people's livelihood, promote socio-economic development and balance regional development," he said. As for Thursday's handover of the 200 China-aid vehicles to Fiji, the ambassador said that the vehicle project is made possible under the direct attention from leaders of both countries. He sees the project demonstrating the strategic partnership between China and Fiji based on mutual respect and common development. With joint efforts made by the two countries, China has now become one of the major trading partners of Fiji, the most important source of foreign direct investment and the No. 4 source of tourists of Fiji. And the mutually beneficial and win-win cooperation between the two countries have maintained a healthy momentum of development. The ambassador also hoped that China and Fiji can work together to seize the tremendous opportunity brought by the international cooperation under the "Belt and Road" Initiative, continue to consolidate mutual trust, expand exchanges, promote cooperation, enrich the connotation of the strategic partnership between the two countries, so as to push China-Fiji relations to a new height. Source: Xinhua| 2018-02-22 22:16:15|Editor: Zhou Xin Video Player Close BEIJING, Feb. 22 (Xinhua) -- China on Thursday marked the 170th anniversary of the publication of the Communist Manifesto, the guiding political document for the communist movement. With the publication of the document, written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, in February 1848, Marxism emerged "as if a lightning cut through dark sky," said an article published by Xinhua News Agency on Thursday. A commentary published in Thursday's People's Daily, the Communist Party of China (CPC) flagship newspaper, compared the Communist Manifesto to "a glorious dawn in human spiritual history" and "a spiritual home for communists." Chinese communists today can still learn a lot from and be inspired by the Communist Manifesto, said an article published on Study Times, which is run by the CPC Central Committee Party School. The Central Committee of the Communist Youth League of China published a post titled "Happy Birthday, Communist Manifesto" on its WeChat public account, which was read by more than 100,000 people and liked by thousands. "From the Communist Manifesto to Leninism, from Mao Zedong Thought, Deng Xiaoping Theory, the Theory of Three Represents, the Scientific Outlook on Development to Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era, we can see a coherent trajectory," said Han Zhenfeng, dean of the School of Marxism at Beijing Jiaotong University. Although China has walked its own path of revolution and socialist development, Marxism has always been the guide, said Prof. Chen Xianda at Renmin University of China. The Communist Manifesto, among other classics of Communism, could be seen on the bookshelf behind President Xi Jinping as he delivered a New Year speech on Dec. 31, 2017 that was broadcast on TV and online. In the 170 years since the publication of the document, the world has seen China emerge from a weak, less-developed country to a prosperous nation and break away from the development model of the West and figure out a more suitable pattern of modernization. Socialism with Chinese characteristics for a new era is not only a cause for China but also an important and remarkable part of socialism in the 21st century, said Jiang Hui of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS). The year 2018 marks the 170th anniversary of the Communist Manifesto as well as the 40th anniversary of socialist China's launch of the reform and opening-up drive. China offers a reference for other developing countries that struggle to modernize, as well as developed countries troubled by inherent plight, said Fang Ning, head of the Institute of Political Science at CASS. Members of a family hug each other during the event "Hugs not Walls" at the riverbed of the Rio Grande river at the border between Mexico and the United States in Juarez, Mexico, on June 24, 2017. The event provided an opportunity for families who live across the border to hug their loved ones for four minutes. (Xinhua/David Peinado) LOS ANGELES, Feb. 21 (Xinhua) -- U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) announced Wednesday that U.S. government has started work on construction for a border wall replacement near downtown Calexico, about 190 km east of San Diego in the state of California. The project covers an area from approximately the Calexico West Port of Entry extending westward beyond the Gran Plaza Outlets, which includes around 2.25 miles of all-weather roads, according to a statement released by the federal agency. A wall in this area was built in the 1990s out of recycled scraps of metal and old landing mat, and the El Centro Sector wall replacement is one of Border Patrol's highest priority projects, said the CBP statement. File photo taken on Jan. 10, 2018 shows the eight border wall prototypes between Mexico and the U.S., Tijuana, Mexico. (Xinhua/Xu Rui) The construction of a more substantial replacement wall will better ensure the safety of agents and the public and create a better atmosphere for business and commerce, while enhancing overall border security, the statement added. It's the first border construction project contract awarded by the Trump administration aside from eight different prototypes of border wall that were built near the Otay Mesa border crossing San Diego. File photo taken on Feb. 15, 2016 shows migrant people reunite with their beloved at the border between Mexico and the United States in Anapra, Chihuahua state, Mexico. (Xinhua/Guillermo Arias) The Trump administration told U.S. Congress last month that it wants 18 billion U.S. dollars over the next decade for the initial phase of a U.S.-Mexico border wall. Half of the around 3,300-km border between the two nations would have a border wall or other fences by 2027 if the work was completed. Actress Parineeti Chopra, who has been updating us time and again about her next big film with Arjun Kapoor 'Ishqzaade', unveiled the first poster of Namastey England on Twitter today. Here's her tweet: Recently, Arjun Kapoor and Parineeti Chopra visited Golden Temple to seek blessings for their upcoming film. As per the reports published in India Today, the team is currently shooting some sequences in Amritsar, post which they will head to Ludhiana and Patiala for further shoots. Arjun and Parineeti will reportedly play Punjabi characters in the film and there couldn't have been a better way to show the true colors of Punjab than to shoot in the state itself. "We are filming at more than 75 locations spread across these three cities. Later, we'll also be shooting in Dhaka, Paris, Brussels and finally in London. That's how the love story progresses," the filmmaker said in a statement. Vipul Amrutal Shah, the filmmaker also claims that the film is not the sequel to Akshay-Katrina starrer 'Namastey London'. "It is not a sequel of Namastey London.But it has a lot of Punjabi tadka to it. We will be shooting in various parts of Punjab. People are going to love the movie. It is a beautiful journey of characters from Punjab to England," he said in a statement. The film is set to hit the screens on December 7. New Delhi: The future of 5,000 Aircel employees hangs in balance amidst reports that company may close its services soon, media reports have said. Quoting recruitment agencies a financial daily report has said that these head hunters have recieved several resumes from Aircel employees following a warning letter issued by the company recently. The market already choked by lay offs in the telecom sector may not be ready to accomodate fresh CVs being floated by the Aircel employees, some recruitment agencies believe. Aircel has reportedly warned its employees to be ready for difficult times ahead in the wake of funding crunch that may lead the company to file for bankruptcy, as per a report in Economic Times. Amidst intense competition in the market, the Maxis-owned telcos operations has not been able to keep pace with rivals. Aircel's chief executive officer Kaizad Heerjee, in an email to employees earlier this week, said that the company has no funding for some time and has been dependent on cash generation from its current business operations. The paper earlier this week reported that Aircel will soon file for bankruptcy at the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT). The board of the telecom company, which has a Rs 15,500 crore debt, has been dissolved ahead of the move. The application to the NCLT will be submitted within a few days. The decision has been reportedly taken following the Reserve Bank of India scrapping all debt revamp schemes in favour of the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code. Since Aircel has not made payments since September, banks cannot restructure Aircel. Two weeks ago Idea Cellular suspended interconnect services with Aircel for non- payment of dues. Idea said it will restore interconnect services immediately after Aircel makes the payment, but did not specify the outstanding amount. Idea said that despite multiple reminders since November 2017, the operator had failed to meet its payment commitments forcing Idea to suspend interconnect services, as per the terms of interconnect agreement. Aircel and Reliance Communications had signed binding agreements in September 2016 for the merger of RCom's mobile businesses with Aircel. However they terminated the deal in October last year for the lapses with mutual consent. New Delhi: The Enforcement Directorate (ED), probing the role of diamond merchant Nirav Modi and his uncle Mehul Choksi, the promoter of Gitanjali Gems, in the Rs 11,400-crore alleged fraud at the Punjab National Bank (PNB), on Friday froze bank accounts with Rs 30 crore balance, shares of Rs 13.86 crore value held in Modi's company. During search on tip off , ED seized 176 steel almirahs and 60 plastic containers containing imported watches. ED officials on Thursday froze mutual funds and shares worth Rs 86.72 crore belonging to Choksi and his group and Rs 7.80 crore owned by the Modi group. The ED also seized 9 car brands that include a Rolls Royce 'Ghost', a Mercedes Benz, a Porsche Panamera, three Honda models, a Toyota Fortuner and an Innova. While the total value of these shares and mutual funds was Rs 94.52 crore, the costly four-wheelers are worth a few crores. Mumbai/New Delhi: It's not just billionaire jeweller Nirav Modi, his wife Ami Modi, his brother Nishal Modi, and his maternal uncle Mehul Choksi have left the country, days before Punjab National Bank's multi-crore fraud case came to light. According to Central investigating agencies, even other former directors of Nirav Modi and Mehul Choksi companies have also ran way from the country. These directors had resigned well on time in last year itself before the case was registered in January 2018. One of the senior executives of Nirav Modi-Mehul Choksi firms, Mihir Bhanshali had resigned in 2012. His security guard at his Mumbai residence told Zee Media that Bhanshali and his family members have left the country about 20 days ago. This is not the first time that Bhanshali is under scanner from Central investigating agencies, six months ago Income Tax Department had raided his house. This came to light after Billionaire jeweller Nirav Modi, involved in Punjab National Bank's Rs 11,400 crore fraud case left the country on January 1 this year, much before the first complaint reached CBI. Also, Nirav Modi's wife Ami, an American citizen, left India on January 6, his maternal uncle Mehul Choksi left the country on January 4 and his brother Nishal Modi, a Belgian citizen, left India on January 1. The CBI had issued lookout circulars against all accused on January 31. On February 15, Punjab National Bank's MD and CEO Sunil Mehta said that the fraud was detected on January 25th and was reported to the investigative agencies, including the Central Bureau of Investigation on January 29th. (With inputs from Rakesh Trivedi) New Delhi: Delhi's ruling Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) on Friday alleged that the Delhi Police pressured Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal's adviser VK Jain to change his statement about the alleged attack on Chief Secretary Anshu Prakash by the party's MLAs. According to PTI, senior AAP leaders Ashutosh and Sanjay Singh had claimed that this was a ploy to destabilise Kejriwal government in Delhi. Targeting Lt Governor Anil Baijal, AAP leader Ashutosh also called him an "agent of the BJP" for not acting on a complaint about attack on Delhi minister Imran Hussain and Delhi Dialogue Commission vice-chairman Ashish Khetan, despite being provided evidence. "The Lt Governor is acting like an agent of the BJP and his loyalty is not towards the Constitution of India," Ashutosh alleged. Jain was apparently at Kejriwal's residence in the Civil Lines area on Monday night, when AAP legislators allegedly attacked Prakash. Sanjay Singh alleged that Jain, in his first statement to the Delhi Police, had stated that when the alleged assault happened he was in the bathroom and he did not know what had happened in the room. "However, the police claimed that today Jain is claiming that when he returned from the bathroom, he found Chief Secretary Anshu Prakash searching for his spectacles, indicating the possibility of an assault. Why did Jain change his stand within a day? Under whose pressure was he forced to change his statement?" Singh asked. Singh even claimed that Jain was picked up by the Delhi Police last morning and was pressured to change his statement. "How is it that the same Jain who emphatically said that he witnessed no assault during the entire time that he was present there, has now claimed otherwise?" the AAP leader said. Delhi Police, however, rejected the AAP charges. Special CP Dependra Pathak, the chief spokesperson of the Delhi Police, said, ''The department was only following rules and procedures.'' "As per due process, a statement was recorded first by the police and then the statement was recorded before the court," Pathak said. Singh had alleged that his party MLAs were being arrested for an "assault" for which there was no proof. On the other hand, despite there being video evidence of officials assaulting Delhi cabinet minister Imran Hussain, no action was taken by the Delhi Police, he added. The party also named a few Delhi government officials seen in the video purportedly showing the attack on Hussain and Khetan. Ashutosh said the medico-legal case report of Prakash states he was assaulted after 12 am but the CCTV camera footage shows he left Kejriwal's residence at 11.30 pm. He said Delhi government officials going on strike following the alleged attack on Prakash was "unfortunate". (With PTI inputs) NEW DELHI: While Delhi Police is at Arvind Kejriwal's residence in connection with the investigation into the alleged assault of Delhi Chief Secretary Anshu Prakash, the Delhi Chief Minister has hit back at the investigating agencies. Claiming that he was happy with the probe into the alleged assault case, he questioned why the Delhi Police does not show the same level of seriousness in investigating other cases too. Launching an attack on Amit Shah, Kejriwal said the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) president's alleged role in judge Loya death case should also be investigated. "I'm happy that the probe at my residence is being done with utmost diligence. However, I want to tell the investigating agencies that if they show similar courage in probing Amit Shah's role in judge Loya's death case too, the country will appreciate them," he said. CM ? https://t.co/jhU4e0kSvr Arvind Kejriwal (@ArvindKejriwal) February 23, 2018 Delhi Police visited Kejriwal's residence to probe the alleged assault of the Delhi Chief Secretary. The police will be examining the CCTV footage which would have been recorded at the CM's residence at the time of the incident. The AAP has alleged that the Delhi Police pressured Kejriwal's adviser VK Jain to change his statement about the alleged attack on Chief Secretary Anshu Prakash by party's MLAs. Jain was apparently at Kejriwal's residence on Monday night, when AAP legislators allegedly attacked Prakash. Senior AAP leader Sanjay Singh claimed that Jain, in his first statement to the Delhi Police, had stated that when the alleged assault happened he was in the bathroom and he did not know what had happened in the room. "However, the police claimed that today Jain is claiming that when he returned from the bathroom, he found Chief Secretary Anshu Prakash searching for his spectacles, indicating the possibility of an assault. Why did Jain change his stand within a day? Under whose pressure was he forced to change his statement?" Singh asked. Singh even claimed that Jain was picked up by the Delhi Police last morning and was pressured to change his statement. New Delhi: IT veteran and tech investor T V Mohandas Pai on Friday said that he cannot think of anyone else in the world other than Nandan Nilekani to assist the Centre in developing IT infrastructure for the mega National Health Protection Scheme (NHPS) in a short time. "Nobody else globally would be able to develop IT infrastructure for NHPS in a short time as Nandan and his team as public service to India," Pai was quoted by news agency Press Trust of India as saying in an event in Bengaluru. According to IT veteran Pai, it is a great move by the Narendra Modi government as the scheme needs a massive IT infrastructure capable of handling one billion plus transactions a year. In his Budget 2018 speech on February 1, Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley had provided an initial corpus of Rs 2,000 crore for NHPC which aims at providing medical cover of up to Rs 5 lakh to over 10 crore poor and vulnerable families, constituting 40 percent of India's total population. Pai said that Nandan Nilekani is eminently suited for this and has the ability to attract best of class global talent to work with him on conceptualisation, design, architecture and to make it work. "Nilekani has the great track record of creating Aadhaar, the largest personal database in the world for any government and of designing the the Goods and Services Tax Network (GSTN) network", he said. The IT infrastructure for the healthcare scheme will be of a huge scale as was required for Aadhaar and will have to be scaled up gradually in view of the massive range of the programme, Pai said. Nandan Nilekani, a former Unique Identification Authority of India Chairman, is also a member of GST return simplification committee. (With PTI inputs) Vardges Gaspar, a well-known political activist in Armenia, told a packed parliament holding hearings on the mass public unrest that rocked Yerevan on March1-2, 2008 that those in power at the time had executed his relatives. You executed them. And now, being under the same roof as you, let me say that Im displaying great restraint not to spit in your faces, Gaspar declared, addressing Republican Party of Armenia MPs. Ten were killed and hundreds when the government resorted to force to quell peaceful protests following the presidential election of February 19. The government declared a state of emergency and a media blackout was imposed. It is fair to say that most in Armenia regarded the election, in which Serzh Sargsyan won 53% of the vote, as fraudulent. Gaspar accused members of the ruling Republican Part of Armenia of using force to solve problems prior to 2008 and since. The activist, who had originally been banned from entering the parliament and giving his address, told relatives of those killed during the unrest ten years ago that he was sorry that he and the other activists hadnt been killed instead. Im sorry that we, the movements longtime activists, werent murdered instead of your children. I hope that you will accept this as sincere, and that you magnanimously pardon us, Gaspar said. New Delhi: The Delhi University president of left-wing students' union AISA alleged that a group of ABVP members "threatened to kill" her when she had gone to attend a discussion at the Satyawati College. Right-wing ABVP dismissed the allegations levelled by Kawalpreet Kaur and instead, accused her of "trying to instigate" students. A case has been registered under IPC sections for causing hurt, sexual harassment, wrongful restraint, criminal intimidation and insulting the modesty of a woman, on the complaint of Kaur, a senior police officer said. "I had gone to Satyawati College this morning as a speaker for a talk on Digital Safety conducted by Google. When the talk was about to get over, many ABVP people gathered in the auditorium and started disrupting the event," Kaur said. "They manhandled the professors and were after me. When the police came to my rescue, they (ABVP members) asked the police -- where are you taking her? We will take her life," she added. The group also threatened to burn down the auditorium, if she was not sent out of the venue, Kaur claimed. She said she had filed a complaint at the Bharat Nagar police station in this regard. Meanwhile, ABVP member and the college's students' union general secretary, Kunal Yadav, said they were protesting against Kaur's presence in the college as the principal "had banned her entry" after she allegedly abused some students there a few months ago. He also denied the charge of manhandling her. "She doesn't even have a scratch. She was not even touched by anyone." "In fact, she pushed and verbally abused the students of our college. She was constantly trying to instigate the male students. A video footage released by us clearly shows how violent she became after which she had to be taken out of the auditorium by the police and college security guards," Yadav claimed. New Delhi: In what could be said to be strong words, Lieutenant Governor of Delhi Anil Baijal on Friday condemned the recent 'unfortunate incidents' in the national capital and said that there was no place for violence in a democracy. "Met Honourable CM Arvind Kejriwal and his Cabinet colleagues. Strongly condemn the recent unfortunate incidents. Advised elected government to take steps to remove mistrust with government employees so that development of Delhi is not affected. No place for violence in a democracy," he tweeted. Met Hon'ble CM @ArvindKejriwal & his cabinet colleagues. Strongly condemn the recent unfortunate incidents. Advised elected Govt. to take steps to remove mistrust with Govt. employees so that development of Delhi is not affected. No place for violence in democracy. LG Delhi (@LtGovDelhi) February 23, 2018 On the other hand, Kejriwal tweeted after meeting the LG, "Officers not attending meetings for last three days. Governance suffering. LG assured he will take all steps to ensure officers started functioning normally. Council of ministers assured him all cooperation. All of us need to work together for the betterment of Delhi." Officers not attending meetings for last 3 days. Governance suffering. I m v concerned. LG assured he will take all steps to ensure officers started functioning normally. Council of ministers assured him all cooperation. All of us need to work together for betterment of Delhi Arvind Kejriwal (@ArvindKejriwal) February 23, 2018 Meanwhile, a Delhi Police team on Thursday descended on Kejriwal's residence and seized a hard disk of the CCTV camera system installed there in connection with an alleged assault on Chief Secretary Anshu Prakash by AAP MLAs. Police claimed that its action came after its request for CCTV footage from the CM's residence was not met. Several policemen on Thursday went to Kejriwal's official residence in the Civil Lines area where Prakash was allegedly assaulted in the presence of the CM on the intervening night of February 19-20. A total of 21 CCTV cameras and a hard disk were examined by the police. The hard disk has been seized and any possibility of "tampering" with the system could be ascertained only through forensic examination, said Additional DCP (North) Harendra Singh. "We had asked for the CCTV camera footage and hard disk on February 20 itself but there was no response. So, we decided to come down and examine it," he said. Singh also said that the in-charge of maintenance at the CM's residence had been intimated about the police visit, PTI reported. Fourteen CCTV cameras were running while seven were not working. Also, there was a time lag of 40.43 minutes with respect to the time of the alleged incident, said the police official. On the other hand, a Delhi court on Thursday dismissed the bail pleas of two AAP MLAs, Amanatullah Khan and Prakash Jarwal, arrested for allegedly assaulting Prakash. Metropolitan Magistrate Shefali Barnala Tondon, however, refused to grant the police their custody saying there was no new ground for custodial interrogation. The court had on Thursday sent the MLAs to 14-day judicial custody. The two MLAs were arrested in connection with the alleged assault on Delhi's top bureaucrat during a meeting at Kejriwal's residence. While Jarwal, an MLA from Deoli, was arrested on Tuesday night, Khan was taken into custody on Wednesday afternoon. The chief secretary has alleged in his complaint that he was sitting on a sofa flanked by Khan and another AAP MLA during the meeting. "Khan and the other MLA, without provocation from my side started hitting and assaulting me with blows on my head and temple," he has alleged in his complaint. Delhi: Chief Secretary Anshu Prakash's complaint letter to Police over yesterday's incident pic.twitter.com/zvdsNGatIN ANI (@ANI) February 20, 2018 However, AAP had countered the allegation with a statement saying, "There was a meeting of MLAs at the CM's residence. The CS refused to answer questions, saying that he was not answerable to MLAs and the CM, and that he was answerable only to the LG. He (Prakash) even used bad language against some of the MLAs and left without answering any questions." It had described as "false information" claims that the meeting and the argument were about TV ads. "Now he (CS) is making such ludicrous allegations. Obviously, he is doing it at BJPs behest. The BJP has stooped very low in disrupting governance in Delhi through the LG and officers. If the CS can make such wild allegations, one can imagine the kind of obstacles that are being created in AAP governments work by the BJP through the officers," it had said. (With PTI inputs) New Delhi: The Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP) and Punjab Regiment were on Friday presented the Republic Day best marching contingent trophies by the Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman. This is the 6th time that the force has won the trophy. The trophies were received by Punjab Regiment's Brigadier Sanjeev Soni, and ITBP Director General RK Pachnanda at a function held at the South Block. Smt @nsitharaman presents the Best Marching Contingent Trophy to the @ITBP_official who participated in the 69th #RepublicDay Parade.@DrSubhashMoS, Hon MoS for Defence also present.https://t.co/rnRSmDpDH7 pic.twitter.com/b58jzO0E3u Raksha Mantri (@DefenceMinIndia) February 23, 2018 Minister of State for Defence Subhash Bhamre, Chief of Army Staff General Bipin Rawat, Chief of Naval Staff Admiral Sunil Lanba, Chief of Air Staff Air Chief Marshal BS Dhanoa and Defence Secretary Sanjay Mitra attended the function. Congratulations to ITBP on winning Award for the best marching contingent among the para-military and other auxiliary forces #Republicday2018 . Attended the Presentation of Trophies for the best Marching Contingents by Hon'ble @DefenceMinIndia Smt @nsitharaman ji today at Delhi pic.twitter.com/2gvHQs43tS Dr. Subhash Bhamre (@DrSubhashMoS) February 23, 2018 Best #marching contingent Trophy to #ITBP among paramilitary and other auxiliary forces marched at Republic Day Parade 2018. Sh R K Pachnanda, DG and Sh Akshay Deshmukh, Parade Commander received the Trophy from Smt @nsitharaman @DefenceMinIndia #Himveer pic.twitter.com/QdVDo7x3kh ITBP (@ITBP_official) February 23, 2018 The Punjab Regiment, one of the oldest formations of the Indian Army, bagged the best marching contingent trophy in the armed forces category after a gap of 25 years. The last time it won the trophy was in 1993. Smt @nsitharaman presents the Best Marching Contingent Trophy to the Punjab Regiment of the Indian Army who participated in the 69th #RepublicDay Parade.https://t.co/rnRSmDpDH7 pic.twitter.com/p4fqNRZ2UY Raksha Mantri (@DefenceMinIndia) February 23, 2018 Congratulating the winners, Sitharaman said the marching contingents on Rajpath on the occasion of the Republic Day inspire the people. Pachnanda said the trophy was a "tribute" to the over 8,999-strong force that worked day and night under inhospitable conditions to protect the borders of the nation. "Winning this prestigious trophy is a great moment for us. The contingent put in seven months' practice to achieve the feat," said Brigadier Soni, the Commandant of the Punjab Regiment Centre. The ITBP, the Sino-India border guarding force, made a return to the national event after two years as part of a new policy to rotate various paramilitary contingents to keep the event time short. The 148-member squad was led by assistant commandant Akshay Deshmukh. (With PTI inputs) Here is what is making headlines today: PM Modi welcomes Justin Trudeau amid row over 'snub' to Canadian PM Trudeau was given a 'Guard of Honour' at the Rashtrapati Bhawan. The visiting Canadian leader will hold strategic talks with PM Modi on Friday. Read more. Future of 5,000 Aircel employees hangs in balance as company looks to shut down services Head hunters have received several resumes from Aircel employees following a warning letter issued by the company recently. Read more. Caught on camera: Man tries to forcibly kiss girl at a Navi Mumbai railway station The shameful incident took place on Thursday at the Turbhe railway station when the girl was waiting to board a local train to Ghansoli for work. Read more. India ranks 81st in global corruption index, Pakistan 117th The Global Corruption Perception (GCP) index ranks a total of 180 countries and territories by their perceived levels of public sector corruption. Read more. Sonu Ke Titu Ki Sweety movie tweet review: It's Bromance Vs Romance The film is helmed by Luv Ranjan and stars Kartik Aaryan, Nushrat Bharucha, Sunny Singh in lead roles. Read more. New Delhi/Chennai: Pakistani intelligence officer Amir Zubair Siddiqui while working in Pakistan's High Commission in Sri Lanka as Visa Counsellor engaged people to indulge in espionage and terror activities in India, said an NIA supplementary chargesheet filed in a Chennai court in a 2014 case. The chargesheet was filed on Thursday by Special Public Prosecutor C.S.S. Pillai before judge P. Cheenthoorpandian of the Special Court for the National Investigation Agency (NIA) in Chennai, an official said on Friday. Now declared a persona non grata and cited as absconding by the NIA, Siddiqui during his employment in the Pakistan High Commission in Colombo from 2009 to 2016 plotted a terror attack along with two Chennai residents -- Balasubramanian and Noorudeen, the official said quoting from the chargesheet. Siddiqui and the two Chennai residents have also been chargesheeted in this case for circulating high quality counterfeit Indian currency, causing damage to the economic security of India. The original case was registered on April 28, 2014 by Tamil Nadu Police following arrest of a Sri Lankan national Mohd. Sakir Hussain in Chennai, who had arrived in India as per the instructions from Siddiqui to carry out subversive activities here. Siddiqui had planned to attack the US consulate in Chennai, Israeli Consulate in Bengaluru, Electronic City in Bangaluru, Eastern Naval Command headquarters in Visakhapatnam, various places of public congregations in south India and ports in India with the help of spies, said the chargesheet. Subsequently, a consignment of fake Indian currency with face value of Rs 2.5 lakh was seized from another accused Mohammad Saleem on May 1, 2014. The case was taken over by the NIA on June 21 on the orders of central government and a chargesheet was submitted against a Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agent Hussain, who was arrested by the CBI in 2013 on charges of indulging in spying activities, and one Saleem and one Sivabalan on October 23, 2014. Apart from Hussain and Sivabalan, Siddiqui had reportedly also sent several persons including one Arun Selvaraj to India to carry out attacks. During interrogation, ISI agent Hussain revealed that he used his counterparts Sivabalan, Salim and another person Rafeeque to circulate fake currency in Tamil Nadu. NIA sources said they did not mentioned Siddiqui in the first chargesheet because they were yet to collect proper evidence against him. "Now, we have strong evidence to prove his involvement in the terror plot." New Delhi: Visiting Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau met Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday following which the two sides inked six crucial pacts to boost trade and bilateral ties further. The two sides held extensive talks, exploring ways to boost ties in several key areas, including trade and energy. Taking the relationship forward! PM @narendramodi and Canadian PM @JustinTrudeau discussed strengthening cooperation in trade & investment, energy, education, healthcare, IT, start up, science & technology, defence and security, tourism and people-to-people contacts. pic.twitter.com/OS7wj84IcE Raveesh Kumar (@MEAIndia) February 23, 2018 India and Canada later inked six pacts including, including one on energy cooperation. Addressing a joint press briefing with Trudeau, PM Narendra Modi said, ''Your visit was long awaited, we are happy that you visited along with your family.'' Your visit awaited since long, we are happy that you visited along with your family :PM Modi to Canadian PM #JustinTrudeau pic.twitter.com/wmHQr6BbuM ANI (@ANI) February 23, 2018 ''We discussed many issues including deference operation. Terrorism and extremism are a threat to countries like ours and to fight these elements it is important for us to come together,'' PM Modi said. The Prime Minister also called on the need to combat the menace of terrorism together. ''It is important that we work together to fight terrorism,'' PM Narendra Modi said after holding talks with Canadian counterpart Justin Trudeau. ''Those who challenge our sovereignty and territorial integrity cannot be tolerated,'' PM Modi said at a joint press meet with Trudeau, adding, ''There should no place for those who misuse religion for political goals.''. Hailing Canada, the Prime Minister said, ''Canada is an important destination for Indian students when it comes to higher education, more than 1 lakh 20 thousand of our students are there. We renewed our MoU on higher education which will enhance the exchange in terms of higher education.'' ''Canada is an energy super-power, it can fulfill our increasing energy demands,'' PM Modi said. On his turn, Trudeau said, '' We share not only rich a history but a set of values that encourage a natural friendship between our two countries.'' ''As Canada looks to diversify its own economy and looks for new opportunities to do business beyond its boundaries, India is a natural partner and a trusted friend for commercial cooperation,'' Trudeau said. Earlier, External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj had called on the Canadian Prime Minister and discussed various issues of mutual interest. "Picture speaks for itself! EAM @SushmaSwaraj had a warm meeting with the Prime Minister of Canada @JustinTrudeau and discussed ways to strengthen and deepen our partnership," Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) spokesperson Raveesh Kumar had tweeted and posted a picture of the two leaders. Trudeau was earlier accorded a ceremonial welcome at the Rashtrapati Bhawan. Prime Minister Narendra Modi had welcomed his Canadian counterpart with a hug ahead of a ceremonial reception at the Rashtrapati Bhavan, putting to rest speculations about the government cold-shouldering the visiting dignitary. After Trudeau, his wife Sophie, and children Xavier, Ella-Grace and Hadrien, alighted from a car on the forecourt of the Rashtrapati Bhavan. Modi shook hands with Trudeau and then hugged him. On Thursday evening, breaking his silence since the Canadian Prime Minister`s arrival in India on February 17, PM Modi said that he looked forward to the bilateral meeting on February 23 (Friday). "I appreciate his (Trudeau`s) deep commitment to ties between our two countries," Modi tweeted. At the Rashtrapati Bhavan, while Modi shook hands with Sophie Trudeau, Xavier and little Hadrien, he had a special hug reserved for Elle-Grace. On Thursday, the PM had posted a picture of him playfully tweaking Elle-Grace`s ears with Trudeau smilingly looking on during a visit to Canada in 2015. "I particularly look forward to meeting his children Xavier, Ella-Grace, and Hadrien," Modi said in his tweet. Hadrien, who will turn four this month, was the cynosure of all eyes at the Rashtrapati Bhavan as he stumbled and struggled to hold on to his hat as Modi playfully stroked his cheeks. The ceremonial reception optics came after much speculation that Modi and his government was cold-shouldering Trudeau during his eight-day state visit to India. The visiting dignitary and his family have since visited Agra, Ahmedabad, Mumbai and Amritsar. While Modi did not accompany Trudeau to Ahmedabad, a meeting with Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh in Amritsar on Wednesday was organised only at the last moment. Ties between New Delhi and Ottawa have been frosty of late as Canada was being seen as offering a platform to separatists demanding an independent Khalistan. On Thursday, a fresh storm blew after it came to light that the Canadian High Commission here had extended an invitation to a convicted Khalistan separatist, Jaspal Atwal, for a reception in honour of Trudeau. The High Commission then rescinded the invitation while the Indian External Affairs Ministry said that it was ascertaining how a visa was issued to Atwal who holds a Canadian passport. Trudeau later said that the matter was being taken "extremely seriously" and that Atwal should never have received an invitation. The visit of Trudeau, who assumed office in November 2015, comes after the visit of Modi to Canada in April that year. Following Friday`s bilateral summit between the two leaders, a number of agreements were expected to be signed. (With Agency inputs) Dharmatri: Kunwar Bai, who became the mascot of Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, passed away at the age of 106 on Friday. Inspired by the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, she had sold off eight to ten of her goats, her only assets, to raise Rs 22,000 to build toilets at her house, in her village of Kotabharri, in Dhamtari district of Chhattisgarh. Chhattisgarh Chief Minister Raman Singh expressed grief over demise. "My heart is deeply saddened on the demise of Kunwar Bai, who lit the lamp of cleanliness in Chhattisgarh and received honour of 'cleanliness messenger' from Prime Minister Narendra Modi ji. It is only the end of the body of mother Kunwar Bai, she will always be immortalised with her good deeds," he tweeted. Kunwar Bai was chosen as the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan mascot in 2016. She was felicitated in the national capital on September 17, 2016, to mark `Swachhta Diwas`. In February 2016, PM Modi, while on a tour to Chhattisgarh to launch the Shyama Prasad Mukherjee Rurban (rural-urban) Mission, had felicitated Kunwar Bai from Kotabharri village of Dhamtari and had then touched her feet to seek blessings. WATCH: Kurrubhat (C'garh)-PM Modi touches feet of 104-yr-old woman who sold her goats to build toilets,earlier todayhttps://t.co/8OA30NKfMH ANI (@ANI_news) February 21, 2016 "An elderly woman of 104 years who stays in a remote village, does not watch TV or read papers, but the message of building toilets under clean India mission somehow reached her. She sold off her goats to build toilet at home and also encouraged others from the village to build," PM Modi had said. Kunwar Bai worked tirelessly to spread awareness about using toilets amongst her fellow villagers and as a result of her efforts, the district of Dhamtari became the first to be declared open defecation free in 2016. (With Agency inputs) Shillong: Charging the Narendra Modi government with promoting a narrow-minded idea of India based on Hindutva, senior Congress leader Shashi Tharoor on Friday appealed to voters in Meghalaya not to vote for the BJP in the February 27 Assembly polls. "This is a government with no tangible achievements. What it has been trying to do is to change the very nature of what India is all about. For 70 years, we have been trying to build India. Even the first NDA government did not dare to tamper with the idea of India as a country of all people," he told journalists here. "They (BJP) come to Meghalaya and they talked about being kind to Christians in BJP-ruled states. I am sorry to say -- we have seen horrendous incidents involving Christians," Tharoor said. Questioning the real face of the Bharatiya Janata Party-led governments, the two-time Congress MP said: "This is a two-faced government. In Meghalaya, they are opening their arms to all, and in Delhi they are denying visa to a pastor who wishes to come to India to celebrate 150 years of Christianity in the Garo Hills. They come here and say you can eat whatever you like. In the rest of India, they beat and even kill people on suspicion of eating beef." Attacking the National People's Party and other regional outfits in Meghalaya, the former Minister of State for External Affairs said: "I have been somebody who is interested in national vision, and not regional one, but in this particular case, the NPP sadly is trying to have it both ways." The NPP, founded by former Lok Sabha Speaker Purno A. Sangma to champion the cause of the people of the northeast, is supporting the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance government at the Centre, Rajasthan and Manipur. Tharoor also praised the state's Congress government headed by Mukul Sangma for improvement in education and health sectors. The Congress leader said Meghalaya had gone ahead of Kerala in the female literacy rate due to the state government's commitment to the Right to Education Act. Los Angeles: Actor Brendan Fraser has claimed that he was once groped by the former president of Hollywood Foreign Press Association. The non-profit organisation, formed 75 years ago, is the main organiser of the Golden Globes Awards ceremony, which is held annually in January. In an interview with GQ magazine, the 'Mummy' star said the alleged incident took place during HFPA luncheon at the Beverly Hills Hotel in 2003. He alleged that former HFPA president, Philip Berk, came to shake his hand when he was leaving the crowded room. "His left hand reaches around, grabs my a** cheek, and one of his fingers touches me in the taint. And he starts moving it around," Fraser said, adding that in that moment he was overcome with panic and fear. "I felt ill. I felt like a little kid. I felt like there was a ball in my throat. I thought I was going to cry," Fraser added. In a statement to GQ, Berk, who is still a member of HFPA, denied the allegations and said, "Mr Fraser's version is a total fabrication." Fraser said he talked about the incident with his then wife Afton Smith, and even considered going public but did not. However, he contacted the HFPA through his representatives and reported the incident. Fraser said his reps asked the HFPA for a written apology. Berk acknowledges that he wrote a letter to Fraser about the incident but said, "My apology admitted no wrongdoing, the usual If I've done anything that upset Mr. Fraser, it was not intended and I apologise'. " According to reports, Berk also discussed the incident in his 2014 memoir, claiming he pinched Fraser's behind in jest. Fraser said in the wake of the #MeToo and Time's Up movements, he became determined to come forward with his story. "I know Rose (McGowan), I know Ashley (Judd), I know Mira (Sorvino) - I've worked with them. I call them friends in my mind. I haven't spoken to them in years, but they're my friends. I watched this wonderful movement, these people with the courage to say what I didn't have the courage to say," he said. "Am I still frightened? Absolutely. Do I feel like I need to say something? Absolutely. Have I wanted to many, many times? Absolutely. Have I stopped myself? Absolutely. And maybe I am over-reacting in terms of what the instance was. I just know what my truth is," he added. The Hollywood Foreign Press Association responded to the allegations in a statement, saying they are investigating the incident. "The HFPA stands firmly against sexual harassment and the type of behaviour described in this article. Over the years we've continued a positive working relationship with Brendan, which includes announcing Golden Globe nominees, attending the ceremony and participating in press conferences. "This report includes alleged information that the HFPA was previously unaware of and at this time we are investigating further details surrounding the incident," it said in the statement obtained by Variety. Shahid Kapoor's daughter Misha Kapoor and Kareena Kapoor's son are grabbing more limelight than some of the most popular actors these days. Just a picture of them is enough for people to go berserk on social media, such is the craze these star kids have. And now we hear that Misha Kapoor has been offered an advertisement by a brand. According to a report published in Mid-Day newspaper, a childrens brand offered to feature Misha in their ad. Although Mira agreed to accept the offer, Shahid politely turned it down. An insider revealed, Mira was excited about the offer, however, Shahid felt that introducing Misha to the world of glamour at this age is not right and its too soon. Hence, he refused the offer. Not to forget, Shahid had expressed his discontent over too much frenzy around his kid, I hate to think of all the glare thats on her. That is probably the only time I feel I should have had another job. I dont want," he was quoted as saying. On the work front, Shahid Kapoor is busy shooting for his next project 'Batti Gul Meter Chaalu' alongside Shraddha Kapoor and Ileana D'cruz in Uttarakhand. The actor will reportedly head to Beas, Amritsar to ring in his 37th birthday. Jaipur: Lawmakers in Rajasthan these days have a different reason to worry ghosts or evil spirits. According to reports, a group of lawmakers in Rajasthan is extremely worried that the Secretariat building has "negative energies and evil souls" and have urged the state government to conduct a 'havan' and other religious ceremonies to get rid of them. Since the death of two Rajasthan lawmakers within past six months, the MLAs are worried that 'evil spirits' are haunting the Rajasthan Secretariat and a 'havan puja' is required to get rid of them. Nagaur BJP MLA Habibur Rehman had even suggested the Rajasthan Chief Minister, Vasundhara Raje, to conduct a 'havan' in the building, which will help in purifying the surroundings. Rehman and some other MLAs believe that the land on which the Secretariat stands had once accommodated a burial ground and crematorium and hence the evil souls are dominating the place. Confirming fear among the lawmakers, Kalulal Gurjar, the chief whip, also said that the untimely deaths of two BJP MLAs one after the other has further le3d them to believe that the secretariat building is indeed haunted. Nathdwara MLA Kalyan Singh had passed away on Wednesday while Kirti Kumari from Mandalgarh passed away last year after suffering from swine flu. Gurjar too has requested the Chief Minister for performing 'yagna' and religious ceremony in the building to ensure that it gets rid of evil spirits. However, some completely disagree with the MLAs and say that it would only spread superstition. "I have never felt the presence of an evil spirit in the assembly. Maybe the people who are saying this are weak-hearted. Such things will only spread superstition among people," Congress leader Dheeraj Gurjar said. BJP MLA B Singh also said that the view of some MLAs that there is a presence of ghosts in assembly is baseless. "It's belief of some senior MLAs that Rajasthan assembly was built on cremation ground so all 200 MLAs are never present here at one time. The view that there is a presence of ghosts is baseless. Doing a 'yagna' to mend this is not needed," he said. However, it is still unclear whether the Rajasthan government is seriously looking into this issue and mulling to perform a 'havan' to purify the Secretariat building. Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje and the State Assembly Speaker are likely to take a call in this regard. Constructed in 2001, the Rajasthan Legislative Assembly is spread across a campus measuring 16.96 acres in Jyoti Nagar and is one of the modern legislature buildings in the country. The Lal Kothi cremation ground is located adjacent to the Assembly and also accommodates a crematorium in its vicinity. (With IANS inputs) JODHPUR: A woman from the United Kingdom has filed a complaint against two men who allegedly sexually assaulted her in Jodhpur in Rajasthan. Two men on a motorbike allegedly sexually molested her while she was walking back to her hotel on Wednesday "There were two men on a motorcycle who grabbed me. I was left shocked. The police are trying to track the culprits using CCTV footage. Jodhpur is a beautiful city, I hope incidents like these do not happen here," the victim said. Jodhpur Police said that the investigation is underway. "We are examining the CCTV footage and investigating the case," the police said. Chennai: Tamil superstar Rajinikanth said today efforts were on to build a strong foundation for the political party he would launch, and asked his fans to keep quiet and "make noise at the right time." "It is being said others are making (political) noise and they (his fans and supporters) are keeping quiet...Let the others make noise, let us make the noise at the right time," he said to a thunderous applause by his supporters. While Rajinikanth did not take any names about who he was referring to, his comments were being seen as a veiled reference to his contemporary film star Kamal Haasan, who launched his political party Makkal Neethi Mayyam (MNM) in Madurai two days ago. Addressing his fans and supporters from Tirunelveli district here, the superstar said if a political party in the state had the "guarantee of a votebank", it was due to the "foundation" it had created. "We need (such) a strong foundation," he said, adding efforts were under way for creating it. Even to run a family "the head should be" proper, Rajinikanth said, adding his focus now was on creating a foundation to support a strong structure -- the political party. The actor, who enjoys cult status in Tamil Nadu, had on December 31 last year announced he will launch his political party, which will contest all 234 seats in the next Assembly elections. Haasan had met Rajinikanth and leaders of various parties ahead of launching his political outfit. Rajinikanth had then said he prayed for "divine blessings" to be bestowed on his "friend" Haasan and wished him success in his political endeavours. He also said he and Hassan had different styles in cinema, a possible indication that they may go separate ways in politics too. Chennai: Actor-politician Kamal Haasan opposed "saffronisation," saying all sections of people should be given space and respect. Using the national flag as a symbol to convey his political message, the actor rejected suggestions that he was denigrating the Hindu right wing ideology. Haasan, who launched his political party Makkal Neethi Mayyam on Wednesday, has said his politics will be free of caste and religion. In November last year, the actor had faced flak for his "Hindu extremists" remark from the BJP and other right wing outfits. However, he had clarified then that he was not anti-Hindu. "Some say that Kamal Haasan is denigrating saffron. It is wrong. Saffron has been given its rightful place for its sacrifice, what is more, even the national flag has a place for it," he said in his column in Tamil weekly Ananda Vikatan.' Hassan said, "I say that saffron should, however, not spread to the entire flag. Let us give space and respect to others. It is the pledge we have taken and that is what has been mentioned in the Constitution too." He did not name or party or organisation. He also did not refer to any specific incident or give a context or the trigger for raising the matter immediately after launching his party. Claiming that a video had appeared on YouTube where some people were shown taking a pledge to remove the word secular from the Constitution, he asked how such a change came through in about 50 years. "Can sacrifice (of pluralistic values) to such an extent be made for the sake of votes," Haasan said, and asked if such a thing was not worse than a war. He said in ancient times even warfare had its own set of dharmic values. Without such values "politics that involves bloodshed all the time should be changed and that is my desire", he said. Great leaders like Mahatma Gandhi and B R Ambedkar had worked for the country despite differences among them and such lessons should not be lost, Haasan said. "I am beginning my journey as a postman making you remember it (working for the nation despite differences)," he said. Chennai: Muthiah Stapathi, the chief temple architect of the Tamil Nadu Government, has been granted bail in connection with a gold idol theft case in Kancheepuram. The Madras High Court had granted anticipatory bail to M Muthaiah on Thursday. Muthaiah, chief 'sthapathi' of Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowments Department, had last month moved an anticipatory bail plea apprehending arrest by the Idol Wing CID Police in the case related to 'hiving off' 5.75 kg of gold from the idol at the Lord Ekambaranathar Temple. The Idol Wing had last month registered an FIR against nine people, including the temple executive officer Murugesan, Muthaiah, sculptor Masilamani and priest Rajappa. In his anticipatory bail, Muthaiah had argued that he had no role in the heist and police had not produced any material evidence against him. The Madras High Court, while granting the anticipatory bail also directed him to surrender before the judicial magistrate of Kancheepuram within a week and execute a personal bond for Rs 50,000 with two sureties to the like sum. The judge also directed him to surrender his passport to the magistrate forthwith. He was further directed to appear before the Idol Wing IG Pon Manickavel every Monday and Wednesday for three weeks and thereafter as and when required. (With PTI inputs) Beijing: China has equipped a branch of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) deployed along the Indian border with a powerful US-style integrated individual soldier combat system to prepare for a future "informatised warfare", a media report has said. Informatised warfare, a term widely used by the Chinese military in recent years refers to the use of IT, digital and artificial intelligence applications in battlefield conditions. The Sky Wolf Commandos, a branch of the PLA Special Operations Forces from the Western Theatre Command, have been equipped with the QTS-11 system in their training, Weihutang, a column affiliated with the China Central Television (CCTV), reported. The Western Theatre Command looks after the security along the 3,488 km-long Line of Actual Control (LAC) with India. The QTS-11 system, according to Chinese experts, is similar to the one being used by US soldiers. Hailed as the "strongest individual firepower in the world", the QTS-11 system not only contains firearms but also a full digitalised integrated individual soldier combat system, including detection and communications, Song Zhongping, a Chinese military expert told state-run Global Times. The system, which includes an assault rifle and 20-millimeter grenade launcher, is capable of destroying antipersonnel targets. Each soldier equipped with the system is armed with a thermal imager and optoelectronic and positioning systems, the Global Times quoted a report by Science and Technology Daily. QTS-11 system weighs up to seven kgs. "The individual soldier combat system is only part of the digitalised army, something countries are attempting to do. Developing the integrated individual soldier combat system adapts to informatized warfare in the future," Song said. QTS-11 systems of the US and China are similar but not comparable. The system's capability depends on how it is used," Song said. Special operations forces are the first to have a taste of the QTS-11 system before the system would be widely equipped into other forces. The system is also very expensive, Song said. The announcement by the official media of the deployment of new system along the border with India followed a report a few days ago of the upgrading the air defences along the LAC was seen by military observers here as a psychological warfare being resorted to by the PLA. The Global Times earlier quoted an expert as saying the upgradation of the air defence with deployment of fighter jets like J-10 and J-11 is aimed at confronting any threat from India in the light of India acquiring new fighter aircraft, an apparent reference to Rafale aircraft. The Chinese military carried out a media blitzkrieg during the height of last years 73-day Dokalam standoff highlighting deployment of new battle tank as well as massive military exercises on the Tibetan plateau. The standoff over PLAs attempts to build a road close to the strategic narrow Chicken Neck corridor in North East ended after the Chinese military stopped the road building in the area which is also claimed by Bhutan. The integrated combat system was firstly developed by the US but they have dropped the research of Objective Individual Combat Weaponry system due to weight problems. LAHORE: Eighty-six years after Bhagat Singh was hanged, a Pakistani court is seeking to rename the Shaadman Chowk in Lahore where he was hanged. The plea also calls for the installation of a statue of the freedom fighter there. Bhagat Singh was hanged along with his two comrades Rajguru and Sukhdev by British rulers on March 23, 1931 in the erstwhile Lahore Jail, which stood at the spot where the roundabout was built later. However, during the hearing of the plea filed by Bhagat Singh Memorial Foundation Chairman Imtiaz Rashid Qureshi, the Lahore High Court was informed that a similar petition was pending with it. Thereafter, Justice Shahid Jamil Khan ordered to club both petitions and fixed March 5 for hearing. The petitioner stated that Bhagat Singh was a freedom fighter of the sub-continent and gave his life along with his companions for the cause of freedom. He pointed out that the founder of Pakistan Quaid-i-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah had also paid tribute to him saying, "There had never been any brave person in the subcontinent like Bhagat Singh." He pleaded that it would be in the interest of justice to name Shadman Chowk after Bhagat Singh and also install his statue at the square so as to inspire the people of Pakistan and the world. In the plea, Qureshi said that in India there were many roads and thoroughfares named after Muslim rulers like Akbar Road, Shah Jahan Road and Bahadar Shah Road. He said India also published tickets with the image of Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, the founder of Aligarh University, and his statue was also installed there. He said an application was filed before the chief secretary and the deputy commissioner of Lahore to this effect but no action had been taken so far. The foundation last month also demanded that Bhagat Singh should be accorded Pakistan's highest gallantry award 'Nishan-e-Haider'. Hafiz Saeed's Jammat-ud-Dawah is strongly opposing the proposal of renaming Shadman Chowk and even had threatened to the civil society members over this matter. The Anti-Terror Operation framework is being replaced with an Operation of the United Forces. The United Operation Headquarters of the Armed Forces of Ukraine will replace the ATO headquarters. Could this measure be something more than a simple relabeling? In order to answer that question, 112.ua has looked into the terminology, the laws and the powers conferred upon the new authorities. 112 Agency The Anti-Terror Operation framework is being replaced with an Operation of the Joint Forces. The Joint Operation Headquarters of the Armed Forces of Ukraine will replace the ATO headquarters. Could this measure be something more than a simple relabeling? In order to answer that question, 112.ua has looked into the terminology, the laws and the powers conferred upon the new authorities. Do you ever wonder how many articles, blog posts or conversations in the kitchen started with: During the second/third/fourth year of the war, the government finally? Also very popular: The President promised to finish the ATO within three months. So it is winter of 2018, when Petro Poroshenko eventually signs the law on On the specifics of the state policy on ensuring state sovereignty of Ukraine on the temporarily occupied territories in Donetsk and Luhansk regions, commonly known as law on the reintegration of Donbas. The document, apart from everything else, details the transition of the Anti-Terror Operation framework, the Anti-terror center of the Secret Service of Ukraine and the director of that center. The leading role in fighting the Russian aggression is going to be borne by the Armed Forces of Ukraine, whereas the Minister of Defense and the Chief of the General Staff are supposed to come up with a nominee for the position of the joint forces commander. The law signed by the President of Ukraine on 20 February, organizes the deployment of the Armed Forces of Ukraine for performing tasks they performed within the ATO, as well as the change of the main operations framework. The ATO will be finished, and an Operation of the joint forces will kick off. It assumes a clear structure of governance, subordination of certain military assets to the commandment, as well as the establishment of a united operation headquarters as the main authority managing the operation in Donetsk and Luhansk regions, - Viktor Muzhenko pointed out. He said earlier that the ATO will be replaced with an operation of the joint forces led by the military commandment. Muzhenko did not mention who will be in charge of it, but he did say it is going to be someone with combat experience. We have qualified applicants. There is a certain approval procedure. After that, they will be presented before the President of Ukraine for confirmation. This is going to be a person with combat experience, sufficient skills, knowledge and hands-on experience required to perform these tasks, - Muzhenko said. Hence, Ukraine has now got a law, which is supposed to organize all of its defensive forces and directly regulate the operations of the security agencies in the now former ATO area. The joint operation headquarters of the Armed Forces of Ukraine is now going to be the main body in the conflict area. It is going to command the military assets of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, other military groups, the Interior Ministry, the National police that are dedicated to combating the Russian aggression in Donetsk and Luhansk regions. Law enforcement officers, servicemen and everybody else involved in fighting the aggressor, are going to be subordinate to the Chief of the joint operation headquarters of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. According to the law, the headquarters will plan, organize and control the execution of tasks on national security and protection and defense, curbing and coercion of the Russian military aggression in Donetsk and Luhansk regions, direction, coordination and control of civil-military or military administrations (if such are formed) in Donetsk and Luhansk regions in the areas of national security and defense. Also, the head of the operation headquarters, in cooperation with the Security Service of Ukraine, will oversee the movement of individuals across the delimitation line, the imports of goods into the occupied areas of Donbas. Into the laws where the Anti-terror center of the Security Service of Ukraine was mentioned, the following phrase was added: either the United operation headquarters of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (in case of establishment for the purpose of executing the powers of relevant government authorities in the area and of conducting national security and defense measures, curbing and combating the Russian military aggression in Donetsk and Luhansk regions). The ATO area is now referred to as the area where measures are taken. In particular, this is how the law on civil-military administrations was amended. For example, the Chief of the joint operation headquarters makes personnel appointments within civil-military administrations, wherever servicemen or law enforcement officers are appointed. In case such regional civil-military administrations are not established, the Chief of the joint operation headquarters assumes these powers nonetheless. Previously, the head of the Anti-terror center of the Secret Service of Ukraine was responsible for this. The bill on national security, which is still to be passed, concerns the powers of the commander of the joint forces in greater detail. The President of Ukraine, upon the presentation of the defense minister and taking into account the recommendations of the commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, appoints and dismisses an individual from the position. The President may appoint the commander of the joint forces for operations control in particular areas. The commander of the joint forces is subordinate to the commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Commanders of those types of the armed forces or leaders of other military groups, whose units are engaged in the joint operation, continue supporting their staff, managing personnel and being in charge of weaponry, ammunition and equipment. The commander of the joint forces participates in the deployment of assets and planning of actions should unforeseen circumstances arise for the armed forces and defense units to be used. And lastly, the commander has a right to report on the execution of tasks directly to the President. The President will authorize the use of the joint forces in particular operations. As Petro Poroshenko said, the relevant preparatory procedures should be completed by 1 April. Now nobody will be able to say what do the Armed Forces have to do with it, if it is an anti-terror operation. The change of the operations framework details the role of every law enforcement authority in the armed conflict, which helps to organize the regulatory framework. Military servicemen suppose that only the titles of positions and control bodies will change, but little will change in actual measures and operations. This is not due to treason, but because it is impossible to change the main principles and methods of warfare. Those may be entitled differently, but the work on the forefront remains largely unchanged. Also, former Ukrainian president noted that the peace in Ukraine depends on the US by 90% Open source If the UN peacekeepers are deployed at the demarcation line then it will be a new border of Ukraine. Leonid Kuchma, the second president of Ukraine and representative of the country in the Trilateral Contact Group in Donbas claimed this at IV Baltic-Black Sear Forum in Kyiv on February 23 as 112.ua reported. 'There is a united opinion in the Trilateral Contact Group and it coincides with the opinion of the president that the UN peacekeepers should be at the whole territory and firstly, at the Ukrainian-Russian border. We were offered to deploy the peacekeepers at the demarcation line to make them protect the OSCE and it means to create a new border with Ukraine', Kuchma said. Also, he noted that the peace in Ukraine depends on the US by 90%. The politicians in Europe forgot the lessons of history and Ukraine should rely on the support of the US. Petro Poroshenko, the President of Ukraine claimed during his speech at the Munich Security Conference that Russia has a chance to show some readiness for consensus and agree to UN peacekeepers. Kurt Volker, the US Special Envoy to Ukraine claimed that the draft resolution of Russia, which provides for the deployment of peacekeepers in Donbas only along the line of conflict, is unacceptable for the United States and the United Nations, since it will not guarantee security, but will deepen the conflict. The HQ thinks that the aim of their stay in occupied territories is the rotation of the militants The Headquarters of the Ukrainian Army claimed that about 200 Russian officers arrived in occupied territories of Donetsk and Luhansk regions as the press service of the HQ reported. Recently the Kremlin handlers sent the unusual humanitarian convoy with about 200 senior officers to the occupied part of Donbas to not lose the control over it and illegal armed formations. According to the intelligence service of the Ukrainian Army HQ, it is, possibly, the representatives of the regular armed forces of Russia who were placed at the proving ground Shidny near Manuilivka, Donetsk region, the HQ claimed. Also, it is noted that the Russians will replace their colleagues in the military detachments of the militants after the arrival. Earlier we reported that Russia sent another so-called "humanitarian convoy" to the Donbas territory occupied by the pro-Russian militants. The trunks carry more than 430 tons of cargo, among which "mainly children's food sets and medical equipment. At the end of January, the Law on State Financial Guarantees for Medical Services came into force Read the original text at 112.ua. Open source At the end of January, the Law on State Financial Guarantees for Medical Services came into force. Following the schedule of the medical reform, the official signing of the service declarations with doctors at the primary level would begin in April, and in July the National Health Service should start its work. All of us have repeatedly heard about the benefits as a consequence of the reform promised by the Ministry of Health, but these changes are illusory. Unfortunately, eloquent declarations do not have real possibilities for their implementation. Concerning the primary level of the medical care, the reform package of the adopted bills provides that during March-June, every citizen of Ukraine must on his family doctor and conclude a service agreement with him. At the same time, it can be any doctor working at the primary level, regardless of the region in which he works; he can be both a staff unit in a polyclinic and a private entrepreneur. So what are the traps and pitfalls here? First, there is no objective information on the qualifications of individual doctors, most patients will be affected by the distorted and biased "advertising." Secondly, those of the doctors who are "faster" will consciously sort the citizens in the nearby houses, as a result of which the most problematic and complex will be distributed according to the "residual" principle. It is also difficult to imagine a situation when the doctor will carry out visits to patients from remote areas of the settlement or a village. In addition, it should be noted that the entire contractual process is likely to take place under the pressure of the leadership of the Primary Health Care Centers (polyclinics, dispensaries), which will not be interested in creating a new order. It would be much easier to preserve the current one when the residents are attached to the doctors by the micro districts order; the wages do not vary greatly not to create competition within the team. Here we should remember about the suggested limitation 2000 patients per family doctor. If we divide the population of Ukraine (which according to the State Statistics Service is 42 million 603 thousand people), we will face a shortage of slightly more than 17 thousand family doctors. According to the tentative data, we actually have less than 10 thousand. In the coming years, this amount is unlikely to increase significantly; rather the doctors are one of the leading groups of labor immigration. The next direction is a guaranteed service package of the primary level. The documents really provide for a wide range of examinations, analyzes, and diagnostic procedures that might be necessary for a person to consult a doctor. Even in Soviet times, district therapists should perform almost all the positions indicated in the latest developments of the Ministry of Health, so here is the question: do we have the necessary diagnostic and procedural-manipulative base to ensure the prescriptions of the family doctor? It should be noted that the state's guarantee of free provision of medicines on the primary level is gradually not mentioned, although this was one of the brightest "brands" of those concepts from the new Ministry of Health team that preceded the adopted bills. Now, this important promise for the population has been replaced by a modest phrase - "provision of medicines in accordance with state and municipal programs." But how many such programs really work at the primary level? Unfortunately, we have a package to which we cannot add the word "guaranteed" yet. And one more question from the sphere of "cunning" figures comes to mind. If the standard of financing at the level of 370 hryvnias (13 USD) is established for each person in a year, what can they be enough for? Taking into account the fact that today people quite justifiably do not trust the results of the research in the state laboratories and have neither the desire nor the time to sit in the morning queues, they will choose paid diagnostic centers where the total blood test costs at least UAH 100 (4 USD). In general, the new model of the funding system is not clear: who will receive the funds - to the doctor's account or to the institution's account? Speaking about the out-patient department, then, apparently, this institution itself will divide the received in calculation per one doctor 60 thousand hryvnias per month. Part will go to the doctor for quantitative and qualitative results, and the rest of the funds will go to the maintenance of the device, purchases, salaries to junior staff and non-medical workers. Everything is clear here, but the question arises: what is new in this mechanism, apart from the beautiful signboard about the regulatory funding, this is approximately the same. Otherwise, the doctor will distribute funds for the maintenance of other medical and non-medical workers - the administration of institutions, nurses, as well as to finance diagnostics, laboratory research, prevention, physiotherapy, vaccinations, droppers, day hospital stay and so on. And among all this, he must allocate something for his own salary. But in order to implement this approach, a very complex legal and financial mechanism should be prescribed: how to divide these funds, what is the order of their redistribution. It is important to realize that the Treasury will not give a penny without this. This mechanism just does not exist... In fact, there are a lot of questions, and all of them should have a clear answer, otherwise, it turns out that Ukraine has crossed the line of the "humanitarian catastrophe." Therefore, it is necessary to bring to the attention of the Ministry of Health's leadership that before laying the walls, it is important to lay the foundation for reforms, which are absent today. This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or 112.International and its owners. Totally, there are 323 memorials dedicated to the history of the Poles in 20th century in Ukraine Open source 166 memorials and memorial signs in Ukraine do not possess the permitting documents. It is stated in the report of the Institute of the National Memory of Ukraine for 2017. The Institute made the list of the memorials and memorial signs dedicated to the history of the Poles in the 20th century in Ukraine. Also, the list of the Ukrainian memorials installed in Poland in honor of the Ukrainian victims of the war and political repressions. 76 objects are put in the list. The pointed information is verified by the heads of the union of the Ukrainians in Poland and researchers of the Ukrainian places of the memory in Poland. Also, it is noted that the Institute analyzed the acting legislation that became the basis for the creation of the road map for the search, exhumation, accomplishment and installment of the memorial in Ukraine. As we reported 15 acts of vandalism in Ukrainian memorial places, on graves in particular, happened in Poland during 2014-2017. As 112.international reported earlier, Ukraine canceled the permission of Polish Institute of National Remembrance to search and exhume Polish, buried in Ukraine, and did not agree to restore them. This worsened relations between two countries. It happened in April, after the monument to Ukrainian Insurgent Army in Hruszowice (Poland) was toppled. Countries discussed the issue a few times, though unsuccessfully the sides were just trading accusations. The Department spokesperson Heather Nauert shed light on new reports that a 23-year-old Ukrainian medic was killed while he was trying to aid civilians near the line of contact Open source The U.S. State Department on Thursday called on Russia once again to withdraw its forces and heavy weapons from Eastern Ukraine, Radio Svoboda reported. The Department spokesperson Heather Nauert shed light on new reports that a 23-year-old Ukrainian medic was killed while he was trying to aid civilians near the line of contact "The incident is a reminder that the conflict in Eastern Ukraine continues to rage on. Civilians and first responders face real dangers every day," she told reporters. "It's also worth repeating that Russia manufactured this conflict in 2014 and continues to control its proxy forces in Donbass," she went on. She stressed that Russia has demonstrated repeatedly that it can stop the violence whenever it chooses. "The United States, once again, calls on Russia to order its proxy forces to implement a complete cease-fire, to withdraw its forces and heavy weapons from Eastern Ukraine, and to agree to a robust UN peacekeeping mission," she reiterated. "Russia continues to perpetuate a conflict that has now claimed more than 10,000 lives," she stressed. The US has repeatedly affirmed that it "will continue to stand by Ukraine as it faces ongoing Russian aggression, which has claimed over 10,000 lives and displaced more than 1.6 million Ukrainians," she added. Ukrainian Pavlo Gryb who is illegally detained in Russia isnt allowed to take medicine, as his gather Ihor Gryb wrote on Facebook. The consuls say that Pavlo is very pale, he keeps complaining about his bad state of health, serious pain in the stomach, overall weakness, weight loss (I dont know how one can get any skinnier). Apparently, some medicine was bought for Pavlos money, but he is not allowed to take it because the doctor at the detention centre finds it feasible. Pavlo was taking a combination of medicine all his life, so it is vitally needed for him! And the prison doctor is against it! No medical help at all, he wrote. As it was reported earlier, 19-years old Pavlo Gryb got lost in Belarus on August 24. The young man was later found at a prison in Krasnodar, Russia. He told a Russian lawyer that he had been kidnapped in Belarus and brought to Russia, where he is accused of preparing a terrorist attack on a Russian school. It has been repeatedly stressed by the Ukrainian side that Gryb needs medication or his life would be under threat, but Russia repeatedly disregarded the appeals, even the one from the European Court for Human Rights. Open source A 27-year-old citizen of Ukraine was found dead at the rental apartment in Hurghada, Egypt on February 22 as Vasyl Kyrylych, the Head of Department of Consular Support of the Foreign Ministry of Ukraine reported to 112.ua. 'The Embassy of Ukraine to Egypt reported that the citizen of Ukraine, who lived in the territory of Egypt in the cohabitation with the local citizen, was killed on February 21, 2018, in Hurghada. The police hold the investigation. The case is controlled by the Ukrainian Embassy to Egypt', Kyrylych reported. According to the local Vetogate, a young woman worked at the Guests Department at one of the local hotels. Her body was found by the husband when he returned home after the work. Somebody stabbed a woman 10 times; the local police hold the investigation. Last summer two citizens of Germany were killed in Egypt in the attack in Hurghada. Then the four coalition parties supporting Mark Rutte's third government are expected to support the bill, but it will be a narrow vote Open source The Dutch lower house of the parliament is voting on a bill on Thursday, 22 February, that would make it impossible for citizens to demand a referendum on future EU treaties, as they did with the EU-Ukraine association agreement, the EU Observer reported. The four coalition parties supporting Mark Rutte's third government are expected to support the bill, but it will be a narrow vote. If just two of the coalition MPs fail to show up, the repeal bill could be rejected. Opposition parties are almost unanimous in their rejection of the government position - believing it takes away a democratic tool from citizens after it was only used once in practice. Most opposition MPs even want citizens to be able to demand a referendum about the bill that would take away their right to demand a referendum something which The Hague wants to prevent. Since 1 July 2015, Dutch citizens have had the right to demand that a non-binding referendum is held on any adopted bill if they are able to gather 300,000 signatures of support. A week after the new law went into force, the Dutch Senate approved the EU-Ukraine association agreement, which governed trade relations between the two but also contained political commitments. The plebiscite was held on 6 April 2016, and the 32 percent of voters who showed up overwhelmingly rejected the treaty 61 percent voted against it. While the Dutch government did not have a legal obligation to follow the referendum result, the political establishment had put itself into a difficult position by saying before the vote that they would take the results into account if a threshold of 30 percent turnout was achieved. For months, Rutte declined to simply accept or reject the public's verdict on the Ukraine treaty but instead lobbied his fellow EU leaders to help him find a solution. The law comes into force on the next day after the publication - Feb. 24 The Law On the specifics of the state policy on ensuring state sovereignty of Ukraine on the temporarily occupied territories in Donetsk and Luhansk regions, known as Donbas reintegration law, has been officially published in the newspaper of the Ukrainian Parliament on Feb. 23. President Petro Poroshenko signed the law on Feb. 20. In this law, we define Russia as the aggressor country. This law sufficiently broadens the legal basis for deploying the Armed Forces of Ukraine and other enforcement units for defending our country. It is crucial that the law settles legal mechanisms of returning these territories by means of politics and diplomacy,' he said. Poroshenko also noted that this law doesnt break any international obligations of Ukraine, including the Minsk agreements, despite Russias attempts to make it look so. Last month, the Ukrainian parliament passed the law about the reintegration of Donbas, defining the legal status of certain areas of Donbas and Luhansk regions as 'the occupied territories'. The official date of the beginning of the occupation is February 20, 2014. Russia is also considered responsible for numerous human rights violations in the occupied territories. Yesterday Kryvy Rih celebrated 74th anniversary of the release of the city from the Nazi-invaders The National Guard of Ukraine holds the investigation on the usage of the Soviet marks banned in Ukraine by the National Guard officers during the march in Kryvy Rih on February 22 as the press service of the Interior Ministry reported. The events dedicated to the 74th anniversary of the release of the city from the Nazi-invaders took place yesterday. The Soviet marks were among the attributes of the celebration. Earlier Yuliana Berezutska, the volunteer published the photos from the event on Facebook. According to them, the participants of the march bore the Ukrainian marks along with the Soviet. The public use of the Soviet marks contradicts with the law of Ukraine 'On condemnation of the communist, national and socialist (Nazi) totalitarian regimes in Ukraine and ban of the propaganda of its marks' adopted by the Ukrainian parliament in April 2015. 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!) President Donald Trump on Thursday extended the national emergency on Cuba under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. President Donald Trump on Thursday extended the national emergency on Cuba under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, the White House announced. The proclamation extends the emergency authority restricting movements of U.S. vessels into Cuban territorial waters, which was last extended by former President Barack Obama in January 2017. The proclamation authorizes the Department of Homeland Security to make rules and regulations governing the anchorage and movement of any foreign or domestic vessel in U.S. territorial waters that may be used or is susceptible of being used for voyage into Cuban territorial waters, and that may create unsafe conditions or result in unauthorized transactions. On February 15, Deputy Energy Minister Vyacheslav Kravchenko recommended that miners start building cryptocurrency farms on the Kola Peninsula. It could be an interesting concept given that Murmansk is an energy-surplus region. It has the Kola nuclear power plant with four 440 MW power units and 17 hydroelectric power plants of varying capacity. The hydroelectric power plants are mainly cascade systems including the Tuloma power plant cascade system with a total capacity of some 400 MW, the Serebryanskaya power plant (total capacity over 350 MW), the Niva power plant (some 250 MW), and three Kovda cascade power plants (some 300 MW). The unique Kislaya Guba Tidal Power Station on the Barents Sea coast has a capacity of 1.7 MW. Taken together they have huge capacity that is not being fully used. There is logic in this initiative by the Russian energy authorities. If cryptocurrency miners decide to use the region's underutilized power plants, it would produce additional revenue and increase the power plants' performance to their rated output capacity. Cryptocurrency miners have been offered lower prices than in other regions, and cooling cryptocurrency farms would be easier in the winter on the Kola Peninsula than in other Russian regions. The farms could be located near power plants. There are several sites around the region that could be interesting for investors in cryptocurrency mining. The only problem is the absence of laws on cryptocurrency operations, or more specifically, mining, in Russia. For example, the Chinese recently banned mining and cryptocurrency trading even on foreign venues, which dealt a crushing blow to the cryptocurrency market some time ago. On the other hand, Venezuela has launched its own cryptocurrency, El Petro, or petromoneda, which is allegedly backed by the country's oil and mineral reserves and is designed to pull the country's ailing economy out of a crisis. It is so far unclear which path Russia will choose. Conflicting opinions have been expressed at different levels, from launching a Russian cryptocurrency to banning any operations with Bitcoin, the first and most popular cryptocurrency. Until the decision is made at the top level, investment in this market will remain risky although highly profitable in the short term. Author: Dmitry Gorbunov Source: https://regnum.ru/news/2382922.html YEREVAN, FEBRUARY 23, ARMENPRESS. President of Artsakh Bako Sahakyan on February 23 addressed a congratulatory message on the Fatherland Defenders Day, the Presidential Office told Armenpress. The message runs as follows: Dear compatriots, On behalf of the Artsakh authorities and personally myself I cordially congratulate you on the Fatherland Defenders Day. I congratulate our people. In almost every family of Artsakh there are soldiers, officers, generals, veterans who participated in the defense of the Fatherland, volunteers who devoted their life for that sacred work. Eternal honor and glory to the Fatherlands devotees! We are proud of the strength of our valorous soldier's arm and spirit, proud of having a powerful and victorious army that has been forged and formed in the crucible of the war. It keeps our native country's borders impregnable and is always ready to give a worthy counterstroke to any encroachment of the enemy. We are proud and will do everything possible to constantly strengthen our countrys defense capacity and peoples security, as well as to maintain peace and stability. Dear friends, I once again congratulate all of you, wish you peace, good health, success and good luck. English translator/editor: Aneta Harutyunyan YEREVAN, FEBRUARY 23, ARMENPRESS. Syrian rebels who are fighting with the Turkish military, opened gunfire at a humanitarian convoy en route form Aleppo to Afrin. Firat reported the rebels used multiple rocket launchers from a town bordering Turkey. The shelling began when the convoy reached the Ziyara checkpoint on the Aleppo Nobul highway. According to Firat, the Kurdish Peoples Self Defense Forces and Syrian troops countered the attack. English translator/editor: Stepan Kocharyan YEREVAN, FEBRUARY 23, ARMENPRESS. The US doesnt rule out a military solution to the Syrian conflict and reserves the right to strike the Damascus forces, US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley said in the University of Chicago. Military solution is always considered regarding any situation, she said. Haley noted that the US doesnt want to be in the center of the Syrian conflict, but it must do everything for helping Syrians, who have been the victims of chemical weapons. Haley said that US President Donald Trump has vowed not to expand in the military sector in terms of possible actions. In her words, the Syrian authorities know that the US can take military actions. English translator/editor: Stepan Kocharyan YEREVAN, FEBRUARY 23, ARMENPRESS. Konstantin Zatulin, First Deputy Chairman of the State Duma (lower house of Russian parliament) Committee for CIS Affairs, Eurasian Integration and Relations with Compatriots, Head of the Institute of CIS Countries, opposes a military solution for the Nagorno Karabakh conflict. In an interview with ARMENPRESS, Mr. Zatulin said Armenia and Azerbaijan must reach agreement and compromise, which will be realistic and most importantly fair. Ive said many times that justice requires to accept that Nagorno Karabakh will never return to be part of Azerbaijan. Recently I even talked about the fact that actually Azerbaijan was declared an independent state after the collapse of the Soviet Union and nobody paid proper attention to the fact that at that time, factually, the territory of Nagorno Karabakh was not under its control, meaning it wasnt de facto ruled from Baku. It didnt receive attention in Baku, which allows them now to announce that this territory belongs to them, however Nagorno Karabakh has not been part of independent Azerbaijan not even for a single day. And the justifications under which Azerbaijan is claiming the territories are vulnerable and unrealistic from the point of view of real politics, Mr. Zatulin said. At a February 19 meeting with EU Special Representative for the South Caucasus and the crisis in Georgia Toivo Klaar, Azeri defense minister Zakir Hasanov didnt rule out the resumption of war at any moment. Asked whether the absence of necessary counter-responses from the international community to Azerbaijani statements doesnt encourage sparking a new war, the Russian politician said: I believe that perhaps the international community is guilty for overlooking the endless statements of Azerbaijan, and in many statements depreciates what its saying, nevertheless I believe the 2016 events received an adequate assessment from the OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairs. It is another issue that there was no clear public condemnation, it is a fact, but I think the Co-Chairs thought that by doing so they wouldve appeared in a quite difficult situation in the future negotiations process. I think they were guided by this when they gave a more equal response and didnt directly accuse Azerbaijan for restarting military operations. However the fact is that there was no such clear statement from the co-chairs, including from the Russian [co-chair], he stressed. According to Mr. Zatulin, the statements were mostly limited with calls on the non use of force, which can factually be considered to be a condemnation of Azeri actions. Statements were about the conflict being unresolved for many years, and that the use of force is unacceptable. Indeed, they didnt openly accuse Azerbaijan, including because discussions over the principles of the Karabakh conflict settlement are continuing till now. We know, that Azerbaijan is participating in the negotiations process, at the same time making statements everywhere claiming that Nagorno Karabakh is part of Azerbaijan. And probably, taking into account such difficult circumstances which were accumulated during the negotiations of so many years, one can conclude that it was this that refrained official circles from addressed assessment. Regarding the civil society, the opinions of independent people who arent tied with mediating duties, they were very clear in Russia. For us, it was understandable who launched these military operations. Recently we even found out with interest about president Aliyevs historic views, Konstantin Zatulin said, adding that he has numerously stated his opinion as an MP, who doesnt depend on any mediating activity, and which enables him to call things by their names. Article by Syuzi Muradyan English translator/editor: Stepan Kocharyan YEREVAN, FEBRUARY 23, ARMENPRESS. The adoption of two bills on the Armenian Genocide by the Parliament of the Netherlands on February 22 further escalated that countrys relations with Turkey, reports Armenpress. After the discussion in the Parliament, Turkeys foreign ministry summoned the Dutch charge daffaires Erik Weststrate on February 17 during which official Ankara said the politicization of historical events is unacceptable. Nevertheless, the Parliament of the Netherlands adopted the two Armenian Genocide bills with absolute majority of votes. The Turkish foreign ministry, immediately after the adoption of the bills, issued a statement strictly condemning the adopted bills. Official Ankara said the bills are not legally binding. The relations between Turkey and the Netherlands escalated in 2017 when the Dutch government banned the Turkish politicians to hold campaigns in the Netherlands ahead of the constitutional referendum in Turkey. The Turkish leadership was making tough statements addressed to the Netherlands, and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan repeatedly blamed that country on showing Fascism and Nazi behavior. The complete failure of talks on normalizing the relations was announced on February 5, 2018 when the Netherlands announced officially recalling its ambassador in Turkey. The ambassador left Ankara in March 2017, but the Dutch foreign ministry announced its decision on not sending the ambassador back to Turkey. Moreover, the ministry said it will not accept appointment of new Turkish ambassador to the Netherlands. English translator/editor: Aneta Harutyunyan YEREVAN, FEBRUARY 23, ARMENPRESS. Prime Minister Karen Karapetyan visited the Digital Armenia Foundation on February 23 where he was introduced on the final version of Armenia Digital Transformation Agenda 2030 framework document, the government told Armenpress. Director of the Foundation Eduard Nersisyan said within the framework of the first stage called digital jump, programs aimed at large-scale infrastructure development and formation of single digitized environment at all spheres of governance are expected. He presented details on the formation of mutual partnership platform between the public administration systems, creation of single centers providing digital services, digital statistics and expected programs on other directions which will lead to reduction of administrative costs, increase of transparency of services provided and reduction of time, expansion of online services and services operating by one window principle. The PM attached importance to the Foundations activities, stating that in line with the long-term programs, initiatives with rapid and visible results are necessary which will contribute to the digitization process. English translator/editor: Aneta Harutyunyan YEREVAN, FEBRUARY 23, ARMENPRESS. Dr. Hayk Demoyan, former director of the Armenian Genocide Museum Institute, presented his new monograph titled Armenian Legacy in America: A 400-Year Heritage. Armenian Legacy in America: A 400-Year Heritage is dedicated to the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first Armenian to America. Four hundred years ago, in 1618, Martin the Armenian arrived in Virginia. The book is an illustrated edition with 620 pages and more than 2,200 photos, including artifacts, documents and rare images demonstrating the history and legacy of the Armenian-American community and the important contributions of the Armenian community to the American homeland. The volume is the first attempt to present a concise illustrated history of the American-Armenian community. It comprises materials from Armenian institutions of both the Republic of Armenia and the United States. Most of the materials and visual data are published for the first time. Book chapters and illustrations are presented in chronological order, covering the time period from 1618 until the early 1990s. The book has been published through the generous support of the Noubar and Anna Afeyan Foundation on behalf of the Aurora Humanitarian Initiatives, Mr. Demoyan said on Facebook. English translator/editor: Stepan Kocharyan YEREVAN, FEBRUARY 23, ARMENPRESS. Mountain Tea and Antaram, two Armenian herbal tea producers, have signed an export deal with German TeeGschwendner on the sidelines of the BIOFACH 2018 agricultural food expo in Nuremberg, Germany. Lukas Parobij, an executive of the German tea company, said they found out about the Armenian producers through the organic agriculture project of NABU and ACBA Credit Agricole Bank. I think the project created very good opportunities and prospects both for Armenian organic tea producers and for us, he said. In addition to the exports deal, the agreement also implies staff training. This is TeeGschwendners first regional project, and I can say that we found what we were looking for in Armenia, he added. The German company operates more than 130 specialized stores in 7 countries across 4 continents. English translator/editor: Stepan Kocharyan YEREVAN, FEBRUARY 23, ARMENPRESS. The Armenian parliamentary standing committee on foreign affairs convened an extraordinary session on February 23 to discuss the draft statement on condemning the Azerbaijani crimes against Armenians, reports Armenpress. Chairman of the committee Armen Ashotyan said all parliamentary factions support adopting the statement on the 30th anniversary of Sumgait Pogroms. He said the statement also includes other cases of Armenophobia demonstrated by Azerbaijan. The statement also includes the massacres held in Baku and Shushi, as well as the ongoing events. The facts show that the anti-Armenian policy is a state-level policy in Azerbaijan which is accompanied by violations of international rights, in particular, the humanitarian law, Ashotyan said. He highlighted that the statement is mostly directed to the foreign audience. The statement aims at informing the broad international community with the expectation that it will properly assess the factual events, Armen Ashotyan said, adding that there is a need for such political statement, and they consulted with the expert community before preparing the document. The Parliament will debate the draft statement on February 28. English translator/editor: Aneta Harutyunyan YEREVAN, FEBRUARY 23, ARMENPRESS. Armenias ruling coalition will officially nominate Armen Sarkissians candidacy as the 4th President of Armenia, secretary of the ARF parliamentary faction Aghvan Vardanyan told reporters after Sarkissians meeting with the coalition partners Republican Party of Armenia (HHK) and the ARF in the parliament. The mechanism is such that the presidential candidate is nominated by lawmakers of the two factions of the coalition, and this decision was made at the meeting, Vardanyan said. He said that the necessary signatures for the nomination of Armen Sarkissian are already being collected. If Im not mistaken, more than 60 signatures have already been collected. For nominating a presidential candidate, the signatures of one fourth of the total number of lawmakers is required, meaning twice more has been collected, he said. Vardanyan said that Sarkissian delivered a speech at the meeting, which is identical to the desires, life and ideas of every citizen of Armenia. Earlier in January Armen Sarkissian, Armenias Ambassador to the United Kingdom, was offered by incumbent President Serzh Sargsyan, who also serves as President of the countrys ruling Republican Party, to be the partys candidate for the upcoming presidential elections. Sarkissian initially requested a brief period of time for pondering the offer, and in the meanwhile held various meetings with political parties, civil society representatives, Diaspora structures and others, and subsequently agreed to be nominated. English translator/editor: Stepan Kocharyan YEREVAN, FEBRUARY 23, ARMENPRESS. The delegation of the ministry of internal affairs of Georgia led by deputy Prime Minister of Georgia, Minister of Internal Affairs Giorgi Gakharia arrived in Armenia on an official visit on February 23, the Armenian Police told Armenpress. The delegation included deputy minister Levan Kakava, director of the Georgian MIA Central Criminal Police Department Tornike Mushukudia and other officials. Chief of Police of Armenia, Colonel-General Vladimir Gasparyan and high-ranking police officers welcomed the guests at "Zvartnots" airport. To welcome the Georgian counterparts the Armenian Police held a solemn ceremony during which the honor guard held a demonstration performance. Thereafter, Police Chief of Armenia Vladimir Gasparyan had a working meeting with the delegation of the Georgian Internal Ministry. Welcoming the guests, Vladimir Gasparyan highly appreciated the traditional partnership between the police structures of Armenia and Georgia and underlined the tangible results that have already been achieved by the joint efforts of law enforcement officials of the two friendly countries. Expressing his gratitude for the warm reception, Giorgi Gakharia expressed a conviction that the close cooperation of the police structures in fighting against crime would deepen, being conditioned by the necessity of counteracting the challenges together. Vladimir Gasparyan reiterated the determination of the leadership of Armenian Police to further strengthen the well-established partnership; the Police Chief highlighted the importance of the direct and daily interaction between the relevant departments of the two law enforcement structures is the best way for that. During the meeting, the two sides also discussed other questions of mutual interest. Vladimir Gasparyan awarded Minister of Internal Affairs of Georgia Giorgi Gakharia with a medal "For strengthening cooperation. English translator/editor: Aneta Harutyunyan YEREVAN, FEBRUARY 23, ARMENPRESS. Human Rights Watch says Turkey is not taking precautions in its military operation in Afrin, which has led to civilian deaths. It appears that vulnerable civilians are facing displacement and death because of the way Turkeys latest offensive is being conducted, said Lama Fakih, deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. Turkey is obligated to take every feasible precaution to avoid harming or killing civilians, and to help them if they want to flee the violence. Human Rights Watch conducted an investigation of three attacks which took place in January, which claimed 26 civilian lives including 17 children. Human Rights Watch sent a letter to Turkeys defense minister on January 26 with its findings about the civilian deaths but has not received a response. If the Turkish armed forces failed to detect the presence of dozens of civilians at the sites it targeted on January 21, 27, and 28 where civilians were killed, this raises serious concerns about how Turkey ascertains whether civilians are in the vicinity of a target and whether they took all feasible precautions to minimize civilian harm, Human Rights Watch said. In January 2018, the Turkish military began an operation in the Kurdish-majority Afrin Canton and the Tel Rifaat Area of Shahba Canton in Northern Syria. Turkey code-named the operation as Operation Olive Branch. In the pretext of fighting terror, Turkey is actually targeting the Kurdish population. English translator/editor: Stepan Kocharyan YEREVAN, FEBRUARY 23, ARMENPRESS. As people full of respect towards humanity we have a constant obligation to the memory of the innocent victims who just wanted to live, Henry Rabary-Njaka - minister of foreign affairs of Madagascar, wrote in the Honorary Guest Book of the Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute, reports Armenpress. The minister arrived in Armenia over the organization issues of the visit of the President of Madagascar to the upcoming Francophonie summit which will be held in Yerevan in autumn. As people, who respect humanity, we also have a constant memory obligation to the memory of the innocent victims, to the children, adolescents, youth, women and men who were just asking for allowing them to live. The whole humanity should learn lessons from these terrible events so that the history will no longer be repeated in this direction. Never Again should not be just a slogan, we should live like that. We pay tribute to the memory of all Armenian victims, Henry Rabary-Njaka said. The delegation members of Madagascars foreign ministry laid flowers at the Eternal Flame in the Tsitsernakaberd Memorial, then toured the Museum-Institute and got acquainted with the history of the Armenian Genocide committed by the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th century. The foreign minister told reporters that before visiting Armenia he got acquainted with these events and said with regret that today as well similar terrible events repeat throughout the world. In response to the question of ARMENPRESS according to which Armenia assumed the leaders role in prevention of genocides, how can Madagascar assist our country in this regard, the foreign minister said: The current leadership of Madagascar shows a great respect to human rights, humanity, of course, the fact that now we are in our friendly country already means that we share the same values with Armenia. English translator/editor: Aneta Harutyunyan YEREVAN, FEBRUARY 23, ARMENPRESS. Lithuania supports the peaceful settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict through negotiations, the Lithuanian ministry of foreign affairs told ARMENPRESS in response to an inquiry on the latest statement of Azeri President Ilham Aliyev, when the latter had made territorial claims reaching as far as Yerevan. Asked whether or not similar statements make the conflict settlement difficult, the Lithuanian ministry of foreign affairs said: Lithuania is closely following the situation in Nagorno-Karabakh. Our position on conflict resolution is well known: we support peaceful settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict through negotiations based on fundamental principles, enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations and the Helsinki Final Act. Lithuania fully supports mediation efforts of the OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairs and join the appeal for measures to reduce tensions in the conflict zone, as well as re-engagement of the parties in negotiations on substance, in good faith and with the necessary political will. Author: Syuzi Muradyan English translator/editor: Stepan Kocharyan YEREVAN, FEBRUARY 23, ARMENPRESS. Even 30 years later principled attitude hasnt changed among the Azerbaijani ruling elite: just like in 1988, today also they are unable to stomach Artsakhs self-determination issue, Artsakh Parliament Speaker Ashot Ghulyan said during a press briefing at the Artsakh In The Crossroads of Struggle For Armenian Statehood international conference in the Armenian National Academy of Sciences. In his words, what was decided in 1988 is once and for all, therefore work must be done in all directions, by strengthening statehood, placing the economy on military basis also, improving the demographic situation, dealing with cultural, educational issues, finding allies in the international community through diplomatic and political means, forces, who can also help in advancing this issue. There are numerous options of imposing peace in the modern international community, and from this perspective we will deal with a more complex political situation. We must engage hybrid policy, he said. Speaking about the recent US intelligence report on the probability of large scale hostilities, Ghulyan said similar warnings happened numerously. The fact that such warnings have happened numerously shows the fragile situation in the region, but I dont think that today the situation is such that Azerbaijan is ready for such operations. It is difficult to say today what the situation will be like the fact that we must work in the direction of eliminating all these threats is the only way, he said. English translator/editor: Stepan Kocharyan YEREVAN, FEBRUARY 23, ARMENPRESS. At a joint press conference in Yerevan with FM Edward Nalbandian, foreign minister of Madagascar Henry Rabary Njaka talked about the expansion of cooperation between the two countries. Henry Rabary Njaka says great potential exists for enhancing cooperation. The hospitality of Madagascar is mentioned often, but I can say that Armenian hospitality is truly unique. All what weve done in the past days was very impressive and even extremely touching at certain moments. I can say this is just the beginning, our contacts must be continuous in both Yerevan and Antananarivo. Madagascar and Armenia are members of that big family, Francophonie, we share important values and in this family we must certainly also protect values of humanism and brotherhood. All thats important, like human rights, fundamental freedoms, respects of one people towards the other, all these values unite us. I am stunned on how much similarities these two peoples have, the Madagascar FM said, stressing that both sides have relevant will for advancing bilateral relations. He mentioned that during the meeting with his Armenian counterpart they addressed several issues including the upcoming visit of the President of Madagascar to Armenia. I believe this visit will be a great honor for the people of Madagascar. Our teams will begin permanent contacts starting today to prepare that state visit. We expect success from that visit, he said. Henry Rabary Njaka expressed admiration for Armenias economic growth, mentioning that Madagascar can only benefit from it. You were recording double-digit economic growth even five years after declaring independence, he said, adding that Madagascar needs a friendly country like Armenia, which is rather experiences in several sectors. English translator/editor: Stepan Kocharyan YEREVAN, FEBRUARY 23, ARMENPRESS. Minister of economic development and investments Suren Karayan held a meeting on February 23 with Ambassador of Belarus H.E. Igor Nazaruk, the ministry said. During the meeting the sides discussed issues related to developing economic cooperation, as well as the process of the agreements reached at the Armenian-Belarusian intergovernmental commission session. The minister namely discussed cooperation over assembly plants of transportation vehicles. A Belarusian task force will soon arrive in Armenia to strengthen partnership in the transportation and logistic sector. The sides also addressed issues of forming tools for substituting imports of products within the EEU. The importance of strengthening cooperation with the Development Bank of Belarus was also discussed. English translator/editor: Stepan Kocharyan YEREVAN, FEBRUARY 23, ARMENPRESS. The unsatisfactory result in the economic sector is the reason why Armenia and Madagascar decided to boost bilateral relations, Armenias minister of foreign affairs Edward Nalbandian said during a joint press conference with his counterpart from Madagascar Henry Rabary Njaka. Armenia and Madagascar established relations 40 years ago, back in the Soviet years friendship groups were carrying out mutual visits, students were arriving from Madagascar to study here, and even trade and economic figures existed. The recorded figures of the recent periods are unsatisfactory and almost dont exist. This is the very reason that we decided with my colleague to take immediate steps in order for the great potential which exists for cooperation and development of relations to be used in a more complete manner, he said. Minister Nalbandian noted that the two countries still have lots to do not only in terms of expanding cooperation but also boosting it. Especially when we are expecting the state visit of the President of Madagascar in May. It will be a good opportunity not only for signing numerous bilateral agreements, but also truly boosting economic relations. We are planning to organize a business meeting on the sidelines of this visit, and launch more active inter-parliamentary relations, the Armenian minister said. English translator/editor: Stepan Kocharyan YEREVAN, 23 FEBUARY, ARMENPRESS. The Central Bank of Armenia informs Armenpress that today, 23 February, USD exchange rate is up by 0.06 drams to 480.63 drams. EUR exchange rate is up by 0.84 drams to 591.51 drams. Russian Ruble exchange rate is up by 0.05 drams to 8.52 drams. GBP exchange rate is up by 3.83 drams to 671.20 drams. The Central Bank has set the following prices for precious metals. Gold price is down by 30.65 drams to 20526.48 drams. Silver price is up by 0.50 drams to 254.43 drams. Platinum price is down by 121.69 drams to 15298.09 drams. YEREVAN, FEBRUARY 23, ARMENPRESS. The delegation of Georgias ministry of internal affairs visited the Armenian Genocide memorial complex. As ARMENPRESS was informed from the press service of the Police of Armenia, deputy Prime Minister of Georgia, Minister of Internal Affairs Giorgi Gakharia put a wreath at the eternal fire, got acquainted with the materials of the Armenian Genocide Institute-Museum, and planted a fir tree at the Memorial Alley. The delegation of the ministry of internal affairs of Georgia led by deputy Prime Minister of Georgia, Minister of Internal Affairs Giorgi Gakharia arrived in Armenia on an official visit on February 23, the Armenian Police told Armenpress. The delegation included deputy minister Levan Kakava, director of the Georgian MIA Central Criminal Police Department Tornike Mushukudia and other officials. Chief of Police of Armenia, Colonel-General Vladimir Gasparyan and high-ranking police officers welcomed the guests at "Zvartnots" airport. To welcome the Georgian counterparts the Armenian Police held a solemn ceremony during which the honor guard held a demonstration performance. Thereafter, Police Chief of Armenia Vladimir Gasparyan had a working meeting with the delegation of the Georgian Internal Ministry. Welcoming the guests, Vladimir Gasparyan highly appreciated the traditional partnership between the police structures of Armenia and Georgia and underlined the tangible results that have already been achieved by the joint efforts of law enforcement officials of the two friendly countries. Expressing his gratitude for the warm reception, Giorgi Gakharia expressed a conviction that the close cooperation of the police structures in fighting against crime would deepen, being conditioned by the necessity of counteracting the challenges together. Vladimir Gasparyan reiterated the determination of the leadership of Armenian Police to further strengthen the well-established partnership; the Police Chief highlighted the importance of the direct and daily interaction between the relevant departments of the two law enforcement structures is the best way for that. During the meeting, the two sides also discussed other questions of mutual interest. Vladimir Gasparyan awarded Minister of Internal Affairs of Georgia Giorgi Gakharia with a medal "For strengthening cooperation. English translator/editor: Tigran Sirekanyan YEREVAN, FEBRUARY 23, ARMENPRESS. Chairman of the Standing Committee on Foreign Relations of the National Assembly of Armenia Armen Ashotyan met with Toivo Klaar, EU Special Representative for the South Caucasus and the crisis in Georgia on February 23. As ARMENPRESS was informed from the press service of the parliament of Armenia, greeting the guest, Armen Ashotyan highlighted the role of the mission of the Special Representative, as well as the involvement of the European institutions in the peaceful settlement of conflicts. Referring to issues of regional stability, Armen Ashotyan highlighted the importance of giving proper and addressed assessments by the European institutions to the un-constructive behavior and rhetoric of Azerbaijan. In this context the Chairman of the Committee underlined that the militaristic rhetoric of the Azerbaijani president and anti-Armenian announcements that can lead to destabilization of the regional security, which also reduce the chances for a peaceful settlement of the conflict. Armen Ashotyan also noted that the proper assessments by the European institutions to Azerbaijans behavior is a public demand, while not doing so reduces the public trust towards international institutions. The Chairman of the Standing Committee also attached great importance to the involvement of the people of Artsakh in EU-funded educational, social and other projects. Referring to Armenia-EU Comprehensive and Enhanced Partnership Agreement, Armen Ashotyan highlighted the speedy ratification of the agreement by national parliaments. English translator/editor: Tigran Sirekanyan YEREVAN, FEBRUARY 23, ARMENPRESS. Foreign Minister of Armenia Edward Nalbandian met with Foreign Minister of Madagascar Henry Rabary Njaka on February 23 who is in Armenia on an official visit, ARMENPRESS was informed from the press service of MF Armenia. The meeting kicked off with a private conversation and was followed with expanded-format talks with the participation of delegations. Greeting the guest, Edward Nalbandian underlined that the visit of the Foreign Minister of Madagascar takes place in the year that marks the 25th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between the two states, and added that Madagascar, as the country presiding over the Organisation of La Francophonie, will transfer the presidency to Armenia this year during the Yerevan summit of the organization. Thanking for the invitation, Madagascars FM noted that he is very impressed with the friendly reception and emphasized that Madagascar is interested in strengthening relations with Armenia. Henry Rabary Njaka said that Armenia and Madagascar, as members of the Organisation of La Francophonie, share common values based on humanism, friendship, protection of human rights and mutual respect between peoples. Stressing that there is mutual readiness for deepening relations between the two states, the Ministers expressed conviction that this visit will give new impetus to the establishment and development of cooperation in various spheres. Ministers Nalbandian and Rabary Njaka discussed issues referring to the state visit of the President of Madagascar to Armenia planned in May. They shared the opinion that the upcoming visit of the President can give new impetus to the strengthening of relations in different spheres. The interlocutors exchanged views on the ways to strengthen relations between Armenia and Madagascar. The sides highlighted the activation of political dialogue, deepening of trade and economic relations. The Armenian FM presented to his counterpart the preparatory works ahead of the the Yerevan summit of the the Organisation of La Francophonie. The sides highlighted the participation of businessmen from Madagascar in the business forum to be held in the sidelines of the summit. Regional and inbternational issues were also on the agenda of the meeting. Following the meeting the foreign ministers of Armenia and Madagascar gave a joint press conference. English translator/editor: Tigran Sirekanyan BAE Systems and Patria have selected RUAG Australia to produce the advanced high-level protection for their Combat Reconnaissance Vehicle (CRV), the AMV35, and RUAG Switzerland will transfer the technology to RUAG Australia to enable this to happen. The agreement substantially boosts Australias capability in the area of advanced protection solutions and means ballistic armour for the AMV35 8x8 combat vehicle will be manufactured in Australia by Australians. A Patria AMV35 combat reconnaissance vehicle drives onto the heavy vehicle deck of the Royal Australian Navy amphibious ship HMAS Canberra during a series of trials at Fleet Base East in Sydney on 6 December 2016 (Picture source: Australian army) BAE Systems is teaming up with RUAG to offer its 8x8 AMV35 Combat Reconnaissance Vehicle (CRV) to Australian forces who want to equip 225 new-generation reconnaissance and combat vehicles (CRVs for combat reconnaissance vehicles). If the bid from BAE Systems Australia is selected by Canberra, RUAG will provide the outer armor of the future Australian vehicle. The call for tenders for phase 2 of the Land 400 program puts the British in competition with the Germans at Rheinmetall, and in the field of communication we can say that the advantage is at BAE. Through its Australian subsidiary, BAE promises to build 225 units in the state of Victoria. Several Australian state ministers also went to RUAG Australia headquarters on February 20 to support the partnership between the two European manufacturers. The Germans promise to build the same number of their Boxer, in the state of Queensland. RUAG Australia Managing Director John Yeager said the Land 400 project would create potential for future export opportunities. If the AMV35 is selected by Australia, RUAG's subsidiary will be able to offer its technology, developed and produced in Australia, to the forces of the country, as well as to foreign customers, thus offering economic benefits to the State. from Victoria. Yeager rightly pointed out that the armor was developed by the parent company, RUAG Defense Switzerland, and that it already equipped other Western armies. The parent company will transfer to Australia the know-how necessary to master the armored technology, which would be a first for the country's defense industry. Last week, BAE Systems announced the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding with the University of Melbourne, offering its students the opportunity to complete internships and apprenticeship training at BAE Systems' Research and Development Center. Fishermans Bend. A final Victoria government campaign was also launched for BAE Systems' bid, with the Labor Party even putting up billboards across Canberra to defend the defense industry in the region. Under the project, valued at $5 Bn (EUR 4 Bn), 2,000 jobs should be created. French manufacturers also want their share of the Land 400 cake: Safran and MBDA joined forces in November 2017 to offer the MMP (medium-range missile / anti-tank) technology to the winner of Phase 2 The ballistic armor selected for the AMV35 is a multi-material protection system that is combat-tested and mission-proven. The AMV35 is an 8x8 combat reconnaissance vehicle jointly developed by the Defence Companies Patria and BAE Systems. These companies have submitted a bid for the Australian Armys Combat Reconnaissance Vehicle (CRV) program, 225 vehicles in seven role variants based on a combat proven vehicle platform and weapon system. COLUMBIA, S.C.Poor Jeff White, owner of what used to be called the Taboo Adult Superstore, can't catch a breakeven though he's dropped the word "adult" from the store's name and signage, removed all the dirty books and movies from store shelves, opened the premises to any shopper 16 years of age or older, and limited his stock to the same sex toys and lingerie one could find in the local Spencer's Giftssuch as the one in the Columbiana Centre Mall, less than 10 miles from the Columbia City Hall. "Im operating a general retail business now," White told TheState.com. "But the city is still associating my new business with my old business." That, of course, made no nevermind to the city's Powers That Be, which have been trying to drive White out of business since he opened his store in 2011, and most recently, sent White a letter stating that his claim that the store as it currently exists is a "general retail business" is "misleading" and that the city still considers it a "sex shop." As part of his ongoing battle with City Hall, White has been trying to obtain a business licensewhich the city's Board of Zoning Appeals has declined to give, as well as denied him "special exception" from the local zoning laws. That's in part due to White having lost his lawsuit against the city, and a district judge's 50-page ruling that the city's attempts to close Taboo were "not a violation of his constitutional guarantees of freedom of expression and of due process." Worse, the U.S. Supreme Court denied White's petition for certiorari in late 2017, leaving White no legal place to go to fight for his right to remain open. Back when Taboo was still an "adult superstore," the city did manage to get an order to close it in February of 2016, forcing White to hold a "going out of business" sale before changing the namethe store's Yelp page now describes it as "Columbia's Premier Couples Store & Smoke Shop"and repainting the facade. At the time, according to WACH-57 Fox News, "City officials issued the order because they feel the current location could bring unwanted crime to the area." But since Taboo has never had any observable adverse impact on the community and since no police reports have ever been filed regarding the store's location at 4716 Devine Street, he managed to remain open while his appeal from the district court loss made its way to the (very conservative) Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, which also found against him. And just to put the icing on the cake, the city hired the infamous Religious Right attorney Scott Bergthold to help rewrite the city's zoning code. Bergthold is an old hand at creating regulations that have the effect of closing down adult businesses while making it look as if the closings were, for example, merely the result of being too close to some supposedly "sensitive use"in this case, a church which sits 551 feet from Taboo's front door. See, it used to be that an adult business in Columbia could be 500 feet from any "sensitive use," but thanks to Bergthold, the city rewrote the law to prohibit such businesses within 700 feet. Of course, the city's excuse for increasing the setback was the usual: "In changing its laws, the city asserted that sexually oriented businesses often are accompanied by 'adverse secondary effects' such as prostitution, lewdness and damage to property values nearby." None of which, of course, actually exist, but such bogus claims are Bergthold's modus operandi in such situations. But Taboo remains open nonetheless, apparently because White's suit against the Zoning Board is still active, and since Taboo doesn't actually pose any threat to local citizenry, the city is content to let the business operate as the lawsuit works its way through the courts. DUSSELDORF, GermanyA German court has confirmed a ruling in a patent infringement case filed in that country by the makers of Womanizer against the makers of Satisfyer products. Novoluto GmbH (c/o Womanizer) won the first-instance case against EIS GmbH before Dusseldorf District Court per the judgement dated Dec. 14, and defends its portfolio of patents against Satisfyer Pro 2. EIS GmbH has filed an appeal. Dusseldorf District Court confirmed Womanizers suit against EIS GmbH in a court judgement. Womanizer thus once again successfully asserted its rights and took action against infringements of its rights by market participants. The main component of the judgment is confirmation of the injunction asserted by Womanizer against EIS GmbH. EIS GmbH must now cease and desist from offering the Satisfyer Pro 2 in the Federal Republic of Germany, marketing or importing it, or possessing it for the above-mentioned purposes. The court also confirmed the claims Womanizer asserted for damages arising from patent infringements. As a result, EIS GmbH must compensate Womanizer for all damages incurred due to actions it has committed since 18 February 2016, and all damages which will be incurred in future. On this basis, Womanizer is currently preparing corresponding suits to claim millions in damages from EIS GmbH, and also reserves the right to take similar action against retailers who sold the Satisfyer Pro 2. EIS GmbH is also obliged to recall the Satisfyer Pro 2 from all distribution channels and to destroy any devices still in the possession of EIS GmbH. Johannes von Plettenberg, Managing Director of Womanizer, is more than satisfied with the judgement and looks forward to 2018 with optimism: This proves the strength of our patents once again. In future, we will continue to take decisive action against EIS GmbH and other imitators of our technology. Womanizer takes the judgement against EIS GmbH very seriously and will now initiate appropriate measures as a consequence. For instance, besides EIS GmbH, we will also file suit for damages against distributors, retailers and other market participants who are selling or have sold the Satisfyer Pro 2. The confirmation by the District Court is a satisfactory end to a great year for Womanizer. I am looking forward to 2018 all the more. I promise that a lot will be happening at Womanizer and that our customers can look forward to new products. Now that it is fully apparent, to all who have the ability to pay some modicum of attention, that Imposter President Biden has extreme cognitive issues, in addition to being an inveterate liar: Can OUR Republic continue with this Executive Office that has completely failed, so many times, on far too many issues here at this early date in this abysmal presidency? No, Joseph R. Biden is completely unqualified, morally and cognitively, to represent real Americans, and lead this Republic of disparate peoples. Yes, Joseph R. Biden has started whispering again, even softer now than before; so, I know he still cares, plus, OUR media will soon stop reporting on Afghanistan in favor of OUR Socialist issues. As legal battles continue over North Carolina's election maps, one recent development deserves special recognition: A state three-judge panel has chosen to distinguish the legal process from partisan gamesmanship.It's especially noteworthy that the panel of two Democrats and one Republican rejected an argument that could have helped the Democratic Party and its ideological allies.To recap: Superior Court Judges Paul Ridgeway and Alma Hinton, both Democrats, and Republican Joseph Crosswhite decided last week not to step into the debate over election maps for N.C. House districts in Wake and Mecklenburg counties. Barring further legal action, the decision means that voters heading to the polls this year in North Carolina's two largest counties will see districts drawn by the Republican-led General Assembly. They will not face districts drawn by a Stanford law professor.That outcome was far from certain.Ridgeway, Hinton, and Crosswhite have overseen trial court proceedings in the Dickson v. Rucho redistricting lawsuit since 2011. The case headed back to their courtroom last September after three trips to the N.C. Supreme Court and two trips to the U.S. Supreme Court. The three judges' latest task involved deciding whether any matters in the longstanding case remain unresolved.Meanwhile, plaintiffs' lawyers in a separate federal case, Covington v. North Carolina, had been searching for a legal avenue that would help ensure that Stanford professor Nathaniel Persily's electoral mapmaking handiwork would prevail in Wake and Mecklenburg counties this year.The U.S. Supreme Court had delivered them a blow. Seven of the nine justices agreed to block a lower court ruling favoring Persily's districts in those two counties. The high court did not explain its decision. But most observers suspected that the justices agreed with arguments from the General Assembly's lawyers. Those lawyers contended that the federal trial court had overreached by meddling with districts that were alleged to have violated state - rather than federal - constitutional rules.To the Covington plaintiffs' lawyers, the conditions appeared right for an appeal to Ridgeway, Hinton, and Crosswhite - state judges dealing with state constitutional issues linked to redistricting. The three judges stood in a perfect position to step in and address the U.S. Supreme Court's concerns.The three state judges declined.First, they noted concerns about timing. Had they adopted the Covington plaintiffs' recommendation, their ruling could have generated chaos. Candidate filing was scheduled to start within hours of the court's decision.But the three judges also raised a more pressing legal issue."[T]his three-judge panel concludes that the doctrine of mootness and judicial economy dictate that this litigation be declared to be concluded," according to their order.It's a nicer way of saying: No, Covington lawyers, you can't hijack a different lawsuit with different plaintiffs and a different case history to achieve your goals.The three state judges did not rule out additional legal action.One of the plaintiffs' lawyers issued a statement complaining about the decision.said Allison Riggs of the Southern Coalition for Social Justice.Riggs' statement makes sense only if one assumes that the Covington and Dickson cases are interchangeable. Under this theory, court rulings applicable in one case ought to apply to the other as well. It doesn't matter that the named plaintiffs in the two cases are different people, or that one case started in the state court system and the other in federal court.That's a far different story than the one Riggs and her colleagues put forward two years ago. In February 2016, lawyers for the General Assembly wanted the federal courts to toss out the Covington case and the Harris v. Cooper congressional redistricting case.The General Assembly's argument at the time? Covington and Harris were " essentially identical " to the Dickson case and another suit that had been resolved in favor of the Republican-led General Assembly.If the cases were interchangeable, legal principles known as "res judicata" and "collateral estoppel" would have barred the plaintiffs in Covington and Harris from proceeding with their federal suits. In essence, the courts would have said, "You lost. Go home."The General Assembly's courtroom victory in Dickson would have remained intact, and election maps drawn in 2011 would have remained on the books in North Carolina - perhaps through the end of the decade.Riggs and her colleagues fought successfully in 2016 against the General Assembly's argument. They convinced federal judges that their plaintiffs and the legal issues of their cases should be distinguished from those in the state Dickson case. The federal cases proceeded, and federal courts eventually threw out the 2011 election maps.Now Riggs appears to have abandoned the notion that the Dickson and Covington cases are distinct. Only if the cases are "essentially identical" would a state three-judge panel believe it has authority to "review the remedy" in one case and apply it to the other.Ridgeway, Hinton, and Crosswhite were unwilling to play along. Their order recognized the legal distinction between the two cases.They decided to follow the dictates of the legal process, rather than a course better suited to partisan politics. Watching the political fallout from the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Massacre assures me that core Democrats and the Fake News will always obfuscate the reality of the events at hand to fully utilize their core maxim: " Never let a tragedy go to waste ".The pathetic hypocrisy of the Left's political utilization of all tragedies, real and imagined notwithstanding, these Leftist usurpers will never admit that these poor Parkland, Florida school children never had a chance and would have been slaughtered regardless of any extreme diminishment of 2nd Amendment, which is their resolved goal, before the sad occurrence of this terrible tragedy. Even if Liberals /Socialist had been fully successful in achieving their ultimate objective of law abiding Americans surrendering their guns, the fact remains: 1) the local Dept. of Social Services, in Parkland, Florida, neglected to identify the shooter as dangerous; 2) the local authorities had been warned of this shooter's psychopathic behavior and did nothing; 3) The FBI dropped the ball again, and did not investigate this disturbed boy, after being warned by knowledgeable community members; 4) the school security cameras were far out of sync; 5) a cowardly armed deputy refused to engage the shooter, Nicholas Cruz. Even if committed Leftists cannot understand this simple paradox: a psychopath with any gun in a "gun free zone", with a cowardly deputy (who goes by the infamous name of Scot Peterson) unwilling to protect these American school children, and these Leftist manipulators, whose prime objective is for law abiding citizens give up their right to protect themselves, or others strains the credulity considered by far wiser men and women than they.Harden these soft target schools, take away the silly "Gun Free Zone" signs, and arm responsible adults. That will make the big difference that our school children deserve. If Americans are not prepared to fully protect our children's lives and their future; what future does our Republic deserve?If core Democrats and their Fake News, who hate the protections of our 2nd Amendment, are left to enact policy over the rest of us, we will suffer the poor fate of a fully destructed republic.People, if ever there was a time to pray for salvation; of the good within our human spirits, and the sustainability of our Republic, that time is now. If left unchecked the twin diabolical forces of evil and ignorance with destroy us all. Patrick Ryan wants to be the Democratic nominee for New York's 19th district in the Hudson Valley, a Republican seat that Dems hope to flip; he's gone on record stating that he can do the job because of his entrepreneurial success but he didn't mention that he built his career at Berico Technologies by pitching a product to help businesses spy on union organizers and left-wing activists, a plan that included spying on left-wing Democrats and planting fake documents in order to discredit labor unions. Ryan's product never came to market, thanks to a leak that revealed the plan, which was jointly developed with Peter Thield's Palantir and the disgraced military contractor HB Gary. Ryan went on to found Dataminr, a CIA-backed surveillance company that spies on left-wing activists, including Black Lives Matter activists, and sells the intelligence to law enforcement. Ryan is supported by the pro-business wing of the Democratic Party, including Blue Dog PAC. The emails show Ryan at every step of the process to pitch the chamber. He was on the initial email thread on October 19, 2010, discussing the idea. Ryan, responding to a unique opportunity to sell "a complete intelligence solution" using "social media exploitation," said it "sounded like a great opportunity." Later that month, after a meeting with the chamber's attorney, Ryan announced to his business partners that a "client of theirs is targeted by another entity, specifically a labor union, that is trying to extract some kind of concession or favorable outcome." The proposal initially included steps to track the online activities of chamber critics using Palantir's powerful data analytics tools. The proposal also included a plan to counter the most vocal critics by planting a "false document" and creating "fake insider personnas [sic]" that could be used to "generate communications" with Change to Win. Other ideas included gathering information on leading Democratic activists, labor union officials, and other chamber critics by scraping their social media accounts and the accounts of their families. HBGary Federal official Aaron Barr, using his company's knowledge of computer exploits, floated the possibility of even using malware to hack into target computers. Democratic Congressional Candidate Built Lucrative Career Spying on Left-Wing Activists [Lee Fang/The Intercept] Ricardo Palacios, a 74-year old rancher, had gotten used to Customs and Border Protection officials tromping across his south Texas ranch lands without permission over the years. But finding a wireless surveillance camera set up in one of his trees? Not OK. Upon discovering the device, Palacios removed it immediately. It wasn't long after that he started receiving calls from CBP and the Texas Rangers demanding that he turn the camera over to them or face charges. Having taken enough of their shit, instead of turning the camera over, Palacios gave the feds something else instead: a lawsuit. According to Ars Technica, Palacios, who's been a lawyer for 50 years, named the two agencies and a CBP agent in a lawsuit that accuses them of violating his constitutional rights, by trespassing on his land, and setting up cameras where ever they damn well please. It's an important case: CBP claims it has a right, within a 100-mile radius of the American border, to stop people (including U.S. citizens, which flies in the face of the Fourth Amendment,) search cars and personal belongings in the name of border security, without a warrant. But this doesn't allow them to go traipsing on to private property in the name of their duties without permission. They're only allowed to do that within 25 miles of the border. Palacios' ranch? It's 35 miles away from the edge of the U.S./Mexican border. This alone would be enough to warrant a suit against the government. But there's more: As Palacios alleges in the civil complaint, his interactions with CBP began in April 2010 when his two sons were stopped at a checkpoint along I-35. When one son, Ricardo Palacios Jr., refused to answer questions, he was taken to a secondary inspection where he was assaulted by a CBP officer. Eventually, after being detained for 90 minutes, he was driven home to the ranch just a few miles away. Over the next several years, CBP agents roamed "freely about, day or night" on the Palacios ranch, despite his numerous efforts to protest. He even sent a formal letter to a regional CBP supervisor on April 9, 2010. However, the letter doesn't seem to have made any substantive difference. Palacios' suit has yet to be heard by a judge, but the ask is very simple: he wants state and federal agents to stop creeping on to his property without permission or probable cause. Were the courts to side with the rancher, it could have far reaching ramifications for how border agents go about their duties. Image via Pixabay News / Africa by BBC William John Endley, the South African accused of conspiring against the Kiir administration in 2016, has been sentenced to death by hanging. #SouthSudan pic.twitter.com/AC0elecqEI Eye Radio (@EyeRadioJuba) February 23, 2018 A court in South Sudan has sentenced a former South African colonel to death by hanging for conspiring against President Salva Kiir's government.William John Endley, who served as an adviser to South Sudanese rebel leader and former Vice-President Riek Machar, was arrested in August 2016.His photo has been tweeted by a privately-owned South Sudanese radio station:South Sudan has been plunged in conflict since 2013 after a power struggle broke out between Mr Kiir and Mr Machar, former allies who turned into bitter foes.Children in South Sudan have been forced to watch their mothers being raped and killed, civilians have been tortured and mutilated, and villages have been destroyed on an industrial scale.These are some of the horrific abuses that a team of UN human rights investigators has detailed in a report published about the conflict in South Sudan.The investigators say evidence suggests that more than 40 senior officials, among them five colonels and three state governors, may bear individual responsibility for the most serious violations.The report will be presented to the UN human Rights Council in Geneva, but its real purpose is to provide evidence for a proposed hybrid court to try alleged war criminals.But the court has still to be set up: South Sudan's parliament has not yet approved it. News / International by Staff reporter A farmer reportedly chewed off a snake's head in revenge after the reptile bit him, with his attending doctors saying they had never come across such a bizarre case.The incident took place in northern India's Uttar Pradesh state in Hardoi district at the weekend, when the man identified only by his first name, Sonelal was rushed to a government health centre after locals found him unconscious.The man told villagers that he was grazing his cattle in the fields when the snake bit him, which however made him so angry he chewed off its hood before spitting it out."The snake bit me, so I held its head and chewed it off, it died, then I brought it back to the village. I tore off its head again,'' Sonelal told the ANI news agency.Sanjay Kumar, a doctor who treated him said he was amazed that the man survived after biting the hood, which could have contained venom, assuming it was a poisonous snake.However, the local media said that the doctors failed to find any marks of snakebite on his body."I've never seen such a case in my life. The man was all right even after biting a snake,'' Kumar said.Witnesses who claimed they saw him ingest part of the snake said they suspected the man was addicted to drugs.Medical officials believe that the man's abnormal reaction could only be explained if he was under the influence of drugs. News / National by Staff reporter Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) Vice President Nelson Chamisa has apologized to late Morgan Tsvangirai's deputy, Thokozani Khupe and MDC-T secretary-general Douglas Mwonzora for the detainment and assault by MDC-T youths linked him. He, however, told Khupe to go Jupiter, Mars or wherever if she is not happy with his elevation to Acting President.MDC-T youth on Tuesday detained and assaulted Khupe, legislator Lwazi Sibanda, MDC-T secretary-general Douglas Mwonzora and several others at Tsvangirai's funeral service in Buhera, Manicaland province.Reacting to the latest developments, Chamisa said, this is totally unacceptable. I got a report and I said to the security guy I want to get a report within 24 hours. We will not accept abuse of leadership and we don't believe in politics of violence. It is anti-MDC. It's not part of the MDC culture. We are not going to leave any stone unturned to look for the culprits. These may be provocateurs deployed to cause noise."Chamisa noted that he attempted to apologize to Khupe soon after Tsvangirai's burial."I tried to apologize and I still apologize. Whoever did it is trying to have an agenda that is foreign. She (Khupe) has been the longest-serving vice presidents and has been loyal to the MDC. We need to be vigilant. This apology goes to Khupe, secretary general Mwonzora and others. I apologize."He further apologized for the public humiliation of Zanu-PF chairperson, Oppah Muchinguri Kashiri, who was booed by some members of the MDC-T while addressing people at the funeral."We don't want to be purveyors of intolerance. Those who differ with us must be tolerated."Chamisa mocked Khupe for mourning about his elevation to Acting President. He said, "You can go Jupiter, Mars or wherever and this will not change. This thing belongs to the people and if there is any query go to Harvest House." News / National by Staff reporter Home Affairs Minister Dr Obert Mpofu yesterday refused to give evidence before a Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Mines and Energy regarding diamond mining activities under his watch as Mines and Mining Development Minister.Dr Mpofu vowed "never" to subject himself to a committee chaired by Mr Temba Mliswa whom he said had been using every platform to denigrate him. There was a heated exchange between Dr Mpofu on one hand and Mr Mliswa and some legislators on the other.The committee had invited Dr Mpofu to respond to issues of corporate governance at Chiadzwa diamond mining fields, which saw former President Mugabe saying the country had lost about $15 billion worth of diamonds through leakages.Trouble started when Dr Mpofu refused to withdraw his statement to the effect that he did not need to be lectured to by Mr Mliswa since he had been in Parliament since 1987. Earlier on, Dr Mpofu had said it was not proper for him to explain issues regarding a ministry that he no longer superintended."I do not know which precedence has been set that former ministers are subjected to operations that they experienced when they were in those ministries. I do not think I am obliged unless you convince me that I am," said Dr Mpofu.When Mr Mliswa explained provisions of the Standing Orders Dr Mpofu said he did not want to be lectured upon, plunging the discussion into limbo."This is not a zanu-pf Politburo," quipped Mr Mliswa drawing Dr Mpofu's ire.Dr Mpofu said the committee had not formally invited him, but had come after he read in the media that legislators were due to meet him yesterday.Dr Mpofu said he would "never" give evidence before a committee chaired by Mr Mliswa because he had been on a crusade to malign him on several platforms."I have been abused so many times by you Honourable Chair. You have said so many things, attacking me and maligning me. You have Nicodemusly come to my house 600 kilometres from Harare to discuss these issues," he said.Related Stories:Mr Mliswa shot back accusing him of lying saying the only time he came to his residence, he was still in Zanu-PF."Yes, but as long as you are sitting there as chairperson, I will never cooperate," said Dr Mpofu.Dr Mpofu stuck to his guns even upon being told that he should have expressed his concerns in writing to the Speaker of the National Assembly, Advocate Jacob Mudenda.''You visited my house and even implicated the Speaker," he said.Earlier on, Mr Lovemore Kurotwi, who was a shareholder of Canadile, a firm that extracted diamonds at Chiadzwa, said they had protested against Dr Mpofu's directive to pay Harare lawyer Mr Farai Mutamangira $600 000 because no legal service had been rendered to them.Mr Kurotwi said he had complained to former President Robert Mugabe that he was being victimised by Dr Mpofu because he had refused to give him a $10 million bribe for approving a special grant to mine diamonds at Chiadzwa.He, however, said he could not absolve former President Mugabe from the allegations since he did not do anything after the report."The way he defended Minister Mpofu, I am left with no option but to think so. I expected investigations of some form. If you report to the highest office, and nothing happens where do you go?" said Mr Kurotwi. News / National by Staff reporter Morgan Tsvangirai's widow Elizabeth was forced to leave Humanikwa village in Buhera soon after the burial of her husband unable to attend post-burial ceremonies after suffering relentless abuse at the hands of her late spouses' family members.Tension seemed high in the family of the late former founding leader of the opposition MDC-T party, Morgan Tsvangirai, when his widow Elizabeth Macheka Tsvangirai, remained seated when the family was being introduced.Elizabeth did not go on the stage when the rest of the Tsvangirai family stood up at Freedom Square, which is also called Robert Mugabe square, where Tsvangirai's life was being celebrated. The body of the veteran opposition leader was brought to the venue so that MDC-T Supporters could say goodbye to their revered leader.The former prime minister's oldest son, Edwin, introduced the Tsvangirai family except for his stepmother. He went on to urge the MDC-T party to respect the family and to stop showing disunity at his father's funeral.This follows reports that the Tsvangirai family has disowned Elizabeth and is planning to grab Morgan Tsvangirai's entire estate. Tsvangirai's mother was present at the celebrations, despite boycotting the memorial service held on Sunday.Gogo Lydia Tsvangirai, made waves on Saturday when she was eavesdropped by ZBC News, threatening to commit suicide if Elizabeth and Nelson Chamisa showed their faces.The torment endured by Tsvangirai's wife has been roundly condemned as nothing short of a disgrace.More to follow... News / National by Staff reporter THE MDC-T youth wing in Bulawayo has warned fellow youth to desist from being used as pawns to fan political violence by their party leaders in the run-up to this year's elections.This comes in the wake of a brutal attack on MDC-T vice-president, Thokozani Khupe (pictured), organising secretary, Abednico Bhebhe and secretary-general, Douglas Mwonzora by suspected party youth during former Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai in Buhera on Tuesday.Khupe and Mwonzora had to seek refuge at a nearby homestead, as the youth, believed to be sympathetic to interim MDC-T leader, Nelson Chamisa, bayed for their blood.MDC-T Bulawayo youth spokesperson, Alfred Dzirutwe yesterday urged the opposition party to rein-in rogue elements bent on tarnishing its image through acts of violence."The rogue elements must be stopped forthwith and must desist from acting violently towards chosen leaders, who were mandated with the responsibility of taking the party to the next congress. We must be vigilant and guard against being used as instruments of violence," he said."We shall render all support and protection to our elected VP [Khupe]. Our departed leader used to preach peace and peace we shall have as the youth wing. We are very saddened and really at a loss for words with what transpired at the burial of the people's hero Tsvangirai."Dzirutwe described the violent youth, as unruly elements, who continuously masquerade as "vanguards" of the party, before condemning them for what he termed barbaric and undemocratic action."As the youth wing, we call upon the relevant leaders to sort their differences, for we shall not be your pawns of violence. The youth of today is hopeful and sees a future sustainable work, education, working economy, away from violence," he said."As a youth wing, we believe in ideology and tolerance of pluralism. We are not a private army and we shall stick to the dictates of the constitution that guides and binds us."This is the second time that Khupe and Bhebhe have fallen victim to attack by the so-called party youth, who last year pounced on senior party officials at the Bulawayo offices and attacked them for boycotting the MDC Alliance signing ceremony.Khupe, Bhebhe and party chairman, Lovemore Moyo are against the allocation of Matabeleland parliamentary seats to alliance members, arguing that the MDC-T has never lost an election in the provinces. News / National by Staff reporter THE University of Zimbabwe (UZ) Council has ordered a probe into the award of a degree to former First Lady Grace Mugabe in 2014.The probe follows the arrest of UZ vice-chancellor, Levy Nyagura on allegations of criminal abuse of office over Grace's PhD.The UZ Council was supposed to meet yesterday to discuss the matter, but the meeting was cancelled under unclear circumstances, prompting a member of the council to lash out angrily.In a letter to members, UZ registrar, Noah Mutongoreni said the decision had been taken after advice from lawyers."Following advice from our lawyers, Messrs Chihambakwe, Mutizwa and Partners legal practitioners, the special council meeting scheduled for Thursday February 22, 2018 has been cancelled," Mutongoreni said But a member of the council, Thembinkosi Magwaliba reacted angrily to the cancellation."The cancellation has serious governance implications, it must have been the council, which should have met and decided not to discuss the issues of the conferment of the degree to Mrs Mugabe and not the lawyers of the university, the registrar or even the council chairman on his own," he said.Magwaliba argued that the UZ Council's power could not be overridden by its lawyers."The council employs the vice-chancellor (Nyagura). The council's employee has been arraigned before the courts and the council has never received a written report on the issues that are the subject of the prosecution."I, accordingly, request that the chairman of the council reinstates the meeting and all issues that are supposed to be discussed be discussed at the meeting. The vague opinion from the lawyers has no power to stop lawful business of the council," Magwaliba said.In another letter addressed to UZ Council chairman, Buzawani Mothobi, dated February 19, Magwaliba seemed to accuse Nyagura of lying to the council."We received a verbal report from the vice-chancellor to the effect that investigations in respect of the matter had been concluded by the Zimbabwe Anti-Corruption Commission and that there were no irregularities found in the manner in which the PhD was awarded."Over the past week, however, we have learnt through the media that, in fact, investigations have been ongoing and the vice-chancellor has appeared in court and has been remanded on $200 bail," Magwaliba said.He warned that the matter, if not handled carefully, could have devastating implications on governance at UZ, demanding the meeting be rescheduled.Meanwhile, the Zimbabwe National Students' Union (Zinasu) has called on Zacc to expand their investigations over fraudulent issuance of acquisition of certificates at institutions, including to politicians.Zinasu said fraudulent behaviour at tertiary institutions was rampant and instituting investigations into such claims will bring back confidence in Zimbabwe's higher education.Zinasu secretary-general, Ashleigh-PFunye said: "We won't tolerate such behaviour, especially when someone denigrates the integrity of our education."He said Zacc must look into other universities, colleges and polytechnics to ensure that corrupt academic staff were brought to book.Zinasu also said Zacc should investigate how academic institutions were utilising funds, as there were reports that money meant for students is being diverted to personal use by top officials. News / National by Staff reporter HISTORY is littered with countless examples of political parties that fail to go beyond the vision envisaged by their founding fathers after their demise.The death of the torchbearers has often led to intra-party fights which have divided and destroyed the political formations.The death of founding MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai, aged 65, has widened the factional fissures ahead of the country's make-or-break general elections slated for July. Tsvangirai succumbed to colon cancer on Wednesday last week. He was buried on Tuesday at his rural home in Buhera next to his first wife Susan who died in a horrific car crash in 2009.A day after Tsvangirai passed on, the MDC-T national council endorsed vice-president Nelson Chamisa as acting president. However, the appointment has received a backlash from other party officials such as secretary-general Douglas Mwonzora who is demanding the convening of an extraordinary congress to elect a new leader.According to Section 9.21 of the MDC-T constitution, in the event of the death or resignation of the president, the deputy president (in this case it envisaged Khupe as the elected one) assumes the role of acting president, pending the holding of an extraordinary congress to elect a new leader. The extraordinary congress must be held no later than a year from the death or resignation of the former president.The MDC-T is locked in a messy succession battle similar to that of the ruling Zanu-PF which culminated in military intervention last November as three rival leaders Chamisa, Elias Mudzuri and Thokozani Khupe, slug it out to inherit Tsvangirai's mantle.The founding MDC-T leader's death has intensified the cut-throat squabbles, sparking questions as to whether the party will survive Tsvangirai's death or suffer endless splits.Factional infighting in the MDC-T reflects a wider problem in African politics. For instance, the Zimbabwe African National Union (Zanu)-Ndonga which was formed by Ndabaningi Sithole after his fallout with Joshua Nkomo's Zimbabwe African People's Union (Zapu), failed to survive its leader's death.Sithole, who was Chipinge's Member of Parliament, died in December 2000. He was the only parliamentary representative for his party. After Sithole's death the party remained without a parliamentary seat, reflecting the collapse of the party.The name of the party, which carries its leader's surname, is an indicator of how MDC-T was deeply entrenched around the person of Tsvangirai. The original MDC party was renamed MDC-T after the party split in 2005. Tsvangirai presided over splits in his party which resulted in the formation of a splinter MDC led by Arthur Mutambara and spearheaded by Professor Welshman Ncube.Prominent politicians, the then MDC-T secretary-general Tendai Biti and Elton Mangoma, also left the party, and were eventually expelled in 2014. Another indication that Tsvangirai's party was personality-based is that he was able to single-handedly appoint two more vice-presidents, Chamisa and Mudzuri.In July 2016, Tsvangirai appointed Chamisa and Mudzuri MDC-T vice-presidents in addition to Khupe who had been elected at congress.According to a policy document titled Issue-Based Politics vs Personality-Based Politics : A Tale of Two Nations written by Janelle Mangwanda and Beatriz Lacombe, heads of state often rely on the weight of their personality intellect and stature to persuade gatherings to support their national positions. It states that contrary to issue-based politics, personality-based politics is dominated by personality and patronage.The policy document describes issue-based politics as a programmatic style of politics."In an issue-based political environment, values, principles, ideologies, policies and issues of the day rather than personalities are the main focal points," reads the document."In an electoral context, personality-based politics refers to a style of politics in which voters are not given real policy choices at elections. They will vote for a candidate without sometimes knowing which party he or she stands for. In such cases, the policies that the candidate stands for are not in any way of concern to anyone. Issue-based politics is a programmatic style of politics."Political analyst Maxwell Saungweme said the MDC-T now faces real challenges and threats."First, there is contention around the manner in which Chamisa wrested power with some pointing to constitutional and procedural issues. If disgruntled MDC members decide to challenge this in court, it may give another setback to the party. But Chamisa may as well accept to go to an extraordinary congress and get a clear and unquestioned mandate from the party's stakeholders. He looks like he will win against all other hopefuls," Saungweme said."The MDC can also be stronger if the likes of Biti and Ncube ditch their own political outfits and join MDC under Chamisa, instead of having the loose alliance. Alliance can be formed with other players who were never with MDC not a mere reunion of former comrades."Electoral defeat in the forthcoming elections, Saungweme added, could be the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back."It's one thing for Chamisa to command the crowds. It's another to have him being announced the winner of the presidential poll where the electoral terrain is tilted in favour of a Zanu-PF candidate with no electoral reforms, military fear factor, politicised Zimbabwe Electoral Commission, monopolisation of public media by Zanu-PF and potential for electoral fraud during polls," Saungweme explained.University of Zimbabwe political science professor Eldred Masunungure said the MDC-T will not completely disappear, but will emerge fractured after Tsvangirai's death.Masunungure said failure by the MDC-T to address the succession issue could also have fuelled the current intra-party fights. Tsvangirai has been at the helm of the party since its formation in 1999."The personalisation or privatisation of the party is seen by the name itself post-2005. Naming a party after an individual for whatever reason is evidence of personalisation. Another de-institutionalisation process that took place is the removal of the presidential term limits. If the party stuck to the two term limits, there would not be these challenges but they let the post be open-ended," said Masunungure.Masunungure said lack of rules of succession led to the challenges MDC-T is facing now. He said the MDC-T was not sufficiently institutionalised.He said the appointment of Chamisa and Mudzuri to the posts of vice-president in addition to an elected Khupe, is a sign of de-institutionalisation News / National by Staff reporter MDC-T acting president, Nelson Chamisa, has summoned the opposition party's provincial and district executives for a meeting in Harare today, as he moves to consolidate his grip on power following a vicious campaign by his rivals Thokozani Khupe and Elias Mudzuri to discredit his appointment by the national council last week.The meeting follows the burial of party leader, Morgan Tsvangirai at his rural home in Buhera on Tuesday.This comes as Khupe has also announced plans to call an MDC-T national council meeting to endorse her as the party's bona fide acting president.MDC-T is facing one of its biggest leadership contestations since formation, with Chamisa, Khupe and Mudzuri angling to take over from the lateopposition leader.Although Chamisa appears to be the most popular among the trio, Khupe and Mudzuri have accused him of manipulating his way to the top.Presidential spokesperson, Luke Tamborinyoka confirmed the meeting, but denied reports that Chamisa wanted to purge some provincial and district leaders opposed to his ascendancy."This is just a consultative meeting to hear the way forward. Because they are not an organ of the party, the president or acting president has the latitude to call them and discuss issues," he said.Some provincial leaders said they will bring several issues among them indiscipline, allocation of seats in the MDC Alliance, the current leadership crisis and the way forward.Harare provincial chairman, Eric Murayi said he was looking forward to the meeting to discuss the party's preparations for the upcoming elections."We want the party to move forward and people to unite," he said.However, sources within the party said the meeting was likely to be used to suspend top officials opposed to Chamisa, among them secretary-general, Douglas Mwonzora and spokesperson, Obert Gutu."That decision (Chamisa's elevation) is unlikely to be challenged and those saying things to the contrary are likely to face the wrath of the party like what happened to the former deputy treasurer, Elton Mangoma," the source said.But Mwonzora stood his ground yesterday, declaring he would not allow his detractors to push him around."Well I am not afraid of anyone in the MDC-T. I am not afraid of those people who will be hired to simply heckle other people and in fact, I will stand up to them. I hold my views, which are correct and the main issue is the interpretation of our constitution and I cannot cease to be a lawyer because it will offend anybody," he said. News / National by Staff reporter President Emmerson Mnangagwa has reportedly approved government plans to decongest the country's prisons by granting an amnesty to some inmates serving light sentences or experiencing health challenges.Zimbabwe Prisons and Correctional Services (ZPCS) Commissioner-General Paradzai Zimondi, confirmed the development yesterday at a handover ceremony of a 30-tonne sugar donation by Tongaat Hullet."I talked to the minister of Justice (Ziyambi Ziyambi) about the issue and he is the one who told me," he said, while presenting the donation to inmates at Harare Central Prison.The last amnesty was granted to more than 2 000 inmates by former President Robert Mugabe in May last year.Zimondi revealed that more than 500 prisoners were suffering from malnutrition and the impending amnesty was coming at an opportune time to save the meagre resources in the country's prisons.He hailed Zanu-PF political commissar, Engelbert Rugeje for mobilising the donation from Tongaat Hullet, while calling on both public and private institutions to help remedy the plight of prisoners, who continue to suffer hunger and malnutrition.Current developments in the granting of amnesty to prisoners come on the backdrop of constant calls by opposition political parties for Mnangagwa to pardon political prisoners, who have been rotting in the country's jails. News / National by Staff reporter HOME Affairs minister, Obert Mpofu says the new political dispensation which has seen the assumption of power by President Emmerson Mnangagwa needs people who are not corrupt.He was giving the closing marks Wednesday at the National Railways of Zimbabwe (NRZ) reception ceremony for equipment hired from South Africa to compliment the company's decrepit stock.The former minister of mines suggested that Mnangagwa's administration was more serious and committed to tackling corruption and fostering development in the country. News / National by Staff reporter ZANU-PF'S deposed generation 40 (G40) faction was "within touching distance" of snatching the party's presidency amid revelations that its vile plan included the capture of several strategic institutions, including public media, just days before the ex-liberation movement's December 15 extra-ordinary congress.This also comes as the vanquished group has been mobilising against President Emmerson Mnangagwa's government under the National Patriotic Front (NPF) banner and a number of its staunch allies, including ex-police commissioner general Augustine Chihuri, Kudzanai Chipanga and Ignatius Chombo, remain under the cosh over a litany of political and professional indiscretions."G40 kingpins had not only set upon a plan to capture key state organs by supplanting tried and tested cadres with their surrogates - across the media spectrum, and numerous parastatals - on the Thursday before the army takeover kicked in, but their trump card was the 10th Dzivaresekwa interface rally and subsequent Zanu-PF congress, and where they would have wanted to install Grace Mugabe as acting president as well," said a source."So sinister was the plot that we would have very well seen Robert Mugabe, and Phelekezela Mphoko going on leave and that unhinged woman taking over the reigns for up to three months after the old man would have been forced on an extended vacation. And as the desperation to seize power set in, you will be aware that they even tried to divide securocrats by roping in people like Chihuri on their side with a view of (even) forming a military buffer for the old man," they said, adding the crafty schemers had also tried to mask their true intentions by throwing in former Justice minister Happyton Bonyongwe's name."Of course, we know that the junta still wanted to put Mnangagwa in charge at congress after sponsoring a spontaneous revolt against their former leader by Zanu-PF provinces, but it had to bring forward its intervention after the G40's increasingly bold manouvres. And like in any situation where such evil plans collapse, there have been many casualties - albeit willing messengers - in the form of the Chihuris, who are now being swept by the tide after a number of dossiers detailing their expedient actions such as the $120 million spot fines and illegal fundraising debacle, failure to deal with Frank Buyanga's cases and unresolved top cop extortion saga," the sources said.With the ex-Zanu-PF women's league boss' influence on her 93 year-old husband, analysts polled by the Daily News recently concurred that it was quite possible that the acerbic Gushungo Holdings owner would have gone on a dry run of party and state presidency after the party's December 15 extra-ordinary congress."In the circumstances of the succession struggles in Zanu-PF in 2017, one cannot entirely deny the plans and actions of the various factions. While pushing Grace to the presidency appeared a long shot it may as well tell us how political strategies were becoming amateurish and how seasoned politicians were throwing caution to the wind," Rashweat Mukundu, a former Freedom House researcher and commentator, said.Ethiopian-based security expert Maxwell Saungweme also said "anything was possible (with these hawks and) the theory seems plausible given Mnangagwa's earlier dismissal. Nonetheless, the military might have gotten wind of this hence its coup".However, Shakespear Hamauswa disagreed and said G40 kingpins - in the form of ex-Higher Education minister Jonathan Moyo, and Saviour Kasukuweres - were just out to create smokescreens for their real motive."The fight was for Mugabe to leave office. So the G40 wanted to create a fake scenario where Mugabe would feel safe after his exit. The G40 had someone else other than Grace. They knew Grace was not going to make it so they were just using her for their hidden agenda," the pro-government analyst said.And as the Zanu-PF leadership contest, and intrigue continues - even after Mugabe's November 21 ouster - Moyo and the deposed leader's nephew Patrick Zhuwao have not only sought to continually project the Harare regime as illegitimate, but have escalated efforts to fight Mnangagwa and his military-backed government under the NPF cover.According to recent media reports and indeed his own twitter posts, the ex-Tsholotsho North legislator still believes the nonagenarian leader was "wrongly, and unjustly" pushed out by the lacoste faction, and its security sector allies.As such, Moyo and his G40 allies - notably Zhuwao - have set in motion plans to derail Mnangagwa by roping in Mugabe, National People's Party leader Joice Mujuru, the Movement for Democratic Change and a dissident group called the 2018Resistance.And in their latest, and nefarious activities to oust the new Zanu-PF leader, it is believed that the embittered lot was working "with certain remnants of the old security structure and apparatus" that was behind the former president's feeble attempt to cling on to power in the after the November 15 military intervention.Meanwhile, Chihuri and several other Grace allies remain under attack for a number of imprudent decisions, including the alleged looting of state resources that have been exposed by police deductions saga, and messy fight with Bigboy Pachirera."You see, Mnangagwa is such a calculative man for he simply lumped the former Zimbabwe Republic Police (ZRP) head's political sins to his professional indiscretions, which culminated in the latter's sacking on December 18 last year. In my understanding, the litany of allegations ranged from his dodgy Kuyedza Club activities to the ex-top cop's refusal to investigate cases reported by Buyanga against five parties and protecting surbodinates implicated in the Delish Nguwaya extortion cases," said a source."Apart from these issues and complaints, his obvious G40 bias also reflected in the police's failure to arrest Innocent Hamandishe on six assault and kidnapping charges, and where his officers would even claim they could not locate the former youth boss yet he was routinely attending Grace's interface rallies," they said.And with the long-serving police chief under fire for presiding over a generally corrupt force - enmeshed in such hellish, and emotive issues as the spot fines saga - the incoming government not only had enough fodder to boot out Chihuri, but found support even among opposition quarters.With all these outstanding issues that strike at the core of the force's integrity, new Home Affairs minister Obert Mpofu has thus sanctioned sweeping changes to improve police conduct and operations - now being spearheaded by police boss Godwin Matanga.In Manicaland, for instance, Chipanga is accused of grabbing a Headlands farm that had been earmarked for a state university, while Chombo is facing fresh charges of trying to muscle in on a Kariba fish farm.In the Buyanga case, Chihuri is accused of sitting on dockets for the prosecution of Tawanda and Winnie Jakachira, lawyer Tamuka Moyo, Simon Charewa and Lawrence Muteswa over the flamboyant businessman's loss of two Harare properties.On the other hand, the stricken man was sucked into the Nguwaya case after chief superintendent Nyaradzai Majachani, superintendent Shepherd Tachiona, constable Clever Gadzikwa and Vengai Zano failed to appear in court despite arrest warrants having been issued. And this was after the Chinese Business Association had raised complaints over continued harassment by the alleged syndicate.And despite efforts to clean up the security sector of rogue elements, Chihuri was seen as a hindrance to the operation by ignoring court warrants for the bent cops. News / National by BBC Thank you to everyone who sent me warm messages of encouragement & support. I'm truly humbled. Special thanks to President @CyrilRamaphosa graciously accepting my apology understanding it was a genuine human moment. Thank you . I look forward to work at #sabcnews on Monday pic.twitter.com/qMFrkRwDjW Peter Ndoro (@peterndoro) February 23, 2018 South Africa's President Cyril Ramaphosa has "forgiven" a newsreader who accidentally killed him off during a live TV broadcast.Peter Ndoro - a former BBC journalist who now works for South Africa's SABC - mistakenly said Mr Ramaphosa had died on Wednesday, 14 February.He had meant to say Morgan Tsvangirai, the leader of Zimbabwe's opposition, had passed away.Mr Tsvangirai died the same day former President Jacob Zuma stepped down.Mr Ndoro has been off air since - but this morning revealed he would be back on SABC this Monday after Mr Ramaphosa "graciously" accepted his apology.To be fair, it did not seem as if the accidental announcement had bothered Mr Ramaphosa in the slightest.A suggestion Mr Ndoro had lost his job over the incident left Mr Ramaphosa looking "visibly shocked", according to the privately owned News24 site.It is not the first time that Mr Ndoro has had a slip of the tongue which put someone in their grave earlier than they should have been.... News / National by Staff reporter PUBLIC VIOLENCE IN HARARE CENTRAL BUSINESS DISTRICT It is with a heavy heart and sadness that I wish to announce the death of two people in a very unfortunate and regrettable incident that occurred on the 22th February 2018 in Harare Central Business District. I wish to express my sincere condolences on behalf of the Zimbabwe Republic Police and my own behalf to the bereaved families and relatives who lost their loved ones. From the onset, let me categorically state that the Zimbabwe Republic Police is currently ceased with this matter and I have since directed a team of expert investigators to extensively establish the cause, what transpired, who was responsible and action will be taken. These investigations will leave no stone unturned, perpetrators will be brought to book and there are no sacred cows. Violence in whatever form is not tolerated. Now for the brief details of what happened, the incident is a culmination of an operation code named Clean up Harare Central Business District, which was being conducted by City of Harare. The police and other security agencies were supportinig the Municipality of Harare to decongest the city centre of commuter omnibuses and mushikashika. At around 1730 hours a press statement was issued by the Ministry of Local Government, Public Works and National Housing, directing that the operation should be stopped. As the directive was given, the police and other security agencies were still in the middle of the operation enforcing the ban and unaware of the cancellation. A team of police officers from Harare Central was confronted by an angry mob armed with stones, concrete pillars and rods. The crowd started to throw stones at the police officers whilst demanding to know why they had earlier on dispersed them along-side why they Harare Municipal Police. The crowd advanced throwing aggressively towards the police throwing stones and then police officers fired warning shots. The mob was not deterred. It was at this stage that the police officers fired shots that unfortunately killed two people and injured four others. In the ensuing violence, three police officers were seriously injured, a police vehicle was severely damaged and two others were burnt, several were stoned and property worth thousands of dollars was extensively destroyed. Meanwhile the bodies of the deceased are at Parirenyatwa Hospital Mortuary. We are appealing for information that may lead to their identification since they did not carry any identity particulars. The Zimbabwe Republic Police is appealing for peace, restraint and co - operation from members of the public as we conduct comprehensive enquiries into this regrettable and tragic incident. We are therefore appealing for calmness in Harare as we deal with this issue. However, let me emphasise that we will deal decisively with those who continue to engage in acts of violence. T G Matanga Commissioner General of Police Zimbabwe Republic police held a press conference today at midday to address the fatal shooting of a pedestrian and subsequent violence that followed at 'Charge Office.'The Commissioner General of Police, T G Matanga has officially offered the ZRP's condolences to the family of the victims of yesterday's clashes. He also expressed regret over what transpired. He indicated that a team of "experts" has been dispatched to investigate what transpired and bring perpetrators to book.Below is the full statement: News / National by Simbarashe Sithole Acting Movement for Democratic Change President Nelson Chamisa has angrily responded to the fatal shooting by Zimbabwe Republic Police (ZRP) officers that rocked Harare central business district yesterday evening in an anti-kombi operation.Chamisa said the excessive use of force by police should be the reason why the force should be a police turned from police force to police service."Sad news about commuters and loss of lives by innocent civilians in Harare CBD. The disrespectful treatment of citizens by government is barbaric."Excessive use of force by police is more the reason why we must turn our police into 'police service' as opposed to police force," said Chamisa via micro blogging Twitter.Meanwhile, Mt Pleasant independent candidate for 2018 advocate Fadzayi Mahere said her heart broke when she heard about the fatal incident hence justice should prevail."My heart breaks to learn that innocent lives were lost at hands of the police. Justice has to be done."Never again must a life be lost because our public officials are disorganized and our would be protectors have zero regard for human life," she tweeted. News / National by Staff reporter A CHIPINGE woman who had an adulterous relation which sired a child with a married man has been slapped with $10 000 adultery damage by the man's legally married wife.Alice Kunetsa, who resides in Gaza, Chipinge was dragged to court for dating and conceiving a child with the plaintiff, Rebecca Mlambo's husband. The court heard that Kunetsa has been involved with Mlambo's husband since 2010. The husband's name was not stated in court papers filed at Chipinge Civil Court.The love birds sired a child in 2014. Mlambo is using the birth of the child to prove that the two have been involved sexually. Mlambo said her husband has been a no-show at home and has taken some of his belongings to Kunetsa's residence."This woman has been dating my husband since 2010 and our relationship has never been the same ever since she came into our life. He has been living at her residence most of the time ever since they met."Right now, I am the only one taking care of our children while she plays house wife to my husband and on top of that they have a child is called by my husband's surname," she said.When asked why she was demanding such a high figure, Mlambo said it was because of the humiliation she suffered since 2010. She said she has been insulted by her rival and her husband has been assaulting her regularly."I want the $10 000 because this woman proved to be stubborn. I asked her to leave my husband alone and now she has already assumed his surname as if she is legally married to him. She has been parading herself as Mrs Mlambo and I am supposed to look on as she commits these atrocities? Ever since they met, my husband became so violent towards me."I have lost two of my front teeth after he assaulted and she has been taunting me because of how he treats me. She might want to deny this, but my husband doesn't even deny their relationship anymore," she said.Kunetsa admitted she once had a relationship with the woman's husband, but severed ties after realising that he was a married man."I am no longer with her husband. As for the $10 000 she wants, I cannot pay that because her husband was not forced to propose me. Besides where does she think I will get such money given the current economic environment," said Kunetsa.The case is set to continue next month before Magistrate Poterai Gwezhira. News / National by Staff reporter Former deputy Prime Minister Author Mutambara has warned MDC-T members to be wary of Zanu PF which he accused of being violent.Mutambara was addressing mourners who gathered at the Tsvangirai homestead in Buhera where he whipped up the MDC-T crowd with a partisan speech filled with hate, accusing Mugabe's administration of having almost killed Tsvangirai."We cannot allow the assistance given by the government to Morgan Tsvangirai to fool us into enabling Zanu PF to achieve any moral equivalence,"Zanu PF's criminal culpability in the violation of our people and brutalization of Morgan Tsvangirai for 30 years must be acknowledged. We must say never again."He saluted Tsvangirai, describing him as a "great Zimbabwean, a great African, a national hero, the people's president"."We are mourning a great Zimbabwean a great African. He has courage, he walked a difficult journey. He was arrested, harassed and brutalised by Robert Mugabe's administration."There are Zanu PF people here, they killed Tsvangirai," said Mutambara.The crowd responded, hurling obscenities and insults aimed at President Emmerson Mnangagwa's emissary, Water Minister Oppah Muchinguri-Kashiri .When she stood up to speak, the crowd was already hostile forcing her to stop midstream before Chamisa's rescue effort.Muchinguri-Kashiri said she was related to Tsvangirai's late wife Susan hence she had links to the family."Besides my government hat, I am hear because I was related to Susan. She was my cousin sister. I thought you needed to know that," she said in a bid to ingratiate herself with the crowd.Tsvangirai died on 14 February after succumbing to colon cancer while in a South African hospital. He was laid to rest at his rural home in Humanikwa village, Buhera. News / Press Release by L'tian Chigwedere (Commissioner) NATIONAL PEACE AND RECONCILIATION COMMISSION PRESS STATEMENT CONDEMNATION OF ALL FORMS OF VIOLENCE: The National Peace and Reconciliation Commission (NPRC) is saddened by reports of intraparty violence and disturbances in Buhera at the burial of the late MDC T leader Dr Morgan Richard Tsvangirai.The nation is hereby implored to:1. Stop immediately the victimisation of women and respect the gender equality provisions in our Constitution2. Desist from making utterances that denigrate other people along ethnic lines and uphold our Constitution that recognises ethnic diversity and 16 official languages.3. Avoid using insulting, obscene or threatening language against other members of society be it in intraparty or interparty situations. Them has to be respect for divergent views without resorting to violence.The NPRC further condemns all other scenes of violence resulting in loss of life and destruction of property as is reported to have happened recently in Harare. In all respects the NPRC implores citizens to value life and engage in meaningful dialogue with a view to ending disputes peacefully. Law enforcement officers am implored to desist from the use of excessive and inappropriate force against citizens but use dialogue as a means of achieving a lasting peaceful resolution of disputes.Political party leaders are urged to desist from inciting their members to engage in violence and criminal activities. The nation has to have a culture of resolving conflicts and disputes peacefully. The NPRC encourages intraparty and interparty dialogue as a means for engagement and ending conflicts. The NPRC remains ready to perform its constitutional mandate of facilitating dialogue between individuals, communities, in intraparty or interparty political situations.Lilian Chigwedere (Commissioner)Deputy Chaimen onNational Peace and Reconciliation Conunission23/02/18 Opinion / Columnist FOR years in the post-colonial era, politicians and a range of civic/residents' associations in the city have campaigned for the legalisation of shebeens.In particular, shebeens have been defended as necessary to address lack of economic opportunity in the city, as institutions that should be celebrated because of their supportive role during the nationalist era, as offering alternative, more respectable, drinking venues than beer halls for the middle class, and as part of an urban African tradition that should be celebrated in independent Zimbabwe.History shows that shebeens were born out of the draconian Law and Order Maintenance Act (Loma), which restricted public gatherings.Subsequent laws prohibited blacks from drinking in their segregated beer outlets in town after 7pm on weekdays, and after 1pm on Saturdays during the Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) era.Bulawayo, the second largest city can be acknowledged as one of the central places, where most black Zimbabweans who had the zeal to liberate the country from the colonial regime were settled as they worked in the industrial areas.As by then the city was affectionately known as Kontuthu Ziyathunqa which symbolised the industrial activities which took place in the industries which were located on a strip starting from the National Railways of Zimbabwe main station stretching along old Khami road up-to Kelvin North, the white regime built suburbs or rather hostels near these industries to accommodate black workers.Old suburbs such as Makokoba, Mzilikazi, Nguboyenja, Njube, Mpopoma, eMabuthweni, Iminyela, Sizinda, Tshabalala to mention a few, accommodated black industrial workers.With the political agenda to suppress the freedom to publicly gather for black people as the whites assumed it would perpetuate the spirit of a revolution against them, the only place where black people could entertain themselves or gather to debate on social, economic and political issues affecting them, was the shebeen.Shebeens by then were illegally owned by women who were then and to date known as the shebeen queens. Their place (shebeen) was where people discussed their issues on a public sphere on how they could liberate themselves or discuss human rights issues as it was an open secret that the whites were bullying the blacks and were using them as slaves.Following an advocacy by black governments after independence to legalise shebeens, a piece of legislation that has been failing to be approved for years, the new government under President Emmerson Mnangagwa is pushing for it and registrations are pencilled for May as said by Prisca Mupfumira who is the Minister of Tourism and Hospitality Industry.The legalisation of shebeens has got mixed feelings among shebeen owners when it comes to who is going to benefit between them and the government.One of the oldest shebeens located in Mpopoma and owned by a man (shebeen King) called Albert 'Jomo' Mnkandla started operating during the early 70s."Our shebeen started operating around 70s when it was under the ownership of my father. Because of it, we were able to survive as we went to school using the profits we got from the business. I took over from my dad when he passed away because the shebeen was not only our source of income but our legacy," said Jomo.He recently closed his business as he suffered numerous raids from the police after one of his customers stabbed a policeman. Jomo said he was in support of the proposed legalisation by the government as it would protect him from raids and would also attract a lot of customers for him."It is a good idea that we should register our businesses because that will guarantee us our safety from being raided by corrupt police officers. Besides that, when my shebeen was still vibrant in Mpopoma, it could attract people like the Soul Brothers band, Dan Tshanda and Freddy Gwala. Hopefully, if I register it will attract more prominent people," he said.An open-minded shebeen queen called Sithulile Phakathi from Iminyela suburb who started her business during Zimbabwe's economic crisis of 2008 and survived to date revealed that despite the taxation which would be imposed by the government, she believed her business would grow as it would be legalised and even attract tourists to experience a shebeen setting and feeling."Look at South Africa, they legalised shebeens and even in Soweto's Vilakazi Street which has museum houses of Noble Peace Prize winners Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu you can find shebeens that are mainly for tourist attraction, if we go that way the country will gain a lot from tourists," she said.As a way of supporting each other at least seven shebeen queens from Mpopoma and Iminyela gather and support one of their members every Wednesday as they all direct their customers to one shebeen which hosts what they call amaWednesday.Margaret "Na Layi" Mahango who owns a shebeen in Mpopoma, who was hosting amaWednesday at her place when B-Metro crew was doing the survey said: "As a way of protecting our businesses from possible collapse we call all our customers to gather at one place which is an act of sisterhood."For another shebeen queen Sthandazile Mlilo from Cowdray Park, the move to legalise shebeens was welcomed with cold arms as she felt the government was only legalising the beer areas so that they could milk them of their profits through taxes."The idea of allowing us to operate our business legally will not allow us to benefit and gain maximum profits like we are used to because the government will tax us and this business has different days of profits."We sell to other regular customers on credit, if they happen not to pay on time and we run a loss, what will I do? Go to jail?" she asked. Opinion / Columnist Politicians, during recent upbeat and optimistic presentations, have often repeated the statement that Zimbabwe will never go back on land reform. They appear to be suggesting that whatever arguments might have existed, we should all accept that they have all been settled and there is nothing left to debate.Despite warnings that any attempt to restart debate on the subject will be treated as an irreverent intrusion on hallowed ground, I want to see the debate re-opened. To start the discussion, I want to dismiss the claim that an attack on land reform is an attempt to defend colonisation. I would rather argue that acceptance of property rights is a way to promote prosperity.Those colonisers certainly introduced the property rights that were set aside by land reform. However, the chosen response, which was to simply take back the land, overlooked a vital fact: it was only one of many ideas that the colonisers introduced at the time. A wide range of other readily acceptable ideas began to revolutionise the country at the same time. But for all of them to function properly, respect for the idea of individual property rights had to be in place.To measure the importance of this idea properly, its worldwide dimensions have to be recognised. The idea of individual property rights formed the foundation upon which the economy of every prosperous country in the world has been built.Giving land a commercial and market value is this idea's core feature. Land with a market value also has collateral value, so money can be loaned to every landowner who can work well enough to pay back the lender. This unlocks the imagination and resourcefulness of borrowers. Those with the best ideas and the ability to put them to work then transform every country that offers protection to property rights.In this country, traditional chiefs did not want to see individual ownership rights introduced in their areas. The early colonial administrators gave them what they asked for: the right to continue allocating land in their designated tribal areas and protection against the buying power of the colonial settlers.In the areas designated for land ownership, the buyers needed to borrow money. For their own protection, the lenders of that money needed the backing of laws and regulations that would guarantee the security of tenure of those borrowers. For their further protection, the lenders also required detailed property registers and strict, legally enforceable, change of ownership procedures to be in place. When property rights and obligations were fully respected, the banks had all the confidence they needed to finance development and to support wealth-creating activities.But, because the traditional powers of the chiefs were not changed, land ownership rights for individuals were recognised in only about half the area making up Zimbabwe. That was soon the more prosperous half. Working as well as it did, that half was successful enough to make Zimbabwe the second-most prosperous country in Africa.But, after the agricultural property ownership rights were cancelled in the land reform programme, which led to that land being allocated free to resettlement farmers, Zimbabwe became one of the poorest countries on Earth.Political imperatives often drive the decisions that have to be made. Taking the land back might be described as one of these. However, government had no need to take the land off the market. By destroying the collateral value of a vitally important national asset, government removed billions of dollars worth of collateral value from Zimbabwe's economy. This inflicted enormous harm on the foundations upon which a large part of Zimbabwe's productive sector had been built.Yes, the idea of putting land onto the market was one of the many ideas the colonisers brought with them. Whatever resentful thoughts might be held against colonisation, it was respect for property rights that made Zimbabwe's investment climate attractive. It was attractive enough to attract a wide range of manufacturing investors. The majority of them went ahead with a very wide range of investments because successful farmers could be relied upon to sustain steady deliveries of raw materials and export revenues.But when agricultural land was disabled by government's decision to cancel its collateral value, the flows of previously dependable raw materials slowed or stopped. Factories had to downsize, or close. Exports of an extensive list of consumer goods fell sharply and the deliveries of the same goods to local stores declined. More and more of the nation's needs had to be imported. These had to be paid for with increasingly scarce foreign exchange. As a result, not enough was left to repay outstanding foreign debts.Other downstream consequences of land reform included the loss of 400 000 jobs, the emigration of thousands of people with technical and managerial skills, the collapse of the Zimbabwe dollar that took with it the nation's savings and pension funds, the near-collapse of National Railways of Zimbabwe and Air Zimbabwe and for more than half the country's population, the growing dependence on informal sector activities.With our new leadership choosing to defend policies that imposed such enormous costs on all of us, but now inviting critical comment on its performance, we have no option but to question its motives. Property rights and access to bank loans made all the previous development possible because they placed within reach the necessary finance. The damage that we now have to overcome was caused by government's decision to reject these very same property rights.Government keeps saying that the problem will be overcome by the adoption of 99-year leases. However, every attempt to generate a lease document that gives the banks the absolute security needed has been rendered un-bankable by government demands that diminish the rights of the lessee and interfere with the marketability of the property.Government claims that leasehold arrangements are extensively used in other countries, but it always carefully omits the fact that the lessors, or landlords in those countries, are usually individuals. In Zimbabwe, the intention is that the primary landlord will always be the government. This is a limiting factor that we do not need.Leasehold arrangements run a very poor second-best to freehold title. The collateral value of the remaining years of an existing lease is never clear, but the market value of a freehold property from which a bank can determine the amount it can lend is easily calculated.Transactions on the property market, handled by real estate agents who are bound by law to work through conveyance and registration procedures, offer the banks additional security.Leasehold arrangements have less collateral value because of difficulties and uncertainties, but the real question to ask is why government is demanding that a second-best option be adopted in preference to the readily available best option?Does government want Zimbabwe to always be a nation of tenants renting their farmland from government? If the answer is yes, it will self-impose limitations on performance, commitment and conduct, as well as on new investment inflows will be the result. The risk that government, as landlord, will interfere with any bank's attempt to recover unpaid debt will be enough to keep those limitations in place and will keep Zimbabwe poor.For the banks, collateral in the form of fixed and easily marketable assets is the most favoured form of security. Every borrower has to agree to the banks' requirement that, if the loan is not repaid, the banks have the right to sell the collateral to recover the money. This powerful motivational force generates among the borrowers an enormous determination to do well in their businesses.Put that force to work in tens of thousands of businesses and it generates goods and services, export revenues, tax revenues and jobs. And these are the measure of the success of the whole country. Or they would be, if Zimbabwe were to restore respect for freehold property rights on agricultural land.Robertson is an economist. These weekly New Perspectives articles are coordinated by Lovemore Kadenge, president of the Zimbabwe Economics Society, email: kadenge.zes@gmail.com, cell +263 772 382 852. Opinion / Columnist In our series of letters from Africa, we consider the fate of ousted president Robert Mugabe as he celebrates his 94th birthday.A famous quote by Machiavelli advises politicians: "It is better to be feared than loved if you cannot have both."However, the Italian Renaissance author and statesman then warns that if a ruler chooses fear, it is best not to be extreme as unnecessary cruelty will never win life-long loyalty.During Mugabe's rule in Zimbabwe, he enjoyed great prestige and high honour.He personified the state he led for almost four decades as he tightened his grip. But two months after his resignation following a military intervention, he cuts a lonely figure.Ahead of his 94th birthday, he looked tired and sad, while the former ebullient first lady Grace Mugabe seemed gloomy no smiles as they met African Union chairperson Moussa Faki Mahamat. Just dejection.Mugabe reportedly told Mahamat that "he resigned for the sake of peace and development in the country".Although he is no longer in power, Mugabe's birthday his 94th is still a public holiday. This year, he celebrated indoors, away from the public glare.It is a far cry from previous years, when his staff presented him with massive birthday cakes at colourful functions at his office.Public celebrations would normally happen the following weekend. There would be food galore, music and huge cakes sponsored by the corporate world, with the opposition condemning the extravagance in a country where many struggled to put food on the table.The absence of all this is likely to make Mugabe's 94th birthday a sobering affair.It seems he is about to learn that very few people can command love, respect and affection in and out of power.I'm so lonely'The late Nelson Mandela, who became South Africa's first black president, is a rare example.Now we learn that Mugabe is reaching out to former enemies as he tries to work out what went wrong for him. One of those he has met is Joice Mujuru, his former deputy whom he fired a few years ago, accusing her of treasonous behaviour.During hate-filled ruling Zanu-PF party rallies, Mugabe and his wife would rail against Mujuru, alleging she used witchdoctors and seduced men to make a grab for power.Mugabe has now apologised for his past and reportedly confided in her that he is lonely and has been deserted by even his relatives and friends. It was as if he was appealing to all Zimbabweans, wondering how he had lost the people's affection.To be forgotten, despised or reviled out of power or in death speaks volumes about your conduct in power, or during your period of influence.The Mobutu model?I remember listening to Candidat Ya Biso Mobutu by the great Congolese rumba king, Franco.It is from 1984, a 19-minute campaign song for Mobutu Sese Soko, the autocrat who ruled Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) for decades until he was toppled in 1997.The song was distributed to millions of Congolese it rouses the emotions and calls for the nation to vote for the sole candidate in an election Mobutu won with 99,9% of the vote.He, like Mugabe, commanded huge rallies. But he took the Machiavellian dictum too far.He was once feted in the streets, hailed as a man who had saved the country from anarchy.There are stories of how he would interrupt important audiences on board his yacht on the Congo River to rush on deck and acknowledge chants of praise from passengers on passing vessels.But Mobutu failed to plan for a legacy that would command true love. When his time was up, no-one wanted him around.He left a trail of misery, corruption, an economy on its deathbed and fled to Morocco, away from relatives and friends, where he died.His magnificent house in Gbadolite was looted. It is now a pale shadow of its former self, with lizards, not military officers, parading around the shell of a building.Fallen emperorLikewise for Jean-Bedel Bokassa in the Central African Republic, who combined extreme greed and delusions of grandeur his lavish coronation as Emperor Bokassa in 1977 is estimated to have cost tens of millions of dollars.When he lost power, crowds celebrated. He was sentenced to death in absentia, although this was later commuted to a prison term on his return from exile.Those who later saw him loitering around his residence in Bangui after he was released from prison say he would wave at anything passing by.Few recognised him, or went to see him.Leaders who become tangled up in corruption do not realise how much disaffection there is towards them until they lose power.Mugabe used to be heartened to hear singing apostolic faith churchmen, clad in white robes, when he landed home after a visit abroad. He would then address those present about the virtues of the liberation struggle that had won the country its freedom, but at the end of day this did not put bread on the table.The spectacular sight of thousands calling for his resignation in his last days in power must have eaten deep into his conscience.The fact that Mugabe has admitted his loneliness is a lesson for current and future leaders earn true love by being a servant of the nation. BBC Online.Hungwe is a Zimbabwean journalist-turned-barrister. Opinion / Columnist THE death of MDC founding leader Morgan Tsvangirai - a hero of the new struggle for democracy - triggered a succession war in the main opposition MDC-T party (one wonders why the party should maintain the name MDC-T when Tsvangirai is now gone).What started as a fierce battle for the party leadership and power eventually degenerated into a Rwandan or Burundi scenario where political violence and ethnicity - a dangerous cocktail - exploded at the burial of the heroic but flawed democratic crusader in his Humanikwa village in Buhera.Misguided rascals descended on the village and cornered MDC-T vice-president Thokozani Khupe, whom constitutional experts say should be the legal interim party leader of the party, and other senior officials like Douglas Mwonzora and Abednico Bhebhe over the succession wrangle. They threatened to attack them until some mourners intervened.As if that was not bad enough, the wild thugs flew into a tribal rage, highlighting the latent dangers of Zimbabwean politics. The hoodlums chanted vulgarities and insults, declaring: "Khupe go back to Matabeleland. We will not be led by a woman", among other imponderables, including allegedly calling her a "dissident" and other such crude slurs.Of course, calling people "dissidents" for having a different opinion started with former president Robert Mugabe and his ancien Zanu-PF regime, which elevated tribalism into a sort of shameful national policy and institutionalised it. The war veterans were also described as "dissidents" by Mugabe at the height of his succession fight.While tribalism has been there for ages as primitive societies somehow practised it and was particularly accentuated by colonial administrators, Mugabe did nothing to fight it. If anything, he heightened the problem and taught his brainwashed supporters the bad habit of thinking that only certain people from certain ethnic groups and regions, in fact from a certain sub-ethnic group, are entitled to rule Zimbabwe.That is why Mugabe told Joshua Nkomo in 1980 that he must only campaign in his "country" Matabeleland and he would do so in his own "country" Mashonaland. It is there in the Struggle for Zimbabwe book. A national leader must never think and act like that.Mugabe, for his own power calculations and self-serving agenda, had clearly decided to reduce the historic election into an ethnic census, which is what it eventually boiled down to. The results of that mentality and dangerous opportunism were predictably disastrous as we later came to witness over 37 years.Making elections an ethnic census inevitably yields disaster. Tribalism in Zimbabwe, which the political elites are mainly to blame for, is partly responsible for election disputes, conflict, corruption, cronyism and underdevelopment.Naturally, no one is a saint; many people and leaders from different tribes and regions of this country are also responsible for perpetuating this problem. It is a national plague and must be tackled as such.Yet the truth is ethnicity, a primitive mindset that many denounce openly but clearly still harbour deep down, is some form of backward false consciousness. Anyone in this country should and can rule if they have the popular support, good policy agenda and the requisite competence. That is how progressive nations are run.The good thing, though, is that dynamic people have already moved ahead of society and political elements in that regard through individual, professional and social integration, among other things such as personal friendships, inter-tribal marriages and business arrangements that make ethnocentric misfits look hopelessly backward and frozen in time.We do not want to be like Rwanda or Burundi in terms of ethnic conflict. Zimbabwe must move beyond ethnocentrism and tribalism to progress as a nation. We need progressive leaders who unite the people and take the country forward on a path of development, inclusivity and opportunities for all.Save legacyThe situation within the MDC-T is defiling the legacy of Tsvangirai. MDC-T de facto leader Nelson Chamisa-who did well to seize the political moment and position himself for the party leadership, although he should go back to the constitutional path - he has his work cut out for him.He has already moved quickly to condemn the Humanikwa violence by some hooligans purporting to be his supporters, but he must go further to distance himself from tribal slurs. The MDC was never founded to further those primitive notions and activities, but democracy, inclusivity and good governance, among other good ideals.As to who should succeed Tsvangirai, it is none of Muckraker's business. It is the mandate of the MDC-T leaders and members, although it is clear Chamisa has moved fast to seize the moment to lay a strong claim to the party leadership.Even if Khupe might be right in saying she must be the interim leader of the party in terms of the constitution until an extraordinary congress is held within 12 months to elect a new leader, the truth is that politics is far more complicated than that. She must have known that in a cut-throat competitive political environment like this she has to fight for it, not just sit and wring hands while whining that it is my "right" to come in.Politics does not work like that. You may have the constitution on your side, but get outmanoeuvred in the end. So Khupe must fight to grab control of the party leadership like Chamiusa did if she really wants to have it. The same applies to Elias Mudzuri. This must all be done in terms of the constitution and legitimate political activities.Otherwise the solution is for Chamisa, Khupe and Mudzuri to sit down like mature people and talk about this issue guided by the constitution, the strategic objective of the party and the agenda of the next elections. Failure to do that would weaken the MDC-T and ultimately the MDC Alliance. In fact, they should be thinking not only of uniting themselves, but talking to Joice Mujuru and others to form a broad coalition and united front for the elections. That is their best chance to win.Dividing votes will inevitably yield the same result: defeat amid an acrimonious dispute of the outcome. That would be tantamount to going round in circles. So someone must think and act big on this issue. Maturity, strategic thinking and vision are needed here.DelusionalismHarare City Council, notorious for shoddy performance in terms of water provision and general service delivery, has come up with yet another harebrained idea typical of its incompetence.The latest brain fade from Town House is the ban on commuter omnibuses from the Harare central business district (CBD). This will force thousands of commuters to walk long distances to work each day across the city or to pay two fares in each direction to get to work and go home.The city council has said there will be shuttle buses to transport commuters from the ranks outside town into the CBD, for a fee of course. It begs the question: who owns these shuttle buses to fleece commuters who are already struggling to make ends meet? The introduction of these shuttle buses appears like a sinister attempt by someone to enrich someone at the expense of the already struggling commuting public.By the way, this has been tried before and it failed. In other words, what council is doing is the very definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.Mugabe's Siberian birthday celebrationFormer president Robert Mugabe turned 94 on Wednesday. This was his first birthday celebration since being ousted from power through a military coup last November.For the first time we were not subjected to televised celebrations which were often characterised by extravagant razzmatazz and festivities in a sea of poverty and suffering.It was good Mugabe was confined to his "Blue Roof" mansion to celebrate, Siberian-style, with his wife Grace, family and whatever friends they still have as this spared us the usual noise and bootlicking which had come to dominate the public sphere for decades.It was refreshing to be spared the dross that Mugabe is a national hero, peerless patriot, ever-victorious iron-willed commander (who gets booted out in the easiest military coup in history) and Widaehan suryong (Supreme Leader) with a "Mandate of Heaven" to rule forever.Like Kim Jong Il, Mugabe's delusional thinking was: "To expect victory in a revolution without a leader is as good as wishing for a flower where there is no sun!" In other words, victory in a revolution depends entirely on the unique leadership qualities of an outstanding leader.By the way, where are all those mobs, sycophants and analysts who used to fall over each other to hero-worship and sing praises of Mugabe? Can they please come out of the woods and tell us what happened to the Dear Leader? How is he doing these days? Have they been to "Blue Roof" to visit him of late or they abandoned him during the coup? Opinion / Columnist Yesterday when Robert Mugabe celebrated his 94th birthday after 37 years of initial hope and then subsequent plunder and a ruinous rule, it is an important point and day where one must reflect on where they want to go and what they have learnt from the past.The MDC-T drama has made me realize that we have learnt very little about the past 37 years and that we are part of the problem and yet we blame politicians all the time for our misery.A politician is like a child, they will try their luck until you stop them, Bob Marley said ' give them a yard and they will take a mile.'We must understand and agree on why and how Zimbabwe became what it is today. Robert Mugabe did not wake up one day presiding over a ruined country, it was a journey which saw him recede our freedoms, rights and access to a better life.Mugabe managed to do so because he weakened the pillars of the state through a patronage system.He destroyed the very institutions that were meant to keep political rule in check and make the executive accountable to parliament.Unfortunately, parliament became a rubber stamp for Robert Mugabe's wild and corrupt frolics and as his megalomaniac attitude hurtled the country down the tubes, those that followed him religiously gave him more power.He was a popular politician and great orator and we were reminded of that all the time we questioned his unconstitutional actions like taking the Zimbabwean army into the disastrous Congo adventure.We were reminded of how popular that decision was and how he was doing the right thing for the region even though it was outside a parliamentary mandate.Whenever a television news package with Mugabe was on our screens, everyone would be told to keep quiet in order for his admirers to suck in their high priest's seductive words.He knew that he spoke well and you could tell from his self assuredness, as he posed for dramatic effect, that he had a captive audience eating from his palm.It was all talk and nothing else as we now know!Mugabe the great wordsmiths and orator knew that his followers would not question his meandering ways. When Mugabe was faced with a problem, that is when his true colours would come out and he would resolve political disputes with wholesale violence.He did that in Matebeleland, he also did that with ZUM with the shooting of Patrick Kombayi in Gweru, he unleashed disproportionate violence against the white farmers in 2000, he again deployed violence during Murambatsvina. Then in 2008 he unleashed a frightening terror campaign against all Zimbabwean districts that had voted for Morgan Tsvangirai.Had Mugabe not been faced with tricky political situations, we would have been loving him to this very day and probably sending him birthday cards.I don't celebrate his broken legacy because he gave us independence with one hand and then he took it away with the other hand. We probably would have done much better with a different leader.The one thing not to forget is that Mugabe's rise was underpinned by his oratory skills and his wild popularity, his ability to make you want to listen and demand more, the same skill that Adolf Hitler possessed. Seduction is the right word for it but the outcomes of both men's actions were extremely disastrous.There is a reason why America can afford to elect a buffoon like Donald Trump and get away with it.It is because America is a country with strong institutions and that it is big on constitutionalism and the rule of law.There is also a reason why their constitution has to be adhered to resolutely, it is because it protects them from megalomaniacs like Trump and Mugabe.Now looking at the recent MDCT tragic case of violence, intimidation and unconstitutional behavior, we have been told that Nelson Chamisa was selected as opposed to being elected by some back room process which according to his supporters is constitutional.The other side has challenged the constitutionality of the so called 2014 amendments and demanded that they be produced, nobody has been able to produce them.Even Morgan Tsvangirai's former advisor, the lawyer Alex Magaisa has also been requesting for the same document for over half a year without luck.I spoke to one of the lawyers advising Nelson Chamisa, the truth is that there is NO such constitution.The lawyer says that amendments were tabled at the 2014 congress but Douglas Mwonzora as the Secretary General did not deal with the administrative filing of the amendments into the constitution. How that could happen, I have no idea.The ascendancy of Nelson Chamisa became topical two weeks ago. I personally have been talking to Chamisa for over two years now about the need for him to step up and represent the younger generation.I thought he would do that but in a clean way.Just like Mugabe's days, those of us calling for him to adhere to the MDC-T constitutional prescriptions, rules and regulations have been verbally abused on social media by trolls and his supporters.We are labeled ZANU PF just like during the Mugabe days when we were labels MDC sell outs, we have been told that he is popular therefore the constitutional debate is irrelevant. Like seriously?His party the MDC-T was founded on constitutionalism and the adherence to the rule of law. It was also rooted in the doctrine of transparency, tribal and racial tolerance and was originally totally against violence and intimidation!We have seen embarrassing scenes of violence against Chamisa's adversaries at Morgan Tsvangirai's funeral of all places.This is nothing new, when there was a disagreement regarding the 2006 senatorial issue, Morgan Tsvangirai lost the vote but he subverted the rules by saying his decision was popular and that led to the party split hence the MDCT, T standing for Tsvangirai.Violence was used and the enduring image is that of Trudy Stevenson lying in hospital battered and bruised.In 2013 when Morgan Tsvangirai's leadership was challenged by Elton Mangoma and Tendai Biti, again indiscriminate violence was used against those calling for him to retire and Elton Mangoma was one of the victims.When Thokozani Khupe challenged Morgan Tsvangirai about the alliance electoral pact, the MDCT militia called the Vanguard went to Bulawayo and indiscriminately beat up Thokozani Khupe and her colleagues.This time around when Nelson Chamisa's ascendancy has been challenged by his colleagues, the same militia group used violence and this time the videos and pictures are glaring and readily available.They called Chamisa by name in the video and referred to him by the moniker, Wamba Dia Wamba, a name of a Congolese former rebel commander who fought with and led the rebel group, Rally for Congolese Democracy.The Vanguard leader Shaky Mukoyi dressed in military fatigues and a beret clearly states in one of the videos that he was getting his instructions from Nelson Chamisa, so it is ridiculous for anyone to say that Chamisa has nothing to do with this vigilante militia group.Shaky Mukoyi tells the group, some high and drunk, that Chamisa has asked them to release the detained MDC-T Deputy President Thokozani Khupe and Secretary General Douglas Mwonzora from the hut where they were being threatened with a bonfire as punishment for their resistance to Chamisa's ascendancy.The thugs sang menacing songs saying that if anyone sells out, they will meet an unspecific fate. This is all in the videos.Journalists were threatened and their equipment pulled from them. This is all in the videos.Now is this how leaders should be chosen? Is this the kind of popularity which is underpinned by menacing violence and intimidation that we should tolerate and accept as a nation? What lessons have we learnt from 37 years of a rule underpinned by violence and intimidation.I personally would have wanted to see Chamisa rise to the top but not in this way. This is not the kind of leadership behavior that this country needs after 37 years of Mugabe's frightening political subjugation where Mugabe put the whole country under a yoke of terror.There are many that believed in a dream of seeing Nelson Chamisa as the MDC-T legitimate president.The longer he takes to order an independent commission to look at the violence and the leadership row, the more those look for alternative choices.He can't expect right thinking people to take his redress statements seriously by asking his security and intelligence units to preside over the matter over who instigated the violence. It is a bit like asking CIO to investigate the police over violence against the opposition.As citizens, we have a moral responsibility and obligation to reject this kind of stone-age politics. It confirms that Mugabeism has become a way of life for some and that Mugabe's departure was the removal of an architect but that his plans are still intact and remain embedded in our political psyche.I hope and pray that Nelson Chamisa will reflect and realize that he must disband this MDC-T militia called Vanguard and that he must seek a mandate on a clean and untainted platform of ideas not violence, intimidation and constitutional chicanery.This country has to decide whether it wants to continue with more of the same acts of violence, intimidation, unconstitutionalism and unbridled appetite for power that is taken at any cost with the citizens cheering on.Citizenship is not just about being Zimbabwean but about being able to responsibly decide what Zimbabwe should look like.If you chose to support any actions because they are being carried out by a populist politician, you have NO right to squirm when that decision backfires!That will introduce you to becoming a victim of economic violence where your survival becomes dependent on the benevolence of your tormentors.Zimbabwe needs a strong opposition party that can hold the government of the day to account. It can not do so when it is equally guilty of doing the very things it is accusing the government of the day of doing, unconstitutionalism, abuse of office and deployment of violence as a weapon of settling political disputes.It will be constantly reminded that it is an illegal construction and its leader will be dogged by issues of legitimacy, hypocrisy and dishonest.Zimbabweans should know and remember that any power taken illegally would have to be defended and kept illegally too!Hopewell Chin'ono is an award winning journalist and filmmaker. He is also a CNN African journalist of the year and Harvard University Nieman fellow. He can be contacted at hopewell2@post.harvard.edu Opinion / Columnist Tax breaks for Special Economic Zones (SEZ) Investments Duty free importation of industrial equipment Diaspora Infrastructure Bonds Victor Bhoroma is business analyst with expertise in strategic marketing and business management aspects. He is a marketer by profession and holds an MBA from the University of Zimbabwe (UZ). For feedback, mail him on vbhoroma@gmail.com or Skype: victor.bhoroma1. For the past 3 years, remittances from Zimbabweans living abroad have been averaging $1 billion. This figure only accounts for funds sent home through official banking channels, as such the figure may be less than 70% of the actual remittances into our nation as some funds are moved via traditional channels. The amount has been growing exponentially from $552 million recorded in 2012 to over $935 million recorded in 2016 as a result of RBZ incentives to lure diaspora funds. RBZ currently gives a 10% incentive for all funds remitted back home. Remittances are now the second largest source of liquidity (more than Tobacco Exports) in the country after Mineral Exports.Remittance flows to Sub-Saharan Africa declined by an estimated 6.1% to $33 billion in 2016, due to slow economic growth in remittance sending countries such as the UK and Australia and diversion of remittances into informal channels due to controlled exchange rate systems in the formal market. Remittances to the Sub-Saharan region were projected to increase by 3.3% to $34 billion in 2017, with Nigeria expected to get over $20 billion of that figure. Zimbabwe is also expected to receive a stable amount going into the future.Over 3 million Zimbabweans live in the diaspora, in countries such as United Kingdom, USA, Australia and New Zealand. The highest number is in South Africa where nearly 2.2 million people have found refuge in the rainbow nation. Our greatest challenge as a country has been on channeling funds remitted back home into investments that can boost economic growth and improve the country's forex reserves. So far most of the remitted funds have been going into domestic consumption, largely because of liquidity challenges affecting households and the country at large.Current engagements of the Diaspora community by the president and RBZ has shown that the diaspora community is keen to invest in Zimbabwe in areas such as Transport, Agriculture processing, Health Services, Insurance, Manufacturing and Tourism apart from the obvious Property Sector. Remittances have a potential to improve our Nostro account balances, finance infrastructure projects locally and guarantee foreign borrowings or financial instruments. At the micro-economic level, remittance benefits are inexhaustible though they are not the subject of the article. To channel remittances into the formal economy and spur economic growth in Zimbabwe, there is need to build their confidence in local financial systems and craft policies that incentivize an expatriate to think of investment instead spending.The recent approval of the $400 million investment into National Railways of Zimbabwe (NRZ) by a consortium led by the Diaspora Infrastructure Development Group (DIDG) and South Africa's Transnet is one good example of the direction authorities need to take in terms of policy.Investment Forums and Identifying investment groups abroad can bring immense benefits to both parties. Investment Inquiries from abroad are growing as most are nearing two decades of living in the diaspora and have made sufficient property investments back home to cushion them. So the time is now ripe for large scale investments back home, guaranteed those investments are safe and returns are sustainable.Besides networking and partnering expatriates on investments such as the NRZ deal which is a typical Public Private Partnership (PPPs). The Apex bank in association with various government ministries can craft strategies along the following existing policies to tap into diaspora remittances for economic growth.Zimbabwe has vast tracts of land in Bulawayo, Victoria Falls and Harare set aside for Special Economic activities under the SEZ Act of 2016. Most of the land is lying idle owing to liquidity and investment challenges the country is facing. Breaks on Capital Gains Tax, Corporate Tax and VAT to diaspora investors can lure capital. The major advantage of such a move is that dividends will stay home as opposed to FDI where they are repatriated outside. Further, the directors are subject to taxing on all their earnings or expenditure after a specified period.Importation of mining, manufacturing or any other production equipment can only be beneficial to our country if done in a structured manner monitored by RBZ and ZIMRA. The diaspora community, like most investors is exposed to world class technology which can spur capacity growth back home. They too would welcome such an incentive to invest back home.Our infrastructure deficit is largely visible to every citizen. Diaspora Infrastructure Bonds can be modelled with financial advice from banks locally or internationally. Funds raised through these bonds will be channeled towards identified key infrastructure such as roads, electricity and ports development. Interest from these bonds will obviously be invested in Zimbabwe by Zimbabweans. What will be key are government guarantees that these obligations will be honored and setting a standard by honoring them when they fall due. Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blog spot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work. . ..Mosaic Magazine..22 February '18..Charles Freilich has produced an astute and savvy analysis of the forces driving the U.S.-Israel relationship. Its no surprise: all who know him regard him as one of the most thoughtful (and critical) students of Israeli decision-making, and his writing is a model of care and restraint.But the reader encountering Freilich for the first time is bound to be confused, because his major operative conclusion seems at odds with his analysis. After explaining at length how it would best serve Israel to bedependent on the United States, he then proposes that it strive to conclude a formal defense treaty with that same United States. Having noted that the stature of the United States in the Middle East is at its nadir, he urges Israel to cement its understandings with the waning superpower. What gives?The explicit rationale offered by Freilich is that such a treaty would be valuable to Israel in deterring Iran. Indeed, he writes, it might prove to be the only partially effective response to a nuclear Iran. If that were the case, such a treaty would be an existential necessity. But I find it improbable that Freilich really believes this, because in many other op-eds and interviews hes asserted the opposite: that Israel is perfectly capable of independently deterring Iran, were that country to cross the nuclear threshold. Israels own deterrence should suffice, he has written. If so, a defense treaty with the United States would add no value to Israeli deterrence of Iran, and so would be totally unnecessary.Then there are threats that fall short of the nuclear. But Israel, as Freilich knows, is capable of dealing with these threats on its own, and when its estimate of such threats differs from Washingtons, it presently has the leeway to chart its own course of action. Even Freilich is reluctant to sacrifice this freedom, however infrequently Israel exercises it. Thats why he writes that a treaty could be crafted that would explicitlyapply to cases of low- to medium-level threats and hostilities.isnt necessary to deter high-level threats, and wouldnt apply to medium- and low-level threats, just what would it add? I could profess to be puzzled, but Im not. Thats because Im an avid reader of everything Freilich writes, so I hope he wont object if I put hisessay in a broader context. Mr. Siegel is author of Let There Be Water: Israels Solution for a Water-Starved World ( St. Martins Press), recently out in paperback. Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blog spot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work. . Wall St. Journal..21 February '18..Cape Town, South Africa, has designated July 9 Day Zero. Thats when water taps throughout the city are expected to go dry, marking the culmination of a three-year drought. South African officials arent responsible for the lack of rain, but inept management and a devotion to anti-Israel ideology needlessly made the situation worse.Even before Israel declared statehood in 1948, its leaders focused on water security as closely as they did military preparedness. Mostly desert, Israel would need adequate water to thrive. In the decades since, the country has developed an apolitical, technocratic form of water governance.Conservation is taught from kindergarten. Market pricing of water encourages everyone to waste nothing. Sensitive prices have driven innovation. Israelis helped create desalination, drip irrigation and the specialized reuse of treated wastewater in agriculture. Although Israel is in the fifth year of a drought, today its citizens can reliably count on abundant water.Cape Town is another story. Its reservoirs began receding more than two years ago. This problem turned into a crisis because of subsidy-distorted water pricing, inefficient irrigation, and a lack of desalination facilities and a long-term plan. In 2016 officials from Israels Foreign Ministry recognized the problem and alerted national, provincial and local governments in South Africa. Israel has trained water technicians in more than 100 countries, and it offered to bring in desalination experts to help South Africa.South African officials ignored or rebuffed the no-strings Israeli proposal. It would be admirable if South Africas rejection came from a can-do attitude, in a statement of national self-sufficiency. But it appears to have been for ideological reasons that South African officials wanted no help from Jerusalem.The leadership of South Africas dominant political party, the African National Congress, aligns itself with the Palestinian cause. Although the two countries have diplomatic ties, South Africa under the ANC has refused to develop warm relations with Israel. This antagonism goes back to the 1960s, when current Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas lived in Moscow with exiled ANC leaders, and Yasser Arafat often visited. Students and leaders of the two movements were supported by the Soviet Union, and they shared revolutionary aspirations.Even more confounding, the South Africans turned to Iran for help. In April 2016, when there was still enough time for a smart plan to make a difference, South Africas water minister visited Tehran. She brought home a memorandum of understanding in which Iran agreed to help develop South Africas water infrastructure.Unlike Israel, Iran is not known for its water-management expertise. Anger over water shortages was a feature of the recent Iranian protests. Even before the South African visit, a former Iranian agriculture minister predicted that as many as 50 million Iraniansaround two-thirds of the populationwould need to be uprooted because of growing water scarcity.As in South Africa, Irans water shortages cant be blamed only on the weather. Water infrastructure projects in Iran are controlled by the Revolutionary Guard Corps, which diverts water to favored ethnic and political groups. In Tehran largely untreated sewage is discharged into nearby waterways, a waste of water that creates health hazards. Years of regime-encouraged overpumping of groundwater has left agricultural districts without water for crops.Two months after the South African water ministers Iran trip, Israel brought a team of water professionals to Cape Town. Neither the mayor, also strongly hostile to Israel, nor any senior municipal official would see them.If the South Africans are snubbing the Israelis out of solidarity with the Palestinians, they might want to consider this: The Palestinian Authority has worked with Israel on a range of water projects since 1995. Israel offers training for Palestinians in wastewater management, infrastructure and security. Israel also provides the Palestinian Authority with more than half the water for domestic consumption by Palestinians in the West Bank. And it pipes more than 2.5 billion gallons of water into Hamas-controlled Gaza each year.Why does South Africa feel compelled to be so anti-Israel? The question has no rational answer. Agile Cigar Reviews are cigar assessments where we use a lightweight, shorter format. These will never take the place of our comprehensive reviews. They are only used on blends we have previously assessed. This might be a blend we are re-scoring or giving a score for the first time. It might be a blend we are looking at in a different size. Today we look at the Black Works Studio Sindustry Robusto. This is a cigar that was previously assessed in the Toro size back in October 2017. Wrapper: Mexican San Andres Maduro Binder: Nicaraguan Habano Filler: Nicaragua Country of Origin: Nicaragua (Fabrica Oveja Negra) Robusto: 5 x 50 The Sindustry is a small batch limited production release from James Browns Black Works Studio brand. Sindustry had a limited soft launch in 2016 just before the U.S. Food and Drug Administrations (FDA) August 8, 2016 deadline that would require new products to have pre-market approval by the agency. In 2017, Sindustry had a more widespread release. We previously assessed the Toro size, which would go on to become the #26 Cigar of the Year on the Cigar Coop Countdown. Today, we take a closer look at the Robusto size. Brown is known for his maduro releases, the Sindustry added another one into the portfolio. The blend features a San Andres wrapper over a Nicaraguan Habano binder and an all-Nicaraguan filler. In addition to the Robusto and Toro sizes, the Sindustry was also released in a lancero. The cigar is produced at Browns Fabrica Oveja Negra factory located in Esteli, Nicaragua. Black Works Studio is not only known for its unique blends, but also its artesian style cigars. Sindustry is no exception as the cigar features a rabito style cap and a closed footer. The Sindustry Robusto starts out with a strong blast of white pepper and a salty component. While the Toro seemed to deliver more in the way of red pepper, the Robusto seemed to produce more of white pepper varietal The salty/spicy combination hung around longer than it did to the Toro. By the second third, notes of chocolate, coffee, and maduro sweetness (a combination of natural tobacco and dried fruit emerged). The last third saw the Sindustry take on more of an earthy profile with a slight increase white pepper. Like the Toro, the Sindustry Robusto delivered a medium to full strength, full-bodied smoke. Complexity-wise, the Robusto offered a lot of flavor nuances and transitions. When comparing the Sindustry Robusto to its Sindustry Toro counterpart, Id still lean toward the Sindustry Toro. If you are looking for a little more spice than the Toro offered, then the Sindustry Robusto is going to be the cigar for you. Given the Sindustry Robusto offers a bolder, fuller smoke, its one I would recommend for a more experienced cigar enthusiast. As for myself, its a cigar I would smoke again and buy multiples for my humidor. Summary Key Flavors: Mocha (Coffee/Chocolate), Black Pepper, Earth, Maduro Sweetness Burn: Excellent Draw: Excellent Complexity: Medium to High Strength: Medium to Full Body: Full Finish: Very Good Rating Assessment: Buy Multiples Score: 90 References Previous Assessment: Black Works Studio Sindustry Toro News: Black Works Studio Sindustry Slated for February Release Price: $9.50 Source: Black Works Studio References: Black Works Studio Photo Credit: Cigar Coop While Middle Eastern cinema seems to be having a fresh resurgence of late, films that shine a light on ordinary people in these countries remain few and far between. With an industry all but decimated by years of political and religious unrest in the area, many fans of Arab cinema have had to content themselves with revisiting old favourites. In What Comes Around, first-time documentarian Reem Saleh delves into the lives of a small poverty-stricken community in the heart of Cairo, Egypt, and attempts to provide an insight on how community spirit could be as valuable as any governmental aid in a country where the majority of people still live below the breadline. Saleh presents a raw account of daily hardship in one of the most overpopulated capital in the world. Centring the narrative around a group of people living in the Rod El Farag area of Cairo, the director allows those whose voices are seldom heard, to speak freely about their hopes and fears. In the absence of an adequate welfare state, many communities in Egypt have had to rely on a each other when it comes to plugging holes at the end of each month. Organising their own credit unions in which each neighbour is expected to contribute towards a monthly kitty, the sum is then awarded to the person who needs it the most each month. Deliberately avoiding all talk surrounding political unrest or the recent events in Tahrir Square, you get the impression that Saleh is less interested in making a political point and rather more concerned in representing her subjects in the most honest way. Saleh manages to advance a globalist humanitarian discourse by allowing her subjects to interact which each other in the most natural of ways. While never shying away from allowing them to tell their own harrowing stories, the director also allows for more lighthearted moment to be depicted. In a country where women are at the heart of the community, we soon realise that these women will not allow themselves to be the victims of poverty. Taking their own destinies onto their hands, they have built a real infrastructure and system of trust which will remain unshaken no matter what. What Comes Around is as visceral in its representation of poverty as it is hopeful in the way it represents the resilience of those it depicts. A raw and deeply affecting documentary which is likely to touch the hearts of all those who come across it. Saleh proves again that more can be done to encourage female filmmakers in countries where women are still battling for representation in all aspects of society. The Berlin Film Festival runs from 15-25 February. Follow our coverage here. Linda Marric FRIDAY, Feb. 23, 2018 (HealthDay News) -- The antibiotic clarithromycin (brand name: Biaxin) may increase the long-term risk of heart problems and death in patients with heart disease, according to U.S. health officials. As a result, the federal Food and Drug Administration said Thursday that it's recommending that doctors carefully weigh the benefits and risks of the drug before prescribing it to patients with heart problems. The agency said its warning is based on a 10-year follow-up study of patients with coronary heart disease. The study found an unexpected and unexplained increase in deaths among heart disease patients who took clarithromycin for two weeks and were followed for one year or longer. There's no clear explanation for how clarithromycin would increase heart disease patients' risk of death, the FDA said in a news release. One heart specialist said this type of alert is worth heeding, however. "It is important for health professionals and pharmacists to identify potential interactions between medications and eliminate prescription errors to prevent this risk," said Dr. Marcin Kowalski. He directs cardiac electrophysiology at Staten Island University Hospital in New York City. The FDA said it has added a new warning about this increased risk for heart patients, and is advising doctors to consider prescribing other antibiotics to these patients. The agency added that it will continue to monitor safety reports in patients taking clarithromycin. The antibiotic is used to treat many types of infections affecting the skin, ears, sinuses, lungs and other parts of the body. Doctors should talk to their heart patients about the risks and benefits of clarithromycin and alternative treatments. If doctors prescribe clarithromycin to patients with heart disease, they should inform those patients about the signs and symptoms of cardiovascular problems, the FDA said. And patients with heart disease should tell their doctor about their condition, especially when they are being prescribed an antibiotic to treat an infection. Heart disease patients should not stop taking their heart disease medicine or antibiotic without first talking to their doctor, the FDA said. Patients taking the antibiotic should seek immediate medical attention if they experience symptoms of a heart attack or stroke, such as chest pain, shortness of breath or trouble breathing, pain or weakness in one part or side of the body, or slurred speech, the agency said. Dr. Satjit Bhusri is a cardiologist at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City. He said, "Although this study suggests an association between this specific antibiotic, there have not been any direct correlations to increased heart disease. "I would also extend this to all antibiotics in general. A short course of antibiotic therapy for a bacterial infection should be initiated if indicated by the physician; and a history of antibiotic therapy, at this time, should not be considered a risk factor for heart disease," he said. More information The U.S. National Library of Medicine has more on clarithromycin. FRIDAY, Feb. 23, 2018 (HealthDay News) -- Children who've had surgery to repair defective hearts are more likely to die or require longer hospitalizations if they live in poorer neighborhoods, a new study suggests. The disparities between affluent and poor children persisted even though all were treated at the same major hospitals, the researchers said. And those disparities were only partially explained by differences in race or insurance coverage. "The fact that there are disparities in health care is nothing new, but it was particularly shocking to see this big an effect in this population," said study author Dr. Brett Anderson. She's an assistant professor of pediatrics at Columbia University Medical Center in New York City. "All of the children included in this study [were] being treated at highly specialized centers," Anderson added. "Our study really said the neighborhood was a significant predictor over and above the effects of income. This tells us we really have a long way to go." Developing in early pregnancy, congenital heart defects are present in babies at birth. They involve abnormalities of the chambers, valves or blood vessels of the heart and affect at least 8 in every 1,000 babies, according to the American Heart Association. Ranging from mild to severe, congenital heart defects can disrupt the ability of the heart to pump properly and also raise the risk of developing various conditions. They are the most common birth defects in the United States and are associated with both the highest death and highest hospitalization rates in children, according to the study. Anderson and her colleagues analyzed data from more than 100,000 cardiac surgery hospitalizations -- and nearly 858,000 total hospitalizations -- among children under the age of 19 at 46 U.S. institutions. Children from the lowest-income neighborhoods undergoing surgery for congenital heart defects had 18 percent higher odds of dying and a 7 percent longer hospital stay than children from the highest-income neighborhoods, the researchers found. Children from poorer neighborhoods also had 7 percent higher treatment costs than peers from the highest-income neighborhoods. The results held true whether children's surgeries were considered high- or low-risk. The findings were also similar when the researchers expanded their analysis to children receiving care for any major chronic condition. In the general analysis of all hospitalizations, children from the lowest-income neighborhoods had a 22 percent greater chance of dying, 3 percent greater odds of longer hospitalization and 3 percent higher in-hospital costs than those from richer neighborhoods. It's unclear why outcomes are so different for young cardiac surgery patients based on their zip codes, Anderson said, but she offered a few potential reasons. "I think one of the real possibilities is that parents from different neighborhoods advocate differently for their children, and we as clinicians alter the care we provide accordingly," she said. "A large number of these kids are operated on right after birth, so they're not sitting in their neighborhoods accumulating those effects. "It's either something we're doing, the patient is bringing something different [to the scenario], or something is influencing parent-provider dynamics," Anderson added. "The next step is figuring out what's driving these differences and how we change it. In the meantime, providers need to look introspectively to see what we can do while we're waiting for answers to affect the care that's being provided," she said. Dr. Shaine Morris is a pediatric cardiologist at Texas Children's Hospital in Houston and wasn't involved in the new research. She agreed with Anderson's recommendation that clinicians pay closer attention to factors that may influence how they treat patients. Morris said it's possible that health care providers don't realize they're treating various patient groups differently. Transportation or housing limitations may also contribute to patients staying in the hospital longer, she noted. "We need to continue to work to see what the possible explanations are," Morris said. "We all recognize this is happening, but we don't really know why. Some [people think] it's bias, but that's just a piece of it. I think we need to keep investigating -- it's a continuous work in progress." The study was published online Feb. 23 in the journal Pediatrics. More information The U.S. National Library of Medicine offers more on congenital heart defects. Share this: Twitter Facebook WhatsApp LinkedIn Email Telegram New York, February 23, 2018The Committee to Protect Journalists condemned last nights arson attack on the independent, investigative news website Chetverta Vlada (Fourth Power) in Ukraines western city of Rivne. According to a report from the Rivne police, an unknown assailant entered the building housing the websites offices and used two gasoline-filled bottles to start the fire, destroying the first-floor offices. The assailant fled the scene, the Kiev-based media freedom advocacy group Institute for Mass Information (IMI) reported. We call on Ukrainian authorities to apprehend the persons responsible for the arson attack on Chetverta Vlada, as well as those responsible for an earlier attack on the websites server, without delay, and to ensure that they are prosecuted to the full extent of the law, CPJ Europe and Central Asia Program Coordinator Nina Ognianova said. Chetverta Vlada is known for its reporting on local corruption, so journalism must be considered the motive for these crimes. The outlets deputy chief editor, Antonina Torbich, told IMI that four people, including her minor son, were in the office at the time of the attack, and no one was injured. Rivne police said on their website that they have opened an investigation into the attack. The arson attack on Chetverta Vlada, which is known for its investigations into local corruption, took place after unknown persons on February 17 robbed the offices hosting the websites server, incapacitating the outlet, according to IMI. The website was still inaccessible today at the time of publication. : , ; , ISIS-K Kerala: Seafood export companies get that sinking feeling February 23,2018 | Source: The New Indian Express And on the eighth day, they called off the strike. But not before the seafood industry suffered a crucial blow. Though the stir by mechanised fishing boat owners ended on Thursday, it has led to major losses to the seafood industry, as seafood exports were paralysed and food processing units operated by various exporting companies were forced to halt their functioning for a week. Kerala State Fishing Boat Operators Association president Joseph Xavier Kalappurackal said the losses suffered by the sector due to the strike amounted to Rs 300 crore. The agitation by boat owners came as the third major blow to the export sector in four months. In November last year, a week-long strike by container lorry operators caused exporters to lose Rs 250 crore. The first week of December saw cyclone Ockhi shatter not only the dreams of fishermen and their families but also the business opportunities for seafood exporters. The boat owners stir, though over, also did its damage. The present situation is almost similar to the Ockhi disaster. The only difference is there is no cyclone, said Alex Ninan of Baby Marine International, who is also president of the Kerala chapter of Seafood Exporters Association of India. There are nearly 100 seafood exporters in the state which together employ hundreds of people, mainly women. We demand an immediate intervention of the government to solve the agitation and end the crisis faced by a sector that brings foreign exchange to the state, he said. Around 5,000 fishing boat operators and workers had launched the indefinite strike last Thursday and stopped venturing into the sea in protest against the Fisheries Department action against fishermen over juvenile fishing. Boat owners and workers have been on the warpath since the department seized two boats on February 4 on charges of juvenile fishing. Gujarat: King of fish hilsa in troubled Narmada waters by Paul John February 23,2018 | Source: The Times of India The king of fish Hilsa has run into troubled waters of the Narmada once Narmada's estuary spread between Ambetha near Dahej and Bharuch which yielded tonnes of this fresh water delicacy is turning into its deathbed, reveals a study by Central Inland Fisheries Research Institute (CIFRI) in Vadodara and Kolkatta. The study found that in nearly a decade, hilsa catch, which recorded 5,180 metric tonnes in 2006-07, has drastically dwindled by over 90% to mere 419 metric tonnes by 2015. The highest catch of hilsa in Gujarat was recorded 15,319 metric tonnes in 1993. But from 1994, the study claims, when Sardar Sarovar Dam became functional it had impacted natural water flow of Narmada which resulted in decline of freshwater availability in the estuary. The other reasons cited are development of sand bars at the mouth of the estuary which reduced the tidal ingress into the system. The trickle flow from the dam also led to low depth of water in the river, which in turn led to loss of breeding, nursery and feeding grounds for the pricey fish," says the CIFRI study carried out by a research team scientists Dibakar Bhakta, Wakamban Anand Meetei Gopinathan Vaisakh, Sanjoy Kumar Das and Ranjan Kumar Manna. Excessive fishing especially as Gujarat does not regulate inland fishing has not helped the cause. Catching juvenile fish hastened their decline. In West Bengal, some of the popular online marts sell a fully grown hilsa which is just above a kilogram at Rs 1,600! While earlier hilsa used to be a prized catch in the Ganga, Narmada, Mahanadi, Krishna, Tapti, and Godavari. Today, it is confined mainly to the Ganga and the Narmada. Catching of juvenile hilsa during winter by golava net (small meshed bag net) also led to a rapid decline in hilsa catch. To maintain the sustainable yield of hilsa, selective fishing and control of juvenile catch are the prerequisites along with maintaining regular flow from the dam, claimed the study. We have not measured the actual Hilsa catch this year. There are two commercial fishing season of Hilsa in the Narmada estuary, the first from June to October and another from January to March. Though we are yet to collate any data this year, but a scientific study by CIFRI is on, says fisheries commissioner Mohammad Shahid. More than 90% of Hilsa catch is observed between June to September. In 2017, which was an election year, we had a rough 1,600 tonnes of Hilsa on the 72 Km long estuary as Sardar Sarovar dam had released some water extra water, admits another senior Gujarat fisheries department official. Sri Lanka: Seafood exports up 42-pct in 2017 February 23,2018 | Source: Economy Next Earnings from Sri Lankas sea food exports rose 42% to US$ 241 million in 2017 from a year ago, according to central bank data. Seafood exports rose 23.5% to $21.5 million in December 2017 alone from the previous year. Earnings from seafood and minor agricultural products, particularly fruits and betel leaves, also contributed towards the enhanced export earnings in December 2017, a statement said. The recovery in seafood exports followed the withdrawal of a ban on fisheries exports in June 2016. Seafood exports from Sri Lanka, which had been the second biggest exporter of fresh and chilled swordfish and tuna to the EU, had plunged after the ban was imposed in 2014. On a cumulative basis, export earnings hit a high of US$11.4 billion in 2017 mainly due to notable increase in tea, textiles and garments, and petroleum products exports, as well as spices and seafood exports. Increased exports to the European Union followed the restoration of the GSP+ facility in May 2017, the central bank said. Although the European Commission listef its fish ban in 2016, it took awhile for exports to recover because of a 16.5% import duty on fish products. The Sri Lanka Canned Fish Producers Association had said the full benefit of the removal of the ban would come only when the GSP Plus facility is restored, enabling duty free exports. A Malaysian woman was charged Wednesday with the murder of an Indonesian domestic worker who was found with wounds covering her body and was allegedly forced to sleep outside with a dog. M. A. Ambika, 60, will be sentenced to death if found guilty of murdering Adelina Sau, in a case that has sparked new tensions between Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur over a long-standing flashpoint issue. About 2.5 million Indonesians work in neighboring Malaysia both legally and illegally including many as domestic workers, but there have been repeated cases of abuse over the years. The victim, in her 20s, died at a Malaysian hospital this month, a day after being rescued by a migrant workers protection group. Her head and face were swollen and she had wounds on her hands and legs. A Malaysian lawmaker said she had been forced to sleep on a porch next to a dog. Ambika was charged during an appearance at the magistrates court in the northern town of Bukit Mertajam with the murder of the domestic worker at her home on February 10, state news agency Bernama reported. She did not enter a plea, the agency said. A murder conviction carries a mandatory death sentence in Malaysia. Her daughter, R. Jayavartiny, 32, was charged with employing the victim despite being aware she did not have a valid work permit. She denied the charge. Local media reported Ambikas son, who was also initially arrested after the helpers death, will appear as a witness in the case. Two people have also been arrested in Indonesia on human trafficking charges in connection with the death of the domestic worker, with police alleging they used forged documents to send the victim to Malaysia. Indonesia is reportedly considering reinstating a ban on sending domestic workers to Malaysia following the case. Jakarta last imposed a ban in 2009 to 2011. Malaysias Deputy Prime Minister Ahmad Zahid Hamidi has urged Jakarta not to go ahead with the ban, insisting recently employers who abuse domestic workers will be brought to justice. The Malaysian government will never protect any employer who is found to have acted cruelly, he said. Father in Malaysia charged with murder of baby girl A young father in Malaysia was charged on Wednesday (Feb 21) with the murder of his 1 1/2-month-old baby girl last week. Muhamad Firdaus Saidon, 22, allegedly caused the death of his daughter, Nurul Ain Umairah Muhammad, at their house in Bukit Tengah at 10.45am last Thursday. Nurul is said to have died following suspected abuse, and a post-mortem revealed that she had a severe brain haemorrhage and multiple injuries on her body. The baby girl, who was born on Dec 30 last year, died while on the way to hospital, the Star Online reported, adding that she had bruises and abrasion marks all over her body and bite marks on her arms. There were also signs that her ribs and right arm had been fractured, and that her left hip also showed signs of recent fracture, said the report, adding that the baby's injuries were believed to have been caused by blunt objects. Her father, a lorry driver, merely nodded in understanding when the charge was read to him before magistrate Muhamad Anas Mahadzir. No plea was recorded. His 22-year-old wife, who had been arrested with him, has been released on police bond and will appear as a witness during the trial, the New Straits Times reported. The charge, under Section 302 of Malaysia's Penal Code, carries a mandatory death penalty upon conviction. The case will be heard again on Apr 19. Chemical and post-mortem reports will also be submitted then. | 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 Opposed to Capital Punishment? Help us keep this blog up and running! DONATE! "One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde Agence France-Presse, February 21, 2018: channelnewsasia.com, February 22, 2018 Hyperloop test site to be built in Dnipro (updated) This year the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine should complete the project's expert assessment If you see a spelling error on our site, select it and press Ctrl+Enter The first China International Import Expo (CIIE) offers a chance for Ukraine to boost its exports to China, Ukrainian First Deputy Prime Minister Stepan Kubiv said on Thursday. "China is a multi-billion-dollar consumer market, where Ukraine can supply many products, ranging from food to industrial goods, clothing, various equipment and services," Kubiv was quoted as saying by the government's press service. Ukraine will display a large exhibition stand uniting a range of companies at the expo scheduled for November in Shanghai, China, he said, according to Xihnua. "I am convinced that the national stand of Ukraine will help our exporters to show themselves in a comprehensive way and to enter the advantageous Chinese market," Kubiv said. Read alsoUkraine, EU to jointly finance new Silk Road transport corridor - XinhuaAccording to Ukrainian statistics, Ukraine exported about 2 billion U.S. dollars worth of goods to China last year, up 11.3 percent from a year before. On Feb. 1, Ukraine announced its participation in the CIIE, a major event to be organized by the Chinese government to promote a new round of high-level opening-up. The expo, which will include exhibitions and forums, provides a platform for trade and services, and offers opportunities for closer international cooperation. Read alsoChina traders cancel U.S. corn cargoes, buy from Ukraine mediaState leaders, entrepreneurs and scholars from over 100 countries and regions are expected to participate in the expo. PM explains EU's decision to shut down border infrastructure development projects in Ukraine Groysman stressed that the State Fiscal Service, as a party to the program, had failed to organize its implementation. If you see a spelling error on our site, select it and press Ctrl+Enter PM Groysman says Rada should cancel taxation of Ukraine's top universities The prime minister noted that the ranking of best universities should be compiled based on statistics of their graduates' employment. If you see a spelling error on our site, select it and press Ctrl+Enter Infrastructure minister says Ryanair to launch flights from Ukraine in late Oct early Nov He earlier said that Ryanair would start flights from Ukraine's largest Boryspil Airport and Airport Lviv in the fall of 2018. If you see a spelling error on our site, select it and press Ctrl+Enter EU Delegation: "Buy Ukrainian" Bill violates country's international obligations Mingarelli says Ukraine might lose competition in public procurement. If you see a spelling error on our site, select it and press Ctrl+Enter No progress yet in gas purchase talks with Gazprom: Kobolyev Ukraine is mulling start of gas purchases from Gazprom as early as March this year. If you see a spelling error on our site, select it and press Ctrl+Enter Countering Hezbollah is a top priority for the United States. It is a Foreign Terrorist Organization, designated as such by the U.S. Department of State in 1997. One of the best ways to hinder any terrorist groups activities is to attack its capacity to generate income. The U.S. Treasury Departments Office of Foreign Assets Control, or OFAC, designated in early February, six individuals and seven entities, pursuant to Executive Order 13224. All of them work for or are controlled by the network of Adham Tabaja and Al-Inmaa Engineering and Contracting, which OFAC designated as Specially Designated Global Terrorists in 2015. The designation allows the United States to freeze their assets, lock them out of the U.S. financial network thereby making international transactions extremely difficult if not impossible, and prosecute them for terrorist activities. It also prohibits U.S. citizens from doing business with them. Ali Muhammad Qansu has a longstanding business relationship with Adham Tabaja, and with numerous Hezbollah members and businesses. He owns the seven entities which were designated along with him. They are Blue Lagoon Group LTD., Kanso Fishing Agency Limited, Star Trade Ghana Limited, Golden Fish S.A.L., Golden Fish Liberia LTD., Dolphin Trading Company Limited, and Sky Trade Company. Jihad Muhammad Qansu is a financial manager of Al-Inmaa and a business associate of Adham Tabaja. Issam Ahmad Saad is a managing partner and minority shareholder in Al-Inmaa. Nabil Mahmoud Assaf is the manager of purchasing, and a minority shareholder in Al-Inmaa. Abdul Latif Saad is the manager of Al-Inmaas Baghdad, Iraq branch. He coordinates with Al-Inmaa Group for Tourism Works-subordinate companies, previously designated in June 2015 by OFAC. Muhammad Badr-Al-Din is a manager of Al-Inmaas Basra, Iraq branch, and has worked with Nabil Mahmoud Assaf and Hezbollah money launderer Mohamad Noureddine. Hezbollah is a terrorist organization responsible for the death of hundreds of Americans. It is also Irans primary proxy used to undermine legitimate Arab governments across the Middle East. The Administration is determined to expose and disrupt Hezbollahs networks, including those across the Middle East and West Africa, used to fund their illicit operations, said Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. The Treasury Department will continue to sever Hezbollah from the international financial system, and we will be relentless in identifying, exposing, and dismantling Hezbollahs financial support networks globally. Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Steve Goldstein recently marked the Tibetan New Year by recognizing the many contributions of Tibetans globally as well as Tibetan-Americans in the United States. At the same time, he noted that Tibetans face great challenges in other parts of the world, especially on the Tibetan plateau. Under Secretary Goldstein reiterated U.S. support for the aspirations of the Tibetan people to safeguard their distinct identity. One way the U.S. has supported the Tibetan people is through the Tibetan Scholarship Program, which has made possible the exchange of over 400 Tibetans from communities in India and Nepal. Participants pursue graduate-level education at U.S. colleges and universities in disciplines that address pressing needs within Tibetan communities. Indeed, the U.S. will celebrate in April the Tibetan Scholarship Programs 30 years of academic exchanges with an alumni event in Dharamsala, India. Through presentations and photo exhibits, program alumni will share how they have applied the knowledge, values, and relationships they gained while in America to positively impact their communities back home. The United States is committed to promoting sustainable development and environmental conservation in Tibetan communities, and to supporting humanitarian assistance to Tibetan refugees in India and Nepal. The United States remains committed to improving respect for the human rights of Tibetans, including their freedom of religion. It is important that Tibetans be able to practice freely their faith and select their religious leaders in keeping with their own customs and traditions, without interference, stressed Under Secretary Goldstein. Finally, and most importantly, said Under Secretary Goldstein, we recognize that the Tibetan people must have a voice in their own future. Just Say No to Teacher No-Strike Laws T hree unions representing public school employees in West Virginia announced a Solidarity among the three is significant, given that they have been at one anothers throats for years. AFT West Virginia and the West Virginia Education Association continued to battle for members and influence long after National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers affiliates in other states called a cease-fire. And the independent West Virginia School Service Personnel Association once belonged to AFT but disaffiliated in 2015. The unions stated that an There are several issues and complications for all involved. ==== hree unions representing public school employees in West Virginia announced a two-day walkout this Thursday and Friday to protest low pay and health insurance benefits.Solidarity among the three is significant, given that they have been at one anothers throats for years. AFT West Virginia and the West Virginia Education Association continued to battle for members and influence long after National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers affiliates in other states called a cease-fire. And the independent West Virginia School Service Personnel Association once belonged to AFT but disaffiliated in 2015.The unions stated that an overwhelming majority of school employees across the state authorized the job action, though it failed to release numbers on votes or turnout.There are several issues and complications for all involved. Click here to read the rest.==== Teachers across West Virginia walked off the job Thursday amid a dispute over pay and benefits, causing more than 277,000 public school students to miss classes even as educators swarmed the state Capitol in Charleston to protest. All 55 counties in the state closed schools during Thursdays work stoppage, Alyssa Keedy, a spokeswoman for the states Department of Education, said. Work stoppages by public employees are not lawful in West Virginia and will have a negative impact on student instruction and classroom time, West Virginia Superintendent of Schools Steven Paine said in a statement this week. Families will be forced to seek out alternative safe locations for their children, and our many students who depend on schools for daily nutrition will face an additional burden. I encourage our educators to advocate for the benefits they deserve, but to seek courses of action that have the least possible disruption for our students. Data from the National Education Association show that in 2016, West Virginia ranked 48th in average teacher salaries. Only Mississippi, Oklahoma and South Dakota sat below it in the rankings, which included 50 states and the District. I see some of my colleagues salivating over the state teacher strike in West Virginia. Don't hold you breath here in NY. Maybe when the conditions of teachers are back to what they were in the 1950s when desperation drove teachers to unionize and be willing to break the law (it was outlawed when they first struck) - I was a high school senior - and not long after I was a teacher 5 years later striking on my first days on the job, followed by 3 strikes the next year and another 7 years later. It's not just the Taylor Law, which also guarantees our old contracts stay in place until a new one is negotiated -- and dues checkoff is another bribe to unions not to strike. It's what people have to lose. Top salary will soon be reaching $118,000. That's like walking around with a target on your back and with so many leaving this current generation may mostly not make it that far.Here are 2 articles on the strike - Diane Ravitch and background from Mike Antonucci on the right who actually feels teacher strikes should not be outlawed - the libertarian view -- and he gives us some good background on the relationships between the 3 unions involved. It is posted at the horrible 74.I always find Mike's takes from the right interesting as they touch on my own libertarian tendencies. That the NEA and AFT affiliates have been fighting is interesting news, as is the story of the disaffiliation -- usually the AFT goes after the disaffiliated with guns blazing. London-based international human rights watchdog Amnesty International (AI) has levied serious criticism against Iran for its continued violation of human rights over the past year. In its annual report, AI pointed out systematic unfair trials, as well as floggings, amputations, and other cruel punishments carried out in Iran as examples of human rights violations by the Tehran regime. The report also noted that, during the past year, Hundreds of people were executed, some in public, and thousands remained on death row, adding that those executed in Iran included people who were under the age of 18 at the time of the crime. AI further lashed out at Iran for widespread torture and other ill-treatment that was committed with impunity. Iranian authorities heavily suppressed the rights to freedom of expression, association, and peaceful assembly, as well as freedom of religion and belief, and imprisoned scores of individuals who voiced dissent, according to AI. The report noted that peaceful political dissidents, women protesting compulsory hijab, journalist, filmmakers, musicians, and members of ethnic and religious minorities were among those targeted by the regime. Last week, media covered reports on violent clashes between dervishes and police in Tehran and the arresting of seven members of the Bahai faith in southern Iran. The report added that many inmates went on hunger strike in prison to protest unfair trials and unjust imprisonment. The authorities endorsed pervasive discrimination and violence based on gender, political opinion, religious belief, ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation, and gender identity, AI maintained. Highlighting last years timeline of rights violations in Iran, AI observed that Tehran continued to deny entry to Iran to the UN Human Rights Councils special rapporteur, the late Asma Jahangir, who was appointed in March 2017. AI further noted that several human rights defenders served prison sentences imposed for communicating with EU and UN officials. In May, President [Hassan] Rouhani was elected to a second term in office, following an electoral process that discriminated against hundreds of candidates by disqualifying them based on gender, religious belief, and political opinion, the report noted. AI also criticized Rouhani for appointing individuals allegedly involved in grave human rights violations to ministerial posts. The AI timeline concluded that, in late December 2017, thousands of Iranians took to the streets to protest against poverty, corruption, and political repression in the first anti-establishment demonstrations on such a scale since 2009. Iranian officials have said some 5,000 people were arrested and at least 25 were killed by security forces during the demonstrations in December 2017 and January 2018. At least five of those arrested died in custody and the government has tried to portray the deaths as suicides. The regime limited peoples access to social media in the aftermath of the demonstrations, the report added. Meanwhile, the jamming of radio and TV broadcasts beamed into Iran via satellite and censorship of traditional media continued, and the Association of Iranian Journalists remained suspended. Throughout the year, law enforcement agents continued their violent raids on private mixed-gender parties, arresting hundreds of young people and sentencing many to flogging, and despite Rouhanis election promises dozens of university students were deprived of the right to continue their education. Independent trade unions were banned and many unionists jailed, and security forces continued to violently suppress workers protesting late payments or non-payment of their salaries, the AI report observed. At the same time, opposition leaders Mehdi Karroubi, Mir-Hossein Mousavi, and his wife, Zahra Rahnavard, remained under house arrest without trial. The AI report went on that the authorities continued to deprive prisoners detained for political reasons of adequate medical care. In many cases, this was done as a deliberate punishment or to extract confessions and amounted to torture. Criticizing unfair trials in Iran, the AI report said even trials resulting in death sentences were systematically unfair and there were no independent mechanisms for ensuring accountability within the judiciary. The report expressed serious concerns over the fact that judges, particularly those presiding over Revolutionary Courts, were appointed based on their political opinions and affiliation with intelligence bodies and lacked legal qualifications. AIs criticism of the death penalty in Iran questioned the sentencing of individuals to death for vaguely worded offenses such as enmity against God and spreading corruption on Earth, while noting that Irans Islamic Penal Code continues to recognize stoning as a method of execution. The protests of individual women in Iran against compulsory veil continues, as more women remove their head-scarfs in public as a sign of defiance. Authorities also continue their crackdown against these protesters. Radio Farda has learned that from Wednesday to Thursday, two more women who have come to be known as women of Revolution Street were detained. One of them is Shaparak Shajarizadeh who was arrested on Wednesday and the family says she was assaulted during the arrest. A video circulated on social media shows another female protester who is standing on a pedestal with her head-scarf removed is pushed and thrown to the ground by plain-cloths security agent. The first such protest took place at the end of December, when a lone woman stood on an electricity box on Revolution street, removed here veil and held it high. Later, it was reported that her name is Vida Movahed, who was detained and released. Well-known human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh has taken up the defense of Shajarizadeh. In an interview with Radio Farda she said that the young woman was assaulted after her arrest on February 21, in the detention facility where she was being held. The attorney also disclosed during the interview that Shajarizadeh had contacted her about two weeks ago, complaining about certain threats made against her and asked for legal protection in case she gets arrested. It is not clear why she was being harassed, but she decided to remove her veil to protest compulsory hijab rules. Baku, Azerbaijan, Feb.23 By Nigar Guliyeva - Trend: A unified approach should be applied towards all conflicts in the OSCE area, Azerbaijani MP Azay Guliyev said addressing a session of the General Committee on Democracy, Human Rights and Humanitarian Questions within the winter session of the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly on Feb.23. "Unfortunately today we have to deal with several conflicts in the OSCE area. These conflicts become more and more dangerous trends and many people suffer from their consequences," he noted. He further stressed the importance of concentrating the activities on showing a unified approach towards all conflicts in the OSCE area. "We have to have a unified approach to all conflicts in the OSCE area, particularly when it comes to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. Internationally accepted and agreed principles should be applied towards all conflicts," he said. The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. As a result of the ensuing war, in 1992 Armenian armed forces occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts. The 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations. Armenia has not yet implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts. Baku, Azerbaijan, Feb. 23 By Leman Zeynalova, Gulgiz Muradova Trend: Netherlands hopes that the Armenia-Azerbaijan Nagorno-Karabakh conflict will be resolved soon, former president of the Senate of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, former president of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), chairman of the Dutch Friends of Azerbaijan Group Rene van der Linden said in an exclusive interview with Trend. He noted that the Netherlands follows the activities of the OSCE Minsk Group. Until now, it hasnt brought a solution to this too longstanding conflict. There are a huge number of refugees in Azerbaijan [as a result of this conflict], said Rene van der Linden. He said that the Netherlands is looking forward to reopening of the negotiations in coming months to come to a solution. Rene van der Linden pointed out that today, there are optimistic views regarding the settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. I hope that this will create a positive climate so that Azerbaijan and Armenia can together with Minsk Group come to a solution, he added. The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. As a result of the ensuing war, in 1992 Armenian armed forces occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts. The 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations. Armenia has not yet implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts. Baku, Azerbaijan, Feb. 23 By Rufiz Hafizoglu Trend: Khojaly is a place where humaneness has died, Turkish presidents assistant Yalcin Topcu said on an event dedicated to the 26th anniversary of Khojaly massacre and held in Kizilcahamam municipality of Ankara. Topcu noted that the Khojaly Genocide mustnt be ever forgotten. Blind and deaf world must see the Genocide carried out against Azerbaijanis in Khojaly. The entire world must know about that, Topcu said. According to him, all occupied lands of Azerbaijan will be liberated and returned ,sooner or later. On Feb. 25-26, 1992, the Armenian armed forces, together with the 366th infantry regiment of Soviet troops, stationed in Khankendi, committed an act of genocide against the population of the Azerbaijani town of Khojaly. As many as 613 people, including 63 children, 106 women and 70 old people were killed in the massacre. Eight families were totally exterminated, 130 children lost one parent and 25 children lost both. Some 1,275 innocent residents were taken hostage, while the fate of 150 people still remains unknown. The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. As a result of the ensuing war, in 1992 Armenian armed forces occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts. The 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations. Armenia has not yet implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts. Baku, Azerbaijan, Feb 23. Trend: A documentary film on the Khojaly genocide titled Running from the Darkness was screened at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of San Diego - the second largest city in the U.S. State of California - on Feb.21, 2018, Azerbaijans Los Angeles Consulate told Trend. The screening was jointly held by Azerbaijans Los Angeles Consulate General and San Diego-Baku Friendship Association. At the San Diego screening , Consul General of Azerbaijan in Los Angeles Nasimi Aghayev highlighted the significance of holding onto the values of interfaith tolerance and harmony in the face of hatred and tragedy, what, in his words, Azerbaijan has been able to do during the last 26 years since the Khojaly Genocide. Describing the film as a story of survival of tolerance against intolerance and stressing the need to educate wider audiences about what happened in Khojaly in 1992 so that similar tragedies do not occur again, the Consul General thanked the filmmakers for masterfully capturing the whole story of this crime against humanity. Speaking on the event, Rev. Ian Riddel of the First Unitarian Universalist Church of San Diego, Rabbi of the Temple Emanu-El Benjamin Fried, Director of the Islamic Center of San Diego Imam Taha Hassane, Executive Director of the San Diego-Baku Friendship Association Martin Kruming, as well as American journalist and author of the book titled Murder in the Mountains: War Crime in Khojaly and the Nagorno-Karabakh Conflict Raoul Lowery Contreras stressed the importance of this unique multi-faith commemorative event. Speakers noted that against the odds of many tragedies it had to endure in the early years of its independence, Azerbaijan has been able to preserve and strengthen its identity and model of interfaith tolerance and multiculturalism. Then the film was screened. Based on interviews with many survivors of the Khojaly Massacre, as well with U.S. elected officials, reporters, academic experts, Christian, Jewish and Muslim faith leaders of Los Angeles and an Armenian human rights advocate, the film vividly tells the horrific story of the tragedy. The documentary also highlights how Azerbaijan, confronted with Khojaly tragedy as well as the illegal occupation and ethnic cleansing of around 20 percent of its sovereign territory by neighboring Armenia in the early 1990s, did not allow the hatred and intolerance to take hold of itself, but on the contrary worked actively to strengthen its age-old identity and traditions of interfaith harmony and tolerance. The well-received screening was concluded with prayers delivered by Imam Hassane and Rabbi Fried for the victims of Khojaly, as well as for peace, reconciliation and tolerance. Produced in 2015-2017 in Los Angeles by American filmmakers, Running from the Darkness premiered in February 2017 at the Museum of Tolerance of the world-famous Simon Wiesenthal Center, which is one of the biggest (400,000 families) and most influential Jewish human rights organizations in the world. The documentary was also screened at the prestigious Red Rock Film Festival in Cedar City, Utah in November 2017. The invasion, entrapment, and indiscriminate murder against unarmed civilians in the town of Khojaly of the Nagorno-Karabakh region of Azerbaijan occurred in February of 1992. On February 25-26, 1992 over 600 Azerbaijani civilians and residents of Khojaly were murdered by Armenian armed forces. Over 250 of those killed were children, women and the elderly. The international organization Human Rights Watch condemned it as the largest massacre in the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan, reporting about unconscionable acts of violence against civilians as they fled, and placing direct responsibility for the the massacre with Armenian forces. Baku, Azerbaijan, Feb. 23 Trend: The Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry has called on the House of Representatives of the Dutch Parliament to avoid double standards. "We see the decision of the House of Representatives of the Parliament of the Netherlands related to the fictitious "genocide of Armenians" as biased," Hikmat Hajiyev, spokesman for the Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry said in Baku Feb. 23. Earlier it was reported that the Dutch Parliament adopted a resolution on the recognition of the so-called Armenian genocide. In her turn, Acting Foreign Minister of the Netherlands Sigrid Kaag said that the countrys government will not follow the example of the parliament. Kaag said that the Cabinet of Ministers will continue to show restraint. It is wrong to use falsifications in political purposes, Hajiyev added. Pursuing shady political goals, the Armenian side continues to refuse from disclosing historical archives and joint research of the so-called Armenian genocide by historians," Hajiyev said. As for the historical facts, Hajiyev stressed that during the World War I, Armenians committed massacre and other atrocities against the population, for its ethnicity, in Anatolia, as well as in the historic Azerbaijani lands of Zangezur, Goyce mahali, Karabakh, including the genocide against Azerbaijanis in March 1918 in Baku and other Azerbaijani cities. Hajiyev added that since the late 1980s, as a result of Armenian aggression and occupation against Azerbaijan, numerous war crimes, crimes against humanity and acts of genocide were committed. More than one million Azerbaijanis were subjected to bloody ethnic cleansing in Armenia and occupied Azerbaijani territories, he said. "The most terrible of these acts is the Khojaly genocide committed in Azerbaijans Nagorno-Karabakh region on February 26, 1992 with the personal participation and command of the Armenian current military and political leadership of Armenia," he said. The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. As a result of the ensuing war, in 1992 Armenian armed forces occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts. On Feb. 25-26, 1992, the Armenian armed forces, together with the 366th infantry regiment of Soviet troops, stationed in Khankendi, committed an act of genocide against the population of the Azerbaijani town of Khojaly. As many as 613 people, including 63 children, 106 women and 70 old people were killed in the massacre. Eight families were totally exterminated, 130 children lost one parent and 25 children lost both. Some 1,275 innocent residents were taken hostage, while the fate of 150 people still remains unknown. The 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations. Armenia has not yet implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts. Baku, Azerbaijan, Feb. 23 By Ali Mustafayev - Trend: The US will continue the work on the settlement of the Armenia-Azerbaijan Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, US Ambassador to Azerbaijan Robert Cekuta told reporters in Baku on Feb. 23. The US continues to focus on the work of the OSCE Minsk Group in order to achieve peaceful settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, the ambassador said. Cekuta noted that recently, in anticipation of the OSCE co-chairs visit to the region, the US co-chair of the OSCE visited Azerbaijan and met with Azerbaijani officials, as well as with IDPs living in the Masazir district. All these meetings are aimed at finding a way out of the situation, Cekuta said. The US is committed to the peaceful settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, and one of the main tasks of the US is that the parties to the conflict reach compromise, he noted. The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. As a result of the ensuing war, in 1992 Armenian armed forces occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts. The 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations. Armenia has not yet implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts. Details added (first version posted on 13:46) Baku, Azerbaijan, Feb. 23 Trend: The Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry has called on the House of Representatives of the Dutch Parliament to avoid double standards. "We see the decision of the House of Representatives of the Parliament of the Netherlands related to the fictitious "genocide of Armenians" as biased," Hikmat Hajiyev, spokesman for the Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry said in Baku Feb. 23. Earlier it was reported that the Dutch Parliament adopted a resolution on the recognition of the so-called Armenian genocide. In her turn, Acting Foreign Minister of the Netherlands Sigrid Kaag said that the countrys government will not follow the example of the parliament. Kaag said that the Cabinet of Ministers will continue to show restraint. It is wrong to use falsifications in political purposes, Hajiyev added. Pursuing shady political goals, the Armenian side continues to refuse from disclosing historical archives and joint research of the so-called Armenian genocide by historians," Hajiyev said. As for the historical facts, Hajiyev stressed that during the World War I, Armenians committed massacre and other atrocities against the population, for its ethnicity, in Anatolia, as well as in the historic Azerbaijani lands of Zangezur, Goyce mahali, Karabakh, including the genocide against Azerbaijanis in March 1918 in Baku and other Azerbaijani cities. Hajiyev added that since the late 1980s, as a result of Armenian aggression and occupation against Azerbaijan, numerous war crimes, crimes against humanity and acts of genocide were committed. More than one million Azerbaijanis were subjected to bloody ethnic cleansing in Armenia and occupied Azerbaijani territories, he said. "The most terrible of these acts is the Khojaly genocide committed in Azerbaijans Nagorno-Karabakh region on February 26, 1992 with the personal participation and command of the Armenian current military and political leadership of Armenia," he said. The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. As a result of the ensuing war, in 1992 Armenian armed forces occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts. On Feb. 25-26, 1992, the Armenian armed forces, together with the 366th infantry regiment of Soviet troops, stationed in Khankendi, committed an act of genocide against the population of the Azerbaijani town of Khojaly. As many as 613 people, including 63 children, 106 women and 70 old people were killed in the massacre. Eight families were totally exterminated, 130 children lost one parent and 25 children lost both. Some 1,275 innocent residents were taken hostage, while the fate of 150 people still remains unknown. The 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations. Armenia has not yet implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts. Baku, Azerbaijan, Feb. 23 Trend: Members of the Azerbaijani Youth Organization in Lithuania held a flashmob in the center of Vilnius dedicated to the Khojaly genocide, Azerbaijan's Embassy in Lithuania said in a message on Feb. 23. The event was held with the support of the embassy upon a special permission of the Vilnius Town Hall in the crowded places and in front of the Town Hall. Over 2,000 candles that burned all night on an area of 100 square meters formed #KHOJALY. Along with Azerbaijani students receiving education in Vilnius and Kaunas universities, Lithuanian youth took an active part in the flashmob. On Feb. 25-26, 1992, the Armenian armed forces, together with the 366th infantry regiment of Soviet troops, stationed in Khankendi, committed an act of genocide against the population of the Azerbaijani town of Khojaly. As many as 613 people, including 63 children, 106 women and 70 old people were killed in the massacre. Eight families were totally exterminated, 130 children lost one parent and 25 children lost both. Some 1,275 innocent residents were taken hostage, while the fate of 150 people still remains unknown. The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. As a result of the ensuing war, in 1992 Armenian armed forces occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts. The 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations. Armenia has not yet implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts. Baku, Azerbaijan, Feb. 23 Trend: Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev received a delegation led by president and chief executive officer of Boeing Commercial Airplane company Kevin McAllister Feb. 23. The head of state said Azerbaijan and Boeing enjoy a long-term successful cooperation, and noted that the Azerbaijan Civil Aviation purchased nearly 20 airplanes produced by this company. Noting that Azerbaijan has a very modern and quality air fleet, President Aliyev underlined that Azerbaijan Airlines enjoy a very good reputation. The head of state said Azerbaijan is already becoming an international transport hub. Saying that Azerbaijan made great strides in transport and infrastructure development, President Ilham Aliyev noted that seven new airports, including six international ones, have been built in the country in recent years. The president emphasized excellent operation of cargo and passenger planes. President Aliyev also stressed that a state-of-the-art shipyard producing all kinds of modern ships was built, and state-of-the-art railway and road infrastructure was established in Azerbaijan. Touching upon the transportation of goods by air, the head of state emphasized that Azerbaijan plays an important role not only in the region, but also in the global cargo traffic. President Ilham Aliyev expressed his confidence that Azerbaijan's cooperation with Boeing will continue successfully. McAllister, in turn, hailed cooperation with Azerbaijan, including AZAL, as very strong. On behalf of Boeing he said they strongly believe in further development of Azerbaijan, and expressed his confidence that the bilateral relations will continue to expand. They also noted that Azerbaijan-US bilateral ties are developing successfully a number of areas. Baku, Azerbaijan, Feb. 23 Trend: The ruling New Azerbaijan Party (NAP) has submitted the voter signatures collected for the registration of Ilham Aliyev's candidacy to the post of Azerbaijani president, along with the required documents, to the Central Election Commission (CEC) in accordance with the requirements of the Election Code and the CEC instructions, said a message posted on the website of the ruling party. According to the requirements of Azerbaijans Electoral Code, a candidate must collect at least 40,000 voters signatures from at least 60 electoral districts each. At least 50 signatures must be collected in each electoral district. In each of the existing 125 electoral districts, the party successfully completed a signature collection campaign in support of presidential candidate Ilham Aliyev. The 6th congress of the NAP was held in the Heydar Aliyev Center in Baku Feb. 8. The decision was made during the congress to nominate chairman of the party Ilham Aliyev as a presidential candidate. The decision was unanimously adopted. The presidential election will be held in Azerbaijan on April 11, 2018. Baku, Azerbaijan, Feb. 23 Trend: A citizen of the Russian Federation, a journalist of Rodnik newspaper, Svetlana Sarycheva addressed a letter to Azerbaijans Foreign Ministry asking for removal of her name from the List of foreign citizens who illegally visited the occupied territories of Azerbaijan, the Foreign Ministry said in a message Feb. 23. In her letter, Svetlana Sarycheva noted that she traveled to the Nagorno-Karabakh region in 2012 and she was unaware about the consequences of that visit. She underlined that this visit doesnt mean her disrespect for Azerbaijan and its people. Reaffirming her full respect to the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Azerbaijan within its internationally recognized borders, its laws and regulations, Svetlana Sarycheva expressed her apology to the countrys government and people for an unauthorized visit to the occupied territories of Azerbaijan. Expressing regrets for this visit Svetlana Sarycheva mentioned that her visit to the occupied territories of Azerbaijan by Armenia in no way served for the promotion of illegal regime established in the occupied lands of Azerbaijan. Furthermore, she attested that she would refrain from such visits to the occupied territories of Azerbaijan in the future without the consent of the government of Azerbaijan. Svetlana Sarycheva asked for permission to visit Azerbaijan with her family in the future. Appeal by Svetlana Sarycheva was considered and the decision was made to remove her name from the list of people declared persona non grata. The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. As a result of the ensuing war, in 1992 Armenian armed forces occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts. The 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations. Armenia has not yet implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts. Baku, Azerbaijan, Feb. 23 By Elchin Mehdiyev - Trend: Approval of two agreements between Turkey and Azerbaijan was discussed at the plenary session of the Azerbaijani Parliament on Feb. 23, the parliament told Trend. The MPs discussed the Agreement on cooperation between Azerbaijan and Turkey in defense industry as well as the Agreement on cooperation between Azerbaijan and Turkey in education. Following the discussions, the agreements were put to vote and adopted. Baku, Azerbaijan, Feb. 23 Trend: President of Moldova Igor Dodon will participate in the 6th Global Baku Forum to be held on March 15-17, the State Committee on Work with Diaspora of Azerbaijan said in a statement on Feb. 23. The 6th Global Baku Forum is organized by the Nizami Ganjavi International Center, with the support of the State Committee on Work with Diaspora. Igor Dodon is planned to address a meeting as part of the forum. President of Albania Ilir Meta, President of Montenegro Filip Vujanovic, Member of the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina Mladen Ivanic and presidents of other countries, prime ministers, ministers, former heads of state and government who are members of the Nizami Ganjavi International Center, about 500 guests, including prominent public and political figures are expected to take part in the forum. As part of the event, it is planned to discuss such global issues as peace and security in the Middle East, the existing geopolitical situation in the Balkans, the growing role of youth in public and political life in the modern period. Baku, Azerbaijan, Feb. 23 Trend: Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev has signed an order to increase the benefit for those on a partially paid social leave to take care of their children. In order to strengthen the social protection of those on a partially paid social leave to take care of their children, the monthly benefit for them will be increased by 10 percent starting from March 1, 2018, according to the order. Baku, Azerbaijan, Feb. 23 Trend: President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev has signed an order on measures to strengthen the technical support to the agricultural sector. According to the order, 160 million manats will be allocated to Aqrolizinq OJSC with the aim of sustainable development of such traditional agricultural areas as grain growing, cotton growing, rice growing, tea growing and horticulture, and meeting the needs of producers of agricultural products in machinery, equipment and kits for irrigation systems. Details added (first version posted on 13:36) Baku, Azerbaijan, Feb. 23 Trend: Azerbaijan's First Vice-President Mehriban Aliyeva has met with head of the Islamic Culture and Relations Organization of the Islamic Republic of Iran Abouzar Ebrahimi Torkaman. First Vice-President Mehriban Aliyeva said that friendly and brotherly relations between the Republic of Azerbaijan and the Islamic Republic of Iran are based on centuries-long cultural and historical bonds of the two countries' peoples. We pay great attention to this historical and cultural heritage, she said. The first vice-president hailed the establishment of relations based on mutual respect and friendship at the level of the states and peoples. Describing the holding of 10 meetings between the two countries' presidents over the past five years as a sign of bilateral ties, Azerbaijan's first vice-president noted that these meetings contributed to strengthening of the cooperation. She stressed that relations between the two countries cover a number of areas, including economy, transport, and most importantly culture. First Vice-President Mehriban Aliyeva stressed the importance of the Days of Azerbaijani Culture as well as the photo exhibition Azerbaijan is a pearl of the Islamic Culture, successfully held in Iran last year, in terms of expanding cooperation in the field of culture. Mehriban Aliyeva expressed her confidence that the Days of Iranian Culture will be excellently organized in Azerbaijan. The first vice-president expressed her hope that head of the Islamic Culture and Relations Organization Abouzar Ebrahimi Torkaman's visit to Baku in connection with the Days of Iranian cinema will be successful. Noting that the Iranian side spared no efforts to excellently organize the Days of Azerbaijani Culture last year, Abouzar Ebrahimi Torkaman praised conditions created by Azerbaijan for organizing the Days of Iranian cinema. He stressed that relations between the two countries are based on cultural and historical bonds. They also discussed the issues related to the declaration of Nakhchivan as a capital of the Islamic culture and Tabriz as a capital of the Islamic tourism, and underlined that there are good opportunities for implementing various projects in the cultural and tourism areas. Baku, Azerbaijan, Feb. 23 Trend: The conjectures voiced by the leadership of Armenia in the pre-election period are aimed at exclusively the domestic consumer, Hikmet Hajiyev, Spokesman for the Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry told Trend commenting on the speech of the Armenian Foreign Minister Edward Nalbandian. Hajiyev said that the Armenian leadership's citing the mythology is not surprising. "It's not a secret for anyone that Armenia has built for itself a reality based on mythical tales. The illogicality voiced by Armenia can only be explained by myths. Such kind of conjectures, voiced by the Armenian leadership during the pre-election period, are designed exclusively for the domestic consumer, "he said. The Foreign Ministry spokesman noted that, just as in the case of the UN Security Council resolutions, instead of familiarizing with the final document of the Eastern Partnership Summit held in Brussels and comprehend it, the Armenian leadership turns to fairy tales and legends. "The final statement of the EU summit in Brussels once again expressed the European Union's commitment to the territorial integrity of the Eastern Partnership countries, including Azerbaijan," he stressed. Baku, Azerbaijan, Feb. 23 Trend: The Azerbaijan State Academic National Drama Theater has staged "An almond tree blossoming" play commemorating the 26th anniversary of Khojaly genocide. Head of the Department of Youth Policy and Sport Issues at the Presidential Administration Yusuf Mammadaliyev, vice-president of the Heydar Aliyev Foundation, founder of Justice for Khojaly campaign Leyla Aliyeva as well as representatives of foreign embassies and youth organizations in Azerbaijan were among the audience. The name of the play is associated with a new logo of Justice for Khojaly campaign picturing a broken branch of an almond tree blossoming in February, which symbolizes unfulfilled destinies of Khojaly people. The almond flower on the logo reflects the hope for securing justice in relation to the genocide committed by the Armenian armed forces on the night from Feb. 25 to 26, 1992 in the Azerbaijani town of Khojaly, an ancient habitat in the Nagorno-Karabakh region of Azerbaijan, and non-recurrence of such ferocious acts. On Feb. 25-26, 1992, the Armenian armed forces, together with the 366th infantry regiment of Soviet troops, stationed in Khankendi, committed an act of genocide against the population of the Azerbaijani town of Khojaly. As many as 613 people, including 63 children, 106 women and 70 old people were killed in the massacre. Eight families were totally exterminated, 130 children lost one parent and 25 children lost both. As many as 1,275 innocent residents were taken hostage, while the fate of 150 people still remains unknown. The play was directed by Gulnar Hajiyeva. Key roles were performed by actors Kerem Hadizade, Zemfira Abdusammad, Mirzaga Mirzayev, Elnur Karimov, Asiya Atakishiyeva, Gushvar Sharifova, Mehriban Huseynova, Zulfiyya Alhuseynova, Elshan Shikhaliyev and Manaf Dadashov. After the performance, vice-president of the Heydar Aliyev Foundation Leyla Aliyeva spoke with the actors. Baku, Azerbaijan, Feb. 23 Trend: Rector of Baku Higher Oil School (BHOS) Elmar Gasimov met with a delegation of Moscow State Institute of International Relations (University) of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation (MGIMO University) visiting Baku. The delegation led by Vice-rector for general affairs and corporate relations of MGIMO University Artem Malgin included Trade Representative of Azerbaijan to Russia, Head of the International Complex Problems of Natural Resources Use and Ecology Department of the university Ruslan Aliyev and Academic supervisor of MGIMOs Master of Business Administration (MBA) program in International Oil and Gas Business specialization Maria Belova. It also comprised representatives of the management of leading Russian companies operating in the oil and gas sector including, among others, PromResurs LLC, PJSC Gazprom Neft, VYGON Consulting, OJSC Varyeganneft and PJSC Gazprom avtomatizatsiya. All of them are either students or graduates of the MBA program of MGIMO University. Opening the meeting, Elmar Gasimov warmly welcomed the guests at the Higher Schools campus. He highly praised activities carried out by MGIMO University and said that the universitys graduates are distinguished by the success they achieve in their work and life. The rector also provided information about the history, establishment, main activities and achievements of the Higher School. Speaking at the meeting, the vice-rector for general affairs and corporate relations of MGIMO University Artem Malgin emphasized that the members of the delegation are very pleased to visit BHOS, which is a modernized education institution meeting the highest international standards. In his words, within a short period of time, the Higher School has managed to attain impressive and outstanding achievements. The meeting participants discussed prospects, spheres and potential of development of cooperation between two higher educational institutions. Then an Agreement on Cooperation between the Baku Higher Oil School and Moscow State Institute of International Relations (University) of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation was signed. During the visit, the guests were given a tour around the BHOS new campus and were acquainted with its facilities. In particular, they were shown training laboratories equipped with the most advanced technologies, educational premises set up in accordance with the best international standards and the modern sport complex. Baku, Azerbaijan, Feb. 23 By Ali Mustafayev Trend: The US embassy in Azerbaijan launched a new project entitled "Knowledge is Power", aimed at supporting the education of children of internally displaced persons (IDPs) from the Zangilan district, US Ambassador to Azerbaijan Robert Cekuta told reporters in Baku Feb. 23. Cekuta said that the task of the US embassy is to support the future generation in Azerbaijan. The ambassador added that presently the US embassys efforts are aimed at supporting the education of children of Azerbaijani IDPs. The US embassys "Knowledge is Power" program will help Azerbaijani children learn English and better use their potential, he said. The ambassador added that the importance of the project to support children of IDPs, funded by the US, is stipulated by the upcoming anniversary of the Khojaly tragedy. All remember the horrors in Khojaly town, the ambassador said. He said that the embassys current goal is not only not to forget what happened, but also to look to the future, invest in the future. Cekuta sees the assistance rendered to children in their education as very important. The English learning program for children of IDPs in Azerbaijan envisages English lessons for children studying at school #4 of the Zangilan district. Since 1991, the US has invested $1.3 billion in Azerbaijans development. About $125 million of that amount was intended to help IDPs. Title changed, details added (first version posted on 14:46) Baku, Azerbaijan, Feb. 23 By Ali Mustafayev Trend: The US embassy in Azerbaijan launched a new project entitled "Knowledge is Power", aimed at supporting the education of children of internally displaced persons (IDPs) from the Zangilan district, US Ambassador to Azerbaijan Robert Cekuta told reporters in Baku Feb. 23. Cekuta said that the task of the US embassy is to support the future generation in Azerbaijan. The ambassador added that presently the US embassys efforts are aimed at supporting the education of children of Azerbaijani IDPs. The US embassys "Knowledge is Power" program will help Azerbaijani children learn English and better use their potential, he said. The ambassador added that the importance of the project to support children of IDPs, funded by the US, is stipulated by the upcoming anniversary of the Khojaly tragedy. All remember the horrors in Khojaly town, the ambassador said. He said that the embassys current goal is not only not to forget what happened, but also to look to the future, invest in the future. Cekuta sees the assistance rendered to children in their education as very important. The English learning program for children of IDPs in Azerbaijan envisages English lessons for children studying at school #4 of the Zangilan district. Since 1991, the US has invested $1.3 billion in Azerbaijans development. About $125 million of that amount was intended to help IDPs. Baku, Azerbaijan, Feb. 23 By Elchin Mehdiyev - Trend: Over 4,000 submissions were sent to courts in Azerbaijan after an order was signed last year by President Ilham Aliyev on the penal policy humanization, Ali Huseynli, chairman of the parliamentary committee for legal policy and state development, said at a plenary session of parliament Feb. 23. He noted that after this order, the Azerbaijani parliament made changes to the Criminal Code and the Code of Administrative Offenses, and the application of the law started on Dec. 1, 2017. According to the submissions, 479 prisoners were released, 585 prisoners had their terms of sentence shortened, 465 persons were released from other types of punishment, and 59 prisoners had their punishment alleviated," Huseynli said. He noted that in addition it is planned to send submissions regarding 5,000 prisoners. Baku, Azerbaijan, Feb. 23 Trend: Azerbaijani leading mobile operator Azercell Telecom has gained another success at international level. The company was benchmarked against the requirements of Investors in People (IIP) standard and awarded GOLD Level of Standard as a mark of strong leadership, sustainable corporate culture and continuous development of people management practices. Notably, Azercell is the only company in Azerbaijan and the only telecom company in CIS with this level of recognition. Azercell CEO Vahid Mursaliyev considers this award a great achievement of the company. Azercell applied the best international practices in people management from the beginning of its activity. All processes followed by the company and current system accord with the international practices. Azercell met all the requirements set forth to achieve the certificate for the first time in 2004 and we were awarded Silver Certificate in 2011 and 2014. Azercell has demonstrated high performance during the certification process conducted in January 2018, and was awarded Gold Level of the standard as a proof of reaching international level in human resources management. It should be mentioned that the company has invested 23.338.153,45 USD on the development of its human resources through the period from 1996 to 2017, which is quite a significant amount. We are a leader in human resources management as in all fields we operate, he said. Ziba Mustafayeva, Head of Human Resources Management Department at Azercell Telecom LLC, noted that the company passed a rigorous audit to obtain IIP certificate. Investors in People audited the company against 9 performance indicators. During the Gold level IIP accreditation process, the assessor took into account the results of on-line employee survey, sight visit to Azercell and one to one interviews conducted with representatives of Azercell, as well as audit of human resources practices. This certificate is the indicator of our development in human resources management practices, she underlined. Paul Devoy, Head of Investors in People, also valued Azercells win of Gold Certificate as an outstanding success: Wed like to congratulate Azercell. Investors in People accreditation is the sign of a great employer, an outperforming place to work and a clear commitment to success. Azercell should be extremely proud of their achievement., he added. Launched in 1991 in the UK, Investors in People is the only internationally recognized standard in people management. At present, it covers 78 countries and over 10,000 companies worldwide. Current 6th generation standard has been implemented at international scale since 2015. For more information, please contact [email protected] The leader of the mobile communication industry, the largest taxpayer and the biggest investor of the non-oil sector of Azerbaijan Azercell Telecom LLC was founded in 1996. With 48% share of Azerbaijans mobile telecom market Azercells network covers 80% of the territory (excluding 20% of the occupied territories) and 99.8% of population of the country. Currently, 4.5 million subscribers choose Azercell services. Azercell has pioneered an important number of innovations in Azerbaijan, including GSM technology, advance payment system, mobile internet services, Metro coverage, 24/7 call centre service, 7 day/week Front Office service, M2M services, one-stop-shopping approach Azercell Express offices, Online Customer Care and Social Media Customer Care services, Mobile Customer Care office, mobile e-signature service ASAN Imza etc. Azercell deployed first 4G LTE services in Azerbaijan in 2012. According to the results of mobile network quality surveys of Global Wireless Solutions company and international systems specialized in wireless coverage mapping such as Opensignal and Testmy.net, Azercells network demonstrated the best results among the mobile operators of Azerbaijan. Baku, Azerbaijan, Feb. 23 Trend: Within the frames of its corporate social responsibility (CSR) strategy, Nar continues successful cooperation with Azerbaijan Technical University (AzTU). After the opening of the Nar laboratory, supplied with the special equipment, at Azerbaijan Technical University, the mobile operator now continues to develop its relations with AzTU in quite few various directions. The University has announced the names of high-achieving students, who have demonstrated the best results during the past semester. The best 3 students of the past semester, Nurana Gulhasanli, Tarverdi Taghiyev and Konul Ahmedova have taken the 1st, 2nd and 3rd places respectively and received special prizes from Nar. Paying special importance to the development of education, with this initiative Nar continues to provide additional motivation for students to be even more successful in their studies. It should be noted that within the frames of partnership agreement signed with Azerbaijan Technical University, Nar established a GSM laboratory at AzTU, where the students gain theoretical and practical knowledge in the area of GSM. This special laboratory, supplied with the latest telecommunications equipment by Nar, hosts trainings and seminars for the students, conducted by professional technical personnel. A large group of young people, who have developed their practical knowledge by means of this program, have already taken their first steps by working for a mobile operator, to grow as young qualified specialists in this particular field. Equipment of the universitys lab and conducting special internship program for students is being implemented within Nars CSR strategy, especially aimed at youth and education. Visit nar.az for more detailed information about the CSR strategy of Nar. Azerfon LLC (Nar) started its operations on March 21, 2007, and within a short period of time became one of the leading companies of the telecommunications and mobile communication industry of Azerbaijan. The Nar brand name was later selected as the symbol that resembles the cohesion of the rich cultural and historical heritage of Azerbaijan with the modern life. Being the first operator in the country to introduce the 3G technology, Nar provides the customers with a wide 4G network coverage. Moreover, within the frames of its strategy aimed at continuous improvement of the network quality, the operator has introduced the HD-Voice service, which ensures a significant increase of the quality and flawless transmission of voice. With a large network of over 6500 base stations, covering 93% of the countrys territory, Nar provides more than 2 million subscribers with the highest quality services. Baku, Azerbaijan, Feb. 23 Trend: Ambassador Robert F. Cekuta and Mrs. Cekuta , along with Cabinet of Ministers representative Mahammad Guliyev, joined 33 students to kick off the "Knowledge is Power!" English language learning program at school No. 4 for internally displaced people (IDP) from Zangilan. This program will provide Zangilans young people with English language skills, opening doors to other new skills and stronger participation in the global economy. The Ambassador and Mrs. Cekuta also took part in an English speaking exercise with the students and learned about their goals and aspirations. Funded by the U.S. Embassy and administered by the American Councils for International Education and the Azerbaijan University of Languages, "Knowledge is Power" provides English language skills to economically disadvantaged high school students from IDP schools through afterschool programming, helping build their career readiness and confidence. "Knowledge is Power" will include four hours per week of structured, classroom learning, with classes held two days per week. The U.S. Embassy is dedicated to supporting the IDP community in Azerbaijan, and offering young people in particular the educational foundation they need to build strong futures for themselves, their communities, and Azerbaijan. The United States has provided $1.3 billion to support Azerbaijans development since 1991, including $125 million to assist Azerbaijans IDP communities. Baku, Azerbaijan, Feb. 23 Trend: As part of the Fourth Session of the Islamic Conference of Labor Ministers of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) in Jeddah city, head of the Azerbaijani delegation, Minister of Labor and Social Protection of Population Salim Muslumov has met with Minister of Labor and Social Development of Saudi Arabia Ali bin Nasser al-Ghafis and Indonesian Minister for Manpower and Transmigration Muhammad Hanif Dhakiri, Azerbaijans Ministry of Labor and Social Protection of Population said in a message Feb. 23. Muslumov at the meeting with Ali bin Nasser al-Ghafis stressed the active cooperation of Azerbaijan and Saudi Arabia in the field of labor and social protection within the OIC. Ali bin Nasser al-Ghafis expressed satisfaction with the constantly developing relations between the two countries and noted interest in strengthening cooperation with Azerbaijan in the field of labor and social protection. During the meeting with Muhammad Hanif Dhakiri, Muslumov told about the possibility of an effective exchange of experience and knowledge in improving the manpower skills. Dhakiri stressed the work carried out in accordance with changes in the labor market of Saudi Arabia. The sides discussed issues of further cooperation in the areas of mutual interest, the draft Memorandum of Understanding on Cooperation in the Field of Labor and Social Protection between the Ministry of Labor and Social Protection of Population of Azerbaijan and the Ministry of Labor and Social Development of Saudi Arabia and the Memorandum of Understanding on Cooperation between the Ministry of Labor and Social Protection of Population of Azerbaijan and the Ministry for Manpower and Transmigration of Indonesia. During the meetings, Muslumov invited Ali bin Nasser al-Ghafis and Muhammad Hanif Dhakiri to pay a working visit to Azerbaijan. Baku, Azerbaijan, Feb.23 By Nigar Guliyeva - Trend: The "open sky" regime will be introduced on the territory of the three more international airports of Uzbekistan - Andijan, Nukus and Navoi. This was announced during a video conference held under the chairmanship of Shavkat Mirziyoyev on the development of the tourism sector on Feb.22. The "open sky" regime allows foreign airlines to perform international flights to the airport without restrictions on the number of flights. Furthermore, the president strongly criticized the activity of Uzbekistan Airways in attracting tourists. He said the air carrier does not conduct efficient work to optimize prices for air tickets, open new flights, expand the possibilities of transit transportation of passengers and the geography of flights. Mirziyoyev tasked in the near future to introduce modern marketing technologies in the airline's activity, create an opportunity to purchase air tickets through the systems available in leading airports of the world, as well as phones and tablets. there was reported that within two days after the abolition of visa regime for citizens of Israel by Uzbekistan, tickets for flights to Tashkent were sold out by the end of June. Thus, additional flights should be opened to countries with visa-free regime, as well as direct flights from other states to Bukhara, Samarkand, Urgench, Navoi and Karshi. Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, Feb. 23 By Huseyn Hasanov - Trend: Turkmen President Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov received Director General of the Asian Development Bank's Central and West Asia Department Werner Liepach, the Turkmen Dovlet Habarlary (TDH) state news agency reported on Feb. 23. President Berdimuhamedov expressed gratitude to the ADB leadership for the constructive approach to the partnership, appreciating the participation of such an authoritative structure as the Asian Development Bank in financing the implementation of the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) gas pipeline project. Turkmenistan stands for expansion of fruitful cooperation with this international financial organization, with which the experience of successful joint work has already been accumulated. Liepach stressed the prospect of strengthening business ties with Turkmenistan, which has a huge economic and resource potential and has proved itself in the world arena as a responsible and reliable partner. Baku, Azerbaijan, Feb.23 By Nigar Guliyeva - Trend: Coca-Cola company in Uzbekistan decided to restore production of "FuseTea", thus increasing production in the country, Uzbek media reported. General director of Coca-Cola Bottlers Uzbekistan Ltd. (known as Coca-Cola Ichimligi Uzbekiston) Fahriddin Normatov said that the company plans to launch production of new types of products, including the FuseTea brand, this year. FruitTea has disappeared from the shelves in Uzbekistan a few years ago. In general, the company's product line in the country has five brands, among which Coca-Cola is the most popular. Earlier, Normatov said that the company plans to increase investments this year, part of which will be directed to the purchase of display refrigerators. Also, the sales system of the products of the Coca-Cola plant in Uzbekistan will be improved. The first Coca-Cola plant in Uzbekistan was built in Tashkent in 1994, and enterprises were opened in Urgench and Namangan in 1997. Coca-Cola Ichimligi Uzbekiston is a part of holding company "Uzbekkozovaktovholding" and is one of the largest enterprises of the food industry of the country. Baku, Azerbaijan, Feb. 23 By Anvar Mammadov Trend: South Korea and Azerbaijan agreed to expand bilateral economic cooperation in infrastructure and other sectors, the South Korean Finance Ministry said Feb. 23. The two sides held high-level talks in Seoul to discuss ways to bolster trade and investment and help more South Korean firms participate in infrastructure projects in the Central Asian country, according to the ministry. Azerbaijan, located along the Caspian Sea, is known for its rich natural resources, including crude oil and natural gas. The country is working on projects to expand its infrastructure, such as roads and railways. During a meeting with South Korean Deputy Finance Minister Ko Hyung-kwon, Azerbaijan's Deputy Finance Minister Emin Huseynov urged South Korean companies to join his country's efforts to expand infrastructure. Ko responded by saying that the Azerbaijani government should play a key role in wooing South Korean companies to the nation. Baku, Azerbaijan, Feb. 23 By Anvar Mammadov - Trend: Secretary General of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) Yousef Al-Othaimeen urged the member states to expedite the signing and ratification of the statute of OIC Labor Center, a specialized institution of the organization to be based in Baku, the Arab media reported. Al-Othaimeen was speaking at the Fourth Session of the Islamic Conference of Labor Ministers on Feb. 21-22, in Jeddah. Creating the center was proposed by Azerbaijan's President Ilham Aliyev at the Second Session of the Islamic Conference of Labor Ministers, held in April 2013 in Baku. He said at the conference that the reforms being held by Azerbaijan are aimed at eliminating unemployment, and the countrys experience may be useful for the OIC member states. President Aliyev added that the creation of such a structure in Baku may strengthen cooperation of the organizations member countries. The proposal of Azerbaijani president received a unanimous support of the OIC member states. During the subsequent events, the draft charter concept of the structure was prepared and submitted to the OIC member states for consideration. After the charter is ratified by 10 countries, it will enter into force. Joining efforts to solve issues of employment, social protection of citizens, and coordination of work in this sphere will be the main purposes of the OIC Labor Center. Baku, Azerbaijan, Feb. 23 By Maksim Tsurkov - Trend: Austria is interested in participating in the implementation of infrastructure projects in Azerbaijan, Secretary General of the Austrian Federal Ministry for Transport, Innovation and Technology Andreas Reichhardt said during a meeting with Head of Azerbaijan Railways CJSC Javid Gurbanov in Baku, the company said in a message. Gurbanov informed the Austrian side about the reforms being carried out in the railway sector of Azerbaijan, the projects of the Trans-Caspian International Transport Route, the North-South and South-West corridors, as well as the launch of the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars (BTK) railway. Reichhardt, in turn, noted that in recent years, the relations between Azerbaijan and Austria have been expanding in all directions, including in the economy sphere. At the end of the meeting, a decision was made to further expand bilateral cooperation. Baku, Azerbaijan, Feb.23 By Nigar Guliyeva - Trend: Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan will increase the number of jointly produced passenger cars to 7,000, Kazakh media reported referring to Kazakhstan's Ambassador to Uzbekistan Yerik Utembayev. "We consider partnership with GM Motors Uzbekistan as a long-term and strategic project, and an agreement has been reached to assemble cars up to 7,000 units a year," Utembayev said during a visit to the largest machine-building plant in Andijan. He further noted that the sides also plan to establish production of agricultural machinery and buses. The envoy said that an agreement had already been reached with the Samarkand automobile manufacturer, which produces buses of the Isuzu brand. In the near future, these buses are planned to be launched along the Tashkent-Shymkent route, and further to organize their joint assembly in Kazakhstan. Utembayev noted that Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan are planning to create a joint large cluster for production of cars and spare parts. Last year, Uzavtosanoat and Kazakhstan's Allure Group of Companies signed a memorandum on mutual cooperation. Within the framework of the memorandum, the companies intend to expand and strengthen mutually beneficial economic cooperation. The parties will develop a long-term cooperation strategy for increasing sales and occupying the dominant market share in Kazakhstan. Previously, a special roadmap has been developed between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Last year, the two sides signed 170 agreements. Furthermore, the parties intend to link the border zones in the southern part of Kazakhstan and Tashkent, as well as Andijan with Almaty. In 2017, the trade turnover between the two countries amounted to more than $ 2 billion. Astana and Tashkent set the task to increase the volume of mutual trade by 2020 to $ 5 billion. Baku, Azerbaijan, Feb.23 By Leman Zeynalova Trend: The Netherlands can offer technical support for the Baku International Sea Trade Port in Alat township in Azerbaijan, former president of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), chairman of the Dutch Friends of Azerbaijan Group Rene van der Linden said in an exclusive interview with Trend. He noted that in March a high-level delegation from the Port of Baku will visit Venlo, the most important logistics center in the Netherlands on the mainland. We have huge industrial settlements, all connected to logistics facilities. We can offer the most modern innovative way of dealing with logistics, said Rene van der Linden. He noted that at the moment, the discussions are being held at the level of Dutch government and the Port of Baku. Azerbaijan is now building a modern port with all the facilities and the Netherlands can render technical support on the basis of its longstanding experience. Earlier, Azerbaijans Economy Minister Shahin Mustafayev said that the first phase of construction of the Baku International Sea Trade Port in Alat settlement will be completed in May 2018. Mustafayev noted that after the first phases completion, the ports capacity will be 15 million tons per year. The ports capacity will be increased up to 25 million tons of cargo and 500,000 containers per year at the second stage, and up to one million containers per year at the next stage, noted the minister. In 2017, the volume of freight traffic through the Baku International Sea Trade Port (excluding the oil terminal) rose by 31 percent and totaled 4.4 million tons as compared to 2016. About 85.7 percent of the total volume accounted for the share of transit cargo transportation. --- Follow the author on Twitter: @Lyaman_Zeyn Baku, Azerbaijan, Feb. 23 By Ali Mustafayev Trend: The US is developing a number of programs to strengthen economic cooperation with Azerbaijan, the US Ambassador to Azerbaijan Robert Secuta told Trend. According to the ambassador, the three main spheres of cooperation between Azerbaijan and the US are economy, including energy, security and supremacy of law and democracy. These three directions are mutually complementary and lead to increase in foreign investments, as well as to the strengthening of economic relations with the US. In Oct. 2017, the US has sent to Azerbaijan the largest trade mission in the history of bilateral relations, Secuta said. The US actively supports the Southern Gas Corridor project and BakuTbilisiKars railway, which is a part of the new Silk Road, he noted. The ambassador added that the countries also cooperate in security sphere and that Azerbaijan hugely supports the US in its Afghanistan mission. Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, Feb. 23 By Huseyn Hasanov Trend: The 25th meeting of the Governing Committee on TurkmenistanAfghanistanPakistanIndia (TAPI) gas pipeline construction project was held in Mary city of Turkmenistan, Turkmen Oil and Gas Complex said in a message. Delegations of member-countries and representatives of Asian Development Bank participated in the meeting. A number of topics concerning the technical and financial points of the cooperation were discussed, the report said. The meeting was chaired by Deputy Chairman of Turkmen Cabinet of Ministers Maksat Babayev. India was represented by Minister of State for External Affairs Mobashar Jawed Akbar, Pakistani side by Minister of State for Petroleum Jam Kamal Khan, Afghani side by Minister of Mines and Petroleum Nargis Nehan. Asian Development Bank was represented by Director General of Central and West Asia Department Werner Liepach. Turkmen President Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov underlined special importance of the TAPI transnational gas pipeline. The head of state noted that the pipeline will become the most important link in modern Turkmen gas infrastructure that is being developed in accordance with the evergrowing demands of various spheres of the national economy and worldwide demand on energy supply. Construction of the Turkmen section of the TAPI gas pipeline began in December 2015. The design capacity of TAPI reaches 33 billion cubic meters of gas per year. Construction of the Afghan section of the TAPI gas pipeline will start on Feb. 23. The pipeline is scheduled to run along the Kandahar-Herat Highway in western Afghanistan, and further through the cities of Quetta and Multan in Pakistan. The pipelines route will end in the Indian city of Fazilka. The total length of the TAPI pipeline will be 1,814 kilometers - a 214-kilometer section of the pipeline will run through Turkmenistan, a 774-kilometer section will run through Afghanistan and an 826-kilometer section will go through Pakistan. Baku, Azerbaijan, Feb.23 By Leman Zeynalova Trend: Around 400 kilometers or 52 percent of the territories along Trans Adriatic Pipeline (TAP) route in Greece and Albania are being reinstated, said a message from TAP AG consortium, engaged in the pipelines construction. After construction, all land is reinstated to at least its original condition. Nearly 400km along our route (about 52 percent out of 765km) in Greece and Albania are being reinstated. Our commitment to environment is at heart of our project, said the message. TAP, worth 4.5 billion euros, is a part of the Southern Gas Corridor which is one of the priority energy projects for the EU. TAP project envisages transportation of gas from the Stage 2 of development of Azerbaijan's Shah Deniz gas and condensate field to the EU countries. The pipeline will be connected to the Trans-Anatolian Pipeline (TANAP) on the Turkish-Greek border, run through Greece, Albania and the Adriatic Sea, before coming ashore in Italy's south. TAPs shareholders are: BP (20 percent), State Oil Company of Azerbaijan (20 percent), Snam (20 percent), Fluxys (19 percent), Enagas (16 percent) and Axpo (5 percent). TAP will be 878 kilometers in length (Greece 550 km, Albania 215 km, Adriatic Sea 105 km, and Italy 8 km). Its highest point will be 1,800 meters in Albanias mountains, while its lowest point will be 820 meters beneath the sea. --- Follow the author on Twitter: @Lyaman_Zeyn Baku, Azerbaijan, Feb.23 By Leman Zeynalova Trend: OPEC and participating non-OPEC countries have in the month of January 2018, once again, broken their conformity record, achieving a level of 133 percent, Joint Technical Committee reported. This solid performance during the first month of the second year of the Declaration of Cooperation continues a remarkable upward trend seen throughout 2017, and demonstrates the commitment of participating countries to the restoration of market stability, in the interests of producers, consumers and the global economy, said a message from OPEC. The OPEC-Non-OPEC Joint Ministerial Monitoring Committee (JMMC) expressed satisfaction with the overall results, but noted the recent market volatility, stressing the importance of vigilance and the need to avoid complacency. The JMMC also noted that performance was not uniform and that conformity was boosted by several over-performing countries, and therefore urged all participating countries to continue and, to the extent possible, intensify their collective and individual efforts, in order to expedite the rebalancing of the oil market. Throughout 2018, the JMMC will focus on striving to maintain or exceed full conformity by all participating countries. The next meeting of the JMMC will take place in Saudi Arabia, in April. OPEC and several other non-OPEC producers have reached an agreement to extend the production deal for a further nine months. This would shift the expiration date of the agreement from March to the end of 2018. The agreement is on the same terms as those agreed in November 2016. --- Follow the author on Twitter: @Lyaman_Zeyn Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, Feb. 23 By Huseyn Hasanov Trend: The Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan (TAPI) electric power-line construction launch ceremony was held on Feb. 23, a source close to the project told Trend. Previous reports indicated that Turkish Calyk Holding showed interest in participating in this 500-kilovolt power-line construction. Turkmenistan currently supplies neighboring Afghanistan with electricity. Turkmenistan built additional stations and high-voltage power-lines to increase the power export. There are large possibilities in power export to Tajikistan, Pakistan and India via Afghanistan, Turkmen Energy Ministry said previously. Turkmenistan exports electric power to Iran, Afghanistan and Turkey. Ashgabat plans to produce 27.4 billion kilowatt-hours of electric power in 2020 and increase the figure to 35.5 billion kilowatt-hours in 2030. Baku, Azerbaijan, Feb. 23 By Maksim Tsurkov Trend: Azerbaijan supplied over 6.54 billion cubic meters (bcm) of gas to Turkey in 2017, as compared to 6.48 bcm in 2016, says the report posted on the website of the Energy Market Regulatory Authority (EPDK) of Turkey. According to the report, in 2017, Turkey imported 55.2 bcm of gas, of which 44.43 bcm were imported through pipelines, and 10.76 bcm fell on LNG imports. The share of Azerbaijan in the total volume of gas imported to Turkey for the reporting period was 11.9 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. --- Follow the author on Twitter: @MaksimTsurkov Baku, Azerbaijan, Feb. 23 By Leman Zeynalova Trend: It is expected to complete 80 percent of the Trans Adriatic Pipeline (TAP) project by late 2018, Trend learned from TAP AG consortium, engaged in construction of the pipeline. "At this point of time TAP is progressing well on schedule, having completed 2/3 of the project so far. TAP will continue to progress construction works this year. TAP expects to have completed 80 of the project by the end of this year," TAP Head of Communications Lisa Givert told Trend. Regarding the possibility for TAPs awarding new contracts or holding new tenders, she noted that TAPs procurement process is complete and all strategic contracts have been awarded in early 2016. Touching upon the decision of the European Investment Bank (EIB) to allocate 1.5 billion euros for the project, Givert said that this is in line with TAPs project financing strategy. "The funds will be used to finance the ongoing project works as it progresses towards commercial and operational start up in 2020," she added. TAP is a part of the Southern Gas Corridor which is one of the priority energy projects for the EU. TAP project envisages transportation of gas from the Stage 2 of development of Azerbaijan's Shah Deniz gas and condensate field to the EU countries. The pipeline will be connected to the Trans-Anatolian Pipeline (TANAP) on the Turkish-Greek border, run through Greece, Albania and the Adriatic Sea, before coming ashore in Italy's south. TAPs shareholders are: BP (20 percent), State Oil Company of Azerbaijan (20 percent), Snam (20 percent), Fluxys (19 percent), Enagas (16 percent) and Axpo (5 percent). TAP will be 878 kilometers in length (Greece 550 km, Albania 215 km, Adriatic Sea 105 km, and Italy 8 km). Its highest point will be 1,800 meters in Albanias mountains, while its lowest point will be 820 meters beneath the sea. --- Follow the author on Twitter: @Lyaman_Zeyn Baku, Azerbaijan, Feb. 23 By Maksim Tsurkov Trend: Turkey imported 28.64 billion cubic meters of gas from Russia in 2017 as compared to 24.54 billion cubic meters in 2016, says a report posted on the website of Turkeys Energy Market Regulatory Authority (EPDK). The report says that Turkey imported 55.2 billion cubic meters of gas in 2017, of which 44.43 billion cubic meters were imported via pipelines and 10.76 billion cubic meters accounted for import of liquefied natural gas (LNG). Russias share in Turkeys total import of gas was 51.9 percent in 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. The main goal of the Government of Kyrgyzstan for 2018 will be to maintain macroeconomic stability, this was stated by Prime Minister Sapar Isakov at Governmental meeting, Kabar reports. He stressed that another important goal for 2018 is competitiveness. "The priority task is the implementation of Forty Steps to New Era Project. In addition, a plan of Governmental Agenda has been approved. It consists of 40 sections and includes 396 measures. Ambitious but achievable tasks were set for 2018. It is important for us to work on time. If we work out everything according to the plan of events, we will have good indicators," the Head of Government said. The Prime Minister stressed that 2017 economic growth outperformed the forecasted figures and the GDP grew by 4.3%. "I particularly wanted to emphasize that Kyrgyzstan has improved its position in the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU). We are in the second place. A positive growth rate is observed in all industries. The main engine has become the industrial sector," the Head of Government stressed. Isakov also said that the external trade in 2017 keeps the trend and grew by 13.8%. "Exports to countries of the EEU increased by 27-28%. These are good indicators for the beginning the Prime Minister added. Baku, Azerbaijan, Feb. 23 By Nigar Guliyeva- Trend: Moscow and Tashkent have established a trusting political dialogue, the tone of which is set by contacts at the highest level, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said at a meeting with Uzbek Foreign Minister Abdulaziz Kamilov on Feb.23, Tass reports. "We are glad to see your interdepartmental delegation, which has held different meetings in Moscow," Lavrov said. "We value our trustful dialogue, the tone of which is set by contacts at the highest level." He further added that the state visit of Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev to Russia in April 2017 was a turning point in the development of bilateral relations. "We value the close coordination of actions through the Foreign Ministry," the minister said, "The foreign ministries have a responsibility to monitor the implementation of the agreements reached at the highest level. Today we will sign the Plan of the inter-ministerial consultations for 2018-2019, and I expect very useful negotiations. " The trade turnover between Russia and Uzbekistan for 2017 increased by almost 34 percent, to $3.65 billion compared to the previous year. "Uzbekistan is one of Russia's leading economic partners in the CIS. Russia's share in the total volume of Uzbekistan's foreign trade hit 18.1 percent in 2017. Baku, Azerbaijan, Feb. 21 By Gazenfer Hamidov Trend: Iran plans to export surplus wheat to Indonesia, the Islamic Republics commercial attache to Indonesia, Anvar Kamari, said. The PR department of the Trade Promotion Organization of Iran(TPOI) quoted Karami as saying that Indonesia is estimated to become the worlds biggest wheat importer in 2018, importing 12.5 million tons of the staple agricultural product. The South eastern Asian country can be considered as main destination of Irans wheat exports, given the fact that the Islamic Republic plans to increase its wheat output, Kamari said. Iran saw a considerable surge in the volume of wheat output over the current fiscal year (starting March 21, 2017). Australia, Canada, Ukraine and the US are main suppliers of cereals, including wheat, to Indonesia. According to the latest report by the agriculture ministry of Iran, the countrys exports of wheat surged by 1,351 percent over the first nine months of the current year. Some 276,410 tons of wheat worth of $70.78 million was exported in the mentioned period. The value of wheat exports in this period increased by 758 percent. Indonesia was 10th target of Irans non-oil exports during the first 10 months of the current fiscal year, according to the TPOIs latest data. The country imported $465 million worth of goods from Iran, registering a huge rise by 267 percent. The volume of Irans exports to the Asian country in the 10-month period amounted to 1.4 million tons, 98 percent more year-on-year. Baku, Azerbaijan, Feb.25 By Khalid Kazimov Trend: Iran Civil Aviation Organization has temporarily banned Aseman airlines form flying ATR planes after a plane produced by the Franco-Italian manufacturer ploughed into a mountain top in the Middle Eastern Country on Feb. 18. Iran Civil Aviation Organization says ATR 200 and ATR 500 planes will resume flying after the investigations on the safety are completed. Aseman Airlines' flight EP3704 with 66 people on board went missing on February 18 in Iran's Central Province. The rescue team located the wreckage from the ATR on Feb. 21 after three days of searching in a vast mountainous area in central Iran. According to Civil Aviation Organization of Iran, seven French experts have already arrived in Tehran to participate in the investigation into the plane crash. ATR earlier on Feb. 21 told Trend that the circumstances of the accident are unknown, so far. Baku, Azerbaijan, Feb. 23 By Gazenfer Hamidov Trend: The latest data released by Trade Promotion Organization of Iran (TPOI), shows that two European countries have taken spots among Irans top non-oil exports destinations. Italy and Germany were the only European countries in the top 20 of Irans non-oil export destinations in the first 10 months of the current fiscal year (started March 20, 2017). Germany imported $282 million worth of goods from Iran in the 10-month period and stood at 18th place, meanwhile Italy ranked 17th with $314 million worth of imports. Irans exports to Germany witnessed a rise by 11 percent in terms of value, however Italys imports from the Islamic Republic decreased by 23 percent. Iran exported 38,000 tons of goods to Germany, 21 percent more year-on-year. the countrys exports to Italy amounted to 563,000 tons, 22 percent less compared to the first 10 months of the preceding fiscal year. Over 65 percent of Iran's export was targeted to five Asian countries, including China, the UAE, Iraq, South Korea and Turkey during the first 10 months of the current fiscal year. China, Irans traditional trade partner from the sanctions period, has maintained its position as the Islamic Republics top trade partner in the period. Over 20.6 percent of Irans non-oil exports went to China in the first 10 months of the current fiscal year (March 20-Jan. 21). During the period, Iran exported $7.422 billion worth of goods to China, 11 percent more, compared to the same period of the preceding year. Under the sanctions, the Islamic Republic shifted its trade eastward, and expanded economic ties with countries such as China and India. Iran exported $5.135 billion worth of goods to the UAE, which marked 13.8 percent of Iran's total exports value. Meanwhile, Irans exports to the UAE registered a fall by 19 percent year-on-year. Iraq ($5.04 billion), South Korea (with $3.412 billion), Turkey ($3.155 billion), India ($2.277 billion), Afghanistan ($2.223 billion), Pakistan ($730 million), Thailand ($586 million), Indonesia ($465 million), Oman ($416 million), Taiwan ($383 million), Japan ($379 million), Turkmenistan ($356 million), Vietnam ($328 million), Hong Kong($319 million), Azerbaijan ($245 million) and Syria($219 million) were the other top importers of Iranian goods. The value of exports to Turkey, which was fourth target of Irans non-oil exports last fiscal year, had registered an increase by 11 percent. The countrys exports to the UAE, Japan and Oman registered fall of 19, 63 and 14 percent. Irans exports to India, Vietnam, Taiwan and Turkmenistan also witnessed a fall by 3, 12, 21 and 18 percent, respectively in terms of value, year on year. Meanwhile, exports to Indonesia and Thailand witnessed huge rise by 267 and 150 percent, in terms of value, respectively. Irans exports to South Korea and Syria had also increased by 33 percent and 24 percent, respectively. Irans exports to Hong Kong (14 percent increase), Pakistan (9 percent) and Afghanistan (6 percent) also witnessed growth in the period. European Union leaders will lay down the first markers on Friday on the size and aims of the blocs next long-term budget, as a large hole in its finances begins to take shape with next years departure of one of its main net contributors, Reuters reports. All EU states except Britain are to say in a summit debate whether they agree to increase the 2021-2027 budget to pay for new common policies on security, defense and migration, at a time when Brexit will slash revenues to the common pot by 10-12 billion euros ($12.3-14.8 billion) a year. We need a new start for Europe, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Thursday, adding the budget discussion could lead to some major changes. The debate about the future financial framework is also a chance to look at the finances of the EU as a whole, she said. British finance minister Philip Hammond said on Friday that talks the previous evening to soothe Brexit differences within Prime Minister Theresa Mays government had been positive and constructive, Reuters reports. Positive and constructive meeting ... last night, Hammond, who is widely viewed as the most pro-European of Mays top ministers, said on Twitter. Were now making steady progress to delivering #Brexit - with a real sense of momentum as we move towards March European Council and agreement on implementation period, he added. One source close to Thursdays meeting told Reuters earlier that May had accepted the argument of those ministers who wanted to move away from EU rules and regulations more quickly than others. A major Israeli security company that manufactures the radars for the Iron Dome missile interception system has sold 100 units of the radar to nine countries for a total of about $2 billion, an official in the company said, according to a report published on Thursday, Times of Israel reports. Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) has sold its multi-mission radar to countries including Israel, Canada, and India, said Eyal Shapira, director of Air surveillance and counter rocket, artillery, and mortar (C-RAM) at ELTA Systems, a subsidiary of IAI, according to the Calcalist news website. More units of the radar are to be purchased soon by the Czech Republic, Shapira reportedly said Wednesday. The radar is used as part of the Israeli air defense systems Iron Dome and Davids Sling. Shapira was quoted saying the system is capable of detecting drones and planes in addition to missiles. The Iron Dome system is the lowest tier of Israels multi-layer air defense, capable of intercepting short-range missiles. Davids Sling is intended to engage missiles with a range of 70-250 kilometers. The third layer is the Arrow-2 and Arrow-3, intended to engage long-range missiles. Australian Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce said on Friday he will resign as leader of his party and will move to the backbench after weeks of pressure over an extra-marital affair with his former media secretary, Reuters reported. Joyce said he will step down on Monday as leader of the National party, the junior partner in Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbulls centre-right coalition. He will remain in parliament, safeguarding Turnbulls shaky one-seat majority. Joyce, a practising Catholic, has been married for 24 years and has campaigned on family values. The Indian armed forces have successfully test-fired nuclear-capable surface-to-surface ballistic missile Dhanush in full operational configuration on Friday morning from a naval warship positioned in the Bay of Bengal. The trial was conducted at about 10.52 am (Indian Standard Time) by the Strategic Forces Command (SFC) of the Navy from an undisclosed location nearly 45 km from the Paradip coast, Sputnik International reports. The Dhanush missile is a single-stage, liquid-propelled, short-range ballistic missile and is the naval variant of the Prithvi missile. This was the third test of this version of a Prithvi missile this month. On Wednesday, the SFC of Indian Army had successfully conducted the first night trial of Prithvi-II ballistic missile from the Integrated Test Range (ITR) off Odisha coast. The missile is about 8.53 meters in length and 0.9 meters in diameter; its launch weight totals about 4.4 metric tons. Dhanush has already been inducted into the armed forces and is under production after it successfully completed several developmental and user trials. A double suicide car bomb blast followed by gunfire has left at least 18 people dead and wounded 20 others in Somalia's capital, Mogadishu, medical workers said, Aljazeera.com reports. A loud explosion reportedly took place on Friday, followed by a second blast and sustained gunfire which broke out near the president's residence. The Aamin Ambulance service, which confirmed the death toll, transported victims to the hospital. The armed group al-Shabab claimed responsibility for the attack. "As far as we know, there has been one blast beside the presidential palace, and another close to a popular hotel," Major Mohamed Ahmed, a police officer, told local media. The attack comes a day after the Somali government had issued a "terror warning" in the capital. Baku, Azerbaijan, Feb. 23 By Rufiz Hafizoglu Trend: Turkish armed forces eliminated five foreign terrorists in Syrian Afrin in the framework of Olive Branch operation, with three of them being American citizens, Turkish media reported on Feb. 23. Recently, citizens of Canada, Germany and the US were eliminated among the PYD/YPG terrorists. Three citizens of the Netherlands, Spain and France fighting among PYD/YPG terrorist groups were eliminated during the fights on Feb. 19. As of today, number of foreign terrorists eliminated in the framework of Olive Branch operation exceeds 120 people, Turkish media outlets said. Citizens of the USA, France, Germany, China, Japan and a number of other countries fight among the PYD/YPG terrorists, was reported earlier. On Jan. 20, the Turkish Armed Forces, together with the Free Syrian Army, launched the Operation Olive Branch in Afrin, Syria. Earlier, Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim announced that about 8,00010,000 PYD/YPG terrorists are supposed to be hiding in Afrin, Syria. Turkey began drawing its military to the Syrian border from the late June, 2017. The forces were being concentrated in Turkish Kilis province bordering Syrian territory controlled by YPG/PYD. On Aug. 24, 2016, Turkish Armed Forces, with the support of the Syrian opposition, launched the Euphrates Shield operation against the IS militants and liberated the city of Jarabulus as well as the city of Al-Bab in northern Syria. --- Follow the author on Twitter: @rhafizoglu Baku, Azerbaijan, Feb. 23 By Rufiz Hafizoglu Trend: About 90 percent of the armament and military technologies used against terrorists in Syrian Afrin are of Turkish production, a source in the Turkish government told Trend. According to the information, Alpagu Drone so-called kamikaze drones, Storm (Firtina) long-range howitzers, Kirpi and Kobra armed vehicles, ATAK helicopters, Kasirga missiles, with a 100-kilometer defeating range, are used against the terrorists. On Jan. 20, the Turkish Armed Forces, together with the Free Syrian Army, launched the Operation Olive Branch in Afrin, Syria. Earlier, Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim announced that about 8,00010,000 PYD/YPG terrorists are supposed to be hiding in Afrin, Syria. Turkey began drawing its military to the Syrian border from the late June, 2017. The forces were being concentrated in Turkish Kilis province bordering Syrian territory controlled by YPG/PYD. On Aug. 24, 2016, Turkish Armed Forces, with the support of the Syrian opposition, launched the Euphrates Shield operation against the IS militants and liberated the city of Jarabulus as well as the city of Al-Bab in northern Syria. --- Follow the author on Twitter: @rhafizoglu Baku, Azerbaijan, Feb. 23 By Rufiz Hafizoglu Trend: Counselor of the Netherlands Embassy in Ankara has been summoned to the Turkish Foreign Ministry, Turkish media reported Feb. 23. The Turkish Foreign Ministry expressed protest to the counselor in connection with the decision in the Dutch Parliament to recognize the 1915 events as the Armenian genocide. Earlier, the Turkish Foreign Ministry strongly condemned the decision of the Dutch Parliament recognizing the so-called Armenian genocide. Armenia and the Armenian lobby claim that Turkey's predecessor, the Ottoman Empire, allegedly carried out "genocide" against the Armenians living in Anatolia in 1915. While strengthening the efforts to promote the "genocide" in the world, Armenians have achieved its recognition by the parliaments of some countries. --- Follow the author on Twitter: @rhafizoglu Baku, Azerbaijan, Feb. 23 By Rufiz Hafizoglu Trend: This summer will be very "hot" for terrorists in Syria, Turkish media quoted President Recep Tayyip Erdogan as saying Feb. 23. The president said that first the Turkish Armed Forces will liberate Afrin and then all other Syrian territories controlled by Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) and the Peoples Protection Units (YPG). "The Syrian authorities are unable to liberate their territories from terrorists," Erdogan said. On Jan. 20, the Turkish Armed Forces, together with the Free Syrian Army, launched the Operation Olive Branch in Afrin, Syria. F-16 fighters of the Turkish Air Force are involved in the operation, inflicting strikes on the positions of PYD/YPG on the Syrian-Turkish border. --- Follow the author on Twitter: @rhafizoglu Baku, Azerbaijan, Feb. 23 By Rufiz Hafizoglu Trend: Turkey deems Dutch Parliaments decision on the 1915 events unacceptable, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said, Turkish media reported Feb. 23. He noted that there are no historical facts confirming a "genocide" of Armenians. Cavusoglu added that negative attitude has been observed in the relations between the Netherlands and Turkey over the past year. Earlier, the Turkish Foreign Ministry strongly condemned the decision of the Dutch Parliament to recognize the so-called Armenian genocide. Armenia and the Armenian lobby claim that Turkey's predecessor, the Ottoman Empire, allegedly carried out "genocide" against the Armenians living in Anatolia in 1915. While strengthening the efforts to promote the "genocide" in the world, Armenians have achieved its recognition by the parliaments of some countries. --- Follow the author on Twitter: @rhafizoglu Dupa inscrierea pe site-ul HotNews.ro, poti deschide sectiunea MyHotNews ca sa completezi sau sa schimbi profilul de utilizator. Atentie! Logarea pe site se face cu adresa de email, nu cu nickname-ul. Adresa ta de email va ramane confidentiala si nu va fi niciodata data unor terte persoane sau institutii. Inainte de a te inscrie pe site te rugam sa parcurgi termenii si conditiile atasate unui cont HotNews.ro. KYODO NEWS - Feb 23, 2018 - 19:53 | World, All The Japanese government has decided to get more heavily involved in supporting the maritime security capabilities of countries facing the Indian Ocean, starting with Djibouti and Sri Lanka, a government source said Friday. The move is part of the "free and open Indo-Pacific" strategy pursued by the administration of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in light of China's expanding maritime influence in the region. Under the strategy, Japan seeks to ensure stability across a wide area spanning from East Asia to Africa through cooperation with countries that share values like the freedom of navigation. The efforts have so far been centered on countries around the South China Sea. According to the source, the government dispatched a coast guard team earlier this month to Djibouti, which faces sea lanes vital to international trade. The team has been training coast guard personnel in Djibouti to use and maintain patrol boats provided by Japan and to deal with suspicious vessels. "Offering the patrol boats and various kinds of exercises as a set will allow Japan to deepen ties with Djibouti," a Japanese government source said. Japan also plans to send the team to Sri Lanka to train authorities there in the use of two patrol boats to be delivered by July, the source said. The team will also provide training in dealing with oil spills from ships. The specialist "mobile cooperation team" was set up in the Japan Coast Guard last October. Japan has already provided patrol vessels and other assistance for countries facing the South China Sea, including the Philippines and Vietnam, whose territorial claims in the sea overlap with China's. As well as making strategic sense for Japan, expansion of the efforts to the Indian Ocean also answers calls from Djibouti and Sri Lanka for assistance with tackling piracy, the source said. China has also been busy in both countries, choosing Djibouti as the location for its first overseas naval base and acquiring development rights to a crucial Sri Lankan port. Sri Lanka participated as an observer for the first time last month in joint anti-piracy drills carried out on a regular basis by Japan and India. KYODO NEWS - Feb 23, 2018 - 23:06 | All, World Mongolian Foreign Minister Damdin Tsogtbaatar pledged Friday to explore a way for realizing dialogue between Japan and North Korea to help resolving the issue of Japanese nationals abducted by the secluded state decades ago. "We're going to explore a way to see if a dialogue (between Japan and North Korea) can be held effectively," Tsogtbaatar said in a meeting with Katsunobu Kato, minister in charge of the abduction issue, at the Cabinet Office in Tokyo. Kato asked for Mongolia's cooperation in resolving the abduction issue given that Ulan Bator traditionally maintains friendly ties with Pyongyang. "We will do our utmost to have North Korea take specific action to realize the return of abduction victims," Kato said at the meeting. Tsogtbaatar replied, "We, like Japanese, feel heartache over (the abduction victims). We intend to take a creative approach to turn (North Korea's) nuclear and missile development and human right issues for the better." The Japanese government officially lists 17 citizens as having been abducted by North Korean agents and suspects Pyongyang's involvement in other disappearances of Japanese nationals. In 2014, Ulan Bator became the venue for the parents of Megumi Yokota, one of the abduction victims, to meet her daughter Kim Eun Gyong. North Korea has claimed that Megumi, who was forcibly taken at age 13 in 1977, committed suicide in the 1990s after giving birth to a daughter. Pyongyang handed over to Japan what it claimed were the cremated remains of Megumi in 2004. But DNA tests conducted in Japan found the ashes were not hers. In an interview with Kyodo News the same day, Tsogtbaatar said representatives of North Korea will attend an international forum to be held in June in Ulan Bator to discuss security issues in Northeast Asia. However, he did not disclose the names of North Korean attendees. Last year, on the sideline of the forum, Shigeki Takizaki, then-deputy director general of the Japanese Foreign Ministry's Asian and Oceanian Affairs Bureau, met with Ri Yong Pil, deputy head of the North Korean Foreign Ministry's Institute for American Studies and urged Pyongyang to return all abducted Japanese nationals. Takizaki also told him that Tokyo cannot tolerate Pyongyang's nuclear and missile development. KYODO NEWS - Feb 23, 2018 - 20:55 | Urgent, All Police will soon set up an investigation headquarters to step up their probe into last month's massive theft of cryptocurrency from virtual currency exchange operator Coincheck Inc., sources close to the matter said Friday. The Metropolitan Police Department's cybercrime division will assign some 100 investigators to the task on Monday, they said. The investigators will mainly analyze data pertaining to unauthorized access to Coincheck's servers. On Jan. 26, Coincheck lost NEM coins worth about 58 billion yen ($542.59 million) at the time to hackers. Cybersecurity experts have said the stolen currency was split up and dispersed between several digital addresses. The police have confirmed that holders of the stolen NEM converted some of it to other virtual currencies through a site on the dark web, which can only be accessed through special software for anonymity, and a few Japanese nationals have offered to exchange their currencies for the NEM. More than 500 million yen worth of the stolen NEM is believed to have been converted into bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. One of the Japanese nationals told the police he exchanged some of his virtual currency called litecoin for the stolen NEM "out of interest," according to the metropolitan police. KYODO NEWS - Feb 23, 2018 - 09:34 | All, Feature Mitsuoka Motor Co., a manufacturer of retro-styled automobiles, said Thursday it has fully restyled its two-seated Himiko convertible, targeted at classic car lovers with an eye for the eccentric. Known overseas as the Mitsuoka Roadster, the new version is based as usual on the Mazda MX-5 but is longer and heavier than before, combining exaggerated two-tone fenders with classic headlights. The new Himiko, equipped with a 1,500 cc engine, will be sold for around 5 million yen ($46,500). The Himiko convertible was first launched in 2008 and the first version sold 271 units, approximately 40 percent of which were exported. Mitsuoka currently exports its products to Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Britain. The company is looking to expand outside Japan, particularly in countries with large classic car markets. "While attention is increasingly going to eco-friendly cars, my company will live or die by good looks," said Mitsuoka president Akio Mitsuoka, who remains dedicated to producing unique, old-school cars whatever the current trends. Founded in 1968, Mitsuoka makes all of its cars by hand in the central Japan city of Toyama. KYODO NEWS - Feb 23, 2018 - 22:53 | All, Japan A U.S. military helicopter flew over an elementary school next to an air base in Okinawa on Friday afternoon despite a promise to avoid doing so, Japanese government sources and the U.S. Forces said. The U.S. military made the promise after a window fell from a CH-53E chopper onto the grounds of an elementary school there in December. The Marines admitted a helicopter flew over the Futenma No. 2 Elementary School on Friday, and said an investigation has been launched. "Although U.S. Forces voluntarily ceased flights over the school to the greatest extent possible, a U.S. helicopter inadvertently overflew the school at around 3:30 p.m. Friday," the U.S. Forces said in a statement. "An investigation immediately began to determine the facts and circumstances surrounding the overflight in order to prevent such flights from occurring again in the future," it said. The Defense Ministry lodged a protest with the U.S. military last month for flying helicopters over the school, but the Marines denied it then. Local concerns have intensified over repeated accidents and mishaps involving U.S. aircraft in the southern Japanese island prefecture, where the bulk of U.S. military forces in Japan are located. KYODO NEWS - Feb 23, 2018 - 10:39 | All, Japan Two men were arrested Friday morning after firing shots at the headquarters of a pro-Pyongyang group in Tokyo, police said. The two men, identified by the police as right-wing activists Satoshi Katsurada, 56, and Yoshinori Kawamura, 46, drove in a van up to the gate of the General Association of Korean Residents in Japan, known as Chongryon, in Chiyoda Ward around 3:50 a.m. and Kawamura fired several shots. The bullets hit the gate and no one was injured in the incident, the police said. The two men were immediately arrested at the site by policemen stationed nearby. Chongryon was established in 1955 with the aim of protecting the rights of North Korean residents in Japan. It has local branches nationwide, and its main headquarters in Tokyo effectively serves as the North Korean embassy in Japan in the absence of diplomatic ties between the two countries. KYODO NEWS - Feb 23, 2018 - 10:33 | All, Feature Crown Prince Naruhito, on the occasion of his 58th birthday on Friday, vowed to "pursue self-improvement" ahead of his accession to the Chrysanthemum Throne on May 1, 2019. Speaking about the emperor's constitutional role as symbol of the state in the upcoming new era, the crown prince said, "I think...what people expect in official duties will change according to social changes and it would be important to respond to new demands." "I would like to sincerely perform official duties accordingly," he said at a press conference held prior to his birthday, marking the first occasion for him to speak his thoughts in public since the setting last December of his father Emperor Akihito's abdication on April 30 next year and his accession on the following day. The 84-year-old emperor hinted at his desire to retire in a rare video message televised in August 2016, citing concern his age and weakening health may one day stop him from fulfilling his duties. Japan's parliament enacted a one-off law last June to enable him to pass the throne to his elder son Crown Prince Naruhito. With the abdication, Emperor Akihito will be the first Japanese monarch to relinquish the throne in more than 200 years. Crown Prince Naruhito said he believes it would be essential to "stand by the people, listen to their voices, and be close to them in their thoughts," the same phrase the emperor used in the video message in describing his thoughts on his first and foremost duty as an emperor. Japan's Constitution states that the emperor shall be the symbol of the state and of the unity of the people. The crown prince said it would be important for him to "continue to look for" a desirable role for the emperor as the symbol of the state while "sharing joys and sorrows with the people and wishing their happiness" and "contemplating" what is stipulated in the Constitution. He also expressed his desire to have opportunities to interact with citizens as often as possible. Upon his accession to the throne, Crown Princess Masako, the Harvard- and Oxford-educated former diplomat battling a stress-related illness, will become the empress. She has shown signs of recovery in recent years by appearing in public more frequently. About his wife, the crown prince said, "I think she will continue to make efforts toward a recovery while taking heed of her health condition," adding, "As for public activities, I want her to build up efforts, performing what she can one by one." Asked about concerns over the possible dual authority after his accession to the throne, the crown prince said, "It would be natural that the emperor and empress continue to be beloved by many citizens," citing their past sincere approach toward their duties. Emperor Akihito, who has had heart surgery and underwent treatment for prostate cancer, will be 85 when he abdicates, while Empress Michiko will be 84. Special legislation had to be worked out by the parliament for him to relinquish the throne as the Imperial House Law lacks a provision on the emperor's abdication. On recent developments, the crown prince said he was amazed by Japanese athletes' performances in the Pyeongchang Olympic Games. Referring to men's figure skating champion Yuzuru Hanyu and women's 500-meter speed skating winner Nao Kodaira, the crown prince said, "I could see their deep friendship beyond borders as I watched them express their admiration for each other with long-acquainted overseas athletes." The crown prince was the first child to be raised by a Japanese emperor and empress as his parents abolished the imperial family's traditional nanny system. Crown Prince Naruhito was educated at Gakushuin University from its kindergarten to the university's graduate school and studied for two years at Oxford University's Merton College. He married Masako Owada, a career diplomat, in June 1993 and the couple have a daughter, 16-year-old Princess Aiko. The princess cannot ascend the throne as Japanese law prohibits women from becoming an emperor. Meanwhile, the government on Friday endorsed the crown prince's planned visit to Brazil between March 16 and 22 to attend the eighth World Water Forum. After departing from Narita airport on March 16 and transiting through the United States, he is set to arrive in Brasilia on March 18. The crown prince is expected to make an address in English at the opening ceremony of the forum on March 19 and deliver a keynote speech in the afternoon. He will attend a session on water crises the next day before leaving Brasilia to return to Japan. During what the Imperial Household Agency views as a personal trip, the crown prince will also meet with Brazilians of Japanese descent in the country. The crown prince, who has made research into water issues his lifework, has also attended world water forums in Mexico and Turkey. A dramatic magnetic power struggle at the Sun's surface lies at the heart of solar eruptions, new research using NASA data shows. The work highlights the role of the Sun's magnetic landscape, or topology, in the development of solar eruptions that can trigger space weather events around Earth. The scientists, led by Tahar Amari, an astrophysicist at the Center for Theoretical Physics at the Ecole Polytechnique in Palaiseau Cedex, France, considered solar flares, which are intense bursts of radiation and light. Many strong solar flares are followed by a coronal mass ejection, or CME, a massive, bubble-shaped eruption of solar material and magnetic field, but some are not -- what differentiates the two situations is not clearly understood. Using data from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, the scientists examined an October 2014 Jupiter-sized sunspot group, an area of complex magnetic fields, often the site of solar activity. This was the biggest group in the past two solar cycles and a highly active region. Though conditions seemed ripe for an eruption, the region never produced a major CME on its journey across the Sun. It did, however, emit a powerful X-class flare, the most intense class of flares. What determines, the scientists wondered, whether a flare is associated with a CME? The team of scientists included SDO's observations of magnetic fields at the Sun's surface in powerful models that calculate the magnetic field of the Sun's corona, or upper atmosphere, and examined how it evolved in the time just before the flare. The model reveals a battle between two key magnetic structures: a twisted magnetic rope -- known to be associated with the onset of CMEs -- and a dense cage of magnetic fields overlying the rope. The scientists found that this magnetic cage physically prevented a CME from erupting that day. Just hours before the flare, the sunspot's natural rotation contorted the magnetic rope and it grew increasingly twisted and unstable, like a tightly coiled rubber band. But the rope never erupted from the surface: Their model demonstrates it didn't have enough energy to break through the cage. It was, however, volatile enough that it lashed through part of the cage, triggering the strong solar flare. By changing the conditions of the cage in their model, the scientists found that if the cage were weaker that day, a major CME would have erupted on Oct. 24, 2014. The group is interested in further developing their model to study how the conflict between the magnetic cage and rope plays out in other eruptions. Their findings are summarized in a paper published in Nature on Feb. 8, 2018. "We were able to follow the evolution of an active region, predict how likely it was to erupt, and calculate the maximum amount of energy the eruption can release," Amari said. "This is a practical method that could become important in space weather forecasting as computational capabilities increase." ### Credit scores have the power to impact your financial well-being. They can be used to determine which car you drive, which home you buy and even whether or not you get offered the job of your dreams. And while credit scores used to be accessed primarily by lenders, nowadays it isn't hard to find your number. Credit card companies, banks and credit unions are making it easy for customers to view their credit scores on demand, and often for free. Here are 10 things you need to know about your credit score, according to experts. [See: What to Do If You've Fallen (Way) Behind on Your Credit Card Payments.] 1. You have to use credit to have a good score. Some people avoid using credit and assume they have a good score if there is no negative activity on their credit report. However, scores for those with little or no credit history tend to be lower, says Mike Sullivan, a personal finance consultant with the nonprofit credit counseling agency Take Charge America. "They punish you if you don't use credit," he says. 2. There are many different credit scores. People commonly think they have a single credit score. "While FICO is the one [score] that gets all the headlines, there are dozens of different options out there," says Sean Stein Smith, an assistant professor of business and economics at Lehman College. That means the free score being provided by the bank may not be the same one used by a lender to approve an application. While FICO scores, named for the Fair Isaac Corporation, originated the concept of the credit score, new models have been developed over the years. For instance, VantageScore is a score created jointly by the three major credit bureaus of Experian, TransUnion and Equifax. 3. Credit scores serve a specific purpose. Sullivan says people often wonder why their credit score doesn't take into account income, marital status and other factors. That's because credit scores are intended as a snapshot of how someone manages debt. "It is designed strictly to help lenders understand their risk," Sullivan says. "That's all they care about." Story continues 4. Credit applications can drop a score. There are several factors that contribute to a credit score, including the number of inquiries made for new accounts. Filing too many credit applications, also known as hard inquiries or "hard pulls," can raise red flags for lenders. Brian Bellhorn, marketing director for financial technology firm Fiserv, says that's something to remember before applying for a store credit card simply to get a discount at checkout. "It's great for consumers to save 15 percent, but the trade-off is a hard credit pull that's going to negatively affect their scores," he says. 5. Checking your score won't affect it. People can check their score as many times as they like. Credit reviews for informational or marketing purposes are known as soft inquires or "soft pulls" and don't get calculated into the credit score formula. The same is true for credit checks done for employment purposes or lender advertising. [Read: 10 Simple Ways to Raise Your Credit Score.] 6. You should check your score regularly. Since there is no danger in reducing your credit score by checking it, Bellhorn recommends reviewing it weekly. A dip in a credit score could alert consumers to potential fraud or credit report errors. "The quicker you catch it, the easier it is to correct it," Bellhorn says. Free FICO scores are available from the card issuer Discover, while the financial website Credit Karma gives people access to those from VantageScore. Other institutions and websites may offer other credit scores as well. 7. Credit score access is becoming standard practice. It used to be a novelty for a bank or credit card issuer to provide free credit scores, but now it's a mainstream offering. Discover, Chase and Capital One are just a few companies offering free credit scores. Bellhorn says banks can reap benefits by enabling consumers to check their scores easily. "What we often find with consumers is that if they are actually monitoring credit scores, it makes them more mindful," he says. Mindfulness may make customers more financially successful, which in turn can lead to more business for the bank. 8. The formulas for calculating scores are similar. While FICO, VantageScore and other companies use proprietary formulas for calculating their scores, each uses a similar model. In general, these scores range from 300 to 850 with higher scores indicating a better credit history. A person's payment history is usually weighted most heavily, but other factors include debt balances, the percentage of credit lines used and the age of credit accounts. The length of your credit history can make it hard for young adults to have high credit scores. "If you're a 21- to 22-year-old and you're doing everything right, your credit may be lower than you think," Stein Smith says. 9. Credit scores can stand in for character references. Although controversial and restricted in some states, credit scores can be used to determine insurance rates, grant security clearance or inform hiring decisions. "If you have an 850 [score], you're close to being a saint and if you have a 450 [score], you're most certainly a sinner," Sullivan says. "I don't know if any of that is true," he adds, but many businesses do operate under the belief that a credit score is an indicator of personal character and reliability. [See: 10 Completely Careless Credit Card Mistakes You're Making.] 10. It's not hard to build good credit. Much has been written about how to increase credit scores, but Sullivan says it isn't difficult. "If you want to have a high credit score, pay all your debts on time," he says. He cautions against using credit repair companies that may use shady practices or charge for services you could do yourself. If there is one thing everyone must know about credit scores, it's that there is no substitute for smart money management that uses debt wisely and pays off balances on time. More From US News & World Report In a now all too familiar sequence of events for Americans, gun control and the National Rifle Association were thrust into the forefront of the national conversation following the mass shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida, on Valentine's Day. Seventeen people were killed and more than a dozen others were wounded that day when a 19-year-old armed with a legally purchased AR-15 opened fire at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. The massacre prompted renewed calls for stricter gun laws. Traumatized students emerged as the most impassioned advocates, aiming their opprobrium on the politicians who took money from the NRA. The National Rifle Association spends more money to influence politics than nearly every non-profit group in the United Statesbut thats only one-half of its arsenal, gun violence experts told Newsweek in separate interviews. The NRAs extravagance has earned it a reputation as one of the most powerful political organizations in the county. When it comes to muzzling politicians on gun control and stymying regulations in Congress, the public often credits the group with near-omnipotence. Its an easy argument to make when lawmakers offer thoughts and prayers in the wake of gun violence but shy away from legislative action. They also tend to have a pecuniary interest in protecting the NRAs aims. Trending: Up to Five New Species Found in Vast Haul of Bizarre Creatures from Deep-Sea Abyss Years of paralysis around the gun debate on Capitol Hill, as well as lawmakers bucking multiple national polls showing that the clear majority of Americans support some form of gun control, show it isnt just about the money, according to Robert Maguire, who tracks spending among political non-profit organizations for the Center for Responsive Politics, a non-profit and non-partisan group that monitors spending on elections and public policy. 'Double-Barrel' Strategy Whats special about the NRA is that it has two sources of its influence, Maguire said. The first is its very deep pockets. The second is its almost unparalleled grass roots support. Story continues GettyImages-160759694 KAREN BLEIER/AFP/Getty Images They really have that double-barrel interest that other groups dont have, he added. Not only does the NRA outspend gun control groups but its also simply better at mobilizing its base (it boasts a membership of five million) against candidates it deems a threat, according to the Violence Policy Center's Executive Director Josh Sugarmann. I think across the board, if you compare the NRA core to any progressive issue, the NRA core supporters are completely willing to follow orders, he said. When they are told to make a call, knock on a door, they do it... The word comes down from above and they do it. RELATED: As Florida Shooting Unfolded, NRA Was Promoting 'Buy Your Loved One a Gun' Twitter Post The pro-gun side is very engaged politically and in the politics of intimidation, Sugarmann added. On the gun violence prevention side, we may have strong support, but we have not matched that level of dedication and engagement. 'If You Cross the Gun Lobby, They Never Forget' David Jolly, a former Republican congressman in Florida, knows firsthand what its like to be forsaken by the NRA. Jolly had the group's support, along with the support of other conservative outside spending groups, when he ran against a Democrat for Floridas 13th congressional district in a January 2014 special election. He won a close race but easily won re-election to a full term the following November. Then, in June of 2016, an election year, a gunman opened fire at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando with an AR-15-style rifle, killing 49 people. Jolly introduced a moderate gun control bill on the House floor nine days later. Among other provisions, the measure would have prohibited people on no-fly and terrorism watch lists from purchasing guns, but also allowed people who were refused gun permits recourse to argue their case before a federal judge. The NRA pulled its support for Jolly, instead directly contributing $9,900 to his Democratic challenger and former Florida Governor Charlie Crist, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Jolly's bill died in the House, as did Jolly's relationship with the NRA. He lost the race that year by 3.8 percent, or 13,544 votes. They werent there for me in my next election, clearly, he said. "I had been abandoned." It's difficult to reduce that loss down to one factor, but Jolly said he believes if his campaign had been better funded, he would have won. They Are Coming for Your Guns Jolly said the NRA sics its base on gun control-endorsing politicians by simplifying all possible firearm legislation down to one message: They want to take your guns away. GettyImages-2743829 Candice Towell/Getty Images Every issue that comes up, however reasonable the gun measure is, the NRA in D.C. and Virginia translates it as a message of confiscation to its base: They are coming for your guns,'" Jolly said. That messaging is what puts the NRA in a league above gun control groups, according to Maguire. Don't miss: Wayne LaPierre Slams 'Elites' In CPAC Speech Even As He Earns $5 Million Annually From NRA There is certainly a passion for gun control in this country but because [the NRAs] message is so simple'You are a gun owner; the Constitution gives you a right to own a gun; nobody should take that away; theyre trying to take that away'that is such a simple message that the gun control groups just dont have, Maguire said. Jollys political fate is precisely the reason other lawmakers financially supported by the gun group are reticent to back gun reforms, Maguire said in an interview separate from Jolly's. Anyone who considers possibly crossing the NRA fears that possibility, he said. Sugarmann said the NRAs counterpart lacks that muscle for such reprisal. I think it has long been believed that if you cross the gun lobby, they never forget and if you cross the gun violence prevention movement it doesnt matter," he said. Birth of the Modern NRA This is not to say the money isnt critical to pro-gun activism. It's the prioritization of money and politics that transformed the NRA into the lobbying powerhouse it is today. The NRA was founded in 1871 and for about a century existed primarily as a marksmanship, hunting and conservation group. Then the 1960s happened. Armed men assassinated President John F. Kennedy, his brother Robert F. Kennedy and the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Congress passed the Gun Control Act of 1968 in the wake of the bloodshed. Then in 1972, the federal government expanded, creating the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms to enforce related laws. In 1975, NRA board member Harlon Carter founded the groups lobbying wing, the NRA Institute for Legislative Action. It was a turning point for the organization. Today, the lobbying arm is one of the most powerful in D.C. It spent $35,157,585 in 2016, more than any other political non-profit in the country that year, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. As a whole, the NRA spent $51,854,687 during the 2016 federal election cycle. GettyImages-633308700 Michael Reynolds - Pool/Getty Images The NRA significantly boosted its spending that year, dropping more money to get President Donald Trump elected than it did in all federal elections in the 2012 cycle combined, the group reported. Trump was the beneficiary of over $30 million in NRA spending$11,438,118 for him and $19,756,081 against Hillary Clintonin the 2016 election. The NRAs return-on-investment is formidable. The group had a 73.3 percent success rate by candidate in 2016meaning nearly three-quarters of the time the NRA spent money for or against a candidate, it got its desired outcome. Its also getting more efficientits success rate when spending money on candidates has trended up since 2008 when it was only 43.6 percent. Gun advocacy groups have also dramatically ramped up their spending over the past five years. nralobbying_2_ Center for Responsive Politics In 2012, gun rights groups outspent gun control groups in federal lobbying efforts $6,129,911 to just $250,000, according to data provided to Newsweek by the Center for Responsive Politics. On December 14, 2012, Adam Lanza walked into Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, and killed 20 children and six adults with an AR-15-style rifle. The next year, pro-gun groups more than doubled their collective lobbying efforts, spending $15,292,052 compared to gun control groups $2,217,765. Lobbying by both gun rights and gun control groups has declined slightly since, but the pro-gun efforts have never dipped below seven figures. Since Newtown, over 100 pieces of gun legislation have failed in Congress. Not one reform has passed. nraspending_115thCongress_001_00000 Center for Responsive Politics The NRA has invested millions on the elections of sitting lawmakers towards those ends. Seventeen incumbent senators, all of them Republicans, have received over $1 million from the group over the course of their career dating back to 1989, either in support of them or against their opponents, the lobbying watchdog reported. 'There's a Groundswell Building' Despite the groups seemingly bottomless coffers, the NRA hasnt succeeded in convincing the public of its tenets. A Quinnipiac University Poll published on Tuesday showed near-universal support for universal background checksincluding among gun owners. The survey found 97 percent of gun owners were in favor of background checks compared to just three percent who weren't. Most popular: Trump Needs to Involve the Arabs in the Israeli-Palestinian Peace If you think Americans are largely unmoved by the mass shootings, you should think again, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Poll Tim Malloy said in a statement about the findings. Malloy told Newsweek that support for stricter gun laws has spiked in the past two years. Weve seen theres groundswell building since Sandy Hook but in the last two years weve seen a swing of 19 points," he said. "Thats huge." The pollsters interviewed 1,249 nationwide voters from February 16 to 19beginning the day after the latest mass shooting unfolded. Clearly what happened in Florida fortified this and gives it momentum, Malloy said. Polling by Giffords, a gun control group co-founded by former Democratic congresswoman Gabrielle Giffordswho was shot in the head during a public meeting with constituents in 2011also supports Quinnipiacs findings. An April 2017 Giffords/Public Policy Polling survey found that 86 percent of gun owners support barring anyone convicted of stalking or domestic abuse from purchasing a gun and 85 percent favor prohibiting anyone on a federal terror watch-list or no-fly lists from buying a firearm. Sixty-seven percent think the NRA is no longer an organization about gun safety. Instead, they said, the NRA has been overtaken by lobbyists and the interests of gun manufacturers and lost its original purpose and mission. GettyImages-856486874 David Becker/Getty Images A Politico/Morning Consult poll from October 2017 found that 79 percent of voters support banning bump-stocksthe aftermarket rifle accessory that helped Stephen Paddock achieve near-automatic-rifle fire in the October 1, 2017 Las Vegas massacre. Paddock killed 58 people and wounded hundreds in just minutes as he sprayed bullets down from his hotel room into an open-air concert. The Politico/Morning Consult survey also found that nearly seven out of 10 voters, or 69 percent, support prohibiting firearms in K-12 schools and on college campuses. Seven out of 10 Republicans also support bans on assault weapons, an October 2017 NPR/Ipsos poll found. Its difficult to reconcile why some politicians remain reticent on gun control when the overwhelming majority of the public supports reforms, gun experts said. Jolly said it's partially political fortitude and partially the Republican leaderships complicity. I think the GOP leadership is complicit, he said. After the Las Vegas massacre you had Republicans saying, We want a bump-stock ban. They couldve done it in a one-page bill, but they even punted on that. Jolly said he doesnt expect Trump to move the chains on the gun issue either, though he said Trump is exactly the kind of candidate who could have started a national dialogue because of his own bases overwhelming support for the Second Amendment. (An October SurveyMonkey poll conducted after the Las Vegas shooting found that if only people living with guns in their home voted, which accounts for about a third of the country, Trump would have taken every state but Vermont in the 2016 election.) Donald Trump wont, Jolly said. He sold his soul at the altar of the NRA. Hes done it in word and deed. At the NRA's annual convention last April, Trump pledged his fealty to the organization. You came through big for me, and I am going to come through for you, he said. The eight-year assault on your Second Amendment freedoms has come to a crashing end. On Tuesday, however, Trump announced he had moved to ban bump-stocks. "We cannot merely take actions that make us feel like we are making a difference. We must actually make a difference," he said during a ceremony at a White House. "Just a few moments ago, I signed a memorandum directing the Attorney General to propose regulations to ban all devices that turn legal weapons into machine guns." Gun-smoke and Mirrors Despite the track record of inaction in Congress and the president's ambivalence on weapons legislation, some gun control experts told Newsweek there is reason to be hopeful. GettyImages-918330158 Joe Raedle/Getty Images Isabelle James, the political director at Giffords, said the notion that the NRA is a kingmaker, able to determine elections and direct a base of single-issue voters, is false. The NRAs true power lies in a myth about their ability to influence elections, James said. The single-issue gun-rights voter is really just a conservative voter who carries guns... They vote conservative all the way down. Theyre never going to actually swing an election. Theyre just going to vote for the conservative candidate, she added. James pointed to the trove of polling in the last five years that showed a clear trend favoring gun violence prevention. I think after 2018 theres going to be a different conversation about which voting block Republicans will fear when it comes to issue of gun control, she said. A Republican defection may already be brewing. Florida Senator Marco Rubio, whose Miami office is about an hour's drive from Marjory Stoneman Douglas, initially offered his prayers to the victimssomething thats become a rote response among NRA backed officials. But on Sunday, he shifted. Rubio told Miamis CBS affiliate WFOR that he would absolutely endorse whats known as a red flag law, or a statute that would allow law enforcement to remove guns from the home of some people suspected of posing a threat to themselves or others. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. What Marco did, he stepped out of NRA bounds when he suggested red flag laws, Jolly said, though he said he wasn't sold on Rubio's commitment to gun control yet. I think there will be a huge blowback and the test will be how he responds to the blowback, he said. Rubios shift may signal a weakening NRA. Andrew Patrick, media director at the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, said the Parkland shooting comes at a time when the NRA appears vulnerable. The fact that [politicians] are afraid of the NRA and the NRAs ability has been true in the past. I dont know or if its still true or just a perceived power, he said. If there is a time for Republicans to grow a backbone and fight for the safety of their constituents, now would be the time. Patrick noted a recent string of losses for the gun group. NRA-endorsed candidates in Virginia and Alabama both lost their respective elections in 2017 and the FBI is reportedly investigating whether the NRA helped funnel money from a Russian banker with ties to the Kremlin to the Trump campaign in 2016. The NRA is probably at its weakest point in modern history, losing elections in its home state of Virginia, Patrick said. It lost in Alabama when it endorsed Luther Strange. Its currently under investigation by the FBI for laundering Russian money. 'We Can't Vote, but You Can, so Make It Count' The gun control momentum also got an influx of new voices after the tragedy in Parkland. As the eyes of the country and the national media descended on the town, several students quickly used their macabre platform to pressure Trump and Congress to act. In an op-ed published on CNN, 17-year-old Stoneman Douglas student Cameron Kasky called on voters to force the hands of their elected officials for the students who were killed in the horrific shooting last week and those left grieving their loss. Im just a high school student, and I do not pretend to have all of the answers," he wrote. "However, even in my position, I can see that there is desperate need for changechange that starts by folks showing up to the polls and voting all those individuals who are in the back pockets of gun lobbyists out of office." Please do it for me. Do it for my fellow classmates. We can't vote, but you can, so make it count," Kasky wrote. I think the leadership from these students is incredibly powerful, James said. No one can say these are special interest groups. These are kids. Jolly said he wants to his party to take the lead on gun control but suspects Republicans may have to lose the House in the 2018 midterm elections for the chilled gun control debate to thaw. If this is the issue that defines your ideology, Republicans are not going to be the ones to lead, he said. I would prefer to see Republicans lead on this issue. I would beg. If they dont, this will be one of the factors to Republicans leaving the House. The NRA did not return Newsweek's requests for comment via phone and email. This article was first written by Newsweek More from Newsweek By Nick Carey DETROIT (Reuters) - When Avis Budget Group Inc reports its results on Wednesday, executives under pressure from restive shareholders will likely point to the potential for profits from managing fleets of vehicles for ride services and robo-taxi companies. Avis, however, won't be alone in chasing revenue from the same ride service companies that are undermining the rental car business. Fleet management is a catch-all term for a complex suite of services ranging from financing car purchases to maintaining, cleaning, fuelling, repairing and selling used vehicles. Fleet managers use real-time data to track vehicles for customers like Uber Technologies Inc, Lyft and General Motors Co's Maven to maximum vehicle usage and cut down on the downtime that leads to lost revenue on expensive assets. "Saying 'I want to go into fleet management' is easy," said Hans-Werner Kaas, a senior partner at McKinsey & Company's Detroit office. "But fleet management is very capital-intensive and is different from what many of those companies do today." Even Element Fleet Management Corp, an established fleet manager, has stumbled recently with an expensive, complex big-data platform deployed to manage large vehicle fleets. Element manages more than 1 million vehicles for corporate customers and spent $70 million on a big-data driven platform for customers using artificial intelligence and predictive analytics. But the system's glitches cost Element's former chief executive his job and helped send the company's shares down more than 50 percent this year. Element said it is fixing the problems and will spend $35 million more in 2018 on product enhancements. "The bumps we've had in rolling out a new platform is indicative of the complexity of pivoting to new transportation models that are still being invented," said Michele Cunningham, Element's senior vice president for products and services. CONFRONTING THREATS Years of heavy U.S. automobile sales have depressed used car values, hurting Avis and others that depend on selling vehicles into the secondary market. Avis is trying to beef up prices but said last month that "unexpected pricing and fleet cost challenges" have cost it $300 million over the last two years. Story continues It expects to post 2017 adjusted pre-tax income nearly 13 percent lower than in 2016. The company's largest shareholder, SRS Investment Management LLC, has proposed three new nominees for Avis' board and said it must formulate "top strategic priorities" to confront a present threat from Uber and Lyft, and a future threat from robo-taxi operators such as Alphabet Inc's Waymo or GM's Cruise. Avis owns ride-sharing service Zipcar, which rents cars to Uber drivers, and last June announced a service agreement for Waymo's self-driving car fleet starting in Phoenix, sending its shares soaring. Avis is testing a fleet of connected cars in Kansas City to build fleet management expertise and "to see how we can do this for others as well," Chief Executive Officer Larry De Shon said. Stanford economist Tony Seba and tech investor James Arbib estimate that self-driving cars in "transportation-as-a-service" will grow from zero U.S. passenger miles in 2020 versus traditionally-owned vehicles to 95 percent of the 6.1 trillion passenger miles in 2030. (For a graphic, see: http://tmsnrt.rs/2Ffgxu6) The fleets required for those services mean "a lot of money on the table" for fleet managers, said Doug Mehl, a partner in A.T. Kearney's automotive practice. That potential is drawing a crowd. Avis rivals Hertz Global Holdings Inc and Enterprise Holdings Inc are staking out positions in fleet management, as are car auction giants Manheim and KAR Auction Services Inc, which already have facilities to handle millions of used vehicles annually. KAR said this month it was buying fleet management software company STRATIM to enter the business. Manheim is talking to partners about larger fleets and expects to invest in new facilities in the next three years as demand grows, said Grace Huang, president of inventory solutions at Cox Automotive, Manheim's parent company. Car dealers want in as well. AutoNation Inc last November signed a service agreement with Waymo, a deal that boosted its shares. "Dealers are a natural fit," National Automobile Dealers Association spokesman Jonathan Collegio said. "Because they're everywhere, they've already made the investments and have the expertise." (Reporting by Nick Carey; Editing by Paul Simao and Jonathan Oatis) In September 2014 at Idaho State University, a teacher accidentally shot himself in the foot when his concealed handgun discharged. Students in the chemistry class watched. Later that month at a Utah elementary school, a teacher carrying a concealed weapon accidentally shot herself in the leg as she used the restroom. In 2016, a group of elementary school students in Pennsylvania found a loaded gun in the bathroom after a teacher accidentally left it behind. In all these cases, its lucky no child got hurt. On Thursday, President Donald Trump doubled down on his suggestion that schools arm teachers with weapons to counteract armed intruders, such as the one who killed 17 people last week in Parkland, Florida. Trump went so far as to say that those who received training to use firearms could be eligible for extra pay. But you dont have to look far to see that this policy could have devastating, albeit unintended, consequences. Law enforcement groups and teacher organizations have expressed opposition to the presidents firearm proposal. Mo Canady, the executive director of the National Association for School Resource Officers the group that trains and represents school cops warned that law enforcement officers responding to an incident might mistake a teacher with a firearm for an assailant. He also expressed skepticism about how an armed teacher would respond to a school shooting attack. Anyone who hasnt received the extensive training provided to law enforcement officers will likely be mentally unprepared to take a life, especially the life of a student assailant, Canady said in a statement. A number of states allow teachers to carry weapons on college and K-12 campuses under certain circumstances. In a few scattered school districts throughout the country, teachers are systematically armed. Its an idea that both of the nations teacher unions strongly oppose. Bringing more guns into our schools does nothing to protect our students and educators from gun violence, Lily Eskelsen Garcia, president of the National Education Association that represents three million educators, said in a statement. Our students need more books, art and music programs, nurses and school counselors; they do not need more guns in their classrooms. Story continues Bill Bond spent years studying school safety with the National Association for Secondary School Principals. Bond, now retired, was the principal of Kentuckys Heath High School in 1997 when a student shot and killed three classmates. He doesnt pretend to have found the answer on school safety after 20 years of studying the issue, he said theres no easy fix. But he does know that teachers shouldnt be armed with weapons. He said he worries that more children would die from accidental shootings if teachers were armed than from school shootings. Im coming at that from a standpoint of a person thats been in a school shooting. I have taken the gun from a guy that had just killed three kids, and also the perspective of a person whose been around guns all their life, Bond said. If youre in a school shooting, its a situation of instant decisions. I had 3 kids killed in 12 seconds. Thats how fast it happens. Love HuffPost? Become a founding member of HuffPost Plus today. This article originally appeared on HuffPost. Donald Trump has declared that he has had the most successful first year in the history of the presidency and finally admitted he has a bald patch.finally Speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on Friday, the US President also drew attention to his own bald spot in what many described as a freewheeling speech. Before launching into the speech, Mr Trump admired himself on the big screen, telling the audience: What a nice picture that is. Look at that. I would love to watch that guy speak. He went on to draw attention to his hairline, saying: Oh, boy. Oh, I try like hell to hide that bald spot, folks. I work hard at it. Doesnt look bad. Hey, were hanging in. Were hanging in. Were hanging in there, right? Together were hanging in. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. After declaring that some of his prepared comments were sort of boring, the President launched into a speech that included praise of his own first year as President, citing tax cuts and changed to regulations as some of his major achievements. He also spoke about immigration and his promised Mexico wall as well as launching an attack on the Democrats and Hillary Clinton and quoting the snake poem that he often read on the campaign trail during the 2016 presidential race. MOST POPULAR TODAY ON YAHOO Despite his promises to take action on guns in the wake of the Florida shooting, Mr Trump said that making schools gun-free zones would put students in far more danger. It was Donald Trumps second appearance as President at the Conservative Political Action Conference, held just outside Washington in Maryland. President Donald Trump doubled down on his suggestion that arming teachers could help prevent school shootings on Thursday, adding that those trained to use firearms could receive extra pay. During a White House meeting with law enforcement officials, Trump proposed for the second time in the last two days that some teachers, certain highly adept people, people who understand weaponry, guns, should carry firearms on campus. He added Thursday that they may be paid a little bit of a bonus to do so. Trump first touched on this idea during a Wednesday listening session with students, families and others affected by gun violence in schools, including many from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, where 17 students and staff members were killed last week. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. He suggested then that arming 20 percent of teaching staff at schools may be effective at quickly ending attacks. Its unclear how much funding would be needed to train and arm 20 percent of the countrys teaching staff, or where that funding would come from. On Thursday, he suggested bringing in more security guards in addition to arming teachers. You cant hire enough security guards. ... You need 100, 150 security guards, he said. There is very little evidence that bringing more cops and security guards to campus will stop school shootings. There is, however, an abundance of evidence suggesting that added school security will funnel more vulnerable students black children in particular into the criminal justice system at an early age. Also on HuffPost Students mourn during a community prayer vigil for victims of Wednesday's shooting. Mourners gather during a prayer vigil. A woman breaks down with emotion during the vigil. Vigil participants hold hands. A mother tries to comfort her weeping daughter at the end of the vigil. Mourners hug. Alyssa Kramer, 16, gets a hug from her mother, Tonja Kramer. Daniel Journey, center, an 18-year-old senior at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, at the vigil. A student rests his head against his mother. City, county and state officials release balloons in honor of the victims. Love HuffPost? Become a founding member of HuffPost Plus today. This article originally appeared on HuffPost. What Were Following The View from Parkland: Community members and survivors of last weeks high-school shooting in Parkland, Florida, expressed the urgency of gun-law reforms to leaders including Senator Marco Rubio, National Rifle Association spokeswoman Dana Loesch, and local law enforcement at a CNN-hosted town hall on Wednesday night. President Trump, who also held a listening session with survivors, suggested that qualified teachers should be armed against school shooters, but that solution is unlikely to help the students or educators who now describe a climate of fear in their schools. And Heather Sher, a radiologist who treated the victims from Parkland, is unequivocal about what she learned from their wounds: Its clear to me that AR-15 or other high-velocity weapons, especially when outfitted with a high-capacity magazine, have no place in a civilians gun cabinet. Recommended: What I Saw Treating the Victims From Parkland Should Change the Debate on Guns The Gun Policy Debate: Wayne LaPierre, the executive vice president of the NRA, accused gun-control advocates of exploiting tragedy and asserted that gun ownership is a God-given right in a provocative speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference. David Frum calls attitudes like this one irresponsible and self-indulgent. Yet deeply entrenched beliefs about Second Amendment rights run all the way up to the Supreme Court, and have tended to stymie policy changes after mass shootings while other deadly events prompt swift action. Even Trumps proposal to ban bump stocks is looking like a hollow gesture to experts on both sides of the debate. To pass meaningful legislation, gun-control advocates would need a majority in the House of Representatives. Heres how they could get it. Outside the U.S.: Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is being snubbed by Indian diplomats on his state visit to New Delhi due to the history of a Sikh separatist movement that entangles Indian and Canadian politics.* Iran-sponsored militias are sowing discord in Iraq. And Austrias far-right Freedom Party is attempting to distance itself from some anti-Semitic fraternities, which it sees as a political liabilitybut which serve as incubators for the partys leaders. Story continues Rosa Inocencio Smith Snapshot Special Counsel Robert Mueller has filed another indictment against Paul Manafort and Rick Gates, listing multiple charges of tax and bank fraud. The editors of The Masthead, The Atlantics premium membership program, dove deep into the workings of Manafort's impact on U.S. politics in their special corruption issue. Sign up to check it out. (The Voorhes) Who Were Talking To Lauren Slater, a psychologist, discusses the history of antidepressants, why they dont always work, and why psychedelics could be the next step in psychiatric treatment. Recommended: This Is What Life Without Retirement Savings Looks Like Michael Varnum, a member of the Interplanetary Initiative at Arizona State University, describes how humans would likely react to news about alien microbes. (One caveat: If there were a lot of spaceships and they had weapons and they were coming to Earth, Im guessing the reaction would be very different.) Evening Read Spencer Kornhaber on Drakes viral video for Gods Plan, currently the No. 1 song on U.S. charts: In it, the Toronto superstar distributes his million-dollar production budget to people around Miamiby telling all the shoppers in a Sabor Tropical Supermarket that everything on the shelves are free, by presenting a scholarship check to an unsuspecting student, by giving gift cards to women at a shelter, and more. The double-takes are the best parts. In one moment, Drake sidles up to a family whos sitting on a ledge. One of the kids notices the rapper sitting next to her, and shrieks. Drake smiles and hands the family a wad of cash. Star-struck thrill melts into a more tender emotion. The family members cover their eyes, and they hug. What is this video: goodhearted charity, pop promotional spectacle, or both? Both, making it part of a long history. The word humanitainment has been used to describe splashy celebrity-generosity efforts ranging from the Live 8 concert to David Beckhams UNICEF work, and that term certainly seems to fit Gods Plan. Its an act of grace, and its a showone perfectly calibrated to currently popular attitudes around giving, stardom, and society. Keep reading as Spencer unpacks those attitudes and their history. Recommended: What's Actually Behind Cape Town's Water Crisis What Do You Know About Global Affairs? Last week the U.S. Justice Department charged 13 Russian nationals with attempting to undermine the 2016 presidential election through an elaborate, social media-powered disinformation scheme. The vast amounts of data that the digital-advertising industry collects about Americans could be partly to blame for the success of the Russian campaign. With the American political system still vulnerable, Daniel Fried argues that President Trump can use criminal prosecution, sanctions, regulatory actions, or digital regulations to combat Russian interference more effectively than President Obama did. But as David Frum writes, the biggest obstacle to protecting American democracy may not be a lack of retaliatory options, but rather Trumps own disinterest. Can you remember the other key facts from this weeks global coverage? Test your knowledge below: 1. The pastor ____________ preached to evangelical communities in Switzerland, South Africa, and the Soviet Union, among other countries. Scroll down for the answer, or find it here. 2. Prices for Trump luxury condos currently being built in New Delhi and Mumbai can run as high as $____________. Scroll down for the answer, or find it here. 3. Cyprus's golden-visa scheme allows foreigners who invest in property over __________ euros to become citizens of the European Union. Scroll down for the answer, or find it here. Annabelle Timsit Urban Developments Our partner site CityLab explores the cities of the future and investigates the biggest ideas and issues facing city dwellers around the world. Gracie McKenzie shares todays top stories: For more updates from the urban world, subscribe to one of CityLabs newsletters. Reader Response In James Fallowss ongoing series of reader reflections on gun violence, a reader draws a connection between guns and an economically motivated crisis of masculinity: Take a moment to look at the gun magazines at your local WalMart and register the themes that are hammered home. Constant references not to hunting but to warfare, and the trappings of masculinity, the humorless insistence on the tacticality of every day objects, including, I kid you not, a spork with a hidden knife. These industries are preying on the needs of men to feel like they have a job, bigger than themselves, a protector of the fatherland, the constitution There has been no counterweight to this culture of death. No one seems to be able to answer the question: What are men good for? What are the qualities that make a good man good? Instead this enormous vacuum is filled by people with products to sell. Men are warriors with tactical sporks. What else could they be if they cant be providers? See more reader comments, read more on the role that toxic ideas of masculinity can play in violence and politics, and write to us: letters@theatlantic.com. Compound Adjectives Retirement-savings crisis, long-standing murder mystery, parental sex-education panic, devil-sent journalistic termites. Time of Your Life Happy birthday to Jan (a year younger than Captain America); to Lorrie (a year younger than VCRs); to Tiaras significant other, Joey (twice the age of Twitter); from Jordan to James (twice the age of MTV); to Jonna (a year younger than universal credit cards); and to Shivali (13 years older than Mean Girls). Do you or a loved one have a birthday coming up? Sign up for a birthday shout-out, and explore the Timeline feature for yourself. * This newsletter originally misidentified Justin Trudeau as Canadas president. We regret the error. Read more from The Atlantic: This article was originally published on The Atlantic. [caption id="attachment_10761" align="alignleft" width="620"] Rick Gates, former deputy campaign manager for Donald Trump, exits Federal Court in Washington, D.C., Friday. (Photo: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg)[/caption] Former Trump campaign aide Rick Gates pleaded guilty in federal court Friday to one count of conspiracy and one count of lying to federal investigators. Gates, the deputy to former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, originally pleaded not guilty in October in federal court in Washington, D.C,. to a 12-count indictment brought by Robert Mueller, the special counsel. On Thursday, Gates and Manafort were charged with an additional 32 counts of bank and tax fraud. Gates' lawyer, Tom Green of Sidley Austin, did not comment as the two men left the courtroom Friday. Gates faces a maximum of five years in prison for each count, as well as three years of supervised release for each. Pursuant to federal sentencing guidelines, Gates will likely face between 57 and 71 months of prison time. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson did not set a date for a sentencing hearing. A status conference for Gates' case is set for May 14. In an emailed statement, Manafort said he maintains his innocence, "notwithstanding that Rick Gates pled today." "I had hoped and expected my business colleague would have had the strength to continue the battle to prove our innocence," Manafort said. "For reasons yet to surface he chose to do otherwise. This does not alter my commitment to defend myself against the untrue piled up charges contained in the indictments against me. Need a guide to the twists and turns in Robert Mueller's investigation? Sign up for Trump Watch by Cogan Schneier. A superseding indictment against Manafort was also filed in the case Friday. It includes many of the original charges against him, and removes charges against Gates. It also does not include prior charges for failure to file reports of foreign and financial bank accounts. Similar charges, however, were filed against Manafort in the Eastern District of Virginia Thursday. As part of his plea agreement, Gates agreed to fully cooperate with Mueller's office. Gates agreed to "participate in undercover activities" as directed by law enforcement agents or the special counsel's office, and not to reveal his cooperation or any information he gains from it with third parties. He also agreed to testify as needed before grand juries, in trials and in other court proceedings as needed by Mueller's office. The obligations continue after Gates is sentenced, according to the agreement. In his plea, Gates admitted to engaging in various criminal schemes as part of his work for Manafort. Those include helping Manafort commit tax fraud and violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act when he lobbied on behalf of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych. Additionally, Gates pleaded guilty to lying to Mueller's investigators during a proffer session Feb. 1 about a meeting between Manafort, an unnamed lobbyist for a company and an unnamed member of Congress in 2013. Gates told investigators that there were no discussions of Ukraine at the meeting, though he was not at the meeting himself and had in fact helped Manafort prepare a report for Ukrainian leadership about the discussions. The Feb. 2 proffer session occurred the day before Gates' prior lawyers, Shanlon Wu of Wu, Grohovsky & Whipple; Walter Mack of Doar Rieck Kaley & Mack; and Annemarie McAvoy of McAvoy Consulting, filed a motion to withdraw from his case. The information that was filed today is posted below: [falcon-embed src="embed_1"] Read more: Former Skadden Associate Pleads Guilty in Mueller Probe Grand Jury Returns New 32-Count Indictment Against Manafort, Gates Memo to Trump: What Not to Expect From Robert Mueller 'Don't Talk,' and Other Advice for Trump From White-Collar Lawyers Steve Bannon Turns to Quinn Emanuel's Burck Amid Russia Probe Latvia's central bank governor Ilmars Rimsevics speaks to the media during a news conference in Riga, Latvia February 20, 2018. REUTERS/Ints Kalnins By John O'Donnell and Gederts Gelzis RIGA (Reuters) - Latvia's central bank chief has been suspended pending an investigation into bribery allegations, and the Baltic country's third biggest bank has sought emergency support following U.S. accusations of money-laundering and sanctions-busting. The problems, which the government says are not connected, have dealt a blow to Latvia's reputation as a financial hub that bridges Russia, which it borders, and the West. WHAT IS THE CRISIS ABOUT? The U.S. Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network said on Feb. 13 it was seeking restrictions on ABLV bank on suspicion of involvement in money laundering and helping clients violate United Nations sanctions on North Korea. ABLV denied the accusations. But it said on Monday it had sought temporary liquidity support from the central bank after depositors withdrew 600 million euros ($740 million), about 22 percent of total deposits, following the U.S. Treasury comments. The ECB has stopped all payments at the bank to prevent its collapse. Separately, central bank chief Ilmars Rimsevics was detained on Saturday on suspicion that he solicited a bribe. He was released on Monday, and denied the accusations, but was suspended from his post on Tuesday. Latvia's Defence Ministry said on Tuesday the allegations may be part of a disinformation campaign intended to damage trust in the country and influence the outcome of a parliamentary election in October. It did not say who was behind this but drew parallels with campaigns before recent French, German and U.S. elections. Russia has denied it was behind those campaigns and says it does not meddle in elections in the West. WHO IS THE SUSPENDED CENTRAL BANK CHIEF? Ilmars Rimsevics was part of the political movement that led Latvia to independence from the Soviet Union and is a member of the European Central Bank's governing council. The 52-year-old economist is known internationally as a conservative policy maker and in Latvia as a firm manager at the central bank, according to people who know him. Story continues Rimsevics says he is the victim of a smear campaign and refuses to resign. He is not allowed leave the country. "I have not demanded or received any bribes," Rimsevics told a news conference on Tuesday. "I have become the target of some Latvian commercial banks to destroy Latvia's reputation." WHAT IS AT STAKE? Latvia has a population of only about 2 million. Occupied by the Soviet Union during World War Two, it won independence in 1990, joined the European Union in 2004 and adopted the euro currency a decade later. The allegations against Rimsevics and ABLV could damage Latvia's standing in the euro zone and its reputation as a financial hub, Latvian politicians say. The events of the past few days have shaken Latvia's financial system but economists say it would survive intact if ABLV collapsed and see little likelihood of contagion into other Baltic states. Latvia's economy has suffered much more serious financial problems before. Its economy nosedived during the 2008-09 global financial crisis that forced it to seek an international rescue, but recovered after the adoption of austerity measures including slashing spending and wages and increasing taxes. DO LATVIA'S PROBLEMS AFFECT THE ECB? Latvia's commercial banking association called on the ECB on Wednesday to step in and sort out the problems at ABLV, putting pressure on it to explain why it has not acted in the crisis. What has happened in Latvia raises questions about a system that makes the ECB responsible for supervising banks across the euro zone, including many in Latvia One senior official at the ECB said it had been caught by surprise by the developments in Latvia and that the governing council was informed by conference call only at the weekend. The central bank has since remained publicly silent. But the root cause of the problem was hardly hidden. Latvia's banks hold around $13 billion worth of foreign deposits, roughly half of all deposits in the sector, an issue highlighted as a source of risk by authorities year after year. IS MONEY LAUNDERING A PROBLEM IN LATVIA? International authorities have long worried about small banks in Latvia that hold funds for foreign clients, mostly from Russia and other former Soviet republics. Several of the clients have been punished for breaches of rules on money-laundering and financing of terrorism, and for sanctions busting. The International Monetary Fund said in 2007 that Latvia was hosted many shell companies and had a reputation "for widespread lax due diligence" in the opening of bank accounts. The situation had improved little when the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development criticised Latvia in 2015 for failing to do enough to tackle financial crime, including the "laundering of proceeds of corruption from overseas". Although it conceded that Latvia had sought international cooperation to tackle corruption, it urged stronger anti-money laundering measures and warned of the risk that foreign bribes could be laundered by foreigners through Latvian banks. DOES RUSSIA HAVE A ROLE IN THE CRISIS? Latvia's relationship with Russia has long been complicated but has deteriorated since Russia seized the Crimea peninsula from Ukraine in 2014 and fighting broke out in east Ukraine between government forces and Russia-backed separatists. Many Latvians saw Russia's intervention in Crimea as a worrying precedent. Their country not only borders Russia but has the largest Russian-speaking minority in the Baltics. Asked about suggestions that Russia may have had a role in the crisis, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said "such statements are not measured and lack a sense of reality." (Additional reporting by Simon Johnson in Stockholm and Balazs Koranyi in Frankfurt, Editing by Timothy Heritage) The First National Bank of Omaha has decided to cut ties with the National Rifle Association in a national moment of reckoning over gun control. Citing complaints from customers, the companys First Bankcard division will no longer issue NRA-branded Visa credit cards touted by the gun-rights group as a special benefit of membership after the current contract between the two parties expires. Customer feedback has caused us to review our relationship with the NRA. As a result, First National Bank of Omaha will not renew its contract with the National Rifle Association to issue the NRA Visa Card, a First National Bank spokesman told HuffPost by email Thursday. The spokesman did not immediately respond to a follow-up question on when the contract will expire. Members of the group are still able to purchase NRA-branded prepaid Visa debit cards because those are made available through a separate entity, NetSpend, which is currently reviewing the relationship it has with the NRA. On Wednesday, a Visa spokeswoman stressed that the company strives to make its payment services available to everyone. Visa has no contractual or financial relationship with the NRA, the spokeswoman said. Visa co-branded cards do not represent an endorsement by Visa of that cause or organization. We strive to make our payment services available to all people in all places, for uses consistent with local, national and international laws. The Visa card was part of a number of benefits offered to NRA members, including FedEx shipping discounts and savings on rental cars from Hertz, Avis, Enterprise and other major providers. By partnering with third parties, the NRA is also able to offer discounts on hotels and airfare, prescription drugs, insurance and other products and services. According to an NRA blog post, the credit card offered 5 percent back on gas and purchases made at sporting goods stores. An NRA webpage that detailed the benefits of the card was pulled midday on Wednesday, leaving an error page in its wake. The NRA did not respond to HuffPosts multiple requests for comment. Story continues The gun-rights group, which operates a powerful lobbying arm, has been a particular target of outrage by many young activists after last weeks shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, left 17 dead. Love HuffPost? Become a founding member of HuffPost Plus today. This article originally appeared on HuffPost. FILE PHOTO: Raj Nair, Ford executive vice-president of global product development, speaks during the North American International Auto Show in Detroit, Michigan, U.S., January 9, 2017. REUTERS/Rebecca Cook/File Photo By Nick Carey and Sanjana Shivdas (Reuters) - Ford Motor Co (F.N) on Thursday named company insider Kumar Galhotra as head of its North American operations, filling the gap left by the abrupt departure of Raj Nair after an internal investigation uncovered "inappropriate behaviour" by the executive. The appointment was part of a broader executive reshuffle by the No. 2 U.S. automaker, the second such move in less than a year since Jim Hackett took the chief executive job in May. Galhotra, who has worked for Ford for 29 years and previously led its luxury Lincoln Motor Co arm, will report to Jim Farley, Ford's president of global markets. The appointment is effective March 1. Ford said on Wednesday that Nair was leaving the company immediately after an investigation found his behaviour was "inconsistent with the company's code of conduct." It did not give any details on what that behaviour entailed. A company spokesman said the review was launched in the past few weeks after Ford received a report of inappropriate behaviour. Ford said in a regulatory filing on Thursday that under the terms of his separation agreement, Nair is entitled to retirement and healthcare benefits but will not receive a bonus for 2017 or 2018 and some equity-based awards will be cancelled. Nair has agreed to waive claims against Ford and to cooperate with any future investigations or litigation. Galhotra, who has also served as Ford's chief marketing officer since last year, takes charge of a business that generates about 90 percent of Ford's global profits. The company also made a handful of other changes to its senior management team on Thursday, appointing Joy Falotico to replace Galhotra as group vice president for Lincoln and chief marketing officer. David McClelland was made vice president of Ford and CEO of Ford Motor Credit Co, Stuart Rowley was named vice president and chief operating officer for Ford North America and John Lawler was appointed vice president, strategy of Ford. Story continues Cathy OCallaghan was named vice president and corporate controller, and chief financial officer, global markets. In morning trading on the New York Stock Exchange, Ford shares were up 3 cents at $10.63. (Reporting by Sanjana Shivdas and Arunima Banerjee in Bengaluru; editing by Patrick Graham and Bill Rigby) By Sarah N. Lynch and Karen Freifeld WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A former senior official in Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, Rick Gates, pleaded guilty on Friday to conspiracy against the United States and lying to investigators, and he is cooperating with a federal probe into Russia's role in the election. Gates, who was a deputy campaign manager for Trump, is being investigated by the office of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, which is probing alleged Russian meddling in the U.S. election. Gates had been potentially facing decades in prison on much more serious charges, including bank fraud and conspiracy to launder money. Under the charges he pleaded guilty to, he faces a maximum sentence of nearly six years. Prosecutors said they could ask the judge for a reduction in Gates' sentence based on the extent of his cooperation with Mueller's probe. The plea increases pressure on Paul Manafort, who was Trump's campaign manager for five months in 2016, to also seek a plea deal. However, Manafort said in a statement issued after Gates' plea deal that he maintained his innocence. Cooperation by Gates, and potentially by Manafort at a later stage, could provide a rich vein of information for Mueller, whose Russia probe includes looking into whether Trump's campaign colluded with Moscow to interfere in the election. Gates' plea deal appeared to be partially motivated by his concern over legal costs and the strain on his family. Prosecutors allege that Manafort, with Gates' assistance, laundered more than $30 million and duped banks into lending money. It says the pair used funds from secret offshore accounts to enjoy a life of luxury. None of the charges to date against Gates or Manafort have made reference to any connection with Russian meddling in the 2016 election or possible collusion. Russia has denied the accusations of interference. Trump has said there was no collusion, and has also denied any attempt to obstruct Mueller's probe. Mueller, appointed by the Department of Justice last year, has a broad brief that allows him to look into any wrongdoing uncovered in the course of his investigation. CAMPAIGN ROLE While it was not clear what Gates might be able to reveal to investigators, he was on Trumps campaign team when his then-boss Manafort attended a meeting in June 2016 at Trump Tower in New York between senior campaign aides and a Russian lawyer. Mueller, according to sources familiar with the investigation, has taken a keen interest in whether Democrats' emails allegedly hacked by Russian intelligence and made public six days after that meeting were discussed then. Gates helped run the campaign's day-to-day operations, played a key role at the Republican National Convention where Trump was chosen as the party's nominee and accompanied Trump on campaign flights. He stayed on in the campaign even after Manafort resigned in August 2016 amid a controversy over cash payments from Ukraine. After Trump's election win, Gates was on Trump's presidential transition team and his inaugural committee. U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded that Moscow sought to meddle in the campaign to tilt the vote in favor of Trump, including by hacking the emails of leading Democrats and distributing disinformation and propaganda online. Gates and Manafort were first charged in October. On Thursday, Mueller piled up more pressure on the pair - filing a 32-count indictment against them that includes charges of bank fraud and lying on tax returns. As part of the conspiracy charge, prosecutors say that Gates and Manafort lied to the Justice Department in September 2016, when they were asked whether they had acted as foreign agents in 2013 on behalf of Ukraines pro-Russian government. THE "HAPSBURG GROUP" A superseding indictment returned on Friday against Manafort from a Washington, D.C., grand jury contained additional details about their political work in Ukraine, including allegations that Manafort secretly retained a group of former European politicians known as the "Hapsburg group" to lobby for the government. The indictment did not name the former politicians, but said that in 2012 and 2013 Manafort paid them 2 million euros through offshore accounts. The group was managed by a former European chancellor, which the indictment identifies as "Foreign Politician A," in coordination with Manafort. The majority of the charges in the new indictment are the same as the ones filed against Manafort in October. In the plea deal, Gates agreed that he lied to the investigators on Muellers team on Feb. 1, about a 2013 meeting between Manafort, a senior lobbyist and an unnamed member of Congress who sits on a congressional subcommittee with jurisdiction over Ukraine. Gates plea may push Manafort to try to reach his own plea deal and cooperate with the probe, despite his protestations to the contrary, said Michael Padula, a former federal prosecutor now in private practice. His ability to negotiate a deal that is favorable to him at this point given that his codefendant has already made a deal with the government will depend on what he can potentially offer the special counsel regarding their investigation into Russia collusion, Padula said. The White House said on Friday that the latest charges against Manafort and Gates were unrelated to Trump. "This indictment has nothing to do with the White House or the president. As you know, we have been cooperative with the special counsel and as we continue to see, there's no evidence of collusion, no evidence of wrongdoing," Mercedes Schlapp, the White House strategic communications director, told Fox News Channel. A court filing on Friday charged that between 2008 and 2017, Gates and Manafort devised a scheme to defraud the United States to obtain money and property by making false representations to banks and other financial institutions. Toward the end of that period they worked for Trump's campaign. In March 2016, Manafort fraudulently obtained a loan for over $3 million on a Manhattan condominium, prosecutors say. In a letter to relatives and close friends that was obtained by ABC News, Gates expressed concern that a long trial would take a heavy toll. "The reality of how long this legal process will likely take, the cost, and the circus-like atmosphere of an anticipated trial are too much. I will better serve my family moving forward by exiting this process," he wrote. Gates, who has a young family and who has been under house arrest, has been peppering the court since last year with requests to travel, coach his childrens sports teams and attend school functions. (Reporting by Sarah N. Lynch and Karen Freifeld; Additional reporting by John Walcott, Doina Chiacu and Mark Hosenball; Writing by Alistair Bell; Editing by Toni Reinhold, Frances Kerry and Leslie Adler) Former Trump campaign official Rick Gates to plead guilty to two counts in Mueller probe Rick Gates, who worked as a top aide on the Trump campaign, will plead guilty Friday in the special counsel's probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 election. Gates will plead guilty to two counts, according to court documents. The news comes a day after Mueller unveiled new charges against Gates and his former business associate Paul Manafort, who was Trump's campaign chief. Rick Gates, who worked as a top aide on Donald Trump 's presidential campaign, will plead guilty Friday in the special counsel's probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 election. Gates' plea is considered an indication that he may be cooperating with special counsel Robert Mueller. A plea hearing was scheduled for 2 p.m. ET Friday. Court documents say Gates will plead guilty to two counts: making a false statement and conspiracy against the United States. The news comes a day after Mueller unveiled new charges against Gates and his former business associate Paul Manafort , who was Trump's campaign chief for a few months in 2016. Gates and Manafort were previously indicted in the probe in October. The charges, which include bank fraud and an array of other financial crimes, stem from alleged conduct that does not relate to work that Manafort and Gates did for Trump's campaign. However, some of the alleged crimes occurred while they were working for Trump and afterward. As part of the new indictment, the special counsel claims that after Manafort and Gates saw their income dwindle through at least January 2017, they "extracted money" from Manafort's U.S. real estate to obtain loans from several financial institutions. Manafort claims he is innocent and is confident he will be acquitted. He is also suing the Justice Department, claiming overreach by Mueller because the charges he faces do not relate to Russian meddling in the election. CNBC's Dan Mangan contributed to this report. WATCH: Mueller investigating whether Manafort offered banker job in Trump WH More From CNBC HP Inc. HPQ delivered another quarter of stellar performance. The company reported better-than-expected results for first-quarter fiscal 2018. Its revenues increased for the sixth consecutive quarter, of which the last five have recorded double-digit growth after an extended period of decline. Also, the Personal Systems and Print segments performance improved for the fourth straight quarter after 2010. In fact, the companys outstanding results for the last few quarters substantiate that the spin-off from Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company HPE, along with its diligent restructuring initiatives, is finally paying off. HPs total revenues increased 15% year over year to $14.517 billion and outpaced the Zacks Consensus Estimate of $13.432 billion. The better-than-expected top-line performance was driven mainly by strength in the Personal System and Printing segments as well as successful product roll outs. The companys bottom-line results were also impressive, wherein its non-GAAP earnings from continuing operations of 48 cents per share came ahead of the Zacks Consensus Estimate of 42 cents as well as managements earlier guidance range of 42-45 cents. On a year-over-year basis, non-GAAP earnings improved 26%. Apart from higher revenues, the companys bottom-line results benefited from lower effective tax rate due to the U.S. tax reform. HP noted that its fiscal first-quarter effective tax rate came in at 15% which is against its previous projection of 21-22%, resulting in a benefit of 4 cents per share. HPs shares are up nearly 6% in todays pre-market trading session. The upswing stemmed from the companys upbeat second-quarter and fiscal 2018 non-GAAP earnings guidance. Notably, the stock has outperformed the industry in the last one year. While the stock has rallied 21.2%, the industry has recorded 15.8% growth. Quarter in Detail The Personal Systems segment generated revenues of $9.440 billion, up 15% year over year. While commercial revenues increased 16%, consumer revenues were up 13%. We believe the spin-off from Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company, and restructuring initiatives, such as focus on product innovations, pricing, marketing and sales activities, are ultimately apparently paying off. Notably, International Data Corporation (IDC), in its latest report on fourth-quarter 2017 PC shipment, stated that the quarter marked the seventh consecutive quarter of overall shipment growth for HP. Talking about only the U.S. market, it is only HP which recorded growth in PC shipments as well as improvement in market share. According to data compiled by Gartner IT, the quarter ended on Dec 31, 2017, was the fourth consecutive quarter of year-over-year shipment growth for the company in the U.S. market. Coming to the Printing business, this segments revenues were up 14% year over year to $5.076 billion, primarily owing to a 10% increase in supplies revenues and inclusion of the first full quarter of the newly acquired business of Samsungs printing (S-Print) business. HP expects that the acquisition of the S-Print business will bring in additional revenues of approximately $1.4 billion in fiscal 2018. HPs total hardware unit sales grew 14% backed by Consumer hardware units increase of 7% and Commercial hardware units year-over-year growth of 73%. The robust growth in Commercial hardware units primarily stemmed from the recent inclusion of Samsungs printing (S-Print) business. Region wise, the company registered double-digit growth in every region it operates. Revenues from Americas were up 10% year over year. While revenues from Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) climbed 13%, the same from the Asia Pacific and Japan region jumped 18% year over year, all in constant currency. Gross margin expanded 10 basis points (bps) on a year-over-year basis to 17.8%, primarily driven by better margin in the printing segment driven by improved productivity and higher supplies mix. This was partially offset by elevated commodity costs of Personal Systems. Non-GAAP operating expenses flared up 17% year over year to $1.6 billion. This was mainly due to the inclusion of S-Print business, and increased investment in research and development as well as go-to-market sales strategies. Non-GAAP operating margin from continuing operations remained flat year over year at 7% as the benefit from improved gross margin were fully offset by elevated operating expenses as a percentage of revenues. HPs non-GAAP net income from continuing operations came in at $803 million compared with $646 million reported a year ago. Story continues HP Inc. Price, Consensus and EPS Surprise HP Inc. Price, Consensus and EPS Surprise | HP Inc. Quote Balance Sheet and Cash Flow HP ended the fiscal first quarter with cash and cash equivalents of $5.475 billion compared with $6.997 billion recorded in the previous quarter. The company had long-term debt of $6.340 billion compared with $6.747 billion reported in the last quarter. The company generated cash flow of $996 million from operational activities during the quarter. HP repurchased shares worth $462 million and paid dividends worth $230 million during the same time frame. Guidance The company, during its conference call, noted that due to implementation of the new tax code, its effective cost rate for fiscal 2018 is likely to be 16% (+/- 2%), much lower than the previous projection of 21-22%, thereby benefiting HPs non-GAAP earnings per share by 13 cents. However, the company stated that higher variable performance bonus opportunities for non-executives will result in dilution of approximately 3 cents toward non-GAAP earnings. Therefore, the net benefit from lower effective tax rate will be around 10 cents, of which it has already earned in the fiscal first quarter. So, the remaining three quarters are likely to see a tax benefit of 2 cents each. Keeping the aforementioned factor, along with improving market share across the PC and Printer businesses, HP raised its non-GAAP earnings guidance for fiscal 2018. The company now estimates non-GAAP earnings to lie between $1.90 and $2.00 (mid-point $1.95), up from the earlier guidance range of $1.75-$1.85 (mid-point $1.80). The Zacks Consensus Estimate is currently pegged at $1.81. For the fiscal second quarter, HP projects non-GAAP earnings from continuing operations in the range of 45-49 cents per share (mid-point: 47 cents). The Zacks Consensus Estimate is pegged at 43 cents. Our Take We are impressed by the performance of HPs PC segment, wherein the year-over-year increase can be attributed to growth in Commercial and Consumer revenues. Additionally, the companys efforts to turn around its business have been commendable. Meanwhile, it has been working on product innovation, differentiation and enhancing the capabilities of its printing business to stabilize the top line. The latest PC shipment data by IDC depicts that HPs restructuring initiatives, including focus on product innovations, pricing, marketing and sales activities, divestment of non-core assets and cutting jobs to lower costs, are paying off gradually. Per the data compiled by IDC, the company witnessed year-over-year shipment growth for the seventh quarter in a row, after witnessing declines for five consecutive quarters. With the start of shipping A3 multifunction printers to more than 80 countries, which covers all its key markets, HP is likely to revive the companys printing business and grab a bigger share in the inkjet printer market. Also, the acquisition of Samsungs printing business is anticipated to support the development and manufacturing of printers. Nonetheless, prices of components such as DRAM and NAND are likely to remain high in 2018 which will continue to drag down the companys margins. Although the companys strategic efforts are driving top-line growth, those might not be enough to offset this incremental cost. Moreover, competition from the likes of Lenovo, Dell and Apple AAPL remains another key concern. HP currently holds a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). You can see the complete list of todays Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here. Zacks Top 10 Stocks for 2018 In addition to the stocks discussed above, would you like to know about our 10 finest buy-and-hold tickers for the entirety of 2018? Last year's 2017 Zacks Top 10 Stocks portfolio produced double-digit winners, including FMC Corp. and VMware which racked up stellar gains of +67.9% and +61%. Now a brand-new portfolio has been handpicked from over 4,000 companies covered by the Zacks Rank. Dont miss your chance to get in on these long-term buys. Access Zacks Top 10 Stocks for 2018 today >> Want the latest recommendations from Zacks Investment Research? Today, you can download 7 Best Stocks for the Next 30 Days. Click to get this free report HP Inc. (HPQ) : Free Stock Analysis Report Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company (HPE) : Free Stock Analysis Report Gartner, Inc. (IT) : Free Stock Analysis Report Apple Inc. (AAPL) : Free Stock Analysis Report To read this article on Zacks.com click here. Zacks Investment Research Investors in Banco Bradesco S.A. BBD need to pay close attention to the stock based on moves in the options market lately. That is because the Mar 16, 2018 $5.00 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 Banco Bradesco shares, but what is the fundamental picture for the company? Currently, Banco Bradesco is a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold) in the Banks - Foreign industry that ranks in the Bottom 23% of our Zacks Industry Rank. Over the last 60 days, our Zacks Consensus Estimate for the current quarter has increased from 21 cents per share to 23 cents. Given the way analysts feel about Banco Bradesco 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: Want the latest recommendations from Zacks Investment Research? Today, you can download 7 Best Stocks for the Next 30 Days. Click to get this free report Banco Bradesco SA (BBD) : Free Stock Analysis Report To read this article on Zacks.com click here. Zacks Investment Research Watch news, TV and more on Yahoo View. Jimmy addresses Donald Trump Jr. around the two minute mark. Jimmy Kimmel is calling out right-wing conspiracy theorists as well as President Donald Trumps least favorite son for perpetuating actual fake news in the wake of last weeks horrific school shooting in Parkland, Fla. VIDEOSStephen Colbert Sickened By Florida School Shooting, Slams Senator Marco House Plant Rubio There are always crackpots in situations like this who come out of the woodwork with [this] irrational, paranoia-filled nonsense. It happened after Sandy Hook, too, Kimmel said during Wednesdays monologue. The right-wing thrives on conspiracy theories: Global warming is a conspiracy, the Russia investigation is a conspiracy, Obamas birth certificate was a conspiracy, and those are just the big ones. There are hundreds of others, including Pizzagate, Scalias murder [and] the three million illegal votes. It was then that he singled out Donald Trump Jr., who is among those liking posts on social media that suggest that David Hogg, one of the students who survived the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, is actually a crisis actor planted by the FBI. In this case, we have known people like Donald Trump Jr. the presidents least favorite son perpetuating this kind of stuff, he said. This is our presidents son doing that liking a story that directly defames a student that survived a shooting. VIDEOSKimmel Urges Trump, NRA Lackeys to Do Something, Now About Shootings: Children Are Being Murdered He then turned his attention to NRA board member/pair of camouflage cargo shorts that came to life Ted Nugent, who shared a link on Facebook that also insinuated that Hogg is part of some grand conspiracy. Story continues The kid who just watched his friends die is a puppet to Ted, and its a puppet show. Is that OK? Should the person who actively spreads this garbage around be a member of your board if you are a reputable organization? Kimmel asked. I dont think so, but I want you to consider this, especially if you are a Trump supporter or a member of the NRA: Do you really think these kids these teenagers who spoke out after a shooting at their school are actors who are part of some sort of deep state, left-wing conspiracy? If the answer is Yes, I do believe that, I have some bad news for you: Youre crazy. Youre a crazy person. Your brain is not functioning, and Im worried about you. Press PLAY on the video above to watch Kimmels latest monologue. Related stories Devious Maids' Roselyn Sanchez Checks Into ABC's Grand Hotel Pilot Once Upon a Time Quiz: How Well Do You Remember the Very First Episode? Scandal's Bellamy Young to Headline ABC Comedic Soap False Profits Bump stocks are back in the headlines. The debate over these gun accessories first flared up after the shooter in Las Vegas, who fired into a crowd of concertgoers and killed 58, modified a semiautomatic rifle with a bump stock. While Nikolas Cruz who shot and killed 17 students and faculty at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. on Feb. 14 did not use a bump stock, calls to ban or regulate the attachments have resurfaced in the wake of the school shooting. The issue does seem to be one facet of the gun control debate where conservatives and liberals may be able to agree. Everyone from Diane Feinstein to the National Rifle Association has said bump stocks should be regulated. What is a bump stock? A bump stock, also called a bump-fire stock, is an attachment that makes a semi-automatic weapon like an AR-15 rifle shoot nearly as fast as fully-automatic machine guns. This accessory replaces the standard stock on a rifle with a piece of plastic or metal molded to the lower end of the gun. This harnesses the guns natural recoil, allowing it to slide back and forth freely and rapidly and re-cock after each round fired. There are other devices that allow guns to simulate automatic firing on a semi-automatic weapon, but bump stocks are the most well known of the legal options. The classification of these devices depends on whether they mechanically alter the function of the firearm to fire fully automatic, Jill Snyder, a special agent in charge at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), said at a news conference in Las Vegas following the shooting there in October. Bump-fire stocks, while simulating automatic fire, do not actually alter the firearm to fire automatically, making them legal under current federal law. Still, this is more of a technicality than a significant difference in the amount of damage possible with a bump stock. A fully automatic weapon shoots about 14 rounds per second. Using a bump stock with a semi automatic AR-15 gave the Las Vegas shooter the ability to fire about 9 shots per second, according to analysis of footage by the New York Times. Story continues Who sells bump stocks? Slide Fire is the primary manufacturer of bump stocks. The Texas-based company stopped producing the accessory in October 2017 after it was found that the Las Vegas shooter used a bump stock. We have temporarily suspended accepting new orders while we work to replenish inventory, Slide Fire said on its website at the time. Several other companies pulled bump stocks from their offerings following the tragedy in Las Vegas. Cabelas, a hunting and fishing retailer that was acquired by Bass Pro Shops in October 2017, announced that it would no longer sell the attachments. Walmart also removed bump stocks from its online store. Bass Pro noted that the company has never sold the gun accessories. Slide Fire resumed selling bump stocks in November. Following the news that Trump called for a ban on them, gun enthusiasts rushed to put in orders and Slide Fires site crashed due to the high traffic. Did Trump ban bump stocks? On Tuesday, President Trump ordered the Justice Department to issue regulations that would ban bump stocks, after pressure to do more to curtail access to deadly weapons following the Florida shooting. This is the first time the president has weighed in on the issue, but the Justice Department announced they would look into bump stocks as part of a review process on the legal definition of machine guns following the Las Vegas shooting. That review is ongoing in the ATF. Trump also tweeted Tuesday about strengthening background checks, indicating that he may support modest gun control measures. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. Press Secretary Sarah Sanders said the White House has not closed the door on any front when asked about a broader ban on assault weapons on Feb. 20. The presidents recent comments on the possibility of new gun control reforms must be measured against his pledges to gun advocates in the past. To the NRA, I can proudly say I will never, ever let you down. Trump said at the groups annual convention in April 2017. The group enthusiastically endorsed Mr. Trump and spent $30 million on his campaign. Have there been other proposed bans on bump stocks? The term often comes up in Congressional statements and proposed legislation following mass shootings, whether or not bump stocks were used. Even the NRA supported measures to regulate bump stock sales following the Las Vegas shooting. The price of bump stocks rises each time a ban is proposed, with sales often doubling or tripling as support for regulation grows. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) introduced legislation to ban the import, sale, manufacturing, transfer, and possession of bump stocks and other similar gun accessories. The only reason to modify a gun is to kill as many people as possible in as short a time as possible, Feinstein said. Republican lawmakers seem to be on board this time around, with House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) saying obviously we need to look at how we can tighten up the compliance with existing laws that ban fully automatic weapons. Latvia's central bank governor Ilmars Rimsevics speaks to the media during a news conference in Riga, Latvia February 20, 2018. REUTERS/Ints Kalnins By Gederts Gelzis RIGA (Reuters) - Latvia's commercial banking association called on the European Central Bank on Wednesday to step in and sort out a crisis at lender ABLV Bank, which has asked for emergency funding after being accused by the U.S. Treasury of money laundering. Latvia's financial sector has been hit by a storm in recent days with the head of the central bank, who sits on the ECB's rate-setting council, also briefly held by the anti-corruption authority over separate bribery allegations. Latvia's president said his country's financial sector was "stable" but that law enforcement bodies had to step up their fight against money-laundering and other forms of corruption. Latvia joined the European Union in 2004 and the ECB has been responsible for oversight of its banks since 2014, when the Baltic nation of 2 million joined the euro zone. "The ECB Supervisory Board must urgently become an active partner in solving and explaining the situation at hand," the Association of Latvian Commercial Banks said in a statement. It said the chair of the ECB's Supervisory Board, Daniele Nouy, should come to Latvia and "provide (a) detailed explanation on the preceding supervisory actions by the ECB". International authorities have long worried about a number of small banks in Latvia who hold funds for foreign clients, mostly in Russia and other former Soviet republics, several of which have been punished for breaches of rules on money-laundering and financing of terrorism, and for sanctions busting. Latvia's banking troubles have highlighted how thinly the ECB is spread in supervising Europe's biggest lenders and the call by Latvia's banking association will put pressure on the euro zone central bank to explain why it has not acted. MONEY-LAUNDERING The United States this month said ABLV had made money laundering a "pillar of the bank's business practices" and had helped breach sanctions on North Korea. ABLV denied any wrongdoing, but the ECB has halted its payments until it comes up with a plan to sort out its finances. Story continues Central bank chief Ilmars Rimsevics has also denied wrongdoing, saying he is a victim of a conspiracy, while the Defence Ministry has said the allegations could be part of a disinformation campaign to influence October's election. The ministry said recent events were identical to campaigns that preceded French, German and U.S. elections. Those have been blamed on Russia. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said such accusations lacked "a sense of reality". "You are witnesses yourselves that Russia is accused of a whole range of things, in the most surprising ways, by a variety of capitals and at a variety of levels," Peskov told reporters on Wednesday. "All this is starting to look like obsessive behaviour." Latvian law enforcement officials briefed President Raimonds Vejonis about the crisis at a meeting of the National Security Council on Wednesday. In a brief statement to reporters after the meeting, Vejonis said the crisis had shown the need "to continue implementing improvements in the banking and financial sector, to continue the fight against corruption and money laundering..." The U.S. State Department expressed "full confidence" that Latvian authorities would "take the necessary steps to uphold the integrity of its banking and financial sector". In a statement late on Tuesday, spokeswoman Heather Nauert said Washington had for many years been working with Latvia, a NATO ally, "to combat corruption, money laundering and other threats to international security", and would continue to do so. (Additional reporting by Simon Johnson in Stockholm and Polina Ivanova in Moscow; writing by Simon Johnson and Gareth Jones; Editing by Toby Chopra) [caption id="attachment_10534" align="alignleft" width="620"] May Day immigration march in Washington, D.C. on May 1, 2017. Photo: Diego M. Radzinschi/ALM.[/caption] Several civil rights groups filed a federal lawsuit Thursday in a move to save temporary protected status for immigrants from El Salvador and Haiti, claiming the Trump administration has a "racially discriminatory immigration agenda." The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, claims the policy revoking TPS for Haitian and Salvadoran immigrants is based solely on race. TPS is a designation given to foreign nationals already in the United States who cannot safely return to their home country. Conditions can include natural or environmental disasters and armed conflict. The plaintiffs are represented by Massachusetts-based Centro Presente, which focuses on immigrant rights, and the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights and Economic Justice. "Defendants' stated reason for terminating TPS for Salvadorians and Haitians ignore these conditions and are nothing but a thin and pretextual smokescreen for a racially discriminatory immigration agendaone the president has been astonishingly blunt about articulating," according to the lawsuit. The lawsuit includes a litany of derogatory statements and tweets from President Donald Trump about immigrants. "President Trump has long made clear his dislike and disregard for Latino and black immigrants, including equating Latino immigrants with rapists, asserting that African immigrants who have seen America would never 'go back to their huts,' and saying a group of Haitian immigrants 'all have AIDS,'" according to the lawsuit. The lawsuit also notes Trump's recent private meeting with legislators in which he reportedly called Haiti and other TPS nations "shithole countries." According to the lawsuit, TPS is set to end for Haiti on July 22, 2019, and for El Salvador on Sept. 9, 2019. The suit states there are 242,900 Salvadoran immigrants in the United States covered by the policy with jobs, homes and an estimated 192,700 U.S.-born children, according to the lawsuit. There are 93,500 immigrants from Haiti in the country covered by the program with an estimated 27,000 U.S. citizen children. "Termination of TPS for El Salvador and Haiti would wreak havoc on the lives of hundreds of thousands of people," according to the lawsuit. "As the individual plaintiffs' experiences reflect, entrepreneurs will lose their businesses, property owners will lose their family homes and families with U.S. citizen children will be torn apart." The suit lists claims for equal protection and due process violations. The suit also seeks a declaratory judgment, and asks for a writ compelling the defendants to carry out all nondiscretionary duties required by the U.S. Constitution and federal law. Katie Waldman, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, declined to comment Thursday, saying the matter is pending litigation. The lawsuit comes one month after the NAACP sued DHS over its Haiti immigration policy. Similar to the lawsuit filed Thursday, the NAACP also cited the president's remarks about immigrants. The NAACP lawsuit was filed in Maryland and alleges government officials failed to follow the normal decision-making process when considering whether to renew the TPS granted to Haitian immigrants since an earthquake rocked the country in 2010. By Nate Raymond BOSTON (Reuters) - A group of Haitian and Salvadoran immigrants on Thursday filed a lawsuit claiming that the decision by U.S. President Donald Trump's administration to terminate the protections that allowed them to remain in the country was racially motivated. The lawsuit filed in federal court in Boston seeks to challenge the Trump administration's decision to terminate the temporary protective status enjoyed by thousands of immigrants from Haiti and El Salvador. The lawsuit cited statements it said showed the Republican president's "dislike and disregard for Latino and Black immigrants," most recently in reported remarks in January by Trump saying immigrants from Africa and Haiti come from "shithole countries." "The animus directed towards Latino and Black immigrants is a clear and unfortunate thread running throughout President Trump's statements - and is actualized by his Administrations policies, such as the ones challenged by this lawsuit," the complaint said. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security declined to comment. Temporary protective status, or TPS, offers protection from deportation to immigrants already in the United States, including those who entered illegally, from countries affected by natural disasters, civil conflicts and other problems. Some 200,000 Salvadorans had been allowed to live in the United States under that program in the wake of two devastating 2001 earthquakes in their home country that left hundreds of thousands living there homeless. About 59,000 Haitian immigrants were likewise protected from deportation after a devastating 2010 earthquake. Democratic President Barack Obama's administration extended the status several times after the initial designation. In January, the Trump administration announced that the Salvadorans' temporary protected status would end on Sept. 9, 2019, giving them 18 months to leave or seek lawful residency. That move came after the administration in November ended TPS for people from Haiti, similarly giving people from that country 18 months to return to the impoverished Caribbean country or legalize their status in the United States. In announcing the end of the designations of Haiti and El Salvador for TPS, the Department of Homeland Security said the conditions in those countries no longer supported their special statuses. The Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights and Economic Justice filed Thursday's lawsuit on behalf of six immigrants from El Salvador and two from Haiti as well as Centro Presente, a Massachusetts-based Latin American immigrant organization. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People filed a similar case in January over the decision to rescind TPS for Haitian immigrants. (Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston; Additional reporting by Yeganeh Torbati in Washington; Editing by Andrea Ricci) Delta and United joins Avis, Enterprise and others in ending partnerships with the NRA. The list of companies terminating their partnerships with the National Rifle Association is growing as public outcry against the gun group escalates following the deadliest mass shooting at a public high school in U.S. history. Delta (DAL) and United Airlines (UAL) said Saturday they will end group airfare discounts for NRA members and they were in the process of informing the gun group of this decision. Moving companies North American Van Lines and Allied Van Lines also ended their discounts with the group over the weekend. FedEx (FDX) though refusing to end special discounts to NRA members condemned the prevalence of assault rifles in the United States and said Monday it supports restricting them to members of the military. "FedEx views assault rifles and large capacity magazines as an inherent potential danger to schools, workplaces, and communities when such weapons are misused. We therefore support restricting them to the military. Most important, FedEx believes urgent action is required at the local, state, and Federal level to protect schools and students from incidents such as the horrific tragedy in Florida on February 14th," FedEx said in a statement. FedEx added Tuesday that its discounts apply only to NRA members, not the organization itself. "The NRA is one of hundreds of organizations in our alliances/association Marketing program whose members receive discounted rates for FedEx shipping," the statement continued. "FedEx has never set or changed rates for any of our millions of customers around the world in response to their politics, beliefs or positions on issues." Here's a list of the firms that have discontinued their partnerships with the NRA in the wake of the shooting: Avis Budget Group (CAR) and Hertz Global Holdings (HTZ) cut ties Friday. First National Bank of Omaha cited a customer outcry in ending its NRA-branded Visa card with the group. "Customer feedback has caused us to review our relationship with the NRA," First National Bank of Omaha told CNBC. "As a result, First National Bank of Omaha will not renew its contract with the National Rifle Association to issue the NRA Visa Card." Story continues The National Rifle Association has defended itself vigorously amid the turmoil. "Since the tragedy in Parkland, Florida, a number of companies have decided to sever their relationship with the NRA, in an effort to punish our members who are doctors, farmers, law enforcement officers, fire fighters, nurses, shop owners and school teachers that live in every American community," the NRA said in a statement. "Let it be absolutely clear. The loss of a discount will neither scare nor distract one single NRA member from our mission to stand and defend the individual freedoms that have always made America the greatest nation in the world." Chubb said it gave notice to the NRA three months ago to discontinue its program, but made the announcement Friday. Metlife and Symantec also made their announcements Friday. Hotel chain Wyndham Worldwide (WYN) told CNBC it ended its relationship with the NRA late last year. The outcry comes amid signs Americans' interest in gun control is not waning like it typically has in the wake of past mass shootings. Google searches for "gun control" have remained elevated a week after the Parkland, Florida, massacre. BlackRock (BLK), the world's largest asset manager, said it was going to reach out to the publicly traded gunmakers "to understand their response" to the shooting. BlackRock indirectly owns shares in companies like American Outdoor Brands (AOBC) and Sturm Ruger (RGR) as a provider of exchange-traded funds. WATCH: Bank of Omaha not renewing NRA credit card contract High school senior Sam Zeif broke down sobbing in a White House meeting with President Trump Wednesday as he struggled to explain what it was like to cower in fear as an unhinged man fired round after round from an AR-15 assault rifle at his high school. The 18-year-old was making a gut-wrenching appeal for help from Trump, Vice President Mike Pence and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. He had received widespread attention last week after he posted an emotional text message exchange he had with his freshman brother during the attack that killed 17 students and staff at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. "I was on the second floor, texting my mom, texting my dad, texting three of my brothers that I was never gonna see them again," he told the president. "Then it occurred to me that my 14-year-old brother was directly above me in that classroom where (teacher) Scott Beigel was murdered." This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. The teen, who turned 18 the day after last week's massacre, said he was horrified that someone his age could buy a semi-automatic rifle. "How is it that easy to buy this type of weapon?" he asked. "How do we not stop this after Columbine, after Sandy Hook? I'm sitting with a mother that lost her son. It's still happening." He recounted how his best friend was shot to death and how the loss gutted his heart. "I'm here to use my voice because he can't," Zeif said. "And I know he's with me, cheering me on to be strong, but it's hard. And to feel like this, it doesn't even feel like a week. Time has stood still." He does not feel comfortable in the world anymore. He does not feel secure in his community. He longs to go to class without fearing some awful violence will descend again. "I want to feel safe at school," he said. Zeif was one of dozens of students and parents who traveled to Washington, D.C., to tell the president he must do something to change the way guns are sold in this country. Story continues The "listening session" was designed to hear their stories, and their recommendations for moving forward, Trump told them. "We cannot imagine the depth of their anguish, but we can pledge the strength of our resolve," the president said. "And we must do more to protect our children. We have to do more to protect our children." Meanwhile, in Florida's Broward County, Sheriff Scott Israel announced deputies are now patrolling high schools with AR-15s, the same weapon allegedly used by 19-year-old suspect Nikolas Cruz. "Schools as soft targets need to be fortified," the sheriff said. RELATED STORIES School Shooting Survivor Leaves Hospital But Still Has Shrapnel Behind Her Eye Parkland Survivor David Hogg Responds to Conspiracy Theories Florida Reps Aide Fired After Saying School Shooting Survivors Are Actors Related Articles: Momenta's (MNTA) Earnings & Revenues Surpass Estimates in Q4 Momenta (MNTA) delivers better-than-expected fourth-quarter results on the back of an upfront payment from CSL. Following the announcement of fourth-quarter of 2017 results, shares of Momenta Pharmaceuticals Inc. MNTA moved up 2.5%. The company reported earnings per share of 18 cents in the quarter, beating the Zacks Consensus Estimate of 6 cents. The figure, however, was down from 60 cents earned in the year-ago quarter. Momenta Pharmaceuticals, Inc. Price and Consensus Momenta Pharmaceuticals, Inc. Price and Consensus | Momenta Pharmaceuticals, Inc. Quote Revenues in the quarter came in at $64.6 million and topped the Zacks Consensus Estimate of $62.7 million and was up from $34.2 million in the year-ago quarter. Momentas stock has gained 3.5% in the last six months as against the industrys decline of 3.3%. Quarter in Detail Momentas top-line comprises product revenues of $13.4 million earned from Sandozs sales of Glatopa, a generic version of Copaxone (20 mg), compared with $15.8 million in the year-ago quarter. The decrease was primarily due to inventory price adjustments owing to Mylans MYL entry into the Copaxone market along with a deduction of $0.6 million for reimbursing the companys share of Glatopa-related legal expenses to Sandoz. Collaborative research and development revenues came in at $51.2 million, up from $18.4 million in the year-ago quarter. The increase was due to a revenue recognition of $50.0 million upfront payment from CSL in fourth-quarter 2017. While, research and development expenses were up to $36.1 million from $26.4 million in the year-ago quarter, general and administrative expenses decreased 13.2% to $15.8 million. Outlook Momenta expects operating expenses (excluding stock-based compensation and net of collaborative revenues) in the range of $180-$200 million in 2018. Operating expenses in first-quarter 2018 are projected around $45-$55 million. Momenta expects to generate revenues of $45 million from Mylan as upfront payment on a quarterly basis. Story continues Pipeline Updates Momenta announced that the FDA has finally approved Sandoz's Abbreviated New Drug Application for Glatopa 40 mg. Both companies suffered a setback with the FDA issuing a warning letter to Pfizer PFE in February 2017, which is Sandozs contracted fill/finish manufacturing partner for Glatopa. Meanwhile, Momenta continues to progress with its other pipeline candidates. In January 2018, Momenta and Mylan announced plans to initiate a patient clinical trial of M710 a proposed biosimilar of Eylea in the first half of 2018. An Investigational New Drug (IND) application has been accepted by regulatory body. The Biologics License Application (BLA) for Momentas M923, a biosimilar version of Humira, is also ready to be filed with the FDA but the company is looking for a collaboration partner for the same. Momenta suffered another setback when the company and partner Mylan announced that M834, a proposed biosimilar for Orencia, did not meet its primary pharmacokinetic end points in a phase I study to compare the pharmacokinetics, safety and immunogenicity of M834 to Orencia in normal healthy volunteers. Hence, Momenta and partner Mylan continue to evaluate the next course of action. Momentas novel autoimmune portfolio includes M230, a Selective Immunomodulator of Fc receptors (SIF3) and M281, an anti-FcRn monoclonal antibody. Momenta successfully completed a phase I single ascending dose study in healthy volunteers for M281. In January 2018, Momenta reported positive top-line data on M281 from a phase I single ascending dose (SAD) and multiple ascending dose (MAD) study of normal human volunteers. The phase I randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study evaluated the safety, tolerability, pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics of M281. The candidate did not exhibit any adverse event, was well tolerated and decreased circulating IgG levels up to 89% with a mean reduction of 84% over the 98-day MAD study. In addition, the SAD portion of the study enrolled five cohorts with a total of 34 healthy adult volunteers and showed that a single dose of M281 achieved up to an 80% reduction of circulating IgG antibodies. Our Take Momentas fourth-quarter results were better-than-expected driven by the receipt of an upfront payment. 2017 was challenging for the company as it faced approval delays of Glatopa 40 mg and reported disappointing results from a biosimilar candidate. While the FDA approval of Glatopa 40 mg should relieve Momenta, competition will limit market share gains. We note that Mylan has already won FDA approval for a generic version of Teva Pharmaceuticals TEVA Copaxone 40 mg. Notably, this is the first generic of Copaxone that has been approved. Since Mylan was one of the first applicants to submit a substantially complete ANDA for glatiramer acetate Injection, 40 mg/mL, containing a Paragraph IV certification, the company and other first filers may be eligible for 180 days of generic drug exclusivity. Hence, we expect the company to face challenges in the market. Meanwhile, the progress of biosimilars pipeline was encouraging. Zacks Rank Momenta currently carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). You can see the complete list of todays Zacks #1 (Strong Buy) Rank stocks here. More Stock News: This Is Bigger than the iPhone! It could become the mother of all technological revolutions. Apple sold a mere 1 billion iPhones in 10 years but a new breakthrough is expected to generate more than 27 billion devices in just 3 years, creating a $1.7 trillion market. Zacks has just released a Special Report that spotlights this fast-emerging phenomenon and 6 tickers for taking advantage of it. If you don't buy now, you may kick yourself in 2020. Click here for the 6 trades >> Want the latest recommendations from Zacks Investment Research? Today, you can download 7 Best Stocks for the Next 30 Days. Click to get this free report Pfizer Inc. (PFE) : Free Stock Analysis Report Momenta Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (MNTA) : Free Stock Analysis Report Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. (TEVA) : Free Stock Analysis Report Mylan N.V. (MYL) : Free Stock Analysis Report To read this article on Zacks.com click here. Zacks Investment Research Friday, February 23, 2018 What to watch today To cap a holiday-shortened week, investors will face a quieter schedule than weve seen over the past couple days. No major economic news is set for release on Friday, while the earnings flow should peter out with American Railcar (ARII), Cabot Oil & Gas (COG), PSE&G (PEG), and Potbelly (PBPB) among the notable names reporting results. Investors on Friday may also brush up on their Buffett-isms, as Warren Buffetts latest letter to Berkshire Hathaway (BRK-A, BRK-B) is set for release on Saturday morning. Read More Top news Wall Street may be rethinking its relationship with guns: With the nations emotions raw over the fatal shooting in Florida, evidence is mounting that investors may be rethinking their long, fraught relationship with the firearms industry. On Thursday, the day the head of the National Rifle Association issued a searing rebuttal to calls for stricter gun control, the nations largest privately owned bank, First National Bank of Omaha, announced it would stop issuing NRA-sponsored credit cards. Then, the investment giant BlackRock Inc. said it was exploring ways to cull gun companies from the portfolios of clients who no longer wish to invest in them. [Bloomberg] General Mills to buy pet food maker in $8B deal: U.S. packaged foods company General Mills Inc. (GIS) will buy natural pet food maker Blue Buffalo Pet Products Inc. (BUFF) in an $8 billion cash deal, Blue Buffalo said on Friday. [Reuters] Mueller squeezes Manafort and Gates with new tax charges: Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and his onetime deputy, Rick Gates, were indicted on tax and bank fraud charges as U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller mounted a fresh attack to strengthen his legal pressure against the men. Mueller used a new 32-count indictment in Alexandria, Va., to raise the legal stakes against the duo, who were initially indicted on Oct. 27 in Washington on charges of laundering millions of dollars and failing to register as foreign agents for their political consulting work over a decade in Ukraine. [Bloomberg] Story continues Regulators to pull back on Obama-era mutual-fund rules: Securities regulators plan to pare back Obama-era requirements that would require mutual funds to tell shareholders about large holdings of hard-to-sell assets, in what would be a significant concession to the industry. The Securities and Exchange Commission had planned to propose rolling back the disclosures, set to go into effect in 2019, on Wednesday. But it postponed the action because commissioners have splintered over the scope of the rollback, people familiar with the matter said. [The Wall Street Journal] For more of the latest news, go to Yahoo Finance Flanked by White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, left, Ivanka Trump, adviser to and daughter of President Donald Trump, speaks as she arrives at the Incheon International Airport in Incheon, South Korea, Friday, Feb. 23, 2018. Ivanka will lead her countrys delegation in the closing ceremony of the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics Sunday. (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon. Pool) Yahoo Finance Originals U.S. economic data right now is as good as it gets, Goldman Sachs says Look for these 5 aces when picking a money manager New European regulations could crush media business models Southwest increases fee for last-minute early boarding The craziest things people have tried to expense at work Like what you just read? Get the Morning Brief sent directly to your inbox every Monday to Friday by 6:30 a.m. ET. And feel free to share it with a friend! The Morning Brief provides a quick rundown on what to watch in the markets, top news stories, and the best of Yahoo Finance Originals. A selection of Glock pistols are seen for sale at the Pony Express Firearms shop in Parker, Colorado December 7, 2015. REUTERS/Rick Wilking/File Photo What would it cost to arm more teachers is Americas schools, as President Trump has proposed? The Washington Posts Philip Bump did some back-of-the-envelope math to try to find the answer. Bump started with Trumps suggestion from his listening session with students and parents Wednesday that arming, say, the 20 percent of teachers most highly adept with firearms could help end school shootings very quickly. That means arming roughly 718,000 teachers nationwide a bit fewer than the number of people in the Army and the Navy combined as of last December. Providing basic firearms training for those people would cost about $71.8 million. More robust training created for teachers in active-shooter scenarios might run about $1,000 per trainee, or $718 million total, based on the cost of one such program based in Ohio. There theres the cost of providing those teachers with guns. Buying hundreds of thousands of Glock G17 pistols would add about $360 million to the tab, but maybe the government could get a big discount, cutting the tab in half. The total cost then would be at least $250 million, which would include basic training and discounted guns, and possibly as high as $1.077 billion, if the government opted for a higher level of training and paid full price for the firearms. If schools provide no training, leaving just the price of the guns, we might be talking about roughly $180 million, or more once you factor in ammunition, higher insurance fees and other potential costs. Trump on Thursday said he would consider providing federal money for firearms training for teachers and proposed providing a little bit of a bonus for those who get the training. He estimated that it may be 10 percent or may be 40 percent of teachers who would be qualified to carry a weapon. The overall cost of arming teachers would obviously change dramatically depending on what the number might be. Bumps Washington Post article also analyzes a proposal by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich to hire six to eight guards to patrol every school. Read his piece for all the details about how much that would cost. Well just tell you that the lowest estimate runs $12 billion a year and the highest is several times that. This article was updated at 4:30 p.m. ET on Thursday, February 22. Like what you're reading? Sign up for our free newsletter. Photo credit: BWXT Nuclear Energy Inc. From Popular Mechanics NASA studied "nuclear thermal propulsion systems" during the Cold War, but shelved the idea because it wasn't necessary. Nuclear-powered spacecraft could send humans to Mars faster and allow them to abort a dangerous mission and return to Earth. NASA has already hired a company to start working on a new NTP engine design. To accomplish what will be the greatest human spaceflight triumph since Apollo 11 - sending astronauts to Mars - NASA is looking to a blast from its nuclear past. Today's chemical propellant rocket engines may not be the fastest or most efficient way to send a crew to another planet. One idea for the next-generation rocket engine you'd need is to bring back nuclear thermal propulsion (NTP) systems. The technology was studied in the 1950s and 60s, but shelved in the early 70s because of technological challenges, and because there was no clear need for the propulsion system. Jeff Sheehy, chief engineer of NASA's Space Technology Mission Directorate, says times have changed. Advances in manufacturing, materials science, and engineering have made it possible to design a better fuel element and nuclear reactor than was possible during the Cold War. What's more, and what has really been lacking until now, is a reinvigorated "desire to send crews into deep space," says Sheehy. "I mean the desire has always been there, but the push or the emphasis that NASA has had for the last few years about developing that capability - that has renewed the interest in NTP as an option." Faster to Mars A nuclear thermal propulsion rocket engine would use a small nuclear reactor to generate heat from uranium fuel. That thermal energy would then be transferred to a liquid propellant, probably liquid hydrogen, which expands into a gas and is shot out through a nozzle to produce thrust. "So you get the exhaust moving very fast out the back end," Sheehy says. Story continues To begin work on a new NTP rocket engine, NASA awarded an $18.8 million contract to BWXT Nuclear Energy in August 2017. BWXT, which has a long history of making nuclear fuel for the U.S. Navy, will use the money for a three-year project with four primary parts: to design a nuclear reactor that uses low-enriched uranium nuclear fuel in the form of "Cermet" (ceramic metallic) rods; to design an engine that could be mated to the reactor to produce thrust; to study cryogenic storage options for carrying liquid hydrogen propellant; and to develop an exhaust capture system that would be used for future ground testing of the NTP engine. Photo credit: NASA "What this project is mainly looking at is a fuel element design that can allow us to use low-enriched uranium," Sheehy says. "Instead of the highly enriched uranium that has been the basis for previous NTP efforts, we're looking at using a mixture where the amount of fissionable material is under 20 percent. ... The handling, the safety, the approval process, licensing, all that, is expected to be somewhat less strenuous than highly enriched, weapons-grade uranium. This is the kind of system that a university might have as a reactor." Nuclear thermal propulsion has a number of advantages over current chemical and electric propulsion systems. A spacecraft using NTP could cut the travel time to Mars by 20 or 25 percent compared to chemical rocket engines, Sheehy says. Alternatively, the higher energy output means a spacecraft with NTP could launch to Mars during a broader launch window than spacecraft with conventional rocket engines. The latter are limited to a 30-day window every 26 months that's dependent on the orbital positions of Earth and Mars. Perhaps most importantly, NTP engines would allow astronauts on a mission to Mars to more readily abort and fly back to Earth. Chemical propellants provide a high amount of thrust, but burn up quickly. Accordingly, Sheehy says, a crewed mission to Mars using chemical propellants would likely need to send the fuel for the return trip in advance. In other words, astronauts flying to Mars with chemical rocket engines would need to get there to pick up the fuel they need to fly home. "You might have the opportunity to abort a month or two into the mission [with NTP]," says Sheehy. "Whereas with a chemical system, once you put yourself on a trajectory to Mars, you're basically going to Mars. You maybe wish you could come home." Nuclear vs. Chemical vs. Electric A big advantage of NTP engines is that they can run much longer than chemical rocket engines, such as the Space Shuttle main engines or the Merlin engines on SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets, and still produce much more thrust than an electric propulsion system, such as the ion thrusters used on satellites. NTP is a happy medium. "The Space Shuttle main engines were mounted on that enormous orange tank, full of oxygen and hydrogen, and as enormous as it was, it only had enough fuel to power the three main engines on the Space Shuttle for about 10 minutes," says Sheehy. "And then you've used all of that propellant and the enormous orange tank is gone." The NTP system NASA and BWXT are designing, on the other hand, could fire continuously for an hour or more. Photo credit: BWXT Nuclear Energy, Inc. "The other important consideration is how you size your engine," says Sheehy. "What we're looking at for the NTP system is an engine that would be in the range of 15,000 to 25,000 pounds of thrust force, and we might group three of those together." The efficiency of a rocket engine is measured in specific impulse. "It's sort of similar to miles per gallon on a car," says Sheehy. Engineers measure the amount of thrust force of an engine in pounds of thrust, and then divide that value by the fuel consumption rate in pounds per second, which leaves you with a specific impulse measured in seconds. "[NTP specific impulse] is actually twice as good as a chemical system, your typical hydrogen-oxygen rocket," says Sheehy. "It's 450 seconds for chemical rockets. The NTP system we're designing would be about 900 seconds. So you get a lot more thrust force for flow rate of propellant." An electric propulsion engine - such as a Hall thruster that ionizes xenon gas - has a high specific impulse, as much as 10 times that of NTP. But the thrust is very low. That makes the technology good for making minor adjustments to the orbits of satellites. The biggest ion thrusters in space are only about 4 1/2 kilowatts. A much larger, 100-kilowatt ion thruster known as X3 is currently being tested at NASA Glenn as a potential engine for missions to Mars, but even an ion thruster that big has a much lower thrust force than an NTP system. "A chemical system has tremendous thrust force, but low miles per gallon, and you can only carry enough propellant to thrust for minutes," says Sheehy. "A solar electric system has very low thrust force, but very high miles per gallon, and you can carry enough fuel to thrust for years. NTP kind of marries the high thrust of the chemical system with a higher... miles per gallon or specific impulse." The efficiency of NTP comes from its propellant of choice: molecular hydrogen. By using the lightest molecule available, the engine can hurl exhaust out the back at incredible speeds of about 9 kilometers per second. "What you want to do in rocketry is throw things out the back very fast, and the way to get things going very fast - or part of the way to do that - is if they're very light," Sheehy says. Photo credit: Los Alamos National Laboratory Liquid hydrogen can be a tricky propellant, though, because the boiling point is so low. For molecular hydrogen to remain a liquid, its cryogenic tanks need to be cooled to 20 degrees Kelvin, cold than -250 degrees Celsius. Designing the propellant tanks will be one of the challenges for BWXT, although the rest of the engine components for the NTP engine should be relatively straightforward. "There's been a lot of development over the last 50 or 60 years working with hydrogen as a propellant," says Sheehy. "All the engine components, like pumps and valves and those sorts of things, have been refined over decades, and so there's a heritage there." Cold War Tech Comeback The NTP project comes at a time when NASA is also working on small nuclear reactors to power ground systems on Mars, such as habitats and chemical processing plants. These reactors, known as Kilopower, will have "substantially different requirements" from an NTP system. "The NTP reactor has to run pretty hot because you want to impart as much thermal energy to that propellant as you can," says Sheehy. "And so it runs up near the limits of the materials, whereas the nuclear surface power reactors run at a lot lower temperature." Photo credit: SSPL - Getty But building an NTP engine is just part of the equation. You'd also need to estimate just how hard (and costly) it would be to build an interplanetary spacecraft powered by nuclear thermal propulsion. Sheehy figures the cost at a few billions of dollars, though the full cost analysis will not be available for another year or so. "Whether NASA ultimately decides to build the nuclear thermal propulsion system for in-space transportation is still TBD, but what we are doing now is development that will allow the agency to take that step,'" Sheehy says. What is clear, however, is that NASA is turning back to nuclear fission technologies of decades past. With improved materials, better understanding of engine systems, computer modeling, and a renewed vigor for space exploration, the nuclear technologies that were abandoned during the Cold War could make a comeback in the 21st century - for the colonization of Mars. You Might Also Like Nordson Corporation NDSN reported flat bottom-line results for first-quarter fiscal 2018 (ended Jan 31, 2018). Adjusted earnings in the quarter came in at $1.35 per share, in line with the Zacks Consensus Estimate. On a year-over-year basis, the companys earnings surged 57% from the year-ago tally of 86 cents. Revenues Increase From Volume Growth & Forex and Buyout Gains In the reported quarter, Nordsons net sales came in at $550.4 million, increasing 35.1% year over year. This improvement was driven by 30.4% gain from organic volume growth, benefits from acquired assets and 4.7% positive impact of currency translation. Also, the top line surpassed the Zacks Consensus Estimate of $538.1 million by 2.3%. At the quarter end, backlog was $405 million, up 24% year over year. On a regional basis, revenues, sourced from the United States, increased 32.1% year over year to $165.8 million. Revenues generated from operations in Japan surged 172.4% to $65.9 million, while that from the American operations grew 14.1% to $34.3 million. Sales in Europe improved 19.1% to $141.9 million and that in the Asia Pacific expanded 31.3% to $142.5 million. The company reports its top-line results under three segments, namely Adhesive Dispensing Systems, Advanced Technology Systems and Industrial Coating Systems. A brief discussion on the segmental performance in the fiscal firstquarter is provided below: Adhesive Dispensing Systems segments revenues totaled $220.9 million, increasing 6.3% year over year. Results were driven by 0.6% organic growth and 5.7% forex gains. Advanced Technology Systems revenues were $271.7 million, up 86.9% year over year on the back of 83.3% organic volume growth and 3.6% gains from favorable foreign currency movements. Product demand was strong in the medical and electronics end markets. Revenues generated from Industrial coating systems grew 6.6% to $57.9 million. Margin Improves Despite Higher Costs & Expenses In the quarter, Nordsons cost of sales increased 36.8% year over year to $249.4 million. It represented 45.3% of net sales versus 44.7% reported in the year-ago quarter. Selling and administrative expenses, as a percentage of net sales, were 33.3% compared with 36.6% in the year-ago quarter. Adjusted earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) in the quarter were $141.9 million, increasing 50.3% year over year. Operating profits grew 55.1% year over year, while the margin came in at 21.4% versus 18.6% in the year-ago quarter. Balance Sheet & Cash Flow Exiting the fiscal first quarter, Nordson had cash and marketable securities of $132.8 million, up from $90.4 million recorded the previous-quarter end. The companys long-term debt was $1,258.8 million, marginally above $1,256.4 million exiting the previous quarter. In the fiscal first quarter, the companys net cash flow from operating activities totaled $109.3 million, up 34.7% year over year. Capital spent on the addition of property, plant and equipment grew 65.5% to $16.7 million. During the quarter, the company paid dividends of approximately $17.3 million to its shareholders. Outlook For second-quarter fiscal 2018, Nordson anticipates sales to increase in the range of 9-13% year over year. Organic volume growth is predicted to range from 3% fall to 1% growth. Acquisition gains will likely add 7% sales growth, while foreign currency movements will benefit by 5%. Operating margin will likely be 22%. EBITDA is expected to be within $143-$154 million. The tax rate is estimated to be 25%. GAAP earnings are expected in the range of $1.33-$1.47 per share, including 8 cents of expenses related to acquisition intangible asset amortization. Nordson Corporation Price, Consensus and EPS Surprise Story continues Nordson Corporation Price, Consensus and EPS Surprise | Nordson Corporation Quote Zacks Rank and Key Picks With $8.2-billion market capitalization, Nordson currently carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). Better-ranked stocks in the industry include Applied Industrial Technologies, Inc. AIT, Dover Corporation DOV and Roper Technologies, Inc. ROP. All these stocks sport a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy). You can see the complete list of todays Zacks #1 Rank stocks here. Applied Industrial Technologies has pulled off an average positive earnings surprise of 10.97% over the last four quarters. Also, earnings estimates for fiscal 2018 (ending June 2018) and 2019 (ending June 2019) have been revised upward over the last 60 days. Dover Corporation has delivered an average positive earnings surprise of 7.26% in the trailing four quarters. Also, bottom-line expectations for 2018 and 2019 have improved in the last 60 days. Roper Technologies financial performance has been impressive, with an average positive earnings surprise of 3.12% in the last four quarters. Also, earnings estimates for 2018 and 2019 have been revised upward over the last 60 days. Zacks Top 10 Stocks for 2018 In addition to the stocks discussed above, would you like to know about our 10 finest buy-and-hold tickers for the entirety of 2018? Last year's 2017 Zacks Top 10 Stocks portfolio produced double-digit winners, including FMC Corp. and VMware which racked up stellar gains of +67.9% and +61%. Now a brand-new portfolio has been handpicked from over 4,000 companies covered by the Zacks Rank. Dont miss your chance to get in on these long-term buys. Access Zacks Top 10 Stocks for 2018 today >> Want the latest recommendations from Zacks Investment Research? Today, you can download 7 Best Stocks for the Next 30 Days. Click to get this free report Roper Technologies, Inc. (ROP) : Free Stock Analysis Report Dover Corporation (DOV) : Free Stock Analysis Report Applied Industrial Technologies, Inc. (AIT) : Free Stock Analysis Report Nordson Corporation (NDSN) : Free Stock Analysis Report To read this article on Zacks.com click here. Zacks Investment Research Wayne LaPierre spoke at CPAC in the wake of the Florida school shooting, mounting an unrepentant defense of gun rights The head of the powerful National Rifle Association (NRA) has broken his silence more than a week after the Florida school shooting with a vituperative attack on gun control advocates, accusing them of exploiting the tragedy to push their agenda. Wayne LaPierre, whose lobby group faces an unprecedented challenge from the activism of students, including survivors of the massacre, sought to paint his opponents as elites and socialists hellbent on undermining Americans constitutional rights. The elites dont care not one whit about Americas school system and schoolchildren, he told the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) at the National Harbor in Maryland. If they truly cared, what they would do is they would protect them. For them, its not a safety issue, its a political issue. They care more about control, and more of it. Their goal is to eliminate the second amendment and our firearms freedoms so they can eradicate all individual freedoms... They hate the NRA, they hate the second amendment, they hate individual freedom. Addressing a sympathetic audience of conservative grassroots activists, LaPierre continued: They fantasise about more laws stopping what other laws have failed to stop. So many existing laws were ignored. They dont care if their laws work or not. They just want to get more laws to get more control over people. But the NRA the NRA does care. The massacre of 17 students and staff at Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school in Parkland, Florida, last week was the second deadliest shooting at an American public school and has spurred extraordinary protests across the country. The debate reached a watershed on Wednesday when students and teachers confronted US Senators in a noisy town hall event televised live by CNN; there were raucous cheers for the idea of sweeping bans on assault weapons. Story continues LaPierres name was initially kept off the agenda at the annual CPAC to protect him from media scrutiny. The NRA often prefers to stay out of the spotlight in the wake of a major shooting. LaPierre sought to put the warnings in the wider context of a socialist enemy within, who he said oppose our fundamental freedoms enshrined in the bill of rights. He claimed that the Communist Manifesto and Karl Marx were ascendent on university campuses, describing socialism as a political disease. The NRA chief warned the packed ballroom: You should be anxious and you should be frightened. If these so-called European socialists take over the House and the Senate and, God forbid, they win the White House again our American freedoms could be lost and our country will be changed forever, and the first to go will be the second amendment to the US constitution the right to bear arms. Pushing the same agenda on school security as Donald Trump, he insisted: The whole idea from some of our opponents that armed security makes us less safe is completely ridiculous. If thats true, armed security makes us less safe, lets just go ahead and remove it from everywhere. He continued: We must immediately harden our schools. Every day young children are being dropped off at schools that are virtually wide open, soft targets for anyone bent on mass murder. It should not be easier for a madman to shoot up a school than a bank or jewellery store or some Hollywood gala. Schools should be the hardest target in this country. Evil must be confronted with all necessary force to protect our kids. He ended his speech, which was met with a standing ovation, by repeating the notorious mantra he had issued after the Sandy Hook school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012: To stop a bad guy with a gun, it takes a good guy with a gun. In an earlier speech, the NRAs national spokeswoman singled out the media for criticism. Dana Loesch said: Many in legacy media love mass shootings. You guys love it. Now Im not saying that you love the tragedy. But I am saying that you love the ratings. Crying white mothers are ratings gold to you. Under intense public pressure, there has been speculation that Trump might use his credibility with Republicans to take on the NRA, one of his strongest backers. But on Thursday he tweeted full support: What many people dont understand, or dont want to understand, is that Wayne, Chris [Cox] and the folks who work so hard at the @NRA are Great People and Great American Patriots. They love our Country and will do the right thing. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! The president reaffirmed his proposal to address school shootings by giving some teachers guns, tweeting that it would be a great deterrent to killers. He suggested a little bit of a bonus for trained teachers who are armed. Trump, who held a listening session with students and parents on Wednesday, also said he would advocate for tightening background checks for gun buyers, with an emphasis on mental health, and lifting the age limit to 21 to buy some types of guns policies less likely to please the powerful pro-gun lobby group. Many attendees at CPAC expressed support for the idea of arming teachers. Debi Millman, a fundraiser based in Los Angeles, suggested it was more realistic than restricting a country already awash with guns. How many millions of them are there? Youre never going to be able to keep evil out. A better solution for me is have the schools be able to defend themselves. If criminals know that if they attack a school theyll get their heads blown off, thats a good idea. Randi Green, a personal trainer from Los Angeles, interjected: Except for the fact most teachers are liberals and would baulk at the idea. Green was sceptical about the students at Parkland who had been speaking out. Theyre definitely being manipulated, she said. Everybody has a voice but these are young kids and I dont think they know better than lawmakers. I thought they were very disrespectful in the way they speak to people. I think the parents are rooting them on. Scott Pio, 33, wearing a red Make America great again cap, also backed the proposal for teachers to carry and conceal firearms. We can arm everybody else around important people, why cant we arm everybody around our students, especially as they are soft targets? What are people so afraid of? Even city council managers are already protected by guns. Pio, a software engineer from Fairfax, Virginia, also suggested making schools more secure, with only one point of entry, and increasing the number of security guards on site. But he was opposed to a ban on semi-automatic weapons. There are plenty of people in rural areas who use guns to protect their homes and go hunting. But Im OK with raising the age to 21 for assault rifles. Chris Davis, 44, a police officer from Pennsylvania, said he was impressed by the students who have spoken out but criticised liberal campaigners demanding tighter gun controls. These same people say President Trump is a tyrant. The reason you have the second amendment is to protect yourself from a tyrant. Todd McKinley, 40, a retired soldier from Kingsport, Tennessee, added: The left called him Hitler, but then they want to grab all guns just like Hitler did. In the aftermath of last weeks deadly high school shooting in Florida, sheriffs in New York are stepping up efforts and calling on funding for at least one armed officer in all schools across the state. This will be an expensive undertaking, but we owe it to our children, and their parents, to provide a safe place for education to take place, Wayne County Sheriff Barry Virts, the president of the New York State Sheriffs Association, said in a statement Thursday. New York state has 4,750 public schools and about 2,000 private schools in grades K-12. The Sheriffs Association estimated that the cost of this proposal would equate to adding about one teacher to each of these schools. Trending: How Many Nuclear Weapons Do the U.S. and Russia Have? Here's What You Need to Know As the national conversation on gun control heats up following one of the deadliest school shootings in American history, its survivors have confronted lawmakers who they said were not serious in pushing any real reform to gun laws. At a listening session on Wednesday, President Donald Trump listened to pleas from survivors and victims' families from Parkland and the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut. "We as a country failed our children," said Andrew Pollack, a father of one of the 17 victims from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Trump suggested solutions to prevent gun violence, such as arming teachers and school officials while ending gun-free zones, which he said offer a welcoming in to shooters. Don't miss: Celine Designs $590 Plastic Bags That Look Like Free Ones from the Grocery Store "If you had a teacher who was adept with the firearm, they could end the attack very quickly," Trump said. If schools could arm up to 20 percent of educators, Trump said its teachers would stop maniacs. On Thursday, he defended his statement and offered his support to the National Rifle Association (NRA). This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. Most popular: Possible School Shooting in Los Angeles Thwarted by Security Guard, Police Say Story continues This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. In the wake of such tragedies, elected officials are weighing options for school safety. Kentucky's Republican governor and legislature are looking at a proposal that would allow armed teachers or staff on campus, while lawmakers from at least half a dozen states are considering similar measures. But many education groups have joined together to block guns in schools and advocate for more school resource officers. A recent Washington Post/ABC News poll found that 62 percent of respondents said Trump is not doing enough to prevent mass shootings, while 77 percent said Congress was falling short on solutions. Following the mass shooting in Las Vegas last fall, a bipartisan measure was introduced, banning the so-called "bump stocks," which give semi-automatic weapons the capability to be fired as if they were fully automatic. Under pressure, Trump moved to issue regulations, which had been stalled, to the Justice Department on Tuesday. This article was first written by Newsweek More from Newsweek rental car companies REUTERS/Arnd Wiegmann Enterprise Holdings, one of the world's largest car-rental companies, is ending a key partnership with the National Rifle Association. The conglomerate, which operates Enterprise Rent-A-Car, Alamo Rent a Car, and National Car Rental, said it was ending a discount program available to NRA members, effective March 26. That follows a move by First National Bank earlier Thursday to end a credit-card promotion with the gun-advocacy group. The developments come about a week after the deadly mass shooting in Parkland, Florida, and amid increased calls for gun control, something the NRA rejects. The car-rental giant Enterprise Holdings says it will end a discount promotion available to members of the National Rifle Association. A company representative told Business Insider in an email on Thursday: "We ended the discount program, effective March 26." The person did not immediately respond to follow-up questions about why Enterprise was ending the program. Avis Budget Group and Hertz two rivals of Enterprise still offered NRA discounts as of Thursday night and did not immediately respond to Business Insider's request for an interview. The move by Enterprise comes about a week after a mass shooting left 17 people dead at a high school in Parkland, Florida. The February 14 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School has led gun-control proponents to increase pressure on US lawmakers and businesses. Earlier Thursday, First National Bank said it would not renew a contract with the NRA in which it issued an NRA-branded Visa card, Reuters reported. "Customer feedback has caused us to review our relationship with the NRA," said Kevin Langin, a spokesman for the Omaha, Nebraska-based bank. The left-leaning news site ThinkProgress said it rounded up a list of 22 corporations it said was "making membership to America's premier gun-lobbying group more enticing" by offering such discounts and promotions. Story continues The NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch and Wayne LaPierre, the CEO of the gun-advocacy group, doubled down on their defense of the lobby on Thursday, hours after Loesch argued the NRA's case at a CNN town-hall event, during which she was confronted by student survivors and parents of those killed in the Parkland shooting. NOW WATCH: Here's what Apple's battery-slowing controversy means for iPhone sales See Also: SEE ALSO: An NRA spokeswoman and a Florida sheriff clashed during a raucous discussion on gun violence President Donald Trump attempted early Thursday to clarify comments he made the previous day when he suggested during a listening session with school shooting survivors that arming adept teachers could be one way to end future tragedies faster by calling again for giving guns to weapons-trained teachers. A gun free school is a magnet for bad people, Trump tweeted Thursday morning. ATTACKS WOULD END! At the listening session with six students who survived the school shooting last week at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, Trump said concealed-carry for teachers of that type of talent would be able to stop a school shooter very quickly. If you had a teacher with who was adept at firearms, they could very well end the attack very quickly, he said during the session. Trump reiterated the point Thursday, saying that he did not call for arming all teachers, before pushing the idea that highly trained teachers could stop school shootings. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. If a potential sicko shooter knows that a school has a large number of very weapons talented teachers (and others) who will be instantly shooting, the sicko will NEVER attack that school, Trump continued. Cowards wont go there problem solved. David Hogg, a survivor of the Florida school shooting, declined to attend the session with Trump. Hogg responded to Trump Thursday, saying he respected the Presidents view but that resources for arming teachers are scarce. According to a Washington Post analysis, arming 20% of teachers would cost a minimum of $251 million and exceed $1 billion at most. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. Trumps tweets come amid a growing call for stricter gun laws from school shooting survivors and parents whose children were murdered in shootings. Angered students, parents and teachers confronted Florida Sen. Marco Rubio Wednesday at a CNN town hall, with student Cameron Kasky asking Rubio directly: Can you tell me right now that you will not accept a single donation from the NRA? In response, Rubio said that people buy into his agenda and that he supports keeping guns away from people with mental illness. The senator said he does not support arming teachers. Story continues Trump, who landed in office with help from the National Rifle Association, indicated support for small steps toward limited gun reforms. He directed the Justice Department on Tuesday to propose regulations that would ban gun accessories like bump stocks, and supports efforts to reform the background check system. Trump tweeted Thursday that he will push the minimum age to purchase a semiautomatic weapon to 21 from 18. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. Congress is in a mood to finally do something on this issue I hope! he said. President Donald Trump suggested Wednesday during a listening session with survivors and family members of school shootings that arming teachers could be one solution to stopping tragedy. An attack has lasted, on average, about three minutes. It takes 5 to 8 minutes for responders, for police to come in. If you had a teacher who is adept at firearms, they could very well end the attack very quickly, Trump said at the event, flanked by two teenage girls who survived the school shooting last week in Parkland, Florida. The good thing about that . you will have a lot of people that would be armed, that would be ready. Trump also expressed a desire to strengthen background checks and is reportedly considering raising the age limit to buy certain types of guns. Trump also announced on Tuesday that he was signing a memorandum directing Attorney General Jeff Sessions to implement regulations banning bump stocks, modifications that increase the rate of fire for semi-automatic rifles. Six students who survived last weeks shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland Florida attended the event, accompanied by their parents and Christine Hunschofsky, the Mayor of Parkland. Two parents who lost their first grade children during the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012 and founded a gun violence prevention group, Nicole Hockley and Mark Barden, were in attendance. So were students, teachers and parents from three local Washington D.C. schools, Thurgood Marshall Academy, Friendship Public Charter School, and Parkmont, some of whom recounted their own losses and experience with gun violence. We want to learn everything we can learn, and starting about two minutes after this meeting were going to work, Trump told those in attendance. Youve gone through extraordinary pain and we dont want others to go through the kind of pain youve gone through. It wouldnt be right. White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters on Tuesday that the President would be discussing a wide range of issues with those attending the session. One of the things that the President wants to do is make sure that he sits down with a number of people from across all fronts, she said.And we want to make sure that were meeting and talking with as many people that not only are affected, but that play in this process as possible. Story continues Trump asked those in attendance what they thought about his suggestion to arm teachers. Some, like Hunter Pollack, whose 18-year-old sister Meadow was killed in the Parkland shooting last week, concurred with Trumps assessment; he said having more armed people on campus could have saved his sisters life. But others explicitly disagreed. Rather than arm them with a firearm, I would rather arm them with the knowledge of how to prevent these acts from happening in the first place, said Hockley. Barden, whose wife is a school teacher and could not attend the session, told Trump her experiences showed why he was wrong. She has spent more than a decade in the Bronx she will tell you that school teachers have spent more than enough responsibility than to have the awesome responsibility of lethal force to take a life, he said as the room filled with a smattering of applause. Nobody wants to see a shoot-out in the school, and a deranged sociopath on his way to commit an act of murder in a school knowing the outcome is going to be suicide, is not going to care if there is someone there with a gun. Thats their plan, anyway. Updated | New charges were filed against Paul Manafort and Rick Gates on Thursday. The 32-count indictment by Special Counsel Robert Mueller's gives greater detail on the money laundering and fraud allegations against the two men. The indictment is the latest development in the case against Manafort, President Donald Trump's former campaign chairman, and Gates, Manaforts longtime associate and a Trump campaign aide. Mueller, who is investigating Russian meddling in the 2016 election and possible coordination with the Trump campaign, first filed charges against the pair last October. They have pleaded not guilty. The new charges include 16 counts stemming from alleged false filings of individual tax returns, seven counts relating to failure to report foreign bank accounts, five counts of bank fraud conspiracy and four counts of bank fraud, according to the special counsel's office. Manafort is now accused of laundering more than $30 million, as opposed to more than $18 million in the previous indictment. Trending: How Did Life Begin? Key Alzheimer's Protein Has Surprising Tie to the Primordial Soup Yet there are significant differences between the two indictments. The earlier one included allegations of conspiracy against the United States, failure to register as an agent of a foreign principal, making false and misleading Foreign Agents Registration Act statements and making false statements to the Department of Justice. But the new indictment instead focuses on alleged income tax violations, bank fraud and bank fraud conspiracy. Both indictments allege failure to file reports of foreign bank and financial accounts. Related: Who is Alex van der Zwaan, Mueller's new defendant? As with the October indictment, the new one does not directly mention Trump or the issue of Russian meddling in the 2016 election. Trump weighed in on the October charges at the time, tweeting, "Sorry, but this is years ago, before Paul Manafort was part of the Trump campaign. But why aren't Crooked Hillary & the Dems the focus?????" Story continues Don't miss: Who Is Scot Peterson, Florida Deputy Who Should Have Went In Killed the Killer? 02_22_Paul_Manafort_indictment_Gates Chip Somodevilla/Getty Muellers team now alleges that Manafort and Gates secretly transferred more than $10 million from entities in Cyprus to entities Manafort owned in the United States. The defendants disguised that money as loans to avoid paying taxes, the prosecutors claim. Manafort allegedly used this money to buy real estate in the U.S., and later took out loans against that real estate for more cash flow. An unnamed bank employee helped Manafort falsify records to take out loans against the real estate, the indictment alleges. In a statement Thursday night, Jason Maloni, a spokesman for Manafort, said, "Paul Manafort is innocent of the allegations set out in the newly filed indictments and he is confident that he will be acquitted of all charges. The new allegations against Mr. Manafort, once again, have nothing to do with Russia and 2016 election interference/collusion. Mr. Manafort is confident that he will be acquitted and violations of his constitutional rights will be remedied." Most popular: Why Does Kobe Bryant Not Want to Convince Players to Join the Lakers? At least two companies the indictment says are controlled by Manafort received millions of dollars from companies owned by Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, Bloomberg reported last October, after the first indictment came out. While reports have characterized Manafort as a political dirty trickster who owns expensives suits, antiques and properties and spends lavishly on rugs, Gates has been less of a public figure. There had been speculation that Gates would change his plea and cooperate with Muellers team. Gatess name also came up in a charge that Muellers team made public on Tuesday involving Alex van der Zwaan, a Dutch lawyer. Van der Zwaan admitted to lying to federal agents about communications he had with Gates when the two were doing work on behalf of the Ukrainian government. Muellers team has also secured guilty pleas from former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos, former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and Richard Pinedo, a California man who sold fraudulent bank account numbers. The team has also indicted 13 Russian nationals and three companies affiliated with the Internet Research Agency, a Russian troll operation. This article has been updated to include more information from the February 22 indictment. It was later updated again to include a statement from Jason Maloni. This article was first written by Newsweek More from Newsweek In this article: (Corrects Spiegel's age to 27 from 26 in paragraph 3) Feb 22 (Reuters) - Snap Inc Chief Executive Officer Evan Spiegel received $637.8 million as total compensation during 2017, the year the company went public, according to a security filing on Thursday. The figure is based on stock-based awards worth $636.6 million and salary and other compensation worth about $1.2 million. (http://bit.ly/2ohmPC6) Spiegel, the 27-year-old Snap co-founder, earned $503,205 in salary during 2016, and a $1 million bonus. Imran Khan, Snapchat's chief strategy officer hired from investment bank Credit Suisse Group AG in 2014, received total compensation of $100.6 million in 2017. He earned $241,539 in 2016 and a $5.2 million bonus. (Reporting by Munsif Vengattil in Bengaluru; Editing by Shounak Dasgupta) Steve Jobs error-filled CV expected to fetch 35,000 In todays technological world, which Apple founder Steve Jobs had a hand in creating, its difficult to imagine someone writing, None next to an entry for phone on a job application. But thats exactly what a teenage Steve Jobs wrote in an application for electronics tech or design engineer in 1973, long before his Apple iPhone changed the world. Jobs also wrote that his access to transportation was possible, but not probable and neglected to capitalise his own second name. The one-page hand-written document is to be auctioned in America next month and is expected to fetch more than 35,000. rex Under a section titled Special Abilities, Jobs wrote tech or design engineer. digital.from Bay near Hewitt-Packard, a reference to pioneering California technology company Hewlett-Packard. The document but does not state what position Jobs was applying for. Jobs and friend Steve Wozniak founded Apple about three years later. Jobs died of cancer in 2011 at the age of 56. MOST POPULAR TODAY ON YAHOO The document dates from when Jobs had dropped out of college, and before he secured a job at Atari where he met Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple. To build the Apple prototype, Wozniak sold his HP calculator (then a hi-tech luxury) for $500. Jobs famously sold his VW van for $250. Apple I paved the way for the PC era despite having a mere 8k of memory and being able to show only a few characters on screen. The job application will be sold as part of a collection of Apple memorabilia including a newspaper article signed by Jobs. The auction opens on March 8 at RR Auction in Boston. Watch news, TV and more on Yahoo View. Donald Trump has threatened to pull immigration agents from California, suggesting their removal would unleash crime like nobody has ever seen. The move was immediately welcomed by a top Democrat, who said deportations were shattering families. In the midst of comments about gang violence, the President suggested the federal government was getting no help from California and mused about the effects of halting operations in the state by the US Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). If we ever pulled our ICE out, if we ever said hey, let California alone, let them figure it out for themselves, in two months they'd be begging for us to come back, they would be begging, Mr Trump said. And you know what, I'm thinking about doing it. California elected officials, who have become accustomed to skirmishes with the Trump administration, rebuked the Presidents comments. Senator Dianne Feinstein denounced his insults and threats as mean-spirited and patently false. In California we protect all of our people from criminals and gangs, as well as dangerous assault weapons, Governor Jerry Brown said in a statement. We do our job Mr. President, you do yours. So-called sanctuary city laws, which wall off local law enforcement from federal immigration authorities, are a frequent target of Mr Trumps ire. California responded to Mr Trumps election by enacting a law that enshrines that separation statewide, prohibiting jails from holding onto immigrants for ICE and barring agreements that delegate immigration enforcement powers to police. The law allows cooperation when immigrants have committed serious or violent crimes. Immigrant advocates argue that the distinction between immigrants who threaten public safety and those who do not has been lost in the Trump administrations crackdown, which has resulted in soaring arrests of people not convicted of crimes. Story continues State Senate leader Pro Tem Kevin de Leon, who is running to unseat Ms Feinstein, invoked a similar argument in his response to the President, arguing the administration was tearing our families apart and wreaking havoc on our economy by threatening our workforce. If ICE and the President want to focus on dangerous criminals, we're here to help, Mr de Leon said in a statement. But if they just want to tear apart hardworking mothers and fathers from their children, then we say Adios. Mr Manafort and his wife arrive at a courthouse in Washington DC in January: Getty Images New charges have been filed against former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and his deputy by special counsel Robert Mueller's team, increasing pressure on the duo as they prepare for an expected trial later this year. Mr Mueller's team unsealed the indictments of Mr Manafort and his business partner, Rick Gates, on fresh tax and bank fraud allegations Thursday, months after both men were hit with a 12-count indictment last year. Those original indictments were the first criminal charges filed by Mr Mueller's probe into the 2016 race, but did not relate to the campaign and instead focused on financial transactions involving Mr Manafort and Mr Gates. That includes work by the men for a Ukrainian political party, and alleged failure to notify US authorities that they were lobbying on behalf of a foreign government. Both men have pleaded not guilty to the earlier charges. "Paul Manafort is innocent of the allegations set out in the newly filed indictments and he is confident that he will be acquitted of all charges," Jason Maloni, Mr Manafort's spokesperson, said in a statement. "The new allegations against Mr Manafort, once again, have nothing to do with Russia and 2016 election interference/collusion. Mr Manafort is confident that he will be acquitted and violations of his constitutional rights will be remedied." New indictments were expected to be filed against the two men, though it was not previously clear on what grounds. Mr Manafort served as President Donald Trump's campaign chairman from June 2016 until August of that year. Mr Gates was also an official on the Trump campaign. The newly unsealed indictments allege that Mr Manafort attempted to avoid paying taxes on "tens of millions of dollars" in income resulting from their work as consultants for the Ukrainian government, former Ukrainian President Victor Yanukovych, as well as Ukrainian political parties. To do so, court fillings show, the two men disguised the incoming money as loans from offshore corporate accounts, which made millions of dollars in unreported payments to bank accounts the men held in the United States. Story continues Mr Manafort, the charges say, also used offshore corporate accounts to purchase property in the United States, and that both men used the money to make improvements on and refinance properties they own in the US. The filings allege a second stage of the money laundering and tax evasion scheme, in which the men used their improved properties as collateral, and to extract loans from financial institutions. The men were able to get more than $20m in loans by "falsely" inflating Mr Manafort's company's income, and by not disclosing its existing debt on their loan applications, the document says. All told, the filings say, the two men oversaw the flow of $75m from offshore accounts, including the laundering of $30m that Mr Manafort hid from US federal tax agencies. Mr Gates did so with roughly $3m, according to the charges. The new filings come at a particularly confusing time in the original proceedings. Just last week US District Judge Amy Berman Jackson criticised the prosecution and defence for "unacceptable delays" in the case, which does not have a trial date yet. It is not even clear who will be the lead defensive lawyer yet. The two men were hit with a 12-count indictment in October, which focused on their alleged failure to notify US authorities that they had acted as lobbyists for a foreign government. By Noel Randewich SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Shares of gunmakers American Outdoor Brands and Sturm Ruger & Company rallied on Thursday after U.S. President Donald Trump advocated tightening background checks for guns in response to last week's high school massacre in Florida. The Republican president's tweets and comments were seen as increasing the possibility of greater curbs on gun ownership, fueling expectation that people might seek to stock up on guns in advance of any changes. Both of those sentiments had dipped since Trump was elected in November 2016 - illustrating a paradox under which a president viewed as more favorable to gun ownership can depress gun sales and shares in gunmakers. "What Trump has been saying is a complete surprise," said Aegis Capital analyst Rommel Dionisio, who covers firearms makers. "The prevailing wisdom for Republican presidents is not to be pro-gun control." Under Democratic President Barack Obama, firearm sales hit record levels as people stocked up, thinking the government might tighten gun control laws. Mass shootings that took place during Obama's eight years in office from 2009 bolstered that expectation even more, often sending shares of gunmakers surging in the immediate aftermath of such events. (http://reut.rs/2EIW0RP) Sales and stock prices of firearms makers slumped after Trump's unexpected election victory was seen as reducing prospects for curbs on gun ownership. Sturm Ruger's stock has fallen 22 percent since the 2016 election, and American Outdoor Brands has lost 63 percent of its value. But tweets and comments by Trump on Wednesday and Thursday that he supported raising the age limit for purchases of some kinds of guns, as well as other measures, turned up the heat on the gun control debate, and boosted gunmakers' shares. Sturm Ruger rose 3.6 percent, while American Outdoor Brands jumped as much as 7.9 percent before ending with an increase of 0.6 percent. Nevertheless, Trump took a pro-gun stance in advocating arming some schoolteachers to prevent school shootings. Also fueling the gun control debate, National Rifle Association chief executive Wayne LaPierre in a speech on Thursday described control advocates as elites aiming to "eradicate all personal freedoms." Reflecting the gun industry slump under Trump, Sturm Ruger reported a 27 percent fall in revenue for the December quarter on Wednesday. Ruger laid off 50 workers in January, and in its quarterly report it said it was slashing its capital expenditures plan for 2018 by more than half, suggesting the Southport, Connecticut, company expects its business to remain difficult. Seventeen students and staff members were killed in the Feb. 14 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, a massacre that has fueled unprecedented youth-led protests in cities across the country. Many of the teens and their parents are calling for greater gun control. (Reporting by Noel Randewich; Editing by Frances Kerry and Jonathan Oatis) AK AL AS AZ AR CA CO CT DE DC FL GA GU HI ID IL IN IA KS KY LA ME MD MA MI MN MS MO MT NE NV NH NJ NM NY NC ND OH OK OR PA PR RI SC SD TN TX UT VT VI VA WA WV WI WY By Aditi Shah NEW DELHI (Reuters) - Uber Technologies Inc's chief executive pledged to continue investing aggressively in Southeast Asia even though the U.S. ride hailing firm expects to lose money in the fast growing market due to costly battles with rivals such as Grab. SoftBank's 15 percent stake purchase in Uber last month has opened up the possibility of combining Uber with other ride-hailing assets the Japanese group owns across Asia. SoftBank has stakes in Singapore-based Grab and India's Ola. At the time of the investment, SoftBank said it wants Uber to focus on growing in the United States, Europe, Latin America and Australia - not Asia, which has been among the most costly and competitive regions for the ride-services firm, a source had told Reuters. Uber is preparing to sell its Southeast Asia ride-hailing business to Grab in return for a substantial stake in the company, CNBC reported earlier this month, citing sources familiar with the matter. But Dara Khosrowshahi seemed to dismiss that strategy on Thursday in his first official visit to Asia since he became Uber CEO last year. "We expect to lose money in Southeast Asia and expect to invest aggressively in terms of marketing, subsidies etc," Khosrowshahi told reporters in New Delhi, adding there is huge potential in the region thanks to a big population and fast internet user growth. "From a competitive standpoint we think we can improve," he said. Khosrowshahi said that a decade from now he expects 80 percent of growth at Uber to be organic and some through acquisitions. "We will look at anything .... But right now the plan for Southeast Asia is to go forward, lean forward and to invest." INDIA PUSH Khosrowshahi said SoftBank is an investor but Uber, which has a valuation of around $68 billion, will take any final decisions along with the board on mergers and partnerships. He said he does not expect any change in Uber's India operations following the deal with SoftBank. Story continues India is one of Uber's fastest-growing international markets and accounts for more than 10 percent of Uber's trips globally, but it's not making money yet, Khosrowshahi said. Uber and India's market leader Ola have been locked in a fierce battle, pumping in millions of dollars of investors' money for a bigger piece of the country's $12 billion (8.64 billion pounds)taxi market. "The greatest value that we can create here is to continue to invest and grow our business here, not just for India but the role it is going to play in shaping our product for the rest of the world," he said. Khosrowshahi declined to comment on specific investments for India but said "it is a lot" and will continue to increase. "We as a company need to have a balanced profile in terms of growth and investment. There are developed markets that we are going to continue to invest in that are going to be more profitable ... and we should actively be investing in markets like India and Latin America that have huge growth ahead of us." Khosrowshahi, who took the helm in August after former CEO Travis Kalanick was asked to step down amid a litany of regulatory problems, driver and consumer scandals and court cases, has pledged to make a clean break with past practices that have lead to accusations of a toxic work culture. Uber has faced bans, restrictions and protests around the world as it disrupts conventional taxi services and Khosrowshahi is tackling this head-on by working with regulators, putting an end to the take-no-prisoners culture he inherited. He said that the company has a responsibility to local governments and regulators, and it needs to have a dialogue with them. (Reporting by Aditi Shah; Additional reporting by Swati Bhat in Mumbai; Writing by Miyoung Kim; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman) Dara Khosrowshahi, chief executive officer of Uber Technologies Inc., exits the Finance Ministry building following a meeting with Henrique Meirelles, Brazil's minister of finance, in Brasilia, Brazil, on Tuesday, Oct. 31, 2017. Uber could face a major legislative clampdown in Brazil, potentially rendering its current business model unworkable in its second-largest market after the U.S. Photographer: Andre Coelho/Bloomberg via Getty Images Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi has distanced the company from reports that it might exit Southeast Asia and India. Currently in India on his maiden visit to Asia as Uber boss, Khosrowshahi told an audience that the company plans to continue to invest in Southeast Asia, where Uber has slipped behind Grab and Indonesia-based Go-Jek. "We expect to lose money in Southeast Asia and expect to invest aggressively in terms of marketing, subsidies etc," Khosrowshahi told reporters, according to Reuters. "From a competitive standpoint we think we can improve." "Right now the plan for Southeast Asia is to go forward, lean forward and to invest," he added. Last week, a CNBC report suggested Uber was planning to offload its loss-making Southeast Asia business to rival Grab, which is valued at $6 billion and also counts SoftBank as an investor. There has also been speculation of a deal between Ola, which SoftBank has also invested in, and Uber. The Uber CEO denied having M&A plans in India but said it is "fun to speculate about." Khosrowshahi has previously spoken of challenging economics in Southeast Asia -- where ride-sharing revenues are estimated at $5.1 billion last year and Uber is not profitable -- but he said that the company "should actively be investing" in regions where there's growth potential, such as Asia and Latin America. Southeast Asia certainly has potential. A recent Google-Temasek report noted that the ride-hailing market in the region has grown four-fold since 2015 and it is tipped to reach $20.1 billion by 2025. More generally, Southeast Asia is now the worlds third-largest region for internet users -- with more people online than the entire U.S. population -- with upwards of 3.8 million people coming online for the first time each month. India, meanwhile, is already a key market. Today it accounts for over 10 percent of Uber's ride volumes but it is not yet profitable, according to Khosrowshahi. "The greatest value that we can create here is to continue to invest and grow our business here, not just for India but the role it is going to play in shaping our product for the rest of the world," he said. Companies including Best Western, Hertz and Wyndham end affiliation after #BoycottNRA campaign gains momentum on social media In the wake of the Florida school shooting, companies that do business with the NRA have been urged to cut ties. Photograph: Pool/Getty Images US companies are distancing themselves from the National Rifle Association as the gun lobby comes under increasing pressure following the mass shooting in Florida last week. On Friday, Hertz announced it was severing ties with the NRA. The car rental firm had offered discounts to NRA members. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. The move came after Best Western and Wyndham Hotels, which had offered discounts to NRA members, confirmed they had cut ties with the group after a social media campaign using the hashtag #BoycottNRA targeted them and others. The insurer Chubb has also dropped cover for NRA Carry Guard insurance, which insures gun owners for legal and other costs if they shoot someone and claim self-defense. The pressure group Everytown for Gun Safety, which has been pressing for Chubb to end the coverage for months, applauded the move. John Feinblatt, Everytowns president, said: For years, the NRA has pushed to allow guns for anyone, anywhere, anytime no questions asked. With Carry Guard, the NRA has figured out how to profit from gun owners who are concerned about being accused of murder. Carry Guard is a danger to the American public, pure and simple. Membership of the NRA comes with discounts on goods and services including car rentals, hotels, home insurance and wine. But the companies that provide those services are coming under increasing pressure to step back after the Parkland shooting, which claimed 17 lives. On Friday, one of the survivors of the shooting, 17-year-old David Hogg, who has become a powerful voice in the push for stricter gun laws, joined the debate and urged FedEx to stop its relationship with the NRA. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. Wyndham is no longer affiliated with the NRA, the hotel group said on Twitter. In an email to the Guardian, the chain said it had ended its relationship late last year. Best Western, which has recently offered perks to NRA members, tweeted that it does not have an affiliation with and is not a corporate partner of the National Rifle Association. Story continues Other companies that have announced they have severed ties include Enterprise RentACar, which owns Enterprise, Alamo and National, and First National Bank of Omaha, which announced it would end a Visa credit card it offered with NRA branding. The moves are putting pressure on other corporations that maintain ties with the NRA. On Twitter, people using the hashtag #StopNRAmazon are calling on Amazon to drop the NRAs video channel from its streaming service. Already indicted for money laundering and tax evasion, Paul Manafort, seen here after leaving a federal court in October 2017, and his associate Rick Gates were charged in a separate 32-count indictment with defrauding the US Internal Revenue Service Already indicted for money laundering and tax evasion, Paul Manafort, seen here after leaving a federal court in October 2017, and his associate Rick Gates were charged in a separate 32-count indictment with defrauding the US Internal Revenue Service (AFP Photo/Drew Angerer) Washington (AFP) - Ex-Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort and his former partner Richard Gates were hit on Thursday with fresh charges of tax and bank fraud, as Russia election meddling special prosecutor Robert Mueller stepped up pressure on the president's former aides. Already indicted for money laundering and tax evasion, Manafort and Gates were charged in a separate 32-count indictment with defrauding the US Internal Revenue Service and lying to US banks in order to get some $20 million in loans. As with the indictment of the two released by Mueller on October 30, the new charges were unrelated to the 2016 election campaign of President Donald Trump. Instead, they grew from the work Manafort and Gates performed for Russia-backed former Ukraine president Viktor Yanukovych between about 2006 and 2014. Mueller's team alleges that the two laundered $75 million through offshore accounts, many of them in Cyprus, bringing a large portion of the proceeds into the United States as loans and purchases to avoid income tax. "Manafort and Gates generated tens of millions of dollars in income as a result of their Ukraine work. From approximately 2006 through the present, Manafort and Gates engaged in a scheme to hide income from United States authorities, while enjoying the use of the money," the new indictment said. A spokesman for Manafort said he "is confident that he will be acquitted." "Paul Manafort is innocent of the allegations set out in the newly filed indictments and he is confident that he will be acquitted of all charges," the spokesman said in a statement. A long-time Washington and international political consultant, Manafort served as Trump's election campaign chairman from June to August 2016, with Gates his deputy. Mueller's primary investigative focus is on whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russian interference in the election, and whether Trump tried to obstruct his investigation. But the mandate for Mueller, a former FBI director, is broad, and he has used it to go after Mueller and Gates for earlier behavior, with some analysts saying Mueller hoped to turn them into witnesses against others in Trump's circle. On January 3 Manafort sued Mueller for overstepping his mandate, calling the Russia probe "completely unmoored" from the special counsel's original jurisdiction. CARACAS (Reuters) - Venezuela's opposition coalition said on Wednesday it could not participate in a "fraudulent, illegitimate" presidential election on April 22 due to unfair conditions created by President Nicolas Maduro's government. The announcement by the Democratic Unity movement, which confirmed a Reuters story on Monday, leaves Maduro on track for re-election but is likely to fuel international condemnation of democratic shortcomings in the socialist-ruled OPEC nation. Maduro's two strongest opposition rivals are both barred from running against him: Leopoldo Lopez is under house arrest, while Henrique Capriles is prohibited from holding office due to accusations of misconduct when he was a state governor. Furthermore, the pro-government national election board already banned the Democratic Unity coalition, plus some of its main parties, from running under their party names. "The premature event announced for next April 22 lacking proper conditions is a show by the government to give an impression of legitimacy that it does not have in the midst of Venezuelans' agony and suffering," the coalition said in a statement, referring to the country's economic crisis. "In the name of the immense majority of Venezuelans, we challenge the Maduro government to measure itself against the people in real elections" later in 2018, it added. The Democratic Unity's decision leaves Maduro facing just one confirmed candidate so far: a little-known evangelical pastor named Javier Bertucci. Another likely candidate is opposition leader Henri Falcon, a former state governor who parted with the socialists in 2010. He has expressed his desire to run against Maduro and may break with the coalition decision to boycott the vote. Falcon's candidacy will likely infuriate Maduro's adversaries, many of whom see him as a Trojan horse seeking to help Maduro legitimize a rigged vote. Maduro has faced calls in Latin America and internationally to improve conditions for the vote, with the United States pondering oil sanctions to pressure him. He says the country is victim of an "economic war" led by the opposition with the help of the United States. "We'll get to the elections whether there's rain, thunder, or lightning - with or without the (Democratic Unity Coalition)," Maduro told a news conference in response to the opposition's announcement. He added that he supports a proposal to hold an early congressional vote on April 22, adding that elections should be held the same day for state and local legislatures. (Reporting by Corina Pons, Deisy Buitrago, and Andrew CawthorneEditing by Cynthia Osterman and Matthew Lewis) Despite the U.S. Treasury Department warning investors away from it, Venezuela President Nicolas Maduro says the launch of his countrys oil-backed answer to Bitcoin, Petro, raised $735 million in its first day. In a tweet late Tuesday, the Venezuelan leader said that investors had promised 4.8 billion yuan, or $735 million in a pre-sale of Petro, the cryptocurrency Maduro hopes will help boost Venezuelas ailing economy. Countries including the U.S. have imposed sanctions on Venezuela, with the U.S., at least, dubbing Maduro a dictator. That comes as the Venezuelan bolivar fuerte has been in free fall partly due to excessive printing of money, while the country still owes its creditors some $141 billion. Maduro has said that he hopes the Petro will help the country skirt Western sanctions, though the U.S. Treasury has warned that it wont be that easy. In mid-January, the department told potential Petro investors that they could be subject to sanctions against Venezuela. Available information indicates that, once issued, the Petro digital currency would appear to be an extension of credit to the Venezuelan government, the Treasury department said in a statement to Reuters. If Maduros plans pan out, the fund raise will indeed attract a much higher figure than the initial $735 million. Maduro has said that he plans to offer a total of 100 million Petros, with a starting price of $60 eachroughly the price of a barrel of oil, for a total of about $6 billion. Some 824 million tokens have so far been made available. And he doesnt plan to stop there. Following on the sale of the Petro, Maduro has said that he plans to launch a cryptocurrency backed by gold next week, Reuters reports. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. At any rate, while Venezuela has become a first in launching a government-backed cryptocurrency, it also flies in the face of what made such assets attractive in the first place, according to critics. This is a stunt, and I dont think of it as a cryptocurrency, Chris Burniske of venture capital firm Placeholder told Bloomberg. The reason I say that is cryptocurrencies need to be decentralized. The Petro is really a top-down hierarchically controlled asset, and its much more akin to a new way to tokenize oil, he added, noting that when the first gold ETF appeared, they werent considered gold, but a different way of packaging the commodity. With Petro, we really have a new wrapper around oil. The head of the National Rifle Association, Wayne La Pierre, railed against elites in politics and the media during a fiery speech defending gun rights at the Conservative Political Action Conference Thursday. LaPierre was speaking amid mounting scrutiny on the NRA and its lobbying efforts in the wake of the latest mass shooting, which resulted in the killing of 17 people at a high school in Florida last week. However, he gave no indication of a willingness to back down in his organizations resistance to any form of gun control. Instead, he accused those who have been calling for such measures of exploiting the tragedy to advance their personal political agendas. "The elites dont care not one whit about Americas school system and school children, he said to a favorable reception at the conservative event. If they truly cared, what they would do is they would protect them. For them its not a safety issue, its a political issue. They care more about control and more of it, their goal is to eliminate the Second Amendment and our firearms freedoms so that they can eradicate all individual freedoms. Trending: Florida is the Most Sinful State in the US and Vermont the Most Virtuous Despite his slamming of so-called elites, LaPierre certainly ranks in a high bracket when it comes to earnings. According to tax documents, the 68-year-old, who has led the NRA as its executive vice president and chief executive officer since 1991, took in more than $5 million in compensation in 2015. While a CNN town hall, which featured a spokesperson for the NRA, and comments from President Donald Trump have hinted at signs of unity in making progress toward preventing further school shootings, LaPierre recast the debate as one of extremes. He repeatedly called out what he called the European-style socialists in American politics, such as Bernie Sanders, Nancy Pelosi and New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, whom he claimed wanted to take away Americans guns and their freedoms. Story continues You should be anxious, you should be frightened, he said to the attendees. This article was first written by Newsweek More from Newsweek Emotional survivors and parents of the school shooting last week in Parkland, Florida, confronted President Donald Trump on Wednesday during a listening session at the White House. Among them was Sam Zeif, a student at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School whose best friend was killed in the shooting. Im here to use my voice because I know he cant, said Zeif, who was in school at the time of the shooting along with his 14-year-old brother. I lost a best friend whos practically a brother, and thats why Im here, Zeif said as he openly wept beside Nicole Hockley, whose son Dylan, 6, was murdered in the Sandy Hook shooting in 2012. I turned 18 the day after [the Parkland shooting], woke up to the news that my best friend was gone. And I dont understand why I can still go in a store and buy a weapon of war, an AR. I was reading today that a person, 20 years old, walked into a store and bought an AR-15 in five minutes with an expired ID. How is it that easy to buy that type of weapon? How have we not stopped this after Columbine, after Sandy Hook? Im sitting with a mother that lost her son. Its still happening. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. We need to do something, and thats why were here, Zeif tearfully added. So lets be strong for the fallen who dont have a voice to speak anymore and lets never let this happen again. Please, please. President Donald Trump (center) Andrew Pollack, a parent whose daughter Meadow was killed in the shooting in Florida, was also overwhelmed with emotion and anger as he stood next to his sons to address the president. Im here because my daughter has no voice, Pollack said. She was murdered last week and she was taken from us. Shot nine times on the third floor. We as a country failed our children. This shouldnt happen. We need to come together as a country and work on whats important, and thats protecting our children in the schools. Thats the only thing that matters right now, he said. Its simple. Its not difficult. We protect airports, we protect concerts, stadiums, embassies, the Department of Education that I walked in today, that has a security guard in the elevator. How do you think that makes me feel? Story continues This content is not available due to your privacy preferences. Update your settings here to see it. Im very angry that this happened because it keeps happening. 9/11 happened once and they fixed everything. How many schools, how many children have to get shot? It stops here with this administration and me. Im not going to sleep until its fixed. And Mr. President, were going to fix it. Pointing to his three sons, Pollack said, My boys need to live with this. Me, Im a man, but to see your children go through this buried their sister. There should have been one school shooting and we should have fixed it, Pollack continued, his voice raising in anger. And Im pissed! Because my daughter, Im not going to see again. Shes not here. I would have been at the school every day if I knew it was that dangerous. Its enough! Lets get together, work with the president and fix the schools. Thats it. No other discussions. Security, whatever we have to do. Im never going to see my kid again, he said. I want you all to know that. Never, ever will I see my kid. I want it to sink in. Its eternity. My beautiful daughter, Im never going to see again. And its simple. We could fix it! President Trump nodded silently along for much of the meeting, which was billed as a listening session intended to discuss ways to prevent school shootings. He began the session by vowing to do something about this horrible situation and said, Were going to get it done. There will be action, not just talk. The meeting was also attended by Vice President Mike Pence, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, and local parents, students and teachers, as well as people from groups representing survivors of the Sandy Hook and Columbine shootings. The White House previously said the goal of the meeting was to have a conversation on how to improve school safety and that the president looks forward to an open discussion on how we can keep our students safe. Trump is also slated to meet with state and local officials on school safety ??at the White House next week. Ahead of Trumps meeting with advocates in the State Dining Room, protesters gathered outside the White House Wednesday afternoon to call for gun control reform, chanting slogans such as What do we want? Gun control! When do we want it? Now! and Hey Hey! Ho Ho! The NRA has got to go! The president and First Lady Melania Trump met with victims of the shooting in Florida on Friday, and the president documented the visit with several photos on his Instagram. Our entire Nation, with one heavy heart, continues to pray for the victims and their families in Parkland, Florida, read a caption from his Instagram. To teachers, law enforcement, first responders and medical professionals who responded so bravely in the face of danger: We THANK YOU for your courage and we are here for you, ALWAYS! Trump has been criticized for his responses to the shooting, including one in which he appeared to blame people who knew the shooter, 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz, was a big problem who should have been reported to the police, and another in which he faulted the FBIs admitted failure to follow up on a report about the school shooter. One student who spoke at Wednesdays listening session said that Trumps new push to ban bump stocks, devices that turn weapons into machine guns, was a step in the right direction, but many, including Sandy Hook mom Nicole Hockley, urged the president to go further. You have the ability to save lives today, please dont waste this, she told Trump, pointing to gun legislation available to you right now. It has been about a month since the last earnings report for Capital One Financial Corporation COF. Shares have lost about 7.5% in the past month, underperforming the market. Will the recent negative trend continue leading up to its next earnings release, or is COF due for a breakout? Before we dive into how investors and analysts have reacted as of late, let's take a quick look at the most recent earnings report in order to get a better handle on the important catalysts. Capital One Q4 Earnings Improve Y/Y, Costs Up Capital One fourth-quarter 2017 adjusted earnings of $1.62 per share increased 2.5% year over year. The Zacks Consensus Estimate was $1.83. Results benefited from a rise in revenues and easing margin pressure. Also, the quarter witnessed a rise in loan and deposit balances. However, increase in provisions and expenses were the undermining factors. After taking into consideration charges related the tax act and other non-recurring items, net loss for the quarter was $971 million or $2.17 per share. This compared unfavorably with prior-year quarters net income of $791 million or $1.45 per share. For 2017, adjusted earnings per share of $7.74 were up 7% year over year. The Zacks Consensus Estimate was $7.47. After considering several notable one-time items, net income was $1.98 billion or $3.49 per share, down from $3.75 billion or $6.89 per share in 2016. Revenue Growth Supports Results Net revenues were $7.01 billion, up 7% from the prior-year quarter. However, the figure missed the Zacks Consensus Estimate of $7.12 billion. For 2017, net revenues grew 7% year over year to $27.24 billion. However, it lagged the Zacks Consensus Estimate of $27.37 billion. Net interest income increased 7% from the prior-year quarter to $5.81 billion. Also, net interest margin increased 18 basis points (bps) year over year to 7.03%. Non-interest income increased 7% year over year to $1.2 billion. The increase was mainly driven by a rise in net interchange fees, partially offset by a decline in other income, and service charges and other customer-related fees. Non-interest expenses of $3.78 billion increased 3% from the year-ago quarter. All cost components, except amortization of intangibles, occupancy and equipment, marketing and professional services, rose year over year. Efficiency ratio came in at 53.89% compared with 56.03% in the year-ago quarter. A decrease in efficiency ratio indicates improved profitability. Credit Quality Worsens Net charge-off rate surged 41 bps year over year to 2.89%. Further, provision for credit losses rose 10% from the year-ago quarter to $1.93 billion. Also, the 30-plus day performing delinquency rate jumped 30 bps year over year to 3.23%. Likewise, allowance, as a percentage of reported loans held for investment was 2.95%, up 30 bps year over year. Strong Balance Sheet As of Dec 31, 2017, loans held for investment were $254.47 billion, up 1% from the prior quarter. Total deposits, as of the same date, increased 2% sequentially to $243.7 billion. Total stockholders equity was $48.73 billion as of Dec 31, 2017, a decline of 3% from the previous quarter. Profitability Ratios Deteriorate, Capital Ratios Improve Return on average assets was negative 0.95% at the end of the reported quarter against 0.91% in the year-ago quarter. Also, return on average common equity was negative 8.14% against 6.48% in the prior-year quarter. As of Dec 31, 2017, Tier 1 risk-based capital ratio was 11.8%, up from 11.6% in the prior-year quarter. Further, common equity Tier 1 capital ratio under Basel III Standardized Approach was 10.3% as of Dec 31, 2017, up from 10.1% as of Dec 31, 2016. Outlook Management expects the impact of growth math to gradually decrease in 2018. This means that the year-over-year increase in delinquencies and charge-off rates are expected to decline gradually, as new loan balances in the front book season become a larger proportion of the overall portfolio relative to the older and highly seasoned back book. In the long term, management remains optimistic about deriving efficiency improvement driven by growth and digital productivity gains. In Consumer banking segment, the charge-off rate will increase gradually and loan growth will moderate. For 2018, management expects effective tax rate to be around 19%. Story continues How Have Estimates Been Moving Since Then? In the past month, investors have witnessed an upward trend in fresh estimates. There have been six revisions higher for the current quarter compared to one lower. In the past month, the consensus estimate has shifted up 8% due to these changes. Capital One Financial Corporation Price and Consensus Capital One Financial Corporation Price and Consensus | Capital One Financial Corporation Quote VGM Scores At this time, COF has a subpar Growth Score of D, however its Momentum is doing a lot better with a B. Charting a somewhat similar path, the stock was also allocated a grade of A on the value side, putting it in the top quintile for this investment strategy. Overall, the stock has an aggregate VGM Score of B. If you aren't focused on one strategy, this score is the one you should be interested in. Our style scores indicate that the stock is more suitable for value investors than momentum investors. Outlook Estimates have been broadly trending upward for the stock, and the magnitude of these revisions looks promising. It comes with little surprise COF has a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy). We expect an above average return from the stock in the next few months. Want the latest recommendations from Zacks Investment Research? Today, you can download 7 Best Stocks for the Next 30 Days. Click to get this free report Capital One Financial Corporation (COF) : Free Stock Analysis Report To read this article on Zacks.com click here. Zacks Investment Research What happened Shares of Denbury Resources Inc. (NYSE: DNR) rose sharply on Thursday and were up 13% at 2:45 p.m. EST. Driving the move: the oil producer's solid fourth-quarter results, which continued its rally from last week's positive production report. So what Denbury Resources finished 2017 on a good note, reporting $48 million, or $0.12 per share, of adjusted earnings. That was more than triple what it pulled in during the third quarter and an even sharper improvement from its year-ago loss. Furthermore, Denbury beat analysts' expectations by $0.05 per share. The oil producer benefited from a 1% rise in production versus the previous quarter, a nearly $10-per-barrel improvement in realized oil prices, and the continued impact of its cost-reduction efforts. An oil pumping unit at sunset Image source: Getty Images. Cash flow was also much higher during the quarter, rocketing 89% from the third quarter to $124 million. That pushed its full-year total to $267 million, which was 22% higher than 2016's level. That cash flow more than covered the company's $241 million in capital spending, $59 million below its original guidance. That gave Denbury some extra cash to pay down debt, which when combined with some exchanges, has fallen $184 million over the past few months. Now what "We are entering 2018 as a much stronger company," according to CEO Chris Kendall. That said, strengthening the balance sheet remains the top priority. This oil stock will likely continue to be volatile until the company gets its finances back on solid ground. More From The Motley Fool Matthew DiLallo owns shares of Denbury Resources. The Motley Fool has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. Erika Harold is Governor Bruce Rauner's pick, and the Rauner millions that have been donated to the Illinois Republican Party are heavily financing Harold's campaign. Litigation attorney Gary Grasso is a former member of the DuPage County Board and former mayor of Burr Ridge. The two were among other AG candidates at a recent Chicago Sun-Times forum . Longtime Democrat incumbent AG Lisa Madigan is not seeking re-election. As a result, there are several Democrats hoping to win the March 20th party primary and challenge the eventual GOP nominee in November. CHICAGO - Two Republicans - Champaign area's Erika Harold and DuPage County's Gary Grasso - are vying to be the IL GOP's nominee for attorney general in 2018. Harold drew the endorsement of the Chicago Tribune Friday, but the paper complimented Grasso, saying he's an "experienced litigator. Youd want him on your side of the table during a messy contract dispute. When he talks about opioid deaths, he sounds like a tactical local prosecutor on the prowl for bad guys." Social conservatives are not yet solidly behind either Republican candidate. Pro-family leaders express disappointment in Erika Harold's refusal to publicly identify her once well-known pro-life views - a result of the faulty strategy her Rauner-paid campaign staff is insisting upon, some leaders say. Therefore, Illinois Family Action withheld endorsement on the attorney general race, as did the Lake County Right to Life. Harold refused to respond to questionnaire requests for official views on social issues, as did Gary Grasso. However, a new radio ad says Grasso is "proud" to be pro-life, although the depth of his views on abortion are not publicly available: IL_Grasso_ConservativeChoice_Radio_30 Harold withheld criticism of Governor Rauner's decision to sign into law taxpayer funding of state employee and Medicaid abortions. When Illinois Review asked her campaign manager Jason Heffley back in Septemenber 2017 how Harold would argue a possible legal challenge to the new law, Heffley rejected the opportunity to comment. His concern expressed to Illinois Review was that Harold had a "very good chance to win the election," "she was well-funded" and making a public comment on abortion could endanger her support among suburban women. Illinois Review was not invited to speak directly with Harold. More on Illinois Family Action's take on the race HERE. Grasso's organization compared the two GOP candidates in this way - with an emphasis on Grasso's experience over Harold's: The enormous use of energy needed to mine bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies is proving to be very contentious, but alternative methods pose far too much of a security risk. The recent warning that electricity use at bitcoin mining facilities in Iceland may exceed that consumed annually by the countrys homes, which could in turn lead to a potential energy shortage, was slightly alarmist in tone. But it showcases the huge amount of computational power needed to mine cryptocurrencies. Is the current cryptocurrency mining process really as wasteful and useless as critics say, and is it in need of a more efficient and cleaner system? The current mining process is indeed resource-intensive and wasteful, but there is no magic fix in sight. Many would argue that its precisely the useless nature of cryptocurrency mining that keeps the system secure. Bam! PoW! Zap! Cryptocurrencies are based on a globally distributed ledger shared among all participants in a decentralised network. This ledger is generally organised in the form of a cumbersome data structure the blockchain which consists of blocks of transactions that are cryptographically linked to each other. Most cryptocurrencies use a particular mechanism, dubbed proof-of-work (PoW), to determine which participant gets the right to add a new block of transactions to the blockchain. To prevent dishonest participants from creating multiple identities to manipulate the public vote, PoW requires participants called miners to use special software to solve an extremely difficult cryptographic puzzle. In simple terms, solving the puzzle involves guessing a random number between zero and an infinitely large number. It demands a lot of computational power because, as more machines are used, a miner can quickly try different combinations and increase the odds of solving the puzzle. But cryptocurrency mining comes at a cost in the form of custom hardware and electricity consumption. Story continues Bitcoin miners alone produce tens of quintillion guesses known under cryptographic terminology as hashes per second. This gargantuan number has risen in tandem with the amount of energy that has been consumed. The main point of contention is that performing these computations doesnt serve any useful or productive purpose outside of cryptocurrency mining itself. But attempts to address the seemingly wasted computing power generated by bitcoin mining have largely fallen flat. Projects over the past few years include Primecoin, a cryptocurrency launched in 2013 that incentivises miners to find a particular sequence of prime numbers. The same year, Gridcoin was launched to reward people for contributing to scientific research projects by requiring miners to perform scientific computations on BOINC, the Berkeley open infrastructure for network computing. SolarCoin was established in early 2014 to incentivise the generation of solar electricity, and the following year students created MangoCoinz as part of a computer science project that aims to reward miners for performing actual physical work. But, after initial excitement, all these projects had limited success and are only marginally used today. More recently, the concept of virtual mining has also emerged to address the high energy consumption of cryptocurrency mining by removing the need for performing computations altogether. This works by tying a miners vote proportionally to their cryptocurrency holdings an approach that became known as proof-of-stake (PoS). But its unclear, according to previous research, whether pure PoS systems can achieve the same high security standards as PoW and there have been incidents to accentuate such doubts. In 2014, it was reported that stolen cryptocoins could be used to attack PoS-based networks. A hack at an exchange controlling 30% of the monetary supply of the cryptocurrency VeriCoin, prompted the projects developers to implement an emergency measure rewriting parts of the transaction history to prevent the hacker from using the stolen coins to attack the blockchain network. So for now PoW remains the best available mechanism to maintain and secure decentralised cryptocurrency systems. Many believe that mining, while energy-sapping, should remain resource-intensive to make it prohibitively expensive for any single entity to gain sustained control over the decentralised system. Given how quickly computing technology develops, perhaps an alternative method will be found. Until then, we appear stuck for better or worse with a drain on computational systems and energy resources to power bitcoin and other cryptocurrency networks securely. This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article. The Conversation The Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance has received funding from EY and VISA for conducting the 2017 Global Cryptocurrency Benchmarking Study and the 2017 Global Blockchain Benchmarking Study. German police say a 70-year-old German-Russian dual national has been arrested and accused of "politically motivated" attempted murder after he attacked three asylum seekers with a knife. The bloody attack, which occurred outside a church in the western city of Heilbronn on February 17, left a 17-year-old Afghan badly wounded. A 25-year-old Iraqi and a 19-year-old Syrian were also wounded, police said on February 22. The suspect, who was apparently drunk at the time of the attack, was overpowered with the help of passersby until police arrived and detained him. He was initially charged with assault and released but on February 21 prosecutors raised the charge to "politically motivated" attempted murder and issued a formal arrest warrant. The man was rearrested after police had further questioned the victims, witnesses, and the suspect, police said in a statement. The suspect voiced anger at Germany's asylum policy that brought more than a million refugees and migrants to the country in recent years, police said. Based on reporting by AFP and AP Leaders of Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Pakistan, and India were expected on February 23 to inaugurate the start of work on the Afghan part of a multibillion-dollar pipeline project that they hope will meet the region's energy needs. The Afghan and Turkmen presidents, Ashraf Ghani and Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov, were set to join high-level Pakistani and Indian officials in Afghanistan's western city of Herat to attend a groundbreaking ceremony for the Afghan section of the TAPI natural-gas pipeline. The planned 1,800-kilometer pipeline connecting Central Asia with South Asia is to carry 33 billion cubic meters of Turkmen natural gas annually for 30 years. The total cost of the project is estimated at $10 billion. "A new chapter of economic growth and regional connectivity starts right here in the economic and cultural hub of #Afghanistan," Ghani wrote on Twitter after arriving in Herat on February 22. Security personnel have been deployed in sensitive areas across Herat, checking all vehicles entering the city, local media reported. Ghani and Berdymukhammedov were also expected to inaugurate work on the construction of a railway link between Afghanistan and Turkmenistan. 'Easing Deficits, Tensions' Backers of the proposed 1,800-kilometer TAPI pipeline say it will ease energy deficits in South Asia and help reduce tensions in the divided region. Afghan officials say Kabul will earn some $500 million annually in transit duties and that the project will help create thousands of jobs. However, security concerns over the project remain high as the Western-backed government in Kabul has been struggling to fend off the Taliban and other militant groups since the withdrawal of most NATO troops in 2014. Turkmenistan started construction of its section of the pipeline in December 2015. The planned underground pipeline is intended to carry 33 billion cubic meters of gas annually alongside Afghanistan's Herat-Kandahar highway, then through Quetta and Multan in Pakistan and ending up at the India-Pakistan border town of Fazilka. It would start from the Galkynysh Gas Field near the town of Yoloten in Turkmenistans eastern province of Mary. Taliban Support Officials say 5 billion cubic meters would go to Afghanistan and India, and Pakistan would buy around 14 billion. Afghanistan, India, and Pakistan have all repeatedly stated their commitment to the project despite the tensions that New Delhi and Kabul have with Islamabad. Pakistan is accused of not doing enough to stop terrorist groups from using its soil for attacks against the neighboring countries, which Islamabad denies. Highlighting security concerns surrounding TAPI, officials in Herat Province on February 22 paraded a group of 10 Afghan militants claiming to have been trained by neighboring Iran to sabotage events related to the planned pipeline. Herat Governor Mohammad Asif Rahimi told RFE/RL that the insurgents changed their minds at the last minute and surrendered. Iranian officials have not commented on the claims. The pipeline would mostly run through parts of Afghanistan where the Taliban have a strong presence. However, the main Taliban organization in the country has declared its support for TAPI, calling it an "important project" for the country. With reporting by Pajhwok, Tolo News, and VOA ARL seeks private cloud to modernize IT infrastructure The Army Research Laboratory wants to modernize the way its 3,500 researchers and support staff complete their everyday tasks. ARL issued a request for information on Feb. 20 to solicit industry feedback on how the agency can move into a cloud environment and still support the massive processing, storage and memory needs that researchers require. Currently, the lab runs three data centers that support five major sites in addition to many smaller locations. That architecture creates performance issues during peak utilization time periods. As storage area networks become saturated, it has become harder for researchers to replicate and backup their data to other sites, according to the RFI. The underlying network architecture is not able to meet ARLs rapidly changing research requirements, so the agency is looking to move into a new computing and storage environment that provides more flexibility and provides better services at a lower cost. Any new cloud solution needs to ensure system administration, patching/upgrading, system and data security and backups can be accomplished more easily, as well as remotely and/or automatically where possible, the RFI states. The new approach should provide flexible capabilities to build and modify logical networks and their connected capabilities to quickly respond to changing research requirements. Specifically, the agency is interested in creating a scalable private cloud that can meet mission needs, establishing an environment to utilize virtual machines and containers in data centers and using virtual desktop infrastructure to increase end-user flexibility and ease client support burdens. ARL also is looking to get input how to create full lifecycle asset management and the use of a hybrid public or private cloud. Reponses to the RFI are due on March 13. North Korea's growing criminal cyber threat This article was first posted on The Conversation. The countries posing the greatest cyber threats to the United States are Russia, China, Iran and North Korea. Like its counterparts, Kim Jong Uns regime engages in substantial cyber espionage. And like Russia and Iran, it launches damaging cyberattacks that wipe data from computer disks and shut down online services. But the North Korean cyber threat is different in two ways. First, the regimes online power did not grow out of groups of independent hackers. Even today, it seems unlikely the country has hackers who operate independent of the government. Second, North Koreas cybercrime efforts -- all seemingly state-sponsored -- steal money that is then used to fund its cash-strapped government. Government-controlled hacking One reason for North Koreas apparent lack of independent hackers is that most North Koreans do not have internet access. Although the country has had an internet connection through China for several years, its reserved for elites and foreign visitors. Would-be hackers cant launch attacks across borders; they cant even pick up hacking manuals, code and tips from the many online forums that other hackers in other nations use to learn the trade and share information. On top of that, North Korea maintains exceptionally strong controls over its population. Any hacking attributed to North Korea is likely done for the government if not by the government directly. State-sponsored hackers North Koreas cyber warriors work primarily for the General Bureau of Reconnaissance or the General Staff Department of the Korean Peoples Army. Prospective candidates are selected from schools across the country and trained in cyber operations at Pyongyang University of Automation and other colleges and universities. By 2015, the South Korean military estimated the KPA employed up to 6,000 cyber warfare experts. North Korean hackers operate from facilities in China and other foreign countries where their government sends or permits them to work. Indeed, the country has reportedly sent hundreds of hackers into nearby countries to raise money for the regime. Many of the cyberattacks attributed to North Korea have been traced back to locations inside China. From espionage to sabotage North Korea has been using cyber operations to spy on the U.S. and South Korea since at least 2004. U.S. targets have included military entities and the State Department. North Korea uses cyber espionage to acquire foreign technology, including technologies relating to weapons of mass destruction, unmanned aerial vehicles and missiles. By 2009, North Korea had expanded its cyber operations to include acts of sabotage. The first of these took place in July 2009, when massive distributed denial of service attacks shut down targets in the U.S. and South Korea. The attackers also used wiper malware to delete data on disks. North Korea has continued to launch DDoS and disk-wiping attacks over the years, targeting banks as well as other military and civilian systems in the U.S. and South Korea. A cyber attack in April 2011 against South Koreas agricultural banking cooperative Nonghyup was said to shut down the banks credit card and ATM services for more than a week. In December 2014, the Norths attackers hit desktop computers in a South Korean nuclear plant with wiper malware that destroyed not only the data on hard drives, but also the master boot record startup software, making recovery more difficult. In addition, the attack stole and leaked blueprints and employee information from the plant. National system to help firefighters quickly locate nearby resources In a letter to California Gov. Jerry Brown, five fire emergency response managers said that they could have better fought the fires and floods that ravaged the state last year and cost $18 billion if they had a better way to track emergency resources during multi-jurisdictional events. An application in the works will provide just that. The cloud-based National Mutual Aid System (NMAS) modernizes the 10-year-old Mutual Aid System created by the International Association of Fire Chiefs (IAFC). It merges data and mapping by marrying Intermedixs WebEOC crisis management software with Esri's ArcGIS platform to help fire officials quickly search for and find additional resources -- whether that be personnel, teams, facilities, equipment or supplies -- from across the country. Were bringing mutual aid to the 21st century, said Jeff Dulin, IAFCs strategic adviser. The WebEOC part of it is the data, and the Esri part of it is the mapping," Previously fire officials would have lists of assets, but they wouldnt know where those resources were located. "Now youll see that visually on a map, so you can see how close they are, how far away, how long it will take them to get there, Dulin said. To use NMAS, fire agencies register with IAFC, which grants them access to the tool. They enter their inventory into the system manually or through WebEOCs batch import process for Microsoft Excel. The data format is based on the National Incident Management System, which standardizes equipment types nationwide, giving stakeholders common definitions and processes for their mutual aid planning, according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. This means that a fire official can query NMAS for Type I engine, and every fire service in the country knows what that means. Once the resources are entered, the Esri component automatically geocodes them. When officials query the system for resources, they get both a map showing locations and a list ranked nearest to farthest. Users can query by distance, time to delivery, category and resource. Additionally, they can plot the best route for resource loaners to use. Individual fire agencies can manage their inventories. Were using accepted nomenclatures, protocols, classifications from existing systems that have been put in place by FEMA, Homeland Security, the Forest Service, said Cy Cole, director of federal business development at Intermedix. Additionally, 44 state emergency management agencies and FEMA already use WebEOC. For Californias recent natural disasters, responders relied on an older system with few GIS components. In their letter, the fire managers asked for revenue to modernize the effective, but aging, Mutual Aid System to include rapid resource processing and ordering, incident logistical support, and command and control functions at local public safety communications centers. What would have been different [with NMAS] was they would have been able to visualize the resources that were available, and they could see where they were, Dulin said. That would have helped them speed up the whole process of making a request both to a resource owner and then getting a resource deployed to that event. Cole said resource requests and fulfillments can take up to two days -- too long when wildfires are involved. Although the idea of mutual aid isnt new, it has been difficult for fire departments, said Ryan Lanclos, director of public-safety industries at Esri. Theres never been a national system for fire service[s] to share and access mutual aid information, he said. In 2017, the amount of disasters that we faced in the U.S. and the cost of those disasters reflect how complex, how costly they were not just monetarily, but for our environment, infrastructure and the people that were impact directly," Lanclos explained. "Those hurricane examples, flooding examples are just perfect use cases" that show how the National Mutual Aid System can help first responders get access to resources they need, he said. Cole said the ultimate goal is greater efficiency. Lets be really clear: All NMAS is, is really just a system to help make it easier for all the fire agencies to do what theyve been doing for years, he said. Were going to help them expand the scope and the reach of mutual aid in the country. Another benefit of the system will be data analytics, he added. Making and fulfilling requests generates data that can be used to facilitate the reimbursement process, for example. You dont expect the fire department to send those million-dollar trucks and all those firefighters for free, Cole said. IAFC will soon launch a three-month beta test of NMAS in California, Florida, Tennessee and Utah -- states that already use Mutual Aid Net. Dulin said the full system should be up and running this summer. Open to states and individual jurisdictions, NMAS comes with a subscription fee based on the size of the area. Ultimately, NMAS will be expanded for use by any public safety agency, Lanclos said. The intent is that the system itself will facilitate resource management" across disciplines. It could be used by law enforcement as well as emergency management -- "logistical resources for food, water and the like, he said. Thats the long-term vision, Lanclos said. The National Mutual Aid System will eventually be tested and proven in its capacity here, and then well start to branch out into other segments of public safety. TORONTO, Feb. 05, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- NextSource Materials Inc. (TSX:NEXT) (OTCQB:NSRCF) (NextSource or the Company), is pleased to announce that Mr. Oliver Peters M.Sc., MBA, P.Eng., one of the graphite industrys top metallurgists and process engineers, will commission the Companys Molo graphite mine in Madagascar and act as the Companys principal process engineering consultant for Phase 1 of the Molo mine. Mr. Peters will relocate to Madagascar for the commissioning period of the Molo mine. Mr. Peters is principal metallurgist and president of Metpro Management Inc. and also currently serves as the senior metallurgical and process consultant at SGS Minerals (Lakefield) Canada (SGS), where he oversees all graphite process development work for SGS. To date, Mr. Peters has directed over twelve pilot plant operations at SGS for graphite projects globally. Mr. Peters was formerly a process engineer at DRA Global (DRA) and has over 20 years of process engineering experience in Africa and Canada. Mr. Peters was the head process engineer for NextSources 2015 pilot plant operation at SGS, which is the largest known pilot plant operation completed by any junior graphite company globally to date. Over 200 tonnes of Molo ore was processed at SGS, creating 13 tonnes of high quality, SuperFlake graphite concentrate that was used to develop the process flowsheet for the Molo mine and enabled NextSource to provide representative run-of-mill bulk samples for evaluation by graphite offtakers. Mr. Peters was instrumental in NextSource achieving a very high quality graphite concentrate. As detailed in the June 2017 Feasibility Study, NextSources SuperFlake graphite concentrate can achieve 98% carbon (C) purity with standard mineral processing (flotation), has excellent thermal expansion, can be easily upgraded to 99.97% purity (battery grade) and contains no deleterious substances. The Companys SuperFlake graphite concentrate also has excellent flake size distribution that is well above the global average, with 46.4 percent being classified as +80 (large), +65 (extra large) and +48 (jumbo) mesh in flake size. Specifically 23.6 percent of SuperFlake graphite concentrate is +48 mesh and greater in size. As previously reported, independent testing of the pilot plant material by various potential offtakers and graphite end-users has confirmed that the Molo SuperFlake graphite concentrate meets or exceeds quality requirements for all major end markets for natural flake graphite - anode material for lithium-ion batteries, refractories and specialty graphite foils. The Molo has also been verified for graphene ink applications. FACTORY ACCEPTANCE TESTING AND COMMISSIONING As NextSources principal process engineer, Mr. Peters will first oversee and approve the Factory Acceptance Testing (FAT) stage of Phase 1 of the Molo mine. Phase 1 will have a production rate of 17,000 tonnes per annum of SuperFlake graphite concentrate and a mine life exceeding 30 years. Employing NextSources unique, all-modular build approach, Phase 1 will be entirely constructed offshore to European standards with a build-assembly time of just six months. The processing plant then will be turned on and operationally tested for a one month period (the FAT process). After a successful FAT, the Molo processing plant will then be dismantled into 35 modules and shipped to site (one month shipping time) where the modules will be re-assembled within a one-month period, for a total time of only 9 months from start of construction to production. The FAT stage is a major project milestone in the mine construction stage where Mr. Peters will ensure that the mechanical operation of the concentrator equipment meets the quality and performance specifications created by the process engineering team. The FAT approval process is a critical step in any mill construction process but in NextSources case, it also provides a significant operational risk advantage versus the competition. Since the modules will be constructed, connected and fully-tested offshore prior to shipping, the entire construction process of the Molo processing plant will already be de-risked before it even reaches site. Phase 1 production is targeted for late 2018, subject to project financing. OVER 80 YEARS OF MINE DEVELOPMENT AND OPERATIONAL EXPERIENCE With the addition of Mr. Peters, NextSources mine operational readiness team now consists of three former engineers from DRA and with over 80 years of cumulative mine development and operational experience. The other team members are Mr. Johann de Bruin, the former Managing Director of DRA, who joined NextSource as a mine engineer consultant in March 2017; and Robin Borley, NextSources senior vice president of mine operations who prior to joining NextSource was the director of mining for DRA. DRA is the largest and most successful African-based mining engineering and construction (EPC/EPCM) company, with 20 offices in 5 continents and over 3000 employees globally. ABOUT SGS MINERALS CANADA SGS is recognized as a world leader in the development of concentrator flowsheet design and pilot plant testing programs. SGS Metallurgical Services division was founded over half a century ago. Its metallurgists, hydro-metallurgists and chemical engineers are experienced in all the major physical and chemical separation processes utilized in the recovery of metals and minerals contained in resource properties around the world. QUALIFIED PERSONS Mr. Craig Scherba, P.Geo., President and CEO, is the qualified person who reviewed and approved the technical information provided in this press release. For further details, the entire updated 2017 Feasibility Study titled, Molo Feasibility Study National Instrument 43-101 Technical Report is available to view on NextSource's website at www.nextsourcematerials.com. ABOUT NEXTSOURCE MATERIALS INC. NextSource Materials Inc. is a mine development company based in Toronto, Canada, that is developing its 100%-owned Molo Graphite Project in southern Madagascar. The Molo Graphite Project is a feasibility-stage project and ranks as one of the largest-known and highest quality flake graphite deposits in the world and the only project with SuperFlake graphite. Safe Harbour: This press release contains statements that may constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of applicable Canadian securities legislation. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on such forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are related to the information contained in this press release and the Companys corporate presentation, which refers to the testing of the pilot plant material by third parties, the results of the updated Feasibility Study, the results of the previous 2015 Molo Feasibility Study, funding of the development of the Molo Project, implementation and commencement of the build-out of Phase 1 and Phase 2 of the Molo Project, commencement of production at the Molo Project, commencement of procurement for mine infrastructure, the procurement of equipment to construct a mine, value engineering, any and all product test results and product analysis, the permit application. These are based on current expectations, estimates and assumptions that involve a number of risks, which could cause actual results to vary and in some instances to differ materially from those anticipated by the Company and described in the forward-looking statements contained in this press release. No assurance can be given that any of the events anticipated by the forward-looking statements will transpire or occur or, if any of them do so, what benefits the Company will derive there from. The forward-looking statements contained in this news release are made as at the date of this news release and the Company does not undertake any obligation to update publicly or to revise any of the forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as may be required by applicable securities laws. English Danish Press release NNIT signs agreement with STARK on outsourcing of IT STARK continues its digital transformation in the Nordic countries and outsources IT infrastructure and operations including application management and development to NNIT. Copenhagen, February 22, 2018 - NNIT, a leading provider of IT services and consultancy signs an IT outsourcing agreement with STARK, part of STARK Group, the leading supplier of building materials to professionals in the Nordic countries. Beyond high quality, security, stability, NNIT will throughout the next minimum four years secure the further development of STARK's IT-infrastructure, business applications, service desk and onsite support to STARK's 72 stores and more than 2,600 employees in Denmark. Furthermore, the Norwegian, Swedish and Finnish parts of STARK GROUP are included partially in the agreement that was signed today. Following a strong ambition to transform the business digitally and adapt to quickly changing customer behavior, STARK performs a complete IT outsourcing, Claus Paulsen, CIO, STARK, explains: "In order to become the preferred digital partner for our clients we must be able to predict tomorrow's technologies while at the same time securing high quality, security and stability in our IT-infrastructure. We now focus on our digital efforts to take the leadership. The partnership with NNIT is the right decision to achieve this and underpins our future growth across the Nordic countries." As part of the agreement, NNIT will take over IT infrastructure, operations, support, and application maintenance and development. By choosing NNIT, STARK will get flexible and scalable IT services while obtaining operational excellence and a high security level. Senior Vice President in NNIT Jacob Hahn Michelsen says about the agreement: "STARK is in a very exciting period of change in order to retain its leading position and we are happy to offer them our experience with delivery of international it-support. We look forward to helping them secure the IT robustness required for an agile and innovative organization to focus on clients and continue its growth in Nordic countries." NNIT will assume 53 employees, who will be welcomed in NNIT's offices in Aarhus by its approximately 100 colleagues there and more than 3,000 colleagues globally. More information Helga Heyn, NNIT Communications, +45 30 77 81 41, hhey@nnit.com STARK media contact, +45 27 79 98 73 About NNIT NNIT A/S is one of Denmark's leading IT service providers and consultancies. NNIT A/S offers a wide range of IT services and solutions to its customers, primarily in the life sciences sector in Denmark and internationally and to customers in the public, enterprise and finance sectors in Denmark. NNIT A/S has more than 3,000 employees. For more information please visit www.nnit.com. About STARK www.stark.dk We're sorry, you encountered a page that doesn't exist. FLOSSMOOR - Thursday, GOP gubernatorial candidate Jeanne Ives called for a repeal of taxpayer funding of abortions while standing in front of Illinois' newest Planned Parenthood in Flossmoor, Illinois. "I stand with you, I will always stand with you on this issue," Ives said. "Abortion hurts women." Ives, the only woman in the gubernatorial primary for either of the state's major parties, shared her personal experience when doctors counseled her to abort her fifth child: The complete press conference is available HERE. Honolulu, HI, Feb. 22, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Associa Hawaii is expanding their accounting team, in response to new business opportunities, with the addition of several employees including Irene Ramiro, finance and accounting controller; Ian Hsieh, client accounting specialist; and Marilyn Sibayan, client accounting specialist. Ms. Ramiro has more than 18 years of experience in the Hawaii property management industry, holding roles such as accounting supervisor and assistant controller. She has managed a multitude of townhome properties as well as single-family homes and high-rise communities. Her portfolio has included a 2500-unit master association where she focused on maintenance planning oversight and facilitating complex capital improvement projects. Prior to rejoining Associa Hawaii, Ms. Ramiro was an account executive at Hawaiiana Management Co. where she managed condominium and community association properties as well as the City and County of Honolulus Housing of Urban Development (HUD) Properties. In her new role at Associa Hawaii, Ms. Ramiro will be providing community managers with finance training as well as providing the necessary accounting and finance support to ensure client satisfaction and retention. She obtained her Hawaii Real Estate license in 2005 and obtained the Certified Manager of Community Associations (CMCA) designation in 2014. Mr. Hsieh has more than eight years of experience in client accounting services in the community and property management industry. Mr. Hsieh served as an accountant with Hawaii First, supporting a broad array of financial and accounting services for HOA and condo associations. In his new role, Mr. Hsieh will provide financial and accounting support to community management operations and other department divisions. Mr. Hsieh earned his Associates Degree in Accounting from University of Phoenix. Ms. Sibayan brings more than 25 years of accounting and financial support experience to Associa Hawaiis finance and accounting team. She previously served as a general ledger accountant for Roberts Hawaii Tours and was a client accountant for Associa Hawaii prior to that. In her new role, Ms. Sibayan will provide financial and accounting support to community management operations and other departments. Ms. Sibayan earned a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration from Far Eastern University in Manila and has continued her education by pursuing professional development opportunities in the area of taxation and GAAP accounting standards. Associa Hawaii has been an industry trailblazer for our accounting systems for many years and we are continuing to focus on building the best team to support those efforts, stated Pauli Wong, Associa Hawaii president. With the addition of our new controller and client accounting specialists, we are assembling the most qualified team to serve our clients, communities and boards. With more than 180 branch offices across North America, Associa delivers unsurpassed management and lifestyle services to nearly five million residents worldwide. Our 10,000+ team members lead the industry with unrivaled education, expertise and trailblazing innovation. For more than 40 years, Associa has provided solutions designed to help communities achieve their vision. To learn more, visit www.associaonline.com. Stay Connected: Like Associa Hawaii on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/associahawaii/ Join Associa Hawaii on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/associahawaii/ Subscribe to the Blog: https://hub.associaonline.com/ Follow Associa Hawaii on Twitter: https://twitter.com/associahawaii/ Join us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/associa Attachments: A photo accompanying this announcement is available at http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/faf0b5cc-1305-4e67-9de6-fef2ef24288c In the case of the Pan-American Highway, however, were talking about a major thoroughfare, one which, despite being only one lane in each direction for much of its most dangerous route, is an important highway, generally running parallel to the Pacific coast for much of Peru. It has the occasional sign Drive Carefully! but no guardrails, or width, to help people accomplish such a worthy goal. Such events occur on a daily basis in the third world, but rarely make the international news. Much of the world is arrayed with crumbling infrastructure from weak bridges to pothole-ridden roads so traffic accidents, caused not by driver error but the inherent danger of the road, is commonplace. On Wednesday, February 21, a bus tumbled over a cliff in Peru , killing at least 44 passengers. The bus was traveling on a narrow but important highway, the Pan-American Highway in the state of Arequipa, and the news horrified the nation, as it came less than two months after another almost-identical bus crash on January 2, also killing dozens of victims, on the same stretch of highway, an area so serpentine that sections are known by names like Devils Curve. Now, these arent cars in private hands here. We are talking about vehicles that are in our legal system referred to as common carriers. They are companies that operate as professionals, presumably with better drivers, better equipment, and more safety-oriented practices, than the average individual might. Faced with the charge of traveling on such narrow, scary mountain roads, who could blame a person for saying Ill leave my car in Huacho, and take the bus to Lima. Better to trust the experts than to try navigating such topography myself! And for such a choice, dozens lost their lives in the senseless tragedy of a bus crash, hundreds of feet down a cliffside. Thousands ask themselves: What can we do? What should we do? How can we prevent such an accident in the future? There are plenty of data points, and the investigations have begun. In South America in particular, there are good drivers, and there are bad ones. One of the drivers had let his permit expire, but dont be too sure thats it; other drivers whove tumbled off the Pan-American Highway have been up to date. Some of these buses are rickety old things, but dont be too quick to blame the equipment; there are also crashes involving modern cars in good condition. Some of the vehicles were overcrowded (the January 2 bus had 57 passengers besides the driver and crew member), but vehicles have also crashed that had no more passengers than published capacity. And the January 2 bus was reported to have hit a trailer being hauled by another vehicle on a road particularly precarious for such types of vehicles but other crashes on this dangerous road have been one-vehicle accidents that is, no other vehicle of any kind could be blamed. Maybe its just a dangerous stretch of road? In fact, Gentle Reader, there is little doubt that the ideas that come to your mind while you read this piece are among the logical steps that Peru should indeed take. More forceful limits of the capacity of a single vehicle, restrictions on segmented vehicles (like tractor trailers or trucks hauling campers), lower speed limits, greater driver training. There are plenty of possibilities, if we leave personal politics out of it, and focus on measures that may genuinely make the road safer. No individual measure will end every threat, but progress can be made, incrementally, to increase safety and reduce horrific incidents on the highway. But the Gentle Reader will also note that, no matter what measures we take, there is a limit to how safe we can ever hope to make a serpentine cliffside highway on the bank of an ocean, one so narrow theres only one lane in each direction. There is a limit to how safe you can ever make a road like this. Almost any kind of incident on such a road has the potential to produce fatalities. So the true solution must include widening and straightening of the road, and the addition of guard rails, fences and walls. There are stretches where they should punch a hole in the mountain and tunnel their way through, because the route around the mountain will just always be too treacherous, no matter what. No, there is no one answer. The solution is a combination of many measures some cheap and some pricey - and Peru can never hope to reach a 100% safety level. But surely, with common sense and a little wise spending, they can make their highways much safer than they are today. A Parallel in Parkland There are plenty of differences between the Peruvian coastal crashes and the Valentines Day murder rampage in Parkland, Florida. The one was an accident; the other was homicide. One involved guns and the other a busl; one took place on a government road and the other took place in a government school. But there are striking similarities as well. Just as the Peruvian crashes involved years of neglected warnings, poor design and the wrong staff, so too did the incident in Parkland show that many common-sense warnings were evaded, so none of the tools society has to protect itself was given a chance to work. There will always be calls for draconian solutions - ban buses, or ban public transportation... but millions use public transportation successfully every day; our economies depend on it. Or ban gun ownership or ammunition purchases... but millions own and use guns for legal and honorable personal use every day, for self defense, for hunting, for target practice. The very existence of buses prevents a lot of accidents that would otherwise take place if those people were in cars; the very existence of rifles in private possession prevents and foils lots of crimes, infinitely more than the crimes in which they are used by the perpetrators. So, no, outright bans of these things don't end the threats. So society's challenge is to study these incidents and find the specific flaws in our system that we can repair, the specific failures that, if fixed, could make such incidents rarer, and less fatal when they do tragically occur. In the days since the killings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, consider the shocking things we have learned: That police were called to Nikolas Cruz home at least 39 times an incredible number for a person without a criminal record. Why didnt any of those visits produce a prosecution? That this school did indeed have an armed security guard a sheriffs deputy but he stayed outside, cowering, for the full four minutes that the killing spree lasted. He has since resigned in shame. That Nikolas Cruz had been under psychiatric care, very likely enough to determine that he should be committed. But he wasnt. That Nikolas Cruz wasnt on the national criminal lists that they check when they buy a firearm. Whether one believes that such things are constitutional or not, the fact remains that if its in place, it should have all the data in it that its supposed to have. The school reports, the psychiatric reports identifying him as dangerous, the police reports. But if such things are not entered into the database, out of either political reasons or incompetence, then the database itself is useless. The Left tells us the problem is the AR-15 rifle. But the statistics show that AR-15s are hardly ever used in the commission of crimes. There are some 15 million AR-15s in private hands in America that are never used in the commission of a crime. Yes, some 15 million in the hands of law-abiding citizens. The gun itself clearly cannot be the problem in Parkland, just as the bus is clearly not the problem in Peru. The Need for an Objective Review We have processes in place often well-intentioned, but with so many quality gaps that safety is terribly compromised, and error or villainy can easily creep into the recipe. What is needed in both circumstances is a calm, impartial study of the situations. If we have a road, let us ask if it should have guard rails, or more lanes, or a redesign incorporating more tunnels to avoid the risks of cliff-side curves. And never forget the cost of such changes. Can we afford them? If we license bus drivers, let us hold them to enforcement of the laws governing their buses both capacity (they must turn away paying customers when theyre full), and speed (drivers shouldnt just get tickets; on dangerous roads, drivers should fear losing their licenses). If government is to run a school, then does that government have commonsense processes in place to keep the school safe? And the same thing goes for a police presence, a federal list of dangerous lunatics, and any other such program. Having a name in place that sounds good but is intentionally hamstrung is no solution. After every mass shooting, we are amazed to find that programs we thought to be in place either werent at all, or were so shoddily implemented as to have been useless when needed. Just like a mountain road without guard rails, we find that we are sewing the seeds for trouble by our carelessness. There are people, places, and things that could all be made safer and more sensible, and there are risks all around us that could be mitigated. But that sometimes requires purging ourselves of a gut instinct to hate mountains or buses or guns, requiring instead that we objectively recognize every individual risk, and have the courage to find a way to do what is possible and Constitutional, to make the world a little safer, where we can. Copyright 2018 John F Di Leo John F Di Leo is a Chicagoland based trade compliance trainer, actor and writer. His columns are regularly found in Illinois Review. Jodhpur/Mumbai Feb 23 (IBNS) : In two shocking incidents, a UK national was allegedly molested by two bike-borne men in Rajasthan's Jodhpur, while a middle-aged man allegedly forcibly kissed a young woman in a suburban railway station in Mumbai, media reports said. Both incidents took place on Thursday. In Jodhpur, the incident took place when the woman, a UK national on a visit to India, walking back to her hotel and two men on a motorcycle suddenly grabbed her. She lodged a complaint with police who are trying to track down the culprits with the help of CCTV footage. In another incident, the Navi Mumbai Railway Protection Force arrested a 43-year-old man for allegedly forcibly kissing a woman at the city's suburban Turbhe railway station. The act, captured on a closed circuit television (CCTV) camera, shows the accused, identified as Naresh K Joshi, walk up to the unsuspecting woman and allegedly force himself on her. The woman in her 20s, pushed Joshi away, and he casually strolled off leaving her shocked. Earlier last month, during the Republic Day weekend a similar incident was reported from Goa where a woman had alleged that she was molested by a bike rider at Morjim. New Delhi, Feb 23 (IBNS): Minister of Foreign Affairs of Bhutan Lyonpo Damcho Dorji is on an official visit to India from Feb 20-23. External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj held talks with the visiting Foreign Minister Lyonpo Damcho Dorji on 21 February 2018. The two leaders discussed entire gamut of bilateral relations, including the upcoming high-level exchanges between the two countries. They expressed satisfaction at the excellent state of bilateral ties, which are unique and time tested, and reiterated their commitment to further advance these exemplary ties for mutual benefit. "The two leaders reviewed the commemorative activities planned this year to mark the Golden Jubilee of the establishment of formal diplomatic relations between India and Bhutan. On 21 February, both the Ministers jointly attended a special event hosted as part of the Golden Jubilee celebrations by the Royal Bhutanese Embassy in New Delhi to coincide with the 38th Birthday of His Majesty, the King of Bhutan, read a statement issued by the MEA. Sushma Swaraj hosted a dinner in honour of visiting Foreign Minister Lyonpo Damcho Dorji. Image: Raveesh Kumar Twitter page Ali Akbar Velayati made these comments after a meeting with Nouri al-Maliki, vice president of Iraqs Islamic Dawa Party, and it is likely that most Iraqis didnt give it too much thought. Having endured many hardships over the past decade, they are likely fed up with foreign affairs issues, even in their immediate area. But one thing that may have riled Iraqis up was Velayatis statement that the Islamic awakening will not allow the return of communists and liberals to power. The former foreign minister for Iran, Velayati should have been more than aware that it is not diplomatic to interfere in the internal affairs of a country during an official visit, especially when that country is preparing for elections. Velayati visited Iraq in an official capacity to attend a non-political event he was invited by the Parliamentary Endowments and Religious Affairs Committee to help set up a centre for rapprochement between Islamic sects so he should not have made a political statement. Adnan Hussein, the executive editor-in-chief of Al-Mada newspaper and head of the National Union of Iraqi journalists, wrote: The tone of Velayatis remarks smacked of blatant interventionism. It seemed a clear incitement against some candidates contesting the elections, namely the communists and the liberals. Indeed, over the past 14 years, those who have ruled Iran have been overwhelmingly Islamist and enjoyed a close relationship with Iran, but their rule has damaged Iraq and left voters looking for alternatives (i.e. communists and the liberals) and many Islamist parties have changed their rhetoric to reflect a more democratic leaning. Velayati must know that this is happening because Iran views Iraq as their proxy state and are increasingly obsessed with its political affairs and so one can only assume that it was intentional. Iran fear that non-Islamist leaders will put Iraq out of Irans influence and thus are trying to stop it. Iran is hardly one to respect the independence of other nation states, why else would it support proxy militias and the destabilisation of the Middle East? In that respect, we should not be surprised that this comment was made. Of course, it is worth noting that if an Iraqi official had visited Iran during the recent uprising, then Iran would not have accepted the advice of heeding the demands of the demonstrators. The continuation of these demonstrations has occurred in spite of an ongoing crackdown on political activists and other perceived threats to the stability of the clerical regime. This crackdown established connections between the January uprising and the Sufi protests, in that the latter phenomenon reportedly resulted from rumors that an arrest warrant had been issued for Gonabadi leader and liberal activist Ali Tabandeh. And after those protests demonstrated opposition to the regimes suppression of dissent, the response demonstrated the continuation of the tactics involved in that suppression. The CHRI reported on Wednesday that security forces had apparently carried out arrests of Gonabadi dervishes throughout the country, following that clashes that took place in the capital city of Tehran. The Gonabadis channel on the Telegram messaging app suggested that more than 3,000 individuals had been arrested, whereas Iranian authorities acknowledged only one tenth of this number. This report is strongly reminiscent of the NCRIs accounts of the January uprising and subsequent crackdown. Although the government initially claimed that only a few hundred arrests had been carried out in response to the demonstrations, one Iranian Member of Parliament later acknowledged a figure well in excess of 3,000. Meanwhile, the NCRI continues to maintain, as it did then, that the actual figure exceeds 8,000. The higher arrest figures contribute to higher levels of anxiety about further repression tactics including torture and execution, especially in light of explicit threats of execution from the Iranian judiciary, accompanied by at least a dozen accounts of persons being tortured to death while in detention. The connections between the January uprising and the Gonabadi protests also extend to broader concerns regarding free speech and access to information in the Islamic Republic. This fact was highlighted on Wednesday by IW, with the publication of an article about the discussions about the Telegram app that had emerged in the wake of the clash with security forces. Some Iranian Telegram users reported problems in accessing the app, leading to speculation that it had been blocked by government authorities once again, just as it had been while the January protests were at their peak. At that time, restrictive measures varied according to time and place, but they included brief outright bans on the service. As the demonstrations began to subside, there was some talk of those obstructions becoming permanent, as they had with Twitter in the wake of the 2009 Green Movement, where the microblogging platform played a major organizational role. Iranian authorities ultimately decided against a permanent ban on Telegram, reportedly under pressure from businesses who had come to rely on the app for domestic advertising and commerce. Although the more recent outages rekindled concerns about such permanent obstruction, it was later reported that the source of this problem was on Telegrams end and was not the result of government restrictions. But the absence of such measures in this case does not mean that Iranian authorities have accepted Telegram as a fixture of Iranian society. Quite to the contrary, IranWire and other outlets have recently reported on a push by hardline officials and commentators to encourage broad-based adoption of alternatives which might allow the regime to obstruct the popular messaging app at a later date, with fewer negative consequences for itself. Telegram has become popular throughout Iranian society but particularly among the activist community, due in part to its perceived security relative to other social media platforms. Telegrams executives have also been resistant to pressures from the Iranian government, including demands that local content be moved to servers inside the Islamic Republic. This has allowed anti-government sentiments to spread more easily through that channel than through others, but it has also fueled efforts by Iranian political and religious authorities to portray the service as socially damaging. These narratives were highlighted on Wednesday by The Iran Project, which reported on recent statements by Mohammad Javad Azari Jahromi, the Iranian Minister of Information and Communications Technology, regarding efforts to promote the use of locally-developed messengers and other applications. We wont allow just any content to be published in this space, he vowed, adding that the economic necessity of digital technology is no reason for Iran to accept foreign-based content. Jahromis remarks made reference to the theoretical national information network, or halalnet, that would effectively cut off Iranian cyberspace from the global internet, allowing in only materials that are approved by the clerical regime. Although touted for years as a thorough solution, this project has also been dismissed by tech experts as impractical and cost-prohibitive. Nevertheless, Jahromi and others continue to insist upon its cultural necessity, as evidenced by the ministers remarks portraying an open internet as harmful to Iranian children. The nations youth in general is a particular target for restrictions on access to information. This trend is no doubt influenced by the remarkably young average population of the Islamic Republic, and by the fact that social and political differences between the Iranian regime and its people are most prominently on display among the lower age demographics. In fact, according to a recent statement by Rasoul Sanai, the political affairs deputy for the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, as many as 80 percent of the persons arrested in the January uprising were under the age of 30. Such observations may encourage Tehran to use locally-developed alternatives as a means not only for influencing young Iranians with propaganda but also for spying on that same demographic, for which the internet and social media are especially popular. This threat was the focus of a recent NCRI report, which was picked up by Fox News on Wednesday. The report noted that the regimes efforts to spy in cyberspace reached new heights shortly after Telegram was banned during the January protests. Additionally, some of those who were arrested at that time were pressured to leave the Telegram environment and enter the controlled environment of Mobogram, a domestic alternative, according to the NCRI. That same report indicates that this and other state-approved social media networks are little more than clones of their internationally popular predecessors, with spyware added. In its coverage of the same NCRI report, The Sun emphasized the potential international reach of these compromised networks over the long term. By presenting themselves as a means to communicate in Farsi with family inside Iran, these apps could be downloaded by users throughout the world, allowing agents of the Islamic Republic to gain access to contact lists and monitor communications, potentially exposing domestic activists who would be comparatively shielded by Telegrams security features. In recent months, it has been widely reported that the Iranian government was stepping up its foreign cyber surveillance and hacking efforts, and that its capabilities had increased to such an extent that these efforts pose a serious threat to Western interests. The Long War Journal highlighted this trend on Wednesday in its commentary on the Worldwide Threat Assessment that was presented by the US Director of National Intelligence last week. According to that commentary, cyber spying activities were given greater attention, alongside domestic unrest, in comparison with previous years assessments. However, it also notes that the document described alleged restraint in these activities over the past year, at least where Western targets are concerned. The Long War Journal points to the lack of a clear rationale for this supposed change, and it offers several hypotheses including the possibility that Iran is just opportunistically lying low. Notably, this is precisely the conclusion suggested by the NCRI in discussion of its report on Iranian spyware. The Sun quoted the organizations Deputy Direct Alireza Jafarzadeh as saying that recent efforts involving Mobogram and other platforms had been focused on the domestic population, but also that this constituted an experimentation phase after which the same tactics might be applied to stepped-up spying efforts targeting Western countries. Several Ukrainian nationals were detained, while a number of their accomplices had fled to Russia. Law enforcers have reportedly detained several suspects in a terrorist act who set up an explosion outside the Espreso TV channel HQ. The sources in the SBU Security Service of Ukraine confirmed to INSIDER the report recently voiced by Ukrainian MP Ihor Mosyichuk, who was injured in the blast, on the success of Ukrainian security forces. The source also provided some details about the suspects. According to him, these are several Ukrainian citizens, some of whom had fled to Russia. Read alsoSecond victim of Oct 25 bomb blast in Kyiv dies"Several members of the criminal group have been detained and put in a detention center, while several other alleged perpetrators, as well as organizers of the crime, are now in Russia," the source said. As UNIAN reported earlier, four people were wounded in a bomb blast near the editorial office of the Espreso TV Channel in Kyiv's Solomyansky district at 22:15 local time on October 25. Among them were MP Ihor Mosiychuk and his bodyguard, who died of wounds. An accidental passer-by, a local resident, became another victim. Check out the Supra Skateboarding website for more information on Saschas new pro colourway. Take a look at Sascha Daleys Flow colourway , and Dee Ostranders Chino colourway. "I would skate the Blazer Vapor then wear Janoskis when I was chillin. I wanted this to be both." adidas Skateboarding have revealed the new Na-kel Smith Collection, it's the first footwear and apparel collection designed by Na-kel himself Check out the new Antihero x Nike SB collection. Created with the help of Antihero / Nike SB pro Brian Anderson. Vans & Quasi join forces for the second time, this collaboration results in the release of the Epoch Sport Pro. Check out all the info... Newsletter Terms & Conditions Please enter your email so we can keep you updated with news, features and the latest offers. If you are not interested you can unsubscribe at any time. We will never sell your data and you'll only get messages from us and our partners whose products and services we think you'll enjoy. Read our full Privacy Policy as well as Terms & Conditions. CHICAGO - Governor Rauner is the hands down favorite of Chicago legacy media editorial boards in the March 20th IL GOP gubernatorial primary - the same Chicago media that boosted Democrat Barack Obama from a lowly state senator to new heights every time he ran for office, including President of the United States. Twice. Chicago Tribune also endorsed JB Pritzker in the Democrat primary: [Gov Rauner] urged a two-year property tax freeze for homeowners. He pushed for changes to workers compensation to grow jobs. He requested legislative votes on term limits and redistricting reform, proposals wildly popular among voters. He said he would adopt Senate President John Cullertons pension ideas to reduce costs. ...He is the first governor to unflinchingly stand up to Madigan. The war for Illinois future will a death spiral or an economic rebound prevail? endures. And if voters elect any Republican, Madigan will again try to make that governor fail. If that governor is Rauner, you know your governor wont stop fighting. In this primary, Rauner is endorsed. Daily Herald endorsed Chris Kennedy in the Democrat gubernatorial primary: Rauner has shown that he can buck the states Democratic tendencies. And, he is completing a four-year legislative learning curve from which he presumably has found out something about what doesnt work and what does both to stop a wholesale onslaught of Democratic measures and to promote at least a degree of limited-government Republican principles. So, the outlook for Republicans in this primary is clear and persuasive. Vote for a candidate whose divisive brand of confrontational conservatism would divide the party, continue the futile obstructionism of the past four years and ensure a loss in November. Or, elect a candidate who has demonstrated his commitment to the fundamental values of the party and has had the opportunity to learn productive ways to advance them. Were putting our hopes on the latter. Gov. Bruce Rauner gets our endorsement for the GOP nomination for governor in the March 20 primary. Chicago Sun-Times: The governor signed a bill overhauling the way public schools are funded in the state, reducing inequities that punished schools in poorer communities for generations. It was his signature achievement. As part of this school funding reform effort, Rauner teamed up with Cardinal Blase Cupich to create a private school scholarship program. We opposed the measure, seeing it as a taxpayer give-away to private schools, but it was popular with Republican legislators and voters. In a Republican primary, it counts as a solid achievement. Rauner also signed the Future Energy Jobs Act, which promises to make Illinois a leader in creating clean energy jobs, such as in the fields of solar and wind power. The bill was derided by critics as a bailout for Exelons nuclear power plants, but it was supported by environmentalists and consumer groups. The new law looks to Illinois future, not the past, and Rauner should brag about it. His opponent, State Rep. Jeanne Ives (R-Wheaton) was not viewed favorably by any of these three news sources. African nations appear at the bottom of Transparency Internationals latest Corruption Perceptions Index. Transparency gave the East African nation of Somalia its lowest rating on the list for the 12th time in 12 years. Transparency is a non-governmental anti-corruption organization. It rated a total of 180 countries on how corrupt their governments and public services appear to be. The ratings are based on findings by experts and public opinion studies. The index uses a 100-point scale to show corruption levels. More than two-thirds of the countries received less than 50 points, with an average rating of 43. African nations had an average rating of 32 points. No nation has ever earned a perfect rating of 100. New Zealand leads the 2017 index with 89 points. Somalia received nine. Kate Muwoki is Transparency Internationals expert on Southern Africa. She says most African governments are failing to deal with corruption. However, she says there are some leaders who have invested in systemic action to change behavior. Muwoki spoke to VOA from Berlin, where Transparency International has its headquarters. She praised a number of African countries where corruption does not appear to be a major problem. They include Botswana, Seychelles, Cabo Verde, Rwanda and Namibia. All five received a rating of over 50 in the latest index. She also noted that South Sudan is near Somalia at the bottom of the list. And Transparency identified rising corruption levels in Malawi, Madagascar, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau. Yet Muwoki suggested that things may change because the African Union and several African leaders have made clean governance a top goal. Major resignations The past year will be remembered as a time when several African leaders accused of questionable activities left office. No fewer than four heads of state suspected of financial crimes resigned over the past 12 months. They are Gambias Yahya Jammeh, Angolas Jose Eduardo dos Santos, Zimbabwes Robert Mugabe, and Jacob Zuma of South Africa. A high-level corruption case also affected the government of Ethiopian Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn. He resigned this month following anti-government protests. Yet the corruption-accused president of the Democratic Republic of Congo has repeatedly postponed elections. And the leaders of Uganda, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Congo, and Cameroon have all remained in power while being suspected of wrongdoing. Corruption investigations continue into current and former officials across the continent. Signs of change The new president of South Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa, has made fighting corruption a major goal of his administration. This week, he called for an investigation of the behavior of top government officials, starting with himself. Now, if there ever has been anything that many South Africans would like to have line of sight of, (it) is the lifestyle audit of their public representatives. Now that is something that I believe we have to do, and this will be done starting with the executive of the country, yes, we will go in that way... In Nigeria, President Muhammadu Buhari announced that all national property recovered in an anti-corruption campaign would be sold. He said the money from the sale will go the countrys treasury. Buhari is the chairman of the AU anti-corruption effort. Transparency Internationals Kate Muwoki says her group has noted and welcomed these developments. But she is urging people to keep up the pressure by shining light on suspected corruption. I'm Caty Weaver. Anita Powell reported this story for VOANews.com. George Grow adapted her report for Learning English. Caty Weaver was the editor. ________________________________________________________________ Words in This Story perception n. the way you think about or understand something index n. a list or record of something scale n. a group of numbers that is used to show the size, strength, or quality of something usually singular audit v. an official examination of ones behavior or activities executive n. a person who directs or supervises something; a directing or controlling office We want to hear from you. Write to us in the Comments Section. A Japanese businessman who won a child custody case in Thailand is largely unknown in his home country. Mitsutoki Shigeta is the son of the owner of Japanese telecommunications and insurance company Hikari Tsushin. As a major shareholder of the company, he earns millions of dollars a year. But in Japan, he generally stays away from publicity. On Tuesday, a Thai court gave Shigeta legal custody of his 13 children who were born to women in Thailand. Many news media aggressively reported on the babies after they were found in a Bangkok apartment building in 2014. But the reporting stopped after his fathers company reportedly threatened legal action against the media. Japanese newspapers no longer use Mitsutoki Shigetas name in their stories. He is simply described as a 28-year-old man. Information from the Thai court, doctors and a fertility center has done little to answer questions about Shigeta and the children. A Japanese lawyer who was said to represent the man refused to talk with the Associated Press about him. Officials at Hikari Tsushin were not available for comment. The company started as a business telephone and office supplies company. It now is on the Tokyo Stock Exchange and controls more than 180 smaller companies. Japanese newspapers reported in 2014 that Shigeta said he wanted to have 100 to 1,000 children. He added that if he were successful, it would cost millions of dollars. He wanted to buy equipment to freeze his "high-quality" sperm at home, so that he could continue producing children even in his old age, reports claimed. Thai officials have rejected human trafficking and other criminal charges against him. Mariam Kukunashvili founded the New Light fertility clinic in Thailand. She sought out some of the women who became pregnant. Kukunashvili told the AP in 2014 that Shigeta told her "he wanted 10 to 15 babies a year and that he wanted to continue the baby-making process until he's dead." She said he also told her that he wanted to compete in an election and win by using his big family for voting. Shigeta's actions, along with some others, caused Thailand to ban commercial surrogacy for non-Thais. That law sent people seeking surrogate mothers to Cambodia, which also later banned it. Japanese newspapers reported that Shigeta's parents were seen kissing a baby when they visited their son in Cambodia, where he also had several children by surrogate mothers. The Thai court said Tuesday that Shigeta plans to send the children to an international school. It also said he is preparing a house for them in Tokyo where they will be cared for by nurses and babysitters. His lawyer in Thailand said he simply wants a big family. I'm Susan Shand. Susan Shand adapted this story based on the Associated Press report. George Grow was the editor. ________________________________________________________________ Words in This Story custody n. the legal right to take care of a child surrogate n. a person or thing that takes the place or performs the duties of someone or something else insurance n. an agreement in which a person makes payments to a company and the company promises to pay money if the person is injured or dies shareholder n. someone who owns shares of stock in a company or business fetus n. a human being in the final weeks of development, before it is born sperm - n. male reproductive fluid commercial adj. related to the buying and selling of goods and services arrange v. to plan or to organize surrogate n. a person or thing that takes the place or performs the duties of someone or something else nurse - n. a person who is trained to care for sick or injured people and who usually works in a hospital or doctor's office American President Donald Trump is calling for stronger gun control measures. He commented one day after an emotional meeting with survivors of school shootings. Trump repeated his call to permit some teachers to carry guns at schools. On Twitter, he wrote that highly trained teachers would also serve as a deterrent and the ATTACKS WOULD END! Trump also tweeted: I will be strongly pushing Comprehensive Background Checks with an emphasis on Mental Health. Raise age to 21 and end sale of Bump Stocks!" Last week, a 19-year-old gunman shot and killed 17 students and teachers at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. The gunman used an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle that he purchased legally. Trumps tweets and calls for action represent the strongest position on gun control from the president so far. But a White House official told the Associated Press that Trump was not supporting or ruling out any one policy. Trump did not immediately offer more details. During his presidential campaign, Trump embraced gun rights and received the support of the National Rifle Association, or NRA. In his tweets Thursday morning, Trump repeated his support for the NRA. He wrote, the folks who work so hard at the @NRA are Great People and Great American Patriots. They love our Country and will do the right thing. Wayne LaPierre is head of the NRA. He spoke Thursday at the Conservative Political Action Conference just outside Washington, D.C. It was his first public appearance since the Parkland school shooting. LaPierre did not address Trumps recent comments. But he did accuse Democrats of using the tragedy for political gain. He said, To stop a bad guy with a gun, it takes a good guy with a gun. LaPierre said the same thing after the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. Twenty six students and teachers were killed in that attack. On Wednesday, the NRA said it would reject any proposal to raise the minimum age for buying a gun. In a statement, it said, Legislative proposals that prevent law-abiding adults aged 18-20 years old from acquiring rifles and shotguns effectively prohibits them for purchasing any firearm, thus depriving them of their constitutional right to self-protection. The current federal minimum age for buying or owning handguns is 21. But the limit is 18 for buying rifles -- including military-style assault weapons such as the AR-15 used in the Florida shooting. The NRAs statement signaled a difficult road ahead for any proposal to strengthen gun control measures. Legislative efforts to pass gun control measures after other mass shootings all failed because they lacked enough support. Chuck Schumer is the Democratic Party leader in the United States Senate. He said the real test for Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress is not words and sympathy, but action. Schumer asked on Twitter, Will President Trump and the Republicans finally buck the @NRA and get something done? Could this time be different? At the White House meeting on Wednesday, Trump listened to Samuel Zeif, a student at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland. "I turned 18 the day after, I woke up to the news that my best friend was gone. And I dont understand why I can still go in a store and buy a weapon of war. An AR. I was reading today that a person, 20 years old, walked into a store and bought an AR-15 in five minutes with an expired I.D. How is it that easy to buy this type of weapon? How do we not stop this after Columbine? After Sandy Hook? I'm Caty Weaver. Hai Do wrote this story for Learning English based on AP 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 deterrent - adj. something that makes someone decide not to do something embrace - v. to accept something or someone readily and gladly prohibit - v. to order someone not to use or do something buck - v. to oppose or resist The United States government agency that oversees immigration has changed its mission statement. The new version no longer describes the U.S. as a nation of immigrants. The director of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, L. Francis Cissna, wrote an email about the change to USCIS employees on Thursday. A letter about the change from Cissna is also published on the agencys website. The new mission statement says: U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services administers the nations lawful immigration system, safeguarding its integrity and promise by efficiently and fairly adjudicating requests for immigration benefits while protecting Americans, securing the homeland, and honoring our values. Cissna said he believes the simple, straightforward statement clearly defines the agencys role in carrying out immigration laws and responsibilities to the American people. The earlier mission statement said the agency secures Americas promise as a nation of immigrants The phrase nation of immigrants has a long history in American political speeches. Most recent presidents from both political parties, including Barack Obama and George W. Bush, have used the phrase to describe America. It is thought to have been used as far back as the 19th century. It described a country where people of many cultures and nationalities added to what has been long described as a melting pot. The phrase also appears as the title of a book, A Nation of Immigrants, by former president John F. Kennedy. The book was published after this death. Cissna said that he no longer wants the agency to call immigration applicants and petitioners its customers. He said he believes the agency is meant to first serve the American people. U.S. Census Bureau information from 2014 shows that there were at least 42 million immigrants, both legal and illegal, in the country. That number has continued to grow. Critics say the mission statement change raises questions about the countrys continued willingness to accept immigrants. They note the importance of Americas promise to those coming to this country. The new statement for the immigration agency does keep the word promise in it. The inscription on the Statue of Liberty in New York City reads Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. The lines do not have the word immigrant in them, nor does the poem that the inscription is based on. However, it is clear what the subject of the inscription truly is. Im Mario Ritter. Mario Ritter wrote this story for VOA Learning English. Ashley Thompson 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 integrity n. the quality of being honest and fair adjudicate v. to make an official decision about who is right in a dispute or to decide on a petition role n. the part played by a person or group in an effort or organization phrase n. words that express a single idea but are not usually a complete sentence applicant n. someone who formally asks for something (such as a job or admission to a college) customer n. someone who buys goods or services from a business 1 hour ago McConnell unmoved on debt limit, risking turmoil for Biden WASHINGTON (AP) The Biden administration has been enlisting one emissary after another to convince Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell to help raise the federal debt limit. It's not working. Despite the high-level conversations, including a call from Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, the GOP leader is digging in and playing political hardball. Read Article Luxoft Holding, Inc., together with its subsidiaries, provides software development services and IT solutions to multinational corporations. The company offers application software development, software architecture design, performance engineering, optimization and testing, process consulting, and software quality assurance services; functional specification and mock-up, product design, engineering, automated testing, maintenance, support, and performance engineering services; and IT strategy, software engineering process, and data security consulting services. Its products and platforms include Populus, a tool chain for human machine interface (HMI) design and development, and the deployment of automotive user interfaces for distributed embedded systems; Qt Automotive Suite, which enables developers to create stunning user experience and ease the integration toward the system backend; AllView, an user-experience demonstrator; software tools and consulting services focused on scheduling analysis, architecture optimization, and timing verification; Pelux, a base development platform; and ARP, an automotive hardware reference platform. It serves financial services, automotive and transport, healthcare and life sciences, travel and aviation, technology, telecom, energy, and other industries. The company operates in North America, Europe, Russia, the Asia-Pacific, and internationally. Luxoft Holding, Inc. was founded in 2000 and is headquartered in Zug, Switzerland. Luxoft Holding, Inc. operates as a subsidiary of IBS Group Holding Limited. Read More Wall Street analysts have given Botswana Diamonds a "N/A" rating, but there may be better buying opportunities in the stock market. Some of MarketBeat's past winning trading ideas have resulted in 5-15% weekly gains. MarketBeat just released five new stock ideas, but Botswana Diamonds wasn't one of them. MarketBeat thinks these five companies may be even better buys. View MarketBeat's top stock picks here. WASHINGTON - POLITICO updated its list the top 10 most threatened incumbent governors Friday, and Illinois' Republican Governor Bruce Rauner remains at the top of the list. Here's how POLITICO's Daniel Strauss sees the race: Illinois Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner is running for reelection. (Previous ranking: 1) Rauner remains the most vulnerable governor in America but much has changed ahead of the March 20 primary. Rauner's primary challenger, state Rep. Jeanne Ives, is running incendiary television ads aimed at turning conservatives against the incumbent. But things may be even more unsettled on the Democratic side: Controversial comments by self-funding front-runner J.B. Pritzker about African-Americans has widened an opening for his opponents in the primary. State Sen. Daniel Biss has emerged as a top competitor to Pritzker in the primary and points to polls of him leading Rauner in the general election. Both Rauner and Biss have been forced to begin airing attack ads against their two main primary rivals. Rauner and Pritzker, both billionaires, are still likely to win their bruising primaries, setting up the general election to be among the most expensive state races in the nation's history. South32 Limited operates as a diversified metals and mining company primarily in Australia, Southern Africa, North America, and South America. The company has a portfolio of assets producing alumina, aluminum, bauxite, energy and metallurgical coal, manganese ore and alloy, ferronickel, silver, lead, and zinc. It also exports its products. South32 Limited has a strategic alliance agreement with AusQuest Limited for exploration opportunity under at its Morrisey nickel-copper project. The company was formerly known as BHP Coal Holdings Pty Limited and changed its name to South32 Limited in March 2015. South32 Limited was incorporated in 2000 and is headquartered in Perth, Australia. Read More United Technologies Corporation provides technology products and services to building systems and aerospace industries worldwide. Its Otis segment designs, manufactures, sells, and installs passenger and freight elevators, escalators, and moving walkways; and offers modernization products to upgrade elevators and escalators, as well as maintenance and repair services. The company's Carrier segment provides heating, ventilating, air conditioning, refrigeration, fire, security, and building automation products, solutions, and services for commercial, government, infrastructure, residential, and refrigeration and transportation applications. This segment also offers building services, including audit, design, installation, system integration, repair, maintenance, and monitoring. Its Pratt & Whitney segment supplies aircraft engines for commercial, military, business jet, and general aviation markets; and provides aftermarket maintenance, repair, and overhaul, as well as fleet management services. The company's Collins Aerospace Systems segment provides electric power generation, power management, and distribution systems; air data and aircraft sensing systems; engine control, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance systems; engine components; environmental control systems; fire and ice detection, and protection systems; propeller systems; engine nacelle systems; aircraft lighting, seating, and cargo systems; actuation and landing systems; space products and subsystems; avionics systems; flight controls, communications, navigation, oxygen, and training systems; food and beverage preparation, and storage and galley systems; and lavatory and wastewater management systems. The company offers its services through manufacturers' representatives, distributors, wholesalers, dealers, retail outlets, and sales representatives, as well as directly to customers. United Technologies Corporation was founded in 1934 and is headquartered in Farmington, Connecticut. Read More Valley National Bancorp is a bank holding company, which engages in the provision of retail and commercial banking services. It operates through the following segments: Consumer Lending; Commercial Lending; Investment Management; and Corporate and Other Adjustments. The Consumer Lending segment consists of residential mortgage loans, automobile loans and home equity loans, as well as wealth management and insurance services. The Commercial Lending segment includes the floating rate and adjustable rate commercial and industrial loans as well as fixed rate owner occupied and commercial real estate loans. The Investment Management segment refers to investments in various types of securities and interest-bearing deposits with other banks. The Corporate and Other Adjustments segment represents the income and expense items not directly attributable to a specific segment. The company was founded on November 12, 1982 and is headquartered in New York, NY. Read More Opera pulled the plug on its Opera Max data saver app last year, but now Samsung says it has a new app designed to replace Opera Max. Like its predecessor, the new Samsung Max app offers a data saving mode and privacy protection feature. But unlike Opera Max, the new app will only be available for Samsung smartphones. The good news is that its free to use and existing Opera Max users with supported phones will get Samsung Max via an upcoming software update. The bad news is that if you dont have a supported phone, you probably wont be able to use Opera Max for much longer. Samsung says the apps data saving mode can compress images, videos, music, and web content to help you get more out of your data plan. It can also show which apps are using the most data, offering suggestions for ways you can save data. The privacy protection feature helps make it a bit safer to connect to open WiFi hotspots by offering one-tap encryption, tracker blocking, and a DNS masking service. Its not quite the same thing as a proper VPN, but it reduces the risk of someone spying on you or stealing data when you connect to an untrusted network. Samsung says the new Samsung Max phone will come pre-installed on Galaxy A and J series phones offered in some countries including India, Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia, Argentina, Nigeria, and South Africa. Folks in other countries can download the app from the Google Play Store if they have a supported Samsung phone. press release Share this article: Share this: Facebook Twitter Reddit Pocket Tumblr Pinterest LinkedIn Email The ten worst colleges for free speech. As ranked by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Drexel, Harvard, Los Angeles Community College District, Fordham, Evergreen State, Albion, Northwestern, University of California at Berkeley, and Texas State. Plus, Depaul wins FIREs lifetime censorship award. More at: The 10 Worst Colleges for Free Speech: 2018, from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, February 12. Amnesty International has released its latest human rights report with a small section mentioning the Macau governments seemingly arbitrary decision to ban several Hong Kong journalists from entering Macau after last years typhoon Hato, as well as the process of suspending lawmaker Sulu Sous mandate in December. The report, which is subtitled The State of the Worlds Human Rights, attempts to shine a light on human rights violations across the world, documenting the struggle of many people to claim their rights, and the failures of governments to respect, protect and fulfill human rights. It also documents success stories, glimpses of hard-won progress, demonstrating that the defense of human rights does yield positive developments [ because of those] who continue to fight for change, sometimes risking their own lives in the process. The report mentions the disappearance of Lee Ming-cheh, a manager of a Taiwanese non-governmental organization, who was seized by state security officers when traveling to mainland China from Macau. As for Hong Kong, Amnesty International highlights the police and judicial crackdown on the founders of the Occupy Central movement namely Benny Tai, Chan Kin-man and Rev Chu Yiu-ming who were charged with up to seven years imprisonment. Meanwhile, police officers who assaulted a protester at the height of the movement were sentenced to a maximum of two years imprisonment a sentence that provoked condemnation from mainland China for its perceived severity. Another concern for Amnesty International was the disqualification of four elected pro-democracy legislators for failing to adequately take their oaths of office. On the other hand, the report noted that progress has been made with regards to same-sex couples. In April, Hong Kongs Court of First Instance ruled that the governments refusal to extend work benefits to the same-sex husband of a civil servant constituted discrimination based on sexual orientation. The Hong Kong SAR government is appealing the decision. A fight broke out yesterday morning at the Border Gate taxi station when three local men cut into a taxi queue. According to a report by TDM, the men were aged between 40 and 50 years old. The dispute escalated when they refused to heed the warnings of two other residents a man and a woman to join the queue. All five were taken to Hospital Conde S. Januario for their injuries. Urban plan for Lai Chi Vun area revealed The Land, Public Works and Transport Bureaus latest plan for land conditions proposes a maximum height of 11.4 meters for buildings in front of the Lai Chi Vun shipyards. The three land plots concerned are 43, 65 and 128 square meters, respectively, and must be used for non-industrial purposes. It has been suggested that both the roof and stairs follow the Chinese architectural style. The plan is under public consultation until the end of this month, with the Cultural Affairs Bureau required to weigh in. Registration open for craft market The Tap Seac Craft Market will be held between April 13 and 15, and April 20 to 22. Stall registrations are now open and all interested parties are welcome to register. Applicants from Macau, Malaysia and Singapore are welcome to register by March 13. Applicants from other regions can visit the Craft Market page on Facebook for application details and the application deadline. Marking its 10th anniversary, the event will feature a total of 220 stalls, allowing local and overseas cultural and creative entities to showcase and sell their original brands and products. Organized by the Cultural Affairs Bureau, the event was first held in 2008. China is highly concerned about a reported ship-to-ship transfer on the high seas that could violate U.N. sanctions on North Korea and has launched an investigation, the foreign ministry said yesterday. Spokesman Geng Shuang said China would seriously deal with any Chinese individuals or enterprises found to be involved in the incident reported earlier this week by Japan. China is highly concerned about the situation and we are in the middle of an investigation, Geng said at a regularly scheduled news conference. Punishment of any Chinese entities found to have been involved would be carried out based on solid evidence and in accordance with Chinese laws and regulations, he said. A Japanese maritime Self-Defense Force PC-3 surveillance plane and an escort ship saw a North Korean-flagged tanker alongside a smaller ship on Feb. 16 about 250 kilometers off Shanghai in the East China Sea, Japans foreign ministry said late Tuesday. Photos posted on the ministrys website show the two ships with what appear to be hoses running between them. The ministry identified the North Korean tanker as the Yu Jong 2. It said the other vessel is of unknown nationality, but had Min Ning De You 078 written in Chinese on its bow, which is shorthand for an oil ship from Ningde city in Chinas coastal Fujian province. It was the third such incident reported by Japan in the past month. China has signed on to increasingly tough United Nations sanctions on North Korea over its nuclear weapons program, and Geng said Beijing recently issued a statement explicitly banning ship-to-ship transfers in accordance with U.N. resolutions. China is North Koreas biggest trading partner and a traditional ally, but ties between them have soured over the Norths nuclear and missile tests and its refusal to return to Chinese-hosted denuclearization talks. AP Macau businessman David Chow applied to start a new banking institution in Cape Verde, he announced last week while visiting the African country. Chow possesses several projects in the nation. According to Chow, quoted by Lusa news agency, the request to start a new bank was submitted last week to the Cape Verdean Central Bank (BCV). During Chows tour to Cape Verde, he presented a revamp to the Ilheu de Santa Maria/Gamboa tourism project, which he is promoting in the city of Praia. Chows idea to create the so-called Sino-Atlantic Bank was voiced in at least June of last year, when the leader of Macau Legend Development Group signed a memorandum of understanding with the Cape Verdean government to create the banking institution, but the BCV have denied receiving any such request from Chow. At that time, the memorandum noted that the company should submit the project and authorization to BCV within a six-month period. According to the proposal, the new financial institution aims to contribute to the development of the financial system of the Republic of Cape Verde, by supporting small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the country, as well as by facilitating local and international payments. If it moves ahead, the project will significantly expand Chows business portfolio in the country where he is also building a resort, which includes a marina, an exhibition and convention center, and a casino collectively worth around MOP2.5 billion. The projects are expected to conclude some time next year. The changes now promoted by Chow to the projects are related to both the hotel and casino projects. In the hotel, a single building will replace the initially planned bungalows, and regarding the casino projects, he has abandoned the idea of building an artificial island to hold the casino, which will now instead be anchored on the islet of Santa Maria. Donation boxes have been placed at eight Filipino-run stores along Rua da Alfandega, as well as in Macaus three remittance centers, to request financial aid for migrant workers in dire straits. A few of the new boxes are for one such worker who recently incurred costly hospital bills for the treatment of his acute illness. The Filipino male, who used to work at a veterinary center, underwent surgery in December at the Conde de Sao Januario Hospital, where he was confined for two weeks after suffering from extreme abdominal pain. After two weeks, he was re-admitted with an infection that had arisen from his operation, which led to a coma. According to his sister Editha Laderas, who works as a domestic helper, the family has resorted to requesting funds from the community to pay the medical bills. The hospital has refused to provide an estimated figure for the bills until the worker has been discharged. Several compatriots from different Filipino church groups have visited the hospital, with Laderas stressing that such visits had provided emotional support at a time of suffering. He was admitted on January 21 and after a week, we decided to place donation boxes in Filipino stores because we do not know where else we can get the amount to pay the pending hospital bills, she told the Times. When he was operated on in December, we paid MOP32,000. We [pawned] a piece of lot that we have in the Philippines and two or three livestock that we have, just to help pay the hospital fee, she said. Her brother holds a special visa which requires letters from the hospital, as his blue card was not renewed at the beginning of this month. When asked whether the workers former employer had supported them financially, Laderas said that they had only received MOP1,000. She claimed that her brother had to carry heavy equipment when he returned to work after his first surgery, leading to the infection. We cannot do anything but face the reality, Laderas noted, adding that they are already expecting significant expenses for the CT scans, medicine and hospital room. However, she is relieved that the doctors have seen significant improvement in his mobility compared to a few weeks ago. Laderas brother will undergo a CT scan on Monday to determine the progress of his recovery. We cannot do anything anymore. Theres nothing left to be sold back home so we now rely on our own salaries and donations from our compatriots, Laderas said. She said the Philippine Consulate General in Macau has advised that it can only help in the event of medical repatriation. Laderas is trying to remain positive and is focusing on the fact that hospital bills can be paid in installments. Some of the other donation boxes are placed on behalf of ill or deceased migrant workers who have no immediate families or relatives in the region. These boxes will only be collected once the worker is due for repatriation to the Philippines. This is of big help to our compatriots. We allow these donation boxes to be placed here, and they get them after relevant papers have been processed, said a store owner who has allowed numerous donation boxes to be placed in his store. Usually, these boxes feature a letter from the hospital, the Philippine consulate or a copy of the workers passport to explain the situation. The government is planning to add more functions to Macaus electronic health record system, according to a report by TDM. Launched in February 2017, the eHR Pilot Program intends to facilitate the sharing of resources between public and private health institutes in Macau, and to provide adequate and appropriate health services to residents more quickly. This time, health authorities are considering establishing an individual account for residents so they can have online access to public services (healthcare included). Through the eHR platform, the clinics under the Health Bureaus (SSM) leadership, the Kiang Wu Hospital and the Conde de Sao Januario Central Hospital have mutual access to the data of each others patients. According to the report, the SSM is looking for a centralized system to improve efficiency. Through the centralized system, individuals will be able to authorize the related parties to exchange information immediately. Moreover, health records and body check-up reports will also be reviewable by the authorized parties online. Residents will have an account which can connect them to different public services. Individuals will be required to register with their real name, since medical records contain rather sensitive information, according to Leong Kei Hong, Chief of the Department of Organisation and Information of the SSM. According to the SSM, by enrolling in the program, residents allow doctors to access their medical records from the aforementioned medical organizations, which may reduce the repetition of medical tests or the misuse of medications. The SSM also claims that the program incorporates strict procedures to protect personal data. Physicians must first obtain the patients consent at each medical visit before they can consult the patients personal data. Residents will also be alerted by SMS through the phone number they used register in the eHR platform. Enrolment in the eHR Pilot Program is optional and free. Since February 28, 2017 (the official launch date of the program), more than 13,000 people are already enrolled in eHR Pilot Program. Seventy percent of those enrolled are residents aged over 40. Credit rating agency Fitch Ratings is predicting 13 percent annual growth for Macaus gross gaming revenues this year, driven by 16 percent growth in the mass-market segment and 10 percent in the VIP segment. This would represent a significant deceleration in VIP growth, the component said to be the thrust behind last years gaming improvement. The firm predicts that the mass- market component will grow in importance as new properties gear up, including MGM Cotai and Morpheus at City of Dreams. It also said that in the longer term, mass-market growth will be supported by an upward trend in the average length of stay by Macau visitors, additional hotel capacity, and improvements to infrastructure in southern China. The infrastructure developments include the soon-to-open Hong-Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge, light rail connecting the various properties on the Cotai Strip and an intercity rail link that, when complete, will link Guangzhou to Macau. The prediction follows a strong January posting that saw gross gaming revenues grow more than 36 percent to MOP26.26 billion, according to the Macau Gaming Inspection and Coordination Bureau. According to Fitch Ratings, its more conservative full-year forecast takes into account more challenging year-over-year comparisons later in the year and the more volatile nature of the VIP segment. While we are more cautious [about] the VIP segment, which declined nearly 60 percent from peak to trough in the recent downturn, we feel it is now more sustainable. [] Still, caution is warranted given the segments reliance on credit and some credit tightening measures taking place on the mainland, the firm noted in its report. The VIP segment grew approximately 26 percent in 2017, while total gross gaming revenue increased by 19.1 percent year-on- year to MOP265 billion; the highest posting since 2014. A deceleration in VIP growth to 10 percent would likely hit harder those casino operators more dependant on high-stakes players. In particular, scandal- embroiled Wynn Macau would likely fare worse than its competitors. But gaming analysts remain divided in their predictions for 2018, with some taking a contrary view to Fitch Ratings. Brokerage firm Sanford C Bernstein expects a slowdown which will be increasingly noticeable as the year progresses. Its analysts predict full-year VIP growth to decline to around 8 percent, while mass-market revenue may record 11 percent growth as its contribution to gross gaming revenue rises. Another report released by Morgan Stanley suggests that the VIP segment might perform better than most analysts expect. The firm said that it expects VIP gaming to grow 20 percent in 2018 and mass-market growth to trail with a 12 percent rise. Fitch Ratings also weighed in on the gaming concession expirations, suggesting that the incumbent operators are likely to be awarded new concessions between 2020 and 2022. We do not believe the gaming concession expirations in 2020 for MGM Resorts and SJM Holdings and in 2022 for the other four Macau operators are a major risk, the firm wrote. We think the government will take a pragmatic approach to renewing (or re-bidding in technical terms) the concessions, emphasizing future non-gaming investment and promotion of local employees by the concessionaires. Fox News on Wednesday morning highlighted students from the Florida high school where 17 students and teachers were killed expressing their solutions to gun violence. Their remarks reflected a Pollyanna world view, such as, if only there were no guns (or a certain gun), all the problems would go away. The unfortunate truth is that only a good guy with a gun can effectively stop a bad guy with a gun. That principle applies to warfare, and, too often, life on the streets. Before there were guns, there were swords, arrows, sticks, rocks, hands and feet. There has always been someone undeserving who wants what you have, where you live, or resents who you are, and is willing to kill to get their way. It is not difficult to appreciate the initial remarks from President Trump on gun violence about the need to stop just talking about gun violence but instead do things that will make a difference; however, we need ideas that are implementable and supportable by reasonable people, not knee-jerk responses that pander to a political position but are not adaptable to actual actions that will lead to a solution. The worst mass killings involve fire, not firearms. 87 people died in a Bronx fire, thanks to a madman and two gallons of gasoline. Confiscate all the guns? The British were on their way to Concord (MA) to confiscate the armory maintained by the colony when Paul Revere made his eponymous ride. That ultimately worked out poorly for the Redcoats and is the main reason the Second Amendment even exists. The shooter who perpetrated the recent massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High in Parkland, Fla., succeeded in killing 17 people. He also got Americans talking about gun control again. But there's a much more realistic and productive conversation to be had about who can get access to guns and how we deal with people who display the warning signs of mental disturbance. To the left side of the aisle, the solution to every act of violence is gun control. So-called assault weapons are only low hanging fruit. What they really want is to ban and confiscate all guns, regardless of caliber, method of operation and cosmetic features. Diane Feinstein (D-Cal) has said as much, but also said the country was not ready for that solution. A partial or total ban is neither practical nor constitutional. The Supreme Court has said as much in Heller and MacDonalddecided on June 26, 2008. On the practical side, there are an estimated 300 million guns in private hands in the US, and at least 100 million owners of guns. The anti-gun crowd points to the governments solution in Australia, but only about 650 thousand guns were taken. While described as a government buy-back, it was not optional, but rather a mass confiscation at the point of government guns. It included not just assault weapons, but all repeating firearms, including pump shotguns, lever guns, and even bolt-action rifles were included in the roundup. Australia "buy back" viewed as a success? There were no constitutional issues in Australia, because in the Commonwealth the constitution is an act of parliament. All individual rights and privileges derive from the government (formerly the Crown). In the US, rights belong to the people, and the Constitution serves to limit the power of government. Did it work? Not quite. The Australian action described as a "buy-back" was precipitated by a mass shooting in 1996 at a resort in Tasmania. It is claimed that no more mass shootings have occurred in Australia. This is misleading because there was only one major incident leading up to the 1996 ban. Gun crime is increasing in Australia in the form of armed robbery, and more recently, acts of terrorism. More significantly, the violent crime rate in Australia was in steady decline even before the gun ban and continued to decline without a change in slope afterwards. There is not even a jiggle in the numbers which would imply success. Result of 1994-2004 "assault rifle" ban The same results have been observed in the US before, during and after the 1994-2004 assault rifle ban. Australians are starting to complain that they are left defenseless in the face of these attacks. A couple years ago, a farmer was arrested for leasing his land for concealment of banned firearms by people who refused to comply. They were coated with grease, placed in large plastic pipes, capped at both ends, and buried using a post hole digger. That would never happen in the US, right? Fewer than 1% of all shooting are done using long guns of any sort. The weapons of choice are easily concealed handguns. Reports of gangs using rifles are prominent, largely for the same reason man-bites-dog is newsworthy - rarity. According to national statistics, only 11% of guns used in crime were legally purchased. Mental health issue in play Mental health is arguably a better approach to mitigating the threat to schools; however, there are unintended consequences. Very few mentally ill people present a danger to themselves or others. Fewer commit acts of violence against others. Suicide rates have little dependency on the availability of firearms but are often included when describing gun violence. In fact, of the 30,000 or so gun deaths each year in the US, less than 9000 are considered homicide, including fewer than 500 justifiable homicides. If seeking treatment for depression or other non-violent mental illness will cause your civil rights to be abrogated, fewer people will seek treatment. President Trump is criticized for ending the Obama era policy of denying firearm ownership to the mentally ill people on social security or veterans benefits. In fact, this applied mainly to those who need assistance in managing their finances. We'd like to see how these bureaucrats would fare on $1200 a month or so. For the protection of individual rights and for the good of society, such determinations should be adjudicated in an adversary process. Background checks It is likely that background checks (NICS) could be improved, but not in the sense Charles Schumer and like-minded leftists would prefer. The Schumer universal background checks define a transaction so broadly that you couldnt hand a gun to a friend even to safely cross a fence while hunting. It would only be permitted on a licensed gun range or private home, not plinking at tin cans in the woods. Documented problems with NICS is that states and local governments are remiss in reporting adjudicated mental health issues and orders of protection. Even the military failed to report criminal acts committed by soldiers. Sadly, enforcement of reporting policies are poorly enforced - no carrot and no stick. Local law enforcement is supposed to be notified if flagged individuals attempt to purchase a firearm through the NICS system, even if no laws are being broken. This is a complete failure. It is not up to gun dealers to enforce soft bans of this sort, and it is probably a violation of privacy laws to disseminate this information to them. Persons on the terror watch list might merit such an alert, but the watch list is maintained by faceless bureaucrats, with little or no recourse available to those on that list by mistake (or for political reasons). Concealed carry as a deterrent There is a strong case for allowing teachers and staff who hold concealed carry permits to carry a weapon on campus. This should probably apply to non-staff licensees as well. Most school shootings occur within a span of about 5 minutes before the assailant is stopped or commits suicide (the usual outcome when confronted by police). That is comparable to the typical response time for a 911 call, and far less than the response for a SWAT team (20-30 minutes). One or two security officers who are armed cant cover all the areas in a school within that time limit, as demonstrated last week in Florida. They may not even know something is going down. An armed teacher, guarding students huddled in a class room, is going to be more effective against an armed attacker than by heroically blocking bullets. Critics of this idea cite the likelihood of blood baths, and OK Corral confrontations, but this does not happen, and has not happened, despite nearly 6 million armed citizens in the US. The concealed carry mantra is simple. You carry a weapon for defense of life, not for winning arguments or settling scores. In the simplest terms, it is because you refuse to be a victim of crime. You would not be expected (nor allowed) to search the halls for the assailant, rather to establish a defensive position while waiting for law enforcement. Many teachers object to being armed on moral or political grounds, but many more would be willing and able to take up arms in an emergency. One sheriff in Florida offered concealed carry training to teaches, up to 50 at a time. Within a week, he had received 500 applications. A professor from the Department of History, Faculty of Social Sciences of University of Macau (UM), Li Ping, discovered a hand- made Chinese letter paper used in the Faxi Temple in Haiyan county, which has been dated to be more than 800 years old. Li recently undertook field trips with his students to the National University of Singapores (NUS) Chinese Library to examine a hand- written copy of Shiji (also known as Records of the Grand Historian). The scholar, who is also a visiting professor at UMs Centre for Chinese History and Culture, conducted a research study on the manuscript which lasted two and a half years, as cited in a press release issued by the university. According to the professor, the manuscript was written in regular script and includes more than 500,000 characters. The manuscript was written by Jiang Ligang, the top calligrapher in regular script during Ming dynasty. Li considers the manuscript important in the study of textual revision because it is different from any other existing version of Shiji, also noting that the prologue of this manuscript was written by the grand chancellor Gu Dingchen during the Jiajing Era of Ming dynasty. The expert said that the manuscript underwent a long journey, starting from Beijing to the south of Jiangsu, Lingnan area, to Macau, before arriving in Singapore where it was ultimately archived by the NUS Chinese Library. The finding has been evaluated and recognized by experts in the fields of history, documentation science, paper making, and calligraphy from the editorial team of the journal Historical Research, and was published in the journals sixth issue in 2017. A California-based environmental organization is calling on gaming operators to remove their shark fin dishes from the menus at their restaurants as Macau is among the group of regions where the consumption of shark fins has been increasing. WildAid, an organization focusing on reducing the demand for wildlife products, recently issued a report titled Sharks in Crisis Evidence of Positive Behavioral Change in China as New Threats Emerge, showing that mainland Chinas neighboring regions are experiencing an increase in demand for shark fin and meat. In 2016, Macau beat mainland China for the first time for the highest volume of shark fin re-exports from Hong Kong, and has since seen a 62 percent rise from 88 tonnes to over 143 tonnes a year later. Shark fin, known as one of Asias delicacies, is regularly served at traditional Chinese restaurants, as well as at traditional banquets. The report estimated that 70 percent of wedding banquets in Macau include shark fin. Tourism websites promote popular eateries famous for their shark fin soup, encouraging tourists to try the delicacy in the city. Thats a very dramatic increase. We dont have the numbers for 2017 yet but its more than double, said Alex Hofford, co-author of the report, to local state broadcasters TDM. In 2013, the BLOOM Association Hong Kong conducted a survey of the availability of shark fin at the 33 casino-hotels that existed at that time. The survey found that just two of the 33 casino- hotels did not serve any shark fin-related dishes, though 17 did provide shark fin alternatives. Most of the hotels have got shark fin on the menu and we are calling on all casinos in Macau to remove shark from their menus. I mean, that shouldnt be too much to ask [for], some American players to do it, said Hofford. The activist admitted that it is harder to remove shark fin from traditional Chinese restaurants. Authorities confirmed that shark fin is banned from government banquets. An estimated 100 million sharks are killed every year, the majority for their fins, with parts from up to 73 million ending up in soup. LV Communist guerrillas said yesterday a Philippine government court petition to have them designated as terrorists is a desperate attempt to alienate them from the people, but insisted they are still open to talks to peacefully settle one of Asias longest-raging insurgencies. Regional rebel commander Jaime Padilla said by telephone that President Rodrigo Duterte would fail like past leaders to defeat the New Peoples Army rebels so hes resorting to fake news to undermine the Maoist guerrillas, who have managed to wage an insurgency for nearly half a century with what he said was the peoples support. The Department of Justice asked a Manila court on Wednesday to formally designate the Communist Party of the Philippines and its armed wing as terrorist groups. It cited deadly attacks and violence committed by the insurgents, including bloody internal purges of suspected military spies, in seeking the designation. Padilla rejected the assertion that the New Peoples Army was similar to extremist groups notorious for beheadings and other atrocities. The Abu Sayyaf is heaven and earth different from the NPA, Padilla said, referring to the brutal Islamic militant group blacklisted by the U.S. and Philippine governments. Labeling the revolutionary movement as such is a big crazy act. He said rebels attack government forces who raid or infiltrate guerrilla zones but the guerrillas do not assault innocent civilians or ransack their properties like the Abu Sayyaf. If they withdraw the petition that will be good because its baseless, said Padilla, who leads a rebel force that has a presence southeast of Manila. Despite the government legal offensive, Padilla said the rebels remain open to a resumption of negotiations to end the hostilities. Duterte resumed peace talks with the guerrillas after he rose to power in 2016. He granted concessions by appointing three left-wing activists to his Cabinet, but the cordial relations rapidly deteriorated when he protested continuing rebel assaults on troops and policemen, along with guerrilla extortion of mining firms and agricultural plantations. Last year, he canceled Norwegian-brokered talks with the guerrillas and signed an order declaring the rebel groups as terrorist organizations in a prelude to his governments formal move this week. Duterte has upped his rhetoric against the rebels in recent days, saying troops should shoot female communist rebels in the genitals to render them useless and suggesting troops could decapitate the rebels. The comments have drawn condemnation from rights groups. Senior assistant state prosecutor Peter Ong said the guerrillas were insincere in their talks with the government and only wanted to grab power. If approved by the court, designating the communists as terrorists could serve as a legal weapon and basis for the government in securing court clearances to put rebel leaders and fighters under surveillance and freeze their bank accounts and assets, Ong said. Companies paying the so-called revolutionary taxes to the rebels could be questioned, even though the military said such extortion demands have been done by coercion. The communist rebel organizations are the second to be targeted by the Philippine government for proscription under a seldom-used 2007 anti-terrorism law. In 2015, a court approved a similar petition against the Abu Sayyaf, which has also been blacklisted as a terror group by the United States. The communist rebellion has raged since 1969 and left about 40,000 combatants and civilians dead. It also has stunted economic development, especially in the countryside, where the military says about 3,700 Maoist insurgents are still waging a guerrilla war. Jim Gomez, Manila, AP The total number of visitor arrivals during the 2018 Chinese New Year (CNY) holiday increased 6.5 percent year- on-year, according to statistics released yesterday by the Macao Government Tourism Office (MGTO). Some 963,265 visitor arrivals were recorded during the CNY holiday. Of these, 716,041 were mainland visitors, representing a surge of 12.3 percent from the previous year. On February 21, the last day of the holiday period, 106,000 mainland tourist arrivals were recorded, representing a 1.2 percent increase year-on-year. However, the total number of visitors dropped by 1.4 percent to 136,000. Wu Keng Kuong, president of the Travel Industry Council of Macau, said the number of tourists this CNY holiday had exceeded the industrys expectations, even though the industry was aware of problems with Macaus tourism capacity. Wu also commented that the checkpoints efficiency should be improved, and expressed hopes that the Macau government can communicate with the Gongbei immigration department in order to improve the management of the Gongbei immigration station during holiday periods. According to a report by Macao Daily News, the Gongbei immigration authority recorded 2.26 million crossings at the Gongbei port, 100,000 more than last year. The Gongbei immigration authority said that the efficiency of the checkpoints improved noticeably compared to last year, and added that the checkpoints were able to maintain order. It attributed the improved border crossing procedure to the expansion of e-channels at Gongbei. The Gongbei port has 191 e-channel checkpoints. During the CNY holiday, 75 percent of the crossings at Gongbei were recorded through e-channels. As the number of tourist arrivals increased, so did the number of taxi infractions, as reported by the Public Security Police Force (PSP). Some 352 taxi infractions were recorded between February 14 and February 21, including 250 cases of overcharging. Researchers at the New York Genome Center (NYGC) and New York University (NYU) have taken steps to facilitate broad access to single-cell sequencing by developing a 3-D-printed, portable and low-cost microfluidic controller. To demonstrate the utility of the instrument in clinical environments, the researchers deployed the device to study synovial tissue from patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) at the Hospital for Special Surgery (HSS). Credit: New York Genome Center Single-cell analysis holds enormous potential to study how individual cells influence disease and respond to treatment, but the lack of cost-effective and user-friendly instrumentation remains challenging. As described in a study published today in Nature Communications, researchers at the New York Genome Center (NYGC) and New York University (NYU) have taken steps to facilitate broad access to single-cell sequencing by developing a 3D-printed, portable and low-cost microfluidic controller. To demonstrate the utility of the instrument in clinical environments, the researchers deployed the device to study synovial tissue from patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) at the Hospital for Special Surgery (HSS). In the study, the researchers describe the 3D-printed custom device, which, along with its electronic and pneumatic components, can be easily obtained and assembled for a total cost of about $600, a fraction of the cost of comparable commercial systems. The device occupies a small footprint as well, not much larger than a tissue box. "Most commercial microfluidic instruments are very costly; as a result, not every lab has access to exciting technology for single-cell analysis," said William Stephenson PhD, Senior Research Engineer in the NYGC's Technology Innovation Lab, who led the development of the instrument and is a lead author on the study. "We designed the instrument to perform droplet microfluidics and in particular Drop-seq, a massively parallel technology for single cell RNA-sequencing." In collaboration with researchers and clinicians at HSS, a world leader in rheumatology research and disease treatment, the group used the instrument to profile joint synovial tissue from RA patients. RA is an autoimmune disease that affects 1% of the population and is associated with painful swelling in the joints. The precise cause of RA is undetermined and muddled by the diversity of cells found in the swollen joints of patients. The portability of the controller permitted patient samples to be processed on-site and immediately after surgery, minimizing handling and transport to optimize sample quality. The researchers collected samples from five RA patients totaling 20,387 cells and looked at the individual gene expression patterns for each cell. "This dataset gave us the opportunity to identify individual subpopulations of cells that could drive the progression of RA, even if they have not been previously characterized," said Rahul Satija PhD, a Core Faculty Member at NYGC, Assistant Professor of Biology at NYU, and senior author on the study. By analyzing the complete dataset and searching for clusters of similar cells, the researchers identified 13 groups, representing both infiltrating immune and inflamed stromal populations. Of particular interest were distinct groups of fibroblasts with strikingly different gene expression patterns. "Roughly an hour after surgical excision, individual cells from patient tissues were labeled for single-cell sequencing. From this work, we have classified unrecognized fibroblast subtypes that may prove to be important drug targets for our RA patients," said Laura Donlin, Co-Director of the HSS Precision Medicine Lab and Assistant Professor at Weill Cornell Medicine, and a lead author on the study. The researchers were able to validate the presence of these multiple groups using flow cytometry, and discovered that they exhibited distinct localization patterns with the joint tissue as well. The dataset is a step towards creating a comprehensive "cell atlas" for synovial tissue from RA patients. Moving forward, the researchers are compiling data from additional RA patients, and aim to obtain patient samples from other arthritic conditions such as psoriatic arthritis and osteoarthritis. In addition, they plan to use CITE-seq, a technique also developed in the Technology Innovation Lab at the NYGC, to more precisely classify cell types by measuring the presence of surface proteins in addition to the transcriptome. They also envision that technology will be useful for profiling samples that are difficult to study in a standard lab, such as highly infectious samples in biocontainment facilities or samples being collected in field research settings. To facilitate its widespread use in the scientific and medical community, the instrument has been fully "open-sourced." Instructions and assembly manuals for the instrument can be found online at the popular microfluidics repository Metafluidics. "We hope that this instrument lowers the hurdles associated with performing single-cell transcriptome profiling experiments in basic research and clinical settings," Dr. Stephenson said. Explore further Gene expression study may help guide Arthritis care More information: William Stephenson et al, Single-cell RNA-seq of rheumatoid arthritis synovial tissue using low-cost microfluidic instrumentation, Nature Communications (2018). Journal information: Nature Communications William Stephenson et al, Single-cell RNA-seq of rheumatoid arthritis synovial tissue using low-cost microfluidic instrumentation,(2018). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-017-02659-x Provided by New York Genome Center Credit: PHOS-ISTOS-project A team of researchers with Texinov Medical Textiles in France has announced that their PHOS-ISTOS system, called the Fluxmedicare, is on track to be made commercially available later this year. The system consists of a piece of fabric imbued with optical fibers and a control mechanism. The system is meant to be used for treatment of skin diseases such as acne, psoriasis and actinic keratosis. The goal of the project was to create a flexible light-emitting textile for use in photodynamic therapy (PDT) of actinic keratosesa skin disease characterized by rough patches. The program was initiated in response to requests by people in the medical community looking to replace traditional PDT systemssystems currently in use involve large light panels directed at patients which in addition to treating skin, cause redness and severe pain. The new system works fundamentally the same as current systemsa cream is applied to the skin followed by treatment with light. The light speeds up a reaction between a photosensitizer in the cream and oxygen in the air. The difference is in the light source. Instead of a large panel, optical fibers knitted into a fabric emit enough light to speed up the reaction, but do so without causing pain. After the cream is applied to the skin, the fabric is placed directly on the body over the impacted area. Fluxmedicare has been undergoing clinical trials at University Hospital, Lille France and at Klinikum Vest in Germany. Dr. Nadege Boucard, a spokesperson for the team working on the project has described it as an unprecedented system for treating skin conditions. He noted also that in addition to effectively treating a wide variety of skin ailments, the new system actually works better because of its wraparound nature. Light is emitted evenly to every part of the body, which, he pointed out, means the beams are homogeneous. A report from the clinical trial team gave an average ranking of pain for the new system of 0 to 1, which Boucard describes as a 90 percent drop. He has further noted that the cost of the system will be approximately 5,000, just a third of those now in use. Explore further Vitiligo treated successfully with arthritis drug and light therapy 2018 Medical Xpress Electron micrograph of the Hepatitis A virus (HAV). Credit: CDC/Betty Partin Four new cases show that, while it's not as bad as it was in 2017, San Diego County's hepatitis A outbreak is not yet extinguished. Weekly public health reports this week and last have each added a pair of newly-confirmed cases to the outbreak total. Although that's nowhere near the number of new cases that flooded in every week in August and September, it's still a faster pace than the roughly every-other-week frequency that government records show San Diego County averaged before from 2012 through 2016. "The outbreak is not over, and the most recent cases seem to be slightly geographically skewed to the northern part of the county," said Dr. Eric McDonald, chief of the county's Epidemiology and Immunization Services Branch. Largely spread among the region's homeless population, that has not necessarily been the key demographic characteristic of the latest outbreak-connected hepatitis A cases. McDonald said three of the four cases were drug users but only one of those was homeless. The fourth was a family member of a person who was already known to have an active hepatitis A infection. "The individual was advised to get vaccinated to prevent illness, but chose not to do so. Most people get vaccinated promptly when we advise it," McDonald said. He added that two of the four cases were evenly split among coastal and inland North County, but the zip codes where each case occurred were not immediately available. To date, the outbreak has generated 582 cases. The viral liver infection has hospitalized nearly 400 people since November 2016 and has killed 20. Hepatitis A, which spreads through fecal contamination, is not usually fatal unless a patient has other co-occurring illnesses such as immune system deficiencies or other liver diseases, including hepatitis B and hepatitis C. Desperate to end the outbreak's rapid spread, San Diego County officials declared a local health emergency on Sept. 1, 2017, canceling the directive on Jan. 23 once it appeared that the crisis was under control. McDonald said outreach efforts are continuing in coastal and inland North County with vaccination foot teams working to deliver doses to homeless residents. Shelters and substance abuse treatment centers are also being asked to make sure their clients have been immunized. Oceanside reported that it will continue to maintain four hand-washing stations in the community through March 1. The city also continues to clean its public facilities, including parks and public restrooms, with a diluted bleach solution recommended by the health department. The City of Encinitas continues to maintain several portable toilets in public locations including the lower parking lot of Encinitas City Hall, the Encinitas Community and Senior Center, Moonlight Beach, Swami's Beach, Beacon's Beach, and near Leucadia Roadside Park. The City of Escondido never set up any hand-washing stations or public toilets during the outbreak, but Interfaith Community Services, which is based in the city and serves many homeless in inland North County, does offer sanitation amenities at all of its facilities. The county has 10 hand-washing stations in different North County locations and will continue their maintenance through the end of March, according to county spokesman Craig Sturak. There had been 250 vaccination events held in North County from Dec. 1, 2017 through Feb. 22 with 31 more scheduled through Mar. 31, Sturak added in an email. Greg Anglea, the nonprofit's chief executive, said he had just finished attending a vaccination event at Interfaith's Escondido site Thursday. "We've had a number of people come through and get the second hepatitis A shot just today," Anglea said. He said that his organization remains focused on the bigger picture. "The reason this spread so virulently is because of the conditions that homeless people have to live in, and those are as unacceptable today as they were before the outbreak," he said. An ongoing fundraising effort with the goal of helping get 1,000 people off the streets permanently has surpassed 450 people seven months after it started. For more information on the campaign, visit interfaithservices.org/housing-1000 . Explore further San Diego County sees slowdown in Hepatitis A cases 2018 The San Diego Union-Tribune Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC. The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, is supporting U.S. clinical sites participating in two ongoing international Phase 2 clinical trials evaluating investigational antibody-based therapies aimed at preventing potentially antibiotic-resistant infections. By aligning the NIAID Antibacterial Resistance Leadership Group (ARLG) with a large international consortium leading the effort, the U.S. investigators hope to enroll 30 adult patients from 15 intensive care units in the trials. NIAID is supporting the domestic sites with a grant to Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, which is part of the ARLGa clinical research consortium working to reduce the impact of antimicrobial resistance. The larger international trials are supported by MedImmune, the global biologics research and development arm of AstraZeneca, based in Gaithersburg, Maryland, and the Brussels-based Innovative Medicines Initiative Joint Undertaking and the Combatting Antimicrobial Resistance in Europe (COMBACTE) consortium. One trial, called EVADE, is evaluating the safety of the investigational medicine MEDI3902 (developed by MedImmune) and its ability to prevent pneumonia caused by Pseudomonas aeruginosa. The other trial, called SAATELLITE, is testing the safety of another investigational MedImmune medicine, suvratoxumab (previously known as MEDI4893), and its ability to prevent disease caused by Staphylococcus aureus. Both trials are randomized, placebo-controlled, and double-blind, meaning neither the participants nor the investigators will know who receives a placebo. MEDI3902 and suvratoxumab are both monoclonal antibodies being investigated as preventive therapies. The medicines are not antibiotics but can be administered alongside standard antibiotic therapy. Monoclonal antibodies have been developed for use against diseases such as cancer, Ebola and respiratory syncytial virus, but rarely have been used to target bacterial pathogens. The World Health Organization recently included P. aeruginosa and S. aureus on a list of antibiotic-resistant bacteria that pose the greatest risk to human health. People in healthcare settings with weakened immune systems, especially those on breathing machines or with catheters, face an increased risk of becoming seriously ill from these infections. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Staphylococcus bacteria are a leading cause of healthcare-associated infections, such as pneumonia, bacteremia, and heart valve and bone infections. In 2011, methicillin-resistant S. aureus (MRSA) caused more than 80,000 serious infections and 11,285 related deaths in the United States, according to the CDC. P. aeruginosa can cause bloodstream infections and pneumonia that can be fatal. Approximately 51,000 healthcare-associated P. aeruginosa infections occur each year in the United States, and about 6,700 of these are drug-resistant, leading to more than 400 deaths annually, according to CDC estimates based on a 2011 survey. "It is becoming increasingly common for hospitalized patientsespecially those with weakened immune systemsto develop severe, hard-to-treat bacterial infections," said NIAID Director Anthony S. Fauci, M.D. "These clinical trials testing monoclonal antibodies as novel preventive therapies are part of a global collaborative effort to explore innovative ways to mitigate the threat of antimicrobial resistance." All participants in both the EVADE and SAATELLITE trials will be on mechanical ventilation in the intensive care unit at the time of enrollment. Trial investigators will provide information about the purpose and possible risks and benefits of the study so that patients can ask questions before they agree to participate. If a patient is unconscious or otherwise unable to consent during the screening process, a legally authorized representative can provide initial consent. Participants in the EVADE trial must be colonized with P. aeruginosa bacteria in the lower respiratory tract but display no signs of pneumonia. They will be randomly assigned to receive either one intravenous (IV) infusion of MEDI3902 or placebo. Investigators will check for incident pneumonia caused by P. aeruginosa for 21 days, and will monitor participants for 49 days total. Similarly, participants in the SAATELLITE trial must be colonized with S. aureus in the lower respiratory tract but free of S. aureus-related disease. They will be randomly assigned to receive either one IV infusion of suvratoxumab or a placebo. Investigators will evaluate the incidence of S. aureus-related pneumonia for 30 days, and monitor participants for 190 days total. Participants in both the EVADE and SAATELLITE trials will be regularly evaluated for any treatment-related safety issues. Thomas Holland, M.D., of Duke University is the coordinating physician for the U.S. sites. Jean Chastre, M.D., of Groupe Hospitalier Pitie-Salpetriere in Paris serves as overall principal investigator for the EVADE trial, and Bruno Francis, M.D., of Centre Hospitalier Universaitaire de Limoges in Limoges, France serves as overall principal investigator for the SAATELLITE trial. For more information about the trials, visit ClinicalTrials.gov and search identifiers NCT02696902 and NCT02296320. Explore further Researchers launch Phase 1 clinical trial of potential MRSA treatment At most US maternity units, women in labor are put on nil per os (NPO) statusthey're not allowed to eat or drink anything, except ice chips. But new nursing research questions that policy, showing no increase in risks for women who are allowed to eat and drink during labor. The study appears in the March issue of the American Journal of Nursing. "The findings of this study support relaxing the restrictions on oral intake in cases of uncomplicated labor," write Anne Shea-Lewis, BSN, RN, of St. Charles Hospital, Port Jefferson, N.Y., and colleagues. Adding to the findings of previous reports, these results suggest that allowing laboring women to eat and drink "ad lib" doesn't adversely affect maternal and neonatal outcomes. No Increase in Complications with 'Ad lib' Oral Intake During Labor The researchers analyzed the medical records of nearly 2,800 women in labor admitted to one hospital from 2008 through 2012. At the study hospital, one practice group of nurses and doctors had a policy of allowing laboring women to eat and drink ad lib (ad libitum, or "as they please"). Another four practice groups kept all patients NPO (nil per os, or "nothing by mouth"). Recommendations to restrict oral intake during labor reflect concerns over the risk of vomiting and aspiration (inhalation) in case general anesthesia and surgery are needed. However, with advances in epidural and spinal anesthesia, the use of general anesthesia during labor has become rare (and, if needed, much safer than before). The study compared maternal and child outcomes in about 1,600 women who were kept NPO (except for ice chips) with 1,200 who were allowed to eat and drink ad lib during labor. The two groups were "sufficiently equivalent" for comparison. The women's average age was 31 years. Before delivery, a "preexisting medical condition" complicating pregnancy was identified in 14 percent of the NPO group compared with 20 percent of the ad lib group. Even though the women in the NPO group started out with fewer medical problems, they had a significantly higher incidence of complications during labor and birth, compared with the ad lib group. The women in the NPO group were also significantly more likely to give birth via unplanned cesarean section. Other outcomesincluding requiring a higher level of care after delivery and the newborns' condition as measured by Apgar scorewere not significantly different between groups. Analysis using a technique called propensity score matching, comparing groups of women with similar risk factors, yielded similar results. The findings add to those of previous studies suggesting that restrictions on eating and drinking during labor could be safely relaxed in uncomplicated cases. "Yet in keeping with current guidelines, most obstetricians and anesthesiologists in the United States continue to recommend restrictions on oral intake for laboring women," Anne Shea-Lewis and colleagues write. "Our findings support permitting women who are at low risk for an operative birth to self-regulate their intake of both solid food and liquids during labor," the researchers add. They note some limitations of their study, especially the fact that the women weren't randomly assigned to NPO or ad lib groups. The authors hope their study will lead to reconsideration of current recommendations to keep women NPO during the "often long and grueling" process of labor and delivery. "Restricting oral intake to a laboring woman who is hungry or thirsty may intensify her stress," Anne Shea-Lewis and colleagues conclude. "Conversely, allowing her to eat and drink ad lib during labor can contribute to both her comfort and her sense of autonomy." Explore further Restricting food and fluids during labor is unwarranted More information: Anne Shea-Lewis, et al. CE, AJN, American Journal of Nursing (2018). Anne Shea-Lewis, et al. CE,(2018). DOI: 10.1097/01.NAJ.0000530913.80349.53 Children from low-income neighborhoods had a higher mortality rate and higher hospital costs after heart surgery compared with those from higher-income neighborhoods, found a national study of more than 86,000 kids with congenital heart disease. The magnitude of the neighborhood effect, which persisted even after accounting for race, type of insurance, and hospital, was similar for children of all disease severities. The findings were published online today in Pediatrics. "These results were surprising," said Brett Anderson, MD, MBA, an attending pediatric cardiologist at NewYork-Presbyterian Morgan Stanley Children's Hospital, assistant professor of pediatrics at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, and the study's lead investigator. "The fact that disparities exist in healthcare is nothing new. But the fact that we see such a big effect in this population is shocking. We think of this group of children as being particularly well integrated into the healthcare system, regardless of their background. Most children with congenital heart disease are diagnosed prenatally or as newborns, and the children in this studymostly infantsall had access to highly specialized cardiac care teams at major tertiary children's hospitals. While we expected to see some differences, we assumed the effect would be minor compared to what is seen in general pediatric populations. In fact, the effect was essentially identical to that observed in general pediatric patients." How the study was conducted The researchers used data from the Pediatric Health Information System (the largest U.S. database of pediatric discharges) to evaluate post-surgical mortality, length of stay, and standardized hospital costs in 86,104 children with congenital heart defects at 46 U.S. pediatric hospitals between 2005 and 2015. The results were combined with U.S. Census Bureau data on median household income by zip code. What the study found Overall, 2.9 percent of the children who had heart surgery died. Children from the lowest-income neighborhoods, which included more families with public insurance, had an 18 percent increase in risk of death compared with children from the highest-income neighborhoods, after adjusting for differences in race, insurance, and disease severity. Length of hospital stay and costs were both 7 percent higher for children from the lowest-income neighborhoods compared to children from the highest-income neighborhoods. The researchers also looked at outcomes in 857,833 children who were hospitalized for other conditions between 2013 and 2015. About half of this group had a chronic condition. Similarly, children from the lowest-income neighborhoods had a 22 percent greater chance of dying in the hospital compared with kids from higher-income neighborhoods. Length of stay and in-hospital costs were about 3 percent higher for children from the lowest-income neighborhoods. What caused the disparities? "When neighborhood disparities have been described in other studies, they have been largely attributed to differences among hospitals or in environmentally-mediated differences in behavioral health," said Dr. Anderson. "In our study, even when the hospital effect was taken into account, neighborhood remained an important predictor of outcomes." The study found a higher incidence of severe heart disease in children from low-income neighborhoods, but the neighborhood effect remained after controlling for disease severity. "Certain environmental factorssuch as maternal stress, nutrition, or health expectationsmight have contributed to the differences in outcomes that we saw in children from low-income neighborhoods," said Dr. Anderson. "But until we conduct detailed qualitative studies, we can't be sure why these disparities persist. Ideally, such studies would examine the role of both families and providerssuch as how long it takes before a family makes or obtains an appointment with a subspecialist, and whether providers knowingly or unknowingly make different care choices based on a family's income level or the socioeconomics of the neighborhood from which the child comes." The study is titled, "Disparities in Outcomes and Resource Utilization after Hospitalization for Cardiac Surgery by Neighborhood Income." Explore further Racial gap in children's asthma linked to social inequality in Houston neighborhoods More information: "Disparities in Outcomes and Resource Utilization after Hospitalization for Cardiac Surgery by Neighborhood Income" Pediatrics (2018). Journal information: Pediatrics "Disparities in Outcomes and Resource Utilization after Hospitalization for Cardiac Surgery by Neighborhood Income"(2018). The outcome of viral myocarditis is closely associated with the immune response of the affected individual. An inhibitor of the immunoproteasome, a protein degradation complex in immunocompetent cells, reduces the extent of the inflammation and thus also the damage to the heart during myocarditis. Scientists of the German Centre for Cardiovascular Research (DZHK) and Charite Universitatsmedizin Berlin have recently discovered this new treatment approach, as published in the scientific journal EMBO Molecular Medicine. Viral infections of the myocardium can cause a devastating reaction of the immune system, which can lead to a severe inflammation with ensuing heart failure or even sudden cardiac death, especially in children and young adults. Activation of the immune response curbs the viral disease on the one hand, but causes pathological reactions in the myocardium on the other. The researchers are therefore attempting to identify new targets to weaken the immune response and simultaneously enable secure control of the virus. This is because the course of the disease appears to mainly depend on the interaction between the virus-mediated cell damage and the individual reaction of the body's own defence system. Thus, viral myocarditis is almost asymptomatic in most people. Stable cardiac function The DZHK scientist Professor Dr. Antje Beling of the Institute of Biochemistry at ChariteUniversitatsmedizin Berlin and her team utilised an immunoproteasome-specific inhibitor, ONX 0914, with the aim of moderating severe courses of viral myocarditis. The immunoproteasome is a protease complex with various enzymatic activities that exists particularly in human immune cells where it degrades proteins. In an animal model with high susceptibility to severe viral myocarditis, this inhibitor could curb the destructive inflammatory reaction. Mice were infected with coxsackievirus B3, which also affects human cardiomyocytes, and were treated with the inhibitor ONX 0914 from the onset of the infection. Although the viral burden only sank fractionally with the inhibitor, less heart tissue was damaged and the cardiac function remained stable. "No severe inflammations that impair the filling of the myocardium and damage the myocardial tissue occur with the inhibitor. The heart can therefore pump unabated", explains Beling. Inhibitor curbs cytokines Monocytes and macrophages are those immunocompetent cells that substantially contribute to myocardial damage during a viral infection. For this reason, the Berlin based researchers investigated how these cells in infected animals reacted to the administration of the inhibitor. They observed that ONX 0914 indeed led to an increased mobilisation of monocytes from the bone marrow. However, these cells produced substantially fewer proinflammatory cytokines during the infection. Especially because of the low production of molecules that attract monocytes in the myocardium, no severe tissue-damaging inflammation could develop. "The inhibition of the production of proinflammatory cytokines is the main effect of the inhibitor ONX 0914, which leads to a better course of the myocarditis", says Beling. In addition, the effect of ONX 0914 on other cells of the immune system, such as lymphocytes and neutrophils, was analysed. During a viral infection, the scientists could observe in untreated mice that there was a sharp decline in the number of lymphocytes in the body, which was completely prevented by the treatment with ONX 0914. Similarly, they found more antibodies directed against the virus after administration of the inhibitor, which indicates that the immune system's antibody response remained intact or was even improved with ONX 0914. Neutrophil defence cells reacted clearly to the treatment with ONX 0914, yet it did not affect the course of the disease. Great therapeutic potential The researchers are currently trying to discover on a molecular level how the immunoproteasome-specific inhibition curbs the production of proinflammatory cytokines. They have already been able to ascertain that a particular cellular signal pathway, the so-called MAP kinase pathway, is involved in the effect's transmission. Moreover, Beling and her colleagues are examining in another myocarditis model whether ONX 0914 can develop the same protective effect there. "The active agent has great potential, not just for myocarditis, but also for other diseases which essentially arise from an exaggerated immune response", says Beling. An analogous inhibitor to ONX 0914 is already being tested in phase I/II clinical studies in patients with inflammatory autoimmune diseases. Explore further Long-term prevention of organ rejection More information: Nadine Althof et al. The immunoproteasomespecific inhibitor ONX 0914 reverses susceptibility to acute viral myocarditis, EMBO Molecular Medicine (2018). Journal information: EMBO Molecular Medicine Nadine Althof et al. The immunoproteasomespecific inhibitor ONX 0914 reverses susceptibility to acute viral myocarditis,(2018). DOI: 10.15252/emmm.201708089 Provided by Deutsches Zentrum fur Herz-Kreislauf-Forschung (DZHK) Many hospital patients get medicine or nutrition delivered straight into their bloodstream through a tiny device called a PICC. In just a decade, it's become the go-to device for intravenous care. But a new study finds that one in every four times a PICC gets inserted, the patient didn't need it long enough to justify the risks that it can also pose. In fact, in just the five days or less that they had a PICC implanted in their vein, nearly one in ten of these patients suffered a blocked line, an infection, a blood clot or another complication linked to the device. One in three short-term PICC patients also had serious kidney problems that could make them potential dialysis candidates, the study also shows. They face special risks from the devices, which can harm blood vessels and jeopardize a patient's ability to receive dialysis later, if their kidneys fail. The study, published in the February issue of the Journal of Hospital Medicine, is based on data from 52 hospitals around the state of Michigan taking part in a massive quality improvement and patient safety effort. It's a detailed analysis of records from 15,397 PICC placements over a two-year period from 2014 to 2016, just before and after guidelines for safe and appropriate PICC use made their debut. The study is a large-scale examination of real-world use of PICCs, or peripherally inserted central catheters, and the factors associated with their short-term use. It highlights the need for efforts to reduce short-term use of PICCs and help medical care teams understand current practice and consider other alternatives for short-term IV access that pose less risk. "When PICCs first came out, they became an 'easy button' for vascular access, and the safety issues weren't recognized," says David Paje, M.D., M.P.H., the University of Michigan hospitalist who led the research team. "Now the dynamics have changed, and we need to be more thoughtful with their use." Paje, an assistant professor of internal medicine, also helps lead the Medical Short Stay Unit at Michigan Medicine, U-M's academic medical center. For the new study, he worked with senior author and Division of Hospital Medicine chief Vineet Chopra, M.D., M.Sc., and co-author Scott Flanders, M.D., who directs the Michigan Hospital Medicine Safety Consortium that provided the data for the study. Colleagues from several Michigan hospitals are co-authors. Moving to MAGIC Based on previous studies of PICC-associated risks, the team assembled an expert panel that developed a guideline for choosing IV devices appropriately, called MAGIC. They unveiled it in 2015, and turned into a mobile and web app in 2017. Hospitals in the Michigan consortium, which is funded by Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan, began receiving training in MAGIC during the study period, but were still implementing it. MAGIC guides clinicians to the appropriate option for the individual patient they're treating. For instance, instead of a PICC, it recommends that patients who will need intravenous access for less than five days should receive a different form of IV device, such as a midline or peripheral IV. "This study helps illustrate how medical devices such as PICCs can be both helpful and harmful," says Chopra, who led the development of MAGIC and is a member of the U-M Institute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation. "Understanding how best to balance appropriate use - using tools like MAGIC - is the way to safe and better patient care." Factoring into PICC use As part of the study, Paje and his colleagues looked at which patients were more likely to receive a PICC for short-term use. The strongest factor was difficult vascular access - a catch-all phrase that means it had been hard to start an IV in the patient in previous visits or earlier in the hospital stay. Clinicians may default to choosing a PICC in these patients in order to keep an intravenous access point open, rather than having to find a vein each time, Paje says. Or, some experienced patients may even ask for a PICC to avoid so many "pokes." Patients whose physicians ordered a multilumen IV device, to avoid contact between different medications or nutrition solutions, were also more common among short-term PICCs. But Paje notes that few of the patients' records actually said that they were receiving multiple IV substances that had to be kept separate. And patients who had a short-term multilumen PICC were much more likely to suffer a complication. Interestingly, patients treated in teaching hospitals were more likely to receive a short-term PICC than those treated in non-teaching hospitals. This could actually be seen as an opportunity to address the issue of inappropriate short-term PICC, if hospitals make a plan to teach their residents about the risks and benefits of PICCs and other IV devices. A recent paper by members of the consortium showed that at one hospital that implemented MAGIC, inappropriate PICC use decreased compared with hospitals that didn't implement it, and PICC-related complications also decreased modestly. Paje notes that the body's own reaction to foreign material, and the mechanical stress put on veins when a PICC is inserted, can combine to damage veins and increase the risk of clots or scarring. The damage can keep a dialysis candidate from being able to successfully establish a vascular fistula, which would have been the preferred way to receive long-term dialysis. In all, 9.6 percent of the short-term PICC patients experienced a complication, including 2.5 percent who experienced a blood clot forming in their vein that could have broken off and caused more serious consequences, and 0.4 percent developing a CLABSI, or central line associated blood stream infection. "The use of PICCs exploded because the safety issues were not initially recognized, including those associated with clots and infections," says Paje. "Now we're coming back full circle, and we need to adapt and implement quality improvement processes to be more judicious with their use. We need to recognize that PICCs are not without any consequence, even for short-term use." He notes that most of the reasons cited for PICC use in the patient records used in the study - such as delivering antibioticsdo not require the deep access to the central bloodstream that PICC provides. Even as clinicians get the word about the MAGIC guidelines and implement measures to right-size PICC uses, Paje calls on patients and family members to speak up and ask questions before a PICC gets placed. "Patients or their representatives should be actively engaged, and informed," he says. "Find out what lines they're putting in, and ask questions." Explore further Peripherally inserted central catheters can cause blood clots in lower limbs More information: David Paje et al, Patterns and Predictors of Short-Term Peripherally Inserted Central Catheter Use: A Multicenter Prospective Cohort Study, Journal of Hospital Medicine (2018). Journal information: Journal of Hospital Medicine David Paje et al, Patterns and Predictors of Short-Term Peripherally Inserted Central Catheter Use: A Multicenter Prospective Cohort Study,(2018). DOI: 10.12788/jhm.2847 The average smartphone user checks their device 85 times a day. Credit: Mikaela Shannon The term "addiction" is often bandied about when we think someone spends too much time on something we deem detrimental to their health and well-being. From checking our phones repetitively, to playing with specific apps and texting, the modern culprit is excessive smartphone use. Worldwide, more than two billion people own smartphones and the average user checks their phone 85 times a day. Obsessively checking our smartphone apps may look like addiction but, for most people, it is reinforced behaviour that could be broken without severe or long-lasting withdrawal effects. Having said this, a small proportion of people may be more prone to behavioural addictions to smartphone functions such as online gambling, pornography, games and social media. Clinically speaking, you can't become addicted to a device, but you can develop behavioural addictions to smartphone functions. What is addiction? The World Health Organisation (WHO) classifies addiction as a dependence on a substance, such as illicit or prescription drugs, tobacco or alcohol. A person is addicted when they have a physical and behavioural dependence on the substance. In 2013, the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (known as the "clinician's bible") introduced wider criteria for "behavioural addictions", which doesn't include the physical dependence element. These are compulsions to engage in a task or act that leads to psychological pleasure. Behavioural addictions, such as gambling or sex addiction, can cause psychological harm, as well as wider relationship problems with friends, family and colleagues. Both "substance" and "behavioural" addictions impact the way we process information. Over time, the brain rewires itself to seek out the reward it needs to gain pleasure or relief from stress. The more an addict seeks a specific reward that triggers both dopamine and other physiological effects (such as stress and pain relief), the more the brain decreases sensitivity to the reward circuits. To date, smartphone use has not led to mass accounts of severe mental dysfunction. So we're unlikely to all be "addicted" to our smartphones, as we often tell each other. Rather than addiction, smartphone users more commonly report obsessive behaviour. Users constantly check their phone, seeking opportunities for a short dopamine reward, or a distraction from boredom or mundane tasks such as travelling on public transport. Nonetheless, some researchers have yet to rule out the potential for smartphone addiction in people who are at high risk of behaviour addiction. These people may experience several negative behavioural changes over time, such as anxiety and irritability, as well as extreme distress when they're unable to access their smartphone. Recent studies in Switzerland have confirmed that people under the age of 18 are at risk of obsessive or addictive-like behaviours around their smartphone use, most likely due to poor impulse control related to their developing frontal lobe. This suggests that adults with poor impulse control and/or personality disorders may be more at risk for smartphone addiction. The problem with social media The behavioural impact of smartphone social media use spans from obsessive behaviour (engaging in and checking smartphone apps until they no longer provide a rewarding dopamine hit) to behavioural addiction (compulsively seeking a dopamine hit via a reward provided by our phone). The average user in the US spends around five hours a day on functional smartphone activities such as texting, social media use, internet searchers, phone calls; half that time is spent on social media (including texting). The specific functional use of our smartphone is what we need to look more closely at. Social media rewards users via "likes", emoji use and social engagement with a large audience. The more people respond to a post, the more we gain a sense of enjoyment that people are validating our thoughts or interests. Social media engagement, and constantly texting friends and family, may be more of a concern than the device on which it is used, because it does lead to dopamine increases, and thus, pleasure or stress relief. People are hard-wired to seek affirmation and acceptance in social settings. Before the rise of Facebook and Instagram, humans sought out one another via many settings for social engagement and social validation. So it's no surprise that when we have the technology to extend our social connections into wider communities we do so without question. As adults, we know we can't socialise all the time because of other demands on our time. Yet, as young people, the social world is our priority, as it influences our identity development and need to feel validated outside our tried-and-true friends and family. Those who have problems with prolonged use of smartphone functions such as social media, media streaming services, games and frequent texting, may fit the criteria of "problematic internet use". In these cases, it's important to unpack the specific reward you get from the function you engage in the most on your smartphone, to see if you can obtain the same reward through more productive and healthy activities. If you are always on social media, for instance, ask yourself: what do I gain from posting and replying online? Can I gain the same rewarding benefits from face-to-face social engagements? For some, online engagement diversifies their offline social engagement, while others are unaware that most of their life is now lived online. Time to put the smartphone down? Many smartphone users are obsessed or infatuated with their smartphone functions. But over time, they will become less interesting and far more a tool we engage with when we need to, just as society has adjusted to computer use. In the meantime, we need to educate young people about problematic internet use and help them understand why using functions on their smartphone can be potentially time-wasting and, at worst, negatively impact their mental wellness. This can be communicated in early childhood and reinforced throughout the developmental stages. As for adult smartphone users, here are some evidence-based tips for reducing your smartphone use: Reduce the number of apps on your phone assess what you actually need and use most often, not just for distraction purposes. The fewer icons on your home screen the better. Turn off notifications through your settings button. Your phone should only notify you for meaningful events to aid in your health and productivity during work hours. When charging your phone at night, don't do it next to your bed. It's tempting to reach for your smartphone first thing upon waking. Instead, try and wake up thinking about the day ahead rather than "what did I miss on social or news media while I was asleep?" Be aware when reaching for your phone during the day, especially when bored try a mindfulness breathing exercise instead to relax and clear your mind. There are many techniques that are evidence based, but here is one example that takes just three minutes. If you truly want to reduce time checking your smartphone, look more closely at your social media use and, if necessary, remove your social media apps. This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article. Thousands of New Zealanders can look forward to improvements in treatment and care of heart failure following new research findings that look set to alter the clinical approach and health care planning for heart failure globally. The findings of a New Zealand-led international research collaboration, recently published in the European Heart Journal, set out how two distinct forms of heart failure previously considered similar in prevalence and risk of death, are in fact very different. Professor Rob Doughty, NZ Heart Foundation Chair of Heart Health at the University of Auckland's Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences, led New Zealand's participation in the seven-year collaborative study of more than 2000 patients from Singapore and New Zealand. It involved expertise in heart health from four major centres in New Zealand (Christchurch, Auckland, Middlemore and Waikato), and all six main hospitals in Singapore. "Heart failure is a common and serious condition affecting around 80,000 New Zealanders. In many people with heart failure the heart muscle is stretched and weakened and does not pump properly. "However, in other cases of heart failure, the heart may have near normal pumping function but the muscle is stiff and often thicker than usual and the heart cannot fill properly between beats. These two types of heart failure were thought to be equal in occurrence and risk of death. "However, our new findings reveal that the stiff heart muscle is less common than originally thought, affecting about three out of every 10 heart failure patients, and there is less risk of dying from this type compared with heart failure where the heart is not pumping properly," says Professor Doughty. Two percent of New Zealand's population live with heart failure, and the study's findings provide greater accuracy about their risk of dying. "Based on our new findings from this study, the global approach and treatment of patients with heart failure, based on measures of heart pump function, may need to be reviewed. This information will influence clinical thought and health-care planning of heart failure around the world, and provide more precise treatment," Professor Doughty said. Professor Mark Richards, Christchurch Heart Institute Director and Heart Foundation Chair of Cardiovascular Studies, provided overall international leadership and coordination of the work between the two countries. "Our findings are pivotal to the understanding of occurrence, death rates and risk prediction within different classes of heart failure,'' Professor Richards says. Professor Richards won research funding and supervised execution of the study in Singapore, where he is also Director of the Cardiovascular Research Institute of Singapore. A total of 16 distinguished heart doctors and researchers have been involved, including Professor Carolyn Lam of the National Heart Centre in Singapore and Professor Richard Troughton of the Christchurch Heart Institute. "We are particularly proud to have proven these findings, with identical procedures executed simultaneously in two countries, 5000 miles apart," Professor Richards says. "In addition, we demonstrated that the world's most successful-ever cardiac biomarker, NT-proBNP, (discovered and validated in the Christchurch Heart Institute) is similarly prognostically powerful in both types of heart failure in both Singapore and New Zealand. Overall, this will exert major influence on clinical thinking and planning." Explore further Heart's pumping function is not an indicator of heart failure survival rates ARCHIVED - The oldest cave art in the world is in Spain, and it wasnt painted by Man Neanderthals were painting rock art in Spain 20,000 years before humans arrived A team of researchers from institutions including the University of Southampton in the UK and the Maz Planck Institute in Germany have published an article in Science magazine in which they conclude that some of the prehistoric rock art in both northern and southern Spain dates from at least 64,800 years ago, a full 20,000 years before Homo sapiens arrived in the Iberian Peninsula. This theory had been conjectured by an earlier study in 2012, but doubts remained over the method by which such conclusions were reached. However, the new study leaves no room for doubt, and what this implies is that the creators of these images, which include hand stencils, must have been Neanderthals, a deduction which will shed new light on how we view the intellectual capacity of a species which died out when Homo sapiens arrived on the scene. The forerunner of Neanderthal Man, Homo erectus, migrated to Europe from Africa approximately 1.81 million years ago. Homo sapiens first evolved, as far as we know, in Africa around 300,000 years ago, and migrated to the Middle East approximately 175,000 years ago, but there is no evidence of their (or our) presence in Europe until 40,000 years ago. In the words of the article published in Science, a new technique called uranium-thorium dating of carbonate crusts shows that cave paintings from three different sites in Spain must be older than 64,000 years. These paintings are the oldest dated cave paintings in the world and predate the arrival of modern humans in Europe by at least 20,000 years, which suggests that they must be of Neandertal origin. The cave art comprises mainly red and black paintings and includes representations of various animals, linear signs, geometric shapes, hand stencils, and handprints. Thus, Neandertals possessed a much richer symbolic behavior than previously assumed. It is even possible, the team speculate, that this indicates that the ability to make mental constructs and represent them through painting is one which may have been transmitted to Neanderthals and humans by a common ancestor. The art studied from which these conclusions were drawn are a red linear motif in La Pasiega (Cantabria), a hand stencil in Maltravieso (Extremadura), and red-painted speleothems in Ardales (Andalucia), and the oldest age provided by analysis was 66,700 years in Maltravieso. Image: one of the paintings in La Pasiega, dated to at least 64,000 years ago Follow Murcia Today on Facebook to keep up to date with all the latest news, events and information in the Murcia region: https://www.facebook.com/MurciaToday/ --> Armenia institutes proceedings against Azerbaijan before International Court of Justice Armenia President meets with WHO Director-General in Geneva Armenia high-tech industry minister receives Head of EU Delegation Andrea Wiktorin Taliban's ad hoc government holds first session 3,000 French medical workers dismissed for refusing to get vaccinated against COVID-19 Russia, China, Iran and Pakistan affirm need to achieve national reconciliation in Afghanistan Armenia State Revenue Committee chief and Russian counterpart discuss cooperation in taxation sector Members of opposition "Armenia" parliamentary faction meet with delegation led by Baroness Caroline Cox Armenia Deputy PM: Gyumri's Shirak International Airport has everything to serve European low-costers Ambassador: I don't believe Belarus gives preference to Yerevan or Baku when it comes to relations Armenia President appoints Chief of Staff of Special Army Corps-Deputy Commander of Corps Zakharova: Russia has told Baku about its position on the Turkish-Azerbaijani joint military exercises Digest: Armenia assumes CSTO chairmanship, Armenian COVID-19 situation is tense Armenia Deputy PM: Government intends to end construction of alternative roads in Syunik Province in spring 2022 Armenia Parliament Speaker receives US Ambassador Armenia Deputy PM on current situation on Goris-Kapan road: Authorities didn't have a choice Armenian parliamentary speaker to Baroness Caroline Cox: You are widely recognized and loved in Armenia Geghamasar community head: Armenia Gegharkunik Province Jaghatsadzor village reservoir under Azerbaijan control Armenia ex-President Serzh Sargsyan's brothers son, daughter sue Prosecutor General's Office Dollar continues dropping in Armenia New district under construction in Artsakh for 92 families displaced by war (PHOTOS) Local grape growers block Yerevan-Armavir motorway Russian trade representative: Armenia-Russia trade turnover has grown by 17.5% Karabakh emergency service: Remains of another fallen serviceman found 3 new cases of coronavirus reported in Artsakh 3.4-magnitude earthquake hits 10 km northeast from Bavra village of Armenia's Shirak Province Armenia President travels to France Armenia Parliament Speaker to Dutch Ambassador: Azerbaijan's rhetoric not aimed at establishing peace in region Armenia Parliament Speaker to Ambassador: Armenian-Iranian trade turnover hasn't undergone serious changes Armenia ex-President Kocharyan visits imprisoned opposition MP now in civic hospital Armenia parliament confirms list of delegates of delegation to the PACE Armenia PM: CSTO potential needs to be supplemented with unmanned formations Armenia minister of economy: We are concerned about situation at Goris-Kapan road Iran ambassador has 2nd meeting with Azerbaijan presidential assistant Sports minister: Armenia Olympic medalists bonuses will increase Armenia assumes CSTO chairmanship Armenia EXPO 2021 forum opens in Yerevan Armenia FM finally manages to head for Tajikistan Armenia economy minister: Our healthcare system may not be able to withstand coronavirus patients pressure Armenia Special Investigation Service chief is appointed Anti-Corruption Committee chair Health minister on COVID-19 situation in Armenia: We have increase in ratio of deaths, severe course 764 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in Armenia Archbishop of Prague: Armenia is surrounded by enemies, question of its existence is raised even now Russias Putin to attend CSTO leaders meeting, via video link Sotk-Vardenis motorway of Armenia blocked UK woman amputates leg to save unborn daughter Armenia PM, Tajikistan President discuss bilateral relations, CSTO Turns out killing of about 1,500 dolphins in Faeroe Islands was pointless Newspaper: Armenia FM punishing CSTO? Newspaper: Armenia ruling power wants to push vetting to fore again Another fallen soldiers remains found in Artsakh search operations Armenia's Pashinyan: Armenian villages of Syunik Province haven't been and won't be encircled, even though there is risk Armenia PM: Armenian government will not change its political course Armenia's Pashinyan arrives in Dushanbe on working visit Prosecutors of Armenia and Russia attend discussions devoted to fight against corruption and cybercrimes Pashinyan: Refusing to pull out troops based on borders of Soviet era would have been disastrous for Armenia Israel defense minister says Iran will be able to produce one nuclear bomb soon Armenia PM clarifies spending of funds donated to Hayastan All-Armenian Fund during 44-day war Armenia Deputy PM: There won't be surprises in terms of natural gas price in the near future EU Special Representative, Azerbaijan FM discuss situation on Armenian-Azerbaijani border Armenia health minister: Authorities have the right to adopt restrictive measures to maintain public health Armenia PM: Azerbaijan has always declared that it plans to resolve Karabakh conflict militarily Husband of Armenian pregnant woman who died from COVID-19 shares true story about wife's death Armenia culture minister: Authorities raise issue of state of Armenian monuments on all platforms Armenia PM: Specialists will explore issue of Azerbaijan's failure to recognize borders of USSR Armenian PM: Panels and footholds were placed since Goris-Kapan road is beyond Armenia's border Azerbaijan Internal Affairs Ministry confirms detention of two Iranian truck drivers Armenia PM: Government is ready to consider signals coming from Ankara Pashinyan: Armenia and Karabakh will do everything possible to make sure route through Lachin corridor remains unchanged Armenia Ararat Province ex-deputy governor appointed chief of Penitentiary Service Armenia PM to leave for Tajikistan on working visit Deputy Mayor of Armenia's Goris: Armenian drivers told me Azerbaijanis had stopped their trucks and checked them Armenia MOD holds discussion devoted to planning of budget for 2022, makes certain adjustments Armenia PM refutes news about secret negotiations with Baku Digest: US doesn't consider issue of Nagorno-Karabakh issue resolved, latest on COVID-19 Armenia army's General Staff chief receives newly appointed US Military Attache Armenia PM states reason why he used Azerbaijani toponyms to describe situation in Syunik Province Lithuania Ambassador to Armenian official: Lithuanian experience will be interesting for Armenia Deputy Mayor of Armenia's Goris: Azerbaijani police detained 2 Iranian drivers in Vorotan 8 international ombudspersons to participate in Russia's elections as experts, including Armenia's Ombudsman Armenia Security Council Secretary meets with Russian counterpart in Dushanbe Azerbaijanis celebrate anniversary of Armenian pogrom in Baku with military parade in Artsakhs occupied Shushi Azerbaijani police detain two Iranian truck drivers on Armenia's Goris-Kapan road Iran embassy in Armenia on situation on Goris-Kapan motorway section: Elimination of road obstacles is topical Armenia FM unable to travel to Dushanbe due to aircraft engine malfunction Armenia government officials answering questions from MPs Armenia Labor and Social Affairs Ministry to carry out new social support program for displaced citizens of Artsakh Armenia finance minister receives Japan Ambassador Armenia State Revenue Committee chief receives Latvian State Revenue Service's Police Department delegation CSTO Collective Security Council to discuss urgent security issues, Armenia PM to also attend meeting Friendship group with India to soon be set up again in legislature, says Armenia parliament speaker Armenian doctors protesting near Prosecutor General's Office in support of Armen Charchyan Toivo Klaar: Important to reduce tensions on border to contribute to better climate for negotiations Turkey, Azerbaijan air forces holding joint military exercises Zas: CSTO foreign and defense ministers councils next meeting will be held in Armenia PACE regrets tragic humanitarian consequences of Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict Russia deputy FM, Red Cross president discuss humanitarian situation in Nagorno-Karabakh US does not consider Karabakh status issue resolved, says envoy to Armenia US government to provide $9.5m to combat corruption in Armenia Opposition Armenia Bloc holds meeting chaired by ex-President Kocharyan (PHOTOS) Amazon has spread like a disease into every industry from retail to entertainment and now even small business lending. If you think regulators won't figure out some way to slow its roll, you could be one of the dumbest on Wall Street. It has probably been forever since you just bought a book on Amazon (AMZN) - Get Amazon.com, Inc. Report . Regulators may at some point look to acknowledge that. What started as an online bookstore in 1994 has expanded exponentially to now include grocery delivery, cloud computing services, music downloads, film production and so much more. Oh, and then there is a large organic grocery store chain that Amazon owns ...something called Whole Foods. A great deal of this growth has been inorganic. In its 23 years, Amazon has acquired the aforementioned Whole Foods Market, Zappos, Souq.com, Audible, Twitch Interactive and many others. The company recently formed a partnership with Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A) - Get BRK.A Report and Action Alerts Plus holding JPMorgan (JPM) - Get JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) Report to explore ways to lower healthcare costs. It could mean acquisitions by the group down the road. Reports have also surfaced stating Amazon will team up with Bank of America Corp. (BAC) - Get Bank of America Corp Report for its Amazon Lending small business loan program, according to CNBC. Despite the impressive expansion, Amazon has largely circumvented regulators even as it has grown from a $438 million company at its 1997 IPO to a $693 billion company today. But if you think evasion will work long-term for Amazon, you might be one of the dumbest on Wall Street. Amazon is the fastest growing major retailer in the U.S., and outpaced eCommerce's growth as a whole in early 2017, Yale Law statistics show. The company's growth plans have caused shock-waves throughout many industries, notably healthcare, where big players fear Amazon's price-slashing and speed. In response, CVS Health (CVS) - Get CVS Health Corporation Report is nearing a deal to buy health insurer Aetna (AET) . Walgreens Boots Alliance (WBA) - Get Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc Report is reportedly looking to buy the rest of drug wholesaler AmerisourceBergen it doesn't own. "We cannot cognize the potential harms to competition posed by Amazon's dominance if we measure competition primarily through price and output," Lina M. Khan wrote in a Yale Law Review note last year. "Specifically, the current doctrine underappreciates the risk of predatory pricing and how integration across distinct business lines may prove anticompetitive." This begets a question: are today's regulatory standards and best practices capable of reining in Amazon? Are the antitrust laws first established in 1890 in the U.S. fit for 21st century companies? Following updates in the 1970s and 1980s, antitrust has focused primarily on keeping prices low for consumers -- which Amazon has indeed done -- through an "Efficient Market Hypothesis" instead of an economic dominance lens. Amazon has subsequently gobbled up the competition and other new businesses, masking the potential for a monopoly with low, consumer-friendly prices. But can it last? Even the president himself has long appeared to dislike Amazon and its CEO Jeff Bezos. On Wednesday, March 28, an Axios report citing unnamed sources said the president has wondered if there's a way to "go after Amazon with antitrust or competition law." Trump reportedly wants to knock Amazon's power by altering its tax treatment. In Trump's view, Amazon has destroyed the old-school business that made him a billionaire. In July, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) looked into Amazon's pricing discounts ahead of its Whole Foods acquisition. And in 2014, the Justice Department blocked a merger between leading online review platforms Bazaarvoice Inc. and PowerReviews Inc., submitting that data-driven industries have network effects that can raise both costs and the barrier to entry, Yale research stated. Comments from FTC Commissioner Terrell McSweeny suggested the group will continue to assess the "competitive implications of data." That could mean regulation will eventually come for companies such as Amazon, which uses large amounts of data to its advantage. "The Amazon people are pretty smart in that what they're acquiring are not horizontal competitors," says Rob Baumann, chair of the economics department at College of the Holy Cross. "These large firms -- they merge smartly." Amazon is unlikely to face regulatory backlash based solely on its acquisitions, Baumann explained. It would take some "existential abuse of power" to draw the real ire of antitrust regulators. But it's hard not to wonder if a shift in narrative could take place. After all, internet companies of today are rapidly evolving beasts. And the powers that be overseas are also keeping a close eye on Amazon and others online. "The European Commission has been considerably more aggressive in eCommerce," says Edward Duffy, antitrust lawyer and commercial litigator at Reed Smith LLP. European regulation of companies such as Action Alerts Plus holding Alphabet Inc. (GOOGL) - Get Alphabet Inc. Class A Report or Amazon are "part of this bigger strategy that has been developed over the past few years," Duffy said. "They're typically using a more traditional framework for looking at it." It's worth noting that many experts point to Amazon's relative size compared to the likes of Walmart Inc. (WMT) - Get Walmart Inc. Report , claiming it can't monopolize any faster than Walmart. Walmart had $500 billion in sales last year, compared to Amazon's $178 billion. But the issue isn't that Walmart is large, but rather that Amazon is wide. It has a hand in everything. Have you ever heard of Walmart Studios? Didn't think so. One of the most high-profile regulatory examples is Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) - Get Microsoft Corporation (MSFT) Report back in 2001. In Microsoft's case, the issue in question was whether the company could bundle its web browser and operating system. While that case ended in a settlement, it illustrates the notion that internet companies aren't like a Walmart. Duffy pointed out that the Department of Justice or FTC could challenge a particular industry-specific practice that may affect the tech and data-driven sectors that might have previously gone unnoticed or unregulated. "For a while there can be a lack of enforcement," Duffy said. "But that can change quickly." Amazon has made it clear that it has no plans to slow down. How many more deals, tie-ins and mergers does Amazon have left until antitrust goes full Robber Baron on Jeff Bezos? Not many, perhaps. In a flurry of activity this week, Qualcomm chipmaker denigrated Broadcom's bid, extolled the virtues of its board and quoted a team of antitrust experts on the risks of the hostile suitor's deal. Qualcomm Inc. (QCOM) - Get QUALCOMM Incorporated Report continued its PR war with hostile suitor Broadcom ltd. (AVGO) - Get Broadcom Inc. Report this week, releasing a flurry of letters, press releases and videos. The mobile chipmaker is fending off Broadcom's unsolicited offer while also girding for a showdown with the rival chipmaker at its March 6 annual meeting. In a letter to shareholders on Thursday, the company took a shot at Broadcom's decision to lower its takeover bid from $82 to $79 per share after Qualcomm increased the price of its $45 billion takeover of NXP Semiconductors NV (NXPI) - Get NXP Semiconductors NV Report . "By lowering its proposal to $79.00 per share, Broadcom has made an inadequate proposal even worse," Qualcomm said. Shares of Qualcomm dropped 1.9% to $62.18 on Thursday. In early trading on Friday, shares were up 0.3%. As its shareholder vote approaches, Qualcomm also released a two-minute video that featured its directors and extolled the virtues of its board, such as the short-tenure and diverse backgrounds of members. Action Alerts Plus holding Broadcom has nominated 6 directors for Qualcomm's board, which would give it a majority if it can convince investors to vote for its slate. Even with a minority position on the board, Broadcom could position itself for a future deal. Earlier in the day, Qualcomm issued a press release warning of the "significant antitrust risk" that Broadcom's takeover bid entails, citing an article published by a trade group that featured "leading antitrust experts" from China, Korea, the E.U. and the U.S. "With respect to likely review timing, recent deals suggest that the regulatory approval process is likely to take 18+ months," the article stated. TheStreet's Executive Editor Brian Sozzi sums up this tech saga below. This article was originally published by The Deal, a sister publication of TheStreet that offers sophisticated insight and analysis on all types of deals, from inception to integration. Click here for a free trial. Home | Latest Addition | JAMB goes tough on candidates, bans 16 items from examination hall (see list) - JAMB says eye grasses worn by candidates on medical grounds would be thoroughly scrutinized by invigilators to ensure they are not for ulterior motives - The examination body states that item that may compromise the sanctity of the examination will be confiscated by examination officials - Admission seekers protest end of 2018 UTME registration, seek extension The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) has listed 16 items including eye glasses and wrist watches that will not be allowed into the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) halls. The secretary of JAMB UTME Monitoring groups, Ngozi Egbuna, made the disclosure in a memo to some civil society groups which will participate in the monitoring of the examination, Vanguard reports. The board however, stated that eye grasses worn by candidates on medical grounds would be thoroughly scrutinized by invigilators to ensure they were not for ulterior motives. READ ALSO: Insecurity: President Buhari to hold meeting with Obasanjo, Jonathan, others The memo read: Kindly note that examination officials are allowed to scrutinise eye glasses or similar devices and where convinced that such item may compromise the sanctity of the examination, the examination official should confiscate it. Where examination official (board staff or ad hoc staff) or any authorised person is found with any of these prohibited items in the examination hall, such compromising action would be treated as a deliberate act of examination sabotage and necessary sanction will be applied. The prohibited items includes: 1. Wrist watches 2. Pen/biro 3. Mobile phones or similar electronic devices, 4. Spy reading glasses which should be scrutinised 5. Calculators or similar electronic devices 6. USB, CD, hard disks and/or similar storage devices. PAY ATTENTION: Read best news on Nigerias #1 news app 7. Reading/writing material 8. Cameras 9. Recorders 10. Microphones 11. Ear pieces 12. Ink/pen readers 13. Smart lenses 14. Smart rings/jewellery 15. Smart buttons 16. Bluetooth devices Meanwhile, not fewer than 500 admission seekers on Thursday, February 22, protesting the closure of the registration portal for the 2018 University Tertiary Matriculation Examination organised by the Joint Admission and Matriculation Board. Punch reports that the students, who stormed Bariga area of Lagos with placards on Thursday, complained that majority of them have not registered. The 2018 UTME examination is scheduled to hold between March 9 and 17, but the protesters requested an extension of the examination till May. Nigerians express mixed feelings as JAMB reduces admission cut-off to 120 on NAIJ.com TV [embedded content] Source: Naija.ng CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM: Latest Addition Home | Latest Addition | Breaking: Yobe Governor Gaidam faults army's claim, says no abducted schoolgirl rescued yet - Governor Ibrahim Gaidam of Yobe state has said that none of the abducted students in Dapchi has been rescued - The government had on Wednesday, February 21, said that some of the abducted girls were rescued by the army - But when Gaidam told the families of the girls to pray for their rescue when he visited Dapchi on Thursday, February 22 Governor, Ibrahim Gaidam of Yobe state, has faulted the claim that the Nigerian army rescued some of the girls of the Government Girls Science Technical College (GGSTC), Dapchi, Yobe state who were abducted by Boko Haram insurgents on Monday, February 19. Vanguard reports that the Governor who visited Dapchi town on Thursday, February 22, however, said, contrary to the claim, that no girl has been rescued yet. READ ALSO: Abia state governor Ikpeazu lambasts Nnamdi Kanu NAIJ.com gathered that the Boko Haram terrorists had attacked the girls college on Monday, February 19, and abducted many of the girls. While 48 of them were said to have been rescued by the army, another 111 of them were reportedly still missing after the attack. A statement signed by Abdullahi Bego, the director general, press affairs to Governor Ibrahim Gaidam, on Wednesday, February 21, claimed that some of the girls were rescued and were then in the custody of the Nigerian Army. The statement read: The Yobe State Government hereby informs the public that some of the girls at Government Girls Science Technical College (GGSTC) whose school was attacked by Boko Haram terrorists last Monday have been rescued by gallant officers and men of the Nigerian Army from the terrorists who abducted them. The rescued girls are now in the custody of the Nigerian Army. We will provide more details about their number and condition in due course. His Excellency, Governor Ibrahim Gaidam, who is very grateful for the gallantry and hard work of the officers and men of the Nigerian Army involved in the operation, is monitoring the situation closely and will make a statement in due course." However, after visiting Dapchi community on Thursday, February 22, Gaidam faulted the claim that the Nigerian army rescued some of the girls. He said, In fact, that none of the abducted girls has been rescued. A Dapchi resident, Abdul Dapchi, whose two sisters were among the abducted girls, lamented to newsmen that the community became infuriated at Governor Gaidam after his confession that no girl was actually recued. He said:We were all angry. How could they have deceived us all along? The Governor is said to have pleaded with the affected family members and the people of the community to keep praying to God for the release of their daughters. PAY ATTENTION: Read the news on Nigerias #1 new app Meanwhile, NAIJ.com had previously reported that forty-eight students of the 94 who were reported missing after an alleged Boko Haram attack in Government Girls Technical College, Dapchi have returned. Survivors of Boko Haram - on NAIJ.com TV [embedded content] Source: Naija.ng CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM: Latest Addition Home | Latest Addition | Commotion as angry landlord set own house ablaze after tenant allegedly refused to pay rent - A landlord has reportedly prevented people in his neighborhood from putting out a raging fire that consumed his property - A shop owner, Cynthia Obaseki, says she lost goods worth N5m to the inferno - Osinbajo promises FG would implement policies to drive economic growth A landlord has reportedly set his rented house ablaze over the alleged non-payment of rent by a tenant. Leadership reports that the landlord, Idemudia Obamwonyi, inherited his late fathers house but became angry after a tenant reportedly failed to pay rent. He was said to have set the house ablaze and prevented people in the neighborhood from putting out the raging fire since he does not get any money from the house. READ ALSO: Insecurity: President Buhari to hold meeting with Obasanjo, Jonathan, others The inferno was said to have affected 20 shops in the building located at Iwebo lane behind Oba Market in Benin City, Edo state. We saw people holding him and he was saying let the house burn, I dont get any money from it," a resident in the area, Ifaluyi Obasogie said. A shop owner who gave his name as Justice Aigbekhan accused Idemudia of demanding more money from them to perform his fathers burial after they had paid their rents. If they are having family issues, they should go and solve it. It is not for them to put us in trouble, he said. Another shop owner, Cynthia Obaseki said she lost goods worth N5m to the inferno. PAY ATTENTION: Read best news on Nigerias #1 news app In another report, in line with its economic recovery and growth plan, Vice President Yemi Osinbajo on Tuesday, February 20, said that the Buhari administration, would continue to ensure the implementation of policies to drive socio-economic growth and prosperity, The Nation reports. NAIJ.com gathered that Osinbajo made the remark while receiving a delegation from the Lagos Chamber of Commerce and Industry (LCCI) at the Presidential Villa, Abuja. The vice president also said that the private sector in Nigeria will continue to play a prominent role in the economic programmes and initiatives of the Buhari administration, adding that the sector is significant in the economy. He noted that the collaboration between the federal government and the private sector will further boost the countrys economic progress. Market Survey: Meet the real Lagos hustlers at the ever-busy Yaba market on NAIJ.com TV [embedded content] Source: Naija.ng CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM: Latest Addition Home | Latest Addition | Homosexual escapes lynching over lovers death in Enugu By Emeka Mamah Police have rescued a 35-year-old gay from being lynched by a mob at Agbani in Nkanu West Local Government Area of Enugu State, following the death of his partner. The suspect (name withheld), was said to have been having an affair with a 29-year-old man who suddenly died at Umuokorouba Area of Ozalla in the area. Police sources told Vanguard in Enugu that the mans death reportedly infuriated youths in Umuokorouba, who then apprehended the suspect and tied him to a tree with the aim of stoning him to death. A Police patrol team, which arrived the scene could not stop the youths from carrying out their intention of killing the suspect. Operatives of Special Anti-Robbery Squad, SARS; Mobil Police Force, MOPOL, and the anti-cult team had to be mobilised before the suspect was rescued and taken to the Police headquarters in Enugu. Meanwhile, the corpse has been deposited at the University of Nigeria Teaching Hospital, UNTH, mortuary at Ituku Ozalla, while one of the suspects that allegedly tied the suspect to the tree was arrested. A senior Police officer, who confirmed the story in Enugu, told Vanguard that some exhibits were recovered at the scene where the homosexual was to be killed, while the operatives of the State Criminal Investigation Department, SCID, had begun investigations. CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM: Latest Addition Two dead bodies of the missing Dapchi schoolgirls abducted by the Boko Haram terrorists on Monday, in Yobe state, have been recovered by the Nigerian military during rescue operation on Wednesday. Reports also indicates that the Nigerian military rescued 76 of the schoolgirls. Boko Haram terrorists had, Monday, attacked the Government Girls Science Technical College (GGSTC), Dapchi, Yobe state, and abducted many of the girls. Ever since, several conflicting reports have emerged as to the true situation of the incident. While some reports claimed the Nigerian army rescued 68 of the girls and that 111 of them were still missing, other reports claim 76 of the schoolgirls have been rescued while two have been killed and their dead bodies recovered. Meanwhile, the Yobe state Governor, Ibrahim Gaidam, has faulted the claim that the Nigerian army actually rescued some of the girls. The Governor made the disclosure when he visited the affected families in Dapchi community, Yobe state. Governor Gaidam was said to have told the people of Dapchi community that none of the abducted schoolgirls has been rescued yet. The report also said the Governor urged the affected parents and the community to continue praying for the safe return of their daughters. Meanwhile, a report by Reuters claimed that while the military has rescued 76 of the girls, two of the them have been killed while 13 others are still missing. The report said a resident and a local government official said there is jubilation in Dapchi community over the rescue of the girls.. Everybody is celebrating their coming with songs and praises to God almighty, said Babagana Umar, one of the parents whose daughter had disappeared. The only sad news is that two girls were dead and no explanation. They said the rescued girls were returned to the village of Dapchi late on Wednesday evening. Earlier on Wednesday, sources said 91students were still unaccounted for after a roll-call was taken at their school on Tuesday. President Muhammadu Buhari, on Wednesday, dispatched the foreign affairs and defense ministers to Yobe to investigate the situation. Parents and witnesses who earlier revealed the news of the missing students to newsmen spoke on condition of anonymity because they said they had been warned by Nigerian security and government officials not to disclose the disappearance. How the Boko Haram terrorists struck the Dapchi school Witnesses who disclosed the incident to newsmen said the Boko Haram terrorists arrived in Dapchi on Monday evening in trucks, with some mounted with heavy guns and painted in military camouflage. The terrorists reportedly went directly to the school, shooting sporadically, sending students and teachers fleeing. The witnesses also said that some people had returned to Dapchi after spending the night hiding in the bush. Meanwhile, the Yobe state Police Commissioner, Sumonu Abdulmaliki, told newsmen on Tuesday that Boko Haram had also abducted three people from nearby Gaidam. More than 20,000 people have been killed and two million forced to flee their homes in the northeast of Africas most populous nation since Boko Haram began its insurgency in 2009. Of about 270 girls abducted from their school in Chibok in April 2014, about 60 escaped soon afterwards and others have since been released after mediation. Around 100 are still believed to be in captivity. Last month, Boko Haram released a video purporting to show some of the Chibok girls still in its custody, saying they do not wish to return home. Aid groups have said that Boko Haram has kidnapped thousands more adults and children, many of whose cases have been neglected. Home | News | Crime/Legal | EFCC arrests 27 wonder bank operators in Oyo - EFCC has arrested 27 'wonder bank' operators in Oyo state - The suspects were arrested at different locations within Ibadan, Oyo state capital - The suspects have volunteered useful information to the operatives of the commission in their quest to unravel the extent of their illegal activities Operatives of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) have arrested 27 suspected operators of illegal financial institutions, also known as wonder banks. Premium Times reports that the head of media, Ibadan zonal office of the agency, Femi Oyewole, who disclosed this on Thursday, February 22, said the suspects were arrested at different locations within Ibadan, Oyo state capital. READ ALSO: Just in: 2 Dapchi school girls reportedly killed in rescue operation, 13 still missing NAIJ.com gathered that the suspects include, Olayeni Oladokun Samuel, managing director of Unlimited Grace Investment limited and ten members of his staff, Chris Igbinake of Grooming Centre and four of his staff and Akanbi Oluwakemi of Grace & Mercy Households Improvement Initiative and four of her staff. Group of suspects operating wonder banks. Credit: Premium Times The EFCC spokesman said, others include staffers of Sobic Financial & Investment Consultant, with their identities given as Awokunle Olukemi, Sikiru Obadara, Olasunkanmi Michael, Adeoti Adegboyega, Oyewusi Esther and Ojekunle Victor Olukayode. He said the suspects have volunteered useful information to the operatives of the commission in their quest to unravel the extent of their illegal activities. He added that investigations, however, have revealed that none of the institutions registered with the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) before embarking on financial transactions with the members of the public. They allegedly give loans to innocent and unsuspecting members of the public who register with them after 10 per cent deposit of the total loans sum and charge 15 to 20 per cent interest on all the loans granted to them, he stated. It was also gathered that these companies have branches in and outside Oyo state with thousands of customers spread across Oyo, Lagos, Ogun, Ondo, Kwara states. Sealed wonder bank by EFCC. Credit: Premium Times At the point of arrest, several copies of hand flyers for advertisement of their activities and laptops were recovered from them. They would be charged to court as soon as investigation is concluded and a prima facie case is established against them, Oyewole said. PAY ATTENTION: Read the news on Nigerias #1 new app Meanwhile, NAIJ.com had previously reported that the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) rejected the plea bargain offer of a former minister of the Federal Capital Territory, Ms Jumoke Akinjide. The EFCC stages a walk against corruption - on NAIJ.com TV [embedded content] Source: Naija.ng CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM: Crime/Legal Loading... Home | News | Crime/Legal | Police DSS, EFCC want court to allow search of Wikes properties - The security agencies and EFCC have asked the court to reject the prayer of Governor Nyesom Wike of Rivers state - Wike had told court to stop the EFCC and security agencies from searching his properties - The governor was alleged to have compromised some electoral officials during the re-run elections conducted by the INEC The Inspector General of Police (IGP) and two federal governments investigating agencies have asked a federal high court in Abuja to reject a prayer by Rivers state Governor, Nyesom Wike, stopping them from searching his properties. The Nation reports that investigating agencies are the Department of State Services (DSS) and the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC). READ ALSO: EFCC arrests 27 wonder bank operators in Oyo, seal their office NAIJ.com gathered that the three are listed as respondents in a suit by the River state Governor, seeking among others, to prevent the search of his property and the execution of a search warrant against him by any of the agencies. The suit was filed last year in the wake of allegation that the governor compromised some electoral officials during the re-run elections conducted by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC). A number of INEC officials, from whom funds were allegedly recovered, are currently on trial before the federal high court in relations to their conduct during the River state re-run election. Arguing IGPs position on Thursday, February 22, David Igbodo urged the court to dismiss Wikes suit on the grounds that it was based on mere speculation. Igbodo, a lawyer with the Nigeria police force, said: The application is speculative because in the first instance, there is no search warrant attached to it. The only exhibit attached is the interview granted by Wike himself in which he made allegations that the police wants to search his house in Abuja. He made the allegation, but he did not attach the search warrant to prove it. Assuming without conceding that the police obtained a search warrant to search the Rivers state Governors house in Abuja; the question is: Can the police execute the search warrant without requiring his presence? The question has been answered by the Supreme Court and the answer is yes. The police can effectively do that without requiring his presence. So the government house of Rivers state in Abuja can be searched without the Governors presence, as there are security men there that can witness the search. Igbodo further submitted that the law allowed the police to gather evidence and investigate officials who had immunity adding that a search warrant was a process of obtaining evidence during investigation. He admitted that the governor enjoys immunity by virtue of the provision of the Constitution. Igbodo proceeded to argue that, the enjoyment of the constitutionally granted immunity by a governor cannot protect him from being investigated. He added that during the process of investigation, investigators were allowed by law to gathered evidence against such a governor. The DSS lawyer, O. Atoyebi, who argued in similar vein, urged the court to dismiss the suit. He contended that the suit was intended by the governor to prevent the service (DSS) from performing its statutory functions. The lawyer to the EFCC, Elizabeth Alabi argued that her client was not a necessary party in the case. Alabi, who urged the court to dismiss the suit, argued that the EFCC has no business in the suit and was wrongfully joined. She prayed the court to award N100, 000 in compensation for his client, against Wike. Lawyer to the governor, Sylva Ogwemoh (SAN) noted that the essence of the suit was the interpretation of a section of the constitution. Ogwuemoh said: The focal point of our summons is the interpretation of Section 308 of the Constitution as it relates to search warrant. A search warrant is undoubtedly a process of court and if that is the case, there is a breach of the absolute immunity that Section 308 confers on the plaintiff (Wike). He argued that under Section 308 of the Constitution the execution of a search warrant required the presence of the person to which the section applies and who enjoys immunity, and in this case, Wike, before the property could be searched. Ogwuemoh while faulting Igbodos argument argued that the IGPs lawyers argument that despite Section 308, the police was with the discretion to search the governments house in the governors absence was against the law. On Igbodos argument that the applicant failed to attach the warrant in question, Ogwuemoh argued that since the suit only seeks the interpretation of a legal provision, there was no need to attach a warrant to the application. After listening to partied, Justice Ahmed Mohammed adjourned to May 9 for judgment. In the suit filed in June 2017, Wike, among other reliefs, wants a declaration that by virtue of the provisions of Section 308 of the Constitution, the IGP, the EFCC and the DSS cannot apply for, obtain, issue or execute any court process compelling his presence. PAY ATTENTION: Read the news on Nigerias #1 new app He also wants the court to determine: Whether the defendants can by the combined effect of Section 308 of the Constitution and Sections 149 and 150 of the Administration of Criminal Justice, apply for, obtain, issue or in any manner or form effectively execute a search warrant at the residence of Wike in Abuja or any of his residences without his physical presence in the course of the execution of such search warrant. Meanwhile, NAIJ.com had previously reported that operatives of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) have arrested 27 suspected operators of illegal financial institutions, also known as wonder banks. The EFCC stages a walk against corruption - on NAIJ.com TV [embedded content] Source: Naija.ng CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM: Crime/Legal Loading... Home | News | General | Amnesty International accuses Buharis govt of unlawful killings Army keeps mum Show us evidence Junaid Mohammed By Gbenga Oke THE Amnesty International has accused the Federal Government of unlawful killings, torture and detention in the last 12 months. Enumerating a litany of mishaps it encapsulated in 15 human rights issues in Nigeria, the London-based non-governmental organisation, in its 2017/2018 annual report also lamented that inter-communal violence linked to lingering clashes between herdsmen and farming communities resulted in more than 549 deaths and displacement of thousands in 12 states. Buhari It reported that Boko Haram carried out at least 65 attacks, causing 411 civilian deaths, and abducted at least 73 people. Sixteen women, including 10 policewomen, were abducted in June when Boko Haram ambushed an army-escorted convoy on the Maiduguri-Damboa road. In July, Boko Haram ambushed a team of oil prospectors in a village in Magumeri. Three oil workers were abducted and at least 40 other people were killed, including soldiers and members of the Civilian Joint Task Force. On 6 May, 82 Chibok schoolgirls, abducted in 2014, were released by Boko Haram fighters in an exchange deal; 113 girls remained in captivity. In November, six farmers in Dimge village in Mafa were abducted and beheaded. Contacted, yesterday, the Nigeria Army declined comment on the allegations Lack of accountability It decried what it described as governments lack of accountability on the issues, saying: In June, the Special Board of Inquiry to investigate allegations of gross violations of human rights, established by Chief of Army Staff, found that Giwa barracks was extremely overcrowded, with poor sanitation and insufficient ventilation, factors, which resulted in detainees deaths. It cleared senior military officers, alleged to have committed crimes under international law, of wrongdoing. Unlawful killings, torture, ill-treatment According to the report, at least 10 IPOB members were killed and 12 others wounded by soldiers in Umuahia, Abia State, September 14. The military claimed that they were killed when they tried to resist the arrest of leader, Nnamdi Kanu, at his home. Witnesses say that, in addition to those killed, at least 10 IPOB members were shot and taken away by soldiers. The government subsequently banned the IPOB. On March 9, a court in Abuja sentenced two police officers to death for their part in the extrajudicial execution of six traders in Apo, Abuja, in 2005. Three other police officers, including the leader of the police team were acquitted. In 2005, a Judicial Commission of Inquiry had indicted six police officers for the murders and recommended their trial as well as compensation for the victims families. One of them allegedly escaped from custody in 2015. In September, the High Court in Port Harcourt convicted five SARS policemen for the extrajudicial executions of Michael Akor and Michael Igwe in 2009. The court also awarded N50 million (USD143,000) in compensation to the victims families. Show me evidence Junaid Mohammed Reacting to the report, Second Republic lawmaker, Dr. Junaid Mohammed, asked Amnesty International to show evidence of its allegation to Nigerians. As far as I am concerned, I want to see evidence, which states how these unlawful killings took place. Even if such reports come from organisations like Oxfam, I would still love to see evidence before concluding. People cannot sit in London and New York and report what is going on especially in major parts of the North right now. CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM: General Loading... Home | News | General | Leadership Crisis: Artiste managers back call for probe of COSON By Beanajmin Njoku Following the leadership crisis rocking the Copyright Society of Nigeria,COSON, the Association of Music Artiste Managers of Nigeria,AMAMN, has backed the call for an audit of the society, saying it will restore confidence between the two bodies. In a statement titled, COSON and The New Dance, AMAMN said nothing but a probe of the leadership of COSON would satisfy its members. This development is coming as the Nigerian Copyright Commission,NCC, is said to have annulled the return of Okoroji as Chairman of the society. Okoroji was returned as COSON chairman at an extraordinary general meeting held on December 19, 2017, days after Efe Omorogbe was installed by the board of COSON. According to AMAMN, the association, on a fact-finding mission, met on Tuesday, February 13, 2018 with Chief Tony Okoroji and his team. A week later, it met with Efe Omorogbe and Mr. Joel Ajayi on ways to resolve the ongoing crisis. It says, Despite the fact that Mr. Efe Omorogbe is not only a bona fide member, but a founding member of our association, we decided to adhere to the principles of Audi Alterem Partem (let the other side be heard as well) and give both sides a chance to present the facts as they see it. The association therefore implores both parties to comply with the position of the Nigerian Copyrights Commission (NCC) in the matter. The regulator has finally spoken and we are grateful. We implore all parties to please adhere to the ruling of the NCC and allow the proposed probe and forensic audit that the NCC has asked to be carried out. As a body, we have resolved to follow this situation to a legal and logical conclusion and ask all artiste managers, to join in this agitation. We dont get paid if our clients dont get paid; let us therefore secure the rights and livelihood of our clients. CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM: General Loading... Home | News | General | Adesina urges lawyers to live up to their constitutional roles Former Secretary General of the Nigerian Bar Association, NBA, Deacon Dele Adesina, SAN, Thursday, urged the judiciary to continuously live up to its constitutional role, in a bid to preserve the legal profession. Lawyers Adesina made the call in Lagos, at the public presentation of his book entitled New Development in Law and Practice in Nigeria. He said that the judiciary had continued to live up to its constitutional and historic role as the baston of constitutional democracy. He said that it remained the tripod on which the hope of democracy and the common man rest, adding that the time to stop politicization of the judiciary is now. According to Adesina , To say that the Nigerian judiciary is corrupt is an unacceptable generalization which must yield up to specifics. In his comment, Chief Wole Olanipekun, SAN, a discussant at the event, also advised lawyers to learn to steal knowledge from their colleagues, adding that it also impacts on the learning process. According to Olanipekun Rome was not built in a day, and so even as young lawyers, they must be prepared to learn and adhere strictly to the principles of legal practice. Warning lawyers against corruption, Olanipekun said: Woe betide any lawyer who gives bribe, offers bribe, compromises the integrity of the legal profession or distorts justice, such lawyer will go to hell. CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM: General Loading... Home | News | General | Uncompleted Projects: NAUTH appeals to FG for increased funding NNEWITO complete ongoing projects and move some departments to its permnent site, the management of the Nnamdi Azikiwe University Teaching Hospital NAUTH, Nnewi, has appealed to the Federal Government to step up its capital votes. Nnamdii Azikiwe University Teaching Hospital, NAUTH NAUTH also appealed to the House of Representatives Committee on Health Institutions to look into improving the capital vote of NAUTH, adding that the school needs money for ongoing projects and the hospital. Chief Medical Director, CMD, of NAUTH, Prof. Anthony Igwegbe, made the call when members of the House of Representatives Committee on Health Institutions paid a visit to the hospitals temporary and permanent sites in Nnewi and the confluence of Nnewi, Oraifite and Ozubulu communities. Prof. Igwegbe told the committee that the health institution has 450 bed capacity with about 4,000 staff, six outstations in Onitsha, Oba, Neni, Ukpo, Umunya and Awka and it is becoming very difficult to operate optimally from the temporary site, hence the need to move some departments to the permanent site. While thanking the Minister of Health, Prof. Isaac Adewole for his assistance and Governor Willie Obianos administration for assisting in constructing access roads to the permanent site, he noted that the temporary site is no longer conducive. His words: The major problem of the health institution is lack of accommodating space following the increasing number of patients We are prioritizing the building projects we are constructing at the permanent site because of lack of funds, we want to get ready the administration, male surgical and general outpatients department and few other departments, for us to move to the permanent site. All our capital votes have been going into the construction of the projects in the permanent site, we need more funds for us to complete some specific projects in the permanent site for us to move in. CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM: General Loading... An artisan creates a sugar painting at a bazaar in Yuquan district, Hohhot, Inner Mongolia autonomous region on Feb 18. Crowding to the local temple fair has been a routine for Hohhot residents as a part of celebrating the Spring Festival, an occasion for family gathering, shopping and fun. [Photo/Xinhua] Local people experience an outdated well at a bazaar in Yuquan district, Hohhot, Inner Mongolia autonomous region on Feb 18. [Photo/Xinhua] Home | News | General | Nissan officials in Nigeria, chart new course in vehicle production Say: Nigeria an outstanding market As part of on-going appraisal of its vehicle assembly project in Nigeria, Nissan Motor Co. Ltd., recently deployed a high-powered delegation from its headquarters in Japan to discuss compelling strategies with the National Automotive Design and Development Council (NADDC). The strategies are aimed at expanding the capacity of Nissans manufacturing facility to produce and supply affordable vehicles; create opportunity for workers as well as ancillary firms and the communities. Nissan Leader of the Nissan delegation, Senior Vice President Middle-East, Africa and India (AMI) Peyman Kargar said: Our visit to the Nissan facility in Nigeria is aimed at helping the plant to sustain its status as a reassuring brand with proclivity for improved performance, sales and after sales. Also adding that the time is right for Nigeria to sustainably and inclusively explore the gains of automotive policy to produce vehicles with unprecedented value, yet affordably priced, Mr. Kargar said: Nigeria is one of Nissans most outstanding markets in our Africa growth strategy and we are ready to partner with the Federal Government to develop the market and explore the countrys strategic regional partners in the West Coast, to make Nigeria the automobile hub for evolving West African markets. He said Nissan remains committed to the Nigerian economy, which has a strong potential of becoming Africas wealthiest country. Kargar referred to Nigerias auto policy as exceptionally inclusive and thorough, one of the traits that inform Nissans eagerness to make a greater contribution in the Nigerian market. We are happy to continue our collaboration with the government to transform Nigeria into a notable manufacturing and distribution hub, he said. The six-man delegation was received by the NADDC Director General/CEO Jelani Aliyu, before proceeding on to inspect the Stallion NMN facility at VON Automobile Nigeria. Other delegates include Nissan South Africa Managing Director/CEO, Mike Whitfield, Managing Director Sales and Marketing, Xavier Gobille, Director Sales and Operations Jim Dando as well as Africa, Middle East and India Managing Director, Frederic Posez and Nissan Motor Co., Ltd. Programme, Product, Marketing Intelligence General Manager, Vincent Valdmann. Local Nissan custodian, Stallion NMN, member of the Stallion Group became the first indigenous stakeholder in 2014 to roll-out locally assembled Nissan vehicles consequent upon the ratification of the National Automotive Policy, assembling four Nissan models including Patrol SUV, NP300, NV350 and Almera. The company has since inaugurated 11 Nissan dealerships across six geopolitical zones of the country, and achieved 10% market share in FY14 and 18% market share in FY15 coupled with notable presence in Victoria Island and Gbagada Lagos as well as in Abuja and Port-Harcourt. Nissan seeks to continue to provide expertise and technological adivisory support to boost Nigerias economic diversification strategies, using the automotive sub-sector to achieve inclusive and shared growth. Stallion NMN Managing Director Pavir Singh said they are midful of the challenges of affordability, saying the company is keen on producing qualitative standard and affordably priced vehicles to cater for different spheres of needs. We as manufacturers are willing to sign a Memorandum of Understanding with the federal government, making vehilces affordable for everyone. We have demonstarted the capacity of our plant, which can produce 100,000 vehicles annually. The auto industry worldwide contributes an average of 11.5 percent to the GDP of their respective countries and the same can be replicated here in Nigeria, Mr. Singh assured. I will be most glad if the attached news release is given utmost consideration in your respective publications. CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM: General Loading... Home | News | General | Weststar breaks into light-duty truck segment with Mercedes-Benz Accelo Following its successful launch in 2017, the Mercedes Benz Accelo has carved its niche in the light-duty commercial truck segment in Nigeria. Weststar Associates Limited, Authorised General Distributor for Mercedes Benz in Nigeria explained the Accelo comes in various applications depending on specific needs. This is in line with the ever increasing pressure on businesses to increase efficiency, reduce operating costs and grow revenues. Mercedes Benz introduced the light-duty truck range to deliver unmatched versatility, reliability and efficiency for business owners and fleet managers in a variety of industries. Based on a solid design, the Mercedes-Benz Accelo allows fitment of several superstructures made to act on the large array of urban transport applications, such as: aluminum standard box body, water tanker, tippers, refrigerated truck body, dry cargo, rescue truck and more Mr. Umoh Ekanem, Sales Manager, Commercial Vehicles, Weststar Associates Limited said. Benz Accelo Designed to deliver maximum productivity, exceptional driving comfort and the highest standards of safety, the Accelo offers exceptional power and agility. Providing the proven and unmatched Mercedes Benz quality standards, the robust truck is the perfect partner for transportation needs of all businesses. Its ruggedness, drive comfort, payload and maneuverability are unique features setting the Accelo apart from other commercial vehicles in its segment, thus making it a perfect cost-effective tool for demanding fleets in the private and public sector. The Accelo is fitted with a strong powertrain that ensures premium performance with strength, durability and Mercedes Benz recognized reliability and equipped with a Mercedes-Benz 150 hp four-cylinder engine and boasts a payload of more than five tonnes. The Accelo cab has a modern design and ensures the highest level of occupant safety, excellent visibility and an ergonomic interior with the capacity to accommodate a driver and two passengers making the drive more comfortable while increasing driver productivity and alertness disc brakes in the front and rear also enable fast, accurate response in everyday urban traffic. Mr. Mirko Plath, Managing Director & CEO of Weststar Associates Limited, who also commented on the successful introduction of the Accelo in Nigeria stated that the various requests from customers seeking light-duty trucks under the Mercedes Benz umbrella stimulated discussions with the manufacturer to explore options within this commercial vehicle segment. We are happy to deliver trucks in this category. In his words, whether long-haul, construction site, or distribution transportation, the Mercedes-Benz brand offers the right solution for the light-duty, medium-duty and heavy-duty truck segments. The Mercedes-Benz brand is indeed a synonym for top-class product and service quality, cost-effectiveness, reliability, and sustainability, as summed up by the slogan Trucks you can trust. The Accelo, he added is available for immediate delivery through Weststar with quality aftersales support synonymous worldwide with the Mercedes-Benz brand. CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM: General Loading... Since the return to democratic rule in 1999, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has conducted the general elections on a two-tier or three-tier basis.Even though the national assembly had attempted in the past to use the Electoral Act to alter the sequence of elections fixed by the INEC it did not succeed. In spite of the ongoing controversy surrounding the sequence of elections our recent experience as a nation has shown that there is nothing sacrosanct about it. In 1999 and 2007 the presidential election came up last while it came up first in 2015. In influencing the order of elections in 2015 the ruling party had thought that holding the presidential election first would have bandwagon effect on the outcome of the other elections. But the result was a disaster for the ruling party. It has equally been confirmed that when elections into the legislative houses were held before other election in the past majority of sitting legislators lost their seats. So, there is no indication that President Muhammadu Buhari stands to benefit electorally from the decision of the INEC to retain the 2015 sequence of elections. But notwithstanding the reactions of the presidency and the national assembly to the sequence of elections announced by the INEC it is pertinent to review the relevant provisions of the Constitution, the Electoral Act and judicial authorities on the vexed issue. In preparations for the 2019 general elections the INEC recently released a timetable for party primaries and the elections into the various offices in exercise of its powers under Sections 76, 116, 132 and 178 as well as paragraph 15 of Part 1 of the Third Schedule made pursuant to section 153 (1) of the Constitution. Under the arrangement the presidential and national assembly elections will be held on February 16, 2019 while the governorship and house of assembly elections will take place on March 2, 2019. But in the Electoral Bill 2018 recently passed by the national assembly the sequence of the general elections has been altered. The sequence proposed by the new amendment is A. National Assembly Election, B. Governorship and State Assembly Elections and C. Presidential Election. No doubt, the matter has generated a needless controversy to the extent that little or no attention is paid to the other provisions of the Electoral Bill which have the capacity to promote internal democracy and enhance the credibility of the electoral process. Perhaps not aware of the state of the law the INEC has announced its intention to approach the Supreme Court to test the constitutional validity of the Electoral Bill 2018 if it is eventually signed into law by the President. Since there are indications that the President may withhold his assent in the circumstance, the national assembly has threatened to override his veto. Having watched the trend of the debate it is regrettable to note that the parties involved in the dispute have not studied the decision of the Court of Appeal in the case of National Assembly v. President (2003) 9 NWLR (PT 824) 104 at 143-144. In that case, President Obasanjo had refused to assent to the Electoral Bill 2002 which had been passed by both Chambers of the National Assembly and transmitted to him June 24, 2002. Subsequently, by a motion of veto-override the national assembly passed the bill into law. In an originating summons filed at the Federal High Court the INEC challenged the validity of the passage of the Bill into law and the constitutionality of Section 15 of the Act which had provided that general elections shall be held in one day. The trial court held that the Bill was properly passed into law but that Section 15 thereof was inconsistent with Sections 76, 116, 132 and 178 of the Constitution. Dissatisfied with the annulment of Section 15 of the Electoral Act, the national assembly filed an appeal at the Court of Appeal. On his own part, the Attorney-General of the Federation filed a cross appeal to challenge the passage of the Bill into law. In its judgment the Court of Appeal held that the manner of passing the bill into was unconstitutional but declined to set it aside on ground of public policy as the 2003 general elections were being conducted under the law. However, the Court of Appeal affirmed the decision of the Federal High Court on the illegality of Section 15 of the Electoral Act. In his contribution to the judgment of the Court, Oduyemi J.C.A (as he then was) stated that in so far as Section 15 of the Electoral Act, 2002 seeks to fetter that discretion and limit the 3rd Defendant to only one day in the year for all elections to the offices concerned, that provision of the Act is inconsistent with the provisions of the Constitution above referred to and is to that extent a nullity. Section 1(3) of the Constitution All in all, I agree with the reasoning in the judgment of the lower court and with the conclusion in the judgment that Section 15 of the Electoral Act, 2002 is inconsistent with the specific provisions of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, 1999 in Section 132(1), 76(1), 178(1), 116(1), 78, 118 and Item 15(a) of the 3rd Schedule: that it infringes upon the absolute discretion vested by the Constitution on the 3rd Respondent with regard to the fixing of dates for election into the various offices concerned. Alteration of the Constitution However, the national assembly took advantage of the 2010 Alteration of the Constitution to attempt to overrule the judgment of the Court of Appeal in the case of the National Assembly v. The President (supra). Thus, in the first alteration made to the Constitution, the national assembly amended sections 132(1), 76(1), 178(1), 116(1), 118 and 178 of the Constitution by adding the phrase in accordance with the Electoral Act. Although the power of the INEC to organize, undertake and supervise the general elections conferred on it by paragraph 15 of part 1 of the third schedule made pursuant to section 153 of the Constitution was left intact, the national assembly members erroneously believed that they had conferred on themselves the power to fix the dates for general elections in Nigeria. Hence, in the 2018 Electoral Bill, the national assembly is alleged to have tampered with the discretion of the INEC to fix the dates for the 2019 general elections. Apart from the illegality of subjecting the provisions of the Constitution to the Electoral Act, the Alteration of the Constitution did not confer on the national assembly the power of fix dates for holding the general election in Nigeria. To that extent, the national assembly cannot use the Electoral Act to usurp the powers exclusively conferred on the INEC to appoint dates for holding the general elections in the country. Indeed, the Supreme Court has had cause, after the first 2010 Alteration of the Constitution, to confirm the discretionary power of the INEC to fix the dates for holding the general elections. In PDP V. SYLVA (2012) 13 NWLR (PT 1316) 85 the respondent challenged the decision of the INEC to cancel and reschedule the 2012 governorship election in Bayelsa State. In dismissing the contention the Supreme Court (per Rhodes Vivour JSC) held that INEC has the sole responsibility to fix dates for election and to my mind if INEC fixes a date for elections and for whatever reason, be it logistic, I do not think anyone has a cause of action against INEC for canceling an election (not held) and rescheduling elections for another day. Similarly, in NDP V INEC (2013) 20 WRN 1 at 45 the Supreme Court (per Ariwoola J.S.C.) held that It is not in doubt that the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) that is, the respondent, has the sole responsibility to decide when elections are to hold. See Peoples Democratic Party v Timipre Sylva & Ors (2012) 13 NWLR (Pt 1316) 85 at 122. The respondent also reserves the prerogative to decide what Timetable of Activities to publish for a General Election. Furthermore, in Hon. James Abiodun Faleke v INEC (2016) 50 WRN 1 the Supreme Court reiterated the view that by virtue of paragraph 15 of Part 1 of the Third Schedule made pursuant to section 153 (1) (f) and (i) of the Constitution, the Independent National Electoral Commission has power to organize, undertake and supervise all elections to the offices of the President, Vice President, the Governor and Deputy Governor of a State and the membership of the Senate, the House of Representatives and the House of Assembly of each state of the Federation. No doubt, the national assembly would have achieved its objective if it had incorporated the sequence of the general elections in the Constitution. But by providing that the INEC shall fix election dates in accordance with the Electoral Act the interference in the exercise of the discretionary power of INECs constitutional power to fix the dates for the elections cannot be justified in law. As far as the Constitution is concerned, the power of the INEC to organize, undertake and supervise the elections which has been interpreted to include the power to fix the dates for the general elections or determine the sequence of the elections has not been altered in any material particular. It is the height of legislative absurdity to say that the power donated to the INEC by the Constitution shall be exercised in accordance with the provision of an interior legislation. In Attorney-General, Abia State v. Attorney-General of the Federation (2002) 1 WRN 1 at 45 Kutigi CJN (as he then was) held that where the provision in the Act is within the legislative powers of the National Assembly but the Constitution is found to have already made the same or similar provision, then the new provision will be regarded as invalid for duplication and/or inconsistency and therefore inoperative. The same fate will befall any provision of the Act which seeks to enlarge, curtail or alter any existing provision of the Constitution. The provision or provisions will be treated as unconstitutional and therefore null and void. From the foregoing, it is submitted that the interference in the exercise of the powers of the INEC to appoint dates for holding the general election in Nigeria is illegal as the provision of the Electoral Bill, 2018 is inconsistent with Sections 76,116,132 and 178 of the Constitution. To the extent of such inconsistency, the provision of the Electoral Bill is illegal, null and void as stipulated by section 1 (3) of the Constitution. In other words, since the INEC has been empowered to organize, undertake and supervise all elections the National Assembly cannot rely on the provision of the Electoral Act to usurp the powers of the INEC to fix the dates for the elections. In view of the settled position of the law the INEC should not waste public funds by rushing to the Supreme Court to contest its own constitutional duty to organize, undertake and supervise the 2019 general elections. Home | News | General | FCT Admin counters news of death of students after eating biscuits; reveals actual cause of demise - The Federal Capital Territory Administration has reported to earlier reports that three students from a school in Kubwa died after eating biscuits at a party - The FCTA stated that the students did not die from food poisoning as was reported, but from cerebrospinal meningitis - A teacher at the school disclosed that the girl who shared the snack was questioned by the school authorities along with her mother; and also countered reports that the biscuits caused the deaths The Federal Capital Territory Administration has stated that contrary to reports, the three deceased students of the Local Education Authority Primary School, Kubwa, Abuja, did not die from food poisoning. According to Punch, the FCTA stated that the actual cause of death was cerebrospinal meningitis. READ ALSO: Governor Ayade allegedly dashes N40m to NULGE workers following endorsement NAIJ.com gathers that the information was disclosed by Abubakar Sani, Special Assistant to the FCT Minister on Media, who reportedly quoted the director of public health, Dr Humphrey Okoronkwo, as stating that the pupils died of meningitis. In an SMS, Sani stated: The FCT director of public health, Dr Humphrey Okoronkwo, says three pupils in Kubwa school died of suspected cases of cerebrospinal meningitis, not food poisoning. The deceased students reportedly died after consuming biscuits shared by a classmate; and two others who partook of the snack were reportedly hospitalized at the Kubwa General Hospital. The school authorities reportedly quizzed the student who shared the biscuits and her mother afterwards. A teacher stated: The girl and her mother have been invited. They met with the school authorities and they were not indicted in any way. The school is carrying out its own investigations. The pupils that were claimed to have died dont even have their names in our register. We dont believe the biscuit theory because a lot of people ate the biscuits. On a visit to the hospital, a worker also lamented over the fact that the deceased pupils were buried without carrying out an autopsy to ascertain the cause of death. The worker reportedly stated: Why will they bury some children without ascertaining what killed them? It is not proper. The solution may be to have all the children immunised. How can anyone say they ate biscuits and died when there is no medical test to confirm this? When contacted, the FCTA education secretary, Tony Ogunleye, stated: Investigation is still ongoing. We will brief you properly when we are done. PAY ATTENTION: Install our latest app for Android, read best news on Nigerias #1 news app Recall that NAIJ.com previously reported that the police in the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) confirmed the death of two pupils of the Local Education Authority (LEA), Kubwa II school, after eating biscuits at a party. On Tuesday, February 20, the two pupils, Nehemiah Yahaya and Yahaya Garba, 14-years-old, all of primary 5 and 4, reportedly died after eating biscuits at a party allegedly organised by unknown persons. The spokesman of the command, DSP Anjuguri Manzah, stated that no arrest had been made as investigation was ongoing. He said that the case would be transferred to the commands Criminal Investigation Department for discreet investigation. Old woman loses her son to cultists - on NAIJ.com TV: [embedded content] Source: Naija.ng CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM: General Loading... Home | News | General | Apprehension in Benue over flier reportedly distributed by army - A group in Benue raised alarm over flier distributed by the army - It accused the army of supporting herdsmen - The army said the fliers are to create awareness A socio-cultural Tiv group in Benue, Mzough U Tiv, has raised concern over fliers reportedly distributed by the Nigerian army deployed to address farmers-herdsmen clashes. NAIJ.com had reported that the army launched Operation Cat Race to address the problem in the state but according to The Punch, residents are apprehensive. READ ALSO: 2019: Buhari asked for more time to decide - Okorocha The leaflets were circulated shortly after the chief of army staff, Lt. Gen. Tukur Buratai, visited Benue to launch the operation. Chief Edward Ujege who is the president-general of the TIiv group alleged that the fliers were to protect the herdsmen in the state. He said: We wish to express our profound displeasure at the emerging trends of the military operation tagged Ayem a kpatema. The general public may recall our initial apprehension about the real mission of troops deployed in Benue State. True to our predictions, the launch of the exercise confirmed our fears. A pamphlet circulated by the Nigerian Army has defined the real intention of the military in Benue State. The pamphlet confirmed that the military had come to provide cover for armed Fulani herdsmen to take over our land. He claimed that the pamphlet acknowledged that herdsmen carried out attacks in the state. Yet, without addressing issues of justice, reparation and compensation, they are compelling Benue people to accommodate the perpetrators of the heinous atrocities. However, the deputy director, army public relations, 707 special forces brigade, Major Olabisi Ayeni said the essence of the pamphlet was to educate the people on both sides. He said: The pamphlet was to convey a message on the need for farmers and herdsmen to live together in peace. We want to ensure peaceful coexistence among the herders and farmers. We are not saying the Fulani herdsmen should not obey the anti-open grazing law enacted by the Benue State Government. NAIJ.com reported that Benue state police command is reported to have arrested four suspects in connection with the January 1 massacre in Benue state. PAY ATTENTION: Read the news on Nigerias #1 new app The suspects were also arrested over the killings of Sgt Solomon Dung and other police officers. The command said the arrest was in line with the directives of IGP Ibrahim Idris who had ordered that all persons involved in the killings in Benue state and those in possession of AK47 rifles and other prohibited arms should be arrested, TVC news reports. Victims of herdsmen killings buried in Benue state on NAIJ.com TV: [embedded content] Source: Naija.ng CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM: General Loading... Home | News | General | Fashola blows hot, threatens to seek FG's approval to withdraw from N120 billion Bonny road project - The N120 billion Bonny-Bodo road project may come to an abrupt stop if the differences between leaders of host community are not settled - The minister of power, works and housing, Babatunde Fashola, threatened to seek the president's approval to withdraw funds for the project - Fashola urged the leaders to come to an agreement for the project to commence The minister of power, works and housing, Babatunde Fashola, has threatened to seek President Muhammadu Buhari's approval to withdraw from the N120 billion Bonny-Bodo road project if the host communities are not willing to cooperate. The minister of power, works and housing, Babatunde Fashola, made the threat at a meeting with rulers, Julius Berger, Nigeria Liquefied Natural Gas (NLNG) and Council of Elders from Ataba, Gokana, on Thursday, February 22, in Abuja, The Nation reports. NAIJ.com gathered that the minister told aggrieved community leaders to settle their difference, failure to do so might force him to seek the president's approval to divert the N60 billion part contract fund for other projects. READ ALSO: 2019: Buhari asked for more time to decide - Okorocha It was learnt that the NLNG is providing N60 billion, and another N60 billion from the federal government. According to the minister, the contractor had received mobilisation yet the project was suspended due to lack of unity from benefiting communities. The elders had insisted that the project would not be implemented except they were 'carried along' and a route built in Ataba. The displeased minister said: We might tell NLNG to take its money back. Since you said you know the permanent secretary, I will leave you with him. All I want is a peace accord and an invitation to Julius Berger, not later than Wednesday 28, otherwise I will write a report to Mr President that it doesnt seem that this project is ready to go on, but we can move the money to another project. Whether it is Ataba, Ogoni or Gokana, you own this project. The people you call militants are not spirits. They take their cue from how you react. You are leaders there. If you go back home today and say it is over, the militants too will calm down. They dont do anything without alerting the leaders. For us, we cant keep the money down. The contractor has received his money but now he cant work. There are projects where contractors are waiting for money, they dont have it. That is a contradiction that will not last long. So, I will leave you. You know where we stand. We have an idea of where you stand. For me, it is a compromise that owes the project. NLNG will not be there forever. It took time to even beg them to release this money. So, if you dont take ownership of the project and put it to use, we might as well tell them, take your money back the project is not ready. When there is peace, we will come back but we need to have a position before the end of this week. There must be an MoU of compromise, assuring us that there will be peace in that place, agreed to by you, give it to us and invite the contractor to come back. Suggest to the contractor anything you want him to do. You cant take over how they organise their business. They are not bringing imported labour into your land. If your people want to supply diesel, sand, make the case for them; let them choose but dont impose on them. They must be able to screen those they will admit to work with them and those who dont meet that standard must sit. PAY ATTENTION: Install our latest app for Android, read best news on Nigerias #1 news The stakeholders, however, pleaded for an extra week to re-converge, saying that they would conclude and submit a workable document by March 7. Meanwhile, NAIJ.com previously reported that Professor Yemi Osinbajo arrived Bonny Island, Rivers state, for the ground-breaking ceremony of multi-billion naira road project embarked upon by the Muhammadu Buhari-led administration. Laolu Akande, senior special assistant on media and publicity to the vice president made this known on his twitter page on Thursday October 12, 2017. List President Buhari's achievements in two years - on NAIJ.com TV [embedded content] Source: Naija.ng CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM: General Loading... The Northern Elders Forum (NEF) has appointed Prof. Ango Abdullahi as its Chairman Board of Trustee (BOT), with a promise to work with the Federal Government to ensure peace in the country.The forum made the promise in a statement signed by Alhaji Mahammed Kirfi, its implementation committee chairman on Thursday in Abuja. The Forum condemned the state of insecurity and killings in some parts of the country. It decried particularly, the state of insecurity and killings associated with the Boko Haram insurgency and herdsmen/farmers clashes, especially in the North. Kirfi described the killings as horrifying carnage and bloodletting and demanded an immediate end to it. The Forum called for the introduction and application of modern livestock management practices as part of measures to end the clashes. This, he noted would go a long way in protecting herdsmen and farmers, their families and communities, as well as enhance quality of life across the country. Kirfi said the decision to appoint Ango was taken at the end of deliberation at the Forums Extra Ordinary meeting. According to him, the meeting also approved a new structure proposed by its special Think-Tank and appointed new officers to run the forums activities. Other new leaders of the forum according to the statement include; Alhaji Sani Daura as Deputy Chairman North-West, Gen. Paul Tarfa (rtd) Deputy Chairman North-East, and Amb. Yahaya Kwande as Deputy Chairman North-Central. Kirfi also said that the forum ratified the appointment of the already existing 21 members of the Board of Trustees and appointed a management board. They are Alhaji Mohammed Goni as chairman, Dr. Patrick Adaba as Vice Chairman, Dr Yima Sen as Director- General, and Dr Hakeem Ahmed, Mr Sam Nda Isiah and Capt. Bashir Sodangi as members among others. Home | News | General | I personally evacuated dead bodies of my 2 sons after Boko Haram's attacks on 58 Buni Yadi students - Goni Ali - A father, Goni Ali, has recalled how he evacuated dead bodies of his two sons when Boko Haram killed 58 Buni Yadi students - Buni Yadi attack occurred two months before the abduction of about 200 Chibok girls in Borno state - Ali said that the federal ministry of education did not show up until after one year after the incident Four years after suspected Boko Haram insurgents killed about 58 students of federal government college, Buni Yadi, Yobe state, one of the victims' fathers, Goni Ali, recalled how he evacuated dead bodies of his two sons. The Cable reports that Buni Yadi attack occurred two months before the abduction of about 200 Chibok girls in Borno state. NAIJ.com gathered that the school students were allegedly attacked by the insurgents for receiving western education. READ ALSO: Why we halted operation in Sambisa forest - Army The Cable visited the school to speak with witnesses and survivors of the attack. In the second part of the series, a parent re-lives the gory experience. The wounds, apparently, are yet to heal. Goni Ali, the father who recalled how he evacuated dead bodies of his two sons after Boko Haram killed 58 Buni Yadi students, Yobe state in 2014 The federal government college, Buni Yadi, Yobe state, used to be an academic destination for young minds of promise. But today, despite efforts to rebuild it, the school still echoes with the helpless wails of those boys murdered in their sleep by Boko Haram. On February 24, 2014, the school came under attack from Boko Haram insurgents who snuffed life out of 58 male students in the coldest blood possible. Though this tragedy did not generate international outcry like Chibok, it is most likely governments poor response to it fed Boko Harams confidence to abduct, two months later, hundreds of girls from the Government Secondary School, Chibok, Borno state. I personally evacuated my sons' dead bodies Four years after, The Cable spoke with some of the bereaved parents who are still bitter about the governments perceived callousness. Goni Ali is a father of four children who were in the school. Two of his boys were killed during the attack. He said the incident has left the most painful, tragic and traumatic memory in his life. We evacuated the dead bodies of our children and nobody assisted us. Nobody ever came to us as parents of the victims of the attack to sympathise with us, he said. The federal ministry of education did not show up until after one year that was in 2015. When some of them came and met me as one of the parents of the victims, I specifically told them we were disappointed with the government. It was reported that the state governor Ibrahim Geidam visited the school and gave the victims N100 million. In 2016, Aisha Buhari gave the Buni Yadi victims N25 million proceeds from the launch of her book, Essentials of Beauty Therapy. They probably never saw the money. He said the military could have saved the children Military checkpoints were dismantled a few days to the attack Ali lamented that the Nigerian military received information of the planned attack on the school hours ahead but failed to act to save the children. Many of us have accused the military of failing to adequately protect the students in the face of the attack. What pained us as parents was that we heard that prior to the attack, check points close to the school were relocated, he says. When the attack occurred, the principal was not in the school, his vice was also absent, as well as most of the senior staff members of the school. The military also quickly dismantled some checkpoints that very evening before the incident. So it seems like they were aware of the incident. Muhammad Machima, chairman of the Parent Teacher Association (PTA), informed The Cable that several letters were written to challenge the action of the military, but no single answer was provided. Nobody ever visited the place to sympathise with even the family and the community. Not until during the 2015 election, when the minister of science and technology, Dr. Abdul Bulama, who is an indigene of Buni Yadi, remembered that we are existing, Machima recalled. PAY ATTENTION: Read best news on Nigerias #1 news app He told us he came to apologise, but we told him we dont want his apology, because we know it was because of election. Meanwhile, NAIJ.com had earlier reported that the Senate leader, Ahmed Lawan, representing Yobe north senatorial district and his counterpart, Senator Mohammed Hassan of Yobe south senatorial on Thursday, February 21, engaged each other in verbal attacks over Yobe missing school girls. Nigerian Air Force operations against Boko Haram - on NAIJ.com TV [embedded content] Source: Naija.ng CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM: General Loading... Home | News | General | Buhari receives Olu of Warri in Aso Rock President Muhammadu Buhari received Olu of Warri, His Majesty Ogiame Ikenwoli, in Aso Rock on Friday, February 23. NAIJ.com gathered that the special adviser to President Buhari on media, Femi Adesina, made this known on Friday, February 23, after the president's meeting the monarch. Although, the details of the meeting was not made public, it is believed that the monarch came to visit the president on the state of the nation. READ ALSO: President Buhari calls El-Rufai the bulldozer President Buhari receives Olu of Warri in Aso Rock At the president's meeting with the monarch were the former governor of Delta state, Emmanuel Uduaghan and the chairman, Presidential Advisory Committee on Anti Corruption (PACAC), Itse Sagay. President Buhari with Olu of Warri HM Ogiame Ikenwoli, Chief Ayiri Emami, Chief Brown Mene, Chief Roland Oritsejafor, former Governor of Delta state Emmanuel Uduaghan and Chief Charles Ajuyah Meanwhile, NAIJ.com had previously reported that President Muhammadu Buhari on Tuesday, February 13, received letter of credence from Alhaji Rashid Bawa, Ghanas High Commissioner-designate to Nigeria in the State House. President Buhari receives Olu of Warri in Aso Rock This is expected to improve the relations between Nigeria and Ghana. Letters of credence is a formal document accrediting a diplomatic officer to a foreign court or government. President Buhari receives Olu of Warri in Aso Rock The Ghanaian ambassador proceeded to the presidents wing to present the letter of credence after the initial formalities and inspection of Guard of Honour. President Buhari receives Olu of Warri in Aso Rock PAY ATTENTION: Watch more videos on NAIJ.com TV 2019 Presidency: Nigerians reveal why they prefer Atiku to President Buhari - on NAIJ.com TV [embedded content] Source: Naija.ng CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM: General Loading... Home | News | General | Police IG set up task force to enforce retrieval of banned firearms - Police chief Ibrahim Idris ordered statement police commissioners to enforce ban on firearms +These also include those used by militias and vigilante groups - The police called on the citizens to support them The inspector-general of police, Ibrahim Idris has set up a task force to enforce the ban on illegal firearms. In a statement on Friday, February 23, the police chief ordered state commissioners of police to commence the simultaneous retrieval of banned firearms from vigilante and militias. It also gave a list of the 9 firearms that have been prohibited. READ ALSO: President Buhari calls El-Rufai the bulldozer The police called on the citizens to support them as they work towards making the nation safe. Read the statement below: The Inspector General of Police Ibrahim K. Idris on 21st February, 2018 directed the Commissioners of Police of all the State Commands of the Federation and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Abuja and their Supervising Assistant Inspectors General of Police of the Twelve Zonal Commands in the Country; to immediately commence simultaneously throughout the Country, the disarmament and recovery of prohibited firearms, ammunition and weapons in the possession of all suspected Militias, Bandits, vigilante groups, Neighbourhood watch and other groups or Individual(s) or Bodies bearing prohibited firearms and ammunition, illegal weapons and lethal devices whether locally fabricated, modified or otherwise fashioned to kill or that can cause harm or injury to persons or that can cause panic, fear, apprehension, security breach, breach of Peace or that can cause threat to law and order anywhere in the Country. Below are the categories of the prohibited/illegal firearms and ammunition, specified under Chapter F.28 LFN 2004 Fire Arms Act: Prohibited Firearms 1. Artillery 2. Apparatus for the discharge of any explosives of gas diffusing projectile. 3. Rocket weapons 4. Bombs and Grenades 5. Machine-Guns and Machine-Pistols 6. Military rifles, namely; those of calibers 7.62mm, 9mm, .300 inches 7. Revolvers and Pistols whether rifled or unrifled (including flint-lock pistols and cap pistols). 8. Firearms such as Pump action gun of all categories 9. Any other firearms/lethal weapons fabricated to kill To this end, A Police Joint Task Enforcement Team has been set up at the Force Headquarters by the Inspector General of Police, while the Commissioners of Police and the Assistant Inspectors General of Police in the States and Zonal Commands respectively have been mandated to immediately set-up similar Police Joint Task Enforcement Teams in their States and Zones to commence the Mop-up, Seizure and Recovery of all illegal and prohibited firearms and ammunition from wrong hands, suspected Militias, Militants, Criminal/Unlawful Gangs. The operation will equally include Cordon and Search and Raid, Seizure from any premises, hideouts, dwelling houses or buildings or sites (completed or under construction) or any other location where these illegal/prohibited firearms are kept or on reasonable suspicion are believed to be kept or being used. Furthermore, members of the General Public, individuals and groups such as Vigilantes and neighbourhood watch group under State Governments, Local Governments or Town Unions, Hunters and Watch night men or any group or association under any capacity or guise other than statutory Security Agencies recognized and gazetted by the Federal Government of Nigeria to bear firearms of specified category; who are currently possessing and using prohibited/illegal firearms such as Pump action gun and the likes for whatsoever purpose are hereby warned and given Twenty One (21) days from today, 22nd February, 2018 to surrender them to the Commissioner of Police in the State they are domiciled. This Operation which among other purposes, is aimed at the full enforcement of the Firearms Act, mopping-up and recovery of all prohibited firearms and illegally acquired weapons will enable the Nigeria Police Force deal decisively with Herders and Farmers Clashes, Kidnappings, Armed Robbery, Cattle Rustling, Militancy and Terrorism. The Commissioners of Police in charge of State Commands are under strict instruction of the Inspector General of Police to enforce and carryout these directives in totality. They have also been directed to convey a security stakeholders meeting immediately to sensitize and educate the members of the general public, stakeholders and other interest groups throughout the States of the Federation and the FCT on this operation. Licensing No license will be given or recognized in respect of prohibited firearms and ammunition except if granted by the President and Commander-In-Chief of the Federal Republic of Nigeria upon the recommendation of the Inspector General of Police. For avoidance of doubt, the Robbery and Firearms Act Cap R.11 LFN 2004 and Firearms Act Cap F.28 LFN 2004 are explicit on punishment for illegal possession of Firearms, offence and punishment for receiving, punishments for parties to offences under sections 1,2,3 or 4 of Cap R.11 and also the provisions for regulating the possession of and dealing in firearms and ammunitions including muzzle-loading firearms and for matters ancillary thereto (L.N. 32 of 1959) as cited under the Firearms Act. PAY ATTENTION: Read the news on Nigerias #1 new app The Nigeria Police Force therefore implores concerned Citizens, General Public, States and Local Government Authorities to prevail on their vigilantes, neighbourhood watch, civil security outfits and watch night men and others attached to any organization including Public and Private Institutions in the Country to surrender within the time limit of 21days, all the prohibited firearms in their possession to the Police and be law abiding. Anyone found with prohibited firearms after the expiration of the 21days will be arrested, investigated and prosecuted. The Police will not hesitate to apply the full weight of the Law on any individual or group under any guise whose conduct run contrary to the law of the land. The renewed commitment of the Nigeria Police Force to guarantee protection of Lives and Property across the country remains unequivocal and unwavering. Meanwhile, Benue state police command arrested four suspects in connection with the January 1 massacre in Benue state. The suspects were also arrested over the killings of Sgt Solomon Dung and other police officers. The command said the arrest was in line with the directives of IGP Ibrahim Idris who had ordered that all persons involved in the killings in Benue state and those in possession of AK47 rifles and other prohibited arms should be arrested, TVC news reports. Victims of herdsmen killings buried in Benue state on NAIJ.com TV: [embedded content] Source: Naija.ng CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM: General Loading... Femi Fani-Kayode, former Aviation Minister, on Friday alleged that the President Muhammadu Buhari-led government was plotting to arrest parents of missing students of Government Girls Science and Technical School in Dapchi, Yobe state. The former Minister anchored his claim on the fact that parents of the missing girls cried out to the world about the incident. In a tweet, the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, chieftain maintained that the current administration is heartless and mendacious. The PDP chieftain also insisted that Buharis government was empowering Boko Haram by paying ransom for the abducted girls. He wrote: Heard they are attempting to arrest some of the parents of the abducted girls for speaking out and letting the world know the truth. Were dealing with a heartless,mendacious govt who have empowered Boko Haram enormously by paying them huge ransoms for kidnapped girls.#Yobe. Recall that about 94 girls from the Government Girls Science and Technical Secondary School in Dapchi, Yobe state were reported missing after Boko Haram terrorists invaded the school on Monday February 19, 2018. Few days later, the Nigerian military came up with a report that some of the abducted Yobe schoolgirls have been rescued. However, governor of the state, Ibrahim Geidam, yesterday dismissed the report, stating that none of the abducted girls have been rescued. Home | News | General | Nigerian Air Force has trained over 500 special forces - CAS - From 2015 to date, the Nigerian Air Force has trained not less than 500 special forces - The chief of training and operation at NAF headquarters said between 2015 and 2016, NAF trained 30 regiment personnel on counter terrorism in Pakistan - In 2017, about 300 Nigerian Air Force special forces personnel graduated in two batches The Nigerian Air Force on Friday, February 23, said it had trained no few than 500 special forces from 2015 to date. The Chief of Air Staff, Air Marshal, Sadiq Abubakar, disclosed this at the graduation of 150 special forces at the Regiment Training Centre, Kaduna. NAN reports that Abubakar was represented by AVM Nurudeen Balogun, the Chief of Training and Operation at the NAF headquarters. READ ALSO: President Buhari calls El-Rufai the bulldozer He said between 2015 and 2016, NAF trained 30 regiment personnel on counter terrorism in Pakistan and another 30 officers on Aircraft Anti-Hijack in China respectively. The CAS said that the regiment training Centre had graduated 300 Nigerian Air Force Special Forces personnel in 2017 in two batches. Along with todays graduation, the NAF has trained well over 500 special forces personnel since assumption of office. The Air chief said the force had initiated the progressive training of special forces which would add to the defence architecture to enable the projection of air power. Imbibed the attributes of absolute discipline, honestly intelligence, motivation , Judgement, decisiveness teamwork aggressiveness and courage, among other values. I want to you to note that it is the possession of this virtue that binds all ranks in the service. The current leadership of the NAF is committed to enthroning professionalism and as such, the rigorous combat training you received is designed to enhance your professional performance, he said. He said that NAF would continue to build a highly sustainable and functional air force that would be responsive and decisive. In this regard, several air and ground related capacity building initiative have been conducted in recent time, he said. He said this would enable NAF to have depth flexibility and capability to operate either alone or in conjunction with other sister services. You will be deployed to various locations where your expertise will be required in resolving numerous security challenges across the country," he added. Earlier, the acting Commandant, Regiment Training Centre, Group. Capt. Issac Subi, said that the 150 graduating students received training for eight weeks. Subi said the curriculum of the Special Forces course was structured to make it effective and efficient to meet the ever changing complexities of military operations. The head of Israeli military training, Roy Zechut, said the trainees in adapting the new skills acquired during the course, would enhance operational success in combating the current terrorists and criminal threats. Zechut reminded the students of the task ahead of them saying: you will have to prove on daily basis that you belong to the special forces family." NAIJ.com previously reported that the Chief of the Air Staff (CAS) Air Marshal Sadique Abubakar led a delegation of senior officers from the Headquarters Nigerian Air Force (NAF) on a courtesy visit to the executive governor of Nasarawa state in Lafia on February 20, 2018. PAY ATTENTION: Get the Latest Nigerian News Anywhere 24/7. Spend less on the Internet! The one-day working visit was in furtherance of the NAFs plan to establish a Quick Response Wing (QRW) in Lafia and other settlements, especially close to the border between Nasarawa and Benue states. The CAS disclosed that a careful threat analysis conducted by the NAF revealed that parts of the state, especially the Benue-Nasarawa axis, was prone to crisis, which NAF presence could help reduce and hence, the decision to establish QRWs in Nasarawa state. Female aerospace engineer from the Tsaigumi UAV team on NAIJ.com TV. [embedded content] Source: Naija.ng CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM: General Loading... Home | News | General | Kogi Government House driver jailed 7 years for causing Professor Iyayis death - The driver responsible for the death of Professor Festus Iyayi in 2013 has been jailed - Danladi Baba was found him guilty of reckless driving by Chief Magistrate Alhassan Husaini of Lokoja Chief Magistrate Court 11 - He was subsequently sentenced to seven years imprisonment Danladi Baba, a driver with Kogi Government House, Lokoja whose reckless driving caused the death of Prof. Festus Iyayi in 2013, has been sentenced to seven years imprisonment. Chief Magistrate Alhassan Husaini of Lokoja Chief Magistrate Court 11, who jailed Baba on Friday, said he found him guilty of reckless driving and causing the death of Prof. Festus Iyayi in a car crash in November, 2013. I have no option than to sentence you, Danladi baba, to seven years without option of fine, the chief magistrate declared. The chief magistrate cautioned government drivers against recklessness drivingespecially while on convoys, and accused the drivers of abusing the privilege of driving VIPs. READ ALSO: President Buhari calls El-Rufai the bulldozer These siren-blaring convoys force on-coming and other categories of vehicles off the roads in a manner that exposes law abiding road users to hazards, he fumed. The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that Baba had been arraigned on a one-count charge of causing death by dangerous driving, an offence punishable under section 5 of the Federal Highway Act CAP F. 13 of 2004. According to the prosecution, Baba, while driving a Toyota Hilux pick-up van on the convoy of then Kogi governor Idris Wada, drove dangerously without regard to other roads users. It said that the action led to a near head-on collision with a bus belonging to the University of Benin chapter of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), which was traveling to Kano. The bus, in an attempt to swerve and avoid the collision, skidded and rolled over several times, leading to the death of Iyayi, while two others Mrs. Ngozi Iloh and Dr. Enchanted Anthony were injured, it said. NAN reports that Baba, who was visibly shaken by the sentence, openly cried in the court room while being dragged away by prison officials. PAY ATTENTION: Install our latest app for Android, read best news on Nigerias #1 news Meanwhile, NAIJ.com had reported that the Kogi government was dragged to court by an indigene of the state over its decision to provide land for federal government's proposed cattle colonies for herdsmen. NAIJ.com gathered that the case was instituted by Sheyi Babaeko, an aspirant for the Kogi state House of Assembly in the 2019 elections. Joined in the suit is the Kogi state governor, Alhaji Yahaya Bello, as well as the commissioners of justice and lands in the state. What must President Buhari do to regain the trust of Nigerians? On NAIJ.com TV: [embedded content] Source: Naija.ng CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM: General Loading... Home | News | General | Transparency Internationals corruption rating is faulty - FG - The federal government says the criteria used by Transparency International on its recent ranking of Nigeria is faulty - Going further, the FG also says the body has a responsibility to reflect the larger picture of the concrete and verifiable achievements of the Buhari administration - The FG says the anti-corruption watchdog was very misleading in its assessment of the Federal governments anti corruption efforts The Buhari presidency has questioned the criteria or facts used by Transparency International, the anti-corruption watchdog to rank the country 148th least corrupt in the world. In a statement by spokesman, Garba Shehu, the government questioned the method used by TI to arrive at what it called TIs very misleading and unfair conclusions in its assessment of the federal governments efforts in this anti-corruption crusade. Government said while it welcomes constructive criticisms from the anti-corruption watchdog, the organisation has a responsibility to reflect the larger picture of the concrete and verifiable achievements of the Buhari administration since it came into office in May 2015. READ ALSO: President Buhari calls El-Rufai the bulldozer Political will is the first major component of fighting corruption in any country and President Buhari has made a huge difference by demonstrating not only the political will but also the extraordinary courage to go after high profile looters, including former military service chiefs and Judges. It was once unthinkable to touch or prosecute the big men for corruption in Nigeria but President Buhari has ended impunity for corruption. Today, the Buhari administration has made accountability the bedrock of governance and corruption is no longer fashionable because it attracts consequences. Blocking leakages for corruption through the rigid enforcement of the Treasury Single Account (TSA) had made life tougher for corrupt officials. He regretted that these efforts were not acknowledged by the Corruption Watchdog. Figures published by the EFCC, the anti-corruption agency, reveal that N738.9 billion was recovered in just two years of the Buhari administration and this impressive and unprecedented record is worthy of mention and acknowledgement by anybody genuinely looking at the larger picture of the countrys progress in the war against corruption. During the 7th session of the Conference of State Parties to the United Nations Convention Against Corruption in Vienna, Austria, the Chairman of the Agency Ibrahim Magu noted that the figure represents $2.9 billion dollars. Besides these impressive recoveries of looted funds, the EFCC has recorded more than 140 successful prosecutions. The Federal government has also signed international agreements to recover the proceeds of corruption and to block the laundering of stolen assets abroad by public officials. Anybody who knows where Nigeria was coming from would not believe that corruption is worse under the Buhari administration. We wonder where they got their facts from. At a time, they are alleging increase in the incidence of corruption under this government, the whole of Africa is applauding by choosing President Buhari as the continental Champion to lead the fight against it. Nothing can be more eloquent than this. In the end, this whole episode may turn out to be just a political distraction, given the strong views some of TIs patrons have expressed against the Buhari Administration. This notwithstanding, facts are facts, and those facts wont cease to be facts even if you dont care to pay attention to them, the statement concluded. PAY ATTENTION: Install our latest app for Android, read best news on Nigerias #1 news app Meanwhile, NAIJ.com had reported that the Amnesty International condemned the deadly Boko Haram attack at a mosque in Mubi, Adamawa state, that killed 50 people. The director of Amnesty International Nigeria, Osai Ojigho, described the attack as another example of Boko Harams continued unlawful disregard for human life. He insisted that the terror group must stop targeting civilians and be held accountable for all the atrocities it has committed, including the use of children for bomb missions. Nigerians share their thoughts exactly 1 yr before elections | Street Gist - on NAIJ.com TV: [embedded content] Source: Naija.ng CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM: General Loading... Home | Politics | Governor Amosun reveals part of what was discussed as former Nigerian heads of state, presidents meet with Buhari - Governor Ibikunle Amosun says the national council of state is increasing funding for agriculture to $1 billion from $200 million - Governor Abubakar Badaru of Jigawa says the funding would help stop Nigeria from importation of items it can produce - The coucil also approved some appointments The national council of state which met on Thursday, February 22, agreed that funding for agriculture should be increased from the current $200 million to $1 billion to aid diversification and ensure food security, Governor Ibikunle Amosun of Ogun has said. Daily Trust reports that Governor Amosun told reporters tha the money would be disbursed through the Anchor Borrower Programme and other existing initiatives. READ ALSO: Buhari meets with governors in Aso Villa, exchanges pleasantries with Fayose CBN, in collaboration with the ministries of agriculture and Trade and Investment, all of them are putting heads together to help our small and medium scale enterprises. All these our small holder farmers, we are helping them now. Indeed, it was even mentioned that the $1 billion may not be okay, we are looking at maybe $2 billion, but of course, $1 billion will be the starting point, Amosun said. On his part, the governor of Jigawa state, Abubakar Badaru, explained that livestock would also benefit from the $1 billion support. According to him, the fund would be given as credit to farmers to develop their own businesses with a view to boosting the economy as well as act as import substitution mechanism. With this, he said, it would help the country to stop importation of milk, beef, chicken and others in the category. So, it is not purely designed to support the rich livestock producers, but to support the movement of those existing herdsmen that cause this problem and these clashes, he said. PAY ATTENTION: Read the news on Nigerias #1 new app Further speaking, the governor of Anambra state, Willey Obiano, revealed that the council approved the appointments of two non-legal practitioners to the federal Judicial Service Commission (JSC), a commissioner of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) and 23 members of the National Population Commission (NPC). NAIJ.com earlier reported that pictures of President Muhammadu Buhari discussing with former heads of state after the council of state meeting has emerged. It was earlier reported that the meeting took place on Thursday, February 22, at the presidential villa, Abuja. Some of the former heads of state who attended the meeting included Yakubu Gowon, Olusegun Obasanjo and Abdusalami Abubakar. Obasanjo and Jonathan are good | Naij.com TV - on NAIJ.com TV [embedded content] Source: Naija.ng CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM: Politics Nauseating Whoopi Goldberg defends murderous regime North Korea, says the countrys evil leaders deserve respect Have you ever read a story about something stupid that Joy Behar or Whoopi Goldberg said while on the set of The View and thought to yourself, how on earth is that show still on the air? Earlier this month, Whoopi Goldberg took part of the show to criticize Vice President Mike Pence for demonstrating what she considered to be a lack of respect for North Korea by not standing up during the entrance of the countrys Olympic athletes. We have to be respectful because what we do know about politicians is they end up sitting with people that you and I say well, why are they sitting with them? So, if youre in Korea, you need to stand up. You need to stand up and show respect, Goldberg said, apparently not even considering how foolish such a statement really is. (Related: Theres a reason why Whoopi Goldberg made Natural News Celebrity Hall of Shame list back in 2015.) The reason Whoopi Goldbergs criticism of Vice President Mike Pence was foolish is twofold. First of all, North Korea isnt exactly a friend of the United States; as a matter of fact, over the past several months, they have been making numerous threats against our country and working diligently to develop weapons that can reach U.S. soil. Why on earth would the vice president of the United States stand for a regime that wants to bring about the destruction of America? Respect is earned, and if theres one thing that North Korea has shown us as of late, its that they most certainly do not deserve our respect. Second, did Whoopi Goldberg have anything to say about respect when the congressional Democrats sat like a bunch of whiney snowflakes during President Trumps State of the Union address? Was she as outraged over the Democrats not standing in support of President Trump as she was about Vice President Mike Pence not standing for a murderous, tyrannical regime? The answer is no, of course not. Whoopi Goldberg is a partisan hack who cares more about viciously attacking those on the right than anything else. Astonishingly, the hosts of The View have found themselves surrounded in controversy even more recently than this. Over the past few days, ABC News has been flooded with more than 25,000 angry phone calls in response to a comment that Joy Behar made regarding Vice President Pences Christian views, in which the liberal host suggested that Pence has a mental illness for speaking with Jesus. (Related: Joy Behar of The View is an enabler of fake news after defending her colleagues and their bogus lies on so-called Russian collusion.) The comment was so absurd that it prompted Vice President Pence to respond to it on C-Span. To have ABC maintain a broadcast forum that compared Christianity to mental illness is just wrong, Pence said. It is simply wrong for ABC to have a television program that expresses that kind of religious intolerance. With criticism pouring in from every corner of the country Joy Behar had no choice but to (sort of) apologize: I dont mean to offend people but apparently I keep doing it, Behar said. It was a joke. We the people arent laughing, Joy, and quite frankly, you should be ashamed of yourself. Time and time again, The View exposes itself for what it really is: A show that consists of five women, the majority of whom are radical leftists or worse, hellbent on advancing the progressive agenda through lies and deception while trashing anyone who considers him or herself to be a conservative. How the show is still on the air after it has been surrounded by this much controversy is anyones guess. Sources include: Breitbart.com FoxNews.com SINCE THE RAPTURE OCCURS BEFORE THE FUTURE 7 YR TREATY IS SIGNED, I WONT BE AROUND TO HAVE THE ACTUAL TREATY SIGNING. BUT UNTIL THEN THIS SITE IS DEDICATED TO THE BEGININGS OF THE ISRAELI / ARAB PEACE PROCESS. AND AS CLOSE TO THE 7 YEAR SIGNING THAT WE GET BEFORE THE RAPTURE OF THE SAVED TO HEAVEN. UNTIL WE MEET JESUS IN THE CLOUDS BODILY, AND COME TO EARTH 7 YRS LATER. Weinstein's rep: "Mr. Weinstein acknowledges the valuable input both Meryl Streep and Jennifer Lawrence have contributed to this conversation and apologizes" https://t.co/VlJWjKOiyi Hollywood Reporter (@THR) February 22, 2018 Harvey Weinstein apologizes to Meryl Streep and Jennifer Lawrence. His lawyer read the following statement: "Mr Weinstein acknowledges the valuable input both Meryl Streep and Jennifer Lawrence have contributed to this conversation and apologizes, the creep states.Moving forward, Mr. Weinstein has advised his counsel to not include specific names of former associates; and to avoid whenever possible, even if they are in the public record. Mr. Weinstein has been informed that his civil counsel responded in court to a class action lawsuit which improperly sought to include all actresses who had previously worked with Mr. Weinstein, even where those actresses have made no claim of wrongdoing.Both actresses were not about that life and shut that shit down. Streep went 0 to a 100 real quick calling the pig and his lawyers desperate.source= https://twitter.com/THR/status/966771242429693952 OMG! Yessss, Bellamy. Secure that post-Scandal work! Reply Thread Link Oh lord, catty Avon ladies. Nope. Reply Thread Link Yes! I love her so much and am so in now that she's been cast. Hope it gets picked up to series! Reply Thread Link Mlm? HmmT Reply Thread Link Get that work Bellamy. You deserved a better story arc during your time on Scandal. Reply Thread Link this sounds like such a fun plot. i hope it does well, i'll watch for sure Reply Thread Link I love her so much. Reply Thread Link LOL no joke, I actually wrote a screenplay with this plot! Reply Thread Link i need to read this Reply Parent Thread Link Yes! I never could have guessed when Scandal started that Mellie would have ended up being my fav character. Reply Thread Link Same! Really hope Mellie ends the show happy. Reply Parent Thread Link Mellie was the best part of this show when I actually watched Is she president yet Reply Parent Thread Link Yes. Through a lot of difficulty and she kiiiiinda wasn't elected by the people but like who cares tbh neither was Fitz! Reply Parent Thread Link Same! I'm so happy she's president tbh, I was cheering for her! Reply Parent Thread Link Same Reply Parent Thread Link she's the best! she stole the show from kerry washington early on. this is when i started stanning: Reply Parent Thread Link I stopped watching post Reply Parent Thread Link I stopped watching regularly after the slave-livia auction & completely before the police brutality episode aired and she's the only one I've missed. Reply Parent Thread Link I've been watching old Scandal eps for work lately -- can someone who watches regularly tell me if there's ANY reason, other than the fact that Joe Morton is awesome and incredibly magnetic to watch, that no one has killed Rowan/Eli/whatever his name is yet?? Because it really seems like someone should've by now. Dude is chaotic evil af. Reply Thread Link First of all, what is your work that you get to watch TV for it? I want it! And second, no not really. I think in some ways it's because Olivia needs the anchoring of her father, but it's not like anyone is necessary on a show like Scandal, but he provides Olivia with someone to blame/go to/be annoyed with/be upset at, etc. So for the writers, he's a good card to have around. It is a little absurd when he's done such horrible things and multiple people have had evident opportunities to kill him but eh In earlier seasons I had the same sentiment but as we're so close to the end now, I kinda just hope he dies before it's all over, I truly hate him, he's vile. Reply Parent Thread Link they sorta retconned that as long as his was ~Command~ they were people ready and waiting to kill anyone who attacked him (i.e. when Olivia was ~command~, and quinn tried to kill her, quinn almost got killed by some random through a window). otherwise, there's a sorta moral weirdness with scandal because like everyone has been so morally corrupt that they don't deal with the other corrupt people they love like that. Liv loves her shitty abusive father, so no one else is going to kill him (or her mom lol) Reply Parent Thread Link I am impatiently waiting for this blue dye to wash out. Reply Thread Link It's never going to happen Reply Parent Thread Link this isn't the first time i've done this. it washes out eventually Reply Parent Thread Expand Link blue dye doesn't wash out Reply Parent Thread Expand Link I had fiery red and blue hair last year, and a little bleach with like 3% developer took all the color out... except for the pink I had on before, that those two covered pretty much completely. Reply Parent Thread Expand Link I'm waiting for the purple to wash out. Looks not the best, but I still rock it. Reply Parent Thread Link I just turned 27 and I swear to God my roots are already SO noticeably white. I've been getting white hairs since I was a freshman in high school though so it's not shocking. My Grandma had totally white hair before she turned 30 but great skin for almost her entire life. I guess it's easier to fix bad hair than bad skin but I'm still insecure about it. Reply Thread Link Ugh, same here. I'm 27 too and started getting comments about white hair last year: "Is that white hair? Wow I'm *insert older age here* and don't have any!") Now I'm so self-conscious that a little over a week ago I started dying it with semi-permanent dye and don't think I'll stop anytime soon. Reply Parent Thread Link Lol i started finding white hairs last year and im only 25. I feel you. Reply Parent Thread Link ugh i just found a super white strand of* (lol) hair sticking out of the top of my head like alfalfa (almost 27) i told my dad whos basically got as much gray hair as me and almost 50, he blamed it on my mom Edited at 2018-02-23 02:48 am (UTC) Reply Parent Thread Link i was thinking about getting back to my natural hair color, but then took a closer look of my roots and realized that nope, unless i'm fine with walking around with mostly white hair at 30, i've got to keep dying it. it was a sad day :( Reply Parent Thread Link I started going grey at 20. It's pretty damn depressing. Reply Parent Thread Link I like the wig. My hair is a bit darker than usual because I used semi-permanent dye to get rid of white hairs, but I want to lighten it a bit when it washes out. Reply Thread Link reaching around those implants to wipe your butt sounds exhausting Reply Thread Link Time for a bidet revolution, I guess. Reply Parent Thread Link lmaoooo, yiiiikes. omg first you have the unicorns username and now you have Viago as your icon?! Stanning you rn. Reply Parent Thread Link you're too lovely! Reply Parent Thread Link My hair is orange. Super bright. I bleached my roots myself and then went over it with Overtone conditioner and it absolutely dyed my bleached hair. That stuff works Reply Thread Link she looks like shit. but clap for this hooker, I didn't think she could afford to have a pool Reply Thread Link lmao Reply Parent Thread Link what kind of shade sandwich! Reply Parent Thread Link idk why but "shade sandwich" is killing me, it's so good :D Reply Parent Thread Link LMAO Reply Parent Thread Link Lmfao this classic ONTD comment Reply Parent Thread Link lol Reply Parent Thread Link Lmfao Reply Parent Thread Link damn lol Reply Parent Thread Link LMAO FUUUUUU THIS KILLED ME LMAOOO Reply Parent Thread Link LMAO irl Reply Parent Thread Link Tell ha Reply Parent Thread Link Lmfao bye Reply Parent Thread Link omggggggg dead Reply Parent Thread Link I'd been researching bleaching my hair so I could try to dye it purple, but I got too scared and just dyed it the same burgundy color I've been dying it for 10 years. My greys are getting out of control, I had to do something immediately. Reply Thread Link hey i just went purple! my natural colour is like "so dark brunette it's black but not actual black but it might as well be", and i went for a purple ombre. my stylist said she would only do one level of bleaching at a time so as to protect the integrity of my hair. after about 5-6 weeks i'll go for another bleach because my ultimate goal is a silver/grey ombre but purple is a good first step. you can do it if you go in stages and take excellent care of your hair as you go! Reply Parent Thread Link I mean there must have been some kind of pressure. She did the face, breasts and hip/ass Reply Parent Thread Link pressured by her label? lmao she's just trying to get a black woman's body, as per usual with that diaper ass. Reply Parent Thread Link she's extremely insecure. pretty much everything she said she'd never do she did after becoming famous. Reply Parent Thread Link i wouldn't be surprised if she had/has bdd to some degree. she got a lot of stuff done. Reply Parent Thread Link This is some Li'l Kim level thirst trappage. How do you even get a camera at that angle? Unless you have your personal ASSistant back there in a bathing suit struggling to snap some pics. Reply Thread Link ohsh... I actually meant Nicki Minaj and her ass selfies D: The "k" syllable dominated my mind, I swear. Please don't tell anyone of my gaffe Reply Parent Thread Link I'm actively battling the little devil on my shoulder who's encouraging me to get bangs Reply Thread Link dont listen to him! he doesnt know how hard they are to maintain and look cute once you leave the salon! Reply Parent Thread Link I gasped when I scrolled down and saw her ass D: Reply Thread Link She doesn't deserve our attention. Reply Thread Link Her ass is bigger than her head in that pic lol. I wish I could do the upkeep for pastel hair Reply Thread Link i would hope that my ass was bigger than my head like why would i want a big head and a small ass?!?! lmao sorry your comment made me think about my own head size compared to my ass Edited at 2018-02-23 02:57 am (UTC) Reply Parent Thread Link Lmao well now that u made me think about it ur prob right lol I just meant like her ass seems like twice as big as her head Reply Parent Thread Link Just get a wig. Reply Parent Thread Link But remember this is just the 100 top grossing films. Which means GO PAY FOR MOVIES WITH WOMEN IN THEM. Lots of great indies or even movies from the mini majors that are focused on women. Reply Thread Link one of the things i miss about living in chicago is having access to tons of indie movies being shown at the theaters. i feel like nothing comes to austin. Reply Parent Thread Link O really? I feel like I always hear about how Austin has a great arts scene. sxsw is in Austin! I'll try to retweet more Austin stuff by women directors if I see it. Reply Parent Thread Link one of the things i was so excited about moving here for was for sxsw. and then i saw the price of a wristband and was like WTFFFF welp nvmd. maybe because i live more on the outskirts of the city and not downtown but the theaters out here get jack shit in terms of indies. in chicago i lived in the city so whenever i wanted to go to the movies, i would see titles and be like 'what's that' and it'd be something in limited release that i hadn't heard of but sounded good. Reply Parent Thread Link i definitely want to see more sets with female crew and directors and writers Reply Thread Link That isn't shocking. WW was co-lead in her own fucking movie, and to a man. Rey became a prop to Kylo Ren, the male villain, and had to learn 2 lessons she already did in TFA. i.e. parents aren't coming back, move forward; don't trust Kylo Ren. Reply Thread Link Everyone had to regress so there'd be lessons to be learned. Poe became a chauvinistic pig who lost respect for a woman he'd previously shown admiration for because when he met her he realized she wore gowns and had pink hair. Finn had to be taught to be courageous and caring because reasons, not like those were part of his core personality already or anything, nah. Rey started to care about coming from an important family so she'd be taught ??? No, let's forget she'd already proudly proclaimed in the TFA novelization that she was a nobody but she didn't give a fuck because she was her own person and where she came from didn't matter. But everyone knows SW books don't matter, IDK why anybody bothers reading that garbage not even LF gives a fuck about. Reply Parent Thread Link Eh not surprised. Movie's are too damn expensive to go to all the time so the box office is suffering as a whole. Thank goodness for MoviePass so I wonder if the numbers will change in 2018. The slate of upcoming films is much more female led so something slowly is changing. Since The Hunger Games series, it's been getting better overall. There's at least one female led movie per quarter. Bring back the RomCom! I'll never forgive men for genuinely thinking films like The Avengers and Star Wars made billions of dollars on them alone. Like come on! That's statistically impossible. Reply Thread Link TLJ wasn't "female fronted", it was Kylo Ren's movie through and through. Rey was only there to serve his and Luke's story. Reply Thread Link Lol Wonder Woman - the "feminist" movie of the year - is still male-dominated for 2/3 of the film. Even Black Panther has better female representation. Reply Thread Link She's also pretty much portrayed as a "cool girl". So many dudes saying whatever about women and she would do something either awesome or talk back and they would be like, oh you're not like the other girls. SUPER FEMINIST. I was so annoyed the whole film she is pretty much the only female character as soon as we leave the island. PFFFT Reply Parent Thread Link And it's funny because many of the Oscar-nominated films had women in the leading roles--The Shape of Water, Three Billboards, Lady Bird, The Post, Molly's Game, Phantom Thread and I, Tonya. Women made a big impression in films in 2017, not even counting the three studio films mentioned in the summary. Reply Thread Link AKA white women Reply Parent Thread Link Last time I checked, white women were women. Better than no women at all. Reply Parent Thread Link We've had white women in leading roles before. White women have being doing pretty good in hollywood for awhile now. Edited at 2018-02-23 09:04 am (UTC) Reply Parent Thread Link LOL, I get it. I know it's frustrating, but go back to 1960 where 90% of all movie leads were men and women were either wives or hookers. They weren't superheros or doctors or lawyers or artists or publishers. Wives or hookers, sisters or waitresses. Maids. I know it's slow going but it is going. Better than going backwards. Reply Parent Thread Link LOL tho we are going backwards it dropped 5% Reply Parent Thread Link Because this was a survey of the 100 highest grossing films. It doesn't take into account all the indies starring women. Things like Lady MacBeth, Beguiled, The Zookeeper's Wife, A Quiet Passion and Ingrid Goes West wouldn't be counted but they still made them. Reply Parent Thread Link I mean sure it's better if you're white, but it's more of the same for everyone else Reply Parent Thread Link mte I'm sorry but its basically white feminism and then we pat ourselves on the back when we give 2 roles to women of color. Reply Parent Thread Link LOL tho female representation of course is mostly white women. And the quality of the representation matters just as much as the quantity. If its people like Gal Gadot with her messy politics keep it Edited at 2018-02-23 06:15 am (UTC) Reply Thread Link I watched Wonder Woman last month and the whole time I was super confused as to how people were super excited over it being a feminist movie??? She's like the only female in the majority of the movie. There were still too many dicks on the dance floor. As someone else already commented, Black Panther did a much better job with women representation. Reply Thread Link But it has a pretty white woman and that's all people and the media care about Reply Parent Thread Link They live in a parallel universe where there's evidently a shortage of white brunette women in leading roles for genre properties lol Reply Parent Thread Link Exactly The problem was never white women not getting enough work even tho of course compared to men they aren't. Reply Parent Thread Link I'm so done with this super slow movement of change. Reply Thread Link I mean, he has a job, so if that's what works, why not. Reply Thread Link lol that's cute! I never got into Naruto but DBZ was everything :D Reply Thread Link We're rewatching season one of DBZ on blu ray and it's been so much fun. We just got to where Piccolo wants to take Gohan for training. Reply Parent Thread Link Ahhh, I want to rewatch the whole thing but it's so long!! And I'm watching this video rn and deciding what I want to start next so I have no time lol It brings me such good memories tho <3 Reply Parent Thread Link Honestly I feel like him taking care of his family is such an amazing trait. I don't know why anyone would find that negative? Reply Parent Thread Expand Link lmao came here to say the same thing about dbz over naruto Reply Parent Thread Link Naruto ruined me tbh I was so upset with the ending I loved those lil ninjas so much Reply Parent Thread Expand Link @mangastream whats the delay on naruto and bleach Michael B. Jordan (@michaelb4jordan) 26 December 2011 Lmao he's such a weeb, bless him. Ppl have been dragging out all his old tweets this week Reply Thread Link lmaoooo Reply Parent Thread Link lmao, this is killing me!! Reply Parent Thread Link Lol Reply Parent Thread Link I knew he would be into Bleach too what abt Sailor Moon, MBJ?? Reply Parent Thread Link Mte, we need 2 ask ha Reply Parent Thread Link my on/off bf is obsessed with sailor moon and will send me sailor moon gifs when were getting along smh Reply Parent Thread Link Sailor Moon was one of the valenstan concepts I considered but didn't want to track down a scene were Uranus (your fave) and Jupiter (my fave) interact that isn't from that one time where they fight. Reply Parent Thread Expand Link I watched Sailor Moon on Hulu, and wow it was so repetitive. The way the bad guys hypnotize everyone, the way she slays them, etc. It got rly boring QUICK. Reply Parent Thread Expand Link Ask him! I'd love to know too :D Edited at 2018-02-24 12:32 pm (UTC) Reply Parent Thread Link Lmao this could be my cousin when he was staying with us. I swear he only watched naruto Reply Parent Thread Link Lol love it Reply Parent Thread Link lmfao Reply Parent Thread Link bless him lol. Reply Parent Thread Link lmaoooo I love this Reply Parent Thread Link don't like either show but love the hunger bc i get it dude Reply Parent Thread Link LMAO, I love that he is such a geek, I dont watch anime but I can still empathize with him Reply Parent Thread Link omg I love him Reply Parent Thread Link That's pretty funny. XD Reply Parent Thread Link lol Reply Parent Thread Link This is my favorite tweet lmao Reply Parent Thread Link LMFAO i love him for this Reply Parent Thread Link Lol bleach tho Reply Parent Thread Link lol Reply Parent Thread Link Lmao that was me too Reply Parent Thread Link An actual weeb, I love it LOL Reply Parent Thread Link omg this is so cute Reply Parent Thread Link https://twitter.com/michaelb4jordan/status/966828379583467520 this made me cackle tho, tell us about ur fav animes michael!!! he def doesn't look 6ft tall tbh i'm sure the weirdos at celebheights.com are aggressively arguing this as we speakthis made me cackle tho, tell us about ur fav animes michael!!! Reply Thread Link mte, also he seems to like wearing thick soled shoes that boost his height Reply Parent Thread Link honestly he probably is 6ft. I'm feel like we are getting used to seeing really tall people like near Shaq heights so 6ft doesn't look that impressive when you aren't standing right there infront of them. like those supernatural guys. the really tall one is like 6'4"/5" so the other brother looks short but he's also 6ft tall Reply Parent Thread Expand Link He looks 6' to me. Reply Parent Thread Link http://cdn01.cdn.justjared.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/mbj-ko/michael-b-jordan-knocked-out-video-creed-02.jpg terrence j is listed at about 5'9 so if thats right then mbj is about 5'10 terrence j is listed at about 5'9 so if thats right then mbj is about 5'10 Reply Parent Thread Link I'm 5'7 and people act like I'm not a man I get treated bad by so many tall men even at work :( OH Let ME REACH THAT FOR YOU SINCE U CANT O_O. asshole cock blocked me at work said that to a woman I was talking too in front of her. Reply Parent Thread Expand Link he said he's currently watching one punch man while on hot ones I hope he's watched my hero academia Reply Thread Link Omg I posted asking if he watched that show on like the 5th page I should have read this first! I appreciate that he watches Wanpanman lol <3 Reply Parent Thread Link He work. he can watch whatever the fuck he wants. Edited at 2018-02-23 09:43 pm (UTC) Reply Thread Link The amount of thirst in my theatre when he came onscreen was audible in the audience. My audience was lots of women and gay dudes and you could hear them when he was on screen. It was something. Reply Thread Link I heard some aunties behind me go "MMMMM" Reply Parent Thread Link Same in mine, it was entertaining that we was all thirsting at the same time. Reply Parent Thread Link the right thing to do Reply Parent Thread Link i gasped when he first came on screen tbh hes so fine Reply Parent Thread Link My theater was M'Baku. I heard several people make noises. (I let out an audible "MMMM" when he walked out the first time.) And my theater was 60+ white people. LOL Reply Parent Thread Expand Link idgi, I think Chadwick and Winston Duke are just so much sexier! Reply Parent Thread Expand Link same lol, too funny Reply Parent Thread Link For my theatre it was Chadwick, and for me too. Damn Reply Parent Thread Link I've honestly never been attracted to the dude before, never got the hype. But him in this movie? That entire museum scene with him in them dreads and glasses and everything just...gawddamn. Reply Parent Thread Expand Link lmao my friend is white af and she immediately googled him afterwards to see what other movies of his to watch because "he is a good actor" uh huh surejan Reply Parent Thread Link Today's the day i finally realized i don't love my mother and she doesn't know me. We just feel obligated and burdened by each other. I've been job and apartment searching for a while. I'm close to joining the military. Reply Thread Link Im sorry about your situation, Ive been there. The good thing is that life never stays the same, it changes all the time! Try searching for a job that provides accomodation, maybe something in a different city? Thats what I did. Reply Parent Thread Link I get you sis. Rn I'm going through the hardest time in my life after moving back from college. After living 5 years away from her I'm ready to kill my self from living with her for the past 5ish months. She and my dad are moving to a new house soon and I have hope because I'm finally free of her but she wants me to move with them until I find a job, and I already told her no multiple times but she's trying to guilt trip me and threaten me, and I'm scared she will threaten our family friend into not letting me move in with them, even tho I have rent money to pay them and they've said they would definitely let me move in before. I honestly wish my mom was dead Reply Parent Thread Link "I honestly wish my mom was dead" ya'll are some sellfish brats here. you dont have a job. be thankful you have a mother that still cares about you. shit can be 10x worse. honestly, some of you brats need to see THE WORLD. Reply Parent Thread Expand Link I moved out and then my dad decided he and my mom ought to move in with me. The amount of emotional abuse and manipulation he put into making sure I not only agreed to them moving in but gave up all power I had in my own home and space was amazing. It was all exacerbated by growing up in a culture where blind obedience to your parents is the only way to go and anything less than that is disrespectfulnever say anything but yes, regardless of what theyre asking. I get feeling like you wont be free until your parent isnt around any longer. Im sorry youre going through this. Reply Parent Thread Expand Link I'm sorry, that's so hard :( Hope you can find a way to move out soon Reply Parent Thread Link If you join the military, join for the least amount of time you can. Im pretty sure yhe Army has 2 year contracts right now. You won't get full benefits but you could always extend if you like it but most likely you won't. I regret joining. Reply Parent Thread Link sorry, bb. i hope you're able to move out soon! Reply Parent Thread Link Dont join the military, join Peace Corps! Reply Parent Thread Link Sorry Coast Guard Sorry again Reply Parent Thread Link Does he post on 4chan too? Reply Thread Link I think that's just the white rick & morty fans tbh. Reply Parent Thread Link i'm 31 and moving back in with my parents this summer. i'm trying to tell myself that i'm not a ~loser. its hard though. Reply Thread Link You aren't a loser. Our generation got fucked over. We'll forever be the lost ones. Reply Parent Thread Link you're not a loser..so many ppl have had to, and some people actually have great relationships with their parents, so what, you do you. so long as you have ambition and work hard, live wherever u want! Reply Parent Thread Link you're not. there are plenty of cultures around the world where adult children live with their parents and no one gaf. Edited at 2018-02-23 09:59 pm (UTC) Reply Parent Thread Link Yeah, a good amount of my family, including my parents, are immigrants so I didn't really grow up with the culture of kids leaving the house at 18 cause that's what you're "supposed" to do. Reply Parent Thread Expand Link My mom is from Brazil and she's always been like: "It's totally normal for people to live with their families until they get married and even if that's at 39, who cares?" Unfortunately I live in a country where most people have a fucked up relationship with their parents, so they expect everyone else to have a shitty relationship with them too and if you haven't moved out by 18, you're a loser. Reply Parent Thread Link hell, i didn't leave home for any length of time until i was 32. Reply Parent Thread Link You're not. My friend is 36 and lives with her mom. They're basically roommates. Unless she gets married, they're probably always going to live together. Sometimes that's the way things are. I live with my parents and I'm in my early 30s. There's no damn way I can afford to live on my own. I take care of them and they take care of me. Reply Parent Thread Link youre not a loser. american culture is fucked up Reply Parent Thread Link i'm 32 and even though i have my own place my parents dog sit for me so after work when i go to pick her up i definitely stay and eat their food and cop their wifi lol \_()_/ for real tho our generation got fucked ur not alone bb Reply Parent Thread Link I'm sorry but I don't understand these responses. I would feel like a loser living at home past at most 26. Reply Parent Thread Expand Link You're not a loser. Things happen and sometimes you gotta move home. I moved back home when I was 26, but managed to move out a year later and that was at the same time I got married. Its not easy to afford your own place these days and you're not alone on that. Plus, some people live with their parents and it helps offset the bills for the family. My friend who is 34 and her brother who is 30 both live with their parents. Reply Parent Thread Link Not a loser roll call here! Not only are you not a loser but very lucky to have parents to help you out in that way! Reply Parent Thread Link I'm turning 30 next week and I swear to god, I'm trying to move out and make enough to live in an okay area with a reasonable living ... but right now, no. So I pay rent. 200 a month, buy my own food, clothes, pay for my own insurance, car, etc. Basically I do everything I should be doing ... but I live with my parents. We get along okay, so I'm not really complaining. If something opened up for me, fuck, I'd be totally into an apartment/house, but no. Not right now. Reply Parent Thread Link I'm in my thirties and never got a chance to move out. It would take me like, two jobs to be able to afford it. And honestly, one's enough. Two would make me legit crazy! Reply Parent Thread Link you're not. it's def a very Eurocentric, "modern" concept so don't put too much stock in it. Reply Parent Thread Expand Link I lived with my parents for 4 years after graduate school even though I had a job. Living with them let me get my retirement savings caught up to where it should've been and get a good amount saved in my emergency savings account. I'm grateful for them. My dad used to joke we were all out of the house at 18, haha. It definitely was hard to not feel like a loser/failure because of how american culture views people who live at home past their college years. I only just moved out at the end of September because I got a job across the country. Now I rent a room in a 4 bedroom apartment for $850 a month. It sucks. Edited at 2018-02-23 11:41 pm (UTC) Reply Parent Thread Link Youve already gotten a plethora or response but Ill add another! Lol! But yeah, definitely dont feel like a loser. The economy is awful nearly everywhere and living on ones own is slowly becoming achievable only if you live in a centain income bracket. Plus, if you have a good relationship with your folks, Im sure youre going to help them as much as much they help you. Moving back in with your parents is tough but theres no reason to feel like a loser because youre surviving! Thats the most important thing Reply Parent Thread Link its a smart decision Reply Parent Thread Link I had an adult tell me to stay at home as long as possible because living on your own is too expensive. Im 32 and live in a small house in their back yard. I keep telling them Im ever leaving. Reply Parent Thread Link you're not a loser. It's a weird western culture thing, the thing about living with your parents. I'm currently living with my mum as her carer but honestly, it works out cheaper for the both of us so why not? Reply Parent Thread Link you shouldnt feel like a loser moving bk with your parents. Whats so wrong about living with your parents esp if you guys have a good relationship? Reply Parent Thread Link a lot of people your age and older are doing it. save the money and don't feel bad about it. my friends even tell me to do the same (I'm 29) and I think I will. I haven't managed to save money this year at all Reply Parent Thread Link late reply, but try not to worry about it. I saw an episode of House Hunters the other day where this 30-something woman was buying a house with her mom because they were both renting separate places and finally realized they were wasting money. Nowadays it's just a smart thing to do, especially if you get along with your parents. Reply Parent Thread Link You for real live with your mum still? @anthonyfjoshua .. me too, we are the same lexander (@AlexWard_) May 10, 2017 Reply Thread Link I still live with my parents and it can be annoying but the pros definitely outweigh the cons. And it's way to expensive to live here anyway so my parents are doing me a favor tbh. Edited at 2018-02-23 09:48 pm (UTC) Reply Thread Link The shaming of adults with jobs who live with their parents pisses me off- like MBJ, a lot of adults are helping their parents. And even if they aren't, but they're pulling their own weight, who cares? Mind your business. Reply Thread Link mte Reply Parent Thread Link Exactly Reply Parent Thread Link this. it's also is just a really American culture thing to move out asap. ONTD talks a big game about diversity, but can't respect that in many other countries, people live remain living with their parents for a host of reasons. Reply Parent Thread Link Yup yup Reply Parent Thread Link mte, theres a lot of different reasons/circumstances/cultural influences for it its a very american idea to up and leave at 18 no matter what Reply Parent Thread Link I feel like a lot of people can't distinguish between living with your parents and your parents living with you. I know people (especially first or second gen) whose parents are retired and lonely so they move in with their kids. Reply Parent Thread Link I live (sort of) with my parents so I cant shame anyone, but its more financially responsible to live with your parents these days. Reply Parent Thread Link I'm in this situation. I moved back in with my mom when I found out she was on the verge of being evicted. Shit happens, and people's reasons for living with family are none of anyone else's business. Reply Parent Thread Link IA. The US culture (or white ppl culture) is weird. Lots of mexicans still live w their parents, sometimes its easier bc of the money or sometimes its because you trying to help them too. Reply Parent Thread Link It's the same in my country Reply Parent Thread Link Same in my country, Peru. I live with My brother and his fam, and my mother. Brother, sis-in-law and I work and contribute paying for the bills and food. And my mum stays at home taking care of it. And my brother pays her for taking care of his kids. Reply Parent Thread Link Yep. Moved back in because my mom was struggling with the mortgage. She ended up paying off the house 3 months early with my help after being 2 months behind for years. Then I stayed long enough to pay off that last bit of my debt and moved out. Reply Parent Thread Link Hear hear! This idea that you have to move out as soon as you're of legal age is dumb. In Hong Kong, most people still live with their parents bc there's so little space and moving out is sooooo expensive. Reply Parent Thread Link lol yeah it's so stupid, why would i move out and have to pay money to live in a house with strangers? my mom is getting older and is gonna need my help anyway in a few years. no wonder most americans are in debt Reply Parent Thread Expand Link I ain't ever moving out tbh, unless I win the lotto or something Reply Thread Link I just want to leave this here since I've been laughing at it for two weeks Reply Thread Link ATTAC has staged protests at Apple outlets in Paris and Aix-en-Provence. Banners held by activists read 'We will stop when Apple pays up' and 'Apple pay your taxes' A French court on Friday threw out a complaint by Apple demanding a ban on protests at its stores by the tax campaign group Attac. Attac had staged a sit-in at Apple's flagship Paris store on December 2, blocking access for several hours in protest at what they claimed was "massive tax evasion" by the US tech giant. Apple said the demonstration put customers' and employees' safety at risk and sought a court order barring the activists from further protests inside its stores. Attac had previously held protests at stores in Paris and Aix-en-Provence in November, demanding Apple pay billions of euros which the EU says it owes in back taxes. But a Paris court dismissed Apple's claim that there was a risk of "imminent damage" from further protests, so long as these were peaceful and did not block access to the store. It noted Apple had not reported any damage from the peaceful Paris protest in December. Attac, which branded the lawsuit an assault on the right to protest, hailed the ruling in its favour. "The court has recognised the legitimacy of our actions and went as far as to say we behaved in the general interest," said its spokesman Raphael Pradeau. He added the group has no plans to stop protesting against the company. Apple did not immediately respond to requests to comment. In 2016, the EU said Apple owed $14.5 billion in back taxes after it negotiated highly favourable tax arrangements with the Irish government. The tech giant also came under fire late last year when leaked financial documents known as the Paradise Papers showed it shifted tens of billion of dollars between tax havens to minimise taxes. Last month the company announced it would pay $38 billion (31 billion euros) on profits repatriated from overseas as it boosts investments in the United States. Apple, which claims to be the largest US taxpayer, is also one of the biggest beneficiaries of a tax-lowering bill passed by the US Congress in December. Explore further Activists occupy Paris Apple store over EU tax dispute 2018 AFP UC San Diego biology and bioengineering professor Jeff Hasty and lab member Robert Cooper have come up with a model for predicting the conditions under which antibiotic resistance spreads in a clinically relevant bacterium. Credit: University of California - San Diego Researchers at the University of California San Diego Center for Microbiome Innovation have identified the mechanism by which a clinically relevant bacterium may gain antibiotic resistance, and have come up with a model for predicting the conditions under which it spreads. The findings, which establish a framework for understanding, quantifying and hopefully combating the emergence of superbugs, were published in a recent paper in eLife. The spread of antibiotic resistance among pathogenic bacteria is a major public health concern. Among the top three most dangerous are Acinetobacter species, which thrive in hospital settings and acquire antibiotic resistance genes surprisingly quickly. "Most of the threat posed by Acinetobacter stems from its ability to acquire drug resistance via horizontal gene transfer (HGT)," said Jeff Hasty, professor of biology and bioengineering at UC San Diego and principal investigator on the paper. HGT is the process by which bacteria exchange genetic material. Acinetobacter species do this at a remarkably high rate, which makes them particularly good at becoming resistant to antibiotics. Until now, HGT has not been directly observed in Acinetobacter speciesand it was observed by accident. When Robert Cooper joined the Hasty lab as a postdoctoral researcher, he was interested in using algae and bacteria to make biofuels. "I was looking for a side project and remembered reading about 'predator' Acinetobacter bacteria that engage in hand-to-hand combat to kill their prey," said Cooper. "They do so by extruding something analogous to a poison-tipped dagger, and stabbing neighboring cells." Intrigued, Cooper acquired some "predator" bacteria and placed them next to "prey" E. coli cells. He gave the predators a red and the prey a green fluorescent protein so that he could tell them apart in live-action movies. The "predator" bacteria did kill the E. coli as expectedbut they also started glowing green! The cells in this video are growing inside a microfluidic chipa microscopic chamber with a channel beneath it to supply fresh nutrients and wash away excess cells. Each oval is a single bacterial cell. This marked the beginning of a journey for Cooper. He attached the green fluorescent protein to an antibiotic resistance gene and observed that the when Acinetobacter killed neighboring E. coli cells, those that acquired the green gene also took up and incorporated the antibiotic resistance gene (see video). Those cells were then able to propagate, creating a colony of drug-resistant Acinetobacter. Cooper went on to establish a model for predicting the number of "prey" cells that would be killed, and how many "predator" cells would acquire the antibiotic resistance gene by HGT, under different conditions. "The model predicts the efficiency of uptake and incorporation of the antibiotic resistance gene," said Cooper. "We hope that it will be useful for determining the conditions under which antibiotic resistance might spread, which could help us focus on the most important areas for prevention." Explore further Bacteria acquire resistance from competitors More information: Robert M Cooper et al. Inter-species population dynamics enhance microbial horizontal gene transfer and spread of antibiotic resistance, eLife (2017). Journal information: eLife Robert M Cooper et al. Inter-species population dynamics enhance microbial horizontal gene transfer and spread of antibiotic resistance,(2017). DOI: 10.7554/eLife.25950 Microbial induced concrete corrosion (MICC) causes massive damage to wastewater plants. Austrian Researchers from Graz present a new solution against the sulphuric acid attack. Credit: TU Graz Writing in Water Research, Austrian researchers from TU Graz and the University of Graz discuss new materials that prevent damage from microbial induced concrete corrosion. Wastewater systems are integral to infrastructure in every community. In an ideal world, they operate smoothly and are long-lasting. But biogenic transformation processes in sewage and water treatment systems are a "natural enemy" of conventional plants, frequently causing damage to concrete and metal elements that is expensive to repair. As a result, it is not uncommon for wastewater systems to have a lifespan of under ten years, before they need to be refurbished or individual components replaced. Toxic gases released during biogenic processes, such as hydrogen sulphide, also pose a significant health risk, causing a range of symptoms from irritation to respiratory failure and death. Writing in the journal Water Research, an interdisciplinary group of researchers from TU Graz and the University of Graz has outlined strategies aimed at preventing what is termed microbial induced concrete corrosion (MICC). Microbial induced concrete corrosion: turning a blind eye not the answer Cyrill Grengg of the Institute of Applied Geosciences at TU Graz explained: "MICC often corrodes the conventional types of concrete used in wastewater treatment plants at a rate of a centimetre or more per year. Accordingly, the concrete elements can be destroyed in a matter of only a few years, causing significant damage to wastewater systems." According to the researchers, there is often a lack of awareness of these processes and the resulting threat to wastewater infrastructure and human health. "Closing the manhole covers and looking the other way is not the answer," Grengg added. In Germany alone, the economic impact of wastewater system repairs is put at around EUR 450 million per year. Although no data are currently available for Austria, the costs can be extrapolated and also applied to other European countries. Microbial induced acid corrosion (MICC) in wastewater treatment facilities results from a sequence of biogenic sulphate reduction reactions, followed by reoxidation. Initially, sulphate in pressure pipelines or standing wastewater is reduced by bacteria under anaerobic or oxygen-free conditions, forming hydrogen sulphide. This pungent, highly poisonous gas escapes into the sewer air and diffuses into sewer pipes and manholes. There reoxidation by autotrophic bacteria takes place on concrete walls that do not even come into contact with wastewater. These microorganisms produce sulphuric acid which reacts with concrete construction elements. As Gunther Koraimann of the Institute of Molecular Biosciences at the University of Graz, who has studied these processes in detail, explains: "This leads to the vigorous formation of a biofilm on the surface of the concrete, a reduction of the pH value to below two, in other words highly acidic, and extensive formation of new minerals, mainly in the form of gypsum. The combination of these processes results in the rapid destruction of the concrete." Holistic solution The Graz-based scientists worked on a holistic solution using an interdisciplinary research approach. In-depth research into the microstructural and microbiological processes was followed by the development of new MICC-resistant materials in close collaboration with the Institute of Construction and Building Materials at TU Darmstadt. In this context, geopolymer concrete proved to be particularly well suited to withstand acid corrosion. When developing this building material, resistance to acid was an extremely desirable property, as were highly antibacteriostatic surfaces, on which the research team made significant advances microorganisms that trigger the initial oxidation process are unable to settle on such surfaces in the first place. In turn, this prevents the formation of sulphuric acid. Florian Mittermayr of the Institute of Technology and Testing of Construction Materials at TU Graz commented: "We achieved some very promising results with materials that have a far greater lifespan than conventional types of concrete. Use of these long-lasting materials would allow operators to refurbish damaged wastewater systems, significantly extending their service life and reducing the financial burden on local government and wastewater associations." The researchers published their latest findings on MICC prevention in the current issue of the journal Water Research 134 (2018) 341352: "Advances in concrete materials for sewer systems affected by microbial induced concrete corrosion: A review." The Austrian province of Styria provided financial backing for the research, and is dedicated to raising awareness of this global problem among Styrian local authorities and regional wastewater associations. Explore further How to tell when a sewage pipe needs repairbefore it bursts More information: Cyrill Grengg et al. Advances in concrete materials for sewer systems affected by microbial induced concrete corrosion: A review, Water Research (2018). DOI: 10.1016/j.watres.2018.01.043 This simple on-site equipment uses a polymerase chain reaction technique to let farmers do cheap, fast and accurate on-site soil testing for crop-damaging pathogens. Credit: Washington State University Soil pathogen testing - critical to farming, but painstakingly slow and expensive - will soon be done accurately, quickly, inexpensively and onsite, thanks to research that Washington State University scientists plant pathologists are sharing. As the name implies, these tests detect disease-causing pathogens in the soil that can severely devastate crops. Until now, the tests have required large, expensive equipment or lab tests that take weeks. The soil pathogen analysis process is based on polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests that are very specific and sensitive and only possible in a laboratory. The new methods, designed by WSU plant pathologists, are not only portable and fast, but utilize testing materials easily available to the public. A paper by the researchers lists all the equipment and materials required to construct the device, plus instructions on how to put it all together and conduct soil tests. Responding to growers needs "We've heard from many growers that the time it takes to obtain results from soil samples sent to a lab is too long," said Kiwamu Tanaka, assistant professor in WSU's Department of Plant Pathology. "The results come back too late to be helpful. But if they can get results on site, they could make informed decisions about treatments or management changes before they even plant their crop." Some diseases from soil pathogens may not be visible until weeks after the crop has sprouted, Tanaka said. That could be too late to treat the disease or could force farmers to use more treatments. Magnetic breakthrough WSU graduate student Joseph DeShields, a first author on the paper, said it took about six months of work to get their device to work in the field. It relies on magnets to capture pathogens' DNA from the soil. "It turns out, it's really hard to separate and purify genetic material from soil because soil contains so much material for PCR tests," said DeShields "So we were thrilled when we made that breakthrough." Rachel Bomberger is a WSU plant diagnostician who helped with the concepts of the machine testing. She said she's impressed by what Tanaka and the team accomplished. "We removed a huge stumbling block when it comes to soil testing," said Bomberger, one of the co-authors on the paper. "We found the missing piece that makes the testing systems work in the field without expensive lab equipment or testing materials." Worldwide application The system was tested on potato fields around eastern Washington, Tanaka said, but it will work on soil anywhere in the world. "It's a really versatile method," he said. "You could use it for nationwide pathogen mapping or look at the distribution of pathogens around the country. We started small, but this could have huge implications for testing soil health and disease." Tanaka said it was important for this discovery to be available in an open-access video journal. "We're always concerned about helping every grower and the industry as a whole," Tanaka said. "We want everybody to look at this and use it, if they think they'll benefit from it." The results were published in the Journal of Visualized Experiments. Explore further Field sensor quickly, accurately identifies soil issues Images of crystals that walk like an inchworm by bending and straightening under alternating temperatures. Credit: Taniguchi et al. Researchers have demonstrated that tiny micrometer-sized crystalsjust barely visible to the human eyecan "walk" inchworm-style across the slide of a microscope. Other crystals are capable of different modes of locomotion such as rolling, flipping, bending, twisting, and jumping. In the future, these moving crystals may open the doors to the development of crystal-based robots. The researchers, led by Hideko Koshima at Waseda University in Tokyo, Japan, have published a paper on walking and rolling crystals in a recent issue of Nature Communications. "We believe that this finding opens the doors to a new field of crystal robotics," Koshima told Phys.org. "Currently, robots made from metals are rigid and heavy, making them unsuitable for daily interaction with humans. Our goal is to make symbiotic soft robots using mechanical crystals." In their work, the researchers investigated asymmetric crystals derived from chiral azobenzene. In experiments, they showed that exposing the crystals to alternating hot and cold temperatures (changing between 120 and 160 C over the course of approximately 2 minutes) causes changes in the crystals' shapes. Depending on their dimensions, some of the crystals repeatedly bend and straighten. Over repeated heating and cooling cycles, these shape changes translate into the mechanical motion of inchworm-like walking. Credit: Taniguchi et al. Crystals with other dimensions exhibit bending and flipping under temperature changes. In experiments, repeated heating and cooling cycles caused these crystals to quickly roll across a surface, attaining speeds of 16 mm/second. This was approximately 20,000 times faster than the walking crystals, which crawled along at just 3 mm/hour. As the researchers explain, the asymmetrical shapes of the crystals is the driving force of both types of locomotion. In particular, the walking crystals have a thickness gradient while the rolling crystals have a width gradient. Both varieties of crystal experience a phase transition at a critical temperature, and due to the asymmetry, this results in a shape change that is more pronounced at one end of the crystal than at the other. Image and illustration of crystals that roll under alternating temperatures. Credit: Taniguchi et al. Along with previous research that has demonstrated crystal motion in other types of crystals, the new results suggest that crystals appear to be promising candidates for robotics. In general, materials that respond to external stimuli, such as temperature changes, have potential applications as sensors, switches, and in a wide variety of other areas. Explore further Robotic crystals that walk n' roll More information: Takuya Taniguchi et al. "Walking and rolling of crystals induced thermally by phase transition." Nature Communications. DOI: Journal information: Nature Communications Takuya Taniguchi et al. "Walking and rolling of crystals induced thermally by phase transition.". DOI: 10.1038/s41467-017-02549-2 2018 Phys.org An artists rendering shows the proposed Dragonfly quadcopter landing on the surface of Saturns moon Titan, unfolding its rotors and lifting off again to survey the landscape and atmosphere. Credit: Steve Gribben/Johns Hopkins APL Co-led by a Western space scientist, NASA is exploring a revolutionary plan that could see a drone-like quadcopter buzz above the surface of Saturn's largest moon. The Dragonfly project would take advantage of Titan's dense, calm atmosphere to fly from site to site as it measures and analyzes the massive moon's chemistry, geology and potential for life. The craft is modeled after drones on Earth, and would have four pairs of stacked rotors that would enable it to zip as much as an object with a mass of a few hundred kilograms could be said to 'zip' across Titan geography that has intrigued and mystified scientists for decades. Unlike conventional, slow-moving rovers that suss out the surface of Mars, Dragonfly would be able to explore across hundreds of kilometres, all the while scouting for geologic points of interest and taking valuable measurements of surface, sub-surface and atmospheric conditions. As co-investigator, Earth Sciences professor and planetary geologist Catherine Neish is helping define and achieve the mission's science goals. She is part of a team led by Elizabeth Turtle at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) whose proposal for a revolutionary rotorcraft to investigate Titan was recently selected by NASA as one of two finalists for the agency's next New Frontiers mission. Not quite as tiny, but at least as nimble, as its namesake in the low-gravity atmosphere, this Dragonfly would be about two metres long, with multiple rotors that enable good control of the vehicle and built-in mechanical redundancies. For many years, people thought to explore Titan by balloon, rover or small airplane but each has limitations that include mobility, durability, range and effective control. "There's something very 'simple' about having a little drone flying around Titan," Neish said. "It's clever in a way that people weren't expecting and, I think, it's audacious and exciting and realistic." The atmospheric conditions of Titan with its orange-brown haze of methane and nitrogen obscure high-resolution views and have made the moon largely inscrutable. The veil lifted only in part in 2005 when the Huygens probe (part of the Cassini mission) produced some images of the surface. Those were enough to tantalize researchers but not enough to show more than a glimpse of the whole. "It's like landing on a London street and saying you've seen the whole Earth," Neish said. Earth Sciences professor Catherine Neish, shown here at Mt. Whitney in Californias Sierra Nevada Range, is co-leading a project that could see a quadcopter exploring Titan, Saturns biggest moon. Credit: Special to Western News With solar power unavailable because of both Titan's distance from the sun and its dense atmosphere, Dragonfly would be plutonium-powered, using a Multi-Mission Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator. That is the same power source as the Mars Curiosity rover and the Cassini space probe. It could fly several kilometres on a single 'Titan overnight' charge and potentially cover hundreds of kilometres during a Titan day (equivalent to 16 Earth days). Dragonfly would spend less time flying than taking science measurements during its two-year mission. Its main tasks would be sampling for organic chemistry and habitability; monitoring atmospheric and surface conditions; shooting and transmitting images of landforms; and conducting studies of the moon's seismology. The potential for significant discovery is exciting, Neish said. "The chemistry is going to be amazing but I'm really interested in what Titan looks like. I'm guessing it's just this weirdly wonderful world that looks like Earth a strange, frozen sedimentary place but with all the wrong ingredients." There's tantalizing evidence there are rivers of methane and ethane, flowing at 95 Kelvin (or minus-200 Celsius) and burnishing ice into marble-sized pebbles when they flood low-lying terrain. A smoggy, windless atmosphere floating above frozen hydrocarbon lakes. A peculiar, ice-water chemical soup sits near or below the surface and maybe, just maybe, could be a nursery for some form of life. We know so little about Titan, Neish said, and what little we do know is so recently discovered. "Before Huygens in 2005, we had no idea what the surface of Titan would be like." Neish's specialty is the geology of planetary surfaces, specifically understanding the processes of impact cratering through radar imaging. She is involved in several spacecraft missions with international, multi-disciplinary teams. She is believed to be the only Canadian researcher on the Dragonfly project. "Planetary science is such a collaborative endeavour. It's a team effort," she said. Dragonfly is one of two NASA recently short-listed from an original proposal group of a dozen as part of the agency's New Frontiers planetary science program. This composite image shows an infrared view of Saturns moon Titan from NASAs Cassini spacecraft, acquired during the missions T-114 flyby on Nov. 13, 2015. Credit: NASA // Special to Western News The other project is called CAESAR (Comet Astrobiology Exploration Sample Return), which would seek to return to Earth a sample from a comet called 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko and determine its origin and history. Led by Steven Squyres of Cornell University in New York, CAESAR would be managed by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. Both teams will receive NASA funding of $4 million this year to further develop their ideas and re-submit proposals. NASA is expected to decide by mid-2019 which one project to support with as much as almost $1 billion in development costs. If Dragonfly were chosen, it could launch as early as 2025 and then potentially take five years or more to reach Titan, Neish said. In space time, that's not long, she said, noting Dragonfly has gone from hypothesis to concept to scale modelling in just two years. The name Titan comes from a generic term for the children of Ouranos (Uranus) and Gaia in ancient Greek mythology. In the stories, the Titans were the ancestors of the human race. The Titans were known to have devoured the limbs of Dionysus, the son of Zeus. Enraged, Zeus struck the Titans with lightning. (Zeus had intended this child to have dominion over the world.) The lightning burned the Titans to ashes, and from the ashes, mankind was formed. Saturn's largest moon Titan is the second largest moon in our solar system, second only to Jupiter's Ganymede, which is only 2 per cent larger. With a mean radius of 2,575 km (1,600 miles), Titan is bigger than Earth's moon and even larger than the planet Mercury. Titan is the only moon in our solar system that has clouds and a dense atmosphere, mostly nitrogen and methane. It is also the only other place in the solar system known to have an Earthlike cycle of liquids flowing across its surface. Titan orbits Saturn at a distance of about 1.2 million km (759,000 miles), taking 15 days and 22 hours to complete a full orbit. Titan is tidally locked in synchronous rotation with Saturn, and permanently presents one face to the planet as it completes its orbit. In 1994, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope recorded pictures of Titan, which suggested that a huge bright continent exists on the hemisphere that faces forward in orbit. These Hubble results didn't prove that liquid seas existed, however; only that Titan has large bright and dark regions on its surface. Titan's surface remained shrouded in secrecy below the clouds until July 2004. That's when NASA's Cassini spacecraft arrived. Cassini was specially designed to peer through Titan's haze with radar and in certain colors of light, called spectral windows that allow a glimpse of what lies below. During dozens of flybys, the Cassini orbiter has mapped a large fraction of Titan's surface and made detailed studies of its atmosphere. Cassini also carried the European-built Huygens probe, which parachuted through Titan's atmosphere in 2005 to make the first landing on a body in the outer solar system. Explore further Aerospace engineers developing drone for NASA concept mission to Titan CRISPR provides a very targeted tool for editing DNA in plants. Credit: www.shutterstock.com Australia's gene technology regulations have not been revised since 2001 - despite many game-changing advances in genetic technologies over the past 17 years. A review of the regulations by the Office of the Gene Technology Regulator (a Federal government body) involved a public call for submissions and has also triggered some fears about what changes are to come. Will it mean genetically modified organisms (GMOs) plants, animals or even humans will not be regulated? We argue that the proposed changes to the regulations will actually involve more oversight of genetic techniques, including the poster-child of new approaches: CRISPR. CRISPR (or more precisely, CRISPR-Cas) is a molecular technology that has been developed from a naturally occurring mechanism in bacteria, and is used to alter DNA. Prior to the proposed amendments by the Office of the Gene Technology Regulator, the regulation of CRISPR-Cas was a bit ambiguous. Rather than opening the door for genetic editing to become more widespread, the proposed changes more tightly regulate the use of CRISPR-Cas technology. How CRISPR works The CRISPR-Cas technique is prized by researchers because it is an efficient and precise way to alter DNA (as well as other molecules such as RNA). There are two main applications of CRISPR-Cas: to increase genetic variation (that is, slight changes in the DNA sequence), and to edit the DNA (an approach similar to "cutting and pasting", where known bits of DNA are taken out and alternatives added back in). Traditionally, genetic variation arose naturally and individuals with desirable traits were selectively bred by humans. We have been doing this for thousands of years, and selective breeding is responsible for a lot of the food that we eat today. About a century ago, X-rays and chemicals started to be used to increase the amount of genetic variation of organisms (typically plants) which can be selectively bred. This has generated more than 3,000 horticultural plant varieties that we consume today, none of which are classified as GMOs. CRISPR-Cas can be used in a similar way to X-ray and chemical methods, but with an advantage: it can target specific sequences of the DNA, minimising unwanted, bystander effects in other parts of the DNA. In the proposed regulation changes, CRISPR-Cas-induced variations of this kind would be classified in the same way as other technologies achieving the same outcome they are not GMOs. As well as inducing variation, CRISPR-Cas is best known as an "editor" which can cut and paste particular bits of DNA. When DNA is added to an organism, they are classified as GMOs, and would still be according to the proposed regulation changes. When CRISPR-Cas technology is used for editing, it can also be used to create changes in the DNA of an organism that will then spread in subsequent generationsthis is referred to as a "gene drive". But CRISPR-Cas is not the only way to achieve this, and the proposed changes increase the regulations for the use of all kinds of gene drives. Fearmongering Columnist Elizabeth Farrelly recently argued that proposed updates to Gene Technology Regulations entail the "deregulation" and "declassification" of CRISPR-Cas such that it would "no longer count as genetic modification" in Australia. This is not the case. The column also appears to argue that changes to the legislation mean that designer babies are both technically possible and imminent. But in Australia, both the current (2001) and proposed changes to the regulations by the Office of the Gene Technology Regulator do not cover the use of CRISPR-Cas technology in humansonly other organisms that are not destined for human food. Further, the 2015 "International Summit on Human Gene Editing" put a moratorium on gene editing in viable human embryos. Worries about designer babies stemming from the current and proposed genetic technology regulations are not substantiated. Focus on outcomes, not process The lesson here is not that we should blindly trust scientists and regulators when it comes to new technology. We agree that emerging technologies can pose risks. Rather, the take-home message is that technological regulation needs to focus on outcomes of the technology, not the technology itself. Let's consider another technology: 3-D printing. Advances in 3-D printing means that the opportunities for creating new products are endless. You can print a house, a car, a prosthetic limb - and also a weapon. Does this make 3-D printing something to be afraid of? We think not. 3-D printing can have many uses, malevolent or life-transforming. Scaremongering about 3-D printing technology, rather than considering the uses of the technology, is a misguided approach to regulation. A 3-D-printed cast should be regulated differently to a 3-D-printed gun. And this kind of regulation is exactly what the proposed updates to the Gene Technology Regulations hopes to achieve. What the updates do address is a change from a process based assessment of technology to an outcome based one. In the same way that we might not want 3-D printing banned in Australia, some regulation on the various outcomes arising from new genetic technologies are necessary. Explore further Equipping CRISPR/Cas9 with an enzyme that controls translation of genetic information into protein This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article. Black Kites at a fire, in Borroloola, Northern Territory, Australia, 2014. Credit: Bob Gosford "This is not a new discovery," said Mark Bonta, assistant teaching professor of earth sciences at Penn State Altoona, when asked about the firehawks. But it is significant. Only relatively recently have Westerners came to understand what Aboriginal people have known for tens of thousands of years: some species of birds in the Northern Territory of Australia, collectively referred to as "firehawks," may be spreading fires intentionally in order to make food collection easier. Firehawks carry sticks already burning from a wildfire and drop them in another area, which sets a new fire; as small mammals and insects race to escape the flames and smoke, they become easy pickings for the raptors. A new article in the Journal of Ethnobiology by Bonta, Robert Gosford, Dick Eussen, Nathan Ferguson, Erana Loveless and Maxwell Witwer, discusses the evidence in support of firehawks, as does an article just published in the New York Times. A lot of skepticism exists about whether the birds use fire as a tool. "In the Western mind, fire is the one thing animals don't have. Fire is what made us human," Bonta said. "We take for granted ignition and the ability to burn. There's a lot to be said for what fire did for usincredible weapons, firearms, being able to set fires. Fire is what gave us power over other animals." Although the focus is on northern Australia, fire-setting behaviors among birds may not be limited by species or geography. The birds known as firehawks include the Black Kite, Whistling Kite and Brown Falcon; Black Kites are also found in Asia and Africa. Bonta notes some "old reports from Texas and Florida" about caracaras setting fires as well. Ongoing bird research will help answer questions, of course. "There's loads to find out," Bonta said, citing recent findings. "We just learned in 2016 that birds' neurons are packed differently. They're way smarter than we thought. We're just beginning to understand avian memory. Crows' problem-solving ability is amazing. There are a lot of tool-using behaviors." Part of the reason Westerners may have trouble accepting the concept of firehawks, Bonta suggested, is our lack of connection to our environment: "Westerners have done little but isolate ourselves from nature," he said. Yet those who make a point of connecting with our earth in some formhe uses turkey hunters as an example"have enormous knowledge because they interact with a species. When you get into conservation [that knowledge] is even more important." Aborginal people "don't see themselves as superior to or separated from animals. They are walking storehouses of knowledge," said Bonta. But empirical evidence is in the eye of the beholder. While Aboriginal people have known about firehawks for a very long time, there is not yet video evidence to "prove" it to Western scientists. Bonta hopes new attention to the subject will "stimulate other people to go out into the field and study this. This should inspire." Maybe even light a fire? Explore further Carefully managed fire can promote rare savanna species More information: Mark Bonta et al. Intentional Fire-Spreading by "Firehawk" Raptors in Northern Australia, Journal of Ethnobiology (2017). Mark Bonta et al. Intentional Fire-Spreading by "Firehawk" Raptors in Northern Australia,(2017). DOI: 10.2993/0278-0771-37.4.700 In this Wednesday, Feb. 21, 2018, photo, Nissan Motor Co.'s Easy Ride robo-vehicle starts going from its global headquarters in Yokohama, near Tokyo. Starting next month, Nissan is testing on regular roads what it calls "a robo-vehicle mobility service." Called Easy Ride, it uses a cell-phone app to book semi-autonomous driven rides. (AP Photo/Shizuo Kambayashi) In the future Nissan envisions, driverless cars will pick up children from school and recommend restaurants to tourists in various languages. Nissan Motor Co. says feedback from people who try it will be used to fine-tune its "robo-vehicle mobility service." The automaker said Friday that 300 people have already signed up to try out Easy Ride next month. The Japanese automaker hopes to roll it out as a commercial service in the early 2020s. Details, including pricing, are undecided. The service was developed in a partnership, which began last year, with Japanese mobile game provider DeNA Co. DeNA has been working on driverless bus and delivery services in Japan. For now, Easy Ride will be limited to a 4.5-kilometer (2.8-mile) course that starts from Nissan headquarters and winds through a shopping mall area in this port city. The app is only in Japanese, but there are plans to offer it in several languages for tourists and other travelers. Like other autonomous drive technology, the Easy Ride vehicle is packed with cameras, sensors and radars to recognize pedestrians, intersections, traffic lights and other vehicles. It's still only driverless in principle, though, since Japanese law doesn't allow totally driverless vehicles. So a human driver in a no-hands position sits behind the steering wheel. The system isn't flawless, with human intervention sometimes needed to avoid a crash, according to Nissan. In this Wednesday, Feb. 21, 2018, photo, Nissan Motor Co.'s Easy Ride robo-vehicle, center, goes on a course during a test ride in Yokohama, near Tokyo. Starting next month, Nissan is testing on regular roads what it calls "a robo-vehicle mobility service." Called Easy Ride, it uses a cell-phone app to book semi-autonomous driven rides. (AP Photo/Shizuo Kambayashi) It's just one of several such kinds of technology being worked on around the world, such as Google's Waymo and Tesla's Autopilot. Just about all the major automakers, including Mercedes and Toyota, are working on such technologies. Nissan has been among the most aggressive. Although opinion is divided on the projection that as many as 10 million driverless cars will be on roads by 2020, everyone agrees the technology is going to grow. "I think the potential is quite large in the long term, especially in large cities such as Tokyo or Boston, where there is a need for point-to-point transit but little incentive to own cars," said Nicholas Evans, an assistant professor at UMass Lowell. However, he cautioned, "In introducing technology, all it takes is for a couple of high-profile accidents for consumers to turn against manufacturers. "It's in the self-interest of manufacturers for rigorous testing and public input on this new kind of technology," said Evans, who studies the ethical dilemmas posed by emerging technologies such as drones and self-driving vehicles. In this Wednesday, Feb. 21, 2018, photo, Nissan Motor Co.'s staff member gets his hands off of the steering wheel of its Easy Ride robo-vehicle during a test ride on a course in Yokohama, near Tokyo. Starting next month, Nissan is testing on regular roads what it calls "a robo-vehicle mobility service." Called Easy Ride, it uses a cell-phone app to book semi-autonomous driven rides. (AP Photo/Shizuo Kambayashi) Ogi Redzic, senior vice president for the alliance among Nissan, Renault SA of France and Mitsubishi Motors Corp said Easy Ride's technology will deliver safer rides because most accidents are caused by human error. Redzic, who oversees the alliance's connected vehicles and mobility services, sees fail-proof cybersecurity as crucial. Driverless mobility services could also help make up for growing labor shortages, reduce traffic and parking problems and help energize depopulated areas, Redzic told The Associated Press on the sidelines of a news conference Friday announcing the service. For Easy Ride, users first download a special app on their cellphones. After logging on, voice recognition is used to set a destination, and the date and time for when the ride picks you up at one of four possible spots in Yokohama. A display visible from the vehicle's back seat shows its route on a digital map. It also recommends events such as concerts, historical landmarks, restaurants and other places to visit, which pop up as photos and text on the display. The service also includes coupons that can be downloaded and used at those spots. In this Wednesday, Feb. 21, 2018, photo, a Nissan Motor Co. staff member gets his hands off of the steering wheel of its Easy Ride robo-vehicle during a test ride on a course in Yokohama, near Tokyo. Starting next month, Nissan is testing on regular roads what it calls "a robo-vehicle mobility service." Called Easy Ride, it uses a cell-phone app to book semi-autonomous driven rides. (AP Photo/Shizuo Kambayashi) Some glitches remain. In a recent demonstration, the app had trouble launching because of a poor internet connection at Nissan headquarters. When a reporter said, "I want to eat a burger," it successfully recommended several nearby joints. But it was not able to find the nearest New Balance store, or any other place to buy sneakers. In this Wednesday, Feb. 21, 2018, photo, Nissan Motor Co.'s Easy Ride robo-vehicle, front, goes on a course during a test ride in Yokohama, near Tokyo. Starting next month, Nissan is testing on regular roads what it calls "a robo-vehicle mobility service." Called Easy Ride, it uses a cell-phone app to book semi-autonomous driven rides. (AP Photo/Shizuo Kambayashi) In this Wednesday, Feb. 21, 2018, photo, Nissan Motor Co.'s staff member shows off a smartphone in front of an East Ride robo-vehicle at its headquarters in Yokohama, near Tokyo. Starting next month, Nissan is testing on regular roads what it calls "a robo-vehicle mobility service." Called Easy Ride, it uses a cell-phone app to book semi-autonomous driven rides. (AP Photo/Shizuo Kambayashi) In this Wednesday, Feb. 21, 2018, photo, Nissan Motor Co.'s Easy Ride robo-vehicle goes on a course during a test ride in Yokohama, near Tokyo. Starting next month, Nissan is testing on regular roads what it calls "a robo-vehicle mobility service." Called Easy Ride, it uses a cell-phone app to book semi-autonomous driven rides. (AP Photo/Shizuo Kambayashi) In this Wednesday, Feb. 21, 2018, photo, Nissan Motor Co.'s staff member gets his hands off of the steering wheel of its Easy Ride robo-vehicle during a test ride on a course in Yokohama, near Tokyo. Starting next month, Nissan is testing on regular roads what it calls "a robo-vehicle mobility service." Called Easy Ride, it uses a cell-phone app to book semi-autonomous driven rides. (AP Photo/Shizuo Kambayashi) Explore further Nissan hiring 300 to develop common connected car technology 2018 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. Credit: University of Glasgow A new type of flexible, wearable sensor could help people with chronic conditions like diabetes avoid the discomfort of regular pin-prick blood tests by monitoring the chemical composition of their sweat instead. In a new paper published in the journal Biosensors and Bioelectronics, a team of scientists from the University of Glasgow's School of Engineering outline how they have built a stretchable, wireless system which is capable of measuring the pH level of users' sweat. Sweat, like blood, contains chemicals generated in the human body, including glucose and urea. Monitoring the levels of those chemicals in sweat could help clinicians diagnose and monitor chronic conditions such as diabetes, kidney disease and some types of cancers without invasive tests which require blood to be drawn from patients. However, non-invasive, wearable systems require consistent contact with skin to offer the highest-quality monitoring. Current systems are made from rigid materials, making it more difficult to ensure consistent contact, and other potential solutions such as adhesives can irritate skin. Wireless systems which use Bluetooth to transmit their information are also often bulky and power-hungry, requiring frequent recharging. The University of Glasgow team's new system is built around an inexpensively-produced sensor capable of measuring pH levels which can stretch and flex to better fit the contours of users' bodies. Made from a graphite-polyurethane composite and measuring around a single square centimetre, it can stretch up to 53% in length without compromising performance. It will also continue to work after being subjected to flexes of 30% up to 500 times, which the researchers say will allow it to be used comfortably on human skin with minimal impact on the performance of the sensor. The sensor can transmit its data wirelessly, and without external power, to an accompanying smartphone app called 'SenseAble', also developed by the team. The transmissions use near-field communication, a data transmission system found in many current smartphones which is used most often for smartphone payments like ApplePay, via a stretchable RFID antenna integrated into the system another breakthrough innovation from the research team. The smartphone app allows users to track pH levels in real time and was demonstrated in the lab using a chemical solution created by the researchers which mimics the composition of human sweat. The research was led by Professor Ravinder Dahiya, head of the University of Glasgow's School of Engineering's Bendable Electronics and Sensing Technologies (BEST) group. Professor Dahiya said: "Human sweat contains much of the same physiological information that blood does, and its use in diagnostic systems has the significant advantage of not needing to break the skin in order to administer tests. "Now that we've demonstrated that our stretchable system can be used to monitor pH levels, we've already begun additional research to expand the capabilities of the sensor and make it a more complete diagnostic system. We're planning to add sensors capable of measuring glucose, ammonia and urea, for example, and ultimately we'd like to see a system ready for market in the next few years." Explore further New biosensor could monitor glucose levels in tears and sweat More information: Wenting Dang et al. Stretchable wireless system for sweat pH monitoring, Biosensors and Bioelectronics (2018). Journal information: Biosensors and Bioelectronics Wenting Dang et al. Stretchable wireless system for sweat pH monitoring,(2018). DOI: 10.1016/j.bios.2018.02.025 A UK-wide study of children's reading habits has found that Scottish secondary school pupils, like their peers in other countries, are not reading challenging enough books. The What Kids are Reading Report, analysed by the University of Dundee's Professor Keith Topping, was written using data compiled by literacy and assessment provider Renaissance UK. It looked at the reading habits of almost 1 million children across Scotland, England, Wales, Northern Ireland, and, for the first time, the Republic of Ireland. This year's report was the largest in the 10-year history of What Kids are Reading. The study of 29,524 pupils across Scotland also reveals the most popular books and authors among Scottish school children. It highlights a persistent problem across the UK in encouraging secondary school pupils to read challenging and age-appropriate books. Book difficulty levels rise sharply in the early years of formal education, meaning that primary pupils are typically reading more advanced books for their chronological age. However, this progress stops at around age 11 and the difficulty of books read falls as pupils get older. This decline exists among both boys and girls and across all parts of the UK. In the final year of primary school, Scottish pupils are reading one year less than their chronological age but this gap doubles by the first year of secondary school. In the later years of secondary school, pupils are reading at least three years below their chronological age meaning that many pupils sitting their National 4 and 5 examinations at age 16 have the reading ability of a 13-year-old or lower. Professor Topping, Professor of Education and Social Research at Dundee, said, "The uniformity of the fall in literacy levels is striking as it cuts across boys, girls and all parts of the UK. "To avert a further slide in literacy levels in secondary schools, pupils should be encouraged to push themselves to read more difficult books. "By their teenage years pupils are more likely to take advice from their friends and peers than their teachers and parents about the types of books they should be reading. With this in mind, teachers could encourage them to talk more openly about what they are reading and make appropriate suggestions to their classmates." The Renaissance study also found that primary school pupils read books with a greater understanding than their secondary school counterparts, with reading comprehension falling sharply in teenage years in relative terms. Pupils in secondary school are also reading books that are no harder than those in primary school. Few secondary schools build dedicated reading time into the timetable when compared with their primary counterparts. Renaissance is calling for secondary schools to consider building dedicated reading time into the curriculum to ensure that teenagers do not fall further behind. Renaissance UK Managing Director Dirk Foch said, "The vast majority of primary schools place an emphasis on developing pupils' literacy skills. However, this is rarely continued once pupils go to secondary school. This makes maintaining literacy levels among teenagers a persistent challenge for teachers and policy makers. "The fall in teenagers' reading ages is striking. By the time many come to sit their National 4 and 5 examinations, many will have a reading age of 13 or less, meaning that they could even struggle to comprehend their exam papers. This could have a significant impact on their future academic success. "Evidence shows that pupils make the most progress when they read for just 15 minutes per day, so I would encourage all secondary school teachers to build some dedicated reading time into the timetable to avert a further fall in literacy levels among young people." Explore further Home reading environment is crucial for children's reading skills Illustration of waves propagating away from a point-like source. Left: Regular wave propagation. Right: Wave propagation on a hyperbolic metasurface. Credit: P. Li, CIC nanoGUNE Researchers from CIC nanoGUNE (San Sebastian, Spain) and collaborators have reported in Science the development of a so-called hyperbolic metasurface on which light propagates with completely reshaped wafefronts. This scientific achievement toward more precise control and monitoring of light is highly interesting for miniaturizing optical devices for sensing and signal processing. Optical waves propagating away from a point source typically exhibit circular (convex) wavefronts. "Like waves on a water surface when a stone is dropped," says Peining Li, EU Marie Sklodowska-Curie fellow at nanoGUNE and first author of the paper. The reason for this circular propagation is that the medium through which light travels is typically homogeneous and isotropic, i.e., uniform in all directions. Scientists had theoretically predicted that specifically structured surfaces can turn the wavefronts of light upside-down when it propagates along them. "On such surfaces, called hyberbolic metasurfaces, the waves emitted from a point source propagate only in certain directions, and with open (concave) wavefronts," explains Javier Alfaro, Ph.D. student at nanoGUNE and co-author of the paper. These unusual waves are called hyperbolic surface polaritons. Because they propagate only in certain directions, and with wavelengths that are much smaller than that of light in free space or standard waveguides, they could help to miniaturize optical devices for sensing and signal processing. Now, the researchers have developed such a metasurface for infrared light. It is based on boron nitride, a graphene-like 2-D material, which was selected because of its ability to manipulate infrared light on extremely small length scales. This has applications in miniaturized chemical sensors or for heat management in nanoscale optoelectronic devices. The researchers directly observed the concave wavefronts with a special optical microscope. Hyperbolic metasurfaces are challenging to fabricate, because an extremely precise structuring on the nanometer scale is required. Irene Dolado, Ph.D. student at nanoGUNE, and Saul Velez, former postdoctoral researcher at nanoGUNE (now at ETH Zurich) mastered this challenge using electron beam lithography and etching of thin flakes of high-quality boron nitride provided by Kansas State University. "After several optimization steps, we achieved the required precision and obtained grating structures with gap sizes as small as 25 nm," Dolado says. "The same fabrication methods can also be applied to other materials, which could pave the way to realize artificial metasurface structures with custom-made optical properties," adds Saul Velez. To see how the waves propagate along the metasurface, the researchers used a state-of the-art infrared nanoimaging technique that was pioneered by the nanoptics group at nanoGUNE. They first placed an infrared gold nanorod onto the metasurface. "It plays the role of a stone dropped into water," says Peining Li. The nanorod concentrates incident infrared light into a tiny spot, which launches waves that then propagate along the metasurface. With the help of a so-called scattering-type scanning near-field microscope (s-SNOM) the researchers imaged the waves. "It was amazing to see the images. They indeed showed the concave curvature of the wavefronts that were propagating away form the gold nanorod, exactly as predicted by theory," says Rainer Hillenbrand, Ikerbasque Professor at nanoGUNE, who led the work. The results promise nanostructured 2-D materials to become a novel platform for hyberbolic metasurface devices and circuits, and further demonstrate how near-field microscopy can be applied to unveil exotic optical phenomena in anisotropic materials and for verifying new metasurface design principles. Explore further Integrated metasurface converts colors of light over broadband inside a waveguide More information: Peining Li et al, Infrared hyperbolic metasurface based on nanostructured van der Waals materials, Science (2018). Journal information: Science Peining Li et al, Infrared hyperbolic metasurface based on nanostructured van der Waals materials,(2018). DOI: 10.1126/science.aaq1704 February 23, 2018 in Multimedia (E) [prMac.com] Boston, Massachusetts - FxFactory today released a new set of Final Cut Pro X plugins called XEffects Rips. Developed by partner Idustrial Revolution, the plugins emulate the ripping of paper, separating the media into two halves with a photorealistic edge. The pack consists of effects and titles for single clips and transitions to rip between clips. "We wanted to develop a plugin that would offer realistic looking rips and tears within Final Cut Pro X. It's a look many graphic designers will be familiar with and we wanted to make that great style available to video editors inside FCPX" said Peter Wiggins, plugin developer at Idustrial Revolution. "We put a lot of effort into our plugins making them easy to use with a couple of clicks. However, we also believe in flexibility, hence we try to publish as many of the custom controls possible so that editors can tweak the look of the plugin to exactly what they want". The rip has onscreen controls for direction and rotation and the rip itself can be positioned using X & Y controls and rotated to any angle. Each plugin comes loaded with a choice of 10 different edges which can be adjusted for edge width, colour and offset. Features: * All Transitions, Effects & Title Plugins work with video or images * Control tear direction and paper tear angle * Onscreen controls for paper tear angles * Position tear anywhere in frame using X and Y controls * 10 different edges to choose from * Control depth of edge and edge offset * Add a drop shadow to outgoing or incoming tear * Make multiple tears using Compound Clips * Control speed of tear * Pin sharp results even in 4K FCPX timelines Idustrial Revolution's designers and editors have been at the forefront of using Apple technology and software in creating content for broadcasters, corporate users and videographers. They have been successfully producing products for Final Cut Pro for over 11 years. Pricing and Availability: XEffects Rips is distributed through FxFactory online. It is being launched at a discounted price of $39 (USD) for one week until the 1st March 2018. Normal price $49 (USD). Established in 2004, Boston, Massachusetts-based Noise Industries is an innovative developer of visual effects tools for the post-production and broadcast community. Their products are integrated with popular non-linear editing and compositing products from Apple and Adobe. Copyright (C) 2018 Noise Industries. All Rights Reserved. Apple, the Apple logo, Mac OS X, and Macintosh are registered trademarks of Apple Inc. in the U.S. and/or other countries. All other trademarks and trade names are the property of their respective owners. ### In a Feb. 23 Slatest, Osita Nwanevu mistranscribed hyper-Catholicism as hyperconservatism. In a Feb. 23 Slatest, Joshua Keating misspelled Antonio Guterres last name. In a Feb. 23 Slatest, Elliot Hannon misidentified the location of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School school shooting as Parkdale, Florida. The shooting took place in Parkland, Florida. In a Feb. 22 Jurisprudence, Mark Joseph Stern misspelled the name of a decision that Justice Clarence Thomas would have reversed. It is Silvester v. Becerra, not Sylvester v. Bacerra. Advertisement In a Feb. 22 Politics, Christina Cauterucci misstated when the Orlando Pulse nightclub shooting happened. It was in the summer of 2016, not 2017. In a Feb. 22 Slatest, Ben Mathis-Lilley misspelled Marjory Stoneman Douglas first name. In a Feb. 21 Brow Beat, Matthew Dessem misspelled commentator Jesse Watters last name. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Due to an editing error, a Feb. 21 Future Tense misstated the date when the Federal Communications Commission published the repeal of net neutrality rules. It was Thursday, not Tuesday. In a Feb. 21 Moneybox, Henry Grabar misidentified the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. In a Feb. 20 Interrogation, Isaac Chotiner misidentified Steven Pinkers book The Better Angels of Our Nature as The Better Angles of Our Nature. In a Feb. 20 Slatest, Josh Voorhees misstated that Sean Duffy and his wife, Rachel, were castmates on Real World: Boston. They met as participants on Road Rules: All Stars. In a Feb. 19 Slatest, Lila Thulin misidentified Philadelphia as Pennsylvanias capital. The states capital is Harrisburg. Slate strives to correct all errors of fact. If youve seen an error in our pages, let us know at corrections@slate.com. General comments should be posted in our Comments sections at the bottom of each article. At this point, its fairly clear that any Democrat who wants to run for president in 2020 with support from the partys progressive base will have to campaign on some sort of plan that they can plausibly call Medicare-for-All. What, exactly, counts as Medicare-for-all? Thats still a bit unsettled. No one serious simply wants to expand the current Medicare program, since it contains some major coverage gaps that todays seniors are typically stuck filling with private supplemental insurance. When Sen. Bernie Sanders tried to define the term back in December, he proposed a full-fledged single-payer health care system with zero premiums, co-pays, or deductibles. That idea won over more than a dozen co-sponsors, including some other likely 2020 contenders like Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Kirsten Gillibrand. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement But many Democrats are still clearly concerned that such a rapid move to true, Canadian-style single-payer would risk a backlash from voters, whod face new taxes and be forced to give up their employer-based coverage, whether or not they wanted to. Those Democrats, which include a big chunk of the partys wonk class, are still looking for their own answer to Berniecare. On Thursday, the Center for American Progressthe D.C. think tank of choice for technocratically inclined establishment Demstook its stab at an alternative with the introduction of Medicare Extra. While the name sounds like an ironic nod at teen slang, the program itself is an interesting blueprint for gradually nationalizing health care without making skeptical voters feel as if theyre being dragooned into the new system. Advertisement Like some of the other ambitious health plans Democrats have floated lately, Medicare Extra looks a lot like a bulked up version of the public optionthe government run insurance plan that progressives tried and failed to pass as part of Obamacare. The new program would essentially roll together Medicare, Medicaid, and the Childrens Health Insurance Program into a single system with more generous benefits that all Americans would be eligible to join, with most families having to pay at least some premiums. But traditional Medicare would be left in place for change-averse seniors who want to stick with what they know, and businesses would be allowed to continue offering their employees private coverage as a benefit. Advertisement Medicare Extras pool of patients would then grow over time. The government would automatically enroll newborns, people turning 65, and the uninsured. After several years, businesses would be allowed buy their employees into the program rather than pay for private insurance. Many would likely jump at that chance in order to save money; Medicare Extra would be designed to keep costs down by paying providers less than private insurers do, with rates set based on an average of what Medicare, Medicaid, and commercial carriers pay today, minus a percentage. Eventually, the program would evolve into a more or less national insurance system. Working people wouldnt necessarily be forced to join it. But most of them would probably want to, or at least would get a nudge from their employer. Advertisement Advertisement Unlike Berniecare, Medicare Extra would not make going to the doctor free for everyone. Conceptually, this is one of the biggest differences between the two plans. Under Medicare Extra, poorer families wouldnt face any premiums, co-pays, or deductibles. But households making more than 150 percent of the poverty line would. Premiums and out-of-pocket costs would be subsidized on a sliding scale according to income, so that well-off Americans would owe more and needier enrollees would owe less. In this way, the scheme would work much like Obamacares exchanges do today. But unlike Obamacare, which stops offering assistance to families with incomes four times above the poverty line, nobody would be required to pay more than 10 percent of their earnings toward the cost of their Medicare Extra premiums. Advertisement Advertisement The other major difference between Berniecare and Medicare Extra is how they treat the private sector. Both programs would ban insurance companies from offering competing plans to individuals. But under Berniecare, companies could not continue offering their workers comprehensive private health insurance as a perk. Under Medicare Extra, they could as long as the insurance met certain basic standards for coverage. The big question is how many would bother. Because it would offer lower payment rates to doctors and hospitals, the new public insurance program would almost certainly be cheaper than any equivalent private plan. In the long-term, it seems like companies that wanted to provide health benefits would probably stick to offering supplemental plans that filled in some of Medicare Extras holes, whatever those might be. Advertisement Some of the other differences would be more cosmetic than substantive. Take the way each plan is funded. Sanders would likely try to pay for much of his program with new payroll and income taxes. Medicare Extra isnt really so different. Families would be asked to pay premiums, just like theyre used to today. But theyd be paying them to the government in order to cover the cost of a public health insurance program, and the transactions would be handled through the tax withholding system. In other words, were more or less talking about payroll and income-taxes by another name. I think that tells you a lot about what the establishment Democrats really want to accomplish. Their vision is more moderate, in that Medicare Extra nominally leaves room for private insurers. But fundamentally, its about softening the transition to a largely socialized health care system. You might even call it single payer with American characteristics giving people the government health care they really want, while respecting their angst about taxes, as well as the fantasy that the free market might come up with something better. Whatever your opinions on the polarizing Best Picture-nominee Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, the protest at the center of the film is undoubtedly shocking and memorable: Frances McDormands character rents out three billboards in order to call out the towns police chief for failing to arrest anyone for the rape and murder of her daughter. Raped while dying; And still no arrests?; How come, Chief Willoughby? the signs read in sequential order. The fictional protest is so memorable, apparently, that several instances of activism echoing the movie have been reported around the world over the last few weeks. Advertisement Earlier this month, protesters set up three trucks around London to bring renewed attention to last years deadly Grenfell Tower fire. In a press release on their website, the group Justice4Grenfell released photos as well as a statement that read in part, Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement 8 months on from the tragedy of the Grenfell Tower, the issue is being ignored. 71 people died in the Grenfell Tower. And still no arrests. And still 297 flammable towers. And still hundreds of survivors are homeless. Advertisement This week, the international civic group AVAAZ took three billboards to Miami to call out Senator Rubio in the wake of the Parkland, Florida shooting: Slaughtered in school; And still no gun control; How come, Marco Rubio? Advertisement And on Thursday, the Union of Medical Care and Relief Organizations, a coalition of medical and humanitarian organizations, set up three billboards outside of the United Nations in New York, urging the Security Council to act on the violence happening in Syria. Advertisement During her acceptance speech at the BAFTAs on Sunday, Frances McDormand commented upon the reports, stating she is thrilled that activists all over the world have been inspired by the set decoration of the three billboards in Martins film. Weve reached out to Martin McDonagh for comment and will update if he responds. Ruth Graham died in 2007 when I was about to embark on a daylong hike in the Great Smoky Mountains. Browsing a rack of newspapers on a coffee run before heading into the woods, I was jarred to see my own name in the headlines. Feeling uncharacteristically superstitious, I called my dad to let him know where I was going and what time Id be back. I felt a similar shiver of affinity on Wednesday morning when I read that Ruths husband, the legendary 20th-century evangelist the Rev. Billy Graham, had died at age 99. Im not related to that Graham family, but they have hovered over my whole life in more ways than our not-uncommon last name suggests. I am the granddaughter of a theologically conservative Protestant pastor and a woman named Ruth Graham. My childhood bedroom overlooked the cupola of the Billy Graham Center, a large building that opened the year after I was born. When I was 18, I moved a half-mile across the tracks to that same campus, Wheaton College, Billy and Ruth Grahams alma mater. And Ive spent much of my career reporting on evangelical culture, where Graham is revered as a lion of the faith. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Being Ruth Graham has nudged me to periodically re-evaluate the evangelical world I was raised in. At times, my shadow identity has generated some funny mix-ups. Just a few weeks ago, a publicist helping me set up a time-sensitive interview with a different prominent evangelical accidentally sent the interview details to Grahams daughteryet another Ruth Grahamleading to a minor comedy of errors. In college, a woman emailed me at my wheaton.edu address to thank me for my ministry during a particular crusade decades earlier. On a campus where Grahams name loomed so large, I fielded questions at least weekly about whether Billy was my grandfather. This was the evangelical equivalent of being constantly mistaken for the granddaughter of the pope. Since then, my name has broken the ice during countless interviews, and been the subject of biting and bemused comments online about my work. Though Ive never misrepresented myself, I have to suspect the name has at least gotten my emails opened by church secretaries and Christian PR reps. After all, what if? Advertisement But being Ruth Graham has meant more to me than an occasional laugh or frisson of reflected glory. It has nudged me to periodically re-evaluate the evangelical world I was raised in, and which Billy Graham presided over unofficially for decades. Having to clarify that Im not biologically related to Graham means Ive had to do a lot of thinking about whether I might be spiritually related to him anyway. Advertisement These days I no longer consider myself an evangelical. Im not an ex-evangelical, I just dont believe it anymoreno drama! But as far as Ive drifted from the fold, I have to admit that I still reflexively view Grahams style of Christianity as the one against others are measured. He emphasized a personal relationship with Jesus, a literal Heaven and Hell, and other basic tenets of theologically conservative Christianity. For as much as his legacy in the secular world rests of his political influence, the theme he returned to over and over was the saving grace of a loving God. Advertisement Advertisement I winced, then, as I scrolled through the dismissive burns proliferating online after Grahams family announced his death this week: The big news today is that Billy Graham was still alive this whole time. Anyway, have fun in hell, bitch. Lauren Duca (@laurenduca) February 21, 2018 Advertisement Advertisement Billy Graham is dead and in hell with Scalia Fits Of The Jorts Star (@jephjacques) February 21, 2018 Its not that I could blame them, exactly. I cant defend Grahams tone-deaf forays into LGBTQ issues, though he wasnt nearly as concerned with the issue as many of his peers. He was arguably ahead of most white pastors on the racial conflicts of the 1950s and 1960s, but certainly no crusader. He was caught on tape denigrating Jews in the Oval Office during the Nixon administration. Ninety-nine years on Earth provides a lot of time for growth and self-reflection, and Graham eventually apologized for these moral errors. But he never flipped around and became an activist with sustained attention to social justice. No one is obligated to forgive him. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement That said, many of his critics this week seem to be conflating him with the generation of politically aggressive conservative Christian leaders who rose in the late 1970s and 80s, including Jerry Falwell and, later, Falwells and Grahams sons. It was a problem he anticipated. It would be unfortunate if people got the impression that all evangelists belong to that group, he told Parade magazine in 1981. I dont wish to be identified with them. Im for morality. But morality goes beyond sex to human freedom and social justice. He supported contraception as early as the 1950s, and after Roe v. Wade, he convened a meeting to determine a proper Biblical response to abortion-on-demand meaning abortion for any reason rather than just due to, say, rape or incestsuggesting a relatively nuanced approach. He preached to American evangelicals about global poverty and advocated for an expansion of foreign aid in the 1950s. He visited South Africa in 1973 under the condition that his gatherings be fully integrated. He said in 1997 that were closer to Islam than we really think we are. And he didnt promise wealth or health in return for piety or donations. A low bar, perhaps, but his cultural stature outlived the sleazy televangelists and GOP minions who competed for the attention of the faithful in his era. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Outlived until now, that is. When President Obama tweeted his respects on Wednesday, his mentions lit up with rebukes for honoring a monster like Graham. Decency, respectability, civilitylately it feels like these qualities are sometimes read as code words for a failure to speak truth to power. Indeed, its tempting to daydream about what theologically conservative Christianity might look like in 2018 if Graham had been just slightly more willing to afflict the comfortable. Instead, he was a natural moderate who had the misfortune to die in a moment in which fence-sitting has fallen out of favor. Perhaps thats for the best, at least for this moment in history. But I believe something will be lost if Graham is remembered warmly only by his fellow theological conservatives. Call it self-interest, but I hope his good name endures. Justice Clarence Thomas makes no secret of his enthusiasm for guns. In the decade since the Supreme Court first found that the Second Amendment secures an individual right to bear arms, Thomas has written a series of opinions attacking laws that regulate gun ownership. On Tuesday, six days after the shooting in Parkland, Florida, the justice penned his fiercest firearm screed yet, condemning a California law that requires gun owners to wait 10 days before buying each additional weapon. According to Thomas, the Constitution prohibits states from imposing a brief cooling-off period on individuals who wish to stockpile guns. Advertisement In a powerful Atlantic piece, Garrett Epps points out that Thomas consistently fails to weigh the consequences of widespread gun ownership in his Second Amendment decisionsthe massacred families, the dead children, the active shooter drills in our schools. The one thing Id add to Epps excellent piece is that there is one context in which Thomas is willing, even eager, to discuss the horrors that bullets can inflict upon the human body. Indeed, his death penalty opinions often read like public service announcements for gun control. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Thomas death penalty decisions describe shootings in graphic detail, lingering on the visceral brutality of gun violence. Consider his account of Jason Wayne Hursts murder of Daniel Lee Branch, from whom Hurst had just purchased a shotgun: Advertisement The two men met in a field, where Hurst asked if he could test-fire the gun. As Branch walked into the field to set up some cans and bottles for that purpose, Hurst opened fire. Hurst shot Branch three times. His first shot struck Branch in the ribs or stomach, prompting him to yell, [N]o, no, dont shoot. His second shot struck Branch in the side, causing him to fall. Hurst then walked over to Branch and shot him in the head, before taking his keys and driving off in Branchs car. Or his description of Kevan Brumfield and Henri Broadways attack on Cpl. Betty Smothers and Kimen Lee: Brumfield fired seven rounds from a .380-caliber handgun at close range from the left side of the cruiser, while Broadway fired five rounds from a .25-caliber handgun from the right rear of the cruiser. Brumfield hit Corporal Smothers five times in the forearm, chest, and head. Lee was hit multiple times as well, causing 11 entrance and exit wounds, but she somehow managed to slide over on the bench seat and take control of the police car. She drove to a nearby convenience store, where she was able to call for help and to describe Broadway to police. Emergency responders transported both women to the hospital. Corporal Smothers was pronounced dead on arrival. Lee survived. Advertisement Advertisement Or his lurid description, in a dissent issued just last month, of Keith Tharpe shooting his sister-in-law with a shotgun, rolling her body into a ditch, reloading, and then firing a second, fatal shot. Advertisement In Tharpe and Brumfields cases, a majority of the court ruled in favor of the defendant on narrow legal grounds, delaying execution. In Hursts, the court declined to review the judgment of a lower court. Thomas was furious that the court spared all three men from imminent death at the hands of the state. He used his dissents to force his colleagues to confront the defendants gruesome crimeseven though these facts were irrelevant to the legal issues at hand. The justice ignores the reality of gun violence, by contrast, when the facts get in the way of his ideological extremism. His opinion in Silvester v. Becerra, the challenge to Californias 10-day cooling off period, is typical of his Second Amendment fulminations.* Studies indicate that waiting-period laws may save lives: These measures appear to reduce both homicides and suicides involving guns. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Californias act, and the Supreme Court declined to review its judgment. In response, Thomas complained that his colleagues had turned the right to keep and bear arms into a second-class right and a constitutional orphan. He added that at least four members of this court would question a 10-day waiting period for abortion or cross-burningtwo rights that, according to Thomas, are not protected by the Constitution. Advertisement Advertisement Last term, the justice wrote a similar opinion, this time joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch, attacking a California law that limits the concealed carry of weapons. Once again, he chastised his colleagues for failing to appreciate the putative importance of guns in American life. For those of us who work in marbled halls, guarded constantly by a vigilant and dedicated police force, the guarantees of the Second Amendment might seem antiquated and superfluous, Thomas wrote. But the Framers made a clear choice: They reserved to all Americans the right to bear arms for self-defense. I do not think we should stand by idly while a State denies its citizens that right, particularly when their very lives may depend on it. Advertisement Advertisement As Epps notes, these dissents have become something of a ritual. Thomas has also slammed a San Francisco measure that compels residents to keep their guns locked up; a federal law that bars domestic abusers from purchasing firearms; and a Highland Park, Illinois, ordinance that bans assault weapons. (He went out of his way to praise AR-style semiautomatic rifles, the weapon of choice for mass shooters, in the latter dissent.) In none of these opinions did Thomas seriously consider the other side of the equationthe lives saved by these modest restrictions on gun ownerships. Advertisement Indeed, reading Thomas Second Amendment opinions, you might get the sense that the justice is entirely unaware of the gun violence epidemic that plagues the United States. But his concurring and dissenting opinions in death penalty cases prove he is well aware of the carnage that guns routinely inflict on human bodies in this country. Advertisement Thomas would likely argue that theres nothing inconsistent about his near-absolute opposition to gun control and his fixation on the atrocity of gun violence in the context of capital cases. In his jurisprudence, law-abiding gun owners always use their weapons responsibly and upstanding citizens must bear arms to protect themselves from monsters like Hurst, Brumfield, and Tharpe. Any restriction on firearmsfrom cooling-off periods to assault-weapon bansonly endangers the men and women who keep guns for self-defense. The students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School could tell Thomas that this stark division between good guys with guns and bad guys with guns has no purchase in the real world. The gunman who shot up their school fired more than 100 rounds in several minutes, killing 17 people. He bought his gun legally. It was an AR-15style rifle, the exact model Thomas alleged to be constitutionally protected. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement American trauma surgeons have grown familiar with the effect ammunition fired from an AR-15 have on the human body. The rifles bullets travel three times faster than a typical handgun bullet and are far more lethal. They cause catastrophic bleeding and exit wounds the size of an orange. Most victims die on the spot. Thomas did not see fit to discuss any of this when he opined on the importance of these weapons for millions of Americans. He did not acknowledge the risk widespread AR-15 ownership creates for the rest of us. (Mass shootings surged after the federal assault weapons ban expired.) Instead, the justice describes gun rights in gauzy abstractions about personal freedom and disregards the human toll of firearmsunless hes discussing a death row defendant who, he believes, deserves to die. There is little consistency, and even less respect for human life, in the justices jurisprudence. There is only a fatalistic resignation to the notion that frequent mass slaughter is the price Americans must pay for liberty. On Wednesday night, an auditorium full of impassioned teenagers and parents jeered Florida Sen. Marco Rubios every word until the senator with an A+ rating from the National Rifle Association conceded he was shifting some of his positions on gun control. Rubio said that he and his Democratic colleague, Sen. Bill Nelson, would try to secure unanimous consent to pass a bill strengthening the federal database for background checks when the Senate returns next week. Rubio also supported raising the age for purchasing long guns from 18 to 21 years old as well as a ban on bump stocks. He said he was reconsidering his past position against limiting magazine sizes. He also rejected the NRA and the Trump administrations pet solution of arming and training teachers at schools. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Watching Rubio change these deeply held positions every 10 minutes, it was difficult not to entertain the possibility that this time the gun control debate might be different even for a crusty congressional reporter who covers a structurally broken system every day. The students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School have been more effective keeping the pressure up than any group of gun-safety activists Ive ever seen. Their activism seems not just to have reached their Republican senator, but also the president. His tangents about training militias of math teachers notwithstanding, President Trump seems capable of actually budging from the NRA line. On Thursday, he said that hes talked with senators and congressmen, and theyre into doing background checks that they wouldnt be thinking about maybe two weeks ago. Its unclear whether he meant improving the reporting that goes into the National Criminal Instant Background Check System, as the NRA-backed, bipartisan Fix NICS Act does, or actually broadening the scope of background checks, an effort the NRA strongly opposed in 2013. He also suggested that he wants to raise the age for purchasing certain long gunsa position the NRA does not support. Advertisement Advertisement The president is key to advancing any efforts in Congress. With lawmakers on recess this week, though, its difficult to gauge how widespread these policy shifts are beyond the Florida senators and representatives who have spoken out about the latest tragedy. Pennsylvania Sen. Pat Toomey, who co-authored with West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin the background check bill that failed in 2013 following Sandy Hook, told this Washington Post this week that he sees enough interest from his colleagues to make another run for it. That proposal would have expanded background checks to cover certain private-party transactions, such as those made online or at gun shows. One doubts that Toomey would be willing to raise this, and put many of his colleagues in a difficult spot, without having run it by them. Advertisement Advertisement Toomeys support suggests there might be just enough movement to tip Congress into a familiar pattern: the Senate is capable of producing some modest legislation that House Speaker Paul Ryan isnt inclined to call up without the presidents support. The position that House leaders staked late last year was to tether its version of the Fix NICS Act with the NRAs No. 1 legislative priority: a national concealed-carry reciprocity measure. The House passed this logrolled gun bill in December, but the Senate has yet to take it up. Before the vote, Politico reported this week, House GOP leaders promised conservatives that they would not decouple the background-checks bill from the concealed-carry language. Advertisement While senators like Rubio are now racing to pass the Fix NICS Act, House conservatives arent moving from their position that it should remain linked with concealed-carry reciprocity. Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, a co-founder and former chairman of the conservative Freedom Caucus, told Politico earlier this week that the Fix NICS Act would allow bureaucrats and administrators to take away an individuals Second Amendment liberties. If a stand-alone vote on the Fix NICS Act is too controversial for conservatives, how would raising the purchasing age for rifles fly? Expanding background checks to cover private sales? Limiting high-capacity magazines? Just as with immigration, success or failure is a matter of whether the president is actually committed to advancing any legislation. If hes willing to provide cover for the changes he claims to be moving toward, that could be enough to get a modest package of reforms on background checks and age minimums to the floor of the House, where Democrats would presumably help pass it. If not, Trump will tack on some disproportionate demand, such as attaching those reforms to concealed carry reciprocity, and hell blame Democrats for the failure to get anything done. Former Trump campaign consultant Rick Gates pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy and one count of lying to investigators on Friday. Special counsel Robert Mueller also unsealed a five-count superseding indictment against Paul Manafort that included new allegations. That new indictment had been issued on Feb. 16, 2018. The cases against the two men are so closely intertwined that looking at the crimes Gates has confessed to and the evidence he has offered can provide insight into the current state of the case against Manafort. Advertisement The five-count indictment includes previously reported details of alleged money laundering, false statements to the Department of Justice, false and misleading statements in Foreign Agents Registration Act submissions, failure to register as a foreign agent, and conspiracy against the United States to hide the alleged lobbying efforts. It also contained new details of the broader lobbying conspiracy surrounding an effort to pay European politicians to lobby on behalf of a pro-Russian political party in the Ukraine. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Here are some of the highlights of Fridays document release: According to emails described in the indictment against Manafort, he communicated directly with former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych to describe his lobbying work. According to the new indictment: [Manafort] secretly retained a group of former senior European politicians to take positions favorable to Ukraine, including by lobbying in the United States. The plan was for the former politicians, informally called the Hapsburg group, to appear to be providing their independent assessments of Government of Ukraine actions, when in fact they were paid lobbyists for Ukraine. In 2012 and 2013, [Manafort] used at least four offshore accounts to wire more than 2 million euros to pay the group of former politicians. Advertisement Manafort allegedly detailed the Hapsburg group plan in an EYES ONLY memo in 2012. He also allegedly described the plan as being to assemble a small group of high-level European highly influencial [sic] champions and politically credible friends who can act informally and without any visible relationship with the Government of Ukraine. This paid super European politician squad, according to the indictment, lobbied United States Members of Congress, officials in the Executive Branch, and their staffs, allegedly in coordination with Manafort. Advertisement Gates will face a recommended sentence of between 57 to 71 months in prison. That means, despite his cooperation, he might face nearly six years in jail. Gates lied to investigators about a March 19, 2013 meeting between Manafort, Mercury Public Affairs lobbyist and former Congressman Vin Weber, and Rep. Dana Rohrabacher at the Capitol Hill Club. He said falsely that Manafort and Weber told him that Ukraine did not come up at the dinner. Rohrabacher, in discussing the dinner, had told news outlets that he couldnt recall if Manafort had received a contract from Russia or Ukraine, and that Russia and the Baltic states probably came up during the dinner. Advertisement Advertisement This lie took place during a Feb. 1 proffer session. That means that as he was negotiating a plea agreement contingent upon sharing information about Manafort, he was apparently continuing to lie on Manaforts behalf. Gates confessed to owning, allegedly with Manafort, a number of shell companies used to funnel his (and allegedly Manaforts) Ukrainian lobbying cash. Money laundering includes a potential maximum penalty of 20 years in prison and Gates certainly makes that case stronger. Gates says he misled Manaforts tax accountants about overseas bank accounts, under Manaforts instructions and on his behalf. Advertisement In Nov. 2016, the pair told the Department of Justice that Manaforts company, DMP International, could not find documents related to Ukraine-related consulting work because the company does not retain communications beyond 30 days. Such documents were subsequently discovered during court-authorized searches of Manafort and [Gates] DMI email accounts and Manaforts Virginia residence in July 2017. Advertisement It will be interesting to now see how possible pressure on Manafort might be applied. On Friday, he maintained his innocence and vowed to fight the charges. But the evidence is stacking up against him and cooperating might be his only way to avoid a lengthy jail sentence. Muellers ultimate goal has been to discover if Donald Trumps campaign, of which Manafort was once the chairman, cooperated in Russias effort to subvert the 2016 election. Now there are European politicians sucked into this scandal, as well as a U.S. congressman known for his support of Russia. In considering what we now know about this case, it might be worth remembering what House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy told colleagues in the summer of 2016: Theres two people I think Putin pays: Rohrabacher and Trump, he said to laughter. Swear to God. Bashar al-Assads regime is carrying out yet another massacre in full view of the world. The bombardment of Eastern Ghouta, an agricultural area of 400,000 people that is one of the last pockets of rebel-held territory near the Syrian capital, has killed at least 426 people, including at least 98 children, since Sunday, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. The Assad government and its ally, Russia, claim to be targeting only military positions, and they blame the violence on rebels firing mortars into Damascus. But aid workers say army helicopters have been dropping barrel bombscrude, indiscriminate weapons useful only for killing civilianson marketplaces and medical facilities. Local insurgents also claim that Russian warplanes have been involved in the bombing, which Moscow denies. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Ghouta, under siege since 2013 and facing acute shortages of food and medicine, has already seen some of the worst suffering of the Syrian war, including the infamous 2013 chemical weapons attack that killed hundreds. With most residents now living in shelters with little access to food or medicine, conditions have become truly dire. U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres* described it as hell on earth in a speech to the Security Council. The international response to the attacks is following a well-established script. The U.N. Security Council is working on a resolution calling for a nationwide cease-fire to allow medical evacuations and aid deliveries. Russia wants changes to the resolution: While the cease-fire in the draft agreement would not apply to strikes against ISIS and the formerly al-Qaidalinked Nusra Front, the Russians also want exceptions for other groups that have cooperated with them . Advertisement This could include the two main rebel groups in control of Eastern Ghouta, which have fought alongside Nusra in the past, meaning that the bombing could continue. Western governments accuse Russia of stalling for time to allow Assad to wipe out the resistance in Eastern Ghouta, possibly wiping out Eastern Ghouta itself in the process. Advertisement While the recent reports and photographs coming out of Eastern Ghouta have been as heart-wrenching and disturbing as anything seen so far in this very brutal war, the response from the Western media and governments seems muted compared with reactions to the 2016 siege of Aleppo or other Syrian atrocities. Last year, President Trump was so moved by the pictures of the beautiful babies killed by a chemical attack in Syria that he launched a missile barrage against Assads air force. Why no similar concern for babies like 35-day-old Samar Dofdaa, pictures of whom sparked brief international outrage when he died of malnutrition a day after being photographed at a clinic in Eastern Ghouta? (For what its worth, if the distinction comes down to death via chemical vs. conventional weapons, there have also been unconfirmed reports of chlorine gas being used in Eastern Ghouta.) Advertisement Advertisement Part of the answer is no doubt simply atrocity fatigue. After almost seven years of fighting, the world has become hardened to images of suffering coming out of Syria. Its also likely that the increasing complexity of the situation in Syria works to Assads advantage. The conflict may have begun as a fight between Assad and the rebels, each backed by various outside powers, but now there are at least three other major conflicts in the country. First, while its been winding down this year, the U.S.-backed war against ISIS in Eastern Syria is still ongoing. Second, Israel and Iran are inching ever closer to outright armed conflict on Syrian soil. Third, theres the recent Turkish incursion targeting Kurdish fighters along the Syrian-Turkish border. Advertisement Advertisement In addition to the Eastern Ghouta campaign, Assads major initiative of the past week has been sending pro-government militias to fight alongside the Kurdish YPG against Turkey in the contested enclave of Afrin. Kurds have long been marginalized under Assads rule, and the YPG, which seeks an autonomous Kurdish region within Syria, is technically opposed to the government. But the two have mostly avoided confrontation while each fights against other enemies, and its not a huge shock to see them team up against their mutual enemy: Turkey. Kurdish fighters also make up a significant component of the Syrian Democratic Forces, the main force working with the U.S. to fight ISIS. This means that at the same time the U.S. is condemning Assads actions in Eastern Ghouta and remains committed to his ouster, the main U.S. allies in Syria are cooperating with Assad to fight against Americas NATO ally, Turkey. These dizzying dynamics undermine everyones leverage to put pressure on Assad to step asideor at least halt his massacresand can only benefit the Syrian leaders efforts to cling to power at all costs. The battle lines, alliances, and rivalries may be shifting rapidly as the war enters a new and unpredictable phase, but the one constant is that Syrias civilians are bearing the brunt of the violence. Special counsel Robert Mueller on Thursday issued new indictments against former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and his one-time deputy Rick Gates. Many of the details of the new 32-count indictment were included in the original 12-count indictment issued against the two men in October. The new charges, though, bring the force of law to allegations of tax evasion, failure to report foreign bank accounts, and bank fraud by both Manafort and Gates. Coming amidst conflicting reports about Gates potential willingness to cooperate with Muellers investigation and testify against his old boss, the new charges muddy the waters surrounding the question of Gates position going forward. Advertisement The Los Angeles Times and CNN had recently reported that Gates was on the verge of reaching a plea agreement with Mueller that would presumably include cooperation in the case against Manafort. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement An associate of Gates, Alex van der Zwaan, pled guilty this week to making false statements about contacts with Gates regarding lobbying allegedly done on behalf of Ukraines then pro-Russian government. Gates, meanwhile, was represented in court on Thursday by Thomas C. Green, a high-profile Washington lawyer reportedly known for helping to negotiate plea deals. The Daily Beasts Betsy Woodruff, however, was reporting on Thursday that Green had been fired and would be replaced by Barry Pollack. Miller Chevalierwhere Pollack worksis the former firm of Manaforts current attorney, Kevin Downing, which might indicate that Gates was moving closer to Manafort and away from a plea deal. Advertisement Either way, the new chargesfiled in the Eastern District of Virginia rather than the District of Columbia where the first charges were filedincrease the potential jail time for both men. The indictment accuses the pair of laundering more than $30 million from offshore bank accounts, moving more than $75 million through those accounts, and fraudulently securing more than $20 million in bank loans by lying about Manafort and his companys income and by hiding debts. The newest details in the indictment describe how Gates allegedly doctored documents and solicited the aide of co-conspirators to falsify records in order to help Manafort allegedly fraudulently secure bank loans. Advertisement This included modifying reported income on official forms by changing them from PDFs to Word documents and back again. Manafort also allegedly supplied a bank with a letter from Gates that falsely took the blame for $300,000 in American Express debt that had damaged Manaforts credit rating. Those specific charges of alleged financial fraud began in July 2016 when Manafort was still head of the Trump campaign. Advertisement As the Washington Post reported, the trial judge in the Washington D.C. portion of the case had expressed frustration at the delayed timetable around a trial date: Advertisement Last week, U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson criticized both sides for what she called unacceptable delays in a case which still doesnt have a trial date set. Again, many of the details of the new charges were already made public in Octobers indictment, so it appears as though Muellers team had been holding them in their back pockets for a number of months. Its unclear whether the charges were simply not fully ready in October, or if there was some greater tactical reason for the delay. Its possible that the reported plea negotiations between Mueller and Gates had reached an impasse and this was the special counsels way of increasing the pressure on him. Its also possible that Muellers team was beginning to feel under the gun to add superseding charges in a new venue sooner rather than later following the criticism from Judge Berman Jackson. Either way, the new charges and reports about Gates legal team throw a good deal of uncertainty into a picture that had begun to appear to calcify in recent days. Much fuss was raised when it was revealed that top Russian intelligence officials visited Washington in January to discuss counterterrorism with the heads of the CIA and the National Intelligence directorate. Chuck Schumer, the Senates top Democrat, wrote in a letter that the meeting, which took place a little more than a year after our Intelligence Community unanimously concluded that Russia interfered in the 2016 U.S. election, raises a number of important questions. Indeed, it does, especially since one of the visitors, Sergei Naryshkin, the head of Russias Foreign Intelligence Service, was on the list of sanctions, drawn up in the Obama administrations final days, which blocked him from entering the country without a waiver. Advertisement Still, too much is being made of this meeting. Yes, Russia meddled in our 2016 election in an attempt to throw our democracy into chaos and help elect Donald Trump. Given how close the contest was (Hillary Clinton would have won with just 70,000 more votes in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan), the attempt almost certainly succeeded. Washington and Moscow also stand on opposing sides of the civil war in Syria (or in at least one of its many civil wars). And Russia violated international law with its annexation of Crimea. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Still, the United States and Russia do have common or converging interests on many issues. The two nations have long actively cooperated on thwarting the spread of nuclear weapons. If the wars in Syria are ever settled, Russia will have to be part of the settlement. The same is probably true of any potential diplomatic easing of the threat from North Koreas nuclear missiles. Advertisement The point is, you dont have to be a cynic or the most amoral adherent of Realpolitik to recognize that its sometimes necessary to talk and deal with unpleasant, even otherwise hostile, playersfor reasons of national security and morality. (Counterterrorism can be a moral pursuit if it winds up saving lives.) During World War II, the United States and Britain allied with the Soviet Union, well aware of Stalins perfidies; if they hadnt done so, out of some desire for moral purity, Hitler probably would have won the war. Through most of the Cold War, American and Russian generals, diplomats, and intelligence chiefs met often to discuss common interestseven as they waged proxy wars and otherwise connived to savage each other in realms where their interests conflicted. Advertisement Loch Johnson, a professor at the University of Georgia and a prominent intelligence historian, wrote in an email about the recent rendezvous in Washington, These meetings occur with some regularity, alternately between Moscow and Langley, and they are widely considered useful on the U.S. side. The theory is that the world is large, and not even wealthy nations can cover it all from an intelligence perspective. Therefore, intelligence liaison is vital. Advertisement The Washington Posts Shane Harris reported that some U.S. intelligence officials are nonetheless worried about the meeting because, as he put it, Moscow could interpret the encounter as a sign the Trump administration is willing to move beyond the issue of election interference. Advertisement Certainly Moscow wants the world to interpret it this way. Almost without exception, these meetings are kept secret on both sides, but this meeting was first reported in Russias state-run TASS news agency. In other words, top Kremlin officials wanted it publicized. As one U.S. intelligence official said to Reuters reporter Jonathan Landay, this disclosure seemed to be a calculated effort that sowed discord in the United States and reinforced the notion that they [the Russians] are not isolated internationally. Advertisement This is a valid worry, and one can only hope that CIA director Mike Pompeo and Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, who attended the meeting, made it very clear that their effort would fail, that we are not ready to move beyond the great hack of 2016. Certainly Pompeo has made this point publicly in many forums. Whats extraordinary, then, isnt the meeting but rather that the Russians can sow confusion about its meaning. Theyre able to do this, with an ease that must astound them, because the Trump administration is a maelstrom of mixed messages. Pompeo and all the other national security officials endorse the intelligence communitys finding that the Kremlin interfered with the election; Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, the national security adviser, recently said that Robert Muellers indictment of 13 Russians renders the finding incontrovertible. But Trump himself has never said as much; on many occasions, hes loudly disputed the finding; faced with Muellers indictment, he hurled blame at Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, the FBIalmost everyone except the Russians. The intelligence officials quoted in the Post story worry that hosting Russian spies, at this delicate time, might send the wrong message. The real problem is that this administration has so much trouble sending any one message on a vast span of issues that could tilt toward war or peace. The Republican Party and the NRA frequently describe the Second Amendment in absolutist terms, suggesting that any restriction on the right to bear arms runs afoul of the Constitution. In reality, however, federal courts have consistently upheld constraints on Americans ability to buy, sell, and carry firearms. On Friday, the 2nd Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals upheld yet another gun regulation, a New York City measure that sharply limits gun owners ability to transport their weapons. The decision serves as a reminder that virtually all gun control laws attainable in our current political climate will pass muster in the courts. Advertisement New York state already bars the concealed carry of firearms for those who cannot establish a special need for self-protection, a law upheld by the 2nd Circuit in 2012. New York City goes further, prohibiting residents from removing their firearm from their home at allunless theyre taking it to or from an authorized small arms range or shooting club within the city. There are seven such facilities in the city, including at least one in each borough. Three residents challenged the measures constitutionality, arguing that the Second Amendment secures their right to transport their firearms to shooting ranges, competitions, and second homes outside the city. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement A three-judge panel for the 2nd Circuit unanimously rejected their claim. In a decision by Judge Gerard Lynch, the court explained that New York Citys law does not place a substantial burden on the core right of the Second Amendment, self-defense in the home. Nor does it prevent New Yorkers from engag[ing] in practice, training exercises, and shooting competitions. Instead, the law simply limits the number of firing ranges at which gun-owning New Yorkers may maintain their skills. Advertisement Still, the court acknowledged that New York Citys law creates a modest burden on New Yorkers who wish to transport their guns to second homes beyond city limits. Thus, the court applied intermediate scrutiny, asking whether the measure is substantially related to the achievement of an important governmental interest. The court easily concluded that it was, citing an affidavit from Andrew Lunetta, the former commander of the License Division. Lunetta explained that when the city had a more lenient rule, gun owners routinely abused it, taking guns outside the city for a variety of illicit reasons, then pretending they were traveling to shooting ranges. Officers struggled to verify or disprove these cover stories, effectively neutering the rule. As a result, gun owners carried their weapons during family disputes and in traffic, crowds, and demonstrations, raising the risk of violence. Advertisement Advertisement When the city introduced its current, more stringent rule, the License Division had a much easier time monitoring the public carry of licensed firearms. This experience, the court explained, demonstrates that the law was indeed carefully tailored to further a critical interest. The court also noted that New Yorkers may still attend shooting ranges and gun shows outside the city; they need only rent a firearm at a facility. They can also purchase a second gun for their second home. The court concluded: Advertisement The burdens imposed by the Rule do not substantially affect the exercise of core Second Amendment rights, and the Rule makes a contribution to an important state interest in public safety substantial enough to easily justify the insignificant and indirect costs it imposes on Second Amendment interests. Accordingly, [the Rule] survives intermediate scrutiny. Advertisement This conclusion aligns neatly with the Supreme Courts Second Amendment jurisprudence, which guarantees only the right to keep a handgun in the home for self-defense. A few courts have extended that right beyond the home, but most have allowed significant restrictions on public carry. Similarly, four federal appeals courts have ruled that states and cities may ban assault weapons altogether; none have held that such weapons are constitutionally protected. The courts have also allowed a variety of other gun safety measures, including mandatory trigger locks, age limits, and waiting periods as well as the strict regulation of gun shops and a lifetime ban on firearm ownership by domestic abusers. As these rulings indicate, it isnt primarily the courts that stand in the way of meaningful gun control. The federal judiciary would likely uphold almost any gun safety law that Congress or the states are able to pass, including an outright prohibition on assault weapons. Republicans may insist that the Second Amendment grants every American the untrammeled right to bear arms whenever, wherever. But in reality, the actual Constitution is no impediment to meaningful reform of American gun laws. It was overlooked following Wednesdays Teens Roast Marco Rubio special on CNN, but that night also saw a significant development in whats expected to be one of the most-watched Senate races in the country. Florida Gov. Rick Scott hasnt yet declared his candidacy against Sen. Bill Nelson. But if and when he does, gun control will play a central role in it. Much to the pleasure of the strongly pro-gun control crowd at the CNN event, Nelson mentioned his co-sponsorship of an assault weapons ban that would take some 200 specific makes off the market. He mentioned, for example, the AK-47, one of the rifles that the Parkland gunman Nikolas Cruz had recently purchased, and which Kalashnikov USA recently began assembling in Florida. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Did you know that the state of Florida, the governors office, gave financial incentives for them to come into the state and manufacture? Nelson said. Without ever mentioning Scott by name, Nelson drew the same connection to the shooting at Stoneman Douglas. And did you know that the state of Florida, the governors office, gave financial incentives for the Colt corporation to come to Kissimmee to manufacture AR-15s the same one that wreaked such havoc here at and that you all are suffering so terribly from? Nelson said. Later, when one student was pressing Rubio about why Congress didnt change gun after previous school shootings, Nelson interjected to steer the conversation towards Tallahassee. You could ask the same question, Nelson said, why two years ago when 49 lives were taken in the Pulse nightclub, and nothing was done; not in Washington, not in Tallahassee, not one thing offered by the administration in Tallahassee. Mention a failure to act in Washington, and Nelson will meet you with a failure of leadership from the administration in Tallahassee. Advertisement Much like Rubio, Scott is feeling the pressure to soften his posture on guns from the maximalist position of the National Rifle Association. On Friday, Nelson and state legislative leaders called for a series of gun-safety measures similar to those that Rubio opened himself to earlier this week. One, a so-called red flag proposal, would bar violent or mentally ill people from purchasing weapons. Another would raise the age of purchase for long guns from 18 to 21. Neither of those proposals are beloved by the NRA. Scott also said that he disagreed with arming teachers, and preferred to boost school security through a greater law enforcement presence. Advertisement What Scott would not do is support a ban on assault weapons. That made Nelsons response fairly straightforward. And no, it did not give Scott partial credit for his minor infractions against the NRA. Advertisement Advertisement Students, parents and teachers across our state are demanding actionbut instead of listening to them, its clear the governor is once again choosing to listen only to the NRA, Nelson said in a statement. The governors plan doesnt do one thing to ensure comprehensive criminal background checks or ban assault rifles, like the AR-15. His leadership is weak and by recommending raising the age to 21 he is doing the bare minimum. As you might expect, certain pundits have declared Nelsons hammering of Scott to be unseemly in a time of mourning. Heres another way to look at it: Its totally appropriate to attack a political opponent for a poor record on guns in the wake of a shooting if you believe that a better record might have prevented such a shooting. NATIONAL HARBOR, MarylandThere was some intrigue about whether the National Rifle Associations Wayne LaPierre would be making an appearance at this years Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) after last weeks shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. His absence from the conferences online schedule early this weekevidently as a precaution against anti-gun protesterswas in itself remarkable. The Washington Examiner pointed out in an article on the mystery that LaPierre has spoken at CPAC every year for at least the past decade. Advertisement The question was finally resolved on the printed schedules made available to attendees upon their arrival. LaPierre was given a 10 a.m. slot, shortly before Vice President Pence was slated to take the stage, ensuring a big audience for a speech that was ultimately a bit tepid by LaPierres usual rabble-rousing standards. He opted, wisely, to begin with pseudo-solemnity. We have serious discussions ahead, and serious issues that impact each and every one of us, he said. Just a week ago, we were all horrified by another terrible tragedy at an American school. Each and every member of the National Rifle Association mourns the loss of the innocent and continues to keep their families and that community in our prayers. We share a goal of safe schools, safe neighborhoods, and a safe country. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement That dreary business aside, he settled into his preferred mode. In the midst of genuine grief, and a very understandable passion, as millions of Americans search for meaningful solutions, what do we find? he asked. Chris Murphy, Nancy Pelosi, and more cheered on by the national media eager to blame the NRA and call for even more government control. They hate the NRA. They hate the Second Amendment. They hate individual freedom. They, as he would explain over the remainder of his speech, included not only Democratic politicians and the media, but a few more usual suspects: Black Lives Matter, antifa, Occupy Wall Street, professors assigning the Communist Manifesto and so onthe parties he warned would necessitate armed vigilance in his speech to CPAC last year. The lefts message is absolutely clear, hed said. They want revenge. You have to be punished. They say you are what is wrong with America. And now, you have to be purged. Advertisement Even conservative listeners were presumably expecting a little more than bile this time around, as Republicans have seemingly been cornered by the unexpected activism in the wake of the shooting into actively considering solutions for gun violence. Much of the conversation about gun control in the wake of Stoneman Douglas has centered around restricting gun ownership for those with mental health issues. On this, the NRA has mixed its messaging. LaPierre dedicated a section of his speech to condemning an Obama administration rule repealed by Trump that put Social Security recipients who had their finances managed by others due to mental illness into the background check system. Good, law-abiding people were automatically and unjustly declared mentally incompetent and put on a new government list, he said. And oh how socialists love to make lists. Especially lists that can be used to deny citizens their basic freedoms. Yet, minutes later, LaPierre was stressing that anyone adjudicated as mentally incompetent or a danger to society should be added to the check system and prevented from getting their hands on a gun. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement This echoed statements from Dana Loeschs in her appearance in CNNs Parkland town hall Wednesday night. He should, A, never have been able to get a firearm, she said of Stoneman Douglas shooter Nikolas Cruz. B, people who are crazy should not be able to get firearms. In a piece early Thursday, the Washington Posts Phillip Bump noted both that legal gun purchasers with clear signs of mental illnesses have been responsible for a minority of mass shootings and the NRAs contradiction. The NRA opposed the Obama rule and advocated for its repeal, he wrote early Thursday. But this is theoretically what Loesch wants to see: determinations of mental fitness that can be used to guide gun ownership. How else could a gun store owner know whether he was selling a firearm to someone whose mental fitness was compromised? Advertisement In her speech preceding LaPierre, Loesch offered, rather than answers to such questions, barbs aimed at the FBI, protesters she claimed had rushed the stage at CNNs town hall screaming burn her and legacy media outlets. Many in legacy media love mass shootings, she said. Crying white mothers are ratings gold to you and many in the legacy media in the back. And notice I said crying white mothers because there are thousands of grieving black mothers in Chicago every weekend, and you dont see town halls for them, do you? You do, actually. MSNBC held one last year. But the line fired up the crowd anywayalmost as much as LaPierres closing to his own speech. Lean in, listen to me now and never forget these words: To stop a bad guy with a guy with a gun, it takes a good guy with a gun. NATIONAL HARBOR, MarylandIt is always morning in Trumps America. On Friday, the president spent most of his address to the Conservative Political Action Conference presenting the evidence. Black unemployment is down. Companies are bringing piles of money back into the country. Dead industries are being revived. West Virginia is doing great now, he said. You look at whats happening in West Virginia. Incidentally, whats happening in West Virginia, on Friday, is a statewide teachers strikethe state is 48th in teacher pay as of 2016. This week, in response to the Stoneman Douglas shooting, the president proposed offering bonuses to teachers who bring guns to school, suggesting the federal money for public schools that vendors, speakers, and activists at CPAC have spent years insisting doesnt exist may well be available, at least for the project of ensuring that each American school has its own John Rambo. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Of course, CPAC is made less for advancing actual policy than riling up the conservative movements foot soldiers in defense of loose, mostly fraudulent abstractions: the Wall. Clean coal. And, of course, the Second Amendment. Dont be complacent, Trump warned the crowd. Because if they get in, they will repeal your tax cuts, they will put judges in that you wouldnt believe, theyll take away your Second Amendment, which we will never allow to happen. This was followed immediately by Trump asking the audience to choose between the Second Amendment and tax cuts. Guns won. Callous, yes, but Trump did, about 40 minutes into his speech, try his hand at solemnity, softening his voice and slowing his cadence down to eulogize Meadow Pollack, one of the victims of the Stoneman Douglas shooting. We wish there was something, anything we could do to bring Meadow and all of the others back, he said. There are not enough tears in the world to express our sadness and anguish for her family and for every family that has lost a precious loved one. Advertisement This was one of the few portions of the speech that was on the prepared script Trump himself called boring less than halfway through. The president veered off it again to admonish Scot Peterson, the sheriffs deputy who was on duty at Stoneman Douglas but didnt enter the building after responding to the shooting. He was tested under fire and that wasnt a good result, he said. I would rather have somebody that loves their students and wants to protect their students than somebody standing outside that doesnt know anybody and doesnt know the students, and frankly, for whatever reason, decided not to go in, even though he heard lots of shots being fired inside. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement This particular exercise in reductivitywhat Americas schools really need are burly, sharpshooting veteran teachers protecting their kids with the power of lovewas topped by a re-recitation of the Al Wilson song The Snake, back by popular demand from Trumps campaign days. Whatever Wilsons intentions may have been in writing it, it is now and forever a xenophobic immigration fable. One that rhymes. It beings with a foolish woman taking pity on a frozen snake that she finds and nurses back to health. Trump finished the story with a flourish the kids at CPAC likely havent heard since the last time their parents tucked them in. She stroked his pretty skin again and kissed and held him tight, he read. But instead of saying thank you, that snake gave her a vicious bite! Advertisement As well as this song and dance played here, it wont be of much help to Republicans facing Novembers midterms and voters whose view of the presidents accomplishments so far are decidedly less rosy and whimsical. Trump understands this and gets that heavy losses are likely. In fact, he began his speech beta-testing a narrative to explain them. The parties of incumbent presidents do poorly in midterms, he said, because supporters get complacent. People are sitting there, and they are saying, we just had this great victory, lets not vote, lets go to a movie, he said. The Republican Partywere going to do great. And then they end up losing. This is sound partial-explanation advanced to ensure that the president and his policies will remain fully blameless no matter what happens in November. And it will work. If Trump returns to National Harbor next year to deliver his third consecutive CPAC speech as president, he can expect the welcoming applause to be just as thunderous. The Netizen Report offers an international snapshot of challenges, victories, and emerging trends in internet rights around the world. It originally appears each week on Global Voices Advocacy. Afef Abrougui, Ellery Roberts Biddle, Marianne Diaz, L. Finch, Rohith Jyothish, Rezwan Islam, Inji Pennu, Karolle Rabarison, Elizabeth Rivera, Juke Carolina Rumuat, and Sarah Myers West contributed to this report. A 22-year-old man in Spain was sentenced Feb. 16 to two and a half years in prison by the countrys Supreme Court for publishing tweets in 2015 and 2016 that incited hate against women. One of the tweets that authorities singled out read, And 2015 will end with 56 women murdered, its not a good record but was all that could be done, lets see if in 2016 we can double that figure, thanks. The man had previously been sentenced to two years imprisonment for those tweets and for others that authorities said glorified terrorism. On review, the Supreme Court absolved the terrorism-related conviction, saying the tweets were generic, but it increased the punishment for the anti-women messages. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Bahraini human rights leader sentenced to five years in prison over tweets On Feb. 21, Nabeel Rajab, the outspoken leader of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, was sentenced to five years in prison over a series of tweets published in 2016 that prosecutors claimed were insulting to national institutions and insulting to neighboring countries. In the tweets, Rajab criticized Saudi Arabias position in Yemens civil war and also pointed to evidence of torture and ill treatment in Bahrains Jaw prison published by Human Rights Watch. Malaysian cartoonist could face prison over PM clown painting Malaysian cartoonist Fahmi Reza was prosecuted and found guilty of uploading false communication after he posted on Facebook a hand-painted cartoon of Malaysian Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak wearing clown makeup. In a subsequent post about the case, he wrote: Advertisement Painting the portrait of the PM with an evil clown make-up over his face was an at of protest against this corrupt government that uses the Sedition Act and other draconian laws to silence dissenting voices. He has been sentenced to one month in prison and a fine of about $7,600. His lawyer intends to appeal the case. Advertisement Kashmiri digital photo journalist marks 150 days in detention Kashmiri photojournalist Kamran Yousuf has been behind bars for 150 days, after being arrested in September 2017. He was finally charged on Jan. 18 with being associated with funding of terror and anti-state activities in the Kashmir Valley. His charge sheet also claims that he has not met the moral duty of a journalist for having neglected to cover any social/developmental activity by the state government or Government of India. Advertisement Yousuf rose to fame last year after his photos and videos of funeral processions and stone pelting battles went viral on social media, regularly receiving tens of thousands of views and shares. The Press Council of India has expressed concern about his detention. The Kashmir Editors Guild and the Committee to Protect Journalists have called for his release. Advertisement Macedonian citizen prosecuted for posting photos of on-duty police officers Police in Macedonia pressed charges against someone who took photos of on-duty police officers during local elections and then posted them on Facebook. The individual posted 30 photos, as part of an effort to demonstrate evidence of possible irregularities in the electoral process. The Basic Court of Gevgelija found the photographer guilty of abuse of personal data and issued a sentence of three months in prison. The person, who is unnamed, is appealing the decision. Advertisement Advertisement Turkish journalists put behind bars for life Six Turkish journalists were issued lifetime prison sentences for attempting to overthrow the constitutional order on the same day Turkish-German journalist Deniz Yucel was released after spending a year behind bars without charges. Yucel was arrested on suspicion of inciting the people to racial hatred and enmity and spreading the propaganda of a terrorist organization. His release came shortly after the Turkish prime ministers visit to Germany. There are currently 155 journalists serving jail time in Turkey. Venezuela is collecting more citizens dataand storing it for longer than ever The National Telecommunications Commission of Venezuela has expanded the (already long) list of personal data necessary to access telephone services in the country. It also has lengthened the period of time that operators should retain the data, from three months after a contract expires to five years. Advertisement The new rule makes Venezuela one of the countries with the longest data retention periods in Latin America, alongside Colombia. In addition to an identity document, signature, fingerprint, and complete name and address, users must now also disclose their email address, be photographed, and have their fingerprint taken with a biometric device. The commission said telephone operators should digitalize the data collected, but did not specify how it should be protected, only that operators and the states security apparatus should define the conditions for proper storage and treatment. New research Dead Reckoning: Navigating Content Moderation After Fake News Data & Society State of Privacy in LebanonSMEX/Privacy International Unique Subscribers and Mobile Internet Users: Understanding the New Growth StoryGSMA Intelligence Well-known British Tree Hunter visits Slovakia Vote for your favourite tree in the contest. Rob McBride, the well-known British Tree Hunter, visited the Slovak finalist in the contest European Tree of the Year, an apple tree from Bosaca. Read also: Read also: Slovak tree of the year: 120 year-old apple tree Read more Rob has dedicated his life to protecting trees, striving to increase the importance of their protection via his activities. He is a photographer, traveller and ambassador of old and significant trees, who regularly cooperates with the BBC. When Rob found out about the contest Tree of the Year, he travelled half of Europe in 2015 and 2017 to visit the finalists of the European contest. I think that trees can connect people like nothing else can. We celebrate together our arborist treasures, our beautiful and precious trees that can help people to find the real value of trees and role that they play in our lives, said Rob McBride, as quoted by a press release. The contest, with 13 trees competing, lasts until the end of February. The results will be announced at the Award Ceremony in Brussels, the 21st of March, where the winners will be awarded. 23. Feb 2018 at 7:15 | Compiled by Spectator staff Blog: Foreigners, get involved What about making our voices heard? And not only in itsy-bitsy interviews about traditional cuisine and the High Tatras. In November, municipal elections take place in Slovakia and foreigners with permanent residence can vote too. (Source: TASR) In January, the number of foreigners' applications for residence permits in Slovakia grew by 37 percent year-on-year, read a flash news item on Monday. I already knew about this massive increase as the head of the Slovak Foreigner's Police Ladislav Csemi called it in an interview for my radio station earlier in January. In fact, this increase is so massive that his employees cant cope with it. Csemi says the departments are understaffed by about 30-40 percent. Labour market analysts had been saying for years that Slovakia needs a foreign labour force so you could argue that police could have planned their resources better. Or as many listeners said, police could hire civilians to handle the registration procedure while police officers deal only with those operations that have a potential criminal aspect such as fake identity documents or human trafficking. Listeners mentioned neighbours Austria and the Czech Republic as countries where civilian clerks deal with foreigners registration. I think that at least in Bratislava it will be a problem to find good quality candidates to fill these administrative positions for a very simple reason - wages. Somebody with at least a secondary school graduation and good command of a foreign language can easily find a better-paid job in Bratislava. In addition, there is no guarantee that a civilian employee would be more customer friendly than a police officer. Foreigners only make bad news There is no question that mentality plays a big role in the way the Slovak authorities deal with foreigners. Even news about increased foreign labour force was quickly linked to the story about the police and the labour inspection raiding a construction site in Kosice to catch illegal workers from Moldova and Ukraine. 23. Feb 2018 at 8:10 | Anca Dragu Historian: After 1948, Czechoslovakia was paralysed with fear On February 25, Czechs and Slovaks mark 70 years since the rise of Communism in their common state. Historian Jan Pesek talks about the coup and its aftermath. In this interview, Jan Pesek answers the questions: - What was the real support for Communists in Czechoslovakia in 1948? - What role did the Soviet Union play in the coup? -How did 40 years of totalitarian regime change Czechoslovakia? -Are Slovaks aware of this part of their history? - Could a similar coup happen in Europe even today? The Slovak Spectator (TSS): Historians mostly agree that it was inevitable the Communists would take control of Czechoslovakia. The events of February only sped up the process. Jan Pesek (JP): The Communists had been gaining decisive posts in the power structures - for instance, they controlled the interior ministry in the Czechoslovak government. They also managed to keep their strong positions after the 1946 elections. The fact that the coup happened in February 1948 is a coincidence. At that point, 12 non-Communist ministers resigned, which played into the hands of the Communists. [The then prime minister and leader of Communists] Klement Gottwald was over the moon seeing them commit such a folly. Communists could have waited for the elections in May and if that had not worked for them, they would have probably used force. They were simply waiting for an opportunity, and the opportunity presented itself with the unfortunate resignation of non-Communist ministers. Jan Pesek (1949), a historian at the Slovak Academy of Sciences since 1994, in his work focuses mostly on the post-war history of Czechoslovakia and Slovakia. His work on Czechoslovakia under Communism include the book Odvratena tvar totality (The Dark Side of Totalitarianism), and the Communist Party of Slovakia: History of a Political Subject. In 2000 he was awarded the Prize of the Slovak Academy of Sciences. TSS: In the 1946 election, the Communist party gained 40 percent of the vote in the Czech Republic, while in Slovakia, the Democratic Party won with 62 percent. Why such a difference in the election results? JP: Thats relative. Communists won 30 percent in Slovakia, more than they have ever had before the war. In 1946, the Democrats were de facto the only party standing against them. But the Democratic Party was not unified within, it comprised former agrarians, mostly Lutherans, who closed the April Agreement with the representatives of political Catholicism before the elections and promised the Catholics posts in the party leadership. So all the non-Communist votes were concentrated in this party. In the Czech Republic, the scene was more diverse. The Communists gained a lot, but other parties were rather strong there too. So, 30 percent in Slovakia and 40 percent in the Czech Republic is not such a big difference. TSS: Nevertheless, the myth that Slovaks did not favour Communists but Czechs did, remains alive among the Slovak public today. JP: Post-war Slovakia was still a prevailingly agricultural state, while the Czech lands were industrially developed. Slovakia caught up only in the 1980s. So in Slovakia, the working class was much smaller after the war, while the agrarian class prevailed. Slovakia was more religious, dominated by the Catholic Church. In the Czech lands, the Catholic Church did not play an important role. TSS: On February 25, 1948, Klement Gottwald spoke to a crowd of some 100,000 supporters gathered at Wenceslas Square in Prague. Did that really reflect the support for the Communist regime in 1948? Read also: Read also: How did Communism happen in Czechoslovakia? Read more JP: The three non-Communist governmental parties were prepared to fight the political fight in the parliament. But the Communists did not rely on that and they brought their offensive out to the streets, making the other parties incapable of reacting. They took to the factories and to the streets, and pressed for the general strike, while their opponents remained passive. Only a few hundreds of students came out, trying to get to the Castle to support President Benes. TSS: How long did the ovations last? The regime applied its non-democratic methods almost immediately 23. Feb 2018 at 16:45 | Michaela Terenzani How did Communism happen in Czechoslovakia? For the 40 years, Czechs and Slovaks would celebrate February 25 as Victorious February, even though the enthusiasm of most of those who supported Communists in 1948 would very quickly evaporate. Prime Minister Klement Gottwald (right) swears an oath into the hands of President Edvard Benes on February 27, 1948 at the Prague Castle. (Source: TASR photo reproduction) Czechoslovakia entered 1948 as the last remaining country under the Soviet sphere of influence, divided after World War II, where the Communists had not yet achieved supremacy. But that was to change very soon. In his monumental work Europe: A History, historian Norman Davies lists the February coup in Czechoslovakia as one of the three events that sealed the division of Europe and gave rise to the Iron Curtain, along with the creation of the Communist Information Bureau in October 1947 and the Berlin Blockade of April 1948. Read also: Read also: Historian: After 1948, Czechoslovakia was paralysed with fear Read more In February 1948, Czechoslovakia was preparing for parliamentary elections and was ruled by a coalition of four parties: the Social Democrats, the Peoples Party, the Democratic Party, and the Communists, who started fearing the rise of the socialist vote that could bring a decline in their own influence, as Davies noted. Their involvement in a genuine democratic system equally meant that they could not gain supremacy by manipulation, as in neighbouring Poland; so they resorted to force, Davies writes. 23. Feb 2018 at 16:45 | Michaela Terenzani Foreigners' Police finally move to Vajnory The new offices will open on March 19. Read more about the limitations at the department in Bratislava's Petrzalka between March 14 and March 16. The new premises of the Foreigners' Police department on Regrutska Street in Bratislava. (Source: Courtesy of Police Corps) After a number of postponements, the Foreigners' Police department for Bratislava will move to new premises on Regrutska Street in the Vajnory borough in the east of the capital on Monday, March 19. In the new premises, the police will open 23 counters, compared to the current 15, the Police Corps spokesperson Andrea Dobiasova informed. "The clients' comfort is further increased thanks to the 'children corner' and barrier-free adjustments," Dobiasova wrote. New opening hours at the Foreigners' Police Bratislava department as of March 19 Monday 08:00 15:00 Tuesday 08:00 15:00 Wednesday 08:00 17:00 Thursday 08:00 15:00 Friday 08:00 14:00 The police claim the work conditions for the immigration officers will improve too, which they hope should have a positive effect on their communication with the clients. The rooms will be bigger and equipped with new furniture. There are 27 parking spots in front of the building at the moment. The bus connections are limited , but the police say they are in talks with the local public transport office to improve the connections. Along with the move, the Foreigners' Police also introduces consultation days in cooperation with the local branch of the International Organisation for Migration. "Clients can obtain important information regarding residence, work, doing business, and insurance all in one place, based on the European good practices example of the so-called one-stop shop centres," Dobiasova noted. The current office of the department on Hrobakova Street in Petrzalka will work with some limitations due to the planned move. These are the opening hours on the days leading up to moving day: Wednesday, March 14 - 7:30 to 12:00Thursday, March 15 - closedFriday, March 16 - closed The police will not provide information on the phone number +421-9610-36855 on March 14 as of 12:00. The new phone number will be published as soon as it starts operating. Read also: Read also: Slovakia doesnt invest much in foreigners Read more 23. Feb 2018 at 10:36 | Compiled by Spectator staff Being young is harder than it used to be The failure of older generations to sympathise with youth means politics are primarily a contest of who can hand out more gifts to old people. It is inspiring to see high school students from Parkland, Florida, where 17 people were shot on Valentines Day, confront American politicians over gun policy in recent days. They are demanding that lawmakers finally correct the United States insane and dangerous gun laws, and rightly point out that adults have thus far failed to do so. If they succeed, it will be a rare example at least in the West of young people impacting contemporary politics. This is not for lack of trying, but rather because their parents and grandparents not only outnumber them, but selfishly ignore their views. To push governments toward policies oriented on the future, todays youth face the difficult task of convincing old people who may not be around to see it that the future matters. This has not always been the case. In fact, for much of the 20th century Western young people had more direct influence over the direction of their countries because they comprised a much larger proportion of the population. For example, in France, where students famously brought the country to a standstill in 1968, one-third of the population was under 20 years old at the time. Today it is just 24 percent, as compared to 38 percent who are over 50 (a full 9 percent are 75 or older). 23. Feb 2018 at 15:08 | Benjamin Cunningham Famous mime celebrates anniversary with Bratislava performances Apart from giving four performances in the theatre where his Slovak career started 50 years ago, internationally famous mime artist Milan Sladek will also have a show with the public-service RTVS broadcaster. To celebrate the 80 th birthday of Milan Sladek, the renowned mime artist will perform on the stage where he mimed 55 years ago. The Mala Scena theatre in downtown Bratislava offers four performances of this Slovak expat, which will combine his cult play Dar (Gift), from 1969 as a reaction to the Soviet invasion, and his most recent piece, Andy & Basquiat. In the beginning which was quite difficult I was told that my art is not typical for Slovakia, Sladek recalled at a meeting with the media on February 22. But I answered that as I am Slovak and I am doing the art of mime, it has become part of the national culture. Describing his long and winding road to this genre, the famous mime artist said he started at the school of applied arts, learning to be a carver. From there, his career took a turn to puppetry, acting and later the art of mime, which he started to study and also perform in Prague, the capital of then-Czechoslovakia. The first performance took place in March 1960. When the theatre he and his colleagues performed at lost interest, he came to Bratislava, to a new local stage called Mala Scena (Small Stage). After his very first performance Evening of Mime in 1958 as part of the student troupe of the local Comenius University, Sladek got to perform first in the Slovak National Theatre (1961-1962) and then at Mala Scena (1962-1968). Years abroad Later, he became a director of Theatre Studio Bratislava but after August 21, 1968, he left Czechoslovakia which was occupied by Russian-led armies. He first emigrated to Sweden and then to Cologne, Germany, where he opened his own Kafka Theatre (1974), then the only pantomimic stage in western Europe. After the fall of communism and the dissolution of Czechoslovakia, he brought a historical building of the Arena Theatre back to life, making it the only Slovak stage offering the art of mime. He was in Slovakia from 1992 to 2002, when he returned to work in Germany. On the art of mime His work was not subject to communist-regime censorship because how can you censor mime? Nor did he, with his ensemble, have to play a certain portion of Soviet-made plays, as there were none, the Slovak mime actor added. And thanks to the fact that he was able not only to do the staging and puppets (thanks to his education and later training), but also costume designs and lighting, he was independent and truly free to create the kind of theatre he envisioned. Nevertheless, Sladek left Czechoslovakia in protest against the occupation of August 1968. The art of mime is, in a wider sense, studying reality around us, processing it within and finding a way to express it, he noted. It is fundamental to all of civilisation: medical science, philosophy, religions everything was born out of mime. Even before the first images in the prehistoric caves appeared, people had started mimicking other people and animals; it was not yet art in the strict sense, but rather a way to explore the surrounding world. The man who arrived to Germany and founded a theatre there claims he was a pioneer in making the art of mime a full-length theatre piece, of which he has made many. Bratislava celebrations of the jubilee In the Bratislava performances on February 28 and March 1 (at 10:00) and March 2 and 3 (at 19:00), he will give two one-act plays, lasting two hours in total. The first one, Gift, is a political grotesque parodying the coexistence of Czechoslovakia and the communist Soviet Union on the story of Kefka, Sladeks alter ego who gets to breed a small, strange bird without knowing what can grow out of it. The second piece, Andy & Basquiat, on the other hand, is a recent work that pays tribute to one of Sladeks fascinations, US artist with Slovak roots Andy Warhol, as well as Afro-American graffiti artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. The one-act play reflects on the clash of concepts of two great, though completely different, artists. A TV programme of the public-service broadcaster, RTVS, televised on February 24 and called A Gala Evening (Galavecer), then lets Sladek look back at his life, his career, his moving to and from Slovakia, his artistic development but also his future plans. He himself will not perform but his colleagues and partners from past and current performances will. Recap and plans for future I was told I dont have to defend or convince people that the art of mime is good with my words but I tend to do so, Sladek admitted at the press meeting. Maybe its because I cannot speak on-stage so I compensate for it off-stage. It is interesting to listen to his musings and explanations, though, for example on the inner skills and practices of mime artists, but it is equally fascinating to watch him perform onstage. This can be seen in the fact that in the 80 years of his life (he turns 80 on February 23, 2018) and 60 years of performing mime, he has toured 55 countries worldwide with more than 46 of his own performances, while receiving several awards. Apart from performing, Sladek has also organised festivals of this genre one in Germany and one in Slovakia that ran for several years each. An art of mime festival complete with a workshop is slated for February 2019. 23. 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KG, Abbott Health Products LLC, Abbott Healthcare (Puerto Rico) Ltd., Abbott Healthcare B.V., Abbott Healthcare Costa Rica S.A., Abbott Healthcare LLC, Abbott Healthcare Luxembourg S.a r.l., Abbott Healthcare Private Limited, Abbott Healthcare Products B.V., Abbott Healthcare Products Ltd, Abbott Holding (Gibraltar) Limited, Abbott Holding GmbH, Abbott Holding Subsidiary (Gibraltar) Limited, Abbott Holding Subsidiary (Gibraltar) Limited Luxembourg S.C.S., Abbott Holdings B.V., Abbott Holdings LLC, Abbott Holdings Limited, Abbott Holdings Poland Spoka z ograniczona odpowiedzialnoscia, Abbott Hungary Korlatolt Felelossegu Tarsasag, Abbott Iberian Investments (2) Limited, Abbott Iberian Investments Limited, Abbott India Limited, Abbott Informatics Asia Pacific Limited, Abbott Informatics Canada Inc, Abbott Informatics Corporation, Abbott Informatics Europe Limited, Abbott Informatics France, Abbott Informatics Germany GmbH, Abbott Informatics Netherlands B.V., Abbott Informatics Singapore Pte. Limited, Abbott Informatics Spain S.A., Abbott Informatics Technologies Ltd, Abbott International Corporation, Abbott International Enterprises Ltd., Abbott International Holdings Limited, Abbott International LLC, Abbott International Luxembourg S.ar.l., Abbott Investments Luxembourg S.a r.l., Abbott Ireland, Abbott Ireland Financing Designated Activity Company, Abbott Ireland Limited, Abbott Japan Co. Ltd., Abbott Kazakhstan Limited Liability Partnership, Abbott Knoll Investments B.V., Abbott Korea Limited, Abbott Laboratories (Bangladesh) Limited, Abbott Laboratories (Chile) Holdco (Dos) SpA, Abbott Laboratories (Chile) Holdco SpA, Abbott Laboratories (Malaysia) Sdn. 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Ltd., Abbott Operations Uruguay S.R.L., Abbott Overseas Cyprus Limited, Abbott Overseas Luxembourg S.a r.l., Abbott Overseas S.A., Abbott Oy, Abbott Point of Care Canada Limited, Abbott Point of Care Inc., Abbott Poland Luxembourg S.a r.l., Abbott Procurement LLC, Abbott Products (Philippines) Inc., Abbott Products (Spain) S.L., Abbott Products Algerie EURL, Abbott Products B.V., Abbott Products Distribution SAS, Abbott Products Egypt LLC, Abbott Products Limited, Abbott Products Limited Liability Company, Abbott Products Luxembourg S.a r.l., Abbott Products Operations AG, Abbott Products Operations LLC, Abbott Products Romania S.R.L., Abbott Products Tunisie S.A.R.L., Abbott Products Unlimited Company, Abbott Resources Inc., Abbott Resources International Inc., Abbott S.r.l., Abbott Saudi Arabia Trading Company, Abbott Scandinavia Aktiebolag, Abbott Sociedad Anonima de Capital Variable, Abbott South Africa Luxembourg S.a r.l., Abbott Strategic Opportunities Limited, Abbott Trading Company Inc., Abbott Universal LLC, Abbott Vascular Devices (2) Limited, Abbott Vascular Devices Limited, Abbott Vascular Inc., Abbott Vascular Instruments Deutschland GmbH, Abbott Vascular International, Abbott Vascular Japan Co. Ltd, Abbott Vascular Limitada, Abbott Vascular Netherlands B.V., Abbott Vascular Solutions Inc., Abbott Ventures Inc., Abbott West Indies Limited, Abbott drustvo sa ogranicenom odgovornoscu za trgovinu i usluge, Advanced Neuromodulation Systems Inc., Alere, Alere (Shanghai) Diagnostics Co. Ltd., Alere (Shanghai) Healthcare Management Co. Ltd., Alere (Shanghai) Medical Sales Co. Ltd., Alere (Shanghai) Technology Co. Ltd., Alere A/S, Alere AB, Alere AS, Alere AS Holdings Limited, Alere BBI Holdings Limited, Alere Bangladesh Limited, Alere China Co. 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Ltd., Alere Medical Pakistan (Private) Limited, Alere Medical Private Limited, Alere North America LLC, Alere Oy Ab, Alere Philippines Inc., Alere Phoenix ACQ Inc., Alere Pte Ltd, Alere S.A., Alere S.r.l., Alere S/A, Alere SAS, Alere San Diego Inc., Alere Scarborough Inc., Alere Spain S.L., Alere Switzerland GmbH, Alere Technologies GmbH, Alere Technologies Holdings Limited, Alere Technologies Limited, Alere Toxicology AB, Alere Toxicology Inc., Alere Toxicology S.r.l., Alere Toxicology Services Inc., Alere Toxicology plc, Alere UK Holdings Limited, Alere UK Subco Limited, Alere ULC, Alere US Holdings LLC, Alere s.r.o., Alisoc Investment & Co, Amedica Biotech Inc., Ameditech Inc., American Generics S.A.S., American Medical Supplies Inc., American Pharmacist Inc., Antares S.A., Apica Cardiovascular Limited, Aquagestion Capacitacion S.A., Aquagestion S.A., Arriva Medical LLC, Arriva Medical Philippines Inc., Arvis Investments Limited, Atlas Farmaceutica S.A., Avee Laboratories Inc., Axis-Shield AD III AS, Axis-Shield AD IV AS, Axis-Shield AS, Axis-Shield Diagnostics Limited, Axis-Shield Ltd., BBI Animal Health Limited, BBI Diagnostics Group 2 Public Limited Company, Banco de Vida S.A., Bioabsorbable Vascular Solutions Inc., Bioalgae S.A., Biohealth LLC, Biosite Incorporated, Bosque Bonito S.A., Branan Medical Corporation, Brandex Europe C.V., British Colloids Limited, CFR Chile S.A., CFR Interamericas EL Salvador Sociedad Anonima de Capital Variable, CFR Interamericas Nicaragua Sociedad Anonima, CFR Interamericas Panama S.A., CFR Pharmaceuticals, California Property Holdings III LLC, CardioMEMS LLC, Caripharm Inc., Cephea Valve Technologies, Cephea Valve Technologies Inc., Colibri Medical Aktiebolag, Comercializadora y Distribuidora CFR Interamericas Honduras S.A., Concateno South Limited, Concateno UK Limited, Consorcio Tecnologico en Biomedicina Clinico-Molecular S.A., Continuum Services LLC, Cozart Limited, Dextech S.A., Diagnostik Nord GmbH, Distribuciones Uquifa S.A.S., Domesco Medical Import-Export Joint-Stock Corporation, Duphar International Research B.V., Endocardial Solutions, Epocal (US) Inc, Esprit de Vie S.A., European Chemicals & Co, European Drug Testing Service EDTS AB, European Services S.A., Evalve Inc., Evalve International Inc., FARMINDUSTRIA S.A., Fada Pharma Paraguay Sociedad Anonima, Fadapharma del Ecuador S.A., Farmaceutica Mont Blanc S.L., Farmacologia Em Aquicultura Veterinaria Ltda., Farmacologia en Aquacultura Veterinaria FAV Ecuador S.A., Farmacologia en Aquacultura Veterinaria FAV S.A., Fernwood Investment S.A., First Check Diagnostics LLC, Focus Pharmaceutical S.A.S., Forensics Limited, Forestcreek Overseas S.A., Fournier Pharma Corp., Fournier Pharma GmbH, Fournier Pharmaceuticals Limited, Framed B.V., Gabmed GmbH, Garden Hills LLC, Global Analytical Development LLC, Globapharm & CO LP, Glomed Pharmaceutical Company Limited, Golnorth Investments S.A., Gynocare Limited, Gynopharm Sociedad Anonima, Gynopharm de Centroamerica S.A., Gynopharm de Venezuela C.A., Hi-Tronics Designs Inc., IDEV Technologies Inc., IG Innovations Limited, IMTC Finance B.V., IMTC Holdings B.V., IMTC Technologies Inc., Ibis Biosciences LLC, Igloo Zone Chile S.A., Igloo Zone S.L., Inmobiliaria Naknek S.A.C., Innovacon Inc., Instant Tech Subsidiary Acquisition Inc., Instant Technologies Inc., Instituto de Criopreservacion de Chile S.A., Integrated Vascular Systems Inc., Inverness Canadian Acquisition Corporation, Inverness Medical (Beijing) Co. Ltd., Inverness Medical Innovations Australia Pty Ltd., Inverness Medical Innovations Hong Kong Limited, Inverness Medical Innovations SK LLC, Inverness Medical Investments LLC, Inverness Medical LLC, Inverness Medical Shimla Private Limited, Inversiones K2 SpA, Inversiones Komodo S.R.L., Ionian Technologies LLC, Irvine Biomedical Inc., Kalila Medical, Kangshenyunga S.A., Knoll UK Investments Unlimited, LLC VeroInPharm, Laboratoires Fournier S.A.S., Laboratorio Franco Colombiano Lafrancol S.A.S., Laboratorio Franco Colombiano del Ecuador S.A., Laboratorio Internacional Argentino S.A., Laboratorio Synthesis S.A.S., Laboratorios Lafi Limitada, Laboratorios Naturmedik S.A.S., Laboratorios Pauly Pharmaceutical S.A.S., Laboratorios Recalcine S.A., Laboratorios Transpharm S.A., Laboratory Specialists of America Inc., Lafrancol Dominicana S.A.S., Lafrancol Guatemala S.A. Sociedad Anonima, Lafrancol Internacional S.A.S, Lafrancol Peru S.R.L, Lake Forest Investments LLC, Lightlab Imaging Inc., Limited Liability Company Abbott Laboratories, Limited Liability Company Abbott Ukraine, Limited Liability Company VEROPHARM, Lung Fung Hong (China) Limited, Mansbridge Pharmaceuticals Limited, MediGuide LLC, MediGuide Ltd., Medscreen Holdings Limited, Metropolitana Farmaceutica S.A., Midwest Properties LLC, Murex Argentina S.A., Murex Biotech Limited, Murex Biotech South Africa, Murex Diagnostics Inc., Murex Diagnostics International Inc., Natural Supplement Association LLC, Negocios Denia Sociedad Anonima, Neosalud S.A.C., Nether Pharma N.P. C.V., NeuroTherm LLC, Normann Pharma-Handels GmbH, North Shore Properties Inc., Novamedi S.A., Novasalud.com S.A., Nutravida S.A., OJSC Voronezhkhimpharm, Omnilab Iberia Sociedad Limitada, OptiMedica, Orgenics France SAS, Orgenics International Holdings B.V., Orgenics Ltd., PBM-Selfcare LLC, PDD II LLC, PDD LLC, PT Alere Health, PT. Abbott Indonesia, PT. Abbott Products Indonesia, Pacesetter Inc., Pantech (RF) (PTY) LTD, Pembrooke Occupational Health Inc., Penagos S.A., Pharma International Sociedad Anonima, Pharmaceutical Technologies (Pharmatech) S.A., Pharmatech Boliviana S.A., Polygon Labs S.A., Quality Assured Services Inc., RF Medical Holdings LLC, RTL Holdings Inc., Ramses Business Corp., Recben Xenerics Farmaceutica Limitada, Redwood Toxicology Laboratory Inc., Rich Horizons International Limited, SC VEROPHARM, SJ Medical Mexico S de R.L. de C.V., SJM International Inc., SJM Thunder Holding Company, SPDH Inc., Saboya Enterprises Corporation, Salviac Limited, Scanax AS, Sealing Solutions Inc., Selfcare Technology Inc., Shandong Abbott Dairy Product Co. Ltd., Shanghai Abbott Medical Devices Science and Technology Co. Ltd., Shanghai Abbott Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd., Shanghai Si Fa Pharmaceutical Company Limited, Sinensix & Co., Spinal Modulation LLC, St. Jude Medical, St. Jude Medical AB, St. Jude Medical ATG Inc., St. Jude Medical Argentina S.A., St. Jude Medical Asia Pacific Holdings GK, St. Jude Medical Atrial Fibrillation Division Inc., St. Jude Medical Brasil Ltda., St. Jude Medical Business Services Inc., St. Jude Medical Cardiology Division Inc., St. Jude Medical Colombia Ltda., St. Jude Medical Coordination Center, St. Jude Medical Costa Rica Limitada, St. Jude Medical Europe Inc., St. Jude Medical Export Ges.m.b.H., St. Jude Medical GVA Sarl, St. Jude Medical Holdings B.V., St. Jude Medical India Private Limited, St. Jude Medical International Holding, St. Jude Medical LLC, St. Jude Medical Luxembourg, St. Jude Medical Luxembourg Holdings II, St. Jude Medical Luxembourg Holdings NT, St. Jude Medical Luxembourg Holdings SMI S.a r.l., St. Jude Medical Luxembourg Holdings TC S.a r.l., St. Jude Medical Mexico Business Services S. de R.L. de C.V., St. Jude Medical Middle East DMCC, St. Jude Medical Operations (Malaysia) Sdn. Bhd., St. Jude Medical Puerto Rico LLC, St. Jude Medical S.C. Inc., St. Jude Medical Systems AB, St. Jude Medical Turkey Medikal Urunler Ticaret Limited Sirketi, Standard Diagnostics Inc., Standing Stone LLC, Swan-Myers Incorporated, TC1 LLC, Tendyne Holdings Inc., Tendyne Medical Inc., Thoratec Delaware LLC, Thoratec Europe Limited, Thoratec LLC, Thoratec Switzerland GmbH, Tobal Products Incorporated, Topera GmbH in Liquidation, Topera Inc., Tremora S.A., Tuenir S.A., TwistDx, UAB Abbott Laboratories, UAB Abbott Medical Lithuania, Union-Madison Realty Company Inc., Unipath Limited (dba Alere International/aka Cranfield), Unipath Management Limited, Unipath Pension Trustee Limited, Veropharm, Veropharm Limited Liability Partnership, Vida Cell Inversiones S.A., Vida Cell S.A., Vivalsol, W&R Pharma Handels GmbH, Western Pharmaceuticals S.A., X Technologies Inc., Yissum Holding Limited, ZonePerfect Nutrition Company, eScreen Canada ULC, eScreen Inc., ( ), and Abbott Laboratories Baltics. CA, Inc., doing business as CA technologies, develops, markets, delivers, and licenses software products and services in the United States and internationally. It operates through three segments: Mainframe Solutions, Enterprise Solutions, and Services. The Mainframe Solutions segment offers solutions for the IBM z Systems platform, which runs various mission critical business applications. Its mainframe solutions enable customers enhance economics by increasing throughput and lowering cost per transaction; increasing business agility through DevOps tooling and processes; increasing reliability and availability of operations through machine intelligence and automation solutions; and protecting enterprise data with security and compliance. The Enterprise Solutions segment provides a range of software planning, development, and management tools for mobile, cloud, and distributed computing environments. It primarily provides customers secure application development, infrastructure management, automation, and identity-centric security solutions. The Services segment offers various services, such as consulting, implementation, application management, education, and support services to commercial and government customers for implementation and adoption of its software solutions. The company serves banks, insurance companies, other financial services providers, government agencies, information technology service providers, telecommunication providers, transportation companies, manufacturers, technology companies, retailers, educational organizations, and health care institutions. It sells its products through direct sales force, as well as through various partner channels comprising resellers, service providers, system integrators, managed service providers, and technology partners. The company was formerly known as Computer Associates International, Inc. and changed its name to CA, Inc. in 2006. CA, Inc. was founded in 1974 and is headquartered in New York, New York. Read More Luxembourg City Film Festival's International Jury President Atom Egoyan talks to RTL in an exclusive interview. The 8th edition of Luxembourg City Film Festival kicked off on Thursday night at Kinepolis Kirchberg with the screening of The Breadwinner, a Luxembourgish animated co-production directed by Nora Twomey, in the presence of Their Royal Highnesses the Grand Duke and Grand Duchess. Watch here the exclusive RTL Interview with President of the Festival's International Jury Atom Egoyan. With sixteen feature films and related projects, the Egyptian-born Armenian Canadian has won numerous awards including five prizes at the Cannes Film Festival, two Academy Award nominations and twenty-five Canadian Genie Awards. Luxfilmfest Running over 11 days from 22nd February - 4th March 2018, including two full weekends, the festival's 8th edition will offer a series of special events, including masterclasses with the Canadian director and German director Volker Schlondorff. The festival caters also to the younger public, with special workshops that aim to get participating children acquainted with the making of movies. Various events, such as workshops introducing the general public to the animation sector and exhibitions will be organised in the festivals headquarters at Casino Luxembourg - Forum d'art contemporain, while Belval's Rockhal will be host to the Luxembourg video clip night. More information about the festival programme and events can be found here. LuxFilmFest 2018 Coffee trading in Indonesia picked up slightly ahead of a mini harvest expected from March, while Vietnam's market was dull following a major holiday, traders said on Thursday. Indonesia's grade 4 defect 80 robusta traded at a premium of $140 a tonne to London's May contract, compared to a $160 premium to the March contract two weeks earlier, a trader in Lampung said. "Trade is starting to pick up (this week) because some areas are already starting to have early coffee harvest," the trader said. Some areas in Indonesia's Sumatra island usually have a mini harvest around March and April, while the main coffee harvest normally starts in July. In Vietnam, the world's top robusta bean producer, trade was slow after the Lunar New Year celebration, the country's biggest holiday locally known as Tet. Traders estimate farmers have sold 40 to 50 percent of their crop so far. Farmers in Daklak, Vietnam's main coffee-growing province, quoted beans at 37,000-37,600 dong ($1.63-$1.65) per kg, expanding from a 37,000-37,200 dong range before Tet, traders said. Traders quoted the 5 percent black and broken grade 2 robusta at a discount of $50-$100 per tonne to the ICE May futures contract , barely unchanged from a range of $60-$100 per tonne prior to the holiday. Trade is expected to pick up in the next few days when farmers and coffee companies workers are fully back to work, traders said. Vietnam Export Import Commercial Joint Stock Bank (Eximbank) has admitted that one of its former branch executives is on the run overseas after appropriating savings worth over US$10 million from a VIP depositor. Rumors have been circulated online that Le Nguyen Hung, a former deputy director of the lenders Ho Chi Minh City branch, used faked papers and forged authorization letters to steal VND245 billion ($10.79 million) from different savings books of a customer only known as B. Eximbank leaders on Thursday confirmed those allegations are true, adding that Hung has fled Vietnam. While it is clear that Hung committed a fraud, a lawsuit is needed to determine if B. could get her money back, Eximbank CEO Le Van Quyet told reporters in Ho Chi Minh City. Quyet explained that all the papers Hung used to make fraudulent transactions to appropriate the money were found with the authentic signature of B. The case should therefore be carefully investigated and Eximbank will follow any ruling given by the court, according to the CEO. As a VIP customer, B. insisted that all transactions be made at her residence, instead of at the bank, according to Bui Thi Thien Tam, director of the Eximbank Ho Chi Minh City branch. The lender will normally send two to three employees to the customers home to conduct transactions of this kind, but B. had particularly requested that she worked with Hung only, Tam added. B. once told Eximbank that she did not want to make contact with many people due to the hefty amount of money, Tam said. Hung, apparently taking advantage of B.s trust, began to steal her money in 2014 and the customer only grew suspicious and detected the theft in 2016. Hung has since been on the run outside Vietnam, while B. insisted that Eximbank give her money back. Quyet said while the bank understands and shares the misfortune with its customer, it could not immediately follow her request, pointing to the fact that all of her signatures on the relevant papers in the case have been verified as authentic by an agency under the Ministry of Public Security. He added that B. had signed those papers in advance as she is an important customer and thus receives special care from the lender. The CEO said his bank will follow the law and will take no action pending the final ruling of a court. If the court rules that Eximbank must pay back the stolen money to B., the bank will immediately do so, he underlined. Quyet also emphasized that the online rumor is only partially true, and the authentic signature of B. plays a crucial part in the case. State-run Vietnam Television (VTV) is in hot water after its special Lunar New Years Eve episode became the center of a public backlash due to homophobic and sexist jokes thrown around by the shows characters. Two LGBT rights organizations have sent a letter of objection to the national broadcaster, while viewers are calling for an end to the 15-year-old show. The comedic show, Gap nhau cuoi nam (Year-end get-together), also commonly known as Tao Quan (Kitchen Gods), is widely popular in Vietnam and considered a must-watch program on Lunar New Years Eve for many Vietnamese families. Since its first episode in 2003, the show has grown to be famous for offering a comedic and satirical view of social and economic issues in Vietnam throughout the previous year, played out by some of the most popular comedians in northern Vietnam. However, in recent years Gap nhau cuoi nam has been drawing criticism for its overexploitation of LGBT characters as a comedic tool and its failure to integrate some current issues of great public interest into the plot. This years episode of the show, which aired on the evening of February 15, elevated the use of homophobic jokes to a new level when one of its main characters Bac Dau, a transgender human embodiment of the Big Dipper asterism in Vietnamese astrology, became the target of constant jokes about their gender. Half-woman, disgusting and faggots were among the words hurled at Bac Dau by other characters. Many viewers have also taken to social media to express their disgust at the shows poor comedic taste, citing body-shaming and objectifying comments made toward a plus-size female character, who was also discouraged from wearing a bikini due to her weight. A plus-size character appears in the 2018 Gap nhau cuoi nam special episode of VTV. Photo: VTV On Thursday, the Institute for Studies of Society, Economics and Environment (iSEE) together with the Center of Protection and Advocacy of LGBT rights in Vietnam (ICS) jointly sent a letter to VTV to voice their objection to the show. In their letter, the non-governmental organizations stressed that they had collaborated with VTV in producing many TV programs promoting the protection of LGBT groups in Vietnam and building a positive image of the community in public view. However, we also acknowledge that there are some bad apples in VTV programs, notably the Gap nhau cuoi nam special where LGBT people have been constantly used as a tool for invoking laughs, and a target of unacceptable insults, the letter reads. As organizations with many years of experience working for the rights of the LGBT community in Vietnam, we object to the use of offensive remarks toward members of the LGBT community solely because of their body features, as well as any action that worsens existing prejudice and discrimination against this group, it continues. Hoang Huong, vice chairwoman of iSEE, told Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper that the prevalence of homophobic and sexist jokes in Gap nhau cuoi nam has been observed for years, but this years show was the last straw that prompted iSEE and ICS to break their silence over the issue. A persons gender is no laughing matter. Its a human matter, she said. The LGBT community is accepted by a growing part of the Vietnamese society, and the public view on LGBT issues has shifted for the better for so long. As a national broadcaster with great influences on public awareness, I think VTV should be the first to make the change, Huong added. Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam! Da Lat, a famous tourist city in Vietnams Central Highlands, has become overcrowded during the recent Lunar New Year holiday, frustrating both visitors and local residents. The situation has been present in Da Lat City, located in Lam Dong Province, over the past two years due to a rapid increase in the number of tourists on weekends and during special holidays. Crowded places and congested streets have upset many visitors and turned the lives of local residents upside down. Congestion A large number of people flocked to the tourist town to celebrate the Lunar New Year, which started on February 16, placing enormous pressure on local streets and infrastructure. It feels just like the rush hours in Ho Chi Minh City, Nguyen Hoang Nam, a visitor from the southern metropolis, said after snaking through the traffic jam near the iconic Xuan Huong Lake. I was driving my car in the city center on the third day of the Lunar New Year [February 18] festival. It took me over an hour to finish a two-kilometer journey, Nguyen Diem Phuong, a Da Lat resident, stated. A street in downtown Da Lat is filled with vehicles. Photo: Tuoi Tre According to Hong Van, another resident in the tourist city, the streets were so crowded that many people in her neighborhood had to walk to the market to buy their groceries. I went to the Da Lat Market on Wednesday, the sixth day of the Lunar New Year fest, and there was still a traffic jam there, Van added. Traffic gridlock often occurs from 7:00 am to 10:00 am and from 4:00 pm to 7:00 pm, the Lam Dong Department of Transport highlighted, adding that routes around the Xuan Huong Lake suffered the most serious congestion. Hotel boom is to blame? According Truong Huu Hiep, director of the provincial transport department, there are over 1,000 hotels in Da Lat, offering some 17,000 rooms to nearly 50,000 visitors on a daily basis. Homestay services have also mushroomed in the city, Hiep continued. Such streets as Nguyen Chi Thanh, Nam Ky Khoi Nghia, Hai Ba Trung, and Phan Dinh Phung are filled with hotels, along with diners, restaurants, and retail services. The number of hotels has increased rapidly while expansion can no longer be done along local streets. More hotels mean more vehicles and a higher risk of traffic jams, Hiep elaborated. Hotels mushroom in the city center. Photo: Tuoi Tre The situation is exacerbated by the fact that the number of personal cars in the city rises by 10 percent a year, the official added. Le Quang Trung, director of the Lam Dong Department of Construction, said that there is a lack of balance in tourism development in Da Lat. The downtown area is overcrowded while the suburbs are rather quiet, Trung said. Local authorities must first limit the number of hotels in the city center and implement certain policies to encourage the establishment of these venues in suburban neighborhoods, the official suggested. Ring roads should be constructed as a long-term measure, he added. The provincial Peoples Committee is mulling over the relocation of bus stations to about four kilometers from the downtown area, which will prevent passenger buses to enter the center. Another solution is turning areas near the Tuyen Lam Lake into a key tourist zone. About 7,000 hotel rooms are expected to serve 20,000 people every day once the plan is completed. However, it may take three to five years to solve the congestion in the city, Trung remarked. Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam! An official from the provinces Long Dien District confirmed the casualties to Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper the same day, adding that the two remaining victims had been rescued and are receiving medical assistance. According to the official, the five nuns had traveled from southern Dong Nai Province to stay at a local monastery in Long Hai Town, Long Dien District before the accident. On the early morning of Thursday, they went swimming at a beach close to the monastery, despite the fact that warning flags had been erected to ward beachgoers off the dangerous waters. The beach was empty at the time, and all five nuns soon found themselves struggling in the strong currents. Rescuers managed to bring three of them ashore, but one later drew her last breath on the hospital bed. Two other nuns remain missing as of Friday afternoon, as search efforts are challenged by fierce waves and big winds, the official said. With a coastline of 3,260 kilometers and a massive network of inland waterways, Vietnam experiences an average of between 3,500 and 4,000 drowning deaths annually, according to statistics from the Ministry of Labor, War Invalids and Social Affairs. Drowning is also the top cause of unnatural deaths among children and teenagers in Vietnam, according to a 2017 Ministry of Health report. Swimming is only taught as an extra-curricular activity at schools, and the rate of the population who can swim remain low, especially in urban areas. Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam! Police in Vietnam have arrested three Chinese men for using fake cards to withdraw money from local ATM booths. The suspects were captured on Thursday for carrying out the card fraud in Ha Long City, Quang Ninh Province. They were identified as Li Dan Yang, 29, Peng Yu He, 30, who were both from Guangdong Province, and Wang Tao, 27, from Fujian Province. At around 3:00 am that day, the border guard office at Mong Cai International Border Gate, located in Mong Cai City, Quang Ninh, received the information from the provincial Department of Police regarding the three suspects. They had traveled from Ha Long to Mong Cai and were attempting to leave Vietnam for China via the border gate. Officers then spotted a group of three people with suspicious signs at 6:30 am before performing an administrative search. Multiple types of bank cards, along with mobile phones, SIM cards, and VND36 million (US$1,585), were found following the examination. According to Lis statements, he had been given the bank cards by a man he had met via WeChat, a Chinese multi-purpose social media mobile application. He was told to use the counterfeit cards in Vietnam, a source close to Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper stated. Li, along with Peng and Wang, later entered Vietnam illegally and arrived in Ha Long City to conduct the illicit scheme. The group was caught red-handed withdrawing cash at a local ATM on Thursday. They managed to escape on a passenger bus and were trying to return to their home country before being captured. The Mong Cai Border Guard Office has transferred the suspects to the Quang Ninh Department of Police for further investigation. Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam! A moribund young Vietnamese girl with cancer had allowed her corneas to be given to someone in need before she died on Thursday. The donor, seven years and three months old, was diagnosed with a type of nervous system cancer in September 2017. Prior to her death on the afternoon of February 22, the family made a phone call to the Vietnam National Coordinating Center for Human Organ Transplantation around noon expressing her wish to donate her eye components, according to Nguyen Huu Hoang, director of the Eye Bank at Vietnams Central Eye Hospital. After she died, Hoang and technicians from the Eye Bank arrived at the hospital where she had been treated. Give sight to another person, will you? her mother told her before kissing her on the forehead. Hoang said that this is the most poignant cornea-giving case he has seen during the past ten years. At the time of the removal, tears clogged my throat. The girl looked as if she was sleeping like an angel, and I began my job in the gentlest and most careful way so as not to wake her from her slumber, he said. Im proud of you, the mother said while looking at her daughter after the technicians had completed the collection. The child, whose mother is a worker in public health, lived in Hanoi, according to Hoang. Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam! A Vietnamese passenger has been penalized for unlocking the exit door of a moving airplane without permission on Thursday. T.D.T., occupant of the 1C seat, opened the right door on the fuselage of the OV8053 flight, operated by VASCO, traveling from Ho Chi Minh City to the Con Dao Islands, while the plane was taxiing on the tarmac after having landed at Con Son Airport of the archipelago. The information was confirmed by a representative of the airline, who added that the passengers action caused harm to the safety latch. As a result, the plane, which was scheduled for a subsequent return journey starting at 10:30 am, was not airworthy and had to lie at the airport until repair equipment was sent from Ho Chi Minh City. The flight departing for the metropolis only took off at about 5:00 pm. Following the door mishandling incident, the flight crew reported it to the security and the airline representative, and the passenger was referred to the local airport security for punishment, according to the VASCO spokesman. On the same day, February 22, the Vietnamese Southern Airport Authority said the passenger was fined VND15 million (US$600). Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam! On 60 Minutes this Sunday, Liam Bartlett meets Robbie Williams, and NZ PM Jacinda Ardern will become the first elected female leader in the western world to have a child in office. Warning! Theres no nice way to put it: Goran Markovic is a con artist. Hes very good at being very bad, and no one should ever believe or trust him. For 40 years he has been perfecting his nasty craft, lying his way around Australia and the world, fleecing almost everyone he encounters. From millionaire businessmen to unsuspecting women anyone it seems is a potential target. Even police, tasked with trying to bring Markovic to justice, have been mocked and taunted by this elusive catch-me-if-you-can crook. But in a special 60 Minutes investigation, the tables are turned as the con man gets stung by two of his victims. Goran Markovic is finally caught and its all on camera. Reporter: Tara Brown Producer: Laura Sparkes The Kiwi that Soared Politicians in Australia need to take note. It is possible to be liked. For proof they only need to look at New Zealands new prime minister, 37-year-old Jacinda Ardern. Four months after taking the top job, her approval ratings are soaring, with 70 per cent of the country believing shes doing well. And now shes taking nation building to the next level by combining politics with pregnancy. When she gives birth in June, shell be the first elected female leader in the western world to have a child in office. But becoming a mum isnt expected to slow Ms Ardern down she says shell be back running the country within weeks. As Charles Wooley finds out, Prime Minister Aderns no-fuss, can-do attitude is an enormous hit with Kiwi voters. Reporter: Charles Wooley Producer: Nick Greenaway The Extroverted Introvert Liam Bartletts not sure if its good news or bad news, but he has discovered there are actually two Robbie Williams. One is one of the best-selling solo artists of all time, the charismatic and cheeky showman from the north of England. The other is a complete contradiction, an introspective, almost unsettled soul who often questions his self-worth. But no matter which Robbie Williams is in the room, Bartlett says both make for a must-watch interview. Reporter: Liam Bartlett Producer: Garry McNab 8:30pm Sunday on Nine (and if you believe that time I have some swamp land to sell you). Mondays Four Corners will screen Everything Forbidden, Anything Possible a look into the secret side of Iran by film maker Jacques Dubois. People think that a lot of things are forbidden here, but in fact as you can see, you can find anything! Young woman Secret parties, sly booze and slinky cocktail dresses are a long way from the conservative images usually associated with the Islamic Republic of Iran. Prohibition is fun, doing things in secret is much more exciting. Young man For decades the Republics morals police have enforced strict rules that seem to cover just about everything, from dog ownership, which is banned, to clothing. Drinking alcohol is punishable with 40 lashes. Repeat offenders can face the death penalty. The problem with alcohol is that other people can smell it and there are alcohol tests. So, to get high, most young people prefer to use drugs such as cannabis. Young man Despite the rules, many young people in Iran are rebelling. Theyre taking their lives in their hands and defying the regime to party in secret. If they catch me I can go to jail. Young woman Filming covertly in Iran, a French film team gained access to a hidden world where everything is forbidden (but) anything is possible. Here you can find every style of dress like this one here, a bit sexy Or that one there, a bit more feminine. Young woman Young Iranians reveal how they outwit the regime to live the kind of life they want at private parties and clandestine beauty salons. For women, this is freedom. Young woman These young people like to party but theyre trying to escape their deep frustration with the governing regime. Iranian people dont like the government and the rules of the government but, we cant do anything. Young woman With their cost of living soaring and few jobs to apply for, the young must battle against their sense of hopelessness about the future. The more pressure they put on us, the more we must rebel. Underground activist Monday 26th February at 8.30pm. ABC/Lou RoccoThis Tuesday, Dolly Parton's Imagination Library will hand out its 100 millionth book. But instead of dropping it in the mail as usual, the country-pop legend will donate it to the Library of Congress. You can watch the ceremony live from Washington, D.C., starting at 10 a.m. ET on February 27 via Facebook. Parton is expected to read to a group of local school kids, and announce a new partnership with the Library of Congress as well. Inspired by her own father, who was illiterate, Dolly launched the Imagination Library in 1995 in East Tennessee. Since then, it's spread across the U.S., to the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia, sending free books to kids all around the world from birth to age five. Copyright 2018, ABC Radio. All rights reserved. Paris is overrun by rats attracted by the abundant food thrown away by the human population. A video shown by 'Le Parisien' from the banks of the Seine shows a multitude of rats in a city dumpster. The rats are shown falling out and fighting over food and the usual detritus humans no longer need. Rats are becoming a common sight in the French capital to both residents and tourists. Garbage workers report being attacked by rats but no one as yet has been bitten. The animals are seen all over the city now and it now seems the authorities are finally realising what a rat problem they have. One may ask is this nuisance having an impact on the tourist trade? Of course, not every tourist visiting the city will be aware of the problem. But by the end of their stay or tour of the city, they may have noticed the little blighters going about their daily lives. Rats not to blame? Paris has been singled out in the press for its rat population. Every city, town, village and hamlet will host some population of rats in the world. Rats must be one of the most hated creatures on the planet. Even that lover of animals Sir David Attenborough has admitted he has a phobia of the highly intelligent Rodents. It goes without saying, women, and some men cannot stand the sight of them. They are associated with decay and it is easy to see why we humans see them like that. The fact they live in sewers does their image no good either. Try seeing things from the rat's point of view though. They need to make a living, they need easy access to food and a place to live and bring up their young ones. By coming into our domain this is where the trouble starts between our species and theirs. Rats were always blamed for many diseases and suffering particularly in the Middle Ages. The latest theory, however, is that the rats did not cause the bubonic plague. It was, in fact, humans who spread infection and disease because hygiene was not as well understood. The wonderful world of pet rats Rats can and do make wonderful pets. Speaking from experience they are highly entertaining and companionable creatures to befriend. They do need exercise but not like in the case of a dog who needs regular walks. As long as they have a sizeable cage, fresh bedding, food and water they are happy. The thought of even keeping one as a pet will seem horrific to some. If you hold that view, fine, however, again speaking from experience this is certainly not the case for me as explained above. Pet rats, unfortunately, can be prone to cancer as they are descended from lab rats. So finally while admitting wild rats can bring problems pet rats in the main are delightful creatures to have. Former US President Barack Obama has responded to the School Shooting that occurred last week in Parkland, Florida, that left 17 people dead. The students that survived this attack have been more outspoken in the ensuing gun debate than the survivors of previous attacks, and its making a real difference. Theyve gotten current President Donald Trump to ban bump stocks (and also reconsider arming teachers with guns, unfortunately). After most school shootings, the Republicans manage to sweep any chance of debate under the rug, but that wont wash with the Parkland students, and Obama has commended them for it. He said, Young people have helped lead all our great movements, and added that watching these smart and fearless kids speak out against their government and its unfair legislation is inspiring. He concluded, Weve been waiting for you. And weve got your backs. Obama has always fought the US gun laws Obama has always been an avid supporter of tighter gun control laws and he spent his entire eight-year term in the White House pushing for harder gun restrictions particularly around the time of the horrific Sandy Hook shooting but he had no luck. The NRA are always putting money into the pockets of the Republican officials in Congress to ensure that they get to keep their guns and any school shooters out there get to keep theirs, too. The Brit Awards two days ago showcased celebrated artists from all over the continent but somehow the spotlight was focused on cheryl cole and Liam Payne. There has been plenty of gossip for the past couple of weeks about 'Chiam' having serious issues, but when the couple arrived side by side on the red carpet there were no signs their relationship was having problems. Legal actions on the move? According to some media, a few of Cheryls close friends have acknowledged the struggle that they are in right now. On the other end, a representative from Liam Payne stated that a meeting with a lawyer was discussed to protect their fortune of 54 million and their mansion which is worth 5.1 million. Seeing them attending the prestigious Brit Award resulted in some interesting reactions. Some of the fans were actually happy that despite the news about their relationship in jeopardy they still showed up together. But the majority were convinced that it is more of a publicity stunt. Cheryl fires back So what is the real score between the power couple? Do they still have a plan to tie the knot? Whats the reason behind Cheryl rejecting Liams proposal? These are some questions that dont have any clear answers right now. Earlier today, Cheryl Cole posted on her social media account a powerful message on her take on this never-ending speculation. She challenged those who created the stunt angle to use their platform properly and not spreading weird and ludicrous news. It appears even UKs longtime sweetheart has her limits. Although she tried to focus on her charitable works, there are still a variety of reporters who want to get the best of her. In other news, she was able to open up a centre which could possibly change millions of lives especially the youth. So what about Liam? Where is he? The former One Direction band member is thriving in his solo career. That is the very reason why he isnt with Cheryl most of the time. It is also the same reason why the rumour of them splitting has intensified. Also, during his appearance with Capital FM breakfast show, numerous fans and listeners were able to notice that he only mentioned Cheryl once. It seems that he is also trying to stay away from the negativity that is currently surrounding them. Whether you're a fan or not, this couple has already captivated a nation. The way they first met, their first dinner date, their very first appearance as a couple, the day they've announced they are having a baby, it's all been truly magical! Australian mineral sands producer Base Resources saw net profits soar 466% in the six months leading to 31 December thanks to increased mining volumes and grades at Kwale, its flagship project in Kenya. Base resources posted an increased output of zircon and ilmenite, the latter of which moved ahead so much so that it was above design capacity, and a steady output of rutile throughout the half, with sales revenue from Kwale topping A$115.9m, a growth of 28% year-on-year. Underlying costs rose slightly to A$131 per tonne sold from the A$130 seen a year earlier, but EBITDA still leapt 58% to A$69.3m, taking net profit to A$21.5m from the A$3.8m seen in the first half of the AIM-quoted firm's previous trading year. Hydraulic mining unit capacity was boosted from 400 tonnes per hour to 800tph, resulting in an increased mining volume of 2.4m tonnes compared to the 1.4m tonnes in the previous half, thrusting production of HMC to 435,305 tonnes, against 391,953 tonnes and 316,451 tonnes posted in its last two halves. Looking forward, Base said demand for ilmenite and rutile, mainly used as feedstock for the production of titanium dioxide pigment, used in paint, plastics and paper, remained buoyant throughout the period. Base significantly reduced its net debt during the period, and held a cash balance of AUD 30.5m at 31 December, down from the $40.4m it had on hand at the end of 2016. As of 1000 GMT, shares had advanced 2.14% to 14.30p. Baron Oil announced the resignation of William Bill Colvin as its chairman and a director of the company on Friday, with effect from 28 February. The AIM-traded firm said Dr Malcolm Butler would assume the duties of chairman in addition to his role as chief executive. Geoff Barnes, finance director, had agreed to defer his impending retirement and remain in his position until the board was more fully constituted, and a suitably qualified finance professional was able to assume the role of finance director. The board added it was currently in advanced discussions with an experienced individual having an oil & gas and corporate finance background, who would join the company as a non-executive director to strengthen the board. It is with great regret that the board has accepted the resignation of Bill Colvin as chairman and director of che Company, which he has served for over five years, commented Dr Malcolm Butler. Bill shepherded the company through the very difficult times following the sudden and unexpected death of our former chief executive. In addition, he had to deal with a partner that continually refused to honour its full farm-in obligations on Block Z-34, offshore Peru. Bill Colvin himself said both him and Malcolm had worked hard over the last two years, carrying out the studies necessary to understand the true potential of the companys deep-water Z-34 Block, in spite of its partner's refusal to cooperate. Following our decision to relinquish without drilling, we achieved the unusual success of securing the release of the full $3.6m held as guarantee of our drilling obligations by the Peruvian authorities. Now that the company has funds in place to enable it to change from concentrating on a single, very expensive, long lead time, remote play to a new strategy of looking for near-term drilling opportunities closer to home, with attractive economics, I feel the time is right for me to move on. I wish Malcolm and his team every success in their future endeavours. ECR Minerals announced on Friday that its Australian subsidiary has been notified of the renewal of its exploration licence for a further five years. Mercator Gold Australias renewed EL5433 licence represents the Bailieston gold exploration project in Central Victoria, of which the company has 100% ownership, which is located in the same district as the million-ounce Fosterville gold mine owned by Kirkland Lake Gold. Craig Brown, chief executive of ECR Minerals, said: The renewal of EL5433 for a further five years is timely, as we are in the process of planning a drilling programme which will test multiple target areas at Bailieston. ECR is fully funded for the drilling, and we look forward to seeing the drill rig turning within the next few months. The drilling programme, set to commence in the first half of 2018, includes proposed work at the Blue Moon and Black Cat prospects within the Bailieston licence. Aside from the Bailieston Licence ECR subsidiary Mercator has 100% ownership of the Avoca, Moormbool and Timor gold exploration licences in Central Victoria. ECR Minerals is a London based exploration and development company with projects in Australia, the Philippines and Argentina. As of 0820 GMT, ECRs shares were unchanged at 1.08p. BMR Group completed the purchase of Zambia's Star Zinc project on Friday , increasing Galileo Resources ' stake in the mine and sending its share price up in response. Star Zinc is a willemite zinc silicate project located 20km northeast of Lusaka, which produces good concentrate grades arising from an unusually high zinc ore input grade. Recent updates have identified readings of up to 52% zinc in core at the site according to Galileo. Galileo now holds an 85% aggregate interest in Star Zinc, realised by way of an 85% equity stake in Enviro Zambia, which is a joint venture company between Galileo and BMR Group, which on Friday made the final deferred consideration to former owner Bushbuck Resources in relation to the acquisition. Prior to the acquisition, Galileo, which is predominantly a copper explorer with interests in Zambia, South Africa and the US, held a 51% interest in the project. Colin Bird, chief executive of Galileo Resources, said: The completion of BMR's acquisition of Star Zinc, together with the company's exploration progress represent are positive developments for the project. We are continuing with drilling and expect to complete this phase during March. We expect our first assay results shortly and will release further assays progressively to the market as soon as they become available. BMR has opted not to exercise its right to buy back a 10% interest in Star Zinc from Galileo, meaning that $100,000 held in escrow will be released to BMR. Meetings between BMR and directors of the Zambian mining ministry and mining cadastre have taken place in preparations for the company's appeal against the notice of cancellation applied to its Kabwe mine. AIM traded company Jubilee Metals Group is also invested in the Kabwe mine project, to which it is providing technical, operational and financial support. Earlier this month Jubilee told BMR that it wished to take up its rights on Kabwe, which will allow Jubilee to increase its effective interest in the Project to 57.41%, comprising 40% direct and 17.41% indirectly as a shareholder in BMR. Leon Coetzer, chief executive of Jubilee, said: "The Zambian Department of Mines' representatives acknowledged the combined strength of the BMR and Jubilee team and recognised the significant progress made by the team towards the execution of the Kabwe project." The formal appeal is expected to be submitted no later than 2 March. As of 1614 GMT, Galileo Resources shares were up 4.44% to 1.41p, while Jubilee's shares were up 1.28% at 2.96p and BMR's shares were unchanged at 1.90p. W Resources announced on Friday that it has secured two long-term offtake agreements for tungsten from its La Parilla mine in Spain. The company will supply Wolfram Bergbau und Hutten AG (WBH) and an unnamed second company which is a leading supplier to the USA tungsten markets with 66% tungsten concentrate on competitive pricing terms. WBH is Europes largest tungsten processing company. Ulrika Wedburg, president of WBH, said: "We are pleased to see the development of another tungsten deposit in Europe and are looking forward to adding the production of the La Parrilla Mine to our supply portfolio." The agreement will cover the initial T2 development of the mine and account for approximately 80% of the planned production tonnage from this phase. Michael Masterman, chairman of W Resources said: "We are delighted to have executed two long term offtake agreements, where tungsten product will be delivered directly to the customers' state of the art, large capacity scheelite tungsten processing plants. The agreements provide W with assurance of a solid revenue stream once production commences in early 2019 as we now focus on the implementation of the mine development plan following the recent US$35 million funding from BlackRock." The loan from BlackRock was secured last week and has been used to repay short term loans from Symmall Pty and Beronia Investments, as well as to fund the developments at La Parrilla. W Resources plans to deliver the project within 12 months from the close of financing, with production to start in the first quarter of 2019. As of 1001 GMT, W Resources shares were up 5.70% at 0.60p. In his quest to make London the worlds first National Park City with over half of the city's space green, Mayor Sadiq Khan announced the first ever London National Park City Week to celebrate the capitals natural environment and encourage Londoners to make it even greener. Khan is aiming to turn the city 50% green by 2050 with help of the National Park City foundation, amid plans to declare the capital a National Park City in 2019. Calling on the different community groups to get involved, he said the program included policies to protect and increase green space and access to it. It would also aim to contribute to better management of the green infrastructure for the benefit of all citizens, helping to identify the economic value of Londons green infrastructure to build the case for essential investment. Khan had already funded the planting of thousands more trees, allocating funds to help Londons boroughs invest in the capitals parks. Earlier in February, he also announced 6m extra funding for more green spaces and a reduction of plastic waste. His 9m Greener City Fund was already delivering new parks, green school playgrounds, funding the planting trees and the restoration of waterways. National Park City Week, would take place in July (21-29) 2018, with a number of activities planned for across the capital including guided walks, talks, food growing, improving spaces for wildlife and community clean-ups. The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, said: "By making our city one of the greenest on earth, we can improve air quality, conserve wildlife and develop a green infrastructure to benefit all Londoners. "From protecting the greenbelt and taking polluting vehicles off our streets, to providing communities with money to develop new green areas, I am working hard to improve Londons environment." HM Treasury is considering imposing an extra tax on tech giants like Amazon , Facebook , Google's Alphabet and Apple on their revenues rather than their profits because they are not so easy to shift from one jurisdiction to another. Chancellor Philip Hammond is expected to announce this new measure in a speech next month as a conclusion to the Treasurys analysis on how to create a fair tax system for online firms. The consultation began due to fears that these digital companies dont pay enough taxes after a series of scandals reached the media. Mel Stride, the financial secretary to the Treasury, told the BBC that companies should pay a fair level of tax regarding the significant profits theyre generating, At the moment they are generating very significant value in the UK, typically through having a digital platform with lots of users interacting with that platform. That is driving a lot of value, so youre looking at social media platforms, online marketplaces, internet search engines where at the moment the tax regime is not taxing those activities fairly, said Stride. Recently Facebook announced a global tax overhaul and planned to move its revenue base from Ireland and begin booking advertising locally in every country where it operates. This move was a response to criticism from the EU that complained it wasnt paying fair taxes and was using the Irish subsidiary to shift profits. Last week a report from the Royal Society of Arts advised the UK government to increase tech giants taxes to provide a universal basic income of 10,000 for every UK citizen under 55. The taxes on tech giants would apply to those companies like Facebook or Apple that make vast profits accessing UK residents data. Last year, the European Commission launched a review of the tax practices of large overseas tech firms as it estimated many were paying just half of traditional rivals. The underlying principle for corporation tax is that profits should be taxed where the value is created. However, in a digitalised world, it is not always very clear what that value is, how to measure it, or where it is created, a statement from the Commission said. The White House announced a brand new set of sanctions in its efforts to strip North Korea of its access to smuggling routes used by the regime to evade a United Nations embargo and fund its nuclear weapons programme. "Today I am announcing that we are launching the largest-ever set of new sanctions on the North Korean regime," Trump will supposedly say at a conservative conference later in the day, according to excerpts of a speech released by the Oval Office. According to his prepared remarks, the Treasury department would soon take action to "further cut off sources of revenue and fuel that North Korea uses to fund its nuclear program and sustain its military." Trump's new measures will target 56 known vessels and shipping and trading companies that he claimed had been helping North Korea sidestep international sanctions. In response to the rogue nation's sixth nuclear test and multiple long-range missile tests, back in September the US President convinced the UN security council to impose its strongest sanctions to date on Pyongyang, which included a cap on North Korean oil imports, the Trump administration's greatest diplomatic victory so far. But since then, intelligence sources reported that a number of ship-to-ship transfers of fuel had taken place in international waters, with Russian vessels allegedly involved in smuggling oil in December. The new measures coming out of Pennsylvania Avenue were not expected to include sanctions on Russian ships or companies, despite multiple allegations and questions surrounding the administration's softness towards Moscow. It was 13 years ago on Monday that Donald Trump married his current wife then known as Melania Knauss. As scandals continue to hover over the head of the president in the form of multiple alleged affairs, neither member of the first couple publicly addressed their anniversary. Trump marriage trouble After separating from his second ex-wife Marla Maples in 1997, Donald Trump met the current first lady the following September. Over the next six years, the couple were a hot item in New York City, which resulted in the two getting engaged in 2004. Just a year later and Trump and his new wife, now Melania Trump, were officially married which led to the birth of their son, Barron, in 2006. However, recent reports as of January 23, including information gathered from author Michael Wolff in his hit book "Fire and Fire: Inside the Trump White House," and an additional story in the Wall Street Journal, claim that the president has been having multiple affairs over the last decade. Where Were the Cutesy Tweets from Melania and Donald Trump on Their 13th Wedding Anniversary? https://t.co/1vkdCcexbU People (@people) January 23, 2018 In an appearance on "Real Time with Bill Maher" last Friday, Michael Wolff suggested that Trump was currently cheating on Melania as commander in chief, only adding fuel to the fire. The drama continued when CNN reported on Monday night that the first lady had canceled her plans to join Donald Trump during his upcoming trip to Davos, Switzerland to address the World Economic Forum. The White House explained that the decision was strictly due to "scheduling and logistical," though many don't believe it. On Tuesday morning, the president posted several tweets and spoke on camera to the press, though he remained quiet about his 13th Wedding Anniversary, with Melania doing the same. As expected, critics decided to speak out. First lady Melania Trump, in a change of plans, will not be joining Donald Trump on his trip to the World Economic Forum in #Davos, Switzerland #WEF18 https://t.co/rYc5lccJ8N pic.twitter.com/FxolmhOw3M CNN International (@cnni) January 23, 2018 Instant reaction Once it was made clear that Monday was the 13th wedding anniversary of Donald Trump and Melania Trump, social media users were quick to point out the silence on the issue from the first couple. "Looks like Trump missed his anniversary, January 22. I guess evangelicals will give him another mulligan," one tweet read. Looks like Trump missed his anniversary, January 22. I guess evangelicals will give him another mulligan. Maridee Now (@marideenow) January 24, 2018 A belated Happy 13th Anniversary to Donald and Melania Trump! Hope you kids are as in love as when Melania first agreed to the terms of the contract! pic.twitter.com/hKkbxM92Ny The Rude Pundit (@rudepundit) January 24, 2018 Today is Donald Trumps wedding anniversary. No, not that wedding. Not that wedding, either. The wedding where he married the woman hed cheat on with a porn star. No, not th Greg Knauss (@gknauss) January 24, 2018 "Happy Anniversary to Trump and Melania. I figured I would say it since they obviously didnt," a sarcastic Twitter user wrote. "Melania Trump pulls out of attending Davos with serial sexual deviant Donald on their wedding anniversary. No word yet whether Stormy Daniels or another porn-star will secretly accompany the Predator-in-Chief," an additional tweet read. That was just before Trump and Stormy's fu*k session anniversary. . Siegfried (@friendlygiant54) January 24, 2018 Happy Anniversary to Trump and Melania. I figured I would say it since they obviously didnt. John C (@JohnCPgh) January 24, 2018 Happy 13th wedding anniversary to Donald and Melanie Trump. Since they dont publicly acknowledge the joy and love they share, I guess Ill do it for them. Chris Pettograsso (@CPettograsso) January 24, 2018 "The only thing better than Melania pulling out of Davos2018 on the Trump's 13th wedding anniversary would be to learn that she's scheduled to meet with Robert Mueller while #IMPOTUS is away," a follow up tweet added. "A belated Happy 13th Anniversary to Donald and Melania Trump! Hope you kids are as in love as when Melania first agreed to the terms of the contract!" yet another tweet read. On Wednesday morning, a 15-year-old male opened fire at his high school in Kentucky, resulting in the deaths of two people while injuring others. While story made headlines on various news outlets, Donald Trump remained silent. MSNBC on Trump It appeared like another peaceful day at Marshall County High School in Benton, Kentucky, but that all changed when a 15-year-old male took out his handgun and opened fire. The results left two people, one 15-year-old girl and one 15-year-old boy, dead, with others being reported as injured. The suspect was eventually captured and taken into custody as the small Western Kentucky town was rocked to their core. As expected, Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin held a press conference to brief the state about what took place, while offering his condolences to the family and friends of those killed and injured. As reported by The Hill on January 24, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau spoke to Bevin before sending out his own tweet offering his condolences. Despite this, Donald Trump has yet to make a public comment on the shooting, much to the chagrin of Joe Scarborough who elaborated further during the January 24 edition of "Morning Joe" on MSNBC. The school shooting in Kentucky on Tuesday was at least the 11th so far this year and the deadliest https://t.co/EUFimkkzoM The New York Times (@nytimes) January 24, 2018 While speaking with network contributor Willie Geist, "Morning Joe" co-host Joe Scarborough ripped into Donald Trump for ignoring the Kentucky school shooting while still spending time tweeting about the FBI. "Too many Republicans and especially Donald Trump remain silent when this happens," Scarborough said. Ive spoken with Kentuckys @GovMattBevin to offer condolences on behalf of Canadians for todays shooting in Benton. Our hearts go out to Kentuckians, and to all those affected by this tragedy. Justin Trudeau (@JustinTrudeau) January 23, 2018 "Americans want to hear from their president. They want to be told everything will be OK. Especially down in Kentucky," Joe Scarborough said. "They actually got words of condolence from the Canadian Prime Minister before the President of the United States because the President of the United States was too busy tweeting out a lie that there were 50,000 texts between 'lovers' at the FBI, a false and misleading tweet," he added. "Why is the President of the United States doing that instead of focusing on his job?" he wondered. As of press time, the commander in chief has still not given his personal thoughts on the shooting in question. Next up As Donald Trump continues to stay mum on the most recent school shooting, he's directed his focus on the FBI and the current Russian investigation. With 2018 only a month old, only time will tell how the rest of his presidency plays out, though his current approval rating is still below 40 percent with the American people. Donald Trump is on his way to Davos, Switzerland to participate in the World Economic Forum. After gloating about his trip on Twitter, those who oppose the president quickly gave him a reminder about how he is perceived in the United States and around the world. Trump's trip While Donald Trump is not viewed in a positive light in the United States, with an approval rating less than 40 percent, his foreign appeal is just as poor. In the year since his inauguration, Trump's controversial policy proposals and reckless rhetoric in interviews, speeches, and on social media have caused massive backlash against him. After it was announced that Trump would be headed to Switzerland for the World Economic Forum, thousands took part in multiple protests in the country in opposition to Trump's arrival. The Hill reported on Wednesday that an estimated 2,000 demonstrators pushed back against Trump just in Zurich alone. In another blow to the president, First Lady Melania Trump decided against accompanying him on the trip, with many believing the recent reports of his extramarital affairs having played a part in the decision. As seen on his Twitter feed on January 24, Trump is doing his best to deflect. Will soon be heading to Davos, Switzerland, to tell the world how great America is and is doing. Our economy is now booming and with all I am doing, will only get better...Our country is finally WINNING again! Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 25, 2018 Taking to Twitter on Wednesday night, Donald Trump attempted to paint a more positive picture of his trip abroad. "Will soon be heading to Davos, Switzerland, to tell the world how great America is and is doing," Trump tweeted out. "Our economy is now booming and with all I am doing, will only get better," he added before noting ,"Our country is finally WINNING again! Thousands of protesters took to the streets of Zurich to protest against the World Economic Forum in Davos and Trumps planned visit: https://t.co/aFUIcpSgc1 KCET-TV SoCal (@KCET) January 25, 2018 Quick opposition Not long after Donald Trump posted his tweet, critics wasted no time firing back. "Are you going to recruit them to immigrate to America? Theyre certainly white enough for you!" Bishop Talbert Swan tweeted out. Our country is losing the battle for sanity with the asylum formerly known as the White House! Bishop Talbert Swan (@TalbertSwan) January 25, 2018 Melania is staying home tho, huh Blond Ambition (@BL0NDAMBITION) January 25, 2018 They are laughing at you. Stop taking credit for the work of others. Brevard Activism (@SC_Indivisible) January 25, 2018 "The winning will be complete when Democrats win Congress later this year, when America wins your impeachment and conviction, and when Mueller wins your criminal conviction. So much winning!" one Twitter user wrote. "Please go and don't come back. I think I speak for at least 65 million Americans," another tweet added. "MELANIA will stay behind and getting a LAWYER ,also she will be taken care of by the SECRET SERVICE , They do a service thats why its a secret," a tweet noted. MELANIA will stay behind and getting a LAWYER ,also she will be taken care of by the SECRET SERVICE , They do a service thats why its a secret Dave (@idol1236) January 25, 2018 Please check yourself into a sanatorium when you are there. Hattie Hathaway (@hattiehathaway) January 25, 2018 Too bad you werent in Davos today to hear Chancellor Merkel eloquently explain the 'Poison' Of Right-Wing Populism. Becky Brunton (@BeckyIB) January 25, 2018 "They are laughing at you. Stop taking credit for the work of others," a social media user stated. "Please check yourself into a sanatorium when you are there," yet another post noted. The negative reaction continued to pour in as the opposition against Donald Trump moved forward. The civil war in Syria is now in its seventh year, and currently shows no signs of slowing down. On Sunday, February 18, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad launched an aerial attack into the rural town of Eastern Ghouta. Al Jazeera report that the area has been under rebel control and locked in a siege with government forces for five years. This recent wave of aerial attacks has seen Assad's forces backed by Russian aircraft. So far, 403 people have been confirmed dead and over 2,000 others have been wounded. Conditions in Ghouta On the ground, the small, rural town has turned into a humanitarian nightmare. Sources say that work is difficult to sustain under the conditions of the bombing, and school has been canceled indefinitely for roughly one month now. Also, nearly 12 percent of children four or under are malnourished. This may be owing to the fact that local prices have skyrocketed. even the simplest foods now cost the equivalent of at least a few dollars. Medical Resources The medical situation is even worse. According to eyewitnesses, government forces are actively targeting medical centers, and more than 20 have been hit since the siege began. This has reduced Syrian medical personnel to treating the wounded in improvised hospitals. These limited resources combined with the sheer amount of casualties inflicted has made it incredibly difficult, if not impossible, for doctors to treat them all. UN response With the situation in Ghouta growing ever worse for civilians, the UN is attempting to broker peace between the Syrian government and rebel forces, if only for a short time so that humanitarian aid can be given to the besieged. However, such efforts have been unsuccessful since both Syria and Russia were heavily resistant to such a proposal. Diplomats from both nations have made claims that the rebels and those who back them of having terrorist affiliations. Others have commented that Assad is a war criminal and that the Russians are breaching international law by aiding him. Brief summary of ISIS and the war In terms of how terrorists, ISIS members in particular, are involved in the conflict and whether any of the above claims are valid, things get complicated. To sum up, ISIS has territory in Syria, and, seeing as it is Sunni, is actively fighting against the Shi'ite regime of Assad. The US, however, is refusing to support them. It has declared them an enemy and is bombing only ISIS-controlled parts of Syria. It is, however, supplying certain Rebel Groups that it deems trustworthy. Russia is taking a more active part of the war, siding with Assad and carrying out air attacks against rebel groups, among them ISIS. In international terms, some would see the Syrian Civil War as a testing ground for various methods of combating ISIS. Things have really heated up this season on "The Real Housewives of New Jersey." Now, Teresa Giudice is going to accuse Kim D. of being a madame and she seems pretty sure of this accusation. You will not want to miss part two of the reunion tonight when it airs on Bravo. It looks like an explosive ending to this season of "RHONJ." Drama with Kim D. this season There has been a ton of drama with Kim D. this season on "The Real Housewives of New Jersey." She isn't even on the show, but she showed up and got right in the middle of everything. Melissa and Teresa were on each other's side throughout this entire drama. These two couldn't believe that the other girls were supporting Kim when she had her fashion show this season. They felt like it was fine because this was for a great cause, but Teresa just couldn't get over the things that have happened with Kim D. in the past. Teresa has some pretty big accusations Tonight on the reunion, Kim D. will come out and she gets into it with Melissa Gorga as well as Teresa Giudice. Kim D. says that Teresa has hurt her children by actually calling her some pretty nasty names even though her child is 28. Melissa starts asking Kim if this who she wants to be and she says she is very happy with who she is and makes it clear that she doesn't want to change. Kim actually accused Teresa of cheating on her husband Joe while he is in prison. Teresa Giudice starts accusing Kim saying that if people would look at her 1099s and tax forms that she would probably be in jail too. She made it very clear that she doesn't feel like Kim is telling the entire truth about her business. Teresa asks her how she affords her Mercedes and her house with two businesses, but Kim makes it clear that she wants everyone to know she makes plenty of money. Melissa Gorga even speaks out saying she doesn't make that kind of money just selling clothes. Then Teresa throws out the big accusation about it being her "prostitution" business that she pays her bills from. Of course, the clip ends there and you will have to watch the rest of it on the show tonight. This is going to get interesting, but you know that Kim isn't going to fess up to these accusations from Teresa. Do you feel like there is any chance that Kim D. really is a madame? Do you think Teresa and Kim will ever make up? They just keep bringing Kim back to bring back the drama. Sound off in the comments below on your thoughts, and don't miss new episodes of "RHONJ" when they air on Bravo. Chicago West is barely a week old and Kim Kardashian West already has more babies on the brain. Kim and Kanye welcomed their third child, a baby girl, into their family on January 15. This is their third child together but the first one via surrogate. They announced the birth soon after and then followed up a few days later with even more details. Kim Kardashian explored the idea of using a surrogate on Season 13 of "Keeping Up With The Kardashians." Just a few short months after that episode aired, rumors began to circulate that not only did Kim and Kanye decide to go through with surrogacy, but that their chosen surrogate was already pregnant. Kim Kardashian's first experience with a surrogate With pregnancy rumors surrounding Kim, Khloe, and Kylie as Season 14 of "Keeping Up With The Kardashians" began last fall, Kim teased a pregnancy announcement was coming. Then, in December, she made it official. She and Kanye were expecting baby number three via surrogate. It didn't take long for Kim to jump on the talk show circuit and start answering questions about her own pregnancy via surrogate while expertly avoiding questions about her sisters. She even accidentally let it slip that she was expecting a baby girl while on the "Ellen DeGeneres Show." Kim admitted that using a surrogate was hard for her. Despite receiving criticism from Perez Hilton over her opinion, Kim said that not being in control was really hard for her. She had a lot of complications when pregnant with North and Saint. Doctors warned her that a third pregnancy could risk her life so a surrogate was the next best option. 'KUWTK' star wants more children Soon after Chicago was born, Kim publicly thanked her. On her own website, Kim wrote that using a surrogate for Chicago "was the best experience Ive ever had. Kardashian also said, She made our dreams of expanding our family come true. Things went so well that Us Magazine is reporting that Kim and Kanye want to do it again. Apparently, they have even asked their surrogate if she will carry the next child for them too. "They asked the surrogate if shed be willing to have another child for them if they decided to do it," said an Us Magazine source. Considering what a great experience this was for Kim Kardashian and Kanye West, it's not exactly shocking that they would have the same surrogate should they choose to have another child. Another plus is that Kanye and the surrogate's husband reportedly hit it off and struck up a bit of a friendship themselves. With Kim still gushing over the surrogate experience and Kanye West at ease as well, it looks like more children are in the famous couple's future. Tony Toutouni is living the good life and he loves to show it all off on Instagram.By the look of it, people really enjoy watching Tony live the good life because his Instagram account boasts more than 1.5 million followers. They often tune in to see the luxury and oftentimes debauchery that sets Toutouni apart from other social media influencers. There's also often a lesson or two to be learned and Tony isn't shy about offering up advice to others who want to grow their social media accounts and become an influencer like he is. Toutouni on being the 'King of Instagram' When asked how it feels to be the new "King of Instagram," Toutouni said, "I don't consider myself to be the king of anything so that's a hard question to answer. I've tried to keep my life private lately because of the negative exposure from hateful people." Truly there are a lot of social media trolls out there and it seems that they hate to see someone else living it up. Can you really blame Tony Toutouni for wanting to go under the radar a bit? Even Kim Kardashian backed off from social media after she was robbed in Paris. Even with the warning that haters will come after you once you start being successful on social media, there will be people who still want to be Instagram famous. To them, Tony has some advice. "My advice for people who want to be like me is to focus and understand the best elements in which made me successful, Toutouni said. "Being successful requires an exceptional drive focused on a goal, knowing there will be obstacles ahead. Although this may sound easy, it's exceptionally hard when you start from zero but there are plenty of people with money who will invest in individuals who prove to be driven, intelligent and trustworthy. Tony shares his secret to success "I got to where I am in life from many different factors however I will always believe my drive, personality, and acceptance of failure have been the main elements," Tony explained. "When I was 14 years old I had a picture of a Porsche in my bedroom. I would stare at it every night, start thinking and write different ideas that I felt will generate enough income to allow me to purchase that car." It turns out, Tony Toutouni was able to turn that picture of a Porsche into the real thing. Plus, he did it at a long younger of an age than most. Then, he proved to still have the drive to succeed by setting even more goals to accomplish and then crushing them. "At 18, I purchased that same exact Porsche and then set higher goals and kept focused regardless of downfalls. My personality allowed me to meet interesting people who not only believed in me but enjoyed doing business with me. To me, it's not just making money but also enjoying life as well. You can have all the money in the world yet still not be rich in my books if you're not enjoying life On Instagram I started to gain many followers by posting pictures of my lifestyle. Being a very close friend of Dan Bilzerian was another factor. In 2017 I married my wife and decided to keep most of my personal life private so I haven't been active on social media. I have been again focused on my real estate developments and in search of new ideas and businesses to acquire." Even though Tony Toutouni hasn't been as active on Instagram as he was in the past, he'll certainly still be successful in whatever he does. His mindset won't allow him not to be. While he admits to being much more private since getting married last year, it's clear that Toutouni is still a major Instagram influencer and a great example for those who want advice on how to build their own brand and be successful. Jenelle Evans is doing her best to dig herself and her husband out of the hole he got them in on Twitter over the last few days. With "Teen Mom 2" fans and even stars of the show calling for MTV to fire the controversial couple after David Eason's homophobic rant, Jenelle came to his defense, denying that she or her husband are homophobic. David offends David Eason came under fire after sharing some pretty controversial opinions on Twitter on Monday. Seemingly out of nowhere, Jenelle's husband tweeted, "Lmao why don't you go tell the homo and transgender parents to start teaching their kids better morals? Oh I forgot thats supposed to be normal." This is the type of person thats allowed on tv, the type of person thats paid by @mtv & @Viacom, and the type of person our youth is influenced by! We need to take a stand for gender equality and show our youth theyre loved no matter who they grow up to be! FIRE DAVID EASON! pic.twitter.com/lfhFz0eke1 ImFcknRakin! (@ImFcknRakin) February 19, 2018 His words infuriated many social media users, initially causing David to delete the tweets. They started getting even more attention when a handful of "Teen Mom 2" stars started tweeting about how offensive he was and asking MTV to fire David and Jenelle for saying such shocking things on social media. Jenelle defends Jenelle Evans came to David's defense after the outcry to have the controversial couple fired. Jenelle already has said that David didn't realize how big of an impact his words could have on Twitter even though he's been on social media before. It looks like his little stint on Twitter was short-lived and Eason is not expected to be returning. "David didn't understand how offensive people would get or how Twitter even works. Now that he realizes his voice is very strong within media/tabloids he has deactivated his account. He agrees he will keep his comments to himself from now on." The thing is, even if David Eason keeps his shocking and incredibly offensive opinions off Twitter, that doesn't change the way he feels. Between the homophobic rant and recently getting everyone upset by posting pictures of Jenelle shooting an assault rifle just hours after a school shooting, he really upset a lot of people. "David doesn't hate people from the LGBT community," Jenelle said of her husband. "My old manager was gay and used to be one of me and David's close friends. We attended Farrah's birthday in Miami with a lot of LGBT people there and he didn't act in any type of way. We went had a good time and left." In the end, Jenelle Evans apologized for David Eason's rant, throwing in, "We are sorry for the comments that were made." It's not clear yet how far that apology will get them. Those who were calling for MTV to fire them still are. In the meantime, MTV and producers for the "Teen Mom" shows haven't commented on the shocking comments made on Twitter yet. There's no telling yet if that means the end for them on "Teen Mom 2" or not. Judith Lynn Judy Midkiff of Midlothian passed away Wednesday, February 21, 2018, due to complications from metastatic breast cancer. She was born in Halifax County on March 20, 1965, and was 52 years old. Midkiff had been employed by Virginia Tech through Virginia Cooperative Extension since 1987. During her three decades with Extension, she served in a variety of capacities. She began her Extension career in Smyth County, serving as Extension agent until August 1994. Midkiff then worked as an area coordinator within the Virginia Family Nutrition Program before moving into the position of project associate and then program manager. As program manager, she managed the infrastructure of the program, collaborated with other partners to enhance the program, and managed the evaluation component of program activities. Judy was a positive and dedicated employee and Hokie, constantly striving to ensure excellence. She was a generous colleague and friend. She will be dearly missed by me, her Virginia Tech family, and many others, said Elena Serrano, a Virginia Cooperative Extension specialist, director of the Family Nutrition Program Project, and a professor in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. Midkiff received several honors and awards during her professional career, including the American Association of Family and Consumer Sciences New Achiever Award and the Epsilon Sigma Phi Mid-Career Award. She served as president of the Virginia Association of Family and Consumer Sciences, the Virginia Extension Association of Family and Consumer Sciences, and the Alpha Gamma Chapter of Epsilon Sigma Phi. She also chaired committees for the National Extension Association of Family and Consumer Sciences and completed a term as chair of the Nutrition Division of the American Association of Family and Consumer Sciences. An award will be established in her memory within the Virginia Family Nutrition Program. She received her bachelors degree in human nutrition and foods from Virginia Tech in 1987. She also received a master of science degree from Virginia Tech in resource management in 1994. She is survived by her daughter, Anna Katherine Midkiff; her sister, Carolyn Midkiff Harris; and husband Fred of Littleton, North Carolina; her nephews, Kevin Harris and wife Suzannah of Raleigh, North Carolina; and Andrew Harris of California; and beloved, cousins, family, and friends. Her brother, Edward Earl Midkiff, preceded her in death. She was the daughter of the late Earl Scott Midkiff and the late Shirley Hodnett Midkiff. She was a former member of First Baptist Church of Millstone and a member of Tomahawk Baptist Church in Midlothian, where she served as a deacon and worked with youth. Funeral services were held on Feb. 24, 2018, at First Baptist Church of Millstone with the Rev. Kristopher Cook officiating. A burial followed in the church cemetery. For memorials, consider: The Patrick Henry Boys and Girls Home, P.O. Box 1398, Brookneal, VA 24528; the Susan G. Komen Foundation; or Tomahawk Baptist Church, The EDGE, 12920 Hull Street Road, Midlothian, VA 23112. Online condolences may be directed topowellfuneralinc.com. Arrangements are by Powell Funeral Home, South Boston. Vietnam Enterprise Investments Limited is a closed ended equity mutual fund launched and managed by Dragon Capital Management Limited. It invests in the public equity markets of Vietnam. The fund seeks to invest in stocks of companies operating across diversified sectors. It primarily invests in value and growth stocks of companies. The fund also invests a part of its assets in private companies and equity linked instruments. It focuses on such factors as good corporate governance and alignment to Vietnam's underlying growth drivers to create its portfolio. The fund benchmarks the performance of its portfolio against the VN index, the MSCI EM Index, and the VN30 Index. Vietnam Enterprise Investments Limited was formed on August 31, 1995 and is domiciled in the Cayman Islands. Read More The following companies are subsidiares of LyondellBasell Industries: A. Schulman, A. 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Ltd., Rexene - LDPE and PP Businesses, SCG ICO Polymers Company Limited, SJS Plastiblends, San Jacinto Rail Limited, Saudi Ethylene & Polyethylene Company, Saudi Polyolefins Company, Sociedad Espanola De Materiales Plasticos Semap S.A., Societe des Stockages Petroliers du Rhone SA, Solvay Engineered Polymers, Surplast S.A., TRV Thermische Ruckstandsverwertung GmbH & Co. KG, TRV Thermische Ruckstandsverwertung Verwaltungs-GmbH, Technology JV LP, The Matrixx Group Incorporated, ULSAN PP Co. Ltd., YNCORIS GmbH & Co. KG, Zylog Plastalloys, and tetra-DUR Kunststoff-Produktion GmbH. Anadarko Petroleum Corporation engages in the exploration, development, production, and marketing of oil and gas properties. It operates through three segments: Exploration and Production, WES Midstream, and Other Midstream. The company explores for and produces oil, natural gas, and natural gas liquids (NGLs). It is also involved in gathering, processing, treating, and transporting oil, natural-gas, and NGLs production, as well as the gathering and disposal of produced water. The company's oil and natural gas properties are located in the United States onshore and deepwater Gulf of Mexico; and Algeria, Ghana, Mozambique, Colombia, Peru, and other countries. As of December 31, 2018, it had approximately 1.5 billion barrels of oil equivalent of proved reserves. The company was founded in 1959 and is headquartered in The Woodlands, Texas. Read More Wall Street analysts have given Enel Generacion Chile a "N/A" rating, but there may be better buying opportunities in the stock market. Some of MarketBeat's past winning trading ideas have resulted in 5-15% weekly gains. MarketBeat just released five new stock ideas, but Enel Generacion Chile wasn't one of them. MarketBeat thinks these five companies may be even better buys. View MarketBeat's top stock picks here. 12 Wall Street equities research analysts have issued "buy," "hold," and "sell" ratings for Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy in the last twelve months. There are currently 1 sell rating, 8 hold ratings and 3 buy ratings for the stock. The consensus among Wall Street equities research analysts is that investors should "hold" Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy stock. A hold rating indicates that analysts believe investors should maintain any existing positions they have in GCTAF, but not buy additional shares or sell existing shares. View analyst ratings for Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy or view top-rated stocks. The Williams Cos., Inc. operates as an energy infrastructure company, which explores, produces, transports, sells and processes natural gas and petroleum products. It operates through the following segments: Transmission and Gulf of Mexico; Northeast G&P; and West. The Transmission and Gulf of Mexico segment comprises of interstate natural gas pipelines, Transco and Northwest Pipeline, as well as natural gas gathering and processing and crude oil production handling and transportation assets in the Gulf Coast region. The Northeast G&P segment includes midstream gathering, processing, and fractionation businesses in the Marcellus Shale region primarily in Pennsylvania and New York, and the Utica Shale region of eastern Ohio. The West segment consists of gas gathering, processing, and treating operations in the Rocky Mountain region of Colorado and Wyoming, the Barnett Shale region of north-central Texas, the Eagle Ford Shale region of south Texas, the Haynesville Shale region of northwest Louisiana, and the Mid-Continent region which includes the Anadarko, Arkoma, and Permian basins. The company was founded by David Williams and Miller Williams in 1908 and is headquartered in Tulsa, Read More Manheim is praying for a hit, for no other reason than to spend more time with her castmates. In my 30 years that I have been doing this, I have never been more in love with a group of actors than I am on this show, she says. When I was younger, I wanted to be on an edgy show and super-hip, cool shows, and I didnt care if the people I worked with were a--holes. And now, as I get older, I want to be with the best people on the planet, and I finally arrived there. So could Manheim live by the good book, like Chip tries to do? I wouldnt probably do so well trying to live by any one book, because I am a complicated person, she admits, noting that an upcoming episode about false idols gave her pause. I couldnt give up my iPhone for a week. My life would fall apart! Plus, she adds, If you have teenagers, the only way they talk to each other is through their iPhones in the back seat. They dont actually verbally speak; they just text. The texting teen in Manheims life, son Milo, accounts for a good deal of the happy chaos in her world. Milo recently made his TV debut on the Disney Channel movie Zombies, winning the lead role as the singing and dancing undead Zed, after 10 callbacks. To say Manheim is thrilled with her offspring's accomplishment is an understatement. I am excited for him it is so wonderful and I am slightly terrified, she says. Its all of those things. But mostly, I am so proud of him. He is so good at what he does, and he loves it, so what more could a parent want that their children are successful at what they want to do. As college looms on the horizon the twosome are already in the throes of essays, ACTs and college visits is Manheim prepared to be an empty nester? Oh, my God. I have started the mourning process, she says with a laugh, and relates a worst-case scenario already playing on a loop through her brain. I have always known that he would go away to college and he would be away for three weeks and then I would get a phone call that would be, Mom, I met a girl. I am going to go to her house for Thanksgiving. We will come to you for Christmas for two days, and then we are going to go backpacking in Puerto Rico. I just know I am never going to see him again! Still, with presumably more free time ahead, are there more dreams to achieve for the woman who has already penned a frank best-selling memoir (Wake Up, Im Fat) and had a one-woman off-Broadway show? Manheim pauses and then ticks off a few list-worthy items: running for local office, being an ambassador to an organization that is meaningful to her, going on the World Poker Circuit (she's a semi pro), perhaps fostering a child. But then she stops and admits she feels guilty about wanting more. Honestly, when I think about my bucket list my career and what I had hoped for, for my children and my family I feel extremely content in the world. In one case, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Missouri officials charged two men and their sweepstakes operation with bilking tens of millions of dollars from victims across the nation and in other countries. The operation, doing business under dozens of names, allegedly sent millions of mailers falsely indicating that recipients had won or were likely to win as much as $2 million. To get the prize, the supposed winners were told to provide fees ranging from $9 to $139.99. One mailer proclaimed: Congratulations, You Have Just Won $1,230,946.00. But in reality, the recipients had won nothing. Another claimed the recipient could win big money by answering a simple arithmetic question and paying a registration fee. The mailer failed to disclose that the consumer would have to answer more questions, requiring more fees, ending with a complex puzzle that few, if any, could solve. Consumers have lost more than $110 million to this particular scheme since 2013, the FTC said. In another case, the FTC alleges that the defendants helped telemarketers trick older Americans into buying bogus technical-support services by offering security software to prevent computer hackers from yanking money from their bank accounts. The tricksters falsely claimed the software was affiliated with the government, though it was actually worthless, old or available free of charge. Once fraudsters gained access to the victims computers, purportedly to install the security software, the telemarketers used the opportunity to acquire the consumers personal information. They charged up to tens of thousands of dollars and later concocted additional phony reasons why the consumers needed more software to avoid new cyberthreats, the FTC reported. Several people paid more than $50,000, and one person paid almost $400,000 during a period of several years, often utilizing accounts set up by the defendants. The enforcement sweep focused on these mass-mailing and telemarketing schemes, along with a wide range of investment fraud and identity theft. Some cases implicated transnational criminal organizations. Others busted individuals who took unfair advantage of older people in their care. Todays actions send a clear message, Sessions said. We will hold perpetrators of elder fraud schemes accountable wherever they are. Stencil Group apartment projects approved by planning commission At the Board of Zoning Adjustment meeting, the board approved a $28.5 million project to start. On Wednesday, Verizon Wireless announced that its Albuquerque brick-and-mortar call center will be one of seven around the country to close. More than a thousand employees here will either work from home or transition to other Verizon facilities, according to a company spokeswoman, with no layoffs or conversions to contractors announced at this time. New Mexicos top economic development official said he would not be surprised to see at least a few other call centers in the state eventually follow Verizons example, though many would likely remain at their physical locations. Most of the call centers in our state are owned by big corporations, and big corporations tend to be forward-thinking, said Matt Geisel, secretary of the states Economic Development Department. Its about offering your employees a certain lifestyle as a way to attract and retain talent. The decision also represents a cost-savings measure for Verizon, which will no longer lease its 197,000-square-foot office on Central Avenue and Coors Boulevard. The company invested $30 million in improvements there in 2006 before occupying the building. Verizon leases the building from Norman Coors LLC. Geisel, a former Rio Rancho economic development official, said he expected there to be significant interest in the real estate. He said when a Sprint call center moved out of its Rio Rancho location in 2016, the city was flooded with inquiries from companies interested in relocating there. It was eventually occupied by Safelite AutoGlass. A move toward home-based operations could mean a significant shift for one of the states most visible industries. As of 2016, the greater Albuquerque region had one of the highest call center saturations in the country among metropolitan areas of its size, according to the Dallas-based advisory firm Site Selection Group. At that time, the area had at least 28 call centers the industrys preferred term is contact center employing about 12,000 people. Thats roughly the same number as Presbyterian Healthcare Services, one of the states largest employers. Between 2005 and 2008, Verizon received $5 million from the Job Training Incentive Program, according to the Economic Development Department. The company employs 1,040 people, and its payroll is about $25 million a year. A $5 million investment from the state for more than a thousand jobs for 12 years is pretty impressive, said Geisel. Verizon was also the recipient of a $20 million industrial revenue bond measure from Bernalillo County in 2006 that was used to finance improvements to the building. IRBs function as a complex mechanism for providing tax breaks. According to Good Jobs First, a not-for-profit organization that tracks economic development incentives, the bonds created the equivalent of a $9.7 million property tax abatement over 30 years for Verizon. County Commission Chair Steven Michael Quezada said in a statement that the county, along with its legal counsel, is reviewing the lease agreement for the IRB issued in 2006 so we and Verizon will have a clear understanding of what commitments are remaining. A 2017 county fiscal report states that the county is permitted to recapture the abated taxes if the company terminates within 10 years. The 10-year period ended in 2016. A Verizon spokeswoman said the company has fulfilled its obligations with the county and is not subject to clawbacks. The company is expected to fully transition its employees by May 2019, and the building will close in October 2019. SANTA FE With just over 10 months left in Gov. Susana Martinez's administration, a top staffer is leaving for a new job. Deputy chief of staff Nick Piatek, whose last day is today, has worked with the Martinez administration for nearly seven years, rising from a communications position within the Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management to a top Governor's Office post. In a statement Thursday, the two-term Republican governor praised the leadership abilities of Piatek, who has accepted a private sector job in California. Nick is a strong leader who helped guide my administration towards making New Mexico a better place to live and raise a family, Martinez said in a statement. It's common for top appointees both on the national and state level to leave during the final months of an elected official's term in office, and the Martinez administration's Cabinet has also had recent turnover. In his position as deputy chief of staff, Piatek has played a leading role in the past two years negotiating with legislative leaders. He also helped oversee the Governor's Office communications strategy. It's unclear whether the Governor's Office will hire a replacement for Piatek, with Martinez's term set to expire at the end of this year. D.C. trip: Gov. Martinez traveled to Washington, D.C., on Thursday to attend political meetings and participate in talks with Trump administration officials. While in the nation's capital, Martinez will take part in the National Governors Association's winter meeting the NGA will hold its summer meeting in Santa Fe and attend a meeting of the Republican Governors Association, a spokeswoman said. She is scheduled to return to New Mexico on Tuesday, Martinez spokesman Emilee Cantrell said. The Governor's Office did not provide details about the nature of Martinez's meeting with Trump administration officials. The governor also traveled to Washington earlier this month to attend a meeting with President Donald Trump about a plan for investments in rural infrastructure. Her current trip falls within the bill-review period for legislation passed during the 30-day session that ended last week. Martinez has until March 7 to sign or veto 108 bills that are still awaiting action. Bills that are not acted upon are automatically vetoed. Per the state Constitution, Lt. Gov. John Sanchez serves as acting governor while Martinez is traveling outside New Mexico. The RGA is covering the cost of Martinez's current trip. Dan Boyd: dboyd@abqjournal.com New Mexico State Police are looking for a man who they say may have been involved in a non-fatal shooting at The Downs Racetrack & Casino early Wednesday morning, according to a release posted on the agencys Twitter page. In the release, police say Edwardo Casillas is being sought in connection with the shooting that occurred around 1 a.m. in the casino parking lot and left a 41-year-old man hospitalized with non-life threatening injuries. Casillas, who goes by Eddie or Califas, is described as 6 feet 3 inches tall, 180 pounds, and with brown eyes. The release indicates Casillas is armed and dangerous and advises anyone who sees him to not approach him but to call State Police (505) 841-9256 and choose Option 3. New Mexicos former higher education secretary is now on leave as president of a small public university in southern Colorado. A wave of media coverage details allegations, which she disputes, that she was a bully and wore an offensive Halloween costume in 2016. But Beverlee McClure blames an outspoken critic for helping craft a misleading narrative about her leave from Adams State University in Alamosa. McClure said she requested the leave so she and the schools trustees could negotiate the terms of her departure after determining that they had different ideas about the schools direction. She declined to offer specifics about the nature of her disagreements with the board but stressed that her 2016 plumber getup featuring a fat suit, too-small T-shirt, faux beard and set of bad, fake teeth was not the issue. I am not on administrative leave because of a costume, she told the Journal. The trustees offered few details when announcing their Feb. 12 decision to put McClure on leave. In a written statement, they said, The priorities of the current board are no longer congruent with the priorities of the president, and she was on leave while the parties work through the details of a transition. In response to Journal questions seeking more information about the decision including whether reasons included bullying behavior or a costume an Adams State spokeswoman deferred to the statement as the only comments ASU planned to make at this time. Adams State has experienced declining enrollment, and the Higher Learning Commission, an accrediting body, placed it on probation in 2016, citing various issues with its online programming. McClure said the problems predated her arrival. She said she was proud of her tenure at ASU, citing achievements related to fundraising and growth in minority student enrollment. McClure has been the schools president since 2015. That followed a series of high-profile positions in New Mexico. She had been the states higher education secretary under Gov. Bill Richardson and later headed the statewide business group, the Association of Commerce & Industry. She is also former president of Clovis Community College. Multiple media outlets, including national higher education publications, have reported on McClures leave this week. The Denver Post quoted onetime ASU faculty member Danny Ledonne, whom McClure had once banned from campus but who successfully fought the ban in court. Ledonne said her costume showed contempt for the working people of Alamosa and was indicative of McClure, who Ledonne said had cultivated this campus culture of bullying and backstabbing. The newspaper also cited five other unnamed current and former faculty members who corroborated Ledonnes depiction. But McClure contends that Ledonne has cyberstalked her for years through his blog and helped twist the narrative around her leave. Hes done a beautiful job, she said. You have to give him credit. Ledonne, however, said he did not believe the costume which was written about in his blog in 2016 was to blame for McClures leave but that it did create media intrigue. He said she was substantially incorrect in her view that he cyberstalked her. Beverlee McClure has made a practice of making false allegations against me for years, and the claim that I cyberstalked her is just the most recent, he said in an email to the Journal. Further, I believe the matter of the Halloween costume has been distorted in the interest of click-bait journalism and that deeper performance issues better explain the leave. McClure said she was planning to return to New Mexico, where she would probably take some time to heal. She has not determined her next career move but is reluctant to return to public service. When people put themselves out there in positions that are considered public (or are a) public official, you really have to give people credit for having courage these days because one perceived misstep and theres just a feeding frenzy, she said. Copyright 2018 Albuquerque Journal Mayor Tim Keller said Thursday that the city is investigating a top official in Albuquerques Animal Welfare Department. Associate Director Deb Brinkley is on administrative leave pending the investigation. As folks have heard, we currently have some senior officials, or at least one, under investigation who is now on administrative leave because of inappropriate transport of animals, Keller told a news conference at the citys Eastside Animal Shelter. Well see where this investigation goes in terms of the legality, but we know conceptually it was wrong, and we know it was inappropriate, and that practice has been stopped, and that individual will be held accountable. Keller said its unclear whether any criminal activity occurred. Brinkley owns a dog rescue in Colorado, and Keller said city animals were being taken there. To our knowledge, it was a mix of animals that were difficult to adopt and some that seemingly were very adoptable, and you can see, in terms of financial incentives, why that would be the case, Keller said. Either way, the way that this was done was totally inappropriate. You cant have city management selling animals to their own company. Brinkley was a colleague of former director Paul Caster, who was replaced by Keller in December, before she was hired by the city. The individuals who used to be leading the department are no longer leading the department, Keller said. That is a big step in terms of changing direction. The mayor also said the department is working to standardize its collection of euthanasia data within its shelters. The department remains committed to maintaining a no-kill policy, which in reality equates to a 10 percent or less euthanasia rate, but Keller said those numbers have been calculated in inconsistent ways in the past. When you have a situation where theres lots of pressure for a no-kill policy and that can lead to folks massaging the numbers, it can lead to folks trying to send these animals elsewhere, perhaps inappropriately, and it can also lead to animals sitting here too long, he said. Animal Welfare Department interim Director John Soladay said the department is working to improve communication between the 140-person staff and 400-person volunteer force. He said decisions to euthanize animals sometimes werent properly communicated to volunteers who may have been working with them, something he hopes to ameliorate. Theres always going to be an animal that folks are just not going to want to let go, said Vickie Fisher, president of the nonprofit Kennel Kompadres, which supports the department, at Thursdays conference. Its always going to be there, but its how you manage it, how you communicate it, how you document what youve done, how you decide at some point, its just going to have to end. Wilner Baptiste is influenced by musicians who can tell a story with their work. The violists inspirations range from Kendrick Lamar and Common to composers Dmitri Shostakovich and Paul Hindemith. Music in general is supposed to relate to some kind of emotional something, said Baptiste. For me, I love someone that can tell me a story I can see, and its inspiring to me. Genres combine in Baptistes group, Black Violin. He and violinist and friend Kevin Sylvester have been touring the world with their unique blend of classical strings and hip-hop for almost 15 years, bridging the gap between the two very different musical worlds. The duo has worked with Kanye West and Alicia Keys, and performed on Ellen and at Barack Obamas second inauguration. The two, who on stage go by Kev Marcus and Wil B, will be performing in Santa Fe and Las Vegas, N.M., next week. The Fort Lauderdale, Fla., residents met in 1996 in their high school orchestra class, Baptiste said in a recent telephone interview. Neither was necessarily drawn to their respective instruments he describes their journey as taking advantage of situations they were placed in by chance. Several years before they met, Sylvesters mother signed him up for weekend music lessons after he started getting into trouble. Violin was the only instrument left. Baptiste, meanwhile, signed up for band class wanting to play saxophone, but he was put in the wrong class. Baptiste said that when the two met, they clicked because they were both into putting new twists on the classical styles they were playing in class. That often meant trying to play the songs they were hearing in popular culture. If we heard a song on the radio that had a violin melody, we would go to school playing that melody, he said. Combining pop or hip-hop with classical grew organically from there. Playing todays hits is something they still do. While a majority of the songs on their set lists are original compositions, Baptiste said the duo will throw in covers ranging from a Mozart/Cardi B mashup to an Imagine Dragons tune. Baptiste feels like Black Violin is breaking down stereotypes about those who play and love classical music. Its latest album, 2015s Stereotypes, explores that topic. During a spoken word section of the albums title song, Sylvester says that while he wishes people werent threatened by my presence without even knowing who I am, part of him is glad the stereotypes exist because it gives Black Violin a chance to debunk preconceived notions about what black men can do. Baptiste said the duo still feels this way, and there isnt a show that goes by where they dont feel walls coming down. He said it also happens among the classical and hip-hop fans in the audience who wouldnt interact otherwise. But they do in our shows . Its different race, different color, different background, different musical interest, he said. They dont necessarily associate with each other outside of our show. But the great thing about that is theyre enjoying the same thing at the same time, and theres no barriers: no color barriers, no religious barriers. Its just music. Another major university and a familiar corporate entity are apparently part of the competition for the next contract to run Los Alamos National Laboratory. According to a respected publication that covers the nations nuclear weapons labs, their contractors and related issues, Indianas Purdue University has teamed up with Bechtel National to submit a bid for the LANL contract, worth more than $2 billion a year with the possibility of earning millions more in management fees. Nuclear Security and Deterrence Monitor says two sources confirmed the Purdue/Bechtel bid. Proposals to operate LANL starting in October were due late last year. Three other major public universities the University of California, the University of Texas and Texas A&M University have confirmed that they are bidding on the contract. UCal, which has been part of LANLs management since the lab was created during World War II, and A&M are reportedly teaming together on a single proposal. The University of Texas is believed to have a corporate partner. The National Nuclear Security Administration, a semi-autonomous agency of the Department of Energy that oversees the national labs, has kept bidders identities confidential. Spokesmen for both Purdue and Bechtel which is part of a private consortium also including UCal that has run LANL since 2006 under an expiring contract declined to confirm or deny a bid. As is Purdues usual practice, we do not comment on proposals that we may or may not have participated in or submitted, Purdues Brian Zink said. But in 2016, a press release that included a comment from Purdues president was issued when Purdue, Lockheed, New Mexico State and New Mexico Tech joined together to bid on the contract to run Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque. Honeywell won that contract competition. Fred deSousa of Bechtel said this week: We wont be commenting on the procurement process right now. Were concentrating on managing the Lab safely and efficiently as part of the LANS team. The Department of Energy decided to terminate its contract with Los Alamos National Security LLC, or LANS which in addition to Bechtel and UCal includes the companies BWXT and AECOM after the consortium received a series of inadequate performance reviews. LANS worst evaluation came after a drum of radioactive waste that was improperly packed with a combustible mix at Los Alamos popped open at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in Carlsbad, causing contamination that shut down the nations only nuclear waste storage facility. Jay Coghlan of the watchdog Nuclear Watch New Mexico suggested that things didnt work out well with the UCal/Bechtel partnership and the California school wouldnt touch Bechtel on a new bid. So Bechtel went off looking for an engineering school to partner with, said Coghlan, referring to Purdue. UCal ran the Los Alamos lab on its own starting with the Manhattan Project to produce an atom bomb in the 1940s until 2006. LANS won the first ever competitive bidding for the lab contract and took over that year. Taxing the winner One issue up in the air as the contract award approaches is whether the winner will be subject to state gross receipts taxes. UCal, a nonprofit, didnt have to pay GRT, but LANS, as a private consortium, is subject to the tax. It paid about $76 million in GRT in 2015 that went to state and local governments. A bill to tax LANL and Sandia, even if they are run by a nonprofit such as a public university, was overwhelmingly passed with bipartisan support in the Legislatures session that ended last week by 48-19 in the House and 31-4 in the Senate. The bill, which has raised legal issues about singling out the labs for taxation among nonprofits, now awaits a signature or veto by Gov. Susana Martinez. The Regional Coalition of LANL Communities is leading a push to persuade the governor that the bill doesnt represent a tax increase and will only maintain the status quo as it exists with LANS. The coalition, which includes cities, counties and tribes in northern New Mexico, sent a letter to the governor this week. It says: Each contract acquisition the NNSA processes sends a shockwave through our regional community with myriad negative and positive possibilities of what comes next. Therefore, we ask that you please sign SB17, so we can ensure our communities can continue to serve its constituents and the State can stabilize future budgets. Thank you for your commitment and we are grateful, in advance, to see your signature on this Bill. Outgoing Santa Fe City Councilor Carmichael Dominguez isnt ready to announce his candidacy for mayor just yet. After all, theres still the matter of next months municipal election in which the citys next mayor will be chosen. And theres a good chance he wont run at all. But dont be shocked if, a few years down the road, Dominguez declares his candidacy for mayor in 2022. You never know, the District 3 city councilor said when asked during an interview this week at his City Hall. Maybe Id run again for mayor in the future. Im only 47, so next term Ill be in my early 50s. And if not mayor, maybe he would run for a seat in the Legislature. Im interested in politics at that level, especially recognizing the impact that the Legislature has on local government. I know its a whole different dynamic over there. But I sometimes feel that we dont get the support that we need not from our delegation, necessarily, but from the Legislature in general, he said. Dominguez is approaching the confluence of his third term as city councilor coming to an end in less than two weeks and retirement from his state government job just four months away. After 25 years working in the state Department of Transportation as a cartographer, Dominguez plans to retire June 30. Ill probably take some time off, then Ill get back into the workforce, he said when asked what hell do after that date. After nearly 30 years of being involved in the community and being close to retirement, I thought it would be a good time for me to take a step back, take a deep breath and gauge the future. Big shoes to fill Dominguez says he never had aspirations for elected office. Its something that just happened, he said, adding that his family was never politically active. It all started in his early 20s when he helped lead a tenant uprising against at the Sierra Vista mobile home park, where his family lived, and, then, when he was elected president of his homeowners association in the fledgling Tierra Contenta subdivision. He served on various city task forces over the years and was invited to serve on the Planning Commission by then-mayor Larry Delgado. After that, he ran for school board and won. He earned 41 percent of the vote to win a three-way race for the City Council District 3 seat in 2006, ran unopposed four years later, and prevailed again against two challengers in 2014, gaining 45 percent of the overall vote. Throughout his 12-year tenure on the council, he has served on the Finance Committee which is responsible for preparing the citys annual budget including the past six as chairman. Theyre going to be extremely big shoes to fill, said Roman Tiger Abeyta, who is running unopposed for the District 3 seat Dominguez is vacating. Now, during the (mayoral) candidate forums they are talking about the south side. They are talking about the south side because of his efforts, because of the work he did to bring the issues that effect south side voters to the forefront. Asked what he considers his biggest accomplishments as a councilor, Dominguez divides them into two categories: what hes done for District 3, which demographically has a higher Hispanic population and lower income families than other parts of town, and what hes done for the city as a whole. District 3 is also the fastest growing part of Santa Fe, and Dominguez points to capital improvements that have been made along Airport Road, creating the Airport Road overlay district to make the area more attractive and attempting to rein in liquor sales, helping bring in the south side farmers market and getting funding for the Zona del Sol community services center, as things he has helped bring about. Hes proud to have proposed free bus rides for children, which benefits kids not just in his district, but also citywide, and creating what he says was the states first independent redistricting commission to establish boundaries of the four City Council districts. While on the Finance Committee, he also played a key role in ushering the city through tough economic times. I was around when we were growing at 4 and 5 percent in (gross receipts tax revenues) year after year to a time when we were making $11 million in cuts in just one year, he said, also noting the $15 million deficit the city overcame in addressing the 2016-17 fiscal year budget. So how did the city get itself in such a hole in the first place? It was a structural deficit. We were borrowing from Peter to pay Paul, he said. And, quite frankly, were not out of the woods yet. Theres still a lot of work that needs to be done. We have cut most of the fat, but I think theres a little bit of fat that still needs to be cut, whether its through reorganization or some sort of financial adjustment. But the fact is we are providing more services than the revenues we are taking in. And thats something that has to be dealt with. It will be dealt with largely by the next mayor, who will take on added duties under the so-called strong mayor form of government. No longer will the Finance Committee be responsible for formulating the budget that task now falls on the mayor. Other priorities Dominguez announced that he wont seek a fourth term as city councilor in July. I always felt that three terms is enough, he said. But I always thought that three terms was good kinda like the beginning of a book, the middle of a book and the end of a book. When Dominguez made the announcement by way of a guest column in the Santa Fe New Mexican he said he was doing so because he was focusing on other priorities in his life. But he also wrote about a growing division in Santa Fe. Not just a socioeconomic division, he said, but the often harsh political discord, as well. This was just two months after the highly charged election on a soda tax proposed by Mayor Javier Gonzales as a means to fund early childhood education programs and soundly defeated by Santa Fe voters that Dominguez says helped create that divide. He says today that political rhetoric has become more vile and personal. But Dominguez said times can change and he has faith that the City of Holy Faith can bridge its divides. We can overcome those challenges, he said. But its going to take the right combination of things, the right formula, to get us there. Santa Fe is a wonderful place to live. I think that we have a population of people who care a great deal about each other. Dominguez did side with the majority when the council voted 8-1 to put the soda tax question to city voters, but he has since faced questions and criticism over not voting in the special election. I think whats important is the fact that I voted for the democratic process and give everyone a chance to vote, he said. Dominguez isnt endorsing anyone in this years March 6 mayoral election, or the City Council races for that matter, with early voting already underway. I think Ill probably sit this one out, he said. Dominguez will attend his last City Council meeting next Wednesday. District 1 City Councilor Signe Lindell says he will be dearly missed. When I started out as a councilor (in 2014), if anyone told me Councilor Dominguez would be the most gracious, spent the most time with me, and mentor me the most, Id say that was very unlikely. But thats exactly who he was, she said. He was always a willing teacher and never at any time did he not have time to help me with procedural questions or sharing his institutional knowledge. Lindell praised Dominguez for his willingness to listen to both sides of a debate, preparedness and work ethic. I dread saying goodbye to him. Hopefully, hell take some time to recharge, and I would hope he would come back and serve the community in some capacity. Were not done with him, she continued. Hes a young guy and he has a lot to give this community. WASHINGTON A landmark organized labor case set for a U.S. Supreme Court hearing on Monday could have far-reaching implications for public sector workers in New Mexico and around the country as the court decides whether public sector unions can force non-members to pay dues. The Supreme Court case Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, Council 31 could affect more than 5 million government workers in 24 states, including New Mexico, and the District of Columbia. It could also affect the financial health of the unions, which are significant supporters of Democratic candidates and causes. A pro-labor rally in Albuquerque dubbed the Working Peoples Day of Action is scheduled from 4 to 6:30 p.m. in Nob Hill at East Central and Amherst. Pro-union rallies will also be held Saturday in major cities across the country, including New York, Boston and Los Angeles. In the Janus case, the U.S. Supreme Court is being asked to jettison a 41-year-old ruling that allows states to require government employees who dont want to be union members to pay for their share of activities the union undertakes on behalf of all workers, not just its members. These fair share fees cover the costs of collective bargaining and grievance procedures to deal with workplace complaints. Employees who dont join the union do not have to pay for the unions political activities, which are paid through a separate, voluntary fund. Conservative anti-union interests are backing an Illinois government employee who says that being forced to pay anything at all violates his First Amendment speech rights. Im not against unions, said the employee, 65-year-old Mark Janus, who is represented by AFSCME Council 31. I dont oppose the right of workers to organize. But the right to say no to unions is just as important as the right to say yes. Janus said he opposes his unions fight for wage and benefit increases when his own state is in pretty terrible financial condition right now. The Janus case is widely expected to break against AFSCME because the Supreme Courts newest member, conservative Neil Gorsuch, could tip what had previously been a 4-4 deadlocked court against the unions. Oral arguments will be heard Monday, and a court decision is expected later this spring. In New Mexico, about 52,000 were union members in 2017, accounting for 6.7 percent of the states total workforce, both in private and public sectors, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. About 37,000 of those 52,000 union members belong to public sector unions. Unionstats.com, which tracks organized labor trends, reports that 22.6 percent of New Mexicos public employees are union members. New Mexicos overall union membership has risen in recent years, though the state is still less unionized than the national average. Carter Bundy, political and legislative director for AFSCME New Mexico, said so-called right-to-work policies that allow workers to opt out of joining a union or paying its dues is bad employment policy for the state. Right to work is wrong for the economy and wrong for workers, not just union workers but other workers as well, Bundy said. When these union-busting decisions come down, it negatively impacts wages, health care, retirement security and workplace safety for workers, whether you are in a union or not. Thats because unions help raise the standard for all of those things in any state. Paul Gessing, president of the libertarian Rio Grande Foundation in New Mexico, said the ability to refuse paying union dues is tantamount to free speech. I dont consider this to be an anti-union case as our friends on the left do, Gessing said. The idea is that any organization that wants me to be a member should have to convince me to be a member and not access my paycheck my money before I get to access it. Gessing said public sector unions consistently aim to expand government, something the Rio Grande Foundation opposes. He also said that government employee unions are among the strongest interest groups in New Mexico. When it comes to government unions, they have one incentive, and thats to grow government and increase their membership and member dues, Gessing said. Carter said that regardless of what happens in the Supreme Court case, New Mexicos public sector unions will continue their fight. For the most part, we have seen a lot of enthusiasm for the union in response to these attacks, and we think employees in our bargaining unit and in other AFSCME bargaining units understand the importance of this case, Bundy said. Weve been very strong here in New Mexico, and weve had a lot of success in defending worker rights and even expanding them in some cases. The Associated Press contributed to this report. WASHINGTON Every good spy story needs a shadowy operative who does the dirty work for the boss, and thanks to the indictment issued last Friday by special counsel Robert Mueller, we now have a nominee for that role in the Russia investigation. Hes a billionaire oligarch named Yevgeniy Prigozhin, and based on Russian and other accounts, he sounds like a real-life version of a James Bond villain. Prigozhins fingerprints appear to be on three of the most sensitive operations launched by Russian President Vladimir Putin: meddling in the 2016 U.S. election; supporting separatist fighters in Eastern Ukraine; and providing military muscle for the Syrian regime. Russias hidden combatants are often described as Little Green Men, and Prigozhin may be the Jolly Green Giant who helps this machine function. Prigozhin has been painted in press accounts as Putins chef, because he got his start as the future presidents favorite restaurateur in Russias wild frontier capitalism of the 1990s. He started with food stalls in his native St. Petersburg and eventually built an elegant floating restaurant there where Putin hosted foreign leaders. Billion-dollar contracts to cater for the Russian military followed. But he started as a tough guy: Back in 1981, prior to gaining Putins favor, Prigozhin was reportedly jailed for nine years for robbery, fraud and child prostitution, according to the Russian news website Meduza. Muellers indictment of 13 Russians alleged that Prigozhin was a key funder of the Internet Research Agency, a St. Petersburg troll farm that sought to plant pro-Kremlin information on social media. The indictment charged that, through several subsidiaries branded as Concord, Prigozhin spent significant funds to support information warfare against the U.S. Prigozhin has denied involvement in the troll factory. He has been sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury since 2016 because of his activities in Ukraine. Muellers indictment describes a complex effort to manipulate American public opinion through fake accounts, false fronts and stolen identities. The troll factorys election bias was evident in the ads it purchased, including: Hillary is a Satan, and her crimes and lies had proved just how evil she is, and Among all the candidates Donald Trump is the one and only who can defend the police from terrorists. Meddling in American politics was a brazen act, but it was an elaboration of tactics that the Internet Research Agency allegedly embraced in 2014 in Ukraine after mass protests toppled Viktor Yanukovych, the pro-Russian president. The Wall Street Journal recently spoke with a Russian journalist who had worked for the agency. The Journal characterized his job as rewriting news from the point of view of pro-Russian separatists. Last year, Mueller indicted Trumps former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, for concealing a scheme to lobby for Yanukovych. Prigozhin is also allegedly connected to a group of mercenaries, known as the Wagner Group, that aided Ukrainian separatists. He also appears to have had a special role in the Wagner Groups mercenary operations in Syria. The Associated Press reported in December he was an investor in Evro Polis, which has a contract to help liberate Syrian oil and gas fields and, in return, receive 25 percent of the production revenues. The Syria mercenary operation took a disastrous turn two weeks ago, when commandos tried to seize oil and gas fields east of Deir al-Zour and were demolished by U.S. and Syrian Kurdish forces holding that terrain. According to Russian website Fontanka, about 3,000 Wagner mercenaries have worked in Syria since Russia intervened in 2015. President Trump, in his torrent of combative Twitter messages following the indictment, said Putin and his operatives must be laughing their asses off because their divisive efforts have worked so well. Maybe, but given the exposure of covert action in Ukraine, Syria and America, they may not have the last laugh. I was a seventh-grader at Billy Lane Lauffer Middle School in Tucson when I was pulled out of class for a meeting. At first I thought I was in trouble because seventh-graders dont normally get pulled out of class unless theyve done something wrong. It turns out I did something right. I was invited to attend the MISS (Math, Information Systems and Science) Adventures camp now called Applied Career Exploration in STEM (ACES) because I had expressed interests in math and science. This program, sponsored by Raytheon Missile Systems, changed my life. The camps goal is to show girls there are no careers just for men, that if we are willing to work hard and focus on education, we can achieve our goals and dreams. From then on, all I wanted to do is become a mechanical engineer because I have always been a hands-on learner and enjoyed math and science and, if a guy can do it, why cant I? Throughout my childhood, Raytheon has always been a part of my learning. ACES is just one component of Raytheons MathMovesU program. I also was involved with Mathematics, Engineering, Science Achievement (MESA) at Desert View High School, which Raytheon helps sponsor. The academic support I received helped me earn a Bachelor of Science in mechanical engineering from the University of Arizona, and I celebrate National Engineers Week this week as someone proud to be in this profession. Education has always been an important factor in my life. Being a first-generation American, both of my parents only had high school diplomas. My father earned his in the United States while my mother earned hers in Vietnam. My parents constantly pushed my younger brother and me to do well in school so that we could provide for ourselves and families in the future. Though I was initially interested in mechanical engineering because of math and science, I later thought about my degree as a stepping stone to eventually make a difference in just one persons life. My father was infected by poliomyelitis when he was younger, so now he cant go anywhere without a walking crutch. I wasnt able to help my father when he was younger, but with the knowledge and skills I have learned along the way, I can try to design something to make a difference in his or someone elses life. I make a difference right now, every day, at Raytheon. We ensure that the warfighter is prepared and that the products we make do what they are intended to do, first time, every time. This is especially important to me as my husband is a United States Air Force pilot. As a manufacturing engineer in radio frequency/electronics integration systems, I work to support production on the factory floor for multiple missile programs. I make and modify work instructions for a part of a missiles assembly. Its like when you buy a table online and it arrives at your door with assembly instructions. We constantly look for new, innovative ways to improve the efficiency and ergonomics for the operators who work on these builds. I find it important to give back as previous Raytheon employees have done for me. I volunteer with Imagine Your STEM Future, a girls mentoring program at Desert View. I work with other volunteers and the students on various programs like an egg drop project, where the girls have a limited amount of money to create a fixture that will prevent the egg from breaking during a fall. I think programs like these are important because it opens up more doors and opportunities for the girls. Girls can do anything they put their minds to do. Large companies can have a profound impact on young people. During National Engineers Week, I encourage my colleagues and friends to give back to their community, just like Raytheon employees gave back to me when I was a student. I am so glad they pulled me out of class! Raytheon employs nearly 200 workers at its Albuquerque facility. The companys work includes telemetry and range support systems, high power microwave, pulsed power, and particle beam technologies and energetics and materials development for the Department of Defense. STEM efforts Raytheon Albuquerque hosts a MathMovesU Day every fall in partnership with the University of New Mexico as part of the companys wider effort to inspire the next generation of engineers, scientists and technologists. The University of New Mexicos Health Sciences Center has long been considered a crown jewel of our states higher education system, and thats due in large part to the service it provides to its community and the state as a whole. Take, for example, its work with underserved populations in Albuquerque through several clinics. Best of all, those clinics are being staffed by future physicians, nurses, pharmacists, physician assistants and physical therapists. Its a win-win. Various underserved populations like immigrants and the homeless get desperately needed medical services. And UNM students get the experience they need to become competent and compassionate health care professionals. These clinics are a lifeline to those in need, like James Christian, a 45-year-old homeless man with diabetes who has lost the lower part of his right leg, all the toes on his left foot and, recently, his right index finger to amputation. My biggest issues are not having the money to buy the right kind of food, and stress, Christian told a third-year medical student during a recent clinic. Students provide some care themselves or refer patients to the hospital or follow-up visits at a health clinic. The HSC students are supervised by an attending health care provider. And sometimes they simply provide a much needed ear to listen to people who often have no one to talk to. I learn so much here, 29-year-old Tae-young Nam said. We are in the classroom the first two years (of medical school). I have never studied so hard. But the clinic reminds me of what I will be doing one day. These types of programs are vital to our community and to the Health Sciences Center, and we applaud UNM for pursuing these opportunities for their students and for the community. This editorial first appeared in the Albuquerque Journal. It was written by members of the editorial board and is unsigned as it represents the opinion of the newspaper rather than the writers. Two bodies found in Stanley, NM, earlier this week have now been connected to an active case being investigated by Albuquerque police, according to the Santa Fe County Sheriffs Office. Spokesman Juan Rios sent out a statement Thursday night confirming that APD is taking over the investigation. Rios also said both bodies were men, when earlier reports attributed one as a woman. The bodies were discovered in Southern Santa Fe County Monday when a rancher found one body, around 2 p.m., stuffed into a garbage bin on Montoya Road. The rancher called deputies who then located another body just a few miles away, on B Anaya Road. At the time the sheriffs office called the deaths suspicious but gave no other details. An APD spokesman could not be reached for comment Thursday night. A team of special prosecutors announced Tuesday that charges will not be filed against former Albuquerque police officer Jeremy Dear for shooting and killing 19-year-old Mary Hawkes in April 2014. The decision brings an end to a high-profile shooting case that happened at a tense time when Albuquerque had just received a findings letter from the U.S. Department of Justice that would launch police into a yearslong reform effort that is changing the way police use force and investigate police shootings. It also raised questions about the departments lapel camera policies. A team put together by 2nd Judicial District Attorney Raul Torrez and headed by Michael Cox, a special prosecutor, said in a letter to Albuquerque Police Chief Michael Geier that no charges will be filed against Dear and the case is closed. Dear shot Hawkes, a suspected car thief, after a foot chase near Wyoming and Zuni SE early in the morning of April 21, 2014, 11 days after the DOJs findings were released. An officer who had been sued for excessive force and had a high number of civilian complaints against him, Dear said his lapel camera came unplugged and didnt record the shooting. Former Albuquerque Police Chief Gorden Eden said that during the chase Hawkes stopped, turned and pointed a gun at Dear. But attorneys for Hawkes family questioned that account, given Hawkes injuries. Cox said in an interview that there was no way to conclude the exact body positions of Dear and Hawkes when the shooting happened. The question we had to ask was, did she have a gun? Cox said in an interview. We couldnt overcome the possibility that she had a gun and she pointed it. All the evidence showed that she did. A lawsuit brought by Hawkes family against the city was settled for $5 million last month. Dear was ultimately fired from the Albuquerque Police Department because Eden considered him insubordinate for failing to record all his interactions with civilians, which the former chief said Dear had to do because of the complaints against him. Dear appealed to get his job back, but a state district judge rejected the appeal last month. Laura Schauer Ives, one of the familys attorneys, said the district attorney had said he would meet with the Hawkes family about the case before a decision was reached on charges, which Schauer Ives said didnt happen. She released a statement from members of the Hawkes family that said they were disappointed with the decision. District Attorney Raul Torrez promised officer involved shootings in Albuquerque would receive impartial review under his stewardship, the family said in a statement. The findings in the Hawkes case and, more importantly the gross mischaracterization of the evidence in the Hawkes case, demonstrate that his promise was hollow. District attorney spokesman Michael Patrick said Torrez does plan to meet with the family. Copyright 2018 Albuquerque Journal Bernalillo Countys sheriff and undersheriff were accused of corruption and a deputy of murder in a strongly worded letter written by an attorney representing the girlfriend of an unarmed man whom the deputy shot and killed last November. Attorney Sam Bregman also said in a letter to state and federal authorities that deputy Joshua Mora had injured fellow deputies on at least two occasions while he was doing training exercises as a cadet, struggled to pass driving school, was often involved in out-of-policy pursuits, and that Mora never gave any commands before he shot and killed Isaac Padilla, 23, and Martin Jim, 35. Jim was an unarmed passenger in the back seat of a stolen truck. All residents of Bernalillo County should be scared to death that this guy is walking around with a badge and a gun, Bregman said in an interview. I know I am. He accused Sheriff Manuel Gonzales and Undersheriff Rudy Mora Joshua Moras father of corruption for allowing Mora to patrol despite having so many red flags in a short career. Mora had only been with the office a year and five months at the time of the shooting. Bregman claims that a Bernalillo County Sheriffs Office supervisor quit the force in disgust of the way high-ranking officials handled the shooting investigation. Sam hyperbole Bregman nothing that he touches is left without being overly sensationalized, said Luis Robles, Moras attorney. Robles said there was nothing in his clients personnel and training files that would point to a pattern of improper behavior. Deputy Felicia Romero, a spokeswoman for the sheriffs office, said there is ongoing criminal and internal affairs investigations into the shooting. She said the agency declined to comment on Bregmans letter or the lawsuit. Bregmans allegations were made in a letter to Attorney General Hector Balderas and acting U.S. Attorney James Tierney dated Wednesday, which asks that Mora be investigated and charged with murder. Bregman said new details about Mora and the shooting were uncovered by Dennis Maez, a private investigator hired by Bregmans firm. Bregman is representing Jims girlfriend, Shawntay Ortiz, in a wrongful death lawsuit that has been filed against the county. The information I am providing clearly shows criminal behavior under New Mexico State Statute, Federal Civil Rights Law, and evidence of Corruption at the highest levels of the Bernalillo County Sheriffs Department, Bregman wrote in the letter. Mora shot and killed Padilla and Jim after a 20-mile, 35-minute chase that ended when Padilla was forced off the road near Coors and Glenrio NW, Gonzales previously said. Gonzales said in a news conference after the shooting last year that Mora fired after Padilla revved the engine, and that Mora was scared for his own life and the life of a sergeant. Gonzales said Mora couldnt see anyone but the driver in the truck when he fired his weapon. Bregman in the letter alleged that deputies violated numerous policies before the shooting, and that Mora never gave the occupants of the truck any commands before opening fire. The letter also alleges that Mora had a brief and troubled career with the sheriffs office. He said the allegations are based on interviews with several current and former sheriffs deputies who were willing to work with investigators. The allegations include: Cadet Mora injured a handcuffed deputy who was role playing during a training exercise. Cadet Mora gave a female deputy a concussion by striking her in the head with his knee when she was playing a down and out female. A driving instructor sidelined cadet Mora from a driving track for being too aggressive, and that Rudy Mora and Gonzales told the instructor to pass Joshua Mora. Mora was involved in 17 vehicle pursuits, and most were out-of-policy. A sergeant who requested Mora be disciplined was moved to a graveyard shift. A deputy sergeant quit the sheriffs office in disgust after the Nov. 17 shooting because the behavior of Undersheriff Mora and Sheriff Gonzales was so reprehensible. Officials for the U.S. Attorneys Office and the Attorney General declined to discuss Bregmans letter on Thursday. ST. LOUIS A St. Louis grand jury on Thursday indicted Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens on a felony invasion of privacy charge for allegedly taking a compromising photo of a woman with whom he had an affair in 2015. The Republican governor responded that he made a mistake but committed no crime. St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner launched an investigation in January after Greitens admitted to an affair with his St. Louis hairdresser that began in March 2015. He was elected governor in November 2016. Thursdays indictment was followed with an announcement by House Republican leaders that they were forming a group of lawmakers to investigate the charges and answer the question as to whether or not the governor can lead our state while a felony case moves forward. In a statement following the indictment , the Republican governor was defiant and attacked the prosecutor who brought the charge. As I have said before, I made a personal mistake before I was Governor, he said. I did not commit a crime. With todays disappointing and misguided political decision, my confidence in our prosecutorial system is shaken, but not broken. I know this will be righted soon. The people of Missouri deserve better than a reckless liberal prosecutor who uses her office to score political points. Greitens attorney, in a separate statement, called the indictment baseless and unfounded. In 40 years of public and private practice, I have never seen anything like this, attorney Edward L. Dowd Jr. said. Gardners spokeswoman, Susan Ryan, responded: Despite the Governors personal attacks, the Circuit Attorney believes the courtroom is the appropriate place to argue the facts, not the media. Greitens legal team immediately filed a motion to dismiss the indictment on the grounds that any relationship with the woman was consensual. Some lawmakers renewed suggestions that Greitens should consider resigning, as they had done when the affair first become public last month. Democratic state Sen. Jamilah Nasheed of St. Louis called for an impeachment process to begin immediately. Gov. Greitens has to go, Nasheed said. Missourians thought they voted for a person of character and integrity, and instead they got a liar and alleged criminal. Any impeachment process must begin in the House with an investigation. The joint statement from House Speaker Todd Richardson, Speaker Pro Tem Elijah Haahr and Majority Leader Rob Vescovo did not specifically mention impeachment while noting that they were initiating an investigation. The indictment states that on March 21, 2015, Greitens photographed a woman identified only by her initials in a state of full or partial nudity without her knowledge or consent. The indictment said Greitens transmitted the image contained in the photograph in a manner that allowed access to that image via a computer. In 2015, the woman told her husband, who was secretly taping the conversation, that Greitens took the compromising photo of her at his home and threatened to use it as blackmail if she spoke about the affair. The penalty for first-degree invasion of privacy in Missouri is a sentence of up to four years behind bars. Greitens was taken into custody in St. Louis and released on his own recognizance. He is due in court for his first hearing on March 16, before Circuit Judge Rex Burlison. Greitens has repeatedly denied blackmailing the woman, but has repeatedly refused to answer questions about whether he took a photo. The indictment came about a month before the statute of limitations would have run out. The statute of limitations for invasion of privacy in Missouri is three years. Ryan, asked if additional charges could be filed, said the matter is still under investigation. Several lawmakers were questioned last week by investigators from Gardners office. Greitens, the 43-year-old father of two young boys, came into office as a political outsider, a brash Rhodes Scholar and Navy SEAL officer who was wounded in Iraq, emerging as the winner in a crowded and expensive GOP primary. A former boxer and martial arts expert, he has embraced the role of maverick. He responded to a Democratic attack ad in the fall of 2016 with one of his own in which he fired more than 100 rounds from a machine gun as an announcer declared hed bring out the big guns to fight Democratic policies championed by then-President Barack Obama. Greitens surprised many experts by defeating Democratic Attorney General Chris Koster in the November 2016 election. Some saw him as a rising Republican star with potential presidential aspirations. But governing hasnt always been easy, even though Republicans now control both houses as well as the governors mansion. Greitens and GOP lawmakers have often clashed, with him comparing some to third-graders and labeling them career politicians. He has also faced questions about so-called dark money campaign contributions and criticism for stacking the state board of education. His use of a secretive app that deletes messages is under investigation by Republican Attorney General Josh Hawley. Greitens charity, The Mission Continues, faced scrutiny during the campaign when Democrats accused him of insider politics for accessing the donor list to raise about $2 million through its top contributors. ___ AP reporters Summer Ballentine, David A. Lieb and Blake Nelson in Jefferson City, Missouri, contributed to this report. SANTA FE With just over 10 months left in Gov. Susana Martinezs administration, a top staffer is leaving for a new job. Deputy chief of staff Nick Piatek, whose last day is today, has worked with the Martinez administration for nearly seven years, rising from a communications position within the Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management to a top Governors Office post. In a statement Thursday, the two-term Republican governor praised the leadership abilities of Piatek, who has accepted a private sector job in California. Nick is a strong leader who helped guide my administration towards making New Mexico a better place to live and raise a family, Martinez said in a statement. Its common for top appointees both on the national and state level to leave during the final months of an elected officials term in office, and the Martinez administrations Cabinet has also had recent turnover. In his position as deputy chief of staff, Piatek has played a leading role in the past two years negotiating with legislative leaders. He also helped oversee the Governors Office communications strategy. Its unclear whether the Governors Office will hire a replacement for Piatek, with Martinezs term set to expire at the end of this year. D.C. trip: Gov. Martinez traveled to Washington, D.C., on Thursday to attend political meetings and participate in talks with Trump administration officials. While in the nations capital, Martinez will take part in the National Governors Associations winter meeting the NGA will hold its summer meeting in Santa Fe and attend a meeting of the Republican Governors Association, a spokeswoman said. She is scheduled to return to New Mexico on Tuesday, Martinez spokesman Emilee Cantrell said. The Governors Office did not provide details about the nature of Martinezs meeting with Trump administration officials. The governor also traveled to Washington earlier this month to attend a meeting with President Donald Trump about a plan for investments in rural infrastructure. Her current trip falls within the bill-review period for legislation passed during the 30-day session that ended last week. Martinez has until March 7 to sign or veto 108 bills that are still awaiting action. Bills that are not acted upon are automatically vetoed. Per the state Constitution, Lt. Gov. John Sanchez serves as acting governor while Martinez is traveling outside New Mexico. The RGA is covering the cost of Martinezs current trip. Dan Boyd: dboyd@abqjournal.com WASHINGTON The nation should keep assault rifles out of the hands of anyone under 21, President Donald Trump says, defying his loyal supporters in the National Rifle Association amid Americas public reckoning over gun violence. He also pushed hard for arming security guards and many teachers in U.S. schools. Theres nothing more important than protecting our children, Trump said, adding that hed spoken with many members of Congress and NRA officials and insisting they would go along with his plans in the wake of last weeks school shooting in Parkland, Florida, that left 17 people dead. But there were no words of support from the NRA for his minimum-age proposal and outright opposition from organizations of teachers and school security guards for the idea of arming schools to deal with intruders. The NRA will back it and so will Congress, Trump contended as he called for raising the legal age of purchase for all guns from 18 to 21. A spokesman later said Trump was speaking specifically about semi-automatic weapons. The presidents proposal came just hours after the NRA affirmed its opposition, calling such a restriction an infringement on gun owners rights. Trump has spent the past two days listening to ideas about how to stem gun violence at schools after last weeks shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. On Wednesday, he heard from students and family members of those killed in recent shootings and on Thursday from local and state officials. In Florida, meanwhile, funerals continued. And a sheriffs deputy who had been on duty at the school but never went inside to confront the shooter resigned after being suspended without pay. Trump has been proposing a growing list of ideas, including more stringent background checks for gun buyers, reopening some mental institutions to hold potential killers and banning bump stock devices that allow semi-automatic rifles to mimic machine guns. He said Thursday that many teachers have military experience and suggested they be paid bonuses for the added responsibility of carrying weapons. He also appeared open to other proposals to harden schools, such as fortifying walls and limiting entry points. One idea he didnt like: the active shooter drills that some schools hold. He called that a very negative thing and said he wouldnt want his own son participating. Spokesman Raj Shah later said Trump was concerned about the name and would prefer calling them safety drills. In Florida, Republican Sen. Marco Rubio said he now is open to raising age requirements for long-gun purchases. That was the day after he was confronted at a CNN town hall by Parkland students and parents over his pro-gun votes and support from the NRA. Kansas Sen. Pat Roberts, another Republican, told reporters during a visit to the Kansas Statehouse that he supported raising age requirements, saying, Certainly, nobody under 21 should have an AR-15. NRA leaders emerged in unannounced appearances at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, blaming the FBI and local reporting failures for the Florida shooting. Evil walks among us and God help us if we dont harden our schools and protect our kids, said Executive Vice President and CEO Wayne LaPierre. The whole idea from some of our opponents that armed security makes us less safe is completely ridiculous. The NRA was an early supporter of Trumps campaign, and it remains unclear how far the president will go to cross them. Shortly before LaPierre took the stage, Trump offered a rallying cry on Twitter, calling NRA leaders Great People and Great American Patriots. They love our Country and will do the right thing. I dont think Ill be going up against them, he said of the politically influential group. I really think the NRA wants to do whats right. In Congress, a bill being drafted by Sens. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., would apply more broadly than just to assault rifles such as the AR-15 used in the Florida shootings. It would raise the age requirements for all rifles. In the end, Trump did not stray too far from conservative Republican orthodoxy. His focus when it comes to background checks is on mental health concerns and not loopholes that permit loose private gun sales on the internet and at gun shows. And he remains opposed to a full ban on assault rifles, Shah said. Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer said he was skeptical the president would follow though. The last time he showed support for sensible gun reform no fly, no buy he quickly dropped his support once the NRA opposed it. I hope this time will be different, Schumer said in a statement, referring to a measure backed by Democrats to prevent people on a terrorism-related no fly list from buying guns. Indeed, it is not clear that the GOP-controlled Congress, which is in recess, will take up or act on a variety of legislative proposals that have been made to address gun violence. Those include measures to expand federal background checks, allow authorities to issue emergency orders to take guns from people identified as a threat to themselves or others, and raise the minimum age for rifle purchases to 21. Polls show growing support for gun control measures, including 97-percent backing for universal background checks in a Quinnipiac University survey released Tuesday. But recent mass shootings, including the 2012 mass murder of elementary school children in Newtown, Connecticut, and the killing of 58 people in Las Vegas last fall, have not resulted in significant legislation. In fact, a bill passed by the House in December would make it easier for gun owners to carry concealed weapons across state lines. ___ Associated Press writers Catherine Lucey, Ken Thomas, Darlene Superville, Alan Fram and Sadie Gurman in Washington, Zeke Miller in Oxon Hill, Maryland, and John Hanna in Topeka, Kansas, contributed to this report. One of the worlds richest troves of Triassic-period fossils has been discovered in an area of Bears Ears National Monument that just lost its protected status, scientists announced Thursday. President Donald Trump signed a proclamation in December that shrank the national monument by 85 percent. The discovery of intact remains of crocodile-like animals called phytosaurs came to light this week when researchers announced it at the Western Association of Vertebrate Paleontologists conference at Dixie State University in St. George, Utah. Based on an initial excavation, the 70-yard site may be the densest area of Triassic period fossils in the nation, maybe the world, Rob Gay, a contractor at the Museums of Western Colorado, said in a statement. In an interview, Gay who led a team of researchers on last years expedition called it the largest and most complete bone bed in the state of Utah, and one of, if not the largest, anywhere in the United States. He called the discovery of three intact toothy, long-snouted fossils from the period extremely rare, adding that the density of bone is as high or greater than all the other Triassic sites in the country. The fossil bed is part of the Chinle Formation, ancient river and flood plain deposits that run through the center of the original monument President Barack Obama designated in December 2016. But that sedimentary rock also contains uranium, which made it more commercially attractive than other parts of Bears Ears. In December, The Washington Post reported that the firm Energy Fuels Resources lobbied Interior Department officials to shrink the boundaries of the monument, in part to allow the company greater access to areas where it held uranium mining rights. Trumps Bears Ears proclamation, which took effect Feb. 2, cut more than 1 million acres from its original 1.35 million-acre expanse. A separate proclamation reduced another national monument in Utah, Grand Staircase-Escalante, by about 800,000 acres. Other large Triassic-period fossil discoveries have been made in Texas, Arizona and New Mexico, so a find as far north as Utah is significant, Gay said. The Triassic period took place immediately after the first mass extinction on Earth, between 251 million and 199 million years ago, and phytosaurs evolved alongside other species that emerged after roughly 95 percent of the previous species had perished. Phytosaurs are not considered dinosaurs, Gay said, but seeing how these animals were able to live in northern parts of the continent might give us some idea of how dinosaurs were able to survive and take over the world. The new find at Bears Ears underscores the fact that Utah is home to key paleontological deposits, and changes in national monuments there could effect the course of future scientific research. David Polly, president of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, said in an interview that 14 paleontologists are working on sites that used to be within Bears Ears boundaries but no longer have protection; twice as many are conducting research on sites that had lain within Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument until earlier this month. One of the reasons Grand Staircase-Escalante was first designated in 1996, for example, was because of its value as a paleontological site. Its Kaiparowits Plateau ranks as one of the most important examples of the Mesozoic Era, and Polly noted that it has yielded 27 new species never been known to science before. But now nearly half of the Kaiparowits Plateau falls outside the new boundaries, Polly noted including nearly all of the Tropic Shale, a roughly 94 million-year-old swath of rock that Trumps monument proclamation identifies as a protected object. More broadly, Polly has identified 472 known scientifically important sites that now lie outside Grand Staircase-Escalantes boundaries. Polly said he is most worried about the Tropic Shale, because it contains commercially viable shale gas deposits and is accessible by road. If shale gas development took place there, you would also be splintering all the fossils in it and erasing all the geochemical signals that tell us about the extinction, the chemistry of the time. Gay said he worked with conservationists and other groups on the bid to designate Bears Ears as a national monument because of its fossil deposits. He searched for Triassic-era fossils for three years before he came across the recent find in June 2016. We decided to stop at some exposures we found promising and found the fossils right away, he said. Exposures are parts of cracked rock that can reveal fossils. While the monument survived, the change in designation has an immediate effect on Gays work, he said, because he could no longer use part of a $25,000 Bureau of Land Management grant he was awarded to continue excavating the site. We were all really upset. We didnt want to believe it at first, Gay said, describing the teams mood as Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke toured Bears Ears before recommending that it be reduced. The Bureau of Land Management did not respond to requests for comment on Thursday. Gays team has been nervous, in part, because it determined during the course of the research that the site had been looted. The team found plaster that had been made to encase a portion of a skull. Gay alerted the BLMs district paleontologist to the problem, and a bureau official told him that its Arizona office had a fragment of fossil that was surrendered in 2008 by a collector who lacked a permit. The team matched the fossil to the recent Bears Ears findings, proving that it came from the same site. This may be one of the only times a recovered fossil has been traced all the way back to the location where it was looted, Gay said. They broke off the skull, Gay said of the amateurs who robbed the site. They didnt even take the whole skull. Also they missed the entire rest of the animal and several other animals laying on top of it and hundreds and hundreds of bones laying across the slope. Copyright 2018 Albuquerque Journal Recent snow and rain have been a blessing for a parched state with a puny snowpack, but it might be too little, too late like feeding a cheeseburger to a starving man. The precipitation helped everywhere, in some places more than others, said Royce Fontenot, senior hydrologist with the Albuquerque office of the National Weather Service. But people should not be lulled into thinking we had a good rain so the drought is over. Its like giving a cheeseburger to someone who is malnourished. It may fill the belly, give a little burst of energy. But how much is it going to help in the long run? The latest New Mexico drought map, released on Thursday, shows that about 80 percent of the state is in severe drought and more than 5 percent, mostly in the north-central and extreme northwest, is in extreme drought. Recent snow has helped make a dismal snowpack situation a little better. And theres a chance for more snow and rain over the next week. Over the next seven days, well see a more active pattern, Fontenot said. We have a system moving through this weekend, mainly in the northern mountains, and another system about the middle of next week. We are building some snowpack, but it is running too little too late. He said that since October, precipitation levels have been well below normal in the state, particularly in the northern mountains and on the eastern plains. And we are running out of time, Fontenot said. Thats the challenge as we look ahead. How much more snow will we get before we stop getting snow? He said the snow season begins to peak in the Gila and Sacramento mountains down south in a couple of weeks and in the northern mountains from late March into the middle of April. Then things start warming up, and we get our melt-off. In response to the exceptionally dry winter, the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District started diverting water for irrigation in Socorro and Valencia counties this week, 10 days earlier than the normal beginning date of March 1. And the state office of the U.S. Department of Agricultures Farm Services Agency is preparing to make available emergency funds to help ranchers buy forage for their livestock if that becomes necessary. Anthony Chavez, state agricultural program specialist with the Farm Services Agency, said the Department of Agricultures Livestock Forage Program makes funds available to help ranchers buy feed for their cattle once a county has been in severe drought for eight consecutive weeks. For some northern counties, he said, that would occur in the third week of March if severe drought conditions persist. We are looking at that because the drought is going to affect a lot of ranchers, Chavez said. They have to make decisions based on what forage they have on the ground, and they may look at reducing herds if there is not enough moisture in the ground to grow grass. All we are doing is trying to supplement them. The MRGCD provides water for 70,000 acres of cropland in the Middle Rio Grande Valley. David Gensler, the conservancy districts water operations manager, said that often irrigators dont need the water until mid-April, but its different this year. We are turning up the wick to deliver water in early March, he said. Gensler said farmers in Socorro County may already be taking deliveries of water and the district will start diverting water for the Albuquerque District on March 1 and the Cochiti District a week later. Last year, the Elephant Butte Irrigation District, which provides water for farmers in southern New Mexico, delivered 24 acre-inches of water to its irrigators. An acre-inch is the amount of water necessary to cover an acre to the depth of 1 inch. Twenty-four acre inches was the most water the district had delivered in at least eight years. But this year, it likely will not make half of that. Right now, our allotment is 8 inches, said Phil King, New Mexico State University civil engineering professor and water adviser to the Elephant Butte Irrigation District. We might get to 10, but I dont think we will get to 12. WASHINGTON The Trump administration is considering an offer from Republican mega-donor Sheldon Adelson to pay for at least part of a new U.S. embassy in Jerusalem, four U.S. officials told The Associated Press. Lawyers at the State Department are looking into the legality of accepting private donations to cover some or all of the embassy costs, the officials said. The discussions are occurring as the administration plans a ribbon-cutting for a scaled-down, temporary embassy that will open in May more than a year ahead of schedule. In one possible scenario, the administration would solicit contributions not only from Adelson but potentially from other donors in the evangelical Christian and American Jewish communities, too. One official said Adelson, a Las Vegas casino magnate and staunch Israel supporter, had offered to pay the difference between the total cost expected to run into the hundreds of millions of dollars and what the administration is able to raise. Under any circumstance, letting private citizens cover the costs of an official government building would mark a significant departure from historical practice. In the Jerusalem case, it would add yet another layer of controversy to Trumps politically charged decision to move the embassy, given Adelsons longstanding affiliation with right-wing Israeli politics. The move of the embassy from Tel Aviv to the disputed holy city cleared a final bureaucratic hurdle this week when Secretary of State Rex Tillerson signed off on the security plan. In a letter sent to Congress, the State Department said the interim facilitys inauguration will coincide with the 70th anniversary of Israels independence on May 14. Its the right thing to do, Trump said Friday of the embassy relocation. Adelsons unconventional offer, made around the time Trump announced in December that the embassy would move, would address the presidents stated distaste for shelling out eye-popping sums for overseas diplomatic facilities. Although Trump has promoted the Jerusalem move as fulfilling a key campaign promise, he also was outspoken last month in blasting the $1 billion price tag for a new embassy in London. How quickly to move the embassy has been a source of intense debate within Trumps administration, said the officials, who werent authorized to discuss the issue publicly and demanded anonymity. Tillerson, who opposed moving the embassy in the first place, advocated a go-slow approach and said it could take years. But Ambassador David Friedman, who lobbied Trump to recognize Jerusalem as Israels capital, has pushed to move it sooner. To enable a May opening, the administration settled on a phased approach to building out the embassy at an existing U.S. facility in Jerusalems Arnona neighborhood that currently handles consular affairs like passports and visas. Initially, the U.S. will merely retrofit a small suite of offices there to accommodate Friedman and one or two top aides. The rest of the staff will remain at first in Americas current facility in Tel Aviv. The Arnona facility will be expanded accommodate a regular contingent of embassy personnel by the end of 2019, and ultimately is likely to spill into an adjacent U.S.-controlled property that currently houses a home for senior citizens, officials said. The State Department said a separate search was starting in parallel to eventually plan and build a permanent embassy. Israels government hailed the impending move, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu saying on Twitter that it would turn Israels anniversary into an even greater national celebration. But Palestinian chief negotiator Saeb Erekat said the move showed Trump was determined to destroy prospects for a two-state solution and provoke the feelings of the Palestinian people. Retrofitting just a few offices can be accomplished at minimal cost. But expanding to allow the bulk of Americas diplomatic staff in Israel to work out of Jerusalem would easily cost more than $500 million dollars, officials familiar with the process said. Particularly pricey are the strict security requirements for embassies that are written into U.S. law. Its unclear how much of the cost Adelson might be willing to cover. The White House declined to comment. An Adelson spokesman didnt respond to multiple requests for comment. The State Department said it had nothing to announce and no confirmation or details about this hypothetical proposal. Undersecretary of State Steve Goldstein added that there had been no formal talks with private citizens about funding. Its not clear if there is any precedent, nor whether government lawyers would give the green light to accept Adelsons or anyone elses donations. Kathy Bethany, the former cost management director for the State Departments Bureau of Overseas Building Operations, said she couldnt recall the U.S. government ever accepting donations to build embassies during her tenure, which ended in 2014. I dont know how well that would work, Bethany said. Would we be beholden to putting their name on the building? Ive never heard of that. There are several ways, in theory, that it could work. Citizens could cut a general check to the U.S. Treasury and unofficially earmark their dollars as being intended to offset the embassys cost. The State Departments Foreign Affairs Manual also lays out a formal process for accepting gifts, including real estate, requiring a rigorous review to ensure the gift would not give the appearance of a conflict of interest. Adelson, who donated $5 million to Trumps inaugural committee, is one of the Republican Partys biggest donors and a major Netanyahu supporter. Adelson also finances Israel Hayom, a pro-Netanyahu newspaper that is distributed free throughout Israel. Allowing donations from Adelson or others would come with significant political risk for Trump. The president already faces major criticism from Palestinians and others who say his decision to move the embassy to Jerusalem also claimed by the Palestinians for the capital of their future state tipped the scales unfairly in Israels favor. Mort Klein, president of the pro-Israel group Zionist Organization of America and a close associate of Adelson, said accepting donations would be ill-advised. Klein said he knew Adelson was deeply interested in seeing the embassy relocate to Jerusalem but didnt know whether the casino mogul had offered to help pay for it himself. This is a government project. Its a government-run embassy, Klein said. I dont want people to be able to say it was Jewish money. ___ Associated Press writers Ian Deitch in Jerusalem and Darlene Superville in Washington contributed to this report. ___ Reach Josh Lederman on Twitter at http://twitter.com/joshledermanAP SILVER CITY A Facebook threat about a school shooting going to happen at a school named SHS prompted administrators of the Silver Consolidated Schools to contact authorities to investigate the matter and also issue a warning through the School Messenger System. According to Silver Schools Superintendent Audie Brown, an administrator saw the mass posting on Facebook. They immediately contacted the Silver City Police Department and then sent out the message which read, SHS families. This morning we received a picture from a Facebook advising parents not to send their kids to SHS as there will be a shooting. Upon investigating further the poster did not specify which SHS nor is this person from Silver or New Mexico. It looks to have been sent referencing any school with initials SHS. Administration and security will be roaming more so than usual. Silver City Police Department has been notified and you should see them around as well. Even though this may be a hoax, we have to take every precaution to keep our students and staff as safe as possible. If you feel that it is unsafe for your students to be at school today, please call the office and let them know that you will be keeping them home. Silver City Police Chief Ed Reynolds said that upon further investigation by the bureau, the threat has been determined to have originated in Springfield, Ohio. The information officer for the Springfield Police Department stated that the threat is localized to the Springfield, Ohio, area and is being investigated by their department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Reynolds said. Based on the information, there is no viable threat to schools in the Silver City area as a result of the information circulated on social media. Brown said he is in the finishing stages of crafting a letter to the media on what the Silver Consolidated Schools has been doing in the wake of school shootings around the U.S. and in New Mexico. A story updating that will follow soon. 2018 the Silver City Sun-News (Silver City, N.M.) Visit the Silver City Sun-News (Silver City, N.M.) at www.scsun-news.com Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC. _____ ALAMOGORDO A student who made a verbal comment perceived as a threat to start a shooting at Alamogordo High School has been taken into police custody. On Thursday afternoon, Alamogordo Public Schools released a statement that theyd received information of a possible shooting threat at the high school around 10:28 a.m. APS officials said APS administrators and the Alamogordo Police Department immediately began an investigation. With the Alamogordo High student being referred to the Juvenile Probation Office, it marks the fourth arrest of a New Mexico teen for making threats to a school over a two day period. The Las Cruces Sun-News reported that Las Cruces police charged 18-year-old Ernest Padilla for one count of unlawful carrying a deadly weapon on school premises. A San Juan County teenager made a bomb threat Wednesday and a 16-year-old Belen boy threatened to carry out a school shooting Thursday, the Associated Press reported. Alamogordo Deputy Police Chief Roger Schoolcraft said the male student made a verbal comment to another student then the conversation was passed through students via text messages before it was handed over to APS officials. Schoolcraft said at that time, the high schools resource officer located the student and took him into custody. At no point in time was the school put on shelter in place. The disciplinary issues will be taken care of through the schools and well probably be referring him to the JPO (Juvenile Probation Office) for Obstruction of the Educational Process, he said. We want to assure the public this was a single, isolated incident thats being handled by both the public schools and the police department. The young man is being taken care of now. For the time being, extra police officers are on site at Alamogordo High School as a precautionary measure. School activity will continue as normal. According to a Ruidoso News article, a threat posted on Snapchat late Wednesday prompted Ruidoso School Superintendent George Bickert to request beefed up security from Ruidoso police at their high school and middle School Thursday and Friday. 2018 the Alamogordo Daily News (Alamogordo, N.M.) Visit the Alamogordo Daily News (Alamogordo, N.M.) at www.alamogordonews.com Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC. _____ ALAMOGORDO Local students spoke to Scott Tingle, an astronaut aboard the International Space Station, in a 20-minute Earth-to-space call during a monumental event with NASA Wednesday morning. The call, also referred to as a downlink, was hosted as part of NASAs Year of Education on Station program, which is designed to enhance student learning, performance and interest in the STEM careers. This year, NASA selected the New Mexico Museum of Space History, Alamogordo Public Schools and the New Mexico School for the Blind and Visually Impaired to host one of 14 downlink events across the nation. The local event was monumental as it was the first time NASA selected a K-12 school in New Mexico to host a downlink. Students from Alamogordo High School, Academy Del Sol, Chaparral Middle School, Mountain View Middle School, Holloman Middle School and the New Mexico School for the Blind and Visually Impaired formed six teams. Each team sent one spokesperson to ask Tingle one question during the downlink. A student from Chaparral Middle School asked if there are time zones in space. Tingle responded that the International Space Station observes Greenwich Mean Time, but astronauts set up world clocks so they can see what time zone their loved ones are in. A Mountain View Middle School student asked Tingle to describe what an orbital sunrise looks like. An orbital sunrise is beautiful, Tingle said. Picture pure black, youre looking at a sky full of stars and you start seeing an arch cut through those stars. You can barely make out the Earths curvature and then all of sudden you get a little bit of a blue ring. You look really close and realize its the thin atmosphere that covers our Earth starting to turn blue as the Suns starting to come up behind the Earth. As it proceeds, the blue ring gets thicker and thicker and then you can start seeing more of the Earth and you see the sun come up. When you look down at the Earth, youre still over dark Earth theres still a lot of Earth dark because its night, but when you look up the Space Station is totally in the daylight because its at a higher altitude. Its an amazing thing. An Academy Del Sol student inquired about the kinds of stress the astronauts deal with in space. Theres all kinds of stress going on, Tingle said. Theres schedule stress primarily because were always trying to get a lot of work done and keep everybody happy. Some things might be going on at home, at work and all the personal things we experience on Earth. The way we deal with it is we have our crew mates and were like a family, weve been training together for a long time, we like each other, we make fun of each other and we laugh theres never somebody we cant talk to. As part of NASAs educational requirement, each of the six teams designed, built, tested and presented a small payload based around the effect of zero gravity on fluids during the downlink event. Following the downlink, students were treated to a presentation from John Danny Olivas, an El Paso native who was selected by NASA to be an astronaut and fly aboard STS-117 Atlantis in 2007 and STS-128 Discovery in 2009. Olivas said his favorite part of the downlink was the level of enthusiasm he saw in Alamogordos students. Its so refreshing to hear such really great questions that the students of Alamogordo came up with, Olivas said. To see them involved in the payloads that they developed with the New Mexico Museum of Space History, the general level of excitement and the respect I was very impressed with the students here in Alamogordo. Science wasnt the only thing celebrated during Wednesdays downlink. The event brought the Alamogordo Public Schools and the New Mexico School for the Blind and Visually Impaired (NMSBVI) together and it didnt go unnoticed by both districts. To be able to be involved in a project like this and have our students exposed to a larger universe, understanding the world is much larger than beyond their nose and to explore science in a way they didnt think was possible its been huge for us, said NMSBVI science teacher Jeff Killebrew. Our students learned how to do experimentation, how to revise experiments and how to contribute to the community and world as a whole. Alamogordo Public Schools Superintendent Adrianne Salas agreed having NMSBVI students involved in the downlink was beneficial to everyone. We should be doing more of that, Salas said. A lot of the times we get so busy within the realm of our schools that we forget other schools in the community. I think including them was fantastic because it also enabled our kids to see theyre doing the same thing we are presenting, running the project and theyre going to analyze it just like we are. You can do what you put your heart to. Salas also gave a special thank you to the New Mexico Museum of Space History for gifting local students with the NASA downlink. We are very lucky to have them, Salas said. Unfortunately, we dont take advantage of (the museum) the way we need to take advantage of it. I dont mean just in education and the schools, I mean people here dont know whats up there. They really need to get out there and see whats up there because thats part of our legacy that weve got a museum that has everything about whats going on in space. 2018 the Alamogordo Daily News (Alamogordo, N.M.) Visit the Alamogordo Daily News (Alamogordo, N.M.) at www.alamogordonews.com Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC. _____ WASHINGTON Congress is reserving one of the nations greatest distinctions for the Rev. Billy Graham, selecting him to lie in honor in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda next Wednesday and Thursday. Americas most famous evangelist died Wednesday at his home in North Carolina at age 99. The Rotunda has long been considered the most suitable place for the nation to pay final tribute to its most eminent citizens. Among those who have lain in state or in honor in the Rotunda are 12 former presidents, including Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy, former military commanders Douglas MacArthur, George Dewey and John Pershing, and civil rights icon Rosa Parks. A look at some of the history and names behind the honor. THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN LYING IN STATE AND LYING IN HONOR The Senate Historical Office explains that there are no hard and fast rules on this, but lying in state ceremonies are usually reserved for deceased presidents and other elected officials. Lying in honor has become the phrase used in recent years to describe ceremonies for those who didnt serve in elected office. Graham is just the fourth to receive that designation. The others are two former U.S. Capitol Police officers who died in the line of duty in 1998 and Parks in 2005. The honor is essentially the same regardless of the language used, but lying in state ceremonies are accompanied by full military honors, while lying in honor ceremonies may only have a Capitol Police detail. ___ WHO DECIDES WHICH AMERICANS RECEIVE THE HONOR Either Congress can pass a resolution or congressional leadership can give the approval after consulting with survivors. In Grahams case, Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell announced the ceremony after conferring with the Rev. Franklin Graham. With your approval, we will move forward with these arrangements, so that Americans have this opportunity to pay their respects to the Rev. Graham before he is laid to rest, they said in a letter to Franklin Graham. The House also agreed to a resolution on Friday providing for Graham to lie in honor in the Rotunda, sending it to the Senate for approval. ___ WHY BILLY GRAHAM GETS THE HONOR Ryan explained in his announcement that Graham forever changed the course of the worlds spiritual health. He served as an adviser to 12 consecutive U.S. presidents and reached millions through radio, television and film. Graham is also greatly admired by many of the millions of evangelical Christians who associate themselves with conservative policies and the Republican Party. I bet those lines are going to be long and beautiful, because he deserves it, President Donald Trump said Friday at a gathering of conservative activists. ___ CEREMONIAL TIES TO LINCOLN A platform hastily constructed to support the casket of Abraham Lincoln while the presidents body lay in state has been preserved and is used to hold the coffins of all those who lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda. When not in use, the platform, or catafalque, is kept in a specially constructed display area in the Capitol Visitor Center. The catafalque is a simple base of rough pine boards nailed together and covered with black cloth. ___ OTHERS WHO HAVE LAIN IN STATE IN THE ROTUNDA The list maintained by the Architect of the Capitol includes several members of Congress, beginning with Henry Clay of Kentucky in 1852 and, most recently, Sen. Daniel Inouye of Hawaii in 2012. The non-elected officials who have lain in state include former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and Washington, D.C., planner Pierre LEnfant. Lawmakers have also chosen to perpetuate the memory of service members who gave their lives in war by honoring unknown soldiers from World War I, World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War. LOS ALAMOS Antonio Tony Redondo is taking over as head of Los Alamos National Laboratorys tech transfer division, the Richard P. Feynman Center for Innovation. Redondo, who has been at Los Alamos for 35 years, is the former Theoretical Division leader and currently a senior scientist in the Theory, Simulation and Computation Directorate. Named after the famous Manhattan Project physicist, the Feynman Center helps to transition science and technology created at the Laboratory to the private sector. Redondo will replace David Pesiri, who has been director of the Feynman Center since 2011. Pesiri will move into the Directors Office. While classes continue today at Santa Fe High School, police are at the school investigating a possible threat that originated on social media, a Santa Fe Public Schools spokesman said. We didnt close the school because in working with the police department we felt we could investigate a possible threat without disrupting school, SFPS spokesman Jeff Gephart said Friday morning. A Santa Fe Police Department spokesman said it appears the possible threat originated from a Snapchat post by a student in Springfield, though he wasnt clear on where Springfield was located. He said someone modified that post to appear as though it was directed at Santa Fe High School. On Wednesday, police in Springfield, Ore., arrested a 15-year-old student after he sent a Snapchat message that read I am the shooter! AL.com, a website run by Alabama Media Group, is reporting today about a Facebook threat determined to be a hoax that originated from Springfield, Ohio. We have not been able to discern a viable threat at Santa Fe High School, SFPD spokesman Greg Gurule said. Gurule said police were looking for the person responsible for relaying the original Snapchat post. He said that person could be charged with interference with an education system. He added that police were maintaining a presence at the school as a precaution. The school districts Gephart said parents of SFHS students were notified of the situation by robocall, and that a few parents came picked up their children at the school after the notification, but classes are going on as usual. Were doing everything we can to make sure parents are informed and that were just being vigilant about the safety of students, he said. The robocall sent to SFHS parents Friday morning said a threat possibly directed at Santa Fe High was discovered on social media and police had been notified. While we work to limit disruptions due to threats like this, there will be an increased police presence at Santa Fe High while we investigate the validity of the threat, as well as to keep our students and staff safe, the message said. We will send out further robo calls with updates and we will post updates to our website at sfps.info. WASHINGTON A former senior adviser to President Donald Trumps election campaign pleaded guilty Friday to federal conspiracy and false-statements charges, switching from defendant to cooperating witness in the special counsels probe of Trumps campaign and Russias election interference. The plea by Rick Gates revealed that he will help special counsel Robert Muellers investigation in any and all matters as prosecutors continue to probe the 2016 campaign, Russian meddling and Gates longtime business associate, one-time Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort. With his cooperation, Gates gives Mueller a witness willing to provide information on Manafort about his finances and political consulting work in Ukraine, and also someone who had access at the highest levels of Trumps 2016 presidential campaign. Gates, 45, of Richmond, Virginia, made the plea at the federal courthouse in Washington. He stood somberly beside his attorney and did not speak during his hearing except to answer routine questions from the judge about whether he understood the rights he was giving up. He admitted to charges accusing him of conspiring against the U.S. government related to fraud and unregistered foreign lobbying as well as lying to federal authorities in a recent interview. Under the terms of the plea, he is estimated to face between 57 and 71 months behind bars and a possible fine ranging from $20,000 to $200,000. Prosecutors may seek a shortened sentence depending on his cooperation. The plea came a day after a federal grand jury in Virginia returned a 32-count indictment against Gates and Manafort, Trumps former campaign chairman, accusing them of tax evasion and bank fraud. Gates is the fifth defendant to plead guilty in Muellers investigation. The indictment in Virginia was the second round of charges against Gates and Manafort, who were initially charged last October with unregistered lobbying and conspiring to launder millions of dollars they earned while working on behalf of a pro-Russian Ukrainian political party. Manafort continues to maintain his innocence. I had hoped and expected my business colleague would have had the strength to continue the battle to prove our innocence. For reasons yet to surface he chose to do otherwise, Manafort said Friday. This does not alter my commitment to defend myself against the untrue piled-up charges contained in the indictments against me. In court filings over the past few months, Gates gradually began to show the strain the case was placing on him and his family. He frequently pleaded with U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson for leniency in his house arrest to let him attend sporting events with his four children. Even on Friday, ahead of his plea, Gates had asked the judge to let him take his children to Boston for spring break so they could learn about American history in general, and the Revolutionary War in particular. Gates plea comes on the heels of the stunning indictment last week that laid out a broad operation of election meddling by Russia, which began in 2014, and employed fake social media accounts and on-the-ground politicking to promote Trumps campaign, disparage Hillary Clinton and sow division and discord widely among the U.S. electorate. The charges to which Gates is pleading guilty dont involve any conduct connected to the Trump campaign. They largely relate to a conspiracy of unregistered lobbying, money laundering and fraud laid out in his indictments. But his plea does newly reveal that Gates spoke with the FBI earlier this month and lied during the interview. That same day, his attorneys filed a motion to withdraw from representing him for irreconcilable difference. Gates served on the Trump campaign at the same time that Manafort, Donald Trump Jr. and Jared Kushner met with a team of Russians in Trump Tower in June 2016. He was also involved in the campaign when then-Sen. Jeff Sessions held a pair of undisclosed meetings with Russian ambassador to the U.S. Sergey Kislyak. For a few months in 2016, Gates was indispensable to Trump, leading the ground effort to help Trump win the Republican nomination and flying from state to state to secure Republican delegates in a scramble that lasted all the way until the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. But his power and influence waned once Trump fired Manafort in August 2016 after The Associated Press disclosed how Gates and Manafort covertly directed a Washington lobbying campaign on behalf of Ukrainian interests. Gates survived his mentors ouster, serving as the campaigns liaison to the Republican National Committee and later working on Trumps inaugural committee. Gates also worked briefly with the outside political groups supporting Trumps agenda, America First Policies and America First Action, but was pushed out of that job last year. When he was indicted last October, Gates was working for Tom Barrack, a close friend of Trump. Fridays court papers accuse Gates of lying to federal agents about a March 19, 2013, meeting involving Manafort, a lobbyist and a member of Congress. Gates said the meeting did not include discussion of Ukraine, when in fact prosecutors say it did. The charges dont name the lobbyist or the lawmaker but filings with the Justice Department show Manafort and Vin Weber of Mercury Public Affairs met with Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., on that date as part of a lobbying campaign on behalf of Ukrainian interests. Also Friday, Muellers team unsealed a new indictment solely against Manafort that included an allegation that he, with Gates assistance, secretly paid former European politicians to lobby on behalf of Ukraine. The indictment accuses Manafort of paying the former politicians, informally known as the Hapsburg group, to appear to be independent analysts when in fact they were paid lobbyists. Some of the covert lobbying took place in the U.S. The indictment says the group was managed by a former European chancellor. Court papers accuse Manafort of using offshore accounts to pay the group more than 2 million euros. ___ Associated Press writer Jeff Horwitz contributed. ___ Read Gates plea agreement: http://apne.ws/P8ZpD6h FARMINGTON, N.M. Farmington police is increasing its presence in the citys public schools in the wake of last weeks mass shooting at a Florida school. Farmington Municipal School District officials announced Friday that uniformed officers and even police Chief Steve Hebbe will make unannounced visits to schools. Officers will walk through the campus and engage with students and faculty. Police spokeswoman Georgette Allen says the public shouldnt be alarmed if they see several patrol vehicles outside a school. The heightened police presence is in addition to already employed school resource officers. The plan will last for at least the rest of the school year. Allen says the idea stemmed from conversations police and district officials had about how to collaborate in light of recent talk about school shootings. In an announcement that will delight Mumbaikars, Ridlr-Indias first local transit ticketing and information app, has made it even easier for users in the city to plan their travel on the Reliance Mumbai Metro. Making their daily commute simpler, users can download Ridlr buy Single Journey and Return Journey tokens, as well Trip Passes and Stored Value Passes for the Mumbai Metro, directly on the mobile application itself without wasting any time in the queues. In addition, they can also recharge their Mumbai Metro smart card with just a few simple steps on the Ridlr app. All metro travelers just need to select their origin and end destinations, pay for the travel using Amazon Pay and then scan the QR code at the entry and exit gates. Thus, travel entire journey at ones own will without any metro executives involvement at the counters. As a part of an exclusive limited period offer, users can earn up to INR 100 worth of cashback on each purchase of a Stored Value Pass with their Amazon Pay balance, and up to INR 150 when they purchase a Trip Pass for the Mumbai Metro. But thats not all. Ridlr users buying a Single Journey or Return Journey token can also earn cashback worth up to INR 40 or INR 80 respectively. This offer will be live on the Ridlr mobile application from February 6 to 28, 2018. In addition, the total cashbacks offered during the offer period will be in the form of both Amazon Pay balance, as well as Ridlr points, thereby ensuring unmatched value to customers with each transaction on the app. Commenting on the announcement, Brijraj Vaghani, Co-founder & CEO, Ridlr, said, Our aim through this partnership is to help Mumbaikars with a highly convenient, seamless, and value-driven intra-city travel experience. With this special offer, users will not only be able to enjoy an easy-to-use and secure digital payment experience but will also be rewarded with attractive cashbacks for transactions conducted on the Ridlr app with their Amazon Pay balance. We are sure that this offer will create additional value for existing, as well as new users of Ridlr. With Ridlr being the foremost public transport app in India and Amazon Pay being globally renowned for its superlative standards of payment service, the move marks a coming together of two category leaders to assure a world-class experience to customers. Thus, by tying up with the Reliance Mumbai Metro for comprehensive digital ticketing assistance, Ridlr aims to reach out to the maximum number of intra-city travelers in Mumbai, and further expand its existing base of 1.5 million users. Ridlr users can also make digital payments using their wallets to buy tickets and passes of various transport options in the city- BEST,NMMT and MBMT buses. In addition to offering mobile app-based ticketing services, Ridlr is the first company in the country to provide real-time traffic information for Indian cities using homegrown technology. By informing commuters exactly when the next bus, train, or metro will arrive, Ridlr helps them plan their journey with ease, even providing accurate information on multiple modes of transport for a single trip. Users can look up real-time traffic conditions, receive updates on possible factors likely to affect their commute, search for schedules of all public transportation in the city, and plan their trip based on the distance, travel time, and modes all in a single search. To Read More Click Here. It is a call to the for top 50 advertising agencies in the country. Here is your chance to participate in an initiative The Gutenberg Galaxy, by India Chapter of International Advertising Association (IAA-India Chapter) supported by The Free Press Journal (FPJ). This book will showcase case studies of selected best print advertisements which was created in the period January 1, 2016- December 31, 2017. The Gutenberg Galaxy is a collectors item which will treasure case studies of the best print advertisements and will be the first of its kind initiative. By keeping the entry free, IAA-India Chapter-FPJ wants to welcome large number of case studies. There is no limit to entries from the agencies. For this initiative, Sandeep Singh will be the Editor. The criteria for the entries are : the case study should not exceed 1,000 words and nor have more than six visuals and the entry should be sent along with a NOC from the client/advertiser. The entry should be sent to Sandeep Singh. The last date for submission of the case study is March 15, 2018. The decision on what goes into this collection lies completely with the Editor. The selection process will also include an interview with the authors of the selected entries. Only after careful evaluation, the potential case study will make it to The Gutenberg Galaxy. The book will be available from April 2018. Post the launch of the book, it will be promoted aggressively through news channels and social media. Ramesh Narayan President IAA (India Chapter) says "The IAA is committed to contribute positively to every segment of its all-encompassing constituency. In a country like ours where print readership is robust, it is important to chronicle the best advertising that appears in this medium not from a creative lens, but in the form of a case study. I am confident the result will be an invaluable resource material that will become a collector's item." Abhishek Karnani, Director, Free Press Journal says, "This initiative is about keeping a record of best print advertisements that were printed last year. By supporting this initiative, Free Press Journal, one of the oldest publications of India, is trying to showcase the contribution of the print adverts. By including case study in the collection, we are helping the reader to understand the strategic use of print media. This collection would act as a reference book for future generation. Sandeep Singh says, "No advertising campaign is ever complete without print advertisement. Print advertisement has lot more facets than any other form of advertising. I congratulate International Advertisers Association and Free Press Journal for publishing 'The Gutenberg Galaxy - a book on case studies in print advertisements. It will not only document but also preserve the best of print campaign in the form of case study for future generations. I am delighted to be associated with this initiative as an editor. To Read More Visit Here. MY FM has always believed in making their audiences happy by making them listen to good music. Taking forward this thought, My FM along with the Chandigarh Traffic police initiated a drive called Oye Honk Mat Yaara under which MY FM RJs ; RJ Meenakshi , RJ Geet, RJ Manav, RJ Gagan & RJ Jassi drove the campaign for a week in the city asking people not to blow horn. MY FM RJs along with Chandigarh traffic police went on Schools, Colleges, Traffic signals and Hospitals in order to inspire people not to blow horn with one compliance i.e to make Chandigarh a Honk Free city. 5 RJs were on ground doing their shows and links from various crossing points educating the citizens of the city not to honk. The campaign was reinforced with the help of ace Bollywood Director ,Mr Imtiaz Ali & wonderful Actor & Music Director Piyush Mishra who imbibed by the thought of not honking to the people of the city. Unlike the entire country who were busy celebrating Valentines Day with their loved ones, MY FM celebrated Valentines Day in a unique style by RJ Meenakshi giving away roses to people of the city in her visit to Sector 15 Chandigarh ,PGI Hospital & Punjab University asking people not to blow horn. Commenting on the initiative, Mr. Rahul Namjoshi, Business Head, MY FM said, Music is pleasing whereas horn is a disruption to the ears. And the very thought of not having a disruption for our listeners while listening to music made us do this campaign. We are overwhelmed at receiving so much support from the people of the city and happy to have been able to succeed this campaign with zest and passion. The Chandigarh Traffic police praised and supported the entire drive. To Read More Visit Here. Customer Logins Obtain the data you need to make the most informed decisions by accessing our extensive portfolio of information, analytics, and expertise. Sign in to the product or service center of your choice. Would you like to receive breaking news notifications from The Post and Courier? Sign up to receive news and updates from this site directly to your desktop. Breaking News Columbia Breaking News Greenville Breaking News Myrtle Beach Breaking News Aiken Breaking News N Augusta Breaking News Click on the bell icon to manage your notifications at any time. Success! Please click the 'Allow' button in the 'Show Notifcations' alert in your browser if one is available. Thank you for signing up! Please enable notifications in your browser and reload the page. Romania Defense Minister Mihai Fifor held a press conference on February 20 in which he laid out some of the major capitalization projects unfolding in the National Defense Ministry. Among the projects, he mentioned the procurement of possibly up to 36 Lockheed-Martin F-16s. A Romanian Air Force F-16A (Picture source: Romanian Air Force) With Romania's quest to reconstitute a submarine capability via a three-vessel order already presented earlier, the Defense Minister took the opportunity this time to outline the largest goal looming for the Romanian Air Force, which concerns expanding the combat aircraft fleet. Currently Romania's Air Force operates a mix of 26 aging, Soviet-legacy MiG-21 Lancers and 12 second-hand F-16s purchased for US$181 million under a government-to-government agreement with Portugal in October 2013. The first six aircraft were delivered in late September 2016, followed by three more in December. The last three aircraft were delivered in October 2017. These F-16s were put through a revitalization and upgrade program with Lockheed Martin prior to their transfer to Romania. The US company had also been awarded a $24 million contract to provide Romanian Air Force with F-16A/B Block 15 training system, logistics support and software development, the US Department of Defense had announced on April 24, 2017. The contract would be performed at Orlando, Florida, and is expected to be complete by April 20, 2021. This contract is 100 percent foreign military sales to Romania. The MiG-21s, meanwhile, are in the final year or two of their service lives and Romania is eager to phase them out of service. But for now, their retirement would leave the Air Force woefully short of capacity. Therefore, a supplement to the F-16 stock is required. Now defense planners are ready to begin moving forward on another acquisition of F-16s to build upon the initial batch of 12. The first step involves a small procurement of four additional F-16s. If this goes as planned, Romania will then move on to a much larger purchase of 36 more units. This would ultimately give the Air Force a combat backbone of 56 of the fourth-generation swing fighters. The 36-unit order reflects a growing ambition on the part of the Defense Ministry to build up fighter capacity, as just a year ago the stated medium-term goal of the ministry was for a 20-unit order. The current fleet of F-16A/Bs is operated from Fetesti AFB by the 53rd Fighter Squadron. In the shantytown of Stabl Antar, south of Cairo, more than 1,000 poor families live in shaky, dilapidated wooden shelters on streets that are flooded from time to time with sewage. The hamlet, huddled at the base of a mountain, is also the home of Stabl Antar Dream School. The three-story elementary school offers both normal school and vocational training, teaching the towns children how to make carpets and pottery after school hours in an effort to help them find income-generating opportunities. Its motto is Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime. Amira Hamada, the schools director, told Al-Monitor, The school is the only one in the area and was created through the efforts of the Sohbat al-Khair charity association to address the large number of children dropping out. The closest school is 10 kilometers [6.2 miles] from the town. Hamada continued, The ministry did not build any schools in the area and does not grant construction permits for schools, saying there are no funds for the teachers salaries and textbooks. Stabl Antar Dream opens its doors every weekday from 8 a.m. until 5 p.m. Divided into two classes, the students spend half of their day on either academics or vocational programs and then switch for the rest of the afternoon. Hamada said the school serves from 75 to 100 students at a time. Their ages run from 6 to 19, as some of them started their studies late or are dropouts who returned to the appropriate class after assessment tests. What started out as informal instruction and skill-sharing became a school in 2006, said Hamada. Secondary schools are not available in the area and Stabl Antar Dream lacks the funds and staff to open a high school. The Ministry of Education provided only five teachers, and the school hired nine instructors and six educational supervisors who are paid a pittance. Magida Nasr, a member of parliaments Education Committee, told Al-Monitor in a phone interview that there are two reasons for the lack of school funding in poor areas. The first reason is a lack of education allocations within the budget. These allocations are growing smaller each year. In fact, the education allocations for 2017-2018 were set at 130 billion Egyptian pounds [$7.3 billion], but the amount that was actually disbursed was only 80 billion Egyptian pounds [$4.5 billion]. Secondly, one ought to mention the complicated and slow government procedures. In 2017, 30,000 classrooms were supposed to be built throughout Egypt. However, we have already started the year 2018 and not one classroom has been built yet because of the rampant bureaucracy in the governments institutions, Nasr said. According to Hamada, the school fees amount to between 900-1,000 Egyptian pounds ($50-$57), which include all the necessary books and materials as well as the uniforms, which are handmade by students themselves in the schools workshops. Hamada added that the school also owns all the machines and equipment needed for the vocational training, including pottery wheels, sewing machines, molds and other materials funded by charities and businessmen. Ahmad Hassan, who teaches ceramic art, told Al-Monitor, The students made wonderful pieces and participated in different exhibitions, the latest being held in January, and were able to sell some of their products. Osti Mohammed is one the schools graduates. Today, he is teaching carpet-making. I was among the first students to enroll in the Stabl Antar Dream School. Everything I learned here has come in handy later in my life. Today, I am able to support myself and my family. I bought three carpet sewing machines and I work at the school as well, Mohammed told Al-Monitor. We sell our products to a well-known factory, where we also buy new raw materials and tools, he said. The teachers also offer moral support to their students, who live in abject poverty in a town deprived of basic civil services. People are also bitten by snakes and scorpions or die in rock falls on rainy days, according to Shaymaa Mohammed, a member of the Sohbat al-Khair charity, which contributed to the building of the school. Since 2008, the state has been threatening to evacuate the shantytown of Stabl Antar to the dismay of the townspeople, who cannot afford to move to better areas. In 2017, Mohammad Zayn Al-Abidin, the head of the Old Cairo district, issued an order to gather the families living on the edge of the mountain in Stabl Antar for their transfer to different areas for their own safety. Abidin added that the slum area includes about 1,000 families living in dire conditions and dangerously dilapidated houses. He confirmed that he had completed the paperwork for 100 families to be moved to Asmarat district. However, the people of Stabl Antar dug in their heels and refused to move, calling for the development of the area and for better services where they live. The signing of a $15 billion deal allowing an Egyptian private sector firm to buy natural gas from Israel over the coming decade has sparked widespread controversy on social media despite garnering enthusiastic praise from officials in both countries. Under the deal hailed as "historic" by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu the Egyptian company Dolphinus Holdings would import around 64 billion cubic meters of gas over a 10-year period (starting at the end of next year) from Israeli drilling company Delek and its US partner Noble Energy, a move that Netanyahu said would strengthen Israel's security, economy and regional relations. Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has also lauded the deal as "a victory, saying it would "help transform Egypt into a regional energy hub." "We have scored a goal," Sisi told Egyptians in televised comments on Feb. 21. He was keen to indicate, however, that "the government was not directly involved in the gas import agreement. Sisi's enthusiasm has failed to rub off on a skeptical Egyptian public, as many Egyptians reacted to the news with shock and outrage. Activists took to social media to question the motives behind the agreement, asking why there was a need to import gas when the country had only a few weeks earlier inaugurated the gigantic Zohr offshore gas field. Petroleum Minister Tariq al-Mulla had recently pledged that the field, off Egypt's northern coast, would help the country achieve self-sufficiency in natural gas, ease the burden on the state budget and cut the imports bill." "I am deeply saddened to hear about the gas import deal from Israel. Aren't our people entitled to an explanation of why such a deal was concluded at a time when the official reports themselves indicate that Egypt is about to become self-sufficient in gas? Stop disrespecting the minds of Egyptians," tweeted Hassan Nafaa, a professor of economics and political science at Cairo University. The mammoth Zohr field, discovered by the Italian oil and gas multinational company Eni in August 2015, holds the largest reserves in the Mediterranean Sea, containing an estimated 30 trillion cubic feet of gas. Production at the field started in mid-December with an initial 350 million cubic feet of gas being pumped daily to a Port Said facility since. Mulla said that by June, production would increase by 1 million cubic feet, reaching full capacity of 2.7 billion cubic feet a day by the end of next year. Energy analysts expect production from the Zohr field to meet the bulk of local demand and restore Egypt as a gas supplier for the East Mediterranean region. They say the significant gas find signals a reversal of a trend started after the 2011 uprising, when Egypt had shifted from net exporter to net importer after multiple militant attacks had sabotaged the country's main pipeline in the Sinai Peninsula, disrupting gas shipments to Jordan and Israel. News of the multibillion-dollar gas import deal has dampened Egyptians' high ambitions. Disappointment and bewilderment have now replaced the optimism spurred by the opening of Zohr. "Just three weeks ago, we were celebrating the opening of the Zohr gas field and had rejoiced at the prospect of achieving energy self-sufficiency and now this, " Mohamed Badrawy, the head of the parliamentary bloc of the Egyptian National Movement, said in a telephone interview broadcast on the privately owned CBC Channel on Feb. 19. He expressed indignation that under a new law allowing private companies to import gas, the first deal would, in fact, be sealed with Israel, long considered by Egyptians to be "an enemy state. "Do we even know who our friends and who our enemies are anymore? At a time when Egyptians are struggling because of the ailing economy and the country is facing a foreign currency shortage, is it acceptable for Egypt to pay $15 billion to Israel?" he retorted. Badrawy added that the Egyptian parliament would demand an explanation from Mulla regarding the recent deal. In an earlier phone interview broadcast on the same channel, Mulla said, "The government has yet to approve the proposed deal." He added that achieving self-sufficiency in gas should not prevent Egypt from importing gas from other countries in the East Mediterranean area like Cyprus and Israel. "The imported gas may be used for local consumption or re-exported to Europe through our LNG facilities," he noted, cautioning that "all arbitration cases must be settled before Egypt can move forward to become a regional energy hub." Israel resorted to international arbitration after Egypt canceled a controversial 2005 contract under which it had supplied Israel with 40% of its natural gas. The deal, widely unpopular with Egyptians, was scrapped in 2012, halting gas supplies to Israel over what Egyptian officials said were "disputes over payments." Egyptians had opposed the deal largely because it had allowed Israel to buy the gas at below-market rates, resulting in multimillion-dollar losses for Egypt. The majority of Egyptians have for decades harbored animosity toward their northern neighbor, owing to widespread support for Palestinians in Egypt and a deep-rooted rejection of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories. In mid-2012, former President Hosni Mubarak, then-Oil Minister Sameh Fahmy and other businessmen involved in the 2005 deal faced prosecution on charges of corruption and squandering public funds over the 2005 20-year agreement, deemed "harmful to national interests" by the court that ruled in the case. They were convicted and handed down sentences of up to 15 years before being acquitted of the charges in February 2015. A Swiss Court has ordered Egypt to pay $2 billion in compensation to East Mediterranean Gas (EMG), the company that operated the pipeline that had delivered the gas to Israel under the now-defunct agreement. In recent days, another arbitrator the Cairo-based Regional Center for International Commercial Arbitration also decided that Egypt must pay EMG $1.033 billion plus interest to compensate for the company's losses. If and when the Egyptian authorities give the green light for the new gas import deal, Egypt would be turning the page on old disputes, thus ushering in a new phase in its relations with Israel. Analysts say the agreement will boost economic and diplomatic ties between Egypt and its northern neighbor, bringing them on par with security relations that analysts have described as currently being "at their best." The deal would also pave the way for other agreements that observers believe would "propel Egypt toward realizing its ambitions of becoming a regional energy production hub." Already there is talk of another import deal being finalized with Cyprus, the details of which have yet to be revealed. This second prospective deal would involve shipments from Cyprus' Aphrodite field which contains an estimated 4.5 trillion cubic feet of gas to Egypt's liquefied natural gas plants, according to Bloomberg. With the country's own vast gas reserves and the prospective shipments from Cyprus and Israel, Egypt's petroleum minister is confident that the country is well on its way to achieving gas self-sufficiency by the year's end and can expect "a surplus by next year." Thanks to the potential deals with Israel and Cyprus, the country's two liquefaction facilities which have remained idle since the uprising seven years ago will soon be up and running again, processing the imported gas for re-export to European markets. While it was only a few short years ago that Egypt faced its "worst energy crisis in decades," the dark memories of the 2012-2014 frequent power outages and severe shortages in gas supplies are now fading and may soon be entirely forgotten. Meanwhile, the Egyptian government faces the daunting task of convincing a wary public of the benefits of the new deals. CAIRO The problem with the public education system in Egypt is that it does not take into account the students skills and interests, Sally Osama told Al-Monitor. Osama is a mother of an 8-year-old who decided to try home schooling. While I was looking for a decent school for my son Mazen, I heard about home schooling but I was afraid of taking this step because I was busy at work. Eventually I found a good school for him, where he went for two years. At a certain point I was surprised by changes in his behavior. He had become lethargic and absent-minded all the time. One day I was shocked to see him draw a picture of himself dead and a knife dripping with blood. I also take courses at the faculty of kindergarten and I was surprised to learn that everything we are taught there is not in line with the schools education method. Eventually I decided to start home schooling. Osama has drawn up a petition for the recognition of home schooling in Egypt, since this alternative education system has yet to be recognized by the Egyptian Ministry of Education. She is among many Egyptian parents who chose an alternative educational approach for their children. However, no official statistics are available on how many students are being home-schooled. Osama said that home schooling focuses on the childs passions and preferences. The curricula are chosen from different countries and adapted to fit the children's personality and interests. She believes that alternative forms of education allow students to develop an independent personality as they have the freedom to choose the courses they will study during the day. In addition to courses taught at home, Mazen is also taking other classes outside the house such as acting classes and is learning French at the French Cultural Center. He is also learning photography, Osama said. She added that home schooling can incorporate flexible online platforms and programs that can be found both in English and Arabic, including Mesahat, Seven Crafts Community and Genius Kids Community, which help children develop their personal skills. Osama is currently in the process of collecting signatures of parents for the petition that is to be presented to Education Minister Tarek Shawki in a bid to recognize home schooling. Students who receive an education at home face challenges if they want to enroll in universities, public and private, later on. To prove that home schooling is as efficient as regular schools, Osama has called on the ministry to test the skills of home-schoolers by the end of each education stage under the supervision of education experts. I am confident that students who receive home education will outshine other students. Many countries recognize this alternative education system, including the United Arab Emirates and Libya, she noted. Osama, however, has yet to collect enough signatures for the petition. Many parents within the home-schooled community have been enrolling their children in state schools just for show, so their children can apply for university programs after they finish with the high school curricula. They fear that if they sign the petition the ministry would force their children to register in a regular school and hinder the university application process at a later stage. Blogger Taysir Harak shared some tips on his blog for home-schoolers who wish to acquire a degree from a public or private university. Harak proposes two options for would-be home-schoolers. First, they can nominally enroll in a school, but come to an agreement with the administration that they will not be attending classes. This will allow them to home-school, yet take state exams at the end of every semester and get credit for schooling. The second option involves registering in the so-called "flexible education" system after the fifth grade (the earliest students are allowed this). These students are required to then study state-sanctioned curricula and can later enroll in university. Abdel Rahman Bari, a member of the parliaments Education Committee with a doctorate in teaching methods and curricula from Beni Suef University, expressed his concerns about home schooling. He told Al-Monitor, Flexible home schooling does not develop the childs life skills namely social skills nor does it promote the sense of belonging to the homeland or to the school, unlike the states public education system. Bari believes that the school is not a place to study sciences and languages only, but also to develop ones social and life skills. He wonders how children could be educated in this way if they do not learn how to communicate with peers when being home-schooled. Ahmed Khairy, a spokesman for the Ministry of Education, told Al-Monitor that the ministry recognizes home schooling after the fifth grade, but that parents have to stick to the state curricula. He added that they are waiting for the petition to be presented to the ministry so it can be studied and the necessary actions taken. In the meantime, Osama and other parents will continue to push for alternative forms of education in light of their increasing frustration with Egypts public education system. Former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose contested re-election plunged Iran into its largest street protests since the 1979 revolution, has written an open letter addressed to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei calling for free elections. Ahmadinejad said the letter, published on his website Dolat-e Bahar on Feb. 21, was in response to a Feb. 18 speech by Khamenei in which the supreme leader discussed discontent among the public and shortcomings within government institutions and even welcomed criticism about himself. Ahmadinejad made three recommendations for reform in the country. The first began, Freedom and the exercise of self-determination is the fundamental right of people and one of the goals of the revolution, as directly stated in the constitution, and the Islamic system was set up to secure these rights. He continued, An immediate and free presidential and parliamentary election, without the engineering of the Guardian Council and the interference of military and security institutions, is an urgent need. The references to Guardian Council engineering and security organizations' interference are among the most controversial points in the letter. The Guardian Council is a 12-member body that vets candidates for elections and laws passed by parliament. The council is in essence a gatekeeper that ensures that all the candidates who run in elections are sufficiently loyal to the status quo. The Guardian Council has historically sought to keep elections tame and has attempted, though not always successfully, to prevent those who want to challenge the system from running. Guardian Council spokesman Abbas Kadkhodaei responded to Ahmadinejads letter by accusing the former president of attempting engineering in the 2009 elections by pressuring the council to announce final results before the watchdog body had fully reviewed complaints from losing candidates. The attack on the Guardian Council is also an indirect attack on Khamenei. Khamenei chooses six members of the council, while the six others are elected by parliament from nominees chosen by the head of the judiciary, whom Khamenei appoints directly. Therefore, all paths to the Guardian Council have Khameneis blessing, directly or indirectly. The reference to security organizations is also controversial given that Ahmadinejads re-election in 2009 was marred by the intervention of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the Basij Organization. Hundreds were arrested in the aftermath of Ahmadinejad's election and dozens were killed in the ensuing protests. Ahmadinejads second recommendation was for the removal of the head of the judiciary, Ayatollah Sadegh Larijani. Referencing Khameneis Feb. 18 speech in which the supreme leader discussed shortcomings in the administration of justice, Ahmadinejad said that a judiciary chief must be independent and approved by the people. However, Ahmadinejads criticism of the judiciary, while it has validity, is also self-serving. A number of former officials from his administration have been sentenced for corruption and his former vice president, Hamid Baghaei, currently has a corruption case in an appellate court hanging over his head. A new judiciary chief could alleviate the legal troubles for Ahmadinejad's former team; this, however, is not considered likely. Ahmadinejads third recommendation was that Khamenei pardon and free all those who are in prison for criticism. After leaving office, Ahmadinejad has not been quiet, and has sought on numerous occasions to question the entire system. Khamenei had staunchly supported Ahmadinejad, and at one point the supreme leader said that when it came to the 2009 presidential candidates, his views were closest to Ahmadinejads. Recently, however, the supreme leader indirectly criticized the ex-president by suggesting Ahmadinejad was acting as if he were an opposition figure and not a former official of the country. Given Khameneis strong previous support of Ahmadinejad and that the latest letter was addressed directly to the supreme leader, Khamenei likely will eventually be forced to respond either in words or actions. The downing of an Israeli F-16 by the Syrian military on Feb. 10 has once again triggered speculations about a possible direct confrontation between Iran and Israel. Shortly after the incident, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Iran violated our sovereignty, and infiltrated its drone into Israeli airspace from Syria. Referring to his previous warnings about Irans presence in Syria, he also stressed that Israel will defend itself against any aggression. Meanwhile, the Israeli army announced that in a retaliatory operation it had struck a number of sites in Syria, including four Iranian targets near the capital Damascus. Reacting to the Israeli claims, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Bahram Ghassemi rejected Irans involvement in these events, saying that the claim of the Zionist regime that an F-16 has been shot down and the involvement of an Iranian drone are too risible to be discussed. The Islamic Republic of Iran has an advisory presence in Syria at the request of its legitimate government. The following day, Secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council Ali Shamkhani labeled the claims made by Tel Aviv as a lie, also underlining that Irans presence in Syria is advisory, not military. Official statements aside, to achieve a better understanding of whats really going on between Iran and Israel in Syria, one must first assess whether Iran has the necessary means and genuine political will to trigger escalation in Syria. First, it should be noted that as is also the case for Russia, Irans leverage over the Syrian government is not complete; as such, considering Iran responsible for all that happens in Syria would be misleading. In fact, as the Syrian government has managed to extend its rule to a large part of the country thanks to its recent achievements on the battlefield, it appears to feel more capable of independent maneuvering or adopting independent positions. As such, it is asserting that it commands real authority in the country and that it is able to independently exert it either now or in the post-war period. As far as Iran is concerned, there have been at least two cases of applying this approach by Damascus. First, while Iran has so far taken a modest stance regarding Turkeys military operation in northern Syria, Damascus has strongly and repeatedly condemned the move, calling it an act of aggression that could face the Syrian armys military response. Second, some reports published in the Iranian media recently indicated that Bashar al-Assads government is not willing to consider a role for Iran in the post-war reconstruction of Syria, instead trying to forge an agreement with the Russians on this issue. On the other hand, having a deeper look at the current situation, one can reasonably argue that a new escalation in Syria is not in Irans interest. First of all, if one accepts the argument that the main reason behind Irans presence in Syria has been to preserve Assads government, it could be said that Tehran has never been closer to completely achieving this key goal. At present, Assads forces have managed to retake about two-thirds of the country from the rebel and terrorist groups and are continuing to advance even further in areas such as Idlib and Deir ez-Zor. In such circumstances, it wouldnt make any sense for Iran to open a new front in the south, diverting the attention of pro-government forces from their operations elsewhere in the country. Second, any direct confrontation with Israel in Syria could easily get out of hand, escalating into a full-scale conflict between Tehran and Tel Aviv, which in economic terms would mean huge costs for both sides. As the Iranian government is currently attempting to revive its economy and to overcome a complex set of economic problems, it would be unwise for Tehran to be willing to shift its financial resources to a new conflict abroad. Third, its now seen as a fact that the United States and its European allies are trying to convince Iran to enter a new set of negotiations, this time over its regional activities and missile program. The pretext for this proposal, which has so far been faced with a strong negative response from the Iranian side, is that Irans activities are a threat to regional peace and stability. Mindful of this, Iran would naturally not be willing to provide the West with a fresh excuse to increase pressures by igniting a new escalation in one of the main regional hotspots, namely Syria. Fourth, Iran is fully aware of the extent of ties its main partner in Syria namely Russia has with Israel. In fact, from the very beginning of its military presence in Syria, Moscow has been trying to assure Tel Aviv that its core interests as well as security will be preserved. In this vein, any direct act against Israeli interests could put Irans growing partnership with Russia at risk; a result that would definitely not be favorable for Iran. Pointing to the recent developments, Russias deputy ambassador in Tel Aviv, Leonid Frolov, said, In the case of aggression against Israel Russia, too, will be on Israels side. However, he also appeared to dismiss the idea that Iran had deliberately tried to stoke escalation by launching a drone into Israeli airspace, casting doubt on the alleged Iranian origin of the unmanned aircraft. All in all, it appears highly unlikely that the Golan incident was part of an Iranian agenda to seek heightened confrontation in Syria. As such, Israels claims of Irans involvement in the events of Feb. 10 should rather be viewed as part of its continued desire to securitize Iran. The aim of the latter remains the same: to increase international pressure on the Islamic Republic to abandon its missile program and regional activities. The visit of prominent Sunni cleric and Islamic preacher Ahmad al-Kubaisi to Iraq after a 15-year hiatus has sparked great controversy among Iraqi Sunnis. Kubaisi has called for the establishment of a unified Sunni marja (the highest level religious authority, somewhat akin to the Shiite one) to serve communities on both religious and political matters. "The Kurds, Shiites, Turkmens, Jews, Christians and Yazidis all have religious authorities," Kubaisi said Feb. 1 in Baghdad in the presence of the head of the Sunni Endowment in Iraq, Abdul Latif al-Humim. Kubaisi criticized the absence of a top Sunni leader and proposed the appointment of Humim as Sunni marja. "Sunnis have now an opportunity to be led by a commander. We have finally found a man in whom we can put our trust. A man who could unify us from Mosul to Basra under one community. This man is Abdul Latif al-Humim," Kubaisi said. Kubaisi's statement sparked fury among Sunni political parties and figures who considered his call a political attempt to support Sunni political parties that are affiliated with Humim. Abdul Rahman al-Luwaisi, a member of parliament for the (Sunni) Forces Union, said Feb. 7, "Kubaisi's visit to Iraq was made upon orders from the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia to support Humim to become the commander of a top Sunni authority in Iraq." "The visit comes to block the path of the Muslim Brotherhood and its affiliated Sunni parties," he added, a jab at the Sunni Islamic Party, which has played a major role in the Iraqi political landscape after 2003, as many of the party's members took up leading positions in power, namely parliament Speaker Salim al-Jabouri. Saudi Arabia and the UAE have been trying for years to undermine the role of the Muslim Brotherhood and its affiliates in the region by supporting Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in his quest to keep the Brotherhood out of power in Egypt. Earlier, the Islamic Party had publicly rejected Humim as head of the Sunni Endowment. Still, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi insisted on appointing him even though the candidates for this position legally must be elected by the Fiqh Council. Luwaisi accused Shiite parties, mainly the National Alliance, of supporting and blessing Kubaisis visit and his endorsement of Humim as part of a political settlement before the May 12 parliamentary election. Kubaisi's visit came at the invitation of Abadi, who met him personally Feb. 1. The prominent Sunni cleric congratulated Abadi on "the victories that have been achieved against the Islamic State" and praised "Abadi's leadership in guiding the country to victory and unity." Kubaisi expressed hope that "the reconstruction of Iraq will also witness great success under Abadi." Abadi has the support of Saudi Arabia and the UAE against his Shiite rivals, former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and head of the Badr Organization Hadi al-Amiri. Both men are close to Iran and are likely to run in the coming elections against Abadi. Badr al-Fahl, a Sunni who is a member of the Iraqi parliament's Awqaf Committee, criticized what he called the establishment of "a religious authority supported from abroad." In light of the political fragmentation among Shiites, Abadi is looking to strong Sunni parties to endorse him for election to a second term in office, which explains Abadi's invitation of Kubaisi and his support of Humim. Kubaisi enjoys wide religious and social popularity among the Sunnis of Iraq, and is also accepted among Shiites for his anti-sectarian positions. Most Sunni religious figures in Iraq were taught by Kubaisi or his students. The Sunni cleric has been living in the UAE since the 1990s, where he enjoys extensive support. Kubaisi also served as adviser to the emir of Dubai and a rapporteur of the Drafting Committee for the Personal Status Law in the UAE. Kubaisi visited Iraq just days after coalition forces took control of Baghdad on April 18, 2003, in an attempt to fill the political vacuum in the Sunni ranks and to mobilize Sunnis against the Shiite forces that controlled the political landscape. Back then, Kubaisi delivered an enthusiastic political speech at the Imam Abu Hanifa Mosque in Baghdad calling for resistance to the American occupation. It caused a wave of Sunni protests against the US occupation of Baghdad. Although the calls for a Sunni religious authority might yield political fruit for some in the coming elections, its actual establishment appears unlikely, even impossible, considering the socially and religiously diverse Sunni population. The Sunni community in Iraq does not follow a single marja that funds religious leaders independently, like the Najaf-based Shiite authority. As the clock inched toward 10 a.m. on Feb. 21, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made his feelings known via Facebook after almost half a day of silence. His previous post, from the day before, had featured a video clip filmed shortly before another political and media bombshell exploded: Shlomo Filber Netanyahus close aide and confidant and suspended director-general of the Communications Ministry was about to turn states witness against his former boss. The clip had been hurriedly prepared by Netanyahu at the end of a long day of ups and downs involving his close associates under interrogation. In the video, Netanyahu repeats his claim that he and his family are the victims of persecution. He looked broken and exhausted. Netanyahu had sought legal advice into the wee hours in assessing the damage that Filber had inflicted on him. Meanwhile, Likud ministers remained shrouded in silence. They evaded interviews and avoided all mention of the ongoing investigative earthquake. They were beginning, however, to assess their situation among themselves. When all was said and done, and considering the dizzying pace of events, the possibility of early elections began to seem a logical conclusion. The big question loomed: Had Netanyahu reached his breaking point after more than a year of serious allegations of bribery? When would the moment come for Netanyahu to announce his departure, as former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert had done in his time? Around 10 a.m., Netanyahu emitted a sign of life posting a survey on Facebook showing that the Likud's projected mandate had risen to 34. He quoted a well-known biblical verse (Exodus 1:12): But the more they [the Jews] were oppressed, the more they multiplied and spread. The message was clear: The more he is confronted with police accusations, the more he will fight back and soar in the polls. He would not raise a white flag, and he would continue to fight to clear himself. Later in the morning, Netanyahu attended a Cabinet meeting where he exuded a business-as-usual demeanor. He received the support of the heads of the coalition parties headed by Naftali Bennett and Moshe Kahlon, HaBayit HaYehudi and Kulanu, respectively. Kahlon emphasized that everyone should wait for the decision of the attorney general. In the evening, Netanyahu made an appearance before the yearly Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, where he seemed to be back to his old self. He avoided any reference to the legal drama in the background, and in his speech, which was broadcast live, he praised Israeli intelligence for preventing the downing of an Australian plane and promised the audience that he would meet them at the same place next year. Later in the evening, Netanyahus mood further improved, after Channel 10 and the News channel announced the results of surveys showing that despite the dramatic developments in Case 4000 involving Netanyahus relations with Shaul Elovitch, majority stakeholder in the telecommunications provider Bezeq Netanyahu remained strong. If elections were held that day, he would be the person putting together the next government. These surveys naturally calmed the internal turmoil of the Likud. All the signs suggest that Netanyahu, despite the legal quandary in which his fate appears to be sealed, believes that all is not yet lost. That is why he continues to fight. This stems from the character trait that in the past has extricated him from daunting situations that others thought impossible to beat. For example, in the initial weeks after the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, Netanyahu faced accusations of inciting hatred and that his campaign of incitement had triggered Rabin's murder. At the time, Netanyahu was kept at arms length, even by his own party, where plans were hatched to give him the boot because polls showed that the Likud would be crushed in the next elections. Netanyahu got back on his feet, ignored the background noise and got on with the fight. Despite the conventional wisdom that Rabins assassination would lead to Netanyahus political demise, that did not happen. Instead, Netanyahu succeeded in harnessing the anger on the right from being collectively tainted as partners in murder and transforming it into sweeping political energy. Against all odds, Netanyahu was elected to the premiership in 1996. Netanyahu once explained that he will fight on behalf of a goal so long as he feels that there is a chance he can still change the situation. He stops only when he recognizes that it is not in his hands to do so. Thus, for example, on the morning of the 1999 elections, when he already knew that he would lose to Ehud Barak, Netanyahu put in a perfunctory appearance at the polling stations, doing only the minimum. He was unruffled and had reconciled himself to the inevitable. By contrast, when Netanyahu wanted to stop Reuven Rivlin from becoming president in 2014, he went to great lengths, including zany attempts to recruit Eli Wiesel to the presidency despite the latters advanced age and ill health. The prime minister even went so far as to try to eliminate the presidency by law. Becoming embroiled in criminal activity is a horse of a different color, however. If taken to its extreme, it could cause Netanyahu to lose his freedom and wipe out his legacy as prime minister. That is why he is not even close to capitulating. Even when it seems to others that the war is lost, Netanyahu sees a long struggle ahead that will only sharpen his senses. This mode of operation is part innate personality and part youthful experience gained in the elite Matkal reconnaissance platoon. This is in addition to an ingrained persecution complex, which was evident from the start of his political career and has only grown stronger with time. Netanyahu truly believes that he is being persecuted by the left and by the media. This only intensifies his motivation to fight against both of them. The prime minister also believes that he was chosen to lead the State of Israel and safeguard its security. Thus, the life story he constructs for himself is filled with a sense of mission. That is what gets him up in the morning for another day of battle against the forces of evil that are trying to bring him down. So long as no more state witnesses make an appearance, Netanyahu will evidently be able to maintain his political and public juggling act over the next few months and retain his position. What happens after that? As noted, Netanyahu looks to be gearing up for a long, drawn-out battle. This is his default setting. He will only relinquish his seat in the event of an all-out political war. This does not stem merely from stubbornness or a do-or-die attitude. Rather, it reflects Netanyahus internal essence as a person who lives with never-ending conflict and constant struggles against real and imaginary opponents. The World According to Netanyahu constantly sizzles with dangers that he tries to identify in real time and nip in the bud. This time, it is not clear that he anticipated the blow inflicted by his friend and confidant. The Israeli Ministerial Committee for Legislation approved Feb. 18 a draft law that would make it possible to revoke the residency status of Palestinians living in occupied East Jerusalem and Syrians living in the Golan Heights if they are found to be engaging in anti-Israel activities. Ahmad Tibi, an Arab member of the Israeli Knesset, told Al-Monitor that the Israeli government is trying to bypass the courts. The Israeli government didnt like the decision of the High Court and therefore is trying to pass a law in order to bypass the court with the single aim of empowering the Interior Ministry to revoke the residency of Jerusalemites. Tibi said that the 13-member Arab Joint List in the Knesset will oppose what he called this dangerous law when it comes to a vote. The legislative effort comes after the Israeli High Court ruled Sept. 13 against a decision by the Israeli attorney general to bar four Palestinians from their homes in Jerusalem. Three of the East Jerusalem residents Muhammad Abu-Teir, Ahmad Attoun and Muhammad Totah were elected to the Palestinian Legislative Council in 2006 on behalf of the pro-Hamas Change and Reform bloc, while the fourth Khaled Abu Arafeh was the minister for Jerusalem affairs during the short-lived Ismail Haniyeh government. The government had operated in both Ramallah and the Gaza Strip at the time. Adalah, a Haifa-based human rights organization, along with the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, which had participated in the case, defending the four Palestinians, welcomed the Israeli courts decision at the time while criticizing that it took 10 years before a final decision was made. The four Palestinians were banished from Jerusalem once they were elected on the grounds that by being members of a hostile and illegal party they had shown lack of loyalty to the country they were residing in. On the same day, Adalah welcomed the decision of the Israeli Supreme Court that the residency revocation by the Israeli authorities was illegal. It is not permitted to revoke the residency of East Jerusalem Palestinians in violation of the rule of law while gravely harming their constitutional rights on the vague assertion of a breach of loyalty, a joint statement issued by Adalah and the Association for Civil Rights in Israel read. While the Israeli court deemed that the decision to revoke the residency of the four Palestinians was illegal, it gave the Israeli government six months to correct the problem by changing the law on citizenship and entry to Israel that was used to ban them. Abu Arafeh, one of the four banned Palestinians, told Al-Monitor that according to the court ruling, he and the other three Jerusalemites should be able to return to live in their homes in East Jerusalem on March 12 when the six-month period runs out. The four have had to rent temporary homes outside of Jerusalem (mostly in Ramallah) until a final decision is reached. Fadi Qawasmi, the lawyer of the four Palestinians, told Al-Monitor that it is not clear whether the Feb. 18 draft law will be passed by March 12, or whether it will apply retroactively. We might still find ourselves back in court either if the government asks for an extension or if they try and apply this law retroactively against the four banished Palestinians, he said. The law needs to pass by the Knesset plenary and then go to committee for further discussion, and then return to the plenary for a second and third hearing and a vote before it becomes law. Three Israel-based human rights organizations have expressed concern about the new bill. Adalah, HaMoked and the Association for Civil Rights in Israel sent a joint letter to the Interior Ministry on Feb. 7 detailing their grave concerns regarding a newly proposed bill to amend the Entry into Israel Law which was later passed by the governmental committee. The three human rights organizations called the draft law a violation of international humanitarian laws because it imposes upon residents an obligation of loyalty to the occupying power, let alone to deny them permanent residency status on this basis. The organizations further argued that this legislation is unconstitutional since it violates the Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty, and is extreme, sweeping and disproportionate. Qawasmi expressed his fears that the new law will contain similar wording to the existing nationality law, which gives the interior minister wide-ranging powers to deny petitioners of citizenship or residency without giving an explanation. If they use the same language, we might have a situation where the Israeli interior minister will reject residency to whomever he wishes without the resident having any legal recourse to object, Qawasmi said. Tibi said the approved bill is very likely to pass, considering the current atmosphere in the Israeli Knesset. The statements by the US president recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and saying that 'Jerusalem is no longer on the table' has whetted the appetite of Israelis to carry out further oppressive actions against Palestinians in Jerusalem, Tibi added. The heart of the debate is that Israel came to East Jerusalem and not the other way around. The court ruled that it is unacceptable to force a loyalty condition on people just to live in their homes and practice their rights. An article by The Times of Israel on Sept. 14 reported, The court said that Palestinian parliamentarians residency status could not be revoked under the Entry into Israel Law, which governs the entry of non-Israeli citizens into the country, saying that the law applies only to those entering Israel and not those already in the country, like the residents of East Jerusalem. It is not clear what the text of the new law will be and whether the government will be able to apply it retroactively to the four Jerusalemites. But what is clear is that, if passed, this law will give Israeli officials yet another powerful tool to administratively banish Palestinians from their birthplace. The Palestinian media have been avidly following the developments in the police investigations of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his confidants that have been rocking Israel. The Palestinian media regularly cover events in Israel, often in a cynical tone, sometimes even with unabashed glee at the prospect of Netanyahu's being booted shamefaced out of office. All the Palestinian journalists spoken with for this article were astounded and impressed by how undaunted the Israeli media have been in reporting the Netanyahu affairs. I have been following all the reports and I know all the players involved, a veteran Palestinian journalist at a West Bank newspaper told Al-Monitor. The journalist, who spoke on condition of anonymity, served nine years in an Israeli prison for security-related offenses. He said Palestinian prisoners have always watched Israeli television while in jail and have been exposed at length to the ways of Israeli politics. We learned how the democratic election process works in Israel, he noted. The prisoners adopted the system in order to elect their leadership in a totally democratic fashion, while ensuring freedom of choice. After the establishment of the Palestinian Authority [PA], the democratic system was adopted in the elections for the president and parliament. The prisoners, he added, rejected the political systems of Arab states and opted for the one they had absorbed from the Israeli enemy. Unfortunately, we have not been successful in implementing a free press and accustoming our leaders to it, the journalist said. Over the years, various reports have surfaced of deep corruption within the Palestinian leadership. While the issue engages the Palestinian public, the media hardly report on it. In most cases, it is international news outlets that report on corruption in the PA, ensuring that Palestinian media are protected against blame, harassment and danger of being closed. In 2015, for example, the Associated Press exposed corruption in the PA. In 2016, the Reuters news agency reported on information compiled by Rafiq al-Natsheh, the chairman of the Palestinian Anti-Corruption Commission Of particular note is the case of a former Palestinian intelligence officer, Fahmi Shabaneh, who in 2010 gave Channel 10 TV reporter Zvi Yehezkeli witness statements and tapes documenting corruption within Fatah, the main component of the PA, as well as sex scandals within the PA. The reason he preferred the Israeli reporter to local Palestinian ones was clear: No one in PA areas would have dared publish the information. After the enemy television channel aired its report, Shabaneh said Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas had promised him he would root out corruption. Since then, his voice has not been heard. We know the Israeli reporters who are after Netanyahu and expose his actions, a journalist from the West Bank city of Nablus told Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity. He named several Israeli investigative reporters admired as role models by journalists in the PA. We like Raviv Drucker [Channel 10 News], Amnon Abramowitz [Hadashot news company], Guy Peleg [Hadashot], who embarrassed Netanyahu [by airing a tape in which Netanyahus son is heard discussing strippers] and Ben Caspit [Al-Monitor columnist]. They are doing the kind of work that a journalist in the PA can only dream of, he said. Its just as important here. Our people would have a better life if only we could do our job and expose all the thefts we see daily in the PA, in the leadership above and even down below among the local leadership. A Palestinian journalist working for a foreign news agency told Al-Monitor that he and his colleagues in the West Bank know that a courageous Palestinian expose of the kind conducted in Israel could result in murder. He blames Israels 50-year occupation of Palestinian territory for this state of affairs. Without the occupation, we might have been able to build a more open system of government, like yours, he said on condition of anonymity. After all, we have learned a lot from you. In the Gaza Strip, the number of journalists per capita is probably the highest in the world. Some of the journalists who are fluent in Hebrew work for the Hamas organization that rules the enclave, monitoring Israeli media. This unit is tasked with gathering open source information, just as Israels Hatzav military intelligence gathering unit does. A Gaza journalist who worked for the Hamas monitoring service told Al-Monitor that Hebrew-speaking Gaza reporters who gather information from Israeli media are impressed by the professionalism of their Israeli peers, and by the fact that they are not afraid to voice their opinions about their leadership. He spoke with great admiration tinged with envy about press freedom in Israel. According to another Gaza journalist, someone who reported on the pervasive view in Gaza that Hamas has failed in its leadership role and only looks out for its close allies would immediately land in jail. We have seen this [corruption] since Hamas took power [in 2007] and especially now, when things are so bad that theres nothing to eat. They make sure their people are paid on time and also receive food and fuel rations. But what about all the others? If we could publish this, maybe everything would look different. Like they do on your side, he told Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity. Nonetheless, the Palestinian journalists in Gaza and the West Bank are sharply critical of the fact that Israels media is a beacon of freedom on every issue except security, especially when it relates to the Palestinians. You are independent and courageous until it comes to the occupation, a Palestinian journalist told Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity. When theres a mess and your army acts the way it does, you turn into obedient soldiers. You are not professionals to the very end. Tensions escalated Feb. 10 between Israel and Syria after Syrian air defenses shot down an Israeli warplane that had bombed Damascus hours after Israel intercepted an Iranian drone in its airspace. Although Palestinians were not involved in the events, a few hours after them, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Popular Resistance Movement and the Palestinian Freedom Movement declared their support for Syria and Iran and vowed not to remain silent if Israel were to attack either country. On the same day, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas armed wing, tweeted that it will be on the lookout to protect the Palestinian people and respond to any Israeli aggression, given the incidents on the Israeli-Syrian border. Mahmoud Mardawi, a Hamas leader in Gaza and former military commander of the brigades, told Al-Monitor, Hamas' position on the events in Syria has loud and clear messages to Israel. Most prominently is that the Gaza front will not be easier than the Syrian and Lebanese fronts, nor will Israel be able to separate the Gaza, Syrian and Lebanese fronts. Hamas also seeks to raise the morale of the Palestinian people and eliminate any fear of a new war on Gaza by reassuring the people that the Qassam Brigades are capable of responding to the Israeli threats. Mardawi added, The movement also wants to show Syria that should Israel attack, Hamas will stand by its side so it will not have to face the enemy alone, as it did before. This will make it harder for Israel to wage war on any front, be it on Gaza, Lebanon or Syria. Maher al-Taher, political relations director of the PFLP, based in Damascus, told Al-Mayadeen on Feb. 10 that any Israeli war against either Lebanon, Syria or Gaza is bound to turn into a broader conflict on all these fronts. Hassan Hoballah, currently overseeing the Palestinian dossier for Hezbollah, told Al-Monitor, The axis of resistance will not allow Israel to wage an aggression against Gaza alone, and the field commanders have their own military means to stop this from happening. Hoballah further stated, however, I rule out the possibility of an Israeli aggression against Syria, Lebanon or Gaza. It will really have to pay if it were to wage a war, particularly in light of the resistances resources, Gaza included, and because all parties in the resistance axis are now in the same boat. The recent events in Syria may have paved the way for Hamas to return once and for all to the Iranian axis it left in 2012 following disagreement over which side to back in the Syrian revolution. With relations gradually falling back into place between Hamas and Hezbollah and Iran, the movements show of support for Syria may put an end to its estrangement and help it rebuild normal relations with all the members of the axis of resistance, that is, Tehran, Damascus and Beirut. While most Palestinian factions took pro-Syrian and pro-Iranian positions, Fatah has noticeably remained silent. It has not commented or issued a statement on the above developments. Tayseer Nasrallah, a member of Fatahs Revolutionary Council and Fatah leader in the northern West Bank, explained to Al-Monitor why that is. Fatah is focusing its attention on the Palestinian cause, Nasrallah said. We do not interfere in the affairs of neighboring countries. We believe that any war in the region will be at the expense of our national cause. We do not want to divert the Palestinian attention toward other issues. Palestinians in Gaza have not yet recovered from the repercussions of Hamas' 2014 war with Israel. This is one reason why they are likely to be unenthusiastic about engaging in a regional war with which they have nothing to do. This is especially the case since Fatah has no desire to engage in a conflict and given that neither Syria nor Hezbollah nor Iran intervened on their behalf during the Israeli wars in 2008, 2012 and 2014. Wasef Erekat, a Palestinian military expert in the West Bank and former artillery unit commander for the PLO, told Al-Monitor, Engaging in a regional war is not in Gazas best interest. Palestinians in southern Lebanon and the Syrian Golan might join in a war against Israel, but Gazans already have it hard enough, and their situation only allows them to stay on the sidelines. Perhaps Gazas allies in Lebanon and Iran can understand this situation and excuse it. On Feb. 10, Iranian Assistant Foreign Minister Hussein al-Islam said that Iran will pursue a strategy of maintaining a united resistance front involving Syria, Lebanon and Gaza. The Palestinian factions' pro-Syrian and pro-Iranian positions beg the question of whether they are simply for show or whether they can be implemented on the ground against Israel. Emad Abu Awad, an expert on Israeli affairs at the Istanbul-based Vision Center for Political Development in Turkey, told Al-Monitor, Israel waging war on all fronts [figuratively speaking] aims at inciting the US against Iran based on accusing [Tehran] of sponsoring resistance in Gaza. Although Israel might fear unexpected developments during war [from different fronts], its northern front with Lebanon and Syria remains its focal point. Tensions could further escalate between Israel and Syria, posing a serious challenge to the parties of the Iranian axis. They could either join forces to stand united in confronting Israel, possibly resulting in a regional war, the repercussions of which the Palestinians might not be able to bear. Alternatively for the Palestinian factions, they could simply stick to issuing statements and taking stances. GAZA CITY Amid the worsening economic and humanitarian situation in Gaza, political and professional figures announced the establishment of a council on Feb. 1 to rescue Gaza from the financial and other crises affecting every sector. Ibrahim Habib, who spearheaded the idea, explained to Al-Monitor that the rescue council is not a political party but is envisioned as a service organization. Its oversight committee consists of 11 members, most of them professionals from a broad range of backgrounds. The councils mission is rescue, Habib said. It is not intended to resolve the problems the Gaza Strip has developed over the years. The rescue is limited to facilitating services in Gaza and communicating with local, regional and international authorities, including Israel, to hold them accountable for the situation in the Gaza Strip, which is still under Israeli control and is no longer habitable. The services the council would seek to provide cover all aspects of daily life in the Gaza Strip, including health, education, environment and economy. Habib also remarked that the council has been communicating with all Palestinian factions and civil society organizations for deliberations on ways to save Gaza. We should not wait for the slow death of residents, he said. Gaza is on the verge of collapse, which will affect all Palestinians. With the factions approval, we want to offer residents a solution. We have launched wide-scale deliberations to discuss the situation and offer solutions to the crises. He further stated, The council is temporary and seeks to fulfill the duties that the current PA government is not assuming in Gaza. As soon as the government begins offering services, the council will be deemed disbanded, and all its members will help the government fulfill its duties. If our work persists for a year without the consensus government assuming its responsibilities in Gaza, we will call for municipal elections based on the single-member constituency to manage the Gaza Strip, and then the council will be disbanded. Habib shared the councils general policies with Al-Monitor, stating, The council shall abide by Palestinian laws and respect international law and international agreements and legislations. Equality between the Palestinian Authority [PA] employees and those of Hamas former government shall be ensured, and their fates and the future of their children shall not be meddled with. The international community and the United Nations shall assume their responsibilities toward the humanitarian catastrophe in the Gaza Strip due to Israels oppressive policies. An ongoing truce with Israel shall be ensured, in addition to self-restraint. Salah Abdul Ati, Gaza director of the Palestinian Center for Policy Research and Strategic Studies Masarat, told Al-Monitor, A unified Palestinian political system is required. There should be one government, one legislative council and one judicial authority. Given the internal rift, these requirements are not being met, so the Palestinian political system is defunct. The humanitarian situation in Gaza is catastrophic, Abdul Ati continued. In addition to Israels siege and crimes against civilians, the PA and President Mahmoud Abbas are punishing us collectively. As a result, the Gaza Strip is paying the price of the Hamas-Fatah tensions. The tragedy in the Gaza Strip is partly incurred by Palestinians. We demand the lifting of collective sanctions on the Gaza Strip and the distancing sector services, employees and citizens from the dangers of political polarization and disputes. Abdul Ati, who supports the formation of a rescue council, said that the idea of forming such a council had also been discussed under Masarats auspices. Some approved, while others disapproved, he said. The Gaza Strip needs a national body to save it. Stressing the importance of a national rescue front to establish national unity, Abdul Ati asserted that the problems facing Gaza, Jerusalem and the West Bank cannot be resolved separately from this challenge. Everybody should build a [unified] national current that transcends ideologies and strive to lift the collective sanctions against the Gaza Strips inhabitants, he added. These sanctions are a crime according to the Palestinian Basic Law. Serious solutions should be sought for all crises in the sectors of health and electricity and for the salaries predicament. No government in the world punishes its people or violates the law except for the Palestinian consensus government. Riham Audi, a political writer, told Al-Monitor, In case the PA does not approve of the council, it will just become an opposing party. If the council is forcibly imposed as a substitute for the PA by the parties forming it and some of the factions in the Gaza Strip, its role would be similar to that of the administrative committee that Hamas formed and would marginalize the PA and deepen the Palestinian rift. The controversy regarding the party representing the Gaza Strip before the international community to receive aid will escalate. Audi explained that the council could succeed if it proceeds as a consensus political and social body offering support, advice and supervision on reconciliation to Fatah and Hamas. The council should track the obstacles to the reconciliation, rather than act as a political and administrative substitute for the PA, Audi said. We need to empower the PA institutions and return to the normal situation before the 2007 rift. Mohammad Abu Jayyab, economic expert and editor in chief of the local newspaper Al-Eqtisadiyah, said, The deteriorating economic situation in the Gaza Strip needs a major rescue, as the worsening economic situation points to a bad future. Clearly, Gaza needs to be rescued, Abu Jayyab told Al-Monitor. But, a committee here and there cannot save it or perform the governments duties unless the committee or council is locally and internationally sponsored and enjoys global funding and support. Gaza needs billions in funding and requires major plans, projects and development. The solution is for the consensus government to perform its duties in Gaza and lift the sanctions. The Pentagon plans to add nearly $20 million in high-tech sensors to Tunisias border, doubling down on US and European investments to stop migrants, extremists and drug traffickers from crossing from Libya. Defense Department officials notified Congress of the move in a letter last month, drawing from a joint fund set up with Germany in September to secure Tunisias 300-mile border with Libya. Germany contributed funding that will be used specifically for the sensors. The funds will enhance the capacity of the government of Tunisia to detect and respond to threats posed by the trafficking of illicit materials, Assistant US Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense Kenneth Rapuano wrote in congressional correspondence reviewed by Al-Monitor. The US Defense Threat Reduction Agency, a Pentagon office charged with countering weapons of mass destruction, kick-started a fence stretching along half of the Tunisian-Libyan border with a $24.9 million grant in 2016. Construction of the 125-mile barrier began less than a year after an attacker linked to the Islamic State (IS) gunned down 38 victims most of them British tourists near the resort town of Sousse on the Tunisian coast. Tunisia faces a scourge of homegrown radicalism, with the latest official figures estimating that at least 800 citizens who joined IS and other militant groups have since returned from foreign battlefields. The CIA assessed in 2016 that IS had recruited as many as 6,000 Tunisians, and the spy agency labeled it as a top source country for recruits. The Tunisian government doesnt have a real plan in terms of how to address this, said Sarah Yerkes, a former State and Defense Department official now a fellow with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. This is the problem of being a country in the midst of a democratic transition. Do you handle this in a democratic and a humane fashion or quick and easy? The United States and Germany have also tried to prevent chemical and nuclear weapons from Moammar Gadhafis era from getting loose, as disarmament has been slowed by Libyas ongoing civil war. The Organization for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons verified that Libya fully destroyed its most threatening chemical weapons materials back in 2014. Yet nonproliferation experts remain worried that radiological sources found in Libyas dominant oil and gas industry, such as X-ray scanners, could be packaged into a dirty bomb as warring factions battle for control. While the impact of such an explosion might not be lethal, the toxicity emanating from the blast could leave areas uninhabitable, as happened with Japans Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant meltdown in 2011. If a [dirty] bomb goes off in the middle of a corn field in Iowa, not that many people are going to care, said Miles Pomper, a senior fellow at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies. If it goes off in New York or Tunis, its another matter. The funding boost comes as the Donald Trump administration is rethinking plans to slash foreign aid funding for Tunisia. The State Departments fiscal year 2019 budget proposal released last week seeks $92 million in bilateral aid, including $40 million in military assistance for border security and intelligence capabilities a 67% increase over the current years request. Over the past year, the Pentagon has also given Tunisia more than $20 million from its Global Train and Equip Fund, including body armor, outmoded helicopters, night vision devices and small arms such as M4 rifles and Russian-made PK machine guns. In 2016, the latest year for which information is available, Tunisia relied on the United States for 10% of its military budget. The United States also has about 100 troops in the country, according to figures the Pentagon released to lawmakers last year. The Russian Defense Ministry reported Feb. 21 that heavy shelling from rebel-held districts in Eastern Ghouta damaged its cease-fire monitoring center near Damascus. The attack came amid escalated fighting between opposition and pro-government forces that has reportedly killed more than 300 people and wounded hundreds more just this week. Meanwhile, despite attempts by pro-government forces to disrupt cease-fire plans with the ongoing operation in Eastern Ghouta in southern Syria, work continues to establish cease-fire monitoring outposts in Idlib province in the north. Out of 12 planned monitoring outposts in Syria, Ankara is believed to have created six so far with its military presence in the following areas: Salwa, north of Idlib; Qalat Samaan and Sheikh Aqeel, west of Aleppo; al-Iss, south of Aleppo; al-Tuqan, the southern suburb of Idlib city; and al-Sirman, near the strategic city of Maarat al-Numan. Russia deployed its own monitoring point Feb. 14 in an Iranian militia-controlled settlement at al-Hadher in rural Aleppo. This way, Turkey not only deters the Kurds since three of the military posts are aimed at restraining the Kurdish power force in Afrin but along with Russia cements front lines, thus virtually limiting the regime forces in their efforts to reclaim lost territory. In this situation, the key issues are determining the fate of the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) Islamist alliance and preventing al-Qaeda from establishing safe havens in Idlib. Russian state media openly claim that Turkey is dealing with the Syrian opposition. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan stated that Russia will provide security beyond Idlib while Turkey will take care of security matters in Idlib. Yet Moscow, which has been positioning itself as a guarantor of Syrian territorial integrity and a chief fighter against terrorism with a constant bashing of the United States on both points can't openly admit that Idlib is now a Turkish influence zone and that the fate of the opposition isn't Russias concern. On Feb. 19, speaking at the Moscow-based Valdai Discussion Club, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said, "Only SAA [the Syrian army] and the Russian air force have been trying to suppress HTS militants in Idlib. This suggests Moscow is still preoccupied with the issue. Officially, Moscow first mentioned its concern with HTS six months into its existence. In August, Gen. Igor Korobov, chief of Russia's Main Intelligence Directorate, said troops had to battle a new alliance of about 25,000 people that had formed in Syria. Since then, air raids against HTS have continued and are a main pretext to operate militarily in de-escalation zones. However, beyond the principled Russian position regarding HTS which Moscow blamed for the offensive on the Russian military police in Hama and for the downed Su-25 jet in Idlib Russia clearly wants to avoid further involvement in the Syrian conflict. Two sources in the Syrian moderate opposition confirmed to Al-Monitor reports that the Russian military held talks with HTS, but Russia hasn't disclosed details of the talks. Agreements between Moscow and Ankara are apparently aimed at blockading the city of Idlib and adjacent areas that are under HTS control. Once these areas are secured, there will be at least two options. In one, a rather unlikely scenario, Turkey would start pushing HTS out of the de-escalation zone toward the Syrian army. In the second scenario, Turkey would gradually integrate some HTS factions ones that aren't officially listed as terrorists into the moderate opposition forces. This is a more plausible option, given that on Feb. 18 Islamist opposition factions Nureddin Zengi Brigade and Ahrar al-Sham merged into the Syrian Liberation Front and were joined by half a dozen other HTS factions. An Idlib resident who was once involved with the militant Jaish al-Mujahideen told Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity that HTS can take one of two paths: disband, or reject radical ideology and transform into a faction similar to the Free Syrian Army, which has fought alongside Turkish forces in Syria. "Essentially, HTS leadership has been lately seeking to add a more moderate mix into its radical structure. Evidently, this was why they have sent most radical elements as cannon fodder to the fight in Hama," he said. Those HTS offshoots that share al-Qaedas radical ideology have gone home, since small groups with no resources or artillery can't open new fronts on their own, and joining a larger group that keeps contacts with Ankara is not an option since it would imply they are giving up their ideology. "Some radical groups that are still part of HTS, such as Katibat al-Ghuraba or smaller groups of Bosnian fighters, receive their orders directly from al-Qaeda. Their pledge of allegiance to HTS was made merely to secure help in military battles [ not necessarily as statements of ideology]. For instance, the Turkistan Islamic Party is under the direction of its emir based in Afghanistan. Yet they dont dare to pull out of HTS, fearing their own elimination or arrests, the opposition member told Al-Monitor. Russian experts tend to avoid public discussions of how pro-government operations and airstrikes helped push the local population to cooperate with HTS, whose leadership has been positioning the group as a vigilante force against the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. At a certain stage, as the HTS core, Jabhat Fatah al-Sham even gave up on its entrance exam, in which newcomers had to demonstrate their solid conviction in the righteousness of HTS ideas, actions and religious interpretations. With this less stringent policy, the organization's structure thus came to include less strident Syrian factions whose presence was needed due to market demand rather than for their true support for the global jihad ideals. HTS has long sustained its power by controlling smuggling routes and checkpoints that enable its attacks on humanitarian and military convoys sent to aid moderate opposition groups. Yet with Ankaras support, a new alliance of 11 military factions calling itself "Repel the Invaders" is fighting the regime offensive in southern Idlib, providing some security guarantees to the population to discourage them from accepting HTS as a governing structure. The problem is that al-Qaeda still has a chance to create its own safe havens in some opposition-controlled areas because of Ankaras obsession with weakening the Kurds above all else; distrust among Iran, Turkey and Russia the trio that negotiated the de-escalation zones; and the regime's desire to weaken the moderate opposition under the pretext of fighting terrorists. Instead, if the moderate opposition is allowed to grow stronger and participate in the political process, al-Qaeda would have far fewer resources to operate outside Syria from the safe havens within the country. Did Turkey imprison an innocent man for over a year, or was it coaxed to release a dangerous terrorist or spy under pressure from the German government? This question is being raised since German-Turkish journalist Deniz Yucel was freed Feb. 16. That day, Yucel released a short video clip explaining that as he was leaving the prison, he was handed a piece of paper dated Feb. 13 that informed him the court had decided to continue his prison term. I was still let go," he said. "I don't know why I was released today, or [why I was] arrested last year. But I know that neither my arrest or rather, my being taken hostage nor my release has anything to do with the rule of law. Yucels release after a lengthy bargaining process between German and Turkish authorities was no surprise. To the contrary, it confirmed the adage, "Desperate times call for desperate measures." The timeline from his arrest to his release proves how desperate Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) government have become to continue credible foreign relations. Prime Minister Binali Yildirim, on his way Feb. 14 to Berlin for an official visit, told the press, I hope [Yucel] will be released soon. I believe there will be positive developments soon. That statement was a clear sign that Yucels release was imminent. Yucel is a correspondent for Germany's Die Welt (DW) newspaper. Another crucial moment came Feb. 8, when AKP Vice Chair Ravza Kavakci Kann told a German television channel, Human rights have excelled under Erdogan. Yet when he was asked how Yucel could be kept in prison for a year without any charge, Kann didn't have much to say. When Yucel was detained, he was being questioned about supposedly spreading "terrorist propaganda" and "inciting hatred." DWs Michel Friedman summarized the situation when he said, "No court, no accusation, but [Erdogan] decided he is guilty. Human Rights? This is how the law exists today in Turkey not [through] the courts, but the president. The German-Turkish negotiations for Yucels release had been in the works for a while. Even Yucel was aware of them. He told his lawyer he didn't want to be a part of a dirty deal between Germany and Turkey. German officials had hinted that the government wouldn't be selling arms to Turkey as long as Yucel was captive. So why was Yucel arrested to begin with? On April 14 (just before the April 16 referendum that granted greater power to the presidency) Erdogan told the Turkish press, As long as I occupy this position, [Yucel] will not be released. Erdogan referred to Yucel as a spy and terrorist. He claimed that Yucel was a German agent acting as a liaison with the Kurdistan Workers Party and that the Turkish government had incriminating evidence against him. The alleged evidence, which was said to be photos or videos, hasn't been made public or shared with the courts. Al-Monitor asked senior government officials why Yucel was arrested and why he was released. Most speculated that his arrest was likely a tit-for-tat affair, because German authorities were holding several pro-AKP Turkish citizens. For example, government elites noted that last year, Turks in Germany who were asking questions about affiliates of fugitive cleric Fethullah Gulen (whom Erdogan blames for an attempted coup in July 2016) were taken into custody as Turkish spies. Turks who confronted alleged Kurdish activists in Germany also were imprisoned. So, in turn, arrests of German citizens in Turkey would send a message to Germany that the countries share a "relationship of equals." This is a concept heard quite often from both the pro-AKP press and the government elite. Yucel is not the first German whose release was based on backdoor deals rather than independent court proceedings. Peter Steudtner and other German human rights activists were held in a Turkish prison for three months charged with being spies. Steudtner was released in October. In the case, known as the Buyukada trial, the prosecution was asking for sentences of up to 15 years in jail. Yet thanks to a deal quietly brokered by former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, eight out of 11 activists in the Buyukada trial were released. Yucels arrest and the process of his release provide us with an understanding of how the meaning of "political prisoner" has evolved in Turkey. Turkey's government has increased domestic surveillance of all residents. People are encouraged to snitch if they observe anti-AKP behavior. Foreigners, dual citizens and people whose names are known internationally undergo meticulous surveillance. Despite the effort, Turkey has failed to provide credible evidence against those taken into custody. As Yucel's case has shown, the courts don't need to produce an indictment, and they aren't obliged to follow due process or even inform those under arrest of the charges against them. A general blanket accusation of being a spy or terrorist is sufficient. The cases are political not only because those in custody are presented as potential threats to the government, but also because decisions about their court cases aren't made in the courts. Rather, the decisions are coming from government elites. In Yucel's case, Erdogan had to eat his promise that Yucel would remain in prison as long as Erdogan was president. Of course, he dined quietly. And Yildirims good wishes about Yucels imminent release received little to no play in the mainstream media. A few days after Yucels release, Yildirim was irritated when he was asked about it. He said, Is there no other issue between Germany and Turkey [to ask about] except for this guy [Yucel]?" When the Turkish government reverses its course, most of the time Erdogan refrains from commenting and the majority of media outlets completely ignore the change. At the time of Yucels release, for example, Erdogan was busy continuing his tirade about Turkey's military operation in Afrin, Syria, and threatening US forces with the Ottoman slap, ridiculing them for their ignorance of how harsh it could be. And pro-AKP social media trolls were sharing images of Erdogan, wearing a fez, slapping US President Donald Trump under the hashtag #OsmanlidanABDyeTokat, or Slap from the Ottomans to USA. Indeed, Turkey's government haphazardly struggles to sweep whatever it can't face under the rug. For example, in February 2017, Yucel was "invited" to police headquarters to be questioned about his interactions with the Redhack organization and about Erdogans son-in-law Berat Albayraks emails. He reported to the police on his own. The allegations were provoking public hatred and enmity and spreading propaganda about terror organizations. Turkey can manipulate public opinion locally, but it is not fooling the world. The World Justice Projects 2017-18 index of how well countries adhere to their rule of law demonstrates Turkey's regression: It dropped to 101 from its already dismal position of 99 out of 113 countries. Turkey will probably continue its descent. In its quest to establish "relations of equals," the Erdogan administration has started treating other countries the way it treats domestic opposition. The motto of the government elite has become, If they don't love and respect us, they will fear us. Domestically, this campaign was against seculars, but as the recent arrest of Al-Azhar-trained religious figure Alparslan Kuytul demonstrates, Erdogans arbitrary actions are becoming bolder. Hostages in desperate times will continue to suffer in Turkish prisons as long as the victims present opportunities for the Erdogan administration to exploit. The alliance between Turkeys ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and its de facto partner, the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), has extended to an unlikely realm: the idea to develop Turkey's own bitcoin. Amid bitcoins meteoric rise last year, the Turkish government had taken an unwelcoming stance toward the cryptocurrency. Ministers likened it to a pyramid scheme and warned citizens to stay away. The MHP, however, argues that instead of dismissing cryptocurrencies, Ankara should draw up legislation to regulate and control the market. MHP deputy chair and former Industry Minister Ahmet Kenan Tanrikulu has penned a detailed report on the issue, proposing the state-controlled release of a national bitcoin called "Turkcoin." For Tanrikulu, missing out on blockchain, the underlying technology of cryptocurrencies, would be a serious mistake. The world is advancing toward a new digital system. Turkey should create its own digital system and currency before its too late, he told Al-Monitor. The politician stressed that cryptocurrencies were already in use in Turkey, despite the lack of a legal framework. The need for regulation is obvious, he said. Also, the use of those currencies in illegal activities must be prevented. He continued, We need to create the infrastructure for the blockchain database. There are nearly 1,400 digital currencies in the world today and many countries are using them. We, too, can create a digital currency, based on companies in the Wealth Fund. Since the demand exists, we should create and release our own digital currency. Opposing those currencies is meaningless. This is a national issue which requires a national consensus. Tanrikulus 22-page report draws attention to the legal vacuum on the issue. The Turkish Penal Code contains the provision that no one can be punished for acts that are not overtly considered a crime in the law. Based on this provision, the use of cryptocurrencies can be considered legal since our law contains no prohibition, the report says. Thus, buying and selling with cryptocurrencies and creating money through bitcoin mining are not within the scope of criminal activity in Turkey today. Many enterprises accept payment in cryptocurrencies, and the number of customers using those currencies is rapidly increasing. The report also proposes the creation of a state-controlled bitcoin bourse. Preventing tax evasion, money laundering and swindling should be given priority in the work for new regulations, it says. The introduction of encouraging regulations after assessing all kinds of risks would enable us to generate revenues from the cryptocurrency market, especially from bitcoin. In this context, the country needs a bitcoin bourse and legislation to regulate this realm. The Finance Ministry and the Capital Markets Board have already started work on the legal vacuum that is expected to result in new regulations. Tanrikulu said his party would lend parliamentary support to bills aimed at regulating and taxing cryptocurrencies. Though the government maintains its stance toward bitcoin and other digital money, the idea for a national cryptocurrency seems to have better prospects. In a Feb. 7 interview, Deputy Prime Minister Mehmet Simsek, who oversees the economy, said the government would launch preparations for a national cryptocurrency. He argued that the use of cryptocurrencies remains illegal and risky in Turkey at present, but added, We are planning to start our own work on digital currencies. We place high importance on digitalization. In fact, a Turkish company has already invested in a project to create a local cryptocurrency and is reportedly planning to make the money available soon. In the MHPs proposal, large public assets in the Wealth Fund such as Turkish Airlines, the Istanbul Stock Exchange, the gas company Botas, Turk Telekom, Ziraat Bank and the National Lottery would serve, in a sense, as its insurance policy. Investments in the currency would appreciate at least as much as those in the companies in the Wealth Fund, but high demand would mean higher appreciation. The profits may not reach bitcoins 1,700% per year, but the risk of a 70% slump in a month would be also nonexistent. As such, the proposed Turkcoin more closely resembles asset-backed securities than existing cryptocurrencies. Low risk combined with profits higher than the yields of sovereign bonds could make the currency attractive to aspiring investors. After a global frenzy, cryptocurrencies have seen a massive tremor in the past month and a half. The price of a bitcoin, which had climbed to nearly $20,000 in December, plunged below $6,000 in early February before a partial recovery since then. Amid the panic among investors, advertorial stories began appearing on Turkish websites about people enjoying bitcoin wealth. Headlines such as How the declining bitcoin made me a millionaire at age 26 work to rekindle demand, the most important factor that keeps cryptocurrencies standing. After the recent crash, many have come to wonder whether cryptocurrencies do have a future. Could they plunge even further? The demand on the market will answer the second question, while on the first, financial giant JP Morgan predicts that cryptocurrencies are unlikely to disappear completely and could easily survive in varying forms and shapes among players who desire greater decentralization, peer-to-peer networks and anonymity, even as the latter is under threat. While the Turkish news media is breathlessly reporting every minor detail of the military's offensive in Syria describing movements village by village, hilltop by hilltop Turkey is quietly taking major steps to erect another military observation outpost east of Idlib. The effort is part of the de-escalation negotiated last year in Astana, Kazakhstan, in which Turkey, Russia and Iran decided to impose and supervise a cease-fire to enable delivery of humanitarian assistance and allow displaced people to return to their homes. Also according to the agreement, Turkey is to establish 12 observation posts, creating a mini buffer zone to contain areas in Afrin held by the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG). The goals are to separate Aleppo from nearby Idlib province, which is controlled mainly by the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), and to halt any YPG aspirations to move westward in Idlib province and create a corridor to the Mediterranean Sea. So far, Turkey has established six of the 12 outposts it has promised, but Moscow wants to speed up the work. Each outpost is designed to accommodate one mechanized infantry company. Almost two Turkish mechanized brigades (nearly 1,400 troops) reinforced with tanks, engineering and construction units are already there, and more are expected. Turkeys efforts to set up these outposts gained impetus following President Recep Tayyip Erdogans phone conversation Jan. 31 with Russian President Vladimir Putin. The six outposts ready so far are in Salwa (north of Idlib), Tal-Tukan (the southern suburb of Idlib city), al-Ais (south of Aleppo), Qal'at Sama'an and Sheikh Aqeel (west of Aleppo), and al-Surman, near the strategic city of Maarat al-Numan. The Tal-Tukan site is just 4 miles west of the area controlled by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The Turkish Armed Forces (TSK) sent a column of more than 70 armored vehicles to Taftanaz after a similar column went to al-Ais and began settling in at the old air base in the area. The al-Ais column took artillery and rocket fire from Iranian militias (and perhaps the Syrian army) and then encountered a bomb-laden vehicle. One Turkish soldier and a civilian worker were killed; six soldiers and two civilians were wounded. The column sent to Taftanaz was not challenged. Reports say Turkish helicopters will be based in the former air base at Taftanaz, and communications with observation outposts in Idlib will be provided from there. Obviously, this means Russia will at least keep the Idlib airspace open to Turkish military helicopters. The latest TSK column moved to Maarat al-Numan via the Cilvegozu border crossing. That column, which had to move 68 miles, consisted of armored personnel carriers, anti-mine protected vehicles, tactical wheeled armored vehicles, heavy construction machinery, power generators, modular construction elements and scores of trucks loaded with military equipment and supplies. The TSK is now expected to set up its seventh observation post, south of Idlib at Han Seyhun. It appears the TSK is creating a buffer between the Assad and Sunni opposition forces, initially in northern and eastern Idlib, and eventually to the south and southwest. Control of Idlib would enable at least some of the Syrian refugees in Turkey to settle in this buffer zone and impede a new migration wave to Turkey under pressure from the Assad regime, supported by Russia. Janet Basurto, the director of Iceserve 24, an information firm closely monitoring cease-fire efforts around Idlib, told Al-Monitor that to call Idlib a de-escalation zone would be a euphemism. Currently, the province is the center of the war, which is endangering more than 1 million internally displaced people and another 1 million Idlib residents living there. The fighting has already prompted a wave of migration, but the most defining fact of the Idlib situation is that civilians are the victims of indiscriminate fire by the Syrian government, Russian forces and militant groups. Idlib is the largest territory controlled by Sunni opposition groups, which settled there with their families. How the war in Syria will conclude and with what kind of a political settlement will decide the fate of Idlib, the last bastion of the Sunni opposition. Why does Moscow insist on Turkey completing the outposts quickly? Russia expert Kerim Has of Moscow State University told Al-Monitor that Russias objective is to separate the Sunni opposition groups around Idlib from radical outfits and bring them to the negotiating table, while also herding all the terror groups that reject the cease-fire into one pocket and eventually neutralize them. He also thinks that Russias permission for Turkey to operate at Idlib has to do with the continuing so-called Operation Olive Branch that began in Afrin. He believes that the operation could turn toward Manbij without entering the heart of Afrin city. Under those circumstances, he predicts, Moscow could well agree to such an operation at Manbij once Turkey erodes the military prowess of opposition forces on the ground. Today, there are two different jihadi fronts active west of the Euphrates. The first is made up of radicals neither Turkey nor Russia wants to have around; this group is determined to resist around Idlib. The other is the moderate front Turkey controls that operates against the Kurdish YPG. Russia wants the Turkish army to ramp up the pressure on radicals and compel them to join the ranks of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) on the Afrin front. Turkey has worked with the FSA and considers it a moderate opposition group. So in other words, while Russian and regime forces are pounding Idlib, Moscow also hopes to guide Sunni armed resistance to a moderate stance through Turkeys de-escalation operations and bring them into the pool of moderates in Afrin. Bluntly speaking, Russia believes the Assad regime will control Idlib long before Turkey achieves its goals. Turkey will not be able to bargain to turn over Afrin in return for Idlib. Basurto of Iceserve24, which provides businesses with strategic information and analyses, agrees with Has' assessment. Seemingly, Russia approves of Turkeys presence in northern Idlib, not due to its effectiveness to initiate or monitor a cease-fire, but to separate the Afrin region from Idlib until the government forces are done with all the militant groups, and [then to] focus all its attention in the YPG and SDF areas. The SDF is the Syrian Democratic Forces, a Kurd-Arab alliance supported by the United States but considered an affiliate of a terrorist group by Turkey. Basurto also addressed Russian domestic politics and the March 18 presidential election there, saying, To simplify the situation, Russia aims to secure [the Assad regime's] gains across Syria, ensure [Moscow's] interests in the country and at the same time protect [Putin's] image amid a presidential election campaign in Russia. Securing Idlib will signal another victorious win for Assad following eastern Aleppo's liberation in late 2016 and Deir ez-Zor in late 2017. An Idlib free of radical militants will trigger discussions that the Syrian war is nearing its end, leaving only the Kurdish question and Turkeys presence in Syria to be addressed." Whether those situations are resolved diplomatically or militarily remains to be seen, she added. Turkeys Syria adventure is heading into deeper uncertainty, facing obscure American and Russian moves and the bitter realities of the field. The idea was to finish the operation against the Kurds in Afrin quickly and march on to Manbij. Then, Turkey's military planned to cross to the eastern side of the Euphrates River and deliver major blows to the main body of the Kurdish "democratic autonomy" in areas like Ras al-Ain and Tell Abyad, where Kurds do not have ethnic majorities. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is determined to put an end to the de facto Kurdish autonomous body in Syria. However, Syria upped the ante this week by agreeing to send its supporting militias to back the Kurds in Afrin. As for the United States, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson's Feb. 16 visit to Ankara somewhat improved relations with Turkey relations that were heading into an abyss because of issues like Fethullah Gulen, the trial of an Iranian-Turkish businessman in New York and the Pentagons alliance with Syrian Kurds against the Islamic State (IS). During Tillerson's visit, the United States acknowledged Turkeys security concerns and agreed to form a committee to find a joint solution, which no doubt contributed to the optimistic mood. Ankara demanded that the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG) be removed immediately from Manbij, but agreed that Turkish and American soldiers can jointly provide security a constructive move, despite Erdogan's occasionally tough rhetoric. Tillerson adopted a reconciliatory stand by saying the committee will make Manbij a priority. But Tillerson also hinted that joint security might not work in the areas liberated from IS by saying, The reason for us to base soldiers in Manbij is to ensure that the town remains under the control of our partners. That's a sticky sentence. The United States considers the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) a partner. Playing a large role in the SDF is the YPG, which Turkey considers a terrorist-affiliated group. Will the United States remove the YPG from authority in Manbij and seek an interim solution that would appease Turkey? Perhaps in return for Manbij, the United States could extend its presence east of the Euphrates River. The United States has demonstrated so far that it will hold on to the areas it now controls in Syria. One signal that the United States plans to stay put came when the Pentagon designated funding for the SDF separately from money for the so-called Syrian "border force" in its 2019 budget. During a Feb. 13 visit to Kuwait, Tillerson stated how much leverage the United States has against the Syrian regime. "The United States and the coalition forces that are working with us to defeat [IS] today control 30% of the Syrian territory, and control a large amount of [the] population, and control a large amount of Syrias oil fields, There have been suggestions that Ankara and Washington could harmonize their anti-Assad efforts. But would that encourage Ankara to give up its goals east of the Euphrates? Not likely. And anyway, it doesn't appear that Erdogan would be satisfied with controlling only Manbij. At this juncture, field realities challenge Ankaras intentions. Now that Syria is mobilizing pro-government militias to defend Afrin, all calculations could be upended. Erdogan fully trusts Putin to keep the Syrian army away from Afrin. Is that what Erdogan spokesman Ibrahim Kalin had in mind when he denied reports of an accord between the YPG and the Syrian army? When a convoy of pickup trucks armed with anti-aircraft guns moved from the Shiite towns of Zehra and Muhur to Afrin, there was speculation that it might have been a move designed by Iran and Syria, which were unhappy with Russia easing its restrictions on Turkey. If Ankara hits a dead end at Afrin, its plans for Manbij will also be blocked. Meanwhile, the Kurds are saying they aren't short of solutions. They can also invite the Syrian army to Manbij, as they did in Afrin. To block Turkeys plans, the local Manbij Military Council may prefer to hand over the area to the Syrian army. The Kurds want to illustrate that they don't lack alternatives if they dont get robust, reliable protection from the United States. Although they resent Moscow giving Turkey the green light on Afrin, the Kurds did not hesitate to negotiate with Damascus. As Russia and Damascus are allies, the Kurds may still consider Russia a viable alternative to the United States. What happens next at Manbij could become a test of the US partnership with the SDF. Turkeys domination of Jarablus, which it liberated from IS in 2016, is not the same as taking control of Manbij, which was saved by other forces. The people of Manbij who lived first under Islamist groups and then under IS, and who now are trying out "democratic autonomy" can't be expected to welcome Turkey with open arms when they see Ankara as the sponsor of groups that ruled them. If a new army is going to take over their town, it is natural for the people to prefer their own national army. The Manbij civilian authority comprises 13 committees made up of 71 Arabs, 43 Kurds, 10 Turkmens, eight Circassians, one Armenian and one Chechen, according to their population ratios. The Kurds are disturbed because their population and political strength aren't being considered in the bargaining for Manbij. Kardo Bokani, the media coordinator for the Democratic Society Movement, which governs Rojava (Syrian Kurdistan) and is the driving force behind the autonomy project, said the Manbij bargaining bears strategic importance for the Kurds. In the US handling of Rojava, we noted the differences between the White House and the Pentagon. Although the White House was more inclined toward Turkey, the Pentagon with the commanders who contributed to the defeat of IS was inclined toward the Kurds of Rojava. When there is discrepancy between the political and military quarters about who to support, military commanders may well have the final say, Bokani told Al-Monitor. Given the hard-line statements by American generals at Manbij, and US attacks against pro-regime forces at Deir ez-Zor, it is very likely the Americans will stay in Manbij. The worst scenario would be the withdrawal of US troops from the town, as the Russians did at Afrin. If that would be the case, the same scenario as Afrin could be staged also at Manbij. Can the Kurds give up their aims to control Manbij to safeguard their gains east of the Euphrates? For the time being, the Kurds say they will not give up their gains to defend American interests. But the seven-year Syrian civil war has amply demonstrated that nothing is impossible in Syria. Could anybody have anticipated that the Americans would set up a partnership with an organization (SDF/YPG) affiliated with the Kurdistan Workers Party, which Washington sees as a tool of the Syrian regime in addition to being on the US terror list? Could anyone have imagined that Iranian-trained forces, which the Kurds don't trust, would join ranks with the YPG? Did anyone think they would ever see the YPG and Syrian flags in the same demonstration? These things must be truly difficult for Turkey to fathom. When Lebanese Armed Forces commander Gen. Joseph Aoun asked what his troops should do if Israel violated Lebanese waters, Prime Minister Saad Hariri promptly responded, You shoot at them. The maritime dispute with Israel is dominating Lebanese politics as the US State Departments David Satterfield continues his three-week shuttle diplomacy between the two countries to reach a common ground, or at least prevent the dispute from spiraling out of control. Hariris forceful statement should be viewed through a Lebanese lens and seen as a rejoinder to last weeks speech by Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah, who offered his armed group as a guarantee that Israel will not intrude in Lebanese waters in the southern border area. Lebanon worries that Israel could use its operations in the Karish gas field to perform directional drilling that would beat Lebanon to the exploration of the adjacent and contested Block 9. Lebanons exclusive economic zone map, published in March 2013, includes a small triangular area contested by the two countries, and Beirut prioritized Block 9, which juts into the contested zone, in the first round of offshore licensing. After Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman on Jan. 31 called Lebanese exploration of Block 9 as provocative, the two sides began to trade threats. This heightened level of tension prompted Lebanon to be on Washingtons radar once again with the visit of the first US secretary of state to Beirut since John Kerry in June 2014. It also signaled the resumption of the 2012-16 mediation by the State Department that was led by Frederic Hof and later Amos Hochstein. Secretary of State Rex Tillersons visit to Beirut on Feb. 15 seems to be rather motivated by three priorities: securing a smooth flow of Mediterranean gas; protecting US companies in Israel and Cyprus from any potential conflict; and preventing a scenario where Hezbollah takes charge of the maritime dispute with Israel. Tillerson spent five hours in Beirut traveling from one headquarters to the other to meet the troika of President Michel Aoun, parliament Speaker Nabih Berri and Hariri, who had to meet numerous times to reach a consensus on how to respond to the US mediation. Berri represents the hawkish voice that focuses on deterring Israel, and Hariri the pragmatic one who said during the press briefing with Tillerson that the Lebanese government is open to a solution that will be fair to us and fair to everyone. However, it is becoming clear that the US mediation has reached an impasse once again. Lebanons idea to have the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon take the lead on demarcating the maritime border requires a UN Security Council decision to expand the mandate of the UN peacekeeping forces. Israel wants to build a wall according to the Blue Line, or the UN-mediated line of the Israeli withdrawal in 2000, while Beirut wants the land border to be according to the 1923 demarcation line between Lebanon and Palestine. These technical discussions mean that the dispute between the two countries is over 860 square kilometers (330 square miles) of water and 13 points on the land border. The United States agrees with Lebanon that a border deal should be reached before Israel builds a security wall. Satterfield first offered leaders in Beirut what is known as the Hof line, or the deal that Hof shared separately with Lebanese and Israeli delegations in London in April 2012, which gives Lebanon 60% of the disputed 860 square meters. Satterfield then came back with a second offer giving Lebanon 75%. However, the response was that the Lebanese waters are not negotiable. In return, Satterfield carried a counteroffer to Israel this week, which is using the regularly held UN-sponsored tripartite meeting between the Lebanese and Israeli armies in Ras al-Naqoura as a back channel to demarcate the maritime border, a process that was discussed in December. The Lebanese government suggested that the United States can take part in these meetings as a neutral observer, which might require the attendance of the military attache in the US Embassy in Lebanon as an option. While Nasrallah considered that the United States is not an honest mediator, he had a subdued tone compared with July 2011, when he said, Whoever impinges our future oil installations in Lebanese territorial waters, we will impinge their oil facilities. Nasrallah said Feb. 16, If Lebanons higher defense council asks us to halt the work of Israels oil and gas platforms, we could do so within hours. He basically put the decision of confrontation on the maritime border in the hands of the defense council, where his allies have a clear majority, instead of the Lebanese government, where such a decision might not be made without a political crisis. Satterfield is not expected back in Washington until early March, which means he has two weeks to push for a potential breakthrough. Next month, or as soon as a replacement is confirmed, Satterfield is expected to move on from his position as acting secretary of state for Near East affairs. The State Department should be thinking about designating an official with the gravitas of Satterfield to follow up on the mediation since this contentious issue will not go away anytime soon and could escalate if the regional dynamics change at some point. While this level of diplomatic involvement might not always be needed, the United States should keep these actors engaged and their calculations in check. Hezbollah does not want to give the impression of conceding to Israel, and the Lebanese government wants to avoid the pitfall of directly negotiating with Israel. In return, there are no high stakes in this maritime dispute for Israel, which is not motivated to give a gift to Lebanon with nothing in return. Thats the core of the stalemate. The best-case scenario for the US mediation is to keep the tensions calm and have both sides adhere to the Feb. 9 commitment of Frances Total which owns 40% of the consortium operating Block 9 that it will not explore within 25 kilometers (15.5 miles) of the disputed areas. The maritime border has implications on the wider Lebanese-Israeli relations. However, both sides are satisfied with and invested in the peaceful status quo in south Lebanon. NAJAF, Iraq An exhibit of wax statues depicting some 68 Shiite clerics and political figures opened at a museum in Najaf last month. It is the first semipermanent installation of its kind in Iraq. Assil al-Talqani, the chairwoman of the Tourism and Antiquities Committee in the Najaf Governorate Council, told Al-Monitor at the Jan. 21 opening that the wax sculptures depict religious, political and cultural figures from Iraq and abroad who are connected to the predominately Shiite city of Najaf. Some were born in Najaf while others studied in the city, such as founder of the Shiite Hawza [Shiite seminary] Shaykh Tusi, Abu al-Qasim al-Khoei and Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr, she said, adding that the museum is a tourist landmark that promotes both cultural and religious tourism. Najaf Governor Louay al-Yasiri said during the opening ceremony that the statues will eventually move to a new museum once it is completed. Its construction began in 2011 and has yet to be finished. That the museum will be located in the holy city of Najaf, home to the top Shiite clerics, has raised controversy among both Sunnis and Shiites. Some denounced it as a violation of Sharia, which has strict teachings about idols and statues. In 2012, when the idea of the museum was conceived, many Shiite and Sunni scholars criticized the plans. "Even those dead people whose statues are displayed would have disapproved of this," Shiite cleric Ali Bashir al-Najafi told Al-Monitor. Sunni Muslims forbid the erection of statues and consider the wax sculptures idols. The museum has been also criticized for displaying only Shiite sculptures. The wax figures waited in the basement of the Art Gallery in Najaf until the local culture and tourism committee prepared them for display in the museum. Some moderate clerics view the museum as cultural enrichment for the religious city, a display that promotes openness to the world. Hadi al-Hisnawi, the representative of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani in Karbala, told Al-Monitor that wax sculptures are acceptable because they contribute to cultural knowledge by introducing important figures to new generations. He pointed to a fatwa permitting owning carved statues that do not promote polytheism or corruption and that uphold religion and ethics. Hisnawi stressed that Islam does not prohibit opening museums and erecting statues if they are a way to preserve history and monuments and serve to promote knowledge. Ali Mirza, a member of the Najaf Provincial Council, told Al-Monitor, I believe the museum is a tourism and cultural landmark that promotes both cultural and religious tourism, which would bring a great deal of money into the city of Najaf. The museum is likely to attract tourists from abroad as well as students and academics. He added, Not one Shiite religious figure despite their significance in religion was immortalized under Saddam, given the regimes sectarian policies. I believe the time has come to honor those pioneers." Writer and Islamic scholar Ali Mumin told Al-Monitor, The statues were executed in a specialized factory in the Iranian city of Esfahan. The museum is one of a kind in the Middle East. He went on, The precision of these statues is admirable. They are as good as the statues in the wax museum in London. They are so [realistic] that you'd almost think they'd talk to you. These are not statues to be idolized, so therefore they are permissible. They were made in Iran, which is governed by jurists, and are displayed in Najaf, which is considered the capital of Islamic jurists. This means that these wax figures are legitimate despite some opinions to the contrary. Yousef Muhsen, who writes for Iraq's Al-Sabaah newspaper, told Al-Monitor, The exhibit is a bold move that disregards several religious jurisprudences. This move further highlights the important heritage of the city of Najaf. The future museum will have various rooms, each one dedicated to one important historical figure and including some of the individual's works, such as copies of his publications, photos and his biography." There is no doubt that the wax statues of Najaf are challenging the conservative stereotypes of this historic city. Will it encourage other cities in Iraq to follow suit? DP World said its Doraleh Container Terminal was illegally seized Friday by the Djibouti government in attempts to force the terminal operator to renegotiate the terms of its concession. DP World said the Djibouti government on Friday illegally seized control of its Doraleh Container Terminal. The Dubai-based terminal operator said it designed, built and, since 2006, operated the terminal pursuant to a concession awarded by the government in 2006. DP World holds a 33 percent equity stake in the port, which has a capacity to handle 1.25 million TEUs. Seizure of the terminal under a decree from Djiboutis president is the culmination the governments campaign to force DP World to renegotiate the terms of the concession, DP World said. The Doraleh terminal is the largest employer and biggest source of revenue in Djibouti, and has operated at a profit every year. According to ocean carrier schedule and capacity database BlueWater Reporting, DP World Doraleh is called by 10 of the 14 direct region-to-region liner services that frequent the Port of Djibouti: the OCEAN Alliances Red Sea Express 2 (REX2); Maersk Lines Horn of Africa and MECL loops; MSCs Australia Express and jointly operated EPIC1/IPAK service with CMA CGM and Hapag-Lloyd; CMA CGMs Mona Express, joint Swahili Express (SWAX2/GIA) with Emirates, and joint India Middle East Mediterranean Express (INDIAMED/IPM) with COSCO; and PILs Red Sea Gulf Service (RGS) and joint Red Sea Express (RSS/RES3) loop with COSCO and Yang Ming. DP World said, We demand that the government will cease its unlawful conduct and continue to work as partners with us in the same spirit of cooperation that has been in place for the last 18 years, which has yielded hundreds of millions of dollars of direct and indirect benefits to Djibouti and enhanced its attractiveness as a leading investment destination in East Africa. The terms of DP Worlds concession were found fair and reasonable by a London Court of International Arbitration tribunal, the terminal operator said. Since December 2017, Djibouti has sought to enforce the law against the concession contract, and made a final demand that the contract be renegotiated by Feb. 21, DB World said. On Thursday, the contract was terminated by presidential decree and the assets of the terminal were expropriated. We consider the law, the attempt of the government to enforce its terms, the purported termination and expropriation to be in breach of the governments obligations under its agreements with us, in force since 2004, and international law, DP World said, adding how Djiboutis conduct was oppressive and cynical. It said the country had failed in attempts to unravel the contracts by alleging they were corrupt both before the High Court of England & Wales and before an arbitration tribunal in London. It said it commenced a new arbitration on Feb. 20, seeking a declaration that the contracts are valid and binding on the government and to obtain urgent interim relief. Djibouti is holding legislative elections Friday, according to the Voice of America (VOA). It noted that there are deepening concerns that democracy in the East African nation isnt working and that the main opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Renewal and Development (MRD), said it will not participate in the legislative elections. The current president of Djibouti, Ismail Omar Guelleh, has held office for almost two decades, making him one of Africas longest serving leaders, according to the VOA. In the most recent presidential election, in 2016, he won more than 86 percent of the vote, the VOA said. He succeeded his uncle, who led for 22 years following independence from French colonial rule. The National Assembly, Djiboutis legislative body, has 65 seats and also holds significant power. With the opposition boycotting the election, the candidates for the legislature will represent the ruling party. Despite being one of Africas smallest countries, Djibouti is strategically located where the Red Sea meets the Gulf of Aden. The U.S., France, China and Italy each have bases in Djibouti, giving it an outsized footprint in a region with much larger economies and more advanced militaries, the VOA said. The Republican Party currently controls the White House and both chambers of Congress, while the Supreme Court has a 5-4 conservative majority something David Hogg, a student at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, pointed out during an interview with his classmates on Sunday's "Meet the Press." Joe Biden is reportedly pondering a 2020 run against President Donald Trump, who has been accused of having blood on his hands regarding the high school shooting in Parkland, Florida by, among others, David Hogg , one of the surviving students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, who has become the media face of those pushing increased gun control after the tragedy: Responding to Trump's tweet, Hogg said: "How dare you. You are in that exact position right now, and you want to look back on our history and blame the Democrats? That's disgusting. "You're the president," he continued. "You're supposed to bring this nation together, not divide us. How dare you. Children are dying, and their blood is on your hands because of that." Parenthetically, young Mr. Hogg's mother, Rebecca Boldrick, is an ardent anti-Trumper with frequent Facebook posts sliming our 45th president, one of which has a picture of son David sitting at a CNN anchor desk during a studio tour. It might be assumed that her son started with a similar anti-Trump bias even before the shooting. Young Mr. Hogg's emotional statement notwithstanding, if there is anyone who has blood on his hands because of the shooting at his high school, it is the former vice president, who was the sponsor of the legislation that made Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School a gun-free zone and David Hogg and his fellow students sitting ducks for an armed predator. What's stopping teachers from bringing guns to work right now? The Gun-Free School Zones Act of 1990. Sponsored by then-Sen. Joe Biden and signed into law by then-President George H.W. Bush the law makes it illegal for anyone "to knowingly possess a firearm" within 1,000 feet of a school zone... Could the Supreme Court overturn the Gun-Free School Zones Act? Maybe. They did it before. Five years after passage, the court declared the law unconstitutional under the Commerce Clause. But Congress amended the bill and President Bill Clinton signed it back into law in 1996. The Supreme Court has not ruled on the issue ever since. Perhaps they should. President Trump as a candidate opposed the idea of schools being gun-free zones: Donald Trump likes the idea of teachers bearing arms in the K-12 classroom. "I will get rid of gun-free zones on schools you have to," the Republican nominee told a crowd at a campaign rally in Burlington, Vt., in 2016. "My first day, it gets signed, okay? My first day. There's no more gun-free zones." His short-sighted optimism aside, that seems even less likely now amid an emotional tide that has cast reason, logic, facts, and common sense aside. Why should we learn what the Israelis already know: that the only way to protect our schoolchildren from a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun? Instead, we irrationally put the onus on guns like the AR-15, which, contrary to media and political hype, is not an assault weapon. Assault is a behavior and not a weapon, and further restricting the access of law-abiding potential victims to defensive firearms is not the answer. The fact is that there has been a sharp spike in school shootings since Joe Biden sponsored the Gun-Free School Zones Act of 1990. Prior to Gun Free Zone Act: During the first decade of the 20th century there were 15 (1903 (2 shootings), 04 (3), 05 (2), 07 (2), 08 (2), 09 (4). During the 1910s there were 19 (1910 (3 shootings), 1911, 12 (2), 14, 15 (2), 16 (2), 17 (2), 18 (2), 19 (3). During the 1920s there were 10 (1920 (7 shootings), 22 (2), 26). During the 1930s there were 9 (1930, 31, 34, 35, 36 (2), 37 (2), 38). During the 1940s there were 8 (1940 (2 shootings), 42, 46, 47, 48, 49 (2)). During the 1950s there were 17 (1950, 51 (4), 52 (2), 53, 54 (2), 55, 56 (2), 57, 58 (2), 59). During the 1960s there were 18 (1960 (3 shootings), 61 (2), 66 (4), 67, 68 (4), 69 (4)). During the 1970s there were 30 (1970 (5 shootings), 71 (2), 73 (2), 74 (4), 75 (3), 76 (3), 77, 78 (7), 79 (3)). During the 1980s there were 39 (1980 (4 shootings), 81 (3), 82 (3), 83, 84 (4), 85 (5), 86 (5), 87 (5), 88 (6), 89 (3)). After the Gun-Free Zone Act: During the 1990s there were 63 (1990 (2 shootings), 91 (6), 92 (7), 93 (10), 94 (10), 95 (4), 96 (7), 97 (6), 98 (7), 99 (6)). During the 1st decade there were 60 (2000 (5 shootings), 01 (5), 02 (7), 03 (4), 05 (5), 06 (11), 07 (5), 08 (11), 09 (7)) During the 2010s (as of 14 February 2018) the total number is 146 shootings (2010 (11 shootings), 11 (7), 12 (11), 13 (26), 14 (36), 15 (21), 16 (15), 17 (9), 18 (10)). School shootings are preventable. As much as Americans are reluctant to turn their schools into what critics might call armed camps, it would be a better situation than the free-fire zones that exist today. Would allowing guns in school be dangerous? We allow guns in schools right now by not having secure entrances; by not heeding warnings from those who did see something and did say something; and by not having adequate armed security on campus, including armed teachers. When citizens with guns were nearby, school shootings have been cut short: Few Americans are aware that in an October 1997 shooting spree at a Pearl, Miss., high school that left two students dead, assistant principal Joel Myrick retrieved a gun from his car and immobilized the shooter until police arrived, preventing further killings. Or, in another school shooting in January 2002 at the Appalachian School of Law in Virginia, a disgruntled former student killed Law Dean L. Anthony Sutin, associate professor Thomas Blackwell and a student. Two of the three Virginia law students who overpowered the gunman were armed, preventing further deaths. Not only would armed security in the schools do more than kumbaya-singing wishful thinking, but the mere uncertainty of whether the shooter would face return fire might deter such crimes. Killers love gun-free zones, which is why the shooter at an Aurora, Colorado movie theater picked a particular one. It is Joe Biden who is in a major way responsible for making our schools free-fire zones for armed predators. It is Joe Biden who has blood on his hands. Daniel John Sobieski is a freelance writer whose pieces have appeared in Investor's Business Daily, Human Events, Reason Magazine, and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications. Lawrence S. Bacow, one of the most experienced and respected leaders in American higher education, will become the 29th president of Harvard University on July 1. After Harvard University's president Drew Gilpin Faust announced her retirement effective at the end of the 2017-18 school year, the school named Lawrence S. Bacow as her successor . Currently the Hauser Leader-in-Residence at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government's Center for Public Leadership, Bacow served with distinction for 10 years as President of Tufts University, where he was known for his dedication to expanding student opportunity, fostering innovation in education and research, enhancing collaboration across schools and disciplines, and spurring consideration of how universities can best serve society. The announcement continues, describing Bacow's prestigious education, outstanding academic accomplishments, impressive career initiatives, and interesting personal background. He's a seemingly excellent and uncontroversial choice. Seemingly. Because this is now, when even stating 2 +2 = 4 can bring a response that this answer is arbitrarily assigned and that multiple answers can be correct depending on...blah, blah, blah. You know the drill. And so the folks who reject merit as a qualifier, whose only criteria are advancing (certain) diversity, pluralism, and multiculturalism, erupted at the announcement, whining that Bakow is eek! another Harvard "white privileged male" and an economist, with even the bland all-American name of Lawrence. So white-skin privileged toxic male will lead Harvard. Again. But...but...Bacow is "[t]he son of immigrant parents his father a refugee from the pogroms of Eastern Europe, his mother a survivor of Auschwitz Bacow has long been devoted to education's vital role in enabling pursuit of the American dream." Bacow's parents survived the worst type of living hell in Europe, where some of the few who emerged alive from its evils managed to immigrate legally to America and, with great determination, overcome many unimaginable obstacles. Bacow is a first-generation American, a child of immigrants but not the right kind of immigrants to the diversifiers, apparently. He's still white. And male. Oh, and Bacow believes in the American dream. Oh, no! Another mark against him think the diversifiers. By the way, although not mentioned but implied if you know history is Bacow's minority status. He is Jewish. Yeah, Jews are a minority less than 2% of the population, therefore much fewer in number and a lower percentage than other officially designated minorities such as black Americans and people from countries conquered by Spain and south of the U.S. wall-less border. But apparently, that is irrelevant at best. Because Bacow is is Jewish. And white. And male. How ironic that Harvard, along with other so-called elite universities, for years practiced its own version of diversity, the notorious Jewish quota system, to limit the number of qualified Jews under the often not so thinly disguised rationale of geographic diversity. Today, diversity is the excuse used by these same institutions to limit the more highly qualified Jews and Asians and other whites of whatever ancestry in favor of less qualified other minorities. Because diversity is merit. Further confusing Harvard's demanding diversifiers, Faust, Harvard's present president, also has white skin. At least it is draped on a female. However, when she assumed the post nearly 11 years ago, she: ... wanted to be the president of Harvard, but I recognized that there was this kind of parallel track where I was being the woman president of Harvard in a way that mattered. Ah, identity "that mattered." Solving this dilemma can be explained only by another Harvard student in the Harvard student newspaper, The Crimson, in Harvardese thinking. Follow along. The decision to name Lawrence S. Bacow Harvard's 29th president will crystallize much of the same disagreement that defines the modern Democratic Party. His supporters will point to his track record as an environmental studies professor, a skilled fundraiser, and founder of Tufts University's Office of Institutional Diversity. Critics will note his ties to large corporations and impute a pragmatism unsuited for radical reform. Time will tell how these debates unfold. In the immediate, however, the community and public have become embroiled in another development: that Bacow's selection marks "a return to white male leadership." ... In its coverage this past week, The Crimson has already detailed the range of relevant attitudes among campus ethnic organizations, which at various moments have called for Latino representation among the presidential candidates, requests for a strong affirmative action advocate, and demands for a champion of ethnic studies. In contrast, someone has yet to probe the connection between these resurgent identity discussions and our liberal sensibilities: specifically, how we resolve the old dilemma of "process" versus "outcome" in the context of representation. ... Calling attention to the rift between outcome and process-oriented perspectives is a timely project, particularly in the wake of similar liberal indecision following the 2016 election. Then, there was much excitement about a woman snagging the nomination of a major political party, which many cast as a sign of social progress. When Donald Trump won, Democrats had to parse through the wreckage in search of lessons. One crucial (yet unvoiced) question from that soul-searching was what to make of Clinton's womanhood. Did her presence which marked a widening of the horizon of representation still reflect some sort of progress? Process liberals would say so; outcome liberals might disagree. ... All the same, I say we stay positive. That Bacow is our incoming president may well prove to be a win-win scenario. Either he takes up the mantle of progress that some had hoped a woman of color would, or he forces us to finally acknowledge and adjudicate our liberal indecisions. Got it? Perhaps all should recall Dr. Martin Luther King, Junior's powerful "I Have a Dream" speech, given at the March On Washington 54 years ago. I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. Oh, right. He was a male. Though a person of color. But still, male. Sigh. William Weld, former governor of Massachusetts and 2016 Libertarian Party V.P. candidate, has filed suit in federal court in Boston, claiming that the state's method of allocating all the electoral votes to the winner of the state's popular vote violates the U.S. Constitution. It is part of similar coordinated lawsuits filed in Texas, California, South Carolina. These states along with Massachusetts represent two Democratic states and two Republican states. The argument is that these states represent the situation nationwide, where the voters for the losing candidate have no voice in selecting the electoral voters and thus no voice in electing the president. The predominant method in America for counting votes in presidential elections violates the United States Constitution; it also distorts presidential campaigns, facilitates targeted outside interference in our elections, and ensures that a substantial number of citizen voters are disenfranchised when their votes are tallied in early November, only to be discarded when it really counts in mid-December. The argument is that winner take all (WTA) violates the First and Fourteenth Amendments because voters are not treated equally. The Texas lawsuit, brought by David Boies, attorney for Al Gore in the 2000 Florida recount lawsuits, also alleges that Texas's system of WTA discriminates against black and Hispanic voters. The plaintiff is the "League of Latin American Citizens." Why not just the League of American Citizens? Maine and Nebraska allocate by congressional districts, while the rest use the WTA system. The fair way to allocate the electoral votes is for every state to reform its system to award the votes based on the winner of the congressional district in each state getting the electoral vote for that district. This would mirror the House of Representatives. But the lawsuits seek to award the electoral votes proportionally by the percentage of the popular vote in the state. The lawsuits specifically oppose awarding electoral votes by congressional districts. The current system disenfranchises many voters. One could win by a few votes, as Bush did in Florida, and win the state. Also, many states such as Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, and Pennsylvania have conservative Republican congressional districts, but their votes are usually swamped by the votes in cities such as Detroit, Cleveland, Chicago, and Philadelphia, where the Democrat machines turn out impossible-to-believe majorities for the Democrat nominee. Thus, the Democrat-controlled cities usually wipe out the votes of the more conservative counties in each state. The issue is whether to reform the electoral system and, if so, how. The current system favors the Democrats because of their lock on states such as California, New York, Illinois, New Jersey, Oregon, and Washington. President Trump won because of the close elections in the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Ohio, and Michigan. Reform would force the parties and candidates to campaign in all 50 states instead of the candidates now focusing on the battleground states. The reform would also force each party to contest each election in every congressional district. Now many congressional district elections are not contested by the other party because of gerrymandering. This reform should be done by each state, since the Constitution allows each state to decide how to award its electoral votes, but each state should follow the same system. But the lawsuits ask the federal courts to make the policy instead of the legislatures of each state. The 14th Amendment provision of equal protection is the vehicle for federal judges to make policy and legislate. The complaints cite Williams v. Rhodes, 339 U.S. 23 (1968), where the Court held that the 14th amendment equal protection provision applies to the state's system of selecting electors. The complaints allege that the principle of "one man, one vote" requires that WTA renders the votes of those voting for the losing candidate meaningless, and therefore it violates the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. This means that a WTA state places greater value on one voter than another. The complaints do admit that a decision by a Virginia federal court in Williams v. State Board of Elections, 288 F. Supp. 622 (E.D. Va 1968), affirmed by the Supreme Court without opinion at 393 U.S. 320 (1969), held that Virginia could allocate its electoral votes by WTA. The district court considered arguments of "one man, one vote" and equal protection similar to Weld's complaint and held: The merits and advantages of the plaintiffs' thesis are readily recognizable. We do not discount or deride their motives, but we are of the opinion that a compulsory compliance with their demand or any other proposed limitation on the selection by the State of its presidential electors would require a Constitutional amendment[.] ... Whatever the pattern, to succeed it must be nationwide[.] ... Any modification of the electoral college system should be on a uniform national basis in order to avoid creating additional inequities on an interstate basis. The responsible way is for a constitutional amendment to specify proportional allocation by congressional district so that each state follows the same procedure. It is an important issue that should be debated in the legislatures of each state and in Congress. It should not be decided by a federal judge based on arguments from attorneys. Image: michael_swan via Flickr. The Steele dossier scandal's tentacles are reaching all the way to Trumpophobic John McCain, via a close associate of his. The longtime aide to Senator McCain who flew to England to get a copy of the Steele dossier and speed it along to the FBI in 2016 has clammed up and asserted his right to avoid self-incrimination. More threads are unraveling in what may be the biggest political scandal in history: the use of intelligence agencies to spy on a rival-party presidential campaign and then unseat a duly elected president. The blowback from the Steele dossier, the multi-million-dollar operation of the Hillary campaign and the DNC, may reach all the way to Trump-haters in the GOP. Catherine Herridge reports for Fox News: A former State Department official and associate of Sen. John McCain has invoked his Fifth Amendment right not to testify in connection with questions from the House Intelligence Committee about the anti-Trump dossier's Russian sources, according to a law enforcement source. David J. Kramer, who is a central player in how the unverified Trump dossier made its way to the FBI in late 2016, testified before the committee in December in a closed-door session, indicating he had information about the dossier's sources. A subpoena was issued for mid-January, as first reported by The Washington Examiner. The law enforcement source confirmed, however, that Kramer did not appear and has exercised his Fifth Amendment rights. David Kramer greets Sen. Tim Kaine at the Halifax International Security Forum in November 2016. (Halifax International Security Forum.) Kramer has already spoken under oath about the dossier, however. This could present an obstacle to exercise of the Fifth Amendment. Yet Kramer gave a videotaped deposition last December in separate civil litigation against BuzzFeed about the dossier and his contact with the former British spy who compiled it, Christopher Steele. Steele was hired by opposition research firm Fusion GPS to write and research the dossier, with funding from the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign. According to British court records obtained by Fox News as part of its ongoing investigation of the Trump dossier, Kramer was personally briefed in late November 2016 by Steele in Surrey, England. After that briefing, Steele told the British court that an arrangement was made so that Fusion GPS co-founded by Glenn Simpson would provide hard copies of the dossier to McCain via Kramer. Shortly afterward, the dossier was given to the FBI, which already had its own copy from Steele. Information on the sources for the Steele dossier could well point to Russian intelligence. This could mean that those who facilitated the use of the dossier to harm President Trump during the election and afterward to generate the Mueller probe were at best dupes and at worst conspirators with the Russian intelligence operatives. It is the sort of thing that ought to attract investigation from a politically unbiased special counsel investigating Russian interference in the 2016 campaign. (Cough!) In a court of law, no inference of criminality is permitted by members of the jury, but in the court of public opinion, we are allowed to say this stinks to high heaven. David J. Kramer currently is housed at Arizona State University, where he is affiliated senior fellow at the McCain Institute for International Leadership. The longtime associate of Senator John McCain doesn't have to worry about his career after the senator leaves office, it would seem. Presumably, the McCain operative is funded by tax-exempt donations to the McCain Institute. I wonder who its funders are. Seems dirt-poor Haiti has no problem maintaining a consulate in Miami, nor wretched Belarus, nor tiny Antigua and Barbuda. Other countries, such as the Gambia, Singapore, Liberia, and Switzerland, maintain honorary consulates, usually because their need for one in Miami is minimal but necessary, and they know how to keep costs down. Well, not Venezuela, whose Florida consulate serves more than 102,000 of its nationals, most of whom fled the Chavista socialist horror show, and which has just been evicted as a deadbeat for not being able to cough up $142,119 in consular back rent, according to the Associated Press's Josh Goodman, a reliable, low-bias reporter, citing Caracas Capital's knowledgeable Russ Dallen. "The fact Venezuela can't come up with such a small amount of cash tells you what dire straits they're in," said Russ Dallen, a Miami-based investor specializing in Venezuelan bonds who discovered the eviction notice on Thursday. What it shows is how fast socialists blow through money to drive themselves into penury. If sovereign Venezuela can't cough up a lousy $142K to pay its back rent, what does it say about its fiscal condition after two decades of socialism? Already we know they have defaulted on their debt (from Russ Dallen, the same reliable source). Goodman did some reporting as well and found that the Chavistas actually once owned the building and then sold it for $70 million in 2005, in what was probably a tidy profit that could have paid around 42 months of rent if they hadn't wasted it on corruption, or paying Castro, or hiring bureaucrats, which is what they did. They earned a trillion dollars from the last decade's oil boom, and it's now come to this. The stunning thing is that they had to have seen it coming and just did nothing. Any other regime that finds itself similarly en-crisis-ed (to make up a word) hotfoots it over to the International Monetary Fund for some tough love and money or, if it's smart, initiates free-market reforms to attract investors and their money to wriggle out of such a crisis. Not Venezuela. It just doubles down and lets what happens happen, the better to Blame Gringo for its failures. Venezuela in fact is so resistant to cleaning up its act that it won't even let charity aid in to feed its starving people, so perhaps we shouldn't be surprised to see it doing nothing about paying its bills, even on such a sensitive matter as its diplomatic face to the international community. Its government loves socialism above anything else, even if its people starve and its diplomats get ignominiously kicked out for non-payment of rent. What we have here in this wretched, disgusting picture is not a government, but a cancer. It should be treated accordingly. Pocahontas speaks with a forked tongue At a February meeting of the National Congress of American Indians, Elizabeth Warren doubled down on her assertion that she is 1/32 American Indian. As to this claim, the liberal Washington Post, in a "Fact Checker" column of 2016, stated that it could come to no conclusion, that "there is no documented proof of Warren's self-proclaimed partial Native American heritage." So what does the senator from Massachusetts hang her feathered headdress on? Since she can provide no proof for her Indian heritage, the woman instead cites "family lore." In any court of law, this type of "evidence" is excluded as hearsay. Oh, yes, and she adds that she has high cheekbones. Well, that should certainly settle the matter, right? If you think Warren's imagining an Indian heritage for herself is the height of her delusion, you're wrong. Incredibly, she repeatedly says, "I never used my family tree to get a break or to get ahead." Although there is zero evidence that Warren has any Indian blood flowing through her veins, there's is plenty to refute her claim that her purported Indian heritage did not give her an advantage in being hired into the Ivy League. Let it be noted that Warren herself admits that she told the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard of her Indian claim. This is significant, to say the least. One would have to be totally oblivious to the fact that the Ivy League thirsts for candidates to fill its affirmative action quotas as much as a drowning man longs for a breath of air. In investigating Warren's background, the Boston Globe further noted that her "law degree from Rutgers University made her the only tenured Harvard Law School professor trained at an American public law school." The inference is inescapable. Warren saw the affirmative action train coming down the track, hopped aboard, and rode it to positions in the prestigious law schools of the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard. Does any honest person doubt this? But Warren says: "No. I rose to the top on my own brilliance." She heap bold. Much ink has been spilled in debating Elizabeth Warren's self-serving claim to Indian heritage. And attention has also been directed to the mocking of Warren by calling her Pocahontas, as President Trump and Howie Carr have done. But this is a distraction from the real issue, and that is affirmative action i.e., quotas for this-and-that group. In a sane world, a world that followed the Constitution or just one that merely obeyed civil rights legislation, a person with a parentage of 1/32 American Indian would never be given any extra consideration over anyone else. But today, that is not the case. Stated clearly as possible, quotas based on race, ethnic background, religion, sexual orientation, or sex are both unconstitutional and immoral. And it is quotas that Elizabeth Warren must be called out on, along with her blatant lies on her alleged Indian heritage and the obvious and unfair advantage it gave her in academia. The final one, the failure of the school's paid guard to go in there and confront the shooter, is the most stinging. There were a lot of horrible law enforcement failures in the aftermath of the Parkland school shooting. The FBI's missed tips were terrible. The sheriff's department's failure to notice repeated calls to the house were awful. An investigator for the Florida Department of Children and Families' declaration that all was well with Nikolas Cruz was unbelievable. The rest of the list is here . How could he have been so cowardly? Via Legal Insurrection, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel reports: The police officer assigned to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School resigned Thursday, under investigation for failing to enter the building as a gunman opened fire and killed 17 people. Sheriff Scott Israel said Deputy Scot Peterson should have "went [sic] in. Addressed the killer. Killed the killer." Peterson, 54, came under scrutiny after 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz entered the school with an AR-15 rifle and killed 14 students and three educators on Valentine's Day. Peterson has been a school resource officer at Stoneman Douglas since 2009. He began working for the sheriff's office in 1985. His annual salary in 2016 was $75,673.72, according to sheriff's office records. The thing is, I taught kids back when I lived in Los Angeles, teaching catechism, and was a member of the Church's child safety committee, commissioned with developing contingency plans for the unthinkable, even in a catechism setting. Having had the experience of teaching, all I can say is, I wouldn't want guns in the classroom. What I'd want are men with guns. Men with guns who aren't afraid to break things. Which is why the school security guard story is so disturbing. President Trump did bring up the issue of arming teachers, and he did it with a nuance he won't be given credit for: calling for the arming of teachers who are capable and willing to be armed and for whom arming is appropriate. He didn't say arm all teachers. He recognized that for a lot of us, being armed with guns in the classroom is absolutely out of the question. I taught nine-year-olds. Where would I put a gun for easy reach when, in that one-out-of-a-million chance that it's needed against a gunman? My desk drawer? My purse? I guarantee you, the nine-year-olds would eventually find it. My person? When I am frolicking around with the kids in some dancy game where it can be tripped off? Don't think so. Teaching is a major responsibility where one not only must impart knowledge, but have control of the classroom two difficult things right there to balance. The only way to get it right is to be absolutely prepared with the lesson, both in knowledge and in materials. I constantly toted tons of material to class to make sure every classroom need, from my own rehearsed script of the lesson to textbooks to music to art materials to first aid to extra quizzes and puzzles for rebel kids to maps to globes to posters and placards to game pieces to snacks for everyone, was met and ready. Having a gun added to that is just unthinkable. A gun is a major responsibility, not some small detail. It's one that requires utmost care and attention, and it's absolutely out of the question for many if not most teachers to have to include that as an extra responsibility and worry about it, too. It's asking too much, given the demands and attention required of teaching. There may be exceptions where arming teachers is appropriate, and those exceptions should be respected some rural teachers, some inner city teachers but it's just not right for most teachers whose mission is to focus hard on teaching as a primary mission. What I am getting at is that this is why we have armed guards. Teachers most certainly should know and have defensive contingency plans such as self-locking class doors and escape plans, but the most appropriate front line of defense is a dedicated armed guard. The guard focuses on protection. The teachers focus on teaching. This is why the guard the Parkland school had is such a sorry affair. Seriously, the guy, Scot Peterson, was paid to protect and defend the students from just such an attack, and he didn't. He was supposed to have given everyone peace of mind so that teaching could go on. That he didn't was a miserable failure. And that isn't the half of it. Apparently, he was just some sort of time-server. According to the Daily Beast's Scott Bixby: The sheriffs deputy who did nothing while Nikolas Cruz killed seventeen people also refused to share information on Cruz with state social services during a 2016 investigation into his home life. https://t.co/cvAXqtH3yA pic.twitter.com/PPn77edXCi Scott Bixby (@scottbix) February 23, 2018 There are arguments that asking anyone to put his life on the line is asking too much, and in some ways, it is. After all, those who were honored for doing so deserve all the honors they get for going above and beyond the call of duty, such as the three young ROTC students, at least one of whom died in uniform protecting his fellow classmates. That would be Peter Wang, who was appropriately honored by West Point for his heroism here. And yes, it was West Point's privilege to have him, not the other way around. Heroism is special. It's not a nine-to-five job. David A. French has a decent take on this on his Twitter account: 1. When you wear the uniform, you pledge to respond to a crisis with courage. 2. Some people will fail that test. 3. That failure is human but still must be punished. 4. But make that judgment with humility. Because none of us knows our true character until its tested. David French (@DavidAFrench) February 23, 2018 The bottom line is that if someone has a job that calls for heroism, he needs to be up to it. If he isn't, well, there are thousands of well paid desk jobs, even in law enforcement, just as available to him as the guard's job. Any argument that you can't require someone to risk his life is weak, if the actual job is to risk his life. Employment is always a personal choice. If you don't want to be a hero, you take a desk job, not the school protector's job. Firemen are paid to run toward the flames, not away from them, and they have a culture of being heroic. Someone who didn't would be a pariah in the firefighting world. Secret Service agents are paid to protect the president, with their lives if necessary. Why should they exist as an organization if they can't be trusted to do that? Where would we be if one of them had Peterson's self-protection-first ethic? Even computer security personnel are similarly situated in the need to be prepared. They get fired if they fail to protect companies against attack, because that's their job tons of boredom until a crisis breaks out. Peterson's job, his one job, was to protect the school. It wasn't to be a time-server. The money paid for his salary was money paid for nothing. Now he's doing the fat donut-cop thing and retiring, presumably on a bloated pension, while the families of the dead are left to pick up the pieces. This is why it's such a shameful failure that this guy thought of his own hide first, given the job nobody made him take. People depended on him. That needs to be an issue as the debate about how to prevent these incidents goes on. Maybe there ought to be some lawsuits, given the fraudulent holding of this job by a guy who didn't want to defend others. If guards can't be depended on as the first line of school defense, who can? The 5G Infrastructure Public Private Partnership (5G-PPP) and 5G Infrastructure Association (5G-IA) are set to provide public presentations on two days of MWC 2018, according to a press release from the organizations. For those who may not be aware, the 5G-PPP is a self-described joint initiative between the European Commission and the European information and communications technologies industry. 5G-IA, on the other hand, is a part of that partnership representing the private or industry side of the group. Presentations will start, beginning at around 11:00 am and concluding at around 1:45 pm local time, on the first day. That will include 5 speakers from various internal 5G-PPP members. With regard to specific topics to be covered and the speakers, the results of 5G-PPP Projects Phase 1, which were recently published in the European 5G Annual Journal 2017 will be a big part of the event. Topics will range from that to providing a new Pan-European 5G Trials Roadmap, key architecture recommendations, and a new White Paper centered around deployment of 5G vehicle to everything (V2X) technologies. As part of that, demonstrations from 5GCAR will start off each presentation, followed later by videos from 5G-MoNArch and 5G-XHaul with presentations from the latter two running from around 11:30 am to 12:30 pm local time. The full presentation will run, as mentioned above, until approximately 1:45 pm. For those attending the Barcelona event, this first set of presentations will be taking place in Hall 7, at Stand 7K17, at a joint 5G-IA and 5G-PPP booth. The second presentation will take place on the final day of the MWC event March 1 in Auditorium 4 of Hall 4, starting at 11:30 am local time. The final event will feature 5G-IA Secretary General Jean-Pierre Bienaime, with discussion centering around an overview of current 5G-PPP Projects and how they are expected to affect 5G and IoT applications. Last but not least, WINGS ICT Solutions representatives Panagiotis Demestichas and Dr. Evangelos Kosmatos will provide an unspecified demonstration from the 5G-PPP ONE5G project. Both days since appear to be inclusive of members from across the broader industries involved in 5G and IoT technologies. Since the group also seems to have a tendency to place focus on the bleeding edge of those tech innovations, there could be some fairly exciting revelations associated with the presentations. Mobile augmented reality service ARCore and computer vision solution Google Lens are set to expand to third-party Android devices in the near future, Alphabets subsidiary said Friday. Following two developer previews, ARCore will officially be exiting its experimental phase of development at Mobile World Congress 2018 scheduled to start next week, as was previously rumored. ARCore 1.0 will debut alongside expanded developer support, with Google confirming it will now start accepting AR apps on the Play Store. The initial version of the service will support the companys Pixel and Pixel 2-series devices, as well as the Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S7 lineups, Galaxy Note 8, LG V30 and V30 Plus, ASUS ZenFone AR, and the OnePlus 5. The OnePlus 5T wasnt mentioned as part of the support package but that may only be an oversight on Googles part. Huawei, Xiaomi, Motorola, Sony, Vivo, and HMD Global (Nokia) will all be updating their devices to support ARCore later this year, whereas Samsung, LG, and ASUS will add more of their products to the mobile AR ecosystem going forward, Google said. The initial thirteen models compatible with the technology are presently being used by approximately 100 million people, all of which will be able to start enjoying ARCore by spring, if not sooner. Samsungs upcoming Galaxy S9 lineup is understood to be supporting ARCore out of the box and the phone maker may confirm that this Sunday after the flagship duo is officially announced. On the developer side of things, Android Studio Beta just received ARCore support as part of its Emulator, facilitating the process of testing AR apps. The development kit itself is now better at understanding its environment when it comes to manipulating virtual assets and making sure they blend with real-world surfaces just right. While its own services are blocked in China, Google will be supporting Huawei, Xiaomi, and Samsung in their efforts to launch ARCore experiences on various app stores in the Far Eastern country, though details on the matter remain scarce, save for the fact that a self-explanatory Easyhome Homestyler app will be released as part of those efforts. A number of high-quality experiences that are launching with ARCore 1.0 include a tour of FC Barcelonas Camp Nou created by Snapchat, Sotheby-made International Reality which allows one to redecorate their home using AR, and an app for exploring the Porsche Mission E Concept supercar. World of Tanks developer Wargaming is also preparing an ARCore-powered AR game, with the list of other established companies that already joined the project including Game Insight, NetEase, and JD.com. AR title Ghostbusters World based on the popular movie franchise will be launching later this year, having apparently been designed as a scarier and more action-packed take on the Pokemon GO formula. Advertisement Google Lens still isnt out of its preview phase of development but will be expanding its availability to more Android-powered devices in the coming weeks. The service thats integrated into the Google Assistant and can be implemented into virtually any app has so far only been officially supported by the Pixel handsets. The functionality is now set to hit the Google Photos app on compatible Android flagships owned by an English-language user. The wording of that announcement doesnt clarify whether Google Lens will initially prioritize users living in English-speaking countries or just those whose device language settings are set to English. The service will also soon get better at identifying flora and fauna, being capable of not just recognizing something like a dog or a flower but determining their breed or type as well, Google revealed. In the Google app for Android, a strange glitch causes the search results to become nothing but garbage text when typing in the query send a message to Barack Obama. This does not happen with any other president or any other variant of the query itself. It also does not happen on the desktop version of Google, in mobile browsers, or in the iOS version of the Google app. Stranger still, only the All results heading is affected; going to images, video, or any other search heading after getting the glitch will give you a collection of perfectly normal search results. Google has yet to say anything about the issue. One Reddit user recently attempted to decode the garbage text using Base64, and it seems to show instructions that would normally bring the user to the Send a message dialog to choose how to send a message to somebody and allow them to fill in the contents of the correspondence. Presumably, the app is trying to invoke the dialog as if you had told the Google Assistant to start creating a message for the former president but fails somewhere along the way. Other theories and discussion on the matter are plentiful but this seems to be the only thing anybody has found so far thats any bit concrete. While its quite easy to jump to conclusions about this issue, the most likely explanation is that its a simple glitch. Some are speculating that the text parser was having trouble with President Obamas name for some reason, and all of the decoded code posted in the thread seems to support this. Even so, the glitch is certainly peculiar, and perhaps a bit comical. With Google constantly striving to bring new features and under-the-hood enhancements to its full product lineup, its not entirely unthinkable that the odd glitch like this one could slip through. The Alphabet-owned company is currently preparing for this years Mobile World Congress where its planning to announce the first Android Oreo (Go Edition) smartphones, as well as launch its mobile augmented reality solution ARCore and computer vision service Google Lens on a global level. The United States Federal Communications Commission on Thursday resolved the remaining petitions related to its Mobility Fund Phase II, an early 2017 initiative meant to enable and facilitate 4G LTE buildouts in rural areas of the country. The regulator now officially moved forward with the idea of providing wireless carriers with $4.53 billion over the course of the next ten years to have them deploy additional network infrastructure in such isolated regions of the U.S. As part of the agreement, mobile service providers must guarantee download speeds of at least 10Mbps and upload rates no lower than 1Mbps. While none of the national carriers complained about the upload requirement, T-Mobile protested about the download minimum, having repeatedly asked for the threshold to be lowered to 5Mbps. The telecom giants petitions have been rejected even though the company remained insistent that 10/1Mbps rates are out of sync with the realities of deploying 4G LTE in rural areas, according to the FCCs fact sheet detailing the development. The new action is understood to be a follow-up to the Mobility Fund Phase I which provided 33 bidders with $300 million in 2012, having tasked them with deploying 3G networks across rural America. The major funding increase between the two projects is attributed to the fact that the FCC has been positioning the second initiative as a much larger operation since its beginnings, having planned it to be a long-term solution for delivering acceptable Internet speeds in rural parts of the country. All companies participating in the program are required to accept third-party equipment in their cell towers, the FCC ruled as part of its petition-resolving efforts in the run-up to the launch of the project itself thats now expected later this year. Enabling rural Internet connectivity recently started becoming a priority of many telecom regulators across the globe as various governments began fearing having their less populated regions be left two technological generations behind urban areas. With the fifth generation of mobile networks now being on the horizon and initial buildouts being planned to start later this year, wireless carriers and network equipment manufacturers are resorting to all kinds of means for bringing 4G LTE to rural areas, from building Internet-relaying blimps to asking churches for help. A new set of Nokia 7 Plus renders has leaked to show the device from more angles than the previously leaked images. These images dont add anything significant to the already available information about the phone. though. In the images, the alleged Nokia 7 Plus can be seen sporting an 18:9 display with rounded corners, making it the first Nokia-branded phone to boast the new display aspect ratio. With the reduced bezels, the phone will utilize on-screen Android navigation keys and its fingerprint scanner will also be moved to the back where its two primary cameras can also be seen. The use of gold accents is visible around the camera housing, fingerprint scanner, power and volume keys, and on Nokia branding in both the white and black color variants, similar to the Nokia 6 (2018). Last week, Evan Blass leaked a couple of images of the handset suggesting it to launch under Googles Android One program. There is a possibility that HMD Global may keep the Nokia 7 Plus Android One variant exclusive to a few markets and launch the regular one in others. While the company has promised to push regular software updates to all its Android smartphones, the Android One devices will have an edge on others with the phone possibly running Android 8.0 (Oreo) out of the box. Nokia is expected to launch a few of its Android devices during the Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona next week. The Nokia 7 Plus previously leaked images also have the February 25 date mentioned probably hinting at the imminent launch. Besides this mid-range smartphone, HMD Global might also announce the Nokia 9 as well as the Nokia 1 with Android Oreo (Go Edition). Yesterday, Google confirmed via a blog post that new Android One and Android Oreo (Go Edition) devices will be announced at the trade show. Going by the leaks and rumors, the Nokia 7 Plus will be powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon 660 processor from last year coupled with 4GB of RAM. A 6GB RAM variant is also a possibility with an internal storage of 64GB. As already mentioned, the handset will reportedly have an 18:9 display measuring 6 inches with an FHD+ resolution of 2160 x 1080 pixels. Two cameras with resolution of 12 and 13-megapixels are expected on the back with Carl Zeiss lenses along with a 16-megapixel camera on the front. Features like Bothie and OZO Audio that debuted with previous Nokia phones can also be expected, while the phone is rumored to be priced at 399 ($491). A number of wireless carriers from across the globe say theres no evidence of Huawei spying on anyone like some congressional committees and intelligence experts in the United States recently suggested, Reuters reports. Deutsche Telekom revealed its collaboration with Huawei is both long-lasting and multifaceted, with the network equipment procured by the Chinese company being specifically built to the telecom giants specifications, then examined by its security experts. Bell Canada VP of Wireless Networks Bruce Rodin said the firm relies on independent cybersecurity auditors to asses Huaweis equipment and never had any spying suspicions reported to it in approximately a decade of collaboration. No malicious code or backdoors have ever been discovered as part of Huawei-made network solutions and the companys recent issues in the U.S. are a commercial thing, Mr. Rodin said, suggesting that Washington is simply trying to protect its own industry by blocking Huaweis attempts to rival it. Thomas Jarzombek, a German parliament member and digital spokesman for Christian Democratic Union of Germany, the party thats currently leading Europes economically strongest country, said Edward Snowdens whistleblowing activities suggest Silicon Valley giants may not be any more trustworthy than their Chinese peers. Huawei recently pledged to invest over $4 billion in the United Kingdom and also earned the support of the second largest economy on the Old Continent. Paris-based wireless carrier Orange said it doesnt treat Huawei differently than any other network equipment supplier, adding that its equally cautious will all of its partners. Washington is still understood to be calling for its foreign allies to drop Huawei from their 5G plans, citing security concerns due to the companys close ties to Beijing. Whereas stateside wireless carriers should all begin deploying 5G technologies by early 2019, large-scale rollouts in Europe are only projected to start in 2020, theoretically leaving EU operators with enough time to replace Huawei should they want to. That still doesnt seem like a probable scenario as the level of distrust the company is facing in the U.S. cannot be compared to any of its European markets where its largely enjoying a healthy working relationship with both telecoms and governments. Outside of its 5G ambitions, Huawei is set to introduce its latest mobile offerings next month, having just confirmed the P20 Android flagship series will be announced on March 27 in Paris, France. Uber Chief Executive Officer Dara Khosrowshahi met with Indias Minister of State for Civil Aviation earlier this week to talk about possible partnerships between the startup and the South Asian country, including a flying car collaboration. The 48-year-old tweeted about the meeting with Jayant Sinha on Thursday, saying the duo discussed both airport partnerships and what they deem is the future of commercial air travel flying vehicles. The contents of the gathering werent disclosed but the move itself is largely in line with long-term ambitions of both parties; Mr. Khosrowshahi has been touting flying cars as part of Ubers endgame for several months now, giving extremely optimistic predictions about their commercialization that he estimates could happen in as little as five years. Mr. Sinha, a former venture capitalist with vast experience in the tech industry, previously promised flying vehicles will make transportation accessible to every Indian, vowing to create a political and economic climate in which such technologies could thrive. Last month, Indias aviation minister said the government department he leads is actively discussing the concept of an air rickshaw to solve the issue of transportation in the country, describing whats essentially a large drone for moving people. New Delhis official repeatedly touted flying taxis as the ultimate mobility solution, claiming existing technologies can already enable drone-based transportation that isnt more expensive than traveling by car or an airplane. Uber is presumably looking to partner with India on testing such contraptions with the ambition to eventually commercialize them in the country. The ride-hailing startup announced a flying car partnership with NASA late last year, revealing it will start testing such solutions in 2020. The company is already understood to be working on a prototype capable of carrying four passengers and flying at up to 200mph (322kmph). The taxi is planned to be tested at the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport before its trials move to Los Angeles. In response to Tesla CEO Elon Musks recent online criticism of the idea of flying cars that he said will be 1,000 times bigger and noisier than drones, Mr. Khosrowshahi took to Twitter to say improved battery tech and multiple smaller rotors should make such aircraft as inconspicuous and environment-friendly as possible. Ubers top official even explicitly thanked Mr. Musk for Teslas advancements in battery R&D, suggesting silent aircraft wouldnt be possible without it. Mr. Khosrowshahi previously indicated Hyperloop One and the convoluted infrastructure it requires may not be needed if the industry can simply deliver a convenient and affordable flying transportation solution. Advertisement Challenge accepted. Improved battery tech (thx 2 @elonmusk) and multiple smaller rotors will be much more efficient and avoid noise + environmental pollution. https://t.co/563U0RqDYF dara khosrowshahi (@dkhos) February 22, 2018 BarcelonaSpain "disproportionately restricted the rights to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly" of people who supported the independence of Catalonia according to Amnesty International (AI) in its report on the state of the worlds human rights in 2017-2018, published this Thursday. The organization also criticizes the fact that "Law enforcement officials policing protests on 1 October in Catalonia used excessive force against peaceful protesters who were opposing a police operation. The police fired blank cartridges and rubber bullets, seriously injuring one person and causing him to lose the sight in one eye", in reference to the case of Roger Espanol. The report also criticises the fact that "Courts in Madrid and Vitoria in the Basque country prohibited two public assemblies aimed at supporting the referendum" and that "The municipality of Castelldefels in Catalonia adopted a blanket ban on the use of public spaces for assemblies aimed at supporting or protesting against the referendum". Referring to the imprisonment of Jordi Sanchez and Jordi Cuixart, presidents of the ANC and Omnium, AI criticizes the fact that they are accused of sedition, "a broadly defined offence". However, the organization does not consider Sanchez and Cuixart to be political prisoners, and makes no mention of their imprisonment. With regard to prosecutions relating to the "glorification of terrorism", Amnesty states that "In many instances, authorities pressed criminal charges against people who had expressed opinions that did not constitute incitement to a terrorism-related offence and fell within the permissible forms of expression under international human rights law". It cites as examples Cassandra Vera, given a prison sentence for her tweets about Carrero Blanco, and the case involving two puppeteers in Madrid. The Alsasua youths Amnesty believes that the Spanish judicial authorities continued to "use counterterrorism legislation disproportionately" in the case of the Alsasua youths jailed for their part in a bar fight with the Civil Guard. It also criticises the sanctions against human rights activists and journalists under the Law on Public Security, known as the "gag law", which "could constitute unlawful restrictions on the rights to freedom of expression, peaceful assembly and information". The report mentions the case of the Catalunya Radio journalist Merce Alcocer, who was fined for crossing an unmarked police line while trying to interview a witness as part of her investigation into the Pujol corruption case. Torture and other ill-treatment Amnesty also mentions Spains request for extradition from Switzerland of Nekane Txapartegi, accused of being a member of ETA and other terrorism-related offences. Txapartegi testified before the UN that she was subject to torture and ill-treatment during the five days she was held incommunicado at a police station in Madrid in 1999. According to AI, "her torture allegations were not thoroughly investigated", before warning that "the Constitutional Court declared admissible an appeal by the government against a Basque Parliament law on the recognition of and reparation for victims of human rights violations in the Basque Country". Failure to relocate refugees AIs report also documents the Spanish governments failure to comply with its refugee resettlement commitments. Madrid was to take charge of 15,888 asylum-seekers under the EU emergency relocation scheme: 1,328 were relocated by the end of the year, of which 592 were Syrian nationals. Violence against women Amnesty records the death of 48 women (and 8 children) at the hands of their partners or former partners last year in Spain. Evictions According to Amnesty International, "Thousands of people were forcibly evicted without adequate judicial safeguards or provision of alternative accommodation by the state. These included 26,767 rental evictions and 16,992 mortgage evictions. Public spending on housing continued to decrease, even though the demand for affordable social housing remained high". It goes on to state that in July, the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights upheld a complaint against Spain for not having provided an evicted family with alternative housing. Impunity and historical memory Amnesty criticizes the Spanish authorities for continuing "to close investigations into crimes under international law committed during the Civil War and the Franco regime. They argued that it would not be possible to investigate the crimes reported, such as enforced disappearances and torture, in view of, among other things, the Amnesty Act and the statute of limitations". AI also criticizes the fact that authorities continued to fail to take measures to locate and identify the remains of victims of enforced disappearances during the Civil War and the Franco regime. The report also mentions the refusal by the judiciary to investigate crimes under international law committed against Spanish citizens in Syria and Venezuela. Tanzanian President John Magafuli has opened a Chinese-built training centre for the Tanzania People's Defence Forces (TPDF). The Comprehensive Training Centre (CTC) was officially opened during a ceremony on 6 February, 2018 at Mapinga in Bagamoyo District, Coast Region. It was attended by Chinese ambassador Wang Ke. President of Tanzania, John Magufuli on Tuesday, February 6, 2018, inaugurated the Chinese Comprehensive Training Centre of the Tanzania People's Defence Forces (TPDF) at Mapinga in Bagamoyo District, Coast Region (Picture source allafrica.com) According to the Presidency, the Sh67.87 billion ($30 million) Centre was built with the assistance of China's People's Liberation Army and will be used to provide modern training to the TPDF. The Centre will provide training to counter current and future threats, the Presidency said. During the opening ceremony, Magafuli witnessed demonstrations that included an amphibious landing and counter-terrorism operations. Tanzania has enjoyed close defence ties with China, and this has included naval exercises, construction projects and the supply of military equipment. For instance, in November 2014 the two nations concluded the month-long Exercise Beyond/Transcend naval training exercise, the first joint training exercise in the history of bilateral military relations between the two countries. This follows numerous naval visits by China. China has delivered a variety of military hardware to Tanzania, including 24 Type 63A light amphibious tanks, 12 Type 07PA 120 mm self-propelled mortars, FB-6A mobile short-range air defense systems and A100 300 mm multiple rocket launchers. The Chinese government also built the Tanzanian Military Academy (TMA) and the Shanghai Construction Group has been contracted by the Tanzanian Ministry of Defence and National Service to construct 12 000 housing units financed by a $550 million loan from the Exim Bank of China. In pithy new blurbs, the National Portrait Gallerys revamped and reinterpreted Americas Presidents installation strives to tell each former officeholders unique stories of both triumph and failure (in the words of the introductory wall text). The individual labels for the portraits of our 44 previous chief executives explore both the heights and depths of their terms in office. To the best of my knowledge, most members of the national art press who attended last weeks unveiling of Barack and Michelle Obamas portraits in the NPGs expansive Kogod Courtyard didnt return the next day (as I did) to see how the new additions had been installed in the galleries. (Heres my report on that.) Ive seen only one report (by Ben Davis for artnet) mentioning the label text for Obama portrait, and no analysis putting that in the context of the NPGs interpretive takes on other recent Presidents. So heres my spin on the NPGs spins: Below is the Obama portraits label. (The text that you glimpse at bottom right is from the Spanish translationa new feature of the Americas Presidents reinstallation.) The only total misfire that the NPGs label alludes to is Obamas unrealized pledge to close the Guantanamo prison (which President Trump has now ordered to remain open). The label doesnt mention that the Affordable Care Act, while having extend[ed] health benefits to millions of previously uninsured Americans, is in the process of being dismantled under the current administration. This means that what is arguably Obamas greatest (although highly controversial) achievement could prove to be very short-lived. More surprisingly, the gallerys label omits text thats included in the entry on Obama contained in the NPGs just published Americas Presidents handbook, which is keyed to the new installation. (The link is to Amazon. Strangely, the Smithsonian-published book is not offered for sale, at this writing, on the NPGs own Publications webpage.) The handbook exactly reproduces the galleries label texts for the other Presidents. Perhaps it was the political sensitivity of the following passage on Obama that led to its being kept out of both the gallery display and the Obama entry on the NPGs website. The only place you can find this sentence is on p. 163 of the new handbook, directly after the text that is duplicated on the gallery label: Despite the promise of his election and his accomplishments, the issue of Obamas raceand even his American citizenshipcontinued to be topics of discussion as the political culture began to fracture by the end of his second term. It seems to me that the issue of Obamas race only continued to be a topic of [negative] discussion among racists. And the NPGs published account should have unequivocally stated that the question of Obamas American citizenship was an entirely bogus issue. Whats more, contrary to the assertion in the handbooks passage, the political culture began to fracture long before the end of Obamas second term. Thats why his attempts to realize his legislative agenda were thwartedperhaps Obamas biggest failure. The need to walk a fine line in crafting the capsule summaries for the portraits labels was acknowledged by the NPGs senior historian emeritus, David Ward, in his introduction to the new guidebook: The challenge for the museum is to recognize the importance of the presidents and treat them with respectful critical attention but not to lose perspective and fall into hagiography. That said, the museum flirted with hagiography in the label for Ronald Reagan (and even more so in the earlier Reagan label that it replaced). Heres an excerpt from the current label: The former actor and governor of California, Ronald Reagan was a formidable politician whose rise exemplified the shift in American demographics to the west and southwest. Within the Republican Party, his ascension marked the revitalization of the conservative, western wing of the party.He unapologetically reduced social welfare programs and encouraged a conservative social ethic regarding the role of religion in public life and reproductive rights. Reagans large, centrally placed portrait dominates the gallery devoted to the most recent Presidents: In the list of what, to Reagans supporters, was a succession of accomplishments, the label-writers inserted only one negative: His conservative stance led him to largely ignore the AIDS crisis. I dont think you needed to have a liberal stance to care about and undertake measures to address the AIDS crisis, any more than todays conservatives would regard political ideology as an excuse to ignore the current opioid crisis. Unlike the other Presidents in the section for recent office-holders, Reagan is represented not only by his large, signature portrait, but also by two smaller NPG-owned images: This ample array comes across as favoritismperhaps a concession to the Republicans now in power, who hail Reagan as a hero. There is, after all, some self-interest in pleasing the politicians who each year will determine the budget of the federally funded Smithsonian. And then theres the Bill Clinton/Chuck Close dilemma The portrait now on display is not the NPG-commissioned portrait that had originally been hung: Nelson Shanks, the artist responsible for the commissioned portrait, later revealed that the shadow to Clintons right referenced White House intern Monica Lewinskys infamous blue dress. He said that while he was painting, he had hung an actual blue dress to cast a shadow on the replica of the Oval Office fireplace that he was using as the setting for his portrait. After extricating itself from this embarrassment, the NPG eventually found itself embroiled in another sex-related controversy, this time involving the substitute portrait of Clinton by Chuck Close, shown above. Unlike the other Americas Presidents portraits, the Close is privately owned. During my visit, I was told that the museum has not decided whether to switch out Clintons portrait yet again, in light of the surfacing allegations about the artist. The nearby National Gallery of Art recently canceled a planned Chuck Close show because of the sexual misconduct allegations. (If a replacement is needed, this Clinton portrait, also owned by the NPG, has the modest virtue of being vapidly innocuous.) Wards did-he-really-write-that analysis of the Lewinsky episode (in his introductory essay for the handbook) only sunk the NPG deeper into Clinton quicksand: There was a brief interlude in Bill Clintons administration in which the president reportedly bemoaned the fact that he did not live in challenging times and thus could not achieve a legacy like his hero John F. Kennedy. (The lack of a sustained period of crisis to occupy him may have contributed to the sex scandal, and its extensive media coverage, that led to his impeachment.) Huh? If the Presidency didnt provide enough challenges to occupy him, maybe Clinton should have worked hard on improving his saxophone prowess. In another portrait switch, the Reagan now displayed at the NPG is not the one originally commissioned. About that work, by Henry Casselli, Jr., Reagan had exclaimed: Yep, thats the old buckaroo, (in the words if its label). To the NPGs credit, the new labels for the five most recent former presidents mostly improve upon the prior labels (the texts of which I requested), in terms of comprehensiveness, scholarship and incisive analysis. (You can read them here and form your own judgments. The newer versions are the ones accompanied by Spanish translations.) In the text at the end of the new handbook, we get a preview of how the NPG may treat the current President, characterized there as a real estate magnate, businessman and reality television star. Heres an excerpt from the museums current take on Trump: For Trump himself, all publicity is good publicity. [I knew that from the one time I met him, long ago, when I was writing a NY Times real estate story.]The beginnings of his presidency have been tumultuous and even chaotic as he has begun to exercise political power. As was the case with his business career, the presidency of Donald Trump will be defined by the personality of the man himself. The official portrait of Trump will be completed after he leaves office. When that might be is anyones guess. Starting March 1, Ford North Americas president will be Kumar Galhotra, a former executive in various senior-level engineering and product strategy positions. Galhotra has been on Fords payroll for the past 29 years.Kumar is an incredibly talented executive with a special feel for product and brand. He is also a seasoned leader who knows how to drive a business transformation, said Jim Farley, Ford President Global Markets.Kumar is the right person to lead our North American business to new levels of operational fitness, product and brand excellence, and profitability.Promoting Galhotra to the top position has caused some other changes within the carmakers top management as well, with at least five other prominent leaders of the group being shuffled between departments.The reasons behind Fords decision to part ways with Nair are still kept under wraps, the automaker limiting itself at saying that the executive acted in ways which are inconsistent with the companys code of conduct.Ford is deeply committed to providing and nurturing a safe and respectful culture, and we expect our leaders to fully uphold these values, said Ford in a statement on Wednesday, when it announced its decision.Nair was a Ford veteran as well, having joined the company in 1987 as a body and assembly operations launch engineer. He went up the corporate ladder head of global product development and chief technical officer until he was named president of Ford North America less than a year ago, in July 2017.Ford did not detail how sacking Nair would affect his financial status. According to Fortune , the executives stock bonus is valued at $5 million. The delayed decision could also mean, according to Forbes , citing local news agencies, that German officials might be considering sending what may be a defining decision in European history to higher Union court.One of the courts judges, Andreas Korbmacher, said the delay comes as the decision to be made must be carefully analyzed.The Federal Court was supposed to have a say in an appeal filed by governments in Baden-Wuerttemberg and North Rhine-Westphalia against a lower court decision that was supposed to make the cities of Stuttgart and Duesseldorf enforce stricter emission rules.The initial lawsuit was filed by environmental group Deutsche Umwelthilfe (DUH) against nine German cities. Having a decision in their favor would have meant all vehicles manufactured before the introduction of the Euro 6 emission standard in 2015 could be banned from entering city centers.Should Germany decide to rule in favor of the environmental group, it would be joining other European cities that have already announced plans to limit the use of diesel-powered cars. Paris, Madrid, and Athens already said they would do so by 2025.Germany going the same path is a different matter, however, as most European countries look to Berlin for guidance, not to France or Greece.The fight for banning diesel cars in Germany started after reports of nitrogen dioxide emissions levels being above the European Union levels starting surfacing last year. Officially, over 70 percent of pollution in German cities are blamed on diesel.According to data compiled by the European Automobile Manufacturers' Association (ACEA), diesel car registrations accounted for 45.8 percent of the German automotive market in 2016. On Thursday, Mercedes-Benz announced the official lineup for the Swiss event, promising several world premieres and other exciting news for its fans, including for electric cars enthusiats.For the first time, the public of the Geneva event will get to see the new A-Class , revealed as the techiest model in its segment in early February, and the first three-pointed star car to use the Mercedes-Benz User Experience, or MBUX The exciting new, and at the same oddly named Mercedes-AMG GT Coupe will also make its grand entry at the show, after tons of photos of it flooding the web from both official and less so sources in recent months.The 2019 versions of the C-Class Sedan and Wagon , the most successful model series from Mercedes-Benz lineup, now in its fifth year of production, will also attend the show.The Germans electric dreams will be represented in Geneva by the first production version model from the EQ brand, called the EQC . The much smaller smart brand will be there too, showing off the improved electric powertrain.Another premiere, this time for the European public, is that of the new G-Class, coming for the first time in Geneva. The X-Class pick-up truck will sit right next to it, as will the Mercedes-Maybach S-Class Numerous new special models are also on display at the show such as the Exclusive Edition of the S-Class Coupe and Cabriolet and the Night Edition, says the automaker.This exclusively elegant series of compact models impresses with a combination of AMG body styling on the exterior and Urban Line with white elements in the interior. Unlike other manufacturers who like to go the way of the teaser, Renault has tried to keep its design studies a secret until their reveal on the stage for that added punch, and as far as we're concerned - as frustrating as it is - we think it's the right strategy.The company is being coy once again on what exactly its new study car for the upcoming Geneva Motor Show looks like, but it did say it's a concept that focuses on "shared urban mobility." I think we all know what that means: a boring minivan-like vehicle where the interior matters a lot more than the exterior.According to the French manufacturer, the study "embodies its vision for shared urban mobility" and builds on the brand's promise for an "Easy Life." We imagine something like the Mercedes-Benz F015 Luxury in Motion concept minus the luxury and with a bit of Renault-styled pizzaz added. At the same time, we hope we are wrong.Other than this, Renault, Alpine, and Dacia have a few other premiers prepared for the Swiss car show. The new and more powerful R110 motor for the Renault ZOE electric hatchback has already been announced, but the stand will also feature a new-generation 1.3-liter TCe engine developed together with the alliance partners and also Daimler (making it interesting for potential buyers of the new A-Class as well).Renault will also introduce a new engine for its sleek-looking Talisman sedan as well as an "exclusive new version of the model," which can really only go two ways: sportiness or elegance. We're betting on the latter.Meanwhile, Alpine promises to give us an update on where it stands with its A110 model as well as the motorsport program, while Dacia, fresh off launching the new Duster, will only introduce a limited-edition for its Stepway family.All-in-all, whether we can call this a pretty low-case presence for the French carmaker depends only on the mystery concept car. But since it won't preview any new models or a new design philosophy, our expectations aren't too high. Developed by Qualcomm, the C-V2X system is hoped to become an integrant part of the 5G technology for automotive applications, providing direct communication between vehicles. It will become an integrant part of the driver assisting technologies the French carmaker is currently developing.Should the French succeed in their endeavor, the technology might be game-changing. Not only will C-V2X facilitate the communication between vehicles, but it will also be able to talk to pedestrians, via the devices they are using.At the Rennes demonstration, PSA says it will show how the systems are used to alert each other to potential roadside hazards or distressed vehicle situations, such as slow-moving or disable cars.In theory, two cars equipped with this system can also warn each other of hazards that are not in both of their lines of sight. Cars can communicate their intentions to both other vehicles and pedestrians, after analyzing the drivers input, like turn signals, braking or accelerating.C-V2X can send a series of warning to other cars, including Do not pass when an incoming car might pose a danger to the one trying to overtake it. Blind curve and road work warnings, as well as blind intersection and lest turn assist are also featured in the Qualcomm system to be presented on PSA vehicles next month.C-V2X has significant global momentum and broad ecosystem support to ensure its success as a relevant V2X technology, said Carla Gohin, PSA Head of Innovation.C-V2X direct communications is an important component of transportation safety thanks to the connected cars that the Groupe PSA is already embracing with onboard telematics. Canadian authorities are investigating after a Cessna 172 on a training flight suffered about $4,000 (USD) in damage when it collided with an airborne object near a British Columbia Airport. The aircraft, owned by Abbotsford-based Chinook Helicopters, was turning final to land at nearby Chilliwack Airport when its left wing struck the object, which left blue bits on the wing, according to flight school owner Cathy Press. It was definitely manmade, she said. Were just lucky it didnt go through the windshield. Her company offers both fixed-wing and rotary training and the plane was being flown by a student and instructor when the collision occurred at about 500 feet AGL. They heard it but they didnt see it, she said. The instructor took over, aborted the landing and the duo returned to Abbotsford. Maintenance personnel examined the wing and found the plastic wingtip fairing destroyed, a significant dent in the sheet metal and enough damage to the outer rib that it had to be replaced. By the time its painted and all finished I wouldnt be surprised if [the bill] is $5,000 (CAD), she said. Press will have to foot the bill herself because its less than her insurance deductible. She said its impossible to know if the object was a drone but she doesnt think it was an RC aircraft because those hobbyists normally know they cant fly near airports. The incident was reported to Transport Canada and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. If the culprit was a drone, it would be one of a handful of airborne collisions between aircraft and drones and the only one that has so far been reported to have caused significant damage. Billionaire casino magnate and prominent GOP donor Sheldon Adelson has offered to pay for some portion of the new U.S. embassy in Jerusalem, which could stretch into the hundreds of millions of dollars, according to an AP report. His offer comes as the State Department is reportedly researching the legal roadblocks surrounding funding the project via private donations. Why it matters: The move would be highly irregular for an American diplomatic complex and raise significant questions surrounding conflicts of interest, especially given Adelson's extensive contributions in support of right-wing Israeli politics. I dont know how well that would work. Would we be beholden to putting their name on the building? Ive never heard of that. Kathy Bethany, the former cost management director for the State Departments Bureau of Overseas Building Operations, to the AP Why the decision could be risky: The legality: While the State Department can accept gifts from private citizens, even for real estate, it has to evaluate them on an individual basis to make sure that they would not give the appearance of a conflict of interest. While the State Department can accept gifts from private citizens, even for real estate, it has to evaluate them on an individual basis to make sure that they would not give the appearance of a conflict of interest. Adelson's other causes: He's a Republican megadonor, granting $5 million to President Trump's inaugural committee. He also finances a free daily newspaper in Israel the largest in the country by circulation that supports Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He's a Republican megadonor, granting $5 million to President Trump's inaugural committee. He also finances a free daily newspaper in Israel the largest in the country by circulation that supports Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The peace process: Beyond the implications of actually constructing and moving the embassy to Jerusalem, Palestinians and other Arab actors in the region would likely double down on their distaste if the cash from the project came from Adelson or other Netanyahu-backing GOP donors. What's next: Vice President Mike Pence promised last month that the embassy would be moved to Jerusalem by 2019, but that could happen even sooner with a quick retrofit of the current consular offices in Jerusalem perhaps even by Israel's Independence Day in April even though most U.S. diplomatic staff in Israel would remain in Tel Aviv until a more permanent and secure complex could be constructed. Levi Sanders, the 48-year-old son of Sen. Bernie Sanders, is considering a run for Congress in New Hampshire, he told Vice News. Oh absolutely, Im definitely considering it. Im excited, motivated, and interested in the race. Im just dotting my is and crossing my ts. Why it matters: The elder Sanders is very popular in New Hampshire, where he swept to victory in the 2016 Democratic primary, and Levi told Vice he'd run on a similar platform. But Levi is not nearly as well-established with New Hampshire Democrats as other candidates already in the race to replace Rep. Carol Shea-Porter, who is retiring. It's also a swing district that could be up for grabs in the general election. After days of speculation, the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), which tracks countries suspected of engaging in terrorist financing and money laundering, added Pakistan to its terrorist financing watch list. Why it matters: Adding Pakistan to the list is a more effective way of urging the state to change its policy of sponsoring terrorist groups than cutting off aid immediately. And Pakistan has until June to improve on its antimoney laundering activities. After three years on the international watchdog's list, Pakistan was taken off in 2015 for improving its standards, especially around financial transactions. Yet, Lashkar-e-Taiba and its affiliates remain at large in Pakistan, violating conditions laid out by the Obama administration for removing Pakistan from the list. The Trump administration has now taken a hardline approach and lobbied for Pakistan's reinclusion, with the support of the UK and Germany. The decision was made after China and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) withdrew their opposition. Turkey, however, remains opposed. But, but, but: This still doesn't address the bigger issue plaguing the region, which is the continued funding of terrorism by Saudi Arabia. Sahar Khan is a visiting research fellow in the Cato Institute's Defense and Foreign Policy Department. An officer on duty during the Stoneman Douglas High School mass shooting never went inside to engage the shooter and has now resigned, the AP reports. The details: Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel said Deputy Scot Peterson resigned after being suspended without pay, according to the AP. He reportedly stood outside the building for about four minutes during the massacre in which 17 people were killed. His resignation came after authorities reviewed video surveillance and interviewed witnesses, including Peterson. Asked what Peterson should have done, Israel said: went in, addressed the killer, killed the killer. Yevgeniy Prigozhin, a Russian oligarch who controls a mercenary force in Syria, was communicating with Syrian officials and the Kremlin "days and weeks before and after" an attack on U.S. and Syrian Democratic Forces earlier this month, the Washington Post reports. Why it matters: This could indicate that the Kremlin signed off on an attack against U.S. troops in Syria that left scores of Russians dead and threatens to raise military tensions to new heights. It also adds to the intrigue surrounding Prigozhin, a Putin ally who was indicted by Robert Mueller for operating the Russian "troll farm" that carried out online election interference. In an intercepted January cable to a Syrian official, Prigozhin said he had "secured permission" from a Russian minister for a fast and strong initiative in early February, per the Post. The attack "marked the biggest direct challenge to the U.S. military presence in eastern Syria" since the U.S. "began deploying there in 2015," per the Post. Big picture: The U.S. retaliated against pro-regime forces because they crossed the deconfliction line that was agreed upon by U.S. and Russian forces. And, U.S. forces were in communication with Russian officials before, during, and after the attack. Go deeper: Read the full Washington Post report. President Trump announced that the U.S. is enacting new, heightened sanctions on North Korea during his speech at CPAC Friday morning. The details: The White House said today that Treasury Department plans to take "new action" to stop major revenue sources that North Korea uses to fund it's nuclear and military programs "by targeting 27 entities, 28 vessels and one individuals all involved in sanction evasion schemes." This round of sanctions does not address the ways North Korea could evade sanctions through cyber means, such as through cryptocurrencies, according to a senior administration official. Backdrop: The U.S. government has released photos alleging six Chinese-owned or operated cargo ships of helping North Korea trade in violation of UN sanctions on the regime. Japan this week said it has observed a tanker with Chinese characters and a North Korean vessel possibly violating sanctions in the East China Sea. Tokyo last month also claimed a North Korean oil tanker was taking on cargo in the East China Sea, possibly violating sanctions as well. Reuters reported last year that Western European security sources said Russian vessels were helping North Korea evade sanctions on maritime routes as well. Bottom line: The goal is to increase the pressure on the North Korean regime to show Kim Jong-un that there is no other action to take but denuclearization, a senior administration official told reporters on a call Friday. Kim Jong-un has said North Korea will never give up its nuclear program. The U.S. embassy will move to Jerusalem on May 14th the day Israel declared its independence in 1948 and the day President Harry Truman recognized the state of Israel, Israeli officials told me. The White House isn't commenting, but a U.S. official confirmed the plans. The bottom line: That's a lot sooner than expected. During his visit to Israel last month, Vice President Mike Pence said only that the embassy would move to Jerusalem by the end of 2019. The details: According to Israeli officials, in the first phase an "interim embassy" will be opened at the consular annex in West Jerusalem that handles visas and passports. The office of the ambassador will move to the building, and Ambassador David Friedman will work from there with a small staff. The consular annex will change its name to the U.S. embassy. The building, located in the Arnona neighborhood, will be an interim embassy and the permanent location of the embassy will be determined at a later stage. Behind the scenes: Officials in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office said Netanyahu did not ask the White House to expedite the move. They said Netanyahu is in constant contact with the administration and will comment once an official statement is made. What we're hearing: The staff of the consular annex in Jerusalem were notified today that starting May 14, they will become the staff of the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem. The consular section will continue operating at the Jerusalem embassy and will provide visa and passport services to both Israelis and Palestinians. The residence of the U.S. ambassador will stay in for now in Herzliya, a city north of Tel Aviv. Ambassador Friedman will be working from his office in Jerusalem and from his office in Tel Aviv as needed. The embassy in Tel Aviv will become a "branch" of the embassy in Jerusalem. In the second phase, the interim embassy in Jerusalem will be expanded and some of the U.S. diplomats working in Tel Aviv will move to Jerusalem. In the third phase, a permanent location for the embassy will be determined. The building of the permanent embassy will be a long process, and the rest of staff from Tel Aviv will only move to Jerusalem when it ends. The U.S. consulate on Agron Street in Jerusalem, which handles relations with the Palestinians, will continue operating as usual. The other side: Saeb Erekat, secretary general of the Palestine Liberation Organization, said in a statement that "President Trump and his team have disqualified the US from being part of the solution between Israelis and Palestinians; rather, the world now sees that they are part of the problem." This story has been updated with the Erekat statement. By Rashid Shirinov Russian airline Pegas Fly will launch flights from Moscows new Zhukovsky International Airport to Baku from March 1 as part of the winter schedule, the airport informed on February 22. The airline will operate "Zhukovsky" - Baku regular passenger flights daily until the end of the winter schedule on March 24. Departure from Moscow will be at 19:35 local time and arrival in Baku will be at 23:30 Baku time. Meanwhile, departure from Heydar Aliyev International Airport will be at 06:15 and arrival at Zhukovsky International Airport at 08:10. Flights will be performed via Boeing-738 aircraft. As part of last year's summer schedule (July 27 October 29), the company operated flights three times a week. Zhukovsky airport is Moscow's fourth international airport. After the 2014-2016 reconstruction there was the official opening of Zhukovsky International Airport on May 30, 2016. The declared capacity of the airport is 4 million passengers per year. Currently, flights from there are served to several destinations in Russia and CIS. It is expected that by 2020 the capacity of its terminals will reach 12 million passengers per year. Currently, a number of Russian airlines, such as Aeroflot, NordStar, Ural Airlines, UTair, IrAero and S7 Airlines, operate flights to Azerbaijan. Over the past year, the country received up to 2.7 million tourists, 31.6 percent of whom were guests from Russia. Taking into account the opening of more and more new flight routes between Russia and Azerbaijan, this figure will further increase in the near future. --- Rashid Shirinov is AzerNews staff journalist, follow him on Twitter: @RashidShirinov Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz By Laman Ismayilova The second audition for the beauty contest Miss & Mister Grand Azerbaijan - 2018 will take place in Allure Model Academy on February 24. More than 100 young men and women participated in the casting, Trend Life reported. Height requirements remain at a minimum of 1.70cm (women). All participants should meet modeling requirements. The beauty contest is open for models aged between 16-27 years old. Participation in audition is free. Only young ladies are invited to the second audition. According to the rules, some 20 men and women, aged between 16-27 will be selected to the semi-final. The runway shows, awareness-raising campaigns at promoting national values will be organized as part of the event. For more information, please contact: +994554084680 Media partners of the event are Trend.az, Day.az, Milli.az, Azernews.az --- Laman Ismayilova is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @Lam_Ismayilova Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz Conference Title: International Conference on Mechatronics & Robotics Theme: Unfolding Knowledge with a Delineate Technical World. Description: Mechatronics and Robotics 2018 warmly welcome all the researchers, developers, experts, students from the field of mechatronics & robotics to attend International Conference on Mechatronics & Robotics during October 15-16, 2018 in Helsinki, Finland. The Mechatronics and Robotics 2018 will be composed around the theme Unfolding Knowledge with a Delineate Technical World ". Technology diluted in every sector like Manufacturing, home automation, Medicinal services, Energy, Defence, Space, etc. Mechatronics & Robotics 2018 will be the best common platform to pick up learning and offer new thoughts, create a network amongst the Technologist, Professionals, Industrialists, Researchers, Innovators and students from the area of Mechatronics & Robotics. Our aims: Unite all the people engaged in this enormous field. Exchange the knowledge and discuss. Look forward to the new way by interfacing new thoughts. Pushing the limits of the future technology. Offer one of a kind stage to take an interest in the share, learn and meet with famous speakers of this field, covering both wide and particular subjects. Unites specialists, leading researchers, scholars, scientists, and educators from fields of Physics, Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, Computer Science and related zones. Connect and trade thoughts regarding the best in class advances identified with Mechatronics & Robotics. Provide an insightful understanding of the issues arising out of the Mechatronics & Robotics and the future concern and remedies. Conference Website: https://robotics-mechatronics.enggconferences.com/ Conference Short Name: Mechatronics & Robotics 2018 Organization name: Conference Series Abstract Submission Link: https://robotics-mechatronics.enggconferences.com/abstract-submission.php Registration Link: https://robotics-mechatronics.enggconferences.com/registration.php Brochure link: https://robotics-mechatronics.enggconferences.com/conference-brochure.php Dates of the conference: 15-16 October, 2018 Venue for the conference: Helsinki, Finland Contact person: Kevin Mathew Tel: +1 702 508 5200 Ext 8122 Emails: [email protected] [email protected] By Trend Khojaly tragedy is a bleeding wound of Azerbaijan and Turkey, Necdet Unuvar, head of the Turkey-Azerbaijan inter-parliamentary friendship group, said. Unuvar made the remarks at a meeting with Azerbaijani MP Elman Mammadov in Ankara Feb. 22. Unuvar stressed that the Khojaly tragedy will never be forgotten. On Feb. 25-26, 1992, the Armenian armed forces, together with the 366th infantry regiment of Soviet troops, stationed in Khankendi, committed an act of genocide against the population of the Azerbaijani town of Khojaly. As many as 613 people, including 63 children, 106 women and 70 old people were killed in the massacre. Eight families were totally exterminated, 130 children lost one parent and 25 children lost both. Some 1,275 innocent residents were taken hostage, while the fate of 150 people still remains unknown. The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. As a result of the ensuing war, in 1992 Armenian armed forces occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts. The 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations. Armenia has not yet implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts. --- Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz By Trend An event dedicated to the 26th anniversary of the Khojaly genocide was held in Turkeys capital of Ankara. The event was held by the Azerbaijani embassy in Turkey together with Ankara municipality. Adviser to the Turkish president Yalcin Topcu, MP from the ruling Justice and Development Party Emrullah Isler and other officials delivered speeches at the event. The speakers spoke about the atrocities committed by Armenians against Azerbaijani civilians in Azerbaijans Khojaly town on Feb. 26, 1992. On Feb. 25-26, 1992, the Armenian armed forces, together with the 366th infantry regiment of Soviet troops, stationed in Khankendi, committed an act of genocide against the population of the Azerbaijani town of Khojaly. As many as 613 people, including 63 children, 106 women and 70 old people were killed in the massacre. Eight families were totally exterminated, 130 children lost one parent and 25 children lost both. Some 1,275 innocent residents were taken hostage, while the fate of 150 people still remains unknown. The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. As a result of the ensuing war, in 1992 Armenian armed forces occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts. The 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations. Armenia has not yet implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts. --- Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz By Trend Azerbaijani Economy Minister Shahin Mustafayev as part of his visit to Egypt met with Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry, the press service of the Azerbaijani Economy Ministry said in a statement Feb. 22. At the meeting, the sides discussed the development and further prospects of mutual relations, and noted that Egypt and Azerbaijan cooperate in international organizations as well. Mustafayev stressed that Azerbaijan has established good-neighborly relations with all countries, excluding Armenia, and intends to develop its relations. He said that in the first years of independence, 20 percent of Azerbaijan's lands were occupied by Armenia. Today, Azerbaijans economy is developing dynamically, he noted, adding that Azerbaijan has a strong army and is able to liberate the lands occupied by Armenia. However, Azerbaijan's President Ilham Aliyev, remaining committed to peace talks and international law, supports the settlement of the Armenia-Azerbaijan Nagorno-Karabakh conflict through negotiations, Mustafayev said. Sameh Shoukry, expressing wish to visit Azerbaijan, noted that he was glad of Azerbaijans success. He stressed that Cairo supports the peaceful steps of Azerbaijan. The Egyptian foreign minister noted that he supports peaceful settlement of the Armenia-Azerbaijan Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. Egypt wants the conflict be settled in accordance with international law and the wishes of the Azerbaijani people, Shoukry said. At the meeting, the sides also exchanged views on issues of mutual interest. Minister of Investment and International Cooperation of Egypt Sahar Nasr and Azerbaijani Ambassador to Egypt Tural Rzayev also attended the meeting. The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. As a result of the ensuing war, in 1992 Armenian armed forces occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts. The 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations. Armenia has not yet implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts. --- Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz By Trend Azerbaijans State Motor Road Agency has a goal to build more than 2,000 kilometers of roads covering at least 600 villages in 2018, chairman of management board at the Agency, Saleh Mammadov said. On top of that, the workplan includes construction of a tunnel in the area of the Baku Olympic Stadium, five pedestrian crossings, some projects in Baku White City, a new road connecting the Ziya Buniyatov Avenue with the Balakhani-Binagadi highway, the Padar-Sabirabad road continuing the Shamakhi-Padar road, a new bridge over the Samur River bordering Russia, reconstruction of two avenues and two streets in Sumgayit, construction of a motor road in the Ganly-gyol area etc., Mammadov said. Mammadov added that the Agency plans to build, reconstruct and repair at least 2,171 kilometers of motor roads. Work schedule has already been approved," he said. "According to an order of the president, the new M-1 Baku-Guba-Russian border motor road - a part of the transportation corridor - will be built. The Alat-Astara-Iranian border motor road with a length of 243 kilometers will be built and commissioned in 2018. --- Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz By Trend President of the International Eurasia Press Fund Umud Mirzayev sent an appeal letter to President of the European Parliament Antonio Tajani. According to the appeal, four members of the European Parliament abused their power and made an illegal visit to the occupied Azerbaijani territories. The document urges European Parliament to take measures against four MEPs Lars Adaktusson, Charles Tannock, Eleni Theocharous and Michele Rivasi. These MEPs undermine the development of dynamic cooperation between the EU and Azerbaijan, Mirzayev said. The steps taken by some MEPs contradict not only to the diplomatic norms and international law, but also the fundamental ethical principles. "Recent visit of Lars Adaktusson (MEP) from the European People's Party to the occupied Azerbaijani territories means that he supports occupation, aggression and bloody ethnic cleansing. Member of the European Conservatives and Reformists Group (ECR) Eleni Theocharous (Cyprus) also visited the area of Nagorno-Karabakh illegally." These MEPs hold biased and unconstructive position aimed at supporting anti-Azerbaijan forces, make all in their powers to cast a shadow on all the work done jointly by Azerbaijan and the EU, he said. Despite the ceasefire announcement in 1994, Armenians continue killing Azerbaijani civilians who are living close to the frontline. People die because during three decades the international community fails to name the aggressor and Armenia continues its aggression encouraged by impunity, Mirzayev added. Over 20 percent of Azerbaijan, including Nagorno-Karabakh and seven adjacent districts, have been under the occupation of the Armenian armed forces for more than 25 years, Mirzayev said. In Azerbaijan, one out of every eight people is a refugee or IDP; 1.2 million people became refugees and internally displaced people as a result of Armenian occupation and military operations. Mirzayev said such a behavior of some MEPs diminishes the trust of Azerbaijani people in the wish of the EU to support the peaceful resolution of the conflict. EU and EP support the territorial integrity and sovereignty of the Eastern Partnership countries, he said. The visit of some MEPs to occupied Azerbaijani territories and their contacts with the criminal regime established in the occupied territories aggravate relations between the peoples of two countries, Armenia and Azerbaijan, and totally undermine the possibility of a rapprochement between the two nations. We express our sincere hope that European Parliaments president will make every effort to prevent the turning of the European Parliament into an anti-Azerbaijan platform, Mirzayev said. --- Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz By Trend Azerbaijan has announced the media outlets that will allocate free airtime and space for publication for pre-election campaigns in the April 11 presidential election. Azerbaijan's Central Election Commission (CEC) said in a message Feb. 22 that free airtime and space for publication will be allocated to the registered candidates at Public Television, the "Azerbaijan", "Xalq Qazeti" and "Baku Worker" newspapers. If the above mentioned media outlets as well as other TV and radio organizations make a decision about the possibility of allocating paid airtime and space for publication for pre-election campaigns, they must send relevant notifications to the CEC. --- Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz By Trend Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi received Azerbaijani Minister of Economy Shahin Mustafayev, the Azerbaijani Ministry of Economy said in a message Feb. 22. The minister conveyed greetings and a letter from Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev to President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. The minister stressed that the restoration of the joint intergovernmental commission for economic and scientific-technical cooperation between Azerbaijan and Egypt is connected to the economic development of both countries. Speaking about the reforms in Azerbaijan, Mustafayev stressed that as a result of the reforms, a favorable climate for business and investments was created in the country. During the meeting, the Armenia-Azerbaijan Nagorno-Karabakh conflict was touched upon. It was stressed that Armenia occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijans territory and continues occupation despite the decisions and resolutions of international organizations Mustafayev also updated the Egyptian president about the meetings held within his visit to the country, the meeting of the joint commission, and the documents to be signed. Mustafayev also wished success to President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in the presidential election in March. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi said that Cairo is ready to cooperate with Azerbaijan in all spheres. Emphasizing that Egypt and Azerbaijan are friendly and fraternal countries, the Egyptian president expressed gratitude to Azerbaijanis and personally to President Aliyev for the support rendered to his country in a difficult period. The Egyptian president also conveyed greetings to President Aliyev. --- Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz By Trend Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev has sent a congratulatory letter to Haji Hassanal Bolkiah, Sultan of Brunei Darussalam. On behalf of the people of Azerbaijan and on my own behalf, I offer my heartfelt congratulations to you and the people of your country on the occasion of the public holiday of Brunei Darussalam, President Aliyev said in his congratulatory letter. I believe that the friendly relations and cooperation between Azerbaijan and Brunei will continue to develop and expand in the best interests of our peoples, the president said. On this remarkable day, I wish you robust health and happiness, and the friendly people of your country lasting peace and prosperity, added President Aliyev. --- Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz By Laman Ismayilova The Finance Minister of India, Mr. Arun Jaitley met with the Finance Minister of Azerbaijan, Samir Sharifov in New Delhi on February 21. The two ministers discussed measures for expanding bilateral cooperation between Azerbaijan and India, particularly in the area of trade and investment and exchange of trade and business delegations. The discussions also dealt with the bilateral agreements being negotiated between the two sides, namely, Bilateral Investment Treaty and the Double Taxation Avoidance Agreement. India and Azerbaijan enjoy close friendly relations based on historical links and growing bilateral cooperation. Indias ONGC-Videsh is an equity partner in Oil and Gas sector in Azerbaijan. In 2017, Indias export to Azerbaijan has grown by more than 60 percent and total bilateral trade between India and Azerbaijan has reached around $460 million. The two countries have growing cooperation in capacity building under the Indian Technical and Economic Cooperation (ITEC) programme which provides fully paid training programmes for Azerbaijani professionals and students in Indian institutions. --- Laman Ismayilova is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @Lam_Ismayilova Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz By Kamila Aliyeva The Trans Adriatic Pipeline (TAP), which is a part of the larger Southern Gas Corridor (SGC) project, will become a welcome addition as it would signify diversification of suppliers for Europe, Dr. Katja Yafimava, a senior research fellow on the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies Natural Gas Research Programme, told Azernews. I believe the TAP, the European part of the SGC, will be built and gas from Azerbaijan's major Shah Deniz field will start flowing to Europe sometime in 2020, i.e. close to what was planned. In any event it would be a welcome addition as it would signify diversification of suppliers for Europe, she said. Commenting on the possibilities of connecting Iran to the Southern Gas Corridor project, Yafimava noted that there wont be large supplies of gas to Europe from Iran in the near future. I don't believe there will be any significant exports from Iran to Europe via the SGC at least until 2030, there might be some very small volumes in the second half of the 2020s, but even for those volumes political and commercial reality is not supportive, she explained. On February 15, European Commission Vice-President for Energy Union Maros Sefcovic said that the EU is ready to discuss the possibility of connecting Iran to the Southern Gas Corridor. He also noted that the EU continues to seek ways to connect Turkmenistan to the Southern Gas Corridor project at a press conference in Baku following the Fourth Ministerial Meeting of the Southern Gas Corridor Advisory Council. For Turkmen gas to reach Europe the legal status of the Caspian Sea would need to be resolved, according to the expert. Despite some recent progress in the talks on this matter (in late 2017) between all littoral states, one should not underestimate many remaining difficulties. Without that it is impossible to build the Trans Caspian pipeline, and there is very little the EU can do about it. All in all even if the legal status will be settled, the Trans Caspian pipeline - and exports of Turkmen gas through it - won't materialize at least until the mid 2020s. Also, importantly, economics (prices) is not supportive for Turkmen exports to Europe, she stressed. There are different scenarios for Europe gas demand, but if it might not be rising significantly, import requirements will be certainly rising, according to the expert. There are various potential sources for gas for the SGC beyond Azerbaijan - e.g. Turkmenistan, Iran, Iraq - although each of those have their sets of serious problems (legal, political, commercial, and in many cases hard security problems) neither of which are either easy or quick to solve, she emphasized. So I would say that the prospects for the SGC - apart from the Azerbaijani Shah Deniz 2 gas that will be coming as from 2020 - are not great in the 2020s. Their gas could reach Europe in the 2030s, but by that time the European gas requirements might be significantly lower if its decarbonization policies are successful, Yafimava said. Speaking of the Turkish Stream project, the second string intended to bring gas to southern Europe, she stressed that it is not a rival as it would not displace any other supplier's gas. If Turkish Stream manages to utilize the SGC infrastructure (e.g. TAP) the 2020s, it is only because there would be free space in that pipeline as there are unlikely to be other suppliers (apart from Azerbaijan with its 10 bcm of gas from SD2) able to provide gas in the early 2020s to fill the rest of the TAP's total capacity which is 20 bcm, the expert noted. Howard Rogers, another expert at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies Natural Gas Research Programme, believes that the exact volumes of Azerbaijani gas, which will be transported via the Southern Gas Corridor (SGC) to Europe, depend on a number of factors. At present, from a European perspective, the question on how much of Azerbaijani gas will make it to Europe depends on many aspects including the performance of older Azerbaijani fields operated by SOCAR, as well as the growth in gas consumption in Azerbaijan and Turkey, he said. The expert further stressed that Turkey's willingness to import more Russian gas and hence allow more Azerbaijani gas to flow to Europe could affect the export volumes. The prospects of gas supplies from Iraq to Turkey, which look highly uncertain at the moment, as well as progress on gas projects in Azerbaijan in addition to Shah Deniz-2 (e.g. Absheron and ACG associated gas) are also of high importance in this regard, he noted. The Southern Gas Corridor, worth $41.5 billion, is considered as one of the priority energy projects for the EU, which strives for diversification of gas supplies. The project envisages the transportation of gas from the Caspian region to the European countries through Georgia and Turkey. At the initial stage, the gas to be produced as part of Stage 2 of development of Azerbaijan's Shah Deniz field is considered as the main source for the Southern Gas Corridor projects. Other sources can also connect to this project at a later stage. As part of Stage 2 of the Shah Deniz development, gas will be exported to Turkey and European markets by expanding the South Caucasus Pipeline and the construction of Trans Anatolian Natural Gas Pipeline and Trans Adriatic Pipeline. The first gas within the Shah Deniz-2 project will be delivered to Turkey in 2018, and to Europe in 2019. --- Kamila Aliyeva is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @Kami_Aliyeva Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz By Trend The State Agency for Local Government and Interethnic Relations (SALGIR) under the Government of the Kyrgyz Republic presented its activities on the development of Local Self-Government for the period from 2013 to 2017 at a Governmental Meeting today, Kabar with reference to the press service of the Government reported. Chairman of the SALGIR Bakhtiyar Saliev informed that within the framework of the implementation of the National Strategy for Sustainable Development of the Kyrgyz Republic (NSSDKR) for the period 2013-2017, the Program for the Development of Local Self-Government was developed. "This program was aimed at increasing the responsibility and optimizing the Local Self-Government authorities, focusing on the needs of citizens, strengthening financial sustainability, expanding the resource base and local economic development, as well as improving the organizational and legal performance of local authorities," he said. At the same time, despite measures taken during the reporting period, the number of subsidized rural administrations increased from 362 to 382, and the number of self-sufficient rural administrations decreased from 91 to 71 units. The main reasons for this phenomenon were low economic activity and inefficient use of the available economic potential on the areas. Isakov instructed the department to conduct a thorough analysis of the reasons that impede the development of the regions. "Perhaps there are other factors that negatively affect the economic performance of the subsidized regions. President Sooronbay Jeenbekov often raises issues of regional development in his appeals. We must take them into account. Give us a carefully researched analytical summary," the Head of the Government said, urging to pay special attention on increasing the staff potential of Heads of Local Self-Government authorities. "In near future, the national campaign Taza Jashoo (Pure Life) will be launched. This campaign should be carried out at the highest level, as it is aimed at improving the social infrastructure, the sanitary condition of urban and rural sites, planting trees, cleaning and landscaping in all regions of the country. I intend to personally coordinate the implementation of this movement, Isakov said. --- Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz By Trend Strategic importance of strengthening good-neighborly relations between Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan was mentioned at a press conference of the Turkmen Embassy in Tashkent, according to a message of the Turkmen Foreign Ministry. The meetings of the Turkmen and Uzbek presidents on March 6-7 and May 19-20, 2017 in Ashgabat and Turkmenbashi gave powerful impetus to the Turkmen-Uzbek interaction and laid new foundations for long-term and strategic bilateral relations, said the message. It was also noted that the Seventh Regional Economic Cooperation Conference on Afghanistan (RECCA VII) was held in Ashgabat on Nov. 14-15, 2017, following which the Ashgabat Declaration was adopted. Participants of the press conference were also informed about the events that took place in Turkmenistan in 2017 as part of its chairmanship in the Energy Charter Conference. In addition, information was provided about the upcoming groundbreaking ceremony for the Afghan section of the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) gas pipeline, the laying of a power transmission line and a fiber optic communication line along the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan (TAP) route, as well as the opening of a new railway along the Serhetabat-Turgundy (Turkmenistan-Afghanistan) route. --- Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz By Shukur Mammadaliyev Would you like to have some really refreshing recreation from your daily routine and hasty city life? Of course I want you would exclaim. I like it, but currently Im fed up with going to pubs, cafe and restaurants, etc. I want something new that would relax me to the core. Well, then I have fantastic suggestion to you. Do not tell me that you are so tired that you cannot to take yourself off from you chair and go anywhere.Then it is mean that maybe it is time to do that. Gather the last strength and do it, okay. Or maybe you are planning your spring or summer holidays, and not sure what to choose. And this is what I suggest. Located some four hours way from the capital of Baku, Goygol is the adornment of Ganja region.Yeah, you right, in English Goygol sound a little bit like Google (lol). Goygol Lake is a unique natural treasury of Azerbaijan. Goygol, or the Blue beauty of Azerbaijan, appeared after an earthquake that hit the area in the Middle Ages, by collapsing the mountain that blocked the path of the river. The flow of water created a lake of pure mountain water on top of the Caucasus Mountains. Compared to Absheron peninsula this place is heaven, both in winter and summer time. Beautiful places including emerald forests, wonderful waterfalls and scenic lakesyes, that is correct, there are about ten lakes! The color and clarity of the waters of Goygol Lake, located 1,600 above sea level is striking. The banks of the lake are covered with forests and rich of flora and fauna. The temperature of the lake water does not rise above + 17 C even in August. What else does a man need? Often most people underestimate one fact that the all good thing for recreation is free from Mother Nature. The simplest things of the nature can make a person more joyful, give maximum relaxation, than any manmade recreation facility, etc. As an example, lets take the sound of waterfall. You may wonder, What special about it? Maybe you never fill that. But it can relax a person to the bone, up to every cell of your tired brain and body. Sound funny, but it works like massage. Have you ever filled that? Then it is time to do that. There are also more than 423 types of trees, shrubs and medicinal plants grow there. In the surrounding forests you can meet foxes, deer and many other animals. Wolves, jackals, bears, lynx are also lives there. But do not worry. In place where people walking they do not come. You will be safe. The lake area is ideal for walking, travelling, and family picnics. Recreation on the shore of the fresh lake is the best decision especially on hot days in summer. Until August 2015 it was closed for visitors. And from that time it is open. There was created necessary facilities. And last year 350,000 people decided to make brain massage and visited Goygol as a tourist without any regret. What about you? When you plan visiting Goygol? Not sitting in the Google. -- Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz At the invitation of Azerbaijan Airlines, President and Chief Executive Officer of Boeing Commerical Airplanes, Kevin McAllister arrived in Baku on February 22. During the negotiations, the parties expressed satisfaction with the strong partnership relations that have developed during the long-term cooperation between Azerbaijan Airlines CJSC and Boeing Corporation. President of Azerbaijan Airlines, Jahangir Askerov noted that cooperation with Boeing Corporation is of strategic nature. In 2000, according to the instructions of Azerbaijani National Leader Heydar Aliyev, for the first time Western-type Boeing 757-200 aircraft were added to the fleet of Azerbaijan Airlines. At that time, with the support of instructors and software Boeing Corporation provided much assistance in mastering and servicing this type of aircraft, as well as organizing ground simulators for B757 / 767 aircraft. In the following years, under the leadership of Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, who pays great attention and care to civil aviation, the fleet of Azerbaijan Airlines was replenished by such aircraft as the Boeing 767-300ER, and later by the most modern liners - Boeing 787 Dreamliner. Along with the success of passenger air transportation, the country's air cargo transportation is developing dynamically. Since 2010 the fleet of Azerbaijans national air cargo carrier Silk Way Airlines was replenished with Boeing 747 F aircraft, and since 2014 the Airline started to operate the newest cargo aircraft Boeing 747-8F, which allowed it to become one of the leading players in the world cargo transportation. In the near future, passengers of Azerbaijan Airlines will be able to fly on another liner of the new generation. According to the agreement reached between Azerbaijan Airlines and Boeing, Boeing 737 MAX aircraft will start to arrive in Azerbaijan starting from 2018, and till the end of 2020 their total number will reach 10. Till the end of 2022 four more Boeing 787-8 aircraft are also expected to arrive in the country. In turn, Kevin McAllister highly appreciated the partnership and friendly relations between Boeing and Azerbaijan Airlines and expressed his confidence in further expansion of mutually beneficial cooperation. During the negotiations, further exploitation and maintenance of all types of Boeing aircrafts operated by Azerbaijani civil aviation, with the participation of our technical center, were also discussed. Within the visit, the guests got acquainted with Azerbaijani civil aviation facilities, which have been built and reconstructed in recent years - the new airport complex of Heydar Aliyev International Airport (Terminal 1), Baku Cargo Terminal, Silk Way Business Aviation, Silk Way Technics the complex on maintenance and service of all types of aircrafts, etc. Azerbaijan Airlines (AZAL) is one of the leaders of the aviation community of the CIS countries. Total route network of the airline is about 40 destinations in 25 countries. In 2017, Azerbaijan Airlines carried over 2.2 million passengers. Currently, AZAL operates such aircraft as Boeing 787, Boeing 767, Boeing 757, as well as Airbus 340, Airbus 320, Airbus 319 and Embraer 190. Aircraft of Azerbaijani civil aviation fully meets the standards of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), and Azerbaijan Airlines is a member of the most prestigious civil aviation association - the International Air Transport Association (IATA). In June 2015 Azerbaijan Airlines received a prestigious "4 Stars" from the world-famous British consulting company Skytrax, which is the leader in assessing airline service quality . The headquarters of Azerbaijan Airlines is located in Baku, at the Heydar Aliyev International Airport, which meets the requirements of international standards. In March 2017, Heydar Aliyev International Airport was awarded the prestigious Skytrax World Airport Award - the airport topped the list of the best airports in Russia and CIS countries in terms of the level of services provided, and again confirmed its compliance with the high level "4 Stars". --- Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz Thousands of Southeast Texas voters did not confirm their addresses to register to vote this spring, and hundreds requested mail-in ballots, lingering effects of Tropical Storm Harvey that could impact voter turnout. Jefferson County had "huge numbers" of voter registration cards that were returned as undeliverable, a significant increase from the last election cycle, said Allison Nathan Getz, tax assessor-collector. RELATED: Here's who's on the local primary ballot "Usually, after we get everything back, we might mail out 3,000 letters asking people to confirm their addresses. This year, we mailed out 7,900," she said. The list of registered voters whose addresses are not verified has more than doubled since 2015, from 7,600 to about 18,000, she said. People on that list will still be able to vote but will need to verify their addresses on election day. If they can't, they'll be able to vote provisionally and then prove their residency at the county's voter registrar office within six days of the election. Getz said the locations with the largest numbers of returned cards were in Port Arthur, Northwest Forest and Bevil Oaks. RELATED: Bevil Oaks flood history sign gets new benchmark "The biggest thing is just not knowing where people are," she said. Orange County Elections Administrator Tina Barrow said her county also saw an increase in undeliverable registration cards, which she said may have been because people are displaced or have moved. They've also seen a slight increase in requests for mail-in ballots from voters who are not living in the county but plan to return to their homes, she said. Displaced residents who are temporarily living outside their home county but plan to return are still eligible to vote there if they registered by the deadline and were eligible to request absentee ballots as long as they have not also registered to vote in the county where they are staying. As of Thursday afternoon, Hardin County Deputy Clerk Stacey Grimes had received more than 560 requests for absentee ballots, and Jefferson County Clerk Carolyn Guidry said she's seen an "enormous amount" of the applications. PHOTOS: Harvey causes widespread flooding across Southeast Texas Many of those are from senior citizens living with children or other family members and asking for ballots to be mailed to their temporary addresses, Guidry said. "They'll put on the application that they were displaced by Harvey." About 2,400 Democrats and 700 Republicans requested Jefferson County absentee ballots, she said. Guidry, who is uncontested in the Democratic primary to retain her position, said several contested elections seem to still be attracting attention, despite challenges in the storm's aftermath. The three-way race for the Democratic nomination for the 172nd District Court, and Justice of Peace contests for Precinct 1 Place 2 and Precinct 8 are driving voters, she said, as well as the U.S. Senate race, Turnout during the first few days of early voting has been low, which Guidry and Barrow both attributed to this week's rainy weather. It's too early to say if overall voter turnout will drop this year because of displaced voters, they said. Several polling stations in all three counties were damaged during the storm and have been relocated. Jefferson County will have 39 stations open on Election Day, down from the usual 40 because the Port Arthur Library and the El Vista community center were damaged. The YMCA, which is not usually a polling place, will be used instead of the library, Guidry said. Barrow said a few Orange County locations have been combined or relocated for the March 6 election because of damage, including the Mauriceville Methodist Church station, which has been moved to the Assembly of God Church. In Hardin County, voters who normally vote at Parkway Life Church and Lumberton Fire Station on Keith Road will vote at Woodcrest Methodist Church next month, Grimes said. LTeitz@BeaumontEnterprise.comTwitter.com/LizTeitz A Port Arthur man was sentenced to 10 years in prison Thursday on drug charges, according to information from the Jefferson County District Attorney's Office. Cody Sherrod Ford, 29, was sentenced by jury, the department said. He faced 10-20 years. Our cameras were at the First United Methodist Church oyster supper on Thursday evening. Did we see you there? Our cameras were at the Protege High School Student Art Exhibition - did we see you there? Missouri Valley, Iowa-based Robert Cunard, MD, entered into a settlement agreement on Feb. 15 with the Iowa Board of Medicine, resulting in the indefinite suspension of his license to practice medicine in the state of Iowa, the Missouri Valley Times reports. Here are six things to know: 1. The board previously alleged Dr. Cunard failed to provide appropriate pain management care. On May 19, 2017, the former family medicine physician entered into a stipulated order with the medical board, agreeing not to prescribe controlled substances with the exception of testosterone and to patients in residential hospice and nursing home settings until the issue is resolved. 2. On July 20, 2017, the board filed a statement of charges against Dr. Cunard, alleging "he willfully or repeatedly violated the laws and rules governing the practice of medicine in Iowa when he failed to provide appropriate medical care and pain management to several patients in Missouri Valley between 2011 and 2017, resulting in serious harm to patients and the public." Dr. Cunard was then placed on administrative leave from CHI Health Missouri Valley (Iowa) and his patients were notified he could no longer prescribe controlled substances. 3. The Iowa Medical Boards investigation alleged Dr. Cunard indiscriminately prescribed controlled substances to several patients, including large quantities of potentially lethal medications, while failing to appropriately assess and document the patients' need for chronic opioid therapy. The statement also alleges several of Dr. Cunards patients experienced motor vehicle accidents and frequent falls, and Dr. Cunard did not address substance abuse as the cause of those incidents. Other allegations include: Failure to appropriately document appropriate utilization of the Iowa Prescription Monitoring Program for patients receiving chronic opioid therapy. Failure to utilize drug screening for patients receiving chronic opioid therapy and to document efforts to address urine drug screens that were negative for prescribed medications. Routinely providing early refills to patients despite evidence of abuse, misuse, or diversion. Prescribing methadone to patients despite the fact that they were participating in a structured opioid treatment program. Prescribing an exceptionally high volume of pseudoephedrine, which is frequently abused in combination with other stimulants, opioids, or benzodiazepines and is used as a raw material for methamphetamine. 4. The Iowa Board of Medicine issued Dr. Cunard a citation and warning and ordered him to pay a $5,000 civil penalty at the settlement. The board also permanently prohibited Dr. Cunard from prescribing, administering or dispensing controlled substances for chronic pain treatment. 5. If Dr. Cunard seeks to reinstate his Iowa medical license, he must first successfully completed a board-approved comprehensive clinical competency evaluation, professional ethics program and medical recordkeeping course. He must also appear before the board. 6. If the board decides to reinstate Dr. Cunard's medical license in the future, he will be placed on indefinite probation subject to board monitoring, including prescribing audits, a board-approved practice monitoring plan and a worksite monitor. More articles on anesthesia: Anesthesiologist Dr. Sean Kiley elected to allopathic medical honor society 3 insights Non-opioid pain treatment market to hit $22.6B by 2022 4 insights Opioid-related overdose deaths declined in Massachusetts in 2017: 7 things to know The American Gastroenterological Association announced the recipients of its highest honors, recognizing eight gastroenterologists. The recipients will be honored during Digestive Disease Week 2018, June 2 to June 5 in Washington, D.C. Here are the honorees: 1. Loren Laine, MD, will receive AGA's highest honor, the Julius Friedenwald Medal. The medal recognizes a physician for their lifelong contributions to gastroenterology. Dr. Laine is considered one of the world's top clinical investigators and a world-renowned expert on gastrointestinal bleeding and upper gastrointestinal tract injuries. He has served three separate terms on AGA's Governing Board and is an AGA Institute past president. 2. Mary Estes, PhD, will receive the William Beaumont Prize. The prize recognizes an individual who made a unique contribution to gastroenterology. AGA said Dr. Estes' work on rotavirus and norovirus has had a "world-wide impact on the care of children." She will also receive the distinguished mentor award, which is the first time an AGA member has received two recognitions in the same year. 3. AGA will bestow its distinguished achievement award in basic science on T. Jake Liang, MD. Dr. Liang has made groundbreaking contributions to research on viral hepatitis, hepatitis B, hepatitis C and liver disease. 4. James Lewis, MD, will receive AGA's distinguished educator award. He has made several contributions to the fields of gastroenterology, pharmacoepidemiology and therapeutics safety, especially related to inflammatory bowel diseases. He is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. 5. AGA is honoring both Bertha E. Toriz, MD, and Michael Kochman, MD, with its distinguished clinician awards. 6. Finally, the organization is bestowing young investigator awards on David Goldberg, MD, and Andrew Rhim, MD. AGA President Sheila Crowe, MD, said, "The AGA recognition awards provide an opportunity for AGA members to honor their colleagues and peers for outstanding contributions to the field of gastroenterology. This year's AGA recognition prize winners are just a few of the notable and talented members who help make AGA such an accomplished organization. We are honored that such esteemed and accomplished individuals are representative of AGA." Marietta, Ga.-based WellStar Health System more than doubled its net income in the second quarter of fiscal year 2018 as the system held down costs and brought in greater revenue. Here are four things to know about the nonprofit hospital's most recent quarter, according to recent financial documents. 1. For the three months ended Dec. 31, WellStar recorded $824.8 million in revenue, up 7.8 percent from $764.9 million recorded in the same period a year prior. WellStar Executive Vice President and CFO Jim Budzinski told Becker's Hospital Review the increases reflected an uptick in inpatient and outpatient admissions, as well as 10 percent growth in its WellStar Medical Group. The opening of Smyrna, Ga.-based WellStar Vinings Health Park in September 2017 contributed to the system's growing outpatient activity. 2. The 11-hospital system kept expenses in check during the second quarter of fiscal year 2018. WellStar saw expenses increase 4.9 percent year over year to $768.6 million as salary and benefit and supplies costs grew. 3. WellStar improved its operating income in the second quarter compared to the same period a year prior. The system saw operating income grow 75.9 percent to $56.2 million, up from $32 million during the second quarter a year prior. WellStar pointed to patient volume increases and its continued integration of five hospitals bought from Dallas-based Tenet Healthcare in March 2016 as reasons for the improvement. 4. WellStar ended the second quarter of fiscal year 2018 by more than doubling its net income to $86.6 million, compared to $39.1 million reported in the same quarter a year before. The improved financial results reflect the results listed above, as well as favorable investment returns associated with WellStar's cash reserves, Mr. Budzinski said. More articles on healthcare finance: Pennsylvania hospital loses tax-exempt status: 4 things to know 10 medical conditions with the highest average cost per inpatient stay Ascension's operating income dips 78% in first half of FY 2018 Covington, La.-based Lakeview Regional Medical Center named Jacques Guillot, MD, chief medical officer, according to The Times-Picayune. Dr. Guillot joined the hospital's medical staff in 1995 and served in multiple leadership roles, including chief of staff from 2015 to 2016. He holds a medical degree from Baton Rouge-based Louisiana State University. "Dr. Guillot has been influential in building the reputation and improving the services at Lakeview Regional for many years," Lakeview Regional CEO Bret Kolman said, according to The Times-Picayune. "His established experience with this hospital gives him a unique perspective and inherent knowledge of its workings. I have had the pleasure of working closely with Dr. Guillot for the last five years, and I know he will continue to play a vital role in delivering compassionate patient care in an environment of dignity and respect." More articles executive moves: Mayo Clinic CEO Dr. John Noseworthy to retire at year-end Adventist Health taps Andrew Jahn as Southern California Region president: 4 takeaways 16 latest hospital, health system CNO and CMO moves Nurses at Pittsfield, Mass.-based Berkshire Medical Center have withdrawn their notice to strike Feb. 27. In a statement from the Massachusetts Nurses Association, union officials said nurses agreed to withdraw their one-day strike notice Feb. 22 after progress in negotiations with BMC. The nearly 800 BMC nurses had planned to strike Feb. 27 after unsuccessful attempts to resolve contract issues such as staffing and health insurance. However, the MNA said strike plans were postponed after the hospital agreed nurse staffing grids will not worsen over the course of the contract. BMC said in a statement to Becker's Hospital Review the hospital specifically agreed to keep staffing grids "in a way that would [not] increase the number of patients assigned to" nurses. They said BMC also clarified that the hospital generally would not expect clinical team leaders and permanent charge nurses to take a patient assignment unless there were limited circumstances, "and then with limited duration." Additionally, the hospital said it proposed extending the contract end date to Sept. 30, 2020, along with pay increases. "We are pleased that the strike has been postponed as a result of our new offer and we are proud of our negotiating team, which has worked so hard over the past year and a half, and [Feb. 22] met for an extensive period to offer a package that is fair to all," the hospital's statement reads. "We are continuing to negotiate and hopeful that we can find a resolution." Both sides have been in negotiations since September 2016. BMC Nurses went on strike in October 2017 and last month they voted to authorize another potential one-day strike. After a strike authorization, the law requires nurses to give hospital officials at least 10 days notice of a planned walkout. The MNA said nurses could still decide to re-issue their strike notice if a contract is not reached. Union officials said nurses still seek "language that commits management to improving staffing levels and improve patient care conditions," as well as an agreement on health insurance. In the meantime, nurses have planned a vigil for Feb. 26 to advocate for a fair agreement with management and patient safety improvements. More articles on human capital and risk: Baystate Franklin schedules 3-day lockout to coincide with planned nurse strike: 6 things to know Protests begin at Kaiser Permanente hospitals across California: 7 things to know US hospitals increasingly recruiting nurses from hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico: 5 things to know The former senior director of the claims department at Pittsburgh-based UPMC Health Plan was sentenced to two years in federal prison on Wednesday for embezzling more than $846,000 from UPMC by putting ghost workers on the payroll, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Ronald Locy was charged in November 2016 with embezzlement in connection with healthcare after the FBI launched an investigation. According to prosecutors, Mr. Locy put his wife on UPMC Health Plan's payroll in 2005. Although she performed no work for the insurer, the company paid her $785,145 in wages and bonuses between 2005 and 2013. Mr. Locy also arranged for his family's nanny to be placed on UPMC Health Plan's payroll. She was paid $62,000. Mr. Locy pleaded guilty in January 2017. More articles on legal and regulatory issues: Former CFO gets prison time for stealing $111k from Montana health clinic 11 latest healthcare industry lawsuits, settlements Patient shoots police officer at West Virginia hospital: 5 things to know A woman who lied about her nursing credentials to get a job at a St. Louis hospital was sentenced Wednesday to five years of probation and eight months of house arrest, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Samantha Rivera first pretended to be a nurse in 2015, when she lied on her resume to get a job teaching nursing at Brown Mackie College in Albuquerque, N.M. Although the college could not verify details she provided, including her education and employment history, the school did not notify the state's nursing board that Ms. Rivera was posing as a nurse. In September 2016, Ms. Rivera secured a job at St. Alexius Hospital in St. Louis by using the name and license number of a New Mexico nurse with a similar name to apply for a job through a staffing agency. On the application, she also falsely claimed to have a bachelor's degree in nursing and experience working at a New Mexico hospital. Ms. Rivera worked as a nurse in St. Alexius Hospital's intensive care unit and its geriatric psych ward, but her contract was not extended in February 2017. She then applied for a job through a Chicago staffing agency, which discovered her nursing license and resume were fraudulent. Ms. Rivera was indicted in May 2017, and she pleaded guilty to healthcare fraud and identity theft in October. In addition to probation and house arrest, Ms. Rivera was also ordered to repay approximately $21,500 to the staffing agency that placed her at St. Alexius Hospital and $28,000 to the New Mexico nursing school she taught at, according to the report. More articles on legal and regulatory issues: Former CFO gets prison time for stealing $111k from Montana health clinic 11 latest healthcare industry lawsuits, settlements Patient shoots police officer at West Virginia hospital: 5 things to know Federal regulators are intensifying compliance enforcement for nursing homes amid a rise in the number of wrongful eviction complaints among residents, according to The New York Times. Here are six things to know. 1. The American Health Care Association estimates there are 15,655 nursing homes in the U.S. with 1.7 million beds. 2. According to the report, state long-term care ombudsman programs have seen more complaints about evictions and discharges at these nursing homes than any other category of grievances. The NYT cites the most recent HHS data showing nursing home evictions and discharges increased through 2015, when 9,192 complaints out of a total of 140,145 involved such events. 3. Federal law only allows nursing homes to transfer or discharge a patient for specific reasons, such as the facility being unable to adequately care for the resident, or the resident is healthy enough to no longer require nursing care. 4. However, legal advocates say evictions often occur because residents' coverage is changing, from the more profitable Medicare to Medicaid, according to NYT. They claim many residents leave without challenging their discharge. 5. In the report, David Gifford, MD, a senior vice president of the AHCA, denied the assertion that residents are unwillingly moved for financial reasons. "There's a tension in the regulations," Dr. Gifford said, according to the NYT. "They clearly state that if someone can harm themselves or others, either through infections or their behavior or whatever, the individual can be discharged. But the regulations also clearly say that the goal is to not discharge people, and they have a right to stay there and receive care." 6. The rising rates of nursing home evictions have spurred federal regulators to respond. According to the report, CMS sent a memo to state officials in December, indicating it would increase efforts to ensure discharges are being done in compliance with federal rules. Read the full NYT report here. More articles on legal and regulatory: Supreme Court won't review CareFirst data breach case SSM Health hospital hit with physician kickback allegations: 4 things to know Virginia police looking for man who sold heroin to overdose patient in hospital The former CEO of Pine Ridge (S.D.) Hospital is expected to plead guilty in March to making a false statement about accepting money from a former staff physician accused of sexually abusing children during a 13-year period, according to the Rapid City Journal. Here are six things to know about the case. 1. Wehnona Stabler, 60, the former chief executive of the 45-bed hospital, was indicted in July 2017 on charges of making a false statement on a 2014 disclosure report. Federal prosecutors claim Ms. Stabler did not report receiving $5,000 from Stanley Weber, MD, a former physician at the hospital. 2. Ms. Stabler reportedly admitted to the allegations in a statement of facts dated Feb. 2, the same day she entered into a plea agreement with the U.S. Attorney's Office, the report states. 3. As chief executive of Pine Ridge Hospital, which is owned and operated by the federal Indian Health Services, Ms. Stabler is required under law to complete a confidential financial disclosure report and is required to document monetary gifts equating to $350 or more. 4. If found guilty, Ms. Stabler may face up to five years in prison, three years of supervised release and/or a $250,000 fine. However, as part of her plea agreement, the U.S. Attorney's Office agreed to recommend probation for as long as the court deems appropriate, according to the report. 5. Ms. Stabler is currently out on bond. Her plea-change hearing is scheduled for March 9. 6. Former physician Dr. Weber, 69, was charged last February with multiple counts of child sex crimes between 1998 and 2011, including aggravated sexual abuse, according to the report. He reportedly resigned from Pine Ridge Hospital in 2016. Court documents do not disclose Dr. Weber's reason for paying Ms. Stabler $5,000, the report states. Attorneys representing Camden County filed a lawsuit Wednesday against drugmakers and drug distributors for the companies' alleged roles in perpetuating the opioid crisis in New Jersey, according to nj.com. The suit is similar to those filed by more than 360 states, counties and municipalities, which accuse drug companies of engaging in deceptive marketing techniques to promote the widespread use of opioids. Uniquely, the Camden County lawsuit not only lists Purdue Pharma as a defendant, but takes aim at company stakeholders, as well. The lawsuit names former Purdue President Richard Sackler, and the estates of brothers Raymond and Mortimer Sackler, according to The Wall Street Journal. The suit accuses the Sackler family of engaging in a racketeering scheme related to the dissemination of opioids throughout the nation, according to nj.com. "These people are no different than members of a drug cartel that distribute drugs illegally, or the drug pushers on our streets who push heroin and fentanyl on a daily basis," said Louis Cappelli, Jr., freeholder director of Camden County, according to nj.com. "They have earned millions of dollars over the years at the expense of the American public." In a statement emailed to Becker's Hospital Review, John Puskar, spokesman for Purdue Pharma, said the company denies the allegations. "We are deeply troubled by the prescription and illicit opioid abuse crisis, and are dedicated to being part of the solution," Mr. Puskar said. "As a company grounded in science, we must balance patient access to FDA-approved medicines, while working collaboratively to solve this public health challenge." Other defendants named in the lawsuit include Abbott Laboratories, Cephalon, Teva Pharmaceutical, Endo International, Janssen Pharmaceuticals, Insys Therapeutics and Mallinckrodt, according to nj.com. More articles on opioids: 11 states, DC lack enough certified prescribers to meet opioid addiction treatment demands How New Jersey's busiest ED slashed opioid prescriptions by 58% Independence Blue Cross removes cost sharing from naloxone treatment A Connecticut man crashed his car into the emergency room entrance of Middletown, Conn.-based Middlesex Hospital and proceeded to set himself on fire Feb. 22. The man recorded the entire incident and reportedly streamed it on Facebook Live, according to the Hartford Courant. Police said Steven Ellam, 27, crashed his Chevrolet Cobalt through the hospital's ER doors around 10 a.m. Feb. 22 and proceeded to douse himself in liquid and set himself on fire. Hospital officials were able to extinguish the flames and transported Mr. Ellam to the burn center at Bridgeport (Conn.) Hospital by helicopter. Sources told the Hartford Courant Mr. Ellam had burns on as much as 90 percent of his body, according to the report. Mr. Ellam's condition was unclear as of Feb. 22, the report states. Hospital officials told the publication there were about 30 patients and 20 staff members in the ER area at the time of the incident. A security guard was hospitalized for smoke inhalation while evacuating patients and staff, but officials said no other patient or staff injuries were reported. During their investigation into the incident, FBI officials uncovered a video made by Mr. Ellam that documents the incident and was reportedly streamed on Facebook Live. The approximately three-minute video, obtained by the Hartford Courant, depicts Mr. Ellam talking about President Donald Trump, ranting about the "one percenters" and shouting "death to the world order" before setting himself on fire, according to the report. While Mr. Ellam's video does not show him lighting himself on fire, a different video shared with the publication by a witness depicts medical staff rushing to help Mr. Ellam, who is on the sidewalk outside the hospital ER. Police said Mr. Ellam's act was intentional, but said Feb. 22 they could not comment on his motive. Officials also declined to comment on whether it was an act of terrorism, according to the report. Investigators reportedly searched Mr. Ellam's home and car for evidence, and discovered cans with flammable liquid in his car, which officials believed to be gasoline. They also reportedly found a spray device similar to one used to spray weeds. However, it is unclear if Mr. Ellam intended to use the spray, the report states. Middlesex Hospital issued an alert on its website Feb. 23 indicating the ER will remain closed and all nonemergency surgeries scheduled for Feb. 23 will be canceled. However, ER patients can receive visitors. Meriden, Conn.-based MidState Medical Center will reportedly receive ER patients at both its hospital campuses while Middlesex Hospital's ER is closed, according to the Hartford Courant. To access the full article, click here. Pensacola (Fla.) Naval Hospital, the oldest naval hospital in the U.S., will slowly restructure to an outpatient center. The transition will begin in July with the closure of its maternity ward, according to the Pensacola News Journal. The decision to reorganize is a result of the declining demand for inpatient procedures and delivery services. Capt. Amy Branstetter, the hospital's commanding officer, told the Pensacola News Journal that the hospital delivers about 30 babies per month and only 20 percent of the surgeries done at the hospital require an overnight stay. The reorganization will impact 100 positions for active duty sailors. They will be sent to other locations where their skills are needed. Previously, the naval hospital also decided to close its emergency department, intensive care unit and residency program. As disruptors continue to push into the healthcare arena and pressure accumulates to reduce drug prices, pharmaceutical companies are taking steps to remain competitive and enhance their drug pipelines. 2017 marked a slow year of merges and acquisitions in the pharmaceutical industry. However, experts from some of the largest drug manufacturers are expecting the pace of deals in 2018 to significantly accelerate as a result of the tax overhaul. And, so far, they have been right. Just three weeks into 2018, deal activity is already almost halfway to 2017's tally, according to CNBC. In the past two weeks, the following drugmakers announced or completed mergers, acquisitions, partnerships and general transactions. 1. Merck to purchase Viralytics for $394M: 3 things to know In a move to expand its cancer immunotherapy pipeline, Merck & Co. inked a deal Wednesday to buy Viralytics, a virus-based cancer drug firm, for 502 million Australian dollars ($394 million). 2. AbbVie, Voyager ink $69M deal to develop Alzheimer's drug AbbVie, a pharmaceutical company based in North Chicago, Ill., teamed up with Voyager Therapeutics, a clinical-stage gene therapy company, to develop a treatment for neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's. 3. J&J reportedly seeks buyers for its $2B sterilization division: 4 things to know As part of its move to divest non-core assets, Johnson & Johnson is reportedly seeking buyers for its sterilization products division. 4. Novartis looks to auction off US generics business: 4 takeaways Novartis plans to auction off its generic pill business in the U.S. amid heightened competition. 5. Bristol-Myers, Nektar ink $1.85B cancer drug deal Bristol-Myers Squibb will pay Nektar Therapeutics $1 billion to develop a cancer immunotherapy treatment one of the largest deals ever inked for a single drug's development. 6. Walgreens is reportedly in talks to purchase AmerisourceBergen: 7 things to know Walgreens Boots Alliance is reportedly in talks to purchase the portion of AmerisourceBergen, a drugmaker, it doesn't already own a move that could help the company in the increasingly competitive healthcare landscape. By mid-2020, patients in Fairlawn, Ohio, will have access to the Crystal Clinic Orthopaedic Hospital, according to the Akron Beacon Journal. Here are five things to know: 1. The new $100 million hospital will include 60 beds and 12 operating rooms. Physicians will also be able to use expanded imaging services, and patients will have access to an outpatient campus. 2. Crystal Clinic, a physician-owned hospital, has been looking to open the orthopedic hospital since 2008, before the financial crisis hit. During the time, Crystal Clinic created a joint venture with Summa Health and started construction on a six-floor, 75-bed orthopedic campus. 3. After plans were halted, Crystal Clinic began leasing 130,000 square feet on six floors at Summa's St. Thomas hospital in Akron, Ohio. The physician-owned hospital spent years looking for a space to build and move its inpatient services. 4. Crystal Clinic employs 460 people and will add an additional 30 support staff for additional hospital operations. The new hospital will have providers for inpatient and outpatient orthopedic and plastic surgeries. 5. Crystal Clinic Orthopaedic Hospital will be the only free-standing specialty orthopedic hospital in the state. The group has 12 locations and roughly 900 employees, including 41 physicians. One-hundred-and-twenty-five jobs are set to be lost at the Carrickfergus site of Sensata Technologies. It's the latest blow to the Northern Ireland economy which has been rocked by a series of jobs losses in recent weeks. Sensata Technologies, which bought Shrader Electronics in 2014, informed employees of its intention to reduce the workforce at its Carrickfergus site on Friday. It has begun consulting with staff saying "proposed alternatives to compulsory redundancy will be considered". It has more than 1,300 staff in Northern Ireland. The company currently has two sites in Northern Ireland - Antrim and Carrickfergus - manufacturing a range of tyre pressure monitoring systems. Employees in Antrim are not affected. Graeme Thompson, UK general manager from Sensata Technologies, said: Following a review of our operations and in response to a drop in expected demand for some of the products currently manufactured in Northern Ireland, the company regrets to announce that we will potentially be reducing the workforce at our site in Carrickfergus by 125 people. This has been a very difficult decision and all possible alternatives were explored before it was taken. Our focus now is on providing support to the affected employees and their families. To that end we have engaged globally recognised but locally based outsourcing consultants LHH Penna to provide career transition advice and assistance for all affected employees. Mr Thompson reiterated the companys commitment to maintaining its manufacturing base in Northern Ireland. He said: Expected production levels for other lines remain steady at this time and Sensata Technologies remains committed to our Northern Ireland operation. Sensata Technologies is a global organisation which makes sensors, switches and controls for multiple industries. It has had a significant manufacturing and research and development presence in Northern Ireland since its 2014 acquisition of Schrader Electronics, which was founded in 1988. The company has 1,301 employees in Northern Ireland. Jobs have either been lost or put under threat recently at Lagan Construction, Wright Group, Williams Industrial Services and Kilroot Power station. (From left) Stephen Rae, editor-in-chief INM; Leslie Buckley, chairman of INM; Niall Fitzgerald; INM chief executive Michael Doorly and financier Dermot Desmond at the Dublin event Work will be required to convert the "too good to be true" language surrounding the border into an actual agreement, a Brexit event in Belfast has heard. And Johnny Hanna, partner and head of tax at business advisers KPMG, warned that some firms were at a "tipping point" in their Brexit plans as he addressed a breakfast held by Belfast Telegraph sister publication Ulster Business. And in Dublin, Belfast Telegraph publisher INM hosted a Brexit breakfast at Trinity College attended by Taoiseach Leo Varadkar. Mr Hanna told business people at the event in Belfast's MAC: "I think everyone recognises that solving the border problem, and actually converting that 'too good to be true language' into the actual agreement itself, will require a lot of work." The event also heard from Ryanair chief marketing officer Kenny Jacobs. Mr Hanna said uncertainty remained despite some positive statements made by Westminster and the EU, over areas such as workers' rights and the common travel area. "There are some very positive statements in regards to EU nationals," he said. "There are some question marks around those EU nationals who arrive in the transition period, assuming there is one, and also some question marks around the common travel area. "We are getting close to a tipping point for many businesses in terms of having plans in place and press the button on those plans." Mr Jacobs warned that Brexit could create turbulence for aviation. He said flights could stop in April next year, as there was nothing in place to replace the 'open skies' agreement allowing air travel between EU countries. "It's as simple as this. Open skies is the agreement that allows European member states to fly among each other," he said. "The UK Government has said we are coming away from Europe, leaving the European Court of Justice, but the ECJ governs open skies. "So, as it stands today, on April 1, 2019, Britain will leave the European Court of Justice (ECJ), and open skies will no longer operate. That is simply what we are looking at." Meanwhile, Mr Varadkar told INM's Brexit breakfast that a draft text of the withdrawal agreement between the UK and the EU would be published within two weeks. But he added: "As Chancellor (Angela) Merkel said, the UK can have as close a relationship with Europe as it wants to have. What it can't do is cherry pick. The EU is a set menu restaurant, not an a la carte." The Taoiseach said the UK can't simply continue to take the benefits of the EU after Brexit. "If you're a member of the club, you're a member of the club. And if you want to be an associate member, you can't write the rules yourself. That is a circle that still needs to be squared." Ian Sheppard, IoD NI chairman (centre) with (from left) Stephen Martin, IoD director general, Catriona Gibson, managing partner of associate sponsor Arthur Cox, Dale Guest, director of corporate banking Northern Ireland at main sponsor Bank of Ireland UK, and Mark Logan, former Skyscanner COO at the annual dinner Northern Ireland risks losing a generation of young people to emigration as they may be put off by the failure of powersharing and a growing number of job losses, a business leader has told a major industry event. Northern Ireland Institute of Directors (IoD) chief Ian Sheppard urged politicians to intensify their efforts to restore devolution "so that we can get ahead with building and shaping our future together". The Titanic Belfast dinner also featured Stephen Martin, the Northern Ireland-born director general of the IoD. Mr Sheppard, who is head of business and corporate banking for Bank of Ireland in Northern Ireland, told guests at the IoD annual dinner last night that the 900 job losses announced over the first two months of the year highlighted the urgency of a return to devolved government. Jobs have been lost across a range of companies in manufacturing and construction. Addressing around 450 business people at the event, Mr Sheppard said: "I genuinely believe that the current political impasse risks alienating a generation of young people who want to be part of a bright future for Northern Ireland. "Otherwise these highly mobile young people will increasingly look beyond Northern Ireland to fulfil their full potential." He added: "It is hard not to be pessimistic that 12 months on and with no marked progress towards resumption of the Executive, there is the very real danger that we are sleepwalking our way into alternative governance structures, which, at a critical time for Northern Ireland, risks seriously diminishing our ability to realise our future ambitions." He said critical decisions should no longer be postponed. "The fact critical decisions regarding all of our futures are being postponed cannot be allowed to continue and so I am using this occasion to reflect the deep-felt views of our members and making a direct appeal to our political leaders to redouble their efforts to restore the decision making institutions in Northern Ireland, so that we can get ahead with building and shaping our future together," he said. However, he added that the impasse was not stopping businesses from forging ahead. "Despite the challenges, local business leaders continue to demonstrate strong leadership ... but we need our political leaders to seize the initiative and deliver on the mandate they were elected to discharge," he said. Ryanair has warned it will grow its airline elsewhere if Stormont fails to reconvene and address the burden of air passenger duty (APD). Kenny Jacobs, chief marketing officer of the budget airline, said the 13 tax levy on every passenger was unfairly impacting on regions like Northern Ireland and "creates an economic hindrance". It comes after the airline announced it would begin a twice daily Belfast to Manchester service from October, bringing its destinations from Belfast to 13, with two more routes available from the City of Derry Airport. It offers 15 routes over the summer season direct from Belfast. APD means passengers on short haul flights flying in or out of Belfast and Londonderry must pay around an extra 13. Critics of the duty claim that it is causing a reduction in the number of potential passengers. It was axed in the Republic of Ireland in 2014. Mr Jacobs said: "Travel tax is not good for growth. On every UK flight 13 is added. That is more than a third of the price of our average fare. "Our growth here has been flat and we would like it to be more significant but that won't happen until APD is looked at." He said the lack of devolved government here was impacting on the growth of tourism and the economy because ministers could not address the issue. In Scotland MSPs voted last year in favour of reducing APD, with the hope of scrapping the tax altogether. "The evidence is there. When tax was removed in Dublin we had double digit growth. There was a strong increase in tourist numbers and if it was removed here there would be an instant boost in jobs and tourism would grow," Mr Jacobs said. "Research from PwC states if APD is cut it would boost Northern Ireland's GDP by 0.5%." Ryanair supports 715 on-site jobs in Belfast and 110 at City of Derry. Annually it transports 955,000 passengers through Belfast and 145,000 from Derry. Mr Jacobs said: "It's a big inconvenience that we can't discuss it in Stormont and what we will say is we will grow elsewhere, where there is no tax. APD is an economic hindrance to growth in Northern Ireland." Mr Jacobs said Brexit would also pose issues for the airline but urged Stormont to address what "we know is already holding back growth". "There is uncertainty surrounding Brexit and we will need more than three years to get systems in place, so in the meantime Northern Ireland should be doing everything to boost the economy that it can," he added. With more than 7500 visitors to their exhibition at the MAC over the past few weeks, Gilbert & George have been taking in the sights of Belfast. The world-renowned artists opened Scapegoating Pictures at the venue in January and have been speaking about their love for the city. George said: We like very much to show here because it is not London, Paris or New York, its not a blase city, art here, needs to be about meaning more than with the market, fame or fortune. "People wonder what the hell is it, what the hell should I think, and thats very good for us. We have something to say to this place. The exhibition is showing across all three galleries in the MAC. It is the first time they have exhibited in Northern Ireland in almost 20 years. Gilbert and George will be back in Belfast for a public signing at the MAC and a special event at the Merchant Hotel on April 11. Aine McVerry, acting CEO of the MAC, said: Anyone who knows the work of Gilbert & George knows how it is both provocative and evocative, and the feedback from the thousands of people who have already visited Scapegoating Pictures certainly reflects this. Previous exhibitions from Andy Warhol and David Hockney have demonstrated how exhibitions of this calibre attract not only local visitors but significant numbers from out of state, boosting the MAC and Belfast reputation as a destination for world class art. "We are already looking forward to their return in April. The exhibition runs until April 22. Demanding change: Jennifer Lawrence is one of a number of stars who are turning to activism First she stuck it to a totalitarian government as Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games. Now Jennifer Lawrence wants to "fix democracy". This week, Lawrence declared that she is taking next year off to get young people engaged politically. She's certainly more of an exciting political prospect than some other US politicians. Once she's finished promoting her film Red Sparrow, she will be working with a non-partisan organisation called Represent.Us. She joins a growing band of actors and actresses turned activists. Also this week, George Clooney and his lawyer wife Amal said they are donating $500,000 (357,000) to support students who will march to demand political action on gun control. They will be on the march next month. Oprah Winfrey and Steven Spielberg matched their donations. Emma Watson, who like Lawrence is 27, has donated 1m to help sexual harassment victims. Then there is Rose McGowan, the founder of #RoseArmy who called out Harvey Weinstein and whose memoir/manifesto, Brave, came out last month. Awards season has shown us that there are varying degrees of activism. If you are a multi-millionaire actor or actress, you can signal your solidarity with a cause by wearing black. Or, better still, you can turn up at an awards ceremony with an activist as your plus one - activists are the most eligible dates at the moment, they've never been so busy. You can also simply be judged by your actions, without towing the dress code line like Three Billboards star Frances McDormand, the only actress not to wear black. Standing out in her red patterned dress, she explained herself by saying she has "a little trouble with compliance issues" and she has spoken eloquently about the "tectonic shift" in her industry's power structure. The Evening Standard's film critic Charlotte O'Sullivan is impressed by Lawrence et al. "It's always brave for female stars in their twenties and thirties - when they're at their most 'hot' - to get involved with activism and risk being labelled po-faced or bolshie," she says. "Lots of studio bosses are conservative and risk-averse. I think the public are also ambivalent about cute actors who act up. "Even people who are sympathetic to progressive views can be critical and accuse actors of jumping on a bandwagon. Lawrence and Scarlett Johansson are pretty but not vacant. Long may it continue." She sees them in context: "Following in the footsteps of stars like Jane Fonda and Marlon Brando." It takes more than a film to make an actress. So as Lawrence prepares for her year in the political field, here is what makes an actress/activist. The messages Lawrence started working with Represent.Us last year, auctioning off the chance to drink wine with her to raise money for the organisation. It was founded in 2012 to stamp out corruption in American politics by overhauling lobbying, transparency and campaign finance laws. The aim is to stop political bribery and give every voter a voice. In 2016 it supported 13 successful state and local anti-corruption acts. Represent.Us's members are high-profile. The chairs are Kulpreet Rana, previously head of intellectual property at Google, and Todd Dipaola, CEO and co-founder of InMarket, an app developer. Board members include David O Russell, the director who worked with Lawrence on Silver Linings Playbook, American Hustle and Joy, Jack Black, Sia, JJ Abrams and Richard Painter, the former ethics adviser to George W Bush (it's a cross-party organisation). Lawrence brings wit to the table. In her fundraising video last year she set out her pitch, goblet of red wine in hand: "You want to help stop political corruption and drink a ton of wine? We can talk politics, drink wine, call your ex, call my ex " then she read out some reviews to guess whether they were discussing alcohol or films: "Full-bodied, strongly grounded - I hope that's about a cabernet and not my breasts." Watson, meanwhile, mainly works with projects to support women. Her 1m donation went to the Justice and Equality Fund, a new UK-based organisation founded by people in the arts which aims to provide support and advocacy projects for victims of sexual harassment. It was founded in response to Time's Up, recognising that the movement was started by women with privilege but that the film industry's role goes beyond that of promoting an equal society. Watson has acknowledged how activism has changed her. She wrote this year: "When I gave my UN speech in 2015, so much of what I said was about the idea that 'being a feminist is simple!' Easy! I have since learned that being a feminist is more than a single choice or decision. It's an interrogation of self I met a woman named Happy who works for an organisation called Mama Cash and she told me this about her history working in the women's sector: 'Call me out. But if you're going to call me out, walk alongside me as I work'." McGowan's mission is all-encompassing. She runs #RoseArmy, a movement to support victims of sexism. The hashtag is Be a Thorn. There's a newsletter and she has a clothing line, with all proceeds going to the East LA Women's Shelter, helping those impacted by sexual and domestic violence, human trafficking, homelessness and HIV. In her book she encourages readers to "email, tweet, demand different from those who are pushing a damaging narrative". The day job Being an activist doesn't mean giving up acting forever. Lawrence has a number of films on the way including the fourth X-Men, Dark Phoenix, which is due out in November. She's also working on a screenplay with Amy Schumer - this is a point where activism and acting intersect as it will have a strong feminist message. She's in Steven Spielberg's new film about photojournalist Lynsey Addario and is producing an adaptation of the novel Burial Rites, about the last woman to be executed for murder in Iceland. Watson, meanwhile, runs an online feminist book club called Our Shared Shelf. They are currently reading Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People about Race by Reni Eddo-Lodge. She says it was one of the most important books of 2017 and inspired her to ask, "How do my race, class and gender affect my perspective?" It intersects with her work as a UN ambassador. There she focuses on the He For She campaign, which appeals to men to support women's rights. She's spreading the word in the March edition of Vogue Australia, where she talks about sustainability and how to design the future. McGowan is busy too. Her documentary about her role in the #MeToo movement, Citizen Rose, came out last month. She is working on an album called Planet 9, about freedom of thought and a skincare line called The Only Skincare with her aunt Rory. The impact These are incipient movements but the women backing them are high achievers. Lawrence has form. When she was growing up in Kentucky her mother Karen, a summer camp manager, didn't allow her to play with other girls because she was too rough with them. She was brought up to be as tough as her brothers. Her fighting spirit came through when she wrote an article for Lena Dunham's Lenny Letter, which galvanised discussion about the gender pay gap. Represent.Us better get ready for that spirit. Lawrence isn't on Twitter but that's unusual for an activist. The other two are prolific there. Watson has 26 million followers on Twitter seeing her feminist message. Her book club has almost 213,000 members. McGowan sees Twitter as an indispensable part of her arsenal. She has 917,000 followers on Twitter and #Brave and #BeAThorn are trending. It was Ashton Kutcher who got her on to Twitter, saying in an interview that it is "the only voice an actor can have". When a tweet goes viral, she says it makes her phone feel like a live wire. She can also do long form - her book, Brave, is already a New York Times Bestseller. Not bad, for an actress. These are the words of Kofi Annan from the letter that he submitted to the president of the UN General Assembly (UNGA) in March, 2005. He further acknowledged in the letter that measures in place to deal with the problem were manifestly inadequate and demanded a fundamental change in approach. Annan was then the UN secretary general, the highest administrative officer of the organisation. His actions led to the tabling of the Prince Zeid report that executed a robust investigation and gave an accountability-based analysis of the sexual violence perpetrated by peacekeeping troops, that were operating with impunity granted to them by the UN itself. Six of the Kashmiri women who were allegedly gang raped by Indian soldiers in 1991 have died, the remaining 17 survivors still await justice. Since the reports submission, the UN has taken several administrative measures to hold the defaulting troops accountable. They include the adoption of the UNGA resolution on criminal accountability of troops, establishment of the Conduct and Discipline Unit, the expulsion of troops whose units were linked with the abuses and finally, obligating Troop Contributing Countries to exercise criminal jurisdictions for the offences committed by their military personnel. Let us now consider India. February 23-24, 1991 It has been 26 years since four personnel of the Rajputana Rifles allegedly raped at least 23 women in Kashmirs twin villages of Kunan and Poshpora. It was supposed to be a cordon-and-search operation to trace militants, but turned out to be the blackest of nights in Kashmirs violence-ridden history. As per the 2012 Jammu and Kashmir State Human Rights Commission (J&K SHRC) report the men in the villages were first ordered to come out of their houses and taken to a separate location. Then members of the security forces who had turned into beasts forcefully entered these houses and gagged the mouths of the victims and committed forced gang rape against their will and consent. Even minor girls as young as eight years of age were not spared. A recently published book Do you remember Kunan Poshpora? exhaustively documents aspects related to the incident. In the book, amongst many gory accounts, one of the survivors shares her story: Three army men caught hold of me and 8-10 army men raped me in turns. They had huge battery torches with them and they used them to see my naked body, while making lewd remarks. Many independent investigations and fact finding missions (including the one led by a former chief justice of the Jammu and Kashmir high court Justice Bahauddin Farooqi) have concluded that the Kunan Poshpora case has seen unprecedented proportions of ignorance with regards to normal investigative procedures that must be followed after such a crime. In 2014, as a jolt to the Indian government, the divisional bench of state high court comprising Chief Justice M. M. Kumar and Justice Hasnain Masoodi took up the SHRC report and decreed the government should explore the possibilities of payment of compensation within three weeks. This was the first time that members of the higher judiciary acknowledged that the heinous crime did indeed take place as until then reports of the gang rape had been considered terrorist propaganda. Since then there have been two petitions in the Supreme Court against the high court order one by the supposedly pro-people state government and another by the Indian army. A stay on the high courts order has already been obtained. And as of now, we dont know how long the case will now go on. 26 years justice is already delayed, already denied. Six victims of the alleged crime have died. Lest the horrors of history repeat, the struggle for justice continues. Saying yes it happens The first step towards solving the problem is to acknowledge its existence. While filing the petition against the high court order, the army claimed that the alleged incident was a hoax orchestrated by militant groups and part of a cleverly contrived strategy of psychological warfare to discredit the security forces and to jeopardize counter-insurgency operations. Here, we should recall the fate of the armys depositions in front of the judicial enquiry commission which was headed by a former Manipur judge, Upendra Singh, in the Thangjam Manorama rape and death case. None of the armys versions were accepted by the commission. The inquiry established that troops of 17th Assam Rifles brutally tortured Manorama in front of her family. Thereafter, she was shot multiple times, including her private parts. Singh found this completely incomprehensible and submitted in the report that it was likely that Manorama was shot in her genitals to cover up the crime. The armys submissions, based on an FIR and other documents, were declared a naked lie. In Union of India & Anr. v. State of Manipur & Anr. (2014), the Supreme Court bench comprising Justice T.S. Thakur and P.C. Ghosh directed the Centre to pay Rs 10 lakh to the Manoramas mother. Like the Jammu and Kashmir high court order in the Kunan Poshpora case, this was also an acknowledgement that some deviant characters in the army do commit heinous crimes, just like members of the civilian population. There are other official documents that scream of the armys excesses. The Justice Verma Committee report for instance, says that brutalities committed by the armed forces have led to a deep disenchantment due to the serious allegations of persistent sexual assault in areas of conflict. It further noted that impunity for systematic or isolated sexual violence is being legitimised by the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act (AFSPA). Additionally, the committee strongly recommended certain amendments for our existing criminal laws and the AFSPA, but the government has taken little action on those specific points. Although, after the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act, 2013 includes the armed forces under Section 376(2)(c) of the Indian Penal Code; accountability is still missing from the cases tried in military courts. In 2005, the Justice Jeevan Reddy Committee had already recommended repealing of AFSPA for the simple reason that it does not provide for any transparent system through which the Centre or other state institutions can ensure that citizens are protected from such actions. Act firmly against impunity abuse In August 2015, then UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon fired Babacar Gaye (the peacekeeping chief of the Central African Republic) for failing to take adequate action against cases of sexual exploitation and called the incidents a cancer in the UN peacekeeping system. In India, the army has its own military courts, whose trial and conviction rates are yet to be assessed. For civilians, in cases of rape, the National Crime Records Bureau data (from 2015) places the conviction rate at around 28%. With AFSPA still unaltered, we can imagine the corresponding statistics for the armed forces. One common fallacy regarding the armys impunity must be clarified. Army officials are not immune under AFSPA if they sexually assault women or commit rape. Section 7 of the Act provides protection from prosecution for anything donein exercise of the powers conferred. These powers include causing death, search and arrest without warrant; and they cannot be taken as a token of liberty to sexually assault residents. But, under AFSPA-related offences, military personnel cannot be prosecuted unless there is a prior sanction by the central government. Responding to an RTIapplication filed by an NGO, the Jammu and Kashmir Home Department stated that no sanction for prosecution has been intimated by the Ministry of Home Affairs and Ministry of Defense to the State Government from 1990-2011 under the J&K Armed Forces Special Powers Act (emphasis added). The Justice Verma Committee clearly suggested that no sanction from the Centre should be required if the person has been accused of committing sexual offence in the disturbed areas where the AFSPA operates. But this suggestion is yet to be adopted. In addition to all this, court martial case proceedings remain opaque. Amnesty International India has raised serious doubts over the manner in which investigations and trials are conducted in our military justice system. Being responsive and sensitive Manoramas brutal murder shook everyone who heard about it. Because of our national medias inherent bias against the North East and Kashmir, the incident attracted negligible coverage. To make their voices heard, women from the region walked nude through Imphal and protested right in front the Assam Rifles headquarters. Monetary compensation ordered by the Supreme Court provided some respite. But is that enough? Kunan Poshpora survivors have been staging regular protests but their voices are stifled and the mainstream media continues behaving as usual. Our collective conscience has in fact become selective. Some of the highest officials at the UN have acknowledged and responded to the offences committed by peacekeeping troops. Can we learn from them? Or are nation-state dynamics so different that we have to continue carving out an absolute immunity for armed forces without any accountability whatsoever? We are also party to major international human rights treaties. In 2014, the CEDAW (Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women) Committee called upon the Indian state to review AFSPA as per the Justice Verma Committees recommendations and ensure that the security sector is subject to effective oversight. The world is watching us and we cannot play innocent or oblivious. We must imbibe the spirit of the principles of fairness in our criminal justice administration and act against offenders. Truth has a peculiar nature it cannot be defeated. Every act of tyranny, or deprivation of justice, has the power to haunt not only the offenders but also us, as a society. We talk of winning the hearts of the Kashmiri population. Government of India, let us start with being just. Courtesy: thewire Almost one in five patients in Northern Ireland is waiting more than a year for treatment Almost one in five patients in Northern Ireland is waiting more than a year for treatment. A total of 14,979 people (19.1%) were left waiting more than 12 months for either an inpatient or day case admission as of December 31, compared with 12% (8,470 patients) 12 months previously. Read More The details emerge in a new report by the Department of Health looking at waiting times in Northern Ireland. It covers the period from October to December - taking in the Christmas and New Year period - and compares the figures to the same three-month period in 2016. The report also shows that as of December 31: A total of 271,553 patients were waiting for a first consultant-led outpatient appointment - 10.3% more than at December 31 2016 (246,198). Almost 30% of patients here (80,651) have waited over a year for their first consultant-led outpatient appointment, compared to 47,072 (19.1) a year ago; A total of 78,440 patients were waiting for admission to hospital - 10.8% more than a year ago (70,782). 112,342 patients were waiting for a diagnostic test - 6.7% more than a year ago (105,302). The current target of having all urgent diagnostic tests reported on within two days of the test being undertaken is also being missed - 86.2% were reported on in that time in the final quarter of last year. Cancer Research UK's public affairs manager for Northern Ireland Margaret Carr called the wait for diagnostic services, which includes tests for cancer patients, "unacceptable." She said: "This situation will be causing huge anxiety to those waiting to find out if they do or don't have cancer. "Northern Ireland must join the other UK governments in committing to a cancer strategy. We are the only part of the UK without one." Susan Hill, vice president of the Royal College of Surgeons, called the waiting times for surgery "completely unacceptable" and said they were causing patients' health to deteriorate. UUP health spokesperson Roy Beggs called the wait for first appointments with a consultant "shocking and outrageous". "For too long the health service in Northern Ireland has been paralysed by the inability to form a government, with no Health Minister or agreed budget," he said. "We urge all stakeholders to come together to find an agreed way forward to allocate funds and allow the much needed elective care plan, as well as the associated reforms, to be implemented as soon as possible." Sinn Fein's Health spokesperson Pat Sheehan said growing waiting lists were "not acceptable" and "need to be tackled through sufficiently funded transformation". The Health and Social Care Board admitted waiting times for many patients "continue to be unacceptable". It said factors including a growing older population, increased demand for services and new specialist treatments meant there "simply isn't either the money or required staffing levels to sustain the current model of care". The Archbishop of Canterbury has paid a visit to Clonard Monastery along with more than 60 members of the Church of England clergy. Archbishop Justin Welby visited the Belfast monastery yesterday as part of a private pilgrimage on peace and reconciliation. The head of the Church of England, who was installed in the role in 2013 after less than two years as a bishop, was welcomed to Belfast by Fr Noel Kehoe, rector of Clonard. Recalling the important contributions of peacemaker priests Fr Alec Reid and Fr Gerry Reynolds, who played significant roles in the peace process, Fr Kehoe said: "Their legacy is of great importance. It teaches us that in life, in mission, and especially in peace-building, hospitality creates space for God to work. So our welcome to you today is not a mere formality, or good etiquette. "Rather, it is an invitation, a prayer, that in the short time you spend with us today, we may be deeply conscious that Divine friendship makes of us friends and fellow pilgrims." Speaking about the ongoing political crisis in Northern Ireland, Fr Kehoe described "a failure in hospitality... a going out to meet the other to discover, in friendship, a common good. The open space is narrowing, and leadership is found wanting." He added: "At the heart of our division is a question of identity. I am British, I am Irish, my culture, my tradition, my language, my flag, my tribe. But a great number of those people who would lead us to exclusive camps also identify themselves as Presbyterian, Catholic, Anglican, Methodist, Baptist. Our churches have a great responsibility that requires leaders to risk." Fr Kehoe asked the Archbishop and the pilgrims "to pray for responsible leadership in politics and pray for courageous leadership in the churches" - which he believes have an important role in modelling a "leadership of hospitality." After praying with members of the community in the church off the Falls Road in the west of the city, Archbishop Welby presented the congregation with an illustration from a ninth century Irish book of the gospel that hangs in Lambeth Palace. He was presented with a handpainted icon of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, in whose honour the annual summer novena attracts more than 10,000 people a day. Fr Ciaran O'Callaghan and Ed Petersen of Clonard's Peace and Reconciliation ministry then accompanied the pilgrims on a prayer walk of the peace walls. Prayers were offered for both communities, for victims of violence, for peacemakers, and for those "we call enemies". A long-running Ulster-Scots radio programme will disappear from our airwaves as it undergoes a revamp, according to BBC NI. The broadcaster was previously accused of shelving weekly radio show A Kist o Wurds after it failed to appear on its usual Sunday slot earlier this month. BBC Radio Ulster, however, said it is working to "refresh and develop" it's Ulster-Scots output and it is expected a new series will begin in the summer. Launched in 2002, and produced by Blackthorn Productions, the popular show features a selection of music, poetry and news in Ulster-Scots and is often presented by Anne Morrison-Smyth and Helen Mark. Listeners of the show, however contacted the Belfast Telegraph to express their concern that a new programme hadn't aired since February 4. It comes after BBC NI faced criticism following its proposals to reduce its 'Pipes and Drums' radio programmes. Ulster Unionist leader Robin Swann called for the BBC to reverse its decision on scheduling the programme for a six-episode series instead of its usual 16. The MLA for North Antrim said he hoped the Ulster-Scots programme wouldn't have the same fate as the pipes and drums shows. "A Kist o Wurds has been a staple of Radio Ulster's programming since 2002 and has been a platform for Ulster-Scots language and culture," he said. "This news comes so soon after the BBC has decided to further reduce its coverage of the local pipe band scene by only scheduling the Radio Ulster 'Pipes and Drums' programme for a six-episode summer series. "Ulster Scots music and culture is a key component of our rich heritage and the BBC as the national broadcaster should be in the business of reflecting and promoting it." On the BBC Radio Ulster website, the show is described as Northern Ireland's longest-running Ulster-Scots radio show. A BBC NI spokeswoman said: "We continue to provide a range of Ulster-Scots output and have been working to refresh and develop BBC programming in this area. "A new weekly magazine series will begin on BBC Radio Ulster in the early summer. "More detailed information will be available shortly. In the meantime, listeners will be able to enjoy a mix of new and archive programmes about Ulster-Scots. "All of this is complemented by specially commissioned television programmes, many of which are also available as part of a newly created collection on the BBC iPlayer." BBC broadcaster Stephen Nolan has hit back at critics who say he and his show are "part of the problem with Northern Ireland politics". He was responding to a Queen's University professor who was highly critical of the show and the presenter during Friday's Radio Ulster programme. Professor Brian Walker said the show was "part of the problem". The presenter said he was "happy" to discuss the issues with the professor. He thanked the academic for his call. "This is a conversation that needs to happen," he told the caller and his listeners. To the day I die this programme will not be some type of sugar-coated programme where the elite have a voice. Stephen Nolan In a lengthly exchange with the professor, Mr Nolan addressed his many criticisms. In recent weeks there has also been a barrage of criticism on social media about "the biggest show in the country". Some, while highlighting the show's content, have called for a boycott. "Your programme constantly escalates tension," said Professor Walker. "We see it over Irish language issue, we see it over this issue of the present [funding over legacy inquests] and what we need at the moment is compromise, is moderate voices but your programme, in my opinion, provides a platform for extreme views." The professor accused the broadcaster of "constant negativity," saying the presenter needed to encourage politicians and not highlight their climbdowns in order to allow them to forge agreement. Professor Walker said he had attempted to get onto the show on five occasions in the past week. Mr Nolan said there were hundreds of calls to the show every day. "And your opinion should prevail and we should censor people who aren't maybe professors of politics?" responded Mr Nolan. Expand Close Professor Brian walker, school of politics, Queens university / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Professor Brian walker, school of politics, Queens university "So someone would define what is moderate and you therefore want me to tell people who are phoning this show 'sorry you are not moderate enough we are keeping you off'. "We don't keep people off the air." It is important you bring on more moderate people. Brian Walker Referencing comments made about every street sign in Northern Ireland being in Irish, Professor Walker said that when people come on with "extreme" statements then people should be brought on to challenge those views. "Why couldn't you bring on people from the universities who would have more moderate views about the Irish language?," he said to which Mr Nolan highlighted how Professor Walker was making the point on the show. "The result of this is it encourages scare tactics out in the community," Professor Walker continued, "When Arlene Foster came on 10 days ago and made a statement about no compulsory Irish language in schools, why did she say that? It had all been hyped up. "It shows how the tension was built up and your programme, by having these other views that went unchallenged were all part of the way it was hyped up." He continued asking how many times TUV leader Jim Allister had appeared on the radio in the past two weeks and said that at times comments made by contributors descended into "fake news," something Mr Nolan outright rejected. Sinn Fein and the DUP are trying to strike a deal, come up with a compromise, and the common approach of this programme has made that more difficult. Brian Walker "[Jim Allister] is a minority view and yet you have him on the television and have him on the radio. He is entitled to make those points but at the same time it is important you bring on more moderate people. "You can stir the pot or you can pour oil on troubled waters. I'm afraid your programme pours oil on troubled waters to encourage division. You point out how politicians have moved away from their original positions - you have criticised them over this. But that's a good thing. "An entirely different way would be to be encourage them." "You are a public body, funded by the taxpayers and the overall good of the community is important, not the pride or the earlier positions of the parties. "It would worry me you are the 'biggest show in the country' and therefore you have a responsibility to this community and this community is deeply divided and therefore there is a strong need for calmness, reconciliation and when people make extreme statements they need to be challenged and not by bringing another extreme person. "Sinn Fein and the DUP are trying to strike a deal, come up with a compromise, and the common approach of this programme has made that more difficult." I would expect a person who is a professor at Queen's University not to say things that are just factually untrue. Stephen Nolan Again Mr Nolan rejected the claims saying statements were challenged routinely on his show which included contributions from Alliance and the SDLP and indeed the professor himself was on the show. He said moderate views were "always welcome" on his programmes and it was not for him to "encourage" people to change their positions. He rejected he was in any way himself critical of the politicians. "It is not true to say views go unchallenged. I would expect a person who is a professor at Queen's University not to say things that are just factually untrue." He said he would publish how his show challenged Irish language groups along side the professor's assertion their comments were not challenged. On the point of highlighting political u-turns, Mr Nolan added: "We set out the promises that both these party leaders made to the electorate when they were seeking their vote. And we challenged them on why they were then breaking those promises. "For you to suggest that is stoking up division ... are you telling me that is not the role of a political journalist? "Why did they take the hard line in the first place you might ask, rather than question the journalist? "My job is to hold politicians accountable when they make promises, cast-iron guarantees to the public and a citizen votes on that basis it is absolutely the role of the journalist. "You think it is the role of the BBC or me on the Nolan show to cover up division or to put a bit of jam on top of it? It is not the role of the BBC or the Nolan show." He said the professor had "lost to the plot" over his assertion journalists should encourage politicians to come to agreement. Mr Walker continued: "It is the role of a journalist not to stir the pot, not to be constantly negative and discourage compromise." To which Mr Nolan responded: "Maybe we should just regurgitate their press releases." "Every single day we invite the DUP and Sinn Fein on. We have the SDLP, Alliance, UUP, people like yourself criticising. "We give free rein to every one. "I am hearing it at the moment that the Nolan show is part of the problem. Brian is saying we are stoking it up that you are all not as angry as the Nolan show is making out. "More moderate people are very, very welcome, but to the day I die this programme will not be some type of sugar-coated programme where the elite have a voice." The funeral of a young Co Tyrone man killed in a crash in Australia will take place in his home village this weekend. Tiarnan Rafferty (22) died when the motorcycle he was driving collided with a car in the Sydney suburb of Marrickville. He was treated by emergency services at the scene, but later died in hospital. Mr Rafferty, from Galbally, had been working in construction in Australia. He was a former student of St Ciaran's College in Ballygawley. Requiem Mass will take place at 1pm on Sunday at the Church of St John the Baptist in Galbally, with burial in the adjoining cemetery afterwards. It was initially thought that it could take up to 10 days for Mr Rafferty's body to be returned home from Australia. The Kevin Bell Repatriation Trust assisted with bringing his remains home. Barry Monteith, an independent representative on Mid-Ulster District Council, is a friend of Mr Rafferty's family. He told the Belfast Telegraph: "It's fantastic that we as a country have something like the Kevin Bell Trust. "To have to deal with the trauma of a death is bad enough, but to have to deal with it when someone is so far away would be almost insurmountable if it wasn't for that organisation. I could not pay enough tribute to them." Mr Rafferty's remains will be waked at the home of his grandparents Seamus and Pauline Girvan from this morning until his funeral Mass on Sunday. Mr Monteith said that there was widespread relief in the community that Mr Rafferty's body had been brought home. "I suppose it's a case of the old tradition we have here of being able to pay your respects to the remains and the family and helping them through this time, but of also trying to be there for them in the weeks and months ahead," he added. Earlier this week Fr Gerard McAleer, parish priest at Donaghmore in Co Tyrone, said that everyone he had spoken to reflected that Mr Rafferty was "a very nice young man". He is survived by his parents Sharon and Damien, sister Aine and brother Cathair. His mother is the national treasurer of Republican party Saoradh. Two brothers have confirmed they are co-operating with an HMRC investigation into a suspected 1 million pound tax fraud. HM Revenue & Customs raided two private and 16 business addresses on Wednesday and seized computers and business records. More than 120 HMRC officers took part in the operation which saw two men, aged 49 and 47, and a woman aged 39, all from the Newry area, arrested and later bailed as part of the ongoing investigation. Damien Garvey (49) and his brother Adrian (48), both from Newry, are directors at the BWL Group, which owns and operates a number of Synge & Byrne coffee shops in Belfast, Derry, Dungannon and Newry. The pair also own and operate some O'Brien's sandwich outlets in Northern Ireland. HMRC directed that several outlets operated by the brothers be temporarily closed on Wednesday. They have all since reopened and are trading normally. Following the raids, Carson McDowell solicitors, representing the brothers, said their clients were cooperating fully with the relevant authorities. The solicitors added: "This investigation relates to accounting technicalities particular to the cafe/outlet industry, and our client is confident that the findings of this investigation will ultimately vindicate them." The leaders of far-right group Britain First will stand trial in April for allegedly inciting hatred at a rally in Belfast, it has been confirmed. Paul Golding and his deputy Jayda Fransen are among four people facing prosecution over speeches outside City Hall. A prosecution lawyer told Belfast Magistrates' Court: "The contest is fixed for April 6, there are no issues and all witnesses are confirmed." The case relates to speeches made at a 'Northern Ireland Against Terrorism' rally in August last year. Demonstrators had gathered on the same day as a republican march organised to mark the use of internment without trial by the British Army at the height of the Troubles in 1971. Golding, 35, and Fransen, 31, are charged with using threatening, abusive or insulting words. They allegedly intended to stir up hatred or arouse fear by his comments, according to the police case. Similar charges have also been brought against 60-year-old John Banks, of Acacia Road in Doncaster, south Yorkshire, and Paul Rimmer, 55, of Modred Street in Liverpool. All four accused deny the allegations against them. None of the four defendants were present in court as it was revealed that the trial is expected to last for a full day. Defence barrister Richard McConkey requested a further review hearing next month to check on requested disclosure. District Judge Fiona Bagnall again excused the accused from attending at that stage. A leading Belfast book store has had to introduce special lighting in a bid to stop people taking drugs in its toilets. Waterstone's in Fountain Street has installed fluorescent tubes emitting purple ultra-violet light as a deterrence to addicts shooting up. Similar measures have been used in other UK cities - in nightclubs, bars, service stations and stores. It is the latest attempt to address a growing problem with substance abuse in Belfast city centre. The UV light prevents veins from showing up and is effective in deterring drug-injecting users. Waterstone's Belfast manager said the decision to fit the lights in the male toilets of the busy store, close to City Hall, was taken some months ago in response to a "small number of incidents" last summer. The issue was raised by a customer who, puzzled by the strange glow in the toilets, contacted this newspaper. Peter Gray remarked on "the bizarre lighting" after a recent visit to the bookshop. The 50-year-old radio technician said the "strange purplish glow" and "eerie twilight" was a "wholly unpleasant experience", which left him "feeling dizzy and with a headache". "When I went into the male toilets I moved around to try and activate the light but there was only this dim ultra-violet gloom like you'd see on a dance floor," he said. "To be honest, when I went to wash my hands there wasn't even enough light to distinguish between the hot and cold taps, never mind to make sure one had left the place clean for the next user. "My eyesight is reasonably good but for someone with impaired vision, or elderly, the experience, I assume, would be even more challenging." Mr Gray said he believed undesirable activity could be curbed by hiring toilet attendants. "That's the old-fashioned, tried and tested technology; lighting can't discriminate between who it is and isn't meant to deter," he said. "The modern solution is also anti-social because it's one less job available for, for example, a retired person who would appreciate a small extra income and the opportunity for passing conversation. "I wouldn't object if I had to pay 50p or 1 to use the toilets; it would be cheaper than the cost of the coffee I felt obliged to buy in order to justify access, even though I am a regular Waterstone's customer." Former Belfast mayor Jim Rodgers said toilet attendants should be employed in premises across the city centre to combat anti-social behaviour and the "worsening drugs problem". "People are dying from drugs, they're being hospitalised; and we need to act now and I firmly believe people are the answer to this problem, not lights," he said. The store manager said the lighting serves as a precautionary measure and gives additional protection to the digilocks on the toilet doors, which preclude entry to users without the required code. "It's a well-known fact that there have been problems with anti-social behaviour in the city centre and Fountain Street area and this is how we've responded after taking advice from the PSNI and other agencies, as well as our health and safety team," she said. "We didn't particularly want to put ultra-violet lights in the toilets but that's what we've done to protect the health and safety of customers, which is our main concern and of paramount importance." A police spokesman said the use of fluorescent lighting was "amongst the advice offered in order to try and design a cut in this type of activity". In November this newspaper revealed a 1,470% rise in call-outs to remove drug paraphernalia from public areas in Belfast - from 42 to 661 - in three years. SHAHID RAFIQ Kunan-Poshpora (Kashmir): Despite passing of 27 years, justice continues to elude the victims of Kunan-Poshpora mass rape. Promises of probes and reopening of the case is just an eye wash. Successive regimes, NGOs, human rights commissions and other voluntary groups have also failed to get the culprits punished. They come every year on 23rd February, click our pictures and cash on our tragedy the victims said. We are seeing all this from past 27 years and everyone has failed to provide us justice. Our fears that the Army and other agencies would not cooperate into the case and the accused soldiers are not traceable, proved true, they said. Our hopes of getting justice are diminishing with passing of each day. We dont think we will get justice as everyone including our own Kashmiri people have forgotten us the victims said. It seems that the investigating agencies have hushed up the case. This is why accused army men are free. We dont want money but stringent punishment to the accused soldiers, said the locals. On the night of 23rd February 23, personnel of the 4 Rajputana Rifles of the Army cordoned off the two villages Kunan and Poshpora in north Kashmirs Kupwara district during a search operation. They raped at least 40 women after pulling residents from their homes and torturing men, the locals alleged. Several victims have died during the past 27 years due to psychological disorders from the stigma of rape. Others are living in a pathetic condition as they are not able to get proper treatment, said relative of a victim. Courtesy: GK The DUP's Sir Jeffrey Donaldson said he was unaware of the deal. DUP leader Arlene Foster has said her party was not aware of a deal on inquest funding going ahead if there wasn't agreement between them and Sinn Fein on getting the Stormont institutions back up and running. It comes after Sinn Fein claimed a deal was done on securing legacy funding with the British Government and of which the DUP leadership was aware. In a statement, Arlene Foster said: "No one in the DUP was aware of inquest funding being progressed in the absence of an overall agreement or a decision to advance all elements of the Stormont House Agreement. "It would be astonishing if the Government granted funding for legacy inquests in the absence of an overall agreement to progress all elements of the Stormont House Agreement. "It is a matter of public record that Sinn Fein has been talking to the Government about progressing legacy inquest funding. I was aware of this during the Talks. We were also talking to the Government about matters of importance to us. "I will be raising this matter with the Secretary of State. On Thursday evening's BBC The View programme Sinn Fein's Gerry Kelly said funding for inquests for Troubles killings was agreed with UK government officials. The Government, however, has said talks with the parties were based on them reaching an agreement. Mr Kelly also claimed the deal would have omitted any statute of limitations to curb security force prosecutions. The policing and justice spokesman said he had proof of his party's agreement with the government to release inquest funding and wanted to see it implemented. Expand Close The DUP's Sir Jeffrey Donaldson said he was unaware of the deal. / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp The DUP's Sir Jeffrey Donaldson said he was unaware of the deal. "There are victims and survivors waiting, some of them over 45-46 years, give them some respite," he said. Senior judges have called on funding to be provided in order to allow them to complete the proceedings. During the programme, however, the DUP's justice spokesman Sir Jeffrey Donaldson said he was "unaware" of the deal. On Friday morning, Sinn Fein's Declan Kearney insisted the DUP leadership knew of the talks on the matter. He said: "The DUP leader Arlene Foster and the negotiation team did know that this agreement had been made with the British Government. "The Irish government were cited upon the agreement between Sinn Fein and the British Government that the legacy funding should be released." A UK Government spokesperson added: "All discussions with parties were in the context of how the UK Government would respond in the event of an agreement. "Regrettably there was no agreement. This Government has set out clear commitments to take forward the Stormont House Agreement legacy institutions, and to support inquest reform. "As Secretary of State made clear on Tuesday, she will be consulting on how to implement Stormont House legacy institutions as soon as possible. The Government announced, in 2014, 150 million to support legacy reform in Northern Ireland." Poor weather conditions have been blamed for the lowest silage yield recorded in Northern Ireland in 12 years. The area of hay saved by our farmers also decreased in 2017, by almost two-fifths to approximately 7,000 hectares - the lowest level ever recorded - with yields also tumbling to a 15-year low. The figures were released yesterday by the Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs (DAERA) as part of its December Agricultural Survey 2017. The survey shows that adverse weather conditions hampered silage cuts and, as a result, a drop in average silage yield to 29.5 tonnes per hectare - the lowest recorded in Northern Ireland since 2006. Overall, the planting of cereal crops was down 20% at the beginning of December 2017 in comparison with the previous year. The sowing of winter wheat amounted to a total of 5,700 hectares - a 22% decrease on 2016 - while the amount of winter barley sown covered 6,400 hectares, representing a 10% drop in comparison to the previous 12 months. Allan Chambers, an expert in seeds and cereals at the Ulster Farmers Union, told the Belfast Telegraph yesterday that it had been impossible to sow crops on large swathes of land last autumn. "It was because of wet soil conditions from persisent rainfall. Soils were at saturation point on some farms, as a result there were real difficulties," he said. "There were fields in Northern Ireland that were completely impassable and no work could be done, including harvesting." Mr Chambers runs his own 300 acre arable farm at Seaforde in Co Down. He said that in 50 years it is only the second time he has seen crops being totally wasted. "The effect of it all is that there has been a shortage of fodder and so the price of silage has doubled," he said. "There have been heavy financial losses as a result of not being able to cut hay or harvest grain or potatoes. "I have been in farming for 50 years and this is only the second time in Northern Ireland that I have witnessed crops being totally wasted. "The last time was in 1985, but even then it stopped raining in September. "This time is started raining at the start of August and it only really stopped this week." "It costs 300 to sow an acre of grain, so that's 15,000 every 50 acres. "There's been hundreds of thousands of pounds lost across Northern Ireland. "I just hope that the weather improves to allow farmers to get field work done this spring." University staff striking over their pension arrangements hit out in fury yesterday when it emerged that Ulster University chief Paddy Nixon is taking home a salary of 264,000 - an increase of 14,000 on his last reported salary of 250,000. It was also revealed that the UU vice-chancellor's complete package, including pension and benefits, is 311,000. The salary figures were revealed by the Times Higher Education yesterday, and came as university workers took part in the first day of four weeks of planned strike action over pension arrangements. The publication also compiled salary figures for the vice-chancellor at Queen's University Belfast, although it warned the figures might be skewed because there was more than one vice-chancellor during the 2016-17 academic year. Vice-chancellor Patrick Johnston died suddenly last June. Professor James McElnay has been acting vice-chancellor since then. Last month, Queen's said Professor Ian Greer from the University of Manchester had been appointed to the top role and will take over later this year. The salary reported for the Queen's chief for 2016/17 was 261,000, and the complete package, including pension and benefits, was reported as 327,000. The vice-chancellor salaries are the highest in the public sector in Northern Ireland. By comparison, the salary scale for the head of the Northern Ireland Civil Service is 148,652-178,709. However, the average salary for university chiefs across the UK last year was 268,000. The new figures reveal that UK vice-chancellors saw their pay rise by just over 10,000 on average (4%) in 2016/17, nearly four times the 1.1% increase awarded to staff, and come amid growing concerns about spiralling pay for university bosses, with several high-profile figures, including ministers, calling for restraint. The University College Union (UCU) claimed last night that the "L'Oreal principle - 'because I'm worth it'" - has taken hold at the top levels of universities. UCU President at Queen's, Dr Fabian Schuppert, branded vice-chancellor pay as "excessive, given the context of ongoing cuts in higher education". "You couldn't make this stuff up," Dr Schuppert said. "Yesterday, on the day we commenced striking - because university leaders want to cut our pensions by up to 55% - we're being told that our vice-chancellors are earning more than ever, while all of these people tell the rest of us to tighten our belts, that we should be happy enough to face the possibility of poverty in old age. They're telling staff on precarious contracts that the universities can't afford to give them job security. And they're telling us that our pensions are unaffordable - even though they've budgeted for them in their own estimates. This is simply indefensible." An Ulster University spokesperson said: "VC salaries are similar acro ss Higher Education, as you would expect in an increasingly competitive sector. "This reflects the scale, complexity and impact of universities across research and teaching." A spokesperson for Queen's said: "The vice-chancellor's salary is determined by the University's remuneration committee, a sub-committee of its governing body, senate. The vice-chancellor is expected to play a full leadership role within the university, within Northern Ireland and on the national and international stage and make a leading contribution to cultural, social and economic development in Northern Ireland." A school principal who was harassed for 18 months by the father of a pupil who she was prevented from expelling says she will remain vigilant after he was given a suspended sentence. Gerard Knight (38), of Cayman Drive, Bangor, was handed a four month prison sentence which was suspended for three years by a judge at Newtownards Magistrate's Court yesterday after being convicted of verbally abusing Julie Thomas, the head teacher of Clandeboye Primary School over a prolonged period of time. The father-of-two had contested the harassment charge, but the judge said the case was "the easiest I have come across in terms of credibility". A restraining order was also imposed on Knight. The court heard the problems began after the board of governors temporarily banned Knight from the school premises following allegations that he had pinned a child to a wall inside the school premises following an incident which involved his son. Police investigated the alleged assault but no charges were brought against Knight, and he was allowed to access the school again. When Ms Thomas, who has been principal of the school for the past five years, attempted to hand him a copy of the parent's code of conduct, he refused to accept it. Later in the school year, Knight became verbally aggressive when his eldest child was suspended. Ms Thomas told the court yesterday that Knight shouted in the school: "If this school was run by a man it would be better." She added: "I was very intimidated ... I was in fear of being struck." The principal sobbed in the witness box as she recounted how Knight cycled along her street and stopped outside her home one Saturday morning in May 2017. She described how he returned soon after and looked straight into her living room before moving away again. On other occasions, Knight shouted and swore at the principal's husband as he picked up their daughter from primary school and posted photographs on Facebook which he had taken of Ms Thomas standing outside the school - he also posted screenshots of correspondence they had exchanged and accused her of lying to police and discriminating against children with special needs. The judge said the Facebook entries showed that Knight was "irrational to the point of paranoia". Knight insisted he was "not an aggressive person" and said he had apologised in writing for questioning the principal's ability to do her job based on her gender. A defence lawyer claimed his client had no memory of stopping outside Ms Thomas' house and denied shouting at her husband while he was picking up their daughter, but the judge dismissed the idea of him coincidentally stopping outside the house as "a lie". Speaking to the Belfast Telegraph outside court, Ms Thomas, who now carries protection devices issued by the PSNI, welcomed the sentence but said she will remain vigilant in the days ahead. "This has taken a toll on my health and on my relationship with my husband and daughter," she said. "On occasions my little girl would hug me and say: 'Mummy, I know that man is making you sad.' It upsets me that she had to go through all this as well." She recalled the chilling moment Knight turned up outside her home. "My weekend at home was the only time I could be free from it, my home sort of became my sanctuary. But I ended up feeling vulnerable in my own home after he turned up outside - it was like he had breached my safe place," she said. The principal, who has worked in the teaching profession for over 25 years, said she does not believe her experience is unique. "Other school heads have commended me for speaking up because they are aware of similar situations," he added. Ms Thomas also expressed disappointment with the Education Authority (EA) and believes only time will tell if they have learned anything from the nightmare which she has endured. "I, along with the support of the governors, wanted to expel the child in question but the EA chose not to go down that road and advised that it would be discriminatory to the child," she said. "That made the process go on much longer than was necessary and definitely heightened everything. If they had reacted differently, I might not have ended up in a courtroom." Ms Thomas said she had already been in discussions with the EA when she sent them an email saying: "I can't cope with this anymore." She said she was shocked to learn they knew nothing about what had been happening. A spokesperson for the EA said that, while they take safety seriously, they do not comment on individual cases. "We are currently working with a group of principals to develop a range of advice and guidance materials to help support principals and school staff in dealing with difficult situations and aggressive behaviour," they said in a statement. "This will include templates and suggested responses to facilitate effective communications particularly in relation to social media." Social media users have levelled criticism at DUP MP Ian Paisley after a tweet in which he called Sinn Fein leader Mary Lou McDonald "Loopy Lou". It came in a retweet by Mr Paisley of a thread from BBC political editor Laura Kuenssberg, in which she was giving an account of Mrs McDonald's meeting with PM Theresa May on Wednesday. The thread recounted that Mrs McDonald claimed the DUP had not given a "true and accurate" picture of negotiations, and that Mrs McDonald had accused the PM of allowing the DUP to block power-sharing at Stormont. Mr Paisley wrote: "Loopy Lou's Party walked out of Stormont". Dublin-based Sinn Fein councillor Paul Donnelly tweeted in response: "I thought at one stage last year that we really saw shift in terms of mutual respect and understanding after Martin's death. "You played a real part in that and it's pretty disappointing to see your comment today." Former Sinn Fein Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness died in March of 2017. Writing underneath the original tweet, a number of users questioned the appropriateness of the comment considering the focus on respect in negotiations to restore Stormont. "Do you think that is appropriate, Ian? Name-calling like you're in a playground. This isn't America, that stuff isn't acceptable," wrote one user. "Letting your side down Ian with comments like that, also letting Northern Ireland down," wrote another. Police are appealing for witnesses after a man walked into a shop in central Belfast and set it on fire. The incident happened a short time before 1pm on Friday in the Donegall Street area. Police received a report of a man entering a premises, pouring out a flammable substance, and then setting it alight. The suspect made off on foot. Three people were in the store at the time of the incident. Although no one was injured, all three were left badly shaken. Northern Ireland Fire and Rescue Service attended the scene and extinguished the fire. Detective Sergeant Keith Wilson said: It is believed this man purchased petrol from a filling station on Clifton Street before making his way to Donegall Street. Did you see him or do you have any information that could assist with our enquiries? If so, please call detectives at Musgrave Criminal Investigation Branch on the non-emergency number 101, quoting reference 540 23/02/18." The public can also give information anonymously by contacting independent charity Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111. The PSNI are appealing for witnesses after an expensive watch was stolen at knifepoint in west Belfast. The incident happened in the Springfield Road area of the city at around 3am on Sunday February 18. Police responded to the call and carried out searches in the area based on the appearance of the two suspects. Inspector McCullough said: We would be keen to speak to two men, both believed to be in their 20s and Middle Eastern in appearance, who were in the area at the time and may have information that could help with our investigation. One is described as very slim build, 58, wearing a navy top with what is believed to be the word Hollister down the arm, dark trousers and a Hermes belt with a large H on the buckle, with facial stubble with his hair shaved at the sides and longer on top. "He is reported to have run off, carrying a knife, towards the Cavendish Street area. The other man is described as being 57 in height, of muscular build, wearing black trousers, grey tee-shirt and with dark hair. We would like to hear from anyone who saw this incident taking place or who knows anything about it. Please contact us on the non-emergency number 101, quoting reference number 231 of 18/2/18." Members of the public can alternatively contact independent charity Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 555 111. Protesters take part in the rally calling for abortion to be legalised here A United Nations (UN) report has found abortion laws in Northern Ireland violate the human rights of women here. The report by the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women said by unduly restricting abortion to women in Northern Ireland the UK was breaching the rights of women living here. "Denial of abortion and criminalisation of abortion amounts to discrimination against women because it is a denial of a service that only women need. And it puts women in horrific situations," the committee's vice-chairwoman, Ruth Halperin-Kaddari, said in a statement. The reports finds that by restricting access to abortion in Northern Ireland the UK is responsible for "grave" and "systematic" violations of women's rights. The UN Body said that restrictive abortion laws in Northern Ireland are in breach of the UK's international human rights obligations and called on the UK Government to change the law to decriminalise abortion and to provide greater access to abortion for women and girls in the region. Grainne Teggart, Amnestys campaigns manager in Northern Ireland, said: This damning report from the United Nations confirms what Amnesty has long said - Northern Irelands draconian abortion laws are a daily violation of the rights of women and girls. The UN Committee is very clear that it is the UK Government which is responsible for ensuring that our laws are in line with the states international human rights obligations. Devolution even if functioning does not relieve the UK Government of their responsibility to uphold human rights in Northern Ireland. We call on the UK Government to introduce abortion reform legislation at Westminster without any further delay. A judge has called for heavier sentencing powers in Northern Ireland when it comes to domestic violence. Barney McElholm made the comments at the Magistrates Court in Londonderry yesterday after sentencing a man who grabbed two women and threw them to the floor. Michael Paul James McIntyre's behaviour was described by his own defence barrister as "neanderthal". Judge McElholm said legislation should be introduced immediately to give judges enhanced sentencing powers. But he added that in the absence of an Executive with legislative powers and while politicians were bogged down in other matters, the new tougher sentencing guidelines soon to be made available in England and Wales won't be available here. Appearing via video-link from Maghaberry Prison, McIntyre (45), from Maureen Avenue in Derry, pleaded guilty to assaulting his ex-girlfriend and another woman and to causing criminal damage to his ex's table by punching it with his fist. Mr McElholm said the maximum sentence he could impose for the domestic violence assaults was six months whereas the maximum sentence for the criminal damage offence was two years. The assaults on the two women took place in a neighbouring house in Maureen Avenue on January 12 last year. A barrister for the Public Prosecution Service said the women told the police they were the victims of sustained violent assaults by McIntyre during which he grabbed them by the hair and throat and threw them to the floor. One of the women was unable to breathe for a short period and the other victim was kicked and punched to the body as she lay on the floor. Defence barrister Stephen Mooney said his client had behaved "like a neanderthal" and that one of the aggravating features of the offences was the degree of degradation involved.Mr Mooney said because of his guilty pleas, McIntyre was entitled to some credit as the two women did not have to give evidence in open court against him. Judge McElholm described McIntyre's behaviour as "thuggish and disgraceful" but said it was also disgraceful that under current legislation the defendant could only be charged with common assault. "I have said before and I will continue to say - we have long passed the point where there needs to be separate domestic violence legislation with enhanced penalties", he said. "The sentencing guidelines for domestic violence in England and Wales are to be changed and they are going to be heavier, and there should be new legislation and enhanced penalties in Northern Ireland of up to twelve months for violent domestic assaults on women and children. "The current maximum of six months is not a deterrent. Of course, if we had a government maybe these matters could be addressed," he said. The judge jailed McIntyre for eight months for punching the table with his fist and also fined him 200. He also imposed a five-month concurrent jail sentence for the assaults on the two women and imposed a Res training Order on McIntyre for five years. At least 15 deaths in as many years; homeless, hapless especially vulnerable in the conflict zone New Delhi, MUZAMIL JALEEL: Late Sunday night, a sentry at an Air Force station on the outskirts of Srinagar shot and killed a 65-year-old man who had crossed the security fence and come very close to the perimeter wall of the station. J&K Police said the man was fired upon after he ignored repeated warnings, including warning shots in the air. The man was barefoot, wore no winter clothes, and carried no ID card. He was identified as Syed Habibullah, a mentally ill man from Soibug, Budgam. He had come very close to the perimeter wall of the Air Force station. They (the sentries) shouted and shouted, asking him to stand still. But he kept moving. There is a video, too. The sentry got a bit nervous and opened fire, I-G (Kashmir Zone) S P Pani said on Wednesday. It is unfortunate. We have asked every district to make a list of homeless people. They are mostly mentally unwell. As there are no shelters, they just roam around. We have repeatedly issued advisories asking people not to venture close to camps. For a sentry, it is difficult to guess their intentions. Only yesterday, two men on a motorcycle rode close to a security vehicle outside the Koel (Air Force) camp (in South Kashmir) and threw a grenade, Pani said. The Valleys top psychiatrist, Dr Arshad Hussain, estimated that perhaps 70% of mentally ill people were cared for by families, but there were still many who were mentally ill and homeless. Though the mentally ill are vulnerable across the world, it is worse in a conflict zone, Dr Hussain said. We dont have halfway homes and rehabilitation homes anywhere in Kashmir. This infrastructure is essential. This, he said, was despite a team monitored by the Supreme Court having recommended the setting up of such homes. Social Welfare Minister Sajjad Lone told The Indian Express that the government planned to bring an ordinance to help mentally challenged people. In fact, the Finance Ministry has already pledged funds to set up a home (for the mentally challenged). We are fast tracking, Lone said. Khurram Parvez, coordinator of the Jammu & Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society (JKCCS), a major human rights group based in Srinagar, however, said the way mentally challenged people are shot dead cant be reduced to a coincidence. The problem in Kashmir, according to him, is that draconian laws like the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) allow security forces to shoot at anybody merely on the basis of a suspicion. And because the government promises probes but nobody is ever held responsible, there is no accountability. Even before the February 19 killing of the 65-year-old, the JKCCS had documented 15 alleged killings of mentally ill people in J&K between 2003 and 2011. The circumstances of most of these deaths were similar, according to the JKCCSs records. March 16, 2003: Security forces allegedly killed a woman who was roaming around their camp in Nowgam, Banihal. Her identity was not established, but it was confirmed that she was mentally unwell. September 5, 2003: An unidentified, mentally challenged boy was shot, allegedly by paramilitary forces, in the Abi Guzar area of Srinagar. February 20, 2004: Gul Mohammad Bhat (22) of Chattru, Kishtwar, who had been born with a mental illness and could not properly comprehend or communicate, was shot and killed as he was walking towards his home at night. Security forces initially claimed he was a militant, but in the face of an outcry, said it was a case of mistaken identity. March 1, 2004: A mentally challenged woman, Shameema Begum, was killed during an encounter in Banihal. April 13, 2004: Security forces allegedly killed Nazir Ahmad Chaku, a mentally challenged man from Anantnag. August 10, 2004: Mentally challenged Ghulam Hassan Chopan of Zainpora, Shopian, was finally buried after the government ordered a magisterial inquiry into his killing. Chopan was allegedly shot by troops in an orchard on August 8. Villagers said he was trying to run away from the security forces personnel who were calling him; the security forces claimed Chopan was killed in an encounter. The outcome of the inquiry has not been made public. December 25, 2004: The BSF allegedly shot dead mentally ill Shamshad Ahmad Ganai in Tral. June 24, 2005: Army expressed regret after shooting dead a mentally ill person at Ganwan Kangan, Ganderbal. May 13, 2006: Army killed mentally challenged Muhammad Abdullah Sheikh on May 12-13 night. There were protests in Kunanposhpora, Kupwara. Army said the death was highly unfortunate, a case of mistaken identity. July 16, 2006: Mentally ill Mohammad Abdullah Wani of Braripora, Handwara, was shot dead in what security forces termed a case of mistaken identity. October 26, 2007: Akeel Ahmed Mir, a mentally challenged boy, was shot after he allegedly tried to enter a security forces camp at Watlab, Sopore, in the wee hours. April 11, 2008: Mentally ill Shakeel Ahmad Malik (24) of Boniyar, Uri, was killed as he tried to sneak into an Army camp. Army termed the incident as unfortunate. January 6, 2009: Army shot deaf and mute Abdul Rashid Reshi on the high-security Gupkar Road in Srinagar. Police said he had crossed the main gate of the Commander 31 Sub Areas residence. January 5, 2011: An unidentified, mentally unsound man was shot dead in Lolab, Kupwara, late in the evening after, according to police, he didnt stop despite repeated warnings from security forces. August 7, 2011: Army and police claimed to have killed top Lashkar commander Abu Usman in Surankote in a gunbattle, but it emerged that a mentally challenged Hindu youth had been killed in a fake encounter. Courtesy: Indian Express First Published on: February 22, 2018 A table receives more justice than victims of domestic violence in Northern Ireland, former justice minister Claire Sugden has said. The east Londonderry MLAs comments come after Judge Barney McElholm called for heavier sentencing powers in Northern Ireland when it comes to domestic violence. Read More The judge's comments relate to a case heard at the Magistrates Court in Londonderry which saw Michael Paul James McIntyre receive a sentence of five months in jail for assaulting two women and eight months for punching a table with his fist. Ms Sugden, speaking to BBC Radio Foyle, said the lack of an Executive at Stormont has prevented legislation she worked on as justice minister, which would impose tougher sentences for perpetrators of domestic violence, from being enacted. Expand Close Appeal: Judge Barney McElholm / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Appeal: Judge Barney McElholm In 2018 we dont have a law because we dont have an Executive, she said. I have said this consistently through this passed awful 13 months of no governance in Northern Ireland. Politicians are absolutely letting down victims of domestic violence abuse in Northern Ireland. "This piece of legislation is absolutely a work in progress. We are at a stage now that, had an Executive been up and running, this would have been introduced into the assembly. "We are long passed the point where Northern Ireland should have a domestic violence law. Other parts of the United Kingdom do, but we dont. Ms Sugden estimated that, had an Assembly been in place, new legislation on domestic violence would have been enacted by October 2017. She said: Judge McElholm is absolutely right to point out that a table receives more justice than victims of domestic violence in Northern Ireland do, and thats wrong. The MLA added that a maximum sentence of six months in prison for domestic violence is disturbing, wrong and shameful. The maximum sentence for criminal damage is four times than that of domestic violence in Northern Ireland. Taoiseach Leo Varadkar warned the UK can have as close a relationship with the EU as it wants, but it cannot "cherry-pick". The Irish Republic's leader insisted yesterday that the UK can't simply continue to take the benefits of the EU after Brexit. He also revealed that a withdrawal agreement is set to be published in two weeks' time. "As Chancellor (Angela) Merkel said, the UK can have as close a relationship with Europe as it wants to have. What it can't do is cherry-pick. "The EU is a set menu restaurant, not an a la carte," he told a Brexit breakfast at Trinity College, Dublin, which was organised by Independent News and Media. "If you're a member of the club, you're a member of the club. And if you want to be an associate member, you can't write the rules yourself. That is a circle that still needs to be squared. Within two weeks you'll see the draft of the withdrawal agreement published. That will be very interesting and will certainly crystallise things." At the breakfast event, Mr Varadkar also spoke about Ireland needing to build new alliances in Europe ahead of the UK's departure. "They were also a very strong ally on a lot of other questions," he said. "We are losing a friend in that regard, also a friend in terms of tax sovereignty and countries being able to set their own tax rules." Niall FitzGerald, the former boss of global consumer goods company Unilever, said the Irish have a responsibility to speak out on Brexit. He said the Dail needed to take an "aspirational and forceful" national strategy, that has a focus on boosting infrastructure. He said the UK had achieved zero in its negotiations with the EU. But he added it would be wrong to think the UK electorate would change its mind. Mr Varadkar also questioned Prime Minister Theresa May's impartiality on the process of getting the Northern Ireland Assembly back up and running. He pointed to the fact that the UK Government is reliant on the DUP to keep it in power, and can therefore be held to ransom by its 10 MPs. "What you have at the moment is a British Government that is dependent on one party in Northern Ireland for its survival," the Taoiseach said. "The Good Friday Agreement is very clear. It says the sovereign Government has to act with total impartiality, but it is difficult for them to do so at the moment given that their Government is dependant on one party in the North." Last December the DUP used its power over Mrs May to scupper a deal she made with Brussels aimed at protecting the Irish border. "That's not a healthy place to be in but it's the realpolitick," said Mr Varadkar, who explained that reinstating Stormont would only be really possible through combined action by the Irish and British Governments. "Things only ever really move forward in Northern Ireland when the British and Irish Governments work together." Meanwhile, DUP MP Ian Paisley came under fire on social media after a tweet in which he referred to Sinn Fein president Mary Lou McDonald as "Loopy Lou". Mr Paisley wrote: "Loopy Lou's Party walked out of Stormont" in response to a thread about Mrs McDonald's meeting with Mrs May on Wednesday. The draft agreement to resurrect Stormont, which was leaked to the media this week, was the most recent version that the DUP and Sinn Fein had been working on before the talks collapsed, it has been confirmed. Just days after talks between the parties broke down, a draft of the deal that had been on the table was leaked to journalist Eamonn Mallie on Tuesday. Clearly marked draft, the 13 page document details areas agreed on, with the sections which have still to be agreed marked with brackets. It included an Irish language act, an Ulster Scots and a respecting culture and diversity act, as well as accommodations on other issues. In the first joint media appearance of senior politicians from the DUP and Sinn Fein, Lagan Valley MP Sir Jeffrey Donaldson and North Belfast MLA Gerry Kelly appeared on BBC NI's The View programme last night. During that discussion it was for the first time confirmed that the leaked agreement was the most recent one from the negotiations table. Speaking to the Belfast Telegraph following the broadcast, Sir Jeffrey said: "That was where discussions had got to when we reached an impasse." He emphasised: "There were still key elements that had not been agreed, obviously we had not agreed an Irish Language Act", and pointed out that the sections on language were among those in brackets clearly indicating that they had not been agreed. Meanwhile, Sinn Fein MLA Gerry Kelly also claimed on the programme that his party had a secret deal over legacy agreed with the UK Government. Mr Kelly indicated that the deal would see the funds which the Lord Chief Justice Sir Declan Morgan needs to legacy inquests released. Nicola Sturgeon has said her governments plans to almost double free childcare by 2020 are on track in the face of opposition concerns about funding, staff and timing. Scottish Labour leader Richard Leonard and his Liberal Democrat counterpart Willie Rennie both highlighted an Accounts Commission report which warned about significant risks to the policy. The government has pledged to increase paid-for nursery places from the current 600 hours to 1,140 for three and four-year-olds, and eligible two-year-olds, by August 2020, equivalent to about 30 hours a week in term time. Our latest report finds "significant risks" surrounding @scotgov ambition to double #earlylearning and childcare hours by August 2020. Read it in full here: https://t.co/WwUpnqilat pic.twitter.com/oiWssT5Zqi Audit Scotland (@AuditScotland) February 15, 2018 Speaking at First Ministers Questions, Mr Leonard highlighted elements of the report including a 160 million yearly revenue funding gap between government and council estimates, a similar 290 million gap on cash needed to upgrade buildings and a lack of progress on securing 12,000 extra staff councils claim to need. He said: This government rightly made childcare its flagship policy but as it stands there is not enough money, not enough staff, not enough buildings to keep that promise. Mr Leonard referred to a recent report from campaigners which found council nurseries offering the free hours are not open long enough for working parents. He added: No one can believe because your childcare promises for the future because your policies in the present are failing. Local councils say it, parents say it, Audit Scotland says it. When will you start to listen? There are over 72,000 children attending council nurseries in Scotland. Only 3% of them can start at 8am or earlier, and just 2% can finish at 5.15pm or later. How does this help working parents? Read our new research. https://t.co/T6XQZHlpG5 Fairfunding4ourkids (@fairfunding4OK) February 20, 2018 Mr Rennie said he backed the policy but is concerned that the Scottish Government will not be able to deliver it. I do agree with [Nicola Sturgeons] ambition, I really want this to work but if everything is ok why are so many organisations speaking out? he said. At the current rate of progress it will take another 20 years to recruit the staff needed and it will take 45 years before places are available everywhere during the school holidays. Three years after the First Minister made this promise, why is the government so far behind? Ms Sturgeon replied: Were not far behind and I have to say some of the claims that Willie Rennie has just made there are ridiculous and will be seen to be ridiculous in a few years time when we have delivered this commitment just as we delivered the 600 hours when many people across this chamber were sceptical that we would do so. Richard Leonard asked for our plan on expanding the childcare workforce - he got a few more facts than he bargained for. #FMQs pic.twitter.com/eJ50venD5s The SNP (@theSNP) February 22, 2018 She added: We are on track to deliver this expansion. The First Minister said one of the reasons behind increasing the hours is to improve flexibilty for parents. She said it is not unusual to have initial disagreements on the money required but plans to have agreement with council umbrella body Cosla by the end of April. She added: This is one of the key policies of this governmentit is one that we are determined to deliver and determined to put the funding and the planning in place to make sure that we can and we do. Shadow home secretary Diane Abbott has condemned shocking treatment of detainees at the Yarls Wood Immigration Removal Centre amid claims dozens of women are on hunger strike in protest at the conditions. After making her first visit to the controversial facility, Ms Abbott said she and Shami Chakrabarti were told by detainees that around 65 women were refusing food but management had denied it was a hunger strike. Because they are refusing to admit they are on hunger strike, they are not monitoring them in the way that they should, she told the Press Association. Just arrived at Bedford Station with Shadow Attorney Gerneral Shami Chakrabarti. After nearly a year and a half of requestsI've final been granted access to #YarlsWood detention centre pic.twitter.com/RFzg3w2hyF Diane Abbott MP (@HackneyAbbott) February 23, 2018 Serco, which runs the centre, confirmed that some women were refusing to eat in the restaurant but said this did not constitute a hunger strike. The Home Office also said it was aware of a situation where some detainees were refusing food but said the individuals concerned were being closely monitored by medical professionals. Ms Abbott said she would be raising conditions at the centre in Bedfordshire which was described as a place of national concern by the Chief Inspector of Prisons in 2015 in Parliament. There are concerns about standards of medical care, there are concerns about access to legal help. There are concerns about the length of detentionDiane Abbott, shadow home secretary She said she had been seeking access to the site for more than a year and what she found when she got there had been pretty shocking. There are concerns about standards of medical care, there are concerns about access to legal help. There are concerns about the length of detention. Even convicted prisoners have a release date, she said. It cannot be right that people for whom the Government has a duty of care and who have committed no crime are being treated like prisoners and have so many issues in relation to their health and welfare. A lot of them had issues with depression and some of them didnt seem to be getting help for that. It was all very concerning. You dont leave people in limbo. It is wrong in Guantanamo Bay. You dont leave people in indefinite detentionBaroness Chakrabarti, shadow attorney general Shadow attorney general Baroness Chakrabarti, who accompanied Ms Abbott on her visit, said a Labour government would end the practice of indefinite detention for people adjudged to have no right to remain in the country while they awaited deportation. This policy is rotten. You dont leave people in limbo. It is wrong in Guantanamo Bay. You dont leave people in indefinite detention, she said. She expressed concern about the attitude of some of the staff they met including a doctor working at the facility. He was incredibly defensive and aggressive and he told me that we had an agenda and we shouldnt be listening to these women, she said. Lady Chakrabarti said the management also tried to make light of the claims that the women were refusing food and claiming that sales in the centre shop had risen exponentially. They said they (the detainees) are not going to the canteen sales in the shop had gone through the roof, she said. There are a number of women who did not take food in the restaurant over the last 48 hours but that does not constitute a hunger strikeSerco spokesman A spokesman for Serco said: There are a number of women who did not take food in the restaurant over the last 48 hours but that does not constitute a hunger strike. Furthermore the purchase of food by residents from the shop increased at the same time so we know people were eating. This was fully explained to Diane Abbott and her party. A Home Office spokesman said: Detention and removal are essential parts of effective immigration controls , especially in support for the removal of those with no legal basis to stay in the UK. We take the welfare of our detainees very seriously and detainees who choose to refuse food and fluid are closely monitored by on-site healthcare professionals. Diane Abbott has been seeking access to the facility for more than a year (Yui Mok/PA) Shadow home secretary Diane Abbott is visiting the controversial Yarls Wood Immigration Removal Centre amid reported concerns over the treatment of women detainees. Her arrival at the centre in Bedfordshire coincided with reports of a hunger strike by more than 100 women held there. The women were said to be protesting at their offensive treatment by the Home Office. Just arrived at Bedford Station with Shadow Attorney Gerneral Shami Chakrabarti. After nearly a year and a half of requestsI've final been granted access to #YarlsWood detention centre pic.twitter.com/RFzg3w2hyF Diane Abbott MP (@HackneyAbbott) February 23, 2018 One Algerian woman told The Independent that she felt broken down by her time there. Every day I wake up and I have to think of a reason to go on. I have given up thinking about the outside, she was quoted as saying. I feel like I am in someones dungeon and no-one is letting me out. Ms Abbott has been seeking access to the facility, which is run by Serco, for more than a year. The Home Office said it was aware of a situation where a number of detainees at the centre were refusing food and that the individuals concerned were being closely monitored. Detention and removal are essential parts of effective immigration controls, especially in support for the removal of those with no lawful basis to stay in the UK, a spokesman said. We take the welfare of our detainees very seriously and any detainees who choose to refuse food and fluid are closely monitored by on-site healthcare professionals. Finance Secretary Derek Mackay just about managed to stay upright on his first snowboard lesson in Renfrewshire. After several trips to the top of the slope at Snow Factor Braehead, he appeared to be getting the hang of the sport. The company, Scotlands only indoor-sports destination, was recently named Digital Business of the Year by the Scottish section of the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB). Expand Close Derek Mackay has snowboarding lesson PA Wire/PA Images / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Derek Mackay has snowboarding lesson Mr Mackay said: In Renfrewshire we are fortunate to have a high number of quality businesses and enterprises now operating bringing jobs and economic growth to the local area. It also brings visitors to Renfrewshire. With the success of online bookings and digital promotion, businesses such as Snow Factor can attract visitors from across the west of Scotland and further afield to the area. Jamie Smith, owner of the Ice Factor Group which bought Snow Factor in 2011, showed Mr Mackay around the facility. After being shown the basics by instructor Conor McIlraith, the MSP said: It was good fun, I thought it would be a bit more dangerous. Cool to see @DerekMackaySNP visit our member and FSB Award winner @Snow_Factor this morning. The Beijing Winter Olympics 2022 better watch out! #Olympics #ShowcaseSuccess pic.twitter.com/Ym49woQqzR FSB Scotland (@FSB_Scotland) February 23, 2018 Mr McIlraith said the MSPs skills on the slope were above average, adding: After three runs, he was able to do it by himself. Despite public resentment, Indian troops routinely employ deadly search operations in Kashmir [Basit Zargar] Deadly Cordon and Search Operations have again become a regular feature of counter-insurgency operations in Indian-administered Kashmir, writes Umar Lateef Misgar. The only belonging that remains intact in Abdul Ahad Bhats single-storey home in Batmurran is a satellite TV dish, perched defiantly against the hollowed remains of a once relatively prosperous household. Bhats house was blown up on Deecember 19 by Indian troops after the discovery of two armed rebels led to Batmurran, a village nestled high in the hills of Southern Kashmirs Shopian district, becoming the scene of a fierce gunfight between Indian forces and armed rebels. The pair had been detected during a Cordon and Search Operation in the area. Nine other houses were either blown up or damaged during the ensuing battle. Cordon and Search Operations (CASO) have again become a regular feature of counterinsurgency operations in Indian-administered Kashmir, a region that has witnessed armed rebellion against Indian rule since the late 1980s. Through these operations, Indian forces lay siege to a target area, usually constituting one or several residential zones, and conduct door-to-door searches to kill armed rebels in gun battles. Last year, according to data compiled by the Jammu Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society, an influential civil society group, at least 540 CASOs were conducted by Indian troops across Kashmir, and 500 of these in South Kashmir alone. More than 200 armed rebels were killed but they were not the only casualties. Cordon and Search operations (CASO) have again become a regular feature of counterinsurgency operations in Indian-administered Kashmir, a region that has witnessed armed rebellion against Indian rule since the late 1980s In Batmurran, a few houses away from where the rebels were hiding and later killed, Abdul Rashid Bhats family sits in mourning on a cold, damp veranda shaded by walnut trees, an unusual sight in the harsh winters of Kashmir when people prefer to remain inside. They are trying to escape the horrible memories of death when Rashids daughter, Beauty Jan, was taken away in a flash. Jan, who would have turned 20 on the day The New Arab visited her familys home, was killed when a bullet tore through the windows of their living room. She left behind an 11-month-old baby and a broken family. I am only living in the hope of raising this baby that my daughter left behind, Rashid told The New Arab, tears swelling up in his eyes. Homes are frequently destroyed by Indian troops attempting to flush out militants during cordon-and-search operations in Kashmir [Saqib Mir] Loss of life and limb is a frequent feature of CASOs. The residents often clash with Indian forces in an attempt to break the siege imposed upon them, and also to give any rebels, who enjoy massive popularity in the region, a chance to escape. In the same village where Beauty Jan was killed, 50-year-old Mohammad Ayoub Bhat also lost his life after being shot during clashes with Indian forces. In their hunt for rebels, Indian troops frequently destroy private property. In Batmurran, the house belonging to Mohammad Yaqub Bhat, where the rebels had taken shelter, was turned into rubble by the Indian forces during a 24-hour gun battle. I had spent my entire lifes savings to build this house, said Yaqub, while describing the intricacies of his now wrecked house. The forces even blew up my cowshed, burning the cow inside it to death. According to Yaqub and other villagers whose houses were also damaged, thedestruction of more than seven buildings could have been easily avoided. However, Rajesh Yadaw, a spokesperson of the Central Reserve Police Force, an Indian paramilitary agency that assists the army during CASOs, recently told Al Jazeera that it was easier to blow up entire houses than engage in a drawn-out gunfight: Why waste our time when a few IEDs can take care of the whole thing? The villagers also accused Indian forces of stealing their valuables, including gold and cash. The forces hauled away with boxes of walnuts and even clothes, Ghulam Qadir Shah, a walnut-trader, told The New Arab.Many of the houses were vandalised and vehicles damaged beyond repair. According to experts in international humanitarian and human-rights law, sieges enacted as punishment of civilians for actions taken by other members of their community, even those that are genuinely nefarious in nature, are a violation of the prohibition of collective punishment under customary International Humanitarian Law in international as well as non-international armed conflicts. Under Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention and Article 47 of the Hague Convention of 1907, pillaging, imposing collective punishment and destruction of public and private property of protected persons is prohibited, a Kashmir-based human-rights lawyer wishing to remain anonymous for the fear of repercussions told The New Arab. The prolonged gunfights that erupt as a result of cordon-and-search operations kill indiscriminately, robbing children of their parents [Saqib Mir] While the Indian military maintains that the rebels, hiding within the population, turn civilian areas into legitimate targets, the overwhelming and disproportionate use of force is still unexplained. Besides, communication services including the internet are frequently suspended, sometimes for days, in areas under Cordon and Search Operations causing massive disruption to day-to-day life. Due to the regular gags on internet services during these sieges, the students cannot access study materials and businesses also incur heavy losses, said Mir Zeeshan, a student from Pulwama district, which saw the highest number of CASOs in 2017. According to Zeeshan, the communication blackout also accelerates the spread of disinformation and rumour-mongering deeply unwanted in an already volatile region such as Kashmir. Despite apparent public resentment against these operations, Indian authorities remain defiant, seeing them as a convenient method of counterinsurgency. Courtesy: alarabia Umar Lateef Misgar is a graduate student of International Relations at the Islamic University of Kashmir. He regularly writes for The New Arab, openDemocracy, Counterpunch and London School of Economics Human Rights Centre. Follow him on Twitter: @Kaashur Surrey Police found there is a case against the ex-officer over conduct (Steve Parsons/PA) A former police inspector has been found to have a case to answer for sexually inappropriate conduct matters in the workplace. Andy Grand, a former inspector with Surrey Police, was suspended immediately after the reports were made in May 2017, the force said. The 52-year-old was found to have a case to answer for conduct including touching women on their bottom, engaging in sexual activity with a woman while on duty, and taking part in inappropriate online messaging with another. We expect extremely high standards of behaviour from our officers and staff, which former Inspector Andy Grand fell woefully below.Deputy Chief Constable Gavin Stephens Surrey Police said Mr Grand would have been dismissed if he had still been in service. This is one of the first hearings to take place since national policy was changed in December 2017 which means misconduct hearings will still take place if an officer leaves a force. Deputy Chief Constable Gavin Stephens said: We expect extremely high standards of behaviour from our officers and staff, which former Inspector Andy Grand fell woefully below. I would like to reassure the public that these matters, reported directly to our Professional Standards Department, were dealt with robustly and quickly. I want to further reassure our communities that his actions are not indicative of policing, or the high standards we expect at Surrey Police and sadly detract from the dedication our workforce show day in and day out in serving the public. A former Surrey Police Inspector has been found to have a case to answer for a number of misconduct matters. Full statement on link: https://t.co/mKU2XYiXTX pic.twitter.com/xob2ByN0Mu Surrey Police (@SurreyPolice) February 22, 2018 There is global movement addressing inappropriate behaviour in workplaces at present, following revelations around a number of individuals, organisations and professions and quite rightly policing is no different. I hope the public is reassured by our desire to investigate these matters, be open about our processes and deal with them robustly. We hope the outcome of this hearing enforces that. Behaviour such as this weighs heavily on our officers and staff who are also let down by this behaviour. Surreys Police and Crime Commissioner David Munro said: The public rightly deserve and expect the highest standards of behaviour from Surrey Police officers and staff which the vast majority display on a daily basis. Sadly this individual has let his colleagues down with this disgraceful and completely unacceptable course of conduct which tarnishes their good name. The force said the decision is subject to an appeal period of seven working days. Oxfam GB has been temporarily suspended in Haiti pending an investigation (Nick Ansell/PA) More than 20 charities, including Oxfam Great Britain, have pledged to boost safeguarding and are calling on people to report unacceptable behaviour. The aid agencies said there can be no tolerance for the abuse of power, privilege or trust within their organisations, and said they are truly sorry that their sector has at times failed. The open letter, published on the Huffington Post website and signed by 22 charities, comes a day after Oxfam GB was temporarily suspended in Haiti pending an investigation into how the charity handled the case of former staff paying for sex. We are truly sorry that, at times, our sector has failed. We must and will do betterAid agencies Mark Goldring, Oxfam GBs chief executive, signed the letter which said charities have an absolute duty to do everything they can to prevent, detect and eradicate unacceptable behaviour. Other charities among the 22 are Save the Children UK, UNICEF UK, Muslim Aid, CAFOD, Christian Aid, and WaterAid. Safeguarding is something that, as a sector, we have long taken very seriously and all our organisations have systems in place to prevent all forms of abuse and misconduct. However, we can never be complacent. We must do even more to protect the very people we were set up to help, the agencies wrote. Expand Close Oxfam sex allegations PA Wire/PA Images / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Oxfam sex allegations They added: We will all increase the resources we devote to safeguarding meeting our responsibility to protect our staff and beneficiaries. We will collectively review our current referencing systems so that people found to have abused their power or behaved inappropriately are not re-employed in the sector including in INGOs, government agencies, the UN and other associated bilateral and domestic agencies. We will work with these authorities and regulatory bodies to ensure any individual caught abusing their power cannot do so again. We will work with the Government to ensure that we can overcome the legal and institutional barriers to rigorous background checks in the UK. In taking these steps, we are also asking people to come forward to report unacceptable behaviour. We hope these measures send a clear message to those who experience or witness any form of abuse it is really important that they know that we will listen and we will take action. These actions are only the first step as, collectively and individually, we do everything possible to ensure that our organisations, our staff and the work we fund meets that most fundamental criteria for all charities to serve people and not to exploit them. We are truly sorry that at times our sector has failed. We must and will do better. Mr Goldring publicly apologised for the actions of charity staff who sexually exploited female victims of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. Oxfam GBs two-month suspension came after charity chiefs revealed Oxfam has received 26 allegations of misconduct since the Haiti sex scandal erupted two weeks ago. Mr Goldring said 16 of the claims stemmed from abroad, while 10 came from the UK. Meanwhile, Plan International UK, which was among the 22 charities to have signed the open letter, said the charity had six confirmed cases of sexual abuse and exploitation of children by staff, volunteers or partner organisations from July 1 2016 to June 30 2017. A blog post published on the charitys website on Thursday said: One involved a Plan International staff member and the other five were volunteers or partner organisations. The staff member was dismissed without a reference and contracts of volunteers or partner organisations were terminated. Five out of the total six cases were of a criminal nature and were reported to the local authorities. In all cases we linked victims and families with local support networks including but not limited to medical and psychosocial support. No Plan International UK staff were involved in any of these cases. The blog post said that in the same period there were nine confirmed incidents of sexual harassment or sexual misconduct by staff against other adults. It added: This resulted in seven dismissals. The other two staff, whose misconduct constituted use of inappropriate language, were given a warning. No Plan International UK staff were involved in any of these cases. The blog post said: The painful but important truth to acknowledge is that sometimes things can go wrong. When they do, we are deeply sorry. Boris Johnsons decision to allow a think tank set up by an arch Brexiteer to host its launch in the Foreign Office (FCO) without charging it for using a room raised concerns in Downing Street and the Cabinet Office, documents suggest. The Foreign Secretary threw open the doors to Whitehalls most opulent department building for the IFT, run by Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan. Internal government emails, obtained by Greenpeace investigative arm Unearthed, show Mr Johnson signed off on the IFT using a suite for free, waiving the 6,000 hire cost, although the event was later moved to the buildings Map Room, the fees for which are not revealed in the documents. Mr Johnson claimed in the House of Commons on Tuesday there was no cost to the public purse for the launch, in response to a question from Labour MP Chris Bryant. Expand Close Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson looks up at the ornate ceiling as he walks with US House of Representatives Speaker Paul Ryan, at the Foreign Office in London. (PA Archive) PA Archive/PA Images / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson looks up at the ornate ceiling as he walks with US House of Representatives Speaker Paul Ryan, at the Foreign Office in London. (PA Archive) The Foreign Secretary used the event to call for Britain to become a world leader in opening up economies, while his Brexit campaign allies Michael Gove and International Trade Secretary Liam Fox also attended. But on September 26, the day before the launch, an unnamed official wrote that Downing Street raised concerns that the Government could come in for some criticism over the free use of the room, according to Unearthed. And the day after the event another official said Cabinet Office ethics director Sue Gray was clear that IFT should pay the room fee, at full commercial rate, according to the documents. But in a Wednesday letter to Unearthed, the Foreign Office revealed it had not subsequently asked IFT to pay for the room despite Ms Grays concerns, although the think tank had paid for security and refreshments. Doug Parr, policy director at Greenpeace, said: It looks like Boris Johnson and Liam Fox pulled out all the stops to help launch a new pressure group that wants to weaken precious British standards around food, animal welfare and the environment the very areas Gove and May claim will be protected when we leave the EU. The IFT advocates the hardest of Brexits to secure a trade deal with Trumps America and now we know the British people helped pay for their coming out party. Taxpayers will wonder why theyre putting their money where Daniel Hannans mouth is. Responding to concerns about the launch raised by Labour MP Chuka Umunna, Cabinet Secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood said the event was handled in line with longstanding policy and its guest list included politicians, EU and non-EU ambassadors and representatives from other think tanks and from the business world. The ideologues running the IFT shouldnt be given freebies by the GovernmentLabour MP Chuka Umunna He wrote to Mr Umunna: Official involvement in organising the event was limited to basic logistical support. IFT covered all expenditure arising from the event. Given that the event supported the Governments objectives on free trade, IFT was not charged for its use of the FCO rooms. Sir Jeremy said FCO policy has since been updated to ensure non-government organisations pay a fee and secure the support of a department directorate to host an event in the rooms, moving it in line with other Whitehall departments. He added: The FCO also considered whether to charge IFT a booking fee retrospectively. However, as the approach to charging for the event was within the scope of the FCO room booking rules at the time, they decided that it would not be appropriate to do so. Sir Jeremy said he had not found any breach of the Civil Service, special advisers or ministerial codes. But responding, Mr Umunna, a supporter of the Open Britain campaign for close ties with the EU, said: As if Boris Johnson launching such an overtly political event on FCO premises was not bad enough, the fact they provided the room for free, contrary to government protocol, is frankly unacceptable. The ideologues running the IFT shouldnt be given freebies by the Government. Mr Bryant, who also supports Open Britain, said: Boris Johnson was flying by the seat of his pants (on Tuesday). He pretended that he had been completely exonerated, but in fact the Cabinet Secretary has made it clear that the Foreign Office should have charged the IFT for the use of the Map Room in line with the practice across the rest of government. The truth is this was a private party going on free of charge on Government premises, using civil service staff and sanctioned by the Foreign Secretary. The IFT may seem like a fringe group of wacky fanatics, but the reality is they are highly influential and are pushing a dangerous agenda. Brandon Lewis' comments may be seen as an attempt to manage expectations ahead of the May 3 polls (David Mirzoeff/PA) The Conservatives chairman has downplayed his partys chances in upcoming local elections which are widely being seen as a test of Theresa Mays leadership. Brandon Lewis said the Tories were facing difficult council elections in May amid speculation that a poor performance could reignite internal attempts to oust the Prime Minister. He admitted the Conservatives face a very challenging dynamic in London, where a poll has suggested Labour could be heading for the highest vote share of any party in council elections in the capital since 1968. Mr Lewiss comments may be seen as an attempt to manage expectations ahead of the May 3 polls to protect the party from another bout of damaging infighting. Expand Close London councils: how the map could change (PA Graphics) Press Association Images / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp London councils: how the map could change (PA Graphics) A poll for the Mile End Institute at Queen Mary University of London found that Labour were favoured by 54% of voters in the capital compared with 28% for Mrs Mays Tories once dont knows were excluded. If repeated on polling day when 151 councils across England go to the polls, including all 32 London boroughs, the Tories could forfeit such jewels in their local government crown as Westminster and Wandsworth, as well as Barnet. Mr Lewis told the House magazine: These are really difficult elections for us. If you look at the electoral cycle, this is the point of the cycle thats always difficult. The last time these were up in 2014, if you look at the numbers, Labour did very well. And obviously London is up and London is a very challenging dynamic for us. Weve got work to do in London and elsewhere. These are difficult elections and I cant shy away from that. But at the same time, weve got to take our case forward and put a strong campaign out there to make sure we do everything we can to give people good local governance with Conservatives and support for candidates around the country to win as many seats as we can. Weve started to see a real energy and enthusiasm, with volunteers around the country and were seeing the benefits of that. But there is still work to do. Mr Lewis also revealed Tory ministers are to visit universities to engage with young people in Conservative-supporting groups to support freedom of speech. Expand Close Handout still, taken with permission, from footage posted on the twitter feed of @chloekayex showing Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg being caught in the middle of a scuffle at the University of the West England, in Bristol. (@chloekayex) Press Association Images / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Handout still, taken with permission, from footage posted on the twitter feed of @chloekayex showing Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg being caught in the middle of a scuffle at the University of the West England, in Bristol. (@chloekayex) It comes after Brexiteer Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg intervened to stop a scuffle at a University of the West of England in Bristol after he was confronted by masked protesters. Mr Lewis said: After what happened with that situation with Jacob Rees-Mogg a couple of weeks ago, we cant shy away because some people want to put people off having their say on politics. Were going to go out there and have a wider programme of interaction with young people and through universities as well. There will be a range of ministers, MPs, myself as chairman, engaging with Conservative-supporting groups in universities more, giving them the support and showing them that were not going to be scared away by some people thinking they can put people off. Weve got to have that freedom of speech. Mr Lewis also hit out at the social media abuse faced by those with right-wing or right-of-centre political views. If somebody on the right or the centre puts out a message, the attack from the hard left is sometimes unbelievably abusive and vitriolic, he said. For some people, if they suddenly get attacked by a huge number of hard-left people theyve never met, that can put them off. Members of the University and College Union on strike outside the University of Kent campus in Canterbury. (Gareth Fuller/PA) University bosses and union officials have agreed to meet next week for talks in the latest stage of a bitter row over pensions. As workers ended a second day of walkouts, Universities UK called on the University and College Union to attend talks on the pension scheme next Tuesday, February 27. UCU said it would be at the meeting but warned that unless employers were prepared to discuss the current proposal on the table it did not see how the dispute could be resolved. It is understood that at this stage, Mondays strike will go ahead as planned. The strikes scheduled for Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday remain on. UCU will be in talks on Tuesday with @universitiesUK. https://t.co/u02484X2r2 #USS #USSstrike UCU (@ucu) February 23, 2018 In a statement, UUK said: It is of paramount importance that both sides make every effort to meet despite the ongoing industrial action to stop any impact and disruption to students. UCU general secretary Sally Hunt said: Because this is so serious for students and for staff we will of course attend. I am however very concerned that UUK has explicitly ruled out discussing the imposed changes that have caused the strikes. The universities minister was very clear that he wanted talks without preconditions and we hope UUK will reconsider his words before we meet on Tuesday. We remain committed to serious negotiations aimed at resolving this dispute. The dispute centres on proposals put forward by UUK in January for the Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS) which would see it move from a defined benefit scheme, which gives workers a guaranteed income in their retirement, to become a defined contribution scheme, in which pensions are subject to fluctuations in the stock market. Expand Close Students in Leeds city centre support university workers (Danny Lawson/PA) PA Wire/PA Images / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Students in Leeds city centre support university workers (Danny Lawson/PA) UUK maintains that the pension scheme has a deficit of more than 6 billion that cannot be ignored and that it has met union officials more than 35 times to discuss reforms. UCU argues that the current proposals would leave a typical lecturer almost 10,000 a year worse off in retirement. In its statement, UUK reiterated that it has never refused to continue to try to find an affordable, mutually acceptable solution and that it would be willing to discuss a credible proposal that addresses the significant financial issues the scheme is facing. Universities UK has now asked UCU to return to talks on the future of the USS pension scheme and attend a meeting next Tuesday, 27 February. See the latest media release: https://t.co/ScV9wSQ8mz #USSstrikes #Pensions #USS Universities UK (@UniversitiesUK) February 23, 2018 It also notes that talks would not revisit the existing January proposals, but UUK has said it is open to any credible and affordable proposal that has not yet been considered. Workers began walkouts at 57 institutions on Thursday, in the first wave of action that will continue in the coming weeks if there is no resolution, building up to a five-day walkout in the week beginning March 12, by which time 64 universities will be affected. Universities Minister Sam Gyimah has called on both parties to resume talks, saying he was deeply concerned about the impact strikes would have on students. Welcome the news that @UniversitiesUK will hold talks with @ucu starting next week - in the interest of students, time for the UCU to suspend strike action and give these latest talks a chance. Sam Gyimah (@SamGyimah) February 23, 2018 Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn sent solidarity and thanks to university workers and urged employers to commit to negotiations. A number of vice-chancellors have shown their support for the industrial action, including Professor Chris Day of Newcastle University, who tweeted: I absolutely support staffs decision to strike. Students have joined university staff on picket lines, while there have been reports that tens of thousands of students have signed petitions demanding compensation for lost classes. February 23 is National Skip the Straw Day, when people are encouraged not to use plastic straws for the good of the environment. Luckily, UK consumers wont find it too difficult to avoid temptation, as many bars and restaurants across the country are ditching plastic straws completely. Since the BBCs Blue Planet II documentary series showed shocking evidence of the damage plastic wreaks on the environment, many companies are opting to use biodegradable alternatives to plastic straws. Around two billion plastic straws are thought to be thrown away in London each year Across the world, plastics make up 85% of beach litter Plastic straws are one of the top 10 items found in beach clean-ups One in three sea turtles has eaten marine plastic With massive chains, as well as smaller independent bars and restaurants, phasing out straws, there are plenty of places youll be safely plastic-free on February 23. Here are just six: 1. Wetherspoons The pub chain switched from plastic to biodegradable paper straws last month. A spokesman for JD Wetherspoon, Eddie Gershon, said: Wetherspoon used 70 million plastic straws annually, so this is a massive benefit for the environment. Wetherspoon is very innovative and will continue to look for new environmentally friendly ways of running the business. 2. All Bar One All Bar One began phasing out plastic straws in 2017, announcing that in just three weeks of the campaign it had saved 91,000 straws from going into landfill. The bar chain is offering biodegradable straws in crushed ice drinks and on request. In a statement, All Bar One said: Over the next year were going to reduce our straw usage by a third. We know how incredibly harmful plastic straws are to animals and the environment. Did you know just one straw, yes one, takes 500 years to decompose? Add that up over one Friday night in our bars and thats a lot of plastic! Expand Close Plastic Drinking Straws Getty Images/iStockphoto / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Plastic Drinking Straws 3. Wagamama From April 22, the Asian food chain will stop providing plastic straws to customers across its 128 UK restaurants. Customers will only be given straws on request or in juices that need stirring, with biodegradable paper alternatives being offered. Chief executive Jane Holbrook said: We are constantly looking to make improvements. 4. Costa Coffee The coffee chain removed straws from condiment units to reduce usage last year, and plans to phase out plastic straws completely. A spokesman told the Press Association: Straws are currently only available on request and this year we announced that we will phase out plastic straws and replace them with a recyclable alternative. We are still finalising what material our plastic-alternative straws will be in order to ensure we can provide them both for straws and stroons (straws with spoons on the end). 5. Pizza Express The restaurant group decided to phase out plastic straws after receiving a letter from a five-year-old customer. Ava wrote: I am writing to you to ask if you could stop using plastic straws because they are very bad for animals. Could you only use straws if people ask for them because I dont want any animals to get sick. Pizza Express then announced on Facebook that it was phasing out plastic straws from all of its 470+ restaurants, and replacing them with biodegradable and recyclable paper options. 6. Las Iguanas The firm is phasing out plastic straw usage, planning to hand out straws on request only. A statement on the company website said: Plastic straws suck! We love the environment, so were reducing our usage. If you really need a straw, just let us know. Its so cool seeing more and more restaurants and bars cutting out single use plastic straws!! Plus coop are in the process of creating plastic free teabags which is also v cool Ellie (@smelliefox) January 29, 2018 Other companies phasing out plastic straws (or offering them on request only) include: Eurostar, Fortnum & Mason, Leon, Mariott Hotel, Tiger Tiger, MEATliquor, Oakman Inns, Waitrose, Morrisons, Iceland, Pret a Manger, Be At One, Bills, Gails Bakery, Swingers, Youngs and Lambeth Council. Air strikes have been targeting hospitals in other civilian sites in Ghouta, a suburb of Damascus (Ghouta Media Center via AP) Doctors in Syrias rebel-controlled suburbs of Damascus have said they cannot keep up with the number of casualties, amid shelling by government forces. The bombing campaign has targeted hospitals, apartment blocks and other civilian sites, killing and wounding hundreds of people in recent days. The bombardment has forced many among the nearly 400,000 residents to sleep in basements and makeshift shelters, and has overwhelmed rescue workers who have spent days digging out survivors from the wreckage of bombed buildings. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called for an immediate suspension of all war activities in the rebel-held Damascus suburbs known as eastern Ghouta where he said 400,000 people are living in hell on earth. "I am deeply saddened by the terrible suffering of the civilian population in eastern Ghouta: 400,000 people who live in hell on earth." -- @antonioguterres on the situation in Syria. https://t.co/aMQXUlAQ8V pic.twitter.com/0fjHShLDkQ United Nations (@UN) February 21, 2018 The UN chief said a suspension of fighting must allow for humanitarian aid to reach all in need and the evacuation of some 700 people needing urgent medical treatment. Dr Waleed Awata described a desperate, chaotic scene at the small hospital where he works as an anesthesiologist in the town of Zamalka, one of a cluster of settlements that make up eastern Ghouta. The facility, with just 17 beds, received 82 patients on Tuesday night alone, he said. We had to give them IVs and treat them on the floor, the 44-year-old physician told The Associated Press. He said the bodies of two women and two children killed in Wednesdays shelling were also brought to the hospital. The hospital was struck on Tuesday by barrel bombs crude, explosives-filled oil drums dropped from helicopters at high altitudes as well as sporadic artillery fire, Dr Awata said. Like many hospitals in the area, patients had been moved into the basement to shield them from air strikes. No one was hurt but the hospitals generator, water tanks and several ambulances were damaged. A young boy cries after surviving air strikes in #Arbin city in #Ghouta . Most of the victims were children after 18 civilians were killed yesterday. Scenes like these have been repeated again and again. Let us hope they do not become commonplace in this world. #SaveGhouta pic.twitter.com/Mv4TQmCg36 The White Helmets (@SyriaCivilDef) February 21, 2018 The international medical organisation Doctors Without Borders said 13 hospitals and clinics that it supports have been damaged or destroyed over the past three days. The International Committee of the Red Cross called for immediate access to tend to the wounded, saying medical personnel in the rebel-held areas were unable to cope amid shortages of medicines and supplies. Syrian government forces supported by Russian aircraft have shown no signs of letting up their aerial and artillery assault on eastern Ghouta since they stepped up strikes late on Sunday as part of a new, determined push to recapture the territory that has been controlled by rebels since 2012. The UN human rights office said in a statement on Wednesday that at least 346 people had been killed in eastern Ghouta since the Syrian government and its allies escalated their offensive on the region on February 4. When the bombs rain down, The #WhiteHelmets rush in but few know about the courageous women in #CivilDefense saving Syrian lives every day. pic.twitter.com/P3rLhLY0FW The White Helmets (@SyriaCivilDef) February 22, 2018 At least 92 of those deaths occurred in just one 13-hour period on Monday, it said, adding that the toll was far from comprehensive, documented in the midst of chaos and destruction. Another 878 people have been wounded, mostly in air strikes hitting residential areas. The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which closely monitors the fighting through activists on the ground, said at least 300 people have been killed since Sunday night alone. The dead included 10 people killed in a new wave of strikes on Wednesday on the town of Kafr Batna. The oppositions Syrian Civil Defence search-and-rescue group, also known as the White Helmets, reported similar numbers, saying government forces targeted the town with air strikes, artillery fire and barrel bombs. AP Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin waits to take the podium to begin a press briefing on North Korea sanctions at the White House in Washington (Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP) The Trump administration has escalated pressure on North Korea by slapping sanctions on scores of companies and ships accused of illicit trading with the pariah nation. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said the US has now blacklisted virtually all ships being used by the North. The administration billed it as the largest instalment of North Korean economic restrictions to date as it intensifies its campaign of maximum pressure to get the North to give up its nuclear weapons. President Donald Trump went further, declaring in a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference that it was the heaviest sanctions ever imposed on a country before. Today the @USTreasury announced the largest NK related sanctions tranche to date. Companies who choose to help fund NKs nuclear ambitions will not do business with the U.S. Steven Mnuchin (@stevenmnuchin1) February 23, 2018 While that claim was questionable previous US measures have targeted bigger players in the North Korean economy, including Chinese and Russian banks and business networks it significantly tightens the noose on North Korean trading. Mr Mnuchin told reporters that the US has now imposed more than 450 sanctions against the North, about half of them in the last year including virtually all their ships that theyre using at this moment in time. The United Nations Security Council has imposed three sets of sanctions on North Korea in the past year. The restrictions are intended to deprive it of revenue and resources for its nuclear and ballistic missile development that pose an emerging threat to the US mainland. Washington is particularly concerned about exports of North Korean coal that are prohibited by the UN sanctions and ship-to-ship transfers of imported oil and petroleum products. The Treasury Department said it was barring US business transactions with nine international shipping companies from China, Hong Kong, Singapore and Panama, and nine of their vessels. Expand Close Trump AP/PA Images / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Trump It also blacklisted 16 North shipping companies and 19 of their North Korean-flagged vessels. Additionally, the department designated a Taiwanese citizen, Tsang Yung Yuan, and two companies he owns or controls. Mr Tsang was said to have co-ordinated North Korean coal exports with a Russia-based North Korean broker, and attempted a one million US dollar (720,000) oil deal with a Russian company sanctioned for dealing with the North. Mr Mnuchin said the actions will significantly hinder North Koreas ability to conduct evasive maritime activities that facilitate illicit coal and fuel transports, and erode its abilities to ship goods through international waters. He vowed the US would do everything to stop the ship-to-ship transfers. We are putting companies and countries across the world on notice that this administration views compliance with US and UN sanctions as a national security imperative. Those who trade with North Korea do so at their own peril, Mr Mnuchin said. In his speech, Mr Trump said hopefully something positive can happen from the sanctions pressure. The announcement comes as South Korea hosts the Winter Olympics, an occasion the two Koreas have used as an opportunity to ease tensions and restart talks. Although South Korea is a close US ally, animosity between Washington and Pyongyang still runs high. Ivanka Trump, the presidents daughter and adviser, arrived in South Korea on Friday to attend the closing ceremony this weekend. Thank you President Moon and First Lady Kim for your warm hospitality and the very special dinner at the historic Blue House, marking the start of our visit to South Korea. #PyeongChang2018 #WinterOlympics pic.twitter.com/eOFYKH755o Ivanka Trump (@IvankaTrump) February 23, 2018 At a dinner with South Korean President Moon Jae-in, she reaffirmed our commitment to our maximum pressure campaign to ensure that the Korean Peninsula is denuclearised. Mr Mnuchin said Mrs Trump had spoken to Mr Moon about the new sanctions before the announcement. The US government also issued a global shipping advisory highlighting the sanctions risk to those who enable shipments of goods to and from North Korea. It alerted industries to North Koreas deceptive shipping practices, which includes falsifying the identity of vessels and disabling transponders that track ships movements. The Treasury Department published photos of a US-designated North Korean vessel, Kum Un San 3, which it said used false identifying information and conducted an illicit ship-to-ship transfer, possibly of oil, with a Panama-flagged vessel that was among the ships sanctioned on Friday. AP The DUP has been under attack from all directions this week and the last thing the party needed was the widow of its co-founder and leader for four decades joining in. Baroness Paisley's words in two radio interviews yesterday were softly spoken but nonetheless lethal to the DUP leadership. She blamed it just as much as Sinn Fein for the political stalemate at Stormont and she said that Arlene Foster should have stood aside last year after the cash-for-ash scandal broke. By stating that Mrs Foster should have stepped down, the Rev Ian Paisley's widow is effectively taking Sinn Fein's side in the RHI row. That is all the more noteworthy because Sinn Fein itself has moved on from demanding the DUP leader stand down. Had the DUP signed off the draft agreement between the two parties, Mrs Foster would have been heading straight back into government with Michelle O'Neill. It's unlikely that the two women will be able to build anything like the strong working relationship that existed between Dr Paisley and Mr McGuinness. But if they are in future returned as First Minister and Deputy First Minister, they will have to establish some sort of decent partnership for there to be any hope of power-sharing succeeding. Faith in the devolved institutions is so low that they couldn't withstand a battle a month, let alone one a day. The Paisley-McGuinness era is looked back upon with fondness by many people across the political spectrum. It will go down in the history books as the golden age of devolution at Stormont. But it's important to remember that the two men were only in power together for a year. And that Dr Paisley was effectively ousted by his own party because he was too openly relaxed and friendly with the Sinn Fein Deputy First Minister. The chuckle brothers scared some unionists just as much as the spectre of an Irish Language Act does now. Dr Paisley did set an example and lead his supporters to a political accommodation very few people would have foreseen. But he had considerably more clout both in his party and the wider unionist community than Mrs Foster currently has or ever did. There is no love lost between members of the Paisley family and certain DUP leadership figures. The bad blood goes back to Dr Paisley's final months in 2008 as party leader and First Minister. In a television interview in 2014, Baroness Paisley accused senior DUP members of treating her husband "shamefully". She said: "I think they assassinated him by their words and by their deeds and by the way they treated him." Particular criticism was directed at Nigel Dodds. But when Mrs Foster became DUP leader in 2015, Baroness Paisley's son Kyle described her as "very capable". As the first female unionist leader, he predicted that she would "bring a breath of fresh air to it." Three years on, his mother is obviously bitterly disappointed. Bangladeshi opposition activists shout slogans before throwing stones at vehicles during a nationwide general strike against the abduction of opposition politician Elias Ali in Dhaka, April 29, 2012. Bangladesh security forces routinely targeted opposition members through enforced disappearances in 2017, with reports suggesting that more than 80 people vanished in this way last year, global rights watchdog Amnesty International said Thursday in its annual report. Prime Minister Sheikh Hasinas government also harassed and intimidated human rights defenders and used repressive laws to restrict free speech and freedom of peaceful assembly within the past year, the London-based group reported. Enforced disappearances were routinely carried out by security forces, mainly targeting supporters of the opposition, Amnesty International (AI) said in a scathing assessment of the climate for human rights in Bangladesh. Some of the disappeared were subsequently found dead. Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan Kamal rejected the report, saying authorities had investigated many cases of enforced disappearances and found that many of the missing people willingly went into hiding to embarrass the government. These are all the same old comments. These are not true. We reject the report, Khan told BenarNews. We take every reported cases of so-called abduction seriously. On Thursday, Dhaka-based rights activists called for members of the security forces who had participated in enforced disappearances to be punished. We, the human rights activists, have been alerting the government about the enforced disappearances for years, Nur Khan Liton, a former executive director of Ain-O-Shalish Kendra, a leading Bangladeshi rights organization, told BenarNews. But the government is not paying heed to us and the enforced disappearances have created a horrible situation in the society, he said. The time has come to think whether the horrible situation is being used to suppress others. The AI report came out a month after the U.S.-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) took aim at Bangladesh over the governments alleged failure to respond to allegations of enforced disappearances and extrajudicial killings. The World Report 2018 from HRW, which gauged conditions for human rights last year in 90 countries, slammed Bangladesh for its long history of rights violations, including arbitrary arrests and extrajudicial killings. It said it had documented more than 300 cases of forced disappearances involving security forces since 2009. Opposition targeted Amnesty released its report covering 159 countries at a news conference in Washington. It was the first time that the group had published its annual report in the United States since Amnesty was founded in 1961. Among the more than 80 cases of enforced disappearances recorded in 2017 in Bangladesh, Amnesty cited an incident in March last year in which Hummam Quader Chowdhury, son of an executed leader of the opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), was released after six months of detention. Rights advocates had also expressed concerns over the safety of Mir Ahmad Bin Quasem and Abdullahil Amaan Azmi, sons of executed Bangladeshi opposition leaders who disappeared in August 2016 and remain missing, Amnesty said. The rights group also cited a Swedish Radio interview in April 2017, in which a senior member of the Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) allegedly described how members of the elite anti-terror unit carried out enforced disappearances and extrajudicial executions. The report also mentioned the abduction of Mubashar Hasan, a political science professor at the privately-run North South University in Dhaka, who was reported missing for six weeks. Hasan returned home on Dec. 22 last year after his unidentified abductors left him blindfolded on a busy Dhaka highway. On Oct. 10, 2017, Bangladeshi opposition leaders said police had arrested 33 leaders of the faith-based opposition party Jamaat-e-Islami, in an apparent government-backed crackdown spread over two weeks. They charged that Hasinas government launched the crackdown in preparation for the next general election, expected to take place in late 2018 or early 2019. AI also noted a new trend in Bangladesh and other South Asian countries whereby governments invoke vague excuses, such as to protect the national interest, to criminalize free speech online. Criticism of the Bangladesh government or the family of the Prime Minister also triggered criminal cases, Amnesty said, pointing to how the government had introduced the Digital Security Act (DSA) 2018, which sets punishments for defamatory content online. On Jan. 29, Hasinas cabinet approved a draft of the security act for submission to parliament. Kamran Reza Chowdhury in Dhaka contributed to this report. Tika R Pradhan is a senior political correspondent for the Post, covering politics, parliament, judiciary and social affairs. Pradhan joined the Post in 2016 after working at The Himalayan Times for more than a decade. Moncks Corner, SC (29461) Today Mostly cloudy skies. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. High around 85F. Winds light and variable.. Tonight Partly cloudy early with increasing clouds overnight. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low 69F. Winds light and variable. Plus, Bill's Message of the Day, on General Mark Milley's call to the Chinese. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Both sides will develop cooperation in the implementation of a program for the production of pharmaceutical, bio-pharmaceutical products and medical equipment in the Andijan region of Uzbekistan. India and the Andijan Region of Uzbekistan have inked an agreement for cooperation in the pharmaceutical industry. Both sides will develop cooperation in the implementation of a program for the production of pharmaceutical, bio-pharmaceutical products and medical equipment in the Andijan region of Uzbekistan. Both the countries have agreed to work together in principle on the issue of creating an Uzbek-Indian free pharmaceutical zone in the Andijan region and start joint development of a business plan for this project. Both sides will be working on the issue of attracting direct investments of Indian companies and Uzbek investors to create modern production facilities for the production of pharmaceutical products and medicines with high value. To continue the research work on the cardiac assist device, a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) was signed between Australia and India represented by the Prime Ministers of both the countries. QHeart Medical, Australia, a pre-clinical stage medical device company in collaboration with Frontier Mediville, is developing a low cost minimally invasive cardiac assist device Bio QCA (QHeart). This device aims to improve Quality of Life and reduce healthcare costs for millions of unserved patients worldwide and will be used for patients at risk for recurrent Heart Failure and Refractory Hypertension. To announce the entry of this medical device into the healthcare system, Frontier Mediville organized a conference recently, which was chaired by Dr. Peter Walsh, PhD, CEO, QHeart Medical, Australia, Dr. MadhusundanRao Neeli, PhD,VP R&D and Quality, QHeart Medical, Australia and Dr. Adrian Lowry, PhD, Research Scientist, QHeart Medical, Australia who had come to India from Australia to take the research further at Frontier Mediville (Research Centre) at Gumminipoondi. Speaking on the occasion, Dr. K M Cherian, Chairman and CEO of Frontier Lifeline Hospital said Bringing improvement in healthcare and addressing the unmet medical needs of India has been the foremost aim of Frontier Lifeline Hospital. In our quest to do so, we are immensely happy with our collaboration with QHeart Medical and this is our another step towards advancement in developing innovative healthcare. Commenting on the collaboration Dr. Peter Walsh, Inventor of the device and CEO of QHeart Medical Inc, Australia said We are delighted to partner with a leader like Dr. K M Cherian and hope it brings revolution to improve the quality of life of our patients. To continue the research work on the cardiac assist device, a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed between Australia and India represented by the Prime Ministers of both the countries. Under the terms and the agreement, Frontier Mediville will oversee the planning, implementation and will be the in-charge of all preliminary approval which is necessary for the research. In the composition and structure of their tissue, pigs are the closest animal to humans. Therefore studies would be followed by survival experiments for up to 6 months in pigs to evidence safety of chronic implantation before transitioning to safety studies in man. A separate submission will be made in the future for the chronic survival studies with the help of management team and faculties at Frontier Mediville. The BioQ CA, through its commercial partner QHeart, has obtained a broad patent position in Australia, EU and the USA (2 granted and 3 pending). The proof of concept was validated in mock artificial circuits and it has undergone basic physiological testing in pigs. The first generation of this device was also tested for chronic use for 2 months in a sheep model. The device has received competitive funding from both the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC). Recently additional funding was received from the Australia-India Strategic Research Fund for further development with improved engineering and large animal testing. Australia-India Strategic Research Fund (AISRF), aims to validate a new fully implantable version of the device initially in acute and terminal porcine animal studies. More specifically, this research will allow further physiological validation of the device and also permit the development of a surgical protocol for a minimally invasive implantation. Chhaupadi is still a norm in Achham Many women in Achham have been found observing Chhaupadi despite the government outlawing the depraved tradition of banishing menstruating and postnatal women to sheds deeming them impure and untouchable. 10 Things You Should Not Do When Tired Wellness oi-Neha Ghosh Do your eyelids start drooping while you are working or do you feel lethargic all the time? This happens when your body is tired and exhausted. Whether you feel lousy during the day or have trouble falling asleep at night, these symptoms of tiredness could be a warning for a number of health problems. The sleep cycle of the body requires consistency and if you are physically tired but mentally wired when going to bed, it can cause drowsiness again the very next day. This will wreak havoc to all the bodily functions such as hormone release, body temperature, immunity and weight control, and will cause loss of energy, low concentration, poor memory and a bad mood. So, you need to make some lifestyle changes, cut back on caffeine and alcohol, eat more of wholesome foods and exercise often. But apart from this, there are certain things you shouldn't do when you are tired. Read on to know about the things you should not do when tired. 1. Don't Drink Lots Of Coffee In A Day Gulping down multiple cups of coffee in a day will only make you feel tired and lousy. This leads to a crash in the body and your energy level goes down. When you drink coffee, the caffeine stays in the stomach for up to five hours, so if you drink coffee again within those five hours, it will impact your ability to sleep at night. 2. Don't Hit The Gym In Full Force Working out requires energy; but if you overdo your workout, then you start experiencing tiredness in your muscles. Instead, you can go for lighter workouts like walking and biking that will not cause muscle cramps or any injury. Giving all your energy in the gym will make you feel tired and weak afterwards. 3. Don't Take A Nap For Longer Hours Taking a nap for longer hours isn't a good idea because sleeping too long in the day can make it harder to sleep at night. This will make you feel tired the next day. You can nap for 20 to 30 minutes in the day but not extending more than that. This will keep you alert and active. 4. Don't Stray From Your Normal Sleep Time When you are tired, don't snooze the alarm button, as it may disrupt your sleep cycle. Putting your sleep pattern off gear will make you more exhausted and tired and you will not get quality sleep. If you sleep 30 minutes extra from your normal time, it will prompt your body to sleep later and get up later. 5. Don't Crave For Junk Food When your body is tired and exhausted, you tend to opt for high-calorie fatty foods. This could be unhealthy and cause weight gain. If at all you want to order fast food, go for meals that are healthy and tasty too like steamed vegetables with chicken or brown rice. This would make a balanced meal and keep you active. 6. Don't Go On Social Media Nowadays, the whole world is on social media and no one can escape the wrath of social media. But, you can escape social media for a while when you are tired and exhausted. If you are on social media, it will keep you awake longer, as the light coming from the phone can affect the brain, making you not wanting to sleep. 7. Don't Have A Drink If you are thinking that drinking a glass of wine will make you doze off before bedtime, then you are absolutely wrong. It's because drinking alcohol before going to sleep will impair the REM sleep (the deepest type of sleep) that will wake you up later on in the morning or at night. 8. Dont Sleep Late During Weekends Sleeping late during the weekends will further disrupt your sleep cycle, as you will sleep without the alarm and get up late during the day. It prompts your body to sleep later and get up later, which isn't good. This will make it difficult for you to get up on a Monday morning. 9. Don't Do Yoga That Requires Energy Yoga definitely keeps your mind calm and relaxes your body. But there are certain yoga asanas that require energy and you don't want to do those when you are already tired and exhausted. Instead, go for yoga poses like the corpse pose, child's pose and other yoga postures that will not increase your heart rate. 10. Don't Eat A Midnight Snack Don't indulge in any kind of a midnight snacking when you are already tired and exhausted. The body won't be able to digest the food after you go to sleep again. Avoid foods like hamburgers, chips and greasy foods that can cause heartburn, which will make it difficult for you to go to sleep. Share this article! If you liked reading this article, share it with your loved ones. ALSO READ: 10 Best Ways To Lose Weight At Work To keep the rating score and review content relevant for your upcoming trip, we archive reviews older than up to 36 months. 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Google disclaims all warranties related to the translations, express or implied, including any warranties of accuracy, reliability, and any implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and noninfringement. Chinese planes sit idle as NAC looks for pilots It seems to be standard practice for Nepal Airlines Corporation (NAC) to get the planes first and find the pilots to fly them later. CM Poudel rails against errant bureaucrats Province 3 Chief Minister Dormani Poudel has said that the provincial government is having difficulty executing its decisions because the top level bureaucrats are unwilling to work at the state level. Govt to have 18 ministries including Office of PM A meeting of the Council of Ministers on Friday decided to reduce the numbers of the ministries to 17 from the current 30. Indian sugarcane hitting Nepali farmers income Sugarcane farmers of Nawalparasi district are being affected by the massive inflow of Indian sugarcane which enter the country via the porous border. This means that Indian sugarcane avoid paying customs duty and is priced lower than Nepali farmers produce. A former commanding officer of the First Regiment, Royal Canadian Horse Artillery is giving back to the Shilo-based regiment that was the highlight of his 35-year career in the military. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 22/2/2018 (1302 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. CANADIAN PRESS Lt. Col. Peter Williams, Commanding Officer of 1 Royal Canadian Horse Artillery at CFB Shilo in Manitoba addresses media on July 6, 2007 A former commanding officer of the First Regiment, Royal Canadian Horse Artillery is giving back to the Shilo-based regiment that was the highlight of his 35-year career in the military. Col. Peter Williams, retired from the military, now lives in Ottawa. FILE PHOTO Williams salutes then-mayor Dave Burgess. Williams is continuing to work to make Shilo a better place through the Home Station Regiment Senate. "Looking back over the many jobs Ive had, probably the best job was commanding officer of the First Regiment," said Williams, who held 1RCHAs top post from 2005-07. "It was a busy time for us. We were getting ready for Afghanistan, we were sending troops to Afghanistan unfortunately, we did suffer some losses with the deaths of Capt. Goddard and Capt. Francis." Today, Williams is president of the newly-established Home Station Regiment Senate, which exists to advance the welfare of members currently in service with the artillery at Shilo, or are retired or former gunners from the base. Shilo also includes the regimental headquarters of the artillery branch of the Canadian Armed Forces, which is why CFB Shilo is referred to as the "Home Station" of the Royal Canadian Artillery. "When I was asked to do this, I didnt really hesitate because I thought the First Regiment soldiers were very good to me and very supportive of the chain of command." He said the formation of a senate is common for reservists but not as much so in regular forces. Williams, who also serves as executive director of the Royal Canadian Artillery Association, said the aim of the Shilo senate is to nurture the family institution, connect with Canadians and celebrate heritage. The regiments operations and succession planning are the responsibilities of the present-day chain of command. The senates role, meanwhile, is supplemental to the leadership and other programs available for soldiers, such as initiatives run by Veterans Affairs Canada. "To use an artillery term, were superimposing whatever we can do on top of those existing programs." For now, the senate is looking toward anniversaries. This year is the 75th anniversary of the Allied invasion of Sicily in the Second World War. Williams said 1RCHA participated in the operation. The 75-year anniversary of D-Day is in 2019 and 2020 will mark 75 years since the liberation of the Netherlands. A particularly important milestone for 1RCHA is in 2021, when A and B batteries, two companies of soldiers within the regiment, will celebrate 150 years of existence. Williams said battlefield tours might be planned to coincide with these occasions. "If we have the funding power to do so, perhaps we could financially support the attendance of a current or past member." The Home Station Regiment Senate was constituted last September and most slots on the senate, occupied by serving and retired officers and non-commissioned officers, are filled. One senate member is former Shilo base commander, Lt.-Col. John Cochrane, who left his post last summer. Williams said the senate will now work to publicize their activities. He looks back fondly at his time serving in Shilo because of the support the soldiers provided him and the other members of his chain of command. He has a "soft spot," he says, for any news coming from 1RCHA, while compiling a monthly newsletter for the Royal Regiment of the Canadian Artillery. "I still keep in touch with the commanding officers. Theyre good enough to send me a Christmas card every year and I send them one as well," Williams said. "Im always keen to know whats going on." Anybody seeking more information on the senate and its activities may contact Williams at cdnig19@hotmail.com. ifroese@brandonsun.com Twitter: @ianfroese By John Daly Even on a chilly midweek morning in February, the English Market is a cacophony of activity where the cheerful banter of traders mixes with the steady traffic of locals and tourists along its crowded aisles. Renowned for generations as the citys main marketplace and an important lynchpin in the development of Corks food culture, the diversity of its offering ranges from local artisan produce to an array of international goods. Every day really is different in a job like mine, and much of how any given day unfolds is down to what might be happening in the market at that particular time, Orla Lannin, Property Manager, English Market, explains. Maintenance and cleaning are continual ongoing tasks in a space of this size, and making sure budgets are balanced would also be a daily focus. The day-to-day operations in the English Market are managed on behalf of Cork City Council by Aramark Property, the publicly quoted company that manages more than three million sq metres of properties within Northern Europe, including shopping centres, retail parks, major office developments, business parks, residential complexes and industrial estates. The English Markets stallholders are local and independent food producers or retailers, many with proud family lineages going back generations and all dedicated to the traditional serve-over-counter trading which ensures that the service to the customer is personal and unique. The English Market is a unique mixture of product, people and place as a source of fresh, quality produce, and that personal service which comes with owner-occupier stalls, Orla explains. It has an atmosphere all of its own and is an essential part of the citys history, with an architectural character, colour, vibrancy and atmosphere that cannot be replicated. Much of Orlas job in recent times is accommodating film crews from international cookery programmes, foreign documentaries as well as the occasional feature film. The upward arc of the Markets role on the big screen took a major leap in 2016 when it played a major role in the hit film, The Young Offenders. Having garnered critical and commercial acclaim at home and abroad, the film was subsequently commissioned as a television series, which is currently running on RTE and BBC. The profile of the Market has been raised even further by the well-received TV series, which has now been commissioned for a second season. The Young Offenders was such a huge success at home and abroad, it has generated a massive amount of interest in the Market, and certainly being part of such a much-loved film is priceless in terms of showcasing it to a potential audience of millions. Orla is currently well into the planning stages of a wrap party for the current series happening around the Market in March: The Young Offenders is so much about Cork and its character, it seemed a perfect fit to have a party here to celebrate that. It has often been the case in other cities around Europe, however, that venerable and unique markets have become victims of their own success as hordes of tourists idly clog up their aisles and end up discouraging locals from doing their daily shop. While visitor numbers into the English Market have clearly increased as a tourist must do over the last decade, concerns around overcrowding and the potential for subsequent health and safety issues had become a major concern. English Market Bylaws were brought in following consistent requests of traders to remedy the situation of encroachment on the aisles. To better manage the traffic and footfall, we introduced new tour group protocols in March of last year, which has been really successful. Tour guides who wish to bring in groups must register on an annual basis with Market management, and be approved to operate within its confines. Groups of all sizes are, of course, welcome, but to help deal with health and safety issues and the problem of overcrowding, those in excess of eight people are required to be split into smaller groups as they move through the market. Smaller numbers allows not just for better crowd management, but also has the effect of visitors spending more as they linger at the stalls rather than being herded in large groups with no real time to browse. With its 46 trader stalls currently fully occupied, the English Market has undergone a significant transformation, with over 60% of traders having undertaken renovations and refurbishments, and more intending to do so in the near future. The English Market has been such an iconic location in Cork for centuries, all the traders take an enormous pride in maintaining their stalls to the highest possible standards. The Market officially launched the Start-Up Stall in July 2016, allowing small food businesses the chance to test the market. The Start Up Stall gives local food-based business start-ups the chance to trade on short-term lets, of up to eight weeks an initiative by the English Market and Cork City Council aimed at start-up businesses retailing products or produce that will complement, rather than duplicate, that of the Markets current offering. New traders come in periodically, and over the last four months three have come in and its great to have new people with different products, but chosen carefully to fit the existing mix and not detract from the food ethos. "It is important to maintain a mix of traders that works to everybodys benefit, and in recent times they start on shorter leases, which works better for all concerned. Coming into an established family of traders can be a daunting proposition for any kind of start-up enterprise but one that is quickly dispelled within the historic aisles of that iconic place. There is a great feeling of community amongst all of the traders here, and anyone new is always made to feel at home with many older hands offering advice and mentoring on the ways of the Market. At the end of the day, we all mind each other in here, theres a great sense of being protected. In recent years, much emphasis has gone into developing a professional marketing strategy for the English Market, to include brand development, public relations, communications and marketing plans. The Markets logo was also updated with a more contemporary design during 2015, and which is now being used to further enhance the brand. The Grand Parade facade of the Market underwent a total revamp in 2017 and was awarded winner of the Best Commercial Business Frontage 2017 by Cork Better Building Awards. The English Markets 230th birthday on August 1st is obviously a major occasion, and certainly there will be events planned around that but we are keeping a lid of those for the present, says Orla. Given how central a part of the city it is and how dear people hold it, this is one English Market birthday party were determined will be one to remember. John Hearne offers some essential steps which younger drivers can take to help bring their motor insurance down to a more realistic level. If youre a young driver, there are three steps that you can take which when taken together can help you reduce your motor premiums by as much as 80%. Get a full licence Complete all the required driving lessons and get some named driver experience and get a full licence. Jonathan Hehir is MD of Coverinaclick, an insurance broker who specialises in insuring young drivers. He points out that the Consumer Price Index released this week showed that the cost of motor insurance actually fell by 11.7% between January 2017 and January 2018. He says: But if you speak to any young driver, that is, one under-25 or their parents they will tell you that insurers are still looking for big money for these policies. However, speaking to the same young drivers and/or parents has made us realise that people are simply unaware of the extent to which lessons and experience can reduce a premium. We believe if people knew how much such measures could help towards reducing their costs, they might be a bit more proactive in applying for their test and so on. Moving from a provisional to a full licence alone can reduce premiums by anywhere from 30% to 80%. Hehir points out that one of the key challenges that young drivers face is that todays market for insurance is extremely uncompetitive. A driver with a full no claims bonus could have more than 15 insurers ready to quote them. A first time driver will be lucky to get five. In this context, securing a reasonable quote is almost impossible. The first thing for you to do is to get the ball rolling far in advance of you actually buying your own car. Go get the theory test, then book your lessons. It is necessary to have completed 12 lessons as part of the process of securing a full licence. However, if you are trying to secure insurance while on a learner permit, youll get a better rate the more lessons you have done. Many insurance firms will advance a discount simply for completing a series of 10 or more lessons. When it comes to applying for the driving test, all of the test centres around the country have long wait times, so even if you dont feel at all ready to sit in beside a tester, its a good idea to go ahead and book. Theres nothing like a deadline to concentrate the mind. In most test centres youll be waiting around four months for a date, though that does vary and wildly. The average waiting time at the Sligo test centre is 13 weeks; in Tralee its 27. Check the Road Safety Authority site, rsa.ie for more details. Remember too that if youre in a hurry to get the test done, you can note that on your application and secure a cancellation. Currently, the national pass rate stands at 53%, so be prepared for the possibility of not getting it first time round. Named driver experience Plan ahead. Getting named driver experience has the single greatest influence the price a young driver will pay. While most insurers will insist on a full year of this, some providers offer discounts to young drivers who have six months experience on their parents policy. Choose car model carefully Look at the model as well as engine size of the car you intend to buy. Remember that the more expensive your car and the bigger its engine, the more youre likely to pay. You may also have to pay more if your car is imported or if there are more theft claims on that particular model. Do not be afraid to ask for quotes for a several different cars. Check price differences between third party, fire and theft and comprehensive according to the value of the vehicle. If you want to teach your teenager to drive, cost out the various alternatives, and note that adding them to your or your spouses cover may not always be cheaper than arranging separate cover for them. Remember, many of the insurers who specialise in insuring young drivers are only available through a broker. Honesty is best policy Just one important word of warning. Fronting, as its known in the industry, is a practice all the insurance companies are wise to, and it wont work. Jonathan Hehir again: Parents taking out policies on what is essentially their sons or daughters car, in order to get a cheaper premium, is something that has been prevalent in the past. But insurers are very strict on this and are taking a zero-tolerance approach. You will not get a quote as a parent on a second car with a young driver named on the policy. However, insurers will accommodate people if they want to name their daughter/son on their main car in order for them to gain some experience. Moving from a provisional to a full licence has definite cost cutting benefits. Drivers can save up to 30% on their premiums simply by securing their full licence. The advent of the N-plate, which is a compulsory disc to be displayed for newly qualified drivers for a period of two years, doesnt appear to have any impact on insurance costs. No insurer has indicated any changes/or new rates based on the new N plate law. In addition to the particular conditions that relate to young drivers, there are of course the standard ways of reducing car insurance premiums. The Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (CCPC) says you can lower your premiums by up to 70% if you havent made a claim or a claim hasnt been made against you. Safe parking cuts insurance Where you park your car can have a significant impact on how much you pay in premiums. A locked garage trumps the street or the driveway, and of course some areas will have higher claim rates than others. You will pay higher car insurance if you live in a city than if you live in the country. Finally, as the CCPC points out, under current equality law, when you buy any goods or services, you cant be discriminated against because of age, gender, race, marital status, family status, sexuality, disability, religion or lifestyle. Insurers cannot refuse to cover you, or charge more for any of these reasons unless they can show that the difference in treatment or charge is reasonable and justified in relation to the risks involved. For more information on when it would be reasonable for an insurance company to treat you differently, contact the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission. By Padraig Hoare There was good news on the jobs front in Dublin with two Irish-owned IT firms announcing 100 jobs each, while Microsoft opened its 134m campus in Dublin. IT professional services and consulting firm Ammeon said it would create 100 new high-skilled jobs over the next 18 months as it expanded its software engineering and consulting divisions. Founded in 2003, Ammeon employs around 165, with the majority based in the companys Dublin city centre headquarters. It has offices in Belfast, London, Belgrade, and Stockholm and clients include financial institutions, government organisations and the European space agency. Semi-conductor company DecaWave said it would create 100 jobs over the next three years after securing 30m in funding from venture capital, Enterprise Ireland and existing investors. The Dublin-headquartered firm, which recently opened offices in Silicon Valley and Shenzhen in China, said the funds would allow it to grow in Ireland, France, China and South Korea. Taoiseach Leo Varadkar was on hand to open the 34,000 sq ft One Microsoft Place in Leopardstown. He said: The opening of this campus is a landmark day for Microsoft, which first came to Ireland 33 years ago, and a testament to the calibre of our tech talent who have contributed so positively to Microsofts global growth. "As a flagship multinational investor, Microsoft has strongly endorsed Ireland as an investment location for the worlds top tech firms. He added that the ambition was to make Dublin the tech capital of Europe. By Joe Dermody Cork and Kerry manufacturers and the regions main educational institutions have joined forces to make huge progress in developing a talent pipeline for future job creation across Munster, notably in science and engineering. With just one year having passed since the formation of Regional Skills South West, new tailored work-focused study programmes are being rolled out in Tralee IT and in several ETBs. UCC, CIT and others are adding new industry-focused modules on BIM (business information modeling), Lean training, project management, validation and robotics into their existing degree programmes in science, engineering and other disciplines. Around 60 manufacturers are on board, including the likes of Stryker, Boston Scientific, Borg Warner, Tricel, Dairymaster, Depuy Synthes, MSD, Alps Electrical, EPS and Liebherr, among many others. At the first Skills Forum meeting in December 2016, all of the leading post-secondary educators in the South West instantly saw the value of the programme. When the talk focused on boosting educational pathways for STEM and other workplace-focused skills, it seems everyone was on the same page. If this was just going to be a talk shop, I wouldnt have been interested, said David Quaid engineering manager, advanced operations, Stryker, and a major advocate of what the Regional Skills South West programme is delivering to businesses in the region. The openness of the universities, ITs and ETBs has been great. They have been very quick to modify courses to suit what industry needs. Now we need to back them up and get people on the courses that will be rolling out from here to September. The courses are off to a flying start. It is great that it has taken just one year from articulating the nature of the skills gap. The rubber is really starting to hit the road here. It has come about just from people sitting together in one room, and now were all speaking in one voice. All of these companies are working together, and the colleges share the same goals. There has been a real partnership approach. A key thing we are doing with the education piece is to ensure there is more than one way into the workforce. Were covering all education levels. We are not forgetting about the ETBs; were looking to get entry levels from all spectrums across all industries. We were determined that this would be an agnostic programme. Having said that, at the first open events, the need to promote STEM skills to young people repeatedly came up as a common thread to virtually all industries. While the new course offerings are an immediate boost, the South West is also promoting STEM careers in primary and secondary schools and beyond. And Barbara OGorman of Boston Scientific and Nick Belton of BorgWarner have developed the STEM Cradle to Career Continuum to bring focus to promoting these key skills across a range of age categories. The group has identified 10-15 as a critical age for influencing career path choices. If youre going to attract more students into STEM careers, you need to get to them as early as possible, said David Quaid. We are training STEM sector employees to go into primary schools for an hour and show students the exciting potential for this sector. For example, an engineer might explain the science that goes into getting a rocket off the ground. From the end of March, Cork ETB (cork.etb.ie, formerly Fas) will be offering a new course in Computer Numerical Control, covering skills around automation and robotics identified as a gap by the South West partners. From September, this will be available as a night course, with a heavy focus on engineering. The South West Manufacturing & Engineering Regional Skills group is chaired by Patrick Buckley, managing director of EPS Group, the Mallow-based waste water treatment company. EPS takes in up to 20 transition year students each year. At any one time, there might be three or four young people on the premises, learning from experienced staff. Similarly, a lot of companies have people coming in on graduate programmes, said Mr Buckley. When you bring people in, you give them a storyboard with a lot of company specifics. You give them an induction course and a mentor. You try to avoid just giving them low-grade tasks. This type of learning is a longer burn, but creating educational placements is a nut we need to crack if we want to develop a conveyor belt of talent. Of course, safety is a priority for summer placements in a manufacturing company. Then theres identifying a mentor. A big question for most Irish businesses is the shortage of talent. It is always a challenge. When we hosted the South West forum, there were around 40 companies from all sorts of industries. They all agreed that well need Government help with setting up educational placements in the workplace. With the South West skills group, all of the manufacturing companies are working together to develop skills and talent in the region. We know that people will move around from one company to another. Thats to be expected. The whole ethos of this initiative is to ensure that the whole Cork/Kerry region has the skills and talent it needs, particularly in engineering and science. This industry-education partnership was formed with the help of Siobhan Bradley, Regional Skills Forum manager for the South West. She led the roundtable discussions at which the manufacturing companies and the colleges discussed approaches to plugging workplace skills gaps. At one end of the spectrum, Springboard courses are also working to resolve some of the entry level gaps. At the other end, companies are also inviting staff to attend evening courses to gear themselves up for middle management roles. And the successful evolution in the numerous approaches to plugging skills gaps will become more apparent in the coming years as new graduates emerge, notably those in science and engineering courses, with a raft of new highly relevant skills. Up to now, the standard engineering course doesnt do enough around areas like the commercial management of a project, or automation and robotics, validation and regulatory standards, Patrick Buckley said. The colleges were very responsive to us when we outlined the need to add these modules. A lot of companies are very enthusiastic about how this is developing. What were doing now is encouraging other businesses to get behind these courses, to get people back to college in night courses. We also want to get more businesses involved in designing future programmes. By Gordon Deegan All of the publicans in one rural town are going keep their doors shut and remain closed for business this coming Good Friday. This follows the six publicans based in the north Cork town of Newmarket coming together and deciding collectively that they will not open their doors in spite of the State lifting the 91-year old ban on publicans serving alcohol on Good Friday. The publican, John Scanlon of Scanlons bar, Church Street, who first proposed the move in an initial chat with a colleague, said today: We have only two days off each year, Christmas Day and Good Friday and we want to hold onto that. It is a day publicans want to spend with their families. According to the most recent census, Newmarket has a population of 976 and the move has received an overwhelmingly positive response from pub customers in the town with one customer congratulating the publicans saying well done Newmarket, keep up our traditions. Publican, Joan Hourigan has been serving pints from the behind the counter at Hourigans bar on Newmarkets New Street for the past 50 years. A mother of nine, five of her children are involved in the business and Ms Hourigan said that she has always enjoyed a day out or decorating their shut pub on Good Friday and I dont want to give that up. Ms Hourigan said that the day off on Good Friday is something that I cherish and a tradition I want to maintain. She said that religion is playing only a small part in her decision to remain closed. She said: A lot of our customers would be older farmers and I wouldnt think we would be particularly busy on Good Friday anyway. They have grown up with the tradition and I think they will see it out. Publicans from Newmarket Co Cork who will remain closed as usual on Good Friday. From Left John O'Connell, High Street Bar, Julia McAuliffe, Scullys Pub, Michael Scanlan and John Scanlan, Scanlan's Bar, Newmarket. Photograph by Eamon Ward. One of the other publicans in the village, Mick Hourigan announced the move to his customers on his pubs Facebook page and the response from customers has been universally positive. He said today: There are 363 days a year when the pub is open and I think that it plenty. Soon they will want us to open on Christmas Day. Mr Hourgian operates a bar and a night-club in the village employing more than 20 people and he said: I wouldnt ask my staff to work on Good Friday. What is around on a Friday is not a lot. In his comments, Mr Scanlon said: The day off every Good Friday is a day that publicans look forward to. Mr Scanlon admitted that the decision to close can only work when all publicans in the area decide to close. He said: It would be different for city publicans who would be giving up a lot of revenues by staying shut on a Friday night, but I dont think there would be a lot around here on Good Friday. Mr Scanlon said that there has been no negative feedback from customers and the response has been positive. Mr Scanlon said: It is going against the grain - but who knows? Other pubs around the country may follow. On the Facebook page of Mick Hourigans pub, one customer wrote: It is great to see that old traditions matter to our countrywell done to you and hopefully more will follow. Another wrote well done Newmarket, keep up our traditions while one woman posted: Well done to ye guys. Fair play. Our country needs to stand up for its traditions. Very proud that it is Newmarket leading the way - we lead where others follow. Another wrote right job - only two days off in the year - keep the tradition going while another customer posted Well done, fair play to ye - hope most bars will do the same. People are not that mad for drink as publicans will tell you they are in no rush into pubs during the week anyway. Earlier this year, President Michael D Higgins signed into law the amendment to the Intoxicating Liquor Act that lifted the Good Friday pub ban that had been in place since 1927. Independent senator, Gerald Craughwell was a co-sponsor of the bill that has resulted in the lifting of the ban. He said today: The bill was all about choice, especially for publicans and I fully respect the decision by the publicans of Newmarket to stay closed on Good Friday. It is very interesting that they have come together to do this. Senator Craughwell said that he wasnt approached by any vintners while the bill went through the Oireachtas. A spokesman for the Vintners Federation of Ireland (VFI) said today: Like all other days of the year -except Christmas Day - publicans can choose to open or remain closed on Good Friday. The decision is entirely their own to make. He said: The removal of the ban on serving alcohol in licenced premises on Good Friday has received broad support from the pub sector particularly as many tourists visit Ireland during the Easter period. By Eoin Reynolds A prosecution barrister said there is "not a shred of truth" in a murder accused's claim that he was provoked by the deceased when he stabbed him to death. Patrick McGrath SC delivered his closing speech in the trial of Rihards Lavickis (25) of Annaly Court, Longford who has pleaded not guilty to murder but guilty to the manslaughter of Akadiusz 'Arek' Czajkowski (31) at Rue Noyal Chatillon, Townspark in Longford on November 1, 2016. His plea was not accepted by the State and he is on trial at the Central Criminal Court. The accused, a confessed drug dealer, admits stabbing Mr Czajkowski. Giving evidence on day seven of the trial, Mr Lavickis said the deceased came looking for repayment of a 300 drug debt and beat him with a knuckle duster several months before the fatal encounter. The night before the stabbing, he said Mr Czajkowski and two other men chased him and the following morning Mr Lavickis awoke to find his front windows had been smashed. He believed Mr Czajkowski was responsible and went looking for him armed with a knife, saying he wanted to frighten the deceased. When he saw Mr Czajkowski, he said he had a "kind of a blackout" and lost self-control. Mr McGrath said that under Irish law if the accused was provoked his conviction would be reduced from murder to manslaughter. But counsel said the prosecution has proven beyond reasonable doubt that he was not provoked and that he is a "deliberate killer". Mr McGrath explained that for provocation to be used as a defence, the accused man must have suffered a total and sudden loss of self-control so that he was no longer master of his own mind. It is a crime of passion, he said, and the common examples, like the battered wife who finally snaps and kills her husband, are "miles away" from the evidence in this case. He pointed out that there was a three-and-a-half hour gap between Mr Lavickis waking to find his windows broken and the fatal stabbing. In that time, he said the accused had time to call the gardai who arrived and took a report from him. He then took the knife, brought it to the deceased's apartment but couldn't find him, went back home, smoked cigarettes and thought about what he would do. He went to meet a friend to do something in relation to drugs, sat in that man's car and saw the deceased. He opened his knife, got out of the car, went across the road where he concealed himself and waited for Mr Czajkowski before chasing after him with his knife held over his shoulder and stabbed him to death. "Provocation does not arise in this case," he said adding that there is not a shred of truth to the claim that he had a blackout or lost control. While Mr McGrath accepted there was background between the two men, he said this is not the type of case that the law allows to be reduced from murder to manslaughter. "This is a deliberate killing," he said, adding that the accused took the law into his own hands and made a conscious decision to go after Mr Czajkowski with a knife. He described the claim that he had a blackout and lost control as a "contrivance and a fabrication" and a "nonsense wholly lacking in credibility". He asked the jury to consider why Mr Lavickis did not use those phrases in four interviews with gardai immediately after the stabbing. Instead, he told gardai that he was angry and that his blood was boiling, which would not amount to the legal defence of provocation. John Shortt SC for the accused said the jury must decide if his client is a "cold-blooded killer", as the prosecution has suggested, or a self-confessed killer who, acting out of character, reacted to events in his life. He said the jury had heard evidence that he was a popular man who was trying to maintain a normal family life in a three-bed apartment with his partner, her mother and sister and three children. He questioned how the prosecution could have the temerity to call his client a liar when, from the outset, he had stood up and said: "I did this, I regret it. I was out of order but I'm telling you why I did it." He said that taking the knife is not proof of intent. He suggested that had Mr Lavickis put on a disguise, thrown away the knife following the stabbing and gone on the run, he would be in a "very much more awkward position." He pointed out that the hoodie is the "garment du jour" for those looking to cover their identity when carrying out a crime, but Mr Lavickis did not wear one. He made no effort to conceal who he was or to go on the run. That, he said, would be strong evidence of someone cold and calculating and guilty of murder, but in this case, Mr Lavickis went home and waited for gardai to arrive. He did not try to hide the knife. Counsel also reminded the jury that following the stabbing, Mr Lavickis was standing over Mr Czajkowski but rather than persist in stabbing him to make sure he had killed him, he stopped and walked away. This, he said, shows someone who suddenly regained reason as the enormity of what he had done came to him. He also pointed to the evidence of State Pathologist Professor Marie Cassidy who said the knife entered the deceased's heart by one centimetre - "the difference between life and death in this case." He said this was an attack that went too far, but that the prosecution must prove intent beyond reasonable doubt. If they are satisfied that he had the necessary intent, they must then consider the defence of provocation. Counsel asked them to remember that Mr Lavickis was assaulted by the deceased with a knuckle duster but did not react or look for revenge. His family home was attacked and on Halloween night it kicks off again when the deceased got out of a car and chased Mr Lavickis as he was simply going about his business. Despite that, the accused went home and went to bed rather than going out looking for Mr Czajkowski. But it didn't end there, he said. The hostility persisted and all of it from Mr Czajkowski. The following morning the accused's windows are smashed and his mother in law, girlfriend and her sister are "not best pleased". He said his client's head was a "total mess" because Mr Czajkowski won't leave him alone and he is getting grief from his family. He described a "tumult of emotion" as the accused, who had taken a cocktail of drink and drugs the night before, thought about why this was happening, that it would not end and what he was doing to do about it. He told the jury they would have to get inside the accused man's head as this was happening. He told the jury that based on the evidence, they should find him not guilty of murder, but guilty of manslaughter. Justice Una Ni Raifeartaigh will complete her charge to the jury on Tuesday. Joint panel reviews status of India-funded projects The current status of two India-funded projectsTarai Roads Project and construction of Integrated Check Posts (ICP) in Nepalwas discussed and reviewed in Kathmandu and New Delhi. DUP leader Arlene Foster has said it would be "astonishing" if the Government granted funding for legacy inquests without an overall agreement. No one in the DUP was aware of the issue being progressed, she added, without a previous deal addressing other elements of Northern Ireland's violent past being implemented. Sinn Fein's Gerry Kelly claimed funding for coroner probes into disputed conflict deaths was agreed during recent talks on resurrecting Stormont powersharing. They dissolved in acrimony last week without a deal. Mrs Foster said: "No one in the DUP was aware of inquest funding being progressed in the absence of an overall agreement or a decision to advance all elements of the Stormont House Agreement. "It would be astonishing if the Government granted funding for legacy inquests in the absence of an overall agreement to progress all elements of the Stormont House Agreement." She said it was a matter of public record that Sinn Fein has been talking to the Government about progressing legacy inquest funding. She added: "I was aware of this during the talks. We were also talking to the Government about matters of importance to us. "I will be raising this matter with the Secretary of State (Karen Bradley)." Sinn Fein's Northern Ireland leader Michelle O'Neill said: "The British Government did commit to releasing the inquest funding and to go ahead with the consultation, minus the amnesty proposal for British State Forces. "That represents positive progress towards the implementation of commitments from the Stormont House and Fresh Start Agreements. "The British Government should never have been using victims as bargaining chips in the negotiations and they now need to implement their agreement, release the funds immediately and start the consultation." The Government said all discussions with Northern Ireland's parties were in the context of how it would respond if there was a deal. A spokeswoman added: "Regrettably there was no agreement." She said the Government has set out clear commitments to take forward the Stormont House Agreement legacy institutions and to support inquest reform. "As the Secretary of State made clear on Tuesday, she will be consulting on how to implement Stormont House legacy institutions as soon as possible." In 2014 the Government announced 150 million to support legacy reform in Northern Ireland. In 2016 Northern Ireland's Lord Chief Justice Sir Declan Morgan requested cash be released as he outlined plans to address a major backlog in inquests. - PA By Aoife Nic Ardghail An exceptionally drunk burglar who fell asleep in the kitchen armchair of the house he was raiding has been jailed for two years. Dublin Circuit Criminal Court heard that David English, the homeowner, initially thought Mark O'Mahony (33) was his son when he found the intruder sleeping in an armchair at the end of his kitchen table. O'Mahony woke up and repeatedly claimed that Mr English had let him into the house, but co-operated with emptying his pockets when asked to do so. Mr English's wife entered the kitchen a short time later and the couple retained O'Mahony until Gardai arrived. Judge Martin Nolan commented that a burglar falling asleep in the middle of a crime was a new departure in his court. This could be described as an inept non-violent burglary, he said, noting that O'Mahony had behaved himself and used no violence towards the householders. O'Mahony, a father-of-two of St Donagh's Road, Donaghmede, Dublin, pleaded guilty to burglary at Carndonagh Park, Donaghmede, on June 10, 2017. He also pleaded guilty to possessing a medical card, driving license and jacket belonging to Eric Mulrooney at the same location. He has 86 previous convictions, including theft, robbery and handling stolen property. Garda Jason Flynn told Dean Kelly BL, prosecuting, that Mr English's son had departed for the airport between 3am and 4am and had left the front door open. Mr English was getting up for work a short time later when he discovered O'Mahony asleep in the kitchen. Garda Flynn said O'Mahony emptied his pockets on request when Mr English noticed his wife's bag on the kitchen counter. The intruder was later found with about 100 in cash taken from the bag. The garda revealed that a car in the area had also been broken into that night and items, including a jacket, were taken. He said O'Mahony was exceptionally drunk and wearing this jacket when Gardai arrived at the Carndonagh Park premises. He agreed with Helen-Claire O'Hanlon BL, defending, that the weather had been atrocious on the night. He further agreed that O'Mahony told him he had been at his uncle's funeral and couldn't recall anything else after he had dropped his grandmother home. Garda Flynn accepted that O'Mahony had a serious drug addiction. Ms O'Hanlon submitted to Judge Nolan that the funeral had triggered events for her client, who was very remorseful and embarrassed because he knew relatives of the English household. Judge Nolan said he suspected O'Mahony stole the coat because of the weather. He said if O'Mahony had shown the slightest bit of violence towards the householders, the sentence would have been doubled. He imposed a two year jail term, backdated to when O'Mahony entered custody on the matter in June last year. Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has insisted Fine Gael is taking claims from senator Catherine Noone she has been bullied for years by an Seanad party colleague "very seriously" and will take "any necessary action" needed to resolve the dispute, writes Fiachra O Cionnaith. Mr Varadkar made the comments as it was confirmed Fine Gael general secretary is to speak with Ms Noone and the other individual involved about the matter before deciding in the coming days on whether it warrants a full investigation. Speaking during the weekly Fine Gael parliamentary party meeting on Wednesday evening during a debate on the need for more women to enter politics, Ms Noone said such a change would be difficult in the current climate. Breaking her silence on the issue, she claimed she has been the subject of a bullying campaign by a Seanad party colleague who has made misogynistic remarks about her and sought to undermine her for a number of years. The claims, which have not been substantiated, led to Mr Varadkar telling Wednesday's behind-closed-doors meeting Fine Gael will not accept any internal bullying and the decision to launch an initial investigation into what is alleged to have happened. Asked by reporters before an informal meeting of the European Council in Brussels, Belgium, today about what action is now being taken, he said discussions with both individuals have taken place, adding the matter will be addressed and will not be ignored. "Yes, there's a dispute between two Senators," Mr Varadkar said. "Senator Noone has made a complaint against another Senator in terms of the way he has spoken to her, and that complaint has been taken very seriously. "It will be investigated by the party, that will be done swiftly and any necessary action will be taken on foot of that." The Irish Examiner understands Mr Varadkar spoke with Ms Noone privately about the allegations on Thursday. In response to the Wednesday parliamentary party revelations, he also asked Fine Gael chair Martin Heydon to contact party secretary general Tom Curran who is currently examining the matter. Mr Curran is expected to speak with both Ms Noone and her Seanad colleague over the coming days before recommending whether the claims warrant further investigation early next week. Speaking on RTE Radio's Today With Sean O'Rourke this morning, Mr Heydon said the allegations will be examined in full and will not be avoided by the party. "First of all, Catherine raised it with me three hours before the parliamentary party meeting, and it was the first time I was made aware of it," he said. "Within hours, myself and the Taoiseach put in place the procedures and wrote to Tom Curran. It [the initial investigation] will be a matter that will be dealt with within days, not weeks." Parents of children of the first school to be divested are concerned about its future. Canal Way Educate Together in Dublin 8 has five years left on a lease, with no clarity on whether the Edmund Rice Schools Trust will renew or not. The Department of Education said it aims to see 400 schools divested by 2030 - so far there are 10. Canal Way Educate Together used to be a Christian Brothers school, and was the first in the State to be divested. The school is halfway through a 10-year lease, which the owner, the Edmund Rice Schools Trust, has no plans to renew as of yet. Principal Dermot Stanley said that the Department of Education has shown little interest in their case. "We were the flagship, and we worked so hard, and the families bought in, and everybody slogged to make this work, and we have - but it has been in the face of adversity by the Department of Education," he said. "We just haven't had the support, and the building still has all the outstanding legacy issues." Those issues include too few toilets which back up daily, heating that doesnt work and windows that need replacing. Mother of two pupils and one hopeful pupil, Deirdre, said that they need certainty on the schools future. "there needs to be a long-term vision in relation to it, the kids need to know that this is going to be their school, and they're not going to have to up and move in a few years' time." By Isabel Hayes A man with "a particular psychological make-up" who was caught with over 600,000 of heroin and cocaine in a car park at Dublin Airport has been given a suspended five-year sentence. Judge Martin Nolan told Dublin Circuit Criminal Court today that it would be unjust to jail Alyn Maginn (41) given his particular psychological make-up and the fact that his moral culpability for the crime was low. Maginn, with an address in Drumhillery Road, Keady, Co Armagh, pleaded guilty to one count of possessing heroin and cocaine at Dublin Airport on July 7, 2017. Detective Garda Chris Brady told Lisa Dempsey BL, prosecuting, that Maginn arrived in Dublin on a flight from Malaga, Spain, and was spotted leaving Terminal 2 as part of routine profiling by customs. Maginn got into a Seat Ibiza and remained there for over two-and-a-half hours before getting out again and walking away, whereupon he was arrested by a customs officer. The car was searched and a loose panel in the passenger side door revealed a wash bag containing two bags of powder. A further wash bag containing more powder was found in the drinks console beside the gear stick. Gardai also recovered weighing scales, bags, cellophane and mixing agent in the car. The drugs were analysed and found to comprise heroin valued at 140 a gramme worth a total of 591,752 and cocaine at 70 a gramme valued at 16,833. The total value of the drugs seized was 608,585. The court heard Maginn had not imported the drugs, but they had been in the car already. A co-accused, Martin Gilroy (34) of Dernanaught Road, Galbally, Dungannon, Co Tyrone, owned the drugs. He was a friend of Maginn's and had asked him to mind the drugs, the court heard. Gilroy, a former addict with 10 previous convictions, was jailed for seven years last November. Maginn has no previous convictions and cooperated with Gardai when arrested. Gilroy handed himself into gardai the following day, the court heard. Ronan Munro SC, defending, said his client lives in Spain with his wife and two young children. A psychological report handed up to court showed Maginn has borderline cognitive ability, is on the autism spectrum disorder and is easily led. He said Maginn's involvement in the crime was low and his moral culpability was greatly diminished. It's a tragic tale, he said. Sentencing Maginn, Judge Nolan said he was a man who was easy to manipulate. He's got particular psychological problems, he has limited intelligence, he's on the autism spectrum, the judge said. He was put upon by his friend who took advantage of him. Because of his particular psychological make-up, it would be unjust to jail him for this particular crime. By Ann O'Loughlin Fugitive struck-off solicitor Michael Lynn has lost his challenge to the DPPs assurances to authorities in Brazil that his time in a prison there awaiting extradition will be set off against any prison sentence imposed on him here. Such assurances were required by the Brazilian authorities before they would sanction Mr Lynns extradition, which his lawyers previously said is due next week. Mr Lynn (pictured below) had sought declarations from the High Court such assurances could not be given. Had he secured those declarations, he may have used them in efforts in Brazil to prevent his extradition, his lawyers indicated. In his ruling on Friday, Mr Justice Michael McGrath rejected arguments by Mr Lynn that guarantees or assurances provided in letters from the Irish embassy in Brazil to the Brazilian authorities last January and earlier this month amounted to unlawful interference with the judicial function in the context of the separation of powers. The issue of whether the contents of the letters satisfied the requirements of the Brazilian authorities is a matter for the Brazilian courts and it is not for the Irish courts to interpret them, he also said. It would be inappropriate for the Irish court to give declarations to Mr Lynn concerning the guarantees for use by him in the Brazilian courts, he said. In Mr Lynns case, the guarantees had to be given by March 11th 2018 failing which, as a matter of Brazilian law, he must be released from custody, Mr Justice McGrath noted. He refused to put a stay on his ruling pending any appeal. Mr Lynn, who fled from here in 2007, allegedly leaving an estimated 80m in debts, is being held at Cotel remand prison in Recife in northwest Brazil. He faces charges here relating to alleged theft and has been imprisoned since 2013 when Brazilian federal police, acting on behalf of Interpol, arrested him. The Brazilian authorities have indicated their consent to Mr Lynns extradition on 21 charges of alleged theft. His extradition had been sought on a total 33 counts, including theft and using a false instrument, based on warrants issued by Dublin District Court in 2012. In his ruling, Mr Justice McGrath noted a solicitor for the DPP had, in sworn affidavits in 2015, said the time Mr Lynn spent in custody in Brazil awaiting extradition would be set off against any sentence imposed here. There are two stages of the extradition process in Brazil, a judicial and administrative one, he said. If, as in this case, objections to extradition are not upheld, the extradition request is granted and it then moves to the administrative or handover stage at which point it is necessary for the requesting State to provide guarantees which, if not provided, could lead to refusal of extradition. The guarantees require the person will only be prosecuted on the charges for which Brazil has permitted the extradition and will not serve more than 30 years. He noted the Brazilian court, when authorising the extradition, had referred to the presumption of veracity of the documents provided when rejecting the arguments against extradition. The central issue was whether the letters and actions of the executive seek to unlawfully interfere with the role of the judiciary in the context of the separation of powers, he said. The letter of January 2018 outlined means by which sentences may be shortened and also referred to remission, judicial practice and the powers of the executive concerning remission. It did not purport to bind the judiciary or interfere with their powers and discretion in relation to sentencing. While the court might have some misgiving about some of the language used in the February letter, that cannot be seen as more than a statement of the law as the court perceives it to be. The court would not engage in interpreting the letters as to whether they meet the requirements of the Brazilian authorities as that was a matter for the Brazilian authorities, not the Irish courts, he said. By Ruaidhri Giblin A garda whose skills behind the wheel lead to the discovery that he had never sat a driving test, has lost an appeal against his conviction for using a fake driving license. Ciaran Folan (46), of Lambstown Lane, Fethard-on-Sea, had pleaded not guilty to four counts related to the use of a driving licence at Lambstown Lane, Fethard-on-Sea, on February 13, 2009, knowing it to be a false instrument as well as knowingly using a document containing a false statement. Folan was found guilty by a jury at Wexford Circuit Criminal Court and fined 3,000 by Judge Barry Hickson on December 13, 2013. Dismissing an appeal appeal against his conviction today the Court of Appeal stated that it had not been persuaded that Folan's trial was unsatisfactory or that the verdict was unsafe. Giving judgment in the three-judge court, Mr Justice George Birmingham said Folan, a native of Galway and a garda since 1999, had applied for and was placed onto a garda van driving course while stationed in the Wexford Division. However, his driving skills and experience caused the instructor concern, the judge said. Following an investigation, it emerged that Folan had not completed the Garda car driving course which was a prerequisite for admission onto the van driving course. Moreover, in order to take part in a Garda driving course, one had to have a category B driving license. Folan indicated on a "driver history sheet" that he held the appropriate license. Contact was made with Galway County Council with a view to examining the original driving license file, but that file was not located. Contact was made with the Road Safety Authority and with other sections of Galway County Council and it emerged that Folan had never applied for and had never taken a driving test and therefore could not have obtained a full driving license, the judge said. Mr Justice Birmingham said Folan had submitted a certificate of competency issued by An Garda Siochanna in order to obtain a driving license, according to records at Galway County Council. However, "no valid certificate of competency could ever have issued". It emerged that Folan's brother had been working in the Driver License Section of Galway County Council and it was he, Brendan Folan, "who had processed the application" at the time the license was issued, the judge said. It was in the course of this investigation that Folan was asked by a Detective Inspector to produce a driving license at Fethard-on-Sea giving rise to the first two counts on the indictment. Folan's brother, Brendan Folan, was an employee of Galway County Council and his duties included issuing driving licenses. His County Council ID number appeared on key documentation in the Wexford trial, in particular the license produced by Ciaran Folan at Fethard-on-Sea. Brendan Folan was charged in Galway with a number of offences including the forging of a driving license and an offence contrary to section 8 of the Prevention of Corruption Act. The trial judge in Galway directed a not guilty verdict in respect of the forgery offence and he was ultimately acquitted of the corruption offence. In his appeal against conviction, lawyers for Ciaran Folan submitted that the trial judge in Wexford erred in permitting the prosecution to proceed on counts 1 and 2 on the indictment in light of the trial judge's ruling in Galway. Implicit in this argument, Mr Justice Birmingham said, was a belief that the Galway trial judge determined that the driving license issue was authentic. However, Mr Justice Birmingham said the argument was quite misconceived. In the Court of Appeal's view it was absolutely clear that the acquittal of Brendan Folan in Galway did not prevent the trial of Ciaran Folan proceeding in Wexford. Folan's lawyers also submitted that the Wexford trial judge erred in allowing counts 3 and 4 to be added to the indictment some three and a half years after the book of evidence had been served. However, Mr Justice Birmingham said there was nothing to prevent the joinder of the additional charges. They were linked in certain respects. All involved a driving license and what were alleged to be false claims in relation to Folan's driving history. Mr Justice Birmingham, who sat with Mr Justice John Edwards and Mr Justice John Hedigan, said the court was not prepared to uphold any of Folan's grounds of appeal. He said the court had not been persuaded that the trial was unsatisfactory or that the verdict was unsafe. The appeal was therefor dismissed. Folan was not in court for the judgment. Counts 1 and 2 related to the production by Folan of a driving license to Detective Inspector John Hunt at Fethard-on-sea, Co Wexford on February 13, 2009 on foot of a request that he produce a driving license. Count 3 related to the completion of a driver history form required to be completed and submitted in order to be admitted to a garda driver training course. This offence related to the period November 17, 2008 to November 21, 2008. Count 4 related to documentation completed in the context of an application to transfer from Clifden Garda station to Wexford Garda Division. Gardai have appealed to the public for help in finding missing Dublin teenager Craig Boylan. The 17-year-old has been missing in the Dublin area since last Sunday. Update - 5.30pm: The government should buy some of the non-performing mortgages being sold by banks, according to a People Before Profit TD. Ulster Bank confirmed earlier it plans to sell around 7,000 mortgages - that's on top of the 18,000 to be sold by Permanent TSB. The news has lead to fears unregulated vulture funds may buy the majority of the distressed mortgages. TD Richard Boyd Barrett said the government needs to step in and help people "saddled with massive debt who do not know how to cope". He went on: "The banks have not been the most pleasant people to deal with so it is not surprising many people are burying their heads in the sand." His comments follow calls by Sinn Fein and Fianna Fail for new laws to regulate vulture funds. Sinn Fein's finance spokesman Pearse Doherty said the mooted sale will "end in tears" and will result in an increase of home repossessions. Deputy Doherty told RTE's Morning Ireland programme warned that repayment options offered by banks will not be provided by vulture funds and said families in arrears should also be offered the type of write-downs being offered by vulture funds. Deputy Doherty warned that no court could force vulture funds to offer options to distressed mortgage holders and suggsted Ulster Bank chief executive Gerry Mallon's failure to appear with his colleagues before the Oireachtas Finance Committee was a "snub to the committee and to the Irish people". Fianna Fail finance spokesman Michael McGrath said swift action is needed to ensure that such international investors are fully monitored by the Central Bank ahead of any loan portfolio sale. Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe has previously said the Government cannot prevent the sales but that he is deeply aware of homeowners' concerns. Laws on repossessions are being reviewed as a result. But Mr McGrath said: "The case for full regulation of these vulture funds is compelling. "If the fund buys a mortgage, a farm loan or an SME loan, it makes all the crucial decisions about the future of that loan. Despite this, the vulture fund is untouchable, unaccountable and entirely beyond the reach of the Central Bank." Fianna Fail is to introduce new legislation on regulation next week. Mr McGrath also called for the 2013 Code of Conduct on Mortgage Arrears to be reviewed. He said 38,000 family home mortgages now owned by non-bank entities, including over 11,000 by unregulated vulture funds. "Mortgage holders who are fully honouring the terms of a restructuring agreement need greater protection," the opposition spokesman said. "The fact that vulture funds do not have to offer some of the main restructuring options such as arrears capitalisation, term extension or split mortgage places distressed borrowers whose loans are with them in a perilous position." Update - 11.30am: Ulster Bank's CEO Gerry Mallon has said the bank will try to sell their loan book as long as it is legal. He said: "We operate under a framework of laws and regulations and neither of these are optional to us, so the laws are a matter for the lawmakers and the regulations are a matter for the regulators. "We'll do whatever is required to comply with both, we'll have a portfolio that we will bring forward to the market and we'll see who is eligible and interested to buy it." 9.41am: Ulster Bank to sell up to 7,000 home loans; Warning mortgage sales will lead to surge in repossessions Ulster Bank has today admitted that it intends to sell up to around 7,000 home loans. The bank has published its full-year results this morning which show it had an operating loss of 151m in 2017. The sale would make it the second major bank in the country to try to put non-performing mortgages on the market. Permanent TSB still has not found a buyer for the 18,000 home loans it has been trying to sell. Ulster Bank's CEO Gerry Mallon said that his bank now intends to make a similar move. "Part of our strategy and one of the things we've made an adjustment in our accounts for is the fact that we reckon that a loan sale is one of the things we'll have to deploy and it could be approximately a third of the overall non-performing loan book," he said. - Digital desk By Fiona Ferguson A Guatemalan mother who was caught with shirts soaked in cocaine valued at 179,000 in her luggage at Dublin Airport has been jailed for three years. Gardai revealed a chemical process would later have been used to extract the cocaine from the shirts. Keila Pineda Lopez (29), of no fixed abode, pleaded guilty at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court to possession of cocaine for sale or supply at Dublin Airport on November 22, 2017. She has no previous convictions. Garda Michael Higgins told Derek Cooney BL, prosecuting, that Lopez was intercepted by customs officers at Dublin Airport after travelling from Brazil. Her luggage tested positive for cocaine and it was found there were 20 identical shirts soaked with cocaine. Garda Higgins told the court that the cocaine could be extracted from the shirts at their intended destination using a chemical process. He accepted that Lopez would have had no knowledge of this process. The shirts were analysed and the cocaine that would have been extracted from them estimated to have a street value of 179,550. Lopez told Gardai she had been approached in her home country and offered 3,000 to transport the drugs. She said she was to be paid on her return and made some allegations of threats. Gardai accepted there had been a mixture of inducement and coercion involved in Lopez's participation in the offence. Lopez had little English and had been given a note to give to a taxi driver with the name of a hostel on it, where she was to wait for further instructions. She made full admissions and co-operated fully with the investigation. Garda Higgins said Lopez had been very honest about her role and was worried about her family. Padraic Dwyer SC, defending, said his client was a mother of one child who she had as a teenager and left school to support. She has worked as a waitress and cashier. He submitted that her reward for this offence was to be small and there had been some coercion. He asked the court to take into account her guilty plea, co-operation with the Gardai, her remorse and the fact she will be serving her sentence as a foreign national with little prospect of visitors. He said she was using her time in custody well to educate herself to improve her employment chances and said her prospects for rehabilitation were excellent. Counsel submitted this offence was at the lower end of the scale and asked the court to impose as light a sentence as possible to allow her return home to her child. Judge Melanie Greally noted a letter from Lopez in which she outlined that she regretted her actions and understood the consequences of the activity in which she was engaged. Lopez said she had learned a lesson and would not re-offend. Judge Greally said the circumstances of the case allowed her to depart from the presumptive minimum sentence of ten years applicable to this offence and she imposed a three-year sentence to date from when Lopez went into custody. Prithvi Man Shrestha is a political reporter for The Kathmandu Post, covering the governance-related issues including corruption and irregularities in the government machinery. Before joining The Kathmandu Post in 2009, he worked at nepalnews.com and Rising Nepal primarily covering the issues of political and economic affairs for three years. A further 1m interim settlement has been approved by the High Court for a girl with cerebral palsy, bringing her total payments to date to more than 2.45m, writes Ann O'Loughlin. The President of the High Court, noting Ruby Leanne McCandless will celebrate her 12th birthday next month, wished the child a very happy birthday. Ruby has diskinetic cerebral palsy and will require lifelong care. She suffered her injuries as a result of her mother not being referred to hospital with symptoms of pre-eclampsia, it was claimed. Des O'Neill SC, for the family, said Rubys mother, Christina McDaid, had high blood pressure at the end of her pregnancy and should have been referred to hospital immediately. Through her mother, Ruby, of Foxwood, Gleneely, Co Donegal, sued the HSE in relation to the care Ms McDaid received at the end of her pregnancy in 2006. It was claimed there were failures to diagnose and treat pre-eclampsia at the earliest reasonable opportunity and to have her admitted to hospital to have her high blood pressure properly managed. In 2014, the High Court approved a settlement including an interim payment of 1.45m to cover care to 2018. Ruby with her parents in 2014 When the case came back before the court today, Mr Justice Peter Kelly was asked by Mr O'Neill to approve a further payment of 1m for the next four years, to include payments to assist Ruby's parents, her main carers, in providing her care into the future. The judge said he was satisfied it was a good settlement and perfectly adequate to meet her future care costs over that period. He was also glad to be told by the child's parents they were satisfied with the settlement. He adjourned the matter to March 2022 on the understanding the parents would have the option of a further interim settlement or lump sum payment. He was hopeful the legislation necessary to provide for periodic payment orders, which was passed last year, would be commenced "long before 2022" and the parents had the option to avail of that. Outside court, a representative of Callan Tansey, solicitors for the family, said they were happy with the settlement but he said politicians should remedy the "fundamentally flawed" periodic payments legislation. It will not ensure the lifelong needs of the catastrophically injured will be sufficiently funded, he said. The court previously heard Ruby's mother was due on March 30, 2006. It was claimed her blood pressure was normal up to March 28th when she attended for her last antenatal check up at Carndonagh Community Hospital during which, it was claimed, it was noticed she had a major problem with her blood pressure. In the days leading up to the appointment, it was claimed she was extremely pale and developing swelling around her face and ankles and her blood pressure was taken four times at the hospital. When she was examined a doctor indicated her elevated blood pressure was a borderline case and told her to visit her GP on March 31st, it was claimed. Her ankles and face were still swollen the next day and she had a headache. On March 30, her right hand started to shake, her face to droop and she began to lose the power over her tongue. An ambulance was called but Ms McDaid blacked out. She was rushed to Letterkenny General Hospital 45 miles away, suffered a series of severe pre-eclamptic fits and there was a lack of oxygen to the baby who was not yet born. Ruby was later delivered by cesarean section and spent her first 11 days in intensive care. Irish Water has pleaded guilty to accidentally discharging lime into Wicklow's River Vartry. The event resulted in a fish kill for about 500m downstream. The discharge from the company's water treatment facility at Roundwood, Co Wicklow, happened almost exactly one year ago, on February 21, 2017. Ms Roisin O Callaghan, Fisheries Environmental Officer with Inland Fisheries Ireland (IFI), told Judge Kennedy that, on that day, IFI received a call that there had been an accidental spill of lime at the water treatment plant. On investigation, she confirmed that the spill had resulted in fish deaths for approximately 500m downstream from the discharge. A series of water samples were taken and analysis confirmed that the lime spill had altered the pH in the receiving water, resulting in the death of approximately 100 fish. Irish Water co-operated fully with IFIs investigation and began an immediate clean-up of the site. Mr Eoghan Cole BL, representing Irish Water, stated that following the clean-up, the Environmental Protection Agency had completed a dye survey on the drainage network to confirm that only clean surface water was discharging to the River Vartry. Judge Kennedy commented on the significance of the River Vartry in supporting Atlantic salmon, sea trout, brown trout and lamprey. Irish Water were fined 500 with costs and expenses amounting to 6,937.65. In a statement, Irish Water confirmed the accidental spill of lime from the Vartry Water Treatment Plant, which is due to undergo a major upgrade. "As soon as the issue was identified, work commenced to remove the lime from the river," Irish Water said. Irish Water outlined in court this week that the pipes that were revealed to be defective during the investigation had since been repaired. "No fault was attributed to Irish Water or any person involved," the company said. Update 24/02/2017: The post-mortem examination on the body of a 71-year-old man has concluded. There are no suspicious circumstances surrounding the man's death. Update 7.01pm: Man's body found in Donegal house; home sealed off Gardai are investigating the discovery of a body of a 71-year-old man at a house in Co Donegal. Emergency services were called to the scene in Letterkenny late last night. Gardai in Millford say they investigating all of the circumstances surrounding the discovery of the body of a 71-year-old man at a house in Garryharry after being called there late last night. The alarm was raised when a car associated with the man was earlier found abandoned nearby at Kirkstown. The house has been sealed off and a post-mortem will be carried out in Letterkenny General Hospital tomorrow morning. Gardai say the results of the post-mortem will determine the course of the investigation. Earlier: Man's body found in Donegal house; home sealed off Gardai are investigating after the body of a 71-year-old man was found at a house in Co. Donegal. Emergency services were called to the house in Garryharry in Letterkenny late last night - the man was pronounced dead at the scene a short time later. The alarm was raised when a car associated with the man was earlier found abandoned nearby at Kirkstown. The house has been sealed off and a post-mortem will be carried out in Letterkenny General Hospital tomorrow morning. - Digital Desk Police in the North are appealing for witnesses after an armed robbery in the west Belfast area. It happened in the Springfield Road area of the city in the early hours of Sunday the 18th of February. By Ann O'Loughlin A retired barrister whose car was rear-ended on the M50 Motorway has been awarded 94,757 damages by the High Court. Mr Justice Anthony Barr said Barbara Seligam gave a fair and accurate account of her injuries since the accident in 2014 and had not tried to exaggerate her symptoms at all. If anything, the judge said Ms Seligman tended to underplay her symptoms and the difficulties which they caused her at a particularly distressing time in her life when her late husband was terminally ill. Mr Justice Barr said he was also satisfied Ms Seligman was at " the very opposite end of the spectrum to what may be termed a malingerer." The judge said she had dealt with other very serious health issues and faced them with great courage and that she had gone on to live for almost ten years after receiving a terminal diagnosis of cancer giving her only three weeks to live. This the judge said was testament to her determination and resilience. Barbara Seligman (79) who lives in Co Wexford had sued the car driver Krzysztok Kuiatkowski and car owner Marlena Jakubiec both of Upper Dargle Road, Bray, Co Wicklow as a result of the accident on the M50 motorway on December 12, 2014. The case was before the court for assessment of damages only. Mr Justice Anthony Barr said the impact between the vehicles was quite severe and Ms Seligman's car was shunted into the car in front and it, in turn, was shunted into the car in front of it. As a result of the impact, Ms Seligman experienced pain and bruising to the left side of her chest and ribs and there was also bruising on her leg and thigh. Over the following days she experienced more severe pain and in 2015 her neck and back continued to be very painful. The judge said he accepted Ms Seligman's evidence she remains significantly disabled in the ordinary aspects of her life and in particular her ability to drive long distances has been reduced. Her ability to ascend stairs has been also greatly compromised. Ms Seligman, the court had heard is an accomplished bridge player who had represented Ireland at senior level on 22 occasions in the past. By Isabel Hayes Two sisters who fraudulently claimed over 50,000 in social welfare benefits on behalf of their father after he died have avoided a jail term. Sentencing Alison Walker and Gillian Walker in Dublin Circuit Criminal Court today, Judge Martin Nolan said the women knew what they were doing was wrong but that they were unable to resist easy money. He took into account a number of mitigating factors, including that Alison Walker is currently six months pregnant and Gillian Walker is a single parent to four children. It would be unjust to imprison (Gillian Walker) and deprive her children of her care, he said. He handed down a two-and-a-half year sentence to both women and suspended each one on a number of conditions. Alison Walker (32), with an address in Galtymore Drive, Drimnagh, Dublin, pleaded guilty to four counts of stealing from the Department of Social Protection at Drimnagh Post Office between December 2013 and March 2016. Gillian Walker (39), with an address in Oranmore Road, Ballyfermot, Dublin pleaded guilty to four counts of stealing from the Department of Social Protection at Drimnagh Post Office between January 2013 and June 2015. The court heard Alison Walker continued to claim carer's allowance in relation to her father after his death in October 2013 while Gillian Walker claimed his state pension. Alison Walker falsely claimed a total of 22,078 while Gillian Walker claimed a total of 32,398 in carer's allowance and respite care grants. Garda Shane Curtis told Diarmuid Collins BL, prosecuting, that the sisters were caught after the post mistress in Drimnagh Post Office became suspicious of their continued claims once she heard of their father's death. She contacted the department and an investigation ensued. Both women cooperated with gardai upon their arrest. Alison Walker has no previous convictions while Gillian Walker has a small number of convictions for road traffic matters. George Burns BL, defending Alison Walker, told the court the women's mother left the family home when they were young and they were brought up by their father. He said Alison Walker was a woman of limited intellectual ability. She left school in second year and started claiming Job Seeker's Allowance from the age of 18. She became her father's full-time carer when she was 25. He suffered from lung cancer, the court heard. Mr Burns said while his client had stolen from the state, she had also been of some service to it by caring for her father in very difficult circumstances. She has limited intellectual ability and didn't understand the severity of the offence, he said. She is now working part-time as a cashier in a shop and earning between 70 and 80 a week. She is entitled to further social welfare payments but has not requested them. Alison Walker pledged to pay back all the money she took but is currently not in a position to repay the department. She and her partner are expecting their first child later this year. Alan Grace BL, defending Gillian Walker, said his client struggled in the wake of her father's death and turned to drugs. She told gardai she had a debt of 1000. She now works in an off-licence part-time and is receiving family allowance as the single parent of four children. She is repaying the Department of Social Protection weekly. Mr Grace said it was a crime of opportunism. They had easy access to the money, he said. Judge Nolan said the loss to the state was considerable and the women knew what they were doing was wrong. He accepted they were both remorseful for their actions. He said they had been good daughters to their father and there were excellent mitigating circumstances. By Ann O'Loughlin A Court of Appeal ruling means retired judge Barry White, not the State, must pay the Bar Council's legal costs in defending claims it had an unconstitutional rule preventing him resuming practice as a criminal barrister. The Court of Appeal today overturned a High Court ruling requiring the State to pay Mr White's entire legal costs of his action aimed at permitting him return to practice. The decision means, although the State must pay Mr Whites costs of his successful claims against it, the judge himself must pay the Bar Councils costs. A stay applies on the costs decision to allow Mr White seek a further appeal to the Supreme Court. Mr White (72), who retired in 2014 after 12 years as a a judge, claimed a Bar Council rule requiring him to be a member of the Law Library prevented him returning to practice. He alleged an impermissible application of that rule by the Minister for Justice meant he was excluded from the criminal legal aid panel in breach of his constitutional rights to work and earn a livelihood. In July 2016, the High Courts Mr Justice Max Barrett ruled Mr White can return to practice without having to be a member of the Law Library but refused to declare the Bar Council rule was unconstitutional. The Bar is effectively a private club entitled to operate its own rules, he said. In a subsequent appeal by the Minister, the Court of Appeal ruled the Minister must reconsider Mr White's application to resume practice. In rulings in 2017 arising from his 2016 judgment, Mr Justice Barrett had found the Minister was liable for Mr Whites costs of the entire case, including his failed claim against the Bar Council. The Minister appealed against the ruling he was liable for Mr Whites costs to the Bar Council. The appeal centred on interpretation of Section 78 of the Courts of Justice Act 1936 which gives a court discretion to order the costs of a case against one party, who was successful, must be borne by an unsuccessful other party. Giving the appeal court judgment on Friday, Mr Justice Michael Peart, with whom Mr Justice Sean Ryan and Ms Justice Mary Irvine agreed, said Mr White's claims against the Minister and the Bar Council were "completely different". In circumstances where the orders sought against the Bar Council could never have been granted against the Minister and vice versa, the High Court erred in concluding it had jurisdiction to make the Minister liable for Mr White's costs to the Bar Council, he held. Update 6.54pm: A number of teenagers who were treated for extreme intoxication at an underage disco last week had bottles of neat vodka hidden in their socks. A field hospital had to be set up at the non-alcoholic event at Bandon Rugby club for around a dozen children last Friday. Three others had to be brought to hospital because they could not manage their own airways. A doctor who attended the scene says a number of teens drank on busses on the way to the disco. He said: "We received a call even before the disco started about a teenager who was completely unconscious. "It was quite apparent as the disco did start that there was a large number of teenagers arriving extremely intoxicated on the buses." Update 2.30pm: Teens could have died from alcohol intoxication at West Cork disco, says specialist An emergency medicine specialist said today two teenagers had the potential to die at a teenage disco in West Cork due to extreme alcohol intoxication. Jason van der Velde, a pre-hospital emergency medicine specialist went to the scene at Bandon Rugby Club last weekend, assessed the condition of the students and decided to set up a field hospital to treat the teenagers, many who were aged around 16. Mr van der Velde told the Sean O'Rourke programme that he was not exaggerating when he says that two of the children had the potential to die at scene due to excessively high blood pressure and difficulty breathing. He described it as a 'vomatorium' and said the children were "paralytically, unconsciously drunk". Two teenagers were sent by ambulance to CUH where they needed overnight care and treatment. Mr van der Velde said Bandon Rugby Club had run the event very well and praised its efforts to assist those trying to help around a dozen or so very drunk teenagers. He said some unconscious teenagers had 'naggins' of vodkas in their socks. He said it was clearly excessive alcohol consumption rather than drink spiking that was responsible. He said that there is a need outlets for teenagers to express and enjoy themselves and hundreds of kids got home safely from the disco, but a dozen kids let the side down. The matter was first reported in the Irish Examiner. Dr Chris Luke, a consultant in emergency medicine at CUH praised the efforts of Dr van der Velde in keeping many of the teenagers from attending a packed-out emergency department at CUH. He also thanked those who assisted at the scene. Dr Luke said parents need to know the risks teenagers take with alcohol and should not blame treating physicians for the outcomes that result from excessive consumption. Earlier: Makeshift field hospital needed to treat drunk teenagers at West Cork disco Senior gardai and medics have called for increased parental supervision around teenage discos after a dozen drunk children three of whom were unconscious and had to be hospitalised arrived at an underage alcohol-free disco in West Cork, writes Eoin English. Supt Brendan Fogarty said he had concerns about the pressure the incident put on garda and ambulance resources, who responded to the incident at Bandon Rugby Club. File photo I dont want to have to shut down such events but I do have a serious concern that seven gardai and in particular, three ambulances, were tied up dealing with this, Supt Fogarty said. I would also like to emphasise the need for parental supervision. Parents really do have to step up. Gardai are investigating several public order incidents and an alleged assault arising out of the incident. They detained three teenagers but when they contacted the parents of one, in Cork City, the parents told gardai they werent in a position to travel to Bandon to collect their child and gardai had to transport the child home. Hundreds of teenagers from all over Cork descended on the rugby club last Friday night, with many arriving by hire buses from the city, and from towns across north and west Cork. One teen was so drunk at a collection point in a north Cork town that he couldnt board the bus. The driver called for an ambulance and the teen was brought to CUH. The rugby club had several adults on duty to supervise, backed up by first aiders and nurses. All disco goers were searched at the door for drink and drugs and anyone in an intoxicated state was refused entry. Up to a dozen teens who arrived drunk were refused entry and directed to a dressing room where they were monitored. But it soon became clear that the club needed medical backup. Dr Jason van der Velde said when he arrived around 9pm, they quickly identified those who needed supportive care. He said two teens were profoundly unconsciousness, couldnt manage their own airways, had low blood pressure, and had to be transported by ambulance to CUH, where they were detained overnight. A fourth child, who was about to be transported to CUH by ambulance, regained consciousness after treatment, before he was escorted home by a parent. Given how temperatures on the night plummeted to below zero, Dr van der Velde said the incident had the potential to become very serious. This was a large incident which had the ability to cause mayhem for the ambulance service and CUH. But dealing with it as we did, at the scene, averted a major incident, he said. Teenagers need a social outlet, he said, but the minority in this incident had, for whatever reasons, let their parents and their communities down. He said he heard reports that some involved hid containers of alcohol in their socks and underwear, and he said it highlighted the need for parental supervision on the disco buses. You cant expect a bus driver, who may be driving alone, to police them, he said. Dr Chris Luke, a consultant in emergency medicine at CUH and the Mercy University Hospital, described the nature of the incident as jaw-dropping. The medical staff, the paramedics performed miracles, he told The Opinion Line on Corks 96fm yesterday. But the father-of-four criticised the my drink was spiked response of some parents and teenagers caught up in similar incidents. He said such spiking incidents are rare in Ireland and he encounters such cases maybe once or twice a year. Parents need to understand that the greatest determinant, the greatest driver of teen drinking is the behaviour of the parent in the house, the culture within the house, he said. I cant tell you how upsetting it is for staff in hospitals to be working flat out, minding the young people of this country, only to be abused by parents who are alleging some mysterious third party spiked their teenagers drink. If it were the case, we would have the worst epidemic of drink spiking in the history of Europe and I dont believe that is the case. - Irish Examiner By Fiachra O Cionnaith Taoiseach Leo Varadkar and European Council president Donald Tusk have launched a brazen broadside against Britain's latest Brexit stand-off solution, saying Theresa May's plan to solve the issue is "having your cake and eating it" and "an illusion". Mr Varadkar and Mr Tusk lashed out at the British prime minister's half-way house plan to end the Brexit customs union stalemate as the Taoiseach separately warned hard-line Brexiteers to "respect our vote" on the 20-year-old Good Friday agreement. In a bid to finally outline a coherent British Brexit plan, on Thursday Ms May held a high-level Brexit cabinet committee meeting in Chequers to find a balance between a soft and hard departure from the EU. Subsequent leaks on Friday said Ms May offered her ministers a choice between three "baskets", with one signifying ongoing EU rules alignment, a second a moderate departure, and a third complete divergence. The latter option, if pursued, would almost certainly have meant either imposing a hard Irish border or forcing customs checks between the North and the rest of Britain, which the DUP would almost certainly reject. Ministers ultimately chose the middle option, which indicates some willingness to follow EU rules in certain areas - although it will remain unclear what EU regulations will be involved until Ms May outlines the move in a speech next Friday. Downing Street had hoped the latest British Brexit plan would end a complex stand-off over customs union access, the Irish border and other issues. However, that hope was shattered on Friday night, after both Mr Varadkar and Mr Tusk insisted there is no possibility such a move will be accepted. "We're hearing this idea that there'd be three baskets if you like and one basket would be very closely aligned to the EU, another would be in between and a third would be divergence. "But that's not a significant move away from having your cake and eating it and that just isn't possible," Mr Varadkar told reporters in Brussels, Belgium, after an informal European Council meeting last night, adding when asked if it is "cherry-picking": "Yes, which is why it's not possible." In a separate briefing on Friday night, European Council president Donald Tusk was similarly critical, dismissing the latest London plan as "pure illusion". "I am glad that the UK government seems to be moving towards a more detailed position. However ... I am afraid that the UK position today is based on pure illusion. It seems like the 'cake' philosophy is still alive," he said. The comments came as Mr Varadkar separately hit out at hard-line Brexiteers calling for the Good Friday agreement to be scrapped as it is causing Brexit difficulties, saying if Brexiteers are so adamant people should respect the democratic 52-48% decision by British voters to leave the EU, then they should also respect the 1998 deal. "I would say to them what they always say to us: respect our vote. The UK voted 52-48% to leave the EU. [We voted] 94% for the Good Friday agreement in Ireland and 71% in Northern Ireland," Mr Varadkar said. Meanwhile, the Taoiseach has admitted he only found out last December's "bulletproof" Irish border agreement will not be included in the EU-UK withdrawal deal and will instead be relegated to a linked protocol last week. Asked when he learned of the likely move after the decision was leaked in recent days before the withdrawal deal's wording is released next week, Mr Varadkar said: "I suppose last week". However, the Taoiseach - who has come under political fire over the change - quickly added a protocol is still "legally binding", saying: "Let's not forget the Kyoto protocol is a protocol, a legally binding treaty on climate change." Nepali EPG urges new peace, friendship treaty with India The Nepali members of the Eminent Person Group on India-Nepal relations plan to recommend a new peace and friendship treaty with India and replace the existing one signed in 1950. By Ruaidhri Giblin A mother-of-two, who stole over 460,000 from a financial services firm to keep her ill husband's struggling business afloat, has had her 365-day jail term varied by one day so that she is eligible for a community support scheme few judges are aware of. Lisa Lynch (33), a former director of AGL Logistics, whose home at Southfield, Ballinatubbert, Athy, Co Kildare, is due to be repossessed by the banks in April, pleaded guilty at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court to stealing the money from Bibby Financial Services over a three-month period in 2013. She was sentenced to 18 months imprisonment by Judge Martin Nolan on December 12 last. The Court of Appeal suspended the final six months of an 18-month sentence in January following a successful appeal. However, the court extended her suspended sentence by one day today so that she would be eligible for a community support scheme called the Care After Prison (CAP) programme - a scheme the court noted few judges would be aware of. Barrister Lorcan Staines, for Lynch, said that in his experience schemes such as the CAP were available to prisoners serving sentences of between three months and 364 days but were not available to prisoners serving sentences of 365 days or more. As such, Mr Staines asked the court to vary its sentence by one day. Acceding to the request by extending her suspended sentence by one day, Mr Justice George Birmingham said the court had intended to give Lynch this advantage and he added that the scheme was something sentencing judges should be made aware of in the future. Giving judgment in the case in January, Mr Justice Birmingham said the circumstances in which Lynch found herself to be in charge of AGL Logistics, a Co Kildare based company involved in the transport business, were unusual. Two days after the birth of her son, her husband was diagnosed with a rare form of mouth cancer. He had previously been the mainstay of the company he inherited from his father and, due to his illness, he became seriously depressed and withdrew from operations. Lynch took over the business. It was accepted that she was ill-equipped for the task and really out of her depth. AGL was a struggling company and, with a view to keeping it afloat, Lynch issued 93 false invoices on foot of which payments were made by Bibby Financial Services which resulted in a loss to it of 460,660. The Circuit Court heard that AGL and multinational Bibby had a deal whereby the larger company would purchase AGL's debt by offering short-term loans at high interest. When AGL was owed money by a customer, Bibby would give AGL 80% of that debt, on the agreement that the money would be repaid whether or not AGL's customer paid their invoice. Lynch, mother-of-two young children, was 33 at the time of the sentence. Mr Justice Birmingham said she was likely to remain the breadwinner in the family due to her husband's difficulties. Her husband is on a back-to-work scheme, the family have substantial debts and the family home is due to be repossessed in April, the judge said. When asked by Bibby what was happening, Lynch talked them through what had occurred. When the matter was investigated by gardai, she made immediate admissions and entered an early guilty plea. In the four years between the matter coming to light and coming to court, Lynch had secured work with her brother-in-law and although the salary was relatively modest, she had on a weekly basis put 50 aside with a view to assembling a compensation fund. The sentencing judge commented that he could not detect the presence of personal greed. Her motive was to secure the survival of the company in a situation where she felt she had an obligation towards its 70 employees. He noted the mitigating factors as Lynch's co-operation, her admissions, early guilty plea and her lack of previous convictions. "Be honest". Thats the advice to radio bosses from a 14-year-old YouTuber on how to succeed in an online space. Jessie Kavanagh has had her own channel since 2015 and earns more than 1,000 a month. She was a guest speaker at todays Radio Days Ireland conference, and she explained how her parents had no idea what she was up to on her phone as she began to develop her online presence. Jessie said: "From when I first started, they actually didn't know that I was doing it. I was filming on my phone, so when we'd be leaving the house, they'd be like 'why is she talking to herself in the bathroom?' "But they think it's really good now, and they didn't think I'd be here doing this. "So far, one of my videos has over 40 million views. I have a little over 220,000 subscribers. "When they comment what they would like to see, I put that up and then the following week they are all eager to come back and see what I have done." As more and more companies become multi-platform, radio stations are expanding their online offerings to compliment their on-air product. More than three million people listen to radio everyday and stations now also want to reach their listeners through digital platforms and social media. Jessies advice is to be honest and be yourself, something she hopes will help her develop a long-lasting career into the future. She said: "I think it is a good opportunity if you're young and you want to start a YouTube channel, I think it's a good idea. "You never know where it's going to go and hopefully one day I'll get to make a career out of it." Syrian government warplanes supported by Russia have continued their bombardment of the rebel-controlled eastern suburbs of Damascus for a sixth day, killing five people, activists said. The death toll from the past week climbed to more than 400, with the number of casualties overwhelming rescuers and doctors at hospitals, many of which have also been bombed. This fresh bombardment comes a day after world leaders called for an urgent ceasefire in Syria to allow relief agencies to deliver aid and evacuate the critically wounded from besieged areas. However, Russia's UN ambassador Vassily Nebenzia, who called Thursday's meeting, put forward last-minute amendments, saying the proposed resolution was "simply unrealistic". A new vote is likely on Friday. The United States accused Syrian president Bashar Assad of planning "to bomb or starve" opponents in besieged eastern Ghouta into submission - just as it did in Aleppo. Kelley Currie, US ambassador for economic and social affairs, told the UN Security Council that the Syrian leader is counting on Russia, a key ally and veto-wielding member of the council, to make sure it "is unable to stop their suffering". The opposition's Syrian Civil Defence Rescue Group reported new airstrikes in Douma, Arbeen and other towns that make up the eastern suburbs of Damascus known as eastern Ghouta. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said at least five people were killed in raids on Hammouriyeh, Zamalka, Douma and al-Marj. The UK-based group monitors the Syria war through a network of activists on the ground. Separately, Human Rights Watch has criticised the way Turkey is conducting its offensive in northern Syria, saying it has failed to take necessary precautions to avoid civilian casualties. The New York-based group cites three attacks in the Afrin region in late January which it says killed a total of 26 civilians, including 17 children. In a statement, it called on Turkey to thoroughly investigate these strikes and make the findings public. A convoy carrying aid and heading toward Afrin is bombed. Turkey launched an air and ground offensive in the Kurdish-controlled region on January 20, saying it aims to clear Afrin of Syrian Kurdish militia known as the YPG which Turkey considers to be an offshoot of its own outlawed Kurdish rebels fighting within Turkey. According to several estimates around 120 civilians have been killed so far in the offensive. Turkey denies hitting civilians. The YPG has accused Turkey of bombing a convoy of civilians that was crossing into Afrin to protest against Turkey's offensive, resulting in multiple casualties who were moved to hospitals in Afrin for treatment. Syrian state TV said a convoy carrying aid and heading toward Afrin has been targeted by Turkish artillery, inflicting more casualties. A convoy carrying aid and heading toward Afrin lies in ruins after it was bombed. The broadcast gave no further details about Thursday's incident, which came two days after pro-government fighters began entering the predominantly Kurdish town to shore up the Kurdish forces, after reaching an agreement with the YPG. Turkey has threatened to bomb the Syrian forces if they work together with the Kurds. The deputy who was on duty at Marjory Stonemason Douglas High School during last week's mass shooting has resigned. Deputy Scot Peterson was under investigation for failing to enter the building and engage the shooter. A former top adviser to President Donald Trump's election campaign has formally pleaded guilty to federal conspiracy and false statements charges in the special counsel's Russia investigation. The plea by Rick Gates is a strong indication that he is planning to co-operate with special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation as it continues to probe the Trump campaign, Russian election interference and Gates' longtime business associate Paul Manafort. The new US embassy in Jerusalem will open in May 2018 to coincide with the 70th anniversary of Israel declaring independence, White House officials said. Secretary of state Rex Tillerson has approved the security plan for the new embassy, while US congress is being notified of the impending move today. Syrian government warplanes supported by Russia have continued their bombardment of the rebel-controlled eastern suburbs of Damascus for a sixth day, killing five people, activists said. The death toll from the past week climbed to more than 400, with the number of casualties overwhelming rescuers and doctors at hospitals, many of which have also been bombed. This fresh bombardment comes a day after world leaders called for an urgent ceasefire in Syria to allow relief agencies to deliver aid and evacuate the critically wounded from besieged areas. However, Russia's UN ambassador Vassily Nebenzia, who called Thursday's meeting, put forward last-minute amendments, saying the proposed resolution was "simply unrealistic". A new vote is likely on Friday. The United States accused Syrian president Bashar Assad of planning "to bomb or starve" opponents in besieged eastern Ghouta into submission - just as it did in Aleppo. Kelley Currie, US ambassador for economic and social affairs, told the UN Security Council that the Syrian leader is counting on Russia, a key ally and veto-wielding member of the council, to make sure it "is unable to stop their suffering". The opposition's Syrian Civil Defence Rescue Group reported new airstrikes in Douma, Arbeen and other towns that make up the eastern suburbs of Damascus known as eastern Ghouta. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said at least five people were killed in raids on Hammouriyeh, Zamalka, Douma and al-Marj. The UK-based group monitors the Syria war through a network of activists on the ground. After days of bombing, the situation in the rebel-held enclave of the Eastern Ghouta in Syria is "beyond imagination" according to the UNhttps://t.co/ViPLlp6SG0 pic.twitter.com/WsKUn9Udbz BBC News (World) (@BBCWorld) February 21, 2018 Separately, Human Rights Watch has criticised the way Turkey is conducting its offensive in northern Syria, saying it has failed to take necessary precautions to avoid civilian casualties. The New York-based group cites three attacks in the Afrin region in late January which it says killed a total of 26 civilians, including 17 children. In a statement, it called on Turkey to thoroughly investigate these strikes and make the findings public. Turkey launched an air and ground offensive in the Kurdish-controlled region on January 20, saying it aims to clear Afrin of Syrian Kurdish militia known as the YPG which Turkey considers to be an offshoot of its own outlawed Kurdish rebels fighting within Turkey. According to several estimates around 120 civilians have been killed so far in the offensive. Turkey denies hitting civilians. The YPG has accused Turkey of bombing a convoy of civilians that was crossing into Afrin to protest against Turkey's offensive, resulting in multiple casualties who were moved to hospitals in Afrin for treatment. Syrian state TV said a convoy carrying aid and heading toward Afrin has been targeted by Turkish artillery, inflicting more casualties. The broadcast gave no further details about Thursday's incident, which came two days after pro-government fighters began entering the predominantly Kurdish town to shore up the Kurdish forces, after reaching an agreement with the YPG. Turkey has threatened to bomb the Syrian forces if they work together with the Kurds. #News #Iran: Silence until when?! No farewell is more bitterer than a Father farewell to his killed baby. This is the story of today in the #Syria, #Eastern_Ghouta This is the crime of Bashar al-Assad and the Iranian regime.#FreeIran #Iranprotests @SyriaCivilDef @nikkihaley pic.twitter.com/l8pTaEJ5Wg -MojahedinFans (@MojahedinFan) February 23, 2018 - Press Association & Digital Desk The latest report on human rights abuses carried out during South Sudan's civil war contains harrowing accounts of beheadings, mutilations, gang rapes and other atrocities. In the document, released by a United Nations commission, one South Sudanese man is said to have returned home after hiding from government soldiers to find they had blinded his mother, gouging out her eyes with spears. The woman had tried to defend her 17-year-old daughter from being raped by more than a dozen soldiers. Seventeen soldiers then sexually assaulted the teenager, while the family's father was beheaded. The UN team has collected evidence of human rights abuses over the five-year conflict, including those which took place in Pagak town, in the hopes of one day achieving justice. Andrew Clapham, a commission member and international law professor, said: "I did not expect to be confronted with so much ritual humiliation and degradation deliberately done for multiple reasons. The suffering and cruelty was worse than anyone could have imagined." One South Sudanese woman told the commission that her 12-year-old son was forced to have sex with his grandmother in order to stay alive, the report said. The findings, with "sufficient evidence" against both President Salva Kiir's government forces and rebels, identify more than 40 senior military officials, including three state governors, "who may bear individual responsibility for war crimes". The report will be presented to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva next month. It will also be made available to judicial mechanisms such as a hybrid court for South Sudan, which long has been urged by the international community but has never appeared. Untold tens of thousands have been killed in South Sudan since the conflict erupted in December 2013, just two years after independence from Sudan. More than two million people have fled the country, the largest refugee crisis since the Rwandan genocide 24 years ago. Millions who remain at home face hunger. The new UN report is an account of the gang rapes, castrations, ethnic violence and other abuses that have left much of the impoverished East African nation in despair, as international frustration with the warring sides grows. An attempt at a ceasefire in late December was violated within hours. The United States then announced a largely symbolic arms embargo and urged the UN Security Council to do the same. South Sudan's government said it has asked the UN commission for the names of the accused senior military officials and will investigate. "We can't condone anyone committing crimes and taking the law in their own hands," spokesman Ateny Wek Ateny said, while adding that such reports "can sometimes be cut-and-paste and based on hearsay". Opposition spokesman Lam Paul Gabriel said: "The human rights body should start putting the blame directly on the regime instead of blaming both sides." The names of the alleged perpetrators are being withheld for now to protect witnesses who came forward, the UN said. South Sudan's conflict began as a power struggle between Mr Kiir and former vice president Riek Machar, but has fractured into an estimated 40 armed groups across the country, with many fighting each other. However, consistent patterns stand out, such as government attacks on unarmed, fleeing civilians in areas where no opposition forces were present, the report said. The Trump administration has escalated pressure on North Korea by slapping sanctions on scores of companies and ships accused of illicit trading with the pariah nation. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said the US has now blacklisted virtually all ships being used by the North. The administration billed it as the largest instalment of North Korean economic restrictions to date as it intensifies its campaign of "maximum pressure" to get the North to give up its nuclear weapons. President Donald Trump went further, declaring in a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference that it was "the heaviest sanctions ever imposed on a country before". While that claim was questionable - previous US measures have targeted bigger players in the North Korean economy, including Chinese and Russian banks and business networks - it significantly tightens the noose on North Korean trading. Mr Mnuchin told reporters that the US has now imposed more than 450 sanctions against the North, about half of them in the last year - including "virtually all their ships that they're using at this moment in time". The United Nations Security Council has imposed three sets of sanctions on North Korea in the past year. The restrictions are intended to deprive it of revenue and resources for its nuclear and ballistic missile development that pose an emerging threat to the US mainland. Washington is particularly concerned about exports of North Korean coal that are prohibited by the UN sanctions and ship-to-ship transfers of imported oil and petroleum products. The Treasury Department said it was barring US business transactions with nine international shipping companies from China, Hong Kong, Singapore and Panama, and nine of their vessels. It also blacklisted 16 North shipping companies and 19 of their North Korean-flagged vessels. Additionally, the department designated a Taiwanese citizen, Tsang Yung Yuan, and two companies he owns or controls. Mr Tsang was said to have co-ordinated North Korean coal exports with a Russia-based North Korean broker, and attempted a $1m oil deal with a Russian company sanctioned for dealing with the North. Mr Mnuchin said the actions will significantly hinder North Korea's ability to conduct evasive maritime activities that facilitate illicit coal and fuel transports, and "erode its abilities to ship goods through international waters". He vowed the US would "do everything" to stop the ship-to-ship transfers. "We are putting companies and countries across the world on notice that this administration views compliance with US and UN sanctions as a national security imperative. Those who trade with North Korea do so at their own peril," Mr Mnuchin said. In his speech, Mr Trump said "hopefully something positive can happen" from the sanctions pressure. The announcement comes as South Korea hosts the Winter Olympics, an occasion the two Koreas have used as an opportunity to ease tensions and restart talks. Although South Korea is a close US ally, animosity between Washington and Pyongyang still runs high. Ivanka Trump, the president's daughter and adviser, arrived in South Korea today to attend the closing ceremony this weekend. At a dinner with South Korean President Moon Jae-in, she reaffirmed "our commitment to our maximum pressure campaign to ensure that the Korean Peninsula is denuclearised". Mr Mnuchin said Mrs Trump had spoken to Mr Moon about the new sanctions before the announcement. The US government also issued a global shipping advisory highlighting the sanctions risk to those who enable shipments of goods to and from North Korea. It alerted industries to North Korea's "deceptive shipping practices", which includes falsifying the identity of vessels and disabling transponders that track ships' movements. The Treasury Department published photos of a US-designated North Korean vessel, Kum Un San 3, which it said used false identifying information and conducted an illicit ship-to-ship transfer, possibly of oil, with a Panama-flagged vessel that was among the ships sanctioned on Friday. - AP Oli and Dahal form a formidable team The unification process between the CPN-UML and the CPN (Maoist Centre) is one of the most significant events in Nepals recent political history, and certainly the most significant one since the peace process started in 2006. One member of a grooming gang spoke to British investigators in derogatory terms about British girls and said: "You can get anything here." The Serious Case Review team spoke to the asylum seeker in prison to try to understand his motivation for abusing vulnerable women and girls, but he refused to show remorse and blamed a British government cover-up. According to the review, the abusers were mainly "not white but came from a diverse range of backgrounds including Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Indian, Iranian, Iraqi, Kurdish, Turkish, Albanian and eastern European". The only one to agree to speak to the inquiry had spent 10 years in Turkey, around five in Greece and some time in Italy and France, and hoped to get to Canada. He exploited a 15-year-old girl but told the inquiry team he was only convicted "because of a conspiracy by the government, police and the judge who paid the victims". The report continued: "If convicted for rape in his home country, he would be beheaded or buried up to the neck and stoned. "He was asked about what he thought about the United Kingdom and influences in his education. "He said you can get anything here - any sex, drugs, alcohol. There is no control. "He spoke in a derogatory way about lack of morals in British girls and did not go with Muslim girls because there are not many of them." The report said it was "unfortunate" there was not more input from other perpetrators. It was hump day for everyone else, but for a select few who were willing to pay $300, Wednesday night was all about champagne and burlesque with special guest, Dita Von Teese. There were some sideward glances from passersbys as perfectly preened guests dressed in feathers, latex, lace and little else spilled their way down the stairs of Tatler in Darlinghurst. Unmissable: Dita Von Teese and her crew at Tatler in Sydney on Wednesday. Credit:Angie Summa Two hours after Von Teese and her crew of 22 landed in Sydney from Adelaide, where they performed their sold-out Art of the Teese tour, they headed straight for the bar where Laurent Perrier bubbles and cocktails were in free flow. All eyes were on the pint-sized Queen of Burlesque, dressed in a ruffled lilac gown with sheer panelling and not a hair out of place in her jet-black pin curls. The word genocide was used to describe Nazi atrocities exposed during the Nuremberg trials. Credit:Philippe Sands It is the core of a "music and spoken word recital" touring Australia in February that began as a lecture on the book but has become much more. "The second time I gave the lecture, the former director of the English National Opera was in the audience and he came up to me afterwards and said 'you know what would be great is you could do it with a violinist'," Sands says. So he tried it. "It was incredible. I spoke exactly the words I'd said in Oxford, but with a friend doing (the Erbarme Dich) on the viola, and the front row started crying. I thought wow." The music creates a space for the listener, he says. It gives them freedom and unties their imagination. These two guys discover they are prosecuting the man who killed their own families. "It's absolutely transformative. It's made me wonder how I could use music in advocacy in an international courtroom. "I'm not a musician but I'm very much a performer. You stand up in court and you're putting on a show, you're a storyteller, you've got a group of judges you need to persuade and you'll need every technique within the limits of what's permitted in a courtroom to persuade them, to convince them. "You use silence, you use pauses, you use volume, you use a particular tone, style, rhythm. You use images and you use stories." In a courtroom, tiny details illustrate a greater truth, Sands says. When he took Australia's ultimately successful anti-whaling case to the International Court of Justice at The Hague in 2013, he and his colleagues settled on just a couple of anecdotes "to illustrate the horror of what was happening with those whales". "You don't do that by settling on a legal text, you do that by using a particular image, a story, an anecdote, and you learn that the tiny detail is what the reader, the judge, the listener, settles on." Such details are part of the reason for the success of East West Street, a surprise bestseller and winner of the 2016 Baillie Gifford Prize, Britain's most prestigious prize for non-fiction. It emerged from Sands' discovery that the city of Lviv now in Ukraine was not only the town where his grandfather was born, but also where the men who invented the legal concepts of genocide and crimes against humanity studied. After years of research, writing and rewriting, Sands had an absorbing account that interwove the Nuremberg trials with a personal "detective story" of Sands' family history. It wasn't easy at one point in 2014, three years into writing, Sands despairingly told his agent that it was impossible to write as one book. But she told him that what made it different was that it told a big political story "through the parallel lens of a very personal story and that was absolutely the right call". Sands says he is coming to understand the book's unexpected appeal, the reason it is being translated and read from South Africa to Chile to China. "They've all got their connections with these issues of the individual and the group, crimes against humanity and genocide. The personal and the political. I didn't realise that as I was writing it." He points to another small piece of evidence that he dug from an archive. It is a piece of paper on which his other Lviv academic, Raphael Lemkin, who lost 49 relatives in the Holocaust, scribbled his thoughts. Lemkin was trying to capture the crimes the Nazis had committed. He tried "cultural extermination" but the word he kept coming back to, written and rewritten, scribbled out and underlined, was "genocide". And there in the middle of the page, also crossed out, is the name of the man he is prosecuting "Frank". The personal amid the political. When he shows this note in the lecture, again, there are tears, Sands says. "It's the power of the word, coupled with the fact that when you see it in the handwriting of the person that invented it, animated, people feel they're with him, they feel that they're there. "He's worked out at this point who's responsible for the killing of his family. These two guys discover they are prosecuting the man who killed their own families. You literally couldn't invent it. "And that's why the performance piece really works. Because an intelligent person who is not trained as a lawyer is able to imagine being in the position of someone in the courtroom who is faced with and is prosecuting the person who killed their own family." Sands worries that the modern world has lost its connection with the "great calamities" that inspired a post-war legal revolution. He sees in Brexit and Trump a pushback against the great pillars of the modern world order built in response to the Second World War. "There is a catastrophe under way in Syria and Iraq and we seem to have lost the will, the Britons and Americans and maybe the Australians of the world, to say 'we don't like these things happening and we're going to try to stop them from happening and we'll use our value system'," he says. "That instinct of 1945 seems to have dissipated." The fundamental, existential struggle for human society is how do we live together, he says. And he sees signs that people are making the same choices that were made in the 1930s. "Now there is that same distinction that human beings seem prone to: between 'them and us', the focus on 'the other' and declaring the other is different from us, has less rights from us, the other is not human. "I think that will come back to haunt us There's a big price that is paid for that, the peeling away of the moral fabric of an entire country I'm talking about Manus Island and what was happening there. "We are not islands of insularity and secure borders. We need to engage with the rest of the world economically, socially, culturally. That comes at a price: if we can go there they can come here. That was the 1945 settlement and I don't think it has disappeared forever. "I don't think the edifice of international law is about to collapse but it is true there are countries like Australia and Hungary and Poland who are saying 'absolutely no' to everyone in all circumstances, or 'we'll take them if they're white and Christian'. That creates a tension." Sands says he's an optimist. International law is "a long game", he says, and basically we're still in the Middle Ages. And maybe we're just waiting for the next catastrophe, he says, the next "great trauma" that will reignite our instinct for justice. In times of desperation, go back to the well. That seems to be Ten's thinking regarding the suddenly chilled reception to I'm a Celebrity, as they're reintroducing last season's favourite Steve Price into the South African jungle. Price made the announcement on Thursday night's The Project, following prodding from co-host Peter Helliar. "My spies are telling me Jungle Steve might be back. Any truth to the rumours?" Helliar asked. Anthony Gooley and Virginia Gay in the stage show of Calamity Jane. Credit:John McRae Gay is the buoyant, beating heart of the show that in January won best independent musical and best female performer in a musical at the Sydney Theatre Awards. Part of its rebooted appeal lies in its immersive staging. Audience members can find a seat on stage and be part of the whoring, gambling Golden Garter saloon. Expect a few meta-theatrical gags in what's essentially a play within a play. Doris Day as Calamity Jane in the 1953 film version. "Richard knows I'm an improviser. I can be fearless We knew with the right team of people around us we could say when you come to see Calamity Jane you are coming to the Golden Garter saloon. We've had the most amazing response. People come in costume with check shirts and sometimes even chaps. It's really charming!" She describes the musical ensemble as "like slapdash flash, a ragtag bunch". "You go into it knowing the famous songs and our amazing musical director Nigel Ubrihien has done beautiful rearrangements and because we are doing all of this on the most extraordinary smell of an oily rag, we all play all the instruments," she says, as trombone-player-in-chief. Virginia Gay says Calamity Jane is an 'important text for feminism now'. Credit:John McRae "The music of the time sounds like ... Appalachian mountain songs, so we thought: what kind of close harmonies can we do?" The jaunty approach has made numbers such as The Black Hills of Dakota crowd favourites, and Gay's confident vocals have carried much of the show. Why Calamity Jane works now for audiences is a question that continues to inspire her. "What fascinates me is Calamity is so loyal and believes in justice and honesty so much and she lives in a society which has given her no power, and she's said I will take back power and agency from this incredibly masculine society. The town of Deadwood is about as rough as it gets. "This is what women are doing right now. In this industry and the wider world they are saying for so long we have put up with less. No more. "Calamity does this by putting on the coats of what she sees as power the costume of a different gender because she says that's the gender with the power. Then I think what's interesting is what happens in the second act. There's this transformation where she tries on an extreme femme style. "Once she meets the women in Chicago and sees that women in this hyper-femme version have power too sexual power she says I'll try that on but it doesn't fit, it doesn't suit." When Doris Day's Calamity eventually gets married in a becoming white gown in the film's finale, there's a sense the viewer of 1953 wants her put back in her place. "It's got a bit of The Taming of the Shrew about it," says Gay. "But for our production it's really important that where she lands finally is somewhere in between. She does not want to be either of these extremes of gender." A spirit of generosity shapes Gay's advocacy and embrace of women's choices and queer perspectives on art. She lent her voice to the same-sex marriage campaign and sees the present as "an interesting and galvanising time". "Women are sitting in their power and I am excited to be part of that." She doesn't lean towards the accusatory polemic and says she's never felt limits imposed on her as a woman, but believes she's in the minority. If she's had any roadblocks "they've been internalised ones about self-worth and the value of my stories". "I've had extraordinary opportunities. Television has been completely unexpected in my career. It's only now I think I'd like to tell my own stories and I'd like to make the important decisions. "I've just made a film for Tropfest with a crew heavily weighted towards female creatives and I wrote and directed it and for me it was a massive step." On television she was also well-embedded with female creatives in the series Winners and Losers. "Winners was about an ensemble, a community of people and I miss the girls. I miss Mel Vallejo who became my best friend and she's moved to New Zealand." Asked what comes next for her, Gay is coy for the first time. There's nothing she can confirm, she says. "I have a base in LA it's the way you have to progress your career, I suppose. America is interesting I think because its population is so much bigger, so its niche markets have so much more monetary weight. So when people make television like Orange is the New Black they have the money and they know they have a niche audience which is as big as the population of Australia. Collette Dinnigan is on a mission to make ivory and rhino horns illegal in Australia and she's doing what any woman in her position would do to draw attention to her plight. Former fashion designer Collette Dinnigan wants to end the demand for ivory. Credit:Janie Barrett The South African-born Sydney-based former fashion designer will destroy as many pieces of ivory and rhino horns as can she in a giant crush in Melbourne to mark World Wildlife Day next Saturday. An elephant is killed every 15 minutes for its tusk, a rhino is killed every eight hours for its horn. To highlight the importance of protecting Africa's iconic animals, she said that pieces can be donated to the cause from across Australia. Economist Saul Eslake has emerged as a prominent skeptic of the benefits of reducing the company tax rate. Credit:Christopher Pearce To quote from the book of Henry, Part 2, Volume 1, Chapter B: "Economic theory and growing empirical evidence support a shift away from company income tax towards taxes on less mobile factors as a means of increasing investment, GDP and growth. "The company income tax rate should be reduced to encourage investment in Australia, particularly highly mobile foreign direct investment. In the long-run this would increase income for Australians, by building a larger and more productive capital stock and by generating technology and knowledge spillovers that would boost the productivity of Australian businesses. In the long-term, a larger and more productive capital stock would not only result in higher growth but is also likely to result in higher wages." A crucial table in the Henry review compared the "welfare loss" to the Australian community from particular taxes. Of federal taxes, company tax topped the chart for creating the biggest losses each additional dollar raised this calculated to destroy about 40 of welfare. By contrast, personal income taxes were found to destroy about 25, and the GST about 10. The overriding commandment of the Henry review was that government should seek to shift the burden of taxation away from the most distorting taxes, towards the lesser distorting ones. On company tax, it was crystal clear: "The company income tax rate should be reduced to 25 per cent over the short to medium term, with the timing subject to economic and fiscal circumstances. Improved arrangements for charging for the use of non-renewable resources should be introduced at the same time." A decade on, this proposal has been warmly embraced by the Coalition government albeit divorced from the proposal that revenue losses be recouped through a mining tax. Debate has raged in recent weeks about the merits of the proposed company tax cut. With Labor opposed to the reduction and the government digging in its heals, the issue looks set to dominate the political landscape leading into the next election. Most economists accept the Henry gospel that a lower company tax rate would, in theory, help to stimulate investment and wages. But substantial disagreement abounds about the true size of the potential gains and the appropriateness of the measure given the economic and budgetary environment. On Treasury's reckoning, the proposed phased reduction in the company tax rate would boost economic growth by about 1 per cent in the long run. This would come at a cost to the budget bottom line of $65 billion over the first 10 years. Once the cut is delivered in full, the annual cost is estimated at around $15 billion. On many accounts, that's a fairly modest economic bang for a lot of budget bucks. Part of the reason for the modest economic effect is that a large chunk of the reduction in the company tax burden would be immediately met by an increase in the burden via personal income taxes. That's because domestic shareholders in Australian firms would immediately receive lower "franking credits" to offset their personal income tax liabilities. Because of Australia's unique system of "dividend imputation", this means that the benefits of any reduction in the corporate tax rate would largely go to foreign investors and owners of capital. And yet, as politically unpalatable as that is, it is also entirely the point. Corporate tax rates around the world are falling, most recently last December with US President Donald Trump's legislation to reduce their statutory rate to a flat 21 per cent. As an investment-hungry nation, Australia's continuing ability to attract foreign investment is now the focus. Reserve Bank governor Philip Lowe last week described the apparent global race to bottom on company taxes as "regrettable", without offering a view on whether Australia needed to join it yet. Former Reserve Bank board member now Lowy Institute non-resident fellow, John Edwards, believes Australia can wait. "There doesn't seem to be any urgent problem with the attractiveness of Australia as an investment destination," Edwards says. "If this did become the case, then we might want to change." Edwards makes the point that while Australia's 30 per cent statutory rate increasingly looks high, the rate that companies here actually pay is reduced by a wide range of deductions, including depreciation and research and development offsets, and the ability to carry forward losses. Meanwhile, companies investing in other countries like the US face hidden taxes like state taxes and the costs of providing private health insurance for employees. Overall, according to Edwards: "I would say we're on a good path to postpone it for several years, until you get a better sense of what the global situation is." Economist Saul Eslake has emerged as a prominent sceptic of the benefits of reducing the company tax rate. "I personally have never taken Henry as gospel," he says, adding that the review was "incredibly wussy" in not advocating for a stronger reform of negative gearing and capital gains tax concessions on housing. On company tax cuts: "I would say that most economists agree with the theory, but economists have struggled to prove that it works with any statistical significance in practice." Eslake points to the Canadian and UK experiences where taxes have been cut but wages growth and investments have disappointed. However, Eslake notes that there is nothing magic about Australia's current corporate tax rate. "I'm not opposed to cutting the company tax rate ever. There's nothing to suggest it's optimal at 30 per cent." It's about how you pay for it that really matters, he says. "Taxes are money that gets spent. Taxes that aren't raised from one place have to be raise from somewhere else." While the International Monetary Fund recently revised up its forecasts for US economic growth in the coming two years based on the Trump tax cuts, Eslake points out that it actually shaved forecasted growth beyond that because of an explicit assumption the lower corporate tax take would have to be offset by higher taxes elsewhere. Eslake says he would prefer cuts to personal income tax rates to more directly address the main problem besetting the Australian economy weak consumer spending. While championing the benefits of company tax cuts, Ken Henry, too, was alert to the risk of a global race to the bottom on tax. In a speech in 2010 he warned: "From a global perspective, however, the consequence of individual countries' decisions to reduce capital income taxes may be an inefficiently low level of capital taxation that limits their ability to finance public services and undertake redistribution." Adjunct professor at Monash University, Stephen King, has literally written a textbook on economic principles. Like every other economic textbook, students are introduced to the idea that taxes impose a "deadweight loss" on economies. "Taxes cause distortions by essentially messing up prices. If you change the price, you change the quantities." And yet taxes remain a necessary evil to fund the social payments and productivity enhancing infrastructure that societies demand. As for the benefits of reducing the company tax rate: "My response would be that it depends. It depends on a whole range of things. Yes, in theory it can boost the economy, but in practice it becomes an empirical question. I suspect every economist would say in theory it would help, but in practice they really can't say." Meanwhile, a wit has said that Turnbull's "bonking ban" will be impossible to police without "putting a microchip in every penis". Lisa Marlowe has written a liberally illustrated and rather blush-making Irish Times feature Sex on the canvas: Picasso's most erotic year laid bare. In the piece, Ms Marlowe gives adulterous lust credit for the great artist's creative feats of 1932. You may access the piece online, now, if you have parental guidance. In this same week in which our puritanical prime minister has preached his ludicrous sermon against the libido, The Irish Times has reminded us of the wonders that lust can sometimes spark. My eyes watering a little at that thought, I press on to say that of course not many of us are Picassos (although I'm sure that Barnaby Joyce has a creative side of some kind). And yet, just as the Picasso story looks on the bright side of lust, it would be refreshing if we could do the same during this current Joyce/workplace lust imbroglio. If only for balance's sake someone worth listening to (perhaps that dinky-di contrarian Germaine Greer) would pipe up in defence of some of the defensible things about sexual desire. That same person might have some thoughtful things to say (instead of hatchet-faced condemnations like the prime minister's) about how and why adultery cometh to pass even among the most decent of folk. But until contrary Germaine takes up the cause, the best and best-known commentator in this moral minefield is US public intellectual Laura Kipnis. Your crush-prone columnist has had an intellectual crush on her for yonks. With Barnaby Joyce so life-rattlingly embattled I urge him to read Kipnis' book Against Love: A Polemic. Therein he will find a sympathetic discussion/explanation of the adulterer's plight. A Canberra man who set up an Instagram account to publish nude photos of a young woman sobbed as a judge sentenced him on Friday to nine months behind bars. Oliver James Simonetti, 20, faced a sentencing hearing in the ACT Supreme Court after he earlier pleaded guilty to a series of child pornography crimes committed in 2016. Simonetti messaged three girls, one of whom was 14, photos of themselves scantily dressed. He demanded nude photographs and threatened to share the photo if they did not comply. None of the victims complied, the court heard, but in one instance Simonetti created an Instagram account in one victim's name and the word nudes, the court heard. He used the account to carry out his threats, posting photos of the woman and inviting others to follow the account. One day workshop organised in Kathmandu on Single Cell Protein A group of undergraduate students from St. Xavier's College, Maitighar, Kathmandu hosted one day workshop on Single Cell Proteins with an aim to address the nutrition crisis prevalent in the country and surrounding on Thursday. A Brisbane driver has escaped a flood in the citys south as heavy rain falling across south-east Queensland sparks warnings from authorities. The mans yellow sedan was trapped in rising water at Marshall Road, Rocklea, one of several affected by flooding across the region. A car trapped in a Rocklea flood. Credit:QPS Media Emergency services were called about 6.20am but the driver had escaped by the time they arrived, police said. Mount Gravatt in Brisbane and parts of the Sunshine Coast hinterland had already copped more than 100 millimetres of rain by 7am on Friday. With up to 300 millimetres of rain dumped in areas of south-east Queensland in the past two days, the weather bureau has warned residents to prepare for the possibility of flash flooding. Heavy rain was expected to continue into the weekend before easing to showers into next week, with the chance of isolated storms. Brisbane is expecting heavy rain across the weekend, so keep your umbrellas handy. Credit:Jorge Branco Concerned residents couldn't monitor the fresh burst of wet weather coming on Friday afternoon at the Bureau of Meteorology's website, with the Brisbane radar down, as it has been since Wednesday. Brisbane fell short of its expected 26-degree maximum on Friday, which was more than 4 degrees below the February average. It was the news rower Mark Roomes family had been dreading ever since he disappeared on an early morning row along the Brisbane River. But it was his generosity and love for life the Roome family sought to highlight on Friday, sharing the father-of-fours catchphrase, isn't life wonderful?. Damian and Carly May's daughter, Esperance, plays with Mark Roome. After a day and a half of fruitless searching, police took a call about 6pm on Wednesday letting them know the 63-year-olds body had been found in West End, just downstream from where he fell in. The family, many of whom had gathered by the river on Wednesday after Mr Roomes rowing buddies spotted his empty scull about 4.40am, received the terrible news shortly after. Then, apparently for no good reason, he was remeasured - and this time told to stand as tall as possible. I stood on my tiptoes and just passed. Why the second chance? Perhaps his uncle, the chief magistrate Kevin OConnor, had something to do with it, but regardless of whether strings were pulled, an outstanding career was saved. Mouse was sent to Fitzroy, then still a gangster hub. When I walked into the station they all just laughed. I was from the quiet southern suburbs. I thought 'what planet have I landed on?' On the street he learned the hard way, and after being decked several times a veteran policeman told him he had to learn to get in first. He took the advice literally and was dubbed Mighty Mouse, soon shortened to Mouse. Mouse developed a reputation as a first-class crook catcher and was the only detective to lock up the notorious Graham The Munster Kinniburgh, not once but twice. The first time an eagle-eyed parking officer noticed a handgun poking out from under a car seat (why are crooks to bad at hiding stuff?) and called police. Graham "The Munster" Kinniburgh: Smart crook but not smart enough to quit when he was ahead. Mouse broke into the car in Victoria Street, Prahran, and seized the .357 magnum. So as not to be rumbled as a waiting cop, Mouse - then a long-haired scuff - grabbed his skateboard and rode up and down the street until the Munster arrived. When he saw the two of us running at him he thought, Im off here (about to be killed) and went for his gun that wasnt there. We dragged him down and it was only when he realised he hadnt been shot [that] he knew it was the cops. Kinniburgh successfully argued in court that he needed the gun for self-defence as he was a target during an underworld war that was raging in the early 1980s. He was right, although he had the wrong gangland feud. Two gunmen murdered The Munster in 2003 as part of the Underbelly War (he was carrying a gun but it did him no good). The second time Mouse pounced was when they raided The Munster and found items stolen from Lindsay Foxs house and a gun hidden in the stormwater drain. The key to the police case was that one of the rings seized was a one-off owned by the Foxes. At an early court date the defence was granted permission to photograph the exhibits and come the trial Kinniburgh produced a perfect replica (allegedly made by a crooked Melbourne jeweller) that harpooned the prosecution. Kinniburgh was acquitted, although he went down for attempting to bribe police. Some crooks are always mobile while others are surprisingly sedentary, like the agoraphobic who dealt drugs out of his mothers Preston flat for seven years. While many dealers wore flash suits or imported leather jackets he only wore boxers and a singlet and sold out the window (which may have saved on parking but made him a sitting duck). When they finally arrested him he said that if he left the flat hed die. So Mouse made him a deal - make a full taped confession and they would bail him without going to the station. During one fracas in a Preston pub where the clientele had criminal records as long as their tattooed arms, OConnor found someone had burned the back of his suit jacket. As a result Mouse returned again and again to arrest any crook he saw. When a local gangster who became a major drug dealer ask why there was a one-man blitz on the pub, Mouse showed him the burn. Why didnt you tell me?'' the gangster said. ''I would have bought you a whole f---ing wardrobe. But it was never about fashion. Think of every major crime in Victoria and if there wasnt a quick arrest then The Dogs were called in. Every crook is catchable. You just have to bide your time and be patient. The people you are working on think they are so smart, so it is satisfying to beat them at their own game. 'A dumbarse': Carl Williams, the self-styled premier of Victoria, is arrested after being under surveillance. Credit:Angela Wylie Drug dealer-turned-killer Carl Williams (killed in 2010) was rat cunning but a dumbarse, the Moran crime family always thought they were being followed while a member of the famous Kangaroo (international stealing) Gang asked Mouse, why wont you leave me alone?. I said it was nothing personal, it was just his turn. Lewis Moran and Jason Moran leave the Coroners Court. They always thought they were being followed. Sometimes they were right. Credit:Matthew Bouwmeester, Andrew De La Rue Most times crims were not aware they were under surveillance (although one knocked on the undercover car window and said if they wanted to watch him they should just come inside for a beer), but sometimes Mouse would go hands-on. Such as when the armed robbery squad couldnt find a bandit hiding in an Ashburton home. "We went in and there was no one there. Mouse just said to keep looking, he had to be somewhere," said one of the investigators, Brian Rix. The offender had slipped under the house through a specially built trapdoor in the bedroom. When Rix went under the house the suspect pulled a gun and a fracas ensued. As they struggled the unarmed Mouse arrived raining blows on the suspect until he saw the error of his ways. There were perks - he spent six weeks in Queensland on one case where the target was staying in a caravan park. He used the park telephone, so we deputised someone in the camp to tell us what was going on. They spent the rest of the time surfing and working on their tans. They didnt catch the crook but they caught plenty of waves. Now he says most of the targets are connected with drugs and just about everyone you work on carries a gun. For Mouse, it is not the drug dealers or the hitmen that left their mark but a suburban father who turned into a cold-blooded killer. His eyes glisten when he talks of John Sharpe, who in 2004 used a spear gun to kill his wife, Anna, who was five months pregnant and then, days later, their 20-month-old daughter, Gracie. The Coalition government is only a few months away from handing down its fifth consecutive budget deficit. But last week, Finance Minister Mathias Cormann was taken off budget preparation duties to be acting prime minister so that Malcolm Turnbull could go to the United States and Barnaby Joyce could take some leave and hold media conferences. To say the government has lost focus is an understatement. Donald Trump has lost focus, too. His wall along the Mexican border is yet to be built or paid for by the Mexicans, the US coal industry is yet to surge and, most significantly for Turnbull, the US President has been unwilling to reduce the US budget deficit. Indeed, Trump's budget is set to deliver a deficit of nearly $US1 trillion. Banker's Association chief Anna Bligh with Business Council chief Jennifer Westacott. The council wants US-style corporate tax cuts, which had worsened that country's massive deficits. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen While the Coalition and the Business Council of Australia talk endlessly about Trump's recent tax cuts and how the US economy is creating jobs, neither group seems keen to discuss Trump's record-breaking deficit. Indeed, given that the Coalition was elected on a promise to rapidly restore the budget to surplus, and given the Business Council was so obsessed with the need to reduce the deficit back in 2013 that its former president, Tony Shepherd, ran Tony Abbott's audit commission, the strategic silence coming from the loudest voices in Australian public debate is remarkable. The Australian business community's current hero is no fiscal conservative. On the contrary, not only is Trump an old-fashioned Keynesian, his budgetary policy is on track to be far more stimulatory than the deficits that Kevin Rudd and Wayne Swan delivered in Australia after the global financial crisis. But in the topsy-turvy world of Australian politics, the groups that led the attack on Rudd's fiscal stimulus are now boosters for the effectiveness of Trump's stimulus. The Barr government's urban renewal program may be "accidentally" leading to gentrification of Canberra's city, pushing public housing tenants to areas with less amenity, the community sector says. But ACT Council of Social Services' executive director Susan Helyer said she did not believe the government was intentionally trying to push hundreds of public housing tenants out of the city. ACT Council of Social Services executive director Susan Helyer says the government's urban renewal has 'accidentally' gentrified Canberra's centre. Credit:Rohan Thomson Since 2014, the government has been overhauling Canberra's public housing stock by demolishing large long-term public housing blocks in an "urban renewal precinct" along the Northbourne Avenue and in the city. Those blocks have largely already been sold off to private developers, which are redeveloping the land to house multi-storey apartment buildings, while the tenants are being moved to newer, smaller public housing lots across the city. Acting Prime Minister Mathias Cormann has described the sexual harassment complaint made against Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce as "very serious" and a Nationals MP has escalated the internal pressure on his leader, declaring "all bets are off". While Mr Joyce has branded the latest allegations "spurious and defamatory," the Nationals executive said the formal complaint from a Western Australian woman would be taken seriously and given due process. "Some very serious allegations have been made. All allegations of sexual harassment are very serious. It's important that we ... establish the facts," Senator Cormann said. "Barnaby Joyce has denied the allegation, but it's being investigated and subject to the outcomes of that investigation, obviously, the appropriate steps would follow." History might have seared these Labor indiscretions into collective memory, but Terry Barnes - a top adviser to Tony Abbott in the latter years of the Howard government - insists the Tories were no less naughty when they were in power. "Most MPs and staffers worked hard, many played hard and a few played very hard indeed," he recalls. "Condoms in the Meditation Room were the norm in my day, and what happened on tour stayed on tour." That infamous room, a quiet alcove above the grand Mural Hall in the centre of Parliament, was built for prayer and reflection. Each semi-private nook contains a seat, some floor space and a plaque pointing to Mecca. These days it is sparse but in its infancy, the room was packed with ridiculous, kitschy Christian babble", in the words of long-serving former Labor operative Justin Di Lollo, who recalls a number of grey plastic Jesus figures superglued on to fake pine crucifixes. I took it upon myself to relieve the room of most of it, he says. Since then, the Meditation Room has become notorious - in the sort of wink-wink, nudge-nudge innuendo indulged by colleagues on the hill - as the go-to venue for a bit of on-site action. Di Lollo, who started just weeks after the new Parliament House opened in 1988, reckons he went in there more than 100 times over a decade but "for all of the many, many, many stories that one hears, I have never in all of those visits seen any nefarious nocturnal activity or evidence thereof". Other hot spots for hanky panky were cleaned up and squeezed out years ago. Di Lollo remembers a number of windowless "guest rooms" with green vinyl lounges dotted around the building. "There are various stories of a bit of rooting going on in there," he says with a hint of nostalgia. One contemporary staffer tells of an especially "hot and risque" moment with a journalist that was "the closest I've ever come to having sex in Parliament House". But the danger of being discovered loomed large. "He didn't have an MP suite at his disposal, so it did shift a lot of risk on to my side," the staffer said. They ended up going back to the journalist's house. In truth, most of the sex between staff, press and lobbyists happens out of Parliament - not difficult when most people are staying at nearby hotels. Evenings during sitting weeks tend to follow a familiar path, from boozy events in the building to dinner in Kingston to particularly on Wednesdays - the Public bar in Manuka, where the party often goes until 3am. Though the venue has changed over the years there has always been a place for the political class to blow off steam on the night before everyone leaves town. Locals seem to know to stay away on a Wednesday night, when the hordes from the hill descend. "They definitely have a good time when theyre here," says Scott Barrie, the bar manager at Public who presides over the suit-and-tie swamp. "They all get real pissed but theyre always really polite and they never act out at all. Barnaby Joyce is fighting to hang on to his career. Credit:Peter Hardin Barrie takes a laissez-faire view on the whole spectacle. "Eighty per cent of them would be guys," he observes, rightly. "Theyd just be smashing beers. What they do once they leave, I don't know." This reporter can vouch that hook-ups between staffers and journalists are common, and Public is ground zero. And rest assured, people do not discriminate on partisan grounds. But, as Murray Watt notes, none of this should come as a shock. "If you get any sort of venue where there are large numbers of younger people gathering together with a few drinks involved, it's not surprising that sometimes people go home with each other," he says. "That happens every Friday night in every town in Australia. Canberra's no different." Alcohol can be a lubricant and a liability around Parliament. It is omnipresent, dished out for free at black tie dinners, office parties and countless drinks events put on by lobby groups and other associations. Ewen Jones, a boisterous and much-loved Liberal MP who lost his seat at the last election, says it was like being in the chocolate factory. But it was also fraught with danger. I love being on the drink. What I didnt get when I went to Canberra is people use a glass of wine as something around which to have the conversation they need to have, he says. Me, I would drink it like it was beer, and I ended up making a fool of myself on more than one occasion. I fell over in the whips office trying to find a seat and nearly took out Bronwyn Bishop. [Liberal MP] Russell Broadbent actually took me aside and said mate, you better watch yourself. Lest you get the wrong impression, make no mistake: ministers and shadow ministers resolutely don't have the time for such shenanigans. They're up at 5am running laps around the building, doing media interviews and preparing for 16-hour work days. And even the raucous corridor parties have largely subsided, according to old hands, though there are still reckless moments. Labor veterans fondly recall the end-of-session parties during the Rudd/Gillard years. "They were wild. People were so drunk. Theres no way someone wasnt f--king in someone elses office," one attendee says. Others describe that government's tortured last months as a long bacchanale. Certain offices develop a culture and, by extension, a reputation. Then-treasurer Wayne Swan's team was notorious for enjoying a good time. Nobody would be surprised to see Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young at a party. The spirit of the old days might be dulled but it limps on with a restraint befitting the modern age. Although we were sometimes a bit horny, we never did anything inside the building, says one recently-departed Liberal staffer. I think most people are professional enough to take it to the hotel room. In the end, the overwhelming sentiment among those who discussed the topic of sex this week was simply bewilderment that anyone found time to copulate in the corridors of power. One killed, 15 injured as bus, truck collide in Nawalparasi One person died leaving 15 others injured when a passenger bus collided head-on with a truck at Harkatta, Nawalparasi along the Mahendra Highway on Friday. US teachers angered by President Donald Trump's suggestion they should be armed to prevent future school massacres have taken to social media to demand something else. Using the hashtag #ArmMeWith, the teachers have requested time, resources, books, art supplies, respect and reasonable gun laws to help them deal with the crisis of gun violence in schools and get on with their job of educating children. The hashtag #ArmMeWith is being used as a protest against the US President's call to arm and train teachers to use guns as a solution to school massacres. Credit:Instagram The hashtag movement has appeared as Trump and the National Rifle Association double down on the call to arm and train teachers to use guns as a solution to school massacres. Trump raised the suggestion during a meeting with victims of the latest high school shooting on Wednesday. He's since suggested teachers could receive a bonus for carrying guns in the classroom, after the NRA gave his idea a glowing endorsement. Washington: Malcolm Turnbull has been caught up in a White House security scare after holding a press conference with Donald Trump inside the presidential residence, where a white van rammed a safety barrier and triggered a security lockdown. Secret Service officers were on high alert and some were seen running toward the building after the van collided with the barrier, shattering the vehicles windows. A Secret Service officer rushes past reporters after a vehicle rammed into a security barrier. Credit:AP Mr Turnbull remained inside the White House at the time of the crash as the building went into lockdown. He was holding a scheduled meeting with US Vice President Mike Pence. The Security Service confirmed the incident and said it had taken the driver, an unknown woman, into custody. No officials were injured and no shots were fired. Eventually, as is almost always the case with such students, he found reason to complain to my boss about my teaching. He took issue in particular with my having deleted a violent comment on the class blog. My boss explained that it was my right and responsibility to maintain a safe learning space for the whole class, which sometimes meant censoring comments. The student became irrational and nonsensical. After he left, my boss walked straight to my office to say she was concerned for my safety, and had referred the student to the appropriate office for assessment of a possible threat. Several years ago, I taught a student who seemed capable of shooting up a classroom. He radiated contempt for me, his classmates in my college freshman composition class, and the assignments, muttering about the stupidity of his peers and rolling his eyes when they spoke. His writing displayed a generalized hatred toward women and violent fantasies involving hypothetical, gruesome gun crimes against cheating girlfriends. One day as I rounded the corner, I heard him berating a female student in the hallway because she had defended me against whatever complaints he aired. Spittle flew from his face toward hers. Teaching freshman comp courses, like teaching high school, is routinely high-stakes, high-emotion work. Students who are still teenagers, who are struggling with leaving home for the first time, and who have probably been told that a college education is the key to a successful future carry an incredible level of stress. We're accustomed to tantrums, shouting and a wide range of irrational behavior. In my courses, that behavior tends most frequently to come from young men. But this student had evoked a more threatening tone. If anyone in the 17 years I've taught college might have shown up with a firearm, this student was the one. So far, this sounds like a viable argument for arming teachers, an idea that bubbles up after every school shooting in this country and one that President Donald Trump expressed support for on Wednesday. But my fellow teachers and I did not enter this profession to be security guards. And if this proposal becomes a reality, we will not have safer schools. We will have confusion, possibly more tragedy and an exodus of educators at a time when our country can't afford it. If this student had shown up with a weapon determined to harm us, what would my responsibility have been? Talk? De-escalate? Beg? Run? It seems clear that under any policy that arms teachers, it would be my responsibility to shoot my student dead. This creates more problems than it solves. If I miss or fail to fire and he murders the other students, can their loved ones sue me? What if my shot ricochets and hurts or kills one of them? What if his gun turns out to be a walkie-talkie, a misidentification that happened outside my campus's library last year, and I shoot my student dead for possession of an unusual electronic device? In these scenarios, some more outlandish than others, teachers become soldiers, and schools become liable when students aren't protected in such circumstances as a shooting. Loading But legal liability isn't the reason I will never carry a firearm into a classroom. If it's my responsibility to shoot someone to protect 25 others, I will have been drafted unwillingly into an ideological army to protect the rights of some civilians to own and operate military-style weapons. And I will not be conscripted. Latest News Greg Medcraft on markets, ASIC and how brokers are changing the mortgage industry in Australia Greg Medcraft on blockchain, brokers and the booming market for mortgages in Australia How commercial brokers can help their clients get to the end of lockdown Fintech offering support to get SMEs over the line and get the recovery started early Regional bank MyStates loan book grew 4.5% to $4.3bn in the first half of FY18 from December 2016 growth that group executive mortgage broker Huw Bough said was constrained by regulations on interest-only and investor lending. The increase is lower than the system growth of 6.3% for the 12 months to December 2017. Without specifying amounts, managing director and CEO Melos Sulicich told Australian Broker that the banks investor lending book is growing at around 5% annualised, while its IO book is growing at about 20% per annum. Both rates are well below APRAs caps of 10% for investor lending and 30% for IO lending. While the bank is known for targeting low-risk, owner-occupied lending, brokers staying away from investor lending has contributed to its limited growth in this space. They sort of say we are happy to do P&I business, particularly owner-occupied lending, but we cant do investor lending, said Sulicich. Brokers account for the majority of MyStates new loan book. The bank announced yesterday that broker-originated loans accounted for 74.5% of housing loan settlements in the first half of FY18, slightly up from 73.3% in the previous corresponding period. Broker-originated owner-occupied mortgage applications with an LVR of less than 80% increased 49%, with broker-originated settlements increasing 15%. Noting that the lending market remains highly competitive, Sulicich said his company continues to urge the government to embrace regulations that promote competition and benefit consumers. These regulations include changes to the framework that will enable smaller banks to compete on a more balanced playing field with major banks. The Tasmania-based bank delivered a net profit after tax of $15.8m in the six months to December 2017, up 4.0% on the previous corresponding period. Net profit before tax was $22.6m, up 7.7%. Total revenue stood at $64.0m, while net interest income grew 6.8%. Sulicich called these outstanding achievements in a highly competitive market where regulation has distorted competition, disproportionately impacting smaller banks. In a press conference call yesterday, he said his company welcomes the discussion on competition in the banking space that was generated by the Productivity Commissions recently released report. And we believe that including effective competition as an objective of the regulatory framework will benefit consumers and provide a more level playing field for smaller banks, he said. Related stories: PMs Office issues 24-hour directive to all ministries The Office of the Prime Minister and Council of Ministers has issued a 24-hour directive to all the ministries to issue deputation letters to officials under them. Liz Mohn, vice-chairwoman of Bertelsmann Stiftung today launched and inaugurated the German Indian Start-Up Exchange Program (GINSEP). The event was also attended by Dirk Wiese, the parliamentary state secretary in Germany's Federal Ministry For Economic Affairs and Energy; German Ambassador to India, Dr Martin Ney; Deepak Bagla, managing director and CEO of Invest India; and, India Today's group editorial director Raj Chengappa. Commerce minister Suresh Prabhu made a surprise appearance at the event. Bertelsmann Stiftung is one of the largest private foundations in Germany and its activities are directly philanthropic. It also owns one of the world's largest media, publishing and services empires--Bertelsmann-which operates in over 50 countries. It aims to strengthen society and help individuals reach their full potential. It works in areas such as international cultural exchange, youth, arts, public education, career training, democracy and government. Speaking at the launch, Ms Mohn said, "We are all ambassadors. Government and PM Modi have taken initiatives to promote youth. We have to take up the challenge." She said when startups are being built their culture is important. "It's important for people to feel involved. Trust plays a decisive role. They have to be allowed to change things, make mistakes. Otherwise, you are not entrepreneurs." Dirk Wiese, the parliamentary state secretary in Germany's Federal Ministry For Economic Affairs and Energy said,"India is growing at a rapid pace. It's very impressive by German standards. There is no country with more young people. There's a great deal German startups can learn from Indian Unicorns. Indian startups are good at developing cost-effective solutions. This is a great opportunity for Indo-German cooperation." German Ambassador to India, Dr Martin Ney, expressed his appreciation of Ms Mohn's appreciation and passion for Indo-German relationship. "PM Modi says India and Germany are natural partners. We both believe and democracy, human rights, free press and share values. We also prefer a rules based international order. The number of countries who share such values are reducing." Deepak Bagla, the managing director and CEO of Invest India made an impassioned pitch for investing in India saying, "The scale, size and pace of transformation taking place in India is unprecedented." He said India had attracted $194 billion in the past 36 months, over 90 pc of that has required no government approval. He said India is the world's No.1 open economy. India Today's group editorial director Raj Chengappa said, "What we are witnessing in India is a revolution in entrepreneurship which touches everyone." "The time has come when we can be anywhere and work. I am excited by this idea-an Idea to make this partnership work will make sure startups will become reality," says commerce minister Suresh Prabhu who made a surprise appearance at the event. Making H1-B visa procedure tougher, the Trump administration has announcement a new policy which is expected to affect individuals who are employed at one or more third-party worksites. This will hugely affect Indian IT companies and their employees. The new policy requires a company to make extra efforts to prove that its H-1B employee at a third-party worksite has specific and non-qualifying speculative assignments in speciality occupation. The new policy will be effective immediately. It must be noted that the new H-1B filing season is expected to be April 2 for the fiscal year 2019, which means that the timing of the announcement is not coincidental. In an interview to ET Now, R Chandrashekhar , President, Nasscom said, "these new norms do complicate the process and make it more onerous in terms of the paper work involved both for the issuance of the visa and the continuation and extension of it." This announcement comes as part of President Trump's Buy American, Hire American directive that was ordered to ensure the interests of US workers. The seven-page policy that was announced yesterday empowers the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to issue H-1B visas to an employee only for the period for which he/she has work at a third-party worksite. This move is expected to affect the duration of H-1B visas and bring it down to less than three years. The guidance says in order for an H-1B petition involving a third-party worksite to be approved, the petitioner must show by a preponderance of evidence that the beneficiary will be employed in a speciality occupation and the employer will maintain an employer-employee relationship with the beneficiary for the duration of the requested validity period. When H-1B beneficiaries are placed at third-party worksites, the companies must demonstrate that they have specific and non-speculative qualifying assignments in a speciality occupation for that beneficiary for the entire time requested on the petition. While an H-1B petition may be approved for up to three years, the USCIS will, in its discretion, generally limit the approval period to the length of time demonstrated that the beneficiary will be placed in non-speculative work and during which the petitioner will maintain the requisite employer-employee relationship, an official statement said. Extensions of H-1B visas have become even tougher, in particular if the employee has been on a bench for any part of their previous duration. Sometimes American companies abruptly end the contract of an employee as a result the workers temporarily do not have any work, which in IT parlance is called on bench. During this period, while they maintain their H-1B visas status, official investigations have revealed that foreign IT workers on H-1B visas do not get paid, which the USCIS says is illegal and abuse of the system. "If an H-1B petitioner is applying to extend H-1B employment for a beneficiary who was placed at one or more third-party worksites during the course of past employment with the same petitioner, that petitioner should also establish that the H-1B requirements have been met for the entire prior approval period," the USCIS said. And if these conditions are not met, and if the petitioner did not comply with the terms and conditions of the original petition and did not file an amended petition on time, USCIS may have eligibility concerns about a subsequent petition filed to extend the beneficiary's employment, the policy memorandum said. "Employment-based petitioners who circumvent the worker protections outlined in the nation's immigration laws not only injure US workers (eg their wages and job opportunities), but also the foreign workers for whom they are petitioning," it said. Companies seeking H-1B visas for their employees working at a third-party site, would now have an intensive paper work to file before submitting their applications. This includes evidence of actual work assignments, which may include technical documentation, milestone tables, marketing analysis, cost-benefit analysis, brochures, and funding documents. The letter should provide information, such as a detailed description of the specialised duties the beneficiary will perform, the qualifications required to perform those duties, the duration of the job, salary or wages paid, hours worked, benefits, a detailed description of who will supervise the beneficiary and the beneficiary s duties, and any other related evidence, the USCIS said. The H-1B programme offers temporary US visas that allow companies to hire highly skilled foreign professionals working in areas with shortages of qualified American workers. Indian IT companies, which are among the major beneficiaries of H-1B visas, has a significant number of its employees deployed at third-party worksites. A significant number of American banking, travel and commercial services depend on on-site IT workers from India to get their job done. Sun Pharmaceutical Industries today said the US health regulator has issued three observations after inspecting its Halol facility in Gujarat. The United States Food and Drug Administration (USFDA) conducted the Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP) inspection of the company's Halol facility from February 12-23, 2018, Sun Pharmaceutical Industries said in a BSE filing. "At the conclusion of the inspection, the agency issued a Form 483, with three observations," it added. The drug firm however did not disclose any detail of the observations. The company is preparing the response to the observations, which will be submitted to the USFDA within 15 business days, Sun Pharma said. "The company is committed to addressing these observations promptly. The company remains committed to working closely with the USFDA and continues to enhance its GMP compliance on an ongoing basis," it said. As per the USFDA, a Form 483 is issued to a firm's management at the conclusion of an inspection when investigator has observed any conditions that in their judgment may constitute violations of the Food Drug and Cosmetic (FD&C) Act and related Acts. It notifies the company s management of objectionable conditions. The company's stock closed with a gain of 5.17 per cent at Rs 570.20 on BSE. Prime Minister Narendra Modi met with his Canadian counterpart Justin Trudeau in Delhi where the two leaders discussed matters ranging from counter terrorism to clean energy and bilateral trade. On the sidelines of the Modi-Trudeau meeting, six memorandums of understandings were signed between various government departments of Canada and India on matters like information technology, energy cooperation and more. With the Khalistan issue clouding Trudeau's first state visit to India, the topic of terrorism featured prominently in the talks between him and PM Modi. "We discussed the entire gamut of bilateral partnership, and identified concrete steps to boost cooperation. We agreed to strengthen our defence cooperation," Modi said, while noting that terrorism and violent extremism were threats for democratic countries such as India and Canada. In his statement after the meeting concluded, Modi stated that those challenging India's sovereignty, unit and integrity will not be tolerated. This is being seen as a veiled jibe at the soft approach of Canadian government towards Khalistani operations. Energy cooperation PM Modi said that Canada is an energy super power and can help India with growing energy needs. Both countries decided to prepare the roadmap for energy cooperation between them. The Indian PM also congratulated Canada for undeterred uranium exports which supplemented civil nuclear power usage and both leaders consented to expand the ongoing mutually-beneficial civil nuclear cooperation by developing collaboration in nuclear science and technology. India and Canada agreed to strengthen bilateral and international cooperation to address climate change, implementing the Paris Agreement, and ensure a future with clean energy. The leaders agreed to expand the scope of the Canada-India Ministerial Energy Dialogue to additionally include electricity, energy efficiency and renewables, and agreed to hold the fourth meeting of the Ministerial Energy Dialogue in Canada in 2018. Counter terrorism India and Canada agreed on Framework for Cooperation on Countering Terrorism and Violent Extremism, which will facilitate effective cooperation between the law enforcement and security agencies as well as the legal and policy practitioners of the two countries for curbing terrorist activities. The Framework is meant to expand security cooperation through institutionalization of NSA-level Dialogue and regular convening of Foreign Minister-level Strategic Dialogue. The Framework consists of institutionalized cooperation between the National Security Council Secretariat of the Republic of India and the office of Canada's National Security and Intelligence Advisor, a government statement said. The National Security Advisor of India and the National Security and Intelligence Advisor of Canada acknowledged their partnership and commitment to strengthen cooperation in counter-terrorism capacity-building and to contribute to international efforts through the UN mechanisms and initiatives as well as groupings such as the Global Counterterrorism Forum, the Financial Action Task Force, and the G-20. Indo-Canada trade ties To continue strengthening the government-to-government framework for cooperative economic engagements, the prime ministers welcomed the conclusion of, and progress on, cooperation agreements/MoUs in areas such as civil nuclear science and technology, education, audio-visual co-production, information technology, intellectual property and sports, the statement said. To realize the full potential of bilateral trade and investment, both sides will renew efforts to expand and diversify bilateral economic and commercial relations. They will also intensify negotiations to finalize a Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement and a Bilateral Foreign Investment Promotion and Protection Agreement, it further added. US businesses and diplomats are pressing India to cut tariffs, industry and government sources say, after New Delhi's move to increase customs duties on dozens of products to help its flagship Make-in-India drive aggravated differences over trade. Ford, which has two plants in India, has sought a reversal of the new tariffs on auto components, while Apple Inc is concerned its iPhones have become even more expensive in the price-conscious $10 billion smartphone market. India and the United States have built close political ties and Prime Minister Narendra Modi was in Washington last summer, bear-hugging President Donald Trump in his personalized style of diplomacy. But trade friction is casting a shadow. A U.S. State Department spokesperson in Washington told Reuters that India should lower trade barriers, which were holding back economic ties. Trump has already called out India for its duties on Harley-Davidson motorbikes, and this month Modi ordered them cut to 50 percent from 75 percent for high-end bikes. But that has not satisfied Trump, who pointed to zero duties for Indian bikes sold in the United States, saying he would push for a "reciprocal tax" against countries, including U.S. allies, that levy tariffs on American products. "It is important that India make greater efforts to lower barriers to trade, including tariff and non-tariff barriers, which will lower prices to consumers, promote development of value chains in India," said the State Department spokesperson, referring to Trump's comments on motorbikes. The U.S. Congress has been pushing over the past year for greater pressure on India to dismantle economic barriers, and now House Republicans have raised the issue of the new round of duties with New Delhi. "We conveyed our concerns to the Indian government last week to raising tariffs above WTO rates - especially as it relates to information technology," a Republican aide in Washington told Reuters. IMPORT TAXES India announced higher import tax on electronics products such as mobile phones and television sets in December, and then on 40 more items in the budget this month. These included goods as varied as sunglasses, juices and auto components. India says the move is aimed at giving local industry the chance to grow and is part of a broader plan to lift the share manufacturing makes up of GDP to a quarter, from around 15 percent, and create the tens of thousands of jobs needed for a young workforce. U.S. commerce department referred questions to the U.S. Trade Representative's (USTR) office in Washington, where a spokesman declined to comment. The Indian commerce ministry did not respond to a request for a comment on the U.S. criticism of the import taxes. But a senior finance ministry official defended the decision to raise duties, saying it reflected a trend in other parts of the world. "When all the major economies, including the U.S. and China, are following protectionist policies, why are we being questioned," the official said. TRADE TIES Bilateral trade between India and the United States has grown to about $115 billion in 2016 from $20 billion in 2001. The United States buys close to a fifth of India's goods and services exports and its trade deficit has widened from $13 billion in 2006 to $31 billion in 2016. The USTR's office is "fairly negative" on India at this point and is analyzing the impact of the customs trade tariffs on various American companies, an industry source aware of the matter told Reuters. "They are more vigilant than earlier, they are in bulldog mode under Trump," the source said. A spokesperson for the USTR's office declined to comment. Even before the new round of hikes, India has been seen as one of the most protected major economies. The United States had an average tariff rate of 3.4 percent on imported goods in 2016, compared with 13.5 percent for India, according to the World Trade Organisation (WTO). China, which the Trump administration is targeting for its trade practices, had an average tariff rate of 9.9 percent that year. Apple, whose top-end iPhone costs nearly $1,700 after the company raised prices twice in recent months due to higher duties, is in talks with other firms on whether the issue could be raised at the WTO, an industry source said. Apple did not respond to a Reuters request for comment. Ford and European carmaker Volkswagen (VOWG_p.DE) have written to Indian Finance Minister Arun Jaitley saying the new tariffs are going to hurt the auto sector and should be reviewed, sources said. Anurag Mehrotra, Ford India's managing director, said the company has invested $2 billion in the country and the government's move would hit the automobile sector. "Like many, we also see it as the return of protectionism," Mehrotra told Reuters, adding he expected car prices to rise up to 4 percent due to new duties. Andreas Lauermann, the head of Volkswagen's India unit said it "remains a challenge to invest further" because of sudden tax hikes. The biopharmachem sector maintained its position as the largest exporter of goods from Ireland in 2017 with record total exports of 67.8 billion, up 2% on the previous year. The sector now accounts for 55% of overall Irish exports of goods (excluding services). This research was released this week at BioPharma Ambition, a major international conference staged in Dublin Castle. The event is hosted jointly by the Irish Pharmaceutical Healthcare Association (IPHA), BioPharmaChem Ireland (part of Ibec) and the National Institute for Bioprocessing Research and Training (NIBRT). The conferences partners are InterTrade Ireland and the IDA. The conference attracted a number of keynote international speakers in the areas of cancer trials, genetics, gene therapy, immunology and manufacturing. Delegates at the conference were told that the island of Ireland was the 6th largest medicinal and pharmaceutical manufacturing hub in the world last year. Each of the worlds top 10 biopharmachem companies has a presence in Ireland. Employment in the sector is expected to have surpassed 30,000 in 2017 when final employment figures are published later this year. The industry also indirectly supports an additional 28,000 people in providing services. Employment in the sector grew more than fivefold from 5,200 in 1988 to 29,826 in 2016. Speaking at the conference, Director of BioPharmaChem Ireland, Matt Moran said, "Ireland continues to enjoy an impressive period of investment for the biopharma sector, most recently the announcement last week by MSD of the construction of a new biotech plant in Dublin employing 350 people. This is the latest in a series of high profile investments which has seen over 10 billion being invested by the industry so far since 2000 including over 1 billion in the last 12 months alone." He added, "Ireland remains one of the most important hubs for biopharma in the world and we so delighted to welcome some of the global industrys leaders to Dublin this week." Source: www.businessworld.ie Police begin hunt for Puns gangsters Police Thursday said they have started further investigations on gang members of Manoj Pun who was shot dead in a gunbattle with police officers on Wednesday in Rupandehi. Harvest Global Investments Ltd. CEO James Sun says increased mainland oversight over asset management products is "largely positive" for mutual funds because "they have always been within the regulatory framework," unlike many "underregulated, nonstandard assets or projects," which new regulations will adversely affect. Photo: Harvest Global Investments Ltd. (Hong Kong) Chinas asset management industry is in the throes of transformation as it continues its rapid growth. China is set to become the worlds second-largest asset management market by 2019, according to a November report by consultancy Casey Quirk & Associates LLC. The countrys A-shares will be included in the MSCIs emerging-markets index this year, and exchange-traded funds are expected to be added to mainland-Hong Kong Stock Connect programs by the second half of the year. At the same time, the industry is facing renewed scrutiny by mainland authorities trying to overhaul the countrys fragmented financial regulatory framework. In July, Chinas central government created a new cabinet-level body, the Financial Stability and Development Committee, to curb risk in four areas, including asset management products. In November, regulators issued a draft of the countrys first unified rules for its asset management industry. Caixin recently spoke with James Sun, CEO of Harvest Global Investments Ltd. (HGI), on how these changes could affect investment flowing between China and the rest of the world. HGI is a subsidiary of Chinese asset management company Harvest Fund Management, which in September became one of the first six firms allowed by Chinas securities regulator to offer fund-of-funds products. Below are some excerpts from Caixins conversation with Sun. The interview, which was conducted in Mandarin and English, has been edited for length and clarity. Caixin: Considering MSCIs decision to include Chinas A-shares in its emerging-markets benchmark, what developments do you expect to see in the asset management industry? Sun: The MSCI inclusion is a trigger event. In itself, its initial implementation might not create an absolute large-scale inflow of investment into China. But it will fire up overseas investors interest in looking at Chinas economy and investment opportunities within China. Then we will gradually see more and more assets being allocated into China. This kind of allocation is also being strengthened by the various Hong Kong connect programs, the Shanghai-Hong Kong Stock Connect, the Shenzhen-Hong Kong Stock Connect, and the Bond Connect plan. Chinas debt market is also a huge market. But this huge market, within the global context, has a very low level of asset allocation; (after the MSCI inclusion of A-shares,) people will become conscious of how such a large market was ignored for such a long time. Whats the impact of recently tightened mainland regulations on asset management? I think the impact is largely positive. Ill tell you why: Mutual funds and Harvest is a mutual fund company, in a sense are very well-regulated, and are the best regulated products in China. They have always been within the regulatory framework, and have always been looked at carefully. Mutual funds will actually emerge victorious from this round of regulatory tightening. After many underregulated, nonstandard assets or projects are hit by this round of regulation, assets with a very clear framework, where the entire product system is very mature and transparent, especially mutual funds, will be the winners. A big problem in China has been how rigid repayment has obscured the relationship between risk and returns. If my minimum-guarantee product already has very high returns, why would I want to invest in funds? Funds are more volatile. But once people know that rigid repayment is something that needs to change, and isnt a normal situation, which is one of the core ideas of this round of regulation, to break down rigid repayment once this is broken down, everyone will clearly understand that mutual funds are actually a product with a good balance between risk and return. How have Swiss investors responded so far to Hong Kong products sold under the new H.K.-Switzerland cross-border trading plan? This is a very meaningful issue. What were doing is paving the road, so to speak. There is a strong lack of European wealth being allocated to Chinese assets. For such a large economy, especially one that has developed so quickly, there are few specialized, tailor-made China-related products for Europes wealthy or private banks. Switzerland is the wealth management center of the world. Hong Kong is the asset management center a global one, in Asia. So, this program is actually connecting Europes wealth management demand with Hong Kongs asset management assembling capability. Thats why we think this is a very meaningful thing. Europe and China are reconnecting, or connecting more strongly, on many levels, including through the Belt and Road initiative. The Belt and Road is the new Silk Road connecting China and Europe, and the old Silk Road was also a connection between China and Europe. I think the Europeans realized they should have a piece of investment in China. But it is definitely a relatively long process because the entire channel hasnt been built yet. The process of establishing this channel will take time. Everyone needs to climb the learning curve, especially the distributors in Switzerland. The demand is there, and is very clear, or we wouldnt be doing this. But we are currently looking at how to find the appropriate channels for this demand, and then what kinds of products will fulfill this demand. What are typical misconceptions foreigners have about investing in China, and that Chinese investors have about investing abroad? I lived in New York for 10 years, and now I live in Hong Kong, so I have many American friends. Those among the American investment community who are the most negative about China are often the ones who have never been to China. But once Americans come to China and see whats happening in China, how Chinas economy operates, once they see Chinas new economy and the progress in various aspects of technology ecosystems, they start to understand it. And then that misconception disappears. Thats why I say to overseas investors, the easiest thing for you to do is to climb over that wall of worry and come here and take a look. When it comes to a lack of allocation abroad, Chinese investors also have to some degree a lack of knowledge and a lack of understanding. Its because investors from every country in the world all have a home bias. They invest in something that they understand. If they dont understand it, they dont put their money in it. Theres nothing wrong with that thats how it should be to begin with, and thats why Chinese investors prefer to invest in Chinese products. But once Chinas wealthy have matured to a certain level, they naturally develop a demand for overseas allocation of investment. I have a saying: China alpha, global beta. For overseas institutional investors, China as an inefficient market actually has many alpha opportunities. Elsewhere in the world, there are no longer so many such opportunities. In mature markets, in efficient markets, its hard to find alpha opportunities. But their beta is very well-packaged. Its very well-represented. You helped HSBC establish its private banking business in China. How has the situation for private banking in the country changed since 2008? That was such a long time ago. (Laughs.) If I recall correctly, it has already been 10 years. So, in these 10 years, there has inevitably been change in this area. The biggest change is that the population of wealthy Chinese has experienced an extremely large expansion. But where things have remained relatively the same, where were still facing the problem we faced 10 years ago, is that Chinas wealthy population doesnt have sufficient diverse and multilayered products for them to allocate their wealth to. The programs currently being spearheaded by Hong Kong, including the Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Connects, the Bond Connect, and the future ETF (exchange-traded fund) Connect, will integrate the Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Hong Kong stock markets. In the process of this integration, you enrich the options of Chinas investors, especially of Chinas wealthy. This is also very beneficial to overseas investors because they are familiar with the Hong Kong market. The Hong Kong market has very well-established norms, so overseas investors are fully able to invest in Chinas new economy through the Hong Kong market. At the same time, this is a good thing for Chinese enterprises and Chinas wealthy population. New-economy enterprises benefit from access to Hong Kongs global financing platform. At the same time, Chinese investors, understanding the situation of these companies, can invest in these companies Hong Kong-listed units, enriching the diversity of their assets. Wealth management is actually distribution, while asset management is providing products and content. So Im connecting the content with the distribution. Thats what Im doing. Connecting asset management, what Im doing now, with wealth management, what Ive done in the past. Contact reporter Teng Jing Xuan (jingxuanteng@caixin.com) The Yu Jong 2, a North Korean-flagged tanker, sits next to a small, blue vessel of unknown nationality in the East China Sea, in a photo taken by a Japanese maritime surveillance plane on Feb. 16. China said it is investigating a possible breach of U.N. sanctions since Chinese characters were on the blue vessel. Photo: Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs China said Thursday it is investigating a Japanese report that a ship marked with Chinese characters transferred cargo to a North Korean vessel in violation of U.N. sanctions. We attach great importance to the relevant information and are carrying out an investigation, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said Thursday. China has been fully and strictly implementing the Security Council resolutions, he said. The Chinese government has earlier issued a notice explicitly prohibiting smuggling by ship-to-ship transfer, Geng said. The investigation comes after Japans Foreign Ministry on Tuesday posted photos of Yu Jong 2, a North Korean-flagged tanker, lying alongside a small vessel of unknown nationality, around 250 kilometers (155 miles) offshore from Shanghai in the East China Sea. The photos, taken on Feb. 16 by a Japanese maritime surveillance plane and an escort vessel, show the two ships with what appear to be hoses running between them. Four Chinese characters and a number that read Min Ningde You 078, meaning Fujian Province, Ningde city, oil tanker 078, are seen on the bow of the smaller vessel, the Japanese Foreign Ministry said. Tokyo said it had reported the incident to the Security Council and shared information with relevant countries. It is the third time this year that Tokyo has reported a cargo transfer between a foreign ship and a North Korean vessel in violation of U.N. sanctions imposed after Pyongyang ratcheted up its nuclear and ballistic-missile programs. The Security Council slapped three sets of sanctions on North Korea last year: one on Aug. 5, aimed at the iron, coal and fishing industries; another on Sept. 11, squeezing textile trade and oil supplies; and the latest on Dec. 22, targeting refined petroleum products. Though China remains North Koreas biggest economic partner, sanctions have dealt a heavy blow to bilateral trade. Chinas trade with North Korea fell to $215.97 million in January, the lowest since June 2014, according to data from the General Administration of Customs released on Friday. Last year, Chinas Ministry of Commerce ordered North Korean businesses in China, including joint ventures with Chinese partners in which North Korea is the majority stakeholder, to wind down operations by early January. Contact reporter Poornima Weerasekara (poornima@caixin.com) Amish Raj Mulmi is a columnist for the Post, and the author of All Roads Lead North: Nepals Turn to China. Our Promise: Welcome to Care2, the world's largest community for good. Here, you'll find over 45 million like-minded people working towards progress, kindness, and lasting impact. Care2 Stands Against: bigots, racists, bullies, science deniers, misogynists, gun lobbyists, xenophobes, the willfully ignorant, animal abusers, frackers, and other mean people. If you find yourself aligning with any of those folks, you can move along, nothing to see here. Care2 Stands With: humanitarians, animal lovers, feminists, rabble-rousers, nature-buffs, creatives, the naturally curious, and people who really love to do the right thing. You are our people. You Care. We Care2. Swedish parliamentarians hail Nepals progress A delegation of Swedish parliamentarians hailed Nepal for its progress on promoting inclusion and gender equality as well as building resilience, improving livelihoods and work on the post-earthquake recovery. Photo: Contributed UPDATE 1:10 p.m. Highway 33 is now fully open after a vehicle incident 15 km north of the junction with Big White Road. UPDATE 10:59 a.m. Highway 33 remains closed in both directions15 km north of the junction with Big White Road because of Vehicle Incident. Detour is available at Goudie Road. UPDATE 10:40 a.m. Highway 33 on the way to Big White is closed at this hour due to a multi vehicle pile-up. Emergency crews are on scene trying to clear the highway. UPDATE 10:32 a.m. Overnight snow is slowing traffic down on roads around the Okanagan. We are getting reports of a 3 vehicle pile-up on the way to Big White, just before the Big White Road turn off. You are urged to drive with caution and adjust your speed to winter driving conditions ORIGINAL 7:51 a.m. Emergency crews on scene of a multi-vehicle pile-up in the 1600 block of highway 97 this morning. Traffic is stacking up around Boucherie road on the other side of the lake this morning as well. Fire investigators have confirmed last weeks fire at a home on Rutland's Argyll Road was an arson. Emergency crews responded to the blaze on Feb. 15 just before 9 a.m. The homeowner, who was home alone at the time, was unharmed thanks to the quick actions of her neighbours, said Cpl. Jesse ODonaghey of the Kelowna RCMP. Police have learned that a resident rushed back to his home to retrieve a fire extinguisher after he spotted the fire. Despite his efforts, when he returned, the fire had grown significantly and spread. The man then helped a second good samaritan, who alerted the home owner inside and evacuated her from her home. The Kelowna RCMP General Investigations Section has now taken lead on the ongoing investigation. Police are seeking the publics assistance to help identify the second good samaritan who helped the homeowner to safety. Anyone with any information is urged to contact Const. Kevin Hamilton of the Kelowna RCMP at 250-762-3300. Pakistan exports fall in 7MFY17-18 23 February 2018 Pakistani cement exports during the first seven months of current financial year, July 2017-January 2018, recorded a fall of 15.4 per cent in volume and 18.7 per cent by value in dollars, says data released by Pakistan's Federal Bureau of Statistics. Pakistan exported 2.71Mt of cement and earned export revenue of US$136.46m between July 2017-January 2018, compared to 3.21Mt at US$167.9m in corresponding months of last fiscal year. Volumes fell by 15.4 per cent and in terms of dollar value, by 18.7 per cent. However, in January 2018 alone, the country exported 357,363t of cement at US$17.88m, compared with 293,522t at US$14.54m in December 2017. This is a MoM rise of 21.8 per cent in terms of quantity and 22.9 per cent by value in dollars. Compared with January 2017 (410,025t at US$22.27m), exports fell 12.8 per cent in volume and 19.7 per cent by value in dollars. During July 2017-January 2018, Pakistan exported 1.31Mt of cement to Afghanistan and recorded a volume fall of 0.1 per cent. Similarly, exports to India fell by 9.7 per cent to 564,841t and to the rest of the world by over 37 per cent. Published under Daydreaming about a trip to Europe? Perhaps a look at some of the continents most incredible castles will inspire you to book a flight. From Portugals most colorful castle (page 4) to Germanys most popular fortress, we share seven must-see castles, ahead. 1. Bran Castle This gorgeous, yet eerie castle is famously believed to be the home of Count Dracula. Dracula aside, the castle has an interesting history that dates back to 1211. Originally built for the Teutonic Knights, Bran Castle has seen everything from crusaders to kings to myths and legend. Next: This castle inspired Disneylands Cinderella Castle. 2. The Alcazar Castle Want to see one of the most breathtaking castles in the world? Head to Segovia, Spain, for views of the Alcazar Castle. Situated on a rocky cliff new the Guadarrama mountains, the Alcazar Castle was one of the castles that inspired Disneys Cinderella Castle. Next: This castles history dates back 2,000 years. 3. Cardiff Castle Another must-see castle in Europe? Cardiff Castle in Cardiff, Wales. Nestled in the heart of the capital, the medieval fortress has seen 2,000 years of history. Next: The most colorful castle in the world. 4. The Palace of Pena Perhaps one of the most colorful castles in the world, the Palace of Pena is a representation of 19th-century romanticism in Portugal. Located in the Sintra hills, you can spot the gorgeous palace from every point in the park. Next: The fairy-tale king lived in this castle. 5. Neuschwanstein Castle Located in Bavaria, Germany, the Neuschwanstein Castle is perhaps one of the most popular castles in Europe. That said, it was originally built as a private fortress for King Ludwig II aka, the fairy-tale king who wanted to withdraw from public life. Next: A castle that was built twice. 6. The Hohenzollern Castle Although the first reference of the Hohenzollern Castle dates back to 1061, the castle we see today was built after 1423 because the original property was completely destroyed. As a result, little is known about the original castles architecture. But, if it was anything like the one that stands today, it must have been magnificent. Next: This castle is 850-years-old. 7. The Eltz Castle The Eltz Castle is an 850-year-old medieval castle located in the hills between Koblenz and Trier, Germany. Today, visitors can experience the medieval times in its purest form, as the family has done a phenomenal job at preserving the fortress and its history. Check out The Cheat Sheet on Facebook! After Robert Kennedys assassination, Fred Rogers recalled how his mother taught him to deal with tragedy in the news. She told him, Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping. Whether its a hurricane destroying beloved homes or a gunman devastating innocent lives, there are always people willing to help. Sometimes, help comes in seemingly simple ways, like writing a check. Even these efforts can go a long way. They dont change the past, but they can contribute to future solutions. Heres what really happens to these donations, and how to know if youre giving to the right organizations in your efforts to help. Florida students accepted millions from celebrities like Oprah Sandy Hook, New Jersey. Columbine, Colorado. And now, Parkland, Florida. Disasters like these are nothing new, but they hurt a little more every time they happen. After Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School experienced one of the worst school shootings in U.S. history, Oprah, the Clooneys, and other celebrities donated millions to support survivors efforts to prevent similar tragedies from happening again. Next: Who are Parkland donations really supporting? March For Our Lives Following most disasters, celebrities and average citizens alike search for the best places to send their funds. Parkland students unintentionally made this step a little easier. This time, donations big and small were given in support of March For Our Lives. The Washington, D.C. event, organized by affected survivors and their families, will focus on gun control, calling for an end to gun violence in schools across the country. Next: Celebrities always find ways to help where they can. Donations poured in after Parkland but it wasnt the first time Its impossible to prepare for a disasters aftermath, especially when you know it isnt going to be the last one. Most donations are monetary, following both natural and manmade disasters, but there are always other ways to help, if you have the resources to do so. Some celebrities got creative when supporting Hurricane Katrina victims. Some volunteered, provided housing for families who lost their homes, and held benefit concerts. Next: A campaign created after this disaster raised over $3 million. Over $3 million went to support Las Vegas in 2017 In October 2017, celebrities like Mike Tyson and members of the Chainsmokers donated to a GoFundMe campaign organized by Clark Country Commission Chair Steve Sisolak. By December of that year, the Las Vegas Victims Fund became a registered nonprofit corporation to help distribute the many donations provided following the tragedy. Donations aided those injured as well as their families. Next: How do celebrity donations actually work, though? What happens when Oprah donates to disaster relief? When celebrities like George Clooney and Oprah Winfrey donate in the emotionally charged aftermath of tragedies like these, what really happens to the money they pledge? Many of them consult a financial advisor before making donations to learn the best organizations to offer their funds. Many media organizations also offer this information along with their disaster coverage for those who want to give but wont do so unless they know their money will go to the right place. Next: Is it safe to donate to a nonprofit after a disaster? Do nonprofits make good use of the money theyre given? Maggie Neilson, co-founder and CEO of Global Philanthropy Group, told Billboard shes usually not too skeptical about big donations being misused. Most non-profits are under so much scrutiny, she said, and I think the quality of their boards are so high that donations are being used appropriately for the most part. Next: Even if its going to the right place, is it really your best option? Is donating money the best way to help? Following the tragedy in Las Vegas, officials urged people across the U.S. to donate blood to aid survivors something that could offer much more short-term relief than cash at the time. Though it might depend on the specific circumstances surrounding a disaster, money is usually the best way anyone can help. It allows organizations to put donations toward the resources that matter most in a specific area and it supports local economies. Check out The Cheat Sheet on Facebook! The day the nation took a stand The Nepali people fought for long years for the advent of democracy, and in February, their struggle finally bore fruit Email Whatsapp Menu Whatsapp Google Reddit Digg Stumbleupon Linkedin Comment The world's greatest evangelist died early Wednesday morning. Here are some thoughts, including from the late Chuck Colson, on the Rev. Billy Graham. Here's a story that could be repeated by any one of a million Americans: "At age 45 I attended a Billy Graham Crusade in New York City and responded to the call. A man took me aside to counsel me after I went forward and I really felt Christ was in that conversation. "I knew it was all different from that point on," this man continued. "I was going to church before then but I didn't have the personal relationship." That testimony belongs to Tom Phillips, the man who, several years later led Chuck Colson to Christ. At the Colson Center, Graham's passing represents more than just the end of an era. It's something like the loss of a grandfather. Rev. Graham ministered to every U.S. president since Harry Truman. He was instrumental in the Civil Rights movement, even posting bail for Martin Luther King, Jr. and personally removing the barrier between the white and black section at his crusades. And he appeared on Gallup's list of most admired men and women more often than anyone else in the world. His 67 years of evangelism, not only in tents, churches and stadiums but also through innovative use of new media and technologies, would deliver a simple Gospel message to more people than any other Protestant minister in history: an estimated 2.2 billion. In response, millions surrendered their lives to Christ to the contrite strains of "Just as I Am." Chuck Colson first met the Reverend Graham in Nixon's White House. In a 2006 tribute, he recalled the minister's pastoral care and concern for the President and his staff. Chuck also felt a debt of gratitude to Graham for offering counsel and support when he was released from prison, and he credited Graham as a mentor who shaped his ministry from the beginning, and even joined him in the prisons to share the Gospel. Chuck recalled seeing Rev. Graham, the celebrity evangelist to millions, sitting cross-legged on the floor in a maximum security prison sharing Christ's love with a single prisoner. Chuck later wrote, "He was as comfortable in that prison as he was in a palace." But still, what strikes me in all of this, is just how unlikely this story is. Some of Graham's success can be attributed to extraordinary talent, oratorical skills, his strong team, and other things. But it can't explain how this self-described "farm boy" would becomewellBilly Graham. Timing is part of the story: God called Graham to ministry at an extraordinary time in American church history. After the Scopes trial of 1925, American evangelicalism had largely retreated from public lifeperceived by a hostile public to be nothing but backwoods fundamentalism. But then arose four faces of an evangelical resurgence: Fuller Seminary, Christianity Today Magazine, the National Association of Evangelicals, and most important of all, Billy Graham, who leapt onto the national stage in the unlikeliest of ways: a 1949 evangelistic crusade in, of all places, Los Angeles. So what was it? His "golden" voice? His calm demeanor? His ability to connect with the powerful? His humility? His innovative use of new technologies? His impeccable integrity? All of these things certainly contributed to his life and influence. But his answer, when he was asked by CNN's Larry King in 2005: "It's the message..." God raised Billy Graham up at a specific time and specific place to exalt Jesus. And that's exactly what he did. This Christian hero came to Jesus "just as he was," and he dedicated his entire life to telling others that, really, that's the only way for any of us to come to Jesus: "Without one plea, but that His blood was shed for me." Thank you God, for Billy Graham. And thank you, Reverend Graham. We love you. We'll miss you. Remembering Billy Graham: America's Pastor Goes Home He was a mentor to so many, and an inspiration to Christians around the world. Read more about Billy Graham, America's pastor, by clicking on the links below. First published at BreakPoint. Anglican evangelicals: 6 quotes from the past for the present The news that three major conservative Anglican evangelical groups are seeking to come together has been greeted with varying reactions. Many people have responded very positively. They see the move as a way of furthering gospel unity, pooling resources effectively and bringing together three organisations with frankly miniscule differentials (Church Society, Reform and the Fellowship of Word and Spirit). Others are struggling to come to terms with the idea at this stage. They are raising thoughtful concerns which the leadership teams of the three groups will no doubt address. Still other have reacted with wearily predictable kneejerk negativity. Unity among Protestant evangelicals has always been a challenge. There are various possible reasons for this: one is the lack of a central, Roman Catholic-style church authority. Another is evangelicals' commitment to combating error, which can sometimes warp into a default attitude of suspicion. This latter problem is memorably satirised in the American novel 'Lake Wobegon Days' which describes how the 18th century Brethren Christians 'having tasted the pleasure of being Correct and defending True Doctrine, kept right on and broke up at every opportunity, until... there were dozens of tiny Brethren groups, none of which were speaking to any of the others'. So here are six quotes from evangelical leaders in varying centuries who have had to wrestle with this issue. How could their wisdom help Anglican evangelicals today as they contemplate this coming together? 1. Richard Baxter, author of 'The Reformed Pastor' (1615-1691): 'We must be very studious of union and communion among ourselves, and of the unity and peace of the churches that we oversee. Ministers must not only hearken to motions for unity, but propound them and prosecute them; not only entertain an offered peace, but even follow it when it flieth from them... Instead of quarrelling with our brethren, we must combine against the common adversaries... Had the ministers of the gospel been men of peace, and of catholic, rather than factious spirits, the Church of Christ had not been in the case it now is.' 2. Thomas Goodwin, Puritan (1600-1680): 'I never yet took up party religion in the lump... I have found Gospel holiness where you would little think it to be, and so likewise truth.' 3. DL Moody, evangelist (1837-1899): 'Talk not...of this party and that party, but solely and exclusively of the great comprehensive cause of Jesus Christ.' 4. John Stott, Anglican evangelical leader (1921-2011): 'We fragment over what we regard as issues of principle but often the real reason is personal, isn't it? When we're afraid, we withdraw into our own fellowships and ghettos where we feel secure with like-minded people... It's a very distressing thing about evangelicalism we are not very good at responsible domestic debate.' 5. George Verwer, founder of Operation Mobilisation, writing in 1969: 'All shall know that you are my disciples if you have love one with another, said Jesus. Is this the way the rest of the world looks at the Christian church? Or do they merely see divisions and intolerance, criticism and narrow-mindedness? Now the Bible teaches us that the way to God is a narrow road. And yet we do not have the right to try to make it narrower than it really is, by excluding everybody who does not think and believe exactly as we do... If you take the whole of the Word of God, and let one verse balance out another verse, then I believe you will end up in the land of the open-hearted.' 6. Bishop Michael Baughen, writing in 1995: 'There is a real need for evangelicals of different emphases or groupings to come together... It does not happen enough in our day.' The majority of Anglican evangelicals involved with the three groups in the current announcement are likely to support this coming together. Some with legitimate questions will hopefully have them answered in due course. Others, who have a more naturally Eeyore-type outlook may want to ponder Jesus' words about 'a house divided' (Mark 3:25) and to ask themselves who will laugh the most at any ongoing discord. If you are a communist in the UK at the moment you can choose between seven parties all with the word 'Communist' in the title (and that's excluding Trotskyist, Maoist and other similar groupings). Each presumably has its own marginally different emphasis. But Anglican evangelicals as followers of Jesus can surely do better than that. Right? David Baker is a former daily newspaper journalist now working as an Anglican minister in Sussex, England. Follow him on Twitter @Baker_David_A Archbishop of Canterbury backs Pope Francis' call for day of prayer and fasting for South Sudan and Congo The Archbishop of Canterbury is backing a call by Pope Francis for a day of prayer and fasting today for the people of South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The call has been supported by Anglican leaders around the world. Archbishop Justin Welby said: 'I support this call and invite you to join us and people around the world in praying that these terribly suffering populations will know peace.' Welby, who travelled to war-torn South Sudan last August, went on: 'On my visits to both countries in recent years, it's been impossible to describe the overwhelming scale of destruction. These conflicts are causing terrible loss of life. Huge numbers of people have been forced to flee their homes, which is tearing apart families and communities. 'There are more than a million new internally displaced people. Famine is causing great suffering and danger. In South Sudan, up to 6 million people face starvation. Sexual violence and humiliation are being committed on the most atrocious scale in both countries.' Around 2 million people have fled South Sudan since fighting broke out in December 2013, sparking what has become the world's fastest growing refugee crisis and largest cross-border exodus in Africa since the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Welby said: 'On my last visit there, I listened to a political leader tell me about the suffering and slaughter of her people. I visited a refugee camp in Uganda filled with South Sudanese children whose families had fled their homes to escape death.' 'We are called to pray fervently for the millions of people who simply cannot take any more of this war.' In the Democratic Republic of the Congo's Kasai region in the past year alone, more than 3,300 people have been killed, including civilians caught in the crossfire of a brutal fight between the Congolese army and an opposing militia group. And in the east of the country in the past week alone, some 7,000 people have reportedly fled to neighbouring Burundi and another 1,200 into Tanzania. The archbishop suggests praying: for the leaders of South Sudan and DRC to turn their hearts from war to peace and a peaceful solution to political problems; for all refugees from these countries; for forgiveness, healing and new relationships; for the local churches doing so much to look after people who are suffering, and to bring peace. Bishop Anthony Poggo, the Archbishop of Canterbury's adviser on Anglican Communion Affairs, previously spent nine years as Bishop of Kajo-Keji in South Sudan. He gave an overview of the situation there to Christian Today, saying: 'South Sudan became a new country in 2011 and sadly after a very short time it plunged into conflict, so for the last four years South Sudan has been having this conflict which is a struggle for power by our leaders which took on an ethnic dimension, resulting in the displacement of many people within the country as well as 2 million people who have crossed the border as refugees. A peace agreement was signed in 2016; it collapsed after 2 months and once again South Sudan has found itself in war with many people displaced and facing famine. There is a lot of suffering.' On the call for prayer, Bishop Poggo said: 'I believe that the call for prayer by Pope Francis is an important call and Archbishop Justin and other Christian leaders have also joined in. It is important to bring these issues to God in prayer. Prayer is an important aspect of our faith. This situation has gone on for many years and it is important that we turn to God for prayer for these two countries.' Speaking of his own experiences, he added: 'Before I took on this role I was Bishop of Kajo-Keji, which has a population of 196,000 according to the 2010 census. Some 95 per cent of these people have been forced to be refugees and are now in Uganda. A few others are internally displaced within South Sudan. Archbishop Justin in August visited the refugees and in one of the camps that he visited, I saw many people that I worked with and knew: seeing them with houses and schools and seeing them now was a very painful and difficult thing to see, so war definitely caused a lot of suffering, with people facing starvation and dependent on food aid from the aid agencies. 'This is a reminder of the effects of war and the importance of peace so we don't have people forced out of their homes into situations where they depend on food aid. 'There is a need for forgiveness, healing and relationships that have been affected by this war.' The acting Anglican primate of South Sudan, Archbishop Peter Munde Yacoub, said: 'Jesus says if we pray faithfully, the mountains can fall into the sea. We have mountains in front of us: the evil war and the killing of innocent people. Pray that Almighty God will remove this evil war and bring us peace, and remove the suffering of South Sudanese people.' Chris Hemsworth's wife Elsa Pataky bravely removes snake from Australian home Chris Hemsworth's wife, Elsa Pataky, has just proved she is capable of dealing with Australia's terrifying wildlife as she recently confronted a tree snake that entered the bathroom of their Byron Bay home. Being the outback woman that she is, the 41-year-old actress did not just trap the snake; she caught the whole thing on tape too. In the footage, she and another woman are seen working together to get the snake safely out of their house. Using just a handle of a mop and a large, empty box, Pataky wrangled it while standing on top of the toilet. "This is how I put her in the box. So professional!" she captioned her video. Once captured, the reptile is then seen slithering and hissing with its forked tongue inside the makeshift cage. Check out the footage below: Immigration Reform news: West Michigan protesters urge congress to renew DACA; two protesters hurt With time running out for the renewal of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which ends on March 5, protesters in West Michigan call for the Congress to take action and pass a bill that will renew the immigrant program. While many youth are unsure of their future now that DACA is coming to an end, organized protests continue to move in the streets of West Michigan calling upon lawmakers to pass a bill renewing the immigrant program. In an interview with FOX 17, DACA recipient and student Danny Caracheo expressed his frustrations regarding the Congress' slow approach to granting renewal to the immigrant program. He questioned that if the lawmakers are continuing to ignore their constituents on this particular matter, then there are other important issues they are paying no heed to. "If lawmakers are choosing to ignore their constituents on such a matter that has so much support, what other issues are they ignoring?" Caracheo asked. Caracheo is among the 800,000 student immigrants whose education has been put on hold when President Trump's immigration reforms refused to renew the immigrant program directed toward the youth. According to reports, as ICE arrests continue to rise, student immigrants are finding it harder to continue pursuing their education. Just last year, there have been 143,470 arrest cases -- the highest in three years. During the ongoing protest in Grand Rapids, two women, members of The West Michigan Coalition for Immigration Reform, were hit by an SUV while in the middle of protesting. The accident occurred between Michigan Street and Ottawa Avenue, where a total of 30 people were protesting in support of the DACA and immigrant rights. The women incurred no major complications, but they were still brought to the hospital for treatment. Members of the group voiced their frustrations saying that the police did not do enough to protect them. According to the Grand Rapids Police, they asked the protesters to stay out of the roadway and get permits in order to organize legal protests. Investigation is still ongoing regarding the incident. 'This Is Us' spoilers, plot news: Will Jack open up about his Vietnam past? While fans of "This Is Us" are still reeling from the aftermath of Jack Pearson's (Milo Ventimiglia) death, the fan-favorite character will still be around on the upcoming episode after a mid-season hiatus. "Vegas, Baby" is aptly titled as Kate and Toby (Chrissy Metz and Chris Sullivan) will be heading to the Sin City for Kate's bachelorette party. Addressing his fans that might have worried that Ventimiglia might be leaving the show for good, the actor told Vulture, "That was a big worry among a lot of people, that I was going to be leaving the show. I'm like, 'No, no, no. I've been dead since the beginning, nothing's changed, I'm personally still around on the show, Jack is still around, not going anywhere." The trailer for the 16th episode of season 2 also teases the anniversary of Jack and Rebecca (Mandy Moore) and, as "This Is Us" episodes go, plenty of flashbacks are to be expected. Viewers will be transported back to the time before the kids were born. They will also get a glimpse of the time before Jack and Rebecca met, and events around the time Jack was still a young soldier in Vietnam. This is crucial for fans of the show who know too well that Vietnam has always been a touchy subject, and a chapter that Jack seems to have trouble bringing himself to talk about. With the trip back to Vietnam, memories of his best friend and his brother Nicky are likely to be brought up. The bachelorette party might just provide the show a chance to have a breather from the heavy weight that it left on its viewers due to Jack's death. As seen in the trailer, there will be drinks, gambling, and plenty of fun to go around as far as Kate and Toby are concerned. As the global market leader for Post-War and Contemporary Art since 2010, Christies now presents the category as part of its innovative 20/21 sales format, featuring works of the 20th and 21st centuries. Our regular Post-War and Contemporary Art sales in London, New York and Paris celebrate leading masters active from 1945 to 1970, including Mark Rothko, Andy Warhol, Francis Bacon and Louise Bourgeois alongside contemporary luminaries such as Jeff Koons, Mickalene Thomas, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Gerhard Richter. In a break with our traditional auction categories, our reimagined 20/21 sales series reflects evolving market demands and collecting habits, featuring increased diverse representation of artists of colour and female artists, and cutting-edge contemporary art such as digital works and NFTs. Christie's introduced NFTs onto the global auction market stage in March 2021, and as the first international auction house to sell an NFT of a purely digital work of art by the artist Beeple we continue to lead and expand this exciting new collecting category. Christies continues to showcase works by emerging artists in our popular First Open sales, which attract new and seasoned collectors alike. In addition to auctions, Christies organises selling exhibitions and private sales of paintings, drawings, photographs and installations by a wide range of artists and schools from early Abstract Expressionism through to the present day. Our global team of specialists is always available for free and confidential valuations of individual works or collections. Please do not hesitate to get in touch to discuss buying or selling at auction, online or through Private Sales. Two former NTB officials jailed in corruption case The Special Court on Thursday convicted two former officials of Nepal Tourism Board (NTB) and a tourism entrepreneur on corruption charges. Alberto Burri: Artist, poet, and creator of the new A profile of the Italian artist who inspired Arte Povera and changed art with his use of unconventional materials Who was Alberto Burri? According to Mariolina Bassetti, International Director of Post-War and Contemporary Art at Christies, Alberto Burri (1915-1995) was an artist, poet, and a creator of the new, who loved discovering new forms in diverse materials. Gallery director Luigi Mazzoleni says, Burri was one of the most important artistic figures of the Italian post-war period, whose works had a fundamental influence, not just on artists of the time, but on younger artists today. Burris artistic innovations helped set the stage for Italys radical Arte Povera or poor art movement, led by artists including Alighiero Boetti, Michelangelo Pistoletto and Jannis Kounellis. In the late 1960s and 70s, in particular, these artists and others used everyday materials as a challenge to the commercialised contemporary gallery system. Burris art was characterised by the daring experimentation that came to define the group. He burst onto the Italian and global art scene, offering a highly personal interpretation of Art Informel, explains Mazzoleni. Alberto Burri (1915-1995), Sacco, 1953. Burlap, fabric, oil, gold and Vinavil on canvas. 39 x 33 in (99.8 x 86 cm). Estimate: 3,000,000-5,000,000. Offered in Thinking Italian on 4 October 2019 at Christies in London Fondazione Palazzo Albizzini Collezione Burri, Citta di Castello DACS 2019 What was Burris background? Burri had demonstrated a passion for drawing since he was a young boy, and he spent a short time studying with a geometer. He continued to paint throughout his years at medical school, admiring the work of Piero della Francesca and other Renaissance artists. Dr. Alberto Burri graduated in the summer of 1940, just a few months before Italy entered the Second World War. In October of the same year he was called up to serve as a medic in the Italian army, and toured the Balkans and North Africa. On 8 May 1943, he was captured by Allied forces and interned in a prisoner of war camp in Texas. His fellow PoWs included academics, architects, and the artist Dino Gambetti, and Burri was motivated to pick up his paintbrushes once again. His earliest works depicted a view of the desert from the interior of the prison camp. Burri had always had an artistic vein, comments Bassetti, but it was only in the sobering silence of the prison that he recognised it. A doctor is, after all, a creator of hope. Alberto Burri (1915-1995), Sacco e Bianco, 1953. Fabric, burlap, oil and Vinavil on fabric. 27 x 22 in (68.5 x 57 cm). Estimate: 2,200,000-2,800,000. Offered in Thinking Italian on 4 October 2019 at Christies in London Fondazione Palazzo Albizzini Collezione Burri, Citta di Castello DACS 2019 How did he work? With resources sparse, Burris early methods were necessarily unconventional, and he recycled materials including industrial and commercial canvas. Sackcloth was readily available, and Burri continued using the material following his release in 1946 and return to Rome. He also began experimenting with bark, corrugated cardboard, sheet metal and crushed stone. His first Sacco of 1949 was made with a jute sack, which he brought back with him from the PoW camp in Texas. The material had a strong symbolic value and the work became the first in a series of abstract collage constructions made from torn cloth, roughly stitched together and stretched across the canvas surface. In the 1950s, Burris methods became more dramatic. Fire became the protagonist which defined Burris forms, explains Mazzoleni. Using a blowtorch, he modified the surface of plastic to create the Combustioni a process he would repeat in the Legni series, before turning, near the end of the decade, towards an almost traditional use of fire in Ferri, his assemblages of sheets of metalwork. Alberto Burri (1915-1995), Combustione, 1960. Plastic, oil and combustion on canvas. 2 x 5 in (7.3 x 13.2 cm). Estimate: 280,000-320,000. Offered in Thinking Italian on 4 October 2019 at Christies in London Fondazione Palazzo Albizzini Collezione Burri, Citta di Castello DACS 2019 What did these violent processes represent? It depends who you ask. Early commentators were keen to suggest that the patchwork surfaces of the Sacchi series stood as a metaphor for living flesh, violated during warfare the stitching recalling Burris practice as a doctor. Others suggested the hardship of life in post-war Italy prompted the artist to repurpose sacks originally used to deliver relief supplies. The Trauma of Painting, the Guggenheims 2015 retrospective, associated Burris work with an ambiguous distress leaving viewers to decide whether this trauma relates to the rips, burns and half-patched holes of the canvas surface, or to the artists own experience of the Second World War and its aftermath. The trauma might also belong to European pictorial tradition shaken and reconfigured by Burris avant-garde approach. From his early exhibitions, Burri was labelled the artist of wounds, explained Guggenheim curator Emily Braun. Hes attacking the supports and surfaces, the very structure of what a canvas is, and in that way Burri draws the viewer in. We feel these materials as if were feeling these textures in our own body. For Bassetti, Burris art represents a very physical form of creative destruction: He used fire to penetrate material, to go through it and transform it. It was a violent act comparable to birth. Alberto Burri (1915-1995), Rosso Combustione Plastica, 1957. Plastic, acrylic, fabric and combustion on canvas. 49 x 34 in (125 x 88 cm). Sold for $4,951,500 on 15 November 2016 at Christies in New York Fondazione Palazzo Albizzini Collezione Burri, Citta di Castello DACS 2018 What did the the man himself say? If there was a profound metaphorical meaning to his burnt and sutured canvases, Burri kept quiet about it, insisting that his choice of material responded to purely formal concerns. Neutral titles, such as Composition, emphasised a concern with construction rather than metaphor, and, in 1994, Burri vehemently stated, Form and Space! Form and Space! The end. There is nothing else. Form and space! How was this unconventional work first received? People didnt really understand him, and when the visionary Palma Bucarelli, director of Romes Galleria Nazionale dArte Moderna, supported Burri, it was met with front-page scandal, says Bassetti. Bucarelli hosted a major exhibition of Burris work in 1959, which was so controversial that it prompted a government investigation. Burri was still causing scandal a decade later. In the last room of Burris exhibition at the Galleria dArte Moderna in Turin in the early 1970s, there was a notebook in which visitors could write their thoughts on the show. When newspapers published excerpts of these comments, which were divided between the artists supporters and those scandalised by his work, the whole thing turned into a major attraction, says Mazzoleni. The reception wasnt all bad, however. Critics were particularly favourable in America the place where Burri had first started painting, almost by chance, as a distraction from his imprisonment. Alberto Burri (1915-1995), Rosso Plastica M1, 1961. Plastic, acrylic and combustion on canvas. 46 x 52 in (117 x 132.5 cm). Sold for 3,442,500 on 16 October 2015 at Christies in London Fondazione Palazzo Albizzini Collezione Burri, Citta di Castello DACS 2018 Where can one see Burris work today? In Burris native Italy, the Fondazione Albizzini di Citta di Castello should be a priority. Beyond gallery walls, the Grande Cretto Bianco di Gibellina in Sicily, which was reduced to a pile of rubble when it was the epicentre of an earthquake in 1968, is also well worth seeing. When the mayor of the town asked artists to create commemorative installations, Burri refused, proposing instead to compress the remains of the old city and cover them with iron and cement creating the Grande Cretto Bianco, or Great White Crack, a monumental work of land art. Alberto Burri (1915-1995), Bianco plastica P, 1970. Plastic, acrylic, combustion, vinavil on cellotex. 78 x 59 in (200 x 150 cm). Sold for 2,210,500 on 30 June 2015 at Christies in London Fondazione Palazzo Albizzini Collezione Burri, Citta di Castello DACS 2018 The prints of Zao Wou-Ki Best known for his large-scale canvases, the Chinese-born French artist was also a committed printmaker whose styles and themes evolved across a five-decade practice I cant think of any other artist whose prints so completely intertwined Asian and Western traditions, says Alexandra Gill, Senior Specialist in Prints & Multiples at Christies in London, of Chinese-born French artist Zao Wou-Ki (1920-2013). Born in 1920 in Beijing, Zao Wou-Ki began drawing and painting at a young age. In 1948 he moved with his wife to Paris, where he would meet and work with some of the greatest Western artists, including Alberto Giacometti and Joan Miro. Zao Wou-Ki (1920-2013), Untitled, 1950. Paper: 32.5 x 41.5 cm, 12 x 16 in. Sold for HK$32,500 on 25 November 2018 at Christies in Hong Kong Zao Wou-Ki was brought up understanding Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, and its well documented that he arrived in Paris with some preconceived notions of what European art was like, Gill explains. But after settling in France, his views began to shift. Zao spent most of his career negotiating the artistic influence of his Chinese heritage and the development of his abstract art. Over time, his images display these struggles, and how he emerged from this conflict into graceful, energetic works which merge the fluidness of Chinese landscape with the controlled abstraction of Western art at the time, says Gill. In 1949, Zao made his first lithographs at the Paris workshop of Edmond Desjobert. He would later describe this initial foray into printmaking: The idea of throwing colour on a large white porous stone, like on China paper, pleased me. I used a lot of water, which is not at all to be recommended. Edmond Desjobert, a remarkably skilful lithographer, criticised me for it and told me the outcome would be poor, because one could not mix so much water with the lithographic ink. Even so I tried, and while the proofs were being printed he became enthusiastic. The success of these early experiments with an unusual lithographic technique entirely his own invention touched off a 50-year practice for the artist. Zao Wou-Ki (1920-2013), Idylle Champetre (Rural Idyll), 1950. 14.8 x 12.1 cm, 5 x 4 in. Sold for HK$50,000 on 25 November 2018 at Christies in Hong Kong If his very early prints tend to be image-based, reflecting the continued influence of figuration, this soon began to change. Zao was particularly moved by the work of abstract painter Pierre Soulages, whom he met in Paris. The paintings of Paul Klee, which he encountered in the mid-1950s, were extremely influential as well, and helped him begin to resolve the tensions between Asian and Western artistic traditions in his work. How could I be ignorant of this painter whose knowledge and love of Chinese painting is so obvious? Zao would write of Klee. From these small signs, drawn on a ground with a multitude of spaces, a dazzling world emerges. The work of Soulages and Klee also encouraged him to move to a bolder style in his prints. As Gill explains, Zaos palette developed and his work became more fluid throughout the 1950s; he also fully embraced abstraction. So significant was his shift to abstraction at this time that Zao stopped naming his works after 1958 (subsequent prints were all Untitled). Zao Wou-Ki (1920-2013), Untitled, 1961. 26 x 63 cm. Sold for HK$50,000 on 25 November 2018 at Christies in Hong Kong Entering the 1960s, his prints become still more energetic and abstract, while retaining suggestions of Chinese artistic traditions. When you look at his prints you can see a very gentle Eastern quality to them they are almost like mystical landscapes, but not quite. You could call them mystical landscapes, or you could call them abstract, in the Western way, says Gill. As Zao would explain in a 1962 interview, Although the influence of Paris is undeniable in all my training as an artist, I also wish to say that I have gradually rediscovered China. Paradoxically, perhaps, it is to Paris I owe this return to my deepest origins. In the 1970s and 1980s, Zao's prints remain bold, and he pulls in fantastic bright colours, Gill says. But as he hits the 1990s his palette changes again: colours become muted, shifting from the vibrant to ochre, brown and saffron. Zao Wou-Ki (1920- 2013), Untitled, 1979. 27 x 22 cm, 10 x 8 in. Sold for HK$37,500, 27 Nov 2018, Online By the final years of his life, theres almost no sense of structure left in his prints at all. Zao Wou-Ki (1920-2013), Hommage a Nobutaka Shikanai, 1991. 64.5 x 52 cm, 25 x 20 in. Sold for HK$37,500, 27 Nov 2018, Online Zao was a traditional painter-printer, Gill explains. His prints were not copies of his paintings, or preparatory studies; rather, his printmaking was another distinct medium in which he could explore his major themes. LARS HAGBERG/Contributor Small business owners can meet with government officials on March 2o (Note: this is a change in date since the original post) to discuss potential economic effects of renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement. The Office of Advocacy for the U.S. Small Business Administration will be at Marriott West Loop by the Galleria (Note: this is a change in location since the original post) from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. 1582: Pope Gregory XIII issued an edict outlining his calendar reforms. (The Gregorian Calendar is the calendar in general use today.) 1937: Mexico observed the first holiday honoring its national flag. The Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas, scandal ridden five years ago, averted new embarrassment last year when the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center rescinded an agency-funded job offer to a researcher who falsified her data. The U.S. Office for Research Integrity reported this week that Colleen Skau, the one-time recruit, altered results and figures in one study published in the journal of the National Academy of Sciences in 2015 and in another in the journal Cell in 2016. The misconduct occurred while she was at a postdoctoral research fellowship at the National Institutes of Health. "After being notified the NIH was reviewing the research for possible misconduct, UT Southwestern withdrew its offer in July 2017, prior to any hire," Russell Rian, the school's director of communications, said in a statement. RELATED: Texas' rebooted cancer agency shifting priorities The research integrity office's finding, its first of 2018, was reported Tuesday by the online publication Retraction Watch. Skau was one of eight awardees of a May 2017 recruitment grant from CPRIT, the tax-supported state agency that funds not just research and prevention projects but Texas institutions' efforts to lure established and promising young scientists to their faculties. Skau's grant would have provided $2 million toward a lab at UT Southwestern. It is not uncommon for CPRIT recruitment grants to fall through. Though the agency announces such awards after its board approves them, they are not final until the institution makes an offer and it is accepted. CPRIT spokesman Chris Cutrone added that had Skau's misconduct been discovered after she was on UT Southwestern's staff, the agency's award contract would have allowed it to terminate the grant for fraud and seek repayment of any grant funds. Skau, whose research focuses on what causes melanoma cells to spread, "intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly" omitted data, overstated numbers and falsified measurements, ORI wrote in its report. Skau, currently manager of research programs at the American Urogynecologic Society, must have her research supervised for three years as part of the ORI agreement. RELATED: At halfway point, is CPRIT delivering? The principal investigator of the papers in question told Retraction Watch the retractions of both are imminent. Principal investigators typically supervise the work but not necessarily conduct the experiments. CPRIT has been quietly awarding grant money in recent years, following high-profile scandals of 2012 and 2013 that threatened its existence. After it was found to have mismanaged three grants totaling $56 million, the state's political leadership shut it down for 10 months and the Legislature passed a reform bill that removed the entire governing board and instituted additional safeguards to prevent abuse from occurring again. On Wednesday, CPRIT awarded $73.5 million in grant money to Texas institutions, bringing its nearly 10-year total to $1.95 billion. The agency has until 2023 to award the remainder of the $3 billion taxpayers approved in 2007. Nearly every unsolved crime story report comes with a call to provide anonymous tips to Crime Stoppers, in exchange for a reward of up to $5,000. But, does anyone ever see these cash rewards? And does Crime Stoppers actually keep tipsters anonymous? The answer to both questions is yes. Nichole Christoph, deputy director of Crime Stoppers of Houston, explained what happens with a tip from the time it is called in. UNSOLVED MURDERS: Houston-area families hope for new clues in these cases When a tipster submits information via phone call, text or the Crime Stoppers website, that person is assigned a unique identifying number, Christoph said. No names are ever provided, and Crime Stoppers gives no identifying information on the tipster to law enforcement, not even the person's gender. It is required by state law that tipsters remain anonymous. Immigration status is not recorded either, so immigrants should feel safe in providing anonymous tips, Christoph said. The tipster is advised to call back within a specified amount of time, depending on the crime being reported, to see if the tip led to an arrest, Christoph said. Once law enforcement verifies that a tip was helpful in solving a crime, the tip is considered by the Crime Stoppers board of directors at a monthly meeting, where the board uses a scale of each crime's severity to determine how much cash to pay out. More severe crimes, such as murder, result in higher reward payments than other crimes like probation violations. Crime Stoppers of Houston only pays out for felonies and certain misdemeanor crimes - domestic violence, animal cruelty and campus-based crimes like a student hiding marijuana in a locker, Christoph said. Crime Stoppers organizations are all run separately, so others in the Houston area may pay out for tips on misdemeanors. Once a reward amount is determined and a tipster calls back with their identifying number, the tipster is given a new unique number and the address of a specific bank, Christoph said. The tipster is directed to go to the bank and give the teller a piece of paper with the identifying number to receive an envelope of cash. All rewards provided by Crime Stoppers are tax-free, Christoph said. No need to report them as income to the IRS. Rewards through Crime Stoppers of Houston are paid using fees collected through the court system. When a judge orders a convict to serve probation, the judge can also order that person to donate up to $50 to Crime Stoppers, Christoph said. Want to report a crime tip? See the Houston area's most recent unsolved crimes in the photos above. Crime Stoppers of Houston: 713-222-TIPS Galveston County Crime Stoppers: 409-763-TIPS Fort Bend County Crime Stoppers: 281-342-TIPS Montgomery County Crime Stoppers: 1-800-392-STOP (includes Liberty and San Jacinto counties) Brazoria County Crime Stoppers: 1-800-460-2222 Chambers County Crime Stoppers: 844-860-8477 Dozens of states, including Texas, reached a $650 million settlement with the U.S subsidiary of a Japanese company that manufactured faulty air bags installed in millions of automobiles worldwide, bags that sprayed deadly shrapnel that killed at least 22 people and injured hundreds more. The agreement was reached with TK Holdings, the American subsidiary of Takata as part of a settlement between 44 state governments and the District of Columbia, requiring a $650 million payout by the Japanese firm. Nearly 34 million of the 250 million vehicles on U.S. roads have been part of the largest recall in U.S. history. Unlike most air-bag makers, Takata uses ammonium nitrate to trigger a small explosion that inflates the air bag when the vehicle strikes something. But in some vehicles - particularly those that were several years old and kept in regions of the country with high humidity - the ammonium nitrate burns too fast, causing the chemical's container to explode and spray drivers and passengers with metal shrapnel. "Companies have a moral and legal obligation to protect their customers from defective products like these incredibly dangerous airbags," Virginia Attorney General Mark R. Herring said. "Just like the Volkswagen emissions scandal showed, we will move as quickly as possible to protect Virginians from defective or unsafe vehicles and will hold manufacturers accountable when they deceive drivers or place them at risk." Faced with the massive cost of worldwide recalls, Takata filed for bankruptcy in the U.S. and Japan last year. The company signed an agreement in November to sell most of its assets to a Chinese company for $1.58 billion, promising to use the proceeds to compensate victims of the accident and repay debts. The recall announced by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration will continue until next year, and millions of drivers worldwide have yet to respond to the announcement. Court documents filed in the U.S. said that Takata was aware of test failures as early as 2004, but took no action for more than a decade, failing to notify regulators that there product was defective. In addition to Virginia, Maryland, the District and Texas, the states that settled with TK Holdings are Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Washington, and Wisconsin. Toys R Us, the beleaguered chain under pressure from Amazon and bigger toy sellers, may close dozens of more stores as it struggles to find a path out of bankruptcy and return to financial viability. The toy retailer has not recovered from a dismal holiday selling season, making the company's difficult situation even worse. Now, it is under pressure to demonstrate to its lenders that it has a realistic strategy for flourishing in the ultracompetitive toy industry. One plan under discussion includes shutting down close to 200 stores, and possibly more, according to people briefed on the matter, who were not authorized to speak publicly. While the planning is fluid and far from completion, the possible store closings, which were reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal, reflect the serious challenges that Toys R Us faces. "If you look at the numbers, it doesn't look good," said Richard Gottlieb, an analyst and the publisher of Global Toy News. "And it appears that some dramatic action is going to have to take place." Toys R Us has already been taking steps to stabilize its business. Last month, the company said it was shutting down 182 stores, affecting 4,500 workers. It is not clear whether any additional closings would occur in the United States, or overseas. The company operates about 800 stores in the United States. Even as other retailers experienced strong holiday sales, Toys R Us cited undisclosed "operational missteps" in explaining its poor performance. Analysts say the company's biggest problem stems from its filing last year for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, after its private equity owners left it saddled with $5 billion in debt. The bankruptcy filing, only months before Christmas, left many shoppers with the impression that the company was shutting down, even though it planned to keep all its stores operating through the holidays, said Jim Silver, the editor of TTPM, a toy review website. "There was too much consumer perception that they were not going to be around, and it hurt their traffic incredibly," Silver said. "When you are buying toys, you want to know you can return them and your gift cards will work." Another big challenge came from competitors like Walmart and Amazon, which pushed toys heavily during the holiday season, just as Toys R Us was struggling to win back customers and calm jittery vendors. Toys R Us is entering a crucial time, as it prepares to buy toys to sell for the next holiday season. It needs to persuade its lenders to keep that spigot flowing. But lenders need to know that the company is viable over the long term. Analysts say that a primarily bricks-and-mortar toy retailer can succeed, but that its stores have to be smaller, unlike the hulking Toys R Us facilities that dot suburban strip malls. "A toy store needs to be fun and engaging and interactive," Silver said. "Toys R Us has been talking about better customer service and experiences, but they never really transpired." Yi-Chin Lee/Houston Chronicle The Houston region ranked as fifth overall entrepreneurial U.S. city in 2018 in a new list from the online publication FitSmallBusiness.com. The Miami metropolitan area took the top honor followed by New York, Los Angeles, and Dallas. Oil headed for a second weekly increase as a surprise pullback in U.S. crude inventories compounded signs that a global glut is easing. Futures in New York are up 1.7 percent this week after closing at the highest level in two weeks on Thursday. While the U.S. is pumping near record volumes, exports also jumped to a four-month high last week, helping drain the nation's stockpiles. Oil stocks in the biggest U.S. storage hub plunged to the lowest level in more than three years. While crude struggled after the best January performance in more than a decade, it's now finding its footing again as the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries and its allies including Russia pledge to persist with output curbs to re-balance the market, and demand remains robust. "Crude stockpiles resumed their downward trajectory" in the U.S., said Stephen Brennock, an analyst at PVM Oil Associates Ltd. in London. "The report was well-received by market bulls." West Texas Intermediate for April delivery fell 6 cents at $62.71 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange at 1:36 p.m. London time, after rising $1.09 on Thursday. Total volume traded was about 42 percent below the 100-day average. Brent for April settlement slipped 11 cents to $66.28 a barrel on the London-based ICE Futures Europe exchange. Prices are up 2.2 percent this week, also set for a second weekly gain. The global benchmark crude was at a $3.62 premium to WTI. U.S. crude exports rose to about 2 million barrels a day last week, according to Energy Information Administration data Thursday. Nationwide inventories declined the most in five weeks to 420.5 million barrels, in contrast to a 2.9 million gain forecast in a Bloomberg survey. Stockpiles at the storage hub of Cushing, Oklahoma, shrank for a ninth straight week to 30 million barrels. The country's crude production ticked lower for the first time since early January to 10.3 million barrels a day, the EIA report also showed. Baker Hughes data due on Friday will show the number of rigs drilling for oil in America, which had risen to a two-year high last week. Oil-market news: The global oil market is rebalancing and the decline in oil inventories is expected to continue in 2018, said Saudi Arabia Energy Minister Khalid Al-Falih. Egypt's Oil Minister Tarek El-Molla said he sees crude trading at $60 to $70 a barrel as fair, adding the nation currently has no plan to join global crude production cuts. Gasoline futures in New York are up 0.4 percent this week, extending last week's 3 percent gain. Houston solar company Sunnova Energy is headed back to Nevada, after quitting the state when lawmakers killed solar power incentives. In 2015, utility regulators eliminated the state's net-metering policy, which allows rooftop solar owners to sell excess power to the grid, and increased fixed fees for rooftop solar customers. Nevada reinstated the net metering policy in June 2017. RELATED: In Oklahoma, a war over wind Nevada is one of many states where regulators and lawmakers have pushed back against policies that have encouraged the spread of renewable energy. In Arizona, regulators killed net metering at the end of 2016. In Ohio, lawmakers are considering rolling back renewable energy standards, which require utilities to buy a share of their power from wind, solar and other renewable sources. Oklahoma has eliminated all of its state-level incentives for all future wind farms, and has considering reducing tax credits available to existing wind farms. Texas state Sen. Carlos Uresti and co-defendant Gary Cain were found guilty on all charges in San Antonio federal court today in a criminal fraud trial that has stunned the city and state capitol. It took the 12 jurors roughly 11 hours over three days to reach a verdict. Both Uresti and Cain are allowed to remain free on bond until sentencing, which was set for June 25. The San Antonio Democrat was indicted last year by a federal grand jury on 11 felony charges in connection with his roles at now-defunct oilfield company FourWinds Logistics. Co-defendant Gary Cain was charged with nine felony counts for his involvement as a consultant to the company. RELATED: Star witness who lost $800K says Uresti was my friend, my lover Story continues below with charges listed. The courtroom was opened shortly after 10 a.m. as lawyers and prosecutors were informed by court staff to return for the verdict. President Donald Trump's new U.S. Attorney for the Western Distric of Texas, John Bash, was there to witness it. Uresti stood behind his chair with his hands clasped as he waited for the verdict to be read to the packed courtroom. The FBI's special agent in charge for San Antonio, Christopher Combs, and other federal agents were also in the courtroom. Each count is listed below. As to State Sen. Carlos Uresti: Count 1, wire fraud: Guilty Count 2, wire fraud: Guilty Count 3, conspiracy to commit wire fraud: Guilty Count 4, wire fraud: Guilty Count 5, wire fraud: Guilty Count 6, wire fraud: Guilty Count 8, conspiracy to launder monetary instruments: Guilty Count 11, engaging in monetary transactions in property derived from specified unlawful activity: Guilty Count 20, securities fraud: Guilty Count 21, securities fraud: Guilty Count 22, unregistered securities broker: Guilty READ MORE: Shocking revelations and testimony during Urestis fraud trial Each wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud count carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison and $250,000 fine. The conspiracy to launder monetary charge is punishable by up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine. Each securities fraud charge and the unregistered securities broker count carries a maximum of 20 years in prison and a $5 million fine. Each of Urestis counts also is punishable by up to three years of federal supervision to be served after release from prison. As to Gary Cain: Count 3, conspiracy to commit wire fraud: Guilty Count 8, conspiracy to launder monetary instruments: Guilty Count 13, engaging in monetary transactions in property derived from specified unlawful activity: Guilty Count 14, engaging in monetary transactions in property derived from specified unlawful activity: Guilty Count 15, engaging in monetary transactions in property derived from specified unlawful activity: Guilty Count 16, engaging in monetary transactions in property derived from specified unlawful activity: Guilty Count 17, engaging in monetary transactions in property derived from specified unlawful activity: Guilty Count 18, engaging in monetary transactions in property derived from specified unlawful activity: Guilty Count 19: engaging in monetary transactions in property derived from specified unlawful activity: Guilty The conspiracy to commit wire fraud count carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison and $250,000 fine. The money-laundering conspiracy charge and each count of engaging in monetary transactions related to unlawful activity is punishable by up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine. Each of Cains nine counts also carries a maximum of three years of post-prison federal supervision. *Uresti, Cain and FourWinds CEO Stan Bates were indicted on 22 felony charges. Bates pleaded guilty to eight counts last month rather than stand trial. The Greater East Montgomery County Chamber of Commerce celebrated accomplishments from 2017 and challenges overcome with its second annual Casino Gala Feb. 16. Held at the Texan Drive Stadium, the gala is an opportunity for Chamber members to celebrate and enjoy a bit of fun and each other's company with a setup complete with craps tables, blackjack, poker and more provided by iHostPoker. Visitors participated with poker chips, which could be earned through the various gambling tables. The increased number of chips were then used to receive raffle tickets for prizes. Chamber President Rick Hatcher commented on the gala's purpose as a celebration and a night of fun after a year's worth of accomplishments. "Some of the greatest things that we did was the Sawmill Festival and the Grand Prix," he said. Hatcher also says last year was the Chamber's first time to host the Casino Gala, which proved to be enough of a success to host again for a second year. The Chamber also faced tough challenges in 2017, chief of which was the damage caused by Hurricane Harvey. Hatcher discussed how the disaster has impacted the organization. "We came together as a group," he said. "I think that carries over in all of the things that we do." Hatcher commented that Harvey's challenges were felt all around the Montgomery County area, especially where it flooded in Kingwood. Many businesses celebrated reopening after Harvey with ribbon cuttings with the Chamber. Despite the damage caused by Harvey, Hatcher says the Chamber continued to offer opportunities to local businesses. "It was a hard year on everybody," he said. "I think people had enough faith in the Chamber and themselves to stick it out." The Chamber also increased its membership by 80 over the course of 2017. Hatcher says the Chamber has also had a significant amount join in 2018. East Montgomery County is also seeing economic growth through the construction projects at the Valley Ranch Town Center. "Last year was successful in spite of many challenges that we had along the way," Hatcher said. Most students at Piney Woods Elementary School in Splendora arrived Friday morning by bus or automobile, but for second-grader Jadyn Thibodeaux, a different kind of horse-power helped her get to school. Sitting atop her quarter-horse Rusty and accompanied by her mother, April Butler, the 7-year-old was decked out in red, white and blue as she made the three-mile trek from Splendora Junior High to the Piney Woods Elementary campus. THE DIRT ON RODEO DIRT: It's actually interesting, we promise With the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo beginning this week, many schools around the area on Friday celebrated Go Texan Day, and Thibodeaux and her family believed the horseback ride to school would be a fitting tribute to the rodeo and what was once an American way of life. "I guess it's a glimpse of a time back in the 1800s when horses weren't a luxury. They were the primary transportation and necessities," her mom said. "Nowadays a lot of kids don't get to be around horses because their parents don't have the property or funding to keep up with a horse. Plus they are a lot of work." On the evening before the ride, Thibodeaux expressed her excitement and couldn't wait to see the reactions of her peers. Mostly she was looking forward to seeing her photo in the newspaper. "I've never been in a newspaper," she said with a giggle. Last year was Thibodeaux's inaugural horseback ride to school, according to her mom, who said that they were peppered with questioned from students about a horse's care and needs. Many just wanted their photos taken with Rusty. The red, white and blue, and American flag theme of Thibodeaux's clothing and horse tack was meant to honor the military, her mom explained. "Her grandfather, father and uncle all served in the military. We love our country and appreciate all the soldiers - past, present and future - and what they do for our country," she said. "I've raised my daughter to respect their commitment to our country." Fiction 1. The Great Alone: By Kristin Hannah. A former prisoner of war returns from Vietnam and moves his family to Alaska, where they face tough conditions. 2. An American Marriage: By Tayari Jones. A newlywed couple's relationship is tested when the husband is sentenced to 12 years in prison. 3. The Woman in the Window: By A.J. Finn. A recluse who drinks heavily and takes prescription drugs may have witnessed a crime across from her Harlem townhouse. 4. Still Me: By Jojo Moyes. Louisa Clark moves to New York and is torn between high society and the life she enjoys at a vintage clothing store. 5. Look for Me: By Lisa Gardner. Sgt. Detective D.D. Warren teams up with a torture survivor to find a missing teenager whose family members were gunned down. 6. Dark in Death: By J.D. Robb. Lt. Eve Dallas must find a killer inspired by police thrillers before another victim is murdered. 7. Little Fires Everywhere: By Celeste Ng. An artist upends a quiet town outside Cleveland. 8. Origin: By Dan Brown. A symbology professor goes on a perilous quest with a beautiful museum director. 9. Before We Were Yours: By Lisa Wingate. A South Carolina lawyer learns about the questionable practices of a Tennessee orphanage. 10. The Rooster Bar: By John Grisham. Three students at a sleazy for-profit law school hope to expose the student-loan banker who runs it. Nonfiction 1. Fire and Fury: By Michael Wolff. A journalist offers an inside account of the first year of the Trump White House. 2. Obama: By Pete Souza. More than 300 pictures of the former president by his White House photographer, with behind-the-scenes stories. 3. All-American Murder: By James Patterson and Alex Abramovich with Mike Harvkey. The story of Aaron Hernandez, the New England Patriots tight end convicted of first-degree murder. 4. Directorate S: By Steve Coll. How the United States failed to understand a secret wing of a Pakistani intelligence agency and doomed two wars. 5. Astrophysics for People in a Hurry: By Neil deGrasse Tyson. A straightforward, easy-to-understand introduction to the universe. 6. Leonardo Da Vinci: By Walter Isaacson. A biography of the Italian Renaissance polymath that connects his work in various disciplines. 7. Killers of the Flower Moon: By David Grann. The story of a murder spree in 1920s Oklahoma that targeted Osage Indians. 8. Everything Happens for a Reason: By Kate Bowler. A divinity-school professor examines her tacit beliefs when she learns she has late-stage colon cancer. 9. The Last Black Unicorn: By Tiffany Haddish. The comedian recounts growing up in South-Central Los Angeles and finding success after a period of homelessness. 10. Promise Me, Dad: By Joe Biden. The former vice president recalls his toughest year in office, as his son battled brain cancer. New York Times In Nevada's high desert is the Navy's premier tactical air warfare training center, home to the Naval Aviation Warfighting Development Center and its Strike Fighter Tactics Instructor program, known to the world as TOPGUN. A 2012 New Caney High School graduate and Porter native is part of the Navy's finest aviation fighter training facility in the world. Petty Officer 2nd Class Joseph Varnado is an air traffic controller working with the NAS Fallon Operations Department stationed aboard Naval Air Station Fallon, Nev. A Navy air traffic controller is responsible for coordinating safe aircraft movements on the ground and in the air. "My dad was a pilot and I've always been interested in aviation," Varnado said. "I always wanted to work in air traffic control, and the Navy was the best option to pursue my passion." TOPGUN Gun began 48 years ago with the determination of nine pilots, the skepticism of the government and almost no budget. In the early years, it turned the tide of a losing air war in Vietnam, revolutionized military doctrine, inspired a Hollywood blockbuster and attracted and trained the best allied pilots and air crew from all over the world. Varnado plays a crucial role in the overall mission that flies over 5,000 adversary sorties per year in support of the Navy and Marine Corp Active and Reserve fleet and replacement squadrons, carrier air wings and marine aircraft groups including the United States Air Force, Air Force Reserve and Air National guard and Canadian Forces. "Nowhere in the world does the Navy have the ability to train as we do in NAS Fallon," said NAS Fallon Commanding Officer Capt. David Halloran. "The Navy specifically chose NAS Fallon as the location for TOPGUN and the Naval Special Warfare Tactical Ground Mobility Training Center because of the desert climate, mountainous terrain, and sophisticated ranges available in northern Nevada. Every Carrier Air Wing and Navy Seal Team is required to receive the essential training provided here prior to being deployed in theater." According to Navy officials, TOPGUN is highly competitive and exposes Navy and Marine Corp pilots to the most demanding training scenarios in fighter aviation lead by some of the most talented pilots in the world. Each pilot is hand-selected for air-to-air and air-to-ground training and subsequently, as a TOPGUN instructor. "I'm the first person in my family to serve in the military," said Varnado, explaining the pride military service brings. "I'm proud to be the tower supervisor here at NAS Fallon." Varnado also said they are proud to serve at the center of excellence for naval aviation, training and tactics development. The future of U.S. aviation depends on the Navy's ability to achieve their vision for defeating tomorrow's air threats with the support of the ground crews and pilots. "The Navy has helped me develop my career while serving my country," Varnado said. HUNTSVILLE - Kent Whitaker was praying when he got the news: The governor had spared his son. In an unexpected last-minute decision, Gov. Greg Abbott granted clemency to the Sugar Land man slated for execution Thursday, just minutes before he was to be strapped to the gurney in Huntsville. Thomas "Bart" Whitaker was sent to death row for targeting his own family in a 2003 murder-for-hire plot aimed at landing a hefty $1 million inheritance. "I'm thankful not for me, but for my dad," Whitaker said upon learning the news, according to a prison spokesman. "Whatever punishment I would have or will receive is just but my dad did nothing wrong. The system worked for him today." The commutation came after years of desperate pleas from the condemned man's father - the only other survivor of the attack - spurred the seven-member Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles to make a rare unanimous push on Tuesday for clemency, sending the final decision to the governor's desk. After two days of weighing the options - life in prison or death - Abbott announced his decision less than an hour before Whitaker was scheduled to die by lethal injection at 6 p.m. It is the first time a Texas governor has commuted a death row prisoner's sentence following a board recommendation since 2007. "In just over three years as Governor, I have allowed 30 executions. I have not granted a commutation of a death sentence until now," Abbott said late Thursday in a statement. "The murders of Mr. Whitaker's mother and brother are reprehensible. The crime deserves severe punishment for the criminals who killed them. The recommendation of the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles, and my action on it, ensures Mr. Whitaker will never be released from prison." In his reasoning, the governor cited father Kent Whitaker's passionate opposition to the execution and the condemned man's willingness to waive all parole claims as factors in his decision. Now, the 38-year-old will spend the rest of his life in prison - and not on death row. "I'm so grateful," Kent Whitaker told reporters outside the death chamber. Hours earlier, he'd already said his goodbyes to his son, who'd been given his last meal and withdrawn his final remaining motion for a stay. "What a fantastic outcome," said Thomas Whitaker's Houston-based defense attorney, James Rytting. "This is confirmation that victims' rights matter in Texas." ANGRY JURORS: 'The only way people are safe is if he is dead,' says juror in Fort Bend death row case But in a statement late Thursday night, Fort Bend County District Attorney John Healey pushed back against that notion. "I have never wavered in my support of the jury's decision," he said. "They heard all the evidence after a tremendous investigation and prosecutorial effort. What they didn't hear, but what I hope the governor heard as it was conveyed to several of his staff members with the expectation that the governor would know it, was that Tricia Whitaker's family was fully in favor of carrying out the execution." The December 2003 killings took place just after celebratory dinner marking Whitaker's supposed graduation from Sam Houston State University - a milestone that never happened. Before the ruse of a dinner, Whitaker had arranged for two friends to wait at the family's Sugar Lakes subdivision home and stage a fake burglary. When the family of four returned from the restaurant, a gunman opened fire as they walked through the door, killing 51-year-old Patricia Whitaker and 19-year-old Kevin. Initially, the case baffled police. But then, authorities learned after reading an article in the Houston Chronicle, one detective later said that Whitaker was no longer enrolled in college. He'd been out on academic probation. As police zeroed in on him as a suspect, Whitaker stole $10,000 from his father and fled to Mexico, where authorities eventually captured him and brought him back to Texas. The pair of slayings came after three years of planning and at least two previous murder plots - a fact that was not lost on the Fort Bend County jury. "We tried to find a way to not kill the guy as a jury," said one former juror, who asked to remain anonymous, citing concerns for her safety. "We tried really hard to follow the law - the law said he needed to be a continuing danger to society and we finally decided that he was because his method of killing was to get other people to kill for him. If he could convince college kids to kill for him, what would prevent him from getting other inmates to do it?" Triggerman Chris Brashear, Whitaker's housemate, pleaded guilty to murder and took a life sentence, while the getaway driver - neighbor Steve Champagne - agreed to a 15-year plea deal. From the outset, Kent Whitaker - who was wounded in the attack - argued against the state's harshest sentence. READ MORE: 'I have seen enough death,' says Sugar Land father fighting execution of son who had rest of family killed "I wrestled with God about my anger and desire for revenge," he said. "It's difficult to explain but he led me to a miracle of forgiveness where I forgave everyone involved with the crime long before I realized it was my son." Nonetheless, Whitaker was sentenced to death. In the years that followed, his father led the fight against death, speaking out passionately about his son's case, penning a book on it and forming the centerpiece of the clemency petition that moved the notoriously tough seven-member Texas parole board. "There is only one person on Earth who is intimate with the murderous attack, the lives and deaths of the other victims, and the life of Thomas Whitaker - Mr. Whitaker's father, Kent. Kent was there," the condemned man's attorneys wrote in their clemency petition. "For the rest of us, the case against commutation to a life sentence seems clear. We can't forgive; we have no sympathy. But clemency is not about something so simple as sympathy or as formidable as forgiveness." Full of graphic descriptions of the crime and Old Testament references, the petition was bolstered by a few dozen letters from friends, family, fellow death row inmates and even prison guards. It was a long shot, but on Tuesday the board sided with Whitaker. "This is beyond amazing," his father said tearfully at the time. "I can't tell you." But to the former juror, the board's vote - and the governor's decision - felt like a betrayal. "I really think Bart Whitaker is a master manipulator and I think he manipulated the parole board," she said. "He got his way with them the same way he did with the people he convinced to kill for him." Marshall Slot, the former Sugar Land detective who probed the case 15 years ago, said it made him "sick." "There's no definitive definition of a sociopath," he said. "It's someone who uses people as pieces in a game. And that's what Bart is." The last time a Texas governor agreed to commute a death row inmate's sentence to life in prison following a board recommendation was in 2007, when Texas Gov. Rick Perry spared Kenneth Foster's life. It had only happened three times before that. A Dallas woman is facing felony charges after police say she destroyed at least $300,000 worth of sculptures and original paintings - including two original Andy Warhol works - at the River Oaks home of well-known Houston trial lawyer Anthony Buzbee. Lindy Lou Layman, 29, was charged Saturday with felony criminal mischief in the incident, Houston police said in court documents. Police allege that Layman threw two abstract sculptures and destroyed three original paintings at Buzbee's mansion. She was released on $30,000 bond. In court, prosecutors said Layman was on a first date with Buzbee, according to KHOU-TV. Buzbee told police he called Layman an Uber after she became intoxicated, the news station reported, after which she refused to leave and hid inside the home. The suspect allegedly tore down two original Andy Warhol paintings each worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, the news station reported. Police said she also poured some sort of liquid on some of the paintings. Layman's LinkedIn profile says she has worked as a freelance court reporter. Buzbee is a high-profile attorney who successfully defended former Texas Gov. Rick Perry in an abuse-of-power case. He hosted a fundraiser at his multimillion-dollar home in June 2016 for then-presidential candidate Donald Trump, though he later said he was "completely" done with Trump's candidacy after a 2005 video of Trump bragging about groping woman surfaced that fall. Buzbee said in October 2016 that he planned to write in veteran Dan Moran on his ballot. Buzbee later donated $500,000 to Trump's inauguration committee, Law.com reported in April. He also raised more than $100,000 for Houston mayoral candidate Adrian Garcia during a fundraiser at the home in 2014. Buzbee's landmark victory came in 2009, when he won $100 million for Texas City residents affected by toxic discharge from the local BP plant. It was heralded as the largest verdict ever against the oil giant, winning Buzbee much acclaim. A federal judge cut the award by $99 million months later. His home, which was listed for $14 million before he bought it, "includes five wood-burning fireplaces, a 17th Century French mantle, limestone floors, mahogany ceiling beams and a slate roof that was cut in Spain." It set a record for a single-family home sale when Buzbee purchased it in 2013. Buzbee said he paid cash for the house but was reluctant to disclose the final sales price. "I'm all about setting records, but I'm not sure this is one I should be proud of or not," he told the Houston Chronicle at the time. "All I'll say is the owner wasn't budging that much." Last year, outgoing Harris County District Attorney Devon Anderson personally dismissed a drunken-driving case against Buzbee, who was arrested in March 2016 for misdemeanor driving while intoxicated. Robert Downen is a metro crime reporter at the Houston Chronicle. Send him news tips at robert.downen@chron.com or follow him on Twitter. Notorious Texas serial killer, Henry Lee Lucas, confessed to killing up to 3,000 people but was only convicted of 11 homicides. Among the 11 convicted deaths was that of an unidentified girl between the ages of 13 - 17, allegedly from Durham, North Carolina. ANOTHER CASE: Houston's 'Tourniquet Killer' put to death in first execution of 2018 Known only as "Cheryl," police in Grimes County, Texas have spent decades trying to identify the young teen, hoping to someday bring closure to her family. Officials have yet to give up on her case and shared a post on their Facebook on Wednesday, Feb 21, 2018, asking people in Durham for help identifying the girl. According to the post, Lucas confessed to Cheryl's murder in 1984. He led investigators to the place where the body was found and was able to give details only the killer would know. "Lucas told Investigators that he picked this teenager up near Durham, North Carolina around Spring 1981 and knew her only as 'Cheryl'," said the post. "After a few months of her traveling with him, Lucas stated that he and Ottis Toole allegedly murdered her and afterward placing her body in a trash bag and threw it in a ditch along FM 244." The teen is believed to have been Caucasian or Hispanic with auburn colored hair (which is under analysis to see if it was dyed or natural) and measured between 5 feet 1 inches and 5 feet 3 inches. She was also wearing a 1904 gold St. Gauden's coin made into a ring that was sold in teen magazines in the 70s and 80s. Police are asking that anyone who had a family member who was murdered, went missing, or was never found between 1976 and 1981 to please contact Lt. Daniel Wagnon at the Grimes County Sheriff's Office, phone number (936) 873-2151, or to email him at daniel.wagnon@grimescountyso.org. Daniela Sternitzky-Di Napoli is a digital producer at Chron.com. You can read more of her stories here and follow her on twitter at @Dani_DiNapoli. Pearland police investigate school threats As threats of violence on campus appeared to increase following last week's shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida, Pearland officers responded to several incidents involving students. THREATS, HARASSMENT Police filed a terroristic threat report Feb. 12 in the 2800 block of Tranquility Lakes Boulevard. A student reported harassment Feb. 12 on a Pearland Independent School District campus in the 2000 block of Cullen Parkway, police said. A male subject made conditional threats to a complainant Feb. 12 in the 5100 block of Spring Branch Drive, police said. A known offender posted intimate visual material on the internet without the complainant's permission, according to a police report filed Feb. 13 in the 3400 block of Curley Maple Drive. An unknown offender threatened a victim while on a school field trip Feb. 9, according to a police report filed Feb. 14 in the 3100 block of Manvel Road. Assault by threat was reported Feb. 15 in the 4600 block of Broadway Street, police said. A student made a threatening comment to another student Feb. 15 or Feb. 16 in the 2300 block of Old Alvin Road, police said. A terroristic threat was reported Feb. 16 in the 11200 block of Broadway Street, police said. A female attempted to make unwanted contact with another female Feb. 16 in the 12400 block of Shadow Creek Parkway, police said. Harassment via telephone was reported Feb. 16 in the 3300 block of Claymill Lane, police said. Police arrested a Houston man, 33, for violation of a protective order Feb. 16 in the 11400 block of Shadow Creek Parkway. ASSAULT A disabled male victim was assaulted and injured Feb. 12 in the 9700 block of Camelots Court, police said. Police charged a Pearland man, 34, with injury to an elderly individual and retaliation on a public servant Feb. 12 in the 1300 block of Broadway Street. Police filed an assault, family violence report Feb. 13 in the 5200 block of Playa Drive. An assault report was completed Feb. 14 in the 2700 block of Sunnyside Lane, police said. Assault, family violence was reported Feb. 14 in the 3100 block of Southern Lane, police said. Assault was reported Feb. 15 in the 1800 block of Main Street, police said. Assault, family violence occurred Feb. 15 in the 2300 block of Cunningham Drive, police said. A male victim reportedly was assaulted by his spouse Feb. 15 in the 2900 block of Emerald Brook Lane, police said. Police filed a report of injury to an elderly person Feb. 16 in the 12000 block of Shadow Creek Parkway. Assault was reported Feb. 16 in the 3200 block of Hamm Road, police said. Police arrested a Pearland woman, 28, for assault Feb. 16 in the 6600 block of Fite Road. A 52-year-old Pearland woman was taken into custody for assault, family violence Feb. 16 in the 1800 block of Oak Lodge Drive, police said. Assault and criminal mischief were reported Feb. 16 in the 1200 block of North Riviera Circle, police said. Police filed an assault, family violence report Feb. 17 in the 1900 block of Country Place Parkway. Family violence was reported Feb. 17 in the 2000 block of North Galveston Avenue, police said. Police filed an assault, family violence report Feb. 18 in the 9000 block of Sun King Drive. A husband and wife reportedly got into an argument that became physical Feb. 18 in the 13100 block of Southern Way Lane, police said. Police filed an assault, family violence report Feb. 18 in the 3000 block of Business Center Drive. THEFT An unknown suspect took an envelope containing money between Feb. 10 and Feb. 12 from a business in the 3800 block Harkey Road, police said. Police filed a theft report Feb. 13 in the 4100 block of Bailey Road. Police took a Houston man, 30, into custody for shoplifting Feb. 13 at Walmart, 1919 Main St. Police filed a theft report Feb. 13 in the 2000 block of Green Tee Drive. A victim's handgun was stolen between Aug. 14, 2017, and Feb. 14 from his residence in the 2200 block of Delta Bridge Court, according to a Feb. 14 police report. A Houston woman, 49, was arrested for shoplifting Feb. 14 in the 1900 block of Main Street, police said. Police arrested two 17-year-old Pearland men for shoplifting Feb. 14 in the 1900 block of Main Street, police said. An Alvin man, 24, was taken into custody for shoplifting Feb. 15 in the 1900 block of Main Street, police said. Police cited and released a Houston woman, 21, for shoplifting lingerie Feb. 15 in the 11200 block of Broadway Street. A cell phone, debit card and $1,000 cash were stolen Feb. 14 or Feb. 15 from a residence in the 2300 block of Cedar Street, police said. Police investigated the theft of motor vehicle parts Feb. 16 in the 3400 block of Lockheed Street. An unidentified male stole a tip jar Feb. 16 at a restaurant in the 3600 block of Broadway Street, police said. Police arrested a Houston man, 26, for shoplifting Feb. 17 in the 2500 block of Pearland Parkway. Theft occurred Feb. 9 or Feb. 10, according to a police report filed Feb. 17 in the 2900 block of Oak Road. A theft investigation took place Feb. 17 in the 1900 block of Main Street, police said. A Webster man, 18, was taken into custody for shoplifting and evading arrest Feb. 17 in the 1900 block of Main Street, police said. A female suspect stole items from a store Feb. 18 in the 1700 block of Broadway Street, police said. A female suspect stole from a business between Jan. 18 and Feb. 7 in the 1900 block of Main Street, according to a police report filed Feb. 18. Internal theft occurred between Jan. 26 and Feb. 7 at Walmart, 1919 Main St., police said. BURGLARY Vehicle burglary occurred Feb. 12 in the 11100 block of Broadway Street, police said. Vehicle burglary was reported Feb. 12 in the 2800 block of Business Center Drive, police said. Vehicle burglary and credit card abuse were reported Feb. 15 in the 6700 block of Fite Road, police said. Unknown male suspects burglarized a vehicle Feb. 16 in the 2000 block of Creekside Park Drive, police said. FRAUD, FORGERY Credit or debit card abuse occurred Feb. 7 and Feb. 8, according to a police report filed Feb. 12 in the 3400 block of East Orange Street. Money was withdrawn from a complainant's bank account without authorization between Dec. 26, 2017, and Jan. 26, according to a police report filed Feb. 14 in the 1100 block of Union Valley Drive. Police filed a report of online impersonation after a forgery attempt Feb. 15 in the 4200 block of Broadway Street. Police investigated a credit card abuse report Feb. 15 in the 5800 block of Village Grove Drive. Police filed a forgery report Feb. 16 in the 1500 block of Hatfield Road. A complainant's debit card was used without authorization Feb. 15, according to a police report filed Feb. 16 in the 1000 block of East Belgravia Drive. A complainant reported an unknown offender used her identity to send a mass email as part of a phishing scam Feb. 16 in the 4200 block of Broadway Street, police said. Police filed an identity theft report Feb. 18 in the 2500 block of Cullen Parkway. A Houston man, 39, was arrested for forgery after a traffic stop Feb. 18 in the 2500 block of Main Street, police said. NARCOTICS Police arrested a Houston man, 21, for marijuana possession Feb. 12 in the 8300 block of Broadway Street. A Missouri City man, 35, was taken into custody for possession of a controlled substance and unlawful possession of a firearm Feb. 13 in the 1900 block of Main Street, police said. A Pearland woman, 22, was arrested for marijuana possession after a traffic stop Feb. 13 in the 9800 block of Summer Breeze Drive, police said. Police arrested a Baytown man, 47, for marijuana possession Feb. 13 in the 2100 block of Main Street. Police arrested a Pearland man, 24, for possession of a controlled substance and unauthorized use of a vehicle Feb. 14 in the 1500 block of Broadway Street. A Houston man, 21, was taken into custody for possession of a controlled substance and marijuana as well as unlawful carrying of a weapon Feb. 14 in the 3000 block of Business Center Drive, police said. A Houston man, 28, was arrested for marijuana possession Feb. 14 in the 11200 block of Broadway Street, police said. Police took a Houston man, 23, into custody for possession of a controlled substance and marijuana Feb. 14 in the 1800 block of Main Street. Police arrested a Houston man, 33, for marijuana possession Feb. 15 in the 2500 block of Elm Hollow Street. Police arrested an Alvin woman, 47, for no driver's license and possession of drug paraphernalia Feb. 15 in the 1900 block of Main Street. Police arrested a Houston man, 25, for possession of a false drug test kit Feb. 16 in the 11400 block of Broadway Street. A 28-year-old Pearland man was arrested for possession of a controlled substance and drug paraphernalia Feb. 16 in the 12700 block of Shadow Creek Parkway, police said. A Pearland man, 31, was taken into custody for possession of a controlled substance, driving while license invalid and an active warrant Feb. 18 in the 2500 block of Pearland Parkway, police said. WEAPONS Police arrested a 17-year-old Manvel man for tampering with identification numbers and unlawful carrying of a weapon Feb. 13 in the 14200 block of Texas 288. Police arrested a Fredericksburg man, 67, for unlawful carrying of a weapon and DWI Feb. 16 in the 6600 block of Broadway Street. A Pearland man, 29, was arrested for unlawful possession of a firearm by a felon Feb. 18 in the 3000 block of Broadway Street, police said. CRIMINAL MISCHIEF A home and vehicle were spray painted Feb. 12 or Feb. 13 in the 5900 block of Wilton Street, police said. Police filed two criminal mischief reports Feb. 15 in the 2300 block of Trenton Hollow Ct. Possible criminal mischief was reported Feb. 16 in the 9800 block of Fair Brook Way, police said. LOST PROPERTY A handgun was lost between Sept. 17, 2017, and Jan. 17, according to a police report filed Feb. 13 in the 9300 block of West Sterling Drive. UNLAWFUL RESTRAINT Police arrested a male suspect for unlawful restraint Feb. 13 in the 9800 block of Broadway Street. ANIMAL CONTROL A male subject discharged a firearm at a loose dog Feb. 13 in the 7500 block of River Pass Drive, police said. DRIVING WHILE INTOXICATED A 19-year-old Pearland man was arrested for DWI after an accident involving injury Feb. 15 in the 2900 block of Pearland Parkway, police said. A Houston woman, 25, was taken into custody for DWI Feb. 17 in the 15200 block of Texas 288, police said. Police arrested a Houston man, 35, for DWI Feb. 17 in the 17500 block of Texas 288. A Spring man, 31, was arrested for DWI Feb. 18 in the 2800 block of Oak Road, police said. Police arrested a Houston man, 62, for DWI Feb. 18 in the 1000 block of Lambeth Drive. A Texas City woman, 32, was taken into custody for DWI Feb. 18 in the 7100 block of Heron Lane, police said. PUBLIC INTOXICATION A 22-year-old Pasadena man was taken into custody for public intoxication Feb. 14 in the 12600 block of Floral Park Lane, police said. TRAFFIC A Houston man, 57, was arrested for driving while license invalid Feb. 16 in the 10300 block of Broadway Street, police said. Police arrested a Pearland man, 62, for driving while license invalid Feb. 16 in the 10600 block of McHard Road. A 57-year-old Pearland man also received a citation for an open container. ROBBERY Unknown male suspects robbed a male victim Feb. 16 in the 6500 block of Broadway Street, police said. LITTERING Two subjects were observed dumping trash Feb. 17 in the 4200 block of Wells Drive, police said. FAILURE TO IDENTIFY Police took a Houston man, 36, into custody for failure to identify as a fugitive Feb. 18 in the 3500 block of Sheldon Drive. Thousands of high and middle school students across the country have walked-out of their classes to demonstrate for stricter gun laws after 17 people were shot and killed at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. Feb. 14. Some school administrators welcomed the protests, as long as students didn't leave school property and demonstrated during lunch. Others, such as Needville ISD's superintendent, threatened to suspend any student who walked out or otherwise protested. Balancing students' rights to free speech with the need to keep schools functioning has been addressed through various court cases, most notably in 1969 with the Supreme Court's Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District decision. That decision, and others following it, specified what types of student protests are protected and which can result in punishment. Here are answers to some common questions about student protests: Is it legal for schools to punish students who protest? Yes, if the protest is found to "materially and substantially disrupt the work and discipline of the school." The Supreme Court ruled in 1969 that public schools are an appropriate place to exercise symbolic speech. Schools can't punish students for actions such as wearing a shirt with a political message, or wearing a black armband to symbolize opposition to war as was the case in Tinker. School administrators can punish students for any protest action that disrupts classwork, involves "substantial disorder" or invades the rights of others. Other types of speech including slander, libel or speech that incites violence also are not protected. "I think certainly no one would argue walking out of class while school is in session is disruptive and will not be legally protected," said Mike Hiestand, senior legal consultant to the Student Press Law Center. "If they're going to take the stand, they need to be prepared to take responsibility for it." How can school districts punish students who disrupt school by protesting or walking out? Most districts detail how students would be punished for disrupting school or taking an unexcused absence in their student codes of conduct. Spring ISD, for example, punishes students with in-school suspension for disrupting class, and Spokeswoman Karen Garrison said that would be the same punishment given to students who disrupt class to protest. Hiestand, however, said schools cannot tack on additional punishments because a student is protesting. For example, if a school district typically punishes students who disrupted class with three days of in-school suspension, it would be illegal for that district to punish a student who disrupts class to protest with three days of out-of-school suspension. "To go beyond (the regular punishment) and say this particular speech is going to get you extra penalties, that's a real problem. That's illegal," Hiestand said. "You can't allow extra penalties because of the speech involved." Is one type of student speech more protected than others? Political messages are more protected than regular speech, as clarified in a 2007 Supreme Court decision in the Morse vs. Frederick case. A student was suspended for 10 days after holding up a banner that read "bong hits for Jesus" at a school event. Justices ultimately ruled against the student, but Justice Samuel Alito wrote in the majority opinion that the students' speech would have been protected if it had been more political. "Had the student said 'legalize pot now' instead of 'bong hits for Jesus,' had it been a political message, then he would have been entitled to greater First Amendment protection, not less," Hiestand said. Why are high school students protesting now, anyway? Thousands of students throughout the country have walked out of their classes at least once since 17 people were shot and killed at the Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida on Feb. 14. Most of those protesting are pushing for stricter gun laws, although their specific demands regarding gun control are not clear. More than 300 students walked out of Austin High School in Houston ISD on Feb. 14, before the Parkland shooting, to protest the immigration detention of a classmate who was arrested after allegedly assaulting a female student. The KIPP charter school network fired co-founder Mike Feinberg on Thursday following three allegations of sexual misconduct, ending its association with a Houston pillar who helped build KIPP into a national powerhouse and become one of the charter school movement's most visible advocates. KIPP leaders said an independent investigation found "credible evidence" that Feinberg sexually abused an underage female student in the late 1990s and offered two former employees money in exchange for a sexual relationship. Feinberg denied the allegations, and investigators hired by KIPP couldn't definitively substantiate them. Nevertheless, KIPP's local and national governing boards decided to remove Feinberg, 24 years after the charter network started in Houston. Prior to his firing, Feinberg supported KIPP schools across the country, helped grow the network nationally and maintained a seat on the KIPP Houston governing board. "In light of the nature of the allegations and the passage of time, critical facts about these events may never be conclusively determined," KIPP leaders wrote in a letter posted Thursday. "What is clear, however, is that, at a minimum, Mr. Feinberg put himself into situations where his conduct could be seriously misconstrued." INSPIRING: KIPP leaders help global partners adopt its model Feinberg's lawyer, Chris Tritico, said his client was not fully informed of the allegations or given an adequate opportunity to respond. More for you Police, school districts see increase in threats after Florida... "Mike Feinberg's contributions to education in the Houston area and the United States are significant, and they will continue for a very long time," Tritico said. "The treatment he received today from the board that he put in place is wrong, and it's not what someone who has made the contributions he's made deserves." In a statement Friday morning, Feinberg said he was "disappointed by the allegations" and the decision to fire him. "I do not condone, nor have I ever condoned, or engaged in, misconduct of this kind," Feinberg said in the statement. "These allegations were thoroughly investigated by non-biased third parties who found no wrongdoing, and the action of the KIPP Board is very disheartening." OPTIONS: Houston parents have many school choices. That can be tricky. A former teacher, Feinberg co-founded KIPP, which stands for Knowledge Is Power Program, in 1994 and helped build the organization into a nationally respected leader in education. KIPP today has 209 schools nationally serving about 90,000 students, including 30 campuses in Houston with roughly 14,000 students. Along the way, Feinberg served as one of KIPP's leading public figures, a high-energy advocate for the charter network. Parents were drawn by its strong academic results in high-poverty neighborhoods. Feinberg earned $231,885 from the Houston network and $220,241 from the national KIPP Foundation, in compensation and benefits, according to 2015-2016 tax filings. "Mike Feinberg has been deeply involved in the public charter school movement in Texas and nationally since its earliest days," Seth Winick, a spokesman for the Texas Charter Schools Association, said in a statement. "The board of the school and foundation have taken action, and we respect their decision. We are saddened by this news for all involved." Read the letter KIPP sent to employees about Feinberg's firing. Allegations and response Feinberg has been under investigation by KIPP and its legal partners since spring 2017, when a current KIPP student told school officials that Feinberg sexually abused a family member who attended KIPP Academy in the late 1990s. Feinberg served as the school's leader at the time. KIPP officials declined to elaborate on the nature of the allegations, other than to note the girl was a minor at the time of the alleged abuse. The letter indicates that KIPP leaders contacted Texas Child Protective Services and began their own investigation using an external law firm. During the review, investigators spoke with a former employee who alleged that Feinberg offered her financial support for continuing her education in exchange for a sexual relationship in the early 2000s, KIPP leaders said. Investigators also learned of a similar allegation about the same time involving a second former employee, but the employee declined to cooperate with investigators, KIPP leaders said. KIPP officials said investigators found the allegation involving a minor had "credibility," though they declined to elaborate on evidence corroborating the determination. The two harassment allegations were also deemed credible, KIPP leaders said. Investigators said they located a financial settlement involving the former employee who cooperated with the review. KIPP officials said the settlement did not stem from litigation, while Tritico said he believed the settlement came after the accuser filed a lawsuit. Tritico said Feinberg opposed the settlement and intended to take the case to trial, but "an insurance company settled the case over Mike's objections." Tritico did not know whether the insurance company represented KIPP or another organization. Tritico said it's too early to know whether Feinberg will take legal action against KIPP. He accused the organization and its legal partners of notifying Feinberg of the allegations "at the 11th hour." "There wasn't any of the rudiments that you would expect of due process and notice and fairness, quite frankly," Tritico said. "He wasn't ever given the ability or the chance to defend himself with respect to these allegations." KIPP officials said Feinberg was allowed to remain on the job throughout the investigation, which spanned nearly a year. He was directed not to be alone with students, and top executives in Houston and KIPP's national organization were aware of the investigation, KIPP officials said. Feinberg continued to attend events where children were present, including the unveiling of a sponsorship agreement at a Houston campus in December. KIPP leaders have encouraged anyone with knowledge of additional allegations to come forward and contact the Washington, D.C.-based law firm WilmerHale. A new vision Feinberg and his roommate, fellow Teach For America alumnus Dave Levin, opened KIPP's first school when they were in their mid-20s, educating about 50 students inside a Houston ISD campus on the city's west side. "This kind of program is where I want to be as a teacher," Feinberg told the Chronicle in 1994. "If the results are good, then we continue, but if not, then it's back to the drawing board. We're just one example of the things Houston Teach For America teachers are trying." Levin left the school after one year, choosing to open another KIPP campus in New York City. Feinberg stayed behind, continuing as the leader of the flagship school. He instituted longer school days, required parental involvement and instilled a no-excuses attitude. The approach worked, and as word spread of KIPP, Feinberg planned expansion across Houston. Unlike some charter school networks, KIPP grew methodically, gradually growing to about 30 campuses. It now boasts schools in 20-plus states and the District of Columbia. In an interview Thursday evening, KIPP Houston Superintendent Sehba Ali said the schools will continue their work. "It's important to note KIPP is bigger than one person," she said. "We have a promise that we've made to our kids to do everything we can to help them get to and through college and to lead successful lives, and we are fully focused on that." The People's New Black Panther Party in Houston is splitting from local community activist Quanell X amid ongoing allegations that he has not delivered services to families he was paid to represent. Standing in the drizzling rain Thursday, three members of The People's New Black Panther Party said they are helping individuals recover money from Quanell and want to disassociate him from their organization. The group has launched an investigation into the activist's advocacy practices, they said. "This has been going on for over a decade in the community ... and we will not stand for it any longer," said Yahcanon Ben Yah, the party's national chairman. "He has been in this situation before and what we want to do now is come out and let the people know that we do not condone his actions. He is not a part of us. He is not our leader." Quanell did not respond to a request for comment. For more than a decade, Quanell has been a fiery advocate for victims of police brutality, murder, wrongful termination and other issues. He assists individuals and families in securing media attention for their cases and negotiates with law enforcement. He routinely garners a strong response when he calls news conferences and has been a regular contributor to a lively opinion showdown segment on FOX 26. Read more: Quanell X marks his spot: Fiery voice takes on power, politics, police Notably absent in Thursday's news conference was the longtime reference to Quanell as "minister" he was referred to as "Mr." instead. The three party members, dressed in black, were joined by a former member of Quanell's security detail and a half-dozen others. In October 2016, people from Houston and Beaumont gathered at a rally outside the Harris County Criminal Courthouse to demand Quanell repay them and apologize. The Black Panther group held the news conference outside the Museum District law office of Ben Hall, a former city attorney and mayoral candidate who party members accused of being an enabler of Quanell. In a text message, Hall said that more than a decade has passed since he represented Quanell in a First Amendment lawsuit involving police. He said he did not have "a clue why anyone would be at my office relating to anything else." Read more: Alleged 'victims of Quanell X' rally in Houston Ben Yah said at least two people have gained refunds from Quanell through pressure and a legal action. They said they plan to continue to work for redress. "We're not going to stop until every victim has recovered their money," Ben Yah said. "We don't want to support brothers who are giving a bad name to this community or calling themselves activists and turning around hurting the community they should be supporting." A woman remains at large after police charged her for the Thursday night fatal shooting of a 59-year-old man in his southwest Houston apartment, according to a Houston Police Department press release. Travaee Unique Bradley, 28, is charged with the murder of the unidentified man. Police found the man dead with multiple gunshot wounds inside his apartment in the 12100 block of Fondren Road. His identity has not been disclosed pending notification to family members. Bradley is an acquaintance of the victim. Police were responding to a call about a shooting at the apartment complex, according to the press release. There was no sign of forced entry, HPD Homicide Detective E.P. Aguilera said. Anyone with information on Bradley's whereabouts is asked to contact the HPD Homicide Division at 713-308-3600 or Crime Stopper at 713-222-TIPS. In March 1952 more than 100,000 troops descended on Lampasas, Texas to restore order to the small town west of Fort Hood. For two months after the paratroopers jump out of the Texas sky, America's fighting men worked to retake the Texas town from a communist threat. TEXAS TO THE RESCUE: How Texas reacted to and benefited from World War II The military training exercise, dubbed Operation Longhorn, was the Operation Jade Helm of the 1950s, without all the sticky conspiracy theories. Lone Star soil was used to train U.S. Army and Air Force troops on what to do if those feared communists overtook a town and declared martial law, according to the Lampasas Dispatch Record. It is one of the most quirky, and obscure tales in modern Texas history. At the time, Operation Longhorn was one of the biggest military maneuvers undertaken since the end of World War II, with exercises costing $3.3 million. An aggressor force called the People's Republic, headed up by troops from the 82nd Airborne at Fort Bragg, went up against several Army divisions from nearby Fort Hood. A fake newspaper was even published all about the invasion, along with a radio broadcast. Don't worry, everyone was in on the plan. HONOR THEM: The real meaning behind Memorial Day and its customs City officials were "arrested" and churches were shut down to simulate the invasion. A list of rules was distributed, detailing dos and don'ts for locals. Even propaganda leaflets rained from the sky at one point, urging locals to resist and to evoke the memory of the Alamo and Goliad. Thankfully they didn't or else things could have gotten out of hand. Some derisively called it a "cold war pageant" for the fear-mongering involved. A recent Texas Standard episode shared some of the radio and film reels released during the operation. Although the invasion was fake, there were very real casualties. According to the Temple Daily Telegram, one paratrooper died during an April 8, 1952 jump, with another 221 injured after high winds proved to be problematic. An Air Force pilot died in the operation when his F-51 fighter collided with another plane. LIVING ON $4 A WEEK: The story of a Texas 'Tarzan' who lived in a tree to save money after WWII Lampasas city fathers and angry ranchers refused to have another Longhorn-type event in their city. Troops had damaged some of their fields and were frankly annoying, according to reports. You don't scare a Texas man's turkeys to death and expect him to take it lying down. The next maneuver happened in Louisiana, far away from Lampasas. "Farmers and ranchers who bore the burden of the maneuver have gotten little enjoyment out of the whole thing because of worry over damage to fences, and misplaced livestock, and many have said, after hearing plans for another maneuver next year, that they would refuse to sign easements for their land to be used for maneuvers again," the local paper wrote after the fact. Police in Amarillo shot an innocent man who helped foil a possible church shooting. The shooting happened shortly after 9 a.m. Feb. 14 at the Faith City Mission, a faith-based outreach organization. Police said Joshua Len Jones, 35, of Amarillo, barged into a church building at Faith City Mission, pulled out a gun and was holding about 100 congregants and church staff hostage. In the time between when police were dispatched and when officers arrived, a handful of churchgoers wrestled Jones to the ground. One of the congregants was able to grab Jones' gun. DEPUTY INJURED: Harris County sheriff's deputy hospitalized after crash Officers entered the building and saw the churchgoer holding the gun and opened fire, according to the Amarillo Police Department. The churchgoer was hospitalized in stable condition. The victim, who spoke to ABC 7 Amarillo, has since been released and told the station he would do it all over again despite being shot by police. "There were other people there," Tony Garces said. "I just took the gun away from him. I got shot. I got the bad part. It's life." Jones was booked into jail on six first-degree felony charges of aggravated kidnapping. He's being held on $1.2 million worth of bonds, according to jail records. No one else, including Jones, was injured. The Amarillo shooting happened on the same day 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz opened fire on a Florida high school, killing 17 people. Jay R. Jordan is a breaking news reporter at Chron.com. Follow him on Twitter at @JayRJordan. This week Texans all over the world commemorate the Battle of San Jacinto, which occurred on April 21, 1836 near present-day Deer Park. Thousands of miles from where General Sam Houston accepted the surrender of Mexican General Santa Ana after a one-sided firefight between their two forces, there is a unique piece of history from the states early days as an independent country. HIDDEN HISTORY: See the last remaining international boundary marker for the Republic of Texas In London, England at 4 St Jamess Street sits the building which at one time served as the site of the Embassy of Texas. From 1842 until 1845, when Texas became a state, this spot near St James's Palace was where the Republic of Texas did business in England. Texas President Sam Houston sent Dr. Ashbel Smith, the republics secretary of state, to begin working on Texas international relationships as a sovereign country. (Technically its known as a legation, which is smaller than an embassy.) As Atlas Obscuras Luke Spencer notes, an embassy in Paris was also established later in 1842. There was also one in Washington, D.C. Spencer shared his photos of the London location with Chron.com this week. You can check out his piece on this small slice of Texas at the Atlas Obscura website. Texas British embassy was located above a wine shop, Berry Brothers & Rudd, which we hope was expert tactical planning on the part of the Texans. The wine shop owners were also the team behind Cutty Sark Scotch. This was a cushy job for Ambassador Smith, who was a tight friend and onetime roommate of Houston. Smith is known as the "father of Texas medicine" and the "father of the University of Texas" among many other things. FAR EAST TEXAS: What does a Texas-themed bar look like in Tokyo? Once Texas became a state in 1845 the site was abandoned, leaving a rent bill of 160 British pounds. A small gold plaque installed in 1963 down an adjacent alleyway marks the spot where the infant countrys overseas HQ once stood. Texas Legation in this building was the legation for the ministers from the Republic of Texas to the Court of St. James 1842 1845 reads the plaque. Physically its rather small, so locals might have been missing it all these years. In 1986 a group of Texans came by to settle the outstanding debt with the wine shop, after all those years. It was only right that the Texans settled up during the states sesquicentennial. A preteen in Iowa is facing a felony charge for allegedly threatening to shoot up a middle school Thursday. Police in Council Bluffs, Iowa which is just across the Mississippi River from Omaha, Nebraska said a female student, 12, was charged with Class D felony threat of terrorism, which carries a possible one-year sentence upon conviction. A Class D felony in Iowa is the lowest level felony, akin to a state-jail felony in the state of Texas. Police received word of a threat toward Kirn Middle School before school started Thursday. A student at the school saw messages on Snapchat allegedly posted by the 12-year-old girl alluding to firearms and bringing harm to students at the school. School authorities quickly notified the Council Bluffs Police Department, who worked together to identify the girl and arrest her. Police determined the threat to be a hoax and found the girl did not have any access to firearms. Jay R. Jordan is a breaking news reporter at Chron.com. Follow him on Twitter at @JayRJordan. NASA scientists are scouring astronomical data for a large planet at the edges of our solar system -- and they want your help. The effort, called Backyard Worlds: Planet Nine, is a citizen science project that asks space enthusiasts to help the agency spot objects in the area around our solar system. Backyard Worlds was launched in February 2016, but its origin began years earlier, according to NASA's tumblr. In 2009, the agency launched the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission, which scanned the skies for infrared light in search of galaxies, asteroids and stars. But the search turned up too much data for researchers to plow through on their own. RELATED STORY: Good news: Civilization less likely to end from an asteroid collision. So, they asked for help. Since the project began, citizens have spotted 432 candidates for brown dwarfs, which are balls of gas too small to be stars but too big to be planets. Of the 20 NASA researchers have followed up on, 17 proved to be real, the agency's tumblr stated. These discoveries are exciting, but NASA is looking for something even greater: the mysterious Planet 9 that some scientists believe is circling past Pluto. California Institute of Technology researchers in 2015 found mathematical evidence suggesting the planet might exist. They believe this as yet undiscovered planet is about the size of Neptune and takes between 10,000 and 20,000 Earth years to make one full orbit around the sun, according to NASA. RELATED STORY: NASA discovers eighth planet in faraway system. But no one has spotted the hypothetical planet yet, the tumblr post stated. "So come join the search, and you might find a rogue world that's nearer to the Sun than Proxima Centauri -- or even the elusive Planet Nine," the Backyard Worlds' website stated. In the two years the project has been operational, more than 45,000 citizen volunteers have participated. To take a crack at spotting the planet, visit the project's website here. Alex Stuckey covers NASA and the environment for the Houston Chronicle. You can reach her at alex.stuckey@chron.com or Twitter.com/alexdstuckey. AUSTIN -- The state Senate's Democratic Caucus late Thursday demanded the resignation of Sen. Carlos Uresti, a fellow Democrat who just hours earlier was convicted of criminal fraud charges in a San Antonio federal court. The San Antonio lawmaker had been indicted by a federal grand jury last year on 11 felony charges in connection with his role at now-defunct oilfield company FourWinds Logistics. He became the first state senator to be convicted of a crime in many years, a judgment that drew immediate private calls for his resignation from other senators and House members. "In light of today's jury conviction of Sen. Carlos Uresti, the Texas Senate Democratic Caucus is calling upon Sen. Uresti to resign his position," Caucus Chairman Jose Rodriguez, D-El Paso, announced in a statement. Earlier in the day, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick stripped Uresti of all his Senate committee assignments -- including his prestigious spot on the budget-writing Finance Committee and his post as vice chairman of the Health and Human Services Committee. Uresti also served on the Education Committee, the Veterans Affairs and Border Security Committee, the Senate Select Committee on Government Reform and the Select Committee on Property Tax Reform. Patrick's action was effective immediately, Senate officials said. "As lieutenant governor, I do not have the authority to remove Sen. Uresti from the Texas Senate, but I have notified his office that he will be relieved of his committee assignments, effective immediately," Patrick said. "I will replace him in those positions shortly so that the work of these committees can continue to move forward." Patrick said he took the unusual step, even as Uresti announced he will appeal his conviction, to keep the Senate focused on "the critical issues facing our state as we prepare for the next legislative session." Uresti was convicted on 11 federal counts of money laundering and wire and securities fraud, and is facing a potentially long prison term. His sentencing is set for June 25. 2017: Uresti lists 171 potential witnesses for fraud trial, including political figures Uresti is not up for re-election until 2020. AUSTIN -- The state will "effective immediately" begin making it easier for disabled Texans who receive job training to register to vote. The action comes after a disability rights group threatened to sue last week if changes weren't made. On Wednesday, the Texas Workforce Commission said in a letter they will begin the process of implementing voter registration services to disabled Texans served by its Vocational Rehabilitation Program. "Please note that the State of Texas ... is committed to making sure that all eligible Texans have the opportunity to register to vote, including Texans with disabilities," the TWC and the Texas Secretary of State office wrote in a joint letter Wednesday. The letter was written in response to lawyers from the Texas Civil Rights Project, representing the Coalition of Texans with Disabilities, who sent their own letter last week threatening the state with potential litigation, if the commission failed to change its practices. The lawyers from the disability advocacy group argued the state was in violation of federal law by not providing voter registration services to Texans with disabilities who obtain job training from state agencies, specifically the TWC. Up to 100,000 Texans with disabilities each year are not being offered services to make it easier to register to vote, based on state data, according to the letter. Beth Stevens, voting rights program director with TCRP, applauded the commission for changing its policy in a statement released Thursday. "By implementing voter registration services in its vocational rehabilitation program, TWC will more closely live up to our society's promise of democratic participation for everyone, regardless of the disabilities they may have," Stevens said. "We are also looking forward to working with TWC to ensure that the new policy complies with federal voting rights laws." The lawyers specifically cite the 1993 National Voter Registration Act, which mandates Texas and other states to make it easier for disabled people to register to vote if they receive job training from state agencies, according to the letter. The commission, which took over the state's job training responsibilities two years ago, had violated the NVRA by continuously failing to provide these services, the lawyers argue. On Sept. 1, 2016, the commission took over from the Department of Assistive and Rehabilitative Services which did provide voter registration services to disabled Texans after legislators abolished the agency during the state's "sunset" process. After the transition, the letter states the commission should have absorbed all responsibilities of the abolished agency, including making it easier for disabled Texans to vote. But the commission decided against providing the voter registration services, stating "voter registration requirements no longer apply to applicants for vocational rehabilitation services," according to the commission's Rehabilitation Policy Manual that was retired in 2017. Executive Director Dennis Borel of the Coalition of Texans with Disabilities thanked the SOS office and the commission for listening to the disability rights advocacy group's concerns in making the change. "Today's action will facilitate the engagement of our citizens with disabilities in the cherished right of voting," Borel said in a statement on Thursday. "In this important election year, we invite all candidates to take note and incorporate disability issue positions into their campaigns." The government of Haiti has announced that it will suspend Oxfam GBs right to operate in the country for two months, while it investigates the charitys handling of the inappropriate behaviour by staff in the country in 2011. Oxfam said it expects the suspension to have a significant impact on its work but it will continue working on reconstruction and development projects in Haiti through its affiliate organisations, Oxfam Italy, Oxfam Intermon (Spain) and Oxfam Quebec. The charitys overall annual programme budget in Haiti is 13m, about a quarter of which, 3.2m, goes through Oxfam GB. Oxfam International regional director Simon Ticehurst and Oxfam Intermon executive affiliate unit head Margalida Massot met Haitian government officials yesterday and committed to cooperate with the governments investigation. According to reports by Reuters, Haitis planning and external cooperation minister Aviol Fleurant said: If during the two month-long investigation I find out there is a link between the aid funds that Oxfam received on behalf of Haiti and the crime that has been committed, we will ... declare Oxfam Great Britain persona non grata and they would have to leave the country without further delay. Oxfam has already temporarily withdrawn from applying for any new UK government funding. According to the charity's accounts for the year ending 31 May 2017, it received 31.7m worth of funding from the Department for International Development (DfID). DfID has said that it will decide after 26 February whether to review the work Oxfam is currently being contracted by the government to do. The charity has apologised to the Haitian government and people for abuses by former staff that occurred in 2011. Speaking before the International Development Committee this week, chief executive Mark Goldring told MPs: I am sorry, we are sorry, for the damage that Oxfam has done, both to the people of Haiti but also to wider efforts for aid and development by possibly undermining public support. He also apologised over Oxfams initial communication with the Charity Commission. The Commission has said that if it had received more information in 2011 it would have acted differently. The tightening of the Russia investigation and the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, made for an emotive backdrop to this years Conservative Political Action Conference, which kicked into gear in Maryland on Thursday. Yesterdays programming started in viscerally anti-media stylethe first panel of the day discussed An Affair to Remember: How the Far Left and the Mainstream Media Got In Bed Togetherand didnt get any friendlier from there. In a widely covered speech, NRA spokesperson Dana Loesch typified this pugnacious tone. At CNNs Parkland town hall the night before, Loesch had ventured a conciliatory note as she faced survivors of the massacre and relatives of victims. At CPAC, that conceit was gone. At one point, Loesch eyeballed the reporters at the back of the room and told them they love mass shootings because crying white mothers are ratings gold. At a different moment, she thundered, We will not be gaslighted into thinking that were responsible for a tragedy that we had nothing to do with. ICYMI: NPR tarnishes its image Bashing the mainstream media has always pushed conference-goers buttonsas commentator Ben Shapiro reminded the press from the stage, We didnt like you guys before [Trump]. The added fire and brimstone this time around could easily be seen as part of a defensive crouch. The extraordinary students of Parkland have shifted this countrys gun debate into uncommonly dangerous territory for firearms advocates, and as the conference unfolded yesterday, news broke that an armed sheriffs deputy had done nothing to prevent the shootingjust as the president and many CPAC speakers doubled down on the efficacy of tightened school security. Almost simultaneously, new indictments hit former Trump campaign advisers Paul Manafort and Rick Gates. But Loesch and other speakers tones were subtler than bunker-mentality anger. Their strategy was twofold: gut-punch the media with an iron fist, but also offer folksy bromides to average, everyday Americans watching at home (Were parents, too, Loesch said. Dont you think our kids deserve the same protection as our celebrities?). This sort of divide-and-rule politicsbesmirch the medias motives, then convince wavering listeners that youre the sympathetic voice of reasononce made Trump stand out among Republican politicians. Now its the go-to game-plan across more mainstream parts of the right. ICYMI: I dont want any writer to have to feel how I felt Sign up for CJR 's daily email This years CPAC feels like a solicitation to Americans to leave the mainstream press behind altogether and embrace sources that advance a different agenda. Shapiro proudly noted that his Daily Wire website has decided not to name mass shooters, since studies have shown that doing so could inspire copycatsdrawing a marked (if disingenuous) contrast with other news outlets. NRA chief Wayne LaPierre, meanwhile, promised to expand his organizations media operations, including its in-house TV channel, to make our message just as accessible as NBC, The New York Times, and the rest of the so-called national news media. The press should note these words, as well as the venom CPAC exposed them to. In the middle of a pummelling, it can be easy to forget that the blows are not an end in themselves, but the first salvo in a much wider war. Below, more from CPAC: They said burn her: On a later panel, Loesch told Sean Hannity she was called names and physically threatened at the CNN town hall Wednesday. She also attacked the network for what she deemed exploitative treatment of shooting survivors. On a later panel, Loesch told Sean Hannity she was called names and physically threatened at the CNN town hall Wednesday. She also attacked the network for what she deemed exploitative treatment of shooting survivors. More in common?: In The New York Times, Michael Grynbaum has a round-up of the anti-media invective that marked CPACs first day: This annual gathering is usually a moment to hammer out what divides the fractious conservative movement. What it has revealed so far is what unites it: contempt for #fakenews and the journalists that.Shapiro memorably described as advocates of leftism, masquerading as objective truth-tellers. In The New York Times, Michael Grynbaum has a round-up of the anti-media invective that marked CPACs first day: This annual gathering is usually a moment to hammer out what divides the fractious conservative movement. What it has revealed so far is what unites it: contempt for #fakenews and the journalists that.Shapiro memorably described as advocates of leftism, masquerading as objective truth-tellers. Did you change or did I?: The Washington Posts Jennifer Rubin says mainstream conservatives should sweat what CPAC reveals about the direction of the right. CPAC has always been out there, she says. Now the rest of the GOP is, too. The Washington Posts Jennifer Rubin says mainstream conservatives should sweat what CPAC reveals about the direction of the right. CPAC has always been out there, she says. Now the rest of the GOP is, too. Fall from grace: After ruling the roost at last years CPAC, Breitbarts influence is visibly diminished this year, write CNNs Tom Kludt and Oliver Darcy. Former Breitbart staffers Shapiro and Sebastian Gorka are giving star turns, however. After ruling the roost at last years CPAC, Breitbarts influence is visibly diminished this year, write CNNs Tom Kludt and Oliver Darcy. Former Breitbart staffers Shapiro and Sebastian Gorka are giving star turns, however. Trump vs. CNN (again): Its not strictly CPAC-related, but the president in a tweet accused CNN of scripting a Parkland survivors question ahead of Wednesday nights town hall. CNN strongly denied the claim, which had been circulating online, and on Fox, all day. There is absolutely no truth to this storyand we can prove that, CNN said. Other notable stories For CJR, Mathew Ingram looks at the structural problems behind online fake news. Computational propaganda doesnt just piggyback on social platforms; it is baked into the DNA and the business model of companies like Facebook, Google, and Twitter. And its going to take more than an algorithm tweak to get rid of it, he writes. Also for CJR, Bill Grueskin highlights a structural problem of a different kind: the culture of impunity around newsroom harassment, particularly at NPR, where an internal investigation found serious flaws in the handling of allegations against former top editor Michael Oreskes. The New York Times has this nice piece on a double trailblazer: Maribel Vinson is a revered name in American figure skating. She was a three-time Olympian, a bronze medalist behind the gold medalist Sonja Henie and an exacting coach who trained hundreds of young talents before dying in a plane crash in 1961. But she had another distinction that is almost forgotten: Maribel Vinson was the first female sportswriter at The New York Times. After CJR wrote about the student journalists of Parkland this week, a journalism teacher at the Sacramento State Hornet newspaper got in touch to share how student reporters at that school fought back against unconstitutional proposed restrictions on campus media production. And I wrote about the unusual case of the Chesapeake Bay Journala free environmental newspaper thats using the First Amendment to win back its funding from the Environmental Protection Agency. The Journal says the EPA cut its grant because it published stories that were critical of officials, which could be a big legal problem for the government. ICYMI: The Chicago Readers African-American thing Has America ever needed a media watchdog more than now? Help us by joining CJR today Jon Allsop is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Review of Books, Foreign Policy, and The Nation, among other outlets. He writes CJRs newsletter The Media Today. Find him on Twitter @Jon_Allsop. Several states could see severe flooding and other weather-related problems amid a storm system that has brought rain, ice and snow to the Midwest and Great Plains. The weather already was blamed for several fatalities, including the deaths of four people in a crash in Nebraska. Melting snow and heavy rain prompted the National Weather Service to issue flood warnings for parts of northern Illinois and flood watches for central Illinois. The fear of a rising Illinois River forced the evacuation late Tuesday of the LaSalle County Nursing Home in Ottawa. In the Chicago area, as much as 4 inches (10 centimeters) of rain fell overnight Monday into Tuesday and forecasters expected another 1 to 3 inches (2.5 to 7.6 centimeters) by Tuesday evening. Parts of Michigans Lower Peninsula were seeing flooding and road closures. In Kalamazoo in southwestern Michigan and the surrounding area, some roads were closed Tuesday due to high water. Temperatures have warmed and the weather service said rainfall was expected to total 3 inches (7.6 centimeters) or more in places. Flood warnings have been in effect in Illinois, Indiana and Michigan, with flood watches in Texas and Arkansas. The weather service issued winter weather advisories for parts of Oklahoma, Kansas, North Dakota, Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin. A 52-year-old Bourbonnais, Illinois, woman was found dead Tuesday in a submerged car in Peotone, south of Chicago. Peotone Fire Protection District Deputy Chief Bruce Boyle said the woman apparently lost control of her car on southbound Illinois Route 45 and ended up in a rain-filed ditch. In eastern Nebraska, speed and slippery pavement caused a crash between a pickup truck and a semitrailer Tuesday that killed four people on Interstate 80, police said. The three men and one woman killed were from Colorado, authorities said. The Kansas Highway Patrol said a 38-year-old woman died and two other people were injured in a collision on an icy highway late Monday. In Minnesota, state police said winter weather contributed to 400 crashes and 250 spinouts, including two fatal accidents. The storm system stretched to Texas, where weather service officials said three weaker EF0 tornadoes hit. One struck early Tuesday in a rural area near Joshua, destroying at least two mobile homes and severely damaging several others. A mother and her disabled daughter were injured when one twister demolished their mobile home. After the tornadoes came the rain. Up to 4.5 inches (11.4 centimeters) of it fell in the Dallas-Fort Worth area by 8 p.m. Tuesday, causing some flooding. Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. The Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that whistleblower protections passed by Congress after the 2008 financial crisis only apply to people who report problems to the government, not more broadly. The justices said that a part of the Dodd-Frank Act that protects whistleblowers from being fired, demoted or harassed only applies to people who report legal violations to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. They said employees who report problems to their companys management but not the commission dont qualify. People who report issues to their companys management are still protected against retaliation but under an older law, the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act. But the two laws differ in a number of ways, including how long people have to bring a lawsuit and how much money they can get in compensation. The justices were unanimous in agreeing that the whistleblower protection in the Dodd-Frank Act only covers people who report to the SEC. Writing for the court, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said Dodd-Franks text and purpose leave no doubt about who the term whistleblower applies to. The definition section of the statute supplies an unequivocal answer: A whistleblower is any individual who provides information relating to a violation of the securities laws to the Commission, she wrote. The SEC had interpreted the whistleblower protection in the Dodd-Frank Act more broadly, an interpretation the Supreme Court rejected. The courts ruling comes at a time when the Trump administration has already laid out changes it wants to make to the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, which the administration believes went too far and has hurt economic growth. President Donald Trump has repeatedly attacked the law as a disaster and has promised to do a big number on it. The Trump administration had nonetheless argued that the law did provide broad protection. Businesses had opposed that reading of the law. The case the court ruled in involves Paul Somers, who worked for San Francisco-based Digital Realty Trust Inc., a real-estate investment trust that owns data centers worldwide. Somers was the companys second in command in Singapore when he made accusations to senior managers that his boss had hidden millions of dollars in cost overruns, granted no-bid contracts and made payments to friends, among other things. Somers was fired in 2014 after making the allegations. He sued, saying his firing was a retaliation that violated the Dodd-Frank Act. He also alleged he had been discriminated against for being gay. Lower courts had sided with Somers, saying he was entitled to whistleblower protections even though he didnt disclose his allegations to the Securities and Exchange Commission. The case is 16-1276, Digital Realty Trust Inc. v. Somers. ___ Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Australian Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce said on Friday he will resign as leader of his party and will move to the backbench after weeks of pressure over an extra-marital affair with his former media secretary. Joyce said he will step down on Monday as leader of the National Party, the junior partner in Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull's centre-right coalition. He will remain in parliament, safeguarding Turnbull's shaky one-seat majority. He said he decided to quit after an allegation of sexual harassment emerged on Friday. He denied any wrongdoing but acknowledged the allegation had hastened his decision. "I will say on Monday morning at the party room I will step down as the leader of the National Party and deputy leader of Australia," Joyce said. National Party federal director Ben Hindmarsh said on Friday the party had received the sexual harassment allegation against Joyce but declined to give any details. The National Party will now elect a new leader, who will also become deputy prime minister under the terms of the coalition agreement with Turnbull's Liberal party. Joyce, a practising Catholic, campaigned on family values and is the father of four children but has left his marriage of 24 years and is expecting a child with his former media secretary. His resignation comes after a falling out with Turnbull, who is in the United States for meetings with U.S. President Donald Trump and who declined to leave him in charge while he is out of the country. Turnbull called Joyce's affair a "shocking error of judgment" last week, to which Joyce responded by calling Turnbull "inept." China's insurance regulator said Friday that it will take control of Anbang Insurance Group for a year, and that the company's former chairman has been prosecuted for alleged "economic crimes." The move is aimed at protecting consumer interests as the company's unlawful practices may endanger Anbang's solvency, the China Insurance Regulatory Commission (CIRC) said on its website. CIRC said it will take control of the company from February 23. It will maintain the company as a private enterprise even amid an equity restructuring, and Anbang's debts and obligations will not be impacted, it added. Separately, the Shanghai prosecutors office said in a one-sentence statement on its website on Friday that Wu has been charged with fundraising fraud and embezzlement. Best known for its 2015 purchase of New York's landmark Waldorf Astoria hotel, Anbang's troubles have been brewing for some time. Last May, the CIRC suspended the Beijing-based insurer from issuing new products for three months, as it singled out one of the insurer's product designs that it said "deviates from the fundamentals of insurance." A month later, Anbang said its then-chairman, Wu Xiaohui, was no longer able to fulfill his duties. The latest development on Friday came amid Beijing's crackdown on high debt levels. The Chinese government has also been scrutinizing overseas deals by domestic companies as part of a massive effort to control potential systemic risks. A Department of Defense memo to Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross supports the findings from Ross that steel and aluminum imports impair U.S. national security. In the memo, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said that the DoD did have some concern that recommendations could negatively impact allies, but that it agreed with the Department of Commerce's conclusion that imports of foreign steel and aluminum based on unfair trading practices were a threat to national security Earlier this month, the Commerce Department recommended imposing heavy tariffs or quotas on foreign producers of steel and aluminum in the interest of national security, following a trade investigation of imports. "DoD continues to be concerned about the negative impact on our key allies regarding the recommended options in the report," he said. However, Mattis said that among the alternatives, targeted tariffs are "more preferable than a global quota or global tariff." "In addition, we recommend an inter-agency group further refine the targeted tariffs, so as to creative incentives for trade partners to work with the U.S. on addressing the underlying issue of Chinese transshipment," Mattis said, in the memo. He stressed: "It is critical that we reinforce to our key allies that these actions are focused on correcting Chinese overproduction and countering their attempts to circumvent existing anti-dumping tariffs not the bilateral U.S. relationship." If President Donald Trump decides to move forward with targeted tariffs or quotas on steel, Mattis recommended that the labor leaders and management of the impacted industries be convened by the president so they would understand that the tariffs and quotas are conditional. If the administration takes action on steel, the DoD recommends waiting before taking any further steps on aluminum, he said. "The prospect of trade action on aluminum may be sufficient to coerce improved behavior of bad actors ... it remains important for the President to continue to communicate the negative consequences of unfair trade practices," Mattis said. Trump and his administration announced the so-called Section 232 investigation into steel and aluminum imports in April. The investigation sought to determine whether the imports posed a threat to national security. On Feb. 16, Ross reported that steel is in fact important to U.S. national security, and current import flows are adversely impacting the steel industry. "[T]he Secretary of Commerce concludes that the present quantities and circumstance of steel imports are 'weakening our internal economy' and threaten to impair the national security as defined in Section 232," the department said. CNBC's Kayla Tausche and Tom DiChristopher contributed to this report. Pump jacks and wells are seen in an oil field on the Monterey Shale formation, March 23, 2014, near McKittrick, Calif. Oil-related stocks in Asia traded higher on Friday as oil prices recorded slight gains after touching two-week highs in the previous session. Those gains in oil prices had come after U.S. crude stocks unexpectedly declined by 1.6 million barrels in the week ending Feb. 16, Reuters said, citing data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. That compared to the 1.8 million-barrel rise in inventories forecast by experts. Woodside Petroleum, Australia's largest oil and gas company, was up 0.56 percent following those increases in prices. Other oil producers also gained: Santos rose 0.39 percent and Oil Search rose 1.46 percent. More broadly, the S&P/ASX 200 energy sub-index traded higher by 0.68 percent in the afternoon Sydney time. Energy stocks in Japan saw sharper gains, with oil producer Inpex trading higher by 2.55 percent and Cosmo Energy gaining 4.59 percent. JXTG Holdings, Japan's largest refiner, was up 3.58 percent. Meanwhile, Hong Kong-listed shares of Chinese oil producer CNOOC rose 0.88 percent in late morning trade local time. Oil giant China Petroleum and Chemical Corporation, or Sinopec, added 1.11 percent. Oil prices were mostly steady on Friday. U.S. West Texas Intermediate crude futures advanced 0.05 percent to trade at $62.80 per barrel and Brent crude futures were off by 0.02 percent at $66.38. "The unexpected fall in oil inventories in the U.S. should see support for crude oil prices remain strong," said ANZ Research analysts in a Friday morning note. "Prices were also supported by comments from UAE Energy Minister Suhail Al Mazrouei, who said the worry is undersupply, not oversupply, as demand remains strong amid the constraints on output," they added. Feel like you spend half your day shuttling to and from work, and that you're slowly losing your sanity while stuck in traffic? You're not alone. In the U.S., the average, one-way commute time is 26.1 minutes, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. If you commute to a full-time, 5-day-a-week job, roundtrip that adds up to 4.35 hours a week and over 200 hours (nearly nine days) per year. But if the travel is getting to you, you might consider moving. According to a study by Best Mattress Brand, some states are worse that others. Best Mattress recently analyzed 2016 commuter data from the American Community Survey, an ongoing survey conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau, to determine which states' commuters have the speediest morning commutes and which ones have the longest. The best and worst states for commutes The states with the shortest, average commutes by car, one-way, are: South Dakota (16.6 minutes) Wyoming and Montana (both 17.3 minutes) Alaska (18.5 minutes) North Dakota (18.6 minutes) Nebraska (18.8 minutes) The states with the longest average car commutes are: U.S. President Donald Trump has called a meeting early next week with key senators and Cabinet officials to discuss potential changes to the biofuels policy, which is coming under increasing pressure after a Pennsylvania refiner blamed regulations for its bankruptcy, according to four sources familiar with the matter. The meeting comes as the oil industry and corn lobby powerful forces in Washington clash over the future of the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), a decade-old regulation that requires refiners to cover the cost of mixing biofuels, such as corn-based ethanol, into their fuel. Trump's engagement reflects the high political stakes of protecting jobs in a key electoral state. Oil refiner Philadelphia Energy Solutions (PES), which employs more than a thousand people in Philadelphia, declared bankruptcy last month and blamed the regulation for its demise. One source said the meeting would focus on short-term solutions to help PES continue operating. PES is asking a bankruptcy judge to shed roughly $350 million of its current RFS compliance costs, owed to the EPA which administers the program, as part of its restructuring package. The other sources said the meeting will consider whether to cap prices for biofuel credits, let higher-ethanol blends be sold all year, as well as efforts to get speculators out of the market. The meeting, scheduled for Tuesday, will include Republican Senators Ted Cruz of Texas, Chuck Grassley and Joni Ernst of Iowa, along with Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt, Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue, and potentially Energy Secretary Rick Perry, according to the sources, who asked not to be named because they were not authorized to speak publicly on the matter. Officials at the EPA, Agriculture Department, and Energy Department declined to comment. A White House official, Kelly Love, said she had no announcement on the matter at this time. The offices of Cruz, Ernst and Grassley did not immediately return requests for comment. The sources said the options moving forward would be constrained by political and legal realities that have derailed previous efforts at reform. The Trump administration has already considered changes to the RFS sought by refiners this year including reducing the amount of biofuels required to be blended annually under the regulation, or shifting the responsibility for blending to supply terminals only to retreat in the face of opposition from corn-state lawmakers. Both H.R. McMaster and John Kelly are military men considered as moderating influences on the president by imposing a routine on the White House. They have also convinced Trump of the importance of international alliances, particularly NATO, which he has criticized as not equally sharing its burdens with the United States. Longstanding friction between President Donald Trump and two top aides, the national security advisor and chief of staff, has grown to a point that either or both might quit soon, four senior administration officials said. White House Chief of Staff John Kelly watches as President Donald Trump speaks during a meeting with North Korean defectors in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, DC on Friday, Feb. 02, 2018. However, all the officials were quick to add that the tensions could blow over, at least for now, as have previous episodes of discord between the president and other top officials who have fallen out of favor, including Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Asked about sources saying that either McMaster or Kelly, or both, might be leaving, White House spokesman Raj Shah on Thursday did not address the possibility. He said: "The president has full confidence in each member of the team." Press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said on Tuesday that Trump "still has confidence in General McMaster." Neither Kelly nor McMaster responded to requests for comment on whether they would remain in the administration. Trump swatted McMaster in a Twitter post after the latter's comments at a European conference last weekend that he was certain Russia meddled in the 2016 U.S. election, which Trump has been reluctant to acknowledge. Kelly and McMaster have chafed at Trump's treatment of them in public and in private, which both at times have considered insulting, said all four officials, speaking on condition of anonymity. The current and most potent irritant, they said, is Kelly's effort, supported by McMaster, to prevent administration officials who have been unable to obtain permanent high-level security clearances from having access to the government's most closely held secrets. Under pressure to act last week, Kelly strengthened the security clearance process in response to a scandal involving Rob Porter, a former official accused of domestic abuse by two ex-wives. Staffers whose interim clearances have been pending since June would have them revoked on Friday. That would bar Trump's son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner from reading the president's daily intelligence brief, which often contains information on covert operations and intelligence collected from spy satellites, spies and close U.S. allies. "There have been running battles between Trump and his generals," said one of the officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity. Kelly is a retired Marine general and McMaster an Army lieutenant general. "But the clearance business is personal, and if Trump sets special rules for family members, I'm not sure if Kelly and McMaster would salute," the official said. White House officials were working to find a compromise that would allow Kushner to continue his work as a senior adviser to Trump, another source familiar with the situation said, also speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal White House matters. Under current law and regulation, the president has authority to grant any level of clearance to anyone he chooses, but officials wanted to avoid that option, this official said. There was no sense that Kushner would be leaving his job. Kelly declined to comment on anybody's specific security clearance. He said in a statement that he had told Kushner days ago that he had "full confidence in his ability to continue performing his duties in his foreign policy portfolio." Kelly said those duties include overseeing the Israeli-Palestinian peace effort and serving as an integral part of the U.S. relationship with Mexico. McMaster's support for Kelly on the security clearance issue is only his latest difference with Trump. Officials in the Defense Department said there have been discussions about him returning to the Army, possibly as head of the Forces Command at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. McMaster, 55, previously served as deputy commander there. Although he has been supportive of Trump on many issues, including threatening North Korea with military action, McMaster has taken a harder stance on Russia than his boss. After Special Counsel Robert Mueller charged 13 Russians, a Russian propaganda arm and two other firms on Feb. 16 with tampering in the election to boost Trump, McMaster said the evidence of Moscow's meddling was "incontrovertible." Trump publicly chastised McMaster in a Twitter post, saying McMaster "forgot to say that the results of the 2016 election were not impacted by the Russians." The average American spends just over $1,000 a year getting lunch at restaurants. But investors Guy Spier, 52, and Mohnish Pabrai, 53, spent $650,100 on just one lunch, although it was for a very special reason: They got to dine with billionaire Warren Buffett. The businessmen purchased their high-priced lunch in 2007 as part of an annual charity auction for Glide Foundation, which helps the homeless and impoverished get back on their feet. Last year, the bidding price topped the million dollar marka steep climb from the $25,000 winning bid when the yearly auction began in 2000. While some may scoff at paying such an exorbitant fee for a 2-hour lunch, even if it is with Buffett, Spier and Pabrai told CNBC's Squawk Box in 2010 that it was "worth every penny." "I think we would have been willing to pay a lot more than that," said Pabrai. "Well worth it." Not only was the experience "fantastic," according to the two investors, but they also walked away with three key business lessons: Mohnish Pabrai 1. Approach everything with integrity During their lunch, Buffet explained how he and his longtime business partner Charlie Munger approach the truth, honesty and integrity. "He and Mr. Munger use an internal yardstick," Pabrai told CNBC. Buffett gave the men an unconventional method to determine their integrity, asking them: "Would you rather be the greatest lover in the world yet be known as the worst, or would you rather be the worst lover and be known as the greatest?" "And he said, 'If you know how to answer that correctly, then you have the right internal yardstick,'" recalled Pabrai. Spier continued, "It's a very interesting person who can walk around, imagine that the world, the feedback that they're getting is that they're awful at what they do, but deep down they know that what they're doing is right." However, Buffett has long been a big believer in cultivating integrity, especially at young age, and has previously noted that he looks for this key characteristic in all employees. "A student [of college age] can pretty much decide what kind a person they are going to be at 60," the billionaire said in an interview for the Nebraska Business magazine. "If they don't have integrity [now], they never will." Guy and Lory Spier stand for a picture at Smith & Wollensky's before having lunch with billionaire investor Warren Buffett, chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, in New York, U.S., on Wednesday, June 25, 2008. Bloomberg | Contributor 2. Get comfortable saying 'no' Warren Buffett reportedly once said, "The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything." And he clearly lives by this sentiment, Spier wrote in a 2014 article for MarketWatch. During their "power lunch," Spier said that Buffet showed them his diary, which was almost bare. "He likes to leave his time unstructured, and to leave plenty of room for spontaneity," said Spier. This isn't a new habit of his, according to Buffett's billionaire bestie Bill Gates. In an interview with Charlie Rose, Gates said that when he first met Buffett in 1991, Buffett showed him his calendar, which was largely empty. This taught the Microsoft co-founder a valuable lesson. "You control your time," explained Gates, who used to have a penchant for packing his calendar."It's not a proxy of your seriousness that you've filled every minute in your schedule." Years later, nothing has changed for Buffett and the billionaire still credits his "consistently amazing growth" with this ability to say 'no.' Spier pledged to do the same after his lunch with Buffett. He wrote for MarketWatch: "Observing Buffett, I could tell that even though he is a kind man at heart he also has absolutely no trouble enduring the momentary unpleasantness that comes from saying no. As I realized this, I resolved to get a lot better at my own ability to say no." 3. Do what you love Buffet also discussed the importance of doing what you love, Spier told CNBC at the time. The billionaire first pointed out that Cecil Williams (the founder of the Glide Foundation) does what he loves by taking care of the less fortunate. Buffett then added that he also he loves what he's doing as the CEO of Berkshire Hathaway. In fact, Buffett, who is worth $86.3 billion, loves his job so much that he'd be happy doing it for much less. "Certainly with $100,000 a year, I could be very happy," the billionaire told PBS Newshour last year. But something different is happening in the wake of last week's deadly shooting in Parkland, Florida. Interest in "gun control" has remained elevated for days after the shooting, according to a CNBC analysis of Google searches. Typically, searches for "gun control" spike a day or two following a mass shooting event and then fall quickly back to normal levels. The storyline has become so commonplace it's almost numbing: A disaffected male shoots and kills innocent people. The media writes a series of breaking news pieces and next-day analyses. A few days later, most of us go back to our normal lives. President Donald Trump's listening session at the White House and nationwide student protests have helped keep the topic in the public eye. On Thursday, a number of companies cut ties with the National Rifle Association amid pressure from customers. And shares of gun makers Sturm Ruger and American Outdoor Brands are down 3.6 percent and 4.5 percent on Friday, respectively. Google releases aggregated search data through its Trends site. The data are delayed a few days and can be broken down by location, date and topic. It's all anonymized and normalized so in a given time period, the highest search volume is indexed to 100. That means we can't tell how many total searches are being done for a given term, just how the trend compares with other time periods. The data aren't granular enough for us to know the intention or political persuasion of the people searching "gun control," but the trend is striking. Since the shooting, Google published additional data on firearm-related searches, noting that typically "gun control" is searched more than "gun shop" in just a few states. In the past week, every state in the union has searched "gun control" more. Still, it's important to keep these data in context. Both "bitcoin" and "snapchat" were searched about three times as much as "gun control" on Feb. 21, the most recent data available. Georgia's Senate passed a bill Friday that won't necessarily help Atlanta's chances of landing Amazon HQ2, the second North American headquarters for the technology giant that 20 metro areas are vying for with a decision expected from Amazon by year end. The Georgia bill, called Senate Bill 375, or the "Keep Faith in Adoption and Foster Care Act," allows adoption agencies funded by tax dollars to decline referrals if doing so would violate "sincerely held religious beliefs." The bill's sponsors claim it will encourage more adoption agencies to open in Georgia, but opponents argue it is nothing more than a way to discriminate against same-sex couples looking to adopt or provide foster care. The bill would also allow agencies to deny services to LGBTQ youth. "Senate Bill 375 is a dangerous step backward that would codify permission to discriminate against the LGBTQ community into Georgia state law," said Sarah Kate Ellis, president and CEO of LGBTQ advocacy group GLAAD, in a statement. "This bill is not about freedom of religion, which is one of our nation's fundamental values, but rather about imposing one's personal religious beliefs on others to discriminate against loving foster or adoptive parents simply because of their identity and deny services to LGBTQ youth." Cryptocurrencies pose a competitive threat to Bank of America's business, the company said in a regulatory filing Thursday. "Clients may choose to conduct business with other market participants who engage in business or offer products in areas we deem speculative or risky, such as cryptocurrencies," the bank said. Such increased competition may "negatively affect our earnings" or affect "the willingness of our clients to do business with us." The comments were part of an annual 10-K filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission about the bank's operations and business risks. The bank said it had no further comment. Bank of America's filing added that widespread adoption of new technologies in financial services, including cryptocurrencies, "could require substantial expenditures" in order to adapt to evolving industry standards and consumer preferences. Popular interest in digital currencies has taken off in the last several months, helping send bitcoin from less than $1,000 at the beginning of 2017 to a high above $19,000 in mid-December. The surge of interest led to the launch of bitcoin futures by CME, the largest futures exchange, and its competitor, Cboe, in December as well. Bitcoin was trading well off its record highs Friday, at around $10,000. However, Bank of America has not embraced the rise of interest in cryptocurrencies. The firm's Merrill Lynch wealth management arm banned its roughly 17,000 financial advisors from buying bitcoin-related investments for clients. The bank also said earlier this month that customers cannot use its credit cards to buy cryptocurrencies. The SEC filing also noted that digital currencies limit the bank's ability to track movement of funds and comply with laws such as anti-money laundering regulation. Boeing and President Donald Trump are nearing a multibillion-dollar deal for two new Air Force One planes, potentially ending the drawn-out and highly publicized negotiations between the two parties, Defense One reported. Boeing confirmed to CNBC that Trump and Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg "had a productive meeting this week." In a Tuesday meeting at the White House, Trump and Muilenburg had a breakthrough in gridlocked negotiations on the two 747 jumbo airliners that the military purchased from the aerospace firm last summer and an announcement is anticipated soon, Defense One reported. Charged negotiations between the Air Force which purchases the planes and Boeing were thrust into the spotlight in December 2016 when then president-elect Trump tweeted his outrage about the costs. https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/806134244384899072 Later that day, he amplified his message in the lobby of Trump Tower: "Well, the plane is totally out of control, it's going to be over $4 billion for Air Force One program," he said. "I think it's ridiculous, I think Boeing is doing a little bit of a number. We want Boeing to make a lot of money, but not that much money." Boeing shares closed up .2 percent on Friday. The stock is up 21 percent year to date. A Standard Life logo sits on a wall outside Standard Life House, the headquarters of Standard Life Plc, in Edinburgh, U.K., on Saturday, Aug. 9, 2014. Standard Life Aberdeen has agreed to sell the bulk of its insurance business to Phoenix Group for 3.24 billion pounds ($4.51 billion), as it posted broadly in-line full-year results, sending its shares higher. The deal will see SLA receive 2.3 billion pounds in cash and a 19.9 percent stake in Phoenix, which becomes Europe's largest company focused on buying books of mature business from insurance companies. SLA said the deal was for 158 billion pounds in assets in its Standard Life Assurance Limited unit, founded in 1825 and one of the Britain's oldest life and pensions businesses, although it would retain its UK retail platforms and financial advice business. The assurance business is primarily based in Britain, with operations in Ireland and Germany, and serves about 4.5 million customers and clients, it said. As part of the transaction, SLA said it would expand the companies' existing strategic partnership and look to be "the asset manager of choice" for Phoenix as it seeks more of the UK market for closed, mature business of around 300 billion pounds. "We are selling capital-heavy UK and European insurance businesses, moving us out of the Solvency 2 environment," co-chief executive Keith Skeoch told a media call. Insurers say stringent European Solvency 2 capital rules have crimped their business. The company also reported its first set of annual results since it formed last year through the 11 billion pound merger of Standard Life and Aberdeen Asset Management. SLA said pro-forma adjusted pretax profit in the year to the end of December was 1.04 billion pounds, down 0.5 percent from 1.05 billion pounds in 2016 but in line with a company-supplied consensus forecast of 1 billion pounds. Assets under management and administration rose 1 percent over the period to 654.9 billion pounds, although the company said it continued to see outflows from its asset management as market conditions remained "tough". Net outflows over the period were 22.1 billion pounds, it said, albeit an improvement on the prior year outflows of 26.1 billion pounds and beating a company supplied analyst forecast for 37.5 billion pounds in outflows. SLA said it would pay a full-year dividend of 21.3 pence a share, up 7.5 percent on the prior year. In a separate statement, SLA said Gerry Grimstone would stand down as chairman at the end of 2019. At 0814 GMT, shares in SLA were up 3.8 percent at 400.2 pence a share, the second-top gainer on the FTSE 100 index. Phoenix shares were up 3.7 percent, the top gainer among the mid-caps. Security measures are taken as the Oromo people protest against government during the Irreecha holiday in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on October 2, 2016. Minasse Wondimu Hailu | Anadolu Agency | Getty Images Ethiopia is one of the world's fastest growing economies and a hub for Chinese investment, having rejuvenated its fortunes after a turbulent history marred by civil war and famine. But, the East African nation's political story is murkier. Given the surprise resignation of its prime minister and the declaration of a state of emergency last week following protests, CNBC takes a closer look at this major frontier market. Set up for political failure Ethiopian Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn resigned on February 15 following mass protests. A six-month long state of emergency was imposed by the government the next day, with the intention of quelling civil unrest. The state of emergency prohibits, among other things, the distribution of potentially sensitive material and unauthorized demonstrations or meetings. Hailemariam remains in office until a new prime minister is appointed. Ethiopia is, in essence, a one party state led by the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front, a coalition comprising of parties representing different regions of the country. Tension has been bristling between the powerful Tigray People's Liberation front, which represents just 6 percent of Ethiopians, and its counterparts representing the Amhara and Oromo ethnic groups. Meanwhile, Hailemariam's party, the Southern Ethiopian People's Democratic Movement, is the weakest in the coalition. People protest against the Ethiopian government during Irreecha, the annual Oromo festival which celebrates the end of the rainy season, in Bishoftu on October 1, 2017. Zacharias Abubuker | AFP | Getty Images Hailemariam, who took power after the death of his predecessor Meles Zenawi in 2012, has failed to unite his party. The former leader headed up a centralized government and wielded prestige from the country's civil war to ensure loyalty. Anti-government protests have bubbled up, most recently in 2016 when the country's last state of emergency was imposed. "It is unlikely (Hailemariam's) successor will adopt a more reformist stance," Emma Gordon, senior East Africa politics analyst at consultancy Verisk Maplecroft, told CNBC via email. "Protests and political uncertainty will therefore continue." Sky-rocketing economic growth The potential for new leadership in Ethiopia is little more than a band aid. "The factors that have driven the protests namely the ethnic federal system, the influence of the military and intelligence services, and the interplay between the political elites and the business sector will remain in place," Gordon said. Ethiopia, one of the least developed economies in the world, has achieved double-digit growth in recent years. Should its incoming prime minister placate ethnic tensions along party lines leading to the lifting of the state of emergency within six months this could continue. "Assuming (a) more benign political outcome, we expect economic growth to remain healthy, albeit below the 11 percent annual expansion targeted by the government's Growth and Transformation Plan," Jane Morley, regional manager for the Middle East and Africa at the Economist Intelligence Unit, told CNBC via email. Chinese Premier Li Keqiang (R) and Ethiopia's Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn at the Great Hall of the People on May 12, 2017, in Beijing, China. Thomas Peter | Getty Images The plan includes investing $20 billion in the power sector, and boosting the number of tourists visiting the country to 2.5 million annually. Morley placed the expected gross domestic product (GDP) growth figure at 7-7.5 percent annually over the next five years, thanks to "growing consumer markets, greater integration into global and regional value chains and continued infrastructure investment." Belt and Road linchpin BlackRock has almost $5 billion invested in renewables, the global head of BlackRock Infrastructure Investment Group told CNBC on Friday. "As I look at infrastructure, I'm looking for where the structural shifts (are) underway, and there's a massive structural shift underway in the power generation system," Jim Barry said. "To give you a sense of the scale, renewable deployment has gone from less than $20 billion a year 10 years ago to $300 billion a year. It's almost 30 percent of the global addressable market in infrastructure. This is no longer niche, it's fundamental to any infrastructure allocation." Barry offered an insight into why this shift was taking place. "What's driving it now, is not that people want to be green, it's not about climate it's cost," he said. "The transformation that's underway, it's fundamentally being driven by economics now," he added. The International Energy Agency (IEA) describes renewable energy as being at the center of the transition to a "less carbon-intensive and more sustainable energy system." Renewables, the IEA states, have "grown rapidly" over the last few years, with sharp cost reductions in both solar photovoltaics and wind power. Vern Brownell, CEO of D-Wave Heidi Gutman | CNBC Vern Brownell spent the past eight years preaching quantum computing to a world that wasn't ready for it. As CEO of D-Wave Systems, Brownell has been overseeing the development of a type of superfast processor that to date has largely been limited to use in research labs. His Vancouver-based company first raised venture funding back in 2004, five years before he joined. But this week Brownell is in San Francisco and has plenty of eager listeners on his agenda. Fresh off D-Wave's $50 million in funding from Canada's PSP Investments, Brownell said he's meeting with banks and big investors about raising hundreds of millions of dollars later this year as the company prepares to move into the public cloud. "We intend to do a very large offering to take advantage of the position we're in," Brownell said, in an interview on Thursday. He said the financing an alternative to an IPO will be led by an investment bank and potentially include sovereign wealth funds and large private equity firms. Brownell has also talked with SoftBank's massive Vision Fund, calling it the type of investor that he would like to see participate. Existing investors include In-Q-Tel, the venture group that invests on behalf of the CIA, and Jeff Bezos' venture firm. Quantum computing's promise Quantum computing differs from classical computing, which is defined by binary code 1s and 0s. With quantum computing, there are units called qubits that aren't limited to that binary state and have the ability to store dramatically more information. In 2015, Google said that its project with NASA using a D-Wave machine performed certain tasks 100 million times faster than conventional processors. Critical to D-Wave's future is getting this technology into the hands of everyday developers. Until now, researchers at Google, NASA, Lockheed Martin and the Los Alamos National Laboratory have used D-Wave machines, which cost millions of dollars, in complex experiments to see if quantum computing can solve problems in drug discovery, cybersecurity and space exploration. By mid-year, D-Wave's technology will be available in the public cloud for the first time through one of the big three vendors Amazon, Microsoft or Google Brownell told CNBC. He's not yet able to announce which one will host the service, but said the goal is to eventually be available on multiple platforms. "I want to be an arms merchant for the cloud providers," Brownell said. "Once one of them has this capability, all of them will want to have it." The D-Wave 2000Q Quantum Computer D-Wave The world clearly needs more powerful processors, as demand explodes for artificial intelligence workloads that require faster and more efficient chips than what's currently available from Nvidia and AMD. But there's a healthy amount of debate among researchers and scientists about whether quantum computers are useful for practical real-world applications. D-Wave's thumbnail-sized processors are deployed in massive refrigerators that have 18 layers of shielding to protect the quantum state. Last year the company started selling the $15 million 2000Q, which has 2,000 qubits, twice as many as the prior version. By getting into the public cloud, D-Wave can start letting developers experiment with its technology in much more cost-effective ways. Brownell said they'll even "be able to use small bits of quantum computing for free." 'From pure science towards engineering' A United Parcel Service driver loads a truck with packages in the Soho neighborhood of New York. UPS' difficulties in handling surging e-commerce delivery volumes from Amazon is a problem, according to one Wall Street firm. Deutsche Bank lowered its rating for UPS shares to hold from buy, saying the company will have to invest more in its delivery infrastructure due to rising online sales. "We have reduced confidence in UPS' ability to control burgeoning capex, with capital intensity expectations more than doubling as a % of sales in just the last 12mo," analyst Amit Mehrotra wrote in a note to clients Thursday. "We see a lack of positive catalysts to justify a Buy rating. UPS shares won't start working in our view until mgmt. can articulate a sound strategy to strike the right balance between price and volumes vis-a-vis Amazon, and talk more concretely about the long-term/structural capital needs of the business as mgmt. 'leans in' to higher B2C shipments." UPS shares rose 0.5 percent Friday. Mehrotra noted that UPS had "significant underinvestment" in building its delivery capability over past decade amid surging e-commerce package volumes. As a result, he reduced his price target for UPS shares to $115 from $135, representing 9 percent upside to Thursday's close. UPS shares are underperforming the market this year in part because investors are concerned Amazon may compete more aggressively in the delivery business. The company's stock is down 12 percent year to date through Thursday versus the S&P 500's 1 percent gain. The Wall Street Journal reported on Feb. 9 that Amazon is gearing up to launch a delivery service for businesses. An UPS spokesperson sent the following statement when asked for comment on the Deutsche Bank report: Futures were higher this morning, but the major averages remain on track for their third weekly loss in four weeks. The Dow and S&P 500 are sitting about 6 percent below their all-time highs of Jan. 26, while the Nasdaq is about 4 percent shy of its record high. (CNBC) General Mills (GIS) announced it's moving into the pet food business with a deal to buy Blue Buffalo Pet Products (BUFF) for roughly $8 billion in cash, sending the pet food maker's stock 17 percent higher in premarket. CNBC first reported the news, citing sources. Snap (SNAP) stock was still under pressure this morning after reality TV star Kylie Jenner tweeted that she no longer uses the Snapchat app following its redesign. The tweet sent shares plunging, and wiped $1.7 billion off Snap's market cap. (CNBC) There are no economic reports today, but investors will be firmly focused on the Fed and potential interest rate moves. Fed Chairman Jerome Powell's written testimony on the U.S. economic outlook will be released at 11 a.m. ET, ahead of his appearance before Congress next week. Fed officials take center stage at the Monetary Policy Forum's annual conference in New York, where Boston Fed President Eric Rosengren, New York Fed President William Dudley, Cleveland Fed President Loretta Mester, and Kansas City Fed President Esther George will speak. Mester is a voting member of the FOMC for 2018, while Dudley is always a voting member. The best-run companies have leaders willing to take a stand on societal issues such as gun control, former Medtronic chairman and CEO Bill George told CNBC on Friday. "If your only purpose is making money, then you're going to run into ... difficulties," said George, a senior fellow at Harvard Business School where he teaches leadership. Taking a moral stance "motives your employees" and "inspires your customers," he told "Squawk on the Street." "If a few shareholders object, so be it." George, who ran Medtronic from 1991 to 2001, spoke after BlackRock revealed plans to speak with gun makers in the wake of last week's Florida school shooting. Seventeen students and faculty members were killed when a gunman opened fire at Stoneman Douglas High School. The move by BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager, also could be a part of founder and CEO Larry Fink's push for societal improvement. Fink sent a letter last month to the chief executives of the world's largest public companies, calling for them to help improve society or risk losing support from the firm. "I like Larry Fink's statement: We have to fulfil our purpose," said George. "The companies that do that are going to perform." George also believes the government should ban assault weapons, but thinks it'll be difficult with a Republican-controlled Congress and White House. Not everyone sees banning assault weapons as the best possible solution to school shootings. President Donald Trump has shown support for arming some teachers and school staff members. Speaking at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference on Friday, he doubled down on his remarks that teachers should be trained to carry firearms. AR-15 rifles are on display during the Nation's Gun Show November 18, 2016 at Dulles Expo Center in Chantilly, Virginia. Getty Images Gun owners who want specialized insurance for their firearms may have less access to one kind of policy following a shooting massacre in Florida last week. Insurance company Chubb said on Friday that it will stop underwriting an insurance policy for gun owners called NRA Carry Guard. The National Rifle Association-branded insurance covers gun owners in the event they face legal repercussions following firearm incidents. "Three months ago, Chubb provided notice of our intent to discontinue participation in the NRA Carry Guard insurance program under the terms of our contract," Chubb said in a statement. The announcement follows a Feb. 14 shooting that killed 17 people at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. The NRA began selling its current line of Carry Guard insurance last year. The policies aim to help individuals who use firearms for self-defense cover their legal expenses. The policies start at $13.95 per month, or $154.95 annually, for $250,000 in civil protection and $50,000 in criminal defense protection. The highest-level coverage costs $49.95 per month, or $549.95 annually. It includes up to $1.5 million in civil protection and $250,000 in criminal defense protection. The policies target gaps that homeowners' policies do not cover. That includes "unexpected procedures and costs associated with proving you acted in self defense," the NRA states on its website. That could be costs associated with civil and criminal legal defenses, bail payments, legal retainer fees, and replacement of firearms, among other items. The United States Concealed Carry Association, or USCCA, also provides liability insurance. "Even in a crystal clear self-defense case, you're often charged with a crime," said Tim Schmidt, president and founder of USCCA. USCCA's policies start at $22 per month, or $247 per year, for $500,000 in civil suit defense and damages coverage and $100,000 in criminal defense protection. The highest level of coverage costs $47 per month, or $497 per year, for $2 million in civil suit defense and damages coverage and $250,000 in criminal defense protection. The organization currently has about 270,000 individual policy owners. "I think there is kind of a rebirth of new people coming into the concept of wanting to be responsibly armed," Schmidt said. Opponents have criticized the coverage as "murder insurance." A call to the NRA was not immediately returned. The difficulty is that it would be very difficult for insurers to underwrite. Michael Barry Insurance Information Institute Gun owners generally will be covered for liability under their homeowners' or renters' insurance policies, according to Peter Kochenburger, deputy director of the Insurance Law Center at the University of Connecticut School of Law. "You're covered for your negligence if you injure someone or if you damage property," Kochenburger said. Those policies typically do not exclude accidents related to firearms, he said. However, rules for these policies vary by state. If an exclusion for gun-related incidents were to be included in a policy, it would need to have been approved by a state's regulator. "If you intentionally damage property or injure someone, you don't get insurance coverage," Kochenburger said. "We as a society don't want someone to engage in an illegal act and not have to pay the consequences [of their actions]." In 2013, three states Massachusetts, New York and Hawaii tried to make liability insurance mandatory for gun owners, according to Michael Barry, head of media and public affairs at the Insurance Information Institute, an industry-funded consumer education organization. "The difficulty is that it would be very difficult for insurers to underwrite," Barry said. "I think pricing a policy like this would be very difficult to do." Victims of a violent assault, however, can receive compensation through a homeowner's insurance policy. In 2015, Sandy Hook school shooting victims' families received $1.5 million through the estate of Nancy Lanza, the mother of shooter. Individuals who own guns need to think through their insurance coverage, particularly for liability, carefully. "That split second [decision] of whether to shoot or not, it's hard to imagine that whether they have insurance or not is a thought in their mind," Kochenburger said. More from Personal Finance: Here's what you should really do with your cash amid market volatility Consumers waste $5,400 a year on impulse buys Olympics gold medalist Chloe Kim's next hurdle at age 17: Sudden wealth WATCH: Dem. Congressman says we need a firmer gun position from Trump Rick Gates, who worked as a top aide on Donald Trump's presidential campaign, will plead guilty Friday in the special counsel's probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 election. Gates' plea is considered an indication that he may be cooperating with special counsel Robert Mueller. A plea hearing was scheduled for 2 p.m. ET Friday. Court documents say Gates will plead guilty to two counts: making a false statement and conspiracy against the United States. The news comes a day after Mueller unveiled new charges against Gates and his former business associate Paul Manafort, who was Trump's campaign chief for a few months in 2016. Gates and Manafort were previously indicted in the probe in October. The charges, which include bank fraud and an array of other financial crimes, stem from alleged conduct that does not relate to work that Manafort and Gates did for Trump's campaign. However, some of the alleged crimes occurred while they were working for Trump and afterward. As part of the new indictment, the special counsel claims that after Manafort and Gates saw their income dwindle through at least January 2017, they "extracted money" from Manafort's U.S. real estate to obtain loans from several financial institutions. Manafort claims he is innocent and is confident he will be acquitted. He is also suing the Justice Department, claiming overreach by Mueller because the charges he faces do not relate to Russian meddling in the election. CNBC's Dan Mangan contributed to this report. Rick Gates, a former Trump campaign official, pleaded guilty on Friday in special counsel Robert Mueller's case against him and former campaign manager Paul Manafort. Gates pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy against the United States and one count of making a false statement. Both counts were issued in a new superseding information on Friday. According to the new information, Gates knowingly lied when he told the special counsel that Manafort, after a March 2013 meeting with a lobbyist and a member of Congress, had said that Ukraine had not been mentioned in the meeting. Not only was that statement never made, the information says, but Gates himself helped prepare a report describing the discussions on Ukraine that had taken place at that meeting. That false statement was made on Feb. 1 the same day Gates' legal counsel filed a motion to withdraw as his defense. Gates also pleaded guilty to conspiring to defraud the U.S. by making false statements regarding his status as a foreign agent, a charge initially proffered in the first indictment from Oct. 27, 2017. According to the sentencing guidelines, Gates could face nearly six years in prison. But the special counsel could petition the court to reduce his sentencing time, Reuters reported, based on his cooperation with investigators. A sentencing date has not been publicly set, although the court tentatively scheduled a status update for May 14. Gates, 45, had initially pleaded not guilty to charges including money laundering and misleading investigators. A second indictment from the special counsel on Thursday piled 32 new counts on Gates and Manafort, including bank fraud. In a statement following Gates' change of plea, Manafort said, "I continue to maintain my innocence." "I had hoped and expected my business colleague would have had the strength to continue the battle to prove our innocence. For reasons yet to surface he chose to do otherwise. This does not alter my commitment to defend myself against the untrue piled up charges contained in the indictments against me," Manafort said. But Gates' new status as a cooperating witness for the Mueller investigation could increase the pressure on Manafort to seek a plea deal. "Gates had a front-row perspective for everything Manafort was up to," said Jens Ohlin, vice dean and professor of law at Cornell Law School. "His cooperation was pretty crucial for Mueller." While Manafort held a more prominent role in Donald Trump's presidential campaign, Gates maintained his connection to it for much longer. Gates remained a part of the campaign after Manafort resigned as chairman in August 2016. He served as an intermediary between the Republican National Committee and the campaign, and he was hired after the election to help with the inauguration. In October 2017, Gates and Manafort, 68, were charged by the special counsel on the same day investigators revealed that George Papadopoulos, a foreign policy aide to the Trump campaign, had pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI and was cooperating with the Russia probe. The New York Times previously reported that Papadopoulos' conversations in 2016 with an Australian diplomat, in which he claimed that Russia had "dirt" on then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, formed the nexus of the investigation into potential collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. Manafort was indicted on 12 counts in October, including laundering foreign money from foreign sources notably from his work for political parties supportive of then-Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich to fund an opulent lifestyle. Gates, Manafort's longtime business associate, was charged on nine of the counts. Manafort was initially saddled with a $10 million appearance bond, and Gates received a $5 million bond. In a court document on Feb. 16, which questioned the value of properties Manafort was offering in lieu of his $10 million bail payment, the special counsel announced the discovery of alleged "additional criminal conduct" including "a series of bank frauds and bank fraud conspiracies." On Thursday, those new discoveries re-materialized in the form of a 32-count superseding indictment against Gates and Manafort. The same day, Judge Amy Berman granted a motion allowing Gates' legal counsel comprising of lawyers Shanlon Wu, Annemarie McAvoy and Walter Mack, to withdraw as his defense team. The lawyers initially made a motion to withdraw on Feb. 1, fueling speculation at the time that Gates was perhaps unable to pay his legal fees, or that he may have lied or planned to lie in court. Multiple outlets also reported that Gates had recently participated in a so-called Queen for a Day interview, in which he would provide any and all information asked by investigators without any of his admissions being used against him. Shortly before his counsel withdrew, Gates retained Thomas Green, a defense lawyer who had represented clients in the Watergate, Iran Contra and Whitewater political scandals. But Gates may have already terminated Green, according to a Thursday report from the Daily Beast, which said Green has been replaced by Barry Pollack of the law firm Miller Chevalier. A Buzzfeed reporter later tweeted that Green told him he was still representing Gates. --CNBC's Bria Horsley contributed to this report. that would set broad limits on imports of the commodities on national security grounds. urging him not to impose tariffs on steel and aluminum imports from overseas. A Chinese worker cutting steel in Qingdao in China's eastern Shandong province. AFP | Getty Images Six free trade advocacy groups wrote an open letter to President Donald Trump on Thursday urging him not to impose tariffs on steel and aluminum imports from overseas. The groups, who favor limited government and free enterprise and swing to the right on economic issues, called the economic case for the recently proposed import restrictions "weak" and warned that, rather than help protect American jobs, it would significantly hurt them. The letter followed a recommendation delivered last week by the Commerce Department that would set sweeping new limits on imports of the commodities, arguing that relying on supplies from abroad could threaten U.S. national security and defense-related manufacturing capacity at home. "The national security case to restrict steel and aluminum imports is thin and the toll such restrictions would take on the economy is considerable," the letter said, adding that a thorough assessment of America's suppliers, treaties and other agreements "makes clear that steel and aluminum imports do not jeopardize national security." The six signatories, which ranged from avowedly conservative and libertarian to non-partisan, are the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), ALEC Action, the R Street Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, FreedomWorks and the National Taxpayers Union. A protectionist pledge Trump campaigned on the promise of reviving long-battered U.S. industries like coal, steel and manufacturing, which hemorrhaged millions of jobs nationwide from the late 1970s onward as both automation and cheaper imports from overseas, particularly China and Japan, forced local factories to shut down. "China is dumping steel all over the United States, okay? It's killing you," Trump told a crowd in the historic steel town of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, while on the campaign trail in 2016. Much of the president's electoral support came on the back of his protectionist pledge to cut out foreign competition, even though it stands in stark opposition to his Republican party's traditional free trade orthodoxy. "The economic case for steel and aluminum tariffs or other import restrictions is weak," the free trade advocates' missive said. It argued that the proposed tariffs at least 24 percent on all steel imports and 7.7 percent on all aluminum imports globally, or larger tariffs of 53 percent on steel and 26.3 percent on aluminum against select countries including China, Brazil, India, South Korea and Russia "would hurt downstream domestic manufacturers" by raising their costs, as well as trigger a "tit-for-tat game of foreign retaliation." The organizations cited 2015 census data showing that steel mills employed roughly 140,000 Americans and added $36 billion to the economy, while "steel-consuming industries, including manufacturers who rely on steel imports, employ 6.5 million Americans and add about $1 trillion to U.S. gross domestic product (GDP)." "Raising costs on manufacturers will jeopardize far more jobs than could possibly be saved by imposing steel tariffs or other restrictions," the letter said. ArcelorMittal is recruiting to hire more than 1,000 workers in 2018, many of them in Indiana. Source: Larry Collins General Mills is moving into the pet food business with a deal to buy Blue Buffalo Pet Products for roughly $8 billion in cash. General Mills' offer price of $40 per Blue Buffalo share represents a premium of 17.2 percent to Blue Buffalo's closing price on Thursday. Blue Buffalo's shares surged more than 16 percent on Friday morning, while General Mills shares fell 3.5 percent. General Mills said it expects to finance the transaction with debt and cash on hand, along with about $1 billion in equity. The company expects the deal to close by the end of 2018. The deal gives the Betty Crocker owner a path into the quickly growing pet food category, as sales of traditional packaged foods continue to slow. For Blue Buffalo, it gives a stronger distribution foothold to big box retailers outlets the pet food maker only began to explore last year, when it began selling in stores like Target. Pet food and care remains a point of growth in the consumer industry. In 2017, consumers spent $20 billion on pet care, $10 billion of which was on dog food, according to Nielsen. The booming business of pet care has attracted investment from traditional consumer companies, including those that want to fortify their pet business and those like General Mills that want to jump into it fresh. M&M-owner Mars has been building its pet business, which includes the Iams, Pedigree and Whiskas brands, to help compensate for slowing confectionery sales. It has aggressively bulked up the business, including its 2017 acquisition of animal hospital company VCA Inc. for $9.1 billion. Jam-owner J.M. Smucker bought Big Heart Pet Brands for roughly $6 billion in 2015, marking its entrance into the pet industry. Manufacturing food for pets and humans requires similar equipment, so it is not hard for a traditional food company to move into the space, industry experts say. General Mill's plans to acquire Blue Buffalo come as all traditional food companies are on alert about a prowling 3G Capital, the backer of Kraft-Heinz, known for its ferocious appetite to acquire food companies and its ruthless cost-cutting approach once it owns them. The ketchup giant recently suggested it may be ready for its next acquisition, and General Mills has been identified as a logical target. It also comes as Big Food is progressively moving away from its bolt-on acquisitions of small, growth companies in favor of bolder deals that can make a more immediate impact. Large food companies have struggled to grow small brands, and the pressure from lagging food sales and constrained retailers has continued to intensify. The deal is expected to be neutral to the company's cash earnings per share in fiscal year 2019 and will add to earnings in fiscal year 2020. International relations between Russia and the rest of the world are now less stable and predictable than they were during the Cold War, according to The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU). "The country may be one of the biggest 'black swans' of political risk in 2018," Agathe Demarais, lead analyst for Russia and regional manager for Europe at the EIU, said in a report published Wednesday. "The international situation is now less stable and predictable than during the Cold War." Under Vladimir Putin's strongman leadership since 1999, Russia has asserted itself as a resurgent global superpower with political and economic influence. It is being closely watched by Europe, China and the U.S. for clues on where its foreign policy is headed. Moscow's increasing assertiveness and provocative military actions in recent years have alarmed its neighbors in Europe and the wider West. In particular, Russia's annexation of Crimea in southern Ukraine in 2014 and role in a pro-Russian uprising in eastern Ukraine around the same time prompted an international outcry with economic sanctions imposed on the country that are still in place. Russia is now in the spotlight for alleged meddling in the U.S. political system, accused of interfering in the run-up to the 2016 election. Last week, 13 Russian individuals and several business entities were charged, although the Russian state has denied involvement. President Donald Trump on Friday announced, "the largest North Korea-related sanctions tranche" ever, which was "aimed at disrupting North Korean shipping and trading companies." If Washington's ultimate objective is deterring aggression and preventing war, this new set of sanctions will not help that outcome. There are realistically only two ways to accomplish the denuclearization of the peninsula. One is through hard-nosed, challenging diplomacy and the other through the launching of a brutal and bloody preventive war. It is a virtual certainty that launching a preventive military strike will incite a major retaliatory attack by North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un. The all-out war that would likely result could see millions die and might prompt Kim to attack U.S. interests directly. Should the United States decide to press for a full World War II-style unconditional surrender by Kim, we could eventually win by virtue of our overwhelming advantage in industrial and technological capacity. But the cost to our country would be radically out of proportion to what would be gained. But make no mistake there will be no war unless Washington starts one. We have an overwhelming conventional and nuclear deterrent to check any aggression by the far weaker North Korea. That provides ample time to achieve our immediate security objectives making sure Kim never uses his weapons while providing all the time we need to pursue diplomacy. Although senior officials often claim the U.S. seeks a diplomatic solution, actions indicate otherwise. We are not presently conducting genuine diplomacy. We are merely taking "actions" devoid of a coherent strategy designed to attain a rational objective. "Maximum pressure" will likely result in only a hardening of North Korea's resolve to maintain what they see as their lifeline to survival: their nuclear deterrent. The Trump administration made commendable progress last September when it got the entire United Nations Security Council to back meaningful and severe sanctions. They were further strengthened in November. One could argue they helped lay the groundwork that prompted Kim to seek dialogue with South Korean President Moon. It can be assumed that North Korea is attempting to use the goodwill of the Olympic games to its advantage, but the U.S. and our allies don't have to play by North Korean rules. We must use our leverage to and our position of strength to negotiate with weak, yet brutal, North Korea to end the standoff on the peninsula. However, if there is no discussion, if there are no established means of communication, diplomacy is, by definition, impossible; in its absence, war becomes the only outcome. Fortunately, there is a viable, rational alternative. National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster has said many times that we are "running out of time" to find a solution. To the contrary, the United States holds all the most powerful cards. Unblinking deterrence and relentless diplomacy can achieve U.S. objectives at a justifiable cost. Powerful deterrence buys us time for diplomatic success. Another fallacy often put forward: if we don't hurry, Kim will threaten America with nuclear blackmail and reunite the peninsula under his command. That fear is misplaced, and in fact illogical. First, the South Korean military is far, far superior to the North Korean armed forces, and by themselves could likely repel such an attack. What the United States should therefore do is engage in a rational, logical, and powerful two-part strategy: communicate determined deterrence through our superior fire power to ensure the safety of the United States and our allies, and engage in relentless diplomacy. It would take many years of consistent application, but this strategy would keep America safe and prevent the deaths of thousands, if not millions. The bottom line is there will be no war on the Korean peninsula unless we light the fuse. Let us instead exploit our economic, diplomatic, and military strengths to pursue a realistic strategy that keeps America safe. Commentary by Daniel L. Davis, a senior fellow for Defense Priorities and a former Army lieutenant colonel who retired in 2015 after 21 years, including four combat deployments. Follow him on Twitter @DanielLDavis1. For more insight from CNBC contributors, follow @CNBCopinion on Twitter. Automaker Nissan and tech firm DeNA will test out a self-driving taxi service in Japan. Nissan said Friday it would conduct a field test of the service, called Easy Ride, on March 5, in the Minatomirai district of Yokohama, along a set route of about 4.5 kilometers. The cars will contain a tablet that shows a list of recommended destinations and the test participants can communicate through text or voice with Easy Ride's mobile app to choose where they want to go. The development marks a challenge from a major auto manufacturer to ride-hailing upstarts like Uber that have transformed the private vehicle hire industry. Nissan and DeNA look to launch their autonomous taxi service to the wider public in the early 2020s. Prior to a wider release, Nissan said both firms would look to develop expanded service routes and the provision of support for multiple languages. Soon after the Republican National Committee came under pressure for paying legal bills for President Donald Trump and his eldest son in the special counsel's Russia probe, it started covering expenses for the president's re-election campaign. The RNC is using campaign funds to pay Trump's company more than $37,000 a month in rent, and to pay thousands of dollars in monthly salary to Vice President Mike Pence's nephew, John Pence, party officials confirmed this week. The rent pays for office space in the Trump Tower in New York for the staff of Trump's re-election campaign. John Pence is the Trump campaign's deputy executive director. Campaign finance experts who spoke to CNBC said this type of spending by a party committee on behalf of a campaign is highly unusual but legal, and it appears the RNC disclosed it correctly. Donald Trump boards the elevator to the lobby after meetings at Trump Tower in New York City. Dominick Reuter | AFP | Getty Images "This is permissible and it's being reported properly, but why they are doing it is a mystery," said Brendan Fischer, senior counsel for the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center. "One would think the RNC could be spending their money more effectively right now on the 2018 campaign, rather than spending it to pay Trump's rent." So far, the party has spent more than $290,000 to cover the Trump campaign's expenses since September, the first month it paid the Trump Tower rent or Pence's salary. Before then, both expenses had been paid directly by the Trump campaign. Then, in late September, the RNC abruptly began paying them both, and still does, according to financial disclosure forms released this week. On Sept. 19, CNN reported that the RNC had paid $230,000 in August to two lawyers representing Trump in special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election. The lawyers, John Dowd and Jay Sekulow, were paid through their law firms using money from a special RNC legal fund, the RNC disclosed in a subsequent filing. CNN also reported that the party spent $196,000 in early September on lawyers for Trump's son Donald Trump Jr., who was facing questions about a June 2016 meeting in Trump Tower with Russians who reportedly promised him dirt on Hillary Clinton. The August payments were disclosed by the RNC in a mandatory FEC report released Sept. 20. At the time, the party publicly defended its decision to pay Trump's lawyers with RNC funds. But privately, officials debated whether this was a proper use of the legal defense fund, which was originally intended to help pay for things like vote recounts, according to news reports. After a final payment on Sept. 18 to lawyers for Trump Jr., the RNC quietly stopped paying those attorneys and Dowd and Sekulow. On Sept. 27, one week after the FEC report was made public, the RNC paid the Trump campaign's rent for the first time, according to the party's monthly disclosure. The initial amount, $75,083.34, was twice the monthly rate and appears to cover the rent for both September and October. John Pence had begun receiving a paycheck from the RNC on Sept. 15, before the first FEC report was released, but after it had been finalized and submitted, according to the same filing. Below is the FEC's original record of the first rent payment the RNC made to Trump Tower. Subsequent payments, known as "coordinated expenditures," were each listed on monthly filings that the RNC submitted to the Federal Election Commission, but do not appear to have been reported by a news outlet until now. Officials at the RNC did not respond to calls or emails from CNBC on Friday, or to detailed questions about the arrangement. According to the committee's filings, the amounts are the same as what the Trump campaign had last paid in August. Rent is $37,541.67 a month payable to Trump Tower Commercial LLC. Pence's salary was $12,000 a month at the Trump campaign, and the RNC appears to be paying him the same or nearly the same amount, judging from the state and federal payroll taxes withheld. The RNC's most recent payment for the Trump campaign was made on Jan. 31, for what appears to be February rent. This is not the first time that a Republican committee has paid the Trump Organization for the use of its properties. Ever since Trump was elected president, his hotels have become the preferred venue for GOP fundraisers, especially the Trump International Hotel, opened by the Trump family in 2016, mere blocks from the White House in Washington. Donald Trump, center, cuts a ribbon with his sons Donald Trump Jr., from left, Eric Trump, his wife Melania Trump and his daughters Tiffany Trump and Ivanka Trump during the grand opening ceremony of the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., Oct. 26, 2016. Andrew Harrer | Bloomberg | Getty Images In August, The Washington Post reported that Republican committees had spent $1.3 million at Trump properties during the first eight months of 2017 -- spending that helped to offset losses elsewhere in the company. One of the Trump Organization's biggest political customers is the Trump campaign itself, which by any measure, is flush with cash. In 2017, the campaign and two affiliated committees raised $32 million and ended the year with $22 million in cash. This is in large part because the Trump campaign never ended. Trump filed the paperwork to run for re-election the day he was inaugurated, the first president ever to do so. Trump's predecessor, President Barack Obama, did not formally launch his re-election campaign until April 2011, after serving more than two full years in office. All of which makes it difficult to compare Trump's campaign and the RNC to Obama's relationship with his party's campaign arm, the Democratic National Committee. "There's really no comparison, because Obama's campaign didn't even have a headquarters in 2009 and 2010," said a former DNC official, when asked whether the party ever paid the rent for Obama's campaign headquarters. The former official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, explained that Obama's 2008 campaign was basically absorbed into the DNC, a system, he said, that could work just as well for Trump's small staff. "They could have a dedicated space at the RNC, or they could just join the RNC staff, which would be a lot more cost efficient for the campaign." The Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue in New York. Andrea Franceschini | Corbis News | Getty Images Trump's campaign, however, doesn't necessarily need to be efficient. "It's not like the Trump campaign doesn't have money on hand," said Campaign Legal Center's Fischer. "They've been actively fundraising since day one, so they have enough money to pay their own staff and payroll taxes." Officials at the Trump campaign did not respond to questions Friday from CNBC, including why they paid John Pence an additional $9,000 in December for "strategy consulting." Equally puzzling, Fischer said, is why the RNC would choose to begin coordinating with Trump now, three years before Election Day 2020. "There are limits to how much a party committee is allowed to spend on coordinated expenditures with a presidential candidate," he said. In 2016, the limit was $24 million, which may sound like a lot, but in reality was only 2 percent of the $1.2 billion that Republicans spent on the 2016 presidential race. "Why would [The RNC] be blowing through their allowed expenditures now, on something the campaign can easily afford?" Fischer said. "Did they think they needed to show loyalty to Trump by paying the rent at the building Trump owns?" CNBC relayed this question directly to officials at the RNC, who did not respond. The timing of the RNC's decision to start paying these campaign costs for Trump raised a number of eyebrows among experts and political operatives. "Committees generally don't pay for campaign headquarters," said the former DNC official. "And this far out from 2020 makes it even stranger." "If you follow the money, it sure looks like the Trump campaign is outsourcing payment for its bills to the Republican National Committee," said Stephen Spaulding, a former special counsel at the FEC who is now with the nonpartisan watchdog group Common Cause. "First the president was using RNC money to pay for his legal bills related to special counsel Mueller's investigation," he told CNBC. "Now cash from the RNC is apparently being used to cover payroll for the vice president's nephew and rent at Trump Tower for his 2020 campaign." "It looks to me like the RNC is shuttling cash around to benefit Trump and the vice president's family in ways that are pretty unprecedented," Spaulding added. Reached for comment, the White House referred questions to the RNC and the Trump campaign. A spokeswoman for the vice president declined to comment. WATCH: Trump reportedly using campaign, RNC funds to pay Russia probe legal bills A Vector Space Systems Vector-R rocket sits next to a launch tower at the Virginia Space mid-Atlantic regional spaceport (MARS), located on the southern portion of NASA Wallops Island. A group representing five U.S. private rocket companies visited Brazil in December to meet with the nation's space agency and analyze the possibility of launching from the equatorial Alcantara launch complex. The U.S. Department of Commerce was informed about the trip, which was organized by members of the private space industry. The group met with multiple Brazilian government and military officials and looked at facilities that may be suitable for manufacturing, assembling and launching satellites. The launch complex on Brazil's northern coast offers an opportunity to launch near the equator, much like the Guiana Space Centre, which is north of the equator in French Guiana. An equatorial launch complex offers the opportunity to decrease the amount of fuel the rockets need to reach geosynchronous orbits often the preferred location for satellites by as much as 20 percent or more, lowering the cost of each launch. Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Vector are interested in the cost savings Alcantara may offer to launch satellites. "Vector is very interested in the opportunity," Vector CEO Jim Cantrell told CNBC, adding that the visit included company representatives from Boeing, Lockheed Martin, SpaceX and Microcosm. "Alcantara has a number of advantages, one of them being its ability to reach geosynchronous orbit. It takes much less fuel to launch from the equator to those orbits," Cantrell said. Brazil's Defense Minister Raul Jungmann told reporters Thursday the complex may be able to support up to five launch pads, key to multiple companies establishing operations. Both Boeing and Lockheed said in statements that the companies are interested in speaking more to officials in Brazil. "While there are no formal decisions at this time, we look forward to a continued dialogue," a Lockheed Martin spokesperson told CNBC in a statement. Boeing, which sent two executives on the trip, also said in a statement that the company sees international partnerships as playing an important role as the space industry develops. "We look forward to Brazil's participation," Boeing said, which is also discussing a potential tie-up with Brazil's Embraer, which manufactures small commercial aircraft and military jets. The government holds a golden share in Embraer, allowing it to veto a deal that would change its controlling interest or involve strategic programs. Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg told CNBC last week that it is "getting closer" to a deal with Embraer that "will satisfy the needs of everybody involved." SpaceX does not share a continued interest in establishing launch operations at Alcantara, the company told CNBC. "Reports that SpaceX is interested in launching from Brazil are inaccurate," spokesperson John Taylor said in a statement. Microcosm, a low-cost rocket venture in Torrance, California, did not respond to a CNBC request for comment. Cantrell says the remaining hurdle to a deal with Brazil is the signing of a Technology Safeguards Agreement (TSA) with the U.S., to protect sensitive information about any rockets exported to Brazil. Under the voluntary Missile Technology Control Regime signed in 1995, Brazil shifted its space program from military to civilian control and put in place laws to protect foreign intellectual property. A TSA signed between the U.S. and Brazil in 2000 was not ratified in the communist-controlled Brazilian Senate, due to concerns of national sovereignty. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross told CNBC on Thursday the future of commercial space projects depends on colonizing the moon, as the current administration wants private industry to take the lead on furthering American interests in space. At a meeting of the National Space Council on Tuesday, Ross outlined reforms to deregulate the space industry. A new window of opportunity may be at hand for cooperation between the commercial space interests of the two governments. Brazilian lawmakers and military officials alike have expressed renewed eagerness to establish a new TSA, matched in turn by the interest of U.S. companies. A non-proliferation agreement with the U.S. may see Brazil become the next step in an increasingly valuable space industry. Vector is set to launch its first Vector-R rocket into orbit in July, the next major step toward the company's goal of launching more than 100 times per year. Boeing and Lockheed Martin are each working on crewed capsules one to send astronauts into orbit around the Earth and the other for deep space travel as well as building satellites and the new Space Launch System rocket for NASA. CNBC's Leslie Josephs contributed to this report. Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska plans to step down as the president of aluminium giant Rusal, the company said in a statement on Friday. The change comes less than a month after the inclusion of Deripaska and dozens of tycoons on a U.S. government list of Russian oligarchs. While it is not a sanctions list, Western banks may be reluctant to deal with companies whose owners are included. Deripaska also plans to quit the same role in En+ Group, another company he controls, two sources familiar with the matter told Reuters on Feb. 19. Hong Kong-listed Rusal is one of the world's largest aluminium producers. Deripaska's En+ owns a 48 percent stake in Rusal, which is a big consumer of hydroelectricity produced by En+'s power companies. Swiss Re reported better-than-expected 2017 net income on Friday despite huge claims during a disaster-heavy 2017 and ruled out a capital increase to ease an investment approach from Japan's Softbank that it was weighing. The world's second-biggest reinsurer posted net profit of $331 million, down from $3.56 billion a year earlier, but beating the average estimate of $119 million in a Reuters poll. Swiss Re had said this month it was in talks about SoftBank taking a minority stake in a deal that could be worth $10 billion or more. "We want to extend our access to risk pools, we want to stay on the forefront of technology and we want to make sure that we're helping the world address this protection gap," David Cole, chief financial officer at Swiss RE, told CNBC on Friday. When asked whether talks with Softbank could lead to the Japanese tech giant taking a minority stake thought be worth as much as $10 billion or more, Cole said he would not be able to comment on the timing of a possible deal or the current speculation regarding its rumored value. "If we come to the conclusion that we can reach an agreement that is in the interest of our shareholders and in the interest of the company, then we will have something to say about it then," he added. Soldiers after the Turkish military and the FSA liberated Afrin in northwestern Syria from the control of Kurdish militia during ongoing Operation Olive Branch on February 19, 2018. Beha El Halebi | Anadolu Agency | Getty Images While the war against ISIS in Syria may be drawing to a close, a separate, festering conflict has reached a tipping point. That's Turkey's discontent with the U.S.-backing of a Kurdish militia in Syria, and it is escalating with the Turkish military attacks on the Kurd-controlled district of Afrin in northern Syria. Called "Operation Olive Branch," the Turks are seeking to push the Kurds away from the Syria-Turkey border, and threatening to move their forces to other areas held by Kurdish forces. The issue here revolves around the U.S., Turkey, and the Syrian Kurdish militia known as the YPG. The U.S. military currently fights on the ground alongside the Syrian Democratic Forces, which consists largely of the Kurdish militia, in the war against ISIS. Ankara sees the YPG, however, as an extension of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) that has been fighting for autonomy since 1984. Both Washington and Turkey call the PKK a terrorist faction, and the Turkish government has vehemently objected to any U.S.-Kurd partnership. Turkey's patience boiled over when the U.S.-led coalition announced its plans to assemble and train a 30,000-strong security force, comprised of a significant number of the Kurdish militia, which would be deployed along the Turkish border. The disagreement could put the U.S. into a precarious position as its NATO ally in Ankara directs an armed conflict against another U.S. partner. A marriage of convenience Amanda Sloat, a senior fellow at the Center on the United States and Europe at D.C.-based think tank the Brookings Institution, told CNBC that the U.S. may have ties on both sides, but Washington is not deliberately playing both sides of the conflict. In order to tackle the rise of ISIS, which had overwhelmed Syria by September 2014, coupled with former U.S. President Barack Obama's unwillingness to commit a large American military contingent to the battlefield, the U.S. needed to partner with appropriate Syrian forces on the ground. "This proved to be an issue because many of the Syrian forces were more interested in fighting the Assad regime instead of ISIS," said Sloat, a former deputy assistant secretary for Southern Europe and Eastern Mediterranean affairs at the State Department. At that point in time, Turkey was more interested in creating a no-fly zone along the Turkish-Syrian border. Ankara was also in a disagreement with the U.S. about what forces it would be willing to commit. "Under this circumstance, the YPG emerged as the ideal partners for the war against ISIS," Sloat said. "The U.S. was reduced to pick from the best of the available options." Although the partnership was met with objections from Ankara, the State Department assured Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan that the co-operation was only temporary. "During the war against ISIS, the U.S. was able to quell Turkey's concerns with the greater good," Sloat said. "Kick the can down the road, if you will." Bulent Aliriza, the director of the Turkey Project at think tank the Center for Strategic and International Studies, agreed that the ISIS issue overshadowed Ankara's concerns at the start. "U.S. activity in Syria can be broken down into the before and after, of the emergence of ISIS," Aliriza, a former Turkish Cypriot diplomat in New York and Washington, said. "Initially, the U.S. wanted to overthrow Assad, thus seeking cooperation with Turkey. In 2014, however, the situation evolved into focusing solely on defeating ISIS, which meant cooperation with YPG on the ground." With a general consensus among the international community that ISIS has been essentially defeated in Syria, the U.S. no longer has that luxury of shelving the issue. Syrian fighters attend their graduation ceremony at the end of a US-led training programme aimed at forming a security force on January 20, 2018. Delil Souleiman | AFP | Getty Images A contradiction in US policy U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Secretary of Defense James Mattis have both officially and publicly said the U.S. would continue to remain in Syria to act as a stabilizing force and ensure radical groups do not re-emerge in the region. That essentially meant the continuation of the American partnership with the YPG. The U.S. mentality is partly based on experience with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the world's largest economy drew down from those countries after accomplishing initial military and security goals. Without any concrete plans for stabilizing the regions, the removal of American forces allowed for the current insecurity and destabilization in both countries. "The dynamics have now changed with ISIS' impending defeat and the fall of the caliphate," Aliriza said. Without an urgent war against terrorism in the region, Washington would be hard-pressed to justify its alliance with the Kurdish militia to its NATO ally in Ankara. "Turkey sees the partnership as an American security guarantee for the YPG and their activities in the region," Sloat explained, "The U.S., on the other hand, sees its presence as vital to counter Iranian influence and to support the liberated areas." The announcement for plans to build a border security force that would be situated close to the Turkish line led to a retaliation by Erdogan: "Operation Olive Branch." Essentially, it's an assault by Turkish forces on the Kurdish enclaves in Northern Syria to force the YPG away from the borders. "What's happened in Afrin is bringing the contradictions of U.S. policy to the forefront," Sloat said. "The move to build a border security force has led Turkey to further doubt the U.S. and their cooperation with the YPG." The biggest winner in Afrin A major player in the region may have well been behind the ongoing conflict, although it has remained relatively quiet. Many experts have claimed the real power in Syria is Russia. A staunch supporter of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad within the international community, Russia's influence in the country outweighs that of the U.S. and the Kremlin may actually be the one that is playing both sides in the conflict. That is, Moscow is allowing Turkish use of the airspace it controls for "Olive Branch" while simultaneously brokering a deal with the YPG that may ultimately extend Assad's power. "Russia stands to gain from an alliance between the Syrian Kurds and Assad," Aliriza said. Moscow had attempted to negotiate a deal with the Syrian Kurds back in July 2017, offering the group protection if it handed over Afrin to Assad. The Kurds rejected the offer at the time, but the hope is that the Damascus forces will now be welcomed in the face of the Turkish assault. Meanwhile, the airspace above Afrin is totally controlled by Moscow, so everything Turkey is doing in the region is happening because Russia allows it, according to Aliriza. Perhaps not coincidentally, Moscow pulled its troops out of Afrin just before Turkey went on the offensive last month. "This makes perfect sense, because this forces the Kurds to take action they didn't want to before, allowing Assad's forces to enter Afrin and playing into Russia's hands," Aliriza said. Hundreds of people attend a march in support of 'Operation Olive Branch and Turkish Soldiers' in Ankara's Pursaklar district,Turkey on February 16, 2018. Emin Sansar | Anadolu Agency | Getty Images Quelling the flames The list of companies terminating their partnerships with the National Rifle Association is growing as public outcry against the gun group escalates following the deadliest mass shooting at a public high school in U.S. history. Delta and United Airlines said Saturday they will end group airfare discounts for NRA members and they were in the process of informing the gun group of this decision. Moving companies North American Van Lines and Allied Van Lines also ended their discounts with the group over the weekend. FedEx though refusing to end special discounts to NRA members condemned the prevalence of assault rifles in the United States and said Monday it supports restricting them to members of the military. "FedEx views assault rifles and large capacity magazines as an inherent potential danger to schools, workplaces, and communities when such weapons are misused. We therefore support restricting them to the military. Most important, FedEx believes urgent action is required at the local, state, and Federal level to protect schools and students from incidents such as the horrific tragedy in Florida on February 14th," FedEx said in a statement. FedEx added Tuesday that its discounts apply only to NRA members, not the organization itself. Since the 1960s, when the federal government began winding down construction of the interstate highway system, federal spending for public projects has steadily fallen as a percent of GDP. Last year, the American Society of Civil Engineers gave the nation's infrastructure a D+ grade in its latest annual report. After years of underfunding, it will take trillions of dollars to make the needed repairs. The cost of doing nothing would be even higher, according to the group's analysis. By 2025, the impact of lost business, higher transportation costs and other economic headwinds would wipe out about $4 trillion in GDP, and approximately 2.5 million jobs. Faced with rising pension costs and tax-weary voters, state governments have also been cutting infrastructure spending as a share of the economy. Over the past half decade, state and local government spending on capital projects dropped from its high of 3 percent of GDP to less than 2 percent in 2015, according a report last year from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Some states have decided they can no longer wait for Washington to come up with a solution. In the last two years, a handful of states have moved to raise gasoline taxes to fund transportation repairs and upgrades. The Trump administration also has suggested that some of the funding could come from private investment, which has financed several dozen public projects in the past two decades. But the idea has had only mixed success. By contrast, Friday's Washington Post report says U.S. intelligence has intercepted communications made by Russian businessman Yevgeniy Prigozhin claiming that he had permission from a Russian minister to move forward with a "fast and strong" action in early February. Another intelligence report says that on January 30, Prigozhin promised that he had a "good surprise" coming for Assad in between February 6 and 9. If Prigozhin's name sounds familiar, it should. He's also one of the Russians indicted by special counsel Robert Mueller last week on charges of funding and organizing the online "troll farm" operations trying to influence voters in the 2016 U.S. election. The real problem here is that Prigozhin hardly seems like a rogue actor in either case. His connections to Putin go back decades and they are close ties indeed. As a youth, Prigozhin did jail time and Russia experts say that's what's made him the man Putin often turns to for the "dirty jobs." So far, the Pentagon is not publicly confirming these reports. The Kremlin is strongly denying its involvement in the Syria attack. But the evidence is strong and serious. Now the question is: What can the U.S. do about it? The best answer for now is to make staying in Syria even more costly and controversial than it already is for Moscow. The first move has to include the State Department denouncing Russia's connections to this attack. It should threaten to pull out of the cooperative agreement the U.S. has with Russia that has allowed both nations' militaries to operate in Syria for several years now. It's true that doing so would create some new headaches for American commanders. But if Russian mercenaries are deliberately attacking Americans anyway, it's fair to say the cooperation agreement isn't worth much as it is. Second, it's time to give Russia a little of its own medicine when it comes to asking its people to reconsider their political support for the Kremlin. Russian-sponsored conventional media and social media platforms routinely question America's presence in Syria. President Donald Trump should ask the Russian people directly whether they continue to support Russia's involvement in Syria now that it's starting to cost Russian lives. Some of that has happened on its own. Family members of some of the Russian mercenaries killed in Syria are starting to publicly complain about the incident. The fact that the Russian people may not support this Syrian adventure is something Trump should bring up in talks with Putin and in the news media. Putin rules Russia with an iron fist to be sure, but growing public anger over dead loved ones is something even dictators can't always control. Finally, the carrot that can go along with the sticks mentioned above is an offer to provide Moscow sanctions relief for withdrawing these mercenaries from Syria. The bottom line is that the U.S. cannot stand by and do nothing in response to this development. If we're going to indict and condemn Russians for election meddling that may or may not have had an impact, then there should be a proportionally stronger response to an armed attack on our soldiers. If both the pro-Trump and resist-Trump movements can just calm down for a moment, they should start to notice that they both have the exact same enemy. In this case, it's not just the same country but the same individual person. If these acts of aggression against U.S. voters at home and troops overseas can't unite us, then perhaps nothing will. 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 isn't doing enough to tackle the gun issue facing the country, Rep. Tim Ryan, D-Ohio, told CNBC on Friday. In a joint news conference with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull on Friday, Trump repeated his calls for improved background checks, eliminating bump stocks and arming some teachers. "The president came up short. We need a firmer position from him. We have to get these weapons of war off the street," said Ryan, referring to assault weapons like the AR-15 used in the recent mass shooting at a Florida high school. "They are meant for war. They are not meant for kids to get or citizens in the country to have," he told "Power Lunch." Ryan also called for a universal background check, including for people at gun shows and those buying weapons through personal sales. "We have to close those loopholes up," he said. Bipartisan senators have put forward a narrow bill to improve the existing background check system, which Trump has said he supports. "We'll be putting in strong language having to do with the background checks and that will take place very quickly. I spoke with Paul Ryan this morning, with Mitch McConnell and people are looking to really energize," Trump said during Friday's news conference. He also once again repeated his call to allow some teachers to carry guns, saying the problem won't be solved with "gun-free spaces." "We need offensive capability. And we're going to be doing something about it. We're dealing with Congress right now," Trump said. "I'm not talking about every teacher. I'm talking about a small percentage but people that have great ability with weaponry, with guns," he added. President Donald Trump said Friday "we'll have to see" what the United States will do if sanctions on North Korea fail to deter its nuclear and missile programs. However, he cryptically warned of a potential "phase two," which may prove "very, very unfortunate for the world." He did not give more details on what action he would take or when he would consider the sanctions failed. "If the sanctions don't work, we'll have to go phase two. Phase two may be a very rough thing. It may be very, very unfortunate for the world. But hopefully the sanctions will work," Trump said at a joint news conference with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull. Earlier in the day, the Trump administration announced a sweeping sanctions package aimed at curbing the communist dictatorship's weapons development. The measures target one individual, 27 entities and 28 vessels, located or registered in several locations: North Korea, China, Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong, the Marshall Islands, Tanzania, Panama and Comoros, the Treasury Department said. The United States and its allies have tried to choke off financing for Pyongyang's nuclear and missile programs. The strategy includes sanctioning entities that the U.S. believes provide oil and other financial assistance to North Korea. Last year, North Korea carried out numerous missile launches as well as its sixth and most powerful nuclear test. The Treasury Department called the sanctions package unveiled Friday the "largest North Korea-related sanctions tranche to date." In a statement, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said the U.S. is "taking decisive action to block the vessels, shipping companies, and entities across the globe that work on North Korea's behalf." While Trump's advisors have said they do not want to take military action against the rogue regime, Trump has previously responded to North Korea's provocations with explosive rhetoric. Last year, he said he would bring "fire and fury like the world has never seen" on the country if it threatened the United States. Speaking with Trump on Friday, Turnbull said Australia is also committed to deterring North Korea's weapons program through its own sanctions and by enforcing United Nations Security Council measures. The Trump administration announced sweeping new sanctions Friday in its effort to stop North Korea's weapons development. The Treasury Department unveiled the sanctions on 56 shipping vessels and entities as the U.S. tries to isolate the rogue regime. President Donald Trump promoted the measures Friday at the end of a freewheeling speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference, saying he hoped they would make a difference. "We imposed today the heaviest sanctions ever imposed on a country before," Trump said, without detailing his evidence for the statement. "Frankly, hopefully, something positive can happen." While the Treasury called it the "largest North Korea-related sanctions tranche to date," it is not clear if it is the largest imposed on any country. The measures target one individual, 27 entities and 28 vessels, according to the Treasury. They are located or registered in several locations: North Korea, China, Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong, the Marshall Islands, Tanzania, Panama, and Comoros, the agency said. "Treasury is aggressively targeting all illicit avenues used by North Korea to evade sanctions, including taking decisive action to block the vessels, shipping companies, and entities across the globe that work on North Korea's behalf," Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said in a statement. "This will significantly hinder the Kim regime's capacity to conduct evasive maritime activities that facilitate illicit coal and fuel transports, and erode its abilities to ship goods through international waters." The U.S. and its allies have enacted a series of sanctions in an attempt to cut off funding for Pyongyang's ongoing nuclear and missile tests. Despite the economic pressure, North Korea has shown few signs of backing down from its aggressive rhetoric and weapons development. Part of the strategy includes stopping oil shipments to the communist dictatorship, and reports suggest North Korea has gotten help in evading sanctions. The U.S. has tried to get China Pyongyang's only major ally to apply as much economic pressure as possible. Mnuchin told reporters Friday that "we believe that the economic sanctions are beginning to have a significant impact on their ability to fund their programs." He did not provide evidence to back the claim. Trump has repeatedly exchanged explosive rhetoric with North Korea's Kim Jong Un since he took office in January 2017. Last year, he said North Korean threats "will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen." He also boasted that he had a "Nuclear Button" that is "bigger and more powerful" than Kim's. While Trump has issued multiple threats toward North Korea, his advisors have repeatedly said the U.S. does not want to use military force. Asked Friday what options the U.S. has if sanctions do not work, Mnuchin would not go into detail. He told reporters: "I don't think we're going to make any comments on what our options are or aren't in the future. We will continue to roll out new sanctions." "Based on its pie-in-the-sky algorithms centered on very little direct federal funding, the plan is being met with skepticism at almost every level of government. Local government leaders are already revenue-constrained and swimming in debt. To say they are disappointed is a huge understatement." As written, the infrastructure plan allocates $20 billion each year over the next decade. But, to get to the promised $1.5 trillion, all other revenue must come from outside sources. State and local government leaders, under the plan, will be required to find or cobble together about 80 percent of a project's anticipated cost before being eligible to compete for federal funding assistance. That's a major hurdle. Based on its pie-in-the-sky algorithms centered on very little direct federal funding, the plan is being met with skepticism at almost every level of government. Local government leaders are already revenue-constrained and swimming in debt. To say they are disappointed is a huge understatement. The administration's plan will likely be picked to pieces over the days and weeks ahead, but there is a viable solution to the problem - and it rests with readily available funding from the capital-rich foundations, EB5 programs, public pension funds and private-sector investors. Those alternative funding sources are abundantly available. Not only is the funding available the experience and expertise that comes with it is attractive. Other countries have been involved in public-private partnerships for the last three decades. Collaborative joint venture projects have been successful for all types of infrastructure projects. There are "best practices" and decades of excellent guidance available for public officials. Some want to argue that this type of funding will be more expensive but those detractors have failed to factor in the cost associated with the benefit of transferring all risk of the project to an outside partner. And, while the cost of capital could be some degree greater, many cities and counties cannot incur more debt and citizens don't want user fees. The funding has to come from somewhere. The cost of continued neglect is much greater. Negative statements also come from citizens who don't understand the benefits of alternative funding options. They fail to realize that at the end of the project the governmental entity will own a new or enhanced public assetSome detractors believe that public private partnerships are only funded through user fees. That's simply not true. There are thousands of examples of infrastructure projects that are funded from retail development around the project that generates revenue for decades. And, some projects are funded through lease agreements or from savings obtained through efficiencies. Citizens who are concerned about fraud should know that in any contractual agreement for large public projects, the final authority and oversight and transparency is dictated by public officials. Misconceptions related to collaborative engagements have been extremely harmful to infrastructure reform in the U.S. If and when government officials are willing to step out and announce a stable, well-developed project with a long term repayment model, investors will line up to talk about investing and partnering on the project. In the case of public-private partnerships, it's a win-win for all stakeholders - investors, the government entity and taxpayers. Not only will most of the cost and risk be borne by the private partner, the public entity will also not have to worry about maintenance or upgrades over the term of the agreement. The private-sector partner will be responsible and at the end of the contract the new and/or enhanced public asset will be handed back to the public entity. What's not to like about that? The public gets a new or enhanced asset with no debt. The chances of the administration's plan being passed as written are, as the saying goes, "slim to none." But, Congress has no option at this point something good must come from this. Time is the enemy and the economic viability of the country is at stake, not to mention the potential for economic prosperity for all citizens. Commentary by Mary Scott Nabers, a former Texas Railroad commissioner, is the president/CEO of Strategic Partnerships, Inc. She is an expert on partnering public and private entities. Her latest book is "Inside the Infrastructure Revolution: A Roadmap for Rebuilding America." For more insight from CNBC contributors, follow @CNBCopinion on Twitter. The new corporate tax cuts in the United States can make a "massive difference" when it comes to deciding where to make business investments, the CEO of global mining company Rio Tinto told CNBC on Friday. Based in Australia and London, the company has 3,200 employees in the U.S. Rio Tinto supplies one-third of all aluminum in the U.S. and 13 percent of the country's copper, Jean-Sebastien Jacques said in an interview with "Power Lunch." "We have some real options as we speak in terms of further investment in copper and further investment in aluminum in Canada as well," he said. Rio Tinto process "a lot" of aluminum in Canada, with the bulk of it sent to the U.S., Jacques said. "We are a capital intensive business," he added. "When we make an investment it's usually 25 years to 40 years." Jacques was part of the Australian delegation visiting the White House on Friday and participated in a meeting with White House economic advisor Gary Cohn. While he wouldn't disclose the details of the meeting, he said infrastructure was a big part of the conversation. "We love infrastructure," he said, pointing out that Rio Tinto would like to support it "in a big way." "If you have more infrastructure requirements, you are going to need more copper, you are going to need more aluminum," he said. "We are here. We have more investment, potentially." Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull was expected to bring up infrastructure as part of his meeting with President Donald Trump on Friday. The first world leader to be received at the White House in Trump's second year, Turnbull was set to propose using a portion of funds in Australia's nearly $2 trillion pension fund to invest in U.S. infrastructure. He was also expected to try to convince the U.S. to rejoin the Trans-Pacific Partnership. CNBC's Kayla Tausche and Stephanie Dhue contributed to this report. [The stream is slated to start at 2 p.m., ET. Please refresh the page if you do not see a player above at that time.] President Donald Trump holds a joint news conference Friday afternoon as Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull visits the White House. The leaders could face questions about efforts to curb North Korea's nuclear and missile programs after the Trump administration announced new sanctions against the communist dictatorship. Trump could also address efforts to change gun laws following the massacre of 17 people at a Florida high school last week. Also at 2 p.m., former Trump campaign aide Rick Gates is expected to plead guilty to charges stemming from special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election. The charges are unrelated to his work on the campaign. Read more: Trump administration unveils sweeping new sanctions targeting North Korea Trump, at CPAC, doubles down on his support for giving teachers guns The once little-known element cobalt is rapidly rising in price, and some warn shortages could hit the metal in the future. The proliferation of lithium-ion batteries, of which cobalt is a key ingredient, in electronics and electrified vehicles is the chief factor fueling this rise in price and concerns among companies over the security of their supplies. Prices for the metal more than doubled in 2017 over the previous year, according to the United States Geological Survey. Some companies have responded to the jump by looking for ways to secure stocks for their own supply chains. Apple is reportedly trying to procure its cobalt directly from miners. Automakers such as BMW and Volkswagen have also reportedly been taking similar steps. Demand for cobalt in vehicle battery materials is expected to grow over 40 percent in 2018, according to U.K.-based cobalt trading firm Darton Commodities. Electric and hybrid vehicle adoption in China and Europe are expected to be significant contributors, and the production ramp of the Tesla Model 3 is expected to be the major driver of EV adoption in the U.S., Darton said in its annual Cobalt Market Review report published in February. While engineers can sometimes find ways to change designs or use substitutes for some elements, cobalt could be tough to replace. There are potential substitutes, but substitution in some uses may lead to losses in performance. "There isn't a better element than nickel to increase energy density, and there isn't a better element than cobalt to make the stuff stable," said Marc Grynberg, CEO of materials company Umicore, in an interview with Reuters. "So (while) you hear about designing out cobalt, this is not going to happen in the next three decades. It simply doesn't work." One potential snag is the fact that the majority of the world's cobalt is mined as a byproduct of some other metal mining. In 2017, about 69 percent of the world's cobalt was mined as a copper byproduct and 29 percent as a nickel byproduct. So the availability of cobalt right now is pretty heavily dependent on the health of the markets for copper and nickel. Mining companies such as ERG and Glencore are planning new cobalt operations that may balance supply and demand in the near term, but if electrified vehicles continue to gain market share, any stabilization may be short-lived. "While production increases are expected to level off by around 2022, demand is expected to accelerate further as EVs will be close to reaching cost parity with [internal combustion engine] vehicles by this time," said Darton in its report. Perhaps you've recently wondered if your money is in gun stocks, and if you can or should take it out. Warning: The answer is complicated. It's very possible that you are an investor in the major gunmakers. An analysis by the nonprofit advocacy group Goodbye Gun Stocks found that 35 percent of U.S. stock mutual funds contain investments in a maker or retailer of guns and ammunition. You can check to see if your investment fund is "gun-free," or how much of your money goes to guns, on their website. Vanguard also offers its investors a way to screen funds for specific holdings. Concerned investors can also ask their financial advisor for a breakdown of exactly where their money is flowing. Rick Rodgers, director at Innovest Portfolio Solutions, says investors often assume their financial advisors have screened investments for certain companies the investor might find problematic, when in fact they haven't. Better communication is needed, he said. "Describe what you wish not to invest in," Rodgers said. "Have the advisor present evidence that they've done the screening." Yet experts say divestment isn't necessarily the best route if, say, you would like to see more gun controls put in place. Jamie Cox of Harris Financial Group, which manages $500 million for about 800 middle-class families, recommends what might seem a counter-intuitive approach: Don't sell your shares. "You're better to band together and become a bigger fraction of ownership," Cox said. He pointed to recent news that BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager and one of the biggest shareholders of gunmakers, announced on Thursday it will speak to gunmakers about society's expectations as mass shootings have become disturbingly common. "If they're managing money on behalf of millions of Americans and they accumulate a large position in company X, they can influence decision making within the corporation," Cox said. He added, "Just because you sell the stock doesn't mean the company doesn't continue to operate. The better way is to come up with rules." The Republican Governors Association says Greitens has stepped down from its executive committee, and the firm representing the former husband of the woman with whom the governor admitted having an affair says his client would like never to hear Greitens' name again. Types of obituaries The Missourian publishes two types of obituaries family obituaries and life stories. A family obituary is the version submitted by a funeral home or family. Please see the submission form for details on cost and deadlines. Family obituaries A life story is a closer look at a person's life and involves a reporter contacting family and friends. Life stories are based on newsworthiness and consent of the family. Life stories. The Missourians Opinion section is a public forum for the discussion of ideas. The views presented in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Missourian or the University of Missouri. If you would like to contribute to the Opinion page with a response or an original topic of your own, visit our submission form Google, as promised, has launched the Chrome browser ad-blocking feature it has touted for nearly a year. Although not the first such effort by a browser maker, Google's decision - effectively a pre-emptive strike against even more users turning to independent add-ons for killing online advertisements - has both import and impact by virtue of Chrome's dominance. With more than 61% of all browser users running Chrome as of January, according to analytics vendor Net Applications, when Google's browser whispers, the web listens. Sites that instead tune out last week's move do so at their peril. Just what is Chrome's ad blocking - Google likes to call it "ad filtering" - really all about? How does it work and what's the reasoning behind it? All good questions. We've got the answers. What is Chrome ad filtering? Google has dubbed Chrome's new functionality an "ad filter" rather than calling it an "ad blocker," the far-more-common label for separate or baked-into-the-browser software that scrubs online ads from website pages. That's because Chrome does not, as do most ad blockers, eliminate all ads from all sites, then close up the now-empty spaces to make the page look more or less composed. Instead, Chrome looks for certain types of ads, those that the Coalition for Better Ads (CBA) says violate what the industry group calls its "Better Ads Standards," then expunges ads from the sites displaying such pitches. The standards have identified several ad types on the personal computer desktop and on mobile devices that CBA-released research claimed are the most annoying of all online advertisements. On a PC, Chrome looks for four ad categories out of six considered by the panel: pop-ups, ads that automatically play video and audio, "prestitial" ads accompanied by a countdown clock, and those dubbed "large sticky ads," which blanket more than 30% of the screen and remain in place no matter how much the user scrolls. Chrome sniffs out a different mix - eight kinds of ads from the dozen originally scrutinized - when it's running on the Android and iOS mobile operating systems. Google/CBA The Better Ads Standards consists of 12 ad types that users reported as particularly annoying. Google is walking a tightrope calling its approach filtering (rather than blocking) because the end result on sites struck by Chrome is the same as if an ad-blocker add-on was installed: All ads have been "disappeared." The filtering Chrome does is on a site-by-site basis, not ad-by-ad, something that some commentary about the new functionality failed to mention. How does Chrome's ad filtering work? The multi-step process Google has implemented starts with an automated evaluation of a sampling of a site's pages that tallies violations of the coalition standards. Each site is handed a grade: Passing, Warning or Failing. A warning means that the site has "a number of ad experiences that violate the Better Ads Standard," which the site administrator should correct before re-submitting for a follow-up review. A failing mark means "numerous" violations were found, and that the site owner has 30 days to make changes and request a second review. Ad filtering kicks in after that grace period if fixes are not implemented. Once ad filtering begins, Chrome will scrub advertisements from a site for at least 30 days, because review submissions after the first two cannot be made until 30 days have passed. Failing-grade sites get added to a list that Google maintains on its servers. Chrome uses that blacklist to look up URLs. When it finds a match - the browser has been steered to a site with a Failed grade - Chrome does another look-up, this time to a set of ad "fingerprints" caged from EasyList, the open-source ad-identification-and-removal rules list that forms the backbone of most browser ad blockers, including Adblock and Adblock Plus. At that point, Chrome declines to honor the page's requests for ads, preventing them from appearing because they're never loaded. (Most ads are served by third-party networks, not directly from the servers running the site on which those ads run.) On any page with at least one omitted ad, Chrome notifies the user with an "Ads blocked" message. That, in turn, can be expanded to display a description which reports, "This site tends to show intrusive ads," along with an option to turn off the browser's filtering for that site. Google Though Chrome will automatically block intrusive ads that violate the Better Ads Standards, users can disable the feature. This is important to remember: On sites that have failed the eval, all ads are eliminated, not just the ones that led to the violation in the first place. Think of the ads that led to the failing grade as triggers for Chrome to cleanse the site of every advertisement. Google has not always led its announcements with that information. But in December, in an update on the anti-ad campaign, Google stated, "Starting on Feb. 15 ... Chrome will remove all ads from sites that have a 'failing' status in the Ad Experience Report for more than 30 days [emphasis added]." Why is Google doing this? In June 2016, when Google broached the ad filtering idea, it cited a 30% year-over-year increase in the use of browser ad-blocking extensions, fueled by "overwhelmingly frustrating or intrusive" ads. "This reduces the ability for publishers to continue creating free content and threatens the sustainability of the web ecosystem," the company explained. Although Google has at times touted as a reason for restricting ads its desire to improve the user experience of Chrome, it has most often stressed the importance of keeping online advertising's reputation from bottoming out. That's no surprise: The company's rise to dominance was fed by ad revenue, specifically the ads users see when they run Google's search engine. By extension, what poisons, or even taints, the online advertising well may, at some point, directly affect Google's ad revenue. Google has incredible motivation to do whatever it takes to ensure that does not happen. One hint that Google's ad-blocking rationale differs from other browser makers' appeared in the company's announcement last week that it had switched on ad filtering. "We're encouraged by early results showing industry shifts away from intrusive ad experiences and look forwarding to continued collaboration with the industry toward a future where Chrome's ad filtering technology will not be needed," Chris Bentzel, an engineering manager on the browser team, wrote in a Google blog post. Bentzel was referring to a statistic he cited that said more than 40% of the sites tagged as failing in the early evaluations had dumped the offending ads to become compliant. Other browsers that have declared war on ads, or some types of ads - Brave is one example - have been explicit in trumpeting the boost in performance that results when ads aren't rendered on a web page - not the long-term benefit to publishers and a rescue of online advertising. How does Chrome's ad filtering affect browsing? Most people using Chrome after Feb. 15 won't notice a difference. According to Google, just 1.5% of 100,000 sites it evaluated prior to the ad filtering launch failed to meet CBA standards. And of those, only 0.9% displayed excessive numbers of the annoying ad categories. For the multiplication-challenged, that means of every 100,000 websites, Chrome would scratch out ads on about 14 sites. Hardly web-shakin'. How can site publishers sidestep Chrome's ad filtering and blocking? That's a good question, and so far, the answer from the CBA is unclear. The organization has said that site publishers who seek and are granted "certification" would be immune from Chrome's blockade. According to a statement from the CBA last week, Google wants to be among the entities allowed to access compliance and thus "certify" - whatever that means - publishers. Key, however, is that Chrome will be kept at bay by certification. "Google has informed the Coalition that it will not filter ads for any company certified under the Program's requirements," the CBA said in the statement. The CBA won't charge for letting a site publisher self-certify, at least not immediately. "Enrollment by each interested publisher allows the company and its domains to be included in the Program's register," the CBA added. "Initial publisher registration will be free of charge until at least July 1. Thereafter, registration may be on a fee basis [emphasis added]." Elsewhere, the CBA confirmed that fees, if there are any, will be annual. It would be foolish to bet against a fees-at-some-point reality. The CBA itself implied as much on its website, where it dubbed the "Better Ads Experience Program" and spelled out the benefits to registration/certification. "This Program has been created by the Coalition for Better Ads to support its mission to improve the online advertising experience for consumers and promote adoption of the Better Ads Standards [emphasis added]." The group also said that fees, if any, would be announced at least 30 days prior to the termination of the free trial run, another clue that money will play a part. Labours Brexit fudge would allow the EU to sign us up to deals like TTIP with no veto or NHS safeguard Not for the first time, the Labour Party is set to adopt yet another new position on Brexit. We dont yet know exactly what Jeremy Corbyn will say in his forthcoming speech, but the heavy implication coming from Emily Thornberry and others is that he will support a new customs union with the EU. In practice, of course, behind the spin we may well see another Corbyn fudge which seeks to close off criticisms rather than address reality. Just think of their old line about replicating all the benefits of the Single Market but without any lost power or free movement that excuse lasted the Opposition for months, despite being completely fantastical. This is the same gravity-defying illogic that claims nationalisation wont cost a penny, and they dont mind using it. So dont be surprised if Labours new aim is a moon-on-a-stick Brexit of one sort or another. The concept of some kind of replicated or partial customs union offers some convenient upsides to Corbyn. It wouldnt necessarily require free movement, which could square away some of the Labour MPs worried about the more UKIP-ish Leave voters in their constituencies. And it might placate some of the more obsessive EU fans on his benches, whove talked themselves into believing that any sort of independent trade policy is impossible, despite the success of most of the world in doing just that. I do wonder, though, if Labour have fully thought through the implications of a Turkey-style partial customs union. The effective abandonment of the power for the UK to set its own trade policy and strike its own trade deals might not seem like a bad thing if you find trade suspiciously capitalist. It would mean ditching new economic opportunities, but Labour might not mind that given they dont appear to even support economic growth any longer. More dangerous to their position is the fact that a Turkey-style arrangement does not just mean sacrificing the power to make our own trade deals in lots of areas. It means allowing the EU to open up our markets as and when it wishes, through its own trade deals, with no consideration of UK interests, or consultation with the British Government, and no improved access for British exports. Heres a description of that deeply unattractive idea, written by none other than Barry Gardiner, Labours Shadow Trade secretary: were, say, the EU to negotiate an agreement with the US that was in the unions best interests but against our own, our markets would be obliged to accept American produce with no guarantee of reciprocal access for our own goods into the US. Emily Thornberry describes such a relationship as a partnership, but in reality it is anything but, as I laid out earlier this week. Theres a political danger, too. Consider all the concern much of it raised by Labour about the prospect of TTIP, the EUs proposed trade deal with the United States. Its critics feared that it would open up the NHS to American companies. Indeed, Corbyn was so worried about this possibility that he pledged to oppose the whole deal to avoid this risk, and the Government sought specific exemptions. And yet the customs union plan apparently set to be adopted by Corbyn and the Labour front bench would allow the EU to do deals opening up our markets in exactly this way, with no power for Parliament or anyone else in the UK to prevent them. Could Labour really be about to support a proposal which would allow the EU to offer up the NHS as part of its trade deals, without the democratic right for the UK to refuse? Iain Dale is Presenter of LBC Drive, Managing Director of Biteback Publishing, a columnist and broadcaster, and a former Conservative Parliamentary candidate. Balanced broadcasting is all about offending people equally so this week I furthered that cause by offending both Muslims and Jews. Twice. On successive days, I did phone-ins on whether Iceland is right to ban male circumcision, and then on whether Halal and Kosher animal slaughter should be outlawed in this country. Its safe to say that peace and harmony didnt break out on either subject. Im quite clear that I dont believe in inflicting unnecessary pain on babies or animals a view which doesnt seem to be prevalent among proponents of either religion. Indeed, it was seriously argued that circumcision causes no pain to babies because they cant feel it. It was likened to a paper cut, can you believe. It was also argued that its more hygienic not to have a foreskin. The point no-one could counter was when I said that if God hadnt wanted us to have a foreskin, he wouldnt have given us one. And if it was so useless, why hasnt it been bred out of us? People also argued that slitting an animals throat causes it no pain. They claimed it severed a nerve. Luckily, a vet rang in to explain to these poor deluded fools that they have been misled, and that the animals would be in a great deal of pain. The fact that many Halal/Kosher abattoirs fail hygiene tests didnt seem to worry the proponents of religious slaughter. I was also informed by my guest from Halal Consultations that the Prophet Mohammed himself had decreed that animals should be slaughtered in this way. I perhaps didnt help interfaith understanding by telling him: I dont care what your prophet thinks: we live in the twenty-first century, not the Dark Ages but there we go. If we cant, as a society, agree that if we have to kill chickens, sheep and cows so we can eat them, then pain must be minimised as much as possible, how can we describe ourselves as humane? So net immigration from the EU has dipped below 100,000 for the first time since 2013. If you voted Brexit and immigration was a reason, you probably view this with a degree of positivity. If you voted Remain, however, you may think its a sign that were on the highway to hell, and that this is yet further evidence of economic bad news. On the other hand, if youre like me you probably shrug your shoulders and despair at those at either extreme. They key word here is net. There are still 90,000 more EU nationals coming here than are leaving. Given that we cant fill thousands of jobs with domestic workers, I cant really foresee a time when this will change. It may be that the numbers from the EU drop because we will presumably not be giving EU nationals preference over people from other countries outside the EU. If we dont do that, it would be rather pointless to have left in the first place. Following the release of the immigration figures, George Eaton, the Political Editor of the New Statesman, tweeted: Net migration from the EU to the UK has fallen below 100,000 for the first time in nearly five years. The Brexodus is underway. Eaton is an intelligent man, but this is just utter bollocks. Either he doesnt understand the term net migration, or he is suffering from the same sort of post Brexit PTSD that has afflicted A C Grayling, among others by which their Remainery blinds them to simple facts. A Brexodus is not underway. Far from it. There are now 3.8 million EU nationals in the UK. In June 2016, there were just under 3.6 million. It would be nice if George admitted he was wrong, but I wont hold my breath. On Wednesday night I went for dinner with a friend at the Gay Hussar in Soho. Its a famous haunt for politicos, but has for some time been in danger of going out of business because its landlord wants it closed. I joined a co-operative a few years ago, designed to raise money to fight a legal challenge if necessary. So I suppose I am a very minor shareholder in it. Its food is mainly Hungarian, and in the past had a reputation, shall we say, for being a bit sh*t. So I was delighted to find it has massively improved! I had the Goulash soup to start with followed by a very tasty Wiener Schnitzel with a pepper salad. I did, however, forget to check if it had been killed in a non Halal or Kosher way My bad. I dont know how many of you listen to Matt Fordes Political Party podcast, but if you dont, check out his interview with James Cleverly, recorded in front of a live audience. Its 90 minutes long and I have to say its one of the funniest, most engaging interviews with a politician I have heard in a very long time. James is naturally funny, but he managed to combine being funny with making some very good political arguments in front of an audience, which I suspect was rather anti-Conservative by its very nature. Some politicians can be very funny at the expense of their own party and colleagues. James didnt fall into that trap, or of behaving like a pundit/commentator rather than an active politician. So many politicians become robots in settings like this, but James isnt of that ilk. Some of his colleagues should have a listen, and then learn. Last May, I started a new political panel debate on CNN International called CNN Talk, alongside Liam Halligan from the Daily Telegraph, and the former Labour SPAD, Ayesha Hazarika. Chaired by CNNs Max Foster, it soon become quite a popular addition to their schedule. Initially shown once a week on Fridays at noon, in September it added a second show on a Monday. From next week it goes three times a week with a Wednesday show added, also at midday. I think it works because the three of us get along well and like each other, but were not afraid to have a real row if there is genuine disagreement. And Max lets us get on with it, without it all being about him. Other presenters could learn a lot from how he chairs the debates. If youve never seen the show, do tune in at midday on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays on Channel 506 on Sky, or its also streamed live on the CNN Facebook page. The comments from people who view it there are also fed into the show from all around the globe. The universities are sometimes thought to consist entirely of Remainers who are determined to thwart Brexit and silence anyone who disagrees with them. This view was last night demolished at University College London. For UCL hosted a meeting entitled The Intellectual Case for Brexit. It is true that other views are still entertained there: Nick Clegg recently spoke in the same series, organised by the UCL School of Public Policy. But last night was the turn of Robert Tombs, Professor of French History at Cambridge, who has just helped launch a website, Briefings for Brexit, on which academics make the case for leaving the European Union. There was standing room only in the J.Z.Young Lecture Theatre at UCL, where Tombs and Sir Richard Aikens, a former Court of Appeal judge, were to speak in favour of Brexit. I was somewhat surprised, and even impressed, to find that the three young women sitting next to me, who were from Turkey, supposed the main interest of the evening would be psychological. But it emerged the hall had been double booked, and some members of the audience thought they were about to hear a lecture about The psychological impact on children of parental alienation. Once that muddle had been cleared up, and the psychology students had departed, there was still standing room only to hear Tombs, who in 2014 published his magisterial account of The English and Their History. His analysis was not, however, historical. He was concerned instead to throw the subject forward, by pointing out that if a second referendum were now to be held, we could not just put the clock back to 2016, and would instead face the question, Do we want to rejoin or not? And even supposing we had not voted to leave the EU, we would still find ourselves facing a rather difficult choice. For as President Macron pointed out in his speech at the Sorbonne, the EU faces an existential crisis: either it will break up, or it will move forward and become a true federation a sovereign Europe. What EU do we want to rejoin? Tombs asked. Is it the Macroniste vision of a federal Europe, to which national politics will in future be subordinate? Polls suggest that only four per cent of people want to hand more powers to the EU, and Tombs has heard that Jeremy Corbyn is among those who are absolutely determined we should leave. Tony Blair and Ken Clarke and Peter Mandelson and the rest should say what the future of Europe is in their view, Tombs declared. Otherwise they would be asking us to buy a pig in a poke, and would provoke a constitutional crisis within Britain itself, tearing ourselves apart for no clear aim at all. Sir Richard Aikens, a former Appeal Court Judge who served as Vice President of the Council of Europes Consulative Council of European Judges, wondered how many of the several hundred people in the room had read the treaties which determine how the EU is run. Fewer than ten hands went up. He observed that these treaties set political and economic integration within a federal Europe as the EUs goal. But who has ever asked the people of Europe if they want this? Answer, no one, Sir Richard replied, added to which a federal Europe would be contrary to the German constitution, which would therefore have to be changed. But he had been assured by a friend in Germany, a lawyer younger than himself, that Germany would not vote for that. And yet, he pointed out, the EU already has legal personality, the appearance of a state, a parliament and a constitutional court. Sir Richards problem with the EU is that it does not in fact function as a representative democracy it follows neither the British nor the French nor the German model of democracy, and therefore lacks democratic legitimacy. He added that he is not prepared to sell my democratic birthrightfor a mess of pottage. The two speakers took questions. Someone asked Tombs why academic opinion is so overwhelmingly anti-Brexit. He suggested there was a certain pressure to conform, and to protect the corporate interest of universities in obtaining research funding from the EU, and added that a worrying number of pro-Brexit academics have told him: I do not dare to express my opinion openly I dont have a job, I need to feed my family. Sir Richard reported the same sort of feeling among lawyers: those pro-Brexit are much less willing to come out and say so. Tombs suggested a lot of anti-Brexit politicians are rather like pit ponies theyve done the same thing for so long theyve no other manner of moving. He warned that if Parliament sabotaged Brexit, there would be a Trump-like rejection of the whole political system. But Sir Richard reckoned such a rejection by Parliament of Brexit was pretty much impossible, for it would require, in the next year, another Act of Parliament, which in turn would require a general election. It was refreshing to hear this subject discussed without the terms customs union or single market being mentioned once. The insoluble problem of the democratic deficit recently somewhat occluded by worries about trading arrangements came once more to the fore. Perhaps insoluble is an unfair term to use, when President Macron is proposing a solution. But since his plan would entail the creation of a United States of Europe, and the extinction of national sovereignty, it would be almost certain to create more enmities and dangers than it removed. CORNWALL, Ontario The City of Cornwall took the time to remember an former councillor and community organizer on Friday, Feb. 23. Gerald Chuck Charlebois has left a lasting impact on the City, especially the East End and is being remembered as a community minded man who had a vision to improve his neighbourhood. He sat on City Council three times between 1986-1988, 1992 to 1994 and 1995 to 1997, Charlebois passed away on Thursday, Feb. 22, 2018 at the age of 69 after a long illness. His DNA is all over the East End, said Cornwall City Councillor Claude McIntosh. He was a man who did more than dream, he was a man of action and the Cotton Mills wouldnt have happened with out him. Charlebois was a key player in the redevelopment of the old Cotton Mills by the waterfront in Cornwall and he was honoured in October with having a part of the waterfront bike path named after him. The City of Cornwall has really lost an advocate for moving this city forward, commented Mayor Leslie OShaughnessy. Centretown Coordinator Todd Lihou said that Charlebois would be remembered in Le Village as a force for positive change. Chuck was such a force for positive change in our community, he said. Whether it was development in Le Village, the waterfront or the Cotton Mills, Chucks fingerprints are all over the positive projects now underway or completed in Cornwall. Le Village has finalized plans to erect two arches on the bicycle path that will denote the new Chuck Charlebois Recreational Trail. This portion of the bike path, running from Marlborough Street to St. Lawrence College is a perfect location to honour Chucks legacy, as it runs directly adjacent to the waterfront lands chuck fought so hard to see developed. Friday afternoon, at the City of Cornwalls Budget Steering Committee meeting, Councillor Denis Carr asked the room for a moment of silence to remember Chuck Charlebois. Canadian flags at municipal buildings were lowered to half-mast out of respect to Charlebois on Friday. AKWESASNE The Saint Regis Mohawk Tribal Council declared a State of Emergency in the Territory of Akwesasne at around 5 p.m. on Thursday, Feb. 22. The declaration of a State of Emergency is pursuant to the inherent power of the Tribe to act in the best interest of tribal members, noted Tribal Chief Eric Thompson. He added, We take immense responsibility in protecting public safety and the welfare of all community members, particularly those that are currently being impacted by flooding. The Tribal Council signed the order to declare the State of Emergency because they believe that there is an imminent threat to the lives and property within their territory due to rising water levels and ice jams. We want all of our community members to please be safe during the flooding, stated Tribal Chief Beverly Cook. She added, Residents being impacted by the high water level should exercise caution and evacuate, if you have not already done so. On Wednesday, the Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe (SRMT) enacted a precautionary and non-mandatory evacuation of the affected areas, that area includes the east and west of the St. Regis River from Helena/North Road to the northern border of the Tribes jurisdiction. The voluntary evacuation order will remain in effect until Saturday, as ice jams clear and waters recede. We continue to encourage community members to please be prepared for any type of natural hazard, said Tribal Chief Michael Conners. He added, Please follow instructions provided by our communitys first responders and develop your own familys emergency preparedness plan, which may require being unable to return to your home for several days. A Unified Incident Command Post comprising Tribes Emergency Planning Office, Saint Regis Mohawk Tribal Police Department and the Hogansburg-Akwesasne Volunteer Fire Department and county and state agencies has been setup to monitor the flooding. Those interested in contiued flood updates are asked to tune into 97.3fm CKON, the Saint Regis Mohawk Tribes Facebook page and Akwesasne TV. Red Hat's unique open source ethos, and the culture of transparency and collaboration it fosters, might have given the Raleigh, N.C.-based software company an edge over Microsoft in satisfying partners as those companies patched their customers' operating systems against the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities. The industry's two leading enterprise operating system developers have very different approaches to selling and supporting software. But when the security crisis called for quick updates of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Microsoft Windows, both vendors demonstrated their enterprise-grade mettle, according to partners. In the CRN survey, however, Red Hat received higher marks from its partner community in its effort to release and coordinate patching. [Related: Red Hat Warned Partners Of Computing, Cloud Performance Loss Stemming From Protecting Against Chip Vulnerabilities] CRN conducted an online poll of 190 members of the CRN Channel Intelligence Council, a panel of solution providers representing the broad channel ecosystem in North America. In the survey, solution providers ranked the vendor responses to the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerability issue on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being the top mark, or "excellent." In that survey, which included 101 Red Hat and 175 Microsoft partners, Red Hat received an average rating of 3.72, compared to 3.66 for Microsoft. Joe Dickman, senior vice president at Vizuri, a Red Hat partner based in Virginia, said in the absence of truly good fixes to the microprocessor vulnerabilities, what partners wanted most was communication and transparency. "When Spectre and Meltdown were announced, Red Hat was very proactive within the partner community," Dickman said. "They always came back with explanations. I think it put more people at ease about their vulnerabilities, or perceived vulnerabilities." Partners, and their customers, above all else didn't want to feel in the dark. "You would rather know your exposure and vulnerabilities than to have to assume where your risk lies," Dickman said. "You feel less vulnerable when you know your options. The worst vulnerability I have is one of uncertainty. I'd rather know my options and at least have a plan to mitigate my risks rather than be misinformed or uninformed." Red Hat Enterprise Linux is an open source product. Anyone who wants can go look at the source code of the kernel and patches added to it. That, of course, is not the case for a proprietary operating system like Windows. "Its the culture they built and the ethos around open source," Dickman said. "The community and collaboration. Patches aren't coming solely from Red Hat. They're being contributed by many others who are looking at this. The collective thing is greater in the open source community than in one that has a closed source proprietary nature." A global systems integrator that works with both technologies, however, saw Microsoft's efforts as just as prompt and transparent. Both companies distinguished themselves to some smaller vendors less experienced in handling situations requiring rapid implementation of security updates, said Chris Moyer, vice president for security at Virginia-headquartered DXC Technology. Microsoft and Red Hat certainly have different mantras and core cultures, and partners to some extent need to adapt their engagement styles to each vendor. But as DXC scrambled to secure a large Windows and RHEL install base, both vendors were quick to make patches available and support efforts to apply them across complex systems. "We reached out early to both and said we want to understand what you're going to do, when you're going to release, how we're going to get ready to put these things into play," Moyer told CRN. "We took some of those things and tested them and made sure we had constant feedback." Implementing a broad array of patches, as required by Meltdown and Spectre, was hardly pain or risk free. What DXC wanted was timely access to information and attention to its feedback, and it got that from both vendors, he said. "If I try something out and get a weird result, I need that relationship and specific connection points," he said. "They both have that kind of mechanism and are both very inclusive." The level of cooperation between vendor and solution provider had to be particularly close because of the many configurations of hardware and software that could affect results across complex environments, as well as factors like the sequence of applying patches. And there wasn't much room for error because the patching required reboots, which meant scheduling downtime. All technology companies were frustrated by a rushed process in putting out Meltdown and Spectre updates, Moyer told CRN. "The whole industry thought they had more time. But all realized they were in a race, so everybody was pushing patches out pretty quickly, which means our test cycles had to ramp up," Moyer said. Because Microsoft and Red Hat both have so much experience releasing patches, their partners fared better than those of many other vendors, he said. "Early access is the biggest thing these guys do well. They're open about it. These guys get more market share, and definitely with us, because they understand enterprise needs," Moyer said. "This is one of those events in our industry that we're glad we have the kind of partnerships we have with these guys." Ric Opal, senior director at Oak Brook, Ill.-based SWC Technology, said Microsoft contacted his company immediately with an email detailing in highly prescriptive fashion how to close the Spectre vulnerability through Windows. Microsoft has been extremely quick to provide information and transparent in its efforts throughout the process, Opal said. The open source ethos has largely permeated the software giant since CEO Satya Nadella took over. At the same time, "the partner has to own part of this," Opal said. "You have to be in tune as a partner for all the guidance and capabilities Microsoft is delivering you. There's an enormity of data. You as a partner have to recognize this is important," he said. Problems typically arise not because patches aren't available, but because they're not ingested and applied properly. Where technology vendors can make an important contribution is helping their partners and customers transform governance processes and procedures around patching. Microsoft has done that programmatically through its One Commercial Partner structure, Opal said. "I consider the communications I have seen to be exceptionally transparent," Opal said. But "some partners might be not plugged into all those coms, even if they're publicly available." Microsoft declined to comment on CRN's poll. Red Hat's Christopher Robinson, program manager in the product security unit, said in regard to the survey that the company is pleased its partners "recognize the maturity and consistency of our vulnerability management process." "While the scope of Spectre/Meltdown was different, at their core, these were security flaws much like any of the over 2,000 we deal with each year to support our portfolio," Robinson said. Red Hat recognizes security flaws can generate intense media and customer attention. That's why it developed a Customer Security Awareness program that implements a methodology for providing information to subscribers and the larger community on issues that arise, and the remediations available, Robinson said. On the technical front, Jon Masters, a Red Hat processor expert, said his company's investments in a "multi-architecture future" have imbued it with deep knowledge of processor design. "We work with so many other vendors that we have a very good handle on how different designs behave," Masters told CRN. "Our connections allow us to help other vendors coordinate mitigations." Quisitive has been a Microsoft Gold partner for years, but the solution provider is now doubling down on cloud services and helping customers get there with a new Microsoft Azure assessment program. In addition to enjoying its elite-level partner status, Quisitive is a Microsoft National Solution Provider, Customer Engagement Alliance Member, and serves on the Partner Advisory Council and Azure Blockchain Advisor. Quisitive is a pure-play Microsoft cloud partner, Steven Balusek, Quisitive's chief services officer, told CRN. Quisitive's customer base consists of midsize to Fortune 100 companies in financial services, manufacturing, retail and health care. The solution provider has been actively working on "de-mystifying" the move to the cloud for its customers because it's not a matter of if they move to the cloud anymore, it's when and how, Balusek said. [Related: Microsoft Azure Tempts Business Users By Slashing Support Prices, Critical Response Times] "Cloud is penetrating all areas of many kinds of businesses. For us, it's about bringing a breadth of understanding of how the cloud can be used to optimize our customers' businesses, and help drive innovation and cost savings," he said. To that end, Quisitive's Microsoft Azure Cloud Assessment Program walks customers through the business case for moving various applications and business processes to the cloud. The six-week program includes a cloud migration plan, cloud ROI analysis, and a road map for moving cloud applications in the future. The Dallas-based company is one of only eight Microsoft partners certified to provide Azure assessment and said it is adding 50 IT consultants to handle the influx of customers moving to the cloud. Through the assessment program, customers will be able to move to the cloud more quickly with a concrete plan on how to get there. They'll also have a clear picture of the associated consumption costs and how to optimize or consolidate their cloud environment, Balusek said. "Customers are being challenged in moving to the cloud with where to start, what resources they'll need, and what to expect in terms of ROI, so our assessment program can give customers an ROI analysis and consumption costs over a multiyear road map to show them exactly when they'll begin saving money by moving to the cloud," he said. Quisitive, by way of the program, can even help customers connect back to internal systems and continue to take advantage of their existing networking gear to save money, Balusek said. Most cloud conversations often start by looking at a customer's existing infrastructure and quickly pivots to a discussion on how to modernize business applications. Quisitive sees Microsoft Azure as a leader in this area, Balusek said. "Azure is really at the forefront in building business applications and driving the value of data within the cloud," he said. Earlier this month, Quisitive said it was being acquired by Toronto-based private equity firm Fusion Agiletech Partners For its part, Fusion specifically wants to fund investments in Microsoft partners with blockchain, cloud and agile development skills, according to the firm. "[The Fusion investment] will allow us to scale geographically and go out and acquire talent that gives us the opportunity to service more customers in more markets," Balusek said. New Hewlett Packard Enterprise CEO Antonio Neri kicked off his first quarter at the helm by blowing past Wall Street expectations with a whopping 24 percent increase in storage sales; a 27 percent increase in networking sales and an 11 percent increase in compute (server) sales. Neri thanked HPE partners for the blockbuster quarterly sales performance with sales out through partners up year over year in every segment of the business. [Related: HPE Partners See New CEO Neri Accelerating 'Next' Era of Channel Sales Growth] "We would not have been able to deliver this performance without the channel," Neri told CRN in an interview after the company bested Wall Street earnings per share expectations by 12 cents. "Most of our business goes through the channel and the results speak for themselves. We saw great performance across every segment of the market in the channel with double digit growth." The channel growth was particularly strong in core industry standard server market and Aruba, said Neri. HPE shares soared 12 percent or $2 per share in after hours trading to $18.41 after the company reported first quarter non GAAP diluted net earnings per share of $0.34 per share on sales of $7.7 billion. That was well above the Wall Street consensus of $0.22 per share on sales of $7.07 billion. Overall, HPE sales for the quarter were up 11 percent from the year-ago period. The strong results are a testament to HPE's innovation and the flat out most profitable partner program in the industry, said Neri. "Our Partner Ready program is the industry leading program for channel partners," he said. "It is stable and predictable. They know it. Think about our competitors: they keep trying over and over, they keep flipping the programs, more rebates here, less rebates there. Invest here. Move there." Neri said the company's "channel first" model is only going to get stronger going forward. He said now is the time for partners to "double down" on HPE and drive forward with the company with game changing innovations like GreenLake consumption based computing and HPE OneSphere SaaS multicloud management platform which was made generally available this week. Partners said they are driving double-digit sales growth from an HPE innovation renaissance with products like Nimble, SimpliVity and Synergy composable infrastructure. "We had an awesome quarter with our HPE sales up 30 percent with across the board growth in servers, Synergy, storage, SimpliVity and Nimble," said said Rich Baldwin, chief strategy officer at Nth Generation Computing, a San Diego-based HPE enterprise partner, No 359 on the CRN SP500. "Everything is going gangbusters. I can't remember a quarter this strong in the last 10 years. It is awesome. Antonio is the right guy at the right time. He understands technology and gets the channel. I feel really good about the future." The HPE sales were so strong during the quarter that Nth Generation is rewarding every employee with a weekend at the San Diego Coronado Island Hotel & Resort on March 9-10, said Baldwin. He said Nth Generation is seeing particularly strong sales of the Nimble all-flash storage portfolio in head-to-head battles with Pure Storage, said Baldwin. "We couldn't be happier with the HPE results," said Baldwin. "Partners are 100 percent behind Antonio. We have known him for many, many years." Neri, who has architected HPE's game-changing Next initiative aimed at making the company more nimble and agile, took the helm on Feb. 1. A 22-year HPE veteran who started as a customer service engineer for the company in EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa), Neri is credited with making massive changes that have streamlined the company's go-to-market sales model. The Next restructuring, for example, has reduced the number of internal HPE sales plans from 400 to 25. It has also reduced the number of HPE internal sales reps that can be compensated on a deal from as many as 30 on a single deal to a maximum of three reps comped on a deal. In addition, the Next initiative has reduced management layers from as many as seven to four. Neri told analysts that the "simplification" of the HPE sales model is accelerating execution in the field. He said HPE Next is an "opportunity" to establish a new "culture" at the company. "This is architecting the company from the ground up with a clean sheet approach," he said. "This is going to change the culture of the company. What I have learned is that you can push more and do more. The organization is actually very excited about what we are doing. They see an opportunity to improve the way we serve our customers." Partners, for their part, say all the changes that Neri has driven with Next and acquisitions like SimpliVity and Nimble are paying off. Raymond Tuchman, CEO of Experis Technology Group, a Potomac, Md., HPE partner, said he is seeing particularly robust sales growth with HPE's SimpliVity hyper-converged product. "We are going to do $1 million in SimpliVity sales in March," he said. "I think SimpliVity is going to be a rocket ship. Customers love it. It blows away Nutanix and all the other hyper-converged offerings because it has built in backup and recovery." Tuchman said he is doing several SimpliVity presentations to customers a week and the win rate is off the charts. "We just had a presentation for a customer today and that customer is now looking at updating its infrastructure to SimpliVity," he said. Given the strong HPE product portfolio, Tuchman expects his HPE business to be easily up 20 percent this year. "This looks like it is going to be a phenomenal year for us and HPE," he said. Dan Sytsma, vice president and general manager of Melillo Consulting, a long-time HPE partner that is celebrating its 30th anniversary, said HPE's hybrid computing strategy with innovative products like SimpliVity, Synergy composable infrastructure and GreenLake consumption based computing are resonating with customers. "This is the best portfolio HPE has had in many, many years," he said. "They have the right mix of what the customers are looking for. Customers are moving to hybrid IT. We are hearing less and less that customers want to go 100 percent cloud. The GreenLake utility computing model allows customers to just buy the capacity they need. HPE is at a really good juncture in the market." HARTFORD Connecticuts hydrogen fuel cell companies appealed to legislators Thursday for help supporting the importance of their products to the states energy grid. In a forum held Thursday, officials from Danburys FuelCell Energy Inc., South Windsors Doosan Fuel Cell America Inc., Wallingfords Proton OnSite, Windsors Infinity Fuel Cell and Hydrogen Inc., North Havens Precision Combustion Inc. and East Hartfords Sustainable Innovations argued that their technology is ultra clean and brings valuable manufacturing jobs to the state, among other economic benefits. Other states and countries refer to Connecticut as the Silicon Valley of fuel cell technology, said Joel Rinebold, director of the Connecticut Center for Advanced Technology who helped form a coalition of the fuel cell companies. Yet the companies are not feeling the support of the state, they said. We seem to be under attack by the very state that we call home, said Jennifer Arasimowicz, senior vice president of FuelCell Energy Inc. CT DEEP seems not to value fuel cells at all. Representatives of the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection said Thursday disagreed. DEEP is and remains supportive of the fuel cell industry, said Chris Collibee, a spokeman for the Department. They are a vital part of our cheaper, cleaner and more reliable energy grid. Connecticut fuel cell companies said they are suffering from a series of blows, the latest of which was DEEPs 2018 Comprehensive Energy Strategy. Published in January, the document recommends fuel cells be moved to a separate class from other renewable energies because they emit some greenhouse gases in their energy production. Fuel cells powered by natural gas provide important grid reliability and resiliency benefits but do not directly advance the states decarbonization goals, the strategy states. In October and November 2016, no hydrogen fuel cell companies won bid awards from DEEP for the states long-term renewable energy contracts. Of 29 projects selected, 21 were in solar and eight were in wind power. For FuelCell, which planned to expand its Torrington factory and increase its payroll by 300 people, it was a blow. The company of 600 employees laid off 97 people. In July 2017, the legislature, reacting to the fuel cell company complaints, passed a law promoting the use of fuel cells and amending some energy-related programs and requirements. The support made industry officials hopeful for the next round of energy bids put out by the state, but when bid requests were issued in December, they were again disappointed. Some consideration needs to be given to a homegrown industry, said David Giordano, government relations and business development director for Doosan Fuel Cell America. Arasimowicz said she wished legislators and the administration would get on the same page. I believe there is a policy disconnect that has happened along the way, she said. state Rep. Michelle Cook, D-Torrington, said she was frustrated by how fuel cell policy seemed to be changing midstream. If we continue to push business out of the state of Connecticut or give people a reason not to come here, it just goes back on the typical record weve been trying to fight all along, she said. State Rep. Jonathan Steinberg, D-Westport, a member of the Energy and Technology Committee and a self-described unabashed fan of hydrogen fuel cell technology, promised Thursday that discussions over fuel cells were coming. That conversation is going to happen, he said. BRIDGEPORT A New York man who police said dragged two Bridgeport cops with a car earlier this month was taken into custody Thursday by U.S. Marshals. Around 9:30 a.m. Thursday, U.S. Marshals from Connecticut and New York City took 22-year-old Naquan Terrelle Clarke into custody in Queens, N.Y.. Bridgeport police were looking for Clarke after he dragged two officers with a vehicle during a traffic stop on Feb. 14. The two officers were treated for deep contusion and bruising but no broken bones, at St. Vincents Medical Center in the city after the incident. They were released later that same day. After the incident, Bridgeport police contacted several New York precincts to have them check known addresses for Clarke. His last known addressed was reportedly in Rosedale, N.Y. Police spoke to his mother at that address but did not find Clarke. But on Thursday, a little more than a week after the incident, Clarke was seen at a residence on 157th Street in Queens, N.Y. When law enforcement approached the residence, Clarke refused to open the door, a report from U.S. Marshals Violent Fugitive Task Force Supervisor Brian ONeill said. Clarke was wanted on charges of aggravated assault. U.S. Marshals were able to get into the residence through an open window, the report said, and arrested Clarke without further incident. Any time a law enforcement officer is hurt during the line of duty our task force will pull out all the stops to assist in any way possible, said U.S. Marshal Brian Taylor. For the time being, Clarke will be held pending extradition from New York. Shortly after the incident, Bridgeport police contacted a military police sergeant and confirmed Clarke was a Marine Reservist. When the department issued a BOLO be on the lookout for Clarke on Feb. 14, the dispatcher warned officers to use caution because he was possibly armed and dangerous. U.S. Marshals did not indicate any issues with weapons during the arrest. Bridgeport police Chief Armando Perez could not immediately be reached for comment on the arrest. HARTFORD Three Ridgefield teenagers brought zeal and youth appeal on Friday to a gun violence prevention rally called by Connecticuts congressional delegation on Friday. I want to assure everybody in the room today and watching online, and the members of Congress who stand complacent in the face of great tragedy, that (we) are not going to stop, said Paul Kim, a Ridgefield High School senior who is helping classmate Lane Murdock organize a late-April student walkout to call for gun violence prevention. I have a vision where on April 20 we will see the largest student protest in the history of the United States, Kim said as supporters applauded in a packed conference room at the Legislative Office Building. I also have a vision that students will never again lay dead on the floor as a result of gun violence. Rob Ryser / Kims call to arms followed emotional speeches by Mark Barden, the father of a boy slain in the Sandy Hook massacre, and Murdock, a 15-year-old Ridgefield high-schooler who founded the National School Walkout to give students a voice in the debate over gun policy. When we walk out on April 20, the whole world will see kids are growing up and taking charge, and nothing can stop that, Murdock said during the hour-long rally organized by Sens. Chris Murphy and Richard Blumenthal, U.S. Rep Elizabeth Esty and other members of Connecticuts all-Democratic delegation. The rally follows the Valentines Day massacre of 14 students and three staff members at a Florida high school, which was the deadliest school shooting since the massacre of 26 first-graders and educators at Sandy Hook School in 2012. Students are the answer; students in this country stopped a war, said Esty, referring to the youth-led protests against the Vietnam War. Esty said the same student spirit has bolstered the national sentiment to end the epidemic of gun violence, in part by putting the focus on the mid-term Congressional elections in November. I foresee the chance for these kids to give a whole new meaning to spring break, Esty said as supporters cheered. I foresee new kinds of trips down to Florida - perhaps not on beaches - perhaps doing a little voter registration, perhaps raising a little bit of consciousness. Max Cumming, a fellow Ridgefield high-schooler who is helping Murdock organize the April walkout, agreed. To the young people of this country - this is your country, this is your democracy and the people in Washington represent you, Cumming said. Demand that they take action and represent you in Washington and pass laws that protect you and your peers. The rally comes two days after President Donald Trump invited Barden and Sandy Hook Promise co-founder Nicole Hockley to a White House listening session with others affected by gun violence. Hockley responded to Trumps suggestion to arm trained teachers with concealed guns that Washington should arm teachers with knowledge. Murphy has been invited to a meeting at the White House next weekto discuss gun policy, his office said on Friday. Murphy began the late-morning rally by calling Congress fully complicit in this epidemic of mass slaughter, referring to an America where an average of 90 people a day die of gunshots and a school shooting happens every three days. But something different is happening because of the courage of victims, of victims families and students, Murphy said. The country is waking up. Blumenthal agreed, saying he was hopeful about legislation he and Murphy support to strengthen the national firearms background check system, among other measures. Every one of these tragedies helps break the wall of resistance and crack the ice of indifference that has paralyzed Congress, Blumenthal said There is a rising level of anger and outrage in America about gun violence, and it is being driven by young people in the streets. Barden, a co-founder of the Newtown-based gun violence prevention group Sandy Hook Promise, broke down at one point in the rally when U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro read a poem by a student who survived the Sandy Hook massacre. Here we are again trying to figure this out, Barden said with tears in his eyes. I am sick of this. I am sick of trying to figure this out. Barden regained his composure when speaking about the school-based awareness programs Sandy Hook Promise has introduced across the country to combat chronic isolation and identify teens at risk of causing harm. These amazing high school students - oh, my God, he said to the cheer of supporters. What a force to be reckoned with. With a net worth of more than $86 billion, Bill Gates is known for being one of the richest people in the world. But theres a lot more you probably dont know about the Microsoft co-founder. Gates was born in Seattle in 1955 and discovered his passion for technology early on. In school, he met long-time friend and future co-founder Paul Allen. Together, they launched another small-business venture before coming up with the idea for Microsoft. Related: 5 Life Lessons From Bill Gates, One of the Most Influential Philanthropists on Earth Until he realized his desire to pursue computers, Gates had planned to become a lawyer and studied pre-law at Harvard. He eventually dropped out, launched Microsoft and met his employee and future wife, Melinda. Today, Gates is not only a self-made billionaire and tech leader, but hes also a philanthropist, an author and even a knight. Check out these 27 surprising facts about Bill Gates. Additional reporting by Nina Zipkin Image credit: Joe McNally | Getty Images 1. Gates developed his first computer software program at 13 years old. After spending a few years in public school, Gates later attended the Lakeside School, a private preparatory school in Seattle. It was there that Gates discovered his passion for computer programming and met Paul Allen, who became his close friend and later Microsoft co-founder. He also developed his first computer software program at age 13. Using BASIC computer language, the program was a tic-tac-toe game in which players could compete against the computer. 2. Gates fixed his high schools class scheduling software so he was in all-girls classes. The Lakeside School recruited Gates to help code its class scheduling system. Gates took advantage of his new task and his coding abilities, and he and his long-time pal and later Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen tweaked the schools scheduling software and placed Gates in all-girls classes. "Paul did the computer scheduling with me. Unfortunately for him he was two years ahead of me and he was off to college by then. So I was the one who benefited by being able to have the nice girls at least sit near me, Gates shared with BBC. Image credit: Bruce Glikas 3. Gates and Allen formed a business partnership before Microsoft. From the moment they met in middle school, Gates and Allen became friends -- likely because of their common interest in computer programming. While in school, the two formed a company called Traf-O-Data. They put together a small computer based on an Intel 8008 chip that measured and analyzed traffic data for the Washington state highway department. Gates and Allen made about $20,000 from the venture, but it slowly dissolved as Allen went on to work for Honeywell in Boston and Gates enrolled at Harvard. 4. He almost had a perfect SAT score. Its hardly shocking that the genius got a near-perfect score on his SATs. Gates scored a 1590 out of 1600 on the college entrance exams. 5. Gates originally studied law in college. In 1973, Gates began studying pre-law at Harvard University, planning to follow in the footsteps of his lawyer father. Although by his sophomore year, Gatess plans changed and he began taking some of the schools most rigorous math and science courses. Then, two years into his Harvard career, Gates dropped out to pursue Microsoft. 6. Gates was arrested twice for his driving. In 1975, in his Porsche 911, 19-year-old Gates was arrested for speeding and driving without a license. But he didnt learn his lesson -- two years later, Gates was arrested again in Albuquerque, N.M., for another traffic violation and for driving without his license. Theres speculation that the generic user icon in Microsoft Outlook 10 is actually a silhouette of Gatess mugshot. 7. His wife, Melinda, used to work for him. After graduating from Duke University in 1986, Melinda Gates landed her first job at a startup -- Microsoft. I just thought, Oh my gosh. I have to work at this company. They are changing the world. And if I get an offer, theres no way Im not going to take it, Melinda told CBS News. Melinda scored the job, and shortly into her time working there, she made a great impression on the boss. Related: Warren Buffett and Bill Gates's Top Secret to Success I met her at a New York City sales meeting, Bill told CBS. And then it was only a week or so after that, that I went up to her in the parking lot and asked if she wanted to go out. Image credit: Bloomberg | Getty Images 8. He was once the youngest billionaire ever. Gates made his first billion in 1987 at the age of 31, making him the youngest billionaire ever at that time. 9. On his wedding day, he rented out every room at the hotel. To ensure privacy, Gates rented out all 250 rooms at the Manele Bay Hotel in Lanai, Hawaii, where his wedding party was staying. At the time (1994), Gates was the second-richest person in America. Taking an extra precaution to keep the media and paparazzi from flying overhead, Gates reportedly hired all of the helicopters on Maui, too. 10. He used to memorize his employeess license plate numbers to keep tabs on them. Youd think a simple punch card or check-in system might suffice -- not for Gates. Gates memorized the license plates of his employees so he would know when they arrived at and left work. I knew everyone's license plate, so I could look out in the parking lot and see when did people come in, when were they leaving. Eventually I had to loosen up, as the company got to a reasonable size, he revealed in an interview with BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs program. 11. Gates bought Leonardo da Vincis Codex Leicester manuscript for $30.8 million. Besides his private plane, Gatess other big splurge was Leonardo da Vincis Codex Leicester manuscript, which dates back to the 16th century. In a 1994 auction, Gates won the manuscript for $30.8 million, making it the most expensive book in the world. Gates sometimes puts the book on loan to museums. 12. In 1995, Gates became the richest man in the world. In July 1995, at 39 years old, Gates became the richest man in the world with a fortune of $12.9 billion. He has since lost that title a few times, but he held the top spot on the Forbes Worlds Billionaires real-time ranking in March 2017. 13. He got pied in the face during a trip to Brussels. During a 1998 trip to Brussels, Belgium, Gates was on his way into a meeting with more than 400 Belgian educators, business leaders and government officials. Upon entering the building, Gates was struck in the face with a pie. After the incident, Belgian prankster and personality Noel Godin took responsibility for the prank, and Gates didnt press charges. "The pie wasn't even that good," a Microsoft spokesperson reported Gates as saying. Image credit: Bloomberg | Getty Images 14. Bill and Melinda Gates run the largest private foundation in the world. The couple launched the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in 2000. With donations from major investors, public figures and celebrities such as Warren Buffett, Hillary Clinton, Madeleine Albright, Jack Nicklaus and Big Sean, it has become the largest private foundation in the world. In 2015, it reported a $39.6 billion trust endowment. 15. He was knighted by the Queen. In 2005, Gates received an honorary knighthood from Queen Elizabeth of England for his charitable work and achievements in technology. Gates and his wife, Melinda, met the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh at Buckingham Palace for the ceremony, during which he received his KBE title -- Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire. Gates is unable to be referred to as Sir because he is not a British citizen. 16. The number-one thing on his bucket list is not dying. In 2013, Gates held an Ask Me Anything (AMA) session on Reddit. During the session, Gates was asked if he had anything left on his bucket list. His response? Dont die Related: How Bill Gates Became a Leadership Legend 17. His bedtime routine involves reading and washing the dishes. Even the richest man in the world makes time to complete his house chores. In a 2014 Reddit AMA, Gates shared that he washes his familys dirty dishes every night. He even finds the task enjoyable. Other people volunteer but I like the way I do it, he said. In addition to washing the dishes, another part of Gatess bedtime routine involves reading for an hour. Even if its late into the night, he makes sure to get in a solid 60 minutes before bed, because for him, Its part of falling asleep, he once told The Seattle Times. 18. If he could have a superpower, it would be more energy. In their 2016 annual letter, Bill and Melinda shared the superpowers they wished they could have. The first things to come to mind for the average person might be x-ray vision, invisibility or time travel -- but Melinda and Bill said they wanted more time and more energy. Bill said he wished for more energy, explaining that many people underestimate the importance of energy access -- from turning on a light switch to pressing the power button on a laptop. Without access to energy, the poor are stuck in the dark, denied all of these benefits and opportunities that come with power. 19. Bill and Melinda Gatess favorite number is 122 million. In their 2017 annual letter to Warren Buffett, who donated a chunk of his fortune to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the couple wrote that 122 million is their favorite number. It is the number of childrens lives that have been saved since 1990 as the mortality rate has declined. Image credit: Matthew Stockman | Getty Images 20. To disguise himself, Gates wears a hat. To ward off any unwanted attention, Gates resorts to an old-school tactic -- wearing a hat. During a 2017 Reddit AMA, Gates was asked if he ever disguises himself in public. "I sometimes wear a hat, Gates wrote. For example when I did college tours with my son I wanted the focus to be totally on him. A lot less people recognize me when I have a hat on or else they realize I am trying to be incognito. 21. Bill and Melinda Gates are giving $10 million to each of their kids. As of March 2017, Forbes reports Bill Gatess net worth to be $86.6 billion. Thats why it comes as a surprise that he and Melinda are planning to give only $10 million to each of their three kids. Its a massive figure to most of us, but its pocket change for this billionaire. Most of the Gatess fortune will go to charitable foundations, including their own Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. 22. He doesnt do his own grocery shopping During a visit to the Ellen Show, host Ellen DeGeneres put Gates through his paces to see if the billionaire, who by all rights is very knowledgeable about the state of the world, could guess the prices of everyday grocery items. When was the last time the Microsoft founder set foot in a store to do his own shopping? Long time ago, he admitted. Spoiler alert: He very sort of passed the test, with a little help from the audience. 23. He typically doesnt do big purchases, with one exception. In an interview with Ellen DeGeneres, Gates shared that even after he became a billionaire, he always erred on the side of caution. I always wanted to have enough money in the bank so that even if our customers didnt pay us for a year, we could still keep paying everybody and do the R&D, he said. While Gates confessed to not having particularly extravagant tastes, he said that he has used his fortune for some transportation-related purchases -- a porsche in the early years and a plane for Gates Foundation travel. But there is one whimsical exception to the rule. We have a trampoline room in our house. The kids like that. Indoor trampolines. I recommend it, Gates said. Its a room with a very high ceiling. 24. He wishes he had been more socialable during college. During an April 2018 Q&A session at Harvard, which Gates dropped out of in 1975, a student asked the Microsoft co-founder: "What is something that you regret doing, or maybe not doing, at Harvard?" The billionaire responded, "Well, I wish I had been more sociable." He added, "I wish I had gotten to know more people. I was just so into being good at the classes and taking lots of classes." He also revealed that Steve Ballmer, who would become CEO of Microsoft after Gates stepped down, would drag Gates out to party. "I was so antisocial I wouldn't have even known they existed, but Steve Ballmer decided I needed some exposure to, I guess, drinking," Gates said. "So, I would go to those events and that was highly educational." 25. Mr. Gates Goes to Washington? In a recent interview, the entrepreneur and philanthropist shared that during a conversation with President Donald Trump around the potential for a universal flu vaccine, he got an unexpected job offer. I mentioned: Hey, maybe we should have a science adviser, he recalled in conversation with science website Stat. He said: Did I want to be the science adviser? In the end, Gates courteously had to decline. Thats not a good use of my time, he said. 26. He thought about getting into politics. Gates's dad was a lawyer, and the Microsoft co-founder considered following in his footsteps when he was in high school. In 1972, when Gates was 16, he spent the summer in Washington, D.C., to work as a congressional page. He was tasked with delivering legislation to the floor of the House and documents to the offices of various congressional representatives. The experience ultimately gave him the clarity to realize that the world of politics wasnt for him and led him down the path of pursuing business and technology. 27. He has some serious real estate. Gates has a home in Medina, Wash., called Xanadu 2.0, named after the the mansion belonging to the title character in Citizen Kane. That fictional estate was relatively luxurious, and Gatess is no slouch in that department. It took seven years and $63 million to build the 66,000 square foot space, which houses a reception room, six kitchens, 24 bathrooms, a library with rare manuscripts, a home theater, a trampoline room and a stream thats home to salmon and trout. Plus, computer screens around the house can display any artwork youd like. Related: Bill Gates Got an Offer to Be Trump's Science Advisor and 26 Other Weird Things We've Learned About Him Meet the Famous Retirees of the Business World Tech Entrepreneurs Move Towards Philanthropy: 5 Most Charitable Business Leaders Copyright 2018 Entrepreneur.com Inc., All rights reserved Legal marijuana supporters have a full agenda this year as the National Cannabis Industry Association (NCIA) prepares for another all-out lobbying effort this spring in Washington. The NCIA plans, for the eighth year in a row, to hold the Cannabis Industry Lobby Days from May 21-23. More than 300 industry professionals will join together in Washington to lobby Congress on behalf of legal cannabis. Theres plenty to talk about. Best of Times, Worst of Times The past year has seen its share of ups and downs for the marijuana industry. On the plus side, Nevada launched a wildly successful adult-use marijuana program in July. California started recreational sales in January and Florida is preparing to start medicinal sales. Both Massachusetts and Canada are expected to start adult-use sales later this year. In all, the industry is expected to have a $40 billion economic impact by 2021, according to estimates from ArcView Market Research. On the downside, Attorney General Jeff Sessions rescinded the Cole Memo, which provided protection from federal interference in states where legal marijuana is sold. Voters in Maine approved the sale of recreational marijuana to adult but the governor vetoed the measure. Federal law effectively precludes cannabis businesses from using normal banking services, forcing a multi-billion dollar industry to operate on cash. Here are some of the key issues cannabis supporters want Congress to address. Related: Colorado Starts a 'Cannabis Conversation' On Driving While High Banking The legal marijuana industry continues to operate primarily as a cash-only business. With pot illegal at the federal level, banks will not extend services to those who work in marijuana. Thats a bad long-term situation, and its led to tax penalties and security issues. Cryptocurrency and blockchain hold some promise to alleviate the issue, but marijuana companies have no realistic alternative to cash. A variety of proposals have been made at both the federal and state level (California officials have talked about creating a state-run bank to deal with the marijuana industry), but so far no concrete solution has emerged. 280E The federal tax code allows businesses to do what any business would expect to do -- deduct normal expenses such as payroll, cost of supplies and rent. Except marijuana businesses cant do that. Thats because Provision 280E in the Internal Revenue Code forbids the deduction of normal business expenses by any operation engaged in the trafficking of illegal Schedule I or Schedule II substances. Marijuana remains a Schedule I illegal drug under federal law. The NCIA reports that some cannabis businesses effectively pay a 70 percent tax rate. Thats something they hope to see changed. Related: Cannabis Industry Likely to Employ More Than 400,000 By 2021, Study Projects Protection Sessions move to eliminate the Cole Memo has both consumers and (especially) marijuana businesses concerned about a potential federal crackdown on marijuana growers and sellers. How and when that might happen, or if it even will, has done nothing but make an uncertain situation even more uncertain. Massachusetts lawmakers are already making a move to bar state law enforcement from aiding any federal attempt to crackdown on the states legal marijuana business. Sen. Patrick Leahy, the Vermont Democrat, also has introduced a provision to protect medical marijuana users nationwide from federal interference. These three issues should be among those discussed in the nations capital in May - although what happens between now and then is anyones guess. Follow dispensaries.com on Instagram to stay up to date on the latest cannabis news. Related: Cannabis Industry Heads to Washington to Tell Congress What It Needs to Thrive Colorado Starts a 'Cannabis Conversation' On Driving While High Cannabis Industry Likely to Employ More Than 400,000 By 2021, Study Projects Copyright 2018 Entrepreneur.com Inc., All rights reserved This article originally appeared on entrepreneur.com If youre in the market for the perfect doomsday cabin in the woods, youd be hard-pressed to find a better property than Kevin Cross lakefront home in the Alaskan bush. Its self-sustaining and surrounded by millions of acres of prime fishing and hunting land. Its 75 miles from the nearest road, or any kind of town, Cross says. Thats 75 miles through woods that you cannot walk through. You might be able to snowmobile through them in the winter, and its questionable if you can get there by boat in the summer. For all intents and purposes, this property is designed for somebody to go away and not see anybody. The nearest town is Skwentna, with a population of just 37 at last official count. The 1,250-square-foot, two-bedroom, two-bath doomsday cabin on 7.6 acres is listed for $159,000. Cross bought the home six years ago as the ultimate getaway for his friends and family. The homes original owner was a military vet with strategic expertise who spent thousands of hours crafting the ideal home for a hard-core prepper. Best of all? The next homeowner will inherit the entire setup, including about a half-million dollars in tools and equipment on the property. The only thing Im taking is my clothes and guns, Cross says. Hes leaving behind a Kuboto tractor, modified Chevy S-10 pickup dump truck, small-scale lumber mill, welding and cutting torches, mower, wood chipper, two snow machines, compressors, and a garage full of tools. The larger equipment, such as the tractor, was flown in on a dual-prop cargo helicopter. The home backs up to a large, unnamed lake (Cross calls it Otter Lake), with year-round pike fishing. He has two floating docks on the shoreline, which he uses to launch his 12-foot-long, flat-bottom fishing boat. Less than a mile away, theres world-class Alaskan salmon fishing on the Yentna River. Cross lives full time in Anchorage, which is 45 minutes away by Beaver, the cargo bush plane made by de Havilland. It costs around $1,000 round-trip to fly from Anchorage to Otter Lake with your family and about 2,000 pounds of cargo. Cross says you schedule a pickup date for the pilot, and confirm with the company using a satellite phone. Cross keeps multiple first-aid kids on the property, with survival kits and satellite phones, in case one of the buildings catches fire and he needs to rough it until help arrives. That isolation means there's a lot of time to read books out by the lake, fish, barbecue, and otherwise relax. Its so silent out there, you can hear the air hum, Cross says. During the summer, as the sun sets, the lakes ecosystem bursts to life, with bugs skating across the water, dodging hungry birds and fish. During the winter, the night sky is incredible, with the moon shining so brightly, you can walk without a flashlight. And theres the northern lights, which dance across the sky in bands of green. So why would Cross ever sell this off-the-grid dream cabin? He says his kids are getting older, and he found himself flying out to the property less. It's time to turn it over to the next prepper and wait for impending doom in Alaskan isolation. The post End of the World? Ultimate Doomsday Cabin in Alaska Seeks $159K appeared first on Real Estate News & Insights | realtor.com. How can you ensure that your credit unions brand is getting positive exposure? Think beyond the traditional means of marketing, even think past the current rage of social media engagement. All of these methods, while proven and important, come with a cost. But, did you know that there is a valid method that does not impact your marketing budget? It is your employees. We all spend so much of our time at our jobs. And, if we, especially those of us in the credit union movement, enjoy our jobs, then why shouldnt we tell people about it? You see, your employees are not just employees, they are potentially brand ambassadors for your credit union. We all have lives outside of work. And we all have circles of influence. Whether it be friends, family, our kids, our activities or other interests, we have access to make a positive impact on those people with our knowledge of credit unions. As a member and employee of a credit union, chances are pretty high that a person has a positive story or two about how the credit union has helped them personally. That kind of endorsement goes a long way with the people they know and have some degree of influence over. So, as their employer, how can you help your employees be well-equipped, engaged brand ambassadors? Educate them. Make sure part of all employee training includes teaching the distinct differences between a credit union and a bank. That way, when that employee is involved in a conversation, they can articulate that difference in a manner that is clear. Also teach employees about the benefits to credit union membership. Again, there are differences that can have major impacts on potential member experiences and could influence them to join a credit union. Talk through the scenarios. Help your employees engage by having others share real-time examples of the benefits they have experienced through credit union membership. Maybe make it a part of a monthly staff meeting or some regular meeting so employees get used to sharing. That will help open the door to them thinking about their own experiences and break down barriers to sharing those stories with others. As credit union members, we all have great stories to tell. We just need to be empowered to do so and the impacts will be tremendous. PA liquor stores put 2-bottle limit on some booze. Here's the list The Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board notified license holders Thursday that two-bottles-per-day purchase limits for customers at state stores, as well as well for bars, restaurants and other license holders, will remain in place indefinitely. Wall Street analysts have given Patrizia Immobilien a "N/A" rating, but there may be better buying opportunities in the stock market. Some of MarketBeat's past winning trading ideas have resulted in 5-15% weekly gains. MarketBeat just released five new stock ideas, but Patrizia Immobilien wasn't one of them. MarketBeat thinks these five companies may be even better buys. View MarketBeat's top stock picks here. Bertrandt Aktiengesellschaft develops solutions for the automotive and aviation industries in Germany and internationally. The company operates through Digital Engineering, Physical Engineering, and Electrical Systems/Electronics segments. It offers design services, including designing and surfacing, and design modelling and rapid technologies; interior development services, such as seat, cockpit, trim, and dimensional management services; and vehicle body development services comprising body-in-white, doors and closures, exterior, and light and visibility services. The company also provides powertrain services, including thermodynamics/emission control, drivetrain control, thermal management, and engine mechanics; and chassis development services, such as concept, component, and module development, module integration, calculation/simulation, testing, and mechatronic chassis systems. It offers simulation services consisting of body-in-white crashworthiness, occupant safety, occupant safety/interior modules, crash management system, structural add-on parts, stiffness/noise, vibration and harshness, and computational fluid dynamics; electronics, including body/comfort/displays, infotainment systems, driver assistance systems, test systems, chassis electronics, diagnosis, on-board power network, and processes; testing services; and engineering services. The company also provides modelling and rapid technology services comprising CAD/CAM, model making, gauge building and cubing, and plastic injection moulding toolmaking services, as well as milling and measuring technologies. It serves automotive, aerospace, commercial vehicle, agricultural machinery, motorcycle, electrical, medical technology, and energy industries, as well as machines and production plants. The company was founded in 1974 and is headquartered in Ehningen, Germany. Read More The following companies are subsidiares of General Motors: 2140879 Ontario Inc., ACAR Leasing, ACAR Leasing Ltd., ACF Investment, ACF Investment Corp., AFS SenSub, APGO Trust, Adam Opel, Adam Opel GmbH, Aftermarket (UK), AmeriCredit, AmeriCredit Consumer Loan, AmeriCredit Consumer Loan Company Inc., AmeriCredit Financial Services, AmeriCredit Financial Services Inc., AmeriCredit Funding, AmeriCredit Syndicated Warehouse Trust, Annunciata Corporation, Argonaut Holdings, Argonaut Holdings LLC, BOCO (Proprietary), BOCO (Proprietary) Limited, Banco GMAC, Banco GMAC S.A., Baylis (Gloucester), Boco Trust, Boden Brussels, CHEVYPLAN, CHEVYPLAN S.A. Sociedad Administradora de Planes de Autofinanciamiento Comercial, Cadillac, Cadillac Europe, Cadillac Europe GmbH, Carve-Out Ownership, Carve-Out Ownership Cooperative LLC, Chevrolet Deutschland GmbH, Chevrolet Sales (Thailand), Chevrolet Sales (Thailand) Limited, Chevrolet Sales India, Chevrolet Sales India Private Ltd., Chevrolet Sociedad Anonima de Ahorro para Fines Determinados, Controladora General Motors, Controladora General Motors S.A. de C.V., Cruise, DCJ1, DCJ1 LLC, DMAX, DMAX Ltd., Dealership Liquidations, Dealership Liquidations Inc., Delphi Energy and Engine Management Systems UK, Delphi Energy and Engine Management Systems UK Overseas Corporation, EDS (Electronic Data Systems), FAW-GM, Fundacion Chevrolet, G.M.A.C., GCAR Titling Ltd., GM (UK) Pension, GM (UK) Pension Trustees Limited, GM APO Holdings, GM Administradora de Bens, GM Administradora de Bens Ltda., GM Asia Pacific Regional Headquarters Ltd., GM Auslandsprojekte, GM Automotive, GM Automotive Services Belgium, GM CME, GM Canada Holdings, GM Canada Limited, GM Components Holdings, GM Components Holdings LLC, GM Cruise, GM Cruise Holdings LLC, GM Cruise LLC, GM Defense LLC, GM Eurometals, GM Eurometals Inc., GM Europe Treasury, GM Finance, GM Finance Co. Holdings LLC, GM Financial, GM Financial AB, GM Financial Canada, GM Financial Canada Leasing, GM Financial Canada Leasing Ltd., GM Financial Colombia Holdings LLC, GM Financial Colombia S.A. Compania de Financiamiento, GM Financial Consumer, GM Financial Consumer Discount, GM Financial Consumer Discount Company, GM Financial Del Peru, GM Financial GmbH, GM Financial Holdings LLC, GM Financial Insurance Services, GM Financial Mexico Holdings, GM Financial Mexico Holdings LLC, GM Financial Real Estate, GM Financial de Mexico, GM Financial de Mexico S.A. de C.V. SOFOM E.R., GM Financial del Peru S.A.C, GM Global Business Services, GM Global Propulsion Systems -Torino S.r.l., GM Global Purchasing and Supply Chain, GM Global Technology Operations, GM Global Technology Operations LLC, GM Global Tooling, GM Global Tooling Company LLC, GM Global Treasury Centre Limited, GM Holden, GM Holden Pty Ltd., GM Holdings U.K. No.1 Limited, GM Inversiones Santiago Limitada, GM Investment Trustees Limited, GM Korea, GM Korea Company, GM LAAM Holdings, GM LAAM Holdings LLC, GM Mexico Holdings, GM Mobility Europe GmbH, GM PSA Purchasing Services, GM Personnel Services, GM Personnel Services Inc., GM Philippines Inc., GM Plats (Proprietary), GM Regional Holdings, GM Regional Holdings LLC, GM Retirees Pension Trustees, GM Retirees Pension Trustees Limited, GM Subsystems Manufacturing, GM Subsystems Manufacturing LLC, GM Technical Center Korea Ltd., GM Viet Nam Motor Company, GM-DI Leasing, GM-DI Leasing LLC, GMAC - Instituicao Financeira de Credito, GMAC Administradora de Consorcios, GMAC Administradora de Consorcios Ltda., GMAC Banque, GMAC Continental, GMAC Espana de Financiacion, GMAC Holdings (U.K.), GMAC Lease B.V. (aka Masterlease Europe), GMAC Nederland N.V., GMAC Prestadora de Servicios de Mao de Obra Ltda., GMAC Servicios, GMAC UK, GMAC de Venezuela, GMAC-Prestadora de Servios de Mo-de-Obra, GMACI Corretora de Seguros, GMACI Corretora de Seguros Ltda, GMAM Real Estate I, GMCH&SP Private Equity II, GMCH&SP Private Equity II L.P., GMF Australia Pty Ltd, GMF Europe, GMF Europe Holdco, GMF Europe LLP, GMF Floorplan Owner Revolving Trust, GMF Funding, GMF Germany Holdings, GMF Global Assignment, GMF Global Assignment LLC, GMF International, GMF International LLC, GMF Leasing LLC, GMF Leasing Warehousing Trust, GMF Wholesale Receivables, GMGP Holdings, General Motors (China) Investment Company, General Motors (China) Investment Company Limited, General Motors (Thailand), General Motors (Thailand) Limited, General Motors - Colmotores, General Motors - Colmotores S.A., General Motors Advisory Services LLC, General Motors Africa and Middle East, General Motors Africa and Middle East FZE, General Motors Asia, General Motors Asia LLC, General Motors Asia Pacific Holdings, General Motors Asia Pacific Holdings LLC, General Motors Asset Management, General Motors Asset Management Corporation, General Motors Australia, General Motors Australia Pty Ltd., General Motors Austria, General Motors Austria, General Motors Auto, General Motors Auto LLC, General Motors Automobiles Philippines, General Motors Automobiles Philippines Inc., General Motors Automotive Holdings, General Motors Automotive Holdings S.L., General Motors Belgique Automobile NV, General Motors Belgium, General Motors Chile, General Motors Chile Industria Automotriz Limitada, General Motors China LLC, General Motors Daewoo Auto and Technology, General Motors Daewoo Auto and Technology CIS LLC, General Motors East Africa, General Motors Egypt, General Motors Egypt S.A.E., General Motors Espana, General Motors Europe Holdings, General Motors Europe Limited, General Motors Financial Chile, General Motors Financial Chile Limitada, General Motors Financial Chile S.A., General Motors Financial Company, General Motors Financial Company Inc., General Motors Financial International, General Motors Financial Italia, General Motors Financial Suisse, General Motors Financial UK, General Motors Financial of Canada, General Motors Financial of Canada Ltd., General Motors Finland, General Motors France, General Motors GBS Hungary, General Motors Global Service Operations, General Motors Global Service Operations Inc., General Motors Hellas, General Motors Holden Australia, General Motors Holden Australia NSC, General Motors Holden Australia NSC Pty Ltd., General Motors Holden Australia Pty Ltd., General Motors Holdings LLC, General Motors IT Services (Ireland) Limited, General Motors India Private, General Motors India Private Limited, General Motors International Holdings, General Motors International Holdings LLC, General Motors International Operations, General Motors International Operations Pte. Ltd., General Motors International Services Company, General Motors International Services Company SAS, General Motors International Services LLC, General Motors Investment Limited, General Motors Investment Management, General Motors Investment Management Corporation, General Motors Investment Participacoes, General Motors Investment Participacoes Ltda., General Motors Investments, General Motors Investments Pty. Ltd., General Motors Ireland, General Motors Israel, General Motors Israel Ltd., General Motors Italia, General Motors Japan, General Motors Japan Limited, General Motors LLC, General Motors Limited, General Motors Manufacturing Poland, General Motors Nederland, General Motors New Zealand Pensions, General Motors New Zealand Pensions Limited, General Motors Overseas, General Motors Overseas Commercial Vehicle, General Motors Overseas Commercial Vehicle Corporation, General Motors Overseas Corporation, General Motors Overseas Distribution, General Motors Overseas Distribution LLC, General Motors Peru, General Motors Peru S.A., General Motors Poland Spolka, General Motors Portugal, General Motors Powertrain (Thailand), General Motors Powertrain (Thailand) Limited, General Motors Research Corporation, General Motors South Africa, General Motors South Africa (Pty) Limited, General Motors Suisse, General Motors Taiwan, General Motors Taiwan Ltd., General Motors Technical Centre India, General Motors Technical Centre India Private Limited, General Motors Treasury Center, General Motors Treasury Center LLC, General Motors Turkiye, General Motors UK, General Motors Uruguay, General Motors Uruguay S.A., General Motors Venezolana, General Motors Ventures, General Motors Ventures LLC, General Motors Warehousing and Trading (Shanghai), General Motors Warehousing and Trading (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., General Motors de Argentina, General Motors de Argentina S.r.l., General Motors de Mexico, General Motors de Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V., General Motors del Ecuador, General Motors del Ecuador S.A., General Motors do Brasil, General Motors do Brasil Ltda., General Motors of Canada, General Motors of Canada Company, General Motors-Holden's Sales, General Motors-Holden's Sales Pty. Limited, GigaPower LLC, Global Services Detroit, Global Services Detroit LLC, Global Tooling Service Company Europe, Global Tooling Service Company Europe Limited, Go Motor Retailing, Go Trade Parts, Grand Pointe Holdings, Grand Pointe Holdings Inc., Grand Pointe Park Condominium, Grand Pointe Park Condominium Association, H.S.H., Haines & Strange, Holden New Zealand, Holden New Zealand Limited, IBC Pension Trustees, IBC Pension Trustees Limited, IBC Vehicles, Lease Ownership Cooperative, Lease Ownership Cooperative LLC, Lidlington Engineering Company, Lidlington Engineering Company Ltd., Limited Liability Company "General Motors CIS", Master Lease Germany, Maven Drive, Maven Drive LLC, Millbrook Pension Management, Millbrook Pension Management Limited, Monetization of Carve-Out, Monetization of Carve-Out LLC, Motor Repris Automocio, Motors Holding, Motors Holding LLC, Motors Properties, Motors Properties (Trading), Multi-Use Lease Entity Trust, North American New Cars, North American New Cars LLC, Omnibus BB Transportes, Omnibus BB Transportes S. A., OnStar Connected Services Srl, OnStar Egypt Limited LLC, OnStar Europe, OnStar Europe Ltd., OnStar Global Services, OnStar Global Services Corporation, OnStar LLC, OnStar de Mexico, OnStar de Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V., Opel Bank, Opel Danmark, Opel Group, Opel Group Warehousing, Opel Leasing, Opel Norge, Opel Sonderdienste, Opel Southeast Europe, Opel Sverige, Opel Szentgotthard Automotive Manufacturing, Opel Wien, P.T. G M AutoWorld Indonesia, P.T. General Motors Indonesia, PIMS, PIMS Co., PT. General Motors Indonesia Manufacturing, Pan Asia Technical Automotive Center, Pan Asia Technical Automotive Center Company Ltd., Prestadora de Servicios GMF Colombia S.A.S., Rapid Motor Vehicle Company, Reliance Motor Car Company, Riverfront Holdings III Inc., Riverfront Holdings Inc., Riverfront Holdings Phase II Inc., SAIC GM (Shenyang) Norsom Motors Co. Ltd., SAIC GM Dong Yue Motors Company Limited, SAIC GM Dong Yue Powertrain Company Limited, SAIC GM Wuling Automobile Company Limited, SAIC General Motors Corporation Limited, SAIC General Motors Investment Limited, SAIC General Motors Sales Company Limited, SAIC-GMAC Automotive Finance Company Limited, SAIC-GMF Leasing Co. Ltd., Servicios GMAC S.A. de C.V., Shanghai Chengxin Used Car Operation and Management Company Limited, Shanghai OnStar Telematics Co. Ltd., Sherwoods (Darlington) Limited, Sidecar Technologies, Skurrays Limited, Stam-Terberg Autobedrijven B. V., Strobe Inc., VHC Sub-Holdings (UK), Vauxhall Defined Contribution Pension Plan Trustees Limited, Vehicle Asset Universal Leasing Trust, Vickers (Lakeside) Limited, Vision Motors Limited, WRE, WRE Inc., and Zona Franca Industrial Colmotores SAS. The following companies are subsidiares of NRG Energy: 3279405 Nova Scotia Company, 3283764 Nova Scotia Company, 7549709 Canada Inc., 7644868 Canada Inc., 7711565 Canada Inc., AC Solar Holdings LLC, Ace Energy Inc., Agua Caliente Borrower 1 LLC, Agua Caliente Solar Holdings LLC, Agua Caliente Solar LLC, Allied Home Warranty GP LLC, Allied Warranty LLC, Arthur Kill Gas Turbines LLC, Arthur Kill Power LLC, Astoria Gas Turbine Power LLC, Bayou Cove Peaking Power LLC, Beheer-en Beleggingsmaatschappij Plogema B.V., Berrians I Gas Turbine Power LLC, BidURenergy Inc., Big Cajun I Peaking Power LLC, Bluewater Wind Delaware LLC, Bluewater Wind Maryland LLC, Bluewater Wind New Jersey Energy LLC, Boquillas Wind LLC, Cabrillo Power I LLC, Cabrillo Power II LLC, Camino Energy LLC, Carbon Management Solutions LLC, Carlsbad Energy Center LLC, Carlsbad Energy Holdings LLC, Chester Energy LLC, Chickahominy River Energy Corp., Cirro Energy Services Inc., Cirro Group Inc., Citizens Power Holdings One LLC, Commonwealth Atlantic Power LLC, Connecticut Jet Power LLC, Cottonwood Development LLC, Cottonwood Energy Company LP, Cottonwood Generating Partners I LLC, Cottonwood Generating Partners II LLC, Cottonwood Generating Partners III LLC, Cottonwood Technology Partners LP, Delaware Power Development LLC, Devon Power LLC, Doga Enerji Uretim Sanayi ve Ticaret Limited Sirketi, Doga Isi Satis Hizmetleri Ticaret Limited Sirketi, Doga Isletme ve Bakim Ticaret Limited Sirketi, Dunkirk Gas Corporation, Dunkirk Power LLC, EHI Development Fund LLC, EME Eastern Holdings LLC, EVgo Services LLC, Eastern Sierra Energy Company LLC, Ecokap Power LLC, El Segundo Energy Center II LLC, El Segundo Power II LLC, El Segundo Power LLC, Elkhorn Ridge Wind II LLC, Energy Alternatives Wholesale LLC, Energy Choice Solutions LLC, Energy Curtailment Specialists, Energy Plus Holdings LLC, Energy Plus Natural Gas LLC, Energy Protection Insurance Company, Everything Energy LLC, Forward Home Security LLC, GCP Funding Company LLC, GenOn Energy, Geostellar Inc., Gladstone Power Station Joint Venture, Goal Zero, Goal Zero Europe GmbH, Goal Zero LLC, Granite II Holding LLC, Granite Power Partners II L.P., Green Mountain Energy, Green Mountain Energy Company, Green Mountain Energy Sun Club, Gregory Partners LLC, Gregory Power Partners LLC, Hanover Energy Company, Huntley IGCC LLC, Huntley Power LLC, Independence Energy Alliance LLC, Independence Energy Group LLC, Independence Energy Natural Gas LLC, Indian River Operations Inc., Indian River Power LLC, Intellastar LLC, Ivanpah Master Holdings LLC, Ivanpah Project I Holdings LLC, Ivanpah Project II Holdings LLC, Ivanpah Project III Holdings LLC, James River Power LLC, Kaufman Cogen LP, LSP-Nelson Energy LLC, Long Beach Generation LLC, Long Beach Peakers LLC, Long Beach Power LLC, Louisiana Generating LLC, MEC Esenyurt B.V., MEC San Pascual B.V., Maplekey UK Finance Limited, Maplekey UK Limited, Meriden Gas Turbines LLC, Middletown Power LLC, Midway-Sunset Cogeneration Company, Midwest Finance Company LLC, Midwest Generation EME LLC, Midwest Generation Holdings I LLC, Midwest Generation Holdings II LLC, Midwest Generation LLC, Midwest Generation Procurement Services LLC, Midwest Peaker Holdings LLC, Mission Bingham Lake Wind LLC, Mission Del Cielo LLC, Mission Energy Construction Services LLC, Mission Energy Holdings International LLC, Mission Energy Wales LLC, Mission Funding Zeta LLC, Mission Midway-Sunset Holdings LLC, Mission Midwest Coal LLC, Mission Minnesota Wind LLC, Mission Watson Holdings LLC, Mission Wind Boquillas LLC, Mission Wind New Mexico II LLC, Mission Wind Owaissa LLC, Mission Wind Pinnacle LLC, Mission del Sol LLC, Montville IGCC LLC, Montville Power LLC, NEO Chester-Gen LLC, NEO Corporation, NRG Acquisition Holdings Inc., NRG Advisory Services LLC, NRG Affiliate Services Inc., NRG Alexandria LLC, NRG Arroyo Nogales LLC, NRG Arthur Kill Operations Inc., NRG Asia-Pacific Ltd., NRG Astoria Gas Turbine Operations Inc., NRG Astoria Power LLC, NRG Audrain Generating LLC, NRG Audrain Holding LLC, NRG Bayou Cove LLC, NRG Berrians East Development LLC, NRG Bluewater Holdings LLC, NRG Bluewater Wind Massachusetts LLC, NRG Bourbonnais Equipment LLC, NRG Bourbonnais LLC, NRG Brazoria Energy LLC, NRG Business Services LLC, NRG CTA Holdings LLC, NRG Cabrillo Power Operations Inc., NRG Cadillac Inc., NRG Cadillac Operations Inc., NRG California Peaker Operations LLC, NRG Capital II LLC, NRG Carbon 360 LLC, NRG Cedar Bayou Development Company LLC, NRG Chalk Point CT LLC, NRG CleanTech Investments LLC, NRG Coal Development Company LLC, NRG ComLease LLC, NRG Common Stock Finance I LLC, NRG Common Stock Finance II LLC, NRG Connected Home LLC, NRG Connecticut Affiliate Services Inc., NRG Connecticut Peaking Development LLC, NRG Construction LLC, NRG Cottonwood Tenant LLC, NRG Curtailment Solutions Canada Inc., NRG Curtailment Solutions Inc., NRG DG Development LLC, NRG Development Company Inc., NRG Devon Operations Inc., NRG Dispatch Services LLC, NRG Distributed Energy Resources Holdings LLC, NRG Distributed Generation PR LLC, NRG Dunkirk Operations Inc., NRG ECOKAP Holdings LLC, NRG ESA Joint Development LLC, NRG El Segundo Operations Inc., NRG Energy Center Eagles LLC, NRG Energy Center Oxnard LLC, NRG Energy Fuel LLC, NRG Energy Fuel Services LLC, NRG Energy Gas & Wind Holdings Inc., NRG Energy Holdings II Inc., NRG Energy Holdings Inc., NRG Energy Inc., NRG Energy Labor Services LLC, NRG Energy Petroleum LLC, NRG Energy Services Group LLC, NRG Energy Services International Inc., NRG Energy Services LLC, NRG Equipment Company LLC, NRG Fuel Cell CA1 LLC, NRG Fuel Resources LLC, NRG Fuel Transportation LLC, NRG GTL Holdings LLC, NRG Gas Development Company LLC, NRG Generation Holdings Inc., NRG Gladstone Operating Services Pty Ltd, NRG Granite Acquisition LLC, NRG Greenco LLC, NRG HQ DG LLC, NRG Holding Leasing Vehicle 7 LLC, NRG Home & Business Solutions LLC, NRG Home Services LLC, NRG Home Solutions LLC, NRG Home Solutions Product LLC, NRG Homer City Services LLC, NRG Huntley Operations Inc., NRG Identity Protect LLC, NRG Ilion LP LLC, NRG Ilion Limited Partnership, NRG Independence Solar LLC, NRG International LLC, NRG Kaufman LLC, NRG Latin America Inc., NRG Lease Co LLC, NRG Lease Development LLC, NRG Limestone 3 LLC, NRG Maintenance Services LLC, NRG Mesquite LLC, NRG Mextrans Inc., NRG MidAtlantic Affiliate Services Inc., NRG MidCon Development LLC, NRG Middletown Operations Inc., NRG Middletown Repowering LLC, NRG Midwest Holdings LLC, NRG Midwest II LLC, NRG Montville Operations Inc., NRG NE Development LLC, NRG Nelson Turbines LLC, NRG New Roads Holdings LLC, NRG NewGen LLC, NRG North Central Operations Inc., NRG Northeast Affiliate Services Inc., NRG Norwalk Harbor Operations Inc., NRG Ohio Pipeline Company LLC, NRG Operating Services Inc., NRG Oswego Harbor Power Operations Inc., NRG Oxbow Holdings LLC, NRG PacGen Inc., NRG Peaker Finance Company LLC, NRG Portable Power LLC, NRG Potrero Development LLC, NRG Power Marketing LLC, NRG Procurement Company LLC, NRG Project Company LLC, NRG Reliability Solutions LLC, NRG Renter's Protection LLC, NRG Repowering Holdings LLC, NRG Residential Solar Solutions LLC, NRG Residential Solar Solutions Leasing II LLC, NRG Retail LLC, NRG Retail Northeast LLC, NRG Rockford Acquisition LLC, NRG Rockford Equipment II LLC, NRG Rockford Equipment LLC, NRG Saguaro Operations Inc., NRG Security LLC, NRG Services Corporation, NRG Sherbino LLC, NRG SimplySmart Solutions LLC, NRG Solar Arrowhead LLC, NRG Solar CVSR Holdings 2 LLC, NRG Solar Dandan LLC, NRG Solar Guam LLC, NRG Solar Ivanpah LLC, NRG Solar Ring LLC, NRG Solar SC Stadium LLC, NRG Solar Sunrise LLC, NRG South Central Affiliate Services Inc., NRG South Central Generating LLC, NRG South Central Operations Inc., NRG South Texas LP, NRG Sterlington Power LLC, NRG Storage Fabrication & Delivery LLC, NRG Storage on Demand NY LLC, NRG SunCap Leasing I LLC, NRG Telogia Power LLC, NRG Texas C&I Supply LLC, NRG Texas Gregory LLC, NRG Texas Holding Inc., NRG Texas LLC, NRG Texas Power LLC, NRG Texas Retail LLC, NRG Trading Advisors LLC, NRG Transmission Holdings LLC, NRG ULC Parent Inc., NRG Victoria I Pty Ltd, NRG Warranty Services LLC, NRG West Coast LLC, NRG Western Affiliate Services Inc., NRG Wind Development Company LLC, NRG Wind Force LLC, NRG Wind LLC, NRG dGen Advisory Services LLC, NRGenerating German Holdings GmbH, NRGenerating International B.V., NRGenerating Luxembourg (No. 1) S.a.r.l., NRGenerating Luxembourg (No. 2) S.a.r.l., New Genco GP LLC, New Jersey Power Development LLC, Norwalk Power LLC, O'Brien Cogeneration Inc. II, ONSITE Energy Inc., One Block Off The Grid Inc., Oswego Harbor Power LLC, Pacific Generation Company, Petra Nova CCS I LLC, Petra Nova Holdings LLC, Petra Nova LLC, Petra Nova Parish Holdings LLC, Petra Nova Power I LLC, Pure Energies Group, Pure Energies Group ULC, Pure Energies Installation Inc., Pure Energies Solar Services Inc., Pure Group Inc., RDI Consulting LLC, RERH Holdings LLC, Reliant Charitable Foundation, Reliant Energy, Reliant Energy Northeast LLC, Reliant Energy Power Supply LLC, Reliant Energy Retail Holdings LLC, Reliant Energy Retail Services LLC, Restoration Design LLC, Roof Diagnostics Solar Holdings LLC, Roof Diagnostics Solar and Electric LLC, Roof Diagnostics Solar and Electric of NY LLC, Saguaro Power Company a Limited Partnership, Saguaro Power LLC, San Gabriel Energy LLC, San Joaquin Energy LLC, San Juan Energy LLC, San Pascual Cogeneration Company International B.V., Sherbino I Wind Farm LLC, Solar Partners I LLC, Solar Partners II LLC, Solar Partners VIII LLC, Solar Power Partners, Solar Pure Energies ULC, Somerset Operations Inc., Somerset Power LLC, South Texas Wind LLC, Station A LLC, Sunrise Power Company LLC, Sunshine State Power (No. 2) B.V., Sunshine State Power B.V., TCV Pipeline LLC, Tacoma Energy Recovery Company, Taloga Wind II LLC, Texas Coastal Ventures LLC, Texas Genco GP LLC, Texas Genco Holdings, Texas Genco Holdings Inc., Texas Genco LP LLC, Texas Genco Services LP, US Retailers LLC, Valle Del Sol Energy LLC, Vienna Operations Inc., Vienna Power LLC, WCP (Generation) Holdings LLC, Watson Cogeneration Company, West Coast Power LLC, XOOM Alberta Holdings LLC, XOOM British Columbia Holdings LLC, XOOM Energy BC ULC, XOOM Energy California LLC, XOOM Energy Canada ULC, XOOM Energy Connecticut LLC, XOOM Energy Delaware LLC, XOOM Energy Georgia LLC, XOOM Energy Global Holdings LLC, XOOM Energy Illinois LLC, XOOM Energy Indiana LLC, XOOM Energy Kentucky LLC, XOOM Energy LLC, XOOM Energy Maine LLC, XOOM Energy Maryland LLC, XOOM Energy Massachusetts LLC, XOOM Energy Michigan LLC, XOOM Energy New Hampshire LLC, XOOM Energy New Jersey LLC, XOOM Energy New York LLC, XOOM Energy ONT ULC, XOOM Energy Ohio LLC, XOOM Energy Pennsylvania LLC, XOOM Energy Rhode Island LLC, XOOM Energy Texas LLC, XOOM Energy Virginia LLC, XOOM Energy Washington D.C. LLC, XOOM Ontario Holdings LLC, XOOM Solar LLC, and eV2g LLC. The following companies are subsidiares of HP: 3Com, 3PAR, ABB CADE, AOME Holdings Ltd., Alpha Holding One B.V., Alpha Holding Two B.V., Anatolus Holding B.V., Antila Holding B.V., Apogee, Apogee Corp, Apollo Computer, AppIQ, Applied Optoelectronic Tech, Aptitude Management Consulting W.L.L., Aquarius Holding S.C.A., ArcSight, Arteis, Artivision Technologies, Aruba Networks, Atos Origin, Atos Origin Middle East group, Aurasma Limited, Autonomy Corporation, Avantek, BT & D Technologies, Bitfone Corporation, Bluestone Software, Boonton Radio, Bristol Technology Inc., Bromium, CEC Europe Service Management, CGNZ, CaLan, Caleum Holding B.V., Callisto Holding B.V., Colorado Memory Systems, Colubris Networks, Colubris Networks, Columba Holding B.V., Compaq Cayman Holdings Company, Compaq Cayman Holdings General Partnership II, Compaq Cayman Islands Vision Company, Compaq Information Technologies, Compaq Information Technologies LLC, Computer Insurance Company, Computing and Printing Global Services Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V., Computing and Printing Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V., Computing and Printing Professional Services Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V., Consera Software, ConteXtream Inc, Convex Computer, Crater Holding B.V., David Vision Systems GmbH, Dazel, Division, Dorado Holding B.V., EDS (Electronic Data Systems), EEsof, EYP Mission Critical Facilities, Elara Holding B.V., ElseWare, Eon Systems, Eucalyptus Systems, Eunomia Holding B.V., ExcellerateHRO, Exstream Software, Extreme Logic, F&M Scientific Corporation, F.L. Moseley Company, Flame Holding B.V., Fortify Software, Four Pi Systems, Gram Global Operations Limited, Gram Inc., HP Austria GmbH, HP Belgium BVBA, HP Bermuda Holding One L.P., HP Bilgisayar ve Bask Teknolojileri Limited Sirketi, HP Bilgisayar ve Bask Teknolojileri Limited Sirketi Ankara Subesi, HP Brasil Industria e Comercio de Equipamentos Eletronicos Ltda, HP Brasil Industria e Comercio de Equipamentos Eletronicos Ltda.Branch 01 (Tambore), HP Brasil Industria e Comercio de Equipamentos Eletronicos Ltda.Branch 2 (Sorocaba), HP Brasil Industria e Comercio de Equipamentos Eletronicos Ltda.Branch 3 (Porto Alegre), HP Canada Co., HP China Holding B.V., HP Colombia SAS, HP Computing and Printing Middle East FZ-LLC, HP Computing and Printing Nigeria Ltd, HP Computing and Printing Systems India Private Limited, HP Computing and Printing d.o.o. (Beograd), HP Computing and Printing d.o.o. (Zagreb), HP Deutschland GmbH, HP Deutschland Holding GmbH, HP Europe B.V. Regional Dubai Branch, HP Europe BV Amsterdam Meyrin Branch, HP Finland Oy, HP France Holding SAS, HP France SAS, HP France SAS Bahrain Branch, HP Global Trading B.V., HP Global Trading B.V. Kazakhstan Branch, HP Hewlett Packard Group LLC, HP Holdgate Co., HP Inc (Thailand) Ltd., HP Inc AP Hong Kong Limited, HP Inc Argentina S.R.L., HP Inc Bulgaria EOOD, HP Inc Chile Comercial Limitada, HP Inc Costa Rica Limitada, HP Inc Czech Republic s.r.o., HP Inc Danmark ApS, HP Inc Gulf, HP Inc Hong Kong Limited, HP Inc Magyarorszag Kft., HP Inc Polska sp. z o.o., HP Inc Romania SRL, HP Inc Slovakia s.r.o., HP Inc Tunisie SARL, HP Inc UK Holding Limited, HP Inc UK Limited, HP Inc. Peru SRL, HP Information Technology R & D (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., HP International Sarl, HP International Sarl (Puerto Rico Branch) LLC, HP International Trading B.V., HP International Trading B.V. (Puerto Rico Branch) LLC, HP Italy Holding S.r.l., HP Italy S.r.l., HP Japan Inc., HP Korea Inc., HP Luxembourg S.C.A., HP Nederland B.V., HP New Zealand, HP Norge AS, HP PPS Asia Pacific Pte. Ltd., HP PPS Australia Pty Ltd, HP PPS Costa Rica Limitada, HP PPS India Operations Private Limited, HP PPS Israel Ltd, HP PPS Malaysia Sdn. Bhd., HP PPS Maroc SARL, HP PPS Multimedia Sdn. Bhd., HP PPS Philippines Inc., HP PPS Sales Sdn. Bhd., HP PPS Services India Private Limited, HP PPS Singapore (Sales) Pte. Ltd., HP PPS Sverige AB, HP Pakistan (Private) Limited, HP Panama S. de R.L., HP Printing and Computing Solutions S.L.U., HP Printing and Personal Systems Hellas EPE, HP Production Company Limited, HP Puerto Rico LLC, HP Schweiz GmbH, HP Solutions Creation and Development Services S.L.U., HP South Africa Proprietary Limited, HP Taiwan Information Technology Ltd., HP Technology (Beijing) Co. Ltd., HP Technology (Beijing) Co. Ltd. Chengdu Branch, HP Technology (Beijing) Co. Ltd. Guangzhou Branch, HP Technology (Beijing) Co. Ltd. Nanjing Branch, HP Technology (Beijing) Co. Ltd. Shanghai Branch, HP Technology (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., HP Trading (Shanghai) Co. Ltd, HP Trading (Shanghai) Co. Ltd. Dalian Branch, HP Trading (Shanghai) Co. Ltd. Zhangjiang Branch, HP WebOS LLC, HP-PPS Ecuador Cia. Ltda, HPCP-Computing and Printing Portugal Unipessoal Lda., HPI Bermuda Holdings LLC, HPI Brazil Holdings LLC, HPI CCHGPII LLC, HPI CCHGPII Sub LLC, HPI Federal LLC, HPI J1 Holdings LLC, HPI J2 Holdings LLC, HPI Luxembourg LLC, HPQ Holdings LLC, Hadar Holding B.V., Handspring Corporation, Heartstream, Hewlett Packard Distribution Center Panama S. de R.L, Hewlett-Packard (Chongqing) Co. Ltd, Hewlett-Packard (Chongqing) Manufacturing Export Procurement and Settlement Co. Ltd., Hewlett-Packard (Japan NK) Holdings C.V., Hewlett-Packard Angola Ltda., Hewlett-Packard Arabia LLC, Hewlett-Packard Cambridge B.V., Hewlett-Packard Company Archives LLC, Hewlett-Packard Copenhagen B.V., Hewlett-Packard Danube B.V., Hewlett-Packard Development Company L.P., Hewlett-Packard Enterprises LLC, Hewlett-Packard Europe BVAbu Dhabi Branch, Hewlett-Packard G.K., Hewlett-Packard Global Holdings B.V., Hewlett-Packard Global Investments B.V., Hewlett-Packard India Sales Private Limited, Hewlett-Packard Indigo B.V., Hewlett-Packard Indigo Ltd., Hewlett-Packard Industrial Printing Ltd., Hewlett-Packard Industrial Printing Solutions Europe BVBA, Hewlett-Packard International Pte Ltd, Hewlett-Packard International Pte Ltd Taiwan Branch, Hewlett-Packard Ireland (Holdings) Ltd., Hewlett-Packard Ireland 1 Limited, Hewlett-Packard Ireland Limited, Hewlett-Packard KSA Ltd, Hewlett-Packard KSA Ltd. Qatar Branch, Hewlett-Packard Lisbon B.V., Hewlett-Packard MENA FZ-LLC, Hewlett-Packard MENA FZ-LLC Libya Branch, Hewlett-Packard Malaysia Manufacturing Sdn. Bhd., Hewlett-Packard Mercator B.V., Hewlett-Packard Munich B.V., Hewlett-Packard Products B.V., Hewlett-Packard Products C.V., Hewlett-Packard Products CV 1 LLC, Hewlett-Packard Products CV 2 LLC, Hewlett-Packard Services Saudi Arabia Company, Hewlett-Packard Singapore (Private) Limited, Hewlett-Packard Sunnyvale B.V., Hewlett-Packard Vietnam Ltd., Hewlett-Packard West Indies Limited, Hewlett-Packard World Trade LLC, Hiflex Software, IBRIX, IndiGo, Indigo America Inc., Kale Holding B.V., Kale Holding B.V. (Puerto Rico Branch) LLC, Knightsbridge Solutions, Lefthand Networks, Limited Liability Company HP Inc, Logoworks, Lyra Holding B.V., MacDermid ColorSpan, ManageOne, Melodeo, Mensa Holding B.V., Mercury Interactive, Metrix Network Systems, NUR Macroprinters, Neoware, Nihon HP Nin-I Kumiai, Novadigm, NuView ManageX, Nur do Brasil Ltda, OOO "Hewlett-Packard RUS", Opelin, Opelin, Open Skies, Opsware, Opsware, Optimization Systems, Optotech, OuterBay Technologies, OuterBay Technologies, PERSIST Technologies, PFE Investments Ltd., PIXACO, PROLIN, PT Hewlett-Packard Indonesia, Palm, Palm, Palm Asia Pacific Limited Taiwan Branch, Palm Comercio de Aparelhos Eletronicos Ltda., Palm Europe Limited, Palm Global Operations Limited, Palm Inc., Palm Ireland Investment, Palm Latin America Inc., Palm South America LLC, Palm Trademark Holding Company LLC, Pearl Holding Cooperatief U.A., Peregrine Systems, Perseus Holding B.V., Phoenix Holding L.P., PipeBeach, Polaris Holding One L.P., Polaris Holding Two L.P., PolyServe, Propus Holding B.V., Qosnetics, Quartz Holding Co, RLX Technologies, Regor Holding B.V., SPI Dynamics, Samsung Printing Solutions, Scitex, Scitex Vision, Scope Communications, Scorpius Holding B.V., Security Force Software, Shoreline Investment Management Company, Shunra Software, Shunra Software, Silverwire Holding, Snapfish, StorageApps, Stratavia, Synstar, Tabblo, Talking Blocks, Tall Tree Insurance Company, Techink International Pte. Ltd., Technology Partners, Telegra, The Technology Partners, Tourmaline Holding B.V., Tower Software, Tower Software Engineering Pty Ltd, Transoft Networks, Trellis Software & Controls, Triaton, Trinagy, TruLogica, Trustgenix, Turquoise Holding L.P., VeriFone, Verifone, Versatest, Vertica Systems, Vesta Holding B.V., Vital Technology Pte Ltd, Voltage Security, VoodooPC, and ZAO Hewlett-Packard A.O.. KAZ Minerals PLC, together with its subsidiaries, engages in mining and processing copper and other metals primarily in Kazakhstan, Russia, and Kyrgyzstan. It operates through Bozshakol, Aktogay, East Region and Bozymchak, and Mining Projects segments. The company operates the Aktogay and Bozshakol open pit copper mines in the east region and Pavlodar region of Kazakhstan; three underground mines in the east region of Kazakhstan; and the Bozymchak copper-gold mine in Kyrgyzstan. It also develops greenfield metal deposits; operates Koksay deposit in Kazakhstan, and the Baimskaya licence area in the Chukotka region of Russia; and produces and sells various by-products, such as gold, silver, molybdenum, and zinc. In addition, the company supplies and distributes heat, water, and electricity; and offers construction, project management, financing, management, sales and logistics, and repairs and maintenance services. The company was formerly known as Kazakhmys PLC and changed its name to KAZ Minerals PLC in October 2014. KAZ Minerals PLC was founded in 1930 and is based in London, the United Kingdom. Read More The following companies are subsidiares of Quanta Services: (De) Lazy Q Ranch LLC, 1 Diamond LLC, 1Diamond AS, 618232 Alberta Ltd., 8246408 Canada Inc., Advanced Electric Systems, Advanced Electric Systems LLC, Advanced Utility Testing & Maintenance LLC, Alexander Publications LLC, Allteck GP Ltd., Allteck Limited Partnership, Apprenticeship Programs Inc., Arby Construction, Arcanum Chemicals LLC, Arnett & Burgess Oil Field Construction Limited, Arnett & Burgess Pipeliners (Rockies) LLC, Arnett & Burgess Pipeliners Ltd., B&N Clearing and Environmental LLC, Banister Pipelines Constructors Corp., Banister Pipelines Constructors GP Ltd., Banister Pipelines Limited Partnership, Brent Woodward Inc., Brink Constructors Inc., Brink Constructors Inc. A Corporation Of South Dakota, Brown Engineering and Testing, CAT SPEC Ltd., CAT-SPEC Limited Partnership, CAT-SPEC Limited Partnership (Regd Name) CAT SPEC Ltd., CAT-Spec Limited Partnership, Canadian Utility Construction Corp., Cat Spec Limited LP, Cat Spec Ltd, Cat Spec Ltd. L.P., Cat Spec Ltd. LP, Cat Spec. Ltd. LP, Cat-Spec Ltd (A Domestic limited Partnership), Cat-Spec Ltd LP, Cat-Spec Ltd., Cat-Spec Ltd. L.P., Cat-Spec Ltd. LP, Cat-Spec Ltd. Limited Partnership, Catalyst Changers Inc., Chatham Electric, Citadel Industrial Services L.P., Citadel Industrial Services Ltd., Citadel Industrial Services Ltd. L.P., Citadel Industrial Services Ltd. Limited Partnership, Coe Drilling Pty Ltd., Computapole, Conam Construction Co., Consolidated Power Projects Australia Pty Ltd, Conti Communications Inc., Crux Subsurface Canada Ltd., Crux Subsurface Inc., Cutting Technology - 1 Diamond LLC, DB Utilities Inc., DE Lazy Q Ranch LLC, DNR Pressure Welding Ltd., Dacon Corporation, Dashiell (DE) Corporation (Dashiell Corporation), Dashiell Corporation, Dashiell Corporation DBA Dashiell (DE) Corporation, De Mears Group, De Mears Group Inc., Delaware Quanta Technology LLC, Delaware Underground Construction Co., Didado Utility Company Inc., Digco Utility Construction L.P. Digco Utility Construction Limited Partnership, Dorado Specialty Services L.P., Dorado Specialty Services Ltd., Dorado Specialty Services Ltd. L.P., Dorado Specialty Services Ltd. Limited Partnership, Dorado Specialty Services. Ltd. L.P., Driftwood Electrical Contractors, EHV Power ULC, ELITE PIPING & CIVIL L.P., ELITE TURNAROUND SPECIALISTS LTD, Elite Fabrication Ltd. Elite Fabrication LP, Elite Piping & Civil Limited Partnership, Elite Piping & Civil Limited Partnership, Elite Piping & Civil Lp, Elite Piping & Civil Ltd L.P., Elite Piping & Civil Ltd., Elite Piping & Civil Ltd. L.P., Elite Piping & Civil Ltd. Limited Partnership, Elite Piping and Civil L.P., Elite Turnaround Specialists L.p., Elite Turnaround Specialists Limited Lp, Elite Turnaround Specialists Limited Partnership, Elite Turnaround Specialists Limited Partnership, Elite Turnaround Specialists Ltd Lp, Elite Turnaround Specialists Ltd., Elite Turnaround Specialists Ltd. L.P., Elite Turnaround Specialists Ltd. LP, Elite Turnaround Specialists Ltd. Limited Partnership, Energy Consulting Group LLC, Enscope, Enscope Pty Ltd, FIC GP LLC, Field Personnel Services LLC, First Infrastructure Capital Advisors LLC, First Infrastructure Capital GP L.P., Five Points Construction Co., G-Tek, G-Vac, GEM Engineering Co., Grand Electric Inc., Great Lakes Line Builders, Grid Creative Inc., Grid Manufacturing Corporation, Grid Training Corporation, H.L. Chapman Pipeline Construction Inc., Haverfield Aviation, Haverfield Aviation Inc., Haverfield International Incorporated, Heritage Midstream LLC, IM Electric Inc., IUC ILLINOIS LLC, IUC Nebraska LLC, InfraSource Construction LLC, InfraSource Field Services LLC, InfraSource Services LLC, InfraSources Construction LLC, Infraestructura ETP de Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V, Infrasource Engineering Company PC, Infrasource Iowa Underground LLC, Infrasource Of Pa LLC, Integracion Tecnologica del Peru SAC, Intermountain Electric Inc., Intermountain Electric Inc. A Corporation of Colorado, IonEarth LLC, Irby Construction Company, Irby Construction Company Inc., Iron Mountain M.J. Electric LLC, Island Mechanical Corporation, J.C.R. Construction Co. Inc., J.C.R. Utility Construction Co., J.W. Didado Electric Inc., J.W. Didado Electric LLC, J.w. Didado Electric, JBT Electric LLC, Kingston Contracting Inc., Lazy Q Ranch LLC, Lazy Q Training Center LLC The Lazy Q Lineman School, Legend Foundation Services, Lex Engineering Ltd., Lindsey Electric L.P., Logical Link, Longfellow Drilling, M. G. Dyess Inc., M. J. ELECTRIC LLC IRON MOUNTAIN, M. J. Electric LLC, M. J. Electric LLC - Iron Mountain, M. J. Electric LLC DBA M. J. Electric Iron Mountain LLC, M.J. Electric LLC DBA M.J. Electric Iron Mountain, M.J. Electric LLC Iron Mountain, MTS Field Services, MTS Field Services (Richmond Co), MTS Quanta LLC, Manuel Bros. Inc., Marathon Construction Services, Mears Canada Corp., Mears Equipment Services LLC, Mears Group Inc., Mears Group Pty Ltd, Mears Installation LLC, Mearsmex S. de R.L. de C.V., Mejia Personnel Services LLC, Mercer Technical Services, Microline Technology Corporation, Mid America Energy Services Inc., NACAP Niugini Ltd., NC Northstar Energy Services Inc, NGI Construction, NGI Construction Inc., NGI Construction Inc. (FN), NLC CA. Inc., NLC FL. Inc. Northwest Lineman Center, NLC ID. Inc. Northwest Lineman College, NLC TX. Inc., NPC Energy Services LLC, Nacap Australia, Nacap PNG Limited, Network Communication Services, North Houston Pole Line L.P., North Houston Pole Line Limited Partnership, North Sky Communications, NorthStar Energy Services Inc., Northern Powerline Constructors Inc., Northstar Energy Solutions LLC, Northwest Lineman Center, Northwest Lineman College, Northwest Lineman Training Center, Northwest Lineman Training Center Inc., Nova Constructors LLC, Nova Constructors LTD, Nova Equipment Leasing LLC, Nova Group Inc, Nova Group Inc (CA), Nova Group Inc., Nova Group Inc. DBA NGI Construction, Nova NextGen Solutions LLC, O. J. Pipelines Canada Corporation, O. J. Pipelines Canada Limited Partnership, O.J. Industrial Maintenance, O.J. Pipelines Canada, One Call Locators Canada Ltd., P.D.G. Electric, PAR Electrical Contractors Inc., PDG Electric Co., Par Internacional S. de R.L. de C.V., Performance Energy Services Guyana Ltd., Performance Energy Services L.L.C., Phasor Engineering Inc., Phoenix North Constructors Inc., Phoenix Power Group Inc., Potelco Inc., Potelco Incorporated, Power Delivery Program Inc., Price Gregory International Inc., Price Gregory Services LLC, Probst Construction Inc., Probst Electric Inc., QEPC, QEPC Power Solutions LLC, QES GP LLC, QP Energy Services LLC, QPS Engineering LLC, QPS Engineering LTD., QPS Engineering PLLC, QPS Environmental, QPS Flint Construction, QPS Flint Tank Services, QPS Global, QPS Global Services, QPS Global Services (Richmond Ci), QPS Professional Services, QPSE, QS Mats, QSI Engineering Inc., QSI Finance (Australia) Pty Ltd., QSI Finance (Cayman) Pvt. Ltd., QSI Finance Canada ULC, QSI Finance GP (US) LLC, QSI Finance I (Singapore) Pte. Ltd., QSI Finance I (US) LP, QSI Finance II (Australia) Pty Ltd., QSI Finance II (Lux) S.a r.l, QSI Finance II (Singapore) Pte. Ltd., QSI Finance III (Canada) ULC, QSI Finance III (Lux) SARL, QSI Finance IV (Canada) ULC, QSI Finance IX (Canada) Limited Partnership, QSI Finance V (US) L.P., QSI Finance VI (Canada) ULC, QSI Finance VII (Canada) Limited Partnership, QSI Finance VIII (Canada) ULC, QSI Finance X (Canada) ULC, QSI Inc., QSN Lux Holdings I SCSp, QSN Lux Holdings II SCSp, QSN Lux Holdings III SCSp, QSN Lux Holdings IV SCSp, QTSL LLC, QUANTA FOUNDATION SERVICES, Quanta APL GP II Ltd., Quanta Asset Management LLC, Quanta Associates L.P., Quanta Aviation Services LLC, Quanta Canada GP ULC, Quanta Canada Holdings III Limited Partnership, Quanta Canada Holdings LP, Quanta Canada III GP Ltd., Quanta Capital GP LLC, Quanta Capital LP L.P., Quanta Capital Solutions Inc., Quanta Cares, Quanta EPC Services, Quanta Electric Power Construction LLC, Quanta Electric Power Construction Management Inc., Quanta Electric Power Services LLC, Quanta Electric Power Services West LLC, Quanta Energized Innovations Ltd., Quanta Energized Services U.S. LLC, Quanta Energized Services of Canada Ltd., Quanta Energy Services LLC, Quanta Environmental Solutions, Quanta Equipment Company LLC, Quanta Government Solutions Inc., Quanta Holdings I (Netherlands) B.V., Quanta Holdings II (Netherlands) B.V., Quanta Infraestructura de Chile SpA, Quanta Infrastructure Services LLC, Quanta Infrastructure Services S. de R.L. de C.V., Quanta Inline Devices LLC, Quanta Inspection Services, Quanta Insurance Company Inc., Quanta International Holdings (US) LLC, Quanta International Holdings II Ltd., Quanta International Holdings Ltd., Quanta International Limited, Quanta Kingsvale LP Ltd., Quanta Lines Pty Ltd., Quanta Maine Services LLC, Quanta Middle East LLC, Quanta Pipeline Services Inc., Quanta Power Australia Pty Ltd, Quanta Power Generation Inc., Quanta Power Inc., Quanta Power Solutions India Private Limited, Quanta Resource Development, Quanta Services Africa (PTY) Ltd., Quanta Services Australia Pty Ltd., Quanta Services Chile SpA, Quanta Services Colombia S.A.S., Quanta Services Costa Rica Ltda., Quanta Services Guatemala Ltda., Quanta Services International Holdings II LP, Quanta Services International Holdings LP, Quanta Services Management Partnership L.P., Quanta Services Netherlands B.V., Quanta Services Panama S. de R.L., Quanta Services Peru S.A.C., Quanta Services Puerto Rico LLC, Quanta Services of Canada Ltd., Quanta Subsurface Canada Ltd., Quanta Subsurface LLC, Quanta Tank Services, Quanta Technology Canada ULC, Quanta Technology LLC, Quanta Technology UK Ltd., Quanta Tecnologia do Brasil Ltda., Quanta Telecom, Quanta Telecom Services, Quanta Telecommunication Services, Quanta Telecommunication Services LLC, Quanta Telecommunications Services LLC, Quanta Underground Services, Quanta Underground Services (Culpeper Co), Quanta Underground Services (Spotsylvania Co), Quanta Underground Services Inc., Quanta Utility Engineering Services Inc., Quanta Utility Installation Company Inc., Quanta Utility Operation LLC, Quanta West LLC, Quantecua Cia. Ltda., R. R. Cassidy Inc., RMS Holdings LLC, RMS Holdings LLC (Delaware), RMS Welding Systems, RMS Welding Systems LLC, Ranger Directional, Realtime Engineers Inc., Realtime Utility Engineers Inc., Redes Andinas de Comunicaciones S.R.L., Riggin & Diggin Line Construction, Rms Welding LLC, Rms Welding Systems LLC, Road Bore Corporation, Ryan Company Inc. The, Ryan Company Inc. of Massachusetts, Ryan Company Inc.(The), Seaward, Seaward Corp, Seaward Corporation, Service EC (DE) Inc., Service Electric Company (DE), Service Electric Company Inc., Service Electric Company of Delaware, Servicios Par Electric S. de R.L. de C.V., Servicios de Infraestructura del Peru S.A.C., Southwest Trenching Company Inc., Specialty Tank Services L.P., Specialty Tank Services LP, Specialty Tank Services Limited Partnership, Specialty Tank Services Limited Partnership, Specialty Tank Services Ltd., Specialty Tank Services Ltd. (LP), Specialty Tank Services Ltd. L.P., Specialty Tank Services Ltd. LP, Specialty Tank Services Ltd. LP, Specialty Tank Services Ltd. Limited Partnership, Stronghold General LLC, Stronghold Holdings (BVI) Limited, Stronghold Inspection L.P., Stronghold Inspection Limited Partnership, Stronghold Inspection Limited Partnership, Stronghold Inspection Lp, Stronghold Inspection Ltd L.P., Stronghold Inspection Ltd., Stronghold Inspection Ltd. L.P., Stronghold Inspection Ltd. Limited Partnership, Stronghold Limited Partnership, Stronghold Ltd., Stronghold Ltd. Limited Partnership, Stronghold Management Holdings LP, Stronghold Specialty General LLC, Stronghold Specialty Ltd., Stronghold Specialty Ltd., Stronghold Specialty Ltd. Limited Partnership, Stronghold Tower Group LP, Stronghold Tower Group Ltd LP, Stronghold Tower Group Ltd., Stronghold Tower Group Ltd. LP, Stronghold VI LLC, Subterra Damage Prevention Specialists Ltd., Summit Line Construction, Sumter Utilities Inc., T. G. Mercer Consulting Services Inc., TA Construction, TC Infrastructure Services Ltd., Taylor Built, Texas Specialty Tank Services Ltd. LP, The Aspen Utility Company LLC, The ComTran Group Inc., The Hallen Construction Co. Inc., The Massachusetts Ryan Company Inc., The Ryan Company Inc Of Massachusetts, The Ryan Company Inc., The Ryan Company Inc. (Massachusetts), The Ryan Company Inc. of Massachusetts, The Ryan Company Incorporated of Massachusetts, The Ryan Company Of Massachusetts Inc., The Ryan Company of Massachusetts, The Ryan Company of Massachusetts (FN), Tom Allen Construction Company Inc., Tom Allen Construction Company of Delaware, Trans Tech Electric, TurnKey Automation Limited Partnership, TurnKey Automation Limited Partnership, TurnKey Automation Ltd., TurnKey Automation Ltd. Limited Partnership, TurnKey Automation Ltd. Limited Partnership, TurnKey I&E Ltd., Turnkey Automation Ltd. L.P., Turnkey Automation Ltd. LP., UCC Underground Construction Co. Inc., Ucc - Underground Construction Co., Underground Construction Co. Inc., Underground Construction Co. Inc. (Delaware), Underground Electric Construction Company LLC, Utilco Inc., Utility Fleet Services, Utility Line Management Services Inc., Utility Testing & Maintenance LLC, Utility Training Services Corporation, VALARD Polska sp. Z o.o., Valard, Valard, Valard Construction (Ontario) Ltd., Valard Construction (Quebec) Inc., Valard Construction 2008 Ltd., Valard Construction Australia Pty Ltd, Valard Construction LLC, Valard Equipment (AB) Ltd., Valard Equipment GP Ltd., Valard Equipment Limited Partnership, Valard Geomatics (Ontario) Ltd., Valard Geomatics BC Ltd., Valard Geomatics Ltd., Valard Mechanical Ltd., Valard Norway AS, Valard Sweden AB, Valard Zagreb d. o. o., Wade D. Taylor Inc., West Coast Communications, Winco Helicopters, Winco Inc., Winco Inc. an Oregon Based Corporation, Winco Powerline Services, Winco Powerline Services Inc., Winco Powerline Services Inc., Winco Services Inc., World Fiber Inc., and mmit Line Construction Inc.. Royal Bank of Canada operates as a diversified financial service company worldwide. The company's Personal & Commercial Banking segment offers checking and savings accounts, home equity financing, personal lending, private banking, indirect lending, mutual funds and self-directed brokerage accounts, guaranteed investment certificates, credit cards, and payment products and solutions; and lending, leasing, deposit, investment, foreign exchange, cash management, auto dealer financing, trade products, and services to small and medium-sized commercial businesses. This segment offers financial products and services through branches, automated teller machines, and mobile sales network. Its Wealth Management segment provides a suite of advice-based solutions and strategies to high net worth and ultra-high net worth individuals, and institutional clients. The company's Insurance segment offers life, health, home, auto, travel, wealth, annuities, and reinsurance advice and solutions; and creditor and business insurance services to individual, business, and group clients through its field sales force, advice centers, and online, as well as through independent insurance advisors and affinity relationships. Its Investor & Treasury Services segment provides asset, cash management, transaction banking, and treasury services to institutional clients; correspondent banking and trade finance services for financial institutions; and short-term funding and liquidity management services. The company's Capital Markets segment offers corporate and investment banking, as well as equity and debt origination, distribution, sale, and trading services for corporations, institutional investors, asset managers, governments, and central banks. Royal Bank of Canada has a strategic partnership with Royal College Of Physicians & Surgeons Of Canada to support the needs of Canada's medical specialists. The company was founded in 1864 and is headquartered in Toronto, Canada. Read More TelefAnica Deutschland Holding AG provides integrated telecommunication services to private and business customers in Germany. It offers voice, data, and value-added services in mobile and fixed line networks; access to infrastructure and services for its wholesale partners; and digital products and services in the fields of Internet of Things. The company provides its products and services through a network of independently operated franchise and premium partner shops, and online and telesales channels, as well as indirect selling channels, such as partnerships and co-operations with retailers. It markets its products and services under the O2, Blau, AY YILDIZ, Ortel Mobile, FONIC, netzclub, and TArkeiSIM brand names. As of December 31, 2020, TelefAnica Deutschland Holding AG had approximately 47 million customers. The company was formerly known as TelefAnica Germany Verwaltungs GmbH and changed its name to TelefAnica Deutschland Holding AG in September 2012. The company is based in Munich, Germany. TelefAnica Deutschland Holding AG is a subsidiary of Telefonica Germany Holdings Limited. Read More 28 minutes ago AP FACT CHECK: Biden's shaky claims on jobs, gasoline WASHINGTON (AP) Boasting that government policies can make a difference in improving the economy, President Joe Biden went too far Thursday in taking credit for job growth since taking office. He also made a dubious suggestion that wrongdoing is behind higher gasoline prices something that his administration will seek to fix. Read Article The following companies are subsidiares of Xerox: A B S Digital Limited, Acorn Business Machines (Holmfirth) Limited, Alloy Acquisitions Corp. LLC, Altodigital Networks, Altodigital Networks Limited, American Photocopy Equipment Company of Pittsburgh LLC, Amici, Arena Group, Arena Group Holdings Limited, Arena Group Limited, Arizona Office Technologies Inc., B 2 Business Systems Limited, Back2Business Limited, Bessemer Insurance Limited, Bessemer Trust Limited, Boise Office Equipment Inc., Bright Ceramic Technologies Inc., Bunch CareSolutions, Business Systems (North Wales) Limited, CPAS Systems, CREDITEX - Aluguer de Equipamentos S.A., CTX Business Solutions Inc., Capitol Office Solutions LLC, CareAR Holdings LLC, CareAR Inc., Carolina Office Systems Inc., Carr Business Systems Inc., Chicago Office Technology Group Inc., ComDoc Inc., Concept Group, Concept Group Limited, Connecticut Business Systems LLC, Consilience Software, Continua Limited, Continua Sanctum Limited, Conway Technology Group LLC, Copyrite Business Solutions (Holdings) Limited, Copyrite Business Solutions Limited, Copytrend Limited, Criterion IT Limited, Customer Value Group, Dahill Office Technology Corporation, Digitex, Digitex Canada Inc., Docucentric Holdings Limited, Eastern Managed Print Network LLC, Elan Marketing Inc., Electronic Systems Inc., Fovia (Innovation) Limited, G-Five Inc., GDP Technologies Inc., Global Imaging Systems, Global PR Corporation, Gyricon LLC, Healthy Communities Institute, Heritage Business Systems Inc., ITEC Group, Image Technology Specialists Inc., ImageQuest Inc., Imagetek Office Systems, Impika, Impika SAS, Inland Business Machines Inc., Institute for Research on Learning, Integrity One Technologies Inc., Intrepid Learning, Invoco Group, Irish Business Systems, LRI LLC, LaserNetworks, LaserNetworks Inc., Lateral Data, Learn Something, Lewan & Associates Inc., Limited Liability Company Xerox (C.I.S.), M & S Reprographics Limited, MRC Smart Technology Solutions Inc., MT Business Holdings Inc., MT Business Technologies Inc., MWB Copy Products Inc., Mail A Doc Limited, Merizon Group Incorporated, Michigan Office Solutions Inc., Minnesota Office Technology Group Inc., Mitral Systems Limited, Mr. Copy Inc., Nemo (AKS) Limited, NewField IT, NewField Information Technology LLC, NewField Information Technology Limited, Northeast Office Systems LLC, Osprey Business Systems Limited, PARC China Holdings Inc., Pacific Services and Development Corporation, Palo Alto Research Center Incorporated, Platinum Digital Print Solutions Limited, Precision Copier Service Inc., Quality Business Systems Inc., Quilver Business Services Limited, R. K. Dixon Company, RRXH Limited, RRXIL Limited, RRXO Limited, RSA Medical, Rabbit Copiers Inc., Reflex Digital Solutions (UK) Limited, Reprographics Egypt Limited, Saxon Business Systems Inc., Smart Data Consulting, SoCal Office Technologies Inc., Stem Networks Limited, Stewart Business Systems LLC, Stewart of Alabama Inc., StrataCare, Talegen Holdings Inc., Tektronix - color printing, Text Comm Limited (in receivership), The Xerox (UK) Trust, The Xerox Foundation, Time Business Systems Limited, Triton Business Finance Limited, Una-Stem Limited, Veenman B.V., Veenman Financial Services B.V., WDS, WaterWare Internet Services, XC Asia LLC, XC Global Trading B.V., XC Trading Hong Kong Limited, XC Trading Japan G.K., XC Trading Korea YH, XC Trading Malaysia Sdn. Bhd., XC Trading Shenzhen Co. Ltd., XC Trading Singapore Pte Ltd., XEROX CZECH REPUBLIC s r.o., XESystems Foreign Sales Corporation, XFS Secured Borrowing 2020-1 LLC, XHC Acquisition Corp., XMPie, XMPie Inc., XMPie Ltd., XRI Limited, XRO Limited, Xerox (Europe) Limited, Xerox (Ireland) Limited, Xerox (Nederland) BV, Xerox (Romania) Echipmante Si Servici S.A., Xerox (UK) Limited, Xerox (Ukraine) Ltd LLC, Xerox A/S, Xerox AG, Xerox AS, Xerox Argentina Industrial y Comercial S.A., Xerox Austria GmbH, Xerox Bulgaria EOOD, Xerox Business Equipment Limited, Xerox Business Services Bulgaria EOOD, Xerox Business Solutions Inc., Xerox Business Solutions Southeast LLC, Xerox Buro Araclari Servis ve Ticaret Ltd. Sti, Xerox Canada Inc., Xerox Canada Ltd., Xerox Canada N.S. ULC, Xerox Capital (Europe) Limited, Xerox Capital LLC, Xerox Computer Services Limited, Xerox Comercio e Industria Ltda, Xerox Corporation, Xerox DNHC LLC, Xerox Dienstleistungsgesellschaft GmbH, Xerox Distributor Operations Limited, Xerox Egypt S.A.E., Xerox Equipment Limited, Xerox Equipment UK Limited, Xerox Espana S.A.U., Xerox Exports Limited, Xerox Finance AG, Xerox Finance Leasing S.A.E., Xerox Finance Limited, Xerox Financial Services B.V., Xerox Financial Services Belux NV, Xerox Financial Services Canada Ltd., Xerox Financial Services Danmark A/S, Xerox Financial Services Finland Oy, Xerox Financial Services LLC, Xerox Financial Services Norway AS, Xerox Financial Services SAS, Xerox Financial Services Sverige AB, Xerox Foreign Holdings LLC, Xerox Foreign Sales Corporation, Xerox GmbH, Xerox Health Care LLC, Xerox Hellas AEE, Xerox Holding Deutschland GmbH, Xerox Holdings (Ireland) Limited, Xerox Holdings Inc., Xerox Hungary Trading Limited, Xerox IBS Limited, Xerox IBS NI Limited, Xerox India Limited, Xerox International Joint Marketing Inc., Xerox Investments Europe B.V., Xerox Israel Ltd., Xerox Italia Rental Services Srl, Xerox Kazakhstan Limited Liability Partnership, Xerox Latinamerican Holdings Inc., Xerox Leasing Deutschland GmbH, Xerox Leasing GmbH, Xerox Limited, Xerox Luxembourg SA, Xerox Mailing Systems Limited, Xerox Manufacturing (Nederland) B.V., Xerox Maroc S.A., Xerox Mexicana S.A. de C.V., Xerox Middle East Investments (Bermuda) Limited, Xerox N.V., Xerox Overseas Holdings Limited, Xerox Overseas Inc., Xerox Oy, Xerox Pensions Limited, Xerox Polska Sp. z o. o, Xerox Portugal Equipamentos de Escritorio Limitada, Xerox Products Limited, Xerox Products UK Limited, Xerox Professional Services Limited, Xerox Realty Corporation, Xerox Renting S.A.U., Xerox Reprographische Services GmbH, Xerox S.A.S., Xerox S.p.A., Xerox Secured Borrowing 2020-1 LLC, Xerox Servicios Compartidos Guatemala y Compani Limitada, Xerox Servicos e Participacoes Ltda, Xerox Shared Services Romania SRL, Xerox Sverige AB, Xerox Technology Services India LLP, Xerox Technology Services SAS, Xerox Telebusiness GmbH, Xerox Trading Enterprises Limited, Xerox Trinidad Limited, Xerox UK Holdings Limited, Xerox XHB Limited, Xerox XIB Limited, Xerox Xf Holdings (Ireland) DAC, Xerox de Chile S.A., Xerox del Ecuador S.A., Xerox del Peru S.A., Zeno Office Solutions, Zeno Office Solutions Inc., Zoom Imaging Solutions Inc., and inVentiv Patient Access Solutions. Brookdale Senior Living, Inc. engages in the operation of senior living communities. The firm manages independent living, assisted living and dementia-care communities and continuing care retirement centers. It operates through the following segments: Independent Living Assisted Living & Memory Care, CCRCs, Health Care Services and Management Services. The Independent Living segment is primarily designed for middle to upper income seniors who desire an upscale residential environment providing the highest quality of service. The Assisted Living & Memory Care segment offer housing and 24-hour assistance with ADLs to mid-acuity frail and elderly residents. The CCRCs segment offers a variety of living arrangements and services to accommodate all levels of physical ability and health. The Healthcare Services segment provides home health, hospice and outpatient therapy services, as well as education and wellness programs, to residents of many communities and to seniors living outside communities. The Management Services segment composes of communities operated by the company pursuant to management agreements. The company was founded in 1978 and is headquartered in Brentwood, TN. Read More Christopher & Banks Corporation, through its subsidiaries, operates as a specialty retailer of private-brand women's apparel and accessories in the United States. The company designs and sells women's apparel and accessories to customers ranging in age from 40 and older. Its stores offer women's apparel consisting of casual clothing, everyday basics, wear-to-work, leisure/active wear, and sleepwear in missy, petite, and women sizes, as well as jewelry and accessories. As of December 4, 2018, the company operated 461 stores, including 314 MPW stores, 80 Outlet stores, 35 Christopher & Banks stores, and 32 stores in its women's plus size clothing division CJ Banks in 45 states. It also operates christopherandbanks.com, an e-commerce Website for its Christopher & Banks and CJ Banks brands. The company was formerly known as Braun's Fashions Corporation and changed its name to Christopher & Banks Corporation in July 2000. Christopher & Banks Corporation was founded in 1956 and is headquartered in Plymouth, Minnesota. Read More Green Dot Corp. operates as a financial technology leader and bank holding company, which engages in the provision of modern banking and money movement accessible for all. It operates through the following segments: Account Services; Processing and Settlement Services; and Corporate and Other. The Account Services segment consists of revenues and expenses derived from deposit account programs, such as prepaid cards, debit cards, consumer and small business checking accounts, secured credit cards, payroll debit cards, and gift cards. The Processing and Settlement Services segment comprises of products and services that specialize in facilitating the movement of funds on behalf of consumers and businesses. The Corporate and Other segment represents eliminations of intersegment revenues and expenses, unallocated corporate expenses, depreciation and amortization, and other costs that are not considered when management evaluates segment performance. The company was founded by Steven W. Streit in October 1, 1999 and is headquartered in Pasadena, CA. Read More DTE Energy Co. operates as a diversified energy company, which engages in the provision of electricity and natural gas sales, distribution and storage services. It operates through the following segments: Electric, Gas, Non-Utility Operations, and Corporate & Other. The Electric segment engages in the generation, purchase, distribution and sale of electricity to residential, commercial and industrial customers in south-eastern Michigan. The Gas segment engages in the purchase, storage, transportation, distribution and sale of natural gas to residential, commercial and industrial customers throughout Michigan and the sale of storage and transportation capacity. The Non-Utility Operations segment engages in gas storage and pipelines, power and industrial projects, and energy trading. The Corporate & Other includes various holding company activities, holds certain non-utility debt, and holds energy-related investments. The company was founded in January 1995 and is headquartered in Detroit, MI. Read More The following companies are subsidiares of Hewlett Packard Enterprise: 3Com International Inc., 3PAR Inc., Apogee, Aruba Networks Inc., Aruba Networks International Cayman, Aruba Networks International Limited, BlueData Software, Cloud Cruiser, Cloud Technology Partners, Cloud Technology Partners Inc., Compaq Computer (Mauritius), Compaq Trademark B.V., Cray, Cray Inc., EDS World Corporation (Far East) LLC, EYP Mission Critical Facilities Inc., H3C Holdings Limited, HP Enterprise Services Australia Pty Ltd, HP Financial Services (Australia) Pty Limited, HP Financial Services (Chile) Limitada, HP Financial Services (Japan) K.K., HP Financial Services Arrendamento Mercantil S.A., HP Financial Services Company (Korea), HP Financial Services International Holdings Company, HPE Government LLC, HPFS Global Holdings I LLC, HPFS Global Holdings II LLC, HPFS Rental S.R.L., Hangzhou H3C Technologies Co. Ltd, Hewlett Packard Caribe BV LLC, Hewlett Packard Colombia Ltda., Hewlett Packard Enterprise (China) Co. Ltd., Hewlett Packard Enterprise B.V., Hewlett Packard Enterprise B.V. Amstelveen Meyrin Branch, Hewlett Packard Enterprise Canada Co., Hewlett Packard Enterprise Canada Co. Hewlett Packard Enterprise Canada Cie, Hewlett Packard Enterprise Costa Rica Limitada, Hewlett Packard Enterprise GlobalSoft Private Limited, Hewlett Packard Enterprise India Private Limited, Hewlett Packard Enterprise Ireland Limited, Hewlett Packard Enterprise Luxembourg SCA, Hewlett Packard Enterprise Polska sp. z o.o., Hewlett Packard Pathfinder LLC, Hewlett Packard Taiwan Ltd., Hewlett-Packard (Israel) Ltd., Hewlett-Packard (M) Sdn. Bhd., Hewlett-Packard (Nigeria) Limited, Hewlett-Packard (Schweiz) GmbH, Hewlett-Packard (Tanzania) Limited, Hewlett-Packard (Thailand) Limited, Hewlett-Packard ApS, Hewlett-Packard Argentina S.R.L., Hewlett-Packard Asia Pacific Pte. Ltd., Hewlett-Packard Australia Pty Ltd, Hewlett-Packard Belgium SPRL/BVBA, Hewlett-Packard Bermuda Enterprises LLC, Hewlett-Packard Brasil Ltda., Hewlett-Packard Bulgaria EOOD, Hewlett-Packard Caribe B.V., Hewlett-Packard Caribe Y Andina B.V. LLC, Hewlett-Packard Chile Comercial Limitada, Hewlett-Packard Cyprus Ltd, Hewlett-Packard Ecuador Cia. Ltda., Hewlett-Packard Egypt Ltd., Hewlett-Packard Financial Services (India) Private Limited, Hewlett-Packard Financial Services Canada Company, Hewlett-Packard Financial Services Company, Hewlett-Packard France SAS, Hewlett-Packard G1 SPV (Cayman) Company, Hewlett-Packard Gesellschaft mbH, Hewlett-Packard Ghana Limited, Hewlett-Packard GmbH, Hewlett-Packard Guatemala Limitada, Hewlett-Packard HK SAR Ltd., Hewlett-Packard Hellas EPE, Hewlett-Packard Holdings Ltd., Hewlett-Packard International Bank Designated Activity Company, Hewlett-Packard International Bank Public Limited Company, Hewlett-Packard International Sarl, Hewlett-Packard Italiana S.r.l., Hewlett-Packard Japan Ltd., Hewlett-Packard Korea Ltd., Hewlett-Packard Leasing Limited, Hewlett-Packard Limited, Hewlett-Packard Luxembourg Enterprises LLC, Hewlett-Packard Macau Limited, Hewlett-Packard Manufacturing Ltd, Hewlett-Packard Marigalante Ltd., Hewlett-Packard Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V., Hewlett-Packard Middle East FZ-LLC, Hewlett-Packard Mocambique Limitada - Sociedada em Liquidacao, Hewlett-Packard Nederland B.V., Hewlett-Packard New Zealand, Hewlett-Packard Norge AS, Hewlett-Packard OY, Hewlett-Packard Operations Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V., Hewlett-Packard Peru S.R.L., Hewlett-Packard Philippines Corporation, Hewlett-Packard Portugal Lda., Hewlett-Packard SARL, Hewlett-Packard SIA, Hewlett-Packard Servicios Espana S.L., Hewlett-Packard Singapore (Sales) Pte. Ltd., Hewlett-Packard South Africa (Proprietary) Limited, Hewlett-Packard Sverige AB, Hewlett-Packard Technology Center Inc., Hewlett-Packard Teknoloji Cozumleri Limited Sirketi, Hewlett-Packard The Hague B.V., Hewlett-Packard Venezuela S.R.L., Hewlett-Packard Vision Limited, Hewlett-Packard d.o.o., Hewlett-Packard s.r.o., Limited Liability Company Hewlett Packard Enterprise, MapR Technologies, New H3C Technologies Co. Ltd., Niara Inc., Nimble Storage, Nimble Storage Inc., Nimble Storage Israel Ltd, Nimble Storage Japan GK, Nimble Storage UK Limited, Plexxi, RedPixie, SGI (Silicon Graphics), Sapphire Holding Co, Scytale, Shanghai Hewlett-Packard Co. Ltd., Silver Peak, SimpliVity, Sinope Holding B.V., Trilead, UAB ES Hague Lietuva, and Unis Huashan Technologies Co. Limited. The following companies are subsidiares of Jones Lang LaSalle: 225 Fitness Inc., 360 Commercial Partners, ACREST, AGL, AMAS Limited, AVM Partners, Advanced Technologies Group Inc., Alaska UK (GP) Ltd, Alkas Consulting, Aoyama Holding Limited, Australian Valuation Solutions, Avenue9, BRG, BRG International LLC, BRG Resource Group ULC, BRG WORKPLACE MANAGEMENT SOLUTIONS (EUROPE) LIMITED, BRG Workplace Management Solutions (India) Private Limited, BRG Workplace Management Solutions (Singapore) Pte. Ltd., Beijing Dazheng Zhongheng Enterprise Consulting Co. Ltd., Beijing Guotai Zhongheng Enterprise Consulting Co. Ltd., Beijing Jones Lang LaSalle Property Management Services Co. Ltd., Big Red Rooster Flow LLC, Bill Goold Realty, Bradford McCormack & Associates, Brune Consulting Management GmbH, Building Services Network Inc., Business Products Group Inc., Business Resource Holdings Inc., CIG III Technoparc Nominee II Inc./Fiduciaire CIG III Technoparc II Inc., CMM Projekt & Office Solutions GmbH, COBERTURA - SOCIEDADE DE MEDIACAO IMOBILIARIA S.A., CTH, Capital Realty LLC, Carolyn House (General Partner) Limited, Charter Oaks Financial Services Inc., Churston Heard Ltd, Claygate Residential (General Partner) LLP , Claygate Residential (Nominee) Limited, CoR Advisors, Cobertura, Colliers Baltimore, ComRef LIM Co-Invest LLC, Corporate Concierge Services Inc., Corporate Concierge Services of Hawaii Inc., Corporate Realty Advisors, Corrigo, Corrigo Incorporated, Credo Real Estate (Singapore), Creston Residential (General Partner) LLP, Creston Residential (Nominee) Limited, DST International Property Services, Dalian Jones Lang LaSalle Services Limited, ECD Energy and Environment Canada, ECD Energy and Environment Canada Ltd., EID (General Partner) LLP, ELPF Lafayette Manager Inc., Eleven Eleven Construction Corporation, Environmental Governance Ltd, Europe Fund III Alberta GP Inc., Europe Fund III GP LLC, FACILITY ASSOCIATES RECRUITMENT LIMITED, FIVE D PROPERTY MANAGEMENT (NSW) PTY LTD, FIVE D PROPERTY MANAGEMENT (NT) PTY LTD, FIVE D PROPERTY MANAGEMENT (QLD) PTY LTD, FIVE D PROPERTY MANAGEMENT (SA) PTY LTD, FIVE D PROPERTY MANAGEMENT (TAS) PTY LTD, FIVE D PROPERTY MANAGEMENT (VIC) PTY LTD, FIVE D PROPERTY MANAGEMENT (WA) PTY LTD, Five D Holdings Pty Limited, Five D Holdings Pty Ltd, Five D Property Management (ACT) Pty Ltd, Fox RPM Corp., GFN Property Investments L.L.C., Guangzhou Jones Lang LaSalle Property Services Company Limited, Guardian Property Asset Management, Guardian Property Asset Management Limited, H Park Germany LP GmbH, H Park Germany Verwaltungs-GmbH, HALL AND KAY FIRE HOLDINGS LIMITED, HFF, HFF Holdings Limited, HFF InvestCo LLC, HFF Partnership Holdings LLC, HFF Real Estate Limited, HFF Securities L.P., HFF Securities Limited, HG2 Limited, HUB PROFESSIONAL SERVICES LIMITED, Halcyon Real Estate, Hall & Kay Fire Services Ltd, Harry K Moore, Hentschel & Company LLC, Hercules Property Manager (Jersey) Limited, Holliday Fenoglio Fowler L.P., Holliday GP LLC, Hunter Facilities Management (HFM), Huntley Mullaney Spargo & Sullivan Inc., Huntley Mullaney Spargo & Sullivan LLC, IFM Services Finland OY, INTEGRAL UK HOLDINGS LIMITED, Inmobiliaria Jones Lang LaSalle Limitada, Integra Realty Resources, Integra Realty Resources - Dallas, Integral, Integral Facility Services Limited, Integral UK, Integrated General Administration Services K.K., J P Sturge Limited, J.L.W. Nominees Limited, J.L.W. Second Nominees Limited, JLL 2002, JLL 2003 Limited, JLL CAMBRIDGE LTD, JLL CMG LLC, JLL Capital Markets AB, JLL Chile Asesorias Inmobiliarias Limitada, JLL Corporate Solutions - Servicos De Conservacao e Manutencao de Imoveis Ltda, JLL Corporate Solutions AB, JLL Corporate Solutions Holdings Inc., JLL Corretagen e Trasacoes Imobiliarias Ltda., JLL Expertises SARLAU, JLL Infrastructure Advisory Pty Ltd, JLL Ingenierie, JLL Investment Scottish Limited Partnership II, JLL Kapitalmarkand Holding AB, JLL Kapitalmarknad AB, JLL Ltd, JLL Macau Limited, JLL Mall Management K.K., JLL Marketplace LLC, JLL Morii Valuation & Appraisal K.K., JLL Mortgage Services Pty Limited, JLL Nevada Inc., JLL Properties LLC, JLL Public Sector Valuations Pty Ltd, JLL Puerto Rico Realty & Co. S. en C., JLL Real Estate Capital Pte. Ltd., JLL Scottish II G.P. L.L.C., JLL Singapore Capital Pte. Ltd., JLL Transaction Services AB, JLL Treasury Support AB, JLL Valuation & Advisory Services LLC, JLL/BWXT Naval Facility Experts LLC, JLLBRR LLC, JLLINT Inc., Jones Lang LaSalle & Compania Limitada, Jones Lang LaSalle (ACT) Pty Limited, Jones Lang LaSalle (B) Sdn Bhd, Jones Lang LaSalle (Barbados) Ltd., Jones Lang LaSalle (Beijing) Consultants Limited, Jones Lang LaSalle (China) Limited, Jones Lang LaSalle (Fiji) Pte Ltd, Jones Lang LaSalle (Geneva) SA, Jones Lang LaSalle (Luxembourg) Secs, Jones Lang LaSalle (NSW) Pty Limited, Jones Lang LaSalle (PNG) Limited, Jones Lang LaSalle (Philippines) Inc., Jones Lang LaSalle (Portugal) - Sociedade de Mediacao Imobiliaria S.A., Jones Lang LaSalle (Puerto Rico) Inc., Jones Lang LaSalle (QLD) Pty Limited, Jones Lang LaSalle (S E) Limited, Jones Lang LaSalle (SA) Pty Limited, Jones Lang LaSalle (Shenzhen) Commercial Consultancy Company Limited, Jones Lang LaSalle (VIC) Pty Limited, Jones Lang LaSalle (WA) Pty Limited, Jones Lang LaSalle (pty) ltd, Jones Lang LaSalle - Central Texas LLC, Jones Lang LaSalle - Front Range LLLP, Jones Lang LaSalle - Northeast Inc., Jones Lang LaSalle - Texas Inc., Jones Lang LaSalle -Sociedade de Avaliacoes Imobiliarias Unipessoal Lda, Jones Lang LaSalle 1. Beteiligungsgesellschaft mbH, Jones Lang LaSalle AG, Jones Lang LaSalle Acquisition Corp., Jones Lang LaSalle Administration B.V., Jones Lang LaSalle Advisory Services Pty Limited, Jones Lang LaSalle Americas (Illinois) L.P., Jones Lang LaSalle Americas Inc., Jones Lang LaSalle Arizona LLC, Jones Lang LaSalle Asia Holdings Limited, Jones Lang LaSalle Asset Management GmbH, Jones Lang LaSalle Australia Pty Limited, Jones Lang LaSalle BV, Jones Lang LaSalle Bangladesh Private Limited, Jones Lang LaSalle Beihai Holdings L.L.C., Jones Lang LaSalle Belgium Holdings LLC, Jones Lang LaSalle Billion Management Services Limited, Jones Lang LaSalle Brokerage Inc., Jones Lang LaSalle Building Operations Private Limited, Jones Lang LaSalle Bulgaria EOOD, Jones Lang LaSalle Capital Investments Limited, Jones Lang LaSalle Charities, Jones Lang LaSalle Co-Investment Inc., Jones Lang LaSalle Co. Ltd., Jones Lang LaSalle Constructions K.K., Jones Lang LaSalle Corporate Appraisal and Advisory Limited, Jones Lang LaSalle Corporate Finance Limited, Jones Lang LaSalle Corporate Property (VIC) Pty Limited, Jones Lang LaSalle Corporate Property Services Pty Limited, Jones Lang LaSalle Dorchester Limited, Jones Lang LaSalle Ecuador S.A. JLL ECUADOR, Jones Lang LaSalle Electronic Sarl, Jones Lang LaSalle Espana S.A., Jones Lang LaSalle Europe Limited, Jones Lang LaSalle European Holdings Limited, Jones Lang LaSalle European Services Limited, Jones Lang LaSalle Expertises SAS, Jones Lang LaSalle Facility Services S.L., Jones Lang LaSalle Finance BV, Jones Lang LaSalle Finance Europe, Jones Lang LaSalle Finance Luxembourg Sarl, Jones Lang LaSalle Finland Oy, Jones Lang LaSalle French Co-Investments Inc., Jones Lang LaSalle Gayrimenkul Hizmetleri Ticaret Anonim Sirketi, Jones Lang LaSalle German Holdings B.V. & Co. KG, Jones Lang LaSalle Global Finance Luxembourg Sarl, Jones Lang LaSalle Global Finance UK Limited, Jones Lang LaSalle Global Finance US LLC, Jones Lang LaSalle Global Holdings BV, Jones Lang LaSalle GmbH, Jones Lang LaSalle Great Lakes Corporate Real Estate Partners LLC, Jones Lang LaSalle Group Finance Luxembourg Sarl, Jones Lang LaSalle Group Holdings BV, Jones Lang LaSalle Group Holdings SNC, Jones Lang LaSalle Group Services spoka z ograniczona odpowiedzialnoscia, Jones Lang LaSalle Guatemala Sociedad Anonima, Jones Lang LaSalle Gutland S.a.r.l., Jones Lang LaSalle Haiti S.A., Jones Lang LaSalle Holding AB, Jones Lang LaSalle Holding BV, Jones Lang LaSalle Holding SAS, Jones Lang LaSalle Holdings Cyprus Limited, Jones Lang LaSalle Holdings Inc., Jones Lang LaSalle Holdings Limited, Jones Lang LaSalle Holdings Y.K., Jones Lang LaSalle Holdings spoka z ograniczona odpowiedzialnoscia, Jones Lang LaSalle Hotels (NSW) Pty Limited, Jones Lang LaSalle Hotels Limited, Jones Lang LaSalle Hotels Participacoes Ltda., Jones Lang LaSalle Hotels S.A., Jones Lang LaSalle IP Inc., Jones Lang LaSalle Innovation Development L.L.C., Jones Lang LaSalle Insurance Services Ltd, Jones Lang LaSalle International Holdings Limited, Jones Lang LaSalle International Inc., Jones Lang LaSalle International Properties Limited, Jones Lang LaSalle Investments LLC, Jones Lang LaSalle Israel Limited, Jones Lang LaSalle Jamaica Limited, Jones Lang LaSalle K.K., Jones Lang LaSalle KFT, Jones Lang LaSalle Kenya Ltd, Jones Lang LaSalle LLP (Kazakhstan), Jones Lang LaSalle Lanka (Private) Limited, Jones Lang LaSalle Laser Ltd, Jones Lang LaSalle Limitada, Jones Lang LaSalle Limited, Jones Lang LaSalle Limited Liability Company, Jones Lang LaSalle Lithuania UAB, Jones Lang LaSalle Ltd (Ireland), Jones Lang LaSalle Ltd., Jones Lang LaSalle Ltda., Jones Lang LaSalle Luxembourg Star Sarl, Jones Lang LaSalle Malta Holdings Limited, Jones Lang LaSalle Malta Limited, Jones Lang LaSalle Management Services Limited, Jones Lang LaSalle Management Services Taiwan Limited, Jones Lang LaSalle Michigan LLC, Jones Lang LaSalle Midwest LLC, Jones Lang LaSalle Misr LLC, Jones Lang LaSalle Multifamily LLC, Jones Lang LaSalle Multifamily Member LLC, Jones Lang LaSalle New England L.L.C., Jones Lang LaSalle Northwest LLC, Jones Lang LaSalle Pension Trustees Ltd, Jones Lang LaSalle Procurement Funding Limited, Jones Lang LaSalle Procurement Ltd., Jones Lang LaSalle Property Consultants (India) Private Ltd, Jones Lang LaSalle Property Consultants Pte Ltd, Jones Lang LaSalle Property Fund Advisors Limited, Jones Lang LaSalle Property Management Pte Ltd, Jones Lang LaSalle Property Management Services LLC, Jones Lang LaSalle Real Estate Advisory Limited, Jones Lang LaSalle Real Estate Brokerage Limited, Jones Lang LaSalle Real Estate Services Inc., Jones Lang LaSalle Receivables Holdings LLC, Jones Lang LaSalle Residential Development GmbH, Jones Lang LaSalle Resources Limited, Jones Lang LaSalle S. de R.L., Jones Lang LaSalle S.R.L., Jones Lang LaSalle S.p.A., Jones Lang LaSalle SAS, Jones Lang LaSalle SE, Jones Lang LaSalle SEA Limited, Jones Lang LaSalle SSC (Philippines) Inc., Jones Lang LaSalle Sarl, Jones Lang LaSalle Saudi Arabia Limited, Jones Lang LaSalle Secs, Jones Lang LaSalle Securities L.L.C., Jones Lang LaSalle Services (Jersey) Limited, Jones Lang LaSalle Services (Malta) Limited, Jones Lang LaSalle Services (Private) Limited, Jones Lang LaSalle Services AB, Jones Lang LaSalle Services AS, Jones Lang LaSalle Services ApS, Jones Lang LaSalle Services B.V., Jones Lang LaSalle Services Bahrain S.P.C., Jones Lang LaSalle Services Gmbh, Jones Lang LaSalle Services LLC, Jones Lang LaSalle Services Lebanon S.A.R.L., Jones Lang LaSalle Services Limited (Nigeria), Jones Lang LaSalle Services Ltd, Jones Lang LaSalle Services S.r.l., Jones Lang LaSalle Services SA/NV, Jones Lang LaSalle Services SAS, Jones Lang LaSalle Services SRL, Jones Lang LaSalle Services Sarl, Jones Lang LaSalle Sociedad Anonima de Capital Variable, Jones Lang LaSalle Sociedad Comercial de Responsabilidad Limitada, Jones Lang LaSalle South Africa (Proprietary) Ltd, Jones Lang LaSalle Strata Management Pty Limited, Jones Lang LaSalle Surveyors (Shanghai) Company Limited, Jones Lang LaSalle Taiwan Limited, Jones Lang LaSalle Technology Services Pte Ltd, Jones Lang LaSalle Trinidad Limited, Jones Lang LaSalle UAE Limited, Jones Lang LaSalle UK FC, Jones Lang LaSalle UK Hanover, Jones Lang LaSalle Vietnam Company Limited, Jones Lang LaSalle d.o.o. (Croatia), Jones Lang LaSalle d.o.o. (Serbia), Jones Lang LaSalle de Venezuela S.R.L., Jones Lang LaSalle of New York LLC, Jones Lang LaSalle of Pennsylvania Inc, Jones Lang LaSalle s.r.o, Jones Lang LaSalle s.r.o., Jones Lang LaSalle sprl, Jones Lang LaSalle spoka z ograniczona odpowiedzialnoscia, Jones Lang Wootton Ltd, Jones Lang Wootton Property Management Services Ltd, KHK Group Limited, Kensington CA LLC, Keystone Partners, King & Co Limited, King Sturge, King Sturge Holdings Limited, King Sturge Management SPRL, LAOF V (General Partner) LLP, LASALLE INVESTMENT MANAGEMENT BV, LAVA (General Partner) LLP, LIC II (General Partner) Limited, LIC Lafayette Manager Inc., LIM Advisory Services S.a r.l., LIM Asia Co-Investments Pte. Ltd., LIM Associates L.L.C., LIM Consejeros S. de R.L. de C.V., LIM Management Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V., LJPF Co-Investments GK, LMF Investments LLC, LPI (Australia) Holdings Pty Ltd, LRA MKP TRS L.P., LREDS II PF L.P., LREDS III Carry Partner L.P., LUKSS I Carry Partner L.P., LUKV Carry Jersey Limited, LUKV/CPP Co-Investment L.P., LaSalle (Shanghai) Industrial Co. Ltd. [ () ], LaSalle - VA Industrial GP LLC, LaSalle AIFM Europe S.a r.l., LaSalle Acquisitions Corp., LaSalle Asia Opportunity II GP LLC, LaSalle Asia Opportunity II Investors GP LLC, LaSalle Asia Opportunity III GP Ltd., LaSalle Asia Opportunity IV GP LTD, LaSalle Asia Opportunity Investors III GP Ltd., LaSalle Asia Opportunity V GP Ltd., LaSalle Asia Recovery L.L.C., LaSalle Asia Venture Co-Investment Trust, LaSalle Aureum Verwaltung GmbH, LaSalle Blooms General Partner Limited, LaSalle CAVA Industrial Carryco LLC, LaSalle CIG III GP Inc., LaSalle CIG IV GP Inc., LaSalle Canada Core Real Property GP Inc., LaSalle Canada Property Fund GP Inc., LaSalle China Logistics Venture GP Ltd, LaSalle China Logistics Venture GP S.a r.l., LaSalle China Logistics Venture SCSp, LaSalle Co-Investment L.L.C., LaSalle Co-Investment Management (General Partner) Limited, LaSalle Direct General Partner Limited, LaSalle EMEA (Scots) Investments GP LLP, LaSalle Euro Growth II S.a.r.l. , LaSalle European Co-invest (Scotland) LLP, LaSalle European Investments L.L.C., LaSalle European Recovery III (GP) LLP, LaSalle French Fund II Co-Investment GmbH, LaSalle French Fund II G.P. L.L.C., LaSalle Fund Management B.V., LaSalle Funds General Partner Ltd, LaSalle Funds Management Limited, LaSalle GPS Holdings LLC, LaSalle Genco G.P. L.L.C., LaSalle German Income and Growth G.P. L.L.C., LaSalle German Retail Venture GP L.L.C., LaSalle Global Partner Solutions Limited, LaSalle GmbH, LaSalle Income & Growth Fund VI Carry L.L.C., LaSalle Income & Growth Fund VI GP L.L.C., LaSalle Income & Growth Fund VI L.P., LaSalle Income & Growth Fund VII Carry L.L.C., LaSalle Income & Growth Fund VII GP L.L.C., LaSalle Income & Growth Fund VIII Carry L.L.C., LaSalle Income & Growth Fund VIII GP L.L.C., LaSalle Investment (Luxembourg) SARL, LaSalle Investment Limited Partnership II-A, LaSalle Investment Management, LaSalle Investment Management (Canada), LaSalle Investment Management (Canada) Inc., LaSalle Investment Management (Jersey) Limited, LaSalle Investment Management (Shanghai) Co. Ltd, LaSalle Investment Management Asia Pte Ltd, LaSalle Investment Management Australia Pty Ltd, LaSalle Investment Management Co. Ltd., LaSalle Investment Management Distributors LLC, LaSalle Investment Management Espana S.L.U., LaSalle Investment Management Hong Kong Limited, LaSalle Investment Management Inc., LaSalle Investment Management K.K., LaSalle Investment Management Kapitalverwaltungsgesellschaft mbH, LaSalle Investment Management Korea Yuhan Hoesa, LaSalle Investment Management Luxembourg SARL, LaSalle Investment Management SAS, LaSalle Investment Management Securities B.V., LaSalle Investment Management Securities LLC, LaSalle Italia SRL, LaSalle Japan Logistics II GP Ltd, LaSalle Japan Logistics III GP Ltd, LaSalle Japan Logistics Investors II GP Ltd., LaSalle Japan Logistik-Immobilienfonds GP SARL, LaSalle Japan Property Fund GP Limited, LaSalle LIC II A G.P. Ltd., LaSalle LIC II A UK LLP, LaSalle LIC II B G.P. LLC, LaSalle Land General Partner Limited, LaSalle Land Trustee Limited, LaSalle Logistics GP LLC, LaSalle Mariner Co-Investment Fund Carryco L.L.C., LaSalle Mariner Co-Investment Fund G.P. L.L.C., LaSalle Medical Office Fund III GP LLC, LaSalle Mexico Advisors Inc., LaSalle Mexico Fund I Investors A G.P. LLC, LaSalle Mexico I (General Partner) LLC, LaSalle Mortgage Real Estate Investors Inc., LaSalle North American Holdings Inc., LaSalle Paris Office Venture General Partner L.L.C., LaSalle Partners (Mauritius) Pvt Ltd, LaSalle Partners International, LaSalle Partners S. de R. L. de C. V., LaSalle Partners Services S. de R.L. de C.V., LaSalle Property Fund GP Holdings LLC, LaSalle Property Fund GP LLC, LaSalle Property Fund REIT Inc., LaSalle RECC GP LLC, LaSalle REDS GP Inc., LaSalle REDS III GP Sarl, LaSalle REDS TSA GP LLC, LaSalle REIT Advisors K.K., LaSalle Ranger Co-Investment Fund G.P. L.L.C., LaSalle Ranger Co-Investment Fund II G.P. L.L.C., LaSalle Ranger Co-Investment Fund III G.P. L.L.C., LaSalle Ranger II Carry L.L.C., LaSalle Ranger III Carry L.L.C., LaSalle Real Estate Debt Strategies II (GP) LLP, LaSalle Real Estate Investment Strategies GP S.a r.l., LaSalle Residential Finance Fund GP Inc., LaSalle Residential Fund III GP Inc., LaSalle Retail Japan-Immobilienfonds GP S.a r.l., LaSalle Salt River Carry L.L.C., LaSalle Special Situations Carry GP LLC, LaSalle Special Situations II Venture GP S.a r.l., LaSalle Student Housing L.L.C., LaSalle Transpennine GP (Scot) LLP, LaSalle UK Property Services Limited, LaSalle UK Ventures (General Partner) Limited, LaSalle UKSS I GP Ltd., LaSalle UKV Co-Investor GP LLC, LaSalle UKVA GP LLC, LaVA Carry (Scotland) L.P., LaVA Feeder (Scotland) LP, Lava II GP S.a r.l., Lead Fast Investments Limited, Lee & Klatskin Associates, Leechiu & Associates, Lexington MKP Management L.P., Light bluu Limited, LodgeTax, MSCI's Global Occupiers business, Maloney Field Services, Martin Potts & Associates, Means Knaus Partners, Merlin UK Property Venture GP Limited, Merritt & Harris Inc., Midosuji Management GK, Morii Appraisal & Investment Consulting, Neo-Swiat, New England - Jones Lang LaSalle LLC, Nextport, Nima Mountaineer AB, Oak Grove Commercial Mortgage, Office Blocks Pte. Ltd., Opex Consulting, Orchid Insurance Limited, Oxford General Partner Limited, P.1 Administracao em Complexo Imobiliarios Ltda., P.2 Administracao em Complexo Imobiliarios Ltda., P.3 Administracao em Complexo Imobiliarios Ltda., PDM International, PDM International (Beijing) Limited, PDM International (Chengdu) Limited, PDM International China Limited, PDM International HK Limited, PDM International Limited, PMX, PT Jones Lang LaSalle, PT. Procon Indah, Pacific Real Estate Partners, Peloton Commercial Real Estate, Primary Capital Advisors, Prime Property Consultants Limited, Procofin, Propell National Valuers Pty Ltd., PropertyLinx Pty Ltd, Quadrant Realty Finance, Rogers Chapman UK Ltd, SBR Continental Europe GP LLC, Sage Capital, Salt River Investors GP LLC, Sandalwood Mall Management Private Limited, Shelter Bay Retail Group, Sovereign Asian Properties Inc., Spaulding and Slye Federal Services LLC, Stessa Inc., Strategic Advisory Group, TETRIS ARQUITECTURA SL - SUCURSAL EM PORTUGAL, TETRIS Arquitectura S.L, Tansei Mall Management Co. Ltd., TeTriSolutions LLC, Tenzing AB, Tetris Amenagement SARL, Tetris Design & Build BV, Tetris Design & Build Romania SRL, Tetris Design & Build Sarl, Tetris Design & Build sprl, Tetris Design and Build (Pty) Ltd, Tetris Design and Build S.R.L (Italy), Tetris Design and Build Sarl, Tetris Poland spoka z ograniczona odpowiedzialnoscia, Tetris Projects GmbH, Tetris Projects Ltd, Tetris SAS, Tetris Tasarm ve Insaat Hizmetleri A.S, The Apartment Group, The Horizon Management Services Limited, The Spargo Corporation, The Standard Group LLC, The Staubach Company, Travis Commercial Real Estate Services, Triangle General Partner Limited, Trinity Funds Management, Trussard Property Consultants, Tetris Design & Build Servicos de Arquitetura Ltda., Tetris Design & Build s.r.o., Utrillo Ltd, ValuD Consulting, Veronique Nocquet, W A Ellis LLP, Washington Partners, Whitetail GP LLC, Wilson Retail Group, Wonderment BV, YY Property Solutions, bluu City Limited, bluu Projects Limited, bluu Regions Limited, bluu Solutions Limited, and bluuco limited. Wall Street analysts have given iShares 1-3 Year Treasury Bond ETF a "N/A" rating, but there may be better buying opportunities in the stock market. Some of MarketBeat's past winning trading ideas have resulted in 5-15% weekly gains. MarketBeat just released five new stock ideas, but iShares 1-3 Year Treasury Bond ETF wasn't one of them. MarketBeat thinks these five companies may be even better buys. View MarketBeat's top stock picks here. 1. Yes. COVID-19 can only be stopped through vaccinations. A mandate is needed. 2. Yes. This is a major step, but were facing a national emergency. It is a justifiable move. 3. No. The government is right to promote vaccinations, but not to require them. 4. No. This is government overreach and legally questionable. A mandate is wrong. 5. Unsure. Its in the publics interest, but mandates infringe on individuals rights. Vote View Results Wall Street analysts have given iShares Europe ETF a "N/A" rating, but there may be better buying opportunities in the stock market. Some of MarketBeat's past winning trading ideas have resulted in 5-15% weekly gains. MarketBeat just released five new stock ideas, but iShares Europe ETF wasn't one of them. MarketBeat thinks these five companies may be even better buys. View MarketBeat's top stock picks here. Rayonier Advanced Materials, Inc. engages in the production and sale of cellulose products, which is a natural polymer commonly used in the production of cell phone and computer screens, filters, and pharmaceuticals. It operates through the following segments: High Purity Cellulose, Forest Products, Paperboard, Pulp and Newsprint, and Corporate. The High Purity Cellulose segment manufacture and market high purity cellulose, which is sold as either cellulose specialties or commodity products in U.S., Canda, and France. The Forest Products segment manufacture and market construction-grade lumber in North America through seven sawmills located in Canada. The Paperboard segment comprises paperboard products. The Pulp and Newsprint segment involves in the production of pulp and newsprint in Canada. The Corporate segment consists senior management, accounting, information systems, human resources, treasury, tax, and legal administrative functions that provide support services to the operating business units. The company was founded in 1926 and is headquartered in Jacksonville, FL. Read More Lloyds Banking Group plc, together with its subsidiaries, provides a range of banking and financial services in the United Kingdom and internationally. It operates through three segments: Retail; Commercial Banking; and Insurance and Wealth. The Retail segment offers a range of financial service products, including current accounts, savings accounts, mortgages, motor finance, unsecured loans, leasing solutions, credit cards, and other financial services to personal and small business customers. The Commercial Banking segment provides lending, transactional banking, working capital management, risk management, and debt capital market services to small and medium-sized entities, corporates, and financial institutions. The Insurance and Wealth segment offers life, home, and car insurance products; and pension, investment, and wealth management products and services. It also provides digital and mobile banking, and telephone services, as well as advisory services for savings, investments, and planning for retirement. The company offers its products and services under the Lloyds Bank, Halifax, Bank of Scotland, Scottish Widows, MBNA, Schroders Personal Wealth, Black Horse, Lex Autolease, Birmingham Midshires, LDC, IWeb, and Agricultural Mortgage Corporation brands. Lloyds Banking Group plc was founded in 1695 and is headquartered in London, the United Kingdom. Read More Swiss Re AG is a wholesale provider of reinsurance, insurance and other insurance-based forms of risk transfer. The Company operates in four segments: Property&Casualty Reinsurance, Life&Health Reinsurance, Corporate Solutions and Life Capital. Its Reinsurance Unit provides premiums and fee income through Property&Casualty and Life&Health segments. Its Corporate Solutions segment is engaged in serving mid-sized and large corporations, with product offerings ranging from traditional property and casualty insurance to customized solutions. Its Admin Re segment provides risk and capital management solutions by which the Company acquires closed books of in-force life and health insurance business, entire lines of business, or the entire capital stock of life insurance companies. Its open and closed life insurance books, including Admin Re, are managed under a unit called Life Capital. Read More Wall Street analysts have given ETFMG Prime Cyber Security ETF a "N/A" rating, but there may be better buying opportunities in the stock market. Some of MarketBeat's past winning trading ideas have resulted in 5-15% weekly gains. MarketBeat just released five new stock ideas, but ETFMG Prime Cyber Security ETF wasn't one of them. MarketBeat thinks these five companies may be even better buys. View MarketBeat's top stock picks here. The following companies are subsidiares of Occidental Petroleum: 1PointFive Inc., 1PointFive P1 LLC, APC Aviation Inc., APC International Holdings LLC, APC Midstream Holdings LLC, APC Venezuela Srl, ARCO Long Beach, Altura Energy, Amarok Gathering LLC, Anadarko 20-25 Company, Anadarko 20-36 Company, Anadarko 20-47 Company, Anadarko 20-48 Company, Anadarko 20-49 Company, Anadarko Algeria Block 403 c/e Company, Anadarko Algeria Block 406B Company, Anadarko Algeria Company LLC, Anadarko Algeria Oil & Gas Company, Anadarko Brazil Investment I LLC, Anadarko Brazil Investment II LLC, Anadarko Canada E&P Limited, Anadarko China Holdings 2 Company, Anadarko Colombia Company, Anadarko Consolidated Holdings LLC, Anadarko Cote d'Ivoire Block 103 Company, Anadarko Cote d'Ivoire Company, Anadarko DBMOS Operator LLC, Anadarko Development Company, Anadarko Development Holding Limited, Anadarko E&P Onshore LLC, Anadarko Egypt Holdings Company, Anadarko Energy Holding Limited, Anadarko Energy Services Company, Anadarko Exploracao e Producao de Petroleo e Gas Natural Ltda., Anadarko Finance Company, Anadarko Gabon Company, Anadarko Ghana Mahogany-1 Company, Anadarko Global Energy S.a.r.l, Anadarko Global Funding 1 Company, Anadarko Global Funding II Ltd., Anadarko Guyana Company, Anadarko Holding Company, Anadarko International Development S.a.r.l, Anadarko International Energy Company, Anadarko International O&G Company, Anadarko International Trading Corporation, Anadarko Jordan Company, Anadarko Kenya Company, Anadarko LMM S.a.r.l, Anadarko Land Corp., Anadarko Mexico B.V., Anadarko Mexico S.a.r.l, Anadarko Midkiff/Chaney Dell BR Corp., Anadarko Midkiff/Chaney Dell LLC, Anadarko Natural Gas Company LLC, Anadarko New Zealand Company, Anadarko OGC Company, Anadarko Offshore Holding Company LLC, Anadarko Offshore Well Containment Company LLC, Anadarko Oil & Gas 5 LLC, Anadarko Peru B.V., Anadarko Petroleum, Anadarko Petroleum Corporation, Anadarko Realty LLC, Anadarko Rockies LLC, Anadarko Royalty Holdings Company, Anadarko UK Corporate Limited, Anadarko US Offshore LLC, Anadarko USH1 Corporation, Anadarko Venezuela Company, Anadarko Venezuela LLC, Anadarko Venezuela Srl, Anadarko WCTP Company, Anadarko West Texas BR Corp., Anadarko West Texas LLC, Anadarko Worldwide Holdings C.V., Atlantic Rim Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V., Aventine LLC, Baseball Merger Sub 2 Inc., Bear Branch Exploration LLC, Big Island Trona Company, Bitter Creek Coal Company, Bravo Pipeline Company, Cain Chemical, Cain Chemical Inc., Carbon Finance Labs LLC, Concord Petroleum Corporation, Conn Creek Shale Company, D.S. Ventures LLC, DMM Financial LLC, Deerwood Exploration LLC, Downtown Plaza II, Elk Hills Field, FLAG Development LLC, FP Westport Commodities Limited, FP Westport GmbH, FP Westport LLC, FP Westport Limited, FP Westport Services LLC, FP Westport Trading LLC, Fosters Mill Exploration LLC, Glenn Springs Holdings Inc., Globrep Representaciones S.A., Grand Bassa Tankers Inc., Grupo OxyChem de Mexico S.A. de C.V., Headwater II LLC, Houndstooth Resources LLC, INDSPEC Chemical B.V., INDSPEC Chemical Corporation, INDSPEC Chemical Corporation, INDSPEC Chemical Export Sales LLC, INDSPEC Holding Corporation, Ingleside Cogeneration GP LLC, Ingleside Cogeneration Limited Partnership, Interore Trading Ltd., Joslyn Partnership, KERR-McGEE TT E&P LTD., KM BM-C-Seven Ltd., KM International Insurance Ltd., Kerr-McGee Corporation, Kerr-McGee Natural Gas Company Inc., Kerr-McGee Oil & Gas Onshore LP, Kerr-McGee Shared Services Company LLC, Kerr-McGee Stored Power Corporation, Kerr-McGee U.K. Energy Corporation, Kerr-McGee Worldwide Corporation, Kerr-McGee do Brasil Ltda., Kerr-McGee of Canada Northwest Ltd., Laguna Petroleum Corp., Laguna Petroleum LLC, Liwa Oil & Gas Ltd., MC2 Technologies LLC, Mariana Properties Inc., Marico Exploration Inc., Miller Springs Remediation Management Inc., Moncrief Minerals Partnership L.P., NGL Ventures LLC, Natural Gas Odorizing Inc., New OPL LLC, OEVC Energy LLC, OEVC Midstream Projects LLC, OIH LLC, OLCV CE Holdings ULC, OLCV CE US Holdings Inc., OLCV Net Power LLC, OLCV Services LLC, OOG Partner LLC, OOOI Chem Holdings LLC, OOOI Chem Sub LLC, OOOI Chemical International LLC, OOOI Chile Holder LLC, OOOI Ecuador Management LLC, OOOI Oil and Gas Sub LLC, OOOI South America Management LLC, OPM GP Inc., OPM Holdco LLC, OTCF LLC, OTH LLC, OXY CV Pipeline LLC, OXY Campus LLC, OXY Inc., OXY LPG LLC, OXY Libya E&P Area 103 BR4 B.V., OXY Libya E&P Area 35 Ltd., OXY Libya E&P Concession 103 Ltd., OXY Libya E&P EPSA 102 B.V., OXY Libya E&P EPSA 1981 Ltd., OXY Libya E&P EPSA 1985 Ltd., OXY Libya E&P NC 143 144 145 150 B.V., OXY Libya Exploration SPC, OXY Libya LLC, OXY Little Knife LLC, OXY Mexico Holdings I LLC, OXY Mexico Holdings II LLC, OXY Middle East Holdings Ltd., OXY Oil Partners Inc., OXY PBLP Manager LLC, OXY Support Services LLC, OXY Tulsa Inc., OXY USA Inc., OXY USA WTP LP, OXY VPP Investments LLC, OXY West LLC, OXY of Saudi Arabia Ltd., OXYCHEM (CANADA) INC., OXYMAR, Oakwood Exploration LLC, Occidental (Bermuda) Ltd., Occidental (East Shabwa) LLC, Occidental Advance Sale Finance Inc., Occidental Al Hosn LLC, Occidental Angola Holdings Ltd., Occidental CIS Services Inc., Occidental Canada Holdings Ltd., Occidental Chemical Asia Limited, Occidental Chemical Belgium B.V.B.A., Occidental Chemical Chile Limitada, Occidental Chemical Corporation, Occidental Chemical Export Sales LLC, Occidental Chemical Far East Limited, Occidental Chemical Holding Corporation, Occidental Chemical International LLC, Occidental Chemical Investment (Canada) 1 Inc., Occidental Chemical Receivables LLC, Occidental Chemical de Mexico S.A. de C.V., Occidental Chile Investments LLC, Occidental Chile Minority Holder LLC, Occidental Colombia (Series G) Ltd., Occidental Colombia (Series J) Ltd., Occidental Colombia (Series K) Ltd., Occidental Colombia (Series L) Ltd., Occidental Colombia (Series M) Ltd., Occidental Colombia (Series N) Ltd., Occidental Colombia (Series O) Ltd., Occidental Crude Sales Inc. (Canada), Occidental Crude Sales Inc. (International), Occidental Dolphin Holdings Ltd., Occidental Energy Marketing Inc., Occidental Energy Ventures LLC, Occidental Exploradora del Peru Ltd., Occidental Exploration and Production Company, Occidental Hafar LLC, Occidental International (Libya) Inc., Occidental International Corporation, Occidental International Exploration and Production Company, Occidental International Holdings Ltd., Occidental International Oil and Gas Ltd., Occidental International Services Inc., Occidental Joslyn GP 2 Co., Occidental LNG (Malaysia) Ltd., Occidental Latin America Holdings LLC, Occidental Libya Oil & Gas B.V., Occidental MENA Manager Ltd., Occidental Middle East Development Company, Occidental Midland Basin LLC, Occidental Mukhaizna LLC, Occidental Oil Asia Pte. Ltd., Occidental Oil Shale Inc., Occidental Oil and Gas (Oman) Ltd., Occidental Oil and Gas Corporation, Occidental Oil and Gas International Inc., Occidental Oil and Gas International LLC, Occidental Oil and Gas Pakistan LLC, Occidental Oil and Gas of Peru LLC, Occidental Oman (Block 27) Holdings Ltd., Occidental Oman Block 51 Holding Ltd., Occidental Oman Block 51 LLC, Occidental Oman Block 65 Holding Ltd., Occidental Oman Block 65 LLC, Occidental Oman Block 72 Holding Ltd., Occidental Oman Block 72 LLC, Occidental Oman Gas Company LLC, Occidental Oman Gas Holdings Ltd., Occidental Oman North Holdings Ltd., Occidental Oriente Exploration and Production Ltd., Occidental Overseas Holdings B.V., Occidental PVC LLC, Occidental Peninsula II Inc., Occidental Peninsula LLC, Occidental Permian Ltd., Occidental Permian Manager LLC, Occidental Permian Services Inc., Occidental Peruana Inc., Occidental Petrolera del Peru (Block 101) Inc., Occidental Petrolera del Peru (Block 103) Inc., Occidental Petroleum (Pakistan) Inc., Occidental Petroleum Corporation, Occidental Petroleum Corporation Political Action Committee, Occidental Petroleum de Venezuela S.A., Occidental Petroleum of Nigeria, Occidental Petroleum of Oman Ltd., Occidental Petroleum of Qatar Ltd., Occidental Power Marketing L.P., Occidental Power Services Inc., Occidental Qatar Energy Company LLC, Occidental Red Sea Development LLC, Occidental Research Corporation, Occidental Resource Recovery Systems Inc., Occidental Resources Company, Occidental Shah Gas Holdings Ltd., Occidental South America Finance LLC, Occidental Specialty Marketing Inc., Occidental Tower Corporation, Occidental Transportation Holding Corporation, Occidental West Texas Overthrust Inc., Occidental Yemen Ltd., Occidental Yemen Sabatain Inc., Occidental del Ecuador Inc., Occidental of Abu Dhabi (Bab) Ltd., Occidental of Abu Dhabi (Shah) Ltd., Occidental of Abu Dhabi Holdings Ltd., Occidental of Abu Dhabi LLC, Occidental of Abu Dhabi Ltd., Occidental of Bahrain Ltd., Occidental of Bangladesh Inc., Occidental of Colombia (Chipiron) Inc., Occidental of Colombia (Cosecha) Inc., Occidental of Colombia (Medina) Inc., Occidental of Colombia (Putumayo) Ltd., Occidental of Colombia (Teca) Ltd., Occidental of Colombia PUT-36 LLC, Occidental of Dubai Inc., Occidental of Iraq Holdings Ltd., Occidental of Iraq LLC, Occidental of Oman Inc., Occidental of Russia Ltd., Occidental of South Africa (Offshore) Inc., Occidental of Yemen (Block 75) LLC, Oceanic Marine Transport Ltd., Opcal Insurance Inc., Oryx Crude Trading & Transportation Inc., Oxy BridgeTex Limited Partnership, Oxy C & I Bulk Sales LLC, Oxy Canada Sales Inc., Oxy Carbon Solutions LLC, Oxy Carbon Storage LLC, Oxy Climate Ventures Inc., Oxy Cogeneration Holding Company LLC, Oxy Colombia Holdings LLC, Oxy Colombia TopCo Ltd., Oxy Delaware Basin LLC, Oxy Delaware Basin Plant LLC, Oxy Dolphin E&P LLC, Oxy Dolphin Pipeline LLC, Oxy Energy Canada Inc., Oxy Energy Services LLC, Oxy Expatriate Services Inc., Oxy FFT Holdings Inc., Oxy Holding Company (Pipeline) Inc., Oxy International Ventures Ltd., Oxy LPG Terminal LLC, Oxy Levelland Pipeline Company LLC, Oxy Levelland Terminal Company LLC, Oxy Low Carbon Ventures LLC, Oxy Midstream Strategic Development LLC, Oxy Oleoducto SOP LLC, Oxy Overseas Services Ltd., Oxy Permian Gathering LLC, Oxy Permian Plaza LLC, Oxy Petroleum de Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V., Oxy Renewable Energy LLC, Oxy Salt Creek Pipeline LLC, Oxy TL LLC, Oxy Taft Hub LLC, Oxy Technology Ventures Inc., Oxy Transport I Company LLC, Oxy Vinyls Canada Co., Oxy Vinyls Export Sales LLC, Oxy Vinyls LP, Oxy Westwood Corporation, Oxy Y-1 Company, OxyChem Ingleside Ethylene Holdings Inc., OxyChem do Brasil Ltda., OxyChile Investments LLC, Oxychem Shipping Ltd., Permian Basin JV Tax Matters Member LLC, Permian Basin Limited Partnership, Permian VPP Holder LP, Permian VPP Manager LLC, Phibro, Placid Oil LLC, Ramlat Oxy Ltd., Rio de Viento Inc., Rodeo Midland Basin LLC, San Patricio Pipeline LLC, Scanports Shipping LLC, SequestCo LLC, Stetson Exploration LLC, Sun Offshore Gathering Company, Swiflite Aircraft Corporation, Transok Properties LLC, Troy Potter Inc., Turavent Oil GmbH [in liquidation], Tuscaloosa Holdings Inc., UP Petroleo III Ltd., Upland Industries Corporation, Venezuela US SRL, Vintage Gas Inc., Vintage Petroleum, Vintage Petroleum Argentina Ltd., Vintage Petroleum Boliviana Ltd., Vintage Petroleum International Finance B.V., Vintage Petroleum International Holdings LLC, Vintage Petroleum International LLC, Vintage Petroleum International Ventures Inc., Vintage Petroleum Italy Inc., Vintage Petroleum South America Holdings Inc., Vintage Petroleum South America LLC, Vintage Petroleum Turkey Inc., WGR Asset Holding Company LLC, WGR Canada Inc., Wardner Ranch Inc., Western Gas Resources Inc., Western Gas Resources-Westana Inc., Western Midstream Holdings LLC, Woodlands International Insurance Ltd., and YT Ranch LLC. Validus Holdings, Ltd. provides reinsurance coverage, insurance coverage, and insurance linked securities management services worldwide. It operates through three segments: Reinsurance, Insurance, and Asset Management. The Reinsurance segment underwrites property reinsurance products on a catastrophe excess of loss, per risk excess of loss and proportional basis; and aerospace and aviation, agriculture, composite, marine, technical lines, terrorism, trade credit, workers' compensation, and other specialty lines, as well as casualty and financial lines. The Insurance segment underwrites property, accident and health, agriculture, aviation, contingency, marine, and political lines insurance products; bankers blanket bond, commercial crime, computer crime, cyber- crime, professional indemnity, and directors' and officers' insurance products for various financial institutions and other companies; and commercial and institutional risks comprising general, professional, and product liability, as well as miscellaneous malpractice insurance products. This segment also underwrites marine and energy liability, and political risk insurance products, as well as insurance products for repair, maintenance, and upkeep of aircrafts and premises for small companies. The Asset Management segment manages capital for third parties through insurance-linked securities, and other property catastrophe and specialty reinsurance investments. Validus Holdings, Ltd. was founded in 2005 and is based in Pembroke, Bermuda. Read More A German Shepherd named Captain, who did no leave his master's grave for a decade, recently died at the same spot where the man is buried. The 15-year-old dog has lived at the side of his owner's grave in the Municipal Cemetery of Villa Carlos Paz, a city in the Argentinian state of Cordoba, The Sun reported. Miguel Guzman had bought Captain as a gift for his 13-year-old son Damian in 2005. Sadly the next year Guzman passed away. Captain went missing when his family returned home from the funeral. Guzman's family assumed he ran away, but were surprised to find out where he had gone. It is unclear how Captain even found his master's grave. "He turned up here one day, all on his own, and started wandering all around the cemetery until he eventually found the tomb of his master, " Hector Baccega, director of the the cemetery, is quoted as saying by The Sun. Baccega also revealed he sometimes used to wander around the cemetery during the day, but was back at the grave at 6p.m. every night. When he was taken to the vet some time ago, it was discovered he had kidney faliure. "Unfortunately, his age and this condition (kidney failure) meant he could not hold on, " Cristhian Sempels, the vet who treated him told reporters, she thought it best to treat him in the cemetery than at a veterinary surgery. His burial details are not yet known. Some have suggested he be cremated so its ashes can be placed in an area where locals can pay tribute to this beloved dog. Thiruvananthapuram: Chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan on Thursday conveyed his strong displeasure to Kannur district secretary P. Jayarajans statement that he had no faith in the current police investigations into youth congress leader Shuhaibs murder. The Chief Minister who was upset over the statement, gave a piece of his mind at the state conference venue. He was seen speaking to the Kannur leader briefly and party state secretary Kodiyeri Balakrishnn too joined them later. The incident has clearly brought into sharp focus the serious differences between the Chief Minister and Kannur district secretary over the murder. Many in the party believe that Jayarajans. The parents of YC Mattannur block secretary T. H. Shuhaib, who was killed allegedly by CPM workers, have in a memo to Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan sought a CBI investigation. Opposition leader Ramesh Chennithala handed over the memo to the CM. The letter states that the murder was a result of a high-level conspiracy by the CPM. Shuhaibs parents, in their letter, have claimed that it was political vengeance, and intolerance towards their son by the CPM that resulted in his murder. Shuhaibs parents alleged that even though it was 10 days since their son was brutally hacked to death, the investigation was at a snails pace due to the intervention of the CPM. The letter also raises the complaint that the police have not been able to retrieve the weapons used for the murder, the vehicle in which the culprits escaped, or identify the real culprits. The statement made by CPM leaders that Akash Thillenkery and Rijin Raj, who the police claim to have arrested, were produced by them t itself proves the relationship between the culprits and the CPM. Social media showed that the two arrested culprits proximity with the top brass of the CPM leadership including Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan and CPM secretary Kodiyeri Balakrishnan, says the letter. Shuhaibs parents also said they believed that because of the intervention of the CPM leadership and some top police officials, the Kerala police would not be able to carry out a fair probe. Chennai: Observing that the professional degree obtained by the student must be considered as an asset, like any other secured asset by the banks, the Madras high court has imposed a cost of Rs 25,000 on Indian Overseas Bank, Kelur Branch, Thiruvannamalai district, which refused to sanction an education loan of Rs 3.45 lakh to an engineering girl student. Education is not considered an asset by the banks. The country would be denied of the service of scientists, doctors, engineers and other professionals in case financial assistance is not given to the deserving students to come up in life. The educated youth are an asset to the nation and their talents can be utilized for the growth of the country. The banks must realize this fundamental fact, said a division bench comprising Justices K.K.Sasidharan and P.Velmurugan while dismissing an appeal from the IOB, challenging an order of a single judge, which directed the bank to consider the plea of R.Muthazhagi, seeking education loan. Writing the judgment for the Bench, Justice Sasidharan said though the banks would sanction loans and letters of understanding to the billionaire businessmen and affluent, even without sufficient collateral security and would take action for recovery only when the scam spinning out of control, they were adopting a totally different yardstick in the case of middle income group and poor people across India. The banks were not concerned with the directives issued by the Central government and RBI to help the poor students by giving them education loan. Such instructions were violated by the banks with impunity. The present case was a classic example as to how the IOB dragged the daughter of a poor farmer belonging to a most backward community in Tamil Nadu from pillar to post, without considering her application to enable her to pay the college fees and complete the course. The bank by filing the appeal against the order passed by the single judge on November 30, 2012 succeeded in dragging the matter till the completion of the course so as to make the matter infructuous. The Himalayan arrears in courts and the inability of the system to prioritise the case also contributed for the delay and denial of justice to the poor student, the judge added. The judge said the appeal was nothing but an abuse of process of court. The officer of a public sector bank wasted the public money and valuable time of the court by filing an appeal against a decision which would not cause any prejudice to the bank. Even if the money spent for this unwanted litigation was given as education loan, it would have helped the girl student. The bank acted as if the public sector banks have no social commitment. We are therefore, of the view that the appeal deserves to be dismissed with cost, said the court while dismissing the banks appeal and imposing `25,000 as costs payable to the girl within two weeks. Firemen put out the fire from near the gate of the chemical factory. DC Hyderabad: Panic spread after a major fire broke at a pharma chemical company in the industrial area of Jeedimetla on Friday morning. Seven persons sustained injuries. Flames went up to a few metres and smoke continued to billow from the factory, creating an alarming situation. Seven persons sustained injuries and it took eight fire tenders to douse the fire which broke out between 6.30 am and 7 am at Seutic Pharmaceuticals in the Jeedimetla area, a police official said. Following information about the fire by local people, fire fighters from various locations rushed to the place to bring the situation under control. We received a call at 6:50 am and by 7 we were there and in the next half an hour, nine fire tenders from Jeedimetla, Sanath Nagar, Kukatpally, Madhapur, Secund-erabad, Shamirpet, Cherlapally and Moulali were deployed, said Jeedimetla Fire Station House Officer Sridhar Reddy. Chemical leak or reaction was most likely to be the reason of fire, said the official. Seutic Pharmaceuti-cals was a 24-hour work company. As a result, night shift workers were still in when the massive fire broke. The fire rescue team evacuated around 20 workers and shifted the injured to the nearby private hospital. HazMat, a hazardous material apparatus rescue vehicle, was also called to the place to rescue added the fire safety officials. The situation was under control in two hours, said the officials, adding that owing to the place bring a residential area, they circled the premise and acted impulsively. We started the operation around 7 am and by 8:30 am, we managed to douse the flames, said Mr Reddy. Condition of 6 burns patients Critical Six persons who suffered burns in the fire accident were undergoing treatment at Apollo Hospital DRDO branch and hospital sources said their condition was critical. The victims were initially rushed to a nearby private hospital at Kompally, from where they were shifted to Apollo Hospital. The injured were identified as senior electrician B. Srinivas (36), maintenance supervisor K Simhachalam (32), shift incharge Kumara Swamy (39) and helpers Haren Khalkar (40), Sanjeeth Kumar (19) and Shyam Chauran Behra (30). While the first three were from Jeedimetla area, the rest from other States and had been working in the unit for the past few months. According to family members of the victims, all of them were on the first shift when the incident happened. They went to work as usual, but around 8 am, their families got the information of the accident and rushed to the unit, but could not get any details. There were people all around and no one could give us any details about our people. We were worried initially, they said. Karun, younger son of Srinivas, said the hospital authorities said his father was recovering. Srinivas received 95 per cent burns, while Simhachalam had 91, Kumaraswamy 80, Sanjeeth Kumar 70, Haren Khalkar 65 and Shyam 35. Local residents wake up to chaos Locals were baffled with the sudden hullabaloo in the area, which is otherwise calm and peaceful. Fortunately, the pharma company had all the fire safety measures like hydrants and fire extinguishers which could be used, officials said. I was waiting for my son to come out so that I could drop him off to school as usual when I noticed the plumes of thick, black smoke which shot up into the sky from the premises. I shouted and alerted the area locals to stay in as we were aware of the chemical company said a local resident Amit Kumar. Since the fire was at a chemical firm, keeping a possibility of dealing with harmful substances, Hazmat vehicle, which is used exclusively to tackle hazardous chemical, biological or nuclear mishaps, was called by the fire officials. Explaining its use, station house officer Reddy said, For example, while dealing with the nuclear-related explosion or fire accident, the team will have a chemical suite and breathing apparatus and can enter the restricted area and bring out the people, he said. Persons exposed to nuclear gases would be shifted to a temporary tent and decontamination measures would be taken, he added. Regional fire officer of central region V. Papaiah said that the fire department received a call around 6.50 am, after which eight fire engines and four water tankers were rushed to the scene of the blaze, which was extinguished in about 90 minutes. The mob-lynching of tribal youth Madhu in Attappadi triggered a wave of protests across Kerala with individuals and organisations demanding justice for the youth and that the government make a realistic assessment of the tribal life in the state. The protestors pointed out that the incident is a dangerous signal of growing intolerance and violence towards marginalised sections of society. A large crowd gathered at Agaly in the morning and stopped the vehicle in which the body was being taken to thrissur for post-mortem. The protestors insisted that the body may be taken only after the police arrested all the accused in the case. They, however, relented after talks with senior civil and police officials. Various groups organised protest march in Thiruvananthapuram on Friday against the lynching. Various adivasi, dalit and human right activists assembled in front of the secretariat for registering their protest. Manaveeyam Theruvidam, a collective of cultural activists, also took out a protest march. ABVP Activists took out an agitation with a coffin in front of the secretariat. Hundreds of social activists cutting across political and ideological spectrum joined together to stage a march in Kochi on Friday protesting against the killing of Madhu. The protest started from the High Court Jn went up to Boat Jn before returning to the High Court Jn for a public meeting. Dalit writers K.K. Kochu, K.M. Salimkumar, C.S. Murali, Jankeeya Manushyavakasa Prasthanam president C.P. Rasheed, green activist Purushan Eloor, poet Ajit Pachanadan, actor-cum activist Jolly Chirayath, Suja Bharathy and several others attended the protest march and public meeting. A group of activists belonging to Welfare Party of India also staged protest before the High Court junction. Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan also joined the protesters, calling it a heinous act. He also instructed the state police chief to speed up the probe and take strict action in the case. In a Facebook post, the Chief Minister it is a blot on Keralas progressive society. But I want to assure you that strict action will be taken at the earliest against all the culprits to ensure that such crimes, especially against people from communities that were long marginalised, are not repeated. The chief minister said Kerala as a whole should stay extremely vigilant to ensure that we continue to remain and progress as a caring, cosmopolitan society. The death set the social media on fire with most commentators questioning Keralas right to call itself a civilised society. Muralee Thummarukudy, a senior UN official with thousands of followers, said he is relieved that the typical argumentative Malayali has not surfaced justifying the killing. The protests on the social media, however, are tinted with hypocrisy, Mr Thummarukudy said in his post. We do not figure in the video of that murderous gang not because we are better than them but because we were not around. We also know that this show of revulsion will last only when the next issue surfaces. Narendra Modi will launch the ambitious Amma two-wheeler scheme that envisages providing 50 per cent subsidy to 1 lakh working women every year to buy mopeds a key promise made by late J. Jayalalithaa in the 2016 elections on Saturday here. CHENNAI: Prime Minister Narendra Modi will launch the ambitious Amma two-wheeler scheme that envisages providing 50 per cent subsidy to 1 lakh working women every year to buy mopeds a key promise made by late J. Jayalalithaa in the 2016 elections on Saturday here. At the function in Kalaivanar Arangam, Modi will also launch a drive to plant 70 lakh saplings on 70th birth anniversary of Jayalalithaa, which falls on Saturday. Though the government envisages providing 50 per cent subsidy to 1 lakh women this year, allotment orders for 1,000 beneficiaries will be handed over on Saturday with Modi himself handing over the orders to a couple of people. Modi, who will stay overnight at the Raj Bhavan here, is also expected to give audience to Chief Minister Edappadi K. Palaniswami and his deputy O. Pannerselvam during which a host of issues are likely to be discussed. City police have beefed up security arrangements ahead of Prime Minister Narendra Modis visit to the city on Saturday. More than 15,000 personnel along with 10 companies of commando police have been deployed for security. Police said that the PM is expected to reach the city airport and will then be flown in a helicopter to INS Adyar where Chief Minister Edappadi K. Palanisami and other ministers would receive him. He is then scheduled to travel to Kalaivanar Arangam where he will launch the Amma two-wheeler scheme on the birth anniversary of the former Chief Minister J. Jayalalithaa. The Prime Minister is then expected to stay at Raj Bhavan that night and would leave to Puducherry next morning. Security has been tightened at airport, INS Adyar and other sensitive areas in the city ahead of PMs visit. Bengaluru: Following data security concerns raised by stakeholders of primary and secondary education, the state government on Friday terminated the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) it had earlier signed with a private firm. The Department of Primary and Secondary Education had signed an MoU with Schooglink Private Ltd, an online platform which enables connection between parents, teachers, schools, educational services and products, in a bid to digitise and improve the school system in the state. The document which came into effect earlier this month (on Feb. 3), and school managements, education experts and other stakeholders found some clauses a threat to data privacy. The department had agreed to share personal contact details of students, parents and teachers from government, aided and private schools functioning in the state and this raised many eyebrows. Karnataka Associated Managements of Primary and Secondary Schools (KAMS) soon approached the Education Minister and even wrote to the CM after raising their concerns on the issue to the department officials. Private schools have already been experiencing the misuse of parents data for marketing, with even the credentials of Student Achievement Tracking System (SATS) being misused by BEO offices at various instances to generate transfer certificates for parents who have disagreed to pay fee in some private schools, remarked D. Shashikumar, general secretary of KAMS. In this particular case, the association had mentioned in its letter to the top government officials that we would take legal action if the MoU was not withdrawn. This was a serious of breach of trust and privacy parents, teachers, students and managements had with the government, he added. The Department of Primary and Secondary Education issued a corrigendum on Thursday mentioning that only the data available on public domain would be shared with the private firm. But criticism continued to pour in and on Friday the government terminated the MoU. Reacting to the termination Principal Secretary of the department Shalini Rajneesh said that it was unfortunate that a non-issue was blown out of context and proportion, leading to such a situation. Clarifying the concerns raised on SATS credentials, P.C. Jaffer, Commissioner for public instruction said the information stored in the state data centre server was secure. There are audit trails as to who is accessing which data and only government agencies are given access. These personal data cannot be shared with a third party without consent of the data giver, he said. PYEONGCHANG, South Korea As I was being battered by a particularly brutal blast of frigid wind, I stared at the barb-wire topped fence that marks the border of South Korea and thought about him. I wondered if hed felt the same cold to his core. I wondered if he felt the same guilt about the U.S. being part of the decision to separate Korea into two countries. I wondered if he was scared and tired and overwhelmed with fear that he would never again see his California home. It has been impossible for me to spend nearly a month in South Korea without thinking of my grandfather, Thomas J. Taylor. Every trip through the countryside is a trip through my life, a catalogue of the conversations we had, and a long list of questions I never thought to ask the only grandfather I ever knew. Lots of kids grow up with grandparents so close, so accessible, and so plentiful that they take them for granted. I was not that child. My dads father was killed in a car-train accident when my dad was 12. My mothers father was lost to a heart attack when she was just 16. Both of my great grandfathers died before my parents even met. Luckily for me, my paternal grandmother re-married the year before I was born. This gave me my one and only grandfather, who was at the time, a major in the U.S. Army. It didnt occur to me that we didnt share biology until I overheard someone talking about my biological grandfather, Fred Donaldson. I will admit that it bothered me. It wasnt that we didnt share a name or biology that gnawed at me, it was the fear that someone might not think him to be mine, simply because we didnt share blood. It wasnt until I was an adult, that I could talk to him and my grandmother about my fear. I was frankly afraid that he might say, Well, yeah, Im not really your grandpa. So what? But it was quite the contrary. His big blue eyes shone with pride and love for me every moment we spent together. He was the reason I tried jalapenos and the reason I pretended it didnt burn my mouth. He was my sanctuary when my grandmother lost her temper with us. And he was the guy who never said no to a swim, regardless of the hour I arrived. He was the guy who insisted we could go to the beach, even though my grandmother worried about everything from ocean critters to the messy sand. He was my human GPS. All I had to do was tell him where I was, and he could guide me anywhere in California. One night, while I was driving from Las Vegas to their house with my oldest daughter, who was 4 at the time, I got lost. I pulled into a Carls Jr parking lot and got my daughter some food. I called my grandfather, who nearly lost his mind because of the neighborhood Id wandered into. Dont leave the car! he said. Im on my way. I didnt tell him until he arrived, that wed already ventured into the restaurant. He is the one who got me hooked on Tommys Chile Burgers, the most delicious mess ever created. Hed take me to the drive through no matter what time I arrived, and hed eat French fries while I scarfed the messiest thing my grandmother allowed in her house. But like most kids, I didnt see my grandfather as a man who had a life that would be interesting to me until he was approaching the end of his life. It was when I was helping him write something he had to submit to the VA about injuries hed suffered while serving in Korea that I even thought to ask him about his service. He talked about the cold. He talked about being homesick. And he talked about being afraid. It was during one of those conversations that he gave me some mementos from his time in Korea. I never imagined I would someday walk the beaches he walked or stand in the shadow of those same mountains. As I toured the DMZ Museum, I felt unnaturally emotional. Seeing the faces of soldiers lost, reading about battles and propaganda, it all made me miss him in such a profound way. I wish Id asked more questions. I wish Id written his answers down. My grandfather retired in 1982 as a Colonel in the Army. He spent his life in military service, but he was one of the most gentle humans Ive ever met. I cannot imagine him young, cold and scared in a place he knew nothing about, saturated in a conflict it took him decades to fully understand. Our early morning conversations ended in 2012 when he passed away. Really, they ended a couple of years before that as his health made even basic conversations about anything impossible. So I had a conversation with him as I walked along a fence on an empty section of beach. I thanked him for being so good to me. I apologized for not seeing him as a person who had a life that might be worth knowing until it was too late. My affection for my grandfather has been my constant companion in Pyeongchang. Did he try this food? Did he find these people as kind? Did he have favorite places? And how did he feel about the people he met while serving. I did have the chance to talk to some of the people who worked at the museum and at the restaurant where we ate lunch. They love Americans. They do not resent us. They do not blame us. There was no choice, said one woman, who would love to see Korea unified as one country. Many people I talked to said Korea will likely never be one country because North Korea is a dictatorship that will not compromise or bend. Despite the efforts of South Koreas government to extend a hand of peace, the most people say they realistically expect is the status quo. They just dont want war. When a country has been invaded by both a foreign government (Japan) and a hostile force (North Korea), they see worst-case possibilities in hateful rhetoric. Listening to Lindsey Vonn talk about losing her grandfather, and how she hoped her effort would make him proud, I felt a kinship with the most successful alpine skier in U.S. history. I understand that desire to make a grandfather proud. I feel it myself. Only, when I start to wonder, I have all those days that he told me I was something special. I have all those burgers and swims and even the times I drove him crazy with my inability to follow directions. I may regret the questions I didnt ask, but I dont regret that we spent plenty of time doing interesting and ordinary things. I might wonder about a lot of things, but when it comes to his feelings about me, Im certain. Hed be as proud of me as I am of him. And for some reason, in the cold of Korea, I feel it even more acutely than I ever have. Utahns love their Pinterest. A new study from Internet Service Partners ranked Pinterest as Utahs top social media app. Pinterest placed third overall among popular apps. South Dakota led the nation in terms of Pinterest fans. Both Utah and Idaho joined the 12 states who favored the app over others. The data found that Snapchat and Google Plus were the most popular apps across the nation, both leading the way in 13 states. Trust us were surprised by this data, too. Google Plus was generally considered a failed (not to mention expensive) social media experiment to compete with Facebook, according to the report. Today, Facebook has 2 billion worldwide users to Google Plus 111 million. Still, the increased Google Plus search queries indicate that the app is making a resurgence. Internet Service Partners, one of CenturyLinks largest retailers, compiled its report by gathering a list of the top social media apps nationwide. The report then used data from SimilarWeb, which obtains the top apps based on installations and active users, to find which apps were popular in individual states. The report then used that data and searched Google Trends to see how popular the apps were in their individual states. Facebook ranked fourth on the list, followed by Instagram at the fifth spot. In fact, Instagram was only popular in one state Nevada. Back in 2017, Statista released one report that found Facebook was the United States most popular app, followed by Facebook Messenger and Instagram, which are both properties of Facebook. Twitter, Pinterest and Snapchat ranked fourth, fifth and sixth, respectively. However, these rankings may change as teens grow older. According to Statista, the most popular app among U.S. teens is Snapchat, followed by Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Pinterest ranks at the fifth spot. Meanwhile, apps like Tumblr, WhatsApp, Musical.ly and LinkedIn sit at the bottom of teen trends. A 2017 report on the most popular apps across the world painted a much different picture. Facebook proved to be the most popular app across the world. WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and QQ, a popular messaging app in China, ranked closely behind. In June 2016, the Utah Commission on Criminal and Juvenile Justice created a working group to study Utahs death penalty. I was honored to be able to serve on this committee alongside dedicated professionals from the Utah Attorney Generals Office, county district attorney's offices, the Utah Board of Probation and Parole, Utah Crime Victims Legal Clinic and others. We were tasked with examining specific components of our states death penalty, one of them being the relative financial cost of seeking the death penalty as compared with having a maximum sentence of life in prison without possibility of parole. This study confirmed what past Utah studies have demonstrated Utahs death penalty is far more expensive than life imprisonment. The commissions report first reviews a 2012 Utah study which estimated that the cost of one death penalty case from trial to execution (compared with a case of life without parole in which the death penalty was never on the table) cost taxpayers an additional $1,660,900. But that was just the tip of the iceberg. The report goes on to note that when you take into account the additional costs incurred in all 165 aggravated murder cases in which death was on the table during the period of study (1997-2016), then the cost soared to about $40 million, with only two of the cases resulting in death sentences. Thus, the real cost of seeking the death penalty is $20 million per death sentence. Many might wonder how the death penalty, which theoretically prevents years of prison housing costs, could be so much more expensive than life imprisonment. The answer is found in examining the difference in the legal process when death is on the table. The U.S. Supreme Court has mandated that with capital cases, additional safeguards must be in place, which result in additional expenses before trial, during trial and on appeal. These extra expenses begin mounting as soon as each death-eligible case is filed and continue until and unless the state affirmatively takes death off the table. These costs cant be curtailed. Every state that has studied the issue has shown its death penalty system is far more expensive than having an ultimate punishment of life without parole. Utah is no different. Our report analyzed studies from over a dozen different states and concludes: While methodologies vary across states, these studies share a unity in finding an increased cost associated with seeking the death penalty. Every time, the death penalty is far more expensive. In sum, not only is Utahs death penalty system far more expensive than previously understood, it is also grossly ineffective in accomplishing its stated goal of achieving death sentences. The stark reality is that every million dollars spent keeping our death penalty on the books is a million dollars that cant go to more effective crime prevention measures, or to improving our schools or even to be left alone in taxpayers bank accounts. This is one of the issues that policymakers should take into account in evaluating the continued desirability and feasibility of maintaining the death penalty in Utah. Ralph Dellapiana is a member of the Utah Commission on Criminal and Juvenile Justice death penalty working group, as well as the director of Utahns for Alternatives to the Death Penalty. SALT LAKE CITY While federal legislators recently tapped the brakes on efforts to establish national standards for driverless vehicles, the Utah Legislature is cruising toward adopting state rules that would pave the way for autonomous cars and trucks to start sharing the highways and byways of the Beehive State with human operators. In a presentation to a House legislative committee on Wednesday, Rep. Robert Spendlove, R-Sandy, said while current Utah statute doesn't expressly prohibit the operation of driverless vehicles on public roadways, his HB371 will specifically allow for their operation but avoids addressing, for now, what might be the trickiest part of a driverless future insurance liability. "(Utah Insurance Commission) Commissioner (Todd) Kiser's part is going to be the toughest part," Spendlove said. "(Autonomous vehicles) are not only going to fundamentally change transportation, but they're also going to change insurance." Exactly what those insurance changes might look like is still an unsolved puzzle. National industry watchers have noted identifying who the customer is the vehicle owner, the carmaker or (if it's different from the maker) the software developer is likely a first crucial step in creating a new liability paradigm to cover accidents that don't involve a driver. Kiser's comments to the House Transportation Standing Committee, when asked if a basic insurance framework was in place for driverless cars, seemed to reflect that a lot of work remained ahead. "I dont think were prepared to answer that question," Kiser, a former legislator, said. "But I know the industry is engaged and involved and wants to be part of the solution." In his bill, Spendlove did outline some basic requirements for autonomous vehicles to become Utah road-ready. They read much like those in place for operator-dependent vehicles and include licensing and registration as well as insurance, though that was left undefined for the moment. It also establishes the different levels of automation that range from Level 1, which is a vehicle that has no computer-controlled assist mechanisms up to Level 5, which is a fully autonomous vehicle that requires no human oversight or action. Criag Bickmore, executive director of New Car Dealers of Utah, testified in support of HB371 and pointed out that many new model cars and trucks were already at Level 2, with things like cruise control, collision avoidance systems and lane correction overrides becoming standard equipment. Spendlove said the legislation is similar to changes instituted by Michigan, a state known for its automobile legacy and one that has scrambled to lead the country in accommodating driverless vehicles. He also noted that while this effort was just the beginning, it was critical for Utah, from an economic development standpoint, to build a reputation as a state friendly to autonomous vehicle innovators. "Essentially, this lays out the framework for encouraging the development of these cars here in Utah," Spendlove said. "Encouraging these cars to come into our market and anticipating the changes that are not just coming, but are on us." Earlier this month, federal legislation efforts were put on pause as the U.S. Senate's AV Start effort, aimed at providing some nationwide regulatory framework for autonomous vehicles, was put on hold after a handful of senators voiced concerns about safety assurances and other issues. The U.S. House passed its own version of the bill last fall. HB371 passed out of committee on a unanimous vote Wednesday and now heads to the full House for that body's consideration. SALT LAKE CITY Former Utah Symphony pianist and associate conductor Ardean Watts wept when Leonard Bernstein died on Oct. 14, 1990. The morning following Bernsteins death, Watts played the composers Mass over the sound system in his University of Utah classroom. With tears streaming down his face, Watts looked at his students and told them the great composer had died. Bernstein, who died at 72, was born Aug. 25, 1918, and this weekend, the Utah Symphony kicks off a celebration of the composers birth centennial with performances that aim to showcase the breadth and diversity of Bernsteins works. The celebration begins Friday, Feb. 23, with pianist Conrad Taos rendition of Age of Anxiety and concludes later this year on Nov. 9-10 with a semi-staged production of Bernsteins popular operetta Candide. Watts, who died last year at 89, isnt the only one in Utahs arts scene who revered Bernstein. Paul Meecham, Utah Symphony and Utah Opera president and CEO, is particularly excited for the symphonys upcoming celebration, called Bernstein at 100. He recalled watching Bernstein conduct Gustav Mahlers Symphony No. 5 at Londons Royal Albert Hall in the 1980s a performance that has stuck with him ever since. Of course I spent the whole time watching up from the nosebleed seats just watching him because he is so mesmerizing to watch . But what I remember most about the performance was I (didn't seem) to take a breath. I just remember it being one complete arc of a performance it was incredible." Bernstein was buried with a copy of Mahlers Symphony No. 5, and his deep love of Mahler set him apart from other conductors of his day, according to Meecham, who said that Mahlers pieces were often viewed as unwieldy, requiring great orchestral forces because of their length. When it came to repertoire, I think the fact that (Bernstein) championed Mahler when nobody else was championing Mahler was highly significant and is the reason why Mahler is a much more accepted composer," Meecham said. " (Bernsteins) personality, he felt things very strongly and wore his heart on his sleeve, and I think Mahlers music is like that sometimes. The idea for "Bernstein at 100" came from music director Thierry Fischer, who once performed in an orchestra in Munich under the direction of Bernstein, who was then nearing the end of his life. When you have an American artist like Bernstein hes a legend, Fischer said. His piano playing, his composing, his conducting and his commitment to education he was involved in so many aspects of what music can bring to a community, to a society." The Utah Symphony's tribute to Bernstein begins Friday and Saturday with Tao's performance of the jazz-infused Symphony No. 2, also known as the Age of Anxiety," a 1949 piece based on a W.H. Auden poem of the same title. Tao, a 23-year-old pianist based in New York, first heard "Age of Anxiety" when he was around 11 years old, and even at that young age, he was instantly moved by the piece. "Thats actually a pretty good time for this piece to arrive in someones life," he said. "It's a very earnest piece, it's a very emotional piece and it's a very ambitious piece ... When I discovered (it), it was just a very emotional experience, because it was very moving to encounter a work that aims to even tackle these things at all, these huge topics. The following weekend, March 2-3, will include performances of Bernsteins choral work Chichester Psalms," to be directed by Barlow Bradford, and the orchestral work Divertimento." These three stylistically diverse pieces reflect "three strong sides of (Bernstein's) personality," according to Fischer, while also showcasing the composer's "creativity and innovative way of writing music." Fischer added that he's especially looking forward to performing "Candide" in November, as the piece was his introduction to Bernstein. Fischer first heard "Candide" on the radio as a teenager in his Geneva home located about 10 miles from the grave of Voltaire, the French author of the novella "Candide" on which Bernstein's operetta is based. While celebrating Bernstein, the Utah Symphony will also be making history with its upcoming performances, as the next two weekends allow the orchestra to complete one of its goals for the 2017-18 season: Become the first American orchestra to record all five of French composer Camille Saint-Saens symphonies. On Feb. 23 and 24, in addition to accompanying Tao, the symphony will perform Saint-Saens Danse Macabre and Symphony No. 1 to be recorded live for the European record label Hyperion. The orchestra will complete the Saint-Saens cycle with Symphony in A Major, recorded live the following weekend on March 2-3. Hyperion will then release the orchestras performances of all five symphonies on three CDs. But as the Saint-Saens cycle comes to a close, the commemoration of Bernstein is only beginning. "When its the year (Bernstein) should have been 100 years old, I would have felt really embarrassed not to have a massive celebration for such a legendary American artist," Fischer said. "I really wanted to pay a very, very strong tribute to him. If you go What: Utah Symphony presents Bernstein at 100 When: Feb. 23-24, 7:30 p.m.; March 2-3, 7:30 p.m. Where: Abravanel Hall, 123 W. South Temple How much: $15-$83 Web: my.usuo.org Phone: 801-533-6683 SALT LAKE CITY An investigation into a woman who turned up at a senator's hotel room door and claimed to be his date has ended, with the Utah Highway Patrol saying it was unable to identify the woman. Senate President Wayne Niederhauser, R-Sandy, said UHP concluded its investigation Wednesday into the Feb. 8 incident at the Little America Hotel involving Sen. Evan Vickers, R-Cedar City. Even so, Niederhauser said, "it's a good reminder to us as legislators that we need to be cautious, that we need to be vigilant, especially during the legislative session." The Senate president said there was no need to investigate further. Niederhauser said Vickers told him the investigation suggests that "maybe it was a wrong door, and maybe she went to some other place in the hotel. But that's all conjecture. We don't know what the situation was." Vickers, who was interviewed by authorities and reviewed hotel surveillance tape, told reporters the day after the incident that when he responded to a knock on his hotel room door about 6 p.m., a "young lady" was standing there. He said she told him, "I'm your date and we have reservations downtown," but he repeatedly insisted, "No, you're not" and closed the door. Vickers described her as "normal" looking and said she did not know his name. Vickers said then that it "certainly had all the feel of entrapment." The incident occurred the day after a British tabloid reported former Rep. Jon Stanard, a Republican from St. George, paid an escort for trysts at another downtown hotel twice the previous summer. Standard resigned earlier that week. SALT LAKE CITY Utah may have received $38.4 million in the last year from the federal government to make up for lands inside its borders that don't generate property tax revenue, but lawmakers overwhelmingly believe it's chump change compared with what they deserve. To that end, both the House and Senate in the Utah Legislature on Thursday unanimously signed off on a resolution and a subsequent bill that directs a more thorough accounting of the lost dollars. The program is Payment in Lieu of Taxes, established in 1976 by the federal government to compensate states with large swaths of federally held land that is unable to generate property tax revenue. Those would be lands such as national parks, acreage managed by the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service. Although the program since 1977 has distributed $6.7 billion to mostly Western states to compensate them for lost revenue that could be directed to schools, roads and emergency services like police and fire, payments over the years have declined, remained stagnant or increased very little. This coming year's proposed budget for the U.S. Department of the Interior calls for a 15 percent reduction in those payments, and in 2014, the disbursements were not approved until midway through the year. It's an issue of equal justice for both sides of Utah's political aisle on Capitol Hill. "We need a fair deal," said House Minority Leader Brian King, D-Salt Lake City. HCR19, sponsored by Rep. Ken Ivory, R-West Jordan, calls on the U.S. president, Congress and the Utah delegation to ensure timely and full payments to rural counties to make up for that loss of revenue, even noting that instead of Payment in Lieu of Taxes, it has recently equated to "Pennies in Lieu of Taxes." "We teach our children a promise is a promise," Ivory said, but noted that promise has not been fulfilled. He also emphasized that the resolution is a public lands measure that draws on bipartisan support among lawmakers, with Sen. Jim Dabakis, D-Salt Lake City, carrying the resolution in the Senate. It passed 73-0 in the House and 23-0 in the Senate. Ivory's HB357also received unanimous support on the House floor, passing 70-0 and receiving a 23-0 vote in the Senate. It calls on the state's Commission on Federalism to evaluate the impacts of federal payments in lieu of taxes to the state, with a hearing that draws on those impacts from shortfalls that affect schools, cities and other entities. Those promised revenues that have dwindled and fallen short are having serious impacts throughout Utah, lawmakers agreed. "We are in a red-headed stepchild situation," said Rep. Mike Noel, R-Kanab. "We really don't get the benefit of property taxes in this state." Around the West, political leaders have chafed at the continuing shortfalls. In 2017, the Western Governors Association passed a resolution on the issue, urging the federal government to deliver fair compensation because of the critical nature the funds provide for basic local government services that could otherwise be derived from property tax revenue. Matt Anderson, director of the Sutherland Institute's Coalition for Self-Government in the West, said he hopes Ivory's HB357 starts a national conversation on the issue. "The (Payment in Lieu of Taxes) program is not working in the West, Anderson said. The program was designed to compensate rural communities and their schools for lost property tax revenue due to federal land ownership. While there is disagreement about how much more funding rural communities should receive from these payments, both sides of the aisle recognize that Utah and our schoolchildren are being shortchanged." SALT LAKE CITY Killing a police dog could land someone behind bars for as many as 15 years under a law the Utah Legislature passed Thursday. SB57 would bump intentionally or knowingly killing a K-9 service dog from a third-degree felony to a second-degree felony, punishable by one to 15 years in prison. The House passed the measure 43-24. Rep. Lowry Snow, R-Santa Clara, said a police dog is an extension of his handler. When someone takes the life of a dog, it's one step from killing an officer, he said. Rep. Dan McCay, R-Riverton, argued against the bill, saying police dogs are used like weapons. "We do not use our officers as weapons," he said. The Senate passed the bill last week. It now goes to the governor for consideration. SALT LAKE CITY The Utah House passed a bill Thursday banning campaign contributions to the attorney general, lieutenant governor, state auditor and state treasurer while the Legislature is in session. Legislators and the governor are already banned from raising money during the 45-day session that runs from the end of January to mid-March. The governor also isnt allowed to solicit donations through the 20-day bill-signing period after the session. HB320, sponsored by Rep. Mark Wheatley, D-Murray, would not affect the fundraiser Attorney General Sean Reyes has planned at Deer Valley Resort on March 1-3. The bill now goes to the Senate. All Utahs children deserve a first-rate education, not just those in the most affluent or urban communities. A first-rate education includes quality school library programs. Currently, the quality of school library programs varies wildly in the state, despite the fact that nationally the components of what constitutes a quality school library are well-known. One component, comprehensive library media curriculum standards, is in place at the state level. It is to be taught to our K-12 students by the second component, a certified teacher librarian. These standards promote the teaching of essential 21st-century skills in information problem solving, media literacy and reading engagement. A value-added effect of hiring teacher librarians is that they collaborate with teachers in other subject areas to raise scores school-wide. Impact studies in 26 states show that schools with such a collaboration structure in place have higher reading scores, higher math scores and greater student satisfaction in school. The Jan. 20 article Equalizing school funding tops lawmakers' to-do list by Marjorie Cortez indicates that legislators are aware of funding inequities. Updating language in the code, however, is not sufficient to provide an equal opportunity for all students to benefit from the basic right to a quality school library. Implicit in that basic right is what expertise a certified teacher librarian can bring to a school. Legislators in the past few years have emphasized adding to the weighted pupil unit. While this approach appears to equalize basic school needs, school districts in outlying or poorer districts that do not have local taxes sufficient to support all components of a basic program continue to slight school libraries. Professional library staffing is not something all districts can currently afford. Why does the role of a teacher librarian and the effect of strong school library programs seem to be undervalued by so many legislators and administrators? Many leaders are simply unaware of the significant impact strong library programs can have on the total school program. One reason for this is that the importance of the school library is no longer included in courses in educational leadership. A second major reason for poor understanding is that many of the administrators and legislators have not grown up attending a school, or have not had their own children attend a school, with a quality library program. The reason for this unfortunate lack is statistical. Utah has few teachers teaching these standards and directing library programs. Thirteen of Utahs 41 school districts have no certified teacher librarians at all, not even at the district level, to guide the non-certified library aides who oversee their school libraries. Only three districts have teacher librarians in every school, elementary and secondary. The remaining districts have some teacher librarians, but these are usually only in secondary schools. In the past 30 years, the quality of school library programs in Utah has gradually diminished due to these factors. Currently, there is a proposal to begin to remedy this dire situation before the Utah Legislatures Public Education Appropriations Subcommittee. It proposes to fund a three-year project/impact study that would place certified teacher librarians in 25 schools around the state while keeping the current library aide. The proposal includes an evaluation component to help demonstrate the impact of a teacher librarian on student learning. Academic and corporate partners have been attracted to this proposal already and are willing to provide supplemental funding. Legislators and citizens alike should get onboard and provide the support this project deserves. Our students deserve to be taught by qualified teacher librarians the skills they need to be successful in an information-rich society. In all schools statewide, not just in the most progressive districts or affluent communities, our students deserve the benefits of academic environment and programs found in strong school library programs. When he travels abroad on trade missions, Gov. Gary Herbert likes to tell his international hosts that Utahns speak nearly 130 foreign languages in business. And to prove his point, he asks those in the Utah delegation to share what languages they speak. He also mentions that these people are fluent in not just the language, but also the countrys culture. The fact that Utahns are so multilingual and familiar with foreign cultures undoubtedly is a factor in the states extraordinary success in international business. Last year, our exports totaled $12 billion. World Trade Center Utah reports that nearly one in four jobs in our state is tied to an export business, and more than 3,500 companies in Utah export. Eighty-five percent of those are small and medium-sized businesses. Utahs reputation for economic success both domestically and internationally has attracted the attention of many foreign dignitaries. Several times each month, foreign government officials and international business leaders visit our state to meet with Gov. Herbert and Lt. Gov. Spencer Cox. They come to witness for themselves the reasons for our extraordinary accomplishments and to find ways their country can benefit by partnering with Utah and its businesses. In 2017, the Governors Office of Economic Development hosted more than 30 diplomatic visits, including diplomats from Latvia, Austria, China, France, Japan, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, Ethiopia and Brazil. In the last few weeks, Utah has received requests for visits from the ambassador to the United States from Ghana, the ambassadors to the United Nations for Bosnia and Herzegovina and Uzbekistan, the deputy foreign minister from the Republic of Belarus, consuls general from several countries and other business and diplomatic delegations from France, the Congo, Brazil and China. The number of visits to Utah from international dignitaries is unusual given that Utah is a relatively small state located in the middle of the country. Most foreigners typically only consider East and West coast cities when they think of America. Yet their leaders continue to flock to Utah on a regular basis. So why do so many diplomats come to our state? Sometimes it is because they want to see for themselves why Utah is doing so well. The Chinese ambassador to the United States visited Utah in the fall of 2016. He said he had not left Washington, D.C., for 18 months but wanted to visit Utah because he had noticed the accolades Utah had been receiving for its economic prosperity. He wanted to learn why we are excelling. Other dignitaries come because they are invited to speak at our universities. Both Brigham Young University and Utah Valley University have strong academic programs that regularly reach out to ambassadors. BYU typically focuses on ambassadors to the United States who are headquartered in Washington, D.C. UVU extends most of its invitations to ambassadors to the United Nations in New York City. The result is a steady flow of dignitaries through our state. One of the advantages of these ambassadorial visits is that BYU and UVU occasionally piggy back on each others visits. An ambassador who is speaking at BYU may also stop for a lecture at UVU, and vice versa. Many students who served missions for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the ambassadors country or natives from that country come to hear him or her speak. Imagine the ambassadors surprise when they are surrounded by American students speaking their language, understanding their culture and aware of current events happening in their country. In addition to university visits, the ambassadors usually request a visit with Gov. Herbert and leaders of the LDS Church. Some of them take a day or two to visit southern Utah and the national parks or make a few runs on Utahs ski slopes. GOED and World Trade Center Utah frequently partner to host luncheons at which Utahs business community has a chance to meet with the dignitaries. This is a rare opportunity for business leaders wishing to do business in that particular country. A businessman once told of trying unsuccessfully for months to get a meeting with key leaders from a foreign country. The ambassador from that country came to Utah for a visit, and the businessman was able to talk to him face-to-face at the luncheon. These international dignitaries are very influential in their respective governments and countries. After their visits to Utah, they typically become good friends of the state and frequently return to their countries singing Utahs praises to their peers and fellow countrymen. In a sense, many of the worlds official ambassadors become unofficial, enthusiastic ambassadors for Utah. SALT LAKE CITY During his annual address to state lawmakers, Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, was asked about banning AR-15 rifles in the wake of last week's Florida school shooting that left 17 dead and sparked new debate about gun control. The question came from Sen. Jim Dabakis, D-Salt Lake City. "It is a ticking time bomb. It's going to happen in a Utah school," Dabakis said. "Can you please tell me why we need AR-15s and assault weapons?" Lee's response was that there is "not, as far as I can tell, a meaningful way to distinguish between the AR-15 on the one hand, and many hunting rifles that are not considered assault weapons on the other hand." He said the distinction can be arbitrary and that banning an entire category of weapons is not the best way to protect people and would not be supported by most Utahns. "One of the complicating factors in all of this is that there are many millions of these weapons already out there," Lee said. "What do you do with all of those? Do you confiscate all of those? And if so, how is that going to work?" The impact on law-abiding citizens needs to be considered, he said. Congress voted down an attempt to ban assault weapons in 2013, after 20 young children and six members of the school staff were shot to death at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut. The teenager charged in connection with the Feb. 14 student and faculty deaths at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, used an AR-15, according to law enforcement. Dabakis said later he wasn't satisfied with Lee's response to his question, calling it very lawyerly." He said AR-15s "ought to be banned. They ought to be collected and melted down." But Sen. David Hinkins, R-Orangeville, said a better way to counter school shooters is to arm schoolteachers. Hinkins said he's encouraging his two daughters who are schoolteachers to get their concealed weapons permits. "I would like to see where the state supplies training to where we actually take them to shooting ranges and they become proficient," he said. "My daughters wouldn't kill a fly basically. But if their children were in danger, I can assure you they would kill somebody," he said. Senate President Wayne Niederhauser, R-Sandy, said he agreed with Lee. "I think there's some difficulties in just outlawing a specific gun," Niederhauser said. "There's so many different semi-automatic rifles out there that you'd have to outlaw all of them, and I wouldn't support that personally." Niederhauser said he has those types of guns and uses them for hunting. Lee told the Utah Senate in his speech that it's been a good year for Uthans, especially when it comes to income taxes, thanks in part to his efforts to end the "parent tax penalty." He had pushed for years for an increase in the child tax credit, which was doubled to $2,000 in the GOP's $1.5 trillion tax cut passed by Congress shortly before Christmas. The state's soon-to-be senior senator said parents were being penalized by the income tax system because they pay to raise children who then contribute toward entitlements of childless seniors. As parents are "bearing the significant cost of child-rearing, they're also shoring up Social Security and Medicare," Lee said. He said Utah families especially will benefit from the increased child tax credit. Lee said the past year has also been good in terms of appointments to the federal judiciary, including the newest U.S. Supreme Court justice, Neil Gorsuch, and reductions in government regulations by the Trump administration. Lee called for passage of the Regulations from the Executive in Need of Scrutiny Act, known as REINS, another issue he has long championed. The act requires congressional approval of any new rules with a major economic impact. "Much remains to be done," Lee said, describing the federal regulatory system as imposing some $2 trillion in compliance costs on the American people through increase costs of goods and services. SPRINGVILLE For the third time this week, police have arrested a Utah student for allegedly making a school shooting threat. The latest incident occurred Thursday when a Springville High School student was arrested after a Snapchat post was discovered "that suggested a threat of violence at the high school," according to a statement from Springville police. Springville Police Lt. Warren Foster said the social media post included a picture of a person holding a gun, along with a message that suggested violence. The threat was a general one, he said, and did not specifically name anyone. Foster did not know Thursday if the picture was a selfie of the student or just a stock image. Police located the student inside the school and arrested him. "During the interview he had actually said it was a joke. I think his exact words were, 'a dark joke.' But we didn't see it as a joke at all," Foster said. Police do not believe the student had any intention of carrying out the threat. Nevertheless, officers went to his house where the boy and his parents voluntarily handed over the boy's Airsoft gun, he said. "In wake of what's going on across the nation, and the mere fact he's a student at a school, we take this very seriously. It's not a joke. As much as somebody might think it's funny, it's definitely not a joke," the lieutenant said. The student was booked into the Slate Canyon Detention Center for investigation of making a terroristic threat and other potential charges. The incident marked the third arrest or citation handed out to a Utah student this week for making threats. All come on the heels of the school shooting in Florida that killed 17 as well as an incident last month at Jordan High School when a 17-year-old allegedly posted on social media about a possible mass shooting and bombing at the school that created panic among students and teachers, prompting many to stay home from school. On Tuesday, a student at Sandy's Eastmont Middle School who was apparently upset about a friend who had been expelled from the school, posted a comment on social media to the effect of getting revenge by shooting up the school, said Sandy Police Sgt. Jason Nielsen. Police do not believe the threat was legitimate. The student was cited for investigation of making a false alarm. On Wednesday, a Wasatch High School student was arrested and accused of threatening gun violence. In each case, police say each arrest was the result of students and parents speaking up and contacting authorities when they saw or heard something alarming. SALT LAKE CITY The Utah Senate gave preliminary approval Thursday to legislation intended to help equalize school funding across the state. SB145, sponsored by Sen. Lincoln Fillmore, R-South Jordan, advanced to a third reading in the Senate by a vote of 20-6. The legislation would set aside $36 million from the states education fund to increase the minimum funding level for school districts statewide, adding funding each year. It would provide $1.5 million for Necessarily Existent Small Schools and provide $25 million for student busing costs to be phased in over five years. The bill also would expand the definition of at-risk students to include children experiencing homelessness, which means districts that serve them would qualify for at-risk funding enhancements. The overarching goal is to close disparities in school funding. While the state appropriates an equal sum to school districts and charter schools on a per-student basis through the weighted pupil unit, school districts also rely on local property taxes. Revenues generated through local property tax revenues vary greatly across the state, Fillmore said. School districts with higher property values are able to generate more property tax revenue than those with lower property values. Young families with children tend to migrate to areas with lower housing prices, which means growth in school-age populations but lower property tax yields to serve their educational needs. "It simply has to do with realities of geography and demographics," Fillmore said. For example, it's 3 miles between Salt Lake City and North Salt Lake in Davis County, but "education funding goes down by $2,100 per student, he said. While there is general agreement that the Legislature needs to address funding equity, there are competing ideas about how to accomplish that. Even though Rep. Brad Last, R-Hurricane, is the House sponsor of Fillmore's bill, he has his own proposal in the House, HB293. HB293 would raise $36 million through a property tax freeze and potentially capture $125 million by 2022. The bill has been assigned to the House Education Committee but has not yet undergone a hearing. Ultimately, compromise between the approaches may be brokered via "the legislative process," Fillmore said. While some senators offered enthusiastic support for Fillmore's bill, others such as Sen. Lyle Hillyard, R-Logan, expressed concern that some districts will not benefit from SB145 if it means a reduction in the weight pupil unit. But others, including Sen. Howard Stephenson, R-Draper, said it is the Utah Legislature's fault that there are "savage inequities" in student funding among districts. At the time of statehood, early Utah leaders agreed "we'd have a socialized education system. That's what we agreed to," Stephenson said. "There is one thing worse than socialism inequitable socialism, he said. Hillyard rejected the argument, noting that local school districts could generate more local revenue by raising property taxes but many are loath to do it. "Granted, we could do more," he said. SALT LAKE CITY Utah is expected to surpass 5 million residents in less than 50 years, and that growth will also change the characteristics of the population, an economic analyst says. By 2065, the Wasatch Front will be more populated, with more elderly and a more culturally diverse population, according to Pam Perlich, director of demographic research at the University of Utahs Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute. Speaking Thursday to an audience hosted by the Bank of Utah at the Little America Hotel in downtown Salt Lake City, she noted that while the state is experiencing its lowest fertility levels ever, the overall population continues to increase due to robust migration that brings thousands of new residents into the Beehive State every year. "Over time, (there will be) more and more reliance on people moving in to take jobs," she said. "More and more of our population growth will be new people moving in rather than people here having extremely large families." Those new residents will also be of varying ethnic and racial makeups, as well as more youthful, she said. "(When) migrants come into an area, there is a burst of economic growth," she said. "Part of that is they tend to be young and they tend to have kids and they tend to be entrepreneurial and highly energetic." She said in the absence of new people coming to Utah in the years ahead, the state would be much older, have a much smaller population and be less diverse. Currently, the average Utah family is having 2.24 children per household, she said. "That's the lowest its ever been," she noted. The level for fertility replacement rate is 2.1 children per household, she said. For the first time in history, Utah does not have the highest fertility rate, with South Dakota the current leader, she added. Meanwhile, Perlich said as the population growth continues, the northwest quadrant of Salt Lake City will become a major economic hub for the area along with the redevelopment occurring at the Point of the Mountain. "(Our research) sees the dynamic for residential and commercial development pushing further and further south into the southern part of Salt Lake County into Utah County, where we see major (growth) into the next 50 years," she said. "We see big growth in Wasatch, Tooele County and Juab County as the metropolitan area expands." She said that in the coming years, the Wasatch Front will experience dense population expansion that will create a more integrated metropolitan area. "Ultimately, 50 years out, there will be this integrated, global metropolitan area including adjacent 'ring' counties surrounding it," Perlich described. "We're talking 3.3 million people just in the four metropolitan Wasatch Front counties." DRAPER She's the daughter of political refugees, a graduate of both the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and Yale Law. In 2010, she became the first Indian-American to ever run for congress, and growing up she hated math and science. On Thursday, Reshma Saujani, the founder and CEO of girlswhocode.org helped Utah's STEM Action Center launch a statewide initiative aimed at preparing girls and young women for the job opportunities of the future. Saujani pointed out to the 200 or so Utah seventh- through 12th-grade girls gathered at Dell EMC's office in south Salt Lake County Thursday morning that the technology they likely use everyday, from companies like Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat, all have a shared trait. "The crazy thing is what all those companies have in common, even though their consumer base is mostly girls, is that their creators are mostly men," Saujani said. "I belive that girls are change-makers. I belive that technology is going to help you get to that path of being a change-maker." Tamara Goetz, executive director of the STEM Action Center, said her organization will use Saujani's platform as a teaching module for the Utah Girls Who Code Club Network, with plans in place to have 50 clubs at schools, community centers, libraries and various organizations across the state to help close the tech employment gender gap. "We've been looking for an opportunity for young girls to get engaged with the core skills that are, and will be, so in demand," Goetz said. "Learning how to code in this setting will allow these girls to learn teamwork, communication, build their confidence ... and dream big." Lt. Gov. Spencer Cox was on hand to introduce Saujani and underscored just how out of balance the gender demographic is when it comes to who's filling tech and innovation positions and who isn't. "These are great jobs that pay a lot of money," Cox said. "The problem is when it comes to tech jobs, only 12 percent of them are being filled by women. Its not cool, right?" Cox also offered an enthusiastic and heartfelt encouragement to the students to not only embrace the opportunity to acquire in-demand skills, but to go big when it comes to thinking about their futures. "Youre going to change the world when it comes to tech and women in the workplace," Cox said. "I need you to make your voices heard on things that are important to you. I need you guys not just to program computers, but I need you to run for office and stand up and be heard and be loud and proud about it." Goetz said the program was off to a blazing start and expected that by the fall term of school, when the code club officially begins, they will likely exceed the hoped for 50 chapters for the their first year. Industry partners will help play a role in financing and finding facilitators, who Saujani noted did not need to have coding or computer skills to be group leaders. Those partners currently include Dell EMC, Adobe and Microsoft, with more local businesses expected to join the effort. Janice Peters, Adobe's program manager for sustainability and social impact, said in a statement that her company was committed to playing a role in breaking down stereotypes. Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen noted during his presentation at the recent Silicon Slopes Tech Summit in Salt Lake City that his company had achieved complete pay parity among its 15,000-plus employees. Through our commitment to Girls Who Code, we are able to raise awareness and visibility of technology among young women and help shatter the perception that the tech industry is only for males, said Peters. Were excited to help kick off this program in Utah to equip young girls with coding and creativity skills that will allow them to share their unique voices, perspectives and ideas. Saujani launched the nonprofit girlswhocode.org five years ago with a group of 20 students in New York City. By year's end, she expects to have 50,000 participants across all 50 states. To learn more about the STEM Action Centers Girls Who Code Club Network, visit https://stem.utah.gov. SALT LAKE CITY Attorney General Sean Reyes looked out over the crowd gathered in the Capitol rotunda Thursday to celebrate Utah Latino Day on the Hill. "I would not be the attorney general of the state of Utah without the Hispanic community," Reyes said. The gathering advertised itself as "a bipartisan celebration of the Latino population, culture and traditions." Reyes said people are not going to agree on every issue, but it's important to have an underlying respect for one another. "Whether you're brand new to this country because you come as an asylee or a refugee, or whether you're brand new to this country because you come from other circumstances, or whether you've been here for multiple generations, it doesn't matter. We are one grand familia," he said. The Latino community in Utah is estimated to have about $8 billion in buying power, Reyes said. Nationally, it's estimated to be $1.7 trillion by 2020, he said. Reyes pointed to the top of the Rotunda at the painting "Father Escalante Discovers Utah Lake in 1776", and said there were Hispanics charting the Utah territory for the first time as the Continental Congress was writing the Declaration of Independence. Just before an assortment of dances began, Reyes told the audience, "I want you to be proud of being Latino, Hispanic. We can do so much more together than we can fractured, fighting one another. We have enough enemies outside who don't want to see us succeed." The subsequent dances and the music represented cultures and countries from all over Latin America. A middle school in Pennsylvania canceled classes after a student sleepwalked into the building on Wednesday morning. According to the Associated Press, the seventh-grade student called 911 at about 2:30 a.m. to inform police that he had sleepwalked into Wendover Middle School, which sits in Hempfield Township, Pennsylvania. Police said the student entered the school through a window. It appears he went through a screen in the window and got himself in the school. He was in the school about 15 minutes, trooper Stephan Limani, of Pennsylvania State Police, told KDKA-TV. He believes he was sleepwalking and went to the school. On Wednesday, the Hempfield Area School District canceled classes amid security concerns. Police swept through the building throughout the day. Classes resumed on Thursday, according to the AP. Police said the incident isnt related to a separate arrest earlier this week when a student allegedly threatened to shoot another student. A couple days prior, we did have a male student verbally threaten a female student, saying he was going to shoot her, Limani said. According to Fox News, the student accused of making the threat was arrested and sent to Westmoreland County Juvenile Detention Center. The school will continue to increase security as it investigates why the sleepwalking student entered the building. In light of the recent events, an added police presence will be at Wendover Middle School tomorrow and counselors will be available to talk with students regarding school violence and safety, as needed,Superintendent Tammy W. Wolicki said in a statement. Additionally, the PA State Police have indicated that they are striving to have an added presence at all district schools. This provides an opportunity for students to see law enforcement within the schools and to promote a sense of safety. SALT LAKE CITY A resolution commending the Jordan School District's fleet of natural gas-powered buses was advanced unanimously Friday by the House Transportation Committee. HCR15, sponsored by Rep. Cheryl Acton, R-West Jordan, recognizes that the district has the state's largest fleet of CNG school buses, with 75 of 260 buses fueled by natural gas and another 36 on order. Acton said the recognition is deserved by the district and may help "promote clean air policies to other fleet managers in the state." She said the district has used grants and other means to keep the costs of the CNG buses and fuel down. Jordan School Board President Janice Voorhies told the committee that children in the fast-growing district matter, not just when they're in the classroom but also their health and quality of life. "We are very proud of the good work our transportation people do to keep those buses rolling and to make them a continued effort," Voorhies said. Rep. John Westwood, R-Cedar City, joined in the praise for the district. "I wish more school districts would follow suit here," he said. "It would greatly improve our air quality." HCR15 now goes to the full House. Wondering Why Lindsay Lohan Has Been Drawing Flak On Social Media? Here's The Reason! Actor Lindsay Lohan, who has fielded rumours of having converted to Islam for months, was seen wearing a hijab at the recent London Fashion Week. Pictures of the star, who now lives in Dubai, have been doing the rounds online. Before her appearance at the show, Lohan posted a live Instagram video in which she was learning to tie a hijab. I think it needs (to be) a little bit more tighter in the (back). I dont want it to come off and show too much, she said. She also spoke to the BBC about her new avatar. Lohan was once considered a sex symbol. Fashion doesnt always have to be so naked and can be adventurous and still beautiful, with a strong group of women behind it, Lohan said. In addition to the traditional attire, Lohan also wore halal makeup to the event. According to a post by halal/vegetarian/vegan makeup retailer HawaCosmetics, Lohan stopped by their booth and told them how shes into halal cosmetics and what shes actually wearing on her face today was all halal!! Lohans choice was met with mixed reactions online. One person on Twitter commented, It amazes me how the western civilization sees wearing the hijab as an act of liberation and empowerment while women in Iran are removing their hijabs off as a protest, meaning the hijab is actually a sign of oppression in muslim countries. Another person replied to the BBCs tweet by saying, Since when did promoting oppressive articles of clothing become a thing? Especially when women take off their hijabs in protest...seems counter-productive... There were others who believed it was Lindsays choice to dress the way she likes. Since when did promoting oppressive articles of clothing become a thing? Especially when women take off their hijab's in protest...seems counter-productive... Lindsey D (@lindseyaya87) February 18, 2018 Lohan previously made headlines when she wore a burkini to the beach, and quoted the Quran on a Kuwaiti talk show. A recent picture she posted on her Instagram, in which she is wearing a swimsuit, was met with criticism from the conservatives, demanding that she take it down. Here are some more reactions: On one side of world Women are being abducted or Killed 4 protesting against Hijab & Burqa and then there is this Mean Girl @lindsaylohan who is Glorifying this Sign of Oppression as 'Tradition' repeatedly in her Insta live Video I'm wondering why she has Accepted Islam? pic.twitter.com/lr2JVaq7uB Bane (@the_hound_o0) February 17, 2018 It amazes me how the western civilisation sees wearing the hijab as an act of liberation and empowerment while women in Iran are taking the hijab off as a protest, meaning the hijab is actually a sign of oppression in muslim countries.@DouglasKMurray Tom Livne (@countertommy) February 19, 2018 Ooredoo Algeria has extended its contract with digital transactions firm eServGlobal for a further three years. The contract encompasses technology platform upgrades as well as support through to 2020. eServGlobal has been a technology vendor to Ooredoo Algeria for more than a decade, facilitating all prepaid recharge requirements. As part of the new contract, eServGlobal will upgrade the technology platforms to the new releases of PayMobile for electronic recharge and VoMS for Voucher Management to facilitate a comprehensive recharge offering for the largely prepaid subscriber base. James Hume, eServGlobal COO, said, Im pleased to be able to share this clear sign of progress against our objective to create true business partnerships with our existing customers. This contract also further supports our commitments to building strong recurring revenue. Imed Soussou, Ooredoo Algeria, CTO, said, Algeria is a growing and dynamic market with strong demand for new technologies. We look forward to continuing this partnership as we work together to build technology solutions for Algerias future. Ooredoo Algeria is a leading telecommunication provider in the country, with more than 14 million customers, and is part of the Ooredoo Group, which has a presence in ten markets across North Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia. eServGlobal is currently working with Ooredoo Group affiliates in four countries. Sydney, we love you, but theres a reason Melbourne is known as Australias culinary capital. Despite practically being a galaxy away from the worlds other noted food cities, Melbourne more than holds its own against New York, Paris, London, and their ilk. You could bounce between restaurants like a Roomba, hoovering up every tasty morsel in sight, and still never make it through everything worth eating in this mouthwatering melting pot. But who could begin to keep track of it all in the first place? Melbourne restaurants come and go faster than celebrity marriages, and unless youre Bourdain or Batali, youre probably not keeping up. Never fear. Weve got your back, and your stomach, with a guide to the cool Melbourne restaurants that belong on your bucket list. A mix of essentials and upstarts, this list should be enough to keep your tastebuds busy (for a little while, at least). Cutler & Co. Address 55/57 Gertrude St, Fitzroy, 3065 Phone 03 9419 4888 Belying its nearly 10 years on the scene, the flagship of Andrew McConnells restaurant empire looks fresh and oh-so-luxe following a revamp of green marble, leather booths, and a bar serving an excellent seafood-centric snack menu. If Don Draper made it to Melbourne, surely Cutler & Co. is where he would come for his post-office Old Fashioned. Kisume Address 175 Flinders Lane, Melbourne, 3000 Phone 03 9671 4888 When youre the youngest sibling of Chin Chin, Kong, and Hawker Hall, theres a lot to live up to. Kisume does not disappoint. Chris Lucas ambitious latest is a three-level love letter to the art of Japanese cuisine. In both style and substance, it is unapologetically dramatic and well-constructed, delivering top-notch sushi in true showman style. Etta Address 60 Lygon Street, Brunswick, 3057 Phone 03 9448 8233 A considered wine list meets a veggie-heavy menu at Etta, an East Brunswick eatery with neighbourhood bistro vibes. One meal here is more than enough to permanently debunk the notion that everything good for you tastes rubbish, thanks to the culinary clout of New Zealand-born chef Hayden McMillan. Mamasita Address Level 1/11 Collins Street, Melbourne, 3000 Phone 04 1245 0766 If youre partial to a burrito or expertly executed guac, march down to Melbourne favourite Mamasita for a taste of authentic Mexican. As the citys first proper taqueria, Mamasita has become an institution of fresh, delicious, unpretentious eats like ox tongue tacos and streetstyle corn slathered in mayo and queso. The extensive tequila and mezcal list is an added bonus. Atlas Dining Address 133 Commerical Road, South Yarra, 3141 Phone 03 9826 2621 At just 22 years old, chef Charlie Carrington launched Melbournes most ambitious restaurant opening of 2016. The menu at Atlas Dining changes every four months to reflect Australias multicultural identity and Carringtons global travels, and though that sounds like an idea ripe for failure or dismissal as gimmicky, Atlas has turned being young and restless into a winning strategy that continues to impress. Osteria Ilaria Address 367 Little Bourke Street, Melbourne, 3000 Phone 03 9642 2287 Like Kisume, Osteria Illaria had big boots to fill. Not only is it the successor to the wildly popular pasta joint Tipo 00, its right next door and also serving a menu of Mediterranean cuisine. But while its older sib throws #bodygoals out the window and embraces #carblife, Osteria Illaria looks beyond noodles to more varied fare, killer cocktails, and an experimental wine list. Cumulus Inc Address 45 Flinders Lane, Melbourne, 3000 Phone 03 9650 1445 Cumulus Inc is a clean, bright eating house and bar serving up Andrew McConnells acclaimed breakfast, lunch and dinners. Located in a historic turn of the century rag trade building, come here for hipster points and acclaimed food, then head to the wine bar upstairs (fittingly called Cumulus Up) for a nitecap before heading home. Piquancy Address 123 Auburn Road, Hawthorn, 3122 Phone 03 9813 5160 From the team behind St. Kilda hotspot Babu Ji comes Piquancy, Hawthorns humble Indian dining destination with a modern twist. The word piquancy refers to a pleasantly sharp and appetising flavour, a name the eatery proudly lives up to with a spice-heavy menu of classic curries and rice dishes mixed with street food bites, local wines, craft beers and traditional lassi beverages. Cookie Address 252 Swanston Street, Melbourne, 3000 Phone 03 9663 7660 Beer hall, eating house, disco three phrases that mash together far better than should be possible, at least in the capable hands of the team behind Cookie. An array of delectable Thai dishes, over 350 wines, and a buzzing atmosphere have made Cookie a reliable staple for many a diner in the Melbourne CBD, both locals and visitors alike. Tonka Address 20 Duckboard Place, Melbourne, 3000 Phone 03 9650 3155 Just off Flinders Lane is this classic purveyor of Melbourne Indian fare. Tonka pairs vibrant South Asia flavours with an award-winning wine list and one of the citys most stunning ceilings. From its laneway location, to its pared-back design, to its friendly service and boundary-pushing cuisine, Tonka represents the Melbourne dining scene to a T. Attica Address 74 Glen Eira Road, Ripponlea, 3185 Phone 03 9530 0111 Dear, dependable, divine Attica though hardly new to the Melbourne foodie rotation, Ben Shewrys fine-dining establishment is an Australian icon. The multi-course tasting menu is experience dining at its most exquisite, and though you will walk away with a significantly lighter wallet, you will also walk away with a contented tummy and a renewed sense of culinary wonder. Top Paddock Address 658 Church Street, Richmond, 3121 Phone 03 9429 4332 On venturing to Richmond you will find Top Paddock, but dont mind the 40-minute wait. This polished cafe is your quintessential Melbourne breakfast haunt bubbling over with Instagramability. From locally sourced eggs to Five Senses signature blend coffee and a hands-on fit out with plenty of natural light and greenery, Top Paddock and its infamous ricotta pancakes are a must for every Melbourne newcomer. Rice Paper Scissors Address 15 Hardware Lane, Melbourne, 3000 Phone 03 9663 9890 For Melbournes CBD city slickers, Hawker-style Asian fusion joint Rice Paper Scissors is required eating. Chef Shane Staffords south-east Asian menu serves up small bites like sticky pork belly and crying tiger beef as well an affordable menu starting at $59 for two. Combine those tasty edible offerings with quirky cocktails and a chic brick interior, and youve got yourself a bonafide Melbourne hotspot. Minamishima Address 4 Lord Street, Richmond, 3121 Phone 03 9429 5180 The art of sushi awaits you at the minimalist palace of chef Koichi Minamishima. The omakase here is the stuff of your wildest, fish-filled dreams reverent and authentic, with hints of the rare and weird to keep you guessing. Come to Minamishima prepared to surrender to the will of the chefs and the accommodating staff. This is a place to sit back and enjoy the ride. Wilson & Market Address 163 185 Commercial Road, South Yarra, 3141 Phone 03 9804 7530 After bringing his Midas touch to some of Melbournes most exciting restaurants over the past 20 years, award-winning chef Paul Wilson launched his first, highly-anticipated solo venture in 2017. Wilson & Market offers a quintessential Melbourne dining experience spread over an urban cafe, luxe bar, wine store, and brasserie at Prahran Market. Ides Address 92 Smith Street, Collingwood, 3066 Phone 03 9939 9542 A once-roving monthly pop-up by Atticas then sous-chef Peter Gunn now has a permanent home in Collingwood. Ides delivers an ambitious fixed-price, multi-course meal that changes frequently (and often at the last minute) according to the whims of its head chef. While you may not know what youll be getting on any given night, you can rest assured that it will be a meal to remember. Vue de Monde Address Rialto Towers, 525 Collins Street, Melbourne, 3000 Phone 03 9691 3888 Perched on level 55 of the Rialto building, Vue de Monde offers fine dining at dizzying heights. The wow factor is dialed up to eleven in everything Vue de Monde does, from the wizardry in the kitchen, to the sultry and theatrical space, to the actual view that gives the restaurant its name. This $10M temple to fine dining comes with high expectations and a price tag that will give you vertigo, but for a special occasion, Vue de Monde brings just the right amount of drama. Read Next The Minister for Education and Skills, Richard Bruton is in the north-west this morning to endorse what has been described as a historic memorandum of understanding between Letterkenny Institute of Technology, Ulster University, North West Regional College and the Donegal ETB. The new agreement is a commitment to establishing a strategic alliance between the education providers, with a view to increasing collaboration north and south of the border. The announcement is of particular importance in the context of Brexit and is of great significance to the region. Minister Bruton will open a new school building for Letterkenny Educate Together National School, while in Donegal. The new 24 classroom building will cater for over 200 students in the area. The Minister will also host a panel discussion in Errigal College, Letterkenny with education partners, focussing on fulfilling the potential of early years learners right through to Junior Certificate. The minister met with the Donegal ETB last night to discuss school building projects for the county. Alisha McKevitt, the woman who saw her home in Omeath go down in flames in the early hours of Wednesday last week, has spoken about the blaze - hailing her Rosie as a hero for alerting her to the fire. A GoFundMe has been set up by Alisha's mother in California, which has raised over $25,000 so far. The fire broke out at the home at Lislea at around 6am on Valentines Day. Unfortunately, the house was not insured as the couple had been working tirelessly to bring it up to code for several months. A new roof had just been installed on the building. Alisha and husband Paddy were in the process of renovating the cottage at Lislea, Omeath, so Paddy could be near his elderly mother. Speaking to the Irish Daily Mirror, Alisha said she would not have survived had she not been awoken in the early hours by Rosie. Alisha, with Paddy at work, managed to escape the fire, as did the couples other two dogs - Woodrow and Petey. Rosie, who they took in only recently, did not survive. I think by waking me that Rosie did save my life because it was literally seconds I had to get out," she told the newspaper. I called all the dogs to come with me and when I realised Rosie our rescue dog was not with me. I thought she must have run into the nearby woods. I searched and called for her for what seemed like ages. Firefighters later discovered Rosie on Alisha's bed but were unsuccessful in trying to revive her. Paddy was at work and he is convinced that Rosie barking or scratching at the door must have woken me. When I woke up I could smell smoke. I am not sure what woke me but Paddy is convinced it was Rosie. I think by waking me she did save my life. The couple have only recently returned from the United States, as Paddy could be nearer his family. A public meeting was held in the Dolmen Centre on Tuesday evening as the local community came out in force to offer support and donations as well as materials and expertise as the McKevitts attempt to rebuild after this tragic event. The response from the community here has been absolutely amazing," Alisha, who along with Paddy has found temporary accomodation, told the Mirror. "Our neighbours are the best. You can read the full interview here. Their GoFundMe page can be accessed here. Students of St Louis Secondary School and St Mary's College in Dundalk will be among the first in the country to undertake Leaving Certificate examinations in Physical Education, it has been revealed. Minister for Education Richard Bruton confirmed on Friday that the two Dundalk schools, alongside Sacred Heart Secondary School in Drogheda, are among 80 schools nationwide that have been selected for the pilot first phase of implementation which will see PE becoming a senior cycle examination subject. "I am delighted that The Sacred Heart Secondary School in Drogheda and both St Louis Secondary and St Maryss College in Dundalk have been included in the pilot scheme for schools to study Physical Education at Senior Cycle," Fine Gael TD Fergus O'Dowd said. "This means that County Louth students could be among the first in the country to take the Leaving Cert exam in PE. Students taking PE as a Leaving Certificate subject from September 2018 will sit the very first LCPE exam in 2020. The subject can be taken at both higher and ordinary levels. Alternatively, schools can implement the Senior Cycle Physical Education Framework which is not for examination. PE as a Leaving Cert will be rolled out in all schools in Ireland from 2020. The assessment process will have 20% going to a physical activity project; 30% to performance assessment and 50% to a written examination. "The Fine Gael Government is taking physical education seriously for the health of our nation and this announcement is part of the overall Government focus on encouraging healthy living," O'Dowd continued. A total of 369 schools applied to participate in the phase 1 roll-out. Federal agents in the United States are intensifying their investigations into two men suspected of being part of the gang involved in the death of Detective Garda Adrian Donohoe. A report in the Irish Independent today says that FBI officers are working with US police in appealing for information on the two men, specifically honing in on the Irish community in Boston where the two suspects have been living. Closer to home, Gardai have been liasing with the PSNI, as well as the FBI as part of the investigation. The newspaper reports that the Bureau have offered a susbtantial reward for anyone who can provide information relating to the two men. It also says posters have been distributed around Boston and in the Norfolk County areas of Massachusetts. The two suspects at the centre of the investigation are brothers. Two other men believed to be in the five man gang who were involved in Detective Garda Donohoe's death are currently living in Northern Ireland. The criminal suspected of being the gunman in the murder is set to be released from prison on motoring offences shortly. The man in his 20s was extradited from the United States last year. Det Garda Donohoe was murdered as he responded to an armed robbery at Lordship Credit Union on January 25th 2013. Speaking on the fifth anniversary of the murder last month, Louth Chief Superintendent Christy Mangan said, "The persons involved in this murder have no doubt received logistical and emotional support from their families and friends." Adrian Donohoe died aged 41, survived by wife Caroline and his two young children. He spent his entire Garda career in Dundalk, rising to the rank of Detective. He resided in Bellurgan. Around 180 Transition Year students from seven secondary schools in Dundalk will converge on the Marist St Mary's College next month for Bank of Ireland's Bond Trader event, a team game of stocks, shares, equities, cash and bonds. The event, which is being held in conjunction with Dundalk Chamber of Commerce, takes places on Tuesday March 6th and while all of the local secondary schools have confirmed their attendance, organisers are calling on mentors to come and take part too. They are looking for any accountants, solictors or business financial controllers who would be available for the morning to sign up for what should be an entertaining, educational and worthwhile exercise with TY students. Any of the above who partake on the day will qualify for two hours of Continuing Professional Development from the bank, as a result of offering their time and expertise. The quiz format - with financial scenarios as opposed to questions - is aimed to give the students a real and practical hands on taste of what bond trading is all about. "This is the first time Bond Trader has come to Dundalk and it's a first time opportunity for all these students," David Dowling, Bank of Ireland's Community Business Leader for North County Louth told the Dundalk Democrat. "We want to partner with other local entities and embed Bank of Ireland into the local community, like we have in our Enterprise Town events." "We're still looking for experts to come and give their time on the day," said Dowling, who asked anyone interested to get in touch with him in the branch on Clanbrassil Street. "Bond Trader will give the students knowledge of trading floor, the implications of buying shares and the risks associated. It's really competitive, but in a fun way." The day will begin with coffee and an informal network session for mentors at 9am before the Bond Trader event starts at 9.30am. The event starts with a 10-15 minute education piece. Teams are then given a mix of assets, a live scenario and the ability to swap these assets to build their ideal portfolio. A team of dealers will facilitate the trades for the participating teams. The events are highly interactive, think the trading floor on the New York Stock Exchange. A team of scorers have a spreadsheet that records who made and lost money after each round. There are 10 different trading scenarios and there is usually a short break after 5 rounds. Bank of Ireland also run a outh banking programme for primary and secondary schools and sponsor the Junk Kouture competition, which is competed in annually by a host of local schools. Please allow ads as they help fund our trusted local news content. Kindly add us to your ad blocker whitelist. If you want further access to Ireland's best local journalism, consider subscribing to our ePaper and/or free daily Newsletter . Support our mission and join our community now. The move to build a new Wastewater Treatment Plant for Omeath has progressed to the land acquisition stage, in a move Irish Water say will stop the discharge of untreated wastewater into Carlingford Lough. Irish Water today (Friday, February 23rd) confirmed they are progressing the project to upgrade the Omeath sewerage system which will in turn stop the flow of untreated wastewater into Carlingford Lough. Once complete, they say, the proposed scheme will improve the water quality in Carlingford Lough benefiting the people that use the Lough and the wildlife that live on the banks of and in the Lough. 'The cleaner water will enhance the amenity value and support social and economic development in the area. The proposed new wastewater treatment plant, pumping stations and sewer pipes will support the increase in local population and future development in the area' Irish Water said in a statement today. 'The practice of discharging untreated wastewater to the Lough is no longer acceptable and Irish Water is rectifying this in conjunction with Louth County Council by constructing a new Wastewater Treatment Plant (subject to planning permission), pumping stations (subject to planning permission) and sewer network to ensure that the treated wastewater discharged to Carlingford Lough meets the appropriate standards.' 'The new Wastewater infrastructure will bring benefits to Omeath in terms of health, integrity of the environment and improved water quality for all' they said. The Carlingford Shore is a designated Special Area of Conservation and Carlingford Lough is a proposed National Heritage Area and an important shellfish area. Irish Water is now submitting Compulsory Purchase Orders to An Bord Pleanala, in relation to required wayleaves and lands. Previously, they have been unable to acquire all of the required wayleaves and lands on a voluntary basis. The company say that the CPOs are being sough "given the importance of the project." Consultations have been on-going with all landowners identified on the proposed scheme. Subsequent to the land acquisition process Irish Water will be seeking planning permission for the Omeath Sewage Scheme from Louth County Council. Subject to the Planning and CPO statutory approvals construction work is expected to commence in early 2019 with project completion in 2021. Commenting on the project Paul Fallon, Infrastructure Programme Manager with Irish Water said, "Irish Water is pleased to be progressing the Omeath Sewerage Scheme. "The next stage is to submit a Compulsory Purchase Order to An Bord Pleanala to acquire the necessary lands for the project. Stopping the discharge of untreated wastewater into Carlingford Lough is a priority for Irish Water. The proposed scheme will protect the environment by improving the water quality in the Lough for residents and tourists that visit the area and the wildlife that live in and around the Lough. Irish Water is committed to delivering this project and will keep the community informed at each stage of the project," he added. The Omeath Sewerage Scheme will involve the construction of the new wastewater treatment plant on a greenfield site north of Omeath Village. The new plant will serve a population equivalent of 1,000 with the capacity for future expansion. The project also includes new foul sewer connections to connect existing wastewater pipes, the construction of a new main pumping station at Shore Road and rising main to transfer wastewater to the new plant. A new outfall pumping station and outfall rising main will bring the treated discharge to the outfall. Work will be carried out to upgrade and extend the existing outfall pipe which will allow the safe discharge of treated wastewater into Carlingford Lough. Irish Water spent over 525 million on water services in 2017. Instantly delete email threats for Office 365 365 Threat Monitor scans all emails as they reach your users' mailboxes to detect ransomware, phishing and spam. Receive real-time phone alerts, get real-time security breach updates and instantly delete threats with just one click - for free! Learn More. One fundamental element of building a brand relationship with customers is consistency. Widely franchised companies like Starbucks compromise consistency, however. They employ several different business models instead of sticking to one. This approach confuses customers and hurts the master brand, since customers never really know what to expect. Because Starbucks uses different business models, depending on store locations, certain customers have become distrustful of the brand, which ultimately hurts the company. Starbucks uses at least two different business models that I have seen, although there may be more. One model is for company-owned Starbucks stores. A different model is for franchises that are not owned by Starbucks, but by other companies, such as supermarkets or department stores. There are Starbucks franchises inside Publix, Kroger, Target and Barnes & Noble stores. They show up in shopping mall booths, hotel lobbies and many other places -- and I think there may be many different models within this slice of the pie. The All-Important Customer Experience Starbucks has been making a simple mistake. The experience the customer gets used to should be the same for every Starbucks-branded store. Period. Building a brand relationship with customers is key to success. However, in Starbucks' case, the rules seem to vary from one store to another -- and that wiggle room for the franchise operator chips away at brand loyalty. Let's face it, customers don't care about business models. What they care about is the experience. If they like a brand such as Starbucks, they want the same experience from store to store. They expect the same taste, choice, service quality, cleanliness and more. They expect it in every single store. That builds a brand relationship. Satisfaction leads to long-term loyalty. When the customer experience is different from place to place, that cuts away at the brand. My local Starbucks started out in a nearby Publix supermarket. It was a separate Starbucks business, but it was within the Publix store. It offered the full Starbucks experience. Last year, Starbucks decided to buy a piece of property nearby and build its own store with a drive-through window. When the store moved from Publix, things suddenly changed. Business increased several times over, which was great for the store. New customers loved it and kept coming back. However, that sudden growth altered the experience for longtime patrons of the original Starbucks store. The company didn't seem to care about that problem, so the store at the new location no longer was recognizable as the friendly neighborhood Starbucks many had grown to love. A year and a half later, Publix decided to open its own Starbucks in the original location. However, it was a franchise store -- Publix owned it, not Starbucks. Many of the longtime customers who liked the original store have been visiting the franchise -- that's the good news. You Can't Go Home Again However, the new Publix-franchised Starbucks has a few noticeable flaws that eat away at the otherwise strong brand relationship with loyal customers. They are small things, but they have been diluting the brand for the customer. One, Starbucks has a frequent customer card, that rewards customers with free refills, free flavors added to the coffee, and other perks. However, the new Publix Starbucks does not offer those advantages, which hurts the Starbucks brand relationship with customers. Two, customers can't redeem their loyalty card points at the new franchise. This means customers must go elsewhere to redeem their points. Three, the high-speed WiFi connectivity available in every Starbucks store doesn't work well in Publix. It is often down or does not work reliably. This can be fixed, but the question is, will it? These differences and more can make customers feel like they are in a Starbucks in a different dimension. The name is there, the coffee is there, but certain things are different or missing. Lesson for Retailers This is Starbucks' mistake: After spending a great deal of time and money building a strong brand relationship with customers, it has been allowing it to get watered down and weakened by franchises bearing the corporate name. Retail stores may be able to choose the model they want, but there is a price for choosing poorly. That price can be significant for retailers like Publix, Kroger, Target and many others. It can have a negative impact on Starbucks itself. Customers who use the company's loyalty programs certainly must pay a price. Companies should work hard to avoid disappointing their customers. Period. That's especially true when it something as simple and important as a loyalty program -- something that is set up to improve the customer experience and build a strong relationship. Lack of consistency hurts valuable brand relationships. That is something every company should be very aware of. If they do nothing to combat it, brand erosion could become painful. Customers notice, and they do remember. Jeff Kagan has been an ECT News Network columnist since 2010. His focus is on the wireless and telecom industries. He is an independent analyst, consultant and speaker. Email Jeff. Instantly delete email threats for Office 365 365 Threat Monitor scans all emails as they reach your users' mailboxes to detect ransomware, phishing and spam. Receive real-time phone alerts, get real-time security breach updates and instantly delete threats with just one click - for free! Learn More. The Federal Communications Commission on Thursday officially published its Net neutrality rollback order in the Federal Register, triggering a flurry of legal actions and Capitol Hill scrambling to stop it before it takes hold. The order, which goes into effect on April 23, reverses an Obama era rule requiring that broadband access be regarded as a utility. Without it, ISPs and other firms will be able to speed up or slow down Internet traffic. It also will allow service provers to make adjustments in program access that could speed up technology innovation, the rollback's supporters have contended. The repeal was a major priority of FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, a commissioner who took the FCC's helm after Donald Trump won the presidential election in 2016 and proceeded to strip away numerous regulations put into place by Obama. Legal Maneuvers Following publication of the FCC's Final Rule, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman announced that a coalition of 23 state attorneys general had filed a petition in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit seeking to block the illegal rollback of Net neutrality. The FCC's ruling was arbitrary and capricious, the AGs argued, and would open up consumers to throttling, blockage of certain content, and a the possibility that some consumers would be charged more than others for the same content. Public Knowledge also filed a lawsuit in federal court to challenge the FCC's order, arguing that Chairman Ajit Pai had broken with more than 20 years of FCC history as protector of the open Internet. "The impact of this order is clear," said John Bergmayer, senior council at Public Knowledge. "By eliminating its rules and oversight role, the FCC has given broadband providers the green light to press forward with anti-competitive and anti-consumer business models." Opponents of the Net neutrality reversal have 60 days to file suit and 10 days to be a part of the multi-district lottery to determine where the cases will be heard, according to Public Knowledge. Congress has 60 legislative days to challenge Net neutrality through the Congressional Resolution of Disapproval. Mozilla on Thursday re-filed its earlier suit challenging the repeal of Net neutrality. The FCC's order does not simply "roll back" an unregulated Internet, argued Dennelle Dixon, chief legal and business officer at Mozilla. It also removes affirmative protections from the public, despite the fact that many consumers do not have a choice of high-speed service provider. Vimeo also filed a petition with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit on Thursday,arguing that the FCC engaged in a "wholesale abdication of FCC's statutory mandate" to regulate one of hte most critical means of communication that exists, through broadband Internet. The FCC engaged in a "deeply flawed rulemaking process" that departed starkly from prior FCC reasoning and precedent, according to the filing. The FCC expressed confidence that its order would withstand the legal bombardment. "We are confident that the Restoring Internet Freedom Order will be upheld in the courts," the agency said in a statement provided by spokesperson Mark Wigfield. "In 2005 the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the FCC classification of broadband as a Title I information service, and we have every reason to believe that the courts will uphold the FCC's decision to return to that light touch regulatory framework." However, there remained fierce opposition to the move from the FCC's two Democratic commissioners. The majority was giving billion-dollar broadband providers the keys to the Internet, said Commissioner Mignon Clyburn, but she remained hopeful that the opposition would prevail. Reps. Mike Doyle, D-Penn., ranking member of the Communications and Technology Subcommittee and Frank Pallone, D-N.J., ranking member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, announced that 143 House members had agreed to co-sponsor a bill to prevent the FCC from rescinding Net neutrality. Low Density, Slow Buildout Rural communities have not seen any additional investment as a result of the rule reversal, according to Christopher Mitchell, director of community broadband networks at the Institute for Local Self Reliance. CenturyLink last month announced plans to focus more of its future investments in high-speed, high density urban areas, he noted. The ILSR does not plan to file a lawsuit, but it has pledged its support to other organizations that take the fight to court. "We continue to work with rural groups to improve Internet access, but most of the hope lies with local groups and states -- not the federal government," Mitchell told the E-Commerce Times. While the Department of Agriculture has been doing some good work to help rural investment, he said, the FCC's Connect America has wasted billions on obsolete networks that make it harder to bring high-speed access to those communities. David Jones is a freelance writer based in Essex County, New Jersey. He has written for Reuters, Bloomberg, Crain's New York Business and The New York Times. Instantly delete email threats for Office 365 365 Threat Monitor scans all emails as they reach your users' mailboxes to detect ransomware, phishing and spam. Receive real-time phone alerts, get real-time security breach updates and instantly delete threats with just one click - for free! Learn More. What accounts for the amazing success of Apple and Starbucks? They both connect with users on an emotional level. This "secret" is evident to anyone who looks closely, and you can apply it to succeed with your own company and improve your own life. Apple was a struggling computer maker until the 1990s, when Steve Jobs returned. Jobs connected with the user base in a new way. Customers loved him -- he created an emotional connection with the company. That emotional connection helped Apple grow rapidly, even with several missteps along the way. The iPod, iPhone, iPad and more have lulled users into a comfortable cocoon that has been pretty much bulletproof, so far. Ties vs. Turtlenecks Think of how Apple compares to Microsoft. Microsoft is more like IBM. Perhaps its employees don't wear suits, white shirts and ties, but that's no longer true at IBM either. Still, the analogy holds: Microsoft is a large and powerful company, but without emotion. On the other hand, Apple has more of a hippie persona -- you know, Apple employees are warm-hearted folks sporting jeans and flip flops, and wanting to save the world. Yes, Apple is run by smart business people, but the company's brand oozes emotion. Terms like "love" seem to apply to Apple, not Microsoft. Starbucks is another example. Its customers get a warm and fuzzy feeling going to their favorite coffee shop. There are many other companies that fit the Apple and Starbucks model. Appealing to emotions is a winning model. When companies succeed in getting their customers to fall in love with them, they win loyalty. Even when the company makes a mistake, its customers don't run to competitors. Instead, they give them the time and room they need to fix their problems. Loving a company lets customers forgive the occasional screw-up, and every company screws up from time to time. Staying Power Apple has survived problems in the last decade what would have sunk other companies. Remember antenna-gate several years ago? Now it is dealing with battery-gate. I predict Apple will get past this new problem as well, simply because its users love the company -- and love is the key. Apple and Starbucks each filled an emotional need that previously had not been addressed. I am not suggesting these companies don't make mistakes -- they make plenty. However, their customers don't leave, due to the emotional connection. If you can focus on making strong emotional connections in your company, as well as in your professional life and your personal life, you may find yourself on the same winning wave as Apple and Starbucks. It's worth some consideration. Jeff Kagan has been an ECT News Network columnist since 2010. His focus is on the wireless and telecom industries. He is an independent analyst, consultant and speaker. Email Jeff. A top EU official hinted that legislation to cut plastic waste in Europe is coming soon. Frans Timmermans, the first vice president of the European Commission, made the comment after Britain's environment minister Michael Gove, a pro-Brexiter, suggested that staying in the EU would make it harder for the UK to create environmental laws such as banning plastic drinking straws. Gove said being in the EU meant there were "some steps we might want to take environmentally that we can't yet." Timmermans later tweeted to Gove: "One step ahead of you. EU legislation on single-use plastics coming before the summer. Maybe you can align with us?" He included several hashtags, including #EUDoesntSuck. "Plastic straws are a scourge," Gove told Sky News. "They're just one example of the ways in which we pollute the oceans and damage marine wildlife. I want to do everything we can to restrict the use of plastic straws and we're exploring at the moment if we can ban them." But the Conservative politician perhaps did not think of Scotland, which is part of the UK and within the EU. After announcing plans to outlaw plastic cotton buds, the Scottish government also announced intentions to ban plastic straws by 2019. Timmermans said at a conference Wednesday in Brussels there is "urgent work to do" to cut plastic consumption in light of China's decision to limit imports of plastic waste. The EU plastics strategy, he added, would involve working with working with businesses to cut plastics and "find ways to re-use and recycle more plastic and avoid micro-plastic leakage." New EU legislation to cut plastic waste would apply to the UK until Brexit is fully implemented, Reuters noted. By Kate Konschnik and Sarah Marie Jordaan U.S. natural gas production has boomed in the past decade, driving gas prices sharply downward. Natural gas has become a competitive choice for electricity generation, edging out coal. Because gas contains less carbon than coal, greenhouse gas emissions from power plants have dropped, and the U.S. grid has become cleaner, more efficient and more flexible. More natural gas is also entering the power sectors in Mexico and Canada. But the low-carbon profile of natural gas doesn't tell the whole story. Methane, its primary component, is a powerful greenhouse gas. It leaks to the atmosphere from wells and pipelines, contributing to climate change and reducing the climate benefit of using natural gas. In 2016 U.S., Canadian and Mexican leaders pledged to reduce methane emissions from the oil and natural gas sector 40 to 45 percent below 2012 levels by 2025. Today, however, Canada is just beginning to contemplate more comprehensive regulatory limits on methane. Mexico has made only nonbinding pledges so far, and the Trump administration is rolling back federal methane regulation. Scientists are still working to quantify methane emissions from oil and gas production, and to improve tools for detecting and reducing methane leaks. But even though much of the science is still uncertain, and the Trump administration is retreating from regulating methane leaks, we believe it is still possible and necessary to make progress on reducing methane emissions. Many actorsincluding state and provincial governments, industry, and nongovernmental organizationsare working to advance methane measurement and mitigation efforts. To be effective, they need to work in concert. In a newly published synthesis article, we propose a North American Methane Reduction Framework to coordinate regulations, voluntary industry actions and scientific developments in methane estimation and mitigation. This approach can bridge the divide between science and policy, and drive new research that in turn can support better policies when governments are ready to act. Measurement Gaps and Partial Responses Despite huge advances, large gaps in methane emissions inventories remain. The magnitude of leaks from oil and gas infrastructure remains disputed and insufficiently measured. Regional studies have found that up to 90 percent of emissions come from a small number of sources that leak large amounts of methane into the atmosphere. Detecting and managing these "super-emitters" is an undeveloped area of research, but offers the potential for major reductions. There also are many discrepancies in how methane emissions are measured from place to place. States and provinces have inconsistent reporting requirements, applying different thresholds over which facilities must report emissions. And there are unexplained differences between facility-level estimates of methane coming out of leaky valves and pipes on one hand, and measurements of methane in the atmosphere near oil and gas facilities. Meanwhile, mitigation work is proceeding slowly. Companies have detected and limited some methane leaks, recapturing what represents lost product. However, earnings from recovering fugitive methane are not always sufficient to justify voluntary action. This suggests a need for regulation. But the U.S. and Canadian national governments have limited authority to regulate methane leaks from oil and gas production, so states and provinces are in the driver's seat. To date, Alberta and British Columbia have set targets, but are still developing regulations. Although natural gas is produced in 32 U.S. states, only a handful require energy companies to conduct bottom-up monitoring and repair leaks. And only California conducts atmospheric monitoring statewide to track top-down methane trends. In Mexico, the regulatory framework for oil and gas is nascent. Partnering to Find Solutions Our framework encourages cross-sector collaborations and scientific research that informs public policy. Scientists from industry, nongovernment organizations and universities can work together to share data and analyze emissions profiles at oil and gas sites, so long as their research is truly independent and peer-reviewed. State agencies can agree to harmonize reporting standards in order to facilitate research by scientists in all sectors. Companies can partner with enforcement agencies to deploy new sensors and measurement tools. There are precedents for this kind of collaboration. For example, an innovative partnership between industry, academics and the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund has brought together researchers to collect data and conduct methane estimation and measurements. This work is designed to improve government emissions inventories and inform mitigation policies, and is distinct from advocating for specific policy outcomes. Similar partnerships have helped to drive solutions to other problems during national leadership voids. For example, the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative is a coalition of governments, companies, investors and civil society organizations that promotes standards for industry reporting of oil, gas and mining revenues. While its impacts vary from country to country, the initiative has been credited with establishing transparency as an international norm and promoting dialogue between governments, businesses and nongovernment organizations. A Continental Framework The challenge of driving action from below is to ensure that multiple actors align their efforts. Our article lays out a 10-step North American Methane Reduction process that is designed to jump-start this conversation. It starts by assessing existing policies in the U.S., Canada and Mexico. Next, the framework aims to iteratively improve policy decisions by continually advancing science and innovation around emissions, based on the number and age of oil and gas components; identifying and characterizing "super-emitters"; improving measurement and detection technologies; and finding more cost-effective mitigation strategies. This approach recognizes that policymaking cannot always wait for completion of scientific researchbut it can be informed by the latest developments and can facilitate new research. The Trump administration has slammed the brakes on regulating fugitive methane emissions, but it cannot wish the problem away. Beyond climate concerns, events such as the 2010 pipeline explosion that killed eight people in San Bruno, California, and the 2015-16 Aliso Canyon gas leak that displaced thousands of residents from the Porter Ranch neighborhood in Los Angeles, underscore the safety risks of poorly maintained oil and gas infrastructure. Plugging methane leaks is no simple task. Management requires measurement, and this international, cross-jurisdictional challenge requires active coordination across many groups, including industry, environmental organizations, academics, national and subnational governments, and public health and safety agencies. Our framework presents a path for integrating science and policy and addressing this uncertain challenge to move North America toward a lower carbon future. Reposted with permission from our media associate The Conversation. The U.S. Supreme Court is poised to deliver a major blow to teachers unions in the coming months: Teachers in about half of states may no longer have to pay mandatory fees if theyre not union members, which could cause drops in both revenue and membership. Theres national speculation about what this all could meanwhile observers say this case wont be unions demise, it could cause the political juggernauts to lose some power. And some teachers are wondering whether this will signal a shift in how teachers unions operate. At stake in Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees Council 31 are the so-called agency or fair-share fees that public-employee unions in 22 states charge to workers who choose not to join but are still represented in collective bargaining. The plaintiff in the case argues that these policies violate free speechhe is forced to pay money to a group that advocates for causes he does not support. The unions say all workers gain from the bargaining they do for salaries and other benefits, so paying a fee for that is only fair. The case, for which oral arguments will be delivered later this month, would affect all public-employee unions, including the American Federation of Teachers, the National Education Association, and their state and local affiliates. With the confirmation of President Donald Trumps nominee, Neil M. Gorsuch, to the Supreme Court, many analysts, onlookers, and some union representatives themselves predict that the justices will rule in Janus favor. See Also Parties Gird for Supreme Court Showdown Over Union Fees If that happens, teachers unions could see a decrease in membership over the next few years, analysts say. Thats because many who pay agency fees decide to simply kick in the extra dollars to become full members. The unions would also lose the revenues generated by those agency fees, which could result in a reduction of union staff members. The NEA has about 88,000 agency fee payers, while the AFT has about 94,000small percentages of the total number of teachers they represent. We should expect to see unions lose some of their sway in policymaking, said Katharine Strunk, a professor of education policy at Michigan State University. If we feel like the union power really is associated with resources and funds, ... you might expect to see that unions are less able to put up a fight, and wed see more of these policies [that they have been advocating for, including around tenure and teacher evaluations] flip. For Randi Weingarten, the AFT president, the case is an ideological attempt to minimizeeven evisceratethe impact teachers unions have. Union opposers have no interest in helping school teachers, she said. They just want to deplete our membership. Still, any significant membership changes might take several years to materialize, said Mike Antonucci, a frequent union critic and the director of the Education Intelligence Agency, a private research firm that specializes in education labor issues. He thinks some of the more immediate effects might be for the states that dont have agency fees, because they rely heavily on subsidies from the national unions. If those subsidies get reduced, and theyre on the edge alreadyhow do they continue to operate? he asked. Yet onlookers caution that an unfavorable ruling would be a shock to the system for unions, not a death knell. Could this put teachers unions out of business? No. Not close, said Charles Taylor Kerchner, a professor emeritus and senior research fellow of educational studies at Claremont Graduate University in California. Unions can go to grass roots and get back to constant organizing fairly quickly. It might drive unions to get closer to their core, to get closer to their members, and to be sort of more in touch with whats going on. Knocking on Doors Indeed, teachers unions in agency-fee states have already started recruiting educators to become full members and retain their memberships regardless of the Supreme Court ruling. When people get that this is a Whose side are you on? moment, and what the proponents of this case are trying to do, they get really, really mad, Weingarten said, adding that local affiliate leaders have been having one-on-one conversations with members. In Minnesota, more than 1,200 fair-share fee payers have become full members since September, when Education Minnesota launched a campaign to inform teachers about the effects of Janus, said Denise Specht, the unions president. Most of those teachers, she said, didnt realize they werent full members. And in New York City, union representatives from the United Federation of Teachers have been knocking on the doors of thousands of teachers across the city for months to talk to them about what Janus means, and to urge them to recommit to the union. Its really about educating our membersevery benefit and right we have, we have fought for, we protect, we have earned, said Michael Mulgrew, the UFT president. If [the Supreme Court ruling] doesnt go in our favor, then we know that we will be targeted by others giving misinformation to our union. Currently, 1 percent of teachers in the UFTs bargaining unit are agency-fee payers rather than full members. Mulgrew hopes to get that number down to below 0.5 percent. John Troutman McCrann, a high school math teacher in New York City, who is also the leader of the union chapter for his school, has been working to engage teachers to make sure they feel represented by their union. His fear is that if educators dont have to pay agency fees, many teachers would become free riders. Were not going to have some classes with 40 students and some classes with 33, McCrann said. Folks who dont pay union dues are going to get the benefits of what weve been working for. In California, 10 percent of teachers are agency-fee payers, said Eric Heins, the president of the California Teachers Association. In conversations, representatives of local affiliates have learned that some of those teachers hadnt joined because they didnt know what the union did, Heins said. Its a good wake-up call, when you have threats like this, to refocus, Heins said. When Lily Eskelsen-Garcia, the NEA president, was a teacher in Utah, her schools union meetings were open to members and non-members alike, she said. It was a chance for us to say, Do you see who we are? Do you see what were trying to do? Do you see why youre important? Eskelsen-Garcia said. That kind of outreach, which sometimes leads people to join, needs to happen more often, she said. Some say Janus could be an opportunity for educators to rethink what unions should look like. I think a lot of people dont feel very engaged or dont feel very integral [to] their own union, said Kathleen Melville, a 9th grade teacher in Philadelphia who is active in her local affiliate. She has been talking to her colleagues about the value of being a union member. Ive never met a teacher who said, I want less in benefits or to get paid less, she said. Every member we lose is power we lose at the bargaining table. Do They Represent Me? No A nationally representative survey of 537 teachers by the Education Week Research Center found that 14 percent of teachers said the union represents their political views not at all. About 20 percent said only a little. Bruce Aster, a high school history teacher in Carlsbad, Calif., doesnt feel represented at all by his uniona frustration that spurred him to sign on to an amicus brief with a half-dozen other California educators arguing on behalf of Janus. Golly, do [unions] represent me? No, Aster said. I would be content and probably welcome them representing me on pure workplace stuff. Instead, Aster pays around $1,100 a year in fair-share fees and receives a refund of about $400the amount of his fees that the union would have used for non-collective bargaining activities. Even though hes not contributing toward overtly political activities, Aster said he disagrees with much of what the union deems important, even for bargaining purposes. Tim Erickson, a special education teacher in Detroit Lakes, Minn., doesnt always support the unions politics and positions, but plans to remain a member no matter what the Supreme Court decides. The devil I know is better than the devil I dont know, he said, adding that his union has helped negotiate smaller class sizes and better working conditions. If that union goes away, holy smokes, are we going to see drastic changes in education. While some teachers say they wish the unions would stay out of politics, union leaders argue education is inherently political, making it critical that they take stances on candidates and issues that affect their members. Politics makes a difference ... in our classrooms and our professional lives, said Heins, the CTA president. And to not be engaged in that would be irresponsible. What Comes Next? As union leaders brace for a ruling likely to be delivered this spring, educators and analysts alike are imagining what the groups will look like, post-Janus. Maybe it will [inspire] union reformor maybe people will create from within unions that truly just represent on workforce issues, said Aster. And Melville, the Philadelphia teacher who supports the union, said she hopes that teachers unions will shift to be more democratic and engage in more grass-roots activities. Not everyone foresees unions becoming more responsive to members. Its very difficult for me to imagine a group of partisan Democrats saying we need to pay more attention to what Republicans are saying, said Antonucci, the analyst, referring to the fact that union leaders tend to be liberal while members are more mixed. Ultimately, though, teachers unions arent going anywhere, analysts say. Unions have always had severe ups and downs, said Kerchner, the Claremont research fellow. They have been counted out many, many times, and they tend to come back. People have a legitimate interest in a desire to organize around things that they care aboutlike their job, like some sort of sense of social justiceand unions are a pretty good vehicle for that. The mass shooting that killed 17 students and staff members at a Florida high school thrusts the Broward County school system into a hornets nest of legal issues including the complexities of a crime scene, the privacy of student records, and the threat of liability. And its fueling what could become a national debate over the proper responses by schools and mental health professionals for those deemed at risk of violence. If the experience of other districts that have had to deal with school shootings is any guide, the school districts in-house staff of eight lawyers, along with its outside attorneys, will be consumed for months, if not years, with issues arising out of the incident at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. Today, we had one staff member who did nothing but work on an emergency contract with a cleanup company to go into the building on the Stoneman Douglas campus where the shootings occurred, said Barbara J. Myrick, the general counsel of the 273,000-student Broward County district. All manner of legal issues face a school district after a major school shooter incident, ranging from short-term concerns such as the reopening of school and maintaining proper access to records and school property to long-term matters such as defending against any lawsuits seeking to hold the district or school officials partially liable. Unfortunately, it seems that with every situation that arises, there is some new element that perhaps hasnt been considered before, said Francisco Negron, the general counsel of the National School Boards Association. That confronts school officials with the need to re-examine their existing plans for dealing with such events and make changes if necessary, he said. Records Trickle Out Myrick spoke to Education Week just two days after the shooting at Stoneman Douglas. The biggest initial demand involved requests for information about the alleged perpetrator, Nikolas Cruz, she said. We have lots of requests for information, but, of course, any of the student records are protected by FERPA, Myrick said, referring to the federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974, which requires law enforcement to get a court order to gain access to the records. W. Stuart Stuller, a Boulder, Colo., lawyer who represented the Jefferson County school district in that state after the 1999 attacks at Columbine High School that killed 13 students and teachers as well as the two student perpetrators, recalled a crush of demands for the perpetrators school records in the days after that incident. The thing to remember is that there are no exceptions in FERPA or in Colorados student-privacy laws even for horrific incidents, said Stuller, who continues to represent multiple Colorado districts. When the police wanted those students education records, we said, Go get a warrant. Law-enforcement authorities will likely follow the steps necessary to get Cruzs records. But some have already leaked. One was a 2016 Florida social-services-agency report of an in-home investigation of Cruz conducted in response to troubling Snapchat posts by the student. But the state Department of Children and Families determined that Cruz was a low risk of harming himself or others. Meanwhile, on the weekend after the shootings at Stoneman Douglas, WPLG-TV in Miami obtained disciplinary records for Cruz from his middle school years, which showed a pattern of fights and unruly behavior. The TV station shared the reports with The Washington Post, which published a story about them as well. There were also the reports that the FBI had failed to check out more-recent troubling reports of Cruzs social-media postings. Involuntary-Commitment Law In the days after the shootings, Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel called on Florida lawmakers to expand the ability of law-enforcement officers to involuntarily commit for a short-term evaluation anyone, including a minor, who produces social-media postings exhibiting violent tendencies or an inclination to commit violence. The sheriff called on state lawmakers to expand the Baker Act, a Florida law that already allows law-enforcement and mental-health personnel to order a detention of up to 72 hours for an evaluation of someone viewed as a potential threat to himself or others. A state-mandated report on the Baker Act shows that in the 2015-16 fiscal year, some 22.5 percent of Baker Act evaluations were initiated for children who were at school at the time of the initiation. The report showed that more than 600 such evaluations of children were initiated at schools in Broward County that fiscal year, though the report did not distinguish between traditional public schools, charter schools, or private schools. I guess there is an impulse to change the criteria for civil commitment to cover social-media posts, said Annette Christy, an associate professor in the department of mental-health law and policy at the University of South Florida in Tampa and the lead author of the report. What I would say is the Baker Act is just one component [of responding to potentially dangerous people.] I would advocate more for improving our overall mental-health system. Jennifer Sughrue, a professor of educational leadership at Florida Gulf Coast University in Fort Myers, teaches school law and other subjects to educators seeking advanced degrees. Sughrue said she expects teacher-educators are going eventually to get new levels of training of how to identify potentially violent students. How are we going to prepare teachers and administrators to identify the kind of behaviors that might raise red flags? Sughrue asked. And what would be the procedure for not identifying just a kid who is acting out? How comfortable are people about pointing a finger and saying that kid is going to be a terrorist or that kid is going to go postal on us? Liability Issues In Colorado, the Jefferson County district faced nine lawsuits from injured victims and the family of one slain student alleging that the violence at Columbine High could have been prevented had educators familiar with the two gunmen, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, responded to numerous warning signs. Those warning signs, the plaintiffs alleged, included school video projects by the pair depicting the use of guns, violent themes in their writing assignments and website content, and statements the two made about blowing up their school in the year before the slayings. The litigation we got was not so much from families of children who were murdered, except for one, but families of children who were wounded, said Stuller. Those children needed lifetime care, and our society does not do a good job of providing that. He says that a number of prominent lawyers in the Denver area represented those families for free. The school district viewed that with a sense of understanding, Stuller said. Everybody understood this was an effort to get resources for children who were badly injured. Still, the district did not concede any liability. The lawsuits, which raised federal and state law claims, were consolidated before U.S. District Judge Lewis T. Babcock of Denver, who in 2001 dismissed all cases against the district and other school defendants. Harris and Klebolds actions on April 20, 1999, were the predominant, if not sole, cause of plaintiffs injuries, the judge said. Babcock concluded that some Jefferson County educators had acted negligently in regard to the warning signs about the two students. Harris video-production teacher, for example, was privy to information that demonstrated Harris and Klebolds long-time obsession with violent themes and ideas, the judge said. But the teachers failure to take action did not amount to willful and wanton conduct under Colorado law, the judge held. The plaintiffs filed a notice of appeal, but the cases were settled soon after Babcocks ruling without any significant concessions by the school defendants. You have a really high bar for finding the school defendants liable in such a case, said Stuller. Putting On a Lawyers Hat Myrick, the Broward County districts general counsel, and her staff were more preoccupied with short-term concerns in the days after the Stoneman Douglas shooting. Those include working with a local funeral home that offered to donate burial services for the victims, exploring the possibility of providing money to the victims from a state victim-advocacy fund, and advising administrators and teachers on how to respond to requests for information. It really is a thousand phone calls, Myrick said. It is a struggle because we are all so devastated by what occurred. At the same time we are dealing with those emotions, we have to put on our lawyer hats. Myrick said she fully expects that the district or some of its officials and educators will face lawsuits stemming from the mass shooting. Under Florida law, Myrick said, plaintiffs would have to wait six months from the day of the incident. I understand that people, emotionally, need someone to blame, she said. Whether we are to blame, I dont know at this point. The Maldives has warned India against any such action, which threatens to disrupt the political crisis in the country. The Maldives has made this statement amidst concern over the increase in the period of emergency in India by the Maldives. The Maldives Foreign Ministry said in a statement on Thursday night that the government of President Abdulla Yameen has taken note of the public statements issued by the Indian government, in which facts and reality are ignored regarding the current political developments of the Maldives. The Ministry told that India has said the facts have to be broken down and that the 30 days increase in the period of emergency is unconstitutional. He said that India has ignored the constitution and law of the Maldives in its statement. The Ministry of External Affairs said, There is no doubt that the Maldives is passing through one of the toughest touches in its history. Therefore, it is important that friends and partners in the international community, including India, stay away from any such action, which hinders the resolve of the situation in front of the country. The Maldives Government repeats its commitment to work closely together with the international community, including India so that their concerns can be overcome. While expressing dissatisfaction over the extension of the period of emergency in the Maldives, India had said on Thursday that it does not see any substantial reason for the Parliament of the Maldives and it is keeping an eye on the situation of this island nation. On accepting President Abdulla Yameens recommendation by the Parliament to extend the term of the emergency in the Maldives 30 days, India declared deep disappointment and termed it a matter of concern. On Tuesday, the Maldivian parliament had extended the period of emergency in the country for 30 days, making President Yameens hold stronger on the power of the country. ConocoPhillips engages in the exploration, production, transportation and marketing of crude oil, bitumen, natural gas, natural gas liquids, and liquefied natural gas on a worldwide basis. It operates through the following geographical segments: Alaska; Lower 48; Canada; Europe, Middle East and North Africa; Asia Pacific; and Other International. The Alaska segment primarily explores for produces, transports and markets crude oil, natural gas and natural gas liquids. The Lower 48 segment consists of operations in the U.S. and the Gulf of Mexico. The Canada segment is comprised of oil sands development in the Athabasca Region of northeastern Alberta and a liquids-rich unconventional play in western Canada. The Europe, Middle East and North Africa segment consists of operations and exploration activities in Norway, the United Kingdom and Libya. The Asia Pacific segment has explorations and product operations in China, Indonesia, Malaysia and Australia. The Other International segment handles exploration activities in Columbia and Argentina. The company was founded in 1875 and is headquartered in Houston, TX. Read More Page Content On 24 February 2018, one hundred years will have passed since the proclamation of Estonia as an independent, democratic republic. This is undoubtedly one of the most important and greatest milestones in the history of Estonia. eu-LISAs head office has been in Tallinn, Estonia since the Agency started working back in 2012 and is proud to be part of the contemporary history of this country. Estonia is an example of the great success amongst the nations of Europe. The story of Estonia is a story of constant self-creation. This country has built a vibrant democracy and new prosperity, and has become a model for the rest of Europe of how citizens can interact with their government in the 21st century said Krum Garkov, Executive Director of eu-LISA. Estonia 100 is a celebration for everyone regardless of ethnic origin, native language, creed or how long they have been living in the country everyone is welcome to join in the festivities. All Estonians abroad and friends of Estonia throughout the world are also invited to take part in the centenary programme. Background: The Republic of Estonia was born hundred years ago, on February 24th, 1918. From the next day, the new country was in turmoil. A brief occupation by German forces was followed by an attack from Soviet Russia and the Estonian War of Independence. The war ended and a ceasefire started on January 3rd, 1920. Regardless political tensions, Estonia grew, local society developed and cultural life flourished for the next 20 years. In the course of World War II Estonia became occupied by Soviet forces in 1940 and by Germany in 1941 and then again by the Soviet Union in 1944. The Estonian government continued its work in exile from 1944 until 1992 and the acting Prime Minister was also the acting head of Estonian state. The Estonian government in exile was internationally recognized. This way the Estonian government in exile carried the legal continuity of the Estonian state. In October 1992 Heinrich Mark, the last Prime Minister who acted as the head of state, handed over his credentials to Lennart Meri. Lennart Meri became the President of Estonia and the continuity of the Republic of Estonia was guaranteed. Be a part of the celebration: local programme, international programme More info here: https://www.ev100.ee/en Bottom Line: Ninety-four percent of adolescents ages 13 to 19 in an economically disadvantaged, largely minority population in San Francisco had measurable levels of a biomarker specific for exposure to tobacco smoke (NNAL). Journal in Which the Study Was Published: Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research. Author: Neal L. Benowitz, MD, professor of Medicine and Bioengineering & Therapeutic Sciences, and chief of the Division of Clinical Pharmacology at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). Background: Benowitz explained that exposure of adolescents to secondhand smoke poses a public health challenge because it increases risk for respiratory infections, aggravates asthma, and is linked to an increased likelihood of becoming an active smoker. In a prior study, Benowitz and colleagues showed that 87 percent of adolescents in an economically disadvantaged population had evidence of exposure to nicotine, as defined by the presence of cotinine in urine samples. In this study, they set out to assess tobacco smoke exposure in this population by measuring levels of NNAL in urine samples. Benowitz explained that NNAL is detectable in urine for much longer periods after tobacco exposure compared with cotinine and that it is present only in the urine of people exposed to tobacco. He and his colleagues, therefore, investigated whether NNAL would be a more sensitive biomarker of exposure to secondhand smoke compared with cotinine, more likely to identify adolescents only intermittently exposed. How the Study Was Conducted and Results: The researchers measured levels of cotinine and NNAL in urine samples from 465 adolescents who received pediatric care at the Children's Health Center at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital. Among these adolescents, 91 percent had public health insurance and 8 percent had no health insurance; 53 percent were Latino, 22 percent African-American, 11 percent Asian, and 3 percent white. Overall, 94 percent of the adolescents had detectable levels of NNAL, compared with 87 percent for cotinine. Thus, using the NNAL biomarker indicated a higher prevalence of tobacco exposure in this population compared with cotinine. Using a level of more than 30 ng of cotinine per ml of urine as a biomarker of active smoking, which is consistent with prior research, 12 percent of the adolescents were identified as active smokers. Eighty-two percent of the adolescents were identified as nonsmokers who had been exposed to secondhand smoke because they had detectable levels of NNAL but did not have cotinine levels above 30 ng per ml of urine. The percentage of individuals who were identified as active smokers was highest among the African-American adolescents, 32 percent. In addition, the level of NNAL in the urine of nonsmokers was highest among African-American nonsmokers, suggesting higher levels of secondhand smoke exposure. Author Comment: "Now, using the tobacco-specific biomarker and lung carcinogen NNAL, we find an even higher prevalence of tobacco exposure, which eliminates the possibility that the [prior] result with cotinine was due to consumption of nicotine-containing products such as tomatoes, potatoes, eggplant, and black tea," said Benowitz "Our data show nearly ubiquitous exposure to tobacco smoke in this population of economically disadvantaged adolescents, which highlights the need for new public health initiatives to reduce exposure," he added. "It also suggests that routine urine screening for NNAL or cotinine, with counseling intervention in those screening positive for exposure, could help address this public health challenge." Limitations: According to Benowitz, the main limitations of the study are that it was conducted at a single hospital and that ethnic minorities comprised the majority of the study population, both of which mean the results might not be generalizable to all urban adolescents. ### Funding & Disclosures: This study was supported by funds from the Flight Attendant Medical Research Institute Bland Lane Center of Excellence on Secondhand Smoke at UCSF, and the National Institute of Health's National Institute on Drug Abuse and National Center for Research Resources. Benowitz is a consultant to Pfizer and Achieve Life Sciences, which market or are developing medications to aid smoking cessation. He has served as a paid expert witness in litigation against tobacco companies. Follow us: Cancer Research Catalyst http://blog.aacr.org; Twitter @AACR; and Facebook http://www.facebook.com/aacr.org About the American Association for Cancer Research: Founded in 1907, the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) is the world's first and largest professional organization dedicated to advancing cancer research and its mission to prevent and cure cancer. AACR membership includes more than 40,000 laboratory, translational, and clinical researchers; population scientists; other health care professionals; and patient advocates residing in 120 countries. The AACR marshals the full spectrum of expertise of the cancer community to accelerate progress in the prevention, biology, diagnosis, and treatment of cancer by annually convening more than 30 conferences and educational workshops, the largest of which is the AACR Annual Meeting with more than 21,900 attendees. In addition, the AACR publishes eight prestigious, peer-reviewed scientific journals and a magazine for cancer survivors, patients, and their caregivers. The AACR funds meritorious research directly as well as in cooperation with numerous cancer organizations. As the Scientific Partner of Stand Up To Cancer, the AACR provides expert peer review, grants administration, and scientific oversight of team science and individual investigator grants in cancer research that have the potential for near-term patient benefit. The AACR actively communicates with legislators and other policymakers about the value of cancer research and related biomedical science in saving lives from cancer. For more information about the AACR, visit http://www.AACR.org. The American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) congratulates the Gerald R. Ford International Airport Authority as the 2018 winner of the Jay Hollingsworth Speas Airport Award for its innovative and sustainable stormwater and deicing treatment system. The Speas award is cosponsored by AIAA, the American Association of Airport Executives (AAAE), and the Airport Consultants Council (ACC) and will be given on March 1 at the ACC/AAAE Airport Planning, Design & Construction Symposium in Denver. Casey Reis, P. E., Director, Engineering and Facilities, and Roy Hawkins, Planning Engineer, Grand Rapids, Mich., will accept the award on behalf of the airport. The award recognizes the airport's development of a $20 million stormwater/glycol treatment system, which is a national example of how airports can address community needs while meeting operational and regulatory requirements. Residual amounts of aircraft deicers were flowing from the Gerald R. Ford Airport located in the Grand Rapids, Mich., area into a tributary, locally known as "Trout Creek." The deicer chemical was food to biofilm, a thin, sticky film of bacteria, which flourished and impacted the stream's ecology. The smelly "nuisance biofilm" caused friction between the airport, its neighbors, community watershed groups, and the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality (MDEQ), which in 2010 required the airport to eliminate its contribution to the biofilm growth by September 2015. The Gerald R. Ford International Airport's new treatment system went to work in October 2015, and Trout Creek is now nuisance biofilm free. The AIAA/AAAE/ACC Jay Hollingsworth Speas Airport Award honors an individual, or individuals, whose contributions have most significantly in recent years to the enhancement of relationships between airports and/or heliports and other surrounding environments via exemplary innovation that might be replicated elsewhere. ### For more information on the Jay Hollingsworth Speas Airport Award, please visit aiaa.org/speasaward. For more information on the AIAA Honors and Awards Program, please contact Patricia Carr at 703.264.7523 or patriciac@aiaa.org. About AIAA The American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) is nearly 30,000 engineers and scientists, and 98 corporate members, from 85 countries who are dedicated to advancing the global aerospace profession. The world's largest aerospace technical society, the Institute convenes five yearly forums; publishes books, technical journals, and Aerospace America; hosts a collection of 160,000 technical papers; develops and maintains standards; honors and celebrates achievement; and advocates on policy issues. AIAA serves aerospace professionals around the world--who are shaping the future of aerospace--by providing the tools, insights, and collaborative exchanges to advance the state of the art in engineering and science for aviation, space, and defense. For more information, visit http://www.aiaa.org, or follow us on Twitter @AIAA. Lizards have special superpowers. While birds can regrow feathers and mammals can regrow skin, lizards can regenerate entire structures such as their tails. Despite these differences, all have evolved from the same ancestor as lizards. Spreading through the Americas, one lizard group, the anoles, evolved like Darwin's finches, adapting to different islands and different habitats on the mainland. Today there are more than 400 species. Constructing a family tree for three lizard species collected in Panama at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) and a fourth from the southeastern U.S., scientists at Arizona State University compared lizard genomes--their entire DNA code--to those of other animals. The researchers discovered that changes in genes involved in the interbrain (the site of the pineal gland and other endocrine glands), for color vision, hormones and the colorful dewlap that males bob to attract females, may contribute to the formation of boundaries between species. Genes regulating limb development also evolved especially quickly. "While some reptiles such as tortoises changed remarkably little over millions of years, anole lizards evolved quickly, generating a diversity of shapes and behaviors," said Kenro Kusumi, corresponding author and professor at ASU School of Life Sciences. "Now that sequencing entire genomes is cheaper and easier, we discovered molecular genetic evidence for rapid evolution that may account for striking differences between bodies of animals living in different environments." Kusumi's lab, working with colleagues at the University of Arizona College of Medicine-Phoenix, is especially interested in how reptiles' genomes shape their ability to regenerate and to develop a diversity of body forms. "This is the first time the complete genetic code--the genome--of any vertebrate species from Panama has been sequenced and analyzed," said Oris Sanjur, co-author and Associate Director for Science Administration at STRI. "Information from these three species is an important contribution to our understanding of biodiversity and the evolution of new species." Scientists estimate that there are 40 species of anolid lizards living in Panama, compared to only one in the U.S. A team from ASU collected three species with permission from the Ministry of the Environment, MiAmbiente: the Central American giant anole, Anolis frenatus, lives high on tree trunks; the grass anole, A. auratus, perches on bushes or on grassy vegetation and the slender anole, A. apletophallus, found only in Panama, hangs out lower on tree trunks or on the ground. Researchers at ASU's School of Life Sciences lined up the DNA sequences of the lizards with the DNA sequences of 31 other animals: the lobe-finned fish and the four-legged animal groups that evolved from them. They also took a careful look at genes that code for proteins: more than 22,000 genes in the green anole, A. carolinensis, versus approximately 20,000 identified each in A. auratus and A. frenatus and 13,000 in A. apletophallus. One obvious explanation for a faster rate of evolution is the anole lizards' faster rate of reproduction. Anoles typically mate in their first year of life, while other reptiles take much longer to reach sexual maturity. They also breed with many other individuals so mutations that make it difficult for individuals to survive are eliminated fairly quickly. The first and only other anole lizard to be sequenced previously was the green anole, A. carolinensis, the only anole species resident in the U.S. In that study from MIT, the A. carolinensis genome held evidence of more recent evolution and the loss of ancient repeated elements in the part of the DNA that does not code for proteins. In this sense, it was important to sequence the three Panamanian species, because the U.S. species may not be the most representative of the diverse anole group. "For 15 years, an impressive amount of time and money poured into discovering the genomes of mammals, motivated by our drive to understand human evolution and to look for cures for disease. Even though the squamate reptiles include more than 10,000 species--almost double the number of mammal species--a single genome was not enough to understand the variability within this group," said the first author of the report, Marc Tollis, a post-doctoral fellow at ASU. "By comparing these four anole lizard genomes, we're beginning to understand how one of the most diverse groups of vertebrates regenerate, develop and diversify," he added. ### The study's findings are published in the Feb. 1 issue of the journal Genome Biology and Evolution. This study was funded by ASU, STRI and the U.S. National Science Foundation and was made possible by an ASU/STRI innovation education and science partnership started in 2010. This agreement is aimed at sustaining biodiversity on Earth and this affiliation was created to acquire and share technology, education and outreach, and interdisciplinary research innovations in social systems, ecosystem services, sustainability, biodiversity and genetics, and alternative energy. The Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, headquartered in Panama City, Panama, is a unit of the Smithsonian Institution. The Institute furthers the understanding of tropical biodiversity and its importance to human welfare, trains students to conduct research in the tropics and promotes conservation by increasing public awareness of the beauty and importance of tropical ecosystems. New York, NY (February 23, 2018)--Children from low-income neighborhoods had a higher mortality rate and higher hospital costs after heart surgery compared with those from higher-income neighborhoods, found a national study of more than 86,000 kids with congenital heart disease. The magnitude of the neighborhood effect, which persisted even after accounting for race, type of insurance, and hospital, was similar for children of all disease severities. The findings were published online today in Pediatrics. "These results were surprising," said Brett Anderson, MD, MBA, an attending pediatric cardiologist at NewYork-Presbyterian Morgan Stanley Children's Hospital, assistant professor of pediatrics at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, and the study's lead investigator. "The fact that disparities exist in healthcare is nothing new. But the fact that we see such a big effect in this population is shocking. We think of this group of children as being particularly well integrated into the healthcare system, regardless of their background. Most children with congenital heart disease are diagnosed prenatally or as newborns, and the children in this study--mostly infants--all had access to highly specialized cardiac care teams at major tertiary children's hospitals. While we expected to see some differences, we assumed the effect would be minor compared to what is seen in general pediatric populations. In fact, the effect was essentially identical to that observed in general pediatric patients." How the study was conducted The researchers used data from the Pediatric Health Information System (the largest U.S. database of pediatric discharges) to evaluate post-surgical mortality, length of stay, and standardized hospital costs in 86,104 children with congenital heart defects at 46 U.S. pediatric hospitals between 2005 and 2015. The results were combined with U.S. Census Bureau data on median household income by zip code. What the study found Overall, 2.9 percent of the children who had heart surgery died. Children from the lowest-income neighborhoods, which included more families with public insurance, had an 18 percent increase in risk of death compared with children from the highest-income neighborhoods, after adjusting for differences in race, insurance, and disease severity. Length of hospital stay and costs were both 7 percent higher for children from the lowest-income neighborhoods compared to children from the highest-income neighborhoods. The researchers also looked at outcomes in 857,833 children who were hospitalized for other conditions between 2013 and 2015. About half of this group had a chronic condition. Similarly, children from the lowest-income neighborhoods had a 22 percent greater chance of dying in the hospital compared with kids from higher-income neighborhoods. Length of stay and in-hospital costs were about 3 percent higher for children from the lowest-income neighborhoods. What caused the disparities? "When neighborhood disparities have been described in other studies, they have been largely attributed to differences among hospitals or in environmentally-mediated differences in behavioral health," said Dr. Anderson. "In our study, even when the hospital effect was taken into account, neighborhood remained an important predictor of outcomes." The study found a higher incidence of severe heart disease in children from low-income neighborhoods, but the neighborhood effect remained after controlling for disease severity. "Certain environmental factors--such as maternal stress, nutrition, or health expectations--might have contributed to the differences in outcomes that we saw in children from low-income neighborhoods," said Dr. Anderson. "But until we conduct detailed qualitative studies, we can't be sure why these disparities persist. Ideally, such studies would examine the role of both families and providers--such as how long it takes before a family makes or obtains an appointment with a subspecialist, and whether providers knowingly or unknowingly make different care choices based on a family's income level or the socioeconomics of the neighborhood from which the child comes." ### The study is titled, "Disparities in Outcomes and Resource Utilization after Hospitalization for Cardiac Surgery by Neighborhood Income." The other authors are Evan S. Fieldston (University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA), Jane W. Newburger (Harvard Medical School, Cambridge, MA), Emile A. Bacha (CUIMC), and Sherry A. Glied (New York University, New York, NY). The study was supported by grants from National Institutes of Health (KL2TR001874 and K23HL133454). The authors declare no financial or other conflicts of interest. Columbia University Irving Medical Center provides international leadership in basic, preclinical, and clinical research; medical and health sciences education; and patient care. The medical center trains future leaders and includes the dedicated work of many physicians, scientists, public health professionals, dentists, and nurses at the Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, the Mailman School of Public Health, the College of Dental Medicine, the School of Nursing, the biomedical departments of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and allied research centers and institutions. Columbia University Irving Medical Center is home to the largest medical research enterprise in New York City and State and one of the largest faculty medical practices in the Northeast. For more information, visit cumc.columbia.edu or columbiadoctors.org. NewYork-Presbyterian NewYork-Presbyterian is one of the nation's most comprehensive, integrated academic healthcare delivery systems, whose organizations are dedicated to providing the highest quality, most compassionate care and service to patients in the New York metropolitan area, nationally, and throughout the globe. In collaboration with two renowned medical schools, Weill Cornell Medicine and Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, NewYork-Presbyterian is consistently recognized as a leader in medical education, groundbreaking research and innovative, patient-centered clinical care. NewYork-Presbyterian has four major divisions: NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital is ranked #1 in the New York metropolitan area by U.S. News and World Report and repeatedly named to the Honor Roll of "America's Best Hospitals." NewYork-Presbyterian Regional Hospital Network comprises hospitals and other facilities in the New York metropolitan region. NewYork-Presbyterian Physician Services, which connects medical experts with patients in their communities. NewYork-Presbyterian Community and Population Health, encompassing ambulatory care network sites and community healthcare initiatives, including NewYork Quality Care, the Accountable Care Organization jointly established by NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, Weill Cornell Medicine and Columbia. For more information, visit http://www.nyp.org and find us on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Wastewater systems are integral to infrastructure in every community. In an ideal world, they operate smoothly and are long-lasting. But biogenic transformation processes in sewage and water treatment systems are a "natural enemy" of conventional plants, frequently causing damage to concrete and metal elements that is expensive to repair. As a result, it is not uncommon for wastewater systems to have a lifespan of under ten years, before they need to be refurbished or individual components replaced. Toxic gases released during biogenic processes, such as hydrogen sulphide, also pose a significant health risk, causing a range of symptoms from irritation to respiratory failure and death. Writing in the journal Water Research, an interdisciplinary group of researchers from TU Graz and the University of Graz has outlined strategies aimed at preventing what is termed microbial induced concrete corrosion (MICC). The research team comprises two TU Graz staff members - Cyrill Grengg of the Institute of Applied Geosciences and Florian Mittermayr of the Institute of Technology and Testing of Construction Materials - as well as Gunther Koraimann of the University of Graz's Institute of Molecular Biosciences. Microbial induced concrete corrosion: turning a blind eye not the answer Cyrill Grengg of the Institute of Applied Geosciences at TU Graz explained: "MICC often corrodes the conventional types of concrete used in wastewater treatment plants at a rate of a centimetre or more per year. Accordingly, the concrete elements can be destroyed in a matter of only a few years, causing significant damage to wastewater systems." According to the researchers, there is often a lack of awareness of these processes and the resulting threat to wastewater infrastructure and human health. "Closing the manhole covers and looking the other way is not the answer," Grengg added. In Germany alone, the economic impact of wastewater system repairs is put at around EUR 450 million per year. Although no data are currently available for Austria, the costs can be extrapolated and also applied to other European countries. Microbial induced acid corrosion (MICC) in wastewater treatment facilities results from a sequence of biogenic sulphate reduction reactions, followed by reoxidation. Initially, sulphate in pressure pipelines or standing wastewater is reduced by bacteria under anaerobic - or oxygen-free - conditions, forming hydrogen sulphide. This pungent, highly poisonous gas escapes into the sewer air and diffuses into sewer pipes and manholes. There reoxidation by autotrophic bacteria takes place on concrete walls that do not even come into contact with wastewater. These microorganisms produce sulphuric acid which reacts with concrete construction elements. As Gunther Koraimann of the Institute of Molecular Biosciences at the University of Graz, who has studied these processes in detail, explains: "This leads to the vigorous formation of a biofilm on the surface of the concrete, a reduction of the pH value to below two, in other words highly acidic, and extensive formation of new minerals, mainly in the form of gypsum. The combination of these processes results in the rapid destruction of the concrete." Holistic solution The Graz-based scientists worked on a holistic solution using an interdisciplinary research approach. In-depth research into the microstructural and microbiological processes was followed by the development of new MICC-resistant materials in close collaboration with the Institute of Construction and Building Materials at TU Darmstadt. In this context, geopolymer concrete proved to be particularly well suited to withstand acid corrosion. When developing this building material, resistance to acid was an extremely desirable property, as were highly antibacteriostatic surfaces, on which the research team made significant advances - microorganisms that trigger the initial oxidation process are unable to settle on such surfaces in the first place. In turn, this prevents the formation of sulphuric acid. Florian Mittermayr of the Institute of Technology and Testing of Construction Materials at TU Graz commented: "We achieved some very promising results with materials that have a far greater lifespan than conventional types of concrete. Use of these long-lasting materials would allow operators to refurbish damaged wastewater systems, significantly extending their service life and reducing the financial burden on local government and wastewater associations." The researchers published their latest findings on MICC prevention in the current issue of the journal Water Research 134 (2018) 341 - 352: "Advances in concrete materials for sewer systems affected by microbial induced concrete corrosion: A review." The Austrian province of Styria provided financial backing for the research, and is dedicated to raising awareness of this global problem among Styrian local authorities and regional wastewater associations. ### Contact Dr. Cyrill GRENGG Institute of Applied Geosciences | TU Graz Rechbauerstrasse 12, 8010 Graz, Austria Mobile: +43 680 3169642 Tel. +43 316 873 6366 cyrill.grengg@tugraz.at Dr. Florian MITTERMAYR Institute of Technology and Testing of Construction Materials | TU Graz Inffeldgasse 24, 8010 Graz, Austria Tel. +43 316 873 7159 f.mittermayr@tugraz.at Gunther Koraimann Associate Professor Dr. Institute of Molecular Biosciences | University of Graz Humboldtstrasse 50, 8010 Graz, Austria Tel. +43 316 380 5626 guenther.koraimann@uni-graz.at As we grow older, our muscular function declines. A new study by researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden shows how an unexpectedly high number of mutations in the stem cells of muscles impair cell regeneration. This discovery may result in new medication to build stronger muscles even when in old age. The study is published in Nature Communications. It has already been established that natural ageing impairs the function of our skeletal muscles. We also know that the number and the activity of the muscles' stem cells decline with age. However, the reasons for this has not been fully understood. In a new study, researchers at Karolinska Institutet have investigated the number of mutations that accumulate in the muscle's stem cells (satellite cells). "What is most surprising is the high number of mutations. We have seen how a healthy 70-year-old has accumulated more than 1,000 mutations in each stem cell in the muscle, and that these mutations are not random but there are certain regions that are better protected," explains Maria Eriksson, Professor at the Department of Biosciences and Nutrition at Karolinska Institutet. The mutations occur during natural cell division, and the regions that are protected are those that are important for the function or survival of the cells. Nonetheless, the researchers were able to identify that this protection declines with age. "We can demonstrate that this protection diminishes the older you become, indicating an impairment in the cell's capacity to repair their DNA. And this is something we should be able to influence with new drugs," explains Maria Eriksson. The researchers have benefited from new methods to complete the study. The study was performed using single stem cells cultivated to provide sufficient DNA for whole genome sequencing. "We achieved this in the skeletal muscle tissue, which is absolutely unique. We have also found that there is very little overlap of mutations, despite the cells being located close to each other, representing an extremely complex mutational burden," explains the study's first author, Irene Franco, Postdoc in Maria Eriksson's research group. The researchers will now continue their work to investigate whether physical exercise can affect the number of accumulated mutations. Is it true that physical exercise from a young age clears out cells with many mutations, or does it result in the generation of a higher number of such cells? "We aim to discover whether it is possible to individually influence the burden of mutations. Our results may be beneficial for the development of exercise programmes, particularly those designed for an ageing population," explains Maria Eriksson. The researchers gained access to the muscle tissue used in the study via a close collaboration with clinical researchers, including Helene Fischer at the Unit for Clinical Physiology at Karolinska University Hospital. ### The study has been a cooperative project between researchers at Karolinska Institutet, Science for Life Laboratory (SciLifeLab), Uppsala University, Linkoping University and Stockholm University, in addition to several affiliated institutes in Italy. The research is financed by the Swedish Research Council, CIMED (Centre for Innovative Medicine), the David and Astrid Hagelen Foundation, the Swedish Society of Medicine, the Gun and Bertil Stohnes Foundation, the Osterman Foundation, the Marianne and Marcus Wallenberg Foundation, Wallenberg Advanced Bioinformatics Infrastructure and the EU Commission funding programme, Marie Sk?odowska-Curie. Publication: "Somatic mutagenesis in satellite cells associates with human skeletal muscle aging". Irene Franco, Anna Johansson, Karl Olsson, Peter Vrtacnik, Par Lundin, Hafdis T. Helgadottir, Malin Larsson, Gwladys Revechon,Carla Bosia, Andrea Pagnani, Paolo Provero, Thomas Gustafsson, Helene Fischer, Maria Eriksson. Nature Communications, online 23 February 2018, doi: 10.1038/s41467-018-03244-6. Munich based Laser physicists have developed an extremely powerful broadband infrared light source. This light source opens up a whole new range of opportunities in medicine, life science, and material analysis. With the help of Infrared light, researchers are able to go in search of the small particles which shape and determine our lives. The phenomenon, in which infrared light sets molecules in vibration, is pivotal in this search. Scientists are exploiting this phenomenon by using infrared light to analyze the molecular makeup of samples. In the hope that this analysis can become even more exact, the laser physicists from the Laboratory of Attosecond Physics at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet (LMU) in Munich and the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics have developed an infrared light source that has an enormously broad spectrum of wavelengths. With this system, which has an output power of 19 Watt, researchers have achieved the broadest simultaneous infrared coverage from a solid state laser. Moreover, the infrared laser pulses emitted should correspond to a sub-cycle pulse in time domain. This new light source opens up countless opportunities for the physicists of better understanding the fundamental properties of solid and soft matter. The analysis of light spectrums after interactions with material with infrared spectroscopy and microscopy allows the more precise and accurate conceptualization of research methods. The LAP team utilizes these methods for driving the so-called "Broadband Infrared Diagnostics" project. In the framework of this project, the scientists are interested in assessing the molecular makeup of blood and breath. ### CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - The arrangement of a city's streets and buildings plays a crucial role in the local urban heat island effect, which causes cities to be hotter than their surroundings, researchers have found. The new finding could provide city planners and officials with new ways to influence those effects. Some cities, such as New York and Chicago, are laid out on a precise grid, like the atoms in a crystal, while others such as Boston or London are arranged more chaotically, like the disordered atoms in a liquid or glass. The researchers found that the "crystalline" cities had a far greater buildup of heat compared to their surroundings than did the "glass-like" ones. The study, published today in the journal Physical Review Letters, found these differences in city patterns, which they call "texture," was the most important determinant of a city's heat island effect. The research was carried out by MIT and National Center for Scientific Research senior research scientist Roland Pellenq, who is also director of a joint MIT/ CNRS/Aix-Marseille University laboratory called 2 (MultiScale Material Science for Energy and Environment); professor of civil and environmental engineering Franz-Josef Ulm; research assistant Jacob Sobstyl; 2 senior research scientist T. Emig; and M.J. Abdolhosseini Qomi, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California at Irvine. The heat island effect has been known for decades. It essentially results from the fact that urban building materials, such as concrete and asphalt, can absorb heat during the day and radiate it back at night, much more than areas covered with vegetation do. The effect can be quite dramatic, adding as much as 10 degrees Farenheit to night-time temperatures in places such as Phoenix, Arizona. In such places this effect can significantly increase health problems and energy use during hot weather, so a better understanding of what produces it will be important in an era when ever more people are living in cities. The team found that using mathematical models that were developed to analyze atomic structures in materials provides a useful tool, leading to a straightforward formula to describe the way a city's design would influence its heat-island effect, Pellenq says. "We use tools of classical statistical physics," he explains. The researchers adapted formulas initially devised to describe how individual atoms in a material are affected by forces from the other atoms, and they reduced these complex sets of relationships to much simpler statistical descriptions of the relative distances of nearby buildings to each other. They then applied them to patterns of buildings determined from satellite images of 47 cities in the U.S. and other countries, ultimately ending up with a single index number for each -- called the local order parameter -- ranging between 0 (total disorder) and 1 (perfect crystalline structure), to provide a statistical description of the cluster of nearest neighbors of any given building. For each city, they had to collect reliable temperature data, which came from one station within the city and another outside it but nearby, and then determine the difference. To calculate this local order parameter, physicists typically have to use methods such as bombarding materials with neutrons to locate the positions of atoms within them. But for this project, Pellenq says, "to get the building positions we don't use neutrons, just Google maps." Using algorithms they developed to determine the parameter from the city maps, they found that the cities varied from 0.5 to 0.9. The differences in the heating effect seem to result from the way buildings reradiate heat that can then be reabsorbed by other buildings that face them directly, the team determined. Especially for places such as China where new cities are rapidly being built, and other regions where existing cities are expanding rapidly, the information could be important to have, he says. In hot locations, cities could be designed to minimize the extra heating, but in colder places the effect might actually be an advantage, and cities could be designed accordingly. "If you're planning a new section of Phoenix," Pellenq says, "you don't want to build on a grid, since it's already a very hot place. But somewhere in Canada, a mayor may say no, we'll choose to use the grid, to keep the city warmer." The effects are significant, he says. The team evaluated all the states individually and found, for example, that in the state of Florida alone urban heat island effects cause an estimated $400 million in excess costs for air conditioning. "This gives a strategy for urban planners," he says. While in general it's simpler to follow a grid pattern, in terms of placing utility lines, sewer and water pipes, and transportation systems, in places where heat can be a serious issue, it can be well worth the extra complications for a less linear layout. This study also suggests that research on construction materials may offer a way forward to properly manage heat interaction between buildings in cities' historical downtown areas. ### The work was partly supported by the Concrete Sustainability Hub at MIT, sponsored by the Portland Cement Association and the Ready-Mixed Concrete Research and Education Foundation. The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, is supporting U.S. clinical sites participating in two ongoing international Phase 2 clinical trials evaluating investigational antibody-based therapies aimed at preventing potentially antibiotic-resistant infections. By aligning the NIAID Antibacterial Resistance Leadership Group (ARLG) with a large international consortium leading the effort, the U.S. investigators hope to enroll 30 adult patients from 15 intensive care units in the trials. NIAID is supporting the domestic sites with a grant to Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, which is part of the ARLG--a clinical research consortium working to reduce the impact of antimicrobial resistance. The larger international trials are supported by MedImmune, the global biologics research and development arm of AstraZeneca, based in Gaithersburg, Maryland, and the Brussels-based Innovative Medicines Initiative Joint Undertaking and the Combatting Antimicrobial Resistance in Europe (COMBACTE) consortium. One trial, called EVADE, is evaluating the safety of the investigational medicine MEDI3902 (developed by MedImmune) and its ability to prevent pneumonia caused by Pseudomonas aeruginosa. The other trial, called SAATELLITE, is testing the safety of another investigational MedImmune medicine, suvratoxumab (previously known as MEDI4893), and its ability to prevent disease caused by Staphylococcus aureus. Both trials are randomized, placebo-controlled, and double-blind, meaning neither the participants nor the investigators will know who receives a placebo. MEDI3902 and suvratoxumab are both monoclonal antibodies being investigated as preventive therapies. The medicines are not antibiotics but can be administered alongside standard antibiotic therapy. Monoclonal antibodies have been developed for use against diseases such as cancer, Ebola and respiratory syncytial virus, but rarely have been used to target bacterial pathogens. The World Health Organization recently included P. aeruginosa and S. aureus on a list of antibiotic-resistant bacteria that pose the greatest risk to human health. People in healthcare settings with weakened immune systems, especially those on breathing machines or with catheters, face an increased risk of becoming seriously ill from these infections. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Staphylococcus bacteria are a leading cause of healthcare-associated infections, such as pneumonia, bacteremia, and heart valve and bone infections. In 2011, methicillin-resistant S. aureus (MRSA) caused more than 80,000 serious infections and 11,285 related deaths in the United States, according to the CDC. P. aeruginosa can cause bloodstream infections and pneumonia that can be fatal. Approximately 51,000 healthcare-associated P. aeruginosa infections occur each year in the United States, and about 6,700 of these are drug-resistant, leading to more than 400 deaths annually, according to CDC estimates based on a 2011 survey. "It is becoming increasingly common for hospitalized patients--especially those with weakened immune systems--to develop severe, hard-to-treat bacterial infections," said NIAID Director Anthony S. Fauci, M.D. "These clinical trials testing monoclonal antibodies as novel preventive therapies are part of a global collaborative effort to explore innovative ways to mitigate the threat of antimicrobial resistance." All participants in both the EVADE and SAATELLITE trials will be on mechanical ventilation in the intensive care unit at the time of enrollment. Trial investigators will provide information about the purpose and possible risks and benefits of the study so that patients can ask questions before they agree to participate. If a patient is unconscious or otherwise unable to consent during the screening process, a legally authorized representative can provide initial consent. Participants in the EVADE trial must be colonized with P. aeruginosa bacteria in the lower respiratory tract but display no signs of pneumonia. They will be randomly assigned to receive either one intravenous (IV) infusion of MEDI3902 or placebo. Investigators will check for incident pneumonia caused by P. aeruginosa for 21 days, and will monitor participants for 49 days total. Similarly, participants in the SAATELLITE trial must be colonized with S. aureus in the lower respiratory tract but free of S. aureus-related disease. They will be randomly assigned to receive either one IV infusion of suvratoxumab or a placebo. Investigators will evaluate the incidence of S. aureus-related pneumonia for 30 days, and monitor participants for 190 days total. Participants in both the EVADE and SAATELLITE trials will be regularly evaluated for any treatment-related safety issues. Thomas Holland, M.D., of Duke University is the coordinating physician for the U.S. sites. Jean Chastre, M.D., of Groupe Hospitalier Pitie-Salpetriere in Paris serves as overall principal investigator for the EVADE trial, and Bruno Francis, M.D., of Centre Hospitalier Universaitaire de Limoges in Limoges, France serves as overall principal investigator for the SAATELLITE trial. ### For more information about the trials, visit ClinicalTrials.gov and search identifiers NCT02696902 and NCT02296320. NIAID conducts and supports research--at NIH, throughout the United States, and worldwide--to study the causes of infectious and immune-mediated diseases, and to develop better means of preventing, diagnosing and treating these illnesses. News releases, fact sheets and other NIAID-related materials are available on the NIAID website. About the National Institutes of Health (NIH): NIH, the nation's medical research agency, includes 27 Institutes and Centers and is a component of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. NIH is the primary federal agency conducting and supporting basic, clinical, and translational medical research, and is investigating the causes, treatments, and cures for both common and rare diseases. For more information about NIH and its programs, visit http://www.nih.gov. NIH...Turning Discovery Into Health NEW YORK, NY (Feb. 23, 2018) - Single-cell analysis holds enormous potential to study how individual cells influence disease and respond to treatment, but the lack of cost-effective and user-friendly instrumentation remains challenging. As described in a study published today in Nature Communications, researchers at the New York Genome Center (NYGC) and New York University (NYU) have taken steps to facilitate broad access to single-cell sequencing by developing a 3D-printed, portable and low-cost microfluidic controller. To demonstrate the utility of the instrument in clinical environments, the researchers deployed the device to study synovial tissue from patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) at the Hospital for Special Surgery (HSS). In the study, the researchers describe the 3D-printed custom device, which, along with its electronic and pneumatic components, can be easily obtained and assembled for a total cost of about $600, a fraction of the cost of comparable commercial systems. The device occupies a small footprint as well, not much larger than a tissue box. "Most commercial microfluidic instruments are very costly; as a result, not every lab has access to exciting technology for single-cell analysis," said William Stephenson PhD, Senior Research Engineer in the NYGC's Technology Innovation Lab, who led the development of the instrument and is a lead author on the study. "We designed the instrument to perform droplet microfluidics and in particular Drop-seq, a massively parallel technology for single cell RNA-sequencing." In collaboration with researchers and clinicians at HSS, a world leader in rheumatology research and disease treatment, the group used the instrument to profile joint synovial tissue from RA patients. RA is an autoimmune disease that affects 1% of the population and is associated with painful swelling in the joints. The precise cause of RA is undetermined and muddled by the diversity of cells found in the swollen joints of patients. The portability of the controller permitted patient samples to be processed on-site and immediately after surgery, minimizing handling and transport to optimize sample quality. The researchers collected samples from five RA patients totaling 20,387 cells and looked at the individual gene expression patterns for each cell. "This dataset gave us the opportunity to identify individual subpopulations of cells that could drive the progression of RA, even if they have not been previously characterized," said Rahul Satija PhD, a Core Faculty Member at NYGC, Assistant Professor of Biology at NYU, and senior author on the study. By analyzing the complete dataset and searching for clusters of similar cells, the researchers identified 13 groups, representing both infiltrating immune and inflamed stromal populations. Of particular interest were distinct groups of fibroblasts with strikingly different gene expression patterns. "Roughly an hour after surgical excision, individual cells from patient tissues were labeled for single-cell sequencing. From this work, we have classified unrecognized fibroblast subtypes that may prove to be important drug targets for our RA patients," said Laura Donlin, Co-Director of the HSS Precision Medicine Lab and Assistant Professor at Weill Cornell Medicine, and a lead author on the study. The researchers were able to validate the presence of these multiple groups using flow cytometry, and discovered that they exhibited distinct localization patterns with the joint tissue as well. The dataset is a step towards creating a comprehensive "cell atlas" for synovial tissue from RA patients. Moving forward, the researchers are compiling data from additional RA patients, and aim to obtain patient samples from other arthritic conditions such as psoriatic arthritis and osteoarthritis. In addition, they plan to use CITE-seq, a technique also developed in the Technology Innovation Lab at the NYGC, to more precisely classify cell types by measuring the presence of surface proteins in addition to the transcriptome. They also envision that technology will be useful for profiling samples that are difficult to study in a standard lab, such as highly infectious samples in biocontainment facilities or samples being collected in field research settings. To facilitate its widespread use in the scientific and medical community, the instrument has been fully "open-sourced." Instructions and assembly manuals for the instrument can be found online at the popular microfluidics repository Metafluidics. "We hope that this instrument lowers the hurdles associated with performing single-cell transcriptome profiling experiments in basic research and clinical settings," Dr. Stephenson said. ### About the New York Genome Center The New York Genome Center (NYGC) is an independent, nonprofit academic research institution at the forefront of transforming biomedical research and clinical care. Founded as a collaborative venture by the region's premier academic, medical and industry leaders, the New York Genome Center's goal is to translate genomic research into new diagnostics, therapeutics and treatments for human disease. NYGC member organizations and partners are united in this unprecedented collaboration of technology, science and medicine, designed to harness the power of innovation and discoveries to advance genomic services. Their shared objective is the acceleration of medical genomics and precision medicine to benefit patients around the world. Member institutions include: Albert Einstein College of Medicine, American Museum of Natural History, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Columbia University, Hospital for Special Surgery, The Jackson Laboratory, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York-Presbyterian Hospital, The New York Stem Cell Foundation, New York University, Northwell Health, Princeton University, The Rockefeller University, Roswell Park Cancer Institute, Stony Brook University, Weill Cornell Medicine and IBM. For more information on the NYGC, please visit http://www.nygenome.org. Media Contact: Karen Zipern, Director, Communications, NYGC kzipern@nygenome.org o: 646-977-7065 c: 917-415-8134 The "loudness" of our thoughts -- or how we imagine saying something--influences how we judge the loudness of real, external sounds, a team of researchers from NYU Shanghai and NYU has found. Its study, titled "Imagined Speech Influences Perceived Loudness of Sound" and published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour, offers new insights into the nature of brain activity. The research project was conducted by Tian Xing and Bai Fan from NYU Shanghai with, David Poeppel and Teng Xiangbin from NYU, and Ding Nai from Zhejiang University. "Our 'thoughts' are silent to others -- but not to ourselves, in our own heads--so the loudness in our thoughts influences the loudness of what we hear," says Poeppel, a professor of psychology and neural science. Using an imagery-perception repetition paradigm, the team found that auditory imagery will decrease the sensitivity of actual loudness perception, with support from both behavioural loudness ratings and human electrophysiological (EEG and MEG) results. "That is, after imagined speaking in your mind, the actual sounds you hear will become softer -- the louder the volume during imagery, the softer perception will be," explains Tian, assistant professor of neural and cognitive sciences at NYU Shanghai. "This is because imagery and perception activate the same auditory brain areas. The preceding imagery already activates the auditory areas once, and when the same brain regions are needed for perception, they are 'tired' and will respond less." According to Tian, the study demonstrates that perception is a result of interaction between top-down (e.g. our cognition) and bottom-up (e.g. sensory processing of external stimulation) processes. This is because human beings not only receive and analyze upcoming external signals passively, but also interpret and manipulate them actively to form perception. The findings are the team's latest in a series of studies using mental imagery paradigms to investigate speech monitoring and control in production process -- namely, a motor-based predictive process, which can extend and predict low-level auditory attributes such as loudness. "Combining perception and speech production monitoring and control, this study can implicate the mechanisms of mental disorders," Tian says. "The most relevant one is auditory hallucination mostly in schizophrenia." ### The project has been supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the Science and Technology Commission of Shanghai Municipality, as well as funding from the three universities. DOI: 10.1038/s41562-018-0305-8 A small rectangle of pink glass, about the size of a postage stamp, sits on Professor Amy Shen's desk. Despite its outwardly modest appearance, this little glass slide has the potential to revolutionize a wide range of processes, from monitoring food quality to diagnosing diseases. The slide is made of a 'nanoplasmonic' material -- its surface is coated in millions of gold nanostructures, each just a few billionths of a square meter in size. Plasmonic materials absorb and scatter light in interesting ways, giving them unique sensing properties. Nanoplasmonic materials have attracted the attention of biologists, chemists, physicists and material scientists, with possible uses in a diverse array of fields, such as biosensing, data storage, light generation and solar cells. In several recent papers, Prof. Shen and colleagues at the Micro/Bio/Nanofluidics Unit at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST), described their creation of a new biosensing material that can be used to monitor processes in living cells. "One of the major goals of nanoplasmonics is to search for better ways to monitor processes in living cells in real time," says Prof. Shen. Capturing such information can reveal clues about cell behavior, but creating nanomaterials on which cells can survive for long periods of time yet don't interfere with the cellular processes being measured is a challenge, she explains. Counting Dividing Cells One of the team's new biosensors is made from a nanoplasmonic material that is able to accommodate a large number of cells on a single substrate and to monitor cell proliferation, a fundamental process involving cell growth and division, in real time. Seeing this process in action can reveal important insights into the health and functions of cells and tissues. Researchers in OIST's Micro/Bio/Nanofluidics Unit described the sensor in a study recently published in the journal Advanced Biosystems. The most attractive feature of the material is that it allows cells to survive over long time periods. "Usually, when you put live cells on a nanomaterial, that material is toxic and it kills the cells," says Dr. Nikhil Bhalla, a postdoctoral researcher at OIST and first author of the paper. "However, using our material, cells survived for over seven days." The nanoplasmonic material is also highly sensitive: It can detect an increase in cells as small as 16 in 1000 cells. The material looks just like an ordinary pieces of glass. However, the surface is coated in tiny nanoplasmonic mushroom-like structures, known as nanomushrooms, with stems of silicon dioxide and caps of gold. Together, these form a biosensor capable of detecting interactions at the molecular level. The biosensor works by using the nanomushroom caps as optical antennae. When white light passes through the nanoplasmonic slide, the nanomushrooms absorb and scatter some of the light, changing its properties. The absorbance and scattering of light is determined by the size, shape and material of the nanomaterial and, more importantly, it is also affected by any medium in close proximity to the nanomushroom, such as cells that have been placed on the slide. By measuring how the light has changed once it emerges through the other side of the slide, the researchers can detect and monitor processes occurring on the sensor surface, such as cell division. "Normally, you have to add labels, such as dyes or molecules, to cells, to be able to count dividing cells," says Dr. Bhalla. "However, with our method, the nanomushrooms can sense them directly." Scaling Up This work builds on a new method, developed by scientists at the Micro/Bio/Nanofluidics Unit at OIST, for fabricating nanomushroom biosensors. The technique was published in the journal ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces in December 2017. Producing large-scale nanoplasmonic materials is challenging because it is difficult to ensure uniformity across the entire material surface. For this reason, biosensors for routine clinical examinations, such as disease testing, are still lacking. In response to this problem, the OIST researchers developed a novel printing technique to create large-scale nanomushroom biosensors. With their method, they were able to develop a material consisting of approximately one million mushroom-like structures on a 2.5cm by 7.5cm silicon dioxide substrate. "Our technique is like taking a stamp, covering it with ink made from biological molecules, and printing onto the nanoplasmonic slide," says Shivani Sathish, a PhD student at OIST and co-author of the paper. The biological molecules increase the sensitivity of the material, meaning it can sense extremely low concentrations of substances, such as antibodies, and thus potentially detect diseases in their earliest stages. "Using our method, it is possible to create a highly sensitive biosensor that can detect even single molecules," says Dr. Bhalla, first author of the paper. Plasmonic and nanoplasmonic sensors offer important tools for many fields, from electronics to food production to medicine. For example, in December 2017, second year Ph.D student Ainash Garifullina from the Unit developed a new plasmonic material for monitoring the quality of food products during the manufacturing process. The results were published in the journal Analytical Methods. Prof. Shen and her unit say that, in the future, nanoplasmonic materials may even be integrated with emerging technologies, such as wireless systems in microfluidic devices, allowing users to take readings remotely and thereby minimizing the risk of contamination. ### Troy, N.Y. --The world of health care is changing rapidly and there is increased interest in the role that light and lighting can play in improving health outcomes for patients and providing healthy work environments for staff, according to many researchers. Recently, the Center for Lighting Enabled Systems & Applications (LESA) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, together with the Illumination Engineering Society (IES), sponsored a workshop to explore pathways to define and promote the adoption of lighting systems specifically for health-care environments. The workshop brought together lighting and human health researchers, healthy-lighting design experts, senior representatives from health-care standards organizations, and health-care providers. The aim of the workshop was to initiate an important discussion among diverse stakeholders on the changes in modern health-care interior lighting applications. The result is the release of a white paper detailing the outcomes and contributions of the participants. "Today, the field of lighting and health care is undergoing rapid development," said Robert F. Karlicek Jr., LESA director, who also serves as a professor in the Department of Electrical, Computer, and Systems Engineering at Rensselaer. "As research continues to build the link between lighting spectral power distributions and wellness, LED lighting technology strives to bring new healthy lighting to market. Often commercialization in this capacity happens without establishing the clinical data to demonstrate a value-added benefit for patients or the providers, or a defined return on investment for the health-care industry." "It has long been known that lighting can impact human health and wellness," said Brian Liebel, director of technical standards at IES. "Research continues to refine the precise role of light spectrum, intensity, and timing on the scope of patient outcomes, and on health-care worker productivity. But more research is required to provide the evidence necessary for new, modern standards for lighting systems in health-care and eldercare markets." According to Karlicek and Liebel, the workshop white paper is intended to be an evidence-based resource for lighting designers and health-care providers to better understand market drivers. Both noted that the whitepaper is not intended to be a comprehensive summary of the field of lighting for human health and wellbeing--rather, a comprehensive introduction of insights shaping the field for participants attending the upcoming IES "Light + Human Health Symposium" that will be held in Atlanta, Georgia, April 8-10. Funded by the National Science Foundation, LESA's vision is focused on creating digitized, color tunable illumination for new applications in lighting, health care, building management, horticulture, and advanced 5G wireless communications platforms. The collaboration with the Illuminating Engineering Society exemplifies the vision of The New Polytechnic, an emerging paradigm for teaching, learning, and research at Rensselaer, the foundation of which is the recognition that global challenges and opportunities are so great they cannot be adequately addressed by even the most talented person working alone. Rensselaer serves as a crossroads for collaboration--working with partners across disciplines, sectors, and geographic regions--to address complex global challenges, using the most advanced tools and technologies, many of which are developed at Rensselaer. ### About the Center for Lighting Enabled Systems & Applications (LESA) ERC Funded primarily by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the LESA ERC is an interdisciplinary, multi-university center developing "Smart Lighting Systems that See and ThinkTM. The Center engages faculty members, graduate students, research staff, and undergraduates to work on research leading to smart lighting systems with adaptive and controllable properties that will change the way society uses lighting. The Center joins academia, industry, and government in partnership to produce transformational engineered systems, along with engineering graduates who are adept at innovation and primed for leadership in the global economy. The LESA ERC is headquartered at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, and partners with Boston University, the University of New Mexico, and Thomas Jefferson University to achieve its objectives. http://lesa.rpi.edu. About the Illuminating Engineering Society (IES) IES is the oldest and largest educational and scientific society in North America devoted to lighting. Founded in 1906, the mission of the IES has been to improve the lighted environment by bringing together those with lighting knowledge and by translating that knowledge into actions that benefit the public. A broad variety of programs, including publications, conferences and seminars, have been established to accomplish this mission. IES publishes and distributes the finest lighting literature authored by committees with the most experienced minds in industry and academia today. For more information about IES, go to http://www.ies.org. About Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, founded in 1824, is America's first technological research university. For nearly 200 years, Rensselaer has been defining the scientific and technological advances of our world. Rensselaer faculty and alumni represent 86 members of the National Academy of Engineering, 17 members of the National Academy of Sciences, 25 members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 8 members of the National Academy of Medicine, 8 members of the National Academy of Inventors, and 5 members of the National Inventors Hall of Fame, as well as 6 National Medal of Technology winners, 5 National Medal of Science winners, and a Nobel Prize winner in Physics. With 7,000 students and nearly 100,000 living alumni, Rensselaer is addressing the global challenges facing the 21st century--to change lives, to advance society, and to change the world. To learn more, go to http://www.rpi.edu. The interplay between surface-water salinity and climate change in Central New York is the subject of a recent paper by researchers in Syracuse University's College of Arts and Sciences. Kristina Gutchess, a Ph.D. candidate in Earth Sciences, is the lead author of an article in the prestigious journal Environmental Science and Technology (ACS Publications). Her co-authors at Syracuse include Laura Lautz, the Jesse Page Heroy Professor and chair of Earth sciences, and Christa Kelleher, assistant professor of Earth sciences. Another co-author is Gutchess' Ph.D. supervisor, Associate Professor Zunli Lu. Rounding out the group are Li Jin G'08, associate professor of geology at SUNY Cortland; Jose L. J. Ledesma, a postdoctoral researcher of aquatic sciences and assessment at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences; and Jill Crossman, assistant professor of Earth and environmental sciences at the University of Windsor (Ontario). The paper draws on the group's study of the impact of de-icing salt from Interstate 81 and other surrounding roads and highways on the Tioughnioga River watershed. Gutchess says their findings make her "cautiously optimistic" about the watershed's future surface-water chloride concentrations. "The long-term application of road salts has led to a rise in the river's salinity level," says Gutchess, who studies processes affecting the quality of surface water and groundwater. "While various models have been used to assess potential future impacts of continued de-icing practices, they have not incorporated different climate scenarios, which are projected to impact hydrogeology in the 21st century." Gutchess' team combined various computational approaches with rigorous fieldwork and laboratory analysis to simulate surface-water chloride concentrations in the Tioughnioga--a large, deep, 34-mile tributary of the Chenango River, flowing through Cortland and Broome counties. Central to their experiment was INCA (short for "INtegrated CAtchment"), a semi-distributed catchment-modeling platform that assesses environmental-change issues. Gutchess calibrated the model for a historical, or baseline, period (1961-90), and used the results to make projections for three 30-year intervals: 2010-39, 2040-69 and 2070-99. Based on the model's projections, the salinity of the Tioughnioga's east and west branches will start decreasing in 20-30 years. "A gradual warming trend between 2040 and 2099 will lead to reductions in snowfall and associated salt applications, causing [the river's] salinity to drop. By 2100, surface-water chloride concentrations should be below 1960s values," Gutchess says. This is potentially big news for a part of the country that has experienced rising surface-water chloride concentrations since the 1950s, when road salting began. Salt, or sodium chloride, is the most commonly used de-icing chemical in the country, spread at a rate of more than 10 million tons a year. In New York State, a typical wintertime event requires 90-450 pounds of salt per lane-mile. Vehicle traffic picks up about 10 percent of the residue; the rest enters adjacent water catchments in the form of runoff, jeopardizing terrestrial ecosystems and drinking water resources. Gutchess' hydrogeological study is one of only a few combining long-term climate variability and salinity management. The INCA model framework enabled her team to assess stream response under 16 different future scenarios, taking into account climate, land use and snow management. "INCA originally was developed to assess sources of nitrogen in catchments in a single-stem main river," Jin says. "Here, we modified the model to incorporate a new multi-branched structure, enabling us to simulate daily estimates of in-stream concentrations of chloride. We also allowed for differences in salting practices between rural and urban areas." According to INCA, road salt accounts for more than 87 percent of Tioughnioga's salinity. Current de-icing practices, combined with increased urbanization, will likely add to its salinity, but only for a while, thanks in part to the changing climate. According to Lu, the study suggests that climatic impacts are not always negative in a specific region: "It is important to understand the nuances of climate change at various time and geographic scales. Ultimately, this project will help us manage our resources more effectively, as we adapt to future changes." With a wink and a nod, he adds, "At the same time, we should not make blanket statements about climate change. No one is exempt from its effects, pro or con." Gutchess is a member of EMPOWER, a water-energy graduate-training program at Syracuse that is sponsored by the National Science Foundation and directed by Lautz. Additional support for Gutchess' research comes from the University's new Campus as a Laboratory for Sustainability program. Upon graduation in May, she will begin postdoctoral research at Yale. ### Primary schoolchildren who have been raised in homes surrounded by more greenspace tend to present with larger volumes of white and grey matter in certain areas of the brain. Those anatomic differences are in turn associated with beneficial effects on cognitive function. This is the main conclusion of a study published in Environmental Health Perspectives and led by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal), a center supported by the "la Caixa" Foundation, in collaboration with the Hospital del Mar (Spain) and the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health (UCLA FSPH). The study was performed in a subcohort of 253 schoolchildren from the BREATHE project in Barcelona (Spain). Lifelong exposure to residential greenspace was estimated using satellite-based information on the children's addresses from birth up through to the time of the study. Brain anatomy was studied using high-resolution 3D magnetic resonance images (MRI). Working memory and inattentiveness were evaluated with computerized tests. "This is the first study that evaluates the association between long-term exposure to greenspace and brain structure," says Dr. Payam Dadvand, ISGlobal researcher and leading author of the study. "Our findings suggest that exposure to greenspace early in life could result in beneficial structural changes in the brain." The data analysis showed that long-term exposure to greenness was positively associated with white and grey matter volume in some parts of the brain that partly overlapped with those associated with higher scores on cognitive tests. Moreover, peak volumes of white and grey matter in the regions associated with greenspace exposure predicted better working memory and reduced inattentiveness. Contact to nature has been thought to be essential for brain development in children. A previous study of 2,593 children ages 7 to 10 from the BREATHE project showed that, during the 12-month course of the study, children who attended schools with higher outdoor greenspace had a greater increase in working memory and a greater reduction in inattentiveness than children who attended schools with less surrounding greenness. The Biophilia hypothesis suggests an evolutionary bond of humans to nature. Accordingly, green spaces are suggested to provide children with opportunities for psychological restoration and prompt important exercises in discovery, creativity and risk taking, which, in turn, are suggested to positively influence different aspects of brain development. Furthermore, greener areas often have lower levels of air pollution and noise and may enrich microbial inputs from the environment, all of which could translate into indirect benefits for brain development. "The study adds to growing evidence suggesting that early life exposure to green space and other environmental factors can exert measurable and lasting effects on our health through the life course," says co-author Michael Jerrett, department chair and professor of Environmental Health Sciences at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. "These results also might provide clues on how such structural changes could underlie the observed beneficial effects of greenspace exposure on cognitive and behavioral development," explains Dr. Jesus Pujol, from the Radiology unit at Hospital del Mar and co-author of the study. "This study adds to the existing evidence about the benefits of transforming our cities by increasing access to the natural environment," says Prof. Jordi Sunyer, an ISGlobal researcher and last author of the study. Further studies are needed to confirm the results in other populations, settings and climates, evaluate other cognitive and neurological outcomes and examine differences according to the nature and quality of greenspace and children's access to and use of them. ### Reference: Dadvand P., Pujol, J., Macia D., Martinez-Vilavella G., Blanco-Hinojo L., Mortamais M. Alvarez-Pedrerol M., Fenoll R., Esnaola M., Dalmau-Bueno A., Lopez-Vicente M., Basagana X., Jerrett M., Nieuwenhuijsen M., Sunyer J. The Association between Lifelong Greenspace Exposure and 3-Dimensional Brain Magnetic Resonance Imaging in Barcelona Schoolchildren. Environmental Health Perspectives, February 2018. About the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health The UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, founded in 1961, is dedicated to enhancing the public's health by conducting innovative research, training future leaders and health professionals from diverse backgrounds, translating research into policy and practice, and serving our local communities and the communities of the nation and the world. The school has 650 students from more than 35 nations engaged in carrying out the vision of building healthy futures in greater Los Angeles, California, the nation and the world. About ISGlobal The Barcelona Institute for Global Health, ISGlobal, is the fruit of an innovative alliance between the "la Caixa" Foundation and academic and government institutions to contribute to the efforts undertaken by the international community to address the challenges in global health. ISGlobal is a consolidated hub of excellence in research that has grown out of work first started in the world of health care by the Hospital Clinic and the Parc de Salut MAR and in the academic sphere by the University of Barcelona and Pompeu Fabra University. The pivotal mechanism of its work model is the transfer of knowledge generated by scientific research to practice, a task undertaken by the institute's Education and Policy and Global Development departments. ISGlobal a member of the CERCA programme of the Generalitat de Catalunya. In July 2011, a meteorite from a Martian volcano fell in the Moroccan desert, and fragments of it rained across a wide area. Several people saw this happen-- which is rare-- and quickly grabbed what they could. Since then, scientists from around the world have been studying pieces of the Tissint meteorite, named after the small town in Morocco where it fell. They're looking for evidence of life on the red planet. At the University of Houston, a team of researchers in the College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics is analyzing a few small fragments with the help of a $349,520, three-year grant from the NASA Solar System Workings program. The research team-- geology professor Tom Lapen, researcher and lab supervisor Minako Righter, and geology graduate student Stephanie Suarez-- is trying to answer an important question: Just how old is this rock? Preliminary analyses of samples of Tissint fragments have revealed conflicting ages. Lapen and his team think it's possible the fragments may include material from multiple rock layers that formed at different times on Mars. "The crystallization ages would be the time at which the lava flowed out as magma and then crystallized," he said. "So the observations are that in this one witnessed fall, there is evidence of multiple flows." In addition to Tissint, the research grant will facilitate analyses of other Martian meteorites from Northwest Africa and Antarctica with the goal of learning more about the volcanic history of Mars and the evolution of the Martian lithosphere, which includes its crust and upper mantle. "The only samples we have to study directly are meteorites. These rocks are probes into the deeper portion of the planet, and from that, we can say something about the interior of the planet," Lapen added. "We can't actually sample the interior, but we can look at what comes out." ### The University of Washington and University of Wisconsin are collaborating with UH on this project. Note: Photo and interview opportunities are available with Lapen, Righter and Suarez. The University of Houston offers live high definition broadcast interviews through our ReadyCam broadcast studio. Located on campus, the digital studio can connect UH experts with networks 24/7. Biologist Jeff Podos at UMass Amherst, an expert in bioacoustics, will teach next fall at two of Brazil's national institutions and will study Amazon rain forest birds study birds that communicate vocally in unusual ways AMHERST, Mass. - Biologist Jeff Podos at the University of Massachusetts Amherst has been awarded a Fulbright Scholar grant that will not only support his teaching next fall at Brazil's National Institute for Amazon Research and the Federal University of Amazonas, but will also take him deep into the Amazon rain forest to study birds that communicate vocally in unusual ways. Podos, an expert in bioacoustics, says the national institute and the university, the oldest in Brazil, both in the Amazon's largest city Manaus, are global hubs for biologists studying biodiversity. He will be collaborating with Mario Cohn-Haft, who grew up in Williamsburg, Mass., not far from UMass Amherst, and who is now curator of birds at the national institute and a world expert on Amazonian birds and their identification. Podos says, "Mario has been leading expeditions into far-flung, remote areas of the Amazon to find and characterize the bird species, their habitats and behavior. As a team, we hope to make audio and video recordings of some of the bird species that sing in very unusual ways, and to describe their habitat. The behavior and vocalizations of some of these species are very poorly understood." The researchers have identified a range of possible target species and locations for their work, Podos notes. "Too much planning is a recipe for failure in the Amazon, where conditions can easily change. One needs to be flexible." The Fulbright Scholar program, which provides its scholars with a stipend and pays for travel, is sponsored by the U.S. State Department's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. The program was established in 1946 and emphasizes science diplomacy and international research collaborations between American researchers and their colleagues around the world. Some of the birds Podos hopes to study are small, yet they deliver songs that can be heard as far as a mile away, the biologist says. He and Cohn-Haft will use not only high quality sound recorders but also special sound-level meters and high-speed video to slow the action enough for study. "Some of the songs are deafeningly loud, the decibels are like a blasting rock band, and from a relatively small animal. We are interested in identifying adaptations these birds have for long-distance song transmission. It's a topic that has been very poorly studied," he says. "We don't know how small animals manage to get so loud. We are truly at the early stages of understanding this biodiversity." Podos and Cohn-Haft also plan to explore the birds' morphology, including such things as their neck and chest musculature, size of the head and beak, the shape of the throat and how these may influence the unusual ways they sing. "We expect to see patterns of morphology that have not described before," Podos notes. "We hope to be able to connect body forms to the sounds they produce. This sounds simple, but it will provide a lot of information about the ecology, diversity and evolution of these species." He adds, "This is all important because these birds communicate using their songs, and they diverge morphologically by natural selection, which changes the kind of songs they can sing. This is a rarely studied area. We'll also look at adaptations to other features of their environment that may influence their songs, which in turn influence their social interactions. Songs are the glue that holds bird societies together, and we want to learn more about the process." For the teaching component, which represents about 30 percent of his Fulbright award, Podos will offer a graduate-level course in bioacoustics at both institutions, where there are not many biologists who study and teach animal behavior, he says. With his fluency in speaking and reading Portuguese improving each year, he also plans to mentor graduate students in their research. He has already served on thesis committees for 14 Brazilian students and looks forward to helping more, and to learning what kinds of research they are doing. As part of the Fulbright mission to "expand and strengthen relationships between people of the United States and citizens of other nations and to promote international understanding and cooperation," scholars are expected to give public talks, mentor students and engage with the host community, in addition to their research and teaching?. ### DALLAS - Feb. 22, 2018 - Long-term acute care (LTAC) facilities are designed to meet the needs of older adults with severe, complex illnesses who are recovering from hospitalization, but less expensive options sometimes overlooked may also be available, population health researchers at UT Southwestern found. Only about half of older adults are transferred to LTACs for reasons related to the severity or complexity of their illnesses. For the other half, hospital preferences and regional trends often influence whether more cost-effective options are chosen, researchers in UT Southwestern's Center for Patient-Centered Outcomes Research (PCOR) found. "We found that many older adults are being sent to LTACs based on the preference of hospital providers and regional availability, when they may potentially be cared for as effectively in other, less expensive post-acute care settings, such as skilled nursing facilities," said lead author Dr. Anil Makam, Assistant Professor of Internal Medicine at UT Southwestern Medical Center, which is recognizing its 75th anniversary this year. Post-acute care is the single largest increase in and source of variation in Medicare spending nationally, and LTACs are the fastest growing and most expensive type of post-acute care. Researchers hope the findings in JAMA Internal Medicine highlight an opportunity to improve healthcare value by prompting doctors to consider transferring less ill patients to high-quality skilled nursing facilities that can still offer an appropriate and effective level of care. The study, based on national Medicare data from 2010 to 2012, also showed that certain regions of the country have far higher rates of LTAC use, in part because of differences in long-term acute care availability. "The extreme regional differences in long-term acute care use across the country suggest that there is overuse of LTACs in the South, including the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, and possibly underuse of LTACs in the Pacific Northwest, the North, and the North Northeast. Nonetheless, geography is not entirely destiny, since hospitals located within the same region use LTACs very differently." Despite these findings, more research is needed to better understand when an LTAC versus a skilled nursing facility is the best option for individual patients. "A key challenge is that no one knows what the right rate of LTAC use is, or even who the right person is to transfer to an LTAC," said Dr. Makam. "There are some people who we know clearly benefit from long-term acute care services, such as those recovering from certain critical illnesses, but there are also a lot of grey areas that we're not sure about. It is critical that we understand which individuals are most likely to benefit from LTACs for post-acute care so that we can make the smartest decisions about how to best use these resources to help older adults recover." ### UT Southwestern's PCOR Center is funded through a grant from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality and helps facilitate studies designed to ensure delivery of high-quality, patient-centered, evidence-based, equitable care. Other UT Southwestern researchers involved in the study include: Dr. Oanh Nguyen, Assistant Professor of Internal Medicine and Clinical Sciences, Lei Xuan and Mike Miller, data analysts in Department of Clinical Sciences, and Dr. Ethan A. Halm, Chief of the William T. and Gay F. Solomon Division of General Internal Medicine, Chief of the Division of Outcomes and Health Services Research in the Department of Clinical Sciences at UT Southwestern, and Director of UT Southwestern's Center for Patient-Centered Outcomes Research. Dr. Halm holds the Walter Family Distinguished Chair in Internal Medicine in Honor of Albert D. Roberts, M.D. Dr. James S. Goodwin from the Sealy Center on Aging at the University of Texas Medical Branch also participated in the study, which was funded by a grant from the National Institute on Aging. About UT Southwestern Medical Center UT Southwestern, one of the premier academic medical centers in the nation, integrates pioneering biomedical research with exceptional clinical care and education. The institution's faculty has received six Nobel Prizes, and includes 22 members of the National Academy of Sciences, 17 members of the National Academy of Medicine, and 14 Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigators. The faculty of more than 2,700 is responsible for groundbreaking medical advances and is committed to translating science-driven research quickly to new clinical treatments. UT Southwestern physicians provide care in about 80 specialties to more than 100,000 hospitalized patients, 600,000 emergency room cases, and oversee approximately 2.2 million outpatient visits a year. February 23, 2018 - At most US maternity units, women in labor are put on nil per os (NPO) status--they're not allowed to eat or drink anything, except ice chips. But new nursing research questions that policy, showing no increase in risks for women who are allowed to eat and drink during labor. The study appears in the March issue of the American Journal of Nursing, published by Wolters Kluwer. "The findings of this study support relaxing the restrictions on oral intake in cases of uncomplicated labor," write Anne Shea-Lewis, BSN, RN, of St. Charles Hospital, Port Jefferson, N.Y., and colleagues. Adding to the findings of previous reports, these results suggest that allowing laboring women to eat and drink "ad lib" doesn't adversely affect maternal and neonatal outcomes. No Increase in Complications with 'Ad lib' Oral Intake During Labor The researchers analyzed the medical records of nearly 2,800 women in labor admitted to one hospital from 2008 through 2012. At the study hospital, one practice group of nurses and doctors had a policy of allowing laboring women to eat and drink ad lib (ad libitum, or "as they please"). Another four practice groups kept all patients NPO (nil per os, or "nothing by mouth"). Recommendations to restrict oral intake during labor reflect concerns over the risk of vomiting and aspiration (inhalation) in case general anesthesia and surgery are needed. However, with advances in epidural and spinal anesthesia, the use of general anesthesia during labor has become rare (and, if needed, much safer than before). The study compared maternal and child outcomes in about 1,600 women who were kept NPO (except for ice chips) with 1,200 who were allowed to eat and drink ad lib during labor. The two groups were "sufficiently equivalent" for comparison. The women's average age was 31 years. Before delivery, a "preexisting medical condition" complicating pregnancy was identified in 14 percent of the NPO group compared with 20 percent of the ad lib group. Even though the women in the NPO group started out with fewer medical problems, they had a significantly higher incidence of complications during labor and birth, compared with the ad lib group. The women in the NPO group were also significantly more likely to give birth via unplanned cesarean section. Other outcomes--including requiring a higher level of care after delivery and the newborns' condition as measured by Apgar score--were not significantly different between groups. Analysis using a technique called propensity score matching, comparing groups of women with similar risk factors, yielded similar results. The findings add to those of previous studies suggesting that restrictions on eating and drinking during labor could be safely relaxed in uncomplicated cases. "Yet in keeping with current guidelines, most obstetricians and anesthesiologists in the United States continue to recommend restrictions on oral intake for laboring women," Anne Shea-Lewis and colleagues write. "Our findings support permitting women who are at low risk for an operative birth to self-regulate their intake of both solid food and liquids during labor," the researchers add. They note some limitations of their study, especially the fact that the women weren't randomly assigned to NPO or ad lib groups. The authors hope their study will lead to reconsideration of current recommendations to keep women NPO during the "often long and grueling" process of labor and delivery. "Restricting oral intake to a laboring woman who is hungry or thirsty may intensify her stress," Anne Shea-Lewis and colleagues conclude. "Conversely, allowing her to eat and drink ad lib during labor can contribute to both her comfort and her sense of autonomy." ### Click here to read "Original Research An Investigation into the Safety of Oral Intake During Labor." DOI: 10.1097/01.NAJ.0000530913.80349.53 About American Journal of Nursing American Journal of Nursing is the most honored broad-based nursing journal in the world. Peer reviewed and evidence-based, it is considered the profession's premier journal. AJN's mission is to promote excellence in nursing and health care through the dissemination of evidence-based, peer-reviewed clinical information and original research, discussion of relevant and controversial professional issues, adherence to the standards of journalistic integrity and excellence, and promotion of nursing perspectives to the health care community and the public. About Wolters Kluwer Wolters Kluwer N.V. (AEX: WKL) is a global leader in information services and solutions for professionals in the health, tax and accounting, risk and compliance, finance and legal sectors. We help our customers make critical decisions every day by providing expert solutions that combine deep domain knowledge with specialized technology and services. Wolters Kluwer reported 2016 annual revenues of 4.3 billion. 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NOTE: These settings will only apply to the browser and device you are currently using. Over 20,000 French farms could go bankrupt if the European Union concludes a major trade deal with four South American countries, France's biggest farm union warned Friday. Christiane Lambert, head of the National Federation of Agricultural Holders Unions, said France risked losing between 20,000 and 25,000 farms if the EU signs a deal allowing tens of thousands of tonnes of tariff-free South American beef into the bloc. On Wednesday, beef farmers across France demonstrated against the deal which could see up to 99,000 tonnes of beef from the Mercosur trading bloc (Brazil the worlds top exporter of the meat as well as Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay) flooding Europe every year. Some campaigners have raised concerns about the use of hormones in these countries which lead to artificially high growth rates in cattle a practice that is widespread in the United States but banned in Europe. Lambert told BFM television she was worried the EU would agree to waive food security norms in return for access to a market of 260 million South American consumers for EU cars and auto parts, dairy products and other goods and services. She complained that the use by South American producers of hormones and of meat and bone meal a type of feed banned in the EU since the BSE or mad cow crisis of the 1990s would allow them to undercut their French counterparts by up to 30 percent. At a meeting Thursday with farmers, President Emmanuel Macron promised France would not budge on meat safety. There will never be beef with hormones in it in France. We shouldnt play with fear, he said, adding: There will be no reduction in our social, environmental or health standards. Negotiators from Mercosur and the EU resumed talks on Wednesday after edging closer to a deal during the last round in Brussels. Paraguays Foreign Minister Eladio Loizaga, whose country currently holds the rotating presidency of the Latin American bloc, said Monday that the two sides were in agreement on 90 percent of the issues, including beef exports to Europe. But EU Agriculture Commissioner Phil Hogan said it was very open as to whether there will be a successful conclusion at this stage. At the end of the previous round, the EU said it was willing to accept tariff-free imports of 99,000 tonnes of South American beef annually, compared to an initial offer of 70,000 tonnes. That sparked outrage among European farmers who accused Brussels of a sellout. Macron is expected to face questions on the issue when he visits the annual Paris farm show on Saturday. A powerful jihadist alliance has claimed an attack on a French military vehicle in Mali that left two soldiers dead, Mauritanian media reported on Friday. Two soldiers from Frances counter-terrorism force in West Africa were killed and another was hurt on Wednesday when their vehicle struck a mine in northeast Mali. The Group to Support Islam and Muslims (GSIM), a fusion of three Malian jihadist groups with previous Al-Qaeda links, claimed the attack in a statement cited by Mauritanias Sahara Medias and widely shared on social media. The group, also known as Jamaa Nusrat ul-Islam waal- Muslimin (JNIM) in Arabic, have been behind several high profile attacks against domestic and foreign forces since forming last year. The French army said the attack took place near Malis borders with Niger and Burkina Faso, a bastion of jihadist activity where three French soldiers were injured in an attack last month. Their deaths bring to 12 the number of French soldiers killed since the start of Operation Barkhane, which was launched to quell jihadist activity in the former French colony of Mali and in neighbouring countries. Around 4,000 French troops are deployed under Operation Barkhane, alongside the UNs 12,000-strong MINUSMA peacekeeping operation in Mali. Russian aluminium giant Rusal said on Friday the firm's founder Oleg Deripaska would step down from his business empire as it prepares for a multi-billion-dollar "shoot-out" for ownership of the country's biggest miner. Deripaska, who was among the first oligarchs to amass huge wealth in the years following the collapse of the Soviet Union, will make way for CEO Vladislav Soloviev to take up the role of president on March 15. Soloviev will be replaced by Alexandra Bouriko, who will become the first woman to helm of a major Russian metals group. Hong Kong-listed Rusal is set to go head-to-head with Vladimir Potanins Interros in an ownership wrangle over mining company Norilsk Nickel. Rusal will seek approval from shareholders, it said Friday, to take part in an auction that will eventually decide which oligarch would buy out the others stake in the worlds biggest producer of nickel and palladium. The news came as the metals giant revealed adjusted earnings before interest, taxes and amortisation in October-December rose to $586 million, up 42.2 percent from the previous year. Results were boosted by rising aluminium prices as well as global demand amid coordinated economic growth in major regions of the world, including China, Europe and North America, Rusal said in a statement. But quarterly net profit was down 31.8 percent at $440 million owing to gains in the previous year after selling off one of its refineries. The management shake-up also came after Deripaska was put on a US government report last month that listed top political figures and oligarchs as determined by their closeness to the Russian regime and their net worth. The report insisted it was not a sanctions list but Russian President Vladimir Putin nonetheless denounced it at the time. The United States blasted Russia on Thursday over the bombing of Syria's Eastern Ghouta, saying it has a "unique responsibility" for the more than 400 deaths in the Damascus suburb. After fresh air and rocket strikes by Syrian government forces killed another 46, State Department Spokeswoman Heather Nauert blamed Russia for not reeling in the regime of its ally President Bashar al-Assad. Without Russia backing Syria, the devastation and the deaths would certainly not be occurring, Nauert told journalists. It is a good reminder that Russia bears a unique responsibility for what is taking place there. What are they doing to stop the devastation, the deaths, the murders that are taking place in Syria? The criticism came hours after the UN Security Council failed to agree on a new draft resolution for a 30-day ceasefire in Eastern Ghouta to allow aid to get in to the civilian population stuck there. Nauert blamed Moscow for again throwing a wrench into the negotiations to block the ceasefire. Nauert said the assault on Eastern Ghouta, which began on Sunday, showed the failure of the Astana process, in which Russia, Iran, and Turkey sought to delineate de-escalation zones in Syria, including one for Eastern Ghouta. It shows what a farce this deescalation zone has become, Nauert said. She said that US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is highly focused on the Eastern Ghouta situation in regular talks with counterparts. But she was unable to detail what options the United States has to halt the attacks, urging media to be more aggressive in publicizing the humanitarian situation. South Africa's top court on Friday reinstated a 24 year prison sentence for a Nigerian oil militant convicted of a series of terror attacks in his home country eight years ago. Henry Okah was jailed in 2013 for masterminding a number of attacks, including twin bombings which killed 12 people in the Nigerian capital Abuja during independence day celebrations in 2010. Okahs appeal was first heard by the Supreme Court of Appeal in 2014, which overturned four of his 13 terror convictions and reduced his sentence to 20 years, but the Constitutional Court in Johannesburg overruled the decision. The appeal against his entire conviction is dismissed, the Constitutional Court said in its ruling. The convictions overturned in the Supreme Court of Appeal must be reinstated together with the sentences the High Court imposed. Okah had repeatedly denied any involvement in the blasts. Lawyers for Okah, who has been a permanent resident of South Africa since 2007, had argued it was outside the countrys legal jurisdiction to put him on trial. He was not extradited to Nigeria because, had he stood trial there, he would have faced the death penalty, said the Constitutional Court in its judgement. Okah, who was also convicted over two other explosions in 2010 in the southern Nigerian city of Warri, a hub of the oil-rich delta region, was the presumed leader of the Nigerian militant group Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND). MEND said it was fighting for a fair share of oil revenue for residents of the Niger Delta. The group has seen spin-offs by radicals who want independence for the region. A high court in the Nigerian capital Abuja is expected to hand down a ruling on March 7 in the trial of Okahs brother Charles for his alleged involvement in the 2010 independence day bombings. Dr. Toy Talks About Responses to "Crisis of Violence" The issue of violence and the disastrous toll it takes on society, especially children, teens, and college students, is again being scrutinized and actively debated. Legislation to mark toy guns with an orange band was passed, but the band is hard to see at a distance. Parents, police, and producers of products have been well-informed, yet kids still die playing with both toy and real guns. We question why any parent would buy a gun of any kind for a child or allow the child to leave home with a toy gun, BB gun, or anything that can be mistaken for a dangerous weapon? How is a teen of 18 able to purchase a gun? In Sonoma, California, a teen carrying a replica rifle was accidently killed by a Sherriff. Disastrous mistakes are made, and everyone feels the pain of grieving families. But, what about the primary responsibility to not permit any child/teen to leave home with a real or realistic looking gun, or weapon? Parents won a $24 Million lawsuit based on a 13-year-old carrying a pellet gun who was shot by an LA policeman. But, why was the 13-year-old carrying a pellet gun? Who is responsible when a child, teen, or mentally unstable person gains access to a firearm? Does law enforcement have sufficient training to differentiate real rifles, guns, and assault weapons from realistic replicas, in a split second, or at a distance? Parents allow children and teens to watch many violent video games while their physical bodies, reading scores, and creative capabilities plummet. Kids all too often act out what they are exposed to on TV, in movies, video games, and in real life. Children understandably upset about being bullied may obtain real guns at home then bring them to school with deadly results, such as occurred in Sparks, Nevada. A 12-year-old student armed with a semi-automatic handgun shot and killed Michael Landsberry, a brave teacher, who served as a Marine in Iraq, was protecting kids in his math classroom; the boy seriously injured two other students before turning the gun on himself. Sadly, kids can more easily find dangerous guns than what they really need: counseling, emotional support, social events, and building friendships. The terrible stories of gun violence persist across the country. We recall the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, that killed 20 students and six adults. The incident reignited a national debate over gun control, and now look how far we have not come to solve this national disgrace. The crisis of violence grows from Columbine, Las Vegas, Orlando, San Bernardino, and Virginia Tech. Issues have not been resolved. Our country is painfully suffering from Oakland and LA to Baltimore, Newark, and Parkland; plus the USA marks the highest incidence in the world of violent crimes, incarceration, sales of guns and violent video games. It's time to act and curtail the crisis. There must be zero tolerance for bullying of any kind. The responses by victims of abuse, bullying, or neglect have sadly led to needless tragedies including suicide, bodily harm, and death of innocent victims of all ages. Guns of any form should not be in anyone's hands (child, teen or adult). We question mistakes made by law enforcement personnel, military, hunters, and those with mental or serious anger management problems. But, we don't live in a perfect world, nor have we so far discovered the cure for violence, diverting anger, improving poor self-esteem, nor found the panacea for peace, or thwarting and redirecting anti-social behavior. We should be spending more resources for research and support programs to find critical answers. Some percentage of the military and law enforcement budgets should be allocated to programs that promote peace. In 1985, Dr. Thomas Radecki, a psychiatrist, and executive director of the National Coalition on Television Violence, in a study of preschoolers compared the effects of playing with He-Man and Masters of the Universe figures, and playing with Cabbage Patch dolls. He reported the incidence of antisocial and violent behavior doubled after the youngsters played with the violent-theme toys. ''The evidence is quite strong that we are transmitting an unhealthy message encouraging children to have fun pretending to murder each other,'' he said. Also that same year as Director of the San Francisco International Toy Museum at The Cannery, I said, "It's time to ban all toy guns because children accustomed to playing with them have also played with accessible real weapons, with tragic results." Then in February 1988, the shocking death of Silivelio "Tony" Grohese, a 13-year-old developmentally disabled child, who was shot and killed by police while he was running with a toy gun on Potrero Hill, prompted a ban on realistic toy guns, and the addition of an orange tip to be placed on the barrel of a replica gun. The Toy Museum held a transformative event in the Courtyard of The Cannery, inviting San Francisco school children to turn in their realistic toy guns in exchange for Hula Hoops, which many children used for the first time much to their delight. It's very sad that after all of these years of messages, studies, positive actions, and potential for improvements, tangible changes have not happened to prevent these on-going terrible tragedies. Instead of being armed with guns, children should be actively playing with balls, Frisbees, Hula Hoops, and jump ropes for good exercise, and helping to discharge stress, negative feelings, and building better social interaction. Sports, jumping rope, or keeping the hoop spinning around the body are great fun, and benefits all kids (and adults) to be more active, less tense, healthier, and more happily engaged. We also need more learning, training, and a lot more loving in our dynamic democracy, yet fragile society. It's time to find strategic answers to assist and protect our children, including not buying toy guns, securely locking up guns, and finding effective ways to prevent abuse and violence at home, in school, and in every community. Heartfelt sympathy goes to every parent, grandparent, and friend who has ever lost a child, teen, or college student due to a gun as tragically happened at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Let's strive to find effective ways to "Crisis of Violence" and finally eliminate the pain it causes. Parkland Teens are joined by students from the Bay Area and elsewhere responding to aftermath shock and instead of apathy have taken action, spoken out in unison, and renewed discourse. Isn't it finally time we heard them? Can we find new, cooperative ways to establish realistic protection, safety restrictions, mental health supportmediation, anti-bullying, discussions, and campaigns; knee jerk reactions like armed guards and armed teachers everywhere are costly, insufficient, inappropriate, and Un-American! Let's instead unite, heal, and resolve the "Crisis of Violence." We must begin locally, state by state across the country, and around our amazing, yet fragile planet to take positive action, change laws and behavior, and show stronger examples that will "Teach Our Children Well!" ## 2018 Stevanne Auerbach, PhD/Dr. Toy, San Francisco CA 94104 HUNTSVILLE Kent Whitaker was praying when he got the news: The governor had spared his son. In an unexpected last-minute decision, Gov. Greg Abbott granted clemency to a Sugar Land man slated for execution Thursday, just minutes before he was to be strapped to the gurney in Huntsville. Thomas Bart Whitaker was sent to death row for targeting his own family in a 2003 murder-for-hire plot aimed at landing a $1 million inheritance. Im thankful not for me but for my dad, the inmate said upon learning the news, according to a prison spokesman. Whatever punishment I would have or will receive is just, but my dad did nothing wrong. The system worked for him today. The commutation came after years of desperate pleas from the condemned mans father the only other survivor of the attack spurred the seven-member Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles to make a rare unanimous push Tuesday for clemency, sending the final decision to the governors desk. After two days of weighing the options life in prison or death Abbott announced his decision less than an hour before Whitaker was scheduled to die by lethal injection at 6 p.m. It is the first time a Texas governor has commuted a death row prisoners sentence following a board recommendation since 2007. In just over three years as Governor, I have allowed 30 executions. I have not granted a commutation of a death sentence until now, Abbott said late Thursday in a statement. The murders of Mr. Whitakers mother and brother are reprehensible. The crime deserves severe punishment for the criminals who killed them. The recommendation of the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles, and my action on it, ensures Mr. Whitaker will never be released from prison. In his reasoning, the governor cited father Kent Whitakers passionate opposition to the execution and the condemned mans willingness to waive all parole claims as factors in his decision. Now, the 38-year-old will spend the rest of his life in prison. Im so grateful, Kent Whitaker told reporters outside the death chamber. Hours earlier, hed said his goodbyes to his son, whod been given his last meal and withdrawn his final remaining motion for a stay. What a fantastic outcome, said Houston-based defense attorney James Rytting. This is confirmation that victims rights matters in Texas. The December 2003 killings took place just after celebratory dinner marking Bart Whitakers supposed graduation from Sam Houston State University a milestone that never happened. Before the ruse of a dinner, Whitaker had arranged for two friends to wait at the familys Sugar Lakes subdivision home and stage a fake burglary. When the family of four returned from the restaurant, a gunman opened fire as they walked through the door, killing 51-year-old Patricia Whitaker and 19-year-old Kevin Whitaker. Initially, the case baffled police. But then, authorities learned after reading an article in the Houston Chronicle, one detective later said that Bart Whitaker was no longer enrolled in college. Hed been out on academic probation. As police zeroed in on him as a suspect, Whitaker stole $10,000 from his father and fled to Mexico, where authorities eventually captured him and brought him back to Texas. The pair of slayings came after three years of planning and at least two previous murder plots a fact that was not lost on the Fort Bend County jury. We tried to find a way to not kill the guy as a jury, said one former juror, who asked to remain anonymous, citing concerns for her safety. We tried really hard to follow the law the law said he needed to be a continuing danger to society, and we finally decided that he was because his method of killing was to get other people to kill for him. If he could convince college kids to kill for him, what would prevent him from getting other inmates to do it? Triggerman Chris Brashear, who was Whitakers housemate, pleaded guilty to murder and took a life sentence, while the getaway driver neighbor Steve Champagne agreed to a 15-year plea deal. From the outset, Kent Whitaker, who was wounded in the attack, argued against the states harshest sentence. I wrestled with God about my anger and desire for revenge, he said. Its difficult to explain, but he led me to a miracle of forgiveness where I forgave everyone involved with the crime long before I realized it was my son. Nonetheless, Bart Whitaker was sentenced to death. In the years that followed, his father led the fight against the death sentence, speaking out passionately about his sons case, penning a book on it and forming the centerpiece of the clemency petition that moved the notoriously tough seven-member Texas parole board. There is only one person on Earth who is intimate with the murderous attack, the lives and deaths of the other victims, and the life of Thomas Whitaker Mr. Whitakers father, Kent. Kent was there, the condemned mans attorneys wrote in their clemency petition. For the rest of us, the case against commutation to a life sentence seems clear. We cant forgive; we have no sympathy. But clemency is not about something so simple as sympathy or as formidable as forgiveness. Full of graphic descriptions of the crime and Old Testament references, the petition was bolstered by a few dozen letters from friends, family, fellow death row inmates and even prison guards. It was a long shot, but on Tuesday the board sided with Bart Whitaker. This is beyond amazing, his father said tearfully at the time. I cant tell you. But to the former juror, the boards vote and the governors decision felt like a betrayal. I really think Bart Whitaker is a master manipulator, and I think he manipulated the parole board, she said. He got his way with them the same way he did with the people he convinced to kill for him. Marshall Slot, the former Sugar Land detective who probed the case 15 years ago, said it made him sick. Theres no definitive definition of a sociopath, he said. Its someone who uses people as pieces in a game. And thats what Bart is. The last time a Texas governor agreed to commute a death row inmates sentence to life in prison following a board recommendation was in 2007, when Texas Gov. Rick Perry spared Kenneth Fosters life. It had only happened three times before that. A police captain who was fired last year for insubordination and working an off-duty job at USAA without permission defended his choice to disobey a direct order from his superior because he felt it was unlawful. Capt. Shawn Ury, a 23-year SAPD veteran, is not contesting that he disobeyed orders or worked at USAA without a permit. He told an independent arbitrator Thursday that his actions were justified, though, given the circumstances. I stayed because I needed to financially and it was something we as a department had been doing historically, Ury said. It is my contention that I did nothing wrong. The city fired him in March and he is appealing to win back his job. Ury had accumulated 10 months of paid leave that he wanted to take while working as a financial research analyst at USAA. His base salary as a police captain in 2016 was $102,564. Lawyers for both sides agree Ury disobeyed the order and worked without a permit. They disagree, though, on a number of other issues: If the department was trying to promote a woman to Urys position, how much control the department should have over an officers personal life, if the order to quit Urys second job was lawful, how officers should handle what they perceive as unlawful orders, and whether proper grievance and appeal processes were followed. The hearing highlights the controversial policy in the police bargaining contract that allows officers to take off months, or years, of work at a time with pay using accumulated vacation, holiday and other leave. According to testimony this week, officers regularly burn time, as its called, for months. Police Chief William McManus has tried to restrict the practice, such as limited leave to 60 days at any one time, but was opposed by the police union. At stake in the arbitration is whether Ury gets his job back, possibly with retroactive pay, his pension and roughly $100,000 from vacation, holiday and other paid leave. Arbitrator Don Hays has several options: He could uphold the indefinite suspension, choose to lessen Urys punishment, or clear him of the charges. If Hays agrees with McManus decision, Ury has a right of appeal to State District Court. Throughout the proceedings, city lawyers have objected to testimony regarding the leave policy and why Urys off-duty work permit was rejected, saying its irrelevant and a back-door way for Urys lawyer to file a grievance with the city. They say the real matter at hand is whether he worked the second job without permission and subsequently disobeyed an order something they argue is unacceptable for a senior officer who is supposed to set an example for junior officers. If Ury was upset that his off-duty work permit was denied, they say, he should have filed a grievance with help from the police union or appealed the order through his chain of command, instead of disobeying orders. Ury claims he did in fact file two grievances with help from the union. However, he admitted in cross examination Thursday that he did not precisely follow the contract and general manual procedures that dictate how a superior should be notified of a grievance and how long an officer has to appeal. Hays has conditionally allowed testimony on why Urys off-duty work permit was rejected, but he said he may disregard that testimony in his final decision, depending on if he thinks its relevant or not. At the end of the proceedings, Hays told both parties that they did a great job arguing their case. The importance of this issue does not elude the arbitrator, he added. Urys account Urys account of what happened concluded the three-day hearing, which included testimony from McManus, an assistant chief, two deputy chiefs, the police union president and a retired police detective. Ury said he decided in September 2016 that he wanted to retire. His father had been recently diagnosed with ALS, or Lou Gehrigs disease, and Ury said he wanted to play a larger role in caring for his health and supporting him financially. Ury originally had hoped to work for the department for 24 years, but he decided to retire a year early due to the circumstances. About that same time, Ury was approached with an offer for the job at USAA. He said he wasnt actively looking for work, but he was interested so he could help support his family financially. Ury said he told his superior, deputy chief Roy Waldhelm, he intended to retire in July 2016. He also told Waldhelm that he hoped to take off roughly 10 months of work, using vacation and holiday leave time he had accrued, while simultaneously working the off-duty job at USAA. I knew it would affect the department I thought being honest was the best approach, Ury testified. I didnt have to tell them. I probably could have worked there without ever telling them. Department regulations do in fact require officers to report off-duty work. Ury said he thought they wouldnt notice. Ury and Waldhem discussed the departments leave policy and requirements for working an off-duty job, Ury said. They decided it would be best to switch Ury from commander of the Emergency Operations Center to nighttime commander of the North Patrol. The department has two nighttime commanders positions on staff, but they often go unfilled because they arent considered essential to operations and because a lower-ranking officer can fulfill the duties, several officials testified. Urys first off-duty permit was approved, and he began working at USAA full-time. Ury said he still worked at SAPD two days a week to handle administrative tasks. In November, Ury realized there was growing concern about his off-duty job. He testified he met with Assistant Chief Anthony Trevino and Deputy Chief Gus Guzman to discuss the issue. Ury recorded the conversation without the knowledge of the others. Urys lawyer asked Hays, the arbitrator, if they could listen to the 30- to 45-minute conversation during Thursdays hearing. The arbitrator said he would listen to it on his own time. Urys lawyer alleges the recording includes a statement from Trevino about the optics of the situation. In January, after his first work permit expired, Ury submitted a second work permit request to Guzman, his new supervisor. Guzman said he denied it because he believed Urys absence would impair the operations of the department. In follow-up conversations, Ury told Guzman he intended to keep working at his off-duty job, even without a permit. If I had a new job and quit two months in, it would be a negative mark on my resume, Ury said. This is a small city. I wouldnt be able to find a new job (after I retired). Mystery solved. Turns out the two peregrine falcons who have been spending the winter months in downtown San Antonio are well known in their hometowns in Canada and Minnesota. They even have names: Radisson and Triumph. The two falcons, who have been thrilling tourists and downtown dwellers as they soar between tall buildings, were identified by the bands on their legs. Named after the Radisson Hotel in downtown Winnipeg, Manitoba, where she was hatched on the roof, the female falcon lives at a Canadian university in Edmonton, Alberta, during most of the year. Triumph, the male falcon, was born at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota; his permanent home is in Minneapolis. Shes a stately 12 years old; hes a comparative youngster at 4. Since early January, the two migrating peregrine falcons have been living primarily on the circular spiral tower on top of the 24-story Drury Plaza Hotel. They have been seen near the Tower Life Building and other structures. Wednesday, the raptors were seen perched atop the Frost Bank sunburst logo. Soon the raptors, who arent related, will be heading back to their permanent homes for the spring breeding season. Peregrine falcons mate for life and the San Antonio visitors mates will meet them back home. The identities of the birds of prey were discovered after local bird enthusiasts sent out inquiries to fellow birders, to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and falcon release programs. In a matter of days, the Manitoba Peregrine Falcon Recovery Project had claimed them. While the two birds arent related, their family histories do intersect, said Tracy Maconachie of the falcon recovery project. Fifteen years ago, Radissons mother was hatched at the Excel Riverside Power Plant, several miles from the Multifoods Tower in downtown Minneapolis, where Triumph has nested for the past two years. Its the same site where the Canadian falcons great-grandmother hatched 30 years ago. Now, these two have San Antonio in common, Maconachie said. The interest in the raptors began days into the new year, when avid bird watcher Lance Aldridge, working in Judge Melisa Skinners 290th court, called attorney and raptor enthusiast John Economidy after glimpsing the falcons zipping past his window pursuing their prey. Recently, Aldridge looked out of his courthouse window and saw the falcons narrowly miss catching a pigeon atop the City Municipal Plaza Building. Later that day, he looked up at the Drury tower to see feathers from the birds lunch drifting through the air. Many raptor recovery projects have placed nest boxes on high ledges on roof tops to help with their survival in urban settings. Economidy would like to have small gravel-base nest boxes, secured with metal clamps, installed on downtown buildings, as has been done on buildings at the University of Texas at Austin and other in cities, including New York and Chicago. I think it would be good for San Antonio, he said, it works for others. Aldridge said officials at the Drury recently agreed to reserve a spot on the roof for a nest box. Hes also e-mailed the city of San Antonio and management at the Tower Life building about the same proposal. I would love for them to stick around and be here year round, he said, and nest boxes are the next step to having that happen. Every one is really getting interested in this. Theyre doing a service to San Antonio, as well as being magnificent birds flying in the sky. San Antonio is the first stop for Manitobas peregrine falcons as they make their way home more than 1,400 miles away. Radisson has been the most successful resident to nest at the University of Alberta in Edmonton since 2008. Each year, most of Radissons extended family wing their way through Texas to Mexico. A few years ago, one of her sisters was identified at the San Antonio Airport and, in spring 2016, another sister was found seriously injured after a hailstorm in North Texas. She recovered at a rehabilitation center in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. We hope that Radisson has an uneventful time in San Antonio, she wrote in an email, so that she is in good shape to return to Edmonton to nest again this spring. Peregrine falcons are reported to be the fastest animal on the planet, with hunting speeds exceeding 200 mph. Average life span is 12-15 years, experts say. According to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, there are between 2,000 and 3,000 breeding pairs of American peregrine falcons in the United States, Canada and Mexico. DDT use as a pesticide from the 1940s through the 1060s nearly caused the extinction of the species in North America. In 1970, the peregrine falcon was on the threatened and endangered species list. In 1981, the Manitoba Peregrine Falcon Recovery Project began reintroducing peregrine falcons in Canada with the release of four captive-bred chicks. By 1999, with help by The Peregrine Fund, falcon recovery projects and wildlife services across the United States and Canada, the falcon was lifted from the federal endangered species list. Julie Ponder, executive director of The Raptor Center at the University of Minnesota, said it was exciting to learn about the whereabouts of Triumph, one of the falcons from their restoration project. The Midwest group banded and took samples for genetic testing from the founders, the ones used to reestablish the population. Each spring, they make a strong effort to document, identify and band all the chicks hatched in the Midwest region. She said that the caring capacity of peregrines is higher now than it ever was historically. The Mayo Clinic is a very actively watched nest box, Ponder said. The patients and staff at the clinic watch it, its a very high-profile site, they would be very excited to find out that one of their boys is in San Antonio. AUSTIN Sen. Carlos Uresti, under pressure to resign after he was found guilty of 11 felony criminal fraud charges, may announce his plans as early as next week. The San Antonio senator said immediately after Thursdays verdict that he had no plans to leave his seat, then said he would meet with his family and his attorneys about his future. On Friday, fellow senators said that Uresti had expressed disappointment that the Texas Senate Democratic Caucus asked for his resignation just hours after the verdict and reiterated that he wanted to mull his options. He was disappointed. He just wanted some time to discuss it with his family, said Sen. Jose Menendez, D-San Antonio, who talked with Uresti on Thursday. Sen. Jose Rodriguez of El Paso, who heads the Senate Democratic Caucus, also said Uresti told him Thursday that he would like to have some time this weekend with his family to talk with them and make a decision as to what he is going to do in the future. Uresti said he might announce his plans in the coming week, Rodriguez said. If Uresti doesn't offer his resignation, the Senate has the power to expel him with a two-thirds vote, although members have yet to bring that up as an option. The Democratic caucus discussion came after Patrick relieved Uresti of his committee assignments following the verdict, Menendez said. Everybody was talking about how Patrick had already stripped him of his committees, Menendez told the San Antonio Express-News of the caucus decision. There was no desire to have anyone think or believe that anybody would condone any of the behavior that had been brought up in the trial or that he (Uresti) had been convicted of. The point was made that Al Franken was asked to step down when he didnt even commit a crime, Menendez said. Franken resigned from his U.S. Senate seat after he was accused of sexual misconduct. Urestis case focused on his involvement in FourWinds Logistics, a fracking company that prosecutors said defrauded investors. Uresti, a lawyer, also was accused of having a sexual relationship with a legal client whom he persuaded to invest in FourWinds. She lost most of her money. Uresti has denied the sexual relationship. I think everyone who serves works hard to take care of their reputation, and I think the caucus as a whole had a concern that it would have an impact on everyone if there wasnt a clear message sent, Menendez said. Even though everyone felt sad for his family, sad for our state, sad for his constituents, we were faced with this situation that this had occurred. The reality is we couldnt not make a statement, he said. Sen. Paul Bettencourt of Houston, who heads the Texas Senate Republican Caucus, said it made sense for the Democratic caucus to take the lead in calling for one of its own to step down. I think thats a better way to avoid people screaming partisanship when this is really the obvious conclusion to the whole matter, Bettencourt said. Patricks decision to remove Uresti from Senate committees which he made in a statement pointing out that he doesnt have the power to remove him from the Senate entirely puts pressure on Uresti to step down. The lieutenant governor is showing the leadership thats required here, Bettencourt said. He did the maximum that he could do, but he did it very firmly. The message here is obvious. You have to respect the institution of the Senate. If he doesnt step down now, Uresti could be forced to resign later under a new ethics law passed last year. It requires any member of the Legislature, the governor or a state-wide official who is convicted of a felony to leave office once the conviction is final. The measure, Senate Bill 500, took effect last June, before Urestis trial began. Sen. Eddie Lucio Jr., D-Brownsville, said he believed Patrick would have taken the same action regardless of the political party of the affected senator. He said he agreed with the Democratic caucus call for Uresti to resign, while expressing his sympathy for those involved. Im saddened for the family, for the children. Very saddened. I prayed for them as soon as I heard this, Lucio said. I also prayed for the victims that lost over the dealings that took place. Menendez said his call with Uresti about the caucus decision was very somber. I called him to tell him. He was disappointed. He just wanted some time to discuss it with his family, and while I understood, I said its been a long career and hes done a lot of good things. I said, No one denies the work youve done on issues such as child abuse and working for veterans, Menendez said. Its just unanimous support that you need to step aside while you go through your process. Uresti was very shocked in terms of he didnt think he was going to be in that position, Menendez said. I think he honestly feels what his attorneys said about him being negligent is what he believes. The issue is, his personal thoughts and feelings are at odds with what the jury found. If Uresti decides to step down, triggering a special election to fill the rest of his term, names that have been floated as potential candidates for the seat include Rep. Roland Gutierrez, D-San Antonio, and former congressman Pete Gallego, who also is a former state House member. Uresti's campaign contributions began to dry up in the months leading up to the trial, though he continued to spend thousands of dollars on advertising through the end of 2017, according to campaign finance reports filed with the Texas Ethics Commission. Over the last six months of 2017, Uresti's campaign raised $35,000, a small sum in comparison to the six-figure hauls he had raised in past reporting periods, documents show. Most of that money came from political action committees, while only a handful of contributions came out of the pockets of individual donors. The Texas Trial Lawyers Association PAC and the Texas Medical Association PAC both gave Uresti's campaign $5,000 in November and December respectively. The next highest contribution, $4,500 came from the campaign of Tomas Uresti, Uresti's brother. Still, Uresti funneled nearly $30,000 into advertising mainly with Google, Microsoft and Facebook, though the ads themselves aren't disclosed. Another $9,500 went into events and gifts, including for Senator Santa toy delivery supplies, gifts for children and a Santa costume. As of Jan. 16, Uresti's campaign reported just $10,000 cash in the bank. Two months ago, Mario Bravo conducted an experiment. Bravo, the environmental activist who is challenging Bexar County Commissioner Paul Elizondo in the March 6 Democratic primary, got his lawyer to submit an open-records request for Elizondos daily work calendar over the previous year. That same day, Dec. 27, Bravo got an old friend to submit an identical request with Councilwoman Shirley Gonzales. Bravo said he had heard anecdotal accounts that Elizondo, the budget-crafting dean of the Commissioners Court, works something less than a full-time schedule. He also wanted to test Elizondos commitment to transparency by comparing Elizondos open-records response with that of Gonzales. On January 24, Gonzaless office dutifully turned over 34 PDFs, loaded with the councilwomans daily work schedules and contemporaneous supporting material, such as intra-office notes and memos. Elizondos office has yet to turn over its requested material to Bravos lawyer, Ricardo de Anda, who practices law in Laredo but lives in San Antonio. Bravo says he suspected this would happen. Thats why he got de Anda to supplement the initial open-records request with a Jan. 8 request for info on the daily times that various county officials use their access cards to take the private elevator at Paul Elizondo Tower. The county responded by taking that open-records request to the Attorney Generals office for an opinion. In a Jan. 30 letter to Attorney General Ken Paxton, Bexar County District Attorney Nico LaHood stated his belief that the information requested is exempt from disclosure. LaHood backed up his argument by citing sections of the Texas Government Code that exempt information that would interfere with the investigation or prosecution of a crime or subject an employee to substantial threat of physical harm. Putting aside the question of how dangerous it would be to provide elevator-use schedules to someone submitting an open-records request, Elizondo said he had nothing to do with the countys decision to go to the AGs office. He also said he rarely uses the private elevator to get to his office. That elevator, to get to it from my car, I have to go through a maze of doors. Its like getting into the Pentagon, Elizondo said. I just walk in and use the people elevator. To Elizondo, the whole open-records issue is Mickey Mouse stuff, the last refuge of a desperate candidate. If hes so interested in my work schedule, he ought to provide his, Elizondo said. This is the kind of bull****that comes up in campaigns that has nothing to do with the ability to do the job. Elizondo has represented Precinct 2 for the last 31 years. In addition to Bravo, he is being challenged in the primary by Queta Rodriguez, a former Marine who serves as the countys Veterans Service officer. Monica Ramos, the public information officer for the county managers office, said any failure to get Elizondos schedule to de Anda was not the fault of the county commissioners office. She said some information needed to be redacted from Elizondos schedule and then it was sent to the district attorneys office. At some point, she said, it fell through the cracks. Im not exactly sure where this got dropped, she said. They (Elizondos staff) were very prompt and very responsive. The countys system for handling open-records requests has frustrated journalists for years. Unlike the city, which has a form that allows you to track the progress of your request, the county uses an email system in which its hard, even for county employees, to monitor the process. Ramos said the county is revamping that system and should have a new one in place by April. The entire Bravo/Elizondo open-records episode has some fascinating political undercurrents. Gonzales, who Bravo cites as an example of how Elizondo should have responded to his open-records requests, supports Elizondo in the primary. And Bravo is the boyfriend of Ana Sandoval, one of Gonzaless council colleagues. As for Elizondo, he argues that any information listed on his work calendar will reveal very little, adding, Were on call day and night. Were in and out. He also suggests that Bravos use of surrogates for his open-records requests was contrary to the spirit of transparency. So why is he using an out-of-town lawyer to get a request? Elizondo said. Thats a sneaky bunch of stuff. Click to read this Alamo dispatch as it originally appeared. SAN ANTONIO de BEXAR, Mexico, Feb. 23, 1836 Intelligence has arrived from our forces, which we now publish for the people's satisfaction. Just weeks after their triumph during the Siege of Bexar, Texas troops here have been confronted by elements of the Mexican Army of Operations. Rumors, those unctuous cousins of gossip, had passed from lip to lip among townsfolk for weeks that forces under the command of His Excellency, Gen. Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, the President and Dictator of Mexico, were marching toward San Antonio. --------- ENEMY SIGHTED During the day to-day, an eagle-eyed lookout posted atop the San Fernando Church spread the disheartening news that Gen. Santa Anna and his troops were winding toward the city. What already was a trickle of residents leaving this city of a few thousand souls soon resembled water gushing from a pump, and by the time Santa Anna arrived, most of San Antonio de Bexar stood empty. For their part, the troops under the joint command of Texian Army Lt. Col. William Travis and the ailing James Bowie, a volunteer who has served as a colonel in the Texas militia, quickly gathered what provisions they could from what was rapidly becoming a town worthy only of ghosts mainly bushels of corn and numerous beeves. Lacking an adequate supply of coffee and possessing only whatever tobacco and cigars they carried, the Texas troops along with some members of their various households withdrew within the stout walls of the old Mission San Antonio de Valero. The fortress-like structure now is usually referred to as the Alamo. Little Enrique Esparza, a lad of but eight years who is the son of Texas trooper Gregorio Esparza, told of his family's move into the Alamo. "It took the whole day to move and an hour before sundown we were inside the fort," he noted. Thusly, San Antonio de Bexar came under the dictator's control without him once having to issue the order for weapons to be charged and shots to be fired or for bayonets to make their gruesome plunges. --------- VISIBLE WARNING Pulling their strings like a grand puppeteer, Gen. Santa Anna had his troops climb to the highest balustrade on the San Fernando Church to-day, and there did they unfurl a bloodred banner the sign of "no quarter," a symbol to those within the Alamo that resistance is an endeavour most futile. Alamo co-commander Travis, though, was unimpressed with the grandiose gesture and let an 18-pounder roar his defiance. He then went about seeking to bolster the forces within his redoubt, dispatching an appeal to the citizens of Gonzales and another (which was co-signed by Col. Bowie) asking Lt. Col. James W. Fannin in Goliad to provide men and materials to the Alamo posthaste. --------- BOWIE ACTS War, of course, is an undertaking that often lacks immediate clarity. For his part, co-commander Bowie attempted to part some of this haze surrounding the Alamo to-day and dispatched a memo to the commander of the opposition forces. "Because a shot was fired from a cannon of this fort at the time a red flag was raised over the tower," he wrote," and (because) a little afterward they told me that a part of your army had sounded a parley, which, was not heard before the firing of the shot. I wish, Sir, to ascertain if it be true that a parley was called, for which reason I send my second aid, Benito Jameson, under guarantee of a white flag which I believe will be respected by you and your forces. God and Texas." Firing toward the Alamo was suspended and Jameson was allowed an audience with Gen. Santa Anna's aides-de-camp, Cols. Juan Almonte and Jose Batres. Almonte recounted that Jameson "informed me of the bad state they were in at the Alamo, and manifested a wish that some honorable conditions should be proposed for a surrender." --------- REPLY MOST GRIM Col. Batres authored the official response to Col. Bowie's inquiry to-day about the situation at the Alamo: "The Mexican army cannot come to terms under any conditions with rebellious foreigners to whom there is no other recourse left, if they wish to save their lives, than to place themselves immediately at the disposal of the Supreme Government from whom alone they may expect clemency after some considerations." Batres did not enumerate what those "considerations" would be, but they surely would entail steps most vile indeed. COMING NEXT on Day 2: Bowie stricken, gives up command. How we did this series: To mark the 175th anniversary of the 13-day Alamo siege in 2011, Express-News copy desk veteran Robert Kolarik was tasked with becoming an 1836 reporter, covering the siege in a series of live daily newspaper dispatches in the language of the day from Feb. 23 through March 6. His stories captured the imagination of readers for almost two weeks. In this Tricentennial year, were repeating those daily dispatches. Art Director Adrian Alvarez created the vintage look for the daily pages and Graphics Editor Mike Fisher did the illustrations. Director of News Production Dean Lockwood conceptualized the series and its vintage format. FAIRFIELD You will soon be able to add The Loft to the ever-expanding space of Fairfield Theatre Company at 70 Sanford St. The FTC is home to StageOne, an intimate 225-seat venue, and the larger Warehouse, which has the capacity for up to 640 seats. The music venue will use almost $500,000 raised from private donations and a recently approved $950,000 state Urban Act program grant to finish the work of creating music classrooms, rehearsal space and offices on the town-owned buildings second floor. The funds will allow us to complete long-needed interior and exterior improvements and renovations throughout the FTC campus, John Reid, executive director, said. The work is already well underway, and we expect to complete this final phase of the overall FTC campus improvement by the fall of 2018. Reid said they were able to get started on the work prior to receiving the state grant because of donations from almost 1,100 individuals over the past year. Kristina Newman-Scott, executive director of the state Office of the Arts, helped to shepherd the funding through the state Bond Commission approval process. I know what the need is out there, Newman-Scott said, and the organizations that are doing the work that needs those funds. Larger organizations, like the Connecticut Science Museum, may have an easier time attracting the needed funding, Newman-Scott said, while smaller groups may not be on the radar. Its a fantastic space, she said. Its so easy to get to, its right there at the train station. Newman-Scott cited studies that show that for every $1 spent on the arts, you get $7 in return, and said having facilities like the FTC is the kind of thing that makes people want to stay in the community. ... Culture is a thing that connects us all. The state funding will go toward the actual construction costs and are provided on a reimbursement basis. One condition of the grant is that the recipient cannot relocate out of state for 10 years. Economic Development Director Mark Barnhart said the announcement of the grant was terrific news and well deserved. FTC has been a vital partner in helping create a more vibrant and dynamic downtown, attracting thousands of visitors each year and generating millions in economic activity to bolster the local economy, Barnhart said. Im sure these factors weighed heavily and appropriately in the states decision. Reid said the work on The Loft will add classrooms and rehearsal rooms, expand and improve the green rooms and dressing rooms, replace the old covered bridge that leads to the building from Unquowa Road, repair and repaint the exterior where needed and improve the grounds to allow for better use of the outdoor space. Additional office space will also be created, which Reid said will allow some staff that currently work off-site because of a lack of space to return. We are especially thankful for the support of our delegation, who continue to advocate on behalf of FTC and the community, encouraging the growth and expansion of the arts and culture in Fairfield County, Reid said. FTC first started in 2001, on the campus of Fairfield University, and moved to Sanford Street in 2004. Initially, the focus was Broadway theater, but eventually, it transitioned to a live music venue at StageOne. The Warehouse was opened in 2015, and FTC presents over 400 concerts and programs between the two spaces. FAIRFIELD The soap opera-like mystery has been solved the husband was really the brother. It was in 2017 that Melanie Marks, owner of Connecticut House Histories, was charged with the task of identifying two portraits painted by Ammi Phillips, an artist born in Colebrook in 1788 who traveled around the state. With the help of former newspaper editor Patricia Hines, the two set out to find out just who the man and woman sold as a pair by Massachusetts auction house Skinner Auctioneers were. The portraits were painted during the time Phillips lived in Kent, and a client of Marks had purchased the pair for a home in Kent she was restoring. What the two Fairfielders uncovered would have put any modern-day soap opera story line to shame: marriage and divorce, an out-of-wedlock baby, suicide and a disgraced stockbroker, and three portraits that went along for the journey. Their digging uncovered the fact there had been three Phillips portraits put up for auction, and it turned out that Skinner had paired Phoebe Wing Sheldon with her brother, Preston Wing, and not her husband, Egbert Sheldon. The real husband, Marks believed, was actually the portrait of the second man that was put up for auction separately. What they needed, Marks said, was to find that third portrait. Through a series of twists, turns and coincidences, they located that third portrait in York, Pa. The owners son emailed images of the letter Egbert Sheldon was holding, which helped with the identification. The portraits were originally consigned to Sothebys in 1993, but didnt meet the reserve price, so the owners put them in storage. At that point, the auction catalog shows the husband and wife properly paired. But when consigned to Skinner in 2001, Phoebe was paired with her brother, and Egbert was listed as a possible relative. Preston Wing, Marks said, was Phoebes dashing bachelor brother, who lived off and on with Preston and Phoebe and hobnobbed with the rich and famous in Newport (R.I.). As luck would have it, Marks client was able to purchase Egbert Sheldons portrait, so all three are together again, after 17 years. Its amazing, Marks said, of finally being able to attach the names to the portraits, and reuniting them. One reason Phoebe and her brother were likely paired incorrectly, Hines said, is because they looked alike. A description from Egberts passport, Marks said, mentioned his blue eyes. And the portrait of Egbert, according to Hines, has these bright blue eyes. Portraits like these, Marks said, are often purchased because the buyer likes the time period. They just have no names, but when you do what weve done, you now know who these people are, she said. And many of those unidentified portraits were painted by Phillips. Marks estimates there are over 680 unidentified Phillips portraits. Hines and Marks are up to the challenge of trying to put names to Phillips portraits and said they would love to hear from people looking to find out just who that is hanging on their wall. According to the National Gallery of Art website, Phillips painted for more than 50 years, and in different styles, so it was once thought they were done by different artists. From 1812-19, Phillips did his painting in towns along the New York-Massachusetts border, and those paintings were distinguished by an almost pastel palette, and faces with dark lined eyes. In 1836, Phillips left for Kent, which lent its name to the next distinctive period, from 1829-38, in his career. According to the National Gallery of Art, The work of the so-called Kent Limner was first isolated when a group of ancestral portraits were brought together for a 1924 summer fair in that town. It was in Kent where the portraits of Egbert, Phoebe and Preston were painted, and where they once again reside hanging in the restored house of Marks client. Driving through Fairfield several iconic places feature the Jennings name: Jennings Beach, Jennings Road, Jennings School and more. The Fairfield branch of the Jennings family, pictured here in 1908, was founded in 1650 when Joshua Jennings came to Connecticut. Over the next three hundred years, his descendants would become an indispensable part of Fairfield society. Not much is known about the Jennings family during the years of 1675-1780, but members of the family were active in the farming industry. Captain Abraham Gould Jennings lived between 1781 and 1852. As a youth, Captain Jennings made several trips to the Orient, as well as a groundbreaking trip around Cape Horn. He was also highly involved in a high spirited chase with the British Navy during the War of 1812. He eventually settled down in Fairfield with his wife, Anna Burr, whom he had married in 1807. Together they reared a group of children including: Augustus Gould Jennings (b.1814), Isaac Jennings (b. 1823) and Oliver Burr Jennings (b. 1825). Jennings Brothers was founded in 1860 by Augustus and Isaac. The company was originally founded in order to manufacture paper, but in 1867 they began to produce Japanese Paper Ware. These specialty patented products were molded out of one piece of hemp fiber under heavy hydraulic pressure. Afterwards, they were painted and and varnished to resemble Japanese lacquer. Augustus went on to become a driving force in the Fairfield community. Captain Isaac was a devout Episcopalian and sailed around the world. He also represented his town in the state legislature. His son Charles held several jobs after the demise of Jennings Brothers including selling wooden bowls, operating the Henry H. Perry Insurance Agency and was the treasurer of the Southport Savings Bank. Oliver Burr Jennings (b. 1825) spent his youth in Fairfield before moving to New York City to open a dry goods business. During the gold rush, O.B. moved to California where he opened another general store. Jennings married Esther Judson Goodsell and had several children. He later partnered with William and John D. Rockefeller to form Standard Oil. Jennings moved back East and his family divided their time between the Jennings homestead in Fairfield and 48 Park Avenue in New York City. O.B. was also a philanthropist who helped pay for the paving of several Fairfield roads and he co-founded the Fairfield Public Library and the Fairfield Beach Company. Annie Burr Jennings (1855-1939), O. B.s daughter, was born in San Francisco but spent a great deal of her life at Sunnie-Holme in Fairfield. She created Sunnie-Holme out of two houses that had been built by John B. Steenbergen in the mid-eighteenth century. In 1914 she established the Audubon Birdcraft Sanctuary and in 1916 bought a home on Unquowa Road to give to the Town for use as a high school. Annie also donated sixteen acres of beachfront property for public use. She led the womans anti-suffrage movement in Fairfield and a crusade against FDRs New Deal. Annie died in July 1939, two months before Fairfields tercentenary. Walter Jennings (1858-1939) was also born to O. B. and his wife in San Francisco. He spent most of his life in Fairfield and attended Hopkins Grammar School and Yale University. Walter dedicated his life to philanthropic works and divided his time between Fairfield and Burrwood, his estate in Oyster Bay on Long Island. Another daughter of O. B.s, Esther Brewster Jennings, was born in San Francisco on Dec. 6, 1861. She married Hugh Dudley Auchincloss on November 19, 1891. Esther divided her time between Dormy House, Sasco Hill and Hammersmith Farm in Newport, RI. She died on April 21, 1913. Oliver Gould Jennings (1865-1936), son of O. B. Jennings, was a charter member of the Fairfield Historical Society and the original building was named for him. He served as President of the Historical Society, the Fairfield Memorial Library, the Board of Fairfield Trust Company, the Fairfield Beach Company and the Resident Town Council. He was said to control the local Republican Party. Oliver also paid for the paving of several roads in Fairfield, donated acres of land to the town, paid for renovations of the Episcopal Church and created the Improvement Association of Fairfield & Vicinity. Their goal was to eliminate mosquitoes in the Fairfield area. In 1906 Oliver spent one million dollars to build a mansion named Mailands, a French chateau that sat on seventy-six acres. After his death in 1936, the Jesuits took ownership of the property and turned it into Fairfield Preparatory School. Today is it Fairfield Universitys McAuliffe Hall. Oliver C. Jennings was born on August 28, 1863 to Horace and Helen Jennings. He attended school in Fairfield and then went into the meat business with his father. In 1866 he opened up a butcher shop and from 1874-1893 ran a grocery store in Fairfield. Have you ever wondered about your familys history? If so, the Fairfield Museum & History Centers next History Bites Lunchtime Lecture is for you! At Getting Started with Genealogy, to be held Wednesday, February 28 from 12:30pm to 1:30pm, Dr. Elizabeth Rose, Library Director at the Fairfield Museum, will talk about how to start researching your familys history using the Museums records and online. Betty Oderwald will talk about the standards that are used by lineage societies like the Daughters of the American Revolution and the U.S. Daughters of 1812. The program is free for Museum members with a $5 suggested donation for non-members. Please bring a bagged lunch. Beverages and dessert will be provided. A former Bridgeport man faces 25 years behind bars after pleading guilty to one count of armed bank robbery. Bryce Alexander Laister, 25, also admitted he robbed a total of five Connecticut banks between November 2016 and June 20. On Thursday Laister waived his right to be indicted and pleaded guilty today in Hartford federal court. Laister admitting robbing: Webster Bank at 314 Merwin Ave. in Milford on November 30, 2016 Key Bank at 133 East Main St. in Plainville on April 7, 2017 Key Bank at 1328 Boston Post Road in Westbrook on May 5, 2017 Peoples United Bank located inside the Stop & Shop at 898 Bridgeport Ave. in Shelton on May 30, 2017 Peoples United Bank located inside the Stop & Shop at 112 Amity Road in New Haven on June 10, 2017. John H. Durham, U.S. Attorney for Connecticut, said in a release that during the Shelton robbery, Laister brandished a pistol, and during the Plainville and Westbrook robberies, Laister threatened to kill or shoot bank employees if they did not comply with his demands. Laister was located and arrested in Stratford on June 15, 2017, after he engaged in a two-hour standoff with local and federal law enforcement officers. At the time of his arrest, Laister possessed a .380 caliber pistol and a magazine loaded with two bullets. A subsequent search one of Laisters vehicles revealed clothing he wore during the robbery on June 10, a makeup kit he used to disguise his features, and a Stop & Shop circular. Laister is scheduled to be sentenced by Senior U.S. District Judge Alfred V. Covello on May 17, at which time he faces a maximum term of imprisonment of 25 years. If he gets the maximum sentence - and serves the full term - the 25-year-old Laister will be 50 when he is freed. Place Your Advert Thousands of Active jobseekers are looking for new agricultural positions in 2020. Call us now to discuss the options for advertising your vacancy in our job section. A veterinary company has held its first ever alpaca blood donation event for local farmers, bringing BBC Countryfile TV crews to Derby to document it. Scarsdale Vets has now brought together a group of Derbyshire alpaca owners for its first ever alpaca blood donation event. It aimed to ensure that animals who donated can provide plasma for their own herd, offering a real life-line to baby alpacas, known as cria, if needed. This unusual alpaca event attracted the attention of BBC Countryfile who were keen to find out more about the thinking behind the venture, and presenter Matt Baker took part in the filming for a programme which will be broadcast this weekend, on Sunday 25th February. The alpaca blood donation event took place on Friday 9th February at Scarsdales farm and equine unit at Markeaton and brought together a group of four alpaca famers from Derbyshire and some of their animals which were eligible to give blood. In total, six alpacas took part in this event. Each owner had been fully briefed ahead of the event, as it is important to get the right animals, as not all are suitable. The event was run by Scarsdale Vets Fay Pooley, who is a farm vet by profession and is currently working towards a Certificate in Advanced Veterinary Practice (CertAVP) specialising in camelids. 'Serious infections' Fay Pooley explains: Having spoken to a number of our alpaca-owning clients we had the idea of bringing together a small group of animals to help us build up a supply of plasma. The reason it is important to have a good supply of plasma is that baby alpacas, also known as cria, are born without antibodies which can leave them open to serious infections in the first few days of life. Immunity in a baby alpaca is usually passed on from its mother through the first milk (known as colostrum), but if the newborn doesnt drink enough in the first twelve hours of life, they wont receive enough antibodies to ensure a healthy immune system. Ms Pooley added: The best way to correct this is by giving plasma intravenously, which will support their immune system until they are old enough to produce their own antibodies. This is an important way to support herd owners in maintaining healthy animals and we are really pleased to have had such a good turn out from local alpaca farmers. The blood collected was then sent to Pet Blood Bank UK, the only charity in the country that provides a blood bank service to all veterinary practitioners in the UK. At their processing centre in Loughborough, the blood will be turned into plasma and frozen for future use. When needed, plasma must only be used within the herd the plasma was collected from, to avoid any potential transfer of disease. Any Brexit deal must allow the next generation of Welsh farmers to prosper, according to NFU Cymru. While representing a significant challenge, Brexit presents an opportunity to "shape the direction" of the industry to benefit future farming generations in Wales. That was the message from NFU Cymru President John Davies, who addressed industry stakeholders and fellow members during an NFU Cymru session with Welsh Government at the annual NFU Conference this week. As part of his address in one of his first major engagements as NFU Cymru President, John Davies used the Welsh 'Agriculture: Embracing Change for Success' session to emphasise the importance of the UK Government securing a deal with the EU27 that enabled farming in Wales to prosper. The 7bn Welsh food and farming industry is heavily reliant on free and frictionless trade with our nearest neighbour and this must remain following our departure from the EU in March 2019, he said. In terms of securing a bright future for this industry we need a future policy for Wales that supports our primary role as food producers whilst also caring for and enhancing our environment and landscapes. We are asking for an integrated strategy that acknowledges food production and the full range of ecosystem and landscape services provided by the Welsh farming industry. To make this achievable we will need a transition period that is well managed and pilots new initiatives that are developed in full partnership with farmers. 'Aligned views' The NFU Cymru session also provided a platform for key figures from Welsh Government to outline their thoughts on how they can work collaboratively with the union to achieve its vision of a productive, profitable and progressive agricultural industry delivering jobs, growth and investment for Wales. The Cabinet Secretary for Energy, Planning and Rural Affairs, Lesley Griffiths AM outlined her vision for land management in Wales post-Brexit and kick-started the conversation with industry as to how this can be delivered. John Davies said: I welcome the five core principles set out by the Cabinet Secretary in todays session as I feel they align with our views in terms of policies to keep farmers on the land, supporting farmers for the full range of public goods and services they provide and, crucially, ensuring that future policy has food production at its core. She also stressed that there is a need for a well-planned transition period taking place over a number of years in order to take us from the current EU CAP arrangements to a new Welsh land management policy. This transition period is of the upmost importance, both for farmers and the rural economy that relies heavily on the Welsh agricultural industry for so much of its income. Mr Davies concluded: We face a period of unprecedented change, but never has the opportunity been greater for us all to work in collaboration to secure a positive future for Welsh agriculture, and indeed, Wales as a whole. Legislation to make CCTV cameras mandatory in slaughterhouses in England to safeguard animal welfare has been laid by Defra Secretary Michael Gove. The proposals will also give the Food Standards Agencys (FSA) Official Veterinarians (OVs) unfettered access to the last 90 days of footage to help them monitor and enforce animal welfare standards. The government hopes mandatory CCTV in all areas of slaughterhouses will provide a tool in fostering a culture of compassion that could help safeguard animal welfare. The new legislation will come into effect from May 2018, once it passes through Parliament, at which point businesses will have six months to comply. President of the British Veterinary Association (BVA), vet John Fishwick said: We commend the Governments commitment to provide Official Veterinarians with unrestricted access to the footage, which the veterinary profession has long been campaigning for. It is vets independence and unique qualifications that help ensure the UK will continue to have the highest standards of animal health, welfare and food safety post-Brexit. 'Full and unrestricted' BVA and the Veterinary Public Health Association, which represents OVs who oversee animal health and welfare and public health in slaughterhouses, have been campaigning for both mandatory CCTV in all areas of slaughterhouses where live animals are kept and "full and unrestricted" 24/7 access to CCTV footage for OVs as part of their welfare at slaughter campaign. David Bowles, head of public affairs for the RSPCA said the charity is "pleased" that the details released today suggest cameras will be compulsory in all areas where live animals are present and Official Veterinarians will have unfettered access to the footage. "We hope this vital step, which mirrors the existing requirement in the RSPCAs farm animal welfare standards for compulsory CCTV in all slaughterhouses, will help lead to higher welfare across the food chain," Mr Bowles said. "The RSPCA also believes there are further ways to improve the slaughter of farm animals once the UK exits the EU such as prohibiting electrical waterbath stunning for poultry and prohibiting slaughter without stunning. The RSPCA said it "strongly feels" that this years new Agricultural Bill should contain incentives for British farmers to move towards "meaningful" welfare production standards, and safeguards to protect those higher welfare standards from being undercut by imported food that has come from animals reared outside the UK under poorer conditions. Lamb from the UK will soon be heading to Saudi Arabia in a deal which could be worth 25 million over the next five years. Saudi Arabian authorities have this week lifted the ban on sheep meat from the UK, following a detailed process to gain access to this new and lucrative market. Exports of lamb could begin as early as next month once export certification is finalised and released. The agreement comes following ongoing negotiations and inspections carried out jointly by Defra, the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board (AHDB), FSA, UKECP, DAERA and APHA. AHDB International Market Development Director Phil Hadley said it is "great news" for the sheep industry and for lamb processors and producers in the UK who are keen to look at new, non-EU markets. The announcement is the result of ongoing and detailed work between all parties and is a testament to the high regard and quality of UK lamb, Mr Hadley said. The news comes hot on the heels of an agreement to progress lifting the BSE ban on UK beef exports to China, as well as exports of a broader range of dairy products, following the Prime Ministers visit to Beijing earlier this month. Arla has announced it will be dropping its UK milk price by 2.16ppl and since December, Arla farmers have seen a total drop of 5.19ppl. The National Farmers' Union (NFU) has urged Arla to "speed up its commitments" to looking at risk management options for its suppliers. The NFU is also calling on Arla to be clear as to why its current plans are not preventing steep price drops. Arla Foods amba board director Johnnie Russell explained: While this will be unwelcome news for our farmer owners, the challenge that we face is that our price, in common with those of our competitors, has been affected by the recent dramatic falls in the commodity markets from the highs of last autumn. While last years increases were driven by fat, the long-term decline in the value of protein since the start of 2017 has had a significant impact. NFU dairy board chairman Michael Oakes says he is "disappointed and surprised" to see this level of price drop again, despite a stable demand for butter and the UK Futures Market Equivalent showing a positive result on the forward curve. We will soon see Arlas seasonality pricing mechanism lower the pence per litre received even more, Mr Oakes explained. Just this week at the NFU Conference Arla announced a growth in revenue of 1.94bn. Arla farmers dont appear to be feeling the positive effects of this revenue or the strategy to manage risk in the market. We want to see more done at both ends of the chain to insulate farmers from such steep price drops. The NFU has said Arla must work with farmers to provide them with the ability to mitigate the effects of volatility on their businesses. Mr Oakes added: We are holding Arla UKs managing director Tomas Pietrangeli to his commitment made at NFU Conference to look into risk management options for Arla suppliers. We are calling on Arla to speed up this work so farmers can see the results. The NFU Dairy Board is due to meet with Arla later in the year and will be reinforcing this call. The Culprits "They have disappeared over night without paying the rent and have taken every bit of mine and luis's clothes shoes bags, small speakers (We had maximum of our stuff here). Stole Her Lingerie "They didn't even leave behind our under wear and socks for that matter (everything they could take away in bags they have taken). We had stored all the stuff under the bed storage and it is all wiped clean (sic)." Broke Everything "My statues and frames have been broken and furniture had been moved around and put in different areas of the home. They changed my lock on the door." Tough Times "The society had to break the lock down before I came to check what all has gone. This doesn't end here." Duped Her Care Taker "They have fleeced my care taker for 85k giving her dreams of taking her son to New Zealand for work saying they need the money for paper work." Cheated Another Lady "They also have fooled another lady for 40k and another man for his land papers (copy of sale deed) saying they wana get the papers checked by their lawyer. This is all happened in Candolim area." Spread The Word "My request to everyone is to please forward this post to all the friends and family who live in GOA or around GOA so they are aware of what has happened to me." Inform The Police "And if anyone sees them anywhere in Goa please let the cops know. We have to get these people caught." So Sad "This photo was taken by my caretaker after they checked in in which her daughter is with them. And guess what... that top that lady on the left is wearing is MINE (sic)." So Shocking It is so shocking that a couple has duped so many people at one time and escaped without a trace. Justice For All We hope the Goa police would nab the couple as soon as possible and put them behind bars before they do the same to others. A plea was filed before a city court seeking lodging of an FIR against Bollywood actors Salman Khan, Katrina Kaif and others for allegedly using a casteist slur against the scheduled castes. According to the complaint, Khan had used the word during the promotion of his film Tiger Zinda Hai. The plea, filed before Additional Sessions Judge Sidharth Sharma, alleged that the accused persons had "committed atrocity" on the members of the caste and insulted and humiliated them by making the casteist remark. The court put up the matter for consideration on February 27, and sought a reply from the Station House Officer concerned on the complaint. The complaint, filed by Harnam Singh, a former Chairman of Delhi Commission for Karamcharis, alleged that the remark was made by Khan during a programme on a television channel while Kaif, "rather than protesting at the offensive and insensitive statement, joined the accused number 1 (Khan) in insulting and abusing the victim through her conduct." Singh said he had in December last year filed a complaint at a police station here, but no FIR has been registered yet, due to which he filed the application before the court. On the work front, Salman Khan and Jacqueline Fernandez wrapped up Race 3's Bangkok schedule recently. Apart from Salman and Jacqueline, Race 3 also stars Anil Kapoor, Bobby Deol, Saqib Saleem and Daisy Shah. Produced by Salman Khan Films and Ramesh Taurani under the banner of Tips Films, Race 3 is directed by Remo D'souza and will hit theatres on Eid 2018. (With PTI inputs) Also Read: Kareena Kapoor Talks About Taimur's Birth, Reveals Some Days Were Really Frustrating; Here's Why Offline Maps You can download a section of a map with Google Maps and use your old smartphone as a GPS device in your bike or car. This app has a horizontal selection tool included in the Offline Maps section. It will tell you the amount of space used for the offline maps. The map will be automatically updated as soon as it is connected to Wi-Fi. Set your default address After downloading offline maps, you can add your home and work addresses as this process has dual benefits. It will help in quick navigation and also give you traffic alerts on the routes. Share your location Google introduced the location sharing feature that allows you share your location with your friends in real-time via Google Maps for a specific time period. This feature will be useful for those who it tough to make their friends understand where they are. Google Map Features - GIZBOT Nearby places and businesses Google Maps lets you search for nearby places and businesses. The keywords you use on Google search engine can be used to get the right results. SEE ALSO: HTC launches Vive Business Edition VR headset in India One-handed zoom It will be difficult to zoom in on the map when you are navigating. You can double tap the section of the map you want to zoom in to it. You can double tap again to continue zooming. Train and bus schedules In India, Google Maps includes timings for the trains and buses in your city. You can search for bus routes to your destination and filter the results to see the different modes of public transport. The bus routes, stops and duration are updates based on the routes. Track your movements Google Maps has a history of all your movements every day. You can see an option called Timeline that will show the places you have visited and routes you have taken. Become a local guide Google Rewards is an effort taken by Google to pay you if you spend your time providing feedback on services via surveys. The program is available on Google Maps under the Local Guides section. You can add details related to businesses and provide your reviews along with photos. First Android Go smartphones to be unveiled at MWC 2018 News oi-Abhinaya Prabhu Android Go phones will cost less than $50. Google has announced that it will unveil the first smartphones running Android Oreo (Go edition) at the MWC 2018 tech show next week. However, the company has not revealed the names of these upcoming smartphones. It has just mentioned that these Android Go smartphones will be priced at less than $50. Android Oreo (Go edition) is the version of the platform that is optimized for the low-end devices. It is a version of Android that ships with optimized Play Store and applications those are light in weight. Google reveals that we can expect these Android Go entry-level smartphones to experience 15% faster app performance with the lightweight apps and twice the amount of free storage. The in-built apps are said to occupy around 50% lesser space than the conventional apps. The low-end smartphones running Android Go will have 1GB or lesser RAM and 8GB storage space probably. Despite the low-end specs, Google promises to offer a high-quality experience as it is not too heavy on resources. Back in December 2017, Google announced the Android Oreo (Go edition) along with the Android 8.1 release. This modified iteration of the OS offers a stable, easy to use, and beautiful software experience for the low-end devices. Google has been releasing Go edition versions of the popular Android apps such as Maps, Chrome, Gmail, and Google Play Store itself. Also, the company has been reworking the Google Assistant for these smartphones so that users can send messages, set alarms, make calls, and do more using their voice. However, as Google Assistant works with only limited languages right now, the Android (Go edition) is gearing towards offering support to the native language of people in the developing countries. Besides Android Go, the company is also offering the Android One program that is focused on the mid-range market segment. This has been existent for quite some years and the recent device to be launched is the Xiaomi Mi A1. Get to know the differences between Android One and Android Go from here. 12 Cool Uses of Old Android Smartphone We can expect Google partners to come up with new Android One devices as well at the MWC 2018 and one such expected smartphone is Nokia 1 from HMD Global. Android One smartphones based on stock Android will get support to OS updates for two years. Even Asus is said to unveil an Android One smartphone at the tech show. Best Mobiles in India Facebook, To stay updated with latest technology news & gadget reviews, follow GizBot on Twitter YouTube and also subscribe to our notification. Allow Notifications Xiaomi Redmi Note 5 Pro gets Face Unlock with MIUI 9.2 update News oi-Abhinaya Prabhu Redmi Note 5 Pro joins the list of smartphones with the Face Unlock feature. Xiaomi Redmi Note 5 Pro went on sale in India via Flipkart and Mi.com along with the Redmi Note 5 yesterday. Given that the device is priced at Rs. 13,999 and Rs. 16,999, it is facing an intense demand among buyers. This is evident from the massive sales that has crossed over 3 lakh units of these smartphones in just three minutes. During the announcement of the Redmi Note 5 Pro on February 14, the company assured that the device will get the Face Unlock feature in March. Now, the company has rolled out this feature for the Nightly build users in closed beta. The update brings the Face Unlock feature along with a slew of system optimizations. Xiaomi Redmi Note 5 Pro First Impressions Xiaomi is known for rolling out Global Nightly Beta ROMs to the closed beta testers every Tuesday. The company recruits closed beta testers for its smartphones via the MIUI forums. So after testing these new features in the Global Nightly Beta ROM, the company will release the same to the Global Beta ROM and then to the final stable version of the ROM. Given that the Face Unlock as been rolled out along with the latest MIUI 9.2 Nightly update, we can expect the Redmi Note 5 Pro to get the feature as a part of the stable MIUI 9 ROM by the end of March this year as promised by Xiaomi. The company is yet to come up with the download links of the Global beta ROM and stable ROM for the smartphone. We can expect the same to be revealed in the coming weeks. Notably, the MIUI 9.2 Nightly build has been rolled out as an OTA update. It will take the device to the version number MIUI 9.2.4, claims Clinton Jeff, the Product PR representative of Xiaomi India. Those who managed to get hold of the Redmi Note 5 Pro in the first sale that happened yesterday, can get the update that will bring the Face Unlock feature to their smartphone if they opt to be a part of the closed beta testers group. Having said that, the next sale of the Xiaomi Redmi Note 5 Pro is all set to happen on February 28 via Mi.com and Flipkart. We expect to see a massive demand even for the next sale of the smartphone. Best Mobiles in India Facebook, To stay updated with latest technology news & gadget reviews, follow GizBot on Twitter YouTube and also subscribe to our notification. Allow Notifications Sun Sunday 81 /52 Times of sun and clouds. Highs in the low 80s and lows in the low 50s. Kuwait - Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance King Air 350ER Media/Public Contact: pm-cpa@state.gov Transmittal No: 17-78 WASHINGTON, FEB. 21, 2018 -- The State Department has made a determination approving a possible Foreign Military Sale to Kuwait of King Air 350ER Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) aircraft for an estimated cost of $259 million. The Defense Security Cooperation Agency delivered the required certification notifying Congress of this possible sale today. The Government of Kuwait has requested a possible sale of four (4) King Air 350ER Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) aircraft with enhanced PT6A-67A engines and one (1) engine spare; four (4) AN/AAQ-35 WESCAM MX-15HDi Electro-Optical & Infrared Imaging Sensor Turret; four (4) Selex Seaspray 7500E Active Electronically Scanned Array Radars (AESA); AN/AAR-47 Missile Warning Systems (MWS); AN/ALE-47 Countermeasure Dispenser Systems; secure communications, cryptographic, and precision navigation equipment; Identification Friend or Foe (IFF) Systems; aircraft modification and integration for ISR mission systems; facility design and construction; ground data processing systems and support equipment; spares and repair parts; support and test equipment; simulators, training and training equipment; publications and technical documentation; U.S. Government and contractor engineering, technical and logistics support services; and other related elements of logistical and program support. Additionally, one of the four aircraft will be further modified to accommodate VIP/senior leadership personnel for transport and Med Evac capability or command and control, and other related elements of logistical support. The estimated total case value is $259 million. This proposed sale will contribute to the foreign policy and national security of the United States by helping to improve the security of a friendly country. Kuwait plays a large role in U.S. efforts to advance stability in the Middle East, providing basing, access, and transit for U.S. forces in the region. The proposed sale will enable Kuwait to gather its own airborne ISR data. This capability will improve Kuwait's situational awareness, armed forces posture, and armed forces capability to respond to threats. Enhancing Kuwait's Command, Control, Communications, Computers, & Intelligence (C4I) capability will result in the potential for greater burden sharing. The proposed sale of items and services will establish Kuwait's first dedicated airborne ISR fleet. The King Air 350ER ISR is part of the Kuwaiti Air Force's rapid expansion and modernization efforts, and is a priority for Kuwait and the United States. Kuwait will have no difficulty absorbing this equipment into its armed forces. The proposed sale of this equipment and support will not alter the basic military balance in the region. The principal contractor will be Sierra Nevada Corporation, Hagerstown, MD. There are no known offset agreements proposed in connection with this potential sale. Implementation of this proposed sale will not require the long term assignment of any additional U.S. Government representatives to Kuwait. There will be U.S. contractor field representatives relocating to Kuwait in order provide day-to-day maintenance and logistics support. There will be no adverse impact on U.S. defense readiness as a result of this proposed sale. This notice of a potential sale is required by law and does not mean the sale has been concluded. All questions regarding this proposed Foreign Military Sale should be directed to the State Department's Bureau of Political Military Affairs, Office of Congressional and Public Affairs, pm-cpa@state.gov. -30- NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address DoD Now on Track to Rebuild, Restore Military, Spokesperson Says By Jim Garamone DoD News, Defense Media Activity WASHINGTON, Feb. 22, 2018 The Bipartisan Budget Act puts DoD on track to rebuild, restore and modernize the U.S. military, Dana W. White, the Pentagon's chief spokesperson, said today. The act lifts the spending caps for fiscal years 2018 and 2019, allowing the department to climb out of a readiness trough and providing funding necessary to modernize the force. "The bipartisan measure will allow Congress to appropriate DoD funds at the level requested by the president for both F.Y. '18 and '19," White said. Hand-in-hand with this is the need for the department to be a good steward of taxpayer dollars, she said. This is one of Defense Secretary James N. Mattis' top priorities. "We want to maximize the value of every tax dollar we receive," White said. Congress still has some work to do. Right now, the department is still operating on a continuing resolution. The appropriations committees need to produce either individual bills for the departments or an omnibus bill covering the entire government. The deadline for this is March 23. If the bills are passed, the department will still have the time to obligate fiscal 2018 funds by the end of the fiscal year Sept. 30. White also welcomed two senior officials who will be instrumental in ensuring the department spends its funds wisely: Jay Gibson, DoD's first chief management officer, and third-in-command after the defense secretary and deputy defense secretary; and Mike Griffin, undersecretary of defense for research and engineering. "Their arrival marks the largest reorganization of the department since the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act, a key step in our reform efforts," White said. White also announced that the secretary will make his recommendations to President Donald J. Trump on transgender service members. She said she expects the president to make his decision known soon after. "This is a complex issue, and the secretary is taking his time to consider the information he's been given," White said. "It's an important issue, and again, he sees all of his decisions through the lens of lethality." NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Pacific Partnership Enhances Regional Disaster Response Cooperation By Navy Petty Officer 1st Class Micah Blechner, Logistics Group Western Pacific SINGAPORE, Feb. 22, 2018 The Navy will join allied and partner-nation militaries for the 13th Pacific Partnership mission, scheduled to start tomorrow. This annual maritime operation will help improve disaster response preparedness, resilience and capacity while enhancing partnerships with participating nations and civilian humanitarian organizations throughout the Indo-Pacific region, officials said. Pacific Partnership is the largest annual multilateral disaster response preparedness mission conducted in the Indo-Pacific region. This year's mission will be led by Destroyer Squadron 31 and staff embarked on the hospital ship USNS Mercy and the expeditionary fast transport ship USNS Fall River, and will include more than 800 military and civilian personnel from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, France, Peru and Japan. Deepening Ties With Regional Partners "Through Pacific Partnership we are deepening integral ties with our allies and partners across the Indo-Asia-Pacific region," said Navy Rear Adm. Don Gabrielson, commander of Task Force 73, the executive agent for Pacific Partnership 2018. "The challenges we face with natural and man-made disasters do not respect borders or national sovereignty," Gabrielson added. "This dynamic mission enables many nations and subject-matter experts to come together to pursue solutions to complex problems while enhancing preparations for disaster emergencies that reduce the severity of their impact. The foundation of trust created through Pacific Partnership engagement helps foster a cooperative environment that encourages collaborative approaches to improving the lives and conditions for the people of this region and beyond." USNS Mercy will make mission stops in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Vietnam, while USNS Fall River will visit Yap, Palau, Malaysia and Thailand. Medical, dental, civil engineering and veterinary teams will partner with each host nation to conduct civic-action projects, community health exchanges, medical symposiums and disaster response training activities. Engagements With Communities Additional community relations engagements will occur in each mission stop to enhance relationships and camaraderie with citizens of the host nations. Following the mission stops, Mercy will also visit Japan during its return transit across the Pacific Ocean. Engagements between Pacific Partnership 2018 participants and host nations are intended to improve capacity, enhance regional partnerships, and increase multilateral cooperation for preparedness. "Our staff and team have come together to form a dynamic team of professionals, and we are ready to execute this mission and engage with our partners throughout the Indo-Pacific," said Navy Capt. David Bretz, commodore of Destroyer Squadron 31. "We are excited about forging new friendships and deepening partnerships across the region." Pacific Partnership began in response to one of the world's most catastrophic natural disasters: the December 2004 tsunami that devastated parts of South and Southeast Asia. The mission has evolved over the years from emphasis on direct care to an operation focused on enhancing partnerships through host nation subject matter expert and civil-military exchanges. Operation's Distinctions Pacific Partnership 2018 will have several other distinctions: -- A multinational command-and-control structure will be used to include a deputy mission commander from the United Kingdom and mission chief of staff from Australia; -- The mission will visit Sri Lanka for a second consecutive year to enhance ties with the Indian Ocean nation; -- Pacific Partnership will continue to leverage the U.S. National Action Plan on Women, Peace, and Security, a plan backed by Executive Order 13595 and U.N. Security Council Resolution 1325. Officials said integration of WPS into Pacific Partnership yields opportunities to engage with partner nations on the topic of gender integration and perspectives, as well as preparedness in dealing with vulnerable populations -- women, children, elderly and disabled -- during and in the aftermath of crises; and -- This year's mission will return to Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam, where the United States continues its legacy of strong cooperation and defense ties with these nations. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Officials Highlight German-American Partnership at Security Conference By Christine June George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies MUNICH, Feb. 22, 2018 Wolfgang Ischinger, the chairman of the Munich Security Conference, told members of the Loisach Group that the German-American partnership is the "backbone" of the transatlantic alliance and the conference, which was held here Feb. 16-18. Each February, the Munich Security Conference brings together more than 450 senior decision-makers from around the world to engage in an intensive debate on current and future security challenges. The Loisach Group is a collaboration between the Munich Security Conference and the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies that focuses on enhancing the security partnership between the U.S. and Germany while promoting an enduring strategic dialogue between these essential partners. The group met Feb. 19 after the Munich Security Conference wrapped up. The Marshall Center, based in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany, is a 25-year old German-American security partnership that has produced generations of global security professionals schooled in American and German security policies. Key to Mutual Security "Our [Loisach Group] guiding principle is the belief that the German-U.S. partnership is the key relationship in America's security relationship with Europe beyond NATO," said Keith W. Dayton, the Marshall Center's director. "This transatlantic relationship is at the foundation of our group and is, we believe, the key to our mutual security." The group was formed last year to focus on enhancing the security partnership between the United States and Germany with a view toward establishing an enduring strategic dialogue platform. The Loisach Group held a roundtable discussion engaging ambassadors, former White House officials and senior German and American military officers, academics and journalists to further strengthen the strategic dialogue by discussing the lessons identified by this year's Munich Security Conference. "I think it's very important that we had this meeting immediately after the Munich Security Conference because it gave us the chance to reflect on what has been said, especially about how to foster the German-American relationship," said German Army Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Jorg Vollmer. "What the Loisach Group bought together today was good and open discussions, exchange of thoughts, and gave all of us, I think, an idea on what we need to improve in the upcoming weeks and months." 'Most Important Relationship in the World' Vollmer was a part of the panel discussion on the state of the German and U.S. strategic dialogue along with Frederick Benjamin "Ben" Hodges III, former commanding general of U.S. Army Europe. "I believe that the relationship between Germany and the United States is the most important relationship in the world for the United States," Hodges said. "Germany is a partner that we need to jealously guard and protect that relationship -- [it is] strategically important for us." Hodges added, "The Loisach Group is another line of effort to help achieve that." Strategic Dialogue This is the first time that Loisach Group held a side event at the Munich Security Conference. The other panel discussion at this side event was on aligning U.S. and German security policy. Sharing their thoughts on this discussion were Karl-Heinz Kamp, president of the Federal Academy for Security Policy in Berlin, and Dan Hamilton, executive director of the Center of Transatlantic Relations at Johns Hopkins University in Washington. "I couldn't be more pleased with the level of engagement and the level of interest," said Andrew A. Michta, dean of the Marshall Center's College of International and Security Studies. "I think we have taken a very significant step in building that network of people who are committed to the German-American security strategic dialogue that Secretary of Defense [James N.] Mattis mentioned when he was here." Mattis and German Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen visited the Marshall Center for the 70th anniversary of the Marshall Plan commemoration ceremony in June last year. "They inaugurated something they called a new 'strategic dialogue' between Germany and the United States," Dayton said. 'In my view, this was a recognition that the security bond between our two countries was extremely important and could not be allowed to fade." Loisach Group's Past, Future The name of the group refers to the Loisach River in Garmisch-Partenkirchen and the fact that the water from that river flows into Munich. The first meeting of the Loisach Group was in May last year, and the second meeting was a few months later in December. Michta said the next meeting for the Loisach Group is planned for this summer before the NATO Summit in Brussels. "We will be able to generate some additional ideas and hopefully, send it to our stakeholders in Berlin and Washington, D.C.," he said. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address German-American Officials Explore Transatlantic 'Backbone' at Munich Security Conference By Christine June, George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies February 22, 2018 MUNICH (Feb. 22, 2018) -- Just in the past five years, events like the Annexation of Crimea and political changes throughout Europe have some officials and members of civil society publicly voicing their concerns about the strength of the transatlantic alliance, even right down to the "backbone." Chairman of the Munich Security Conference Ambassador Wolfgang Ischinger referred to the German-American partnership as the "backbone" of the transatlantic alliance and of the Munich Security Conference. He was speaking to members of the Loisach Group after their eight-hour, side event at the Munich Security Conference held here Feb. 19. MUNICH SECURITY CONFERENCE COLLABORATION Each February, the Munich Security Conference brings together more than 450 senior decision-makers from around the world to engage in an intensive debate on current and future security challenges. The Loisach Group is a collaboration between the Munich Security Conference and George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies, based in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany. The Marshall Center is a 25-year old German-American security partnership that has produced generations of global security professionals schooled in American and German security policies. "Our (Loisach Group) guiding principle is the belief that the German-U.S. partnership is the key relationship in America's security relationship with Europe beyond NATO," said retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Keith W. Dayton, the Marshall Center director. "This transatlantic relationship is at the foundation of our group and is, we believe, the key to our mutual security." The Loisach Group was formed last year to focus on enhancing the security partnership between the United States and Germany with a view toward establishing an enduring strategic dialogue platform. The Loisach Group held a roundtable discussion engaging ambassadors, former White House officials, and senior German and American military officers, academics and journalists to further strengthen the strategic dialogue by discussing the lessons identified by this year's Munich Security Conference. "I think it's very important that we had this meeting immediately after the Munich Security Conference because it gave us the chance to reflect on what has been said, especially about how to foster the German-American relationship," said the Commander of the German Army Lt. Gen. Jorg Vollmer. "What the Loisach Group bought together today was good and open discussions, exchange of thoughts, and gave all of us, I think, an idea on what we need to improve in the upcoming weeks and months." 'MOST IMPORTANT RELATIONSHIP IN THE WORLD' Vollmer was a part of the panel discussion on the state of the German and U.S. strategic dialogue along with retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Frederick Benjamin "Ben" Hodges III, former commanding general of United States Army Europe. "I believe that the relationship between Germany and the United States is the most important relationship in the world for the United States," Hodges said. "Germany is a partner that we need to jealously guard and protect that relationship - strategically important for us. "The Loisach Group is another line of effort to help achieve that," he said. 'STRATEGIC DIALOGUE' This is the first time that Loisach Group held a side event at the Munich Security Conference. The other panel discussion at this side event was on aligning U.S. and German security policy. Sharing their thoughts on this discussion were Dr. Karl-Heinz Kamp, president of the Federal Academy for Security Policy in Berlin, and Dr. Dan Hamilton, executive director of the Center of Transatlantic Relations at the Johns Hopkins University in Washington, D.C. "I couldn't be more pleased with the level of engagement and the level of interest," said Dr. Andrew A. Michta, dean of the Marshall Center's College of International and Security Studies. "I think we have taken a very significant step in building that network of people who are committed to the German-American security strategic dialogue that Secretary of Defense Mattis mentioned when he was here." The U.S. Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis and German Minister of Defense Ursula von der Leyen visited the Marshall Center for the 70th Anniversary of the Marshall Plan Commemoration Ceremony in June last year. "They inaugurated something they called a new 'strategic dialogue' between Germany and the United States," Dayton said. 'In my view, this was a recognition that the security bond between our two countries was extremely important and could not be allowed to fade." LOISACH GROUP'S PAST, FUTURE The name of the group refers to the river in Garmisch-Partenkirchen and the fact that the water from the Loisach River flows into Munich. The first meeting of the Loisach Group was in May last year, and the second meeting was a few months later in December. Michta said the next meeting for the Loisach Group is planned for this summer before the NATO Summit in Brussels. "We will be able to generate some additional ideas and hopefully, send it to our stakeholders in Berlin and Washington, D.C.," he said. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address West Virginia leaders meet with Peruvian counterparts By Capt. Holli Nelson | West Virginia National Guard February 22, 2018 LIMA, Peru -- West Virginia National Guard senior leaders and members of the State Partnership Program met with Peruvian military leadership in Lima, Peru recently to develop a path forward for future engagements in the coming months and years. Maj. Gen. James A. Hoyer, West Virginia's adjutant general, and senior enlisted leader, Command Sgt. Maj. James L. Allen, along with the SPP team and U.S. Embassy in Peru personnel, met individually and collectively with various high-ranking officials within the Peruvian military forces to establish priorities through key leader engagement. Altogether, meetings occurred between the WVNG and U.S. Ambassador to Peru Krishna Urs, Peruvian army and air force commanding generals, operations officers and other key leaders of the service branches and joint force, as well as the leaders of the National Civil Defense Institute (INDECI) and National Emergency Operations Center. "Having the opportunity to meet face to face with the new leadership in the Peruvian army and air force and civilian authorities to establish goals and objectives to move our strong partnership forward was an important step in ensuring we help our partner nation grow and prosper militarily," said Hoyer, the WVNG adjutant general. "Our Soldiers and Airmen in West Virginia possess unique skill sets that align perfectly with what our Peruvian partners need to further develop their military programs and response efforts." He continued, "They ultimately want what we want in West Virginia, to be a force capable of responding to their people when they need them most and I know we can help them achieve that goal." Due to the Peruvian military's unique command structure and recent rotation of leadership, the meetings were necessary to ensure a strong partnership can continue between the two entities and to look for new opportunities for growth through the State Partnership Program. Between both the Peruvian army and air force, a common theme of ensuring the military can provide help to citizens in a natural disaster or humanitarian crisis was at the top of the list for discussion points during the visit. With Peru's mountainous terrain and sometimes- unpredictable rain patterns, flooding is a major issue for many areas in the country, as well as the potential for catastrophic earthquakes or other natural disasters. Through previous meetings between the two military forces, the West Virginia National Guard has helped to establish and build upon current efforts within the Peruvian military to assist their citizens in a time of need. Such efforts have included subject matter expert training, showcasing equipment capabilities such as the C-130H, and sharing lessons learned from disaster response and new program creation. The WVNG leaders and the SPP director and coordinator, along with the U.S. Embassy staff in Peru, will establish the guidelines and potential opportunities for engagement that were outlined during the meetings with key leaders. Going forward, the WVNG will focus on providing timeframes, projects or other training events for Peru and West Virginia to meet and expand humanitarian assistance and disaster relief capabilities. Additionally, future endeavors may include non-commissioned officer development, aeromedical evacuation training, engineering support, and construction planning and development. West Virginia and Peru are jointly connected through the National Guard Bureau's State Partnership Program (SPP) and the two have been advising, training and assisting each other since 1996. Each year, the two forces are conducting roughly 15 or more engagements to build partner capabilities through the mutually beneficial endeavor. The SPP was designed in 1992 to improve and build relations around the globe through more than 70 partnerships with different countries. In just over 20 years, Peru and West Virginia have partnered together for more than 120 interactions between the forces providing insight into regional challenges facing the Andean Ridge, especially in the areas of counter-insurgency, anti-terrorism, emergency preparedness, risk mitigation, disaster response and recovery. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address NATO Secretary General commends Croatia for Support to Euro-Atlantic aspirations of Balkan Neighbours NATO - North Atlantic Treaty Organisation 22 Feb. 2018 NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg welcomed the Croatian Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic to NATO Headquarters on Thursday (22 February 2018) to discuss preparations for the Summit in July and regional cooperation in the Western Balkans. Mr. Stoltenberg thanked Croatia for its contributions to NATO, including to the battlegroups in Lithuania and Poland and to the Alliance's missions in Kosovo and Afghanistan. He also thanked Croatia for supporting NATO partners including Ukraine. They also discussed NATO's adaptation. "Your efforts help to make NATO strong", he said. "It shows that NATO is an Alliance of 29 Allies where we stand together and respond to a more challenging security environment". The Secretary General commended Croatia for "helping other neighbours in the Western Balkans to work on their Euro-Atlantic aspirations". He said: "NATO's door is open, we just enlarged last year with Montenegro and we have aspirant countries in the region and we welcome the support and efforts you make to help them". Mr. Stoltenberg also welcomed the fact that Croatia has stopped the cuts in defence spending and has now started to increase investments in defence. "We've all made a pledge in 2014 to stop the cuts, gradually increase and then move towards spending 2% of GDP on defence", he said. "And Croatia has stopped the cuts and started to increase and we welcome that". The Secretary General also underlined the importance of continuing to increase defence spending when the security environment becomes more challenging and difficult. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address 71 militants killed, 5 arrested during Egypt's operation in Sinai Iran Press TV Thu Feb 22, 2018 06:20PM Egypt has released the details of a massive military operation in the restive northwestern Sinai peninsula, saying 71 militants have been killed since the start of the offensive on February 9. Military spokesman Colonel Tamer Rifai said during a press conference on Thursday that seven members of the Egyptian security forces had also been killed in the operation, meant to root out militancy in Sinai. "Seventy-one extremists have been killed and five arrested," said Rifai, adding, "As a result of the heroic combat operations by our armed forces ... seven heroes of the armed forces were martyred." The official further noted that around 2,000 people had been rounded up in the operation, which came after an ultimatum by President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi to end deadly terrorist attacks in Egypt. Sinai has been the hotbed of militancy in Egypt since a coup led by Sisi ousted former president Mohamed Morsi in the summer of 2013. Sisi came to power a year later only to see attacks that had normally targeted security forces in Sinai expanded to the mainland Egypt to affect civilians. A branch of Daesh, a Takfiri terrorist group that is on its last legs in Iraq and Syria, where it was most active, has been behind many attacks in Sinai and elsewhere. The group was blamed for an attack at a northern Sinai mosque in November that killed more than 300 worshippers. Many blame Sisi's tough crackdown on dissent for the protracted violence in Egypt. Under the former army chief, the Egyptian judiciary has jailed tens of thousands of activists, many of them members or sympathizers of the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood, a political party from which Morsi and members of his cabinet had hailed. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address 7 killed in Boko Haram attacks in Cameroon, Chad Iran Press TV Thu Feb 22, 2018 04:58PM At least seven people have been killed in Chad and Cameroon by militants of the Boko Haram Takfiri terrorist group, which is based in neighboring Nigeria. A local source in the northern Cameroon border area said Thursday that five civilians had been killed in Boko Haram's raid two nights earlier on a border town, which gives direct access to Nigeria. "A group of Boko Haram fighters made an incursion during (Tuesday) night in Assigashia ...The attackers killed five people and wounded five more," said the source, who was close to administrative authorities. An official in the Cameroon security services also confirmed the raid and the casualty toll. Due to its geographic location, Assigashia has seen recurrent Boko Haram attacks in the past. The militants were blamed for a raid in January that left a civilian killed. Meanwhile, a captain and a soldier were killed in Chad in an ambush by Boko Haram. A senior military official said Thursday that the attack which took place a day earlier targeted the troops who were returning from a border patrol in the Lake Chad region near the Nigerian frontier. "The Boko Haram attackers disappeared into the island" on the lake, said the source about the attack, which was the first known assault on Chadian territory by Boko Haram since May 2017. More than 20,000 people have been killed and hundreds of thousands displaced in more than eight years of insurgency by Boko Haram in Nigeria, Chad, Cameroon and Niger. Nigeria's government says the militants have been pushed from major strongholds in northern cities and towns. However, attacks targeting civilians and security forces have continued unabated over the past months both inside and outside Nigeria's borders. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Russia Opposes U.S. Bid To Condemn Iran Over Supply Of Yemeni Arms RFE/RL February 22, 2018 Russia is opposing a bid by the United States and its allies to include language condemning Iran for allegedly violating an arms embargo imposed on Yemeni rebels in a United Nations resolution renewing that embargo this month. "We don't like condemnations at all, in general," Russian UN Ambassador Vasily Nebenzya said on February 21. "The resolution is about Yemen...not about Iran." The UN Security Council is negotiating over a draft resolution offered by Britain in consultation with the United States and France that would condemn Iran for violating the arms embargo on Yemen's Huthi rebel leaders and include a council commitment to take action over the violation. The United States has been lobbying for weeks for the UN council to hold Iran accountable for allegedly supplying weapons to the Shi'ite Huthi rebels, who have been battling Yemen's government in a civil war for years. A UN panel of experts last month corroborated U.S. allegations that ballistic missiles the Huthis fired at Saudi Arabia last year were manufactured in Iran. It said Iran violated the arms embargo, if not by supplying the missiles directly to the Huthis, by allowing the weapons to fall into Huthi hands. While Iran openly backs the Huthis, it has denied arming them. Britain's draft resolution would threaten action against Iran for "failing to take the necessary measures to prevent the direct or indirect supply, sale or transfer" of short-range ballistic missiles, drones, and other military equipment to the Huthis, UN diplomats said. The Security Council is expected to vote on the draft resolution next week, as the existing arms embargo is due to expire on February 26. Russia, as one of five world powers sitting permanently on the Security Council, has the power to block any new sanctions against Iran by vetoing the resolution. The Yemen conflict has turned into a proxy war between Iran and its regional rival Saudi Arabia, a U.S. ally that intervened in the civil war in 2015 by putting together a Gulf Arab coalition to wage air strikes against the Huthis on behalf of the Yemeni government. U.S. President Donald Trump has threatened to pull out of Iran's 2015 nuclear deal with world powers unless more is done to curb Iran's ballistic-missile development and role in such regional conflicts, saying the agreement's failure to address such matters was among its "disastrous flaws." The draft resolution offered by Britain would expand the Yemeni arms embargo to include "any activity related to the use of ballistic missiles in Yemen." But UN diplomats say Russia is opposing such language in negotiations over the text, with one UN diplomat telling Reuters that Russia viewed Britain's draft text as "unacceptable." With reporting by AFP and Reuters Source: https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-opposes-us-bid-condemn-iran- threaten-action-at-un-over-alleged-violations -yemeni-rebel-arms-embargo/29055829.html Copyright (c) 2018. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Dutch Parliament Recognizes Armenian Killings As 'Genocide' February 22, 2018 Lawmakers in the lower house of the Dutch parliament have overwhelmingly passed a motion recognizing as "genocide" the 1915 massacre of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. However, despite the vote on February 22, acting Foreign Minister Sigrid Kaag said the Dutch government would not follow the parliament's lead. Kaag said the cabinet would "continue to exercise restraint" with respect to the politically sensitive issue. The World War I-era mass slaughter and deportation of up to 1.5 million Armenians by Ottoman Turks is considered by many historians and several nations as genocide. Turkey objects to this, however, saying that Armenians died in much smaller numbers and because of civil strife rather than a planned Ottoman government effort to annihilate the Christian minority. At least 23 countries, including France and Germany, recognize the killings as genocide. The Dutch parliament's action is likely to heighten diplomatic tensions between the Netherlands and Turkey. Relations between Turkey and The Hague worsened in 2017, when the Netherlands refused Turkish ministers access to the country to campaign for a referendum, which eventually passed, giving President Tayyip Erdogan more power. Based on reporting by dpa and AP Source: https://www.rferl.org/a/dutch-parliament- recognizes-armenia-genocide/29057328.html Copyright (c) 2018. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Amnesty International Says Trump Setting 'Dangerous Precedent' Alan Crosby February 22, 2018 Amnesty International has taken aim at U.S. President Donald Trump and other world leaders the global watchdog says are abandoning human rights, accusing them of setting a "dangerous precedent" for other governments to follow. In an annual report released on February 22, Amnesty International Secretary-General Salil Shetty warns that in the current political climate "it is abundantly clear that none of us can take our human rights for granted." "The specters of hatred and fear now loom large in world affairs, and we have few governments standing up for human rights in these disturbing times," Shetty says. "Instead, leaders such as al-Sisi, Duterte, Maduro, Putin, Trump and Xi are callously undermining the rights of millions," he says, referring to Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Trump, and Chinese President Xi Jinping. "Last year our world was immersed in crises, with prominent leaders offering us a nightmarish vision of a society blinded by hatred and fear," Shetty continues. "This emboldened those who promote bigotry, but it inspired far more people to campaign for a more hopeful future." The report, titled The State Of The World's Human Rights, singles out Trump's controversial travel ban to the United States that targets people from six predominantly Muslim countries. The travel ban -- a revised version of a plan Trump introduced early in his term -- severely restricts the ability of people from Iran, Chad, Libya, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen to enter the United States. "The transparently hateful move by the U.S. government in January [2017] to ban entry to people from several Muslim-majority countries set the scene for a year in which leaders took the politics of hate to its most dangerous conclusion," Shetty says. Amnesty's report includes a survey of 159 countries and territories in an exercise to show how people have been suffering from conflict, displacement, discrimination, or repression. Signs of regression cited in the report also include restrictions on the right to protest in France and attempts to roll back women's rights from the United States to Russia and Poland. The annual report also says that the "feeble response" to crimes against humanity and war crimes from Burma to Iraq, South Sudan, Syria, and Yemen underscore the lack of leadership on human rights. "We saw the ultimate consequence of a society encouraged to hate, scapegoat, and fear minorities laid bare in the horrific military campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya people in Myanmar," Shetty says, using another name for Burma. In addition to the negative effects, the report also says that regressive policies have "inspired" many people to join long-standing struggles, with human rights activists helping to secure many "victories" across the globe. These include lifting the total abortion ban in Chile, achieving a step toward marriage equality in Taiwan, and securing a landmark victory against forced evictions in Abuja, Nigeria. "Defenders of human rights around the world can look to the people of the United States to stand with them, even where the U.S. government has failed," says Margaret Huang, executive director of Amnesty International USA. "As President Trump takes actions that violate human rights at home and abroad, activists from across the country remind us that the fight for universal human rights has always been waged and won by people in their communities," she adds. Amnesty also says that the rise of "the willingness of prominent leaders to tout fake news" has increased the importance of the role of free speech in the battle for human rights. Central Asia The space for civil society continued to shrink across the former Soviet republics of Central Asia, and a discourse hostile to human rights remained prevalent, Amnesty says. Human rights defenders, activists, the media and political opposition were frequently targeted by authorities. Across the region, the rights to freedom of association and peaceful assembly and the right to freedom of opinion and expression came under attack. Public protests were met with a range of restrictive measures and excessive use of force by police. Governments continued to implement counterterrorism measures that disproportionately restricted people's rights in the name of security, the report says. Afghanistan According to Amnesty International, widespread human rights violations and abuses resulted from the continuing conflict pitting the Taliban and other extremist groups, including Islamic State (IS), against the government. Thousands of civilians were killed or injured in the violence, while the number of people internally displaced by conflict rose to more than 2 million. In addition, about 2.6 million Afghan refugees lived outside the country. Violence continued against women and girls, by state and non-state actors, with a reported increase in armed groups publicly executing and lashing women. Human rights defenders received threats from both state and non-state actors while journalists faced violence and censorship, Amnesty said. Armenia Amnesty says there was "limited accountability" for the "unnecessary and excessive force" authorities used to suppress largely peaceful demonstrations in Yerevan the previous year. The trials of opposition members accused of hostage-taking and other violent crimes violated the right to a fair trial, according to Amnesty, which also said that a human rights defender faced criminal charges. Azerbaijan The report accuses authorities of intensifying a crackdown on the freedom of expression, particularly following what it said were revelations of large-scale political corruption. It noted that independent news outlets were blocked and their owners arrested and critics of the government continued to face politically motivated prosecution and imprisonment following unfair trials. Members of the LGBT community were arbitrarily arrested and ill-treated, the report says, adding that suspicious deaths in custody were still not being investigated effectively. Belarus Amnesty says the country's security authorities violently cracked down on peaceful protests and returned several people who were seeking international protection to their home countries despite fears of torture and other ill-treatment. It says heavy legislative restrictions on media, NGOs, political parties and public assembly remain in place. It also notes that the government in Minsk continued to refuse to cooperation with the UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in Belarus. Bosnia-Herzegovina The report says minorities continued to face widespread discrimination and threats and attacks against journalists and media freedom persisted. Meanwhile, access to justice and reparations for civilian victims of war remained limited. Georgia The country continues to be plagued by an impunity for human rights abuses committed by law enforcement officials, which underlines the need for an independent investigation mechanism, according to Amnesty. A legal dispute over a pro-opposition TV channel has sparked concerns about judicial independence and media freedom, while the fencing of the de facto borders with the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia continue to have a negative impact on local residents' economic and social rights. Iran The report says Iranian authorities heavily suppressed the rights to freedom of expression, association and peaceful assembly, as well as freedom of religion and belief, and imprisoned scores of people who voiced dissent. In the justice system, trials were systematically unfair and torture and other ill-treatment such as floggings and amputations were widespread and committed with "impunity." The authorities endorsed pervasive discrimination and violence based on gender, political opinion, religious belief, ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation, and gender identity. Hundreds of people were executed, some in public, and thousands remained on death row, including people who were under the age of 18 at the time of the crime occurred. Moldova Amnesty says the government recalled a draft law on NGOs which contained undue restrictions for organizations that receive foreign funding. The report is critical of an "unfair" trial where nine activists were convicted of attempting to organize mass disturbances in 2015 and given conditional prison sentences. It also notes that an LGBTI Pride in the capital Chisinau was stopped by police due to alleged security concerns, while President Igor Dodon made homophobic statements and discrimination against Roma persisted. Pakistan Amnesty says a crackdown on freedom of expression intensified last year, with The Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act, 2016 being used to intimidate, harass and arbitrarily detain human rights defenders for online comments. Enforced disappearances were widespread and impunity was prevalent. It highlighted blasphemy-related violence that claimed the life of a student, triggering rare condemnation from the government. Meanwhile, large demonstrations in support of blasphemy laws, which were used to convict people expressing opinions online. Journalists were attacked by unidentified assailants and minorities continued to face discrimination in the enjoyment of economic and social rights. Killings of women continued in so-called "honor" crimes, despite a 2016 law criminalizing the practice, and attempts to restrict child marriage were blocked by parliament. Russia Amnesty says that there were further restrictions on the rights to freedom of expression, association, and peaceful assembly in Russia. Harassment and intimidation of human rights defenders and independent NGOs continued. Cultural rights were reduced, including through reprisals and self-censorship. Religious minorities continued to face harassment and persecution. It said the right to a fair trial was frequently violated and that torture and other ill treatment persisted with the work of independent monitoring bodies for places of detention eroding further. "Serious" human rights violations continued in the North Caucasus and migrants and refugees were denied protection of their rights. Some forms of domestic violence were decriminalized. LGBT people continued to face discrimination and violence. For example, it says gay men in Chechnya were targeted through a coordinated campaign of abduction, torture, and killings by the Chechen authorities. Ukraine An investigation into the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) for its alleged secret prisons failed to make any progress, according to the report, while law enforcement officials continued to use torture and other ill-treatment. The Ukrainian authorities increased pressure on their critics and independent NGOs, including journalists and anticorruption activists. They launched criminal investigations and passed laws aimed at restricting the rights to freedom of expression and freedom of association, among other things, Amnesty said. The de facto authorities in the separatist-controlled territories continued to unlawfully detain and imprison their critics. In Russian-controlled Crimea, critics of the authorities faced intimidation, harassment, and criminal prosecution. The number of attacks on LGBT events rose across the country and the government failed to adequately address sexual and domestic violence. Source: https://www.rferl.org/a/amnesty-international-trump- other-leaders-setting-dangerous-precedent- abandoning-human-rights/29055935.html Copyright (c) 2018. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address EU Presses Moldova On Judicial Reform, Fighting Corruption Rikard Jozwiak February 22, 2018 BRUSSELS -- The European Union is urging Moldova to press ahead with judicial reforms and undertake a "more decisive fight against corruption," according to a draft text seen by RFE/RL. The draft expresses EU concerns over the prosecution of lawyers, judges, and political opponents and the "selective use" of law enforcement and justice proceedings which, it says, undermines the "public's respect and faith in the judicial system." The draft by the EU Foreign Affairs Council will be presented to the bloc's foreign ministers for approval on February 26. The remarks reflect longstanding demands by the EU for Chisinau to make substantial reforms to its judicial system and to crack down on corruption in what is one of Europe's poorest countries. In October 2017, the EU said it would not transfer a final tranche of loans worth 28 million euros ($35 million) to support a revamp of the justice system, saying the authorities had not fulfilled the bloc's conditions for receiving the money. The disbursement of other EU funding, including a 100 million euro ($118 million) microfinancial-aid package, has also been delayed. EU sources familiar with the matter told RFE/RL that the first payment in that funding package could be made in April, and that it would depend on Moldova's judicial, media, and electoral reforms. The draft does not state specifics, but says that "the council recalls that EU assistance to the Republic of Moldova is based on strict conditionality, and is linked to satisfactory progress in reforms." The reluctance to commit more funds to Chisinau is also linked to what the EU regards as the lack of progress of the investigation into a 2015 bank fraud that resulted in the disappearance of up to $1 billion from the country. The draft states that the fraud should be "subject to a thorough, impartial and comprehensive investigation and prosecution, with a view to recovering the misappropriated funds and to bringing all those responsible to justice, irrespective of any political affiliations." Controversial Electoral Reform The EU draft text also includes criticism of a bill introducing a mixed electoral system that was approved by lawmakers and signed into law by President Igor Dodon in July 2017 despite mass protests in Chisinau and criticism from the EU and the United States. The law provides for half of the lawmakers to be elected on party lists and the other half in individual constituencies. Critics say the changes favor Moldova's two largest political parties -- the ruling pro-Western Democratic Party and the opposition Russia-friendly Socialists. They say the Democratic Party initiated the changes to improve its chances in 2018 parliamentary elections amid declining popularity. The draft text underlines that "the consequences of the new electoral law system should be thoroughly and closely monitored during the electoral process, including during the campaign, on election day, and the period thereafter, with respect to their impact on democracy in general and on the multi-party system in particular." It said that with the law "majoritarian candidates may be influenced by businesspeople or other actors who follow their own separate interests." Moldova is not in the EU, but an Association Agreement between the bloc and Chisinau, signed in 2014, fully came into force in July 2016. The country has been marred by widespread corruption and high migration, as well as the frozen conflict with the Moscow-backed breakaway region of Transdniester. Source: https://www.rferl.org/a/eu-presses-moldova- judicial-reform/29057286.html Copyright (c) 2018. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Lavrov Vows Close Russia-Serbia Ties Despite EU Ambitions RFE/RL February 22, 2018 During a visit to Belgrade, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov welcomed Serbia's drive to join the European Union, but also vowed that Moscow would remain engaged with the Balkan country no matter what happens. Lavrov arrived in the Serbian capital on February 21 for a two-day visit aimed at bolstering long-standing ties with Serbia. "We always wanted partners to have a free choice and develop their political ties," Lavrov said at a news conference with President Aleksandar Vucic, who is leading Serbia through a delicate balancing act. The country is seeking to join the EU but at the same time attempting to preserve its traditional strong ties with Russia, which shares its Orthodox Christian heritage and has supported Belgrade in numerous disputes with the West. Vucic said that "Serbia is on the European path, but will continue to build best relations with Russia." "I presume there will be different wishes and pressure for those relations to go in the opposite direction, but Serbia will stay on the same line," he added. During a trip to Slovenia earlier in the day, Lavrov sharply criticized the West and the EU in particular for failing to maintain good relations with Moscow and for attempting to draw countries in the Balkans away from Russia. "I think it's absolutely detrimental to push a false choice on any country, which suggests that well, you go either West or East," he said. "Regrettably, some of our counterparts in the West proceed from precisely this logic when they communicate with countries in the Western Balkans, and not only there." While EU leaders have laid down tough conditions for joining the bloc -- particularly on establishing the rule of law, guaranteeing fundamental rights, and settling regional territorial disputes -- they say they have not pushed anti-Russian policies as a condition of membership. Vucic reassured Lavrov that despite its EU ambitions, Serbia would never impose financial sanctions on Moscow, as the United States and EU have done after Russia's annexation of Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula and for its support of separatists in eastern Ukraine. "I want to be clear, Serbia will never impose sanctions against the Russian Federation," Vucic said. Lavrov said that "neither Russia nor Serbia are imposing anything on each other." "Serbia is determined to keep its neutral status, which is a factor of stability in the Balkans," the Russian foreign minister added. Belgrade's neutral military policy has not been openly opposed by U.S. or European leaders. Western countries have raised questions, however, about Serbia's establishment of a joint Russian-Serbian humanitarian center in the southern city of Nis, which Western officials suspect may be used by Russia to harbor spies and disseminate propaganda in the Balkans. Lavrov was also set to meet with Serbian Prime Minister Ana Brnabic during his Belgrade visit, which coincides with the 180th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic ties between Russia and Serbia. With reporting by AP and dpa Source: https://www.rferl.org/a/lavrov-russia-serbia- slovenia-eu-nato-belgrade-vucic/29055325.html Copyright (c) 2018. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Hand-Me-Down Drones: US Navy May Pick Up Air Force's Retiring Predators Sputnik News 23:12 22.02.2018 The US Air Force fleet of MQ-1 Predator strike drones is slated to go offline later this spring, and the US Navy is mulling whether to scoop them up for naval aviation missions, an Air Force spokeswoman told Jane's International Defence Review on Wednesday. As of March 9, the US Air Force will exclusively fly a fleet of 93 MQ-9 Reaper drones, Jane's noted, though military contractors for the service will continue flying Predators for the rest of 2018. The Navy is in talks to acquire the retiring fleet of MQ-1 Predators, USAF spokeswoman Annabel Monroe said. The use of drones has drawn mixed reviews. Some military strategists say that drones are cheaper to fly than conventional strike aircraft and feature the added bonus of not putting a pilot's life on the line. A former US State Department official stationed in Yemen argued in 2013, however, that for every jihadist killed by a drone strike in Yemen, the US generates between 40 and 60 new enemies. The Friends Committee on National Legislation sees the low-cost argument in support of drone strikes as mistaken. "With the lack of overarching strategy, many mistakenly see drones as a low cost human and financial alternative to war. By deviating from conventional authorized and specified wars that start and stop, the drones program allows the US to remain in a constant state of endless war," the Friends Committee reports. "This shifts the strikes into covert operations with little or no congressional or public oversight, and operating outside of legal norms," the committee added. The War Zone, a vertical at The Drive, reports that there are at least 100 serviceable Predator drones in the Air Force's arsenal. "There are a number of possibilities as to where they could go, including Air Force museums," a spokesperson told the War Zone last month, adding that "the Air Force is working with the Navy to determine configurations and quantity for possible transfer." Sputnik NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Trump's Office: US Troops Can Stay in Syria Indefinitely Without Congress' OK Sputnik News 22:13 22.02.2018(updated 22:15 22.02.2018) NEW YORK (Sputnik) - President Donald Trump's administration has decided that US troops fighting the Daesh terror group (banned in Russia) can remain in Syria indefinitely without new legal authorization from Congress, two newly published letters written by senior Pentagon and State Department officials informed. "As a matter of domestic law, legal authority for the use of military force against Daesh and al-Qa'ida includes the Authorizations for Use of Military Force (AUMF) of 2001 and 2002," Assistant Secretary for Legislative Affairs Mary Waters wrote in a letter to Senator Tim Kaine. In her letter, Waters argued that international law also provides a legal basis for keeping US forces in Syria to protect Iraq and the United States from terrorists. In a separate letter to Kaine, Deputy Under Secretary of Defense David Trachtenberg outlined the Pentagon's plans to keep troops in the country indefinitely, emphasizing that the Congress had already granted authority for an open-ended mission when it passed the AUMF. The two letters came in response to Kaine's request that the Pentagon and State Department provide more information about the counter-Daesh mission in Iraq and Syria and clarify its objectives. In his own correspondence, Kaine expressed his concern that the United States would soon find itself lacking legal justification for the wars in Iraq and Syria, particularly if US-led forces began combating the Syrian government, Iran, Iranian proxies or other groups not mentioned or alluded to in the 2001 AUMF. Both Waters and Trachtenberg wrote in their responses that US troops could strike Syrian government or Iranian forces if either of these threatened or attacked American troops fighting the Daesh terror group. "The United States does not seek to fight the Government of Syria or Iran or Iranian-supported groups in Iraq or Syria," Waters said in her letter. "However, the United States will not hesitate to use necessary and proportionate force to defend US, Coalition, or partner forces engaged in operations to defeat Daesh and degrade al-Qa'ida. The AUMF, first passed by Congress on September 14, 2001, gave then US President George W. Bush the power to use military force against al-Qaeda and any associated forces responsible for September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. Nearly 2,000 US troops are currently operating in Syria, though the Syrian government has not authorized their presence in the country. Sputnik NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Dark Horse: South Africa's Bronco II Joins US Light Attack Aircraft Scene Sputnik News 22:05 22.02.2018(updated 22:07 22.02.2018) A South African company wants to take a bite out of the US light attack aircraft market by offering its Bronco II to the US military. "This is not simply an armed variant of a civilian crop-duster of a modified training aircraft," Ivor Ichikowitz, chairman of South-Africa based Paramount Group International, which produces the aircraft, told Flight Global on Wednesday ahead of the Air Force Association's Air Warfare Symposium in Orlando, Florida. "Every inch of this aircraft is designed for purpose specifically for the kind of asymmetrical warfare that sophisticated military forces are now being asked to conduct," he explained. The twin-seater aircraft is tailored for slow-speed surveillance and strike missions. Paramount Group is working with Virginia-based company Fulcrum Concepts to offer a US-made Bronco II for the Pentagon. According to Ichikowitz, negotiations are ongoing with "highly respected and experienced" manufacturers in the US to produce the aircraft. Boeing has a standing partnership with Paramount, but the Chicago-based aerospace and defense manufacturer is not mentioned in Paramount's news release. The US Air Force has a yet-to-be awarded contract for new light attack aircraft. The Sierra Nevada-Embraer A-29 Super Tucano, Textron AT-6 Wolverine and Scorpion were invited to a flight demonstrator in Holloman Air Force Base, New Mexico. This month, the Air Force announced that only the Wolverine and Super Tucano were invited back for another round of evaluations at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona this summer. It's not clear whether the Bronco II will be able to take part in the light attack contract competition. If the Bronco II cannot compete at the current light attack aircraft capability requirement, the next contract may not come around for years. Heather Wilson, secretary of the Air Force, said on February 16 that the service would spend $2.4 billion on light attack aircraft over the next five years, but none of the spending would occur until after 2020. The War Zone, a vertical at The Drive, notes that while Wilson said the service plans to buy light attack aircraft "very rapidly" once the next contract goes out, this summer's evaluation period of the A-29 and AT-6 will be the sixth such testing round since 2007 for the current contract. Sputnik NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address India 'Deeply Dismayed' by Extension of State of Emergency in Maldives Sputnik News 15:28 22.02.2018(updated 15:39 22.02.2018) India has reiterated that the consequent delay in the resumption of the political process and the continuing suspension of democratic institutions including the judiciary is likely to further delay restoration of normalcy in the Maldives. New Delhi (Sputnik): India has expressed strong concern over the government of Maldives' decision to extend the national state of emergency. On Tuesday the authorities extended the state of martial law by 30 days in the presence of only 38 lawmakers despite the country's law necessitating the requirement of at least 43 lawmakers being present and voting on the matter. India's Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) has said that it is important to ensure that all democratic institutions are allowed to function in a fair and transparent manner in accordance with the Constitution. "We are deeply dismayed that the Government of Maldives has extended the State of Emergency for a further 30 days. The manner in which the extension of the State of Emergency was approved by the Majlis in contravention of the Constitution of Maldives is also a matter of concern," MEA said in a statement on Wednesday evening. The Majlis (Parliament) of Maldives on Tuesday accepted the recommendation put forth by President Abdulla Yameen proposing to extend the state of emergency, hours after India called for an early restoration of normalcy in the archipelago nation. "It is important to ensure that all democratic institutions are allowed to function in a fair and transparent manner in accordance with the Constitution," India's Ministry of External Affairs said in a statement. The Maldives were plunged into a political crisis on February 1 after the country's apex court dismissed the conviction of former President Nasheed and his eight associates accused of terrorism. The crisis intensified after the current government led by Abdulla Yameen rejected the court's ruling and declared martial law on February 5. Sputnik NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Sweden Eyes Massive $22Bln Budget Hike to Create 'Formidable' Defense Sputnik News 14:55 22.02.2018 "Only then will we be able to talk about a defense force that's robust and dangerous," government investigator Ingemar Wahlberg said, presenting a survey lobbying for a radical 40-percent budget hike. A drastic increase in military spending would give Sweden a military with a sufficient deterrence capacity, a government investigation has found. A decline in the military's capacity would, by contrast, become "inevitable" after 2020, unless "large material investments" are made. Among others, Stridsfordon 9040 tanks will be over 30 years old after 2020. As a sort of future guide for Swedish politicians, the investigation has assessed and ranked a large number of defense projects considered relevant. Implementing all of them would set the Swedish state coffers back a whopping extra SEK 180 ($22 billion) by 2030, without even counting increased staff expenditures, the Dagens Nyheter daily pointed out. According to government investigator Ingemar Wahlberg, however, this would provide the Swedish defense with higher endurance, flexibility, impact power and better survival opportunities. The Armed Forces' ambition is to be able to resist an attack against a highly qualified opponent for three months without relying on help from other countries. According to Wahlberg, the proposed changes would make the Swedish defense "very warlike" and would cost a tentative attacker a lot of money. Should Swedish politicians prove unwilling to go all the way, the investigation has prioritized the defense projects into three levels in descending order of importance. The pivotal priority would be to strengthen existing units by replenishing their inventory and using it to the maximum. Additionally, the first step would entail more coastal missiles and an enhanced naval and amphibian capacity. Sweden would retain its five submarines and focus on artillery and air defense. Combined, these measures would cost SEK 56 billion ($7 billion). The second step, costing SEK 65 billion ($8 billion), would put a strong emphasis on fighter aircraft, strengthening sensors, radar equipment and weapons. Additionally, Sweden's air force would be spread across the nation to become less vulnerable to attacks from abroad. Wahlberg described the Swedish Air Force in its current state as "vulnerable." In the third step, costing SEK 47 billion ($6 billion), emphasis will be put on the Navy, procuring more submarines, as well as artillery for the ground forces. However, the investigation also proposed an adequate re-prioritization, should the Swedish leadership prove unwilling to take the proposal hook, line and sinker. Above all, the purchase of the US Patriot air defense system is advised to be postponed, which would free up SEK 12 billion ($1.5 billion) for maintaining existing equipment and procuring basic equipment for 50,000 soldiers. At present, the Swedish Armed Forces number around 20,000, down from 180,000 during the 1980s. Lastly, the investigation also estimated that defense measures planned by parliament for the period 2016-2020 are underfinanced by at least SEK 6 billion ($0.75 billion). According to Liberal party defense policy spokesman Allan Widman, the investigation doesn't leave Swedish politicians any other choice but to go all out. "It is a harsh and honest message delivered," Widman said, as quoted by the Sydsvenskan daily. The right-wing Sweden Democrats, who strive to cancel the purchase of the Patriot missile system and favor other solutions, also welcomed the investigation. In Sweden, which is currently still non-aligned despite increasing cooperation with NATO, military spending has dwindled from 3.1 percent of GPD in 1981 to a mere 1.1 percent in 2015, when it started to crawl upward, in a bid to match NATO's goal of 2 percent. According to Dagens Nyheter, Sweden's total military expenditure is projected to rise from SEK 37.5 billion ($4.6 billion) in 2015 to SEK 53.4 billion ($6.6 billion) in 2019. Sputnik NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Lack of funding for aid operations means 'people will die' in Central African Republic - UN official 22 February 2018 - A senior United Nations relief official is urging the international community to boost support for humanitarian efforts in crisis-gripped Central African Republic (CAR), where nearly half the population requires assistance. UN Deputy Emergency Relief Coordinator Ursula Mueller made the appeal in the capital, Bangui, on Thursday at the end of a four-day visit to the country. "CAR is facing a large-scale humanitarian crisis," she said. "Violence is fast spreading across the country while urgent and critical needs are increasing and should be covered. Civilians continue to bear the brunt of violence and insecurity." Clashes between the mainly Muslim Seleka rebel coalition and anti-Balaka militia, which are mostly Christian, plunged the country into civil conflict in 2013. The UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has described the CAR as "a fragile country" that has been devastated by years of conflict and faces both structural and economic challenges. Ms. Mueller, the Office's second-in-command, said protection will "remain central" to its action there in 2018. The UN and its partners are seeking $516 million to meet the needs of nearly two million people in the CAR this year, or roughly half the population. However, as Ms. Mueller pointed out, funding for humanitarian operations in the country has declined over the past three years. Meanwhile, the number of internally displaced people nearly doubled in 2017 to 694,000. Ms. Mueller witnessed the human face of the humanitarian crisis when she visited the northern town of Paoua. Clashes between armed groups have forced more than 65,000 people to flee there from surrounding villages. "I have seen people who are hungry. I call on the international community to support the humanitarian response for Paoua. If we do not receive funding, people will die," she stated. Meanwhile, residents have also been affected. The displaced people are living with local communities in Paoua which has depleted the limited resources available there. Ms. Mueller also expressed appreciation to humanitarian workers in the town and across the CAR. "They're doing incredible work under very difficult conditions. Targeted attacks prevent them from delivering life-saving assistance. Fourteen humanitarian workers were killed last year alone. This is unacceptable," she said. While in Paoua, Ms. Mueller met with displaced women, and marvelled at their strength and dignity amid what she described as "incredible hardships." She said: "They want safety, peace, and schools. What any mother wants for their children." One of the women, Veronique, fled to Paoua with her six children after her husband was killed. Another woman, Esther, spoke about her struggle to access food, health care and education. During her meeting with CAR President Faustin Archange Touadera, Ms. Mueller underlined the need to ramp up efforts to protect civilians. She also shared concerns expressed by the displaced people in Paoua, namely the need for security to help them return to their homes. The CAR is one of three countries that Ms. Mueller is visiting in West and Central Africa. She will also visit Cameroon and Chad in a mission that will wrap up next Tuesday, 27 February. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Afghanistan: UN mission welcomes new penal code, urges measures to protect women from violence 22 February 2018 - While welcoming the entry to force of a new Penal Code in Afghanistan as a having the "potential to trigger real change," the United Nations mission in the country said on Thursday that it is concerned by the removal of the chapter penalizing violence against women. The penal Code entered into force last week, placing the country, for the first time, into compliance with international treaty obligations in criminal justice, the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) said. "Together with international partners and experts from UN agencies, UNAMA supported Afghan authorities in drafting the code," the UN Mission said. "UNAMA will continue dialogue with stakeholders so that the application of the new codedoes not result in impunity gaps and in particular that there is a robust legal framework in place to protect women from violence," it added. The new Penal Code reinforces Afghanistan's compliance with international human rights and criminal justice standards and incorporates all mandatory crimes under the UN Convention against Corruption, the UN Convention against Transnational Organized Crimes (UNTOC) and its three protocols. Moreover, it incorporates the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court covering war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide and establishes command responsibility for those who fail to prevent or punish subordinates who commit these crimes. Reforming the sanctions regime, the new Penal Code introduces alternatives to imprisonment, which judges impose for imprisonment sentencing below five years, and are mandated to impose for incarcerations less than three months. The code also significantly reduces the number of crimes for which the death penalty applies. "The coming into force of the Penal Code will bring significant positive developments and a real potential to trigger societal transformation," UNAMA stated. Women's protection in jeopardy However, removing the chapter penalizing violence against women causes concern over safeguarding the strongest possible legal protection of women. Technical amendments to the Code will be essential to ensure that the criminal provisions of the Law on the Elimination of Violence Against Women (the EVAW Law) still apply. UNAMA noted that the current EVAW law remains in place and continues to provide overall legal protection for women, and remains committed to facilitating dialogue on ways to strengthen the criminalization of violence against women. "UNAMA looks forward to the full implementation of the revised Penal Code, with a view to achieving accountability for those who violate national and international laws," concluded the UN mission. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Afghanistan Unveils Plans for Controversial Militia Force By Ayaz Gul February 22, 2018 Afghanistan's ministry of defense has announced the creation of a new militia force comprising about 36,000 men to defend areas that military-led operations have cleared of Taliban insurgents. The move comes despite long-running accusations of rights abuses against the existing Afghan Local Police, which consists of local militias trained and paid by the U.S. military. Defense Ministry spokesman, Dawlat Waziri, said in a brief statement the new force will consist of 7,500 officers of the Afghan National Army, or ANA, and 28,500 other personnel. The recruitments will be made from Afghan government-controlled areas where they ultimately will be deployed after undergoing military training to keep insurgents from staging a comeback. He emphasized that the new Afghan militia force being raised will work under the direct command and control of the defense ministry. Waziri did not say when the recruiting process will begin. Patricia Gossman, senior Afghanistan researcher at Human Rights Watch, has swiftly criticized the announcement, saying accountability of forces operating outside the normal ANA structure has been a persistent problem. "What remains unclear is whether these recruits would come from existing militia forces, and if so, how the [Afghan] ministry would ensure that they would be held accountable," noted Gossman told VOA. The New York-based watchdog has been closely monitoring and documenting past allegations of rights violations against Afghan militias. 'Oversight mechanisms' go unexplained Gossman notes that Afghan authorities have not explained what kind of "oversight mechanisms" will be put in place to hold members of the new militia force responsible in instances of abuses against civilian population. Allegations against ALP members included sexual abuse of boys. "What lessons has the Defense Ministry learned from the problems with the ALP? No one has really answered these questions," she added. Afghan officials maintain, however, that by placing the new militia force under the army's control will help prevent the abuse and misuse of authority. Thursday's announcement comes amid fierce clashes between Afghan security forces and Taliban insurgents across the country, with both sides claiming to have inflicted heavy casualties on their opponents. The Taliban controls or contests about 44 percent of the Afghan territory and insurgents continue to stage deadly attacks against government forces. Under U.S. President Donald Trump's new Afghan war strategy, American forces have stepped up airstrikes against insurgent targets, hoping the battlefield pressure will push the Taliban to the negotiating table for talks with the Afghan government to end the conflict. The insurgent group has vowed to resist the pressure, though, and to intensify battlefield attacks in the coming spring fighting. The Afghan conflict killed and wounded more than 10,000 civilians while pro-government forces reportedly lost about 10,000 personnel in 2017. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Egypt sentences 21 to death over terrorism charges Iran Press TV Thu Feb 22, 2018 03:36PM Egypt has sentenced 21 people to death on charges of involvement in terror activities as the North African country presses ahead with a campaign to contain an insurgency linked to the Daesh Takfiri terrorist group. The state-run MENA news agency reported Thursday that the court also handed down hefty prison sentences to seven more people, accusing all the defendants in the case of belonging to a group linked to Daesh. The court said in its ruling that the convicts had been involved in activities disrupting public order, possessed weapons and endangered society, among other charges. Of the total 28 defendants, 16 were tried in absentia. The sentences are the latest to come from Egypt's Judiciary as the government of president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi faces increasing criticism over its inability to stop terrorist attacks across the country. Experts say Sisi's large-scale crackdown on dissent has been a main reason behind the continued unrest in Egypt. Courts have jailed tens of thousands of members or sympathizers of the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood, while its senior leaders, including former president Mohamed Morsi, face death or life sentences. A court on Thursday ordered six suspected Brotherhood members to remain in custody for 15 days pending investigation. The six were arrested on Wednesday on a farm belonging to Abdel-Monaem Abul Fetouh, a former Brotherhood leader and an outspoken government critic. Abul Fetouh was arrested last week after he returned from a trip to London. MENA reported Tuesday that Fetouh, along with 15 others, was added to Egypt's terrorism list after it was found that they had allegedly joined an outlawed organization "aiming to harm the interests of the state." Authorities have accused the popular activist, who was to contest the presidential election next month, of holding secret ties to Brotherhood leaders while abroad. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Trump administration considering new sanctions against Russia Iran Press TV Thu Feb 22, 2018 08:34AM The administration US President Donald Trump is considering new sanctions against Russia in response to alleged election meddling and a cyber attack last year, in a bid to push back against criticism that it has been slow to act. The sanctions process is slow moving for legal reasons and cannot be accelerated in response to negative headlines, three senior Trump administration officials told Reuters on Wednesday. "The process on sanctions is long; it's arduous; it's not pretty, but when the evidence is there and we're ready, we go ahead with the sanctions," one official said. The unnamed officials refused to shed more details on the nature of the new penalties and how long it would take the Trump White House to arrive at a decision. They, however, confirmed that some bans had already been imposed against two Russian entities Concord Catering, and Concord Management and Consulting. Both companies had been cited in a 37-page indictment issued by US Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who is overseeing a high-ranking probe into alleged ties between Moscow and the Trump team. According to Mueller's indictment, the two companies were in control of the Internet Research Agency, a group that coordinated the alleged meddling by directing hacking attacks that exposed Democrats' secrets. Trump has come under from both Republicans and Democrats in the US Congress, which nearly unanimously passed a new sanctions bill against Russia last summer, for not punishing Russia enough. The Trump administration announced in January it was not going to announce sanctions against Russia under the new law. The US and its European allies have imposed sanctions against Russia since 2014, when the Crimean Peninsula voted in a referendum to separate from Ukraine and reintegrate into Russia. According to the US State Department, the sanctions have so far cost Russian military companies more than $3 billion in failed weapons deals with other countries. "We believe somewhere north of $3 billion we've been able to stop those transactions," State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert told reporters on Tuesday. "Stopping transactions like that is, in effect, a punishment." NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Western Dragon: Chinese Air Force Deploy Advanced Fighters to Indian Border Sputnik News 22:42 22.02.2018 The People's Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF) has boosted their high altitude capacities along their southwestern borders, sending more top-of-the-line jet fighters to parts of China that border rival state India. Early in February, PLAAF published photos of Chengdu J-10 Vigorous Dragon multirole fighters and Shenyang J-11 (a modification of the famous Soviet Sukhoi Su-27) air superiority fighters participating in combat training exercises in western China. Speaking to the Chinese Communist Party-owned Global Times, PLA expert Song Zhongping explicitly labeled the purpose of the additional fighters to boost Chinese military strength in case of conflict against India. "The upgrade in the Western Theatre Command is urgent because in China's western region, relations with India have been strained due to the border tensions, with no resolution in sight," Song said. "Strengthening the 3.5-generation fighter jets or even stationing more advanced fighters in the Western Theater Command has been urgent for the PLA." "India is gearing up already, so it's necessary for China to prepare for a possible military confrontation. And in these mountainous areas, superiority in the air is of utmost importance." On their part, India has been bolstering their own military force along the Chinese border. They reportedly have deployed Su-30 MKI long range fighters, an Indian modification of the Soviet Sukhoi Su-30 to the border. When asked about the move, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang downplayed it. "I am not aware of the information mentioned by you. I may refer you to the military," he said in a statement. "We hope the Indian side can work with China to uphold the peace and tranquillity of the border areas because this is in common interests of both sides." The thin air and high altitude of the mountains of western and southwestern China reduces the range and effectiveness of fighter jets, placing the PLAAF at a disadvantage were they to fly missions against India. More advanced fighters like the J-10 and J-11 have improved aerodynamics, offsetting this problem. Relations between Beijing and New Delhi are typically strained, but they bottomed out in the summer of 2017 when both nations deployed military force to the Doklam Plateau, a remote mountain range that is disputed between China and India's close ally Bhutan. PLA soldiers and construction workers arrived to build a road through the plateau, which Beijing claims is part of Tibet. Bhutan protested China's presence, and India intervened by deploying troops to the disputed territory. For 10 weeks, PLA and Indian military troops faced off a few hundred meters apart. Both nations pulled their troops back on August 28 following quiet negotiations between the two powers and the road-building came to an end. However, reports began to surface in October that China had continued to maintain a large military presence near the disputed region, and January satellite photography confirmed that the PLA was settling into permanent military encampments a few miles back from the site of the stand-off. There has also been friction over Arunachal Pradesh, a province of India that is also disputed with China, who considers it to be part of South Tibet. Earlier in February, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi made a brief visit to Arunachal Pradesh, provoking a "stern" protest from the Chinese Foreign Ministry. Sputnik NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Chinese Air Force Passed Taiwan and Philippine Airspace on 'Long Haul' exercise Sputnik News 21:50 22.02.2018(updated 21:52 22.02.2018) A unit from China's People's Liberation Army Air Force, flew through the Bashi Channel between Taiwan and the Philippines as part of a long-range flight training mission in the western Pacific Wednesday, according to Taiwan's Ministry of National Defense (MND). Xi'an H-6K bombers, Shaanxi Y-8 electronic signal intelligence planes and J-11 fighters flew through the Bashi Channel at around noon on February, 21. They came from the Guangdong province in southern China and after finishing their training mission, the aircraft returned along the same flight path, according to local media. MND spokesman Chen Chung-chi said Taiwan's military, has closely monitored the Chinese military and was aware of the maneuvers. The Chinese aircraft did not "represent an immediate threat to Taiwan or any emergency situation." Reportedly, the exercise of the flight group was "nothing out of the ordinary." China from time to time holds military exercises and maneuvers in the Asia-Pacific region, which attract international attention. The main reason is the demonstration of the PLA's combat capability in the event of a conflict with neighboring states and special territories with which Beijing has not been able to achieve full mutual understanding and agreements on various geopolitical issues affecting the national interests of the People's Republic of China. The Chinese air force started carrying out air exercises in the western part of the country, over Tibet and close to the India-China border, in February. Notably, J-10 and J-11 jets are now stationed in China's western theater to bolster air defenses against a possible Indian threat. Sputnik NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address N Korea Calls US-Japan Missile Drills Provocation Against Intra-Korean Dialogue Sputnik News 21:39 22.02.2018(updated 21:41 22.02.2018) MOSCOW (Sputnik) - North Korea's committee on Korean reconciliation condemned on Thursday an upcoming joint US-Japan missile defense drill as an attempt to reignite regional tensions and obstruct the ongoing thaw between Pyongyang and Seoul. "Branding this as a ferocious gangster-like act aimed to tarnish the hard-won atmosphere for the improvement of the North-South ties and for peace on the Korean Peninsula, and as a dangerous military provocation to ignite the train of a war," the [North's] Korean National Peace Committee said in a statement, announced by state-run Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) and quoted by South Korea's Yonhap news agency. The statement was made after on February 15, the Japanese Defense Ministry announced that this year's joint ballistic missile defense exercise, which is due to start on Friday and last for a week, would have a larger scale than the previous ones and involve not only the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force and the US Navy but also the two countries' air force units and the US Marine Corps. The ministry stressed the importance of the drill, citing November's North Korean ballistic missile activities. The committee also noted "greater bellicosity" and the danger of the forthcoming exercise, pointing to the planned involvement of fighter jets and US marines. Tensions on the Korean Peninsula have further escalated as North Korea achieved significant progress in its nuclear and missile programs last year. Pyongyang tested several ballistic missiles, including its most advanced intercontinental ballistic missile in November, which it said was capable of hitting any part of the mainland of the United States. In turn, Washington has led a number of diplomatic initiatives to put pressure on Pyongyang and held several drills in the region. In January, Pyongyang and Seoul resumed bilateral talks ahead of the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics. As a result, their national teams marched together under a "unification flag" at the opening ceremony and are jointly participating in a number of sporting events. The sides also reportedly agreed to delay their military activities until after the Olympics, which will last through Sunday. Sputnik NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address China Probing Possible Breach of UNSC's N Korea Sanctions During Sea Transfer Sputnik News 15:06 22.02.2018 BEIJING (Sputnik) - Beijing is currently examining a Japanese report that a suspected Chinese vessel may have carried out a cargo transfer with a North Korean ship in violation of the UN Security Council's (UNSC) sanctions, Geng Shuang, the Chinese Foreign Ministry's spokesman, said. "China considers this case to be extremely important and is conducting a corresponding investigation. Beijing has always been strictly fulfilling the UNSC resolutions as well as its international obligations," Geng Shuang, the Chinese Foreign Ministry's spokesman said. On Wednesday, Tokyo reported an alleged violation of the UN sanctions by Pyongyang after detecting an apparent cargo transfer between the North Korean tanker Yu Jong 2 and an unidentified vessel in the East China Sea. A number of Chinese characters meaning" oil, [Chinese city] Ningde, province of Fujian" were spotted on the unknown ship. The spokesman added that, as for the alleged violation of the UNSC resolutions by Chinese individuals and legal entities," Beijing intends to seriously consider these cases in accordance with the country's legislation." North Korea has faced several rounds of sanctions over its nuclear and ballistic missile tests, conducted in violation of the UNSC resolutions. In response to these activities, in August the UNSC imposed sanctions on Pyongyang, targeting exports of coal, iron ore, and seafood from the Asian nation to UN member states. In December, new sanctions against North Korea were imposed, strengthening the measures regarding the supply, sale or transfer of all refined petroleum products, including diesel and kerosene to North Korea. Sputnik NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Creating History: India's First Woman Fighter Pilot Flies Solo on MiG-21 Bison Sputnik News 17:13 22.02.2018 For over 50 years, MiG-21 variants have been serving the Indian armed forces, and their quick reaction time still makes them potent for interception and ground attack roles. New Delhi (Sputnik): Flying Officer Avani Chaturvedi has become the first Indian woman fighter pilot to fly solo. The Indian Air Force (IAF) said that Chaturvedi flew a MiG-21 Bison in her first training solo sortie, in Jamnagar, Gujarat on Monday. "My heartiest congratulations to Flying Officer Avani Chaturvedi for successfully clearing her first solo sortie on a MiG-21 'Bison' fighter. The IAF has always taken a lead in providing an equal platform to women officers. It's a red letter day for the country," Air Chief Marshal B S Dhanoa told the Times of India. The IAF has given the MiG-21 Bison to the first three women fighter pilots, as it considers the aircraft best suited for sharpening the skills of new flyers, as they have more manual features compared to other, more sophisticated aircraft. Avani Chaturvedi, Bhawana Kanth, and Mohana Singh comprise the first batch of women fighter pilots who were commissioned in 2016 into the IAF previously considered a male bastion. The decision to let women assume combat roles was taken by the Indian government in October 2015. Meanwhile, combat roles in the Army are still not permitted for women, due to a combination of operational concerns and logistical constraints. The Indian Navy is also considering the idea of deploying women on warships. The country's Defense Minister Nirmala Sitharaman resolved to end gender inequality in the armed forces when she took over the ministry last year. Sputnik NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address China's Transgressions Expose Vulnerability of India's Chicken Neck - Navy Chief Sputnik News 14:06 22.02.2018(updated 14:07 22.02.2018) Siliguri, the only corridor that connects India's northeastern states to the rest of the country, feeds the primary military formations which would counter China in the event of a conflict. India fears that the frequent transgressions by the Chinese PLA are part of a plan to strangle this corridor. New Delhi (Sputnik): In a rare admission of the vulnerability of the strategic Siliguri corridor, which connects India's northeast to the rest of the country, navy chief Admiral Sunil Lanba has raised serious concern over frequent transgressions by Chinese troops into areas that are close to the corridor. The corridor, also referred to as the 'chicken's neck,' if choked, would cut off all supplies to the northeastern states hosting military formations that would counter China in case of war. "Frequent instances of transgression by the Chinese PLA across the Line of Actual Control (de facto border) and the recent standoff at Doklam are indications of increasing assertiveness of China, as it makes rapid progress economically and militarily. Recent developments have also underscored the vulnerability of the Siliguri Corridor," Admiral Sunil Lanba said. Meanwhile, the Indian Navy has reportedly deployed at least eight warships in the East Indian Ocean to track Chinese naval forces, which recently conducted a military drill in the open sea. On Tuesday, the Chinese news portal Sina.com.cn reported that eleven Chinese warships, including a fleet of destroyers and at least one frigate, sailed into the East Indian Ocean this month without making any concrete indication of the deployment regarding the crisis in the Maldives. "If you look at warships and other equipment, the gap between the Indian and Chinese navy is not large," Sina.com.cn said. However, the Indian defense ministry has denied the report, saying that no Chinese warship had come near the waters of the Maldives since political turmoil broke out in the island-nation. Indian Navy spokesperson Captain D. K. Sharma told The Indian Express, "We have a very robust surveillance system in the Indian Ocean region, which is supported by mission-based deployment in place since July 2017." As part of the mission-based deployment, at least 11 Navy vessels are deployed at various strategic locations for maritime domain awareness. Sources confirmed the entry of a Chinese Navy task force into the Indian Ocean from the Sunda strait but that was for training exercises in international waters, closer to Australia and has since left via Lombok Strait. Sputnik NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Envoy: IAEA confirms Iran's compliance with JCPOA for 10th time IRNA - Islamic Republic News Agency Vienna, Feb 22, IRNA -- Ambassador and permanent representative of the Islamic Republic of Iran to the IAEA Reza Najafi said on Thursday that the international body reaffirmed that Iran is living up to its commitments under the 2015 nuclear deal. He further noted that this is IAEA's tenth report since the JCOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) took effect and ninth report to the Board of Governors on the verification of JCPOA implementation, confirming that Iran's nuclear activities were in full compliance with the international pact. Continuation of Iran's nuclear activities including enrichment and 5060 first generation centrifuges in Natanz site, keeping production of heavy water in Arak facility and Tehran research reactor were among the items dealt with in the IAEA's new report on Iran's nuclear program, Najafi said. The text of the new report was like those in the past with the changes including technical developments such as rise of heavy water reserves, rate of enriched uranium of 3.67 percent and replacing certain centrifuges, he said. Najafi also underlined that Iran and all members of the IAEA expect secretariat of the agency to continue its professional job impartially on the basis of Safeguards standards. IAEA Board of Governors will examine the report during their quarterly session from March 4-9. 8072**1396 NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address IAEA once again verifies Iran's compliance with nuclear deal Iran Press TV Thu Feb 22, 2018 05:04PM The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has once again confirmed that Iran is living up to its commitments under the 2015 multilateral nuclear agreement. The UN nuclear agency said in a report, cited by French news agency AFP, that the Islamic Republic is sticking to the deal's key parameters such as the number of uranium centrifuges and stockpiles. Iran has informed the IAEA of a decision "to construct naval nuclear propulsion in future" and the agency has requested "further clarifications and amplifications," the report added. The IAEA, which is tasked with monitoring Iran's nuclear activities, has repeatedly verified Tehran's full commitment to its side of the bargain. Iran and the P5+1 countries namely the US, Russia, China, France, Britain, and Germany finalized the nuclear accord, officially called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), in July 2015 and started implementing it in January 2016. Under the deal, Iran undertook to apply certain limits to its nuclear program in exchange for the termination of all nuclear-related sanctions against Tehran. However, US President Donald Trump sees the agreement as a legacy of his predecessor former president Barack Obama that he should undo. Last month, Trump extended waivers of key economic sanctions on Iran, lifted under the JCPOA, for another 120 days but said he was doing so "for the last time." He also called on European allies and the US Congress to work with him to "fix the disastrous flaws" in the pact or face a US exit. Iran's Ambassador to the IAEA Reza Najafi said Thursday's report was the IAEA's tenth since the deal took effect, adding that the document once gain confirms that Iran's nuclear activities are in accordance with the JCPOA. The Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI), he said, had sent a letter to the IAEA and informed it of its decision to work on the nuclear propulsion. Najafi further stressed that Iran, along with other IAEA member states, expects the agency to continue its "technical and neutral" work to verify the implementation of the JCPOA. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Iran may withdraw from nuclear deal if gets no benefits: Araqchi Iran Press TV Thu Feb 22, 2018 11:42AM Iran says it could withdraw from the 2015 nuclear deal if the "atmosphere of uncertainty" created by the new US administration continues to prevent Tehran from reaping the benefits of the multilateral accord, particularly in the business and banking sectors. Speaking at Britain's Royal Institute of International Affairs in London, Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi criticized US President Donald Trump over his threat to stop waiving anti-Iran sanctions, a US commitment under known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). "If the same policy of confusion and uncertainties about the JCPOA continues, if companies and banks are not working with Iran, we cannot remain in a deal that has no benefit for us," he said. "Trump has created an atmosphere of uncertainty which is like a poison for the business community in working with Iran." Iran and the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council the United States, France, Britain, Russia and China plus Germany signed the nuclear agreement on July 14, 2015 and started implementing it on January 16, 2016. Under the JCPOA, Iran undertook to put limits on its nuclear program in exchange for the removal of nuclear-related sanctions imposed against Tehran. Trump has repeatedly described the nuclear deal, as "the worst and most one-sided transaction Washington has ever entered into," a characterization he often used during his presidential campaign, and threatened to tear it up. The US president on January 12 reluctantly agreed to waive sanctions against Iran that were lifted as part of the landmark deal, but said it would be the last time he issued such a waiver unless his conditions were met. The US president said he wanted America's European allies to use the 120-day period before sanctions relief again came up for renewal to agree to fix its "terrible flaws," otherwise Washington will no more extend the bans relief. Araqchi further said, "The deal would not survive this way even if the ultimatum is passed and waivers are extended." The Iranian official rejected Washington's interpretation of the "sunset" clause in the JCPOA as wrong. "There is no sunset clause in the JCPOA. Although the US administration and Trump are talking about sunset clause and that JCPOA is just for 10 years, that is not true," he said. "Iran's commitment in the JCPOA not to go for the nuclear weapons is permanent." Trump's administration has been upset at the deal's "sunset" clause, which it says sets an expiration date for the limits on the Iranian nuclear activities after which Iran will be free to develop a nuclear weapon. However, under the JCPOA, the monitoring of Iranian nuclear activities by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) will technically not expire. Iran and its negotiating partners agreed under the deal that if the agreement is fully implemented by all sides, Tehran will in eight years ratify the Additional Protocol at its Parliament. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Iran Will Withdraw From Nuclear Deal If 'No Economic Benefit' February 22, 2018 Iran has threatened to withdraw from the landmark 2015 nuclear deal with world powers if there is no economic benefit from it and major banks continue to fail to do business with Tehran. "If the same policy of confusion and uncertainties about the JCPOA [nuclear agreement] continues, if companies and banks are not working with Iran, we cannot remain in a deal that has no benefit for us," Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi said on February 22 in a speech at the Chatham House policy institute in London. Under the July 2015 agreement between Iran and six major powers -- Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia, and the United States -- Tehran pledged to restrict its nuclear program in return for relief from crippling international economic sanctions. But U.S. President Donald Trump delivered an ultimatum to European powers on January 12, saying they must agree to "fix the terrible flaws of the Iran nuclear deal" or he would refuse to extend the U.S. sanctions relief on Iran that it calls for. U.S. sanctions will resume unless Trump issues fresh "waivers" to suspend them on May 12. "The deal would not survive this way even if the ultimatum is passed and waivers are extended," Araqchi said. Araqchi and other Iranian officials arrived in London for "political talks" on February 21, Iranian semiofficial news agency ISNA reported. Based on reporting by Reuters and ISNA Source: https://www.rferl.org/a/iran-nuclear-agreement-will -quit-if-no-economic-benefit/29056411.html Copyright (c) 2018. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Watchdog Says Iran In Compliance With Nuclear Deal RFE/RL February 22, 2018 Iran remains in compliance with the 2015 nuclear accord signed with six world powers, the United Nations atomic watchdog says. In its confidential quarterly report seen by U.S. media on February 22, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) indicated that Tehran was meeting the accord's key requirements. The report comes four months ahead of a deadline set by President Donald Trump for Congress and European allies to fix what he called "disastrous flaws" in the deal or face a U.S. withdrawal from the deal. Trump and other U.S. officials claim Tehran is violating the "spirit" of the deal and that it is using its ballistic-missile program to circumvent nuclear restrictions. Iran denies the allegations, insisting it is adhering to the accord and that its nuclear program is strictly for power-generation purposes. Trump has also expressed concerns that some terms of the deal, signed under his predecessor, will expire in 2026. The deal, signed by Iran with the United States, Britain, France, Germany, China, and Russia, put limits on Iran's nuclear program in return for the easing of economic sanctions against the country. The IAEA reports have consistently shown Iran adhering to the deal in the two years since it took effect. Naval Propulsion Plan According to the latest report, the number of centrifuges to enrich uranium, Iran's total stockpile of low-enriched uranium, and the volume of heavy water -- a reactor coolant -- have all remained below the agreed maximum. Lowly enriched uranium can be used for peaceful applications such as power generation, Iran's stated aim, but also for a nuclear weapon if processed to a higher level. The report also said that Iran had told the IAEA by letter of a decision that "has been taken to construct naval nuclear propulsion in future." The UN atomic watchdog requested "further clarifications and amplifications," the report said, adding that, if a decision had been reached to build new facilities for naval nuclear propulsion, it needed to supply initial design information. Tehran had yet to respond, according to the report. Iran insists its nuclear program is only for peaceful purposes, while the United States and other countries claim it has been trying to develop nuclear weapons. With reporting by AFP, AP, Reuters, and dpa Source: https://www.rferl.org/a/iran-iaea-compliance- nuclear-deal-naval-propulsion/29057277.html Copyright (c) 2018. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Iran Plans to Construct 'Naval Nuclear Propulsion in Future' - IAEA Report Sputnik News 19:05 22.02.2018(updated 19:38 22.02.2018) The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which monitors Iran's implementation of the nuclear deal (JCPOA) reported that Tehran revealed the country's plans to build new facilities for naval nuclear propulsion. According to the agency, they have requested design information from the Islamic Republic and are currently waiting for the response. However, the agency specified that Iran had stayed within the main restrictions on the country's nuclear activities imposed by the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), commonly referred to as the Iran nuclear deal The IAEA explained that Tehran has not exceeded limits on its stocks of low-enriched uranium and heavy water, and has not enriched uranium exceeding the limit of 3.67 percent purity, the statement indicated. Iran Nuclear Deal (JCPOA) The agreement on the Iran nuclear program was signed in July 2015, by Iran and the P5+1 group of nations - the United States, Russia, China, France and the United Kingdom plus Germany. The deal specifies a gradual lifting of sanctions imposed on the country in exchange for it maintaining the peaceful nature of its nuclear program. The deal, however, was widely denounced by US President Donald Trump, who refused to certify Iran's compliance with the agreement in October 2017, but didn't pull the United States out of the pact. In January, Trump declared that he would waive sanctions on Iran as required by the JCPOA, but said this would be the last time. The US president also warned of the US withdrawal from the deal if it is not amended and asked the Congress to address the flaws in the "terrible Iran nuclear deal." The president continued his sharp line towards Iran in the Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), released on February 2, 2018, specifying that the Islamic Republic's policy in the Middle East views US authority in the region as a threat to its goal to become the dominant regional power. According to the document, Iran continues to fund the largest missile program in the Middle East and could, in the future, threaten or deliver weapons, developing increasingly long-range ballistic missile capabilities, and pursuing its alleged "aggressive efforts" to undermine neighboring governments, casting doubt on its "long-term commitment to foregoing nuclear weapons capability." Sputnik NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address UN Atomic Agency: Iran Complying With Nuclear Accord By VOA News February 22, 2018 The United Nations atomic agency has concluded that Iran is continuing to restrict its nuclear program in compliance with the 2015 international accord aimed at curbing Tehran's nuclear weapons development. A quarterly International Atomic Energy Agency report Thursday said Iran is honoring key aspects of the deal that the United States, China, Russia, France, Germany, Britain and the European Union reached with Iran in exchange for the lifting of sanctions that hobbled the Islamic Republic's economy. U.S. President Donald Trump has criticized what he says are "disastrous flaws" in the agreement. He has pushed the countries that agreed to the Iran pact to overhaul it, but they have rebuffed him and have continued to support the agreement. Trump has threatened to pull the U.S. out of the agreement and has a May deadline to again consider whether he will waive reimposition of sanctions against Tehran. Iran Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi contended Thursday in a London speech that Trump's frequent complaints about the deal represent a violation of the terms of the accord and have hurt his country's ability to secure new foreign investment money. He threatened that Iran could pull out of the deal no matter whether Trump again forgoes new sanctions against Iran. "If the same policy of confusion and uncertainties about the (deal) continues, if companies and banks are not working with Iran, we cannot remain in a deal that has no benefit for us," Araghchi said. "That's a fact." The report said Iran has not exceeded limits on its stocks of low-enriched uranium and heavy water, and did not enrich uranium beyond a limit of 3.67 percent purity required by the agreement. The deal, long in the negotiating, was aimed at extending the time Iran would need to build a nuclear bomb, if it wanted to, from a few months to roughly a year. The U.N. agency said that Iran told it in a letter that it had decided "to construct naval nuclear propulsion in (the) future." In response, the IAEA requested "further clarifications and amplifications," adding that if Iran went ahead with its naval nuclear propulsion plans, it would need to supply initial design information. Iran has yet to respond, the report said. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Bangladesh accelerates plan to put Rohingya refugees on isolated island Iran Press TV Thu Feb 22, 2018 07:59AM The government in Bangladesh is rapidly pushing a controversial plan to relocate some 100,000 Rohingya Muslim refugees from Myanmar to an isolated and flood-prone island in the Bay of Bengal, where they may be stranded forever. Reuters reported on Wednesday that work on the project had accelerated in recent months as a group of foreign engineers were providing assistance to the Bangladeshi government for the preparation of Bhashan Char Island also known as Thenger Char to receive refugees before the onset of monsoon rains in April. Reports said hundreds of laborers were carrying bricks and sand from ships on its muddy northwest shore, with satellite images also showing roads and what appeared to be a helipad. Bhasan Char, whose name means "floating island," emerged from the silt about 20 years ago and is located about 30 kilometers from mainland Bangladesh. The island is flat, shape-shifting, and inundated by regular floods during the months of June and September every year. Aid workers have expressed grave concern that the silt island is vulnerable to frequent cyclones and cannot sustain the livelihood of thousands of people. Contradictory statements Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina said in a statement earlier this week that the settlement of Rohingya Muslims on the island would be a "temporary arrangement" to reduce the dense population at the refugee camps in the Bangladeshi border city of Cox's Bazar, where nearly 700,000 members of the ethnic minority group currently live in deteriorating humanitarian conditions. There are many other Rohingya refugees who had resettled in Bangladesh before a recent wave of state-sponsored violence started in neighboring Myanmar in August last year. In an interview with Reuters, an adviser to the Bangladeshi prime minister said, however, that the Rohingya refugees would only be able to leave the island if they wanted to go back to Myanmar or were selectively granted asylum by a third country. "It's not a concentration camp, but there may be some restrictions. We are not giving them a Bangladeshi passport or ID card," said H.T. Imam, adding that the island would have a police encampment with some 50 armed personnel. Reacting to the comments, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees emphasized in a statement that "any relocation plan involving refugees would need to be based on and implemented through voluntary and informed decisions." A plan to develop the island and use it to house refugees was first proposed in 2015 and revived last year. Despite criticism of the conditions on the island, Bangladesh says it has the right to decide where to shelter the growing numbers of refugees. The news came as the government of Myanmar decided on Tuesday to process and resettle some 6,000 Rohingya Muslim refugees who are currently stranded at the country's border with Bangladesh. Bangladesh and Myanmar signed an agreement in November last year to repatriate all Rohingya Muslims who have crossed the border since August to escape a brutal military crackdown. The repatriation was set to start last month, but was delayed by a lack of preparation, as well as protests staged by Rohingya refugees against the plan to send them back to Myanmar while conditions were not safe for their return. Myanmar's government troops have been committing killings, making arbitrary arrests, and carrying out arson attacks in Muslim villages in western Rakhine State since late 2016. The Rohingya have lived in Myanmar for generations but are denied citizenship and are branded illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, which likewise denies them citizenship. The UN has described the 1.1-million-strong Muslim community as the most persecuted minority in the world. Civilian witness contradicts Myanmar police on Reuters reporters' arrest Separately on Wednesday, the first civilian who testified at a hearing in the case of two Reuters reporters who had been covering the crackdown on the Rohingya in Myanmar and have been accused of violating Myanmar's Official Secrets Act contradicted police and prosecutors about where the pair had been arrested. The two local journalists, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, were detained last December during a meeting with two police officials over dinner for allegedly "possessing important and secret government documents related to Rakhine State and security forces." The hearing was held as the exact location of the detentions has emerged as a point of contention in the proceedings. The reporters told relatives that they were taken into custody almost immediately after being handed some papers at the Saung Yeik Mon restaurant by two police officers they had not met before. This is while the prosecution and earlier police witnesses testified that the journalists were detained after they were stopped and searched on a street, which is several hundred meters from the restaurant. At a news conference late last year, family members of the journalists said that police may have fabricated a case for their arrest. The two reporters had been working on a Reuters investigation into the killing of 10 Rohingya Muslim men who were buried in a mass grave in Rakhine State, where Myanmar has barred foreign groups and reporters from entering. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Pakistan Diplomat: Attempt to Add Islamabad to Terrorist Financing Watch List Delayed By Madeeha Anwar, Hashim Habibzada February 21, 2018 Pakistan's chief diplomat said Tuesday that a U.S.-led motion to put Pakistan on a global terrorist financing watch list has been deferred for three months. The final decision of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) is expected to be announced Thursday. Pakistan's foreign minister, Khawaja Asif, who is on an official visit to Russia, made his announcement in a tweet Tuesday. Asif also mentioned that the financial watchdog has instructed the Asia Pacific Group (APG), an entity of FATF, to consider "another report in June" on the matter. The South Asian country has been trying hard to avoid being added to the FATF list of countries that have failed to adhere to FATF guidelines and regulations and take adequate measures to crack down on terror financing and money laundering. US stance The U.S. State Department's spokesperson Heather Nauert, however, told reporters Tuesday that the final decision on the motion is expected later this week. "So, I don't have just independent confirmation that a decision was made early. We're anticipating that the final decision would be made on Thursday of this week," Nauert said "Financial Action Task Force, and it's where a lot of countries have come together, and they look at various nations who we believe and those other countries believe are not doing enough to crack down on terror financing, counterterrorism and the like," Nauert said. "Pakistan is one of those countries that they're taking a close look at," she said. The member countries of FATF have held meetings in Paris this week to discuss Pakistan's designation, among other pressing global issues. The United States, Britain, France and Germany have reportedly put forward a motion to put Pakistan on the FATF list, stating the country has failed to comply with anti-terrorist financing and anti-money laundering regulations. Economic impact This is not the first time Pakistan faces scrutiny by FATF. The country was on the global watch list from 2012 to 2015. The country fears going back on the list could hamper foreign direct investment and hurt Pakistan's access to international financial markets. In an attempt to demonstrate compliance with the international antiterrorist financing regulations, Pakistan amended its antiterrorism law last week. The change authorizes the government to blacklist charities linked to Hafiz Saeed, a U.S.-designated global terrorist. Saeed has been wanted by the United States since 2012 for allegedly planning the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks that killed 166 people, including six Americans. Also under scrutiny are Hafiz Saeed's Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD) and its subsidiary, the Falah-e-Insaniat Foundation (FIF), which allegedly serve as the front organizations for Lashkar-e-Taiba, a U.S. and European Union-designated terrorist organization, accused of carrying out terror attacks in India and Afghanistan. "How many times have we talked about the person who Pakistan let out of house arrest, who was responsible for the Mumbai attacks back in 2008 that killed so many people, including Americans, too?" Nauert said, referring to Saeed during her press briefing on Tuesday. If Pakistan does get a deferment Thursday, the country will still face scrutiny again in three months if it does not meet the demands of the FATF. Possibility remains Some experts remain concerned that Pakistan could still be added to the list in June and suffer economic damage. "Pakistan has in the recent past tried to invite foreign investors for infrastructure projects and take part in CPEC [China Pakistan Economic Corridor]. If sanctions are imposed, international financers and different investors will face difficulty to come to Pakistan," Ata Muhammad, a Paris-based analyst told VOA. Some experts also criticized the country for failing to make a convincing case for its efforts against terrorism. "The country has worked according to Financial Task force guidelines, and its financial monitoring unit has worked aggressively to choke terror financing by filing thousands of cases," Zahid Gishkori, a Pakistan-based journalist said. "Banned outfits were generating around 2 billion rupees, the state curbed it. Pakistan has also frozen around 5,200 accounts related to terror financing. There was a list of actions that were done," Gishkori added. Echoing Gishkori's assessment on Pakistan's failure to make its case, U.S.-based security analyst Kamran Bokhari says Pakistan needs to take more effective action against terror groups of all kinds across the country. "Pakistan had been accused of playing double-games and not dealing with all the terror networks indiscriminately and has not shown its commitment against those terrorists who launch attacks in India and Afghanistan," Bokhari said. Washington suspended $2 billion worth of aid to Pakistan last year and is pressuring Islamabad to cut its alleged ties to Islamist militants waging war in Afghanistan and India. Pakistan denies the charges and maintains that it has carried out military operations against terror groups throughout the country indiscriminately and that there are no terror safe havens in the country. VOA Urdu contributed to this report. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Saudi Arabia, China, Turkey block US move to put Pakistan on terror-financing list Iran Press TV Thu Feb 22, 2018 11:08AM Saudi Arabia has reportedly joined Turkey and China in a move to block a US-sponsored attempt this week to place Pakistan on an international terror-financing watch list. Washington had reportedly working behind the scenes during the ongoing Paris meeting of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) to take action against Islamabad, which it says has acted against terrorist financing and the implementation of the UN Security Council resolutions. Officials involved in the process told The Wall Street Journal on Thursday that a US effort to reverse the decision on the watch list was under way Wednesday at the FAFT meeting. The report said this was one of the "rare disagreements" between Saudi Arabia and the administration of US President Donald Trump. The officials from the countries on the task force said Saudi Arabia was acting on behalf of the Persian Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), the Saudi-dominated bloc of six Persian Gulf nations which are collectively a member of the FATF. The report said the US is still trying for the FATF, a secretive international body that monitors countries' efforts to fight terror financing and money-laundering, to take a decision on this by Thursday. The US effort, which included pressure on the Saudis, raised the possibility of a fresh vote on action against Pakistan as soon as Thursday, the officials said. "We're anticipating that the final decision would be made on Thursday of this week," said Heather Nauert, a US State Department spokeswoman, reiterating that Pakistan was among countries that are not doing enough "to crack down on terror financing, counterterrorism and the like." The FATF was scheduled to meet through Friday and has not yet publicly announced any decision. The Trump administration is angry with what it sees as Pakistan's inadequate efforts to combat terror groups and has sought to ratchet up pressure on Islamabad. Pakistan has denied the allegations. Saudi Arabia's move on behalf of Pakistan came just days after Islamabad said it would send more than 1,000 troops to the oil-rich kingdom on a "training and advice mission." The development is notable because Saudi Arabia has been pushing Pakistan to provide ships, aircraft and troops since 2015 for its devastating military campaign against Yemen. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address China Denies Contacts with Separatist Militants in Pakistan By Ayesha Tanzeem February 22, 2018 Chinese officials have denied reports that they are in contact with separatist militants in Pakistan's restive Baluchistan province to secure tens of billions of dollars' worth of infrastructure projects planned for the area. A report in the Financial Times this week said that quiet talks between the two sides had been ongoing for five years and that Beijing had been in direct contact with the militants. However, a senior Chinese official dealing with the region said he had "never heard of it." The official did not want his name mentioned in the media. Sher Muhammad Bugti, a representative of a separatist group the Baluch Republican Party, also denied having any negotiations with China. "We do not know of any talks, nor have we been contacted [by China]," he told the VOA Deewa Service from his exile in Switzerland. However, some other separatist leaders have demurred from issuing a similar denial. China is planning the largest segment of its One Belt One Road initiative in Pakistan called the China Pakistan Economic Corridor. The primary aim of the network of roads and railway lines is to connect Xinjiang province in Western China through Pakistan to the Indian ocean, reducing its international shipping time by weeks and slashing the cost. The port city Gwadar, the lynchpin of the project, is in Baluchistan province. CPEC, as the network is commonly known, is also hailed as a regional connectivity framework, with "impact on Iran, Afghanistan, India, Central Asian Republic, and the region," according to its official website under the Pakistan government. However, it passes through areas in Pakistan, particularly in Baluchistan, that have long faced an insurgency demanding more autonomy and control over local resources. Baloch separatists view CPEC with suspicion, fearing it is another attempt by the federal government of Pakistan to plunder the assets of their province without giving them a due share in the profit. However, officials say employment and prosperity generated by CPEC projects will benefit the local population. The $60 billion Chinese investment plans have also materialized at a time when Pakistan is facing increased tensions with the United States, which recently suspended all military aid to the country for failing to act against militants that the U.S. said are operating against neighboring Afghanistan and India from its soil. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Navalny Briefly Detained, Could Be Jailed Ahead Of Russian Election RFE/RL February 22, 2018 Russian opposition politician Aleksei Navalny says he was briefly detained by police and accused of an administrative offense that could result in a 30-day jail term. Navalny and a senior ally, Leonid Volkov, were both detained separately on February 22, weeks before a presidential election in which Navalny has been barred from challenging incumbent President Vladimir Putin. The developments raised the prospect that Navalny and Volkov could be in jail during the March 18 election, which the vocal Putin foe is calling on Russians to boycott. Navalny tweeted that he had gone to the dentist because "my tooth hurt," and that police approached him as he was leaving the dentist's office and told him, "You're detained." He later tweeted that he had been taken to a police station and then released after being served with notice that he was accused of repeated violations of what Kremlin critics say are draconian laws restricting public assembly. Navalny, who has organized protests and published reports alleging corruption in Russia's ruling elite, has been prohibited from running in the election due to a conviction on financial-crimes charges he contends were fabricated. He wrote on Twitter earlier in the day that Volkov, who headed his campaign before he was barred from the ballot, was detained at Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport. Volkov had been due to fly to the Bashkortostan region to meet with supporters. Navalny has been detained numerous times and served short jail terms for organizing unauthorized protests and other alleged infractions. He and other Kremlin critics say they suspect Putin's government wants to put him and his senior associates behind bars on or around election day in order to thwart their plans to hold more protests and monitor the vote for evidence of fraud. "The [Kremlin's] aim is to neutralize the monitors and avert post-election protests," political scientist Yekaterina Shulman wrote on Facebook. She predicted the authorities would "isolate" Navalny and Volkov "on election day itself and immediately afterward." Navalny was previously detained on January 28 on his way to a rally in Moscow that was part of a nationwide protests he organized to support his call for a boycott of the election, which he has dismissed as a farce and the "reappointment" of Putin. Navalny said at the time that he suspected he was not brought to a court hearing right away because authorities wanted to make sure that he would be jailed for up to a month closer to March 18 in order to keep him behind bars on election day. "If they jail me on January 28 then I will be released on February 28. But Putin wants me be isolated right on the eve of the election, and most likely on the day of the election. Therefore, I suppose they will jail me later to make sure that I am in a cell on March 18," Navalny wrote in his blog. On February 20, police in Moscow detained Roman Rubanov, the chief of Navalny's Anticorruption Foundation, which has published the reports alleging graft among allies of Putin. A court ruled that he violated the law on public gatherings and handed 10-day jail term. Source: https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-navalny -detained-police-moscow/29056482.html Copyright (c) 2018. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Cossack Fighter Laments Russian 'Utilization' Of Mercenaries In Syria February 22, 2018 ST. PETERSBURG, Russia -- Russia is abuzz with media reports that dozens -- perhaps hundreds, by some accounts -- of Russian mercenaries were killed or wounded in the eastern Syrian city of Deir al-Zor on February 7-8 in fighting with the U.S. military and its Syrian-rebel allies. The Russian government has been reluctant to talk about the incident, saying on February 15 that "about five" Russians "may have been killed" and, on February 20, that "several dozen" Russian and other former Soviet citizens were injured. The United States has estimated that about 100 fighters were killed in the incident, without specifying their nationalities. Many of the wounded mercenaries from the Vagner commercial security firm have been evacuated to Russia and are being treated in military hospitals. RFE/RL Russian Service correspondent Yelizaveta Mayetnaya visited one such hospital outside St. Petersburg, where she spoke with Yevgeny Shabayev, the ataman of the Khovrino Cossack organization and a sometime mercenary. Shabayev had just finished visiting eight of the wounded mercenaries. He agreed to talk with RFE/RL about the fighting in Syria and about how and why Russians end up going there. His assertions -- including about burials and casualties, remuneration and compensation, deployments, or purported meetings in the Kremlin -- have not been corroborated by RFE/RL. RFE/RL: You've just finished visiting the wounded soldiers. What did they tell you about the night they were injured? Yevgeny Shabayev: My friend who was brought back as "cargo 300" [wounded] from the battle in Syria told me a pretty depressing story when I saw him in the Khimkinsky [Central Military] Hospital. Our Vagner fighters -- more precisely, from the 5th and 2nd sections -- came under attack from the air. It might have been drones, but he couldn't confirm that since it was night and later there was already mopping up by helicopters. When 550 men come under fire in the desert at night, not many of them are going to survive. He said that about 200 men emerged uninjured. He couldn't say what happened to the rest, but surviving there would have been very hard. And that is for one simple reason: There was no helicopter cover or evacuation support because the Vagner units do not have helicopters. Knowing that, you can draw your own conclusions about the number of dead. [Ultranationalist State Duma deputy Vladimir] Zhirinovsky says it was more than 300. [Nationalist military analyst] Viktor Alksnis says it was 334. I think these numbers are pretty accurate, based on my information from various sources from various regions. Over the last weekend [February 17-18], they already buried the 15th guy who died that night. RFE/RL: How long did it take to recover the wounded? Shabayev: That is a very difficult question, since reinforcements came from the Vesna [Spring] battalion. That is a Donbas battalion (named after a region of eastern Ukraine where Russia-backed separatists control territory) which, unfortunately, gets paid rather less than the Vagner regulars, although it is technically part of the Vagner force. They also came under attack from the air -- not such a heavy attack, but still something pretty serious. It is really hard to evacuate people in the desert. It isn't like Afghanistan or Chechnya. So I can't really say precisely when they managed to evacuate them, but they started arriving in Russia around February 11-12, while the battle itself was the night of February 7-8. RFE/RL: Were they evacuated by Russian military aircraft? Shabayev: I can't confirm that, but I think, yes, since there are no other aircraft there. RFE/RL: How long was your friend in Syria before he was wounded? Shabayev: Quite a while, but I can't say for sure. There have been five "waves" of Vagner recruits. This wasn't my friend's first trip [to Syria]. RFE/RL: What types of wounds did you see among the Vagner fighters you visited at the Khiminsky hospital? Shabayev: Mostly belly wounds from shrapnel. They were very serious wounds; these patients were not really transportable. The fact that they were brought here is up to the tremendous heroism of our medics. Thank you to them. We can't name their names for one simple reason -- they can be kicked out of the hospital because this is a military hospital, and private military companies -- any private military companies -- are illegal in Russia. And there is one more reason why I don't mention their names. All of them, right down to the nurses, are obligated by law to report to the police and prosecutor's office any gunshot wounds or other similar injuries. Naturally, a criminal case would be opened, and people would be sent to prison. RFE/RL: It is strange that, knowing full well that mercenary activity is illegal and carries a 15-year penalty, they still went there anyway... Shabayev: The main reason why they go there is that they have no life here. No work and no social or economic status, neither as former military with specific experience nor as simple citizens. They went as hired soldiers to protect [oligarch] Yevgeny Prigozhin's pipeline, since they were guarding the oil fields around Palmyra. Then they were ordered to grab another plot that was, let's say, "available." But it turned out that they were under the control of an alternative business company that takes the protection of its clients pretty seriously. I mean a private American company. (Editor's note: According to the U.S. Defense Department, the attack by the Russians and pro-government Syrian forces on February 7 was repulsed by fighters of the Syrian Democratic Forces and U.S. military personnel -- not mercenaries.) RFE/RL: Have you heard of cases when the relatives of slain Vagner fighters were not paid death benefits? Shabayev: The contracts that mercenaries sign when they go to Syria have no legal status in the Russian Federation. Generally, they include provisions that 1 million rubles ($18,000) will be paid in the event of injury and 2 million ($36,000) in the case of death. The recruiters who send these guys to Syria are responsible for these payments, but there have been many problems. I heard of a case from the Krasnodar region where a Vagner fighter was killed and his relatives did not get anything. RFE/RL: Did the majority of mercenaries in Syria fight previously in the Donbas? Shabayev: Even before our troops were sent to Syria, they say there was a meeting in the Kremlin where, according to what I've been told, [Donbas military commander Aleksandr] Borodai was given the order to "utilize" the large number of people who had seen with their own eyes that you can change the government by, let's say, nonelectoral means. Such people are not needed in our country. So, in addition to our oil-related goals, there was also the issue of "utilizing" the Donbas veterans. That, basically, is what they are doing. The majority of the first three Syria recruitments were people who had undergone serious training, and they have been cleared out. More precisely, they were sent to storm Syrian cities before artillery bombardment. RFE/RL: And who is paying for the treatment of those who were wounded in Syria? Shabayev: The [Russian] government. They are in government hospitals. I'd like to stress that for the United States, private military companies are not state structures, since we ourselves [i.e., the Russian state] do not recognize them. So they [the United States] had no obligation to warn [Russia] about their attack. On the contrary, they confirmed their action publicly. Instead of expressing "serious concern" like our beloved leader [Foreign Minister Sergei] Lavrov always does, the Russian government just ignored the situation and spoke out instead about events in Florida. That is, at least 100 Russians died, and our government is worried about the deaths in American schools. I never really noticed that [U.S. President Donald] Trump was ever much worried when someone in Ulan-Ude kills schoolkids with an ax. If our Russian government doesn't want to support our citizens, if it doesn't protect them and forgets about them even after they are killed, then that state is serving something besides the national interests of the Russian people. Most likely, it is serving commercial interests. Probably some business project in which people are nothing but biomass. On the other hand, they use us like biomass here in Russia, too. You pay for housing, for communal services, but they kill you. The country is going extinct; it's just that over there [in Syria], the living are destroyed more quickly. RFE/RL: Now, following these major losses in Syria, [there is reportedly] a new, sixth mobilization. Are people signing up? Shabayev: We have a prison in Donetsk and a prison in Luhansk [conflict zones in eastern Ukraine] where people, including Russian citizens, have been held for more than three years since the signing of the Minsk agreements [that ushered in a shaky cease-fire in Ukraine]. These people didn't want to stop. They wanted to attack further and defend their motherland. And they were thrown in prison without any charges. There are no lawyers there -- everything is done on orders. (Editor's note: Russian officials insist despite mounting evidence that no regular Russian troops are active in Ukraine.) So these people have been sitting for three years. And a recruiter comes up to them and says, either you can rot in here or you can go and fight and maybe earn some money too. When you are confronted with such a choice, you go and fight. And not for 150,000 rubles ($2,650) per month like the main Vagner fighters. You go into Vesna or Karpaty, where you get less than 100,000 ($1,770). The recruiters also work in Ukraine. There are veterans of the [Ukrainian government's] Antiterrorism Operation in Syria as well. No one now cares who shows up there. You can find in one trench in Syria guys who were trying to kill each other in the Donbas. Source: https://www.rferl.org/a/syria-russian-mercenaries- cossack-shabayev--interview/29056934.html Copyright (c) 2018. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address UN Security Council fails to agree on ceasefire across Syria: Russia Iran Press TV Thu Feb 22, 2018 07:20PM Russia says no agreement was reached at the United Nations Security Council on a month-long ceasefire across Syria as the conflict deepens in the Arab country due to a sharp rise in terrorist attacks. Russian Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia made the announcement on Thursday after a council meeting on a draft resolution demanding a 30-day truce in Syria amid renewed violence in Syria's Eastern Ghouta region. Sweden and Kuwait, two non-permanent members of the Security Council, had proposed the ceasefire measure in Syria to allow deliveries of humanitarian aid and medical evacuations. On Wednesday, Nebenzia presented amendments to the draft resolution, saying, "We cannot simply decide that there is a ceasefire." "That's a long and complex process to achieve. Cessations cannot be established by putting a word in the resolution," he noted. Earlier on Thursday, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov expressed Moscow's readiness to consider the ceasefire in Syria, but only if it does not cover the Daesh, the al-Nusra Front and other terrorist groups which "conduct systematic shelling of the residential quarters of Damascus." "It is hard to oppose a call to a ceasefire with the goal for civilians to take a breather, to supply humanitarian aid and medication and to offer assistance to people in a difficult situation," Lavrov said. Eastern Ghouta near Damascus has witnessed renewed violence in the past few days, where terrorists have mounted repeated mortar attacks on the Syrian capital in the face of an imminent rout. Terrorist attack kills 3, injures 22 Separately on Thursday, a total of three civilians, among them two children, were killed and 22 others wounded in terrorist attacks on Damascus and its countryside. A source at Damascus Police Command told the official SANA news agency that the casualties came after armed groups positioned in Eastern Ghouta fired mortar shells on several nearby residential neighborhoods. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Russia to support UN-proposed truce in Syria but not for Daesh, Nusra: Lavrov Iran Press TV Thu Feb 22, 2018 03:57PM Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov says Moscow will consider supporting a UN-proposed ceasefire, providing it does not cover the Takfiri terrorist groups of Daesh and Jabhat Fateh al-Sham, formerly known as al-Nusra Front, as well as other militant outfits that are shelling civilians in Syria's militant-held Eastern Ghouta. The top Russian diplomat made the remarks during a press conference in the Serbian capital of Belgrade on Thursday, saying Russia was ready to consider a UN Security Council draft resolution demanding a 30-day truce in the Arab country as long as it did not include the two Takfiri groups and other militants "who are shelling residential quarters of Damascus." Lavrov's comments came two weeks after Sweden and Kuwait, two non-permanent members of the UNSC, proposed the month-long ceasefire measure in Syria to allow deliveries of humanitarian aid and medical evacuations. The world body is expected to vote on the proposal later on Thursday. The ceasefire resolution calls for the truce to go into effect 72 hours after the adoption of the measure and for aid deliveries and medical evacuations to commence 48 hours after that. Eastern Ghouta is included in a deal between Turkey, Russia and Iran to establish de-escalation zones in Syria with the aim of reducing violence in the war-torn Arab country. Earlier in the day, Moscow denied a US claim that Russian fighter jets had carried out airstrikes in Eastern Ghouta and reportedly killed scores of civilians since the start of the week, saying members of Jabhat Fateh al-Sham and other militants holed up in Ghouta were shelling different parts of the flashpoint enclave. Elsewhere in his remarks, Lavrov said the Ghouta-based militants had rejected Russia's offer to "evacuate peacefully" and that they were using civilians there as human shields. "The al-Nusra Front and its allies categorically rejected this proposal and continue to shell the city from their positions, using the civilian population of Eastern Ghouta as a human shield," he said. The so-called Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a pro-opposition monitoring group, claimed that at least 250 civilians had been killed in the attacks in the enclave, in which an estimated 400,000 people live. Separately, Russian Ambassador to the UN Vassily Nebenzia described the situation in Eastern Ghouta as "complex," saying, "There are terrorists there who the Syrian army is fighting and the terrorists are shelling Damascus." Russia has been lending aerial support to Syria's counter-terrorism operations since September 2015. Meanwhile, the US and its allies have been bombarding what they call Daesh positions inside Syria since September 2014 without any authorization from the Damascus government or a UN mandate. The strikes, however, have on many occasions resulted in civilian casualties and failed to fulfill their declared aim of countering terrorism. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Terror sponsors responsible for East Ghouta situation: Russia Iran Press TV Thu Feb 22, 2018 03:05PM The Kremlin has blamed the current situation in the Eastern Ghouta region on the countries that are supporting terrorists in Syria, vehemently rejecting claims linking Russia and its allies to the violence. "The situation in Eastern Ghouta is the responsibility of those who support the terrorists that are still there," Kremlin spokesman Dmitriy Peskov told reporters on Thursday. "As you know, neither Russia, nor Syria nor Iran belong to the category of such states because they are the ones waging an uncompromising struggle against the terrorists in Syria," he said. Eastern Ghouta near Damascus has witnessed renewed violence in the past few days, where terrorists have mounted repeated mortar attack on the Syrian capital in the face of an imminent rout. Speaking on Tuesday, US State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert held Russia accountable for the "attacks" and "the dire humanitarian situation" in the region, calling on Moscow to end its support for the Damascus government. Moscow denied the US claim as "groundless" and stressed that armed groups operating in the militant-held Eastern Ghouta are preventing civilians from leaving the conflict zone. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov also accused al-Nusra Front terrorists of using civilians in Eastern Ghouta as "human shields" while keeping up attacks on Damascus. In a letter of complaint to the UN, the Syrian Foreign Ministry drew attention to a sharp rise in deadly terror attacks in Damascus and its suburbs, urging the world body to take proper measures against the countries that support and fund the armed groups. Earlier on Thursday, UN Special Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura expressed hope that the Security Council would agree on a resolution to end violence in Eastern Ghouta. De Mistura, however, emphasized that the attempt to agree on a ceasefire deal is an "uphill" battle. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Afrin residents celebrate arrival of pro-government forces Iran Press TV Thu Feb 22, 2018 01:27PM Hundreds of Syrians have held a demonstration in Afrin to celebrate the arrival of pro-government fighters in the northwestern city that has been the target of Turkish attacks. The gathering took place at Afrin's main square on Thursday, with the participants waving the Syrian national flag and posters of President Bashar al-Assad. The protesters reaffirmed that Afrin is an integral part of the Syrian territory and that they will not allow Turkish forces as well as terrorist groups to desecrate their homeland. They further stressed that the aggressors would be defeated. Earlier on Thursday, the Syrian daily al-Watan reported that some 500 Syrian popular forces had entered the Afrin region since Tuesday. The pro-Damascus fighters will defend the Syrian city against Turkey's military operation, it added. The Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG) confirmed that hundreds of pro-government fighters had been deployed on the frontlines in Afrin to help counter a Turkish offensive. "Groups aligned to the Syrian army came to Afrin, but not in the quantity or capacity to stop the Turkish occupation," YPG spokesman Nouri Mahmoud told Reuters. "The Syrian army must fulfill its duty... to protect Syria's borders." The pro-Damascus demonstration in Afrin came one day after Ankara's warning to consider any group coming to the help of the Kurds in the Syrian city as a "legitimate target" for the Turkish military. Turkish presidential spokesman Ibrahim Kalin said Wednesday that any force in Afrin, including the Syrian government, would be targeted by Turkish troops if they assist the YPG. Turkey launched the so-called Operation Olive Branch in Syria's Afrin on January 20 in a bid to eliminate the YPG, which Ankara views as a terror organization and the Syrian branch of the outlawed Kurdish Workers Party (PKK). Turkey has warned that the Afrin offensive could expand to the nearby Syrian city of Manbij. Syria has condemned the Turkish campaign as an act of aggression, which is meant to support terror outfits operating inside the conflict-plagued Arab country. Assad said the "brutal Turkish aggression cannot be separated from the Turkish regime's policy from the first day of Syria's crisis, which was essentially built on supporting terrorism and terrorist organizations, whatever their names." NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Strikes Hit Syria's Ghouta For Fifth Day As UN Pleads For Cease-Fire February 22, 2018 Warplanes and artillery bombarded eastern Ghouta -- a rebel enclave near Syria's capital, Damascus -- for a fifth straight day on February 22, as the United Nations pleaded for a halt to one of the fiercest air assaults of the seven-year civil war. The UN's humanitarian coordinator for Syria, Panos Moumtzis, said that at least 370 people have been killed and 1,500 injured since the Syrian government and its allies escalated their offensive on the region on February 18. The UN Security Council is to meet later on February 22 to discuss the situation. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has urged an immediate suspension of "all war activities" in the area, where he said people are living "in hell on earth," and German Chancellor Angela Merkel called for the European Union to step up pressure on Russia and Iran to end the violence in Syria. "The [Syrian] regime is not fighting against terrorists, but against its own people, killing children, destroying hospitals, and this is a massacre to be condemned," Merkel told parliament on February 22. Merkel also said that "Iran and Russia have a particular responsibility" as they are both supporting the government forces. However, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov denied that Russia has any responsibility for the situation in eastern Ghouta, saying, "Those who support the terrorists are responsible." Russian news reports, meanwhile, said Moscow has sent more warplanes to Syria, including its latest Su-57 fighter jets. Russia and Iran have given Assad's government crucial support throughout the seven-year-old war in Syria, which began with a government crackdown on protests in 2011. Moscow helped turn the tide of the conflict in Assad's favor by a launching a campaign of air strikes in 2015 and stepping up its military presence on the ground. With reporting by Reuters and AP Source: https://www.rferl.org/a/syria-russia-says-not- responsible-eastern-ghouta/29056831.html Copyright (c) 2018. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Kurdish YPG Agrees to Hand Control Over Tell Rifaat to Syrian Army - Source Sputnik News 16:51 22.02.2018(updated 21:33 22.02.2018) The Kurdish Self-Defense Forces (YPG) confirmed to the Reuters news agency that the Syrian Armed Forces has taken under control the Kurdish-held territory of Aleppo. "We in Aleppo have gone to the Afrin canton. As a result, the eastern districts of Aleppo city fell under the control of the Syrian regime," Furat Khalil, a YPG commander told the agency. Earlier in the day, a Syrian security source told Sputnik that the Kurdish Self-Defense Forces (YPG) and the Syrian armed forces have agreed on the transfer of control over the town of Tell Rifaat in northern Aleppo province to the Syrian army, the government troops will enter the settlement in the next few hours. "An agreement has been reached to pass control of the town of Tell Rifaat in Aleppo province from YPG units to the Syrian army. The Syrian army will enter the town within a few hours," the source said. The decision comes amid reports that Afrin Kurds had reached an agreement with Damascus to sent the government forces in Afrin to counter the Turkish military operation in the region. Later on, reports appeared saying that the Syrian government forces had entered Afrin. However, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan refuted the reports on Tuesday, saying that a convoy of pro-Syrian government forces, which tried to enter the besieged Syrian city of Afrin, retreated under the Turkish warning fire in the area. According to the latest information provided to Sputnik by YPG representative in Afrin Brusk Haseke the day before, Syrian forces had arrived in Afrin despite shelling. Turkey has been conducting its "Olive Branch" in Syria's Afrin since January 20, aiming at targeting the Kurdish YPG. The latter is allegedly affiliated with the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which Ankara regards as a terrorist organization. Damascus has firmly condemned Turkey's military campaign, calling it a violation of the country's sovereignty. According to the latest summary statement of the Turkish General Staff, issued earlier in the day, Turkish troops have killed and captured 1,829 militants of the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG), the Democratic Union Party (PYD), and Daesh. Sputnik NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Moscow Worried UN Resolution on Syrian Ceasefire Aimed at Accusing Damascus Sputnik News 15:17 22.02.2018(updated 16:17 22.02.2018) Russia suspects that western countries want to shift focus away from the necessity of starting the Geneva talks to launching plan "B" in Syria, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov stated. The minister went on by expressing concern over the proposed UN Security Council resolution on Syria, saying that it may aim to accuse Damascus of everything and to protect the militants. The top diplomatic official noted, however, that Russia was ready to consider the draft resolution. "The resolution that we are suggested to adopt ..., we are ready to consider this proposal," Lavrov said, noting that at the same time the ceasefire regime "must not at all" reach the Daesh and the Jabhat al-Nusra terror groups (both banned in Russia) and those factions that are cooperating with them and systematically firing on the residential areas of Damascus. The minister was commenting on the draft resolution, on the introduction of a 30-day ceasefire in Syria for the delivery of humanitarian aid and medical evacuation, proposed by the delegations of Sweden and Kuwait to the Security Council. The voting on the draft is expected to take place on Thursday. As Lavrov further noted, the West doesn't seem to want to extract those terrorist forces from the ceasefire deal. "Our western partners, unfortunately, do not want to go for such a clear withdrawal of terrorists from the ceasefire regime, this raises certain questions," the minister stressed. He underlined that Russian military forces, working in Syria, particularly the Reconciliation Center, have offered the militants to peacefully leave the territory of Eastern Ghouta, similar to the evacuation of militants with their families from Eastern Aleppo. "Moreover, a few days ago, our military, operating in Syria at the Reconciliation Center, offered militants to leave Eastern Ghouta peacefully, just like the militants who were evacuated with their families from Eastern Aleppo. Jabhat al-Nusra and those who interact with them, flatly refused this offer. He reminded that Russia had called for the Thursday UN meeting. "We offered to consider the situation in Eastern Ghouta and the situation around it. If our arguments are ignored yet again, we will have no other choice but to believe that the authors of this initiative yet again want to blame Damascus and protect terrorist groups," he said. Eastern Ghouta is one of four Syrian de-escalation zones created during the Astana talks on Syrian reconciliation. Three states: Russia, Iran and Turkey serve as guarantors of the de-escalation deals, which apply to all sides except those linked to the al-Qaeda terrorist group (banned in Russia). According to the UN, almost 400,000 people have been trapped in the area besieged by Syrian government forces, while Russia argues these claims, saying that Damascus has been attacked by militants controlling the enclave. Russia, US Relations, Energy Market The Russian foreign minister went on to speak about US trade policies, saying that Washington was trying to push Moscow out of the Eurpean energy market, promoting their liquified natural gas (LNG). "We know that a significant part of the anti-Russian approach in the Balkans and, in general, in Europe, is initiated by Washington. We see this aim very clearly. The goal is stake out American military-political domination and economic leadership, including by trying to force Russia out of energy markets and force Europeans to switch to more expensive liquefied gas from the United States," Lavrov said at the University of Belgrade. He specified that the Balkan countries' entrance into NATO, forcing them to take a side in the military-political confrontation, the philosophy which the US is promoting in Europe. The minister concluded that it hardly had anything to do with the declared goal of strengthening the national security of the Balkan states, as "no one was threatening them." Sputnik NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Has Russia Deployed Latest-Generation Stealth Warplanes in Syria? By Jamie Dettmer February 22, 2018 Moscow may have deployed two of its latest generation stealth warplanes to Syria, according to video footage of a pair of Su-57s landing at a Russian airbase in the war-torn country. The reported deployment, seen on social media, comes amid rising alarm that the Syria conflict that started out as an uprising against President Bashar al-Assad and is now split into several separate struggles could erupt into a wider regional clash between outside powers. On Thursday, Iran's deputy foreign minister warned of the risk of the multi-sided fighting in Syria spreading with regional players being brought into direct conflict, saying, "Fear of war is everywhere in our region." In an interview with the BBC, Abbas Araqchi refused to confirm that Iran had flown a drone in Israeli airspace launched from Syria earlier this month. The overflight sparked a confrontation leading to the downing of an Israeli fighter jet and major retaliatory Israel airstrikes on Syria's air defense system and Iranian military bases in Syria. Araqchi said the drone belonged to the Syrian army and accused Israel of flying drones over Syria and other neighboring countries. "They shouldn't be angry when they are faced with something that they are doing against others on a daily basis," he said. Earlier this week Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu brandished dramatically at an international security conference in Munich what he said was a piece of the Iranian drone Israel had shot down, saying Iran was the "greatest threat to our world." Footage of a pair of Su-57s Moscow's most advanced combat warplanes were filmed landing this week at Russia's Hmeimim air base southeast of the city of Latakia on Syria's Mediterranean coastline. The footage quickly circulated Thursday on social media sites. VOA is unable to verify the video, but if Russia has deployed Su-57s it would mark a significant addition to Moscow's firepower in a theater of war that now features a dizzying array of competing forces and increased military involvement by outside sponsors including Russia and Iran on Assad's side, Turkey, which is determined to stop Syrian Kurds from establishing an autonomous state of their own, and the U.S., which has aligned with the Kurds to defeat the Islamic State. Israel has been mounting increasing airstrikes in recent weeks in Syria, fearful that the radical Lebanese Shi'ite militia Hezbollah, sponsored by Iran, will consolidate bases in Syria from which to threaten Israel's northern border. Everyday in Syria's crowded airspace warplanes from half-dozen countries are flying in ever closer proximity, increasing the dangers of a clash, which could turn a war of proxies into an all-out confrontation between jostling outside powers, all of whom are determined to shape the outcome of the messy Syria conflict. In footage posted Thursday by Syrian political activists, four Su-35 fighter jets and four Su-25 strike aircraft were seen escorting the Su-57s as they came into land at the Hmeimim air base. Russia has manufactured a dozen Su-57s so far. The single-seat, twin-engine jets are due to enter operational squadrons formally next year after years of problem-plagued development. Nicknamed the "F-22 killer" the Su-57 has been earmarked by the Russian military as a direct competitor to America's U.S. F-22 Raptor. Russian and Syrian officials have not commented on the unverified video footage but pro-Assad news sites welcomed the additional firepower. Beirut-based Al-Masdar News, which boasts close links with the Syrian military, said: "With the arrival of the Su-57s (and additional warplanes in general), it appears that Moscow is expecting major escalations in Syria during 2018 and having been caught off-guard in the past wants to be fully prepared for any drastic situation that may arise." In December, Russian leader Vladimir Putin declared Moscow's mission in Syria had been accomplished a declaration coinciding with confirmation that he'd seek a fifth term as Russia's president in elections in March. He said Russia would start a military draw-down. And Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu announced on the same day as Putin's victory declaration was made that 38 warplanes had returned to Russia. But Moscow has remained trapped in Syria, say analysts. Its military power has been needed by Assad to support offensives against remaining rebel holdouts in the northwestern province of Idlib and in the Damascus suburb of Eastern Ghouta, which has seen in the past four days some of the most intense airstrikes of the seven-year-old Syria conflict. Overnight Thursday, Russian warplanes carried out reportedly hours-long airstrikes on Eastern Ghouta, adding to a days-long aerial bombardment of the shattered suburb that has left more than 300 people dead this week and as many as 2000 injured, say opposition activists. "Russia overall finds its ability to control the complex Syrian conflictparticularly the interplays between the parties involvedmuch diminished," according to Pavel Baev in an analysis for the Brookings Institution, a Washington-based think-tank. He argues Russia is facing "a series of new challenges" in Syria as other outside adversaries maneuver to secure zones of influence and consolidate footholds via proxies or using their own forces. "Putin thought that he figured out a proper balance of key drivers in the convoluted war, but its new mutation has caught him unprepared. The space for maneuvering between regional adversaries is narrowing," says Baev. Clashes involving outside forces in Syria this past month have included Turkish troops firing on pro-Assad militias which attempted to reinforce Afrin, a Kurdish enclave besieged by the Turks, and U.S. warplanes on February 7 striking pro-Assad forces, including Russian contractors, as they advanced on an oil facility east of the Euphrates controlled by the U.S.-aligned Kurds. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address UN Officials Appeal for Syria Truce, Eastern Ghouta Assistance By Margaret Besheer February 22, 2018 Russia expressed its objections Thursday to a draft U.N. resolution intended to implement a 30-day pause in fighting across Syria and lift the siege on the town of eastern Ghouta. At a Security Council meeting that Moscow requested, its ambassador dismissed as "not possible" the proposed cease-fire and accompanying aid deliveries, along with large-scale medical evacuations. "Here what we need is not symbolism, not decisions for the sake of decisions, but measures undertaken commensurate with the realities on the ground," Russian envoy Vassily Nebenzia told council members. "The Security Council needs to reach agreement on feasible not populistic, severed from reality decisions." Coverage criticized Nebenzia criticized media coverage of the military operations against eastern Ghouta as a "'massive psychosis" and said there was a campaign to tarnish Syria and Russia. As he has previously done, he accused the civil society first responders known as the White Helmets of being close to terrorist groups and acting as part of a "misinformation campaign." "There is an impression that all of eastern Ghouta is comprised of hospitals alone and that the Syrian army is fighting against those hospitals," Nebenzia said. "This is a well-known tactic in information warfare." The Syrian American Medical Society, a U.S.-based medical relief organization, said Wednesday that 13 medical facilities had been targeted in just two days. Four were destroyed and two had to temporarily close. U.N. humanitarian chief Mark Lowcock who briefed council members via video link from Geneva, urged support for the humanitarian pause. "You are all as member states aware that your obligations under international humanitarian law are just that: binding obligations," Lowcock said. "They are not favors to be traded in a game of death and destruction." He warned that counterterrorism efforts must not supersede the duty to protect civilians, and he noted that the U.N. human rights office had documented at least 346 civilian deaths this month and 900 injuries. 'Urgent and concrete action' "The international community must take urgent and concrete action," Lowcock said. "What we need is a sustained cessation of hostilities and we need it desperately." The U.S. envoy to the U.N. Economic and Social Council said that while Russia had asked for the meeting to find a way out of the situation, it appeared intent on "blocking any meaningful effort to do so." "The United States is ready to vote on this resolution right here and right now," said Ambassador Kelley Currie. But a vote Thursday did not appear likely. Sweden's ambassador said he would first review the amendments put forward by the Russians. "We are trying to find a way forward that will work for everyone, but of course that has meaningful implications on the ground," Olof Skoog told reporters. On Wednesday, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres appealed to the council to approve the cease-fire, and especially to help the 400,000 besieged residents of eastern Ghouta, whom he said "live in hell on Earth." Last year, the enclave was designated as one of four "de-escalation zones" in a deal with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's supporters, Russia and Iran, along with Turkey. Fighting has escalated as the Syrian military and its allied forces appear to be launching an all-out operation to retake eastern Ghouta, which is one of the last areas near Damascus still under control of the armed opposition. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Taiwan's defense minister Feng stepping down ROC Central News Agency 2018/02/22 23:23:38 Taipei, Feb. 23 (CNA) Taiwan's Defense Minister Feng Shih-kuan () is to be replaced by National Security Council Secretary-General Yen Teh-fa () in a cabinet reshuffle that is likely to be announced Friday. Sources told CNA that the reshuffle will also see Labor Minister Lin Mei-chu (), who has tendered her resignation due to health reasons, replaced by Deputy Labor Minister Su Li-chiung (). Feng has been serving as defense minister since President Tsai Ing-wen's () inauguration in May 2016. His stepping down comes amid increased military moves by China's fighter jets and naval vessels near Taiwan, including exercises encircling the island from the air and the sea. Shortly after Feng became defense minister, there was also an accidental firing of a missile into the Taiwan Strait, resulting in the death of a Taiwanese fisherman. Human error as well as insufficient oversight and unclear standard operating procedures were blamed for the incident. The new defense minister Yen is a retired two-star Army general and decorated officer who had served various important posts in the military, including as chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces and vice defense minister. During his post as head of the Kaohsiung-based 8th Army Corps responsible for the defense of southern Taiwan, Yen and his troops had performed well in the post-disaster relief of Typhoon Morakot in 2009, earning high praise from then-President Ma Ying-jeou before his promotion to deputy chief of the General Staff two years later. Yen has served as the de facto head of the NSC since May 2017. After leaving the current job, Feng will assume the post as president of a soon-to-be-launched think tank titled "Institute for National Security Studies" (), according to the sources. Founded by the defense ministry, the semi-official organization will focus on the study of the Chinese military after it is established in May, according to Taiwan's military. A graduate of the Air Force Academy in 1967, Feng is a former Air Force fighter jet pilot and Air Force deputy commander. (By Lu Hsin-hui, Wen Kui-hsiang, Yeh Su-ping, Joe Yeh and Shih Hsiu-chuan) Enditem/cs/sc NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address Turkey's Syria Operation Showcases Domestic Weapons Industry By Dorian Jones February 22, 2018 Turkey's ongoing military offensive against a Kurdish militia in Syria's Afrin enclave is showcasing the growing prowess of the Turkish armaments industry. In recent years, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has sought to dramatically reduce his country's dependency on imported arms. "Almost all of the armored carriers (operating) in Afrin are domestically produced. I thank our friends who produced them," said Erdogan Wednesday at a meeting at his presidential palace. The Turkish military, alongside allied Syrian rebels, is seeking to seize Afrin, a Kurdish enclave, from the control of a Kurdish militia that Ankara accuses of being a terrorist group linked to an insurgency inside Turkey. Erdogan went on to blame the deaths of Turkish soldiers fighting in Afrin on the failure of countries to sell Turkey sophisticated weapons, including armed drones. He did not name the countries to which he was referring. Last year, Erdogan issued a presidential decree putting Turkey's armament industry directly under his control. The government has poured billions of dollars' worth of investments into expanding the defense industry. Further investments are on the way. "A total of 55 projects worth $9.4 billion were evaluated," according to a presidential statement in January at a meeting of Turkey's Undersecretariat for Defense Industries. "In the past there was no money, but now there is a lot of money slushing around, and the AKP has the vision to realize this project. This is a success story of the AKP," said political analyst Atilla Yesilada of Global Source Partners, referring to the ruling party. "We used to procure 80 percent of our (armament) needs from abroad; now we are producing our own rifles, simple drones, armored vehicles. It saves foreign currency, it develops an industry which has some export potential and reduces foreign dependency." Trimming foreign dependency on imported weapons is a key priority of the Turkish government. The current Afrin operation has served as a reminder to Ankara of the vulnerability of such dependency. Germany is currently blocking a key upgrade of Turkish-owned, German-made Leopard tanks because of their use in the Afrin operation. But the Afrin campaign is also showcasing Turkey's armaments industry. "There are many new military technologies. Turkey has developed armed drones, helicopters, smart munitions and for the first time, they are all being tested in action abroad," said defense analyst Metin Gurcan, who also served in the Turkish military. "I am sure all these new systems will be tested and after that, upgraded accordingly. Systems that are combat proven result in their prices going up," Gurcan added. Along with developing strategic arms independence, Ankara has an eye on the lucrative international arms market. Analysts suggest Turkey is unlikely to try and compete with the world's major players, but rather will try and find a niche. "Turkey has been trying to become a very important player in the arms exports market, in the region of the Middle East, Central Asia, Africa," said Gurcan. "Turkey is very flexible, ready to accept proposals for technology transfer joint production, also at a cheaper price, than the normal market prices. I think Turkey's arms industry is emerging as a new exporter that can provide, more efficient, low cost, battle tested, and less problematic for arms buyers," he said. Gurcan points out Ankara is using close diplomatic ties, with central Asian countries and Qatar, to secure several arms contracts. Turkey's defense industry, however, may be approaching a ceiling in reducing its dependency on arms imports. "Turkey does not produce its own microchips, not even the general use chips. So anything that requires specialized circuitry you have to buy from abroad," points out analyst Yesilada. "If you are producing a guided missile you can't (in Turkey) because you don't have a similar domestic industry where you can draw on their experience." The Turkish defense industry says it has started to produce so-called smart bombs, but analysts suggest they fall short of the capability of munitions imported from the United States and Europe. Turkish forces are relying heavily on such specialized munitions in their ongoing Afrin operation, with hundreds of air sorties already carried out. A Western diplomat with knowledge of the subject says Ankara is starting to reach out to allies to replenish its stocks of such weapons. Bridging the technology gap is a priority for Ankara. It has made technology transfers a key demand for purchases of sophisticated weapons, particularly its efforts to buy a surface-to-air missile system. Several bids, including from the United States, of its Patriot missile system broke down in part because of disputes over technology transfers. Such failings are reasons given by Ankara for its controversial decision to buy an S-400 missile system from Russia. Turkey's NATO allies had warned against doing so, citing compatibility issues. "It's (a deal) already done. Turkey paid 40 percent of it and the rest is given as a credit by Russia, and the first delivery is by 2020," said international relations expert Huseyin Bagci of Ankara's Middle East Technology University. It remains unclear whether Moscow has met Ankara's technology transfer demands and the details of the deal remain unclear. Bagci suggests that Turkey's defense industry has hit a ceiling for now. "Turkey is buying big jet fighters, smart bombs, etc., and is selling small munitions, artillery, etc. Turkey is definitely not yet a giant of weapons production; it is not," Bagci said. NEWS LETTER Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list Enter Your Email Address In a stunning exit for a homegrown Connecticut company, Blue Buffalo Pet Products is taking an $8 billion buyout from food giant General Mills 16 years after its launch, while maintaining its Wilton headquarters office as a division of the food giant. Created in 2002 by Bill Bishop Sr. and his sons Billy and Chris to market pet food with wholesome ingredients, Blue Buffalo is now a fixture in several major pet food store chains and smaller independent shops. The deal was announced Friday even as Blue Buffalo has been working to expand its reach to more mass retailers, the bread and butter of General Mills, which includes natural brands like Annies, Larabar, Cascadian Farm and Muir Glen. General Mills has a huge stable of mainstream consumer brands, as well, including Cheerios, Nature Valley, Pillsbury and Haagen-Dazs to name a few. This idea of entering a new category thats one of the things that excites us, said General Mills CEO Jeff Harmening in a Friday morning conference call. We have an opportunity to add (an) $8 billion brand to the General Mills portfolio, and as we enter this new category we are doing so with a leadership team led by Billy and his family but also many others who have been quite successful over time. We know consumers pretty well, and it turns out that many of those consumers also have pets, Harmening added. It really would be up to Billy and his team to take a look at the (marketing) capabilities that we have take a look under the hood and see what can apply to their business. I expect theyll find some things. Blue Buffalo sales totaled nearly $1.3 billion in 2017, up 11 percent, with profits rising by half to $194 million. Combined, the companies aim to cut $50 million in costs, without stating how that will impact Blue Buffalos workers. In addition to its Wilton corporate offices, Blue Buffalo will continue running manufacturing and development facilities in Joplin, Mo., and Richmond, Ind. Billy Bishop Jr. will continue to lead Blue Buffalo, reporting directly to Harmening. It was the second major success for the family in the span of two decades, with the senior Bishop a co-founder of Sobe Beverage in Norwalk, sold in 2001 to Purchase, N.Y.-based Pepsico for $370 million. We share very similar values from a company standpoint, and to me thats at the heart of this transaction, Billy Bishop said Friday. Now is the right time for the Buff to take it to the next level. In addition to the Bishop family, the private equity firm Invus Group is a major shareholder in Blue Buffalo, with the firm based in New York City and run by Greenwich resident Raymond Debbane. Under General Mills offer, Blue Buffalo stockholders will receive $40 for each share of Blue Buffalo, a 23 percent premium over the issues average price over the preceding weeks. Blue Buffalos growth over the years included a significant stumbling block, after the company traded words and lawsuits with industry giant Purina, a subsidiary of Nestle Holdings. After a poultry byproduct was discovered in Blue Buffalo pet food that had not been listed in its ingredients, Purina sued Blue Buffalo, which pinned the blame on a supplier while countersuing Purina for false advertising. The companies resolved their litigation in November 2016. Blue Buffalo was hit with a consumer class-action lawsuit, as well, settling the case for $32 million and suing Travelers to honor an insurance policy claim. Spencer Sloan / Shares of United Technologies rose 3 percent Thursday, a day after its CEO indicated a willingness to consider the question of breaking up the Farmington-based conglomerate whose divisions include Otis, Pratt & Whitney, and UTC Aerospace Systems which has a major plant in Danbury. Only this past January, UTC shareholders voted in favor of the companys proposed $30 billion acquisition of Rockwell Collins, with the Iowa-based giant to bolster UTCs aerospace division with aircraft avionics and flight-deck systems among others. Asymmetry By Lisa Halliday Simon & Schuster. 288 pp. $26 --- Initially, Lisa Halliday's debut novel, "Asymmetry," appears to be a roman a clef. A young publishing assistant named Alice embarks on a love affair with the American literary lion, Ezra Blazer, who sounds and behaves very much like Philip Roth. In fact, any identification with Roth, with whom Halliday once shared a romance, seems there for the reader's delight and plucking. An incorrigible flirt, with no progeny and every literary honor but the Nobel (a recurring joke), Ezra has a weakness for almost everything older - Yiddish humor, vintage music, forgotten movies - except companions. Women he prefers absurdly young. Ezra is Alice's teacher, her patron, and in danger of being her everything if she doesn't stake a claim. Alice muses, "As soon as you are born the sand starts falling and only by demanding to be remembered do you stand a chance of it being upturned again and again." In the midst of becoming a writer, wise Alice realizes that she cannot bloom as an artist as long as she is enveloped by Ezra. "Ninety-seven years they'd lived between them, and the longer it went on the more she confused his for her own." Halliday's coruscating work takes you down roads you hadn't planned on taking. Alice's name is no accident; Lewis Carroll's heroine is invoked several times. Even the book's structure is initially bewildering. "Asymmetry" delivers two seemingly disconnected novellas, followed by a brief third coda. And that is the magic of this exquisite, impressive book: the way it plays with influence and assumption. As Ezra notes, "Our memories are no more reliable than our imaginations, after all. But I'm the first to admit it can be irresistible, contemplating what's 'real' versus 'imagined' in a novel." After the first novella, titled "Folly," the book takes a hard left into "Madness." Amar is on his way to visit his brother in Iraq, in possession of two passports and few wiles about airport security. The result is a prolonged detention in a Heathrow holding room, a contemporary purgatory. Amar's story, the less familiar, is relayed in the first person, while Alice's story, which seems deeply rooted in Halliday's own biography, is told in the third. These two smart, perceptive characters are the same age, well-educated, yet unlikely to collide. A girlfriend tells Amar, "Once we know the end of an unfortunate story, it's tempting to ask why its protagonist did not do better to swerve his fate." Deprived temporarily of his freedom, Amar contemplates what he knows and has failed to learn, the violence of other places, the constant of war, the absurdity of his situation. He considers the writing of Stephen Crane: "It perhaps might be said - if anyone dared - that the most worthless literature of the world has been that which has been written by men of one nation concerning the men of another." Which is precisely what Halliday is doing. But, Amar asks, "wasn't it also Crane who said that an artist is nothing but a powerful memory that can move itself at will through experiences sideways?" This passage also moves sideways in the novel, Ezra having typed it in "Folly" for Alice to discover. "Asymmetry" concludes with the section entitled"Ezra Blazer's Desert Island Discs," based on the BBC radio program that asks guests to name the songs they would want on a deserted island. Halliday has blessed Ezra with unexpected events in his late age, gifts that deviate from Roth's biography. Ezra's comic imperative to seduce, however, remains a constant. In his wide-ranging interview on the radio show, he becomes the key to understanding the novel's wonders. For us, the ride is in surrendering to falling down rabbit holes to unknown places. The moment "Asymmetry" reaches its perfect ending, it's all the reader can do to return to the beginning in awe, to discover how Halliday upturned the story again and again. NEW YORK (AP) In appointing Margaret Brennan as moderator of "Face the Nation" on Thursday, CBS News gets the first person with day-to-day experience covering the Trump administration as host of a Sunday morning political talk show. She replaces John Dickerson and will start on Sunday. Dickerson recently moved to New York to become one of the three anchors of "CBS This Morning." Brennan, in an interview, said the Sunday political shows are an increasingly important forum for lending perspective at a time the news cycle moves so quickly for journalists and viewers. "To be able to step back and give some perspective is value-added," she said. Brennan, 37, was born in Stamford, Conn. and grew up in Danbury, Conn. where she attended St. Peter's School. She attended Convent of the Sacred Heart in Greenwich for high school. Brennan has been a panelist on "Face the Nation" and filled in as moderator since Dickerson's exit, along with Nancy Cordes and Major Garrett. She's currently a White House and foreign affairs correspondent for CBS, and interviewed Secretary of State Rex Tillerson on "60 Minutes" this past Sunday. She'll exit the White House for her new job, but leaves with a perspective on how it operates and tries to get things done that may be an advantage over her rivals. "It's not a White House that mimics any other," she said. Mary Hager, executive producer of "Face the Nation," cited Brennan's "ability to ask newsmakers tough but fair questions in a deft and respectful manner, her sharp news instincts and her tremendous ability to make complicated subjects understandable" as strengths. In 2015, she was the commencement speaker at her alma mater, Convent of the Sacred Heart in Greenwich. "When I left Sacred Heart, I definitely had the conviction of my own opinions in terms of not thinking twice to ask a question," Brennan told Hearst in 2015. "That was key to giving me the confidence to think analytically and voice opinions and put myself out there." Brennan worked at Bloomberg News and CNBC before joining CBS in 2012. She takes over a broadcast that had Bob Schieffer and Lesley Stahl as long-running predecessors before Dickerson took over. CBS News President David Rhodes credited Dickerson with giving "Face" an all-week presence across digital and social media. "I can't wait to see how Mary and Margaret together will continue to evolve this important public affairs program," he said in a note to CBS employees. Her competition on Sundays includes Chuck Todd at NBC, George Stephanopoulos and Martha Raddatz at ABC, Chris Wallace at Fox and Jake Tapper on CNN. "I have thought of the show as being an exclamation point for the week that was and a starting point for the week that's coming," Brennan said. Additional reporting by Lidia Ryan and Paul Schott, Hearst Newspapers. Wonder what the new guy in the next Legislative Office Cubicle is making? Well, our annual request for the salaries of state employees in the Capitol and the neighboring Legislative Office Building, under the state Freedom of Information Act, was just answered. Known as Salary Porn, it is bound to increase the envy - and loathing - quotient in the government class. Acronyms for various office include things like OLR- Office of Legislative Research; OFA, Office of Fiscal Analysis; and HDO, HRO, SDO, SRO for House Democrats, House Republicans, Senate Democrats, Senate Republicans. A Windsor man faces up to 3 years in prison after he pleaded guilty in federal court Thursday to filing a false tax return, authorities said in a release. Craig Francis, also known as Horus Durjaya Bey, 44, pleaded guilty in federal court in New Haven, according to the release by the office of John H. Durham, U.S. Attorney for Connecticut. A week after a deadly shooting at a Florida High School left 17 dead, not a single Republican gubernatorial candidate addressed gun regulations in a debate Wednesday, but all of them said they support increasing the presence of law enforcement in schools. Peter Lumaj, an Albanian-born Fairfield immigration lawyer, said his first move as Governor would be an executive order mandating armed security in schools. He was one of the contingent of hopefuls that raised his hand when asked if he would maintain the existing gun laws in the state. We protect the president with guns, we protect the vice president with guns, we protect the congressmen, congresswomen with guns, we protect the senators with guns, Lumaj said. You go to the state office, they are protected with guns. You go to police station they are protected with guns. Yet the most precious thing that we have in our lives, our children, are not protected. As a society, we have failed them. If I were your governor, there would be an executive order that every school in our state would provide armed security for our children. Former Trumbull First Selectman Tim Herbst called for a comprehensive approach to preventing mass shootings that includes investing in mental health and greater security in schools. A deadly weapon is made deadly by a deadly person, Herbst said. Most of the eight candidates who participated in the debate said they would maintain the current gun laws, put in place after the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. State Rep. Prasad Srinivasan of Glastonbury clarified a statement he made about reversing his vote on a 2013 bill that brought stricter gun regulations to the state, saying he wouldnt change the gun regulations. The reason Im so upset today is that the two other parts of the bill never got funded, school security and mental health Srinivasan said. We passed a bill we did not implement. It is critical you have to walk your talk. None of the candidates addressed the issues that have been part of the daily national conversation including bump stocks, banning semi-automatic weapons or limiting magazine capacity. They did not say a word on expanding background checks or arming teachers an idea President Donald Trump has embraced. Spanish company BQ has launched two new Android smartphones today, both of which are already available from its international online store. The Aquaris VS and Aquaris VS Plus share a lot of specs, as you'd expect from the naming convention, and yes, the Plus model is bigger. The BQ Aquaris VS has a 5.2-inch 720p IPS touchscreen with 2.5D glass and up to 520 nits of brightness, a 12 MP main camera with f/2.0 aperture and 1.25m pixels, as well as 1080p video recording. For selfies you have an 8 MP sensor with f/2.0 aperture and 1.12m pixels, and even a LED flash. The phone is powered by the Snapdragon 430 chipset, which has a 1.4 GHz octa-core Cortex-A53 CPU. You get either 3GB of RAM and 32GB of storage for 189.90, or a 4/64GB combo for 209.90. A fingerprint scanner is on the back, and the Aquaris VS has a 3,100 mAh battery with support for Qualcomm Quick Charge 3.0. It runs Android 7.1.2 Nougat with an update to Oreo promised for the future. The Aquaris VS Plus only has one version, with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage. It boasts a 5.5-inch 1080p IPS LCD with 2.5D glass and up to 570 nits of brightness. It has a 3,400 mAh battery, while all the other specs are identical to what its smaller sibling brings to the table. This model retails for 229.90. While the BQ online store delivers to a lot of countries, do note that these phones have very limited LTE band support - just 1/3/7/20. That's all you need for Europe, but if you're anywhere else in the world you'd better check if your carrier's bands are fully supported before you order and pay the shipping fee, which for some countries is more than a 20% premium over the price of the handset. Login or sign up to follow actresses, movies & dramas and get specific updates and news Login Sign Up Email Password Password Username Your E-mail will only be used to retrieve a lost password. Stay logged in Help The Havre Public Schools Board of Trustees will meet Tuesday at 6 p.m. in the Robins School Administration Building. The agenda for the meeting is: A. Call to order 1. Pledge of Allegiance 2. Roll call 3. Welcome to visitors 4. Agenda deletions or corrections, if any B. New business 1. Personnel Open agenda An opportunity for any member of the audience to bring to the attention of the board questions or relevant comments concerning district matters not on the agenda. The board will not discuss or take action on items not on the agenda, but may refer a matter presented to a future agenda. C. Closing The next board meeting will be Tuesday, March 13, at 6:30 p.m at Havre Middle School. Havre Public Schools Board of Trustees Planning workshop Board of Trustees Planning Workshop is scheduled for Tuesday, Feb. 27, 6 p.m. in the Robins School Administration Building Items for discussion 1. Board evaluation instruments 2. Trauma 3. High school bathrooms 4. Community listening sessions 5. Budget projections 6. Other For Bear Paw Development Corp. 2017 was "a year of incredible accomplishment" Bear Paw Executive Director Paul Tuss said at this year's annual meeting Thursday in the Montana State University-Northern Student Union Building Ballroom. "This good work occurred because Bear Paw has talented, committed and hardworking staff. I am blessed to be able to work every day with people who truly make a difference," Tuss said. Bear Paw Development, the oldest economic development district in Montana, assists communities, businesses and aspiring entrepreneurs with economic development projects in Blaine, Chouteau, Hill, Liberty and Philips counties, as well as the Fort Belknap and Rocky Boy's Indian reservations. Bear Paw also works with the Little Shell Band of Chippewa Indians. Because of a hard-working team of economic practitioners, Tuss said, Bear Paw was able to coordinate more than $8.9 million through grant writing, revolving loan fund investments, bank financing and other sources for business startups, expansions and community infrastructure. Bear Paw in 2017 was able to leverage $85.33 from outside sources for every $1 invested in it by local governments, and helped the private sector create or retain 195 jobs. A flier at the meeting says Bear Paw has coordinated $136 million in local funding since 2006 for projects in its Economic Development District through state, federal and local sources, as well as through banks, revolving loan funds, owner equity and other investments. Tuss thanked his colleagues Director of Operations Stefnie Redding, Director of Loan Services Tiffany Melby; Director of Community Development Michelle Turville; Food and Agriculture Development Center Director Taylor Lyon; Small Business Development Center Director Joe LePlante, and Community Planner Eryn Nissen. Nissen, Tuss said, has stepped down from her position at Bear Paw this month "for a private sector pursuit of her own." Krystal Steinmetz, who held the position for seven years, had come back after a hiatus, Tuss said, and Thursday marked her second day back on the job. He also thanked Bear Paw Development's Board of Directors and parting at-large board member and former Chester Mayor Wayne Wardell. Wardell, Tuss said, was not at the meeting but had served on the board for 23 years. By Emily Mayer The Havre Plaindealers Feb. 23, 1918 edition was full of news related to the Great War. Dr. H. C. Culbertson of the United States Food Administration was scheduled to speak before interested community members on March 5 regarding the world food shortage and what Americans could do to help alleviate the shortage. Two letters from local men were published among the national war news. BOYS ABROAD WANT LETTERS FROM HOME The Plaindealer is in receipt of a letter from Private Wm. J. Lorimer, who went with the first draft from Hill county, describing his trip across the briny and safe arrival in France. Mr. Lorimer, who has a ranch thirty miles north of Havre, has numerous friends in Havre and Hill county who will be glad to know of his safe journey over a perilous route. In his letter Mr. Lorimer praises the work of the Y. M. C. A. in providing home-like surroundings for the boys over there but states all the boys want letters from home. Mr. Lorimers address is Co. I, 163rd U. S. Infantry, Somewhere in France, Via New York. LETTER FROM A HAVRE BOY NOW IN JAPAN Nagasaki, Japan, Jan. 14, 1918.-Dear Folks: We finally landed in Japan after living on the ship in the harbor 25 days. We are nearly all quartered at the Nagasaki hotel (170 of us) this is a first class hotel and their dining room service is hard to beat. We may be here 60 days, cant say just how long. I am quite sure though that when we leave here we are going to Russia again. Nothing would suit this bunch better than to get these orders. Havent got a letter from any one since I left St. Paul, the Russians must be holding it up at Vladivostok. We are organizing foot ball and base ball teams and we also have a good gymnasium, so time is not very heavy on our hands. The weather is fine here, oranges are still hanging on the trees, and green vegetables are coming in right along. The mail for the States close within an hour and I want to get this out on the next boat so will have to stop writing. Good bye, Lieut. F. M. Niskern, Russian Railway Service Corps. Nagasaki Hotel, Nagasaki, Japan. The Russian Railway Service Corps, numbering 350 men, was a quasi-military organization formed by President Wilson at the request of the Russian government to operate the Trans-Siberian, Chinese Eastern and Ussuri Railways. Russia was embroiled in civil war after the Mensheviks overthrew the tsar, and President Wilson saw an opportunity to protect American interests in Russia to defeat Germany, namely American military equipment stored on the rails in Vladivostok and Murmansk. Other objectives in forming the Russian Railway Service Corps was to help the Czech Legion in Russia out of the country and fight for the Allies as the Legion was sympathetic to the cause, as the American Government didnt trust the Bolsheviks because they had made a separate peace treaty with Germany. Another part of the mission was to help the Russians organize their new government, with the goal of capitalism the ultimate result. Shortly after arriving in Russia, the Russian Railway Service Corps, under the command of Colonel George Emerson, went to Nagasaki due to unsettled conditions, mostly due to marauding bands pillaging and plundering, with the Cossacks in particular having an affinity of commandeering trains along the rails. In Havre, life went on and two entries in the Society column mention George Washington-themed parties, as our first presidents birthday was observed on Feb. 22. Birthday Party. On Friday afternoon Mrs. Earnest Hayes entertained seventeen little folks in honor of her daughters fourth birthday. The decorations were all symbolic of George Washington and games of all kinds were played as amusements, followed at a late hour by a tempting lunch. Mrs. Hayes as assisted by her sister Miss Ligori Healey. Those invited were Marjory, Lucile and Dorothy Case; Mary Hamilton, Mary Beth MacKenzie, Katherine and Elanor Fuller, Katherine and Janette McCarthy, Georgia Pyper, David Almas, Wilbur Ferguson, David Sprinkle, Billie Roper, Stewart MacKenzie, Janette Grimmer, Billie Ryan and Richard Spooner. Twenty-Ninth Anniversary. Mr. and Mrs. Henry Spooner celebrated their twenty-ninth wedding anniversary on Tuesday evening. The rooms were profusely decorated with the national colors and emblems and place cards relative to George Washingtons birthday were used on the dining table. Places were marked for eleven guests and Mr. and Mrs. Spooner were the recipients of congratulations and good wishes from all present. Havre Police Department Officers arrested two people after a Sixth Street caller reported Thursday at 7:24 a.m. that a white sedan had been sitting out front for more than an hour and the person behind the steering wheel appeared to be passed out. Eric Lee Ambler of Havre, 41, was arrested on a driving under the influence charge and Mercedes Rose McDowell of Havre, 23, was arrested on charges of possession of dangerous drugs and possession of drug paraphernalia. Officers investigated after a Montana State University-Northern caller reported Thursday at 8:52 a.m. that a Saturn was hit sometime the day before and incurred mirror and door damage. Officers investigated after a 13th Street West caller reported Thursday at 9:19 a.m. a car crash. Officers investigated after a caller at a First Street business reported Thursday at 3:23 p.m. that a cellphone was stolen out of his pickup truck. Officers arrested Jeffrey Blaine Dolphay of Havre, 38, on charges of obstructing a peace officer and driving with a suspended or revoked drivers license Thursday at 3:43 p.m. during a motor vehicle stop on Fifth Street North. Officers investigated after a 15th Avenue caller reported Thursday at 3:59 p.m. a two-vehicle crash where someone slid into a fire hydrant and another vehicle left the scene. Officers investigated after a 13th Street West caller requested Thursday at 9:33 a.m. to speak to an officer. Officers investigated after a Hoover Avenue caller reported Thursday at 11:31 p.m. a motor vehicle crash. Hill County Sheriffs Office Deputies arrested Steven Allen Rawlins of Harrodsburg, Kentucky, 33, on a state District Court warrant Thursday at 12:11 p.m. at the Hill County Detention Center. Havre Fire Department Medical crews responded to one call Thursday and one today. Havre Animal Shelter This morning the shelter held three medium-hair cats, sex listed as unknown; one female and two male short-hair cats; one female medium-hair cat; one female long-hair cat, and one female calico cat. The shelter this morning held a 1-year-6-month-old female Australian shepherd, a 1-year-6-month-old female Rottweiler-shepherd mixed-breed dog, a 9-month-old male Australian shepherd, a 1-year-old male Labrador retriever-pug mixed-breed, a male 11-month-old German shepherd, a 2-year-old female border collie, a 6-year-old female Labrador retriever, a 7-month-old pit bull-hound mix and an 8-month-old male mixed-breed dog. 'If it weren't for Fort Assinniboine, there might have not been a Havre' Before Montana became a state, before the name Havre had ever been emblazoned on, or staked in, any part of the Hi-Line, there was a Fort Assinniboine. "If it weren't for Fort Assinniboine, there might have not been a Havre," said Candi Zion, a historian and former chair of the Havre/Hill County Preservation Commission. At the time of its establishment, the fort stretched 220,000 acres. That large swath of territory covered a portion of present-day Havre, as well as Rocky Boy's Indian Reservation. Today, less than 20 percent of the military infrastructure survives. Recently, as a result of a small group of local residents who've been working hard for the last four years, Fort Assinniboine has been upgraded in national recognition and is one step from a monumental breakthrough. The fort was first nominated for national recognition in 1984, but the most recent nomination, approved Jan. 26 by the Montana State Historic Preservation Board to be sent to Washington, D.C., could mean big things for the fort and the region. Zion, who is the main writer of the National Register of Historic Places Registration nomination form, said it should be smooth sailing from here. This kind of recognition could improve tourism and make grants easier to come by, those involved in the work say. "This re-establishes what we always suspected, that it was a very significant fort, and it's right here in our backyard," said Becki Miller, historic preservation officer for the Preservation Commission. "I think it's a huge untapped tourism resource." Now it's up to the keeper in Washington. "Once it goes to the keeper, it's reviewed once again," she said. "But since the state review board accepted it, usually those go without a hitch and they just automatically put them on the National Register of Historic Places." Zion pieced together a large portion of the 138-page National Register of Historic Places Registration form. The bibliography for the form lists 98 sources comprising books, electronic resources, historic documents collections, interviews, correspondence, newspaper-magazine articles and other papers. The information in this article is based on Zion's research. Fort Assinniboine served a major role in U.S. military and diplomatic relationships, not only with the tribal nations of the area, but also Canada. The fort served as the key component of a military strategy to secure the international border with Canada "with respect to an overall policy of intimidation and containment of the Native American nations between 1879 and 1903." Fort Assiniboine's main function was border patrol and engagement with the Cree, Metis, Blackfeet and Sioux. Its location between the Blackfeet reservation to the west and Fort Belknap to the east led to interaction with the Gros Ventre and Assinniboine nations as well. The size and scale of the 220,000-acre military post and military reservation established it as one of the most massive in the United States, the nomination form says. During the fort's years of military use - 1879-1911 - as many as 104 buildings stood, "neatly arranged around the 2,000-foot long parade ground," the nomination says. Most of the buildings were built with locally produced load-bearing red brick, with nativestone foundations, and slate roof surfaces. Zion said the brick is an indication that the U.S. government intended Fort Assinniboine to be a longtime fort. Many forts being built around that time were made of wood. Some bricks from the fort were brought in to build Pershing Hall at what was then Northern Montana College, now Montana State University-Northern. It was named for the commander of Allied Forces in World War I, Gen. John "Black Jack" Pershing, who served as a lieutenant at Fort Assinniboine. "While fort personnel rarely engaged in battle, its role in the United States' military and diplomatic relationships with tribes and Canada proved crucial. The mere fact of the fort's existence undoubtedly dissuaded, or at least caused pause to consider, possible actions by Native Americans," the nomination research says. Between 1879 and 1903, Fort Assinniboine and its area of influence was the place where the United States' evolving relationships between tribal nations and Canada played out. The existing buildings, sites and structures constructed and used between 1879 and 1903 retain enough integrity to convey the fort's association with these nationally significant events. This nomination also emphasizes the significance of the Northern Agricultural Research Center - NARC - the operation that assumed the property after the fort was decommissioned. State contractors for the experiment station razed most of the other army buildings from 1925 to 1927. NARC occupies 6,960 acres of the fort territory. The research center conducts and promotes ag and natural resource studies, scientific investigations and experiments relating to agriculture, natural resources and rural life and to disseminate this information to the people of Montana. Those living on the grounds are all NARC employees, said research associate Roger Hybner. Dressed in his winters warmest, Chairman of the Fort Assinniboine Preservation Association Ron VandenBoom gave a partial tour in areas not barricaded in by mountains of snow of the grounds Wednesday morning. Youre standing in one of two of the largest forts in use at the time, VandenBoom said, adding that the other large fort at the time was Leavenworth. No expense was spared to make this. Up until the July 4, 2015, hailstorm, 14 of the original 104 brick and stone building still stood, VandenBoom said. The 2015 storm blew a tenuous structure down, bringing that number down to 13. The Interpretive Center, which is the former Post Library adjacent to the evident Bachelor Officers Quarters building, is the point of entry, per se. Its where guides meet with guests before taking them on tour. The building was first a fort library, and after the agricultural center took over in 1915, it served as offices for employees. Now the structure is on its way to becoming a museum. Many of the rooms are still empty, while others, such as the Gary Wilson Room, is starting to fill up. This is the beginning of our museum, VandenBoom said. A few artifacts such as green beer bottles with round bottoms in the room named for the late Havre historian and founding member of the Fort Assinniboine Preservation Association, have already been collected. The reason for the round bottoms, VandenBoom said, was because the military figured soldiers would drink less if they couldnt set the bottles down. How much truth there is to that being a real motivation for the military, VandenBoom said, he didnt know. On the eastern wall hangs a letter written by Canadian rebel leader Louis Riel on March 18, 1880, to Colonel Black of Fort Assinniboine. Rifle bullets rounded up off the grounds are also on display. VandenBoom has also collected charcoal tiles that came off the roof of one of the buildings during the 2015 storm and put old fort photos on them. Plans include accruing more old artifacts and expanding the museum, VandenBoom said. The next building in the tour was the Officers Amusement Hall, once the fanciest building in the fort. To open the large garage-size overhead door, one had to trudge through four feet of snow. After getting stuck in the snow en route, VandenBoom decided to sit that part of the tour out and let reporter and photographer fend for themselves. The Amusement Hall was where all the social activities were held, including dances and balls, usually put on by the soldiers wives, VandenBoom said. Today the Amusement Hall is a shell of what it once was. The walls are peeled or hollow and the floors down to the wood planks. There is very little that indicates its glory days. However, come summer 2018, music will once again fill the hall, VandenBoom said, as there are plans to have local bands play during the busy months of the fort. West of the amusement hall is the Bachelor Officers Quarters building, which stands out not only as the largest of the buildings, but the most ornate, boasting a turret on its eastern edge. The building has six apartment complexes, and each housed about two officers. These officers were lucky guys, VandenBoom said, adding they even had indoor bathrooms, whereas the enlisted men had outdoor bathrooms. At first, before pipe plumbing, indoor plumbing meant a shoot and a waiting bucket on a lower floor. Every apartment had a servant girl who cooked, washed laundry and cleaned, whereas, again, enlisted men did not, VandenBoom said. The fort jail building, south of the Interpretative Center, was able to house up to 50 prisoners at a time, VandenBoom said. Given the size of the fort and the surrounding town, that was a significant size for a jail, VandenBoom said he thought. Ryan Welch/Havre Daily News The kitchen was in the basement of the building, and what is believed to be the former cafeteria, is a room with a slide shoot in the middle and several long plank tables suspended in the air by wire. After the fort was closed, the jail building was sold to the city of Havre. Now the building, minus some of the bars off the windows, sits empty. Getting food to Fort Assinniboine was not always easy, as time was usually an enemy of produce. For that reason, a root cellar was built, VandenBoom said, to store and keep cool the food that was grown on the grounds. Thats all of the tour that Mother Nature allowed. But once the snow melts and ice thaws, the fort opens for tours again. Schools still open, administration and law enforcement say not a credible threat Local police officers have been spread to all Havre public schools today to watch and guard after a threat was found Thursday in a Havre High bathroom. Despite the threat, and the seriousness with which the school administration and local law enforcement is taking it, school is in session today. Obviously, there was a threat, School District Superintendent Andy Carlson said this morning, adding, We would not hold school if we had a more credible threat. Carlson would not say why the threat is not credible enough to cancel school, only that officers have been investigating, and they continue to do so. Officers from the Havre City Police Department, as well as the Hill County Sheriffs Office, have been stationed at all the schools. Theres a very large police presence at school, Carlson said. Havre Police Chief Gabe Matosich said this morning that his department, with help from Sheriffs Office deputies, have been working diligently on the investigation. In addition to having the entire day shift spread out, there were still some night shift officers working as of 10:15 a.m. An announcement posted on the schools website Thursday says, At approximately 3:00 on Thursday, February 22nd it was reported to the Havre High School administration that a threat was written on the back of a bathroom stall door in the mens west restroom. The threat indicated that there would be a school shooting on February 23, 2018. Carlson would not divulge details about the written threat, but he did say it was first reported by a Havre High student. The Havre Police Department dispatch log shows that Thursday at 3 p.m. school resource officer Joshua Holt instigated an investigation into suspicious activity. District administrators are cooperating with the Havre Police Department in the investigation, Carlson said. Video surveillance, interviews, and staff member collaboration has been vital in determining the credibility of this threat, the announcement says. Matosich said investigators are interviewing people and following the investigation wherever it leads. St. Jude Thaddeus School Principal Jolene Christensen said this morning the private school has always been proactive and erred on the side of caution and, aside from informing their educators of the threat made at Havre High School, they havent needed to change anything. Local social media such as Havres Questions, Comments, & Concerns, indicate some parents are keeping their children home today because of fear for their safety. Carlson said it was too early to tell what attendance is today, but, he added, he gets it. Im a parent, too its not a joke, Carlson said. Its a mean, callous act. It preys upon peoples feelings. Its frustrating, Carlson added. If people are keeping their kids at home, I get it. The threat comes just nine days after a gunman killed 17 students and educators at the Parkland, Florida, school in Feb. 14, and two days after a group of students and parents gathered at the White House for a listening session on school safety and gun control. Copycat threats are not uncommon following shootings like the one in Florida, Matosich said. The threats, he added, are statewide. Multiple Montana school district are investigating similar threats today made in their districts over the week. Someone who makes threats or is involved in a similar act, a Havre Police Department press release says, can be convicted of intimidation and be imprisoned for up to 10 years and be fined up to $50,000. Anyone who has information about the threat made Thursday is asked call the Havre Police Department at 265-4361 or the Sheriffs Office at 265-2512. Before returning to school for the 2017-2018 year, all Havre Public School employees learned in August new safety protocols meant to help handle armed intruders, bomb threats and other similar possible dangers. School resource Officer Josh Holt gave the Standard Response Protocol presentations three times within two days. Holt had said that shootings can happen anywhere, and that Havre is in no way immune from such a tragic incident. Despite the training, Carlson pointed out this morning, school employees are educators, and law enforcement is law enforcement. Planned activities will continue tonight unless there is reason to change anything. The Havre Wrestling Club Board voted this morning to still hold the Little Guy Wrestling Tournament at 5:30 p.m. at Havre High School. Press release The Highway 2 Association Annual Meeting will be held, Friday, March 2, at the Cottonwood Inn in Glasgow. The association has been advocating for an adequate highway in the U.S. Highway 2 corridor since 2001. Senate Bill 3, directing Montana Department of Transportation to construct four lanes 4 For 2 in the U.S. highway corridor across the state, was approved by the Legislature in 2001. Association President Bob Sivertsen said, An adequate highway is the prerequisite for economic development in northern Montana. As it stands, our communities cant compete for businesses that are looking to locate, relocate or expand. The meeting agenda consists of a look at the economy in the region and a discussion of highway projects in the corridor. The two Poplar round-a-bouts $10 million that are proposed will generate some lively discussion, as they are viewed as a waste of money when an alternative proposal can address the highway issues, including safety, for about one-third the cost, Sivertsen said. The meeting will convene at 11 a.m. and adjourn by 3 p.m. The public is encouraged to attend. People are asked to RSVP by Wednesday, Feb. 28, at 262-2346. At the end of a special meeting Thursday, the Hill County Park Board approved sending a draft revision of lease agreements for Beaver Creek Park cabins to the Hill County Attorney almost unchanged, despite audience members saying their suggestions on ways to improve the draft were essentially ignored. We do have to make decisions and sometimes they are not popular, but they need to be done, Hill County Commission Chair Mark Peterson said during the meeting. Beaver Creek Park secretary Aubrey Williams said the schedule is tight, but if approval comes quickly enough she could send th... Last updated 2/23/2018 at 9:11am North Central Senior Citizens Center, Feb. 26 to March 2 Monday Transportation from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Tuesday Transportation from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.; bingo at 1:15 p.m. Wednesday Transportation from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m; TOPS at 8 a.m.; cards at 1 p.m.; mall or Walmart shopping from 1 to 4 p.m. Thursday Transportation from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.; pinochle at 1 p.m.; mall or Walmart shopping 1 to 4 p.m. Friday Medical transportation will be available from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. but people must make a request at least 24 hours in advance. No cards played this week Menu by Earlen... Nature is all around us, and sometimes its a little too much in-your-face. A Coopers hawk in upstate New York is helping one city with its pigeon problem, but not everyone is appreciative. A red-eyed, crow-sized raptor, the Coopers hawk normally feasts on birds like pigeons and mourning doves, which are often found in urban and suburban areas so now the hawks are, too. NYup.com reports that a bank in Dewitt, New York, had a Coopers hawk move into the area in the first part of February and since then has been using the banks front entrance as its personal killing ground... Changes afoot The changes dont stop with the tools and platforms utilised. One experienced recruiter, Joe Screnci, chairman of JRS International Search Partners, says the job interview itself has also changed and will continue to evolve with technology, expertise and regulation. Whether interviews are conducted faceto- face or via online tools, or whether they are one-on-one or via panels, these changes must be considered during this critical phase of recruitment. Results should be validated using other tools and techniques to provide a meaningful insight into the candidate - Joe Screnci, JRS On the technology front, the proliferation of social media and also online databases has impacted how background checks are handled and what kinds of questions are asked at interviews. Im finding a trend that information found online is making its way into interview questions, says Screnci. He adds that anti-discrimination legislation has also had an impact on how interviews are handled. This development has caused interviewers to focus interview questions on experience, qualifications, skills and capability. Meanwhile, changes in corporate culture promoting diversity and equity ensure that interview questions focus on ability rather than disability. Targeted selection off-target One consistent element has been behavioural interviewing, also known as targeted selection, which today is used widely as a means of candidate assessment. However, Screnci says there is a fundamental flaw in this technique. The premise of this technique is that the best predictor as to how someone will act in a certain situation in the future is how they reacted to a similar situation in the past. This does not consider the environment they were in at the time and other infl uences; for example, economic climate, management directives, personal circumstances, company culture, etc., associated with the past situation. Many extraneous infl uences could have a ected how the person acted at the time, he says. Without these infl uences, Screnci suggests the person may well have acted di erently. Accordingly, the predictive value of this technique is questionable if there isnt an understanding of these infl uences. Results should be validated using other tools and techniques to provide a meaningful insight into the candidate, Screnci says. It may seem like an obvious thing to say but youve got to get that balance right every executive team and every CEO will want to know exactly how a potential program is going to benefit not only the business but also its employees. Since taking up the top spot at Yellow in September 2017, Linton has been the driving force behind overhauling the companys HR policies with a progressive attitude in mind already, a flexible working policy has been introduced alongside a summer hours scheme and a lump-sum payment for any employee who returns from parental leave. Aside from demonstrating the potential benefits, Linton also says HR professionals should seriously consider testing a new program for a short period or on a certain section of the workforce. We trialed flexible working for three months in one of our core teams, made sure we got it right and made sure we got feedback from people, so when we rolled it out across the entire organisation, wed ironed out all of the bumps, he says. According to Linton, its also critical that HR leaders continue to measure the impact of any new initiatives to ensure theyre successful and having the desired effect. Dr. Trevor-Roberts said if a significant part of a job is changed due to automation, most organisations believe it is quicker and easier to retrench the person in that role and hire someone new with the skills required. There are a few trends that, if taken together, suggest that a better outcome could be achieved if we focus on our existing employees. Firstly, employees are capable of learning new skills: Whilst early scientific evidence suggested that our brains were 'fixed', recent evidence has refuted this belief showing that the adult brain is 'plastic' and can re-wire itself to learn new skills. said Dr. Trevor-Roberts. Secondly, whilst this seems obvious to say, employers must believe in their employees. Indeed, research by Rosenthal and Jacobson found that simply believing in your employees made them improve. McMinn honored for 25 years of service Anthony McMinn accepts the Old North State Award from state Rep. Chuck McGrady. In its first 11 years, the Hendersonville Rescue Mission had 11 directors simple enough arithmetic to arrive at an average tenure of one year and an average stress factor of a lot. Related Stories Anthony McMinn has been director for 25 years, and friends, supporters and family members gathered on Saturday night at The Cedars to salute McMinn for his long tenure and to thank him for the way he has blessed the poor. There are a lot of ways to measure success over that time. I could say its because of the way the program has grown, Rescue Mission board chairman John Lampley said. Or I could say its the breadth of services, from transitional housing to job training to health services and on and on and on. Or I could say its the quality of staff. Anthonys a good judge of character. But I think the greatest reason is hes the man God has given us. Putting a new man in that coat Donnie Parks, who retired as Hendersonville police chief in 2007 after 30 years, was keynote speaker. Parks described his close friend in terms of his success, his love of God, his family and those he serves, his patience for human nature and impatience to get things done, his wisdom and foresight. Sometimes wed go to a restaurant and Id ask, How do you know that person? Hed say, Thats someone we worked with and we finally got him a job and hes been here for three years, Parks said. Thats not just putting a new coat on a man, thats putting a new man in that coat. The Rescue Mission is led on the premise of love and its a Christ-like love. The people that come to the mission are going through a period of darkness and thats where you need Anthony McMinn, a special person to lead them through. As a friend, I know I can count on him when Im as high as the moon or when Im so low I can sit on a dime and kick my feet and not hit the ground, Parks said. Hes a friend to the poor, hes a friend to the rich. Race and ethnicity does not matter to him. Hes a friend to those who are forgotten. Old North State Award State Rep. Chuck McGrady presented the longtime mission leader with the Old North State Award, signed by the governor and presented to someone who has provided years of exemplary service and commitment to North Carolina. McMinn said he was accepting the award on behalf of his wife, his board, his staff and nonprofit agencies who partner with the mission as we serve God to meet the needs of the less fortunate. Im blessed and and Im honored but I could not do what I do without my wife, he said. It was almost 30 years or more that I was walking through the mall in Atlanta and I see her sitting on a bench. She had just graduated from college, and she was beautiful and she still is and shes the mother of my children and shes my best friend. I have the best board of directors Ive ever worked for. It allows me to use the talent God has given me, God has blessed us. This award right here, it has my name on it. But Tim Jones, stand up, he said to the missions operations manager. Ive got a great staff. The rescue mission, he pointed out, serves the downtrodden and the lost 365 days a year. When its snowing and sleeting and youre by the fireplace, chillin, were feeding people, were preaching and were loving. And I thank God that I have a staff thats so committed. Im awful grateful. Because if you think of the rescue mission, we had 12 directors in 36 years and Ive been here 25. Were not here just by accident. Were here by divine appointment. I thank God for you guys, my church family, Im so blessed. All these agencies leaders that are here, you do a great job, he said of the providers of food, clothing, medical care, housing. We dont try to do it all. What we do we want to do right. But sometimes we partner with you guys for the greater good of our community. Computers and mobile phones are not the only devices likely to be targeted by cyber criminals, with webcams, televisions and even fridges at risk, Interpol has warned. While many tech users are generally aware of the threat cyber criminals can pose to PCs and mobile phones, the international police organisation has highlighted how all devices that can connect to the internet - known as the Internet of Things (IoT) - are potentially at risk of a cyber attack. It said cyber attacks targeting IoTs, which can include smart home devices, have increased significantly in the past two years. Evidence Police and cyber investigators are having to develop their skills to learn how to collect evidence from connected devices other than computers and phones. To help tackle this new threat, 43 investigators and digital forensics experts from 23 countries took part in investigating a simulated cyber attack on a bank launched through an IoT device as part of Interpol's latest Digital Security Challenge. In the scenario, cyber criminals attacked a bank in an attempt to steal large sums of money, with investigators discovering malware installed by the criminals was contained in an email attachment sent via a hacked webcam, making it harder to identify the source of the attack. Once the teams accessed the digital data held by the compromised webcam, they were able to identify the command and control server - a remote machine controlled by an attacker. The outcome means investigators can identify technical vulnerabilities in servers to help prevent further attacks. Noboru Nakatani, the executive director of Interpol Global Complex for Innovation, a research centre for the identification of crimes, said that the exercise would assist police in conducting real-world investigations more effectively. The organisers of Tedfest are planning a collective toast to Dermot Morgan this weekend as hundreds of Father Ted fans flock to the Aran Islands ahead of the 20th anniversary of the actor's death. Tedfest, the annual madcap three-day celebration of the classic Channel 4 sitcom, is being staged for the 12th successive year from today in its spiritual island home of Inishmore. More than 300 fans of the cult comedy are expected to flock to the Co Galway outpost for what has become one of the island's most lucrative weekends of the year. Dozens of zany Craggy Island-themed events have been planned, including old favourites such as Ted's Got Talent and a Lovely Girls Competition. However, organiser Peter Phillips said the main focus this year will be to commemorate in style the sitcom's late title star, Dermot Morgan, ahead of the 20th anniversary of his sudden death. The Dublin comic, who starred as Father Ted Crilly, suffered a heart attack while hosting a dinner party in his London home on February 28, 1998. His death came only a day after the 45-year-old had finished filming the last ever episode of the timeless sitcom. Phillips said he expects the anniversary will add a special poignancy to this year's festival. "It's hard to believe it's 20 years since we lost Dermot Morgan, and without him Father Ted wouldn't have been the classic comedy that it remains," he said. "So we owe him a great deal, and everyone who's coming over will be acutely aware that his anniversary is approaching. Tribute "When the time is right, we'll be paying a massive tribute to him and raising a glass. It should be the highlight of the festival." Phillips, who is from Wales, also admitted he never expected the festival to become as popular as it has. "I expected it to work, but I could never have imagined it would still be going 12 years later," he said. "We owe a lot of its success in the early years to Gerry Ryan, as he plugged it a lot on his radio show. "But I think the fact it takes place on an island has a lot to do with its appeal. It just wouldn't work as well if we had it in Dublin every year. "It takes a lot of effort to get over here, so once people arrive they're hell-bent on having a good time. "Father Ted is one of the greatest sitcoms of all time. "It was brilliantly written and acted, and I think in its own gentle way it encouraged people to question the Church and therefore made Ireland the more secular country it is today." Tedfest XII will run until Sunday. Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has warned that the UK can have as close a relationship with the EU as it wants, but it cannot "cherry-pick". The Taoiseach said the UK cannot simply continue to take the benefits of the EU after Brexit as he spoke at an INM- organised Brexit breakfast at Trinity College. "As Chancellor Angela Merkel said, the UK can have as close a relationship with Europe as it wants to have. What it can't do is cherry-pick. The EU is a set-menu restaurant, not an a-la-carte," said Mr Varadkar. "If you're a member of the club, you're a member of the club. If you want to be an associate member, you can't write the rules yourself. "That is a circle that still needs to be squared. "Within two weeks you'll see the draft of the withdrawal agreement. That will be very interesting and will certainly crystalise things." Mr Varadkar added that Ireland also needs to build new alliances in Europe ahead of the UK's departure. "They were also a very strong ally on a lot of other questions. We are losing a friend in that regard, also a friend in terms of tax sovereignty and countries being able to set their own tax rules," he said. The Taoiseach told guests at the breakfast that low property rates here help balance the high burden of income tax faced by workers. While promising that the Government will "dramatically" reduce the income tax burden in the coming years, he said companies should stop complaining that taxes are too high. Mr Varadkar said people can buy "very nice houses" without paying huge property tax. "It is absolutely the case that marginal tax rates in Ireland are out of kilter with all of our competitors. You hit the high rate at very modest incomes," he said. "That is counter-balanced by other things, though. People in Ireland, who largely can afford to buy very nice houses, don't pay the kind of property taxes that people pay in London or America." Reliant Separately, the Taoiseach questioned Theresa May's impartiality on the process of getting the North's administration back up and running. Mr Varadkar pointed to the fact that the British government is reliant on the DUP to keep it in power, and can therefore be held to ransom by its 10 MPs. "What you have at the mom-ent is a British government that is dependent on one party in Northern Ireland for its survival," he said. The great Irish writers room at the Wax Museum Plus. Inset, Philomena Lynott with her waxwork and that of her son Phil What better way to soak up the atmosphere of St Patrick's Day than downing pints with a life-sized waxwork of Brendan Behan? This year, Wax Museum Plus is offering punters the chance to rent out the entire museum to watch the colourful parade. The asking price is 3,000 for five hours (10am-3pm) but general manager of Wax Museum Plus Ed Coleman says he is open to negotiations. Located in the Lafayette Building on the corner of Westmoreland Street, the first floor of the museum offers a unique panoramic view of O'Connell Street and Burgh Quay. The first floor is dedicated to great Irish writers, with Patrick Kavanagh, James Joyce and Brendan Behan all nestled around a Georgian-themed bar. The museum will cater for private parties of 50. Guests are allowed to bring their own food and drink at no additional cost. "They can enjoy a drinks reception and make the most of this entirely unique experience," Mr Coleman said. "You can have a pint with Brendan Behan and sit down for a chat with James Joyce afterwards. "You will be immersed in Irish culture and have the best seat in the house for the parade. It will be an unforgettable experience for everyone involved." Three members of staff will be on site during the day. Party members will be free to wander around the museum and visit other wax figures, including Pope John Paul II, ET and Jedward. Earlier this month, the museum introduced its latest addition - Philomena Lynott, the Queen Mother of Irish rock 'n' roll. The mother of Thin Lizzy frontman and Irish rock icon Phil Lynott was added to the Grand Hall of Fame. Centenary Mr Coleman said he was pleased that the introduction of Lynott's waxwork coincided with the centenary celebration of women's suffrage. UFC champion Conor McGregor was also added to the museum in recent months. The museum relocated to Westmoreland Street last year. As a result, the museum has had to downsize slightly - and sadly, some wax figures were let go. These included some of the less memorable Popes, and actor Noel Purcell. A Springville High School student was arrested Thursday for allegedly posting a threat of violence on Snapchat. The Snapchat post was sent out at about 5 a.m. Thursday, and suggested a threat of violence at Springville High School, according to a press release from the Springville Police Department. The student reportedly told detectives that the comment was a joke and he had no intentions of going through with the threat. The student was booked into the Slate Canyon Detention Center on multiple charges including threats of terror, following a thorough investigation, the release said. The Springville Police Department takes these jokes very seriously and tries to act on them quickly to protect the students and staff of our schools and the citizens of our community, the press release said. 1 / 5 Tony Conway poses for a portrait outside of his RV at American Campground on Wednesday, Feb. 21, 2018, in American Fork. Evan Cobb, Daily Herald 2 / 5 Rhonda Johnson holds her dog, Rool, in her RV at American Campground on Wednesday, Feb. 21, 2018, in American Fork. Evan Cobb, Daily Herald 3 / 5 Jeff Johnson poses for a portrait outside the community bathrooms at American Campground on Wednesday, Feb. 21, 2018, in American Fork. Evan Cobb, Daily Herald 4 / 5 Icicles hang off a RV at American Campground on Wednesday, Feb. 21, 2018, in American Fork. Evan Cobb, Daily Herald 5 / 5 RVs sit in parking areas throughout American Campground on Wednesday, Feb. 21, 2018, in American Fork. Evan Cobb, Daily Herald A handful of American Fork residents are being pushed out of their residences this week, and without much notice. Long-term residents of the American Campground, a recreational vehicle park that sits on 1.8 acres of land just off 500 East in American Fork, were given notice by management Feb. 12 to vacate the premises by Feb. 28. The Daily Herald caught up to a few of these residents Wednesday, and most of them were struggling to find a new home with such short notice. Tony Conway had just pulled in from a full day of looking for a place to rent. Hes lived at American Campground with his wife and daughter for seven years. Though he has a truck and the ability to move his trailer, hes finding that other RV parks and campgrounds wont accept it because its too old. Theyre forcing us to find another place or be homeless, Conway said. He was contemplating pooling his resources with a few neighbors to go in together on renting a home. Many other residents complained of the same problem. An older woman on the corner near Conway has lived in her old trailer there for 18 years. Another of Conways neighbors has an original Airstream. And theyre never going to accept that anywhere, he said. Resident Jeff Johnson has lived at American Campground with his wife, Jillian Williams, in their small RV for six years, recovering from financial losses incurred by the Great Recession. We have no place to go, he said. Were not living here because we love it. Were living here because its affordable. This place, for whatever reason this select group of people value it, and hold it dear, because theres no other place to go. The cost of a monthly site at American Campground is around $500, and residents are finding it hard to find even a small apartment for that price. Some of the older residents are on fixed-incomes, paying their rent from their Social Security. For those residents who have jobs in Utah County and many of the residents do they are finding no place nearby to move to with their trailers. One resident, Rhonda Johnson, no relation to Jeff Johnson, said shed just secured a place that morning at a RV park in Nephi. Shes moving there this weekend and will commute from Nephi to her job in Provo. Other residents are looking at similar options. The closest places theyve found that will accept their RVs are either in Nephi or Heber. Its families they are kicking out, Conway said. While the notice to vacate came from the owners of American Campground, many residents blame the city. Why penalize us for problems between the owner and the city? Its outright asinine they would do this to their fellow citizens, Jeff Johnson said. Erik Olson, counsel for the current owner of the property, said in a phone call late Thursday night, his client purchased the property from the previous owner who had the property for a long time. We believe that the previous owner had been out of compliance with city requirements, but we did not learn that until after purchasing the property. We have attempted to operate the property as it had been historically, for the benefit of those residents, some of whom have been there for quite some time, Olson said. In order to comply with city ordinance which prohibit long-term tenancy, we have unfortunately been required to change how the campground is operated. While we are sad for residents affected by this, we understand the importance of the citys ordinances and it is important for us to comply with the law. American Fork Mayor Brad Frost wanted to make it clear the city did not issue the eviction notices. The city did not give the residents the notice to vacate, Frost said in a phone call this week. We wanted the owners to be in compliance for their business license. The owner made the choice to do this. Based on a 1980 ordinance, the zoning for the location is a recreational vehicle court limited to a 30-day stay. Previous owners have allowed long-term residents to re-sign up to stay every 30 days. It is unclear when Geo Investments took ownership, but Jeff Johnson said as far as he knows, it was fairly recent. Frost said the city has been working with the owner on their business license renewal, because it is not current. The place was never meant to be a residential place, Frost said, but in the past there seems to have been some confusion about the sites designation. As for the citys stance now, Frost explained their biggest concern is the safety and well-being of the residents. The city put out an official statement late last week to that same effect: The citys intent is to make sure that anyone staying in American Fork City is doing so in safe and adequate conditions. With regard to American Campground, the City has been working, and will continue to work with the property owner to satisfy safety and zoning requirements. American Fork strives to protect individuals and private property rights. Regardless of who is to blame, its the campgrounds residents who are shouldering the result, and a major upheaval to their lifestyles and homes. Conway will be helping his neighbors tow their trailers away Saturday, but as he, Jeff Johnson, and other residents point out, for the residents of American Campground, this was their last resort. They dont have many other options. These are the lowest of the poverty level. A lot of these people are here because they have to be, Jeff Johnson said. What's with all the COVID variants? And should I still get a shot? Earlier this week, Nepals two communist parties -- Prime Minister KP Oli-led Communist Party of Nepal (UML) and Prachanda-led Maoists -- agreed to merge. They had fought elections together last November-December. They had won a resounding mandate. And with the proposed merger, the new Communist Party will become Nepals most powerful in decades -- with parliamentary strength, organisational depth, and penetration in all spheres of state and society. This alliance, and the merger, has strong Chinese backing. Here is the twist. India did not want the alliance to happen, or the alliance to win the elections, or the merger. It could do little to stop any of the three developments. To understand the scale of shift we are witnessing in Nepal, lets rewind 13 years. It was in Delhi that the most unlikely of political alliances was struck in 2005. India facilitated a dialogue between democratic political parties and Maoists, and supported a movement that ousted an autocratic monarch. China barely figured within the Nepali political theatre at a time of such a historic change. The two different alliances in 2005 (between parties and Maoists, backed by India) and 2017-18 (between Communists, backed by China) reveals the biggest departure that has taken place in the last decade in Nepal. China is today an actor in Nepals internal politics. It has preferences. It invests political and financial capital to shape outcomes. And it has left India with limited room to get its way. The Chinese push Why has China expanded its influence and how has it done so? One, Chinas national power has grown tremendously in the past decade. If it is expanding in Latin America and Africa, is it any surprise that it would expand its influence in Nepal, with which it shares a long border? To interpret any engagement between China and Nepal only through an alarmist prism would be a mistake. Both are sovereign nations, both have had historic ties, and in an inter-connected world, both will grow closer. Two, not only does China share a border with Nepal, it is in Tibet that the two meet. Nepal is a route that Tibetans have used to escape, or to return home. Chinese officials have told Nepali interlocutors that they believe the Western bloc -- US, EU, and human rights groups -- might create unrest in Tibet by using Nepal as a hub. Beijing has not only sought a clear commitment by Nepal that Tibetan activities would be cracked down upon but also directly engaged with political parties and security forces to get it done. Three, China sees economic opportunity in Nepal -- both as a venue for investment but, more critically, as a potential route to deepen its penetration into the Indian market. It has pushed connectivity projects, proposed trilateral cooperation between the three countries, and played up Nepals hopes of acting as a bridge. And this is because it believes this is a good way to swarm the entire market across the Gangetic plains. Four, as the contradictions of Delhi and Beijing have grown on a range of global and regional issues, China sees Nepal as a place where it can squeeze India. By translating its economic engagement into a political role, backing precisely the actors Delhi is uncomfortable with, and altering Nepals strategic alignment, China wants to counter, reduce, and even negate India. The Nepali pull The reason this has become possible is because Nepal itself is changing. Its hill-dominated establishment, perennially suspicious of India, sees an opportunity to increase its leverage with Delhi by playing the China card. But beyond the rulers, the Kathmandu middle class and intellectual elite -- all from the hills - believe that Chinese capital can transform Nepals fortunes. They reciprocate Beijings overtures. Indias inconsistent policy line, erratic diplomacy veering from neglect to overbearing pressure, and its record of antagonising all sides of the Nepali political spectrum have reduced New Delhis power. Back in 2013, the Chinese ambassador to Nepal said to interlocutors he would do everything in Kathmandu that his Indian counterpart did. Beijing is living up to its word. Assam has organised a tribal festival called Aadi Mahotsava at Gandhi Mandir Indoor stadium field here to celebrate the ethnic tribal culture of the country. The 10-day festival is being conducted by the Tribal Cooperative Marketing Development Federation of India in collaboration with the Ministry of Tribal Affairs in an attempt to celebrate the rare art and culture of the tribal communities. The local artisans from 20 different cities, including Chattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, West Bengal and north-eastern states Manipur and Assam, have participated in the event to showcase handcrafted artifacts and products. The Chief Minister of Assam, Sarbananda Sonowal, inaugurated the event on Friday in the presence of other state dignitaries. He told ANI, the great silhouette shown by the artisans of India to the people of northeast and Assam will go a long way in increasing the number of participants in the coming future and more importantly the tribal communities from all across the country will get an opportunity to earn their income through such festival. If the income of the farmers increases, peace will prevail in the country always. Further, the event also includes dedicated stalls displaying the ethnic tribal cuisines and handcrafted shawls and handlooms including Mekhelas, chador and Naga waistcoats. One of the exhibitors of Nagaland informed that handloom shawls and wooden artifacts received a good response from the visitors. He said, We have displayed handloom and handicraft items like shawls, wooden artifacts and have received good response from the elderly customers as well. Follow @htlifeandstyle for more A Spanish government-funded body has apologized after it caused an outcry by asking an art gallery to yank a photo exhibit on political prisoners from a prestigious international fair in Madrid. IFEMA, which runs the venue hosting Madrids International Contemporary Art Fair, says in a statement the move wasnt intended as censorship and said it acted in good faith. The statement Thursday didnt suggest Political Prisoners in Contemporary Spain by artist Santiago Sierra be put back on display. IFEMA on Wednesday asked for the removal of 24 photographs of unidentified prisoners, saying controversy over the exhibit was hogging public attention. A woman walks past a person holding a photograph, part of the art-installation by Spanish artist Santiago Sierra Political prisoners of contemporary Spain at ARCO art fair in Madrid. (AFP) Some political leaders and activists in Catalonia have recently been jailed because of their regions bid to become independent from Spain, and their supporters claim they are political prisoners. Follow @htlifeandstyle for more Tribals, minorities and other socially disadvantaged groups are going to be over represented when it comes to choosing respondents to the questions for the happiness index; and to catch the ethos of the state, the questions should be more local than global. These were the two major takeaways of the two-day brain-storming session that took place in the city, in which 80 happiness experts from all over the world were sharing their expertise with the IIT Kharagpur team, that is preparing the questions. Madhya Pradesh aims to be the first state in the country to float a happiness index in 2018, which will be based on a questionnaire that will help the government gauge the happiness quotient of people. A department of happiness was set up after the chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan had announced creation of the happiness department during a state executive meet of the BJP in Bhopal on April 1, 2016. Manohar Dubey, chief executive officer of the state happiness department (Rajya Anand Sansthan) said over-representing the disadvantaged was one of key suggestions because it has been seen that in most surveys they are not included and we want the respondents to be truly representational. Dubey said once the questionnaire is prepared, 20,000 volunteers will fan out in all the 51 district of the state and ask the questions to a cross-section of society that is truly representational. It is a challenging task and we are hopeful that we will have a happiness index and we will come to know by year end how happy/sad the people of the state are, and devise ways to improve it, Dubey said. He also pointed out that when the global level survey is done to determine happiness, only 1000 respondents are taken from India. Our scale is enormous given that we are doing it for only one state having population of seven crore. Radhika Punshi, managing director of Talent Enterprise, a Dubai based consultancy firm that has worked on Happiness and was one of the participants, said discussions were held on 14 domains like Family, Security, Transport, Environment, etc and 30 sub-domains taking into account how the world was measuring happiness. It is not certain how many domains the questions will cover, as everything is still in a state of flux. Raj Raghunathan, professor at the University of Texas at Austin, and author of the book If youre so smart why arent you happy?, said studies have shown that it is not only money that determined happiness and the GDP driven mindset of world country had made us more self-centered, and less empathetic towards others. I feel that things are progressing in the right direction in preparing the happiness index. The 10th edition of the Bengaluru International Film Festival (Biffes) got off to a glittering start on Thursday and gracing the occasion was Bollywood star Kareena Kapoor Khan, reports The Hindu. Speaking from the steps of Vidhana Soudha, the paper quoted the actor as saying: Cinema is the coming together of people, which has no language, religion and regional boundaries, she said, to a resounding applause. Cinema is in my blood. It is my passion and it is food for the soul for me. Kareena Kapoor Khan said cinema is in her blood. (PTI) The actor opened up about her familys association with the state. In particular, she spoke of her grandfather Raj Kapoors love for Karnataka. She said: My grandfather Raj Kapoors spirit is among us to night, blessing us all storytellers, directors to keep up the good work they are doing... I am saying this not because of my presence, it is because of his (Raj Kapoors) love for Mysuru, she said. Raj Kapoor had shot many of his films in Mysuru, the report added. The actor then went on to express her desire to work in a Kannada film. She said, I dont know the language, but I hope some day I will entertain in your language. May be in a film some day. Kareena Kapoor seen here with Ratna Prabha , chief secretary of Karnataka in Bengaluru. She expressed a desire to work in a Kannada film. (IANS) Not to be left behind, ace Bollywood director Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra of Rang De Basanti fame too chipped in with his association with the state. He was quoted as saying, Im the son-in-law of Karnataka as my wife, PS Bharati, (who worked for Rang De Basanti as editor) is from Bengaluru. He further praised the state government for the support it was providing to the film industry. I have not seen a government which is putting its heart and soul, besides support and patronage, he added. Also present at the inaugural was Iranian actor of repute, Fatemeh Motamed-Arya, who called cinema a family. He said, Wherever there is cinema, we can see peace and humanity. Cinematographer Marc Baschet said attending Biffes to him was the same feeling of getting an Oscar! Follow @htshowbiz for more In a career of five-plus years, Bollywood actor Sidharth Malhotra has created some well etched characters Abhimanyu Singh in Student of the Year (2012); Guru in Ek Villain (2014); Arjun Kapoor in Kapoor & Sons (2016); Vikram Sethi in Ittefaq (2017); and Jai Bakshi in the recent release Aiyaary and this variety in roles has been the result of striving to always be different. His next film joins the long list of Bollywood biopics; this one is on the Kargil martyr, Param Vir Chakra winner Captain Vikram Batra, whose story means a lot to Sidharth. In these few years, Ive consciously made it a point to not repeat myself or choose the easy route, says Sidharth. All my films have been different. When I came to the industry, being a young actor, this was my way of standing out, where Id try new things and not just bold and edgier films. And Im happy with the choices Ive made though some worked, and some didnt. The actor adds that after a few years, he wants to look back at his work and be happy about it. I want a body of work that would make me happy and proud to have tried various genres and interesting stories, and the assurance that I didnt try to feed off something thats very typical and safe, says Sidharth. For me, it has been important to go beyond mainstream stuff, so that my audience can expect something interesting from each of my films. At a time when Bollywood, it seems, is obsessed with biopics, what took Sidharth so long to sign one? A biopic needs to mean something, he says. As an actor, I need to feel the connect. A biopic is not a fictitious story. It is based on a real person and I think one needs to handle that with a lot of sensitivity. The character that Ill be playing next is very sensitive and his story is also quite touching. When I was approached for the film, and they spoke to me about the character, I felt it means a lot to me and I have so much respect for him. The actor had shared, in an earlier interview with Hindustan Times, that he was overwhelmed to learn that the family of Captain Batra was keen for Sidharth to be cast in the martyrs role. Captain Batra, nicknamed Sher Shah, led one of the most difficult battles in the Kargil War of 1999, a battle that took place on the icy slopes at an altitude of 16,000 feet. The Indian troops, bolstered by the presence of Sher Shah, began pushing back the Pakistani invaders. But even though Peak 4875 (now called Vikram Batra Top) was captured, Capt. Batra died protecting one of his junior officers. For his leadership, courage, and generosity, he was posthumously awarded the Param Vir Chakra in August 15, a little over a month after India won the Kargil War. Actor Abhishek Bachchan had played Captain Vikram Batra in the film LOC Kargil (2003). Asked if hed watch that film for reference, Sidharth says, Yes, Abhishek played the same character, but I dont think Ill watch the film because it wasnt a biopic. Interact with Shreya Mukherjee at Twitter/@Shreya_MJ In India, defacing, disfiguring and insulting our national flag is a criminal offence; the punishment includes a jail sentence or a fine or both. Of late, we police our patriotism and codify our nationalism and use loose labels like anti-national even in the course of routine disagreements. This reductionism has unfortunately become the new normal. So in this age of outrage and competitive nationalism, where is our anger over how the tricolour was desecrated and debased by being used at a rally for a man accused of rape and murder in Jammus Kathua district? An eight-year-old girl from the shepherd Bakerwal community, who was abducted, sexually abused and killed her father says the body came back with burn marks, visible signs of torture and genital mutilation deserves just as much of our empathy and rage as the 2012 Delhi gang rape victim did. The state police arrested a special police officer (SPO) by the name of Deepak Khajuria as the main accused in the case. But a self-styled Right-wing group called Hindu Ekta Manch has stood up in favour of Khajuria; its street agitation to free him saw the flag being held by protesters, as well as loud chants of Bharat Mata Ki Jai. If this isnt a subversion of nationalism, what is? Yet, where are all the patriots? Where are those crusaders who file criminal cases when someone even inadvertently holds the flag upside down? Or wear the flag on their shirt or dress? Remember police action against fashion designer Malini Ramani when she wore a flag dress? What is worse: wearing the flag colours with affection on your clothes or using the tricolour and patriotic slogans as a cloak for hatred and bigotry? Our prime time debates are so stacked up with instant judgement and hysterical hashtags usually. Where are the nationalist television anchors suddenly hiding? Why isnt someone tweeting that the Hindu Ekta Manch should #GoToPakistan that favourite Twitter inanity meant for those who fail to pass the patriotism exam? Not only has our flag been debased by the Hindu Ekta Manch, but the uniform has also been insulted. The Jammu and Kashmir police are the bravest, most extraordinary force in India its officers are most vulnerable to terror attacks and yet they are often vilified by hardliners in their own community. By choosing to defend SPOs charged with rape and murder, this shameful group of extremists has demeaned and undermined the dauntless officers who stand for sacrifice and courage. Generally speaking, I dont like using the phrase anti-national in casual conversation. To me, its commonplace use signals the end of debate and free thinking in our public discourse. But if ever I were to use it in a column, I would use it for the Hindu Ekta Manch. What else can you call people who communalise the rape of a child? What else can you call those who turn the grave of a girl into a metaphorical gladiatorial battle between Hindus and Muslims? What else should you say of those who want to widen the gap between the regions of Jammu and Kashmir a division that can only hurt Indias national and strategic interests? Which other word can you use for those who call for the social boycott of the Gujjar-Bakerwal nomad community (a Muslim minority in that area) merely for demanding justice for one of their own children? Im glad to see chief minister Mehbooba Mufti pulling no punches in saying how appalled she was to see the Indian flag being used as an instrument of support for an apprehended rapist. The BJP has distanced itself from the Hindu Ekta Manch whose leader Vijay Sharma was its Kathua district president from 2013-2015. I hope the party that defines its self- mage using muscular nationalism will also see Sharma as treacherous in the deepest sense of the word. I would argue that after this ugliness, all politicians mainstream parties as well as Right-wing groups in Jammu and separatists groups in the Valley should keep their distance from this sensitive case. This is no time for point-scoring or political sloganeering. In the past divisions like these have only magnified the differences within the state and pitted two religions and communities against each other. And we cannot forget that in the end this is about a young girl who took her ponies to graze near a village pond when she was kidnapped, drugged, brutalised and dumped in the thick of the forest. She was a child. She could have been our child. We should speak up for her and demand justice. That is what our flag stands for. Barkha Dutt is an award-winning journalist and author The views expressed are personal Uttarakhand school education minister Arvind Pandey Friday reiterated the BJPs governments resolve to bring in a law to regulate the fee structure at private schools in the hill state. Pandey didnt announce any time frame but added that an act to reign in the private schools will be formulated this year. There should be a way to regulate the private schools as they collect fee without disclosing the charges. We dont want to curb the freedom of private schools, but we also dont want parents should suffer. Parents have the right to know the structure of the fee. And the government should also be informed, Pandey said here. Sources in the know of the things said that the BJP government was taking cue from a draft bill Fee Control and Disposal of Complaints Bill, 2015 formulated during previous Congress government. The bill empowers the government to make it mandatory for schools to display the fee under various heads like sports, extracurricular activities, taxes and others. The bill also gives the government the power to reschedule fee revision, which is currently done at least once every two years. Pandey was speaking to the media after signing a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Hans Foundation for Akshay Patra Yojna. The project facilitates a centralized kitchen which would provide mid day meal to nearby schools. The MoU has been signed for 9 kitchens for which the foundation donated Rs 70 crore. These kitchens would be established at Dehradun, US Nagar, Haridwar and Nainital. More such kitchens would come up in Kumaon as well, Pandey said. He said state has started publishing NCERT books and 60% of it is already available in the market. The prasad offerings at all the shrines, including Badrinath and Kedarnath, in Uttarakhand will now have a local flavour. Chief minister Trivendra Singh Rawat Friday launched the Prasadam scheme under which only locally prepared offerings will be sold to pilgrims visiting the religious places. The scheme aims to transform the hill states rural economy, the CM said. We have some 625 shrines where a large number of pilgrims visit annually. At all such shrines, devotees will now get locally prepared prasadam, he said. The government supported scheme, under which devotional offering will be prepared by women-run self-help groups (SHGs) using local produce, aims to transform the states rural economy. Launching the scheme at a press conference, Rawat said the scheme was part of Prime Minister Narendra Modis vision to boost the farmers income by 2022. The scheme is inspired by an experiment successfully carried out at the Badrinath shrine. Introducing the man behind the successful experiment, Rawat said Govind Singhji made substantial profits by selling prasad from a small shop on the precincts of the shrine. Singh sold prasad worth 19 lakh in a year earning a net profit of 9 lakh, CM said adding that the government had provided him the shop at the shrine. The experiment would now act as a model to transform the states pilgrim-centric rural economy. That model getting replicated in all 625 shrines across the state means a SHG (comprising 10 women and four artisans) each will prepare prasad and sell it to pilgrims, Rawat said. This would help resolve the livelihood issues facing some nine thousand individuals besides leading to the economic empowerment of women associated with the scheme. It would also fetch those associated with the scheme an estimated annual income of 80 crore if they sell the prasad for 100 per packet. That is the minimum total income the scheme will fetch the SHGs considering that at least 80 lakh of the total 485,000 pilgrims visit those (625) shrines annually. Of these pilgrims, some 1.17 lakh are foreigners, Rawat added. The CM said that the state government would provide the SHGs all possible help. For instance, we will ensure that they get a space to sell the prasad and are also properly trained to prepare it. The sacred offerings prepared by them would have local farm produce as its ingredients, Rawat said. He said that the prasad would also be attractively packaged. Besides, I have also asked the entrepreneurs to use stevia (a locally found shrub which is a calorie-free sweetener and sugar substitute) in preparing prasad so that even diabetics could relish it. New Delhi A 55-strong police team on Friday swooped down on chief minister Arvind Kejriwals residence in north Delhis Civil Lines to look for scientific evidence in the case of alleged assault on Delhis chief secretary Anshu Prakash. The police team searched every nook and corner of the chief ministers house and seized hard disks containing footage from 21 CCTV cameras. Kejriwal, his wife and parents were at the Flagstaff Road residence when the police entered the premises around 11.15am. The police, however, denied holding up the chief minister during the search operation or even interacting with him. Kejriwal left for a public function in west Delhis Bindapur mid-way during the search. While a detailed analysis of the footage will be conducted in the next few days, Harender Singh, additional deputy commissioner of police (north), said seven of the 21 CCTV cameras were found to be switched off. Our forensics team will be able to say when and under what circumstances these cameras were switched off or began malfunctioning, said Singh, who led the search operation. The additional DCP also pointed out that all 21 cameras were found to be slow by 40 minutes and 43 seconds and claimed that the forensics team would be able to say when the timings in the cameras were last reset. He said it was too early to say if the cameras had been tampered with. As per our records, the alleged offence happened between midnight and 12.15am on Monday, said the officer. One video clip in circulation, obtained from the CCTV footage, has shown the chief secretary, Anshu Prakash, leaving the CMs residence around 11.30pm on Sunday. Aam Aadmi Partys counsel, BS Joon, downplayed the controversy over the difference in timings in the CCTVs. It does not matter what the timing of the incident was. We have already told the court that the incident under investigation was of eight minutes and seven seconds, said Joon. AAP spokesperson, Ashutosh, refused to believe the police had come looking for just CCTV footage. The police were trying to find out when the walls of the residence were last painted. They were searching the lawns and the terrace, he said. The additional DCP said police were compelled to search the CMs residence after investigators attempts to seek CCTV footage on February 20 were met with no response. We had planned a visit to the residence around 9.30am, but postponed the visit because 100-150 people were to visit the CM for a public meeting in the morning, said the additional DCP. Teams drawn from the local police, the cyber cell and the forensics department arrived outside the CMs residence around 11am, even as a group of curious onlookers and journalists began gathering outside. Fifteen of us went inside the premises while around 40 men were deployed outside to ensure law and order. We needed to collect all possible scientific evidence put them on record in our probe, said the officer. The officer said the maintenance staff had been intimated about the polices visit. AAP staffers inside the residence claimed that the policemen even peeped inside bathrooms and searched porta cabins outside the bungalow. Police even checked the freshness of the wall paints and looked for repair works undertaken in the room where the alleged assault happened. We visited all the places where the complainant said he had been to that night. There were no CCTV cameras in the room where the assault happened. We were checking if any CCTV cameras had been taken off. But we did not find any fresh paint on the room walls, said the officer. Singh said the people in-charge of the maintenance of the CCTV cameras was questioned, mainly to understand the system. The hall outside the crime scene and the corridors leading to it are covered by cameras. We will analyse peoples movement before and after the alleged offence, said the officer. Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam. The world is one family. Thats what we are feeling in Alka Bagchis drawing room in west Delhis Janakpuri. Its like being in an airport lounge. Everyone is talking in a mix of tongues. We soon learn why. Ms Bagchi, who teaches Hindi in a high school, is a Punjabi. Her mother-in-law is a Nepali. Her husband is a Bengali. And now, after years of being marinated together, the house chatter has become a mixed pickle of Hindi, English, Bengali, Punjabi and Nepali. And amid these happy people, weve fallen in total love with Ms Bagchis father-in-law. Wordsworths poems are sliding off his Bengali-accented tongue as casually as Arjit Singhs film songs roll down from ours. As happens in such cozy gatherings, the talk quickly shifts towards fish curries, healthy corn chillas, and absolutely delicious boar meat.Of course, we make Punjabi, Bengali as well as Nepali dishes in our home, Ms Bagchi proclaims. Surprisingly, there seems to be no cuisine-rivalry in the house. Ms Bagchis Nepali mother-in-law tactfully expresses fondness for her Punjabi samdhans dal makhani, who returns the favour by uttering polite words about her mutton momos. Expounding on the challenges of a multi-ethnic household, the Hindi teacher amusingly recalls her first week as a new bride. I had no idea that Bengalis and Nepalis can be very strict when it comes to eating habits... just three days after my wedding my mother-in-law gave me a bowl of fish curry and I promptly licked it clean right on my bed everybody jumped in horror! Poor Ms Bagchi But I was from a Punjabi family! Now, she dines only on the dining table. Wanting to proclaim affection for her Kathmandu-born saas, Ms Bagchi enters the kitchen to make a Nepali delicacy aloo achaar. Its very easy to make. But unlike most pickles, it cannot last more than 10 days during the cold season and in summer Ill suggest you to finish it off in two days. Be warned, the recipe needs two Nepali spices not easily available in Delhi. But the pickle is worth the trouble. We swear. INGREDIENTS 1 kg Boiled baby potatoes 4 tbsp Seasame seeds 4 Red chillies 3 tbsp Ginger paste 3 tbsp Lemon juice 5-6 Green chillies To taste Salt 1 tbsp Turmeric powder 2 tbsp Mustard oil 1 tbsp Jimbu (Faran) 1 tbsp Timbur (Pricklyash) METHOD Peel the boiled baby potatoes and slit them into halves. Roast seasame seeds with red chillies. Make a fine paste of the roasted mix above with the ginger. Mix salt, turmeric and lemon juice into the paste. Add this paste into the potatoes. Mix well, making sure to coat each potato piece with the paste. Make a seasoning of mustard oil, green chillies, jimbu and timbur. Pour it on the potatoes and mix well. United Nations Environment Programme chief Erik Solheim on Tuesday said India must move fast to tackle air pollution and to do so, the country must focus on its transport, renewables and agriculture sectors. But how exactly will that happen? Take, for example, the case of electric vehicles (EVs). With the kind of catastrophic pollution levels we have, the State should do its best to push for EVs. But our progress has been uneven. The hopes for cleaner air were raised when last year the transport minister asked the automobile industry to shift to EVs. Arguing that petrol and diesel vehicles will have to make way for electric power trains and engines running on other fuel variants such as ethanol and biofuels, he warned the vehicle manufacturers: I am going to do it, whether you like it or not. I will bulldoze. Petrol, diesel banaane walon kaa band-baajaa bajaanaa hai [We will take the makers of petrol/diesel engine vehicles to task]. A month later, the minister promised an EV policy so that India can achieve full electric mobility before 2030. But on February 15, the Centre did a volte face when the Centre provided a breather to carmakers that are unprepared for a shift to the clean-fuel technology. The transport minister announced that the country does not need a dedicated EV policy; instead it may come out with an action plan. While India is debating between a policy and an action plan, China, where air pollution is also a huge problem, is trying to become the Detroit of electric vehicles. A 2017 McKinsey&Company report talks about how and why China has emerged as a leader in both the supply ofand demand forEVs. On the supply side, Chinas government has made it a priority to create favourable conditions for EV stakeholders, including investors. As for demand, Chinas high marks are evidenced not only by the number of vehicles sold, but also by the variety of choices available. In 2016, 25 new EV models were introduced. All told, a Chinese consumer can now choose from around 75 EV modelsmore than in any other country weve measured, the report said. In several major cities (including Beijing and Shanghai), EVs are exempt from lotteries for number plates (there is a cap on vehicles due to congestion) and significant registration fees that apply for cars with internal-combustion engines. The country also subsidises EVs. For example, a midsize EV owner can get a subsidy of 23% on the price of the car. Electric vehicle sales are low in India because a paucity of choice in terms of models and a lack of charging infrastructure. In a 2017 report on the future of shared, electric and connected mobility future in India, the NITI Aayog, along with Colorado-based Rocky Mountain Institute, had suggested setting up a manufacturer consortium for batteries, common components, and platforms to develop battery cell technologies and packs and to procure common components for Indian original equipment manufacturers. But there has been little progress on any of this. If the government wants the automobile industry to bring about change in their products and attract investments for greener ones, then it needs to come up with a policy. Knee-jerk interventions and sudden change of plans will affect citizens. EVs are one of the pillars of the plan to combat pollution. Not encouraging them to thrive will deal us a significant blow in the battle to improve the air we breathe. The University of Lucknow will hold its annual examinations under the watchful gaze of CCTV cameras, vice chancellor SP Singh said at a meeting of varsity officials and degree college principals here on Friday. The institutions annual examinations will begin on March 5. A decision to this effect was taken to ensure the fairness and sanctity of the examinations, Singh said at the event. Governor Ram Naik, who is the chancellor of all state universities, had earlier directed vice chancellors to install CCTV cameras in examination halls. All exam centres must install CCTVs before the start of the annual examination, Singh said. If any student is caught using unfair means, the flying squad and invigilators concerned will issue a notice to him/her and seek a signature of receipt. If the student refuses to sign, the centre superintendent will send the notice to the students address by registered mail . The vice chancellor said candidates must also sit in accordance with the seating plan pasted outside examination rooms as well as the gates of the centres concerned. They should be frisked properly before being allowed to enter, he added. After the meeting, Lucknow University spokesperson stated that notes, bags and electronic gadgets like mobile phones were strictly prohibited inside examination centres. Only the computerised attendance sheet bearing the students photograph will be allowed, he said, adding that the university has adopted a zero-tolerance policy against those involved in examination fraud. Pollution in Srinagar, the summer capital of Jammu and Kashmir, hit a dangerous level during winter when tiny particulate matter was recorded five times more than the permissible limit mainly due to the use of coal for domestic purpose, a new study has said. The study by Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM), Pune in collaboration with University of Kashmir found PM 2.5 levels in winter touched 348 g/m in 2013-2014 with the permissible limit at 60 g/m and that domestic coal usage accounts for 84% of the emissions, followed by the transport sector and fuelwood burning. Particulate matter PM 2.5, about 30 times finer than a human hair, can be inhaled deep into the lungs, causing heart attacks, strokes, lung cancer and respiratory diseases. The high altitude destinations around the world are perceived to have a clean environment. They become preferred places for tourist attractions. However, such places are slowly found to be environmentally degrading due to ever increasing tourists and associated emissions, the study published in Scientific Reports earlier this week said. The authors analysed data collected between May 15, 2013, and April 20, 2014, and found that in the other three seasons, summer, autumn and spring, the PM 2.5 levels were within the permissible limits. However, in winter they consistently breached the standards. On some days air pollution in Srinagar is worse than air pollution in Delhi, Gufran Beig, a scientist at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM) and one of the authors of the study, said. Though spring and autumn in the Kashmir valley are also chilly, residents use conventional sources for mostly warming water but not for indoor and outdoor heating. The state is heavily dependent on hydel power and during winters when the rivers freeze power supply is disrupted forcing people to resort to conventional sources like coal. The usage of biofuels and enhanced emission peaks in the winter and mostly remains the same with little variability amongst the winter months, the study said. A rapid pace of urbanisation, the concentration of economic activity and biofuel use were the main contributors to air pollution in Srinagar, the researchers found. Apart from biofuel emissions, the research also identified westerly winds flowing from Afghanistan as a major source of PM 2.5 pollution. Srinagar is not the only tourist destination in north India that has reported high pollution levels in recent years. Even for Jammu city, the average PM10 levels in 2015 were twice the national standard, according to a recent Greenpeace India report. The report also found that Dehradun in Uttarakhand was one of the most polluted cities in India in 2016, with average PM 10 levels at 238 g/m. With Milan at her feet, designer Miuccia Prada unveiled her fluorescent and urban chic fall-winter collection on Thursday, in a high rise building towering over Italys fashion capital. Prada, who is also co-chief executive of the eponymous luxury group, used Milan Fashion Week to continue her exploration of different facets of femininity, with designs that stood out with their bold colours and stark lines. Clad in fluorescent pink, orange and green, Prada models danced on a shiny black floor to the rhythm of Blondie. Neon light installations of monkeys, dinosaurs, bananas and aliens playfully displayed outside the building could be seen from the floor to ceiling windows. A model presents a creation from the Prada Autumn/Winter 2018 women collection. (REUTERS) Prada hosted the show in the Torre building, a modern tower which will be the latest addition to the groups Fondazione Prada art foundation project. The existing Fondazione buildings, once a gin distillery, were turned in the early 1990s into a space dedicated to contemporary art and culture. I wanted to have a little revenge on the artwork, occupying the space of the Fondazione with fashion, Prada told reporters at the end of her show. The new building will officially open during Milans design week, held annually in April, and will be used as an exhibition space. A model presents a creation from the Prada Autumn/Winter 2018 women collection. (REUTERS) Models walked with the city skyline and train tracks as a backdrop, wearing oversize nylon and neoprene coats with wide shoulders from which delicate transparent dresses and tulle skirts peeped. All the models wore brightly coloured tulle bows around their necks. The idea is the constant struggle women have - a duality, between strength and having to protect yourself and what you like as a woman, such as sweetness and femininity, the designer said. She explained that the big sporty pieces wanted to symbolically defend the women wearing them while the light details were included for them to be able to express their womanhood. Black technical material was juxtaposed with fuchsia, yellow and blue. Black stilettos and white boots were paired with fluorescent socks and gaiter-like legwarmers. Transparent black tulle, decorated with sparkling beading or bright plastic flowers, gently covered tight sheath dresses, while plastic fringed mini-dresses in lime green and white glowed in the night-time setting. Its about women being able to go out at night, even wearing super sexy clothes, without fear, Prada said. The collection was well-received by the public on Thursday evening, with the audience bursting into loud applause as the designer reached the runway at the end of the show. But Prada also voiced concern about the high expectations set on fashion, which she said pushed designers beyond their job by the perceived need to engage in political and social issues through their clothes. Follow @htlifeandstyle for more Rodger Mallison/Fort Worth Star-Telegram/TNS via Getty Images(NEW YORK) -- The governor of Texas decided Thursday to spare the life of a convicted killer who carried out a plot to kill his parents and his brother. About 40 minutes before the scheduled execution, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott announced he would grant clemency to 38-year-old Thomas "Bart" Whitaker. The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles, in a rare recommendation, voted unanimously Tuesday in favor of the "lesser penalty" of commuting Whitaker's death sentence to life behind bars without the possibility of parole. In just over three years as governor, I have allowed 30 executions. I have not granted a commutation of a death sentence until now," Abbott said in a statement. The murders of Mr. Whitakers mother and brother are reprehensible. The crime deserves severe punishment for the criminals who killed them. The recommendation of the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles, and my action on it, ensures Mr. Whitaker will never be released from prison." Bart Whitaker was convicted of capital murder for the shooting deaths of his mother, Tricia Whitaker, and his younger brother, Kevin Whitaker, in an attack he devised at the family's Sugar Land, Texas, home in December 2003. Bart's father, Kent Whitaker, was also shot during the attack, but survived. Kent Whitaker said he has forgiven his son and became his most outspoken advocate. "I love him. He's my son," Kent Whitaker told 20/20. "I don't want to see him executed at the hands of Texas in the name of justice when there's a better justice available." On Tuesday, the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles, in a rare recommendation, voted unanimously in favor of the "lesser penalty" of commuting Whitaker's death sentence to life behind bars without the possibility of parole. Prosecutor Fred Felcman, who was also the original prosecutor in the case, told ABC's Houston station KTRK-TV on Tuesday that he was disappointed by the parole board's recommendation. "I guess the 12 jurors' opinion means nothing to the parole board," Felcman said. 20/20 sat down with Kent Whitaker awhile he awaited the boards decision on his sons fate. He said that Bart has learned Spanish in prison and was teaching some inmates English, while helping others earn their high school diplomas. "I have seen such change in him," Kent Whitaker said of his son. "He's been incarcerated for 11 years. That's 4,000 days. He's done a lot of work himself and he's struggled hard to try to find out what it was that went wrong in his mind." "There's a mental illness issue here that we still don't quite understand," the father added. "But he has learned how to recognize the danger points and to work around them. I want the opportunity to spend years watching him grow. And there's so much that he can do." Kent Whitaker said he recognizes the horrible crime his son committed, saying, "I live with it every day... and nobody's denying it." "Forgiveness is absolutely critical if you want to heal from your loss," he continued. "It is the only way that you can get the bitterness out, and the bitterness is going to stay there and it's going to affect your relationships in ways that you can't even see or recognize. But it's going to negatively affect them. I was able to forgive on the night of the shootings." On Dec. 10, 2003, Bart Whitaker announced to his family that he had finished his final exams at Sam Houston State University and would be graduating. To honor his achievement, his parents presented him with a Rolex watch. That night, the family went to a popular Cajun restaurant to celebrate. Photos taken from that night show Bart smiling for the camera, but he told 20/20 in a 2009 interview that he knew at that moment that an intruder had entered their home and was waiting for their return. If everything went according to his plan, his brother, mother and father would all be dead within minutes. "I don't really know a better term for how I was feeling [that night], other than I was on auto-pilot. I wasn't even aware of myself," Bart Whitaker told 20/20 in 2009. "I wanted them dead," he added. "It was my idea." When the family arrived home, Bart, knowing what awaited his family inside, ran down the driveway, saying he needed to grab his cell phone out of his car. Kevin Whitaker, 19, was the first one to open the door and was shot in the chest, then his mother followed and was also shot. Next, his father was wounded, too -- he was shot through the right chest and arm, breaking his humerus bone. Bart said he then ran into the house and pretended to try and catch the shooter. They wrestled a bit and then Bart was shot in the arm to make him appear to be a victim. "It was to distance me from the guilt," he told 20/20 in 2009. "But also I think on an internal level it was me realizing that there was no way that I could come out of this physically unscathed." Kevin and Tricia both died from their gunshot wounds. Kent and Bart both survived. Investigators would later discover that Bart had never graduated Sam Houston State University and was still listed as a freshman on academic probation. When they were released from the hospital, Bart moved back home to be with his father, where they spent time together reading the Bible. The investigation made little progress, until a man named Adam Hipp walked into the Sugar Land police station and introduced himself as a former friend of Bart Whitaker's. Hipp told police Bart had hatched a second, previously unknown murder plot that was aborted at the last minute, but Hipp claimed Whitaker had asked him to be the shooter. Another break in the case came in August 2005, when a man named Steven Champagne, who was Barts former co-worker and neighbor, went to police and confessed to assisting in the crime and provided the entire story of what happened on that December 2003 night. Champagne told investigators that Bart had set up the crime and lured his family to dinner to celebrate his fake graduation from college. As the Whitakers celebrated, Champagne said he watched from a car in the parking lot. Meanwhile, Bart's roommate, Chris Brashear, hid in Bart's SUV outside the Whitaker home. Champagne told police Brashear entered the house with the key and disabled the alarm with the code Bart had given him. Champagne said he followed the family home and parked on a nearby street and waited. "[Brashear] said Bart's brother had walked in first," Champagne recalled in his confession. "And, when Chris shot him, he said before he shot him he thought he smiled. And then Chris shot his mom and then shot Bart's dad .... And then, he acted like he wrestled around with Bart and shot Bart." A minute later, as he told cops, Brashear joined him in the car and they fled the scene. "Bart said his family was worth a lot of money," Champagne said, explaining his motivation. "He said he would give us some money -- I mean millions of dollars." He also told police that he and Brashear had thrown a bag full of evidence off of a bridge into a nearby lake. A police dive team later found a soggy duffel bag full of decomposing evidence. Though the bag had spent two years at the bottom of the lake, detectives were able to obtain a DNA profile of Brashear on the mouth of a water bottle. The bag also contained Bart Whitakers cell phone. In March 2007, a jury convicted Bart Whitaker of the capital murder of his mother and his younger brother, and he was sentenced to death. The shooter, Brashear, received life in prison without parole. The getaway driver, Champagne, was sentenced to 15 years for his role in the plot. Since then, Kent Whitaker has gotten remarried and has devoted his time to spreading his message of forgiveness as well as fighting to prevent his sons execution. Kent wrote a book, "Murder by Family," in which he tracks the pain, tears and faith that carried him through it all. "I think that justice would be the opportunity to spend his life helping others and allowing me the opportunity to walk that road with him," Kent Whitaker said. Copyright 2018, ABC Radio. All rights reserved. The turban has long been a part of Western fashion, though more in African style than Indian. The recent Gucci show at the ongoing Milan Fashion Week (Feb 21-27), however, had a model walking the runway in what appeared to be a full-fledged Sikh turban. And with that, Gucci has joined design labels such as Chanel, Elie Saab, Jean Paul Gaultier, Matthew Williamson, and Marchesa, which have on and off created collections or striking outfits inspired by elements of Indianwear, such as the sari drapes, the lehenga swirls, the sparkly embroidery. With the world communities coming closer, the influence of Indian culture and heritage on international fashion is only growing, it seems. However, that might raise the question of cultural appropriation. Designer Nachiket Barve thinks that Indian culture can be best represented by Indian designers. He says, When an international designer takes inspiration from our heritage, they often forget the nuances required to make it just as it should be. Turbans, for example, have a religious significance [for Sikhs] and should be represented in the most appropriate way. A model sporting a nath (nose ring) as part of Jean Paul Gaultiers Fall/Winter collection, shown at Haute Couture Fashion Week in Paris, in July 2017. (AFP) Designers and fashionistas have, in the past, been called out for cultural appropriation, a situation in which elements from one community are used by a dominant community a big example was when top model Heidi Klum dressed as the goddess Kali for Halloween 2008, and upset Hindus but designer Masaba Gupta states that the fashion fraternity usually does its research. Masaba adds, Since we see more and more [international] designers taking their influence from the Indian culture, its only good that were showcased in the grandest and most aesthetic way. While we tend to copy everything from the West, its only good that they think were so culturally rich that we can have a lot of influence on their design. This trend is certainly going to go big. Designer Namrata Joshipura agrees and says, International designers only show our culture in a positive light and make things look even more fashionable. So we all should be open to interpretations. A five-member team of the Gurgaon child welfare committee (CWC) and district child protection unit (DCPU) visited a prominent school on Friday afternoon and met the principal and other teachers in connection with the rape threat made by a student against a teacher and his daughter, who is also in the same class. The committee submitted a questionnaire to the school authorities asking them to answer the same before meeting them on Monday. The officials asked the school authorities about the entire incident and gave them a five-point questionnaire seeking information about the matter. The team, however, did not meet the victims as well as the student who had allegedly posted the threat online. The officials said neither the victims nor the accused was present in the school on Friday. The school authorities have been asked to visit the CWC office in Gurgaon on Monday at 11am and submit the documents explaining the matter to them. The school authorities must explain what happened and the subsequent action taken by them. We met the school principal and sought the requisite information, said Shakuntla Dhull, chairperson, CWC, said. Dhull said that the student, who allegedly made the rape threat, confessed to the same and also apologised to the family of the victims. The father of the student has also submitted a written undertaking assuring that his son will mend his ways. He also apologised to the victims. Dhull said that it was because of this reason that none of the stakeholders wanted to legally pursue the matter, as they fear that it could affect the career of both the accused student and the victims. Read I Rape threat: Gurgaon Deputy Commissioner seeks report from school On February 11, a student of the school had posted a message on a social media site threatening to rape his class teacher and getting her daughter abducted and raped by someone. The message, which was later deleted by the student, left the teacher in shock and on Monday, she wrote to the school authorities informing them about the threat. In the questionnaire given to the school authorities, they have been asked if an FIR has been filed in the case, and, if not, why. The CWC has also sought to know if the school has sent word to the administration about the incident, and, if not, why. They have also been asked to consider if the case in question comes within the ambit of the Prevention of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act. They have also been asked to inform if the victims and the student have been counselled. These are basically the information that we have sought from the school authorities. They met us and shared the details about the case. They have also assured us of cooperation, Nisha Saini, legal-cum-probation officer, district child protection unit (DCPU), said. The teachers husband, who filed the complaint, refused to speak to the media on the case. A businessman, who runs stone tools unit in Daruhera, was followed by armed assailants in an SUV for a couple of kilometers on Delhi-Jaipur highway before being abducted near Daruhera. His Toyota Fortuner was later snatched by the accused, who removed its GPS and later dumped the victim near d, Manesar, the police said. The incident sparked an abduction alarm, as a senior Maharashtra police officer, who is related to Achal Kumar Asthana, the victim, called the Gurgaon police and told them that he had been missing since long and his phone had been switched off. As soon as the information was received, the Gurgaon police swung into action and teams were set up to investigate the matter. However, after sometime, Asthana called the police and told them he had been dumped somewhere near Manesar by the armed assailants who snatched his car. A case in this regard was registered at Bilaspur police station on his complaint. Asthana visits his stone tools unit in Daruhera everyday. In his complaint to the police, Ashtana said that he did not realise that he was being followed by the accused, who blocked his car near the Old Rao hotel. He said that when he came out of the car, three youths took held him at gunpoint and forced him to sit in their car, while one of the them took the wheel of his Fortuner. The accused took him to an isolated place on the KMP expressway where the GPS system of his vehicle was removed. Read I Woman alleges gang rape in car, taken from Gurgaon, dumped in Greater Noida Later, the accused was brought to Wazirpur near Manesar where they handed him his phone, which had been switched off. They also gave him his purse and told him to take other items that he had in the car, as they just wanted his car and nothing else. Surender Singh, in-charge, crime branch, Bilaspur, said that the accused seemed to be professional car jackers as they carried out the heist professionally. They removed the GPS system and also did not harm the owner. They also chased him from the old toll point at Bilaspur and carried out the attack between two prominent eateries on the highway. The accused will be nabbed soon, he said. The family members of a 21-year-old man, who died at a private hospital in the city on Wednesday, accused the hospital authorities of medical negligence and staged a protest on the Manesar highway on Thursday demanding action against the doctors, who they claimed, are responsible for his death. Claiming he had no history of any medical complications, the family members of the deceased Deepak Yadav, a resident of Manesar, filed a complaint with the Gurgaon police alleging medical negligence. The 21-year-old was pursuing his MBA, the kin said. According to the complaint filed with the police, the doctors at Gurgaons Civil Hospital had diagnosed Deepak with having fluid in his lungs and he was advised to seek specialised medical treatment for his condition. Deepak was also struck by typhoid a week ago, his kin said. On February 19, Deepak was admitted to Paras hospital at Sushant Lok-1 where the doctors were treating him for his condition, then police said. The family members also pointed out that on Wednesday morning, Deepaks condition had improved and he was supposed to be released from the hospital. However, the doctors conducted some more tests on the same day after which Deepaks condition deteriorated and he died later in the day, his kin claimed. Read I Gurgaon: Man dies in hospital, family alleges medical negligence Around 12 noon, Deepak died. He was put on ventilator for a few hours and then the doctors declared him dead. This is sheer negligence on the part of the doctors. Deepaks condition deteriorated after the doctors conducted some blood tests, Kailash Kumar, uncle of the 21-year-old who had filed the complaint, said. The complaint was lodged with the Sector 43 police post, which comes under Sushant Lok-I police station. Police said that they have started an investigation and will send a copy of the complaint to the chief medical officer, Gurgaon Civil Hospital, before filing an FIR. We have received the complaint and we will be conducting a probe into the matter. We will be sending the report to health department for verifying facts. We cannot establish a medical negligence case unless it is confirmed by the panel of doctors (set up to probe the negligence complaint), inspector Sudeep Kumar, station house officer (SHO), Sushant Lok Police station, said. However, the hospital released a statement saying that the doctors provided the best treatment to the patient. We have been completely transparent in our approach. The patient was being treated for pleural effusion and had a sudden cardiac arrest. Multi disciplinary teams were working on the patient. Throughout the course of treatment, the patients family was updated on his progress. We are with the family (at this hour) and extend our full support. The family has filed an FIR and we are open to any investigation. We are ready and willing to extend full cooperation and support to the authorities, a spokesperson for Paras Healthcare said. The incident is the latest in a series of medical negligence cases against private hospitals which has come to the fore of late. In one of these cases, a woman, who was admitted to the Colombia Asia Hospital in Palam Vihar on January 8, died 18 days after of complications after a gall bladder surgery. The family of the 47-year-old lodged a complaint with the Palam Vihar police station accusing the hospital staff of medical negligence. On November 22, a seven-year-old boy suffering from dengue and admitted to the Medanta-The Medicity hospital, died. Shaurya was lodged at Medanta from October 29 to November 20 before his condition deteriorated and he was shifted to Delhis Ram Manohar Lohia hospital. He later succumbed at the RML hospital. His father, Bhupender Singh Parmar, lodged a complaint with the Sadar police station alleging medical negligence. In another case, an FIR was filed on December 9 under section 304 (2) (culpable homicide not amounting to murder) of the IPC against one of the doctors of Fortis hospital, who was involved in the treatment of seven-year-old Adya Singh, who died of dengue in September. The Special Task Force (STF) of the Kolkata police arrested another suspected militant, the sixth in a month, of the Bangladesh-based banned outfit Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen (JMB) early on Friday morning. Police said Nur Alam Momin, 22, was arrested around 3:30 am following a raid at Kamatjolapara village in Shamsherganj, Murshidabad district. The police had arrested five others earlier this month for their alleged links with the JMB. These include Paigambar Sheikh, Jamirul Sheikh, Azhar Hossain, Shish Mohammad and Kalu Sheikh. Police claimed that two of them, Azhar Hossain and Shish Mohammad, were involved in planting improvised explosive devices (IEDs) during the visit of Tibetan spiritual leader Dalai Lama to Bodh Gaya in Bihar. Momin was taken away by Kolkata polices STF. We dont have any more information on him, said Amit Bhakat, officer-in-charge, Shamsherganj police station. During questioning, the five arrested told police Momin used to help them spread JMBs ideology in Bengal. I have two sons. Elder son Nur used to sell religious books and other items in different villages. I dont believe he is associated with any anti-national activity. If police has any evidence against him, I will not try to shield my son, said Mansur Momin, the father of Nur Alam Momin. Read | Bangladeshs most wanted terror duo launches Indian unit A government-aided school in West Bengal has refused to paint its building in blue and white citing a long-standing tradition of having adopted the orange colour because of its association with the Ramakrishna Mission. The state education department last month had issued a notification asking all state-run and-aided schools to paint the buildings in blue and white, the favourite colour combination of chief minister Mamata Banerjee. Instead, the authorities of Krishnachandrapur High School in Mathurapur block in South 24 Parganas district have requested the education department to allow the school to retain its traditional colour. School headmaster Chandan Kumar Maity justified their stance citing local sentiments and long association. We have written letters and forwarded emails to the sub-inspector of school and the block development officer pushing our request, said Maity. We have also requested the department to give us the expenditure of Rs 6 lakh that would have been spent on painting the new colours. We dont have enough funds to paint the building first and then ask for the reimbursement, he added. We are hopeful that the government will consider our request. According to the directive, those schools that have not got a coat in the past three years, have to re-paint their building in blue and white. When contacted, state education minister Partha Chatterjee said, I cannot comment on this as I am not aware about the development. The school in Mathurapur, about 63 km from Kolkata, was founded in 1948 by the Ramakrishna Mission Lok Shiksha Parishad and Vivekananda Seva Sangha. Since then the three-storeyed school building has been painted in orange. In 1977, when the Left Front government came to power in West Bengal, the school was taken over by the state. However, the colour has remained the same, said the headmaster. We are hopeful that the state government will consider our plea. If it doesnt, the matter will be placed before the managing committee that will take the final decision, he said. Outgoing judge of the Supreme Court of India, justice Amitava Roy, on Friday called on the Supreme Court judges not to project a fractured face to the public. Making a direct reference to the ongoing tussle between Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra and four senior judges of the Supreme Court, Justice Roy said at his farewell function organised by the Supreme Court Bar Association: It is because of the credibility this institution enjoys that people have trust. I feel that we cannot project a fractured face to anyone. This is the first time that any judge of the Supreme Court has publicly spoken about the problem plaguing the top court. On January 12 this year, four senior judges of the Supreme Court, Justices J Chelameswar, R Gogoi, Madan B Lokur and Kurian Joseph, took the unprecedented step of criticising their chief justice Dipak Misra at a press conference over the allocation of cases. Since then, attempts have been made to bridge the gap between the judges and also address the issues raised by the four judges. In a bid to introduce more transparency in the working of the top court, CJI Misra recently made the roster work allocation of the judges public. Meanwhile, in what appears to be a sign of thaw between the CJI and senior Supreme Court judges, the Supreme Court collegium on Thursday confirmed the appointment of 37 judges in 5 high courts. The Supreme Court collegium, comprising Justices Misra, Chelameswar and Gogoi, cleared the appointments of additional judges as permanent judges of the high courts. A copy of the collegium resolution has been put out on the Supreme Courts website, with regard to the appointments to Gujarat, Bombay, Allahabad, Kerala and Rajasthan high courts . It says: As per the resolution, certain complaints were received by the Department of Justice and the CJI against a few of the recommendees. The collegium, however, refused to pay heed to such allegations, noting, We do not see any merit in the aforesaid complaints as the allegations made therein are found to be false, without any substance or are not supported by any reliable evidence/document. As they do not call for any action, in our considered view, the said complaints deserve to be ignored. Canadas spy agency had been warned about the repercussions of convicted Khalistani terrorist Jaspal Atwal attending events with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on his tour to India, Canadian media reported on Friday. Trudeaus first bilateral visit to India was hit by a controversy over the dinner invitation to Atwal by the Canadian High Commissioner in New Delhi. Atwal had been convicted of shooting at visiting Punjab cabinet minister Malkiat Singh Sidhu on Vancouver Island in 1986. High commissioner Nadir Patel cancelled Atwals invite for the dinner, hosted on Thursday night for Trudeau, while the ministry of external affairs (MEA) said it will ascertain how Atwal entered India. The informant, who asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation, confirmed speaking to an agent from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) on February 17, hoping to alert the Canadian government to Atwals criminal history. The person said to the CSIS agent that this is an embarrassment for the prime minister and CSIS should send a note to the prime ministers office. And they sent a note. CSIS did not respond to requests for comment, Postmedia reported. A separate source told Postmedia that some members of the Punjabi-language media in Surrey sent news reports about Atwals history to the Canadian High Commission in New Delhi on February 20. The source said it was widely known that Atwal, a former member of the terrorist International Sikh Youth Federation, was going to India to attend some of the events with Prime Minister Trudeau and the Canadian delegation. Despite the warnings, Atwal attended a reception on February 21 in Mumbai where he was photographed with Trudeaus wife Sophie Gregoire and Infrastructure Minister Amarjeet Sohi. The outcome has embarrassed Trudeau, who had made efforts in India to insist Canada is not soft on Sikh separatism and believes in a united India, the Vancouver Sun said. Atwal was also once accused of assaulting Indian-origin former British Columbia premier Ujjal Dosanjh. Dosanjh said the Canadian government demonstrated a lack of concern by inviting the man convicted of attempted murder in another case. Dosanjh, also a one-time federal Liberal cabinet minister, says he was taken aback when he found out that Atwal was invited to a dinner reception with the prime minister after attending another event with the Trudeau family earlier this week, the Globe and Mail reported. He said Atwal attacked him with an iron bar in 1985 over his opposition to Sikh extremism. The assault left Dosanjh with 80 stitches and a broken hand, but Atwal was acquitted of the crime. It left me speechless about the lack of preparation or the depth of unpreparedness with which Mr Trudeaus trip went through, he said. The CBI on Friday produced Rotomac owner Vikram Kothari and his son Rahul before a Delhi court in connection with the Rs 3,695-crore loan default case and sought their transit remand to take them to Lucknow. The duo was produced before additional chief metropolitan magistrate Samar Vishal. They were arrested on Thursday for alleged default on loan repayment. According to ANI news agency, the accused were sent to one-day transit remand by Delhis Patiala House Court, to be produced before concerned court in Lucknow, on Saturday. Defence advocate Pramod Kumar Dubey raised objections to the jurisdiction of the court, saying the accused should be produced before a sessions court and not before a magisterial court. The court reserved its order till 2 pm on the issue of jurisdiction. A consortium of seven banks had extended loans worth Rs 2,919 crore to Rotomac Global Pvt Limited 2008 onwards, according to a CBI FIR. The amount swelled to Rs 3,695 crore, including the accrued interest, because of repeated defaults on payment, the agency said. The CBI initiated the action on the complaint of Bank of Baroda, a member of the consortium led by Bank of India, which had approached the agency fearing that Kothari may flee the country like Nirav Modi and his uncle Mehul Choksi. The principal exposure of the banks regarding the loan is Bank of India Rs 754.77 crore, Bank of Baroda Rs 456.63 crore, Overseas Bank of India Rs 771.07 crore, Union Bank of India Rs 458.95 crore, Allahabad Bank Rs 330.68 crore, Bank of Maharashtra 49.82 crore and Oriental Bank of Commerce Rs 97.47 crore, the agency said. The CBI had filed the case against Vikram, his wife Sadhana and Rahul, and unidentified bank officials. The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on Friday filed a case of corruption against the district magistrate of Bihars Aurangabad district, chief executive of Bharatiya Rail Bijlee Company Limited (BRBCL) and a few other unidentified people, officials said. The central agencys spokesperson Abhishek Dayal confirmed that a first information report has been lodged against district magistrate Kanwal Tanuj and BRBCLs CEO C Shiv Kumar. He said the agency also carried out searches at the office, residence and other properties of Tanuj and Kumar at Aurangabad, Lucknow and Noida. Tanuj and Kumar have been accused of various criminal offences including conspiracy, cheating, forgery, use of forged documents and criminal misconduct. The case is related to alleged irregularities and cheating the government of Rs 2.07 crore in the acquisition of land in the Nabinagar area of the district for setting up a power plant by BRBCL, a subsidiary of state-owned power producer NTPC Ltd. The FIR, a copy of which is in possession of the Hindustan Times, said Kumar entered into a criminal conspiracy with Tanuj other unidentified officials of BRBCL, including Gopal Prasad Singh, who has since died. Tanuj, the FIR said, got false documents including receipts for the period from 1988 to 2017 and sale deed of a vacant plot in the name of Singh, and reportedly sold by a person called Mukund Lal. A CBI official, who was a part of the search team and did not want to be named, said Tanuj then fraudulently directed the Nabinagar circle officer (CO) to begin the acquisition process of the 7.45 acres of land owned by Singh. The circle officer directed BRBCL to purchase the land from Singh and also buy 0.905 acres from the state government for their project. The possession of land is done in the presence of landowners after the identification of their land but when BRBCL officers along with other administrative officials visited the site on April 11 and 12, 2017, Singh allegedly could not identify his land. Several villagers, who had gathered there during the visit, told officials that Singh was not the owner of the plot. During the possession procedure, a video/CD was also prepared at the spot. A CBI official said that despite the locals objection and prevailing confusion on the land ownership, Tanuj on May 26 directed BRBCL to make the payment for Singhs land within 48 hours. The agency has found during its investigation that Mukund Lal was not a landlord and had not sold any land to Singh. Singh was paid Rs 2,07,84,853 on June 12 despite the fact that he could not identify the land and the money was subsequently withdrawn. The DMs confidential section was sealed and all the landline phones were disconnected. Several ADM rank officers were also being questioned in connection with the case. Tanuj could not be reached despite repeated attempts since the searches began around 9am. The searches were on by the time of filing of this report. BRBCL is constructing four units of 250 MW at Nabinagar. The joint venture project has been developed by BRBCL in which NTPC has 74 % share and the ministry of railways has the remaining 26%. The four units of BRBCL plant are proposed to be constructed on around 1,500 acres of land and all of them are to be completed at a revised cost of around Rs 8,100 crore. Relative to India, China is a late entrant in the Maldives, a key Indian Ocean nation and the only SAARC member-state Prime Minister Narendra Modi is yet to visit. But China may well have stolen a march over India, which hasnt quite managed to have its concerns over happenings in the island nation addressed by Maldives president Abdullah Yameen, who extended the emergency in his country much to New Delhis dismay. Maldives reluctance to follow its promised India-first policy has, in recent times, become an irritant for New Delhi. External affairs minister Sushma Swaraj conveyed this to her Maldivian counterpart, Mohamed Asim, in as many words when they met in New Delhi last month, an official familiar with the development recalled. The minister conveyed the message that the India-first policy is as important a part of taking bilateral ties forward as Indias neighbourhood-first policy, he said on condition of anonymity. Although the Chinese footprint in South Asia and the Indian Ocean region is something New Delhi has learnt to live with despite an understandable unease, the rapid expansion in ties between Male and Beijing has become a larger cause of concern. The Maldives located around 700 km from Indian shores has become a showpiece of mega projects-driven Chinese foreign policy as well as an important player in President Xi Jinpings marquee one-road-one-belt project. Chinese presence in the island nation has been growing steadily ever since Beijing opened an embassy in Male in 2011, about 37 years after India set up its mission there. The Indian Ocean region has around 40 countries and is home to 40% of the worlds population. It touches Australia, Southeast Asia, South Asia, West Asia and the eastern sea bend of Africa making the countries that rim the ocean vital cogs in the geopolitical ambitions of both India and China. Maldives has been a long-time ally of India but relations between that country and China have warmed rapidly in recent years. Maldives is only the country besides Pakistan that has a free-trade agreement with China, and this accord seems to have overshadowed the nations trade agreement providing for the export of essential commodities with India in 1981. Negotiations for the free-trade agreement (with China) took only three years to complete. And it was rushed through Parliament, making many opposition MPs express their concerns, a second Indian official said, asking not to be identified. Soon enough, China kicked off a stream of mega projects including the Friendship Bridge and Laamu Atoll Link Road in the Maldives. Reciprocal visits by premiers Xi and Yameen to each others countries further boosted ties, and Male became an earnest partner in the one-road-one-belt project in the Indian Ocean. Over 97% of Indias international trade (by volume) and 75% (by value) passes through this region. China has used inducements and investments on a significant scale to strategically penetrate the Maldives, which is now slipping into a debt trap, said strategic affairs expert Brahma Chellany. The growing trade and investment ties between the two countries are increasing Chinas political and strategic influence in the region, much to Indias discomfort. For instance, New Delhis hackles were raised when three Chinese naval warships docked in Male harbour in August 2016 in the first such goodwill visit. So, what helped China step up its influence in the Maldives? Sachin Chaturvedi, director of New Delhi-based think-tank RIS, believes the answer lies in the approach. A multisectoral approach has helped China increase its influence in trade, development cooperation and defence. This has given the country greater flexibility in envisioning and implementing its projects, he said. Experts believe the growing ties between the two countries hold major political consequences for India. Chinas support has spurred the Maldives unbridled lurch toward authoritarianism. Without being able to count on Chinas support, Yameen wouldnt have behaved the way he did recently, said Chellany. The employees of diamond merchant Nirav Modis firms, located in the Special Economic Zone (SEZ) in Surat, staged a protest on Thursday, demanding the payment of their salaries. The firms were unable to pay them after their bank accounts were frozen by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) and the CBI in connection with the alleged Rs 11,400-crore scam at the Punjab National Bank (PNB), they claimed. Some 700 employees of two of Nirav Modis firms in the SEZ have lost their jobs as the management has locked the units and asked us to search for jobs elsewhere. We are in a big trouble. We have not been given any assurance about the payment of our outstanding salaries, Deepak Ingle, an employee, said. A week ago, ED officials had conducted raids at Firestar Diamond International Pvt Ltd and Firestar International Pvt Ltd and seized a stock worth over Rs 900 crore. Both these units were part of Nirav Modis empire, the ED officials had said. The management has told us they cannot pay the outstanding salaries for January and February as all the bank accounts have been frozen by the ED and the CBI. We want the government to think about us and un-freeze at least one account to facilitate the payment of our salaries, Ingle said. The ED had first registered a case under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) against Modi, his uncle and business partner Mehul Choksi and others on February 14, based on a CBI FIR that was lodged following a complaint from the PNB. Modi (46) was booked by the CBI, along with his wife, brother and Choksi, on January 31 for allegedly cheating the state-run bank to the tune of Rs 280 crore. The bank had subsequently sent two more complaints to the CBI, saying the scam was worth more than Rs 11,400 crore. Off a tolled highway in Rajasthans Sikar district, Tulcha Ram, a brawny 50-year old, offers a guided tour of his resplendent farm one that may not remain his for long. Those are khejri trees, he says, pointing to an elegant grove of prosopis cineraria with antler-shaped branches, all of similar height. The farms floor is iridescent-green and spongy as you walk it. Its actually a month-old black gram or channa crop. Ram risks losing this bucolic haven measuring 3.72 hectares to his creditors. A loan of Rs 3 lakh taken on Kisan Credit Card from the Punjab National Banks Badalwas branch in Sikar district turned into a Rs 4.5 lakh monster after repeated defaults. It was like a noose around my neck, he says, showing off a notice issued on February 9, 2017 from a local official in Dhod tehsil to auction his land to the highest bidder. An auction fee of 5% was also added to the outstanding. Then, the bidding took place. One-third of the total land holding which is Rams share in the family property -- was auctioned at Rs 18 lakh to the highest bidder, Nandlal Chawla from a neighbouring town. Just as the auction proceedings were being closed, Ram showed up to pay the debt. He had collected the outstanding by begging and borrowing from everyone he could ask for help. Effectively, that was a loan to repay another loan. At the behest of local elders, the auction was reversed, he says. Ram isnt off the hook yet. Now, I worry about paying all these creditors who helped me save my land from Punjab National Bank, he says. Farmers in many states have got into precisely these sorts of debt traps a generic problem caused by high costs of cultivation and falling returns from agriculture. In state after state, governments have succumbed to pressure and waived off farm loans or are considering doing so. Maharashtra, Punjab, Madhya Pradesh, and Karnataka have waived off loans, or partially written off loans, or part of the interests. On February 12, Rajasthan announced it would partially write off loans owed by small and marginal farmers worth Rs 8000 crore. Its decision was forced by an 11-day protest by farmers in Sikar, 200 km from capital Jaipur from September 1-13 2017, last year. History shows that an agitation launched from Sikar never fails. It has always spelt trouble for governments. It is a revolutionary place, says Amra Ram, the leader of All-India Kisan Sabha, who led the agitation. The siege was intense. Highways were blocked. Traders shuttered shops and transactions in the Sikar farmers market ground to a halt. Thousands from all over the politically influential Shekhawati region comprising the three big districts of Churu, Sikar and Jhunjhunu joined in. Amra Ram says the loan waiver will cover only 2% of the farmers caught in debt traps. In 2000, the Kisan Sabha forced the government to release more power to farms. In 2015, it forced the then government to roll back electricity tariff hike after a 15-day protest, just like it forced the current government to defer a decision to raise rural electrify prices in 2016. What made last years agitation successful was that everybody joined us, even local DJs, with their fan following, says Ram Ratan, a prominent farm leader from Sikar. DJs bring to mind hip jockeys in city nightclubs, but in the Shekhawati region, they are local Jat youth who play ear-numbing music in local marriages, religious festivals, birthdays and other rural events from atop specially modified pickup trucks. When harvests are good, they make good money. When onion prices crashed in Sikar the biggest growing district in Rajasthan even DJs were without business. The Rajasthan governments loan waiver, limited to small and marginal farmers, is a follow up on an agreement it had signed with protesting Sikar farmers. It promises to pay off Rs 50,000 of each small farmers total outstanding on short-duration loans taken from cooperative banks. The first test of whether this has managed to placate farmers took place on February 22. The main farmers body that staged the massive agitation last year, forcing the government to accept its demands, called for a similar agitation on that day. It believed the waiver wasnt enough because it takes care of just 1 of its 11 demands. Its major demands were a total loan waiver, not partial, of all categories of farmers and a complete freeing up of cattle trade in the state. Despite a loan waiver, hundreds of farmers blocked the Bikaner-Agra national highway 52 near Sikar town on Thursday. Two days ago, the government arrested the national secretary of Kisan Sabha, Amra Ram and his colleague Pema Ram, to pre-empt the protests. Our leaders were arrested when they were on a padyatra (protest march) in Jaipur, Ratan, their colleague said. With elections due later this year in the state, the government is watching the farm sector closely. We need to understand that Rajasthan is neither Gujarat, nor Maharashtra. Rajasthans economy is mostly about tourism, mines and agriculture. I dont think disruption from policies such as the Goods and Services Tax is an issue here unlike in Gujarat, which is a textile hub, says Prof. Sanjay Lodha of Udaipurs Mohanlal Sukhadia University. The plight of farmers is because they havent been getting good prices, Lodha says. Just a few years ago, things were smooth-sailing. The rough patch in Rajasthans agriculture began roughly four years ago. Incredibly, a fracking boom in faraway US -- which saw a surge in natural gas production to offset rising oil prices -- brought prosperity to Rajasthans poorest farmers. Fracking is a method of extracting shale gas by pumping high-pressured gas into the ground, which requires a processed powder called guar gum made from guar (cluster beans). Rajasthan is Indias largest gaur producer, with a share of 84% in national output. At its peak, the total export value of Indias guar gum most of it from Rajasthan rose to Rs 21,287 crore from about Rs 121 crore in 2003-04. In 2016-17, this came down to just Rs 3,106.62, an 85% fall. The boom ended but farmers got used to better lifestyles. They bought cars, tractors and jewellery. The boom was over in 2012-13. What followed were two years of drought beginning 2014-15. Farmers were already in distress. They got angry when they heard the government was going to increase power tariffs, says retired bureaucrat Shankarlal Choudhury. The pastoral economy has also been hit by self-styled cow vigilantes. Laxman Singh, a livestock farmer in Dujod village, says income from cattle trade has dwindled because of cow vigilantism. Milch cattle were like ATMs. If I need money, I just sell them. Theres hardly any buyer now, he said. The government has tried to do its bit. Agriculture minister Prabhulal Saini says the government procured pulses, soyabean and peanuts worth Rs 2,800 crore at minimum support prices. Rajasthan has also promised 6 months of free cow feed to cow shelters worth Rs 50 crore and help set up biogas plants in 25 identified large gaushalas with a subsidy of Rs 40 lakh for each. It is banking on these measures ahead of the crucial poll that will decide the fate of the Vasundhara Raje-led government. The farmers are still unhappy lot. There are stuck on a demand for a total loan waiver. Ratan says he and others have forcibly put off auctioning of 122 land-holdings in Sikar, none of which will be benefit from the current loan waiver because they arent small farmers. Hundreds of people living in the border areas in Uri of north Kashmirs Baramulla district were shifted to a camp after intermittent firing by the Pakistani troops, the latest of which occurred on Thursday night, officials said on Friday. Three civilians were wounded on Monday evening after Pakistani forces opened fire across the Line of Control in Uri and since then there has been intermittent firing almost every day. Due to firing and shelling from across in border areas of Uri about 500 people migrate to safer areas. DC and SSP on spot looking after the people, director general of state police SP Vaid tweeted. Officials said that a special camp has been set up a few kilometres away from the affected villages to house the displaced people. Locals and police officials said that although the firing had stopped after Thursday night, people were in the camp fearing further firing. Baramulla deputy commissioner Nasir Ahmad Naqash and senior superintendent of police Imtiyaz Hussain have promised all the help to the people staying in the camp. Pakistan violated the 2003 ceasefire agreement with India 882 times last year along the Line of Control in Jammu and Kashmir, according to reports. India accuses Pakistani soldiers of providing cover firing to help militants cross over and carry out attacks in its part of Kashmira charge Pakistan denies. The Centre is preparing to launch a fresh hunt for fighter aircraft for the Indian Air Force while widening the scope of its search, an official familiar with the development said. The NDA government is in the process of laying the groundwork for a new global tender for warplanes, which would be built in India in collaboration with a foreign aircraft maker, this person said. A defence ministry spokesperson, however, said on Friday that no decision had been communicated to her office. A plan to locally produce single-engine fighters in collaboration with a global defence contractor has been dropped to expand the scope of the competition by including twin-engine fighters too. HT had reported on December 15 last year that the plan faced an uncertain future with the defence ministry treading cautiously as a single vendor situation might crop up. US defence contractor Lockheed Martin and Swedish firm Saab were the only two companies exploring opportunities to build F-16s and Gripens in India. The earlier plans involved pursuing two separate projects under the Make in India initiative to build single-engine and twin-engine planes in the country. Both these plans had not taken off. The count of the IAFs fighter squadrons has reduced to 32 compared to an optimum strength of 42-plus units required to fight a two-front war. The Chinese and Pakistani air forces operate 60 and 25 fighter squadrons respectively. India floated a global tender for 126 planes more than a decade ago but it was cancelled after Prime Minister Narendra Modi said in April 2015 that India would buy 36 Rafale jets from France under a government-to-government deal. The IAF is looking at inducting the French-origin fighters by 2022 to bolster its combat capability. India signed a $8.7-billion deal with France for two Rafale squadrons in September 2016 as an emergency purchase to arrest the worrying slide in the IAFs capabilities. The fighters will be delivered to the IAF September 2019 onwards. The IAF also plans to deploy 123 Tejas light combat aircraft over the next decade. The IAFs first Tejas squadron, raised in 2016, consists of only five planes. Also, India is yet to take a call on whether it should co-develop a stealth fighter with Russia, with the IAF having strong reservations about going ahead with the multi-billion dollar fifth generation fighter aircraft (FGFA) project. Authorities in Jammu and Kashmir have issued a low-danger avalanche warning for high altitude areas of various districts in the state, including the Jammu-Srinagar national highway, advising people to take precautionary measures. On the basis of information received from the Snow and Avalanche Study Establishment (SASE), low-danger avalanche warning has been issued for various high altitude areas, an official spokesperson said. The low-danger avalanche warning has been issued for Baramulla, Gulmarg, Furkian-Z Gali and Kargil and Leh Districts, Kupwara-Chowkibal-Tangdhar, Kulgam, Badgam, Kupwara, Bandipora, Ganderbal Kargil and Bandipora-Kanzalwan-Gurez sector and Srinagar-Jammu National Highway for next 24 hours, he said. The warning was also issued for Kargil and Leh in the Ladakh region, Poonch, Rajouri, Reasi, Ramban, Doda, Kishtwar and Udhampur in Jammu region besides Srinagar-Jammu National Highway, the spokesperson said. He said the people living in these avalanche-prone areas have been advised by the disaster management authority to take precautionary measures. Congress President Rahul Gandhi on Friday met Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and discussed a range of issues concerning the two countries. I had a warm and cordial meeting with the Canadian Prime Minister in Delhi this evening. We had a fruitful discussion on a range of issues concerning our two countries. I look forward to continuing the dialogue and building a lasting friendship with him,Gandhi tweeted after the meeting. According to sources, the two shared their commitment towards liberal values. Issues pertaining to economic development and new technologies were also discussed during the around 40-minute meeting, they said. The sources said the two leaders talked about bridging the gap of inequalities in society and how important pluralistic values were and how destructive divisive politics can become and hurt society. The two leaders also talked about how important are inclusive democracies, besides jobs creation. Gandhis meeting was rescheduled after the Canadian prime minister had to call on President Ram Nath Kovind after bilateral talks with Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Besides Gandhi, former union minister and senior Congress leader Anand Sharma was also present during the meeting with Trudeau. Gandhi also met Trudeaus wife and children during his meeting. Prime Minister Narendra Modi greeted his Canadian counterpart Justin Trudeau with a hug on Friday, a day after embarrassed Canadian diplomats had to rescind a party invitation for a man convicted of attempting to kill an Indian politician during a visit to Canada in the 1980s. Jaspal Atwal, a former member of a banned Sikh separatist group, had been invited to a Thursday evening party for Trudeau at Canadas High Commission in New Delhi. Canada quickly withdrew the invitation once it was discovered, with Trudeau telling reporters: The individual in question never should have received an invitation. Trudeau is on a week-long visit to India accompanied with his wife Sophie Gregoire Trudeau and three children Ella-Grace, Xavier and Hadrien and a delegation of ministers. Here are the Live updates: 9pm: Congress president Rahul Gandhi tweets about his meeting with Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau. I had a warm and cordial meeting with the Canadian Prime Minister in Delhi this evening. We had a fruitful discussion on a range of issues concerning our two countries. I look forward to continuing the dialogue and building a lasting friendship with him, Gandhi says. Congress president Rahul Gandhi with Canadian PM Justin Trudeau in New Delhi on Friday. (Office of RG/Twitter) 8:50pm: Canadian PM Trudeau says he has long been known to wear traditional clothes to a broad range of events in different communities in Canada and elsewhere. Reaction of people on whether Im wearing traditional clothing or suit-and-tie is extremely encouraging in Indo-Canadian friendship, he adds. 8:43pm: I am pleased to be able to refresh and renew relationship between Canadian government and Punjab CM. We know its a relationship important to many Canadians.We will continue to look for ways to deepen investment to move forward and there are many steps to come to improve that relationship, said PM Trudeau. 8:40pm: Obviously the situation (Jaspal Atwals invitation) was unacceptable. Like I said yesterday (Thursday), this individual should have never been invited and the MP responsible has taken responsibility. I would be having a conversation with the MP in Canada, Trudeau said. 8:30pm: We did not talk about Jaspal Atwal, Canadian PM Justin Trudeau says of his meeting with PM Narendra Modi earlier in the day. 5:43pm: Earlier visuals of Trudeau and his family at Rajghat. Earlier visuals of Canadian PM #JustinTrudeau and his children, Hadrien (3), Ella-Grace (9) and Xavier (10) at Delhi's Rajghat. pic.twitter.com/UCRXXrEVlO ANI (@ANI) February 23, 2018 2:15pm: Joint address ends. 2:07pm: We discussed about strengthening people-to-people ties. I am inspired by the prospect of our shared future, says Trudeau. 2:06pm: A renewed economic partnership must create jobs and help families. PM Modi and I are united in that collaboration: Canada PM. We share not only rich a history but a set of values that encourage a natural friendship between our two countries. 2:05pm: As Canada looks to diversify its own economy and looks for new opportunities to do business beyond its boundaries, India is a natural partner and a trusted friend for commercial cooperation: Trudeau. 2:03pm: I look forward to continued partnership (between our countries) for years to come, says Trudeau. 2:01pm: Canada is a energy super-power, it can fulfill our increasing energy demands, says PM Modi. 2:00pm: We have similar thoughts when it comes to the situation in North Korea and Maldives: Modi. 1:58pm: Canada is an important destination for Indian students when it comes to higher education. More than 1 lakh of our students are there. We renewed our MoU on higher education which will enhance the exchange in terms of higher education: Modi. 1:55pm: Those who challenge our sovereignty and territorial integrity cannot be tolerated, says Modi. 1:53pm: India and Canada can work together in every sector. We discussed many issues including defence cooperation. Terrorism and extremism are a threat to countries like ours and to fight these elements, it is important for us to come together, says Modi. 1:52pm: Your visit was awaited since a long time. Very happy that you came here along with your wife and children, Modi tells Trudeau. I experienced Canadas love for India when I went there. 1:50pm: PM Modi begins his address. 1:45pm: The two sides exchange five Memorandums of Understanding including on information and communications technology, sports, IPR, education and energy. 1:42pm: Taking the relationship forward! PM @narendramodi and Canadian PM @JustinTrudeau discussed strengthening cooperation in trade & investment, energy, education, healthcare, IT, start up, science & technology, defence and security, tourism and people-to-people contacts. pic.twitter.com/OS7wj84IcE Raveesh Kumar (@MEAIndia) February 23, 2018 1:15pm: Modi and Trudeau hold extensive talks, exploring ways to boost ties in several key areas, including trade and energy. 12:15pm: Delegation level talks to be held soon, with a number of agreements expected to be signed in several areas. 12:05pm: Prime Minister Narendra Modi meets Justin Trudeau at Delhis Hyderabad House, to hold delegation level talks later: ANI. The bilateral talks will focus on trade, defence, civil nuclear cooperation, space, climate change and education. 11:20am: Trudeau meets external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj. Ministry of external affairs spokesperson Raveesh Kumar says the two sides discussed ways to strengthen and deepen the bilateral India-Canada partnership. 10:50am: PM Trudeau and his family reach Rajghat to pay tributes to Mahatma Gandhi. 9:10am: Canadian PM inspects guard of honour at Rashtrapati Bhavan. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his Indian counterpart Narendra Modi will on Friday attempt to shore up bilateral relations after a rocky start to the visiting leaders trip, which was hit by one controversy after another. Trudeau has faced intense scrutiny from the media back at home and in India over different aspects of his visit, including his governments perceived softness towards pro-Khalistan elements in Canada and the absence of a personal welcome from Modi when he flew into New Delhi on February 17. Though the visit had been in the pipeline for more than a year, commentators noted the apparent lack of careful planning in putting together Trudeaus itinerary only half a day of the eight-day trip was set aside for substantive engagements, including meetings with Modi and other Indian leaders. The visit was buffeted by a fresh controversy on Thursday after it emerged that convicted Khalistani terrorist Jaspal Atwal, who was convicted of attempted murder after he admitted to an attempt on the life of an Akali Dal leader in Canada in 1986, had been invited to a dinner reception hosted for Trudeau by the Canadian high commissioner. Trudeau, who has been at pains to assure his Indian hosts that he believes in a one united India and that his government opposes violent extremism, said the invitation to Atwal had been rescinded and should never have been extended in the first place. The Canadian MP from Trudeaus Liberal Party who asked for Atwal to be included in the guest list also offered an apology. But the damage had been done, just hours ahead of the crucial talks with Modi, and with former Indian diplomats and commentators holding up the episode as an example of the Canadian governments softness towards radical Sikh groups that continue to back the movement to carve out an independent Sikh homeland. Former Canadian minister Ujjal Dosanjh, who survived a murderous attack by Atwal in 1985, said the episode also reflected the deep inroads made by pro-Khalistan elements into the Liberal Party. Trudeau has also been accused by Canadian commentators of using the India visit to woo the influential Indo-Canadian community ahead of elections scheduled for next year. On Thursday night, Modi finally sent out a set of tweets welcoming Trudeau and his family, setting the tone for Fridays engagement. I look forward to meeting PM @JustinTrudeau tomorrow and holding talks on further strengthening India-Canada relations in all spheres. I appreciate his deep commitment to ties between our two countries, he said in one tweet. The shadow of Khalistan is expected to linger over the talks, with the Indian side likely to seek fresh commitments from the Canadian leader on tackling the activities of radical Sikh groups. Stalled negotiations on a free trade agreement and another pact to promote and protect investments are also expected to come up in the talks. Trudeau will meet external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj ahead of his talks with Modi. After a one-on-one session, the two leaders will be joined by the Canadian ministers accompanying Trudeau for further discussions. This will be followed by the signing of several agreements and the two leaders will then make remarks to the media. There is considerable interest in whether Trudeau will make any fresh gesture to allay the concerns of his India hosts at the media interaction. He had condemned violent extremism during his meeting with Punjab chief minister Amarinder Singh. For a leader who is so used to adulation during his overseas visits, Trudeau will probably be hoping that he can use his engagements with Modi and the top Indian leadership to conclude his visit on a note that overcomes or at least compensates for all the criticism and negative coverage he has received since he arrived in India. The Congress is set to unleash all its firepower in Karnataka in a bid to retain power in the state, party insiders said. The ruling party has adopted a multi-pronged strategy to prevent the BJP from realising its Congress-mukt Bharat (Congress-free India) mission. Karnataka is the only big state ruled by the Congress, which is why the party is investing much prestige in the state, with its chief Rahul Gandhi set to begin the second leg of his campaign in the Bombay-Karnataka zone from Saturday, party leaders said. The Congress has divided the state into four zones of Hyderabad-Karnataka, Bombay-Karnataka, Mysore and Bangalore regions for effective and efficient canvassing. Each state minister along with central and state office-bearers have been assigned different constituencies for better poll management. The party has also instructed its communication, social media, research and data departments to focus on the elections and tap local resources. Research department head Rajeev Gowda and social media head Divya Spandana happen to be from Karnataka and are spending considerable time in the state. Picking up from where he had left in Gujarat, Gandhi has continued with his temple visits in Karnataka undeterred by the charge that he is playing a soft-Hindutva card to appease the majority community in an attempt to counter the BJP. However, the Congress chief did visit the shrine of Khwaja Bande Nawaz, a 13th century Sufi saint, during his previous tour. But will it help the Congress? Political analysts maintain that there is a possibility that the strategy that the Congress devised in Gujarat might come in handy to an extent in Karnataka given that corruption and development issues were non-starters. Only Hindutva has a pan-Karnataka appeal and other subjects are region-specific and this is one issue which the BJP will try to exploit . It is imperative for the Congress to respond to that in some way, said A Narayana, associate professor for public policy at the Bengaluru-based Azim Premji University. The Congress is fighting the polls under the leadership of chief minister Siddaramaiah. By clearing the air about the CM face, Gandhi has not only silenced Siddaramaiahs detractors but also put on him the onus of retaining power in Karnataka. At every public rally, the Congress president has praised Siddaramaiah for his governance and commitment to work for all sections of the society. He even urged Prime Minister Narendra Modi to learn how to govern from Siddaramaiah. Siddaramaiah is from the backward Kuruba community, the third largest caste in Karnataka after Lingayats and Vokaligas, the two upper castes that have dominated the state politics for decades now. The Congress is likely to release its manifesto next month, senior leader M Veerappa Moily said. It will be a holistic document. The idea is to make it a peoples manifesto in letter and spirit, he said. The document is expected to highlight the Siddaramaiah governments achievements and also specify the partys vision for next five years. Congress leaders are holding deliberations with different segments of the society across the state to take their inputs in preparing the manifesto. The gudiya helpline, set-up by the Bharatiya Janata Party led government, in the state for the distressed women has become popular in less than a month of its launch. The BJP, in its Vision Document released before the assembly polls held late last year, had promised a helpline to check crime against women. On January 15, the state government had announced a 24X7 helpline for women safety in the state. The helpline (with the number 1515), which was launched on January 26, works under the supervision of the chief ministers office (CMO) and is monitored by a superintendent of police rank officer, who has to initiate action within 48 hours of receiving the complaint. When the helpline was started, there were people who would call just to inquire about how the helpline works, said superintendent of police (law and order) Kushal Sharma. Complaints received on helpline Domestic Violence: 38 Phone stalking: 26 Kidnapping: 13 Eve teasing: 4 Fake FB Account: 4 Rape: 2 Miscellaneous: 18 Total 105 Domestic violence, stalking complaints top list In less than a month, as many as 105 complaints were received on the helpline. While most of them have been disposed of after being redressed, complaints regarding domestic violence and women being stalked on the phone tops the list, said Sharma Among 105 complaints, 38 cases pertain to domestic violence, while 25 cases of the phone stalking have been reported so far. Besides four college girls also reported their social media accounts were hacked. Meanwhile, two cases of rape and four cases of eve teasing were also reported on the helpline. Gudiya is the nickname given to 16-year-old schoolgirl from Kotkhai who went missing on her way home from school at Mahasu on July 4 and whose body was found two days later dumped in the Halaila forests of Kotkhai. After widespread protests, including violence in which the police station at Kotkhai was set ablaze, the case was referred to the CBI by Himachal Pradesh high court. Initially, when the helpline was launched the complainants had lots of questions about the Kotkhai incident, said CPI(M) leader and former deputy mayor Tikender Panwar. The CBI had arrested nine policemen, including the head of Special Investigating Team (SIT) Zahur Zaidi and Shimlas superintendent of police DW Negi. The CBI that took over case last year in July, so far has not been able to nab a single culprit even after cross examining more than 400 persons in connection with the case. When the CBI took over the case everyone was optimistic that it will crack the case soon. But, ironically nothing happened; it focused on arresting cops for custodial death, Panwar said. Union minister VK Singh on Friday sought to defend Army chief General Bipin Rawats remark linking AIUDFs growth to illegal immigration in the northeast. See, we have a habit of politicising everything. Let the army chief say what he wants to. If you dont like it, you dont like it. Thats it, Singh, minister of state for external affairs, told reporters on the sidelines of an event in Mumbai. Everything is being politicised these days, Singh, a former Army chief, said. Referring to reports of increase in Muslim population in several Assam districts, Gen Rawat had said the All India United Democratic Fronts growth has been faster than that of the BJP in the 1980s. Addressing a seminar in New Delhi on Wednesday, Rawat had also said that a planned influx of people from Bangladesh into the northeast is taking place as part of proxy warfare by Pakistan with support from China with an aim to keep the area disturbed. AIUDF president Badruddin Ajmal had on Thursday criticised the Army chief for his politically driven comments and said his responsibility is to lead the armed forces for the security of the nation and not to monitor the growth of a political party. A jilted man killed a 17-year-old girl after he attacked her with a sword outside her school gate and nearly severed her head in Madhya Pradeshs Anuppur district, police said on Friday. Police said the incident took place in Kotma town, more than 550km east of Bhopal, on Thursday afternoon when Pooja Panika was walking to her school on Nigwani Road to appear for her biology examination. He struck her on her back, neck and throat, killing the Class 11 student of the local government school on the spot. He fled the scene dropping the sword. I saw a girl and a man walking behind her outside the school and thought they were family. The man suddenly started beating the girl. I tried to intervene and shouted him to stop. As I was about 20 feet away, he managed ran away, an eyewitness was quoted as saying by the news agency ANI. Police said the girls parents named Dilip Sahu as the suspect and that he has been arrested and is being interrogated. In 2014, the girl had filed a complaint of eve-teasing against Dilip and a criminal investigation was done on the matter, sub-divisional police officer Vijay Singh was quoted as saying by ANI. An investigation is underway, officials added. A 27-year-old tribal man was beaten to death by 15 locals over allegation of theft in Kadukumanna village in Attappady, near Palakkad on Thursday night. Chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan condemned the killing saying a civilised society cant tolerate such heinous acts. Police have detained eight, though only two arrests have been made. The killing caused an outrage as the video of the attack went viral. One of the pictures posted in social media also shows a man holding a stick questioning the tribal, while in another; a man is seen taking a selfie with the injured victim. State police chief Loknath Behera said a Special Investigation Team has been constituted under Thrissur range IG MR Ajith Kumar and action will be taken against erring police officers. Police said the deceased, Madhu, was apprehended by a mob over allegation of theft and severely beaten up. Later he was handed over to the police. On way to the police station he reportedly collapsed and died. The police have arrested two persons in connection with the case. It is heinous crime. A civilised society cant tolerate such act. The government will take strict action against the guilty, CM Vijayan said in a Facebook post. Meanwhile, BJP has called for a shutdown in Mannarakkad to protest the killing. Congress has also decried it saying it was a cold-blooded murder. It is a shame on literate Kerala. Like honour killings in north India such brutal acts are raising their ugly heads here, said writer and activist Joy Mathew. Tribal activist Dhanya Raman said Madhu was suffering from mental ailment and he used to roam around the area for more than a year. However, Agali police said Madhu was involved in three cases of theft and he was caught-red handed while stealing from a shop. The state government has announced a magisterial inquiry into the incident. State culture and SC/ST minister A K Balan will visit the area on Saturday. The government will not spare the guilty. We have already asked the police to charge all accused under murder charges, Balan said adding the incident has brought shame to the state. The National SC/ST Commission has also sought a report from the district collector and police superintendent. The commission said in New Delhi that it will send a fact-finding team to Palakkad on Monday. Malliamma, the victims mother, said her son led a nomadic life and used to stay in caves. But she denied allegation that he used to steal food from shops and houses. Even if he had stolen food when he was hungry he should not have been killed like this, she said. Meanwhile, an aide of Mannarkkad MLA N Shamsuddin (Muslim League), M Ubaid, was reportedly present at the scene when the crowd attacked the tribal. However, the legislator said though he was present he only took a selfie and did not beat him. He is only a party worker not my staff member. When I made inquiries, local people told me though Ubaid was present he did not beat him but he took a couple of selfies. He should have saved him rather than clicking selfie, the MLA said while condemning the incident. Two similar incidents were reported from the state in last one month. In Pallippuram (Thiruvananthapuram) a mentally-deranged woman was beaten up by three women in front of a crowd last month. Later police arrested all three when the video of the attack gone viral. A transgender was stripped and attacked by a crowd in Valiyathura on the outskirts of the state capital a couple of weeks back alleging he was a child-lifter. Two FIRs were lodged against Bhind MLA Narendra Singh Kushwaha on Thursday night for overstaying in Kolaras assembly constituency despite prohibitory orders and allegedly assaulting Congress candidate Mahendra Singh Yadavs son, Lokendra Yadav, police said. The first FIR was initiated by the police under Section 188 of IPC, while the second FIR was lodged by Lokendra. Earlier, Kushwaha, too, had lodged FIRs against the Congress leaders son and his relatives for allegedly attacking him and damaging his car. Both sides have lodged FIRs. Arrests will follow. However, no money was found in the Bhind MLAs jeep as had been alleged. Wrong information is doing the rounds on social media that an FIR had been lodged against 150 Congressmen, said Sunil Pandey, superintendent of police (SP), Shivpuri district. There is no law and order problem. What happened on Thursday night was just an isolated incident, he added. Trouble began late on Thursday evening when Congress workers were staging a protest against the presence of Kushwaha in the constituency after the end of the campaign at 5pm. The workers also demanded that the police search Kushwahas vehicle as they suspected cash inside, but the cops failed to do so. According to them, the police made an attempt to defend Kushwaha and allegedly allowed his driver to flee the spot with the money. This enraged the locals on the spot and they pelted stones at the jeep. They also claimed that the police caned the Congress workers in a bid to divert their attention from the MLA resulting in injuries to Mahendra Singh Yadav. The SP, however, said the police had to resort to mild lathicharge to bring the situation under control, as the protesters misbehaved with the police force. BJP MLA from Bhopal Rameshwar Sharma, who is coordinating the party campaign in Kolaras, rubbished the allegations as baseless. Protesting against the incident, Congress workers on Friday staged a dharna before the collectors residence in Shivpuri, demanding action against BJP leaders. Senior Congress leaders Kamal Nath and Jyotiraditya Scindia raised the issue with chief election commissioner OP Rawat in Delhi and demanded a free and fair election, Congress spokesperson Pankaj Chaturvedi said. In a series of tweets on Friday, Scindia said BJP was so upset on seeing its imminent defeat that even when Kushwaha was caught red-handed distributing money, the police indulged in goondaism under the BJPs pressure. He said this was nothing but shameful for democracy that BJP was using money and muscle power and also the police and administration. Meanwhile, state BJP lodged a complaint with the Election Commission accusing Brajendra Singh Yadav, Congress MLA from Mungaoli, of distributing money among voters at Bahadurpur. A picture was also submitted along with the complaint to support the claim, state BJP spokesperson Rajneesh Agrawal said. When contacted, the Congress candidate rubbished the charges, saying the picture had been photoshopped in a bid to defame him. Pralay Shrivastava, the spokesperson for chief electoral officers office, said a report had been sought from the collector, Ashok Nagar, on the BJPs complaint. Police said BJP MLA from Sagar district Shailendra Jain was arrested and his vehicle seized on Friday when he was found staying in the constituency after the election campaign was over. Kolaras and Mungaoli assembly constituencies, both under Guna parliamentary constituency, go to polls on February 24. (With input from Ranjeet Gupta in Shivpuri) The NIA has filed a charge sheet against Pakistani intelligence officer Amir Zubair Siddique for allegedly conspiring to wage a war against India when he was posted in Sri Lanka in 2014, an official statement said on Friday. He has been accused of hatching a conspiracy to cause explosions at the American consulate in Chennai, the Israeli consulate in Bengaluru, the Electronic City in Bengaluru and various other places of public congregation in south India, it said. Siddique was working in the Pakistan high commission in Colombo as visa counsellor when the case was registered in 2014. Besides Siddique, two Chennai residents -- Balasubramanian alias Balan and Noorudeen alias Rafi -- have also been chargesheeted in the case for circulating high quality fake Indian counterfeit notes and causing damage to the economic security of the country, the NIA statement said. The charge sheet was filed in a special NIA court in Poonamallee in Chennai. The original case was registered on April 28, 2014 by the Tamil Nadu Police following arrest of one Sri Lankan national -- Mohd Sakir Hussaien -- in Chennai, who had arrived in India as per the instructions from Siddique to conduct subversive activities in India, the probe agency said. High-quality fake Indian counterfeit notes of face value of Rs 2.5 lakh were seized from another accused Mohammad Saleem on May 1, 2014, it said. The case was taken over by the NIA on June 21, 2014 and a charge sheet was submitted against accused Hussaien, Saleem and others on October 23, 2014. In this case, Hussaien had earlier pleaded guilty in the court and was convicted for five years of imprisonment, the statement said. The parliamentary panel on health wants the government to scrap its proposal for a bridge course to allow Ayush practitioners practice allopathy, two panel members said on condition of anonymity. The panel, which is reviewing the new National Medical Commission bill, which envisages overhauling medical education and replaces the tainted Medical Council of India, will also seek several other changes in the flagship legislation. We want to strengthen Ayush. But we do not want this Crosspathy. This will cause a great harm to Ayush as its practitioners will leave the traditional systems and start practising allopathy, which is more lucrative, said a prominent member of the panel. The National Medical Commission (NMC) Bill, 2017, has been embroiled in controversy since it was announced, with allopathic doctors protesting against the provision wherein Ayush practitioners could prescribe allopathic drugs after completing a bridge course. The Indian Medical Association (IMA) on January 1 also had called a day-long nationwide strike, to protest against the Bill. The strike was called off only after the bill was referred to the parliamentary standing committee. The panel, headed by Samajwadi Partys Ramgopal Yadav, also wants changes in the composition of the NMC board. The proposed board has 25 members out of which five are to be elected, 17, from the government of India and the remaining three, from the states. We will demand more representation from the states and we are also opposed to election in the five seats. Remember, one of the key problems of corruption in MCI was because of election of its executive committee and other key posts, said another senior MP, a member of the House panel. Fighting MCI elections was more expensive that fighting assembly polls, quipped a member. In its report to the Parliament, the panel however will ask the government to make massive investments in Ayush and maintain that it requires major expansion across India. The Revised estimate for Ayush in 2017-18 was Rs 1558 crore and in the 2018-19 budget only Rs 1600 crore has been allotted. The government should spend more. But no mix Ayush with allopathy, said the third member. In a bid to promote Ayush, the panel is likely to add in its report that at least 50% of the 1.5 lakh wellness centres proposed in the general budget of 2018-19 should be based only on Ayush. The panel is set to present its report in the second half of the budget session that starts on March 5. We have a problem against the bridge course clause as it will dilute the quality of medical education. Also, choosing board members who are nominated rather than elected is an attempt by the government to ensure bureaucrats and politicians have a stronghold over the commission. There should be elected members, said Dr Harjit Singh Bhatti, president Resident Doctors Association, All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), Delhi. The RDA AIIMS has been quite vocal about its and its president, Dr Bhatti was invited for consultation on the Bill by the parliamentary standing committee on health on Tuesday. The ministry of health and family welfare has been maintaining that it will rely entirely on suggestions made by the parliamentary panel. We have referred the Bill to the panel and further course of action will be decided on the basis of what the panel decides, Union health minister JP Nadda said earlier this month, after referring the Bill to the panel. The panel however, is unlikely to make any change to the proposal to shut down MCI. With Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau by his side, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday said there is no place for misuse of religion for political and divisive purposes, sending a clear message at a time Canada is perceived as having been soft on Khalistani separatists. Terrorism and extremism are threats to our democratic and pluralistic societies, Modi told the media along with Trudeau following one-on-one and delegation-level talks between the two countries here. It is very important for us to come together to fight these forces, he said. There should be no space for those who misuse religion for political purposes and divisive politics. Read: Modi, Trudeau discuss terrorism, trade ties; ink six pacts Modis candid remarks came during the last leg of Trudeaus week-long visit, which was marked by a certain cold attitude from New Delhi towards the visiting dignitary because of Canadas perceived support to Khalistani elements. In a major embarrassment to Trudeau, on Thursday his countrys High Commission here had to rescind an invitation to a convicted Khalistani separatist, Jaspal Atwal, for a reception that was hosted in honour of Trudeau. After Trudeaus arrival on Saturday, it was only on Thursday evening that Modi tweeted his welcome message before greeting the visiting dignitary with a hug ahead of the ceremonial reception at Rashtrapati Bhavan on Friday. In his remarks, Trudeau avoided any reference to separatists or terrorism. We share respect for democratic traditions and pluralism, he said adding the two leaders discussed ways to strengthen people-to-people ties between the two countries. Modi said the National Security Advisors (NSAs) of the two countries were giving finishing touches to the Framework for Cooperation and Countering Terrorism and Violent Extremism between the two countries. Modi said that during Fridays talks, both sides also discussed means to further deepen economic relations. We have asked our negotiators to double their efforts to finalise the Bilateral Investment and Promotion Agreement and the Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement, he said. Bilateral trade between India and Canada stood at a C$8.02 billion (around $6 billion), which does not reflect the true potential. Following the talks, the two sides signed a joint declaration of intent for cooperation in the field of ICT and electronics, terms of reference for the India-Canada ministerial energy dialogue, and memorandums of understanding (MoUs) for cooperation in the areas of sports, intellectual property rights (IPRs), higher education, and science, technology and innovation. Stating that there are over 120,000 Indian students in Canada, Modi said that the renewal of the MoU on higher education would benefit students and teachers in both countries. He also called for increased exchange of skilled professionals and said that there are immense possibilities in the technology partnership. Describing Canada as an energy superpower, the Prime Minister said the North American country can help India meets its increasing energy needs. Today we decided to expand our energy dialogue and chalk out the future of our energy partnership, he said. Stating that regional and global issues also came up for discussion, Modi said that the two sides assessed the situation in Afghanistan, the challenges of cross-border terrorism it faces, and the efforts being undertaken for a secure, prosperous and democratic Afghanistan. We share similar views on marine transport and freedom of navigation in the Indo-Pacific region, the threat to the two Koreas from North Koreas proliferation efforts, and restoration of the freedom of democratic institutions in the Maldives, he stated. With Canada being home to around 1.2 million people of Indian origin, Modi said that people-to-people contacts formed an important foundation for the strategic partnership between the two countries. We are committed to maintaining friendship and amity with the Indian community in Canada and seek their active participation in Indias progress and development, he said. On his part, Trudeau said that both India and Canada share a set of values that make them natural allies. As Canada looks to diversify its own economy and looks for new opportunities to do business beyond its boundaries, India is a natural partner and trusted friend for commercial cooperation, he said. The visit of Trudeau, who assumed office in November 2015, comes after Modis visit to Canada in April that year, which was the first prime ministerial visit from India to that country in 42 years. The Indian army will give Pakistan a reply sooner rather than later for the February 10 terror attack on a military camp in Jammu, General Bipin Rawat said. Six soldiers and a civilian were killed in the fidayeen attack in Sunjuwan by Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) terrorists. Soon after the incident, defence minister Nirmala Sitharaman had said that Pakistan, which she accused of backing the attackers, would pay for its misadventure. Pakistan thinks it is fighting a war that is paying them dividends but we have several options, including surgical strikes, the army chief said in an interview on Wednesday, without giving details that would compromise Indias tactical and strategic response. Rawat said that he would order a ceasefire at the Line of Control (LoC) as soon as Pakistan stops sending terrorists to India. The Indian Army will honour the ceasefire and de-escalate tensions the day Pakistan stops sending terrorists across the line of control, Rawat said, referring to the 2003 agreement put in place as a confidence-building measure. Ceasefire violations at the LoC have spiked over the last year. There were 860 such violations recorded in 2017 from either side, as compared to 271 the previous year, according to government data. Asked about the January 27 firing in Shopian, in which three protestors were killed by army bullets at a time when the PDP-BJP government had withdrawn cases against first-time stone-pelters on the suggestion of the Centres interlocutor Dineshwar Sharma, Rawat said: The cases were withdrawn as a goodwill gesture but what goodwill are they (the stone pelters) showing? The pelting continues. He defended the military action, saying stone-pelters were hampering military operations. The army has a job to do. We dont want collateral damage but what do you expect us to do when we get surrounded by a stone pelting mob? Even in Shopian, we fired in the air first. Referring to the controversial incident when Major Gogoi tied Kashmiri shawl weaver Farooq Ahmad Dar to the bonnet of a jeep last year, Let me tell you, we honour local sentiments and dont conduct operations during janazas (funeral processions) even though terrorists come there and fire in the air. What do you want me to do, have a seat in front of all jeeps. We got flak even for that. Security personnel deployed at Sunjuwan military station during the militant attack in Jammu. (PTI File Photo) The Jammu & Kashmir police had registered an FIR against the army after the Shopian firing. Asked if he had given permission to the father of Major Aditya (named in the Shopian FIR) to approach the Supreme Court to get the police complaint quashed, Rawat said, The father has a right to defend his son. If a girl (Kerala actress Priya Varrier) can approach the court because her wink has offended people cant a father do the same if he apprehends that his son would be arrested? The General also had a piece of advice for the media: to not show visuals of grief-stricken family members of martyrs. Because the media only focuses on soldiers killed by Pakistan, they build a narrative on how they have managed to inflict a blow on us. All martyrs are equal, he added, even those killed in an avalanche. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeaus office scrambled to contain damage after it emerged that a convicted Khalistani terrorist had been invited to an official dinner reception in New Delhi. The Army defended chief General Bipin Rawats comments about the rise of a political party in the Northeast on the back of Muslim support. These stories made news on Thursday. Here is more about them. Convicted Khalistani terrorist on Justin Trudeaus dinner guest list A fresh controversy hit Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeaus visit to India after it emerged that a convicted Khalistani terrorist had been invited to an official dinner reception in New Delhi and photographed with the leaders wife. Canadian authorities said the invitation extended to Indo-Canadian businessman Jaspal Atwal had been rescinded. Trudeaus visit has been met with media reports that Indian political leaders gave him the cold shoulder because of his administrations perceived closeness to Sikh separatist groups in Canada. Nirav Modis luxury cars seized in PNB fraud The Enforcement Directorate (ED) said it has seized a Rolls Royce Ghost, a Porsche Panamera and some half a dozen more luxury vehicles belonging to billionaire jeweller Nirav Modi and his firms, in a probe into an alleged Rs 11,400 crore fraud against state-run Punjab National Bank. An ED official said the agency has frozen mutual funds and shares worth Rs 7.80 crore of Nirav Modi and Rs 86.72 crore belonging to his uncle Mehul Chokshi of the Gitanjali Group. PNB responds to Nirav Modis letter, says followed lawful avenues to recover dues The Punjab National Bank asked billionaire jeweller Nirav Modi to come up with a concrete plan to return the Rs 11,400 crore his companies allegedly fraudently. Responding to Modis claims about the bank closing all recovery options, PNB said it followed lawful avenues to recover its dues. In a regulatory filing, it also said it has enough assets and capital to meet any liabilities arising from the fraud. Nothing political, says Army after General Rawats comments on Assam party The Army defended chief General Bipin Rawats comments about the rise of a political party in the Northeast on the back of Muslim support, saying there was nothing political or religious in the talk. The response comes after Badruddin Ajmal, president of the All India United Democratic Front questioned if Rawat was indulging in politics. Child porn ring busted; operated through WhatsApp: CBI The Central Bureau of Investigation has busted a child porn racket in which pornographic videos and pictures were being circulated through a WhatsApp group. Nikhil Verma, one of the five alleged administrators of the group, has been has been arrested. Verma, 20, is an unemployed commerce graduate from Kannauj in Uttar Pradesh, said a CBI spokesperson. India ranks 81st in global corruption perception index India was ranked 81st among 180 countries ranked on perception of corruption in public sector. Berlin-based Transparency Internationals Corruption Perception Index 2017 also singled out India as one of the worst offenders in the Asia-Pacific region for corruption and press freedom. New Zealand and Singapore scored the highest scores with 89 and 84 out of 100, respectively. Somalia was found to be the most corrupt country in the world. Frail-looking Parrikar presents Goa budget after hospital treatment Goa chief minister Manohar Parrikar presented the states budget in the legislative assembly hours after he was discharged from Mumbais Lilavati hospital. Parrikar spoke only for five minutes while presenting the budget at around 3 pm, and left the House after it was adjourned sine die. In his address, he told the House that due to his ill- health, he would not be able to present the entire budget on the floor. Donald Trump suggests arming teachers as he meets Florida survivors US President Donald Trump suggested arming teachers to deter future mass shootings as he held an emotional meeting Wednesday at the White House with survivors of the gun rampage that left 17 people dead at a Florida high school. Trump also promised very strong background checks on gun owners during the poignant listening session, in which he heard first-hand accounts from bereaved parents and friends, and schoolchildren who narrowly escaped with their own lives. HC dismisses plea to prosecute Adityanath in 2007 Gorakhpur riot case The Allahabad high court dismissed a petition challenging an order that refused sanction to prosecute chief minister Yogi Adityanath in a case related to the 2007 Gorakhpur riots. Adityanath, who was the parliamentarian for Gorakhpur then, was one of the accused in the case. CBI arrests Rotomac promoter Vikram Kothari, his son The Central Bureau of Investigation arrested Rotomac promoter Vikram Kothari and his son Rahul Kothari on charges of cheating a consortium of seven banks by siphoning off bank loans to the tune Rs 2,919 crore. The arrests came after the Kotharis were questioned for the fourth consecutive day on Thursday following searches at their residences and office premises in Kanpur. Donald Trump Jr. dodged controversy during a speech in New Delhi alongside Prime Minister Narendra Modi by switching his topic from what was originally touted as a foreign policy address to less contentious topics such as family and business. Im here as a businessman, the US presidents son said. Im not representing anyone. Trump Jr., an executive vice president of the Trump Organization Inc., was in India selling the companys luxury condominiums. But the trip raised questions of conflict of interest, since access to the presidents eldest child was also on offer: recent full-page ads in Indian newspapers announced that Trump is here. Are you invited? The ads said customers who bought a Trump Towers residence could join Trump Jr. for dinner and a conversation. The Trump Organizations business is booming in India, where more construction projects with Trump licensing deals are under way than in any other country outside of the US. Mistaken Message Trump Jr. was originally billed to give a foreign policy address on Reshaping Indo-Pacific Ties: The New Era of Cooperation at a business conference, immediately before remarks by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. US senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, wrote to Kenneth Juster, the US ambassador to India saying he was concerned that Mr Trumps speech will send the mistaken message that he is speaking on behalf of the President. Read | Trump Jr.s foreign policy speech in India raises concerns Trump Jr., 40, and brother Eric Trump have no formal roles within the Trump administration, unlike the presidents daughter and son-in-law, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner. Menendez urged the ambassador to take every effort to avoid any perception of special treatment or a conflict of interest, and ensure the embassy wasnt providing special assistance. As the trip was scrutinized in the media, Trump Jr.s speech was rebranded as a fireside chat. The US embassy in New Delhi has said Trump Jr. is a private citizen, and that diplomatic personnel werent involved in his trip. It is indeed strange for him to be speaking alongside Indias prime minister, given the great gulf between their backgrounds and areas of focus, said Alyssa Ayres, a senior fellow for India, Pakistan and South Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington. Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday spoke of the primacy of Indias sovereignty, unity and integrity after a two-hour meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in which the countries named Sikh insurgent groups Babbar Khalsa International and Sikh Youth Federation along with Islamic State, al Qaeda and Pakistan-based outfits such as Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed. India and Canada signed six pacts to step up their ties in various spheres on a day Modi greeted Trudeau with a hug and subsequently delivered a pointed message at the perceived soft approach of the Canadian government towards the Khalistan issue.With Trudeau at his side, Modi said in a media statement delivered in Hindi: There should be no place for those who misuse religion for political goals. Challenges to the sovereignty, unity and integrity of our nations cannot be tolerated. That remark was seen as a statement directed at the Canadian leadership and the Liberal Party government that Trudeau heads, and which has often been accused of pandering to Sikh separatists. The issue has been a major and recurring irritant in bilateral relations of late and has overshadowed Trudeaus first state visit to India. India and Canada adopted a Framework for Cooperation on Countering Terrorism and Violent Extremism, which national security advisor Ajit Doval and his Canadian counterpart Daniel Jean were tasked to work on. In a first-of- its-kind statement, the two sides said they are committed to work together to neutralise the threats emanating from terrorist groups such as al Qaida, ISIS, the Haqqani Network, Lashkar e-Toiba, Jaish-e-Mohammed, Babbar Khalsa International, and the International Sikh Youth Federation. For New Delhi, the clubbing of banned Sikh insurgent groups with global terrorist outfits, including ones based out of Pakistan that target India, is a significant achievement. The two sides decided to further develop exchanges and facilitate effective cooperation in the fields of security, finance, justice, and law enforcement, including, where appropriate, at the operational level, as per the framework agreement. The joint statement after the meeting also found enough mention of terrorism and emphasised that no country should allow its territory to be used for terrorist and violent extremist activities. A ministry official said that while Khalistan had not been referred in any of the statements issued after the meeting, Indias concern found explicit expression in the naming of these banned groups. The issue of pro-Khalistan activism in Canada, often due to the soft approach of local politicians including some in Trudeaus government, was a focus of the discussions between the two prime ministers, another Indian official said. First of all, we agreed on strengthening our security cooperation. Terrorism and separatism are dangers to democratic, pluralistic societies like India and Canada. It is important for us to come together to counter such forces, Modi said. While six agreements were signed in the presence of the two prime ministers, neither the Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement nor the Bilateral Investment and Promotion Agreement were inked. However, Modi said negotiators had been asked for redouble their efforts in finalising these pacts that are necessary to give the economic partnership an institutional framework. Trudeau stressed the need to expand India-Canada trade and commercial ties. As Canada looks to diversify its own economy and looks for new opportunities to do business beyond its boundaries, India is a natural partner and a trusted friend for commercial cooperation, he said. Trudeau met external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj prior to his summit encounter with Modi. Later, all six ministers accompanying Trudeau -- including Indo-Canadian ministers Navdeep Bains, Harjit Sajjan, Amarjeet Sohi and Bardish Chagger -- also met with Modi. Trudeau has invited Modi for a return visit to Canada at an early date; an invitation that Modi accepted. Cooperatives department minister Ajay Singh Kilak said on Friday that the benefit of crop loan waiver would be extended to those farmers who have repaid their short-term loans on time. Replying to a debate on the farmers issue raised by the opposition in the assembly, Kilak said, This is the first time that farmers who have repaid loans on time have been included in ambit of loan waiver. Under the previous Congress government only defaulter farmers had got the benefit of loan waiver, he said. Kilak said, The government is sensitive to the issues of farmers and chief minister Vasundhara Raje has taken a bold decision to waive loans that will benefit lakhs of farmers. Farmers who had taken short-term loans from central cooperative banks two-three years back and were in the overdue category till September 30, 2017, their interest and penalties will be waived and the loan will be brought under the outstanding category, and they will be given the benefit of loan waiver, he said. The minister said, Those farmers whose short-term crop loan is in the category of outstanding till September 30, 2017, they will also get the benefit of loan waiver of Rs 50,000. Kilak said Rajasthan State Farmer Debt Relief commission was announced in the budget and a high-level inter-departmental committee has been constituted under the chairmanship of home minister Gulab Chand Kataria. The committee will decide the categories of farmers falling under this commission, limit of relief to be provided, deciding types and procedure and will also decide the conditions if non-cooperative or any other banks are to be included in this commission. He said the first meeting of the committee will be held on February 28. Giving district-wise details of short-term crop loans disbursed to farmers, Kilak said the BJP government has disbursed more loans than the previous Congress government. He said, The BJP government till now has disbursed more than Rs 61500 crore as short-term crop loans, which will be taken up to Rs 80,000 crore, whereas the previous Congress government had disbursed less than Rs 25000 crore in its tenure of five years. The Trinamool Congress has issued a show cause notice to Anupam Hazra, its MP from Bolpur, for posting social media messages that are not in line with the partys position on Indias freedom fighters. On February 16, Hazra posted a Facebook message that appeared to justify Mahatma Gandhis assassination 70 years ago. Six days later, the MP put up another message wondering if he was going against the ideals of party leader Mamata Banerjee by expressing his belief that Indian National Army leader Subhash Chandra Bose was superior to Gandhi. Hazras actions sparked outrage in the party, with Trinamool general secretary Partha Chatterjee condemning the MPs actions and Birbhum unit president Anubrata Mondal describing him as a nonsensical person who should be thrown out of the party. Anupam Hazras posts are certainly not in line with the Trinamool Congress views. Let the parliamentary team find out why he has been doing this repeatedly, because I really have no idea, said Chatterjee, who is also the state education minister. Hazra could not be contacted by phone, and text messages seeking his comments received no reply. He has to respond to the show cause notice issued by Sudip Bandyopadhyay, leader of the party in the Lok Sabha, by March 2. Among other controversial Facebook messages, the 36-year-old MP posted on February 16 that he has trouble accepting Mr Gandhi as the Father of the Nation. He went on to say that Netaji would have received the title if he was not victimised by Mr Gandhi and Mr Nehru. Speaking to a TV channel in Delhi on Friday, Hazra said his was a personal observation based on the interpretation of historical events. I clearly remember Mamata Banerjee saying that she believes Netaji was alive. A few days later, a party MP Sugato Bose said he was not alive. But that was not counted as anti-party activity, he argued. The politician, nevertheless, took pains to reiterate his loyalty to the party chief. When I was sworn in on May 19, 2014, I vowed to live by the honesty and values of Didi (a reference to Banerjee). I have lived up to it in letter and spirit till this day, and will continue to do so in the future. But I got the label of being anti-party when I thought as a Bengali that Netaji is better than Mr Gandhi. I also had to go through a lot of mental agony. Is there no value in the party for abiding by the ideals and beliefs of the partys founder? Hazra asked in another message posted on February 22. However, the criticism Hazra faced after his post on Gandhi seemed to have softened him a bit. On February 19, he wrote that his love for Bose over Gandhi does not indicate his support for the latters assassin, Nathuram Godse. Hazras Facebook rants on Gandhi are not a recent phenomenon. On November 4, 2016, he posted an image of a 10 rupee note that featured Bose instead of Gandhi. Beneath it, he wrote: ...with due respect ...enough of Gandhiji...!!! ...hope someday this persons unparalleled contribution towards Indias freedom will get recognised with due regards...!!! Hazra holds a postgraduate degree in social work from the Visva-Bharati University. He also completed his PhD thesis on rural sanitation from Assam University. Leaders are likely to discuss Hazras conduct at a party meeting on March 9. An 18-year-old girl was allegedly burnt to death on Thursday night in Uttar Pradeshs Unnao when she was returning from the market after buying vegetables. According to her family, the girl had left her house around 7 pm on her bicycle. Around 8 pm, the girl was seen in flames near Bara Sagwar between her house and the market, according to a witness who told police he couldnt do much to save the girl. The girls burnt body was found at the spot. A plastic container, partially filled with petrol, and matchbox were found close to the body. Her bicycle and the vegetables were lying nearby. Unnao SP Pushpanjali said it was not clear if she committed suicide or was murdered. But the victims mother and brother have alleged she was burnt alive by unidentified people. Lucknow ADG, Rajeev Krishna said police were treating the case as homicide as it appears that the girl had been murdered. It is a gruesome crime and the perpetrators of the crime will not be spared, he said. Lucknow zone IG, Sujeet Pandey visited the crime spot to monitor investigations. The mother was working in a nearby mustard field at the time of the crime. Chief minister Yogi Adityanath on Thursday said his government would provide a secure and investor-friendly atmosphere in Uttar Pradesh. Addressing a programme organised to felicitate 1,100 investors who have signed MoUs with the government, the CM said the BJP government created a conducive environment for investment in UP within 11 months of its rule. Yogi said since early morning he had been attending sessions organised by various departments to interact with investors. Infrastructure and industrial development commissioner (IIDC) Anup Chandra Pandey said, I thank investors for saving my job. The turnout of investors has ensured that I will get good entry in the annual confidential report (ACR). Terming the UP Investors Summit as the biggest meet in the country, Pandey said 20 union ministers participated in the summit. On the opening day of the summit, the state government had planned registration of 2,300 investors but it touched the 9,000 mark, he said. When the state government planned to hold the investor summit, we hoped of MoUs worth Rs 1 lakh crore with various companies. However, the figure touched Rs 4.50 lakh crore mark on the very first day, Pandey said. He said the state government had planned nine sessions in the two-day meet but when the programme got rolling it increased to 25. The investors summit was unique in the sense that Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated the event and President Ram Nath Kovind was the chief guest of the closing ceremony, he added. Pandey said the establishment of international airport on western and eastern dedicated corridor connecting Mumbai and Kolkata ports with Delhi, announcement by union railway minister Piyush Goyal on setting up of three factories in UP were the highlights of the penultimate day of the summit. President Ram Nath Govind said Uttar Pradesh comprises one of the largest workforces as well as consumer markets, not only in India but anywhere in the world. Speaking at the concluding function of the Uttar Pradesh Investors summit he said, UP is home to some of Indias finest institutions of higher education, such as IIT Kanpur, IIM Lucknow, Banaras Hindu University, Allahabad University and so many others. This talent pool and this energy give Uttar Pradesh the base to become an economic powerhouse. They make it an irresistible destination for investors, he said. Union government has transferred a larger share of tax revenues as well as economic and policy responsibilities to the states. Increasingly, the economic future of India is being written by states and state governments, such as that of Uttar Pradesh, said the President. He said the state government had shown determination in providing a facilitative environment for business and for investors. He said The Nivesh Mitra single-window-portal has made it easier to start an enterprise in the state. The state government has begun implementing the Business Reform Action Plan 2017 as per the union governments suggestions. The President said Uttar Pradesh was a leading producer of many agricultural commodities. He said there were enormous opportunities for large investments in the state in agriculture-based businesses such as food parks, food processing units, animal husbandry and dairy products manufacture. Referring to the One District One Product (ODOP) scheme of the state government, he said one should learn from Italy and France on branding and marketing of the traditional handicrafts. Our artisans are very skilled and we should use their skills effectively. This will result in economic progress of crafts-persons in every district of Uttar Pradesh and every district will be able to carve out its distinctive identity, he said. About the progress being made in the civil aviation sector the President said I have been told that air services will be launched in five districts of Uttar Pradesh soon. After this the air service will be available to 42 more districts of state, said the president. Earlier Finance minister Arun Jaitley said the Union government was giving full cooperation to the state government and there was a need to add the states resources to develop the rural infrastructure. He said the defence corridor to be set up in Bundelkhand would increase the demand for specialized workforce. He said the state government should adopt skill development programme to make the investors realise that trained personnel too were available in UP along with land and incentives. Governor Ram Naik said the success of summit had become a point of discussions among the people of state living abroad. Naik referred to an email he received from London on Thursday to make his point that the people of UP origin there wanted to contribute to states development. Governor Ram Naik shared his conversation with Prime Minister Narendra Modi on way to airport on Wednesday and said the PM acknowledged that the UPs summit was greater than the summit Modi had organized in Gujarat in 2003. Union minister for civil aviation Ashok Gajapathi Raju on Thursday said Uttar Pradesh would get nine more airports in next 15 months. Addressing the UP Investors Summit, the minister said Uttar Pradesh got nine out of 25 routes finalised by the Centre under the regional connectivity scheme. Nine more operational airports will come up in Aligarh, Azamgarh, Bareilly, Chitrakoot, Jhansi, Moradabad, Myurpur (Sonbhadra), Allahabad and Shravasti in 15 months, Raju said. Allahabad will be connected to 13 cities of the country. No one would have imagined this a few years ago. When the BJP came to power, there were 476 airstrips in the country and only 75 of them were airports. In three years, we have added 18 airports, he said. The minister said 56 more airports would be added in the country in next 15 months as the government wanted everyone to experience air travel. Only one per cent population of Uttar Pradesh travels by air that is why there is a huge untapped passenger potential. Air traffic is increasing in UP at a rate of 28.8% while cargo is going up by 32%. This is when most of the potential remains untapped, he said. Raju said Lucknow airport would soon have a unit of maintenance, repair and operations. It will give services for aircrafts at the lowest possible rates not only in India but globally too, he said. He said helipads would be developed at tourist destinations like Vrindavan, Mathura, Naimisharanya, Chandra Prabha, Mahoba, Chunar and Deogarh. 50,000 MORE JOBS IN CIVIL AVIATION SECTOR IN FIVE YEARS Civil aviation sector will provide around 50,000 jobs in Uttar Pradesh in the next five years, a senior official at the Airports Authority of India (AAI) said. Addressing the UP Investors Summit, executive director (regional connectivity), AAI, GK Chaukiyal said Jewar airport would be the biggest airport of the country and would have four terminals and runways of 1000 hectares each. Civil aviation sector will provide 50,000 jobs. While Jewar international airport will come up in 5000 hectare area, Kushinagar airport will be spread in 1000 hectare area. Jewar airport will see about 1,000 landing and take-offs in a day, he said. Chaukiyal said the government would invest Rs 15,000 crore in Jewar airport and cargo hub and Rs 354 crore in Kushinagar airport. Officials of GMR group demanded connectivity of proposed Jewar international airport with metro train. Having announced its first ever start-up policy with a corpus of Rs 1000 crore to fund business ideas with promise, the Uttar Pradesh (UP) government is all set to participate in the first ever national start-up ranking of the states launched by the centres department of industrial policy and promotion (DIPP). As part of the ranking, each state would be required to fill a 38 point questionnaire that would form the basis on which states would be ranked and which would determine the seriousness of the states in ushering in entrepreneurial culture. March 31 is the last date by which states can express their willingness to participate in the rankings that will quiz the states on their response implementation of start-up policy, incubation and seed and venture funding support. After evaluation and stakeholder feedback exercise in April, the rankings will be released in May. Speaking on the sidelines of the UP Investors Meet here on Thursday, Sanjeev Sharan, UPs additional chief secretary, IT and electronics, said,We are working towards being ranked the countrys number one state on the basis of start-up policy. The rankings will usher in a model of competitive yet cooperative federalism: competitive because the idea is to get the states to engage in healthy competition and cooperation because we are sharing the best practices of each states startup policy, said Anil Agarwal, joint secretary in the centres DIPP. UPs minister of state for IT Mohsin Raza said the government had set aside Rs 1000 crore for funding start-ups. We are also going to organise a start-up fair every quarter in which start -ups would be invited to offer innovative solutions for problems faced by the state. The idea is to involve students and entrepreneurs in the development process of the state and to ignite the entrepreneurial spirit, he said. The selected start-ups will be awarded UP Aavishkaar Puruskar along with funding of up to Rs 50 lakh to implement the solutions. Agarwal, a bureaucrat from UP on deputation to the centre, said the DIPP was willing to assist the state provide detailed support. Prime Minister Modiji wants a start-up in every district and block of the country. The rankings are expected to cajole the governments to push ahead with the start-up culture, he said. In 2014, just four states of the country had a start-up policy as against 18 at present. Officials say the remaining states will also be encouraged to have a startup policy. Saurabh Srivastava, co-founder and director of Indian Angel Network suggested that the state government should consider setting up an advisory board comprising professionals to suggest how to accelerate creation of an ecosystem that is conducive to ease of doing business. Professor BV Phani of IIT Kanpur, who was in Lucknow to participate in the UP investors summit, said, UP has the capacity to become the start-up capital of the world. Union information technology minister Ravi Shankar Prasad urged the Uttar Pradesh government to leverage the reach of common service centres (CSCs) for spreading awareness about menstrual hygiene in the most populous state. Prasad said the services of 9000 women working in 83000 CSCs in rural pockets should be used to propagate menstrual hygiene which is among the primary causes of high dropout of girls from college. There are 12 sanitary pad rural manufacturing units run by CSCs in UP and by April another 100 units would come up. Sanitary napkins at Rs 5 per piece are being sold through these CSCs and I would like the state government to encourage it further because a clean India is healthy India, the minister said at the UP investors summit on Thursday. Prasad said sanitary pad manufacturing units are being set up in all blocks of the country through CSCs. He urged deputy chief minister Dinesh Sharma to visit these CSCs, run by independent village-level entrepreneurs who provide government services in rural areas, to further encourage focus on menstrual hygiene. He said the Software Technology Park of India (STPI) would set up a centre of excellence at Lucknows Sanjay Gandhi Post Graduate Institute of Medical Sciences (SGPGIMS) to promote health care and e-hospital concept. In Uttar Pradesh we have leveraged technology to connect 21 hospitals with e-hospital concept. Another 5 medical colleges are being added, he said. The e-hospital concept that Prasad referred to is an open source health information management system that integrates clinical, administrative and other medical facilities online. Lauding UPs direct benefit transfer scheme to transfer subsidy and loan waiver amount of lakhs of farmers in the state, Prasad also spoke of how technology has helped government reduce human interface, bring transparency and save money. Can you believe it that we have saved Rs 32 crore in purchase of dustbins alone? From e-scholarships to digital payments we have realized the immense benefits of technology, he said. He also spoke of developing Noida and Greater Noida as major global market of mobile manufacturing and said he has cleared files of two leading mobile manufacturers to make Rs 7000 crore investment in Noida and how he has brought Taiwanese investment and expertise to Noida. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri Director - Martin McDonagh Cast - Frances McDormand, Woody Harrelson, Sam Rockwell, Abbie Cornish, John Hawkes, Peter Dinklage Rating - 5/5 Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri is an anomaly. It shouldnt exist. There is not a single moment in its less than two-hour runtime that feels like something youve already seen, or experienced, or have had relayed to you by a pompous friend. And as the world becomes more hopeless and trips to cinema end more often in disappointment than joy, this is a sign straight from above there is magic to be found still; its out there, somewhere, waiting for you to make a mistake. Sure, on the surface, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri might remind you of something by Coen Brothers star Frances McDormand, who, with Mildred Hayes, has given Marge Gunderson a companion for life, isnt the only connective tissue but despite these strictly superficial similarities it is as much a product of a singular voice that of writer-director Martin McDonagh than, say, No Country for Old Men is a Coen Brothers movie. Woody Harrelson and Frances McDormand in a still from Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. Three Billboards were going to have to abbreviate henceforth, for obvious reasons is a real movie, filled with real, complex characters that go on personal and collective journeys. Unlike most years, when the Oscars race usually boils down to one mainstream film against an indie, 2018 is different. We have a selection of fine smaller films exchanging hesitant looks, and wondering, Is this it? And each of them be it Three Billboards, or Call Me By Your Name, or The Shape of Water, or Lady Bird, or Phantom Thread is defined by one virtue: Empathy, something the world desperately needs more of, now more than ever. Films these days dont seem to spend enough time developing characters; its all about arriving at the next big moment and hitting mandated beats. And youd be hard pressed to find another movie this year or any other year that challenges the norm more aggressively. The gigantic leap of faith that Three Billboards demands of its audience bigger, Id say, than what is required of you to accept the central romance in The Shape of Water is almost unheard of these days. So often, you can almost imagine directors or more likely, studios frantic at the thought of losing the audience for even a minute because of a, lets say, difficult scene. So often, we see movies flirt with greatness only to falter at key moments, retreating into the safety of familiarity. But not here. Not in Ebbing, Missouri. Frances McDormand could have easily had a career as celebrated as that of Meryl Streep. The movie tells the story of the insular small town deep in the heart of Trump territory, and the many lost souls whose lives are brought together after one particularly tragic incident. A grieving mother (played by the electrifying Frances McDormand), furious at the inaction surrounding the investigation into the rape and murder of her teenage daughter, erects three billboards along a forgotten road. In the signs, which she rents out for a year, she questions local police chief Willoughby (Woody Harrelson) directly, and demands answers. Raped while dying, the signs say, And still no arrests? How come, Chief Willoughby? Right now, the conversation within the film community is overwhelmingly about the cultural turning point were experiencing with regards to stories about women, and the marginalised. There is no way Three Billboards will ever have the sort of impact movies such as Wonder Woman, or more recently, Black Panther will. But would you believe it, three billboards just like the ones in the movie have started popping up around the world. While some demand reform in American gun laws, another, outside Londons Grenfell tower questions, 71 dead. And still no arrests? How Come? Sounds like a movement, doesnt it? Frances McDormand and Peter Dinklage in a still from Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. Quietly, McDonagh has done so much for dwarf actors. Three Billboards has a lot on its mind child abuse, domestic abuse, racism, corruption, sexuality, religion, gender that on multiple occasions, it almost seems to be bursting at the seams with a rage that is nearly impossible to find anymore, and when witnessed, impossible to ignore, or forget. It could be argued that McDonagh has bitten off more than he can chew both his previous features were ambitious, but nowhere near as ambitious as this. And this is coming from someone who would ten times out of ten pick In Bruges as one of his favourite movies of the last decade. But here, McDonagh sets the bar so impossibly high for himself that its a bit of a shock that he succeeds at all. The overwhelming consensus, wisely, would be to avoid making jokes about rape. And it would be just as wise to not expect audiences to sympathise with racists. But both things happen in this movie. Youre going to be laughing in a story about death violent, sickening death, and sexual violence and by the end youre going to be rooting for a character that embodies the worst mankind has to offer. These are delicate themes, and the slightest bad decision can destroy a movie (at best), and careers (at worst). But McDonagh isnt interested in half measures. He isnt interested in writing within templates. To make great art, the artist must put everything on the line. And everyone involved in this picture from Frances McDormand and Sam Rockwell, who will win Oscars, to Carter Burwell, whose soft piano cushions some of the films fury is aiming for greatness. And as always, McDonagh insists that we, as a people, despite our general unpleasantness, can still be redeemed. One person at a time. Hes going to start at the bottom and work his way to the top. Like his previous movies, Three Billboards strives for such a microscopic sweet spot tonally that the fact that it not only finds it, but sustains it for two hours, is miraculous. It not only aspires towards greatness, but confronts it, screams at it, and when it has everyones attention, revels in it. Its a profane and profound masterpiece that will evolve into a time capsule of sorts, when things get better. Bring your children. Watch the Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri trailer here Follow @htshowbiz for more The author tweets @htshowbiz for more ott:10:ht-entertainment_listing-desktop Mumbaiites from various non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and community-based organisations in the city came together under the banner of 51 Mumbaikar Abhiyaan. They met Mumbais mayor Vishwanath Mahadeshwar on Wednesday to demand representation in 17 ward committees. The delegation 51 Mumbaikar Abhiyaan demanded their nomination in the committees that deal with important civic issues. As the name suggests, the delegation comprises 51 members, since each of the 17 ward committees can have three representatives each. The ward committees in the municipal body were formed under the 74th amendment to the constitution. They are supposed to include local citizens who have knowledge about the ward. Citizens can raise several issues, such as drainage, water, roads, garbage, health care and education, in the committees. The committee also has the power to pass proposals for civic projects that cost up to Rs5 lakhs. The local representatives are supposed to help corporators in the planning and budgeting of projects in the area. However, citizens have complained that in reality, corporators elect members to the ward based on political connections rather than people who are familiar with the problems in the area. It has been going on for years now. However, this time, after the civic elections, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation has not even initiated the process of nominating citizens to the ward committees, said Sitaram Shelar, director of the centre for promoting democracy (CPD), which is spearheading the movement. The elections for appointing corporators to the 277 electoral wards were held in February 2017. In a letter to the CPD, the corporation has stated that the decision to nominate citizens to various ward committee is pending with the mayor. A civic official from the mayors office said that Mahadeshwar is looking into the matter and is likely to take a decision within a week. Students of the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) boycotted lectures third day in a row to protest against the managements decision to withdraw financial help under the Government of India Pre-Matric Scholarship Scheme. On Friday, around 100 alumni of the institute and faculty members joined the protest. This is not the first time that the institute is holding students at ransom. At the time of admission we were told that we wont have to pay tuition, mess and hostel fees, which has been highlighted in the prospectus as well. How can the institute suddenly expect us to start paying the fees now, said one of the students. Students studying at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) under the scholarship are exempted from paying such fees. While students are calling this move as apathetic on part of the institute, officials from TISS have called it necessary, especially with mounting debt. The exemption was possible as long as the government aid was flowing. But over the past few years, allocation of funds to this sector has reduced and so has the flow of aid, so we have no option but to ask students to pay the fees, said the spokesperson and added that the institute has agreed to a dialogue with students to come to a conclusion. Course fees for the eligible GOI Post Matric reserved category students are still exempted. The students are only required to pay dining hall charges and hostel fees on actual basis, which is the norm in all universities, said the registrar of TISS. Students, however, feel the need for a permanent solution. We are trying to reach out to the central government this time. We also hope to put across this problem to the lawmakers. Cutting out funds will affect the lives of lakhs of students from the reserved categories, who only have such options to pursue higher education, said an alumnus of the institute. TISS has campuses in Tuljapur , Hyderabad and Guwahati apart from its main centre in Trombay, Mumbai. In a meeting held at the institute late on Thursday night, students said the TISS management refused to agree to their demand. We will continue our agitation by banning classes until our problems are heard and a solution is drawn, said another student. Fugitive gangster Suresh Pujari mostly targets hoteliers and businessmen who advertise in a newspaper from Mangalore in Karnataka, his four aides arrested in connection with the Bhiwandi firing told the Thane anti-extortion cell (AEC). A 16-year-old teenager was also part of the January 10 firing, according to an officer. The four men have confessed to the firing and told us that Suresh Pujari reads advertisements in a Mangalore-based newspaper to zero in on his targets. After getting phone numbers from the newspaper adverts, he demands money from businessmen and hoteliers. The accused were asked to download a video chat application and exchange the password with Pujari, said Pradeep Sharma, senior inspector from the Thane AEC. The four arrested men are Harish Kotian 30; Sanket Dalvi 25; Prathmesh Kadam 22; and Aniket Thakur 25. The police said the accused, at the behest of Pujari, demanded Rs25 lakh from a hotelier in Bhiwandi. As the hotelier refused to pay, Pujari allegedly sent three shooters to the hotel. The teenager shot at a receptionist in the leg and fled the spot. The four people were arrested by the Mumbai crime branch and handed over to the Thane anti-extortion cell, while the teenager was sent to a correction home. The minor came in contact with Kotian and Dalvi through their common friend Kadam. He was offered Rs75,000 for firing on the receptionist at KN Park hotel on Kalyan-Bhiwandi Highway. He acted on the instruction of Kotian and Dalvi, who were in contact with Pujari, said an officer. The arrested accused also told the police that Pujari had lied to them, saying that the hotelier was his childhood friend and owed him Rs25 lakh, said Rajkumar Kothmire, inspector from the Thane AEC. Pujari told the four men and the minor that they should not have fired at the receptionist, said Kothmire. The accused were supplied with two pistols and 11 bullets by a man on Ghodbunder Road, said the police. They used five bullets for training, while another five were seized. Suresh Pujari used to target contractors and hoteliers from Ulhasnagar, Ambernath, Kalyan and Dombivli. The ambitious helpline 103 to prevent crimes against women and children seems to have little impact as it received only 389 calls from women in distress in 2017 compared to 1,169 calls previous year, showed the Mumbai police data. The drastic drop of 67%, the police said, was because of lack of awareness. In 2016, the special helpline was advertised, which was discontinued the following year. Activists have demanded that the Mumbai police use their Twitter handle and other means to advertise the helpline. Apart from crimes against women and children, the helpline and SMS service, launched in 2008, receives calls over neighbourhood quarrels. The police have discontinued several special helplines owing to lukewarm response from the public over the years. According to women police officials, the number 100 is ingrained in people, which is not the case with 103. Of the 30 to 40 calls received daily on the helpline, only three to four calls are forwarded to the concerned police station for action. The rest are either frivolous or information seeking calls, said Deepak Devraj, deputy commissioner of police (operations). Devraj said each police station has five mobile vans which attend to distress calls from women. In 2011, non-governmental organisation Akshara had carried out a survey and found that only 12% of the women respondents (5,000) were aware of helpline 103. We had emphasised to roll out a dedicated helpline to give womens issues more attention. Earlier there were just three lines and a few trained professionals, which kept the number perpetually busy. Even now (with increasing lines), not many women or senior citizens are aware of the helpline as the Mumbai police have stopped the publicity drive, said Dr Nandita Shah, co-director of Akshara. People are making calls to 100 for all kinds of emergencies because it is more popular. However, 103 is still important as women feel that special attention has been given to them, added Shah. The Mumbai polices Twitter account, which has 4.3 million followers, should spread the word about 103, said Shah. Suburban train services on the Central Railways main line saw multiple disruptions on Friday afternoon. Around 2pm, the engine of an outstation train, Suvidha Express, which was heading from Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus (CSMT) to Patna, failed near Kasara railway station. The failure has not yet been fixed, and all Kasara-bound trains are terminating at Asangaon station currently. Earlier, at 11.15am, the slow train corridor was affected owing to a technical failure at Matunga station. Trains were diverted on to the fast corridor and the failure was rectified quickly, but slow trains (both up and down) on the main line are still running 20 minutes behind schedule. To ease the discontent among farmers who have a lot to be unhappy about, including the loan waiver delays, no compensation yet for the losses suffered after a pink bollworm attack four months ago and the humiliating methods used to assess losses owing to unexpected hailstorm, the government on Thursday decided to quickly release the first phase of the funds to compensate the farmers. The unexpected delay in assistance by the Central government under the National Disaster Relief Fund, has compelled the state cabinet to take the decision to release funds with immediate effect. Agriculture minister Pandurang Fundkar said they were issuing a government resolution (GR) and the funds will be immediately released to district collectors for disbursement. The issue of delay in paying compensation was discussed in the state cabinet on Thursday. Medha Gadgil, addiational chief secretary, relief and rehabilitation department, said the GR will be issued by Friday. According to preliminary estimates, Nagpur, Amravati and Marathwada divisions incurred losses ranging between Rs500 crore and Rs700 crore each after the pest attack. The government is expected to release more than Rs1,000 crore in the first phase in anticipation of the reimbursement from the Centre. The state government has been targeted by farmers, their organisations and the opposition alike for the delay in extending compensation. The government was also left red-faced after field-level officials made farmers hold slates while photographing them for crop-loss assessment owing to hailstorms. The state government had announced it would assist farmers with Rs30,600 a hectare towards the loss of crops due to the pest attack. Besides the claims from the seed companies and crop insurance, the state had sought Rs2,430 crore from the Centre under NDRF. Of the 30,600 a hectare, Rs6,800 had to come from the NDRF, Rs8,000 from insurance cover and Rs1,600 as claims from the seeds companies. In reply to the memorandum by the state government, the Centre has asked to submit the data of the farmers who have suffered the crop loss of more than 50%. The state has submitted the statistics of the farmers with losses of more than 33%, as per NDRF norms. But with the additional information sought by the Centre, the officials from the relief and rehabilitation department feel the Centre may ask the State to bear the burden of the financial assistance to the farmers with losses between 33 and 50%. According to NDRF norms, farmers with more than 33% loss are entitled for compensation as per the standing norms. But the Centre is now hinting at implementing the new drought manual, which requires the loss to be 50% for the relief fund. Although no such clear intimation has been received from them, it appears the Centre expects the state to shoulder the major burden. The number of farmers with losses of more than 50% is very limited and most of them range between 33% to 50%, which means major burden will have to be borne by the State, if the Centre denies the package, said an official from the department. Of the 41 lakh hectare of the land under cultivation of cotton, more than 35 lakh hectares was affected due to the pink bollworm. The law to regulate rates charged by medical establishments across the state has refused to give the right of the patient to ask for an itemised bill and claim the dead body of their kin without paying hospital dues. Two health activists of Maharashtra, who were representing patients rights in the committee for drafting Clinical Establishment Bill, 2017, alleged that their expectation of the bill standing for general public are diminished after a number of suggestions made by them were rejected while making the final draft. The final decision over the bill draft will be taken on February 27. In the winter assembly session of December 2017, Maharashtra health minister Dr Deepak Sawant promised to bring in a law to ensure affordable care as preamble of the draft bill. A major aim behind the act was to bring in private and trust-run hospitals under the ambit of the state government in terms of unethical practices, mostly related to exorbitant bill amounts and practices of recovery of the bill. A 15 -member committee, headed by Dr Mohan Jadhav, deputy director, Directorate of Health Services, was appointed to draft the bill. Many key provisions for patients suggested by Jan Arogya Abhiyan, a conglomerate of health activists and NGOs in the state, are excluded by the feedback committee. Moreover, the committee has only two representatives voicing patients rights and 12 members from private practitioners and hospital owners, hugely affecting the functionability of the bill drafting committee, said Dr Abhijit More, convener of Jan Aarogya Abhiyan and a member of the committee. More and Dr Abhay Anant Phadke, convener of Jan Swathya Abhiyan, had suggested the display of patients charter and responsibilities at prominent places of all clinical establishments, display of hospitals rates on their websites and across the clinical establishments and penalty for denial of giving photocopies of clinical records to the concerned patients, amongst other demands. None of them are a part of the final draft of the bill. We know being a member of the committee, we arent supposed to speak regarding the matters when the bill is yet to be framed. But eventually we are demanding basic patient rights and none of the committee members, due to vested interests or political pressures, are ready to consider these simple demands, said Dr Phadke. The probe report into the death of a 32-year-old man in the MRI unit of the BYL Nair Hospital will be submitted to the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) chief Ajoy Mehta soon, elected representatives were told in the general body meeting on Thursday. Deputy municipal commissioner (public health) Sunil Dhamne told HT the report will be submitted for approval within a couple of days. I cannot share any details until the report is submitted and approved, he said. On January 27, Rajesh Maru, a Lalbaug resident, was sucked into an MRI machine at the civic-run hospital along with an oxygen cylinder. The police arrested three staffers, including a doctor from the hospital, on charges of death due to negligence. They were released on bail. Councillors also demanded that all families that lose their breadwinners in such incidents should be compensated. Chief minister Devendra Fadnavis had announced a compensation of Rs5 lakh to the family of the deceased. Questioning the delay, Opposition leader Ravi Raja said, It has been almost a month since Marus death owing to irresponsibility and negligence of the hospital staff. The BMC has not submitted any result from the investigation. The family has not been compensated as promised. The BMC should take care that such incidents are not repeated, said Raja. To cut red tape, Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) has decided to issue registration certificates for businesses online, without first verifying the documents attached. It has also decided to do away with spot inspections of new businesses before issuing this certificate. An inspection will be conducted after the certificate is issued online, and will take place only if a complaint is made against that business, said a senior civic official. This plan, part of the ease of doing business initiative, is expected to make the procedure easier. On a pilot basis, the self verification of documents begun with the shops and establishments department. Small shops such as groceries stores, garments, stationery, hardware stores, offices, eateries, restaurants, and bars could register online. Verifying documents for every new registration is a time consuming affair. Verifying all registration documents does not impact the legality of the business. We have done away with a small bureaucratic procedure, said an official from the shops and establishments department. After a business is registered with the BMC, it has to apply for other types of licences, including a fire no-objection certificate, a health licence incase it is an eatery, and a licence to use LPG cylinders. The verification process needed to obtaining these licences is intact. But, in a city such as Mumbai, the process of registering businesses should be faster. Registration only involves a declaration of manpower needed to run the business, and its nature, said civic chief Ajoy Mehta. Under the ease of doing business, the BMC has brought 30 permissions online, and is inching closer towards self verification of documents. Within the next year, all 123 types of services provided by the civic body will go online. According to BMCs shops and establishments department, Mumbai has 8.5 lakh establishments, and gets more than 300 applications in a week. It gets close to Rs24 crore each year as fees from renewal or new registrations. A 27-year-old man was arrested for allegedly raping a film artiste last month, police said on Friday. The man, identified as Pradeep Tiwari alias Chintu, was arrested on Thursday from Unit 12 of Mumbai Polices Crime Branch from an autorickshaw stand in suburban Dahisar, officials said. Officials said that Tiwari was a habitual offender and had been charged with nine cases of rape and sexual harassment since 2003. Police said that Tiwari had offered the 31-year-old victim a lift on his motorcycle in the early hours of January 12 when she was returning from a photoshoot in Vasai. The victim, a resident of suburban Versova, was waiting to hail an autorickshaw in Dahisar when Tiwari offered her the ride. Police said that instead of taking the victim to Dahisar railway station, Tiwari took her to an isolated building en route and allegedly raped her. The victim filed a police complaint and a medical examination at the Cooper hospital confirmed the rape, following which a case was registered on January 14. Tiwari was handed over to Dahisar police and further investigations were underway, officials informed. A 38-year-old, who raped his teenaged daughter and fathered her two children, was sentenced to life on Thursday. The man, who was unemployed for many years, raped his daughter for over four years in Kolkata till she turned 16. Later, he moved to Nalasopara with the girl, leaving his wife and two other children back, said KR Khandagle, public prosecutor. While the first child survived, the second died within a fortnight after its birth, said a Tulinj police official before the Vasai court. The survivor filed a complaint on January 25, 2015. The man was arrested for rape under section 376 of the IPC and Sections 4, 12 and 18 of the POSCOA, 2012. The DNA of both the kids matched with that of the convict, said Khandagle. Students domiciled outside Maharashtra can now seek admission to post-graduate medical and dental courses in the state, irrespective of their domicile status. The Bombay high court on Thursday struck down the new eligibility rule introduced by the Director Medical Education and Research (DMER) prohibiting such students from getting admission to post-graduate medical and dental courses in the state. The court was hearing a petition filed by nine such students, who completed their MBBS from Maharashtra under the 15% all-India quota and have either completed or are almost done with their one-year compulsory internship in the state. As they wanted to pursue post-graduate medical courses, they appeared for the National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test (NEET) held in January 2018 and secured good marks. Their petition, filed through advocate Pooja Thorat, states that until last year, the only eligibility condition necessary to seek admission to a PG medical or dental course in Maharashtra was to complete an MBBS or BDS course from the state. Their counsel, advocate VM Thorat, said the requirement of being domicile of Maharashtra was introduced by the DMER by its notice of November 15, 2017. He said these students were not being considered for admission to PG medical courses in their own states for having completed their MBBS from Maharashtra. Thorat then cited an SC judgement holding that there cannot be any reservation in admission to PG medical or dental courses on the basis of domicile. The division bench of justice Bhushan Gavai and justice BP Colabawalla accepted his contentions and struck down the requirement of domicile, paving the way for non-Maharashtra students to pursue post-graduate medical or dental courses in the state. Interested in sponsoring sanitary napkins for school students in rural Maharashtra? You can now visit the state women and children development departments Asmita scheme portal (https://mahaasmita.mahaonline.gov.in/) and pay Rs182.40 for a years supply of pads. On Thursday, the women and child development department launched a portal for the scheme that the cabinet approved of this month. For people interested in promoting better health care for young girls, we have made the process easier. All you have to do is visit our portal and sponsor a child online, said Pankaja Munde, women and child development minister. We decided to launch the scheme after we realised that the penetration of sanitary napkins was as low as 17%. I found that school girls in Maharashtra miss up to 40 days a year because of a lack of access and money to buy sanitary napkins. This had to change, she said. Under the scheme, girls will be given Asmita sanitary napkins produced by global agencies and procured through states UMED Maharashtra State Rural Livelihood Mission. Self-help groups will distribute and sell the napkins for a subsidised cost of Rs5 for a pack of eight. The government will pay a subsidy of Rs15.29 for every pack. A packet of eight napkins will cost rural women Rs24 or Rs29, depending on the size. All the girls and women will be given Asmita cards. The state government plans to formally launch the scheme on March 8, Womens Day, by inviting actor Akshay Kumar, who recently essayed the role of social entrepreneur and activist Arunachalam Muruganantham in the movie Padman. Love and family values were the lessons that Noida students learnt from a puppet show on a Chinese folklore laced with magic and mysticism, which was performed by a Singapore-based theatre group on Friday morning in the city. The Paper Monkey Theatre, a five-member group from Singapore that includes decorated director Benjamin Ho-Kah-Wai, was in Noida on Friday to perform The Magic Lantern in front of the students of Shiv Nadar School. In a spell-binding performance that lasted 45 minutes, the artistes depicted the story of Chen Xiang, the protagonist, who fights his way to release his abducted mother Shengmu from the mighty Er Lang Shen. This play is about a mothers love for her child and when the child grows up, they reciprocate that love. These are Asian family values and despite cultural differences between so many countries in Asia, these values continue to exist among our families. Today, we see that families are breaking apart and in such times, it is important that children must be told through art form about our culture, said 50-year-old Benjamin. According to an old Chinese legend, Shengmu, an immortal goddess, escaped from her heavenly abode with a magical lantern and later married a mortal man. Together, they had a child named Chen and the family lived happily until the mighty Er Lang Shen separated the couple and abducted Shengmu. Later, when Chen gets to know about his family, he battles his way through harsh weather and other adversities. Four artists of the theatre group used puppets playing as characters and narrated the folklore through the rod and hand method which left the audience mesmerised. The play also had instances of use of magic and mysticism of Chinese mythology. Later, Benjamin also entertained the students with his puppet tricks. In this art form, thumb and last three fingers of a hand are used to enact the characters. This art form is found in China for a long period of time, said Benjamin. On the question of importance of art and cultural exchange between different nationalities, Benjamin said, It is important that such plays are witnessed by audiences of different nationalities so that despite differences in cultures, we can find common values. Students said they had a great time, enjoying the puppet show where they were mesmerised over the challenges faced by Chen and the manner in which he overcame them. This story taught us that with love, will power and dedication, one can cross all barriers. We really liked the show, said Rhea Chaddha, a Class 5 student of Shiv Nadar School. The phenomenon of oppression has to be understood within the political categories of black and white, dominant and oppressed castes. To understand how race and caste operate in historical terms, one must look to the west, east and to the south, to the United States, to India and to Africa. This will help us contextualise the interrelated experiences of the marginalised. American sociologist and civil rights activist, WEB Du Bois, declared that the problem of the 20th century was colour. In India, BR Ambedkar brought the discussion of caste into mainstream discourse and dedicated his life to the annihilation of the structures of the caste system. West Indian philosopher, Frantz Fanon, articulated the paradigm of the oppressed in a world dominated by the white race. In 1943 and 1944, Du Bois wrote in his column in The New York Amsterdam News that the greatest color problem in the world is that of India. Remember that we American Negroes are the bound colony of the United States just as India is of England. This creates a parallel between the African American experience within the US and the Indian experience within colonised India, thus raising the possibility of solidarity building between these two communities, both of which face similar types of oppression. What Du Bois misses in his generalised and romanticised categorisation of the Indian experience as a colony of England, is the way in which the Dalit community is further reduced to the colonial subjectivity of a casteist society in which the Brahmins dominate. Du Bois gaze towards the east suggests that he sought to show the interrelation of suffering using the examples of the experiences of black Americans and the Indian struggle. As a result of this relation, Du Bois received a somewhat unexpected response from the nationalist, Lala Lajpat Rai. Rai reduced Du Bois argument to the Hindu-Muslim binary, interpreting it through a Gandhian and Brahminical lens, which rejects British rule only to re-establish Brahminical hegemony over the untouchables of India. Rai, Du Bois primary link to India, was not the internationalist that Du Bois wanted him to be, argues literary scholar Dohra Ahmad. By providing a nonconformist intervention to the Indian colonial problem, Ambedkar predicted the post-colonial and post-caste situation. Looking at the traditional caste bourgeoisie, Ambedkar debunked the dominant narratives about colonial slavery. Furthermore, he exposed the caste hierarchy, in which reverence to the Brahminical religion was the priority, second only to the colonial state. Fanon posited that the aggressive project of delegitimising the values of the colonised community was to reduce the natives values to absolute evil. Fanons reservations about appropriating Marxism and applying it to an African context were largely to do with the fact that Marxism ignores the importance of race, even class. Fanon writes: In the colonies, the economic substructure is also a superstructure. The cause is the consequence; you are rich because you are white, you are white because you are rich. This is why Marxist analysis should always be slightly stretched every time we have to deal with the colonial problem. This argument was extended by Ambedkar in his thesis on Marx. Post-Ambedkarite thought follows Fanonesque sentiments, demanding that Brahmin/caste Hindu Marxism stretch Western European dialectical materialism in order to be relevant to the native caste situation in India. If Du Bois, Ambedkar, and Fanon have to be thought of as movement-based actors who unified the global struggles for social justice, then the teleologies (the purpose for the emergence) of these figures need to be explained with empirical arguments. The reason the three people become more relevant to our contemporary times suggests that we still hold age-old discriminations like caste, race, gender and sexuality close to our hearts and we are constantly on a mission to develop new models of suppression neoliberalism, market fundamentalism, cultural commodification, misrepresentation. Du Bois, Ambedkar and Fanon challenge the universal hegemonic pretensions of culture and civilisation. These ideals need to be collectively examined so as to forge a radical alliance of the oppressed. Suraj Yengde is a WEB Du Bois non-resident fellow, Hutchins Center and associate, department of African and African American Studies, Harvard University Twitter: @surajyengde The views expressed are personal The Patna police are grappling with the problem of absconders within its rank. On a surprise inspection of the Patna police lines Thursday afternoon, DIG (central range) Rajesh Kumar discovered that over 200 jawans and officers were absconding for the last two-and-a-half years. Another 300-400 cops were either underutilised or in hiding and 50 others attached as personal bodyguards of private individuals, with practically no threat perception. This is a luxury the Patna police cannot afford, said Kumar. With 8,500 constables within its ranks, the district police force faces a scarcity of nearly 2,000 constables. Kumar held a munshi (constable) and a sub-inspector responsible for the mess at the Police lines, and suspended them with immediate effect. He also directed officials to stop forthwith disbursal of salary to absconding cops, while issuing them showcause notices. They have been asked to report to duty within three days or face suspension. As per the Bihar Police Act, cops absconding for more than six months can be summarily dismissed, without even initiating disciplinary proceedings against them. We will initiate action against them, said Kumar. The DIG found that many cops, having the right connection were assigned either no duty or light responsibilities, like processing files and correspondences. Besides, against a requirement of handful personnel, surplus cops were deployed for light work, leaving field units and police stations severely understaffed. Kumar also ordered withdrawal of personal security guard of private individuals who used them more as a status symbol than anything else. I have ordered withdrawal of at least 50 bodyguards, attached to socialites, doctors, builders, promoters and small-time politicians, facing practically no threat perception. These bodyguards were provided many years back, with the government paying for them, added Kumar. After the crackdown, Kumar mobilised manpower and constituted a 35-member special commando unit to be stationed at Kotwali police station for raids, searches and action against organised criminals. A mini bus and a bulletproof SUV were provided to them for mobility. Deployment of police personnel and ensuring their proper utilisation is the responsibility of sergeant, sergeant major and deputy superintendent of police, stationed at the Police Line. Besides, as per the internal management system of Patna police, superintendents of police are supposed to visit the Police Line once a week, added Kumar. Patna has five SPs rural, central, east, west, and one for traffic in addition to 7-8 sergeants, four sergeant majors and one DSP at the Police Line. Given the scarcity of security personnel, the Patna police frequently requisition cops from headquarters and adjoining districts. Over 500 cops were requisitioned from Gaya (Shahabad police range), Nalanda, the Bihar Military Police and the police headquarters recently during the sixth India region Commonwealth Parliamentary Association organised here between February 17 and 20. The CISF on Thursday restored a diamond ring to the passenger, who had dropped it at the Jay Prakash Narayan International Airport in Patna on Tuesday afternoon. Farida Imam, 33, flying in with her husband Adil Zobair, 36, from Saudi Arabia via New Delhi by GoAir flight G8 140, had unknowingly dropped her ring on the tarmac. I was looking for my house keys in my purse while we were made to wait on the tarmac, after deboarding, for the taxing of a plane. After reaching home, I realised later the same evening that I had lost my ring. My niece, a journalist, connected me with CISF officials, who initiated investigation, based on CCTV footage, said Farida Imam, 33. READ: Lost at Patna airport, CISF recovers passengers gold bracelet from Ranchi The CCTV footage showed a person picking up something from the tarmac and handing it over to a GoAir staff at the ladderpoint, she recollected the CISF telling her. Based on CCTV footage and after checking the duty roster, the CISF zeroed in on the airline staff, who handed over the ring to the sleuths, she added. In a tweet, the CISF headquarters said, #CISF restores a passenger namely Ms. Farida Imam, her lost diamond ring through meticulous CCTV surveillance @Patna Airport. Team #CISF appreciated. The tweet also carried the image of Imams appreciation note. This is the third instance of recovery of precious metal by the CISF at Patna airport. On February 4, it had recovered a gold bracelet, followed by a gold chain on February 15. A Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) legislator has raised a banner of revolt against party leader Tejashwi Prasad Yadav, describing his ongoing statewide Samvidhan Bachao Nyay Yatra (tour for saving the Constitution and for justice) a nautanki or drama. Maheshwar Prasad Yadav, a fourth term MLA from Gaighat in Muzaffarpur, also gave Tejashwis public meeting in the district on Thursday a miss. While Tejashwi, leader of Opposition in the state legislative assembly, was addressing the public meeting at Sharfuddin government high school in Bochaha assembly constituency of the district, Maheshwar chose to attend a banks opening ceremony at a place nearly 25 km from the venue of the rally. After the bank function, the MLA was all praise for chief minister Nitish Kumars development programmes. The Gaighat MLA told reporters that the Nitish-led government was making rapid strides towards development. The state was moving on the path of development. This processes will continue for more years and the state will touch new heights of development and prosperity under the leadership of the chief minister , he said. The MLA also took a dig at RJD president Lalu Prasad, calling him a symbol of nepotism. He said Lalus son Tejashwi had embarked on the yatra only to befool people as he had been harping on alleged betrayal of mandate by Nitish . The political innings of Lalu has come to an end as he has only promoted his family members and ignored interests of party workers, the RJD MLA added. RJDs Bihar unit chief spokesperson Shakti Singh Yadav said the party had taken a serious note of MLAs comments. The party would issue a show cause notice to the Gaighat MLA and take appropriate action if his reply was not found satisfactory, he said. The MLAs utterances against RJD leaders has come as rude shock for the party ahead of the crucial byelections to Araria Lok Sabha and two assembly seats in Bihar on March 11. The byelections, being held for the first time after the collapse of the Grand Alliance, are being seen as a litmus test for the RJD as well as the ruling JD(U)-BJP combine. Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) president Sharad Pawars change in track over the issue of reservation in jobs and education has evoked mix reactions from caste outfits and political class. Pawar, while facing questions from Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) chief Raj Thackeray on Wednesday, said reservation should be on economic criterion rather than based on caste, a clear departure from his earlier stand when he supported reservation for Marathas. Replying to a question on various castes demanding reservation, Pawar in a special interview by Thackeray at Punes Brihan Maharashtra College of Commerce, said the time has come to think of reservation based on economic conditions rather than caste. It is a sensitive issue. But I think barring Dalits and tribals, reservation should be given on economic criterion rather than caste. Pawars remarks have come against the backdrop of various castes, including Marathas, Dhangars and Lingayats demanding reservation. Reacting to Pawars remarks, Pravin Gaikwad, former head of Maratha outfit Sambhaji Brigade, said NCP chiefs statement is in the view of various castes and communities coming out on the street demanding reservation. In my view, however, reservation on the economic criterion may not be possible as it will require amendment in the Constitution. Practically too, it will be difficult to determine who is poor and who is rich so as to give reservation, said Gaikwad, who was at the forefront of demanding reservation to Marathas. It was the NCP-Congress government in 2014 that cleared 16% reservation for Marathas. The Bombay High Court while hearing a petition on reservation however turned it down following which the BJP government led by Devendra Fadnavis submitted a 1,200-page document in the court to argue the social and economic backwardness of the Maratha community. Following reservation to Marathas, Dhangars and Lingayats too have come out on the streets in large number demanding reservation. Anand Dave, Pune district president for Akhil Bharatiya Brahmin Mahasangh (ABBM) expressed his happiness over NCP chiefs changed track. Pawar has finally endorsed our position. We have been demanding reservation on financial status rather than caste. Everyone who is poor should get it, said Dave. Meanwhile in Mumbai, Shiv Sena chief Uddhav Thackeray said if Pawar had adopted late Sena supremo Bal Thackerays stand of giving reservation on economic criterion rather than caste, there would not have been divisions among the communities. Balasaheb always advocated economic criteria for reservation, but Pawar, as chief minister, did so on caste lines. Had Balasahebs advice been taken, we would not have seen divisions between various castes, Uddhav said. Sanjay Sonawani, author of several books and supporter of reservation for Dhangar community, said that some politicians are deliberately trying to create divisions in society by raking up such issues as the reservation of economic criterion will only upset Dalits and tribals. There is reservation in politics too. How are they going to give reservation based on economic status in politics. If Pawar is so much concerned, he can start from his own party by giving tickets to economically downtrodden class Sonavani said. Pawars nuanced position, according to political analysts, is the result of recent Maratha consolidation which led to polarisation of votes, eventually benefiting BJP in last years civic polls. Last year, Marathas came out on the streets in large numbers to demand reservation. Subsequently during civic polls held in 10 cities, including Mumbai, Pune, Nashik and Nagpur, BJP performed well. I think his latest stand on reservation is more realistic as compared to 2014 when the NCP was fighting elections and Pawar had no option but to support the reservation based on caste given that large community such as Marathas were demanding it, said Prakash Pawar, professor of political science at Shivaji University in Kolhapur. BOX - I Caste-based reservation Reacting sharply to Pawars statement on reservation, Union minister of state for social welfare Ramdas Athavale said caste-based reservation will stay till there are castes in the country. Those who want to stop caste-based reservation should work towards eliminating the caste system. We will upset every attempt to make reservation on economic criterion. BOX - II Vidarbha statehood NCP chief Sharad Pawars remarks on Vidarbha have irked protagonists of separate statehood to the region. In his interview to MNS chief Raj Thackeray, NCP chief Sharad Pawar said demand for separate Vidarbha is being made only by non-Marathi speaking people, who want to rule the region.The demand is mainly being made by Hindi speaking people. Those who are making the demand hope that once Vidarbha gets separate statehood status, they can rule the region, said Pawar. Responding to Pawars remarks, former advocate general and staunch supporter of separate Vidarbha Shrihari Aney said, Demand for separate Vidarbha isnt based on language. The Special Task Force (STF) of Punjab Police on Friday nabbed four smugglers in the district and recovered 2.5kg of heroin buried by them in a field along the India-Pakistan border in Fazilka. Giving details, assistant inspector general of police (AIG-border range) Rachhpal Singh said those nabbed were identified as Manjit Singh, Sharma Singh, Satnam Singh and Gulshan Singh, who allegedly had contacts with Pakistani smugglers. Manjit Singh, considered to be the kingpin of the gang, has agriculture land across the fencing along the border. He used to get the drug consignments dumped in his field and then supply the same in border areas, including Amritsar and Tarn Taran. After their arrest, they led the police to a designated spot in Manjits field near Jalalabad, Fazilka, where four packets containing 2.5kg heroin were found, the AIG added. He said a case was registered against the accused under various sections of the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) Act at Fazilka. Accused Sharmas close relatives are already facing trial in a drug case after the recovery of more than 50kg heroin in Fazilka, he added. In view of the low conviction rate in criminal cases in as many as nine districts of Punjab, the director, prosecution, has convened a meeting of all district attorneys (DAs) and other law officers on Friday to find out the reasons behind it and to seek explanation from the officers concerned. The conviction rate is as low as 45% in Mohali, followed by Faridkot and Muktsar where it is 47%. It is 48% in Fazilka and Bathinda, 49% in Ferozepur, 51% in Jalandhar and 54% in Amritsar. Besides, Moga also features in the list of districts shortlisted for low conviction rate by the authorities concerned. There should be at least 60% conviction rate in the criminal cases filed after proper scrutiny by the prosecution authorities concerned. Sources said the director, prosecution, Vijay Singla has already sounded DAs of the districts concerned over the issue and told them to come fully prepared for the Fridays meeting to be held at Chandigarh. 90% cases filed by the police are without any supporting scientific evidence whereas conviction in the court depends only on the production of solid evidence. Rajvinder Singh Bains, Senior criminal lawyer There are multiple factors for the low conviction rate, including major flaws in police investigation, inefficiency in gathering evidence, and lack of proper follow-up of cases during the trial period and so on. The matter will be taken up with the police authorities concerned as well, a top official of the prosecution department said, on the condition of anonymity. He said law officers are supposed to provide legal guidance to police officials in gathering the proper evidence to file only those cases in the court where solid evidence is available against the accused to ensure conviction. At the argument stage, the law officers need to prepare thoroughly for cross-examination to prove the charges levelled against the accused. He said getting recorded the evidence from witnesses plays most crucial role in any case in the court. At that stage, law officers are required to remain most focused. There are instances when prime witnesses turn hostile and that leads to acquittal. Or sometimes, prime witnesses do not turn up for getting the evidence recorded. At times, public is also at fault as in cases of fraud and cheating, it has been observed that complainant reached compromise with the accused after filing the case, he added. Senior criminal lawyer Rajvinder Singh Bains said, 90% cases filed by the police are without any supporting scientific evidence whereas conviction in the court depends only on the production of solid evidence. Till the time police use torture and other harsh measures to gather evidence against the accused, the conviction rate will not increase. He added that the police need to change its investigation methodology to gather scientific evidence for improving the conviction rate. Also, as cases linger on for years in the court, this also affects the conviction rate. The court of additional district and sessions judge Poonam R Joshi on Thursday held five men guilty of abducting and gangraping a 17-year-old girl in September 2015. The court will decide the quantum of sentence on February 27. The convicts are Chandrashekar, 18, resident of Railway Colony, Mauli Jagran; Bansi, 35, resident of Manimajra; Surjit Singh, 35, and Shekar Rana, 20, residents of Faidan village; and Sahil Verma, 22, resident of Sector 68, Mohali. As the judge announced the verdict, the convicts broke down. Later, the mother of one of the convicts was seen yelling at him outside the court room, saying she will never forgive him. In her complaint to the police, the victims mother had alleged that her daughter, a Class-12 student, was returning from tuition around 7pm when four men abducted her in a car on September 11, 2015. They took her to a forest behind Kalagram where they took turns to rape her, before leaving her there and fleeing. The victim had alleged that she screamed for help as the men attacked her, but no one came to her rescue. She managed to return home around 11pm, and narrated the incident to her mother, who filed a complaint the next day. The victim was medically examined at Government Multi-Specialty Hospital, where doctors found injury marks on her body. Acting on the womans complaint, the accused were booked under Sections 363 (abduction), 376 (rape) and 376D (gangrape) of the Indian Penal Code, and Sections 4, 8 and 12 of the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act at the Manimajra police station. The shoot of Prabhass upcoming multi-lingual film Saaho began a few months ago. After canning important sequences in Hyderabad, the team is finally set to travel abroad to shoot predominant portions of the film. The next few schedules of the film will take place across Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Romania, where most of the films high-octane action scenes will be shot. One of the highlight of the action scenes will be the one thatll be shot on the worlds tallest building, Burj Khalifa. The last film that was shot there was Fast Five. Tipped to be a mega budget action extravaganza being made on a budget of over Rs 150 crore, the film is being directed by Sujeeth. Neil Nithin Mukesh has been roped in as the antagonist and he had said in one of his interviews that it will the biggest action film this country would have ever seen. Neil had said, Saaho is a larger-than-life film and, post Baahubali, the entire nation is rooting for Prabhas. And where there is a mega hero, there will always be a mega villain too. My character has many shades like every other character in the film. Its quite an exciting project, Sujeeth has a great vision. Saaho will be the biggest action film of 2018. After playing a father and son in Baahubali franchise, Prabhas will be seen in an action avatar in Saaho, and his clean-shaven look has already gone viral. Saaho, which marks the southern debut of Shraddha Kapoor, has music by Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy and cinematography by Madhie, whose work in Ghazi was widely spoken about. Tamil actor Arun Vijay is said to be playing a pivotal role. Follow @htshowbiz for more ott:10:ht-entertainment_listing-desktop Dutch lawmakers Thursday overwhelmingly voted in favour of recognising the early 1900s massacre of Armenians under the Ottoman Empire as genocide, in a move likely to worsen already-strained ties with Turkey. The motion is accepted, parliamentary speaker Khadija Arib announced after the lower house voted 142 to 3 in favour of the proposal that parliament in no uncertain terms speak about the Armenian genocide. It also agreed to send a cabinet representative to Yerevan in April for the commemorations of the killings and every five years afterwards. Armenians have long sought international recognition for the 1915-1917 killings in the Ottoman era as genocide, which they say left some 1.5 million of their people dead. But Turkey -- the Ottoman Empires successor state -- argues that it was a collective tragedy in which equal numbers of Turks and Armenians died. So far, parliaments in more than 20 countries, including Germany, have voted for laws or resolutions explicitly recognising the Armenian genocide. But acting Dutch Foreign Minister Sigrid Kaag quickly tempered the motion, saying even though the ruling four-party coalition voted for the motion, the government will restrain itself. Cabinet will therefore not follow the House in this matter, said Kaag. Well pay our respects to the victims and relatives of all massacres of minorities, Kaag said, stressing that the cabinet would not make a judgement on whether there had been a genocide. For some years, the Dutch government has taken a nuanced position, speaking of the question of the Armenian genocide, with Kaag reiterating Thursday that that would remain the case. A motion by the far-right Freedom Party proposing that the government must recognise the killings as genocide was rejected by MPs. Its a good thing that theres a motion, supported by almost all, Socialist Party MP Sadet Karabulut said about the vote. But its sad to say that the government, because of political reasons still speak about the question of the Armenian genocide. It will however be a step forward if government attends the commemorations, she said. Still historical debate Tunahan Kuzu, leader of DENK, a Dutch political party whose supporters are mainly of Turkish descent, however voted against the motion. We are satisfied with the Ministers (Kaag) explanation, because shes not going with the majority of the chambers desire to put its own take on a historical event, Kuzu told lawmakers. We regret the pain of all the victims and the suffering of all loved ones, he said, adding we are for reconciliation. But reconciliation cannot happen if you are presenting a one-sided political view of history, the DENK MP said. Ankara too vehemently rejects the term genocide, saying up to 500,000 died when Armenians rose up and sided with invading Russian troops in World War I. Before the vote experts said the Netherlands was unlikely to officially change its stance from speaking about the question of the Armenian genocide. The Dutch government is indicating that its a case over which there still is historical debate, Erik-jan Zurcher, professor of Turkish studies at Leiden University told AFP. Zurcher added that although the latest move was sure to strain Turkish-Dutch relations it would not break fundamental ties between the two countries. Relations however have deteriorated since Dutch officials barred two Turkish ministers from attending a rally in Rotterdam on the eve of general elections last March. Pakistan will be placed back onto an international terrorism-financing watch list from June, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter, a move that may hinder the countrys access to financial markets. The move follows a push from the US, UK, France and Germany to get Pakistan placed on the Financial Action Task Forces grey monitoring list during a review meeting in Paris this week. China, which is financing more than $50 billion of infrastructure projects across Pakistan, removed its earlier objections to the move, said the person, who asked not to be identified as the discussions are private. Pakistans benchmark stock index reversed earlier gains and fell 0.6% at the close in Karachi. Saudi Arabia too removed its objections, while Turkey alone backed Pakistan, a person familiar with the matter told the Hindustan Times. A statement from FATF after the Paris meeting on Friday made no mention of Pakistan. Technically the South Asian nation has three months to convince the body that it has acted against terror organisations, though it will be difficult for them in practice, the person said. Earlier this week, Foreign Minister Khawaja Muhammad Asif said no consensus had been reached to put Pakistan on the list and that the nation had been given a three-month pause. Officials at Pakistans finance ministry couldnt immediately comment. The move is the latest attempt to get Islamabad to take more action against terror groups that allegedly have support and sanctuary within Pakistan. Relations with the US have deteriorated drastically in the past year and in his first tweet of 2018, President Donald Trump said Pakistan gave lies and deceit in return for American funding. FATF removed the nuclear-armed nation after three years in 2015 from a list of countries which are subjected to regular monitoring. More Pressure Being placed on the list may impede Pakistans access to global markets at a time when its foreign reserves are dwindling and external deficits are widening ahead of national elections in July. Yet, during the previous period under FATF monitoring, Pakistan managed to negotiate an International Monetary Fund bailout and continued to tap the international bond market. Gradually the US is coming up with more pressure, Shamoon Tariq, the Stockholm-based vice chief investment officer at Tundra Fonder AB, said before the decision. If the US puts more pressure on the World Bank and IMF on future funding, that would be a real challenge. Last week, Pakistan vigorously tried to avoid inclusion to the list and said the US had voiced concerns about the freedom with which the suspected planner of the 2008 Mumbai attacks, Hafiz Saeed, and his organisations operated in the country. Last week, Pakistan announced that it changed a law and now allowed its security forces to take action against groups on the UN Security Council list -- such as Saeeds charities which are alleged fronts for militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba. It also seized dozens of offices, buildings, seminaries and ambulances belonging to Saeeds Jamaat-ud-Dawa and Falah-e-Insaniat Foundation. Economic Hardship Pakistans Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi also said in an interview this month that in the last two to three months Pakistan has more or less complied with sanctions against Saeeds organizations. However, Abbasi said more action against Saeed himself was unlikely as we have no charges against him. India says it has provided evidence against Saeed to Pakistan. On Thursday, White House spokesman Raj Shah said Trump was not yet satisfied with Pakistans progress in fighting terrorism. However, Pakistans government has said any financial squeeze will ultimately aid extremism. If Pakistan faces any economic hardship because of this, its going to affect our budget and capacity to fight the anti-terrorism war, Pakistans Interior Minister Ahsan Iqbal told reporters in Islamabad on Monday. The question is whether these nations want to help terrorists or the war against terrorism? Hindustan Times Rezaul H Laskar contributed to this report The armed sheriffs deputy assigned to the Florida high school where 17 people were shot dead has resigned rather than face suspension after an internal investigation showed he failed to enter the school to confront the gunman during the attack, the county sheriff said on Thursday. Deputy Scot Peterson, who was on duty and in uniform as the resource officer posted at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, was the only law enforcement officer present on Feb. 14 when the rampage started, Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel said. Petersons actions were caught on video during the massacre, which ranks as the second-deadliest shooting ever at a US public school, carried out by a lone gunman wielding a semiautomatic AR-15-style assault rifle. Nikolas Cruz, a 19-year-old former student, was later arrested and charged with 17 counts of premeditated murder in the assault. What I saw was a deputy arrive at the west side of Building 12, take up a position and he never went in, Israel said, referring to the building on campus where authorities said the bulk of the shooting occurred. Israel told reporters the shooting in the Fort Lauderdale suburb of Parkland lasted six minutes, and that Peterson reached the building under attack about 90 seconds after the first shots were fired, then lingered outside for at least four minutes. Asked what the deputy should have done, Israel replied, Went in. Addressed the killer. Killed the killer. Peterson has not given a reason for why he did not enter the building, Israel said. Neither the deputy nor any representatives could immediately be reached for comment. Israel said he had decided on the basis of his review of the video to suspend Peterson, but the deputy resigned first. The sheriff said two other deputies have been placed on restricted duty pending an internal investigation into whether they properly handled two telephone tips, received in 2016 and 2017, warning that Cruz might be inclined to commit a school shooting. Authorities have said that Cruz, who was expelled from Stoneman Douglas High last year for unspecified disciplinary problems, made his getaway moments after the shooting by blending in with students fleeing the school for safety. Law enforcement response under scrutiny Police officers arriving on the scene from the adjacent city of Coral Springs thought the gunman was still inside as they searched the building, based on a security camera video feed that they mistakenly believed was showing them real-time images but was actually footage from 20 minutes earlier. Coral Springs Police Chief Tony Pustizzi told reporters on Thursday that the confusion stemmed from human error and a communication failure, not malfunctioning equipment. He insisted that the mishap did not put any lives in danger. Still, the disclosure may help explain the time lapse between the shooting and the suspects arrest. The Broward sheriff has said Cruz, after slipping away from the school, casually spent more than an hour drifting through a Walmart store and visiting two fast-food outlets before he was spotted and taken into custody without a struggle. The shooting has renewed a national debate between proponents of gun rights, as enshrined in the Second Amendment to the US Constitution, and advocates for tougher restrictions on firearms. High school students from Stoneman Douglas and elsewhere around the country have launched a protest and lobbying campaign demanding new curbs on assault weapons. US President Donald Trump has suggested school gun violence could be abated by arming teachers. On Thursday, the head of the National Rifle Association, Wayne LaPierre, lashed out at gun control advocates, accusing liberal elites of politicizing the Florida mass shooting to try to attack our firearms freedoms so they can eradicate all individual freedoms. The carnage also has raised questions about whether law enforcement agencies did all they could to detect and follow up on possible warning signs of last weeks gun violence in advance. The Broward sheriffs office received at least 18 calls for service or tips about Cruz during the past decade, and internal affairs detectives are still reviewing two of them to determine if they were properly handled, Israel said. In one instance from February 2016, the sheriffs office received information from a neighbors son that Cruz planned to shoot up a school, based on an Instagram post with a picture of a juvenile with guns, according to an agency fact sheet released to the media. A deputy subsequently determined Cruz possessed knives and a BB gun and notified a school resource officer, the document said. In a more recent incident dated Nov. 30, 2017, a caller told the sheriffs office that Cruz was collecting guns and knives and could be a school shooter in the making, according to the fact sheet. The tipster, it said, advised that the weapons were kept at a friends house at an unknown location. A deputy in that case referred the caller to the Palm Beach Sheriffs Office because Cruz was said to have moved to that jurisdiction, the Broward sheriffs office said. The Federal Bureau of Investigation prompted widespread outrage last Friday when it said it had failed to act on a tip warning that a man, since identified as Cruz, had possessed a gun, the desire to kill and the potential to commit a school shooting. Russia has tested over 200 new types of arms in Syria during its campaign in support of President Bashar al-Assad, a senior lawmaker said on Thursday, as Moscow was accused of taking part in air strikes against rebel-held Eastern Ghouta. As we helped the brotherly Syrian people, we tested over 200 new types of weapons, said Vladimir Shamanov, a former commander of Russias airborne troops who now serves as head of the Russian Dumas defence committee. Its not an accident that today they are coming to us from many directions to purchase our weapons, including countries that are not our allies, he said. Today our military-industrial complex made our army look in a way we can be proud of, he said. Russia, a close ally of the Syrian government in the protracted multi-front war, has been accused of indiscriminate bombing throughout the conflict causing massive casualties. The latest criticism focuses on the air strikes against the enclave of Eastern Ghouta, where more than 350 civilians have been killed in five days, but the Kremlin denied involvement in the regime-led assault. Shamanovs remarks also come amid reports that Russia has deployed its Su-57 stealth fighter prototype in Syria, where two such planes were reportedly spotted yesterday. Photos of the fifth generation jet, allegedly over Syria, were re-posted by various state media today. A source in the defence ministry confirmed to RBK news agency that the two planes were sent to the Hmeimim base for a test in real conditions. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov declined to comment on the reported deployment of Su-57. Donald Trump Jr., the eldest son of the US president, will be pushing another ethics boundary on his whirlwind trip to India where he has been promoting Trump-brand real estate. On Friday evening he is to make a foreign policy speech at a New Delhi business summit headlined by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Two government ministers are also scheduled to speak at the two-day conference. He will be speaking about Reshaping Indo-Pacific Ties: The era of Cooperation. Critics say airing his views on international relations, especially while sharing a platform with senior Indian government officials, is problematic because of the implication that he has his fathers ear. I am concerned that Mr. Trumps speech will send the mistaken message that he is speaking on behalf of the president, the administration or the United States government, not as a private individual, or that he is communicating official American policy, senator Robert Menendez, ranking Democratic on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said in a letter earlier this week to the US Embassy in New Delhi. Menendez said he expects that the US State Department and the embassy will treat Trump Jr. like any other American on private business and will take every effort to avoid any perception of special treatment or a conflict of interest. On Thursday, White House spokeswoman Lindsay E Walters said the Trump administration takes seriously its obligation to ensure that government resources are not used to provide a private benefit to anyone. Donald Trump Jr. is a private individual and neither the State Department nor the White House has provided any support for this trip beyond coordinating with his Secret Service protection, Walters said. Trump Jr.s India visit has already raised ethical concerns. President Trump has pledged to stay away from any new foreign business deals during his term in office to avoid potential ethical conflicts. While the projects that Trump Jr. is promoting in India were inked before his father was elected, ethics experts have long seen the use of the Trump name to promote even existing business ventures as tricky territory. Trump Jr. and his brother Eric have been running the Trump Organization, the familys real estate business, during their fathers presidency. Since Tuesday, Trump Jr. has been traveling to four Indian cities to meet business partners and buyers in the luxury residential projects that bear his familys name. With five ventures under the Trump brand, India has the companys largest number of projects outside the United States. The Trump Organization charges a licensing fee to its Indian partners who build the properties under the Trump name. A luxury complex is already open in the central city of Pune while the others are in varying stages of construction in Mumbai and Kolkata and two in the New Delhi suburb of Gurgaon. Trump Jr. has dismissed claims that his family business is benefiting from his fathers presidency. UNICEF deputy director Justin Forsyth has resigned following complaints of inappropriate behaviour towards female staff in his previous post as head of British charity Save The Children, the childrens agency said today. Executive Director Henrietta Fore today accepted Justin Forsyths resignation from his position as Deputy Executive Director of UNICEF, said a UNICEF statement. We are grateful to Mr Forsyth for his work over the past two years to advocate for the most vulnerable children and help advance UNICEFs mission to save childrens lives. This mission is now more important than ever, it added. Forsyth joined UNICEF in 2016 after leaving his post as chief executive officer of Save the Children, where he faced complaints from three workers who said he had sent inappropriate texts and commented on what young female staff were wearing. UNICEF on Wednesday said it was unaware that Forsyth faced those complaints when he was recruited. Forsyth had apologised to the three staff members for the incidents. In the wake of the MeToo movement, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres this month announced a zero-tolerance policy on sexual harassment and vowed new stepped-up measures to address misconduct by staff at the world body. A new helpline for UN staff will be set up and UN-wide rules put in place to ensure that claims are addressed in the same manner throughout the organization. The complaints at Save The Children follow revelations that Oxfam was investigating 26 cases of sexual misconduct since a crisis erupted over its handling of a scandal involving prostitution in Haiti. Three of Oxfams senior leaders have apologized for the charitys handling of an internal investigation into the use of prostitutes by staff in Haiti following the devastating 2010 earthquake. US president Donald Trump was not satisfied with the progress shown by Pakistan in its fight against terrorism in line with the South Asia strategy he had announced last August, the White House said, as American officials continued to press a Paris-based world body on terror financing to put the country on a watchlist. The United States has seen modest progress in terms of Pakistans acknowledgement of these concerns, White House deputy press secretary Raj Shah said while speaking to reporters in response to a question. Shah added this administration had brought some clarity to the relationship with Pakistan, a one-time ally, by holding it accountable for its actions. Though the spokesperson did not spell out the concerns, they are and have remained the same for years, traversing administrations Democratic and Republican, that Pakistan supports terrorism as a state policy, and offers shelter and safe-haven to them from which they carry out attacks across the border. President Trump accused Pakistan of accepting $33 billion in aid from America and giving back in return only lies and deceit on Twitter on January 1. Just days later, the US announced it was suspending nearly $2 billion in security-related aid to Pakistan and set aside less money for it in the budget. It also proposed to the Paris-based terror-financing global watchdog, Financial Action Task Force, to put Pakistan on a watchlist, called the grey list, that are countries with weak measures to combat money laundering and terrorist financing. Pakistan was on the list from 2012 to 2015 and its officials fear that being put on it again would be devastating for the economy. The international community has consistently expressed its long-standing concerns about ongoing deficiencies in Pakistans implementation of its anti-money laundering/counterterrorism finance regime. These concerns remain, even as Pakistan has recently begun to take action to address these deficiencies, a state department spokesperson said. The United States encourages Pakistan to continue efforts to meet its international obligations on countering the financing of terrorism. We look forward to additional information on how Pakistan is meeting these obligations, the spokesperson added. The task forces plenary will decide and an announcement is expected either way on Friday evening when the body wraps up its three days of deliberations. Islamabad has indicated it might escape the guillotine as there is no consensus in the body. China and Turkey are said to be opposing the US-sponsored proposal along with Saudi Arabia. But Americans are believed to be working on Saudi Arabia, whose ruling family enjoys a good rapport with Trump and his family. Officials at the highly secretive task force and US state and treasury departments refused to share details of the discussions and said they will remain confidential till they are released after the conclusion of the plenary. I n Chinese astrology, each year is related to a Chinese zodiac animal according to the 12-year cycle - and 2018 is a Year of the Dog. So there's never been a better time for dog lovers to find fun and quirky homeware and canine-themed accessories. Jill Perkins and Jan Morley have been designing and producing giftware for over 30 years, with all products made in the UK. Above is their Thomasina Clock, above, priced 28. Pedigree chums: Londoners go mad for dog-themed homewares, says Hampstead-based artist Rory Dobner, who hand-draws his distinctive black-and-white artwork in his north-west London studio, putting whimsical character dogs on to tiles, plates, mugs, cushions and tea towels. His Hot Dog and Buster Bulldog, above, are the most popular perhaps because of their patriotic feel. Whisper it he draws cats, too. Mugs from 22, plates from 36. A dog for life: Frank, above, is a 3D printed dog. With no need for a mould, complicated shapes are easy. A computer-controlled machine builds up an object in tiny layers just a tenth of a millimetre thick, for an exceptionally fine finish. Frank is a collaboration between Italian architect Enrico Baratella and British designer Andy Downham, who have manipulated geometric shapes for a playful effect. Priced 149, Frank stands 30.5cm high. A range of Frank accessories are also available. Sit: Finnish plastic furniture pioneer Eero Aarnio designed Puppy, above, in 2005 for Italian brand Magis, to use indoors and out. Now a much-loved classic, it comes in four sizes, from small (perfect for kids) to giant, in green, orange, white and Dalmatian spots, from 57.50 to 284 at Aram Store, Drury Lane, WC2. Pets on paper: a pack of beagles, dachshunds, Pomeranians, poodles, pugs and Labradors are going on hols in their best outfits and sunnies. H ome buyers and tourists have largely overlooked Madrid in their Gaudi-fuelled rush to Barcelona, but now the Spanish capital is fighting back. Property prices there have risen more than 12 per cent year on year according to the Spanish Statistical Office, while hotel super-brands Mandarin Oriental and Four Seasons have significant projects in the pipeline. There has never been a better time to invest in Madrid, claims Rod Jamieson of property agents Lucas Fox. It has always been a significant financial centre and never aimed to attract tourists as Barcelona did. However, since the 2007 recession Madrid has transformed itself with newly pedestrianised areas and a new business and residential neighbourhood at Chamartin, all furthering Madrids aim to claim some of Londons financial power. Jamieson lives in Madrid and starts each day with a run in the magnificent Buen Retiro Park, often finishing the day with friends at a bar or restaurant. This is one of Europes most sociable cities with a vibrant nightlife just another ingredient of its superb lifestyle, says Jamieson. SO MUCH TO OFFER AND SO AFFORDABLE Madrid has everything history, culture, luxury boutiques, 70 theatres, excellent global links through a great airport and restaurants spanning Michelin stars to tiny tapas bars, adds Jamieson. Its Europes third-largest city in terms of GDP and population but in terms of property prices and cost of living, it is surprisingly affordable. Compared with Paris or London it is still cheap. Prime property districts include Jeronimos, where big classical flats in quiet streets overlook Buen Retiro Park, and upmarket Salamanca where prices rose 19 per cent last year. Cortes and Justicia, home to the trendy areas of Las Salesas and Chueca, are around a third more affordable. Buyers come from Europe, the US and throughout South America. In Sol, close to Gran Via, Knight Frank is selling a fourth-floor, two-bedroom flat with two balconies overlooking Plaza del Carmen, for 610,000. Nearby, the same agent has a beautifully renovated, bright, three-bedroom flat in Santa Ana Plaza for 830,000. NEW DEVELOPMENTS Five miles from central Madrid, Jamieson tips unprepossessing Tetuan as a district to watch. Lucas Fox is selling a new development of eight contemporary and generously sized duplex one- to three-bedroom apartments priced from 393,000. 610,000: a renovated one-bedroom flat with three balconies in a smart central street in Justicia (Lucas Fox) Government figures show that transactions of new developments in Madrid rose 53 per cent last year, almost double what was achieved in Barcelona, a trend highlighted in Knight Franks latest Madrid Market Report. Prestigious architects and good leisure and concierge facilities have encouraged sophisticated international buyers to Madrid, says Carlos Zamora of Knight Frank Madrid. The price of residential homes in Madrid is less than half of comparable cities such as Vienna, Paris and Zurich, he says. This price gap with other European cities and the forecast uplift potential over coming years makes property in Madrid extremely appealing. 1,373,000: spectacular new flats with up to four bedrooms in the central Almagro district (Lucas Fox) In central Almagro a development of 27 apartments, all fully remodelled behind an elegant classical facade, start from 1,373,000 for two- to four-bedroom homes from 2,120sq ft, also through Lucas Fox. These homes have underground parking and a communal pool, gym and spa. A PLACE TO STAY: TOTEM, MADRID TOTEM is a relative newcomer to Madrids hotel scene but in just 18 months is already a favourite for elegance, beauty and value. Its location in super-smart southern Salamanca is perfect, only steps from the citys finest boutiques and the virtuoso restaurants in Calle Jorge Juan try El Paraguas, Lux Madrid and especially Amazonico, currently the hottest ticket in town. Super-smart: TOTEM is a relative newcomer to Madrids hotel scene The 68 rooms and suites at TOTEM are light and airy, some contemporary attic rooms and some spacious corner suites. But most memorable is the ground floor bar called, along with the restaurant, Hermosos y Malditos The Beautiful and the Damned. Sofas upholstered in moody velvet blues, curvaceous palm trees and an extensive cocktail list create a wonderfully atmospheric start to an evening in Madrid. The friendliest staff matched with cool interiors make TOTEM a perfect symbol for Madrid itself. Appointment 23 February 2018 BENCHMARK, a global hospitality company, has appointed Jerry Gibson vice president and managing director for Turtle Bay Resort, a Benchmark Resorts & Hotels property located on the North Shore of Oahu, Hawaii. Greg Champion, president, made the announcement. Jerry Gibson brings 38 years of exemplary hospitality leadership experience to his new position with Turtle Bay Resort, including 25 invested in the Hawaii market. He most recently was the highly successful area vice president for Hilton Hawaii, overseeing the operations of Hilton-managed properties throughout the Hawaiian Islands, including two of Hilton"s largest campuses, Hilton Hawaiian Village and Hilton Waikoloa Village. On the mainland, Gibson was also responsible for properties in the Northwest, Arizona and Las Vegas. Mr. Gibson"s hospitality experience spans the Continental United States, offshore, and also includes positions in Europe. He has served in leadership roles in operations and food & beverage with leading brands such as Hyatt and Marriott, in addition to his tenure with Hilton. Upon returning to Hawaii in 2008, Gibson immersed himself within the community, serving on boards for the Hawaii Lodging & Tourism Association where he was elected president, the Hawaii Hotel Owners Roundtable, the Hawaii Visitors & Convention Bureau, Honolulu Festival Foundation, Japanese-American Society of Hawaii, Waikiki Beach Special Improvement District Association, among others. He is the recipient of the Pineapple Award that honors the Best of the Best in Hawaii"s Tourism and Hospitality, and will be honored this April by the University of Hawaii at Manoa School of Travel Industry Management"s Celebrate a Legacy in Tourism event. Jerry Gibson is a graduate of the University of Massachusetts where he earned his degree in Business Administration. He resides in Honolulu with his wife, Sandra. Industry Update Appointment 23 February 2018 Rogier Hurkmans Appointed Regional Vice President of Operations, Continental Europe At Interstate Europe Hotels & Resorts in Birmingham, United Kingdom Interstate Hotels & Resorts - a leading global hotel management company of franchised branded and independent hotels and resorts - announces the appointment of Rogier Hurkmans as a regional vice president of operations for Continental Europe. Reporting to Ken McLaren, Interstate's executive vice president of international operations, Hurkmans will help to build the company's regional, multi-lingual operating platform, ensure operational excellence and achieve optimal profitability for managed properties.Hurkmans joins Interstate with more than 30 years of hospitality experience. In his most recent position as cluster general manager with Wyndham Dubai Marina and TRYP by Wyndham Dubai, Hurkmans successfully established and implemented a cluster organization, driving sales and revenue management while overseeing day-to-day operations. As general manager of prestigious properties such as Steigenberger Hotel Berlin and Crowne Plaza Brussels-Le Palace, Hurkmans has a proven track record of growing market share, repositioning properties and consistently gaining recognition for exceptional guest satisfaction and quality. Hurkmans also brings a strong multilingualism to his new role, with fluency in English, Dutch and German, and proficiency in French. Interstate Hotels & Resorts - a leading global hotel management company of franchised branded and independent hotels and resorts - announces the appointment of Rogier Hurkmans as a regional vice president of operations for Continental Europe. Reporting to Ken McLaren, Interstate's executive vice president of international operations, Hurkmans will help to build the company's regional, multi-lingual operating platform, ensure operational excellence and achieve optimal profitability for managed properties.Hurkmans joins Interstate with more than 30 years of hospitality experience. In his most recent position as cluster general manager with Wyndham Dubai Marina and TRYP by Wyndham Dubai, Hurkmans successfully established and implemented a cluster organization, driving sales and revenue management while overseeing day-to-day operations. As general manager of prestigious properties such as Steigenberger Hotel Berlin and Crowne Plaza Brussels-Le Palace, Hurkmans has a proven track record of growing market share, repositioning properties and consistently gaining recognition for exceptional guest satisfaction and quality. Hurkmans also brings a strong multilingualism to his new role, with fluency in English, Dutch and German, and proficiency in French. Hotelschools.com Hotel Management School Maastricht Rogier Hurkmans (Class of 1998) is a graduate of Hotel Management School Maastricht in Maastricht - Netherlands, The (Class of 1998) is a graduate of Hotel Management School Maastricht in Maastricht - Netherlands, The more information Interstate Hotels & Resorts Interstate Hotels & Resorts is the International Division of leading U.S.-based global hotel management company, Aimbridge Hospitality. Thousands of hotel owners, developers, and guests have discovered the Interstate difference in our 100-property portfolio of hotels in the UK, Ireland, Europe and Russia, alongside the global 1,400-property portfolio managed by our U. more information Recent Appointments at Interstate Nicole Turnhout-Ammerlaan - Vice President Operations Western Europe 17 November 2020 Nicole Turnhout-Ammerlaan joins Interstate from IHG, where she worked for seven years as both General Manager of a flagship Crowne Plaza Hotel in Am sterdam and an Area General Manager, following more than a decade in commercial and operational posts at NH Hotels Group in Europe. read more Sabina Wyss di Corrado - Vice President of Development Europe 17 November 2020 Sabina Wyss di Corrado brings over 17 years' experience in development, advisory, operations and lecturing in travel and hospitality to her new role. This includes senior positions at PPHE Hotel Group, Christie & Co, TRI Hospitality Consulting and the ICT, following operational roles across Europe, Latin America and Australia. read more Appointment 23 February 2018 The Arizona Biltmore, A Waldorf Astoria Resort has named seasoned culinarian, Herve Cuyeu Executive Chef. A respected creative talent with deep roots in the dining operations of legendary luxury properties, Chef Cuyeu is uniquely suited for the position, having led culinary operations at several distinctive properties with multiple dining outlets, within the brand portfolio, each offering uncompromising Waldorf Astoria service. Chef Cuyeu's career spans more than two decades, during which he has earned the reputation of an inspiring leader who is both the consummate professional and creative force. He is known for his unique ability to meld classic recipes with ever-evolving contemporary trends, and in his new position, Chef Cuyeu is tasked with continuing to strike the balance of delivering well rounded dining experiences that offer a sense of place, maintain fine technique and embrace a sense of modernity. Early plans range from a thoughtful refining of menu offerings at Wrights at the Biltmore to developing an on-property beekeeping program with experiential and honey themed tasting options. Prior to joining the team at The Arizona Biltmore, Cuyeu was the executive chef at the iconic Drake, A Hilton Hotel in Chicago. He successfully led the redesign and revitalization of long-established menus within all four of the propertys restaurants. He served prior to the Drake in the unique position of Executive Chef & B Five-Diamond hotel, the Waldorf Astoria Chicago where he rejoiced with his French roots at Balsan brasserie. Previous to the Waldorf Astoria Chicago Chef Cuyeu oversaw the culinary operations at the Waldorf Astoria and the Edgewater in Naples Florida as Area Executive Chef. A native of Bordeaux, France, Chef Cuyeu's passion for fine culinary technique was first sparked at the age of 15, while working in the kitchen of the St. Jacques de Compostelle. He later graduated from the esteemed Lycee Hotelier of Guyenne and went on to train in many of the finest kitchens, mentored by world-renowned chefs, such as Chef Michel Guerard of the Michelin two-starred, La Bastide Gasconne. The Arizona Biltmore participates in Hilton HHonors, the only guest loyalty program where guests who book directly through www.waldorfastoria.com have access to benefits including a Personal Concierge and complimentary Wi-Fi at 25 Waldorf Astoria hotels worldwide. Event BLLA presents the 2018 Travel & Hospitality Industry Executive Women's Conference being held on March 8th, 2018 at the SLS Beverly Hills Hotel. Connect with like-minded professionals, creating a network for information and support. Candid discussions around today's workplace environment and transparency of issues being discussed in the media, technology, Act 2 - life after corporate work, women taking flight, women-owned start-ups, luxury travel and more. Join us by registering and sponsoring this event, www.tiewn.com. Executive Women's Conference - Travel & Hospitality - by BLLA is organized by Performance 23 February 2018 HENDERSONVILLE, Tennessee -- The U.S. hotel industry reported positive year-over-year results in the three key performance metrics during the week of 11-17 February 2018, according to data from STR. In comparison with the week of 12-18 February 2017, the industry recorded the following: Occupancy: +1.2% to 62.9% Average daily rate (ADR): +3.2% to US$128.75 Revenue per available room (RevPAR): +4.4% to US$80.99 Among the Top 25 Markets, San Diego, California, reported the largest increase in RevPAR (+26.1% to US$142.06), due primarily to the highest jump in ADR (+16.9% to US$174.51). Orlando, Florida, experienced the only double-digit rise in occupancy (+11.7% to 85.6%), resulting in the second-largest lift in RevPAR (+23.4% to US$127.96). ADR in the market rose 10.5% to US$149.45. Miami/Hialeah, Florida, posted the second-highest jump in ADR (+15.9% to US$289.77), resulting in the third-largest increase in RevPAR (+20.7% to US$260.02). Overall, six of the Top 25 Markets reported double-digit increases in RevPAR. San Francisco/San Mateo, California, reported the steepest declines in ADR (-25.5% to US$206.10) and RevPAR (-31.0% to US$164.80). Seattle, Washington, saw the only double-digit decline in occupancy (-12.8% to 67.2%) and the second-largest drop in RevPAR (-17.5% to US$88.25). New Orleans, Louisiana, reported the only other double-digit decrease in ADR (-11.5% to US$175.69). The partnership will see SiteMinders solutions adopted by the majority of Essential Tools client portfolio of 25 hotels across the country, including OPO Hotel Porto Aeroporto, Sea Porto Hotel and Grande Hotel de Luso. Hotel clients of Portugals Essential Tools have gained access to best-in-class distribution and direct booking technology, thanks to the renowned consultancy firms partnership with SiteMinder, the global hotel industrys leading cloud platform. The deal which comes one week ahead of Portugals main tourism exhibition, BTL, in Lisbon will see SiteMinders solutions adopted by the majority of Essential Tools client portfolio of 25 hotels across the country, including OPO Hotel Porto Aeroporto, Sea Porto Hotel and Grande Hotel de Luso. Essential Tools CEO, Luis Ferreira, says, Using SiteMinders booking engine and channel management solutions, our hotel clients can open their doors to Portugals many tourists who wouldnt otherwise be aware of their hotels existence or have a way to book with them directly online. We are very pleased to provide these capabilities alongside SiteMinder, which has earned its place over the years as one of the most sought-after technology providers in Portugals hotel market. For 10 years, Essential Tools has supported hotel businesses to capitalise on Portugals burgeoning tourism sector through integrated tourist advisory services, destination marketing and eCommerce solutions. It is estimated more than 21 million tourists visited Portugal in 2017 to mark 10 percent growth from the previous year. According to the Hotel Industry Association of Portugal, 2017 will likely form the third consecutive year both demand and prices paid have grown for local hotels. We congratulate Essential Tools for recognising that technology is an enabler of a sustainable hospitality and travel industry, and an instigator of positive change. We are very proud to work alongside the team in offering the technological solutions their hotel clients need to compete into the future, and being a part of that change, says Mateus Coelho, Regional Manager - Portugal, Spain and Brazil at SiteMinder. Appointments with SiteMinder at BTL can be made here. Media contact Maria Cricchiola +61 410 233 735 media@siteminder.com About SiteMinder As the leading cloud platform for hotels, SiteMinder allows hotels to attract, reach and convert guests across the globe. We serve hotels of all sizes with award-winning solutions for independents and groups alike, wherever they are in the world. SiteMinders products include The Channel Manager, the industrys leading online distribution platform; TheBookingButton, a wholly-branded booking engine for direct bookings via the web, mobile or social; Canvas, the intelligent website creator for independent hoteliers; Prophet, the real-time market intelligence solution that takes the guesswork out of pricing rooms; and GDS by SiteMinder, a single-point of entry to a six-figure network of travel agents and the worlds major global distribution systems. With more than 28,000 hotel customers and 550 of the industrys top connectivity providers as our partners, today we have presence in more than 160 countries on six continents. For more information, visit www.siteminder.com. About Essential Tools Essential Tools - Tecnologias de Informacao, Lda. has been in the market since 2008 and, over the last few years, has developed a continuous and stable path through sustained growth, which allows them to address the new challenges with optimism and the necessary serenity, maintaining the level of quality of their services using best practices and a sense of responsibility. The success in the practical development of the solutions they present, combined with a team of professionals with superior training and experience in the areas of tourism and hospitality, marketing, design and Web design, allows them to respond and provide the necessary support to those who need help in their tourism projects and hoteliers. For more information, visit essential-tools.pt. Daily News Delivery Join your colleagues and stay up to date on the latest Hotel industry news and trends. Subscribe 2021 Hotel News Resource American furniture retailer West Elm has done it, as have luxury brands such as Armani and Bulgari. Now Japanese lifestyle giant Muji, which is known for its minimalist aesthetics, is taking a step into the hospitality business. American furniture retailer West Elm has done it, as have luxury brands such as Armani and Bulgari. Now Japanese lifestyle giant Muji, which is known for its minimalist aesthetics, is taking a step into the hospitality business. The first Muji hotel opened in Shenzhen last month, and it has two other properties lined up for launch in Beijing and Tokyo later this year and next. Rooms will feature Muji homeware products, allowing guests to lounge on the furniture and try out homewares in private. Stores within the hotels then allow them to purchase their favourite items. Muji is one of the retailers that successfully started operations abroad at an early stage and their minimalist brand concept has built up a loyal following with audiences around the world, explains Naoko Iwanaga, JLL Japans Research Manager. A hotel not only gives them greater visibility as a brand, but it creates a perfect space to showcase and experience Mujis designs, furniture and other lifestyle products. The strategy to open first in China points to how Muji is prioritizing important offshore markets, she adds. Whether its opening a store or a hotel, the end goal for an enterprise remains universal to drive sales and make a social contribution. This could be a one reason why Muji chose to start in China where theres strong potential for retail growth, Iwanaga adds. China is one of Mujis biggest foreign market and the company aims to open another 360 locations in the country by 2021. And its hotels plans are a key way to help grow brand awareness and create excitement among its target audience. Muji is already very established in Japan but with the growing populations and rising affluence of Chinas many cities, it can easily reach millions more people, says Atsushi Murai, Vice President of Investment Sales Asia, JLL Hotel and Hospitality Group. The decision to open its first hotel in China shows its expansionary retail plans but I think well see this is just the start. They will probably open more hotels in China, followed by Southeast Asia. New travel patterns Mujis blurring of the lines between retail and hospitality doesnt just take experiential shopping to a new level in Asia, as big brands look to encourage consumers to interact and build relationships with their brands in new ways. Its hospitality ambitions also bring a new edge to the Asian hotel market, where the focus is increasingly on out-of-the-ordinary experiences. Mujis minimalist brand philosophy also fits well with changing traveler preferences, which have evolved beyond traditional luxury hotels to craving something simpler and unique. For fans of the brand, the hotel offers a memorable way to step inside the Muji world and interact with its products in a way thats not possible in a traditional retail store. From the travelers perspective, they get a quality stay at an attractive hotel that fits in with their lifestyle and outlook, observes Murai. Mujis price point puts the hotel in the three to four stars category. Thats quite a good position to be in as both business and leisure travellers will perceive Muji as non-traditional and more interesting than your conventional hotel in the same category. He believes that other lifestyle brands could follow Mujis lead in Asia: Brands want customers to spend more time with them at different touch points. The ways in which retail and hospitality connect with consumers may be evolving but at their heart its all about how brands in both sectors build relationships with their customers. Yet the potential entry of more retailers-turned-hospitality players wont cause too much concern for traditional hotel groups operating in Asia. Theres already plenty of competition in the market, Murai says. As all good hotels know, they can keep their guests loyal by ensuring theyre providing the best experience possible from top class service and facilities to quality food and unique design features. Source - JLL Real Views Daily News Delivery Join your colleagues and stay up to date on the latest Hotel industry news and trends. Subscribe 2021 Hotel News Resource 50 Cent enjoys himself some memes and Instagram troll posts. The rapper-turned-entrepreneur generally takes to the social media platform to take low-key shots at his peers, usually to elicit a laugh or two from his audience. Today, Fiddy decided to weigh in on the ongoing Troy Ave-Casanova beef stemming from Troy Ave's comments on The Breakfast Club and the snitching allegations against him. Many have taken the time to clown Troy over his lyrics on "2 Legit 2 Quit," where he raps, " Im only loyal to my fam, middle finger from the stand, its either me or you." The lyrics suggest that Troy has no problem whatsoever snitching if it means he'll be good in the end. In his interview on The Breakfast Club, Troy alluded to his situation with Casanova being similar to the 50 Cent-Rick Ross beef, saying while Casanova is out here pulling 50 Cent-esque "Pimpin' Curly" skits, he's just going to keep working like Ross did. This comment seems to have pushed Fif's buttons a little, causing him to post the troll photo of an animated Troy Ave at the stand, throwing up a middle finger just like in his "2 Legit 2 Quit" lyrics. Fiddy is an entertaining character to follow on Instagram. We hope he posts some more about the Troy Ave-Casanova drama as it certainly livens up the situation. Since 2015, Foot Locker and PENSOLE have collaborated to develop the next generation of footwear designers by fostering innovation and creativity in the classroom. This weekend Asics will unveil the brand new Fresh Up GEL-180 model a collaboration between Asics, Foot Locker and the PENSOLE Footwear Design Academy. The design was created at PENSOLE during the Foot Locker Fueling the Future of Footwear Master Class. Members Brady Corum, an American footwear designer, and Vince Lebon, an Australian color and materials designer, drew inspiration from hip-hop cultures inherent nature of creativity and innovation, to feature textures and colors from microphones, turntables, graffiti and more. With limited pairs produced, the Asics Fresh Up GEL-180 shoe will be available this Saturday, Feruary. 24, exclusively at select Foot Locker locations around the world. Faster than you can utter "itty bitty bitch" Blac Youngsta has emerged to hit you with the new album. Somehow the rapper managed to take a break from swimming in a Scrooge McDuckian pile of money and book some studio sessions. You might recall the album's notorious single "Booty," which has solidified itself as a quintessential anthem for strip clubs across the South and beyond. In fact, the single's magnetism was enough to catch the ear of Chris Brown, who decided to lend his vocal talents to an upcoming remix; after all, he too is a fan of the booty. Yet behind the playful sexual promiscuity, Blac Youngsta has some serious artistic depth. The opening trifecta of songs finds the rapper coming through with some genuine honesty. "Strength" contains some powerful writing from the Youngsta, as he reflects on the tragedy of having to bury his brother. In fact, 223 is a surprisingly well-rounded project, with a healthy mix of bangers for both the club and the streets. The French Montana assisted "Right There' is another addition to the flute-banger canon, while features from Travis Scott, Yo Gotti, and Lil Boat round out the project. Forget about the antics and give 223 a chance. The stunt prince wouldn't have sounded out of place on Cash Money circa 1999; imagine a parallel world with Blac Youngsta on Mannie Fresh production, sharing the mic with Juvenile and Turk. Fantasies aside, he's done well. West Coast emcee Joe Moses has finally unleashed his first drop of the year on the masses in the package of his latest Back Goin Brazy single, featuring Future. Moses most recently signed his name on the dotted line in a deal with Atlantic Records and its safe to say that the energetic Back Goin Brazy is only the beginning of what the Los Angeles-based rapper has up his sleeve as we await details on a forthcoming project. At the end of last year, Joe Moses brought the gang back together as he put out a collective project with N.W.B. titled Til Death Do Us Part. While the project was host to 21 tracks as various crew members got their opportunity to shine, were looking forward to a solo effort from Joe Moses in the near future, and if Back Goin Brazy is any indication, our aspirations are reasoned. A public outcry led by Actor and model Avan Jogia is highly critical of luxury brand Gucci's placement of a turban on a white male model in its most recent unveiling during Milan Fashion Week. Most the noise coming from twitter users looking to protect sacred symbols. Avan who has walked for other luxury brands such as Dolce & Gabbana, is stupefied by Gucci's to go with a white model when plenty of POC options remained on the table. The garment, less colloquially known as the Dastar, is an article of religious faith, it's aesthetic merit a secondary thought in the lives of many practicing Sikhs. Gucci has yet to file an official response but they would be hard pressed to find a respectable claim to back their decision. Gucci's presentation of male and female oddities carrying mannequin heads is also not winning a lot of plaudits either. We'll call this one art imitates life: the untouchables. The student survivors of the deadly attack on Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, which left 17 dead in the most devastating school shooting in U.S. history, have been very vocal about the need for legislative change. Emma Gonzalez, Cameron Kasky, and Jaclyn Corin were invited on to the Ellen DeGeneres Show to speak about gun control, especially in the wake of this massacre that will forever impact their lives. Throughout the interview, the students address topics such as the loss of loved ones in the tragedy, the need for policy change to impede further acts of violence similar to what they've experienced, as well as the widespread notion that they are "crisis actors." The teenagers reveal that they are not opposed to guns, but would like to see stricter regulations on semi-automatic rifles and their ancillary accessories that enable the firearms to act like automatic weaponry, which are illegal. Addressing the notion that the students are "crisis-actors" with an intent to promote a leftist agenda, Kasky jokingly admits that his time spent in youth theatre will effectively squash any claims about his acting ability. The three activists then began to discuss the march they've organized, which will be taking place on March 24 in Washington D.C., as well as other participating cities across the nation. Ellen revealed that Shutterfly has donated $50,000 to "March for Our Lives," before urging viewers at home to participate in the event and promote an essential change for the better of all Americans. Peep some highlights of the interview below: Tekashi 6ix9ine is arguably the most talked about artist coming out of New York right now. However, much of that has to do with the controversy he sparks. He's received threats from several gangs and members of said gangs that have told him that he's far from welcome on their turf. Regardless, he hasn't taken any of these warnings seriously. He's received threats San Antonio's Tango Orejon gang who've made it clear that his presence is not welcome in their city. But clearly, that hasn't done anything to stop him from performing in the city. Tekashi will still perform at his scheduled show in San Antonio tonight despite the threats from gang members, TMZ reports. However, there will be an increase of security presence at the venue. Their report says the club owners are simply concerned with making sure that everyone in the venue is safe and that 6ix9ine gets in and out of the venue without any harm. In addition, Tekashi's manager has reportedly notified San Antonio police about the threats the gang has made. The San Antonio gang said Tekashi's banned from their city due to pleading guilty of the Use Of A Minor In A Sexual Performance. They said that "penitentiary rules are in effect." Regardless, Tekashi still continued with his performance in Dallas last night and plans to continue his tour. Yesterday, Tekashi got into a scrap outside of LAX after almost making it through his weekend in L.A. in one piece. The rapper received threats by L.A. gang members after he said that he won't be checking in with anyone once he lands. That resulted in a good chunk of his shows being cancelled. Nonetheless, it seems like good promo for his Day69 album that drops tonight. Norwegian offshore company Borr Drilling said Thursday it would acquire Paragon Offshore of Houston for $232.5 million, the latest move to consolidate an industry sector overshadowed by a boom in onshore oil and gas production. The acquisition, expected to close next month, will expand Borr's fleet to include 58 drilling units, more than double the 26 it now operates. Paragon has 11 rigs working or under contract in the North Sea, India and Middle East, as well as 21 older models held out of service. The deal is the latest marriage proposal in the struggling offshore sector, which has only just begun a slow rebound after a two-year oil bust that forced producers to scale back on costly deep-water exploration and drilling projects. The industry has seen a wave of offshore bankruptcies and acquisitions as companies attempt to weather a slow recovery by shedding debt or boosting market share. Last fall, British driller Ensco acquired Houston's Atwood Oceanics in an $850 million deal. And Transocean, the Swiss offshore driller with a large Houston presence, bought Norway's Songa Offshore for $1.1 billion. One of the most significant deals came early last year, when Houston's FMC Technologies merged with France's Technip to create TechnipFMC, now the world's largest offshore energy services company. The flurry of activity comes as deep-pocketed companies begin to once again show interest in offshore production even though it's costlier than drilling in the rich and proven shale fields of West Texas. Oil majors including Chevron, Royal Dutch Shell, BP and French company Total announced major deep-water discoveries in the Gulf of Mexico late last month as oil prices hovered near $65 a barrel, the highest price in years. "The timing is perfect for Borr Drilling as the signs of a recovering market are starting to appear," said Oddmund Fre, vice president of oil field service research at Rystad Energy, a Norwegian consultancy. Borr's proposed acquisition would make it the second-largest provider of offshore rigs, with a fleet just four units smaller than that of Ensco-Atwood, according to Rystad. But the company said it will likely retire most of Paragon's older rigs because they're costlier to reactivate and operate than newer models. The deal could mark a turning point for Paragon, which separated from Noble Corp. in 2014 and sought Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection early last year. It emerged months later as a private company after wiping $2.3 billion from its balance sheet in the banrkuptcy process. Borr said Paragon now has about $180 million in cash, $215 million in liabilities and a revenue backlog topping $200 million. Some 25,000 billboards along certain stretches of Texas highways could soar in size under a regulatory change approved by state transportation officials. The Texas Transportation Commission voted unanimously Thursday to eliminate the existing 42-foot height restriction beginning September 2019, allowing the size limit to double. The ruling followed months of deliberation and discussion, including a write-in campaign that generated thousands of letters both against and in favor of taller billboards. The action allows the 2019 Texas Legislature to revisit the matter and issue clearer rules, commission chairman J. Bruce Bugg said. "We are trying to bring what I would call a fair balance to the deliberation," he said. The commission was immediately criticized for giving lobbyists for outdoor advertising companies a stronger hand in dealing with legislators when they meet next year. Many sign companies are aggressively seeking to roll back limits on height and the brightness of electronic billboards. "The industry has no incentive to participate in that, help in that, or do anything other than kill it," said Margaret Lloyd, president of Scenic Texas, which advocates for sign limits. State Sen. Robert Nichols, R-Jacksonville, and chairman of the Texas Senate Transportation Committee, said lawmakers in 2017 made clear they intended to keep the 42-foot ceiling in place, although the authority rested with the transportation commission. "Billboards will go to 85 feet," Nichols said, warning of the consequences if lawmakers do not act. BULLET TRAIN: Plan sparks age-old Texas debate of progress versus tradition Industry officials were more supportive of Thursday's action. "We fully support industry regulations that balance private property rights with the need for beautification across the state of Texas and the revised rules do just that," said Lee Vela, president of the Outdoor Advertising Association of Texas and vice president for public affairs at Clear Channel Outdoor-Houston. Billboard height restrictions are not required under the Highway Beautification Act, passed in 1965 at the urging of the late Lady Bird Johnson, then the nation's first lady as President Lyndon Johnson's wife. Rather, the height restrictions date to the mid-1980s and the administration of then-Gov. Mark White. In 1985, then-Gov. Mark White urged transportation officials to set a limit of 42 feet on rural roads. One year later, White pressed for freeways and interstates to have the same restrictions. Thus, the Texas Department of Transportation has had authority to regulate billboards erected along state-controlled highways for more than three decades. At last count, there were about 25,000 of them. The rules do not apply in municipalities, like Houston, that already regulate signs or along rural roads maintained by TxDOT that are not eligible for federal funds for maintenance and improvements. Billboards on those lesser-traveled roads will remain at 42 feet. Regulating the billboards is difficult for TxDOT, officials said, noting the number of signs and the development alongside highways over the decades. Roads are also often redesigned, affecting heights of surrounding billboards. As of October, there were enforcement issues with at least 159 signs. Others could exceed the 42-foot standard but were erected prior to 1986. The latest revisions to the billboard regulations were prompted by a court challenge to Texas' sign rules in 2016, and a need to address hundreds of billboards that do not satisfy state rules because they pre-date laws, road conditions changed or were simply installed out of compliance. "Some of them were over 100 feet," Scenic Texas' Lloyd told transportation officials. "(Outdoor advertising companies) basically turned their backs to the agency that was regulating them." Vela, the industry representative, said Texas has sufficient oversight of the outdoor advertising industry. "We support robust enforcement of all regulations and believe that the department does a very good job of enforcement," he said. U.S. 290 TO END: Construction finally coming to a close in 2018, mostly Comments pro and con poured in when TxDOT first proposed some of the rule changes in October, with more than 4,700 comments on the height restriction dominating the mix. Of the 2,010 in favor of increasing the limit to 85 feet or eliminating height rules altogether, many came from outdoor advertising companies, property owners with billboards on their land and companies that use the signs to advertise. Another 2,694 commenters opposed raising the height limits. Most of those were from Scenic Texas and its supporters and concerned residents. James Nielsen/Staff Lawmakers who commented were divided, with some backing no height restrictions while others, including Nichols, stressing the need for beautification. With lawmakers for and against the 42-foot standard, a bill proposing that as a cap is likely. But its passage is less certain, roughly a year before lawmakers reconvene. What's clear, Nichols said, is inaction with the new rules in place will lead to taller signs. "If one billboard goes to 85, the next one will and the next," he said. He said he understood the need to balance property rights, economic development and highway beautification, noting the current height doesn't lessen salesmanship. "I do not think McDonald's or Burger King will sell more hamburgers" with taller signs, Nichols said. "... I do think it will be much uglier." Jackie Adams was prepared for increased demand for African fashion at her store, Melodrama Boutique, in February. She had stocked everything from Ankara skirts and dresses to Dashiki tops in preparation for Black History Month cultural celebrations. Then a superhero stepped in and sent sales soaring. Across Houston and around the world, the Marvel Studios film "Black Panther" earned more than $500 million worldwide just one week after its U.S. theatrical release. Critics and fans alike praised its cultural impact - with a majority-black cast and crew, its setting in a fictional African nation that was never colonized, and its message about family, legacy and the African diaspora. But the movie also sparked new interest in African fashion, which has had a positive financial ripple effect for local designers. Months before the film's premiere, new and longtime fans of the "Black Panther" comic books took to social media to express their desire in attending screenings wearing African fashion. Houston-based and Ghanaian-born Hannah Ephraim took inspiration from promotional stills to design a new men's top. Ephraim, who owns the online fashion store Ansaba's Etem, said she focuses on design and sewing and is not the best at promoting her products. Turns out, she didn't need to do much marketing. Her design, resembling the navy blue embroidered regal attire worn by the film's protagonist, T'Challa, sold out as soon as she put the garment for sale at the start of the year. She's currently working to fill orders as new ones keep coming in. Local Nigerian designer Onyii Brown of Onyii & Co. has seen growing interest in African-style fashion over the last six years. So she wasn't necessarily surprised to see her sales of African designs double since the film's release and afterward. "It's just like an empowerment," Brown said. "Black Panther" tells the story of T'Challa, king of the technologically advanced nation of Wakanda, and his alter-ego, a super-powered protector called the Black Panther. The movie's costume designers borrowed from real-world African patterns and accessories including Ndebele neck rings, Suri face paint and Zulu headgear and blankets to create an overall pan-African style. Brown felt overjoyed at the opening-night screening in Houston when she saw all the Ankara capes and outfits with Ghanaian and Nigerian designs in the theater lobby. She hadn't seen so many people embracing pan-Africanism since the 1970s. "It's one of those things that you can't believe," Brown said. She expects the film's impact on the fashion industry will carry on, with more designers from various cultural backgrounds incorporating traditional African patterns into more modern garments. "The movie is going to put a lot of new designers on the map," she said. Both Brown and Ephraim are already working up designs for fall collections paying homage to the film. They are inspired by the filmmakers' approach in adding a futuristic twist to the character's traditional clothes, such as blankets that double as force-field-shield generators. At Melodrama Boutique, Adams is placing orders for African designs that can be worn to the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo such as cowboy boots with fringe and African adornments. As fanfare over the film continues to grow, Adams sees the potential for more African-Americans to not only embrace and explore their African history through fashion, but also to support black-owned businesses. "It's a beautiful opportunity for us to revitalize our businesses," Adams said. AUSTIN - Ellsworth Kelly conceived "Austin," the sculptural building unveiled last week on the University of Texas campus, as a place of serenity. With its double-barrel vaulted ceiling and shape inspired by a Romanesque church, the quiet space brings important motifs of the artist's career into focus as one transcendent gesture of form, color and light. The late American minimalist, who died in 2015 at 92, had dreamed of producing a chapel for several decades. A painter and sculptor, he initially sketched his building in 1986 for TV producer Douglas Cramer, a Kelly collector who wanted a structure for a vineyard in Santa Barbara, Calif. That never came to pass. The story of why the university's Blanton Museum of Art ended up with the masterpiece begins, curiously, neither in Santa Barbara nor in Austin, but in Houston, where the art dealer who would be Kelly's agent for the project was struggling with acceptance and faith. Cultural protest More Information Ellsworth Kelly's 'Austin' When: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesdays-Fridays, 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Saturdays, 1-5 p.m. Sundays; related exhibition "Form Into Spirit," through April 29 Where: Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas at Austin, 200 E. MLK Jr. Blvd. Info: $5-$9; 512-471-5482, blantonmuseum.org See More Collapse Tempers were as hot as the temperature outside the gates of the Astrodome on the night of Aug. 17, 1992. Inside, where the Republican National Convention was opening, conservative commentator Patrick Buchanan was sowing divisiveness, throwing salvos about a "cultural war" against those who supported abortion, radical feminism and the "homosexual rights movement." While real fireworks exploded above the Dome, police clashed at the gates with a crowd of about 2,000 demonstrators who were protesting the federal government's lack of support for AIDS research. The marchers had walked several miles, from Hermann Park, through the Texas Medical Center. Some staged a "die-in." A few burned an effigy of President George H.W. Bush. Hiram Butler, a Houston art dealer, participated as a board member of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, which had set up shop for the week in his West End gallery. The protest was fully permitted and legal, Butler said recently. "I was very careful about that." Then, as he remembers it, the police attacked, and he and his friends ran for their lives. He avoided arrest but was incensed and offended, mad enough to complain about the police brutality to the city council. Like a lot of people in Houston's gay community, Butler was fed up with so many things: the hostile rhetoric of the Bush administration, which denounced gays as enemies of "family values." Gay bashings on the streets, including the fatal stabbing of 27-year-old Paul Broussard the previous year by two carloads of teenage boys from The Woodlands. Less noisy deaths, too. By his early 40s, he had seen too many to count. Butler, a native of Eagle Pass who started his career at the Museum of Modern Art, had moved back to Texas after losing all of his New York friends to AIDS. But the epidemic dragged on across Houston, too - especially in Montrose, where haunting, withered figures were seemingly everywhere one looked. As it so happened, Butler visited Florence, Italy, and Rome soon after the convention protest. And as he viewed Italy's largely Bible-inspired Renaissance masterpieces, he had a revelation: "You start looking at the Sistine Chapel and all the great monuments of Western civilization, and you realize that Michelangelo and Leonardo were gay." What was a gay man to do with such knowledge in Houston in 1992? A place for Friends Butler was no heathen. Raised Episcopalian but bothered by the gender-based politics of the local diocese, he had been exploring the Quaker faith because it and its Religious Society of Friends involved no clergy or hierarchy, and because they cared about gender equality and recognized gay marriage. The intersection of art and religion fascinated Butler, and he decided to turn his frustration into action, with the Rothko Chapel as his model. He would use his blue-chip network of patrons and artists to shepherd other conceptual art buildings across Texas that would be havens of tolerance and spiritual enlightenment. The thought stuck: "Lemme show 'em what one queer can do." Butler quickly orchestrated a commission for stained-glass windows at St. Stephen's Episcopal Church in Montrose, by New York artist Jennifer Bartlett, which was unveiled in 1995. Five years later, the Live Oak Friends Meeting House, designed by architect Leslie Elkins, opened in the Heights. Not just drawing more Quakers to share worship, the meeting house quickly became a magnet for international art lovers who wanted to see the city's first skyspace by James Turrell - a luminous, sublime experience that changed with each day's setting sun. Now, more than 20 years into his quest, Butler has five meditative spaces under his belt. Kelly's "Austin" is the latest. Finding a home Butler learned of the project that would become "Austin" almost by the grace of God in the summer of 2012. He and his husband, Andrew Spindler-Roesle, were in New York for a memorial service and ran into Kelly and his husband, Jack Shear - with whom they were friends - on the sidewalk outside the funeral home. As they exchanged pleasantries, Butler told Kelly he was planning Turrell's Philadelphia meeting house. Kelly said, "You know what? I designed a chapel in the '80s. Bring me a patron." "That was like catnip," Butler said. Because Kelly was in his late 80s by then, and in delicate health, Butler quickly engaged San Antonio architect Rick Archer and builder Tom Butler (no relation) to join him in meetings at Kelly's New York studio. The art dealer called Houston's major museums first. They liked the idea but couldn't take it on, so he then pitched Kelly's concept to a devoutly Catholic Houston couple who prefer to remain anonymous. They, too, embraced it and wanted to build Kelly's chapel at Strake Jesuit High School in southwest Houston. Kelly, who was an atheist, turned them down. He was inspired by religious architecture but wanted his chapel to be seen as a work of art, nondenominational and ecumenical. Butler also shopped the project to Rice University, but he said officials there felt the design was too specific, too Christian - given the cruciform shape of the building; 14 interior panels that, though utterly abstract and minimal, were inspired by the Stations of the Cross; and the tall redwood totem that might be construed as a cross at the altar end of the building. So Hiram Butler and Archer turned to their alma mater, the University of Texas. They had collaborated with the Landmarks public art program there to create Turrell's "The Color Inside." With an assist from patrons Jeanne and Michael Klein, who got the project in front of the university president quickly, and significant support from major patrons including Houstonians Charles and Judy Tate (who gave their Latin American art collection as part of a $10 million gift to the Blanton in 2014) and the large Blanton family (also from Houston), Kelly's project finally took off. "It was literally a village," said Blanton Museum director Simone Wicha, who managed the project for the university and raised more than half of the $23 million cost. "We knew if we were given the chance by Ellsworth - if he felt like we were the place because clearly he had had conversations with other institutions as well - it would be a great honor. Having funders who stepped up early on gave weight to it as something that could be achieved. And that really mattered because of Ellsworth's age. It would have been a lot of slower if there hadn't been people who didn't just get it immediately." No one felt that pressure more than Archer and Tom Butler and their colleagues at Overland Partners and Linbeck, who brought the artist's concept from vision to visible, as Archer likes to say. The artist's crude drawings from the '80s proposed a slightly different configuration, made of stucco. That raw plan became the jumping-off point for deep and intense collaboration, as the architect and builder and their teams talked Kelly through his options for materials he had never used before - including three window designs of meticulously colored, hand-blown stained glass; the 14 panels rendered as "paintings" of black-and-white marble; black granite floors and an exterior whose 1,569 panels of muted, gray Spanish limestone wouldn't be too glaring in the Texas sun. To understand what Kelly was trying to accomplish, Archer said, they needed to learn not just what Kelly was thinking but his thought process. The architect had seen meticulous before, collaborating with Turrell and other artists on previous projects, including glass master Dale Chihuly's "Splendor on the Ceiling" at the San Antonio Museum of Art. Kelly was "the kind of artist who would stare at two canvases to decide whether the gap between them should be 216ths of an inch or 332nds of an inch," Archer said. "But he also believed in letting things happen through chance because he wanted people to see the art, not the artist." That's why the building's stonework placement was planned digitally: The patterns were chosen randomly via an algorithm. Wicha was great at listening and making sure Kelly's wishes were met, Archer said. Kelly produced "hundreds and hundreds" of drawings that the team regenerated as construction documents, so they could ensure that every detail satisfied his desire. Yet Kelly understood the realities, too: His building had to accommodate the public, with air condititioning and auxiliary lighting; for that, he depended on the architect and contractor. Kelly gave the work its title, following his tradition of naming works for the places they were created. But it was also deeply personal to the artist, Archer said. "He was deeply engaged in connecting it to his life." Many of the tactile, tangible decisions he made related directly to things he loved in his home and studio. As simplistic as Kelly's art may look to some people, virtually every painting, drawing or sculpture he made grew from ideas that he considered his entire career. "Austin" is a primer in several key Kelly themes: Its stained-glass designs depict his lifelong fascination with the color grid and the color spectrum. The panels mirror his most reductive, black-and-white works. The mathematically precise redwood totem, like others he designed in stainless steel, painted aluminum and bronze, represents a segment of a circle. Even the building's shape had been in his head for decades, referencing religious architecture he first saw in Europe as a young military artist during World War II. Timeless eloquence More than a thousand people lined up to experience "Austin" last Sunday, when the doors first opened to the public. "We are very lucky to have it," Butler said about the idea he helped bring to reality. "It's absolutely glorious." Does it really all relate to that moment of awakening when he wanted to show the world what a queer could do? "Yes!" Butler said. "There was very much a topical aspect to it, in addition to a spiritual aspect." Wicha credits Butler as the catalyst. "He had tremendous courage and initiative to find a home for it, truthfully, in the nick of time," she said. Butler is quietly pressing on to realize more chapels, including one in San Antonio that he hopes will be a commission for emerging artist Matt Kleberg. Turrell has also recently designed a private space for a River Oaks couple and a public chapel that will be built in Fort Worth. Less developed is a project Butler has yearned to create for years, with Elkins, the architect: a synagogue designed by minimalist draftsman and sculptor Richard Serra, akin to one the artist created in Germany. Serra isn't getting any younger, and neither is Butler, who said, "That is what I most want to do." Kelly, who lived in New York and was too ill to travel during the final years of his life, never visited the city and museum that would build his final magnum opus. The date on the "Austin" cornerstone reads "2015" because that's when Kelly donated his only building to the Blanton. Wicha defended that decision. "In many ways," she said, the project was "completed" when Kelly passed away because he had selected the site and every inch of material in its 2,715 square feet. He had overseen the design of every detail, even down to the handle on the nearly invisible emergency-exit door. And ground was broken before his death. "In a sense, he had handed it over for us to fabricate, the way any artist would do," Wicha said. Gray skies may have made the dancing light on the walls less intense during the chapel's opening days than they will be on a bright summer day, but "Austin" is unquestionably a masterpiece. The place feels timeless, really, but time will pass eloquently there. MONDAY C.C. Hunter: Author will discuss and sign "This Heart of Mine," 7 p.m., Blue Willow Bookshop, 14532 Memorial; 281-497-8675; bluewillowbookshop.com. Watt Casey Jr.: Author will discuss and sign "My Guitar Is a Camera," 7 p.m., Brazos Bookstore, 2421 Bissonnet; 713-523-0701 or brazosbookstore.com. TUESDAY Steve Cavanagh: Author will talk about his legal thriller, "The Plea," at 6:30 p.m., Murder by the Book, 2342 Bissonnet; 713-524-8597; murderbooks.com. THURSDAY Scott Ziegler: Ziegler Cooper Architects' senior principal will discuss the book by Roger Yee, "Ziegler Cooper: 40 Years of Inspirational Design," 7 p.m., Brazos Bookstore. FRIDAY Thomas Pierce: Author will discuss and sign "The Afterlives," 7 p.m., Brazos Bookstore. SATURDAY Paul Petronella: Author will discuss and sign "Paulie's: Classic Italian Cooking in the Heart of Houston's Montrose District," 7 p.m., Brazos Bookstore. Ana Khan Last September Patrice Pike was planning to visit Houston for a concert to benefit Step Onward Foundation, an organization she co-founded that provides services for struggling young adults to keep them from becoming homeless. Hurricane Harvey wiped the event off the calendar. That benefit is back on the books this week, with Pike playing along with Wayne Sutton, whom longtime fans know as her old bandmate in Little Sister/Sister 7, the much-loved '90s Dallas band. "It doesn't feel good at all to talk about the effects on us because of all the suffering in Houston," Pike says. "But the analogy I use when talking to people about this is about ripples. They were far and wide." Pike has seen a spike in the number of at-risk youth recently, some because of the storm but also some because of a health care system that is in transition. "It has made us focus even more on helping out the people we're working with," Pike says. "To keep them safe, keep them from dropping out of school during a family emergency. Rather than casting a wider net, we're trying to help the people we're working with." Pike describes Step Onward as "smaller than the big organizations, the Red Cross or even Star of Hope, but we're able to focus on direct service to individuals. So we don't have thousands of recipients. But we're helping individuals who have no parents or struggling parents stay in school. We stick with those students all the way through this process." The organization provides mentorship and connects at-risk youths with organizations that provide education, housing and other resources. They try to help young people avoid loans they'll struggle to pay back, and to make the tuition and room-and-board-type payments that - if left delinquent - can terminate a student's enrollment. "The bigger organizations, it's not in their wheelhouse to help provide (for) kids trying to get a college education," Pike says. "That's what makes us unique, even though we're small. We're trying to keep an emphasis on these things that can sustain these students." Pike says the organization's modest size keeps closely connected to those she's seeking to help. Sometimes that means shuttling off right after a performance if she gets a text from somebody who needs help. As for the music, Pike and Sutton are working on an album together, which should be good news to Sister 7 fans. She points out differences between their approach to music then and now. Then the idea was to make music and make money from it. These days, Pike sees her work with Step Onward as intertwined with her music. More Information Patrice Pike Band Step Onward Foundation benefit When: 6:30 p.m. Saturday Where: Warehouse Live, 813 St. Emanuel Details: $50-$75 donation; steponward.org See More Collapse "It's given me a different perspective on purpose," she says. "It feels like a higher purpose. I do the music and combine it with this other work that I love. It feeds me in ways a vanity career wouldn't. I came from a background of teenage homeless and at-riskness. So I'm just trying to pay that forward. Early in my career I got micro-loans when I was 18 to get a band van, to buy my first guitar. This is part of an ongoing healing experience for me." SAN MARCOS - Daniel Wescott spends his days surrounded by death - skeletons on shelves, leathery corpses in the grass and rotund bodies rotting under the bright Texas sun. It's all part of his standard workweek. Wescott is in charge of the nation's largest body farm, a sprawling 26-acre research space affiliated with Texas State University, where scientists can study decay out in the wild. It can sound a bit morbid, and, perhaps, bizarre, but since the founding of the Freeman Center body farm - announced 10 years ago this month - researchers have come a long way in understanding how human remains decompose and what that means for solving crimes involving dead bodies. For instance, when the Forensic Research Anthropology Facility opened, it was difficult to figure out if someone was Hispanic by just analyzing their bones. And the time of death couldn't be determined by analyzing microbes on the skin of a corpse. Ten years and 500-some bodies later, it's a different story. Today, there's a steady stream of new research coming out of San Marcos. The facility's lab is settling into its new quarters following an August upgrade and significant expansion, while Wescott is in his seventh year at the helm of what could loosely be called the country's largest death lab. "I've always been interested in dead things," he said. "But it took me a while to get to this point." The Kansas native was once a cabinetmaker, but shifted careers after going back to school at age 26 - initially for engineering. "One day, the professor said that somebody brought in a skeleton and did anyone want to look at it, and so I did," he said. "And the next day I changed my major." Now, studying bones is his specialty. "I do a lot of bone biomechanics. What I'm really interested in is whether you can reconstruct someone's activity patterns and behaviors from their skeleton." The clues lie in subtleties like how the honeycomblike structures inside the bones compress over time in response to repeated stresses and pressures. For example, obesity can impact the way a person walks, pushing the legs farther apart and putting more pressure on the inner thighs. After death, that shows up in bone analyses when the structures on one side of the bone are aligned differently than on the other side. A sedentary lifestyle is reflected in bones that are abnormally thin, not built up by movement and pressure. The bones of long-distance runners are longer and oval-shaped front-to-back. But before the bones end up boxed on shelves in the lab where Wescott studies them, they typically start as decaying corpses tucked away between the weeds in the grassy expanses outside. Scientific advances From a distance, it doesn't even look like the bodies are there. Up close, however, tangled in the grass and weeds, cages jut up out of the plant life, enclosing corpses so scavenging creatures can't get to them. Some remains are stowed under tarps or tires to study decay in different conditions. Some are buried underground, others tied up or prepared in specific ways in an attempt to replicate ancient burial rituals. Many have "death rings" around them - outlines where liquified organs have leaked out and killed off the surrounding grass. But some are just bones, intentionally left out without any caging in order to figure out how far and quickly vultures will scatter remains, a key piece of information to know when marking off the perimeter of a crime scene. On any given day, the farm boasts dozens of bodies in varying stages of decay. And though the death fields aren't open to the public, they attract a variety of researchers from across the country and internationally. Scientists come in and sample the dirt. Entomologists come in to check out the bugs. Botanists look at the plants. The lab also trains cadaver dogs, helps identify migrants found dead near the southern border and helps first responders fine-tune their use of hyper-spectral imaging drones to locate human remains. A lot of the findings are crime-centric, but the lab's work is also helpful in other realms. Public health experts can learn more about the harms of decaying organisms and cemetery planners can find out more about how decay impacts the soil. "We just know so little about how human remains decompose that having that facility and that location is a priceless asset," said David Carter, an associate professor of forensic science at Chaminade University of Honolulu. "You really can't overstate how valuable their data are." Nothing but the truth The body farm helps scientists discover some truths about decay. The data also dispels some conventional wisdom, such as the belief that all dead bodies bloat. "We have some pretty good evidence that's not true," Wescott said. People have been dying for a long time - but that little black pearl of knowledge about what happens afterward is fairly new. "It has more to do with season," Wescott said. "Sure, every body we have out here in the middle of the summer goes through bloat, but we don't know that's true in the winter." Other factors - like if someone was on strong antibiotics just before death - could impact bloating as well. Another piece of conventional death wisdom overturned by Wescott's work: Dry conditions make mummies. It turns out that isn't always true, either. At the San Marcos site, for instance, some of the bodies are mummified - even though it's not a particularly arid climate. "Here, it looks far more like it has to do with the intensity of the sun," Wescott said. "The more radiation, the more desiccation." The lab's work has also challenged conventional wisdom in other ways. Last year, researchers there made waves when they spotted a deer munching on human bones - a gruesome first that sparked incredulous headlines. It may all seem a bit esoteric, the stuff of a death-obsessive's dreams. But the findings in San Marcos have immense practical applications that can impact the living - especially those accused of crimes. "What I'm concerned about is that if we convict somebody, we convict them on fair evidence," Wescott said. And part of that evidence includes knowing when they died. Over the past decade, studies using skin samples from bodies at the San Marcos site have helped scientists hone in on more exact times of death for days-old dead bodies. "What we're looking at is the unseen witness, the microbes naturally associated with your body," said Jeff Tomberlin, a Texas A&M University entomologist who has done some of his research at the body farm. "Once you die, the microbial community will change, and those changes can be critical for determining when somebody died," he said. "That was not possible with microbes 10 years ago." Tchaikovsky's "Swan Lake," the story of a Russian princess turned into a swan under a sorcerer's curse, is a watery tragedy. Houston Ballet's magnificent "Swan Lake" Ball grew out of one, too. After Hurricane Harvey displaced Houston Ballet from Wortham Theater Center, the institution's home venue and the site of ballet balls past, chair Hallie Vanderhider was tasked with finding a new locale to host her fast-approaching gala. Then Richard Flowers and the Events Co. swooped in with a solution: Tent the Ballet's parking lot. The translucent, custom structure took a full week to build. Much like Natalie Portman's Oscar-winning turn in the sinister and deliciously campy "Black Swan" film, the decor inside was equal parts Odette, the White Swan, and Odile, her noir counterpart. One side of the ballroom gleamed in ivory while the other half was an exquisite nightmare in obsidian. A mirrored runway split the two. Guests entered the illuminated pop-up via a red carpet, the sole pop of color. Several patrons, including board member Holly Smith Alvis, paused for a social-media op in front 3-D-printed wings. Four costumed ballerinas manned the night's most Instagrammed spot, a custom pond complete with inflatable swan floats and two aerial swans flying overhead. But Vanderhider, Swan Queen-elect, flew in and blew all other birds out of the water. Fashion designer Naeem Khan spent four weeks and 3,500 natural black coque feathers on Vanderhider's 7-pound gown. Fady Armanious, Tootsies's creative director who orchestrated the couture match-up, escorted her, dressed in a white feather cape. Fellow patrons Phoebe Tudor and Duyen Nguyen embraced extreme plumage, too. The pair modeled their quilled outerwear under a canopy of chandeliers. For dinner, City Kitchen played up the graphic color motif with jumbo lump crab with black truffles, beef tenderloin and grilled sea bass and "deconstructed" genoise cake. The evening honoring United Airlines raised more than $1.4 million - the most in ballet-ball history. Vanderhider celebrated the victory with a wardrobe change. She shimmied into a dance-floor-friendly Monique Lhuillier dress covered in fuchsia ostrich feathers for Party on the Moon's tent-rattling performance. Unlike "Swan Lake" or "Black Swan," this year's gala scored a fairy-tale finale. Forget the Bean. Forget hot dogs, deep-dish pizza or Wrigley Field. A weekend trip to Chicago - a nonstop, three-hour flight that can cost less than $300 round trip - doesn't have to be a barrage of tourist attractions for the city to feel like a big experience. The city, after all, balances out its metropolitan glamour with a small-town charm and quirkiness. Take a $10 Uber, for example, from downtown's Loop toward Lakeview/Wrigleyville. The view of Lake Michigan on the way is well documented, but less so is the conversation you can strike up with the Uber driver, who by now has replaced the taxi driver as your no-nonsense tour guide. On a recent trip to Chicago's artsy north end, my Uber driver complained about flooding in the city. The weather, the traffic and the size of the city can be challenging, he said, but the diverse people and food are fantastic. And the city needs to get over its Midwestern inferiority complex and admit that its cultural scene is every bit as rich as a coastal city, he added. I smiled. Pretty relatable set of complaints to hear from a Houstonian, I said. Why was I nearly 10 miles north of Chicago's "heart"? I had asked a local playwright for his favorite place for local people, particularly artists, to chat casually and passionately. Uncommon Ground, the location in Lakeview, was his answer. It's the kind of neighborhood coffee shop that's nonchalant enough for an early-afternoon coffee or pomosa (pomegranate juice with sparkling wine, $9) yet hip enough at night for dinner and drinks (think brandy cocktails, pork scallopini and a gluten-free wild mushroom and black garlic risotto). The coffee shop features the background chatter of a place that's well loved by locals, but its popularity isn't as blistering as an ultra-hip brunch place - that's a good thing for conversation. And it's off the picturesque North Clark and West Grace streets, the type of neighborhood where a young family would live. Here, you can walk to the Music Box Theatre, an art-house cinema where you can see foreign and cult movies on 70 mm film, or stroll around the dog-friendly Challenger Park. Clark Street, like Lincoln and North Milwaukee avenues, is one of the diagonal main streets that spider off from Chicago's downtown and offer an unbeatable walking experience. While walking on Clark, take a turn north onto Halsted Street for one of Chicago's top nightlife hotspots, Boystown. Boystown's strip of late-night bars and clubs offers more than dancing and drinking - Replay has arcades, and Town Hall Pub, where you can get $1 cashews and $2 seasoned potato chips, features an almost dive-bar-esque lack of pretentiousness. A trip to Chicago can have its tinges of glamour. Back downtown, I had a great time seeing a mainstage production at the Goodman Theatre (170 N. Dearborn), one of the best-known theater companies outside New York, then doing post-show wine and conversation at the showbiz bar Petterino's. Think Sardi's, but in Chicago rather than New York, with walls covered with autographed pictures of celebrity visitors. And there was an allure to sipping on the light, fizzy Eitel cocktail (Belvedere citrus vodka, lemon, prosecco) at the art-deco hotel lounge Bar Allegro (171 W. Randolph). But the urban-residential section of Chicago felt more daily and honest. I took the L (the Chicago rail system) uptown and weaved my way through alleyways - these are ubiquitous in Chicago and more pleasant than you'd imagine - to my friend's decent-sized, less-than-$1,000-a-month apartment to play video games. The experience was every bit as fun as taking a selfie at the Bean but tenfold more informative about what it's like to live in the city that's most similar in population to Houston. So if you're game for using Couchsurfing.com or AirBnb, look for rentals seven to 15 miles north of the Loop. Drop by an unheard-of brunch spot and strike up a conversation with a driver or bartender. Every corner in this section of town has its own personality. It just takes a slow, steady pace and a calm demeanor to experience it fully. The University of Houston will require all faculty and staff to undergo face-to-face sexual misconduct prevention training this semester, a new addition to the university's annual online training. UH President Renu Khator emailed employees about the new requirement on Monday afternoon. Calling the existing online training "robust," Khator said face-to-face training "will have the added benefit of allowing dialogue and discussion which, in turn, will lead to better understanding and awareness about our roles and responsibilities as they relate to Title IX," the federal law that prohibits gender discrimination. TITLE IX: Feds close Title IX investigation into University of Houston The new sessions come as universities and workplaces in Houston and around the nation are grappling with how to prevent sexual misconduct. A national movement dubbed #MeToo in which victims of sexual harassment and assault have come forward with their stories has prompted conversations about inappropriate workplace behavior. One spreadsheet reported by The Wall Street Journal sourced anonymous allegations detailing harassment and misconduct in academia specifically. More than 2,000 responses were submitted. BRILES: Khator says UH did 'additional review' before hiring ex-Baylor coaches "We have aggressively addressed this issue over the years by hiring new personnel, refining our policies and regularly delivering prevention and awareness training within our communities," Khator wrote. "But we can, and should, do more." Mandatory training sessions will take place this semester, Khator's email said. Lindsay Ellis writes about higher education for the Chronicle. You can follow her on Twitter and send her tips at lindsay.ellis@chron.com. HUNTSVILLE - Kent Whitaker was praying when he got the news: The governor had spared his son. In an unexpected last-minute decision, Gov. Greg Abbott granted clemency to the Sugar Land man slated for execution Thursday, just minutes before he was to be strapped to the gurney in Huntsville. Thomas "Bart" Whitaker was sent to death row for targeting his own family in a 2003 murder-for-hire plot aimed at landing a hefty $1 million inheritance. Now Playing: Thomas Whitaker's family speaks out minutes after his clemency ruling was announced by Governor Greg Abbott on Thursday, February 22. Video: Houston Chronicle, Keri Blakinger "I'm thankful not for me, but for my dad," Whitaker said upon learning the news, according to a prison spokesman. "Whatever punishment I would have or will receive is just but my dad did nothing wrong. The system worked for him today." The commutation came after years of desperate pleas from the condemned man's father - the only other survivor of the attack - spurred the seven-member Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles to make a rare unanimous push on Tuesday for clemency, sending the final decision to the governor's desk. After two days of weighing the options - life in prison or death - Abbott announced his decision less than an hour before Whitaker was scheduled to die by lethal injection at 6 p.m. It is the first time a Texas governor has commuted a death row prisoner's sentence following a board recommendation since 2007. "In just over three years as Governor, I have allowed 30 executions. I have not granted a commutation of a death sentence until now," Abbott said late Thursday in a statement. "The murders of Mr. Whitaker's mother and brother are reprehensible. The crime deserves severe punishment for the criminals who killed them. The recommendation of the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles, and my action on it, ensures Mr. Whitaker will never be released from prison." In his reasoning, the governor cited father Kent Whitaker's passionate opposition to the execution and the condemned man's willingness to waive all parole claims as factors in his decision. Now, the 38-year-old will spend the rest of his life in prison - and not on death row. "I'm so grateful," Kent Whitaker told reporters outside the death chamber. Hours earlier, he'd already said his goodbyes to his son, who'd been given his last meal and withdrawn his final remaining motion for a stay. "What a fantastic outcome," said Thomas Whitaker's Houston-based defense attorney, James Rytting. "This is confirmation that victims' rights matter in Texas." ANGRY JURORS: 'The only way people are safe is if he is dead,' says juror in Fort Bend death row case But in a statement late Thursday night, Fort Bend County District Attorney John Healey pushed back against that notion. "I have never wavered in my support of the jury's decision," he said. "They heard all the evidence after a tremendous investigation and prosecutorial effort. What they didn't hear, but what I hope the governor heard as it was conveyed to several of his staff members with the expectation that the governor would know it, was that Tricia Whitaker's family was fully in favor of carrying out the execution." The December 2003 killings took place just after celebratory dinner marking Whitaker's supposed graduation from Sam Houston State University - a milestone that never happened. Before the ruse of a dinner, Whitaker had arranged for two friends to wait at the family's Sugar Lakes subdivision home and stage a fake burglary. When the family of four returned from the restaurant, a gunman opened fire as they walked through the door, killing 51-year-old Patricia Whitaker and 19-year-old Kevin. Initially, the case baffled police. But then, authorities learned after reading an article in the Houston Chronicle, one detective later said that Whitaker was no longer enrolled in college. He'd been out on academic probation. As police zeroed in on him as a suspect, Whitaker stole $10,000 from his father and fled to Mexico, where authorities eventually captured him and brought him back to Texas. The pair of slayings came after three years of planning and at least two previous murder plots - a fact that was not lost on the Fort Bend County jury. "We tried to find a way to not kill the guy as a jury," said one former juror, who asked to remain anonymous, citing concerns for her safety. "We tried really hard to follow the law - the law said he needed to be a continuing danger to society and we finally decided that he was because his method of killing was to get other people to kill for him. If he could convince college kids to kill for him, what would prevent him from getting other inmates to do it?" Triggerman Chris Brashear, Whitaker's housemate, pleaded guilty to murder and took a life sentence, while the getaway driver - neighbor Steve Champagne - agreed to a 15-year plea deal. From the outset, Kent Whitaker - who was wounded in the attack - argued against the state's harshest sentence. READ MORE: 'I have seen enough death,' says Sugar Land father fighting execution of son who had rest of family killed "I wrestled with God about my anger and desire for revenge," he said. "It's difficult to explain but he led me to a miracle of forgiveness where I forgave everyone involved with the crime long before I realized it was my son." Nonetheless, Whitaker was sentenced to death. In the years that followed, his father led the fight against death, speaking out passionately about his son's case, penning a book on it and forming the centerpiece of the clemency petition that moved the notoriously tough seven-member Texas parole board. "There is only one person on Earth who is intimate with the murderous attack, the lives and deaths of the other victims, and the life of Thomas Whitaker - Mr. Whitaker's father, Kent. Kent was there," the condemned man's attorneys wrote in their clemency petition. "For the rest of us, the case against commutation to a life sentence seems clear. We can't forgive; we have no sympathy. But clemency is not about something so simple as sympathy or as formidable as forgiveness." Full of graphic descriptions of the crime and Old Testament references, the petition was bolstered by a few dozen letters from friends, family, fellow death row inmates and even prison guards. It was a long shot, but on Tuesday the board sided with Whitaker. "This is beyond amazing," his father said tearfully at the time. "I can't tell you." But to the former juror, the board's vote - and the governor's decision - felt like a betrayal. "I really think Bart Whitaker is a master manipulator and I think he manipulated the parole board," she said. "He got his way with them the same way he did with the people he convinced to kill for him." Marshall Slot, the former Sugar Land detective who probed the case 15 years ago, said it made him "sick." "There's no definitive definition of a sociopath," he said. "It's someone who uses people as pieces in a game. And that's what Bart is." The last time a Texas governor agreed to commute a death row inmate's sentence to life in prison following a board recommendation was in 2007, when Texas Gov. Rick Perry spared Kenneth Foster's life. It had only happened three times before that. Several major companies - Enterprise Holdings, First National Bank of Omaha, Symantec, Hertz and Avis - have ended co-branding partnerships with the National Rifle Association as a #BoycottNRA social media movement picks up steam. Enterprise - the parent company of car-rental brands Enterprise, Alamo and National - cut ties on Thursday, when it discontinued an arrangement that offered discounts to NRA members. First National Bank of Omaha, one of the country's largest privately held banks, also announced Thursday the end of a credit-card co-branding deal with the NRA. The bank had issued what its ads described as the "Official Credit Card of the NRA," according to the Omaha World-Herald; the Visa card offered 5 percent back on gas and sporting goods store purchases and a $40 bonus card. Now Playing: The battle over gun control has spread to credit cards, rental cars, hotels, and software security. Video: Time On Friday, Symantec announced in a terse statement on Twitter that it had also ended its discount program with the gun-rights organization. The company, which provides cybersecurity solutions worldwide, had been offering discounts on Norton anti-virus and malware protection, cutting prices on its premium package from $110 to $48 for NRA members. Another car-rental company, Hertz, soon followed suit. Separately, insurance company Chubb Limited said Friday that it will stop underwriting "NRA Carry Guard," a policy marketed to NRA members who face legal or civil lawsuits after they shoot someone. A spokesman for Chubb told Reuters that the company informed the NRA of the decision three months ago; the policy has faced criticism from gun-control groups who called it "murder insurance." The decisions came as the names of companies with NRA associations began circulating widely on the Internet and social media under the #BoycottNRA hashtag after the deadly Valentine's Day attack at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. A gunman wielding an AR-15 rifle killed 17 people and wounded at least 14 others, drawing anguished calls for a ban on assault weapons from students and families. The mass killing focused renewed attention on the NRA, which is credited with blocking gun-control measures for years through millions of dollars in political campaign contributions and pressure from its large membership base. American businesses have become increasingly politically aware and have participated in boycotts over the past few years against states over LGBT rights. But the NRA is a well-funded membership operation devoted to a single cause - guns - and unlikely to be moved by the actions of companies with which it has such loose and peripheral ties. Like many other organizations, the NRA has benefit deals with companies designed to make membership more appealing. The NRA "member benefits" page offers savings on a credit card, hearing aids, car rentals, travel, car purchases and prescription drugs. FedEx, for example, gives NRA Business Alliance members up to a 26 percent discount on shipping expenses. FedEx has not said anything publicly about its NRA association in recent days; when reached around 4:30 ET on Friday afternoon, a company spokesperson said he had no information to provide. Hashtags urging boycotts of specific companies involved in the deals have sprouted up across social media over the past several days. People then started posting comments on the social media platforms of many of the companies urging them to take action. The Omaha bank appears to have been the first to respond publicly. "Customer feedback has caused us to review our relationship with the NRA," the bank said in a statement posted on Twitter. "As a result, First National Bank of Omaha will not renew its contract with the National Rifle Association to issue the NRA Visa Card." Enterprise followed a few hours later on Thursday. "All three of our brands have ended the discount for NRA members," said a tweet on the Enterprise Rent-A-Car account. By Friday morning, Symantec had made a similar announcement. Then came Hertz. On Friday evening, Alice Pereira, a spokeswoman for Avis Budget Group - the company mark for Avis, Budget and Zipcar brands - confirmed that it will no longer provide the NRA member discount as of March 26. Movers North American Van Lines and Allied Van Lines also disassociated their companies from the NRA. The NRA has not commented on the announcements. However, the World-Herald quoted Rod Moeller, director of government affairs for the Nebraska Firearms Owners Association, saying that the group will "be giving strong consideration to moving their accounts to a bank that hasn't bowed to political pressure." Boycott movements have become increasingly effective political tools over the past few years. Indiana got hit hard by threatened boycotts in 2015 when then-Gov. Mike Pence signed legislation allowing businesses and individuals to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation. The Indiana legislature and Pence reversed the measure within two weeks. In 2016, North Carolina was the target of a business boycott after it enacted a "bathroom bill" requiring transgender people to use bathrooms based on their assigned gender at birth. After the NCAA canceled tournaments in the state and PayPal decided not to build a new facility in the state, the legislation was partially repealed. The NRA claims 5 million members and corporate allies in the gun industry that provide the organization with tens of millions of dollars per year. The group devotes massive resources to fighting gun regulations in the name of the Second Amendment to the Constitution, which protects the right to bear arms. - - - The Washington Post's T.J. Ortenzi and Keith McMillan contributed to this report, which has been updated. --- Video Embed Code Video: National Rifle Association chief executive Wayne LaPierre addressed the Conservative Political Action Conference on Feb. 22, in the wake of the Florida high school shooting.(The Washington Post) Embed code: It's a solemn duty, speaking for the dead. The burden of this responsibility was apparent in Tammie West Wall's somber demeanor when she stepped to the microphone and introduced herself to Harris County commissioners last April: "My name is Tammie West Wall, and I represent a small burial cemetery in the Aldine, Texas, area." Six months had passed since workers with heavy equipment removed headstones from graves at the 5-acre cemetery in northeast Harris County without family members' knowledge or permission. Markers still stand at the graves of Wall's ancestors, the West family, but she is advocating for others who feel their family legacies have been dishonored. Prior to Wall's appearance before the Commissioners Court, she and other relatives of those buried at the cemetery had sought help from private attorneys (too expensive), prosecutors (couldn't make a case), state regulators (complicated) and others. They wanted the markers restored, the cemetery protected from future desecration, and those responsible held accountable. Sacrosanct?: Families stunned after cemetery site cleared Now, a new avenue has emerged that the families hope will help them achieve the first two goals. The families are trying to persuade the Texas Department of Banking, which regulates "perpetual care" cemeteries, to deny Foresthaven Cemetery Corp.'s application for renewal of its license. A decision is expected by April. If the license is not renewed, Harris County would have legal authority to take over the cemetery, Assistant County Attorney Glen Van Slyke said. That is the intention of Commissioner Jack Morman, whose precinct includes the site. "We're ready to maintain the Aldine cemetery, including the restoration of headstones, once the state banking department gives us the authority by not renewing the owner's perpetual care license," Morman wrote in an email. "Between volunteers and Precinct 2 efforts, I believe we can restore respectability." Foresthaven Cemetery Corp. owns the property and holds the perpetual care license. The company's president, Sugar Land attorney Corwin Teltschik, has not responded to repeated requests for comment. Questions, complaints Inquiries by the Harris County District Attorney's Office last year revealed that Teltschik had arranged for a Houston businessman, Ibrahim Badat, to acquire some plots in the cemetery on behalf of a nonprofit. It was Badat who had hired the workers who cleared the site, Assistant District Attorney Valerie Turner said. RELATED: Prosecutors' inquiry on gravestone removals offers hope to families Badat's attorney, Charles Maynard, said his client has paid to have new headstones prepared for the grandparents of Al Seeliger, who says the original markers were removed when the site was cleared. The new headstones are in storage, however, because of uncertainty about the actual location of the graves, family members said. In a Jan. 26 letter to Turner, Maynard wrote that his review of the best available records shows that "the only missing headstones known to have been previously located in the cemetery were the Seeligers' and possibly one other headstone." Turner, in a previous interview with the Chronicle, said she had determined that at least four or five markers - "that's conservative, it's probably more" - were removed when the site was cleared. The prosecutor concluded that she did not have sufficient evidence to bring criminal charges for grave desecration, but she has stayed in touch with the families. "We've had several people write complaints - people that have lived in the area who can verify that it's never been taken care of," Wall said. Morse-Bragg: Threats to historical cemeteries in area not new About 30 relatives gathered at the cemetery recently to place white crosses there, along with a placard with the names of 43 people their research identified as buried there. Over the years, family members have assumed responsibility for mowing and other upkeep. Outcome in doubt The state can only require the license holder to spend as much money on maintenance as its perpetual care fund earns - typically by selling plots, said Deborah Loomis, the banking agency's deputy general counsel, and Stephanie Newburg, the department's deputy commissioner. Since Foresthaven has sold so few plots over the years, they said, its income has been negligible, limiting the banking department's enforcement authority. "Unfortunately, because it is such a small cemetery with such a small perpetual care fund, I don't know that there is going to be a positive outcome," Newburg said. After more than a year of struggle, however, the families are hopeful. Seeliger and his wife, Gail, drove from their home in North Texas to join the recent family gathering at the cemetery. Seeliger grew up in the Aldine area and, as a teenager, helped dig the grave of his grandfather, Gus Seeliger. "This may be our last shot," Gail Seeliger said, "but we gave it a good fight, huh?" 'Give us closure:' Families pray for resolution after graves desecrated The KIPP charter school network fired co-founder Mike Feinberg on Thursday following three allegations of sexual misconduct, ending its association with a Houston pillar who helped build KIPP into a national powerhouse and become one of the charter school movement's most visible advocates. KIPP leaders said an independent investigation found "credible evidence" that Feinberg sexually abused an underage female student in the late 1990s and offered two former employees money in exchange for a sexual relationship. Feinberg denied the allegations, and investigators hired by KIPP couldn't definitively substantiate them. Nevertheless, KIPP's local and national governing boards decided to remove Feinberg, 24 years after the charter network started in Houston. Prior to his firing, Feinberg supported KIPP schools across the country, helped grow the network nationally and maintained a seat on the KIPP Houston governing board. "In light of the nature of the allegations and the passage of time, critical facts about these events may never be conclusively determined," KIPP leaders wrote in a letter posted Thursday. "What is clear, however, is that, at a minimum, Mr. Feinberg put himself into situations where his conduct could be seriously misconstrued." More for you Police, school districts see increase in threats after Florida... INSPIRING: KIPP leaders help global partners adopt its model Feinberg's lawyer, Chris Tritico, said his client was not fully informed of the allegations or given an adequate opportunity to respond. "Mike Feinberg's contributions to education in the Houston area and the United States are significant, and they will continue for a very long time," Tritico said. "The treatment he received today from the board that he put in place is wrong, and it's not what someone who has made the contributions he's made deserves." In a statement Friday morning, Feinberg said he was "disappointed by the allegations" and the decision to fire him. "I do not condone, nor have I ever condoned, or engaged in, misconduct of this kind," Feinberg said in the statement. "These allegations were thoroughly investigated by non-biased third parties who found no wrongdoing, and the action of the KIPP Board is very disheartening." OPTIONS: Houston parents have many school choices. That can be tricky. A former teacher, Feinberg co-founded KIPP, which stands for Knowledge Is Power Program, in 1994 and helped build the organization into a nationally respected leader in education. KIPP today has 209 schools nationally serving about 90,000 students, including 30 campuses in Houston with roughly 14,000 students. Along the way, Feinberg served as one of KIPP's leading public figures, a high-energy advocate for the charter network. Parents were drawn by its strong academic results in high-poverty neighborhoods. Feinberg earned $231,885 from the Houston network and $220,241 from the national KIPP Foundation, in compensation and benefits, according to 2015-2016 tax filings. "Mike Feinberg has been deeply involved in the public charter school movement in Texas and nationally since its earliest days," Seth Winick, a spokesman for the Texas Charter Schools Association, said in a statement. "The board of the school and foundation have taken action, and we respect their decision. We are saddened by this news for all involved." Read the letter KIPP sent to employees about Feinberg's firing. Allegations and response Feinberg has been under investigation by KIPP and its legal partners since spring 2017, when a current KIPP student told school officials that Feinberg sexually abused a family member who attended KIPP Academy in the late 1990s. Feinberg served as the school's leader at the time. KIPP officials declined to elaborate on the nature of the allegations, other than to note the girl was a minor at the time of the alleged abuse. The letter indicates that KIPP leaders contacted Texas Child Protective Services and began their own investigation using an external law firm. During the review, investigators spoke with a former employee who alleged that Feinberg offered her financial support for continuing her education in exchange for a sexual relationship in the early 2000s, KIPP leaders said. Investigators also learned of a similar allegation about the same time involving a second former employee, but the employee declined to cooperate with investigators, KIPP leaders said. KIPP officials said investigators found the allegation involving a minor had "credibility," though they declined to elaborate on evidence corroborating the determination. The two harassment allegations were also deemed credible, KIPP leaders said. Investigators said they located a financial settlement involving the former employee who cooperated with the review. KIPP officials said the settlement did not stem from litigation, while Tritico said he believed the settlement came after the accuser filed a lawsuit. Tritico said Feinberg opposed the settlement and intended to take the case to trial, but "an insurance company settled the case over Mike's objections." Tritico did not know whether the insurance company represented KIPP or another organization. Tritico said it's too early to know whether Feinberg will take legal action against KIPP. He accused the organization and its legal partners of notifying Feinberg of the allegations "at the 11th hour." "There wasn't any of the rudiments that you would expect of due process and notice and fairness, quite frankly," Tritico said. "He wasn't ever given the ability or the chance to defend himself with respect to these allegations." KIPP officials said Feinberg was allowed to remain on the job throughout the investigation, which spanned nearly a year. He was directed not to be alone with students, and top executives in Houston and KIPP's national organization were aware of the investigation, KIPP officials said. Feinberg continued to attend events where children were present, including the unveiling of a sponsorship agreement at a Houston campus in December. KIPP leaders have encouraged anyone with knowledge of additional allegations to come forward and contact the Washington, D.C.-based law firm WilmerHale. A new vision Feinberg and his roommate, fellow Teach For America alumnus Dave Levin, opened KIPP's first school when they were in their mid-20s, educating about 50 students inside a Houston ISD campus on the city's west side. "This kind of program is where I want to be as a teacher," Feinberg told the Chronicle in 1994. "If the results are good, then we continue, but if not, then it's back to the drawing board. We're just one example of the things Houston Teach For America teachers are trying." Levin left the school after one year, choosing to open another KIPP campus in New York City. Feinberg stayed behind, continuing as the leader of the flagship school. He instituted longer school days, required parental involvement and instilled a no-excuses attitude. The approach worked, and as word spread of KIPP, Feinberg planned expansion across Houston. Unlike some charter school networks, KIPP grew methodically, gradually growing to about 30 campuses. It now boasts schools in 20-plus states and the District of Columbia. In an interview Thursday evening, KIPP Houston Superintendent Sehba Ali said the schools will continue their work. "It's important to note KIPP is bigger than one person," she said. "We have a promise that we've made to our kids to do everything we can to help them get to and through college and to lead successful lives, and we are fully focused on that." Outside, it looks primitive and make-do: A series of lightweight tents, tied down to the ground with rope. Inside, it is a fully functioning hospital that can be set up anywhere there's an emergency medical need - whether it's a typhoon or an earthquake, a desert or a war zone. The Samaritan's Purse emergency field hospital has helped save lives in earthquake-stricken Ecuador and in Mosul, Iraq. The hospital makes its own oxygen and offers high-quality care to people who are injured by war. A small version of the hospital - which can treat 100 patients and have up to 25 surgeries per day when fully deployed - is on display this weekend at Lakewood Church for the Mobilizing Medical Missions Conference, known as M3. The conference is designed to recruit doctors and nurses, dentists and IT professionals - anyone who wants to help, really - to assist with survival or rebuilding in global crisis spots. More than 75 mission organizations from across the country have come to Houston for the conference, which starts Friday morning. More Information M3 Medical Missions Conference When: Friday-Saturday Where: Lakewood Church, 3700 Southwest Freeway, Houston Registration: $40-$80 Information:m3missions.com See More Collapse "The M3 conference is about connecting the needs with the resources," said Dr. Paul Osteen, who ran the hospital in Mosul last year as part of his ministry with the Osteen family, including his brother, Lakewood pastor Joel Osteen. 'Bombs going off' For 12 years, Paul Osteen has spent about a third of each year working in similar tents in sub-Saharan Africa. He went to Mosul for two months in 2017 and oversaw the medical teams that helped a country torn apart by ISIS. "We'd be flooded with severely injured (people), mostly civilians," Osteen said. "Mortars, snipers, car bombs - they were very, very ill and our job was to stop the bleeding and stabilize the patients." That involved a triage room, an ICU, an operating room and many more facilities - all set up in tents surrounded by a cement wall. The wall and guards protected the volunteer doctors and nurses, and an underground bunker provided additional shelter if needed. But it was still a dangerous place to work, volunteers said. "We could hear the bombs going off all the time," said Kelly Sites, a Disaster Assistance Response Team nurse who spent several weeks in Mosul last year. "We could feel the ground shaking as we were working. We were absolutely in the middle of it." Not just war zones That doesn't mean every volunteer who signs up for an M3 mission will end up in a war zone. The M3 conference offers opportunities for people to join missions, orphan care or projects that benefit sanitation, hygiene, human trafficking, poverty or injustice. "We have 75 mission organizations and all of them need help," Osteen said. "They have tangible ways people can give." Osteen, 62, launched the M3 conference a few years ago, after he was flying back from one of his long stints in Africa working with Samaritan's Purse, a nondenominational relief and aid charity run by Franklin Graham, son of evangelist Billy Graham. Osteen had spent four months helping patients at a hospital in western Zambia, near Angola - and as he prepared to leave, a physician there said to him: "Do you realize you're the only qualified surgeon in an area the size of Louisiana?" The need for a missions project formed. "I began to think about all those moms who needed a C-section, who needed health care," he said. A day later, as he flew back to Houston, he said he saw the skyline of the Texas Medical Center and realized he could match needs with abilities. "I just thought: What would happen if we connected the desperate needs with the incredible resources we have here in Houston?" This weekend, people can find ways they can help, whether it's volunteering for a stint in Haiti, Kenya, Guatemala, Mexico or Uganda, or training physicians who will go to war-torn countries. There are also volunteer opportunities stateside. "Sometimes you see the statistics and the numbers and you think, 'how can I help?'" Osteen said. "M3 is saying: You can help. You can make a difference. Just do your part." SAN ANTONIO -- Texas state Sen. Carlos Uresti and co-defendant Gary Cain were found guilty Thursday on 20 combined felony charges in a month-long criminal fraud trial that has stunned San Antonio and the state capitol. Uresti and Cain face the possibility of years in federal prison and up to millions in fines when they are sentenced by Senior U.S. District Judge David Ezra on June 25. Hours after the verdictl, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick took steps to remove the San Antonio Democrat from his committee assignments in the state Senate, "effective immediately." Uresti and Cain were convicted in federal court here of defrauding investors in the now-defunct company FourWinds Logistics, which bought and sold sand used in fracking for oil production before it collapsed in 2015. Uresti, 54, was convicted on 11 criminal charges while Cain, 61, was convicted on 9 charges. "Today, justice was done," U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Texas John Bash said in a statement. "It's a somber day for the state, for the city because whenever someone who's in a position of public trust defrauds other people and causes harm to other people, that's very sad." He said he hoped the verdict sends a message to others: "it doesn't matter your status in government or in the community. If you commit fraud, you're going to be held accountable." Amid a throng of media outside the courthouse, Uresti said he was disappointed with the verdict, apologized to his wife and resolved to keep his Senate seat -- despite a call from state Democrats to reconsider his role in politics. Uresti said the verdict was "a shock" when asked about how this would impact him politically. "This is not the verdict we were expecting, so I'm going to meet with my family and my wife and my attorneys and we'll make those decisions down the road." Uresti said he has no plans to step down from office and will appeal the ruling. "Absolutely," he said when asked if he would appeal. "And those are the things we're going to discuss with our lawyers as well." Cain hasn't decided whether he'll appeal yet, according to his lead lawyer Charles "Chad" Muller. Uresti is already facing pressure to step down in the Senate, with Patrick announcing plans hours after his conviction to remove him from all of his committee posts. "Though I recognize that Sen. Uresti is entitled to exercise his right to appeal, my first priority is to the people of Texas," Patrick said in a statement, adding that he doesn't have the authority to remove him from office. Uresti is vice chairman of the Health & Human Services Committee and has posts on the Education, Finance and Veterans Affairs and Border Security panels. The Texas Democratic Party also issued a statement pressuring Uresti to reconsider his position in the state Senate, saying "no one is ever above the law." "After being found guilty of such serious crimes, Senator Uresti must seriously consider whether he can serve his constituents," said party spokesman Tariq Thowfeek. The verdict came after 11 hours of jury deliberations over three days following a month of sometimes salacious testimony involving prostitutes, sex, drugs and deceit at FourWinds. Former CEO Stan Bates pleaded guilty to criminal fraud charges last month, admitting that he misused investor money for his own pleasure. The ex-Marine fostered a bacchanalian atmosphere at the company, former employees testified. Some employees said Bates appeared to have a cocaine habit and used company cash on hookers, expensive cars and to pay for his son's fraternity dues. Prosecutors called FourWinds a Ponzi scheme. Bash said FourWinds lured investors with "false pretenses, false promises, misrepresentations, including altered bank statements ... A lot of that money went to pay prior investors, a lot of that money went to personal expenses by the co-conspirators -- everything from gifts and travel and luxury vehicles to controlled substances, even prostitutes." Although the defense team acknowledged that FourWinds was a scam, they tried to convince the jury that Uresti didn't know until it was too late and shouldn't be convicted as a result. "Carelessness, negligence, foolishness," Uresti lawyer Tab Turner told jurors in closing arguments Tuesday. "The law says you have to have criminal intent." The courtroom was opened shortly after 10 a.m. as defense lawyers and prosecutors were informed by court staff to return for the verdict. Uresti stared emotionless at the courtroom deputy as she read the verdict to the packed room -- turning to face the jury for the last two charges. Cain also showed no reaction in the courtroom, but he wiped away tears as he left. Uresti's wife Lleanna, who missed the verdict, held her husband in a long embrace outside the courtroom. None of the eight men and four women on the jury would comment to reporters as they left the courthouse. Uresti, who didn't testify in his own defense during the month-long trial, isn't required to give up his seat even though he's now a convicted felon. Texas ethics rules allow him to remain in office until he exhausts the appeals process. However, there could be renewed calls for him to end his nearly 21-year political career now that he's been found guilty and facing jail time. Uresti said he has no plans to step down from office and will appeal the ruling. The State Bar of Texas likely will soon seek compulsory discipline against Uresti, who has been a licensed attorney for more than 25 years. Uresti's license would be suspended during any appeal; otherwise he faces disbarment and the loss of his livelihood as a convicted criminal. It was Uresti's legal dealings that landed him in federal prosecutors' cross hairs in the first place. The lawmaker was part of the team of attorneys that secured a $2.5 million out-of-court settlement for Denise Cantu of Harlingen in 2012 following the deaths of two of her children in a vehicle rollover two years earlier. Uresti recommended Cantu, 38, invest some of her settlement in FourWinds, which prosecutors say was a Ponzi scheme that squandered investors' money. Cantu invested $900,000 and lost $800,000. She has sued him for fraud and the case is pending. Uresti told Cantu the FourWinds investment was "guaranteed," "good as gold" and she could get her money back if she wasn't satisfied, she testified during the trial. Besides recruiting investors, Uresti also was FourWinds' outside legal counsel and a 1 percent owner of the company. Prosecutors said Uresti had financial difficulties that led him to "groom" Cantu, becoming her friend, confidant and financial adviser before drawing her into a sexual relationship. Cantu, the government's star witness, revealed details of their relationship -- testifying how Uresti first told her she looked "sexy" while they were attending a deposition in her wrongful-death case and how they exchanged sexually explicit texts. She also testified they had sex in the bathroom shower at his law office. He has denied being sexually involved with her. During the trial, an Internal Revenue Service investigator told jurors how none of Cantu's money ever went to buy sand. Instead, the money was used to pay an earlier FourWinds investor. Cantu wired $800,000 to a FourWinds entity to buy sand in June 2014. A week later $700,000 of that money went to FourWinds' operating account at Chase. The company then cut a $40,000 check to the Uresti Law Firm that was deposited in its trust account. Uresti told the San Antonio Express-News in a 2016 recorded interview that was played for the jury by prosecutors that the loan was "kind of like an advance on future commissions (and) future legal work." Trust accounts generally are set up for holding client funds that are meant to be kept separate from a lawyer's own money. Cantu and a group of Mexican nationals that invested in the company testified they were not aware that Uresti stood to get a cut of their profits. The Mexicans, in particular, said they would never have agreed to that since Uresti was holding their money as an escrow agent and that would have been a conflict of interest. Outside of the jury's presence last week, Ezra said FourWinds was a "scam from the get-go" because Bates misrepresented the company to investors. Investors' money was used to fund FourWinds' launch, according to evidence presented during the trial. None of FourWinds' principals put in any of their own money to start the company, though Bates told investors he put in $2 million of his own money and passed around a fraudulent bank statement claiming that it had almost $19 million in the bank. Friends warned Uresti about Bates, calling him a "complete con man" and a "shady individual," testimony during the trial revealed. Yet the lawmaker seemed to have blinders on in his dealings with Bates. The pair are ex-Marines and government witnesses said Uresti told potential investors that a Marine is an "honorable person" you can trust. A FourWinds office manager testified that the company had a reputation as a "brothel" that employed "surgically enhanced women" and let workers booze it up. Witnesses also testified that he thought Bates might have been using cocaine. Bates pleaded guilty to eight felony charges last month rather than stand trial. He was the fourth company official to plead guilty in the case. Bates brought on Uresti co-defendant Cain as a company consultant to find financing for the business on the recommendation of Uresti and Bexar County District Attorney Nico LaHood. Cain and LaHood were business partners in Trinity Global Funding & Consulting for a time when Cain became involved with FourWinds. Prosecutors say Cain knew about the fraud at FourWinds a month after joining the company in September 2014. Two months earlier, a Bexar County jury acquitted Cain of swindling Rackspace Hosting Inc. in a 2007 land deal. LaHood was part of Cain's defense team. Cain, who took the stand in his own defense, said it wasn't until early 2016 -- several months after he parted ways with FourWinds -- that he learned the full scope of how officials there mishandled investor money. In a November 2015 sworn statement made in Bates' personal bankruptcy case, however, Cain said he noticed irregularities with FourWinds' financial records in late 2014 or early 2015. "I ... saw evidence of misuse of investor funds including commingling (and) failure to return funds to investor accounts," Cain said in the affidavit. Despite this knowledge, Cain continued to be paid a $15,000 consulting fee every two weeks until he parted ways with FourWinds in May 2015. Uresti has other legal matters hanging over his head. The legislator is accused in another criminal case of using his consulting business -- Turning Point Solutions -- to split $850,000 in bribes with Jimmy Galindo, a former county court judge in Reeves County in West Texas. Galindo has pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit bribery and failure to file a 2013 tax return. The case against Uresti is scheduled for trial in May in the same San Antonio courthouse that he has spent almost the last five weeks in. The Securities and Exchange Commission has an ongoing civil investigation into the FourWinds case. An SEC official from Fort Worth was present for Cantu's testimony. For the first time this primary election season, Land Commissioner George P. Bush and his predecessor Jerry Patterson spoke on the same stage Thursday night in Houston. They didn't debate or speak at the same time. Nonetheless, it was a rare joint appearance by the Land Office Republican candidates, who spoke at the Texas Latino GOP PAC's Tough Tejano Gala, an event aimed at growing the presence of Latinos in the Republican party. Despite being in a hotly contested race for the General Land Office, the two didn't take any overt political jabs against each other. Instead they spoke of the importance that Latinos play in the GOP. Bush emphasized the need to grow the number of Latinos in the Republican party and encouraged more conservative Latinos to run for office. "When they're in office, we need support their important work, and do more to support them in their efforts to get re-elected," Bush said. "Ever since I was in office, y'all have supported me and worked with me, and I thank you for that," said Bush who went on to emphasize his work in making the GLO "more conservative and more effective than it's ever been." Patterson, his predecessor who was in charge of the GLO for 12 years, was seated just a dozen feet away. Bush is seeking reelection to serve a second term as Texas' Land Commissioner, but he is facing three Republican challengers, including Patterson, who has been highly outspoken and critical of Bush. The two have not shared a stage at any forums, debates or other public events since Patterson announced in December he would challenge Bush. "Commissioner Bush, good to see you out and about. We appreciate that," said Patterson, prior to Bush taking the stage. "No politics tonight though." As the primary election nears, Bush and Patterson have intensified their attacks against each other on social media and in the press. Patterson has criticized Bush's handling of housing recovery efforts in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey and the redevelopment of the land around the Alamo. He has also called out Bush for not showing up to candidate forums or publicizing campaign events. Bush, on the other hand, has said he is focused on doing his job as Land Commissioner and touts that he drastically cut the size of the General Land Office after he took over. The campaign has splashed campaign ads against Jerry Patterson criticizing him for not supporting President Donald Trump. At the gala, the men were seated just one table from one another during dinner. After the speeches were over, a large group of people approached Bush. He spent some time taking photos and answering question from those in attendance. As Bush walked out of the event to his campaign van, a Houston Chronicle reporter tried to ask Bush how he plans to reach out to more Latino voters. But an organizer of the event physically blocked the reporter, saying the campaign had been promised members of the media would not be present. Democratic Party infighting has erupted over a key Houston congressional race, rekindling some of the tension between members loyal to Bernie Sanders and those who backed Hillary Clinton in 2016. It ramped up after the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee late Thursday launched a series of attacks against Democrat Laura Moser, claiming she is too flawed a candidate to win in November against Republican incumbent John Culberson. The race has emerged as one of the most important seats in the nation for Democrats to win as they try to regain control of Congress from Republicans. Moser was endorsed two weeks ago by Our Revolution, a group formed by Sanders supporters after 2016. "Democratic voters need to hear that Laura Moser is not going to change Washington," the DCCC states on its website in an extraordinary attack against one of its own candidates. "She is a Washington insider who begrudgingly moved to Houston to run for Congress." It is an unusually aggressive move by the DCCC in the middle of a primary in which the voting is already almost half over. Early voting for the March 6 election began Tuesday and runs through March 2. Moser and her allies are lashing back at the national effort to swing a Houston election. "We're used to tough talk here in Texas, but it's disappointing to hear it from Washington operatives trying to tell Texans what to do," Moser said in a statement to the media. "These kind of tactics are why people hate politics," she continued. "The days when party bosses picked the candidates in their smoke filled rooms are over. DC needs to let Houston vote." But DCCC officials say the problem is Moser has left a trail of documents that make her a weak general election candidate in the must-win 7th Congressional District in Houston. That race is crucial to Democrats' hopes of winning back the majority in the U.S. House. The DCCC has made Culberson, R-Houston, one of their biggest targets in 2018. Culberson has been in office since 2000 and has had no trouble winning his re-elections. However, in 2016, Democrats say Clinton did so well in the district that Culberson could be defeated. Clinton won 48.5 percent of the vote to Trump's 47.1 percent in 2016. "I've never heard of anything like that before," Culberson said in Houston of the Democrats' actions. "It sounds like two factions of their party don't agree on something. I'm just focusing on winning my primary, which I think I will." National Democratic campaign officials offered no apologies for their Texas incursion. "We don't do this lightly," said Meredith Kelly, a spokeswoman for the DCCC. "This shows how important Texas 7 is for us." The DCCC chairman is U.S. Ben Ray Lujan, a New Mexico Democrat, who endorsed Clinton in the 2016 primaries. Moser also was a Clinton supporter D.C. ties at issue At the heart of the DCCC's concern is a comment Moser gave a Washington, D.C. publication in 2014 in which she is quoted saying that she'd rather have her "teeth pulled without anesthesia" than return to Paris, Texas, to work. That quote was in a November 2014, Washingtonian magazine story. In January 2018, Moser was still listed as receiving a homestead exemption on her property taxes on Washington, D.C. property she owns. That exemption is only available to people who claim D.C. as their home. As of Friday, that homestead exemption had been removed from Moser's D.C. property. If Moser were to win the primary, Democrats worry that her D.C. ties and her comments about not wanting to return to Texas could jeopardize the party's efforts to win the seat. Moser said she can explain both issues easily and says neither is a crippling blow as the DCCC is making them out to be. She said her comments in the Washingtonian was about moving to more rural areas like Paris, Texas specifically and not Houston. She said no one in Houston would mistake her not wanting to return to Paris, as being opposed to Houston. As for the homestead, Moser explained she moved back to Houston in April 2017 and have since fixed the exemption. Moser left Houston in 1999 and returned to the area last year. She said given how many people have moved to Houston over the years, she doesn't think her residency issues will be a big issue for voters. "I'm as rooted as anyone could be here," Moser said of her family roots in the area. The DCCC has not endorsed any of the other candidates running in the race. Progressive Democratic groups are blasting the DCCC for getting into the race, and some are defending Moser. "DCCC's actions unfortunately reveal a party establishment cracking down on leaders who challenge their ways of doing things," a statement from Justice Democrats on social media stated. 'Throwing bombs' Democracy for America's editorial director Annie Weinberg also took issue with the DCCC. "The idea that some faceless hacks are calling themselves Democrats while sitting in a D.C. office throwing bombs at a pro-Choice Democratic woman in support of a lawyer who built a career at a law firm for union-busters is precisely why Democrats lost over 1,000 elected offices over the last decade," Weinberg said in a statement on Democracy for America's social media sites. Moser, a writer and activist, has ties to former President Barack Obama. Her husband, filmmaker Arun Chaudhary, worked on Obama's 2008 campaign and became the first official videographer of the White House. Following the 2016 election, she founded Daily Action, a text-messaging service focusing on liberal causes and opposition to the GOP agenda under Trump. At its peak, she says, the service engaged 300,000 people in direct calls to action. Moser was born and raised in the Southside Place area of Houston and graduated from St. John's, an elite prep school in the city. Democratic activist groups have been fractured in the 7th Congressional District from the start. Democratic challengers: Here are the seven Democrats hoping to beat Rep. John Culberson While Moser has Our Revolution backing, Democrat Lizzie Pannill Fletcher picked up the endorsement from the influential EMILY's List. Jason Westin has an endorsement from the Blue America PAC, founded by music producer and liberal provocateur Howie Klein. Nonprofit executive Alex Triantaphyllis meanwhile continues to have big support from Democratic donors having raised more than $1 million for his campaign and won an endorsement from the late-Gov. Mark White before he died last year. Democrat James Cargas, meanwhile has an endorsement from the local chapter of the Communications Workers of America. The race also includes Democrats Ivan Sanchez and Joshua Butler. Jeremy Wallace writes about state politics and government for the Chronicle. Follow him on Twitter at @JeremySWallace. The tragic death of a Border Patrol agent in West Texas is a sad reminder that the politics around immigration and border security is too often based on distortions, partisan posturing and outright lies. This dishonest debate has real impact on immigrants and law enforcement. Border Patrol agents Rogelio Martinez and Stephen Garland were badly injured late at night on Nov. 18 near Van Horn. Martinez died a few hours later. RELATED: A border patrol agent is dead, and Texas deserves answers Before an investigation could begin, President Donald Trump, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Gov. Greg Abbott all said the agents had been attacked and renewed their calls for increased security on the U.S.-Mexico border. They never talked to Culberson County Sheriff Oscar Carrillo, one of the first responders to the injured agents. He said the talk of an attack was ill-informed and said their injuries were consistent with a fall. Carrillo was criticized by the National Border Patrol Council and others for daring to say what he saw. But earlier this month, after 10 weeks of investigation, the FBI issued a statement saying it had found no evidence of an attack. Though the investigation continues, the FBI said evidence points to a fall or accident as the likely cause of the agents' injuries. RARE VAGRANTS: We must live the idea of America as a welcoming nation The FBI has conducted a thorough investigation and continues to do so. More than 650 people have been interviewed, and the bureau brought in numerous outside experts to assist. Kevin McAleenan, the acting commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, sent an email to agents saying "no viable evidence against any criminal element has been developed." RELATED: Trump plan for Dreamers crafted from Jell-O and metal U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, tweeted in November that he promised Martinez's mother "that we will find out who is responsible and hold them accountable," but he didn't try to advance a political agenda. After the FBI report, Cornyn stepped forward as a statesman. "I just think that maybe it's a cautionary tale that all of us need to take a deep breath when things like this happen and realize that we don't have all the information and wait until we get a little more information before reaching conclusions," he said. What do Trump, Cruz and Abbott have to say now? Nothing. FAKE BORDER NEWS: Contrary to Trump's rhetoric, illegal crossings have been on the decline for years They decided early on to exploit a Border Patrol agent's death for their political purposes. They were far from alone. Political and media figures have continually pushed a distorted portrayal of immigrants and the border as a way to advocate for increased border security and decreased immigration. Facts simply aren't important. This approach makes the jobs of Border Patrol agents more difficult. If what happened in Van Horn was an accident, the Border Patrol should review training and take the necessary steps to better protect agents in the field. TRANSPARENT: Trump's border wall has nothing to do with keeping the Texas border secure. Surprised? The Border Patrol's records over the past decade show that agents are far more likely to die in an on-the-job accident than in a confrontation with criminals. Since 2010, one Border Patrol agent was shot to death by a criminal while on duty; one was killed in a friendly fire incident with fellow agents; and 10 were killed in automobile accidents. This reality doesn't fit neatly into the border security narrative, so you don't see Trump, Abbott or Cruz taking to Twitter to urge a focus on better protecting agents against accidents. Whether Agent Martinez died as the result of a homicide or an accident, his loss is a tragedy for his family, the Border Patrol and the nation. Those who rushed to politicize his death acted shamefully. This tragedy should serve as a lesson to those who willfully distort the truth about immigration and border security. These are complex, important subjects that deserve robust but honest debate. That would be the best way to honor Agent Martinez's sacrifice. Houston Independent School District has been getting a lot of attention lately, from budget cuts to the threat of a state takeover. Little attention has been placed, however, on the families and children most affected by these changes. While budget cuts remain largely administrative, school performance is not. In the era of increased accountability, blame often falls on school district administration and principals for how children perform in school, but many years of research demonstrate that academic performance can be affected by many other factors such as neighborhood violence, food insecurity and the physical and mental health of the children attending school. For instance, a study by University of Illinois at Chicago researcher Marcus Casey and colleagues on the impact of neighborhood crime on standardized test scores in Chicago found violence negatively impacted test scores, and schools where violent crimes took place were less likely to meet accountability standards. Additionally, numerous studies have also found that food insecurity, depression and bullying all have a negative impact on academic performance. In a study of academic performance conducted within a large, urban school district that analyzed data from a wide range of schools, from improvement required (IR) to met standard (MS), my colleagues and I also found that social and mental health needs were correlated with worse academic performance. In each of the participating schools, we surveyed students and their parents about student physical and mental health, food insecurity, neighborhood violence, bullying and a variety of other factors that could influence a child's well-being. For example, we found that bullied children were more likely to report symptoms of depression as well as fail a grade. In some schools, students who witnessed neighborhood violence were almost five times as likely to fail a grade than students who had not. The correlation between worse academic performance and negative factors was consistent across all schools, yet the main difference between the IR schools and the MS schools was the percentage of students who suffered from negative factors such as depression, neighborhood violence or food insecurity within the school. In a cohort of 10 IR schools, 25 percent of high school students, 16 percent of middle school students and 18 percent of elementary students reported symptoms of depression. Moreover, 1 in 5 students are food insecure, and 16 percent of middle and high school students have witnessed a murder or shooting in their neighborhood. In comparison, the percentage of students experiencing negative factors is significantly lower in the 11 met standard schools we surveyed. For instance, only 10 percent of students are food insecure, only 7 percent of middle and high school students witnessed a murder or shooting in their neighborhood and only 14 percent of all students in MS schools reported depressive symptoms. Further data analysis needs to be performed, but the stark contrast between student needs and experiences at IR versus MS schools is evident. The schools designated as IR have a much higher concentration of students who experienced factors that correlate with worse academic performance. One solution could be to close schools with a large number of students with depression, trauma and hunger and distribute those students throughout the school district so that their poor performance does not affect the overall rating of the school. This approach does not address the underlying problem, however, nor does it ensure educational equity for the students affected. Instead, already-depressed and traumatized students will have to wake up earlier to catch a bus to go to a new school away from established support systems, such as the principal and teachers accustomed to working with children with complex social and emotional needs. Further, parents who may already have a difficult time engaging in their child's school will have additional challenges of transportation to the new school. An equitable approach would be to identify the needs of the students in the IR schools and develop wraparound services in partnership with the community to address those needs, which many school districts, including HISD, have started to do. Despite mounting evidence that existing accountability measures may not be the best metric for evaluating teacher and principal effectiveness, HISD is under pressure from the state to turn around its troubled schools in a year. Yet, the state must give the district time for recent comprehensive strategies to make an impact. Depression, trauma from neighborhood violence and food insecurity did not develop overnight and will not be solved overnight, particularly in light of the exacerbation of these factors from Hurricane Harvey. Accountability measures need to take into account the community they aim to serve and protect - the students - and look at the whole student, not just how he or she performed on a state test. Moore is the Baker Institute Fellow in Child Health Policy. Ron Jenkins/Stringer Early voting has started in Texas' spring primary elections, and the initial Democratic turnout is reported to be at record levels. Republicans, on the other hand, seem focused on attacking each other in several high-profile contests. Gov. Abbott is campaigning not just for himself, but against three Republican incumbents in the Texas House -- Sarah Davis of Houston, Lyle Larson of San Antonio and Wayne Faircloth in Galveston. The split in GOP ranks stems from a throwdown over ethics the lawmakers had with the governor last year. We need to understand if, how, and where we made errors so that we can apply those learnings in the future in our management practice and embed them in our culture, it added. The scope of the review will include all actions taken with respect to the specific incidents, current management practices and policies in relation to preventing sexual harassment and supporting those who wish to make complaints, and the organisational culture of the firm. The reviewer will also make appropriate recommendations for change and will have full access to all material and staff. Current employees will be expected to participate in the review while former staff and summer clerks will also be invited to participate. The move comes after serious allegations were made by two young women following a student law-clerk Christmas party in Wellington more than two years ago. A third incident took place in a bar and resulted in a police complaint. The incidents involved two older male lawyers, both of whom no longer work for the company although one does continue to offer his expertise to the firm on occasion. China to impose annual fishing ban in Yellow River from 2018: Report February 19,2018 | Source: Reuters China will ban fishing in the Yellow River, or Huanghe, between April 1 and June 30 every year starting from 2018, state-owned media Xinhua reported on Monday, citing a statement from the Ministry of Agriculture. The ban aims to protect aquatic organisms in the Yellow River as excessive fishing threatens fishery resources, and will be effective in the main stream, 13 tributaries and three major lakes linking to the Yellow River. China has introduced annual fishing ban in the Yangtze River since 2002 and in the Pearl River, its No.3, since 2010. The Yellow River is the second longest river in China after the Yangtze River. It originates from the Qinghai province in the northwest and flows through the central-north part of the country, including the provinces of Gansu, Inner Mongolia, Ningxia, Shaanxi, Shanxi, Henan and Shandong. In recent years, some regions, such as Ningxia and Gansu, have introduced fishing bans in the Yellow River during certain periods. However, illegal fishing remains rampant due to a lack of collaborated regulatory enforcement across regions. China is also considering imposing annual fishing ban in more rivers. Thomson Reuters 2018 Theme(s): Fisheries Development and Aquaculture. Seychelles designates huge new marine reserve February 22,2018 | Source: AFP A vast new marine protected area has been created in the Indian Ocean around the Seychelle islands, the government announced Thursday. The 210,000-square-kilometre (81,000-square-mile) zone an area equivalent to nearly half of the Black Sea is intended to protect both the sea and the archipelagos economy, which relies on fishing and tourism. Our large ocean brings development opportunities but also responsibility, said Environment Minister Didier Dogley. Our ocean is central to our development and for the future of generations to come. Dogley described the initiative as a paradigm shift on how we manage and use our coastal and ocean resources. It is the result of a ground-breaking financial deal, brokered in 2016 by American NGO the Nature Conservancy. Under it, $21 million (17 million euros) of government debt was swapped for conservation funding to protect the low-lying, ocean-dependent nation against the effects of climate change, including warming, rising and acidifying seas. The deal, which covers roughly 15 percent of Seychelles exclusive economic zone, was partly funded by a foundation chaired by Hollywood actor and environmental activist Leonardo DiCaprio. This effort will help the people of Seychelles protect their ocean for future generations, and will serve as a model for future marine conservation projects worldwide, said DiCaprio. These protections mean that all species living in these waters or migrating through them are now far better shielded from overfishing, pollution, and climate change. Almost one-third of the new reserve will be off-limits to all fishing. The remaining area will allow small-scale, local fishing but ban trawlers from the countrys $300 million fishing industry. The new protected areas include the remote Aldabra atolls, home to nesting seabirds, hawksbill turtles, giant tortoises and the dugong, or sea cow. Dogley said that by 2020 close to a third of Seychelles waters will be protected with a new spatial plan for ocean use to prevent unregulated and illegal fishing as well as oil and gas exploration, deep-sea mining and dredging. The Nature Conservancys president, Mark Tercek, said the Seychelles would be a model for the rest of the world. What you see today in Seychelles is what we expect to introduce in the Caribbean and other ocean regions facing the threats of climate change, he said. 2018 The Citizen Theme(s): Others. I'm looking at an intimidating 800-page binder as I write this article. It contains confidential information about a new product category. When I prepare the company's leaders to launch the product, I'll be thinking about a technique Steve Jobs and Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin used brilliantly: Don't start with the product details; tell people why the product will change their life. In any presentation, your listeners are asking themselves one question. It's the most important question for you to answer and the one question that matters most: Why should I care? It may come as shock, but your customers don't care about your product, service, company, or idea. They care about themselves--their hopes, dreams, and quality of life. Tell them how your product will improve their life and you'll have their attention. Steve Jobs once said that people don't want to know about computers; they want to know how computers will help them live better. "You've got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology--not the other way around," Jobs said. Steve Jobs explained the why before the how. Jobs applied this concept to presentations by explaining the why before the how. For example, few people recall how much storage was built in to the original iPod (5 GB), but they can recall that it made it possible to carry a thousand songs in your pocket; "1,000 songs in your pocket" became one of the most iconic taglines in product history. But it started when Jobs asked a fundamental question--why should Apple's customers care about a new MP3 player? In 2008, Jobs launched a notebook computer with these specs: a 13.3-inch LED backlit display, a full-size keyboard, 1.6GHz processor, and a unibody aluminum design. Those were the details, but the specs didn't sell the benefit of the product. When Jobs pitched the first MacBook Air, he simply said: "In a sentence, it's the world's thinnest notebook." In one sentence, Jobs explained the why (the benefit of the product) before expanding on the how (the details of how they managed to squeeze so much power into a thin computer). The Google guys captivate an investor with one sentence. "A great leader can strip down a complicated product to its essence," famed venture capitalist Michael Moritz once told me as he recalled the day two Stanford graduate students--Sergey Brin and Larry Page--pitched a company they called Google. When Page and Brin walked into the offices of Sequoia Capital, they presented investor Moritz with a one-sentence summary of their product that was irresistible in its simplicity. In one sentence, it answered the question, Why should a customer care? The pitch went like this: "Google organizes the world's information and makes it accessible." It was clear and unmistakable. Once the investors were satisfied that the technology was capable of doing what the Google founders said it could do, they bought it. But they were hooked by the opening sentence. How to create a pitch line. Every time I'm asked to meet with senior leaders about a new product, I urge them to create a pitch line--one sentence that sells the benefit of the product, answering the question, why should I care? The answer should be short (140 characters) and free of jargon or buzzwords that take up space without answering the question. For example, I once worked with executives at Toshiba America Medical Systems to help them launch a CT brain-scan machine. Here is how they first described it: It's the first dynamic high-volume CT that utilizes 320 ultra high-resolution detector rows to image an entire organ in a single gantry rotation. I told them it was too complex, abstract, and failed to answer the one question that matters most. "Why should I care?" I asked over and over. Finally, out of frustration, one of the leaders blurted out, "Look, Carmine, if you have a stroke and our product is in the hospital, doctors will be able to make a far more accurate diagnosis much faster than before. Our product could mean the difference between going home and living a full life or never recognizing your family again." "Why didn't you just say so?" I responded. "I'm sold." No matter your position or industry, hiring can be painful. On average, each corporate job posting attracts 250 resumes. That's a lot of time to review resumes, let alone interview candidates and deliberate with colleagues. When your company is small and not well known, it's even more of a challenge. A 2015 Bank of America survey found that small-business owners struggled to hire the right talent: 45 percent cited that salary expectations were too high. 29 percent believed candidates preferred to work for a large or midsize brand. 26 percent said candidates wanted benefits they did not provide. To compete with the big players, you must find a way to focus on the opportunities and experience your company offers candidates. Here's how to recruit top talent as a fast-growing -- but small -- startup. 1. Offer stock options at the ground level. Here's one of bootstrapping's benefits. I can give all full-time employees shares at the ground level. That way, if we're acquired or go through an IPO, all employees have the chance to make it big. That opportunity increases significantly as we grow from my team's hard work, thus giving everyone more ownership over the company's destiny. 2. Already have a tight-knit, fun, smart team. At a startup -- especially in the early days -- you'll likely be working with a small team. In a small-team dynamic, each person has greater presence and influence. This is both a blessing and a curse. But when you have a great team already at your company, it's a great recruitment tool. If all team members are engaged and excited about work, you can showcase an environment (the right) candidates will want to work in. To achieve this, hire for the right culture fit. In a small team, a cultural misfit is all the more noticeable. For my team, that means candidates who are passionate about their craft, care about making an impact, and are excited about learning. I also look for a bit of quirkiness, too. It makes things more fun. 3. Give complete ownership of a business area. By the nature of a startup, there will be endless amounts of work to do and few hands to do it. This can be overwhelming to some, but it can be a fantastic opportunity for others. If you can give a new employee full ownership over an area of the business, communicate it right off the bat. This is a huge selling point. The opportunity to independently develop, manage, and be held accountable for a strategy provides massive career growth. And it's the type of opportunity that doesn't often come up in a larger company. 4. Offer work on cool, challenging problems. Here's another way to showcase opportunity over brand name. Offer interesting and unique challenges someone can really sink their teeth into. Know your niche and sell it. For us, our niche is our global reach. When recruiting our current content manager, she knew she could write and publish blog articles for any tech company, but at LogoMix, she could develop and launch a company's first global content marketing strategy. That was unique, and it was too good an opportunity to pass up. 5. Remember to hire for the right reasons. It's easy to get overexcited about a rock-star candidate. But at the end of the day, you need to be a great fit for them. Ask questions about what they're looking for in their next role, and learn about their work environment preferences. Sometimes, we find people who would be fantastic for us, but we're just not what they're looking for in a company. We don't try to convince them otherwise. Small-business owners are still grappling with Facebook's announcement last month that it is shaking up its news feed algorithm. The changes are expected to make it harder for companies to reach their followers, threatening one of entrepreneurs' most important digital marketing channels -- and leaving lots of questions about what comes next. With the change, Facebook news feeds will become more personal. Users will see more posts from family and friends, and fewer posts from businesses, brands, and national media outlets. It's an attempt by the social media giant to cut the clutter and emphasize "meaningful social interactions." But while some users may appreciate this personal approach, the changes threaten to hurt small-business marketers. Facebook counts more than two billion users, including 68 percent of all Americans, according to the Pew Research Center. As print media and yellow pages ads lost their effectiveness in the past decade, Facebook emerged as the only reliable way to reach a large, local audience. With this change, it's become a lot less reliable. The full impact of Facebook's changes will become clearer in the coming weeks and months. In the meantime, there are a few ways you can boost your business's social presence and try to reach as many followers as possible. Here are my tips for earning a spot in Facebook's new "meaningful" news feed: 1. Listen to your customers. Social media isn't a megaphone -- it's a conversation. Respond to followers' questions, ask for their comments, and pay attention to their interests. Use Facebook Insights to see what content is most popular with your customers. Facebook rewards posts that generate likes, shares, and comments, which you can earn with content that interests followers. 2. Skip the sales messages. Stay away from overly promotional content. Your followers may be interested in your business, but they don't want to be "sold" to all the time. Instead, post content that is useful or interesting. Share your expertise by providing advice about your field, comment on trends in your industry, or share news about your community. 3. Host timely events. Creating events on Facebook is a good way to get the attention of followers -- and their friends. Because they're timely, events tend to get prominent placement in news feeds. And when one of your followers indicates that they plan to attend your event, it is shared in their friends' news feeds. If you have a brick-and-mortar business, you can schedule in-store performances, daily "happy hours," or open houses. But even if you don't have a retail location, you can post Facebook events for sales, webinars, or other "virtual" gatherings. 4. Stream live video. The social platform has been pushing Facebook Live video streaming in a big way. Videos will often earn prominent placement in news feeds, with alerts sent to your followers. It's also engaging content. Users love watching videos, and they can ask you questions (and get answers) during your live stream. Consider streaming videos of product demos, interviews with your team, or behind-the-scenes tours of your business. 5. Create or join Facebook Groups. There's no better example of Facebook's emphasis on "meaningful" content than the Groups formed by users who share a common interest. You can join or create groups around your industry, community, or topics of interest like local history. Do not promote your business in these groups. You can share your expertise, or just participate in the conversation to show that you're an active member of the community. 6. Make local connections. Now that Facebook favors local news over national media, a public relations strategy could be a shortcut into news feeds. Develop relationships with local reporters; offer to act as an expert source or help connect them with other resources in your field. If your business is involved in community events, neighborhood groups, or local sponsorships, make sure you let Facebook followers know about it. 7. Boost your advertising budget. Spending to boost posts or place ads was necessary to make an impact on Facebook even before the news feed changes. Now, paid promotions are more important than ever. Consider increasing your budget, but make sure you monitor results and spend only on ads and posts that earn lots of engagement from followers. Jeff Weiner CEO, LinkedIn speaks onstage at LinkedIn's CommsConnect NY at Carnegie Hall on May 8, 2015 in New York City. Getty Images Conventional management thinking demands that standard work traits that drive results -- things like persistence, sacrifice, grit, resilience -- are what most bottom-line bosses expect of their workers to get the job done. Sure, that works. But in a twist of fate leaving corporate bottom-liners baffled, more evidence is coming out to suggest that it's virtuous behaviors like compassion, empathy, and gratitude that make the difference in people-centric work cultures. LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner, perhaps the most outspoken of any high-profile leader on the effects of "compassionate management," tweeted this last year. Big misconception about managing compassionately is that it's a "soft" skill. Most compassionate people I know are typically the strongest. -- Jeff Weiner (@jeffweiner) October 6, 2017 As more executives and thought-leaders use their position to influence the masses, people are shifting perceptions about what used to be considered "soft". Let me expand on this further. The Science of Compassion in the Workplace To add fuel to this very necessary fire, the recently released The Oxford Handbook of Compassion Science documents compassion as an individual, group, organizational and cultural force of nature that positively changes lives and transforms companies.. David DeSteno, one of the Oxford Handbook contributors found that when people feel compassion (as well as gratitude and pride), it builds grit and thereby paves the way to perseverance. In fact, states DeSteno, "People made to feel pride and compassion are willing to persevere more than 30 percent longer on challenging tasks compared to those feeling other positive emotions, such as happiness, precisely because pride and compassion induce them to place greater value on future rewards." Another contributor, organizational psychologist Kim Cameron, cites compelling research about the effects of compassion in the workplace. He says that people who feel compassion "demonstrate higher levels of helping behavior, moral reasoning, connectedness, and stronger interpersonal relationships, as well as less depression, reduced moodiness, and less mental illness." For skeptical bottom-liners, another study (Bright, Cameron, Caza, 2006) documented in the Oxford Handbook found that organizations characterized by higher levels of compassion (and other virtuous behaviors like forgiveness) increased performance, innovation, customer retention, profitability, and quality. They also had considerable less employee turnover. 3 Ways to Manage Compassionately for Competitive Advantage Leaders of the future invested in putting their employees first are beginning to understand that virtuous behaviors like empathy and compassion must be cultivated as new workplace traits to build sustainable value and enhance the business. Here are four ways to do it. 1. Alleviate the personal suffering of your employees. Using his symbolic power and social platform, Jeff Weiner has publicly stated that the compassionate response of every leader should be to do everything in their power to remove the pain and alleviate the suffering of employees. One recent example that came across my desk is the responsibility of companies to assist employees who are victims of domestic abuse. In one notable research, it was found that nearly 75 percent of HR heads in medium and large UK organizations "believe companies can empower victims by giving them guidance on how to deal with domestic abuse and only 9 percent agree it is a personal matter and not appropriate for employees to raise with their employers." There is a business case for this, of course. In the research, it was found that those companies that believe domestic abuse has had an impact in their organization in the past 12 months, "58 percent say an employee's productivity has declined, 56 percent said that it has caused absenteeism and 46 percent say that it had an impact on other colleagues' productivity." The compassionate response for leaders is to have domestic abuse constantly on the radar screen, communicate consistently to employees about available services, and ensure that they stand by the side in full support of abused employees. 2. In time of crisis, put people before business. A great example depicted in the Oxford Handbook is that of Phil Lynch, former president of Reuters America. As researchers Monica Worline and Jane Dutton tell the story, on September 11, 2001, Lynch sprung to action after watching terrorists fly planes into the World Trade Center towers, where several Reuters employees lost their lives. The collapse of the towers also destroyed Reuter's business infrastructure that connected them to their clients. Assessing priorities and who came first, Lynch's immediate response was issuing out this order to his executive team: "People first, then customers, then the business." Directing attention to suffering and actually modeling a compassionate response for others to adapt, "Phil and his team issued regular updates about the crisis, employees' safety, and activities to help the recovery, emphasizing again and again those three priorities." Answering tough questions on global teleconferences during the crisis, full transparency was on display. "Lynch responded openly about what leaders were feeling, as well as the steps Reuters was taking." 3. Build more trust within teams to release compassionate energy. In Weiner's own instructional course on managing compassionately, he stresses the role trust has in fostering compassion between teams and leaders and their team members. Here's Weiner: [A] huge part of scaling is trust amongst the leaders and trust amongst the employees of that organization who have worked together over time and have each other's backs, [whom] have developed a sense of shorthand with one another. They can, to some extent, predict how someone's going to respond in certain situations, and it is beyond a competitive advantage when you've got that kind of trust, when you have that kind of shorthand, and compassion helps develop that. I hate it when I lose something -- my iPhone, my sunglasses, the keys to my car, my car. So, I can imagine how Brit + Co CEO Brit Morin felt when she lost her wedding ring on a United Airlines flight somewhere between New York City and Jackson Hole, Wyoming. According to news reports, Morin removed her ring while she was filming a segment for Good Morning America. Somehow the ring ended up in the hands of a United Airlines gate agent, who promptly put it in a safe until it could be determined who the owner was. When United figured out who the ring belonged to a week later, United Airlines Captain Jim Moorey flew it back to San Francisco where he personally delivered the ring to a grateful Brit. Along with the ring, the pilot enclosed a note that read in part: "So happy I was able to return this ring to you. From day to day, I take pride in getting passengers from point A to point B safely and on time. Today I'm happy to be part of a team focused on making just one individual happy (you!)." In a tweet explaining her heartwarming story, Brit said that this simple act gave her "a newfound faith in humanity and airlines." I lost my wedding/engagement rings last week somewhere between New York and Jackson Hole. A @United gate agent found it, put it in a safe, and then gave it to a pilot to HAND DELIVER it back to me in SF. I have a newfound faith in humanity and airlines - Thanks United. pic.twitter.com/T342OGou5p -- Brit Morin (@brit) February 19, 2018 In America, school shootings happen with frightening regularity. Now, an entire industry of bulletproof products and emergency response tools has been created. Getty Images If Jeffrey Isquith had his way, the next time there's an active shooter inside a school, students and teachers will be able to duck for cover safely behind chairs, desks, and walls that are made with his company's bullet-resistant technology. "The whole reason for this company is to protect children in schools," says the founder of Amulet Protective Technologies, which makes ballistic material that can be put into walls, doors, cubicle dividers, and office furniture to create bullet-stopping barriers in public spaces. Isquith started Amulet in 2012 after reading about the chronic mass shootings, including Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut where 28 children and teachers were killed, and the movie theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado, which resulted in a dozen deaths. "It occurred to me that there were these shootings at every type of public space--schools, offices, religious institutions, airports," says Isquith, who had previously worked with furniture manufacturers, as well as in General Electric's military products division. "One day I had an epiphany--what if you married ballistic tech with furniture to make shields in the public space?" In America, where there have been six mass shootings in the first two months of 2018, finding new ways to prevent gun deaths has not only become a public crisis, but a potent business opportunity. In the week since the harrowing Parkside, Florida massacre, which resulted in 17 student and teacher deaths by an AR-15, Amulet, along with other startups in the counter-active shooter market are seeing their businesses boom. Amulet, which has been in testing for four years, released its first product line last year and has seen a surge of interest after every mass shooting in America--particularly over the past week. "There's a real uptick in interest, especially at colleges," says Isquith over the phone from Phoenix, where he was meeting with administrators at a community college before flying to Toronto for another potential client. "We've been hearing from schools all over the country." Amulet's technology is tested according to the National Institute for Justice's body armor standard and can stop rifle fire, including from an AR-15, an assault rifle popular with mass shooters, says Isquith. Recently, schools in three counties in Virginia retrofitted desks and walls with Amulet's ballistic barriers. Amulet's technology is also being used by Arconas, one of the largest airport seating manufacturers in North America (to make its popular Flyaway chair bullet-resistant with ballistic barriers inside), and it recently licensed its technology to about ten office and public furniture companies. Total Security Solutions, a Michigan-based company that manufactures and installs custom bullet-resistant systems for schools, the government, gas stations, banks, and offices, has also experience a recent surge in interest and sales. "Any time an event like Parkland occurs, there is an increase and calls about the products we provide," says Jean Rozenboom, the director of administration at Total Security Solutions, noting that the Inc. 5000 company's most popular service is custom bulletproofing. Rozenboom says sales have increased about 10 percent each year since the Sandy Hook massacre in 2012. Perhaps the most sobering product experiencing a growth surge since Parkland is the Bullet Blocker backpack. The Lowell, Massachusetts-based bullet-resistant briefcase and jacket-maker saw a 40 percent increase in overall sales, along with a 300 percent increase in sales for its backpacks, says founder Joe Curran. Curran, a former corrections officer and firearms instructor, started Bullet Blocker after the Virginia Tech shooting. With two kids who were in elementary school at the time, Curran asked administrators what their emergency plans were, which he didn't find sufficient. "I looked around the classroom and realized that every kid had their backpack with them and I got the idea," says Curran. He went home, cut his bulletproof vest in two pieces and made two prototypes with his son and daughter's backpacks. He's since rolled out 60 different products, ranging from a compression shirt that is bullet-resistant to a service that retrofits luxury bags with ballistic material. The latest trend in digital tokens may be the purchasing power of minority communities. Companies from Kodak to Atari have employed the blockchain--a decentralized ledger for recording transactions--as an alternative to traditional financing. Now, fringe organizations are beginning to follow suit, and certain businesses may be the biggest beneficiaries. On Thursday, the LGBT Foundation, a Hong Kong-based non-profit aimed at supporting gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender individuals globally, announced that it would launch its own digital token on the blockchain. The goal, explains the organization's president Christof Wittig, is to generate capital to support LGBT individuals suffering from persecution around the world. Meanwhile, several LGBT-run businesses in the San Francisco Bay Area have already agreed to accept the "pink dollar" as payment for goods and services. Wittig, who is also the founder and CEO of the San Francisco-based gay social network Hornet, notes that his company will be the first to accept the token as compensation from its more than 25 million members, who pay a monthly or annual subscription fee. The benefit of transacting with these "coins," analysts say, is that they can be traded freely on online exchanges, and therefore offer greater liquidity to investors than more traditional equity investments. During so-called "initial coin offerings" (ICOs,) or financing events in which digital tokens are made available to the public, some businesses have raised the equivalent of millions in real-world cash. Although more than half of ICOs globally failed to generate any value in 2017, startups that succeeded raised as much as $5.6 billion collectively, averaging more than $12 million apiece, according to recent research from the venture fund Fabric Ventures and the cryptocurrency data provider TokenData. Generating real-world cash is indeed Wittig's goal: The foundation aims to raise $50 million through an April coin offering. "Merchants understand very little of the purchasing power of this community," the entrepreneur tells Inc., noting that with annual spending nearing $1 trillion, gay consumers rival other minority groups with their disposable income. "The blockchain allows brands to offer service targeted to LGBT members, in return giving them better understanding about the demographic." In addition to supporting LGBT-run businesses, the foundation hopes to raise sufficient funding to operate independently and help support its activism goals. "We believe that we can create a funding mechanism out of this token to direct capital to causes that are important to the LGBT community," says Wittig. It is still early days for blockchain technology, however, and there is a fair amount of risk involved with creating one's own virtual currency. It's worth considering the extent to which investors will be aware of (and indeed interested in) purchasing the tokens. Remember that just 435 out of a total of 913 ICO attempts were successful in 2017, according to the TokenData report, which means that more than half of them failed to create any value. Meanwhile, some investors are leery of investing in digital tokens for fear that the network will be hacked. Just last month, the Japanese virtual currency exchange Coincheck announced that hackers stole some $530 million from investors during a recent security breach. The decentralized nature of the blockchain has indeed made it an attractive platform for criminals, drug traffickers and, more recently, terrorist organizations such as Islamist Jihad. Wittig says he's clear-eyed about the dangers involved, however. "We are absolutely concerned about making sure that everyone who participates will be safe, and that it will benefit merchants and consumers," he says. To that end, the foundation is partnering with a number of experienced cryptocurrency investors and security analysts to design a "meaningful" token, he adds. Shares in I-res REIT fell by almost 1pc yesterday, despite the company reporting 'strong' results for 2017. Ireland's biggest private landlord saw its profit increase to 65m during the 12-month period, from 47m in the prior year. The results for 2017 were supported by what the company described as "strong market fundamentals". I-res REIT, whose portfolio includes apartments in Sandyford's Beacon South Quarter, reported revenue of 44.7m during the period, up from 38.8m in 2016. Meanwhile, the group's EPRA earnings per share (a measure of underlying operating performance of an investment property company, excluding fair value gains and property disposals) increased to six cent from 4.9 cent in 2016. During the year the number of apartments held by the group increased to 2,450 from 2,378 the previous year, with an overall portfolio occupancy rate of 99.8pc. According to the company, its residential occupancy levels "continue to generate strong rental rate growth across the portfolio". In November, the company announced that it had spent 7m on a 4.5-acre site with planning permission for 99 new homes at Hansfield Wood in Clonsilla, west Dublin, as it broadens its offering to the rental market with the delivery of new houses to complement its existing apartment stock. Even though the mornings are getting brighter and the evenings are stretching, the snow and the rain are never too far away from these drumlin hills. Last Tuesday I did my first grass cover measurement of 2018. The two obvious things I noted was a lot of water lying on top of the ground and unfortunately no big grass covers in any paddocks. That night I fed my grass measurements into the new PastureBase computer programme and it returned a farm cover of 496 kgDM/ha. All paddocks grew an average of either one or 2kg/day over the past 100 days. It was my first time to use PastureBase and I was happy enough navigating through it. Like all the programmes nowadays there is an endless amount of reports available to the farmer with many of them helping to improve our efficiencies. Another feature I used was the Spring Rotation Planner which is a good guide for utilising grass in early spring. I live in hope of starting grazing by February 22 and completing first rotation by April x18. Unfortunately, the paddocks are very wet and by walking them I realised they are not fit for cow or tractor. No fertiliser has been spread yet but with urea in the shed and the sower greased I await drier weather. Like many other farmers, I have an abundance of slurry on my farm. After moving around tanks for as long as I could, I decided to get the contractor to mix all the tanks and lower them a bit. I moved this slurry into an empty tank that was lying idle close by. This has relieved the situation by about 25,000 gallons. Profit monitor results Expand Close File photo / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp File photo Last month's discussion group meeting was devoted to the 2017 Profit Monitor. We came away in a more positive mood than the previous year and I know everybody has their fingers crossed for this year. The better milk prices in 2017 also returned better profit monitor results for the same year. The difference in milk price between 2016 and 2017 was an extra 9c/l. My costs haven't changed that much over the past 15 years. In 2003 total costs of production were 20.66c/l while in 2017 costs were 20.58c/l. There are endless figures to be extracted from the profit monitor. A few key ones for me are that my breakeven milk price for 2017 was 23.6c/l. This takes into account the cash receipts and payments less drawings and tax. The net profit/ha on the farm was 3,418, while the costs/ha were 4,369. Milk solids per cow finished at 437kg, litres per cow was 5,883 at 3.90pc butter fat and 3.31pc protein. For the year ahead I must continue to improve the milk solids as this is how I get paid. Every extra cent per litre I can make, works out an extra 5,000. Calf or cull cow sales won't make this up. The Teagasc profit monitor does take effort to complete but when it's done you will look at your dairy enterprise as a business and it will answer a lot of pertinent questions. I would encourage all dairy farmers to do one. Calving Calving is going steady enough with no major hiccups to report. I attended a LacPatrick organised calf rearing workshop recently. It reminded me again about the importance of the first 60 days of the life of the newborn calf. Research shows that the first 60 days of life of the heifer calf can affect her first lactation of milk if she was exposed to any diseases. There are many strains of pneumonias and scours which are now exposing themselves. Biosecurity and strict controls in and out of the calf house are a must, especially with the expanding numbers of calves. There was a good demonstration on the correct use of the stomach tube. Hygiene and care are critical for this task. The tube should be clean enough that you would be happy to swallow it yourself. The weanling heifers have got their first shot of Lepto and BVD vaccine while all the dairy animals have got their six monthly IBR vaccine. The milking machine got a service and I replaced all the rubber tubing from front to back so all is ready for the new milk season. Finally, a student from Ballyhaise College has started with us for 12 weeks and it's so far so good. Gerard Sherlock farms at Tydavnet, Co Monaghan Leo Varadkar is on a high in the opinion polls. It would appear that he has cut a dash in his approach to Brexit and more generally his youth and vigour are well regarded by the public. This past weekend he got his third consecutive high poll ratings. Two surveys, including one for the Sunday Independent, put his Fine Gael party on 36pc. Those of you who watch the figures will remember that this was the Fine Gael vote haul in that historic and ground-breaking general election of February 2011. It gave the party, then led by Enda Kenny, a record 75 TDs. We know the following election in February 2016 was a very poor one for Fine Gael, with a campaign full of gaffes and spills. They scraped home with 50 TDs, and only the absolutely up-in-a-heap Dail numbers allowed the party to pull together a minority hybrid government, operating by grace of the main opposition party, Fianna Fail. Now at Leinster House we hear the beginnings of a flurry. Could this "Leo bounce" be an opportunity for Fine Gael to regain the 2011 glory? That would put them in the driving seat to form another government, and leave their main adversaries in Fianna Fail in a right fix, facing additional grief on their left flank from Sinn Fein. You'll hear more talk about a general election in 2018 as the spring advances. It is undoubtedly a tempting scenario for the new Taoiseach in office only since last June. If he could rely upon those opinion poll ratings being borne out at the ballot box, there would be no dilemma involved in choosing to hit the campaign trail. But life in general, and political life in particular, is not often that simple. Leo Varadkar and his inner circle need only look across the water to see how fickle such scenarios can be. Theresa May emerged from the Brexit referendum wreckage in the weeks after the sudden departure of David Cameron as Conservative Party leader and Prime Minister. Let's recall that Mr Cameron's surprise election win in May 2015 already had a big influence upon Fine Gael's election strategy just eight months later. The idea that British voters opted for Cameron's Tories as the tried and trusted path to prosperity intrigued some Fine Gael strategists. For many this was the origin of Mr Kenny's ill-starred "Let's keep the recovery going" election slogan. The problem was that too many beyond the greater Dublin area felt the recovery had not reached them. Following the Tory trail was not helpful. On top of that we can look to Theresa May's disastrous decision last April to seek an enhanced parliamentary majority in elections on June 8 last. It was an error-strewn campaign characterised by Mrs May's failure to campaign with any kind of vigour. It ended with a hung parliament and her new government as prisoners of the Democratic Unionist Party. But her election plans in April 2017 were based on wrong opinion polls which suggested she could not lose and that her Labour rivals were "unelectable." So, beware those polls Leo Varadkar! And remember also that embattled Fianna Fail leader, Micheal Martin, has made a recent leadership career out of defying the poll findings and campaigning doggedly for a better outcome. We are facing into a tricky and intriguing political year with changes likely on a day-to-day basis. It will be many things - but it is not going to be dull. John Downing is an Irish Independent political correspondent The group of Irish volunteers who travelled to Burkina Faso to build a milking parlour for the Complexe Agricole Temewe farm school in the New Year. Irish volunteers who recently built a milking parlour in Africa are calling on Irish farmers to give the project an extra helping hand by donating farm equipment. Paul Connolly, who is an optometrist in Cavan town, was part of a team of eight who travelled to Burkina Faso in West Africa in late December to build a milking parlour at the Complexe Agricole Temuwe farm school. The seeds of the project began when Paul joined the Economy of Communion, which is an organisation that allows businesses help projects in developing countries. Four years ago Paul met Fr Expedit Gnoumou who told him about efforts being made in Burkina Faso to develop a farm school. I met Fr Gnoumou and he told me about the work that was being done at a farm school over there. He told me that farming was very old-fashioned and traditional over there and that people looked down on it, says Paul. This stuck with me as farming was like that in Ireland in the past. I could see that he was really eager about the project and that made me want to get involved. Paul Connolly and the group of volunteers from Cavan, Meath and Dublin, including farmer and builder, Kevin Costello, spent seven out of their 10 days in Africa building the five-unit milking parlour with a local team. It was great we had Kevin because he knew what he was doing. The local lads were very strong. Without them we wouldnt have had a hope of getting it done so fast, says Paul. They looked after us so well there too, for a country thats the second poorest in the world they were great to keep the food coming for us. While mining is the most popular trade in the west African country, Paul is hopeful that the milking parlour will encourage more young people to get into farming there. Theyve had two intakes of students in the school already so the demand is there and it has chickens and pigs too. In the long-term this will benefit everyone and make people more self-sufficient, he adds. Paul and the volunteers hope to send a cargo shipment of equipment for the farm in the coming months, but can only do this with the help of Irish farmers. Were now asking Irish farmers to donate any unused milking equipment they might have lying around or any used farm equipment that might be in good condition to the project, says Paul. Even ploughs or anything that can be attached to a tractor would be helpful, as they have one tractor but nothing to attach to it. Farmers interested in donating to the project should call Paul on 087 9356756. AIB has selected three distressed debt funds for the final round of bidding on its sale of soured commercial and residential loans, once worth 3.7bn. The Irish Independent understands Lone Star, Cerberus and Goldman Sachs outmuscled private equity rivals such as Apollo and Oaktree to clinch a position in the last phase of the race, which was launched last year and is referred to as Project Redwood. No traditional banks made the cut, underscoring the lack of interest in these assets from this corner of the market. AIB, which is 71pc owned by the taxpayer, is understood to have imposed tough sale conditions, with the successful bidder required to own a regulated lending entity in the State. The bank has declined to comment on the specifics of the deal - but it appears the Redwood sale will conform to Fianna Fail's calls for so-called vulture funds to be regulated by the Central Bank. It follows Permanent TSB's decision to earmark 18,000 impaired home loans for sale, revealed by the Irish Independent last week. Three-quarters of the distressed exposures are tied to owner-occupier mortgages, spurring Fianna Fail's finance spokesperson Michael McGrath to swing into campaign mode and demand greater protections for borrowers. His private member's bill, to be taken next week, will call for the 'vulture funds' to be subject to regulation. Yet Redwood illustrates that the greatest gains in this market have gone to those funds that have dug in deepest and played the most aggressive line. Read More Both Lone Star and Cerberus, two of the most prolific purchasers of distressed loans, own banking entities, or retail credit firms, authorised by the Central Bank. Lone Star does so via its ownership of former sub-prime lender Start Mortgages, Cerberus due to its recent acquisition of Start's former rival, StepStone. But unlike AIB, Permanent TSB has steered clear of restrictions on its mega-home loan sale. Some might question the wisdom of that strategy given the inevitable political backlash to vulture funds carting off thousands of impaired mortgages. Earlier this week, the bank broke its initial silence on the deal in the face of an intensifying hostile political reaction. PTSB stressed the majority of the 14,000 owner-occupier mortgages were in deep arrears and said many borrowers had failed to engage or were unable to meet the revised terms of the loans. It highlighted that some had "made no payments at all for years". Taoiseach Leo Varadkar insisted "it is speculation to suggest the buyer may be a so-called vulture fund". He failed, however, to suggest a logical alternative. The back taxes that Apple allegedly owes to Ireland will be paid into an escrow in the coming months, TDs and Senators have been told. A senior official with the Department of Finance said the process of appointing a custodian agent is almost complete, and that an announcement of who it is will be made "very shortly". John Hogan, assistant secretary in the tax division of the department, told the Public Accounts Committee that the process of securing investment managers will be completed next month. "Our best guess is that all of that will facilitate the flow of funds into the account through the course of quarter two as early as possible, we hope and anticipate," Mr Hogan said. One of his colleagues also confirmed that the cost of the process to date has been 2.5m. That is unlikely to increase significantly, the committee heard. Niall Cody, the chairman of the Revenue Commissioners, said the amount of money due to be paid by Apple will be in and around the 13bn stated by the European Commission. "It's in that ballpark," Mr Cody said. He was responding to a question from Fianna Fail TD Marc MacSharry about whether the bill his office is obliged to calculate will be in line with the record EU estimate, which both Dublin and Apple are appealing. "Over 95pc of the calculations are completed and we have agreed with the [European] Commission that all our calculations will be with them before the end of April." Mr Hogan also said there had been no expressions of interest from other member states towards the Apple money. Responding to a question about resources from Independent TD Catherine Murphy, Mr Cody said staffing levels were 6,600 full-time equivalents, to 5,700 in 2014. Staff numbers are due to increase to 6,114 this year. Ardagh chairman and CEO Paul Coulson said he has "no interest whatsoever" in selling off any of his family's $1.32bn (1.07bn) stake in the packaging giant as the group firms up a mechanism to boost the freefloat of shares on the New York Stock Exchange. The company - one of the world's biggest packaging groups for consumer goods from beer to beauty products - floated in New York last year. However, just 8pc of the business was sold to investors. Mr Coulson and his family own 36pc of the wider group. Last month, Ardagh indicated that it was eyeing a plan that in about two years' time would see shareholders in the group's holding company (holdco) - ARD Holdings - receiving shares in the listed entity - Ardagh Group SA - which they can then decide to sell or retain. Shareholders in ARD Holdings don't currently own shares in the listed entity. If they receive shares in Ardagh Group under the plan, the idea is that many will decide to sell those shares, boosting the freefloat on the stock market. Speaking to analysts yesterday as Ardagh released fourth-quarter results, Mr Coulson said that the group hoped the future capital structure for the holdco would result in a "material" increase in the freefloat of shares in the listed entity. "If we were to do this, and when we do it, we want to achieve a material increase in the freefloat in the listed company," he said. "At the moment, it's 8pc. I would see it as being a multiple of that in terms of the increase in the freefloat. We need to make a material worthwhile increase in the freefloat." There is about $2.1bn (1.7bn) of debt at the Ardagh holdco level - separate to the 7.1bn of debt within the listed entity. The eventual holdco plan would see part of the debt in that entity repaid, the remaining debt refinanced, and a material part of the holdco's 92pc shareholding in the listed Ardagh Group spun out to ARD Holdings shareholders. Asked why Ardagh, which has its roots in Irish Glass, simply didn't sell shares straight to the market to improve liquidity, Mr Coulson said he and the company had "no interest" in selling shares in that manner and "certainly not at current levels". "We believe this is a very valuable business and the major shareholders including myself have no interest in doing that," he said. "The reason we're doing it the way we're doing it is that it enables individual shareholders in ARD Holdings to make their own individual decisions as to whether they sell shares or not. "As you know, my economic interest is of the order of 36pc - my family interest in ARD Holdings - so over a third of the shares in the listed company, in effect," added Mr Coulson. "I have no interest whatsoever in selling shares in this group. That's always been my position. I've been in this business for 20 years. This is a long-term hold." Ardagh's revenue rose 20pc last year to 7.64bn, while its earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) climbed 16pc to 1.34bn. The results were in line with expectations and shares in Ardagh climbed more than 5pc in early trading in New York. The company was boosted by a full-year contribution from assets acquired from rivals Ball and Rexam in 2016. Mr Coulson said that as of this year, the company will also cease reporting its figures in euro and instead report in dollars. He also said that Ardagh has no desire to pursue any opportunities in emerging markets such as China or elsewhere. "We are focused on Europe and the US. We have no interest in going near Asia. We don't have any interest in Africa or India or any of these emerging markets," said Mr Coulson. Mr Coulson said that Ardagh is "very happy" with the evolution of its business in Brazil and could look to deepen its presence there. Erris has also applied for 18 new drilling licences in Galway. Stock image Exploration firm Erris Resources has started drilling for zinc in Co Sligo. It's the latest effort by exploration firms to locate commercially-viable deposits that would cement Ireland's position as one of the world's biggest producers of the base metal. Erris Resources said it's begun testing acreage at Skreen for high-priority targets. The AIM-listed company has also applied for 18 new contiguous prospecting licences in an area east of Galway. The licence application covers 673 sq km. It's about 40km west of the now-defunct Tynagh Mine, a zinc resource that operated from 1965 to 1981. Erris Resources CEO Merlin Marr-Johnson said that the licence application covers a block that's linked to a zinc trend in the midlands. "This type of new project generation is in line with our stated objective to identify low-cost opportunities that have the potential to create shareholder value," he said. The Skreen prospect in Co Sligo is located in the Abbeytown district, and Erris Resources will undertake a 1,500m drill programme there. It will also drill at other locations, including Lugawarry, Streamstown and Abbeytown. Erris listed on London's Alternative Investment Market last December, raising 4m (4.5m) to develop its zinc assets in Ireland, as well as gold projects in Sweden. It said at the time that zinc remains in a period of "sustained supply deficit while demand continues to grow". The company pointed out that Ireland has a history of large-scale zinc production. Zinc and lead are mined commercially at Tara Mines in Co Meath, while the Lisheen zinc mine in Co Tipperary, owned by Vedanta Resources, closed in 2015. Tara Mines, owned by Swedish firm Boliden, is the eight-largest zinc mine in the world. In 2016, it generated a pre-exceptional profit of 1.3m, compared to a 22.7m loss before exceptional gains in 2015. The average price per tonne of zinc during 2016 rose 8.7pc to $2,095. The average price per tonne of lead was $1,872, which was 4.9pc higher than in 2015. Tara Mines, which employs about 700 people, produced 2.6 million tonnes of ore in 2016. The mine opened in 1977 and accounts for half of Boliden's total zinc concentrate output. Last year, Boliden said it will invest 44m in the mine after finding additional reserves. Belgian bank and insurer KBC reduced its non-performing loans by 25pc last year as rising house prices and the improving financial health of borrowers eased the lender's still heavy burden of legacy-era debts. KBC's Irish unit was badly affected by the crash and, despite the swift progress in dealing with its NPLs throughout 2017, the level remains the highest in the market at 35pc of the overall loan book. In total, the volume of soured exposures stands at 4.2bn. However, that figure is set to fall again next year with the bank forecasting bad debt provision releases of between 100m and 150m in 2018. In 2017 the lender's write-backs totalled 215m. Yet KBC's impaired owner-occupied mortgages remain relatively steep at 2.1bn or 24pc of outstanding owner-occupied mortgages. Wim Verbraeken, CEO of the group's Irish arm, emphasised the bank applies a "very conservative" classification to its NPLs and he played down the prospect of imminent loan portfolio sales, stressing the bank has resorted to this strategy only once, offloading a small portfolio of soured exposures in 2017. Mr Verbraeken also apologised to "all impacted customers for the harm and distress caused by the bank's error or failure" in the industry-wide tracker mortgage debacle. Earlier this month it emerged KBC is one of the slowest of the 15 lenders probing this issue, in terms of offering compensation and redress to borrowers. The bank has admitted its role in the overcharging of tracker mortgages resulted in the loss of six family homes and 27 buy-to-let properties - twice the number racked up by larger rivals Bank of Ireland and AIB. KBC's exposure to this festering problem weighed on the Irish division's full-year net profit, which fell by 20pc to 183m, partly due to a 61.5m top-up provision in the previous quarter to its tracker mortgage redress scheme. The move brings the total money set aside for this crisis to 120.3m. According to Owen Callan of Investec, this figure is unlikely to rise much further. "This should be 95pc of what they need to do," he said. While KBC continues to grapple with legacy issues, the resurgent economy and house-price growth has also helped expand its footprint in the increasingly competitive residential mortgage sector. KBC is now neck-and-neck with PTSB with a 12pc market share. Mr Callan pointed out this takes the lender to within touching distance of its 15pc target. He described the group as a challenger bank in Ireland, given its digital-led strategy, thin retail presence and concentration on so-called 'micro' businesses. He predicted the focus will centre on driving up the relatively low volume of deposits, pointing out that the Irish arm remains largely dependent on the group for funding. Ulster Bank last year set aside 192m to cope with the cost of what it said was 'legacy issues' including compensation and refunds for customers in relation to the tracker mortgages scandal. The figure include 87m set aside in the final quarter of 2017, according to full year financial results published on Friday. In its update today the bank said it was nearing conclusion of its discussions with the Central Bank on the issue and it hoped to be in a position to update on the final numbers of impacted customers in the near future. In an interview with Morning Ireland today, out-going Ulster Bank CEO Gerry Mallon said that the bank could sell as much as 7,000 mortgages that are in arrears. Adjusted operating profit at the bank was 109m, a considerable drop on the 280m reported in 2016. However the groups operating expenses also declined during the year to 516m from 559m the prior year. Meanwhile, the groups adjusted income was 693m, a decrease from 701m in 2016, with the income impacted by a reduction in income on free funds. The bank suffered an impairment loss of 68m during the year, which included a provision in relation to a change in its non-performing loan strategy to allow for potential loan portfolio sale. During the year new lending increased by 3.4pc to 2.6bn, with 1bn in new mortgage lending to customers buying a home. Describing the year as being one of "significant progress in many key areas with some difficult decisions in others" Mr Mallon said that the banks focus remained on ensuring that it is best positioned to compete and grow for the benefit of its customers, economy and shareholders, while also seeking to regain customer trust by addressing mistakes of the past. "Consistent with the industry-wide regulatory requirement to reduce Non-Performing Loans [NPLs] we have included an impairment provision to allow for potential sales of distressed loan portfolios that are in long-term arrears and are unsustainable," Mr Mallon said. Millennials are killing themselves in the race to get ahead, the Managing Director of Twitter in Ireland has warned. Speaking at the Institute of Directors annual Spring Lunch, Twitter MD Sinead McSweeney said she is increasingly worried and concerned about the mental health and well being of millennials and said that the definition of success needs to evolve. Ms McSweeney, the first civilian head of the communications division of An Garda Siochana who previously worked with the Police Service of Northern Ireland, said she had been struck in recent months by the level of swirl around the challenges for todays leaders and managers in managing millennials. You know that saying youll kill yourself trying to do all that well, on a serious note, they [millennials] are killing themselves, Ms McSweeney told a high profile group of executives that included former Tanaiste Mary Harney, former Garda Commissioner Fachtna Murphy and Emer Gilvarry, chairperson of Mason, Hayes And Curran. There is a huge issue around mental health and wellbeing and the and the levels of pressure that individuals are putting on themselves and the anxiety that is prone to surface in their lives and in their work. Ms McSweeney said that leaders and managers have a duty to ensure they do not add to the pressures felt by millennials that and help them realise that that it is okay to slow down. Its okay to take a moment to enjoy the achievements that you have, that you dont have to rush straight to the next level or achievement, said the Cork born tech boss. It is true that leading and managing in todays workplace can be challenging," said Ms McSweeney, adding that older generations had much to learn from millennials and their quest for impact. On the one hand, millennials prefer flatter organisations, but they are still burdened with the previous generations measurements of success such as promotion and advancement. They also have a sense of an accelerated timeline and for reaching those achievements. Ms McSweeney said that many millennials desire to be at the top of their game early and sometimes have the difficulty to see the need to do the time and to learn the lessons to get there. But she also defended young workers from criticism because of their desire to help others in their communities and through their work. The quest for impact, a footprint bigger than your foot, and finding work that provides it is increasingly recognised as key to thriving and happy workplaces. A heightened sense of community impact and helping others, these are values from which we could all benefit. Conditions that Ryanair is attempting to impose on Ryanair pilots in return for pay increases are "unacceptable", trade union Forsa, formerly Impact, has warned. The tense exchange between the union and the airline in a letter today that has been seen by Independent.ie comes just two months after Ryanair said it would recognise unions across Europe. "Since the very start of talks, Ryanair management have attempted to use the recognition process as an opportunity to impose conditions on our members which we have never negotiated," Forsa national secretary Angela Kirk told Ryanair's chief people officer Eddie Wilson in the letter today. She added: "We anticipated that this recognition agreement would lead to a constructive and mutually beneficial framework of engagement for all stakeholders amd curtail the ongoing haemorrhage of experienced pilots. Unfortunately to date, this has not been the case." Ryanair chief executive Michael O'Leary warned earlier this month that the airline could face the threat of strike action around Easter as it continues to try and hammer out deals with unions in Europe. Those efforts are being spearheaded for the airline by Mr Wilson and Ryanair's chief operations officer Peter Bellew. Forsa has previously warned Ryanair that as it has recognised the union in principle, it must now negotiate any pay deals for Ryanair pilots in Ireland through the union. Ms Kirk told Mr Wilson that the union, in an effort to move the formal recognition process along, will now table a "less complex", modified version of its proposed recognition agreement. She added: "Finally, we can only assume by your continuous reference to our Aer Lingus members, that a bench-marking process should be conducted of the pay, terms and conditions of pilots in Ryanair, against the pay, terms and conditions of pilots in Aer Lingus." A spokesperson for Ryanair told Independent.ie tonight: "We don't comment on our discussions with our people." It opened almost four months ago in the US, last week in the UK, and today Irish audiences will finally get the chance to watch Lady Bird and find out what all the fuss is about. Inevitably, most of the focus around these parts has been on Saoirse Ronan's Golden Globe-winning, Oscar-nominated central performance, and much more on that in a moment. But this is first and foremost Greta Gerwig's film. The writer and actress spent years pulling together this screenplay inspired by her own adolescence, and eventually decided to direct Lady Bird herself. She cast Ronan as the winningly self-dramatising teen Christine 'Lady Bird' McPherson after running into her at the Toronto Film Festival in 2015. She asked the Irish actress to read through the script with her and two pages in, knew she'd found her Lady Bird. The other crucial bit of casting was the girl's mother, Marion, a hard-working nurse who loves her daughter fiercely but not always tenderly, and finds her adolescent pretensions infuriating. Though some of you may remember her for playing Roseanne Barr's sister in Roseanne, Laurie Metcalf is a heavyweight theatre actress, and has been a key member of Chicago's Steppenwolf company for decades. She's a brilliant foil for Ronan's juvenile histrionics, and their intense but embattled connection forms the film's comic and dramatic spine. It's 2002 and Christine McPherson is among the more esoteric students at a Sacramento Catholic high school. Though she's not quite sure what to do with it, Christine craves attention, and has adopted a number of unsubtle notice-getting tactics. She's dyed her hair pink, tells anyone who'll listen that she intends to leave Sacramento as soon as possible for New York, "where the culture is", and has changed her name to 'Lady Bird'. It is, she says, "my given name - given to me, by me". This latter affectation infuriates her mother, who hectors her daughter constantly and wonders aloud whether she'll get the grades to enrol in an east coast ivy league college. Maybe Marion doesn't want her baby to fly the nest, and you get the sense their passionate closeness will survive all the tests that adolescence can throw at it. Christine's best friend at school is Julie (Beanie Feldstein), who's a whiz at maths and turns out to be a better actor than Lady Bird when they both sign up for the school drama club. Read More Lady Bird will quit the club in high dudgeon when she's overlooked for all the main parts in a production of Shakespeare's Tempest, but meanwhile has found a boyfriend in Danny (Lucas Hedges), a sweet young man who tells her he respects her too much to touch her breasts. That apparent gallantry should set off the alarm bells, and worse is to come when she hooks up with Kyle (Timothee Chalamet), an affected twit with wealthy parents who smokes roll-ups because he doesn't want to "engage with this society". It's all a learning curve of course, and Ronan guides us soulfully through every twist and turn. Among the many refreshing things about this film is the fact that Lady Bird isn't ultimately seeking to validate herself by finding a nice boyfriend: those romances are incidental to her search for meaning, and identity, which will be achieved through her own talent and individuality. Read More Greta Gerwig's script sparkles with wit and has the ring of truth: the film might only be partly based on her own experiences, but the fact Gerwig gave her cast her high school yearbooks and journals to help them prepare suggests a keenly felt autobiographical undercurrent. Ronan is Lady Bird, pure and simple: she has the acting equivalent of perfect pitch and her nuanced, graceful performance allows us to simultaneously laugh at, love and sympathise with the brave but spiky teen. Her relationship with the hard-working Marion will ring true to most mothers and daughters, and Tracy Letts gives a lovely turn as Lady Bird's loving father - a gentle, defeated soul who fondly indulges his daughter's dreams. Lady Bird (15A, 94mins) A four-year-old parrot that can sing 10 songs and has more words than the average toddler will be getting everyone in a flap on TV3's Ireland's Got Talent tomorrow. Escobar, a double yellow- headed Amazon parrot, could soar to new heights when viewers see one of the show's first non-human acts in action. His proud owner, Kevin Lawler (38), an electrician from Blanchardstown, said Escobar is something of a celebrity in their area, thanks to his impressive repertoire. "All the neighbours would be calling in and asking to see him and hear him singing," he said. "He knows about 10 different songs at this stage and it was lots of hard work getting him to learn them. "You have to just keep repeating the words over and over to him. "I take him out for walks sometimes. I have a little harness for him and he just sits on my shoulder when we go out and you get such a reaction from people. "They call me the 'parrot man' in the area, everyone knows him." Expand Close Escobar and owner / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Escobar and owner Kevin said Escobar makes a great companion, given his entertaining and friendly nature. "He's a brilliant pet - he's like a dog that can talk to you," said Kevin. "I have him in the bed with me sometimes. The only time he goes in his cage is when I have to go out." He said the breed is one of the best for talking and performing, describing Escobar as a "real character" and saying he entered him for a "bit of craic". Escobar even has his own Facebook page with nearly 500 followers as Kevin regularly posts videos of him singing. "A few people told me I should enter him and I just thought, well, why not give it a go?" he said. Escobar was due to sing The Fields Of Athenry for the panel of judges. However, things don't exactly go according to plan, as viewers will see tomorrow night, after Escobar gets a touch of stage fright. Also taking to the stage will be Izzy the Beagle and her owner Amy Flanagan (15), from Cork. The unborn may be left with no constitutional rights at all if the Eighth Amendment is repealed, the Supreme Court was told. The seven-judge court has reserved judgment on the State's appeal over High Court findings concerning the extent of the constitutional rights of the unborn. It follows a case brought by a Nigerian man who came here in 2007, his Irish partner and their child, born in August 2015. The Chief Justice said the court would deliver judgment as soon as it was in a position to do so. Yesterday Mr Justice Frank Clarke repeatedly pressed State counsel Nuala Butler about its position on that "important" and "live" issue, and queried if the Justice Minister was "refusing to answer". Ms Butler said she was instructed the minister considered the issue has not been definitively decided. The State's position was that before 1983 there was no recognition of legal personality of an unborn at common law. While it did not follow the unborn had no right to life before 1983, there was no recognised constitutional personality. Although various judges before 1983 made observations concerning the unborn, a lot of what was said was about "respect for human life" which was different from the concept of individual rights holders. The Eighth Amendment was intended to treat the unborn in a "different category" and not as a person, citizen or child. It does not follow from its enactment that the unborn has a legal personality, she said. The appeal follows proceedings initiated before the child was born. The Nigerian man and his partner sought to revoke a 2008 deportation order based on his prospective parentage of an Irish citizen child. Mr Justice Richard Humphreys found the minister was required, when considering the revocation application, to consider the rights of the unborn. He held the unborn has constitutional rights beyond the right to life and is a "child" within the meaning of Article 42A, inserted as a result of the 2012 Children's Referendum, which requires the State to protect and vindicate the rights of "all children". In its appeal, the State maintains the unborn has the right to life but no other constitutional "rights" which the minister must consider in the context of a revocation application. The prospective parentage is a "circumstance" that may be considered but the minister is not required to consider "rights" of the unborn before birth. The respondents argue the essential question is whether the State is correct that, outside the Eighth Amendment, the unborn is constitutionally "invisible" or a "nullity". They say the unborn has rights to the care and company of her father which the minister must consider when considering whether to revoke the deportation order. In arguments yesterday, Maurice Collins SC said the effect of the State's position is that, if the Eighth Amendment is repealed, the unborn will have "no constitutional rights at all". The State's refusal to recognise, even as a matter of language, the unborn is an "unborn child" was "striking and startling" and nothing in the Constitution provided any basis for this constitutional "chasm" and inequality between the unborn and the born. The officer was taken to University College Hospital to be treated for non-life threatening lacerations The Criminal Assets Bureau and a number of Garda national units have carried out a series of raids targeting the Kinahan cartel across several counties. The search which began this morning was carried out in Dublin, Meath, Limerick and Longford. It involved the search of 20 residential premises, 18 professional premises and one gymnasium. Approximately 15,000 cash was seized along with five vehicles (Audi Q7, Mercedes Vito, VW Golf Mark 7 GTD, VW Golf, Honda Motorcycle) and five watches (Breitling, 2 Rolex, Cartier, Legend). A freezing order has been made in respect of a substantial amount of money in a bank account. Expand Close Van searched in CAB raid. Photo: An Garda Siochana / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Van searched in CAB raid. Photo: An Garda Siochana A quantity of documents, mobile phones, etc. are being examined by investigating officers. No arrests were made. Speaking today Detective Chief Superintendent Patrick Clavin said: "This CAB investigation into an Organised Crime Gang is continuing, today marks a significant development in the progress of this investigation. The Criminal Assets Bureau are relentless in their mission to identify the criminally acquired assets of persons and to deny such people these assets. The motivation of these organised crime gangs is greed for wealth and we will do all we can to deprive them of this wealth". Former Anglo Irish Bank CEO David Drumm said the bank was still f***ed despite Mr F***ing Denis of Irish Life and Permanent telling him Anglo would be looked after, his trial has heard. He made the remark during a recorded phone call with John Bowe, former Director of Treasury at the bank, on September 22 2008. Denis Casey was the chief executive of Irish Life and Permanent at the time at which the phonecall took place. Today Dublin Circuit Criminal Court heard recordings of eight phone calls between employees of Anglo, the Central Bank and McCann Fitzgerald Solicitors, all of which took place on dates in late September 2008. Six of the eight calls, played for the jury by Detective Sergeant Michael McKenna of the Garda National Economic Crime Unit, were conversations between Mr Drumm (51) and John Bowe. Paul O'Higgins SC, prosecuting, said the calls were deliberately recorded by the bank for business purposes, to preserve the details of transactions and deals. They were recovered during the Garda investigation at the bank. In a phone call on September 22 Mr Drumm and Mr Bowe discussed the fact that 500m went out the doors today. Mr Drumm suggested Mr Bowe do a Ladybird type thing when he made a presentation at an upcoming meeting and said a simplified version of Anglo's cash flow would be needed. Mr Drumm said Mr f***ing Dennis had confirmed that morning that Anglo will be well looked after. Mr Bowe commented that Anglo was still in a hole, to which Mr Drumm responded that they were f***ed, needed to fix the balance sheet by year end and said their liquidity had depleted by 14bn. And who was in charge when that was going on, Mr Drumm asked, to the sound of laughter from the two men. Mr Drumm asked Mr Bowe if they could bloat the balance sheet, and remarked that the family photo, Anglo's end of year financial snapshot, should it be published on f***ing Bebo was not going to look good. The two bankers then discussed the September transactions with ILP, which Mr Bowe said were booked as a repo and had a small amount of haircut. We're going to have to tell board members that we have lit a fuse here that's not going to go away, we'll have a difficult story to tell on December 3, Mr Drumm said. The jury then listened to three phone calls that took place on September 29 2008 between Mr Drumm, Mr Bowe and other Anglo executives. Mr Bowe explained the transactions with ILP to Mr Drumm: What happens is the money goes around in a circle. The dance here is that we actually get it back in time. It has to go through a lot of different hands. Mr Bowe told Mr Drumm that Permo wanted collateral for future deals and said that recovering the money lent to ILP within time limits was becoming very very tough. Mr Drumm said a f***ing journal entry would do it an awful lot quicker. Laughter is heard when Mr Drumm said Anglo Finance director Willie McAteer might be auditing the books. Debit the giver, credit the receiver, he joked. In another recorded conversation he referred to the financial regulator as Freddie f***ing Fly and said he intended to go to that f***ing shower of clowns down in Dame Street, to look for emergency funding for the bank. Mr Drumm, with an address in Skerries, Co Dublin, has pleaded not guilty to conspiring with former bank officials Denis Casey, William McAteer, John Bowe and others to defraud depositors and investors at Anglo by dishonestly creating the impression that deposits in 2008 were 7.2 billion larger than they were. He has also pleaded not guilty to false accounting on December 3, 2008, by furnishing information to the market that Anglo's 2008 deposits were 7.2 billion larger than they were. The jury has been told that Mr Drumm accepts the facts of the 2008 transactions between Anglo and ILP but he disputes they were fraudulent or dishonest. The trial, now in its fourth week, continues before Judge Karen O'Connor and a jury of ten men and four women after losing a juror on day 26. Former Anglo Irish Bank CEO David Drumm described the Financial Regulator as f*****g Freddie f*****g Fly and the Central Bank as a shower of clowns before getting emergency funding during the financial crisis, a jury heard. In phone recordings made at Anglo in 2008, Mr Drumm was heard telling a colleague he would go to the Central Bank and keep asking the thick question: when is the cheque arriving? Mr Drumm also described a letter to the Financial Regulator stating that the struggling bank was in breach of the liquidity conditions of its banking licence as a death warrant. The tapes were being played today in the trial of Mr Drumm, who denies conspiracy to defraud and false accounting charges. Mr Drumm (51) is pleading not guilty to conspiring to defraud Anglo investors in 2008 by dishonestly creating the impression that the banks customer deposits were larger than they were. He is alleged to have conspired with former Anglo officials Willie McAteer and John Bowe, as well as then-CEO of Irish Life and Permanent (ILP), Denis Casey, and others. Mr Drumm also denies false accounting, by providing misleading information to the market. The case centres on a series of circular billion-euro inter-bank transactions between Anglo and ILP, routed through Irish Life Assurance (ILA). The money was placed back in Anglo and treated as customer deposits, which are considered a better measure of a banks strength. Mr Drumm admits he authorised the transactions but denies there was anything dishonest or fraudulent in them. Detective Sergeant Michael McKenna, who was involved in the investigation, agreed with Paul OHiggins SC, prosecuting, that it had emerged there were certain telephone recordings. Calls were recorded in Treasury and other areas that were kept and were still in existence, he said. One of the phones that was taped belonged to a senior Treasury department official John Bowe, and some of the calls on that phone became relevant to the proceedings. The jury first heard a calls between Mr Bowe and officials in the Financial Regulator, on September 18, 2008, followed by a call with John Cronin of McCann Fitzgerald Solicitors. I should have been a solicitor you know, instead of that, Im a banker, Mr Bowe said to Mr Cronin. This was followed by a call between Mr Bowe and Mr Drumm in which Mr Drumm said the rumour is going around that they are trying to merge, referring to other financial institutions. He then said: It would never be allowed politically. They had 30-40,000 employees between them and for half of them to lose their jobs was not palatable for the country. William didnt give me any confidence this morning but he didnt tell me anything that I didnt expect, he said. Mr Drumm and Bowe spoke about Anglo being a hard sell and Mr Drumm said he did not know what you would describe it as...a f*****g stallion. Mr Bowe read out to Mr Drumm a letter he had prepared for the Financial Regulator about Anglos breach of the regulatory liquidity ratio under the banks licence. The jury had heard earlier this was in advance of Anglo seeking emergency funding. The bit about the licence is signing a death warrant, Mr Drumm said. In a call on September 19, 2008, Mr Bowe told Mr Drumm about the banks position deteriorating more slowly than our worst case scenario. They then discussed getting cash - 6bn - from ILP. We cant take it off f*****g Freddie f*****g Fly down there, the Financial Regulator because it will appear on the balance sheet, he said. Mr Bowe said they did not have the spare cash. Mr Drumm spoke of what they would say to the Central Bank. He referred to ratings agencies and the bank being under stress. "We'll be saying, 'Yeah, a stress because HBOS were f*****g sold and Lehman's went bust and f*****g Bank of America f*****g took over Merrill's and other f*****g non-normal things happened, Mr Drumm said. We need the f*****g loan because we are running out of money, he said. He said he was going to keep it simple. I'm going to keep asking the thick question: 'When, when is the cheque arriving?', he said, adding: if we say it in their language, nothing will happen. You have it, so you're going to give it to us and when would that be? We'll start there," he said. "If they don't give it to us on Monday they have a bank collapse. If the money keeps running out the door, the way it has been running out the door." Mr Drumm also spoke about being relaxed before agreeing to meet the following morning for a pep talk and then off we go. Mr Bowe suggested 10am. 10 oclock it is. You the man," Mr Drumm said. In the next phone call, on September 22, the two men again discussed the banks situation and Mr Drumm at one point asked about what would happen if they got 4bn or whatever from that f**king shower of clowns down on Dame Street. Mr Drumm asked Mr Bowe to come in for the CEOs review for the next board meeting. He said he thought they just need a ladybird-type thing, something we can hand out to them. Mr Drumm said they would say this is the real world here at the meeting, this is what could happen, this is what we think will happen, even with the 6bn fixes, which Mr f*****g Denis confirmed for me this morning. Were f****d, Mr Drumm said, adding that the bank had depleted our liquidity by 14bn. He said the question would be asked: who was in charge when that was going on? Whose f*****g can was that? The snapshot, the family photo is not going to be any better than that no matter what we do, he went on to say. The balance sheet looks shot, Mr Drumm said at one point before asking: are you going to be able to bloat the balance sheet on the right hand side? He asked Mr Bowe: what will get us up into to the teens? If this photo is ever going to be published on f*****g Bebo, its not going to look that great, Mr Drumm said. He said it did not look doable that you could fix the poxy balance sheet over the year end. He continued to say it needed to be got into the minds of the board members that we have lit a fuse here and its not going to go away. Mr Drumm was asked on the call about a meeting he had had with Gillian and Denis. Gillian was listening but this man had a f*****g brick wall built in front of him, he said. He is just mind numbingly blocking it, he said. He suggested getting back to Gillian and saying one party, ie your f*****g Chief Executive is not receptive. Mr Bowe asked if Mr Drumm thought they can be turned. I do, he replied, saying its too compelling for them. He added: its the last f*****g roll of the dice. Keep whacking our heads off that wall and see if we can eventually split it open, he said. On September 29, Mr Drumm said in a phone call the transactions had become an "acedemic exercise." Mr Bowe said "Permo came back and said they couldn't do it. They basically said they couldn't do any more without collateral." "But we are sorted anyway," Mr Drumm said. In another call on the same day, Mr Drumm referred to "Permo - that 6bn fix. Are we still doing that?" Mr Bowe replied "we are doing bits every day", adding later: "it's very tough to do but we are picking away at it." "f*****g journal entry would do it an awful lot quicker," Mr Drumm said. The trial continues. Fugitive struck off solicitor Michael Lynn has lost his challenge to the DPPs assurances to authorities in Brazil that his time in a prison there awaiting extradition will be set off against any prison sentence imposed on him here. Such assurances were required by the Brazilian authorities before they would sanction Mr Lynns extradition, which his lawyers previously said is due next week. Mr Lynn had sought declarations from the High Court such assurances could not be given. Had he secured those declarations, he may have used them in efforts in Brazil to prevent his extradition, his lawyers indicated. In his ruling on Friday, Mr Justice Michael McGrath rejected arguments by Mr Lynn that guarantees or assurances provided in letters from the Irish embassy in Brazil to the Brazilian authorities last January and earlier this month amounted to unlawful interference with the judicial function in the context of the separation of powers. The issue of whether the contents of the letters satisfied the requirements of the Brazilian authorities is a matter for the Brazilian courts and it is not for the Irish courts to interpret them, he also said. It would be inappropriate for the Irish court to give declarations to Mr Lynn concerning the guarantees for use by him in the Brazilian courts, he said. In Mr Lynns case, the guarantees had to be given by March 11th 2018 failing which, as a matter of Brazilian law, he must be released from custody, Mr Justice McGrath noted. He refused to put a stay on his ruling pending any appeal. Mr Lynn, who fled from here in 2007, allegedly leaving an estimated 80 million in debts, is being held at Cotel remand prison in Recife in northwest Brazil. He faces charges here relating to alleged theft and has been imprisoned since 2013 when Brazilian federal police, acting on behalf of Interpol, arrested him. The Brazilian authorities have indicated their consent to Mr Lynns extradition on 21 charges of alleged theft. His extradition had been sought on a total 33 counts, including theft and using a false instrument, based on warrants issued by Dublin District Court in 2012. In his ruling, Mr Justice McGrath noted a solicitor for the DPP had, in sworn affidavits in 2015, said the time Mr Lynn spent in custody in Brazil awaiting extradition would be set off against any sentence imposed here. There are two stages of the extradition process in Brazil, a judicial and administrative one, he said. If, as in this case, objections to extradition are not upheld, the extradition request is granted and it then moves to the administrative or handover stage at which point it is necessary for the requesting State to provide guarantees which, if not provided, could lead to refusal of extradition. The guarantees require the person will only be prosecuted on the charges for which Brazil has permitted the extradition and will not serve more than 30 years. He noted the Brazilian court, when authorising the extradition, had referred to the presumption of veracity of the documents provided when rejecting the arguments against extradition. The central issue was whether the letters and actions of the executive seek to unlawfully interfere with the role of the judiciary in the context of the separation of powers, he said. The letter of January 2018 outlined means by which sentences may be shortened and also referred to remission, judicial practice and the powers of the executive concerning remission. It did not purport to bind the judiciary or interfere with their powers and discretion in relation to sentencing. While the court might have some misgiving about some of the language used in the February letter, that cannot be seen as more than a statement of the law as the court perceives it to be. The court would not engage in interpreting the letters as to whether they meet the requirements of the Brazilian authorities as that was a matter for the Brazilian authorities, not the Irish courts, he said. A 54-year-old man who cut his hand and threatened a social worker that he would get the virus from his blood has avoided a jail term. Dubliner Joseph Mulraney was upset as he wished to bring his partner home from a hospice and believed the social worker had been encouraging her to stay in the institution, Dublin Circuit Criminal Court was told. Mulraney, of Sundrive Road, Kimmage, pleaded guilty to false imprisonment and threatening to spray blood at Our Ladies Hospice, Harolds Cross, Dublin on April 18, 2017. He has two minor previous convictions from the 1980s. Garda Thomas Burke told Eoin Lawlor BL, prosecuting, that the social worker had a previously amicable relationship with Mulraney and had a number of sessions with him and his partner who was a patient at the hospice, suffering degenerative brain disease. Gda Burke said as he started his shift the social worker picked up a voicemail message left by Mulraney saying he had a bone to pick with him. He later encountered a confrontational and aggressive Mulraney in the corridor and brought him to his office. He attempted to calm Mulraney but he began accusing the social worker of putting ideas in his partner's head. Mulraney asked where the panic button was and kicked it off the wall. Mulraney took out a razor blade, cut his hand and threatened to spit the blood. He told the man he would get the virus from it. The social worker stayed away from him as he began rubbing blood on various surfaces in the office, including the man's desk. The man got out of the office past him and alerted security. Mulraney was arrested and interviewed. He told gardai he had taken tablets and did not remember much. He agreed he had cut his hand and had been upset. He believed the man had been telling his partner not to come home but to stay in the hospice. Mulraney said he was sorry and took full responsibility for what happened. The garda agreed with Vincent Heneghan SC, defending, that Mulraney had no intention of stabbing the social worker. He agreed that Mulraney's accommodation at the time had not been suitable for his partner and that the social worker had been nothing but kind and decent to Mulraney. Gda Burke agreed that Mulraney lived a rather sad and pathetic life which he mainly conducted in around 200 meters of his home. He did not expect him to come before the court again. Mr Heneghan said Mulraney had snapped as he wanted to get his partner out of hospital. He said she was now living with him in new accommodation and Mulraney had written a letter of apology. Judge Martin Nolan said Mulraney had been under some stress and decided to take it out on the social worker in a fairly insidious and disgusting crime. He noted a victim impact statement handed into court which, he said, outlined that the social worker had been greatly affected by the crime. He noted Mulraney had pleaded guilty and was remorseful. Judge Nolan imposed a three and a half year sentence which he suspended in full. A prisoner who brought drugs into Mountjoy under threat from other inmates that his brother's leg would be broken has been jailed for one year. Gareth Carroll (36) was on temporary release when he got a call from inside the prison from a number of inmates who were with his brother at the time. They instructed him to bring heroin, Valium and Xanax into the prison on his return and said if he refused to do so, his brother wouldn't be leaving with his legs intact. Carroll returned to jail and prison officers later spotted drug paraphernalia on a table in his cell. He was searched and the drugs fell out of his underwear. Carroll, of Cherry Orchard Avenue, Ballyfermot, Dublin pleaded guilty at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court to possession of 1,497 of heroin, 768 worth of diazepam and 286 of alprazolam on May 10, 2015. He was serving a sentence for a drug offence at the time. Garda Barry Brennan told Dara Hayes BL, prosecuting, that both Carroll and his brother were serving sentences in Mountjoy when Carroll agreed to bring the drugs into the prison. He admitted that he had concealed the heroin and tablets internally. Gda Brennan agreed with Keith Spencer BL, defending, that Carroll's brother was later placed in protective custody in the jail. Mr Spencer said Carroll was introduced to heroin as a 15 year old and had been a significant abuser of the drug since. He said the whole family had been blighted by drugs and his client had not had many opportunities in life. Counsel told Judge Melanie Greally that there had been a significant glimmer of hope recently because Carroll was now committed to a new relationship and was free from drugs for the first time. He is stable on a methadone programme and is attending Narcotics Anonymous. He recognises that his addiction was a lifelong one that had caught hold of him from a young age but he now wants to break of that cycle and wants to invest himself in more wholesome interests, Mr Spencer said. Today Judge Greally noted that many in the prison population were there to rehabilitate and reform from drug abuse. She said people bringing such substances into prison were to be viewed in a very serious light. She accepted that Carroll's own drug addiction was a major contributing factor to his crime, as was the credible threat to his brother. She handed down a two-year sentence and suspended the final 12 months. The judge threw out McDonaghs claim which meant the six other claims collapsed with it and were dismissed A man jailed for raping and threatening to kill his wife as their marriage was breaking down continues to show no remorse for raping her, the Court of Appeal has heard. The 43-year-old man, who cannot be named for legal reasons, was jailed for ten years after being convicted by a jury in the Central Criminal Court. He was the third person to be convicted for marital rape since rape within a marriage was made illegal in 1990. The trial court heard that the woman had to stay in contact with her husband after the rape so he could have court ordered access to their child. A jury of eleven men and one woman convicted him of raping his wife in their home in May, 2014 and of threatening to cut her face, having denied the charges. He was also convicted of threatening to kill the woman the next day over the phone. However, the jury failed to reach verdicts on charges that he head-butted her and threatened to do serious damage to her when they met to discuss custody of their son. He had admitted assaulting his wife with a hammer. Ms Justice Isobel Kennedy sentenced him to 12 years imprisonment with the final two suspended in June 2016. The Court of Appeal upheld the man's conviction last December holding that none of the grounds of appeal argued on his behalf succeeded. Giving judgment on that occasion, Mr Justice Alan Mahon said the man, an Arab Muslim from north Africa, married his wife, an Irish national, in 2005. Mr Justice Mahon said a series of assaults and threats, including rape in the marital home, culminated in an attack by the man on his wife and her mother during which both were struck with a hammer. Moving to appeal his sentence yesterday, his barrister, Ronan Munro SC, submitted that the sentence was excessive for a single rape offence and the sentencing judge placed insufficient weight on the mitigating factors. Not only had his client no previous convictions but, Mr Munro said, he had been a good husband and father and the couple had been in love up until the breakdown of the marriage. He said the man had suffered a depressive episode a year beforehand and it was in that context that these offences occurred. Mr Munro said the court should not lose sight of the person who existed before the depressive episode. If he existed once, he can exist again, counsel said. The Court of Appeal heard that the man refuses to show any remorse for the rape offence. Moreover, he continued to be unaccepting of his conviction in that he had decided to bring his unsuccessful conviction appeal to the Supreme Court, although he was within his rights to do so. Mr Munro said his client had indicated shame and remorse in relation to the assault. Counsel for the Director of Public Prosecutions, Seamus Clarke SC, said it wasn't a single incident but a Spring and Summer of torment for his wife which included the breaching of a barring order, threats and assault. Dismissing his conviction appeal in December, Mr Justice Mahon said the man, at the outset, had raised concerns that he would not receive a fair trial before a jury made up of Irish citizens most likely to be entirely of the Christian faith. It was pointed out that the man was a foreign dark skinned Muslim from north Africa. Mr Justice Mahon said this was really a challenge to the Juries Act 1976. There was a concern that an Irish person of the Christian faith might have a view that men of the Muslim faith treated women generally, and more particularly their wives, with less respect or at least differently than was the norm in Irish society. The trial judge said any suggestion a jury panel should be told they should not serve if the were racially prejudiced was insulting to any potential jurors and that it presumes prejudice on their part. She said she would give the jury the usual warnings. Mr Justice Mahon said juries had time and time again shown themselves well capable of acting responsibly and discharging their duty to determine an accused guilty or not guilty in accordance with evidence presented in the trial. He said Irish juries were regularly called upon to consider the guilt or innocence of persons charged with rape and various types of sexual offences including, on occasion, where the accused is a foreign national or a member of a non Christian religion. To assume or to have any significant concern that racial or religious prejudice was a significant feature in Irish society to the point that the probability of a fair trial could or should be called into question was without foundation. It was quite likely that any special or unusual warning on possible prejudice against Muslims or foreigners would simply be considered insulting and entirely counter productive, Mr Justice Mahon said. The fact the jury disagreed on two specific counts strongly suggested that they took their duty to fairly try the man seriously and were not prejudiced or biased against him because of his religion, colour or nationality, Mr Justice Mahon said. A Guatemalan mother who was caught with shirts soaked in cocaine valued at 179,000 in her luggage at Dublin Airport has been jailed for three years. Gardai revealed a chemical process would later have been used to extract the cocaine from the shirts. Keila Pineda Lopez (29), of no fixed abode, pleaded guilty at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court to possession of cocaine for sale or supply at Dublin Airport on November 22, 2017. She has no previous convictions. Garda Michael Higgins told Derek Cooney BL, prosecuting, that Lopez was intercepted by customs officers at Dublin Airport after travelling from Brazil. Her luggage tested positive for cocaine and it was found there were 20 identical shirts soaked with cocaine. Gda Higgins told the court that the cocaine could be extracted from the shirts at their intended destination using a chemical process. He accepted that Lopez would have had no knowledge of this process. The shirts were analysed and the cocaine that would have been extracted from them estimated to have a street value of 179,550. Lopez told gardai she had been approached in her home country and offered 3,000 to transport the drugs. She said she was to be paid on her return and made some allegations of threats. Gardai accepted there had been a mixture of inducement and coercion involved in Lopez's participation in the offence. Lopez had little English and had been given a note to give to a taxi driver with the name of a hostel on it, where she was to wait for further instructions. She made full admissions and co-operated fully with the investigation. Gda Higgins said Lopez had been very honest about her role and was worried about her family. Padraic Dwyer SC, defending, said his client was a mother of one child who she had as a teenager and left school to support. She has worked as a waitress and cashier. He submitted that her reward for this offence was to be small and there had been some coercion. He asked the court to take into account her guilty plea, co-operation with the gardai, her remorse and the fact she will be serving her sentence as a foreign national with little prospect of visitors. He said she was using her time in custody well to educate herself to improve her employment chances and said her prospects for rehabilitation were excellent. Counsel submitted this offence was at the lower end of the scale and asked the court to impose as light a sentence as possible to allow her return home to her child. Judge Melanie Greally noted a letter from Lopez in which she outlined that she regretted her actions and understood the consequences of the activity in which she was engaged. Lopez said she had learned a lesson and would not re-offend. Judge Greally said the circumstances of the case allowed her to depart from the presumptive minimum sentence of ten years applicable to this offence and she imposed a three year sentence to date from when Lopez went into custody. Eir may miss a Government-agreed deadline to connect 300,000 regional homes and businesses around Ireland to high-speed broadband by the end of 2018. Both the company and the Government say Storm Ophelia has thrown off the roll-out timetable. Both parties say that force majeure provisions have kicked in, with the final roll-out possibly extending into 2019. By the end of December 2017, 120,000 of the 300,000 connections were completed, behind the company's target of 132,000. The delay means Eir will either have to increase its rollout plan from 500 homes per day or miss the deadline in 10 months' time. Last year, the company signed a contract with the government for the completion of the 300,000 by the end of 2018 as a condition for the government to strike those homes off the state-subsidised National Broadband Plan roll-out list. The premises involved are generally located around regional towns and are separate from the 540,000 homes and businesses in rural areas that are to receive state-subsidised fibre broadband over the next five years under the National Broadband Plan. The missed deadline comes after Eir announced a new chief executive, Carolan Lennon, who is in charge of Eir's wholesale broadband wing. "We are fully committed to completing our roll-out and it remains our aim to do so by the end of December 2018," said a spokesman for Eir. Impact "We have now passed more than 170,000 premises with fibre to the home technology across Ireland. 130,000 of those connections are in rural Ireland and 120,000 premises are part of the commitment contract. "As outlined by the Department of Communications, the force majeure impact of Storm Ophelia, led to an agreed reduction in the Q4 target, to 20,000." The 300,000-premise fibre network is a wholesale network, meaning that other retailers can purchase access to it to re-sell to householders or businesses. However, several major broadband providers have said they will not use the network, blaming access pricing that is too high. Last month, Eir controversially withdrew from the National Broadband Plan, blaming complexity and a lack of economic prospect for its participation in the 25-year state contract. That leaves a sole bidder, Enet, to negotiate with the Government for the contract, which will not now seen any connections until next year at the earliest. Officials from the Department of Communications say they hope to see a contract signed with Enet this Autumn. However, Enet executives say there may still be stumbling blocks, principally in the form of access to Eir's rural infrastructure, deemed "critical" for the state-backed scheme to work. Eir executives say the existing regulated price for access to its rural poles and ducts is a fair one, leading to possible conflict on the issue in coming months. According to the Government, 69pc of the 2.3m premises around the country currently have access to medium or high speed broadband: "By the end of 2018 it is expected that 77pc will have access, climbing to 90pc in 2020." The FBI has intensified its investigation into two men suspected of involvement in the murder of Det Gda Adrian Donohoe and who fled to the US after his death. It comes as the suspected gunman in the callous killing is expected to walk free from prison in the coming days. The two suspects in the US, who are brothers, have been living among the Irish communities in Boston since their involvement in the heroic garda's murder in 2013. Gardai have been liaising with several international police agencies, including the PSNI and the FBI, as part of the investigation. Federal agents in Boston and the local police have increased pressure on two of the five-man gang living in the area and have offered a substantial reward for anyone who can give information to assist them. Posters distributed by the FBI in recent weeks in north Boston state: "Investigators believe people living in Boston and the upper Norfolk County towns of Massachusetts may have information that can assist the investigation. "A substantial reward is being offered for any information leading to the arrest and convictions of the person(s) involved." The FBI and US police have specifically appealed for information from the area's Irish community. Senior gardai previously vowed they will go "to the ends of the earth" to bring Det Gda Donohoe's killers to justice. In the coming days the criminal suspected of being the gunman in his murder will be released from a Dublin prison after being jailed for motoring offences. The man, aged in his 20s, was extradited from the US last year after hiding out in New York and Boston following the murder. The other two criminals involved in the murder are currently living freely in the North, despite the investigation involving the PSNI. Det Gda Donohoe, a father-of-two, was murdered during an armed robbery at the Lordship Credit Union near Dundalk, Co Louth, on January 25, 2013. On the fifth anniversary of the murder last month, senior gardai said the killers were being shielded by family and friends. Chief Supt Christopher Mangan said those providing support to Det Gda Donohoe's killers "will never have peace" until they come forward with information about the murder. "The persons involved in this murder have no doubt received logistical and emotional support from their families and friends," he added. An Irish Cystic Fibrosis campaigner has shared her relief after no longer having to rely on an oxygen supply after a successful double lung transplant. Orla Tinsley (30) underwent the life-changing operation in New York just before Christmas after previously being called about a potential transplant six times before those organs were found to be unsuitable. The Kildare-born journalist shared a photo of several oxygen cannisters on her Twitter account and said she is happy she will no longer need them. Today I am nine weeks post Transplant and thinking of my donor. Today I said goodbye to my o2 collection. Here is just 5 day and worth not including overnight. Bye bye, baby! #beatcf #posttransplantlife #recycleyourself #organdonation pic.twitter.com/oeFgISUgLf Orla Tinsley (@orlatinsley) February 22, 2018 She said: "Today I am nine weeks post Transplant and thinking of my donor. Today I said goodbye to my o2 collection. "Here is just 5 day and worth not including overnight. "Bye bye, baby! #beatcf #posttransplantlife #recycleyourself #organdonation." Ms Tinsley has tirelessly campaigned to raise awareness about Cystic Fibrosis and to improve services for people with the condition. The pathologist who misdiagnosed the breast cancer tests of two patients at St James's Hospital in Dublin was employed there for the whole of 2010. The hospital has continued to refuse to inspect the test results of some 270 other patients he examined. It follows revelations the doctor diagnosed Dubliner Alison McCormack with a non-invasive form of breast cancer, known as DCIS, in 2010. Ms McCormack, who was 35 at the time, had surgery, but because of the form of cancer she did not receive chemotherapy. However, two years later she developed more symptoms and when it was found to be cancer was told the DCIS had returned, according to 'RTE Investigates'. But it turned out she had a more serious form of cancer in 2010 which was missed. An examination of 39 test samples looked at by the doctor found another woman also had her cancer misdiagnosed. The hospital concluded the mistakes could have been "equally made by any other competent pathologist" and has refused to extend the look back to around 270 breast cancer patients whose tests he looked at, or hundreds of other samples he interpreted for other conditions. Meanwhile, the spotlight has now shifted to the safeguards in place to minimise the risk of more patients being misdiagnosed in all cancer centres. The body representing pathologists, the Faculty of Pathology, in the Royal College of Physicians, said that it has no data on the error rate in reading test results for DCIS cancer. "Because the error rate is so small there is no specific data for any diagnostic type such as DCIS," said a spokeswoman. In a bid to improve patient safety in Ireland, all 25 laboratories and eight private laboratories have input pathology results into a central computer system since 2014. "The most recent data from the programme covering the period from August 2016 to July 2017 - which includes data from every hospital in Ireland - shows an extremely low 'error' rate of 0.27pc. "The error rate was 0.31pc for the eight cancer centres and 0.21pc for general centres during this period. "These figures include minor errors, unlikely to be of clinical significance, therefore the major error within the programme is actually lower than 0.27pc," she said. She added there is no well-defined international error rate but "most authors quote a rate of between 0.5pc and 1pc". Patients "should be reassured there is monitoring". Matthias Kausch, who moved here from Germany, was sent an appointment letter for St Vincents Hospital in 2024 A man who has been given an appointment to see a neurologist in January 2024 has told of his shock at the length of time he was expected to endure before being assessed by the specialist. Matthias Kausch, a German national who has lived in Wexford for 16 years, received the letter from the neurology department in St Vincent's Hospital in Dublin after his GP referred him for an appointment. Mr Kausch (49) was doubly perplexed to see the appointment was for New Year's Day. "There is not one consultant in the country who would be willing to put a patient through on New Year's Day," he told the Irish Independent. "I don't need to be urgently seen but I thought if I have not heard anything again in six months I will go back to my GP and ask [him] to follow up for me." He said it was so bizarre he posted the letter on Facebook. His case was taken up by local Labour Party councillor George Lawlor who said yesterday it was just a symptom of the waiting list crisis now faced by hundreds of thousands of public patients. A spokesperson for the hospital yesterday said the waiting time to see a neurologist can be as long as 18 months. She blamed the appointment letter sent to Mr Kausch on a computer glitch. However, it is unclear how many other patients received a similar outpatient clinic date and a review is now under way. When a GP refers a patient to a specialist in the hospital they receive an acknowledgement letter. She said this tells them they will get another letter informing them of their appointment date six to eight weeks in advance of it being confirmed. However, it means patients referred today may not receive an appointment letter until the middle of 2019. The letter sent to Mr Kausch was due to a "systems error". "When new letter templates were installed on the IT system in the neurology department," the spokesperson said. "This has now been fixed and the problem should not happen again." The issue only was discovered when Mr Kausch went public. The hospital is struggling to cope with the demand by patients to see a neurologist. St Vincent's has four neurologists and the earliest a patient can be seen is three months after referral and the "longest is 18 months". As of yesterday, Mr Kausch had received no new communication from the hospital. The number of people waiting for a first time appointment to see a neurologist increased significantly last year. There are more than 10,115 people waiting in excess of six months. This has deteriorated since the Government took over when the figure stood at 6,568 waiting more than six months. Neurologists see people suffering from a range of conditions including multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's disease, peripheral neuropathy, spinal cord tumours and stroke. The number of neurologists in hospitals is lower per head of population than several other countries. President Michael D Higgins with his Greek counterpart Prokopis Pavlopoulos at a welcoming ceremony in Athens President Michael D Higgins has revealed that he no longer sees himself as a one-term president. Speaking in Athens, Mr Higgins said he is undecided whether to run for a second term. However, the Irish President acknowledged his ambitions have grown since he was first elected in 2011. "I did say at one stage getting through the term was the length of my aspirations. I had changed my mind on that because I do think that very solid foundations had been laid. "This leaves choices open as to what I may do." Reports this week suggested that Mr Higgins will seek a second term, and plans to declare his intentions in July. Yesterday he said: "In the appropriate time, I'll be making an announcement to clear any confusion that is there. "I have said we're in the midst of deciding very serious matters in Ireland at the present time. It's best if we do that with a discourse that is civil and taking into account of different viewpoints when that is over." The 76-year-old denied he was affecting anyone else's decision-making on a tilt at the presidency. "It is a decision that I have to come to and my decision is not standing in the way anyone else's decision [to run]. "If I did decide to stand it would be invoking an article of the Constitution which would mean I would stand as an independent. "Like anyone else, like every other candidate, I've to take many, many things into consideration. "I don't think that anybody looking back at my history is ever going to say I've never been afraid of any democratic consultation of any kind." The President concluded by telling members of the media: "I hope that satisfies every body's curiosity." Mr Higgins is currently on a three-day State visit in Athens, Greece. It begun with a wreath-laying ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknown Solider in front of the city's Old Royal Palace. He was then welcomed at the Presidential Mansion of Prokopios Pavlopoulos, president of Greece. "I know President Macron was here recently and I read his speech he gave in Athens. He acknowledged that great mistakes with great effect on the Greek people had been made and these were mistakes of the European Union. "If we're to draw on this and go forward I think I have to say something much stronger. That is that social cohesion must be placed at the top of the [EU's] agenda. "It's not a union if some countries are condemned to be always poorer, nor to have adequate infrastructure, sufficient housing and health." Mr Higgins then met Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras along with the mayor of Athens. Mayor Georgios Kaminis presented President Higgins with the Medal of Athens at City Hall in the Greek capital. Mr Higgins returned the gesture with a folio of his own poems. A man was rushed to hospital suffering from hypothermia on Thursday night after falling from a rocky shoreline in Co Cork. The 32-year-old local man from Fountainstown, Co Cork, south of Cork city, fell onto the rocks along the shore of the popular beauty spot around 8pm last night. He remained pinned against the rocks for some time before a passerby heard his cries for help and raised the alarm, according to the Irish Coast Guard. A Coast Guard lifeboat and lifeboat from the local Crosshaven RNLI were dispatched as well as the local fire brigade and ambulance. But due to the way he fell, it took them quite a while to free him, a spokesman said. It was a difficult extraction. He couldnt move, he said. The man was eventually freed and rushed to Cork University Hospital for treatment. Irish Rail has apologised after an email intended for staff was accidentally sent to more than 150,000 customers. The transport giant stressed that while "no personal data was accessible" to members of the public who received the email on Thursday, they have reported it to the Data Protection Commissioner. Irish Rail's Human Resources Department had intended to email employees about company policies but accidentally sent it to some customers who had registered for marketing communications. Confused members of the public took to Twitter on Thursday to flag the issues. One person said: "Why did I just receive an internal HR policy email from @IrishRail? I'll take the job like but I'm not sure I have the experience.." Another said: "Did anyone else just receive a staff HR email from @IrishRail... or was it just me?" An Irish Rail spokesman has apologised for the incident and said that no confidential information has been shared. "While the email also contained links to the company policies concerned, these were not accessible by customers as they could only be accessed by employees with an irishrail.ie log-in within sharepoint. "We have investigated this, and established an error in the distribution settings caused this to happen, which has been corrected and will ensure this doesnt happen again.," he said. He added that the Data Protection Commissioner has been notified about the incident. The spokesman said: "We emailed an apology yesterday evening to all customers who had received the email in error, which totalled over 150,000 email addresses. "While no personal data was accessible, we have also reported this to the Data Protection Commissioner." Almost 26,000 homes and businesses were without power in north Dublin for over an hour this morning. Power outages were reported on the official ESB website at Clonsaugh but premises as far south as Dublin's north inner city were also affected. ESB's Operations Manager Derek Hynes told RTE Radio One's Morning Ireland that the power outage also affected a "swathe of west Dublin from the N4 to the N2". "At 7.20am this morning we had a fault reported at the substation in Finglas, just off the M50," Mr Hynes said. "This disconnected power to just under 26,000 homes in Palmerstown, Castleknock and Coolmine. "This is effectively a swathe of west county Dublin from the N4 to the N2." Mr Hynes said they do not yet know the cause of the outage but are carrying out a thorough investigation. Power was restored shortly after 8.30am. "We'd clearly like to apologise," Mr Hynes added. "We have no idea of the cause yet but we'll know more this morning after a thorough investigation." DART services were initially affected by the power outage. There were no services between Malahide/Howth and Clontarf Road for a period this morning but Irish Rail has advised that services have now resumed. However, there are now significant delays as a result. Traffic lights were out of action at a number of junctions throughout the city centre due to a technical fault. Outage The latest power outage came just five days after hundreds of businesses across Dublin city centre were plunged into darkness on Monday. Up to 4,500 ESB customers were left without power at 11.15am due to an interference from ongoing construction works. During the lunchtime rush, many cafes and restaurants were forced to close - DublinTown, which represents city centre businesses, says it may have cost businesses up to 1m. Pat McEvoy, manager of O'Brien's Cafe on Merrion Row, told the Herald that about 90pc of his day's business was lost. "Our card machine was down and the only thing we could sell was cold sandwiches," he said. "However, since we couldn't offer them a free coffee to go with them, customers were going elsewhere. "This would be by far our busiest time - 90pc of our business is gone and we will have to throw out a lot of food as a result. It was hugely damaging." Up the road at O'Donoghue's Pub, manager Paul Richardson said the business had lost the equivalent of 20 pints of beer. "Whenever the electricity goes out, the beer froths up very high and starts to get warm. "Thankfully, our fridges were still working and we were putting pint glasses in them to try to keep the beer as cold as possible. "It could have been a whole lot worse. If the power went out on Friday evening or during an Ireland match, we would have been in big trouble," he said. Tackling the housing crisis and helping the environment should be the government's top priority as we plan for Ireland's future, according to these schoolchildren. Taoiseach Leo Varadkar officially launched the Government's Project Ireland 2040 last week, an ambitious 116 billion development plan that includes investment in sectors such as housing, health, justice, culture and transport. Independent.ie chatted to Junior Infants and First Class pupils in Adamstown Castle Educate Together national school in Adamstown, Co Dublin about the plan. *Thanks to the pupils and staff at Adamstown Castle Educate Together National School in Adamstown, Dublin for their help. For more information on Project Ireland 2040 visit the official website Fine Gael senators could be asked to give their version of a confrontation between two of their colleagues as part of an investigation into alleged bullying and sexism. Party bosses have now launched a formal probe into claims that Senator Catherine Noone was subjected to misogyny by a male colleague. It's understood the outcome of the investigation will be known within a week. Ms Noone has alleged that a fellow senator repeatedly speaks down to her, dismisses her views and treats her in a misogynistic way. Sources said that Ms Noone's issues with the senator "go back years" but have intensified in recent months. The senator at the centre of the controversy last night told the Irish Independent he was not aware of any complaint against him. Ms Noone is understood to have alleged that some derogatory comments have been directed towards her as a result of her work on the Oireachtas Committee on the Eighth Amendment. She was the chairperson of the committee which proposed allowing unrestricted abortion up to 12 weeks into a pregnancy. The breakdown in relations between Ms Noone and her colleague peaked at a meeting in recent weeks. It's understood Ms Noone was speaking when the other senator loudly cut across her and refused to let her back in. Ms Noone has told party officials she felt drowned out by his behaviour and unable to speak. The majority of Fine Gael's 19 senators witnessed the exchange and sources confirmed they may now be asked by party headquarters to outline their recollection of the exchange. Ms Noone raised the long-running row - without naming the individual involved - at a private Fine Gael meeting on Wednesday, telling colleagues that it had gotten to the point where she "can't take it anymore". In response to her contribution, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar said he would not "stand over any bullying or sexism towards colleagues". He asked parliamentary party chairman Martin Heydon to investigate the allegations further. Last night, a Fine Gael spokesperson confirmed that Mr Heydon has written to general secretary Tom Curran "regarding an internal matter within the party". A statement said that: "Due process will be followed and the matter will be dealt with swiftly." It added: "Fine Gael expects party colleagues to treat all with the utmost respect, professionalism and dignity at all times. "Any internal party matters are dealt with in the strictest of confidence and Fine Gael will not be making any further comment." Fine Gael last year had to deal with a separate controversy which led to the resignation of senior activist Barry Walsh from the party's executive council. It came after TD Kate O'Connell highlighted offensive tweets by Mr Walsh, including posts where he used the term "bitch" in relation to some female politicians. Ms Noone previously described Leinster House as a "difficult environment" for women after an unrelated incident involving remarks made by pro-life Independent TD Mattie McGrath ahead of votes in the abortion committee. He said: "The fat lady hasn't sang here yet and I'm not talking about the chairperson of the committee or anybody like that." He immediately backtracked and later contacted Ms Noone to apologise. Ms Noone wouldn't comment directly on Mr McGrath's remarks at the time. But she spoke in general about the "reality" that Leinster House "is quite a difficult environment for women". Senator Catherine Noone has alleged a male colleague repeatedly speaks down to her, dismisses her views and treats her in a misogynistic way The Taoiseach says he is taking "seriously" a complaint made by Senator Catherine Noone against a fellow Fine Gael senator. Ms Noone alleges she has been the subject of bullying and sexism. Speaking in Brussels, the Taoiseach confirmed a formal investigation in to the matter has been launched by the party. "Senator Noone has made a complaint against another senator in terms of the way he has spoken to her and that complaint is being taken very seriously," said the Taoiseach. The matter "will be investigated by the party, and that will be done swiftly", he told reporters. He said "any necessary action will then be taken on foot of" the investigation into Ms Noones grievances. Its understood the outcome of the probe will be known within a week. However, the senator at the centre of the controversy last night told the Irish Independent he was not aware of any complaint against him. Ms Noone said the person in question repeatedly speaks down to her, dismisses her views and treats her in a misogynistic way. Sources said that Ms Noones issues with the senator "go back years" but have intensified in recent months. Ms Noone is understood to have claimed that some of derogatory comments have been directed towards her as a result of her work on the Oireachtas Committee on the Eighth Amendment. She was the chairperson of the committee which proposed allowing unrestricted abortion up to 12 weeks into a pregnancy. The breakdown in relations between Ms Noone and her colleague peaked at a meeting of Fine Gael senators last week. Its understood Ms Noone was speaking when the other senator loudly cut across her and refused to let her back in. Ms Noone has told party officials she felt drowned out and unable to speak by his behaviour. The majority of Fine Gaels 19 senators witnessed the exchange and sources confirmed that they may now be asked by party headquarters to outline their recollection of the exchange. Ms Noone raised the long-running row - without naming the individual involved - at a private Fine Gael meeting on Wednesday telling colleagues that it had gotten to the point where she "cant take it anymore". In response to her contribution Taoiseach Leo Varadkar said he would not "stand over any bullying or sexism towards colleagues". He asked parliamentary party chairman Mr Heydon to investigate the allegations further. Last night a Fine Gael spokesperson confirmed that Mr Heydon has written to general secretary Tom Curran "regarding an internal matter within the party". A statement said that: "Due process will be followed and the matter will be dealt with swiftly." It added: "Fine Gael expects party colleagues to treat all with the utmost respect, professionalism and dignity at all times. "Any internal party matters are dealt with the strictest of confidence and Fine Gael will not be making any further comment," the spokesperson concluded. Fine Gael last year had to deal with a separate controversy which led to the resignation of senior activist Barry Walsh from the partys executive council. It came after TD Kate OConnell highlighted offensive tweets posted by Mr Walsh including some where he called female politicians "bitches". Ms Noone previously described Leinster House as a "difficult environment" for women after an unrelated incident involving remarks made by Pro-life Independent TD Mattie McGrath ahead of votes in the abortion committee. He said: "The fat lady hasnt sang here yet and Im not talking about the chairperson of the committee or anybody like that." He immediately backtracked and later contacted Ms Noone to apologise. Ms Noone wouldnt comment directly on Mr McGraths remarks at the time. But she spoke in general about the "reality" that Leinster House "is quite a difficult environment for women". The North's political leaders, Sinn Fein's Michelle ONeill and Arlene Foster of the DUP. This week on The Floating Voter, fresh from the Brexit Breakfast hosted by Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, Kevin Doyle is joined in studio by Philip Ryan and Shona Murray. Following the launch of Project Ireland 2040 we ask is it propaganda over planning? We bring you the analysis of Leo's speech at the Brexit Breakfast, scrambled egg, rashers and all. With Leo calling out Theresa May on being dependent on the DUP to prop up her government, we ask is Northern Ireland the unwanted ugly stepchild of a failed marriage? And as Fine Gael make more gains in the polls, we ask when will it be time to go to the country... again? Two teenagers "had the potential to die" as medics were forced to set up a field hospital for dozens of "paralytic drunk" disco-goers arriving at an alcohol-free underage event. Some teenagers were so drunk arriving at the scene that they needed immediate medical attention and help to breathe. Three ambulances were dispatched to the scene and a doctor set up a triage, before sending two critically-ill children to Cork University Hospital (CUH). Meanwhile, a medic was called to Bandon Garda Station to tend to drunk teenagers who had been refused from the alcohol-free venue, and had subsequently begun "fighting on the streets of Bandon". Furthermore, a doctor described how he responded to "tetchy" parents who claimed their children's drinks "had been spiked". There were approximately 500 teenagers, about 16-years-old, attending the disco last Friday night. Speaking on RTE Radio One's Today with Sean O'Rourke, consultant in emergency medicine at the CUH Chris Luke said "his heart sank" when he heard three ambulances had been dispatched to the west Cork town. "I heard there was the possibility of half a dozen, a dozen very ill teens coming in our direction," Dr Luke said. "We're basically stretched to the end of our pin already." He paid credit to critical care retrieval physician Jason van der Velde who decided to triage the teenagers at the scene to avoid overwhelming an already-stretched A&E unit. Speaking this morning Dr van der Welde said the best description of the scene was a "vomitorium". "When I arrived, the crew had a completely unconscious teen. "We organised our resources like we do in a major incident, we set up a field hospital and said let's get a handle on it before we start pushing ambulances out, if you start pushing them out you start running out of resources very fast." Dr van der Welde said there was credit due to the rugby club hosting the alcohol-free underage event who "did an exceptional job" in bringing the intoxicated teenagers into a safe area in the clubhouse to ensure they were warm and safe. "I'm not exaggerating but at least two teenagers had the potential to die at the scene. "Their blood pressure was into the seventies, they were unconscious. "I'm not talking about a little tipsy. We're talking about paralytic unconscious drunk. "You've got to make sure they're warm, that they're properly looked after on their side so they don't choke on their own vomit." The doctor confirmed that they sent two teenagers to hospital for prolonged critical care and were looked after overnight by nursing staff. He said he was then called to the local garda station to check on teenagers who had begun fighting in the town. "Some kids who were not allowed into the disco had gone into Bandon town and started fighting on the streets. "I had to go into the garda cells and make sure they're okay." Dr van der Welde said it is important to have outlets like youth discos for teens to express themselves and enjoy themselves. He also said there were plenty of kids who got into buses safely and made it to the "wonderful party safely and had a wonderfully safe time". "A dozen kids let their side down," he said. Speaking about the hospital's resources, Dr Chris Luke said they are raising the issue because the A&E department is "already stowed out". "These youngsters, these children, will die. They're scantily clad and they're heading out drunk into the winter night and if they fall asleep in the ditch, they will vomit and they will die. Most of these deaths are due to hypothermia and dying from choking on your own vomit." He continued; "It upsets me a little when parents rush to the diagnosis of spiked drink. "If parents raise the issue of spiked drink, they're raising an issue like rape, murder, kidnap, it is an incredibly serious thing to suggest to hospital staff. "It is a very serious suggestion. And of course, like Jason said, they're blind drunk getting on the bus and off the bus, they have naggins of vodka, the traditional drink. In what part of this chain of events were the drinks spiked and how were they spiked? "Spiking a drink is incredibly rare," he continued. "We have to go back to the parents and say get a grip, nobody else can prevent this other than the parents, if your child is scantily clad and going out on a winter's night with a clinking rucksack. "It's getting very upsetting when people lash out at staff and say some bogeyman spiked their drinks. "At the minimum, these parents can be tetchy, sometimes they can be abusive. "To suggest your teen's drink was spiked is an astonishingly serious allegation and should involve the guards." Dr van der Weld added; "Let's be absolutely clear. Some of these teens who were completely unconscious, we pulled naggins out of their socks, the most in ingenious ways of concealing alcohol. "Let's be absolutely clear on this, let's not beat around the bush here." Gardai are investigating a number of public order incidents and an alleged assault arising out of the incident. The Irish Examiner confirmed today that the rugby club had several adults on duty to supervise, backed up by first aiders and nurses. All disco goers were searched at the front door for drink and drugs and anyone in an intoxicated state was refused entry. British singer Johnny McDaid (L) and partner US actress Courteney Cox pose on the red carpet on arrival for the BRIT Awards 2018 in London on February 21, 2018. / AFP PHOTO / Tolga AKMEN International Hit Songwriters Ruth-Anne Cunningham and Johnny McDaid to Receive an IMRO Outstanding Achievement Award International hit songwriters Ruth-Anne Cunningham and Johnny McDaid received an IMRO Outstanding Achievement Award. Picture: Conor McCabe Photography Johnny McDaid (L) and Courteney Cox attend The BRIT Awards 2018 held at The O2 Arena on February 21, 2018 in London, England. (Photo by John Phillips/Getty Images) British singer Johnny McDaid (L) and partner US actress Courteney Cox pose on the red carpet on arrival for the BRIT Awards 2018 in London on February 21, 2018. / AFP PHOTO / Tolga AKMEN Courteney Cox and fiance Johnny McDaid at IMRO Awards at The Gibson Hotel, Dublin Johnny McDaid (L) and Courteney Cox attend The BRIT Awards 2018 held at The O2 Arena on February 21, 2018 in London, England. (Photo by John Phillips/Getty Images) Courteney Cox and fiance Johnny McDaid at IMRO Awards at The Gibson Hotel, Dublin Courteney Cox enjoyed a high profile trip to Dublin to support her fiance Johnny McDaid. The Snow Patrol rocker (41) was being honoured with an Outstanding Achievement award from the Irish Music Rights Organisation on Thursday night, and he and the tv legend proudly posed for the pictures at The Gibson Hotel. Ruth-Anne Cunningham was also given the award for her contributions to the international songwriting indutstry. Cox (53) and McDaid flew out of Los Angeles last week and have spent the last number of days in London, partying at the Brit Awards on Wednesday, before making their way to Dublin on Thursday in time for the prestigious ceremony. Expand Close Courteney Cox and fiance Johnny McDaid at IMRO Awards at The Gibson Hotel, Dublin / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Courteney Cox and fiance Johnny McDaid at IMRO Awards at The Gibson Hotel, Dublin The record producer, from Derry, has never been shy about professing his love for his other half, whom he reunited with in 2016 after a brief four month split. "I dont know if you can put a label on what makes us work, but I know that Ive never loved like I love this woman, so if thats enough, then that's enough," he told People. The Friends actress won't be moving to Ireland or London anytime soon, but the couple reportedly split their time between continents to make things work. "A permanent move is off the table. But Courteney is willing to spend more time in Ireland to make the relationship work. At this point she'll bend over backward to make Johnny happy," a source told OK! magazine. The governor of Nigerias Yobe state, Ibrahim Gaidam told residents of the village of Dapchi that 76 of their schoolgirls who were reported to have been rescued from Islamist Boko Haram kidnappers are still missing (stock picture) The governor of Nigeria's Yobe state told residents of the village of Dapchi that 76 of their schoolgirls who were reported to have been rescued from Islamist Boko Haram kidnappers are still missing. His government had said on Wednesday the schoolgirls had been rescued by the military, sparking celebration in the streets. But a day later, Ibrahim Gaidam told villagers the girls were still unaccounted for. "The government said yesterday the girls have been found, then the governor came today to say the soldiers are yet to find them," said Ali Maidoya, who lives in Dapchi. "Why did they lie to us before?" The students' disappearance is one of the largest since Boko Haram abducted more than 270 schoolgirls from the town of Chibok in 2014. That case drew global attention to the nine-year insurgency, which has sparked what the United Nations has called one of the world's worst humanitarian crises. A roll-call at the girls' school on Tuesday showed 91 students were absent. Boko Haram insurgents drove into Dapchi on Monday evening in trucks, some of them camouflaged and mounted with heavy guns, and attacked the girls' school, sending hundreds of students fleeing. On Wednesday, one witness said he had seen three trucks filled with weeping girls. There is confusion over the number now missing, with estimates ranging from around 50 to more than 100. State police, the Yobe government and others have all given different figures. Last year, President Muhammadu Buhari's administration agreed to pay millions of euro to secure the release of some of the Chibok girls. This week's kidnapping of the Dapchi schoolgirls may have been carried out in the hope of securing a similar multi-million euro ransom. Police vehicles are parked outside a property in Toronto where officers recovered the remains of at least six people from planters (Rob Gilles/AP) Canadian police have charged an alleged serial killer with another murder, bringing the total to six. Detective Sergeant Hank Idsinga said the remains of three of the six victims have been identified, and there could still be other charges made. I believe there will be, he said. The remains were found at a property that alleged serial killer Bruce McArthur used as storage for his landscaping business. McArthur was arrested on January 18 on two counts of murder in connection with the disappearances of Andrew Kinsman, 49, and Selim Esen, 44, who were last seen in 2017 in a Toronto neighbourhood known as the Gay Village. Expand Close From left to right, Selim Essen, 44, Sorush Mahmudi, 50, Dean Lisowick, Andrew Kinsman, 49, and Majeed Kayhan, 58 (Toronto Police Service via AP) / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp From left to right, Selim Essen, 44, Sorush Mahmudi, 50, Dean Lisowick, Andrew Kinsman, 49, and Majeed Kayhan, 58 (Toronto Police Service via AP) Police identified Mr Kinsmans remains through fingerprints. Not long after his arrest, McArthur was charged with the murders of three more men: Soroush Marmudi, Majeed Kayhan and Dean Lisowick. Little is known about Mr Marmudi, a 50-year-old reported missing by his family in 2015. Mr Kayhan was a 58-year-old Afghan immigrant who was reported missing by his son in 2012, and Mr Lisowick was a homeless prostitute in his mid-40s. The latest murder charge involves 40-year-old Skanda Navaratnam, who went missing in 2010. Friends said McArthur employed and had a sexual relationship with Mr Navaratnam, who was last seen in 2010 leaving Zipperz, a now closed gay bar. McArthurs Facebook profile also showed he was friends with Navaratnam. There's hundreds of outstanding missing persons occurrences that we're looking atDetective Sergeant Hank Idsinga Police said they identified the remains of Mr Marmudi and Mr Navaratnam, who was a refugee from Sri Lanka, through dental records. They believe there are multiple murder scenes, including McArthurs apartment. Authorities have checked at least 30 other places where McArthur was known to have worked, including some of Torontos wealthiest neighbourhoods. They expect to find more remains in planters they have retrieved from around the city and are currently investigating about 20 containers in which plants are grown. Police are also looking at a number of missing person cases to determine if there are connections to McArthur and are running down tips that have come in from around the world. Theres hundreds of outstanding missing persons occurrences that were looking at, Mr Idsinga said. We are tracing his whereabouts as far back as we can go. The 66-year-old McArthur is believed to have met his victims in the Gay Village and on gay dating apps for older and large men. Edward Royle, a lawyer for McArthur, declined to comment on the case. Mr Navaratnams disappearance was originally investigated as part of Project Houston, a police task force looking for him and two other men who went missing between 2010 and 2012: Mr Kayhan and Abdulbasir Faizi, 42. Police have interviewed some of McArthurs past known associates, but Mr Idsinga said evidence unearthed so far indicates he acted alone. AP Police are trying to track down the grandson of a Second World War soldier whose body was found in Russia more than 75 years after he went missing. The US soldier was discovered in Karelia on August 29, 2017 by a dedicated search group. Now police in Utah are helping to track down the soldiers grandson his next of kin to return his personal belongings and explain the discovery. If anyone knows Anton, please have him #contact us. We are trying to notify him of the discovery of his #ancestors remains. #ThankYou pic.twitter.com/JXAavGrTHB SLC Police Dept. (@slcpd) February 23, 2018 Anton Skripko, who was born in November 1964 almost two decades after his grandfather went missing would now be 57. Salt Lake City Police has posted the appeal on social media asking for anyone who knows Anton to make sure he gets in touch. In order to return this soldiers personal belongings and notify his family, we are seeking current contact information for and attempting to locate the grandson of the solider, who is a Utah resident and the only known next of kin. The post has led to a flurry of interest on social media with armchair sleuths attempting to track him down. Jakub Marian is a Czech cartographer, whose maps give a fascinating and different take on the world from above. His latest creation depicts Europe, but instead of names countries are given the autocomplete of a question about the country. The question is Why did (country name) ? and the answers, taken from Google in the US, give a revealing incite into both the Americans using the search engine and the European countries themselves. Expand Close The autocomplete map of Europe / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp The autocomplete map of Europe Predictably the UKs entry reads leave the EU and many more countries such as Denmark, Lithuania and Finlands are join the EU. Others are intriguingly specific however, such as Swedens ban Christmas lights, referring to a fake report that the country banned them to avoid offending Muslims the truth was reportedly a ban on lights being put on poles for safety reasons. Norways knight a penguin refers to the similarly bizarre story of Nils Olav I, II and II, three penguins adopted and honoured by the Norwegian military the second of whom was knighted in 2008 and is pictured below with his Kings Guard over which he was colonel-in-chief. Expand Close Nils Olav the penguin in 2008 / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Nils Olav the penguin in 2008 Jakub, who is also a linguist, mathematician and musician, has extended his talents to many other interesting and entertaining maps. Others of note about Europe include one for Valentines Day which showed all the different ways to say I love you in different nations. Expand Close The map showing how to say I love you / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp The map showing how to say I love you Another shows the average class size at primary school level using data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Expand Close Europe with the data from the OECD / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Europe with the data from the OECD If youd like to see more of Jakubs marvellous work, check out his website, or alternately you can find him on Facebook and Twitter. BMW Group is in talks with a Chinese manufacturer about a possible partnership to produce electric versions of its Mini cars for the worlds biggest car market. BMWs announcement adds to increasing competition in Chinas market for electrics as global car makers spend billions of dollars on developing models to meet official sales quotas. BMW, which owns the Mini brand, said it signed a letter of intent with car maker Great Wall, and is looking to work out a co-operation agreement and investment details. General Motors, Volkswagen AG, Nissan and other car makers also have announced plans with local partners to produce dozens of electric models for China. Another bidder has withdrawn from the running to operate the Wales and Borders rail franchise, blaming the collapse of construction giant Carillion. Abellio Rail Cymru (ARC) said it was unable to overcome the impact of the liquidation last month of Carillion, which was its partner in the bid. The firm was one of four original bidders for the contract. Arriva Trains Wales, which currently runs the service, pulled out of the running in October. ARC is a further victim of Carillion's liquidationKen Skates, Welsh Government The move leaves two remaining bidders French joint venture KeolisAmey and Hong Kong-based MTR Corporation. Ken Skates, the Welsh Governments Cabinet Secretary for Economy and Transport, said it was unfortunate that having invested significant time, effort and money into the process, ARC is a further victim of Carillions liquidation. Amey Rail has bought most of Carillions rail projects, safeguarding 700 jobs, but Mr Skates said: Whilst this has safeguarded a number of jobs in Carillion Rail, it has unfortunately left ARC unable to secure the capability it would need to proceed. Transport for Wales has analysed the robustness and technical capability of the remaining bidders and are confident that they are both capable of providing a high-quality solution that will enable us to transform rail services right across Wales. I would like to further recognise ARCs contribution to this process. The teams enthusiastic and professional involvement to date has contributed significantly to the procurement process. The contract is due to be awarded in May and the Wales and Borders services, and the South Wales Metro, will begin operating from October. Syrian government warplanes supported by Russia have continued their bombardment of the rebel-controlled eastern suburbs of Damascus for a sixth day, killing five people, activists said. The death toll from the past week climbed to more than 400, with the number of casualties overwhelming rescuers and doctors at hospitals, many of which have also been bombed. This fresh bombardment comes a day after world leaders called for an urgent ceasefire in Syria to allow relief agencies to deliver aid and evacuate the critically wounded from besieged areas. However, Russias UN ambassador Vassily Nebenzia, who called Thursdays meeting, put forward last-minute amendments, saying the proposed resolution was simply unrealistic. A new vote is likely on Friday. The United States accused Syrian president Bashar Assad of planning to bomb or starve opponents in besieged eastern Ghouta into submission just as it did in Aleppo. Expand Close Protests take place outside the Russian Consulate in Istanbul (AP) / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Protests take place outside the Russian Consulate in Istanbul (AP) Kelley Currie, US ambassador for economic and social affairs, told the UN Security Council that the Syrian leader is counting on Russia, a key ally and veto-wielding member of the council, to make sure it is unable to stop their suffering. The oppositions Syrian Civil Defence Rescue Group reported new airstrikes in Douma, Arbeen and other towns that make up the eastern suburbs of Damascus known as eastern Ghouta. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said at least five people were killed in raids on Hammouriyeh, Zamalka, Douma and al-Marj. The UK-based group monitors the Syria war through a network of activists on the ground. Separately, Human Rights Watch has criticised the way Turkey is conducting its offensive in northern Syria, saying it has failed to take necessary precautions to avoid civilian casualties. Expand Close United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Mark Lowcock speaks to the Security Council (AP) / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Mark Lowcock speaks to the Security Council (AP) The New York-based group cites three attacks in the Afrin region in late January which it says killed a total of 26 civilians, including 17 children. In a statement, it called on Turkey to thoroughly investigate these strikes and make the findings public. Turkey launched an air and ground offensive in the Kurdish-controlled region on January 20, saying it aims to clear Afrin of Syrian Kurdish militia known as the YPG which Turkey considers to be an offshoot of its own outlawed Kurdish rebels fighting within Turkey. According to several estimates around 120 civilians have been killed so far in the offensive. Turkey denies hitting civilians. The YPG has accused Turkey of bombing a convoy of civilians that was crossing into Afrin to protest against Turkeys offensive, resulting in multiple casualties who were moved to hospitals in Afrin for treatment. Syrian state TV said a convoy carrying aid and heading toward Afrin has been targeted by Turkish artillery, inflicting more casualties. The broadcast gave no further details about Thursdays incident, which came two days after pro-government fighters began entering the predominantly Kurdish town to shore up the Kurdish forces, after reaching an agreement with the YPG. Turkey has threatened to bomb the Syrian forces if they work together with the Kurds. Syrian government warplanes have carried out a sixth day of air strikes in rebel-held suburbs east of Damascus, killing 32 people, activists said, as the death toll from a week of bombardment soared over 400. At the United Nations, last-minute negotiations were under way ahead of an expected vote on a Security Council resolution demanding a 30-day humanitarian ceasefire. The new bombings came a day after Syrian army helicopters dropped leaflets over the rebel-controlled areas of eastern Ghouta, urging residents of those suburbs to leave for their own safety and calling on opposition fighters to surrender because they were surrounded by government troops. Opposition activists reported air strikes and artillery shelling on a string of towns on the edge of Damascus or eastern Ghouta. At least 32 people were killed in raids on areas including Hammouriyeh, Zamalka, Douma and al-Marj, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based group that monitors the civil war through a network of activists in Syria. "I am deeply saddened by the terrible suffering of the civilian population in eastern Ghouta: 400,000 people who live in hell on earth." -- @antonioguterres on the situation in Syria. https://t.co/aMQXUlAQ8V pic.twitter.com/0fjHShLDkQ United Nations (@UN) February 21, 2018 The Ghouta Media Centre, an activist collective, also reported 32 killed, saying the victims included 13 people in the Damascus suburb of Douma, five in Ein Tarma and five in Shiefouniyeh. Syrian state TV reported that insurgents fired 70 shells on Damascus, killing one person and wounding 60 others. It said one of the shells hit a hospital, damaging its intensive care unit as well as cars parked nearby. The oppositions Syrian Civil Defence rescue group reported new air strikes in Douma, Arbeen and other towns east of Damascus. At the White House, US President Donald Trump blamed Russia, Iran and the Syrian government for the recent violence in Syria, calling it a humanitarian disgrace. Expand Close President Donald Trump speaks during a news conference with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull in the East Room of the White House (Carolyn Kaster/AP) / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp President Donald Trump speaks during a news conference with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull in the East Room of the White House (Carolyn Kaster/AP) His comments came at a joint news conference with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull. UN Special Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura called again for an urgent ceasefire to relieve the appalling suffering of civilians in eastern Ghouta by stopping the bombing there and the indiscriminate shelling of Damascus. He said the cease-fire must be followed by an immediate, unhindered humanitarian access to eastern Ghouta and evacuation of sick and injured. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres also had urged an immediate suspension of all war activities in eastern Ghouta, saying 400,000 people are living in hell on Earth. European Union foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini said unhindered humanitarian access and the protection of civilians is a moral duty and a matter of urgency. The UN draft resolution demands that as soon as the ceasefire takes effect, all parties should allow humanitarian convoys and medical evacuations in areas requested by the UN. It states that 5.6 million people in 1,244 communities are in acute need, including 2.9 million in hard-to-reach and besieged locations. The Syrian government and its Russian allies want to continue attacking extremists from the Islamic State group and all al Qaida affiliates. Expand Close Russian Ambassador to the United Nations Vassily Nebenzia, left, speaks to Chinese Ambassador to the United Nations Ma Zhaoxu before a Security Council meeting on the situation in Syria (Mary Altaffer/AP) / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Russian Ambassador to the United Nations Vassily Nebenzia, left, speaks to Chinese Ambassador to the United Nations Ma Zhaoxu before a Security Council meeting on the situation in Syria (Mary Altaffer/AP) Russias UN Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia called a 30-day ceasefire unrealistic and said it could not be enforced. But Sweden and Kuwait, which sponsored the resolution, have been pressing for immediate action. They rejected a key Russian-proposed amendment that would have ruled out an immediate ceasefire. It was not immediately clear whether Russia will veto the resolution or abstain. We are so close to adopt this resolution, Kuwaits UN Ambassador Mansour Al-Otaiba, the current council president, told reporters. We are almost there. The text the sponsors circulated earlier on Friday demands that a 30-day ceasefire take effect 72 hours after the resolution is adopted. It is about saving lives, Swedens UN Ambassador Olof Skoog said. UN convoys and evacuation teams are ready to go. Its time for the council to come together and shoulder its responsibility to urgently avert a situation that is beyond words in its desperation. AP A Florida inmate convicted of raping and killing a college student decades ago screamed and yelled murderers! three times, thrashing on a stretcher as he was being put to death. The governors office said Eric Scott Branch, 47, was pronounced dead at 7.05pm on Thursday after receiving a lethal injection at Florida State Prison. Branch was convicted of the 1993 rape and fatal beating of University of West Florida student Susan Morris, 21, whose naked body was found buried in a shallow grave near a nature trail. Just as officials were administering the lethal drugs that included a powerful sedative, Branch thrashed about on his stretcher and then yelled murderers! murderers! murderers before falling silent. Moments earlier, he had addressed the prison officers in the room saying that, instead of them carrying out the death sentence, it should have been governor Rick Scott and Attorney General Pam Bondi. Let them come down here and do it. Ive learned that youre good people and this is not what you should be doing, Branch told the officers. Expand Close A vigil was held for Eric Scott Branch in Gainesville, as he was sentenced to death. (Lauren Bacho/AP) / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp A vigil was held for Eric Scott Branch in Gainesville, as he was sentenced to death. (Lauren Bacho/AP) Outside the prison, Herman Lindsey a former death row inmate who was exonerated in 2009, was part of a group protesting the death penalty. Theres no way to guarantee were not killing innocent people, he said. Evidence in the case shows that Branch approached Ms Morris after she left a night class on January 11, 1993, so he could steal her red Toyota and return to his home state of Indiana. He was arrested while travelling there. In denying one of Branchs appeals, the Florida Supreme Court noted that the crime was particularly brutal. She had been beaten, stomped, sexually assaulted and strangled. She bore numerous bruises and lacerations, both eyes were swollen shut, the justices wrote. Branch also was convicted of sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl in Indiana and of another sexual assault in Panama City, Florida, that took place just 10 days before the fatal attack on Morris, court records show. The jury in his murder case recommended the death penalty by a 10-2 vote under Floridas old capital punishment system, which was ruled unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court in 2016. The high court said juries must reach a unanimous recommendation for death and judges cannot overrule that and Florida legislators subsequently changed the system to comply. She had been beaten, stomped, sexually assaulted and strangled. She bore numerous bruises and lacerations, both eyes were swollen shut One of Branchs final appeals to the US Supreme Court involved whether he deserved a new sentencing hearing because of that jurys 10-2 vote in his 1994 trial. The Florida Supreme Court has ruled that the new system of sentencing does not apply to inmates sentenced to death before 2002. Branch claimed in a last-minute appeal that the Florida courts decisions on which inmates get new sentencing hearings and which do not is unfair and arbitrary. In court documents, Branchs lawyers say this prohibits about 150 Florida death-row inmates from having their sentences reviewed. The US Supreme Court, without comment, rejected that appeal on Thursday and one other which Branchs attorneys had filed. Executions due to take place in Texas and Alabama were cancelled. Thomas Bart Whitaker, 38, was on death row for masterminding the fatal shootings of his mother and brother at their suburban Houston home in 2003. Whitakers father, Kent, said he forgave his son, and the state parole board recommended that governor Greg Abbott commute the sentence to life in prison, with Mr Abbott granting clemency. In Alabama, Doyle Lee Hamm was sentenced to die for the 1987 death of a motel clerk during a robbery. He has fought his death sentence, arguing there is a risk of a botched execution because of damage to his veins due to lymphoma and other illnesses. It was postponed after officials said there was not enough time to prepare the inmate before a death warrant expired at midnight. A former top adviser to President Donald Trumps election campaign has formally pleaded guilty to federal conspiracy and false statements charges in the special counsels Russia investigation. The plea by Rick Gates is a strong indication that he is planning to co-operate with special counsel Robert Muellers investigation as it continues to probe the Trump campaign, Russian election interference and Gates longtime business associate Paul Manafort. The 45-year-old Gates made the plea at the federal courthouse in Washington. He admitted to charges accusing him of conspiring against the US government related to fraud and unregistered foreign lobbying as well as lying to federal authorities in a recent interview. With his co-operation, Gates gives mr Mueller a witness willing to provide information on Manafort about his finances and political consulting work in Ukraine, and also someone who had access at the highest levels of the Trump campaign. Expand Close Paul Manafort maintains his innocence (Jacquelyn Martin/AP) / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Paul Manafort maintains his innocence (Jacquelyn Martin/AP) Gates plea came a day after a federal grand jury in Virginia returned a 32-count indictment against him and Manafort, Mr Trumps former campaign chairman, accusing them of tax evasion and bank fraud. The indictment in Virginia was the second round of charges against Gates and against Manafort, who has denied any wrongdoing. The two men were initially charged last October with unregistered lobbying and conspiring to launder millions of dollars they earned while working on behalf of a pro-Russian Ukrainian political party. Gates decision marks the fifth publicly known guilty plea in the special counsel probe into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin during the 2016 campaign. The plea also comes quickly on the heels of the stunning indictment last week that laid out a broad operation of election meddling by Russia, which began in 2014, and employed fake social media accounts and on-the-ground politicking to promote Mr Trumps campaign, disparage Hillary Clinton and sow division and discord widely among the US electorate. The charges to which Gates is pleading guilty do not involve any conduct connected to the Trump campaign. They largely relate to a conspiracy laid out in his indictments, but they do reveal that Gates spoke with the FBI earlier this month and lied during the interview. I had hoped and expected my business colleague would have had the strength to continue the battle to prove our innocence. For reasons yet to surface he chose to do otherwisePaul Manafort That same day, his lawyers filed a motion to withdraw from representing him for irreconcilable difference. The court papers accuse Gates of lying about a March 19 2013 meeting involving Manafort, a lobbyist and a member of Congress. Gates said the meeting did not include discussion of Ukraine, when in fact prosecutors say it did. The charges do not name the lobbyist or the lawmaker but filings with the Justice Department show Manafort and lobbyist Vin Weber of Mercury Public Affairs met with Representative Dana Rohrabacher on that date as part of a lobbying campaign on behalf of Ukrainian interests. On Friday, Manafort said in a statement that he maintains his innocence. I had hoped and expected my business colleague would have had the strength to continue the battle to prove our innocence. For reasons yet to surface he chose to do otherwise, Manafort said. This does not alter my commitment to defend myself against the untrue piled-up charges contained in the indictments against me. In court filings over the past few months, Gates gradually began to show the strain the case was placing on him and his family. As Gates was kept on house arrest, he frequently pleaded with US District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson for leniency to attend sporting events with his four children. Even on Friday, ahead of his plea, Gates had asked the judge to let him take his children to Boston for spring break so they could learn about American history in general, and the Revolutionary War in particular. On Thursday night, Gates emailed a brief letter to friends and family, telling them of his decision to plead guilty, Republican lobbyist Jack Burkman said. Its sad, said Burkman, who had hosted a fundraiser for Gates legal defence fund. Under the terms of the plea, Gates is estimated to face between 57 and 71 months behind bars. Prosecutors may seek a shortened sentence depending on his co-operation. AP A food bank in Germany is being criticised for its decision to stop serving more foreigners, who make up a growing percentage of its users. The food bank in the western city of Essen announced last month that it will only register new users who can prove they have German citizenship, saying young foreign men are scaring away elderly people and women. Other food banks, migrant groups and local politicians said it was wrong to exclude people who need charity. The chairman of Essens integration council, Miguel Martin Gonzalez Kliefken, said the decision plays into the hands of far-right groups, some of which have hailed the move. In an interview with broadcaster n-tv on Friday, Mr Kliefken said the food bank should remove any troublemakers rather than punish people based on their nationality. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has greeted his Canadian counterpart, Justin Trudeau, with a hug, a day after embarrassed Canadian diplomats had to revoke a party invitation for a man convicted of attempting to kill an Indian politician. The invitation was the latest blunder in Mr Trudeaus eight-day visit, which has included everything from criticism of his colourful wardrobe to questions about whether his government is sufficiently critical of Sikh extremists. Expand Close India Canada / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp India Canada Jaspal Atwal, a Canada-based former member of a banned Sikh separatist group, had been invited by a Canadian MP to a Thursday evening party for Mr Trudeau at Canadas High Commission in New Delhi. Atwal was convicted of trying to kill an Indian Cabinet minister during a 1986 visit to Canada. The minister was shot but survived. Atwal was jailed, but became a businessman after his release. Canada quickly withdrew the invitation once it was discovered, with Mr Trudeau telling reporters: Obviously we take this situation extremely seriously. The individual in question never should have received an invitation. Expand Close Canada India Trudeau / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Canada India Trudeau Earlier in the week, Atwal attended a reception in Mumbai, at which he was photographed with Mr Trudeaus wife, Sophie Gregoire Trudeau. Mr Modi nevertheless welcomed Mr Trudeau on Friday with his signature bear hug, smiling at his wife and their three children, who also attended the formal outdoor ceremony. I hope PM @JustinTrudeau and his family had a very enjoyable stay so far. I particularly look forward to meeting his children Xavier, Ella-Grace, and Hadrien. Here is a picture from my 2015 Canada visit, when I'd met PM Trudeau and Ella-Grace. pic.twitter.com/Ox0M8EL46x Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) February 22, 2018 She remembers it well, @narendramodi! It's been great to visit so far - we'll see you today. https://t.co/5C2CgLOW6n Justin Trudeau (@JustinTrudeau) February 23, 2018 In a tweet on Thursday night, Mr Modi said he was looking forward to meeting Mr Trudeau and his family, adding I appreciate his deep commitment to ties between our two countries. But it has not been an easy trip for the Canadian premier in many ways. He has been ridiculed in India on social media for his familys seemingly endless wardrobe changes, with the photogenic group often appearing in colourful Indian clothing, and has faced repeated insistence that he denounce Sikh extremism. Expand Close CORRECTION Trudeau India 20180220 / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp CORRECTION Trudeau India 20180220 Sikh radicalism is the main issue, the Hindustan Times, one of Indias largest newspapers, said in an editorial earlier this week. Justin Trudeau should allay Indias concerns on terrorism. Canada has a small but politically potent Sikh population, some of whom support a breakaway Sikh state, known as Khalistan, inside India. The Indian media often describe Mr Trudeaus government as being soft on the Khalistan issue. Mr Trudeau insisted that he had told Indian politicians that was not true. I was pleased to be able to make very, very clear that Canada supports one united India, he said after one meeting. Ivanka Trump has landed in South Korea to attend this weekends closing ceremony for the Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang. South Korea has rolled out the red carpet for her first visit since her father Donald Trump became US president. Her arrival at the airport was broadcast live on TV. "We're excited to be here." Ivanka Trump arrives in South Korea to attend the #WinterOlympics. pic.twitter.com/tdUTIecpzJ NBC News (@NBCNews) February 23, 2018 South Korean media reports said the special treatment includes the venue for dinner on Friday with President Moon Jae-in: a traditional Korean house at Mr Moons office. A North Korean delegation will also attend the closing ceremony, but the South Korean government said it is unlikely that Ms Trump would meet North Koreans or defectors from North Korea. Expand Close Ivanka's arrival caused a stir in South Korea (AP) / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Ivanka's arrival caused a stir in South Korea (AP) Hopes are high in South Korea that she may deliver a message from President Trump on North Korea. She told media at the airport that she is very, very excited to attend the 2018 Winter Olympic Games (and) cheer for team USA. South Korean media said Mr Moon would emphasise the importance of US-North Korea talks during the dinner with Ivanka Trump and other members of a US delegation. Mr Moon hopes to make the Olympics an avenue for peace on the divided Korean Peninsula. Expand Close Ms Trump. flanked by White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, arrives at the Incheon International Airport (AP) / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Ms Trump. flanked by White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, arrives at the Incheon International Airport (AP) But while the games appear to have paved a way for possible rapprochement between the two Koreas, US and North Korean officials have yet to make direct contact. Earlier this week, the US government said Vice President Mike Pence was set to meet North Korean officials during his visit to South Korea for the opening ceremony, but that North Korea cancelled at the last minute. Mr Moon met Kim Yo Jong, the sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, and Kim Yong Nam, North Koreas nominal head of state, a day after the opening ceremony and urged North Korea to do more to engage in a dialogue with the United States. Congratulations to @TeamUSA #WomensHockey for an incredible win the first GOLD in 20 years. This team shows us what we can achieve when we work together, never give up, never give in, and ALWAYS believe in ourselves and in each other. #USAvsCAN See you in #PyeongChang tomorrow! Ivanka Trump (@IvankaTrump) February 22, 2018 For now, there are no signs that Ivanka Trump will meet Kim Yong Chol, vice chairman of North Koreas ruling Workers Party Central Committee, who is to attend the closing ceremony. The White House has emphasised that the purpose of her visit is to celebrate athletes achievements, highlighting that she is a winter sports enthusiast herself. She is expected to attend the games on Saturday before Sundays closing ceremony. The crowd gathered at a makeshift cemetery in Douma, a neighbourhood of Eastern Ghouta, to say a few brief prayers and bury seven people killed in a bomb blast that morning. The mourners separated the corpses - three children, three teenage boys, and one elderly man - with cinder blocks and laid wooden slabs across the blocks to create a new tier for the next set of bodies to come. As they began laying the bodies into the earth a jet streaked overhead and fired a rocket into the crowd. Friends and family leapt into the open grave for safety, but when the smoke cleared they counted 11 of their number who had been killed. What started as seven deaths had suddenly become 18. "We don't have time to bury any one person, to dig him a grave and to honour him" said Abu Abdelrahman, a father-of-three who was at the graveyard during the strike. "We just say a quick prayer and then go back." No one knows how many people will be in those mass graves, or buried under the rubble of their homes, by the end of Bashar al-Assad's assault on Eastern Ghouta, the last rebel-held suburb of Damascus. The Syrian leader's pilots and artillery crews work diligent shifts, according to residents. They begin their bombardment at around 6am and silence their guns at midnight, giving the 400,000 trapped civilians a few hours' respite. At least 310 people have been killed since Sunday and more than 1,550 have been wounded, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. One man sounded weary and resigned when the Daily Telegraph reached him by Whatsapp in the basement where he and his family are hiding. "I think the picture is clear now. Look at the photos of body parts on Facebook, they express what I want to say," he said. "I will tell you something I saw today," said Abu Abdelrahman. "I was about 20 metres from our basement and there was a bombardment. I saw one body without a head. It is like Judgment Day here. Some people grab their children and they run and they run into a rocket by mistake." For many jaundiced observers of Syria's seven years of war, the siege feels like a bleak and repetitive sequel to the battle for Aleppo, which ended in 2016. Daily Telegraph London Telegraph Media Group Limited [2021] The Syria Civil Defence helps an unconscious woman from a shelter in Douma. Photo: Reuters The European Union called on Friday for an immediate ceasefire and access for aid trucks, using a strongly-worded statement to express its anger at bombing of Syria's eastern Ghouta. "The European Union is running out of words to describe the horror being experienced by the people of eastern Ghouta," the bloc said. "Unhindered humanitarian access and the protection of civilians is a moral duty and a matter of urgency ... the fighting must stop now," the EU said in its statement agreed by all 28 of the bloc's governments. Attack Expand Close A Syrian man runs between destroyed buildings in Ghouta (Ghouta Media Center via AP) / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp A Syrian man runs between destroyed buildings in Ghouta (Ghouta Media Center via AP) A new wave of bombs struck Syria's eastern Ghouta unabated on Friday, witnesses said, ahead of a U.N. Security Council vote to demand a 30-day ceasefire across the country. For a sixth straight day, warplanes have pounded the densely populated agricultural pocket east of the capital, the last rebel bastion near Damascus. Expand Close Two Syrian kids who were wounded during airstrikes and shelling by Syrian government forces, sit at a makeshift hospital, in Ghouta, suburb of Damascus, Syria. (Ghouta Media Center via AP) / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Two Syrian kids who were wounded during airstrikes and shelling by Syrian government forces, sit at a makeshift hospital, in Ghouta, suburb of Damascus, Syria. (Ghouta Media Center via AP) The recent escalation has killed at least 426 people and injured hundreds more, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group says. The dead include at least 98 children. Medical charities say jets have hit more than a dozen hospitals, making it near impossible to treat the wounded. The Britain-based Observatory said government warplanes and artillery hit Douma, Zamalka, and other towns across the enclave in the early hours on Friday. There was no immediate comment from the Syrian military. Expand Close A rescue worker holds an injured girl in the rebel held besieged town of Hamouriyeh, eastern Ghouta, near Damascus, Syria February 21, 2018. REUTERS/Bassam Khabieh / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp A rescue worker holds an injured girl in the rebel held besieged town of Hamouriyeh, eastern Ghouta, near Damascus, Syria February 21, 2018. REUTERS/Bassam Khabieh A witness in Douma who asked not to be identified said by telephone that the early morning bombing was the most intense so far. Another resident, in the town of Hamouriyeh, said the assault had continued "like the other days". "Whenever the bombing stops for some moments, the civil defence vehicles go out to the targeted places. They work to remove the debris form the road," said Bilal Abu Salah. Expand Close This photo released on Wednesday Feb. 21, 2018 provided by the Syrian anti-government activist group Ghouta Media Center, which has been authenticated based on its contents and other AP reporting, shows a Syrian young girl who was wounded during airstrikes and shelling by Syrian government forces, cries at a makeshift hospital, in Ghouta, suburb of Damascus, Syria. (Ghouta Media Center via AP) / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp This photo released on Wednesday Feb. 21, 2018 provided by the Syrian anti-government activist group Ghouta Media Center, which has been authenticated based on its contents and other AP reporting, shows a Syrian young girl who was wounded during airstrikes and shelling by Syrian government forces, cries at a makeshift hospital, in Ghouta, suburb of Damascus, Syria. (Ghouta Media Center via AP) The bombing of eastern Ghouta since Sunday night has been among the fiercest of the war, now entering its eighth year. The Civil Defence in eastern Ghouta said its rescuers rushed to help the wounded after strikes on Hamouriyeh on Friday morning. The emergency service, which operates in rebel territory, says it has pulled hundreds of people from under the rubble in recent days. CEASEFIRE ATTEMPTS Damascus and Moscow say they only target militants, and that they aim to prevent rebels from firing mortars at the capital. They have accused insurgents of holding residents as human shields in the Ghouta. Syrian state news agency SANA said on Friday that factions in the besieged suburbs shelled neighbourhoods of Damascus. The army was pounding militant targets in response, it said. Hamza Birqdar, the military spokesman for the Jaish al-Islam rebel faction, said it had thwarted nine attacks by pro-government militias trying to storm a front in the southeast of the Ghouta. Nearly 400,000 people live in eastern Ghouta, a pocket of satellite towns and farms that has been under government siege since 2013. The U.N. envoy for Syria has pleaded for a truce to halt one of the worst air assaults of the seven-year war and prevent a "massacre". Staffan de Mistura renewed his call on Friday to stop both the "horrific" bombing of besieged eastern Ghouta and indiscriminate mortar shelling on Damascus. The U.N. Security Council was considering a resolution, which Kuwait and Sweden drafted, demanding "a cessation of hostilities throughout Syria for all military operations" for 30 days to allow aid deliveries and medical evacuations. The vote is set to take place on Friday. The resolution does not cover the groups Islamic State, al Qaeda and the Nusra Front, which Moscow and Damascus say they have targeted in eastern Ghouta. Several previous ceasefire attempts in Syria have quickly unravelled throughout the multi-sided conflict, which has killed hundreds of thousands and displaced 11 million people. (Reporting by Ellen Francis; Additional reporting by Michelle Nichols in New York; Editing by Tom Perry and Peter Graff) An injured man lies on a bed in the rebel held besieged town of Hamouriyeh, eastern Ghouta, near Damascus, Syria, February 21, 2018. REUTERS/Bassam Khabieh Two Syrian kids who were wounded during airstrikes and shelling by Syrian government forces, sit at a makeshift hospital, in Ghouta, suburb of Damascus, Syria. (Ghouta Media Center via AP) Member of the Syrian Civil Defense group carries a boy who was wounded during airstrikes and shelling by Syrian government forces, in Ghouta, a suburb of Damascus, Syria. . (Syrian Civil Defense White Helmets via AP) This photo released on Wednesday Feb. 21, 2018 provided by the Syrian anti-government activist group Ghouta Media Center, which has been authenticated based on its contents and other AP reporting, shows a Syrian young girl who was wounded during airstrikes and shelling by Syrian government forces, cries at a makeshift hospital, in Ghouta, suburb of Damascus, Syria. (Ghouta Media Center via AP) A rescue worker holds an injured girl in the rebel held besieged town of Hamouriyeh, eastern Ghouta, near Damascus, Syria February 21, 2018. REUTERS/Bassam Khabieh People carry the body of Majid Santiha on a stretcher in the besieged eastern Ghouta town of Hamouriyeh near Damascus, Syria, February 21, 2018. REUTERS/Bassam Khabieh/File Photo A man carries an injured boy as he walks on rubble of damaged buildings in the rebel held besieged town of Hamouriyeh, eastern Ghouta, near Damascus, Syria, February 21, 2018. REUTERS/Bassam Khabieh TEMPLATE OUT In this photo released on Wednesday Feb. 21, 2018, provided by the Syrian anti-government activist group Ghouta Media Center, which has been authenticated based on its contents and other AP reporting, shows Syrian citizens carry a victim during airstrikes and shelling by Syrian government forces, in Ghouta, suburb of Damascus, Syria. (Ghouta Media Center via AP) This photo released on Wednesday Feb. 21, 2018 provided by the Syrian anti-government activist group Ghouta Media Center, which has been authenticated based on its contents and other AP reporting, shows a Syrian paramedic, treats a kids who was wounded during airstrikes and shelling by Syrian government forces, at a makeshift hospital, in Ghouta, suburb of Damascus, Syria. (Ghouta Media Center via AP) People carry a body on a stretcher as they walk on rubble of damaged buildings in the rebel-held besieged town of Hamouriyeh, eastern Ghouta, near Damascus, Syria, February 21, 2018. REUTERS/Bassam Khabieh Mohammed Abu Anas runs with an injured boy in the besieged eastern Ghouta town of Hamouriyeh near Damascus, Syria, February 21, 2018. REUTERS/Bassam Khabieh/File Photo A man digs a shelter under the house of Bilal Issa in the besieged eastern Ghouta town of Hamouriyeh near Damascus, Syria, February 21, 2018. REUTERS/Bassam Khabieh/File Photo In this photo released on Wednesday Feb. 21, 2018, provided by the Syrian anti-government activist group Ghouta Media Center, which has been authenticated based on its contents and other AP reporting, shows Syrian paramedics treat a kids who was wounded during airstrikes and shelling by Syrian government forces, at a makeshift hospital, in Ghouta, suburb of Damascus, Syria. (Ghouta Media Center via AP) In Pictures: 13 photographs that depict the horrors of under-siege Syrians in Ghouta Close The United Nations Security Council will vote on Friday on a draft resolution demanding a 30-day truce in Syria to allow aid deliveries and medical evacuations, but it was not immediately clear if the text had won the support of Syrian ally Russia. The vote comes as warplanes pounded eastern Ghouta, the last rebel enclave near Syria's capital, for a fifth day running. U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres appealed on Wednesday for an immediate end to "war activities" there. Russia on Thursday proposed amendments to the resolution drafted by Sweden and Kuwait, arguing that the language was unrealistic and that the 15-member Security Council could not simply impose a truce on Syria without consulting the parties. It was not immediately clear what changes were made to the text. The council is due to vote at 11 a.m. (1600 GMT) on Friday, said Kuwait's U.N. mission, president of the council for February. Expand Close The Syria Civil Defence helps an unconscious woman from a shelter in Douma. Photo: Reuters / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp The Syria Civil Defence helps an unconscious woman from a shelter in Douma. Photo: Reuters A resolution needs nine votes in favor and no vetoes by Russia, China, the United States, Britain or France. Russia has cast 11 vetoes on possible Security Council action on Syria since its civil war began in 2011. Previous attempts at a cessation of hostilities in Syria have quickly unraveled. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has called for an end to the "massacre" in Eastern Ghouta after fresh air strikes on the rebel-held enclave killed another 13 people. Condemning the Syrian regime for targeting "its own people", Ms Merkel said: "The killing of children, the destruction of hospitals - all that amounts to a massacre that must be condemned and which must be countered with a clear no". At least 335 civilians have been killed since Sunday in the besieged enclave of Eastern Ghouta near Damascus as regime forces intensified their bombardment of the site. The German leader's comments came on the eve of the UN Security Council's expected meeting in New York to vote on a resolution calling for a 30-day ceasefire, the delivery of aid, and the evacuation of the wounded. Sweden and Kuwait, which drafted the measure, requested the vote "as soon as possible," the Swedish mission said. It remained unclear whether Russia would resort to its veto to block the draft resolution. The Kremlin said yesterday that Russia was not responsible for the civilian deaths in Eastern Ghouta and said it was working with the regime to fight terrorism. "Those who support the terrorists are responsible," said Dmitry Peskov, a Kremlin spokesman. "Neither Russia, nor Syria, nor Iran are in that category of states as they are waging an absolute war against terrorists in Syria." Both Russia and China have previously blocked UN resolutions critical of the Assad regime. Staffan de Mistura, the UN special envoy on Syria, said yesterday he hoped the Security Council would agree a resolution to end fighting in Eastern Ghouta, but said it would not be easy. "I hope it will. But it's uphill. But I hope it will. It is very urgent," he said as he arrived at the United Nations in Geneva. Ms Merkel's intervention followed a statement from the White House saying the US "strongly condemns recent attacks on the people of Syria in Eastern Ghouta by Russia and the Assad regime". "We fully support the call from the United Nations for a cessation of violence to allow for the unfettered delivery of humanitarian supplies and urgently needed medical evacuations of civilians," the White House said. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said at least 13 people were killed in Douma, the main town in Eastern Ghouta, three of them children. Rockets "It was raining on the area so there are no warplanes but it seems the regime chose to use rockets instead," Rami Abdel Rahman, the head of the Britain-based war monitor, said. "The rocket fire hasn't stopped this morning. Around 200 ground-to-ground rockets struck Douma alone," he said, adding that the number of wounded across the enclave yesterday topped 120. According to state media and the Observatory, at least 15 people have been killed by mortar rounds and rockets fired in the other direction, by Islamist and jihadist groups, over the same period. Residents of Douma, the biggest town in the district, described plumes of black smoke billowing from residential areas after planes dropped bombs from high altitude. Searches were under way for bodies amid the rubble in the town of Saqba and elsewhere, said rescuers. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has greeted his Canadian counterpart, Justin Trudeau, with a hug, a day after embarrassed Canadian diplomats had to rescind an invitation to a man convicted of attempting to kill an Indian politician during a visit to Canada in the 1980s. Jaspal Atwal, a former member of a banned Sikh separatist group, had been invited to a party for Mr Trudeau at Canadas High Commission in New Delhi on Thursday evening. Expand Close India Canada / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp India Canada Canada quickly withdrew the invitation once it was discovered, with Mr Trudeau telling reporters: The individual in question never should have received an invitation. Mr Trudeau, who is in India an eight-day visit, met Mr Modi on Friday. Expand Close India Canada / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp India Canada Canadas Sikh population includes some who support a breakaway Sikh state inside India. Joseph Thornton, a Gainesville, Fla., resident, rings a bell during a vigil for Eric Scott Branch in Gainesville, Thursday, Feb. 22, 2018, as he is sentenced to the death penalty. (Lauren Bacho/The Gainesville Sun via AP) Herman Lindsey talks to people during a vigil for Eric Scott Branch in Gainesville, Fla., Thursday, Feb. 22, 2018, as he is sentenced to the death penalty. (Lauren Bacho/The Gainesville Sun via AP) This undated photo made available by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement shows Eric Scott Branch in custody. Florida is scheduled to execute Branch Thursday, Feb. 22, 2018, for raping and killing a college students in 1993, so he could steal her car. (Florida Department of Law Enforcement via AP) A Florida inmate convicted of raping and killing a college student decades ago screamed and yelled "murderers!" three times, thrashing on a stretcher as he was being put to death. The governor's office said Eric Scott Branch, 47, was pronounced dead at 7.05pm on Thursday after receiving a lethal injection at Florida State Prison. Branch was convicted of the 1993 rape and fatal beating of University of West Florida student Susan Morris, 21, whose naked body was found buried in a shallow grave near a nature trail. Just as officials were administering the lethal drugs that included a powerful sedative, Branch thrashed about on his stretcher and then yelled "murderers! murderers! murderers" before falling silent. Moments earlier, he had addressed the prison officers in the room saying that, instead of them carrying out the death sentence, it should have been governor Rick Scott and Attorney General Pam Bondi. "Let them come down here and do it. I've learned that you're good people and this is not what you should be doing," Branch told the officers. Expand Close Herman Lindsey talks to people during a vigil for Eric Scott Branch in Gainesville, Fla., Thursday, Feb. 22, 2018, as he is sentenced to the death penalty. (Lauren Bacho/The Gainesville Sun via AP) / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Herman Lindsey talks to people during a vigil for Eric Scott Branch in Gainesville, Fla., Thursday, Feb. 22, 2018, as he is sentenced to the death penalty. (Lauren Bacho/The Gainesville Sun via AP) Outside the prison, Herman Lindsey a former death row inmate who was exonerated in 2009, was part of a group protesting the death penalty. "There's no way to guarantee we're not killing innocent people," he said. Evidence in the case shows that Branch approached Ms Morris after she left a night class on January 11, 1993, so he could steal her red Toyota and return to his home state of Indiana. He was arrested while travelling there. In denying one of Branch's appeals, the Florida Supreme Court noted that the crime was particularly brutal. Expand Close Joseph Thornton, a Gainesville, Fla., resident, rings a bell during a vigil for Eric Scott Branch in Gainesville, Thursday, Feb. 22, 2018, as he is sentenced to the death penalty. (Lauren Bacho/The Gainesville Sun via AP) / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Joseph Thornton, a Gainesville, Fla., resident, rings a bell during a vigil for Eric Scott Branch in Gainesville, Thursday, Feb. 22, 2018, as he is sentenced to the death penalty. (Lauren Bacho/The Gainesville Sun via AP) "She had been beaten, stomped, sexually assaulted and strangled. She bore numerous bruises and lacerations, both eyes were swollen shut," the justices wrote. Branch also was convicted of sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl in Indiana and of another sexual assault in Panama City, Florida, that took place just 10 days before the fatal attack on Morris, court records show. The jury in his murder case recommended the death penalty by a 10-2 vote under Florida's old capital punishment system, which was ruled unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court in 2016. The high court said juries must reach a unanimous recommendation for death and judges cannot overrule that and Florida legislators subsequently changed the system to comply. One of Branch's final appeals to the US Supreme Court involved whether he deserved a new sentencing hearing because of that jury's 10-2 vote in his 1994 trial. The Florida Supreme Court has ruled that the new system of sentencing does not apply to inmates sentenced to death before 2002. Branch claimed in a last-minute appeal that the Florida court's decisions on which inmates get new sentencing hearings and which do not is unfair and arbitrary. In court documents, Branch's lawyers say this prohibits about 150 Florida death-row inmates from having their sentences reviewed. The US Supreme Court, without comment, rejected that appeal on Thursday and one other which Branch's attorneys had filed. Executions due to take place in Texas and Alabama were cancelled. Thomas "Bart" Whitaker, 38, was on death row for masterminding the fatal shootings of his mother and brother at their suburban Houston home in 2003. Whitaker's father, Kent, said he forgave his son, and the state parole board recommended that governor Greg Abbott commute the sentence to life in prison, with Mr Abbott granting clemency. In Alabama, Doyle Lee Hamm was sentenced to die for the 1987 death of a motel clerk during a robbery. He has fought his death sentence, arguing there is a risk of a botched execution because of damage to his veins due to lymphoma and other illnesses. It was postponed after officials said there was not enough time to prepare the inmate before a death warrant expired at midnight. Donald Trump has been compared to Vladimir Putin and Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte by Amnesty International, as it warns his policies in the US are fuelling repression around the world. The US president was accused of ushering in "a new era of human rights regression" and charged, along with other controversial world leaders, with "shamelessly turning the clock back on decades of hard-won protections". "The spectres of hatred and fear now loom large in world affairs, and we have few governments standing up for human rights in these disturbing times," said Salil Shetty, executive director of Amnesty International. "Instead, leaders such as Egypt's Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, Duterte, Putin and Trump are callously undermining the rights of millions. "The feeble response to crimes against humanity and war crimes from Myanmar to Iraq, South Sudan, Syria and Yemen underscored the lack of leadership on human rights. Governments are shamelessly turning the clock back on decades of hard-won protections." Mr Trump's willingness to tout "fake news" in order to manipulate public opinion, coupled with attacks on institutions that act as checks on power, show that free speech will be a key battle-ground for human rights this year, the British-based organisation said. "In 2018, we cannot take for granted that we will be free to gather together in protest or to criticise our governments," said Mr Shetty. Presenting its annual report for the first time in the US, Amnesty said that Mr Trump has "wasted little time in putting his anti-rights rhetoric of discrimination and xenophobia into action". The organisation highlighted extreme restrictions placed on women's and girls' access to sexual and reproductive health services, repeals of protections for the LGBTI community, abuses along the US-Mexico border, and threatening Native American tribes' access to clean water with the approval of the Dakota Access Pipeline. Yet despite Mr Trump's policies, Amnesty said that the American people could still be counted on to support human rights around the world. "Defenders of human rights can look to the people of the United States to stand with them, even where the US government has failed," said Margaret Huang, executive director of Amnesty International USA. The report, 'The State of the World's Human Rights', condemns atrocities in countries including Yemen, Syria, Myanmar and Saudi Arabia. The report also singled out France, for its treatment of migrants, Australia, for its detention of asylum seekers on the island of Nauru, and Mexico, for the impunity with which journalists are murdered. Persimmon flags, as bosses hand back a slice of their bonuses following a furore over pay (PA) Bosses at Persimmon have moved to calm the furore over their hefty pay packets by handing back around 50 million in bonuses. Chief executive Jeff Fairburn will see his near-100 million award trimmed by 25 million after slashing the number of shares he can gain under a controversial 2012 long-term incentive plan (LTIP). Chief financial officer Mike Killoran will have 24 million lopped off his 78 million payout, while Dave Jenkinson faces a smaller sum of 2.5 million being snipped from a 40 million award. The cuts are based on the housebuilders closing share price on Thursday. Future payouts for three executives will also be capped a 29 per share. In a statement, Persimmon defended the creation of the much-criticised pay plan, saying the LTIP had been a significant factor in the companys outstanding performance. The latest twist comes after Mr Fairburn moved to deflect stinging criticism over his bonus last week by announcing plans to hand over a substantial amount of the award to charity. The under-fire chief said he would set up a private charitable trust to support a number of charities selected by himself and his family. Persimmon has faced mounting pressure from politicians and some shareholders over the long-term incentive plan introduced by the company six years ago, which was set to pay out more than 200 million. We are pleased that in the end Persimmons board has listened to shareholder concerns on payAshley Hamilton Claxton Royal London Asset Management (RLAM), which holds a 0.5% stake in Persimmon, said the pay awards were still extremely generous even after the cuts. Ashley Hamilton Claxton, head of responsible investment at RLAM, said: We are pleased that in the end Persimmons board has listened to shareholder concerns on pay. This incident has been a classic corporate governance failure and highlights the need for remuneration committees to step up and make decisions if circumstances beyond a companys control change. We have consistently called for remuneration committees and boards to use their discretion when faced with pay outs that are unacceptable and are pleased that in this case the company has finally recognised the need to do this. However, even after this reduction, in our view the scale of the remuneration on offer under this plan is still extremely generous given the governments support for the sector through the Help To Buy scheme. While the LTIP was approved by 85% of shareholders in 2012, the controversy engulfing the company forced chairman Nicholas Wrigley and remuneration committee chairman Jonathan Davie to resign late last year. A Tesco sign, as the 3.7 billion takeover of Booker faces a crunch vote (PA) Tesco will hope to avoid a bloody nose next week when its 3.7 billion takeover of wholesaler Booker faces shareholder scrutiny. Tesco and Booker investors will hold separate meetings on Wednesday to cast their votes on the proposed tie-up, which has been billed as delivering 200 million in cost savings. The deal has received a mixed reception from shareholder advisory groups amid concerns that Tescos offer undervalues the Londis and Budgens owner. However, Britains biggest supermarket was handed a boost on Wednesday when advisory firm Pensions Investments and Research Consultants (Pirc) urged shareholders to back the merger. In reports to Tesco and Booker shareholders, Pirc advised investors to approve the deal to create the UKs leading food business. Despite the boost, Britains biggest supermarket could still be in for a bumpy ride after Institutional Shareholder Services recommended Booker investors oppose the deal. Although the combination is expected to result in substantial synergies, it appears that Booker shareholders will have limited potential benefit from those synergiesInstitutional Shareholder Services ISS said the transaction does not warrant support at the current terms. In a note, ISS said: Although the combination is expected to result in substantial synergies, it appears that Booker shareholders will have limited potential benefit from those synergies. In addition, the rationale for Booker shareholders to give up control appears less than compelling at the relatively low premium offered. ISS said Tesco appeared to be getting the better deal under current terms. The disapproval adds to criticism from Sandell Asset Management, which is pressing for a higher offer from the supermarket giant. Sandell, which owns a 1.75% slice of Booker, said it should pay out all of its 2018 profits as a closing dividend to shareholders, as opposed to 65%. The group also claimed that Booker is worth between 255p and 265p a share, much more than the 205.3p offered by Tesco. Tesco, which is undergoing a turnaround under chief executive Dave Lewis, got the green light for the takeover from the competition watchdog in December. The firms also announced that highly regarded Booker boss Charles Wilson will head Tescos UK business following the tie-up. The supermarket group has more than 3,000 stores across the UK, while Booker is the countrys largest wholesaler. It supplies more than 5,000 stores under the Premier, Londis, Budgens and Family Shopper brands, as well as thousands of independent retailers and caterers. The US presidents eldest son has heaped praise on the Indian media and accused American journalists of unfair criticism, as he neared the end of a controversial trip across India promoting Trump-brand luxury real estate. Donald Trump Jr said at an Indian business summit that life since his fathers election has been difficult from a family standpoint, but that he had enjoyed the coverage he received during this trip. I love the Indian media. They are so mild and nice, he said, to audience laughter. Expand Close The US president's eldest son, who is running his father's business empire during his presidency, speaks at a Global Business Summit in New Delhi (AP) / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp The US president's eldest son, who is running his father's business empire during his presidency, speaks at a Global Business Summit in New Delhi (AP) Mr Trump Jr has met with carefully selected Indian reporters since coming to India, with coverage often focusing on the promised luxury of the real estate developments he is selling. Hours earlier, as criticism mounted that Mr Trump Jr was pushing an ethics boundary by making what seemed to be a foreign policy speech at the Global Business Summit, conference organisers hurriedly changed the speechs title. Very quickly, Reshaping Indo-Pacific Ties: The Era of Cooperation became A Fireside Chat with Donald Trump Jr. With summer already approaching, it is far too warm for cosy fires in New Delhi. But flames flickered on a video screen behind Mr Trump Jr as he was interviewed by a TV anchor with the channel co-hosting the business summit. Critics had said that Mr Trump Jr airing his views on international relations, especially while sharing a platform with senior Indian government officials including Prime Minister Narendra Modi was problematic because of the implication that he has his fathers ear. Expand Close Mr Trump Jr's trip to promote real estate has raised eyebrows among some commentators (AP) / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Mr Trump Jr's trip to promote real estate has raised eyebrows among some commentators (AP) Senator Robert Menendez, ranking Democrat on the US senate foreign relations committee, said in a letter to the US embassy in New Delhi: I am concerned that Mr Trumps speech will send the mistaken message that he is speaking on behalf of the president, the administration or the United States government, not as a private individual, or that he is communicating official American policy. Mr Menendez said he expects that the US state department and the embassy will treat Mr Trump Jr like any other American on private business and will take every effort to avoid any perception of special treatment or a conflict of interest. On Thursday, White House spokeswoman Lindsay E Walters said the Trump administration takes seriously its obligation to ensure that government resources are not used to provide a private benefit to anyone. Expand Close Trump Towers are being constructed in Pune, India (AP) / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Trump Towers are being constructed in Pune, India (AP) She added: Donald Trump Jr is a private individual and neither the state department nor the White House has provided any support for this trip beyond coordinating with his Secret Service protection. Mr Trump Jrs India visit has already raised ethical concerns. President Trump has pledged to stay away from any new foreign business deals during his term in office to avoid potential ethical conflicts. While the projects that Mr Trump Jr is promoting in India were signed off before his father was elected, ethics experts have long seen the use of the Trump name to promote even existing business ventures as tricky territory. Mr Trump Jr and his brother Eric have been running the Trump Organisation, the familys real estate business, during their fathers presidency. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin waits to take the podium to begin a press briefing on North Korea sanctions at the White House in Washington (Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP) The Trump administration has escalated pressure on North Korea by slapping sanctions on scores of companies and ships accused of illicit trading with the pariah nation. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said the US has now blacklisted virtually all ships being used by the North. The administration billed it as the largest instalment of North Korean economic restrictions to date as it intensifies its campaign of maximum pressure to get the North to give up its nuclear weapons. President Donald Trump went further, declaring in a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference that it was the heaviest sanctions ever imposed on a country before. Today the @USTreasury announced the largest NK related sanctions tranche to date. Companies who choose to help fund NKs nuclear ambitions will not do business with the U.S. Steven Mnuchin (@stevenmnuchin1) February 23, 2018 While that claim was questionable previous US measures have targeted bigger players in the North Korean economy, including Chinese and Russian banks and business networks it significantly tightens the noose on North Korean trading. Mr Mnuchin told reporters that the US has now imposed more than 450 sanctions against the North, about half of them in the last year including virtually all their ships that theyre using at this moment in time. The United Nations Security Council has imposed three sets of sanctions on North Korea in the past year. The restrictions are intended to deprive it of revenue and resources for its nuclear and ballistic missile development that pose an emerging threat to the US mainland. Washington is particularly concerned about exports of North Korean coal that are prohibited by the UN sanctions and ship-to-ship transfers of imported oil and petroleum products. The Treasury Department said it was barring US business transactions with nine international shipping companies from China, Hong Kong, Singapore and Panama, and nine of their vessels. Expand Close Trump / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Trump It also blacklisted 16 North shipping companies and 19 of their North Korean-flagged vessels. Additionally, the department designated a Taiwanese citizen, Tsang Yung Yuan, and two companies he owns or controls. Mr Tsang was said to have co-ordinated North Korean coal exports with a Russia-based North Korean broker, and attempted a one million US dollar (720,000) oil deal with a Russian company sanctioned for dealing with the North. Mr Mnuchin said the actions will significantly hinder North Koreas ability to conduct evasive maritime activities that facilitate illicit coal and fuel transports, and erode its abilities to ship goods through international waters. He vowed the US would do everything to stop the ship-to-ship transfers. We are putting companies and countries across the world on notice that this administration views compliance with US and UN sanctions as a national security imperative. Those who trade with North Korea do so at their own peril, Mr Mnuchin said. In his speech, Mr Trump said hopefully something positive can happen from the sanctions pressure. The announcement comes as South Korea hosts the Winter Olympics, an occasion the two Koreas have used as an opportunity to ease tensions and restart talks. Although South Korea is a close US ally, animosity between Washington and Pyongyang still runs high. Ivanka Trump, the presidents daughter and adviser, arrived in South Korea on Friday to attend the closing ceremony this weekend. Thank you President Moon and First Lady Kim for your warm hospitality and the very special dinner at the historic Blue House, marking the start of our visit to South Korea. #PyeongChang2018 #WinterOlympics pic.twitter.com/eOFYKH755o Ivanka Trump (@IvankaTrump) February 23, 2018 At a dinner with South Korean President Moon Jae-in, she reaffirmed our commitment to our maximum pressure campaign to ensure that the Korean Peninsula is denuclearised. Mr Mnuchin said Mrs Trump had spoken to Mr Moon about the new sanctions before the announcement. The US government also issued a global shipping advisory highlighting the sanctions risk to those who enable shipments of goods to and from North Korea. It alerted industries to North Koreas deceptive shipping practices, which includes falsifying the identity of vessels and disabling transponders that track ships movements. The Treasury Department published photos of a US-designated North Korean vessel, Kum Un San 3, which it said used false identifying information and conducted an illicit ship-to-ship transfer, possibly of oil, with a Panama-flagged vessel that was among the ships sanctioned on Friday. AP Under the partnership two popular 4G smartphones from Motorola - Moto C, Moto E4 and the Lenovo K8 Note from Lenovo will be available with a cashback of Rs 2000, thereby, bringing down the effective price of the devices and bringing them within the reach of more customers. All smartphones will come bundled with a special recharge pack of Rs 169 from Airtel offering 1GB 4G data per day and unlimited calling benefits local and STD. The Moto C, at an effective price of Rs 3999, becomes a great option for first time smartphone users. Moto E4 with an all-day battery is perfect for the consumer who is always on the go. The popular Lenovo K8 Note, which has a large 13.97 cm (5.5) Full HD display, 10 core processor and dual rear cameras, offers a budget friendly option for young customers looking to make a one-time investment for a smartphone with a premium build and advanced specs. Vani Venkatesh, Chief Marketing Officer, Bharti Airtel said, We are delighted to collaborate with Motorola under the Mera Pehla Smartphone initiative. It marks a major milestone in our journey towards building a large open ecosystem of affordable smartphone options for our valued customers. We look forward to working with Motorola to bring smartphones within the reach of more and more customers. Sudhin Mathur, Managing Director, Motorola Mobility India and Lenovo MBG India, said, We are delighted to partner with Airtel in the Mera Pehla Smartphone initiative, as it opens a world of limitless possibilities for the consumers. It is a great opportunity for Airtel subscribers to upgrade to 4G and enjoy the meaningful experiences across Motorola & Lenovo smartphones. We are confident that with this partnership, we will be able to empower more users with an enriched mobile experience. The cashback benefit of Rs 2000 will be given to customers in two installments over 36 months. A customer need to make Airtel prepaid recharges worth Rs 3500 within the 18 months to be eligible for the first cashback installment of Rs 500. Similarly, another set of recharges worth Rs 3500 over the next 18 months will make the customer eligible for the second installment of Rs 1500. Mumbai, Feb 23 (IBNS): Indian benchmark indices closed higher on Friday with BSE Sensex up 322.65 points at 34142.15, and NSE Nifty up 108.30 points at 10491.00. Top gainers on Friday included Tata Steel, Sun Pharma, UPL, Tech Mahindra, Yes Bank, Dr Reddy's Labs, Bharti Airtel and Vedanta while Gail, Asian Paints, Coal India, Eicher Motors, HUl, M&M and Infosys were some of the key stocks that declined. Meanwhile, according to media reports, the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI) has requested the Reserve Bank of India for a list of corporate borrowers from public sector banks with debt of Rs 2,000 crore and above. ICAI's Financial Reporting Review Board will check for any possible violation of accounting and auditing standards, the organisation said in a statement, media reported. Chennai, Feb 23 (IBNS): Reaffirming its commitment towards transforming the education landscape, the government of Tamil Nadu today announced an agreement with Microsoft to improve the integration of technology in teaching and learning in the state. The partnership was announced by K.A. Sengottaiyan, Minister for School Education, Government of Tamil Nadu at an event attended by academia and regulators. It aims to reform education, build tech capacity and enhance digital literacy across all levels. As a part of the agreement, Microsoft will adopt seven schools identified by the government and train their teachers and students around building 21st century skills which includes critical thinking, creative coding & gaming, app development, robotics, and entrepreneurship. Microsoft will also offer its Microsoft Innovative Educator Program to all educators in primary, secondary, vocational and tertiary education across the state. Additionally, the company will train and provide a digital literacy certification District Education Officers (DEOs) in Tamil Nadu. Talking of the agreement, K.A. Sengottaiyan, Minister for School Education, Government of Tamil Nadu said, We are committed to harnessing the power of the technology to reform education in Tamil Nadu and make our youth future-ready with the essential digital skills. We have a longstanding partnership with Microsoft and believe their expertise in this area makes them an ideal partner for our transformational initiatives. Building educator capacity Microsoft will provide resources, free tools & software, as well as online professional development specifically tailored for educators through its Partners in Learning Network. The company has so far trained 48,000 teachers in Tamil Nadu on usage of ICT in education. From this skilled ecosystem, the company will now further train a set of 500 school teachers as master trainers over next few months . These master trainers willin turn enable their peers state-wide. In addition to offering a fundamental understanding of computers and productivity software, the comprehensive Microsoft Teaching with Technology (TwT) Curriculum program will empower educators with a deeper knowledge of how technology integration can enhance the teaching and learning experience, equipping students with 21st-century skills. All educators of Tamil Nadu will be eligible to seek certification as Microsoft Certified Educators and apply for the elite Microsoft Expert Educator program. Building administrator capacity The company will also impart training to District Education Officers (DEOs) over a the next few few months. The DEOs will further percolate technology usage to the schools and staff in their districts. The Digital Literacy Curriculum will be available both online and offline and provide the officers the opportunity to be internationally certified on various Microsoft Technologies. Manish Prakash, Country General Manager - Public Sector, Health & Education, Microsoft India, said, At Microsoft we believe that education is the single-most important investment in the future of individuals, and key to the growth of a nation. We are deeply invested in empowering Indias education ecosystem with technology, necessary for success in the 21st century. The combination of quality content, partnerships, capacity building of teachers and administrators is as essential for this as access to technology We are delighted to continue our collaboration with the state of Tamil Nadu in this journey. New Delhi, Feb 23 (IBNS): Top Rankers organized its 9th National Management Summit in New Delhi over a span of two days, starting Friday. Chief Guest Dr. Mangu Singh, MD, Delhi Metro Rail Corporation; Guest of Honor Padamshiri Dr. Pritam Singh; Guest of honor, Dr. AK Balyan, CEO-Oil & Gas, Reliance Infrastructure and Dr. Jitendra Das, Director, FORE School of Management- one of the leading management institute, were present on the occasion. There was a pool of eminent speakers invited from all over the country who addressed over 300 participants sharing their experiences and wisdom. The participants were deputed from various corporate and academia. Speaking on the occasion, Mangu Singh appreciated the efforts made by VSK Sood, MD Top Rankers Management Consultants and emphasized the fact that these awards are an important segment to appreciate the efforts made people for the society. He emphasized that there is dire need for management profession to have the spirit of entrepreneurship for industrial growth. S.Y.Siddiqui, Chief Mentor, Maruti Suzuki,drew the attention of the participants to start visualizing and appreciating the value of creativity, Innovation and they should believe in complaisance. "We organize such awards every year to encourage hard work and has reached the 19th milestone. We would like to thank all the people and companies who have supported us in this endeavor," said VSK Sood. The first leg of the day started with a more cheerful FORE-Top Rankers Excellence Awards 2018, celebrating and appreciating the sheer hard work of eminent professionals who have been achievers in their respective fields in HR, Marketing, Finance and General Management. Some of the awardees includes Kanwal Jeet Jawa (MD, Daikin), J.S. Kaushal, (MD Central Warehousing Corporation), Ajay Sevekari (MD Brigestone India), Surendra Singh (President &COO, Rico Auto), Sanjay Verma (Group CPO , Uniparts India), K.K Krishna (Director Finance, Hitachi Metals), Arusna Oswal, (MD , Abhey Oswal Group). The speakers included S.Y. Siddiqui (Chief Mentor Maruti Suzuki India Ltd.), VM Chamola(Director HR, HAL), Alok Nigam(Sr. VP & Group CHRO, Bhartiya Group), Seema Bhangia (Head HR, Mukul chopra, M.N. Sahah , R.P Singh, (Director HR & Legal IFFCO), D V Shastri, (ED HR, Gail India LTD) and the list continues long. The summit began at an informative note with enthusiastic participants from all walks of companies. Six different sessions created a storm of idea and points of discussion in this 2 day summit. New Delhi, Feb 23 (IBNS): In the backdrop of the recent National Health Protection Plan announcement, hundreds of surgeons from paediatrics, urology, bariatrics are headed to a specialist conference to gain insights from fellow practitioners in their field this week. Going by the agendas of national medical conferences this week -- 13th Paediatrics Endoscopic Surgeons conference at Indraprastha Apollo Hospital, New Delhi, 2nd National Conference of Robotic Urology Forum at PGI, Chandigarh (both between Feb 23-25) and 16th National Congress of Obesity & Metabolic Surgery Society at Chennai February 22-24 -- it is clear that the surgeons are serious about skilling themselves. By participating in these conferences, panel discussions, symposiums, sharing technical papers, making video presentations, the surgeons share experiences, expertise and practical solutions with others but they also learn from others. Recognising the immense value that these conferences provide to the medical community, Vattikuti Foundation, is providing a da Vinci Surgical Robot to demonstrate the immense possibilities in the field of paediatric surgery, urology, head & neck surgery, and weight reduction. Live workshop feeds from operation theatres in hospitals equipped with da Vinci surgical Robots are a great way of learning various standard and novel procedures from surgeons from different locations, says says Dr Arun Prasad, Chief of Obesity and Metabolic Surgery Centre, Apollo Hospital, New Delhi. The surgeons at the Urology forum in Chandigarh will learn from some of the best known surgeons in the field, a variety of techniques in robot-assisted radical prostate removal without affecting the nerve that is involved in urinary bladder control. The paediatric surgeons conference will cover the reconstruction of rare gastrointestinal tract, urinary system and lungs among newborns and infants using the surgical robot. Robotic surgery, most beneficial for removing cancerous body cells, malignancies, tumours, is also used for repair and reconstruction of body parts like urinary bladder, uterus and pancreas. According to Dr Gagan Gautam, Head, Urologic Oncology & Robotic Surgery, Max Institute of Cancer Care, New Delhi, A da Vinci surgical robot is a bit of a miracle worker, an obedient assistant to an accomplished surgeon that enhances her ability to get a magnified view, allowing maneuverability that far exceeds a human hand. The big advantage is to do away with big cuts making healing far less painful and quicker. A trained surgeon is in charge every second of the way. A da Vinci robot is a breakthrough in minimally invasive surgery and a major step up from laparoscopic procedures. It means negligible blood loss, less pain, shorter post-op care and minimal hospital stay. Trained robotic surgeons contribute to the body of knowledge around procedures. Vattikuti Foundation and hundreds of surgeons around the world have worked in several specialties to develop new procedures using a robotic instrument. The conferences will help spread a new body of knowledge, says Gopal Chakravarthy, CEO of Vattikuti Technologieswhich has been working closely with Intuitive Surgical Inc. and Vattikuti Foundation to popularise Robotic Surgery in India. Washington, Feb 23 (IBNS): Significant amounts of toxic metals, including lead, leak from some e-cigarette heating coils and are present in the aerosols inhaled by users, according to a study from scientists at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. In the study, published online in Environmental Health Perspectives on February 21, the scientists examined e-cigarette devices owned by a sample of 56 users. They found that significant numbers of the devices generated aerosols with potentially unsafe levels of lead, chromium, manganese and/or nickel. Chronic inhalation of these metals has been linked to lung, liver, immune, cardiovascular and brain damage, and even cancers. The Food and Drug Administration has the authority to regulate e-cigarettes but is still considering how to do so. The finding that e-cigarettes expose usersknown as vapersto what may be harmful levels of toxic metals could make this issue a focus of future FDA rules. Its important for the FDA, the e-cigarette companies and vapers themselves to know that these heating coils, as currently made, seem to be leaking toxic metalswhich then get into the aerosols that vapers inhale, says study senior author Ana Maria Rule, PhD, MHS, an assistant scientist in the Bloomberg Schools Department of Environmental Health and Engineering. E-cigarettes typically use a battery-supplied electric current that passes through a metal coil to heat nicotine-containing e-liquids, creating an aerosola mix including vaporized e-liquid and tiny liquid droplets. Vaping, the practice of inhaling this aerosol as if it were cigarette smoke, is now popular especially among teens, young adults and former smokers. A 2017 survey of 8th-, 10th- and 12th-grade students in public and private schools, sponsored by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, found that about one in six had used e-cigarettes in the previous 30 days. Vaping is popular in part because it provides the nicotine hit and the look and feel of tobacco-smoking but without smokings extreme health risks. Evidence that vaping isnt entirely safe continues to accumulate, however. Recent studies have found that e-cigarette liquids contain flavorings and other chemicals that harm cells in standard toxicology tests. Other studies, including onelast year from Rules group, have detected significant levels of toxic metals in e-liquids exposed to the e-cigarette heating coil. For the new study, Rule and her colleagues, including lead author Pablo Olmedo, PhD, who was a postdoctoral researcher at the Bloomberg School at the time of his work on the study, recruited 56 daily e-cigarette users from vaping conventions and e-cigarette shops around Baltimore during the fall of 2015. Working with participants devices, which they brought to the researchers lab at the Bloomberg School, the scientists tested for the presence of 15 metals in the e-liquids in the vapers refilling dispensers, the e-liquids in their coil-containing e-cigarette tanks and in the generated aerosols. Consistent with prior studies, they found minimal amounts of metals in the e-liquids within refilling dispensers, but much larger amounts of some metals in the e-liquids that had been exposed to the heating coils within e-cigarette tanks. The difference indicated that the metals almost certainly had come from the coils. Most importantly, the scientists showed that the metal contamination carried over to the aerosols produced by heating the e-liquids. Of the metals significantly present in the aerosols, lead, chromium, nickel and manganese were the ones of most concern, as all are toxic when inhaled. The median lead concentration in the aerosols, for example, was about 15 g/kg, or more than 25 times greater than the median level in the refill dispensers. Almost 50 percent of aerosol samples had lead concentrations higher than health-based limits defined by the Environmental Protection Agency. Similarly, median aerosol concentrations of nickel, chromium and manganese approached or exceeded safe limits. These were median levels only, Rule says. The actual levels of these metals varied greatly from sample to sample, and often were much higher than safe limits. E-cigarette heating coils typically are made of nickel, chromium and a few other elements, making them the most obvious sources of metal contamination, although the source of the lead remains a mystery. Precisely how metals get from the coil into the surrounding e-liquid is another mystery. We dont know yet whether metals are chemically leaching from the coil or vaporizing when its heated, Rule says. In an earlier study of the 56 vapers, led by Angela Aherrera, MPH, a DrPH student at the Bloomberg School, the levels of nickel and chromium in urine and saliva were related to those measured in the aerosol, confirming that e-cigarette users are exposed to these metals. The researchers did observe, however, that aerosol metal concentrations tended to be higher for e-cigarettes with more frequently changed coilssuggesting that fresher coils give off metals more readily. The researchers also detected significant levels of arsenic, a metal-like element that can be highly toxic, in refill e-liquid and in the corresponding tank e-liquid and aerosol samples from 10 of the 56 vapers. How the arsenic got into these e-liquids is yet another mysteryand another potential focus for regulators. Rule and her team are now planning further studies of vaping and metal exposures, with particular attention to their impacts on people. Weve established with this study that there are exposures to these metals, which is the first step, but we need also to determine the actual health effects, she says. Metal Concentrations in e-Cigarette Liquid and Aerosol Samples: The Contribution of Metallic Coils was written by Pablo Olmedo, Walter Goessler, Stefan Tanda, Maria Grau-Perez, Stephanie Jarmul, Angela Aherrera, Rui Chen, Markus Hilpert, Joanna E. Cohen, Ana Navas-Acien, and Ana M. Rule. Support for the research was provided by the Maryland State Cigarette Restitution Fund (PHPA-G2034), the Alfonso Martin Escudero Foundation, the American Heart Association Tobacco Regulation and Addiction Center (1P50HL120163), and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (5P30ES009089). Kolkata, Feb 23 (IBNS): One of India's popular gastro-pub chain, the Monkey Bar, is all set with a special festive spread between February 28 and March 4, this year, to celebrate Holi, the festival of colours. The signature 'Holi High' festival will be held at Monkey Bar outlets in Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore and Kolkata. Those who prefer to go traditional during Holi, Monkey Bar is offering endless pitchers of thandai, laced with almonds, milk, aromatic spices -- both the loaded and the non spiked version -- the company said in its release. Typcial Holi savories such as 'gujiyas' will be available alongside a desi menu consisting of papdi chaat, khasta matar kachoris, hot bedmi puris with raseele aloo and more. Did you know that Monkey Gujiyas are flaky, sweet dumplings stuffed with cream cheese, almond and cashew nuts, topped with dry cranberry and dusted with cardamom sugar. Or, you may order the Cocktail Masala Idlis tossed in ghee, gunpowder and curry leaf and served with garlic and coconut chutneys. Or, go for the Ricotta Dahi Bhalla - the 'bhalla' stuffed with ricotta and walnut and topped with sweet yogurt and a generous drizzle of tangy tamarind chutney. The special Holi Food menu is priced at Rs 180 per plate, Virgin Thandai at Rs 200 and Thandai at Rs 350; prices mentioned are exclusive of taxes. Images: Monkey Bar/Tanushree Bhasin Toronto, Feb 23 (IBNS): Obsessively checking your smartphone apps might look like addiction, but is it? Dr Andrew Campbell, a University of Sydney expert in cyberpsychology, explains and offers evidence-based tips to reduce smartphone use. The term addiction is often bandied about when we think someone spends too much time on something we deem detrimental to their health and well-being. From checking our phones repetitively, to playing with specific apps and texting, the modern culprit is excessive smartphone use. Worldwide, more than two billion people own smartphones and the average user checks their phone 85 times a day. Obsessively checking our smartphone apps may look like addiction but, for most people, it is reinforced behaviour that could be broken without severe or long-lasting withdrawal effects. Having said this, a small proportion of people may be more prone to behavioural addictions to smartphone functions such as online gambling, pornography, games and social media. Clinically speaking, you cant become addicted to a device, but you can develop behavioural addictions to smartphone functions. What is addiction? The World Health Organisation (WHO) classifies addiction as a dependence on a substance, such as illicit or prescription drugs, tobacco or alcohol. A person is addicted when they have a physical and behavioural dependence on the substance. In 2013, the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (known as the clinicians bible) introduced wider criteria for behavioural addictions, which doesnt include the physical dependence element. These are compulsions to engage in a task or act that leads to psychological pleasure. Behavioural addictions, such as gambling or sex addiction, can cause psychological harm, as well as wider relationship problems with friends, family and colleagues. Both substance and behavioural addictions impact the way we process information. Over time, the brain rewires itself to seek out the reward it needs to gain pleasure or relief from stress. The more an addict seeks a specific reward that triggers both dopamine and other physiological effects (such as stress and pain relief), the more the brain decreases sensitivity to the reward circuits. To date, smartphone use has not led to mass accounts of severe mental dysfunction. So were unlikely to all be addicted to our smartphones, as we often tell each other. Rather than addiction, smartphone users more commonly report obsessive behaviour. Rather than addiction, smartphone users more commonly report obsessive behaviour. Users constantly check their phone, seeking opportunities for a short dopamine reward, or a distraction from boredom or mundane tasks such as travelling on public transport. Nonetheless, some researchers have yet to rule out the potential for smartphone addiction in people who are at high risk of behaviour addiction. These people may experience several negative behavioural changes over time, such as anxiety and irritability, as well as extreme distress when theyre unable to access their smartphone. Recent studies in Switzerland have confirmed that people under the age of 18 are at risk of obsessive or addictive-like behaviours around their smartphone use, most likely due to poor impulse control related to their developing frontal lobe. This suggests that adults with poor impulse control and/or personality disorders may be more at risk for smartphone addiction. The problem with social media The behavioural impact of smartphone social media use spans from obsessive behaviour (engaging in and checking smartphone apps until they no longer provide a rewarding dopamine hit) to behavioural addiction (compulsively seeking a dopamine hit via a reward provided by our phone). The average user in the US spends around five hours a day on functional smartphone activities such as texting, social media use, internet searchers, phone calls; half that time is spent on social media (including texting). The specific functional use of our smartphone is what we need to look more closely at. Social media rewards users via likes, emoji use and social engagement with a large audience. The more people respond to a post, the more we gain a sense of enjoyment that people are validating our thoughts or interests. Social media engagement, and constantly texting friends and family, may be more of a concern than the device on which it is used, because it does lead to dopamine increases, and thus, pleasure or stress relief. We need to educate young people about problematic internet use. Dr Andrew Campbell People are hard-wired to seek affirmation and acceptance in social settings. Before the rise of Facebook and Instagram, humans sought out one another via many settings for social engagement and social validation. So its no surprise that when we have the technology to extend our social connections into wider communities we do so without question. As adults, we know we cant socialise all the time because of other demands on our time. Yet, as young people, the social world is our priority, as it influences our identity development and need to feel validated outside our tried-and-true friends and family. Those who have problems with prolonged use of smartphone functions such as social media, media streaming services, games and frequent texting, may fit the criteria of problematic internet use. In these cases, its important to unpack the specific reward you get from the function you engage in the most on your smartphone, to see if you can obtain the same reward through more productive and healthy activities. If you are always on social media, for instance, ask yourself: what do I gain from posting and replying online? Can I gain the same rewarding benefits from face-to-face social engagements? For some, online engagement diversifies their offline social engagement, while others are unaware that most of their life is now lived online. Time to put the smartphone down? Many smartphone users are obsessed or infatuated with their smartphone functions. But over time, they will become less interesting and far more a tool we engage with when we need to, just as society has adjusted to computer use. In the meantime, we need to educate young people about problematic internet use and help them understand why using functions on their smartphone can be potentially time-wasting and, at worst, negatively impact their mental wellness. This can be communicated in early childhood and reinforced throughout the developmental stages. 5 evidenced-based tips for reducing smartphone use As for adult smartphone users, here are some evidence-based tips for reducing your smartphone use: Reduce the number of apps on your phone assess what you actually need and use most often, not just for distraction purposes. The fewer icons on your home screen the better. Turn off notifications through your settings button. Your phone should only notify you for meaningful events to aid in your health and productivity during work hours. When charging your phone at night, dont do it next to your bed. Its tempting to reach for your smartphone first thing upon waking. Instead, try and wake up thinking about the day ahead rather than what did I miss on social or news media while I was asleep? Be aware when reaching for your phone during the day, especially when bored try a mindfulness breathing exercise instead to relax and clear your mind. There are many techniques that are evidence based, but here is one example that takes just three minutes. If you truly want to reduce time checking your smartphone, look more closely at your social media use and, if necessary, remove your social media apps. This article was written by Dr Andrew Campbell from the University's Faculty of Health Sciences. It was originally published on The Conversation as 'No, you're probably not 'addicted' to your smartphone - but you might use it too much'. New Delhi, Feb 23 (IBNS):Before his interaction with the Indian PM, Canadian PM Justin Trudeau said his daughter Ella-Grace remembers Narendra Modi since his visit to 2015 to his nation. Modi earlier tweeted: " I hope PM @JustinTrudeau and his family had a very enjoyable stay so far. I particularly look forward to meeting his children Xavier, Ella-Grace, and Hadrien. Here is a picture from my 2015 Canada visit, when I'd met PM Trudeau and Ella-Grace.." Trudeau was quick in replying: " She remembers it well, @narendramodi! It's been great to visit so far - we'll see you today." She remembers it well, @narendramodi! It's been great to visit so far - we'll see you today. YYYY https://t.co/5C2CgLOW6n Justin Trudeau (@JustinTrudeau) February 23, 2018 Modi and Trudeau will meet on Friday. The Indian PM said he is looking forward to meet his Canadian counterpart. "I look forward to meeting PM @JustinTrudeau tomorrow and holding talks on further strengthening India-Canada relations in all spheres. I appreciate his deep commitment to ties between our two countries," Modi tweeted. Trudeau, who is on a week-long visit to India, will stay till February 23. Apart from diplomatic talks, Trudeau had visited Taj Mahal, Sabarmati Ashram, Golden Temple during his stay in India. Trudeau has meet several Chief Ministers of the country and Bollywood stars during his stay in India so far. Image: Narendra Modi Twitter page New Delhi, Feb 23 (IBNS): On the last day of his India visit, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has met Indian External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj in the national capital on Friday. The two leaders have engaged themselves into a discussion of strengthening the bilateral ties between India and Canada. MEA spokesperson Raveesh Kumar tweeted, "Picture speaks for itself! EAM @SushmaSwaraj had a warm meeting with the Prime Minister of Canada @JustinTrudeau and discussed ways to strengthen and deepen our partnership." Picture speaks for itself! EAM @SushmaSwaraj had a warm meeting with the Prime Minister of Canada @JustinTrudeau and discussed ways to strengthen and deepen our partnership. pic.twitter.com/4nB1QmwgQT Raveesh Kumar (@MEAIndia) February 23, 2018 Trudeau will also hold a meeting with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday. A day ago, Swaraj had met Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland, who flew down to India on Wednesday. Swaraj and Freeland had wide ranging discussions on strengthening relations in trade and investment, security and cyber security, energy, people to people contacts and other relevant bilateral and regional issues. Image: twitter.com/MEAIndia New Delhi, Feb 23 (IBNS): Convicted pro-Khalistani terrorist Jaspal Atwal, whose visit to India with Canadian PM Justin Trudeau sparked a massive controversy, has said it is unfair to raise his decade-old conviction, media reports said. Atwal was convicted in Canada for attempting the murder of then-Punjab minister Malkiat Singh Sidhu on Vancouver Island in 1986. Atwal's invitation to the dinner hosted by the Canadian High Commissioner in India on Thursday came as an embarrassment for Trudeau as he had ensured Punjab Chief Minister Captain Amarinder Singh of Canada's distance from all those who are allegedly involved with the Sikh separatist movement. Trudeau has also promised to take actions against all who want the Indian state of Punjab to be a separate country, named Khalistan. As a damage control, the invitation to Atwal was later rescinded. The Canadian Prime Minister has said that he will take action against the "person responsible" for inviting Atwal. "We take this very seriously. The individual in question should have never received an invitation. The person and department responsible will take full responsibility for his actions," Trudeau said. Atwal is reportedly a former member of the International Sikh Youth Federation, a banned 'terrorist group in Canada, the UK, the US and India. New Delhi, Feb 23 (IBNS) : The Delhi Police visited Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal's home on Friday to look for CCTV footage and to question employees in connection with the alleged assault on Chief Secretary Anshu Prakash by two MLAs of the ruling Aam Aadmi Party, media reports said. This came close on the heels of the statement of Kejriwal's key aide VK Jain that he was a witness to the assault that took place on Monday night Chief Secretary Anshu Prakash has alleged that he was assaulted by two Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) lawmakers-Prakash Jarwal and Amanatullah Khan in presence of Kejriwal after being called for a meeting at midnight on Monday. Denying the allegation, the AAP referred to the CCTV footage to allege that Anshu Prakash was lying about the assault. The chief secretary said he was seated between two MLAs and asked by Kejriwal to explain the delay in releasing a three-year anniversary TV campaign. Soon, the MLAs allegedly shouted at him and threatened him. "One MLA, whom I can identify, threatened that I will be confined in the room for the entire night unless I agree to release the TV campaign," he had said. As a consequence of the incident, Government officials have denied to attend any meeting called by Delhi ministers until Kejriwal apologises for the assault on Prakash. On the basis of Prakash's complaint, the Delhi Police have registered an FIR against AAP MLAs Khan and Jarwal. While Jarwal has been arrested, Khan has surrendered to police. A Delhi court on Wednesday rejected the petition of police for custodial interrogation of Khan and Jarwal. New Delhi, Feb 23 (IBNS): After meeting Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, his Indian counterpart Narendra Modi on Friday said terrorism is a threat to both India and Canada. He said those who challenge India's territorial integrity will not be tolerated. "It is important that we work together to fight terrorism," Modi said in a joint statement with Trudeau. "Those who challenge our sovereignty and territorial integrity cannot be tolerated," he said. Speaking further, Modi said: "There should be no place for those who misuse religion for political goals." During the crucial visit and meet of Trudeau with the PM, India and Canada have signed six pacts. Modi earlier tweeted that he was looking forward to meet his Canadian counterpart. "I look forward to meeting PM @JustinTrudeau tomorrow and holding talks on further strengthening India-Canada relations in all spheres. I appreciate his deep commitment to ties between our two countries," Modi tweeted. Trudeau, who is on a week-long visit to India, will stay till February 23. Apart from diplomatic talks, Trudeau had visited Taj Mahal, Sabarmati Ashram, Golden Temple during his stay in India. Trudeau has meet several Chief Ministers of the country and Bollywood stars during his stay in India so far. New Delhi, Feb 23 (IBNS) : Announcing that India and Canada have agreed to work fight together against terrorism and extremism, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday asserted that any challenge to the country's sovereignty and unity will not be tolerated. During his joint briefing with the visiting Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau after bilateral talks between the two countries, Modi said : " I and Prime Minister Trudeau have agreed to jointly fight terrorism and extrmism. Indian and Canadian security advisors had met earlier and finalised a framework for cooperation on countering terrorism and violent extremism." He said terrorism and extremism are "dangerous" for democratic and pluralistic states like India and Canada. "Terrorism and extremism and dangerous for democratic and pluralistic societies like India and Canada. Our coming together is important for fighting such forces." "There should be no space for those who misuse religion for political motives and promote separatism. We will not tolerate those who challenge unity and integrity of our countries...those who challenge the sovereignty and unity of India and Canada will not be tolerated," Modi said. He also said India and Canada have similar thoughts when it comes to the proliferation of North Korea, safety and peace in the Indo-Pacific region and independence of democratic institutions in Maldives. Modi said, "Prime Minister Trudeau and I exchanged our view on global issues. We discussed in detail the situation of Afghanistan. It is evident and true that the government and the people of Afghanistan need support in tackling the menace of terrorism and in establishing a peaceful atmosphere in the country." PM Modi said an MoU on higher education has been renewed between India and Canada. This will benefit the students of both nations; and those travelling to and from India, he adds. Modi said India has attached a high importance to pursuing its strategic partnership with Canada. "Our ties are based on democracy, pluralism, the supremety of law and the mutual interaction." .Addressing the press briefing, Trudeau said : we share not only rich a history but a set of values that encourage a natural friendship between our two countries. Trudeau further stressed the need to expand India Canada trade and commercial ties in his joint briefing with PM Modi at Hyderabad House, New Delhi on Friday. As Canada looks to diversify its own economy and looks for new opportunities to do business beyond its boundaries, India is a natural partner and a trusted friend for commercial cooperation, Trudeau said. Earlier, Modi and his Canadian counterpart inked six MoUs, after holding bilateral talks on a wide range of topics. Their talks a range of issues including terrorism and extremism, as well as ways to strengthen ties in trade, education and defence. Trudeau was given a ceremonial reception at the Rashtrapati Bhavan, where he was received by President Ram Nath Kovind, PM Modi and members of the Union Cabinet. He later paid tribute to Mahatma Gandhi at Rajghat. He also held talks with External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj. Trudeau said India is a natural partner and a trusted friend. "Modi and I welcome cooperation in several sectors," he said. He adds that India is the second largest source of students in Canadian universities." He said the two countries are similar in terms of democratic and cultural practices as well. A statement issued by the Ministry of External Affairs said Modi and his Canadian counterpart held discussions on strengthening cooperation in trade and investment, energy, education, healthcare, IT, start up, science and technology, defence and security, tourism and people-to-people contacts. Kolkata, Feb 23 (IBNS): A senior official of Sashastra Seema Bal (SSB), who was held in connection with a murder case, fled from police custody at Diamond Harbour in Kolkata's neighbouring South 24 Parganas district of West Bengal on Friday, reports said. Earlier on Thursday night, police from Diamond Harbour Police Station arrested one SSB commandant, D.K. Singh, a constable of the Central armed police force, Amitabha Maity, and a local trader, Mozammel Mondal, from Sarisha area after a resident of Raidighi, Altaf Jamadar, was allegedly shot dead inside Sarisha's Prince Market. When police were taking three accused to court on Friday morning, few SSB jawans from nearby SSB camp at Sarisha reached the scene and took away the commandant and his companion from police custody. Following the dramatic escape, the SSB official took shelter inside the central force's camp. Later a heavy police force, led by senior officials, reached the camp and cordoned it off. Senior officials of West Bengal police asked the superior officials of SSB in New Delhi to take adequate steps and hours later, the SSB commandant surrendered to the police. A local police official told IBNS that the SSB officer has been taken to custody again and was produced in a local court. Condemning of the incident, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee said, "The incident was highly deplorable. Law and order is our state administration's subject." "SSB intervened in it and snatched a murder case accused from police station - it's just unthinkable," she said from Siliguri. Meanwhile, IG of SSB's Siliguri frontier, Srikumar Bandyopadhyay, told IBNS, "SSB always follows country's law and order and rules. After I was informed about the incident, I directed our officials to hand the accused commandant over to the police." "We've commenced a departmental probe into the matter," Bandyopadhyay added. ADG (law and order) of West Bengal Police, Anuj Sharma, said that they are looking into the matter. "The incident, happened today, was very shocking and unthinkable. Our police are investigating the case and I informed the senior officials of SSB about the entire episode," Anuj Shamra told IBNS. (Reporting by Deepayan Sinha) New Delhi, Feb 23 (IBNS): Justin Trudeau, the Prime Minister of Canada, called on President of India Ram Nath Kovind at Rashtrapati Bhavan here on Friday. Welcoming the Canadian Prime Minister to Rashtrapati Bhavan, the President said that India attaches high priority to its partnership with Canada. Our shared values of democracy, pluralism and the rule of law bind us together. In recent times, India and Canada have made significant progress in our cooperation in the areas of investment, education energy and connectivity. The President said that the India-Canada economic partnership hold immense potential. The Indian economy is growing at a fast pace. It opens new opportunities for Canadian investments. India invites Canadian companies to partner its initiatives such as Make in India, Digital India, Start-up India, Smart Cities, infrastructure development and Skill India. The President emphasised that the two countries should look at ways to enhance and diversify their bilateral trade. The President said that democratic and pluralistic societies like India and Canada face common challenges from forces of terrorism and extremism. As strategic partners, we should stand united in the fight against terrorism, separatism and extremism. New Delhi, Feb 23 (IBNS): A delegation of AGMUT Cadre I.A.S Association, Delhi Administrative Subordinate Services (DASS), DANICS officers association, Delhi Jal Board, Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD), engineers and Delhi Government Employees Welfare Association met the Union Minister of State (Independent Charge) of the Ministry of Development of North Eastern Region (DoNER), MoS PMO, Personnel, Public Grievances & Pensions, Atomic Energy and Space, Dr Jitendra Singh here on Friday. The delegation was led by Ms Manisha Saxena, Secretary, AGMUT Cadre I.A.S. Association. During the meeting, the delegation expressed deep anguish over the incident of alleged assault and misbehaviour with Shri Anshu Prakash, Chief Secretary, Delhi Government on February 20, 2018. The resolutions passed by IAS associations of all States/UTs and other services such as IPS, IRS, IFoS and various officers/employees associations of Government of NCT of Delhi were also presented to the Minister. During the meeting, the delegation submitted that they strongly condemn the assault on any Government officer by anybody during execution of their duties. Any incident of physical or verbal assault of an officer compromises their physical safety and demotivates them and their functioning which requires a dignified environment, representatives of the delegation said. The delegation also mentioned about the previous such incidents when the officers were assaulted in past. This affects the morale of the officers and they are forced to take voluntary retirement or seek transfer due to such behaviour, they said. The delegation demanded that there should be clear guidelines while functioning in the administration. In response, Dr Jitendra Singh said that it is the duty of the Government to provide a safe and dignified working environment to all the officers so that these officers can work to the best of their ability without fear. He said that it is the responsibility of DoPT to ensure that bureaucrats and officers are treated with dignity and provided a work-friendly environment. The Minister assured that the concerns expressed by the officers in their resolution will be discussed with the concerned authorities. He further said that the Secretary DoPT will meet the members of delegation and discuss how best to observe the guidelines and incorporate provision that ensure dignified and safe functioning environment to the officers. Kolkata, Feb 23 (IBNS): The Special Task Force (STF) of Kolkata Police on Thursday nabbed an active member of Bangladeshi terrorist group Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB) from Dhulian in West Bengal's Murshidabad district in connection with Bodh Gaya explosion, officials said. According to reports, from Feb 1 to Feb 5, city police's STF arrested at least 5 JMB activists from Murshidabad and seized firearms, ammunition and explosives from their possessions. "While interrogating the five arrested JMB men, we came to know about another activist of the Bangladesh-based terrorist group, Nur Alam Momin, who was one of the key conspirators of Bodh Gaya explosion and our personnel arrested him from Murshidabad," a senior official of STF told IBNS. However, the JMB member was produced in a Kolkata court on Friday and was sent to 10-day STF custody. (Reporting by Deepayan Sinha) New Delhi, Feb 23 (IBNS): Congress President Rahul Gandhi on Friday met Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in Delhi, which the former termed as a fruitful discussion. Tweeting about the meet, Gandhi wrote: I had a warm and cordial meeting with the Canadian Prime Minister in Delhi this evening. We had a fruitful discussion on a range of issues concerning our two countries. I look forward to continuing the dialogue and building a lasting friendship with him. @JustinTrudeau pic.twitter.com/KJmhYed2tr Office of RG (@OfficeOfRG) February 23, 2018 Earlier, Trudeau visited Rajghat along with his family. On Friday, Trudeau held bilateral talks with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. .Addressing the press briefing, Trudeau said : We share not only rich a history but a set of values that encourage a natural friendship between our two countries. Trudeau further stressed the need to expand India Canada trade and commercial ties in his joint briefing with PM Modi at Hyderabad House, New Delhi on Friday. As Canada looks to diversify its own economy and looks for new opportunities to do business beyond its boundaries, India is a natural partner and a trusted friend for commercial cooperation, Trudeau said. New York, Feb 23 (JEN): A senior United Nations relief official is urging the international community to boost support for humanitarian efforts in crisis-gripped Central African Republic (CAR), where nearly half the population requires assistance. UN Deputy Emergency Relief Coordinator Ursula Mueller made the appeal in the capital, Bangui, on Thursday at the end of a four-day visit to the country. CAR is facing a large-scale humanitarian crisis, she said. Violence is fast spreading across the country while urgent and critical needs are increasing and should be covered. Civilians continue to bear the brunt of violence and insecurity. Clashes between the mainly Muslim Seleka rebel coalition and anti-Balaka militia, which are mostly Christian, plunged the country into civil conflict in 2013. The UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has described the CAR as a fragile country that has been devastated by years of conflict and faces both structural and economic challenges. Mueller, the Offices second-in-command, said protection will remain central to its action there in 2018. The UN and its partners are seeking $516 million to meet the needs of nearly two million people in the CAR this year, or roughly half the population. However, as Mueller pointed out, funding for humanitarian operations in the country has declined over the past three years. Meanwhile, the number of internally displaced people nearly doubled in 2017 to 694,000. Mueller witnessed the human face of the humanitarian crisis when she visited the northern town of Paoua. Clashes between armed groups have forced more than 65,000 people to flee there from surrounding villages. I have seen people who are hungry. I call on the international community to support the humanitarian response for Paoua. If we do not receive funding, people will die, she stated. Meanwhile, residents have also been affected. The displaced people are living with local communities in Paoua which has depleted the limited resources available there. Mueller also expressed appreciation to humanitarian workers in the town and across the CAR. They're doing incredible work under very difficult conditions. Targeted attacks prevent them from delivering life-saving assistance. Fourteen humanitarian workers were killed last year alone. This is unacceptable, she said. While in Paoua, Mueller met with displaced women, and marvelled at their strength and dignity amid what she described as incredible hardships. She said: They want safety, peace, and schools. What any mother wants for their children. One of the women, Veronique, fled to Paoua with her six children after her husband was killed. Another woman, Esther, spoke about her struggle to access food, health care and education. During her meeting with CAR President Faustin Archange Touadera, Mueller underlined the need to ramp up efforts to protect civilians. She also shared concerns expressed by the displaced people in Paoua, namely the need for security to help them return to their homes. The CAR is one of three countries that Ms. Mueller is visiting in West and Central Africa. She will also visit Cameroon and Chad in a mission that will wrap up next Tuesday, 27 February. Photo: OCHA New York, Feb 23 (JEN): The United Nations humanitarian chief on Thursday called for action by the Security Council to halt the appalling destruction of Syrias eastern Ghouta, where nearly 300 people have reportedly been killed in just the past few days, as bombs and mortars have rained down on bakeries and medical facilities. What we need is a sustained cessation of hostilities and we need it desperately, UN Emergency Relief Coordinator Mark Lowcock told the Council via video conference, adding: Millions of battered and beleaguered children, women and men depend on meaningful action by this Council. He told the gathering that as UN Member States, they are all aware that their obligations under international humanitarian law are just that; legally binding. They are not favours to be traded in a game of death and destruction. Humanitarian access is not a nice-to-have. It is a legal requirement. Counter-terrorism efforts, Lowcock continued, cannot supersede the obligation to respect and protect civilians. They do not justify the killing of civilians and the destruction of entire cities and neighborhoods. When an entire generation is robbed of its future, when hospital attacks have become the new normal, when sieges of entire cities and neighbourhoods have become a lasting reality for hundreds of thousands of people, the international community must take urgent and concrete action, he declared. Reading out to the Council excerpts of thousands of text messages and social media posts received over the past three days by the Office of the UN Special Envoy for Syria in Geneva, from civilians in eastern Ghouta pleading for help, Lowcock said one aid worker had lamented: Lowcock recalled that the Council had been briefed in minute detail month after month on the scale of the suffering of the Syrian people, with endless reports on dead and injured children, women and men.Most air raids have intentionally targeted civilian residential buildings. Whole families have died under the rubble. Today, as the battles intensify I call on you [] to act to stop the systematic operations against civilians and open the roads for humanitarian assistance. Airstrikes, mortars, rockets, barrel bombs, cluster munitions, chemical weapons, thermite bombs, suicide bombs snipers, double-tap attacks on civilians and the essential infrastructure they depend on, including hospitals and school, rape, illegal detention, torture, child recruitment and sieges of entire cities reminiscent of medieval times, he detailed the situation. He updated the members that over the past 24 hours, heavy shelling and aerial bombardment on multiple communities in East Ghouta continued, killing at least 50 and wounding some 200 people adding that according to some sources, the death toll since 19 February is close to 300 people. Mr. Lowcock, noting that half of Syrias population has either fled the country or faced repeated internal displacement. Eastern Ghouta is a living example of an entirely known, predictable, and preventable humanitarian disaster unfolding before our eyes, he said, enumerating that nearly 400,000 people have been besieged for more than four years, thousands upon thousands of children face acute malnutrition and 700 people are in need of urgent medical evacuation to hospitals just miles away from Damascus. He highlighted that as the appalling violence ensues, accessing people in hard-to-reach and besieged areas remain elusive. Access is not only limited on aid deliveries, but we are also seeing growing challenges to our ability to independently assess needs on the ground and to monitor aid delivery, he explained. You can still save lives in eastern Ghouta and elsewhere in Syria. I urge you to do so, the Emergency Relief Coordinator said. UNICEF/2018/Amer Almohibany Melbourne, Feb 23 (IBNS): Scandal-hit Australia's Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce said on Friday that he'll resign from his post three days later. Joyce's political career plummeted after his alleged affair with a former staffer made the news. Bowing down to pressure, he tweeted, "On Monday morning I will step down as the Leader of @The_Nationals and Deputy Prime Minister of Australia. I would like to thank everyone for offering their support to me, especially the people of New England." The leader of the Nationals has however vowed to continue his fight for the people. "I will continue to fight for the people in the weatherboard and iron, for the people on the peripheral and the small regional towns. I used my experience of these towns and my goal in life will always be to try to make their lives better," he said. Last year, he lost his job briefly after admitting that he held dual citizenship. New York, Feb 23 (JEN): While welcoming the entry to force of a new Penal Code in Afghanistan as a having the potential to trigger real change, the United Nations mission in the country said on Thursday that it is concerned by the removal of the chapter penalizing violence against women. The penal Code entered into force last week, placing the country, for the first time, into compliance with international treaty obligations in criminal justice, the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) said. Together with international partners and experts from UN agencies, UNAMA supported Afghan authorities in drafting the code, the UN Mission said. UNAMA will continue dialogue with stakeholders so that the application of the new codedoes not result in impunity gaps and in particular that there is a robust legal framework in place to protect women from violence, it added. The new Penal Code reinforces Afghanistans compliance with international human rights and criminal justice standards and incorporates all mandatory crimes under the UN Convention against Corruption, the UN Convention against Transnational Organized Crimes (UNTOC) and its three protocols. Moreover, it incorporates the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court covering war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide and establishes command responsibility for those who fail to prevent or punish subordinates who commit these crimes. Reforming the sanctions regime, the new Penal Code introduces alternatives to imprisonment, which judges impose for imprisonment sentencing below five years, and are mandated to impose for incarcerations less than three months. The code also significantly reduces the number of crimes for which the death penalty applies. The coming into force of the Penal Code will bring significant positive developments and a real potential to trigger societal transformation, UNAMA stated. Womens protection in jeopardy However, removing the chapter penalizing violence against women causes concern over safeguarding the strongest possible legal protection of women. Technical amendments to the Code will be essential to ensure that the criminal provisions of the Law on the Elimination of Violence Against Women (the EVAW Law) still apply. UNAMA noted that the current EVAW law remains in place and continues to provide overall legal protection for women, and remains committed to facilitating dialogue on ways to strengthen the criminalization of violence against women. UNAMA looks forward to the full implementation of the revised Penal Code, with a view to achieving accountability for those who violate national and international laws, concluded the UN mission. UNAMA/Zachary Golestani Ottawa, Feb 23 (IBNS): Former B.C. Premier Ujjal Dosanjh has said he was "flabbergasted" at convicted pro-Khalistani Jaspal Atwal's invitation to an event with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his wife in India, media reports said. Reacting to Atwal's appearance in a picture with Trudeau's wife Sophie, Dosanjh told CTV News, "I was shocked at the incompetence it must have taken for the PMO or the RCMP or the High Commission to actually accomplish thisthat you have a convicted attempted assassinwho is now hobnobbing with the elite of Canadian politics." "What is India to make of it and what are Canadians to make of it? I just have no words," the former B.C. Premier added. Atwal was convicted in Canada for attempting the murder of then-Punjab minister Malkiat Singh Sidhu on Vancouver Island in 1986. Dosanjh has also accused Atwal of assaulting him earlier. Recounting his own encounter with Atwal, Dosanjh said: "I was attacked in the parking lot of my law office by him with an iron bar with a bolt at the end of it and he left me with injuries that required 84 stitches to my head and several stitches to one of my hands." Atwal's invitation to the dinner hosted by the Canadian High Commissioner in India on Thursday came as an embarrassment for Trudeau as he had ensured Punjab Chief Minister Captain Amarinder Singh of Canada's distance from all those who are allegedly involved with the Sikh separatist movement. Trudeau has also promised to take actions against all who want the Indian state of Punjab to be a separate country, named Khalistan. As a damage control, the invitation to Atwal was later rescinded. The Canadian Prime Minister has said that he will take action against the "person responsible" for inviting Atwal. "We take this very seriously. The individual in question should have never received an invitation. The person and department responsible will take full responsibility for his actions," Trudeau said. Atwal is reportedly a former member of the International Sikh Youth Federation, a banned 'terrorist group in Canada, the UK, the US and India. Image: Website grab/CBC News "Prevent Unauthorized Transactions in your demat / trading account Update your Mobile Number/ email Id with your stock broker / Depository Participant. 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The site provides comprehensive and real time information on Indian corporates, sectors, financial markets and economy. On the site we feature industry and political leaders, entrepreneurs, and trend setters. The research, personal finance and market tutorial sections are widely followed by students, academia, corporates and investors among others. SREI Infra ended at Rs81.85 up by Rs4.05 or 5.21% from its previous closing of Rs77.80 on the BSE. The scrip opened at Rs77.20 and touched a high and low of Rs82.80 and Rs77.20 respectively. A total of 19,34,531(NSE+BSE) shares were traded on the counter. The current market cap of the company is Rs3,914.04cr. The stock traded below its 200 DMA. SREI is a leading infrastructure and equipment financing company in India. Its key business includes infrastructure project finance and infrastructure equipment finance, which contributes ~54% and 46% of revenue, respectively. Its AUM stands at Rs.37,683cr on FY17. The companys GNPAs and NNPAs in FY17 stood at 2.4% and 1.7%, respectively. A strong recovery in domestic infrastructure development activities will push companys loan growth. The company is well-capitalized (CAR at 18.9% in FY17) to leverage on the upcoming growth opportunities. We expect NIM to improve by 50bps from ~3.8% to ~4.3% over FY17-18E due to better liability management. Also, credit cost is expected to drop from ~1.8% to 1.5% in FY18E on lower NPA accretion. ROE is expected to improve from ~4.7% to ~8% over FY17-19E due to NIM improvement and lower credit cost. Shares of Sun Pharmaceutical Industries (Sun Pharma) rose nearly 4% ahead of the outcome of the US Food and Drug Administration's inspection of the company's unit in Halol, Gujarat, later today.The US FDA had begun inspecting the unit on Feb 12 and is expected to conclude the inspection later today.Markets seem to factor in that the drug maker is going to clear the inspection after failing in the previous two attempts. Sun Pharmas US formulations and Indian-branded Generics contributed 45% and 26% respectively to FY17 revenue, while Emerging markets, ROW and API contributed 15%, 9% and 5% respectively. It has a strong pipeline for the US market with 136 ANDAs and 4 NDAs awaiting approval. We believe that Sun Pharma is expected to see recovery in its US business, which should see double digit growth in FY19E. Owing to the recovery in the US business, Sun Pharmas EBITDA margins should see improvement to ~24% in FY19E and 26% in FY20E. Overall, Sun Pharma is expected to witness revenue growth at ~14% CAGR over FY18E-20E. The bottom-line is estimated to remain weak in FY18E, however we expect recovery in profitability from FY19E onwards. The stock currently trades at 24.6x its FY20E EPS. Sun Pharma is currently trading at Rs564.25 up by Rs22.1 or 4.08% from its previous closing of Rs542.15 on the BSE. The scrip opened at Rs550 and has touched a high and low of Rs569.10 and Rs549.80 respectively. So far 67,34,882 (NSE+BSE) shares were traded on the counter. The stock is currently trading above its 50 DMA. Before the US approves new uranium mining, consider its toxic legacy ByThe Conversation Uranium the raw material for nuclear power and nuclear weapons is having a moment in the spotlight. Companies such as Energy Fuels, Inc. have played well-publicized roles in lobbying the Trump administration to reduce federal protection for public lands with uranium deposits. The Defense Departments Nuclear Posture Review calls for new weapons production to expand the U.S. nuclear arsenal, which could spur new domestic uranium mining. And the Interior Department is advocating more domestic uranium production, along with other materials identified as critical minerals. What would expanded uranium mining in the U.S. mean at the local level? I have studied the legacies of past uranium mining and milling in Western states for over a decade. My book examines dilemmas faced by uranium communities caught between harmful legacies of previous mining booms and the potential promise of new economic development. These people and places are invisible to most Americans, but they helped make the United States an economic and military superpower. In my view, we owe it to them to learn from past mistakes and make more informed and sustainable decisions about possibly renewing uranium production than our nation made in the past. The uranium fuel cycle. Image: National Energy Education Development Project Mining regulations have failed to protect public health Today most of the uranium that powers U.S. nuclear reactors is imported. But many communities still suffer impacts of uranium mining and milling that occurred for decades to fuel the U.S.-Soviet nuclear arms race. These include environmental contamination, toxic spills, abandoned mines, under-addressed cancer and disease clusters and illnesses that citizens link to uranium exposure despite federal denials. As World War II phased into the Cold War, U.S. officials rapidly increased uranium production from the 1940s to the 1960s. Regulations were minimal to nonexistent and largely unenforced, even though the U.S. Public Health Service knew that exposure to uranium had caused potentially fatal health effects in Europe, and was monitoring uranium miners and millers for health problems. Today the industry is subject to regulations that address worker health and safety, environmental protection, treatment of contaminated sites and other considerations. But these regulations lack uniformity, and enforcement responsibilities are spread across multiple agencies. This creates significant regulatory gaps, which are worsened by a federalist approach to regulation. In the 1970s the newly created Nuclear Regulatory Commission initiated an Agreement States program, under which states take over regulating many aspects of uranium and nuclear production and waste storage. To qualify, state programs must be adequate to protect public health and safety and compatible with the NRCs regulatory program. The Orphan uranium mine on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon operated from 1956-1969 and is now a radioactive waste site. Photo: Alan Levine Today 37 states have joined this program and two more are applying. Many Agreement States struggle to enforce regulations because of underfunded budgets, lack of staff and anti-regulatory cultures. These problems can lead to piecemeal enforcement and reliance on corporate self-regulation. For example, budget cuts in Colorado have forced the state to rely frequently on energy companies to monitor their own compliance with regulations. In Utah, the White Mesa Mill our nations only currently operating uranium mill has a record of persistent problems related to permitting, water contamination and environmental health, as well as tribal sacred lands and artifacts. Neglected nuclear legacies Uranium still affects the environment and human health in the West, but its impacts remain woefully under-addressed. Some of the poorest, most isolated and ethnically marginalized communities in the nation are bearing the brunt of these legacies. There are approximately 4,000 abandoned uranium mines in Western states. At least 500 are located on land controlled by the Navajo Nation. Dine (Navajo) people have suffered some of the worst consequences of U.S. uranium production, including cancer clusters and water contamination. A 2015 study found that about 85 percent of Dine homes are still contaminated with uranium, and that tribe members living near uranium mines have more uranium in their bones than 95 percent of the U.S. population. Unsurprisingly, President Donald Trumps decision to reduce the Bears Ears National Monument has reinvigorated discussion over ongoing impacts of uranium contamination across tribal and public land. Despite legislation such as the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act of 1990, people who lived near uranium production or contamination sites often became forgotten casualties of the Cold War. For instance, Monticello, Utah, hosted a federally owned uranium mill from 1942 to 1960. Portions of the town were even built from tailings left over from uranium milling, which we now know were radioactive. This created two Superfund sites that were not fully remediated until the late 1990s. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on YouTube: Uranium-Contaminated Structures in the Navajo Nation Monticello residents have dealt with cancer clusters, increased rates of birth defects and other health abnormalities for decades. Although the community has sought federal recognition and compensation since 1993, its requests have been largely ignored. Today tensions over water access and its use for uranium mining are creating conflict between regional tribes and corporate water users around the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. Native residents, such as the Havasupai, have had to defend their water rights and fear losing access to this vital resource. Uranium production is a boom-and-bust industry Like any economic activity based on commodities, uranium production is volatile and unstable. The industry has a history of boom-bust cycles. Communities that depend on it can be whipsawed by rapid growth followed by destabilizing population losses. The first U.S. uranium boom occurred during the early Cold War and ended in the 1960s due to oversupply, triggering a bust. A second boom began later in the decade when the federal government authorized private commercial investment in nuclear power. But the Three Mile Island (1979) and Chernobyl (1985) disasters ended this second boom. Uranium prices soared once again from 2007 to 2010. But the 2011 tsunami and meltdown at Japans Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant sent prices plummeting once again as nations looked for alternatives to nuclear power. Uranium production in the United States, 1949-2011. Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration Companies like Energy Fuels maintain especially in public meetings with uranium communities that new production will lead to sustained economic growth. This message is powerful stuff. It boosts support, sometimes in the very communities that have suffered most from past practices. But I have interviewed Westerners who worry that as production methods become more technologically advanced and mechanized, energy companies may increasingly rely on bringing in out-of-town workers with technical and engineering degrees rather than hiring locals as has happened in the coal industry. And the core tensions of boom-bust economic volatility and instability persist. Uranium production advocates contend that new environmentally friendly mills and current federal regulations will adequately protect public health and the environment. Yet they offer little evidence to counter White Mesa Mills poor record. In my view, there is little evidence that new uranium production would be more reliably regulated or economically stable today than in the past. Instead, I expect that the industry will continue to privatize profits as the public absorbs and subsidizes its risks. Stephanie Malin is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Colorado State University. She receives funding from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, the American Sociological Association's Spivack Community Action Research Initiative Grant, the Rural Sociological Society's Early Career Award, and the CSU Water Center and School for Global Environmental Sustainability. Colorado State University provides funding as a member of The Conversation US. This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article. Join the Conversation There are quite a few bizarre things on this planet (and outside of it). But, this, by far, is one of the weirdest, most oh-my-goodness inducing thing that we've heard of. A teenager from Indonesia claims to have laid 20 eggs in the past two years. On Monday, the teenager laid two eggs in front of the doctors, which has baffled medical experts. Shocking right? Go ahead, read that again. We know you want to. A team of doctors in Syech Yusuf Hospital has examined the eggs and said that they are chicken eggs. "Our suspicion is that the eggs were deliberately shoved [into Akmal's rectum]. But we did not see it directly," local media Detik quoted Muhammad Taslim, a spokesman for the hospital, as saying. His father has said that he has never swallowed whole eggs and there is no black magic involved. Doctors have quarantined the teenager to study his condition at Syekh Yusuf Hospital in Gowa. But this is not the first such case. An elderly man Kakek Sinin in Tanjung Wangi, North Jakarta, had shocked everyone when he laid eggs in 2015. How is it humanly possible for someone to lay eggs, that too chicken eggs? Beats me, but I guess we have to leave it to science and the experts to determine if this really is the truth. Some say, the eggs were forcefully shoved into the boy. If this is true then this is quite barbaric. But no one knows for sure... Yet! Looking forward to that drink tonight? Well, no matter what multiple conflicting studies have shown till date drinking in moderation has shown to be associated with living a longer life, affirms the most recent study. Living past 90 may come down to drinking a couple of glasses of alcohol a day, according to a study published by the University of California Irvine's Institute for Memory Impairment and Neurological Disorders. trending-gifs.leadstories.com The study was conducted on more than 1,600 nonagenarians (people between 90 and 99 years old) revealed that about two glasses of wine or beer a day was linked to an 18 percent drop in the chances of an early death. "I have no explanation for it, but I do firmly believe that modest drinking improves longevity," said head of the research Dr. Claudia Kawa, M.D, a neurologist at the University of California and one of the researchers in the study, in her speech to the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Surprisingly, people who were overweight but not obese in the 70s ended up living a longer life compared to people with a normal weight or were underweight. "It's not bad to be skinny when you're young, but it's very bad to be skinny when you're old," added Kawa. rts.ch Another revelation was that the people who spent two hours a day on a hobby were able to cut their risk by 21 percent. "These people are inspiring-they drink wine, drink coffee, gain weight, but they exercise and use their brains," Kawas said. "Maybe that can tell us something." This isn't the first study that links alcohol with long life either. A 2015 study of people with mild Alzheimer's had previously found that moderate drinkers were less likely to die in comparison. A more recent larger study in 2017 revealed that light and moderate drinkers were less likely to die from cardiovascular ailments in comparison to teetotallers. Red wine, for instance, is renowned for its anti-ageing benefits due to a compound called resveratrol. uk.news.yahoo.com Downing a couple of glasses of alcohol isn't the elusive anti-ageing magic pill that you've been waiting for. Rather people who drank moderately also have to be engaged in a healthy lifestyle to lengthen their lifespan. Beware, drinking more than a couple of glasses can instead end up damaging your liver! Youre Bangalored is a term quite popular across the IT world across the globe - it simply means that losing ones job to outsourcing in India, and more specifically, to Bangalore. That said, it is safe to say that India is excelling in technology through its youth. Many Indian kids are not only landing high-paying jobs in US but also making the world see India as a potential hub when it comes to technology. So, how did that happen? All of it happened over the years with thousands flocking to Silicon Valley seeking better opportunities, Indian tech giants landing opportunities; and our sheer ability to learn and do more. We also served up innovation that the world embraced. Here are just a few of them that we bet you didnt know were developed by Indians. 1 LinkedIn Pulse Pulse Global brand LinkedIn acquired Pulse for a whopping $90 million.. Developed by Alphonso Labs, founded by Stanford University graduate students Ankit Gupta and Akshay Kothari, the idea of Pulse came to the duo during 'Launch Pad', a course for aspiring entrepreneurs that challenged students to create a product in the course of 11 weeks. In an age of information overload, this app allows you to check out whats trending with professionals around the world. 2 Signeasy Developed by Sunil Patro, an IITian and an ex Microsoft employee, SignEasy lets a person sign documents digitally from anywhere in the world. This gave birth to hassle-free processes and it quickly became the second-most downloaded app on the iPad and the 5th most downloaded on the iPhone worldwide. Its available on cloud mediums such as Evernote, Google Drive and AppSense. 3 Iris Android Community The Android equivalent of Siri, Iris is used by millions of Android users across the globe as a personal assistant. Developed by Bangalore-based Dextera - one of the biggest name in app development in India, Iris is a voice-recognition device to help its users. Anyhow, in a world where a lot of Siri clones are thriving, Dextera was the first to make a duplicate version of Siri for Android users. Unfortunately, they have currently scrapped the app because they are working on a better version. 4 360 Panorama freegreatpicture Of late, our Facebook timelines have been flooded with people sharing 360-degree pictures from their travels. While it became quite exciting to move picture backwards, forward and even sideways to see exactly what the traveller saw, the information that it was made by an Indian firm made it even more thrilling. Developed by Occipital, 360 Panorama is an app to make your panorama the prettiest. 5 Paytm Use promocode LUCKY2000 and get up to 2000 Cashback on Mobile Recharges, Electricity Bill and DTH Payments! Paytm (@Paytm) February 22, 2018 One of the fastest growing companies in the online-tech space Paytm came years after PayPal, yet it is giving a huge competition to the brand. Operating in 16 countries, Paytm allows users to make online payments for everything. Book a flight, share money, book a movie ticket, recharge mobile and DTH and much more. Its truly one of the most popular apps in India and is synonymous with online payments today. All thanks to the app, Vijay Shekhar Sharma the founder of the app is Indias youngest billionaire. 6 Hike Messenger With 40%of Hikes user base outside of India, especially in Europe and Latin America, the Indian messaging app developed by Bharti Softbank has been a huge hit with the masses. Similar to Whatsapp in many ways, Hike offers free calling, very different and interesting stickers for enjoyable communication, daily jokes, facts, camera filters and offline messages. Hike also has a lot of features that are not provided by Whatsapp, so give it a try. 7 Zomato RT if this is how you spend your time pic.twitter.com/AIneZmAlSA Zomato (@Zomato) July 3, 2017 The food-tech giant with its gargantuan reach is redefining how people discover eating out in over 19 countries. Founded by Deepinder Goyal, Pankaj Chaddah and Gunjan Patidar, Zomato is now a global brand. Founded in 2008, by 2009, they covered over 2,000 restaurants in three major cities: Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata. Now they are serving people in UK, Ireland, Canada, Lebanon, UAE, Turkey, New Zealand, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, South Africa and many more. Available on both Apple and Android, Zomato is currently facilitating in-depth information on over 300,000 restaurants. 8 Shifu MyVenture Shifu is a goddamn genius. A to-do app, Shifu was developed by Prashant Singh, Michael Massey, and Deepansh Jain, in a bid to make life easier for its users. The app tracks your phone usage reminds you of the tasks that need to be done and puts an end to your procrastination. If you set a reminder, it will constantly tell you about the undone task, and works exclusively based on your location. For example, if you need to buy vegetables and you write it down in Shifu, it will track your location and remind you when you will in a stores vicinity. 9 Friday Dextera Another one by Dextera Bangalore, Friday is quite similar to Shifu in many ways. It functions like a personal assistant that reminds you of your tasks, tracks your activities on the phone and follows every order. It will also do stuff for you, based on your instruction. Only available on Android as of now, Friday caters to 7 million users and is constantly growing, 48% users from the US, 7% users from India and the remaining from around the world. 10 Game Your Video Youtube With people talking in videos more than text, all of us needed an app that could record, edit and share videos with the world instantly So came Game Your Video - an app that offers real-time recording. Developed by Global Delight, GYV is currently serving only iPhone and iPad users and has won multiple awards for its simplicity and agility. Users love how easy and effortless its system is. 11 Newshunt Youtube Just as the name suggests, Newshunt is for people who are tired of switching from one newspaper to another. So it collates news from different platforms and offers regional content in more than 11 languages and from 87 newspaper. Content in popular languages like Hindi, Bengali, Punjabi, Gujarati, Marathi, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu and English is shared. The app also offers ebooks in 50 languages. As of now, its catering to over 40 million users and has more than a billion views. The brand has now changed its name to DailyHunt. In a first, the government is preparing to deploy commandos of central paramilitary force CRPF at the Indian embassy in war-ravaged Iraq, which is under threat from Islamic State, Al Qaeda and other terror groups. A contingent of 45 highly trained men, led by a deputy commandant rank officer, will be initially posted to secure the embassy and diplomats in Baghdad and, if required, more personnel will be sent later. The Indian embassy last faced a missile attack in 2004 but sources said lately RAW and other central intelligence agencies have warned of possible terror attacks. ap/representational image An in-principle approval for the deployment of an armed squad at the complex located in the Al Mansour area of the Iraqi capital has already been accorded by the home ministry, sources said. The CRPF commandos will have a specific task of securing the embassy, its diplomatic staff and their families against terror threats. bccl/representational image Given the constant threat of the IS terror group in Iraq, it was being discussed for a long time that the Indian embassy there should have a professional security cover, an official said. The effort to send the paramilitary commandos is a move in that direction. A final decision will be taken soon, the official said. While there has be no targeted hit at the Indian mission in Baghdad, the city has witnessed suicide attacks and bombings by IS terrorists. The proposed contingent would not only guard the embassy complex, but also provide proximate security cover to senior diplomats and staffers every time they move out of the facility. ap/representational image CRPFs elite CoBRA squad, known for their operations against Maoists, will be part of the proposed contingent, an official said. The personnel will have to be adept in handling improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and in conducting special operations and hostage rescue tasks, he said. This will be the first such overseas task for the about 3-lakh personnel strong CRPF. In a shocking case of barbarism that will put any civilised society to shame, a tribal man was beaten to death by a mob in Kerala. 27-year-old Madhu, a resident of a tribal settlement in Attapadi, Palakkad was roughed up by the mob on Thursday after they allegedly found 'stolen food items' with him. Read more New H1-B Visa Policy Requires Extensive Documentation, Will Make Approval Tough For Indians Donald Trump has done that he always wanted to do. A new policy that would adversely impact foreign workers, particularly the Indian techies who have an American dream to achieve. Reports suggests that the Trump administration's new policy will make it very tough to get H-1B visas for those who are to be employed at one or more third-party worksites. Read more Human Rights Report Slams India On Increasing Hate Crime Against Dalits & Minorities Amnesty International, in its annual report has painted a bleak picture of the human rights situation in India. The annual report, titled State of the Worlds Human Rights, published on Thursday said Indian authorities were openly critical of human rights defenders in 2017, feeding a climate of hostility and violence against them. Repressive laws were used to stifle freedom of expression, and journalists and press freedom came under increasing attack. Read more Man Enters Board Examination Hall With Pistol, Kills Girls And Commits Suicide In Uttar Pradesh Armed with a belt hiding 16 live cartridges and carrying a .315 calibre country-made pistol, a 22-year-old youth shot dead a 17-year-old girl minutes before she was to take her class XII chemistry Board exam on Thursday. The accused later turned the gun on himself even as people standing nearby watched the horror unfold in front of their eyes. It took just about three minutes for the twin tragedies to play out. Read more Farmer Builds 'Temple Of Love' In Wife's Memory Where He Worships Her Idol Building a temple in his village was a labour of love for Raju alias Rajuswamy since it was his wife's ardent wish. But it wasn't complete until he installed an idol of hers in the temple and worshipped her along with the deities. "Our love was divine," he said. People from even nearby villages now visit Krishnapura village of Yellandur taluk in the district, and ask about the temple of Rajamma. The temple was built in 2006 and Raju, a farmer, has been performing puja every day for the past 12 years. Read more Stalker Beheads Girl In Front Of Her School In Broad Daylight In MP, She Had To Appear For Exam A class 11 student was allegedly beheaded in front of her school in Kotma village 30km from Anuppur on Thursday, by a man who had been stalking her for years and was spurned. The accused was arrested later in the day. She was on her way to school around 12.30pm when the accused ran up to her and attacked her, said a retired teacher, so far the only eyewitness. Read more In a shocking case of barbarism that will put any civilised society to shame, a tribal man was beaten to death by a mob in Kerala. 27-year-old Madhu, a resident of a tribal settlement in Attapadi, Palakkad was roughed up by the mob on Thursday after they allegedly found 'stolen food items' with him. Indiatimes However, another version of the narrative suggests that Madhu, was mentally unstable and hardly ventured outside the forest settlement. He was dragged out of a cave which he had made his shelter, and paraded in public, blaming him for all the recent thefts in the area. An amateur video, shot by bystanders showed what the mob had allegedly 'recovered' as evidence from Madhu. A polythene bag in his possession had some rice, a packet of chili powder, coriander powder, couple of cigarettes, a broken mobile charger and a torchlight! (the total worth of this is less than Rs 200) Apparently, this was enough for the frenzied mob of around 40 people to conclude that Madhu is a thief and had to be taught a lesson. He was then stripped and roughed up by the mob, as people clicked selfies and made videos of it. Indiatimes Disturbing images and videos of circulation online shows the youth, with a perplexed look, as if he was unable to understand why he was being beaten up for. Indiatimes Madhu was later handed over to the police. His condition worsened on the police vehicle and died on the way to hospital. Following the brutal killing there is much uproar, especially among the tribal communities in the state demanding the arrest of those responsible. Terming the incident as inhuman, Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan said police have been asked to take strict action against the behind the act. Cocoa (CC) Consolidates Just Above Key 2600 Level Tradable Patterns - 1 hour ago Cocoa (CC) consolidated for a 3rd straight day yesterday with its daily Doji, continuing to gear up for a retest of last weeks 2021 high. Significantly, CC has been trying to extend its Bull Flag... NIB : 31.20 (-1.14%) Chart of the Day: Energy Fuels - Nuclear Play Barchart - Thu Sep 16, 6:56PM CDT The Barchart Chart of the Day belongs to the uranium miner Energy Fuels (NYSE: UUUU ). I found the stock by sorting Barchart's Top 100 Stocks list first by the most frequent number of new highs... UUUU : 8.16 (-2.04%) Cattle Market Closes Mixed Barchart - Thu Sep 16, 5:00PM CDT Fat cattle futures were weaker on Thursday but closed off their lows with 17 to 87 cent losses. Feeders were higher nearby, gaining $1.15 in September, but were 27 to 40 cents red in the deferred months.... LEV21 : 123.600s (-0.46%) LEG22 : 132.650s (-0.38%) GFU21 : 155.875s (+0.74%) GFV21 : 157.100s (+0.38%) Corn Closes Red on Thursday Barchart - Thu Sep 16, 5:00PM CDT At the settle for Thursday, corn futures were 3 1/4 to 4 cents weaker. Poor weekly export sales were the main influence, with the lack of New Orleans origination crimping sales. Crude Oil prices are also... CLV21 : 72.48 (-0.18%) XVF22 : 2,448s (-0.73%) ZCZ21 : 527-4 (-0.38%) ZCPAUS.CM : 5.1568 (-1.26%) ZCH22 : 535-0 (-0.33%) ZCZ21 : 527-4 (-0.38%) Shootin' the Bull Swift Trading Company - Thu Sep 16, 3:52PM CDT Bonds were lower today and have now punctured both ends of the triangle. The US dollar was sharply higher today. All factors of trading in other commodity markets appeared to be hampered by these market's... Policyholders should address queries about their own position to the interim liquidators, it said. The Reserve Bank licenses and prudentially supervises CBL Insurance Limited in New Zealand. Early this month, NZX suspended CBL Corporations stock due to concerns that the company failed to give complete and true information to the market. Its trading in stock was also placed at a halt. This came just days after CBL updated the market on its amended ratings by A.M. Best it had its issuer credit and financial strength ratings downgraded under review with negative implications; and CBL Corporations issuer credit rating downgraded under review with negative implications. CBL also announced, on February 14, its decision to exit its French construction insurance business as it looks to focus on core business products that are more profitable. Days after these events being made known to the market, CBLs chief operating officer Suzanne Tindal left the company. On February 20, CBL Insurance Europe Dac (CBLIE), CBL NZs European arm, was directed by the Central Bank of Ireland to cease writing new business, until further notice. The company is set to announce its full year-results on February 27. Related stories: The insurance industry needs to wake up and think that they are front and centre in terms of data attacks, because they are where the data is, Gareth Lindahl-Wise told Insurance Business. The market needs to recognise the value of the data that it holds, which obviously varies depending on the lines of business, but its very attractive data for maliciously-minded people. I would expect an upsurge in more structured, systematic, and capable attacks to try and get to that data, he said. But while cyberattacks from external actors are widely discussed, there is also an insider threat too. Last month, insurance group Canada Life took a former senior executive to court over claims he had taken significant and highly confidential information with him before transferring to another company. The firm alleged that the executive had sent three emails with documents attached from his work account to his personal account, containing confidential information about the groups underlying assets and the market value of each fund and related asset breakdown. The insider threat is one of the most difficult to deal with, said Lindahl-Wise. Even where you have a good cybersecurity regime in place, you are giving access to trusted individuals. If those trusted individuals turn bad, thats your worst-case scenario If you cant detect anomalies, for example someone downloading data or sending work to personal emails, that really is an exposure. When it comes to the insider threat, its important that businesses assess who within the organisation should have access to what data. Data segregation allied to role segregation is probably your best way of doing this, the director said. But that may mean facing some uncomfortable conversations: for example, while senior executives would likely have access to strategic, top-line information, they would not necessarily need access to personal customer data. Sometimes theres a reluctance to have a hard discussion just because youre the CEO, doesnt mean you should be able to access this, because your role doesnt require it, Lindahl-Wise said. Ultimately, the volume, sensitivity, and potential to exploit the data that insurance companies hold is going to attract the wrong attention. Thats something that insurance companies really need to be on guard for, and they should really be assessing their threat posture. Related stories: Policyholders should address queries about their own position to the interim liquidators, it said. The Reserve Bank licenses and prudentially supervises CBL Insurance Limited in New Zealand. Early this month, NZX suspended CBL Corporations stock due to concerns that the company failed to give complete and true information to the market. Its trading in stock was also placed at a halt. This came just days after CBL updated the market on its amended ratings by A.M. Best it had its issuer credit and financial strength ratings downgraded under review with negative implications; and CBL Corporations issuer credit rating downgraded under review with negative implications. CBL also announced, on February 14, its decision to exit its French construction insurance business as it looks to focus on core business products that are more profitable. Days after these events being made known to the market, CBLs chief operating officer Suzanne Tindal left the company. On February 20, CBL Insurance Europe Dac (CBLIE), CBL NZs European arm, was directed by the Central Bank of Ireland to cease writing new business, until further notice. The company is set to announce its full year-results on February 27. According to a release from MAPFRE, it will sell its life business and conduct an orderly withdrawal from the personal lines markets in states where it has underperformed. The company will then find replacement carriers to underwrite the policies where viable. This transaction represents definitive progress on MAPFREs profitable growth strategy in the US, allowing us to focus operations on a reduced number of states, said MAPFRE Insurance president and CEO Alfredo Castelo. We are pleased to partner with Safeco to provide a seamless transition for our agents and customers. This innovative approach to book transfer leverages our leading products and services to help grow their business while providing their customers with a great experience, commented Safeco Insurance senior vice-president of distribution strategy and operations support Gary Fischer. Carrier Management reported that the 11 states MAPFRE identified as core regions where it will continue its growth strategies are California, Connecticut, Idaho, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Ohio, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington. The insurer added that it will also continue to operate in three other states Arizona, Florida, and Pennsylvania but noted that in these states, MAPFRE must first reinforce the companys underwriting and distribution foundation before it can expand its capacities. Although Safeco Insurance is picking up MAPFREs personal lines policies in Indiana, Kentucky and Tennessee, there is yet to be any word regarding the fate of the latters businesses in New York and New Jersey. MAPFRE is pursuing the sale of its New York and (in terms of the companys life business) Delaware-based subsidiaries. Related stories: Sonoma West Medical Center and district officials said they had done nothing wrong and were preparing a response to the insurer, according to a report by The Press Democrat. According to Anthem, the fraudulent billing began after the hospital partnered with Durall Capital Holdings, a Florida company, and Duralls testing laboratory, Reliance Laboratory Testing. In exchange for more than $2 million, the cash-strapped hospital agreed to conduct toxicology testing for Durall. Anthem claimed that when healthcare providers from around the country sent specimens to Reliance for testing, Reliance would then distribute those specimens to various labs for screening, including a lab at Sonoma West, according to The Press Democrat. Sonoma West bills Anthem for some or all of this testing representing that it had performed the services, when, in fact, it had not, Anthems letter said. The letter also pointed out that as a hospital, Sonoma West receives substantially higher amounts for urine drug testing, often 10 times or more, relative to the lesser amount that clinical laboratories like Reliance would receive. Indeed, it is that reimbursement delta that appears to be the only value that Sonoma West brings to its partners in the scheme, Anthem said. Sonoma West, for its part, insisted that it had done nothing wrong. We dispute the assertions in the letter, and a response to Anthem is being prepared to address their concerns, said John Peleuses, CEO of Sonoma West. Related stories: Insurance agent gets life sentence KY insurance exec headed to prison for fraud A Pennsylvania couple has lost their home in a mudslide, and they say their insurance company likely wont cover the damage. Lynn Eash says she was inside her Johnstown, Penn., home when she heard a loud cracking noise. She ran outside with her three pet dogs as mud pushed her home 10 feet off its foundation. Eash says she and her husband still cannot go inside the home. The couple cant retrieve their car, because it would cause their home to collapse completely. The couple lost a son in 2007, and his remaining possessions are still inside the home. The couple is currently staying with friends in the area. The state Department of Transportation says Route 271 near the Eashs home will remain closed until geological experts assess the area. Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Topics Pennsylvania The Chinese government on Friday seized control of Anbang Insurance Group Co. Ltd and said its chairman had been prosecuted, dramatically illustrating Beijings willingness to curtail big-spending conglomerates as it cracks down on financial risk. Anbang had violated laws and regulations which may seriously endanger the solvency of the company, the China Insurance Regulatory Commission (CIRC) said in a statement announcing the seizure, without giving details. The CIRC also said Anbangs chairman and key shareholder, Wu Xiaohui, had been prosecuted for economic crimes. Wu was arrested in June as troubles mounted for one of Chinas most aggressive buyers of overseas assets. The Shanghai prosecutors office said in a statement Friday that Wu had recently been charged with fundraising fraud and abuse of his position, and that his case had been forwarded to the citys intermediate court for prosecution. During the government takeover of Anbang Group, which will last for one year starting from Friday, the company will be managed by a group of officials from the CIRC, the central bank and other key financial regulators and government bodies. The group will seek to undertake an equity restructuring of the insurance giant, even as it keeps Anbang operating as usual, protecting the rights and interests of its consumers and stakeholders, the CIRC said. The takeover of Anbang, which claims 1.97 trillion yuan ($310.85 billion) in assets and ranks 139 on the Global Fortune 500 list, is a defining blow to a conglomerate best known for acquiring New Yorks landmark Waldorf Astoria hotel. The unprecedented seizure of a major non-state company also underscores how far the ruling Communist Party will go in its growing campaign to lower financial risks, sending a signal to risk-taking private enterprises. Anbang Insurance has significant stakes in a slew of major Chinese companies, such as banks and property developers. Late on Friday, China Minsheng Banking Corp Ltd., China Merchants Bank Co. Ltd., developers China Vanke Co. Ltd. and Gemdale Corp. said they received similar notices from Anbang assuring them that there would not be immediate stake sales. Currently, operations at Anbang Insurance Group and its units are operating normally with abundant cash reserves. There are no plans to sell shares in your company, the companies quoted Anbang as saying in similar filings to the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges. Too Big It was not immediately clear what triggered the move. Three insurance industry insiders said they were not surprised by the move since Anbang had been in the crosshairs of the government. But they said they believed it had more to do with Anbangs behavior than systemic financial risks. A regulatory source with knowledge of the matter said the government had been effectively running the company since Wu was detained and the timing of the official takeover was linked to the investigation into Wu, which was nearly complete. But a Beijing-based lawyer who works with the CIRC and other regulators said senior officials at the insurance regulator had been watching Anbang closely since last year as its liabilities from the sale of shadow banking products grew, raising questions about the companys solvency. The group has become too big to fail in some sense, said the lawyer, who declined to be identified by name. The CIRC said on Friday that it had sent a working group to Anbang in June 2017 and that at present the companys operations are generally stable. This appears to be an unprecedented takeover a Chinese-style hostile takeover, said Scott Kennedy, director of the Project on Chinese Business & Political Economy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. The Chinese government doesnt want to have a company default on foreign debt and it also wants to teach a lesson to other Chinese business people that the Party is in charge. After a spate of high-profile deals worth over $30 billion, Anbang began to run into roadblocks even before Wus detention, failing to close on a handful of investments and facing criticism over its opaque shareholding structure. A spokesman for Anbang Insurance Group declined to comment and referred to the CIRC announcement. Calls to Wu Xiaohuis personal phone numbers were either disconnected or unanswered. Clearly a message is being fed back into the market and to private companies that being very innovative may not be looked on favorably in the long run, said Keith Pogson, senior partner for Asia-Pacific financial services at EY. This says to the market tread carefully if they hadnt already got that message. In a separate statement Friday, CIRC said insurers must take steps to handle fraud risks and that it had issued new guidelines for the industry. The regulator said it would seek to improve coordination among relevant authorities to prevent and mitigate fraud risks. Tightening Noose The CIRC said that Anbangs debts and obligations will not be impacted by the takeover. The takeover was implemented under a broad provision in the countrys insurance law allowing it to rectify violations of the law by insurance companies, it said. The noose had been tightening around Anbang as Chinas insurance industry came under the microscope over the past year or so for risky behavior, ranging from term-mismatches on insurance products and highly leveraged overseas acquisitions, as well as corrupt practices. Anbang distributes insurance through multiple channels, with the bulk going through banks. Under Wu, Anbang was among Chinas most active overseas investors after the government liberalized offshore investment rules earlier this decade. In the United States, Anbang bought the Waldorf Astoria for $1.95 billion, and later agreed to pay $6.5 billion for Strategic Hotels and Resorts, purchasing both properties from Blackstone Group. It acquired life insurance companies in South Korea and in Europe, as well as the largest retirement home chain in British Columbia, Canada. But it has faced increasing push-back in its offshore deal-making amid a broader decline in Chinese outbound acquisitions. Beijing has strengthened curbs over capital outflows after Chinas leadership vowed to curb risk in its financial system. ($1 = 6.3375 Chinese yuan renminbi) (Reporting by Matthew Miller and Judy Hua in Beijing, Engen Tham and John Ruwitch in Shanghai, and Jennifer Hughes, Sumeet Chatterjee and Julie Zhu in Hong Kong; editing by Philip McClellan and Keith Weir) Related: Topics Legislation Fraud China Though states and the federal government remain at odds on marijuana legalization, the drug is gaining traction as a viable treatment in workers compensation claims. In a recent discussion with Claims Journal, Brian Allen, vice president of government affairs for Mitchell, and Mark Pew, senior vice president of PRIUM, a division of Genex Services LLC, provided insight on pending workers compensation cases involving medical marijuana reimbursement and on the federal governments recent announcement regarding marijuana enforcement. According to Pew, most of the states in the U.S have legalized marijuana either in medical or recreational form, while several more are considering marijuana proposals. In the states that allow medical marijuana, there have been exemptions primarily targeting health insurers who pay for the drug treatment, said Allen. It creates a bit of a gray area or some ambiguity for workers comp insurers, said Allen. Some cases that have been adjudicated relate to self-insured employers, he said, that neither fall into the private or workers comp insurer category. Many states have remained silent on the issue of payment by an insurer. Its still a question in a number of states, he added. In 2015, the Minnesota Department of Labor and Industries released a ruling allowing medical marijuana coverage under workers compensation. A lot of court decisions have been driving reimbursement, said Pew, who has been focused on the intersection of chronic pain and appropriate treatment since 2003. In states where decisions are still pending, like the case of Bourgoin v. Twin Rivers Paper Mill and Sedgwick Claims Management Services, awaiting a decision by the Maine Supreme Court, and Petrini v. Marcus Dairy, Inc. and Gallagher Bassett Service on appeal with the Connecticut Court of Appeals, its likely courts will rule in favor of the plaintiff, according to Allen, since its clear that doctors could document medical improvement. The risk of prosecution for paying for medical marijuana treatment was negligible under the previous administration, said Allen, adding that the Controlled Substances Act doesnt contain any specific language outlining an insurer could be prosecuted for reimbursement. He added that state courts are unlikely to defer to federal law, so feds wont get much support in pursuit of prosecution. Reimbursement for medical marijuana is also being done on a voluntary basis, Pew said, either because it is deemed a reasonable and necessary treatment and also because it is typically cheaper than other treatment options. The decision is really based on whether that patient is achieving benefit from it, he said. Some states have laws explicitly stating that an employer or workers compensation insurer is not required to pay for medical marijuana. Arizona passed legislation that amended its medical marijuana law, emphasizing the Acts language doesnt require a workers comp carrier or self-insured employer to reimburse for medical marijuana treatment costs. Pew said that those carriers and self-insured employers paying for medical marijuana treatment are not necessarily making it public. Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey and New Mexico are seven states where payment has been publicly documented. I think any court is probably going to lean towards the anecdotal story of the individual patient and if its helping with their pain and its reasonable and necessary based on the advice of doctors in that state, I would assume that most states are going to come to that same conclusion, said Pew. According to Allen, courts are reluctant to get in between a doctor-patient relationship. I think the courts are going to defer to the doctors every time, said Allen. Opioid Alternative With so much media attention surrounding overdoses and overprescribing issues related to opioids, both experts opined that marijuana could be an alternative. The groundwork is there, said Allen, who noted that anecdotal evidence on medical marijuana suggests it may work in some cases. The problem is the drugs side effects are largely unknown. They talk about the pluses, we really dont hear a lot about the minuses, and we know there are some out there, Allen said, adding that THC may be most problematic aspect of marijuana. Pew explained that marijuana is the only drug with a self-guided dosage, with no real guidance from a doctor or pharmacist. Though there are more knowns that unknowns, Pew said hes heard many stories of its benefits. Marijuana is still illegal at the federal level and is classified as a Schedule I drug under the federal Controlled Substances Act. Last month, the Department of Justice released a memo indicating that marijuana enforcement would be at the discretion of local assistant U.S. attorneys. Because they are political appointees, Allen doesnt see them going against popular opinion. Its unlikely they would pursue a medical marijuana case, unless there was some egregious abuse. I dont see any U.S. attorney in any of the states making a conscious decision to prosecute medical marijuana users, said Allen, a former state legislator with more than 25 years of political and government relations experience. Pew said theres too much money tied to marijuana. Its a $1.2 billion business in Colorado, he said. From a financial standpoint, its unlikely there will be any prosecution related to legalized marijuana because cities, municipalities and even some schools have marijuana income outlined in their budgets. Both said there is a disconnect between the states and the federal government with respect to the laws governing marijuana. The states are way ahead of Congress on this issue, said Allen. Before it can be rescheduled, Pew said more research needs to be done since little is known about the many chemicals within marijuana. Just saying were going to reclassify marijuana or make it legal, its much more complicated, Pew said. Topics Carriers Workers' Compensation Talent Cannabis Drugs Takata Corp.s U.S. unit agreed Thursday to settle a probe by 44 state attorneys general into claims it concealed a deadly safety defect with air bag inflators. TK Holdings Inc., which is in bankruptcy reorganization proceedings, agreed in the settlement to a $650 million civil penalty over the defect linked to at least 22 deaths. South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson said in a statement that because Takata does not have the money, the states agreed not to collect this civil penalty in order to maximize the recovery available to consumers who were the victims. In February 2017, Takata pleaded in a U.S. federal court to a felony charge as part of a $1 billion settlement that included compensation funds for automakers and victims of its faulty air bag inflators in connection with the largest automotive recall in history. The companys air bag inflators can inflate with too much force and spray metal fragments. Three former senior Takata executives were charged in January 2017 with falsifying test results but none have appeared in a U.S. court. The company agreed in the settlement to not represent that its airbags are safe unless supported by competent and reliable scientific or engineering evidence and not falsify or manipulate testing data, or provide any testing data that the companies know is inaccurate. On Friday, a lawyer for TK Holdings said the company is on the verge of receiving court approval for its reorganization and $1.6 billion sale of its non-air bag businesses. At the start of a hearing in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Wilmington, Delaware, lawyer Marcia Goldstein told the court that Takatas U.S. unit had resolved nearly all objections to the reorganization. The judge will hear from some objectors before reaching any decision. Takata and TK Holdings Inc filed for bankruptcy last year in the wake of the recall. The company has said it has recalled, or plans to recall, about 125 million inflators worldwide by 2019, including more than 60 million in the United States. As part of the companys bankruptcy plan, automakers are contributing between $80 million and $130 million to help compensate those injured. That agreement removed a major obstacle to the plan of reorganization by Takatas U.S. unit and helps ensure the sale of Takatas non-air bag inflator businesses to Key Safety Systems, a unit of Chinas Ningo Joyson Electric Corp. (Reporting by David Shepardson; Editing by David Gregorio) Topics USA By Damali Mukhaye. Science teachers have cited fake and expired chemicals used in conducting practical subjects as one of the many reasons for the high failure rates in science subjects across the country. This is after the government blamed teachers for the poor science grades in the 2017 Uganda Advanced Certificate of Education examinations whose results were released on Wednesday. The teachers are blamed for employing poor teaching methods. However, according to James Bato the Dean Upper School also a biology and chemistry teacher at Kitante Hill School, students cannot get the expected results when conducting practical exams using expired or counterfeit chemicals that have flooded the market. Bato adds that the limited number of science teachers in rural schools coupled with poor remuneration has affected the teaching of science subjects, calling for government intervention to make the field more attractive. The Travelers Companies, Inc. has released an enhanced homeowners insurance product with tailored pricing and flexible coverage options called Quantum Home 2.0 (QH2.0). The new product includes simpler policy documents designed to help customers better understand their insurance. The new QH2.0 products is available through an updated platform that allows agents to quote and bind coverage. Michael Klein, executive vice president and president, Personal Insurance, and Head of Enterprise Business Intelligence & Analytics at Travelers, said the carrier partnered with its agents to develop QH2.0. He added the new product is a completely redesigned and provides for agents greater customization, fewer steps to complete a quote and simplified customer communications. Travelers new home insurance product includes features such as: Decreasing Deductible and loss forgiveness options. New discounts for customers who pay on time and for those with smart-home protective technology, including fire, burglar and water alarms. An enhanced water package that can cover sewer backups and hidden water damage. Equipment breakdown coverage for appliances and water heaters, etc. QH2.0 is available in Colorado, Oregon and Wisconsin, with additional states rolling out the product in mid-2018. The Travelers Companies, Inc. is a provider of property casualty insurance for auto, home and business. Topics Homeowners The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers predicted ahead of Hurricane Harveys arrival that reservoirs in Houston would fill to record levels, flooding adjacent neighborhoods, but never shared the concern with the public, government records reveal. A Corps forecast on Aug. 25, the same day Harvey made landfall, determined Barker and Addicks reservoirs would spill beyond their banks, engulfing homes and businesses. It wasnt until the next day that officials in Fort Bend County issued the first flood advisory for areas adjacent to Barker. Authorities in Harris County, home to Houston, didnt issue similar warnings until Aug. 27. But by then neighborhoods upstream of Barker and Addicks were already inundated, and many residents had to be rescued by boats or military vehicles. Corps forecasts have emerged months later through discovery in a lawsuit in which thousands of homeowners are seeking compensation from the Corps, which operates the reservoirs. The Houston Chronicle obtained copies of the documents. Houston-area officials were criticized in the days after Harveys arrival for not acting quickly enough to alert people of flooding dangers and urge evacuations. More than 9,000 homes and businesses were flooded by the reservoirs at least 4,000 upstream of Barker and 5,000 to 6,000 upstream of Addicks, according to a Chronicle analysis. Officials in Fort Bend and Harris counties said they were not informed of an initial Corps flooding forecast on Aug. 24. Fort Bend County Judge Robert Hebert said the county received the next days forecast, but he said the Corps characterized it as internal and preliminary. County officials say the Corps forecast issued Aug. 26 was so alarming that they decided to issue an advisory the same day. Hebert said the county did so despite objections from Corps officials, who wanted the forecast kept confidential. The Corps did not respond to the Chronicles request for comment. Harris County Judge Ed Emmett declined to comment. The flooding forecasts were generated by the Corps Water Management System, which analyzes information about rainfall, weather forecasts, river conditions and other data to guide the management of Corps dams and reservoirs. Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Topics Trends Flood National wholesale insurance brokerage and managing general agent Worldwide Facilities has added George Vogle to its Atlanta office as a senior vice president specializing in professional liability. Vogle began his career in 1977 with General Reinsurance in Chicago as a casualty facultative reinsurance underwriter. He moved to Atlanta in 1981 to join Bowring North America, a division of Marsh McLennan, as a casualty surplus lines broker. In 1998, Vogle joined Swett and Crawford as a professional liability broker, where his team focused on various lines of professional liability including healthcare, cyber liability and insurance agency E&O. Worldwide Facilities is a national wholesale insurance broker and managing general agent that has been in business since 1970. Its brokers and underwriters work in a range of specialty lines. Topics Agencies Professional Liability Investigators ruled arson was to blame for a fire that started in a Georgia home and rapidly spread throughout a subdivision, destroying five houses and damaging at least 14 others before firefighters could extinguish all the flames. Police arrived quickly and helped all residents of the Greystone subdivision evacuate safely on Sunday, said Paulding County fire Lt. Steve Mapes. He said one homeowner injured an ankle while escaping, but no other injuries were reported. But the damage was extensive. The fire started after 3 a.m. Sunday inside the kitchen and dining room area of a home on Rosemont Court in Hiram, about 35 miles (56 kilometers) northwest of Atlanta. Flames jumped to neighboring houses spaced about 10 feet (3 meters) apart, all of them covered with vinyl siding that allowed the fire to spread quickly, Mapes said. With the houses being so close together, it makes it difficult for us to conduct firefight operations, especially when we arrive on the scene and find very intense fire conditions, Mapes told WSB-TV. Investigators determined the fire was intentionally set and had a person of interest in custody, said Glenn Allen, a spokesman for Georgia Insurance and Fire Safety Commissioner Ralph Hudgens. The persons name was not being released because charges were still pending, Allen said. It breaks your heart to think somebodys actions could impact so many other people, said Nick Bennett, whose home was among those damaged by the flames and heat. The local Red said about 20 people had been displaced by the subdivision fire. Hiram police were taking donated clothing and other items to give to the families. Officials said it took 25 Paulding County firefighters equipped with five engines and two ladder trucks to extinguish the fire. Weve had multiple houses that have been on fire in the past, but really nothing like this in the last 20 years that Ive worked for the department, Mapes told WXIA-TV. Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Topics Georgia Homeowners Arson The parents of a Florida State University fraternity pledge who died of alcohol poisoning after a party have filed a civil suit against those who have a connection in their sons death. Thomas and Sandra Coffey are suing Pi Kappa Phis national chapter and several others, including the nine fraternity members who were charged with criminal hazing after Andrew Coffeys death Nov. 3. The suit was filed in Leon Countys circuit court, which is where Florida State University is located. Miami lawyer David Bianchi, who is representing the family, said the suit does not specify an amount that they are seeking in damages. He also said that the university is not among the parties being sued even though the chapter adviser is employed by Florida State and is included. The university did not do anything wrong. They are just as upset as everyone else, Bianchi said. We sued those who had a role in Andrews death. The state medical examiner said Coffey had a blood alcohol level of .447 at the time of the autopsy. The 20-year old junior drank a lethal amount of bourbon and malt liquor at the fraternitys Big Brother Night party, which was held at an off-campus home. The lawsuit does include the two people who rented the home to the fraternity. It also includes the nine fraternity members who are facing felony hazing charges Luke E. Kluttz and Clayton M. Muehlstein, both 22; Brett A. Birmingham and Anthony Petagine, both 20; and Conner R. Ravelo, Christopher M. Hamlin, Anthony Oppenheimer, John B. Jack Ray and Kyle J. Bauer, all 21. Ravelo was Coffeys big brother in the fraternity. The other eight are members of the fraternitys executive council, which organized the party. All nine have entered not guilty pleas and are awaiting trial. FSU President John Thrasher suspended fraternities and sororities three days after Coffeys death. He partially lifted the suspension on Jan. 29, allowing Greek organizations to hold philanthropic events and recruit members. The ban on alcohol and social functions remains in place indefinitely. Pi Kappa Phis national office closed the Florida State chapter following Coffeys death. National spokesman Todd Shelton said via text message that his office had no comment on the pending litigation. Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Topics Lawsuits Florida Education Universities The former foster son of ex-Seattle Mayor Ed Murray has filed a claim for damages against the city, saying that last year it negligently failed to investigate his and other mens allegations that Murray sexually abused them decades ago. The Seattle Times reports Jeff Simpsons claim notice says he intends to eventually sue both the city and Murray to let a jury decide the amount Simpson should be compensated for damages and legal costs, noting that figure could exceed $1 million. Neither the Seattle City Attorneys Office nor Murrays private lawyer immediately responded to requests for comment. Murray, who resigned in September after a fifth man, his cousin, publicly accused him of sexual abuse decades ago, has persistently denied all of his accusers allegations. Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Topics Washington Cannabis businesses, beware: The Hershey Co. is on the warpath. Perhaps the most famous confectionery peddler in the world has a well-documented history of actively protecting its trademarks, and the marijuana industry is no exception. Although Hersheys has been relatively quiet in the marijuana sector since it sued two cannabis businesses in 2014, the company seemingly ramped up its oversight of possible trademark infringements in 2017. Hersheys a Fortune 500 company with annual revenue of more than $7 billion sent cease-and-desist letters last year to at least two California marijuana companies: Harborside, a well-established dispensary in Oakland. Good Girl Cannabis Co., an edibles maker in rural northeast California. Those cases emphasize that the still-maturing cannabis industry still must face such legal issues as complicated trademark laws that can force small companies to change course. While Good Girl Cannabis owner Kimberly Scott said her situation was resolved quickly and amicably, Harborside wound up fighting back after months of legal threats from one of Hersheys law firms. Harborside filed suit against Hersheys in December after receiving multiple demands from an Indianapolis law firm representing the confectioner. The lawyers wanted Harborside to pay $20,000 for liquidated damages and sign a settlement agreement with a confidentiality clause. Harborside refused confidentiality, and I told Hersheys that we were prepared to proceed with the litigation, said Henry Wykowski, Harborsides longtime attorney. And guess what happened? They caved the next day. The case was voluntarily dismissed Jan. 31, 2018, according to court records within weeks of Harborsides initial filing. Wykowski said the sides reached a settlement agreement that outlined zero legal liability for Harborside with respect to Hersheys trademark-infringement allegations. Harborsides executive director, Steve DeAngelo, characterized Hersheys attorneys as bullies. We stood up to the federal Department of Justice when they tried to close us down (in 2012), DeAngelo said in a statement. We are certainly not going to be intimidated by a candy company. Hersheys did not respond to requests from Marijuana Business Daily for comment, nor did the law firm that represented the chocolatier against Harborside. In mid-2014, Hersheys filed suit against a Colorado edibles maker, Tincturebelle, and a Seattle dispensary, Conscious Care Cooperative, regarding edibles that were obvious parodies of classic Hersheys candies. Hersheys won easily in both instances, with the Colorado and Washington state companies settling instead of going to trial. Its unclear from court records if Tincturebelle paid Hersheys any money. But Conscious Care Cooperative did not. At the end of it, we walked away not owing them anything, Conscious Care co-founder Trek Hollnagel told MJBizDaily. Hollnagel, also a co-founder of Dope Magazine, said Conscious Cares attorney convinced Hersheys lawyers that the dispensary wasnt the guilty party since it was an edibles reseller and not the manufacturer that created the product name and logo. Conscious Care was dissolved in 2016. Tincturebelle also reached a settlement and remains in business. California attorney Amanda Conley, who has seven years-plus of experience in intellectual property disputes, said one of her marijuana business clients also received a cease-and-desist letter from Hersheys around 2014. Her client reached a quick settlement, she said, and no money changed hands. We backed down pretty quickly, but so did Hersheys, Conley recalled. She said the Harborside case seems to be a ramping up, just based on our limited experience with this company. Wykowski, Harborsides attorney, believes Hersheys took its trademark concerns a step further with his client. The confectioner sent Harborside a cease-and-desist letter in April 2017 demanding that the dispensary stop selling Jolly Meds cannabis infused products. In an attempt to stave off a potentially expensive legal fight, the dispensary immediately began working to comply with Hersheys request. Its situation was similar to Conscious Cares in that Harborside was a middle man reseller, not the creator of the product line Hersheys took issue with. That meant asking the manufacturer, San Francisco-based Jolly Meds, to redo its name and packaging. (Jolly Meds officially changed its name and product line to J:Meds in 2017 and has a trademark pending with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.) Harborside spent months responding to Hersheys requests and acquiescing to demands regarding the products in question, Wykowski said. Hersheys came on strong, Wykowski said. We thought this was an appropriate time to take a stand, not only on behalf of ourselves but on behalf of other people who are similarly situated. Harborside then filed suit based on the repeated demands from Hersheys attorneys. Hersheys wanted a $20,000 payout from Harborside and an agreement that would have forbidden the dispensary from disclosing the existence of a settlement, including the payment. The case had another twist: Hersheys told Harborside that Jolly Meds was violating the confectioners trademark for Jolly Ranchers, yet didnt send any correspondence at all to the infused products manufacturer. They did not come after us directly, J:Meds owner Jeffrey Kolsky said. They came after us through (Harborside), basically. The only practical impact on Kolsky was that he rebranded his products quicker than he had planned. Really, nothing has come of it, he said, except that we pivoted to become J:Meds instead of Jolly Meds as soon as it happened. We basically said, This is a fight not worth having. The takeaway for Wykowski is that Harborsides fight will serve as an alert that at least some of Hersheys attorneys are trying to extract payments from companies by threatening expensive lawsuits and then demanding confidential settlements. We have already been contacted by other attorneys that are faced with a similar situation on this issue, he added, because now its a matter of public record. Kolsky said he was delighted to see Harborsides stand against Hersheys, which he accused of predatory practices. It was very apparent that this was a game they were playing, that they were trying to get money where they could, Kolsky said. I think what it took was somebody standing up to Hersheys with money and saying, `Were calling you out on this. This is wrong. Despite Harborsides victory, Conley said most companies involved in trademark disputes will have to evaluate their situations on a case-by-case basis, in large part because settlements typically are cheaper than a court battle. Such fights can easily cost a company hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees, according to Conley. You dont want to be in this fight. You have so much money to spend right now on compliance and other issues, the last thing you need to be doing is having a fight with Hersheys. Both Conley and Wykowski agreed: There will only be more cannabis-related trademark and IP legal disputes as the industry continues to develop. Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Topics California Cannabis A private school system in Honolulu, Hawaii has agreed to pay $80 million to the victims of a doctor accused of sexually abusing students and other patients for decades. Kamehameha Schools has also agreed to create new safeguards and methods to report abuse in the tentative settlement agreement reached with 32 plaintiffs. Dozens of victims of Robert Browne filed lawsuits against the school, St. Francis Medical Center and Brownes estate, claiming negligence and other charges for not protecting them from abuse. Browne, who was the chief of Psychiatry at St. Francis Hospital, worked as a consultant for the school and treated hundreds of Kamehameha students from the late 1950s into the early 1980s. He died in 1991. The victims later reported being subjected to weekly sexual abuse, sometimes lasting for years, and had criticized the schools handling of it. School CEO Jack Wong issued an apology to the victims in December, saying not enough was done after the abuse was reported. While the settlement amount is impressive, the money wont erase the damages to the victims, attorney Michael Green told Hawaii News Now. Green represented a number of the victims. Micah Kane, chairman of the schools board, said the settlement provided the opportunity to reconcile. It was an emotional journey for everyone involved on both sides of the table, Kane said. While we brought closure, its something were going to carry for a long period of time. Were not going to forget this time and what the trust experienced. Kamehameha Schools has agreed to set up an independent hotline for people to anonymously report wrongdoing at the school. It has also agreed to create a recovery fund to cover medical expenses for students who experience sexual assault. The agreement still requires court approval. Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Topics Education What Is the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA)? The Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) of 1974 protects the retirement assets of workers in the U.S. by implementing rules that qualified plans must follow to ensure that plan fiduciaries do not misuse plan assets. ERISA also covers some non-retirement accounts, such as employee health plans. Under ERISA, plans must provide participants with information about plan features and funding, regularly and free of charge. The Employee Benefits Security Administration (EBSA), a unit of the Department of Labor (DOL), oversees and enforces ERISA provisions. Key Takeaways The Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) implements rules and regulations preventing retirement plan fiduciaries from misusing plan assets. ERISA also sets minimum standards for participation, vesting, benefit accrual, and funding of retirement plans. ERISA grants retirement plan participants the right to sue for benefits and breaches of fiduciary duty. Understanding the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) Most employer-sponsored retirement plans, both defined-benefit and defined-contribution, are covered by ERISA. Common examples include 401(k) plans, pensions, deferred-compensation plans, and profit-sharing plans. Examples of non-retirement employer plans that fall under ERISA include health maintenance organization (HMO) plans, flexible spending accounts (FSAs), disability insurance, and life insurance. ERISA requires accountability of plan fiduciaries. It generally defines a fiduciary as anyone who exercises discretionary authority or control over a plans management or assets, including anyone who provides investment advice to the plan. Fiduciaries who do not follow the principles of conduct may be held responsible for restoring losses to the plan. In addition, ERISA addresses fiduciary provisions and bans the misuse of assets through these provisions. ERISA also sets minimum standards for participation, vesting, benefit accrual, and funding. The law defines how long a person may be required to work before becoming eligible to participate in a plan, accumulate benefits, and have a non-forfeitable right to those benefits. It also establishes detailed funding rules that require retirement plan sponsors to provide adequate funding for the plan. In addition to keeping participants informed of their rights, ERISA also grants participants the right to sue for benefits and breaches of fiduciary duty. To ensure that participants do not lose their retirement contributions if a defined-benefit pension plan is terminated, ERISA guarantees payment of certain benefits through a federally chartered corporation known as the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC). Not every retirement plan is subject to the terms of ERISA. ERISA does not cover IRAs or plans set up and maintained by government entities and churches. Similarly, if a company sets up a plan outside of the U.S. for its nonresident alien employees, ERISA does not govern that plan. History of ERISA ERISA was enacted to address irregularities in the administration of certain large pension plans. These issues highlighted a lack of protections for workers. When Studebaker-Packard closed its Indiana factory in 1963, for example, more than 4,000 workers lost some or all of their pension plan benefits because the plan was underfunded. In another high profile incident that took place in the 1960s, the Teamsters' Central States Pension Fund, which had a rather colorful history involving questionable loans to Las Vegas casinos, brought the issue of fiduciary malfeasance related to retirement accounts into the public eye. In general, retirement accounts that qualify under ERISA are protected from creditors, bankruptcy proceedings, and civil lawsuits. If your employer declares bankruptcy, your retirement savings are not at risk. Also, creditors to whom you owe money cannot make a claim against funds held in your retirement account. Special Considerations The complicated rules of ERISA deter some small-business owners from setting up retirement accounts for their employees. To allow these companies to sidestep some of the confusing regulations, there are alternatives. A SIMPLE IRA, for example, is a retirement savings plan that most small businesses with 100 or fewer employees can use. SIMPLE stands for "Savings Incentive Match Plans for Employees." While SIMPLE IRAs are covered by ERISA, they don't have the reporting and administrative burden that qualified retirement plans such as 401(k)s do, and they are easier to set up. With a SIMPLE IRA, the employer chooses and files the plan using IRS forms 5304-SIMPLE or 5305-SIMPLE. Employers must follow ERISA rules that dictate which employees are eligible and how a company handles employee contributions, and they are required to clearly spell out details of the plan's features within a summary plan description. If you're retired, your new job is to manage your money. One way to do your job well is to make sure you're getting the best bang for your buck. Mutual funds are a popular investment choice. But like many choices, behind them lie yet even more options: the different types of share classes, which essentially reflect fee structures associated with the funds. These fee structures are usually pretty straightforward, although it can be difficult knowing which share class is right for your situation. For the most part, when you're working with a commission-compensated advisor, like a financial planner or a stockbroker, you're going to buy one of two share classes: A or C. There are others, but for the sake of this article, we're going to focus on these most popular share classes. Key Takeaways An investor will often get discounts if all of their money is with one mutual fund company. A or C mutual fund share classes are the two most popular among investors. A class shares are better for retirees who do not need immediate access to their money upon retirement. Class A Shares The class A share includes an up-front commission, otherwise known as a front-end load. Typically, if you're a retiree who needs income immediately, this isn't the best share class to buy. Class A shares have a high initial investment that's required (as fees), so a large portion of the principal you invest will take a hit when you purchase the shares. However, if you have alternative income sources other than your retirement accounts, class A shares might be a wise choice. Class A shares are best for those who can buy and hold the funds over a long period of time. Class C Shares The class C share is, in many ways, the opposite of the class A share. The class C share typically lacks an up-front commission, but you have to hold it for at least one year. Otherwise, you're going to have to pay a 1% surrender charge. Typically, as a retiree, this is the most attractive way to go so that you're not locked into the investment for an extended period. Additionally, you can also move to a different mutual fund company after that one year's time has expired. There is a downside to class C shares, though. While you won't have the up-front commission, you will pay much higher internal fees, known as the expense ratio. This expense is typically at least 1% higher than you would pay with class A shares. Which Share Class Is Right for You? While there are many factors to consider when choosing a mutual fund share class, how long you can keep your money in investments will probably be the primary determining factor. If you can buy and hold your mutual funds for long periods, consider class A shares. If you can't, consider class C shares. Alternatively, you may want to find an excellent fee-based money manager who can help you buy institutional share classes. Institutional share classes will have much lower expenses than both the class A or C shares. But remember that you're also then going to have to pay the advisor their management fee, which could be around 1% of your assets under management per year. The Bottom Line Take a few moments to consider the differences between the most popular A and C share classes and then decide which one is right for you. Choose wisely, and you're likely to save and make more money. Detectives investigating the murder of a man in front of his partner and an 11-year-old child have made an arrest under the Terrorism Act. Raymond Johnston, 28, was shot dead with a shotgun in Poleglass in West Belfast at around 8pm on Tuesday February 13 at a house in Glenbawn Avenue. A 57-year-old man has been arrested under the Terrorism Act and is currently being questioned at Musgrave Serious Crime Suite, the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) said. Police said a 34-year-old man arrested in the Poleglass area yesterday has been released unconditionally. The officer leading the investigation, Detective Chief Inspector Geoff Boyce, said on Wednesday: "It is just over one week since the brutal murder of Raymond Johnston. "The manner in which Raymond's murder was carried out was particularly savage. "The gunmen were in the house for a very short period of time and he was murdered in front of an 11-year-old girl and his partner. "We are determined to catch those responsible and give justice to the Johnston family and while we have made progress in the investigation, we still need help from the community. "Did you see Raymond the day he was murdered? Can you remember where and when you saw him, and who was he with? "I am appealing to any members of the public that had contact with Raymond, or anyone who was in the area at any time on Tuesday, February 13 and had a dash cam fitted in their vehicles to contact us." Witnesses, or anyone with information that could assist the investigation, are asked to contact detectives on the non-emergency number 101, quoting reference 1192 of 13/02/18. Information can also be provided to Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111. PA By Sarah-Jane Murphy Update 6.45pm: Former Anglo Irish Bank CEO David Drumm said the bank was still f***ed despite Mr F***ing Denis of Irish Life and Permanent telling him Anglo would be looked after, his trial has heard. He made the remark during a recorded phone call with John Bowe, former Director of Treasury at the bank, on September 22 2008. Denis Casey was the chief executive of Irish Life and Permanent at the time at which the phonecall took place. Today Dublin Circuit Criminal Court heard recordings of eight phone calls between employees of Anglo, the Central Bank and McCann Fitzgerald Solicitors, all of which took place on dates in late September 2008. Six of the eight calls, played for the jury by Detective Sergeant Michael McKenna of the Garda National Economic Crime Unit, were conversations between Mr Drumm (51) and John Bowe. Paul O'Higgins SC, prosecuting, said the calls were deliberately recorded by the bank for business purposes, to preserve the details of transactions and deals. They were recovered during the Garda investigation at the bank. In a phone call on September 22 Mr Drumm and Mr Bowe discussed the fact that 500m went out the doors today. Mr Drumm suggested Mr Bowe do a Ladybird type thing when he made a presentation at an upcoming meeting and said a simplified version of Anglo's cash flow would be needed. Mr Drumm said Mr f***ing Dennis had confirmed that morning that Anglo will be well looked after. Mr Bowe commented that Anglo was still in a hole, to which Mr Drumm responded that they were f***ed, needed to fix the balance sheet by year end and said their liquidity had depleted by 14bn. And who was in charge when that was going on, Mr Drumm asked, to the sound of laughter from the two men. Mr Drumm asked Mr Bowe if they could bloat the balance sheet, and remarked that the family photo - Anglo's end of year financial snapshot - should it be published on f***ing Bebo was not going to look good. The two bankers then discussed the September transactions with ILP, which Mr Bowe said were booked as a repo and had a small amount of haircut. We're going to have to tell board members that we have lit a fuse here that's not going to go away, we'll have a difficult story to tell on December 3, Mr Drumm said. The jury then listened to three phone calls that took place on September 29 2008 between Mr Drumm, Mr Bowe and other Anglo executives. Mr Bowe explained the transactions with ILP to Mr Drumm: What happens is the money goes around in a circle. The dance here is that we actually get it back in time. It has to go through a lot of different hands. Mr Bowe told Mr Drumm that Permo wanted collateral for future deals and said that recovering the money lent to ILP within time limits was becoming very very tough. Mr Drumm said a f***ing journal entry would do it an awful lot quicker. Laughter is heard when Mr Drumm said Anglo Finance director Willie McAteer might be auditing the books. Debit the giver, credit the receiver, he joked. In another recorded conversation he referred to the financial regulator as Freddie f***ing Fly and said he intended to go to that f***ing shower of clowns down in Dame Street, to look for emergency funding for the bank. Mr Drumm, with an address in Skerries, Co Dublin, has pleaded not (NOT) guilty to conspiring with former bank officials Denis Casey, William McAteer, John Bowe and others to defraud depositors and investors at Anglo by dishonestly creating the impression that deposits in 2008 were 7.2 billion larger than they were. He has also pleaded not guilty to false accounting on December 3, 2008, by furnishing information to the market that Anglo's 2008 deposits were 7.2 billion larger than they were. The jury has been told that Mr Drumm accepts the facts of the 2008 transactions between Anglo and ILP but he disputes they were fraudulent or dishonest. The trial, now in its fourth week, continues before Judge Karen O'Connor and a jury of 10 men and four women after losing a juror on day 26. Earlier: Drumm referred to financial regulator as 'Freddie f***ing Fly', trial hears Former Anglo Irish Bank CEO David Drumm referred to the financial regulator as Freddie fucking Fly and said he intended to go to that fucking shower of clowns down in Dame Street, to look for emergency funding for the bank, his trial has heard. On day 30 of Mr Drumm's trial at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court the jury listened to recordings of phone calls between employees of Anglo, the Central Bank and McCann Fitzgerald Solicitors, all of which took place on dates in late September 2008. Six of the eight call played were conversations between Mr Drumm and former Director of Treasury at Anglo, John Bowe. Prosecution barrister, Paul O'Higgins SC, told the jury that the calls were deliberately recorded by the bank for business purposes, to preserve the details of transactions and deals. The recordings were recovered during the Garda investigation at the bank. Two phone calls between Mr Drumm and Mr Bowe from September 18, 2008 were played. In one call Mr Drumm told Mr Bowe what he planned to do when he met those fucking clowns down on Dame Street the following day when asking for emergency funding for Anglo. He told Mr Bowe I'm going to keep asking thick questions. When is the cheque coming? and said they needed to get into the fucking simple speak. Mr Drumm is heard saying that if the Anglo bankers showed up with horrible numbers at least they looked like they had put up a fight. We were badly fucking damaged like everyone else but we have rebuilt and here's a fucking balance sheet, he tells to Mr Bowe he plans to say to the Financial Regulator. He referred to other fucking non-normal things such as the collapse of Lehmans Bank in recent times. Mr Drumm said that he planned to ask the Financial Regulator: "How are you getting on with that loan, lads?" In the second call on September 18, Mr Drumm asked Mr Bowe what would happen should the bank receive a ratings downgrade. Mr Bowe replied that Anglo's entire book would be affected by such an event. We're not a morsel, we're half an element in their terms, Mr Drumm said. Mr Bowe then read a draft letter from Anglo to the Central Bank, regarding the Anglo's liquidity ratio, and told Mr Drumm that there was no point whinging about it as we're effectively beholden to them. He said to Mr Bowe that if the Central Bank didn't give funding in the coming days they would cause a bank collapse. The phone call ends with the men agreeing to meet for a coffee and a pep talk the following morning in advance of their meeting with the Financial Regulator. Mr Bowe signed off by telling Mr Drumm You the man. Mr Drumm (51), with an address in Skerries, Co Dublin, has pleaded not (NOT) guilty to conspiring with former bank officials Denis Casey, William McAteer, John Bowe and others to defraud depositors and investors at Anglo by dishonestly creating the impression that deposits in 2008 were 7.2 billion larger than they were. He has also pleaded not (NOT) guilty to false accounting on December 3, 2008, by furnishing information to the market that Anglo's 2008 deposits were 7.2bn larger than they were. The jury has been told that Mr Drumm accepts the facts of the 2008 transactions between Anglo and ILP but he disputes they were fraudulent or dishonest. The trial, now in its fourth week, continues before Judge Karen O'Connor and a jury of ten men and four women after losing a juror on day 26. Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has not ruled out Fine Gael running a candidate in a potential presidential election this autumn after current incumbent Michael D Higgins strongly hinted he intends to seek re-election to the coveted role, writes Fiachra O Cionnaith. Mr Varadkar neither confirmed nor denied his party is intending to contest the now likely election at a media briefing yesterday, only saying Fine Gael will "make a decision" once the President officially reveals his own plans. Speaking to reporters at the European Council in Brussels, Belgium, the Taoiseach praised the President for his time in office, saying he "has been excellent" for the country and its reputation both at home and abroad. However, while not specifically saying Fine Gael will seek to contest the election should the President now as expected seek re-election later this year, Mr Varadkar left the door open for such a future move. "Well, I want to say that President Higgins has been an excellent president for Ireland," he said. "He has just come back from a successful trip to Greece and he now plans for a trip to the Balkan states which I think is going to be very welcome, and very much part of our efforts to build alliances with them and other countries post-Brexit. "So, I think he's done a really excellent job. Fine Gael will make a decision after we know his intentions, for sure." Mr Varadkar's comments came after the President strongly suggested to reporters during an official visit to Greece on Wednesday that he intends to seek re-election later this year, despite saying during the 2011 presidential campaign he would only serve one term. Asked about the issue in Athens amid reports he will confirm his re-election bid in July, the President said on Wednesday: "I did say at one stage that getting through the term was, in fact, the length of my aspirations. I have changed my mind on that because I do think that very solid foundations have been laid there and this leaves choices open as to what I may do. "I think I will decide that appropriately and I will do so in plenty of time so that there will be opportunities to, if I did decide, that there will be opportunities to do that in an appropriate way. "It is a decision that I have to come to and my decision is not standing in the way of anyone else's decision. If I did decide to stand, it would be invoking an article in the constitution which would mean that I would stand as an Independent." Fine Gael MEPs Mairead McGuinness and Sean Kelly have recently said they would like to be considered if Fine Gael runs a candidate. Similarly, Fianna Fail leader Micheal Martin has previously hinted his party may run a candidate if there is a contest, with senator Mark Daly publicly putting his name forward and candidates such as presenter Miriam O Callaghan and controversial former taoiseach Bertie Ahern suggested by some members. Independent senator Ger Croughwell has publicly said he intends to run and is confident of receiving enough Oireachtas support to do so, while new Sinn Fein leader Mary Lou McDonald has said she is in favour of a contest. - Irish Examiner By Tom Tuite A Dublin youth, who stole a minivan in Co. Roscommon and drove on the wrong side of a road during his attempted getaway drive across the Midlands, has been told he is facing an 18-month sentence. Judge John OConnor accepted the 17-year-old boy had significant issues and adjourned sentencing until a date in March to see if the youth takes up a training course placement recently found for him. He pleaded guilty at the Dublin Childrens Court to theft of a Renault Traffic Van from a house in Boyle, Co. Roscommon, on March 14, 2017. Another youth who stole the Audi house during the burglary in Boyle is currently serving a sentence. Judge John OConnor heard that Gardai gave pursuit and the two vehicles were seen driving in convoy near Mullingar in Co. Westmeath. A stinger device was deployed to stop them but it was avoided and the 16-year-old drove the van across a fly-over and headed back westbound on the wrong side of the N4. Gardai spotted him abandoning the van and running behind a house. He was arrested and taken to Mullingar Garda station. The 16-year-old, who cannot be named because he is a minor, also pleaded guilty to taking part in a burglary at a service station at 4am in Ballybrittas in Co. Laois on Feb. 8, 2017. Judge OConnor heard that the shutters were prised open and 1,000 worth of cigarettes were taken as well as several Cadbury cream eggs. The youth and three others took part in the burglary and the car they used was spotted in Clondalkin in Dublin just over an hour later. All the stolen property was recovered. Last month he spent a stint in custody after Judge OConnor noted he had repeatedly broken bail terms which included a curfew. The judge has said the teenager has been lucky to be included in a bail support scheme unlike most defendants and yet there had been blatant breaches of his bail terms. The teenager was later released and was accompanied to court by his grandmother, his social worker and a bail support youth worker when his case resumed following a four-week adjournment. His barrister had also told the court that the boy had been recently beaten up in his area but was adamant he wanted to take help offered to him. At the resumed hearing, counsel said that risk factors identified by the Probation Service the teen's peer group and lack of an educational placement may be addressed through a training course placement recently found for him The court heard that he had been diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder when he was aged eight and he had attended a special centre for extensive supports. The teen also faced a fresh charge relating to a motor theft after the front door to a house in Dublin was broken down and car keys were taken. He has not yet indicated how he will plead to that allegation. Judge OConnor warned him he was facing a possible sentence of 18 months and possibly up to two years if convicted on the new charge. You do not seem to get it, he told the teen. He also said he had to deal with the victims of his behaviour and adjourned the case to see how the teenager got on in his new course. "I'm trying my best," the boy said. Police in the US investigating the killing of Garda Adrian Donohoe are closing in on a suspect, it has been reported. Garda Donohoe was shot dead by a gang of five while on a cash escort from the Lordship Credit Union in Co Louth in January 2013. Natural Cycles is the first app certified as a form of birth control. Is it effective, asks Sharon Ni Chonchuir WE live in a smartphone era, so its little surprise that women have started to use fertility apps to help them conceive. Now one of those apps claims to do the opposite by offering an effective form of contraception. In February 2017, the EU certified the Natural Cycles app as a form of birth control, making it the first app ever to be ranked alongside the pill, condoms, and IUDs. Our aim is to provide an alternative, says Dr Elina Berglund, the 33-year-old Swedish particle physicist -- who was one of the researchers that led Cern to discover the Higgs boson. She designed the app with her husband and fellow physicist Dr Raoul Scherwitzl. It was created as a result of my own need to find a natural alternative to prevent pregnancies and give my body a rest from hormones. Natural Cycles claims it can pinpoint when you can and cant get pregnant with 99.5% accuracy under perfect use. But can it really live up to its claims of being comparable to better known methods of contraception? Like all fertility apps, Natural Cycles is based on fertility awareness. This is a scientific method that involves a woman paying close attention to her body in order to understand her monthly cycle. Every morning, she takes her basal body temperature (BBT). This is the bodys temperature at rest and its best to take it before getting out of bed or moving too much. Because BBT rises when a woman is ovulating, its an indicator of fertility. A womans cervical mucus changes around ovulation too. Taken together with other signals, all of these are monitored to give an overall picture of the womans fertility cycle. Women can only become pregnant during the 24 to 48 hours of ovulation and sperm survive in the body for up to five days. This means there are only six days a month where sex can lead to pregnancy. If a woman can identify those six days, she can time intercourse so as to increase or decrease her chances of getting pregnant. Theres nothing new in this. Austrian gynaecologist Hermann Knaus and Japanese gynaecologist Kyusaku Ogino carried out groundbreaking studies that divided womens cycles into fertile and infertile days in the 1920s. Practising Catholics will certainly be familiar with the concept. The rhythm method, still the method of contraception recommended by the Catholic Church, is based on this same fertility theory. However, these same Catholics will also know the rhythm method isnt always reliable. Does this mean these apps arent reliable either? No, says Berglund. We have a dedicated team of scientists who have developed an algorithm that women can trust and they are constantly working to make it even better. Natural Cycles Using a womans personal data, Natural Cycles tells her where she is in her cycles. It does so by designating days red or green. Red days mean sex could result in pregnancy. Green days mean no such worry. Typically, it takes four to six weeks for Natural Cycles to get to know your body, says Berglund. The app is reliable from the beginning though as it gives you more red days until it gets to know your specific cycle. The more data is entered, the more days turn green as the apps algorithm becomes better able to accurately predict when you are fertile by taking a whole host of factors into account. Dr Berglund tested this algorithm herself with the help of a team that included a professor in obstetrics and gynaecology. They carried out several large-scale clinical studies, the most recent of which was the largest ever conducted into fertility awareness methods. Published in the Contraception journal, it examined data from 22,785 women, with an average age of 29, using the Natural Cycles app for contraception. The aim was to calculate the apps Pearl Index a rate that summarises how many women out of 100 may experience an unintended pregnancy within one year of using a contraceptive method. Natural Cycles was found to have a Pearl Index of 99.5% under perfect use and 93% under typical use. What this means is that as long as women act according to whether or not the day is red or green, intercourse is 93% likely not to result in pregnancy, says Berglund. This figure compares well with other forms of contraception, with the pill scoring a perfect use figure of 99.7% and a typical use figure of 91%. These results have led to huge interest in the app. Weve had an incredibly positive response from women looking for natural, non-hormonal, and non-invasive forms of contraception, says Berglund. More than 600,000 women globally including 6,000 in Ireland are currently using the app. Swedish scientists Dr Elina Berglund and Dr Raoul Schewitzl, the couple behind the app. Many are discussing it online. Some are talking about how grateful they are for an alternative to the pill, which in some women can cause symptoms that range from mood swings to weight gain. Dr Shirley McQuade is medical director of the Dublin Well Woman Centre, where she has seen a growing demand for non-hormonal birth control. The only proven effective form of non-hormonal birth control is a copper intrauterine device (IUD) and the number of devices fitted every year has been increasing, she says. Between 2005 and 2011, we averaged 65 a year but last year we fitted 292. More women are coming in and asking for it. This demand is highest in women in their 20s, according to Dr McQuade. The copper coil lasts for at least ten years so young women see it as a good choice because they dont intend to get pregnant until their late 20s or early 30s, she says. Its more reliable than the pill. They dont need a reminder to take something every day and nor do they have to visit the doctor regularly for prescriptions. Copper IUDs also allow women to stay in touch with their fertility cycle, unlike the pill, which creates an artificial cycle. There is a tendency for women in their late 20s who have been taking contraceptive pills for years to consider having an IUD fitted so they will know what their natural cycle is, says Dr McQuade. They are usually doing this with a view to a possible pregnancy in a few years time. The Well Woman Centre does not teach fertility awareness, so Dr McQuade does not know if more people are using it as a form of contraception. However, she would not recommend they do so. For committed couples where the woman has a regular cycle, natural fertility awareness claims to have a high level of accuracy but in real life, it has a high failure rate, she says. To prove her point, she cites a study published in Trussel et al Contraceptive Technology in 2011 which found that 24% of women had an unintended pregnancy within the first year of typical use of these methods compared with 9% of women taking the pill and 0.8% of those fitted with IUDs. Dr Bartlomiej Kuczera, a fertility consultant at Beacon Care Fertility in Dublin, believes there are significant limitations to natural birth-control methods. In theory, natural fertility compares well with the pill, IUDs, and condoms, he says. However one needs to have a clockwork cycle and lifestyle to have such good results. You have to be keen to make an effort in taking BBT, observing symptoms such as cervical mucus and obeying the rules of abstinence or using condoms on fertile days. Natural Cycles Fertility apps become problematic because not everyone fits this description. There are lots of reasons why they might not work, says Dr McQuade. Your cycles could be irregular or shorter than 23 days or longer than 33. You could be menopausal or breastfeeding. You might have polycystic ovarian syndrome. All of these can make identifying ovulation difficult and thats why I dont recommend natural fertility methods to anyone looking for effective contraception. Dr Kuczera points out that such methods require education and understanding and might not be suited to everyone. They also require self-discipline and sexually liberal individuals may be unhappy with the limitations, he says. Swedens Medical Products Agency recently carried out an investigation into Natural Cycles following a report by a Stockholm hospital that 37 women had asked for abortions after becoming pregnant while using the app. The investigation found it was to be expected a small fraction of users of any form of contraception would experience unplanned pregnancy. Berglund welcomed the investigations findings and stands by her apps effectiveness, stating that she never claimed it was for everyone. The average user is 30 plus and in a stable relationship, she says. The app tracks their fertility and they can use that information as they want, either to accurately prevent or plan a pregnancy. Berglunds aim is to provide women with a natural alternative when it comes to contraception and hopes her app offers another option for couples who have the desire and ability to abstain or use protection on certain days every month. She also rejects the criticism voiced by some that these apps place too much of the responsibility for contraception on women. The onus of responsibility is shared so the woman inputs her temperature every morning and on red days, when she is fertile, the couple abstain from having sex or use a barrier method like the male condom. For those who are looking for contraception by smartphone, there is now an approved app for that but it may not be for everyone. Theres more than one app for that Natural fertility awareness forms the basis of all of the fertility-tracking apps on the market. Of those, Natural Cycles is the only one that claims to be a reliable form of contraception. Heres a list of the most downloaded fertility trackers and what they have to offer: Kindara Fertility Tracker, free This app and its wireless basal body temperature thermometer make the process of measuring and tracking your BBT much easier in the mornings. Using this and other signals, it predicts fertile days, ovulation and menstruation. Fertility Friend FF App, free Using fertility signals such as BBT and cervical mucus, this app alerts you to ovulation dates and the best days to conceive. A bonus feature offers videos, tutorials, and quizzes which help you to get to know your body and its cycle better. Glow Ovulation and Period Tracker, free Thanks to its innovative data analysis, Glows predictions get better the longer you use the app. What sets it apart from competitor apps is the additional support it offers to those undergoing IVF and IUI treatments. My Cycles Period and Ovulation Tracker, free This app tracks ovulation symptoms from cervical mucus to headaches and allows you to make personalised notes, rather than simply inputting numbers. It also shows your menstruation and ovulation cycles in one display, so you have a full picture for the month ahead. Ovia Fertility, free This app asks you to log symptoms ranging from BBT and blood pressure to your mood in order to make a reliable calculation of your next fertile window. It also allows for syncing between your phone and your partners so that you are both on the same page. Natural Cycles, free for the first month, with a monthly fee of 8.99 or a yearly fee of 64.99 thereafter The only certified contraceptive app in Europe, this helps you to keep track of your ovulation, your period and the days when sex is likely to result in pregnancy. It claims to get more and more accurate the longer you use it. Sally and Donal Daly have been fostering for 30 years, they are there for children in a time of crisis, writes Catherine Shanahan. Sally Daly is just shy of 75, but despite being well beyond official retirement age, shows no sign of any desire to call a halt to the job she loves: fostering children, who, for all sorts of reasons, cannot stay with their birth parents. Shes the original Supermum, but instead of leaning-in to earn her stripes, she bent over backwards to offer sanctuary to more than 150 children at her Skibbereen home over the past 30 years. When I open the door and I see a little child on my doorstep, I just want to help them in their time of crisis. Id do it for nothing. I love being there in their hour of need, she says. Sallys fostering adventures began in her 40s, when she was asked to care for a little boy whose mother was ill and whose father was working and not in a position to look after him around-the-clock. It struck me at the time that there were other people in the community who had a similar need to this little boys family. To be honest, I dont think Id ever heard of fostering. But someone said to me I should think about it and so I contacted the health board and I never looked back. Sally had the support of her husband Donal, 70, from the get-go. She liked the experience of looking after that little boy and she was very, very keen to foster and I went along with it, he says. We are fairly laid back most of the time and we are very much OK about opening up our doors. Besides, one extra person in the house doesnt make that much of a difference. Mealtimes are the same, we have plenty of room, so its not huge extra work. Their relaxed attitude extended to their own four children. The two older children went on to college shortly after we started fostering, so it was mainly the younger two that were at home. But they never voiced any opposition to having additional kids around, says Sally. They just sort of took it for granted, it became part of their lives. And weve been very lucky with the children we took in. Weve had lovely children. The Dalys signed up for short-term foster care placements but Sally says it didnt always work out like that. One little girl was placed with them at four months and shes still with them, aged 23 they ended up adopting her just before her 18th birthday, at which point her foster care would have ended. Sally says theyve seen a big improvement over the years in aftercare for children who do turn 18, the point at which the States statutory duty to look after them ends, although each child has a right to an aftercare plan prepared by the Child and Family Agency, Tusla. This plan, mandatory since last September, is supposed to identify transitional supports such as education, training, financial support and social network support and it must be provided before the young person leaves care. That service wasnt there when we started out, Sally says. But now they get help with housing and education and thats good. Some of the children who arrived at the Dalys house were very traumatised. They were dealing with the trauma of leaving brothers and sisters behind, of being separated from their parents and of being brought to a strangers house, Sally says. They mightnt talk for a while when theyd arrive or they mightnt eat. I wouldnt rush them into talking, Id never put any pressure on them to tell me anything they werent comfortable with. Id just let them know we are there for them and that we have their best interests at heart. Her approach was to imagine how her own child would feel if they found themselves in a strangers house and what it would take to reassure them. We are effectively representing their parents. Im very conscious of that, so wed look after them as if they were our own. But you also want to make sure you dont make the birth parents feel undervalued, because it mustnt be a nice feeling for parents to have a child in care. The youngest child the Dalys took in was just 15 days old. A number of years ago, they switched to emergency placements, where children are placed in care at short notice. These days, most of the kids they take in to their home are teenagers. They could be with us for three weeks or three months, even though the emergency placements are meant to be short term. But it depends on the situation and we are pretty flexible, Donal says. Sally says there is support available to foster carers, particularly through the likes of the Irish Foster Carers Association (IFCA), but she worries that the children themselves dont always get enough support. What upsets me most is when children cant get in contact with their social worker. I know the social workers are overworked and under resourced, but the children can have a lot of questions that I cant necessarily answer like Where am I going from here, whats happening next? I cant answer those questions. Sally would also like more effort made to keep brothers and sisters in touch when they are placed in foster care. Sometimes the whole family has to go into care and the siblings are split up and thats very tough on everyone. It can make it very difficult for them to maintain relationships. Sally has seen improvements over the years in the access arrangements put in place by Tusla to help children maintain family links. She is also appreciative of support groups that meet once a month, facilitated by social workers, where foster parents can trade experiences and learn from each other. DONAL says training of foster carers has also improved hugely. Training is now compulsory. It wasnt really there in the early days. You need a lot of specialised knowledge when dealing with kids so I understand where Tusla and the IFCA are coming from. Catherine Bond, CEO of the IFCA, is currently gearing up for Fostering Fortnight which gets underway on February 26. It will be a celebration of all thats good about fostering, she says. When you look at the statistics, 92% of more than 6,000 children in State care are with foster families, as opposed to institutional care, and thats a very significant success story for the Irish Government and the Irish State. But we need to mind our foster carers and support them in doing very critical work. And that support needs to be timely, Catherine says. Foster families dont always have an allocated link social worker, whose role is it is to provide supervision and support for the foster carer and the child on a regular basis. Similarly, not every child has an allocated social worker, the individual responsible for the childs safety and welfare. However the statistics are heading in the right direction, Catherine says. She says foster care is without doubt a successful model of care for children. All the evidence shows they do best in a family environment, says Catherine. Sally says fostering enriched their lives. But its a decision people shouldnt take lightly. It is a big commitment. Nonetheless, she says shes loved every kid thats come and gone. I do hope they are all happy and settled wherever they are, she says. Fostering Fortnight, runs from February 26 to March 9. The theme this year is Fostering Changes Lives For more information see www.ifca.ie Germanys law on social media sends an important message: Democracies wont stand idly by while their citizens are exposed to hateful speech, writes Alexandra Borchardt. Germany's Network Enforcement Act, according to which social-media platforms like Facebook and YouTube could be fined 50m for every obviously illegal post within 24 hours of receiving a notification has been controversial from the start. After it entered fully into effect in January, there was a tremendous outcry, with critics from all over the political map arguing that it was an enticement to censorship. Government was relinquishing its powers to private interests, they protested. So, is this the beginning of the end of free speech in Germany? Of course not. To be sure, Germanys Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz (or NetzDG) is the strictest regulation of its kind in a Europe that is growing increasingly annoyed with Americas powerful social media companies. And critics do have some valid points about the laws weaknesses. But the possibilities for free expression will remain abundant, even if some posts are deleted mistakenly. The truth is that the law sends an important message: Democracies wont stay silent while their citizens are exposed to hateful and violent speech and images content that, as we know, can spur real-life hate and violence. Refusing to protect the public, especially the most vulnerable, from dangerous content in the name of free speech actually serves the interests of those who are already privileged, beginning with the powerful companies that drive the dissemination of information. Speech has always been filtered. In democratic societies, everyone has the right to express themselves within the boundaries of the law, but no one has ever been guaranteed an audience. To have an impact, citizens have always needed to appeal to or bypass the gatekeepers who decide which causes and ideas are relevant and worth amplifying, whether through the media, political institutions, or protest. The same is true today, except that the gatekeepers are the algorithms that automatically filter and rank all contributions. Of course, algorithms can be programmed any way companies like, meaning that they may place a premium on qualities shared by professional journalists: credibility, intelligence, and coherence. But todays social media platforms are far more likely to prioritise potential for advertising revenue above all else. So the noisiest are often rewarded with a megaphone, while less polarising, less privileged voices are drowned out, even if they are providing the smart and nuanced perspectives that can truly enrich public discussions. If the algorithm doesnt do the job of silencing less privileged voices, online trolls often step in, directing hateful and threatening speech at whomever they choose. Women and minorities are particularly likely to be victims of online harassment, but anyone may be targeted. The German blogger Richard Gutjahr, for example, became the object of conspiracy theories and the target of intense harassment after being present at two terrorist attacks within two weeks of each other. Victims of online harassment often respond with self-censorship, and many, with their sense of security and even self-worth eroded, remove themselves from social media altogether. In this sense, by offering blanket protections in the name of free speech, countries actually privilege hate speech. But why should a victims rights count less than those of their bullies? In a democracy, the rights of the many cannot come at the expense of the rights of the few. In the age of algorithms, government must, more than ever, ensure the protection of vulnerable voices, even erring on victims side at times. If already-vulnerable people are besieged by mobs of extremists and aggressors, it is entirely understandable that they will fear speaking up. If that happens, free speech is dead. Not all NetzDG critics dispute this assessment: some agree that the speech of the vulnerable does need extra protection. But they argue that the necessary protections are already in place. After all, severe insult and incitement to hatred and violence are prohibited, and perpetrators can be prosecuted. French President Emmanuel Macron, for example, favours focusing on strengthening the judicial systems ability to deal with hate speech and misinformation. But, in the digital age, speed is decisive. The technology is instant, and online posts can be shared widely within minutes. Democratic institutions move rather slowly much too slowly for police and the courts to be effective in fighting trolls and online hate. And many victims are not in any position to hire a high-quality lawyer, as Gutjahr did. Relying on the states most cumbersome institutions alone is not an effective strategy for protecting free speech on todays digital communication networks. Hate speech and other kinds of dangerous and illegal content must be attacked at the source. On one hand, there is a need for increased media literacy on the part of consumers, who need to be taught, from a young age, about the real-world consequences of online hate speech. On the other hand and this is what the NetzDG attempts to ensure social-media platforms must ensure that their products are designed in ways that encourage responsible use. But this is no quick fix. On the contrary, it demands a fundamental rethink of business models that facilitate and even reward hate speech. Firms cannot be allowed to profit from damaging content, while shrugging off responsibility for its consequences. Instead, they must revise their algorithms more effectively and scrupulously to flag content that humans should monitor and assess, while entrenching in all of their business decisions an awareness of their responsibility in the fight for truly free speech. This may contradict the straightforward business logic of doing whatever maximizes profit and shareholder value. But it is, without a doubt, what is best for society. The German government is right to push companies in the proper direction. Alexandra Borchardt is director of strategic development at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2018. Americas failure to commit resources has enabled a multiplicity of players Iran, Russia, Islamic State, Hezbollah to muddy the bloody waters of the civil war, says Christopher R. Hill GIVEN that most of the Middle East is now in turmoil, US secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, should be commended for keeping the Syrian conflict in mind, during his recent trip to the region. His job hasnt been easy. American diplomacy has been all but invisible in the Middle East, and the US State Department does not seem to have any ideas or, more importantly, funding with which to take the lead. If the United States is serious about addressing the increasingly deadly crisis in Syria, it needs to start showing sustained interest, and start putting its money where its mouth is. The complexity of the situation in Syria has far-surpassed the worlds capacity to master it. Rapidly changing events, a growing number of players, and constantly shifting battle lines all point to a quagmire. Just six months ago, there were two clear trends in the conflict: Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, with the support of Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah, was on his way to victory; and the Islamic State (IS) was about to be soundly defeated by a US-led coalition. Today, the successful campaign against IS seems Pyrrhic, at best. Hundreds of thousands of lives have been lost, and a resolution of the larger conflict is nowhere in sight. If anything, the world is even more on edge, now. In recent weeks, Israel has clashed with Iranian forces in southern Syria to show that it will not allow Iran to establish a presence there. And Turkey has launched a bold campaign against Syrias Kurds, whom it hopes to drive out of the northwest province of Afrin to prevent them from linking up with Turkish Kurds across the border. Assad has come to terms with reality and indicated that he would cede territory to the Syrian Kurds. But Turkey remains unwilling to countenance an autonomous, Kurdish entity along its border. The US, for its part, has spent the past six years marshalling various groups of Sunni Arab fighters, under the auspices of the so-called Syrian Democratic Forces, an offshoot of what was previously called the Free Syrian Army. Some elements of the SDF have been more effective than others, and have even fought alongside the Kurds against IS. But now they find themselves in the crosshairs not just of Assad, but also of Russia and various Iran-backed Shia militias. The US was right to focus on defeating IS; but now it faces a much broader mission: to ensure the survival of its various allies on the ground. This raises the prospect of a direct conflict with other powers, not least Russia. In fact, the US might already have killed dozens of Russian military contractors in a recent airstrike. The US and its European partners have been reluctant to come down hard on their Nato ally, Turkey, and have merely urged Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to show restraint. But jawboning, one of the USs favourite diplomatic tools, rarely works on those in the heat of battle. Syrians rescuing a child, following a reported regime air strike in the rebel-held town of Hamouria, in the besieged Eastern Ghouta region, on the outskirts of the capital, Damascus. Picture: Abdulmonam Eassa/AFP/Getty Images Moreover, Turkey doesnt seem to care what its allies think. For example, it recently raised eyebrows within Nato, yet again, by purchasing new-generation, Russian S-400 anti-aircraft batteries. This does not bode well for any future peace process. After all, Western countries will need Turkey to counterbalance the Russians, whose broader strategic agenda goes well beyond the Middle East. When historians look back at the Syria conflict, they will praise both former US presidents, Barack Obama and Donald Trump, for relentlessly pursuing IS. But they will fault the US for not comprehending the larger war. The Obama administration didnt know what it was bargaining for, when, without thinking about what would come next, it called in 2011 for Assads removal. In July of that year, Robert S Ford, the US ambassador to Syria, was sent to the Sunni town of Hama, where Assads father had ordered a massacre 30 years earlier. According to the US State Department at the time, the point of the visit was to [express] our deep support for the right of the Syrian people to assemble peacefully and to express themselves. Did the administration really not foresee that Assad like his father before him would react to a popular uprising with violence? When the US took a side against Assad, seven years ago, it was asserting its national interest in Syria, while ignoring the interests of other key players, such as Turkey, Russia, Iran, and Israel. And now, with the US vacillating, there is a very real danger of a full-fledged US-Russian proxy war. So far, the Trump administration has not been spurred to action by the humanitarian catastrophe confronting Syrian civilians. But perhaps it would do more if it considered the threat the conflict poses to the entire region. If the administration wants to show leadership, it should start by consulting the other regional powers to understand their interests and determine if they can be reconciled. Tillerson may be trying to do just that. But even before asking the regional players what they want, the Trump administration should ask itself the same question. With the stakes in Syria rising fast, one can only wonder where America stands. Christopher R Hill, former US assistant secretary of state for East Asia, is chief advisor to the chancellor for global engagement, and professor of the practice in diplomacy at the University of Denver, and the author of Outpost. Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2018. Ghouta: Key questions about the current Syrian offensive What is Ghouta? Ghouta is an informal name for the suburbs of the Syrian capital, Damascus (which form around the Barada River), and for towns in its eastern reaches, including Douma, Kfar Batna, and Saqba. The residents of eastern Ghouta were among the first to rise up against Bashar Assads rule in 2011. The area was taken over by rebels a year later, as the unrest turned into an armedinsurgency, then civil war. They held on ferociously, determined to preserve the rebel position closest to the capital, denting thenarrative of an Assad victory in key places. Today, it is the last majoropposition enclave in the area,surrounded by areas firmly under government control. Historically an agricultural area,it has been partially besieged by the government since 2013 and completely since mid-2017. The rebel-held suburbs endured a devastating sarin gas attack in 2013, which killed hundreds of people. Over the years, residential buildings, hospitals, schools, and warehouses have all been destroyed. According to the UN, there are 393,000 residents in eastern Ghouta, many of them internally displaced from other parts of the country, accounting for 94% of all Syrians under siege today. UN aid convoys rarely make itinside, and the lack of access has led to severe food shortages, starvation, and malnutrition, and a sharp rise in food prices. Why has Eastern Ghouta eluded Assad for so long? Thousands of battle-hardened militants are entrenched in Eastern Ghouta, including the powerful Army of Islam group, based in Douma, and the ultra-conservative Ahrar al-Sham and Faylaq al-Rahman groups. Hayaat Tahrir al-Sham, a rebel coalition affiliated with al-Qaida, also has a presence in the area. Despite its proximity to Assads seat of power, in Damascus, Syrian troops, stretched thin by the scale of the rebellion, overlooked Eastern Ghouta for the first years of the civil war, while they focused on recapturing areas deemed more crucial for the governments survival, including Homs, Aleppo, and areas near the border with Lebanon. The militants of Eastern Ghouta had years to dig in, amassing an abundant reserve of weapons and ammunition from supply lines that stretched to the Syrian desert. From there, the rebels frequently lob mortar shells into Damascus neighbourhoods, including dozens of shells on Tuesday that killed eight civilians and wounded others. Because the region is agricultural and once the source of most of the capitals sugar, rice, fruits and vegetables the militants were able to grow their own food, diminishing the need for supply lines. Theyve also built a labyrinth of secret, underground tunnels, beyond the reach of airstrikes. Some supplies get in this way, but utilities have been decimated. What is happening now? With Russia and Irans help, Assad has turned the war decisively in his favour, recapturing key areas of the country from rebels and Islamic State militants. The renewed assault on Eastern Ghouta is part of a broader escalation on several fronts, in recent weeks, as Assad and his allies step up their efforts to finish off remaining pockets of resistance including Idlib province, in the north, which houses many evacuees from Aleppo. The government has recently sent Brigadier General Suheil al-Hassan, also known among his troops as Tiger, to Eastern Ghouta to lead the effort. He has led elite forces to many victories against insurgents, since the conflict began, including in Aleppo and most recently in Deir el-Zour, against Islamic State militants. For Assad, victory in Eastern Ghouta would remove a longstanding threat and nuisance, going a long way toward ending the seven-year rebellion against him. South African police have launched an investigation to find a British couple kidnapped more than a week ago from a popular tourist spot in southern KwaZulu-Natal province. The pair, who have dual British and South African nationality, live in Cape Town and were snatched on February 12 near the small town of Vryheid. They have not been named but have been described as a 74-year-old British man who moved to South Africa in the 1970s and his 63-year-old South African-born wife. The victims' vehicle was found on Wednesday in the city of Durban - almost 200 miles away from where they disappeared - but there was no trace of the couple. A spokesman for the Directorate of Priority Crimes Investigation, known as the Hawks, refused to comment on whether a demand for a ransom has been received. But he revealed that two suspects have been arrested - Aslam Del Vecchio, 38, and 27-year-old Fatima Patel - on charges of kidnapping as well as robbery and arson dating back to last year. They were arrested on February 16 and had been on a wanted list after a sugar cane field in the region was torched. Earlier this week, the Foreign Office updated its travel advice for South Africa to include news of the kidnap under the advisory's terrorism section. But Captain Lloyd Ramovha said there was currently no suggestion that the disappearance of the couple was linked to terror. He told the Press Association: "As far as the ongoing investigation is concerned, nothing suggests any link to terrorism at this stage. "We say that without wanting to pre-empt what eventually we will find but at this stage nothing points to a terrorist link." An Foreign Office spokesman said: "We are working closely with the South African authorities following the kidnap of two South African/British dual nationals and have offered consular support to the family." "As there is an ongoing investigation we cannot comment further." The Philippine president has banned a reporter from attending briefings at the presidential palace compound because her online news organisation's licence to operate was revoked by the government's corporate watchdog. Rodrigo Duterte invoked the Securities and Exchange Commission ruling in banning Rappler reporter Pia Ranada from the Malacanang palace complex, where he, his spokesman and other top officials hold news briefings. "It is not a legitimate agency according to SEC," Mr Duterte told a news conference. "If they would be considered legitimate you could enter again, no problem with me." In a ruling made public last month, the commission said Rappler violated a constitutional prohibition on foreign ownership and control of mass media companies when it received money from an international investment firm. Rappler has rejected the ruling and continued to operate. Rappler, known for its critical reporting of Mr Duterte's presidency, and media watchdogs called the move an attempt to muzzle the press. Presidential spokesman Harry Roque Jr argued that it was not, saying Ms Ranada can report by watching news conferences on television. Mr Duterte's move "could portend a broader assault on journalists and news organisations, whose critical watchdog role has magnified the government's poor human rights record, from extrajudicial killings of thousands of alleged drug dealers and users to conflict-related abuses in the south," Carlos Conde of the US-based rights group Human Rights Watch said. Despite the SEC ruling, the president initially allowed Ms Ranada to continue covering presidential palace events but that ended when she stood by a story that alleged a key Duterte aide had intervened in a military deal to purchase frigates, Mr Roque said. "We cannot allow anyone into the president's home especially a person who insists on disrespecting the home by reporting fake news," he told reporters. Mr Duterte repeated an earlier accusation without offering evidence that Rappler might be funded by the US Central Intelligence Agency. Rappler has denied the allegation. Mr Duterte has also publicly attacked a leading newspaper, the Philippine Daily Inquirer, and the ABS-CBN TV network for what he called biased reporting, including on his crackdown on illegal drugs that has left thousands of mostly poor suspects dead since he took power in 2016. The National Union of Journalists of the Philippines said "when the highest official in the land chooses to wage a personal vendetta against an individual, whether a journalist or a media outfit, it sends a clear and chilling signal that everyone else better report only what he wants you to or else." Human Rights Watch called on Filipinos, who this weekend mark the anniversary of the 1986 "people power" revolt that overthrew dictator Ferdinand Marcos, to show their support for a free press. Journalists were jailed and critical media organisations padlocked after Marcos declared martial law in 1972. AP - PA After it emerged that AIB would not have to pay any corporation tax for 20 years because of the losses accrued during the 2008 financial crash, the Dails Public Accounts Committee (PAC) heard evidence yesterday from the Revenue Commissioners. The PAC was told that of the 218bn in losses that can be carried over and offset against tax, 124bn of that related to the banks and other financial institutions. PAC chairman Sean Fleming asked officials from the Revenue Commissioners and the Department of Finance whether a sunset clause had ever been considered. He also asked had they thought about how a ceiling on how much tax relief could be applied. This is probably not fair to the taxpayer. I think a ceiling and a sunset clause should be considered in the interest of the State, he said. It is not good for a country to have such losses in the hands of such a small group of companies. Finance officials appearing before the committee said such measures were not in keeping with international norms and have not yet been considered. It was then pointed out that the UK has a 5m ceiling above which a lower rate of relief applies. The committee also heard that the Government expects the final disputed tax bill that the European Commission ordered it to collect from Apple to be close to the 13bn estimated. Its in that ballpark, Revenue chairman Niall Cody told the PAC when asked if the bill his office is obliged to calculate will be in line with the record EU estimate, which both Dublin and Apple are appealing. Over 95% of the calculations are completed and we have agreed with the Commission that all our calculations will be with them before the end of April. Payments into Ireland from Apple should commence from the beginning of April, the committee heard. Earlier at the committee, it emerged that relatively few of the 175,000 companies registered in Ireland pay corporate tax due to a series of gaps and complex rules within the tax system. The director of public policy and taxation at Chartered Accountants Ireland, Brian Keegan, confirmed that almost a third of Irelands top 100 firms pay the official 12.5% corporate tax rate with 10 of the top 100 paying 66% of the total corporate tax figure. Mr Keegan who last week gave the PAC a separate private breakdown of Irish corporate tax issues said just over 175,000 companies are registered in this country. Under questioning from Social Democrats TD Catherine Murphy, Mr Keegan said that while the 12.5% official corporate tax rate applies across the board, differences in how it legally affects individual companies means relatively few companies in Ireland pay it and those that do pay small amounts. The independent figures came after Revenue Commissioners chairman Niall Cody and Department of Finance officials told the PAC last November that eight of the 100 most lucrative Irish-based multi-nationals are effectively paying no corporation tax, five have a tax bill under 1%, and others are using loopholes to be paid by the State. Despite accepting the figures, Mr Cody and Department of Finance officials defended the current tax system, with Mr Cody insisting: I dont believe Ireland is a tax haven. The hospital and US medical firm University of Pittsburg Medical Centre (UPMC) have teamed up to provide a new radiotherapy service. The service, which is planned to open in July 2019, will bring the latest and best radiation therapy treatments to patients closer to where they live. This week, Tanaiste Simon Coveney said the population of Cork will grow by 60% over the next 20 years, putting increased pressure on hospitals in the region. Major new acute hospitals are planned for Cork, Dublin, and Galway but sites have yet to be identified. These acute hospitals, together with hospitals to treat planned medical and surgical procedures, are part of the Ireland 2040 plan announced by the Government last year. The radiotherapy centre at the Bon Secours is part of a 77m investment. UPMC will fund half of the cost of the 13m centre. President of UPMC International, Charles Bogosta, said UPMC will manage the new radiotherapy centre in the Bon Secours and provide all of the doctors and staff. It will have the capacity to treat up to 75 patients a day and 95% will be day patients, he said. UPMC, together with the Bon Secours Health System, held a national oncology symposium at Pairc Ui Chaoimh presented by Irish and international cancer care experts yesterday. Bon Secours Health System CEO Bill Maher said they want to highlight the very highest quality of services that could be delivered. It is a significant part of our ambitious 2020 strategy to launch our new services soon and raise awareness of this important issue, he said. Over the last 20 years, hundreds of patients at the Bon Secours secured access to new and better drugs by volunteering to take part in clinical trials. Some of the drugs successfully trialled include Herceptin and Palbociclib two drugs now used internationally by thousands of breast cancer patients. The hospital was also the only Munster site that participated in the trial of Lonsurf, a drug now used in the treatment of late-stage colon cancer. Brian Bird, consultant medical oncologist at the hospital, said that with two research nurses, a data manager and a research pharmacist they could offer their patients new hope. Current trials include new treatments for breast and ovarian cancer. Collaborative work started in the hospital has won funding from University College Cork and Science Foundation Ireland. We are grateful to our predecessors who started this great work and are happy to build on it with UPMC looking forward to opening radiotherapy trials in the future, said Dr Bird. The Bon Secours is the largest private hospital in Ireland and has been treating patients in the Munster region for more than 100 years. The extensive expansion of the hospital is the largest investment undertaken by the Bon Secours and is a key part of it 150m injection in its five acute hospitals. An audit by Red C Research and Marketing, who are responsible for the recruitment of assembly members, found that one recruiter, without permission, recruited seven replacement members outside the agreed process for a meeting of the assembly held last month. The seven were included in the 99 members of the Assembly who met in January to discuss the Manner in which Referenda are held. Despite this, Red C said it is satisfied that this was an isolated incident. Red C remains confident that all members recruited prior to the meeting in mid-January 2018 were recruited to a very high standard, as requested by, and agreed with, the Citizens Assembly, the company said in a statement. The chairwoman of the Assembly, Judge Mary Laffoy, said she is disappointed at the position the Assembly has found itself in, but is satisfied that previous topics discussed by the group were not affected. I want to assure the public in the clearest possible terms, that I am satisfied that this is an isolated incident, and that it has no impact on the work of the Assembly on previous topics, said Ms Justice Laffoy. The Assembly reported its findings on the Eighth Amendment last June. However the Pro-Life Campaign which is opposed to repealing the Eighth Amendment which gives equal right to the life of the unborn and its mother has called for an independent audit of the recruitment process. Cora Sherlock of the Pro Life Campaign told RTEs News at One: Its very obvious I think to everybody that the Government set up the Oireachtas committee to consider the recommendations of the Citizens Assembly. Now that serious questions have been raised over the Citizens Assembly, how it did its work, what I do think is the current situation, and well have to see how this develops, but as of now I think theres a question mark over the entire process of the Citizens Assembly, their recommendations, the Oireachtas committee and indeed the question of whether the Government can even go ahead now and hold a referendum. The Save The Eighth campaign said the Red C audit also raises questions as to how representative of the public the Assemblys findings are, given it could have margins of error of up to 10%. However, responding to criticism from Independent TD Mattie McGrath in the Dail yesterday, Health Minister Simon Harris said: It would be entirely disingenuous to try to conflate the issue of a referendum on the Eighth Amendment with the issue of the error on the part of Red C. This error affected a discussion on climate change rather than abortion. I do not know why the deputy fears letting the people of Ireland have their say. That is all I want. Editorial: 12 The Midleton filmmaker joined friends and colleagues from the studio she co-founded, Cartoon Saloon, for the Audi International Dublin Film Festival screening of her movie, The Breadwinner. For the animator, it marked an impressive dress rehearsal for the Oscars on March 4, where the film has been nominated in the best animated picture category. Next week, shell jet to Los Angeles for the biggest night in cinema. Im bringing my long-suffering husband Michael. Weve been together for over 20 years so hes coming with me on the night. Ill squeeze his hand a few times and ask him to pinch me to make sure its real, she said. Its incredible, its fantastic, she said of the films success so far. We have so many of our crew here tonight to celebrate with us. And were delighted to being it to ADIFF which is a wonderful festival, a really great celebration of film. The Breadwinner tells the story of Parvana, a girl living under the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. When her father is unjustly jailed, she disguises herself as a boy in a bid to make ends meet. For Twomey, who was diagnosed with cancer during the films production, being able to stay engaged creatively and do what she loves provided an invaluable respite. It did, absolutely. For me, cancer diagnosis is absolute chaos in your life. I have two young boys, and right in the middle of a production, to have somebody say something like that to you, you have cancer, you know, its something else. But honestly, working for me was a way through it. My job I can do sitting down. I can Skype people, I can email. For me it was a sense of normality in a world gone crazy. The Breadwinner was executive produced by Angelina Jolie, who worked with Twomey and her creative team throughout production and has become a friend. The film tells the story of Parvana, an 11-year-old girl living under Taliban rule, who dresses like a boy to support her family following the wrongful arrest of her father. Twomey, a passionate supporter of gender equality and parity, hopes that her film will help encourage and empower young women. The film is about a young girl using her voice to transform herself and those around her. Its a very realistic film but it does use the voices of young women, of young girls. There are so many women behind this film: Deborah Ellis (who wrote the book on which the story is based), Angelina Jolie, Mimi Gitlin whos one of our producers, Anita Doran (screenwriter), myself, and 50% of our crew are female. To have that kind of balance in a story is amazing, we dont have enough of it and we need more. You see many young directors coming up the ranks and thats important to encourage and its incredible to see. I think theres an onus on every director, male and female, to encourage young women coming up through the industry. To make sure there arent any points in their career where they dont feel encouraged. The Breadwinner will be released in Ireland by Element Pictures in May. Supt Brendan Fogarty said he had concerns about the pressure the incident put on garda and ambulance resources, who responded to the incident at Bandon Rugby Club. I dont want to have to shut down such events but I do have a serious concern that seven gardai and in particular, three ambulances, were tied up dealing with this, Supt Fogarty said. I would also like to emphasise the need for parental supervision. Parents really do have to step up. Gardai are investigating several public order incidents and an alleged assault arising out of the incident. They detained three teenagers but when they contacted the parents of one, in Cork City, the parents told gardai they werent in a position to travel to Bandon to collect their child and gardai had to transport the child home. Hundreds of teenagers from all over Cork descended on the rugby club last Friday night, with many arriving by hire buses from the city, and from towns across north and west Cork. One teen was so drunk at a collection point in a north Cork town that he couldnt board the bus. The driver called for an ambulance and the teen was brought to CUH. The rugby club had several adults on duty to supervise, backed up by first aiders and nurses. All disco goers were searched at the door for drink and drugs and anyone in an intoxicated state was refused entry. Up to a dozen teens who arrived drunk were refused entry and directed to a dressing room where they were monitored. But it soon became clear that the club needed medical backup. Dr Jason van der Velde said when he arrived around 9pm, they quickly identified those who needed supportive care. He said two teens were profoundly unconsciousness, couldnt manage their own airways, had low blood pressure, and had to be transported by ambulance to CUH, where they were detained overnight. A fourth child, who was about to be transported to CUH by ambulance, regained consciousness after treatment, before he was escorted home by a parent. Given how temperatures on the night plummeted to below zero, Dr van der Velde said the incident had the potential to become very serious. This was a large incident which had the ability to cause mayhem for the ambulance service and CUH. But dealing with it as we did, at the scene, averted a major incident, he said. Teenagers need a social outlet, he said, but the minority in this incident had, for whatever reasons, let their parents and their communities down. He said he heard reports that some involved hid containers of alcohol in their socks and underwear, and he said it highlighted the need for parental supervision on the disco buses. You cant expect a bus driver, who may be driving alone, to police them, he said. Dr Chris Luke, a consultant in emergency medicine at CUH and the Mercy University Hospital, described the nature of the incident as jaw-dropping. The medical staff, the paramedics performed miracles, he told The Opinion Line on Corks 96fm yesterday. But the father-of-four criticised the my drink was spiked response of some parents and teenagers caught up in similar incidents. He said such spiking incidents are rare in Ireland and he encounters such cases maybe once or twice a year. Parents need to understand that the greatest determinant, the greatest driver of teen drinking is the behaviour of the parent in the house, the culture within the house, he said. I cant tell you how upsetting it is for staff in hospitals to be working flat out, minding the young people of this country, only to be abused by parents who are alleging some mysterious third party spiked their teenagers drink. If it were the case, we would have the worst epidemic of drink spiking in the history of Europe and I dont believe that is the case. Field hospital needed to treat drunk teenagers at Cork disco Three intoxicated children aged between 15 and 17 were taken unconscious by ambulance to CUH and up to a dozen were triaged in a field-hospital set up on the grounds of Bandon Rugby Club to ensure the hospital was not overwhelmed by scale of the incident. Jason van der Velde, a pre-hospital emergency medicine and critical care retrieval physician based at CUHs emergency department, said the response by the event organisers, and the decision to triage the teens at the scene, averted the possible overwhelming of an already at-capacity ambulance service, ED, and hospital. He described the scene as he arrived at one of the clubs dressing rooms, where the teens were being cared for initially, as akin to an ancient Roman vomitorium. Dr van der Velde said: The team at the rugby club managed this incident exceptionally well. Their planning was right, they did as best as you could expect. Chief Supt Con Cadogan said gardai are investigating alleged assaults at the event, and are concerned at a lack of parental responsibility. Parents need to be more vigilant. They have to watch out for their kids, talk to them, know what theyre doing, and who theyre with, he said. Chris Luke, a consultant in emergency medicine at CUH and the Mercy University Hospital, described the scale of the incident as jaw-dropping. He told Corks 96FM: The medical staff, the paramedics performed miracles. They delivered a wonderful service which eased the burden on CUH, which was already very, very busy. He said some parents who arrived to collect their children on the night verbally abused medical staff and insisted their children had had their drinks spiked. Having your drink spiked in Ireland is really very, very rare, Dr Luke said. But when you find teens on buses with clinking rucksacks, you have to ask how was it planted on the back of that girl? How were they plied with their drink by some horrible stranger? Its just not realistic to say that little Johnny or Mary had their drink spiked. Parents need to understand that the greatest determinant, the greatest driver of teen drinking, is the behaviour of the parent in the house, the culture within the house. I cant tell you how upsetting it is for staff in hospitals to be working flat out, minding the young people of this country, only to be abused by parents who are alleging some mysterious third party has spiked their teenagers drink. If it were the case, we would have the worst epidemic of drink spiking in the history of Europe and I dont believe that is the case. Ms Noone, a member of the industrial and commercial panel, made the allegations at a private meeting of party TDs and senators in Leinster House on Wednesday night. The party confirmed that its general secretary, Tom Curran, has been informed of the allegations by chairman Martin Heydon. Parliamentary Party Chairman Martin Heydon has written to General Secretary Tom Curran regarding an internal matter within the party, said a statement. A party spokesman said: Due process will be followed and the matter will be dealt with swiftly. Fine Gael expects party colleagues to treat all with the utmost respect, professionalism and dignity at all times. Any internal party matters are dealt with the strictest of confidence and Fine Gael will not be making any further comment. At the meeting on Wednesday, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar committed to fully investigating the claims, saying that sexism had no place in the party. He said he was disappointed to hear such claims and insisted bullying would not be tolerated within the party. Justice Minister Charlie Flanagan also stressed that avenues were available within the party to members with concerns of this nature. Ms Noones intervention at the meeting followed a presentation about the partys efforts to encourage more women to contest elections for Fine Gael. The Irish Examiner understands that the allegations date back over a number of years, but Ms Noone claims the alleged bullying has intensified since the debate around the referendum on the Eighth Amendment got under way. It is understood that Ms Noone, who chaired the all-party Oireachtas committee that examined the Eighth Amendment last year, told colleagues that the alleged bullying had become too much to take and had got to the point that she cant take it anymore. I just want it stopped, she told colleagues. A number of members present said Ms Noone was visibly upset while raising the concerns. She did not name the individual who she said was responsible for the alleged abuse. Contacted by the Irish Examiner, Ms Noone said she would not be making any comment. The party figure at the centre of the allegations too had no comment to make, saying there had been no contact from Mr Heydon or Mr Curran. Ms Noones allegations are the second incident to rock the party in recent months. In November, Barry Walsh resigned from the executive council of Fine Gael over regrets the tone and language he used in tweets that he has posted. He also accepted that some tweets had caused serious offence to many people and I apologise unreservedly for that. Mr Walsh came under considerable pressure to stand down after it was disclosed that he had posted abusive and personalised tweets. The issue was brought to light by Dublin Bay South TD Kate OConnell, who had also sat on the Oireachtas committee on the Eighth Amendment, at a Fine Gael meeting where she presented a series of tweets by Mr Walsh, some of which were directed at her. There have been fears in recent days that Irelands so-called bulletproof deal for no fresh border with the North may be watered down in any final Brexit deal text. Britain is finalising its withdrawal terms from the EU, but there are suggestions the promise on the border will lie outside of these. Health Minister Simon Harris refused to clarify the issue in the Dail yesterday, saying that statements on this would be inappropriate. A deal clinched in December by Taoiseach Leo Varadkar means that Britain must prevent any new border even if there is no Brexit deal. The pact with EU negotiators was seen as a major victory for Mr Varadkar. Opposition TDs now fear this work may be undone and, in fact, there may be no basis in law for the so-called backstop deal on the North. Fianna Fail Brexit spokesman Stephen Donnelly said: The Irish Governments view is that this backstop is unambiguous and comprehensive, ensuring that there will be no North-South border controls now or at any stage in the future. But many believe that there is wiggle room within what was agreed in December. Mr Varadkar will attend an informal meeting of EU leaders in Brussels today where Brexit is expected to be discussed on the sidelines of the summit. Mr Donnelly said: The backstop may be the only protection left against hard border controls on the island, and it feels as though it has just been weakened. Mr Harris said the December deal on the North must be honoured in full. We are fully satisfied that full legal effect will be given to the December agreement in any withdrawal agreement, he said. Speaking on the issue in Washington, Tanaiste Simon Coveney said the backstop agreed in December will be given legal effect as part of the withdrawal agreement. Our preference is that the legally binding backstop would never be used and instead all of these issues would be solved through option A a future EU-UK partnership, he said. The new study on teaching careers across the continent revealed that in the vast majority of European countries, teacher appraisal is common practice. While Irish children are regularly tested, the Eurydice study on education systems in 43 nations found that when it comes to secondary school, Ireland is among a tiny minority of countries which dont evaluate teaching skills. Only Ireland, at secondary school level, Iceland and Turkey do not have regulations on systematic appraisal for teachers, read the report from the EU Commission. In Ireland, it noted that the Teaching Council is responsible for regulating the teaching profession at primary school level but serving teachers at secondary school level education may be appraised only in exceptional cases. The Eurydice study said: This is carried out by the inspectorate at the request of the school board. The report noted that Ireland is almost on its own when it comes to its hands-off approach to appraising the performance of teachers. In 33 education systems, regulations from top-level authorities require teacher appraisal to be carried out. It added: In four countries, Denmark, Estonia, Finland and Norway, the schools or the local authorities that run them have full autonomy for deciding whether teachers should be appraised and how and when this should take place. In another three education systems in France, the Czech Republic, and the Netherlands there is some top-level input but schools are left a good deal of autonomy. In Northern Ireland, each schools board of governors must have procedures and processes in place to monitor and evaluate the operation and effectiveness of the teacher appraisal scheme. The report, entitled Teaching Careers In Europe, said teacher appraisal is a process intended to assess individual teachers performance and ensure that they have the skills needed to carry out their role effectively. Their performance can be tested by drawing on a range of information from classroom observations to parent and or pupil surveys. It can be designed for new teachers, serving teachers, or both and can be linked to promotion and professional development needs, or be a way to provide teachers with feedback on their performance. The report said that in more than one third of systems, appraisal is used to determine whether a teacher should be promoted and in 10 cases to determine who should receive bonuses or other benefits. In nine education systems appraisal is used to determine salary progression. It is also used to provide teachers with feedback and identifying professional development needs are the main purposes of teacher appraisal. Promotion is the only reason for appraisal in Croatia and Lithuania, read the report. In Italy, in-service teacher appraisal is intended to identify which teachers are entitled to receive a reward for their performance. It said: Further investigation will be needed to fully understand the summative and formative dimensions of teacher appraisal in the different education systems and how they relate to better teacher performance. However, the Department of Education has chosen just 80 from the 369 that applied to take part in the roll out of the new curriculum. It will be examined for the first time at the Leaving Certificate in 2020, and all schools will be open to teach the new curriculum from autumn of that year. The schools selected for the first phase are being announced today, after an invite issued in December for expressions of interest. These schools may choose to offer it as a non-examinable subject, using a senior cycle PE framework also being rolled out on a phased basis. As well as a final written exam in June of sixth year, worth half of the Leaving Certificate marks, students will be assessed on performances and related projects in relation to any one of a range of activities. While these may include traditional team or individual sports, it could also incorporate dance, orienteering or other physical activities undertaken during the two-year PE course. The department had expected to facilitate 50 to 60 schools teaching the subject from this year. Education Minister Richard Bruton said he was delighted it was able to offer places to so many schools after the huge demand for involvement. This was an important commitment in the action plan for education, and is in line with the Governments overall emphasis on healthy lifestyles, said Mr Bruton. The minister was speaking at Our Lady of Mercy Secondary School in Beaumont, one of 18 Dublin schools among those picked. Another 10 schools in Cork, seven in Donegal and six each in Limerick, Tipperary and Wexford have been selected, along with smaller numbers in more than a dozen other counties. Although the department is not committing any additional resources beyond teacher training for the new subject, the Governments National Development Plan 2018-2027 includes a programme of building and modernisation aimed directly at ensuring appropriate PE facilities for students at all second-level schools. Mr Higgins said that if he runs again in any contest, he would compete as an independent candidate. Speculation in recent days suggests he will announce in the summer if he will seek a second term. Independent senator Gerard Craughwell and Fine Gael MEP Sean Kelly, among others, have expressed an interest in contesting any contest for the Park. People are entitled to know, said Mr Higgins during a state visit to Greece. I have said that we are in the midst of deciding very serious matters at the present time, he said. It is best that we do that with a discourse that is civil and takes account of different viewpoints. When that is over, I also said that I am committed to a fairly heavy programme this year, but I have no difficulty whatsoever as an incumbent president directly answering the question as to what in fact are my own intentions. One point I would say is that, as somebody who has been a member of local politics and the Dail, the Seanad, and I have been a member of two Cabinets, you always anticipate what it is going to be like, and yes, I did say at one stage that getting through the term was in fact the length of my aspirations. Mr Higgins said he has laid very solid foundations in office so far and this leaves choices open as to what he may do. I think I will decide that appropriately and I will do so in plenty of time so that there will be opportunities to, if I did decide, that there will be opportunities to do that in an appropriate way, he said. The President said it is a decision he has to come to and this does not stand in the way of anyone elses choices. Parties, including Fine Gael, are considering whether to run candidates when Mr Higgins finishes his term in October, but are holding off deciding until he declares his position. Jane Lamcellari appealed via RTEs Ryan Tubridy Show for support for her sons training at the Royal Academy of Music, London. Jayden Lamcellari attends the academy every week. Britains oldest conservatoire has waived its fees to help him realise his full potential. However, Jane says it is a struggle to meet annual travel costs of about 4,000. I am a nobody, and nobody wants to help a nobody, she wrote to Tubridy, who has arranged for Jayden to appear on The Late Late Show tonight. But my 15-year-old will be a somebody that everybody will want to know and everyone will want to support one day just not yet. He will be the pride of Ireland, but Ireland will not support or help him. Jane, from Blanchardstown, who works full time and who has a 15-month-old baby girl, Ayrianna, said she was at her wits end when she wrote the email to Tubridy. Her son started playing the cello when he was three and could read music before he could read words. Her husband, Enrien, who is from Albania, is also a cellist and works part-time as a music teacher. The couple met in Crete 20 years ago. Jane was on a girlie holiday with her sister and cousin, and they went to a concert where Enrien was a member of a quartet. She convinced Enrien to move to Ireland and he plays part time with the RTE Concert Orchestra. Last September, Jayden started contacting the London Royal Academy, the Royal College of Music in London, and the Guild Hall in London. He also wrote to the Julliard School in New York, and they have invited him to play there in June. Both the Royal College and Guild Hall offered him a scholarship, but the Royal Academy said they wanted Jayden and would cover all of his fees. The family are up at 4am every weekend and travel to London, where Jayden packs a weeks learning into one day and then gets up of 5am each day during the week to practice. I have done everything to get support for my son, said Jane. I am talking about my childs quality of life. If we fail to sustain his dream, I fear that his physical and mental health will suffer. The jury of nine men and three women returned to Courtroom 1 at the courthouse on Washington St, Cork, before 3pm with their unanimous guilty verdict. The 74-year-old priest had denied indecently assaulting the boy at a school in Co Cork early in the 1980s. Tadgh ODalaigh of Woodview, Mount Merrion Avenue, Blackrock, Dublin, was convicted yesterday at Cork Circuit Criminal Court on a charge of indecently assaulting the boy on an unknown date between September 1, 1980, and January 28, 1981 at the Sacred Heart college, also known as Colaiste An Chroi Naofa, Carraig Na Bhfear, Co Cork. A victim impact report will now have to be prepared. Prosecution barrister, Siobhan Lankford, said this could be done in a week. Defence senior counsel Shane Costelloe wanted sentencing put back until May to, as he described it, put forward some kind of mitigation. It is not straightforward in light of previous matters. Ms Lankford said the State would be opposed to bail. However, after a brief adjournment in consultation with the defence, she said the State would take the view that, in light of his age and the fact that there had been no issues when on bail heretofore, they would not oppose bail on condition that he stayed away from the victim. Sentencing will take place on May 11. The victim was aged around 12 when he was in bed in the sick bay on the evening of the assault. Ms Lankford said the assault occurred at a time when the accused went in to check the victims temperature in the sick bay. The complainant said: He put his hand down and touched my testicles and penis. He did that. I just lay there. I didnt know what to do. It was probably a minute, a minute and a half. That is a long time when he is at me. He stopped. He left. I was left lying there. That is basically what happened. He said he did not tell anyone about it until about 30 years later. Mr Costelloe said: My client absolutely refutes that. He says that never happened. Mr Costelloe said ODalaigh was convicted of indecent assault on another boy in the school sickbay but this conviction was quashed by the Court of Criminal Appeal. He said the initial coverage of the accused being convicted of sexually abusing a boy in the sickbay appeared in newspapers, including the Irish Examiner, in June 2014 and that it was three days later that the complainant in the present case went to the gardai to make his complaint. I went because it was being denied [by the defendant] in the paper, he said. It made me angry I read something where he denied something. That spurred me. It made me angry. Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe has said he cannot influence banks or ask them to hold off on selling distressed loans until after the Government reviews the current status of unregulated vulture funds now operating in Ireland. Appearing before the finance committee, Mr Donohoe said it is vital that PTSB reduce the number of non-performing loans (NPLs) on its books by selling 18,000 mortgages, including 14,000 relating to private homes. Its vital across the coming period that a way be found that the NPLs that that bank had and other banks have be reduced if we want to have a safe and secure banking system, said Mr Donohoe. Fianna Fail TD John McGuinness asked that the Minister insist that the banks at least hold off on their sales until such time as these regulations and the legislation are actually reviewed. However, Mr Donohoe said the single supervisory mechanism has issued a direction to PTSB to sell off some of its non-performing loans and the bank is following this. I dont have the power available to me to intervene in the compliance with that regulation or its timing. I cannot influence, because of the fact that we are dealing with an independent regulator, how a bank responds back to how a bank responds back to their timing. But what I can do is influence what I can directly control and if I believe that there are some changes that are needed that require legislative or regulatory change, yes my objective would be to have them implemented as soon as possible. But he added: We are talking about a bank that has non-performing loans. We need a stable and secure and successful Permanent TSB in Ireland. Mr Donohoe has come under pressure from Fianna Fail, which has drafted a bill to address and regulate vulture funds operating in Ireland. The bill is due to come before the Dail next week. He has also faced intense questioning from his own party this week, many of whom believe struggling mortgage holders must be offered debt write-downs instead of so-called foreign vulture funds. Mr McGuinness suggested that the sale of PTSBs 3.7bn Project Glas loan portfolio would be the first of many sales. PTSB has 14,000 homes, AIB is lining up for some sort of sale also, and we know from the exchanges here with other banks that they too are lining up and that there will be issues now for homeowners. Mr McGuinness said the committee had sent a formal invitation to PTSB to appear before the committee next Tuesday to discuss the makeup of the loans, the length of time people have been in difficulty, and the efforts they have made to solve these difficulties. Mr Donohoe said banks should come before the committee to answer questions that you may have. I understand there may be a number of banks that will be producing results soon and for legal reasons they may not be able to comment publicly on matters in the period just before they publish their results. But I believe the banks should accept your invitation and should explain and should provide answers to the various questions that you have. More than 100 home-owners in the 250-unit Bru Na Sionna development in Shannon, Co Clare, have been told that the total bill for remedial work on fire safety deficits could be 2.25m, but that the local authority fire officer is demanding a schedule of works be set out by March 10. The owners were called to a meeting last week to update them on the progress since they were told last December about the extent of the work required and the possibility of evacuation. The meeting, at the Oakwood Arms hotel in the town, was told that only 10% of the required funds has been paid since it was agreed to raise an initial 1.25m towards the works at the management companys AGM in December. If there isnt an improvement on the 10% soon the money will begin to run out, one of the directors at the management company John Callinan told the meeting. A number of homeowners replied that they simply didnt have the money. One man who lives with his family in a three-bed duplex in the development said he went to his bank manager last December but was told he could not have a loan on the basis that he may lose his home anyway. The building firm which constructed the development, Paddy Burke builders, has gone into receivership but the receiver has possession of around 40 apartments. The meeting was told that the receiver was informed of the charge to all owners last December but has not contributed anything towards the fund. Speaking to the Irish Examiner afterwards the solicitor for the management company Conor Glendon said he is precluded by law from saying who had or had not paid, but that the management company could issue High Court proceedings against any party that does not meet its obligations. Were continuing to do the work and meeting the fire officers deadlines, Mr Glendon said. An old for sale sign at the Bru na Sionna Estate. The total bill for remedial work on fire safety deficits could be 2.25m. We didnt expect all the money in at this stage, a number of owners have said they want to pay but understandably its going to take time to get money together so non-payment isnt indicative of peoples unwillingness to pay. He said that the directors of the company are in the same difficult position as all the owners and that generally people recognise that they will have to pay if they want the works done. Some owners questioned why fire marshals had been installed since last July yet they were only told the extent of the serious problems in December. Mr Glendon said that once it was discovered there were defects, fire marshals were installed as a precaution until the extent of the damage could be assessed, which was finally confirmed in December. It was an extraordinary step to take and an expensive one but our primary concern was for safety, he told the Irish Examiner. A number of owners expressed outrage at the self-assessment regulatory system that was in place when Bru Na Sionna was built between 2005 and 2007. They were told that the fire safety certificates which they had received for their properties were aspirational, with the certs issued at the outset of the building rather than as proof that the homes were actually built according to the fire safety standards. As previously reported by this paper, the extent of the fire safety deficits were only discovered last year during preparation for litigation between the management company and the receiver for Paddy Burke over who had responsibility for completing works in the common areas. The Anglo Irish bank loans used to fund the building of Bru Na Sionna were taken over by Nama, which in turn sold them onto the vulture fund Promentoria, a subsidiary of Cerberus. Andrew Gray was at Cork Circuit Criminal Court where he was sentenced to a total of three years in prison with the last year suspended. Judge Sean O Donnabhain said of Gray, aged 44: He is of a disposition he cannot change. He is a worry to society with a difficulty that needs to be monitored. He is in high need of treatment and the risk of reoffending is high. Defence barrister, Donal OSullivan, said the accused was unable to access the equivalent of the Safer Lives programme for such offenders when he was in prison over the past few months. Mr OSullivan said the prison service would not put him on such a programme because he was not a sentenced prisoner. He was in prison on remand. Judge O Donnabhain said Gray should be put on the programme now and there is also a requirement on him to come under the supervision of the probation service on his release from prison. He was sentenced on two charges for similar offences committed in 2010 and 2017. He admitted possession of images and movie clips of child pornography at an address at North Main St, Bandon, Co Cork, on May 10, 2017. Gray was also sentenced having admitted earlier this year to possessing images and videos of child pornography in November 2010. Living at St. Vincents hostel, Anglesea Terrace, Cork, earlier this year he admitted the charge that on November 12, 2010 at Woods St, Cork, he had 28 images and two videos of child pornography. It was previously stated in court by way of background that the accused handed in his computer for repair and the images were spotted and gardai alerted. The pictures showed children with their genital areas exposed and involved in sex acts with children and in some cases with adults. The images were supplied to him after contact he made with a man in America via an internet chatroom. Originally from Wales, Gray has been living in Cork for some time. He later moved to Clonakilty, and lived for a time in Bandon. It follows the revelation that some residents who lost their caravans during Hurricane Ophelia and Storm Eleanor, have refused offers of new caravans, slowing down a 631,000 replacement programme on two halting sites in Cork. The details are contained in a report, due to be presented to councillors on Monday. It shows how the cost of emergency accommodation for the families hit by Hurricane Ophelia was almost 6,000 but rocketed to at least 26,553 after Storm Eleanor. The costs are ongoing until all replacement caravans are delivered, but the accommodation payments to four families were ceased after issues arose with receipts. The report says private security had to be hired after council staff were subjected to alleged harassment, threats and intimidation from the families affected by the storms and that 11 health and safety incidents have been officially logged with the health and safety section of Cork City Council by the staff of the Traveller Accommodation Unit. The report also reveals how some 256,000 was spent replacing 14 caravans at the Spring Lane site and five at the Carrigrohane site after Hurricane Ophelia, with half the money coming from the councils Traveller accommodation revenue budget. A further 375,000 was spent replacing 11 caravans at the Carrigrohane site and 13 will require replacement at the Spring Lane site. Half of this money will need to be sourced from the councils own resources. Fianna Fail Cllr Ken OFlynn said it was disappointing to see the behaviour of a minority causing great hardship to the honest decent members of the Traveller community. But he said the city has to adopt a zero tolerance approach to any abuse of staff. Nobody should be going to work and be at fear of abuse, he said. Cllr Mick Nugent said it was regrettable that issues had arisen with the receipts of some of the affected families. Fergus ODowd made the comments at an Oireachtas committee meeting yesterday where Irish Water said it wants to become a single public-service utility by 2021. Irish Water currently has Service Level Agreements (SLA) with the countrys local authorities, who deploy staff to carry out work on behalf of the company, which it plans to conclude once it becomes a single public-service utility. However at yesterdays Joint Oireachtas Committee on Housing, Planning and Local Government, Mr ODowd criticised Irish Water for a lack of transparency within the company, and for the costs in establishing the utility. We were told the total set-up costs of consultants would be less than 20m, said Mr ODowd. Thats the truth. And what happened? It was over 200m. They went crazy with consultants, they spent money left, right, and centre and they left people like me, who set up the company and who fully supports what you are saying here today in terms of a single utility, with egg on our faces and created trouble up and down the country. People lost their seats over this. We acted in good faith but we were told untruths, it is appalling what happened there. Mike Quinn, group CEO of Irish Waters parent company, Ervia, said the current arrangement through SLAs leads to inconsistent customer service outcomes because of the multiple and varied ways of working carried out across the country. Implementing the single public utility, where all water services staff would work directly for the national utility and deliver a joined-up single service, is the optimum way to manage our water and wastewater services, said Mr Quinn. Mr Quinn said the change would, in time, free up 70m a year in operational savings and efficiencies. Irish Water managing director Jerry Grant said there is a need to build a system that would draw water from the Shannon to serve the needs of the capital. The Liffey is currently providing 40% of all its water resources to meet the needs of the greater Dublin area, said Mr Grant. It is absolutely at its sustainable limit. If we had a dry period, a critical dry period, we would be in serious trouble in the greater Dublin area. There is no quick way out of this other than to build a new scheme that will secure future supply. That is the Shannon scheme. Mr Quinn said he does not believe the public realise the improvements that are needed to the water network. I dont think weve done a good job on engaging with the public on the challenges facing Irish Water, he said. There is a complete lack of knowledge around the state of the infrastructure that provides those services. We have a job of work to do this year, which I will be leading, to make sure that message is understood by the public, why we are spending the amount of money we are spending to improve the water infrastructure. The lengthy meeting saw a number of politicians query officials and make observations on Irish Water. Cork North Central Solidarity TD Mick Barry criticised plans to introduce excessive use charges, which he said are an attempt to introduce water charges through the back door. He questioned how Irish Water would determine excessive usage when 42% of homes are unmetered. However, Mr Grant would not respond to Fianna Fail senator Jennifer Murnane OConnors attempt to raise one persons complaint about their service. That was a Joe Duffy conversation that youve reported, and frankly he got it completely wrong, as very often happens on Joe Duffy, said Mr Grant. I met a number of people engaged in different lines of business, ranging from the equine industry to agriculture, and much more besides. When I brought up the subject of Brexit in order to seek to gauge the Dutch attitude towards it, it was met with a shrug of the shoulders and a generally high level of apathy and lack of any real interest. The Dutch are already making preparations for increased customs activity once the UK leaves the EU in anticipation of the event. A hard Brexit will have significant implications for the Dutch agriculture, horticulture and flower exporting sectors, given how much trade these sectors do with the UK. However, the Dutch seem to be taking a very pragmatic approach and the attitude seems to be what will be, will be. One commented that the British will be the British. This level of apathy is very understandable given how farcical the whole debacle is becoming. The reality is that little progress has been made in the UK regarding the fairly imminent exit from the EU. One certainly gets the strong impression that the country is still fighting the referendum campaign rather than drawing up a coherent exit plan. We have seen a number of supposedly key speeches being delivered by senior British politicians in recent weeks, but we are still no clearer as to what might unfold. Boris Johnson wants the UK to leave both the single market and the customs union in order to allow Britain strike its own trade deals and set its own standards. He is pushing a Liberal Brexit, whatever that means sovereignty for the leavers and liberal values for the remainers. He wants to restore the UKs position as an independent free trading nation. However, leaving a trading block of 500 million people in order to forge new trade deals does not make sense. Under the EU regime that the UK believes has hampered its development so much, Germany has managed to export 150% more than the UK to India and 250% more than the UK to South Africa both countries which have close historical relationships with the UK. To suggest that the EU restricts flexibility through rules and regulations just does not stack up. It has not impeded Germany, nor indeed, has it impeded Ireland. David Davis does not want a race to the bottom. If he really doesnt, then he is certainly doing his best to hide it. The reality is that the UKs biggest trade relationship is with the EU, which accounts for 43% of UK exports and 54% of imports of goods and services. The US accounts for just 18% of UK exports. Walking away from this sort of economic relationship does not make a lot of economic sense, but then again sense has hardly been in ample supply since June 23, 2016. The word is now that the British prime minister is talking about managed divergence. The suggestion is that the UK/EU trading relationship would be broken into three baskets. Complete alignment would describe a situation where the UK would follow EU rules and regulation. The second basket would be described as managed mutual recognition, meaning that each side would agree on common objectives, but each would choose its own rules. The third basket is where the UK would abandon EU regulations and do whatever it wants. The theory is that different types of trade would fit into one of the three baskets. This concept of managed divergence would bring the whole process to an elevated level of insanity. The notion that the EU would agree to such an arrangement is about as likely as Donald Trump introducing gun controls. From Irelands perspective, the future is still fraught with deep uncertainty. There is not a lot we can do about this, other than making sure that our economy is as strong as possible in the longer run. In that context, Ireland 2040 should be welcomed by anybody who cares about the long-term future of the country. Opposition politicians and other begrudgers clearly do not. If the plan was to be delivered in full by 2040, Ireland would certainly be in a much better place than it is today. It is good to have a plan and aim for the stars. From the Archive Chiming with History An artists rendering of the storied Dhammazedi Bell. / Illustration: Totty Swe The Dhammazedi Bell, believed to be the worlds largest, has rested stubbornly at the bottom of the Yangon River since 1599. Periodically it floats to the surface of the national consciousness as a source of pride, longing, superstition, fear and inevitably, perhaps conflict. We look back at this most fraught of national symbols by revisiting this article from The Irrawaddy magazines May 2014 issue. YANGON Multi-beam Echo Sounding Survey. 3D Seismic Survey. GPRGround Penetrating Radar. The language in an official method statement proposing the recovery of Myanmars famed Dhammazedi Bell owes everything to technology and science. But this is a story in which star billing goes not to science but to superstition, and a supporting cast of dreamers, schemers and assorted would-be heroes. Superstitious government leaders are just some of those who believe that the discovery of a bell said to have sunk to the bottom of the Yangon River off Monkey Point more than 400 years ago could be the key to the countrys rise from its current status as one of Asias poorest nations. Believers romantic desires to tie the Dhammazedi Bell with the national destiny has resulted in several failed missions over recent decades to reclaim the bell, believed to be one of the biggest in the world. Hollywood star Richard Geres purported interest in the bell was never more than a rumor. But over the years a motley crew of individuals and companies from the United States, Australia, Japan and Singapore has expressed interest in joining a search that for Myanmar Buddhists would be the equivalent of a quest for the Holy Grail. Non-believers, including former political dissidents, once thundered that any attempt to salvage the bell (reckoned to lie in the mud under 40 feet of water in a strong current), would only serve to legitimize an illegal military regime. The former junta, for its part, decreed that only citizens of the country had the right to search for the bell because finding it was a national issue. Why such a frenzy? For answers, we need to look at the bells fabled history. A Bad Foreigner The bell was named after King Dhammazedi, who ruled the Mon-speaking Hanthawaddy Kingdom from 1471 to 1492. A devout Buddhist, Dhammazedi had the bell cast in 1490 as a donation to Shwedagon Pagoda, Myanmars most sacred shrine. Made from more than 290 tons of copper, gold, silver and tin alloy, it is said to have been more than twice as heavy as the Bell of Good Luck, a Chinese temple bell that at 116 metric tons has held the world record since it was cast in 2000. The bell remained at its intended home until 1608, when the ruler of Thanlyin, on the opposite shore of the Yangon River from Yangon (then called Dagon), decided he had a better use for all that metal. At the time, Thanlyin (or Syriam) was under the control of Filipe de Brito e Nicote, a Portuguese mercenary who in 1599 had led a Rakhine force that had sacked Thanlyin and Bago, then the capital of Lower Myanmar. De Brito (better known in Myanmar as Nga Zinga) had already earned the ire of local people by melting down several bells to forge cannons. But it was his decision to steal the Dhammazedi Bell for this purpose that ensured his infamy in this country for centuries to come. Using elephants and forced labor, he had the bell moved to the Yangon River, where it was placed on a raft for transport to Thanlyin. However, much to the satisfaction of onlookers, de Britos plan to turn a sacred object into weapons of war failed when the raft fell apart and deposited the bell far below the rivers surface. Five years after this episode, King Anaukpetlun of the Taungoo dynasty recaptured Thanlyin and had de Brito impaled on a stakea punishment reserved for defilers of Buddhist temples. But 400 years after the Portuguese governor of Thanlyin met his ignominious end, the story of how he tried, and failed, to steal the Dhammazedi Bell continues to resonate in the imaginations of Myanmar citizens and foreigners alike. Gong-Ho Since then, there have been many attempts to retrieve the bell, but poor visibility, silting, nearby shipwrecks and four centuries of shifting currents have so far made the task impossible. But everybody knows that it is still thereas late as the 19th century, some claimed that it was visible at low tideand so the search continues. Some who have tried and failed, including tycoons and powerful generals, now say the quest is cursed. Jim Blunt, an American diver from California, was told as much when he made his own attempt in 1995 with the cooperation of the Myanmar authorities. Several divers had already died looking for the great bell, including two Myanmar Navy divers who became trapped inside a wreck and died horribly. Consequently, the search [began] for outside expertise, Mr. Blunt told the London-based newspaper The Independent. Mr. Blunt carried out 116 dives over a period of two years. In a documentary film about his experiences, he claimed that he banged his fist on the bell and was rewarded by a metallic sound. Historian U Chit San Win has made it his mission in life to relocate this lost artifact of Myanmars past. Since 1987, he has led a number of searches, including one in 1996 that was supported by then Military Intelligence chief Gen. Khin Nyunt. During one attempt in the 1990s, U Chit San Win lost a son to rabies. However, when asked what he thought about the curse that many believe is on the bell, he declined to give a direct answer. Others have been less reticent about their concerns. At a recent meeting between U Chit San Win and a government minister that was observed by a senior member of The Irrawaddys staff, the minister attentively listened to a detailed method statement and proposal to launch another search, but in the end declined to back the project because, he said, he feared for the safety of his family. Saving the Nation Despite such misgivings, some remain determined to find the bell that they believe will save the nation. In October, U Khin Shwe, a leading Myanmar businessman and politician, announced a plan to fund another hunt for the bell, saying that he would spend more than US$10 million if necessary to return it to the glittering Shwedagon Pagoda. Weve already hired big ships to salvage the bell. If we succeed, we will put it on display at Shwedagon, he told The Irrawaddy. One foreign expert predicted that the whole operation would cost between $5 million and $10 million. Whatever the cost, Im ready to spend it. Some suspect U Khin Shwes agenda. As a powerful member of the ruling Union Solidarity and Development Party sitting in the Amyotha Hluttaw, or Upper House of Parliament, he is regarded as a controversial figure. Both he and his Zaykabar Company, a conglomerate with interests in the construction and telecommunications industries, have been on the US sanctions list since 2007, and more recently he was involved in a highly publicized land rights dispute with farmers on the northern fringes of Yangon. U Khin Shwe first came to the attention of policy makers in the West in the 1990s, when he paid the Washington, D.C.-based public relations firm Bain and Associates more than $20,000 a month to help burnish the image of Myanmars military junta. To return the favor, state media proudly proclaimed him to be a doctor with an honorary Ph.D. from Washington University of the United States, which turned out to be an unaccredited degree-mill incorporated in Hawaii but operating from a post office box in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. Never one to miss a chance to improve his public image, U Khin Shwe (who is related to powerful Pyidaungsu Hluttaw, or Union Parliament, Speaker U Shwe Mann through his sons marriage to the daughter of the former top general) has more recently joined other junta cronies in attempting to cozy up to opposition leader and Nobel laureate Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. Many suspect, then, that his high-profile plans to find the Dhammazedi Bell are little more than just another PR exercise designed to enhance his personal status. Mystical Powers vs. High Tech In any case, if he is serious about finding the bell, he has no shortage of people willing to offer words of encouragement. One well-known monk from Mon State has suggested that his mystical powers could ensure the success of the mission. But as a veteran of the quest, U Chit San has more practical advice: Go high-tech. I dont believe the bell can be recovered without the use of the latest technology, because according to my experience, using local technology wont work, he told The Irrawaddy last year. Nearly two years ago, it looked like U Chit San Wins dream might finally come true. At a seminar held in Yangon in June 2012, a Singapore-based trading company, SD Mark International LLP Co., said it was willing to spend up to $10 million to finance a non-profit project to find the bell and convey it back to Shwedagon. The search was expected to take 18 months to complete. But since it was first announced, nothing has come of it. According to a source familiar with the project, it was quietly shut down by the Ministry of Culture, which had planned to participate, because of concerns about a lack of funding. U Chit San Win said he has no intention of giving up. It has to be out there somewhere, he said. Even as he said these words, however, he looked somber, as if he were reflecting on his past failures and on the loss of his son. Now in his late sixties, he seemed resigned to the possibility that he might not be around to witness the day the bell is restored to its former glory. One hurdle, he acknowledged, is that many in the country dont want the bell to be found by foreigners. Thats why he supports U Khin Shwes mission, he said. The bell, he says, is a beacon of hope. Our country is so poor and plagued with conflict. Many people believe that if the bell is found, it will bring us peace and prosperity, he said. But will the spirits that many believe saved the Dhammazedi Bell from being turned into cannons now allow it to fall into the hands of shady businessmen? Many might argue that if that is to be its fate, perhaps it is better off where it issubmerged in mud, far from the grasp of mortal men and their schemes and dreams. Kyaw Hsu Mon contributed reporting. This article first appeared in The Irrawaddys May 2014 print edition. Food Eat Till You're Full: Brunch at Babett Feature: A selection of items from Babett's brunch set menu. / Supplied YANGON Babett, a mainly Spanish and Mediterranean-themed restaurant at Hotel G, is offering a new brunch set menu for those who like to combine their breakfast and lunch. The restaurant was busy when I arrived on a recent day at noon. Babetts interior is a perfect match for its name, which means a young lady, with its colorful theme, comfy couches and a combination of regular and high tables. It also has an outdoor area. Inside, the walls are decorated with vintage Burmese artwork and antiques. The five-course brunch set menu is available on Sundays from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. and runs 40,000 kyats ($30) per person. Each course includes a selection of items to choose from, and customers can pick up to two items per course. For the Starters, I went with the tealeaf salad and the Spanish ham croquetas. These items didnt take long to prepare and reached the table in 15 minutes. Tealeaf salad is on of my favorite-foods list and I was dying to know how they prepare traditional Burmese dishes in this Spanish-themed restaurant. They did not disappoint. The salad was very good because it wasnt too oily and they used good quality leaves. The Spanish ham croquetas, a cooked ball of potato and ham, tasted rich, sweet and so soft. The next category was Eggs, and I asked for recommendations. The staff chose the mimosa eggs and the 64-degree egg with espuma of grilled bread. Their chef visited the tables asking customers if they wanted anything else and explaining the ingredients and how the items were cooked. I thought the service was cool and friendly. He said the mimosa eggs were a customer favorite, even with kids. True to his word, the eggs were very good but a little bit too salty for my taste. I preferred the 64-degree egg, which was served with spinach and tasted rich. I wondered at how carefully they must have had to cook the egg and place it on top of the bread and vegetables. For Pizzetta & Pastas, I chose their signature G pizza. Topped with tomato sauce, Serrano ham, pepperoni, mozzarella and olives, it smelled amazing and was one of my favorites of the brunch. It was then time for the main course, Babetts Sunday Special, and I ordered the Mediterranean sea bass papillote. Even though I was nearly full, I still wanted to try a bit of each course I had left. By this time the restaurant was super busy and the orders took a little too long. On the other hand, the wait gives you more time to chat with friends and digest the last course. The sea bass arrived and I could tell the fish was fresh after just one bite. It tasted sweet and the raw tomato gravy was not sour, pairing perfectly with the fish. This dish was really something special and I would go back to have it again. The Deserts were still left, but I was already full, having also had a glass of wine. The brunch set menu includes a free flow of juice, cocktails and sparkling wine. So if you love sparkling wine, this set menu is perfect for you. Their brunch is not a buffet, but it has many items to choose from and you are sure to leave super full. The food is very good and the staff is friendly and willing to help you with your orders. The brunch set menu is served every Sunday at Babett, located at the top of Yawmingyi Road, beside the Park Royal Hotel Yangon. The menu items may vary from week to week. Burma EU Set to Prepare Sanctions on Myanmar Generals Diplomats A human skull is seen in a shallow grave in Inn Din, Myanmar, October 26, 2017. / Reuters BRUSSELS The European Union will start preparing sanctions against Myanmar generals over killings of Rohingya Muslims by formally calling on the blocs foreign policy chief next week to draw up a list of possible names, two diplomats said. Any new travel bans and asset freezes would be the EUs toughest measures yet to try to hold the military accountable for the abuses, likely joining US and Canadian sanctions already in place. Ministers will call on (Federica) Mogherini to propose restrictive measures on senior members of the Myanmar military for systematic human rights abuses, without delay, one diplomat said on Thursday, referring to EU sanctions. Foreign ministers will also ask Mogherini and the EUs foreign service, the EEAS, on Monday to look at ways to strengthen the blocs 1990s-era arms embargo on the Southeast Asian country that remains in place. In a statement expected to be released on Monday at a regular gathering of EU foreign ministers, the bloc is also expected to reiterate its call for the release of Reuters reporters detained on Dec. 12 over accusations that they violated Myanmars Official Secrets Act. The two had been working on a Reuters investigation into the killing of 10 Rohingya Muslim men who were buried in a mass grave in Rakhine State after being hacked to death or shot by ethnic Rakhine Buddhist neighbors and soldiers. No names of generals to be targeted for sanctions have been yet discussed, the diplomats said, but the United States said in December it was sanctioning Major General Maung Maung Soe, who is accused of a crackdown on the Rohingya minority in Rakhine. EU sanctions lists are often coordinated with Washington. The EUs decision to consider sanctions reflects resistance to such measures in the UN Security Council, where veto-wielding powers Russia and China said this month they believe the situation in Rakhine was stable and under control. The United States and United Nations have described the military crackdown in Myanmar as ethnic cleansing. About 655,000 Rohingya have fled Rakhine for shelter over the border in Bangladesh, according to the United Nations. Burma Generals Prep $15M of New Fencing For Border With Bangladesh The Irrawaddy NAYPYITAW The Upper House of Parliament on Thursday heard the Home Affairs Ministrys 20 billion kyats ($15 million) plan to raise several more kilometers of fencing along Myanmars border with Bangladesh and carry out other related work. Home Affairs Deputy Minister Major General Aung Soe told the Upper House session that the money would come from the presidents emergency fund and be handed over to the Ministry of Defense to carry out the work in Rakhine State. He asked the session to make a record of the project, which it did. With the presidents approval, the fund can be appropriated without approval from Parliament. Fencing was built along 204 km of Myanmars 295-km border with Bangladesh in three phases between 2009 and 2015. In phase four, an 11.5-mile [18.5-km] fence was put up along the border during the 2016-17 fiscal year. Another 3.2-mile Y-shaped fence topped with barbed wire coils is being built during the 2017-18 fiscal year. Fencing will have been put up along 14.7 miles of border when that work is completed, Maj-Gen Aung Soe said. The 20 billion kyats from the presidents emergency fund will be used to build a Y-shaped fences topped with barbed wire coils along an additional 18.5 km this fiscal year along with other related infrastructure including a 12.2-meter-wide patrol route along the fence, 161 reinforced concrete conduits and eight buildings including three warehouses. The old fences are not strong enough and people can cross over them or remove them. However, we dont yet know about [the quality of] the new fences. We want better fences so that people from the other side cannot enter illegally. If the fence cannot prevent people on the other side of the border from entering illegally, it will be a waste of money to build a fence. It is the responsibility of the ministries to spend the funding effectively, said lawmaker U Pe Than, of Rakhine States Myebon Township. U Pe Than, a central executive committee member of the Arakan National Party, said the project would be adequately funded but stressed that the ministries had to spend the money effectively because the fence was key to preventing illegal immigration and the threat from the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army. The Upper House also made a record of another 1 billion kyats from the presidents emergency fund that the Border Affairs Ministry will use to upgrade two gravel roads connecting Ngakhuya to Zetipyin and the Kyikanpyin junction to the Kyaukpyinseik camp in Rakhine States Hla Phoe Khaung Village. The two roads are a combined 18.5 km in length. Border Affairs Deputy Minister Major General Than Htut told the session that the road upgrades would contribute not only to the border areas security but also to transportation, health, social affairs and the education of local people. The Implementation Committee for Recommendations of the Rakhine State Advisory Commission led by Kofi Annan had instructed authorities to upgrade the roads. Defense Deputy Minister Major General Myint New said his ministry would also spend 5 billion kyats from the emergency fund on renovating 882 buildings belonging to the militarys Western Command that were damaged by Cyclone Mora. The damage caused by the natural disaster was inspected by proper teams and 882 out of 1,009 buildings hit by the cyclone will be repaired in the first phase during the 2017-18 fiscal year, he said. The presidents emergency fund was known as the reserve fund in the past, explained U Khin Cho of the Lower House Public Accounts Committee. If the president approves, the fund can be spent without seeking the approval of Parliament. However, it is necessary to inform Parliament of the spending. Translated from Burmese by Myint Win Thein. Burma Two Men Arrested in Mandalay Over Foiled Attempt to Send 52 Illegal Workers to China Fifty-two workers from Myinchan District, who were being smuggled to China, were intercepted at the Ohn Chaw checkpoint on Wednesday / Kyaw Thet Htwe's Facebook Mandalay Police on Friday charged two men under the overseas employment law for attempting to illegally send a group of 52 workers, including five women, to China. The workers, all from Myingyan District, were detained on Wednesday at the Ohn Chaw checkpoint on the Mandalay-Lashio Highway on the outskirts of Mandalay, as they were being sent to Guangzhou in southern China. Weve arrested Kyaw Soe Lin and Aung Lin from Myingyan for working as employment agents without a business license for overseas employment and sending workers abroad illegally, Police Lieutenant Zaw Myint told The Irrawaddy. The two men are currently being detained at the central prison in Mandalay as police continue their investigation. Police told The Irrawaddy that each of the workers paid about 500,000 kyats to the agents, who promised to find them work with a furniture factory in Guangzhou, where they could earn 8 yuan (US$1.25/1,670 kyat) per hour. We received a tip-off about human trafficking and checked the bus. Then we found out the workers were about to be sent cross the border illegally, explained Police Lieutenant Zaw Myint from the Ohn Chaw police station. They have no passports and no proper employment documents. If something happened to them at their destination, there would be no one to help them. The police officer said that even though the workers were not being trafficked, they still faced employment security risks and being arrested for entering another country illegally. We explained to them that they could be arrested in a foreign country and there would be no one to help them for they have no proper documents. Weve told them not to trust the agents so easily and not to just see the money, he said, adding that the workers had been sent back to their homes in Myinchan on Thursday and asked to spread word of their experience to others. Lack of employment opportunities and low salaries in Myanmar encourage local workers to seek work in factories and on plantations in neighboring countries such as China and Thailand. According to police, the incident on Wednesday was the first such large-scale one Mandalay in recent year. In 2007, police were able to stop two girls who are about to be trafficked to China, and return them to their parents. There have been at least five incidents of people being trafficked and being sent illegally to work in China that were halted here at Ohn Chaw. However, this is the first time in several years weve found such a large group, the police lieutenant said. In contrast, he said, there was at least one such incident every day in Muse on the MyanmarChina border, with Chinese authorities sending back workers who had crossed the border illegally. In Muse, Myanmar workers are being handed over to us almost every day. When we check, we find they were cheated by illegal agents who promised them they would get jobs in China. We are trying to educate the locals, but the locals also need to open their eyes and ears, not just focus on the money, Zaw Myint said. News Four Rohingya Sentenced to Death for Deadly 2016 Attack in Rakhine A Myanmar Army unit patrols in Maungdaw Township near Rakhine States border with Bangladesh on Oct. 16, 2016. / The Irrawaddy SITTWE Four Rohingya involved in an attack on a police outpost in northern Rakhine State in October 2016 were sentenced to death on Friday by a special court in the states Maungdaw District. The four were among 30 people found guilty of involvement in an attack on Nga Khura Police outpost in northern Maungdaw Township on Oct. 9, 2016 that killed two security officials. The other 26 convicts earned prison sentences ranging from 10 to 20 years. Another 15 suspects were released, according to Deputy District Judge U Nyo Lwin Oo. The court sentences the four to death for the crime of homicide, said the deputy judge, adding that the 45 people were initially charged under articles 303, 326, 33 and 34 of the Penal Code. Separately, another 34 Rohingya accused of involvement in the attack were sentenced to 18 years imprisonment each on Wednesday. The deputy judge said hearings in the cases of another 294 Rohingya were under way at the special court and verdicts would be announced soon. Additionally, 76 Rohingya villagers accused of involvement in a series of attacks on security outposts on Aug. 25, 2017 have been charged with committing acts of terrorism, according to the Rakhine State Attorney Generals Office. The Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army, which has been denounced by the government as a terrorist organization, claimed responsibility for the attacks, which killed 11 security members. Since it has been declared a terrorist organization, anyone arrested in relation to the attacks was charged with terrorism, said Rakhine State Attorney General U Kyaw Hla Tun. Maungdaw District Court also declared as fugitives 509 Rohingya accused of involvement in the attacks but who are not in custody. News Wa Political Parties Call for Government to Lift Travel Curbs on Their People Representatives of UWSA and NDAA troops in Mongla travel together to peace talks. / Lawi Weng / The Irrawaddy Two Wa political parties have asked the government to allow their people to move freely in northern Shan State after authorities blocked members of the ethnic group from traveling to Kyaingtong and Tachilek. Ethnic Wa in the two major towns have also been stopped from returning to their homes near Pangsang Township. Meanwhile, ethnic Wa students who have just finished exams at government schools have also been prevented from going back to their homelands, according to a joint statement released by the Wa Democracy Party and the Wa National Unity Party. Blocking them from traveling benefits no one. We are asking the government to let our civilians travel, said Nyi Palote, chairman of the Wa National Unity Party. He pointed out that there are two tribes the La and Loi La who are ethnic Wa and live in the region but whose members have been allowed to travel freely, but not other Wa people. This action from the authorities is intended to divide these tribes and the Wa, said Nyi Palote. Peace is important in our lives, as we all know. We all expect to have peace. But restricting the ethnic Wa from traveling around the country is not building peace. Instead, it will block peace and national reconciliation and it is discrimination against the Wa, the parties said in the joint statement. The Myanmar Armys action appears to have been born out of its animosity toward the United Wa State Army (UWSA), which is a leading member if the Federal Political Negotiation and Consultative Committee (FPNCC). The FPNCC, also known as the Northern Alliance, consists of seven ethnic armed groups the UWSA, the National Democratic Alliance Army (NDAA), Taang National Liberation Front (TNLA), Arakan Army (AA), Myanmar National Democratic Alliance (MNDAA), Kachin Independence Army (KIA), and Shan State Army (SSPP/SSA). But the army appears to have singled out the Wa. There are other ethnic armed groups in the FNPCC, not only the UWSA. They should not target the Wa by blocking only them from traveling, Nyi Palote told the BBCs Burmese language service. The UWSA signed a ceasefire agreement with the government in 1989, but it has yet to sign the Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement (NCA) despite the government urging it to do so. The UWSAs territory borders China and traded goods flow over the frontier daily. The UWSA also shares a border with Mongla Township in Special Region 2, which is run by the NDAA. The two armed groups have agreed to allow all trade and citizens to cross their border and there are some UWSA troops based at a port on the Mekong River near Mongla. The NDAA has agreed to let the UWSA take care of the river port and nearby areas. But the Myanmar Army wants the UWSA troops to withdraw from the port. The travel restrictions on the ethnic Wa relate to the UWSA troops based in Mongla, U Zaw Htay, director of the Presidents Office, told reporters in Naypyidaw earlier this week, noting there were about 4000 UWSA troops based in Mongla. The Tatmadaw (Myanmar Army) is negotiating with the UWSA over this issue, he said. The UWSA has asked the Myanmar Army several times not to interfere in Mongla, according to Nyi Rang, a UWSA spokesperson based in Lashio. We will take care of this with our brothers, he said, referring to the NDAA. Some leaders of the NDAA also want the UWSA troops to leave their region, but they do not dare say so publicly. As such, they have sought help from the Myanmar government and the military to pressure the UWSA to pull out of Mongla. This dispute flared after the first Panglong peace conference was held in 2016. Some NDAA leaders who joined the conference asked the Myanmar government for help. But the information was leaked to the UWSA, who have deployed thousands of troops in Mongla and taken control of several mountain bases. The UWSA agreed to withdraw some of the troops from Mongla last year with some units of the UWSA and NDAA posting shared photos on social media to show their improved relationship. The UWSA is the largest ethnic armed force in Myanmar with an estimated 40,000 troops. The UWSA has influence and power, and some NDAA leaders are not happy about its presence in their territory. My understanding is that (NDAA) invited the UWSA to set up bases in their region, said Nyi Rang, the UWSA spokesperson. Specials Ninety Percent of Rohingya Population Ejected from Rakhine Smoke is seen on Myanmar's side of the border as an exhausted Rohingya refugee woman is carried to shore after crossing the Bangladesh-Myanmar border by boat through the Bay of Bengal, in Shah Porir Dwip, Bangladesh, on Sept. 11, 2017. / Reuters YANGON At least 90 percent of the Rohingya population of conflict-torn northern Rakhine State has fled to neighboring Bangladesh in the wake of the governments clearance operations following Muslim militant attacks last year, according to The Irrawaddys calculations based on government and INGOs statistics. Following the attacks in August, majority-Muslim Maungdaw and Buthidaung townships, as well as nearby Rathedaung township, all in northern Rakhine State, saw an exodus of Rohingya to refugee camps in the neighboring country. Rohingya in the camps have recounted arbitrary killings, rapes and arson by Myanmar security forces. The Irrawaddy analyzed recent updated regional statistics reports from the General Administrative Department for the three townships. The reports are dated October 2017. The GAD is under the military-controlled Ministry of Home Affairs. Along with the GAD reports, The Irrawaddys tally also takes into account figures on the number of Rohingya in Bangladeshi camps collected by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. OCHA said that between Aug. 25 and Jan. 27, 688,000 new arrivals were registered. Only 79,000 Rohingya remain The GAD reports on Maungdaw, Buthidaung and Rathedaung put the total Rohingya population before the latest crisis at 767,038. A senior official from Maungdaw Districts General Administration Department told The Irrawaddy that the statistics were collected in 2016. The official spoke on condition of anonymity as he was not authorized to talk to the media. (Maungdaw District comprises Maungdaw and Buthidaung townships.) A comparison of the GADs population figures with OCHAs camp registration numbers shows that around 90 percent of the Rohingya population fled into Bangladesh and merely 10 percent (79,038) remained in the three townships in western Myanmar. That 90 percent does not include people who died, went missing or were arrested. While the reports were dated October 2017, they do not include figures on people with internally displaced person (IDP) status, Rohingya fatalities, Hindu or Rakhine victims, or damage caused by both military and security officials. The Myanmar Army, or Tatmadaw, announced on Aug. 31 that it had killed 370 suspected militants of the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army . According to the GADs numbers, Rohingya accounted for 93 percent of the Maungdaw population, and 84 percent in Buthidaung. The number was significantly lower in Rathedaung Township, at just 6 percent. Muslim militants attacks also displaced nearly 30,000 non-Muslims in Maungdaw district mainly from the Mro, Thet and Daingnet Arakanese sub-ethnic groups, as well as Hindus. However, the majority of the displaced non-Muslims including Buddhists have already arrived back in Maungdaw, while hundreds of Hindu IDPs await government resettlement. To get a clearer idea of the population ratios of Rakhine, Rohingya and Hindu groups before Aug. 25, see the following infographic pie chart created by The Irrawaddy, accompanied by footage of the exodus originally posted on OCHAs website. See the total population of each town by clicking on the appropriate color in the following infographic: Emotive terms avoided Neither of the terms Bengali or Rohingya are used in the GAD reports. Nor is there any mention of the Muslim community from Rakhine State, the term coined by Daw Aung San Suu Kyi when she requested that the U.S. Embassy refrain from applying the controversial term Rohingya in 2016. In line with her instruction, the final report issued by the Kofi Annan-led Advisory Commission on Rakhine State avoided using the emotive term. In place of any of the above terms, the GAD report simply says foreigner or Bangladeshi, implying that they are illegal immigrants from Bangladesh. GAD officials from Maungdaw and Buthidaung confirmed that the term Bangladeshi in the reports refers to the Rohingya. Its not clear whether Daw Aung San Suu Kyi sent an internal memo to ministries instructing them to use the term Muslims in Rakhine State instead of Bengali and Rohingya. The GAD report also avoids mention of burned Rakhine and Hindu villages. The Irrawaddy witnessed some burned sites at Buddhist villages like Khone Daing and a village from Kha Maung Seik village tract while accompanying a tour of Maungdaw for foreign diplomats in October 2017. The GAD reports do not clearly mention the number of Rakhine or Muslim villages in each township. They only list the total number of villages. According to GAD officials from Maungdaw and Buthidaung, Maungdaw comprises 364 villages, of which 272 are Muslim (or 74 percent of the villages in Maungdaw). Nearly 70 villages were spared arson attacks after the months-long clearance operations by government security forces, they said. Buthidaung comprises 339 villages, including 173 Rohingya villages, or 51 percent. A senior GAD officer in Buthidaung said 30 of the townships 173 villages were burned to the ground. He requested anonymity due to the sensitivity of the issue. Rathedaung region is dominated by ethnic Rakhine; it had just 22 Muslim villages before the conflict. Rohingya sources said that only two or three villages remain intact; the rest were completely torched. See specific village numbers by clicking on the different colored areas of the graphic. Mosques reduced to rubble Maungdaw Township had 836 Muslim religious buildings but its unclear whether GAD included both madrassas and mosques in this figure. On the other hand, there are 84 Buddhist monasteries, and 61 pagodas and temples. The GAD reports state that there were 442 Muslim religious buildings in Buthidaung and 87 in Rathedaung, while the number of Buddhist monasteries is nearly 400, plus 110 stupas and temples in the two townships. The Hindu community has a mere 17 temples in Maungdaw district, which also houses one Christian church. Some religious buildings of both the Rakhine and Rohingya communities were destroyed in 2017, but this is ignored in the report. But U Khin Maung Than, the chairman of the Arakan National Partys Maungdaw Chapter, told The Irrawaddy that a Buddhist monastic school with hundreds of students in Nantha Taung Village and a pagoda in Shwe Yinaye village in Maungdaw were burned by Rohingya militants. The Irrawaddy was unable to reach Maungdaw district administrative official U Ye Htut for comment on Thursday. A Muslim civil servant from Buthidaung Township told The Irrawaddy that at least 20 mosques have been demolished since late 2017. A senior Buthidaung Township official said, They were probably destroyed during the [August-December] conflicts. As far as I know there have been no new incidents in the area. Buthidaung resident U Tun Thar (name changed for his safety) told The Irrawaddy that every single Muslim village has at least one mosque or place of worship. Contradicting the GAD officials claim that there have been no new incidents, U Tun Thar alleged that in early February, five decades-old mosques in abandoned villages in Taung Bazar, located near a border police outpost, had been torn down by local Buddhist mobs and looters. He said another one in Ale Chaung village, which was recently designated as the site of a new border police regimental base, was also destroyed by residents of neighboring villages. Displaced Rohingya Adul Wahid (not his real name) from Rathedaung Township said that the century-old Zay Di Pyin mosque was also completely pulled down by locals. The Irrawaddy independently verified this during a visit there last December. Adul Wahid recently heard that two mosques in Oo Daung and Myin Hlut villages in southern Maungdaw were also bulldozed very recently. A Buddhist relief worker who has close ties with the governments resettlement program there told The Irrawaddy on condition of anonymity that the rest of the Muslim villages in southern Maungdaw were bulldozed between January and early February. He recounted that Muslim villages that had been situated along the highway between downtown Maungdaw and Taung Pyo Letwei in northern Maungdaw had been cleared out. He estimated that at least two-thirds of the Muslim villages had disappeared. See details below. Burned-out sites flattened When The Irrawaddy visited last December, most of the villages in southern Maungdaw and some in northern Maungdaw remained as burned-out sites. The smoldering remains of one of the biggest Muslim enclaves, Myo Thu Gyi, which previously had a population of about 8,600 living in 1,230 houses, had already been bulldozed, as had the Ka Nyin Tan Muslim quarter. At that time, locals told The Irrawaddy that heavy machinery such as bulldozers, dump trucks and steamrollers had been hired by the local authorities. On Friday, Human Rights Watch (HRW) issued an urgent release regarding government mass demolitions in northern Rakhine. Its satellite images showed that at least 55 Rohingya villages partially destroyed by arson since Aug. 25, 2017 have subsequently been bulldozed. HRWs Asia director Brad Adams was quoted in a statement as saying, Bulldozing these areas threatens to erase both the memory and the legal claims of the Rohingya who lived there. The statement agrees with the facts cited above by Abdu Wahid. Myin Hlut village tract was partially burned in the late 2017 attacks, but was bulldozed between January and Feb. 13. On Dec. 1, 2017, the governments information committee announced that houses had been built in over 20 villages across the state in an effort managed by the Union Enterprise for Humanitarian Assistance, Resettlement and Development (UEHRD), led by Dr. Win Myat Aye. He told Agence-France Presse a couple of weeks ago that the bulldozing of burned sites was part of a plan to rebuild villages. He was quoted in an AFP report as saying, When [the refugees] come back they can live in their place of origin or nearest to their place of origin. HRW urged the UN Security Council and international aid agencies to demand the government immediately stop the demolition projects, saying the sites should be preserved until a UN fact-finding mission is granted permission to enter the area. Adams said, Deliberately demolishing villages to destroy evidence of grave crimes is obstruction of justice. Distrust grows on both sides During a trip by Home Affairs Minister Lt.-Gen Kyaw Swe to Bangladesh last week, the Bangladeshi government handed him a list of 8,032 returnees. Myanmar officials have been scrutinizing the profiles of refugees to screen for anyone involved in ARSAs serial attacks. Meanwhile the flight of the Rohingya from rural areas of Buthidaung and Rathedaung continues. According to the Ministry of Home Affairs updated headcount of new arrivals at the Gawdu Thara shore in southern Maungdaw Township, at least 3,206 people fled between the beginning of January and Feb. 21, and 804 new arrivals were encamped near the seaside. Although the Rohingya exodus continues, some Muslims are determined to stay in abandoned villages. Abdul Wahid is one of them. He has been sheltering in Du Oo Thay Ma village of Buthidaung Township after his home was set on fire by Rakhine vigilantes in the hope of being granted access to a government rehabilitation project. He said, We are not traitors and have been faithfully living in Rathedaung for generations. We are keen to go back to our native place. He and 160 others have been struggling to survive in Du Oo Thay Ma village, which once comprised 700 homes but from where nearly 400 households joined the exodus in recent months. Displaced Rohingya from Rathedung Township are currently occupying some of the homes. According to Abdul Wahid, they have received food only twice in six months, once from the ICRC and once from local authorities. He has requested rations from Buthidaung Township authorities but the response was vague; they said the social welfare process is directly handled by UEHRD. He demanded the authorities look beyond the refugee repatriation process and not ignore the daily needs of IDPs who remain in Myanmar. Although police have not banned Rohingya from entering forests, Rohingya fear surprise arrests should Arakanese villagers complain or supply false information to the police about seeing ARSA members in the forest. We dont have any problem with them so far. We just want to go and find food to survive but they [Rakhine villagers] might misunderstand. Thus we decided to avoid hunting and searching food in the forest. Its too risky. He said that even if they were able to cut bamboo and firewood and collect seasonal fruits and vegetables, and fish in nearby waterways and creeks, there is no market to sell goods. We are in a very difficult situation here. Could you tell the authorities please? Abdul Wahid requested. Friday, February 23rd, 2018 (8:28 am) - Score 8,802 The telecoms regulator has today completed several wholesale market reviews, which among other things will force Openreach (BT) to adopt stiffer Quality of Service standards (installations and repairs), open up their cable ducts to rival ISPs and introduce a big price cut on 40Mbps FTTC broadband lines. Ofcoms review has largely chosen to leave newer full fibre FTTP/H/B and hybrid fibre G.fast broadband services alone (i.e. they dont want to discourage the new services by being too heavy handed with regulation), while Virgin Media arent yet deemed to have Significant Market Power (SMP) like Openreach and have also escaped the regulatory hammer. However the regulator has finalised new charge controls and changes for various other services and, to prevent BT from stifling new investment by rivals as network competition emerges, the operator will not be allowed to make targeted wholesale price reductions in areas where rivals are starting to build new networks (details). Jonathan Oxley, Ofcoms Competition Group Director, said: Full fibre meets the countrys future broadband needs, as demand for data soars. Ultrafast speeds will allow people to download entire films, or businesses to share huge files, almost instantly. Full fibre will also underpin exciting technology like remote healthcare diagnostics, 5G mobile and connected devices. The measures weve set out today will support the growing number of companies who have already announced plans to build full-fibre networks, and open the way for even more ambitious investment around the UK. Matt Hancock, UK Secretary of State for Digital (DCMS), said: Full fibre is vital to build a Britain thats fit for the future. Ofcoms measures will be instrumental in supporting full fibre roll-out by promoting competition and ensuring widespread availability of these services. The whole telecoms sector must now come together in the national interest to invest in the digital infrastructure that the UK needs and become a model of great customer service. The most prominent change is surely their proposed price reduction on the up to 40Mbps (10Mbps) upload tier of Openreachs superfast broadband Fibre-to-the-Cabinet (FTTC / VDSL2) service. This service can already cover around 9 out of 10 UK premises and its fast growing towards almost universal coverage. As a result Ofcom now believes that its time to cut the wholesale price of the 40Mbps tier, which should bring the price down much closer to the level of slower ADSL2+ based copper line broadband products and thus make it easier to shift subscribers off those older connections. On top of that BT/OR will no longer be subject to the detailed VULA Margin Condition test was imposed in 2014. In the regulators view this change will help BTs rivals to compete for customers, while several build out their own full-fibre networks, which is at least partly true. Internet providers like TalkTalk, Sky Broadband and other ISPs will no doubt rejoice and it will help to fuel stronger uptake, which is also good for the Governments Broadband Delivery UK programme (i.e. clawback linked reinvestment of public funding to boost coverage). On the other hand the regulator runs the risk of making slower FTTC so cheap that it could discourage investment in new / ultrafast networks, which might struggle to compete against the extremely low pricing. Lest we forget that both the Government and Ofcom are currently very keen to encourage more coverage of ultrafast full fibre FTTH/P broadband (example), especially via alternative networks. A similar situation already exists in todays market. Just under half of the broadband lines in the UK are still based off slower copper ADSL based lines and thats partly because theyre so cheap and not everybody sees a need for the faster services (FTTC, HFC DOCSIS, FTTP etc.), which tend to attractive a higher monthly premium. Quality of Service The review will also introduce stronger service performance and quality standards, which would require Openreach (BT) to install and repair related services more quickly than they do today. The targets for this have been tweaked a bit since the original March 2017 proposal (here), but they still represent a big improvement. Openreach will be required to (by 2020/21): Complete at least 88% of fault repairs within one or two working days of being notified, up from 80% today; Complete at least 97% of repairs within seven working days; Provide an appointment for 90% of new line installations within 10 working days of being notified, compared to 80% within 12 days currently; and Install 95% of connections on the date agreed between Openreach and the telecoms provider, up from 90% today. Ofcom states that these rules will also be complemented by a range of other improvements, such as the new system for automatic compensation when things go wrong (here). Cable Duct and Pole Access As expect the regulator has also finalised their approach to Duct and Pole Access (DPA), which allows Openreachs existing telegraph poles and underground cable ducts to be used by rivals in order to deploy new ultrafast broadband services (e.g. FTTP/H). Openreach will also have to repair faulty infrastructure and clear blocked tunnels / ducts where necessary for providers to access them, which can be very expensive. Ofcom states that this measure, which is already being used by providers such as Virgin Media and Cityfibre, will fundamentally change the business case for building new networks It could cut the upfront costs of laying fibre cables by around 50% from 500 per home, to 250. It could also reduce the time required for digging works, enabling fibre to be installed in some streets in a matter of hours, where it would have taken days. Openreach must also ensure there is space on its telegraph poles for extra fibre cables connecting homes to a competitors network. And it must release a digital map of its duct and pole network, so competitors can plan where to lay fibre. On many of these points Openreach is already way ahead of the regulator and has started to implement most of the changes via a revised Physical Infrastructure Access (PIA) product. Key Decisions (DPA / PIA) Access to BTs ducts and poles. BT must allow other telecoms providers access to deploy their own networks in BTs underground ducts and chambers or overhead on its telegraph poles. This network access obligation also requires Openreach to make adjustments to the existing infrastructure, so it is ready for use repairing faulty infrastructure and relieving congested sections where necessary. Enabling greater flexibility in the use of ducts and poles. We are relaxing the current PIA usage restriction to allow mixed usage: telecoms providers can deploy local access networks offering both broadband and non-broadband services, provided the primary purpose of the network deployment is the delivery of broadband services. Access on equivalent terms to ensure a level playing field. BT is subject to a no undue discrimination condition, requiring strict equivalence in respect of all processes and sub-products that contribute to the supply and consumption of duct access, unless BT can demonstrate that a difference is justified. We will support these measures through ongoing monitoring to ensure that they are effective. Access to digital maps to support large-scale network planning. Telecoms providers must be provided with integrated access to digital maps with Openreachs duct and pole network records, including detailed location information and the extent of spare capacity. Processes to ensure efficient network deployment. BT is required to publish a Reference Offer, setting out how operational processes (e.g. ordering PIA, clearing blocked ducts) will work, together with relevant terms and conditions including service level agreements and guarantees. Pricing to support competitive investment. We are setting a cap on PIA rental charges which results in significant reductions compared to current rental charges. Costs associated with making the existing infrastructure ready for use will be recovered from all users of the infrastructure, up to a limit of 4,750 per kilometre, with other ancillary charges required to be cost-based. We are also placing financial reporting requirements on BT, so that we can monitor the effectiveness of the pricing regulation and the no undue discrimination condition, in terms of the recovery of costs between BTs own use and that of other telecoms providers using duct and pole access. We should point out that its long been possible for ISPs to access Openreachs existing ducts via the old PIA solution, although rivals complained that this was often cumbersome (administration), suffered from awkward costs and was intended more for helping to connect residential homes (i.e. using it to provide leased line style rural backhaul or big business connectivity wasnt possible, although this helps alternative networks to build a more economically viable model). The new approach seeks to rectify many of those failings. A number of trials have already been conducted (here), although these did suffer from a few problems with blocked ducts, limited duct space, cost and a lack of maps for new cables causing various hiccups (here and here). Improvements have been made since then but BT still warns that not all of their ducts will be usable. An Openreach Spokesperson said: Overarching Ofcoms statement gives us certainty on their approach to key products and we welcome Ofcoms intention to support investment in full fibre networks. But to incentivise further FTTP investment, infrastructure builders including Openreach as the largest FTTP builder in the UK need to be certain they can secure a return on their investment and a fair bet. In particular, we will need to look carefully at geographic pricing restrictions and need to define future fair bet conditions in more detail. In the meantime Openreach is getting on with the job of making Fibre-to-the-Premises broadband available to three million premises by the end of 2020. That puts us on the right trajectory to cover ten million premises with FTTP by the mid-2020s if the conditions are right. We want to go significantly beyond that to the majority of the UK but the pace and extent of our investment will depend on how quickly other key enablers can be realised. We welcome Ofcoms comments around support for a future digital switchover. On MSLs/service Continuing to improve service is our number one priority, having exceeded Ofcoms broadband targets for the last three years. We view these as a minimum, not a target, and weve been making great strides over the last year in reducing the number of faults on our network and speeding up new connections and repairs. Were determined to go even further so we support the ambition of higher service standards. Ducts and Poles Our ducts and poles have been open since 2011 and we have been sharing a digital map of this network for more than a year. Weve been making the process more accessible and user-friendly and well now work closely with our customers to consider how to develop and implement these latest proposals effectively. BT estimates that the price changes in todays Ofcom WLA draft statement, for the directly charge controlled products, will have a year on year adverse financial impact on Openreachs revenue and profit in 2018/19 in the range 80m 120m. The operator added that there will also be further year on year impacts on Openreach, resulting from price reductions to the directly charge controlled products, in each of the successive two financial years in the range of low to mid tens of millions of pounds. Additionally, Openreachs cost base will increase as a result of meeting the more demanding minimum service levels required in WLA markets. Conclusions Overall Ofcom notes that full fibre (FTTH/P) broadband services are currently only available to around 3% of UK premises and they believe that todays changes will deliver a significant improvement. Indeed recently a number of alternative network (AltNet) providers have announced significant investments and the regulator expects that these could boost coverage to 20% by 2020. For example, Hyperoptic aim to cover 2 million urban premises with FTTH/P by 2022 (aspiration for 5 million by 2025), while Vodafone with Cityfibre will reach 1 million by 2021 (aspiration for up to 5 million by 2025) and Virgin Media plan 2 million by around 2019/20. Not to mention all of the work by smaller operators and Openreachs own plan for 3 million by 2020 (aspiration for 10 million by c.2025). TalkTalk has also proposed a similar deployment. One caveat with the above is that we dont yet know how much overlap (overbuild) will exist between these rival FTTP/H deployments, which is a significant factor and difficult to predict. In some areas we might potentially see a choice of several FTTH/P providers and streets being dug up several times, although hopefully natural competition will help to balance things out and some consolidation may follow as new networks grow. On the other hand todays improvements are largely as expected and wont change the viewpoint that Ofcom remains fixated on fostering a market of cheap broadband services, which sounds good for consumers but does make it harder to sell faster full fibre lines (i.e. if you can do everything you want with a 40Mbps FTTC today for only a little money then would you pay significantly more for FTTH/P? Plenty would but is it enough to make the model work). Likewise precious few of todays measures will do anything to support Openreachs on-going calls for more flexibility in regulation, which they say is needed if they are to solidify a plan for expanding their FTTP network to 10 million premises by around 2025 (currently theyve only put a solid strategy in place for reaching 3 million premises by 2020). 2017/18 Wholesale Local Access Market Review https://www.ofcom.org.uk/../wholesale-local-access-market-review UPDATE 8:48am Budget ISP TalkTalk has sent in its response and we expect more to follow. A Spokesperson for TalkTalk said: Ofcoms strong decision is good news for consumers, competition and investment. We have long argued that Openreach has no incentive to invest in the full fibre broadband that Britain needs when it could make excess profits by overcharging for copper-based services. Ofcoms move not only protects customers in todays market, but also ensures Openreach and others are encouraged to invest in the full fibre networks of tomorrow. UPDATE 9:42am Hyperoptic has offered a comment. Dana Tobak, CEO of Hyperoptic, said: We welcome the news of Ofcoms draft statement on the Wholesale Local Access market. In particular its recommendations for supporting investment in Full Fibre network build by limiting the lowering prices on the 40 Mb FTTC product, allowing mixed use for duct and pole access which will allow infrastructure builders to create stronger business cases for more investment and ensuring equivalence of inputs with respect to BTs own use of DPA. Of course, the details matter, and matter significantly, so final implementation of the statement needs to follow in both spirit and operational processes. We look forward to Openreachs publication of a reference offer, which fully matches or exceeds Ofcoms statement, given its independence from the BT Group. This will ultimately create a better digital future for the UK, not just serve the interests of BT retail. Weve also added Openreachs comment above. The Fair Work Ombudsman says the provision of a website where complaints about illegal practices in workplaces can be lodged anonymously and in a number of languages has led to about 20,000 complaints being received in a year-and-a-half. The FWO said in a statement that the Anonymous Report tool was launched in mid-2016 and since then the deluge of reports received were leading to positive outcomes for vulnerable workers. However a spokesperson for the FWO said there was no plan as yet to offer mobile apps for making complaints. Ombudsman Natalie James said information received from the public also provided valuable intelligence which helped design future compliance activities. The reports we receive enable us to identify trends and generate leads for our inspectors to follow up, she said. This assists us to focus our priorities and direct our resources to those areas where we will have the greatest impact. For example, the hospitality industry accounts for 17% of our formal requests for assistance. However, it accounts for 36% of anonymous tipoffs." James said it was also known that most people who used the tool provided information about their current employment. We always urge employees to come forward if they have concerns in the workplace, but we appreciate that it can be a hard thing to do. With our Anonymous Report tool, workers can come to us and tell us what is happening now without the risk of being identified, she said. About 800 reports have been received in languages other than English, with Chinese and Korean the most common. These numbers show my agencys increasing reach into sections of the community that we may not have heard from in the past, James said. It is fantastic that the community has embraced our Anonymous Report tool and is helping us by letting us know when they see or suspect something that isnt right. Government functionaries in many countries appear to be obsessed with the idea that breaking encryption will lessen the quantum of crime Australia's Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton is but the latest to voice the need for access to encrypted communications. Gaining access may well be the holy grail for governments, but will the charges against those whose messages are accessed hold up in court unless encryption is banned altogether? Dutton issued what was more or less an ultimatum to the companies who provide encryption: you have to do what the government commands, or else... But that is easier said than done. For one, most of the companies in the picture Facebook, for example, which owns WhatsApp call the US home. Government functionaries located in Australia are unlikely to be able to sway an American company, no matter how serious or desperate their pleas. Undoubtedly, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull will take up the topic with the Americans during his ongoing visit. But again is it likely that President Donald Trump is willing to indulge in a fight with tech firms when he has plenty on his plate (Russian collusion allegations, for example) to keep his mind (?) occupied. Governments could, of course, work out cosy arrangements with tech firms and receive unwritten agreements that in specific cases, the companies will be willing to slip targeted malware onto specific devices identified by their Unique Device Identifiers so that communications are tapped before anything gets encrypted. Given that it is mainly the Five Eyes countries which are shouting themselves hoarse about encryption, one problem that could present itself is that methods of collection of evidence are often sought by defence lawyers. And it is unlikely that any government is going to reveal how it has collected the evidence if it is by the method cited earlier. In March last year, government investigators in Washington state dropped all charges against a man charged with child pornography offences as they did not want to reveal the technological means they had used to locate him. And in April 2017, the US Government dropped two child pornography cases against a man rather than reveal material available on WikiLeaks which is still classified by the US Department of Justice in court. Melbourne-based lawyer and business adviser Joel Vernon pointed out that a facilitated access regime held water in theory but not so much in practice. A redesign of encryption methodologies would, he suggested, "undermine the constructive purposes like government transactions, online banking and even simply validating the identity of a website for which encryption is used". Vernon has an additional point to make: "Crime and terror existed before the Internet, and a facilitated access regime simply wont miraculously render them non-existent. In the meantime, device and service providers would have had to retool and re-engineer, passing on those costs to the end-user. Any incidental performance hit will also be absorbed by the end-user." Now that is not going to make Joe Public happy. It is unlikely that any government would want to drive a big business (and encryption is mainly provided by those in that domain) offshore. Certainly not a government that claims to be obsessed with jobs. In this context it is interesting to note that while the US is accusing Huawei of spying, the UK is perfectly content to do business with the company jobs and investment are at stake. What does Dutton propose to do about a company like Open Whisper Systems which produces the messaging app Signal? It has been designed to generate the minimum logs possible. In fact, when a subpoena was issued in October 2015 asking for email addresses, history logs, browser cookie data and other information associated with two phone numbers as part of a grand jury probe, OWS owner Moxie Marlinspike could not provide anything. He had nothing to give: Signal does not store such details. But maybe Signal is not so much on the government's radar as WhatsApp is. Will the use of VPNs also be outlawed? Nobody is sure at the moment. But there is no doubt, the laws will be rolled out later this year, as the longer the wait, the more the chances that the horse will bolt and leave the stable door swinging. The US has warned Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull not to allow Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei to supply equipment for any future 5G networks, indicating that there are security risks involved. The Australian Financial Review reported that Turnbull, who is on a visit to the US, was told of Washnigton's concerns about Huawei when he met the head of the NSA, Mike Rogers, and the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Kirstjen Nielsen, on Friday. Turnbull was told that Huawei's involvement in any project carried the risk of cyber espionage, and that Chinese spying was among the top two risks on the cyber security agenda of the US-Australia partnership. An official who was involved in the talks was quoted as saying: "When you control telco networks, you can control everything." According to the AFR, Huawei is part of a working group drawn up by the Department of Communications which includes other suppliers and carriers that will help to roll out 5G technology. Huawei faced problems in the US in January, with a deal for AT&T to sell its phones on plans being cancelled at the last minute. And following this, Verizon was reported to have yielded to pressure from the US Government to stop selling Huawei devices. Earlier this month, US intelligence chiefs warned against the use of Huawei equipment, with the head of the FBI, Christopher Wray, telling a US Senate hearing: Were deeply concerned about the risks of allowing any company or entity that is beholden to foreign governments that dont share our values to gain positions of power inside our telecommunications networks." The UK, which is one of the members of the Five Eyes intelligence sharing network that includes Canada, the US, New Zealand and Australia, works with Huawei and recently said it would continue to do so. But Australia denied Huawei any role in supplying equipment to the country's national broadband network project about six years ago, following advice by ASIS, one of the spy agencies. And last year, Australia put pressure on the Solomon Islands to drop Huawei as the main contractor for an undersea cable project. The project was later awarded to the Vocus Group. Vodafone and Optus partner with Huawei in Australia. Telstra, the country's dominant telco, does not. Huawei, along with Nokia, Ericsson and another Chinese vendor, ZTE, are among the few companies that have the technology to take part in a 5G rollout. Intel concealed information about two flaws in its processors from US cyber security officials and the latter only became aware of them when they were publicly disclosed a little more than six months after the processor behemoth was informed about them. The information was revealed in letters sent by Intel and tech companies Apple and Alphabet to Greg Walden, a member of the House of Representatives who chairs the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Reuters reported. The flaws were reported to Intel in June 2017 by Google and the former was given the standard 90 days to fix them before they were publicly disclosed. This grace period was extended more than once, before 9 January was set as the final date. However, when news of the flaws broke prior to this, Google went public on 3 January. The two flaws are in Intel processors made since 1995.removes the barrier between user applications and sensitive parts of the operating system. Spectre, which is also reportedly found in some AMD and ARM processors, can trick vulnerable applications into leaking the contents of their memory. Intel's response to Walden was that it did not inform the US Computer Emergency Readiness Team, or US-CERT, as there was "no indication that any of these vulnerabilities had been exploited by malicious actors". The company said it did not carry out any analysis of whether the flaws might be exploitable on critical infrastructure as it thought that this might not be the case, but said that it had informed some other technology companies. Alphabet's letter said it had left the decision of informing US-CERT up to Intel. Walden also sought answers from Microsoft, AMD, ARM and Amazon. Microsoft said it had informed some anti-virus software companies about the flaws a number of weeks they were finally publicly disclosed. As iTWire reported recently, Intel faces a total of 33 lawsuits over the two flaws. Additionally, the Boston law firm of Block & Leviton is preparing a class action lawsuit against Intel chief executive Brian Krzanich for allegedly selling a vast majority of his Intel stock after the company was notified of the two security flaws and before they became public. Unlicensed Syncopation and Jazz Ensemble to Host Joint Concert Feb. 23, 2018 BLOOMINGTON, Ill. Illinois Wesleyan Universitys Unlicensed Syncopation and Jazz Ensemble will present a joint concert on Sunday, Feb. 25 at 7:30 p.m. at Westbrook Auditorium in Presser Hall (1210 N. Park St., Bloomington). The event is free and open to the public. Unlicensed Syncopation is IWUs vocal jazz ensemble led by visiting instructor of music education Andrew Dahan. The groups setlist will include pieces such as: Watch Me Walk Away by Alyssa Allgood and Hank Mobley, arranged by Andrew Dahan; Dobbins Flowery Vale, a traditional Irish air and reel song, arranged by Matti Kallio; and Sing a Song of Song by Kenny Garrett, arranged by Kerry Marsh. The IWU Jazz Ensemble, conducted by professor Glenn Wilson, will play music by Billy Strayhorn, George Gershwin, Bill Evans, Ahmad Jamal and many more well-known jazz composers. The two groups will then round out the night together with a performance of Harolds House of Jazz by Richie Cole, David Lahm, Kelly Kunz and Amanda Taylor. Both premier jazz groups, comprised of elite music students under rigorous instruction, are key components of the IWU music program. Collectively, they have been invited to perform at various music events in the surrounding area, have played alongside distinguished guest artists and have toured internationally. For additional information, please contact the School of Music at (309) 556-3061. By Rachel McCarthy 21 Nursing Fellowship Award to Inspire Student-Faculty Collaboration Feb. 23, 2018 Stevenson Hall School of Nursing BLOOMINGTON, Ill. Illinois Wesleyan University nursing faculty Ann Eckhardt and Amanda Hopkins have a passion for research, and they can further pursue that passion with their students, thanks to funding from the Illinois Board of Higher Educations 2018 Nurse Educator Fellowship. Earned by 19 applicants statewide, the fellowship awards $10,000 to each recipient in an effort to ensure the retention of well-qualified nursing faculty at institutions of higher learning. Hopkins said the fellowship is reflective of the Universitys mission, as the funds will continue to encourage student-faculty collaboration and inspire student-led experiences. These funds have allowed me to not only conduct research on my passion, but also to collaborate with students to fulfill their passion, Hopkins said. Hopkins said the fellowship also embodies the School of Nursings emphasis on encouraging students to work with faculty on rigorous research experiences. I think it is really important and one of the things that distinguishes us and our relationship with our students at this University specifically the School of Nursing compared to other nursing institutions, Hopkins said. Design, methodology and delivery is an expectation, and I think that receiving these funds are going to help continue student collaborative research. Such experiences are not common for undergraduate nursing students, according to Eckhardt. Having taught at larger institutions, Eckhardt and Hopkins said research opportunities are often geared toward graduate students and focused on faculty members interests. Something unique that we do is encourage students if theyre passionate about something, we help to support that interest, Eckhardt said. Ann Eckhardt Hopkins said because of the amount of funding granted to large institutions that emphasize research, One would assume that many more undergrads would be engaged in more research opportunities at a large institution versus Illinois Wesleyan, which isnt the case at all. As an institution focused on signature work and leadership projects, student-faculty collaboration, student-led research and students involvement in research, is engrained in the culture here at Illinois Wesleyan, Hopkins said. It is enculturated from a very early stage. Student-led research is crucial to preparing students for success in the workplace and in giving them a leg up when they are entering a graduate program where they have to conduct research, Eckhardt said. An Illinois Wesleyan alum, Eckhardts undergraduate research experiences allowed her to find and pursue her passion in graduate school. The 2003 IWU graduate remembers being encouraged to identify her interest in heart disease and heart surgery at Illinois Wesleyan. That got me started on my entire research trajectory, Eckhardt said. It started when I was an undergraduate and has continued throughout graduate school and my career. I want to be able to do the same thing for my students to be able to help lead them through what hopefully could be a research arc and not just a one-time study. The small, qualitative study that Eckhardt conducted as an undergraduate inspired her to take her current research in Acute Coronary Syndrome (ACS) to an international level. After attending the Technos International trip in Japan 2014, a two-week cultural immersion trip that involves two students and one faculty member, Eckhardt noticed an odd juxtaposition between the increase in heart disease in Japan versus a decrease in the U.S. Since then, she has been collaborating with a faculty member and research assistants in Japan to collect data to compare the symptoms of ACS in Japan to those in the U.S. She will use the funds from the fellowship to attend the Sigma Theta Tau International Research Congress to present preliminary findings and address the challenges she has faced with international collaboration. This is an opportunity to dialogue with researchers around the globe to see if there are other researchers out there that would want to do something similar, that would be willing to look cross-culturally and add another avenue to the study, Eckhardt said. So potentially it would not just be the U.S. and Japan, but we would be looking at some other areas as well. Amanda Hopkins After being approached by a student three years ago who was concerned about wearing hijab in hospitals, Hopkins said it was her experience as a professor at Illinois Wesleyan that also inspired her current research involving creating culturally competent and inclusive healthcare environments. The whole journey began with a student saying this is something Im passionate about, and me saying, this is something we need to research, Hopkins said. In 2014, Hopkins began working with her student to develop a survey tool to examine the perceptions and attitudes of healthcare providers on Muslim nurses and received the fellowship in 2015 to pilot her study. But due to a lack of state funding, 2015 awardees did not receive funds and were required to reapply for the 2018 term to be reconsidered for the fellowship. Having received the fellowship for a second time, Hopkins and assistant professor of nursing Wendy Kooken, along with her new student research assistant Siohbhan Geraghty 18, have expanded the study to include a range of underrepresented populations. She will use the funds from the fellowship to pilot the study. It is the exact same effort and goal, except now, it can be multifaceted so it can be used in the future instead of only with this one group, Hopkins said. Having used the funds in different ways to enhance their research, Eckhardt and Hopkins said the unrestricted funds grant them the freedom to develop their own passion and that of their students, embodying the signature work that characterizes Illinois Wesleyan. I think to have an award like this gives us the ability to identify what is most meaningful for us, whether that is faculty development, funding for a study that we are working on or a signature experience that we are with students, Eckhardt said. Having this unrestricted funding can help to support multiple facets of our faculty development as well as our scholarship. By Vi Kakares '20 Summerville, SC (29483) Today Mostly cloudy skies early. A few showers developing later in the day. High 87F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 30%.. Tonight Partly to mostly cloudy. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low 71F. Winds light and variable. Reddit Email 502 Shares Middle East Monitor | South Africa has been a staunch ally of the Palestinian struggle and regularly spoken out against the atrocities committed by the Israeli government The South African government is intending to cut diplomatic ties with Israel in protest of its treatment of the Palestinian people, the countrys Science and Technology Minister Naledi Pandor announced yesterday. Pandor informed parliamentarians of the governments resolution during a ten-hour joint debate on South African President Cyril Ramaphosas State of the Nation Address (SONA) that he delivered last week. Bonus video added by Informed Comment: TeleSur: South Africa Cuts Ties with Israel Over Abuse of Palestinians' The majority party has agreed, that government must cut diplomatic ties with Israel, given the absence of genuine initiatives by Israel to secure lasting peace and a viable two-state solution that includes full freedom and democracy for the Palestinian people, she said. The comments were made in response to opposition leader Kenneth Meshoe, who had argued that it was disappointing that national and provincial authorities in South Africa had refused help from Israeli companies to address the countrys current water crisis. However, the proposal was applauded by parliamentarians and Pandor, who is expected to be appointed vice president in Ramaphosas new Cabinet, was given a standing ovation as she left the podium. The governments decision was further confirmed on the South African Parliaments official Twitter account. #Pandor: The majority party has resolved that government must cut diplomatic ties with Israel #SONADebate Parliament of RSA (@ParliamentofRSA) February 19, 2018 South Africa has been a staunch ally of the Palestinian struggle and regularly spoken out against the atrocities committed by the Israeli government. Last month, the South African representative to the UN told the Human Rights Council that Israel is the only state in the world that can be described as an apartheid state, just days after the ruling African National Congress (ANC) party called for government ministers to strengthen the countrys visa restrictions with Israel. Last year, the government also resolved to downgrade the South African Embassy in Israel to a liaison office, and cautioned Tel Aviv for blacklisting supporters of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which included prominent figures of the ANC. The BDS South Africa campaign has witnessed significant support from the nations public, with universities and churches backing a cultural and economic boycott of Israel affiliated organisations. This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Via Middle East Monitor Reddit Email 193 Shares San Francisco (Tomdispatch.com) | I was teaching the day the airplanes hit the World Trade Center. It was the second meeting of The Communist Manifesto for Seminarians, a course for my fellow graduate students. By the time I got to class, both towers had collapsed. A few hours later, Building 7 came down as well. We dispensed with a planned discussion about what Marxists mean by idealism and materialism and talked instead about the meaning of this particular example of the propaganda of the deed. We already sensed that, with George W. Bush and Dick Cheney in the White House, the attacks would mean war. But like the rest of the world, we didnt yet have the faintest idea how long that war would last. And 16 years on, we still dont know. A few years later, I found myself in front of 40 undergraduates on the first day of the first ethics course I would ever teach. You know how sometimes you have no idea what youre going to say until the words are out of your mouth? That day, I opened my mouth and this came out: I was so excited about this class that I couldnt sleep last night. Eighty horrified eyes stared back at me. I guess it wasnt like that for you, I added, and felt the blush creep up my face. Most of them had the grace to laugh. Thirteen years later, I still have trouble sleeping the night before a new semester begins. Its not exactly stage fright, but knowing that Ill only have a few chances to convince a new crop of students that they really do want to examine their deepest values the things they care most about and even talk about them in front of their peers. In fact, most of them do care deeply and about important things, too, like how they should treat their friends, their parents, and their sexual and/or romantic partners. They care about their friends who drink and drug too much and appreciate the friends who get them home safe when they do the same. They care about economic inequality, especially when theyre trying to find a place they can afford to rent in this city of soaring prices, San Francisco, or when contemplating the massive debt most of them will be carrying for years, if not a lifetime, after they graduate. Some of them regularly turn out to be Milton Friedman-style economic libertarians. Almost invariably, more are reflexively anti-capitalist. More than half of them are young people of color. They and the majority of their white peers care deeply about racism. They dont think the police should shoot unarmed black men and they tend to believe that people of color face institutional barriers that white people never even see. Slavery, they know, was a terrible idea, but many of them are fuzzy about when it started in this country and how it ended. Quite a few of them are immigrants or the children of immigrants. Some are undocumented or DACA recipients, so not surprisingly they care about immigration laws and policies. Their fellow students would never turn them in to the authorities. They may not know exactly why, but they have the feeling it would be unethical. Some of them are in the Reserve Officer Training Corps, or ROTC. Some are veterans. U.S. military adventures affect them directly. While the rest of the students do care about war and peace, most of their lives are touched more lightly by Americas wars than were those of their peers a decade ago. They care about so much, but theres a lot they just dont know. Dont Know Much About History The first hint I got about the gaps in my students background knowledge came early on in my teaching career. In a homework assignment a student wrote that Aristotle had quoted Shakespeare. Another thought that when that Greek philosopher mentioned a theater, he was talking about going to the movies. I wasnt surprised that those students knew little about ancient Athens; theres no reason to expect them to arrive at college versed in Greek philosophy. But something far more basic was missing: a sense of the sweep of what Americans call western history a chronological grid on which to pin the key movements and events that shape todays world. I soon found myself putting a giant timeline on the blackboard on which the students would try to place the authors we were reading. Then wed fill it in with other world events. Even the relatively short history of the United States occupies a strangely flattened state in many of their imaginations. In their minds, for instance, all of the countrys wars especially those of the twentieth century seem to run together, making it hard to understand how one war can lead to another. My pre-collegiate history education was not really much better than theirs, but it was somewhat different. I grew up in Washington, D.C., in the days when Congress ran the city directly, including defining the curriculum for elementary and secondary school students. We were required to take three cracks at American history (in fifth, eighth, and twelfth grade). Repeatedly, we spent so much time on the 13 original colonies that, by the day school let out for the year, we had barely reached World War I. I never did find out what happened after that, not in school anyway. Nowadays, schools have speeded things up a bit and the war they never get to happened inVietnam. Im certainly not the first person to discover that, for new generations, foundational events in her own life the Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam War, the womens liberation movement, even the first Gulf War are, to the young, history almost as ancient as the Civil War. Why should they know about such things? They werent even born yet. But heres a surprising development surprising because this last decade and a half seems to have flown past so quickly. Im now encountering students who have no memory of an event that has shaped their lives, this country, and much of the world for the last 16 years: the 9/11 attacks. The Early Years The first undergraduates I taught were already in their teens on 9/11, which meant that those attacks formed a historic dividing point in their lives. For them, as for the coterie of men who would lead this country to the dark side (to use Vice President Dick Cheneys admonitory phrase), there was a before 9/11 and an after 9/11. After 9/11, they lived in a nation at war. The United States was suddenly fighting an enemy that, as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told Meet the Press less than a month after the attacks, is not just in Afghanistan. It is in 50 or 60 countries and, he added, it simply has to be liquidated. Little did they or the rest of us know that the liquid this protean enemy most resembled was a blob of mercury, which multiplies into hundreds of separate droplets when you hit it. Recently, former CIA director and retired general David Petraeus admitted to Judy Woodruff of the PBS NewsHour that the war on terrors first battlefield, Afghanistan, has become the locus of a generational struggle, one that more than a decade and a half later is not going to be won in a few years. Ive watched that generational struggle as it developed in the classroom. My first students had friends and relations fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. One young womans uncle, a man in his late forties, was a surgeon who had been reactivated and sent to Iraq years after completing his active service. In fact, it turns out that everyone who joins the military signs on for eight years, whether they know it or not. Any of those years not spent on active duty or in the drilling Reserves still leaves you in the Individual Ready Reserves, as many were surprised to discover when the U.S. Army ran short of personnel to fight two simultaneous land wars. A few students had partners fighting overseas and their worry was painful to observe. Soon enough, I had women students whose male partners were returning from those wars as changed and dangerous men. Several confided (either to me privately or to an entire class) that theyd had to move out because they feared for their safety. And soon one of our schools graduates, Jennifer Moreno, died in combat. Every September, the Army would appear on campus. Arriving in gleaming Hummers, theyd erect a portable climbing wall and pass out glossy recruitment literature, encouraging students to join ROTC. Once, I was stunned by the courage of four young women, who stood off to the side of the show holding up homemade antiwar signs. Then one fall, the recruiters didnt show up at all. I never knew whether it was because the wars had fallen out of favor with the board of my Jesuit university or because troop drawdowns had eased recruitment pressure. All I knew was that it probably wasnt thanks to those brave students with their hand-drawn signs. In the early years, more than one ROTC member admitted to me (or our class) that he or she doubted the Bush administrations rationale for the war in Iraq. One young man from Guam explained that, having accepted a scholarship (my ticket off the island), he was duty-bound to fight in Iraq despite his doubts. I know that in basic training, they try to take you apart as a person and then put you back together as a soldier, he told me. I want you to know that Im not going to let that happen to me. Ive often wondered what did happen to him. Heres another thing I remember from those early years. To my surprise, many of my students supported torture less as an interrogation method than as punishment for truly heinous crimes (torture, that is, as righteous vengeance). Terrorists should be tortured, some argued, as payback for 9/11, but perhaps because their own childhoods were still so near in time and memory, a number of them thought that those most deserving of torture were not political terrorists, but child abusers. Just about all of them were certain of one thing: the men who flew the planes on 9/11 were Iraqis. When Johnny (and Janie) Come Marching Home Again Eventually, of course, war veterans began to appear in my classes. They were older and in many cases more mature than the other students in ways that didnt just reflect their age. I often teach an ethics class in which students work with a community-based organization. One veteran chose to do this service learning with Swords to Plowshares, which provides services for vets. Theyd helped him when he first got out, and he wanted to return the favor. If anyone tells you they came back whole from Iraq or Afghanistan, he assured me, theyre either lying or they just dont know yet. He was right, I think. One thing Ive noticed over the years: like many survivors of war, those vets never volunteer to talk about what theyve seen. Nor do their fellow students show much curiosity about it, and I dont ask directly. But some, like the young man whod served five years as a sniper in Iraq and Afghanistan, are clearly in pain. Hed suffered a broken back and brain trauma when an improvised explosive device blew up his Humvee. He was bitter about the war and his own role in it, certain that hed been lied to by his government. Since leaving the military he had learned a lot of history. Now, he sat in the last row of the classroom, back to the wall, one leg bouncing uncontrollably up and down. Usually he left early. The anxiety of being in a room with that many people, he explained to me, was more than he could endure. Such veterans, however, are classroom oddities, rare exceptions to the general rule that the U.S. can fight an endless war on terror without pain, sacrifice, or even, in recent years, much attention at all. These days, my students live in a country that has been at war almost since they were born, and yet, as is true with most of their fellow citizens, the fighting could be happening on Mars for all the impact it has on them. Most of them no longer know people directly affected. Their friends and family, of course, arent among the tens of millions of Iraqis, Syrians, Afghans, or Yemenis made refugees by those American wars and their consequences. Most of them havent yet realized that, if their government hadnt spent $5.6 trillion and counting on those very wars, there might have been federal money available to relieve them of the school debt they will carry for decades. Those Who Fail to Learn Its not an accident that my students arrive at college with little understanding of U.S. history or, for that matter, knowledge of how their government works. Nor is it their fault. Education is crucial to citizenship in a democracy and, for many years, those on the right in this country have done their best to defund and dismantle public education. Under President Trump we have a secretary of education who makes no secret of her belief that, like other public goods, education is best left in the tender hands of the market. The other day I asked my Ethics: War, Torture, and Terrorism class to name the countries where the United States is currently involved in some military action. They were able to come up with Iraq and Afghanistan. A veteran then added Djibouti, where U.S. Africa Command has a key base. Syria? someone wondered. A ROTC member mentioned Yemen. No one even thought of Somalia or Libya. No one had heard of the West African country of Niger, where Sergeant LaDavid Johnson died in an ambush set by an ISIS affiliate. (If asked, some might have remembered that when Donald Trump called Johnsons widow, he made news by struggling to remember her husbands name and suggesting that Johnson had known what he signed up for.) Nor could they name any of the other countries, 76 in all, affected in some fashion by their countrys undeclared, never-ending generational war on terror. The good news is that they want to learn. The bad news: nowadays, they tend to think that the men who flew those planes on 9/11 were from Iran. Rebecca Gordon, a TomDispatch regular, teaches at the University of San Francisco. She is the author of American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes. Her previous books include Mainstreaming Torture: Ethical Approaches in the Post-9/11 United States and Letters from Nicaragua. Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Alfred McCoys In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, as well as John Dowers The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, John Feffers dystopian novel Splinterlands, Nick Turses Next Time Theyll Come to Count the Dead, and Tom Engelhardts Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World. Copyright 2018 Rebecca Gordon via Tomdispatch.com Reddit Email 164 Shares By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | Fundamentalist Salafi militias, some linked to al-Qaeda, and backed by Turkey, have allegedly taken three new villages in the Afrin canton away from the leftist Syrian Kurdish Peoples Protection Units (YPG). Over all, the Turks and their allies claim the conquest of 71 villages in northern and western Afrin. A Turkish airstrike, in the meantime, allegedly destroyed a YPG vehicle convoy nearing Afrin with armored vehicles and weapons, creating a massive set of explosions. Turkey and its Sunni Arab allies are seeking to establish a buffer zone between the Syrian Kurds and the Turkish border in the region west of Aleppo. This effort requires removing Kurdish populations from Afrin and its surroundings and replacing them with pro-Turkish Syrian Sunni Arabs. Although Turkeys president Tayyip Erdogan maintains he is pursuing this fight to stop Kurdish terrorist against Turkey, there is no evidence that Afrin was a threat to Turkey, and indeed the region was relatively quiet. It is likely that Erdogan is attacking Afrin to send a message to the United States that he will not permit the regularization of a semi-autonomous Kurdish military force on his borders. Wars are also useful in shoring up public support, and Erdogan is widely viewed as increasingly dictatorial outside his own party. He has had war critics, and indeed tens of thousands of other critics, summarily fired or arrested. Financial Times: Syria war flashpoint in Afrin enclave In response to a series of battlefield losses, the YPG in Aleppo has allegedly coordinated with the Baath government of President Bashar al-Assad, turning over to the Syrian Arab Army the areas of Aleppo and immediate vicinity it controlled. This move freed up YPG fighters to go defend Afrin. The official Syrian news service, SANA, which is a mouthpiece of the Syrian regime, alleges that Shiite militias have reached the enclave of Afrin, ready to fight the fundamentalist Salafi rebels deployed by Turkey as an adjunct to its invasion of the Kurdish-majority canton. It says that hundreds of residents of the city of Afrin came out into the square to welcome the support, and chanted slogans in favor of their citizenship in the Syrian nation. They opposed the Turkish aggression on Syrian territory. Commenting on the ongoing situation in Syria is made extremely difficult by the fog of war and the contradictory reports from the various propaganda arms at work to shape public perception of the situation. All we can do is try clearly to identify the sources of allegations and attempt to weigh their reliability. Syrias Kurds have been badly treated by the Arab nationalist Baath government in the past, and most Syrian Kurds likely dream of independence or at least a large amount of autonomy. Some of Iraqs Kurds, however, are cautioning them not to be overly rash or ambitious, given the debacle the latter faced over Kirkuk in a standoff with the Iraqi government. That the Syrian Kurds in Afrin were enthusiastically chanting about being part of Syria and welcoming fundamentalist Shiite militias could be true, but both would be a function of desperation. Turkey is attempting to chase most Afrin Kurds away from any area near the Turkish border, and is deploying the impressive fire power of a NATO member to do so. The US abandoned the Afrin Kurds to their fate, despite having depended on the Kurdish YPG militia to defeat ISIL in Raqqa. Afrin as a Kurdish canton is substantially to the West of the other two Kurdish enclaves in Syria, Jazira and Kobane, and while US special operations forces are embedded with the latter, Afrin is not in the US sphere of influence. How many Shiite militiamen have actually gone to Afrin and how effective they will be against the Turks and their Salafi allies is unclear as yet. These pro-Damascus militias typically include Lebanons Hizbullah, Iraqi Shiite militias freed up by the fall of Mosul to the Baghdad government, and Afghans shanghaied into service by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps. If these various reports are true, a YPG Kurdish and Shiite militia coalition is forming to fight the Salafi guerrillas allied with Turkey, and the Damascus regime of al-Assad is coordinating with the Kurds to take over territory formerly under YPG control in the Aleppo region so as to free up YPG fighters in the struggle against Turkey. CIL CONSTRUCTION IS ON-TIME AND ON-BUDGET Construction remains on-time and on-budget with first gold pour expected mid-2019 Concrete works are tracking well, with all eight ring beams and the SAG mill foundation pour complete and ball mill foundation pour commencing EPCM design is progressing well with nearly 50% complete MORE EXPLORATION SUCCESS: LE PLAQUE MAIDEN RESOURCE The 100%-owned Le Plaque target has the potential to be the next significant discovery following the recent Daapleu and Bakatouo discoveries, respectively 1.3Moz and 0.7Moz of Indicated resources 1 The Le Plaque target, covering an area of 4km 2 , is located 5km south of the future CIL plant Only the central portion, representing about 25% of the Le Plaque target, was drilled in 2017, in an area named Le Plaque Main, for which a maiden Indicated resource of 85koz at 2.70 g/t and an Inferred resource of 43Koz at 2.40 g/t was delineated This maiden resource positions Le Plaque Main to be amongst Ity's highest grade deposits; 75% of the holes drilled in this area encountered intersects thicker than 2m with grades higher than 2g/t Mineralization occurs from surface and remains open at depth and in several directions A high resolution ground IP/resistivity survey is currently underway on the Le Plaque area which will be followed by a new drilling campaign in the coming months, with the goal of delineating the extensions and investigating other high-grade targets in proximity The Le Plaque target, covering an area of 4km , is located 5km south of the future CIL plant Only the central portion, representing about 25% of the Le Plaque target, was drilled in 2017, in an area named Le Plaque Main, for which a maiden Indicated resource of 85koz at 2.70 g/t and an Inferred resource of 43Koz at 2.40 g/t was delineated This maiden resource positions Le Plaque Main to be amongst Ity's highest grade deposits; 75% of the holes drilled in this area encountered intersects thicker than 2m with grades higher than 2g/t Mineralization occurs from surface and remains open at depth and in several directions A high resolution ground IP/resistivity survey is currently underway on the Le Plaque area which will be followed by a new drilling campaign in the coming months, with the goal of delineating the extensions and investigating other high-grade targets in proximity A $7m exploration program is planned for 2018 at Ity to further explore the Le Plaque target in addition to several other near-mill targets (including testing of extensions at the Mont Ity, Bakatouo and Daapleu deposits), and on greenfield targets located within the 100km corridor along the Ity mine Endeavour Mining (TSX:EDV)(OTCQX:EDVMF) is pleased to announce that good progress is being made on the construction of the CIL plant at its Ity Mine in Cote d'Ivoire, having achieved a major milestone with the completion of the CIL tanks ring beam concrete pours. Construction is progressing on-time and on-budget with the first gold pour expected mid-2019. In addition, Endeavour is pleased to report a high-grade maiden Mineral Resource estimate for the central part of its Le Plaque discovery, located within 5km of the future CIL plant. The Le Plaque target, which covers an area of 4km2, has the potential to be the next significant discovery following the company's recent Daapleu and Bakatouo discoveries, and the maiden resource positions it to be amongst Ity's highest grade deposits. Only the central portion has been drilled to date, representing about 25% of the Le Plaque target, in an area named Le Plaque Main, for which a maiden Mineral Resource estimate has been delineated, as presented in Table 1 below. A new drilling campaign aimed at delineating the extensions and investigating other high-grade targets in proximity is planned for the remainder of 2018. Table 1: Mineral Resource estimate for Le Plaque Main deposit On a 100% basis Tonnage (kt) Grade (Au g/t) Content (Au koz) Indicated Resources 974 2.70 85 Inferred Resources 553 2.40 43 No Measured Resources have been estimated. The Mineral Resource estimates are reported in accordance with the National Instrument 43-101 and has been estimated using the Canadian Institute of Mining, Metallurgy and Petroleum (CIM) "Estimation of Mineral Resources and Mineral Reserves Best Practice Guidelines". The mineral resource estimate is classified as "Indicated" and "Inferred" as defined by the CIM. Patrick Bouisset, Executive Vice-President Exploration and Growth at Endeavour, said: "We are very pleased with the Le Plaque discovery as it continues to demonstrate the highly prospective nature of the Ity area. While we have only drilled a small portion of the target, its characteristics suggest it may have the potential to be the next significant discovery following the Daapleu, Mont Ity and Bakatouo discoveries. Importantly, with an Indicated Resource grade of 2.7g/t, compared with the current Ity CIL reserve grade of 1.5g/t 2, the Le Plaque area has the potential to further improve the asset's already robust production profile. In 2018, we look forward to continuing exploration at the entire Le Plaque target, and several other near-mill targets, with the aim of delineating additional extensions. We are equally excited about our increased greenfield exploration focus with drilling initiating on a number of targets within the wider 100 km Ity corridor which we fully control." ITY CIL PROJECT CONSTRUCTION UPDATE Construction is progressing on-time and on-budget with the first gold pour expected mid-2019. The main milestones achieved to date include: Nearly 50% of the total capital cost of $412 million has already been committed. No LTI with over 800,000 man-hours worked. Concrete works are tracking well, with all eight ring beams and the SAG mill foundation pour complete and ball mill foundation pour commencing. Tailings storage facility (TSF) earthworks are progressing on schedule with 15% completed. EPCM design is progressing on-schedule with approximately 50% completed. Design work for the 90KV transmission line is complete and bush clearing is 70% completed. Picture 1: CIL Ring Beams Poured Picture 2: TSF Earthworks ABOUT THE LE PLAQUE DISCOVERY As illustrated in Figures 1, the Le Plaque area covers 4km2, located within 5km of the Ity Mine complex and the future CIL plant location. Several high-grade mineralized trends stretching over 400 meters were identified, with the largest being a 2km long geochemical anomaly with best values >1,000ppb. The trends are all open along strike and at depth. To date, approximately 25% of the Le Plaque target was drilled, in an area named Le Plaque Main as shown in the Figure below. In addition to the Le Plaque area, several other near-mill targets have been identified (as per the blue circles in Figure 1), which represents a small portion of the 100km corridor controlled by Endeavour. Figure 1: Ity Near-Mine Exploration Targets Subsequent to the Le Plaque discovery announced on May 29, 2017, a follow-up drilling campaign was undertaken in Q4-2017 on the Le Plaque Main area with the goal of delineating a maiden resource estimate and to confirm its high-grade mineralization. A total 48 holes of Reverse Circulation ("RC") drilling comprising 4,000 meters and a total of 76 holes of Diamond Drilling ("DD") comprising 10,028 meters have been drilled to-date on the area. The drilling campaign was highly successful with approximately 75% of the drilled holes encountering intersects thicker than 2 meters with grades greater than 2g/t Au. Some of the selected best DD and RC drill intercepts of the Q4-2017 campaign, include (true thickness): Hole FL17-599: 24.00m @ 2.03 g/t Hole FL17-603: 6.00m @ 8.96 g/t Hole FL17-619: 7.00m @ 6.37 g/t Hole FL17-624: 15.00m @ 2.67 g/t Hole FL17-626: 11.50m @ 3.44 g/t Hole FL17-639: 7.00m @ 5.01 g/t Hole FL17-643 : 4.00m @ 59.41 g/t Hole FL17-646: 12.00m @ 3.50 g/t Hole FL17-655 : 8.50m @ 11.94 g/t Hole FL17-657: 16.50m @ 3.33 g/t Hole FL17-661 : 5.00m @ 7.49 g/t As shown in Figure 2, the Le Plaque area appears to be geologically and structurally complex with mineralization being hosted in sheared and deformed rocks, with hydrothermal silica and phyllic alteration (sericite-silica-pyrite). The Le Plaque target is mostly underlain by diorite and granodiorite intrusions, similar to those found at the Ity mining complex located 5km to the north, with subordinate skarn and volcano-sedimentary units. Regional scale structures transect the area in northeast, north and possibly northwest orientations, and some of these are interpreted as being associated with mineralization. Figure 2: Le Plaque Main geological context and some Q4- 2017 best intercepts Preliminary data from an ongoing high-resolution Gradient Induced Polarization/Resistivity survey of a 302km-line covering 7.7km already suggests, when coupled with previous geological and drilling data, that mineralization remains open at depth and along strike in association with the continuation of host structures. At least three target areas with almost no drilling have been identified and will be drill-tested in coming months. 2018 drilling will also be guided with the integration of high helicopter borne combination Mag/Radiometric/VTEM geophysical surveys flown in 2017 by Geotech Ltd (Canada). Data collected to date suggests that extensions of the Le Plaque Main deposit are constrained by the lack of drill information. As shown in the cross-sections in Figures 3 and 4, the controls of the mineralization are both lithological and structural. Most of the mineralized structures at Le Plaque Main deposit are found close to the intrusive contact between gently north-plunging granodiorite and diorite or skarn, suggesting a primary peri-batholithic mineralizing event. Figure 3: Le Plaque Main ESE-WNW Cross-section Figure 4: Le Plaque Main SW-NE Cross section 2018 EXPLORATION PROGRAM An $7m exploration program has been planned for 2018 on the greater Ity trend to test the following targets: TARGET EXPLORATION CAMPAIGN DETAILS LE PLAQUE AREA AND NEARBY TARGETS Drilling to be guided by the integration of the full airborne and ground geophysics survey ITY DEPOSIT Drilling to focus on the lateral hanging wall new mineralization discovered in 2017 in the northern part DAAPLEU DEPOSIT Drilling to test deep and possible lateral ore shoots BAKATOUO DEPOSIT Drilling to test extension of the deposit to the East and to the West of the Cavally river OTHER NEAR-MINE Air core reconnaissance of a large and untested area East of Bakatouo GREENFIELD TARGETS Several targets being tested within the 100km corridor along the Ity mine ABOUT THE LE PLAQUE MAIN RESOURCE The Le Plaque resources have been estimated based on the drill results published on May 29, 2017 and those completed in Q4-2017 as provided within the appendix of this press release. The effective date of this resource estimate is February 5, 2018. The mineral resource is reported at a 0.50 g/t gold cut-off grade within Whittle optimized pit shells based the economic parameters described in the table below: Table 2: Whittle Pit Shell Parameters PARAMETER PIT SLOPE ANGLE 40 deg GOLD PRICE US$1,500/oz MINING COST $3.0/t MINING RECOVERY 95% MINING DILUTION 20% PROCESSING COST $20/t LE PLAQUE MAIN RECOVERY RATE 90% Preliminary metallurgical studies done on the Le Plaque Main deposit indicate the gold recoveries of the mineralized material are similar to the other deposits at the Ity Gold Mine. The initial Le Plaque Main geological model was developed in Leapfrog 3D modelling software using available geology information from 76 diamond drill holes totaling 10,028 meters completed between 2015 and 2017, and from 48 RC holes totaling 4,000 meters completed between 2016 and 2017. The geological model and assay data guided the mineralization model. A total of 14 mineralized domains were interpreted and modelled into 3D wireframes within Geovia Surpac modelling software. The main mineralized zones have an average strike of 130 degrees azimuth dipping 40 degrees to the northeast. The drill holes gold assays were composited to one-meter intervals within the mineralized wireframes and capped at 25 g/t Au. Spatial analysis of the gold mineralization using variograms indicated a good continuity of the grades along strike and down dip of the mineralized zones. Gold grades were interpolated using inverse distance squared constrained by the mineralized domains. Density values of the oxidized material vary from 1.4 to 1.5 based on weathering material type, while the fresh rocks density is 2.8. The mineral resource was modelled using a 3D block model built in Geovia Surpac. Measures were conducted to validate the accuracy of the estimate, including comparing results from the inverse distance to ordinary kriging estimation, swath plots comparison and visual review on section and plan view. The disclosure of a mineral resource statement for the Le Plaque Main deposit is not deemed material to Endeavour as a whole. Therefore, the Company will not be filing a technical report in respect of this mineral resource estimate. ASSAYS AND QUALITY ASSURANCE/QUALITY CONTROL The Le Plaque-Floleu drill samples were prepared in accordance with National Instrument 43-101 Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects. Drill core (HQ and NQ) and Reverse Circulation percussion hammer chip samples were prepared on site at the SMI (Societe des Mines d'Ity) exploration mechanical preparation facilities. Up to the end of 2016 samples were analyzed using a standard 50-gram gold fire assay with an Atomic Absorption finish at Bureau Veritas Laboratories in Abidjan (independent lab). ICP-ES analysis was completed by ACME Laboratories Ltd. in Vancouver, Canada. Core and Reverse Circulation sampling and assay data were monitored through a quality assurance/quality control program designed to follow NI 43-101 and industry best practice. In 2017 Endeavour entered into an agreement with SGS Cote d'Ivoire SA to establish and operate independent mineral assay laboratory services at Ity Mine operations. The services included dedicated sample preparation, leach, copper soluble and fire assay services for mine and grade control operations, as well as dedicated sample preparation and fire assay facilities for exploration samples. All Le Plaque-Floleu samples in the 2017 calendar year were processed by SGS using a standard 50-gram gold fire assay with an Atomic Absorption finish (code FAA505). Sample collection followed established procedures, and sample submission included the same control samples and insertion procedures as used in previous campaigns with Bureau Veritas Laboratories in Abidjan. ICP-ES analysis (4 acid digest, code GE-IC40M) was completed by SGS Laboratories Ltd. in Burnaby, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada QUALIFIED PERSONS The scientific and technical content of this news release related to exploration has been reviewed, verified and compiled by Gerard de Hert, EurGeol, Senior VP West Africa Exploration for Endeavour Mining. Mr. de Hert has more than 19 years of mineral exploration and mining experience, and is a "Qualified Person" as defined by National Instrument 43-101 - Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects ("NI 43-101"). Jeremy Langford, Endeavour's Chief Operating Officer - Fellow of the Australasian Institute of Mining and Metellurgy - FausIMM, is a Qualiied Person under NI 43-101, and has reviewed an approved the technical information in this news release related to the CIL construction announcement. The statistical analysis, geological modelling and resource estimation were prepared by Kevin Harris, CPG. Mr. Harris is Endeavour Mining's VP Resource Manager and is a "Qualified Person" as defined by National Instrument 43-101 - Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects ("NI 43-101"). CONTACT INFORMATION Martino De Ciccio VP - Strategy & Investor Relations +44 203 640 8665 This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. DFH Public Affairs in Toronto John Vincic, Senior Advisor (416) 206-0118 x.224 This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. Brunswick Group LLP in London Carole Cable, Partner +44 7974 982 458 This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. ABOUT ENDEAVOUR MINING CORPORATION Endeavour Mining is a TSX listed intermediate African gold producer with a solid track record of operational excellence, project development and exploration in the highly prospective Birimian greenstone belt in West Africa. Endeavour is focused on offering both near-term and long-term growth opportunities with its project pipeline and its exploration strategy, while generating immediate cash flow from its operations. Endeavour operates 5 mines across Cote d'Ivoire (Agbaou and Ity), Burkina Faso (Hounde, Karma), and Mali (Tabakoto) which are expected to produce 670-720koz in 2018 at an AISC of $840-890/oz. Endeavour's high-quality development projects (recently commissioned Hounde, Ity CIL and Kalana) have the combined potential to deliver an additional 600koz per year at an AISC well below $700/oz between 2018 and 2020. In addition, its exploration program aims to discover 10-15Moz of gold by 2021 which represents more than twice the reserve depletion during the period. For more information, please visit www.endeavourmining.com Corporate Office: 5 Young St, Kensington, London W8 5EH, UK This news release contains "forward-looking statements" including but not limited to, statements with respect to Endeavour's plans and operating performance, the estimation of mineral reserves and resources, the timing and amount of estimated future production, costs of future production, future capital expenditures, and the success of exploration activities. Generally, these forward-looking statements can be identified by the use of forward-looking terminology such as "expects", "expected", "budgeted", "forecasts", and "anticipates". Forward-looking statements, while based on management's best estimates and assumptions, are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to be materially different from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements, including but not limited to: risks related to the successful integration of acquisitions; risks related to international operations; risks related to general economic conditions and credit availability, actual results of current exploration activities, unanticipated reclamation expenses; changes in project parameters as plans continue to be refined; fluctuations in prices of metals including gold; fluctuations in foreign currency exchange rates, increases in market prices of mining consumables, possible variations in ore reserves, grade or recovery rates; failure of plant, equipment or processes to operate as anticipated; accidents, labour disputes, title disputes, claims and limitations on insurance coverage and other risks of the mining industry; delays in the completion of development or construction activities, changes in national and local government regulation of mining operations, tax rules and regulations, and political and economic developments in countries in which Endeavour operates. Although Endeavour has attempted to identify important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in forward-looking statements, there may be other factors that cause results not to be as anticipated, estimated or intended. There can be no assurance that such statements will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. Please refer to Endeavour's most recent Annual Information Form filed under its profile at www.sedar.com for further information respecting the risks affecting Endeavour and its business. AISC, all-in sustaining costs at the mine level, cash costs, operating EBITDA, all-in sustaining margin, free cash flow, net free cash flow, free cash flow per share, net debt, and adjusted earnings are non-GAAP financial performance measures with no standard meaning under IFRS, further discussed in the section Non-GAAP Measures in the most recently filed Management Discussion and Analysis. APPENDIX A: The table below presents the Reverse Circulation and Diamond drilling completed in Q4 2017 at Le Plaque Main. Additional results are available in the press release dated May 29, 2017, available on the Company's website and on SEDAR. HOLE ID TARGET AREA DRILL TYPE FROM (M) TO (M) DOWN HOLE THICK (M) TRUE THICK (M) GRADE AU G/T COMPOSITE FL17-628 LePlaque Main DD 68.60 72.60 4.00 4.00 4.83 4.0m @ 4.83 g/t FL17-628 LePlaque Main DD 98.27 101.10 2.83 2.50 11.19 2.8m @ 11.19 g/t including 0.73m @ 38.90 g/t from 98.27m FL17-628 LePlaque Main DD 111.55 114.75 3.20 3.00 1.98 3.2m @ 1.98 g/t FL17-629 LePlaque Main DD 167.30 169.88 2.58 2.50 2.10 2.6m @ 2.10 g/t FL17-629 LePlaque Main DD 190.54 191.60 1.06 1.00 0.58 1.1m @ 0.58 g/t FL17-630 LePlaque Main DD 89.00 91.00 2.00 2.00 1.75 2.0m @ 1.75 g/t FL17-630 LePlaque Main DD 92.05 96.00 3.95 3.50 8.20 4.0m @ 8.20 g/t including 0.64m @ 22.90 g/t from 93.28m FL17-630 LePlaque Main DD 113.00 114.00 1.00 1.00 0.83 1.0m @ 0.83 g/t FL17-631 LePlaque Main DD 49.00 50.90 1.90 1.50 0.84 1.9m @ 0.84 g/t FL17-631 LePlaque Main DD 77.35 81.00 3.65 3.50 1.52 3.7m @ 1.52 g/t FL17-631 LePlaque Main DD 83.00 84.00 1.00 1.00 0.90 1.0m @ 0.90 g/t FL17-631 LePlaque Main DD 86.32 87.80 1.48 1.00 2.36 1.5m @ 2.36 g/t FL17-631 LePlaque Main DD 88.85 91.37 2.52 2.50 1.03 2.5m @ 1.03 g/t FL17-631 LePlaque Main DD 92.59 98.00 5.41 5.00 0.80 5.4m @ 0.80 g/t FL17-631 LePlaque Main DD 123.65 125.00 1.35 1.00 0.64 1.3m @ 0.64 g/t FL17-631 LePlaque Main DD 127.39 131.00 3.61 3.00 1.16 3.6m @ 1.16 g/t FL17-632 LePlaque Main DD 10.95 12.00 1.05 1.00 0.58 1.1m @ 0.58 g/t FL17-632 LePlaque Main DD 66.50 68.35 1.85 1.50 2.77 1.8m @ 2.77 g/t FL17-632 LePlaque Main DD 155.33 158.58 3.25 3.00 1.13 3.3m @ 1.13 g/t FL17-632 LePlaque Main DD 167.00 169.20 2.20 2.00 0.75 2.2m @ 0.75 g/t FL17-632 LePlaque Main DD 171.50 172.63 1.13 1.00 2.64 1.1m @ 2.64 g/t FL17-632 LePlaque Main DD 181.00 182.10 1.10 1.00 10.30 1.1m @ 10.30 g/t FL17-633 LePlaque Main DD 171.83 173.20 1.37 1.20 1.23 1.4m @ 1.23 g/t FL17-633 LePlaque Main DD 180.05 184.46 4.41 4.00 3.81 4.4m @ 3.81 g/t FL17-634 LePlaque Main DD 41.20 43.78 2.58 2.00 0.56 2.6m @ 0.56 g/t FL17-634 LePlaque Main DD 45.58 47.55 1.97 1.50 0.86 2.0m @ 0.86 g/t FL17-634 LePlaque Main DD 49.00 50.05 1.05 0.50 0.51 1.0m @ 0.51 g/t FL17-634 LePlaque Main DD 95.00 96.26 1.26 0.50 0.66 1.3m @ 0.66 g/t FL17-634 LePlaque Main DD 104.00 105.00 1.00 0.50 1.15 1.0m @ 1.15 g/t FL17-635 LePlaque Main DD 29.30 30.65 1.35 1.00 3.03 1.3m @ 3.03 g/t FL17-635 LePlaque Main DD 47.00 48.28 1.28 1.00 0.71 1.3m @ 0.71 g/t FL17-635 LePlaque Main DD 55.11 58.00 2.89 2.50 1.78 2.9m @ 1.78 g/t FL17-635 LePlaque Main DD 60.00 61.50 1.50 1.50 0.55 1.5m @ 0.55 g/t FL17-635 LePlaque Main DD 72.00 73.50 1.50 1.50 0.59 1.5m @ 0.59 g/t FL17-635 LePlaque Main DD 81.00 82.45 1.45 1.00 0.68 1.5m @ 0.68 g/t FL17-635 LePlaque Main DD 88.45 89.45 1.00 1.00 0.56 1.0m @ 0.56 g/t FL17-635 LePlaque Main DD 92.45 99.27 6.82 5.00 2.50 6.8m @ 2.50 g/t FL17-635 LePlaque Main DD 113.57 114.60 1.03 0.50 0.72 1.0m @ 0.72 g/t FL17-636 LePlaque Main DD 1.97 4.15 2.18 2.00 0.72 2.2m @ 0.72 g/t FL17-636 LePlaque Main DD 55.00 56.00 1.00 0.50 0.53 1.0m @ 0.53 g/t FL17-636 LePlaque Main DD 77.00 78.00 1.00 0.50 0.52 1.0m @ 0.52 g/t FL17-637 LePlaque Main DD 5.30 8.30 3.00 2.00 1.00 3.0m @ 0.99 g/t FL17-637 LePlaque Main DD 103.92 109.74 5.82 4.00 1.37 5.8m @ 1.37 g/t FL17-638 LePlaque Main DD 49.42 52.10 2.68 2.50 7.57 2.7m @ 7.57 g/t including 1.1m @ 12.60 g/t from 51.00m FL17-638 LePlaque Main DD 53.59 57.46 3.87 3.00 1.12 3.9m @ 1.12 g/t FL17-638 LePlaque Main DD 59.00 60.00 1.00 1.00 1.23 1.0m @ 1.23 g/t FL17-638 LePlaque Main DD 62.28 63.50 1.22 0.50 0.50 1.2m @ 0.50 g/t FL17-638 LePlaque Main DD 75.00 76.00 1.00 0.50 4.22 1.0m @ 4.22 g/t FL17-638 LePlaque Main DD 86.50 89.21 2.71 2.00 0.59 2.7m @ 0.59 g/t FL17-638 LePlaque Main DD 90.56 92.78 2.22 2.00 3.23 2.2m @ 3.23 g/t FL17-638 LePlaque Main DD 95.05 96.66 1.61 0.50 3.84 1.6m @ 3.84 g/t FL17-638 LePlaque Main DD 98.84 100.14 1.30 0.50 1.41 1.3m @ 1.41 g/t FL17-639 LePlaque Main DD 5.68 14.83 9.15 7.00 5.01 9.2m @ 5.01 g/t including 1m @ 12.40 g/t from 8.00m FL17-639 LePlaque Main DD 37.50 40.50 3.00 2.50 0.65 3.0m @ 0.65 g/t FL17-639 LePlaque Main DD 65.00 67.00 2.00 2.00 1.29 2.0m @ 1.29 g/t FL17-640 LePlaque Main DD 2.87 3.87 1.00 1.00 0.53 1.0m @ 0.53 g/t FL17-640 LePlaque Main DD 50.00 52.00 2.00 1.50 0.79 2.0m @ 0.79 g/t FL17-640 LePlaque Main DD 53.50 56.50 3.00 2.00 0.65 3.0m @ 0.65 g/t FL17-641 LePlaque Main DD 24.40 26.50 2.10 2.00 0.51 2.1m @ 0.51 g/t FL17-642 LePlaque Main DD 31.70 34.85 3.15 3.00 21.92 3.2m @ 21.92 g/t FL17-642 LePlaque Main DD 52.40 53.50 1.10 1.00 0.67 1.1m @ 0.67 g/t FL17-642 LePlaque Main DD 67.12 70.00 2.88 2.50 3.48 2.9m @ 3.48 g/t FL17-643 LePlaque Main DD 41.00 42.00 1.00 1.00 0.98 1.0m @ 0.98 g/t FL17-643 LePlaque Main DD 121.50 127.92 6.42 6.00 1.25 6.4m @ 1.25 g/t FL17-643 LePlaque Main DD 128.93 133.05 4.12 4.00 59.41 4.1m @ 59.41 g/t including 0.95m @ 195.00 g/t from 129.65m FL17-643 LePlaque Main DD 139.25 147.08 7.83 7.00 2.04 7.8m @ 2.04 g/t FL17-643 LePlaque Main DD 148.40 149.77 1.37 1.00 0.55 1.4m @ 0.55 g/t FL17-644 LePlaque Main DD 61.00 62.10 1.10 1.00 0.92 1.1m @ 0.92 g/t FL17-644 LePlaque Main DD 71.25 74.73 3.48 3.00 1.38 3.5m @ 1.38 g/t FL17-644 LePlaque Main DD 76.00 85.22 9.22 8.00 1.36 9.2m @ 1.36 g/t FL17-644 LePlaque Main DD 90.00 93.00 3.00 3.00 3.55 3.0m @ 3.55 g/t FL17-644 LePlaque Main DD 96.75 97.88 1.13 1.00 23.30 1.1m @ 23.30 g/t FL17-644 LePlaque Main DD 102.00 104.17 2.17 2.00 1.63 2.2m @ 1.63 g/t FL17-645 LePlaque Main DD 158.07 163.00 4.93 4.50 1.47 4.9m @ 1.47 g/t FL17-645 LePlaque Main DD 168.80 170.60 1.80 1.50 0.73 1.8m @ 0.73 g/t FL17-645 LePlaque Main DD 180.50 182.00 1.50 1.50 1.28 1.5m @ 1.28 g/t FL17-646 LePlaque Main DD 76.50 77.54 1.04 1.00 1.48 1.0m @ 1.48 g/t FL17-646 LePlaque Main DD 80.00 84.00 4.00 4.00 1.42 4.0m @ 1.42 g/t FL17-646 LePlaque Main DD 87.00 88.10 1.10 1.00 1.55 1.1m @ 1.55 g/t FL17-646 LePlaque Main DD 89.85 102.16 12.31 12.00 3.50 12.3m @ 3.50 g/t including 0.54m @ 22.40 g/t from 92.71m FL17-646 LePlaque Main DD 108.15 111.95 3.80 3.50 0.96 3.8m @ 0.96 g/t FL17-647 LePlaque Main DD 0.00 1.05 1.05 1.00 0.51 1.1m @ 0.51 g/t FL17-647 LePlaque Main DD 37.00 39.84 2.84 2.00 4.58 2.8m @ 4.58 g/t FL17-647 LePlaque Main DD 44.37 45.60 1.23 1.00 17.30 1.2m @ 17.30 g/t FL17-647 LePlaque Main DD 66.53 68.62 2.09 1.50 1.18 2.1m @ 1.18 g/t FL17-648 LePlaque Main DD 36.65 39.00 2.35 2.00 0.84 2.4m @ 0.84 g/t FL17-648 LePlaque Main DD 63.40 65.90 2.50 2.50 1.96 2.5m @ 1.96 g/t FL17-648 LePlaque Main DD 70.09 72.30 2.21 2.00 1.56 2.2m @ 1.56 g/t FL17-648 LePlaque Main DD 76.00 77.00 1.00 1.00 0.59 1.0m @ 0.59 g/t FL17-648 LePlaque Main DD 84.35 89.30 4.95 4.50 2.86 5.0m @ 2.86 g/t FL17-648 LePlaque Main DD 94.00 95.00 1.00 1.00 1.50 1.0m @ 1.50 g/t FL17-649 LePlaque Main DD 0.00 1.45 1.45 1.00 0.76 1.4m @ 0.76 g/t FL17-649 LePlaque Main DD 17.65 21.02 3.37 3.00 2.08 3.4m @ 2.08 g/t FL17-649 LePlaque Main DD 67.56 68.70 1.14 1.00 0.98 1.1m @ 0.98 g/t FL17-649 LePlaque Main DD 78.20 79.30 1.10 1.00 0.53 1.1m @ 0.53 g/t FL17-649 LePlaque Main DD 101.40 106.91 5.51 5.00 4.85 5.5m @ 4.85 g/t including 1.05m @ 18.20 g/t from 103.45m FL17-649 LePlaque Main DD 108.00 110.00 2.00 2.00 1.06 2.0m @ 1.05 g/t FL17-650 LePlaque Main DD 62.00 63.59 1.59 1.50 79.11 1.6m @ 79.11 g/t including 0.8m @ 96.00 g/t from 62.0m FL17-650 LePlaque Main DD 92.90 93.93 1.03 1.00 0.64 1.0m @ 0.64 g/t FL17-651 LePlaque Main DD 40.75 43.34 2.59 2.50 10.21 2.6m @ 10.21 g/t including 1.34m @ 15.00 g/t from 42m FL17-651 LePlaque Main DD 93.00 97.10 4.10 4.00 1.31 4.1m @ 1.31 g/t FL17-651 LePlaque Main DD 108.90 110.11 1.21 1.00 0.50 1.2m @ 0.50 g/t FL17-651 LePlaque Main DD 113.07 120.00 6.93 6.50 3.16 6.9m @ 3.16 g/t including 1.00m @ 12.90 g/t from 114.0m FL17-654 LePlaque Main DD 58.00 61.00 3.00 3.00 1.82 3.0m @ 1.82 g/t FL17-654 LePlaque Main DD 64.80 65.92 1.12 1.00 1.73 1.1m @ 1.73 g/t FL17-654 LePlaque Main DD 74.24 78.10 3.86 3.50 0.66 3.9m @ 0.66 g/t FL17-654 LePlaque Main DD 80.00 81.00 1.00 1.00 1.46 1.0m @ 1.46 g/t FL17-654 LePlaque Main DD 88.76 90.28 1.52 1.00 1.18 1.5m @ 1.18 g/t FL17-654 LePlaque Main DD 95.00 96.35 1.35 1.00 0.73 1.3m @ 0.73 g/t FL17-654 LePlaque Main DD 97.43 98.61 1.18 1.00 0.53 1.2m @ 0.53 g/t FL17-655 LePlaque Main DD 55.90 57.87 1.97 1.50 2.38 2.0m @ 2.38 g/t FL17-655 LePlaque Main DD 65.40 66.57 1.17 1.00 1.67 1.2m @ 1.67 g/t FL17-655 LePlaque Main DD 89.30 90.63 1.33 1.00 0.89 1.3m @ 0.89 g/t FL17-655 LePlaque Main DD 92.00 96.48 4.48 4.00 7.99 4.5m @ 7.99 g/t including 1.00m @ 15.80 g/t from 93.0m FL17-655 LePlaque Main DD 97.54 99.74 2.20 2.00 7.72 2.2m @ 7.72 g/t including 0.70m @ 22.80 g/t from 97.54m FL17-655 LePlaque Main DD 114.17 115.37 1.20 1.00 2.50 1.2m @ 2.50 g/t FL17-655 LePlaque Main DD 123.00 137.99 14.99 8.50 11.94 15.0m @ 11.94 g/t including 1m @ 34.80 g/t from 129.0m FL17-655 LePlaque Main DD 141.00 142.10 1.10 0.50 0.67 1.1m @ 0.67 g/t FL17-656 LePlaque Main DD 1.10 2.10 1.00 1.00 0.67 1.0m @ 0.67 g/t FL17-656 LePlaque Main DD 16.30 17.60 1.30 1.00 0.55 1.3m @ 0.55 g/t FL17-656 LePlaque Main DD 20.40 23.50 3.10 3.00 0.75 3.1m @ 0.75 g/t FL17-656 LePlaque Main DD 32.96 34.06 1.10 1.00 1.29 1.1m @ 1.29 g/t FL17-656 LePlaque Main DD 80.35 81.85 1.50 1.00 1.67 1.5m @ 1.67 g/t FL17-656 LePlaque Main DD 99.33 102.07 2.74 2.50 3.08 2.7m @ 3.08 g/t FL17-656 LePlaque Main DD 149.80 151.25 1.45 1.00 0.61 1.4m @ 0.61 g/t FL17-657 LePlaque Main DD 109.67 126.52 16.85 16.50 3.33 16.8m @ 3.33 g/t including 1.20m @ 15.40 g/t from 110.83m FL17-657 LePlaque Main DD 128.50 129.50 1.00 1.00 1.85 1.0m @ 1.85 g/t FL17-657 LePlaque Main DD 131.50 137.70 6.20 6.00 4.97 6.2m @ 4.97 g/t including 1.20m @ 21.80 g/t from 136.5m FL17-658 LePlaque Main DD 19.50 21.88 2.38 2.00 1.53 2.4m @ 1.53 g/t FL17-658 LePlaque Main DD 35.80 36.80 1.00 0.50 0.56 1.0m @ 0.56 g/t FL17-658 LePlaque Main DD 64.10 65.24 1.14 0.50 0.80 1.1m @ 0.80 g/t FL17-658 LePlaque Main DD 67.27 68.50 1.23 0.50 1.13 1.2m @ 1.13 g/t FL17-658 LePlaque Main DD 72.03 76.10 4.07 3.00 0.69 4.1m @ 0.69 g/t FL17-658 LePlaque Main DD 78.20 79.46 1.26 1.00 1.48 1.3m @ 1.48 g/t FL17-658 LePlaque Main DD 91.85 92.95 1.10 0.50 0.50 1.1m @ 0.50 g/t FL17-658 LePlaque Main DD 127.34 128.56 1.22 0.50 0.83 1.2m @ 0.83 g/t FL17-659 LePlaque Main DD 31.00 32.00 1.00 0.50 0.81 1.0m @ 0.81 g/t FL17-659 LePlaque Main DD 43.70 44.80 1.10 0.50 3.84 1.1m @ 3.84 g/t FL17-659 LePlaque Main DD 51.00 54.17 3.17 2.50 1.24 3.2m @ 1.24 g/t FL17-659 LePlaque Main DD 71.71 75.28 3.57 2.50 2.36 3.6m @ 2.36 g/t FL17-660 LePlaque Main DD 42.25 45.95 3.70 3.50 7.38 3.7m @ 7.38 g/t including 1.25m @ 14.10 g/t from 44.70m FL17-660 LePlaque Main DD 121.00 124.00 3.00 2.00 6.02 3.0m @ 6.02 g/t including 1m @ 16.30 g/t from 122 FL17-661 LePlaque Main DD 34.65 35.85 1.20 1.00 0.52 1.2m @ 0.52 g/t FL17-661 LePlaque Main DD 49.00 52.20 3.20 3.00 0.75 3.2m @ 0.75 g/t FL17-661 LePlaque Main DD 58.00 59.00 1.00 1.00 1.30 1.0m @ 1.30 g/t FL17-661 LePlaque Main DD 61.00 65.49 4.49 4.00 1.36 4.5m @ 1.36 g/t FL17-661 LePlaque Main DD 66.68 68.00 1.32 1.00 0.74 1.3m @ 0.74 g/t FL17-661 LePlaque Main DD 71.63 72.78 1.15 1.00 0.78 1.2m @ 0.78 g/t FL17-661 LePlaque Main DD 73.90 74.90 1.00 1.00 1.43 1.0m @ 1.43 g/t FL17-661 LePlaque Main DD 88.00 90.30 2.30 2.00 1.35 2.3m @ 1.35 g/t FL17-661 LePlaque Main DD 144.05 155.00 10.95 5.00 7.49 10.9m @ 7.49 g/t including 1m @ 66.20 g/t from 145.0m FL17-662 LePlaque Main DD 36.00 37.30 1.30 1.00 1.24 1.3m @ 1.24 g/t FL17-662 LePlaque Main DD 53.05 67.98 14.93 14.00 1.16 14.9m @ 1.16 g/t FL17-662 LePlaque Main DD 72.87 74.45 1.58 1.50 1.58 1.6m @ 1.58 g/t FL17-662 LePlaque Main DD 93.00 94.00 1.00 1.00 0.81 1.0m @ 0.81 g/t FL17-662 LePlaque Main DD 99.58 100.95 1.37 1.00 1.15 1.4m @ 1.15 g/t FL17-663 LePlaque Main DD 2.00 3.00 1.00 1.00 1.43 1.0m @ 1.43 g/t FL17-663 LePlaque Main DD 8.00 9.30 1.30 1.00 0.58 1.3m @ 0.58 g/t FL17-663 LePlaque Main DD 10.50 14.10 3.60 3.50 7.67 3.6m @ 7.67 g/t including 1.50m @ 17.20 g/t from 10.5m FL17-663 LePlaque Main DD 70.30 71.50 1.20 1.00 0.53 1.2m @ 0.53 g/t FL17-663 LePlaque Main DD 87.84 89.00 1.16 1.00 4.32 1.2m @ 4.32 g/t FL17-663 LePlaque Main DD 90.50 92.00 1.50 1.00 1.61 1.5m @ 1.61 g/t FL17-663 LePlaque Main DD 96.05 97.45 1.40 1.00 1.11 1.4m @ 1.11 g/t FL17-663 LePlaque Main DD 100.55 102.50 1.95 1.50 0.87 2.0m @ 0.87 g/t FL17-663 LePlaque Main DD 104.00 107.00 3.00 3.00 1.60 3.0m @ 1.60 g/t FL17-663 LePlaque Main DD 152.00 154.15 2.15 2.00 1.44 2.2m @ 1.44 g/t FL17-664 LePlaque Main DD 6.50 7.80 1.30 0.50 0.82 1.3m @ 0.82 g/t FL17-664 LePlaque Main DD 132.50 134.00 1.50 1.00 0.95 1.5m @ 0.95 g/t FL17-664 LePlaque Main DD 140.00 144.70 4.70 2.50 1.10 4.7m @ 1.10 g/t FL17-664 LePlaque Main DD 146.17 148.32 2.15 2.00 0.81 2.2m @ 0.81 g/t FL17-664 LePlaque Main DD 150.40 153.55 3.15 2.00 0.99 3.2m @ 0.99 g/t FL17-664 LePlaque Main DD 155.80 158.00 2.20 1.00 11.50 2.2m @ 11.50 g/t including 0.97m @ 25.00 g/t from 157.03m FL17-664 LePlaque Main DD 160.80 162.67 1.87 1.00 2.12 1.9m @ 2.12 g/t FL17-664 LePlaque Main DD 169.00 177.96 8.96 4.50 1.81 9.0m @ 1.81 g/t including 1.20 m @ 6.54 g/t from 175.8m FL17-590 LePlaque Main RC 17.00 18.00 1.00 0.50 0.68 1.0m @ 0.68 g/t FL17-590 LePlaque Main RC 25.00 26.00 1.00 0.50 1.02 1.0m @ 1.02 g/t FL17-590 LePlaque Main RC 44.00 46.00 2.00 1.00 0.80 2.0m @ 0.79 g/t FL17-590 LePlaque Main RC 62.00 63.00 1.00 0.50 0.55 1.0m @ 0.55 g/t FL17-590 LePlaque Main RC 72.00 73.00 1.00 0.50 0.89 1.0m @ 0.89 g/t FL17-591 LePlaque Main RC 22.00 24.00 2.00 1.00 2.31 2.0m @ 2.31 g/t FL17-591 LePlaque Main RC 34.00 37.00 3.00 2.00 1.86 3.0m @ 1.86 g/t FL17-591 LePlaque Main RC 39.00 43.00 4.00 2.50 0.95 4.0m @ 0.95 g/t FL17-591 LePlaque Main RC 45.00 49.00 4.00 2.50 1.34 4.0m @ 1.34 g/t FL17-591 LePlaque Main RC 51.00 53.00 2.00 1.00 3.69 2.0m @ 3.69 g/t FL17-591 LePlaque Main RC 71.00 72.00 1.00 1.00 0.56 1.0m @ 0.56 g/t FL17-591 LePlaque Main RC 77.00 80.00 3.00 2.00 1.09 3.0m @ 1.09 g/t FL17-592 LePlaque Main RC 3.00 11.00 8.00 6.00 1.99 8.0m @ 1.99 g/t including 1m @ 6.52 g/t from 6.00m FL17-592 LePlaque Main RC 25.00 27.00 2.00 2.00 0.62 2.0m @ 0.62 g/t FL17-592 LePlaque Main RC 29.00 30.00 1.00 1.00 0.74 1.0m @ 0.74 g/t FL17-592 LePlaque Main RC 42.00 43.00 1.00 1.00 3.38 1.0m @ 3.38 g/t FL17-592 LePlaque Main RC 74.00 76.00 2.00 1.50 3.74 2.0m @ 3.74 g/t FL17-593 LePlaque Main RC 6.00 7.00 1.00 0.50 1.95 1.0m @ 1.95 g/t FL17-593 LePlaque Main RC 9.00 10.00 1.00 0.50 0.58 1.0m @ 0.58 g/t FL17-593 LePlaque Main RC 12.00 23.00 11.00 9.00 1.35 11.0m @ 1.35 g/t FL17-593 LePlaque Main RC 30.00 31.00 1.00 0.50 1.21 1.0m @ 1.21 g/t FL17-593 LePlaque Main RC 40.00 41.00 1.00 0.50 0.76 1.0m @ 0.76 g/t FL17-593 LePlaque Main RC 58.00 59.00 1.00 0.50 2.11 1.0m @ 2.11 g/t FL17-594 LePlaque Main RC 2.00 3.00 1.00 1.00 0.58 1.0m @ 0.58 g/t FL17-594 LePlaque Main RC 11.00 14.00 3.00 2.50 2.05 3.0m @ 2.05 g/t FL17-595 LePlaque Main RC 3.00 5.00 2.00 1.50 0.54 2.0m @ 0.54 g/t FL17-595 LePlaque Main RC 7.00 11.00 4.00 3.00 1.73 4.0m @ 1.73 g/t FL17-595 LePlaque Main RC 13.00 14.00 1.00 0.50 0.65 1.0m @ 0.65 g/t FL17-595 LePlaque Main RC 21.00 30.00 9.00 6.00 1.63 9.0m @ 1.63 g/t including 1m @ 5.89 g/t from 23.0m FL17-595 LePlaque Main RC 40.00 41.00 1.00 0.50 0.55 1.0m @ 0.55 g/t FL17-595 LePlaque Main RC 65.00 66.00 1.00 0.50 0.53 1.0m @ 0.53 g/t FL17-596 LePlaque Main RC 1.00 3.00 2.00 1.50 0.82 2.0m @ 0.82 g/t FL17-597 LePlaque Main RC 8.00 9.00 1.00 0.50 0.59 1.0m @ 0.59 g/t FL17-597 LePlaque Main RC 49.00 50.00 1.00 0.50 2.55 1.0m @ 2.55 g/t FL17-598 LePlaque Main RC 53.00 54.00 1.00 0.50 2.84 1.0m @ 2.84 g/t FL17-599 LePlaque Main RC 9.00 43.00 34.00 24.00 2.03 34.0m @ 2.03 g/t including 1m @ 19.50 g/t from 10.0m FL17-600 LePlaque Main RC 35.00 36.00 1.00 1.00 0.73 1.0m @ 0.73 g/t FL17-600 LePlaque Main RC 73.00 76.00 3.00 2.00 18.44 3.0m @ 18.44 g/t including 1m @ 50.60 g/t from 73.0m FL17-600 LePlaque Main RC 80.00 81.00 1.00 1.00 0.76 1.0m @ 0.76 g/t FL17-601 LePlaque Main RC 45.00 46.00 1.00 0.50 0.73 1.0m @ 0.73 g/t FL17-602 LePlaque Main RC 19.00 22.00 3.00 2.50 0.57 3.0m @ 0.57 g/t FL17-602 LePlaque Main RC 25.00 28.00 3.00 2.50 0.79 3.0m @ 0.79 g/t FL17-602 LePlaque Main RC 59.00 61.00 2.00 1.50 2.29 2.0m @ 2.29 g/t FL17-602 LePlaque Main RC 65.00 71.00 6.00 5.00 3.31 6.0m @ 3.31 g/t FL17-602 LePlaque Main RC 75.00 76.00 1.00 0.50 1.06 1.0m @ 1.06 g/t FL17-603 LePlaque Main RC 20.00 22.00 2.00 2.00 1.50 2.0m @ 1.50 g/t FL17-603 LePlaque Main RC 57.00 58.00 1.00 1.00 0.57 1.0m @ 0.57 g/t FL17-603 LePlaque Main RC 59.00 60.00 1.00 0.50 0.53 1.0m @ 0.53 g/t FL17-603 LePlaque Main RC 62.00 69.00 7.00 6.00 8.96 7.0m @ 8.96 g/t including 1m @ 55.70 g/t from 63.0m FL17-603 LePlaque Main RC 78.00 79.00 1.00 0.50 0.97 1.0m @ 0.97 g/t FL17-616 LePlaque Main RC 43.00 44.00 1.00 1.00 0.57 1.0m @ 0.57 g/t FL17-616 LePlaque Main RC 63.00 65.00 2.00 1.50 4.05 2.0m @ 4.04 g/t FL17-618 LePlaque Main RC 5.00 6.00 1.00 1.00 2.38 1.0m @ 2.38 g/t FL17-618 LePlaque Main RC 16.00 22.00 6.00 4.00 3.75 6.0m @ 3.75 g/t including 1m @ 14.00 g/t from 18.0m FL17-618 LePlaque Main RC 65.00 69.00 4.00 2.50 0.84 4.0m @ 0.84 g/t FL17-618 LePlaque Main RC 76.00 87.00 11.00 7.00 0.77 11.0m @ 0.77 g/t FL17-618 LePlaque Main RC 91.00 99.00 8.00 5.00 1.30 8.0m @ 1.30 g/t FL17-619 LePlaque Main RC 2.00 8.00 6.00 4.00 3.69 6.0m @ 3.69 g/t including 1m @ 6.70 g/t from 6.0m FL17-619 LePlaque Main RC 30.00 32.00 2.00 1.00 1.08 2.0m @ 1.07 g/t FL17-619 LePlaque Main RC 38.00 48.00 10.00 7.00 6.37 10.0m @ 6.37 g/t including 1m @ 32.50 g/t from 43.0m FL17-619 LePlaque Main RC 52.00 59.00 7.00 4.50 1.24 7.0m @ 1.24 g/t FL17-619 LePlaque Main RC 62.00 70.00 8.00 4.50 1.58 8.0m @ 1.58 g/t FL17-619 LePlaque Main RC 72.00 79.00 7.00 5.00 0.71 7.0m @ 0.71 g/t FL17-619 LePlaque Main RC 82.00 96.00 14.00 9.00 1.19 14.0m @ 1.19 g/t FL17-623 LePlaque Main RC 2.00 4.00 2.00 2.00 1.52 2.0m @ 1.52 g/t FL17-623 LePlaque Main RC 6.00 8.00 2.00 2.00 1.34 2.0m @ 1.34 g/t FL17-623 LePlaque Main RC 12.00 13.00 1.00 1.00 0.68 1.0m @ 0.68 g/t FL17-623 LePlaque Main RC 19.00 25.00 6.00 4.00 37.24 6.0m @ 37.24 g/t including 1m @ 210 g/t from 19.0m FL17-623 LePlaque Main RC 33.00 34.00 1.00 1.00 0.83 1.0m @ 0.83 g/t FL17-623 LePlaque Main RC 37.00 38.00 1.00 0.50 1.34 1.0m @ 1.34 g/t FL17-623 LePlaque Main RC 40.00 48.00 8.00 6.00 1.49 8.0m @ 1.49 g/t FL17-623 LePlaque Main RC 53.00 61.00 8.00 6.00 5.83 8.0m @ 5.83 g/t including 1m @ 20.50 g/t from 54.0m FL17-623 LePlaque Main RC 63.00 64.00 1.00 0.50 0.88 1.0m @ 0.88 g/t FL17-623 LePlaque Main RC 66.00 72.00 6.00 4.00 0.81 6.0m @ 0.81 g/t FL17-623 LePlaque Main RC 74.00 85.00 11.00 6.50 4.58 11.0m @ 4.58 g/t including 1m @ 15.20 g/t from 78.0m FL17-623 LePlaque Main RC 87.00 90.00 3.00 1.00 0.78 3.0m @ 0.78 g/t FL17-624 LePlaque Main RC 0.00 22.00 22.00 15.00 2.67 22.0m @ 2.67 g/t including 1m @ 21.50 g/t from 11.0m FL17-624 LePlaque Main RC 37.00 38.00 1.00 1.00 0.51 1.0m @ 0.51 g/t FL17-624 LePlaque Main RC 41.00 43.00 2.00 1.00 3.81 2.0m @ 3.81 g/t FL17-625 LePlaque Main RC 51.00 53.00 2.00 1.00 0.75 2.0m @ 0.74 g/t FL17-625 LePlaque Main RC 57.00 64.00 7.00 5.00 1.05 7.0m @ 1.05 g/t FL17-625 LePlaque Main RC 75.00 79.00 4.00 3.00 0.78 4.0m @ 0.78 g/t FL17-625 LePlaque Main RC 84.00 85.00 1.00 1.00 0.93 1.0m @ 0.93 g/t FL17-625 LePlaque Main RC 87.00 89.00 2.00 1.50 0.61 2.0m @ 0.60 g/t FL17-626 LePlaque Main RC 1.00 18.00 17.00 11.50 3.44 17.0m @ 3.44 g/t including 1m @ 14.90 g/t from 12.0m FL17-626 LePlaque Main RC 20.00 39.00 19.00 14.00 2.02 19.0m @ 2.02 g/t including 1m @ 10.90 g/t from 25 .0m FL17-626 LePlaque Main RC 64.00 65.00 1.00 1.00 0.50 1.0m @ 0.50 g/t FL17-626 LePlaque Main RC 73.00 75.00 2.00 1.50 1.23 2.0m @ 1.23 g/t FL17-626 LePlaque Main RC 77.00 78.00 1.00 1.00 0.78 1.0m @ 0.78 g/t FL17-627 LePlaque Main RC 40.00 41.00 1.00 0.50 0.97 1.0m @ 0.97 g/t FL17-652 LePlaque Main RC 83.00 85.00 2.00 1.50 0.96 2.0m @ 0.96 g/t FL17-653 LePlaque Main RC 9.00 10.00 1.00 1.00 0.79 1.0m @ 0.79 g/t FL17-653 LePlaque Main RC 14.00 21.00 7.00 6.00 0.64 7.0m @ 0.64 g/t FL17-653 LePlaque Main RC 26.00 29.00 3.00 2.00 1.04 3.0m @ 1.04 g/t FL17-653 LePlaque Main RC 34.00 35.00 1.00 0.50 1.34 1.0m @ 1.34 g/t FL17-653 LePlaque Main RC 44.00 45.00 1.00 0.50 0.70 1.0m @ 0.70 g/t FL17-653 LePlaque Main RC 51.00 52.00 1.00 0.50 0.58 1.0m @ 0.58 g/t FL17-653 LePlaque Main RC 61.00 62.00 1.00 0.50 1.48 1.0m @ 1.48 g/t FL17-653 LePlaque Main RC 67.00 70.00 3.00 2.50 1.19 3.0m @ 1.19 g/t FL17-653 LePlaque Main RC 105.00 108.00 3.00 2.50 4.89 3.0m @ 4.89 g/t 1 As published in the September 20, 2017 press release entitled "Endeavour launches construction of Ity CIL project based on optimization study" 2 As published in the September 20, 2017 press release entitled "Endeavour launches construction of Ity CIL project based on optimization study" Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - February 23, 2018) - B2Gold Corp. (TSX: BTO) (NYSE AMERICAN: BTG) (NSX: B2G) ("B2Gold" or the "Company") announces a positive initial open-pit resource at the newly-discovered El Limon Central zone, at the El Limon property in Nicaragua, of 5,130,000 tonnes at a grade of 4.92 grams per tonne ("g/t") of gold containing 812,000 ounces of gold (refer to table below). This large, good grade new zone has the potential to decrease the El Limon Mine's cash operating costs and all-in sustaining costs per ounce, dramatically increase the El Limon mine life, and could lead to an expansion of the El Limon mill to a higher throughput rate which could potentially double annual gold production. The El Limon Central zone, at its closest location, is approximately 150 metres from the El Limon mill facility, extending southeast and northwest, adjacent to existing plant and administrative infrastructure. Historical records indicate that parts of the Central zone had been mined underground in past decades. B2Gold's recent exploration work indicates the underground mining was much more limited than previously thought. The El Limon central vein structure has been drill tested along a 2.2-kilometre strike length so far, and remains open to depth and along strike, and will be further drill tested during 2018. This structure has experienced some limited historic mining along its length. Further north, the structure extends along strike and this area is being drill tested at present. Highlighted results within the pit include 19.70 metres at 24.24 g/t gold (LIM-17-4119), 24.80 metres at 11.65 g/t gold (LIM-17-4112), 5.66 metres at 64.76 g/t gold (LIM-16-3984) and 15.70 metres at 20.04 g/t gold (LIM-17-4069). Below and beyond the resource pit limits to the north, drill highlights include 2.0 metres at 13.43 g/t gold (LIM-17-4184) and 20.35 metres at 3.0 g/t gold, including 4.1 metres at 6.85 g/t gold (LIM-17-4198). All widths noted are true widths. The Mineral Resource estimate was prepared in-house at B2Gold. A total of 248 drill holes (35,871 metres of drilling) were used in the gold grade estimate with more than 75% of the drill meterage (28,078 metres) coming from diamond drilling, completed by B2Gold. The remainder of the drilling was completed by previous owners during the late 1990s through early 2000s. Inferred Mineral Resources reported at different gold cutoff grades are presented as a sensitivity case. Cutoff Grade g/t gold Tonnes Grade g/t gold Ounces1 0.8 5,560,000 4.62 825,000 1.0 5,330,000 4.78 819,000 1.2 5,130,000 4.92 812,000 1.4 4,950,000 5.05 804,000 1.Mineral Resources are reported in accordance with NI 43-101 and the 2014 Canadian Institute of Mining, Metallurgy and Petroleum "Definition Standards for Mineral Resources and Mineral Reserves" (CIM Definition Standards). Mineral Resources that are not Mineral Reserves do not have demonstrated economic viability Inferred Mineral Resources are amenable to open-pit mining methods and are reported within a pit shell run using a gold price of US$1,400/oz., an average gold recovery of 83.8% (based on preliminary metallurgical testwork), and recent EL Limon Mine cash operating costs. The 2017 El Limon budget was increased to USD$7.00 million and included over 30,000 metres of drilling in 157 holes with a focus on the El Limon vein. The 2018 El Limon budget is USD$7.00 million and will include 24,900 metres in 132 holes, again, with a focus on the El Limon vein. B2Gold is currently conducting additional metallurgical testing on the El Limon Central ore and a study to evaluate the potential to expand the El Limon throughput to significantly increase annual gold production and reduce cash operating costs. The study is expected by mid-2018. El Limon Tailings Project Update In 2017, an initial study was completed regarding the potential re-processing of the old tailings at the El Limon Mine. Based on historic mill and drilling records, the tailings contain an estimated 9 million to 11 million tonnes with a potential gold grade of 0.80 g/t to 1.0 g/t. An ongoing drilling program is underway as part of a feasibility study which will confirm resources and grades, the optimum grind size, capital costs and final project economics. Based on the initial study completed in 2017, the Company believes that the project has the potential to produce an average of approximately 20,000 to 25,000 ounces of gold and 70,000 to 80,000 ounces of silver per year for approximately 9 to 11 years. The concept is to regrind the old tailings to a much finer grind size, process them through a new CIP plant and place the tailings in a new lined tailings storage facility. The potential quantity and grade included in the initial study is conceptual in nature, and there has been insufficient exploration to date to define a Mineral Resource, and it is uncertain if further exploration will result in the target being delineated as a Mineral Resource. The El Limon Mine has produced over 3 million ounces of gold since 1941, principally from the veins of El Limon, Talavera and Santa Pancha, the current focus of production. B2Gold purchased the mine in 2009, with the acquisition of Central Sun Mining, and the 19,200-hectare El Limon Mine is 95% B2Gold and 5% IMISA. The 2018 production forecast is between 55,000 to 60,000 ounces of gold. B2Gold's Quality Assurance/Quality Control The primary laboratory for El Limon drilling program is Bureau Veritas Minerals in Vancouver, Canada. Core samples are prepared at El Limon preparation facility with the pulp sent to Vancouver and analysed using 30g fire assay with atomic absorption finish as well as multi-element ICP-MS analyses. SGS Laboratories in Medellin, Colombia, is the umpire laboratory. Quality assurance and quality control procedures include the systematic insertion of blanks, standards and duplicates into the core sample strings. The results of the control samples are evaluated on a regular basis with batches re-analysed and/or resubmitted as needed. All results stated in this announcement have passed B2Gold's quality assurance and quality control ("QA/QC") protocols. Tom Garagan, Senior Vice President of Exploration, is the Qualified Person as defined under National Instrument 43-101, who has reviewed and approved the contents of this news release. About B2Gold Headquartered in Vancouver, Canada, B2Gold Corp. is the world's new senior gold producer. Founded in 2007, today, B2Gold has five operating gold mines and numerous exploration and development projects in various countries including Nicaragua, the Philippines, Namibia, Mali, Burkina Faso, Colombia and Finland. With the large, low-cost Fekola Mine now in production, B2Gold is well positioned in achieving transformational growth in 2018. In 2018, with the planned first full year of production from the Fekola Mine, consolidated gold production is forecast to be between 910,000 and 950,000 ounces. This represents an increase in annual consolidated gold production of approximately 300,000 ounces for the Company in 2018 versus 2017. ON BEHALF OF B2GOLD CORP. "Clive T. Johnson" President and Chief Executive Officer For more information on B2Gold please visit the Company website at www.b2gold.com or contact: Ian MacLean Vice President, Investor Relations 604-681-8371 This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. Katie Bromley Manager, Investor Relations & Public Relations 604-681-8371 This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. The Toronto Stock Exchange and the NYSE American LLC neither approve nor disapprove the information contained in this news release. This news release includes certain "forward-looking information" and "forward-looking statements" (collectively "forward-looking statements") within the meaning of applicable Canadian and United States securities legislation, including projections, guidance, forecasts, estimates and other statements regarding future financial and operational performance, events, production, mine life, revenue, cash flows, costs and the results of exploration, including, the potential for large, good grade new zone to decrease El Limon's cash operating costs, to increase its mine life by several years and to expand its mill to a higher throughput rate to potentially double annual gold production; timing of further drill testing; the results of an initial study completed in 2017 and the potential to produce an average of approximately 20,000 to 25,000 ounces of gold and 70,000 to 80,000 ounces of silver per year for approximately 9 to 11 years; 2018 production forecast of 55,000 to 60,000 ounces of gold; achievement of growth in 2018 and the consolidated forecasted gold production of between 910,000 and 950,000 ounces. Estimates of mineral resources and reserves, including the new inferred mineral resource estimate at El Limon, are also forward-looking statements because they constitute projections regarding the amount of minerals that may be encountered in the future and/or the anticipated economics of production, should a production decision be made. All statements in this news release that address events or developments that we expect to occur in the future are forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are statements that are not historical facts and are generally, although not always, identified by words such as "expect", "plan", "anticipate", "project", "target", "potential", "schedule", "forecast", "budget", "estimate", "intend" or "believe" and similar expressions or their negative connotations, or that events or conditions "will", "would", "may", "could", "should" or "might" occur. All such forward-looking statements are based on the opinions and estimates of management as of the date such statements are made. Forward-looking statements necessarily involve assumptions, risks and uncertainties, certain of which are beyond B2Gold's control, including risks and assumptions associated with the volatility of metal prices and our common shares; risks and dangers inherent in exploration, development and mining activities; uncertainty of reserve and resource estimates; risk of not achieving production, cost or other estimates; risk that actual production, development plans and costs differ materially from the estimates in our feasibility studies; risks related to hedging activities and ore purchase commitments; the ability to obtain and maintain any necessary permits, consents or authorizations required for mining activities; uncertainty about the outcome of negotiations with the Government of Mali; risks related to environmental regulations or hazards and compliance with complex regulations associated with mining activities; the ability to replace mineral reserves and identify acquisition opportunities; unknown liabilities of companies acquired by B2Gold; ability to successfully integrate new acquisitions; fluctuations in exchange rates; availability of financing; risks relating to financing and debt; risks related to operations in foreign and developing countries and compliance with foreign laws; risks related to remote operations and the availability of adequate infrastructure, fluctuations in price and availability of energy and other inputs necessary for mining operations; shortages or cost increases in necessary equipment, supplies and labour; regulatory, political and country risks; risks related to reliance upon contractors, third parties and joint venture partners; challenges to title or surface rights; dependence on key personnel and ability to attract and retain skilled personnel; the risk of an uninsurable or uninsured loss; adverse climate and weather conditions; litigation risk; competition with other mining companies; changes in tax laws; community support for our operations including risks related to strikes and the halting of such operations from time to time; risks related to failures of information systems or information security threats; ability to maintain adequate internal control over financial reporting as required by law; risks relating to compliance with anti-corruption laws; as well as other factors identified and as described in more detail under the heading "Risk Factors" in B2Gold's most recent Annual Information Form and B2Gold's other filings with Canadian securities regulators and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (the "SEC"), which may be viewed at www.sedar.com and www.sec.gov, respectively (the "Websites"). The list is not exhaustive of the factors that may affect the Company's forward-looking statements. There can be no assurance that such statements will prove to be accurate, and actual results, performance or achievements could differ materially from those expressed in, or implied by, these forward-looking statements. Accordingly, no assurance can be given that any events anticipated by the forward-looking statements will transpire or occur, or if any of them do, what benefits or liabilities B2Gold will derive therefrom. The Company's forward-looking statements reflect current expectations regarding future events and operating performance and speak only as of the date hereof and the Company does not assume any obligation to update forward-looking statements if circumstances or management's beliefs, expectations or opinions should change other than as required by applicable law. The Company's forward-looking statements are based on the applicable assumptions and factors management considers reasonable as of the date hereof, based on the information available to management at such time. These assumptions and factors include, but are not limited to, assumptions and factors related to the Company's ability to carry on current and future operations, including development and exploration activities; the timing, extent, duration and economic viability of such operations, including any mineral resources or reserves identified thereby; the accuracy and reliability of estimates, projections, forecasts, studies and assessments; the Company's ability to meet or achieve estimates, projections and forecasts; the availability and cost of inputs; the price and market for outputs, including gold; the timely receipt of necessary approvals or permits; the ability to meet current and future obligations; the ability to obtain timely financing on reasonable terms when required; the current and future social, economic and political conditions and other assumptions and factors generally associated with the mining industry. For the reasons set forth above, undue reliance should not be placed on forward-looking statements. Production results and the Company's guidance presented in this news release reflect total production at the mines the Company operates on a 100% basis. Cautionary Note to United States Investors The disclosure in this news release and in the documents described in this news release regarding mineral properties was prepared in accordance with Canadian National Instrument 43-101 ("NI 43-101"), which differs significantly from the requirements of the SEC set out in Industry Guide 7. Accordingly, such disclosure may not be comparable to similar information made public by companies that report in accordance with U.S. standards. The Company has prepared its public disclosures in accordance with Canadian securities laws, which differ in certain respects from U.S. securities laws. In particular, this news release refers to "mineral resources" and "inferred mineral resources". While these categories of mineralization are recognized and required by Canadian securities laws, they are not recognized by the SEC and are not normally permitted to be disclosed in SEC filings by U.S. companies. U.S. investors are cautioned not to assume that any part of a "mineral resource" or "inferred mineral resource" will ever be converted into a "reserve." In addition, "reserves" reported by the Company under Canadian standards may not qualify as reserves under SEC standards. Under SEC standards, mineralization may not be classified as a "reserve" unless the mineralization can be economically and legally extracted or produced at the time the "reserve" determination is made. Accordingly, information contained or referenced in this news release containing descriptions of the Company's mineral deposits may not be compatible to similar information made public by U.S. companies subject to the reporting and disclosure requirements of U.S. federal securities laws, rules and regulations. "Inferred mineral resources" have a great amount of uncertainty as to their existence and great uncertainty as to their economic and legal feasibility. It cannot be assumed that all or any part of an inferred mineral resource will ever be upgraded to a higher category. Historical results or feasibility models presented herein are not guarantees or expectations of future performance. VANCOUVER, British Columbia, Feb. 23, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- B2Gold Corp. (TSX: BTO) (NYSE AMERICAN: BTG) (NSX: B2G) (B2Gold or the Company) announces a positive initial open-pit resource at the newly-discovered El Limon Central zone, at the El Limon property in Nicaragua, of 5,130,000 tonnes at a grade of 4.92 grams per tonne (g/t) of gold containing 812,000 ounces of gold (refer to table below). This large, good grade new zone has the potential to decrease the El Limon Mines cash operating costs and all-in sustaining costs per ounce, dramatically increase the El Limon mine life, and could lead to an expansion of the El Limon mill to a higher throughput rate which could potentially double annual gold production. The El Limon Central zone, at its closest location, is approximately 150 metres from the El Limon mill facility, extending southeast and northwest, adjacent to existing plant and administrative infrastructure. Historical records indicate that parts of the Central zone had been mined underground in past decades. B2Golds recent exploration work indicates the underground mining was much more limited than previously thought. The El Limon central vein structure has been drill tested along a 2.2-kilometre strike length so far, and remains open to depth and along strike, and will be further drill tested during 2018. This structure has experienced some limited historic mining along its length. Further north, the structure extends along strike and this area is being drill tested at present. Highlighted results within the pit include 19.70 metres at 24.24 g/t gold (LIM-17-4119), 24.80 metres at 11.65 g/t gold (LIM-17-4112), 5.66 metres at 64.76 g/t gold (LIM-16-3984) and 15.70 metres at 20.04 g/t gold (LIM-17-4069). Below and beyond the resource pit limits to the north, drill highlights include 2.0 metres at 13.43 g/t gold (LIM-17-4184) and 20.35 metres at 3.0 g/t gold, including 4.1 metres at 6.85 g/t gold (LIM-17-4198). All widths noted are true widths. The Mineral Resource estimate was prepared in-house at B2Gold. A total of 248 drill holes (35,871 metres of drilling) were used in the gold grade estimate with more than 75% of the drill meterage (28,078 metres) coming from diamond drilling, completed by B2Gold. The remainder of the drilling was completed by previous owners during the late 1990s through early 2000s. Inferred Mineral Resources reported at different gold cutoff grades are presented as a sensitivity case. Cutoff Grade g/t gold Tonnes Grade g/t gold Ounces1 0.8 5,560,000 4.62 825,000 1.0 5,330,000 4.78 819,000 1.2 5,130,000 4.92 812,000 1.4 4,950,000 5.05 804,000 1.Mineral Resources are reported in accordance with NI 43-101 and the 2014 Canadian Institute of Mining, Metallurgy and Petroleum Definition Standards for Mineral Resources and Mineral Reserves (CIM Definition Standards). Mineral Resources that are not Mineral Reserves do not have demonstrated economic viability Inferred Mineral Resources are amenable to open-pit mining methods and are reported within a pit shell run using a gold price of US$1,400/oz., an average gold recovery of 83.8% (based on preliminary metallurgical testwork), and recent EL Limon Mine cash operating costs. The 2017 El Limon budget was increased to USD$7.00 million and included over 30,000 metres of drilling in 157 holes with a focus on the El Limon vein. The 2018 El Limon budget is USD$7.00 million and will include 24,900 metres in 132 holes, again, with a focus on the El Limon vein. B2Gold is currently conducting additional metallurgical testing on the El Limon Central ore and a study to evaluate the potential to expand the El Limon throughput to significantly increase annual gold production and reduce cash operating costs. The study is expected by mid-2018. El Limon Tailings Project Update In 2017, an initial study was completed regarding the potential re-processing of the old tailings at the El Limon Mine. Based on historic mill and drilling records, the tailings contain an estimated 9 million to 11 million tonnes with a potential gold grade of 0.80 g/t to 1.0 g/t. An ongoing drilling program is underway as part of a feasibility study which will confirm resources and grades, the optimum grind size, capital costs and final project economics. Based on the initial study completed in 2017, the Company believes that the project has the potential to produce an average of approximately 20,000 to 25,000 ounces of gold and 70,000 to 80,000 ounces of silver per year for approximately 9 to 11 years. The concept is to regrind the old tailings to a much finer grind size, process them through a new CIP plant and place the tailings in a new lined tailings storage facility. The potential quantity and grade included in the initial study is conceptual in nature, and there has been insufficient exploration to date to define a Mineral Resource, and it is uncertain if further exploration will result in the target being delineated as a Mineral Resource. The El Limon Mine has produced over 3 million ounces of gold since 1941, principally from the veins of El Limon, Talavera and Santa Pancha, the current focus of production. B2Gold purchased the mine in 2009, with the acquisition of Central Sun Mining, and the 19,200-hectare El Limon Mine is 95% B2Gold and 5% IMISA. The 2018 production forecast is between 55,000 to 60,000 ounces of gold. B2Golds Quality Assurance/Quality Control The primary laboratory for El Limon drilling program is Bureau Veritas Minerals in Vancouver, Canada. Core samples are prepared at El Limon preparation facility with the pulp sent to Vancouver and analysed using 30g fire assay with atomic absorption finish as well as multi-element ICP-MS analyses. SGS Laboratories in Medellin, Colombia, is the umpire laboratory. Quality assurance and quality control procedures include the systematic insertion of blanks, standards and duplicates into the core sample strings. The results of the control samples are evaluated on a regular basis with batches re-analysed and/or resubmitted as needed. All results stated in this announcement have passed B2Gold's quality assurance and quality control ("QA/QC") protocols. Tom Garagan, Senior Vice President of Exploration, is the Qualified Person as defined under National Instrument 43-101, who has reviewed and approved the contents of this news release. About B2Gold Headquartered in Vancouver, Canada, B2Gold Corp. is the worlds new senior gold producer. Founded in 2007, today, B2Gold has five operating gold mines and numerous exploration and development projects in various countries including Nicaragua, the Philippines, Namibia, Mali, Burkina Faso, Colombia and Finland. With the large, low-cost Fekola Mine now in production, B2Gold is well positioned in achieving transformational growth in 2018. In 2018, with the planned first full year of production from the Fekola Mine, consolidated gold production is forecast to be between 910,000 and 950,000 ounces. This represents an increase in annual consolidated gold production of approximately 300,000 ounces for the Company in 2018 versus 2017. ON BEHALF OF B2GOLD CORP. Clive T. Johnson President and Chief Executive Officer For more information on B2Gold please visit the Company website at www.b2gold.com or contact: Ian MacLean Vice President, Investor Relations 604-681-8371 This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. Katie Bromley Manager, Investor Relations & Public Relations 604-681-8371 This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. The Toronto Stock Exchange and the NYSE American LLC neither approve nor disapprove the information contained in this news release. This news release includes certain forward-looking information and forward-looking statements (collectively forward-looking statements) within the meaning of applicable Canadian and United States securities legislation, including projections, guidance, forecasts, estimates and other statements regarding future financial and operational performance, events, production, mine life, revenue, cash flows, costs and the results of exploration, including, the potential for large, good grade new zone to decrease El Limons cash operating costs, to increase its mine life by several years and to expand its mill to a higher throughput rate to potentially double annual gold production; timing of further drill testing; the results of an initial study completed in 2017 and the potential to produce an average of approximately 20,000 to 25,000 ounces of gold and 70,000 to 80,000 ounces of silver per year for approximately 9 to11 years; 2018 production forecast of 55,000 to 60,000 ounces of gold; achievement of growth in 2018 and the consolidated forecasted gold production of between 910,000 and 950,000 ounces. Estimates of mineral resources and reserves, including the new inferred mineral resource estimate at El Limon, are also forward-looking statements because they constitute projections regarding the amount of minerals that may be encountered in the future and/or the anticipated economics of production, should a production decision be made. All statements in this news release that address events or developments that we expect to occur in the future are forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements are statements that are not historical facts and are generally, although not always, identified by words such as expect, plan, anticipate, project, target, potential, schedule, forecast, budget, estimate, intend or believe and similar expressions or their negative connotations, or that events or conditions will, would, may, could, should or might occur. All such forward-looking statements are based on the opinions and estimates of management as of the date such statements are made. Forward-looking statements necessarily involve assumptions, risks and uncertainties, certain of which are beyond B2Golds control, including risks and assumptions associated with the volatility of metal prices and our common shares; risks and dangers inherent in exploration, development and mining activities; uncertainty of reserve and resource estimates; risk of not achieving production, cost or other estimates; risk that actual production, development plans and costs differ materially from the estimates in our feasibility studies; risks related to hedging activities and ore purchase commitments; the ability to obtain and maintain any necessary permits, consents or authorizations required for mining activities; uncertainty about the outcome of negotiations with the Government of Mali; risks related to environmental regulations or hazards and compliance with complex regulations associated with mining activities; the ability to replace mineral reserves and identify acquisition opportunities; unknown liabilities of companies acquired by B2Gold; ability to successfully integrate new acquisitions; fluctuations in exchange rates; availability of financing; risks relating to financing and debt; risks related to operations in foreign and developing countries and compliance with foreign laws; risks related to remote operations and the availability of adequate infrastructure, fluctuations in price and availability of energy and other inputs necessary for mining operations; shortages or cost increases in necessary equipment, supplies and labour; regulatory, political and country risks; risks related to reliance upon contractors, third parties and joint venture partners; challenges to title or surface rights; dependence on key personnel and ability to attract and retain skilled personnel; the risk of an uninsurable or uninsured loss; adverse climate and weather conditions; litigation risk; competition with other mining companies; changes in tax laws; community support for our operations including risks related to strikes and the halting of such operations from time to time; risks related to failures of information systems or information security threats; ability to maintain adequate internal control over financial reporting as required by law; risks relating to compliance with anti-corruption laws; as well as other factors identified and as described in more detail under the heading Risk Factors in B2Golds most recent Annual Information Form and B2Golds other filings with Canadian securities regulators and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (the SEC), which may be viewed at www.sedar.com and www.sec.gov, respectively (the Websites). The list is not exhaustive of the factors that may affect the Companys forward-looking statements. There can be no assurance that such statements will prove to be accurate, and actual results, performance or achievements could differ materially from those expressed in, or implied by, these forward-looking statements. Accordingly, no assurance can be given that any events anticipated by the forward-looking statements will transpire or occur, or if any of them do, what benefits or liabilities B2Gold will derive therefrom. The Companys forward-looking statements reflect current expectations regarding future events and operating performance and speak only as of the date hereof and the Company does not assume any obligation to update forward-looking statements if circumstances or management's beliefs, expectations or opinions should change other than as required by applicable law. The Companys forward-looking statements are based on the applicable assumptions and factors management considers reasonable as of the date hereof, based on the information available to management at such time. These assumptions and factors include, but are not limited to, assumptions and factors related to the Company's ability to carry on current and future operations, including development and exploration activities; the timing, extent, duration and economic viability of such operations, including any mineral resources or reserves identified thereby; the accuracy and reliability of estimates, projections, forecasts, studies and assessments; the Companys ability to meet or achieve estimates, projections and forecasts; the availability and cost of inputs; the price and market for outputs, including gold; the timely receipt of necessary approvals or permits; the ability to meet current and future obligations; the ability to obtain timely financing on reasonable terms when required; the current and future social, economic and political conditions and other assumptions and factors generally associated with the mining industry. For the reasons set forth above, undue reliance should not be placed on forward-looking statements. Production results and the Companys guidance presented in this news release reflect total production at the mines the Company operates on a 100% basis. Cautionary Note to United States Investors The disclosure in this news release and in the documents described in this news release regarding mineral properties was prepared in accordance with Canadian National Instrument 43-101 (NI 43-101), which differs significantly from the requirements of the SEC set out in Industry Guide 7. Accordingly, such disclosure may not be comparable to similar information made public by companies that report in accordance with U.S. standards. The Company has prepared its public disclosures in accordance with Canadian securities laws, which differ in certain respects from U.S. securities laws. In particular, this news release refers to mineral resources and inferred mineral resources. While these categories of mineralization are recognized and required by Canadian securities laws, they are not recognized by the SEC and are not normally permitted to be disclosed in SEC filings by U.S. companies. U.S. investors are cautioned not to assume that any part of a mineral resource or inferred mineral resource will ever be converted into a reserve. In addition, reserves reported by the Company under Canadian standards may not qualify as reserves under SEC standards. Under SEC standards, mineralization may not be classified as a reserve unless the mineralization can be economically and legally extracted or produced at the time the reserve determination is made. Accordingly, information contained or referenced in this news release containing descriptions of the Companys mineral deposits may not be compatible to similar information made public by U.S. companies subject to the reporting and disclosure requirements of U.S. federal securities laws, rules and regulations. Inferred mineral resources have a great amount of uncertainty as to their existence and great uncertainty as to their economic and legal feasibility. It cannot be assumed that all or any part of an inferred mineral resource will ever be upgraded to a higher category. Historical results or feasibility models presented herein are not guarantees or expectations of future performance. The Dutch parliament is set to adopt a motion Thursday formally recognising the 1915 massacres in Armenia as genocide, in a vote likely to ratchet up already strained relations with Turkey. The Christian Union (CU) party, a conservative junior coalition partner in Prime Minister Mark Ruttes four-party government, will propose two motions to the lower house with the support of the coalition parties, CU MP Joel Voordewind said. The first motion proposes that parliament in no uncertain terms speak about the Armenian genocide, Voordewind told AFP. The second motion will ask the cabinet to send a representative to Yerevan on April 24 for the commemoration of the Armenian genocide and then once every five years, he said. Armenians have long sought international recognition for the 1915-1917 killings as genocide, which they say left some 1.5 million of their people dead. Turkey the Ottoman Empires successor state argues that it was a collective tragedy in which equal numbers of Turks and Armenians died. Ankara vehemently rejects the term genocide, saying up to 500,000 died when Armenians rose up and sided with invading Russian troops in World War I. So far, parliaments in more than 20 countries, including Germany, have voted for laws or resolutions explicitly recognising the Armenian genocide. For years, official Dutch government policy has been not to speak of the Armenian genocide but of the question of the Armenian genocide, said Erik-jan Zurcher, professor of Turkish studies at Leiden University. Thereby the Dutch government is indicating that its a case over which there still is historical debate, he told AFP. The Netherlands implicitly wants to keep relations with Turkey intact by suggesting that its a question over which there is no consensus. Zurcher said despite the high chance the motion will be adopted by a majority vote on Thursday, he believed it was unlikely to become official government policy. I expect that the Dutch government will continue its current policy and will continue to say that this remains a matter between Ankara and Yerevan to be resolved. If the government agreed to adopt the wording officially it would lead to a deep diplomatic crisis between the Netherlands and Turkey, Zurcher added. Relations between the two nations are already at an all-time low, with the Dutch government withdrawing its ambassador from Turkey earlier this month, and saying it will refuse an envoy from Ankara. Ties have deteriorated since Dutch officials barred two Turkish ministers from attending a rally in Rotterdam on the eve of Dutch general elections last March. jhe/jkb/dl APRIL Farida Abbas Khalaf, one of thousands of Yazidi women abducted, raped and brutalised by Islamic State group fighters, says the jihadists departure has not made it safe to return to Iraq. Everything is still the same. The same people who joined (IS) are still in those neighbourhoods. How can we return and trust them again? Khalaf said in an interview with AFP this week. Who will guarantee that genocide will not happen again, by perpetrators using another name? she asked, speaking through a translator. Khalaf was 18 when IS fighters arrived in her once peaceful village of Kocho in Iraqs northern Sinjar region on August 3, 2014. Speaking on the sidelines of a summit for human rights defenders in Geneva, the young woman with long black hair and sorrowful eyes said she and her family never expected to be attacked. We hadnt harmed anybody, we hadnt offended anybody We just wanted to live in peace, she said. But the Kurdish-speaking Yazidis, who follow a non-Muslim faith, became particular targets of hatred for the Sunni Muslim IS extremists that seized Sinjar in 2014 and unleashed a brutal campaign against the minority that the United Nations has called a genocide. When IS jihadists descended on the village, they gave the Yazidis two weeks to convert to Islam or risk the consequences. Khalaf, who has written a book about her experience titled: The Girl Who Beat ISIS, described what happened when those two weeks were up. Taken to slave market They gathered all of us in the village and they asked us to convert. We refused, and they started killing the men, she told AFP. That one day alone they killed more than 450 men and boys. Khalafs father and one of her brothers were among those killed, and she was abducted. When we were taken, they did everything to us. They raped women and girls as young as eight, she said. Khalaf was taken to one of ISs infamous slave markets, where Yazidi women and girls were sold and traded as sex slaves across the jihadists self-proclaimed and since-crumbled caliphate in Syria and Iraq. They picked the ones they wanted, just like they were at the supermarket or buying an animal, she said. In captivity, Khalaf said she managed to remain strong despite undescribable torment, seeking inspiration in her faith and upbringing, and in her desire to provide support to the younger girls held and ravaged alongside her. She said she never stopped thinking about escape, and after four months, a poorly locked door gave her and several other girls their chance to get away. After a long and arduous journey, she finally made her way to Germany, which has taken in more than 1,000 Yazidi survivors, providing them with refuge and psycho-social support. Bringing IS to justice Asked what her daily life is like now, she said it was focused on helping ensure recognition of the genocide committed against the Yazidis and bringing IS to justice. Baghdad declared victory over the jihadist group last December after a years-long battle to retake large swathes of territory the extremists seized in 2014. But that is far from enough, Khalaf said, insisting: I want to see IS and those who committed these crimes in international court. She said she was consumed with thoughts of the estimated 3,000 Yazidi women and girls who remain in captivity, and of the thousands who have gotten away but remain stuck in poorly serviced camps in Iraq. They need help, they need treatment, and they are not getting that in the camps, she said, warning that without support, many will die from suicide. She hailed Germany, Canada and Australia for taking in many Yazidi survivors, but said there was an urgent need for more countries to do their part. She also called on the international community to help rebuild the villages destroyed in Sinjar and to provide protection to Yazidis interested in returning home. I could only consider going back once I see justice, an international court recognising this as a genocide, and with international protection, she said. Otherwise, how can we know we will not face another genocide? Turkey summoned the Dutch charge daffaires on Friday to condemn the vote by lawmakers in the Netherlands to recognise the massacre of Armenians under the Ottoman Empire as genocide, an official said. The Dutch diplomat was called to the foreign ministry in Ankara, which condemned the parliaments vote, a ministry official told AFP. The Dutch lower house on Thursday voted 142 to 3 in favour of the proposal that parliament in no uncertain terms speak about the Armenian genocide. Armenians have long sought recognition that some 1.5 million of their people were killed in a genocidal campaign in World War I by Ottoman forces ordered by Minister of War Enver Pasha and other top officials to wipe them from Anatolia. But Turkey the Ottoman Empires successor state insists similar numbers of Muslims and Armenians were killed in a collective tragedy during wartime conflict and has always strongly resisted pressure to recognise that any genocide took place. Acting Dutch Foreign Minister Sigrid Kaag quickly tempered the motion, saying even though the ruling four-party coalition voted for the motion, the government will restrain itself. The Turkish foreign ministry on Thursday said in a statement it strongly condemned the move. Turkish European Union Affairs Minister Omer Celik told reporters on Friday: We condemn the decision taken by the parliament. For us, it is null and void. So far, parliaments in more than 20 countries, including Germany, have voted for laws or resolutions explicitly recognising the Armenian genocide. The parliament vote comes as Netherlands and Turkeys diplomatic ties plunged further following the Dutch decision to withdraw its ambassador from Turkey earlier this month. Relations have been strained since early last year when Dutch officials stopped a Turkish minister from attending a Rotterdam rally in March last year. The Dutch ambassador has not had access to Turkey since March 2017. Turkey on Friday summoned the Dutch charge daffaires to condemn the vote by lawmakers in the Netherlands to recognise as genocide the massacre of Armenians under the Ottoman Empire. The Dutch diplomat was called to the foreign ministry in Ankara, which condemned the parliaments vote, a ministry official told AFP. Thursdays vote saw MPs voting 142 to 3 in favour of the proposal that the parliament refer to the massacre as the Armenian genocide. Armenians have long sought recognition that some 1.5 million of their people were killed in a genocidal campaign in World War I by Ottoman forces ordered by Minister of War Enver Pasha and other top officials to wipe them out in Anatolia. But Turkey the Ottoman Empires successor state insists similar numbers of Muslims and Armenians were killed in a collective tragedy during the conflict and has always strongly resisted pressure to recognise that any genocide took place. Acting Dutch Foreign Minister Sigrid Kaag quickly tempered the motion, saying even though the ruling four-party coalition voted for the motion, the government will restrain itself. Ankara strongly condemned the move, with Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu on Friday noting the populist decision was not binding in any way and saying it was a reflection of the increasing racism, anti-Turkish sentiment and Islamophobia in Europe. Cavusoglu said the decision was very, very wrong and based on limited information. Turkeys EU Affairs Minister Omer Celik also condemned the decision, describing it as null and void but adding, like Cavusoglu, that Ankara took note of the Dutch governments position. But Armenian Foreign Minister Edward Nalbandian welcomed the vote, saying Friday that the Dutch parliament had yet again reiterated its commitment to universal values and the noble task of preventing from happening genocides and crimes against humanity. So far, parliaments in more than 20 countries, including Germany, have voted for laws or resolutions explicitly recognising the Armenian genocide. The vote comes at a low point in diplomatic ties between the Netherlands and Turkey after a Dutch decision earlier this month to withdraw its ambassador. Relations have been strained since early last year when Dutch officials stopped a Turkish minister from attending a Rotterdam rally in March. The Dutch ambassador had not had access to Turkey since March 2017. 77 Shares Share Many doctors today find themselves living paycheck to paycheck. They make a good income but just never seem to get caught up. Non-doctors see us as rich. But many of us are just broke on a larger salary. The whole reason I wrote my book stemmed from a conversation with a doctor who was struggling to make ends meet on a $450,000 a year income. That should never happen. The national average income is around $50,000. If a doctor is earning 9x the national average, and is struggling to pay their bills, it is not because they dont make enough money. Breaking the paycheck to paycheck lifestyle is not about making more money, it is about spending less. Everyone that I have worked with who lives paycheck to paycheck has a lot of fat they can cut from their spending. The problem is, they are unwilling to make the cuts that will end the cycle. Many of the things doctors put into their monthly spending plan are expendable. But many luxury items are now being thought of as necessities. The following are some of the things I have heard doctors place in the necessity category: Premium channels on their cable TV plan, cable TV, a gym membership, a second gym membership, extra workout classes at the gym, the latest iPhone as soon as it comes out, private school for the kids, a boat, a motorhome, destination vacations, new cars, leased cars, extra cars, cars for their children, land line and cell phones, cell phones for all the kids, a second home, a vacation home, a dream home, a private airplane, expensive wine, eating out, a maid, a cook, a nanny. Im sure you could think of many more. Why have nonessential things gained such a prominent place in our spending plan? When did things become so important? Isnt it people and relationships that are important? Remember when your children were young and they liked to play with the box that their Christmas present came in more than they liked to play with the toy that was in the box. Stuff doesnt make us happy. It is so discouraging to show someone how they can end the cycle of living paycheck to paycheck only to find them unwilling to make any changes. They would rather keep up the financial stress and strain than give up something they have previously decided is necessary. The fear of missing out may be the downfall of their financial future. Attaining financial peace in the home is way more important than having and maintaining stuff. One family, who didnt have any money to save toward their childrens college education, despite having a very large income, told me they were not planning on having their children go to college, they would teach them to be entrepreneurs instead. Well, what if the child decides to become a doctor, or a nurse, or an engineer? Spending all your money now and not saving any for the future has its downside. In order to break away from the paycheck to paycheck lifestyle, you will need to do three things. 1. Make an accurate spending plan. 2. Make spending cuts to generate breathing room. You will not be able to make a change unless you change something. 3. Let money accumulate in your bank account. You cannot spend all your income every pay period. You also cant keep bringing your bank account back down to zero every pay period. Just because there is money in the account, doesnt mean you should spend it. Until you develop a cushion, you will not break this cycle. Once you put these three steps into practice, living paycheck to paycheck will cease. You will be living within your income, and your savings will begin to grow. You must conquer whatever dogma statement is holding you back: My kids MUST attend private school. I wont live in that neighborhood full of renters. Apartments are for medical students. Renting is throwing away money. We must buy a house right away. But this is our DREAM home. I love expensive cars. Leasing will always keep me driving a new car. If I rent a house, I cant paint it the color I want. But I need that Hawaii vacation to unwind. Im stretching out my low-interest loans for maximum leverage. The home mortgage is my last great tax write off. The boat is needed to relax. I dont need to pay off my student loans. Im using my loans to leverage my investments. Id rather invest than pay off my debt. We all have our little pet reasons for not making cuts in our spending. But those of us with higher than average incomes have many places where we can cut our spending. If you are making $400,000 a year and you tell someone who is making $200,000 a year that there is nothing in the budget to cut, they would be hysterically laughing. If they can live on $200,000, then so can you. If you are making $200,000 a year and you tell someone who is making $100,000 a year that there is nothing in the budget to cut, they would be hysterically laughing. If they can live on $100,000, then so can you. If you are making $100,000 a year and you tell someone who is making $50,000 a year that there is nothing in the budget to cut, they would be hysterically laughing. If they can live on $50,000, then so can you. Im sure you can see the pattern here. There is always something that can be cut to provide the breathing room you need to end the paycheck to paycheck cycle, since there is always someone who seems to be able to get by on less than you. These cuts are not permanent. Once you have ended the cycle, you will be able to add back some of your luxuries. But, once the cycle has ended, pay attention to your spending plan. Have fun spending your money within a good plan, and you will never go back to living paycheck to paycheck. Living on less than you make, and saving the difference will build your savings account allowing you to be prepared for the unexpected like a job loss, a major injury creating an interruption in your income, a major purchase, and retirement. Taking action to stop living paycheck to paycheck isnt difficult, you just need to start. The sooner you start, the sooner you will be free from the bondage of not enough money to make ends meet. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen shillings and sixpence, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pound ought and six, results misery. Charles Dickens Spending less than you earn creates happiness. Spending more than you earn brings misery. Begin to end your paycheck to paycheck lifestyle now. Cory Fawcett is a general surgeon and can be reached at his self-titled site, Dr. Cory S. Fawcett. He is the author of The Doctors Guide to Starting Your Practice Right, The Doctors Guide to Eliminating Debt, and The Doctors Guide to Smart Career Alternatives and Retirement. Image credit: Shutterstock.com 185 Shares Share As a psychiatrist, Ive spent almost two decades caring for patients who have survived sexual trauma, be it childhood sexual abuse, rape or repeated and threatening forms of sexual harassment. Ive witnessed how when the assailant was known to the victim, especially someone from whom they expected comradery or even just professionalism, it can be devastating. The fact that the assailant came from within a trusted circle often delivers the toughest of blows. The stigma that shrouds sexual trauma means the survivor, who risks being shamed, is often forced into silence. Ive lost count of the times my patient has kept their sexual trauma a secret reasoning, I did not think anyone would believe me or I figured if I tried to forget about it, it would all go away. Unfortunately, such silence often proves poisonous, leaving survivors to grapple with the messy emotions of anger, denial, fear, shame, and guilt. When assault survivors do speak up they often face secondary injuries ranging from victim blaming to unintentional injuries caused by friends, family and colleagues who, though they may believe her/him, question their character and worth. Last Fall, when news cycles filled with sexual harassment scandals from the worlds of Hollywood, media and politics something surreal happened. For the first time that I can recall, conversations about sexual trauma were overflowing well beyond the narrow confines of my clinic room. They were showing up in conversations with friends at dinner, with family members both young and old, social media streams and the table of contents of prestigious medical journals. When TIME Magazine named the #MeToo movement as their Person of the Year, my colleagues and I were sharing a sense of optimism. Finally, the rest of the world might understand what we had been bearing witness to all this time. If survivors who had a voice, platform and societal advantage were speaking out and being heard, this could mean a positive trickle-down effect for our patients, most whom did not come from such privilege. Maybe now we would see much needed societal introspection, a cultural shift, organizational changes and stronger laws. But that was then, in 2017. Today, some say we are in the midst of a #MeToo backlash. This new year has seen stories suggesting #MeToo has been sloppily invoked and public reactions are becoming reflexive. In January, nearly 100 French women activists, academics and actresses signed an open letter stating that the #MeToo movement had gone too far, becoming a witch hunt against men. The publication of Babe.nets story about comedian Aziz Ansari sparked national debates about what constitutes sexual assault, rape and harassment with flirting, seduction or confusing consensual sexual experiences. In the public war of words that ensued, I started to fear the #MeToo discourse may become derailed. It dawned on me that a crucial piece has been missing from the public discourse about #MeToo: the hard-earned knowledge of scientists who have, in recent years, been studying sexual harassment in unprecedented depth and scale. The Veterans Health Administration (VA) is required to actively screen every single patient for sexual trauma as part of their routine care. In this sense, it is quite unlike any other healthcare system I have ever worked in. Add to this the fact that it is also the nations largest healthcare system, serving 9 million veterans per year, and we have a unique (and precious) opportunity: To understand, on a population level, the impact of sexual assault and harassment. Many lessons have emerged from this new science of sexual harassment. Though it is true the bulk of this research comes from veteran populations, from a clinician point of view, these lessons feel widely applicable. Lesson 1: Definitions matter, precision matters, measurement matters Definitions matter. Its vital that when discussing sexual harassment whether it be with a survivor, colleague, friend or relative we are on the same page about what we are referring to. Ambiguity causes confusion, and in the emotionally charged arena of sex and sexual relations, confusion causes chaos. Defining sexual trauma and then successfully implementing methods for frontline healthcare professionals to screen for it, researchers have been able to measure the magnitude of the problem. When veterans are asked, by their doctor, if they experienced sexual assault or repeated sexual harassment during their military service, 1 in 4 women and 1 in 100 men respond yes. Both these statistics would confirm the intuitions of many seasoned mental health professionals: sexual assault and harassment are pervasive. No doubt, survivor anecdotes are powerful, but nothing works quite as well as cold hard data to get through to hardened skeptics. Lesson Two: Sexual harassment can make you sick Science now knows much more about the impact of sexual harassment on the human body and psyche. Research shows how experiencing harassment is associated with higher rates of obesity and chronic pain conditions such as headaches, back pain or fibromyalgia. Sexual trauma also triggers mental health conditions such as PTSD, eating disorders, clinical depression and substance abuse. In fact, rape is the trauma most likely to lead to PTSD, even more than exposure to war and childhood abuse. Lesson Three: Big data shows us that sexual harassment can be deadly By mining databases of over six million patients, a team of researchers from the National Center for PTSD unearthed a strong correlation between screening positive for experiencing sexual trauma and subsequent death by suicide. Their data, which was published the American Journal of Preventive Medicine in 2016, showed this correlation persisted even after statistical adjustments were made for age, zip code, medical and psychiatric conditions. Lesson Four: Harassment is bad for the bottom line Researchers collected healthcare data on 426,223 men and 59,611 women. The study results, which were published last September in the Journal of Medical Care, found significant and consistent differences in health care use and costs when comparing those who screened positive for sexual trauma with those who did not. Costs were found to be up to 50 percent higher among those with a positive screen. Moreover, this higher use of healthcare went well beyond care directly related to the original trauma. While it feels demeaning to think of harassment in economic terms, that may be the shift employers, and policymakers need to feel the impact it has on their bottom line. The danger of a #MeToo backlash is that it fuels those who seek to deny, doubt, detract and deflect the seriousness of sexual harassment. If movements like #MeToo lose momentum, the spotlight on sexual harassment fades. Those who have power to affect change employers, influencers, leaders, and policymakers have permission to put this heavily politicized and messy issue on the backburner. By acknowledging the contribution of scientists who have studied sexual harassment, I hope we can take a step toward preventing this from happening. Shaili Jain is a psychiatrist and can be reached at her self-titled site, Shaili Jain, MD, and on Twitter @shailijainmd. She blogs at The Aftermath of Trauma on Psychology Today, where this article originally appeared on February 5th, 2018. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Department of Veterans Affairs or the United States Government. Image credit: Shutterstock.com The Herald reports: Minister of Justice Andrew Little has laid out a vision for criminal justice reform which sees sentencing law relaxed and a rejection of tough on crime-style politics. His comments during an interview with the NZ Herald have been likened by one leading academic as the boldest political move in criminal justice since former Minister of Justice Ralph Hanan, who saw the death penalty abolished in 1961. Little said so-called law-and-order policies have been a 30-year failure and locking up more people with longer sentences hasnt made New Zealand safer. Actually NZ has become much safer over the last 30 years and if Little thinks letting out recividist rapists and bashers early will make NZ safer he is going to get a nasty shock. One of the major challenges is to turn around public attitudes to say that what we have been doing for the last 30 years in criminal justice reform actually isnt working. Our violent criminal offending is going up. Only in the last two years. It is still much lower than the high of 2009. The trend has been down. The proposed upgrade of Waikeria Prison is due to be decided next months by Cabinet and poses a huge challenge when it came in promising to reduce prison numbers by 30 per cent in 15 years. There are two ways to reduce prison numbers a very good way and a very bad way. The very good way is to reduce offending and reoffending. Every Government tries to do this, and some programmes do work to reduce reoffending. However some criminals are recividist and nothing works. The very bad way to reduce prison numbers is to simply let the recividist criminals out early so they can keep offending and bash and rape more New Zealanders. If that is your policy then it is very easy to reduce prison numbers. He said other possible changes being considered were to the Parole Act 2002 and the Bail Amendment Act 2013 considered two of the main drivers behind the prison population boom. Changes to bail laws rapidly inflated the prison population by locking more people up to await trial, while the parole changes 15 years ago kept people inside longer. A huge number of criminals commit further offences on bail. Those without a history of breaching bail conditions still tend to get bail. But giving bail to people with a history of offending on bail will again lead to more killings, bashings and rapes. And the parole changes stopped serious violent and sexual offenders from getting parole after just one third of their sentence. If anything will cause this Government to be a one term Government, it would be changing the bail and parole laws so convicted recividist criminals get to commit more crimes and create more victims. Share this: Facebook Twitter LinkedIn More Reddit Pinterest Print Tumblr Two High Court actions brought by former Irish Farmers Association general secretary Pat Smith against the Association have been resolved. Mr Smith had sought orders requiring the IFA to comply with the terms of an agreement he said he had entered into with the association in November 2015 to pay him 2m via payments of 1m now and a further 1m over the next ten years. It is understood Mr Smith will receive 1.9m from the IFA in settlement of his claim. Mr Smith had also alleged he was defamed by the Association and has issued a claim for damages, including aggravated damages. As part of the settlement in a statement read to the court by its counsel Mark Connaughton SC for the IFA said IFA and Pat Smith confirm the actions over alleged breach of contract in relation to Mr Smith's departure from the IFA and the action relating to statements and comments made subsequent to his departure have been settled. "Mr Smith was employed by the IFA for more than 26 years and was its CEO for seven years until his employment was terminated by agreement in November 2015" "IFA accepts that Mr Smith was a highly effective, hardworking and dedicated executive of the Association who provided solid and professional leadership for farmers and the Association," the statement said. "IFA accepts that it made certain statements in the media at the time which were defamatory of Mr Smith and regrets the damage caused to his reputation" the statement continued. "IFA wishes Pat Smith and his family the very best for the future," the statement concluded. The other case was aimed at securing enforcement of a November 19th 2015 agreement which Mr Smith, represented by Tom Mallon Bl, instructed by solicitor Donal Spring claimed was valid, effective and enforceable. Mr Mallon told Ms Justice Carmel Stewart on Thursday afternoon that both cases were listed for hearing before the High Court, but could now be struck out on consent. The Judge welcomed the resolution of the matters. In the case over the 2015 agreement, Mr Smith had sought orders for specific performance of that agreement or, alternatively, orders requiring the Association pay him 1m now which he claims is due in consideration of his resignation as general secretary. He also wanted it to pay him an additional 1m via yearly 100,000 instalments. Mr Smith, who worked for the IFA for over 25 years and became the general secretary in 2009, departed the association after the IFA came under pressure to reveal his salary. It was later disclosed he was paid more than 540,000 in 2013 and more than 450,000 in 2014 and 2015. In his action over the agreement, he sought orders requiring the IFA calculate income tax and statutory deductions from the 1m sum sought now in the most tax-efficient manner that is legally permissible and pay those to the Revenue. Laois Gardai have to cover hundreds of kilometres in a single night to catch just one gang of thieves. So said revealed Laois Offaly Division Gardai who featured during an RTE PrimeTime special focused gangs the roam the countryside robbing. A special task force was set up to target gangs late last year in response to a spate of crimes in the Laois Offaly Division. PrimeTime's Fran McNulty was given direct access to the operation carried out by detectives and uniformed gardai mounted at Portlaoise Garda Station. During a briefing beforehand, Gardai were told that two recent burglaries had taken place in which thieves broke in through roofs and disabled alarms. The meeting was told that a Romanian gang may have been involved. PrimeTime accompanied Garda Alan Dunford and Sgt Mark O'Connell on the subsequent operation to Ballacolla in south Laois where they were due to set up a checkpoint near a motorway service station. Sgt O'Connell said these gangs tend not to use the main routes other than the motorway network but catching them demands a lot of work and resources. "We have three or four cars out tonight looking for one care covering hundreds of kilometres," said Sgt O'Connell. To see the full report on the RTE Player click here Laois TD and Minister for Justice Charlie Flanagan said every resource was being made available to the Gardai. He agreed with a call from the Director of Public Prosecution for sentencing guidelines for judges when it comes to burglary. Tipperary TD Mattie McGrath called for a three strike policy on the same programme. A Laois mum-of-two, who stole over 460,000 from a financial services firm to keep her ill husband's business afloat, has had her 365-day jail term varied by one day qualify for a community support scheme. Lisa Lynch (33) is a a former director of AGL Logistics, whose home at Southfield, Ballinatubbert in east Laois near Athy, is due to be repossessed by the banks in April. pleaded guilty at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court to stealing the money from Bibby Financial Services over a three-month period in 2013. She was sentenced to 18 months imprisonment by Judge Martin Nolan on December 12 last. The Court of Appeal suspended the final six months of an 18 month sentence in January following a successful appeal. However, the court extended her suspended sentence by one day today, Friday, February 23, so that she would be eligible for a community support scheme called the Care After Prison (CAP) programme - a scheme the court noted few judges would be aware of. Barrister Lorcan Staines, for Lynch, said that in his experience schemes such as the CAP were available to prisoners serving sentences of between three months and 364 days but were not available to prisoners serving sentences of 365 days or more. As such, Mr Staines asked the court to vary its sentence by one day. Acceding to he request by extending her suspended sentence by one day, Mr Justice George Birmingham said the court had intended to give Lynch this advantage and he added that the scheme was something sentencing judges should be made aware of in the future. Mr Justice Birmingham said in January that the circumstances in which Lynch found herself to be in charge of AGL Logistics, a Co Kildare based company involved in the transport business, were unusual. Two days after the birth of her son, her husband was diagnosed with a rare form of mouth cancer. He had previously been the mainstay of the company he inherited from his father and, due to his illness, he became seriously depressed and withdrew from operations. Lynch took over the business. It was accepted that she was ill-equipped for the task and really out of her depth. AGL was a struggling company and, with a view to keeping it afloat, Lynch issued 93 false invoices on foot of which payments were made by Bibby Financial Services which resulted in a loss to it of 460,660. The Circuit Court heard that AGL and multinational Bibby had a deal whereby the larger company would purchase AGL's debt by offering short-term loans at high interest. When AGL was owed money by a customer, Bibby would give AGL 80 per cent of that debt, on the agreement that the money would be repaid whether or not AGL's customer paid their invoice. Lynch, a mother-of-two young children, was 33 at the time of the sentence. Mr Justice Birmingham said she was likely to remain the breadwinner in the family due to her husband's difficulties. Her husband is on a back-to-work scheme, the family have substantial debts and the family home is due to be repossessed in April, the judge said. When asked by Bibby what was happening, Lynch talked them through what had occurred. When the matter was investigated by gardai, she made immediate admissions and entered an early guilty plea. In the four years between the matter coming to light and coming to court, Lynch had secured work with her brother-in-law and although the salary was relatively modest, she had on a weekly basis put 50 aside with a view to assembling a compensation fund. The sentencing judge commented that he could not detect the presence of personal greed. Her motive was to secure the survival of the company in a situation where she felt she had an obligation towards its 70 employees. He noted the mitigating factors as Lynch's co-operation, her admissions, early guilty plea and her lack of previous convictions. A Laois road has been deemed as one of the worst to ever drive on with a county councillor saying he was afraid of his life driving on it. Cllr James Kelly said Raheenphelan Glebe Road in Donaghmore was one of the worst he was ever on. It is one of the worst roads I have ever seen, I had to reverse on it recently and I was afraid of my life, only a tractor could drive on it, he said. The road is in need of re-surfacing works according to Cllr Brendan Phelan who passed a notice of motion at the February meeting of the Borris-in-Ossory/Mountmellick Municipal District meeting. The council continuously has to repair this road, it is in an area where water lies and it is almost impassable at times, he said. Cllr John King said that trees are also a problem. There are a lot of trees on that road too and landowners need to play ball as well, he said. Senior Engineer at Laois County Council, Paul McLoughlin added that hedge cutting should be carried out at the road in the coming weeks. Laois County Council said it will assess the road in the overall context of the development of future roads programmes. SEE ALSO - Gardai use 'Three Billboards Outside Borris-in-Ossory' to share drink driving message. WATCH - This vacant Portlaoise school has been totally smashed up by vandals. A badly damaged road in Mountmellick is in need or repair after repeated flooding according to Cllr Paddy Bracken. A flooding problem needs to be addressed and the road needs to be reinstated at Cloncannon Lower, Mountmellick. Laois County Council said it will be making an application for funding to repair the damage to this road. This road is in a very bad way and we are not neglecting these areas, Cllr Bracken said. Cllr Seamus McDonald said the road is in an awful way. A gully is also needed to relieve flooding at Upper Cloncannon according to Cllr Bracken. Laois County Council said it will survey the area and provide a gully as necessary. The local authority is doing up an application for funding to fix all infrastructure that has been damaged by flooding across the county. This funding will be different to any funding that has been announced for flood defences so far. All damage done to roads, bridges or any infrastructural damage will be compiled and included in the funding application. SEE ALSO - Huge potential in biogas to 'bring jobs across the Midlands says Laois TD Brian Stanley. Accident 'black spot' at Laois junction needs safety measures says Cllr. A Laois school will be one of the first in the country to study PE as a Leaving Cert subject. Scoil Chriost Ri in Portlaoise is included in the pilot scheme for the first 80 schools in the country to study PE in Senior Cycle. Minister Charlie Flanagan has welcomed the news. I am delighted that Scoil Chriost Ri is included in the pilot scheme for schools to study Physical Education at Senior Cycle. This means Laois students could be among the first in the country to take the Leaving Cert exam in PE," he said. A total of 80 schools will implement either the examinable Physical Education Leaving Certificate subject or the new Senior Cycle Physical Education Framework which is not for examination, or both. It will be rolled out to all schools from 2020 so all students in Laois will benefit from this before too long. Students taking the new Leaving Certificate subject from September 2018 will sit the first Leaving Certificate Physical Education (LCPE) exam in 2020. The subject can be taken at both higher and ordinary levels. The new Senior Cycle Physical Education (SCPE) Framework, will provide a new modern curriculum for teachers to teach PE to all students at senior cycle. The assessment process will have 20% going to a physical activity project; 30% to performance assessment and 50% to a written examination. The Fine Gael Government is taking physical education seriously for the health of our nation and this announcement is part of the overall Government focus on encouraging healthy living. We want to support families and communities in Laois to make healthy choices," he said. Gas pressure relieving chimney stacks to be erected in built up parts of Portlaoise and Portarlington. Gas Networks Ireland has obtained planning permission from Laois County Council for four 3 metre high stacks and overground equipment to reduce operating pressure in the local gas supply. So-called District Regulating Installations are being installed at locations on Colliers Lane, James Fintan Lalor and Coote Street in Portlaoise and a similar facility French Church St, Portarlington. Gas Networks told Laois County Council that it is required to reduce the operating pressure from medium to low at some installations. The equipment is being installed to comply with the Atex EU workplace directives. According to Gas Networks, these cover 'what equipment and work environment is allowed in an environment with a potentially explosive atmosphere'. Gas Networks told Laois County Council that, in the event of over pressure, a relief valve in the stacks and related equipment releases gas into the atmosphere to reduce pressure in the system. It says there will be no gas in the pressure relief vent stacks if there is no release. It adds that the stacks are 3 metres in height so that they will not overlap with pedestrians. The company, which is part of Ervia that runs Irish water, says there would be no continuous odour associated with venting because of its infrequency and minimal amount of gas released. As for fire risk, Gas Networks told the council that there are no fire safety issues associated with venting because of its infrequency and minimal amount. The company says that unit is also designed to disperse gas at a much lower rate than what is needed for ignition. The Chinese Ambassador launched the start of the Chinese New Year celebrations at Kildare Village earlier today. According to Maureen Bergin from Kildare Village they have two similar outlet centres in China and have been marking the Chinese New Year for the past eight years. We have two outlet centres in China and we have been working with the Chinese Embassy since we opened, she said. We try to bring a taste of the Chinese new year celebrations to the Village so this weekend we will have a Chinese dragon, you can get your Chinese horoscope read and you can make some Chinese sugar paintings This year is the Year of the Dog, which according to the Chinese Ambassador H.E Yue Xiaoyong suggests leadership, loyalty and prosperity for the year ahead. This year of the dog also means hope, the Ambassador said speaking to the Leader. It is a very good year and symbolises more prosperity. It is an ancient way to calculate years China is a farming country and it is a good way of staying in tune with the weather for planting and harvest. It lets you know when to plant and when to harvest.Kildare is one of the places I like to visit since I came here last June. I like the Village and the National Stud. WATCH: The Chinese Ambassador explaining the meaning behind The Year of the Dog at Kildare Village pic.twitter.com/eiOTz6Ggvu Leinster Leader (@leinsleadernews) February 23, 2018 Meanwhile other experiences on at the Village this weekend include a traditional Chinese street food pop-up Bite of China, and Chinese arts and crafts for the kids. Chinese artist, Angela Wang will be on hand to showcase the basic foundations of Chinese arts and crafts. Face-painters from Dublin Body Paint will also be available transforming the little ones into their favourite animal from the Chinese Zodiac including the Tiger, Rooster, Monkey, Dragon and of course, the Dog. On Saturday 24 and Sunday 25, Shanghai based Huang Hongmei will offer guests of Kildare Village the rare opportunity to witness and sample the traditional Chinese art of sugar painting. Huang Hongmei will demonstrate this traditional practice by using hot, liquid sugar to create intricate two-dimensional figures. On Sunday visitors can discover what the Year of the Dog has in store with Hong Kong-born Chinese Astrology expert, Ting-Foon Chik. Naas is facing a potential medical crisis because of a chronic shortage of family doctors. A number of GPs working in the town have either retired or cut back on their working hours. This means it is almost impossible for individuals or families to be accepted as patients at the reducing number of established practices. It comes as the population of Naas is set to increase dramatically some 1,000 homes are or will be under construction in the town. A Naas-based GP told the Leader that the Health Services Executive is to blame because it fails to recognise the costs of setting up a practice and because doctors are trained to work in existing group practices. Most of the doctors working in Naas are well over 50 and the costs involved are discouraging young doctors from setting up as a traditional practice, said the GP. If I retired tomorrow, Id have to let all my staff go and a lot of my pension would go to pay redundancy. There is no incentive to open a practice. There are now circa a dozen full-time equivalent doctors in Naas across seven GP practices and this represents a drop of about 25% since four retired. The doctor also said there is no clear career path along which a GP can progress, unlike within a hospital setting where a doctor can aspire to becoming a consultant. The HSE expects doctors to be business people in order to run practices, but were not trained for this. In other countries there are better structures. The doctor added there was not a single application to take over a GP practice in Naas when it was advertised recently. The HSE has to ask why it is so unattractive. At the same time the number of of HSE management staff increased by 15%. The doctor also criticised the reduction of payments to GPs by the HSE as part of the Haddington Road (public service) pay agreement even though GPs didnt sign up to this. This means there is a huge disincentive to take on work, the GP added, accusing the HSE of turing community practice into a dumping ground. READ ALSO: Overcrowding still a problem at Naas Hospital Consequently, more and more people are flocking to the KDoc service which is bulging at the seams. Some doctors work 10-12 hours a week with KDoc on top of their normal working, which goes well beyond 40 hours a week. KDoc is not set up to manage long term medical conditions; its firefighting. Its an urgent care until you go back to your own practice, the doctor said. The Irish College of General Practitioners, the professional body for GP practice has predicted a fall of 1,000 in the number of GPs working in Ireland over the next decade due to a growing population and increasing complexity in chronic illnesses. Over a third of Irish GPs are aged over 55 and 155 are over 65. While the number of GPs in training is steadily increasing, many Irish GPs emigrate to Australia where working conditions are better and financial security is guaranteed. The ICGP has also criticised the fact that pay cuts of 35% imposed during the financial crisis have not been reversed making it more difficult to pay for new doctors and staff and for new doctors to establish practices in areas of growing population. It has warned that general practice cant meet the needs of a growing population, especially in areas of high population growth, without more spending and resources. The HSE said it does not have any vacant GMS (medical card) posts in Naas and have not been notified of any GPs retiring in Naas in the foreseeable future. However it says it recognises that the population of the Kildare is growing and there is a demand for GPs. In recognition of this the HAS has worked to improve primary care facilities with new centres in Naas, Newbridge, Clane, Kildare town, Celbridge and Kilcock recently opened. A spokesperson said further work is ongoing with the HSE GP practice unit to look at future population changes with a view to inform future planning of additional primary care facilities. The spokesperson said the HSE works with the ICGP to to recruit and train GPs, adding there are 14 specialist GP training schemes embracing hospital work and supervised general practice work. Also, a process has been in place since 2014 to modernise ad update the contractual arrangements with 3,000 GPs who whole contracts. This has resulted in contract change to cover free GP care including for under 6s and over 70s, diabetes patients, children with asthma, blood pressure monitoring and higher fees for suturing, bladder catheterisation and primary reproductive services. The HSE says it is working to retain GP services in rural communities and to enhance the childhood immunisation programme. A man jailed for raping and threatening to kill his wife as their marriage was breaking down continues to show no remorse for raping her, the Court of Appeal has heard. The 43-year-old man, who cannot be named for legal reasons, was jailed for 10 years after being convicted by a jury in the Central Criminal Court. He was the third person to be convicted for marital rape since rape within a marriage was made illegal in Ireland in 1990. The trial court heard that the woman had to stay in contact with her husband after the rape so he could have court-ordered access to their child. A jury of eleven men and one woman convicted him of raping his wife in their home in May, 2014 and of threatening to cut her face, having denied the charges. He was also convicted of threatening to kill the woman the next day over the phone. However, the jury failed to reach verdicts on charges that he head-butted her and threatened to do serious damage to her when they met to discuss custody of their son. He had admitted assaulting his wife with a hammer. Ms Justice Isobel Kennedy sentenced him to 12 years imprisonment with the final two suspended in June 2016. The Court of Appeal upheld the man's conviction last December holding that none of the grounds or appeal argued on his behalf succeeded. Giving judgment on that occasion, Mr Justice Alan Mahon said the man, an Arab Muslim from north Africa, married his wife, an Irish national, in 2005. Mr Justice Mahon said a series of assaults and threats, including rape in the marital home, culminated in an attack by the man on his wife and her mother during which both were struck with a hammer. Moving to appeal his sentence yesterday, Thursday, February 22, his barrister, Ronan Munro SC, submitted that the sentence was excessive for a single rape offence and the sentencing judge placed insufficient weight on the mitigating factors. Not only had his client no previous convictions but, Mr Munro said, he had been a good husband and father and the couple had been in love up until the breakdown of the marriage. He said the man had suffered a depressive episode a year beforehand and it was in that context that these offences occurred. Mr Munro said the court should not lose sight of the person who existed before the depressive episode. If he existed once, he can exist again, counsel said. The Court of Appeal heard that the man refuses to show any remorse for the rape offence. Moreover, he continued to be unaccepting of his conviction in that he had decided to bring his unsuccessful conviction appeal to the Supreme Court, although he was within his rights to do so. Mr Munro said his client had indicated shame and remorse in relation to the assault. Counsel for the Director of Public Prosecutions, Seamus Clarke SC, said it wasn't a single incident but a Spring and Summer of torment for his wife which included the breaching of a barring order, threats and assault. Dismissing his conviction appeal in December, Mr Justice Mahon said the man, at the outset, had raised concerns that he would not receive a fair trial before a jury made up of Irish citizens most likely to be entirely of the Christian faith. It was pointed out that the man was a foreign dark skinned Muslim from north Africa. Mr Justice Mahon said this was really a challenge to the Juries Act 1976. There was a concern that an Irish person of the Christian faith might have a view that men of the Muslim faith treated women generally, and more particularly their wives, with less respect or at least differently than was the norm in Irish society. The trial judge said any suggestion a jury panel should be told they should not serve if the were racially prejudiced was insulting to any potential jurors and that it presumes prejudice on their part. She said she would give the jury the usual warnings. Mr Justice Mahon said juries had time and time again shown themselves well capable of acting responsibly and discharging their duty to determine an accused guilty or not guilty in accordance with evidence presented in the trial. He said Irish juries were regularly called upon to consider the guilt or innocence of persons charged with rape and various types of sexual offences including, on occasion, where the accused is a foreign national or a member of a non Christian religion. To assume or to have any significant concern that racial or religious prejudice was a significant feature in Irish society to the point that the probability of a fair trial could or should be called into question was without foundation. It was quite likely that any special or unusual warning on possible prejudice against Muslims or foreigners would simply be considered insulting and entirely counter productive, Mr Justice Mahon said. The fact the jury disagreed on two specific counts strongly suggested that they took their duty to fairly try the man seriously and were not prejudiced or biased against him because of his religion, colour or nationality, Mr Justice Mahon said. Mr Justice George Birmingham, who sat wih Mr Justice Alan Mahon and Mr Justice John Edwards, said the court would reserve its judgment on the sentence appeal. Kildare County Council has granted planning permission for a Blueway along 47kms of the Grand Canal. The proposal was part of a planned 115km Blueway that was expected to go from Lowtown, Robertstown, to St Mullins near New Ross. However following objections to the plan further south, Carlow County Council refused planning permission for that section. A further section, from Athy to Jerusalem, Co. Kildare was not granted planning permission because it was proposed to go along a part of the Barrow river that is subject to flooding. Notwithstanding the Carlow decision the Blueway in Kildare is expected to bring increased economic activity prosperity to the towns and villages it passes through, or near, including Robertstown, Rathangan, Monasterevin and Athy. Facilities such as this in other parts of the country, most particularly in Mayo and Waterford have had a reviving affect on local communities. Laois County Council has approved its section of the route, going from Killneard to Vicarstown and back in towards Kilberry and Athy. The foresight to have it, Commenting on the news, Cllr Martin Miley contrasted the decision of Carlow County with Kildare, saying that "thankfully Kildare County Council has seen the benefit from an economic point of view to grant this project from Athy to Robertstown". He also complimented the Council's foresight in seeing the benefits to the county. Meanwhile Social Democrats TD Catherine Murphy has learned that funding will be made available this year to develop designs for the Grand Canal Greenway between Sallins and Naas - and that construction of the proposed Royal Canal Greenway between Maynooth and Dublin will commence later this year. Work has already started on other parts of this Greenway, notably from Maynooth to Kilcock, and it is expected to form part of a full length route from Dublin to Galway. Such amenities are a huge resource to the local area and are also important for local businesses as they attract visitors to the county, Deputy Murphy commented, and she hopes that Kildare County Council and South Dublin County Council can work together speedily to progress the Hazelhatch to Grange Castle project underway as it would be a fantastic resource. Read more: Planning lodged with KCC for Blueway Read more: BREAKING - Controversial Barrow Blueway, which affects Kildare, refused planning Read more: A Blueway in Kildare would bring millions to small towns Read more: Amazing benefits of cycling tourism to Kildare Kildare Drama Festival marks its 60th anniversary this month as it promises to bring a week and a half of excitement, emotion and drama to the stage at the towns CWMS Hall. The festival was officially launched by Noel Cunningham of TV3 at an event at the Kildare House Hotel on Thursday, February 15 and he gave the festival a great shout out on the TV station (See below). The festival has been running since 1958, and is one of the longest-running amateur drama festivals in the 36 counties. It has been held every year since then, except for 2001, when it was cancelled due to Foot and Mouth. The founding fathers of the Kildare enterprise were Comdt Bill Rea, Joe Cardiff and Teasie McGrath, under the auspices of An Tostal. The festival was a runaway success in its early years. In 1960, people went into the (then) CYMS hall at 2.30pm in the afternoon, brought a parcel of sandwiches and got tea in the supper room and came out at 2.30am the following morning, have seen two three-act and two one-act plays, and listened to four adjudications. Several well-known actors and producers have trod the boards at the Kildare Drama Festival. Famous names to have starred on the Kildare stage include Naas man Tom Hickey (later Bengy in The Riordans); RTE presenter and author Deirdre Purcell; Fair Citys Joan Brosnan Walsh (Mags); Myles Dungan and Gabriel Byrne, who performed there in 1975 with the Dublin Shakespeare Society; Riverdance supremo Moya Doherty and actress Simon Delaney. The festival has also been a home base for many Kildare town drama groups, including the Kildare Muintir na Tire Dramatic Club, The Phoenix Players, The Kildare Theatre Group and, since 1991, The Silken Thomas Players, who won their first All-Ireland Open in 2007 with Norman Heart. Festival secretary Ian Weir is looking forward to a successful festival this year. It is the first year that the festival will feature a Night of Drama for youngsters, with schools from Kilcullen, Athy, Kildare and Newbridge taking part, plus workshops being facilitated in schools. Tickets can be purchased at the door. PROGRAMME Wednesday, February 28 Kilworth Drama Group, The Beauty Queen of Leenane by Martin McDonagh. This play tells of the relationship between a manipulative mother and her daughter, wh olive in a remote part of Ireland, and what happens when daughter Maureen forms a relationship with a local man. Thursday, March 1 Ballycogley Players, The Night Alive by Conor McPherson The play tells the story of a middle-aged, separated man living in Dublin, who rolls from one Get-Rich-Quick scheme to another. Friday, March 2 Ballyduff Drama Group, Albertine in Five Times by Michael Tremblay In this play, translated by Linda Gaboriau, we see the heroine at five different ages from the 1940 sto the 1980s and try to figure out if there was a point when she might have chosen a different fate for herself. Saturday, March 3 Co Kildare Schools Night of Drama, starts at 7.30pm Monday, March 5 Curtain Call Productions, Some Girl(s) by Neil LaBute An up-and-coming writer decides to visit his ex-girlfriends, all of whom he mistreated, before his wedding. We follow him on his odyssey through the landscape of his messy break-ups. Tuesday, March 6 Holycross/Ballycahill, Bold Girls by Rona Munro A stirring play about the lives of three women living in war-torn belfast, whose men have been killed or imprisoned for their political activities. Life goes on - but sudden revelations cause changes. Wednesday, March 7 Kilrush Drama Group, Wexford, The Weir by Conor McPherson In a bar in rural Ireland, the landlord and three regulars attempt to spook a young woman who has recently arrived from Dublin - but it is they who end up scared. Thursday, March 8 Kilmuckridge Drama Group, The Seafarer by Conor McPherson Set on Christmas Eve in Baldoyle, the play centres on James Sharkey Harkin, an alcoholic who has recently returned to live with his blind, ageing brother, Richard. Friday, March 9 Brideview Drama Group, Stolen Child by Bairbre Ni Chaoimh and Yvonne Quinn A humorous yet moving drama about a woman adopted at birth who enlists the help of a colourful private detective to uncover her past. Admission: Nightly tickets: 12; Students/OAPs: 7; Schools night: 5; Season tickets: 50. Ticket prices include interval teas. Tickets on sale at the door or Kildare Town Heritage Centre (045 530672). The Kildare Drama Festival 60th Anniversary Committee 2018 A mother-of-two, who stole over 460,000 from a financial services firm to keep her ill husband's struggling business afloat, has had her 365-day jail term varied by one day so that she is eligible for a community support scheme few judges are aware of. Lisa Lynch (33), a former director of AGL Logistics, whose home at Southfield, Ballinatubbert, Athy, Co Kildare, is due to be repossessed by the banks in April, pleaded guilty at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court to stealing the money from Bibby Financial Services over a three-month period in 2013. She was sentenced to 18 months imprisonment by Judge Martin Nolan on December 12 last. The Court of Appeal suspended the final six months of an 18 month sentence in January following a successful appeal. However, the court extended her suspended sentence by one day today, Friday, February 23, so that she would be eligible for a community support scheme called the Care After Prison (CAP) programme - a scheme the court noted few judges would be aware of. Barrister Lorcan Staines, for Lynch, said that in his experience schemes such as the CAP were available to prisoners serving sentences of between three months and 364 days but were not available to prisoners serving sentences of 365 days or more. As such, Mr Staines asked the court to vary its sentence by one day. Acceding to he request by extending her suspended sentence by one day, Mr Justice George Birmingham said the court had intended to give Lynch this advantage and he added that the scheme was something sentencing judges should be made aware of in the future. Giving judgment in the case in January, Mr Justice Birmingham said the circumstances in which Lynch found herself to be in charge of AGL Logistics, a Co Kildare based company involved in the transport business, were unusual. Two days after the birth of her son, her husband was diagnosed with a rare form of mouth cancer. He had previously been the mainstay of the company he inherited from his father and, due to his illness, he became seriously depressed and withdrew from operations. Lynch took over the business. It was accepted that she was ill-equipped for the task and really out of her depth. AGL was a struggling company and, with a view to keeping it afloat, Lynch issued 93 false invoices on foot of which payments were made by Bibby Financial Services which resulted in a loss to it of 460,660. The Circuit Court heard that AGL and multinational Bibby had a deal whereby the larger company would purchase AGL's debt by offering short-term loans at high interest. When AGL was owed money by a customer, Bibby would give AGL 80 per cent of that debt, on the agreement that the money would be repaid whether or not AGL's customer paid their invoice. Lynch, a mother-of-two young children, was 33 at the time of the sentence. Mr Justice Birmingham said she was likely to remain the breadwinner in the family due to her husband's difficulties. Her husband is on a back-to-work scheme, the family have substantial debts and the family home is due to be repossessed in April, the judge said. When asked by Bibby what was happening, Lynch talked them through what had occurred. When the matter was investigated by gardai, she made immediate admissions and entered an early guilty plea. In the four years between the matter coming to light and coming to court, Lynch had secured work with her brother-in-law and although the salary was relatively modest, she had on a weekly basis put 50 aside with a view to assembling a compensation fund. The sentencing judge commented that he could not detect the presence of personal greed. Her motive was to secure the survival of the company in a situation where she felt she had an obligation towards its 70 employees. He noted the mitigating factors as Lynch's co-operation, her admissions, early guilty plea and her lack of previous convictions. A fundraising campaign has been set up for a young Kildare man fighting cancer for the third time. Michael (Mick) Mullan from Eadestown is currently receiving life-saving treatment in DanaFarber Cancer Institute in Boston. The targeted chemotherapy is not available in Ireland. Fundraisers galore are being set up by family members at home to try raise much needed funds for Micks treatment abroad. The first of many events takes place on April 19. Laugh for Mick, a comedy gig, will be on in the Laughter Lounge, Dublin. Mick graduated with a masters in law from one of Americas most prestigious institutions in Massachusetts, Harvard, last year. Mick Mullan on graduation day from Harvard Law School As a baby, 16 months old, he was diagnosed with neuroblastoma with a 1 in 4 chance of survival. After chemotherapy, surgery and a bone marrow transplant, Mick remained cancer free until he turned 22. He was then diagnosed with renal cell cancer in 2013 while studying at Trinity College in Dublin. Despite this, he graduated with an honors degree, and earned a scholarship into Harvard Law School. Since November 2015, he has been fighting metastasized renal cell cancer, and is still battling through. The son of Patrick and Patricia Mullan of Eadestown, Mick attended Rathmore National School and Naas CBS, and played GAA for the local club. He has two brothers, Ciaran and Dermot, and girlfriend of nine years, Mel Murphy from Ballymore. If you would like to support Mick, a link to his GoFundMe page can be found here. WATCH HIS INSPIRATIONAL JOURNEY HERE: A 22 year-old man who was travelling at 178kph on the M7 motorway has been convicted of dangerous driving. At Naas District Court (February 21) Michael Stokes, Bay 1, St Anthony's Park, Knocknaheeny, Cork, was convicted of the offence on the M7 at Ballymany on March 26 2016. The court was told that a garda spotted him driving at 178kph in the 120kph zone and followed him before he stopped. The court was told that the road was wet and the temperature was 6 degrees. Traffic was moderate. It also heard that the patrol car reached a speed of 188kph before both cars stopped. Refusing a request to reduce the charge to careless driving, Judge Desmond Zaidan told Mr Stokes: You put Gardai and other road users at risk. Mr Stokes said he only had the car for two weeks and it was too heavy. The judge said Mr Stokes foot was too heavy for the car. Solicitor, Tim Kennelly said his client had no previous convictions and asked for a hefty fine rather than anything else. He said he was a young man and asked that the incident be treated as an isolated one. Mr Stokes was unemployed. Judge Zaidan fined him 750 and banned him from driving for two years. Death on our roads exceeds deaths from violence. It is a cross no one should have to bear, said the judge. Two High Court actions brought by former Irish Farmers Association (IFA) General Secretary, Pat Smith, against the Association have been resolved. Mr Smith had sought orders requiring the IFA to comply with the terms of an agreement he said he had entered into with the association in November 2015 to pay him 2m via payments of 1m now and a further 1m over the next ten years. It is understood Mr Smith will receive 1.9m from the IFA in settlement of his claim. Mr Smith had also alleged he was defamed by the Association and has issued a claim for damages, including aggravated damages. As part of the settlement in a statement read to the court by its counsel Mark Connaughton SC for the IFA said IFA and Pat Smith confirm the actions over alleged breach of contract in relation to Mr Smith's departure from the IFA and the action relating to statements and comments made subsequent to his departure have been settled. "Mr Smith was employed by the IFA for more than 26 years and was its CEO for seven years until his employment was terminated by agreement in November 2015" "IFA accepts that Mr Smith was a highly effective, hardworking and dedicated executive of the Association who provided solid and professional leadership for farmers and the Association," the statement said. "IFA accepts that it made certain statements in the media at the time which were defamatory of Mr Smith and regrets the damage caused to his reputation" the statement continued. "IFA wishes Pat Smith and his family the very best for the future," the statement concluded. The other case was aimed at securing enforcement of a November 19th 2015 agreement which Mr Smith, represented by Tom Mallon Bl, instructed by solicitor Donal Spring claimed was valid, effective and enforceable. Mr Mallon told Ms Justice Carmel Stewart on Thursday afternoon that both cases were listed for hearing before the High Court, but could now be struck out on consent. The Judge welcomed the resolution of the matters. In the case over the 2015 agreement, Mr Smith had sought orders for specific performance of that agreement or, alternatively, orders requiring the Association pay him 1m now which he claims is due in consideration of his resignation as general secretary. He also wanted it to pay him an additional 1m via yearly 100,000 instalments. Mr Smith, who worked for the IFA for over 25 years and became general secretary in 2009, departed the association after the IFA came under pressure to reveal his salary. It was later disclosed he was paid more than 540,000 in 2013 and more than 450,000 in 2014 and 2015. In his action over the agreement, he sought orders requiring the IFA calculate income tax and statutory deductions from the 1m sum sought now in the most tax efficient manner that is legally permissible and pay those to the Revenue. A Latvian father took the law into his own hands when he stabbed a Polish man to death, a prosecution barrister told his trial this morning. Patrick McGrath SC delivered his closing speech in the trial of Rihards Lavickis (25) of Annaly Court, Longford who has pleaded not guilty to murder but guilty to the manslaughter of Akadiusz 'Arek' Czajkowski (31) at Rue Noyal Chatillon, Townspark in Longford on November 1, 2016. His plea was not accepted by the State and he is on trial at the Central Criminal Court. The accused admits stabbing Mr Czajkowski and told the trial that he had "a kind of a blackout" at the time after he said the deceased attacked him with a knuckle duster and then smashed the windows of his home. Mr McGrath said the accused man is claiming provocation, which would reduce his conviction from murder to manslaughter, but the prosecution says it has proven beyond reasonable doubt that he was not provoked and that he is a "deliberate killer". Defence counsel John Shortt SC said his client did not plan the attack and is not a "cold blooded killer" but a man who was provoked by the actions of the deceased. Justice Una Ni Raifeartaigh will begin her charge to the jury of six men and six women this afternoon. The Health and Safety Authority has today published its Programme of Work for 2018 detailing key priorities, themes and inspection targets for the year. Highlights The Authority has set a target of 11,435 workplace inspections and investigations for 2018: - The construction sector will receive the highest number of inspections with 4,000 planned. - There will be 2,000 inspections carried out in the agriculture sector and the Authority will participate in 50 Farm Knowledge Transfer Groups. - 1,285 inspections and audits are planned under the chemicals legislation programme. A number of occupational safety and health initiatives will be adopted - Work-related stress will continue to be addressed through the promotion of the online tool WorkPositive.ie. - In the healthcare sector there will be a focus on manual and patient handling. - Accidents involving vehicles are consistently the most common cause of fatal injury in all workplaces. This year the Authority will raise awareness of vehicle safety through joint initiatives with the Road Safety Authority (RSA) and An Garda Siochana. Continuing the commitment to deliver free and easy-to-use services through online programmes - New hsalearning.ie courses, including a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) on induction for new workers, will be developed. - There are currently 48,000 businesses using BeSMART.ie, the free HSA online safety tool, a further 6,000 users are expected to be added during 2018. HSA chemicals safety programme will focus on workers and consumers The REACH deadline, for registration of chemicals above one tonne, is on May 31st. The HSA will be providing advice and support to Irish SME registrants to help them meet this deadline. There will also be an emphasis on ensuring consumer products comply with EU chemicals safety regulations. Any products that are found to have the potential to cause harm will be removed from the market. The Irish National Accreditation Board (INAB), now part of the HSA, will continue in its role of supporting enterprise: INAB will maintain and extend accreditations for over 200 clients It will also meet any increased demand for accreditation services, particularly in the areas of EU regulation and Brexit. Minister of State for Trade, Employment, Business, EU Digital Single Market and Data Protection, Pat Breen TD said: The work of the HSA is vital to a workforce that is increasing in size and approaching full employment. All workers, regardless of the sector, have the right to a safe and healthy workplace. This can be achieved by making sure that day-to-day knowledge of safety is high, particularly in the agriculture sector where we have seen unacceptable levels of death and injury. The HSA approach of combining inspections and enforcement with prevention and awareness-raising measures is one I fully support. The HSA Programme of Work for 2018 is available to download from www.hsa.ie. FIVE retired Limerick council staff have died without being paid their full pension entitlements that were promised to them after a Labour Court battle last summer, the Limerick Leader has learned. The issue related to a five-year industrial relations campaign led by retired members of Limerick City and County Councils cleansing department, to have overtime calculated in their pensions. The Labour Court ruled in their favour in July 2017. However, Siptu has sought to engage with the council to get a timeline on the payments as the calculations involved are absolutely horrendous, local representative Ger Kennedy said. A number of retired staff were paid 1,000 in a recent instalment, but it is understood that these payments were taxed heavily. In June 2016, up to 18 retired staff picketed outside City Hall at Merchants Quay over the issue. And it has been indicated that another picket could take place in the next three weeks if the issue is not resolved. But since the campaign began, five ex-staff members have died. One retired member was laid to rest this Monday. Files in relation to the pension entitlements promised to the staff, some of whom have yet to get full payment, each should have taken five days to review. That is according to an email sent by an HR official in the council to Siptu on July 5 last, shortly after retired cleansing department staff won a five-year Labour Court battle against the authority over their pension entitlements. But the email sent to Siptu nearly eight months ago, received by the Leader this Wednesday, states that each file for the small number of retired staff would take four to five days. One source said all calculations should have been completed within 50 to 60 days at this rate. A number of sources said that files in relation to some former employees had been misplaced but were later recovered. In response to queries about this and the July email, the Council said it is working with the unions in relation to this issue and will be making no further comment on the matter. We note the referral of a large number of individuals. We have commenced the review process which as you can appreciate due to the nature of the records involved will take significant time. In noting the time it takes to review each file based on work completed to date, this is 4-5 days but as we work through the files this may not take as long taking account retirement dates also, the official wrote. In this regard, additional resources are required due to the intensive nature of the work. The official added: On the basis of audit requirements, we cannot make an interim payment but instead will revert with the necessary update on a case by case basis. One retired staff member told the Leader: Are we all going to die before we get paid? From the day they retire until the day they go to God, they should be getting paid. The spokesperson for the council had previously said that it was committed to reviewing the inclusion of overtime for pension purposes. The review of the pensions is very complex, as the records for each person must be examined in detail and per individual. The recalculation of a pension is in turn very detailed and cannot be completed without a comprehensive review of historical records having taken place. We have agreed an approach with the union representing the staff and are endeavouring to progress this significant programme of work as a priority. Mr Kennedy said this week: We have a written agreement with the council covering the payments, so we are not concerned that the payments wont be made. We are engaging with the council to get a timeline in relation to payments. And I know that a number of our members are frustrated, but progress is being made. THE ENVIRONMENTAL Protection Agency has launched an investigation after a procedural and operational failure caused the spillage of a caustic substance at Aughinish Alumina in early February. The EPA received a complaint on February 8, in relation to a spill which occurred on the morning of February 5. A spokesperson for the EPA said: On the 8th February 2018, the EPA received a complaint in relation to a spill at the Aughinish Alumina facility which occurred on the morning of the 5th February. The EPA contacted the licensee and a report on the incident was provided. Following a transfer of caustic between tanks early on the morning of the 5th February, the transfer lines were flushed as per normal procedure. However due to various procedural and operational failures, the 22m of the flushed liquid, comprising dilute caustic with a pH of 8.8, overtopped a bund and spilled onto tarmac and gravel in the vicinity, continued the spokesperson. The licensee reported that the spilled material was cleaned up. The EPA's investigation in relation to the cause and impact of this incident is ongoing. Aughinish claimed that the material was not released to surface water, according to the EPA spokesperson. She added that the investigation into whether any of the alkaline substance ended up in the nearby waters of the Shannon Estuary is ongoing. In a separate incident last week, the plant had to be shut down due to the electrical fault. On the 19th February 2018 the licensee (Aughinish) informed the EPA of a plant shutdown which occurred on the night of the 14th February. An electric fault triggered a controlled shut down of the plant, said the EPA spokesperson. This shutdown was part of the plants standard safety protocols. When the electric fault was rectified the plant was restarted (12 hours later). There were no uncontrolled emissions reported before or during this period. The licensee notified the EPA of this event as part of its weekly start-up and shutdown notifications. Aughinish declined to comment on the incidents. WHILE most brides-to-be enjoy a pre-wedding pamper in a salon, one Limerick woman had to make do with getting beautified in a bureau this week. Eleanor Lynch OConnor from Garryowen is getting married in Copenhagen, Denmark, this weekend, and had booked in for an appointment at the beauty salon at the St Munchins Community Centre in Kileely. There was sadness earlier in the week after the salon was destroyed by a fire following an electrical fault, cutting off power to the community centre. Amazingly, it was able to open to the public the following day and Lisa Ledger, who runs the Be Beautiful salon at the centre, pulled out all the stops to make sure Eleanor was ready for her big day this weekend when she ties the knot with Indian national Shobhit Chopra. She took over her mother, general manager Lindas office, where she set up a treatment table ensuring Eleanor was wedding ready. Honestly, I knew whatever happened, they would look after to me, a grateful Eleanor told the Limerick Leader. But to be in the middle of Lindas office on a bed, it was hilarious! Linda said: We cancelled every other appointment, but we couldn't cancel her. We couldnt let her down. Eleanor, who has worked at the St Munchins Centre for almost two years, is marrying her fiance in Copenhagen because, she says, of the amount of bureaucracy there is here. We have to go through so much red tape to prove we are in a relationship, and do you know what? Its not worth the hassle. All I need in Denmark is a passport, a freedom to marry certificate and a birth certificate, Eleanor explained. The happy couple are to spend a few days in Copenhagen before returning to these shores to travel around the Irish countryside on honeymoon for a few days. Sadly, Shobhit can only stay here until May, before he returns to Canada where he has citizenship. From there, he will have to apply for a spouses visa, which can take up to 12 months to process. In that time, he will not be allowed to re-enter Ireland. Eleanor admits it will be tough to be apart from her new husband so soon after getting married. Meanwhile, the community centre is fully re-opened following Monday nights blaze minus the beauty salon. Thanks to a whole host of volunteers, however, Linda hopes it will be back in business in the next week. Munster and Ireland number eight CJ Stander is to visit the community centre this Monday to launch a fundraising effort to help following the fire. His wife, Jean-Marie cut the ribbon to open the beauty salon back in 2014. CAMPAIGNERS have welcomed calls to introduce a smoking room at University Hospital Limerick (UHL). Fianna Fail councillor Kieran OHanlon has caused sparks to fly this week after suggesting health bosses in Dooradoyle allow smoking in a designated spot inside the boundary of the hospital. He said: It saddens me to see people outside the hospital in the middle of winter in their dressing gowns and their pyjamas. Typically, these patients gather at the gate, with the entire campus a tobacco-free zone since 2012. Now, smokers lobby Forest Ireland has supported Cllr OHanlons call. Some people smoke to relieve stress and hospitals can be extremely stressful places for patients, visitors and even members of staff. It's cruel to expect patients to go off site, often in their pyjamas, if they want to have a cigarette. It also discriminates against those who are infirm or immobile, the group said in a statement. They added that allowing a smoking area inside the hospital grounds is a reasonable compromise which shouldn't inconvenience anyone. "We thank Cllr O'Hanlon for his comments and hope the hospital will reconsider its current policy, the group added. While Cllr OHanlons suggestion is unlikely to be taken up, with UL hospitals chief Colette Cowan saying it goes against HSE policy, there has been support for his stance on social media. It is not right to have a patient stand outside the hospital grounds in the pajamas. The hospital signed them in as patients and should not be forcing then out to the main road, wrote one contributor to the Leaders Facebook page. SHES just 17, but Askeaton student Lucy Fitzgibbon has the beauty world in the palm of her hand. The teenager is only in fifth year at Limerick Tutorial College, but with 45,000 followers on Instagram, her brand is already a formidable force. And now the social media influencer, styled online as Lucy Fitz, has been nominated for a Gossie award for Best Newcomer and shell attend a ceremony this Friday night in Dublin to find out if she is victorious. I started my Instagram account two years ago this week. Its always grown gradually, there was no major moment when the follows blew up. It was gradual growth, she told the Limerick Leader. Lucys main platforms are Instagram and Snapchat, but she admits she is trying to become stronger on YouTube this year. Her account started off with photographs of her eye makeup at the age of 15. Within weeks, she was taking appointments and responding to queries about the products she uses. And that was before she sat her Junior Cert at Rathkeales Colaiste na Trocaire. Fast forward two years, and the power of Lucys influence is extended to selling out events. Lucy Fitz Here & Now took place in the Strand Hotel in December, and 400 excited fans of the teen bought tickets at 40 each to attend her girls-day-out event. Its a makeup demo, then theres a little talk about how I got started, what motivated me to do it, how I overcame certain problems and just a bit of advice for people. There were pop-up shops and goodie bags, she said. She now has plans for Here & Now events in Cork, Dublin and Galway. While her page started as an ode to makeup, her admirers have forged a connection with the girl, who comes across equal parts bashful and outgoing. She has become known for her honest attitude towards beauty standards, family matters and teenage life, and she has a best friend quality to the thousands of girls who watch her speaking on Snapchat. It all started with makeup but Im into my lifestyle and fashion posts as well now, she said. Lucy, who will be 18 this August, still has another year of school left to do before her Leaving Cert. I thought I wanted to do science after, maybe physics because I love physics, but I think now I might do a business course or something similar, so I can keep going with this, she said. Lucy can be found on Instagram under the username lucyyfitz. LIMERICKS road network stands to benefit significantly if all the projects identified in the National Framework Plan secure the necessary funding and reach completion. The most-talked about big ticket item included in the plan is the M20 motorway from Limerick to Cork at a cost of 850m or more. Welcoming the investment, the Minister of State for Finance and Public Expenditure, Patrick ODonovan said the project is is due to commence the planning stage. The largest cities outside of Dublin must be connected in a first class manner and this is happening because Fine Gael have put the country in a position to do so, he said. Extensive work and significant amounts of money were already expended on the M20 before the project was shelved a number of years ago. This will now have to be reviewed, according to Kieran Lehane, director of services with Limerick City and County Council. We will be required to revisit the basics, he explained. And this, he expected, would involve looking at traffic origin and destination in a study area from the N20 to the N24. It is likely but not absolutely guaranteed that the previously selected route will remain the same, he explained. Reacting to the M20 announcement, government backbencher and Fine Gael TD Tom Neville said: I would ask that the TII be very considerate and work very amicably with all landowners that will be affected by this. It is essential that their needs and farming needs are met as best as possible in any future consultation process. I think that is paramount that the least amount of effect on farm holdings be adhered to, and that a robust and interactive communication process be put in place. But the completion of a new road, bypassing Adare and linking Foynes to Limerick and the national motorway network is of huge interest locally, both in terms of traffic congestion at Adare and the development of port business in Foynes. The road was included in the governments 40b capital spending programme of 2015 and since then considerable progress has been made in selecting a route and in producing a final design. The 33km route is expected to cost about 200m and the council expects to be submitting the project to An Bord Pleanala for planning permission by the middle of this year. If this goes ahead, and if there are no hold-ups, this project could be well up the list for funding. Two other items have fallen under the radar somewhat: distributor roads for Newcastle West and Abbeyfeale. The Newcastle West distributor road will become increasingly crucial once the Adare by-pass is completed, according to Mr Lehane, as the town will become a pinch-point. Abbeyfeale is already struggling with traffic congestion. I am delighted that the N21 Newcastle West and Abbeyfeale Bypasses have been included and that they will be progressed through pre-appraisal and early planning in 2018, Minister ODonovan said. While the framework plan has been generally welcomed, Fianna Fail TD Willie ODea is somewhat less impressed. Most of this has already been announced, Deputy ODea said. I think this is the fourth capital plan that they (the government) have announced in the last couple of years, and what I find absolutely fascinating is that they are making such a big issue of the proposed Limerick to Cork [road]. That was on the capital programme previously and it was taken off by the then-Minister for Transport Leo Varadkar three years ago, and now suddenly they are making a virtue of putting it back on when they took it off in the first place." Limerick Chamber CEO Dr James Ring has welcomed a number of elements in the plan, most notably the M20 to Cork which the chamber championed and also the Limerick to Foynes road. However, he said that deeper analysis of last Fridays announcement suggests that the regions capacity to help address current economic imbalance on the island has been largely ignored in the plans. This, he said, is a missed opportunity. Fianna Fail's Cllr James Collins was critical of the fact that only the Coonagh Knockalisheen section of the Northern Distributor Road was included. Work on that section is currently underway. THE OFFICE of the Comptroller and Auditor General is drafting a special report into the findings of an internal audit carried out at the University of Limerick which found that the university provided inaccurate or incomplete information to several government bodies. The findings of an internal audit carried out by Deloitte found that UL provided inaccurate or incomplete information in relation to 1.2 million in severance payments, breaches in procurement policy and spending on study abroad schemes for staff to the Public Accounts Committee, the Department of Education and Skills, the C&AG and public broadcaster RTE. The C&AG is now carrying out a special report into claims that the university or people in it may have misled his office. The report is expected to be finalised by May when it will be circulated to the Department of Education and is expected to examine most, if not all, of the issues raised in the Deloitte audit. The C&AG Seamus McCarthy told the Dail Public Accounts Committee that the special report is expected to be finalised before the summer but his office has not set an exact date for publication yet. The internal audit carried out by Deloitte found 42 matters of extreme, serious and moderate priority, in relation to termination payments, further study, procurement and correspondence exchanged between UL and key stakeholders. This included 16 areas of extreme priority, all relating to severance packages worth more than 1.2m. The Deloitte report, which has been obtained by the Leader, found that inaccurate or incomplete information was provided to the Department of Education and Skills, the Dail Public Accounts Committee, the Comptroller and Auditor General, RTE and even the universitys own legal advisors. None of the severance agreements examined as part of the audit had been approved by the Department of Education. One compromise agreement was also backdated and presented to the C&AG as a factual representation of what occurred. UL has advised the Public Accounts Committee that 17 of the audits 42 recommendations have been implemented and 25 are currently in progress. Sinn Fein Deputy David Cullinane said: Any time there is a report where issues arise in a public institute I ask the same question, which is who is held to account. It seems there is some restructuring going on, but if individuals misled the Office of the Comptroller and Auditor General or if there were errors, procedural lapses, process failures or whatever by individuals, who is held to account in the university? It does not seem on the face of it that anybody was, except there was a consolidation of positions. The special C&AG report follows the news that the Higher Education Authority (HEA) will take no further action in relation to severance payments for former staff members at the University of Limerick. After receiving a completed second review carried out by Dr Richard Thorn, the HEA is satisfied that no further action is required apart from the ongoing requirement for UL to implement the recommendations made by Dr Thorns first report and other internal audits. THE EIGHTH cycle of the Coillte Biking Blitz returns to County Limerick this spring with over 1,500 mountain bikers taking part. It heralds the 2018 biking season and showcases the beauty of the Ballyhouras. The Coillte Biking Blitz is a cross country mountain bike series that is taking place every second weekend until March 25. The second event in the series is on this Sunday, February 25 at the Ballyhoura Mountain Bike Trail. Event organiser, Niall Davis, of Biking.ie, said it is a brilliant introduction for children or adults who want to try out mountain biking for the first time. As a beginner friendly mountain bike series, with free events for kids on balance bikes as young as two-years-old, our aim is to ensure everyone has a fun experience. Winning or losing isnt on the agenda and everyone gets a medal. Events like these can really open the door to endless adventures, said Niall. The Coillte Biking Blitz is mostly aimed at mountain bike novices, but all other ability levels are also welcome. As the age category rises so does the level of competition. Senior races are split up into two classes - Baggy Shorts for first timers, who want to have some fun on the hills, and Super Pro, for the longer distance and more experienced category. Race distances vary but are typically 15km or 30km and the first to post is crowned the winner, explained Niall. For more information log on to www.bikingblitz.ie A ROW broke out in this months metropolitan district meeting over the ongoing saga of the citys missing mayoral chain. Sinn Fein councillor Seighin O Ceallaigh asked local authority bosses for the value of the insignia, which was stolen from the car of Independent member Frankie Daly shortly before Christmas. With Cllr Daly not in the room, his colleague on the Independents bench, Cllr John Gilligan accused Cllr O Ceallaigh of engaging in the worst form of political discourse: character assassination. The City East man was told in a written reply that the chain of office was worth 6,000. Cllr Daly, who was wearing the chain when attending an event in place of current mayor Stephen Keary, reported the theft in December. He had left the chain of office in his car overnight in readiness for an event the following Monday. But he was left reeling after realising the gold-and-silver chain had been stolen from the car parked outside his home in the Irish Estates, Corbally. The chain was specially commissioned for the merger of Limerick City and County Council and was originally worn by the new authoritys first leader, Cllr Kevin Sheahan. In recent times, the centuries-old chain has been preferred by Limericks first citizen, with the more modern chain donned by the metropolitan district mayor and his deputies. Officers at Mayorstone garda station are continuing to investigate the theft, and can be contacted at 061-456980. SEVEN Limerick schools are among the first 80 secondary schools to offer PE as a Leaving Cert subject. Castletroy College, Gaelcholaiste Luimnigh, Villiers Secondary School, John The Baptist Community School, Scoil Pol, Colaiste Mhuire and Colaiste Ide agus Iosaef have been selected as part of a nationwide pilot scheme that allows students study PE for the senior cycle. Fine Gael Senator and chairperson of the board of management at Gaelcholaiste Luimnigh Maria Byrne congratulated the schools on their successful bids. This means Limerick students could be among the first in the country to take the Leaving Cert exam in PE. As Chairperson of the Board of Management of Gaelcolaiste Luimnigh, it is a great honour for the school and a very exciting time for our students and teachers to be included in this pilot programme we are very passionate about sport in our school. Students taking the new Leaving Certificate subject from September 2018 will sit the first exam in 2020. The assessment process will have 20% going to a physical activity project; 30% to performance assessment and 50% to a written examination. The subject can also be taken at both higher and ordinary levels. THE premiere of an award-winning film exploring the effects of suicide in young people will be screened in Limerick in the coming weeks. Mary Immaculate College is to host the premiere of Unseen, an award-winning, new short-film produced in Ireland that explores the effects of suicide on the countrys culture, particularly in young people. Unseen, which was filmed in Ireland last March, picked up the award for Best Short Film in Ireland at the Richard Harris Film festival and was also a nominated finalist in the 2017 Galway film festival. This film is an incredibly powerful tool to help young people and young adults talk about their own mental health, CIY director Jasper Rutherford said. We wanted to de-stigmatise mental health and make it easier for young people to talk about. This film enables that to happen in a positive way, whether in the classroom, in youth groups, at university, or even in the home. The film, produced by the charity CIY, features Irish actors Bob Carley and Desmond Eastwood, and was developed by a mostly Irish-based crew. As a charity, CIY works with youth through events, trips and resources to help initiate difficult conversations around social justice issues. Throughout the week of March 5, CIY are piloting the film in a number of secondary schools in an effort to raise awareness of mental health in young people. Unseen is expected to be shown to around 2,000 pupils during that week in six different schools. Unseen will be shown at 7 pm on March 7 at the Mary Immaculate College. To register for a free ticket for the screening, please visit unseenfilm.org, where mental health resources can also be found. Feb 23, 2018, 6 AM Described by Siegel International as a choice original-gum example of the rarest stamp of the first issue of France, this 1849 1-franc dull orange red on yellowish will be offered during the March 13 auction of the Scarsdale collection. The March 13 auction of the Calgary collection of Canada by Robert A. Siegel International includes a rare, lightly hinged, unused example of Canadas 1851 12-penny black Queen Victoria stamp on laid paper with full margins. Mint never-hinged example of the Canada 1959 5 St. Lawrence Seaway with red inverted (Scott 387a) to be sold by Siegel International. By Michael Baadke A rare philatelic hat trick will be offered by Robert A. Siegel International March 13 when it presents the Calgary collection of Canada. Leading off the auction are unused examples of the first three Canadian laid-paper stamps from 1851: the 3-penny red Beaver (Scott 1) with no gum, the 6d slate violet Prince Albert (2) also with no gum, and a spectacular example of the 12d black Queen Victoria (3) with original gum, lightly hinged with large balanced margins all around, intense shade and superbly detailed impression on crisp paper, clearly visible laid lines. Though Siegel points out that the 6d Prince Albert stamp is rarer in unused condition than either the 3d Beaver or the 12d black, in this case it is the pristine 12d stamp that commands attention and the highest value listing, at $175,000. Siegels census of the 12d black records a total of 18 original-gum singles and four pairs, possibly five. This stamp, with incredible depth of impression, is ex-Weill and ex-Sir Gawaine Baillie, and is accompanied by its 1959 RPS certificate. In an auction of 387 lots, these three rarities appear among the first five items presented. The full selection of this collection extends through Canadas prominent classic series and well into the 20th century with a selection of significant modern errors. Among these is a mint never-hinged example of the 1959 5 St. Lawrence Seaway with red inverted (Scott 387a). Siegel reports that about 400 examples of Canadas most famous stamp error were sold, but that few remain mint never-hinged and without imperfections. The stamp is listed in the Siegel catalog with its Scott catalog value of $9,500. Additional offerings in this sale include complete booklets, registration and postage dues, war tax stamps, and other back-of-the-book material. Prior to the Tuesday afternoon auction of the Canada material, Siegel will offer classic France in part 10 of the Scarsdale collection. A standout among the 85 lots is a rare original-gum example of the 1849 1-franc dull orange red Ceres stamp (Scott 8a), described by Siegel as the rarest stamp of the first issue of France. The stamp is listed in the catalog with its $95,000 Scott catalog value. The auction offers numerous unused examples of the classic Ceres and Napoleon issues, plus examples from other series and the back of the book. The material is being offered at unreserved public auction by Siegel International in association with Charles Shreve, at the Siegel galleries in New York City. The catalogs are presented online; information is available from Robert A. Siegel International, 6 W. 48th St., New York, NY 10036. Connect with Linns Stamp News: Sign up for our newsletter Like us on Facebook Follow us on Twitter The catalog values mentioned in this article are italicized in the Scott Standard Postage Stamp Catalogue; the italics indicate an item that can be difficult to value accurately. About 300 million years ago, Earth didn't have seven continents, but instead one massive supercontinent called Pangaea, which was surrounded by a single ocean called Panthalassa. The explanation for Pangaea's formation ushered in the modern theory of plate tectonics, which posits that the Earth's outer shell is broken up into several plates that slide over Earth's rocky shell, the mantle. Over the course of the planet's 3.5 billion-year history, several supercontinents have formed and broken up, a result of churning and circulation in the Earth's mantle, which makes up most of planet's volume. This breakup and formation of supercontinents has dramatically altered the planet's history. "This is what's driven the entire evolution of the planet through time. This is the major backbeat of the planet," said Brendan Murphy, a geology professor at the St. Francis Xavier University, in Antigonish, Nova Scotia. History More than a century ago, the scientist Alfred Wegener proposed the notion of an ancient supercontinent, which he named Pangaea (sometimes spelled Pangea), after putting together several lines of evidence. The first and most obvious was that the "continents fit together like a tongue and groove," something that was quite noticeable on any accurate map, Murphy said. Another telltale hint that Earth's continents were all one land mass comes from the geologic record. Coal deposits found in Pennsylvania have a similar composition to those spanning across Poland, Great Britain and Germany from the same time period. That indicates that North America and Europe must have once been a single landmass. And the orientation of magnetic minerals in geologic sediments reveals how Earth's magnetic poles migrated over geologic time, Murphy said. In the fossil record, identical plants, such as the extinct seed fern Glossopteris, are found on now widely disparate continents. And mountain chains that now lie on different continents, such as the Appalachians in the United States and the Atlas Mountains in Morocco, were all part of the Central Pangaea Mountains, formed through the collision of the supercontinents Gondwana and Laurussia. Pangaea formed through a gradual process spanning a few hundred million years. Beginning about 480 million years ago, a continent called Laurentia, which includes parts of North America, merged with several other micro-continents to form Euramerica. Euramerica eventually collided with Gondwana, another supercontinent that included Africa, Australia, South America and the Indian subcontinent. About 200 million years ago, the supercontinent began to break up. Gondwana (what is now Africa, South America, Antarctica, India and Australia) first split from Laurasia (Eurasia and North America). Then about 150 million years ago, Gondwana broke up. India peeled off from Antarctica, and Africa and South America rifted, according to a 1970 article in the Journal of Geophysical Research. Around 60 million years ago, North America split off from Eurasia. Life and climate Having one massive landmass would have made for very different climatic cycles. For instance, the interior of the continent may have been utterly dry, as it was locked behind massive mountain chains that blocked all moisture or rainfall, Murphy said. But the coal deposits found in the United States and Europe reveal that parts of the ancient supercontinent near the equator must have been a lush, tropical rainforest, similar to the Amazonian jungle, Murphy said. (Coal forms when dead plants and animals sink into swampy water, where pressure and water transform the material into peat, then coal.) "The coal deposits are essentially telling us that there was plentiful life on land," Murphy told Live Science. Climate models confirm that the continental interior of Pangaea was extremely seasonal, according to a 2016 article in the journal Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology. The researchers in this study used biological and physical data from the Moradi Formation, a region of layered paleosols (fossil soils) in northern Niger, to reconstruct the ecosystem and climate during the time period when Pangaea existed. Comparable to the modern-day African Namib Desert and the Lake Eyre Basin in Australia, the climate was generally arid with short, recurring wet periods that occasionally included catastrophic flash floods. Pangaea existed for 100 million years, and during that time period several animals flourished, including the Traversodontidae, a family of plant-eating animals that includes the ancestors of mammals. During the Permian period, insects such as beetles and dragonflies flourished. But the existence of Pangaea overlapped with the worst mass extinction in history, the Permian-Triassic (P-TR) extinction event. Also called the Great Dying, it occurred around 252 million years ago and caused most species on Earth to go extinct. The early Triassic period saw the rise of archosaurs, a group of animals that eventually gave rise to crocodiles and birds, and a plethora of reptiles. And about 230 million years ago some of the earliest dinosaurs emerged on Pangaea, including theropods, largely carnivorous dinosaurs that mostly had air-filled bones and feathers similar to birds. Cycle in history The current configuration of continents is unlikely to be the last. Supercontinents have formed several times in Earth's history, only to be split off into new continents. Right now for instance, Australia is inching toward Asia, and the eastern portion of Africa is slowly peeling off from the rest of the continent. Geologists have noticed that there is a quasi-regular cycle in which supercontinents form and break up every 300 to 400 million years, but exactly why is a mystery, Murphy said. But most scientists believe that the supercontinent cycle is largely driven by circulation dynamics in the mantle, according to a 2010 article in the Journal of Geodynamics. Beyond that, the details get fuzzy. While the heat formed in the mantle likely comes from the radioactive decay of unstable elements, such as uranium, scientists don't agree on whether there are mini-pockets of heat flow within the mantle, or if the entire shell is one big heat conveyor belt, Murphy said. Current research Scientists have created mathematical, 3D simulations to better understand the mechanisms behind continental movement. In a 2017 article in Geoscience Frontiers, scientists Masaki Yoshida and M. Santhosh explain how they produced simulations of large-scale continental movements since the breakup of Pangaea 200 million years ago. The models show how tectonic plate motion and mantle convection forces worked together to break apart and move large land masses. For example, Pangaea's large mass insulated the mantle underneath, causing mantle flows that triggered the initial breakup of the supercontinent. Radioactive decay of the upper mantle also raised the temperature, causing upward mantle flows that broke off the Indian subcontinent and initiated its northern movement. Yoshida and Santos created additional geological models to predict mantle convection and continental movement patterns 250 million years in the future. These models suggest that over millions of years, the Pacific Ocean will close as Australia, North America, Africa, and Eurasia come together in the Northern Hemisphere. Eventually, these continents will merge, forming a supercontinent called "Amasia." The two remaining continents, Antarctica and South America, are predicted to remain relatively immobile and separate from the new supercontinent. Additional reporting by Carol Stoll, Live Science contributor Additional resources Whether fidget spinners really help kids focus is unclear, but one thing is for sure: Don't take the ball-bearing toy apart and swallow the pieces. That's a lesson one Washington state teen learned the hard way. The girl, who is in her late teens and had a history of depression, reportedly broke off the toy's three prongs and swallowed them, which led to severe neck pain and vomiting, according to a new report of the case. She sought doctors' help at Seattle Children's Hospital, where a chest X-ray revealed three round metal pieces from the popular plaything in her esophagus, the tube connecting the throat to the stomach, according to the case report published today (Feb. 22) in the journal JAMA Otolaryngology Head & Neck Surgery. It's relatively rare to find multiple objects in the esophagus when a person accidentally or intentionally swallows them, but it happens, said Dr. Jonathan Perkins, a pediatric otolaryngologist at the children's hospital who treated the girl and co-authored the case report. [11 Weird Things People Have Swallowed] The girl admitted to the doctors that she had intentionally ingested the toy parts. And in her case, the last piece she swallowed was the most challenging for her doctors to remove. Tricky toy removal The first two pieces of the fidget spinner ended up lower down in the girl's esophagus. These fragments eventually passed through the esophagus, into the stomach and on to the intestines, without doctors needing to remove them, Perkins said. But the third piece got stuck. The sharp, jagged edges of the plastic toy piece, which resulted when the teen broke apart the fidget spinner, got wedged into the walls of the esophagus, Perkins told Live Science. Also complicating matters for doctors was the thickness of the toy and the large size of the piece (about 1.2 inches, or 3 centimeters), he noted. Perkins needed to perform a rigid endoscopy, a procedure in which he placed a stiff tube in the girl's mouth while she was sedated. Doctors can then insert a small camera and tools into this tube to explore the esophagus and carefully remove the object, if possible. Because the piece of toy was about four times the size of the normal diameter of the esophagus and had sharp edges lodged into the walls, it was difficult to reach in and grab with a metal tool and pull it out, Perkins said. There were additional concerns about damaging tissue or causing tears in the esophageal lining while removing the piece. If the endoscopy had not been successful, doctors would have needed to perform surgery through the girl's neck to retrieve the wedged-in toy, Perkins said. As a result of the incident, the girl spent more than a week in the hospital. Her esophagus fully healed, but she probably won't be monkeying around with a fidget spinner anymore. Originally published on Live Science. Building a useful plane that's faster than Mach 5, or five times the speed of sound, is a difficult engineering challenge, but a team of researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences has a plan to pull it off. The trick to making these faster-than-Mach 5, or hypersonic, vehicles is to build a "waverider"-shaped airframe and top it off with a "high-pressure capture wing," the researchers wrote in a December 2017 letter to the journal Science China. Waveriders are aircraft bodies shaped to skim along the top of the pressure wave created by their own supersonic flight in essence, using the shock wave to increase the plane's lift, or the upward force that keeps a plane in flight. But the roofs of waveriders can also become "compression surfaces" planes that surrounding air flows against, pushing the whole vehicle back toward the ground. High-pressure capture wings (HCWs) attached to the top of the plane turn that pressure instead into additional lift. The team named this waverider-HCW combination the "hypersonic I-shaped aerodynamic configuration" or "HIAC," after the resulting shape, which in cross section resembles a capital letter "I" with serifs. [Photos: Hypersonic Jet Could Fly 10 Times the Speed of Sound] Creating lift This design solves the basic problem of hypersonic planes, the researchers wrote: It's very difficult to build a Mach 5-plus plane with enough room inside for passengers or cargo that it doesn't knock itself out of the air. For a plane to stay aloft, it generates lift which generally occurs when air flowing over the top of a plane is traveling faster than the air underneath it. Meanwhile, the faster a plane goes, the greater the force of the friction of surrounding air, or drag, is. For a plane to fly at very high speeds, however, that drag has to be much lower than that lift, or else the plane will struggle to move fast enough to stay airborne. Supersonic planes struggle with the additional problem of pressure waves created when they pass the speed of sound, which create additional drag on the airframe. The waverider-HCW combination is all about turning the pressure waves of hypersonic travel from drag and downward force into additional lift. Past designs that relied on the waverider airframe alone, like the Boeing X-51, had to be very slim far too small for human passengers or meaningful cargo. But if you raise the roof on a hypersonic waverider, the researchers wrote, the airflow over the top of the vehicle will create drag and actually push it downward, reducing lift. Well-designed aerodynamic planes, they wrote, create lots of lift, have high lift-to-drag ratios and pack lots of cargo space compared to their total size. Sticking the HCW on top of a waverider lets designers give the vehicles higher roofs and more cargo space, and creates additional lift to keep the vehicle aloft at extreme speeds. Hypersonic planes aren't entirely new. The Air Force X-15, flown throughout the 1960s, hit peak speeds of 4,520 mph (7,274 km/h), or Mach 6.7, with human pilots. And spacecraft routinely hit extreme speeds during re-entry; the space shuttle used to hit the atmosphere at nearly Mach 25. But the X-15 design, which wasn't a waverider, wasn't practical. And spacecraft only bust into hypersonic speeds during re-entry due to the massive momentum of orbit. And those machines aren't particularly useful for the reasons governments typically choose to build hypersonic vehicles: skirting air defenses and smashing into things hard enough to cause massive damage. U.S. Air Force Chief Scientist Geoffrey Zacharias told the National Interest in August 2017 that the U.S. "anticipates having hypersonic weapons by the 2020s, hypersonic drones by the 2030s and recoverable hypersonic drone aircraft by the 2040s. There is little doubt that hypersonic technology, whether it be weaponry or propulsion, or both, will figure prominently into future aircraft designs." This design could move the world a bit closer to that reality. Originally published on Live Science. An earlier version of this story incorrectly said that Gawker Media founder Nick Denton instructed his reporters not to investigate rumors that a wealthy backer was supporting a lawsuit against the company. The lawsuit was brought by Terry Bollea, better known as professional wrestler Hulk Hogan, after Gawker published a sex tape involving Bollea, and it was later revealed to have been supported by Peter Thiel, a venture capitalist and founder of PayPal, who had been outed as gay by Gawker. A $140 million judgment against Gawker precipitated the company's collapse. This version has been updated. --- Conspiracy: Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and the Anatomy of Intrigue By Ryan Holiday Portfolio. 335 pp. $28 --- In this age when people compete to be contrarian, it's rare to encounter a genuinely startling proposition. That's what makes the premise of Ryan Holiday's "Conspiracy" such a delight. It takes real chutzpah, during an investigation into possible collusion to swing the 2016 presidential election, to argue that we might be better off "if more people took up plotting." Unfortunately for Holiday, and for readers who enjoy a good provocation, his book focuses on a case that demonstrates why transparency beats conspiracy in the long run. "Conspiracy" chronicles the legal battle between Terry Bollea, better known as professional wrestler Hulk Hogan, and Gawker Media, the swashbuckling Manhattan publishing group founded by Nick Denton. In 2012, A.J. Daulerio, then editor of the company's flagship site, published excerpts of a sex tape, recorded in 2006 without Bollea's consent or knowledge, that showed Bollea in bed with Heather Clem, who was then married to Bollea's best friend: the radio personality Bubba the Love Sponge. The story may seem wacky already, but this is when it gets truly weird. In 2007, Gawker Media acquired a powerful and patient enemy when one of its writers outed PayPal founder and venture capitalist Peter Thiel as gay. Gawker's Denton, who like Thiel is gay and libertarian, believed that Thiel's refusal to be open about his gayness was proof that Thiel was "paranoid." To Thiel, the story was a terrible violation, one that made him into an object of curiosity, in a way he found incomprehensible. Thiel, as Holiday writes, "venerated privacy, in creating space for weirdos and the politically incorrect to do what they do. Because he believed that's where progress came from." What Gawker saw as transparency, Thiel saw as a threat to Silicon Valley. He was so angry at Gawker that he began to refer to it as "the Manhattan Based Terrorist Organization." But it took him four years to strike back. In 2011, a Mr. A, whose role is first described in "Conspiracy" but who remains a shadowy figure throughout the book, persuaded Thiel to devote $10 million and five years to a shell company aimed at finding and backing potential lawsuits against Gawker. Among their beneficiaries: Terry Bollea. In 2016, a Florida jury awarded Bollea damages so punishing that Denton had to sell the company. On the surface, it seemed that Thiel's conspiracy had checkmated Gawker Media. Holiday, an author and corporate adviser, had unusual access to Thiel and Denton. It is one of the many ironies of this story, and of "Conspiracy," that talking makes Thiel more sympathetic and comprehensible than plotting ever did. But by the end of the book, it's clear that, despite Holiday's argument, Thiel's conspiracy failed: Thiel killed Gawker, but in doing so undermined his dream of making the Internet a more decent place and securing a more private life for himself. By contrast, Gawker was destroyed not because its leaders failed to conspire, but because they didn't pursue the transparency they claimed to believe in. One of the challenges conspiracies face is that they tend to mistake their most difficult tasks, such as killing Abraham Lincoln or Gawker, for their larger goals (winning the Civil War or cleaning up the Internet). Yes, John Wilkes Booth managed to assassinate the president. And yes, by the end of Bollea v. Gawker, Gawker was dead. But Holiday strangely fails to acknowledge that Lincoln's death didn't prevent the Confederacy's defeat in the Civil War or the Reconstruction that followed, and Booth didn't live long past the assassination himself. And Holiday can't quite bring himself to admit that Thiel's war on Gawker didn't fundamentally change the nature of the Internet. Thiel's quest came up short in part because his conspiracy fell prey to a risk that comes from not having to be publicly accountable for your actions: adopting tactics or allies that undercut the broader mission. Thiel and his co-conspirators were willing beneficiaries of an Internet-based controversy - Gamergate - that would make the way Gawker outed Thiel look positively civilized. Ostensibly a consumer movement opposing unethical video-game journalism, Gamergate was sparked by a highly invasive online rant written by the ex-boyfriend of a video-game designer named Zoe Quinn. Readers falsely suggested that Quinn had leveraged a relationship with a Gawker media writer for a positive review of one of her games, lending a watchdoggy gloss to an attempt by a man to take revenge on a former partner. Quinn was subject to violent threats and had to leave her home. The campaign of harassment spread to other people who had either advocated for or embodied diversity in the industry, or spoken up against Gamergate tactics. While Gawker Media was far from Gamergate's only target, the movement opened up yet another front in the war on the company's credibility. Holiday's treatment of Gamergate in "Conspiracy" is troublingly brief. "Mr. A. claims that the conspirators had nothing to do with starting Gamergate," he writes, "but they undoubtedly fanned the flames." This ambiguity and secretiveness should have prompted Holiday to dig much deeper, rather than to accept the conspirators' stonewalling. It matters a great deal precisely what the relationship between the Thiel conspiracy and Gamergate was. Even if the conspirators merely watched from the sidelines as Gamergate ripped through the Internet, the very existence of Gamergate should have disproved Thiel's narrow belief that Gawker was the cause of all Internet-based nastiness, calling into question whether the target Thiel had chosen was actually the key to his larger goals. But if Thiel's conspirators had any contact with Gamergate - and Mr. A's use of the phrase "largely autonomous but very helpful" to describe the relationship certainly leaves open that possibility - that would mean they were willing to work with people who made the Internet nastier, more stupid, less truthful and - in the case of "swatting" attacks on Gamergate critics - more dangerous. And though his taste for conspiracy may have showed Thiel's belief that it is important to be able to scheme and act out of the public eye, it also gave the impression that he had lots to hide. When he came forward after the verdict to acknowledge that he had funded Bollea's lawsuit, it became clear that he had been plotting revenge for nearly a decade - and that made him seem vindictive and obsessive. If he had been hiding this plot, what else might he be doing in the shadows? In 2016, journalists jumped on remarks Thiel had made about life extension technologies and suggested that he was exploring ways to harvest the blood of the young to promote his own longevity. It wasn't true, but that didn't prevent the story from taking off and even becoming a plot point on the HBO comedy series "Silicon Valley." Thiel's conspiracy against Gawker Media seemed so implausible that the revelation of its existence made everything else seem possible. Holiday acknowledges Thiel learned that "unleashing such wild, chaotic forces is a dangerous bargain. Thiel might be gay, an immigrant, libertarian, and generally civilized and thoughtful, but the people on the alt-right he found himself partly aligned with were not." And Holiday notes that the case made Thiel a celebrity. But even as he allows for these caveats, Holiday doesn't reach the final, intellectually honest conclusion: that Thiel's conspiracy was a failure, not a success. To do so would be to admit that "Conspiracy" doesn't come close to proving Holiday's most ambitious argument. If transparency might have served Thiel better than conspiracy, Gawker's stated values might have saved the company, too. Holiday writes that Denton had suspicions that Bollea had a powerful financial backer, but the author quotes former Gawker executive editor John Cook as saying, Denton "did not want to get wrapped in any kind of conspiracy theories." Had Gawker been able to chase down proof that Bollea's lawsuit was the work of an extraordinarily wealthy man stewing over a smaller slight and reported that before the case went to trial, it would have entered the arena on far different terms. As Holiday notes, breaking that story would have bolstered Gawker's claim to be a serious journalistic outlet. Thiel himself might have benefitted from choosing transparency over conspiracy. The risk of public scrutiny could have prevented his co-conspirators from allying, however nebulously, with Gamergate, a move that damaged Thiel's credibility and his stated objective of restoring sanity to the Internet. If, instead, Thiel had publicly aligned himself with the many people, particularly feminists, talking about the dangers of revenge porn and a shrinking private sphere back in 2008 - when the porn aggregation site XTube received complaints that not everyone had consented to the posting of videos available on the site - he could have given their message greater credibility in less-than-receptive circles without incurring collateral damage to the culture of the Internet. By the time Thiel did identify himself as Gawker Media's nemesis after the verdict in Bollea v. Gawker, the narrative of the trial was well on its way to being set. Thiel discovered that it's difficult to come forward and insist that you're the hero of the story when you've already won the sort of surprising and dismaying victory that makes the public inclined to believe that you're the villain. "Cunning and resources might win the war," Holiday writes toward the end of "Conspiracy," "but it's the stories and myths afterwards that will determine who deserved to win it." The flaw in Thiel's thinking, and in "Conspiracy," is in failing to recognize that the stories and the myths that emerge after an event often are the substance of the victory. We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights By Adam Winkler Liveright. 471 pp. $28.95 --- In a recent class on American business history, I asked my students what they thought a corporation was. A hand in the front row quickly shot up, and a woman answered, "Not people!" Although we eventually got around to a more formal definition - an entity with a legal existence that is distinct from the people who own or control it - the students' top concern was political. At the heart of the matter about corporate identity is a question of power: What role should private businesses play in public life? In his new book, "We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights," Adam Winkler puts corporate power center stage. Beginning with the story of how corporations - legal creations of governments - came to be seen as consummately "private" economic actors in the first place, he methodically charts how they gained political privileges that today mirror those held by flesh-and-blood citizens. "Corporations are not people" has become the mantra of Occupy Wall Street, the Bernie Sanders campaign and any number of progressive organizations. This belief, an obvious rejoinder to Mitt Romney's famous declaration to the contrary in 2011, extends far beyond the question of how the tax burden gets passed along (which was what Romney was talking about). Opponents of what they call "corporate personhood" argue that corporations simply should not enjoy the political rights of citizens - such as freedom of speech or religion, or political participation - because their wealth and power distort popular democracy. In a moment of gigantic corporate mergers, unabashed corruption and legislative dysfunction, the call to rein in corporate political power is as loud as ever. For most Americans, the current debate stems from the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision. In January 2010, a 5-to-4 majority invalidated provisions of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform (McCain-Feingold) Act of 2002 that prohibited certain types of "electioneering communications" (basically ads) by corporations and unions, on the grounds that those groups represented, in Justice Samuel Alito's words, "associations of citizens" who enjoyed the right to free speech. (The idea that spending money on campaigns was an exercise of speech came from a 1976 decision, Buckley v. Valeo.) As Winkler recounts, the 2010 Supreme Court ruling sent shock waves through American politics. In an unusual public rebuke, President Barack Obama called out the justices to their faces during his State of the Union address, accusing them of upending "a century of law" that regulated corporate political activity. Just as unusual was Alito's response, conspicuously shaking his head and mouthing "not true" at the president. Quickly, a groundswell of activism pushed back. Groups like MoveToAmend.org proposed amending the Constitution to clarify that human beings, not corporations, are the only legitimate bearers of political rights. In 2014, political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page escaped the confines of academia to puncture the progressive consciousness with a well-circulated report that said economic elites and business interests wielded outsize influence on policymaking. The report was usually summarized as: "America is No Longer a Democracy." Virtually unrestricted corporate campaign giving has exacerbated the hyperpartisanship that defines national politics. As Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) admitted during last fall's tax bill vote, policymakers must please their donor bases to secure re-election. And even though Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump spent less on their campaigns than Obama and Romney had in 2012, the flood of campaign cash created the structural conditions that allowed Trump to win the Republican primary. With deeper pockets than in years past, a long list of Republican candidates stayed in the race far longer than they otherwise would have, dividing the roughly 65 percent of GOP primary voters who did not support Trump. For activists, the implication was clear. The country had lost its way and had allowed a misguided notion of corporate personhood to take over. We had to return to our democratic values and a less corrupt time, when concentrated wealth did not subvert democracy. Winkler's book, however, shows that this fixation on corporate personhood gets it precisely backward. Yes, American corporations have steadily gained "the same rights as individuals under the Constitution," he shows. But the key to their success lies not in the embrace of corporate personhood but in its rejection. Winkler, a professor of law at UCLA, roots his history of corporate civil rights in the two competing concepts of the corporation that have structured jurisprudence since the early 19th century. "Corporate personhood" is the more limited of the two. This view conceives of corporations as legal persons that have specific but limited rights, such as owning property or suing in court. Historically, opponents of corporate power used this notion to deny corporate entities more expansive rights, such as voting, speaking or religious liberty. The flip side sees the corporation not as a legal person but rather as a voluntary association of the human beings who compose it. Lawyers and jurists refer to this blurring of the distinction between a corporate entity and its shareholders as "piercing the corporate veil." And this, Winkler maintains, is the error that Alito made in viewing limitations on corporate behavior as restrictions on the actions of actual humans. Yet "We the Corporations" is far more than a clear liberal critique of Citizens United. Winkler's deeply engaging legal history, authoritative but accessible to non-lawyers, takes readers inside courtrooms, judges' chambers and corporate offices as he reconstructs 200 years of case law. The book offers new takes on familiar stories - including all-star attorney Daniel Webster's famous defense of Dartmouth College in 1819 and Justice Lewis Powell's pro-business memo to the Chamber of Commerce in 1971 - as well as fascinating insights from largely forgotten moments. Throughout, Winkler overlays the pursuit of corporate civil rights onto American history, from the English corporate colonies to the Bank Wars, from trust-busters and New Dealers to Ralph Nader, Robert Bork and Hobby Lobby. This meticulous, educational and thoroughly enjoyable retelling of our nation's past leads to Winkler's argument: Citizens United, however wrongly reasoned, was not an aberration in American law. Rather, it marked the culmination of a 200-year campaign, waged by well-funded corporate elites, to bend the law in their favor. In the decades after the Constitution took effect, corporations hired lawyers like Webster to defend their basic legal rights. By the late 19th century, they had manipulated the 14th Amendment to acquire property rights but not political rights; corporate campaign giving, for example, was highly restricted by the Tillman Act in 1907. Yet by the mid-20th century, justices had increasingly pierced the corporate veil to award liberty rights, including freedom of the press and, eventually, free speech and religious liberty. Winkler ends with cautious optimism that the tide may turn against "the remarkably successful corporate rights movement." But the lessons for democracy are sobering. The legal history shows that corporate political rights are not an aberration in America but a constituent part of it. Yes, there are some progressive heroes, such as anti-monopoly jurist Louis Brandeis (although the anti-corporate cause was just as often headed by detestable elements like the racist Chief Justice Roger Taney, who wrote the Dred Scott decision). But the long arc of history is clear: Those who stood athwart the corporate juggernaut are the long-term losers, trampled by well-funded and powerful business elites. The past is no place for progressives. Those who seek justice, equality and a more inclusive democracy should stop looking to an imagined past for heroes and models. Rather than yearn for something we used to be, people who bristle at the power of concentrated wealth in public life must create something that has never been. For conservatives, however, the historical reservoir of argument is vast. Those who wish to hoard privilege and concentrate wealth have a deep well of tradition, precedent and legal theory on their side. "We the Corporations" leaves no doubt: America has been pro-corporate and elitist from the beginning. --- Waterhouse is an associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. HARRISONBURG, Va. - For Lindsay Acker and Austin J. Sachs, students at Eastern Mennonite University who spent 3 1/2 months last year in the Middle East, the one-man play that came to their campus compelled them to grapple with all sorts of wrenching memories. "I was in tears when the show ended, and my stomach was in knots the rest of the night," reported Acker, a sophomore from Buffalo. "A lot that I had chosen to set aside - because dealing with it daily is emotionally, physically and spiritually challenging - just came back to the surface," explained Sachs, a junior from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. And for Gassan Abbas, the Palestinian actor from Israel who has been performing "I Shall Not Hate" in one college town after another, the experience has broadened his understanding of the compassion in this country - as well as a sense of its myopia about the world. "It's important for me to emphasize that the American people are very naive," the plain-spoken performer said in Hebrew, in an interview conducted with the help of an Israeli interpreter, Sivan Atzmon. About his region of the world, he added: "They know nothing." Well, surely the audiences who have been coming to see "I Shall Not Hate" in places like Norman, Oklahoma, Grinnell, Iowa, and Virginia's Shenandoah Valley know a little more, courtesy of the stories that Washington, D.C.'s Mosaic Theater Company has been bringing to their doorsteps. Led by Artistic Director Ari Roth, a seven-person team embarked on the first national tour the three-year-old theater company has ever undertaken, with "I Shall Not Hate" and another solo play about Israelis and Palestinians, David Hare's "Via Dolorosa." The mission the company is on, traveling with cast and crew across the country with a modest set that Roth bought for $600 from the Israeli theater that first presented "I Shall Not Hate," is broadening a conversation that otherwise was unlikely to unfold so rigorously in these locales. "You're going to the middle of a cornfield in Iowa and bringing the concerns of Gaza, and a part of the world that touches people, wholeheartedly," Roth said as he drove to Eastern Mennonite U., a school of 2,000 students, about two hours from Washington. Revealing in dramatic fashion some of the problems existing half a world away certainly can have a profound effect on audiences, but finding venues willing to give them a hearing is no easy assignment. Roth, for years, has been seeking to connect American theatergoers with drama from Israel and its Arab neighbors. At Theater J, the Washington company he headed for 18 years until his ouster in December 2014 by his superiors at the D.C. Jewish Community Center, he created a festival, Voices From a Changing Middle East, that featured work, often of a political nature, from the region. He's continued some of that programming at Mosaic, which he founded after his firing, and out of which the idea of the tour emerged. Affirmative responses came from organizations at the University of Oklahoma, Grinnell College, Eastern Mennonite and the University of Chicago - often the result of prior networking or through local contacts. "Putting Palestine on American stages," Roth noted, "is still a touchy proposition." "I Shall Not Hate," whose U.S. premiere Mosaic produced in 2016 during its inaugural season, is the first-person account by Izzeldin Abuelaish and Shay Pitovsky, based on Abuelaish's own book and the horrific tragedy that befell his family during the 2008-9 conflict in Gaza between Israel and Hamas, Gaza's governing organization. Abuelaish (pronounced A-boo-Lie-ish) is a fertility doctor, now living in Canada, who studied in Cairo and at Harvard, worked in an Israeli hospital and was supporting his wife and children in Gaza when horror, in the form of an Israeli tank missile, struck. Three of his daughters were killed in the attack. And yet, as explained by the character Abbas embodies in the 75-minute play, performed in Hebrew and Arabic with English surtitles, Abuelaish's having known and worked with Israelis wouldn't allow him to express hatred for them. The piece and "Via Dolorosa," a political travelogue detailing Hare's observations about the state of the Middle East, have played to good and sometimes highly vocal crowds during the tour's brief stays; post-show discussions with the touring team and local scholars and other experts are a regular feature. Eastern Mennonite's special focus on reconciliation, through its Center for Justice and Peacebuilding, served as the catalyst for Mosaic's Harrisonburg stop. The center's executive director, Daryl Byler, knew Abuelaish and had invited him to the campus a few years ago; when Mosaic put on "I Shall Not Hate" in Washington, Byler brought an Eastern Mennonite group to see it. Acker and Sachs were among 20 students who went to the Middle East last year as part of the university's summer peace-building institute, led by Prof. William Goldberg. Having absorbed a range of aspects of life in Israel, the Palestinian West Bank, Jordan and Egypt, they were well-prepared for a play dissecting the intensity of suffering that is endemic to the region. (The Saturday matinee audience in the college's Studio Theater was made up of other EMU students, as well as residents from the area, including some women wearing scarves and hijabs). Sitting in a university cafeteria before that performance, Abbas sounded angry and fatalistic about the prospects for any sort of brokered peace between Palestinians and Israelis - despite the play's essential humanitarianism. "You know, I used to be such a supreme optimist. But it's been a while, a couple of years," he said, adding that hopelessness has worn him down. "Today I'm not an optimist. I'm not an optimist at all." Sachs and Acker were seated with him in the dining hall, listening to Abbas's words. Later in the day, after seeing the play, the students had some sobering thoughts of their own. The play reminded Sachs, for instance, of what he saw last year: how little contact young Palestinians and Israelis have and how that lack of positive interaction meant that "they never get to see the other as just another kid, like them. So people like Abuelaish, who become that point of contact between the two sides, make a huge difference in putting a face to the other." A play, then, despite the long odds, as an instrument of peace-building. To Acker, even the mere act of bearing witness to someone else's pain, can have meaning. As she put it: "There's healing in really hearing, in really listening to the stories." Author Tayari Jones has been keeping a big secret about her new book, "An American Marriage," for a very long time. At least, it has seemed that way. In October, Jones got a phone call that changed her life. Oprah Winfrey was on the line, telling her that "An American Marriage" had been selected for Oprah's Book Club. But there was a catch. She couldn't tell anyone until the book was published months later in February. "So you have to sit on the secret a long time," Jones, a 47-year-old Atlanta native, said in a phone interview. It's something authors dream of. An Oprah endorsement guarantees instant sales. And since Winfrey relaunched her book club online in 2012 - it ran for 15 years to coincide with the "Oprah Winfrey Show" - she has been more selective, picking fewer books. Only one was named in 2017 - "Behold the Dreamers" by Imbolo Mbue. Winfrey, apparently, has been waiting for months, too, to tell readers about Jones' novel and is betting big. Her Harpo Films company is attached to produce the adaptation of the book, too. In a video announcing the book's selection, she said she read the book in galley form, before it went to print. "It's so juicy," Winfrey said. "Every chapter, it's, 'Will they, or won't they, and how's this going to end?' It's one of those books I could not put down. As soon as I did, I called up the author and said, 'I gotta talk to you about this story.' " "An American Marriage" tells the story of Celestial and Roy, a recently married black couple living in modern-day Atlanta. Everything seems to be going their way. Celestial is getting recognized for her work as an artist. Roy's career as an executive also is thriving. But when Roy is arrested and sentenced to 12 years in prison, for a crime he didn't do, everything changes. Celestial, the newlywed, has some big questions to answer. "It's really a love triangle," Winfrey said in her video. "It places it inside a world that a lot of people don't know about but that affects all of us in really big ways. I think you'll come away with greater empathy and understanding." More Information 'An American Marriage' By Tayari Jones Algonquin Books 320 pp., $26.95. See More Collapse Besides Winfrey's stamp of approval, "An American Marriage," published by Algonquin Books, has garnered praise from the New York Times and Washington Post. Jones normally lives in Brooklyn, N.Y., and is on the MFA faculty at Rutgers University in Newark, N.J. She is spending the 2017-18 year in the Bennett Fellows Program at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas' Black Mountain Institute to work on her fifth novel. She's the author of "Leaving Atlanta," a story set during the infamous child murders of 1979-81, and "Silver Sparrow," about the relationship between two sisters, one who carries her father's last name and the other his shame. She recently discussed her new book and the moment Winfrey called. Q: OK, tell us about the moment Oprah called and said she wanted to make you the Oprah pick? Did you scream? Is that instant book sales? A: Well, it's not instant sales because they told me about this in October. It's complicated. First, they have to take pictures for the (March) magazine. Then they have to print regular copies of the book like everything is normal. Then they have to print the Oprah Book Club copies. Then they hide those about 100,000 copies somewhere. Then they have to get the bookstores to order the books sight unseen without knowing the title. They are sent to the bookstore in plain brown boxes and told not to open until a certain date. Q: Let's go back to the actual call. A: I received a phone call at 9 at night. I was driving my car. A voice said in surround sound, "Hello, this is Oprah." She has a distinctive voice. She waited patiently a good 45 seconds for me to go through, "Oh, my goodness, I can't believe it." Then she said she had read my book in manuscript form and wanted to use it for her book club. And would I like that? I said, "Yes, ma'am." There's so much that has to be done for Oprah's Book Club. So much that has to be coordinated. People at Algonquin Books did so much legwork to make this launch a huge success. This is a team effort. I wrote the book, Oprah brought the magic, and the countless others brought good old-fashioned elbow grease. Q: It seems like you are taking on more complex subjects. How have your grown as a writer? A: I think what I'm doing is more topical. What was important for me when I wrote my earlier books was giving the family structure the significance of any other topic. As an African-American novelist, there's so much expectation to pull from the headlines. I want to give more space to our family stories, our everyday slice-of-life stories. This story is more overtly engaging with the kind of structural challenges of African-American life. Q: Why did you decide to take on mass incarceration? A: I was interested in mass incarceration, not because of any personal experience. It's just as a black American, this problem is always in the air. I grew up understanding that prison could come and get you. You didn't have to earn your way into prison. I decided I wanted to explore this in my work. The mistake I made in trying to write the book is that I was taking on mass incarceration. Mass incarceration is not a plot. It's not a story. It's not a conflict. It's an issue. And I'm not a sociologist. So I think when I was trying to write to an issue, I couldn't get anything done. I had to think about one individual incarcerated. Then I could open it up to a story that could be surprising, engaging, funny and romantic. I use the skills I used in my earlier books. I could use the skills I already had when I realized that every incarcerated person is a part of a family. Q: How has the plight of black men influenced your writing? A: So much of the cornerstone of the way that black culture understands itself is about the plight of the black man. The challenge really is to think (about) the plight of all black people, which is just something we have not been trained to do. And I like to write about the lives of black men rather than their plight. I don't think that we do them service to reduce them to their suffering all the time. They suffer, but they do live, laugh and love. One of the challenges in writing this book, even though it's about wrongful incarceration, is to remember people have a full life. They are not just their struggles. Pass the chicken, hold the smoke. Thats the goal for Pollos Asados Los Nortenos owner Frank Garcia, who is hoping to reopen his popular restaurant at 4642 Rigsby on the Southeast Side within the next few weeks. The restaurant has been closed since Sept. 29, when the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality filed a lawsuit against the restaurant for violating the Texas Clean Air Act. It was also shut down briefly in Jan. 2016, when the city revoked the certificate of occupancy, before reopening a month later. The billowing smoke from the grilled chicken has always been the restaurants signature as it could be seen, and smelled, from many blocks away. But it created a rift with neighbors who cited health concerns about the air quality, as became an issue with city and state officials. The days of having problems (complaints about the smoke), are not going to be over, Garcia said. Ive come to expect that. But we are doing everything that the state and city of San Antonio is requiring us to do. We want to do this right and get everything signed off on by the proper authorities. Garcia is building a brand-new cinder block outdoor pit area that is about three times larger than the original cooking space, and he said it will be outfitted with a new smoke-scrubbing system that will limit smoke emission so that it doesnt violate the Clean Air Act. He also said that some routine plumbing and electrical work needs to be completed. Once everything passes the inspection process, Pollos Asados Los Nortenos will be back to cooking its typical 750 to 800 whole chickens per day on mesquite charcoal for a crowd that tends to snake around the building during peak hours. The rest of the menu, which includes grilled burgers and fajitas, will remain unchanged. These guys are working fast. We could be up and running in two weeks, Garcia said of the new construction process. Pollos Asados Los Nortenos is at 4642 Rigsby, 210-648-3303, Facebook: Pollos Asados Los Nortenos A new Texas A&M University System financial aid program hopes to benefit middle-class families who do not qualify for federal aid geared at low-income students but who do not have the financial means to recover after unexpected expenses. The grants, pending regent approval, will distribute $3 million per year for the next decade to students whose family income is between $60,000 and $100,000 each year. A&M will use revenue from the Permanent University Fund to finance the grants. It's the latest indication that universities in Texas see middle-class families as especially vulnerable in paying for college as costs increase. Rice University's latest strategic plan, released earlier this month, singled out middle-class students as a group that needs more outreach. "We must also more robustly address the needs of students from middle-class families, who are increasingly finding themselves priced out of the best in private higher education," the plan read. Rice pledged to raise about $200 million in financial aid endowments as part of its plan. Greg Fenves, the University of Texas at Austin's president, pledged to provide additional financial aid for low- and middle-income students in his fall address in September. A&M's Chancellor John Sharp said Hurricane Harvey made it clear that there is a gap in existing financial aid plans. He was tapped by Gov. Greg Abbott as the state's recovery czar. "We do not want our hard-working students to be forced to take out extra loans or lose valuable time toward their degree because of unanticipated issues with things like medical expenses, job loss, or natural disasters," Sharp said in a statement. Lindsay Ellis writes about higher education for the Chronicle. You can follow her on Twitter and send her tips at lindsay.ellis@chron.com. In the wake of the recent school shooting in South Florida that killed 14 students and three adults, Klein ISD has seen an uptick in threats of on-campus violence. Several arrests and charges have been made in gun-related incidents on the school district's campuses and the district has boosted security efforts. The Klein ISD Police Department said that Joseph Beville, 18, is accused of threatening to show off and use a gun at Klein High School. He was charged with exhibition of firearms. Also, according to court documents, an 18-year-old was arrested, accused of threatening to kill a Klein Forest teacher and "shoot up" the school. LaQuina Washington, 18, was a held on a $2,500 bail on a charge of exhibiting a firearm on school property. District representatives said Washington did not bring the gun to school. Klein ISD Police Chief David Kimberly has received phone calls from worried parents due to the spike in safety concerns in the district. "We responded to those incidents just as we would have prior to the incident in Florida. Anytime we receive notification rather in person or social media, we immediately launch an investigation and we trace it back to the source to determine validity and credibility," Kimberly said. "If it's credible, we work through it by filing appropriate criminal charges, working with the administration, or a combination of both." An arrest also was made of a Klein Forest High School student for bringing a gun on school grounds. Nicolas Nugyen, 18, received a charge of exhibiting a firearm on school property Feb. 7. According to court records, he was later released on a $2,500 bail. "Klein ISD employs a number of safety measures which include having officers on campuses throughout the day, training staff members for incidents related to intruders, conducting safety drills with students and staff, having cameras on campuses, and conducting background checks of visitors upon check in at a campus, just to name a few," said Ron Webster, Klein ISD executive director for campus safety and support. "Additionally, the district is in the process of planning for the implementation of access control mechanisms on the front doors of all elementary schools. Safety will continue to be a priority in Klein ISD." Houston-area law enforcement officers also have beefed up patrols of local schools. "In this day and time, in light of what's occurring all around us and most recently in Florida, we don't want to take any chances," said Precinct 4 Constable Mark Herman. "We want to err on the side of caution in case anyone tries to emulate what's going on in Florida." Herman said deputies are checking with schools each day in the Klein, Humble, Tomball, Spring and Cypress-Fairbanks districts as part of their regular patrols. Klein ISD covers 87.5 square miles of north Harris County, and serves approximately 50,000 students and 6,500 employees in the district. On days that school is not in session, of the 48 total officers in the department, half of the force is out patrolling the district. The Klein ISD Police Department, which is a 24-hour, 7-day a week agency, has a jurisdiction that includes all the geographical territory within the boundaries of the district, which includes any property outside the district that is owned, leased, or otherwise under the control of the school board. Though none of the schools in Klein ISD have bullet-resistant windows surrounding its schools, the police department says the department continues to improve safety in the district. "We have many other facets and layers in place and we are continuously working to add to an improve those. Parents need to talk with their students and spend some time in their rooms and look at what their kids are dong and have an open line of communication with their children," Kimberly said. "If the kids hear or see something, they need to come to their parents or adults and say something. Too many times students will know something, but they won't say something for fear of being labeled a snitch or just not being sure of the situation." Kimberly stresses that it is important for students to report any suspicious activity or social media posts that they might see. If a student doesn't feel comfortable sharing information with an officer, they can confide in their parents or other school administrators who can relay that information to law enforcement. Officers also investigate criminal, traffic and accidents occurring on district property and assist other law enforcement agencies as necessary. District officers randomly check all facilities on a 24-hour basis. The district has random searches monthly on a lottery system. Additionally, police dogs check lockers and parking lots at random with officers. Klein ISD officers have the same authority, powers, privileges, and immunities as bestowed on all Texas peace officers while on or off duty. "We take students safety and security as priority one. We are very diligent in what we are doing," Kimberly said. "It takes the community's assistance for us to become aware of (some) situations. We can investigate it and communicate it back out to make certain the community is aware of what is going on." The Katy Area Economic Development Council honored a current and a retired Texas legislator last week by presenting each the 2017 Stan C. Stanley Eagle Leadership and Economic Development Award. District 28 state Rep. John Zerwas, R-Richmond won in the elected official category, which is in its first year, said Lance LaCour, EDC president/CEO. A physician for more than 30 years, Zerwas is serving his sixth term in the Texas Legislature. Bill Callegari, who served in the Texas Legislature from 2001-15 and as a Katy Independent School District trustee from 1984-88, won the award in the volunteer category. Awards were presented Feb. 20. Zerwas said he came to know Stanley when he first ran for office and got to know him over the years on an ongoing basis. "I was aware of a lot of his efforts and contributions for Boy Scouts especially Eagle Scouts. The thing that impressed me most being around Stan - he was always there to help someone. Once he knew me and understood my political positions, one of his first comments was 'How can I help you?' That was the essence of who Stan Stanley was," said Zerwas. Saying he was incredibly honored after receiving the award, Zerwas added, "I hold Stan Stanley as an icon in terms of community service and volunteerism. To receive an award bearing his name is incredibly humbling." Callegari said, "I knew Stan Stanley very well. We were close friends, and I admired and respected him very much. We visited often, usually two to three times each week, and shared several common interests." When Callegari served in the Texas Legislature, he said he contacted Stanley on a regular basis to keep in touch with what people in Katy were thinking and what issues were important to them. Receiving the award named after his friend means a great deal to him. It's very meaningful to get any recognition from people, Callegari added, and having it named after Stanley made it more important and personal. "The annual award, which is in its second year, recognizes a volunteer in the Katy area who has made contributions in leadership and economic development to the Katy area," explained LaCour. "All persons volunteering (non-paid positions only) in the Katy area are eligible for nomination. The award winner will be selected by a committee assembled by the Katy Area EDC based on criteria including but not limited to, years of service, leadership skills demonstrated, special achievements, and qualities Stan so greatly exhibited such as being faithful, conscientious, unselfish and committed to the Katy area community." LaCour said that criteria for the elected official award includes serving for several years as an elected official "with a proven track record of contributing to community development and/or economic development." "The nominee must also exhibit faithful, conscientious, unselfish and helpful service with strong leadership skills," added LaCour. Callegari and Zerwas were selected from a pool of finalists which included Ann Hodge, Katy Area Chamber of Commerce; Rick Lawler, Katy Area EDC BOG and Katy Area Districts Council; David Loesch, Katy Rotary/Wild West Brewfest, and Wayne K. Thompson, Fort Bend County constable, Precinct 3. "Last year, we did announce the winner in November however we shifted the deadline back to receive more nominations as people were still dealing with the impacts of Harvey in early fall," said Lance. A five-member Task Force Committee, chaired by Paul Kurt, selected the winners. Kurt of Kurt and Associates was joined by Katrina Katsarelis of Katy Magazine, Caroline Champion of Houston Methodist West and Karen Kurt and Karl Falk, both of Stanley Signature Signs. Last year's volunteer winner was Stan Goss, whose accomplishments include leading the formation of Katy Area EDC Visions events, which helped recruit UH to develop a $46 million campus in Katy area, and leading the formation of the Transportation and Mobility Taskforce. This year's Conservative Political Action Conference began 472 days after the 2016 presidential election. Its first day ended with jeers for Democrat Hillary Clinton. Ben Shapiro, a conservative pundit and college campus speaker, told attendees Thursday afternoon that President Trump had ensured that Clinton "will never be president of the United States." The chant started within seconds: "Lock her up! Lock her up!" "She's already in a jail of her own making," said Shapiro, "somewhere in the woods in upstate New York." The country's largest conservative gathering, part networking event and part pep rally, has thrived off the threat of a rampaging left. During Barack Obama's presidency, speakers - Trump included - warned that Democrats would "fundamentally transform" America and saddle children with unpayable debt. On its first day, this year's conference portrayed a conservative movement that was winning the present and the future, in the position, finally, to smash the left. "We don't have to wonder what would happen if the party of Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer won the House and the Senate this November, do we?" asked Vice President Mike Pence, referring to the Democratic minority leaders in the House and Senate, respectively. "In the past few years, Democrats have only fallen further to the left." Like the president, who peppers his remarks and tweets with references to the defeat of "Crooked Hillary," the CPAC conservatives lacked a clear, new adversary. Members of the administration who attended their conference argued that Trump was implementing an agenda that conservatives had dreamed of for years. White House counsel Donald F. McGahn used his remarks to spell out how Trump's judicial appointments - a ready applause line - were part of a long-term strategy to dismantle the bureaucratic state. "What you're seeing is the president nominating a number of people who have some experience, if not expertise, in dealing with the government, particularly the regulatory apparatus," said McGahn. "There is a coherent plan here, where the judicial selection and the deregulatory effort are really the flip side of the same coin." Conservatives who might have entered the conference skeptical about Trump's achievements were given reasons to be cheerful. At one session, which asked whether Republicans were "serious about defunding Planned Parenthood," they were reminded that the administration was allowing states to do just that. At a roundtable of conservative college organizers, the young crowd was promised resources for campus organizing - and lawsuits, when necessary - to unravel decades of left-wing dominance at universities. "The future of western civilization will be won on college campuses," said Charlie Kirk, the president of Turning Point USA, a conservative organization with a $8 million budget. "The left has feelings. We have history, logic and perspective." With Clinton defeated, and Obama long gone, the search for left-wing threats was ambitious. The conference's exhibit hall contained little about potential Democratic presidential candidates; the only one that stood out was a stand-up of Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., made grotesque and outfitted with a Native American headdress. Onstage, the Democratic Party was alternately mocked as pathetic or described as an increasingly radical menace. Wayne LaPierre, the executive vice president of the National Rifle Association, told attendees that the "European socialism" of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., had infested the opposition. "They are not Democrats in the mold of John F. Kennedy or Tip O'Neill," said LaPierre. "They hide behind labels like Democrat, left-wing and progressive to make their socialist agenda more palatable, and that is terrifying ... absolute control in every corner of our government is their ultimate dream." Watching from afar, actual socialists found the spectacle amusing. After LaPierre warned that Young Democratic Socialists of America had organized more than 100 campus groups, the organization cut it into a quick promotional video. "The real red scare is the tide of blood the NRA and their lapdogs in Congress have brought to our schools," said Michelle Fisher, the national co-chair of the Young Democratic Socialists of America. "[We're] growing because people across the country have had enough of corrupt politicians sacrificing the lives of children for the NRA's freedom to profit. They buy their power, we build ours." Other conservatives focused on a short-term threat: The potential loss of one or both houses of Congress in this year's midterm elections. A morning panel designed to show what great shape Republicans were in shifted, at times, to a discussion of what might happen if the party lost, or the ongoing probe into foreign involvement in the 2016 election grew fangs. "I hope everyone in this room is going to remember that this impeachment threat is out there," said Fox News commentator Liz Peek. "It's a very good reason to go vote, and to give money." Sebastian Gorka, a former White House adviser who now works with the main presidential super PAC, said that Trump would face any impeachment push from Democrats by "outflanking them every day on Twitter multiple times." There was little public discussion of the electoral situation that worried the president and his party. Since the last CPAC, in 2017, Republicans had lost control of the governor's mansion in New Jersey, of a Senate seat in Alabama, and of 37 state legislative seats. Instead, there was heavy optimism about how Republicans would turn things around. A Thursday evening discussion between Charlie Kirk and presidential son Eric Trump ended with predictions of sweeping victories in 2018, as the polls that once predicted a Clinton victory would prove wrong again. "Hardcore Democrats - you know, I talk to them - they say, he's surpassed every expectation," said Trump. Get Williams-Wright was "unmoveable, unshakeable and unstoppable," sad the Rev. Rodney Graves, pastor of McCabe -Roberts Avenue United Methodist Church, eulogizing on Friday his longtime congregant, whom he said "sat at many tables" and left a lasting legacy to make her corner of the world a better place through service to others. Gethrel "Get" Hall Williams-Wright died a week ago after a brief hospitalization after living with and beating pancreatic cancer for as long as she could. She was 78. Williams-Wright served a long career with the U.S. Postal Service, led organized labor unions, reared a family and served her city as an at-large member of Beaumont City Council since 2007. "This is the best of times for mama," said her son, Cornelius D. Williams Jr., the son of her first husband, known as "C.D," the father of her five children. Her second husband, Clinton Wright, also preceded her in death. "It's the worst of times for us," Williams Jr. said. "She has everything before her. She laid down her sword in the knowledge that we would be OK." He addressed words of comfort to her four grandchildren, calling them brave and strong. "We are her lasting legacy," Williams Jr. said. "She knew it was not what we do (ourselves), but what we do for others to make a better place." Regina Rogers, founder of the Julie Rogers Gift of Life Program, a cancer-screening and resource for people who are medically underserved, called Williams-Wright an "extraordinary woman and treasured friend," whom she visited often after her cancer surgery in 2014. "She had a passion for service," Rogers said. "She only wanted to look after those in need because that was the way it was supposed to be." Rogers mentioned Williams-Wright's dedication to her community dating to a time in the Stadium Shopping Center south of Washington Boulevard when people of color were barred from dining at a pharmacy's lunch counter. Williams-Wright sat down with friends and supporters and told the manager they would eat, pay and leave and would be there early in the day and on into the evening until they were accepted. At the postal service, which had a skirts-or-dresses policy for women, Williams-Wright lined up her fellow women and wore pants, knowing they all couldn't be sent home. They had skirts in their lockers just in case, but she got the policy changed. "That was typical Get," Rogers said. "She obtained her goal without being confrontational." After her 2014 surgery, Williams-Wright wanted to return to her work on council, Rogers said. "She thanked God for the additional time," Rogers said. "She had a phenomenal perspective and attitude in the face of a cancer that is often terminal after a few months," Rogers said. She said Williams-Wright called her prayers to God her own private "knee-mails." "We will always remember your adorable laugh and the many ways you made our little corner of the world a more loving place," she said. Graves said Williams-Wright was able to cross "the imaginary line of what it means for a city to be unified." While Beaumont still struggles with the idea, he said her goal was always to make it stronger. "For her to pass during Black History Month is a sign of a sovereign God," Graves said. He recalled a recent Sunday service after which he spoke with her. "I told her, 'Get, I honor not only you, but who you are.' She said, 'I'm just a flunkie.' That means she was a servant, a leader who served,'" Graves said. The three reasons she will be missed, he said include the qualities that she was unmoveable, like a tree because it is grounded and has strong roots and like a strong tree, has the wisdom to bend. "She was unmoveable, but she understood negotiation and stuck to her principles," he said. "She was unshakeable. But she had fear, but fear never had her. She would go where the crowds were friendly, but also where the crowds were fierce," he said. "She was unstoppable -- faithful to the poor, the widowed, the orphaned and to strangers. Sometimes, she just spoke with the expression on her face. 'Oh, I am in trouble now,'" he said to laughter in the full church. Graves said death had moved and shook and stopped "this loving mother, grandmother and leader." "But before death could claim victory, Jesus said, 'Uh, uh. She was just walking through your door to get to me. She's mine now,'" Graves said. "She shall be missed, but she's not lost because we know where she is," Graves said. Dan Wallach is a freelance writer. Several major companies - Enterprise Holdings, First National Bank of Omaha, Symantec, Hertz and Avis - have ended co-branding partnerships with the National Rifle Association as a #BoycottNRA social media movement picks up steam. Enterprise - the parent company of car-rental brands Enterprise, Alamo and National - cut ties on Thursday, when it discontinued an arrangement that offered discounts to NRA members. First National Bank of Omaha, one of the country's largest privately held banks, also announced Thursday the end of a credit-card co-branding deal with the NRA. The bank had issued what its ads described as the "Official Credit Card of the NRA," according to the Omaha World-Herald; the Visa card offered 5 percent back on gas and sporting goods store purchases and a $40 bonus card. On Friday, Symantec announced in a terse statement on Twitter that it had also ended its discount program with the gun-rights organization. The company, which provides cybersecurity solutions worldwide, had been offering discounts on Norton anti-virus and malware protection, cutting prices on its premium package from $110 to $48 for NRA members. Another car-rental company, Hertz, soon followed suit. Separately, insurance company Chubb Limited said Friday that it will stop underwriting "NRA Carry Guard," a policy marketed to NRA members who face legal or civil lawsuits after they shoot someone. A spokesman for Chubb told Reuters that the company informed the NRA of the decision three months ago; the policy has faced criticism from gun-control groups who called it "murder insurance." The decisions came as the names of companies with NRA associations began circulating widely on the Internet and social media under the #BoycottNRA hashtag after the deadly Valentine's Day attack at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. A gunman wielding an AR-15 rifle killed 17 people and wounded at least 14 others, drawing anguished calls for a ban on assault weapons from students and families. The mass killing focused renewed attention on the NRA, which is credited with blocking gun-control measures for years through millions of dollars in political campaign contributions and pressure from its large membership base. American businesses have become increasingly politically aware and have participated in boycotts over the past few years against states over LGBT rights. But the NRA is a well-funded membership operation devoted to a single cause - guns - and unlikely to be moved by the actions of companies with which it has such loose and peripheral ties. Like many other organizations, the NRA has benefit deals with companies designed to make membership more appealing. The NRA "member benefits" page offers savings on a credit card, hearing aids, car rentals, travel, car purchases and prescription drugs. FedEx, for example, gives NRA Business Alliance members up to a 26 percent discount on shipping expenses. FedEx has not said anything publicly about its NRA association in recent days; when reached around 4:30 ET on Friday afternoon, a company spokesperson said he had no information to provide. Hashtags urging boycotts of specific companies involved in the deals have sprouted up across social media over the past several days. People then started posting comments on the social media platforms of many of the companies urging them to take action. The Omaha bank appears to have been the first to respond publicly. "Customer feedback has caused us to review our relationship with the NRA," the bank said in a statement posted on Twitter. "As a result, First National Bank of Omaha will not renew its contract with the National Rifle Association to issue the NRA Visa Card." Enterprise followed a few hours later on Thursday. "All three of our brands have ended the discount for NRA members," said a tweet on the Enterprise Rent-A-Car account. By Friday morning, Symantec had made a similar announcement. Then came Hertz. On Friday evening, Alice Pereira, a spokeswoman for Avis Budget Group - the company mark for Avis, Budget and Zipcar brands - confirmed that it will no longer provide the NRA member discount as of March 26. Movers North American Van Lines and Allied Van Lines also disassociated their companies from the NRA. The NRA has not commented on the announcements. However, the World-Herald quoted Rod Moeller, director of government affairs for the Nebraska Firearms Owners Association, saying that the group will "be giving strong consideration to moving their accounts to a bank that hasn't bowed to political pressure." Boycott movements have become increasingly effective political tools over the past few years. Indiana got hit hard by threatened boycotts in 2015 when then-Gov. Mike Pence signed legislation allowing businesses and individuals to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation. The Indiana legislature and Pence reversed the measure within two weeks. In 2016, North Carolina was the target of a business boycott after it enacted a "bathroom bill" requiring transgender people to use bathrooms based on their assigned gender at birth. After the NCAA canceled tournaments in the state and PayPal decided not to build a new facility in the state, the legislation was partially repealed. The NRA claims 5 million members and corporate allies in the gun industry that provide the organization with tens of millions of dollars per year. The group devotes massive resources to fighting gun regulations in the name of the Second Amendment to the Constitution, which protects the right to bear arms. - - - The Washington Post's T.J. Ortenzi and Keith McMillan contributed to this report, which has been updated. --- Video Embed Code Video: National Rifle Association chief executive Wayne LaPierre addressed the Conservative Political Action Conference on Feb. 22, in the wake of the Florida high school shooting.(The Washington Post) Embed code: President Donald Trump announced new financial measures against North Korea on Friday aimed at ensuring Pyongyang cannot continue to fuel its nuclear ambitions by sidestepping existing sanctions. "Today we put the strongest sanctions on Korea that we have ever put on a country," Trump said at a news conference with the Australian prime minister. "We must continue to stand together to prevent the brutal dictatorship from threatening the world with nuclear devastation." The measures target 56 vessels, shipping companies and other entities that U.S. officials say are used by North Korea to conduct trade prohibited under previous sanctions. They come as the Trump administration seeks new ways to intensify pressure on North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, whose increasingly advanced missile and nuclear weapon programs have made the isolated nation the most pressing foreign threat facing the United States. The penalties, the latest of multiple rounds of Trump administration sanctions, signal U.S. officials' concern that an under-the-radar fossil fuel trade undermines their ability to use economic pain as a means for making the Kim regime rethink its nuclear program. Trump first referenced the new sanctions in the final moments of a more-than-hour-long speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference outside Washington. "I do want to say, because people have asked: North Korea," he said before briefly mentioning the sanctions. "Hopefully something positive can happen. We will see." Senior U.S. officials, briefing reporters ahead of Trump's address, said the steps North Korea has taken to conceal its illicit shipping activities include conducting prohibited ship-to-ship transfers, falsifying ship names and disabling vessels' automatic identification systems "to try to intentionally mask their movements." "We are determined through these efforts to increase the pressure and show Kim Jong Un that there is no other path to take but denuclearization," said one official, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. Experts said new sanctions would not have the same economic bite as previous measures targeting North Korean exports but may ensure better enforcement by disrupting the increasingly sophisticated steps Pyongyang takes to evade them. Nine of the sanctioned ships were capable of carrying large shipments of coal, a vital North Korean export that was tagged by earlier measures. "These will incrementally add to the pressure but not make a substantive difference," said Patrick Cronin, an Asia scholar at the Center for a New American Security. "The strategy is meant to be one of slowly increasing pressure, not a sudden destabilizing blow." The sanctioned entities include companies based in China, Singapore and Panama. Also on Friday, the Treasury Department released photos of what it said were North Korean ships using fraudulent names and ID numbers. The administration issued a global shipping advisory designed to increase awareness of North Korea's attempts to hide its maritime activities and also to warn companies that they could be subject to penalties if they trade with the regime. Stephen Osborne, who has written about maritime sanctions as a research associate at Project Alpha, a nonproliferation group based at King's College London, said the new measures would make clear to other countries which companies to avoid. "The success of the illicit trade relies on secrecy, and the most effective approach against that is exposure," Osborne said. "To give a clear outline of the vessels, individuals and companies that have been linked to North Korea is a good first step." Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, in a briefing, said the actions would put companies and countries "on notice that this administration views compliance with U.S. and U.N. sanctions as a national security imperative. Those who trade with North Korea do so at their own peril." Speaking beside Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, Trump suggested that the United States might resort to military action if sanctions don't work. "We'll have to see," Trump said. "I don't think I'm going to exactly play that card. But we'll have to see. If the sanctions don't work, we'll have to go Phase Two. And Phase Two may be a very rough thing - it may be very, very unfortunate for the world. . . . If we can make a deal, it will be a great thing. And if we can't, something will have to happen." The announcement takes place as Ivanka Trump and a presidential delegation visit South Korea for the Closing Ceremonies of the 2018 Winter Olympic Games. Trump attended a dinner earlier Friday with South Korean President Moon Jae-in. Mnuchin said Trump was briefed on the U.S. move, and she discussed the sanctions with Moon before they were publicly announced. Moon said North Korea's participation in the Olympics has "served as an opportunity for us to engage in active discussions between the two Koreas, and this has led to lowering of tensions on the peninsula and an improvement in inter-Korean relations." "I also believe that such developments are thanks to President Trump's strong support for inter-Korean dialogue, and I would like to express my deep appreciation on this point, as well," Moon said. Another key element of the Trump administration's strategy for confronting North Korea is building a more comprehensive regime of international sanctions. Speaking before the announcement, Nikki Haley, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, claimed success for the United States in steering three rounds of successively tighter international sanctions at the U.N. Security Council over the past year. Those penalties are more effective than any Washington can apply on its own, mostly because they involve North Korea's major trading partner, China. "And even though North Korea has yet to end its nuclear and missile programs, we know the sanctions are having a real impact," Haley said in an address to the University of Chicago's Institute of Politics. "The regime has less and less money to spend on its ballistic missile tests and less capacity to threaten other countries with those tests." - - - The Washington Post's David Nakamura and John Wagner in Washington, Anne Gearan in Chicago and Anna Fifield in Seoul contributed to this report. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has approved security arrangements for moving the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and the official opening may come as early as Israel's Independence Day in mid-May, a State Department official said. The embassy, initially to be located in the current premises of the U.S. Consulate in Jerusalem's Arnona neighborhood, will eventually be moved to new premises President Donald Trump has said will be constructed. The cost of that building is expected to run into the hundreds of millions of dollars. Las Vegas casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, a major Republican donor, has offered to fund an unspecified part of the construction, according to an administration official who confirmed an Associated Press report. Adelson is a strong supporter of both Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and owns a pro-Netanyahu newspaper in Israel. Private financing of an embassy could raise significant problems. Steven Goldstein, the undersecretary for public affairs, said State Department attorneys were looking at the legality of such a gift but that no formal talks about it had taken place. In recent months, Trump has criticized what he has called extravagant spending on embassies, including the new $1 billion mission in London that opened last month. Goldstein said Tillerson had signed the security plan late Thursday for moving the embassy to the current U.S. Consulate facility, a final hurdle for implementing the decision Trump announced in December. "Safety and security have been and always will be primary" for Tillerson, Goldstein said. Trump's proposed 2019 budget significantly cut funding for protection of U.S. diplomatic facilities overseas. The Jerusalem consulate currently issues visas and attends to the needs of visiting American citizens, while other official business is conducted in the embassy in Tel Aviv. Once the consulate is designated the official embassy, Ambassador David Friedman and several aides will maintain offices in both places, said the State Department official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the matter. Trump's announcement recognizing Jerusalem as Israel's capital and ordering that the embassy be moved broke decades of U.S. policy. Jerusalem has long been considered a subject of final status negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. Both claim the city as their capital. Trump said at the time that he believed the move would push the peace process between them forward, since it would take Jerusalem off the table as a subject of disagreement. The announcement was widely condemned in the Arab world and beyond. The United Nations General Assembly voted 128-9 in favor of a nonbinding resolution rejecting recognition of Jerusalem. White House aide Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law, has been tasked with drawing up a new Israeli-Palestinian peace proposal, expected to be presented to the two sides shortly. The Palestinians, following Trump's recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital and intention to move the U.S. Embassy, said the United States was no longer able to serve as an honest broker in the negotiations and has since refused to meet with senior Trump officials. A series of protests planned for coming weeks in the wake of the Valentines Day mass shooting in Florida has forced school districts in San Antonio to consider how to handle potential disruptions to the school day. North East Independent School District announced Thursday in a letter to parents that it would dock any students who participate in walkouts during school hours with an unexcused absence. The students would be given no credit for work during that period, and parents and guardians would not be able to request an excused absence for their children. While we understand people are passionate on all sides of the issues stemming from events in Florida, we cannot allow students to disrupt the learning environment during school hours, the letter said. If students wish to protest, they may do so in a peaceful manner before or after the regular school day. RELATED: Sheriff: Deputy failed to enter Fla. school in shooting San Antonio Independent School District plans to handle any protests during the school day in a similar manner, assigning students an unexcused absence, said district spokeswoman Leslie Price. Campus administrators, especially at the high schools, are encouraging students to express their frustrations in constructive ways, such as writing to legislators, but if they do walk out, theyll be directed to supervised areas on campus to keep them off the streets, she said. At least three possible protest dates have circulated in reaction to the Douglas High School massacre in Parkland, Florida, that left 17 people dead. National school walkouts have been set by Womens March organizers for March 14 which falls during Spring Break in Texas and by a Connecticut student for April 20, the anniversary of the Columbine High School shooting in Littleton, Colorado. On March 24, a Saturday, students in Florida plan to hold a March for our Lives rally at the U.S. Capitol. Students across the country already have walked out at some high schools, including hundreds of students in Austin and Central Texas, according to media reports. RELATED: Judge calls day care worker's crime every parent's worst nightmare In the Houston area, some superintendents have taken a hard line, threatening to suspend students who participate in walkouts or protests during school hours. Needville ISD, in Fort Bend County, said it would punish students with a three-day out-of-school suspension, while Spring ISD has said students could face in-school suspension. Ed Suarez, spokesman for Schertz-Cibolo-Universal City Independent School District, said its board policy strikes a balance between every students constitutional rights to free speech and the need to prevent disruptions in class. But he declined to say specifically how the district would handle a protest or walkout. SCUC ISD is sensitive to the concerns about student and staff safety and will take these potential expressions of free speech on a case-by-case basis, Suarez said. Northside ISD officials are still discussing how to handle potential protests and will notify families, its spokesman Barry Perez said. He said the district wants to find a way to turn any potential protests into learning opportunities. Last week, NEISD students launched a letter-writing campaign to get the attention of elected officials in Texas and Washington, D.C. on gun law reform and school safety issues. Getting Fiesta medals ready for the big show in April can entail lots of deadlines that require meeting with graphic artists, finalizing a design, making decisions about price points, coming to terms with how many a group or individual can afford to order and then actually submitting an order usually to a factory across the globe. Thus, many orders arrive in China just as workers go home for a nice, long period to celebrate their new year. And because all of that soaks up time, the Express-News is extending its deadline for its 2018 Fiesta Medals Contest to 5 p.m. Friday, March 23. Three men were arrested Thursday afternoon in connection with threats to impose penitentiary rules on Brooklyn-based rapper 6ix9ine if he performed at an area nightclub. San Antonio International Airport spokesman Rich Stinson confirmed that a group of men were taken into custody at about 4:30 p.m. In total, three men had been arrested as of Thursday evening, Stinson said. One of the men is accused of making the threat, he said, while the others were arrested in connection with past traffic violations and warrants. They had not been publicly identified as of Thursday evening. RELATED: SAPD releases name, photo of man arrested for allegedly threatening rapper 6ix9ine before S.A. concert Both he and San Antonio Police Department spokesman officer Douglas Greene said law enforcement have been monitoring the situation since threats were first made last weekend through social media, including Facebook. Authorities have been taking every necessary precaution that we can to make sure that everybody is safe, Greene said. A video was released Saturday by self-purported members of Tango Orejon, a local prison gang, showing several men holding weapons and threatening the rapper because he had been convicted of a child sex crime. You are not allowed in our city, a man in the video said. He was quickly followed by another saying, We dont (obscenity) with no (obscenity) child molesters in our city. Stinson said an airport officer noticed a vehicle matching a description given to them by area law enforcement and was about to approach it when it drove away. The same vehicle returned moments later, and a man entered the airport, Stinson said. Airport security then followed the man and arrested him moments later because he matched the description of someone they had been briefed on who was wanted on several warrants. Airport police then went to the vehicle and found four other men inside, including the man who is accused of making the threat on Facebook, investigators said. Airport police have turned the investigation over to the San Antonio Police Department. As far as I know they did not have any weapons, but I do know they (police) were still searching the vehicle, Stinson said Thursday evening. We are all very proud of our police department that we have at the airport and their awareness of whats going on, Stinson said. Greene said San Antonio police were still talking to the individuals involved, and that there could be more arrests. Longford is on the up, Longford has turned the corner and Longford is very much open for business. They were just some of the choice depictions used by national and local politicians earlier today for the official launch of the Royal Canal Greenway. Rural Affairs Minister Michael Ring conducted the formalities at Mosstown Harbour in Kenagh as part of an overall project aimed at linking Dublin to Clondra. Mr Ring complemented the part played by Longford County Council in bringing the project, jointly funded by the Department of Rural and Community Development as well as Transport, to fruition. The 6km stretch of greenway was built by Longford County Council using 525,000 allocated by Minister Ring through his Departments Outdoor Recreation Infrastructure Scheme. "We all know outdoor activity is the way forward," he told those in attendance. "It's great to see so many children and so many adults of all ages enjoying facilities like this all over the country. "What will happen from this development here today is you will see businesses popping up, you will see people employed and you will see jobs created." The afternoon coincided in OPW Minister Kevin 'Boxer' Moran's announcement to allow free admission for disabled visitors and their carers to heritage sites within his department's portfolio. That disclosure came at Corlea Trackway Visitor Centre shortly afterwards with Mr Moran confirming the policy would take effect from May 1. "The OPW is entrusted with looking after wonderful heritage sites and I feel passionately that everyone should be able to enjoy these cultural assets on our doorstep," he said. There were contributions too from Longford County Council CEO Paddy Mahon and Cathaoirleach Cllr Martin Mulleady, both of whom spoke fervently of the recent economic positivity the county was experiencing. "Longford, as I have said from day one, is open for business," said Cllr Mulleady, as he reserved special praise for Longford County Council's "outstanding" executive. "There has been an awful lot of good things that have happened in Longford over the past fortnight. "We got negative publicity, we took it and we came out fighting. That's what we are at. It's about time Longford people stood up for their county and were positive going forward because that is what this county needs." ALSO READ: Minister Michael Ring will officially open final section of Royal Canal Greenway in Longford Local News, Crime, Politics By Long Island News & PR Published: February 23 2018 Hart Leads and Directs Operations and Investigations of FBI Long Island Office. Suffolk County, NY - February 23, 2018 - Suffolk County Executive Steve Bellone today announced the nomination of Geraldine Hart Senior Supervisory Resident Agent in charge of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Long Island Office -- to serve as the next Police Commissioner for the Suffolk County Police Department. Hart, a 21-year veteran of the Bureau, would become the first woman to hold the position of Suffolk County Police Commissioner in the history of the Department. Geraldine possesses the integrity, competence, and excellence that we are looking for in someone to lead the Suffolk County Police Department, said Suffolk County Executive Bellone. As our next Police Commissioner, she will bring a fresh perspective and build on the progress that we have made over the last two years. Geraldine Hart, nominee for Suffolk County Police Commissioner, said: I am honored for the opportunity to serve the residents of Suffolk County and privileged to serve with the brave, hardworking men and women of the Suffolk County Police Department. I am extremely optimistic about the future of the Suffolk County Police Department and what we can accomplish together. As the Senior Supervisory Resident Agent of the FBI's Long Island Office since February 2014, Hart has effectively led and directed the operations and investigations of 115 FBI Special Agents, Task Force Officers, and support personnel, affecting a diverse region of over three million residents. In this role, Hart directly supervises the Long Island Gang Task Force, as well as spearheaded the first multi-agency MS-13 Intelligence Center to centralize and facilitate the sharing of gang intelligence, with an emphasis on enhanced collaboration between the FBI, Suffolk County Police Department, New York State Police, Nassau County Police Department, and local governments. In addition to her work combatting gang violence, Hart oversees complex investigations that include public corruption, white-collar crime, terrorism, counter-intelligence, child exploitation, and cyber crimes. Hart is also actively engaged in liaison activities, such as providing active shooter training opportunities for Nassau and Suffolk School Superintendents, houses of worship, and the first FBI Teen Academy in Central Islip and Brentwood . Her leadership abilities were recognized at the highest levels as the recipient of the 2015 Director's High Impact Leadership Award, which is given to a select number of individuals in the Bureau based on an anonymous survey among their peers who rank them for superior leadership abilities. Hart began her career as an FBI Special Agent focused on Transnational Organized Crime, where she helped lead and execute complex investigations end enforcement actions to dismantle violent organized crime enterprises, such as the Lucchese crime family. In 1999, Hart was assigned to the Lucchese Organized Crime Squad, working on an investigation that led to the conviction of fugitive Frank Federico, who was responsible for the murders of garbage-industry haulers and informants Robert M. Kubecka, of Greenlawn, and Donald Barstow of Stony Brook (United States v. Federico). That same year, Hart was awarded the Office of Inspector Generals Integrity Award. As an FBI case agent, Hart, in 2005, worked closely with the Suffolk County Police Department to investigate two former NYPD detectives who secretly worked as mafia associates on behalf of the Lucchese crime family. The investigation led to the indictments of Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa, who were ultimately convicted of committing murder and disclosing sensitive law enforcement information to mob bosses. The investigation also led to the discovery of a body in Brooklyn in connection with the criminal actions of these two individuals (United States v. Eppolito). For her performance on the case, Hart received the United States Attorney Generals Award for Excellence in Law Enforcement, the highest award given out in the FBI. In 2012, Hart was promoted to Supervisory Special Agent to supervise a task force comprised of FBI Special Agents and NYPD Detectives investigating the Genovese, Colombo, and Bonanno crime families. In January 2014, these investigations resulted in the takedown of five organized crime members for murder, one tied to the Lufthansa heist at John F. Kennedy Airport , along with a body that was identified and dug up dating to the 1970s. Hart also directed large-scale investigations into allegations of corruption at the District Council and local union level, which resulted in successful prosecutions. School & Education, Local News, Community, Charity & Cause, Politics By Long Island News & PR Published: February 23 2018 Suozzi: "This about doing what is right, and Im proud to join Congressman King in this bipartisan effort." Glen Cove, NY - February 23, 2018 - On Saturday, March 24th, Congressman Tom Suozzi (NY-3) and Congressman Pete King (NY-2) will join Long Island high school students for a rally demanding action to stop the senseless mass shootings happening in schools across the nation. We are inspired by the teenagers and high school students who are standing up collectively and demanding not one more, and we want to help them organize across Long Island and beyond. This is a young peoples movement and its our job as elected officials to shepherd this passion so meaningful action is taken at the congressional level to address gun violence prevention. This is not about Republicans and Democrats. This about doing what is right, and Im proud to join Congressman King in this bipartisan effort, said Suozzi. I am proud to work with Congressman Suozzi on this effort and will continue to advocate for policies that prevent gun violence and keep our communities and children safe. I have continually been a lead sponsor of legislation which would expand the current background check system and look forward to working with Congressman Suozzi to make sure it becomes law, said King. Each member supports H.R. 4240, the Public Safety and Second Amendment Rights Protection Act, which is being led by Congressman King and cosponsored by Congressman Suozzi. This bill would expand the existing background check system to include all commercials firearm sales, provide reasonable exceptions for family and friends, and preserve Second Amendment Rights. It would also offer states better federal funding if they maintain proper record-sharing systems that help report criminals and the dangerously mentally ill. The rally will take place the same day as the March for Our Lives demonstration in Washington, D.C. LOCATION: Suozzi & King Rally to Demand Action on Commonsense Gun Legislation 11:00am, Saturday, March 24th Nold Hall Gym Whats a computer, a young girl asks in Apples latest change-the-world TV spot for the iPad. Toss aside your cynicism, and its easy to buy into Apples vision as she types stories, scribbles handwritten drafts, and produces precocious paintings on her eminently portable iPad Pro. A computer? The girl might as well be asking about Betamax or beepers. And its a vision that fits well with the lazy Sunday afternoon Apple presents as the girl totes the device around parks and diners. But for work? Were the young girl a few years older and taking notes in collegeor for a big meeting at workshe probably would have tossed her beloved iPad Pro aside by now. I should know: Ive used the tablet as my primary work device since 2015, and while its seen some impressive improvements over the years, its still not ready to fully usurp the MacBook. Heres why. The lack of mouse support gets frustrating IDG I could have already copied and pasted this text with a mouse in the time it takes to select it on an iPad Pro. Lets be blunt: Nothing prevents me from trumpeting the iPad Pro as a laptop replacement quite like the absence of any kind of mouse support. Yes, Apples touch controls are elegant and graceful, and theyre wonderful for flipping through ebooks and scrubbing through Netflix videos. But, alas, they still kind of suck for actual work. The key element mouse control brings over touch controls is speed. As a writera creative profession that uses the iPads simplest functionsI simply find precision editing much quicker and simpler with a mouse. Editing drafts demands constant highlighting and rearrangement of text, and that process drags into eternity when youre forced to hold your finger down to right click and carefully select sentences and words. The Apple Pencil allows for improved precision, no doubt, but in practice its almost as slow as using your fingers as the time needed to press down on the screen remains the same. Ive heard arguments that adding mouse support diminishes the iPads nature as a mobile device, but thats just silly. It adds an option. Indeed, even the iPhone supports Bluetooth keyboards and its a phone. If anything, adding mouse support for the iPad Pro would hurt the MacBook line because, after all, Apple would have a true laptop replacement on its hands. Maybe its not as eager to achieve that reality as it lets on. Handwriting-to-text tech still isnt great IDG The iPad Pro makes it easy to type and write by hand at the same time. Apples marketing tends to play up the Apple Pencil as an artists tool, so its ability to help you use your iPad Pro much as you would use a legal pad with a pen doesnt get as much love. Thats a shame, especially in an age whenas Scientific American and others reporta growing number of studies show that writing notes by hand helps your brain remember more of what you write down than clacking your fingers across the keys. Unfortunately, the technology isnt quite yet there to get the most out of it. Only the Notability app really nails the fluid sensation of writing by handalternatives often feel stiff and unwieldyand, more importantly, handwriting-to-text technology remains in its early phases. Apps such as Notes Plus and Nebo allow for some impressive script-to-text transcriptions, but getting the most out of them requires carefully laying down letters as though youre being graded by how carefully you form your letters in a Big Chief tablet. And should our iPad girl try to transcribe notes she hurriedly wrote in a meeting? Shell be looking at jumbles of consonants that might feel at home on maps of Wales. Fortunately, the iPad Pros split-screen multitasking view makes it really easy to display your handwritten notes from an app like Notes in the left window and transcribe it through a document like iA Writer in the right window. Some essential productivity apps arent built in IDG You can find several great calculator apps on the App Store, but most of the free ones come with ads. The strangest thing I discovered while using my iPad Pro as my primary work device is that the iPhone is often a better tool for on-the-go productivity. Bizarrely, for a Pro device, Apples giant, powerful tablet doesnt come with native apps for tracking stocks, taking voice notes, or even a calculator. You wont even find a native weather app. All these come standard on an iPhone. No matter, you say: There are some worthy third-party alternatives! And thats certainly true, but the problem is that you cant access them through the Control Center. Imagine the disappointment our Whats a computer? girl will feel in later years when she swipes up her Control Center in order to whip up a quick freelance estimate for her artwork and finds that theres no calculator, forcing her to dig through her piles of apps. So much for professionalism. As a journalist, being able to whip out my iPhone, swipe up on Control Panel and start recording a voice note has landed me great quotes more times than I can count. With an iPad Pro, I have to waste a few precious extra seconds to get to an app like Rev or Just Press Record for the same effect. The absence of such apps from Control Center thus often translates into a significant productivity speedbump. Fortunately, simply adding the apps would make this problem go away. A (likely apocryphal) story says that the calculator app didnt make it on the iPad because Steve Jobs didnt like the way it looked when all stretched out on the devices screen shortly before launch, but that was years ago. Apples had plenty of time to fix it since then. Popular apps wont always play nice IDG Years into the iPad Pros life cycle, the Gmail app still doesnt support split-screen multitasking, which can make copying info from emails a pain. Sometimes the iPad Pros most frustrating limitations have nothing to do with Apple at all. Your Windows-based colleagues may use a popular app for work, but theres no guarantee that the maker of that software is going to take steps to ensure the apps iPad counterpart stays up to date. Consider Google Docs. At this point, its probably the most widely used program for writing, sharing, and editing rough drafts in media, but Google didnt bother to update the iPad app to support split-screen multitasking until August of 2016. Thats around a year after Apple introduced the feature, and by that point, you could find it on almost every obscure indie word processing tool. As a freelance writer, that meant I was constantly switching between whatever source I was looking at and my Google Docs file while writing. In most cases, Id write the draft in another app and simply paste it into Google Docs for sharing. Surely, you say, such problems are behind us now. Not really, as Google still hasnt introduced split-screen support for the iPad Pros Gmail app. Considering the resources available at Google, the delays coming out of Mountain View occasionally feel spiteful. The file system has improved, but its still a pain IDG The Files app greatly simplified file management of the iPad Pro, but the process can still be a pain. Lets be clear. If juggling multiple file types and sending attached files through email is part of your everyday work routine, youre not going to be happy using an iPad Pro as a primary work device. File management isnt anywhere near as awkward as it was in the dark days before iOS 11 and the introduction of the Files app, but it remains an overly convoluted and messy business compared to the intuitive elegance of handling files on a Mac (or a Windows PC, for that matter). Essentially, you need to plan ahead for everything as its usually impossible to make new folders in specific locations in iCloud Drive from an app itself. (Theres also an option to save files On My iPad, but thats a bigger headache than it sounds like.) Lets say I want to save a Pages file as a PDF and send it off later. Id first have to make a Documents folder in iCloud Drive through the Files app, then head back over to Pages and export the document as a PDF to the new Documents folder. If I wanted to rename that PDF before sending it, Id have to go back to the Files app (and the iCloud Drive subsection) and do it there. Then Id have to open the Mail app and send it from there after searching for the proper folder. Still with me? Keep in mind that this is the easy, breezy scenario. Youll encounter additional frustrations when you try to open Zip files (which needs a third party app, and few of them are ideal). If you need to resize an image to specific dimensions or file size before emailing it, youll have to get yet another third-party app since Apple doesnt allow for that degree of control itself. And the list goes on. Its not unworkable, but the need to be inventive when sending files off the iPad Pro serves as the most damning argument against its use as a primary work device. That said, I managed to deal with it for almost two years and I still find myself reaching for my iPad Pro on occasion even though Im back to using a MacBook Pro for the bulk of my work. Its handier. Its more portable. Heck, its lighter. The iPad Pro is so close to being able to being a truly viable laptop replacement, and all it would take it for Apple to change its mind about a couple of key design commitments. With Apple, though, thats like asking winter to be summer. Heres to hoping. by Sara Guaglione , February 22, 2018 Smithsonian redesigned its print magazine for the March issue, which hits newsstands March 27, featuring four covers based on Norman Rockwells the Four Freedoms. Rockwell, a famous 20th-century American artist, was inspired by President Franklin D. Roosevelts speech to Congress in 1941 on American involvement in World War II. Roosevelt spoke of the Four Freedoms, or the humanitarian values that were at stake in the war: Freedom of Worship, Freedom of Speech, Freedom from Want and Freedom from Fear. Rockwell painted four images to go with those ideas, which were printed in four successive issues of the Saturday Evening Post in 1943. 2018 is the 75th anniversary of Rockwells works, and Smithsonian deemed it the right time to revisit those themes. advertisement advertisement Smithsonian commissioned four contemporary artists Tim O'Brien, Melinda Beck, Ryan Schude and Edel Rodriguez to recreate one of Rockwells images. While Rockwell based his paintings on his white Vermont neighbors, the four artists chose to update the images to represent a new, more diverse America. In the original Freedom of Worship painting, for example, the five central subjects are all white. OBrien decided to paint people of different backgrounds and religions in his cover for the March Smithsonian issue. Smithsonian collaborated with NYC-based design firm Priest + Grace, which has done work for Hearst, Conde Nast and Reuters,- to redesign the monthly print magazine. The publisher wanted a more modern look and feel. "We wanted to change the overall look of the magazine to reflect the great content weve been putting inside lately. Were publishing some amazing and startling work by award-winning writers, photographers and illustrators, and we wanted to give them a cool new showcase, Smithsonian editor-in-chief Michael Caruso told Publishers Daily. by Steve McClellan @mp_mcclellan, February 22, 2018 VML has appointed Jason Xenopoulos to the new position of Global Chief Vision Officer and Chief Creative Officer of VMLs Europe, Middle East and Africa region. Xenopoulos is tasked with steering the WPP agencys long-term vision and global positioning across its global network, which spans 33 offices across six continents. As to this second role, Chief Creative Officer, EMEA, Xenopoulos will work with Global Chief Creative Officer Debbi Vandeven as the shops creative product evolves. Also, working with Jon Sharpe, CEO of VML Europe, Xenopoulos will foster relationships with the regions key clients, manage and develop creative leadership across EMEA and help drive growth at the agency. He will sit on VMLs global creative council, which helps guide creative teams. advertisement advertisement Jasons ability to steer our future across the connected consumer experience will be a great asset for the entire VML global network, stated VML Global CEO Jon Cook. He has been a valued partner across our offices, capabilities and leadership over the last six years. Xenopoulos will remain based out of VML South Africas office in Cape Town, reporting to Cook and Vandeven. In 2010, Xenopoulos co-founded Native, which was acquired by VML in 2013. He has served as CEO and Chief Creative Officer of VML South Africa since then. Jarred Cinman has been promoted to succeed Xenopoulos as CEO VML South Africa, while Diane Wilson has been elevated to the offices deputy CEO post and Ryan McManus has been upped to Chief Creative Officer. by Wendy Davis @wendyndavis, February 22, 2018 Siding with Google, a federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit by an advertiser who alleged "rampant" and "widespread" click fraud on Google's network of publisher sites. U.S. District Court Judge Beth Labson Freeman in San Jose said in her ruling, issued this week, that the advertiser -- business owner Gurminder Singh -- lacks "standing" to proceed because he did not allege that Google charged him for invalid clicks. Freeman's ruling was without prejudice, meaning that Singh can revise his allegations and bring them again. The dispute dates to 2016, when Singh filed a class-action complaint about alleged click fraud on the Google Display Network -- including Blogger, YouTube and numerous other sites that show pay-per-click ads. Beginning in 2016, he noticed "anomalous click patterns" that were indicative of fraud, he alleged in court papers. advertisement advertisement Singh alleged that he ran "experiments" to determine the extent of click fraud in Google's network. Those experiments, combined with research by others, "revealed rampant, wide-spread invalid and/or fraudulent click activity on advertisements within the AdWords platform," Singh alleged in his court papers. "Across the entirety of AdWords United States user base, these invalid clicks result in billions of dollars in additional profits for Google on an annual basis at the expense of its advertisers," he said in his complaint. Freeman ruled that those allegations were not sufficient to warrant a lawsuit. "Singhs experiments purport to demonstrate that Google does not sift out a vast majority of invalid clicks," she wrote. "These experiments are not scientific." She added that the complaint does not "address whether Singh was personally charged for invalid clicks." Freeman gave Singh until April 23 to revise his allegations and bring them again. Singh isn't the only one suing Google. The company is also facing a suit by an AdWords advertiser who alleges that Google failed to honor a promised discount, and failed to geo-target ads. by Aaron Baar , February 22, 2018 A loyal customer is a repeat customer. No surprise then, that Subway is launching a new loyalty program across North America next month designed to reward repeat customers with purchase credits and perhaps a surprise or two, according to the company. The new Subway MyWay Rewards program is designed to be a customized experience for consumers, says the companys chief digital officer Carissa Ganelli. Customers will be able to enroll in the program through the companys app and website, and earn tokens with every purchase regardless of how they pay. Members will earn 4 tokens for every dollar spent, with 200 tokens translating into $2 of purchase credit. There will be bonus token opportunities and surprises on birthdays as well. We began developing the MyWay Rewards program two years ago, listening to our customers and using their feedback to design the program, Ganelli tells Marketing Daily. But, it is just one part our larger transformation, changing every element of our business from new menu items to the look of our restaurants to the entire customer experience so we can best serve the more than seven million people who visit a Subway each day around the world. advertisement advertisement Subway has had a Rewards loyalty program in place since 2005. While that program only serves about a third of the companys North American stores, the new MyWay program will be much larger, available in more than 28,000 locations in the U.S. and Canada. Subway will begin rolling out the MyWay program with current loyalty members, and will be promoting it in the companys restaurants. The company will also promote the program through a new marketing campaign. The loyalty programs introduction comes on the heels of the chain launching its first campaign from new creative and media agency, The Franchise @ Dentsu Aegis Network. The new Make It What You Want campaign stresses the customizable and affordable nature of the QSR chains menu. by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, February 22, 2018 As expected, the Federal Communications Commission today published the full text of its order repealing the Obama-era net neutrality rules. The move means that the battle over the future of broadband will now move to the courts, Capitol Hill and statehouses throughout the country. Already, advocacy groups, tech companies and other net neutrality proponents are gearing up to fight for restoration of the rules, which prohibited carriers from blocking or throttling traffic and from charging companies higher fees for prioritized delivery. A coalition of 23 attorneys general are proceeding with a lawsuit challenging the repeal, as are Mozilla, Vimeo and consumer advocacy groups. Senator Ed Markey (D-Massachusetts) said Thursday he is pressing forward with a resolution to scrap the FCC's recent move. So far, that effort has garnered the support of 50 senators. advertisement advertisement The FCC voted 3-2 last December to repeal the Obama-era rules, which treated broadband as a common-carrier service. Current FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said those rules were too "heavy handed." But a broad array of net neutrality proponents counter that the rules are necessary to prevent broadband providers from engaging in censorship, and from harming competitors. The FCC's two Democrats are among the most vocal critics of the decision to repeal the rules. "Today it is official: the FCC majority has taken the next step in handing the keys to the internet over to billion-dollar broadband providers," Commissioner Mignon Clyburn stated. "I am both disappointed and hopeful. Disappointed that this is one more anti-consumer notch on this FCCs belt, but hopeful that the arc of history is bent in favor of net neutrality protections." Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel added that the agency "is on the wrong side of history and the wrong side of the law." After the repeal takes effect -- which won't happen for at least two months -- broadband providers will be free to censor sites, slow down competitors and otherwise interfere with people's use of the web. In other words, a carrier like Comcast or Charter will be able to throttle traffic from online video providers like Netflix or Amazon. For now, the major Internet service providers have said they have no plans to block or throttle traffic. But that could change at any time. Carriers will also be able to engage in practices that fall short of blocking and throttling, but nonetheless influence how consumers access services. For instance, carriers will be able to make their own video services more appealing by exempting their own streams from consumers' data caps. (In fact, AT&T has been doing that since 2016, but the Obama-era FCC said the practice violated the net neutrality rules. After current chairman Ajit Pai took over, he gave AT&T the green light to continue.) On Thursday, the American Library Association -- which is among the groups that have long supported net neutrality -- declared that open Internet principles are "essential" to intellectual freedom and democracy. "Without the protection of Net Neutrality, tiered access limits diversity and blocks ideas and opinions," the group writes. "Allowing ISPs to determine which speech receives priority access and which speech can be delayed, or even blocked, based on commercial and financial interests impairs intellectual freedom. This leads inevitably to censorship of voices without economic or political power." by Larissa Faw , February 23, 2018 The Wyoming Office of Tourism (WOT) is launching the third year of its "That's WY" campaign creative with AOR BVK. The creative will incorporate previous messaging and images, as well as new creative that showcases stories of Wyoming, including the Continental Divide Trail in the Medicine Bow National Forest and bullfighter Dusty Tuckness. In addition, WOT has redesigned its website with a focus on content that matches the needs of the traveling public. The $5.2 million paid media investment, up from $4.4 million in 2017, will focus on reaching key target markets of Chicago, Denver, Kansas City, Minneapolis, Portland, Salt Lake City and Seattle, through a mix of TV, radio, print, digital, audio, out-of-home and social media advertising. WOT will supplement this outreach with PR, a dedicated travel trade marketing strategy as well as an international partnership with Brand USA to attract overseas visitors. advertisement advertisement WOT is also arranging cooperative marketing partnership with in-state marketers by offering initiatives such as the sticker campaign first launched in 2013. This initiative encourages travelers to pick up unique stickers at various destinations across the state. Partners are invited to craft these stickers for their specific regions to help showcase their respective assets within Wyoming. "This industry is always changing," stated Darren Rudloff, president of the Wyoming Office of Tourism Board of Directors and Visit Cheyenne. "And for Wyoming to stay competitive, we have to be flexible and adaptable to move along with it as we continue to inspire travelers to choose Wyoming." WOT credits its integrated marketing and promotion efforts, including the multi-year "That's WY" campaign with a 2.4% increase in visitation to the state in 2017. by Sara Guaglione , February 23, 2018 The New York Times Magazine is launching a new creative studio called NYT Magazine Labs, in an effort to apply magazine thinking to new products, according to New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet and NYT Magazine editor-in-chief Jake Silverstein. NYT Magazine Labs will be led by editorial director Caitlin Roper. Roper was previously special projects editor of The New York Times Magazine, the supplement included with the Sunday edition of the Times newspaper. Roper is responsible for new sections and pages in The New York Times, such as the revamped A2-A3, the Kids section, the Annotated Constitution and the Puzzle Spectaculars. NYT Magazine Labs will be dedicated to creating more projects across The New York Times Company, as well as serve as an editorial and design resource, Baquet and Silverstein wrote. advertisement advertisement The monthly Kids section will now be under the jurisdiction of NYT Magazine Labs, as will a number of other print special sections. Roper will work with Deb Bishop, currently the magazines art director for special projects. Bishop will become the art director for NYT Magazine Labs. She is responsible for the section design and art direction of the Kids section. Roper will also collaborate with Marc Lavallee to experiment with new technologies, and with Monica Drake to "respond to new opportunities for special projects throughout the newsroom," the editors added. by Sarah Mahoney @mahoney_sarah, February 23, 2018 The #BoycottNRA movement is a gathering storm. Teachers unions are demanding pension funds sell off gun stocks. Tens of thousands of Gen Z students are piling on the #NoMore protests. It would be easy to think it all adds up to a sea change in the way most Americans view firearms. But the reality is far more complex, and increasingly, marketers are looking at Millennials as a key part of the puzzle. Underneath the increasingly polarizing conversations, new data suggests the issues surrounding guns are far less black-and-white than your noisy Facebook friends suggest. New polls from Quinnipiac University report that 66% of Americans want stricter gun laws, and 67% want a ban on assault weapons, like the one used to kill 17 students recently in Parkland, Fla., the highest percentage since it began polling. Yet Rasmussen reports that while it, too, is finding support for gun-control laws reaching new highs, the majority of Americans 58% dont trust the governments ability to enforce gun laws. advertisement advertisement Meanwhile, Millennials, the most liberal generation on most social issues, are decidedly more measured in their views on guns, and gun marketers are taking notice. Fewer of them own guns than past generations, according to Pew Research, 27%, versus 30% of the U.S. overall, but those that do are more enthusiastic, especially about the assault rifles other generations seem eager to ban. A Pew survey in 2015, for example, reported that 49% of those between 18 and 29 supported an AR ban, compared to 55% of those 30 to 49, 61% of 50 to 64 year olds, and 63% of those who are 65 and older. But Millennials are more likely than other generations to want restrictions on the mentally ill and firearms, and they are the least likely at 19% to support the National Rifle Association. (It probably doesnt help that its CEO has derided them as an uninformed self-absorbed self-minded generation.) Millennials are the new focus of firearms marketing, says Nathan Yates, owner of Forward View Consulting, who follows the gun industry, and he says they are especially keen to buy assault rifles. While their parents and grandparents often prefer traditional firearms, millennials (especially men) have become assault rifle buyers. Look for firearms marketing to focus on target shooting over hunting. New markets are important for gun sellers, as gun ownership continues to fall and hunting continues its long decline. While millennials arent especially interested in hunting, theyve adopted target shooting readily. Ammunition manufacturers love target shooting because a day of hunting deer will involve one to two shots at best, Yates tells Marketing Daily. A day at the range can involve shooting 500 rounds. He says Ruger and Smith & Wesson continue to be the top gun brands in the U.S. and doesnt think the recent bankruptcy of Remington will have much impact. Remington has become an afterthought now. Smith & Wesson, Ruger and Savage will likely benefit from the bankruptcy just a little. Brands that focus on modern sporting rifles [assault weapons] are most vulnerable. Nor does he believe the current outcry surrounding the Parkland shootings will change the pervasive sales pattern established in the last election: Mass shootings trigger a quick spike in gun sales, which quickly subside to low levels. With Trump in office, theres less fear of gun control legislation passing, he says. While this Trump Slump in guns has an impact on retail brands, including Cabelas and Dicks, as well as gun companies themselves, experts are bullish on the long-term health of the sector. Wedbush, for example, currently rates American Outdoor Brands, which owns Smith & Wesson, as an outperform. Despite difficult comparisons as the industry shifts from the Obama era, with its high gun sales, to the Trump era, we continue to be encouraged by strong underlying trends in concealed carry, which helps generate sold growth for the industry, it writes in a recent report. Additionally, a Republican-controlled government is a positive for the long-term viability of the industry, and specifically the modern sporting rifle segment. And while Americans own fewer guns overall, those that already do will continue to buy them, albeit at a slower pace than in the Obama era. No gun enthusiast will ever have enough guns, says Yates, just as no avid reader will ever have enough books. Meanwhile, more than a dozen companies have terminated co-branding partnerships with the NRA. About Medindia Medindia is a leading online provider of health information, applications and services for consumers, doctors, healthcare professionals globally. Medindia, currently ranks #1 in India / South Asia in terms of traffic in the health category and among the top health sites in the world. Medindia's content is viewed by over 2 million visitors each month from over 230 countries. Medindia offers almost 1 million pages of trusted health and wellness information including news, special reports, articles, animations, slides, infographics, videos, health directories, drug information, calculators, personalized health record, mobile apps, interactive tools, applications and much more. All of Medindia's content is edited and authenticated by doctors and healthcare professionals. It is certified to comply with the HONCode standard for trustworthy health information. This site complies with the HONcode standard for trustworthy health information: verify here Mission Medindia's mission is to empower consumers, doctors and healthcare professionals globally with authentic, accurate, timely and personalized health information and provide them tools to allow for better management of health, provide better care to patients, and lead healthier lives. Our Story Medindia has been a pioneer in many ways and was one of the earliest health websites to be launched from India. 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For more details including opt-out requests, access requests or complaints, please review their privacy policy or contact their data protection officer via privacy@exponential.com If you have comments or questions about our privacy policy, you can complete a User Feedback Form, send an email to info@medindia.net or write to us at the following address:Medindia4u.com Pvt. Ltd.A-113, 3rd Avenue,Anna Nagar,Chennai-600102, IndiaPhone : +91-44-42612731 / +91 97911 73039 Last updated on: May 12, 2016 Daniel Craig still has one Bond film up his sleeve but people are already betting on the next probable bond! Daniel's exit from the Bond franchise will leave a subtle hint of disappointment all around but we're hopeful the next Bond will do deserving justice to the role and why shouldn't he? It's the most reactionary and overrated role in British cinema, ever! I've taken into consideration the most suited contenders who could be a part of the franchise after Craig and I am betting my money and hopes on them! You can certainly agree to disagree with me! Cillian Murphy BBC Worldwide His odds to become the next Bond were quite high a while ago but they've been slashed tremendously after his recent series 'Peaky Blinders' started doing well, where he plays Tommy Shelby. Why: We can totally see Murphy giving the Bond character a fresh and an exciting take. With the beautiful blue eyed charm and chiselled cheek bones, his character as Tommy Shelby is quite similar to that of James Bond in many ways, being a ladies' man, with an air of mystery around him. Personally I wish it's him! Tom Hardy Lionsgate But of course! He's inarguably one of the most talented actors around right now (seen Locke?) but he isn't sure yet if he'd want to take up the role. But there's no harm in assuming he could! Why: If you look at him carefully, I believe he physically resembles Fleming's Bond, with his natural build and a dangerous edge! And moreover so, he did play a Bond like character in Nolan's 'Inception', so we already know how awesome his idea of Bond is going to be. Unfortunately though Hardy fuelled a debate recently by saying "There's a saying amongst us in the fraternity of acting... that if you talk about it (Bond rumours) you're automatically out of the race. So I can't possibly comment on that one! . Seems like Bond wants Hardy more than Hardy wants Bond! Michael Fassbender 20th Century Fox Remember Magneto from the latest X-Men Franchise? A typical Hollywood heavyweight, Fassbender can make for the perfect English spy. But he's sceptical about taking up the franchise too and has already said no! (is it because he's half German?) That doesn't stop me from listing him here anyway! Why: For one, definitely revisit 'Inglorious Basterds' where he plays Lieutenant Archie Hicox , a model British soldier who respects the chain of command and you'll see what I mean. He's always the wise quaint, intellectual man, who can kill you with his thumb! Exactly how Bond is envisioned! At 39, he's an actor at the height of his powers! Idris Elba Pinterest A very popular choice with critics and fans alike, Elba has been a star contender for playing the next Bond. Why: What's there to ask? Tall, handsome, charismatic and suave, he has all that it takes to become the next Bond. We've already seen how tough he is playing John Luther, in the British crime drama series 'Luther' and I believe he checks all the boxes! Apart from all that, his casting would be historic of course but Elba feels there should be less emphasis laid on him playing a 'black Bond' and more emphasis on a natural Bond, who happens to be black! The only problem, though, he's 43 (four years younger than Craig) and ideally, Bond should last at least a decade! Damien Lewis Twitter After a 'black Bond' are you ready for 'ginger hair Bond?' Also, how cool was Band of Brothers? I absolutely dug the series! (it also earned him a Golden Globe nomination BTW!) Why: A very smooth performer, Lewis will be a whiff of fresh air, after Craig's very blunt character. His work in 'Homeland' was exceptional and with the calibre of adorning a hard working role always, he's going to do full justice to Bond. He's 45, which means, he may never be seen as Bond! But he's definitely one of my favourites on the Bond wish list! Hugh Jackman Twitter I will definitely pay big monies to see Jackman as Bond! My personal favourite, I wish for him to break out of 'Wolverine' and sip some dry Vodka Martini - Shaken, not stirred, on screen. Why: A fine actor, a definitive 'manly-man' and that attitude he carries forth with his roles-he'd make the perfect Bond! Alas, he turned the role down even before Craig was considered to play Bond! Why Hugh why! James Norton Youtube TV Star Norton's career skyrocketed with 'Happy Valley', 'War and Peace' and 'Grantchester'. I am sure, playing Bond is totally his kinda thing. Why: I am quite certain Norton can slip into Bond's character easily with his boyish charms and suave personality to match 007. Young, well educated, attractive and smart AND a rising good actor, what's there not to consider? Except maybe, his transition from a TV actor to James Bond might take time and people probably will not recognise him as Bond immediately. So that's my list of men I believe can and should make the next Bond! They have everything that's needed and more. Definitely tell me if you have some more contenders you'd like to list out, in the comment section below. The story of how erectile dysfunction (ED) has been assessed and treated through the ages makes for a fascinating read. Formerly known as impotence, a word that comes from the Latin impotencia meaning lack of power, ED was for long ascribed to supernatural or psychological origins.1 Some ancient Indian and other cultures believed that ED could be treated with interesting natural remedies such as sesame powder, pulses, rice, salt, sugarcane, animal fat, butter and some other unmentionable ingredients!1 An ancient Arabic remedy suggested that topical treatment with jasmine and asafoetida (hing) could help.1 Today, thankfully, we know more about the causes of this condition and have treatments to address it and now we would like to dispel any stigma still associated with it. Scientific studies have clearly shown that ED is not just in the head and most cases have an underlying organic cause that can be cured with the help of modern medicines and medical devices. But no cure is possible unless men and women are willing to admit the problem and not be embarrassed about asking for help. Thinkstock/Getty Images Causes: The Ds and Es of ED ED, defined as difficulty in getting an erection, maintaining an erection or experiencing reduced sexual desire (loss of libido),2 is often the cause of much grief and anxiety in the bedroom. Healthy sexual performance involves the organs, blood vessels, nerves, muscles, chemicals and emotions,2 so naturally, many factors can contribute to the development of ED, such as:2,3 Diseases or medical conditions: type 2 diabetes, heart disease, chronic kidney disease, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, obesity and injury to the urinary system, spinal cord or penis Drugs: antidepressants, antiandrogens, appetite suppressants, sedatives and hypertension medication Emotional/psychological reasons: stress, anxiety, depression and even guilt or anxiety related to sexual performance Everyday habits: smoking, drinking, drug use, lack of physical activity Age has a role to play as well. The older a man is, the higher the likelihood of developing ED. However, aging does not cause ED and it can be treated, regardless of age.3 Here are some treatment options: Drugs Thinkstock/Getty Images Oral Medications: ED is often treated with drugs (e.g. sildenafil, tadalafil, vardenafil and avanafil) that relax the smooth muscles found in many of body organs, including the penis, to increase blood flow in response to sexual stimuli. However, these medications cannot be taken if a person is taking medicines such as nitrates because it may cause a sudden drop in blood pressure.4,5 In some cases, a doctor may prescribe testosterone. Self-injections: Doctors sometimes prescribe a medication (alprostadil) that men are required to inject at the base of the penis. This increases blood flow causing an automatic erection that lasts for under an hour. There is minimal pain because the injection uses a fine needle.4,5 Suppositories: Here, with the help of a plastic applicator, a small drug (alprostadil) containing pellet that is as big as half a grain of rice, is inserted into the urethra (opening at the end of the penis). The drug dissolves and helps to increase blood flow causing an erection in 10 minutes, which lasts for half an hour to an hour.4-6 Devices Pumps or vacuum devices: A vacuum erection device consists of a plastic tube to be placed over the penis. An attached pump removes the air to create a vacuum which pulls the blood into the organ creating an erection. A band is then placed at the base of the penis to maintain the erection for about 30 minutes. This method takes some getting used to because of some painless bruising, purple colouration and cold sensation but these usually do not cause any long-term trouble.4,5 Implants: This is a medical device that a doctor implants in the penis. The man can activate this whenever needed to achieve an erection and can choose when to return to normal.4,5 If you have noticed any symptoms of ED, do not be afraid or embarrassed to talk to your doctor about it. In my practice, I have often seen patients develop ED because of diabetes or hypertension. Remember, this condition could just be a signal from your body telling you that something is wrong perhaps your blood pressure or blood sugar levels are higher than they should be. And there is a solution for everyone. Talk to your doctor about it so that you can together select the best course of treatment and also treat the underlying cause of the condition. Sources: 1. Shah J. BJU Int. 2002 Sep;90(4):433-41. 2. Mayo Clinic. Erectile Dysfunction Symptoms and causes. June 2017. http://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/erectile-dysfunction/symptoms-causes/dxc-20314091 3. National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases. Symptoms & Causes of Erectile Dysfunction. July 2017. https://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/urologic-diseases/erectile-dysfunction/symptoms-causes 4. Mayo Clinic. Erectile Dysfunction Treatment. June 2017. http://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/erectile-dysfunction/diagnosis-treatment/treatment/txc-20314103 5. National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases. Treatment for Erectile Dysfunction. July 2017. https://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/urologic-diseases/erectile-dysfunction/treatment 6. WebMD Medical Reference. How Does Alprostadil Treat Erectile Dysfunction? October 2015. http://www.webmd.com/erectile-dysfunction/guide/alprostadil-treat-ed#2 Author Bio- Dr. Ajit Saxena, Senior Consultant for Robotic Surgery, Urology, & Andrology, Indraprastha Apollo Hospital, Delhi. He is specialized in treating prostate disease using a bloodless technique (Vapour resection) and also in treating impotence. He is a recipient of the 1996-97 International Japanese Organization 'OISCA' for his unique contribution in the realm of surgery, particularly in the domain of Urology. He is also the Founder President of Andrology India and currently President of Delhi Andrology Society. SEBEWAING There will be a new police chief in Sebewaing starting July 1. The village council, this week, approved replacing Police Chief Bill Owens, 63, with Officer Branden Gettel, 39. Owens employment contract with the village ends March 31. After that, he will continue as an at-will employee until June 30. During that time, I will be teaching him the duties of being a police chief, said Owens, noting it involves a lot of paperwork and administrative duties. Owens, who has 44 years of police experience, started with the Sebewaing Police Department in June 2000. He worked his way up the ranks to take over as chief from Dick Neumann, who retired. Before that, he worked for the Tuscola County Sheriffs Office and Unionville Police Department. Chief Owens has been a great mentor, and his years of experience have been a wonderful asset, said Gettel, who graduated from Unionville-Sebewaing Area Schools in 1997. After that, he attended Northwestern Michigan College, and earned his criminal justice degree at Delta College. Gettel credits his college instructor, Al Hart, for sparking his interest in going into law enforcement. I took his class and that is when I made up my mind what my career would be, said Gettel. And an extensive career it has been. Over the years, he has worked part time for the police departments in Ubly, Elkton and Cass City, as well as the sheriff's office. He started at the Sebewaing Police Department in 2003. He also works part time for the United States Marshal Service, and is an instructor at the Delta Police Academy. I really enjoy being an instructor, he said. As chief, Gettel will receive $24 an hour, benefits, and a $1 annual raise for three years starting in July 2019. Im looking forward to serving the community I grew up in. Its an honor, said Gettel, who has also served as a firefighter for 12 years. Trustee Brandi Slocum, who serves on the police committee and was the only no vote on the council on changing police chiefs, previously said reducing the number of full-time police officers was a financial decision. Between funding the department, wages and the Municipal Employees' Retirement System, the police department budget is about $320,000. That is about half of the villages operating budget. In July, the police department will run with Gettel as chief, full-time officer Chris Eisengruber and part-time officers. In other police matters, the Sebewaing Chamber of Commerce donated $1,000 to the police department for a $2,000 bullet-proof vest. In other business, the council: Approved a special use permit for a dog-grooming business to operate out of a residence at 310 Tenth St. There will be a finance committee budget meeting at 7 p.m. Feb. 26. MIDDLETOWN The man who police said drove his car into the Middlesex Hospital emergency room and set himself on fire Thursday morning livestreamed the incident on Facebook. Steven Ellam, 27, of Milardo Lane, Middletown, was airlifted to the Bridgeport Hospital burn unit after the 10 a.m. crash, officials said. His was listed in critical condition at the hospital on Friday afternoon. In the 21/2-minute video, Ellam spoke in a flat voice, referred to himself several times as Jesus Christ and appeared to address the president while driving along Crescent Street. Donald Trump, where are ya? My name is Jesus Christ. Im in Middletown, Connecticut. Ive come to expose you as the Antichrist protecting the Illuminati. The 1 percent. At first, the camera faced the dashboard, with a view of the street, then Ellam turned it on himself, and filmed himself driving down Crescent Street, with the hospital on his right. The 1 percent have been trying to brainwash me to protect the police for I dont even know how long. I know that you are their protector, Ellam said. Im going to attack one of your headquarters right now Middlesex Hospital. Ellam again turned the camera toward the front of the silver Chevrolet sedan. After he hit the building, he screamed Jesus Christ several times. The camera captures the flames in the car as he yelled Save me! The vehicle smashed through the emergency room doors and entered the vestibule, where it came to a rest. It did not reach the hospital interior. During a conference Thursday, the mayor said Ellam purposely crashed into the facility, where 30 people and 20 staff were at the time. It was intentional, but we are not going to speculate as to why, Mayor Dan Drew said. Based on eyewitness statements, we believe he then set himself on fire. ... At this time, we believe this is an isolated incident. No one else was hurt. Ellam had gas cans with flammable liquid inside the sedan, and the vehicle caught fire after it collided with the building, witnesses said. In November 2016, Ellam was convicted of first-degree strangulation after a June 2013 incident in which he violently attacked a woman on High Street and punched her repeatedly. Police at the time said he placed two garbage bags over the womans head in an attempt to strangle her. The current investigation is ongoing alongside state and federal agenciess probes, but Middletown police said Friday afternoon that they had no new details to report. We are interviewing witnesses today and following up on any leads, Lt. Heather Desmond said Friday afternoon. As this investigation progresses, we remain confident that Ellam acted alone and that there is no threat to the public at this time. Police asked anyone who may have information regarding Ellam or the incident to contact the Middletown Police Department at 860-638-4000. This unusual incident quickly became manageable because of the quick response of hospital staff, random citizens who called 911, the actions of police and fire personnel and the quick response from the outside agencies, Police Chief William McKenna said in a release Friday afternoon. Because of the combined efforts of all of those involved, we were able to limit the damage and threat to innocent lives. Critical incident management procedures were successfully executed and exceeded expectations, McKenna said. The lives of doctors, nurses, patients, staff and visitors of the hospital were affected and the healing process may take some time, the chief said. Hospitals, clinics and other medical facilities stepped up and provided a remarkable service when it was in need. Events as this one can cause major disruption, yet it can also bring out the best in those who rarely receive the credit they deserve. The sheriff deputy was armed and in uniform, standing outside the Florida school where a gunman was methodically killing students, authorities said Thursday night. And yet he did nothing. In the hours since authorities described the deputy's response, he has been vilified by his own department, the community and the president. The deputy, Scot Peterson, "clearly" knew there was a shooter inside, Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel said at a news conference, something that Israel said made him "sick to my stomach." President Donald Trump called Peterson a coward. "When it came time to get in there or do something, he didn't have the courage," Trump told reporters Friday morning. The 54-year-old deputy, a resource officer at the school since 2009, has resigned. Peterson had served with the Broward County Sheriff's Office since 1985, and was considered a trusted and exemplary deputy, according to performance reviews reported by the South Florida Sun Sentinel. What could have been going though his mind that stopped him from going in? And what usually happens afterward to a first responder who fails to respond? Most people are familiar with the classic psychological responses to threat: fight or flight. These evolutionary responses are found throughout the animal world. "What police are called on to do is not natural," said Ellen Kirschman, a clinical psychologist who has worked with police departments across the country for more than 30 years. "Instead of running away from danger, they run toward it." But police psychologists often encounter a third path: a freezing response. No one except Peterson knows exactly what happened, Kirschman said, but she has worked with officers in the past with similar experiences. One officer she counseled had been involved in a shooting incident. On his first night back on patrol, he encountered almost the same situation. "He got these suspects out of their car and onto the ground, but once he pointed his weapon at them, he could no longer move," she said. "When other officers arrived, they could barely pry his fingers off the gun." When our brains perceive danger, adrenaline floods our body. The amygdala, a part of the brain in charge of emotional responses, becomes more active and can overrule the prefrontal cortex, which is in charge of nuanced cognitive functions like complex decision-making. Our senses can become distorted. Many officers describe experiencing tunnel vision or tunnel hearing, where they become entirely focused on something like a suspect's gun or voice. Their sense of time becomes similarly distorted. "You are not processing things like you normally would," Kirschman said. For some animals, such as deer or opossums, the freeze response immobilizes them so a motion-sensitive predator will not see them or will lose interest. Police officers do undergo extensive training to help them overcome instinctive responses to a crisis. "You see this for soldiers, firefighters, pilots. The training serves as a kind of stress inoculation. It puts you in that exact scenario so you see this is how your body responds and this is how you fight through that and overcome it," said Steve Albrecht, who was a San Diego police officer for 15 years and author of several police tactic books. Pilots, for example, are put into flight simulations in which their plane is crashing. Firefighters practice regularly how to run into burning structures. For police, the training often begins from the moment they become an academy cadet. And among crisis scenarios, an active shooter is perhaps the most dangerous and difficult. "When you walk into an active shooter, this is what you're thinking, 'either he's going to kill me. I'm going to have to kill him or he's going to kill himself in front of me,'" Albrecht said. The problem, he said, is that for many police officers, that training often doesn't continue on regular basis. "With the budget realities most departments are facing these days, officers like him may only get hands-on training once a year, if even that. That's not enough. The instincts wear off. Without that repetition, the imprinting of responses to your body and mind, it can't take place." It's easy for officers to lose focus if they rarely encounter danger. "If yesterday the school was completely boring, and the day before that and the one before that, when that suddenly changes it's stunning to you," Albrecht said. "Officers need to engage in tactical daydreaming every once in a while. Walking through scenarios about how bad things could get and steps you would take to respond to that. I'm guessing this guy didn't do any of that stuff." "On the one hand, feel bad for him; on other hand, if you can't engage with danger of the situation, you should quit and sell shoes," Albrecht said. "This is why we have police." With all the public scrutiny and vilification of the deputy at the school, several police psychologists expressed worry about his mental well-being. "I would not want to be in that man's shoes," said Kirschman, the police psychologist. "The guilt and self-blame he must be feeling, let alone what's being heaped on him from the outside. After something like this happens, I've seen officers torment themselves sometimes to the point of suicide." Kirschman said she is especially concerned because Peterson has resigned. "I don't know what kind of support or counseling he'll get since he resigned. I don't know what happens to his medical benefits," she said. "He needs counseling with someone who knows police work. His family will need support." Officers involved in controversial shootings often experience a sense of betrayal, she said. "The betrayal makes the experience much harder. You feel betrayed by the community you risked your life to protect. Betrayed by your own friends in the department. Betrayed by the administration that's throwing you under the bus," Kirschman said. "The funny thing about police departments is that when you're recruited, police are told, 'We have your back.' The family in blue and all that. But in high-attention situations like this, you see departments quickly turn against their own officers when they need support most." Because of the mental vulnerability of police after shootings, many departments routinely send officers for a psychological exam. "It's like a checkup to make sure they're OK," said Laurence Miller, a clinical psychologist who works with the West Palm Beach Police Department and Palm Beach County Sheriff's office. Initially, many have trouble sleeping. The adrenaline fades and their bodies crash, he said. Some find themselves mulling over the incident over and over in their minds. "It's tough because when the second-guessing from others begins, it's usually that you overreacted or underreacted. And there's very little area in between," Miller. Miller sees the deputy's freezing reaction as one clear reason against a proposal, now being pushed by the president and the National Rifle Association, to arm teachers across the country. "This is a problem we see among trained law enforcement professionals. What's impressive is that most of the time they don't freeze. They're able with training to do their best in a situation," said Miller, who is regularly brought in to counsel officers after shootings. "Now imagine putting teachers in that same position. It's a recipe for disaster. It's not just a question of them freezing or not, but who becomes liable when teachers react poorly and end up killing a student?" --- Video Embed Code Video: President Trump on Feb. 23 called the inaction of the armed school resource officer assigned to protect students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School "a shame."(The Washington Post) Embed code: Video: Current and former students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., comment on the school resource officer who stayed outside during the Feb. 14 shooting.(Alice Li,Whitney Shefte/The Washington Post) Embed code: KABUL, Afghanistan -- A new Army unit created specifically to advise and assist conventional foreign military forces has begun deploying to Afghanistan. The 1st Security Forces Assistance Brigade -- whose members will be dispersed at outposts throughout the country and be closer to the front lines of the war than most U.S. troops have been in years -- is a key component of the Trump administration's strategy for ending a stalemate with the Taliban. Instead of advising high-ranking Afghan commanders, as is done now, the new brigade will work with battalion-level personnel. U.S. military officials in Afghanistan have often cited this as a vital, missing component of their advising efforts. The 1st SFAB's leadership has arrived in Kabul, according to a post Wednesday on the unit's Facebook page, and was welcomed by Gen. John Nicholson, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan. More than 800 members of the brigade will arrive over the coming weeks in preparation for the spring fighting season, which generally begins in early April. The brigade will participate in NATO's Resolute Support mission, which is focused on training, advising and assisting Afghan forces, and is separate from the U.S. counterterrorism mission in the country. Historically, conventional Army units have been used in an ad hoc fashion to advise and assist forces in Afghanistan and other theaters. The new SFABs, trained specifically for combat advising, are intended to make advisory more effective and efficient. From World War II to Vietnam and Korea, the Army has carried out advise-and-assist missions to help allies strengthen their forces. But with the current advising mission lasting longer, the Army has brought in the new, dedicated units. The 1st SFAB, based at Fort Benning, Ga., and under the command of Col. Scott Jackson, is one of six planned SFAB brigades of roughly 1,000 soldiers each, which will be deployed worldwide. The White House plans to increase the number of American troops in Afghanistan from 11,000 last summer to around 15,000 by spring. After the new strategy was announced in August, the SFAB's training was cut short significantly so that the unit would be able to deploy by spring, the New York Times reported. The move prompted questions as to whether the new brigade would be sufficiently prepared for the task. The 1st SFAB is comprised of volunteers from across the Army, primarily non-commissioned and commissioned officers from regular units, who trained at the Military Adviser Training Academy in Fort Benning. The unit was stood up in October. Earlier this month, the brigade's colors were unveiled for the first time during an activation ceremony at the National Infantry Museum. What Is ISIS-K? Two Experts on the Group Behind the Kabul Airport Attack and its Rivalry with the Taliban By 2018, the group had become one of the top four deadliest terrorist organizations in the world. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis' recommendations to President Donald Trump on the policy for transgender individuals in the military reportedly call for allowing them to continue to serve. Despite Trump's proposed ban on the recruitment and continued service of transgender individuals, the Washington Post, citing two U.S. officials, reported that Mattis has recommended continuing to take in transgender recruits and allowing those already in the ranks to remain on duty. At a Pentagon briefing Thursday, Dana White, Mattis' top spokesperson, declined to discuss specifics of Mattis' recommendations but said they were based on his overall vision for improving the "lethality" of the force. "This is a complex issue, and the Secretary is taking his time to consider the information he's been given," White said. "It's an important issue, and again, he sees all of his decisions through the lens of lethality." She said that Mattis "will provide his recommendations to the president this week and the president will announce his decision" on how to proceed. Mattis was under a Tuesday deadline to send to the White House his recommendations, based on a review by a panel of experts, but White and other Pentagon spokesmen said Mattis' report had yet to leave the building and would probably be forwarded on Friday. At that time, it will be up to the White House whether to discuss or release the recommendations which have taken center stage in the military since Trump caught the Pentagon by surprise last July by sending out a series of Tweets calling for the ban. Trump said in the Tweets that he wanted the future policy to be that the U.S. "will not accept or allow transgender individuals to serve in any capacity in the U.S. military." In August, he directed Mattis to review the policy and report back to him by Feb. 21. Trump said he decided on a ban "after consultation with my Generals and military experts," citing the "tremendous medical costs and disruption" he believed that retaining transgender individuals would involve. However, Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Joseph Dunford appeared to have been blindsided by Trump's call for a ban. He quickly issued a directive to the service chiefs telling them to stay with the 2016 policy ordered by former President Barack Obama, which allowed transgender individuals to serve openly, until he had further guidance. Trump then ordered Mattis to conduct the review. It was unclear what would happen if Trump rejected Mattis' reported recommendation and continued to press for a ban. Trump's initial proposals triggered a series of lawsuits by advocacy groups and four federal district courts have now ruled that a ban would be unconstitutional. The courts also ordered that the recruitment of transgender individuals should resume on Jan. 1 and the military has complied. -- Richard Sisk can be reached at Richard.Sisk@Military.com. The Pentagon sought Thursday to keep Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and the military out of the roiling debate on gun control in the wake of the Feb. 14 Florida high school shootings. "Our mission is to defend this nation and all our citizens. I think you have to remember the tragic events in Florida and gun control are issues for political leaders. It's really their responsibility to move forward" on the question of stricter gun controls, said Dana White, the Pentagon's chief spokesperson. When asked if Mattis thought there should be a ban on the AR-15 rifle, the weapon used in the Florida shootings, White said "I have not asked him that question." White also sidestepped questions on proposals mentioned by President Donald Trump and the National Rifle Association to have teachers who served in the military, or retired service members, carry concealed weapons to protect schools. "Currently we have not been given any task with respect to that," White said, but "we are absolutely open to those conversations." In a Tweet Thursday, Trump said "I will be strongly pushing Comprehensive Background Checks with an emphasis on Mental Health. Raise age to 21 {for gun sales} and end sale of Bump Stocks! Congress is in a mood to finally do something on this issue -- I hope!" The Army has already played a role following the tragedy at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., by honoring three Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps cadets who were among the 17 students and faculty allegedly killed by 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz, who reportedly was also a former JROTC member. The three cadets -- Peter Yang, 15, and Alaina Petty and Martin Duque Anguiano, both 14 -- were posthumously awarded the Medal of Heroism, the highest award given to Army JROTC cadets. Peter Yang, who police said held a door open to allow other students to escape before being fatally wounded, had dreamed of going to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, and last week West Point posthumously admitted him to the class of 2025. "It was an appropriate way for USMA to honor this brave young man," West Point officials said in a statement. "West Point has given posthumous offers of admissions in very rare instances for those candidates or potential candidates whose actions exemplified the tenets of duty, honor and country." -- Richard Sisk can be reached at Richard.Sisk@Military.com. ORLANDO -- Russia's Su-57 stealth fighter, like China's Chengdu J-20, has become a bogeyman to the United States in the competition to possess the best fifth-generation fighters in the world. But has the Su-57 made its debut in Syria? The Pentagon, won't confirm it. "The addition of fifth-generation fighters into Syria would certainly not be in keeping with Russia's announced force drawdown," said Eric Pahon, Defense Department spokesman. "We do not consider these jets to be a threat to our operations in Syria, and will continue to deconflict operations as necessary," Pahon said in a statement Thursday. "The coalition remains focused on the enduring defeat" of the Islamic State, he added. "We call on all parties, however, to remain focused on defeating ISIS, de-escalating and resolving the Syrian conflict, and protecting innocent civilians." Related content: On Wednesday, videos of two Su-57s began circulating on social media, showing the jets landing at Khmeimim air base in Western Syria. The Sukhoi-made jet, known also as the T-50 or PAK-FA, is a single-seat, twin-engine multirole fighter intended to go up against the Air Force's F-22 Raptor and F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. Russia has been swift to procure and test the fifth-generation-like aircraft in light of the F-35's initial operating capability, which it achieved in 2016. Russia's new Sukhoi lies "somewhere between the F-22 and F-35," according to Doug Barrie, senior air analyst at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. Barrie told Air Force Times in 2016 that even though the T-50 has the sophisticated agility of a future fighter, it will not be as advanced as the most capable U.S. platforms. On Thursday, Gen Mike Holmes, Air Combat Command commander, said he was unaware of reports surrounding the Su-57 in Syria, but added the situation in Syria grows more complex by the day. "It's one thing to do the counter-air mission with a long lookout in front of you, it's different to do when everyone's tightly packed in there," Holmes said during a roundtable discussion with reporters here at the Air Force Association's Air Warfare symposium. "So our guys will continue to prep for the scenarios that they're deployed to face," Holmes said. When asked whether it was concerning to have another stealth aircraft in the mix, Holmes emphasized the tough environment and constricted air space in the region. "Certainly, the higher the complexity and the higher the technology ... it raises the level of complexity for the crews to deal with," the commander said. Russia first deployed forces and aircraft to Syria in 2015, changing the dynamic as U.S. and coalition troops began their air campaign against the Islamic State a year earlier. Russian President Vladimir Putin said a withdrawal of their bulk of troops would begin in 2017. It's not surprising the Russian air force may want to step up its tactics and procedures in a war environment. Last month, the Air Force's deputy chief of staff for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance said that the Russian air force has been focusing on intently watching how fourth- and fifth-generation aircraft perform within the Syrian airspace. "In the skies over Syria, it's really just been a treasure trove for [the Russians] to see how we operate," Lt. Gen. VeraLinn "Dash" Jamieson told congressional staffers and reporters during an Air Force Association briefing in Washington, D.C. "Our adversaries are watching us, they're learning from us," she said at the time. That same month two F-22 fighters intercepted two Russian Su-25 fighter jets, conducting multiple maneuvers, firing warning flares and, in one instance, aggressively flying to avoid colliding with one another. A Russian Su-35 multi-role fighter was also involved. An F-22 ended up trailing the Su-35 after it flew across the river into territory deemed unsafe to coalition aircraft. -- Oriana Pawlyk can be reached at oriana.pawlyk@military.com. Follow her on Twitter at @oriana0214. ORLANDO -- The Air Force is determining how best to move forward with the Defense Department's new hazing and misconduct policy, aiming to follow guidelines while still keeping some traditions associated with the practice of "tacking-on" rank or insignia during promotion ceremonies, the top enlisted leader of the Air Force said Thursday. The policy, released earlier this month, includes a definition of hazing that explicitly encompasses "pinning" or "tacking-on" during promotions. "We want to be able to provide our senior leaders out in the field the right guidance on what they should do in lieu of these promotion ceremonies, which we have every month," said Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force Kaleth O. Wright. Wright sat down with Military.com during the Air Force Association's Air Warfare Symposium here. Wright said he knows there will be pushback from airmen on "the cultural birthright" to pin on new stripes, and while the Air Force-specific policy is still being crafted, the message is "clear cut." Related content: "We need to make sure that we really understand the department's intent exactly," he said. But "I don't think [the Air Force] will straddle the middle" between the guidance and the pin-on practice. While the term "pinning" or "tacking-on" may evoke the infamous tradition of pounding new rank into an airman's chest hard enough to break the skin, the term also encompasses less extreme physical actions, such as an "atta-boy" nudge or other physical gestures of congratulation. In unofficial capacities, however, more dramatic hazing and abusive behavior may still persist. "We'll be in line with the DoD policy, again, we just have to figure out what it means, and exactly what we want to articulate to commanders in the field," Wright said. He said the guidance language is there for a reason. "I hate to say and believe tacking and pinning ceremonies that we do in the Air Force were collateral damage, but this was probably aimed at some of the tacking and pinning and hazing that's done, not just in a formal promotion ceremony in front of a crowd of people, but ... in Special Operations or some other career field, some other specialty where you've achieved something significant and go through some ritual to culminate that process," Wright said. Tolerance of hazing has never been the Air Force's message, he said. Leaders have tried to tackle various ceremonial issues that, for one reason or another, have gotten out of hand. "I've worked for commanders who've decided, 'Hey this is too much, so let's stop doing that,' " Wright said, without specifying any incidents. Whatever comes next for airmen, he said it's always been about achieving a milestone in their careers. "Airmen get excited for a day or two, then they move on, and realize that, 'Man, I'm just thankful to get promoted, my family was able to be there, so if I don't get the biggest guy in the world to knock me off the stage, then no problem,' " he said. The Pentagon on Feb. 8 put forth a new policy -- DoD Instruction 1020.03 Harassment Prevention And Response in the Armed Forces -- aimed to deter misconduct and harassment among service members. The policy reaffirmed the Defense Department does not tolerate any kind of harassment by any service member, either in person or online. The guidance went into effect immediately, outlining the department's definitions of what is considered harassment. However, each service -- Army, Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps -- is in charge of planning its implementation, outlining steps and milestones in order to comply with the instruction, which supersedes any past anti-harassment policies. Among activities that specifically define hazing are oral or written berating for the purposes of humiliation, "any form of initiation or congratulatory act" that includes striking or threatening to strike someone; encouraging someone to engage in "illegal, harmful, demeaning, or dangerous" activities; breaking the skin, as with rank insignia or badges in "pinning" rituals; branding, tattooing, shaving or painting someone; and forcing someone to consume food, water, or any other substance. "Service members may be responsible for an act of hazing even if there was actual or implied consent from the victim and regardless of the grade or rank, status, or service of the victim" in either official or unofficial functions or settings, the policy continues. Upon the policy's debut, some airmen and Air Force veterans took to the popular Facebook group Air Force Amn/nco/snco to criticize the policy's ban on the "tacking-on" tradition. "It's an honor to be tacked on!" wrote one former airman. "This is why we should halt all Wing level promotion ceremonies and give the role back to the squadron to address promotions how they see fit for morale and unit bonding," wrote another. Others questioned what other policies will erode practices over time. "What little heritage and traditions we had ... they're gone now ... no wonder the morale is at an all time low," wrote a retired airman. Wright did not specify when the Air Force plans to present its own guidelines. "We will have to convene, next time I sit down with the boss [Chief of Staff Gen. David Goldfein] ... [to determine] where we want to go," he said Thursday. Additionally, the Pentagon will receive a first-of-its kind report on hazing in the ranks, tracking data and victim reports in order to better standardize reporting information and case collection. Services need to meet that report deadline by Dec. 1. -- Oriana Pawlyk can be reached at oriana.pawlyk@military.com. Follow her on Twitter at @oriana0214. ORLANDO -- Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Goldfein was frank with airmen when he announced he has not only been battling fatigue after a recent trip to the Pacific, but also a diagnosis of Bell's palsy. "Chief, what's the crooked face, and the weird speech?" Goldfein quoted airmen during his speech here at the Air Force Association's Air Warfare Symposium. He said he woke up Feb. 17 with the condition, which is paralysis of one side of the face resulting from nerve trauma. It's temporary and medically treatable. "I'm on the mend, and it only hurts you when I laugh," he said, adding that Gen. Curtis LeMay also had Bell's palsy while he was the Air Force chief of staff. LeMay hid his problem by smoking cigars on the left side of his mouth. Goldfein brought a cigar with him, and projected a photo of himself with a cigar, making the audience erupt in laughter. He said he wants to be up-front with airmen so his message about the future of the force could be heard regardless of his temporary facial paralysis. -- Oriana Pawlyk can be reached at oriana.pawlyk@military.com. Follow her on Twitter at @oriana.pawlyk. Army Identifies Sergeant Who Died While Deployed Supporting ISIS Fight The Army has identified a service member who died while serving in support of the fight against ISIS in Iraq and Syria as Sgt. Christina Marie Schoenecker, a Reserve soldier from Kansas. By Hope Hodge Seck | Read more Pentagon's New Deploy-or-Out Policy Could Separate Up to 286K The Pentagon's new "deploy-or-out" policy could result in the separation from military service of possibly 286,000 personnel who are currently deemed medically unfit for overseas duty. By Richard Sisk | Read more Low Recruit Discipline Prompts Army to Redesign Basic Training The U.S. Army will soon launch a redesign of Basic Combat Training intended to build more discipline after many commanders complained that new soldiers often show up to their first units with a sloppy appearance and undisciplined attitudes. By Matthew Cox | Read more Most Read in Army Most Read in Navy Most Read in Air Force Most Read in Marine Corps Most Read in Technology Most Read in Gear and Fitness Most Read in Business Most Read in Spouse and Family Most Read in Entertainment Most Read in Pay and Benefits Most Read in Veterans -- Sean Mclain Brown can be reached at sean.brown@military.com. Follow him on Twitter at @seanmclainbrown. While the rest of us wait for self-driving Uber cars to become a reality, troops at a small Marine Corps base outside San Diego may be among the first to kick the tires on cutting edge driverless vehicle technology. Marine Corps Air Station Miramar, best known as a home base for a number of Marine Corps fighter jet squadrons, is now also serving as a testing ground for autonomous vehicles and other technology under a new service initiative, the Marine Corps Mobility Transformation effort. As part of that effort, private companies including Qualcomm Technologies will be using a custom-made autonomous vehicle proving ground to test out their products. And Marines lucky enough to be stationed on the base can expect some rides out of the deal. On Wednesday, industry representatives and local, state and federal government officials converged aboard Marine Corps Air Station Miramar, California for a demonstration of autonomous vehicle technology, according to a news release from the base. Video of initial tests shows two passenger vehicles, a Kia Soul and a black Lincoln sedan, both operated by Qualcomm, traveling down a dusty Miramar road. According to the release, two routes have been mapped at Miramar, one urban and one rural, to provide a course for autonomous vehicle testing. The first tests began earlier this month. "We hope to be able to integrate these types of systems into our combat forces and into our garrison forces and that they will allow us to bring broader and more diverse technology to the Marine Corps and the military," Col. Jason G. Woodworth, commanding officer of the air station, said in a statement. And, he added, it comes with a major perk for the Marines on-base: an autonomous vehicle shuttle that will begin operations in the next six months to a year. According to the release, two driverless electric 15-passenger vans will be programmed to follow the urban track, making stops at Miramar's most popular locations. When not operating on schedule, officials said in the release, the vans will be available on-demand along the route. Those vans are part of a second technology initiative, assessing electric autonomous vehicles that are vehicle-to-grid capable, meaning they can be charged through the air station's microgrid. That program, according to the release, will determine the feasibility of these vehicles as a means of transportation, both for official purposes and personal use. "This gives the young Marines who are stationed here a chance to potentially ride in an autonomous vehicle before you can do it in many places," Woodworth said in a filmed interview. For industry, Miramar provides a more controlled environment than a public road. Officials have to close roads at the air station or stop traffic for extended periods, allowing companies to create more precise conditions for data collection. "Qualcomm is very pleased to be collaborating with Miramar on the research and development for technologies we believe are necessary for the automotive industry of the future," Paul Guckian, vice president of engineering for Qualcomm Technologies, said in a statement. Testing is set to continue throughout this year. -- Hope Hodge Seck can be reached at hope.seck@military.com. Follow her on Twitter at @HopeSeck. Military personnel from U.S. European Command will join members from the Israeli Defense Force in a combined missile-defense exercise next month. Juniper Cobra 18, which is scheduled to take place March 4-15, has been in the planning stages January 2016. JC18 is the ninth in a series of biennial Juniper Cobra exercises conducted in Israel between the IDF and USEUCOM every two years since 2001, according to a Feb. 22 U.S. European Command press release. More than 2,500 U.S. personnel will participate in the exercise, with about 2,100 U.S. military members operating alongside IDF personnel at various locations within Israel, according to the release. "The United States and Israel enjoy a strong and enduring military to military partnership built on a trust that has been developed over decade of cooperation," U.S. Air Force Third Air Force Commander Lt. Gen. Richard Clark, who also serves as the commander for the deploying Joint Task Force-Israel, said in the press release. "The Juniper Cobra exercises continue to strengthen this relationship, providing us with the opportunity to bolster interoperability and develop seamless integration with our Israeli partners." During the course of the exercise, troop movements and other activities may be noticed by the civilian population. The exercise will follow protections and practices that are in place for minimal environmental impact, according to the release. While some U.S. personnel will remain in Israel for additional training opportunities, the majority are scheduled to depart upon completion of this exercise, the release states. -- Matthew Cox can be reached at matthew.cox@military.com. Consistently finding employment is just one of many lifestyle challenges military spouses face. With frequent moves, the seemingly endless search to not only land a career, but to maintain and grow it, can be frustrating. In the job search, the advice "it's all about who you know" is often tossed around as the secret key to landing a dream job. That somehow, if only you could find the right person with the golden ticket, all of your employment wishes would come true. Granted, sometimes that does happen, but there's actually a second part of the equation that is rarely mentioned. It's not who you know, it's who knows you. Sound like the same thing? Not quite. In a former life, I worked as a defense contractor in Washington, D.C. for a large consulting firm. One of the first questions I was consistently asked within the firm was, "What's your personal brand?" Initially, I absentmindedly ran my fingers over my suit jacket lapel and fought the urge to answer, "Um, Calvin Klein?" I had zero idea what people were asking me. One zealous manager in particular pulled me aside and explained it in two simple questions: "What are you known for? What do you excel in?" He elaborated a bit further: When someone hears your name, can they associate you with a particular specialty? I humbly realized the answer was probably "no." Outside of a hiring interview, I hadn't developed the ability to sell my skill sets well, nor could I succinctly say what I wanted to do within my career. In this particular company, as new projects would open, managers within the firm would assign teams of consultants to various projects. I quickly learned that when project managers were actively matching employees to contracts, hallway conversations and chance meetings by the elevator centered on, "Do I know anyone or know someone who might have someone that fits this project's job description?" In other words, who popped to mind? And that's the key difference. In moving to a new location within your current career field, or even when trying to make the jump into a different career, ask yourself the question: Who knows me? If no one does, here are eight ways to make it happen. Develop an elevator pitch This is one of the first and best things you can do for yourself. It's worth investing the time to perfect your pitch, so when an opportunity comes you are ready to grab it. Develop the ability to sell yourself, your skill sets, and what you want in a succinct but engaging manner. Forbes offers the following tips on how to perfect your elevator pitch: Who are you? What do you do? What are you looking for? Build a polished presence, both in-person and online Nailing down your elevator pitch can go a long way in helping you develop a polished presence, particularly online. If you can mentally capture what it is you want to do, you can begin to tailor an online presence around that goal. If you don't yet have a social media presence, create one -- and if you do, take the time to review and edit it because first impressions online are just as important as in-person ones, whether that's via LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or Pinterest. Google yourself. What comes up? Additionally, if possible, have samples of your work available online. Start carrying business cards with you every time you leave the house. Your cards can be beautifully simple: Your name, email, website, and a short professional title. Ensure your email address is professional (i.e. FirstMLast@gmail.com, not KennyLovesPorkChops@xyz.com. Yes, unfortunately that is an actual email address someone gave in a hiring interview.). Tap into your existing contacts Once you can quickly pitch yourself and have created a media presence to refer people to if asked, it's time to scrub your contact list. Does anyone have connections to your new location or within your career field? It might be possible for someone create a bridge for you and make an introduction. Research and join professional organizations Many professions have national organizations you can join, but don't forget to look for local chapters and associations, too. Try checking the local Chamber of Commerce for organization leads as many businesses are quite actively advocating within local circles. Often there are also active and very specific Facebook groups for your area. Follow those leads to get your name out there. Get to know the key professionals and current events in your field In virtually every industry, there are people who have established themselves as key players. Even better, they usually like to share what they are up to, which gives you an in-road to get connected. Go to the events they go to. Develop online relationships with mentors and titans. Like something they've worked on? Reach out and let them know. Researching your industry and being aware of current events within will also work to establish your credibility once you do start connecting with more people in your industry. No prospects in sight or making a career jump? Brainstorm ways to contribute to the community as a volunteer, particularly if you are making a career jump. Organizations and agencies love volunteers and this could be a fantastic way to get your foot in the door and prove yourself. Make the ask Once you identify a potential lead, group, or even new connections within your network, be prepared to ask for exactly what you want. This can be hard to do, sometimes it may internally seem too forward or direct and feel as if you are putting someone on the spot. But all it takes is one yes! End with a follow-up Remember, the goal is to have someone think of you when an opportunity presents itself, so openly invite them to follow up with you if they hear of something. Leave your business card or provide your contact information in online correspondence. As military spouses, we certainly face more than our fair share of challenges when it comes to snagging a great job and maintaining our careers. Let's bring all of the networks and people we can into our corner to make sure we're the first ones that pop to mind when those awesome opportunities arise! Keep Up with the Ins and Outs of Military Life For the latest military news and tips on military family benefits and more, subscribe to Military.com and have the information you need delivered directly to your inbox. Theres no question people are going to want to live in B.C. But we need to see a moderation and my hope is, by addressing both supply and demand, you'll see more supply in the market that will ease some of the cost pressures and you'll see a moderation, James said Wednesday (February 21) after speaking to the Greater Victoria Chamber of Commerce. Tom Davidoff of the University of British Columbias Sauder School of Business said he hopes the speculation tax will help make the lower end of the market more affordable, particularly for condos. The levy will be introduced this fall, targeting foreign and domestic homeowners who do not pay income tax in B.C., including those who leave homes vacant. In the 2018 tax year, the rate will be $5 per $1,000 of a property's assessed value. Next year, the rate will rise to $20 per $1,000 of assessed value. It will initially apply to Metro Vancouver, the Fraser Valley, the Victoria area, the Nanaimo Regional District, Kelowna, and West Kelowna. A non-refundable income tax credit will also be introduced to offset the new levy, providing relief for people who do not qualify for an exemption but who pay income taxes in B.C. A team of federal investigators led by special counsel Robert Mueller is looking into whether former President Donald Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort obtained $16 million in mortgages by promising a banker a job in the White House, NBC News has reported. According to the report, which cited two people with direct knowledge of the matter, Manafort took out three loans from Federal Savings Banks in December 2016 and January 2017. The separate loans relate to homes in New York City, Virginia, and the Hamptons. The banker under investigation is Stephen Calk, president of the Federal Savings Bank. In August 2016, Calk was named a member of candidate Trump's Council of Economic Advisers. However, he has not received a job in Trumps cabinet. In the scrublands of West Texas theres an oil-drilling operation like few that have come before. Encana Corp.s RAB Davidson well pad is so mammoth, the explorer speaks of it in military terms, describing its efforts here as an occupation. More than 1 million pounds of drilling rigs, bulldozers, tanker trucks and other equipment spread out over a dusty 16-acre expanse. As of November, the 19 wells here collectively pumped almost 20,000 barrels of crude per day, according to company reports. Encana calls this cube development, and it may be the supersized future of U.S. hydraulic fracturing, says Gabriel Daoud, a JPMorgan Chase analyst who visited Davidson last year. The technique is designed to tap the multiple layers of petroleum-soaked rock here in the Permian shale basin all at once, rather than the one-or-two-well, one-layer-at-a-time approach of the past. After a years-long land grab by explorers, the Permian is graduating, according to Daoud. Now its all about entering manufacturing mode. With the new technique, Encana and other companies are pushing beyond the drilling patterns that dominated during the early, exploratory phases of the shale revolution. Now, operators are assembling projects with a dozen or more well bores that touch multiple underground layers of the Permian and other shale plays simultaneously, tapping the entire 3-D cube beneath a producers acreage. The shift has been controversial, with some of the biggest names in oil shying away from the approach as too aggressive and expensive. But if proponents are right, the cube could accelerate a drilling boom thats already helped push U.S. production past an historic 10 million barrels a day, rewriting the rules of global energy markets along the way. Along with the Davidson pad, Calgary-based Encana has 12- and 14-well operations in Texas as well as a 28-well behemoth in the Montney shale play in Alberta and British Columbia. Devon Energy Corp. said on Wednesday that it has more than 10 multi-zone projects scheduled for 2018, including the 11-well Boomslang pad in the Permian and the 24-well Showboat project in Oklahoma. Concho Resources Inc., another early champion, debuted its Brass Monkey operation in the Permian last year, with 10 wells that dive underground and then burrow about 2 miles horizontally. We have just started to get into the manufacturing and harvest mode of the shale revolution, Concho Resources Chief Executive Officer Tim Leach said on a conference call. More Information "We have just started to get into the manufacturing and harvest mode of the shale revolution." --Tim Leach, Concho Resources chief executive officer See More Collapse The operations arent cheap. A project the size of RAB Davidson may have cost Encana $120 million, according to JPMorgans Daoud. Included in the calculations are the cost of the extra wells, bigger tank batteries, added pumping power, extended pipeline networks and additional labor required in cube development, among other expenses. Proponents, though, say it saves money in the long run, thanks to economies of scale and improved well productivity rates. One driller bragged about employing several drilling contractors on the same pad and leveraging ones price against the other, the analyst recalled. Encana didnt respond to messages seeking comment, but on a conference call in November, company officials said all of their 2018 wells will be part of large-scale pads. Per-well costs dropped by a quarter at the Montney cube, Encana reported. The alternative is a high-cost, scattered approach to development that risks sterilizing resources in the long-run, CEO Doug Suttles told analysts. Not everyones convinced. Major Permian operators including Pioneer Natural Resources Co. and EOG Resources Inc., while expanding their well pads, have nonetheless taken a more conservative approach. Along with the initial cost, skeptics cite the potential for logistical nightmares in going too big. Some worry about undercutting innovation and note its hard to diagnose problems on individual wells when a dozen or more are running all at once. Its all a question of return, said Kimberly Ehmer, a spokeswoman for EOG Resources. The impact to returns is not clear-cut until you understand the impact to well productivity and other operations costs. The Houston-based explorer has limited itself to six- to eight-well pads thus far, she said in an email. Its too early to say which side, if either, is right, although that may change this year as more results become available from large-scale production. For now, theres no sign cube wells are any less productive, said Sarp Ozkan, a director at Houston-based researcher DrillingInfo Inc. A move toward cube development could spur more consolidation, he said, as companies without the financial or administrative might to pull off industrial-size operations get snapped up or pushed out. It also could have a big influence on oil and gas markets: If the industry takes a more cautious approach, U.S. output could fall below forecasts in the coming years, easing some of the downward pressure on prices. If Permian producers master manufacturing mode, on the other hand, the global supply glut may only get worse. You add all the numbers up and what you start to come up with is very, very scary, Ozkan said in a telephone interview. The production potential is only as high as the demand will allow it to go. You dont have to use ... Calaveras County Seal View Photos San Andreas, CA As Tuolumne County and City of Sonora officials cautiously consider how commercial cannabis might fit into their residents future, those in Calaveras are gearing up to lower the boom on its fledgling legal industry. To update progress on related activities underway, Clarke Broadcasting reached out to Calaveras officials as well as Calaveras Cannabis Alliance (CCA) Executive Director Trevor Wittke, an organic viticulturist and owner of Mokelumne Hill-based Sun Grown Medicinals. Wittke wryly acknowledges, We shall see how it actually plays out but I am quite confident that the ban ordinance is not the end of story of cannabis in Calaveras County. His thoughts are echoed by CAO Tim Lutz and District 2 Supervisor and Vice-chair Jack Garamendi, who both confirm that the county is expecting lawsuits to soon begin flying. While District 1 Supervisor and Board Chair Gary Tofanelli was twice contacted for this story he did not return the calls. Supervisors Ban Prevails: Effective March 9 As reported here, the Calaveras County Board of Supervisors, by a tumultuous and narrow (3-2) Jan. 10 vote, initiated the process under which the hundreds of the legally permitted and still in-process registered commercial medical cannabis grows must cease operations. A halfhearted effort to bring a board-sponsored twin-set of measures for the voters to decide on, as reported here, derailed during the supervisors Feb. 14 meeting. Shrugging off the failure of that attempt, Garamendi points to the additional risk that the county would assume if the measures made it to the ballot and were subsequently challenged in court, perhaps under CEQA. The county would be legally liable to defend it and we already have multiple lawsuits heading our way around the ban, and so I did not think it was in the best interest of the county to assume that greater liability, he explains. He adds that he does support the idea of a citizens initiative. Locally published on Feb. 7 nearly a month after it was adopted the bans 30-day effective date was subsequently pushed out to begin March 9. The ordinance ends all commercial cannabis cultivation activities and limits registered personal cultivation to six plants for medical or recreational use. Lutz stresses, We do have a registration process that is being developed to at least register personal grows through the Planning Departments website. They must be indoor in a non-living area, locked up. Lighting and other installations would have to be permitted. Under the countys legal provisions it is important to note that registered commercial growers will then have 90 days or until June 7 to cease all cultivation activities. Among their other obligations are to restore or remediate all cultivation areas by Jan. 10, 2020. This includes ensuring that any non-permitted grading or construction comes into compliance or is removed from grow sites along with trash and debris; erosion control measures must also be installed. Related Quirks, Issues Ironically, growers applications, many still in pending status, are still being processed. As CAO Lutz explains it, the reasons are due to the language in the urgency ordinance and ban that provides for a 90-day transition period. He adds that for growers whose applications are still in the pipeline, staffs completion of their registrations will help preserve the legality of their status and products with the state. Looking back over the past two years, Wittke readily describes the countys emergency regulatory ordinance that the ban replaced as far from perfect. However, he laments, We were getting serious handle on the situation, moving through regulatory process. The good actors were being identified and stayed in compliance the bad actors were getting kicked out of the system and abated and other bad actors who were trying to hide in the mix were also being identified and abated. He also airs concerns over Brown Act violations that the supervisors may have committed for which they received a care and correct letter, calling the boards ongoing inconsistent actions and lack of clear and reasonable staff guidance emblematic of the past processes many flaws. CCAs position is that the county unfairly administered the Measure C taxes, which per the ordinance language should have been billed to all cultivators, not just the registered ones. Wittke says the county still sent illegal growers other communications such as abatement notices. Lawsuits Already In The Works Although a group lawsuit seeking to invalidate Measure C taxes is being handled through Oakland-based cannabis attorney William Panzer, according to Wittke, CCA has not come out in support of it. Providing a local resource channel for those seeking a solution through the court system is the recently organized Calaveras Cannabis Legal Defense Fund (CCLDF) led by Ebbetts Pass Lumber Company owner and cannabis farmer Jason Hauer, who is spearheading a group of supportive local businesses. CCLDF indicates it has raised about 28 percent of an initial $250,000 fundraising goal. Growers who have followed all the county rules are eligible for legal assistance funds to protect their farming interests as part of the groups stated intent: to preserve the countys sustainable cannabis industry. Asked whether his group has any specific strategies in mind as March 9 approaches, Wittke shares, Our primary response to the ban is simply to ask the board of supervisors and community in general to reconsider the issue and to hopefully implement some form of regulations that are workable. In the meantime, he notes, Cultivators are pursuing different remedies, be it through litigation or through efforts to engage in political organizing to address the issues. He maintains that a compromise set of regulations that CCA proposed back in June of last year may potentially be a still-viable solution because it had garnered support among community members who were previously vocally supportive of no commercial grows. The proposal included moving operations out of residential neighborhood zones and setting a size cap at 20 acres. Growers Already Hurting, Other Impacts To Come Garamendi, whose district contains far and away the countys greatest number of legal cultivators, reports those he has been in touch with are distraught for good reason. He relays, The growers we are talking with have played by the rules, payed their taxes, been trying hard to comply with state and county regulations. They are frustrated. They feel like they played fair and the county did not respond. Furthermore, he states, many of them paid their taxes, which by January added up to about $4 million. Describing it as a real confirmation from those wanting to be on board as a legal entity, he notes, They could have packed up and left and not paid their taxes. [Their payment] is a benefit to the county and will help us out tremendously in this fiscal year. At the same time, Garamendi acknowledges that many of the countys registered growers have invested their life savings and are now worried that it will all disappear. We have seen some people moving. It is sort of in that pause mode where we are waiting to see the real financial impacts on our local businesses. People I am sure aremaking very hard decisions[saying] our business is now illegal and what are we going to do? How does this impact us with state licensing? Will be able to sell our product legally that we have grown legally under the state rules? So there is a lot of gray area going on. Chiming in, Lutz emphasizes, We recognize the ban has raised a lot of questions with growers who were previously allowed to cultivate under the countys urgency ordinance and where we also have the state law coming into effect at around roughly the same time period as we are looking at implementing this ban. He adds that county offices are all working to reduce confusion over the timelines through outreach, providing online resources and advising anyone with questions to directly contact county officials. Lutz further maintains, The county remains committed to addressing the illegal grow operations that are throughout pockets of the community that continues to be one of the top priorities of the board, wanting to address the illegal, the cartel grows and we will continue to work to devote resources to addressing that problem. A Time Of Budget Fixing, Fence Mending Next Tuesday the supervisors will be looking hard at the countys midyear budget, which Lutz and his colleagues have been honing. While he says the countys finances are currently looking good, as the regulatory cannabis program starts winding down, key issues will concern absorbing some of its infrastructure into other programs and setting up reserves for code and criminal enforcement and other related needs such as legal defense. Planning ahead, the county will be critically looking at building alternative funding and growing revenues. Among the potential plans are a possible November ballot measure seeking an increase in the countys transient occupancy (TOT) tax charged to visitors, which could increase revenues for public roads and safety coffers. Critical to the countys success and being able to move forward, Lutz confides, My thoughts really are at this point is that we as a community really need to start looking at what happens post-cannabis, how do we start to go through the healing process. This obviously has been a hugely contentious topic that has divided this community in a way that few other things have. With Calaveras still healing from the Butte Fire, tackling the local tree mortality disaster and needing to evolve services and government, Lutz simply states, We need to find a way to work together, come together and start to make progress on things other than being in this stalled state that cannabis has put us all in. As for possible citizen-led ballot initiatives in the works to restore the cannabis industry in Calaveras, Wittke says CCA has no intention to take the lead, primarily because of the difficulty in finding a compromise that everyone within the cannabis cultivating community/industry can agree on that might also be palatable for the electorate. As of right now we have not seen anything that looks like an appropriate compromise in an initiative form, he explains. That said, we are willing to work with other individuals and groups that are looking to take on such an endeavor. County officials are directing growers ban compliance-related questions as well as those concerning what is allowable for a personal cannabis grow to the Calaveras County Planning Department, which has also prepared a FAQ list here. Lutz says other inquiries may be directed to his office at 209 754-6025. Wagon with petitions delivered to California Water Commission hearing View Photos Sacramento, CA Mother Lode Republican Assemblymember Frank Bigelow is blaming the California Water Commission for failing to approve water storage projects in the state. Republican members of the California Legislature this week delivered a wagon-load of more than 4,000 petitions signed by residents across the state to the commission calling for the immediate approval of funding for the Sites Reservoir in Colusa County and Temperance Flat Reservoir, northeast of Fresno. The lack of urgency from bureaucrats at the water commission is putting Californians livelihoods in danger, said Assemblyman Frank Bigelow (R-ONeals), If we are hit with another drought, the commission will be responsible. Bigelow indicates that in 2014, Californians approved Proposition 1, a water bond that included $2.7 billion for investments in new reservoirs, which tasked the commission with allocating those funds. He criticized the commission for rejecting all proposals stating that the reason given was that none met the requirements laid out in Proposition 1 to deserve funding. In a recent op-ed Bigelow stated, Voters expected billions of gallons of water to be added to our surface storage system. Sadly, with a dry start to winter and another drought looming, the state hasnt spent a dime on the new storage it promised. Republicans argue that if built, the Temperance Flat Reservoir could hold 423 billion gallons of water and the Sites could hold 586 billion gallons. Update at 5:40 p.m.: The Calaveras County Sheriffs Department has released the statement below with further details on a state appellate courts decision to overturn the murder conviction of Isiah Fowler in the slaying of his sister 8-year-old sister, Leila Fowler. On February 22, 2018, the Third District Court of Appeals reversed the Juvenile Courts decision regarding the case of the 2013 murder of Leila Fowler and has remanded the case for a new trial. As the Appeals Court decision is not yet final, a new Court date has not yet been set. In its decision, the Court of Appeals reviewed four interviews of the juvenile suspect in this case conducted in 2013. The Appeals Court agreed with the Juvenile Courts finding that the first and second interviews were properly admitted into evidence at the trial. However, the Appeals Court disagreed with the Juvenile Court regarding the third and fourth interviews, and found those interviews should have been excluded from the trial primarily due to a perceived conflict of interest on the part of the juveniles parent in giving law enforcement permission to conduct the interviews after the juvenile became a person of interest in the murder. Applying current federal standards of review, the Appeals Court stated it could not find the Juvenile Courts consideration of the interviews at trial to be a harmless error beyond a reasonable doubt. Therefore, the Appeals Court reversed the Juvenile Courts decision in the case and remanded the case for a new adjudication hearing (trial). At the time of the Leila Fowler murder investigation, California Welfare and Institutions Code Section 625.6, which requires that a youth 15 years of age or younger consult with legal counsel prior to custodial interrogation, had not been enacted. This legislation was enacted in 2017. The Attorney Generals Office represented the People in fighting to uphold the Juvenile Courts decision in this case and is carefully reviewing the decision of the Appeals Court. The Calaveras County Sheriffs Office stands by its investigation and its commitment to seek justice for Leila Fowler. The District Attorneys Office joins in that commitment and is prepared for any re-trial of the case. Original post at 7:20 a.m.: San Andreas, CA The murder conviction of a Calaveras teen has been overturned by an appellate court, so he could now face a new trial. Isiah Fowler was found guilty in 2015 for the murder of his 8-year-old sister, Leila Fowler. It was a case that shook the close knit Valley Springs community. However, a state appellate court found that two of the four interviews law enforcement conducted with him violated his Miranda rights. He made inconsistent statements as well during the interviews. You can read a 58-page appellate court report by clicking here. Isiah Fowler was 12-years old when his sister was killed, and he is now 17. He will remain in a youth correctional institution in Stockton, where he has been serving a 16 year sentence, until the next legal step is determined. Federal authorities on Thursday arrested a San Antonio man they believe killed another man in Big Bend National Park three years ago. John Michael Baker, 23, is accused of killing Shannon Stewart Roberts, 43, of San Antonio, whose decomposed body was found in a remote area of the park March 31, 2000, according to an FBI news release. Information about where Baker was arrested was not available late Thursday. Roberts' remains were found by Border Patrol agents during a search for a fugitive on an unrelated theft case. Roberts had apparently been partially buried in a shallow, sandy grave for several months. At the time of his death, Roberts was in his fourth year of medical school at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio. University officials had reported him missing to San Antonio police earlier in March 2000 after noticing that Roberts wasn't attending classes he had paid for and fellow students had not seen him. He signed in at the park's ranger station in mid-January 2000. A 24-year-old San Antonio man was sentenced to 17 1/2 years in prison Wednesday for the February 2000 murder of a San Antonio medical student in Big Bend National Park. John Michael Baker pleaded guilty in August to using a rope to choke Shannon Stewart Roberts, 43, to death and burying his body in the national park. Roberts' decomposed body, which had been partially unearthed by animals, was discovered in March 2000 by a U.S. Border Patrol agent. At the time of his death, Roberts was in his fourth year of medical school at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio. University officials had reported him missing to San Antonio police earlier in March 2000 after noticing that Roberts wasn't attending classes he had paid for and fellow students had not seen him. He signed in at the park's ranger station in mid-January 2000. Baker was given the maximum sentence for second-degree murder by a federal judge in Midland who considered Baker's escape from federal custody days before his guilty plea, federal prosecutors said. Baker was arrested in Fort Worth the day after he escaped. Many around the Bay Area noticed a strange streak of light in the sky a little after 6:30 a.m. Thursday. Nope, it wasn't a UFO. That was a SpaceX rocket carrying a Spanish satellite into orbit. The launch of the Falcon 9 occurred at 6:34 a.m., more than 250 miles to the south of the Bay Area at Vandenberg Air Force Base near Lompoc. Typically, launches from Vandenberg aren't visible from the Bay Area but the conditions were just right to create a show that extended to the north. Jan Null, a consulting meteorologist with Golden Gate Weather Services, saw the launch from San Jose. 3 1 of 3 Jan Null / Golden Gate Weather Services Show More Show Less 2 of 3 @shamptonian / Twitter Show More Show Less 3 of 3 "There are only a couple opportunities per year when the time of day (i.e., pre-sunrise) is right and the trajectory is high enough to be seen this far north as more launches are southward," Jan says. "The sky was just starting to light up so you had some illumination but the sky wasn't so bright that it washed it out." SFGATE received reports of people seeing the light streak as far north as the wine country. "It looked like a giant jellyfish in the sky," Scot Hampton (Twitter @shamptonian) of Rohnert Park told SFGATE. Shortly after liftoff, Spain's PAZ satellite successfully entered orbit. The satellite carries an instrument to make radar images of the Earth for government and commercial purposes. Secondary test satellites for a proposed space-based internet system were to be released later. The Associated Press contributed to this report. Insects, both alive and dead, were found in at least two San Antonio restaurants this week, according to city health inspection reports. They were among the 15 San Antonio establishments to land on this week's list of dirtiest restaurants, including a Tex-Mex restaurant where an employee was seen handling tortillas without gloves. Several fast food stops, including Jimmy John's, Subway, Pizza Hut and Wingstop also appeared on this week's list. At one spot, an inspector recommended the restaurant wash its raw fruits and vegetables before serving them to customer, and another spot had a buildup of mildew and mold in its ice machine. SEE LAST WEEK'S VIOLATIONS: San Antonio restaurant inspections: Feb. 16, 2018 To make the Express-News' list of dirtiest restaurants, an establishment must earn a score of 89 or below or anything less than an "A" during a random city health inspection. The San Antonio Express-News examines hundreds of restaurant inspections each week conducted by the San Antonio Food and Environmental Health Services division to bring you the eateries with scores of 89 or below. Restaurants are graded on a 100-point system, where "100" is a perfect score, and demerits are based upon the number of violations found during a regular food establishment inspection. There are three categories of demerits and each are assigned a demerit score of 3, 2 or 1 points, according to the health division. Scores and demerits listed are only representative of the state of the restaurant at the time of inspection and establishments are surveyed at random. See the other restaurants that landed on this week's list of dirtiest restaurants in the slideshow above. erobinson@mysa.com | Twitter: @eeelizzzabeth Following a recent court victory, Connecticuts congressional delegation is urging the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to give the state relief from air pollution caused by a Pennsylvania power plant. Both U.S. senators and all five representatives submitted a letter to EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt Friday, urging him to grant a petition Connecticut filed in 2016 to enforce federal anti-pollution rules on the coal-burning Brunner Island Steam Electric Station, requiring the plant to reduce its emissions. It is unacceptable that EPA failed to respond to Connecticuts petition until now a clear violation of the time period intended by the U.S. Congress, the letter states. It is equally unacceptable that at this late date, EPA now proposes to deny the petition without providing an enforceable remedy to address Connecticuts air pollution problem. Connecticut and Delaware had filed Good Neighbor Petitions to the EPA under the Clean Air Act, claiming Brunner Islands emissions had high levels of nitrogen oxide that cause smog and were harming their residents health. Earlier this month, a federal judge ruled in favor of the state on a 2017 filing that requires the EPA to make a decision on reducing the plants smog within 60 days. The public hearing on it was held Friday. Connecticut has long been adversely impacted by trans-border air pollution, often directly causing our state to exceed EPA ozone and other pollutant limits the very type of pollution emitted by Brunner Island Station, the delegation wrote. The letter asks the EPA to expeditiously provide Connecticut with long sought after relief from dirty, downwind air pollution and require the plant to reduce its harmful omissions. Last week, the Sierra Club, an environmental advocacy group, reached a settlement with Talen Energy, the company that oversees the plant, to phase out coal and switch to natural gas by 2028. During the phase out, the carbon emissions will be reduced and beginning in 2023 the nitrogen oxide emission rates will be reduced by about two-thirds of the 2016 levels, according to a statement from the Sierra Club. Even with this decision, the legislators stressed EPA action was still necessary. While EPA expects Brunner Island Station to only burn natural gas going forward, there is no legally enforceable requirement that prevents it from switching back to coal prior to the summer of 2023 should a recent proposed consent decree take effect, according to the letter. Connecticuts delegation stated states arent able to address pollution sources in other states and so the EPA is needed to step in and require that source adds emission controls or stops operating. They said the pollution was preventing Connecticut from meeting the National Ambient Air Quality Standards and increased the concentrations of ground-level ozone. This can cause respiratory problems and a higher risk of premature death, according to the letter. The legislators also said the pollution increases costs for local businesses to compensate for the out-of-state contribution. Air pollution does not respect state lines nor the health and economic consequences that come along with it, the legislators said in the letter. DANBURY A New York-based organizations application to open a new charter school in Danbury cleared its first hurdle in the state approval process this month. The State Department of Education concluded that the proposed Danbury Prospect Charter School meets the states criteria for a successful charter operation and can proceed to a series of public hearings for further review, according to a letter earlier this month. The proposed K-12 school would be the first in Connecticut by the Brooklyn Prospect Charter School group, which operates four charter schools in Brooklyn with about 1,000 students. The application scored 39.9 out of 57 possible points designed to judge 19 elements of the proposals design, organizational effort, student services and likely viability, according to the score sheet. State leaders awarded the highest possible scores to Brooklyn Prospects experience, leadership, evidence support and educational philosophy. Were really excited to get this news and take our next steps, said Daniel Rubenstein, the charter groups executive director. If approved, Danbury Prospect would be the first in the state to teach curriculum known as the International Baccalaureate an academic program that emphasizes critical thinking through in-depth reading and writing. The next step for the application will be a public hearing in Danbury before the state Board of Education to solicit feedback and commentary from residents, said department spokesman Peter Yazbak. That hearing could come as soon as next month, but the board has not yet set a date, he added. Following the hearing, education Commissioner Dianna Wentzell will make a formal recommendation and the board will vote on the application, Yazbak said. The lengthy approval process has pushed back Brooklyn Prospects plan to open in time to host classes for sixth-grade students starting this fall. Now the school hopes to open in fall 2019, Rubenstein said. But the proposal hinges on whether the General Assembly would allocate money for the school amid budget negotiations later this year or next. In each school weve been part of, almost all of them have been delayed for one reason or another, whether with the facility or politics, Rubenstein said. We want to get it right and create a world-class school, and if it takes an extra year, were okay with that. Mayor Mark Boughton has been a strong supporter of the Danbury Prospect plan and said last week he is excited to hear the idea progress. But Superintendent Sal Pascarella has cautioned the new school could be a drain on the school district if it siphons off highly motivated students, even though some local schools threaten to burst at the seams amid booming enrollment. The charter school group has not yet settled on a location for the proposed school, but it has narrowed its list to three or four sites and hopes to locate near Main Street, Rubenstein said. Because of the time it takes for a facility to get ready, we want to go there while the application is still under review, he said. We also need to get the word out more to make sure parents know this option is going to be out on the horizon. Its important to keep the momentum going. MILFORD Last week, several members of the citys faith organizations learned how to better prepare their buildings to deter active shooters. About 30 faith leaders and community attended Tuesdays session with Milford police The event had been scheduled even before the recent school shooting in Florida that killed 17 people, said Mike DeVito, public information officer for the Milford Police Department. It just happened to be at this time, DeVito said Friday. There have been briefings and security meetings for schools over the last five years, DeVito said, and there are police officers stationed in all Milford schools. He said the city has a security director, who is retired cop who served on the force for 25 years. But Tuesdays meeting focused on faith buildings. DeVito said the seminar, which lasted about 90 minutes, was based on ways the police and the faith organizations could prevent crimes, not what to do while a crime was being committed. It was more about preparation, possible identification (of problematic behavior) and things they can do in a security sense, DeVito said. Many houses of worship are open 24/7, but DeVito said that makes them more vulnerable to criminals, including, possibly, shooters. I strongly encourage a much more stringent plan, DeVito said. They need to be very careful with their building usage. DeVito said many congregations open their facilities for various activities beyond worship, including committee meetings and clubs But you need to be very, very careful, DeVito said. You have to kind of vet who is using your building in these off-hours. Police suggest establishing safety committees of volunteers who are familiar with those attending congregation functions. DeVito said they might be able to identify someone exhibiting changed or problematic behavior. A lot of places were already doing that, DeVito said of the faith communities represented at the meeting. He mentioned one congregation that has weekly security meetings. DeVito said that when it comes to services, people tend to be creatures of habit, with unofficial assigned seats. Everyone knows everyone else, DeVito said. Safety committees can identify, way better than police could, if theyve never seen someone before. On the grounds outside these buildings, DeVito said, its best to eliminate shrubs, bushes or any other landscaping that could allow people to sneak up or hide. An issue a lot of faith leaders had was uncertainty on how to protect people during a service. One of the attendees ... said as the service approaches, they lock all the doors and leave just one door unlocked, DeVito said. A lot of other people thought it was a good idea. At the end of the seminar, DeVito said, he offered each organization the chance to have police officers go to their buildings for an on-site evaluation. Overall, it seemed to be very positive, he said. They were very receptive. Like many, I recently watched the new Winston Churchill movie, Darkest Hour. There have been many fine portrayals of Churchill, but this movie provides a much more intimate examination of his own humanity and, for that reason, his courage and fortitude is even more remarkable. In one moving scene, Lady Churchill walks into her husbands darkened bedroom to find him sitting on the edge of his bed. She says, You look like you have the cares of the world sitting on your shoulders. And indeed, in that darkest hour, he did. The decisions that were in his hands as prime minister, at this moment in history, may well have determined the fate of the world. The events in the film take place from May 8 to June 4, 1940. Thy are bookended by two important addresses in the House of Commons: the Norway Debate and Churchills rousing, epochal We shall fight them on the beaches speech. In between these extraordinary examples of oration, Churchill became prime minister (an unpopular second choice within his own party), replacing Neville Chamberlain. For much of the film he is the one voice in the British Parliament who saw the abhorrent truth in the rise of Nazism and the need to fight. You cannot negotiate with a tiger while your head is in its mouth, he declared to those members of his own party who were set on appeasement. And yet, for all Churchills heroism, I could not help but be reminded that the true heroes of the hour were the ordinary men and women who chose to fight for freedom, even when their defeat seemed inevitable. This courage was exemplified in what became known as Operation Dynamo. With the fall of Belgium and France, over 300,000 Allied troops were stranded on the beaches of Dunkirk in France. Their slaughter was all but assured if they could not be quickly evacuated across the English Channel and back to the U.K. In a moment of courageous desperation, Churchill gave the order that civilian vessels, captained by ordinary men and women, be sent from Dover to recover troops from Dunkirk. It was a perilous trip that carried the high probability that the German Luftwaffe planes would eviscerate the fragile armada of sail and steam boats before they came within sight of the French coast. And yet between May 26 and June 4, over 800 boats were launched and over 300,000 men were brought safely home. There is, however, a curious backstory to this daring and courageous rescue. On May 27, King George VI called for a National Day of Prayer. Three extraordinary events occurred following that same day of prayer. First, Adolf Hitler overruled his generals and halted the advance of the German troops (something that has never been fully explained). Second, a storm of unprecedented scale grounded the Luftwaffe that was poised to attack the evacuating Allied troops. And finally, despite the storm, a serene calm settled over the English Channel days later, enabling the vast armada of boats to rescue the escaping men. Here are ordinary men and women called to do extraordinary things for the sake of justice and goodness and love, covered and compelled by the love of God. Was it ever thus! What would happen if we brought the same courage and faith to some of the desperate issues that we face as a nation and as a world? Personally, I am humbled and encouraged by the peaceful student protests that are taking place in the wake of yet another horrific act of barbarism that was the shooting at the high school in Florida last week. As a church, we recently hosted an event where more than 25 organizations that are fighting local and global injustice came together. It was a remarkable sight an armada of boats, a flotilla of love in action. And each of these organizations was represented that day because someone in this community, gripped by the power to challenge the status quo and a deep passion for justice, felt compelled to get involved. My faith teaches me that we were made for such a selfless love. We are called and empowered to love in this way. Martin Luther King Jr. understood this power when he wrote, As my sufferings mounted I soon realized that there were two ways in which I could respond to my situation either to react with bitterness or seek to transform the suffering into a creative force. I decided to follow the latter course. Drew Williams is the senior pastor of Trinity Church. United States pop star Madonna has expressed her excitement following the groundbreaking ceremony for four new schools she plans to build in the country. Writing on her official Facebook account, Madonna said she is excited for the new four schools that will be built in Kasungu. 'So exciting! Ground breaking ceremony in Kasungu district in Malawi. Building four more schools,' Madonna said. Madonna fell in love with the country as she has been helping in various sectors like health and education. The US Pop Star is doing the job through Raising Malawi. Founded in 2006 by Madonna, Raising Malawis mission is to bring an end to the extreme poverty and hardship endured by Malawis orphans and vulnerable children. Raising Malawi supports community-based organizations that provide these children and their caregivers with critical resources including food, clothing, shelter, education, medical care, and psychosocial support. Raising Malawi has recently expanded upon its long-standing support to the paediatric surgery program at Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital by building the countrys first paediatric surgery and intensive care unit, The Mercy James Centre for Paediatric Surgery and Intensive Care. Madonna has four children adopted from Malawi namely David Banda, Mercy James and the twins Estere and Stella. From Malawi24 Process technology students within the Lone Star College System now have a campus of their own. Lone Star College - Kingwood opened an 8 acre campus at Generation Park, which is known as the Lone Star College - Process Technology Center, in January. LSC-Kingwood will celebrate the newest addition to the college system by hosting a ribbon cutting ceremony at 9 a.m. on March 6 in Generation Park. The process technology program prepares students for careers as process technologists and operators in the petrochemical, plastics, food and beverage and pharmaceutical industries, said Maribeth Stitt, dean of the business, technology, communication and languages division. There are currently about 168 students in the process technology program who have been taking their courses in the Lone Star College - Atascocita Center since January 2017, Stitt said The center is a 40,200 square-foot building that is located in the only section of Generation Park situated within Humble ISD's boundaries. "Generation Park has a very small 8.3 acres of land that was in Humble ISD, which is in our service area," Stitt said. "The people that go to this program generally go to work in the gulf coast area at chemical plants like ExxonMobil, and this was the closest place in our college system that we can put a program closest to where the jobs are." After the ribbon cutting there will be a tour of the facility. Construction was completed on the process technology center in December after a groundbreaking ceremony in October 2016. Several guest speakers will attend the event, including LSC-Kingwood President Katherine Persson, LSCS Chancellor Stephen Head and Aaron Demerson, Texas Workforce Commission employer initiatives director. Meanwhile, San Jacinto College is also planning a presence within the mixed-use development after purchasing 57 acres within Generation Park in 2015, said Amanda Fenwick, the college system's vice president for marketing and public relations. The campus could service as many as 2,600 students when it opens and could focus on academic transfers and workforce needs of the surrounding community, Fenwick said. However, the campus is still in the planning phase and no firm timeline is set, she said. The campus is located within Sheldon ISD's boundaries. "We are working on getting an update of demographic stats and growth across our district to help us understand needs, especially in the northeast part of our district," Fenwick said. "Our chancellor and staff have also been holding exploratory meetings about potential programs that might be needed for that part of the district and region, but no decisions have been made beyond that." ANSONIA Honoring the past is something present Ansonia Police Chief Kevin Hale and his officers believe is important, especially when it comes to individuals who gave their all to serve and protect in the line of duty. Hale recently told the Board of Aldermen he was approached by some of his officers, with Officer Chris Kelley taking the lead, about paying homage to Ansonias first Police Chief Daniel Hayes. Hayes, according to Hale, was police chief in 1880. He was born in Ireland in 1846 and later settled in Ansonia. According to the website, The Officer Down Memorial, Inc., Hayes was shot two days before Christmas in 1880 while attempting to arrest a suspect. The suspect was James Chip Smith. Hayes had been summoned by Smiths father who asked him to arrest his son for discharging a pistol in a saloon. Smith had been drinking most of the day, threatening both his boss and his mother with the gun. When Hayes located Smith at the former Railroad Hotel downtown, which was located near the current railroad station, a struggle ensued and Hayes was shot in the stomach by Smith. Hayes, 34, died of his injuries four days later at the home of former Ansonia Police Chief Thomas Ellis, who went on to become the departments longest serving chief for 33 years. Smith was eventually found guilty and executed in 1882. Hale said Hayes was the second police officer in Connecticuts history to be killed in the line of duty. A more complete biography about Hayes can be found on Ansonia polices website. With May known as Police Memorial Month, and May 15 dubbed National Police Day by President John F. Kennedy, Hale and his officers would like to pay homage to Hayes in a special way this year. Theyd like to see a street downtown, currently named Railroad Avenue, renamed after Chief Hayes. Hale said the police will submit a formal request to the Board of Aldermen, likely at the boards monthly meeting in March, to rename the street. It is important to remember those who have gone before us, especially those who gave their lives protecting others, Hale said. Chief Hayes left an important legacy in a number of ways. Hale noted not only was Hayes the citys first police chief, but he had three children, one of whom was named Mary, who was an educator here and whose name was placed on the former Lincoln-Hayes School on Cottage Avenue. Hale also said judges to this day still use the Chip Smith Rule, when charging juries, an instruction that encourages juries to do all they can to break a deadlock. There is a tremendous amount of history and bravery in Chief Hayes story and it is important for all of us to remember, Hale said. Aldermanic President Lorie Vaccaro said the police departments proposal to rename a street downtown for Hayes is a fitting tribute. I feel that to honor the late Chief Hayes by renaming Railroad Ave in his memory is absolutely the right thing to do, said Vaccaro. Vaccaro noted that in order to change the name of a city street, aldermen would need to draft up a resolution, which he believes would receive full support from his fellow aldermen. In speaking for the board, Id say that every alderman would be honored to rename Railroad Avenue to recognize, honor and remember one of Ansonias first true heroes, Vaccaro said. TROY Troy United Methodist Church is hosting its Fire-Up Conference this weekend. The conference is for high school students, and the theme for the conference is Fearless. Events begin at 7 p.m. Friday at the church. Tom Price is the leader of the Harvest Team, which puts on the retreat. Harvest is based out of Troy United Methodist Church, but it puts on conferences like Fire-Up throughout southern Illinois. Its a church discipleship conference, Price said. Well have worship, small groups, seminars, and recreation. Troy United Methodist Church, as the sponsoring host, provides snacks, food and hospitality, he said. Its an opportunity for worship, prayer, and growing in Christ, he said. The first year of the conference was 1997, Price said. Each year there is a keynote speaker, and this year, it will be Tom Richter. For the last 14 years, he has been pastor of an international church in Queens, New York, Price said. He speaks all over the country doing events like this. Hes very gifted in terms of speaking the language of the students. Price said he expects between 150 and 200 kids at this event. Some years we have more, some less, he said. But thousands have come through over the years. In addition to the conferences, there is also the Harvest Band. They will be playing at the conference. Weve been around since 1996, Price said. The group changes as members leave and join. Price is the only founding member. At least two members in it now werent born when it started, he said. The band plays a mix of modern worship songs and other Christian music. We write some songs, but cover most, Price said. We have a pool of about 20 people for the band, and probably about 250 have been with us as musicians over the years, he said. There are three parts to the Harvest Ministry, Price said. The band, the conferences and the summer teams, who lead music at youth camps and gatherings. Price said that over 15 churches will send students to the Fire-up conference. Its open to all, but usually a church group will register as a group, he said. The conference will start on Friday night at end with a 10:45 worship service on Sunday. The mission of the church is to reach people in the name of Jesus, Price said. This is one part of that. Our target audience is kids who are in church already. We want them to really follow Jesus wholeheartedly. For more information, visit www.troyumc.org/. WASHINGTON - A top Justice Department official alerted the White House two weeks ago that significant information requiring additional investigation would further delay the security clearance process of senior adviser Jared Kushner, according to three people familiar with the discussion. The Feb. 9 phone call from Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to White House Counsel Donald McGahn came amid growing public scrutiny of a number of administration officials without final security clearances. Most prominent among them is Kushner, President Donald Trump's son-in-law, who has had access to some of the nation's most sensitive material for the last year while waiting for his background investigation to be completed. A week after the call from Rosenstein, White House Chief of Staff John Kelly announced that staffers whose clearances have not been finalized will no longer be able to view top-secret information - meaning that Kushner could stand to lose his status as early as Friday. As president, Trump can grant Kushner a high-level security clearance, even if his background investigation continues to drag on. But Trump said Friday that he would leave that decision to Kelly. In his phone conversation with McGahn, Rosenstein intended to give an update on the status of Kushner's background investigation. He did not specify the source of the information that officials were examining, the three people said. Justice Department officials said Rosenstein did not provide any details to the White House about the matters that need to be investigated relating to Kushner. "The Deputy Attorney General has not referenced to the White House any specific concerns relating to this individual's security clearance process," spokeswoman Sarah Isgur Flores said in a statement. A White House spokesman declined to comment on the status of Kushner's clearance or on information relayed by Rosenstein to McGahn. Kushner's lawyer, Abbe Lowell, declined to comment. In a statement to The Washington Post last week, Lowell said he had been assured by officials that there was nothing unusual about the delay in Kushner's security clearance. "My inquiries to those involved again have confirmed that there are a dozen or more people at Mr. Kushner's level whose process is delayed, that it is not uncommon for this process to take this long in a new administration, that the current backlogs are being addressed, and no concerns were raised about Mr. Kushner's application," Lowell said in a statement on Feb. 16. Kushner's interim clearance allows him to view both top-secret and sensitive compartmented information - classified intelligence related to sensitive sources. With that designation, he has been able to attend classified briefings, get access to the president's daily intelligence report and issue requests for information to the intelligence community. Security clearance experts said it is rare to have such a high level of interim clearance for such a long period of time. Typically, senior officials do not get interim access to top-secret and sensitive compartmented material for more than three months, experts said. The day before Rosenstein's call to McGahn, The Post reported that Kushner was among dozens of White House personnel who were relying on interim clearances while their FBI background investigations were pending. White House officials have complained that they have had trouble getting information from the Justice Department and FBI about the status of delayed clearances, including Kushner's. People familiar with the Feb. 9 call said Rosenstein was returning a White House phone call seeking guidance on the status of his background investigation, among those of others. Rosenstein intended to speak to Kelly, but the chief of staff was not immediately available, so he ended up talking to McGahn instead, according to three people familiar with the call. In the call, Rosenstein did not say whether the information that had come to the attention of the Justice Department was learned by the FBI in its standard background clearance investigation of White House staff. Rosenstein also oversees the investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller, who has scrutinized Kushner's contacts with foreign officials and business dealings as he examines Russia's interference in the 2016 election. There are conflicting accounts about whether Rosenstein discussed with McGahn the significance of the information and its possible impact on Kushner's clearance. Two people said the deputy attorney general told McGahn the Justice Department had obtained important new information, suggesting it could be an obstacle to his clearance process. Two others said Rosenstein did not discuss the nature of the ongoing investigation. Bob Bauer, who served as White House counsel in the Obama administration, said administration officials should view Rosenstein's alert as a strong reason to revoke Kushner's interim top-secret access. "It seems to me that he should have restricted access to highly classified material until the resolution of those issues," Bauer said. Kushner's inability to obtain a final clearance has frustrated and vexed the White House for months. As someone who meets regularly with foreign officials and reads classified intelligence, he would typically have a fast-tracked background investigation, security clearance experts said. During the last six months, McGahn privately discussed the slow pace of Kushner's background investigation with other senior aides, including with Kelly in the fall, according to a top administration official. Kelly expressed frustration with Kushner's access to classified material on an extended interim clearance, according to the official. But McGahn and Kelly decided to wait for the FBI to complete its background investigation and took no action at the time to change his access. Their wait-and-see mode ended abruptly last week, when Kelly issued a new policy that would block staff with interim clearances from receiving top-secret information as of Friday. The changes were prompted by intense scrutiny that has followed domestic-abuse allegations against Rob Porter, the president's former staff secretary, who was also working under an interim top-secret clearance. The move puts a "bull's eye" on Kushner, a senior official told The Post last week. Kelly has told associates that he is uncomfortable with Kushner's uncertain security clearance status and his unique role as both a family member and staffer, according to people familiar with the conversations. He has said he would not be upset if the president's son-in-law and his wife, Ivanka Trump, left their positions as full-time employees. On Friday, Trump said he would defer the question of Kushner's access to his chief of staff. "I will let Gen. Kelly make that decision, and he's going to do what's right for the country," the president said during a news conference. "And I have no doubt that he will make the right decision." In a statement about Kushner issued earlier this week, Kelly said he had "full confidence in his ability to continue performing his duties in his foreign policy portfolio including overseeing our Israeli-Palestinian peace effort and serving as an integral part of our relationship with Mexico." Inside the White House, officials have discussed concerns that the delay in Kushner's clearance is due in part to repeated updates he made to a form detailing his contacts with foreign officials. He filed three amendments last year to the questionnaire, after failing to fully disclose contacts reaching back several years. Kushner has said the omissions were inadvertent errors. Investigators scrutinize those activities to determine whether a person could be subject to influence or blackmail by a foreign government and can be trusted to guard classified information. Ordinarily, security clearance experts said, the failure to completely disclose all contacts would jeopardize an applicant's chances of obtaining final clearance. In addition, Kushner's actions during the transition have been referenced in the guilty plea of former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn, who admitted he lied to the FBI about contacts with then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. Prosecutors said Flynn was acting in consultation with a senior Trump transition official, whom people familiar with the matter have identified as Kushner. - - - The Washington Post's Shane Harris, Sari Horwitz, Ellen Nakashima and Julie Tate contributed to this report. WASHINGTON - President Donald Trump's decision to place himself at the center of the roiling debate over the nation's gun laws began hours after last week's Florida high school massacre, when images of angry yet poised teenage survivors were beamed into the White House on live television. Trump's aides almost immediately recognized the power of their message and argued that before the president could propose any solutions, he needed to hear personally from these young adults, according to administration officials. Trump agreed. The plans culminated six days later under the grand chandelier of the White House's state dining room, where Trump sat face-to-face with survivors of gun violence and the relatives of victims and witnessed their angst and raw anger. The president, who has often struggled to convey empathy, clutched a slim notecard with reminders about how to communicate with the grieving - "I hear you," read one - that officials said White House Communications Director Hope Hicks jotted down during a huddle with Trump to prepare for the event. In the end, the response to the deadly mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School unfurled in classic Trump fashion: He floated policies without offering specifics. He shaped his views by surveying friends and reacting to the testimonials he saw on cable news. And he cast himself as the main protagonist in the unfolding gun drama. "We're going to do something about this horrible situation that's going on, and we're going to all figure it out together," Trump said as he opened Wednesday's session. "I want to listen. And then after I listen, we're going to get things done." Inside the West Wing, his advisers were anxious about what might unfold in such a charged and unscripted atmosphere, according to aides familiar with the debate, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share internal discussions. Some had pressed to limit the amount of time television cameras were permitted to broadcast, but others - including the president himself - felt it was worth the risk to allow the media see the entire event. "He wanted it to be largely unscripted because he wanted it to be real," one senior White House official said. "He wanted a free-flowing dialogue. . . . He wanted to listen to these kids." Earlier, Trump met privately with Andrew Pollack, whose daughter, Meadow, was among the 17 people killed at the high school in Parkland, Florida. Pollack was initially not slated to attend the broader media session, but Trump made a personal appeal, according to the senior White House official. Pollack did attend and provided one of the most intense and moving moments of the day. "I'm very angry that this happened, because it keeps happening," he told the president with the cameras rolling. "I'm pissed. It was my daughter I am not going to see again." At Wednesday's event and elsewhere, Trump broached several policies - more comprehensive background checks for gun purchases, raising the minimum age for buying an assault rifle, banning bump stocks and, most controversially, arming teachers - but was vague and always changing on the specifics. "Right now we're in a listening phase," Raj Shah, deputy principal White House press secretary, told reporters Thursday. "I wouldn't say that we are or aren't going to propose something that is as specific as legislative language." Eager to be seen as leading the debate, Trump tossed out ideas like so much fish food. He was inspired by the emotion conveyed by the shooting survivors blanketing cable news, aides said, as much as by considered policy discussions. "What's inspiring him is obviously this tremendous tragedy, and when you sit down with parents and kids that were actually there and you hear their side of the story and the pain and anguish that they have, it makes you want to do something," said Ed Rollins, strategist on a pro-Trump super PAC. "But the issue has always been extremely complicated. There's no easy answer for it." Trump's advisers urged caution, counseling the president not to make knee-jerk proposals on a policy issue as fraught as guns but rather to let the debate play out and Congress sort out the details, administration officials said. But Trump has not heeded that advice, insisting that he be seen as spurring action and at times seeming reactive rather than deliberative - spurred on in part by what he sees as an opportunity to fix a problem that former President Barack Obama and others proved unable to solve. "Unlike, for many years, where people sitting in my position did not take action, they didn't take proper action, they took no action at all, we're going to take action," Trump said Thursday, although he has yet to provide any guidance to Congress about just what sort of legislation he might support. Even his allies who are intimately involved in the gun debate were left confused about what he was proposing. On background checks, for instance, Trump was unclear about whether he was advocating for a universal system that closes loopholes and has been long championed by Democrats, or simply making tweaks to shore up existing law. Last Friday, aides connected him and Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn, R-Texas, by phone so that Trump could learn more about his bipartisan bill to improve the federal background check database. His most divisive proposal came during Wednesday's listening session, when he suggested that arming appropriately trained teachers might help save lives during school shootings. When such a proposal was floated in the wake of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, by Wayne LaPierre, the National Rifle Association's executive vice president, it was treated as a fringe idea and widely dismissed by educators and gun-safety advocates. But now the person pushing the idea is the president. Some White House aides have mentioned arming teachers to Trump privately over the past week, noting that some Republican-majority states are considering similar state laws. "We have to harden our schools, not soften them up," Trump said Thursday. "A gun-free zone to a killer or somebody that wants to be a killer, that's like going in for the ice cream. Like, 'Here I am - take me.' " Trump also talked with lawmakers and friends about raising the age from 18 to 21 for purchasing assault weapons, like the AR-15 used in the Parkland shooting and many other massacres. Aboard Air Force One last Friday en route to Florida to meet with victims and first responders, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., joined Trump and argued that the age limit for rifles was based on a previous era when handguns, not rifles, accounted for most high-profile gun violence, said one person familiar with the conversation. Now, Rubio said, the epidemic of mass shootings involving assault rifles had brought the issue to the fore again. The two men also discussed other school safety initiatives. The next night, at Trump's private Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida, the president dined with talk show host Geraldo Rivera. Over Dover sole (Rivera) and well-done steak (Trump), the two men discussed what could be done to prevent future shootings, according to a person with knowledge of the conversation. Like Rubio, Rivera suggested raising the age for purchasing assault weapons, and Trump seemed receptive to the idea, this person said. The president also told Rivera and others at the club that he "knew he had to do something." Trump, a Manhattan real estate developer who was born in Queens, did not emerge from a gun culture. "He has never been a gun guy," one longtime Trump confidant said. In 2000, Trump supported the federal assault weapons ban that was in effect at the time. "I generally oppose gun control, but I support the ban on assault weapons and I also support a slightly longer waiting period to purchase a gun," he wrote in a book that year, "The America We Deserve." During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump seemed to reject the idea of arming teachers. "Crooked Hillary said that I want guns brought into the school classroom. Wrong!" he wrote on Twitter, referring to his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton. But aides said the president is sensitive to the cultural significance of the Second Amendment in large swaths of the country, particularly those states that helped propel him to his electoral college victory. While Trump is willing to take some tentative steps on gun restrictions, he is reluctant to spurn the NRA outright and has been in frequent touch with Chris Cox, the NRA's top lobbyist and strategist. Aides said that, when reminded Thursday that the NRA opposes raising the minimum age for purchasing assault weapons, Trump told them that the administration should still champion the idea - but be sure to also praise the NRA and its leaders. Then the president did just that during a roundtable event at the White House: "They're very, very great people. They love this country. They're patriots. The NRA wants to do the right thing." Trump spent the Presidents' Day holiday weekend at Mar-a-Lago with his two adult sons, both avid hunters and gun rights advocates, who assured him that he had more political flexibility than others around him realized to push for small legislative changes that they viewed as "common sense." White House officials have struggled to outline Trump's precise policy goals when it comes to guns, and have avoided overpromising that sweeping changes will happen quickly. But they were all united in at least one message - Trump, they repeated, would be a man of action. "These are not easy solutions," White House counselor Kellyanne Conway said on "Fox & Friends" on Thursday. "But this is a necessary conversation, and this is a president that doesn't just listen. He acts." --- The Washington Post's Josh Dawsey contributed to this report. The superintendent of South San Antonio Independent School District slammed the actions of a former trustee Friday, saying she created havoc by disguising herself as a student and wandering the districts high school campus to criticize security there. Stacey Alderete, formerly Stacey Estrada, was served with a criminal trespass warning Tuesday after she shot a video of herself walking unaccompanied for nearly a half hour inside South San High School, where one of her children is a student. Ms. Alderete is simply a disgruntled former board member that lost her last election and has spent a lot of her time since then trying to create havoc for the school district, Superintendent Abelardo Saavedra said. If she would spend the energy in working with us in improving programs things would be more productive and would better serve the students. The warning, issued by South San police, states Alderete could be arrested if she appears on district property without preapproval by the South San administration. Alderete, who lost a reelection bid in November 2016, refused to sign it, according to the document. School districts seek such warnings against people they deem disruptive or a security threat, although their policies on when to use them vary. In a Facebook post that included a portion of the video, Alderete said she was able to gain access to the high school campus for 20 minutes without checking in at the front office, while dressed as a student and wearing a backpack. We have a total of 11 buildings spread widely throughout the high school. 10 of those buildings do not automatically lock if need be. 4 officers are assigned to the high school making it IMPOSSIBLE TO COVER, Alderete wrote in the post. Our elementary schools ZERO! If I was able to do this without being detected ANYONE CAN! At a board meeting Wednesday, Alderete said she took the video to make a point about security and call attention to the need for more police officers at the district. She decried the possibility that South Sans police force could be reduced, mentioned at a recent budget meeting that discussed ways to handle a projected multimillion-dollar deficit next year. I proved yesterday just how vulnerable to violence or school shootings our children are at the high school, she told trustees. I want to make very clear that this in no way is the fault of our amazing officers and the chief, but has everything to do with the leadership of our district. The district assigns four officers to patrol the high school, two at each middle school and two across the nine elementary campuses, in addition to several officers who do not have campus assignments, Saavedra said. Trustees have taken no formal action regarding the districts police force, he said. Saavedra said it was totally ridiculous for Alderete to suggest she has exposed security concerns because, as a former trustee, she is a fairly high-profile parent who is recognizable to school staff. I am not surprised that teachers that might have seen her that day did not stop her, he said. A former day care worker in San Antonio was sentenced Thursday to 45 years in prison for images he created of himself molesting a 4-year-old child. Nicholas Andreas Gonzales Malven, 31, pleaded guilty last June to two counts of producing child pornography, which stemmed from the images he created while working at La Petite Academy day care on Spring Time Drive. In sentencing him, Senior U.S. District Judge David Ezra noted the case might make parents think twice about leaving their kids in day care. The judge added that what Gonzales did is every parents worst nightmare and violated not only the victim but the trust of the victims parents and the day care. RELATED: Pair to plead guilty in shooting that led to North Star Mall manhunt To have somebody sexually assault your child at a day care facility is what every parent worries about, Assistant U.S. Attorney Tracy Thompson said afterward. I mean you dont want them to fall down and hurt themselves, but to violate that trust. I think the judge put it really well when he said (the defendant) violated not only the children but the trust of those parents. Nobody wants eight hours a day off away from their child, Thompson added. We joke about it, but nobody really wants that. Those parents put their child there believing they would be safe, paying that they would be safe. Thompson and retired FBI special agent Jeff Allovio, who investigated the case, said other workers at the day care were mortified to learn about Gonzales conduct when he was arrested here in July 2016. RELATED: Lt. Gov will remove Uresti from senate committees I mean, youre entrusting a child to them and to think that, within your group, that that occurred, its very devastating, said Allovio, now a Bexar County sheriffs deputy. The judge rejected Gonzales lawyers call for a 30-year sentence and to not stack the prison term of the second charge on top of the first count. Though Thompson asked for a stacked sentence that would have given Gonzales 60 years, the judge opted to sentence him to 30 years on one count and 15 years for the second count, to run consecutively for a total of 45 years. The judge also imposed a slew of sex-offender restrictions should Gonzales get out of prison. Gonzales also agreed to pay $3,000 in restitution. As part of his plea deal, Gonzales admitted taking images of him molesting the child at the day care and sending them to a sexual partner and then to an undercover FBI agent in explicit online chats. In a statement after Gonzales arrest, a spokeswoman for La Petite Academy said La Petite cooperated with the FBI. The FBI also investigated Gonzales past and learned he had been honorably discharged from the Navy in 2006 because of homosexual conduct (violation of the militarys dont ask, dont tell policy in place at the time). He went to work at three different day cares in Washington state and filed a complaint against one because he was not allowed access to younger children because hes a man, Allovio said. The day care operator is facing a lawsuit in state court over the matter. A lawsuit filed after an explosion at a Texas state park that killed an employee has officially been dropped, according to media reports. Clayton and Lisa Trueblood sued Kris Miller, Blaine Bertrand, Rick Bertram and Dennis Rice for negligence in the death of their daughter Peyton in 2016. Peyton Trueblood, 21, was working in the amphitheater at Palo Duro Canyon State Park when two containers holding fireworks for a musical exploded. A quick stroll through the AT&T Center this month during the San Antonio Stock Show & Rodeo is probably all you needed to notice a swath of cowboy boots and hats and big belt buckles. While plenty of Texans rock a cowboy hat daily and don boots to hit the town on the weekend, the fashion is especially on display when the rodeo comes to town. The event lasts until Feb. 25. Those traveling from out of town to the rodeo who might need a good getup can find a number of stores across San Antonio that sell hats and boots and big belt buckles. One place, however, might be most famous for its hats Paris Hatters. RELATED: San Antonio favorite Paris Hatters featured on Stetson blog Located on Broadway Street near Peacock Alley in downtown San Antonio, the store has been in business since 1917 and customers have come from afar to get fitted for a hat. Dozens of celebrities and important figures have visited the shop, including the Pope John Paul II. "We 'hatted' a saint," said Abe Cortez, who runs the store with his wife Myrna. Cortez can figure out what hat will work best for a customer the moment they walk into the shop, he told legendary hat-maker Stetson, and the hats get a hand-sculpted shape. Paris Hatters was named the country's Number 1 Stetson dealer in 2012 and sells about 9,000 hats a year, according to the store's website. They claim to have shipped hats to every country in the world, except Cuba. Cowboy hats and other varieties have remained popular through the years, the couple said. John Travolta rocking a cowboy hat caused a spike in sales and so did movies like Urban Cowboy. The store outfitted hats for other movies including Lonesome Dove, All the Pretty Horses and The Newton Boys, Cortez said. Today, younger groups are becoming interested in all kinds of hats, Cortez said. "They are more comfortable wearing hats now than they used to be," he said. "We have a generation of kids who are more fashion-forward." Prices for hats range from $20 to $5,500, he said. Kelsey Bradshaw is a digital reporter for mySA.com. Read more of her stories here.| kbradshaw@express-news.net | Twitter: @kbrad5 Police released the name of the man arrested for allegedly threatening to impose "penitentiary rules" if controversial rapper 6ix9ine performed in San Antonio. Adam Rodriguez, 35, was arrested Thursday around 4:30 p.m. near the San Antonio International Airport. Preliminary information released by police does not explicitly name 6ix9ine, the Brooklyn-based rapper with a conviction for creating child porn, but did describe the intended subject of the threat as "a musician who was to arrive at the airport today for a concert in town tonight." RELATED: Men tied to threats against Brooklyn-based rapper detained at San Antonio airport Last weekend, a group of men claiming to be Tango Orejon gang members, including one resembling Rodriguez, released a video saying the rapper would be met with "penitentiary rules" when he landed in San Antonio to play at Bar 23 at 4429 Walzem Road. Caution: The video below contains language that may be offensive to some audiences. As the clip went viral, San Antonio police said they were aware and monitoring the situation. According to police, an airport police officer on Thursday noticed two cars carrying men he recognized from the video. He called for backup after one of the passengers was dropped off at the terminal. RELATED: SAPD responds to profanity-laced Tango Orejon video threatening controversial rapper 6ix9ine Airport police approached one of the vehicles and found four other men inside, including the man who is accused of making the threat on social media. Rodriguez was arrested on a $5,000 bond and the vehicle was impounded. Records show he posted bond and was released. The other men were booked on traffic warrants, according to SAPD. "There were no injuries of property damage as a result of this incident," the report reads. More arrests could follow, pending further investigation, according to a previous mySA.com report. Madalyn Mendoza is a digital reporter for MySA.com. Read more of her stories here.| mmendoza@mysa.com | Twitter: @MaddySkye Luke Skywalker will be in Austin next month when the actor that plays him makes a visit to the South by Southwest festival. That's right, Mark Hamill is set to make an appearance at the film portion of the festival when a documentary chronicling the making of "The Last Jedi" premieres March 12 at 11 a.m., festival officials announced Thursday. AUSTIN The U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments April 24 in the long-running legal fight over Texas political maps, which could scramble the boundaries of two congressional and nine state House districts. Court watchers expect a decision by midsummer in the case that centers on district maps that advocacy groups say were drawn to intentionally dilute minorities voting strength. The high court announced the schedule Friday, more than a month after officially agreeing to hear the legal challenge. A decision could affect the 2018 midterm elections, especially if the U.S. Supreme Court rules that some of the districts must be redrawn. Last year, a three-judge federal court panel in San Antonio invalidated two of the states 36 congressional districts and nine state House districts, ruling they were drawn with discriminatory intent. Attorney General Ken Paxton appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which granted a temporary suspension of the lower court ruling. We look forward to our day at the Supreme Court. Justice delayed is justice denied for TEXAS voters under the extreme gerrymandering of the legislature, state Rep. Rafael Anchia, D-Dallas, who chairs the Mexican American Legislative Caucus, a leading plaintiff in the case, said in a statement. We are hopeful that the justices will agree that Texans shouldnt be forced to wait any longer for justice at the polls. The state has been operating under temporary court-ordered maps drawn for the 2012 elections and adopted by the Legislature in 2013. Paxtons office didnt immediately return a call for comment, but has continually defended the maps. The effect on upcoming elections will depend on what the Supreme Court decides. A ruling that calls for a redrawing of any of the boundaries would not only affect districts named in the case but could also have a ripple effect on surrounding districts. Wow, this certainly sets up for an interesting 2018 election schedule; once the Supreme Court decides, the San Antonio three judge court will likely have to redraw and order new elections in some of the districts in time for the November election, Rolando L. Rios, one of the plaintiffs attorney in the case, said in a statement. We have been through this before and it gets a little crazy but it will work out; this is what happens when the State of Texas continually violates the voting rights of minorities. The affected congressional districts are District 35 represented by Democrat Lloyd Doggett and District 27, held by Blake Farenthold, R-Corpus Christi, who is not seeking re-election. None of the affected House districts are in Bexar County, but several are in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. WASHINGTON - The special counsel unsealed new charges Thursday against President Donald Trump's former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, accusing him of hiding income and defrauding banks. Many of the charges are similar to ones he was charged with in October. According to the new 32-count indictment, Manafort provided false information about his income to banks when he applied for mortgages. Seven of the counts relate to Manafort's failure to properly file reports on his foreign bank accounts. The indictment also revealed similar charges against Manafort's longtime business associate and campaign deputy, Rick Gates. He was indicted along with Manafort in October. The new charges were expected. The original indictment did not explicitly bring tax charges, an omission that experts predicted that the special counsel, Robert Mueller, would ultimately correct. The first indictment also relied heavily on accusations that Manafort violated foreign lobbying laws, which have not been used at trial. The new indictment gives prosecutors more options. Not involving Trump The charges do not involve Trump or his campaign and involve accusations that predate either man's involvement with the president. But the investigation has been an unwanted distraction for the White House. After Gates and Manafort were indicted, a former national security adviser and a foreign policy aide to Trump have pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about their Russian connections. And 13 Russian operatives were charged with trying to sow chaos in the presidential election and tip the vote toward Trump. The indictment depicts a complex scheme by Manafort and Gates to shield tens of millions of dollars from U.S. tax authorities by moving the funds through foreign bank accounts around the world: in Cyprus, the Seychelles, and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. "Manafort and Gates hid the existence and ownership of the foreign companies and bank accounts, falsely and repeatedly reporting to their tax preparers and to the United States that they had no foreign bank accounts," the indictment said. The authorities allege that Manafort and Gates disguised more than $10 million of their own money as loans to move the funds into the United States. At least $1.5 million was used to buy real estate for Manafort on Howard Street in New York's SoHo neighborhood, according to the documents. Mueller's investigation A lawyer for Manafort did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment. Manafort and Gates have pleaded not guilty. Manafort has also sued the Justice Department, claiming that Mueller's appointment had overstepped his authority by bringing charges unrelated to Russian meddling in the presidential election. The new indictment raises charges of bank fraud, which are new, as well as 16 charges of filing false tax returns. Prosecutors had previously accused Manafort and Gates of cheating on their taxes, but the new indictment turned each filing into an explicit charge. The indictment was brought in a federal court in Alexandria, Va., prosecutors said, because the crime occurred there. Mueller said he did not have authority to bring the charge in Washington. The two men are now facing similar indictments in two federal courts, which raises the likelihood that Manafort's case will be moved to Alexandria. Manafort's friends have said that Mueller's indictment is an effort to pressure him into providing information about Trump and his campaign. If so, Thursday's indictment adds to that pressure. But White House lawyers and Manafort's associates have been adamant that he does not have any information that could hurt Trump. Court records paint an unflattering portrait of the man who ran the Trump campaign. Prosecutors say Manafort concealed years of lobbying for the pro-Russia government in Ukraine, laundered millions of dollars in proceeds and misled investigators about his foreign work. WASHINGTON - The nation should keep assault rifles out of the hands of anyone under 21, President Donald Trump declared Thursday, defying his loyal supporters in the National Rifle Association amid America's public reckoning over gun violence. He also pushed hard for arming security guards and many teachers in U.S. schools. "There's nothing more important than protecting our children," Trump said, adding that he'd spoken with many members of Congress and NRA officials and insisting they would go along with his plans in the wake of last week's school shooting in Parkland, Fla., that left 17 people dead. But there were no words of support from the NRA for his age-limit proposal - and outright opposition from organizations of teachers and school security guards for the idea of arming schools to deal with intruders. "The NRA will back it and so will Congress," Trump contended as he called for raising the legal age of purchase for "all" guns from 18 to 21. A spokesman later said Trump was speaking specifically about semi-automatic weapons. The president's proposal came just hours after the NRA affirmed its opposition, calling such a restriction an infringement on gun owners' rights. Trump has spent the past two days listening to ideas about how to stem gun violence at schools after last week's shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. On Wednesday, he heard from students and family members of those killed in recent shootings and on Thursday from local and state officials. Trump has been proposing a growing list of ideas, including more stringent background checks for gun buyers, reopening some mental institutions to hold potential killers and banning "bump stock" devices that allow rifles to mimic machine guns. He said Thursday that many teachers have military experience and suggested they be paid bonuses for the added responsibility of carrying weapons. He also appeared open to other proposals to "harden" schools, such as fortifying walls and limiting entry points. One idea he didn't like: The "active shooter" drills that some schools hold. He called that "a very negative thing" and said he wouldn't want his own son participating. Spokesman Raj Shah later said Trump was concerned about the name and would prefer calling them safety drills. In Florida, Republican Sen. Marco Rubio said he now is open to raising age limits for long-gun purchases. That was the day after he was confronted at a CNN town hall by Parkland students and parents over his pro-gun votes and support from the NRA. Kansas Sen. Pat Roberts, another Republican, said that he supported raising age limits, saying: "Certainly, nobody under 21 should have an AR-15." NRA leaders at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference blamed the FBI and local reporting failures for the Florida shooting. "Evil walks among us and God help us if we don't harden our schools and protect our kids," said Executive Vice President and CEO Wayne LaPierre. "The whole idea from some of our opponents that armed security makes us less safe is completely ridiculous." NRA officials also accused Democrats and media outlets of exploiting the Florida shooting. "Many in legacy media love mass shootings," spokeswoman Dana Loesch said at CPAC. "Now I'm not saying that you love the tragedy, but I am saying that you love the ratings. Crying white mothers are ratings gold." She and LaPierre did not mention the age limit issue in their fiery remarks at CPAC. But Loesch said Wednesday night the NRA opposes the higher age limit for rifles because, "if we are asking young men and women to go and serve their country (in the military) they should be able to also have a firearm." She added: "I'm also thinking of young women" who may need a rifle for self-protection. The NRA was an early supporter of Trump's campaign, and it remains unclear how far the president will go to cross them. Shortly before LaPierre took the stage, Trump offered a rallying cry on Twitter, calling NRA leaders "Great People and Great American Patriots. They love our Country and will do the right thing." "I don't think I'll be going up against them," he said of the politically influential group. "I really think the NRA wants to do what's right." In Congress, a bill being drafted by Sens. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., would apply more broadly than just to assault rifles such as the AR-15 used in the Florida shootings. It would raise the age limits for all rifles. WASHINGTON - The Trump administration has decided that it needs no new legal authority from Congress to indefinitely keep U.S. military forces deployed in Syria and Iraq, even in territory that has been cleared of Islamic State fighters, according to Pentagon and State Department officials. In a pair of letters, the officials illuminated the Trump administration's planning for an open-ended mission of forces in Syria beyond the Islamic State fight. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson foreshadowed the plan in a speech last month, saying that troops will stay in Syria to curb Iran and prevent the Syrian government from reconquering rebel-held areas. Heavy rainfall hit San Antonio Friday morning, causing major road closures and flooding throughout the area. A complex of storms developed in Southwest Bexar County overnight and moved into the city around 4 a.m., according to Jason Runyen, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service. RELATED: Men tied to threats against Brooklyn-based rapper detained at San Antonio airport Within an hour and a half, about 2 inches had fallen over the San Antonio area, causing flooding in several parts of the city. San Antonio police closed the lower lanes of Interstate 35 at Main Avenue downtown due to flooding. Only one northbound lane of Interstate 35 at Weidner Road remains open while crews clear high water. The eastbound lanes of Interstate 10 at Interstate 37 and westbound lanes of Interstate 10 at Frio Road are experiencing major slowdowns, according to TXDOT. At Gibbs Sprawl and Rittiman Roads on the Northeast Side, drivers waded through deep puddles and flooded sections of the roadway. One driver, 20-year-old Catherine Holmes, stalled out briefly after hitting one such flooded crossing. "I knew it was going to rain," she said. "Just not like this. I've never seen it flooded over here before." RELATED: BCSO: Man shot at woman, held her against her will Luckily, her car restarted. She was able to drive out of the flooded area and continue on her way to her job at a nearby Walmart, but not before notifying authorities about the dangerous crossing. "It was dark so I couldn't really see how deep it was," she said. "I wouldn't have gone through here if I had seen all that water." That section of the roadway has since been closed, as well as three other city streets, according to the city's Emergency Street Closures web page. RELATED: Schertz police: Man fatally shot during botched home invasion An Interstate 10 access road near FM 1516 flooded early Friday morning, and about four cars stalled in the high water. Firefighters arrived and blocked the road with construction cones, but around 7:15 a.m., determined drivers started going around them and passing through the water anyway. "They're trying to do the best they can," said Lester Scarbro, 57, who works in the area and spent Friday morning watching the drivers try to go through the water with some colleagues. About 20 minutes after drivers started passing the road blocks, police arrived and began turning drivers back. Rain should taper off by about 7 a.m., though a flood advisory will remain in effect until 7:30 a.m, Runyen said. Once the storm passes through, chances of rain throughout the remainder of Friday will drop to around 40 to 50 percent. According to CPS's power outage map, there are currently 115 outages affecting over 9,000 customers. Text "NEWS" to 77453 for breaking news alerts from mySA.com Caleb Downs is a crime reporter for mySA.com. Read more of his stories here.| cdowns@mysa.com | Twitter: @calebjdowns Everyone is really tired of hearing how guns are violent and should be outlawed. A gun never killed anyone. People have killed people. Jack the Ripper and untold thousands of others have used knives to stab and maim people since history began. Do we outlaw them, too? It sure would be hard to carve up the Thanksgiving turkey. Automobiles have killed as many people as anything, some by accident, some intentionally. Do we ban vehicles, too? Get real, people. Complain about something that can be fixed, not something that cant be changed. Get a life. Michael B. White Media showing bias In the wake of another in a long series of shootings and killings in schools, I just observed a news anchor for one of the major networks go into a rant about how President Donald Trump must do something about the killings that just happened in the Florida school. Her extreme criticism of President Trump was in keeping with other media operatives who attempt to blame everything bad that happens within the continental U.S. and even outside the U.S. on the president. In contrast, former President Barack Obama never received criticism for any of the mass murders that occurred during his term in office. This obvious example of media bias has convinced me and many others that news purveyors have totally lost their credibility and consequently are not worth watching. Alton Samsel, Pleasanton NRA behind crisis The NRA literally has bought and paid for their own dream team of lawmakers in our Congress. It is entirely responsible for the crisis of gun violence in this country, and now its time for this unholy alliance to be held liable for the mayhem and heartache it has caused. Since money is the raison detre of the gun lobby, I propose that the NRA and all congressmen and senators with A+ or A ratings pay monetary damages to the families of the innocent victims of gun violence. Why not? They must be forced to acknowledge the catastrophe they have purposely created. Plus, they can afford it. Julie Love, Rio Medina More magic, please Re: Lone Star foreclosure looms again; Sale of 32-acre brewery property is set, Business, Feb. 15: To Chris Kit Goldsbury: Please repeat your Pearl magic at the Lone Star Brewery. San Antonio will be forever in your debt. Craig Bell HOME Affairs Minister Obert Mpofu yesterday caused a storm in Parliament and divided legislators, as he refused to answer questions on mining issues and the alleged missing $15 billion diamond revenue. Tempers started to flare when Mpofu swore that he would not be grilled by the committee, as long as its chairperson, Temba Mliswa (Norton MP), presided over the meeting. The former Mines minister claimed Mliswa was fighting a personal vendetta, saying the Norton MP once drove 600km to his home to discuss issues with him. It was not clear if Mpofu was trying to avoid giving answers on allegations made earlier on by businessman, Lovemore Kurotwi that he had solicited for a $10 million bribe from him in order for the Mines ministry to allow his company, Canadile Miners, to extract diamonds from Chiadzwa. Kurotwi, who had appeared before the Mines committee earlier, described Mpofu as corrupt like the deposed President Robert Mugabe. The businessman said Mugabe could have been part of the problem as he failed to take any action against Mpofu, after he wrote to him detailing how his then Mines minister had demanded a $10 million bribe from him and his foreign partners, Yeuda Litch and Subithry Naidoo. Mugabe was complicit, from the way he supported the corrupt tendencies of Mpofu, I would say he is corrupt, Kurotwi said. The businessman said when he refused to pay the $10 million bribe, Mpofu then hit back by pulling his company out of Chiadzwa and confiscating his equipment, which is now being used by the Zimbabwe Mining Development Corporation, while his 1,7 million carats of diamonds worth around $150 million were confiscated by the State. Mpofu reportedly went further and got Kurotwi arrested on allegations that he had lied to the government that he would bring in diamond investment worth $2 billion. He also allegedly roped in former ZMDC chairperson, Goodwills Masimirembwa and lawyer, Farai Mutamangira, to investigate him instead of engaging the police and Zimbabwe Anti-Corruption Commission. Mutamangira was said to have been paid close to $1 million for his services. The ZMDC board, which also appeared before the committee, disclosed that over a period of six years, the government only got $189 million from diamonds. But in 2009, Mpofu had bragged in Namibia that the country was expecting $2 billion in diamond revenue. When Mpofu appeared before the committee after Kurotwi, the minister seemed angry and gave snide remarks to MPs when they tried to instruct him on the proceedings. Mpofu told the legislators they could not lecture him on Parliament, as he has been a legislator since 1997. Asked by Musikavanhu MP Prosper Mutseyami to withdraw the statement, Mpofu responded: I am not going to withdraw because I have not taken an oath before the committee. Mliswa replied: We expect leaders like you to respect other MPs. Mpofu later addressed Mliswa as comrade instead of honourable and the issue caused another storm. Mpofu said he was angry because the committee had not sent him a formal invitation to appear before them, adding that he had read it from newspapers. He said as former Mines minister, he could not take questions for a ministry that he no longer presided over. I have no mandate to speak for the ministry of Mines and you must be aware of that comrade, Mpofu said I have been abused by the chairman (Mliswa), who has been saying things in public, attacking me and maligning me. I have been attacked by the chairman in the papers, where he has called me names, yet he nicodemously comes to my house in the cover of the night to talk about things. I live 600km from here. Mliswa denied the claims, saying he only visited Mpofus home to discuss Zanu PF issues pertaining to the fallout with former secretary for administration, Didymus Mutasa, and not diamond issues. He said Mpofu was trying to mislead Parliament. Mpofu responded: For as long as he (Mliswa) is sitting in front of me presiding on this issue, I will not co-operate. As Mpofu continued to refuse to take questions from MPs, Zanu PF legislators, Masango Matambanadzo (Kwekwe Central) and Dexter Nduna (Chegutu West) began to defend him. This resulted in MPs shouting and pointing fingers at each other. Mpofu asked to be excused for a few minutes claiming that he wanted to wash his hands. When he returned, he stuck to his guns, saying: I will never, ever be presided over by Mliswa. Mliswa responded: You know why you are avoiding me because I deal with facts. You will not get away with murder. Mpofu then accused Mliswa of threatening him. I have never seen such an unprofessional chairperson. (The late former chairperson of the Mines Portfolio Committee) Edward Chindori Chininga and (former Mines Committee chairperson) Daniel Shumba were professional and never behaved like this, he said. This further irked the legislators, who warned Mpofu he could be charged with contempt of Parliament. Seeing that the meeting had degenerated into complete chaos, Mliswa then sent MPs for a lunch break and ordered Mpofu to appear before the committee in the afternoon. Mpofu then went out shouting: I am not coming back. I will only come when you invite me formally. You want to abuse me. He did not return. Mliswa said the committee would now prepare a report on Mpofus behaviour to be handed over to the Speaker of the National Assembly, Jacob Mudenda. He said Mpofu would be allowed to give his side of the story and reasons why he did not want Mliswa to preside over the meeting. NewsDay Breaking News via Email Loading... Related Zimbabwe Latest News - Governor Ibrahim Gaidam of Yobe state has said that none of the abducted students in Dapchi has been rescued - The government had on Wednesday, February 21, said that some of the abducted girls were rescued by the army - But when Gaidam told the families of the girls to pray for their rescue when he visited Dapchi on Thursday, February 22 Governor Ibrahim Gaidam of Yobe state, has faulted the claim that the Nigerian army rescued some of the girls of the Government Girls Science Technical College (GGSTC), Dapchi, Yobe state who were abducted by Boko Haram insurgents on Monday, February 19. Vanguard reports that the governor who visited Dapchi town on Thursday, February 22, however, said, contrary to the claim, that no girl has been rescued yet. READ ALSO: Abia state governor Ikpeazu lambasts Nnamdi Kanu Legit.ng gathered that the Boko Haram terrorists had attacked the girls college on Monday, February 19, and abducted many of the girls. While 48 of them were said to have been rescued by the army, another 111 of them were reportedly still missing after the attack. A statement signed by Abdullahi Bego, the director general, press affairs to Governor Ibrahim Gaidam, on Wednesday, February 21, claimed that some of the girls were rescued and were then in the custody of the Nigerian Army. The statement read: The Yobe State Government hereby informs the public that some of the girls at Government Girls Science Technical College (GGSTC) whose school was attacked by Boko Haram terrorists last Monday have been rescued by gallant officers and men of the Nigerian Army from the terrorists who abducted them. The rescued girls are now in the custody of the Nigerian Army. We will provide more details about their number and condition in due course. His Excellency, Governor Ibrahim Gaidam, who is very grateful for the gallantry and hard work of the officers and men of the Nigerian Army involved in the operation, is monitoring the situation closely and will make a statement in due course." However, after visiting Dapchi community on Thursday, February 22, Gaidam faulted the claim that the Nigerian army rescued some of the girls. He said, In fact, that none of the abducted girls has been rescued. A Dapchi resident, Abdul Dapchi, whose two sisters were among the abducted girls, lamented to newsmen that the community became infuriated at Governor Gaidam after his confession that no girl was actually recued. He said:We were all angry. How could they have deceived us all along? The governor is said to have pleaded with the affected family members and the people of the community to keep praying to God for the release of their daughters. PAY ATTENTION: Read the news on Nigerias #1 new app Meanwhile, Legit.ng had previously reported that forty-eight students of the 94 who were reported missing after an alleged Boko Haram attack in Government Girls Technical College, Dapchi have returned. Survivors of Boko Haram - on Legit.ng TV Source: Legit.ng - Attahiru Jega laments that the federal government and the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) are reluctant to go to court over the recent election re-ordering - Jega argues that the Senate made a mistake in approving the election re-ordering - He calls politicians a threat to the country's democracy The former chairman of Nigeria's Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Attahiru Jega, on Thursday, February 22, described politicians as the greatest threat to democracy in the country. The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that Jega said this at an election programme organised by Youth Initiative for Advocacy, Growth & Advancement (YIAGA) in Abuja. The report quoted him as saying the biggest threat is the recklessness of politicians to undermine Nigerias democracy, thereby destabilising the process of development. Nigeria like all countries face threats to its democracy, we must identify the threats that have the tendency to derail the development of our democracy and address them. READ ALSO: Buhari meets with governors in Aso Villa, exchanges pleasantries with Fayose We must also checkmate the threats of politicians to undermine our democracy because all we need now is adding value to the process. We also need to mobilise our people in towns and villages to be part of the electoral process and ensure that we do not engage in authoritarian reversal which would take us several years to get back on track. The signals are there, the fragility of the system is evident, we are a country with enormous systemic security challenges," he said. He added: Both INEC and the interested parties have been reluctant to go to court for interpretation of constitutional provisions and this is significant because this has to do with the independence of electoral bodies. Frankly, a lot of the arguments on this cannot be wished away and I think it is necessary for the independence of the electoral commission because that is key to the integrity of the electoral process because if we allow people to jettison and undermine that independence for whatever reason, then we are in serious problem. I think there is serious justification to test this matter in court. I am struggling to see where the National Assembly found the constitutional justification for what they have done. I will mention two specific provisions. "First of all, in the schedule of the constitution part 15 Section 1, of the said schedule, INEC has the constitutional power to organise, undertake and supervise elections. But that is not enough. In section 76 (1), Section 111 (1) and Section 178 (1), it is categorically stated that elections shall be held on a date to be appointed by INEC. So, if elections are to be held on a date set by INEC, where does the National Assembly get the power?" Jega advised that Nigerians should have quality representatives that would provide good governance and protect the interest of the people. On his part, the director-general of the National Orientation Agency (NOA), Dr Garba Abari, said Nigerias democracy was under threat and the signs and indicators were evident. Abari reportedly stressed the need for government to partner CSOs to educate Nigerians on elections to especially curb invalid votes. According to him, NOA was concerned about the number of invalid votes that kept recurring during elections, adding that there was need to educate the electorate on election procedure. PAY ATTENTION: Read the news on Nigerias #1 new app Also, the executive director of YIAGA, Samson Itodo, said with barely 358 days to the 2019 elections, there was need for Nigerians to redesign what the future of the nation would look like. Itodo explained that the election programme was timely as it was aimed at assessing the state of Nigerias democracy and to chart the way forward. Legit.ng earlier reported that the chairman of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Uche Secondus, accused INEC of doing everything possible to rig the 2019 general elections in favour of the All Progressives Congress (APC). Secondus said his party supported the electoral amendment by the Senate that put the presidential election last. He said there was nothing with the sequence. Obasanjo and Jonathan are good | Legit.ng TV - on Legit.ng TV Source: Legit.ng - Following report that it deliberately halted operations in Sambisa forest to allow Boko Haram leader Shekau escape, the Nigerian army has reacted - According to the deputy director of the army public relation, there are several factors that influence the planning and conduct of military operations, - He said it was appalling and unimaginable that a fundamental operational procedure could be misinterpreted The Nigerian army has reacted to report that troops were asked to halt during Operation Lafiya Dole in order to allow Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau to escape describing it as false. In a statement on Thursday, February 22, Colonel Onyema Nwachukwu who is the deputy director of the army public relation explained that there were methods of operation in military engagement. He listed some of the factors that can allow troops to slow down or change tactics and that this has nothing to do with allowing the enemy escape. Read the statement below: "The attention of Theatre Command, Operation LAFIYA DOLE has been drawn to unfortunate mainstream and social media reports and insinuations that troops advance at the ongoing Operation DEEP PUNCH II was deliberately halted to allow the escape of the purported factional Boko Haram terrorists group leader, Abubakar Shekau in Sambisa forest. This is not true. READ ALSO: Apprehension in Benue over alleged army fliers Though the Theatre Command considers this misinformation as very laughable, it is quite disheartening and capable of dampening the morale of troops who are working round the clock to fight the terrorists in north eastern Nigeria. It is therefore expedient to respond to these insinuations. Contrary to these mischievous allegations, no such order or directive was given by anybody to any of the units and formations on that operation. This spurious allegation is most unfortunate and wake up call for the public to be very wary of agents of destabilization that are determined to thwart our efforts of clearing the remnants of Boko Haram terrorists hibernating in nooks and crannies of Sambisa forest and the Lake Chad islands. Contrary to the insinuations being touted and for a better understanding of military operations by the authors of this misinformation, it is crucial to point out, that there are several factors that influence the planning and conduct of military operations, whether kinetic or otherwise. The ongoing Operation DEEP PUNCH II, which is aimed at clearing Boko Haram insurgents from the Sambisa forest and the northern fringes of Lake Chad region, was planned to be executed in phases. It is a phased operation and therefore requires that at a predetermined point or stage, troops will be halted either preparatory to transiting to another phase or outrightly transiting depending on the threat situation. Secondly, during the operations, troops advance could be halted when vehicles or other mobile equipment are bugged down due to the difficulty of the terrain and for recovery purposes. More also and very importantly too, in military operations avenues are deliberately provided for troops to habour, where they rest and carry out refitting of weapons and other equipment before resuming the operations. Additionally, booby traps and land mines could also compel an advancing troop to halt to enable some specialized squad, scout and assess the situation before movement resumes. These and several other factors could precipitate the halting of troops during operations. It is therefore very appalling and unimaginable that a fundamental operational procedure could be misinterpreted and be mischievously used as a psychological weapon to indirectly dampen the morale of our troops. PAY ATTENTION: Read the news on Nigerias #1 new app The Theatre Command is seriously taken aback by this phony publication and considers it a psychological warfare on troops of Operation LAFIYA DOLE. Consequently, members of the public are please enjoined to discountenance this misinformation as it is untenable and does not reflect the strong chararacter and courageous disposition of troops of Operation LAFIYA DOLE." Meanwhile, following the recent abduction of some female students of Government Girls Science and Technical College, Dapchi, Yobe state, by Boko Haram terrorists, the minister of information and culture, Alhaji Lai Mohammed said that it was a ploy by the insurgents to embarrass President Muhammadu Buharis government. The minister, who arrived at the college on Thursday, February 22, said that the government didn't want to manufacture stories on the true state and number of the kidnapped schoolgirls, Vanguard reports. Legit.ng gathered that Mohammed urged the parents of the affected girls and the people of Dapchi community to give the government more time to tell them the exact situation of things. Survivors of Boko Haram - on Legit.ng TV Source: Legit The Tories are taking delusion to a new level. The Cabinet met for 8 hours yesterday to hammer out a unified position on Brexit. The official version is that everyone emerged thinking they had gotten what they wanted. That simply means the bickering will be on hold for a bit. There is no way for the hard and soft Brexit factions of the Tories to reconcile their positions. And more generally, in negotiations when the two sides have meaningful differences in their position, a good deal is one where both parties come out feeling a bit bruised. They had to make meaningful concessions. So unless there was some blood on the floor and one side emerged a significant loser, differences were merely papered over. The Tories are unwilling to deal with Brexit in a serious manner because if and when they do, the two camps will have to duke it out. As Richard North put it: Rebellious Tory backbenchers can be full of fire and fury when their government has a big majority but, when the margin is slender and the opposition looks poised to win the next election, the MPs invariably rediscover the advantages of obedience, and put the party first. Right before the ministerial meeting started at Chequers, the EU put out a document that had been reviewed by member state diplomats, that reaffirmed the EUs position on key issues. It is remarkable how many times the EU keeps repeating the same basic points about what the UK can and cannot expect to achieve, and the UK keeps acting as if it can demand something not on offer and have it delivered. One of the UKs pet demands has been that it shouldnt have to conform with EU rules all that tightly, yet should still have the benefits of streamlined (or per the UK pipe dream, frictionless) trade. The EU has said no to this and sadly saw the need to say no again. From the Guardian: Under what is understood to be Mays [sic] preferred model, the UK would be in regulatory alignment with the EU in some areas while finding different ways to achieve the same outcomes in other sectors. In the so-called third basket of sectors, the UK would in time diverge from the EU and go its own way under the model. Yet, with something close to incendiary timing, the European commission, hours abefore the cabinet get-together, has published a document ruling out the model. It is claimed by Brussels that such an approach would breach an agreement among EU27 leaders to prevent cherry-picking by the UK that it is said would pose a risk to the integrity of the single market. The document says: UK views on regulatory issues in the future relationship including three basket approach are not compatible with the principles in the [European council] guidelines. The paper, discussed and agreed among member state diplomats, claims the model proposed by the UK would also appear to give the UK a say in EU decision-making. The paper responds that no EU-UK co-decision is possible and that the UK is either in or out. The document adds that the approach proposed by the UK would also have to involve a central role for the European court of justice. Even if the UK weakened its stance to allow this, the paper claims, there would be a problem in enforcing the courts decisions without the rest of EU law being applicable. So what came out of the Cabinet confab? Its almost painful to read. From the Financial Times: The 11-member Brexit cabinet committee was said by those at the Chequers meeting to have endorsed a proposal dubbed Canada plus plus plus by David Davis, the Brexit secretary. Under the plan, Britain would seek to negotiate a free-trade agreement similar to the EU-Canada deal, but then try to embellish it by securing better access to the single market for goods and services through close regulatory co-operation. Brexiters seized on the broad agreement at Chequers that Britain should be able to set its own rules and regulations, allowing an ambitious managed divergence with the EU over time. But Remainers, led by Philip Hammond, the chancellor, insisted that the starting point should be that Britain and the EU would have high levels of alignment The EU and UK would agree common regulatory goals, known in London as an equivalence of outcomes, but would be free to achieve those goals in different ways. The right to diverge would be overseen by a dispute resolution mechanism, imposing market access sanctions if either side tried to disrupt the level playing field. There would be a mutual recognition of each others rules and regulators. The EU had rejected all of this even before the meeting. Barnier even developed a cute graphic that showed that the only type of deal the UK could have given its red lines was a Canada-type arrangement. You could call it Canada plus to allow for the idea that a deal with the UK would require an extensive section on services, which was not part of the Canada treaty. But plus plus plus is old deep and special wine in new bottles. And that wine turned to vinegar quite a while back. Similarly, the EU had told the UK no equivalence for financial services. It has said if the UK is going to have single-market type access, as it will during the transition period, it needs to accept the jurisdiction of the ECJ. And mutual recognition of each others rules and regulators has never been on offer. The EU will conform to UK requirements when exporting goods and services to its market as it does with all other third countries as a matter of course. I wish I could come up with a suitable Monty Python clip to illustrate this bizarre dynamic. But thats not a fit, because the characters in Monty Python, no matter how daft, are still adults. Despite the OxBridge veneer, the UK is acting like a child who thinks if he makes enough of a ruckus, the adults will give in. The EU has already shown it isnt of that school of parenting. This episode generated many pithy comments from Financial Times readers, such as: PeeJay Hi Id like to discuss driving my LH drive car on your UK motorways. Id like to follow my own local laws but Im going to make sure that I follow the principle of equivalence of outcomes so I will always drive with the aim of not crashing. I recognise that continuing to drive on the right as I do at home would create difficulties given the flow of traffic in the UK, but obviously on a motorway I will be able to drive in the outside lane and treat it as the equivalent of the slow lane at home I believe this will be an acceptable compromise that recognises my sovereignty while creating a deep and special road-based relationship. I find roundabouts confusing but traffic lights are ok, so Id like to diverge when I get to a roundabout, always subject to the overriding equivalence of outcomes principle, so I promise to not actually crash. Your police may be concerned by the screeching tyres and evasive action of other road users as I exercise my very limited and reasonable right to diverge but I hope you will regard this as evidence of the vibrant and dynamic nature of our new deep and special relationship. If an accident does happen I dont want to be subject to UK courts since that would infringe my sovereignty. Instead I propose that we set up an independent tribunal to adjudicate. Over time there my be other aspects of your motorway laws that I find difficult to comply with or just hard to understand so I reserve the right to follow a programme of ambitious managed divergence we can discuss the details as we go along (just call me on my mobile its not hands-free but I can usually reach it in the passenger footwell I can always stop if I think its unsafe to continue driving people hoot as they swerve to avoid me parked in the fast lane but reaching the hard shoulder is such a pain and I find driving without the music of the horns is distracting). I look forward to forging a deep and special partnership of motorway users. But let us be creative as well as practical in designing an ambitious partnership which respects the freedoms and principles of the UK, and the wishes of the foreign drivers like me. A partnership of interests, a partnership of values; a partnership of ambition for a shared future: UK drivers and me side by side delivering prosperity and opportunity for all. This is the future within our grasp so, together, let us seize it. As Richard North put it: In many ways, Mrs May is now confronted with an unsolvable dilemma. The practical, political and legal hurdles, separately and combined, have conspired to create a perfect storm of unsolvability (if that is actually a word) which would defeat a constitutional or political genius and surely prove beyond the ken of our current prime minister, who is self-evidently neither. The question then must not be what manner of deeds are required to cut a Gordian knot of such dimensions as to make the original look little more than a snag in a running line. If Brexit means Brexit, as a newly-appointed prime minister was keen to assure us, then unsolvable means unsolvable. We are way past anything that will get Mrs Mays war cabinet off the hook on which it is impaled. The task now is to put the creature out of its misery as fast and humanely as possible, and to minimise the damage and mess as it thrashes around in its ungainly and violent death-throes. Politically, this is the embodiment of the age-old joke, occasioned when certain tourists asked for directions to Dublin, only to be told, I wouldnt start from here. There is no way, from her current political location, that Mrs May can make it to her destination whatever that might be. May is set to give a speech on Brexit next week. So expect the usual infighting to resume then. At the launch of the St. Patrick's Day Parade in Clonmel were, seated, Richie Molloy, Deputy Mayor; Brendan Nyhan, president of Clonmel Rotary Club and parade grand marshal; and Anthony Coleman, District Administrator, Tipperary County Council. Standing, Aidan Fennessey, Clonmel Twinning Committee; David Shanahan, Clonmel Chamber of Commerce CEO; Dolores Fahey, Civil Defence; Catherine McCormack and Carol Creighton, County Council; Cllr. Pat English and Cliona Maher, South Tipp Arts Centre manager. Clonmel Rotary Club president Brendan Nyhan will be the grand marshal of the St. Patrick's Day Parade in Clonmel. The parade will celebrate Clonmel Rotary Club, which this year marks its 50th anniversary. The club started life on September 30th, 1968 and was the brainchild of Tommie Moran, who paradoxically had both a chemist and a tobacconist's shop in Gladstone Street; and he was supported by Tom Reilly and Arthur Morris. The club are very fortunate to have one the founding members, Con Moroney, still very active in Rotary. Since its inception the goal of the club has been to make a positive difference to the people and town of Clonmel and the wider community. Rotary is a self-funding and completely voluntary service organisation. Down through the years the club has run a variety of fundraising events to raise money for various charities and causes. Con Moroney brought back the idea for a mile of pennies that hed come across in Blackpool in the 1970s and another one of the more novel fundraising efforts in the past was the collection and baling of old newspapers that were sold to the Waterford Paper factory. In the pre-Internet era Clonmel Rotary published the local telephone directory, which was very popular. The club has always been prepared to help out where it can, whether it is a charitable donation, sponsorship or youth development activities. The club has a proud history in the town since its foundation and has built up a strong presence in the community, working in partnership with other local organisations. It is as strong and vibrant now as it was at its inception and this is very much due to the hard work and dedication of the members down the years. The St. Patrick's Day Committee has been working hard for the past number of weeks getting ready for the parade in Clonmel. It's hoped that people will come out and participate in and support the event in the same strength of numbers that they've done in recent years. The Clonmel Bianconi Twinning Committee are again organising the Morning Parade from the Town Hall at 11.30am to St. Marys Church for 12 noon Mass, which will be celebrated in Irish. This parade will be led by Banna Chluain Meala and will include councillors, representatives of town organisations and visitors from three of Clonmels twin towns Esyines, Costa Masnaga and Reading. The day will commence with the traditional flag-raising ceremony at St. Patricks Well at 8.30am. Once again, the starting area for the main parade, which commences at 3pm, is Irishtown and it will parade through the town to finish in Parnell Street, outside the Town Hall. Any groups wishing to participate in the parade can do so until Friday week, March 2nd by going online to www.countytipperarychamber.com/2018-clonmel-st-patricks-day-parade-registration.html and completing the form and submitting it to Clonmel Chamber of Commerce. To keep up to date on the parade, follow the St. Patricks Day Parade Facebook page. Tipperary weather is about to take a cold turn - Met Eireann have issued a Staus Yellow cold weather warning for a full week! A blast of weather all the way from Siberia in Russia could be set to hit Ireland over the coming days according to the latest Irish and UK forecast as Spring sunshine is replaced by a sub-zero eastern weather front. Exceptionally cold weather is forecast for next week with significant wind chill and severe frosts. Disruptive snow showers are expected from Tuesday onwards, particularly in the east and southeast. The alert is in affect from today, Friday, February 23, to next Friday, March 2. Met Eireann says it will be dry settled but cold for the remainder of the weekend but a return to winter is its forecast. It is possible that the weather front that will keep weather settled until the weekend could end up pushing very cold Siberian weather east. Temperatures are set to fall to -1 Saturday night and -2 on Sunday night and Monday night, with chilly days. While the details of further outlook remain uncertain, Met Eireann cautioning at the moment that it looks like it will be a cold regime for early days of next week with easterly winds, and frosty nights with sub zero temperatures. Snow is also possible with the a risk of some wintry showers in some eastern and southern coastal counties and some may be of snow, but mainly dry elsewhere. The Met Office in the UK is also monitoring the situation. It says weather could potentially make a 'dramatic few days'. It warns that very cold weather could hit Ireland on Britain on Monday. Stealing heating oil from a community resource centre was taking from his own a judge has told a man as he convicted him of theft at a special sitting of Cashel District Court. Before the court was Johnny Reilly, 2 Aubrey Road, Glengoole, Thurles, who had denied a charge of stealing kerosene heating oil from Glengoole Resource Centre. However following evidence Reilly was convicted of the charge by Judge Terence Finn. He escaped a jail sentence. Evidence was given in court by two brothers who were visiting their father in Glengoole and observed the theft from the home. Justin Norton told the court that on November 12 last he was upstairs in his fathers house when he looked out a window and saw two people crossing the field behind the house. They were carrying a green, five gallon drum. They were dressed in tracksuits and hoodies with the hoods up. Mr Norton said the two people proceeded to the boundary of the field with the resource centre where they put down the drum. They looked over the fence into the resource centre and after a while went back for the drum. It was at that stage Mr Norton realised they were going for the oil tank. He called his brother, who was downstairs, and rang the gardai. Mr Norton and his brother both then observed the two men in hoodies loitering at the tank before they came back over the fence and left, carrying the green drum, which now appeared to be full. The men crossed the field to the far ditch where they left down the drum and climbed out on to the roadway. Mr Norton and his brother got into their own car and drove up the road towards Ballingarry village to see if they could see what vehicle the other men were using. He said they saw a silver Volkswagen people carrier driving towards them and he used his phone to record the vehicle as it drove past them, getting a clear view of the number plate. He recognised the men in the car. He said he thought the car had been parked further up the road in a farmers access road. Mr Norton said he could not make out the faces of the two men but gave clear descriptions of the hoodies they wore - one was dressed in a white or grey hoodie and dark tracksuit pants with a stripe down the side, while the other was also wearing tracksuit bottoms and a dark hoodie with a grey hood and multicoloured top. He said the man with the darker hoodie had carried the drum. Alan Norton said he joined his brother in observing the two men at his fathers home. He used his dads binoculars to watch them. He confirmed his brothers evidence. Mr Norton said he took a video of what was happening on his phone. When the two men in hoodies went out onto the road he drove his car, with Justin Norton in the passenger seat, drove after them. Alan Norton confirmed the two men in hoodies were in the car, the man in the darker hoodie was driving. Mr Norton said that after he had passed the silver car he observed it in his rear view mirror stopping at the side of the ditch where the green drum had been left. After this the Nortons drove back to Glengoole village where they met Garda Kieran Tobin and gave him the video and photos they had taken. Garda Tobin told the court he responded to a call about the theft at 13.25pm on November 12 last while he was on mobile patrol. He went straight to the resource centre. He saw no vehicle but met the Norton brothers. A short time later, at 2.05pm, Garda Tobin was driving on the Bog Road when he met a car matching the description the men had given him and with the same registration as the car in the video. He activated the lights on the garda car to indicate to them to pull over, which they did. Garda Tobin spoke to the female driver. He recognised John Reilly who was the front seat passenger. The garda observed that he clothing he was wearing matched the description given to him by the Nortons and in the video - a dark hoodie with a grey hood. Garda Tobin said he also noticed a strong smell of fuel from the vehicle. A back seat passenger was another man who matched the description of the second man in the video and seen by the Nortons. Reilly was arrested and taken to Thurles garda station where he was interviewed and later charged with the theft of the kerosene. Before going to the station Garda Tobin searched the vehicle and found a green five-gallon drum matching the one in the video. It was empty. The drum and hoodies were produced in court as evidence. Manager of the Glengoole Resource Centre, Clare Cashin, gave evidence in court that the centre is heated by kerosene oil burners and keeping the centre at an appropriate temperature is important as it hosts children and elderly groups. An application by defence solicitor Aidan Leahy that no evidence had been given to say the liquid in the drum was kerosene, and other legal technicalities, were rejected by Judge FInn saying Reilly had a case to answer. Mr Leahy then said he would not be offering any defence in the case. Judge Finn proceeded to convict Reilly of theft. He heard the defendant had two previous convictions for road traffic matters. Mr Leahy said his client is a young man and lives with his partner. Judge Finn said that Reilly had taken a product that was being used to heat a community resource centre, a community where he was resident at the time. He was taking from his own - the court forms a very poor view of that. Mr Leahy said Reilly had 100 in court with him and if given time would top that up. Judge Finn said he required compensation to be paid. He adjourned the case to allow preparations to be made for this and also to consider a Community Service order so Reilly could give back to the community. Judge Finn also suggested that Reilly might want to offer some expression of regret to Ms Cashin. The case was adjourned for sentencing to last Thursday's court, February 22, in Cashel. A Probation Service report was made available at last Thursdays Cashel District Court. Judge Finn said Reilly had been found suitable for Community Service and so he ordered him to carry out 150 hours of Community Service in lieu of a sentence of three months imprisonment. A Tipperary man serving life for murder committed 20 years ago, has had a bid to have his conviction declared a miscarriage of justice dismissed by the Court of Appeal. Anthony Buck (41), with a last address at Garrymore, Clonmel, had pleaded not guilty at the Central Criminal Court to the murder of David Nugent in Tipperary on July 8, 1996. He was convicted by a jury following a lengthy trial and was given the mandatory life sentence by Mr Justice John Quirke on February 2, 1998. The prosecution's case relied on incriminating statements made by Buck over the course of three interviews conducted following his arrest in July 1996. In an earlier application, it was claimed to be of some significance that the Sunday in question was the day of the Munster Hurling Final between Limerick and Tipperary because efforts to contact a solicitor in Cahir, Cashel, Tipperary, Clonmel and Carrick on Suir were unsuccessfull. The Court of Appeal dismissed Buck's bid to have his conviction declared a miscarriage of justice on the basis of new or newly discovered facts today (Friday). The Director of Public Prosecutions successfully sought to have the application dismissed as an abuse of process and Buck's bid failed before it went to full hearing. Giving judgment, Mr Justice John Hedigan said Buck was a lay litigant. He had nonetheless prepared his written application with great skill and considerable detail. Moreover, at the hearing the court was impressed by the manner in which he presented his case. He was as brief as he could be and answered all questions of the court with courtesy, skill and care. In the court's judgment however, the application put forward no material that supported an application to have his conviction declared a miscarriage of justice. It did not include new or newly-discovered facts , as was required, and was bound to fail. What Buck was doing, the judge said, was examining in detail the record of his own trial and drawing conclusions from matters that seemed to him to be contained in custody records, statements and memos of garda interviews of other named individuals. Throughout his pleading and in his submissions to the court, Buck referred to his belief and to things he thinks can be reasonably inferred. Mr Justice Hedigan said these very expressions support the view that there are no new facts or newly discovered facts available to ground this application. It was merely further argument based on the facts that existed at the time of the trial. As to the argument Buck made concerning the ability of his legal representatives to appreciate the significance of certain matters at his trial, Mr Justice Hedigan said this was an unstateable position, bearing in mind that his legal team at the time was headed by Patrick McEntee SC, the most distinguished criminal senior counsel of the day. Mr Justice Hedigan, who sat with Mr Justice Alan Mahon and Mr Justice John Edwards, said the DPP's motion to dismiss the application before it went to full hearing must succeed. Clonmel World Music present Rob Heron and the Tea Pad Orchestra from Newcastle-upon-Tyne at Raheen House Hotel, Clonmel next Thursday, March 1st. Clonmel World Music is back for its second show of the year, following the huge success of its Scullion show in January, and they are delighted to welcome one of the best UK Roots bands back to the town. Rob Heron and the Tea Pad Orchestra are one of the hardest working bands in the UK roots circuit, with thousands of touring miles under their belts. They have earned themselves a sizeable fan base in Britain, Europe and beyond. Based in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, they play their own brand of Western Swing, Blues, Gypsy Jazz and Country, or North Eastern Swing as they've coined it. Their style is more eclectic than most, influenced by early 20th century American music, with the addition of razor-sharp solos, great arrangements and original songs; their music harks back to a golden age, while staying perfectly modern. Rob Heron and The Tea Pad Orchestra dont care what genre you choose to put them in western swing, country blues, ragtime hokum or whatever else as long as you understand that theyre 100% sincere and 100% immersed in this stuff. This is no lazy pastiche, no dressing up box. They live and breathe this music and want you to get immersed with them. The songs are penned by Tom Cronin and Rob Heron, who is a crazy fool for country music and a full time dandy-cowboy! The dynamic band also features Ben Fitzgerald (guitar), Tom Cronin (mandolin, harmonica), Colin Nicholson (accordion) and Ted Harbot (double bass). Doors for the gig will open at 8pm. There will be no support act, and the band will start at 9pm sharp. Tickets are available online on www.clonmelworldmusic.com ; in Marians Bookshop, Clonmel ; in South Tipperary Arts Centre Clonmel, or from Gerry Lawless on 086-3389619. (Natural News) Former employees of Google and Facebook are campaigning to warn users about the addictive dangers posed by social media networks like Google and Facebook, according to a Daily Mail Online report. Tristan Harris, who was a former in-house ethicist at Google, is leading the new group called the Center for Humane Technology which campaigns to raise awareness about the negative effects of smartphones and social media, especially to children and younger users. The group launched an awareness campaign called The Truth About Tech. Together with the nonprofit media watchdog organization Common Sense Media, the group plans to lobby the U.S. government over tech addiction. Moreover, it is tackling an advertising campaign directed to 55,000 public schools in the U.S. to warn parents, students, and teachers over its concerns, which include the mental health effects of social media overuse, such as depression, stress, anxiety, self-image, and self-worth. The group also aims to address more broader problems that technology brings, such as its strong influence in relationships and peoples political beliefs. Another former high profile figure of a technology company has expressed concerns over its products in December. Chamath Palihapitiya, a former executive of Facebook, also took a stand against the social media company that he helped to build. He said that Facebook is ripping society. Palihapitiya joined the company in 2007 and became its Vice President for user growth. He feels guilty for Facebooks influence and manipulation to its users. Moreover, he advised users to pause from using social media. (Related: Social media mind games: Psychologist reveals Facebooks manipulation tactics to keep you hooked (and what you can do about it).) We were on the inside. We know what the companies measure. We know how they talk, and we know how the engineering works, Harris told the New York Times, as cited by Daily Mail Online. The largest supercomputers in the world are inside of two companies Google and Facebook and where are we pointing them? Were pointing them at peoples brains, at children. Even Facebook itself has acknowledged that the site may negatively affect democracy through the spread of fake news. In fact, its executives said in a series of blog posts on January that it was far too slow in determining negative effects that occurred during the 2016 U.S. election. They cited Russian interference, toxic discourse, and the dangerous consequences of misinformation. The hazards of social media Social media has changed the way people communicate and interact with one another. However, it also has consequences that users encounter. Here are some of the dangers of social media use. Mental health issues Instagram is the most damaging social media platform on mental health, based on a survey of 1,500 teenagers and young adults by the Royal Society for Public Health and the Young Health Movement (YHM) in the U.K. It was found to cause extreme anxiety and depression. Instagram is the most damaging social media platform on mental health, based on a survey of 1,500 teenagers and young adults by the Royal Society for Public Health and the Young Health Movement (YHM) in the U.K. It was found to cause extreme anxiety and depression. Compromised privacy Whenever you go online, you compromise your privacy by disclosing your personal information. Whenever you go online, you compromise your privacy by disclosing your personal information. Risks for the young and credulous Young people use social media now more than ever in the past. In fact, approximately 91 percent of individuals aged 16 to 24 use the internet for social networking. Most of them share their personal information without second thoughts or knowing what harm it may bring them. If youd like to read more news stories and studies on technology, please go to Computing.news. Sources include: DailyMail.co.uk GulfNews.com (Natural News) A baby formula scandal continues to rock France to its core: the French dairy group, Lactalis, has issued a worldwide recall of its powdered milk products due to some of them being contaminated with salmonella. At least 7,000 tons of Lactalis products have been pulled from over 80 countries across Europe, Asia, and Africa. Despite the companys efforts, 38 children have been hospitalized ever since the scandal first broke out in December of last year. Furthermore, its believed that there are at least 10 more salmonella cases that have not been taken into consideration. Far from being a recent occurrence, the Institut Pasteur identified the salmonella strain as being the exact same one that caused another outbreak back in 2005. As critics have pointed out, the Craon-based production site responsible for the 2005 outbreak was purchased by Lactalis a year later. First we confirmed that the same type of Salmonella agona was behind the two outbreaks, in 2005 and 2017. So we asked ourselves where the strain could have been during the 12 years in between. The only possible hypothesis is that it remained at the factory in question, said Francois-Xavier Weill, director of the Institut Pasteur. This was confirmed by Emmanuel Besnier, chief executive officer (CEO) of Lactalis. Besnier stated that the company had disinfected the site shortly after it was bought, but admitted that the salmonella problem may have returned after factory renovations and developed over the course of several months. Traces of salmonella were first discovered on a broom in August. Though government inspectors reviewed the factory the next month, they didnt go through the production area for baby formula. Moreover, French law dictates that Lactalis was under no obligation to inform the inspectors of the salmonella. Besnier admitted that more traces were uncovered in November, leading to another round of decontamination while remaining quiet on the matter. Lactalis only confirmed the presence of salmonella in December, when reports of children becoming infected salmonella began to emerge. Several more children fell ill despite the recall, a fact that Lactalis has blamed on retailers for failing to act quickly. Other retailers, such as the supermarket chains Leclerc and Carrefour, have confessed to selling Lactalis products well after the company announced the recall. The French government has said that it would hold these companies accountable, in addition to Lactalis itself. (Related: Oyster recall: Salmonella contamination forces Canadian company to recall oysters.) The Craon factory has been shut down for decontamination, while the dehydration tower where the salmonella was initially found will be be permanently closed. Furthermore, Besnier has estimated that the scandal would cost his company upwards of hundreds of millions of Euros. Although the French government originally deemed the company to be solely responsible for the outbreak, President Emmanuel Macron has since come forward to state that the crisis was a massive oversight on the part of his administration. Moving forward, there will be zero tolerance on the part of the state, remarked Macron. Numerous families have filed lawsuits against Lactalis and retailers. The organization, Association of Victims of Salmonella Contaminated Milk, is representing these families and providing support to other families who believe that their own children were made ill by Lactalis products. Quentin Guillemain, founder of the group, has called the crisis a health scandal of unprecedented scale. Although Lactalis has offered compensation to the families, Guillemain stated that the victims would push through with their legal complaints. Lactalis is a huge multinational. That doesnt mean it should be allowed to operate above the law, he said. Salmonella is a foodborne illness that can cause an infected person to experience diarrhea, fever, and abdominal cramps. Although most people can recover without treatment, hospitalization may be required in cases with severe diarrhea. For infants and people with an existing illness, salmonella can be a life-threatening condition. Remain updated on any and all news about the Lactalis scandal by going to FoodSupply.news. Sources include: NYTimes.com GlobalNews.ca UK.Reuters.com (Natural News) Rocket science is not a realm which belongs exclusively to the just the United States and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) anymore. Many other countries besides the U.S. have made significant progress with their rockets and space-bound satellites, and the latest one of note is none other than Japan, which recently announced the successful launch of what is now the smallest rocket ever to carry a satellite to orbit. Whats even more impressive is that the tiny Japanese rocket was said to be cobbled together from nothing but recycled home electronics and smartphone parts, which means that with the right process and certain equipment, it could be possible for anyone to replicate their results. At the very least, its a sure shot at sending a small satellite into space without having to spend a fortune on the preparation. According to a report, the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) managed to launch the worlds smallest experimental rocket last week. Dubbed the SS-520, the rocket was launched at the JAXA Uchinoura Space Center. And with it was an ultra-small TRICOM-1R satellite that measured only 13.6 inches. The rocket itself was said to be about the size of a utility pole that measures about 10 meters in length and 50 centimeters in diameter. The successful launch is a welcome change from last years previous attempt wherein the Japanese space agency tried and failed to launch the very same small rocket. Although they were able to easily fire up the first stage of the rocket, it is said that the second stage stalled and was unable to ignite due to electrical communication issues. Due to the circumstances surrounding the launch, the Japanese were forced to abort the mission. The report on the successful JAXA rocket launch stated that the CubeSat, which was found to be in nominal condition by JAXA, will be used to collect images of the planet Earths surface with the use of multiple on-board cameras. The fact that they were able to do this means that Japan is now among a growing number of so-called space industry leaders, all of which appear to have embraced tiny space exploration vehicles, owing to their many benefits. Even NASA itself was said to be planning on launching tiny rockets in the not-so-distant future, with help from private space company Rocket Lab. In particular, Rocket Labs plans appear to be quite promising. It has plans to launch a tiny rocket called Electron some time later this year, and on it, there will be a total of three payloads. The first one is an imaging satellite while the other two are satellites meant to collect data for tracking ships as well as the weather. While much larger space companies, with deeper pockets and access to more resources, such as SpaceX and even NASA itself, exist, its still fortunate that small players and even the smallest space agencies in countries around the world can work on their own space-related initiatives. After all, the availability of small rockets that are capable of carrying small payloads into orbit means a great deal, as the associated costs are quite low and there are few barriers to entry. For companies that find its too expensive to work with the likes of SpaceX, small rockets may be the perfect ticket to space. Learn more about how rockets are used in space missions in Space.news. Sources include: DailyMail.co.uk Jaxa.jp A controversial public debate has been raging since last year when the San Francisco Police Department pulled out of the FBIs Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF), pitting those who say the departments withdrawal puts the city at risk against those who say local officers shouldnt be embedded with federal agents until civil rights concerns are addressed. Although San Francisco is the largest Bay Area city without a presence on the JTTF, an NBC Bay Area investigation discovered very few other local agencies in the region choose to lend their officers to the federal task force. Law enforcement sources say that leaves the region vulnerable to a terrorist attack. Most of those agencies that arent on the JTTF told NBC Bay Area they simply dont have the resources or personnel to dedicate a full-time officer. But for some larger agencies, such as the San Francisco Police Department, politics also factor into the decision. In San Francisco, policy no longer allows its police officers to be sworn federal officers on the JTTF. The JTTF operating out of the FBI San Francisco field office is responsible for covering 15 Northern California counties. But NBC Bay Area found just six local agencies overall, representing only two of those counties, have a formal presence on the task force. Formal members of the JTTF are sworn in as federal agents, and as such, gain security clearances that allow them access to intelligence they otherwise are not allowed to see. The FBI says that by having so few local agencies with butts in the seats at JTTF headquarters, it puts this area at a disadvantage when conducting terror investigations within those communities because they lean on the local knowledge and connections of those officers. The threat has evolved, and it is much more difficult to detect, said Craig Fair, deputy special agent in charge for the San Francisco field office. Individuals are radicalizing themselves, acting alone, and that makes them much more difficult to detect. That is why we rely on our relationships with communities as well as local law enforcement. But prominent civil rights groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) say there are significant civil rights concerns when local officers are deputized as federal agents. The FBI has a decades-long practice of targeting minority and politically unpopular communities, said Zahra Billoo, executive director of CAIR San Francisco Bay Area. Through that practice, they have eroded nearly all civil rights protections when it comes to interviewing, visiting, and investigating what they would call people of interest. When local police departments partner with the FBI, what weve been worried about is they are performing at the lower civil rights standards that the FBI uses, rather than the much stronger protections that we have in California. Lack of Participation There are more than 100 local law enforcement agencies within the 15 counties covered by the FBIs San Francisco field office, but multiple federal and local law enforcement sources told NBC Bay Area only six of those agencies have a permanent officer assigned to the JTTF. Those agencies include the Oakland Police Department, San Jose Police Department, Fremont Police Department, Alameda County Sheriffs Office, Santa Clara County Sheriffs Office and BART police. Although the San Mateo County Sheriffs Office does not currently have a member on the task force, a spokesperson told NBC Bay Area that the department expects to formally join the JTTF soon. Map by Maria Rojas/NBC While the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center (NCRIC), which facilitates information sharing among federal and local law enforcement agencies, has more participation from local law enforcement agencies, those officers dont participate in active terror investigations. Thats the responsibility of the JTTF, and the FBI says having local partners on the task force is invaluable. The Bay Area has iconic targets, Fair said. Everybody knows that, whether its the Golden Gate Bridge, Transamerica building, or other parts of the Bay Area. [Those locations] have actually been part of propaganda material that has been pushed out through ISIS social media. Fair said local officers bring unique skills to the table and also bring a connection to the command staff and individual officers in their departments. Local terror investigations, he said, can be hampered without their support. The implication is that they dont have the day-to-day real time access to certain information, Fair said. There could be a delay while we pick up the phone and find the right person to talk to. I dont want to say that there is a communication breakdown, but there certainly would be a delay in either receiving information or reporting information thats germane to that particular department. Civil Rights Concerns But some critics of the JTTF, like CAIRs Billoo, believe the FBI is exaggerating the public safety implications. If the FBI knows of a credible terror threat, and because the department is not participating in the Joint Terrorism Task Force wont still pick up the phone and have a conversation with that police department, that sounds like political gaming to me, Billoo said. Billoo says the fact that local officers are deputized as federal agents is a major concern because the federal government has simply lost the trust of many minority communities in the Bay Area. She says the FBI puts the Muslim community under a microscope without giving the same level of scrutiny to possible white supremacist terrorists. I worry that what we have right now is a president who is openly anti-Muslim and has put forward policies that target members of my community as well as other communities, Billoo said. While Fair vehemently denies the FBI targets people for First Amendment protected activity, he acknowledges his office has some work to do in gaining the trust of some Bay Area communities. I understand that, and that is what we try to overcome, Fair said. I come into work [every day], and my job is to uphold the Constitution and protect the American people. And there is no community that is excluded from that mission. Fair insists that the FBI and any JTTF activity targets only individuals, not communities. And he says the Federal agents only investigate individuals or groups that could pose a potential threat. Billoo and other critics say past history of FBI behavior belies that, and they say the level of distrust in many minority communities, especially Muslim communities, towards the FBI and the U.S. Government remains high. NBC Bay Area sent a survey to more than 90 Northern California law enforcement agencies to gain a perspective on their decisions to participate or not participate on the JTTF. NBC Bay Area received information on 35 of those agencies, and the vast majority of agencies without an officer on the task force say it simply comes down to a lack of resources. For small agencies, sparing even one full-time officer can be a challenge. However, many did say they attend regular briefings with the FBI to get updates on potential threats. The FBI says its not concerned if smaller agencies dont participate but would like larger agencies, such as the San Francisco Police Department, to consider joining. None of the larger Bay Area law enforcement agencies that do not have an officer on the task force agreed to an interview for this story. San Francisco According to federal and local law enforcement sources, federal officials had no idea a gunman opened fire on his colleagues at a San Francisco UPS facility until they saw it on television. Although Fair did not want to comment on that specific incident, he said time is crucial in any potential terror attack. Its important for us to get the identity of that individual so that we can run the name through our databases and so that we can resolve that theres not another threat out there as weve seen in France, as weve seen in other areas around the [European Union] where theres multiple actors, Fair said. When the Memorandum of Understanding between the JTTF and San Francisco Police Department expired last year, San Franciscos Board of Supervisors voted to pull the department out of the task force. San Francisco Supervisor Jane Kim helped spearhead the initiative, saying she was concerned the JTTF was targeting Muslim communities. What we ask is that we dont use local law enforcement officers to survey communities without probable cause, Kim said. I think that is the main issue. Meanwhile, the San Francisco Police Officers Association has been fighting a well-publicized battle with City Hall over that decision. It is astounding that in San Francisco, being one of the top five targets in the United States, that our investigators are prohibited from cooperating or participating in investigations that could cause injuries or fatalities to citizens, residents, and visitors to this city, said Martin Halloran, President of the San Francisco Police Officers Association. The San Francisco Police Department declined an interview request for this story, but said in a statement the department will continue to work in collaboration with local, state and federal law enforcement partners to keep the city safe irrespective of their status on the JTTF. Although San Francisco is the largest Bay Area city without a presence on the JTTF, an NBC Bay Area investigation discovered very few other local agencies in the region choose to lend their officers to the federal task force. Law enforcement sources say that leaves the region vulnerable to a mass scale terrorist attack. Most of those agencies that arent on the JTTF told NBC Bay Area they simply dont have the resources or personnel to dedicate a fulltime officer. But for some larger agencies, such as the San Francisco Police Department, politics also factor into the decision. In San Francisco, policy does not allow its police officers to be sworn federal officers on the JTTF. The JTTF operating out of the FBI San Francisco field office is responsible for covering 15 Northern California counties. (LINK)But NBC Bay Area found just six local agencies overall, representing only two of those counties, have a formal presence on the task force. Formal members of the JTTF are sworn in as federal agents, and as such, gain security clearances that allow them access to intelligence they otherwise are not allowed to see. The FBI says that by having so few local agencies with butts in the seats at JTTF headquarters, it puts this area at a disadvantage when conducting terror investigations within those communities because they lean on the local knowledge and connections of those officers. The threat has evolved and it is much more difficult to detect, said Craig Fair, Deputy Special Agent in Charge for the San Francisco Field Office. Individuals are radicalizing themselves, acting alone, and that makes them much more difficult to detect. That is why we rely on our relationships with communities as well as local law enforcement. But prominent civil rights groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) say there are significant civil rights concerns when local officers are deputized as federal agents. The FBI has a decades-long practice of targeting minority and politically unpopular communities, said Zahra Billoo, Executive Director of CAIR San Francisco Bay Area. Through that practice they have eroded nearly all civil rights protections when it comes to interviewing, visiting, and investigating what they would call people of interest. When local police departments partner with the FBI, what weve been worried about is they are performing at the lower civil rights standards that the FBI uses, rather than the much stronger protections that we have in California. Lack of Participation There are more than 100 local law enforcement agencies within the 15 counties covered by the FBIs San Francisco field office, but multiple federal and local law enforcement sources told NBC Bay Area only six of those agencies have a permanent officer assigned to the JTTF. Those agencies include the Oakland Police Department, San Jose Police Department, Fremont Police Department, Alameda County Sheriffs Office, Santa Clara County Sheriffs Office, and BART police. [maybe embed interactive map here] Although the San Mateo County Sheriffs Office does not currently have a member on the task force, a spokesperson told NBC Bay Area that the department expects to formally join the JTTF soon. While the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center (NCRIC), which facilitates information sharing among federal and local law enforcement agencies, has more active participation from local law enforcement agencies, those officers dont participate in active terror investigations. Thats the responsibility of the JTTF, and the FBI says having local partners on the task force is invaluable. The Bay Area has iconic targets, Fair said. Everybody knows that, whether its the Golden Gate Bridge, Transamerica building, or other parts of the Bay Area. [Those locations] have actually been part of propaganda material that has been pushed out through ISIS social media. Fair said local officers bring unique skills to the table and also bring a connection to the command staff and individual officers in their departments. Local terror investigations, he said, can be hampered without their support. The implication is that they dont have the day-to-day real time access to certain information, Fair said. There could be a delay while we pick up the phone and find the right person to talk to. I dont want to say that there is a communication breakdown, but there certainly would be a delay in either receiving information or reporting information thats germane to that particular department. Civil Rights Concerns But some critics of the JTTF, like CAIRs Billoo, believe the FBI is exaggerating the public safety implications. If the FBI knows of a credible terror threat, and because the department is not participating in the Joint Terrorism Task Force wont still pick up the phone and have a conversation with that police department, that sounds like political gaming to me, Billoo said. Billoo says the fact that local officers are deputized as federal agents is a major concern because the federal government has simply lost the trust of many minority communities in the Bay Area. She says the FBI puts the Muslim community under a microscope without giving the same level of scrutiny to possible white supremacist terrorists. I worry that what we have right now is a president who is openly anti-Muslim and has put forward policies that target members of my community as well as other communities, Billoo said. While Fair vehemently denies the FBI targets people for First Amendment protected activity, he acknowledges his office has some work to do in gaining the trust of some Bay Area communities. I understand that and that is what we try to overcome, Fair said. I come into work [every day] and my job is to uphold the Constitution and protect the American people. And there is no community that is excluded from that mission. Fair insists that the FBI and any JTTF activity targets only individuals, not communities. And he says the Federal agents only investigate individuals or groups that could pose a potential threat. Billoo and other critics say past history of FBI behavior belies that and they say the level of distrust in many minority communities, especially Muslim communities, towards the FBI and the US Government remains high. NBC Bay Area sent a survey to more than 90 Northern California law enforcement agencies to gain a perspective on their decisions to participate or not participate on the JTTF. NELSON MAP HERE NBC Bay Area received information on 35 of those agencies, and the vast majority of agencies without an officer on the task force say it simply comes down to a lack of resources. For small agencies, sparing even one fulltime officer can be a challenge. However, many did say they attend regular briefings with the FBI to get updates on potential threats. The FBI says its not concerned if smaller agencies dont participate, but would like larger agencies, such as the San Francisco Police Department, to consider joining. None of the larger Bay Area law enforcement agencies that do not have an officer on the task force agreed to an interview for this story. San Francisco According to federal and local law enforcement sources, federal officials had no idea a gunman opened fire on his colleagues at a San Francisco UPS facility until they saw it on television. Although Fair did not want to comment on that specific incident, he said time is crucial in any potential terror attack. Its important for us to get the identity of that individual so that we can run the name through our databases and so that we can resolve that theres not another threat out there as weve seen in France, as weve seen in other areas around the [European Union] where theres multiple actors. When the Memorandum of Understanding between the JTTF and San Francisco Police Department expired last year, San Franciscos Board of Supervisors voted to pull the department out of the task force. San Francisco Supervisor Jane Kim helped spearhead the initiative, saying she was concerned the JTTF was targeting Muslim communities. What we ask is that we dont use local law enforcement officers to survey communities without probable cause, Kim said. I think that is the main issue. Meanwhile, the San Francisco Police Officers Association has been fighting a well-publicized battle with City Hall over that decision. It is astounding that in San Francisco, being one of the top five targets in the United States, that our investigators are prohibited from cooperating or participating in investigations that could cause injuries or fatalities to citizens, residents, and visitors to this city, said Martin Halloran, President of the San Francisco Police Officers Association. The san Francisco Police Department declined an interview request for this story, but said in a statement the department said it will continue to work in collaboration with local, state and federal law enforcement partners to keep the city safe irrespective of their status on the JTTF. A controversial public debate has been raging since last year when the San Francisco Police Department pulled out of the FBIs Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF), pitting those who say the departments withdrawal puts the city at risk against those who say local officers shouldnt be embedded with federal agents until civil rights concerns are addressed. Although San Francisco is the largest Bay Area city without a presence on the JTTF, an NBC Bay Area investigation discovered very few other local agencies in the region choose to lend their officers to the federal task force. Law enforcement sources say that leaves the region vulnerable to a mass scale terrorist attack. Most of those agencies that arent on the JTTF told NBC Bay Area they simply dont have the resources or personnel to dedicate a fulltime officer. But for some larger agencies, such as the San Francisco Police Department, politics also factor into the decision. In San Francisco, policy does not allow its police officers to be sworn federal officers on the JTTF. The JTTF operating out of the FBI San Francisco field office is responsible for covering 15 Northern California counties. (LINK)But NBC Bay Area found just six local agencies overall, representing only two of those counties, have a formal presence on the task force. Formal members of the JTTF are sworn in as federal agents, and as such, gain security clearances that allow them access to intelligence they otherwise are not allowed to see. The FBI says that by having so few local agencies with butts in the seats at JTTF headquarters, it puts this area at a disadvantage when conducting terror investigations within those communities because they lean on the local knowledge and connections of those officers. The threat has evolved and it is much more difficult to detect, said Craig Fair, Deputy Special Agent in Charge for the San Francisco Field Office. Individuals are radicalizing themselves, acting alone, and that makes them much more difficult to detect. That is why we rely on our relationships with communities as well as local law enforcement. But prominent civil rights groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) say there are significant civil rights concerns when local officers are deputized as federal agents. The FBI has a decades-long practice of targeting minority and politically unpopular communities, said Zahra Billoo, Executive Director of CAIR San Francisco Bay Area. Through that practice they have eroded nearly all civil rights protections when it comes to interviewing, visiting, and investigating what they would call people of interest. When local police departments partner with the FBI, what weve been worried about is they are performing at the lower civil rights standards that the FBI uses, rather than the much stronger protections that we have in California. Lack of Participation There are more than 100 local law enforcement agencies within the 15 counties covered by the FBIs San Francisco field office, but multiple federal and local law enforcement sources told NBC Bay Area only six of those agencies have a permanent officer assigned to the JTTF. Those agencies include the Oakland Police Department, San Jose Police Department, Fremont Police Department, Alameda County Sheriffs Office, Santa Clara County Sheriffs Office, and BART police. [maybe embed interactive map here] Although the San Mateo County Sheriffs Office does not currently have a member on the task force, a spokesperson told NBC Bay Area that the department expects to formally join the JTTF soon. While the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center (NCRIC), which facilitates information sharing among federal and local law enforcement agencies, has more active participation from local law enforcement agencies, those officers dont participate in active terror investigations. Thats the responsibility of the JTTF, and the FBI says having local partners on the task force is invaluable. The Bay Area has iconic targets, Fair said. Everybody knows that, whether its the Golden Gate Bridge, Transamerica building, or other parts of the Bay Area. [Those locations] have actually been part of propaganda material that has been pushed out through ISIS social media. Fair said local officers bring unique skills to the table and also bring a connection to the command staff and individual officers in their departments. Local terror investigations, he said, can be hampered without their support. The implication is that they dont have the day-to-day real time access to certain information, Fair said. There could be a delay while we pick up the phone and find the right person to talk to. I dont want to say that there is a communication breakdown, but there certainly would be a delay in either receiving information or reporting information thats germane to that particular department. Civil Rights Concerns But some critics of the JTTF, like CAIRs Billoo, believe the FBI is exaggerating the public safety implications. If the FBI knows of a credible terror threat, and because the department is not participating in the Joint Terrorism Task Force wont still pick up the phone and have a conversation with that police department, that sounds like political gaming to me, Billoo said. Billoo says the fact that local officers are deputized as federal agents is a major concern because the federal government has simply lost the trust of many minority communities in the Bay Area. She says the FBI puts the Muslim community under a microscope without giving the same level of scrutiny to possible white supremacist terrorists. I worry that what we have right now is a president who is openly anti-Muslim and has put forward policies that target members of my community as well as other communities, Billoo said. While Fair vehemently denies the FBI targets people for First Amendment protected activity, he acknowledges his office has some work to do in gaining the trust of some Bay Area communities. I understand that and that is what we try to overcome, Fair said. I come into work [every day] and my job is to uphold the Constitution and protect the American people. And there is no community that is excluded from that mission. Fair insists that the FBI and any JTTF activity targets only individuals, not communities. And he says the Federal agents only investigate individuals or groups that could pose a potential threat. Billoo and other critics say past history of FBI behavior belies that and they say the level of distrust in many minority communities, especially Muslim communities, towards the FBI and the US Government remains high. NBC Bay Area sent a survey to more than 90 Northern California law enforcement agencies to gain a perspective on their decisions to participate or not participate on the JTTF. NELSON MAP HERE NBC Bay Area received information on 35 of those agencies, and the vast majority of agencies without an officer on the task force say it simply comes down to a lack of resources. For small agencies, sparing even one fulltime officer can be a challenge. However, many did say they attend regular briefings with the FBI to get updates on potential threats. The FBI says its not concerned if smaller agencies dont participate, but would like larger agencies, such as the San Francisco Police Department, to consider joining. None of the larger Bay Area law enforcement agencies that do not have an officer on the task force agreed to an interview for this story. San Francisco According to federal and local law enforcement sources, federal officials had no idea a gunman opened fire on his colleagues at a San Francisco UPS facility until they saw it on television. Although Fair did not want to comment on that specific incident, he said time is crucial in any potential terror attack. Its important for us to get the identity of that individual so that we can run the name through our databases and so that we can resolve that theres not another threat out there as weve seen in France, as weve seen in other areas around the [European Union] where theres multiple actors. When the Memorandum of Understanding between the JTTF and San Francisco Police Department expired last year, San Franciscos Board of Supervisors voted to pull the department out of the task force. San Francisco Supervisor Jane Kim helped spearhead the initiative, saying she was concerned the JTTF was targeting Muslim communities. What we ask is that we dont use local law enforcement officers to survey communities without probable cause, Kim said. I think that is the main issue. Meanwhile, the San Francisco Police Officers Association has been fighting a well-publicized battle with City Hall over that decision. It is astounding that in San Francisco, being one of the top five targets in the United States, that our investigators are prohibited from cooperating or participating in investigations that could cause injuries or fatalities to citizens, residents, and visitors to this city, said Martin Halloran, President of the San Francisco Police Officers Association. The san Francisco Police Department declined an interview request for this story, but said in a statement the department said it will continue to work in collaboration with local, state and federal law enforcement partners to keep the city safe irrespective of their status on the JTTF. A controversial public debate has been raging since last year when the San Francisco Police Department pulled out of the FBIs Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF), pitting those who say the departments withdrawal puts the city at risk against those who say local officers shouldnt be embedded with federal agents until civil rights concerns are addressed. Although San Francisco is the largest Bay Area city without a presence on the JTTF, an NBC Bay Area investigation discovered very few other local agencies in the region choose to lend their officers to the federal task force. Law enforcement sources say that leaves the region vulnerable to a mass scale terrorist attack. Most of those agencies that arent on the JTTF told NBC Bay Area they simply dont have the resources or personnel to dedicate a fulltime officer. But for some larger agencies, such as the San Francisco Police Department, politics also factor into the decision. In San Francisco, policy does not allow its police officers to be sworn federal officers on the JTTF. The JTTF operating out of the FBI San Francisco field office is responsible for covering 15 Northern California counties. (LINK)But NBC Bay Area found just six local agencies overall, representing only two of those counties, have a formal presence on the task force. Formal members of the JTTF are sworn in as federal agents, and as such, gain security clearances that allow them access to intelligence they otherwise are not allowed to see. The FBI says that by having so few local agencies with butts in the seats at JTTF headquarters, it puts this area at a disadvantage when conducting terror investigations within those communities because they lean on the local knowledge and connections of those officers. The threat has evolved and it is much more difficult to detect, said Craig Fair, Deputy Special Agent in Charge for the San Francisco Field Office. Individuals are radicalizing themselves, acting alone, and that makes them much more difficult to detect. That is why we rely on our relationships with communities as well as local law enforcement. But prominent civil rights groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) say there are significant civil rights concerns when local officers are deputized as federal agents. The FBI has a decades-long practice of targeting minority and politically unpopular communities, said Zahra Billoo, Executive Director of CAIR San Francisco Bay Area. Through that practice they have eroded nearly all civil rights protections when it comes to interviewing, visiting, and investigating what they would call people of interest. When local police departments partner with the FBI, what weve been worried about is they are performing at the lower civil rights standards that the FBI uses, rather than the much stronger protections that we have in California. Lack of Participation There are more than 100 local law enforcement agencies within the 15 counties covered by the FBIs San Francisco field office, but multiple federal and local law enforcement sources told NBC Bay Area only six of those agencies have a permanent officer assigned to the JTTF. Those agencies include the Oakland Police Department, San Jose Police Department, Fremont Police Department, Alameda County Sheriffs Office, Santa Clara County Sheriffs Office, and BART police. [maybe embed interactive map here] Although the San Mateo County Sheriffs Office does not currently have a member on the task force, a spokesperson told NBC Bay Area that the department expects to formally join the JTTF soon. While the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center (NCRIC), which facilitates information sharing among federal and local law enforcement agencies, has more active participation from local law enforcement agencies, those officers dont participate in active terror investigations. Thats the responsibility of the JTTF, and the FBI says having local partners on the task force is invaluable. The Bay Area has iconic targets, Fair said. Everybody knows that, whether its the Golden Gate Bridge, Transamerica building, or other parts of the Bay Area. [Those locations] have actually been part of propaganda material that has been pushed out through ISIS social media. Fair said local officers bring unique skills to the table and also bring a connection to the command staff and individual officers in their departments. Local terror investigations, he said, can be hampered without their support. The implication is that they dont have the day-to-day real time access to certain information, Fair said. There could be a delay while we pick up the phone and find the right person to talk to. I dont want to say that there is a communication breakdown, but there certainly would be a delay in either receiving information or reporting information thats germane to that particular department. Civil Rights Concerns But some critics of the JTTF, like CAIRs Billoo, believe the FBI is exaggerating the public safety implications. If the FBI knows of a credible terror threat, and because the department is not participating in the Joint Terrorism Task Force wont still pick up the phone and have a conversation with that police department, that sounds like political gaming to me, Billoo said. Billoo says the fact that local officers are deputized as federal agents is a major concern because the federal government has simply lost the trust of many minority communities in the Bay Area. She says the FBI puts the Muslim community under a microscope without giving the same level of scrutiny to possible white supremacist terrorists. I worry that what we have right now is a president who is openly anti-Muslim and has put forward policies that target members of my community as well as other communities, Billoo said. While Fair vehemently denies the FBI targets people for First Amendment protected activity, he acknowledges his office has some work to do in gaining the trust of some Bay Area communities. I understand that and that is what we try to overcome, Fair said. I come into work [every day] and my job is to uphold the Constitution and protect the American people. And there is no community that is excluded from that mission. Fair insists that the FBI and any JTTF activity targets only individuals, not communities. And he says the Federal agents only investigate individuals or groups that could pose a potential threat. Billoo and other critics say past history of FBI behavior belies that and they say the level of distrust in many minority communities, especially Muslim communities, towards the FBI and the US Government remains high. NBC Bay Area sent a survey to more than 90 Northern California law enforcement agencies to gain a perspective on their decisions to participate or not participate on the JTTF. NELSON MAP HERE NBC Bay Area received information on 35 of those agencies, and the vast majority of agencies without an officer on the task force say it simply comes down to a lack of resources. For small agencies, sparing even one fulltime officer can be a challenge. However, many did say they attend regular briefings with the FBI to get updates on potential threats. The FBI says its not concerned if smaller agencies dont participate, but would like larger agencies, such as the San Francisco Police Department, to consider joining. None of the larger Bay Area law enforcement agencies that do not have an officer on the task force agreed to an interview for this story. San Francisco According to federal and local law enforcement sources, federal officials had no idea a gunman opened fire on his colleagues at a San Francisco UPS facility until they saw it on television. Although Fair did not want to comment on that specific incident, he said time is crucial in any potential terror attack. Its important for us to get the identity of that individual so that we can run the name through our databases and so that we can resolve that theres not another threat out there as weve seen in France, as weve seen in other areas around the [European Union] where theres multiple actors. When the Memorandum of Understanding between the JTTF and San Francisco Police Department expired last year, San Franciscos Board of Supervisors voted to pull the department out of the task force. San Francisco Supervisor Jane Kim helped spearhead the initiative, saying she was concerned the JTTF was targeting Muslim communities. What we ask is that we dont use local law enforcement officers to survey communities without probable cause, Kim said. I think that is the main issue. Meanwhile, the San Francisco Police Officers Association has been fighting a well-publicized battle with City Hall over that decision. It is astounding that in San Francisco, being one of the top five targets in the United States, that our investigators are prohibited from cooperating or participating in investigations that could cause injuries or fatalities to citizens, residents, and visitors to this city, said Martin Halloran, President of the San Francisco Police Officers Association. The san Francisco Police Department declined an interview request for this story, but said in a statement the department said it will continue to work in collaboration with local, state and federal law enforcement partners to keep the city safe irrespective of their status on the JTTF. Described by many as a transformative first lady, Michelle Obama will host A Moderated Conversation with Former First Lady Michelle Obama at the Oracle Arena in Oakland on Wednesday, March 28 at 8:00 p.m. Most of the country fell in love with Mrs. Obama while husband Barack Obama served as president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. Despite no longer being in the White House, she remains in a position of great power thanks to her immense following and popularity. As First Lady, Mrs. Obama launched a series of initiatives highlighting the importance of physical and mental health, and education. Campaigns that are still running today thanks to her involvement. She launched Lets Move!, an organization dedicated to solving the challenge of childhood obesity, Joining Forces, a service supporting veterans and service members, Reach Higher, a campaign dedicated to inspiring young people to see higher education and Let Girls Learn, helping adolescent girls around the world go to school. The moderated conversation is put together by Unique Lives & Experiences, a womens lecture series, and tickets for the event go on sale Feb. 26 at 10:00 a.m. Reese Witherspoon will take part in the Watermark Conference for Women Silicon Valley as a keynote speaker, joining Amal Clooney and other powerful women. In addition to being an academy-award winning actress, Witherspoon wears many other hats, as an entrepreneur, activist and producer. The conference comes at a time where men and women in Hollywood are making nation-wide headlines with the latest #MeToo movement, which is sure to be a topic of conversation at the conference which will also have New York Times Reporter Jodi Kantor, who co-authored the story about Harvey Weinstein that led to a crescendo of women speaking out. The annual, sold out conference taking place at the San Jose Convention Center on Feb. 23, is expected to have more than 6,500 attendees and will be the largest conference of its kind. Watermark is the leading community of top women executives, emerging executives and entrepreneurs in the San Francisco Bay Area whose mission is to increase the number of women in leadership positions. In the wake of high-profile cases of gun violence like last weeks Florida school massacre, and what police called a thwarted shooting spree in Fair Haven, Vermont, Gov. Phil Scott issued a broad range of recommendations he wants his state to take, to remain one of the safest in the nation. Gov. Scott, a Republican, said Thursday he wants the Vermont Legislature to consider increasing the legal age to purchase a gun to 21, with exceptions, like for military members or people who have completed firearms training courses. Scott called on lawmakers to consider expanding reporting requirements and background checks for gun purchases, to further reduce access to guns by people who should not have them. He also voiced support for bills that would take guns away from domestic abusers and people deemed threats to harm themselves or others. Additionally, the governor announced a new round of safety audits of schoolssomething Vermont Public Safety Commissioner Tom Anderson said has long been a priorityand a request for $5-million in grant money that could help schools upgrade security, such as by installing video monitoring systems or investing in school resource officers. No single solution or combination of actions will eliminate 100 percent of the risk, Gov. Scott said. But I remain fully committed to working with the legislature and community stakeholders to reduce the risk of violence in our communities. Scott said he remains open-minded to discussing solutions to public safety concerns with people from different points of view, suggesting all options are on the table. He did, though, say the idea of arming educators to defend their classrooms does not seem like a viable solution to him. Evan Hughes, of the Vermont Federation of Sportsmens Clubs, encouraged the Vermont Legislature to not move too quickly on new rules that may impact the ability of law-abiding Vermonters to purchase guns theyd use responsibly. Already, Vermont has some of the best gun laws in the countrythey work very well for us, Hughes told necn, cautioning against letting emotions of the Florida massacre overtake decision-making at the Statehouse. Laws enacted following tragedies tend to not be based on sound public policy. Gov. Scott acknowledged some of his suggestions will likely be unpopular with a segment of voters, including from his own party. However, Scott said when it comes to critical issues like community safety, Vermonters should put politics aside in order to achieve results that make the state a better place to live for everyone. Also at the Statehouse Thursday, student advocates turned out in force to call on lawmakers to get tougher on guns. We do not feel safe in our schools, Harwood Union High School Sophomore Emma Greenwood told the Vermont Senate Judiciary Committee. Nearly 100 middle and high schoolers from a dozen schools packed the Statehouse, urging lawmakers to support stringent background checks for each and every gun sale. School should always be a safe place, South Burlington High School Kiran Waqar told the committee in formal testimony. Are we just going to sit around and watch more lives be taken? Stowe ninth grader Natalie Dohela asked the senators in remarks she presented to the committee. In the wake of the school massacre in Parkland, Florida, young activists have been calling on politicians to get serious on gun reforms, hoping to avoid another mass shooting. The Montpelier demonstration by teenagers followed similar initiatives around the country. When will we value our children more than our guns? Burlington senior Eli Pine asked the judiciary committee. This is the first step, but we also need more, Montpelier junior Nathan DeGroot said of bills pending in the Vermont House and the Vermont Senate. The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Dick Sears, D-Bennington County, said he and his colleagues valued the input by the teens. Its always helpful to hear from the kids on how impacted theyve been by events around the country and here in Vermont, Sears said. We should listen, Gov. Scott later said of the presentations by students. And we should listen throughout the country. Its their future and they should be a part of it. Gov. Scott again praised a teenager from Dutchess County, New York for reporting alarming Facebook messages from her friend, crediting that student with helping thwart a possible school shooting in Fair Haven last week. The governor said he wants all Vermonters, whether theyre kids or grown-ups, to remember: if you see something suspicious, say something to law enforcement. President Donald Trump's proposals on school security were front and center during a forum Thursday afternoon with candidates for Illinois attorney general. State Rep. Scott Drury, an attorney by trade, voiced his opposition to arming teachers in schools. "The answer to gun violence in schools is not to put more guns in schools," Drury said. "To sit and listen to Donald Trump say we will just arm all of our teachers--thats absolutely backwards." Former Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn supports an assault weapons ban. "I think we need to ban assault weapons, we need to put limits on high capacity magazines, we need to license gun dealers, and most of all, we need to give the people a chance to vote on this," he said. As did attorney and former Chicago police oversight official Sharon Fairley. "We just need an assault ban," she said. "We just need to get that done." Sen. Kwame Raoul also vocalized against assault weapons but honed in on handgun violence as well. "I am against assault weapons, but on a daily basis, we are losing kids to handguns in the hands of people who simply shouldnt have them," he said. Such a ban is already in place in Highland Park, where Nancy Rotering, also a candidate for attorney general, is mayor. "We banned assault weapons and large capacity magazines in Highland Park under a 10-day window that was provided in the concealed carry act," she said. "We got sued by the NRA, we got taken to the Supreme Court and we prevailed." Now Sen. Tammy Duckworth is hoping the time is right for a national assault weapons ban. "The problem is the Republican leadership in both houses of Congress won't let this come up for a vote," she said. Gary slutkin/founder &ceo cure violence (00:20) "This has been a stuck problem, obviously," said Cure Violence CEO Gary Slutkin. A problem Congressman Mike Quigley is proposing to fight a new way. "We are here today because we have to find options that have a shot at getting accomplished," he said. He suggested attacking violence as a public health problem and funding the CDC to search for a cure. "If you have an assault weapon, like you have in so many of these shootings, designed for a theater of war with a 30 round clip," he said. "You are not protecting your home, you are not hunting deer--you are hunting people." A caller from Massachusetts told authorities months before the Parkland, Florida school shooting that suspect Nikolas Cruz was a "school shooter in the making." According to a document released by the Broward County Sheriff's Office, a caller from Massachusetts reached out to them in November of 2017. "Caller advised subject Nikolas Cruz is collecting guns and knives. Cruz wants to join the Army. Concerned he will kill himself one day and believes he could be a school shooter in the making," the document reads. The deputy who responded contacted the caller via telephone. "No report was initiated," the document reads. In an interview after the shooting, the deputy said he referred the caller to the Palm Beach Sheriff's Office as the caller said he believed the Cruz was living in Lake Worth. The document makes no reference to how the caller knew Cruz. The call and response remain under an internal affairs review. Brookline Deputy Superintendent Michael Gropman said it is not surprising that a tip about Cruz came from out of state. He said in today's digital and social media age, it is common. "All those warning signs were there," he said in reference to Cruz. Gropman conceded that it can be difficult for departments to keep up with the "massive" amount of tips received, but information suggesting an imminent threat should be taken seriously. While the Cruz case may make it seem like law enforcement failed to act on numerous tips, Gropman said sometimes the issue is that agencies aren't sharing critical information with each other. He said privacy laws make it difficult for law enforcement to know about school or medical issues. "Until the social service agencies, law-enforcement, education, mental health, and hospitals can all communicate readily about possible, perceived threats, we're not going to be able to significantly affect this," said Gropman. Cruz, 19, a former student, is accused of fatally shooting 17 people with an assault-style rifle on Feb. 14 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Authorities said he had displayed behavioral troubles for years. The tip from Massachusetts was one of about two dozen calls received by local and federal law enforcement about Cruz's behavior over the two years leading up to last week's school shooting. Many of the incidents involved the threat of violence. Two years ago, a deputy responded to a suspicious incident call in which someone reported that Cruz made a post on Instagram indicating he "planned to shoot up the school." However, the police document suggests the specific target was "unknown." The deputy made contact with the caller who wished to remain anonymous. The deputy determined that Cruz had knives and a BB gun. "Information forwarded to Stoneman Douglas School Resource Officer," the document's response description concludes. Authorities are searching for answers after a 27-year-old Middletown man rammed a car into the Middlesex Hospital emergency room, then set himself on fire, while those who know him struggle to understand what happened. Yellow tape continued to block off the area of the hospital where the crash happened Thursday night. Middletown Mayor Dan Drew told NBC Connecticut that the suspect, Steven Ellam, recorded the entire incident on Facebook live. Facebook has since removed the original post but the video is spreading across social media. NBC Connecticut has seen the video. In it, Ellam referred to the Illuminati and President Trump and called himself Jesus Christ. Those who know Ellam are shocked by what happened. I found out who it was and that was absolutely devastating, Portland resident Jennifer Shafer said. Shafer said Ellam came across as a kind, passionate aspiring musician when she met him. Nothing unusual or that he was just a young artist who wanted to get his music out there and was very polite and nice actually, Shafer said. Ellam was a guest on Shafers radio show Voice of the City on WESU last year. She said every interaction with Ellam was positive. When she heard about the incident at Middlesex Hospital, it never occurred to her that Ellam could be the person responsible. I just thought, 'Wow what a tragedy. What happened?' she said. The owner of the local pizza shop where Ellam worked told NBC Connecticut that Ellam worked there for nine months and he was a good employee who worked hard but quit Wednesday with no explanation. At a local coffee shop, the manager, Mike LaVoie, referred to Ellam as a regular. He'd come in several times a week, just get a coffee, usually a quiet person, in and out real quick, LaVoie said. As investigators continue to dive into Ellams past and his possible motivation, those who knew him are left wondering why. I just think it's really heartbreaking. My heart goes out to his family and to him and I hope he makes it, Shafer said. Authorities said Ellam has an extensive criminal history dating back to when he was a teenager and that there is no known connection between him and the hospital. The hospitals emergency department will remain closed until further notice. For more information on this story, click here. Governor Dan Malloy did not hold back when he was asked about the National Rifle Association Executive Vice Presidents comments on how to prevent future mass shootings. Wayne LaPierre, quite frankly, doesnt care how many people die as long as guns get sold, Connecticuts second term governor said. LaPierre, the longtime head of the nations largest gun rights group, spoke during the Conservative Political Action Committees annual meeting in Washington DC, commonly referred to as CPAC. They were his first comments since a gunman opened fire in a Parkland, Florida high school, killing seventeen students and staff. LaPierre laid the blame for the shooting not on access to firearms, but instead said, They want to sweep right under the carpet the failure of school security, the failure of family, the failure of America's mental health system and even the unbelievable failure of the FBI. Malloy has been a staunch advocate for more strict gun controls since the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in December 2012. The governor said the NRA has a predictable line of attack in the aftermath of a mass shooting, saying the group is far more concerned with gunmaker profits and sales than the lives of innocent civilians. Hes reopened the NRA emergency book to understand how you deflect a serious discussion about making Americans safer, Malloy said. LaPierre advocated for more armed school security guards. School security were on the premises on the day of the Parkland shooting, but the shooter managed to enter the school before being intercepted, and he later escaped undetected in a crowd of people evacuating. LaPierre told the Washington DC crowd that hardening soft targets like schools was the only way to make them safer, and said, To stop a bad guy with a gun it takes a good guy with a gun. Malloy said the NRA has made it clear that they want everyone to have weapons at all times. You know what the NRA would say? Lets everyone have a gun, everywhere they are and well all be safer. You think Syria is safer right now? You think Iraq is safer right now? The man who officials said crashed into the emergency department of Middlesex Hospital in Middletown Thursday and set himself on fire remains in critical condition, the hospital emergency department remains closed 24 hours after the incident and the mayor said there will be an increased police presence in the city. Steven Ellam, 27, of Middletown, crashed his car into the entrance of the emergency department just before 10 a.m. Thursday and set himself on fire as he documented the ordeal on Facebook Live, according to officials. Earlier in the day, Ellam had quit his job at Illianos without giving an explanation. He has no known connection to the hospital, but officials said he has an extensive criminal history that goes back to when he was 14 years old. Ellam suffered serious burns and is hospitalized at Bridgeport Hospital, where he remains in critical condition. Middletown Mayor Dan Drew said city officials believe what happened Thursday was an isolated incident. The people of Middletown can go about their lives without worrying that theres any additional threat here, Drew said. While investigating, police went to Ellams home Thursday but have not said what they found, if anything. The building department is working with Middlesex Hospital to help get the emergency room up and running. Its not clear when that will happen. In the meantime, any patient that has a medical emergency should call 911. And if they want to take themselves to a walk-in facility or another emergency room, they should go somewhere other than Middlesex (Hospital), Drew said. A Ridgefield teenager is the driving force behind a proposed nationwide walkout of high school students planned for April of this year. Lane Murdock started organizing the event in the days following the shooting in Parkland, Florida. Murdock said the first 48 hours were some of the busiest of her young life. "I was hearing from people all over the country that they wanted to participate," Murdock said. The 15-year-old's response to the most recent mass shooting could be the start of a new activism among teenagers, as witnessed by students from Florida speaking out for stricter gun laws. She said her generation has lived with gun violence and mass shootings in ways that no other has in history. "In the short time I've been in high school, we've had The Pulse [Orlando], Las Vegas, and Florida shooting so of course kids are getting into action," Murdock told reporters and gun rights supporters during a press conference on Friday. "This surrounds us every day." Joining Murdock and her peers are nearly all of Connecticuts members of Congress and families affected by the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary. Mark Barden, the father of Daniel Barden who was killed by a lone gunman in Newtown more than five years ago, spoke up in support of the movement aimed at reducing gun violence not just in schools but in all public places where shootings have occurred. Barden recently returned from a visit to the White House where he was invited, along with fellow Sandy Hook parent Nicole Hockley, to meet with President Donald Trump, for a listening session on gun violence. "Let's give him credit because he asked for advice on what to do about this," Barden said of the president. Barden said he advised, "I've been working this and I've come up with a really good model that works. Where arming teachers and students with the tools on how to recognize people and to spot them and to get them help before they pick up an AR-15 and wreak havoc at a school or at a concert or at a movie theater or at a shopping mall." Trump told the Conservative Political Action Committees annual meeting that he is a still a staunch supporter of the NRA but said he wanted to strengthen the background check system. For the second time this week, he also proposed arming teachers, saying the shooting in Florida could have been stopped by a teacher. "A teacher would've shot the hell out of him before he knew what happened," Trump said. On background checks, the president would find common ground with about 97 percent of Americans, according to a recent Quinnipiac University poll. Sen. Chris Murphy told the group in Hartford on Friday, "Apple pie doesnt poll that well," Sen. Chris Murphy quipped in Hartford on Friday. Murdock said she only expects the walkout movement to grow over the next two months and said she also expects her generation to take the lead when it comes to guns and other issues. "Most of us cant vote yet," she said. The superintendent of Regional School District 4 wants the community to know that two alleged threats last week at Valley Regional High School were determined to be unsubstantiated. The findings were announced at a news conference at the districts central office late Friday afternoon. The first alleged threat was reported to be seen on a social media post video on Tuesday. Supt. Dr. Ruth Levy said a student expressed sadness and while she did not go into details of the video, she said the student never said anything about hurting anyone. Despite that, state police said rumors began to fly at the school that the post included a threat involving a gun. Levy said it was all taken out of context and State Police said no threat was made. On Friday, troopers were called to the school again for similar allegations about the same post. Again, they found no threat was made to any students or teachers. Levy said social media is not the place to go for factual information. "Social media, first of all, can be used for wonderful things, but it can be used to spread information very quickly. In this particular case, it had a devastating effect both on an innocent individual as well as on the fear that happens in a community, particularly post a tragedy as what happened in Florida," she said. A 27-year-old man is accused of crashing a car carrying several cans of gasoline into the emergency entrance of Middlesex Hospital in Middletown, Connecticut, just before 10 a.m. Thursday and setting himself on fire, according to officials. Officials identified the suspect as Middletown resident Steven Ellam. Ellam was airlifted to Bridgeport Hospital, where he is in critical condition, according to officials. A security guard who was helping evacuate patients immediately after the incident was also taken to the hospital with smoke inhalation. No other injuries have been reported. Ellam's motives are unclear, according to local officials. As they investigate, emergency officials are evacuating homes in the vicinity of the man's residence. Hospital officials said patients are safe, but the emergency department of Middlesex Hospital is closed and patients have been evacuated and moved to other areas of the hospital. The Middlesex Hospital emergency department is closed and all outpatient services at the hospital's Middletown location have been suspended until further notice. Visitors are prohibited until further notice except in special circumstances. Anyone who needs to check on a loved one should call 860-358-6000. MidState Medical Center, both campuses of The Hospital of Central Connecticut and Hartford Hospital are accepting patients who have been diverted. Residents in the area of Crescent Street in Middletown are being asked to shelter in place after a car crashed into Middlesex Hospital. Middletown Mayor Dan Drew said during a news conference that local officials believe this was an isolated incident, but other municipal, state and federal authorities have been called in to assist in clearing the vehicle and the man's home as a precaution. The Middletown Police Department, Connecticut State Police, Hartford Bomb Squad, FBI, State's Attorney's Office are all involved in the investigation. Police officials said the suspect has been known to the Middletown Police Department since he was a teenager and has a criminal record dating back years. Mayor Drew said police secured other important buildings in town, including schools, but there is no reason to believe the buildings or people in them are in danger. A neighbor who witnessed the crash reported seeing the man on fire and hearing screams for help. A driver crashed into Middlesex Hospital in Middletown Friday morning and a witness describes a horrifying scene with someone on fire. "Just heard an explosion. I got up, looked out the back window and then I looked at the hospital and that's when I saw the car in there, and then I saw a guy come running out with -- he was on fire, screaming for mercy and he just kept screaming and screaming and some guys ran up to him, threw something on him, put him on the gurney," said Gary Mills, who lives right across the street from the hospital. Another witness said the man appeared to be naked. A hospital spokesperson said one person was in the car when it went down the one-way street and crashed into the entrance around 10 a.m. We will be holding a press conference at noon regarding the emergency at Middlesex Hospital. At this time we don't believe there is any threat to the community and we believe this to be an isolated incident. Mayor Dan Drew (@MayorDanDrew) February 22, 2018 Other hospitals in the area have added extra security as a precaution. Westlake Academy is taking school security to the next level, adding a Keller Police Department substation that will open later this spring. The substation will cost about $25,000 and be built in an existing school building. The city of Westlake has an existing contract with Keller police and will pay for the facilities construction. "We wanted people coming and going, we wanted officers pulling in and out of the campus, we wanted them circling the parking lots," said Assistant Principal Jennifer Furnish. Keller police say the project has been discussed for years, and with school shootings on the rise nationwide, increasing the police presences is as important as ever. "As you watch the trend and you continue to see the more frequent nature of some of these active attacks, you start thinking how can we add new layers of protection," said Keller Police Chief Michael Wilson. Students at the school say they support the police presence after having watched kids their same age go through the unthinkable in Parkland, Florida. "It's unfortunate that now we do have to think about that, we do have to take measures to ensure it doesn't happen again," said Alexis Walker. Construction on the new substation will start at the end of February. Keller police expect to have one to six officers coming in and out of the facility at all times. The principal at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School is asking schools around the country to send banners with positive messages to his still-grieving students. Argyle High School, which shares a connection through the same mascot the Eagles is doing just that. "I wrote, 'From one heart to another, we stand with you. Sending love and prayers your way,'" said Argyle senior Lizzie Dagg. Their words are meant to heal. "Basically what we're trying to do is show them that we're there for them. Every student in the country is here for them. Even though we're not face-to-face, we're hand-in-hand," Dagg said. "We realize this could happen anywhere. You just don't know when it's going to happen," said Argyle senior Mira Lillard. In Argyle, signs greet school visitors, telling them some faculty carry guns to protect students. "It breaks your heart. Just coming to school and thinking it may or may not be a safe place is such a hard thing to grasp," Dagg said. Argyle students are also writing personal letters to each Parkland student. "I think it's really incredible that something like this can reach all the way from Florida to Texas, and we can come together and do something about it," said Argyle sophomore Jaclyn Harris. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott on Thursday spared the life of a convicted killer shortly before the man's scheduled execution for masterminding the fatal shootings of his mother and brother. In sparing the life of Thomas "Bart" Whitaker about an hour before he was scheduled for lethal injection, Abbott accepted the state parole board's rare clemency recommendation. Whitaker's father, Kent, also was shot in the 2003 plot at the family's suburban Houston home but survived and led the effort to save his son from execution. Abbott commuted the sentence to life without parole. "I'm thankful not for me but for my dad," Bart Whitaker told prison officials after getting the word in a tiny holding cell a few feet from the death chamber. "Any punishment that I would have or will receive is just, but my dad did nothing wrong. The system worked for him today. And I will do my best to uphold my role in the system." The seven-member Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles, whose members are appointed by the governor, recommended unanimously Tuesday that Abbott commute the sentence. Abbott, a Republican had the option of accepting the recommendation, rejecting it or doing nothing. "Mr. Whitaker's father, who survived the attempt on his life, passionately opposes the execution of his son. Mr. Whitaker's father insists that he would be victimized again if the state put to death his last remaining immediate family member," Abbott said in a proclamation issued Thursday evening, adding that Whitaker had also agreed to waive all further rights to parole. Abbott, also citing the parole board's recommendation, added: "The totality of these factors warrants a commutation of Mr. Whitaker's death sentence to life in prison without the possibility of parole." It was only the fourth time since the state resumed executions in 1982 that the parole board has recommended clemency within days of an inmate's scheduled execution. In the previous cases, then-Gov. Rick Perry, also a Republican, accepted the board's decision in one case and rejected the other two, who subsequently were put to death in the nation's most active capital punishment state. Kent Whitaker said he was "humbled" and looked forward to hugging and touching his son. "It was overpowering," he said of the governor's decision, which he learned in a phone call from Keith Hampton, one of his son's lawyers. He and supporters were nearby the prison in a home used by inmate visitors and were standing and praying, Whitaker said. He put Hampton's call on his speakerphone. "The room erupted," he said. Hampton said he was "very relieved (Abbott) did the right thing." Texas Department of Criminal Justice spokesman Jason Clark said Bart Whitaker placed his arm through the bars of the holding cell after he was finished speaking with prison officials and asked to shake his hand. "I haven't touched another person in 13 years," Whitaker told Clark, who said he accepted the prisoner's request. Death row inmates in Texas are kept alone in their cells for 23 hours a day and their one hour of recreation also is alone in a concrete wall enclosure. Agency spokesman Jeremy Desel said Whitaker would not be returned to death row but would be taken to a prison processing facility where he'd be treated as a new incoming inmate and eventually assigned to a unit in general population, a process that likely would take a couple of weeks. Kent and Patricia Whitaker and their two boys had returned home the night of Dec. 10, 2003, following a restaurant dinner to celebrate Bart Whitaker's college graduation when they were confronted by a gunman wearing dark clothes and a ski mask. Patricia Whitaker and her 19-year-old son, Kevin, were killed. Kent Whitaker and Bart were wounded. Nearly two years later, Bart Whitaker was arrested in Mexico after investigators determined he arranged the plot in hopes of collecting a family estate he believed was worth more than $1 million. "I'm 100 percent guilty," Whitaker testified at his trial in 2007. "I put the plan in motion." He hated his parents and brother at the time, he said. Whitaker's father said he loves and has forgiven his son, calling him a changed person. "As the greatest victim in this case, you don't have to convince me how awful this crime was," Kent Whitaker said. Evidence showed the plot included two of Bart Whitaker's friends and was at least his third attempt to kill his family. Whitaker's wound to his arm was meant to draw attention away from his involvement. Unknown to his parents, the dinner celebration marking his graduation was a fraud. He'd dropped out of school months earlier. The gunman, Chris Brashear, pleaded guilty in 2007 to a murder charge and is serving life in prison. Steve Champagne, who drove Brashear from the Whitaker house the night of the shootings, took a 15-year prison term in exchange for testifying at Whitaker's trial. The University of North Texas spokesperson at the center of a controversy of a student-led petition to name a new campus building after a woman or person of color has resigned. In an email sent earlier this month, Nancy Kolsti responded to the student behind the petition drive, calling the effort "reverse racism." UNT confirms Kolsti a 26-year employee of the university submitted her resignation Tuesday, citing personal reasons. The petition drive was launched by Misaki Collins, a UNT student who noticed just two buildings on campus were named after a woman, and none after a person of color. The petition urged UNT administrators to consider doing so with a new residence hall. "It was really upsetting," Collins said. "Because I'm talking about how diverse UNT is and how great it is and how much I love this school, and there's a lack of representation in a lot of different aspects." Kolsti's e-mail to Collins sent from a personal account touched off a campus controversy. "Insisting that UNT must have a residence hall named after another woman or a 'person of color' when there are other deserving individuals is imposing a quota system, and, to me, that is a form of reverse racism," the email read, in part. When Collins made the email public, UNT responded. "We encourage our students to take an active role in helping to shape the university and applaud the actions of our student government to petition for values in which they believe," a statement read. Of the e-mail, the school said, "UNT also supports free expression from all of its community members including university employees." A California couple charged with torturing their children by starving, beating and shackling them is now facing additional charges in connection with the case. David and Louise Turpin appeared in a Riverside courtroom for a conference about their case. Three more charges of child abuse were filed against both as well as a felony charge of assault against Louise Turpin. They have pleaded not guilty to torture and other charges and each is held on $12 million bail. The couple was arrested last month after their 17-year-old daughter escaped from the family's home in Perris, California, and called 911. Authorities said the home reeked of human waste and evidence of starvation was obvious, with the oldest sibling weighing only 82 pounds. The case drew international media attention and shocked neighbors who said they rarely saw the couple's 13 children outside the home. Those who saw the children recalled them as skinny, pale and reserved. Authorities said the abuse was so long-running the children's growth was stunted. They said the couple shackled the children to furniture as punishment and had them live a nocturnal lifestyle. The courtroom conference is expected to focus on date-setting and other procedural issues. The district attorney's office has drafted an amended complaint but it has yet to be filed in court, officials said. It is not immediately clear where the children, who range in age from 2 to 29, are now. They were hospitalized immediately after their rescue and since then county authorities have declined to discuss their whereabouts or condition. Riverside County has obtained a temporary conservatorship for the seven adult siblings, who declined to speak with reporters through their attorneys. "Our clients need time, space, and privacy while they receive services and begin the difficult process of rebuilding their lives," Caleb Mason, an attorney for the siblings, said in a recent statement. As a grieving Florida community demanded action on guns, President Donald Trump on Tuesday directed the Justice Department to move to ban devices like the rapid-fire bump stocks used in last year's Las Vegas massacre. It was a small sign of movement on the gun violence issue that has long tied Washington in knots. "We must do more to protect our children," Trump said, adding that his administration was working hard to respond to the shooting in Parkland that left 17 dead. After past mass killings yielded little action on tighter gun controls, the White House is trying to demonstrate that it is taking the issue seriously. The president, a strong and vocal supporter of gun rights, has not endorsed more robust changes sought by gun control activists. But the White House cast the president in recent days as having been swayed by the school shooting in Florida and willing to listen to proposals. In a tweet Tuesday night, Trump indicated he wants to strengthen the background check system, but offered no specifics. Trump said: "Whether we are Republican or Democrat, we must now focus on strengthening Background Checks!" Asked at a press briefing Tuesday if Trump was open to reinstating a ban on assault-type weapons, spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said White House officials "haven't closed the door on any front." She also said that the idea of raising the age limit to buy an AR-15 was "on the table for us to discuss." Sen. Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat and leading advocate for tighter gun controls, said Trump's directive suggested the president was aware of fresh energy on the issue and called it a sign that "for the first time" politicians are "scared of the political consequences of inaction on guns." A bipartisan legislative effort to ban bump stocks last year fizzled out. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives announced in December that it was reviewing whether weapons that use bump stocks should be considered illegal machine guns under federal law. Under the Obama administration, the ATF had concluded that bump stocks did not violate federal law. But the acting director of the ATF told lawmakers in December that the ATF and Justice Department would not have initiated the review if a ban "wasn't a possibility at the end." The Justice Department had not made any announcement regarding its review when Trump on Tuesday signed a memorandum directing the agency to complete the review as soon as possible and propose a rule "banning all devices that turn legal weapons into machine guns." Reacting to Trump's memo, the department said in a statement that it "understands this is a priority for the president and has acted quickly to move through the rulemaking process. We look forward to the results of that process as soon as it is duly completed." A day earlier, Trump sent another signal he had been swayed by the Parkland shooting and the dramatic calls for action in its aftermath. A White House statement said Trump was looking at a bill that would strengthen federal gun background checks. On Wednesday, he will host parents, teachers and students at the White House for a "listening session" that will include people impacted by mass shootings in Parkland, Columbine, Colorado and Newtown, Connecticut. The president was moved by a visit Friday with Florida victims in the hospital and is trying to work on solutions, said a person familiar with his thinking who sought anonymity to discuss internal conversations. Among the steps sought by gun control advocates: closing loopholes that permit loose private sales on the internet and at gun shows, banning assault-type weapons and passing laws to enable family members, guardians or police to ask judges to strip gun rights temporarily from people who show warning signs of violence. The Parkland shooting also has prompted the Republican-controlled Florida Legislature to take a fresh look at gun control legislation, although so far GOP leaders are refusing to endorse calls to ban assault rifles. Still, the discussion of some types of gun control legislation is a dramatic turnaround for Florida, which has earned the nickname the "Gunshine State" for its gun policies. The federal background check bill was developed in response to a mass shooting last November in which a gunman slaughtered more than two dozen people at a Texas church. It would penalize federal agencies that don't properly report required records and reward states that comply by providing them with federal grant preferences. The measure, which is pending in the Senate, was drafted after the Air Force acknowledged that it failed to report the Texas gunman's domestic violence conviction to the National Criminal Information Center database. The GOP-controlled House paired the background checks bill with a measure making it easier for gun owners to legally carry concealed weapons across state lines. The concealed carry measure, a top priority of the National Rifle Association, would allow gun owners with a state-issued concealed-carry permit to carry a handgun in any state that allows concealed weapons. Murphy said any attempt to combine background checks with concealed-carry provisions would significantly jeopardize the chances of passing bipartisan reform of the background checks system. What to Know The school resource officer who was at the Parkland school during the shooting but "never went in" has retired after being suspended. Citing security footage, the Broward Sheriff says officer Scot Peterson took a position outside the school during the shooting. Two other officers have been placed on restrictive duty while investigators look into 23 previous calls received related to the gunman. The school resource officer who was at the Parkland school but "never went in" where 17 people were shot dead has retired after Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel on Thursday said the official had been suspended without pay. Israel said school resource officer Scot Peterson took a position outside of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School as the onslaught occurred, citing security footage. Israel said Peterson was "absolutely on campus," adding that he was armed and in uniform during the shooting. "After seeing video and witness statements, and Peterson's own statement, I decided this morning ... to suspend Scot Peterson without pay pending an internal investigation," Israel said, adding that Peterson chose to then resign and retire. When asked what Peterson should have done during the shooting, Israel said he should have "went in, addressed the killer and killed" him. "Our main goal at this point, absent of helping these families heal and keeping our schools safe, is making sure this killer receives the justice he deserves," Israel previously said. President Donald Trump reacted to Israel's revelation Friday morning, telling reporters on the South Lawn that Peterson "certainly did a poor job." "That's a case where somebody was outside, they're trained, they didn't react properly under pressure. Or they were coward," Trump said. "When it came time to get in there and do something, he didn't have the courage." Trump and the NRA have pushed for "hardening" schools against attackers and arming teachers and other staff members with guns in the school. However, critics have said that is beyond the scope of a teacher's job and could present new safety challenges. The NRA on Friday responded to Israel's comment to an NRA spokesperson during a town hall on Wednesday in which he said the NRA is "not standing up" for the survivors of the shooting. "No Sheriff Israel, you were the one that didnt PROTECT these children and that is your job. You run the largest fully accredited sheriff's office in the United States, yet your office failed this community," NRA wrote on Twitter. Hours after the NRA's post, the hashtag #ResignSheriffIsrael began trending on Twitter. When asked how a trained, armed officer who didn't "didn't react properly under pressure" would be different from arming a teacher, the president said that "you have to have a certain degree of offensive power in the school, not just defensive." In 2014, the Broward County Crime Commission awarded Peterson with the title of School Resource Officer of the Year for the City of Parkland District. The group said Peterson proved "to be reliable in handling issues with tact and judgment." The Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office said the suspended deputy's family requested privacy and protection. Israel also addressed the 23 previous calls BSO received related to the gunman. Two other officers who previously responded to one of the calls related to accused gunman Nikolas Cruz have been placed on restrictive duty. "In two of these cases, after being briefed by internal affairs, I've restricted two of our deputies to take statements and make a decision to see whether they should have and could have" done something to prevent the shooting, Israel said. BSO released a document that detailed each call it received related to Cruz including the two calls that led to the unidentified officers being placed on restrictive duty. The two officers are facing an internal affairs investigation and a BSO internal review. On Feb. 2, 2016, a deputy responded to a suspicious incident call in which someone reported that Cruz made a post on Instagram indicating he "planned to shoot up the school." However, the police document suggests the specific target was "unknown." The deputy made contact with the caller who wished to remain anonymous. The deputy determined that Cruz had knives and a BB gun. "Information forwarded to Stoneman Douglas School Resource Officer," the document's response description concludes. It has not yet been confirmed if Peterson, who was assigned to the school for years, was the resource officer who received the information of the threat. The other call and response under review occurred on Nov. 11. "Caller advised subject Nikolas Cruz is collecting guns and knives. Cruz wants to join the Army. Concerned he will kill himself one day and believes he could be a school shooter in the making," the document reads. The deputy who responded contacted the caller via telephone. "No report was initiated," the document reads. In an interview after the shooting, the deputy said he referred the caller to the Palm Beach Sheriff's Office as the caller said he believed the Cruz was living in Lake Worth. The BSO press conference occurred after 17 people, mostly teenagers, were shot dead at the school in Parkland. The accused gunman is a former student who had previously been reported over disturbing behavior particularly about weapons. Israel on Wednesday announced that he directed a new policy that will arm Broward County deputies stationed at schools with a rifle. What to Know A FedEx delivery man noticed that a child was home alone in an apartment in the Bronx on Jan. 26 and called the cops Police broke down the door and found a 5-year-old child in a filthy apartment; bugs were on the boy and blood spattered the walls The boy's parents were arrested at the time, but just indicted this week on new endangerment charges The parents of a 5-year-old boy found alone, covered in bugs, in a rodent-infested New York City apartment spattered with blood and feces have been indicted on endangerment charges, authorities announced Thursday. Charlotte Lewis, 48, and Wilfred Lewis, 59, each face first- and second-degree counts of endangering the welfare of an incompetent or physically disabled person and four counts of endangering the welfare of a child. A FedEx worker delivering packages to the Kingsbridge Avenue home Jan. 26 saw the child home alone and alert police. Authorities responding to the home found the 5-year-old boy with bugs on his body, officials say. The apartment was infested with dead and live rodents and insects and walls were stained with blood and feces, the complaint says. The boy had been left there by himself for about seven hours. "This was a deplorable situation; a 5-year-old boy and his three siblings were living in such squalor," Bronx District Attorney Darcel Clark said in a statement. "The parents had a duty to protect their children from these dangerously unhealthy conditions." Both the boy's parents, an MTA worker and a hospital employee , were arrested in January after the child was found. The indictment announced Thursday accuses them of additional charges. It wasn't clear if they spoke at their arraignment, nor was attorney information immediately available. At the time of the initial arrest, the father told cops the boy was home sick from school, according to the NYPD. The couple's three other children, one of whom is a teenager with special needs, were taken into custody by the city, police said. A spokesman for the city's Administration for Children's Services has said the agency was working with the NYPD on the investigation. What to Know A New York City teen was arrested for threatening a shooting at his school, police say; he allegedly tried to buy guns repeatedly online News of the arrest comes as the nation debates how to best protect the nation's students and educators Second Amendment advocates want to arm teachers and fortify schools, while gun control supporters seek legislation addressing gun violence A teen who threatened a shooting at his Bronx school was arrested after he repeatedly tried to purchase guns online, police said Thursday as officials unveiled new plans to keep kids safe in the city's hundreds of schools. The 15-year-old faces a felony charge of making terroristic threats for a social media message be posted back on Dec. 12, according to police. In the post, he allegedly said he was bullied and wanted to buy a gun and kill classmates. The NYPD arrested him Wednesday night after the departments Computer Crimes Unit was tipped off to the threat. The teen tried multiple times to purchase a gun online and was in possession of a bulletproof vest, police said. The NYPD didn't immediately say which school the teen was attending. The arrest comes amid a renewed debate about how to keep students and educators across the country safe a week after a shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida, killed 17 people. In the wake of the shooting, students have joined gun control supporters and Second Amendment advocates in debating the best way to secure the nation's schools. Some students have planned marches and staged walkouts under the hashtag #NeverAgain. President Trump said Thursda that making schools safer would be a top priority for his administration. He said he wants to "harden" schools and floated the idea of arming teachers as a possible deterrent. Several organizations representing teachers came out against that idea, including the New Jersey Education Association, which said in a statement that it is "adamantly opposed to the idea of arming educators." It said doing so would turn schools into "armed fortresses of fear." The union United Federation of Teachers said in a statement: "Teachers should be marking papers, not being trained in marksmanship." In a letter to parents Thursday, Carmen Farina, the chancellor of New York City's Education Department, said her agency was working with the NYPD to keep students and staff safe. She said schools are taking part in safety drills and that principals are reviewing the safety protocol for their buildings. Farina echoed Mayor Bill de Blasio in encouraging students to speak up if they fear someone may be harmful in their school. De Blasio on Thursday called for random screenings and ordered emergency drills at all city schools within the next 30 days. He said the new steps will mean more students will encounter metal detectors when heading to class. "Every school will have [a magnetometer] sometimes. That is an important deterrent," de Blasio said. But he added that many parents and educators feel the presence of the scanners makes for a negative environment and that the devices wouldn't be in place at every school, every day. Last year, 88 out of 1,300 school buildings had scanners. Speaking at a gathering of conservatives Thursday, National Rifle Association leader Wayne LaPierre said there must be "effective trained armed security that will absolutely protect every innocent child in this country." LaPierre accused supporters of gun control of exploiting the mass shooting in Florida to promote an anti-gun agenda. He called out several tri-state Democrats, including de Blasio and Gov. Andrew Cuomo, as promoting a "terrifying" agenda of "absolute control in every corner of our government." Meanwhile, the governors of New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Rhode Island announced Thursday they were forming a "States for Gun Safety" coalition to combat gun violence. The interstate initiative focuses on sharing law enforcement intel and working on gun safety legislation. What to Know On Tuesday, a menu consisting of cornbread, collard greens, macaroni and cheese and Kool-Aid and watermelon-flavored water angered students. NYU President Andrew Hamilton made a statement calling the choices made by the dining halls food staff inexcusably insensitive. With the apology, Hamilton noted that food staff members had been fired, and that the remaining staff would undergo sensitivity training. After an outcry from students, New York Universitys president is apologizing for a Black History Month menu that featured watermelon-flavored water and Kool-Aid. Two food service workers were also fired after Nia Harris, a black student, took her frustrations over Tuesday's menu, which also included cornbread, collard greens, macaroni and cheese. "This school prides itself on being diverse and inclusive. Yet, we are displaying stereotypical food for Black History month and telling black students that this is not racially insensitive," Harris said in the post. In the post, which was also sent to the school administration, Harris said the beverages used were racially insensitive and reflected poorly on the schools diversity and inclusion policies. There is a long history of negative racial connotation of watermelon, she said. Harris said she and others asked the administration to understand that the celebration of Black History Month could not be reduced to the use of a piece of fruit as a prop. In a statement on NYU's website Wednesday, NYU President Andrew Hamilton called the choices made by the dining halls food staff inexcusably insensitive." He added that in addition to the firings, other staffers would undergo sensitivity training. Some students commented on Harris post, blaming her for costing school employees their jobs, with one student writing: As a black man I enjoyed the hell out of that meal. The cooks who suggested it was black and you got them fired. My aim and my goal was not to get anyone fired. I just wanted an apology, said Harris. Amid a national conversation about whether more officers and teachers should be armed in schools, data compiled by the News4 I-Team shows many schools in the Washington, D.C. region already have dedicated officers. Police officers are deployed at nearly all high schools and a growing number of middle schools in the region, police and school district records show. School resource officers (SROs) are sworn police officers, many of whom are armed, and assigned posts at local schools. Agency records show every high school and middle school in Fairfax County, Loudoun County and Prince William County has at least one assigned school resource officer. The departments School Resource Program is effective not only in providing security to the school facility itself, but it is also beneficial in providing an opportunity for officers to positively engage with our youth to foster and build relationships, Prince William County police department spokesman Jonathan Perok said. In Howard County, Montgomery County and Prince George's County, all high schools have officers, but only some middle schools. In 2017, the Montgomery County Council considered a boost in funding to spread officers to a larger number of middle schools. Our SRO program is community policing at its best, and at the same time, an additional security measure to keep our children safe," Craig Rice, chair of the Montgomery County Council education committee said. "We are also looking at expanding our SRO program to middle schools in response to parents' concerns about safety in those schools as well." In D.C., 109 members of the Metropolitan Police Department are responsible for school safety, spokesman Dustin Sternbeck said. Eighty-nine of these members are school resource officers. The other members are supervisors but maintain a presence in the schools too, Sternbeck said. Smaller city police departments also provide officers for schools, including in Arlington and Hyattsville. Prince Georges County said assignments for officers are based on an assessment of security needs. "School resource officers are professionals who help maintain safe and orderly learning environments. They listen to students, parents and staff members to facilitate information sharing," school district spokesman John White said. "They are role models and provide critical safety and crime prevention services, plus immediate access to county resources in an emergency. Frederick County Public Schools said it has resource officers at all 10 of its high schools, and a set of roaming officers from the countys sheriffs department and the City of Frederick police department. Those officers travel to all schools, district spokesman Michael Doerrer said. The presence of a school resource officer does not guarantee safety. An armed officer in uniform was present during the Feb. 14 school shooting in Parkland, Florida, but he "never went in," the county sheriff said Thursday. School district security staffers also are assigned posts in local school buildings. Unlike police officers, those security staffers are school district employees and not sworn law enforcement. A 2017 investigation by the News-4 I-Team found a large number of those security staffers are not licensed by either state police or state departments of education. It was not immediately clear if any officers had been added to local schools since the Florida shooting. Budget discussions are underway in D.C. and counties across the region. Every public school in the state of West Virginia was closed Thursday and was set to be closed again Friday as teachers staged walkouts, demanding higher wages and health insurance coverage. Teachers across the state's 55 counties protested in front of their schools and then assembled in Charleston to walk to the state Capitol. Dozens of teachers rallied along a road in Belle, West Virginia, near Riverside High School, holding signs saying Enough is enough." American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten joined the group. In Charleston, teachers sought to pressure lawmakers who were still considering other proposals for them. Chants of "Do your job so I can do mine" reverberated throughout the Capitol halls. Gov. Jim Justice on Wednesday night signed a 2 percent raise next year for teachers, followed by 1 percent raises the following two years. But teachers say the increases are too stingy. They also complain about projected increases in health insurance costs. On Tuesday, West Virginia Superintendent of Schools Steven Paine said he was working with teachers to reach a resolution as soon as possible. "Work stoppages by public employees are not lawful in West Virginia and will have a negative impact on student instruction and classroom time," he said in a statement. "Families will be forced to seek out alternative safe locations for their children, and our many students who depend on schools for daily nutrition will face an additional burden. I encourage our educators to advocate for the benefits they deserve, but to seek courses of action that have the least possible disruption for our students," he continued. West Virginia teacher pay ranks 48th nationally. The teachers last went on strike statewide in 1990. Since the deadly school shooting in Florida, local law enforcement are keeping focused on their training and one Virginia department is using a high-tech simulator to put its officers in realistic shooting situations. In the basement of the Stafford County Sheriff's Office, Deputy Justin Howell turned in his service weapon, magazines and stun gun before walking into the virtual world. Inside, he loaded a compressed air gun and stepped onto a stage in front of a 300 degree screen, entering school mayhem that's all too real. Hands up hands up! He went that way! Inside the building? Outside the building? Howell yelled during the training. Some of the simulation is disturbing to watch. The simulator's floors vibrate and deputies wear devices similar to stun guns to replicate the feeling of being shot. Youre definitely on the edge I would say, Howell said. This offers an array of options for us to train our people to be more effective and to be, you know, highly professional law enforcement officers in the field, Stafford County Sheriff David Decatur said. Decatur said the simulator also teaches officers de-escalation. "Any type of force you use you have to be trained and understand case law, understand when it is appropriate, when it is reasonable, he said. Howell said he hopes he will never have to take the virtual skills into the real world. I train myself to believe it is real and not a game," Howell said. D.C. police have raided a home in the Glover Park neighborhood and arrested a man on drug charges as part of a crackdown on marijuana sales. The raid and arrest occurred Thursday afternoon on the 3800 block of W Street NW, just blocks west of the U.S. Naval Observatory. Firefighters were called to the house for a possible hazmat situation. They later cleared the scene. Police hauled evidence out of the house after making the arrest. The raid is the latest in a series of crackdowns on people distributing edibles -- which are food made with marijuana -- and oil infused with THC, the active ingredient in cannabis. Several people were arrested and charged on Feb. 1 with drug distribution at the Mason Inn on Wisconsin Avenue in Glover Park. A week earlier, D.C. police and agents from the Alcoholic Beverage Regulation Adminisitration arrested 22 people at vending events at two downtown D.C. clubs. "These people are just trying to make a living, and they're not bad people," marijuana activist Adam Eidinger previously said. "But Congress is blocking D.C. Council from even writing a law that would allow them to do what they're doing." D.C. police have previously said the enforcement action on the vending events occurred because of citizen complaints. A D.C. law legalizing the possession of small amounts of marijuana went into effect in February 2015. People age 21 and older can legally possess as much as 2 ounces and give 1 ounce or less to someone else, as long as no money, goods or services are exchanged. But it remains a crime in D.C. for anyone to sell pot or use it in public. A number of businesses skirt the law against selling marijuana by selling customers items and then giving them marijuana as a "gift." Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders' son is considering a political career himself. Vice News reports Levi Sanders is actively considering a run for Congress in New Hampshire's highly competitive 1st District in 2018. "Oh absolutely, Im definitely considering it. Im excited, motivated, and interested in the race," Sanders told Vice News on Thursday. "Im just dotting my is and crossing my ts." Sanders worked as a senior policy strategist on his father's 2016 presidential campaign. He is currently an analyst for Cambridge and Somerville Legal Services. An advocate for social security benefits, Sanders told Vice News that like his father, he would proposed Medicare for all and free college tuition as part of his platform. Seven Democrats are already running and raising money in New Hampshires 1st District to succeed Democratic Rep. Carol Shea-Porter, whos retiring. New technology displayed in New Hampshire Thursday could bring a new sense of normalcy to people who have lost limbs. Next Step Bionics & Prosthetics, Inc. and DEKA Research and Development demonstrated the LUKE (Life Under Kinetic Evolution) arm for the public in Manchester. The LUKE arm is a modular prosthetic arm developed by DEKA and funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA. According to Next Step, the LUKE arm is configurable for people who are amputated from shoulder to forearm. The hand has four pre-programmed grips. In 2007, DARPA awarded what would be become a multi-year, $40 million contract to DEKA for an advanced prosthesis that would be minimally invasive and easily controlled. The public demonstration showed how the arm works on its recipients, Ron Currier and Chuck Hildreth. Both men are missing at least part of their arms and hands. Currier lost his hands in the Air Force. He was electrocuted. "This arm right here is the closest thing to a real hand that I've had in 43 years," Currier said. Currier has engineer and inventor Dean Kamen of DEKA to thank for that. "These people have literally given their arms for this country," Kamen said. "We can't keep giving them the same 150-year-old technology that military gave soldiers in the Civil War." Matthew Albuquerque is the CEO of Next Step Bionics & Prosthetics. They're the first to try the LUKE arms out. "Those little boxes on his feet send wireless signals up to the arm so he can move the prosthesis, however he wants to move his feet," Albuquerque said. "These are going to give me back my new normal," said Currier. The LUKE arms starts at $150,000 if you're not a veteran. Albuquerque said he hopes as more are made, the cost will decrease. One man was killed in a single-vehicle crash overnight in North Attleborough, Massachusetts. WJAR-TV reports police arrived to the scene on Mendon Road where the driver of a pickup truck had crashed into a utility pole. The driver, who has not been identified, was pronounced dead. The victim was the only one in the truck. Utility crews were on scene until early Friday morning making repairs to the pole. The exact cause of the crash is under investigation. The New Milford Historical Society & Museum will present Connecticut Crossroads Oral History Project with Chris Fisher Feb. 24 from 1 to 3 p.m. The Connecticut Crossroads Project is a not-for-profit organization with the mission to preserve the history of communities within Connecticut. New CHILD Study research has found that overweight and obese women are more like to have children who are overweight or obese by three years of age--and that bacteria in the gut may be partially to blame. "We know that maternal overweight is linked to overweight in children," said Dr. Anita Kozyrskyj, the University of Alberta investigator who led the study. "What our study showed is that both the type of infant delivery--vaginal birth versus cesarean section birth--and changes in gut bacteria are also involved." The study, published in JAMA Pediatrics, found that when an overweight woman delivered vaginally, the risk of overweight in her child was three times higher than normal. But the risk was five times higher than normal when the woman delivered via cesarean-section (C-section). This association persisted even after adjustment for multiple other factors. "There seemed to be something about a C-section that increased the risk of childhood obesity," observed Kozyrskyj, senior author of the study and one of the world's leading researchers on the gut microbiome--the community of microorganisms or bacteria that live in the digestive tracts of humans. "We have shown in our previous research that an infant's gut microbiome is influenced by the type of delivery, so we wondered if this effect could be associated with obesity risk in early childhood." To investigate further, Kozyrskyj and her research team studied over 930 mothers and their infants participating in AllerGen's CHILD Study, a national population-based birth cohort. DNA sequencing techniques performed in the laboratories of Drs James Scott and David Guttman at the University of Toronto provided information on the types and quantity of bacteria present in the infants' stool. An older analysis method not used in microbiome analyses--sequential mediation--was employed. The children's weights were assessed at one and three years of age. "We found that an abundance of a family of bacteria called Lachnospiracae does in fact influence the relationship between maternal weight and child weight following vaginal and cesarean birth," said Dr. Hein Min Tun, who is the study's first author, a Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) postdoctoral fellow at the University of Alberta and an AllerGen Highly Qualified Personnel. "Given that infant overweight and obesity are a major public health problem, our results reinforce increasing concerns over rising cesarean deliveries and affirm the role of the gut microbiota as a 'super organ' with diverse roles in health and disease," added Kozyrskyj. Some scientists have hypothesized that tumor-promoting changes in cells during cancer development--particularly an epigenetic change involving DNA methylation--arise from rogue cells escaping a natural cell deterioration process called senescence. Now, researchers at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Centerdemonstrated that instead, tumor-associated epigenetic states evolve erratically during early stages of tumor development, eventually selecting for a subset of genes that undergo the most changes during normal aging and in early tumor development. The work, published in the Feb. 12 issue of Cancer Cell, may help refine biomarkers of cancer risk. Screening for these genes may help stratify, for every age group, individuals with the highest risk for cancer development, the authors say. "Aging is probably the leading risk factor for most common cancers," says coauthor Stephen Baylin, M.D., the Virginia and Daniel K. Ludwig Professor of Cancer Research at the Kimmel Cancer Center. As epigenetic changes are reversible in laboratory models, some scientists are considering the possibility of modifying this risk factor as a potential way to modulate aging as a cancer risk factor. "Maybe you won't find the Ponce de Leon Fountain of Youth, but if you could dampen down the risk of cancer for every decade you age, that could be huge," says Baylin. For the study, investigators studied patterns of DNA methylation, a process by which cells add tiny methyl chemical groups to a beginning region of a gene's DNA sequence, often silencing the gene's activation. They took fibroblast cells from human foreskin samples and followed an established, three-step laboratory process called Weinberg's classical transformation system to convert the cells to cancer cells. The process includes infecting cells with genes known to induce tumor development. The scientists also injected the early transformed cells into mice to monitor their progression. They took a second group of fibroblast cells and let them naturally mature into senescence. The researchers followed methylation changes observed in both groups of cells over time. "Senescence is a very well-known, normal aging process that is actually an antitumor mechanism. It occurs when cells perceive an excess of DNA damage, when cells undergo too many cell divisions or when they experience cancer development-related stress. So it was puzzling to us how the senescence process could lead to the formation of tumors," says senior study leader Hariharan Easwaran, Ph.D., assistant professor of oncology at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center. To solve the mystery, Easwaran, Baylin and collaborators began mapping the evolution of epigenetic DNA methylation alterations during senescence and transformation. They found that although the alterations appeared similar between senescent cells and transformed cells, the way they evolved and the genes that got methylated were different for the most part. The researchers found that DNA methylation that evolved during senescence was very programmed, so much so that replicates of the senescence process in different petri dishes all had the same epigenetic pattern, Easwaran says. Independent replicates of the transformation process, by contrast, appeared very stochastic, or random. In addition, the transformation process primarily involved regulator genes that are critical for cancers to maintain the characteristics of a cancer cell, Baylin says. In comparison, senescence involves a number of metabolic process genes. In additional experiments, Wenbing Xie, Ph.D., the study's lead author, could not coax senescent cells into becoming transformed cells, serving as a protection against cancer development, and identified a subset of transformation-associated methylated genes that were most prone to get methylated during early tumor formation and during aging. In future work, the researchers will explore tissue-specific patterns of DNA methylation gains for the senescence and transformation classes of genes, and hope to use that to devise strategies for determining age-associated risk-stratification of tumor development. An international research consortium developed, with significant involvement of Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine (LCSB) scientists, the first computer model to include 3D in the representation of human metabolic processes. To this end, the researchers integrated the three-dimensional structures of over 4,000 metabolic products, or metabolites as they are known, and nearly 13,000 proteins into an existing computer model. They also added an enormous volume of genetic and chemical information to the model on which the simulation runs. The name of this new computer-based tool, which has been made available to the biomedical research community recently, is Recon3D. The researchers' results on Recon3D appear in the journal Nature Biotechnology (doi:10.1038/nbt.4072). The importance of scientific computer models continues to increase. They make the existing knowledge tangible and thereby help scientists to accurately formulate and work on targeted problems in research. To create such models, researchers analyze all the publications and databases they can find on a topic and feed this information into their model. Human metabolism research is one example, as Prof. Ines Thiele, head of the Molecular Systems Physiology group at the LCSB of the University of Luxembourg and an ATTRACT fellow of the Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR), says: "For the predecessor of Recon3D, Recon 2, a large team of research groups in different fields aggregated an enormous volume of data on the genome, chemical metabolic activities and physiological properties of the human organism." This data basis has now been considerably expanded yet again for Recon3D, Thiele reports. Computer model of human metabolic processes What is unique about the new computer model, however, is the integrated three-dimensional structural data of proteins and metabolites. Dr Ronan Fleming, head of the LCSB Systems Biochemistry group which was responsible for integrating the structural data of the metabolites into Recon3D, says "so far, we have been able to say of a given metabolic reaction that substance A and B turn into substances C and D. Now, we know precisely which atoms each substance consists of, how the atoms are arranged in the starting materials and where those very same atoms can be found again in the products of the chemical reaction." To make this possible, the researchers first had to find out which computational program - or algorithm as scientists call it - imports the three-dimensional structures of the molecules most accurately from the literature into Recon3D. To find this out, Fleming's team researched the molecular structure of the starting materials of a series of chemical reactions and determined the whereabouts of every single atom after the metabolic reaction was completed. They then tested various algorithms on the same reactions to identify those with the best predictive power. Fleming reports "with these results, we were then able to import very accurate structures of more than 4,000 metabolites into the computer model." Fleming's colleagues from the University of California in the United States expanded Recon3D with data on almost 13,000 protein structures, thereby bridging the research fields of structural biology and systems biology. An expanded computer model available to all researchers "Recon3D now allows us to study metabolic processes that run differently, for example, in Parkinson's patients than in healthy people, much better and with more accuracy," Thiele sums up the possibilities that the new computer model offers. Dr Andreas Drager from the Center for Bioinformatics at the University of Tubingen (ZBIT) has put it into a standardized format so that other researchers can use the model for their scientific questions. "Recon3D lays the foundations for creating cell-type-specific models that could be used to simulate the function of tissues through to entire organs in the computer," explains Drager and continues "it could help to better understand the interplay between pathogens, such as bacteria or viruses, and the human host." Fleming also adds that, thanks to the three-dimensional structures of the metabolites and proteins in Recon3D, it is now possible to follow, at atomic resolution, how a genetic mutation could affect the development of certain diseases. "This can open up entirely new avenues for research on therapeutic approaches," Fleming concludes. Researchers studying a rare genetic disorder that causes severe, progressive neurological problems in childhood have discovered insights into biological mechanisms that drive the disease, along with early clues that an amino acid supplement might offer a targeted therapy. The research, which found abnormalities in a biological waste-disposal process called autophagy, links the mechanism underlying rare pediatric neurogenetic disorders to more common neurodegenerative disorders, such as Huntington's or Parkinson's disease. "We showed that this rare neurological disorder disrupts autophagy, which plays a role in many neurodegenerative disorders in both children and adults," said study leader Xilma R. Ortiz-Gonzalez, MD, PhD, a pediatric neurogeneticist at The study team reported its findings online in Annals of Neurology on Dec. 29, 2017. TBCK-encephaloneuropathy (TBCKE) is caused by a mutation in the TBCK gene, which has been a focus of The team also seeks to investigate why some children with TBCK mutations can have much milder presentations than others, and whether this provides a clue to understanding differences in the underlying mechanisms of the disease. The current study reported on a cohort of eight unrelated boys, ranging from age 9 to 14 years, all of Puerto Rican descent. All had a mutation, called the Boricua mutation, at the same location on the TBCK gene--p.R126X. They all share a very severe presentation, including profound intellectual disability (ID), epilepsy, low muscle tone, and progressive dysfunction in both the central and peripheral nervous systems. By adolescence, the patients had chronic respiratory failure caused by their progressive neuromuscular weakness. Scientists already knew that the TBCK protein, coded for by the gene with the same name, regulates signals along the mTOR biological pathway. Abnormal mTOR signals occur in epilepsy, autism, ID and other neurological conditions. One key role for mTOR signaling is in autophagy, the normal cleanup process in which cells dispose of damaged proteins, lipids, and other biological objects. When autophagy doesn't function normally, neurodegenerative diseases may result. Researchers in the current study found that the Boricua mutation leads to abnormal autophagy, which could be why this specific cohort of patients with TBCKE have a neurodegenerative course. The study team found a potential biomarker for TBCKE--abnormal levels of chemicals called oligosaccharides in the patients' urine. Further studies will determine if oligosaccharide levels could become a simple laboratory test to help diagnose the disorder. Notably, oligosaccharide levels improved when the researchers added the amino acid leucine to the patients' cells in laboratory cultures. "Leucine activates mTOR signaling that was disrupted by the mutation, so this finding suggests that leucine might offer some improvement in disease symptoms if used in patients," said Ortiz-Gonzalez. This is consistent with Ortiz-Gonzalez and her CHOP collaborators are continuing to investigate the biology of TBCKE, while working to establish a patient registry of children with this rare disorder. Her eventual goal is to identify more patients and perform studies that could set the stage for a clinical trial to test leucine or a similar compound as a personalized treatment for this severe childhood disease. A new comprehensive study conducted by researchers at New York University College of Dentistry (NYU Dentistry) in collaboration with Rheonix Inc. describes a novel test for Zika virus, which utilizes saliva for rapid identification of the diagnostic markers of the virus. Credit: Tacio Philip Sansonovski/ Shutterstock.com The test was a modified version of an existing model developed by the researchers at NYU and Rheonix for rapid HIV testing, which has appeared in two publications, PLOS ONE and the Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE). Factors including population concentration and global air travel account for the frequent outbreak of infectious diseases. The World Health Organization declared Zika and related birth defects a public health crisis after the 2015 outbreak of the virus in Brazil which spread to other countries in Central and South America, the Caribbean, and the Southern United States. Dr. Maite Sabalza, the lead author and postdoctoral associate at the Department of Basic Science and Craniofacial Biology at NYU Dentistry said: "The recent Zika virus outbreak confirms that we need an effective surveillance and diagnostic program to reduce the impact of future emerging infectious diseases." Early detection of the pathogens is crucial for preventing the outbreak of the diseases, which involves two separate steps: one to detect a pathogen's nucleic acids (RNA or DNA) and another to test for antibodies the proteins the body produces in response to pathogens. Conventional testing methods involve blood samples to detect the Zika virus and are typically processed using a common diagnostic technique called real-time polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR). However, blood may not be the best fluid as the virus may disappear in the blood within a week or two following infection. In addition, it can persist longer in semen, saliva, and urine as the antibodies could prevail for months or years in such bodily fluids, thereby making it essential for diagnosis to also detect antibodies after infection. Current RT-PCR tests require three hours and specific antibody tests can take several weeks. However, the novel method developed the NYU researchers was based on isothermal amplification, which could detect the nucleic acids of a virus within 20 minutes, and perform antibody tests, which utilizes Zika-specific antigens, in less than an hour. The sooner you can identify a pathogen, the sooner steps can be taken to treat and isolate people. During an epidemic, you could test people before they get on a plane. The future of going through security at the airport may not be taking off your shoes, but instead spitting into a tube." Dr. Daniel Malamud, NYU Dentistry Researchers modified the current model so as to use markers which could detect the Zika nucleic acid sequences instead of those for HIV. Further, they used a portable isothermal amplification device used for point-of-care testing to detect Zika RNA. Researchers adapted the test to the Rheonix CARD cartridge and workstation, allowing them to approximate the viral load in saliva samples in order to understand the severity of the disease and immune responses, especially among pregnant women and fetuses. The researchers also recognized Zika-specific antigens which can be used to identify the Zika specific antibodies needed for testing using a high-density peptide microarray. Since Zika can be easily misdiagnosed with other viruses like chikungunya and dengue, detection of Zika-specific antigens necessitates more precise diagnostic testing. Researchers at NYU and around the world continue to validate their observations in further experiments using Zika-infected saliva. Dr. Sabalza said: "In working towards the goal of quickly making effective diagnostics available, we have developed a generic protocol that can not only be used to test for Zika virus but can be adapted for the next emerging or re-emerging infectious disease." Dr. Richard Montagna, Rheonix's Senior Vice President for Scientific & Clinical Affairs, said: "In addition to being able to react very quickly to any newly emerging or re-emerging infectious disease, our fully automated testing platform requires virtually no hands-on efforts and is well suited for use by individuals with minimal training." GamesRadar+ is supported by its audience. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Learn more Justice League vs. The Legion of Super-Heroes is coming to DC in 2022 Plus Wonder Woman returns to the Justice League while OMAC returns to the DCU HARTFORD The first black woman to sit in the state legislature, Bridgeports Margaret E. Morton, has been nominated to the Connecticut Womens Hall of Fame. Margaret Morton laid the ground-work for me to stand where I am today the third black woman ever to be elected to the Connecticut Senate, state Sen. Marilyn Moore, D-Bridgeport, said at a news conference Thursday. Margaret knew that being the only black woman in the legislature meant she had an added responsibility to serve as a mentor to the men and women of color who would come after her. She broke down barriers and became a leader at the State Capitol. In honor of Black History month, the four current African-American women legislators Moore, state Rep. Patricia Billie Miller, D-Stamford, Rep. Toni Walker, D-New Haven, and Rep. Robyn Porter, D-New Haven gathered to remember Morton and her lasting impact. No matter how massive the mountain, Margaret Morton always found a way to make moves that redefined history, said Porter. While this Queen Matriarch put down the roots and carried the torch for a more equitable future, I feel a personal calling in my spirit to carry on her legacy. Morton, who died in 2012 at age 87, protested segregated lunch counters in Bridgeport before running for the House of Representatives in 1972. The citys Margaret E. Morton Government Center is named for her. Mortons accomplishments are even more laudable today, because back in 1972 when she was elected to the House of Representatives, being a woman of color running for office was not as common as it is in this day and age, said Miller. Morton served four terms in the House and then in 1980, challenged a Democratic incumbent for state senate and won, becoming the first African-American woman elected to the state Senate. In her six terms in the state Senate, she rose to the position of Deputy President Pro Tempore. When she retired in 1992, she was the highest ranking black woman in legislative history. Lt. Gov. Nancy Wyman and New Haven Mayor Toni N. Harp joined the legislators Thursday to emphasize the need for more women of color in government. I'm quite sure no one in this room second-guesses the value of role models in the development of Connecticuts future leaders, but in the African-American community, theres a dearth of outstanding role models because they were omitted from so many history lessons and overlooked when positions of prominence became vacant, Harp said. The pattern of omission and oversight is only amplified when the conversation is about African-American women, so those of us gathered today want to provide as much momentum as possible for Sen. Morton's induction. Of the 187 members of the Connecticut legislature, 8.5 percent 16 people are black. Connecticut legislators represent a state population that is 12 percent black and 80 percent white, according to 2016 census data. NEW FAIRFIELD Complete with a New Fairfield swag bag and a standing ovation, the school board has announced its new superintendent will be outgoing Region 12 Superintendent Patricia Cosentino. Cosentino, who announced last year she will leave Region 12 when her contract expires, will replace Superintendent Alicia Roy, who also said she will step down at the end of her contract. Both contracts end June 30, and Cosentino will officially start in New Fairfield on July 1. The school board voted on the hiring decision during a special meeting Thursday after spending the last few months searching for a replacement. Its an honor to be here, Cosentino told the crowd. Im thrilled ... and Im here to serve. I look forward to meeting you all and building wonderful relationships with you and your children. Before starting in Region 12 in 2012, Cosentino served as principal of Bethel High School for six years. She previously taught fifth and sixth grade in New York. Cosentino said she will spend the next few months meeting with Roy, visiting the schools and getting to know organizations in town. She said one of her goals when she becomes superintendent will be a marketing campaign to publicize the district. New Fairfield is a school district that has so many wonderful strengths, including a wonderful community, Cosentino said. I think its about time that people know that. Roy, who announced last summer she would step down, had faced public criticism over the last two years, including claims there was a lack of communication in the district. The search for a new superintendent was led by a committee made up of four school board members. Consulting firm Cooperative Educational Services helped the committee develop a leadership profile for the position through a survey of residents. Chairwoman Peggy Katkocin said there were 13 total candidates for the position. The full board interviewed candidates in a closed executive session before deciding on Cosentino. This is a big day for New Fairfield, board member Doug DeRito said Tuesday. Several years from now were going to look back at this moment ... as maybe one of the proudest moments of this school district. File Photo / File Photo NEW MILFORD Town Council and the Board of Finance will discuss the proposed nearly $101.9 million budget over a series of workshops. The meetings will be on Feb. 27, 28 and March 1, 6 and 7. Each will have a public comment period. All of the meetings begin at 7 p.m. and will be held in the E. Paul Martin room at Town Hall. Being a Silicon Valley billionaire comes with its pitfalls, one being that everything you say will be scrutinized by the public. Elon Musk doesnt seem to mind though. Despite his position as the CEO of Tesla and chairman of SolarCity, Musk has noted his lack of filter and marketing skills, and the results are sometimes, well, perfect. Musk often takes to Twitter, most recently representing his Gigafactory in units of hamster. He also outwitted analysts this week after they asked him if the SolarCity merger was due to a conflict of interest. Fine Musk, you win. To celebrate him and his lack of filter, here are 18 times Musk made us laugh: Additional reporting by Nina Zipkin 1. He trolled the trolls. While companies such as Google and Facebook grapple with how to weed out false news stories, Musk took to Twitter to weigh in on the work of a mysterious person named "Shepard Stewart," who has been publishing fake pieces about him and his companies. He included a South Park reference, naturally. Can anyone uncover who is really writing these fake pieces? Can't be skankhunt42. His work is better than this. https://t.co/Qs69AFMGE5 Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 22, 2016 2. Musk personally canceled a blogger's Tesla pre-order after receiving a "rude" letter. Stewart Alsop, a California venture capitalist, learned that an open letter to Musk was a quick way to get his Tesla Model X order canceled. The letter claimed that the reveal of the Tesla Motors Model X started late, was too crowded and focused too much on safety. Musk personally responded to the blogger and canceled his order. He then went a step further to address the media. Must be a slow news day if denying service to a super rude customer gets this much attention Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 3, 2016 3. He denied his cousin a family discount at Tesla, or rather, offered a family discount to everyone. Lyndon Rive, SolarCity CEO and Musks cousin, made the mistake of asking for a family discount on the new Tesla. Musks response? Yeah absolutely. Go to TeslaMotor.com, buy the car online, and the price you see there is the family discount,' Rive told Tech Insider. Everyone gets a family discount. Rive wasnt too offended. He has the Model S and his wife has the Model X. He also told Tech Insider that the response was totally fair. Related: 4 Pop Culture Fixations of Elon Musk 4. He brought backseat reading lights back to the Model S because his son called it the stupidest car in the world. One of Musks most important critics, his son, complained that he couldnt read in the back of his dads car. The Model S originally had reading lights in the back, but Tesla took them out to increase headroom in the back seat. One of Musks five sons thought that idea was stupid. Musk brought the backseat reading light back to the Model S, even offering to put the lights into cars that had already been delivered -- for free. 5. When Musk was asked about his personal life, his reaction was hilarious. Musk has joked in the past about how marriage hasnt worked out for him, with his first marriage ending in divorce, and his second marriage also recently ending in divorce. But when asked about his personal life, the billionaire definitely seems to know what hes doing. "I think the time allocated to the businesses and the kids is going fine," Musk told Bloomberg BusinessWeek. "I would like to allocate more time to dating, though. I need to find a girlfriend. How much time does a woman want a week? Maybe 10 hours?" 6. Apparently for Iron Man, getting wasted is in the job description. Musk told Bloomberg that Robert Downey Jr., who plays Marvel's Iron Man, once showed up at the SpaceX office playing on the notion that Musk has been called the real Iron Man. Bloomberg's reporter noted that Musk didnt seem to have the bad-boy personality Tony Stark has. Musk replied, Hey, I went to Haiti last Christmas and visited some pretty dangerous parts. I got wasted, too, on some drink they call the Zombie. 7. Musk got a little off track when introducing the bioweapon defense mode on the new Tesla Model X. As you may have heard, the Tesla Model X comes with a bioweapon defense mode. Originally designed to protect against pollution, Musk jokes that it could also protect against other hazards. If theres ever sort of an apocalyptic scenario, of some kind, hypothetically, you just press the bioweapon defense mode button, Musk said, laughing. This is a real button. 8. Musk made a sexual joke on The Late Show and then laughed at it while everyone else was still processing it. While on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Musk made a joke that even Colbert had to take a moment to think about. After showing a video of a snake charger that automatically plugs into your car, Musk joked, For the prototype at least, I would recommend not dropping anything when youre near it. 9. And Musks response to warming up the planet sounds incredibly nonchalant, but warning, its not. Musk frequently talks about Mars, which he refers to as a fixer upper planet. He has frequently been asked about the possibility of inhabiting the planet. The answer on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert? Maybe we can just drop nuclear bombs on the north and south poles, he says casually. Related: 7 Takeaways in the Success of Elon Musk for Young Entrepreneurs 10. Musk doesnt recommended using the Model S as a boat, or does he? Sure, the Model S can float, but its not recommended by Tesla or Musk. After a man in Almaty, Kazakhstan, posted a video driving his Tesla through a flooded tunnel, Musk tweeted: We *def* don't recommended this, but Model S floats well enough to turn it into a boat for short periods of time. Thrust via wheel rotation. Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 19, 2016 Sounds a bit like a recommendation. 11. He most certainly doesnt lie about what it takes to run a business. In an interview with Limitless Stars, Musk doesnt exactly suggest starting a business. Starting a company is like eating glass staring into the abyss of death. Um, if that sounds appealing, go ahead. He sure makes it look easy though, simultaneously running two incredibly successful companies while taking care of five children. Click here to see the video. 12. He defined his Gigafactory in units of hamster. Elon Musk has been hard at work with his Gigafactory, dedicating more than $5 billion into the facility that will apparently be one of the largest buildings in the world. Musk made headlines in 2015 when he ramped up the construction schedule. Despite the serious nature of the factory for Teslas future, Musk posted on Twitter the units of hamster that the Gigafactory would take up. Yes, units of hamster. Some were unsatisfied with the animal chosen, requesting it be in units of puppies. Gigafactory in units of hamster pic.twitter.com/9BAchcBX73 Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 30, 2016 13. He shut down analysts on Tesla's acquisition of SolarCity. After Tesla and SolarCity made the announcement that the two would be merging, analysts started to question Musk, mostly because he owns around 20 percent of both companies. Isnt that a conflict of interest? The conflicts of interest, Musk said to an analyst on Monday, are if we dont merge. Well, when you put it like that. 14. He was painfully honest about his struggles. When a Twitter user asked whether the ups and downs Musk has had make for a more enjoyable life, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX responded in a painfully honest way. The reality is great highs, terrible lows and unrelenting stress. Don't think people want to hear about the last two. Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 30, 2017 I'm sure there are better answers than what I do, which is just take the pain and make sure you really care about what you're doing Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 30, 2017 Yeah Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 30, 2017 Maybe not medically tho. Dunno. Bad feelings correlate to bad events, so maybe real problem is getting carried away in what I sign up for. Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 30, 2017 If you buy a ticket to hell, it isn't fair to blame hell ... Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 30, 2017 15. He corrected the record after a news story about the world's "first crewless ship" published. When The Verge tweeted a story explaining that the "worlds first crewless ship will launch next year," Musk had a one-word response. Musk was referring to SpaceX's three existing autonomous ships that support sea landings of its Falcon 9 reusable rocket. 16. Even with a busy schedule, he provides customer service. Even while running Tesla, SpaceX and his side companies, Musk makes time for customers. After a Tesla customer tweeted about a poor experience he had in one of the Tesla stores, Musk responded directly to the person letting him know he was taking care of the issue. Def not ok. Just sent a reminder to Tesla stores that we just want people to look forward to their next visit. That's what really matters. Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 16, 2017 17. He trolls his competition. In response to a USA Today story about Daimlers announcement that it would be investing $1 billion in electric vehicles, Musk tweeted that $1 billion wasnt enough to compete with Tesla. Daimler responded to Musk in agreement, saying that the figure was missing a zero and the company was actually spending $10 billion. Good Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 25, 2017 People began speculating whether Musks tweet motivated Daimler to increase its investment, which turned out to be untrue, but Musk took the credit anyways. Yes, I did :) Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 26, 2017 18. He groans at his competition. After The Verge reported on Delphi Automotives $450 million acquisition of autonomous vehicle startup nuTonomy, Musk responded to the tweet with a groan literally. Groan Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 24, 2017 19. He rips rival projects sarcastically. When asked about Ubers flying car initiative as compared to the Boring Companys more underground pursuits, Musk made it clear, dripping in sarcasm, that he isnt the biggest fan of the idea. If you love drones above your house, youll really love vast numbers of cars flying over your head that are 1000 times bigger and noisier and blow away anything that isnt nailed down when they land Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 22, 2018 But it turns out that his criticism wasnt lost on Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, who had this to say about a potential way forward for the project. Challenge accepted. Improved battery tech (thx 2 @elonmusk) and multiple smaller rotors will be much more efficient and avoid noise + environmental pollution. https://t.co/563U0RqDYF dara khosrowshahi (@dkhos) February 22, 2018 Related: 19 Times Elon Musk Had the Best Response Internet de alta velocidad, el nuevo reto de Elon Musk 25 Weird Things We've Learned About Elon Musk Copyright 2018 Entrepreneur.com Inc., All rights reserved This article originally appeared on entrepreneur.com China has at least eight CRISPR gene therapy clinical trials to treat various forms of cancer. CRISPR is being tested as a treatment for cancers of the lung, bladder, cervix and prostate. Clinicaltrials.gov lists all of the clinical trials in the world. Only one CRISPR cancer study has been approved in the United States, and its only just now starting to look for the first patient to treat. Clinical trials can be approved in China by a single nine-member hospital committee in just two months. One such committee included a lawyer, a bioethicist, nurses, doctors, a journalist, a representative of cancer patients and a representative of the public. Patients are willing to try new cures. Thats why the ethics committee and the lab are very positive about this. But the less stringent oversight makes doctors and bioethicists worry that some Chinese doctors may be rushing ahead too quickly, possibly putting patients at risk. China has made this a very high priority a national priority to develop CRISPR cancer treatment. NEW HAVEN About 80 city residents were evacuated from their Norton Street apartment complex Thursday afternoon when authorities abruptly condemned the five-story, century-old building due to unsafe conditions. Jason Wronowski said his roommate texted him there was an inspection going on and there were issues, but he didnt realize he would only have 45 minutes to grab whatever he could until he got home around 5 p.m. Oh, I thought, they were going to be like, Were just going to move you out. Heres a different apartment. But it was just like, Get out. Well figure it out later, he said. Wronowski, who has lived in the building for about a year, said he managed to grab some clothes and his three cats, he wishes he would have had more time to take food and additional clothing. I didnt even know what to think, he said. It was pretty intense. They didnt really give you much time to get out. They were just like, Get out. He and his roommate are staying at the Regal Inn in a small room with one bed. While Wronowski doesnt have to pay for the motel room, he will have to pay to get to and from work, as he doesnt have a car. He said he used to take the bus, but now will have to spend money on ride-sharing services, which can be expensive. The structural damage went from the basement to the fifth floor and it followed right through on all the plumbing stacks. The plumbing stacks are holding the building up, Building Official James Turcio said Friday. Also, a rear fire escape was severely deteriorated and essentially disconnected from the building, while a floor within the building was sagging some six inches. A photo of a steel I-beam showed it was rotted through with rust. In the basement the 4-by-4 wooden supports, reaching some 16 feet, were holding nothing. You could flop them in the wind, Turcio said of the structures whose function it is to support the five floors. It was a total team effort, Turcio said, from finding the damage and evacuating the tenants. The initial review began Wednesday when Livable City Initiative Inspector Rick Mazzadra came to the building to conduct a regular apartment licensing review, which occurs every three years, and arranged for the building department to come there on Thursday. Also Wednesday, Mazzadra contacted the property manager, Mendy Katz, who brought in a contractor to do repairs. The contractor then called structural engineer Nic Cuoco to the scene, Turcio said. Cuoco, in his written report on 66 Norton St., said he found significant deterioration of the first-floor framing and floor sheathing in the bathroom areas. He wrote that, in most of areas of the building, the sheathing was completely destroyed. The floor joists were severely notched and/or unsupported and headers were cracked. The cast-iron waste pipes appear to be supporting most of the structural load. As such, they are kinked or buckling at the bell-joints, Cuoco wrote. The engineer said after reviewing two apartments, he found floor deformations of approximately six inches in the vicinity of the bathrooms, and said the building was structurally unsound and not safe to occupy. Turcio commended the actions of the four LCI inspectors who came to the scene. Along with some 20 police officers and several fire companies, the LCI inspectors notified and helped evacuate the tenants to hotels that the landlord, Ernest Schemitsch of Brooklyn, N.Y., has to pay for. My inspectors did an awesome job, Deputy Director of Housing Code Enforcement Rafael Ramos said. Turcio said these situations are stressful for everyone. This is the toughest decision a building official has to do to empty a building out, Turcio said. We dont take these things lightly. I saw somebody with a very small baby in a carrier last night. It is a very difficult decision to make, Dan ONeill, the deputy building inspector, said. Turcio said he acted around 3 p.m. Thursday after talking to Cuoco and James Eggert, the assistant building inspector, who was already on the scene Thursday at 2 p.m. We walked the cellar and saw numerous areas in deterioration in the structural floor joists. We went upstairs and saw on one of the load-bearing wall lines, the floor sagged six inches. You could feel it walking on it. That is a big red flag, ONeill said. Attorney Ian Gottlieb, who represents Schemitsch, said it is a fluid situation, but the company is doing everything they can do to get everyone re-housed. He said they are waiting for the full structural report ordered by Turcio. Ultimately, it will have to be fixed, Gottlieb said, referring to the seriously damaged building Attorney Amy Marks of the New Haven Legal Assistance Association thanked Serena Neal-Sanjurjo, executive director of LCI, for negotiating with the landlord to get $75 to $100 food vouchers from Stop & Shop to the tenants as there is no ability to cook or refrigerate food in the hotel rooms. We are delighted that Serena took responsibility for the well being of the families, Marks said. We are extremely grateful. Stephen Izzo, the former live-in superintendent of the building, lived in the basement with his wife, Lindsey Yeaton, and their 12-year-old son. He said while he was the superintendent, the entire structure concerned him. He said if a person were to put down a bowling ball, it would just roll on its own due to the six-inch dip in all the floors. Im in the basement apartment. Above me is apartment 2, 22, 32, 42 and 52. When someone runs their water, my kitchen has no kitchen ceiling, you could stand there with a bar of soap and take a shower, Izzo said. There was a pipe in apartment 52 that went into an old cast-iron, 115-year-old pipe that was cracked ... all the way down. It got mold in 42, 32, 22, 2 and my basement. He said when they came home Thursday around 3 p.m., we didnt see whats going on in the front of the building. Were on the other side. All of a sudden, my wife goes, Whats going on? She goes in and comes out and says, The buildings condemned. Izzo was one of the tenants staying at the motels who complained earlier in the day that money for food was an issue. We cook at home. We cook meals. These are families. We dont have extra money to go out and eat three meals a day, he said. Turcio said everything worked as it should have, according to their protocol. The licensing program caught it. The city worked together on this, Turcio said. This building has been deteriorated for years and years, Turcio said. But to get in there and do a full inspection, that can be a problem, to get access. Turcio has now ordered a complete structural inspection, which is likely to take three to four days. Given the seriousness of the deterioration, he estimated it could be months before the building is fixed. On Friday, he officially posted a notice of imminent danger and an order to vacate. Turcios order said violations of the building code present an imminent danger of failure or collapse of the structure and endanger public safety. This was due to structural deficiences throughout the apartment building necessitating that occupantsy be vacated immediately. Portions of the structure are in danger of immediate collapse, the order read. Fire Chief John Alston said the Fire Department started evacuating the 38 occupied units Thursday around 3 p.m., and the building was completely empty by 9:30 p.m. Seventy-four people 52 adults, 22 children and 12 pets were transported by school buses to three area hotels. Six other residents were staying with family or friends. Shelly Sutherland, who has lived in the building for about five years, said she, her husband and three children are staying in a cramped room with two double beds at the Three Judges Motel. She was home sleeping when someone knocked on the door and told her she had one hour to gather everything she may need. One hour. How are you going to do all that stuff with three kids? she asked. She described the living conditions in the apartment as deplorable, and said the building is infested with rats and cockroaches. She said her 7-year-old had to go to the Intensive Care Unit three times since December for asthma, and she believes its due to the mold in the building. However, the living arrangements at the motel arent much better, she said. Her kids have been crying and are unable to sleep. She said she doesnt even have the money she needs to buy food. Before the decision was made to give the tenants food vouchers, Sutherland was among those worrying about food, but there is still no way to heat it. My daughter, she drinks a bottle in the morning, but we cant give her a bottle because theres no microwave to warm it up, she said. Shaquana and Monique Paige, who have lived in the apartment building for more than a year, are in a similar situation with their two kids. Shaquana Paige said the living conditions in her room are horrible. We cant even get some hot water in the bathroom. The bed has big holes in it. Big holes. Marks hopes the school system arranges for the children in the motels to be picked up on Monday. She said the permanent relocation plans also have to be monitored. The tenants have to have a choice of where they are re-located and not to some unsafe property. Marks said she did not understand how the many serious problems were not caught earlier by the apartment license program, LCI or the Housing Authority of New Haven which has four federally supported Section 8 tenants in the building. A review of LCI records shows 129 visits to 66 Norton St. to answer complaints since 1998 with 17 in the last two years. A few were specifically for plumbing problems. Four apartments were labeled as illegal as of Friday. Karen DuBois-Walton, executive director of the authority, said she would review the records. She said an apartment for an elderly or disabled person is inspected every three years, while others are inspected every two years unless a tenant has a problem that is reported to LCI before the mandated review. One source gave a colorful description of the serious situation. Essentially, someone could have taken a bath like in the movies and ended up on the next floor, the source said. The building is over 100 years old. Its from years and years of water damage [and] at least two fires over the years. The source, who has 20 years experience, had never seen a building that close to collapse in New Haven. Turcio confirmed that there had been fires in the building in 1977, 1978, 1983 and 1996, and some of that damage was visible. It was the plumbing leaks, however, which seem to be the major contributor to the structural damage. He surmised that some of those plumbing repairs had not been permitted or professionally taken care of. Rick Fontana, the director of emergency management, said the evacuation was orderly. Any time you evacuate a large, five-story building with eight units per floor, there would be some trouble or chaotic moments, but it was a very organized evacuation all departments working together, Fontana said. It wasnt something where we just ran in and started banging on doors and pulled everybody out. We gave people the time to gather their belongings. He said they are still trying to figure out the logistics, where renters could come back to get their possessions. Turcio said the fire alarm seemed to be the only thing in working order. The building was sold in 2015 by Menachem Gurevitch of Mandy Management, one of the largest landlords in the city, to Schemitsch for $2.5 million. Marks said it was another example of an out-of-state investor preying on low-income tenants by not investing in or maintaining their buildings. There should have been a lot of checks and balances, she said. This problem lingered for years and ended in a crisis. Marx said it is not an isolated incident. The building official said they do not come in to inspect when a building changes hands. We dont have a retroactive code, he said. Once a certificate of occupancy is issued, we are out of the picture and it becomes a fire marshal responsibility. If they flag some structural problems, we will get called back, ONeill added. Turcio said if a tenant has a problem, they should call LCI. If they (LCI inspectors) see something serious, they call us right away, he said. Turcio expected to see a police presence at the building to protect the tenants possessions and make sure no one enters the apartments. Ramos said the owner at this point is cooperating and understands he will be responsible for the cost of the relocations, which LCI will monitor. If there are problems finding permanent housing replacements, LCI will step in. In celebration of Black History Month, Connecticuts four current African- American women legislators: Sen. Marilyn Moore, D-Bridgeport, Rep. Patricia Billie Miller, D-Stamford, Rep. Toni Walker, D-New Haven and Rep. Robyn Porter, D-New Haven nominated Margaret E. Morton, the first African-American woman to sit in the state legislature, to the Connecticut Womens Hall of Fame. Joined by Lt. Governor Nancy Wyman and New Haven Mayor Toni N. Harp, they also emphasized the need for more women of color in government. Margaret Morton laid the ground-work for me to stand where I am today the third black woman ever to be elected to the Connecticut Senate, Sen. Moore said. Margaret knew that being the only black woman in the legislature meant she had an added responsibility to serve as a mentor to the men and women of color who would come after her. She broke down barriers and became a leader at the State Capitol. She is a true role model to women across the state. It is my honor to stand in support of the late Margaret E. Mortons nomination to the Connecticut Womens Hall of Fame for her extraordinary service in state government and her commitment to advancing the priorities of our communities of color, Rep. Miller said. Ms. Mortons accomplishments are even more laudable today, because back in 1972 when she was elected to the House of Representatives, being a woman of color running for office was not as common as it is in this day and age. Her resolve, integrity and dedication during her service still inspire us to keep serving with pride and honor as we continue working toward a better future for our constituencies. The late Margaret Morton was a phenomenal role model for all women in the Connecticut General Assembly. She was a force to be reckoned with, who always exercised her power on behalf of her constituents and the community at-large. No matter how massive the mountain, Margaret Morton always found a way to make moves that redefined history, said Rep. Porter. While this Queen Matriarch put down the roots and carried the torch for a more equitable future, I feel a personal calling in my spirit to carry on her legacy, and that calling has only been further solidified in discovering that we both were sworn in at the age of 48 with a passion for people and a tremendous love for God and community. I had the honor and privilege of serving with Margaret. She was a powerful woman and legislator, one who set a high standard and served as an example for all of us, said Lt. Governor Wyman. Her nomination to the Connecticut Womens Hall of Fame speaks to her accomplishments and her legacy. Margarets story and her work continue to inspireoffering the next generations a reason to get involved in government and public service, to run for office, and to make their voices heard. I'm quite sure no one in this room second-guesses the value of role models in the development of Connecticuts future leaders, but in the African-American community, theres a dearth of outstanding role models because they were omitted from so many history lessons and overlooked when positions of prominence became vacant, Mayor Harp said. The pattern of omission and oversight is only amplified when the conversation is about African-American women, so those of us gathered today want to provide as much momentum as possible for Senator Morton's induction. Calling on Women of Color to Get Involved in Government Service As the first African-American woman elected to the state legislature, Morton laid the foundation for other women of color to serve as a voice for their residents. But it is up to Connecticuts current and future female leaders to carry out her legacy. To ensure that every issue facing women - regardless of their age or race - is represented at the Capitol, it is vital that more women of color run and are elected to state office. By having an elected group of lawmakers that is a true reflection of the demographics they represent, the legislature can begin to address issues in a more equitable and fair way. The CT Womens Hall of Fame Induction Process Nominations to the Connecticut Womens Hall of Fame are accepted on an ongoing basis and reviewed by their Consulting Scholars Committee. Each year, the Consulting Scholars select a theme for the Induction Ceremony and create a slate of nominees for approval by the Board of Trustees. Qualified candidates may or may not be inducted in the year in which they are nominated, but all nominations are kept on file for future consideration. Richard E. Taylor Biographical Medicine Hat is a small town in Southwestern Alberta founded just over 100 years ago in a valley where the Canadian Pacific Railway crossed the South Saskatchewan River. I was born there on November 2, 1929 and raised in comfortable if somewhat Spartan circumstances. My father was the son of a Northern Irish carpenter and his Scottish wife who homesteaded on the Canadian prairies; my mother was an American, the daughter of Norwegian immigrants to the northern United States who moved to a farm in Alberta shortly after the first World War. During my early years our family of three was part of a large family clan headed by my Scottish grandmother. I attended schools named after English Generals and Royalty Kitchener, Connaught, Alexandra. Although I read quite a bit and found mathematics easy, I was not an outstanding student. In high school I did reasonably well in mathematics and science thanks to some talented and dedicated teachers. I was nearly ten years old when World War II began. That conflict had a great effect on our town, and on me. In rapid succession the town found itself host to an R.A.F. flight training school, a prisoner of war camp and a military research establishment. The wartime glamor of the military, the sudden infusion of groups of sophisticated and highly-educated people, and new cultural opportunities (the first live symphonic music I ever heard was played by German prisoners of war) all transformed our town and widened the horizons of the young people there. I developed an interest in explosives and blew three fingers off my left hand just before hostilities ended in Europe. The atomic bomb that ended the war later that summer made me intensely aware of physicists and physics. Higher education was highly prized in the society of a small prairie town and I was expected to continue on to university. After some difficulties over low grades in some high school subjects, I was admitted to the University of Alberta in Edmonton. I registered in a special program emphasizing mathematics and physics and gradually became interested in experimental physics, continuing my studies towards a Masters degree at the same institution. My thesis research was a rather primitive effort to measure double b -decay in an aging Wilson cloud chamber. Between sessions at the University, I spent two summers as a research assistant at the Defense Research Board installation near Medicine Hat working with Dr. E.J. Wiggins, who encouraged me to continue my studies either in eastern Canada or in the United States. Those were interesting years, and during this time I met, courted and married Rita Bonneau a partnership which has enriched my life in every way. Together we decided to try California, and I was accepted into the graduate program at Stanford, while she found work teaching in a military school in order to support us both. The first two years at Stanford were exciting beyond description the Physics Department at Stanford included Felix Bloch, Leonard Schiff, Willis Lamb, Robert Hofstadter, and W.K.H. (Pief) Panofsky who had just arrived from Berkeley. I found that I had to work hard to keep up with my fellow students, but learning physics was great fun in those surroundings. At the end of the second year I joined the High Energy Physics Laboratory where the new linear accelerator was just beginning to do experiments. My thesis work was accomplished there under Prof. Robert F. Mozley, on a rather difficult experiment producing polarized g -rays from the accelerator beam and then using those g -rays to study p -meson production. In 1958 I was invited to join a group of physicists at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris who were planning experiments at an accelerator (similar to the linac at Stanford) which was under construction in Orsay. I stayed in France for about three years working on the experimental facilities for the accelerator, and then participated in some electron scattering experiments. My wife began a new career there as a librarian at the Orsay laboratory, a career which was interrupted for a while when our son, Ted, was born in 1960. We returned to the United States in 1961 but a continuing connection to French physics and physicists has been a significant element in my life since that time including a Doctorate (Honoris Causa) very kindly conferred upon me in 1980 by the Universite de Paris-Sud. Upon our return to the United States, I joined the staff of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory at the University of California. After less than a year in Berkeley, I moved back to Stanford where work on the construction of Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) was just beginning. At SLAC, I started working on the design of the experimental areas for the new accelerator. By 1963 I had joined the group considering the requirements for electron scattering apparatus in the larger of two experimental areas. I worked closely with Pief Panofsky, and with collaborators from the California Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I spent the next decade helping to build equipment and taking part in various electron scattering experiments, a number of which are the subject of the 1990 Nobel lectures. This was a period of intense activity, but also one of intense enjoyment for me. I was surrounded by people I liked and admired, and deeply involved in experiments which generated interest in laboratories and universities all over the world. I count myself extremely fortunate to have been at SLAC at that time. I became a member of the SLAC faculty in 1968. In 1971, I was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship and spent an interesting sabbatical year at CERN, where I was impressed by the great progress that European science had made in the decade since I had worked in France. Well before my trip to CERN, colleagues in the group at SLAC had become interested in testing some of the invariance properties of the electromagnetic interaction, a field which would absorb our efforts for most of the 1970s. When Charles Prescott joined the group in 1970, he began a serious study of ways to test parity conservation in the interaction between an electron and a nucleon. The electroweak theories of Weinberg and Salam predicted levels of nonconservation that looked extremely hard to measure. We attempted an experiment with the existing Yale polarized source, but the measurements did not reach the desired level of sensitivity. I was not very encouraging to my colleagues who wished to pursue the experiment to higher levels of accuracy. After the theoretical work of Veltman and vant Hooft and the discovery of neutral currents at CERN (during the year I was there) and at NAL (now Fermilab), the interest in experiments on parity conservation greatly intensified. In 1975 a new method for producing polarized electrons was discovered by a group in Colorado which included E.L. Garwin of SLAC. In 1978, after building a source for the linac based on the new method, we were able to demonstrate a violation of parity in close agreement with the electroweak predictions. After the parity experiments, our group presented two proposals for large experimental facilities at PEP, the e+e collider then being built at SLAC. Both those proposals were rejected. The group was finally successful in proposing a relatively small PEP detector, but I did not take part in that experiment. In 1981, I received an Alexander von Humboldt award which allowed me to spend most of the 1981-82 academic year at DESY in Hamburg. In 1982 I returned to SLAC as Associate Director for Research, a post I held until 1986 when I resigned to return to research. Since that time I have spent quite a bit of time in Europe and I am presently playing a very small role in the H 1 detector preparations at HERA. From Les Prix Nobel. The Nobel Prizes 1990, Editor Tore Frangsmyr, [Nobel Foundation], Stockholm, 1991 This autobiography/biography was written at the time of the award and later published in the book series Les Prix Nobel/ Nobel Lectures/The Nobel Prizes. The information is sometimes updated with an addendum submitted by the Laureate. Richard E. Taylor died on 22 February 2018. Copyright The Nobel Foundation 1990 To cite this section MLA style: Richard E. Taylor Biographical. NobelPrize.org. Nobel Prize Outreach AB 2021. Fri. 17 Sep 2021. Managing Editor Having lived and worked in Indy on and off since 1977, and currently living in Carmel, I've seen the city change a great deal. I love covering the arts in all its forms, and the places where the arts and broader cultural issues intersect. Viewed of Thank you for reading! On your next view you will be asked to log in to your subscriber account or create an account and subscribepurchase a subscription to continue reading. Mr. Wu was founder and chairman, but his name did not appear in Anbangs corporate ownership records. Instead, it is owned on paper by a succession of shell companies controlled by a handful of obscure names. Such ownership arrangements are common in China, where the wealthy and politically connected often own properties under the names of others. A New York Times investigation two years ago found that many of those owners were family or acquaintances of Mr. Wu, often hailing from his home region, in Chinas Zhejiang province. Anbang has said it is owned by a number of shareholders who made the proper disclosures under Chinese law. The takeover of Anbang will put the Waldorf Astoria, for decades a symbol of New York elegance, under the control of the Chinese government. In addition to hosting celebrities like Frank Sinatra and Elizabeth Taylor, for years it had been the lodging of choice for presidents and other world leaders. That changed in 2014, when Anbang said it would buy the hotel for nearly $2 billion. President Barack Obama declined to stay there over security concerns. The hotel is currently closed as it undergoes renovations that will shrink the hotel and add condominiums. The Waldorf Astoria purchase ushered in the rise of a new breed of Chinese deal makers. The companies, which also included Dalian Wanda Group, HNA Group and Fosun International, bought up everything from hotels to banks to movie production companies. Though the companies are privately owned, their leaders often benefited from their political connections, and they were often backed by cheap debt provided by Chinas state-run banks. The deals made the companies truly global players. For example, in a financial disclosure last spring, shortly before the police detention of its chairman, Anbang said that nearly three-fifths of the assets of its main business, life insurance, were overseas. Many in legacy media love mass shootings, Ms. Loesch said, eliciting nods and approving shouts. Addressing the reporters in the room, she said:You guys love it. Im not saying that you love the tragedy, but I am saying that you love the ratings. Crying white mothers are ratings gold. The incendiary dig was not much of a surprise at a conference that attracts a wide spectrum of right-wing groups and news outlets, many of which have honed the provocation of liberals into a fine, and sometimes profitable, art. Still, some of Ms. Loeschs other remarks reiterating the N.R.A.s arguments for defending the Second Amendment and calling for more guns in schools drew a more tepid reaction from the audience, perhaps a sign of how the national outcry after the school shooting in Parkland, Fla., has become a backdrop for this weeks gathering. It was her media attacks that played best, like when she said that she needed a security detail to leave the televised CNN town hall with gun violence survivors where she spoke on Wednesday night. There were people rushing the stage and screaming, Burn her, Ms. Loesch said. A CNN spokesman said on Thursday that the networks security personnel accompanied all the town hall speakers, including Ms. Loesch, from the stage, and that Ms. Loesch also had her own private security. The spokesman did not say whether she had been threatened. After Ms. Loeschs remarks on Thursday, some journalists chafed at the idea that they were exploiting the deaths of children. The point of all of this is to say that people in the media arent real human beings with souls and families and feelings, which is disgusting, Elise Foley, a reporter at HuffPost, wrote on Twitter. Takata was forced into bankruptcy last year amid lawsuits, multimillion-dollar fines and crushing recall costs involving airbag inflaters that use the explosive chemical ammonium nitrate as a propellant. The chemical can deteriorate over time when exposed to high heat and humidity and burn too fast, blowing apart a metal canister. A reorganization plan for the company was approved last week by a federal bankruptcy judge in Delaware. We were able to resolve this investigation while ensuring that the needs of injured consumers take priority, South Carolinas attorney general, Alan Wilson, said in a statement. Also under the deal, Takata agreed not to represent its airbags as being safe unless supported by scientific evidence, not to falsify any testing data and to keep cooperating with automakers to make sure replacement inflaters are available. It also will not sell any airbags that use ammonium nitrate unless for recall replacement parts. Some of the provisions were already included in an agreement with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. A Takata spokesman was not immediately available for comment. As part of a criminal plea agreement with the Justice Department, Takata agreed to pay $125 million to victims and $850 million in restitution to automakers who bought its inflaters and were stuck with recall and litigation costs. Under the restructuring plan, Takata will sell most of its assets unrelated to airbags to a Chinese-owned rival for $1.6 billion. The problem touched off the largest automotive recall in United States history. Up to 69 million inflaters in the United States and an additional 60 million worldwide are being recalled, according to court documents and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The original street-style star the woman who first understood the career potential of dressing for the sidewalk has had enough. This weekend Anna dello Russo, the Italian fashion editor who turned self-veneration into social media gold and 1.4 million Instagram followers, is beginning to say goodbye to all that. At 55, shes jettisoning the spoils of her internet age: selling some of her clothes and taking the first steps toward killing off her digital alter ego, A.d.R. On Saturday, Christies is to auction 30 of what the editor described as her most iconic outfits by the likes of Gianni Versace, Tom Ford for Gucci, Nicolas Ghesquiere for Balenciaga during an invitation-only event at a palazzo on the Corso di Porta Romana in Milan. Proceeds are to benefit the Swarovski Foundation Scholarship program, which collaborates with design schools to support emerging talents. President Trump called again on Thursday for the opening of more mental hospitals to help prevent mass murders like the one at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. Yet ramping up institutional care, experts say, likely would not have prevented most of the spree killings regularly making headlines in this country. Were going to be talking about mental institutions. And when you have some person like this, you can bring them into a mental institution, and they can see what they can do. But weve got to get them out of our communities, the president said during a meeting at the White House with state and local officials. In the 1960s, states across the country began to close or shrink mental hospitals after a series of court decisions that limited the powers of state and local officials to commit people. The decline continued for decades, in part because of cuts in both state and federal budgets for mental health care. Some details about how the agreement will work in practice remain murky. The patchwork of state law means that states cannot necessarily restrict gun sales to everyone on another states no-gun list. And gun control advocates said states are already supposed to report to the national background check system people prohibited from owning guns under the parameters of state law, and not only those restricted by federal law. But officials working on the coalition said the agreement would reinforce and expand what they share, including the names of people, for example, who have been voluntarily hospitalized for mental illness and are prohibited by some states from owning guns. The agreement seemed poised to heighten the monitoring of people with mental illness, raising concerns among mental health advocates about unnecessarily stigmatizing people and discouraging them from seeking care. New York, for example, keeps a no-guns database that has grown to 77,447 names of people whom mental health professionals have reported as being a danger to themselves or others. New York will now share that database with the other three states, Alphonso David, Mr. Cuomos chief counsel, said in an interview. It is not clear how the other states would act on it, given that the law in Connecticut and New Jersey, for example, expressly forbids firearm purchases only by people who have been committed to a mental health center. But some states give their licensing authorities discretion to ban people they deem a risk to public safety, and Mr. David said they could use New Yorks database as an investigative tool to make their own determination. The case has gripped the city, especially a segment of New Yorkers who rely on paid child care for their children. Yoselyn Ortega, 55, is accused of slaughtering a 2-year-old boy and a 6-year-old girl inside their familys luxury Upper West Side apartment in 2012. Their mother, Marina Krim, returned home from picking up a third child from swimming lessons to find her bloodied children in a bathtub and Ms. Ortega plunging a knife into her own neck. She had cared for the children for two years. Ms. Ortega faces two counts of first-degree murder and is pleading not guilty by reason of insanity. The questioning called voir dire occurs in all criminal cases heard by a jury, and as in many other cases, the queries this time touch on a persons relationship to crime, whether he or she has ever been a victim, whether he or she can devote the time necessary for what is expected to be a long criminal trial. But this is not just any case, and it is turning out not to be just any voir dire, either. Whether potential jurors had a nanny or not, either as a parent or a child, whether they worked as one, and what that experience was like, has become part of the questioning. And the voir dire process itself has become a kind of lens onto the different New Yorks one inhabited by those who can afford nannies, the other populated by those who cannot, or who might have worked as a nanny themselves, like potential juror No. 18, who spent a summer caring for her nieces and nephews as a full-time job. The varying attitudes of the city are on stark display within the wood-paneled courtroom, as are searing emotions. As potential juror No. 4 answered the judges list of questions on Tuesday, he stopped at the final one and explained that he could not be fair and impartial. Image Lawyers for Ms. Ortega are planning to mount an insanity defense on her behalf. Credit... John Marshall Mantel for The New York Times I live a few blocks from where the crime allegedly occurred and had kids raised by nannies, he said. A former senior New York City official who says he was fired for resisting efforts by Mayor Bill de Blasio to secure special treatment for political donors lodged a formal complaint with the Conflicts of Interest Board on Thursday against the mayor and a top aide. The complaint to the board came a day after the former official, Ricardo Morales, filed suit in Federal District Court in Manhattan, and several months after the Department of Investigation opened an inquiry into Mr. Moraless firing last February. Mr. Morales had worked as a deputy commissioner in the Department of Citywide Administrative Services, a position that brought him into contact with City Hall for at least two episodes in which actions by the mayor and other City Hall officials became the subject of high-profile investigations. His truthful testimony was adverse to Mr. de Blasio, according to the lawsuit, which charges that his firing was illegal retaliation. And by we, he added, I dont mean me. Mr. Percocos rebuttal was definitive. We did not treat him that way, he wrote. No one ever promised him anything, he said. Second, he is being cute yet again. Facts matter. His efforts to retain staff went beyond convincing and coaxing; prosecutors have also accused him of threatening the job prospects of at least four government employees if they left against his wishes. Earlier in the trial, Seth Agata, a former counsel to Mr. Cuomo, testified that he had heard rumors of Mr. Percoco calling other employers and asking them to rescind their job offers to staffers that he wanted to keep. Mr. Percoco also appeared to leverage his influence in the government to offer concrete incentives to stay: namely, pay raises and new job titles. Thank you for the 10 percent increase in pay that you facilitated. I appreciate your efforts and friendship, Daniel Brown, an executive chamber employee, wrote to Mr. Percoco in October 2014. Unfortunately, as we discussed, my situation requires more. Other moves were more mundane. In November 2014, he sent an email to staff in the governors appointments office, using his personal email account to ask them to generate the necessary paperwork for an incoming aide to the lieutenant governor. Sure, one of the staff members replied. This is not the first time prosecutors have fixated on Mr. Percocos omnipresence in the governors office after his resignation. In the second week of the trial, they displayed charts showing how Mr. Percoco often swiped in and out of the governors Manhattan headquarters while he was working on the campaign, and how more than 800 calls were placed from his desk phone in that time. Election laws prohibit the use of government offices for campaign work. It remains unclear if Mr. Cuomo, whom prosecutors have not accused of wrongdoing, knew about Mr. Percocos activities, although state Republican leaders have argued that it is impossible the governor did not know his friend and trusted aide was working just feet away from his own office. It just seems if we are investing a billion in station upgrades we think that some of those stations should get elevators, said Polly Trottenberg, the commissioner of the citys Department of Transportation. I dont understand nonetheless how they reached the decision, picking some of these stations. But Mr. Cuomo and transit officials have argued that improving the appearance of stations is part of improving the experience for riders and that the system is already undergoing a major face-lift as part of the subway emergency plan that was begun last summer. At Thursdays meeting, Andy Byford, the president of New York City Transit, the M.T.A.s subway division, offered a full-throated endorsement of Mr. Cuomos plan, arguing that some of the work addressed structural issues that could no longer be ignored. If they were purely cosmetic then I would have a problem with it, Mr. Byford said. Mr. Byford said he had spent weeks analyzing the stations slated to be enhanced and had come to understand why things like elevators were not part of the plan, explaining that some of the stations were close to accessible stations, while in other cases figuring out how to make a station compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act would drag out the necessary work. To wait for perfection at every station? he said.Some will fall into a dangerous state of disrepair, and you will fall into my scenario of, yes its ADA-compliant but oops the station would be inaccessible because it had fallen apart. The current City Council speaker, Corey Johnson, who is the first male gay leader of the body, said he was uncomfortable with the low representation of women on the City Council. Its an embarrassment for politics in New York City and bad for the Council, Mr. Johnson said. If you look at Washington and Albany, when compromises need to be struck on polarizing issues where the temperature is hot, you have women able to step in and negotiate and come at politics with a different perspective. Ten of the 11 women on the City Council serve as chairwomen of committees, and the 11th, Laurie Cumbo of Brooklyn, is the majority leader, Mr. Johnson noted. But Ms. Mark-Viverito said she has heard from women on the current Council who are concerned about being stretched too thin because they are being asked to serve on multiple committees because of diversity concerns. New York States other legislative bodies arent faring much better than the City Council. Women make up 32 percent of the Assembly, with 45 women among 141 current members. There are nine vacant seats. Women make up 23 percent of the Senate with 14 women out of 61 senators, with two vacant seats. New York State has never had a female governor and New York City has never had a female mayor. Twenty-two percent of the United States Senate are women; 19 percent of the House are women. Both figures represent an increase from previous Congresses, and the number seems poised to grow: The number of women considering running for office in the 2018 midterm elections is on pace to break records. There are already 50 female candidates for the Senate who have either filed papers or are likely to run, according to the Center for American Women and Politics. Thats more than the record 40 women who filed to run in 2016. There are 396 filed and likely candidates for the House. In 2012, a record 298 women filed to run for the House. Catherine Wolf, an experimental psychologist whose research focused on enhancing interactions between humans and computers and who, after illness left her paralyzed, relied on her laptop to communicate, using a system that let her wiggle an eyebrow to pick out letters died on Feb. 7 at her home in Katonah, N.Y. She was 70. Her husband, Joel, said the cause was sepsis, a complication of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrigs disease. Dr. Wolfs work at IBMs Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Westchester County, N.Y., helped programmers develop voice-recognition systems that, for example, let users compose text by speaking to a computer and banking customers make transactions by telephone. When she started, you couldnt speak naturally to a computer and have it understand anything, John Vergo, principal research staff member at the Watson center, said in a telephone interview. You had to stop between each word, and you could only hope the computer recognized what youd said. David Zwick, who was instrumental in writing and securing passage of the Clean Water Act of 1972, and who founded the advocacy group Clean Water Action, died on Feb. 5 in Minneapolis. He was 75. He had had various health problems, including several heart attacks late last year, the environmental group Friends of the Earth, on whose board he served, said in announcing his death. Mr. Zwick was a second-year law student at Harvard when Ralph Nader, an alumnus, came to the campus in the late 1960s recruiting Naders raiders to work on his citizen-advocacy projects. Mr. Zwick expressed interest, but Mr. Nader thought he was too immersed in school to be an immediate candidate. I said, Let us know when youre out and you want to work, Mr. Nader recalled in a telephone interview. And he said, No, I want to come now. So I knew this was a very committed person. But therein lies the true danger: that the polarization in American politics, society and life has become so yawning that people on the far right, and to some degree on the left, are prepared to accept the most appalling and transparent lies to bolster their beliefs. As Amanda Taub and Max Fisher wrote in The Interpreter column in The Times on Sunday, The false information and political advertisements that the Russians are accused of spreading could ring true only to those already predisposed to suspect the worst. Not so many years ago, fake quotes like one in which Hillary Clinton praises Shariah law, or reports suggesting that Black Lives Matter activists are killing police officers, would have been dismissed as the rants of sick extremists. That they evidently find credence in at least a part of the population says far more about the state of public discourse than about Russia. We have become almost accustomed to Mr. Trumps outrageous references to Crooked Hillary and all the other innumerable ways he constantly stokes partisan flames. Whether he knowingly colluded with the Russian web campaign is almost beside the point, since he is directly colluding with Russias efforts to discredit democracy when he treats the Kremlins brazen cybermeddling as a partisan issue and absurdly pins the blame on Barack Obama or Mrs. Clinton. Its getting worse. Freedom House, an independent democracy watchdog, concluded in its annual report that democracy faced its most serious crisis in decades in 2017 as its basic tenets including guarantees of free and fair elections, the rights of minorities, freedom of the press and the rule of law came under attack around the world. The United States, it added, retreated from its traditional role as both a champion and an exemplar of democracy amid an accelerating decline in American political rights and civil liberties. Mr. Putin and his operatives no doubt take credit for this. Fear and suspicion of liberal democracy runs deep in Russia and in other countries slouching toward authoritarianism. They have a vested interest in making Western democracies appear as flawed, ugly and messy as possible. The Kremlin is not likely to abandon what looks to it like a winning strategy. Its true that its much harder to get a drivers license than it is to buy a lethal weapon, and that we impose many safety standards on our vehicles. And traffic deaths which used to be far more common than gun deaths have declined a lot over time. Yet traffic deaths could and should have fallen a lot more. We know this because, as my colleague David Leonhardt points out, traffic deaths have fallen much more in other advanced countries, which have used evidence-based policies like lower speed limits and tightened standards for drunken driving to improve their outcomes. Think the French are crazy drivers? Well, they used to be but now theyre significantly safer in their cars than we are. Oh, and theres a lot of variation in car safety among states within the U.S., just as theres a lot of variation in gun violence. America has a car death belt in the Deep South and the Great Plains; it corresponds quite closely to the firearms death belt defined by age-adjusted gun death rates. It also corresponds pretty closely to the Trump vote and also to the states that have refused to expand Medicaid, gratuitously denying health care to millions of their citizens. What Id argue is that our lethal inaction on guns, but also on cars, reflects the same spirit thats causing us to neglect infrastructure and privatize prisons, the spirit that wants to dismantle public education and turn Medicare into a voucher system rather than a guarantee of essential care. For whatever reason, theres a faction in our country that sees public action for the public good, no matter how justified, as part of a conspiracy to destroy our freedom. This paranoia strikes both deep and wide. Does anyone remember George Will declaring that liberals like trains, not because they make sense for urban transport, but because they serve the goal of diminishing Americans individualism in order to make them more amenable to collectivism? And it goes along with basically infantile fantasies about individual action the good guy with a gun taking the place of such fundamentally public functions as policing. Anyway, this political faction is doing all it can to push us toward becoming a society in which individuals cant count on the community to provide them with even the most basic guarantees of security security from crazed gunmen, security from drunken drivers, security from exorbitant medical bills (which every other advanced country treats as a right, and does in fact manage to provide). In short, you might want to think of our madness over guns as just one aspect of the drive to turn us into what Thomas Hobbes described long ago: a society wherein men live without other security than what their own strength and their own invention shall furnish them. And Hobbes famously told us what life in such a society is like: solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. Yep, that sounds like Trumps America. To the Editor: In the 1950s and 60s, when the Southern states remained committed to racial segregation, many of us marched and spoke out against this blight on our democracy. But marching wasnt enough to end this abuse of African-Americans. Nor were court orders sufficient to overcome this national embarrassment. As the Kennedys and Lyndon B. Johnson understood, substantial change would come only with congressional action not simply through marches and sermons, however essential they may have been, but by changing the laws of the land. The young people who are protesting today are the advanced wave of what must come next: gun control legislation that takes weapons meant for battlefields out of our schools, off the streets and away from disturbed individuals with no respect for human lives. And the way to achieve these legislative advances is through the ballot box. Every reasonable voter in this country should make a candidates position on gun control a test of his or her ballot. In the 1870s, the womans suffrage movement claimed the right to vote by citing the new 14th Amendments promise that no state shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States. Their opponents didnt see it that way. Citizenship no more carries the right to vote than it carries the power to fly to the moon, The Rochester Union and Advertiser scoffed in an 1872 editorial. But suffragists insisted. The right to vote, they argued, cannot be carved away from citizenship. Is the right to vote one of the privileges or immunities of citizens? Susan B. Anthony asked in an 1873 speech. Her answer: It is not only one of them, but the one without which all the others are nothing. Anthonys call remains unfulfilled today, as suppressive voting rules in nearly every state deny many Americans their voting rights. Six million otherwise eligible individuals are stripped of the right to vote because of a felony conviction, removing them from a key arena of public life. This week I asked a group of students at the University of Chicago a question Im asking students around the country: Who are your heroes? Theres always a long pause after I ask. But eventually one of the students suggested Steven Pinker. Another chimed in Jonathan Haidt. There was general nodding around the table. That was interesting. Both men are psychology professors, at Harvard and N.Y.U., who bravely stand against what can be the smothering orthodoxy that inhibits thought on campus, but not from the familiar conservative position. One way Pinker does it is by refusing to be pessimistic. There is a mood across America, but especially on campus, that in order to show how aware of social injustice you are, you have to go around in a perpetual state of indignation, negativity and righteous rage. Pinker refuses to do this. In his new book, Enlightenment Now, he argues that this pose is dishonest toward the facts. For example, were all aware of the gloomy statistics around wage stagnation and income inequality, but Pinker contends that we should not be nostalgic for the economy of the 1950s, when jobs were plentiful and unions strong. A third of American children lived in poverty. Sixty percent of seniors had incomes below $1,000 a year. Only half the population had any savings in the bank at all. President Trump on Thursday repeated his call for highly trained schoolteachers to pack heat in their classrooms. If they were armed, the president said, they could fire back immediately at school shooters like the young man with an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle who took 17 lives in Parkland, Fla. Beyond that, he tweeted, the knowledge that teachers have guns of their own would deter the sicko from heading to a school in the first place. With his usual fondness for capital letters, he added, ATTACKS WOULD END! Thus did Mr. Trump parrot a tired shibboleth repeated once again on Thursday by Wayne LaPierre, the executive vice president of the National Rifle Association. To stop a bad guy with a gun, it takes a good guy with a gun, Mr. LaPierre told a gathering of conservative activists. Actually, its hard to tell who was parroting whom. The president said much the same in a morning tweetstorm that said a gun free school is a magnet for bad people. Lets ask someone whos in the trenches every day what he thinks of arming teachers. Its hard to begin to count the number of ways this is a bad idea, said Chris Magnus, police chief of Tucson. For starters, the number of gunslinging educators would be huge. In the United States, there are about 3.5 million elementary and secondary school teachers in public and private institutions. Arming 20 percent of them, as Mr. Trump suggested, would mean 700,000 or so teachers with Glocks and the like on their hips an armed force half as large as Americas real armed forces on active duty. One can envision parents with the means to do so swiftly yanking their children out of that sort of environment. But the impulses that propel seemingly ordinary people to commit psychological (and, in some cases, literal) stripteases before audiences of millions are examined with a vividness that feels stingingly fresh. And then theres Mr. Thomass and Mr. Lees proposition that a contestant-baiting TV host might be perceived by his public as someone fit to rule the world. But until Donald Trump The Opera comes along (shudder), Jerry Springer may be the richest theatrical means we have for channeling the heaving American Id that put Mr. Trump in the White House. And theres the nifty dividend that Jerry Springer also sings volumes about the enduring appeal of the musical as a popular art form. But first a trigger warning, in deference to those who protested at Carnegie Hall: This show has what is surely the highest ratio of obscenities of any mainstream musical ever. Make that any mainstream theater production period. (Sorry about that, David Mamet.) Whats more, Anglo-Saxon words that are still regularly bleeped on radio and television have been set to melodies that recall Baroque choral prayer song as well as soulful Broadway ballads. Those uttering these curse words include Jesus and his heavenly father. The juxtaposition of holy music and unholy lyrics might seem too facile by half; its a treatment long applied by giggly school children to church hymns. But this show uses the disparity between words and music to suggest how inadequate most peoples vocabularies are in conveying their most ardent longings. Music is what captures the skyward-reaching, ineffable yearnings of the characters the triple-timing bisexual lug, the man with the diaper fetish, the housewife who wants to be a pole dancer. The pure, pulsing beauty of Mr. Thomass score (he and Mr. Lee collaborated on the book and lyrics) hooks us subliminally, while reminding us how classic American musicals are so often all about aspiration. The aspirations in Jerry Springer are a little less classic than finding love or triumphing over adversity. What drives the denizens of the Springer universe is, quite simply, the desire to exercise their constitutional right to be famous. All week long in Brady Shutts classroom at Liberty High School, north of Iowa City, his students have been talking about school shootings. So on Thursday, when President Trump proposed arming teachers to curb violence, Mr. Shutt posed a question to his students: What do you think of the idea of training teachers to have guns in schools? Eyes bugged out. Heads vigorously shook no. They said, You mean arming teachers? Teachers like you? Why would a teacher ever have a gun in school? Mr. Shutt recalled. It just didnt fit into their worldview. And there were concerns about what that would do to the relationship between teacher and student. Mr. Shutt said he was deeply opposed to Mr. Trumps proposal in particular the idea that federal funds should be used to train teachers in how to use a gun, when educators, Mr. Shutt said, had so many other needs. KIPP, one of the countrys largest and most successful charter school chains, dismissed its co-founder on Thursday after an investigation found credible a claim that he had sexually abused a student some two decades ago, according to a letter sent to the school community. The co-founder, Michael Feinberg, was accused last spring of sexually abusing a minor female student in Houston in the late 1990s, according to someone with close knowledge of the case who was not authorized to speak publicly and asked not to be identified. An outside investigation found her claim credible after interviewing the student and her mother, who both gave the same sequence of events. Mr. Feinberg denies the accusation, his lawyer, Christopher L. Tritico, said. Investigators also uncovered evidence that Mr. Feinberg had sexually harassed two KIPP employees. One case, in 2004, led to a financial settlement, the letter said; the other could not be corroborated because the woman involved would not cooperate, but the letter found it to be credible. We believe that Mr. Feinbergs actions were incompatible with the leadership qualities that are central to our mission, said the letter, which was sent Thursday afternoon to teachers, administrators and families of students. Chief Pustizzi called it a communications failure. The video system allows for real-time playback. At first the guys are hearing, Oh, hes on the second floor. Well, its not true, cause we have people on the second floor and the people are saying, Well, hes not on the second floor, Chief Pustizzi said, adding that, if anything, the officers were more expeditious as they moved through the school under the belief the gunman was still there. Coral Springs police have said they were the first to respond to the shooting. Sheriff Israel, who defended his offices response on Wednesday and said his own deputies had not hung back outside the building, said on Thursday that the Coral Springs officers acted heroically. Samantha Fuentes, an 18-year-old senior at Stoneman Douglas High who was shot in both legs, said she never saw Deputy Peterson during the 30 minutes that passed before SWAT officers arrived at the first-floor classroom in which she and other students had been taking a class. He is not someone who has much of a presence in the school, she said. Sheriff Israel, flanked by two of his top aides, appeared emotional Thursday during the news conference in which he described Deputy Petersons conduct. His eyes appeared to glisten, and his speech was sometimes halting. The two other deputies placed on restricted duty pending an internal investigation were identified by the sheriffs office as Edward Eason and Guntis Treijs. In November 2017, a caller told the authorities that Mr. Cruz had been stockpiling guns and knives. In a summary of the call, the sheriffs office said the caller, located in Massachusetts, worried that Mr. Cruz will kill himself one day and believes he could be a school shooter in the making. A deputy contacted the person who called, but no report was filed. The caller was referred to the sheriffs office in Palm Beach County, where the caller said Mr. Cruz lived. In February 2016, the sheriffs office received what it described as thirdhand information that Mr. Cruz planned to shoot up the school and had posted a picture on Instagram of a juvenile with guns. A deputy determined that Mr. Cruz had knives and a BB gun and forwarded the information to the school resource officer at Stoneman Douglas High. That was Deputy Peterson. WASHINGTON The Justice Department plans to ask United States attorneys to prioritize the prosecutions of prospective gun buyers who lie on federal background check forms, according to two law enforcement officials briefed on the decision. The request, part of a larger set of recommendations by the Justice Department expected to be announced in the coming days, would essentially enforce existing laws that govern gun purchases. It allows the Trump administration to take action on gun-related violence without riling opponents of more restrictive gun policies. A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment. The directive comes as the Trump administration weighs responses to the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., last week, in which 17 people were killed. But the renewed emphasis on background checks would not have stopped the suspect in that shooting, 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz, who legally purchased several firearms including an AK-47 within the past month. The political news cycle is fast, and keeping up can be overwhelming. Trying to find differing perspectives worth your time is even harder. Thats why we have scoured the internet for political writing from the right and left that you might not have seen. Has this series exposed you to new ideas? Tell us how. Email us at ourpicks@nytimes.com. For an archive of all the Partisan Writing Roundups, check out Our Picks. From the Right Samantha Fuentes, who was shot in both legs during the Parkland assault, said she had felt no reassurance during a phone call from the president to her hospital room last week. He said he heard that I was a big fan of his, and then he said, Im a big fan of yours too. Im pretty sure he made that up, she said in an interview after being discharged from the hospital. Talking to the president, Ive never been so unimpressed by a person in my life. He didnt make me feel better in the slightest. Ms. Fuentes, who was left with a piece of shrapnel lodged behind her right eye, said Mr. Trump had called the gunman a sick puppy and said oh boy, oh boy, oh boy, like, seven times. The account of the call was reminiscent of the last time Mr. Trump drew public scrutiny for his reaction to a tragedy, with his private condolence call to Myeshia Johnson, the widow of Sgt. La David T. Johnson, one of four American soldiers killed in an attack in Niger. In that case, in October, Ms. Johnson said she had been deeply offended by Mr. Trumps words and tone, saying that he had not referred to her husband by name, calling him only your guy, and had upset her by saying that Mr. Johnson knew what he signed up for, but it hurts anyway. Mr. Trump quickly lashed out on Twitter, saying he had spoken respectfully to the widow. Colleagues said Mr. Trumps notes on Wednesday were written by Hope Hicks, his communications director and longtime aide, who had briefed the president along with Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the press secretary, before he attended the session. The presidents aides had been well aware that he might confront an emotional and potentially volatile situation when he sat down with grief-stricken parents and students, as well as others who had been living with loss for years or even decades. They decided to allow news cameras to capture the entire session anyway. We should not forget that under the discarded mission statement, the integrity and national security functions of U.S.C.I.S. grew dramatically so showing that we could be both a welcoming nation and a safe one, Mr. Rodriguez said. We should stop to reflect about the many opportunities that America will lose because of the attitudes reflected in this statement, and ask ourselves whether this is really the country we want to be. Ira Mehlman, a spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which favors restricting immigration, applauded the change. A nation of immigrants isnt a mission statement, he said, its a slogan. The biggest problem with our immigration system is that it lacks a clear national interest objective, he added. As director of U.S.C.I.S., Mr. Cissna has promoted an agenda that reflects the Trump administrations skeptical and often hard-line stance on immigration. The agency has increased scrutiny of visa applications for foreign workers whom American companies seek to hire; it has changed the asylum application process to discourage people from seeking safe haven in the United States; and it has added steps to the process for foreigners already in the country to obtain legal permanent residency, or a green card. U.S.C.I.S., a unit of the Department of Homeland Security, reviews petitions of foreign nationals who seek to visit, work, reside and find refuge in the United States. It also processes citizenship applications, which have surged since President Trump won the election in 2016. In his letter to his staff, Mr. Cissna wrote, We are also responsible for ensuring that those who naturalize are dedicated to this country, share our values, assimilate into our communities, and understand their responsibility to help preserve our freedom and liberty. CHARLESTON, W.Va. Public schoolteachers walked out of classrooms across the state on Thursday, protesting pay raises that they called too stingy. Despite warnings that the walkout was illegal, thousands of teachers and support staff members converged at the Capitol in Charleston, seeking to pressure lawmakers who are still considering other proposals to help them financially. It was their first statewide strike since 1990 in West Virginia, where teacher pay ranks 48th in the nation. Chants of Do your job so I can do mine reverberated throughout the Capitol halls, along with other slogans including 55 strong a reference to the states 55 counties. On Wednesday night Gov. Jim Justice signed a 2 percent raise next year for teachers, followed by 1 percent raises the next two years. But teachers said the increases were not enough. They also criticized projected increases in health insurance costs. PINAMAR, Argentina A former Russian diplomatic worker and an Argentine police officer were among six people arrested on Thursday after a 14-month investigation triggered by the discovery of hundreds of pounds of cocaine at the Russian Embassy in Buenos Aires. We have dismantled an international cocaine trafficking organization operating between Argentina, Russia and Germany, Patricia Bullrich, Argentinas minister of security, said in a televised news conference. She said the seizure of 389 kilograms of cocaine, more than 850 pounds, was made at a school on the grounds of the embassy in December 2016, leading to an investigation by Argentine border guards, the Buenos Aires police and the Russian Interior Ministry. The cocaine, she said, was valued at more than $60 million. The Russian ambassador to Argentina, Viktor Koronelli, and three members of Russias Federal Security Service alerted Ms. Bullrich on Dec. 13, 2016, to what they thought were 16 pieces of luggage filled with drugs. Saying it was shocked at the highest level, the government of Haiti has suspended the aid group Oxfam Great Britain for two months while it investigates allegations of sexual misconduct by charity employees in the aftermath of the devastating 2010 earthquake. The government took the step two weeks after the organization, the British arm of the umbrella group Oxfam International, acknowledged that employees had been fired or resigned after they were found to have had sex parties with prostitutes in staff housing. On Thursday, the Haitian minister of planning and external cooperation, Aviol Fleurant, said officials were looking into the incidents and trying to determine whether any of the women were underage. The government raised the prospect that the British aid organization, which spends $3.9 million annually in Haiti, may not be allowed to resume its work. Mr. Fleurant told Reuters that if investigators establish a link between donations to Oxfam meant for Haiti and criminal activity, officials will declare Oxfam Great Britain persona non grata, and they would have to leave the country without further delay. In October 2017, four refugees were killed nearby. More than 585,000 people live in the sprawling Kutupalong-Balukhali camp and in the surrounding forested areas, according to the United Nations migration agency. Humanitarian needs and conservation efforts in the area have been at odds in recent months. The refugee camp is in an important habitat for the endangered Asian elephant and is along a migration route for elephants traveling between Myanmar and Bangladesh, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Much of the vegetation has been cleared to make more space for refugee shelters, further complicating the situation. Behaviorally, elephants always follow their traditional routes and corridors for regular movement, the conservation union said in a statement. If they find any obstacles within it, they try to break it. MELBOURNE, Australia Barnaby Joyce, Australias deputy prime minister, said on Friday that he would resign his post after a series of damaging revelations, including an extramarital affair, led to weeks of searing headlines and a change in the rules for how politicians must conduct themselves. Ive acknowledged that in many areas, Im rough around the edges, Mr. Joyce said at a news conference in the city of Armidale. I never tried to be anything else. Mr. Joyce, a populist from rural Australia and a crucial member of Parliaments governing coalition, had previously admitted to an affair with a former staff member, who is now pregnant. The Australian news media was reluctant to report on the relationship with the woman, Vikki Campion, until it was discovered that the couple were living rent-free in an apartment donated by a supporter. Later, two women came forward to accuse Mr. Joyce of sexual harassment and misconduct. Fridays news conference came less than 24 hours after the second of those women came forward with allegations that Mr. Joyce had harassed her. UNITED NATIONS The United Nations Security Council, facing staunch opposition from Russia, failed to pass a resolution on Thursday that would have imposed a 30-day cease-fire in Syria to allow humanitarian aid to reached a besieged Damascus suburb. With new reports on Thursday of a rocket attack that took 42 lives, the death toll this week in the rebel-held suburb, eastern Ghouta, rose to more than 300. The suffering of civilians in Syria brings shame on all of us, Britains representative, Stephen Hickey, said at the Security Council meeting. He described the conditions in eastern Ghouta as a hell on earth. A senior official at Unicef, the United Nations agency for children, resigned on Thursday amid allegations that he had behaved inappropriately toward women in his previous job, when he was chief executive of the British charity Save the Children. The official, Justin Forsyth, said in a statement that he was resigning as deputy executive director because of the danger of damaging both Unicef and Save the Children and our wider cause. He maintained that his decision was not based on the mistakes I made at Save the Children. They were dealt with through a proper process many years ago, he said in the statement. I apologized unreservedly at the time and face to face. I apologize again. This week, an investigation by BBC Radio found that Mr. Forsyth had faced three complaints of inappropriate behavior including sending text messages to women commenting on their appearance before he left Save the Children. He became a deputy executive director at Unicef, one of several, in May 2016. The Outsider Art Fair has long prided itself for operating on the art worlds fringes. But in June, it will venture right to the center, opening up a satellite fair during Art Basel in Switzerland. At the Hotel Pullman, a block away from Art Basels nerve center at the Messeplatz, about 25 dealers will showcase works from self-taught artists who operated outside of conventional institutions, and sometimes dealt with psychoses. Outsider Art Fair Basel will run June 13-17, a day longer than Art Basel itself. Its not going to be a smaller version of Art Basel or something, Andrew Edlin, the owner of the Outsider Art Fair, said in a phone interview. You know when you walk in, youre entering a whole different thing. While the works will come from around the world, Mr. Edlin hopes to tap into the history of Art Brut in the region: Among the Swiss artists to be displayed are Adolf Wolfli, who created much of his work in a psychiatric hospital in Bern; and Aloise Corbaz, whose work can also be found in the Collection de lArt Brut museum in her hometown of Lausanne. The U.S.-based artists James Castle, Martin Ramirez and Judith Scott will also be included. HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam In 1978, when he was 2 years old, Tuan Andrew Nguyen was on a plane to the United States. He and his parents were boat people, postwar refugees from Communist Vietnam. They were lucky: After a week at sea in a small, open craft, they made landfall on Bidong Island, a speck of land that would soon become the worlds largest refugee camp. Then an American church group offered to resettle them in Oklahoma. When Tuan started crying somewhere over the Pacific, a flight attendant gave him a Dennis the Menace comic book. Its his earliest memory. Today, at 41, Mr. Nguyen is living in the city his parents fled, one of eight million souls careening around its overheated streets on motor scooters. He is a Viet Kieu, an overseas Vietnamese, who came back with alien influences like hip-hop, graffiti art and comics. He is also a member of the Propeller Group, an artists collective that offers a sly commentary on contemporary Vietnam through works like Television Commercial for Communism, a 60-second spot that purports to repackage the ideology of Marx and Lenin as a sleek, egalitarian, consumer-friendly lifestyle. It comes with a manifesto, of course, but also with a 24-page booklet of brand guidelines. The logo for the new Communism has been carefully crafted to be fair to every letterform, the guidelines specify in deadpan fashion. Equal spacing is important. HAMBURG, Germany At the end of Schuberts great song cycle Winterreise stands the Leiermann, a tattered hurdy-gurdy player so repellent that even dogs only growl at him from a distance. And yet there is something about this old beggar, and the endlessly looping tune he cranks out, that fascinates the narrator of this bleak cycle so much so that the narrator is ready to join him in what promises to be permanent exile, or perhaps death. Schuberts Leiermann came to life with startling immediacy at a recent performance of Winterreise by the vocalist Natasa Mirkovic at the Elbphilharmonie here. Ms. Mirkovic was accompanied not by a pianist, as usual, but by Matthias Loibner, one of a growing tribe of hurdy-gurdy masters who are ushering this thousand-year-old instrument into its latest reincarnation. Anyone looking for the more overtly impassioned, idealistic Nono will have an opportunity when Intolleranza 1960 is performed on Thursday by the American Symphony Orchestra. The 75-minute work is a dizzying succession of brief, powerful scenes as a migrant worker stumbles upon a political protest that in turn delivers him to a jail where torture is routine. The American Symphonys music director, Leon Botstein, said that Nonos varied writing for chorus, as well as some ferocious orchestral textures, would be electrifying under any political circumstances. But in a recent interview, he added that the reason to do this was not only to keep the achievements of radical musical modernism alive. Comparing Nonos dramatization of xenophobic politics to the current debate over immigration, Mr. Botstein said, Heres this foreign worker being harassed and tortured and were looking right at it, adding that the performance would arrive just days before the protected status of the undocumented immigrants brought here as children, often referred to as Dreamers, expired on March 5. In the operas fifth scene, a chorus of the tortured seems to address the audience directly. And all of you there? a translation by Todd Portnowitz renders it. Are you deaf? Complicit in the herd? In vile shame? Do the cries of our brothers not stir you? Mr. Botstein asked, What are we going to do when in fact people start disappearing from our midst, legally? He said he hoped that this would be the question in the minds of those hearing Intolleranza 1960. Mr. Botstein seemed far less worried about whether the mainstream classical audience was still as hostile as it once was to Nonos dissonances. Modernism has left more of a residue than we remember, he said, whether you hear it in Bernard Herrmann scores, or in the sound world that accompanies the visual media we have now. The audience is going to be less shocked. The question is, will the audience be moved? In that sense, he wants to do the same thing that late Beethoven does. The Abraaj Group, one of the largest private equity firms specializing in emerging markets, said on Friday that its founder, Arif Naqvi, would no longer oversee the firms asset management business. The abrupt move follows claims made by clients that the Dubai-based firm, which manages $14 billion in assets, misused investor money in a fund that invests in hospitals and other health care businesses. Abraaj said on Friday that it would temporarily halt investment activities until it completed a broad corporate restructuring. The World Bank and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation were among the prominent investors that, over the past year, have been questioning the firms governance practices. The investors main fear was that Abraaj might have used cash allocated for investments in hospitals in Pakistan and Kenya for other, unauthorized purposes. Suspicions arose when investors learned that more than $200 million, which the firm had said it would use on investments in 2016, hadnt actually been deployed. Now, under official pressure, many of the companies a group referred to as the gray rhinoceroses, big problems that are ignored until they start moving fast are unloading assets. Dalian Wanda last year shed billions of dollars worth of property investments. HNA is paring properties amid analysts questions about how it will meet its heavy debt obligations. As official skepticism of Anbang grew, so did public skepticism. A month ago, a lacerating commentary entitled Goodbye Anbang spread widely on Chinese financial news websites and on social media platforms. The biggest problem here is not the pursuit of profit by capital, its how you were able to grow so fat overnight, said the commentary. This is not playing by the market rules. Its the scams of privileged wealth. But many Chinese regulators had been hesitant to act aggressively, and the pace of enforcing discipline had been slow. With Anbang, the Chinese government may have hoped to set an example, by seizing control rather than engineering a quiet injection of cash from a pliant state company. Xis concern about financial risk has had a lot of impact on the behavior of a lot of banks, regulators and companies, said Victor Shih, an associate professor at the University of California, San Diego, who studies Chinese politics and finance. You have seen the regulators being very cautious, and being maybe more pre-emptive than they would have been without this political pressure from the highest levels. Despite the government pressure, Chinese deal making is unlikely to completely end, given the countrys vast sums of money and global ambitions. China has continued to support acquisitions in strategic areas like energy and technology. Fosun, widely considered a gray rhino, or a large and visible problem that is ignored until it starts moving fast, said this week it had acquired a majority stake in Lanvin, the French fashion house. Chinas ambitions, though, are likely to attract renewed scrutiny. Regulators in the United States and elsewhere have been asking tough questions about the ownership and stability of acquisitive Chinese companies. Some lawmakers and White House officials support broadening the authority of regulators who review takeover offers. Anyone who knows anything about China knows the nature of the party and state and the opacity of company ownership, said Fraser Howie, a former banker in Asia and a co-writer of three books on the Chinese financial system. There was never any excuse for not asking the difficult questions. A lot of foreign regulators just skipped over them and were far too relaxed in their approach. Playbill is not just hoping for future readers. It created a website called Playbillder that lets schools and theater groups create a Playbill for their shows. Schools can use it to sell ads to raise money and bring in services. In 2017, according to the company, about 2 million Playbills were produced using its software. About 85 percent of its licenses are sold to schools and about 40 percent of those are middle and elementary schools. A broad range of businesses target this youth market. According to the Educational Theatre Association, about 27 percent of a schools budget goes toward licensing the material. Sets are another 19 percent. Costumes are 17 percent. Last year nearly 4,000 high school students attended the organizations International Thespian Festival, which featured vendors offering everything from a costume inventory database to stage makeup, lighting and ticketing software. Broadway Media Distribution, a company that provides projected digital scenery, works directly with Music Theatre International and Theatrical Rights Worldwide to create backgrounds tailored to their shows. They can cost anywhere from $250 to $995 depending on the production. About 85 percent of the companys customers are middle and high schools. On a Saturday evening at the festival, young actors from Spotlight Theatre Productions in Sarasota, Fla., wearing purple and blue billowing pants and golden vests, held hands in a circle. They passed a hand squeeze from one to another as they prepared to go on stage. They were about to perform songs from a new version of Aladdin JR. in front of nearly 6,000 theater-obsessed students, parents and theater directors. Aladdin JR. had an unusual path to its debut here. Aladdin, the highest grossing movie of 1992, was adapted as a school musical in 2004. Its success there inspired Disney to stage it on Broadway in 2014. Now it has again been adapted for schools. The success of musicals in this market is upending traditions in theatrical licensing, said Mr. Flahaven. Historically, musicals would not be released to the educational market until the Broadway production closed. Licensers were afraid that it would cannibalize business. But that is changing. Aladdin JR. is available even though the original show remains on Broadway. And at the direction of Andrew Lloyd Webber, licenses for his production of School of Rock are available to schools while it too is still on Broadway. The idea is to put it out there and to see if it drives business toward seeing the Broadway show or the tour, said Mr. Flahaven. Mr. Liu is expected to lead a sizable delegation to Washington. He would be the second Politburo member to visit the city so far this month. Yang Jiechi, Chinas top diplomat, arrived this month but made little headway at a time when the mood in Washington has shifted toward strong concern about Chinas rapid military buildup and record trade surpluses with the United States. The Chinese government has taken the position that it is not afraid of a trade confrontation with the United States, and that the Chinese market can absorb extra goods if the United States turns them away. But Mr. Xi and his advisers have also tried to preserve the status quo on economic relations with the United States while they focus on domestic issues, like breaking Chinas addiction to debt-fueled economic growth. The choice of Mr. Liu to lead the delegation is somewhat surprising, and underscores his growing influence in the Chinese government. Wang Qishan, the powerful leader of Mr. Xis anticorruption campaign until his retirement from the Politburo in October, is expected by many experts to be named the countrys vice president during the annual session of Chinas congress, which is to begin on March 5. As vice president, Mr. Wang would play a significant role in international diplomacy. But the choice of Mr. Liu to lead the trip to Washington on Tuesday indicates that he may play a leading role in international economic negotiations. He already runs the Communist Partys elite policy planning unit for financial issues. The sheer volume of existing scholarship on the history of civil rights in the United States poses a formidable challenge to any academic seeking to say something new or unexpected. Adam Winkler, a professor at the law school at the University of California Los Angeles, has nonetheless managed to produce a work that is both engrossing and surprising. Professor Winkler has identified a secret parallel universe of civil rights whose beneficiaries are not the discrete and insular minorities whose protection were once the focus of the Supreme Courts jurisprudence. From pre-Revolutionary times to now, We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights charts the strategies and philosophical battles that have now earned state-created corporate entities much the same civil rights as individual citizens. Professor Winkler argues that this has occurred because corporate rights have largely been won in the courts, not in the streets, and have developed largely without much public scrutiny. Recent Supreme Court decisions in the Citizens United and Hobby Lobby cases have brought the apparent triumph of corporate rights to the forefront of the national consciousness. But the nature of the role of corporations in United States history is poorly appreciated, often undermining the quality of the resulting debate. We celebrate the persecuted Pilgrims landing at Plymouth Rock in 1620 every Thanksgiving, but years earlier the Virginia Company of London founded Englands first permanent New World colony in Jamestown. And few realize that key portions of the earliest state constitutions including the recognition of individual rights are lifted wholesale from the corporate charters of these early colonies. That said, given the absence of any mention in the Constitution of corporations or, with the exception of the First Amendments reference to the press, businesses of any kind, the ability of these artificial persons to secure many of the same rights as real people is a little shocking. The corporate rights movement achieved this result by following many of the same tactics as the more familiar modern African-American civil rights movement, using test cases and civil disobedience. More broadly, the biggest differences between the corporate and individual civil rights movement is the relentlessness and rate of success of corporate litigants. HELLS GATE NATIONAL PARK, Kenya Verdant hills stretch into the distance at Hells Gate National Park, where zebras, buffalos, antelopes, baboons and other wildlife roam an idyllic landscape of forests, gorges and grassy volcanoes near the shores of Lake Naivasha. Snaking over the same landscape are pipes. Miles and miles of pipes some high enough off the ground that trucks can pass underneath and giraffes wont hit their heads carry steam from beneath this volcanic valley to big power plants inside the park. The valleys animal herders have long known the unusual properties of the ground under their feet. On chilly days, they warmed themselves near vents that emit plumes of hot steam. Now, Kenya is increasingly harnessing that steam to turn generators that can allow it to expand electrical service and power its rapidly growing economy. The park, about 50 miles from the capital of Nairobi, sits over the East African Rift, a huge fracture in the earths crust that also cuts through Tanzania, Uganda, Ethiopia and other countries. Steam from here helped generate 47 percent of Kenyas electricity in 2015, with hydropower (nearly 35 percent) generating much of the rest. I think Goldfish start from a very healthy place, he said. (Well set aside that this is a brand that offers flavors like Smores and Cookies & Cream.) We have no artificial flavors and preservatives. Its 100 percent real cheese. We source our colors from real plants. The move into organic was driven by market research. Were always listening to our moms thats our primary buyer, Mr. Foley said. Certainly there are more moms looking for more organic options. Moms aside, theres an elephant in the room we have not addressed. Or, to be more accurate, a bunny. The advent of 70 percent organic Goldfish almost certainly has something to do with the rise of Cheddar Bunnies, made by Annies Homegrown, which General Mills acquired in 2014. One blog for moms declared Cheddar Bunnies the Goldfish of this generation in 2015, the kind of sentiment that probably didnt sit well at Campbell. Organic Goldfish appear to emulate Cheddar Bunnies, which debuted in 2003. Both are made with organic wheat and are 70 percent organic. Annies did also start selling a fully organic, U.S.D.A.-certified variety of Cheddar Bunnies in 2008, though the lesser organic variety remains the flagship. Going 70 percent organic limits additives like autolyzed yeast extract, which provides savory background flavor notes to Cheddar Goldfish but is left out of organic wheat Goldfish, Campbell said. Going fully organic would require further paring of the industrial pantry, and might be a distinction lost on many consumers anyway. Image Credit... Jens Mortensen for The New York Times In response to questions about its view of Goldfish, Annies took the high road. In a statement, the company said, We believe that organic food is good for people and the planet we all share, so were always excited to see increased access to organic options for consumers. The perpetrators fill out fake tax returns in your name, using your actual information. Then they have the I.R.S. deposit the money in your own bank account. After that, the scammers call you up and say that there has been a mistake, and you got a refund you shouldnt have, and theyre from a collection agency. Would you mind just sending the money to them? The I.R.S. has its own official procedures for turning in erroneous refunds, and have I mentioned this? they dont involve agents calling you. Not only will tax agents not call you, the I.R.S. makes it painfully clear that it would rather you not call, either. The signals arent even subtle. In a recent news release about early filing season myths, a number of the purported myths come down to: Dont call us. Not as in Dont call us, well call you, but Dont call. We mean it. Take myth No. 4, which is about whether calling the I.R.S. will get you a better refund date. Answer: No. Or No. 5: Calling the I.R.S. Is the Most Convenient Way to Get Answers to Tax or Refund Questions. Again, nope, nope, nope. Because baby, theyre just not that into you. I like the agencys honesty but object to the folks at the I.R.S. calling these things myths. Myths are things people actually believe. Heres a real myth: that anyone wants to call the I.R.S. Normal people dread having contact with the agency, aside from sending in their tax return, and, if they are fortunate, getting a refund. If youve ever been in actual conversation with this agency, it probably means something bad has happened, such as getting a letter about a problem with your taxes, and youve had to follow up. That situation is likely to get worse: Once you start calling the agency to clear things up, well, it can be an endless cycle of fix-it calls followed by dunning I.R.S. notices demanding that you fix the thing you just fixed, with more calls to clear things up. The programs make the routine parts of doing your taxes entering information and doing calculations as easy as filling out an online survey. You just answer the questions posed in the programs interviews and type in numbers. But when complexities arise, you can still find yourself fretting over Internal Revenue Service rules, as I did with the broken-pipe home-office deduction. The programs are like a global positioning system app on a smartphone helpful but not perfect. Most of the time, the tax programs send you in the right direction, and if you know roughly where youre headed, youll arrive much faster. If not, you can end up wandering hither and yon. And the Internal Revenue Code is scarier than a dark wood when youre lost in it. Ive been reviewing tax software since 2010. When I started, TurboTax had the slickest technology, Block gave the best tax guidance and TaxAct was a bargain. These days, TurboTax and Block are mostly interchangeable at least they were for my households return. Theyre easy to use and give access to ample help options. Both also disappointed me in surprising ways this year: A document upload didnt work with TurboTax, and a Block human helper failed to follow up. More on those problems below. TaxAct is still a bargain, the cheapest of the three. While its a fine choice for a typical return, I find its technology a little less robust than that of TurboTax and Block. Another firm in this niche, TaxSlayer, is even cheaper its top offering was $55 in February, compared with $59.95 for TaxAct Premium. Beyond the price, my tryout revealed no standout benefit; I couldnt see a reason to switch to it from the better-known outfits, if youre already satisfied. More Toil This Year With TurboTax This year, I opted to try TurboTaxs most expensive online offering, TurboTax Live, which was $149.99 for a federal return in mid-February. Prices from each of the providers can change throughout the tax season, and, for many filers, each state return is typically about $37. (All three offer free filing for folks with simpler returns. And some banks and brokerage firms offer credits toward the purchase of the programs.) If you receive a paycheck, check to see how much tax is being withheld. New withholding guidelines take effect this month, giving taxpayers an increase in their take-home pay. For most people, 2018 taxes are expected be less than those for 2017. That is because marginal rates have been trimmed, and many people will no longer need to itemize deductions. The standard deduction, $6,350 for a single taxpayer in 2017 and $12,700 for a married couple filing jointly, will rise in 2018 to $12,000 for singles and $24,000 for couples filing jointly. But plenty of people will owe higher taxes for 2018. Triggers for higher taxes include: Itemized deductions for high state and local taxes, which will be limited to $10,000 in 2018; Complex financial situations like owning a business, A large number of personal exemptions. For people with adjusted gross income of $156,900 or less in 2017, each personal exemption reduces taxable income by $4,050 thats $20,250 for a family of five. But personal exemptions will be eliminated for 2018 returns. The new rules open up an opportunity for an older child who lives at home and works part time, perhaps to help pay college costs. The student can file her own return and owe no taxes on up to $12,000 in earnings by claiming the standard deduction. The parents would no longer lose a dependency exemption because those exemptions would no longer exist. Julian Block, a tax lawyer in Larchmont, N.Y., said that if you realize that you face higher taxes for 2018, fill out a new Form W-4 with your employer to increase withholding. You may also need to pay estimated taxes for 2018. The first quarterly payment is due on April 17, as are 2017 tax returns. The goal is to avoid a penalty for underpayment of estimated taxes. If enough is withheld in 2018 to equal your 2017 liability, you can sleep at night, he said. If you want a full picture of flooding risk, you need expertise in weather, but also climate and hydrology and engineering and running complex models on the latest computer hardware, Mr. Sorkin said. All of those specialized disciplines are usually heavily siloed within the public sector or the scientific community. Jupiters scientists will have to grapple with a number of technical challenges. While current climate models can provide broad statistical projections of how average temperatures and rainfall patterns are likely to shift across large regions over the coming century, it remains difficult to predict such shifts precisely over shorter time scales which is what companies are often most concerned about. Forecasting at 10-20 year time periods is perhaps the most difficult period to forecast, Simon Mason, a climate scientist at Columbia Universitys International Research Institute for Climate and Society who is not involved with Jupiter, wrote in an email. If that is not enough, trying to predict severe weather events rather than long-term averages is even harder still! Past efforts to provide what are known as climate services have struggled with this issue. In 2009, the German government established the Climate Service Center to provide information about global warming risks to cities and businesses. But Guy P. Brasseur, a climate scientist who helped start the center, said potential clients were often disappointed with the uncertainty in the resulting forecasts. One airline wanted to know how often the airport in Frankfurt would be closed because of snowstorms next year, Dr. Brasseur said. We were unable to answer a question like that. Jupiter, which acknowledges the uncertainties in climate forecasting, will have to prove that a market exists. But at least one firm in the insurance industry sees potential value in the companys approach, particularly after flooding and other disasters caused $306 billion in damages last year in the United States and record losses by insurers. That certainly raised the stakes in terms of trying to get the best possible science on your side when youre pricing risk, said John Drzik, president of global risk at Marsh, one of the worlds largest commercial insurance brokers, which is currently in talks with Jupiter to explore what types of data and risk analyses might be most useful to its clients. Measles cases soared in Europe last year, and at least 35 children died of the highly infectious disease, according to the World Health Organization. The virus found its way into pockets of unvaccinated children all over the continent, from Romania to Britain. The number of recorded cases quadrupled, to 21,315 in 2017 from 5,273 in 2016, a record low. The biggest outbreak last year was in Romania, where there were 5,562 cases and which accounted for most of the deaths. The countrys large rural Roma population also known as Gypsies often do not vaccinate their children and may not take them to hospitals promptly when they fall ill. The country also has an underfunded public health system. The second biggest outbreak was in Italy, with 5,006 cases and three deaths; 88 percent of those cases were in people never vaccinated, and another 7 percent in people who had not had all the recommended doses, the European Center for Prevention and Disease Control said. When Teva Pharmaceuticals announced recently that it would begin selling a copycat version of Syprine an expensive drug invented in the 1960s the news seemed like a welcome development for people taking old drugs that have skyrocketed in price. Syprine, which treats a rare condition known as Wilson disease, gained notoriety after Valeant Pharmaceuticals International raised the price of the drug to $21,267 in 2015 from $652 just five years earlier. Along with similar practices by pharmaceutical executives like Martin Shkreli of Turing Pharmaceuticals and Heather Bresch of Mylan (the maker of the EpiPen), the story helped spark a national conversation about the high cost of prescription drugs, not to mention Congressional inquiries and federal investigations. In promoting its lower-cost alternative to Syprine, a Teva executive boasted in a news release that the product illustrates Tevas commitment to serving patient populations in need. What the release didnt mention was the price: Tevas new generic will cost $18,375 for a bottle of 100 pills, according to Elseviers Gold Standard Drug Database. Thats 28 times what Syprine cost in 2010, and hardly the discount many patients were waiting for. Sweet Fern Productions: Animated Life Coelacanth Picture Lock 12-14-2015 Narrators: Per Ahlberg, professor of evolutionary organismal biology at Uppsala University Samantha Weinberg, author of A Fish Caught in Time Keith Thomson, author of Living Fossil: The Story of the Coelacanth and emeritus professor of natural history at the University of Oxford. START Per Ahlberg: You have this fish thats...its like a sort of living time machine. Sam Weinberg: It was like looking at a dinosaur. This creature that has been around for four hundred million years . Title card: December 22, 1938 Keith Thomson: It was December the 22nd, 1938 . On this hot, December day in East London South Africa, a trawler came into town and deposited its load of fish. And the trawler captain had a habit of keeping any odd-looking interesting specimens and giving them to the curator of the local museum, Marjorie Courtenay Latimer . SW: She loved nature so much, and she wanted to make the museums collections the best they possibly could be, and so she went down to the harborside. She describes picking through this big pile of slimy fish and eels, and then suddenly she saw, poking up, this sort of strange, blue fin . PA: Its a very distinctive kind of fish with strange fleshy limb-like fins. This thing was like nothing shed ever seen. SW: She said to the chairman of the museum, I think this is something really special. He went, oh no, little Latimer, its just a rock cod. But she knew in her gut that this was something different. And she thought, well Ive got to find a way to preserve it. So she set off on Christmas Eve in East London . KT: She tried to get the local cold storage company to take care of it, SW: They said, Ugh, no way, go away. KT: She tried to get the local mortuary to embalm it, SW: They said, Oh, we cant have any stinking fish here! She said why? All the other people in here are dead anyway. KT: And so eventually it was given to a taxidermist . SW: And she thought, well Ive got to find someone to identify this fish. And she immediately thought of Professor JLB Smith . KT: Who was the only ichthyologist in South Africa. SW: So she drew a rough little drawing, and sent a letter . SW: Soon as he saw the fish, he walked round and round it slowly. KT: he practically fainted. SW: he said it was like bombs going off in my head, and I was seeing the shape of a fish known only from fossils . PA: Its such a characteristic shape. Its like the outline of a Viking ship. SW: This was the coelacanth. A fish that was thought to have become extinct 65 million years ago . It was like, a dinosaur had just come into your living room! PA: You know, 400 million years ago these are just a bunch of fishes very much like other kinds of fish that were around at the time. But now they are these absolute anomalies . Theres nothing else like it on the planet. KT: They had in fact made the discovery of the century. PA: It was given the name Latimeria chalumnae, in honor of Marjorie Courtenay Latimer . KT: Without her, the specimen wouldnt have been preserved. PA: The key excitement was that this was such an obvious living fossil. KT: Charles Darwin came up with the term . Its sort of dumb in a way, because if its alive it cant be a fossil. But what it means is, theres an early fossil record, then a total gap, and then there happens to be a living one . It doesnt mean that hundreds and hundreds of its relatives havent become extinct. SW: One of the things that I love about the coelacanth is that its seen history past. TEXT: Devonian 419-359 million years ago Ahlberg: When the coelacanths first appeared, as one lineage of lobe-finned fishes among other similar-looking forms, well, what can you say about the world? They shared the waters with strange armored jawless fish with sucker-like mouths . TEXT: Tiktaalik One lineage of their close relatives started nosing around in the shallows and then I suppose from the coelacanths perspective just sort of disappeared out of view as they emerged onto land . Weinberg: And I like to sort of the coelacanth as saying Bye, good luck. TEXT: Carboniferous 5=359-299 million years ago Ahlberg: We get into the period of the coal swamps, producing so much oxygen that it becomes possible for dragonflies the size of falcons and millipedes longer than a man . TEXT: Permian 299-252 million years ago PA: The world is suddenly struck by a gigantic mass extinction, the worst biotic crisis thats ever hit the planet. Something like 90% of all species disappear . Coelacanths sort of keep going. Theyve perhaps taken a bit of a knock, but there are quite a lot of them. They swim around, doing their coelacanth thing. TEXT: Cretaceous 145-66 million years ago Another huge mass extinction . Then, mammals diversify on the land. Primates emerge. One primate lineage starts standing up on its hind limbs, starts using tools, starts using fire, starts speaking, and here we are . PA: And meanwhile, coelacanths, well, they havent really changed . That is a truly astonishing thing. PA: For me personally, its just that the world should have such things in it. That it should be possible to see this kind of improbable ghostly messenger from the very deep past. SW: And I just hope that the coelacanth manages to outlive us all, and keep going and witnessing what is to come. TEXT: There are two known species of coelacanths. They live on steep underwater slopes off the coasts of East Africa and Indonesia. TEXT: The population size isnt known, but they are considered threatened. CREDITS Directed, Produced and Edited by Flora Lichtman and Sharon Shattuck Advisers Laura Bonetta, Sean B. Carroll, Dennis Liu Director of Photography Daniel Cowen Original Score and Sound Design Martin Crane Assistant Director Ruth Lichtman Production Design Flora Lichtman Ruth Lichtman Sharon Shattuck Emma Wiseman Research Ruth Lichtman Transcriptions Davis Bynum Puppeteers Flora Lichtman Ruth Lichtman Alex Mullen Sharon Shattuck Emma Wiseman Choreography Emma Wiseman Thanks Members of the HHMI Educational Media Team NYT Credits Series Producer and Curator Kathleen Lingo Series Researcher Lindsay Crouse Give yourself a clear time frame. John Francis woke up on his 27th birthday in 1973 and decided not to speak for the day. He found he liked not talking, so extended his vow of silence for a year. Francis, an environmental activist, suggests starting with four days, knowing you can always opt to go longer. In the end, he didnt speak for 17 years. I kept feeling I had more to explore, he says. Take a break from texting, emailing or participating in social media, or at least minimize your digital output. A big part of being silent is being the recipient, not the broadcaster, Francis says. Dont worry if you slip up. A couple of times, he inadvertently said something, including excuse me after bumping into a woman in a grocery store. Once, after 10 years of silence, Francis gave himself an hour to call his worried parents before he set off alone to walk across the United States, a mute, African-American man with a banjo. Your silence should be an experience, not a contest. Dont make it a gimmick, he says. Ideally, your first foray will be in a retreat setting where you might spend time alone in nature. But many people cant do that, Francis says. To be silent in your day-to-day life, you need to give those around you notice. Talk to your family and co-workers and see if you can work out logistics ahead of time. Francis learned some sign language over those 17 years but also got quite good at miming and using nonverbal cues if he needed to communicate. Smile a lot, he says, and wave. He kept a pen and journal handy in case he needed to write something down for someone. Expect some measure of personal transformation. It helped me find myself, says Francis, who within a few silent weeks began to realize that previously he only ever listened to people long enough to start formulating what he was going to say next; but, he says, his mind didnt need to be filled up with endless chatter. An intricate, hitherto undiscovered soundscape was all around him. Youre going to hear more if youre not talking, he says. But defense lawyers had also indicated other reasons for pulling back on their witness lists. Earlier in the week, they had suggested that two of the defendants, Steven Aiello and Joseph Gerardi, executives of a Syracuse-area development company, might take the stand. But if they did, lawyers for Mr. Aiello and Mr. Gerardi insisted, prosecutors should not be allowed to cross-examine them on their involvement with the so-called Buffalo Billion, itself the subject of an upcoming corruption trial. The Buffalo Billion refers to the infusion of $1 billion by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomos administration into his signature upstate development project. But federal prosecutors have accused Alain E. Kaloyeros, former president of the State University of New York Polytechnic Institute, and Mr. Howe of rigging bids and doling out favorable treatment to certain contractors. Milton L. Williams Jr., a lawyer for Mr. Gerardi, said allowing questioning on that topic would get into a whole mini-trial that would unfairly prejudice the jury. Prosecutors said defense lawyers had opened the door to that line of inquiry by arguing that Mr. Aiello and Mr. Gerardi had been innocent victims of, rather than active collaborators with, Mr. Howe, when they allegedly bribed Mr. Percoco. They said they had the right to question the executives on the Buffalo Billion to show they had been involved in sordid dealings with Mr. Howe before. Judge Valerie E. Caproni of Federal District Court in Manhattan seemed to agree. Why isnt it a fair response to your argument that your clients were duped to show that, far from being duped, your clients engaged in a different scam with Todd Howe? she asked the lawyers. Mr. Aiello and Mr. Gerardi did not take the stand. Neither did Lisa Toscano-Percoco, Mr. Percocos wife. According to prosecutors, much of the more than $300,000 Mr. Percoco received in bribes was funneled through payments to his wife through a low-show job with Competitive Power Ventures, orchestrated by a former company executive, Peter Galbraith Kelly, who is also a defendant in the trial. And Howard Glaser, Mr. Cuomos former director of state operations, did not appear either. Mr. Schachter said that the new Gothamist will look very much like the old one. At the relaunch, Gothamist will operate as it was operating, Mr. Schachter said. If you were a Gothamist user, you went to Gothamist.com, you got a Gothamist newsletter, you followed Gothamist on social media your Gothamist will be back. If you come to WNYC.org, we will find a way to represent Gothamist on our home page. He said that WNYC and Gothamists strengths would play well together. We have a big reporting staff covering local news that Gothamist has never had, Mr. Schachter said. Gothamist has a connection with the audience that we have on the radio, but have struggled to find in text and visuals. We think that the two organizations have a real complementary set of skills and assets to bring together. The news was first reported by Wired. WNYC will also maintain the archives of DNAinfo. Many details of the integration remain to be worked out. WNYC plans to bring aboard Gothamists founders the publisher Jake Dobkin and the editor Jen Chung and a number of other Gothamist editors, who will work with WNYC journalists to relaunch the site, Mr. Schachter said. Union representation the very issue that hastened the shutdown of Gothamist and DNAinfo also remains a question mark. WNYC employees who work primarily for digital platforms are not included in the stations bargaining agreement with SAG-Aftra, which represents members of the on-air staff. Gothamist and DNAinfo journalists, whose work was purely digital, had just voted to join the Writers Guild of America East when they were shut down in the fall. LIGHTS UP And then I go out there and hope for the best hope for some inspiration, and for new things to happen. GOALS I do have different goals every show. Ill say, Im going to be as loose as possible. Or, Im going to keep this show as intimate as possible. Then comes a Friday night show where I know people are going to be rowdy, and Im going to go out there and be as rowdy as them. At around 5:30 on a Thursday evening in October 2012, Marina Krim returned home to her apartment on the Upper West Side from her younger daughters swimming lesson to find the bloodied bodies of her two other children her older daughter, 6, and her son, 2 dead, in the bathtub. The familys nanny, Yoselyn Ortega, was standing over them, slashing herself with a knife. Ms. Krims husband, Kevin, had been flying home from a business trip and learned what happened when he was met by the police at the airport. The details of the case hardly require recitation for a certain parental class in New York City, for whom crime long ago had become almost invisible and for whom child rearing had become an obsession. Every anxiety now seemed valid, every distant suspicion worth pursuit. For many, the image of Ms. Krims face pressed against the window of an ambulance as she was taken away from a scene of mythic barbarity remains indelible. After five years of delays, hearings, debates about her mental fitness, and efforts on the part of her lawyer to suppress statements she made in the hospital, Ms. Ortega is now standing trial for the murder of the Krim children; opening arguments are set to begin next week. The process of jury selection has been onerous, in part, because the trial is expected to last several months this is common when a defendant professes that he or she is not guilty by reason of insanity. Lawyers for the accused bring forth psychiatrists who claim the client acted in madness, and prosecutors deliver counterexperts who testify that the madness had merely been performed. Beyond that, the impartial do not present themselves in vast numbers in a case like this nearly anyone who has ever left a child with someone, or really anyone who has ever had a young child at all, could seem unsuitable to sit among the 12 men and women rendering judgment. Weve seen with the #MeToo movement and the Times Up movement that there has been a dark, secretive, dangerous current and epidemic of sexual harassment, Mr. Johnson said on Friday. This is a way to address that and hopefully be on the leading edge of trying to do something legislatively thats going to protect more people. The measures, which are set for a Wednesday hearing before the committee on women, must still be voted on, and are subject to approval by Mayor Bill de Blasio. Were collaborating with them on this, Mr. Johnson said of the mayors office. The mayor is supportive of the concepts and aim and we look forward to working with the council on the details, Eric F. Phillips, the mayors press secretary, said in a statement. He said the mayor was working on his own proposals. Likely to be the most contentious aspect of the legislation is the requirement that private employers provide training. More than 30,000 businesses in the city could be affected by the regulation. The bill specifies that the training be interactive, either in person, with audiovisual material or some other form approved by the citys Human Rights Commission; it also requires that employers maintain records of compliance. Enforcement would be handled by the commission as well, and businesses could face penalties up to $500 for their first violation, and up to $2,000 for each one after. Mr. Johnson said he did not expect the legislation would burden employers, but said he looked forward to hearing their concerns next week. Some in the business community expressed skepticism. Thanks to the #MeToo movement, any employer who is not asleep understands the importance of strong policies on sexual harassment and relevant training, said Kathryn Wylde, the president of the Partnership for New York City, a business group, who was briefed on the bills. What more city laws are going to accomplish, aside from legal and compliance headaches, is unclear. Idrissa Ouedraogo, whose simple, carefully observed movies about cultural change in Burkina Faso and elsewhere in Africa brought him international acclaim and a top award at the Cannes International Film Festival, died on Sunday in Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, where he lived. He was 64. The countrys president, Roch Marc Christian Kabore, announced the death on Twitter. No cause was given. Mr. Ouedraogo (pronounced oh-dra-OH-go) was in his early 30s when he wrote and directed his first feature, Yam Daabo (The Choice, in the Moore language of Burkina Faso, which is in Western Africa), a 1986 release about a family disrupted by famine. When it was shown in New York in 1988 as part of the Museum of Modern Arts New Directors/New Films festival, Caryn James, in her review in The New York Times, called it a beautifully composed, emotionally triumphant film and said that it brings to our attention a most valuable filmmaker. She was in her first year of law school at George Washington when her father committed suicide bedeviled, she said, by money troubles. Using her law books as collateral, she took out a loan so that her youngest brother could stay in boarding school. Coming from the segregated South, said Rashida Bumbray, a New York-based curator and choreographer who was formerly artistic director at Duke Ellington, Peggy understood the real political significance of training young black artists, and that political significance also extended to when those artists are beginning their careers. Her idea of what it meant to be a collector also meant investing in the artist as a human being, Ms. Bumbray said. She had a relationship with each individual. She didnt take it lightly. She practiced a radical kind of love, and we see that love truly manifest in the success of the artists she collected and nurtured so deeply. Simone Leigh, a multimedia artist whose work exploring African-American tropes and female identity was also championed by Ms. Cooper Cafritz, said of her: She had a lot of faith that we could do well. She made you feel like the most important artist in the world. She saw thats what was needed. In 2009, more than 300 pieces of art that she had spent years collecting were destroyed in a fire that ravaged the gabled and columned eight-bedroom estate Ms. Cooper Cafritz had built in 1986 with her husband at the time, Conrad Cafritz, a wealthy developer, in the Kent neighborhood of northwest Washington. Firefighters said there had not been adequate water pressure in the neighborhoods hydrants. In 2014, Ms. Cooper Cafritz settled a lawsuit with Washingtons water authority for an undisclosed amount. After months of investigation, fire officials classified the cause of the fire as undetermined. The house had long been a vibrant social hub for Washingtons elites. There were political fund-raisers, including one for the Rev. Jesse L. Jacksons presidential campaign in 1988. When John F. Kennedy Jr. was looking for a place for a party in the capital to introduce his new magazine, George, Ms. Cooper Cafritz opened her doors to him. Mr. Graham insisted that his German crusades were apolitical, but his sermons suggested otherwise. In Berlins Olympic Stadium, he elevated the citys geospiritual significance in an emerging world order. Berlin is prayed for in the world more than any other city, he declared, calling the city a battleground, a continent for conquest not for earthly power, as the world wars had been, but a new battle for the hearts and minds of the people. In so many words, Mr. Graham was talking about the Communists. Amid rising Cold War tensions and debates over German remilitarization, he affirmed that West Germans were his brothers in arms literally as well as spiritually. To strengthen a Christian democratic West against a godless Soviet East, he cast his weight behind German rearmament. He spoke for most Americans, but also for leading politicians like President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Chancellor Konrad Adenauer of West Germany. Adenauer made a point of meeting with Mr. Graham in 1963 as he steered his country westward. In the aftermath of the war and the American-led Marshall Plan for Europes reconstruction, ordinary West Germans experienced Americanization in various forms, and for many, Mr. Graham portended a similar Americanization of German religion with its emphasis on conversion and its use of modern communication technologies for evangelism. Mr. Grahams crusades offered German Protestants the chance to experience these modern, American religious developments. Many looked to Mr. Graham not only as a promise against secularization, but also as a means of aligning themselves with the West. Though his German Crusades were astoundingly well-attended and supported by leaders like Adenauer, they also met with plenty of criticism. Some Germans deemed Mr. Graham a Hollywood huckster who, as the German news media put it, advertised the Bible like toothpaste and chewing gum. Others sensed an unnerving parallel between his mass gatherings and Germanys fascist past. The June 1954 issue of Der Spiegel featured Mr. Graham on the cover with mischievous eyes and a mouth pursed in what could be a sales pitch as much as a sermon. The magazines feature was disparagingly titled Religion for Mass-Consumption, and argued that Mr. Grahams real goal was to steer souls away from Communism more than toward God. Unsurprisingly, the East German press was even more critical, one paper characterizing the crusades as tools of American propaganda in the psychological Cold War. Liberal Protestants in the United States and Germany felt themselves caught in the middle of Mr. Grahams bifurcated world. While prominent theologians like the German Lutheran pastor Martin Niemoller and the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr supported Germanys democratization, they protested Mr. Grahams equation of Christianity with America, anti-Communism and free-market capitalism. If many mainline protestants had used similar language in the immediate aftermath of World War II, by the mid-1950s they had departed drastically from seeing socialism as anathema to Christianity. Mainline liberals accused Mr. Graham of raising international tensions by identifying Berlin as the beacon of the West in a sea of Communist red. His call for spiritual armament risked a new military conflict. In Joseph Conrads great short story, The Secret Sharer, the captain of a ship comes to harbor a secret. A murderer named Leggatt slips on board in the night, and the captain, without exactly knowing why, chooses to hide him in his cabin. Desperate to save the man, and safeguard his deception, the captain almost drives the ship aground as he steers it close enough to shore for the killer to plunge into the water and escape. The captain, new to the ship, asks himself a question at the outset: I wondered how far I should turn out faithful to that ideal conception of ones own personality every man sets up for himself secretly. Yet, faced by events that seem to awaken some personal demon, he is unmoored. It was, in the night, as though I had been faced by my own reflection in the depths of a somber and immense mirror. What does the captain see reflected that leads him to an almost fatal compromise? It could be a personal memory of some act of violence; it could be Leggatts desperate humanity; it could even be that he draws this doppelganger out of his subconscious, an apparition, as he anxiously embarks on a ship to which he is a stranger, with a crew he does not know. I have been thinking of The Secret Sharer as I contemplate the American carnage of the Trump administration after 13 months. Everybody who serves President Trump is faced with his or her own reflection in the depths of a somber and immense mirror. Everyone is compromised, whether fatally or not. How could it be otherwise serving a man who does not know the difference between reality and make-believe? In the early 2000s, federal, state and university biologists began putting GPS collars on elk around the Yellowstone landscape for local studies and management purposes. In my research, I have helped stitch together disparate data sets and fill in gaps. The resulting map we put together illuminated a web of migration corridors radiating outward from Yellowstone into an area five times its size. More than 20,000 elk in at least nine major herds travel these corridors. They are the very same animals park visitors see in summer, but they live 20, 30 or even 50 miles beyond park boundaries in winter, on lands held by the Bureau of Land Management, the Forest Service, state governments and hundreds of private landowners, and used for such things as grazing, hunting, timber harvests and mineral extraction. When I look at this map, I see Yellowstones veins and arteries, carrying the blood in and out of its big heart. Other researchers, working across public and private land south of Yellowstone, have mapped two major migrations where new conservation initiatives are underway. In one case, biologists from the University of Wyoming, the Wyoming Game and Fish Department, the National Park Service and the Wildlife Conservation Society mapped a 120-mile migration of pronghorns from their winter range in the Green River Basin to their summer range in Grand Teton National Park. In another, the wildlife biologist Hall Sawyer, working with the Bureau of Land Management, discovered and mapped a 150-mile mule deer migration in the same general area. This stunning discovery, in 2012, of a migration rivaling the longest known large mammal migration in Africa reminds us that we do yet understand the full extent of the natural treasures on our public lands. For both the pronghorn and mule deer migrations, the National Geographic photographer Joe Riis located the trails and followed the herds through seasons and years to tell the story. Maps and photographs together fueled public support for new protections. For the pronghorn, these included the first migration corridor ever designated on Forest Service land, conservation easements and fence removals on private land, and new overpasses installed by the Wyoming Department of Transportation to reduce wildlife-vehicle collisions. For the mule deer, the newly formed Wyoming Migration Initiative identified a spot along the corridor where 4,000 deer squeeze through a quarter-mile bottleneck that was proposed for residential development. Conservation groups then worked with the state to protect the land. In August 2017, President Trump issued an executive order banning transgender Americans from serving in the military and tasked Defense Secretary Jim Mattis with giving him recommendations on how to carry out that ban. A Pentagon spokesman said that the recommendations were made on Friday. Kristin Beck, a former Navy SEAL, served from 1990 to 2011. Ms. Beck, formerly known as Christopher, deployed 13 times, including to Afghanistan and Iraq. Along the way, she was awarded numerous ribbons and medals for her service, including a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart. In 2013 Ms. Beck came out as a woman and began hormone therapy in preparation for sex reassignment surgery. If permitted, she would like to rejoin the military this year. In this video op-ed, Ms. Beck makes a last-minute plea to allow all transgender Americans to serve their country. Whitman is waiting for the task force to begin its work before talking about specific proposals. But Norm Eisen, the chairman of CREW, who was Barack Obamas ethics czar, has also been thinking about post-Trump reconstruction, and he has some ideas. Until now, he told me, most people assumed that no president would dare to flout norms against profiting from the office. Trump has shown otherwise. So we need to have legislation that No. 1, requires the release of tax return information and, No. 2, requires presidential compliance, to the full extent allowed by the Constitution, with conflict-of-interest law, Eisen said. Eisen also suggests strengthening the power of the inspectors general, officials charged with investigating fraud and abuse in government agencies. He argues that the Office of Government Ethics which until now has relied largely on administration officials capacity for shame be given legal teeth, including subpoena power. And he thinks we need statutes laying out what it means to comply with the Constitutions emoluments clause, which prohibits government officials from accepting payments or gifts from foreign governments, and which no president has ever ignored the way Trump has. We now know theres nothing to save us if you have a president who runs roughshod over these things, Eisen said. Steven Levitsky, a Harvard professor and a co-author of the recent book How Democracies Die, cautions that new laws arent enough to knit together the fraying civic fabric that allowed for Trumps rise. No set of rules anywhere can respond to every situation, cover every ambiguity, he said. Even the most exacting regulations cant compensate for bad faith and a total-war approach to politics. Our political parties are so intensely polarized and this polarization is being driven by Republican Party extremism that they are willing to basically employ any means necessary to win, Levitsky said. As long as thats the case, youre going to see politicians breaking norms and skirting rules, or using the letter of the law in ways that undermine its spirit. This is almost certainly true, but people outside the Republican Party dont have the power to moderate it. All they can do is forcefully rebuke it, and the banana republic governance the party has imposed on the country it purports to love. De-Trumpification would be a way to officially mark this obscene presidency as aberrant, a negative example for future generations. Like a lot of parents I know, Im dismayed that my kids, now too little to understand what a president is, will someday study Trump in school. One of the great tasks of the post-Trump era will be ensuring that the lessons of his presidency are the right ones. LONDON Procedures and processes, as everyone who has spent time waiting for permission to travel in authoritarian regimes knows, are what malevolent bureaucracies take refuge in when they wish to deliver a silent snub. The bureaucrats tell you: We are still waiting for news of your request and have no news either way! There are procedures to be followed! You will just have to be patient! It is out of our hands! As a journalist who has reported on Syria and Iraq for the past five years, I am used to it. It goes with the territory. But because of my travels in Syria, under rules instituted in 2016 I am no longer able to claim the usual visa waiver that Irish citizens like me typically enjoy and now have to present myself for an interview at the American Embassy in London when I want to enter the United States. The first sign that something was amiss came in April last year, when I was invited to attend an investigative reporting symposium in Berkeley, Calif. The promised post-interview visa didnt come through in time. It remained in process, and I couldnt board my flight. A few months later, I was offered a fellowship at Harvard. I submitted my visa application several months before my expected date of travel. Yet my J1 educational visa stayed stubbornly in process. Another journey to the United States remained out of reach. Francesco Rissos childhood was straight out of a Fellini film. The fashion designer, who has been the creative director of Marni since 2016, was born near Sardinia and spent his first four years living on a wooden schooner with his parents, sailing around the Mediterranean. Next, they settled into a grand 16th-century villa in Genoa with three of Rissos grandparents and an ever-rotating cast of glamorous houseguests from abroad. My family was extremely eclectic, says the 35-year-old, who, craving stability, escaped at 16 to study fashion at the Polimoda school in Florence before attending the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York and Central Saint Martins in London. It was a vertigo way of life I was always outside my comfort zone, he says. That forced me to be adventurous and open-minded. In 2008, Risso landed a job working on womens design and special projects for Prada, where he remained for eight years. Since taking the helm from Marnis founder, Consuelo Castiglioni, who started the label in 1994, hes upheld the Milanese houses reputation for explosive floral prints and prim but off-kilter silhouettes. But he has also added his own diverse aesthetic, informed by everything from Disney cartoons to 18th-century tartan hunting jackets. Im driven by a concept I call retrovolution, he says. Its about taking everything youve learned in the past about tradition and moving beyond it. Francesco Risso, the creative director of Marni, lists the Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini and Disney cartoons among his many inspirations. In his two years at the Italian brand, where he arrived from Prada, he has quickly developed a signature aesthetic of playful eclecticism. His collections are bohemian, romantic and sometimes a little perverse. While Rissos designs may evoke bygone eras and even childhood as with the trailing blanket cape from his most recent mens wear collection they are not nostalgic. Im driven by a concept I call retrovolution, the designer says. Its about taking everything youve learned in the past about tradition and moving beyond it. T challenged Risso to document his world and creative approach in Polaroid and the result is the 10 dreamlike images below, which the designer explains as follows: Life is built on encounters: One way or another all of them stay with me. They are the population of my soul, of my mind, disguises of my face or of my friends or of my loves. Animals in the jungle of imagination keep me company as family jewels and strike my eye when I forgot about them, about me. A child playing, an explorer discovering, a young boy listening and a man telling. HONG KONG United States officials have torpedoed a Chinese state-backed groups plan to buy an American electronics company, signaling the Trump administrations continuing skepticism toward Chinese investment deals, particularly those that involve transferring technological know-how. Xcerra, a Massachusetts-based provider of equipment for testing computer chips and circuit boards, said this week that it was withdrawing from its $580 million sale to an investment group backed by a Chinese government-controlled fund. The reason, according to Dave Tacelli, Xcerras president and chief executive, was that the deal was not likely to be approved by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, a multiagency Washington panel that operates largely out of the public eye. The committee, known as Cfius, plays an advisory role to the president, but it can effectively block foreign acquisitions of American companies over national security concerns. Despite our best efforts to secure approval, it has become evident that Cfius will not clear this transaction, Mr. Tacelli said. The deal would ultimately have been financed by the China Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund, a $21 billion fund that counts several Chinese state-run companies as investors. Bill Mason and Sherri Rosen-Mason are credentialed white liberals, having fought for 15 years to increase the diversity of the student body at the New Hampshire boarding school where he is the headmaster and she the director of admissions. But when their college-aged son applies to Yale and is deferred and his best friend, whose father is black, gets in diversity suddenly becomes discrimination. Misbehavior ensues. Thats the setup for Admissions, a new play by Joshua Harmon (Bad Jews, Significant Other) that he describes as a satire of white privilege and white guilt. The satire is premised on the Masons staunch belief in a good education, despite the evidence that their own son, who angrily decides to withdraw all his Ivy applications, may have learned the wrong lessons from his. At least five Off Broadway premieres this spring Admissions opens at Lincoln Center Theater on March 12 take up this theme, from several angles. In the wake of notable recent examples, including Dominique Morisseaus Pipeline, Anna Deavere Smiths Notes From the Field and Julia Chos Office Hour, these new plays, all set in and around schools, question the idea that an education is universally and always positively transformative, rewarding any sacrifice or subterfuge entailed in getting there. That theme is addressed most directly in Lucy Thurbers Transfers, which opens at MCC Theater on April 23. The play concerns two students Kristofer, who is Latino, and Clarence, who is black studying at a South Bronx community college in hopes of nabbing a scholarship to a top university. Everyones assumption is that their efforts will be worth it should they succeed; Transfers is partly based on Ms. Thurbers own experience as a scholarship student at Sarah Lawrence. The emperors Chinese name was Qin Shihuang. We also called him Ying Zheng, explained Jia Jia, our friendly and assertive tour guide, who punctuated many of her pronouncements with a definitive hmph. She continued: Emperor was a good emperor. But he was also ruthless. And he was very crazy. The emperor, she said, while achieving the unification of China and creating the great clay army, also had a fondness for torturing his subjects and a taste for mercury, thinking it was the secret to everlasting life (it was, in fact, the opposite). There were three excavation locations at the museum, and we saved the biggest and best for last. The vast, final dig site held hundreds of soldiers, lined up in a majestic and slightly eerie show of force: infantrymen, archers, even a few horses. I was surprised when Jia Jia told us that while Qin Shihuang created around 8,000 life-size soldiers to protect him in the afterlife, only 2,000 or so have been unearthed and reassembled since local farmers made the discovery in 1974 (and only a portion of those are on public display at any given time). Many, many decades of painstaking work remain. Admission to the site, should you choose to go on your own, is 150 yuan, or 120 during the winter off-season. I was able to do most of my exploration of Xian solo, though, thanks to the compactness of the city center. I recommend making a quick stop at the Bell and Drum Towers, which closely resemble each other and are both located in the heart of the city. Tickets to each will cost 35 yuan, or you can buy a combo ticket for 50 yuan. The pagoda-like structures, with their distinctive upward-tilting eaves, are quite regal and majestic, and beautifully illuminated during the evening. They were constructed within years of each other during the 14th century by the Hongwu Emperor of the Ming dynasty the Bell Tower rang to mark the beginning the day; the Drum Tower , its end. Another duo of complementary sights is the Giant Wild Goose and Small Wild Goose Pagodas, both south of the city walls. The larger of the two is one of Xians most famous structures, a sandy-colored Tang dynasty pavilion constructed in 652 A.D. to house sutras and icons brought from India by the Buddhist monk Xuanzang. The seven-story pagoda occupies the spacious and peaceful grounds of Dacien Si (Mercy Temple), which costs 50 yuan to access. Meandering around the temple grounds on a chilly day, I saw men and women lighting incense and worshiping at Sakyamuni, the main hall of the monastery. From there I entered the pagoda (this requires a separate 20-yuan ticket) and climbed the nearly 250 wooden stairs leading to the top. Created to protect the 657 volumes of Buddhist scriptures Xuanzang brought back, the pagoda yields another benefit: the views from the top are excellent, if slightly hindered by smog. (Air quality is a problem throughout China, and asthmatics and those with delicate respiratory systems should take particular notice. The government is t esting measures to stem the problem in different cities, including Xian, which is experimenting with building-sized air purification towers.) To the northwest is the Small Wild Goose Pagoda (built in 707, its slightly younger), and while the pagoda itself is currently being restored, the area is worth visiting for a couple of reasons. The Studio of Chinese Calligraphy and Painting, in addition to traditional artwork, has a small museum dedicated to Mao Zedong that I found to be more honest and critical than I expected. It cites the lost generation of the Cultural Revolution and the eras disastrous blow on traditional Chinese culture. A friendly employee at the shop directed me to the spacious, modern Xian Museum (free admission), which has diverse array of installations: contemporary paintings from the Taklamakan Desert region, relics from the Tang and Sui Dynasties, and, in the basement, an exhibition detailing the history of Xian. On Nov. 30, two and a half months before the Parkland massacre, an unidentified caller from Massachusetts told the Broward County Sheriffs Office that Mr. Cruz was collecting guns and knives and that he could be a school shooter in the making. Two years before, the office reported receiving thirdhand information from the son of one of Mr. Cruzs neighbors that he planned to shoot up the school on Instagram. The tip that the F.B.I. received in early January from someone close to Mr. Cruz suggested that he owned a gun and had talked about carrying out a school shooting. But the bureau failed to investigate, even though the tipster said Mr. Cruz had a desire to kill people, erratic behavior and disturbing social media posts. That information should have been sent to the Miami F.B.I. field office, the bureau said. The F.B.I. also received a tip from a bail bondsman in Mississippi in September about a suspicious comment left on his YouTube channel by a nikolas cruz who professed a desire to be a professional school shooter. The bondsman notified YouTube, which promptly took down the comment. The F.B.I. said it did not have enough information to determine if nikolas cruz was a real name or a pseudonym, and the bureau said it could not justify keeping a file on the tip open and closed it in October. When the second tip reached the F.B.I. in West Virginia in January, a specialist was able to view the earlier tip, too. But even then, the specialist, in consultation with her supervisor, decided that there was not enough evidence to pursue it and that it did not appear to be an imminent threat. The acting F.B.I. deputy director, David L. Bowdich, briefed congressional staff members about the case on Friday and acknowledged the bureaus failure to investigate, according to three people with direct knowledge of the meeting. WASHINGTON One of the most powerful moments during President Trumps meeting with survivors and relatives of the Florida school shooting this week came when a student pleaded with the president to do what Australia did after a similar tragedy. As it happened, Mr. Trump had an opportunity on Friday to get a firsthand report on Australias crackdown on guns when he hosted the countrys prime minister at the White House. But both men quickly discounted any comparisons, saying their nations are too different. Its a completely different context, historically, legally and so forth, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said when asked about his countrys example during a news conference. We are very satisfied with our laws, he added. But we certainly dont presume to provide policy or political advice on that matter here. You have an amendment to your Constitution that deals with gun ownership. You have a very, very different history. Standing beside him in the East Room of the White House, Mr. Trump repeated the point. Theyre very different countries with very different sets of problems, said the president, who has embraced a couple of modest new gun restrictions since the Florida shooting, even as he promotes the idea of arming trained teachers. But I think were well on the way to solving that horrible problem that happens far too often in the United States. WASHINGTON A former top adviser to Donald J. Trumps presidential campaign has agreed to cooperate with the special counsel inquiry into Russias interference in the 2016 election after pleading guilty on Friday to financial fraud and lying to investigators. The adviser, Rick Gates, is a longtime political consultant who once served as Mr. Trumps deputy campaign chairman. The plea deal could be a significant development in the investigation a sign that Mr. Gates plans to offer incriminating information against his longtime associate and the former Trump campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, and possibly other members of the campaign in exchange for a lighter punishment. He faces up to nearly six years in prison. The deal came as the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, has been raising pressure on Mr. Gates and Mr. Manafort with dozens of new charges of money laundering and bank fraud unsealed on Thursday. Both men were first indicted in October and pleaded not guilty. The plea agreement was part of a flurry of recent activity by the special counsels team. Last week, 13 Russians were indicted on charges relating to a carefully planned scheme to incite political discord in the United States in the months before the 2016 election. Mr. Gates changed his plea on Friday during an appearance in a Washington courtroom, his eyes cast down as the government outlined the charges against him. A man who had made millions of dollars lobbying in Ukraine accepted the fate that may await him: a prison sentence for carrying out a financial conspiracy to hide the money he earned there. For as much time as is spent trying to figure out whats inside President Trumps head, whats on top of it has attracted less significant scrutiny but a fair bit of curiosity. On Friday, he lifted the veil. So to speak. Appearing at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Oxon Hill, Md., the president poked fun at his own mop, a tangle of twists and turns that coalesce in what, in the end, becomes an apparent full head of hair. But if you look within, the president said, not all is as it seems. As Mr. Trump was speaking, a television monitor, showing him on the stage, caught his eye. What a nice picture that is, he said. Look at that. Id love to watch that guy speak. The crowd roared. Then, as many people would do when they suddenly realize theyre being looked at, he considered how his hair looked. He hovered his hands over his multi-angled locks, turned his back to the crowd to show off his solid-gold covering like a tarp keeping the rain out, then briefly touched the edges over his neck. WASHINGTON The Justice Department informed the White House this month that there were substantial issues related to Jared Kushner that still needed to be investigated and would significantly delay a recommendation on whether he should receive a permanent security clearance, according to two people briefed on the matter. The White House was not told what the issues were involving Mr. Kushner, President Trumps son-in-law and senior adviser. But the notification led White House lawyers and aides to believe that they were more problematic than the complexity of his finances and his initial failure to disclose contacts with foreign leaders the reasons Mr. Kushners lawyers have said are holding up the process, the two people said. An interim clearance has given him access to closely guarded information, including the presidential daily brief, the intelligence summary Mr. Trump receives every day. The issue took on added urgency after the chief of staff, John F. Kelly, issued a sweeping review of interim clearances in response to the disclosure that the White House staff secretary, Rob Porter, had his permanent security clearance delayed for a year because of spousal abuse allegations. In a memo to the White House staff, Mr. Kelly said that he would cut off high-level access to many of the aides who had been unable to get a permanent clearance. WASHINGTON President Trump boasted again on Friday that he has unleashed a roaring American economy by cutting more red tape in the federal bureaucracy than any previous president, the latest attempt to prove he is making good on his campaign pledge to slash industry regulations. No president has ever cut so many regulations in their entire term, O.K., as we have cut in less than a year, Mr. Trump told the annual Conservative Political Action Conference. And it is my opinion that the regulations had as big an impact as these massive tax cuts that we have given. Before taking office, Mr. Trump promised to eliminate at least two federal regulations for each new one that is issued during his administration. In dozens of speeches since, the president largely has stuck to two specific claims about his deregulation record. Neither is true, according to analysts who study regulations and former federal workers who have administered them. Weve eliminated more regulations in our first year than any administration has ever eliminated. And that means four years, eight years, or, in one instance, 16 years. Mr. Trump, at a Feb. 1 Republican retreat. I pledged to eliminate two unnecessary regulations for every one new regulation. We have succeeded beyond our highest expectations. Instead of 2 for 1, we have cut 22 burdensome regulations for every one new rule. Mr. Trump, on Jan. 26, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. The Trump administration has engaged in a sleight of hand to create the 22-1 ratio. And while Mr. Trump has made progress in his deregulatory agenda, his claims of achieving more success in one year than throughout the entire presidencies of any of his predecessors is hyperbole, not fact. In the last two months, law enforcement authorities in California took a gun away from a 38-year-old man who had threatened to kill himself, his wife and their young child if she left him. They removed three weapons from a 23-year-old ex-Marine who, the authorities said, had developed a paranoia that all males wanted to harm him. And they took a handgun from a 39-year-old man whose terrified neighbors reported that he was firing his weapon in the backyard; the man, who said he thought he was aiming for raccoons and rats, was found to be intoxicated, the police said. California is one of only five states with red flag laws or extreme risk protection orders allowing the police to temporarily take away guns from people deemed by a judge to be dangerous, often after a family member or acquaintance raises concerns. Similar measures are being weighed in more than a dozen additional state capitals from Pennsylvania to Hawaii, and are drawing new attention after the deadly shooting this month at a Florida high school in a case where the suspect, Nikolas Cruz, had numerous troubling run-ins with the authorities over many months. Florida has no red flag law. It is difficult to measure the effectiveness of red flag laws, in part because it is impossible to count mass shootings, or other tragedies, that were avoided. That said, the authorities in states with the laws, including Connecticut, Indiana, Oregon and Washington, say they have seen patterns: upticks in the use of such laws after mass shootings in other places. The measures were also used in situations far different from the mass shooting scenarios they were originally conceived to prevent. Most often, guns were removed from people not seen as threats to large groups or public gatherings, but as risks to themselves or to their families, or suffering from debilitating illnesses such as Alzheimers or alcoholism. The last-minute commutation was the first in a decade in a state that has long led the nation in executions and came after Mr. Whitakers father, Kent, who was shot in the attack but survived, led an effort to stop his sons execution. Mr. Whitakers father insists that he would be victimized again if the state put to death his last remaining immediate family member, Mr. Abbott said in a statement, noting that 30 inmates had been executed during his three years as governor. Mr. Whitaker must spend the remainder of his life behind bars as punishment for this heinous crime. While multiple executions have been scheduled and carried out on the same day before, the unusual flurry on Thursday bucked an overall decline in executions across the country over more than a decade. Twenty-three people were put to death in 2017, a steep decline from 52 in 2009 and 98 in 1999, according to the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington. Four inmates, including Mr. Branch, have been put to death in 2018. We wont be able to tell from what happens tonight alone whether this is a change in the trend or not, Robert Dunham, executive director at the Death Penalty Information Center, said in an interview. But Mr. Dunham noted that the number of executions so far this year and those scheduled in the coming weeks would still be fewer than those during the same time in some previous years. It will still be consistent of the long-term trend away from the death penalty, he said. GENEVA More than 40 senior military officers and officials in South Sudan should be prosecuted on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity, a United Nations commission said on Friday, citing harrowing witness testimony and thousands of documents tying them to mass atrocities in the countrys four-year civil war. Government and opposition forces had systematically butchered men, women and children, slitting throats, gouging out eyes, castrating and mutilating men and gang raping men and women on a massive scale, the commission said in a report it intends to submit next week to the Human Rights Council in Geneva. Holding those in charge in South Sudan accountable for the intentional suffering they inflict on their own people is crucial to stemming this humanitarian catastrophe, said Andrew Clapham, a member of the commission and an international law expert. South Sudan gained independence from Sudan in 2011, two years later plunged into a brutal ethnic conflict between President Salva Kiirs ethnic Dinka community and the Nuer community of his former vice president, Riek Machar, creating a humanitarian disaster and what the commission described as the worlds fastest growing refugee crisis. The results of the 2016 campaign were humiliating for the party. The P.R.I. lost elections in 7 states, including some where they had held power for more than 70 years, and Mr. Beltrones was forced to step down as party president. Then came the investigations under the new governor, Mr. Corral, whose efforts have put the entire party on alert. This is hardly the first time Mr. Beltrones has been against the ropes. In various phases of his career, he has faced political exile, only to reinvent himself and work his way back into the halls of power. In 1997, when he was the governor of the state of Sonora, Mr. Beltrones was accused by some American officials of having links to drug traffickers. The claims were serious enough that the American ambassador at the time considered revoking his Mr. Beltroness visa to the United States. Most people thought Mr. Beltrones was done after that. He left his governorship and did not have another major political position for years. But by 2003, he was back, having found his way into the center of the action as a crucial intermediary between the P.R.I. and the administration of Vicente Fox, the first non-P.R.I. president in 70 years. A new era for Mr. Beltrones followed. He became known as a politician capable of maintaining power even when his party was in the opposition, able to broker deals with his rivals and retain his own influence, lawmakers recall. As other politicians of his generation fell by the wayside, Mr. Beltrones evolved. Through charm, guile and a shrewd ability to read the winds of change, he galvanized his reputation as Mexicos timeless politician, the ultimate power broker even when his party was out of power. Perhaps his most powerful moment came when he allied himself with another former president, Felipe Calderon of the rival National Action Party, whose election was so contested that one opposition party blocked his entry into Congress to keep him from being sworn in as president. KABUL, Afghanistan One of the boldest efforts to date to stabilize Afghanistan through economic development began on Friday with a ceremonial start to construction on a $22.5 billion natural gas pipeline crossing the countrys war-ravaged south. The pipeline, known as TAPI for its route through Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India, taking in some of the worlds most contested land, is an experiment in pipeline diplomacy of a type considered but ultimately rejected in other hot spots like on the Korean Peninsula. Such so-called peace pipelines have been contested. They were once also considered, but not built, as a solution to a long-simmering conflict west of here between Armenia and Azerbaijan, also involving Central Asian energy. Enemies forced to share energy infrastructure are as likely to blow it up or shut off supplies as make peace, experience in Eastern Europe has shown. Ukraine and Russia, for example, fought two so-called gas wars over prices and transit fees before a real war broke out in 2014. Gazprom, the Russian natural gas monopoly, has found no backing for its proposed trans-Korean gas pipeline crossing the Demilitarized Zone, which it says would ease tensions. HONG KONG A newspaper controlled by the Communist Party of China criticized the United States for its high level of gun violence, calling it hypocritical that a country that condemns others over human rights violations is failing to stem such slaughter at home. The opinion column in The Global Times, which is run by the Communist Partys Peoples Daily Group, said that after a gunman killed 17 people last week at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., the United States should look to China, which has strict controls on guns. Its inhumane for the U.S., which boasts about its human rights record, to turn a blind eye to gun violence, snub increasing calls for gun control and risk more innocent lives, the piece said. The column on guns appeared Friday in the English-language edition of the newspaper, but not in the Chinese print version. While The Global Times is controlled by the Communist Party, it is not an authoritative voice, meaning its pugnacious opinion pieces dont necessarily reflect the views of the Chinese government in the way a commentary in The Peoples Daily would. NEW DELHI After days of controversy over whether he would blur the lines between American foreign policy and his familys real estate business during a trip to India to sell condos, Donald Trump Jr. on Friday abandoned plans to give a policy speech and instead gave an interview with an Indian journalist, sticking to safe topics. His remarks in the interview about his fathers successful 2016 presidential campaign, how little the family sees him now, and Indias great entrepreneurial spirit were so anodyne that when the Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan entered the room near the end of the interview, people lifted their phones to take photos of the actor and stopped paying attention to the oldest child of Americas president. Im here as a businessman, Mr. Trump told a crowd of about 2,000 business and political leaders, who were gathered for the annual business conference hosted by Indias most powerful media company, The Times Group. Im not representing anyone. But his efforts to distance himself from administration policy were met with some skepticism. Though he claims that its not an official speech, we take it as an official statement, said P. V. Sunil, a managing director of a company that builds malls and cinema complexes in India and Singapore. He speaks to his father more than anyone here. Flashy silk and gold-embroidered outfits, adorned with pointy red shoes fit for royalty, are acceptable garb for Bollywood performers. But apparently not if you are the telegenic prime minister of Canada on a trade trip to India. Justin Trudeau and his family have attracted some praise but also ridicule during their eight day visit for wearing elaborate traditional clothing that some insist is more appropriate for a Maharajah and his court than a visiting leader. While admirers in the sprawling multicultural country lauded him for dressing truly in the spirit of India, the tut-tutting disapproval was far louder. PARIS France unveiled a tough new anti-Islamist policy for its prisons and schools on Friday, confronting a lingering threat that is likely to intensify as radicalized fighters return from Syria. For now perhaps the greatest menace is in the countrys prisons, and it is there that the government of President Emmanuel Macron is concentrating its fire with the changes announced on Friday aimed at isolating hundreds of radicalized inmates. Over 1,600 inmates are jailed on terrorism charges or have been identified as radicalized. The government now wants to separate and isolate them from other inmates a shift from past strategy in which they were more likely to be dispersed among other prisoners. But officials now say that approach instead spread radicalism and threatened the security of guards, who went on a nationwide strike after a violent rampage by a jihadist inmate in January. The changes are in part a response to the strike, which paralyzed Frances prisons. In addition to the prison measures, France will more closely scrutinize the licensing of certain types of private, religiously oriented schools, often identified with the spread of radicalization. Some 74,000 students attend these schools. SANTA MARIA DI CASTELLABATE, Italy On a recent afternoon, Alessia DAlessandro ran into a couple of friends on the boardwalk of the town along the southern Italian coast where she spent her teenage summers swimming in the sea and living with her mother in the local princespalace. They were like, Oh, my god, you came back! said the 27-year-old, who had left Italy after high school to pursue academic and employment opportunities in her mothers native Germany. What are you doing here? Many Italians are asking the same thing. Before critical elections on March 4, Italys leading party, the anti-establishment Five Star Movement, has sought to counter its image as a eurosceptic movement populated with unqualified, web-based activists by recruiting candidates from the countrys professional class. This month, they reimported Ms. DAlessandro, a self-described child of Europe, from her job at a Berlin think-tank, and prominently rolled her out as a response to patronage politics as usual in the pivotal south. But revelations that the partys leadership inflated Ms. DAlessandros resume apparently without her knowledge drew criticism that the party was fundamentally dishonest, unprepared to govern and, most damningly, just like other parties. LONDON Britain took a crucial step on Friday toward making all adults presumed organ donors unless they say otherwise, which would add the country to a growing list of those that have adopted the policy to address a chronic shortage for transplants. The House of Commons, on a sparsely attended voice vote, gave unanimous approval to send an organ donor bill to committee, where a final version would be created. Though it still could face procedural obstacles, it has the support of a rare alliance of the Conservative government, the leadership of the opposition Labour Party, and the British medical establishment, indicating that chances of passage are good. Ive seldom seen such a unanimous range of support, said Geoffrey Robinson, the Labour lawmaker who sponsored the bill and who was one of dozens from both major parties who spoke in favor of it on Friday. This will save lives. The change would apply in England. The Scottish Parliament is also considering moving to an opt-out system, while Northern Ireland requires explicit consent. Wales has had presumed consent to organ donation since 2015. WASHINGTON Sheldon G. Adelson, one of the most hawkish supporters of Israel among American Jews, has offered to help fund the construction of a new American Embassy in Jerusalem, according to the State Department, which on Friday said it was reviewing whether it could legally accept the donation. The total price tag to build the new embassy to replace the current one in Tel Aviv is estimated at around $500 million, according to one former State Department official. While private donors have previously paid for renovations to American ambassadors overseas residences, Mr. Adelsons contribution would be likely to far surpass those gifts and could further strain American diplomacy in the Middle East. Before the embassy is built, the Trump administration plans to open a temporary one in Jerusalem. On Friday, it said that it was accelerating the projected opening in time to mark the 70th anniversary of the creation of the State of Israel on May 14. Even some of Mr. Adelsons allies expressed concern that if the administration accepts his offer for the permanent embassy, it could be seen as a well-heeled financial contributor effectively privatizing and politicizing American foreign policy. The crooks, for example, will call victims and pretend theyre a collection company for the I.R.S., which has deposited the funds in error. They then demand that victims transfer the money to a different account. They say, We made a mistake; send it back to us, Mr. Lemons said. Or, they will leave voice messages threatening the taxpayer with criminal fraud charges or an arrest warrant if they dont call the number provided to return the refund. It signifies the ingenuity of the fraudsters out there, said Russell Schrader, executive director of the National Cyber Security Alliance, which promotes online safety and security. The scam has the ring of truth for victims, as there is actually an erroneous deposit sitting in their bank account (or in some cases, a paper check in the mailbox). That can frighten victims into acting, especially if a caller is bullying them. But its always best to hang up and independently check whether the information you were given is valid, said Eva Velasquez, chief executive of the nonprofit group Identity Theft Resource Center. Always go to the source when you get these kind of contacts, she said. Look up a public number for the I.R.S. online, she advised, and contact the agency to ask if the call was legitimate. (The I.R.S. identity theft units number is 1-800-908-4490). Here are some questions and answers about tax refund fraud: What should I do if an erroneous tax refund is deposited in my account? If it seems too good to be true, it probably is, Mr. Lemons said. Dont forward the money, he said, and dont spend it: Dont go out and make a down payment on a new car with the cash. If the refund arrived as a direct deposit, the agency said that you should contact your banks automated clearinghouse department and have the funds returned to the I.R.S. (Consumers may also need to close their account.) Call the I.R.S. to explain why the money is being returned, notify your tax preparer and file a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission. In the case of paper checks, the next steps depend on whether you have cashed the check. The agency provides details on its website. Our bodies are full of poisons from products we use every day. I know Ive had my urine tested for them. But before I get into all that, lets do a quick check for poisons that might be in your body. Surprised? So was I when I had my urine tested for these chemicals. (A urine or blood test is needed to confirm whether you have been exposed.) Let me stress that mine should have been clean. Almost a decade ago, I was shaken by my reporting on a class of toxic chemicals called endocrine disruptors. They are linked to cancer and obesity and also seemed to feminize males, so that male alligators developed stunted genitalia and male smallmouth bass produced eggs. In humans, endocrine disruptors were linked to two-headed sperm and declining sperm counts. They also were blamed for an increase in undescended testicles and in a birth defect called hypospadias, in which the urethra exits the side or base of the penis rather than the tip. Believe me, the scariest horror stories are found in urology journals. If youre a man, you dont wring your hands as you read; you clutch your crotch. So Ive tried for years now to limit my exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals. Following the advice of the Presidents Cancer Panel, I eat organic to reduce exposure to endocrine disruptors in pesticides. I try to store leftover meals in glass containers, not plastic. I avoid handling A.T.M. and gas station receipts. I try to avoid flame-retardant furniture. Those are all common sources of toxic endocrine disruptors, so I figured that my urine would test pristine. Pure as a mountain creek. Silent Spring Institute near Boston, which studies chemical safety, offers a Detox Me Action Kit to help consumers determine what harmful substances are in their bodies. Following instructions, I froze two urine samples (warning my wife and kids that day to be careful what food they grabbed from the freezer) and Fed-Exed them off for analysis. By the way, the testing is for women, too. Men may wince as they read about miniaturized alligator penises, but endocrine disruptors have also been linked to breast cancer and gynecological cancers. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists warns women that endocrine disruptors can also cause miscarriages, fetal defects and much more. As I waited for the lab results, I continued to follow the latest research. One researcher sent a bizarre video of a mouse exposed to a common endocrine disruptor doing back flips nonstop, as a kind of nervous tic. A mouse exposed to a common endocrine disruptor does back flips continuously. Finally, I heard back from Silent Spring Institute. I figured this was a report card I had aced. I avoid all that harmful stuff. In my columns, I had advised readers how to avoid it. Sure enough, I had a low level of BPA, best known because plastic bottles now often boast BPA Free. But even a diligent student like me failed the test. Badly. I had high levels of a BPA substitute called BPF. Ruthann Rudel, a toxicologist who is the head of research at Silent Spring, explained that companies were switching to BPF even though it may actually be yet more harmful (it takes longer for the body to break it down). BPF is similar to that substance that made those mice do back flips. These types of regrettable substitutions when companies remove a chemical that has a widely known bad reputation and substitute a little-known bad actor in its place are all too common, Rudel told me. Sometimes we environmental scientists think we are playing a big game of whack-a-mole with the chemical companies. Sigh. I thought I was being virtuous by avoiding plastics with BPA, but I may have been causing my body even more damage. My urine had an average level of an endocrine disruptor called triclosan, possibly from soap or toothpaste. Like most people, I also had chlorinated phenols (perhaps from mothballs in my closet). I had a high level of a flame retardant called triphenyl phosphate, possibly from a floor finish, which may be neurotoxic. Hmm. Whenever you see flaws in my columns, thats just my neurotoxins at work. My lab results: high levels of four chemicals were found Chemical Details Found in products like 1,4-dichlorobenzene Can affect thyroid hormones and may increase risk of cancer Mothballs, toilet deodorizers Antimicrobials Can interfere with thyroid and other hormones Colgate Total toothpaste, soap, deodorant Bisphenols Can mimic natural hormones like estrogen Protective lining for canned goods, hard plastic water bottles, thermal paper register receipts Flame retardants Can affect neurodevelopment and hormone levels, and may increase risk of cancer Nail polish, foam cushioning in furniture, rigid foam insulation Benzophenones Can mimic natural hormones like estrogen Sunscreen, lotions, lip balm Parabens Can mimic natural hormones like estrogen Cosmetics, personal care products like shampoos, hair gels, lotions Notes: Benzophenones and parabens were also found, but in lower levels than in most Americans. Tests for phthalates and fragrance chemicals were not included. Will these endocrine disruptors give me cancer? Make me obese? Make my genitals fall off? Nobody really knows. At least I havent started doing random back flips yet. The steps I took did help, and I recommend that others consult consumer guides at ewg.org to reduce their exposures to toxic chemicals. Likewise, if I had downloaded the Detox Me smartphone app, I would have known to get rid of those mothballs, along with air fresheners and scented candles. (Science lesson: A less fragrant house means cleaner pee.) Yet my takeaway is also that chemical industry lobbyists have rigged the system so that we consumers just cant protect ourselves adequately. You should not have to be a Ph.D toxicologist to be safe from so many of the chemicals in use, Dr. Richard Jackson of U.C.L.A. told me. So much of what we are exposed to is poorly tested and even less regulated. The Trump administration has magnified the problem by relaxing regulation of substances like chlorpyrifos, Dow Chemicals nerve gas pesticide. The swamp has won. So the saddest lesson is that even if you understand the peril and try to protect yourself and your family as I strongly suggest you do your body may still be tainted. The chemical companies spend tens of millions of dollars lobbying and have gotten the lightest regulation that money can buy. 'Help us save our 7-year-old son' Cancer patients family appeals to the kindness of strangers My daughter's cancerous tumour will kill her without your urgent help Entrepreneur couple donate Rs 200 cr to build cancer hospital for underprivileged Feature oi-Staff By Oneindia Staff Writer City-based entrepreneurs Vijay Tata and Amrita Tata celebrated their daughter's birthday in a memorable way for many. In a distinctive initiative, the couple launched New India, a charitable trust on Wednesday and donated 200 crores to it for building a free cancer hospital for the underprivileged. The couple has been sheltering 40 kids for 6 years and the dream got bigger to give back to society, which gave birth to NEW INDIA. Actor Emraan Hashmi graced the occasion with his presence. The unique attribute about NEW INDIA is that it is self-funded and it won't accept funds from anyone. Inaugurating the NGO, Bollywood actor Emraan Hashmi said, "I have very closely seen the pain which cancer patients and their family goes through. NEW INDIA's initiative to create new hope for poor cancer patients is worth appreciating and I am glad that individuals like Vijay Tata and Amrita Tata are coming forward to take this novel step." The couple has pledged 50 acres of land worth 100 crores in Attibele-Anekal Road to the trust. Additional 100 crores will be used towards the construction of the super-speciality cancer care hospital. Entire hospital project will be designed by a UK based Architect and Engineering firm, BDP, formerly known as Building Design Partnership. About NEW INDIA NEW INDIA - A nonprofit organization will be completely self-funded by Vijay Tata and Amrita Tata and will focus on creating a new hope for the betterment of underprivileged. It aims to cater women, children, critical illness and stop-rape initiative to bring justice to rape victims and help them resurrect their lives. OneIndia News Bijepur byelection: BJP accuses CMO officials of meddling in poll affairs India oi-Chennabasaveshwar By Chennabasaveshwar Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) accused Odisha CM's private secretary and officials of CMO of involving in the poll affairs, ahead of Bijepur byelection to be held on Saturday. At a press meet, senior BJP leader and Petroleum minister Dharmendra Pradhan alleged that CM Naveen Patnaik's private secretary VK Pandian has sent 100 government officials to Bijepur, to help the ruling Biju Janata Dal (BJD) in the election, reported a private television channel. "We have a specific information that Pandian, the chief political worker of CM Naveen Patnaik had convened a meeting in Bhubaneswar two days ago. After the meeting held in presence of four other bureaucrats Kutte, Pradipta, RupaRoshan Sahoo and Gopabandhu, it was decided to send 100 hundred government officials to Bijepur on special leave. These officials will help the BJD in conducting election here", Pradhan was quoted as saying. Pradhan also demanded that Labour Minister Sushant Singh should be kept out of Bijepur. The Sub-divisional Police Officer (SDPO) of Padampur, Laxmi Narayan Panda, was transferred on Thursday. A delegation led by Dharmendra Pradhan had moved the Election Commission of India seeking Panda's transfer from Padmapur, which is part of the by-poll bound Bijepur Assembly seat. BJD candidate Rita Sahu, Pranay Sahu of Congress and BJD's Ashok Panigrahi are in the fray for February 24 by-elections. The result of the by-election will be declared on February 28. (With agency inputs) BJP is not-anti Christian: Will Modi's attempt to woo voters in Meghalaya, Nagaland work? India oi-Oneindia By Oneindia Shillong/Kohima, Feb 23: As the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is hoping to capture power in poll-bound Nagaland and Meghalaya, it is the issue of "religion" over which the party is struggling hard. Both Nagaland and Meghalaya are Christian-dominated states and the BJP's image of being a "pro-Hindu" party is definitely not doing any good to the saffron party in the northeastern states. Moreover, when last year the Centre tried to bring a pan-India ban on the sale of cattle for slaughter, people of both the states opposed it vehemently. In the northeast region, majority of the people consume beef and any attempt to impose restriction on food habits of the people is likely to meet with resistance. While in Meghalaya the ruling Congress is campaigning against the BJP by alleging that the party is "anti-Christian", in Nagaland the powerful church body has asked people to vote for political parties which adhere to Christian and Naga values. On Thursday, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited Nagaland and Meghalaya to campaign for the saffron party, he clarified that "the BJP is not an anti-Christian" party. To stress on the fact that the BJP has nothing against the Christian people and has worked for the betterment and safety of the community, Modi during his 42-minute speech at Meghalaya's Phulbari in West Garo Hills listed instances when the Centre has come to the rescue of Indian Christians living on foreign shores. Modi told a crowd of around 25,000 people in Phulbari that the ruling BJP government has rescued Indians belonging to the Christian community from the clutches of terrorists in countries like Iraq and Afghanistan. The PM cited the example of Catholic priest from Kerala, Father Tom Uzhunnalil, who was kidnapped by terrorists in Yemen. He also told the crowd that his government rescued 48 Christian nurses from Kerala after terrorists kidnapped them in Afghanistan in July 2014. "Father Tom, who was spreading the message of Christianity in Yemen, was kidnapped by terrorists (in 2016). The Indian government made tireless efforts to rescue him. We also urged nations having cordial relationship with Yemen to save Father Tom. We freed him and got him back. His heath was deteriorating and we provided for his medical care as well," Modi said. Modi accused the ruling Congress in Meghalaya of playing communal politics by accusing the BJP of being anti-Christian. The PM told the crowd that under the Congress regime, which is in power for the last 15 years, the state did not see any developmental works. He also alleged that the Congress was corrupt as the party leaders pocketed all the funds granted by the Centre for developmental works. PM Modi said Nagaland needed a strong and stable government to work for development. "My vision for the Northeast is transformation by transportation," he said during an election meeting at Tuensang, about 360 kilometres from Kohima, according to the official Twitter account of the BJP Nagaland. The Assembly elections in both Nagaland and Meghalaya are scheduled on February 27. The Assembly polls in Tripura were held on February 18. The results of all the three Assembly elections will be declared on March 3. OneIndia News BJP ready to fight polls with or without the Sena: Fadnavis India pti-PTI Mumbai, Feb 23: The BJP was ready to fight polls with or without the Shiv Sena, Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis today said. He, however, added that the BJP desired that the two parties fought polls together. "I do not read or listen to anybody in the party (Sena) because there is just one person who takes all its decisions. And I have good relations with Uddhav ji (Sena chief Thackeray). I keep meeting him on and off," Fadnavis said. He was speaking at a programme organised by a news channel here in suburban Bandra. Fadnavis further said, "I think we will fight the polls together. However, we are ready to fight it this way or that way." To a query regarding the spate of suicides at Mantralaya despite the government's farm loan waiver, Fadnavis said these incidents had no connection with the present government. "One person who committed suicide had complaints pertaining to the MPSC (Maharashtra Public Services Commission) paper he had answered in 2013. The other was a convict who had a written a letter to the Chief Justice to have his sentence reduced," he said. "Dharma Patil (a farmer who consumed poison and later died in hospital) had received a compensation of Rs 3 lakh from the previous government but then said he wanted a higher compensation. According to the law, once the compensation is accepted, it cannot be changed," he added. Replying to a query on former Congress leader Narayan Rane's induction into the NDA despite his alleged criminal records, Fadnavis said that Rane, as per his (Fadnavis) knowledge, had no case against him. Fadnavis added that Rane would be given a ministerial berth or an appropriate position at the right time. In reply to another query on NCP chief Sharad Pawar's praise of Rahul Gandhi, Fadnavis said that there couldn't be worse days for Pawar if he had to praise the Congress leader. PTI Canada can fulfill India's increasing energy demands: Modi India oi-Vikas By Vikas Asserting that India is committed to furthering a strategic partnership with Canada, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday said that terrorism is a major threat to democratic and pluralistic countries like India and Canada. Speaking at the joint press statement after the bilateral talks between India and Canada, PM Modi said that Canada is an energy superpower that can fulfil India's increasing energy demands. "Both me and Prime Minister Trudeau have agreed to step up cooperation to combat terrorism menace. Our NSA have met. They are finalising Framework for Cooperation on Countering Terrorism and Violent Extremism," Modi said. "For our economic cooperation to flourish, there is a need to put in place an institutional mechanism. For this, we have directed representatives from both sides to double the pace to finalise Bilateral Investment & Promotion Agreement and Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement," he added. He said that there is no place in the society for those who use religion for politics, adding that India and Canada would never tolerate any attack on unity and integrity of both the countries. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said India is a natural partner and a trusted friend for commercial cooperation. "We share not only rich a history but a set of values that encourage a natural friendship between our two countries," he said at the joint press statement. India Canada bilateral talks During the bilateral talks earlier, PM Modi and his Canadian counterpart discussed strengthening cooperation in trade and investment, energy, education, healthcare, IT, start up, science and technology, defence and security, tourism and people-to-people contacts. Ceremonial Reception at the Rashtrapati Bhawan Earlier today, Trudeau was accorded a ceremonial welcome at the Rashtrapati Bhawan. Following his official welcome at the Rashtrapati Bhavan in New Delhi, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau and his family paid tribute to Mahatma Gandhi at Rajghat. Modi welcomes Trudeau PM Modi greeted Trudeau with his signature bear-hug and posed for photographs with his family. Almost a week after Justin Trudeau arrived in India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday took to Twitter and said that he is looking forward to meeting the Canadian Prime Minister. Trudeau meets EAM Sushma Swaraj It was widely reported earlier that the Union Government had 'snubbed' Trudeau. Questions had also been raised about Trudeau being given a lukewarm response on his arrival in India. Some had raised questions after Prime Minister Modi had not received the Canadian PM. A customary tweet from the PM welcoming the dignitary was also missing. (Images - MEA/Twitter) OneIndia News Congress prime opposition to BJP in UP, will win without SP, BSP alliance: Ajay Kumar Lallu Congress leader who had threatened to set BBMP office on fire, surrenders India oi-Vikas By Vikas Congress leader Narayanaswamy, who had thrown petrol inside a BBMP office and threatened to set it on fire, surrendered before the police on Friday. Narayanaswamy is a block Congress president and MLA Byrathi Basavraj's right-hand man. In a video that surfaced on Tuesday, Narayanaswamy, a member of Bengaluru Water Board (appointments to the board were personally made by Chief Minister Siddaramaiah) can be seen throwing petrol inside a Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) office in Horamavu threatening to set it ablaze. Narayanaswamy is said to have stormed the BBMP office on February 16 after an official refused to process fake documents for a piece of land in NRI layout whose documents were seized by the court. While the officer in question was transferred immediately after the incident, the rowdy politician was allowed to go scotfree. Narayanaswamy allegedly forced ARO Chenagalrayappa to process documents illegally. When the official refused to concede, an agitated Narayanaswamy landed at the regional BBMP office and threatened to destroy all the files along with the building. [Congress leader threatens to set BBMP office on fire, more embarrassment for Siddaramaiah] After the video became public, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) tore into the Congress government and behaviour of its leaders. This comes at a time when the Congress is already grappling with Mohammed Haris Nalapad's assault case. Mohammed Haris Nalapad, son of a Congress MLA, had allegedly thrashed a youth in a Bengaluru restaurant. Nalapad later surrendered and is in custody as of now. OneIndia News Delhi govt claims its doorstep delivery of ration scheme stalled; LG says hasn't rejected, asked to follow law AAP likely to field Colonel Ajay Kothiyal as CM candidate in Uttarakhand AAP leaders to visit Ram Lalla shrine before Ayodhya yatra, first list of UP candidates soon AAP to contest all seats in UP assembly polls, not in talks for any alliance: Sanjay Singh CS assault case: Delhi court dismisses bail plea of AAP MLAs India oi-Deepika By Deepika Delhi's Tees Hazari Court on Friday dismissed the bail application of the two AAP MLA's accused of assaulting Delhi Chief secretary at Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal's residence. AAP MLAs Amanatullah Khan and Prakash Jarwal, will stay in the judicial custody as of now. Metropolitan Magistrate Shefali Barnala Tondon, however, refused to grant the police their custody saying there was no new ground for custodial interrogation. The court had on Wednesday termed the alleged assault on the Chief Secretary was a "highly sensitive" case. The magistrate had refused the plea of the Delhi Police to quiz them in custody for two days, saying the legislators were ready to cooperate in the investigation and no case property was to be recovered from them, which was the basic purpose of police custody. The two MLAs were arrested in connection with the alleged assault on the bureaucrat during a meeting at Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal's residence on the night of February 19. Amanatullah Khan, who represents the Okhla constituency, and Prakash Jarwal, AAP legislature from Deoli, were taken into custody after Chief Secretary Anshu Prakash has filed a complaint against them on Tuesday. OneIndia News For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Friday, February 23, 2018, 16:17 [IST] List of all single-use plastic items to be banned from July 2022 CS assault row: Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal's aide VK Jain resigns India oi-Deepika By Deepika Delhi Chief Secretary Row : Arvind Kejriwal's advisor VK Jain resigns | Oneindia News Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal's advisor VK Jain has reportedly resigned from his post on Friday. This comes a day after Jain gave contradictory statements about the alleged attack on Delhi Chief Secretary Anshu Prakash by AAP legislators. Contradicting his earlier stand, Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal's advisor, VK Jain said he witnessed the assault on Delhi on Chief Secretary Anshu Prakash on February 19 during a meeting in Kejriwal's residence and saw Prakash's "spectacles fall off". According to the prosecutor, Jain, in the statement, admitted that he saw Prakash being assaulted after exiting the washroom. "... He saw two MLAs had surrounded the Chief Secretary and were assaulting him and that is when his spectacles fell off," Srivastava told the court. The two new statements contradict Jain's earlier stand. In a statement to police on Wednesday, he had said he was present at the February 19 meeting but denied witnessing the assault and said he was in the "washroom" for a few minutes. Jain's testimony has been cited by the police as a new ground to seek custodial interrogation of Amanatullah Khan and Prakash Jarwal, the two lawmakers arrested earlier for the assault. The chief secretary has alleged in his complaint that he was sitting on a sofa flanked by Khan and another AAP MLA during the meeting. "Khan and the other MLA, without provocation from my side started hitting and assaulting me with blows on my head and temple," he alleged in his complaint. OneIndia News CS assault row: Quiz Shah in Judge Loya case, says Kejriwal as cops search his home India oi-Deepika By Deepika Delhi Police on Friday arrived at Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal's home to review CCTV footage and question staff in the chief secretary's assault case. A team including the local police, the cybercrime branch and forensic experts have visited Kejriwal's residence to look for CCTV footage.This is reportedly the first time Delhi Police has conducted a review at a chief minister's residence. There are 21 cameras installed out of which 14 were operational& recording was off in 7. There was no camera in the room where the incident took place. The cameras were running behind time by 40 minutes. We have seized recordings of 21 CCTV cameras & a hard disk:ADGP North #Delhi pic.twitter.com/ItMJECUi9h ANI (@ANI) February 23, 2018 According to Delhi government spokesperson, Arunodya Prakash, 60-70 policemen entered the chief minister's residence. "Huge number of police force enters CM house without any intimation.. If this what they can to do an elected CM, think what they can with poor people!!!" Prakash wrote on Twitter. There is minimum courtesy in democracy. Every citizen has rights under constitution. Is it an attempt to humiliate a CM who is working tirelessly for the poor and the last man of the society? arunoday (@arunodayprakash) February 23, 2018 "There is minimum courtesy in democracy. Every citizen has rights under constitution. Is it an attempt to humiliate a CM who is working tirelessly for the poor and the last man of the society?" he tweeted. Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal on Friday said asserted that the courts must probe Judge Loya death, and asked if cops will "question" Amit Shah, following the police "search" at his residence. Jitni shiddat se iss mamle (Delhi Chief Secy assault case) ki jaanch ho rahi hai mujhe khushi hai,honi chahiye, lekin main jaanch agencies se kehna chahta hu ke Judge Loya ke katal ki jaanch pe Amit Shah se puch-taach karne ki bhi himmat dikhayen to desh unko badhai dega-Delhi CM pic.twitter.com/p8uZG0wxmT ANI (@ANI) February 23, 2018 A team of police has been sent to my house. They are currently searching my house. I appreciate this. But when will Amit Shah be probed over the death of Judge Loya? The chief minister also tweeted that the Council of Ministers has sought an appointment with LG Anil Baijal to present their case on the alleged assault on the chief secretary. Council of Ministers has sought an appointment to meet Honble LG today Arvind Kejriwal (@ArvindKejriwal) February 23, 2018 Reportedly, the police team has retrieved CCTV footage and questioning staff members on what happened on Monday night at a meeting in which Chief Secretary Anshu Prakash was allegedly attacked by two lawmakers of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP). Chief Secretary Prakash alleged that he was assaulted by Ajay Dutt and Prakash Jharwal at Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal's residence. However, the Chief Minister's office denied the allegations saying the incident never took place. In a statement, Kejriwal's office termed the allegation by Delhi Chief Secy bizarre and alleged that Chief Secy is playing into the hands of BJP. Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal's key aide VK Jain is also reported to have told a city court on Thursday that he had seen ruling party lawmakers assault Mr Prakash at Monday's midnight meeting at Kejriwal's house. OneIndia News Delhi: No place for violence in democracy, says LG Anil Baijal India oi-Shreya By Shreya Delhi Arvind Kejriwal and all his Cabinet colleagues met Lt. Governor on February 23 at Raj Niwas on the issue of alleged manhandling of Chief Secretary, Delhi at the residence of Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal on February 19 residence. The issue of ministers being attacked inside the Delhi secretariat was also raised. The LG strongly condemned the incidents and termed them as most unfortunate. He also noted that no government can fulfill its promises to the people if the employees feel demoralized and insecure. "There is no place for violence in a democratic and civilized society. He observed that steps need to be taken to remove mistrust between the government employees and the elected govt. so that development of Delhi and public interest do not get adversely affected," In the morning of February 23, the Delhi Police visited the residence of the Chief Minister to inquire about the alleged assault on the Chief Secretary Anshu Prakash, and extract CCTV footages of the meeting. The police claimed that discrepancies were found in the timing of the footage and that the CCTV footage was running late by 43 minutes. The AAP, however, refuted all claims and that that they were asked illegal questions. Delhi CM also remarked,"This kind of zeal should be shown in all matters including the case of Judge Loya." OneIndia News For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Friday, February 23, 2018, 22:12 [IST] Finding NiMo: Email ID holds the password to Nirav Modis whereabouts? India oi-Oneindia By Oneindia New Delhi, Feb 23: "Finding NiMo" has become a national obsession, these days. After billionaire jeweller Nirav Modi fled the country to escape facing the law for his alleged involvement in the Rs 11,400-crore Punjab National Bank (PNB) fraud, the whole nation seems to be asking "where is Nirav Modi or NiMo?" On social media, several jokes on "Finding NiMo" are trending. Jokes apart, the "fraudster", who is enjoying a high-flying life by looting taxpayers' money, needs to be brought back to India immediately for a fair trial. Multiple reports suggest multiple locations where NiMo could be traced. NiMo is the abbreviated version of Nirav Modi. Like Indians have coined NaMo, the favourite sobriquet to address Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The phrase "Finding NiMo" has been inspired by the hugely successful animated English film, Finding Nemo, based on the story of a baby clownfish. Initially, after the scam came to light, television reports stated that the fugitive billionaire, who masterminded the latest gigantic banking fraud, was staying at a plush hotel in New York. Later reports stated that the 47-year-old diamond designer whose creations were worn by both Hollywood and Bollywood divas like Kate Winslet and Priyanka Chopra could be hiding in Dubai or in Belgium, where he spent several years of his childhood. Last time Nirav Modi was seen in public was in Davos, Switzerland. There's a photograph to prove it too. In a viral picture, Nirav Modi was seen posing with PM Modi and other business honchos at the World Economic Forum in Davos on January 23. Reports say that Nirav Modi and his family members left the country on January 1. The law enforcement agencies are yet to confirm about Nirav Modi's whereabouts. However, the email id on which the ministry of external affairs (MEA) has recently sent a notice to Nirav Modi holds the key to his current location. It's a well-known fact that the law enforcement agencies can locate a person by tracking his/her online activity. The MEA and the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) are tight-lipped about the possible "hideout" of Nirav Modi. The email was reportedly sent to Nirav Modi's personal address by the MEA to inform him about the suspension of his passport and asking him to respond by Friday. MEA spokesperson Raveesh Kumar said: "A request had been received to send notice to a particular email ID. Accordingly, the notice was sent to the email ID as requested." On Thursday, when the MEA spokesperson was interacting with the media, he refused to answer the query on Nirav Modi's whereabouts. Kumar said the question should be addressed to the law enforcement agencies. "There are certain investigations and legal procedures which need to be completed before the MEA comes into the picture," he added. The CBI, on its part, maintains that the Interpol has been alerted and now Nirav Modi's whereabouts have to be established through diplomatic channels. "We only know that he left India on January 1 for Dubai with his brother Nishal," CBI spokesman Abhishek Dayal has said. According to the officials of the Enforcement Directorate, they have seized nine cars belonging to Nirav Modi. The ED stated that it has frozen the fugitive billionaire's shares and mutual funds worth Rs 7.8 crore and that of his uncle Mehul Choksi valued at Rs 86.72 crore. A few days ago Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) president Amit Shah stated that assets worth more than Rs 5,000 crore were seized from properties belonging to Nirav Modi and his associates within three days of the fraud coming to light. Shah added that the investigation was on to crack the case. The entire banking fraud has become a political hot potato as the Congress is demanding an answer from the PM. The BJP, on its part, has alleged that the scam began in 2011 during the previous Congress-led UPA government. OneIndia News At meet with PM, CDS says medical personnel of armed forced who retired in last 2 years being recalled 'I don't want to react', says Sitharaman on Army Chief's remark on AIUDF India oi-Vikas By Vikas Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman has refused to comment on General Bipin Rawat's remark linking All India United Democratic Front (AIUDF)'s growth and the immigration of Bangladeshis in the northeast. "I don't want to react to anything...Somebody said something, somebody talking about....why should I react?" she told journalists on the sidelines of Uttar Pradesh Investors Summit when asked to comment on General Rawat's remarks. The controversy erupted after General Rawat spoke of proxy warfare in the Northeast by Pakistan with help from China and the "planned" influx of Bangladeshi immigrants. He also referred to Ajmal's AIDUF in connection with reports of an increase in Muslim population in several districts of Assam. "I think the government is looking at the Northeast with correct perspective...With development will come control of the people residing in this area. I don't think now you can change the population dynamics of this region... there is a party called AIUDF. It has grown at a faster rate than the BJP has over the years. The AIUDF is moving at a faster pace in the state of Assam," General Rawat had said. ['Let Army Chief say what he wants': MoS VK Singh on Gen Rawat's remark on AIUDF] Hitting back at General Rawat, AIUDF chief Badruddin Ajmal on Thursday said the Army Chief has been misinformed and misguided. He said parties like AIUDF and AAP have grown because of the misgovernance of big parties. [AIUDF hits back at Army Chief, says shoot the infiltrators] Ajmal said, "We respect General Rawat a lot but I think he has been misinformed and misguided. If Army chief is saying that demographic change is happening in Assam then it is the government's job to check it. We are the only party which said that shoot anyone who infiltrates into our borders." OneIndia News J&K: NIA takes over Sunjuwan attack probe India oi-Vicky By Vicky The Sunjuwan fidayeen attack at Jammu and Kashmir will be probed by the National Investigation Agency. Six soldiers were martyred in the pre-dawn strike when Jaish-e-Mohammad terrorists stormed the highly fortified 36 Brigade headquarters of Army at Sunjuwan in Jammu on February 10. "In compliance with the Ministry of Home Affairs order, the NIA has re-registered the case (in Sunjuwan fidayeen attack incident) ." said an NIA officer. On February 10, Jammu and Kashmir Police had registered a case under sections 120B, 121, 302 and 307 of Ranbir Penal Code, sections 7 & 27 of the Arms Act and sections 16 and 18 of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967. OneIndia News Media was critical of UPA during 26/11 attack, not the same with Narendra Modi govt: Rahul Gandhi Karnataka elections: Rahul to release first of its kind Congress manifesto India oi-Vicky Nanjappa Ahead of the Karnataka Assembly Elections 2018, Congress president, Rahul Gandhi will release a first of its kind manifesto. The manifesto to be released between March 10 and 15 would have three parts, Congress leader Veerappa Moily said. A gala event is being planned in Bengaluru for the release of the manifesto. There would be three manifestos. While two would focus on the districts and regions, the third would be a state level one, Moily said. "While Rahul will launch the manifesto in Bengaluru, there will be simultaneous launches in all 30 districts," Moily also added. Moily went on to say that the Congress government in Karnataka had fulfilled 98 per cent of the promises made in 2013. He said that Karnataka has been made thirst and hunger-free while listing out the party's achievements in Karnataka since it came to power in 2013. He further went on to say that a sub-committee was formed to take up an impact assessment of the government's work. We have all the numbers, he also added. Karnataka Assembly Election dates Date of notification April 17 Last date to file nominations April 24 Last date to withdraw nominations April 27 Date of polling May 12 Date of counting May 15 OneIndia News Media was critical of UPA during 26/11 attack, not the same with Narendra Modi govt: Rahul Gandhi Karnataka polls: Mahadayi to make a comeback during Rahul Gandhi's second tour India oi-Anusha By Anusha Ravi In the second leg of his campaign ahead of Karnataka Assembly Election 2018 Congress chief Rahul Gandhi will tour the Mumbai-Karnataka region. The contentious Mahadayi row is expected to make a comeback as Congress aims to defeat the Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP) attempt to "hijack" the row. The four-decade-old water sharing row between Karnataka, Goa and Maharashtra is turning out to be the biggest poll plank in the region that has a considerable Lingayat voting population. AICC President Rahul Gandhi's schedule in the region between February 24 and 26 makes no mention of temple or dargah visits. The carefully crafted schedule only mentions rallies, public meetings and corner meets ins various districts of Mumbai-Karnataka that Rahul Gandhi will tour. "Rahul Gandhi will visit temples and dargahs as part of his tour. There is nothing wrong in visiting temples. The issue of Mahadayi- that concerns the people of that region- will also be raised," said Dr G Parameshwara, President KPCC. As part of his 3-day tour, Rahul Gandhi is scheduled to visit districts of Belagavi, Chikkodi, Vijayapura, Bagalkot and Dharwad- regions fighting for drinking water from the Mahadayi (also called Mandovi) river. Over speculation of separate religious tag for Lingayats row eating dividing its vote share in the region, the BJP was compelled to play the Mahadayi card. While B S Yeddyurappa's claim of having solved the water sharing row during his Parivarthana Yatra merely on the basis of a letter by Goa Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar backfired, the Congress cashed in on the opportunity to turn the tables in their favour. Karnataka Assembly Election dates Date of notification April 17 Last date to file nominations April 24 Last date to withdraw nominations April 27 Date of polling May 12 Date of counting May 15 OneIndia News 'Let Army Chief say what he wants': MoS VK Singh on Gen Rawat's remark on AIUDF India oi-Vikas By Vikas A day after row erupted over General Bipin Rawat's remark linking All India United Democratic Front (AIUDF)'s growth and the immigration in the northeast, Minister of State for External Affairs Gen (retired) VK Singh has said that let the Army Chief say whatever he wants. Singh, who is a former army chief, said that everything is being politicised these days. "We have a habit of politicizing everything.Let the army chief say what he wants to. If you don't like it, you don't like it," Singh told reporters on Friday. The controversy erupted after General Rawat spoke of proxy warfare in the Northeast by Pakistan with help from China and the "planned" influx of Bangladeshi immigrants. He also referred to Ajmal's AIDUF in connection with reports of an increase in Muslim population in several districts of Assam. "I think the government is looking at the Northeast with correct perspective...With development will come control of the people residing in this area. I don't think now you can change the population dynamics of this region... there is a party called AIUDF. It has grown at a faster rate than the BJP has over the years. The AIUDF is moving at a faster pace in the state of Assam," General Rawat had said. Hitting back at General Rawat, AIUDF chief Badruddin Ajmal on Thursday said the Army Chief has been misinformed and misguided. He said parties like AIUDF and AAP have grown because of the misgovernance of big parties. [AIUDF hits back at Army Chief, says shoot the infiltrators] Ajmal said, "We respect General Rawat a lot but I think he has been misinformed and misguided..If Army chief is saying that demographic change is happening in Assam then it is the government's job to check it. We are the only party which said that shoot anyone who infiltrates into our borders." OneIndia News Saturdays to be working now for all government employees: Kerala govt Kannur University: Controversial syllabus of VD Savarkar, MS Golwalkar will not be taught now Man takes selfie as adivasi man is beaten to death for stealing food in Kerala India oi-Chennabasaveshwar By Chennabasaveshwar Tribal man beaten to death for allegedly stealing food, people click selfie | Oneindia News Inhumane, shocking and deplorable. Words are not enough to describe how low humanity has reached. In a shocking incident, a 27-year old Adivasi was allegedly hacked to death by a mob who say that he had stolen eatables and food packets. Seven people have been taken into custody in connection with the case. Adivasi man, Madhu, belonging to an Adivasi community called 'Muduga' in Attappady forest range in Palakkad district. According to reports, the mob questioned him for hours and tied his hands and one of them even took a selfie with Madhu before he was thrashed brutally. The mob handed over Madhu to cops and he died while he was being taken to the hospital in Agaly Palakkad on Thursday evening. Madhu had informed the cops that he was assaulted by the mob. Police have registered the case. Muduga tribes mainly habitat in the Attappady valley south of the Nilgiris in Palakkad district. Seven people were taken into custody on Friday in connection with the case. Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan condemned the incident and said that he has instructed the State Police Chief to take strict action against the culprits. OneIndia News Mann Ki Baat: What Rahul wants to hear from PM? This time on Nirav Modi, Rafale scams India oi-Oneindia By Oneindia New Delhi, Feb 23: It seems Congress president Rahul Gandhi has become a 'big fan' of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's monthly radio broadcast--Mann Ki Baat (Heart's Talk). Perhaps that is why after January, once again this month, Rahul wants Modi to speak on subjects concerning the nation. For the upcoming Mann Ki Baat programme, scheduled on February 25, Rahul wants the PM to speak on the multi-crore Punjab National Bank (PNB) and Rafale scams. "Modi Ji, last month you ignored my suggestions for your Mann Ki Baat monologue. Why ask for ideas when in your heart you know what every Indian wants to hear you speak about? 1. Nirav Modi's 22,000 Cr. Loot & Scoot 2. The 58,000 Cr. RAFALE scam. I look forward to your sermon," tweeted Rahul. Modi Ji, last month you ignored my suggestions for your Mann Ki Baat monologue. Why ask for ideas when in your heart you know what every Indian wants to hear you speak about? 1. Nirav Modi's 22,000 Cr. Loot & Scoot 2. The 58,000 Cr. RAFALE scam. I look forward to your sermon. pic.twitter.com/jp0AnLePtU Office of RG (@OfficeOfRG) February 21, 2018 The Congress has been regularly targetting the Modi government over the PNB scam, masterminded by billionaire jeweller Nirav Modi who has fled the country, and the defence scandal involving the purchase of French fighter aircraft Rafale. Till now, Modi has not spoken anything about both the scams. Every month on last Sunday, PM Modi addresses the nation via his popular radio broadcast. The PM started the unique tradition of speaking to people (one way) on October 3, 2014, and since then he has been religiously following it without any breaks. Modi's critics and opposition political parties have often derided the attempt as nothing but "self-indulgent", as the PM never takes questions from people and press in the monthly broadcast. In a reply of a sort to his critics, Modi has made it a point to ask for inputs and ideas from people for Mann Ki Baat on Twitter ahead of the broadcast every month. "What are your ideas and inputs for this month's #MannKiBaat, which will take place on the 25th? Dial 1800-11-7800 to record your message. You can also write on the NM App Open Forum or share your suggestions on MyGov," Modi wrote on Twitter to announce about February's Mann Ki Baat. What are your ideas and inputs for this months #MannKiBaat, which will take place on the 25th? Dial 1800-11-7800 to record your message. You can also write on the NM App Open Forum or share your suggestions on MyGov. https://t.co/6AMicNM07I Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) February 15, 2018 Last month too, Congress president took to Twitter to advise Modi on what he should speak about in the Mann Ki Baat programme, aired on January 28. The Congress president asked the PM to address the subjects of unemployment, the alleged Chinese presence in Doklam and increasing number of rape cases in Haryana. "Dear @narendramodi, since you've requested some ideas for your #MannKiBaat monologue, tell us about how you plan to 1. Get our youth JOBS 2. Get the Chinese out of DHOKA-LAM 3. Stop the RAPES in Haryana," Rahul had tweeted. However, in the last edition of Mann Ki Baat, Modi did not talk about any of the issues suggested by Rahul. Hopefully, this time Modi will speak out on Nirav Modi-PNB and Rafale scams. OneIndia News Nagaland: Will Modis promise to settle Naga political problem help BJPs poll prospect? India oi-Oneindia By Oneindia Kohima, Feb 23: It is the demand to immediately settle the seven-decade-long Naga political problem that all political parties in the state in January boycotted the upcoming Nagaland Assembly elections. However, later they revoked their decision and decided to field candidates for the polls. The Assembly elections in Nagaland are scheduled on February 27. It does not mean that the issue of settlement of the Naga political problem has fizzled out in the poll-bound state. The decision to boycott the elections was based on the popular sentiment that the Centre should first resolve the seven-decade-long Naga political problem before conducting elections for the 13th state legislative assembly. The political parties came to the decision to boycott polls as apex tribal hohos (bodies) and civil society organisations have long been demanding the early settlement of the vexed Naga political problem. Earlier, the Naga Hoho, the state's apex tribal organisation, warned that it would not "allow the elections". On Thursday, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited Nagaland to campaign for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) he spoke out about the contentious issue. In fact, he assured the crowd at a rally in Tuensang that the Centre is soon going to settle the Naga political problem. "We are working seriously and in some months we will settle the Naga political problem which will be respectable and honouring political rights of Nagas. This will strengthen democracy. We are having parleys with different groups and organisations," the PM said. The National Socialist Council of Nagalim (Isak-Muivah) (NSCN-IM) has been engaged in peace talks with the Centre since 1997 when it announced a ceasefire agreement after a violent insurgency movement. In 2015, the Naga peace accord was signed between the Centre and the NSCN-IM. Since then the residents of Nagaland have been hopeful that peace will finally arrive in the state. In the recent times, especially after assurances from central leaders, including Centre's interlocutor in the Naga peace talks RN Ravi, there has been a renewed hope for lasting peace in the state. The BJP has fielded 20 candidates and its alliance partner the Nationalist Democratic Progressive Party (NDPP) 40 for the elections to the 60-member Assembly. PM Modi said Nagaland needed a strong and stable government to work for development. "My vision for the Northeast is transformation by transportation," he said during the election meeting at Tuensang, about 360 kilometres from Kohima, according to the official Twitter account of the BJP Nagaland. He said that in less than four years, the centre has added 500 km of national highways and plans to invest more than Rs. 10,000 crore in the roads of Nagaland. PM Modi called on the people of the state to vote for the BJP-NDPP alliance "which would ensure that the funds reach the people". Along with Nagaland, Meghalaya is also voting for the state Assembly elections on February 27. The Assembly elections in Tripura were held on February 18. The results of all the three Assembly elections will be declared on March 3. OneIndia News NIA charges Pakistan diplomat in South India terror case India oi-Vicky By Vicky The National Investigation has filed a charge sheet against a Pakistan diplomat who was posted in Colombo and had planned attacks in South India. It may be recalled that a consular officer from Pakistan, Amir Zubair Siddiqui had plotted attacks and had even set up a module in the office of the Pakistan high commission in Sri Lanka. He had raised a module which was to target the US Consulate in Chennai, Eastern Naval Command, Visakhapatnam and the Israeli consulate in Bengaluru. The Q Branch of the CID, Tamil Nadu had busted the case following it was handed over to the NIA. During the pendency of the probe, Siddiqui was removed overnight from the commission and flown into Pakistan. The accused who were questioned admitted that they were tasked by Siddiqui to strike at important locations in South India. In the first charge sheet, the NIA had not named the diplomat. However, over a period of time, the probe found more evidence of his involvement following which the agency decided to name him in the additional charge sheet. OneIndia News Afghan soil should not be used to spread terrorism: Russia In touch with all concerned: India on reports of kidnapping of Indian national in Kabul No longer in black-list: MHA on Jaspal Atwal India oi-Vicky By Vicky Amidst the claim that India was unaware how Jaspal Atwal, the convicted Khalistani terrorist got a visa, records suggest that he was no longer in the black list of the Union Home Ministry. The central government time-to-time reviews the blacklist of the Sikh extremists taking into account intelligence inputs and activities of the persons concerned, a home ministry official said. Names of nearly 150 wanted terrorists and their associates were removed from the blacklist in the last few years, the official said. "Atwal's name no longer figures in the current blacklist," the official said. The review of the blacklist is always done in consultation with the Punjab government and central security agencies. Most of the persons whose names have been deleted from the wanted list are believed to be currently based in countries like Pakistan, the US, Canada, Norway, France and Germany. After the government removed them from the blacklist, they could move freely around the world and even return to India. Perhaps taking advantage of the central government's decision to remove his name from the blacklist, Atwal arrived in India and subsequently got the invitation to the dinner being hosted in honour of Trudeau by High Commissioner of Canada Nadir Patel, the official said. Atwal was a Sikh separatist active in the banned International Sikh Youth Federation when he was convicted of the attempt to murder of Punjab minister Malkiat Singh Sidhu in Vancouver in 1986. Sidhu was shot at twice on a road and survived, but was later assassinated in India. A judge called it "an act of terrorism" and sentenced Atwal and three others to 20 years in prison. It is not yet immediately known as to how Atwal got an Indian visa and why he was cleared to attend official events here. Atwal is said to have been active in Canadian politics in recent years. OneIndia News Well this stunt by Rajinikants duplicate didnt go quite as expected: Watch hilarious video Rajinikanth comments on Kamal Haasan's political event, calls him 'efficient' India oi-Chennabasaveshwar By Chennabasaveshwar Superstar Rajinikanth spoke for the first time after the launch of Kamal Haasan's political party in Tamil Nadu's cultural capital Madurai. But, Rajinikanth did not elaborate over alliance with Kamal Haasan's party in Tamil Nadu. Rajinikanth, said, "Kamal Haasan's public meeting was good, I watched it. Our paths and styles may be different but our goal is same, that is doing good for people." Asked about his opinion on the MNM, Rajinikanth said Haasan was an "efficient" person. "Kamal is efficient. He will earn people's confidence," he said. Haasan had yesterday written in a Tamil weekly that he had earlier held a "secret" meeting with Rajinikanth to inform about his decision to enter politics. The duo had then decided that even if they were in opposing camps, the respect for each other should be maintained. Kamal Haasan on Wednesday formally announced the name of his political party - 'Makkal Needhi Maiam'. He took to Twitter to announce official website of the party 'Maiam' and asked his supporters to join in. Haasan has avoided the word Dravidian in the name of his party and has preferred the term Makkal (people) to denote inclusiveness and even his party symbol on the flag - joined hands in red, white and black colour--denotes unity and fight for justice for the people of Tamil Nadu, said a person from Haasan's team who did not want to be named. Actor-turned-politician Kamal Haasan, during his US tour, had ended the speculation over his alliance with Tamil superstar Rajinikanth and said that his alliance with the Rajini is unlikely as of now. While speaking at Harvard University, Haasan said,''Alliance with Rajinikanth is unlikely as of now. He further said that he hope Rajinikanth's politics is not saffron.' (With agency inputs) Red carpet welcome for Canadian PM at Rashtrapati Bhavan, meets PM Modi India oi-Deepika By Deepika Canadian premier Justin Trudeau met Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday at his ceremonial welcome in Delhi's Rashtrapati Bhavan. PM Modi greeted Trudeau with his signature bear-hug and posed for photographs with his family. Following his official welcome at the Rashtrapati Bhavan in New Delhi, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau and his family paid tribute to Mahatma Gandhi at Rajghat. #Delhi: Canadian Prime Minister #JustinTrudeau & his family pay tribute to Mahatma Gandhi at Rajghat. pic.twitter.com/M3sDqfgmPy ANI (@ANI) February 23, 2018 Justin Trudeau will hold talks with Prime Minister Narendra Modi later today. The meeting will be done to power the India-Canada bilateral relations. The bilateral talks between the two will focus on civil nuclear cooperation, trade, space, climate change, defence, and education. After the delegation level talks between the two, a number of agreements are expected to be signed. Almost a week after Justin Trudeau arrived in India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday took to Twitter and said that he is looking forward to meeting the Canadian Prime Minister tomorrow. It was widely reported earlier that the Union Government had 'snubbed' Trudeau. Questions had also been raised about Trudeau being given a lukewarm response on his arrival in India. Some had raised questions after Prime Minister Modi had not received the Canadian PM. A customary tweet from the PM welcoming the dignitary was also missing. Prime Minister Narendra Modi usually breaks protocol to go to the airport to receive important heads of government. But in case of Trudeau, the receiving minister was MoS Agriculture Ganjendra Singh, not even External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj or her two deputies Gen VK Singh or MJ Akbar. Justin Trudeau, who is accompanied by his wife Sophie and their three children, visited the Taj Mahal earlier this week, but for some reason Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath was conspicuously missing. Barely a month ago, when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited the Taj, the UP CM personally showed him around. However, MEA officials clarified that there was no snub as is being reported. The government has gone by the book, the official also said. On being asked if the response was in reaction to the Khalistan issue, the official said that as per protocol the PM does not go to the airport to receive dignitaries. It is only when the situation merits it is there is a departure from the protocol, the officer also explained. OneIndia News Names of doctors SK Sarin, Suresh Kumar, Sandeep Budhiraja to be sent for Padma awards: Delhi CM 'Saw Chief Secretary Anshu Prakash being assaulted', says CM Kejriwal's aide India oi-Deepika By Deepika In a dramatic twist that could spell more trouble for the Aam Aadmi Party in Delhi, Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal's advisor, VK Jain, has reportedly said that he witnessed the assault on Delhi Chief Secretary Anshu Prakash on February 19 during a meeting in Kejriwal's residence. Contradictory to this statement, Jain on Wednesday he had said he was present at the February 19 meeting but denied witnessing the assault and said he was in the "washroom" for a few minutes. Counsel for Delhi Police Atul Shrivastava handed over VK Jain's statement which was recorded before a magistrate. Jain said he had gone to the washroom during the meeting and when he returned, he saw two lawmakers hitting the Chief Secretary. The statement, recorded before a magistrate, would be admissible as evidence during the trial. Prakash's allegation that he has been assaulted by ruling party lawmakers has already pitted city government's officials against the AAP government. Jain, in his first statement to the police, had stated that when the alleged assault happened he was in the bathroom and he did not know what had happened in the room. However, the AAP has alleged that the Delhi Police pressured Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal's adviser VK Jain to change his statement about the alleged attack on Chief Secretary Anshu Prakash by the party's MLAs. OneIndia News To appoint Lokpal, PM, CJI, LoP to meet on March 1, SC told India oi-Vicky By Vicky Assuring the Supreme Court on the appointment of a Lokpal, the Centre said a meeting to deliberate on the issue had been fixed for March 1. The issue had been hanging for long and on the last date of hearing the court had said that there was no justification in keeping the enforcement of the Lokpal Act suspended. The court was informed by the Attorney General of India, K K Venugopal that a meeting was scheduled on March 1. He said that the meeting would comprise the Prime Minister, Chief Justice of India and leader of the largest opposition party. The court is hearing a petition filed by an NGO seeking the immediate appointment of a Lokpal. The NGO Common Cause had argued that even though the Lokpal Bill was passed by Parliament in 2013 and came into effect in 2014, the Lokpal was not being appointed by the government deliberately. It said the amendments proposed to the Lokpal and Lokayuktas Act 2013, and the views of the Parliamentary Standing Committee, were attempts at streamlining the working of the Act and does not constitute legal hindrances or bars its enforcement as it stands today. The court had observed that the amendments proposed to the Lokpal and Lokayuktas Act 2013, and the views of the Parliamentary Standing Committee, were attempts at streamlining the working of the Act and does not constitute legal hindrances or bars its enforcement as it stands today. OneIndia News Canadas Trudeau says he discussed with PM Modi recent protests, importance of resolving issues through dialog Following Trudeaus call to PM Modi, India to supply 5 lakh doses of vaccines to Canada 'Will renew relationship between Canadian govt, Punjab CM', says Justin Trudeau India oi-Madhuri Canadian PM Justin Trudeau on Friday said he is pleased to able to refresh and renew relationship between Canadian government and Punjab CM. Trudeau said,''I am please to be able to refresh & renew relationship between Canadian government and Punjab CM. We know it's a relationship important to many Canadians. We will continue to look for ways to deepen investment to move forward and there are many steps to come to improve that relationship.'' ''I've long been known to wear traditional clothes to broad range of events in different communities in Canada & elsewhere. Reaction of people on whether I'm wearing traditional clothing or suit & tie is extremely encouraging in Indo-Canadian friendship,'' Canadian PM also said. Trudeau is on a week-long visit to India accompanied with his wife Sophie Gregoire Trudeau and three children - Ella-Grace, Xavier and Hadrien - and a delegation of ministers. OneIndia News For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Friday, February 23, 2018, 21:30 [IST] Yogi govt's 'saffron' obsession spreads to Mathura India oi-Vikas By Vikas With Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath set to visit Mathura to take part in Holi celebrations, several walls of the city were painted saffron. From cleanliness to giving the city a saffron hue, the Nagar Panchayat has not left a stone unturned to welcome the Chief Minister. News agency ANI quoted a Mathura resident as saying that they are looking forward to Adityanath's visit. "Every year we used to celebrate a colourful Holi. This year it is saffronised. We are happy that the Chief Minister is coming to the city to celebrate the festival with us," a local said. This is not the first time that 'saffron colour' has made news after Adityanath came to power in Uttar Pradesh. In January, the Yogi-led government had drawn flak from the opposition for painting the Haj House in Lucknow saffron. Two days later, the Haj House was repainted and the original colour was restored. The way the entire episode of Haj House being 'saffronised' was pretty hilarious. First, the Haj House was painted saffron which made headlines. Then UP Waqf and Haj Minister Mohsin Raza made a statement that there is nothing wrong with it as "saffron is an energetic and bright looking colour." Two days later, the Haj House was repainted and the original colour was restored. The state government went into a damage control mode and blamed the contractor for it. Then, Mohsin Raza issued notice to Haj Committee Secretary RP Singh seeking clarification on the incident. All in all, what it truly reflected was that everyone just tried to pass the buck. The real question, which is yet to be answered, is what led to the Haj House being painted in saffron in the first place. Even the Lal Bahadur Shastri Bhawan, which houses the chief minister's office, was painted saffron after Adityanath assumed office last year. Reports say that the education department had distributed saffron-coloured school bags to primary schools students and the booklets that were distributed to mark 100 days and six months of the Adityanath government were saffron in colour as well. OneIndia News Assad committing 'war crimes' with Russian support, says White House International pti-PTI Washington, Feb 23: Asserting that Bashar al-Assad had gassed his own people, the US on Friday accused the Syrian President of committing "war crimes" with Russian support in the strife-torn country where over 400 civilians have been killed in air strikes and bombardments in rebel strongholds in a week. White House Deputy Press Secretary Raj Shah said the US is monitoring the situation and has put the Assad regime as well as Russia "on notice". His remarks come as more than 400 civilians were killed over the last five days in the Syrian government's Russia-backed air strikes and bombardments in rebel strongholds. "Bashar al-Assad has already committed war crimes. He has already gassed his own people with sarin, he has already committed unthinkable acts,a Shah told reporters at a news conference, when asked if President Donald Trump believes that Assad is committing "war crimes", said Shah. Assad has been committing war crimes with support of the Russians, he claimed. "We don't want that to continue," he said, adding the US is monitoring the situation. "(We) don't want to get ahead of anything that may or may not be announced on that front. But you know the Assad regime and Russia's actions on this front are on notice," he said when asked what more can Trump do to stop the killings. At a separate news conference the State Department Spokesperson Heather Nauert said more than 400 civilians have been "horrifically" killed by the Syrian regime. "As we all know, they are backed by not only Russia but also Iran. It is a good reminder that Russia bears a unique responsibility for what is taking place there. Without Russia backing Syria, the devastation and the deaths would certainly not be occurring," she said. During a UN Security Council meeting on Syria in New York, the US urged the 15-member body to move forward with this ceasefire and humanitarian resolution immediately. It expressed concern over the situation in Eastern Ghouta, where fresh bombardments by Syrian government yesterday killed dozens. "The pictures and videos are everywhere. Screaming parents digging through rubble to find their children. Doctors working frantically with no medicine and no equipment in underground hospitals to save whoever they can," said Kelley Currie, US Representative for Economic and Social Affairs. "These are not terrorists showing up in these makeshift emergency rooms. These are civilians. They are ordinary people under attack by a barbaric Assad regime that is bent on leaving eastern Ghouta levelled to the ground, with no regard for the 400,000 men, women, and children who live there," she added. "No one needs to use their imagination to know what the Assad regime is planning," she said. "It is exactly what we saw in Aleppo in 2016 and in Hama and Homs before that. The Assad regime wants to bomb or starve all of their opponents into submission. That is why, except for two small deliveries of aid, the regime has not allowed any medical convoys or deliveries of food into eastern Ghouta since November. And the bombing attacks have been relentless," Currie said. She alleged that the regime wants "to keep bombing and gassing" these 400,000 people and is counting on Russia to make sure the Security Council is unable to stop their suffering. PTI Biden says another terror attack likely in 24-36 hours, vows to keep up airstrikes against ISIS PM Modi likely to visit US later this month Did a rare disagreement between US-Pak help Pak get off the hook? International oi-Vicky By Vicky China, Turkey and Saudi Arabia joined hands to block a move by the US to place Islamabad on the terror financing watch list, according to a media report. While Pakistan has claimed a victory of sorts, the US was working behind the scenes during the ongoing Paris meeting of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) so as to take action against the country which it believes has not acted against terrorist financing and the implementation of the UN Security Council resolutions. The Wall Street Journal which first reported about the development said this was one of the "rare disagreements" between Saudi Arabia and the administration of President Donald Trump. Saudi Arabia, it said was acting on behalf of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). The report said the US is still trying for the FATF to take a decision on this by today. Pakistan yesterday claimed it had foiled US-led efforts to place it on a terror financing watch-list after the country was granted a three-month reprieve by the Paris-based international watchdog FATF. The FATF, a global body that combats terrorist financing and money laundering, met in Paris amid reports that the US with the support of some European allies was trying to place Pakistan on a list of countries that financially support terrorism. "The officials said the US effort, which included pressure on the Saudis, raised the possibility of a fresh vote on action against Pakistan as soon as Thursday. The Pakistanis were scrambling to shore up support," the WSJ report said. Noting that the Trump administration is angry with Pakistan's inadequate efforts to combat terror groups, the daily said the US has sought to ratchet up pressure on Islamabad. Last month, it froze some $2 billion in security assistance to Pakistan. The US says Pakistan is not taking action against terror groups like the Haqqani network and the Taliban. Islamabad has denied those allegations. China, Pakistan's all-weather ally, has repeatedly blocked efforts by India, the US and the UK to designate JeM chief Masood Azhar a terrorist under the Al-Qaeda Sanctions Committee. Pakistan being added to the "list of countries deemed 'high risk' for doing too little to curb terror financing," would have a financial implication for the country. As a result of this inclusion, banks, other lenders and international companies seeking to do business with Pakistan could rethink financial ties, putting a damper on its already struggling economy, the daily said. Yesterday, US state department spokesperson Heather Nauert said the FATF is expected to take a decision by today on adding Pakistan to the 'grey list' of countries not doing enough to comply with terrorist-funding regulations. OneIndia News Trump says India has just been devastated by COVID-19 Collapse of Kabul will go down as one of the greatest defeats in American history: Donald Trump Thousands of terrorists might have been airlifted out of Kabul: Trump slams Biden Never in history has withdrawal from war been handled so badly: Trump 'Donald Trump not satisfied with progress in Pakistan', says White House International oi-PTI The White House on Thursday said that US President Donald Trump is "not satisfied" with the progress made by Pakistan in its fight against terrorism. "For the first time, the US is holding Pakistan accountable for its actions," White House Deputy Press Secretary Raj Shah told reporters during a press conference. "I know that we have restored some clarity in our relationship with Pakistan. For the first time we're holding Pakistan accountable for its actions," Shah said. "We've seen modest progress in terms of Pakistan's actual acknowledgement of these concerns, but the President is not satisfied with progress when it comes to Pakistan," Shah said. He was responding to a question on the progress made in President's (Trump's) South Asia Policy which was announced in August last year. "The US is working closely with our partners in Afghanistan. We've made significant progress against ISIS, reducing their presence and eliminating hundreds of fighters. We've eliminated their top leaders, and we're working relentlessly to target their leadership and bases wherever they emerge," Shah said. In another news conference, the Pentagon said that the South Asia policy offers an opportunity to Pakistan. "The (Defense) Secretary believes that Pakistan has an opportunity to do more with respect to regional security and that it's in its interests to do more with respect to regional security. It's an opportunity, and we would welcome Pakistan's involvement," Pentagon Chief Press Spokesperson Dana White said. PTI India ignoring facts and ground realities: Maldives Foreign Minister International oi-Vikas By Vikas Maldives' Minister of Foreign Affairs said that the Indian Government has ignored the 'facts and ground realities' in the country. Maldives's reaction came after India expressed concern over political situation in the island nation. India had urged the President Abdulla Yameen's government in Maldives to restore democracy in the country. "Govt of Maldives takes note of public statements issued by Govt of India that ignore the facts and ground realities with regard to the ongoing political developments in the Maldives," news agency ANI quoted Minister of Foreign Affairs, Maldives, as saying. "The assertion by the Govt of India that the extension of the State of Emergency by the People's Majlis was unconstitutional is a clear distortion of facts, which ignore the Constitution and Laws of the Maldives," the Maldives Minister further said. The Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) on Thursday urged the President Abdulla Yameen's government in Maldives to restore democracy in the country and "release political prisoners". The MEA's reaction came after Yameen extended the state of emergency by another 30 days on Tuesday. "India didn't see "any valid reason" for extension of emergency. We continue to watch the situation and continue to urge the govt of Maldives to release political prisoners, release Chief Justice, implementation SC orders and restore normal functioning of institutions of democracy," the MEA statement said. "It is our sincere desire to see democracy in Maldives is restored and situation returns to normal. This we feel is also the desire of the people of Maldives. We are dismayed the Maldives government has extended emergency for a further period of 30 days," the statement added. President Yameen declared the emergency on February 5 after the Supreme Court ordered the release of a group of Opposition leaders, who had been convicted in widely criticised trials. [Maldives crisis: US disappointed over extension of emergency] Among them was exiled ex-President Mohamed Nasheed. The court said his 2015 trial had been unconstitutional. Only 38 MPs were present for the vote, which took place hours before the state of emergency was due to expire, despite 43 lawmakers being needed for the vote to take place as required by the Constitution, Maldives Independent news website reported. All 38 were from the ruling Progressive Party of Maldives and they all approved the extension, it said. The opposition boycotted the vote. The state of emergency will now end on March 22. Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal in an editorial expressed concern over increasing Chinese influence in this island nation. OneIndia News Where did the 'out of control' Chinese rocket debris land after re-entering Earth? Planning a trip to Maldives: You can do so from July 15 Maldives govt welcomes preparations for Presidential Elections International oi-Chennabasaveshwar By Chennabasaveshwar The Government of Maldives on Thursday welcomed the announcement of the Elections Commission's decision to begin preparations for the Presidential Elections to be held this year. The Maldivian Government reiterated its commitment to provide a free and stable environment to carry out campaigns which will lead up to this year's Presidential Elections. In the Presidential statement issued, "the Government of Maldives warmly welcomes The Government took note of its announcement to hold the first round of Presidential elections during early September and encouraged all relevant stakeholders to offer the Commission their full, unreserved support for the conduct of their work." Update on the Current Situation in the #Maldives (22/02/2018): Government welcomes Elections Commissions commencement of work for presidential elections. https://t.co/AAAOzDumUV pic.twitter.com/YbPRGqAhmR Presidency Maldives (@presidencymv) February 22, 2018 "It is noted in the statement that free, fair and credible elections are the foundation of our democracy and that it is essential for continuity of our nation's growth, stability and prosperity, " President's office stated. Also, Maldives extended its invitation to all international stakeholders to observe the electoral process; and urged the international community to provide support and assistance in bringing back normalcy in the Maldives. Further, the government requested the international community to 'refrain from any actions' that could hinder resolving the situation the island nation is facing. In the statement, and reaffirmed hopes that all relevant stakeholders extends their support to this endeavour. "It is underscored in the statement that all elections after the ratification of the Constitution were accepted to be fair and free by all parties, and that the Government recommends all political parties and politicians alike to work towards making the upcoming elections free and fair, rather than engage in a battle to topple the Government and to destabilize the nation, " the statement from Maldives also read. OneIndia News PIA flight lands in Kabul, becomes first commercial airline to do so since Taliban takeover On Afghanistan, Pak has to line up on broad majority of international community: Blinken Terror funding: Pakistan placed on Grey List by FATF International oi-Vicky By Vicky Pakistan has been placed on the grey list by the Financial Action Task Force. The decision was taken at the ongoing FATF meet in Paris after the United States of America moved a resolution. Pakistan was on the FATF watch list from 2012 to 2015, then only on issues of money laundering. The decision was taken after China and Saudi Arabia withdrew their objections. Earlier China, Turkey and Saudi Arabia joined hands to block a move by the US to place Islamabad on the terror financing watch list. The US was working behind the scenes during the ongoing Paris meeting of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) so as to take action against the country which it believes has not acted against terrorist financing and the implementation of the UN Security Council resolutions. Pakistan has been asked to submit intense financial scrutiny on terror financing. The decision was taken late night and an announcement to this effect is expected soon. It may be recalled that Pakistan's foreign minister had claimed two days back that they had been given a three-month reprieve. He had also said that hard negotiations had paid off. The US says Pakistan is not taking action against terror groups like the Haqqani network and the Taliban. Islamabad has denied those allegations. Pakistan being added to the "list of countries deemed 'high risk' for doing too little to curb terror financing," would have a financial implication for the country. As a result of this inclusion, banks, other lenders and international companies seeking to do business with Pakistan could rethink financial ties, putting a damper on its already struggling economy. OneIndia News Would you like to know how many people have read this article? Or how reputable the author is? Simply sign up for a Advocate premium membership and you'll automatically see this data on every article. Plus a lot more, too. A planned influx of people from Bangladesh into India's north-eastern region is underway as part of a proxy war being waged by Pakistan, with support from China, to keep the area disturbed, said Indian Army Chief General Bipin Rawat on Wednesday (Feb 21). He made this statement while addressing a seminar in New Delhi on 'North East Region of India - Bridging Gaps and Securing Borders.' The Army Chief pointed out the growth of All India United Democratic Front in Assam (AIUFD), as compared to the Bhartia Janta Party (PJP) in the country in the 1980s, to buttress his point on the increase in Muslim population in several districts of the state. "There is a party called AIUDF. If you look at it, they have grown in a faster time-frame than the BJP grew over the years," said Gen Rawat, while referring to the BJP winning only 2 seats in 1984. "The AIDUF is moving at a faster pace in Assam," he added, during a conference on bridging gaps and securing borders in the Northeast region. The Army chief then went on to stress that the "proxy game" was being executed by "our western neighbor (Pakistan)", with support from across the "northern border (China)", to keep the area disturbed. "They will always try and ensure that this area is taken over, playing the proxy dimension of warfare. The solution lies in identifying the problem and holistically looking at it," he said. Pointing out that it was no longer possible to change the population dynamics of Assam, with Muslim majority increasing from five districts earlier to eight to nine districts now, the Army chief said efforts should be made to "amalgamate" the people living in the region. The Federal government is taking several measures to ensure development of the entire region, which will help in sorting out many problems. Migration, of course, is also taking place from Bangladesh because of shrinking land space in the country due to several factors, including floods, General Rawat said. AIUDF chief Badruddin Ajmal expressed shock on General Rawat's 'political statement' and asked "why the rise of a political party is a concern for the Army Chief." "General Bipin Rawat has made a political statement, shocking! Why is it a concern for the Army Chief that a political party, based on democratic and secular values, is rising faster than BJP?" Ajmal wrote on Facebook. "Alternative parties like AIUDF, Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) have grown because of the mis-governance of big parties. By making such statement, isn't the Chief of Army Staff indulging into politics which is against the constitutional mandate given to him?" he asked. Another AIUDF leader said that the party's popularity is growing faster than the BJP because it is working for the downtrodden. "AIUDF is working for the downtrodden. this is why our popularity is growing faster than BJP. We are hopeful that people of Assam irrespective of caste & creed, will accept AIUDF and our party will come to power soon," AIUDF MLA from Assam Aminul Islam said. The Indian Army on Thursday (Feb. 22) clarified its Chief General Bipin Rawat's remarks. "There is nothing political or religious in the talk. Army Chief just mentioned amalgamation and development in the seminar on Northeast organized at DRDO Bhawan," the army said. Quicklink Not Found Sometimes, authors delete their quicklinks after publishing them. To see if the quicklink was renamed or re-published, please click here. Progressive Content Not Found Sometimes, authors delete their progressive content after publishing. To see if the progressive content was renamed or re-published, please click here. Would you like to know how many people have read this article? Or how reputable the author is? Simply sign up for a Advocate premium membership and you'll automatically see this data on every article. Plus a lot more, too. By Andy Myer American High School Yearbook: 2018 (Image by Andy Myer) Details DMCA Here we are again. Another massacre in a school, this time in Parkland, Florida. Before we ultimately resign ourselves to this obscene state of affairs, shouldn't we at least see the actual crime scene photos? It's an argument made recently in Slate . Don't we deserve to have all relevant information and visual material as we debate the issue of guns in this country? It's unlikely. In the meantime, let's close our eyes and imagine what the bodies of youngsters in Sandy Hook Elementary torn apart by assault weapon ammunition really look like. Conjure up the slumped figures peppered with slugs in the pews of the Sutherland Springs Church, the dead and wounded littering the campus of Virginia Tech, the concert grounds in Las Vegas, and the hallways and classrooms of Columbine and Stoneman Douglass High School. Think of the thousands of shattered families, whose lives surely will never be the same. While we're at it, consider the injured survivors, some of whom will have lifelong disabilities, medical needs, and unalterably changed futures. Go on to contemplate the emotional distress of witnesses and first responders who may be physically unscathed, but will suffer PTSD for months, years, perhaps their entire lifetimes" To read the rest of this article and see the drawing by Andy Myer, a cartoonist, writer, and published author/illustrator of three children's books who has donated this work to ThisCantBeHappening!, please go to: www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/3797 (Article changed on February 23, 2018 at 14:12) Would you like to know how many people have read this article? Or how reputable the author is? Simply sign up for a Advocate premium membership and you'll automatically see this data on every article. Plus a lot more, too. From Voices In Our Heads Image created from image crediting (Image by Bob Alexander) Details DMCA One of my favorite movies is director Don Siegel's 1964 remake of The Killers. It was supposed to be one of the first "Made for TV" movies, but someone at Universal thought it was too violent so it was released theatrically. Siegel directed two movies, The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), and Dirty Harry (1971), that are on my List of The 100 Best Movies Ever Made. And then there's ... The Killers. As a friend of mine said, "Don Siegel was one of those directors who could make good pieces of a movie, but had a hard time making a complete movie." And The Killers is a very good example of that. It's almost good. Too bad, because the cast is incredible: Lee Marvin, John Cassavetes, Angie Dickinson, Clu Gulager, and ... in the last theatrical role of his 27-year long career ... and the first time he ever played a bad guy ... Ronald Reagan. I watch this movie at least once every year. During the Reagan presidency I watched it more often than that. No matter how rotten the Real World became, because of the miracle of videotape, I could watch Lee Marvin shoot Ronald Reagan whenever I needed a little morale booster. There is justice somewhere in the world, even if it's only in the movies. I used to hate Ronald Reagan for a million reasons. The Republicans took an almost-has-been Hollywood celebrity, grafted him onto conservative bullshit, and thus created a president for the Yahoos of America. The Republicans could pick the pockets of the rubes while their celebrity front man razzle-dazzled the crowds with a line of patter sure to please the easy to please Morons of America. Fast Forward... Tuesday, June 16, 2015. Fucko the Clown announced his candidacy for President of the United States. The Donor Class was briefly derailed when Fucko completely eclipsed their choice for president, Jeb Bush. The Donor Class forgot there was one thing more powerful than their political machinations ... celebrity. Which proved that The Donor Class wasn't as smart as they thought they were. Flashback... When Ronald Reagan was president the rubes of America became even more fascinated with money. Big Money. Wealth. They didn't have any, they weren't ever going to get any, but they could watch it on TV by tuning in to Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. To these dumbasses, Money equaled Intelligence. In 1987 these same dumbasses bought a book -- part biography, part formula for business success -- called The Art of the Deal by Fucko the Clown and Tony Schwartz. In reality, Fucko didn't write one word of the book, but it sold over a million hardcover copies and cemented in the minds of The Morons of America that Fucko was one of the Titans of Business. A gawdawful star was born. Meanwhile... As president Reagan was telling comfortable lies to his base, another group of grifters elbowed their way onto the political scene ... The Televangelists. They had always wheedled nickels, dimes, and dollars from the god-haunted mentally deficient of America, but they really started hauling in The Big Bucks when they were able to get their tent shows onto cable TV. Regardless of how many of these sleazeballs were found with their hands in the church's cookie jar or in hotel rooms with hookers, there was always another greed-crazed shitheel waiting in the wings ready to hoot and holler for The Lord to keep the tax-free money rolling in. And all those nickels, dimes, and dollars added up to the multi-billion dollar Jesus Industry. Yes ... there are that many suckers in America, Praise the Lord. Armed with that kind of money and power, the avariciously-united Televangelists became a political force. They realized after fleecing the multitudes that they could also tell their incredibly stupid followers how to vote. After making a quid pro quo deal with the Republican Elites -- don't tax our money and we'll deliver our minions' votes -- the Televangelists told their congregations to vote Republican ... And They Did. That's one of the reasons I don't believe in their god. I think it is more probable that Pinky Lee is The Most High. For those who don't know who Pinky Lee was ... that's why he created Google. Welcome to the Monkey House... There is no reason to rehash the 2016 campaign and election. Fucko the Clown tapped into the always simmering hatreds burning in the hearts of the truly stupid, but still lost the popular vote. But since the people only indirectly elect the president, the Electoral College is responsible for this sh*t-show, and Fucko won that contest. Though the Donor Class isn't very smart ... they're very quick learners. They finally remembered ... the Power of C elebrity. Next Page 1 | 2 (Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher). Would you like to know how many people have read this article? Or how reputable the author is? Simply sign up for a Advocate premium membership and you'll automatically see this data on every article. Plus a lot more, too. World Beyond War has been raising funds for and renting billboards in opposition to war. We've run into censorship from numerous billboard companies but persevered, and more billboards are on their way. First we put this message up here in Charlottesville, Va., and then in Baltimore, Md. (see explanation of the 3% calculation here): Now we're putting these two images up on billboards in Syracuse, NY, where drone pilots participate in U.S. wars from Hancock Air Base: For 8 hours a day for 16 days in March, these two images will be on either side of a billboard truck driving around downtown Syracuse and the University of Syracuse. Then, from April 2 to May 27 each image will be on two of the four stationary billboards located at 115 South Street, 700 East Washington Street, 1430 Erie Boulevard East, and 1201-1208 South Salina at Raynor Street. Then, from May 28 to July 22, one image will be on two and the other on one of three billboards at 700 East Washington Street, 909 East Genesee Street, and 1758 Erie Boulevard East. Why Syracuse? The Syracuse area hosts Hancock Air National Guard base where the Guard's 174th Attack Wing conducts drone assassination and target identification missions using MQ-9 Reaper drones in Afghanistan and probably elsewhere. It has been announced that the numbers of drone operators being trained at Hancock will be doubled. The billboard ads are being undertaken in the context of what amounts to a whiteout of information on drone and other air operations in Afghanistan. Pentagon reports on drone and other air attacks in other nations are inadequate at best, and these reports when they come have been inaccurate and have grossly under-reported casualties. The U.S. government has made no reports and taken no responsibility for the emotional devastation of drone attacks on children as well as adults, as documented by the Al Karama Foundation's "Traumatising Skies." Syracuse is home to a creative and courageous group of activists who have done a great deal of public education already and who are continuing those efforts. Overcoming Censorship Some companies have refused to rent space for billboards opposing drone wars. No company has questioned the facts of the messages, apart from one company asking us to say that drone wars "may" make us less safe, adding the word "may." It is hardly disputable that drones make orphans, or that they kill innocent children. That drone wars make us less safe ought to be obvious after what the "successful" drone war has done to Yemen, following the April 23, 2013, testimony of Farea al-Muslimi before the U.S. Congress that drone strikes were building support for terrorists. But don't take it from him or me, when a leaked CIA document admits that the drone program is "counterproductive," and numerous recently retired top U.S. officials agree. For the most part companies have given no explanation for refusals to display these graphics. In some cases, they have said the graphics made them "uncomfortable," or they've asked that we stick to "positive-oriented messaging." Those companies that have written policies that I've seen for what they accept have in no case had a policy that explained their refusal, other than their declaration of their right to refuse for any reason whatsoever. While some companies in Syracuse said no, and others yes, every company in Forth Smith, Arkansas has, thus far, said no, without any explanation. These include: RAM Outdoor Advertising: 1-479-806-7735 Ashby Street Outdoor: 1-479-221-9827 Billboard Source: 1-940-383-3500 Feel free to ask them to explain. Remember that politeness is most effective. RAM Outdoor Advertising did say: "Thanks for sharing your potential creative. I've shared it with the owners and they have decided that your creative will violate our lease agreements. We will have to decline your ads." I requested to see the "lease agreements" and received no reply. Next Page 1 | 2 (Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher). Would you like to know how many people have read this article? Or how reputable the author is? Simply sign up for a Advocate premium membership and you'll automatically see this data on every article. Plus a lot more, too. From Alon Ben-Meir Website The following is a satirical would-be conversation between Prime Minister Netanyahu (Bibi) and President Trump (Donald) during Netanyahu's upcoming visit to the White House on March 5th. [White House, exterior. BIBI exits his motorcade, waving to the few dignitaries that were invited for the occasion.] BIBI: (to himself) Will this be my last visit to the White House? (a pause) Oh well, I have weathered many storms before, I will still outfox everybody else, God willing. [DONALD comes to the entrance to greet BIBI] DONALD: Hello my friend, how are you? BIBI: I feel great! (embraces DONALD) DONALD: And how've you been, my friend? BIBI: Well, considering everything that's going on, I am sure you know how I feel. DONALD: We have plenty to talk about. [As they approach the Oval Office, DONALD dismisses his aides, along with VP Pence. DONALD and BIBI enter the office and close the door.] DONALD: So tell me, what's really going on with you. We are buddies, after all. BIBI: What can I tell you, things will be better if only some of these schmucks leave me alone. DONALD: I know exactly what you mean, Bibi. I have been saying that all along about many of these morons who are out to get me. BIBI: I don't understand why. I have served my country all my life, and look how they are treating me! Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 (Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher). Would you like to know how many people have read this article? Or how reputable the author is? Simply sign up for a Advocate premium membership and you'll automatically see this data on every article. Plus a lot more, too. This piece was reprinted by OpEdNews with permission or license. It may not be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the source. The mainstream Western news sources dealing with the war on Syria have been discredited. This helps to explain why the mainstream news stories amount to criminal war propaganda. There is a war on Syria because the West and its allies are waging a "Regime Change"/Dirty War on the country. All of this is well-documented. It is not an "organic" war. The war exists because of the West and its allies, not despite the West and its allies. Western governments, including Canada's government[1], have publicly declared their intent to remove the democratically-elected President of Syria from power. Mainstream news sources are embedded with the terrorists, who are proxies for the West. The White Helmets[2] are an intelligence construct paid for by the West and its allies to serve the function of public-relations front for al Qaeda and al Qaeda-affiliated terrorists. Similarly, news sources such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Syrian Observatory for Human Rights[3], and others are partisan, supported by the West, and sources for propaganda stories. These sources are part of the hybrid warfare complex that is engineering consent for more war crimes against Syria and her peoples; hence they are criminal according to Nuremberg Principles. War propaganda is a crime. The West wants to escalate its aggressions against Syria, so the war propaganda is also escalating. MSM news consumers should be aware, though, that many of the allegations against the Syrian government have been proven false. The alleged gas attacks have been false flags. The Caesar photo[4] evidence alleging Assad's atrocities against his own people is fraudulent. The Saydnaya[5] stories are fake. The West invents stories and engineers false flags so that its disastrous, holocaust-generating invasions can be falsely viewed as "humanitarian" or as the fruit of a "Responsibility to Protect". In the past few weeks alone, Western-supported terrorists have launched more than a thousand bombs onto the citizens of Damascus. Terrorists deliberately target schools, hospitals, and shopping centers, and these mortars have so far murdered about 11 civilians over these last few weeks. Pictured below are some of the terrorists' victims. The mortars come from East Ghouta, in the Damascus area, and to the relief of Syrians, East Ghouta is the next target for the legitimate Syrian military to address. The Syrian military has every right, and in fact is duty-bound, to protect its citizens and to destroy and/or neutralize the terrorists. Tom Duggan has lived in Syria for a number of years. What follows is a daily report directly from Syria. Duggan's analysis is consistent with 7 years of evidence-based observations. It is credible reporting. News from mainstream media, sometimes referred to as "colonial" media, is nothing short of war propaganda. Those of us who are allowing ourselves to be misled by mainstream war propaganda must share some responsibility for the current overseas holocaust that is being perpetrated thanks to our monies and our tacit consent. * Notes [1] Mark Taliano, "Canada rejects the rule of international law and embraces international barbarity." American Herald Tribune. 18 March, 2016.(https://ahtribune.com/opinion/695-canada-international-law.html) Accessed 21 February, 2018. [2] Video: "White Helmets -- The Mask of Terror/ Aleppo, January 2016." LiveLeak/Anna News 1 December, 2017. (https://orbisnjus.com/2017/12/01/video-die-white-helmets-die-maske-des-terrors-sehenswert/) Accessed 2 February, 2018. Next Page 1 | 2 (Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher). Would you like to know how many people have read this article? Or how reputable the author is? Simply sign up for a Advocate premium membership and you'll automatically see this data on every article. Plus a lot more, too. From Alternet Teenagers who hope to change the world can start by voting in the midterms. Surely, you've seen the pictures. A handful of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School students watched in dismay as the Florida House blocked debate on a bill to ban assault rifles, less than a week after 17 people were gunned down at their school. "I'm calling on every student/teacher/parent 2 exercise 1st Amendment Right & engage in sit-ins, protest, walkouts & legal demonstrations. NOW IS THE TIME," state Democratic Rep. Kionne McGhee tweeted Wednesday, when his procedural move that would have allowed the Florida House to debate the bill was shut down. While pollsters and political observers across the country are saying the political response to the nation's latest mass shooting will be different because young people are speaking up, organizing and calling for gun controls in unprecedented manners -- including mass demonstrations in Tallahassee Wednesday -- there is a hard truth behind the Florida House's cold-hearted, high-profile snub. "To the young people getting woke to the politics of gun control, here's the reality: The old farts who are elected to office don't give a damn because you don't vote," tweeted Michael McDonald, a University of Florida demographer and nationally known voter turnout expert. "Average midterm turnout rates for ages 18-29 is a pathetic 20 percent. If you want to change the world start by voting." And this generational apathy has only gotten worse, not better, over time. "Further context: the Census Bureau reports ages 18-29 turnout rate was 30 percent in 1974, the first midterm election 18-20 yr olds could vote (except in 4 states) and followed the close of the Vietnam War," McDonald tweeted. "Was the highest midterm turnout rate for ages 18-29 from 1974 to 2014." McDonald isn't trying to be the grim reaper at a moment of great trauma for students who experienced a mass shooting. There's a rising tide of support nationwide elevating the teenagers' call for reasonable gun controls, which is seen in celebrity donations for their marches and other protests. But he raises a salient point. Florida may be a purple state demographically -- evenly split between Republicans and Democrats. But the GOP has dominated its statewide politics for most of this decade, and the legislature has a record of blocking gun controls, including pre-empting gun laws that remain in municipal law books. In other words, Florida Republicans know they can ignore young people's demands, or patronize them, because when they look past the latest wave of outrage and protests, the historic pattern is this slice of the electorate largely doesn't turn out and vote -- especially during non-presidential years like 2018. Thus, the Florida House overwhelmingly voted Tuesday to block debate on a bill to ban the category of weapon used in the latest massacre. But as the South Florida Sun Sentinel noted, its legislative leaders are looking at more watered-down proposals, such as possibly "raising age restrictions for gun purchases" and "temporarily taking away someone's guns if they are deemed a threat." Maybe this latest mass shooting will be different and will galvanize a new wave of political advocacy. But that usually is a longer game and involves voting every time there's an election. That hasn't been the pattern for young people. Indeed, demographic voter turnout analyses from the U.S. Election Project, which McDonald oversees, notes that twice as many people under age 30 vote in presidential years as in midterms. In presidential elections, 40 percent of eligible voters under age 30 typically cast ballots. In midterm years like 2018, it's under 20 percent. That doesn't mean younger people don't care about politics and aren't voting. It's just that their numbers are poor in midterm years and creeping up slowly in the presidential years. For example, in 2016 the Pew Research Center found the electorate's age was skewing toward younger generations, as opposed to what's been historically larger numbers by seniors and the elderly. Next Page 1 | 2 (Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher). Would you like to know how many people have read this article? Or how reputable the author is? Simply sign up for a Advocate premium membership and you'll automatically see this data on every article. Plus a lot more, too. On February 16th, the Justice Department unveiled the first of four pillars of the Mueller investigation into interference in the 2016 election: the indictment of 13 Russians for Internet-based meddling. This should end Trump claims the Mueller investigation is a "hoax." The DOJ announcement suggests that we should expect many more indictments as a product of the remaining three pillars of the probe. The February 16th announcement, by Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein, focussed on an extensive effort, conducted by Internet trolls headquartered in St. Petersburg, to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. Using a variety of tactics, the Russians began by disparaging Hillary Clinton, switched to inhibiting voter participation, and concluded by encouraging Americans to either vote for Trump or a third-party candidate, such as Jill Stein. (At its peak, the Russian effort had a monthly budget of $1.25M and employed hundreds of operatives.) The DOJ indictment is noteworthy because it arrived unexpectedly -- there were no press leaks suggesting an indictment was imminent -- and the 37-page legal brief was unusually thorough -- it appears the FBI had a source inside the St. Petersburg troll factory ("Internet Research Agency"). The indictment revealed that the head of the Russian operation was Yevgeny Prigozhin, a close friend of Russian premier Vladimir Putin. In the coming months we're likely to see indictments clustered around the three additional pillars of the Mueller inquiry: hacking, collusion, and obstruction. The hacking indictments should explain who hacked the emails of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and John Podesta, Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman. (It might also shed light on the chain of events that led then FBI director, James Comey, to reopen the Clinton email brouhaha 11 days before the election.) The collusion pillar would explore the illicit cooperation between Russian operatives, involved in election interference and hacking, and the Trump campaign. It would answer questions such as, were members of the Trump campaign aware of the Russian activities and did they coordinate with them? The February 16th, DOJ indictment is silent about collusion: "There is no allegation in this indictment that any American had any knowledge [of the Russian operation]." (Trump has suggested that the indictment proves there was no collusion between his campaign and the Russians. This isn't true because the indictment doesn't discuss collusion.) In the context of the 2016 election, collusion can mean "a long-term criminal conspiracy." One would hope that the coming Mueller indictments would address the concern that Donald Trump has subterranean ties to Putin, and Russian oligarchs, and this relationship subverted the US electoral process. (The DOJ indictment noted that the St. Petersburg-based troll operation began in 2014. Trump tweeted that since the Russian subversion began a year before he announced his presidential candidacy, it had nothing to do with his campaign. However, it's worth remembering that Trump was in Moscow in November of 2013 and bragged to the press about his relationship with Vladimir Putin.) Finally, the fourth pillar of the Mueller investigation should focus on obstruction of justice: has the Trump Administration blocked DOJ efforts to understand interference in the 2016 election? This first pillar answers the question that has vexed many Americans: Did the Russians try to interfere in the 2016 election? The answer is yes. Russians agents are trying to subvert our democracy and, therefore, we are at war with Russia. The remaining pillars should address these questions: Did the Russian interference cost Hillary Clinton the presidency? Did the Trump campaign coordinate with the Russians? And, is Donald Trump a Russian agent? It will be very difficult to prove that Russian interference cost Clinton the presidency. Writing in his 538 website, Nate Silver (https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-much-did-russian-interference-affect-the-2016-election/ ) observed that it was probably the October 26, 2016, Comey letter, reopening the Clinton email controversy, that tipped the election to Trump. Nonetheless, Silver observed, "Thematically, the Russian interference tactics were consistent with the reasons Clinton lost." (For example, one reason Clinton lost was a decline in black voter turnout and the Russian agents worked to suppress this turnout.) However, it should be noted that Clinton lost the electoral college because of 77,784 votes in three states. In Wisconsin, Clinton lost to Trump by 22,177 votes where Jill Stein received 31,006 votes. It may be that there are smoking guns lying in the wreckage of the 2016 election: voting machines that were tampered with or Russian agents advising Clinton not to campaign in Wisconsin... It seems likely that the Mueller investigation will establish coordination between the Trump campaign and the Russians. (For example, it seems obvious that the Trump campaign knew that the Russians had hacked the DNC well before this was public knowledge.) What remains to be seen is whether there's evidence that ties Donald Trump to this. Finally, there's the concern that Trump is a Russian stooge; that Putin blackmailed Trump to run for President because Putin wanted to disrupt our democracy. On the one hand this seems like the most difficult suspicion to prove. On the other hand, Trump acts like he's guilty; he spends so much time decrying the Mueller investigation as "a hoax," and trying to thwart it, that it's hard to believe that he didn't do something wrong. Given the level of professionalism evidenced in the February 16th indictment, the Mueller investigation will establish whether Trump is guilty of "high crimes and misdemeanors." Would you like to know how many people have read this article? Or how reputable the author is? Simply sign up for a Advocate premium membership and you'll automatically see this data on every article. Plus a lot more, too. What obstacles stand in the way of America achieving true greatness when, once again, it would be highly respected, greatly admired, and looked upon for leadership in world affairs? What must the U.S. government and the people of America do to restore that distinction? In this article we'll talk about these obstacles putting special emphasis on the largest ones standing in the way. The first is this government's obsession with and addiction to war; the second is the extreme violence that is taking place in our country, exemplified by the plague of mass shootings that continue unabated. Relative to the war and domination of other nations, this U.S. government must stop being the policeman of the world; it can't continue to appoint itself as the prosecutor, judge and jury and pass judgment over other nations, often severely punishing certain ones for supposed threats to America. Its highly aggressive foreign policy, based on intimidation and domination, is not working and never will. It is making untold numbers of enemies around the world. Every billion spent on bullets, bombs, missiles and other weaponry is a billion that could have been used to make America the envy of the world, with an education system second to none, an infrastructure like no other, a world class universal healthcare system, and many other initiatives that strengthen the foundations of America. Over decades a plethora of important domestic needs have not been addressed as trillions of taxpayer dollars have been poured into the military empire and associated wars that never should have been initiated. One of the main reasons why our national debt will soon reach $21 Trillion is due to military spending. The wars such as Iraq and Afghanistan cost over $3 trillion, none of which was budgeted. And why is the U.S. military still in Afghanistan after more than 17 years with no end in sight? Does our government expect anyone to believe that we are there to spread democracy or to make the lives of the Afghan people better? As a result of this massive military spending, our system of education is lagging far behind that of many other developed nations, any number of which offer free education for students from primary school through college. Students attending their colleges are not weighed down by student loans that in America have reached some $1.3 trillion. A great nation with a responsible government would have created an effective universal health care system based on a Medicare model or some other single payer system to replace our outdated, very costly and inefficient system. This government has refused to fund a modern health care system that would drastically reduce the costs of health insurance premiums and prescription drug costs and cover every single American. If we had a government with competent leaders we could possess a modern infrastructure such as those in the countries of Europe proper, Scandinavia, China, and Japan. Why do they have excellent infrastructures? Simply by making the maintenance and improvement of their infrastructures a high priority. Engaging in war is not even on the list of their top priorities. Now after this Republican-controlled Congress and Mr. Trump have given Corporate America $1.5 trillion in tax cuts these politicians say they are ready to address the nation's infrastructure. That's very commendable but there is one major problem involved with doing it; where in the world are they going to find the money when they just gave it away to those at the top and the rest of it is being poured into the furnaces of war? But wait, it seems as Republicans such as Speaker Paul Ryan and his cohorts know exactly where to find this funding. Ryan has made no secret of his plans to try to cut spending on Medicare, Medicaid and other social programs, those that they derisively refer to as "entitlements", i.e., "handouts" from the government. Ryan has further stated that health programs such as Medicare and Medicaid are the big drivers of debt." He apparently can't see the mountain of debt that is being accumulated from this government's military actions in many parts of the world. If we had a government that knew how to conduct foreign affairs in a sensible way we could reduce the military budget and scale back the empire of bases to a great degree; let's say reducing that budget by at least one third. America would still have the most powerful military on this planet. It's time for real change; this hubristic foreign policy must come to an end. The wars from Vietnam to Iraq to Afghanistan have been colossal failures. These unnecessary, unjustifiable wars have accomplished nothing except creating misery, suffering, and destruction in various parts of the world. We need to also talk about the deadly disease that has invaded the body of America, the disease of mass killings of Americans by their fellow Americans, i.e., domestic terrorists. This mass shooting that snuffed out the lives of 17 high school students at a high school in Parkland, Florida was so deadly and violent that it has infuriated this entire nation. It has the potential to ignite a massive movement to force the NRA-controlled and corrupted politicians in federal and state governments to take appropriate measures to stop this madness. Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 (Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).